The situation in California has exactly nothing to do with "severe restriction", if by that you mean environmental measures. There have been 13 plants delayed or blocked.
I was thinking more along the lines of building permits held up or denied, plus annual emissions limits which forced some plants to shut down last December and created the rolling blackout problems. After the last bust there was an excess of generation capacity and its associated carrying costs, which people resented paying. The mind-set produced by these circumstances wasn't exactly conducive to preparing for a large influx of population and a business boom, especially in electric-intensive industries like web hosting.
California has been trying to export all its generation capacity for some time; look at where the power from the Four Corners plant (accused of hazing up the vistas over the Grand Canyon) is going. California is outsourcing generation all the way across Nevada from Utah, and from as far north as British Columbia.
The growth in demand has been documented many places.
So has the sag in demand (and real-estate prices, and a bunch of other things) after the defense cutbacks around 1990. California has been running a boom-bust-boom cycle for a while. The problem is that California didn't do anything to future-proof the state's infrastructure before the problems struck full force. For instance, in 1995 and even earlier there was a lot of work going on at PG&E and elsewhere on electronically readable and controllable electric meters. Would there be problems with rolling blackouts if individual customers could be cut off if they didn't turn their usage down at critical times, and all electric water heaters could be shut off by the power company? Would there be a shortage of natural gas if everyone's first source of heat for hot water was a solar collector and gas or electricity was only a backup? How about if compact fluorescents were mandatory?
The fact remains that no amount of plant building is going to keep up with this growth. Stopping the growth is the only solution.
You could have said the same thing back in 1930... and you'd have been just as wrong (I had to quote this because it's silly). It's quite possible to build enough plants to satisfy just about any foreseeable level of demand. Whether it's wise to do so instead of modifying consumption patterns is a different matter, and I do agree in advance that serious changes are warranted, desirable and will happen (especially if market prices remain at or above the US$0.15/KWH level).
Regarding solar and wind, energy demand is much, much lower in the evening, so you don't really need that much storage.
This is also just wrong. In many parts of the country, wind energy is associated mostly with the passage of fronts. You get significant amounts of wind energy about two days out of seven. This places a very large premium on either storage systems or backups, and if you are trying to use less fossil fuel you want those backups to run as little as possible.
Also folding in my response to #12...
Regarding Kyoto, what's the problem with cutting coal consumption by cutting demand?
Coal is cheap to dig, and currently running at a fraction of the per-BTU cost of oil or gas. What's going to cut demand as long as oil and gas prices are high? (Carbon taxes are one answer, but they require some kind of action other than market forces in the current environment.) --
While greenhouse energy taxes are interesting, (certainly for gasoline), they wont really address the problem. China is not going to cut back or levy taxes on greenhouse gasses.
In that case, China will face trade sanctions. It doesn't matter much to the government, because all government has to do is shift taxing authority from transactions or inventories to greenhouse emissions. The taxes might even be easier and cheaper to collect than the current taxes.
What these clowns dont want to face is the solution. They don't even try and present one, because the solutions are just as horrific as their predictions.
(spelling corrected for clarity) Excuse me, but hogwash. The USA could probably have met the entire Kyoto obligation with a 50 cent increase in fuel taxes and an increase in the CAFE requirements from 27.5 to 30 MPG for all personal-use vehicles (including SUVs). If all vehicles from 2005 were no less efficient than the Toyota Prius, that would mean an enormous reduction in emissions (around half). What's horrific about people getting around in more efficient vehicles?
All of this conservation, cut back, emission crap is a total waste of time...
For years and years architects have been designing buildings which are largely heated, cooled and lit without externally supplied energy. I'm talking about modern buildings. There are plenty of options for existing buildings too, from foamed-in-place insulation for walls to upgraded appliances and heating plants. It doesn't take a large increase in the price of fuel before conservation becomes the preferred option, on the basis of dollars and cents.
I want my car. I want my heat. I want my oil.
Okay on the car, okay on the heat... but why do you care if oil is involved or not? It was the case a while back that the best light you could get came from oil derived from the heads of sperm whales. That got scarce, someone figured out how to make a lamp oil from the nasty black stuff oozing out of the ground in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and the rest is history. Today we have even better light, and no whales are involved; very few people in the USA even get their light from petroleum, it's typically coal, hydro-electric or nuclear. Why do you care what powers your car? If insulation, a solar-thermal panel and a heat pump will keep your house warm for less money than buying fossil fuel, do you really care? What do you want, to have fuel or to be warm and comfortable? Don't make errors in thought that come from mis-defining the problem.
Already in places like India it's cheaper to get a solar panel, a battery and a fluorescent lamp than it is to buy lamp oil. Conservation makes dollars-and-cents sense in more places and uses all the time. Greenhouse-emission taxes increase the incentives, and you can bet that the market will do things and find solutions under the profit motive that would be impossible for government mandates to accomplish.
The thing that bothers me is that I might have to buy land on a hilltop despite my best efforts to avoid the environmental problems, because there were no fiscal incentives for others to avoid doing the damage. --
(I thought Dancin' Santa was supposed to be the troll...)
Nuclear is not the only option -- it's only the second most stupid option, after fossil fuels.
Democracy, n.: The worst form of government, after all the others.
Of all the alternatives to fossil fuels, I can't think of a single one that works most everywhere and doesn't require submerging lots of land, clear-cutting or repetitively mowing large tracts and taking most of their net biological productivity and burning it, or forcing you to deal with a very intermittent supply. Except nuclear, that is.
Solar and wind have their place, but there's a problem: we don't have the infrastructure and consuming patterns which can deal with large parts of the electrical generating capacity going off-line overnight or even for days at a time. We can promote these sources by making everyone buy electricity at the hour-by-hour spot rate, so that it becomes economically reasonable to charge your batteries or make ice when power is cheap and then consume the power or air-conditioning later. But:
This won't happen until people are paying the true cost of the power they use according to exactly when they use it, and
we'll still need base-load generating capacity to supply the things which cannot shut down.
Ergo, nuclear.
The energy "crisis" we're facing is not a supply-side crisis, it's a demand-side crisis.
Then why is the crisis aspect only affecting the part of the country which has had severe restrictions on additions to generating capacity for over a decade, and a drought?
If we fix our usage problem now, we won't need nuclear plants.
Not true. If we are going to meet even the tiny Kyoto CO2 reductions, we are going to have to make large cuts in coal consumption. The bulk of coal is used to make electricity, and the electric powerplant fuel which makes the least CO2 happens to be uranium. --
If it could live on a 100-base-T cable, you could perhaps play MPEG video streams over it from a central server. Just what you want to go with your networked TiVo! --
It requires a change in the business model
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The problem with that scenario is that the current business model stops working. The game consoles are all sold below cost, and subsidized by revenues on the games. What happens when you have an application that replaces gaming (no further game sales for most buyers) and doesn't give much in the way of revenue either? At least with AOHell, the user supplies their own hardware. If you try doing this with a Playstation 2, you either have to raise the price of the console to sell it at a profit or accept the bleeding from the subsidy going to the users who won't be buying games.
On the other hand, this looks like a great way of killing Microsoft's X-box: buy lots of subsidized units and put Linux on them, populate whole Beowulf clusters with the things, and otherwise go hog-wild at Bill and Steve's expense. --
People think science is messy, with all the arguing and comparing of results and simulations and papers and peer-review that goes on for years...
Guess what? It's a million times neater than the sausage-grinding work of making law.
The National Academy of Sciences has essentially said that the question of what we should do is settled. Great. Who's going to say how we should do it? This is the messy, ugly issue. Dozens of different interest groups are going to get involved, from the western economic interests who make their money from coal mining to the environmentalists who want strip-mining and mountaintop removal ended, to the natural gas interests who are salivating over the increase in their potential market (because gas has so much less carbon per unit of energy than coal or even oil), to the social-justice types who don't want limits placed on the emissions of "developing nations" because that won't promote any transfer of wealth from the USA and Europe, to the electric utilities who are worried that all their coal-fired generators might be priced out of the market, to the nuclear plant operators who are looking at a huge surge in the value of their plants, to the auto companies and SUV drivers who like the status quo but won't be able to have it... it goes on and on.
What kind of mess is going to come out of these competing interests when they go into make the law that tries to limit greenhouse gas emissions?
This should be simple. There ought to be a straight tax on greenhouse-gas emissions, based on their heat-trapping efficiency. That will let the market sort things out in the most efficient manner possible (where there is a market to do the job). Instead what we are probably going to get is a set of caps, taxes, preference, exemptions, and more that makes an unholy legal and regulatory mess on top of the environmental mess; you can bet that it'll be chock-full of errors, oversights and perverse incentives. You can just hear the cash registers of the Washington lobbyists going CHA-CHING, and the accountants and regulators and lawyers for decades to come.
Ye gods, I hate it already. Why the hell can't we have the climate scientists and economists write the law, and get the pols and lobbyists the heck out of it? We would probably get a better result cheaper and with a lot less pain. --
Okay. So's GPS. Does that make it useless? Looks to me like it makes a really useful location system and clock anyway.
He claims that an application would be a data network on an airplane, saving the need to run miles of wire. But what would you do with such a network?
That is perhaps the weakest suggestion, but I have an idea for that: broadcasting arrival time and gate information for connecting flights in a format easily decoded by PDA's and other units with no power or data connection to the seat.
Here is a device that delivers a low-bandwidth (it uses ELECTRICAL WIRING, FGS), shared-medium network. A standard wireless network would provide for bandwidth overhead, would probably be cheaper (compare the range of a wireless base station to the number of flourescents in your average hospital hallway) and provide TWO-way communications.
I don't think you get it. The power supply probably doesn't carry the data to the lamp (though you might use carrier-current to do that). The advantages are:
You get a lot of transmitter power (several WATTS per tube), and you already owned the transmitters.
You can arrange them in itty-bitty "cells"; each lamp can be transmitting something different, such as location codes. The limited range gives you better resolution.
For applications like translations or transcriptions, you don't need two-way service; it's overkill.
A receiver that can pick the signal out of the fluorescent emissions can be ultra-low power (the multi-watt transmitter does the work) and dirt cheap.
While it's nice that they have a device that will help Tommy Braindamage find his way to an appointment, shouldn't someone be keeping closer tabs on Tommy if he is this brain damaged?
Maybe Tommy B. needs to exercise the parts of his brain that are still working, and that exercise is part of his recovery program. Reminding him that he's supposed to be someplace soon and telling him how to get there gives him more exercise than a chaperone. If he goes out of the rehab unit, you can always have an el-cheapo car-alarm transmitter alert the staff to go pick him up (runs on two button cells and costs a few bucks, already has the spectrum allocated by the FCC).
And who cares if it's not a commercial success? It's fun and thought-provoking. --
It is a lot more limited in range than Bluetooth. If you want a signal that only goes as far as your desk chair, you can broadcast it from the lamp under the bookshelf. If you want to use it for location purposes, you broadcast from the compact-flourescent reflector floods in the ceiling (try that with Bluetooth). Covering different parts of a room with different signals (mentioned in the link)... no problem.
Why not use infrared? When you've already got many times the emitter power in the ceiling for room lighting, a separate IR emitter system looks like a waste of money (and electricity). --
The Music House is a museum devoted to the history of mechanical music reproduction. They have a large collection of music boxes, player pianos, player organs (both electrical and purely mechanical), and a set of machines which are hard to describe in mere words. If you go anywhere near them, stop in and take the tour; it is a real great experience for anyone who is either a geek or a music lover. --
Airplane engineers make compromises, too. There are always compromises between cost and weight, between time and labor to assemble and surface finish, between manufacturability and total performance. When the Boeing 747 was new, it could only carry a part of its specified load because the available engines didn't produce enough thrust for the airframe. Did Boeing re-engineer the aircraft to lighten it and make its payload fraction higher? No, they compromised and delivered an aircraft that wouldn't be able to fulfill its complete potential until some time later.
Everything in life is full of compromises. Ironically, one of the things edging us out of the compromise trap is computers. Using genetic algorithms we can find superior or possibly optimal solutions for a given set of constraints, and do it very quickly. When one of your compromises is time-to-market which is determined by the amount of engineering work required, this is a very big deal. --
I don't normally count my self as stupid, but that made about as much sense to me as Geordi explaining how the deflector dish is going to create a reverse tackyon pulse to break the hold of the tractor beam while negating the subspace turbulance to disrupt the localized positron field surrounding the enemy ships.
Except that what I was trying to describe is real physics, and it's not balonium, it's supposed to be understandable and quantifiable. Good thing I don't teach physics for a living, I guess.
It's said that you lose about half your audience with each equation you put in a piece. This may be true for the public in general, but maybe not for Slashdot... yet Taco et alii have decided not to allow the use of the <sup> tag and other things that are needed to write even elementary exponential equations in a fashion that displays clearly. What can you do? --
(That was actually a back-handed complement; your post had errors no worse than the Wired article, which means that you could easily beat their level of accuracy and professionalism if you wanted to. What this says about Wired is not something I'll speculate about here.) --
In the ZDNet article cited for the Slashdot story, it's made clear that the problem was that the railroads did not own the sub-surface rights where the cables actually ran. I quote:
... in many cases railroads bought the surface rights from original property owners to lay tracks. But those rights didn't include so-called subsurface rights, which traditionally allow for activities such as mining or oil drilling.
Next time, read a little more carefully. It wouldn't do for you to have as much egg on your face as a certain Wired author and his editor, would it? --
This is why on big transmission lines, each phase is carried on two or four wires separated by spacers.
Maybe one of the reasons, but the other one is that the multi-wire configuration has lower electric field strengths and less corona losses than a single conductor does. --
Actually, no. With AC current, cable capacity is not a function of it's cross-section area, but only of it's cross-section perimeter, since AC current only travels at the surface of the cable.
Unfortunately, that's a rather large over-simplification of the actual physics. Each material has a characteristic skin depth for a particular frequency. This skin depth is determined by the magnetic and electrical characteristics. Here's an explanation of what happens which will probably be unclear due to my lack of physics lecturing experience:
Imagine a conductor going in and out of your screen, in the middle. Now assume an increasing current through that conductor, going into the screen. Since the magnetic fields from a conductor form circles around it (by the right-hand rule), you'll have a magnetic field going clockwise around the conductor.
You can assume that this current flows only on the very surface of the conductor, but that would imply an arbitrarily small depth and a rather large resistance. This is pretty obviously not the case in reality, so it's worth analyzing the situation to see what really happens. If you have a step-function increase in current along the conductor, you'll have a lot of current flowing in the surface layer, a big magnetic field around the outside, and a smaller current in the bulk of the conductor with a smaller field there. The bigger field tries to penetrate the conductor, along with its associated current. It can't do this all at once; as the field flows into the conductor it sets up eddy currents like smoke rings blowing down a pipe. These currents flow in the forward direction (the direction of the change in current) on the outside and in the reverse direction (against the change in current) on the inside. The eddy currents have to fight the resistance of the wire, and they decay exponentially with time. After a few time constants, the current is flowing pretty much evenly through the whole wire.
As you can see, if the time-constant of the eddy currents in the wire is a lot smaller than the frequency of the power in the wire, skin effect will be pretty small. The construction of the wire has an effect, too. Since the time-constant of the eddy damping is a function of the thickness of each individual piece of conductor, winding strands in thinner shells will reduce the skin effect. The trapezoidal arrangement of conductors in the aluminum-clad-steel wires may be designed for this purpose (or maybe it was just a convenient way to squeeze more aluminum into the cross-section than a single layer of pie-shaped wires would have been; my guess is, a little of both). --
If you are replacing structural steel in a power line, you'd want to replace it with something that is stronger and lighter (Kevlar or graphite or maybe Spectra). What's the point in using a core material that's not as strong (glass is weaker than graphite)? It increases the weight, reduces the amount of aluminum you can put in the wire, and reduces your advantage.
If you're going to run optical fiber along a power cable, it would make more sense to replace one of the outer aluminum strands with a jacketed bundle of fiber. That puts the fiber right where it's easy to work with, instead of in the structural center of the cable beneath the conductors. --
1x1 web bugs could be stopped easily with a caching proxy. The URL of every 1x1 transparent GIF could be cached, and on a repeat hit the proxy could just feed back a generic 1x1 transparent GIF. Shared lists of these URLs could make repeat hits on any GIF relatively rare.
Of course, the spies could escalate in any number of ways. Dynamically generated content could change the URL for every page load, eliminating the effective caching at some expense in server load. To counter that, a fix to the proxy might ignore "nocache" on images where the image is from a different site than the referrer. A patch to the browser might just ignore 1x1 images. And so it goes. --
According to the judge, the fourth amendment didnt apply because the computers were owned by Russians and located in Russia
Okay so far.
This in turn means if these men had been Americans, the whole FBI hack would have been illegal.
No. If they had been Americans, and their computers had been in the USA, the FBI would have been able to get regular search warrants to download the files thereon (they did get a warrant to search the files, remember). What would you prefer: have the courts declare that the inability to obtain a warrant to obtain evidence of a crime (because the evidence lies outside the USA) means that such evidence is ipso facto illegally obtained? I sure wouldn't like that if the crime had been against me, and I doubt you'd sit still for it if you'd been the victim either.
So, essentially, yes, you broke your own laws.
No. The laws only apply within the boundaries of the USA; outside the USA, various other laws and treaties apply instead. The courts applied Constitutional critera to evidence which was already within the USA (issuing a warrant to search the files) but did not require the same for the access to the computer in Russia because there was no procedure established for accessing it, and thus none necessary. A ruling to the contrary would let crooks hide in places like Russia or China and get away with extortion and vandalism with impunity. --
... if we cant even follow our own rules when dealing with other countries citizens...
Didn't we? The FBI got a warrant to look at the files they captured. They got around the lack of an extradition treaty with Russia by enticing the crooks to come here, and got the crooks to reveal the codes needed to access the incriminating evidence with a bit of "human engineering". Make no mistake, they are crooks; the captured files revealed that they were the people responsible for several blackmail operations.
if that country is blatently ignoring their own laws dealing with me, then screw em.
I think you have this backwards. Russia is a lawless place in many ways right now. If there was law in Russia, those crooks would have been investigated locally, the evidence revealed without need for any subterfuge, and either have been handed over to US authorities or have been prosecuted and jailed on Russian soil. The FBI is just making it tougher for crooks to get away with "internet protection rackets" by hiding on foreign soil. By raising the stakes, they make it less likely that people will try to do this.
Wouldn't it make us all better off if those guys had just sold programming services instead? They had plenty of expertise in several areas, but they decided to engage in crime. I have no sympathy. --
who cares WHERE the CO2 gets produced? Certainly the planetary ecology doesn't care.
Sloppy thinking, faulty conclusion. The planetary ecology doesn't care how much CO2 is produced, only how much is released... and that is a function of both the efficiency of the process and whether it is produced by stationary or mobile sources; a stationary process has options for post-processing which a mobile process does not.
In principle, the CO2 output of a stationary gas reforming plant could be combined with certain minerals or pumped into spent oil or gas wells; this CO2 would get to the atmosphere very slowly if at all. What do you think this would do to the planetary ecology, exactly? --
Hydrogen doesn't occur free on earth in significant quantities. This raises the question of how it is to be produced, and the byproducts of the process. If the original energy source is a fuel containing carbon, there's the potential for releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. If the fuel carried by the vehicle is methanol (CH3OH) then it's all but certain that the carbon will be exhausted to the atmosphere. If the system uses stationary reformers and loads only hydrogen onto the vehicle, in principle the CO2 could be sequestered (pumped down old oil wells) and released over a very long period if ever. --
You're arguing that the GPS suddenly failing is sufficiently important as a consideration that it requires continuously sending your location to a central repository, BUT
You're depending on the continued operation of the vehicle communications system to alert the network to the fact that your airbag deployed?
Why can't the vehicle remember where it was for the last 2 minutes, and only send this information to the network if the airbag goes off (along with the "airbag" message)? This eliminates the issue of surveillance, and the last-received GPS coordinates are going to be just as good in either case.
Oh, yeah. It also deflates the argument for the desirability of Big Brother. Too bad you couldn't spend two seconds thinking about that. --
The problem being that modern refined gasoline is too explosive for them (this is a similar problem to using weapons-grade plutonium in a nuclear reactor).
Sorry, not even close. Gasoline (fuel for Otto-cycle engines) and diesel fuel (fuel for Diesel-cycle engines) have conflicting requirements; diesel fuel MUST ignite in a compressed air charge, but gasoline must NOT ignite when compressed in an air charge. If you put gasoline in a diesel engine, it may not even start. There are also little quirks such as the typical diesel injector pump using the fuel as lubricant and it would die rather quickly if it was fed only gasoline, but those are secondary issues.
Diesel gas is cheaper per mile in a diesel engine, but also is less pure, and that translates into nastier pollution.
Diesel fuel is cheaper per mile because the diesel engine has a higher thermal efficiency and better part-throttle efficiency. The "purity" is a red herring, except as it relates to things like sulfur content (some of the sulfur compounds help lubricate the injector pump).
The $.50 / gallon is somewhat hard to swallow unless they mean cost of seeds to oil.
They probably mean the cost of NaOH, methanol and processing, because they assume that the vegetable oil is a waste product from a cooking process and is free (or even negative cost, if the user would have to pay to dispose of it). --
Slashdot Mirror
California has been trying to export all its generation capacity for some time; look at where the power from the Four Corners plant (accused of hazing up the vistas over the Grand Canyon) is going. California is outsourcing generation all the way across Nevada from Utah, and from as far north as British Columbia.
So has the sag in demand (and real-estate prices, and a bunch of other things) after the defense cutbacks around 1990. California has been running a boom-bust-boom cycle for a while. The problem is that California didn't do anything to future-proof the state's infrastructure before the problems struck full force. For instance, in 1995 and even earlier there was a lot of work going on at PG&E and elsewhere on electronically readable and controllable electric meters. Would there be problems with rolling blackouts if individual customers could be cut off if they didn't turn their usage down at critical times, and all electric water heaters could be shut off by the power company? Would there be a shortage of natural gas if everyone's first source of heat for hot water was a solar collector and gas or electricity was only a backup? How about if compact fluorescents were mandatory? You could have said the same thing back in 1930... and you'd have been just as wrong (I had to quote this because it's silly). It's quite possible to build enough plants to satisfy just about any foreseeable level of demand. Whether it's wise to do so instead of modifying consumption patterns is a different matter, and I do agree in advance that serious changes are warranted, desirable and will happen (especially if market prices remain at or above the US$0.15/KWH level). This is also just wrong. In many parts of the country, wind energy is associated mostly with the passage of fronts. You get significant amounts of wind energy about two days out of seven. This places a very large premium on either storage systems or backups, and if you are trying to use less fossil fuel you want those backups to run as little as possible.Also folding in my response to #12...
Coal is cheap to dig, and currently running at a fraction of the per-BTU cost of oil or gas. What's going to cut demand as long as oil and gas prices are high? (Carbon taxes are one answer, but they require some kind of action other than market forces in the current environment.)--
Already in places like India it's cheaper to get a solar panel, a battery and a fluorescent lamp than it is to buy lamp oil. Conservation makes dollars-and-cents sense in more places and uses all the time. Greenhouse-emission taxes increase the incentives, and you can bet that the market will do things and find solutions under the profit motive that would be impossible for government mandates to accomplish.
The thing that bothers me is that I might have to buy land on a hilltop despite my best efforts to avoid the environmental problems, because there were no fiscal incentives for others to avoid doing the damage.
--
Of all the alternatives to fossil fuels, I can't think of a single one that works most everywhere and doesn't require submerging lots of land, clear-cutting or repetitively mowing large tracts and taking most of their net biological productivity and burning it, or forcing you to deal with a very intermittent supply. Except nuclear, that is.
Solar and wind have their place, but there's a problem: we don't have the infrastructure and consuming patterns which can deal with large parts of the electrical generating capacity going off-line overnight or even for days at a time. We can promote these sources by making everyone buy electricity at the hour-by-hour spot rate, so that it becomes economically reasonable to charge your batteries or make ice when power is cheap and then consume the power or air-conditioning later. But:
- This won't happen until people are paying the true cost of the power they use according to exactly when they use it, and
- we'll still need base-load generating capacity to supply the things which cannot shut down.
Ergo, nuclear. Then why is the crisis aspect only affecting the part of the country which has had severe restrictions on additions to generating capacity for over a decade, and a drought? Not true. If we are going to meet even the tiny Kyoto CO2 reductions, we are going to have to make large cuts in coal consumption. The bulk of coal is used to make electricity, and the electric powerplant fuel which makes the least CO2 happens to be uranium.--
If it could live on a 100-base-T cable, you could perhaps play MPEG video streams over it from a central server. Just what you want to go with your networked TiVo!
--
On the other hand, this looks like a great way of killing Microsoft's X-box: buy lots of subsidized units and put Linux on them, populate whole Beowulf clusters with the things, and otherwise go hog-wild at Bill and Steve's expense.
--
Guess what? It's a million times neater than the sausage-grinding work of making law.
The National Academy of Sciences has essentially said that the question of what we should do is settled. Great. Who's going to say how we should do it? This is the messy, ugly issue. Dozens of different interest groups are going to get involved, from the western economic interests who make their money from coal mining to the environmentalists who want strip-mining and mountaintop removal ended, to the natural gas interests who are salivating over the increase in their potential market (because gas has so much less carbon per unit of energy than coal or even oil), to the social-justice types who don't want limits placed on the emissions of "developing nations" because that won't promote any transfer of wealth from the USA and Europe, to the electric utilities who are worried that all their coal-fired generators might be priced out of the market, to the nuclear plant operators who are looking at a huge surge in the value of their plants, to the auto companies and SUV drivers who like the status quo but won't be able to have it... it goes on and on.
What kind of mess is going to come out of these competing interests when they go into make the law that tries to limit greenhouse gas emissions?
This should be simple. There ought to be a straight tax on greenhouse-gas emissions, based on their heat-trapping efficiency. That will let the market sort things out in the most efficient manner possible (where there is a market to do the job). Instead what we are probably going to get is a set of caps, taxes, preference, exemptions, and more that makes an unholy legal and regulatory mess on top of the environmental mess; you can bet that it'll be chock-full of errors, oversights and perverse incentives. You can just hear the cash registers of the Washington lobbyists going CHA-CHING, and the accountants and regulators and lawyers for decades to come.
Ye gods, I hate it already. Why the hell can't we have the climate scientists and economists write the law, and get the pols and lobbyists the heck out of it? We would probably get a better result cheaper and with a lot less pain.
--
- You get a lot of transmitter power (several WATTS per tube), and you already owned the transmitters.
- You can arrange them in itty-bitty "cells"; each lamp can be transmitting something different, such as location codes. The limited range gives you better resolution.
- For applications like translations or transcriptions, you don't need two-way service; it's overkill.
- A receiver that can pick the signal out of the fluorescent emissions can be ultra-low power (the multi-watt transmitter does the work) and dirt cheap.
Maybe Tommy B. needs to exercise the parts of his brain that are still working, and that exercise is part of his recovery program. Reminding him that he's supposed to be someplace soon and telling him how to get there gives him more exercise than a chaperone. If he goes out of the rehab unit, you can always have an el-cheapo car-alarm transmitter alert the staff to go pick him up (runs on two button cells and costs a few bucks, already has the spectrum allocated by the FCC).And who cares if it's not a commercial success? It's fun and thought-provoking.
--
Why not use infrared? When you've already got many times the emitter power in the ceiling for room lighting, a separate IR emitter system looks like a waste of money (and electricity).
--
The Music House is a museum devoted to the history of mechanical music reproduction. They have a large collection of music boxes, player pianos, player organs (both electrical and purely mechanical), and a set of machines which are hard to describe in mere words. If you go anywhere near them, stop in and take the tour; it is a real great experience for anyone who is either a geek or a music lover.
--
Everything in life is full of compromises. Ironically, one of the things edging us out of the compromise trap is computers. Using genetic algorithms we can find superior or possibly optimal solutions for a given set of constraints, and do it very quickly. When one of your compromises is time-to-market which is determined by the amount of engineering work required, this is a very big deal.
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It's said that you lose about half your audience with each equation you put in a piece. This may be true for the public in general, but maybe not for Slashdot... yet Taco et alii have decided not to allow the use of the <sup> tag and other things that are needed to write even elementary exponential equations in a fashion that displays clearly. What can you do?
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(That was actually a back-handed complement; your post had errors no worse than the Wired article, which means that you could easily beat their level of accuracy and professionalism if you wanted to. What this says about Wired is not something I'll speculate about here.)
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Imagine a conductor going in and out of your screen, in the middle. Now assume an increasing current through that conductor, going into the screen. Since the magnetic fields from a conductor form circles around it (by the right-hand rule), you'll have a magnetic field going clockwise around the conductor.
You can assume that this current flows only on the very surface of the conductor, but that would imply an arbitrarily small depth and a rather large resistance. This is pretty obviously not the case in reality, so it's worth analyzing the situation to see what really happens. If you have a step-function increase in current along the conductor, you'll have a lot of current flowing in the surface layer, a big magnetic field around the outside, and a smaller current in the bulk of the conductor with a smaller field there. The bigger field tries to penetrate the conductor, along with its associated current. It can't do this all at once; as the field flows into the conductor it sets up eddy currents like smoke rings blowing down a pipe. These currents flow in the forward direction (the direction of the change in current) on the outside and in the reverse direction (against the change in current) on the inside. The eddy currents have to fight the resistance of the wire, and they decay exponentially with time. After a few time constants, the current is flowing pretty much evenly through the whole wire.
As you can see, if the time-constant of the eddy currents in the wire is a lot smaller than the frequency of the power in the wire, skin effect will be pretty small. The construction of the wire has an effect, too. Since the time-constant of the eddy damping is a function of the thickness of each individual piece of conductor, winding strands in thinner shells will reduce the skin effect. The trapezoidal arrangement of conductors in the aluminum-clad-steel wires may be designed for this purpose (or maybe it was just a convenient way to squeeze more aluminum into the cross-section than a single layer of pie-shaped wires would have been; my guess is, a little of both).
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If you're going to run optical fiber along a power cable, it would make more sense to replace one of the outer aluminum strands with a jacketed bundle of fiber. That puts the fiber right where it's easy to work with, instead of in the structural center of the cable beneath the conductors.
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Of course, the spies could escalate in any number of ways. Dynamically generated content could change the URL for every page load, eliminating the effective caching at some expense in server load. To counter that, a fix to the proxy might ignore "nocache" on images where the image is from a different site than the referrer. A patch to the browser might just ignore 1x1 images. And so it goes.
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Wouldn't it make us all better off if those guys had just sold programming services instead? They had plenty of expertise in several areas, but they decided to engage in crime. I have no sympathy.
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In principle, the CO2 output of a stationary gas reforming plant could be combined with certain minerals or pumped into spent oil or gas wells; this CO2 would get to the atmosphere very slowly if at all. What do you think this would do to the planetary ecology, exactly?
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Hydrogen doesn't occur free on earth in significant quantities. This raises the question of how it is to be produced, and the byproducts of the process. If the original energy source is a fuel containing carbon, there's the potential for releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. If the fuel carried by the vehicle is methanol (CH3OH) then it's all but certain that the carbon will be exhausted to the atmosphere. If the system uses stationary reformers and loads only hydrogen onto the vehicle, in principle the CO2 could be sequestered (pumped down old oil wells) and released over a very long period if ever.
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- You're arguing that the GPS suddenly failing is sufficiently important as a consideration that it requires continuously sending your location to a central repository, BUT
- You're depending on the continued operation of the vehicle communications system to alert the network to the fact that your airbag deployed?
Why can't the vehicle remember where it was for the last 2 minutes, and only send this information to the network if the airbag goes off (along with the "airbag" message)? This eliminates the issue of surveillance, and the last-received GPS coordinates are going to be just as good in either case.Oh, yeah. It also deflates the argument for the desirability of Big Brother. Too bad you couldn't spend two seconds thinking about that.
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In The Adolescence of P-1, P-1 recognizes people by their touch on the keyboard. This idea is old.
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