solar powered hovering wireless routers
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Solar Powered Wi-Fi
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The issue of power has always been a problem for wireless technology. Even though the signal can, in theory, go anywhere, in practice the lack of available - or affordable - power can often stymie installation.
I disagree.
At least for outdoor municipal wifi, the routers are usually mounted on utility poles. There's no shortage of cheap power on utility poles!
You can make the argument that it might not be mounted on a utility pole. Like somewhere indoors. But then that renders the solar aspect pretty useless.
What we really need are solar powered wireless wifi routers that can autonomously position and hover themselves at a fixed location. Now that'd be cool, and useful.
Based on power lines? I'm not sure what you mean by that.
The nodes generally sit on unused space on the light poles. If you've got no light poles with extra space on your street then your reception might be bad. One example in Mountain View is View Street, which definitely has power lines, but also has stubby light poles. The stubby light poles have no room for nodes, hence no municipal WiFi access.
I've been using Google's free WiFi in Mountain View for a year now with very few problems. In fact, it's more reliable than Comcast's $40/month cable modem service ever was.
If you're having a problem you should check to see if there's a node in your area. Here's a map of all nodes in Mountain View. The service works best when you have line-of-site access to the node. My wireless modem sits on my window sill, connected to a node ~60 meters away obscured by a thick magnolia tree.
Have you tried the TrueCrypt + MojoPac combo yet? You can you encrypt your user folder, you can encrypt every file, you can encrypt every registry entry.
It's a physics based fact that keeping a mass, such as an air car, airborne consumes more energy than a ground based rolling car.
There are many problems with that statement. The one that bothers me the most is this. In a car, you have to travel down a non-optimal path to reach your destination. In an air car, you can go straight there.
That is, in a car you're wasting fuel going around hills, mountains, one-way streets, stop lights, etc. No worries about that in an air car. I would say this makes up for a large part of any fuel consumption issues.
Huygens doesn't really have a landing site. It's supposed to do all its science while parachuting. If it happens to not land in a methane ocean, or whatever, and instead survives on the ground, that's a bonus. In which case its batteries would die in 1/2 hour or so.
As the orbit parameters for Cassini are still up in the air pending future TCMs (trajectory correction maneuvers), I would guess the parameters for Huygens' "launch" are still up in the air as well - and thus adjustable.
I don't have any official answers. But almost certainly Huygens' atmospheric entry point can be adjusted.
I'm willing to bet the engineers would chosen a competent computerized navigation system over Chuck Yeager, had we had the requisite technology back then. Chuck Yeager's wife would've preferred a computer in the cockpit as well.
"Allen is ArsDigita's president and has been with the company since April of 2000."
So, it was quite obvious by 2001 that Shaheen was driving aD into the ground. Why then was Philip "quite happy to let a 'professional manager' step in and take over some of his day-to-day management duties..."
The entire piece reads of Shaheen destroying aD over the course of 2000. Yet Eve and Philip are happy to let Shaheen take control?
"In late March 2001, ArsDigita received $38 million in financing... In early April, Allen Shaheen... took Philip's place as CEO.
'ArsDigita University was one of the primary reasons I decided to join ArsDigita Corporation.'
- Allen Shaheen, early April 2000"
end quote
What the heck is that? Shaheen commenting on the company a year before he joined? All the quotes in the "Venture capital and new management" section are screwy like that. Is Eve trying to pull a fast one, or is it a mistake?
"Life on Mars" conspiracy originated from rocks found in Antarctica, not NASA. "Space tourist" conspiracy originated from the Russians and Tito, not NASA. Now, the "JFK" conspiracy, that's where you should look at NASA.
Earth-based lasars can be used once the push from the sun becomes null. I don't know to what distance a lasar keeps its integrity, but I know it's alot farther than the sun can.
The original Civilization was my very first computer game. Like a lot of people, I lost a couple months of my childhood on that game. I still think it is the best computer game I've ever played. It would have been near perfection had the world been about 1000 times larger and customizable, with 20 or so more tribes. Throw multi-player in there also. Of course back in 1991 most computers had somewhere on the order of 2 MB RAM, which made those features difficult to achieve.
I taught myself how to program the C language trying to hack the Civilization game save files -- I got pretty far into hacking those things. I could put any military unit anywhere on the map at anytime. Unfortunately the game had a bug where you'd get some whacked terrain squares above north america after about 2100 AD, and that would eventually cause whacked-out barbarians and the game to freeze up. Or else I'd have never stopped playing that game.
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I disagree.
At least for outdoor municipal wifi, the routers are usually mounted on utility poles. There's no shortage of cheap power on utility poles!
You can make the argument that it might not be mounted on a utility pole. Like somewhere indoors. But then that renders the solar aspect pretty useless.
What we really need are solar powered wireless wifi routers that can autonomously position and hover themselves at a fixed location. Now that'd be cool, and useful.
Based on power lines? I'm not sure what you mean by that.
The nodes generally sit on unused space on the light poles. If you've got no light poles with extra space on your street then your reception might be bad. One example in Mountain View is View Street, which definitely has power lines, but also has stubby light poles. The stubby light poles have no room for nodes, hence no municipal WiFi access.
I've been using Google's free WiFi in Mountain View for a year now with very few problems. In fact, it's more reliable than Comcast's $40/month cable modem service ever was.
If you're having a problem you should check to see if there's a node in your area. Here's a map of all nodes in Mountain View. The service works best when you have line-of-site access to the node. My wireless modem sits on my window sill, connected to a node ~60 meters away obscured by a thick magnolia tree.
Have you tried the TrueCrypt + MojoPac combo yet? You can you encrypt your user folder, you can encrypt every file, you can encrypt every registry entry.
That is, in a car you're wasting fuel going around hills, mountains, one-way streets, stop lights, etc. No worries about that in an air car. I would say this makes up for a large part of any fuel consumption issues.
Huygens doesn't really have a landing site. It's supposed to do all its science while parachuting. If it happens to not land in a methane ocean, or whatever, and instead survives on the ground, that's a bonus. In which case its batteries would die in 1/2 hour or so.
As the orbit parameters for Cassini are still up in the air pending future TCMs (trajectory correction maneuvers), I would guess the parameters for Huygens' "launch" are still up in the air as well - and thus adjustable.
I don't have any official answers. But almost certainly Huygens' atmospheric entry point can be adjusted.
These engineers think superconductivity will generate money for their pocket book: American Superconductor Corp
In fact, they're laying 600m of it in New York: Superconductor lines could boost U.S. power grids
I'm willing to bet the engineers would chosen a competent computerized navigation system over Chuck Yeager, had we had the requisite technology back then. Chuck Yeager's wife would've preferred a computer in the cockpit as well.
"Allen is ArsDigita's president and has been with the company since April of 2000."
So, it was quite obvious by 2001 that Shaheen was driving aD into the ground. Why then was Philip "quite happy to let a 'professional manager' step in and take over some of his day-to-day management duties..."
The entire piece reads of Shaheen destroying aD over the course of 2000. Yet Eve and Philip are happy to let Shaheen take control?
quote
"In late March 2001, ArsDigita received $38 million in financing... In early April, Allen Shaheen... took Philip's place as CEO.
'ArsDigita University was one of the primary reasons I decided to join ArsDigita Corporation.'
- Allen Shaheen, early April 2000"
end quote
What the heck is that? Shaheen commenting on the company a year before he joined? All the quotes in the "Venture capital and new management" section are screwy like that. Is Eve trying to pull a fast one, or is it a mistake?
"Life on Mars" conspiracy originated from rocks found in Antarctica, not NASA. "Space tourist" conspiracy originated from the Russians and Tito, not NASA. Now, the "JFK" conspiracy, that's where you should look at NASA.
Earth-based lasars can be used once the push from the sun becomes null. I don't know to what distance a lasar keeps its integrity, but I know it's alot farther than the sun can.
The original Civilization was my very first computer game. Like a lot of people, I lost a couple months of my childhood on that game. I still think it is the best computer game I've ever played. It would have been near perfection had the world been about 1000 times larger and customizable, with 20 or so more tribes. Throw multi-player in there also. Of course back in 1991 most computers had somewhere on the order of 2 MB RAM, which made those features difficult to achieve.
I taught myself how to program the C language trying to hack the Civilization game save files -- I got pretty far into hacking those things. I could put any military unit anywhere on the map at anytime. Unfortunately the game had a bug where you'd get some whacked terrain squares above north america after about 2100 AD, and that would eventually cause whacked-out barbarians and the game to freeze up. Or else I'd have never stopped playing that game.