And if the lawyer volunteers his/her time, just to spite the mega-corp?
If a pro-bono lawyer defeats the legal department of a mega-corp, then I would say that the it is extremely likely that justice has been done. I am deriving this conclusion from the fact that the pro-bono lawyer must have had such an airtight case that no amount of money blown on high-priced corporate lawyers could scuttle the case or indefinitely delay the judgement.
Yes, I saw that right after I posted. Autocorrect stymied me as I spelled "botnet". Fixed it once, but then it "helped me out" again when I edited the sentence later.
Would a simple botnet be able to easily crack all encryption crackable by quantum computing, or are there better ways to go at it given a botnet?
Yes it is crackable using a bother simulating a quantum computer, in the same sense that you would be able to simulate a quantum computer solving the traveling salesman problem by using a botnet. Or by using a massively parallel supercomputer.
That is to say, the quantum computer simulation is Turing computable. This really doesn't help for anything more than trivial problems, much like pointing out the Halting Problem is decidable if you "simply" observe the Turing machine for the appropriate Busy Beaver function's number of execution steps.
More succinctly, the simulation would gain you nothing over a direct parallel processing attack on the key space, and in fact the quantum computer simulation would add execution overhead that would reduce efficiency compared to straightforward brute force attacks.
Why the hell would I want a fixed asset to get a dynamic address? And why should I then have to search the address space to find out where it is so I can configure the computers that need to talk to it?
...because you might want to be able to remap your network topology without having to go manually poke configurations of n individual printers?
Have you not heard of DHCP reservations? They cause the device with the listed MAC address to always draw the same address from the DHCP server. It's tantamount to a static IP without the tedious hardcoding on all the devices. No searching the address space required to find the device.
I am not addressing the rest of your comment regarding screens on printers, because I agree. I just wanted to debate this single point you made about DHCP.
Meh. We are talking about many gigawatt-hours of electrical energy. Read some of the other replies from people who have actually designed snowmelt systems. Using electrical radiant heat for snowmelt on roads seems like something we will do once electricity gets to be "too cheap to meter".
You make a good point, but what about the converse? You point out how people don't make lithium molotovs from their cellphones, but how often do we read about lithium batteries in phones, laptops, iPods, etc inadvertently catching fire? Relatively frequently, right?
Now replace that with a device that can channel megatons worth of energy.
A poorly maintained vehicle might crash and kill, say, 1 to 20 people. A poorly maintained replicator might lose containment and annihilate everyone within many square km (i.e. nuclear bomb type devastation). If that were in an urban area, the death toll could be in the millions.
Thanks for the link. I think the ST guys let their imaginations get the better of them. That is an order of magnitude more power than the sun's radiated power hitting the earth.
In a universe like this, one would expect planetary annihilation to be commonplace rather than, say, the infantry combat seen in DS9.
I'm an engineer as well. The "fabricator" approach you describe is much more tenable than an energy-based replicator.
Practically speaking, what would need to be synthesized from energy? Not vitamins (those are organic compounds and you already listed the C, H, and O hoppers, to which I will add N). Technically, you don't even need an H2O tank because you have H and O hoppers. The trace stuff for biomatter is, well, trace. Easy enough to keep those elements around in hoppers as well (I can see the design review now: "Shall we use a few trace element hoppers or shall we channel a few exajoules for shits, giggles, matter synthesis, and catastrophic failure modes?")
Of course, all of this stuff is highly abundant on Earth, so I was envisioning applicability in a starship in interstellar space where there is a dearth of ambient matter. Even then, I would anticipate such a technologically advanced machine would have equally technologically advanced recycling capabilities and an appropriate loadout before departure.
Honestly, given humanity's history of running into practical efficiency limits that are far below the thermodynamic theoretical bounds, about the only thing I can think of where this technology would be useful would be for a long-haul interstellar starship that paused close to stars and converted the abundant stellar energy into potential energy via creating matter/antimatter to keep in fuel tanks for later use.
And it's cool to think that, maybe, when you have a warp core that powers a space ship going FTL with many millions of petawatts of energy, some star trek technology like replicators might come true:)
True, but somehow I doubt that anyone will ever be glib while wielding the power of the entire generating output of the Sun, for example (call that 100 billion petawatts). The power at that scale could destroy entire solar systems if a mishap or violent use were to occur.
If you weren't aware of the Kardishev scale, you might find it intriguing to consider the implications of a Type II civilization wielding the power of the entire Sun or to think about what a Type III civilization could accomplish.
Current thermodynamics works fine enough for what is suggested. Thermodynamics allows for next to ideal conversion.
Gotcha. So, in order to avoid boiling some water to distill it to purity, you're going to be doing a matter/energy/matter conversion. In order to come out ahead of using a simple boiler, your ~9 petawatt (two conversions in the requisite time doubles the power) process is going to need to be 99.99999999% efficient or so.
Even a 99% efficient process would dump 90 terawatts of waste heat. The waste heat of your process would represent approximately 1/10 of the power of an average hurricane. Remember, you're claiming we would do this in order to "save energy" by not distilling a quarter liter of wastewater.
In summary: just because science develops a method that allows something to be done does not imply it will ever be the favored technology. We developed the means to create gold via atomic bombardment a long time ago, and that process will never supplant gold mining.
You have forgotten that no process will be perfectly efficient unless someone invents some new thermodynamics. You are talking about "waste" of a few hundred grams of easily-recycled organic matter (or water) by channeling megatons worth of energy. What's a few percent of waste heat generated on a process that is pumping quadrillions of joules around? Entropy always gets its pound of flesh.
But hey! We *saved* some water we could have, you know, could have distilled into purity using today's technology by using an infinitesimal amount of that waste heat that would be inescapably generated by pumping around those megatons of energy for pointless matter/energy conversions!
...and I'm supposedly the one who lacks perspective. Priceless.
If you assume we have a way to convert energy into matter with 100% efficiency, then it's not far fetched to assume we'd also have a way to convert matter into energy. So, you can save yourself all the calculations, and just grab 250 grams of waste products from the ship's waste disposal system, and turn them into a cup of Earl Grey tea.
So, uh, at that point why are you even bothering with a matter/energy conversion? Just use the cleaned, recycled water directly. I already have a machine that can "3D print" a cup of 95 C water, and all it requires is a water reservoir and a 1300 W heating element. I have to bring my own cup, but that was already stipulated.
But that wont happen because they'll ban the thing over irrational fear before the technology reach the point it can print a cup of earl grey.
Okay, let's say you want to make a cup of earl grey tea from energy alone. For simplicity's sake, let's pretend you are providing the cup and the only thing you need to create is 250 mL (~8 fl oz for those of us in the benighted US) of pure water at 100 C. I chose 0.95835 g/cm3 as the density of H2O @ 100 C.
Synthesizing that water from pure energy in a 100% efficient process that magically created only the appropriate molecules would require approximately 6,000 gigawatt-hours of energy, aka 2.15E16 J (hooray for e=m*c^2 being on-topic for once in forever). FWIW, the absolute minimum amount of energy required is equivalent to over 5 megatons of TNT.
For reference, the generating capacity of the entire United States is approximately 1,000 gigawatts. So, uh, in some mythical 100% efficient conversion of electricity to matter it would require the entire generating capacity of the United States for over 6 hours (line losses, oh my!) to produce the water for one cup of earl grey. If you want to stay true to concept, let's say your tea needs to be ready in 5 seconds. Okay, that represents 4.3 petawatts.
So, no, I doubt a ban will be what stands in the way of you getting your replicated earl grey.
Besides, anything that created that much power would be instantly weaponized.
Thanks for all the mods, everyone! The moderation log message from the Slashdot backend system report was hilarious to read.
I wish the complete mod log were visible on the comment, in chronological order (Funny displaced by Flamebait displaced by Insightful, Troll, Interesting, and so it iterated). It really was a very amusing meta conversation.
I look forward to observing the many ironic and humorous mods this topic will induce. In fact, the act of moderation itself may be the actual discussion more so than any of the content.
I would mod my own post as insightful troll, for example. I mean, this is just pandering, right?
Thanks for listing some additional factors I hadn't considered. The power draw requirements were enormous by my calculations, and it appears I underestimated them by at least an order of magnitude. I have encountered these Solar Roadways types of people before... they are very "cowboy". Gung-ho, enthusiastic, etc, but they never bothered to do the basic analysis of what would be involved to make their system viable. Apparently, per their FAQ, their gauge of "hot enough to operate as a snowmelt" is based on touching the thing, rather than running calculations.
Hell, their FAQ indicates they want to put piezoelectric generation in their tiles. Did no one inform them that this isn't "free energy" and that it would increase rolling resistance? Just what we need: a next-gen roadway that reduces vehicle fuel efficiency.
Even their narrative about how they decided to spec their surface strength screams "cowboy". They iteratively refined it as people told them about additional scenarios with heavier trucks. This should be a red flag to someone that they are operating beyond their depth. They should have been doing this analysis before building prototypes, and it should be vetted by subject matter experts (obviously not me) to try to mitigate the number of unknown unknowns. As it stands, I practically guarantee they have missed something else that's critical, because they're way beyond their depth. They seem to be in the "what other cool sounding stuff can we cobble together into this glass?"
They kind of handwave their suggestion of using massive amounts of titanium dioxide to keep their roadway panels clean and then letting "rain wash it away". Do we want massive amounts of titanium dioxide dumped into our waterways? Is that safe, or is it the next wildlife toxin?
There's no reason not to be ambitious or to respect the status quo. Look at Elon Musk and SpaceX. However, notice that Musk hired experienced engineers in the field, rather than starting out by throwing together some titanium prototype rocket nozzles in his garage because it sounded like a cool thing to do.
It's on Kickstarter, so that alone makes it about 50% likely to be a scam.
I agree with the rule of thumb, but you are also incorrect about it being on Kickstarter. As I remarked above, they are begging on Indiegogo rather than KS.
Whilst I doubt the practicality of these panels, this is not an issue, as the panels are connected to the grid. They may or may not be generating more power than they use over the course of the year, but they certainly don't have to be at a single point in time.
Unless they manage to bring down the cost of electrical power by several orders of magnitude it's not feasible to use electrical heat to melt snow on roadways. As the OP pointed out, it requires a 30 kW (thermal) boiler for a driveway snowmelt system. I provided links to my snow melt cost per km calculation. Feel free to substitute your own values for power cost, snow scenarios, etc.
There's a reason we don't do it today. As I said, phase change is a bitch.
Using solar PV for keeping snow off roads would be dumb. Thanks for pointing that out, Captain Obvious.
Your "Captain Obvious" comments would be better directed to Solar Roadways, who are marketing this PV system and touting its electrically-powered snow melting functionality (again, apparently grid-tied power draw to provide the radiant heat). "We designed our panels so the heaters are driven by the grid..."
I'm not entirely convinced they're legit, given this apparent cost of operation oversight (or misleading marketing). I will also note that they are using indiegogo to beg for donations rather than kickstarter. With indiegogo they get to keep all donated monies even if they don't reach their goal. They are trying to get money to scale up for production, but they claim they don't have any idea what their production costing would be. So, that's also "interesting".
Read their FAQ. For example, they claim their tiles can't be stolen because the other tiles in the roadway would wirelessly track a removed tile. Apparently they haven't heard of Faraday cages, either. If meth heads can manage to perform organic chemistry, I guarantee they can rig a functional Faraday cage.
I have put in driveway snowmelt systems and a typically driveway needs at a minimum ~100 kbtu/hr boiler to keep the driveway clear. Scaling that up to a road way and it would be astronomical.
That was my thought as well. Phase change is a bitch, so I anticipated this was a marketing gimmick. I decided to run some quick calculations to determine how much snow could be melted by a 1 m^2 solar heating roadway plate thing.
Solar Roadways is in Idaho, so I decided to use their location for stats. I decided to use an average insolation value of 2 kWh/day in December in Idaho. I disregarded the fact that these plates won't be tilted to compensate for latitude, which will give the roadway an artificially improved performance stat. I used an enthalpy of fusion for water as 334 kJ/kg. I used a 50 kg/m^3 value for the density of freshly-fallen snow. Finally, I decided to let the road panel have a 15% PV efficiency as well as a 100% solar panel coverage (neither of which is likely to be realistic for a road tile thing, but again this is in favor of the roadway panel).
So, how much snow can this melt per day? Call it 6.5 cm. In practice, I'm guessing the answer is closer to "0", because the instant the panel is covered by snow it will cease generating energy. Also, snowstorms are not known to occur during bright, bright, sunshiny days. It seems Solar Roadways expects their panels to be hooked to the grid and pull power to melt snow.
Therefore, this exercise devolves to "why haven't we installed electric radiant heat in our existing roadways to melt snow?"
Well, if we have a four lane standard US highway (12 ft lanes) and we need to melt that same 6.5 cm of freshly fallen snow, it would require 4.4 MWh (yes, megawatt-hours). In Idaho, it looks like an average wholesale rate for 1 MWh of electricity is approximately $150. So... call it $600 per km to melt a few cm of snow... once? And this is for light, fluffy, happy snow, not the slushy sleety shit that has the density of neutronium and gives grandpa a heart attack when he tries to shovel it.
Unless I dropped a few orders of magnitude here (please let me know if I did), it seems the answer to this is "just use the fucking salt instead, like we have been doing." In conclusion, perhaps the LED roadway is useful, but the snow melting bit really seems to be a gimmick.
Let's put it into perspective, though. There are tradeoffs. Yes, during the period of high levels of regulation, telephone service was universally available and it was very reliable. In return, we had very little innovation (for quite some time Bell even dictated which phones you could plug into their network in your house), long distance rates were expensive and had no competition driving them down, etc.
We can see the downside of less regulated telecoms (lower reliability, overselling capacity, etc), but let's not pretend there aren't positives that have come from this lower regulatory level as well.
One thing is for certain: no matter how regulated or "deregulated" this gets to be, all the US internet's base are belong to NSA. They set up us the bomb years ago. The best we can hope for is to get signal so main Netflix screen can turn on.
I have a bunch of thunderbolt ports and handful of USB 3 ports on my Mac. I would love to trade my thunderbolt ports for some more USB 3s and maybe 2 HDMIs.
DisplayPort is great. DisplayPort can serve as a transport for HDMI. Thunderbolt is PCIe + DisplayPort via a mini-DisplayPort plug.
I like having Thunderbolt on my MacBook. If I require more USB 3 connectivity I just use a hub. USB 3 isn't suitable for the same kind of applications that Thunderbolt does well.
My point is simply that your argument for Thunderbolt isn't actually an argument for it.
Haha, yes, I understood the point I *thought* you were trying to make, but that wasn't what you said. It isn't my job to restate your conclusions correctly.
You are correct that my citation of using the DisplayPort functionality isn't support Thunderbolt per se. 1394 was certainly niche, but it was great when it came to bulk data transfer, such as pulling video from cameras.
I like Thunderbolt because I want a high speed PCIe type bus, and I believe the approach is more elegant than slots on a motherboard. I'm sure you understand that intersection of utility between a PCIe type bus and USB type peripheral bus is quite small. Things tend to fit into one realm or the other.
I also appreciate that Thunderbolt multiplexes DisplayPort, which is an elegant solution especially on smaller laptops.
Apple has a history of trying proprietary video connectors. The HDB-15, then the weird thing on some first gen PowerMacs, and then the ADC. With Thunderbolt/mini-DisplayPort they finally will probably succeed, mostly because the PCIe part is optional. I don't perceive why Apple would feel pressure to relent on Thunderbolt if DisplayPort monitors continue to get traction, and the Mac Pro users (especially) want high speed expansion.
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And if the lawyer volunteers his/her time, just to spite the mega-corp?
If a pro-bono lawyer defeats the legal department of a mega-corp, then I would say that the it is extremely likely that justice has been done. I am deriving this conclusion from the fact that the pro-bono lawyer must have had such an airtight case that no amount of money blown on high-priced corporate lawyers could scuttle the case or indefinitely delay the judgement.
Yes, I saw that right after I posted. Autocorrect stymied me as I spelled "botnet". Fixed it once, but then it "helped me out" again when I edited the sentence later.
Would a simple botnet be able to easily crack all encryption crackable by quantum computing, or are there better ways to go at it given a botnet?
Yes it is crackable using a bother simulating a quantum computer, in the same sense that you would be able to simulate a quantum computer solving the traveling salesman problem by using a botnet. Or by using a massively parallel supercomputer.
That is to say, the quantum computer simulation is Turing computable. This really doesn't help for anything more than trivial problems, much like pointing out the Halting Problem is decidable if you "simply" observe the Turing machine for the appropriate Busy Beaver function's number of execution steps.
More succinctly, the simulation would gain you nothing over a direct parallel processing attack on the key space, and in fact the quantum computer simulation would add execution overhead that would reduce efficiency compared to straightforward brute force attacks.
Let DHCP set the IP address.
Why the hell would I want a fixed asset to get a dynamic address? And why should I then have to search the address space to find out where it is so I can configure the computers that need to talk to it?
...because you might want to be able to remap your network topology without having to go manually poke configurations of n individual printers?
Have you not heard of DHCP reservations? They cause the device with the listed MAC address to always draw the same address from the DHCP server. It's tantamount to a static IP without the tedious hardcoding on all the devices. No searching the address space required to find the device.
I am not addressing the rest of your comment regarding screens on printers, because I agree. I just wanted to debate this single point you made about DHCP.
Meh. We are talking about many gigawatt-hours of electrical energy. Read some of the other replies from people who have actually designed snowmelt systems. Using electrical radiant heat for snowmelt on roads seems like something we will do once electricity gets to be "too cheap to meter".
The technical term for this type of telescope is "occulting".
Naturally, this term would freak people out, so they circumlocute to avoid using it.
You make a good point, but what about the converse? You point out how people don't make lithium molotovs from their cellphones, but how often do we read about lithium batteries in phones, laptops, iPods, etc inadvertently catching fire? Relatively frequently, right?
Now replace that with a device that can channel megatons worth of energy.
A poorly maintained vehicle might crash and kill, say, 1 to 20 people. A poorly maintained replicator might lose containment and annihilate everyone within many square km (i.e. nuclear bomb type devastation). If that were in an urban area, the death toll could be in the millions.
Thanks for the link. I think the ST guys let their imaginations get the better of them. That is an order of magnitude more power than the sun's radiated power hitting the earth.
In a universe like this, one would expect planetary annihilation to be commonplace rather than, say, the infantry combat seen in DS9.
I'm an engineer as well. The "fabricator" approach you describe is much more tenable than an energy-based replicator.
Practically speaking, what would need to be synthesized from energy? Not vitamins (those are organic compounds and you already listed the C, H, and O hoppers, to which I will add N). Technically, you don't even need an H2O tank because you have H and O hoppers. The trace stuff for biomatter is, well, trace. Easy enough to keep those elements around in hoppers as well (I can see the design review now: "Shall we use a few trace element hoppers or shall we channel a few exajoules for shits, giggles, matter synthesis, and catastrophic failure modes?")
Of course, all of this stuff is highly abundant on Earth, so I was envisioning applicability in a starship in interstellar space where there is a dearth of ambient matter. Even then, I would anticipate such a technologically advanced machine would have equally technologically advanced recycling capabilities and an appropriate loadout before departure.
Honestly, given humanity's history of running into practical efficiency limits that are far below the thermodynamic theoretical bounds, about the only thing I can think of where this technology would be useful would be for a long-haul interstellar starship that paused close to stars and converted the abundant stellar energy into potential energy via creating matter/antimatter to keep in fuel tanks for later use.
And it's cool to think that, maybe, when you have a warp core that powers a space ship going FTL with many millions of petawatts of energy, some star trek technology like replicators might come true :)
True, but somehow I doubt that anyone will ever be glib while wielding the power of the entire generating output of the Sun, for example (call that 100 billion petawatts). The power at that scale could destroy entire solar systems if a mishap or violent use were to occur.
If you weren't aware of the Kardishev scale, you might find it intriguing to consider the implications of a Type II civilization wielding the power of the entire Sun or to think about what a Type III civilization could accomplish.
Current thermodynamics works fine enough for what is suggested. Thermodynamics allows for next to ideal conversion.
Gotcha. So, in order to avoid boiling some water to distill it to purity, you're going to be doing a matter/energy/matter conversion. In order to come out ahead of using a simple boiler, your ~9 petawatt (two conversions in the requisite time doubles the power) process is going to need to be 99.99999999% efficient or so.
Even a 99% efficient process would dump 90 terawatts of waste heat. The waste heat of your process would represent approximately 1/10 of the power of an average hurricane. Remember, you're claiming we would do this in order to "save energy" by not distilling a quarter liter of wastewater.
In summary: just because science develops a method that allows something to be done does not imply it will ever be the favored technology. We developed the means to create gold via atomic bombardment a long time ago, and that process will never supplant gold mining.
You have forgotten that no process will be perfectly efficient unless someone invents some new thermodynamics. You are talking about "waste" of a few hundred grams of easily-recycled organic matter (or water) by channeling megatons worth of energy. What's a few percent of waste heat generated on a process that is pumping quadrillions of joules around? Entropy always gets its pound of flesh.
But hey! We *saved* some water we could have, you know, could have distilled into purity using today's technology by using an infinitesimal amount of that waste heat that would be inescapably generated by pumping around those megatons of energy for pointless matter/energy conversions!
If you assume we have a way to convert energy into matter with 100% efficiency, then it's not far fetched to assume we'd also have a way to convert matter into energy. So, you can save yourself all the calculations, and just grab 250 grams of waste products from the ship's waste disposal system, and turn them into a cup of Earl Grey tea.
So, uh, at that point why are you even bothering with a matter/energy conversion? Just use the cleaned, recycled water directly. I already have a machine that can "3D print" a cup of 95 C water, and all it requires is a water reservoir and a 1300 W heating element. I have to bring my own cup, but that was already stipulated.
But that wont happen because they'll ban the thing over irrational fear before the technology reach the point it can print a cup of earl grey.
Okay, let's say you want to make a cup of earl grey tea from energy alone. For simplicity's sake, let's pretend you are providing the cup and the only thing you need to create is 250 mL (~8 fl oz for those of us in the benighted US) of pure water at 100 C. I chose 0.95835 g/cm3 as the density of H2O @ 100 C.
Synthesizing that water from pure energy in a 100% efficient process that magically created only the appropriate molecules would require approximately 6,000 gigawatt-hours of energy, aka 2.15E16 J (hooray for e=m*c^2 being on-topic for once in forever). FWIW, the absolute minimum amount of energy required is equivalent to over 5 megatons of TNT .
For reference, the generating capacity of the entire United States is approximately 1,000 gigawatts . So, uh, in some mythical 100% efficient conversion of electricity to matter it would require the entire generating capacity of the United States for over 6 hours (line losses, oh my!) to produce the water for one cup of earl grey. If you want to stay true to concept, let's say your tea needs to be ready in 5 seconds. Okay, that represents 4.3 petawatts .
So, no, I doubt a ban will be what stands in the way of you getting your replicated earl grey.
Besides, anything that created that much power would be instantly weaponized.
Thanks for all the mods, everyone! The moderation log message from the Slashdot backend system report was hilarious to read.
I wish the complete mod log were visible on the comment, in chronological order (Funny displaced by Flamebait displaced by Insightful, Troll, Interesting, and so it iterated). It really was a very amusing meta conversation.
Cedar Rapids, IA developed their own anti-goose drone as well.
I look forward to observing the many ironic and humorous mods this topic will induce. In fact, the act of moderation itself may be the actual discussion more so than any of the content.
I would mod my own post as insightful troll, for example. I mean, this is just pandering, right?
Thanks for listing some additional factors I hadn't considered. The power draw requirements were enormous by my calculations, and it appears I underestimated them by at least an order of magnitude. I have encountered these Solar Roadways types of people before... they are very "cowboy". Gung-ho, enthusiastic, etc, but they never bothered to do the basic analysis of what would be involved to make their system viable. Apparently, per their FAQ, their gauge of "hot enough to operate as a snowmelt" is based on touching the thing, rather than running calculations.
Hell, their FAQ indicates they want to put piezoelectric generation in their tiles. Did no one inform them that this isn't "free energy" and that it would increase rolling resistance? Just what we need: a next-gen roadway that reduces vehicle fuel efficiency.
Even their narrative about how they decided to spec their surface strength screams "cowboy". They iteratively refined it as people told them about additional scenarios with heavier trucks. This should be a red flag to someone that they are operating beyond their depth. They should have been doing this analysis before building prototypes, and it should be vetted by subject matter experts (obviously not me) to try to mitigate the number of unknown unknowns. As it stands, I practically guarantee they have missed something else that's critical, because they're way beyond their depth. They seem to be in the "what other cool sounding stuff can we cobble together into this glass?"
They kind of handwave their suggestion of using massive amounts of titanium dioxide to keep their roadway panels clean and then letting "rain wash it away". Do we want massive amounts of titanium dioxide dumped into our waterways? Is that safe, or is it the next wildlife toxin?
There's no reason not to be ambitious or to respect the status quo. Look at Elon Musk and SpaceX. However, notice that Musk hired experienced engineers in the field, rather than starting out by throwing together some titanium prototype rocket nozzles in his garage because it sounded like a cool thing to do.
It's on Kickstarter, so that alone makes it about 50% likely to be a scam.
I agree with the rule of thumb, but you are also incorrect about it being on Kickstarter. As I remarked above, they are begging on Indiegogo rather than KS.
Whilst I doubt the practicality of these panels, this is not an issue, as the panels are connected to the grid. They may or may not be generating more power than they use over the course of the year, but they certainly don't have to be at a single point in time.
Unless they manage to bring down the cost of electrical power by several orders of magnitude it's not feasible to use electrical heat to melt snow on roadways. As the OP pointed out, it requires a 30 kW (thermal) boiler for a driveway snowmelt system. I provided links to my snow melt cost per km calculation. Feel free to substitute your own values for power cost, snow scenarios, etc.
There's a reason we don't do it today. As I said, phase change is a bitch.
Using solar PV for keeping snow off roads would be dumb. Thanks for pointing that out, Captain Obvious.
Your "Captain Obvious" comments would be better directed to Solar Roadways, who are marketing this PV system and touting its electrically-powered snow melting functionality (again, apparently grid-tied power draw to provide the radiant heat). "We designed our panels so the heaters are driven by the grid..."
I'm not entirely convinced they're legit, given this apparent cost of operation oversight (or misleading marketing). I will also note that they are using indiegogo to beg for donations rather than kickstarter. With indiegogo they get to keep all donated monies even if they don't reach their goal. They are trying to get money to scale up for production, but they claim they don't have any idea what their production costing would be. So, that's also "interesting".
Read their FAQ. For example, they claim their tiles can't be stolen because the other tiles in the roadway would wirelessly track a removed tile. Apparently they haven't heard of Faraday cages, either. If meth heads can manage to perform organic chemistry, I guarantee they can rig a functional Faraday cage.
I have put in driveway snowmelt systems and a typically driveway needs at a minimum ~100 kbtu/hr boiler to keep the driveway clear. Scaling that up to a road way and it would be astronomical.
That was my thought as well. Phase change is a bitch, so I anticipated this was a marketing gimmick. I decided to run some quick calculations to determine how much snow could be melted by a 1 m^2 solar heating roadway plate thing.
Solar Roadways is in Idaho, so I decided to use their location for stats. I decided to use an average insolation value of 2 kWh/day in December in Idaho. I disregarded the fact that these plates won't be tilted to compensate for latitude, which will give the roadway an artificially improved performance stat. I used an enthalpy of fusion for water as 334 kJ/kg. I used a 50 kg/m^3 value for the density of freshly-fallen snow. Finally, I decided to let the road panel have a 15% PV efficiency as well as a 100% solar panel coverage (neither of which is likely to be realistic for a road tile thing, but again this is in favor of the roadway panel).
So, how much snow can this melt per day? Call it 6.5 cm. In practice, I'm guessing the answer is closer to "0", because the instant the panel is covered by snow it will cease generating energy. Also, snowstorms are not known to occur during bright, bright, sunshiny days. It seems Solar Roadways expects their panels to be hooked to the grid and pull power to melt snow.
Therefore, this exercise devolves to "why haven't we installed electric radiant heat in our existing roadways to melt snow?"
Well, if we have a four lane standard US highway (12 ft lanes) and we need to melt that same 6.5 cm of freshly fallen snow, it would require 4.4 MWh (yes, megawatt-hours). In Idaho, it looks like an average wholesale rate for 1 MWh of electricity is approximately $150. So... call it $600 per km to melt a few cm of snow... once? And this is for light, fluffy, happy snow, not the slushy sleety shit that has the density of neutronium and gives grandpa a heart attack when he tries to shovel it.
Unless I dropped a few orders of magnitude here (please let me know if I did), it seems the answer to this is "just use the fucking salt instead, like we have been doing." In conclusion, perhaps the LED roadway is useful, but the snow melting bit really seems to be a gimmick.
Let's put it into perspective, though. There are tradeoffs. Yes, during the period of high levels of regulation, telephone service was universally available and it was very reliable. In return, we had very little innovation (for quite some time Bell even dictated which phones you could plug into their network in your house), long distance rates were expensive and had no competition driving them down, etc.
We can see the downside of less regulated telecoms (lower reliability, overselling capacity, etc), but let's not pretend there aren't positives that have come from this lower regulatory level as well.
One thing is for certain: no matter how regulated or "deregulated" this gets to be, all the US internet's base are belong to NSA. They set up us the bomb years ago. The best we can hope for is to get signal so main Netflix screen can turn on.
I have a bunch of thunderbolt ports and handful of USB 3 ports on my Mac. I would love to trade my thunderbolt ports for some more USB 3s and maybe 2 HDMIs.
DisplayPort is great. DisplayPort can serve as a transport for HDMI. Thunderbolt is PCIe + DisplayPort via a mini-DisplayPort plug.
See where I'm going with this? You're welcome.
I like having Thunderbolt on my MacBook. If I require more USB 3 connectivity I just use a hub. USB 3 isn't suitable for the same kind of applications that Thunderbolt does well.
My point is simply that your argument for Thunderbolt isn't actually an argument for it.
Haha, yes, I understood the point I *thought* you were trying to make, but that wasn't what you said. It isn't my job to restate your conclusions correctly.
You are correct that my citation of using the DisplayPort functionality isn't support Thunderbolt per se. 1394 was certainly niche, but it was great when it came to bulk data transfer, such as pulling video from cameras.
I like Thunderbolt because I want a high speed PCIe type bus, and I believe the approach is more elegant than slots on a motherboard. I'm sure you understand that intersection of utility between a PCIe type bus and USB type peripheral bus is quite small. Things tend to fit into one realm or the other.
I also appreciate that Thunderbolt multiplexes DisplayPort, which is an elegant solution especially on smaller laptops.
Apple has a history of trying proprietary video connectors. The HDB-15, then the weird thing on some first gen PowerMacs, and then the ADC. With Thunderbolt/mini-DisplayPort they finally will probably succeed, mostly because the PCIe part is optional. I don't perceive why Apple would feel pressure to relent on Thunderbolt if DisplayPort monitors continue to get traction, and the Mac Pro users (especially) want high speed expansion.