Between tens of thousands of large-scale feedlots and factory-farm operations, and tens of thousands of municipal waste operations, there is probably enough poop in the U.S. to run 10,000 such waste-to-oil plants.
If one such plant costs $20M to build, the total capital required would be $200B. A lot, but not an insane amount of money, especially compared with the capital that goes in to oil exploration and extraction. Seems like a potentially competitive solution.
So let's see: $20M in capital costs about $200,000 per month to service the debt, say another $300,000 per month to run the plant, 500bbl./day is about 15,000 bll./month @$40/bbl. is $600,000 per month - Hmmmm! Could be profitable. Pretty close, anyway.
Close enough to optimize the costs: If you made an assembly line to build the plants and started ordering components in 1000-lots, I bet the capital requirements could be halved or better.
The simple fact is, 10,000 of something isn't that many in a nation of 300M people.
Is there a TDMA->GSM->CDMA2000 migration path? I just don't see that happening. Maybe - a very big maybe - there is a case for an EVDO overlay. But even in CDMA carriers EVDO has to compete with CDMA+802.11 as a "3G-lite" future.
Try the XIVth. DMVs are state jurisdictions for different reasons that what you suggest. States are no more free to abridge liberties than the federal government.
I have one. Plusses: It works. It sounds great. It's cool, and it's faster than burning CDs. It also plays WMA, which does sound (to me) better than MP3s. If you don't have a CD player in your car (and my car limits me to a choice of a couple expensive trunk-mounted changers) this is the way to go. The minuses are that higher-bitrate recordings limit you to about 80 minutes of music, unless you get the expanded memory (the newer ones might come with more memory). Recharging the battery is a little inconvenient. And I wish it played Oggs.
Your milage may vary depending on your country's constitution, but in the U.S., there is no generalized right for cops to go fishing for criminals. They have to have "probable cause." Radar is still somewhat controversial on those grounds, and it is one reason speeding is not a misdemeanor but a civil infraction.
Indeed, as you point out, a warrant is required for accessing most records, and a warrant has to be based on credible testimony, and a judge has to sign his name to it (a standard that is often enough abused, but...).
So a library simply being property of a municipality or charitable foundation is not enough to enable a completely free hand in records access.
What makes you say that? U.S. citizens live in a country where, supposedly, our Constitution - our basic LAW - says all unenumerated rights are retained by the states and the people.
In other words, the government does not grant our rights, much less confer any privileges outside a narrow set of areas where it is permitted to do so by the Constitution.
So anyone who actually believes "driving is a privilege" has been taken. Bamboozled. Successfully propagandized. Or, worse still, believes it should in fact be a priviledge and that our rights are what the government lets us do. Even a Canadian should be more tuned in to that charter thingy you have up there. Supposedly guarantees some rights. Eh. Whatever.
Please put Katz articles under his byline. If I wanted to read worrywart handwringing digital divide why they all hate us crap, I'd read the Katz crap. As it is, I filter it out and find Slashdot mostly informative. Please keep Slashdot useful and usable.
All the people on Slashdot who wish Microsoft would go away should hope and pray they get in bed with RIAA and MPOA. That is the one thing that could kill them quickly.
There is some reason to have a little hope. The people who wrote the Constituton were skeptical of their experiment with intellectual property. The new law could fall too far outside what the founders ment by "limited."
They may also take note of the fact it is publishers and not authors or inventors who lobbied this extension.
The left/right split on this will be interesting. The conservatives could cop out and claim they don't want to mess with Congress. Or they could draw an original intent line in the sand.
Dexter Russell knives only go up to 14" (unless you count the 16" pizza knife - but that has a handle at both ends, so it clearly has a "peaceful" purpose). Therefore anyone wanting a 15 INCH KNIFE must be a terrorist or militia member intending to overthrow the lawfully constituted government and its agents. Your apron is probably in camoflage pattern.
Jack Valente announced today that the MPOA will sue the cat cloners to fore them to include Digital Right's Management technology in all cloning equipment: "Breeders put a lot of work into those cats. If anyone can make copies, who will breed cats?" Microsoft announced that code in Windows Media Player is not to blame for mysteriously well-targeted banner ads for cat food aimed at people who play more than the usual amount of soft rock.
Verizon and Sprint will go CDMA2000. Voicestream, AT&T, and Cingular will go GSM/GPRS and follow that evolution to WCDMA/UMTS. One thing (among many, the sum of which would make your hair hurt) that complicates the picture is that AT&T and Cingular are starting with IS-136 networks.
It is a common error - one repeated widely in the press, to suggest the U.S. is not adhering to the Genveva Convention. In fact, that is the very treaty that lays out what an "illegal combatant" is. Spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and guerillas have always be treated differently, and usually much more harshly, than regulars.
It sounds like it is 1xRTT, which roughly corresponds to GPRS on a GSM network. Neither are generally accepted as being "3G." Many people call this kind of service "2.5G."
The main improvement over current cellular data services is that everyone in a cell shares a slice of bandwidth used for data. Since most data is bursty, this is much more efficient. It should feel, most of the time, like sharing an ISDN line. Of course, you don't control who you share with, so it will be intersting to see how good it is in the real world.
There are lots of ways to screw it up by not having enough bandwidth, to using too little bandwidth for data, to not controlling the number of users that can use data in a cell, etc. But if it is done right, the user expereince should be pretty good.
Real 3G uses two systems: An evolution of the CDMA system VZ and Sprint use called CDMA2000 (I bet they wish they didn't commit to that 2000!) and WCDMA/UMTS which vies with G.SHDSL for Worst. Acronym. Ever. These systems will do about the same thing: share data bandwidth among users in a cell. But they will enable up to a couple megabits shared capacity per cell.
The main advantage of data on cellular is that digital cellular is data ready now. You just have to get the phones to share access to the channels used for data, and built a moderate sized data network behind your radio network, and you have pervasive mobile data coverage. This is a huge advantage over systems like Ricochet, which had to build out networks just for data. By borrowing cellular bandwidth and piggybacking on the same digital radios in the cell sites and handsets, the amount of new stuff that has to be bought before we get really widespread coverage is vastly reduced.
It is DSL. Only without the ATM or FR layer 2, at slightly higher speeds, over somewhat shorter distances, and a somewhat simplified interface. In other words, DSL for inside multi-tennant buildings, a several year old technology.
All things considered, their public wireless LAN access point and Mobile IP technology is much more interesting, and applicable to many of the same situations.
Peter Jennings: "Tax cuts proposed by President Bush could jeopardize funding for a NASA/EPA mission to restore ice caps on Mars."
Dan Rather: "Most scientists we talked to agreed the ice caps melted after the Mars rover landed. Have we created an SUV problem on Mars?"
Oprah: "On today's show we have Jane A. Token, NASA's Director of Space Ecology, to give us the women's perspective on the future of space exploration."
Tom Daschle: "We need the Republicans to stop blocking funding for our new program to hire Mars ice watchers as federal employees to raise the level of professionalism..."
Cell phone coverage does suck in the U.S., and where it exists it is too often congested. This is a product of the way the spectrum was sliced up and auctioned in the first place, so now this needs to be fixed. One way of doing it is to allow the industry to consolidate. There are way too many licensees in the U.S. Having two or three GSM and IS-136 carriers and two or three CDMA carriers would be enough for adequate price competition. And then there is Nextel, which uses it's own technology and spectrum. No lack of competitors, even after a big consolidation.
One of the benefits you can expect is to, finally, have decent GSM coverage in the U.S. so you can roam pretty much worldwide. Also GPRS, 3G, and 1xRTT/3xRTT wireless data uses cellular bandwidth, which will make congested cells even more congested unless the providers can buy more bandwidth. And before you say "But what about Ricochet?" remember they went bust because they could not afford to build out a data-only network. Wireless mobile data on cellular networks is the only way to have widespread coverage from day-one.
Also, Verizon Wireless != Verizon land-line. They are a joint venture with Vodafone. NTT owns a big chunk of AT&T Wireless, and Voicestream was acquired by Deutsche Telekom.
There are two main flavors of 3G: WCDMA/UMTS and CDMA2000. The standards are at 3gpp.org and 3gpp2.org, respectively. Even though the 3gpp site looks like it was put together by 6th graders, 3gpp is by far the bigger, more influential organization, and WCDMA/UMTS by far the dominant 3G standard. But CDMA2000 (3gpp2) will be viable in the U.S., Korea, and a few other places.
The current dominant standard, GSM, is evolving toward WCDMA/UMTS. This is the upgrade path all GSM and most IS-136 networks will take. GSM/GPRS uses the same data infrastructure and protocols as WCDMA/UMTS. Oddly enough, GSM is more different from WCDMA/UMTS than IS-95 (CDMA) is from CDMA2000. CDMA also has some technology advantage over GSM. But it's kind of a Betamax thing: it is better to be widely used than it is to be better technologically.
Both 3G standards use CDMA technology, but they are not compatible. Maybe there will be dual mode radios that will be cheap enough to work on both kinds of networks.
Anybody know what iDen's upgrade path is?
How do I turn off the redundant things in the square brackets?
1) Ericsson T39 with infrared, Bluetooth, GPRS, tri-band, tiny, it rocks.
2) GSM and IS-136 are both more closely related to analog cellular than is CDMA (IS-95). IS-95 cells can be larger, but not because of any relationship to analog.
The (worldwide) future is WCDMA/UMTS, which is where GSM carriers are going, although U.S. and Korean IS-95 networks will evolve to CDMA2000, so it will be safe to stay IS-95 in the U.S. IS-95 is the Betamax of cellular technologies.
Why would you want a phone on a desk? Coreless, at least, and mobile (GSMCTS please), optimally, are the right thing.
Why would you want an IP phone with no apps that integrate with the network or nodes on the network? Sketchpad? Faxes??!! How retro. Gimme a break. Does this thing integrate with PCs, integrate with IM, do anything useful?
Why would you want a phone with a color LCD display? Do you want a $600 phone? Cordless, mobile, small as possible is nicer, and on the GSM handset cost curve would be good too.
Why would you want a phone that makes you run new wiring or an oddball network on existing phone wiring? Bring the broadband wiring to one desk. All else in the home should be wireless.
Why would you want a phone with latency issues? Is your internet provider ready with a QoS-aware network? Should they be? And if they are, would it cost any less than the PSTN?
Why would you want a phone that exposes latency and reliability issues in 802.11b, which are not important to data, but could make a wireless IP phone perform very badly? And is 802.11b coverage in your home as good as your $30 900Mhz cordless phone coverage?
Why would you want a phone with less than the voice quality provided by an analog line? Why not implement the ISDN high quality speech CODEC (not even ISDN phones do this - terrible shame), at least? What is so good about "toll grade" that people can't seem to think about better quality?
Sorry, until IP phones do something I'm willing to pay to have, I would rather have a smaller/cheaper/longer-battery-life mobile than an IP phone.
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The press release says $20M.
Between tens of thousands of large-scale feedlots and factory-farm operations, and tens of thousands of municipal waste operations, there is probably enough poop in the U.S. to run 10,000 such waste-to-oil plants.
If one such plant costs $20M to build, the total capital required would be $200B. A lot, but not an insane amount of money, especially compared with the capital that goes in to oil exploration and extraction. Seems like a potentially competitive solution.
So let's see: $20M in capital costs about $200,000 per month to service the debt, say another $300,000 per month to run the plant, 500bbl./day is about 15,000 bll./month @$40/bbl. is $600,000 per month - Hmmmm! Could be profitable. Pretty close, anyway.
Close enough to optimize the costs: If you made an assembly line to build the plants and started ordering components in 1000-lots, I bet the capital requirements could be halved or better.
The simple fact is, 10,000 of something isn't that many in a nation of 300M people.
Is there a TDMA->GSM->CDMA2000 migration path? I just don't see that happening. Maybe - a very big maybe - there is a case for an EVDO overlay. But even in CDMA carriers EVDO has to compete with CDMA+802.11 as a "3G-lite" future.
The article is all about scaling back the requirement to deploy WCDMA UMTS to, basically, trial deployment.
It also, very significantly, allows AT&T to choose a technology other than WCDMA. For example, they could choose TD-SCDMA.
Try the XIVth. DMVs are state jurisdictions for different reasons that what you suggest. States are no more free to abridge liberties than the federal government.
I have one. Plusses: It works. It sounds great. It's cool, and it's faster than burning CDs. It also plays WMA, which does sound (to me) better than MP3s. If you don't have a CD player in your car (and my car limits me to a choice of a couple expensive trunk-mounted changers) this is the way to go.
The minuses are that higher-bitrate recordings limit you to about 80 minutes of music, unless you get the expanded memory (the newer ones might come with more memory). Recharging the battery is a little inconvenient. And I wish it played Oggs.
Your milage may vary depending on your country's constitution, but in the U.S., there is no generalized right for cops to go fishing for criminals. They have to have "probable cause." Radar is still somewhat controversial on those grounds, and it is one reason speeding is not a misdemeanor but a civil infraction.
Indeed, as you point out, a warrant is required for accessing most records, and a warrant has to be based on credible testimony, and a judge has to sign his name to it (a standard that is often enough abused, but...).
So a library simply being property of a municipality or charitable foundation is not enough to enable a completely free hand in records access.
"Driving is a privilege..."
What makes you say that? U.S. citizens live in a country where, supposedly, our Constitution - our basic LAW - says all unenumerated rights are retained by the states and the people.
In other words, the government does not grant our rights, much less confer any privileges outside a narrow set of areas where it is permitted to do so by the Constitution.
So anyone who actually believes "driving is a privilege" has been taken. Bamboozled. Successfully propagandized. Or, worse still, believes it should in fact be a priviledge and that our rights are what the government lets us do. Even a Canadian should be more tuned in to that charter thingy you have up there. Supposedly guarantees some rights. Eh. Whatever.
Please put Katz articles under his byline. If I wanted to read worrywart handwringing digital divide why they all hate us crap, I'd read the Katz crap. As it is, I filter it out and find Slashdot mostly informative. Please keep Slashdot useful and usable.
StrongArm(tm) is an Intel trade mark.
All the people on Slashdot who wish Microsoft would go away should hope and pray they get in bed with RIAA and MPOA. That is the one thing that could kill them quickly.
Touchpads require too much force, combined with near-zero travel - BAD! With zero travel and zero force, this should reduce RSI.
There is some reason to have a little hope. The people who wrote the Constituton were skeptical of their experiment with intellectual property. The new law could fall too far outside what the founders ment by "limited."
They may also take note of the fact it is publishers and not authors or inventors who lobbied this extension.
The left/right split on this will be interesting. The conservatives could cop out and claim they don't want to mess with Congress. Or they could draw an original intent line in the sand.
Dexter Russell knives only go up to 14" (unless you count the 16" pizza knife - but that has a handle at both ends, so it clearly has a "peaceful" purpose). Therefore anyone wanting a 15 INCH KNIFE must be a terrorist or militia member intending to overthrow the lawfully constituted government and its agents. Your apron is probably in camoflage pattern.
Jack Valente announced today that the MPOA will sue the cat cloners to fore them to include Digital Right's Management technology in all cloning equipment: "Breeders put a lot of work into those cats. If anyone can make copies, who will breed cats?" Microsoft announced that code in Windows Media Player is not to blame for mysteriously well-targeted banner ads for cat food aimed at people who play more than the usual amount of soft rock.
Verizon and Sprint will go CDMA2000. Voicestream, AT&T, and Cingular will go GSM/GPRS and follow that evolution to WCDMA/UMTS. One thing (among many, the sum of which would make your hair hurt) that complicates the picture is that AT&T and Cingular are starting with IS-136 networks.
It is a common error - one repeated widely in the press, to suggest the U.S. is not adhering to the Genveva Convention. In fact, that is the very treaty that lays out what an "illegal combatant" is. Spies, saboteurs, terrorists, and guerillas have always be treated differently, and usually much more harshly, than regulars.
It sounds like it is 1xRTT, which roughly corresponds to GPRS on a GSM network. Neither are generally accepted as being "3G." Many people call this kind of service "2.5G."
The main improvement over current cellular data services is that everyone in a cell shares a slice of bandwidth used for data. Since most data is bursty, this is much more efficient. It should feel, most of the time, like sharing an ISDN line. Of course, you don't control who you share with, so it will be intersting to see how good it is in the real world.
There are lots of ways to screw it up by not having enough bandwidth, to using too little bandwidth for data, to not controlling the number of users that can use data in a cell, etc. But if it is done right, the user expereince should be pretty good.
Real 3G uses two systems: An evolution of the CDMA system VZ and Sprint use called CDMA2000 (I bet they wish they didn't commit to that 2000!) and WCDMA/UMTS which vies with G.SHDSL for Worst. Acronym. Ever. These systems will do about the same thing: share data bandwidth among users in a cell. But they will enable up to a couple megabits shared capacity per cell.
The main advantage of data on cellular is that digital cellular is data ready now. You just have to get the phones to share access to the channels used for data, and built a moderate sized data network behind your radio network, and you have pervasive mobile data coverage. This is a huge advantage over systems like Ricochet, which had to build out networks just for data. By borrowing cellular bandwidth and piggybacking on the same digital radios in the cell sites and handsets, the amount of new stuff that has to be bought before we get really widespread coverage is vastly reduced.
It is DSL. Only without the ATM or FR layer 2, at slightly higher speeds, over somewhat shorter distances, and a somewhat simplified interface. In other words, DSL for inside multi-tennant buildings, a several year old technology.
All things considered, their public wireless LAN access point and Mobile IP technology is much more interesting, and applicable to many of the same situations.
Peter Jennings: "Tax cuts proposed by President Bush could jeopardize funding for a NASA/EPA mission to restore ice caps on Mars."
Dan Rather: "Most scientists we talked to agreed the ice caps melted after the Mars rover landed. Have we created an SUV problem on Mars?"
Oprah: "On today's show we have Jane A. Token, NASA's Director of Space Ecology, to give us the women's perspective on the future of space exploration."
Tom Daschle: "We need the Republicans to stop blocking funding for our new program to hire Mars ice watchers as federal employees to raise the level of professionalism..."
One of the benefits you can expect is to, finally, have decent GSM coverage in the U.S. so you can roam pretty much worldwide. Also GPRS, 3G, and 1xRTT/3xRTT wireless data uses cellular bandwidth, which will make congested cells even more congested unless the providers can buy more bandwidth. And before you say "But what about Ricochet?" remember they went bust because they could not afford to build out a data-only network. Wireless mobile data on cellular networks is the only way to have widespread coverage from day-one.
Also, Verizon Wireless != Verizon land-line. They are a joint venture with Vodafone. NTT owns a big chunk of AT&T Wireless, and Voicestream was acquired by Deutsche Telekom.
The current dominant standard, GSM, is evolving toward WCDMA/UMTS. This is the upgrade path all GSM and most IS-136 networks will take. GSM/GPRS uses the same data infrastructure and protocols as WCDMA/UMTS. Oddly enough, GSM is more different from WCDMA/UMTS than IS-95 (CDMA) is from CDMA2000. CDMA also has some technology advantage over GSM. But it's kind of a Betamax thing: it is better to be widely used than it is to be better technologically.
Both 3G standards use CDMA technology, but they are not compatible. Maybe there will be dual mode radios that will be cheap enough to work on both kinds of networks.
Anybody know what iDen's upgrade path is?
How do I turn off the redundant things in the square brackets?
1) Ericsson T39 with infrared, Bluetooth, GPRS, tri-band, tiny, it rocks.
2) GSM and IS-136 are both more closely related to analog cellular than is CDMA (IS-95). IS-95 cells can be larger, but not because of any relationship to analog.
The (worldwide) future is WCDMA/UMTS, which is where GSM carriers are going, although U.S. and Korean IS-95 networks will evolve to CDMA2000, so it will be safe to stay IS-95 in the U.S. IS-95 is the Betamax of cellular technologies.
Why would you want a phone on a desk? Coreless, at least, and mobile (GSMCTS please), optimally, are the right thing.
Why would you want an IP phone with no apps that integrate with the network or nodes on the network? Sketchpad? Faxes??!! How retro. Gimme a break. Does this thing integrate with PCs, integrate with IM, do anything useful?
Why would you want a phone with a color LCD display? Do you want a $600 phone? Cordless, mobile, small as possible is nicer, and on the GSM handset cost curve would be good too.
Why would you want a phone that makes you run new wiring or an oddball network on existing phone wiring? Bring the broadband wiring to one desk. All else in the home should be wireless.
Why would you want a phone with latency issues? Is your internet provider ready with a QoS-aware network? Should they be? And if they are, would it cost any less than the PSTN?
Why would you want a phone that exposes latency and reliability issues in 802.11b, which are not important to data, but could make a wireless IP phone perform very badly? And is 802.11b coverage in your home as good as your $30 900Mhz cordless phone coverage?
Why would you want a phone with less than the voice quality provided by an analog line? Why not implement the ISDN high quality speech CODEC (not even ISDN phones do this - terrible shame), at least? What is so good about "toll grade" that people can't seem to think about better quality?
Sorry, until IP phones do something I'm willing to pay to have, I would rather have a smaller/cheaper/longer-battery-life mobile than an IP phone.