Just don't use social media and you won't have to hide from your employer... Or.. Gasp... Be careful and keep it safe for work at all times.
One really should not put anything online that you would not want EVERYBODY to be able to read. Everything you put online, pictures, comments, blogs, chats etc. is going to be public information forever, or at least it CAN end up out living you. Remember that every time you are tempted to post.
Very good point. It's not like you can fly in stop and go traffic and turn the motor into a generator to make you slow down. Aircraft engines in aircraft of similar size do run at 100% power output during takeoff and initial climb. After that they are routinely called on to run at 75% power for hours at a time and only during approach get throttled back much. Cars hardly ever run above 75% power for more than a min or two, and never run 100% power for more than a few sec.
However, to be fair... They are only claiming fuel savings based on the amount of energy in the batteries and how far they can get you without the on board charger. Then you "save gas" by finding a place to plug in the thing and recharge the batteries when you get there. Of course this is assuming you can find a place to plug in while you are tied down on the transit ramp at the FBO..
Another thought... I wonder how long it will take to charge the battery? I'm just guessing, but it seems like this will be similar to charging electric cars where it can take a few hours with the right charging setup, to many hours when limited to a 15A 120V circuit. I'm thinking "Range Anxiety" will be a real problem for folks trying to make a two hop cross country and don't have 2 days to kill when making the trip. Then heaven forbid you get diverted to some field where the nearest plugin is half a mile away and your extension cord is only a hundred feet.
This idea seems crazy to me. Where I am all for "being green" in situations where it makes sense, I don't see how this idea can be made workable.
The main issue with small aircraft is useful payload. You may have 4 seats, but there is no way you can safely fly them with 4 adults, bags and full tanks because you will be way over the max takeoff weight. In most 4 seat aircraft If you take a full fuel load, you are going to have to limit yourself to 2 adults with minimal baggage. Or you can take half the fuel and 4 adults with no bags. My flight instructor was known to say "There is nothing more worthless than the runway behind you, the altitude above you, and the fuel you left in the truck" so when going long distances it's safer to put as much fuel in the tanks as you can, stay as high as you can, and always start and land as close to the end of the runway as possible..
In the case of this aircraft, 900 lbs of batteries means that they have traded 150 Gal of fuel or 4 adults, or a huge pile of baggage for batteries. Unless they can save nearly all that weight in their removal of the piston engine, useful load is going to be a HUGE problem. Aircraft engines in the horsepower range they are describing don't weigh anywhere near 900 lbs so I don't think they are going to get enough weight savings to make this work. This tells me that they are unlikely to have 4 seats worth of working payload and there will be no way to leave anything but 23 gal of fuel behind.
Additionally, their claim about leaded AvGas being a huge problem is untrue. Many aircraft engines can be and are legally and safely operated on the same 87 octane unleaded fuel you put in your car. Many aircraft are operated on either 110 octane Low Lead AvGas or 87 octane unleaded. However this is more due to the cost and availability of 110 LL and not environmental concerns.
Finally, the yearly inspection requirement will not go away with an electric powered aircraft. I find it hard to come up with a way that this yearly inspection is going to be any cheaper just because the aircraft has an electric motor. The airframe will still require inspections and I'm sure the FAA will have a list of things you must look at for the electric motor and battery systems. I'm also sure that these things will include stuff that you simply cannot test using a computer, but must actually LOOK at like we do now.
This is an interesting idea, but I am sure they are crazy if they think they can engineer an aircraft that will meet the advance billing. There is little hope of this idea being practically possible even in a modern carbon fiber airframe. They are not likely to be able to produce an aircraft that has a useful payload when compared to gas powered models. I'm pretty sure that their 500K price tag will not be possible on a carbon fiber airframe, unless they intend to loose money on these things. My guess is that this whole thing is an attempt to attract investors who don't know any better and who want to invest in something "green" and who will be separated from their "green" by the scam.
You are correct. I was thinking the 12x increase was over USB3.0 when it was over Firewire 800. Thanks for correcting me. Thunderbolt does 10 Gbps (max per attached device) and USB 3.0 does 4 Gbps per port. This gets you (for a single device) a 2.5x increase. However, if you have multiple devices, you can use up to 20Gbps and achieve a 5x performance improvement per port for multiple devices. This is only half an order of magnitude increase.
You may be right on the price factor, but things get cheaper over time if they catch on with sufficient volumes. USB 3.0 does have the advantage of compatibility, price and number of fielded units, but it lags in performance by an order of magnitude. Given that an Apple championed port now is making its way into the main stream, there is already a demand and supply of devices that can be connected to this port. This means that there is already a low volume of production for this and helping the case for R&D dollars to be spent on this. With R&D, the cost of the silicon will decrease as will the power requirements as volume increases.
I think the real issue is if Apple has intellectual property in this technology or not. If they do, then everybody will have to license it from Apple and depending on how they license it (and how they price the licenses) they could easily kill it. But this doesn't seem to be a factor if we are now seeing non-Apple devices with Thunderbolt ports.
Well... I don't think so. Apple cables may be expensive, but most of them can easily be purchased for a LOT less (with a few notable exceptions) if you don't go to Apple for them. Charging cables for an I-Phone run $20 each from Apple, but you can get them on E-bay for about $2 or less . I suppose that the devices that use this port may be expensive now, but that will change. Given the bandwidth and latency of Thunderbolt it will be hard for any existing technology to compete. Given that is runs basically at PCI Express speeds, even FireWire will have problems. Then add that you can connect a wide range of device types (Displays, Video Capture, Disk Drives, Raid Arrays, Network Adapters etc) to the same port and it's hard to see how even FireWire will make it. To be sure, FireWire will continue to see use in professional video/audio production equipment, but it's basically missed the consumer market in favor of USB.
Thunderbolt is a high speed device interface that has similar performance to PCI Express. It supports a wide range of devices that require very high bandwidth and low latency I/O operations, including displays, network adapters, mass storage devices (Disk Drives, RAID arrays etc.) and things like that. Like USB, the port can supply power to attached devices but it runs at much higher data rates than even USB 3.0. Currently it is generally only supported by Apple but the article is saying that it is starting to show up on more generic X86 hardware.
Looking at the comparisons I've found, seems that Thunderbolt is likely to put a spanner in the works for USB 3.0 support. Why bother with USB 3.0 when this port exists at about the same price? Yea there is the compatibility issue with USB, but I have a feeling they will leave the USB 2.0 ports and just add Thunderbolt until they can send USB to the same place printer and serial ports went. Given the bandwidth available on this port, you can put multiple displays and a hand full of disk drives on one port and do away with the VGA, DVI, and eSATA ports in one shot.
This sounds like a great idea. Keep a record of all ESN's that are stolen devices and make it so none of these can be used on any carrier in the country. This would go a long way to reduce the trafficking of stolen phones. However, there needs to be some rules on what constitutes a "stolen" phone.
1. Carriers should not be able to disable a phone unless the owner has reported it stolen. (I.e. They cannot list phones that are on unpaid contracts, without compensation to the owner of the phone.)
2. The database must be available to check if an ESN was reported stolen, and if it is, return contact information for the owner or his agent.
3. The ESN must be removable from the list, if the owner of the phone requests it.
4. A means of transferring stolen ESN's between "owners" or "agents"
Somehow though, I don't think this is what the carriers have in mind. My guess is that they want to stop folks from getting expensive phones cheap on contract, then dumping the contract and selling the phone for quick cash. Being able to disable the phone on all US carriers would make this much harder to do.
The issue is not just about cooling, although this is the primary problem illustrated by Fukushima. It is about natural stability of the system. Industrial sized nuclear reactors are generally NOT stable systems so they use technology and human interaction to keep them stable. We could design in more natural stability, and some new reactor designs do just that by reducing the required technology and human interaction. However, these designs may or may not prove to be safer.
Personally I think what happened at Fukushima is actually shows that this kind of activity CAN be and generally IS safe. The magnitude of the earthquake was many times greater than the design was supposed to handle, yet the magnitude of the damage caused beyond the plant will likely end up fairly limited dispute the loss of containment on multiple reactors. It could have and should have been a LOT worse, given how far out of the design parameters the event was and how crippled the response turned out to be. The Fukushima engineers really out did themselves and should be proud of their work.
If this event shows us anything it is this: Emergency response plans and the equipment needed to execute them MUST be available both on and off site and transportation for offsite equipment MUST be possible in ways that don't require much infrastructure. it was totally possible to prevent the loss of containment after the earthquake and tsunami had the necessary equipment shown up in time. This equipment was delayed in transit for way to long and during that delay is when much of the damage took place.
The issue wasn't the plant's design being to weak to deal with the magnitude of the event, because in reality the plant DID survive the initial event fairly well. But the problem was the inability to provide the necessary power to keep the plant safe. This seems to be a planning and logistics problem to me and not a fault in the engineering of the plant. Had the power generation equipment been delivered in time, even in the face of an unplanned for event, the actual damage could have been limited to the plant site.
This will get you maps that will tell you the expected power, accounting for panel angle, cloud cover etc for your area. Then it's just a matter of subtracting your unique situation, shade from trees, angles of collectors, type of collectors etc.
Sorry but you are going to have to start shoveling. Consider that GPS can routinely produce location solutions measured in tens of meters in a small fraction of a second. Also consider that if you avarage the time signals recovered over long periods of time you can generate time bases that are very high granularity. I'll Quote from NIST.gov... "Tests between widely separated receivers have demonstrated standard uncertainties for time comparisons of less than 10 ns and relative standard uncertainties for frequency comparisons of less than 1 x 10-13, both for averaging times of 1 d. The frequency uncertainty decreases as the averaging time increases. The frequency uncertainty is limited by the relative standard uncertainty of the NIST primary frequency standard which is 2 x 10-15." That's not even for GPS, but for ground based radio. GPS is similar accuracy and 1x10-13 is better than a pico second after a day of observations.
Surely somebody will come up with a new way to store data in the next 12 years. Just a hunch, but I'm thinking that somebody is going to dust off some old research or idea and we are all going to be rushing out to replace our flash drives for something faster long before we start hitting this limit. This sounds like some researcher just threw down the gauntlet. Innovation will prove that his assumptions where incorrect because their conclusion looks like ones I've heard in the past.
Anybody recall the "640kB out to be enough for anybody" quote?
One thing does stand out though, 2 TB limits on NAND flash drives? Really? 16TB on TLC? Given standard drive sizes seem to be multiplying by 2 about every year, there will be serious issues even before the 2024 date.
Archive.org may respect robots.txt, but this is not universal. My point here is that once information is public on the web, it can (and many times does) stick around long after the original source is long gone.
This problem is much worse for social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Just ask former house member Mr. A. D. Weiner. Once you post, it's history and you may not be able to take it back. You never know who may have a copy even if the site actually deletes the data. If there is any reason you don't want EVERYBODY in the world to know, it's best not to post.
ANYTHING you give up to a website is there for the duration of time. I just figure it will never go away.
Even if you run your own site, don't fool yourself that you can take down the information and it's gone. There are folks that archive web content and sell the historical data for profit. If you are expecting that Facebook or Twitter content can be deleted and it will be gone forever, you are a fool.
I'm always amazed at the number of folks who simply don't understand this, and think that they can delete their Facebook posts and they are gone. So I'm not suprised that data on dating sites might stick around after you are gone.
" has actually been increasing in volume faster than we've been using it.".....do you have a citation, or are you just remembering from that time where you read nothing?
Check out foot note 3 for a discussion of what I'm talking about. There may be *other* reasons for it, but if you look at the various tables in this article, you will notice that we have a lot more oil reserves claimed in 2009 than we had in 2000.
Don't buy into that lie. Three reasons this not true.
1. It costs so much per unit to produce oil and producers will only produce the oil they make a profit on. The stuff that they cannot make money on gets left behind. As the supply of oil decreases the price will rise and large amounts of oil will then be profitable to produce, the higher the price goes, the more of the known oil will be profitable. Producers will then produce this less profitable oil and recoverable reserves increase.
2. We keep finding more. The word is a big place and there are lots of places we've not looked. Finding new oil increase reserves.
3. Technology is improving, helping us produce the stuff cheaper and in situations where it wasn't possible before as well as helping us find more.
So recoverable oil reserves, which is what can be produced at a profit, has actually been increasing in volume faster than we've been using it. Sure, we are obviously going to run out, but not any time soon.
So are you saying Google is intending to use at least two fibers to the customer to get around this issue? Somehow I don't think they will.
My point here is that Google is not making any huge leap in technology. Hanging fiber on poles is great and Google apparently has enough money to do it, but the *real* question is not about the technology being deployed. The real question is: Can Google make it pay? If Google doesn't make money on this, it won't matter.
The technology to use the fiber to my house will march on, speeds will improve while equipment prices decline. What's expensive today, will be run of the mill soon. The fact that I have fiber to my house won't change. Having a single fiber in that last mile was and is a huge leap over twisted pair or even coax and the truth is that the bandwidth over that fiber will continue to improve with time. Is my 25 MegaBit link stressing the bounds of physics and technology over that single fiber? Nope, not even close.
Verizon could offer Gigabit if they wanted/had too. Once you have fiber to the house, you can offer what ever speed you decided to offer. I believe that verizon tops out at 150 Megabit, but there is nothing preventing them offering more. At some point they'd have to roll out new ONT's (mine's basically limited to 100Base-T but I'm sure the equipment exists.
I still don't think this is all that newsworthy, at least until they hook up their first subscriber in a few months. Then, I want to know when they start to turn a profit on this venture. Going to be hard to get any kind of ROI on this business given the infastructure costs
Hmmm.... Still, my 25 MegaBit doesn't approach the bandwidth available on the fiber to my house (which carried the phone line, their full set of cable channels as well as their on-demmand streaming as well). My pipe from the ONT to Verizon is limited to the fiber capacity, which is the same as what Google is doing. That Verizon throttles me to 25 Megabit is simply an imposed limit, not a real one.
So let me know when they sign up their first customer and how much they pay. Maybe I can use the competition to get more bandwidth and a cheaper price out of Verizon. Oh, and I'm betting that they don't make money for YEARS....
People somehow think Facebook is just fun, it is not just fun to FB it's a business. I do enjoy keeping up with folks but it is extreamly dangerous if you don't pay close attention to what you post. My last nephew's birth was announced on FB, poor kid. I know his full name, date of birth, place of birth, mother's name, father's name, mother's maiden name all from things posted on Facebook by his mother. This data will NEVER go away, unless Facebook decides to erase it or happens to loose it. Something tells me that FB isn't going to erase anything on purpose so this kid's life is going to be an open book to anybody on my sister's extensive "friend" list. Shure hope nobody takes the poor kids ID and "establishes" some credit history for him.
NEVER post anyting on FB (or any other social media type site) or willingly give up personal information online without VERY good reason and then ONLY using HTTPS or other secure/encrypted means. A social site wants your birth date? Forget it or lie to them... They ask you for your mother's maiden name as a "security question"? Really forget it, it's not worth the risk. Social Security Number? You got to be kidding! Credit Card number? Rreally? If you really *must* then do what I do and contrive an alternate "backstory" with all this kind of information to give out online. At least with a fictional life story, your not as easy a target for ID theives like my poor nephew is now. Hopefully, not being the easy target might save you the trouble of clearing your name, or (shudder sudder) your kid's credit history.
I guess it is for KC folks, but I've had fiber to my house for years here in Texas from Verizon. Seriously, they are really only setting up the backbone network at this point, so there is a LONG way to go before they will be ready to cable up their first house. Call me when they sign up their first customer....
Well, Cheaper solar cells would be nice no matter how they are made but this is going to have to improve it's effeciency by more than 10X's or it won't be worth the trouble. Current solar cells approach 200x (or more) of this efficency and they are not able to acheive ROI's high enough to be cost effective. They need to drive the cost factor down to where the cost/watt is at least on par with current cells. Somehow, I don't think that using grass will be cheap enough given that current cell designs use things like sand as raw materials..
Everybody needs to remember.... It's cost per watt that will drive this industry. Make it so the cost/watt is at or below the cost of buying power off the grid and the stuff will sell like hotcakes. Until then, it will be a small market.
Slashdot Mirror
Just don't use social media and you won't have to hide from your employer... Or.. Gasp... Be careful and keep it safe for work at all times.
One really should not put anything online that you would not want EVERYBODY to be able to read. Everything you put online, pictures, comments, blogs, chats etc. is going to be public information forever, or at least it CAN end up out living you. Remember that every time you are tempted to post.
Very good point. It's not like you can fly in stop and go traffic and turn the motor into a generator to make you slow down. Aircraft engines in aircraft of similar size do run at 100% power output during takeoff and initial climb. After that they are routinely called on to run at 75% power for hours at a time and only during approach get throttled back much. Cars hardly ever run above 75% power for more than a min or two, and never run 100% power for more than a few sec.
However, to be fair... They are only claiming fuel savings based on the amount of energy in the batteries and how far they can get you without the on board charger. Then you "save gas" by finding a place to plug in the thing and recharge the batteries when you get there. Of course this is assuming you can find a place to plug in while you are tied down on the transit ramp at the FBO..
Another thought... I wonder how long it will take to charge the battery? I'm just guessing, but it seems like this will be similar to charging electric cars where it can take a few hours with the right charging setup, to many hours when limited to a 15A 120V circuit. I'm thinking "Range Anxiety" will be a real problem for folks trying to make a two hop cross country and don't have 2 days to kill when making the trip. Then heaven forbid you get diverted to some field where the nearest plugin is half a mile away and your extension cord is only a hundred feet.
This idea seems crazy to me. Where I am all for "being green" in situations where it makes sense, I don't see how this idea can be made workable.
The main issue with small aircraft is useful payload. You may have 4 seats, but there is no way you can safely fly them with 4 adults, bags and full tanks because you will be way over the max takeoff weight. In most 4 seat aircraft If you take a full fuel load, you are going to have to limit yourself to 2 adults with minimal baggage. Or you can take half the fuel and 4 adults with no bags. My flight instructor was known to say "There is nothing more worthless than the runway behind you, the altitude above you, and the fuel you left in the truck" so when going long distances it's safer to put as much fuel in the tanks as you can, stay as high as you can, and always start and land as close to the end of the runway as possible..
In the case of this aircraft, 900 lbs of batteries means that they have traded 150 Gal of fuel or 4 adults, or a huge pile of baggage for batteries. Unless they can save nearly all that weight in their removal of the piston engine, useful load is going to be a HUGE problem. Aircraft engines in the horsepower range they are describing don't weigh anywhere near 900 lbs so I don't think they are going to get enough weight savings to make this work. This tells me that they are unlikely to have 4 seats worth of working payload and there will be no way to leave anything but 23 gal of fuel behind.
Additionally, their claim about leaded AvGas being a huge problem is untrue. Many aircraft engines can be and are legally and safely operated on the same 87 octane unleaded fuel you put in your car. Many aircraft are operated on either 110 octane Low Lead AvGas or 87 octane unleaded. However this is more due to the cost and availability of 110 LL and not environmental concerns.
Finally, the yearly inspection requirement will not go away with an electric powered aircraft. I find it hard to come up with a way that this yearly inspection is going to be any cheaper just because the aircraft has an electric motor. The airframe will still require inspections and I'm sure the FAA will have a list of things you must look at for the electric motor and battery systems. I'm also sure that these things will include stuff that you simply cannot test using a computer, but must actually LOOK at like we do now.
This is an interesting idea, but I am sure they are crazy if they think they can engineer an aircraft that will meet the advance billing. There is little hope of this idea being practically possible even in a modern carbon fiber airframe. They are not likely to be able to produce an aircraft that has a useful payload when compared to gas powered models. I'm pretty sure that their 500K price tag will not be possible on a carbon fiber airframe, unless they intend to loose money on these things. My guess is that this whole thing is an attempt to attract investors who don't know any better and who want to invest in something "green" and who will be separated from their "green" by the scam.
You are correct. I was thinking the 12x increase was over USB3.0 when it was over Firewire 800. Thanks for correcting me. Thunderbolt does 10 Gbps (max per attached device) and USB 3.0 does 4 Gbps per port. This gets you (for a single device) a 2.5x increase. However, if you have multiple devices, you can use up to 20Gbps and achieve a 5x performance improvement per port for multiple devices. This is only half an order of magnitude increase.
You may be right on the price factor, but things get cheaper over time if they catch on with sufficient volumes. USB 3.0 does have the advantage of compatibility, price and number of fielded units, but it lags in performance by an order of magnitude. Given that an Apple championed port now is making its way into the main stream, there is already a demand and supply of devices that can be connected to this port. This means that there is already a low volume of production for this and helping the case for R&D dollars to be spent on this. With R&D, the cost of the silicon will decrease as will the power requirements as volume increases.
I think the real issue is if Apple has intellectual property in this technology or not. If they do, then everybody will have to license it from Apple and depending on how they license it (and how they price the licenses) they could easily kill it. But this doesn't seem to be a factor if we are now seeing non-Apple devices with Thunderbolt ports.
Well... I don't think so. Apple cables may be expensive, but most of them can easily be purchased for a LOT less (with a few notable exceptions) if you don't go to Apple for them. Charging cables for an I-Phone run $20 each from Apple, but you can get them on E-bay for about $2 or less . I suppose that the devices that use this port may be expensive now, but that will change. Given the bandwidth and latency of Thunderbolt it will be hard for any existing technology to compete. Given that is runs basically at PCI Express speeds, even FireWire will have problems. Then add that you can connect a wide range of device types (Displays, Video Capture, Disk Drives, Raid Arrays, Network Adapters etc) to the same port and it's hard to see how even FireWire will make it. To be sure, FireWire will continue to see use in professional video/audio production equipment, but it's basically missed the consumer market in favor of USB.
Thunderbolt is a high speed device interface that has similar performance to PCI Express. It supports a wide range of devices that require very high bandwidth and low latency I/O operations, including displays, network adapters, mass storage devices (Disk Drives, RAID arrays etc.) and things like that. Like USB, the port can supply power to attached devices but it runs at much higher data rates than even USB 3.0. Currently it is generally only supported by Apple but the article is saying that it is starting to show up on more generic X86 hardware.
Looking at the comparisons I've found, seems that Thunderbolt is likely to put a spanner in the works for USB 3.0 support. Why bother with USB 3.0 when this port exists at about the same price? Yea there is the compatibility issue with USB, but I have a feeling they will leave the USB 2.0 ports and just add Thunderbolt until they can send USB to the same place printer and serial ports went. Given the bandwidth available on this port, you can put multiple displays and a hand full of disk drives on one port and do away with the VGA, DVI, and eSATA ports in one shot.
This sounds like a great idea. Keep a record of all ESN's that are stolen devices and make it so none of these can be used on any carrier in the country. This would go a long way to reduce the trafficking of stolen phones. However, there needs to be some rules on what constitutes a "stolen" phone.
1. Carriers should not be able to disable a phone unless the owner has reported it stolen. (I.e. They cannot list phones that are on unpaid contracts, without compensation to the owner of the phone.)
2. The database must be available to check if an ESN was reported stolen, and if it is, return contact information for the owner or his agent.
3. The ESN must be removable from the list, if the owner of the phone requests it.
4. A means of transferring stolen ESN's between "owners" or "agents"
Somehow though, I don't think this is what the carriers have in mind. My guess is that they want to stop folks from getting expensive phones cheap on contract, then dumping the contract and selling the phone for quick cash. Being able to disable the phone on all US carriers would make this much harder to do.
The issue is not just about cooling, although this is the primary problem illustrated by Fukushima. It is about natural stability of the system. Industrial sized nuclear reactors are generally NOT stable systems so they use technology and human interaction to keep them stable. We could design in more natural stability, and some new reactor designs do just that by reducing the required technology and human interaction. However, these designs may or may not prove to be safer.
Personally I think what happened at Fukushima is actually shows that this kind of activity CAN be and generally IS safe. The magnitude of the earthquake was many times greater than the design was supposed to handle, yet the magnitude of the damage caused beyond the plant will likely end up fairly limited dispute the loss of containment on multiple reactors. It could have and should have been a LOT worse, given how far out of the design parameters the event was and how crippled the response turned out to be. The Fukushima engineers really out did themselves and should be proud of their work.
If this event shows us anything it is this: Emergency response plans and the equipment needed to execute them MUST be available both on and off site and transportation for offsite equipment MUST be possible in ways that don't require much infrastructure. it was totally possible to prevent the loss of containment after the earthquake and tsunami had the necessary equipment shown up in time. This equipment was delayed in transit for way to long and during that delay is when much of the damage took place.
The issue wasn't the plant's design being to weak to deal with the magnitude of the event, because in reality the plant DID survive the initial event fairly well. But the problem was the inability to provide the necessary power to keep the plant safe. This seems to be a planning and logistics problem to me and not a fault in the engineering of the plant. Had the power generation equipment been delivered in time, even in the face of an unplanned for event, the actual damage could have been limited to the plant site.
She is harsh, only if you wish to defy her.
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/1961-1990/redbook/atlas/
This will get you maps that will tell you the expected power, accounting for panel angle, cloud cover etc for your area. Then it's just a matter of subtracting your unique situation, shade from trees, angles of collectors, type of collectors etc.
Sorry but you are going to have to start shoveling. Consider that GPS can routinely produce location solutions measured in tens of meters in a small fraction of a second. Also consider that if you avarage the time signals recovered over long periods of time you can generate time bases that are very high granularity. I'll Quote from NIST.gov... "Tests between widely separated receivers have demonstrated standard uncertainties for time comparisons of less than 10 ns and relative standard uncertainties for frequency comparisons of less than 1 x 10-13, both for averaging times of 1 d. The frequency uncertainty decreases as the averaging time increases. The frequency uncertainty is limited by the relative standard uncertainty of the NIST primary frequency standard which is 2 x 10-15." That's not even for GPS, but for ground based radio. GPS is similar accuracy and 1x10-13 is better than a pico second after a day of observations.
Surely somebody will come up with a new way to store data in the next 12 years. Just a hunch, but I'm thinking that somebody is going to dust off some old research or idea and we are all going to be rushing out to replace our flash drives for something faster long before we start hitting this limit. This sounds like some researcher just threw down the gauntlet. Innovation will prove that his assumptions where incorrect because their conclusion looks like ones I've heard in the past.
Anybody recall the "640kB out to be enough for anybody" quote?
One thing does stand out though, 2 TB limits on NAND flash drives? Really? 16TB on TLC? Given standard drive sizes seem to be multiplying by 2 about every year, there will be serious issues even before the 2024 date.
Archive.org may respect robots.txt, but this is not universal. My point here is that once information is public on the web, it can (and many times does) stick around long after the original source is long gone.
This problem is much worse for social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Just ask former house member Mr. A. D. Weiner. Once you post, it's history and you may not be able to take it back. You never know who may have a copy even if the site actually deletes the data. If there is any reason you don't want EVERYBODY in the world to know, it's best not to post.
ANYTHING you give up to a website is there for the duration of time. I just figure it will never go away.
Even if you run your own site, don't fool yourself that you can take down the information and it's gone. There are folks that archive web content and sell the historical data for profit. If you are expecting that Facebook or Twitter content can be deleted and it will be gone forever, you are a fool.
I'm always amazed at the number of folks who simply don't understand this, and think that they can delete their Facebook posts and they are gone. So I'm not suprised that data on dating sites might stick around after you are gone.
Don't think I'm right? Check this out: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
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" has actually been increasing in volume faster than we've been using it." .....do you have a citation, or are you just remembering from that time where you read nothing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves
Check out foot note 3 for a discussion of what I'm talking about. There may be *other* reasons for it, but if you look at the various tables in this article, you will notice that we have a lot more oil reserves claimed in 2009 than we had in 2000.
Don't buy into that lie. Three reasons this not true.
1. It costs so much per unit to produce oil and producers will only produce the oil they make a profit on. The stuff that they cannot make money on gets left behind. As the supply of oil decreases the price will rise and large amounts of oil will then be profitable to produce, the higher the price goes, the more of the known oil will be profitable. Producers will then produce this less profitable oil and recoverable reserves increase.
2. We keep finding more. The word is a big place and there are lots of places we've not looked. Finding new oil increase reserves.
3. Technology is improving, helping us produce the stuff cheaper and in situations where it wasn't possible before as well as helping us find more.
So recoverable oil reserves, which is what can be produced at a profit, has actually been increasing in volume faster than we've been using it. Sure, we are obviously going to run out, but not any time soon.
No way to read these things? Wow, Who needs encryption now... (Ok.. Ok.. Just write your data to /dev/null...)
In this case though, one doesn't need the ccombination...If the judge wanted in the safe, all he need do is call a locksmith to drill the safe open.
My point here is that Google is not making any huge leap in technology. Hanging fiber on poles is great and Google apparently has enough money to do it, but the *real* question is not about the technology being deployed. The real question is: Can Google make it pay? If Google doesn't make money on this, it won't matter.
The technology to use the fiber to my house will march on, speeds will improve while equipment prices decline. What's expensive today, will be run of the mill soon. The fact that I have fiber to my house won't change. Having a single fiber in that last mile was and is a huge leap over twisted pair or even coax and the truth is that the bandwidth over that fiber will continue to improve with time. Is my 25 MegaBit link stressing the bounds of physics and technology over that single fiber? Nope, not even close.
I still don't think this is all that newsworthy, at least until they hook up their first subscriber in a few months. Then, I want to know when they start to turn a profit on this venture. Going to be hard to get any kind of ROI on this business given the infastructure costs
Hmmm.... Still, my 25 MegaBit doesn't approach the bandwidth available on the fiber to my house (which carried the phone line, their full set of cable channels as well as their on-demmand streaming as well). My pipe from the ONT to Verizon is limited to the fiber capacity, which is the same as what Google is doing. That Verizon throttles me to 25 Megabit is simply an imposed limit, not a real one.
So let me know when they sign up their first customer and how much they pay. Maybe I can use the competition to get more bandwidth and a cheaper price out of Verizon. Oh, and I'm betting that they don't make money for YEARS....
NEVER post anyting on FB (or any other social media type site) or willingly give up personal information online without VERY good reason and then ONLY using HTTPS or other secure/encrypted means. A social site wants your birth date? Forget it or lie to them... They ask you for your mother's maiden name as a "security question"? Really forget it, it's not worth the risk. Social Security Number? You got to be kidding! Credit Card number? Rreally? If you really *must* then do what I do and contrive an alternate "backstory" with all this kind of information to give out online. At least with a fictional life story, your not as easy a target for ID theives like my poor nephew is now. Hopefully, not being the easy target might save you the trouble of clearing your name, or (shudder sudder) your kid's credit history.
I guess it is for KC folks, but I've had fiber to my house for years here in Texas from Verizon. Seriously, they are really only setting up the backbone network at this point, so there is a LONG way to go before they will be ready to cable up their first house. Call me when they sign up their first customer....
Everybody needs to remember.... It's cost per watt that will drive this industry. Make it so the cost/watt is at or below the cost of buying power off the grid and the stuff will sell like hotcakes. Until then, it will be a small market.