This is the Apple AirPort Extreme. Same basic performance, same feature set, same way to admin it same price.
But because it says Google, we're supposed to believe this is part of some super-duper conspiracy to take over the world.
Right.
Or maybe Google just wants some of the market that Apple currently has, selling the same router you can get for $50 for $200, and being the best selling home router in spite of that?
"The ultimate dream when it comes to clean, green, safe, abundant energy is nuclear fusion."
Not since the 1980s when we realized any machine able to harness it would cost more than we could afford to pay for it.
"The same process that powers the core of the Sun could also power everything on Earth millions of times over"
Indeed, and if we build solar panels at the rate we are now, we'll do just that.
"Recent advances have all three looking promising in various ways"
Really? Let's see:
- magnetic confinement - after some initial tabletop experiments, a guy in south america claims to have a working fusion device, and suddenly there's millions provided for research. After some initial failures, Teller calls a meeting at the Princeton Gun Club and basically says he's highly sceptical that any of the existing devices could work because they use concave fields that will cause the plasma to squirt out. Everyone leaves the meeting and immediately convinces themselves that his concerns don't apply. 60 years later... guess what, he was right.
- inertial confinement - John Nuckols came up with a formula in the 1960s that said we would have breakeven with lasers around a couple of kJ. We build those and they didn't work, not even remotely close. In the 1980s they ran some experiments using small nuclear bombs as drivers, and those suggested it would require 100 MJ. But instead of believing the results, everyone involved waved their hands and said it didn't apply, and we should keep going with the 4 MJ machine. Well guess what, it didn't work, it's stuck at 1/10th breakeven, and a driver able to close that gap is around 100 MJ.
- magnetized target fusion - so basically the entire history of fusion goes like this: I have a device that will work. It doesn't work. I have another device that will definitely work. Repeat. MTF is the latest iteration.
That doesn't mean we need a 40 MJ laser, it probably means we need 100 MJ, w
"one wonder why we don't spend more resources towards achieving the holy grail of energy."
Because it doesn't work and it's not the holy grail of energy. And people that actually work in the energy industry are perfectly aware of that, and that's why they don't get more resources.
This is a wonderful example of misdirection. As someone that lives within the exclusion zone of Pickering, it's not the radiation that worries me, it's the fact that I will be forced from my home never to return, rendering the largest investment I have worthless. Losing most of my life's capitalization, yeah, that worries me. And it worries me more that the other end of that exclusion zone is well within Toronto, which means that the collective savings of about a million other people will be similarly effected.
"On a sunny summer afternoon, the facility could provide more than 5% of the city’s power needs at a price—$50 per megawatt hour—considerably below other solar projects. In July, Austin Energy announced bids for a new round of solar construction that were below $40 a megawatt hour."
"It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. "
I recently went to a page where the JS begged me to turn off AdBlock. So I did. I was rewarded with a page that was 3/5th ads, with the content squished into the center. Turning it back on produced a single column of readable text. I can't wait for AB on iOS.
When Apple refused to support Flash and told everyone it was because Flash sucked, the interwebs came alive with conspiracy theories about how Apple was trying to force people onto QT and apps. The thing is, Flash did suck, and all the other platforms turned it off too. And today, the conspiracy theory is no longer mentioned.
So here we are with plug-ins. Is Apple making a plug-in system, or trying to force everyone to use apps? I suspect the later, and have a feeling this story arc will play out the same way as Flash over the next six months.
> hmmm... I can only speak to what I've heard of the US grid
Which is, apparently, "nothing whatsoever".
> You have to use oil if you do that::rolleyes::
Hydro has the fastest ramp time of any power source, followed by the *infantismal* amount of ICE engines, followed by natural gas turbines.
> Yes you know it will be a sunny day or there might be wind but you really don't know how much.
We know within something like 20% what will be going on in an hour to four. This has been the case for the better part of a decade now (I was doing tech analisys on energy systems when this stuff went mainstream). There is more than enough warning, what MAY be lacking is the NG peakers to offset it. At current levels, however, this is a total non-problem.
> Login and make your point or remain an ignorable AC troll.;)
Gebus, I have just about zero idea what my caloric intake or output is. I certainly see value in something that's 20%. And if I can calibrate that against, say, a bike machine, then I'm all for it.
That is NOT the full report - or if it is, HP's definition of "report" is "useless marketing BS".
Harking back to the AC OP's concern, the paper you link to has no actual data in it, only summaries. For instance, "Thirty percent utilized cloud-based web interfaces "
I lived in Ireland for a while. One day in October when it was nasty outside I was inside shivering and then noticed why... the drapes were blowing around. So I got up to close the window.
The window *was* closed.
This was in a home built in the 1970s.
In contrast, I am now living in a typical Canadian home built in 1972. It is completely insulated, plastic wrapped and has reasonably high-quality double-pane windows throughout. The only thing that's changed since is to use more insulation overall and to also cover the outside of the basement walls, which they didn't really start doing around here until the 90s.
Even still, it uses much more energy than it has to. I've already replaced all the lights with LED and put in reasonably new appliances, so my daily electricity is down to about 10 to 11 kWh, about half the national average. Most of the energy I use is heating, and I could cut that by 1/2 to 1/3rd by using a georeturn heat pump.
Cutting total energy use in half in the western world is not impossible. Just expensive. But we're talking "about the same as that craptastic Wolf stove and terribly inefficient Sub-Zero fridge" expensive.
"After taking control of the car's entertainment system it was possible to gain control of vital car systems such as the brakes"
Actually reading the article you find nothing of the sort happened. The article merely states
"Once an infotainment system had been compromised, he said, an attacker could potentially use it as a way to control more critical systems, including steering and braking."
This hack consisted solely of causing text like "LOLZ I RULZ" appear on the radio display.
Thank you samzenpus for giving this topic the attention it most certainly does not deserve.
At one of the places I used to work we needed to upload daily activity files to a bank. This consisted of using RSA security to log into their system, and then running a IBM3270 terminal emulator. I found that somewhat amusing.
> Bede's certificated plane, the American Aviation AA-1 Yankee
The original BD-1 never matured as Bede lost interest in finishing the design and spent his time on the network of dealerships he was going to build to sell them.
The investors had to fire him and give the design to someone else to complete. They had to do pretty much a complete redesign on it.
This is a recurring theme, Bede was clearly an "ideas guy".
> The BD-5 is a propeller-driven plane with an internal combustion engine, which Bede derived from a sailplane version he never sold
Incorrect.
The BD-5 design was copied, deliberately and publicly, from a Schweizer glider. The goal was, always, to produce a powered light aircraft. The B model, the glider, was an offshoot of the A model. As it turned out, the A model wings were substantially under-designed, and an intermediate length was substituted on most models. All of the designs initially made considerable use of fibreglass, but the entire series was moved to aluminum as the orders poured it.
The design was flawed from conception to construction. It fails due to a well-known issue in aircraft design, as it is "close coupled". The short length of the aircraft means that there is limited distance between the various force points like the CoG and CoF and the control surfaces. Exasperating this is the rear mounted engine, which means there's only, literally, inches between the heaviest part of the aircraft and the control surfaces. That means the controls have to be made larger so they have enough force to operate at low speeds. However, this also means that they are dramatically overpowered at higher speeds. There's no way around this, its basic physics. The "solution" for more expensive designs is powered controls and artificial feel.
Worse, in terms of the length of the aircraft, moving the pilot's seat a few inches is more of a relative shift than it is in, say, a Cessna. This means the aircraft is extremely sensitive to changes in W&B. Even something as minor as burning off fuel will require constant trimming, and that trim point will, for the reasons outlined above, change with speed.
So all of this conspires to make the aircraft difficult to fly on approach. As the aircraft slows the trim keeps changing. Combine that with high approach speeds and ever-more-sensitive controls. And finally, put the thrust line above the aircraft, so if you goose the engine it pushes the nose down, precisely the opposite of what you want it to do.
There is a reason a Cessna looks like it does. It is, for the vast majority of cases, the proper layout for an aircraft. Canard and other layouts have well known advantages in particular situations, but these are generally offset by their disadvantages which is why they are used only in edge cases like fighters.
The BD-10 was a joke from start to finish. Bede had no idea what he was doing, which is not surprising because he never really did any of the design on any of "his" projects - the actual design was left to young engineers typically fresh out of university. In the case of the -10, it was designed using a piece of Mac software known as MacFlow which had a number of bugs in both the software and the models. They initially predicted supersonic performance, but this was due to a bug in the model, From that point on the performance of the aircraft continued to degrade as drag and weight increased continually.
Building a transonic aircraft from pop-rivets? Yeah, that will work...
"Conservative cost estimates for building a single Hyperloop track from Los Angeles to San Francisco come in at US$6 billion."
Is that supposed to sound expensive?
SFO's two terminals cost well over $1 billion each in inflation adjusted dollars. The new tower was $350 million. I can't find numbers on the physical plants, like the runways, but I suspect they're similar. I think $5 billion for the entire airport is not unreasonable. LAX is significantly larger and more expensive; they're spending $270 on elevator repairs alone.
A six-lane highway costs between $10 and $26 million per mile. It's 380 miles from LA to SF, so that's $3.8 to $9 billion.
Every statement in this post should be postfixed with "in the US" or some variant thereof. I can't speak for Europe, but I know that here in Canada very very little of this applies. For instance...
"Legislators do not pay each other for votes."
This assumes your political system allows any sort of free voting and thus trading of votes. As far as I can tell, this is generally very rare.
In systems descended from the UK parliament, representatives are expected to vote along the party line, and there is a party whip to ensure they do. Horse trading takes place though the whip, and involves party positions and goals, not votes. There is little or no ability for benchers to arrange this amongst themselves, and they will find themselves out of the party if they try it. There are votes that do not follow these rules, the "free votes", in which case the member has to vote according to their own personally feeling or their constituent's wishes, and again the trading of votes for favors is explicitly not allowed.
Although there is still considerable gamesmanship and jockeying for positions, for cabinet positions for instance, but there is very little of the sort of rider-attachement and "hypocrisy" you see in the US system. You may not like the ruling party's decisions, but typically they at least follow party lines and pass without compromise.
"Legislators do not pay each other for votes, and every member of a parliament in a democratic society is legally equal to every member,"
Legally perhaps, but I'm unaware of any system, the US or otherwise, where this is even remotely true in practice.
> I'm pretty confident that absorbing half of the energy output of a significantly sized fusion explosive
How do you propose to do that?
In space, the primary effect of the bomb over any sort of range, like a kilometer, is x-rays. These rapidly heat nearby objects and cause shock waves. The energy transfer is not particularly efficient.
They work great against RV's because the shock wave can cause the heat shield to detach from the underlying aerostructure. Against something like an asteroid I suspect it would damp out rather rapidly.
So that leaves offgassing from the outermost layer of the asteroid. That might be what, 0.1% efficient?
Take a liquid sodium reactor, connect it to an electrical heater that scoops up and melts the asteroid material. Allow that to radiatively cool (and even regenerate the heat) and then fire that out of a mass driver. The total delta-v-per-pound-of-fissile is going to be at least one order of magnitude better.
> This is unprecedented in the history of the nation state mechanism::rolleyes::
You really need to read more history. You might want to start with Pax Romana and the late 19th century, to name two.
All the nukes did was make us fight proxy wars instead. Ask Korea, Angola, Vietnam, and Afghanistan how much they enjoyed this unprecedented period of peace.
They represent the death of the Soviet launch industry. And the Chinese, Japanese, Indians and pretty much everything in the US as well. The only niches still open are heavy lift like Ariane 5, and how long will that last? Couple of years, tops.
Surprised the hell out of me, but BDB turns out to be the correct solution.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the Apple AirPort Extreme. Same basic performance, same feature set, same way to admin it same price.
But because it says Google, we're supposed to believe this is part of some super-duper conspiracy to take over the world.
Right.
Or maybe Google just wants some of the market that Apple currently has, selling the same router you can get for $50 for $200, and being the best selling home router in spite of that?
"The ultimate dream when it comes to clean, green, safe, abundant energy is nuclear fusion."
Not since the 1980s when we realized any machine able to harness it would cost more than we could afford to pay for it.
"The same process that powers the core of the Sun could also power everything on Earth millions of times over"
Indeed, and if we build solar panels at the rate we are now, we'll do just that.
"Recent advances have all three looking promising in various ways"
Really? Let's see:
- magnetic confinement - after some initial tabletop experiments, a guy in south america claims to have a working fusion device, and suddenly there's millions provided for research. After some initial failures, Teller calls a meeting at the Princeton Gun Club and basically says he's highly sceptical that any of the existing devices could work because they use concave fields that will cause the plasma to squirt out. Everyone leaves the meeting and immediately convinces themselves that his concerns don't apply. 60 years later... guess what, he was right.
- inertial confinement - John Nuckols came up with a formula in the 1960s that said we would have breakeven with lasers around a couple of kJ. We build those and they didn't work, not even remotely close. In the 1980s they ran some experiments using small nuclear bombs as drivers, and those suggested it would require 100 MJ. But instead of believing the results, everyone involved waved their hands and said it didn't apply, and we should keep going with the 4 MJ machine. Well guess what, it didn't work, it's stuck at 1/10th breakeven, and a driver able to close that gap is around 100 MJ.
- magnetized target fusion - so basically the entire history of fusion goes like this: I have a device that will work. It doesn't work. I have another device that will definitely work. Repeat. MTF is the latest iteration.
That doesn't mean we need a 40 MJ laser, it probably means we need 100 MJ, w
"one wonder why we don't spend more resources towards achieving the holy grail of energy."
Because it doesn't work and it's not the holy grail of energy. And people that actually work in the energy industry are perfectly aware of that, and that's why they don't get more resources.
This is a wonderful example of misdirection. As someone that lives within the exclusion zone of Pickering, it's not the radiation that worries me, it's the fact that I will be forced from my home never to return, rendering the largest investment I have worthless. Losing most of my life's capitalization, yeah, that worries me. And it worries me more that the other end of that exclusion zone is well within Toronto, which means that the collective savings of about a million other people will be similarly effected.
" That means for every 7750 men, there were 3 women"
So does that mean there were 2583 men for every woman?
Can someone put this into football fields for me?
> The problem is output per area.
If its such a problem, why is wind the fastest growing energy source in history?
The answer is that it's not a problem, except to people looking for any excuse they can find to attack [insert any other power source here].
"On a sunny summer afternoon, the facility could provide more than 5% of the city’s power needs at a price—$50 per megawatt hour—considerably below other solar projects. In July, Austin Energy announced bids for a new round of solar construction that were below $40 a megawatt hour."
That's 4 cents per kWh.
Wow.
" offer solar energy that's cheaper than diesel."
Diesel is an extremely expensive fuel. Comparing yourself to that, when conventional PV is 2 to 3 times cheaper already, seems very fishy indeed.
http://www.lazard.com/media/1777/levelized_cost_of_energy_-_version_80.pdf
Don't care, using it.
"It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. "
I recently went to a page where the JS begged me to turn off AdBlock. So I did. I was rewarded with a page that was 3/5th ads, with the content squished into the center. Turning it back on produced a single column of readable text. I can't wait for AB on iOS.
When Apple refused to support Flash and told everyone it was because Flash sucked, the interwebs came alive with conspiracy theories about how Apple was trying to force people onto QT and apps. The thing is, Flash did suck, and all the other platforms turned it off too. And today, the conspiracy theory is no longer mentioned.
So here we are with plug-ins. Is Apple making a plug-in system, or trying to force everyone to use apps? I suspect the later, and have a feeling this story arc will play out the same way as Flash over the next six months.
> hmmm... I can only speak to what I've heard of the US grid
Which is, apparently, "nothing whatsoever".
> You have to use oil if you do that ::rolleyes::
Hydro has the fastest ramp time of any power source, followed by the *infantismal* amount of ICE engines, followed by natural gas turbines.
> Yes you know it will be a sunny day or there might be wind but you really don't know how much.
We know within something like 20% what will be going on in an hour to four. This has been the case for the better part of a decade now (I was doing tech analisys on energy systems when this stuff went mainstream). There is more than enough warning, what MAY be lacking is the NG peakers to offset it. At current levels, however, this is a total non-problem.
> Login and make your point or remain an ignorable AC troll. ;)
Says the guy with an alias.
> CANNOT get more accurate than 20%
You're COMPLAINING?!?
Gebus, I have just about zero idea what my caloric intake or output is. I certainly see value in something that's 20%. And if I can calibrate that against, say, a bike machine, then I'm all for it.
That is NOT the full report - or if it is, HP's definition of "report" is "useless marketing BS".
Harking back to the AC OP's concern, the paper you link to has no actual data in it, only summaries. For instance, "Thirty percent utilized cloud-based web interfaces "
Useless.
> Without drastic reduction on the demand side
I lived in Ireland for a while. One day in October when it was nasty outside I was inside shivering and then noticed why... the drapes were blowing around. So I got up to close the window.
The window *was* closed.
This was in a home built in the 1970s.
In contrast, I am now living in a typical Canadian home built in 1972. It is completely insulated, plastic wrapped and has reasonably high-quality double-pane windows throughout. The only thing that's changed since is to use more insulation overall and to also cover the outside of the basement walls, which they didn't really start doing around here until the 90s.
Even still, it uses much more energy than it has to. I've already replaced all the lights with LED and put in reasonably new appliances, so my daily electricity is down to about 10 to 11 kWh, about half the national average. Most of the energy I use is heating, and I could cut that by 1/2 to 1/3rd by using a georeturn heat pump.
Cutting total energy use in half in the western world is not impossible. Just expensive. But we're talking "about the same as that craptastic Wolf stove and terribly inefficient Sub-Zero fridge" expensive.
The summary here on /. reads
"After taking control of the car's entertainment system it was possible to gain control of vital car systems such as the brakes"
Actually reading the article you find nothing of the sort happened. The article merely states
"Once an infotainment system had been compromised, he said, an attacker could potentially use it as a way to control more critical systems, including steering and braking."
This hack consisted solely of causing text like "LOLZ I RULZ" appear on the radio display.
Thank you samzenpus for giving this topic the attention it most certainly does not deserve.
At one of the places I used to work we needed to upload daily activity files to a bank. This consisted of using RSA security to log into their system, and then running a IBM3270 terminal emulator. I found that somewhat amusing.
> Bede's certificated plane, the American Aviation AA-1 Yankee
The original BD-1 never matured as Bede lost interest in finishing the design and spent his time on the network of dealerships he was going to build to sell them.
The investors had to fire him and give the design to someone else to complete. They had to do pretty much a complete redesign on it.
This is a recurring theme, Bede was clearly an "ideas guy".
> The BD-5 is a propeller-driven plane with an internal combustion engine, which Bede derived from a sailplane version he never sold
Incorrect.
The BD-5 design was copied, deliberately and publicly, from a Schweizer glider. The goal was, always, to produce a powered light aircraft. The B model, the glider, was an offshoot of the A model. As it turned out, the A model wings were substantially under-designed, and an intermediate length was substituted on most models. All of the designs initially made considerable use of fibreglass, but the entire series was moved to aluminum as the orders poured it.
The design was flawed from conception to construction. It fails due to a well-known issue in aircraft design, as it is "close coupled". The short length of the aircraft means that there is limited distance between the various force points like the CoG and CoF and the control surfaces. Exasperating this is the rear mounted engine, which means there's only, literally, inches between the heaviest part of the aircraft and the control surfaces. That means the controls have to be made larger so they have enough force to operate at low speeds. However, this also means that they are dramatically overpowered at higher speeds. There's no way around this, its basic physics. The "solution" for more expensive designs is powered controls and artificial feel.
Worse, in terms of the length of the aircraft, moving the pilot's seat a few inches is more of a relative shift than it is in, say, a Cessna. This means the aircraft is extremely sensitive to changes in W&B. Even something as minor as burning off fuel will require constant trimming, and that trim point will, for the reasons outlined above, change with speed.
So all of this conspires to make the aircraft difficult to fly on approach. As the aircraft slows the trim keeps changing. Combine that with high approach speeds and ever-more-sensitive controls. And finally, put the thrust line above the aircraft, so if you goose the engine it pushes the nose down, precisely the opposite of what you want it to do.
There is a reason a Cessna looks like it does. It is, for the vast majority of cases, the proper layout for an aircraft. Canard and other layouts have well known advantages in particular situations, but these are generally offset by their disadvantages which is why they are used only in edge cases like fighters.
The BD-10 was a joke from start to finish. Bede had no idea what he was doing, which is not surprising because he never really did any of the design on any of "his" projects - the actual design was left to young engineers typically fresh out of university. In the case of the -10, it was designed using a piece of Mac software known as MacFlow which had a number of bugs in both the software and the models. They initially predicted supersonic performance, but this was due to a bug in the model, From that point on the performance of the aircraft continued to degrade as drag and weight increased continually.
Building a transonic aircraft from pop-rivets? Yeah, that will work...
"Conservative cost estimates for building a single Hyperloop track from Los Angeles to San Francisco come in at US$6 billion."
Is that supposed to sound expensive?
SFO's two terminals cost well over $1 billion each in inflation adjusted dollars. The new tower was $350 million. I can't find numbers on the physical plants, like the runways, but I suspect they're similar. I think $5 billion for the entire airport is not unreasonable. LAX is significantly larger and more expensive; they're spending $270 on elevator repairs alone.
A six-lane highway costs between $10 and $26 million per mile. It's 380 miles from LA to SF, so that's $3.8 to $9 billion.
The F-35 program is one trillion and counting.
Sorry, but this number seems fine to me.
Every statement in this post should be postfixed with "in the US" or some variant thereof. I can't speak for Europe, but I know that here in Canada very very little of this applies. For instance...
"Legislators do not pay each other for votes."
This assumes your political system allows any sort of free voting and thus trading of votes. As far as I can tell, this is generally very rare.
In systems descended from the UK parliament, representatives are expected to vote along the party line, and there is a party whip to ensure they do. Horse trading takes place though the whip, and involves party positions and goals, not votes. There is little or no ability for benchers to arrange this amongst themselves, and they will find themselves out of the party if they try it. There are votes that do not follow these rules, the "free votes", in which case the member has to vote according to their own personally feeling or their constituent's wishes, and again the trading of votes for favors is explicitly not allowed.
Although there is still considerable gamesmanship and jockeying for positions, for cabinet positions for instance, but there is very little of the sort of rider-attachement and "hypocrisy" you see in the US system. You may not like the ruling party's decisions, but typically they at least follow party lines and pass without compromise.
"Legislators do not pay each other for votes, and every member of a parliament in a democratic society is legally equal to every member,"
Legally perhaps, but I'm unaware of any system, the US or otherwise, where this is even remotely true in practice.
And they're cheaper to launch from the equator too.
So when I want to know about nuclear reactor problems, I immediately turn to an anthropologist.
Seems like it's time for another Sokal affair.
> I'm pretty confident that absorbing half of the energy output of a significantly sized fusion explosive
How do you propose to do that?
In space, the primary effect of the bomb over any sort of range, like a kilometer, is x-rays. These rapidly heat nearby objects and cause shock waves. The energy transfer is not particularly efficient.
They work great against RV's because the shock wave can cause the heat shield to detach from the underlying aerostructure. Against something like an asteroid I suspect it would damp out rather rapidly.
So that leaves offgassing from the outermost layer of the asteroid. That might be what, 0.1% efficient?
Take a liquid sodium reactor, connect it to an electrical heater that scoops up and melts the asteroid material. Allow that to radiatively cool (and even regenerate the heat) and then fire that out of a mass driver. The total delta-v-per-pound-of-fissile is going to be at least one order of magnitude better.
> Throwing a handful of nukes at it would be about as effective as throwing pebbles at a tank
Plus we have no way to deliver it.
> This is unprecedented in the history of the nation state mechanism ::rolleyes::
You really need to read more history. You might want to start with Pax Romana and the late 19th century, to name two.
All the nukes did was make us fight proxy wars instead. Ask Korea, Angola, Vietnam, and Afghanistan how much they enjoyed this unprecedented period of peace.
> the "various murky details surrounding the U.S. moon landings between 1969 and 1972
Yes, let's relive that time in history where the US absolutely crushed your country in a come-from-behind victory.
> Falcon9 / Dragon / DragonRider/ CST100 represent serious competition
They represent the death of the Soviet launch industry. And the Chinese, Japanese, Indians and pretty much everything in the US as well. The only niches still open are heavy lift like Ariane 5, and how long will that last? Couple of years, tops.
Surprised the hell out of me, but BDB turns out to be the correct solution.