But if Google's monopoly power has ensured that they are by far the best search engine, because they can afford (as monopolist) better spiders, more defences against link farms and so on, then the alternatives are no good. As I said, if there are many equal search engines it doesn't matter if one is slanted. But the allegation being raised by the Senate is that there are no other "good" search engines, except Bing. That was my point about monopolists: if Google has destroyed, by being better, all other search engines, then the demands for fairness made on it are higher than if it has face-to-face competitors. Your point is a bit like saying that, if there is a monopoly car manufacturer but you consider its cars unsafe, you can always walk.
I am not sure the allegation of being a monopolist holds water, but my reply was couched on the basis that it is, as alleged. IF Google is a monopolist THEN there are no alternative good search engines SO the government is entitled to demand impartiality from Google. IF the initial premise is false, then the whole response does not apply.
Not in the light of the remark quotes in the summary. If they have a monopoly of search, it is reasonable that they report search results as impartially as reasonably possible. But the quote implies that Google will bias its results to favour its own sites. If it were one of many, this wouldn't matter; people could decide to use more impartial search engines if they wished. But if it is a monopoly, this could be construed as abuse of monopoly power. Monopolists are held to a higher standard than those with competition. (And, ISTM, this breaks the now-dropped "Don't Be Evil" maxim. Providing clearly marked advertising around honest search results is fine; providing slanted search results is not).
I suspect Apple is hanging their hat on the phrase "portable electronic device with a touch screen display", believing that doing what had been done all along somehow becomes new and patent-able simply because you added a touch screen into the mix.
If this is correct, and I suspect it might be, then it opens the opportunity either to break the system by reduction ad absurdum, or make a lot of money.
Wait till someone patents something useful. Say an improvement in battery technology, hereinafter referred to as an XYZ battery or XYZ for short. Rush out an patent "a device with a touchscreen and XYZ", "A device with icons and XYZ", "a device with buttons and XYZ", "a device combining XYZ and electronic components in a case", "device with sound generating capability powered by XYZ", "a phone powerd by XYZ", "a GPS powered by XYZ" and so on. Since XYZ has just been invented, there can hardly be prior art. You, of course, have no rights over XYZ: they are reasonably owned by its inventor. But you can lock that inventor out form all uses of his invention, and lock the Apple's of this world out from using an improved technology, unless they pay you a licence fee.
Either the system will see sense and throw the whole lot out - and with them a huge number of similar pointless combination-of-two-known-inventions patents, or you will get hugely rich. What I call a win-win proposition. maybe I should patent it.
The vast amounts of water are what you need, and what you don't get in space. You only detect a neutrino when it, just very occasionally, interacts with matter, which generates a flash which their suspended detectors report. You need cubic kilometres of something of reasonably known chemical composition, preferably with a lot of light nuclei, not vacuum. Another project is using cubic kilometres of Antarctic ice for the same purpose. You could hang your detectors in space, but there would be nothing there to detect unless you hauled cubic kilometres of water or, say, highly compressed hydrogen, there. Not to mention that they would be in different orbits, so that you would need a significant structure to hold them in constant physical relationships.
As to the choice of ocean: the Mediterranean is actually quite clear because of its relatively low oxygen content. While they may be cleaner, the Atlantic etc. are, at least in their shallower areas, pretty opaque because they are full of plankton. And you need a shallow area, of which the Mediterranean has plenty, because you are fastened to the bottom. This is not about the abyssal depths, this is just about instrumenting a very large volume of clear-ish water.
This is a detector that, basically, could not be built in space because of the gigatons of matter needed.
As far as I can gather, the problem which originally caused the computers give up and hand over to the pilots (referred to as selecting Alternate Law) actually cleared up quite early in the incident. But once having handed over, the computer could not return to Normal Law until the crew told it to. The crew gave no sign that they realized that Alternate Law had been selected, and seem to have behaved as if they were still in Normal, "I won't let you make a mistake" law all the time. If they had re-engaged Normal Law, the computer would probably have flown them safely out or it. In fact, if they had just let go of the controls, particularly the junior pilot, it would all have settled down very quickly.
Precisely - he is, and knows he is, a figurehead, and he should not interfere in the democratic process. His only interventions have been calmly to ask the politicians to get their act together and stop behaving like spoiled children (free translation). It is one faction of politicians who build him up for their own purposes. He cannot interfere with the law without interfering with democracy. He can then pardon those convicted. It is one of the problems of a constitutional monarchy that things done in the monarch's name are actually totally, out of the control of the monarch. His function is roughly the same as the flag in the US - something to salute, and produce prominently on state occasions, but not as functional part of the legislations. These laws are roughly like the rules, which some consider laws, about respectful treatment of the Stars and Stripes.
Or, say, someone has an epileptic fit across the join. Or a combative drunk decides it would be funny to block the way. Or some parent dives after a runaway child. Or any of dozens of things that could go wrong.
TFA says the trains are together as long as a train stops at a station. That is, as long as they/normally/ stop at a station. But, for example, a few weeks ago I was sat at a station for 15 minutes while police removed a drunk. Of course, most stops are routine. But non routine events happen several times a day for any given train.
Trains don't start until after all the doors are closed - a fact enforced by interlocks nowadays. This scheme has trains moving with open doors: an absolute no-no in modern train safety.
There are already solutions to this where you go to work at a generic office within waling distance of your home. You have co-workers, coffee machine or water cooler, a work-style environment with no family interruptions. There is a reception for deliveries if needed. You have the "commute" of a ten minute walk, which allows you to switch between home and work modes.
Didn't you see the bits where I referred to it as "opt in". Your freezer would listen to/requests/, and respond as you had programmed it. Yes, it is power. Like the power that stop lights have over you. Or the power that broadcasters have to force you to watch only the things they broadcast at the time the broadcast them. If the meter only requests, and does not get a response, where is the loss of privacy.
it is not so much anti-American as recognising a cultural difference. You can call it selfishness, or you could call it proud self-reliance. Whichever way it is, recognise that when you get brownouts as in California, because the supply system is not up to the demands placed on it, it is because of your own freely made decisions. I see America as headed for several infrastructure related crises - power, water, maybe roads - because of its preference for individual choice. As a friend (though you may doubt it) of America, I would prefer not to see it headed into crisis. But if you don't want to hear advice from well-intentioned friends, don't listen. but don't say nobody told you.
Not if it doesn't go all the way down. Freezer motors don't work harder when they have to cool more, they work longer. They have only one speed, and are controlled by switching on and off. So your gas analogy applies here: cooling you don't do now, you can do later. But ti doesn't apply to electricity.
The crucial difference with gas in your analogy is that gas can be stored - electricity cannot. I entirely agree that not buying gas on a particular day makes no difference - the gas sits in the tanks until you do buy it, at zero cost to the gas company, But shifting electricity from peak to baseload makes a huge difference to the company - like four or more times the price for the last kWatt at peak times compared to a baseload kWatt. (In the UK's "continuous auction" power market, the last kWatt has been known to go up to 100 times baseload at extreme peaks). If the electricity company could have a big tank of electrons which they charged up in baseload and discharged at peak, that would be fine - which is why they want to use car batteries for exactly that. But to provide that last kWatt of power they have to have a gas turbine generating system which sits idle for 99% of the time, coming on fast (which gas turbines do well) for the 1% peak load. What they want is to switch their peak load to low cost baseload nuclear (24 hr on/off time) or coal (3 hours on/off time) power stations.
The incentive is that they have a statutory duty to deliver power 24/7 at a fixed price, where they do not have fixed costs.It is the same incentive that drives transport companies to discount ticket when they have spare capacity. Baseload power is cheap, peak power is expensive, because they have to keep power stations idle 99% of the time to handle the 1% of peak load. If they can persuade you to transfer your consumption off the peak onto the idle periods, they are saving enough money to give you a tasty discount and still keep enough for themselves to increase profits. What CEO is going to announce "we have to increase our capital investment 50% of a 5% return in sales"? Or would he rather say "We can not replace 25% of our power stations at end of life, while only cutting our income 5%"? The latter cuts costs enormously while cutting sales minutely, increasing profits accordingly, Profits, not sales, are what drive companies. Your solutions maximises sales, not profits - a slippery slope which has often taken companies to perdition.
They could abuse the system as you describe, but I think it would be fairly easy to design a contract, if not a statutory obligation not to do so - and fairly easy to detect.
You might want a continuous auction, with your home devices playing the market. This can produce startling results, when the price of the last kWh goes through the roof, and you have pit an "at all costs" tag on something. Most people don't want that uncertainty: they want to know that their bills cannot go bananas, even if it means forgoing the last 2% of savings.
The scheme would be opt-in, so you wouldn't have to do it. Peaks are often evening, so if you are not using your car that evening, it will be fully charged by morning. Likewise, afternoon air conditioning peaks are while people are sitting in offices, and can be topped up before going home time. it would only use at most the top 25% of your battery, so you would be 75% charged whenever you needed it. And if you had a sudden impulse journey, it is highly likely that 75% charge will do you. You might head out on an impulse to see a move five miles away, you are unlikely to do a hundred mile drive on an impulse. If you know you are going on a hundred mile journey soon, you can opt out and get a full charge.
I don't know whether you have noticed it, but America is having economic problems at the moment. Building to satisfy peak demand would cost trillions and be incredibly inefficient. If you are going to spend that money, roads would be a better place to start. By definition, the last power station would only be needed for the peak minutes of the biggest surge of demand in the year. On the other hand, drivers will have spent a lot of money buying expensive battery storage which they use only a little bit of the time. There is a huge gap between sharing nothing and sharing so much that it actually causes problems. But people. particularly Americans, seem to hate the idea of sharing anything at all. Without asking what would be the/real/ inconvenience, how often it would be used, how much, how easy it is to opt out, you have a knee jerk response "it's mine - hands off".
See previous response: the only suggestion is cutting margins from generous to good. Your freezer has masses of space "cold capacity". Most peaks are in the evening, and your car would be recharged by morning. Cutting the top 1% of peaks, using perhaps 10% of your car's battery 20 evenings a year, would be very valuable to utilities. Of course, you don't have to opt in.
Your response is typically American - me, me, me, and damn the community, even if it is to my financial advantage to share. You have bought capacity you don't need, but you won't consider sharing it (for money) just in case you might on a rare occasion want to use it. I bought it, so it is mine not to use.
Most freezers have a large allowance for power cuts. If you get a power cut and do not open the freezer, it should stay cold for 24 hours. If you cut that margin to 18 hours, that will get them through the evening peak, and possibly stop you getting the power cut at all.
The care would probably be only the top, say, 25% of the capacity so you always have 75% if you need to go out in a hurry. Since peaks are in the evening, if you do not intend to use the car again until morning, overnight charging will have topped it back up to 100% by morning.
Of course, having only 18 hours instead of 24 of safety and risking the car being at 75% if you need to make an unexpected journey are both losses to you. But the utilities should be saving enough money to make the difference to your power bills significant.
Put it another way: you paid a lot for that big battery in your car. Why use it only when driving? Why not make that investment earn money for you while it is sat outside your door?
According to TFA, the smart meters will do more than that. They are intended in the medium term to allow power control within the house. So that the meter can signal to, say, the freezer that power demand is particularly high, and if it could hold off consuming power for a while it would be appreciated. And if you have electric cars, could they not charge at peak times, but turn on quickly as the peak subsides rather than doing it on a crude timer (or, in the most optimistic scenario, turn around and return power to the grid at extreme peaks).. In principle, this could save trillions in new power stations and power distribution.
Not only does Wireshark run on Linux, it runs better. I run Wireshark on both Windows and Linux on identical CPUs. The Linux one captures packets about 25% faster than the Windows one, meaning fewer dropped packets on high-load links (750 Mbit/sec vs 600 on a 1Gig link, Centos 5 vs Win Vista). The Windows IP stack is seriously less efficient than the Linux one.
And O(n^2) is polynomial - it has a ^2 in it. And, apparently, they have proved there is no shortcut which is not polynomial unless P=NP. They have shown that this is one of a class of problems for which time to solve increases fast enough that for some value of n it must become uncomputable.
I was told by a Muslim that the actual ruling in the Koran is that you should not "allow alcohol to rule you". His interpretation was that he should not get drunk, and was quite happy to drink a single beer.
All I can say is that you seriously do not understand the technology of fusion. The residual heat etc is less energy than, say, a tanger of gasoline. If every single erg of energy from the fusion chamber of a fusion reactor escapes, we merely have a significant industrial incident. But much smaller than some recent refinery blowups.
A fission reactor is ten years fuel being let out slowly - you hope. A fusion reactor is one tenth of a seconds fuel being coerced to react against it's will. Look up the physics for heavens sake. A fission reactor is distantly related to a fission bomb. A fusion reactor is no relationship at all to a fusion bomb, which needs a fission bomb to start it
Irrelevent, an accident from fusion reactor is far more dangerous than a fission rector, no matter how much fuel is used at any time. Neither fission nor fusion should be used
This is simply false. I invite you to provide some evidence for that assertion.
A fusion reactor cannot produce a bomb-style thermonuclear explosion. No should not, not ought not. Can not, The matter is not in the reactor. Matter that is not present cannot explode, no matter what man may do to cock it up.
Usuable areas of land aready exist for both solar and wind
I said nothing about area of land used. I am talking about the use of concrete and steel. Concrete production is one of the biggest polluters around. Rinning roads through wilderness areas destroys ecosystems.
Fusion is not combustion under any sane definition. One of the virtues of is fusion is its inability to cause disasters. How can efficient power production cause power shortages? Why should fusion cause monopolies? Nobody is suggesting a single fusion reactor any more than anybody is suggesting a single ginormous wind farm. If the system in TFA worked (which I doubt) it would be far more distributed than wind power: you could have a fusion reactor in every house. The fusion reactors which I expect to be built will be smaller than a large hydropower system, and lower power (and hence more distributed) than the wind farms we would need to power our current cities.
You have made some colossal and false assumptions about how fusion power would work, if it did. You are running in fear from a bogye man which does not exist.
It is not a matter of expectations, it is the behaviour of the proponent, Schectman (admirably) stuck to the scientific method despite the scorn of his peers, and had all his results available for inspection. This guy is not: he has restricted observers to what he wants them to see. The establishment way well be, and has been, wrong. But when rejected by the establishment, good scientists react one way, and fraudsters or crackpots another. This guy is behaving like the latter, not the former. Which does not prove him to be a fraudster or crackpot, but has my alarm systems on edge.
Explain "major disaster". It seems to me that you are extrapolating to fusion reactors the failings of fission reactors, when one of the major virtues of fusion reactors is that they are inherently not susceptible such failings. A fission reactor is fuelled up with about ten of years of fuel, and has days of energy unstoppably being generated at any moment, so it is a disaster waiting to happen. Where as a fusion reactor has tenths of a second of fuel in the reactor at any moment and can be turned of in milliseconds. The energy available to cause a disaster is several orders of magnitude different.
The problem with solar and wind are that they are so diffuse. We have to cover many acres of land with concrete and some sort of energy collector. A fusion reactor would be one building delivering the outputs of several thousand of the largest windmills, or several square miles of solar collectors. the environmental cost of building the solar farms (concrete, roads, solar cells, pylons) is something to be avoided.
The heat pollution results after the power is used. Even if the generating system produces no waste heat at all (thermodynamically impossible), all the energy beamed down ends up as heat after it is used. Your computer needs fans to get rid of the used heat from its operation. And bussard ramjets are overkill - as I said, Jupiter contains more hydrogen than we can safely use.
If the fusion fuel is hydrogen, and we use it reasonably efficiently, then when it runs out the so-called renewables will have run out as well. They are just second hand fusion power derived from a fusion reactor 93 million miles away, running on the same hydrogen as we are using for our fusion. Hydrogen has run out, the sun will be cooling as well. There is enough hydrogen in Jupiter that if we fuse it all on Earth, we will have killed ourselves with waste heat and be in danger of melting the Earth.
Not that I believe this particular project is real, but if we did get very cheap hydrogen fusion power, heat pollution would be a problem long, long before running out of hydrogen was a problem.
Agreed. I am due to upgrade from my current non-smart phone in Dec, and I think this has just changed my choices. I was going to go Android - partly to compare with my iPad: have one from either side. But I want something with proper and timely updates.
And I could, no doubt, root it and install some better software. But my phone is a phone, not a workbench. I spend enough of my day fighting cranky systems. I want my phone/web/email system to Just Work. And it sounds like Apple is doing that far better than Android. Certainly the iPad just Works.
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But if Google's monopoly power has ensured that they are by far the best search engine, because they can afford (as monopolist) better spiders, more defences against link farms and so on, then the alternatives are no good. As I said, if there are many equal search engines it doesn't matter if one is slanted. But the allegation being raised by the Senate is that there are no other "good" search engines, except Bing. That was my point about monopolists: if Google has destroyed, by being better, all other search engines, then the demands for fairness made on it are higher than if it has face-to-face competitors. Your point is a bit like saying that, if there is a monopoly car manufacturer but you consider its cars unsafe, you can always walk.
I am not sure the allegation of being a monopolist holds water, but my reply was couched on the basis that it is, as alleged. IF Google is a monopolist THEN there are no alternative good search engines SO the government is entitled to demand impartiality from Google. IF the initial premise is false, then the whole response does not apply.
Not in the light of the remark quotes in the summary. If they have a monopoly of search, it is reasonable that they report search results as impartially as reasonably possible. But the quote implies that Google will bias its results to favour its own sites. If it were one of many, this wouldn't matter; people could decide to use more impartial search engines if they wished. But if it is a monopoly, this could be construed as abuse of monopoly power. Monopolists are held to a higher standard than those with competition. (And, ISTM, this breaks the now-dropped "Don't Be Evil" maxim. Providing clearly marked advertising around honest search results is fine; providing slanted search results is not).
I suspect Apple is hanging their hat on the phrase "portable electronic device with a touch screen display", believing that doing what had been done all along somehow becomes new and patent-able simply because you added a touch screen into the mix.
If this is correct, and I suspect it might be, then it opens the opportunity either to break the system by reduction ad absurdum, or make a lot of money.
Wait till someone patents something useful. Say an improvement in battery technology, hereinafter referred to as an XYZ battery or XYZ for short. Rush out an patent "a device with a touchscreen and XYZ", "A device with icons and XYZ", "a device with buttons and XYZ", "a device combining XYZ and electronic components in a case", "device with sound generating capability powered by XYZ", "a phone powerd by XYZ", "a GPS powered by XYZ" and so on. Since XYZ has just been invented, there can hardly be prior art. You, of course, have no rights over XYZ: they are reasonably owned by its inventor. But you can lock that inventor out form all uses of his invention, and lock the Apple's of this world out from using an improved technology, unless they pay you a licence fee.
Either the system will see sense and throw the whole lot out - and with them a huge number of similar pointless combination-of-two-known-inventions patents, or you will get hugely rich. What I call a win-win proposition. maybe I should patent it.
The vast amounts of water are what you need, and what you don't get in space. You only detect a neutrino when it, just very occasionally, interacts with matter, which generates a flash which their suspended detectors report. You need cubic kilometres of something of reasonably known chemical composition, preferably with a lot of light nuclei, not vacuum. Another project is using cubic kilometres of Antarctic ice for the same purpose. You could hang your detectors in space, but there would be nothing there to detect unless you hauled cubic kilometres of water or, say, highly compressed hydrogen, there. Not to mention that they would be in different orbits, so that you would need a significant structure to hold them in constant physical relationships.
As to the choice of ocean: the Mediterranean is actually quite clear because of its relatively low oxygen content. While they may be cleaner, the Atlantic etc. are, at least in their shallower areas, pretty opaque because they are full of plankton. And you need a shallow area, of which the Mediterranean has plenty, because you are fastened to the bottom. This is not about the abyssal depths, this is just about instrumenting a very large volume of clear-ish water.
This is a detector that, basically, could not be built in space because of the gigatons of matter needed.
As far as I can gather, the problem which originally caused the computers give up and hand over to the pilots (referred to as selecting Alternate Law) actually cleared up quite early in the incident. But once having handed over, the computer could not return to Normal Law until the crew told it to. The crew gave no sign that they realized that Alternate Law had been selected, and seem to have behaved as if they were still in Normal, "I won't let you make a mistake" law all the time. If they had re-engaged Normal Law, the computer would probably have flown them safely out or it. In fact, if they had just let go of the controls, particularly the junior pilot, it would all have settled down very quickly.
Or so it seem now - final report not yet in,
Precisely - he is, and knows he is, a figurehead, and he should not interfere in the democratic process. His only interventions have been calmly to ask the politicians to get their act together and stop behaving like spoiled children (free translation). It is one faction of politicians who build him up for their own purposes. He cannot interfere with the law without interfering with democracy. He can then pardon those convicted. It is one of the problems of a constitutional monarchy that things done in the monarch's name are actually totally, out of the control of the monarch. His function is roughly the same as the flag in the US - something to salute, and produce prominently on state occasions, but not as functional part of the legislations. These laws are roughly like the rules, which some consider laws, about respectful treatment of the Stars and Stripes.
Or, say, someone has an epileptic fit across the join. Or a combative drunk decides it would be funny to block the way. Or some parent dives after a runaway child. Or any of dozens of things that could go wrong.
TFA says the trains are together as long as a train stops at a station. That is, as long as they /normally/ stop at a station. But, for example, a few weeks ago I was sat at a station for 15 minutes while police removed a drunk. Of course, most stops are routine. But non routine events happen several times a day for any given train.
Trains don't start until after all the doors are closed - a fact enforced by interlocks nowadays. This scheme has trains moving with open doors: an absolute no-no in modern train safety.
Back to the drawing board.
There are already solutions to this where you go to work at a generic office within waling distance of your home. You have co-workers, coffee machine or water cooler, a work-style environment with no family interruptions. There is a reception for deliveries if needed. You have the "commute" of a ten minute walk, which allows you to switch between home and work modes.
Didn't you see the bits where I referred to it as "opt in". Your freezer would listen to /requests/, and respond as you had programmed it. Yes, it is power. Like the power that stop lights have over you. Or the power that broadcasters have to force you to watch only the things they broadcast at the time the broadcast them. If the meter only requests, and does not get a response, where is the loss of privacy.
it is not so much anti-American as recognising a cultural difference. You can call it selfishness, or you could call it proud self-reliance. Whichever way it is, recognise that when you get brownouts as in California, because the supply system is not up to the demands placed on it, it is because of your own freely made decisions. I see America as headed for several infrastructure related crises - power, water, maybe roads - because of its preference for individual choice. As a friend (though you may doubt it) of America, I would prefer not to see it headed into crisis. But if you don't want to hear advice from well-intentioned friends, don't listen. but don't say nobody told you.
Not if it doesn't go all the way down. Freezer motors don't work harder when they have to cool more, they work longer. They have only one speed, and are controlled by switching on and off. So your gas analogy applies here: cooling you don't do now, you can do later. But ti doesn't apply to electricity.
The crucial difference with gas in your analogy is that gas can be stored - electricity cannot. I entirely agree that not buying gas on a particular day makes no difference - the gas sits in the tanks until you do buy it, at zero cost to the gas company, But shifting electricity from peak to baseload makes a huge difference to the company - like four or more times the price for the last kWatt at peak times compared to a baseload kWatt. (In the UK's "continuous auction" power market, the last kWatt has been known to go up to 100 times baseload at extreme peaks). If the electricity company could have a big tank of electrons which they charged up in baseload and discharged at peak, that would be fine - which is why they want to use car batteries for exactly that. But to provide that last kWatt of power they have to have a gas turbine generating system which sits idle for 99% of the time, coming on fast (which gas turbines do well) for the 1% peak load. What they want is to switch their peak load to low cost baseload nuclear (24 hr on/off time) or coal (3 hours on/off time) power stations.
The incentive is that they have a statutory duty to deliver power 24/7 at a fixed price, where they do not have fixed costs.It is the same incentive that drives transport companies to discount ticket when they have spare capacity. Baseload power is cheap, peak power is expensive, because they have to keep power stations idle 99% of the time to handle the 1% of peak load. If they can persuade you to transfer your consumption off the peak onto the idle periods, they are saving enough money to give you a tasty discount and still keep enough for themselves to increase profits. What CEO is going to announce "we have to increase our capital investment 50% of a 5% return in sales"? Or would he rather say "We can not replace 25% of our power stations at end of life, while only cutting our income 5%"? The latter cuts costs enormously while cutting sales minutely, increasing profits accordingly, Profits, not sales, are what drive companies. Your solutions maximises sales, not profits - a slippery slope which has often taken companies to perdition.
They could abuse the system as you describe, but I think it would be fairly easy to design a contract, if not a statutory obligation not to do so - and fairly easy to detect.
You might want a continuous auction, with your home devices playing the market. This can produce startling results, when the price of the last kWh goes through the roof, and you have pit an "at all costs" tag on something. Most people don't want that uncertainty: they want to know that their bills cannot go bananas, even if it means forgoing the last 2% of savings.
The scheme would be opt-in, so you wouldn't have to do it. Peaks are often evening, so if you are not using your car that evening, it will be fully charged by morning. Likewise, afternoon air conditioning peaks are while people are sitting in offices, and can be topped up before going home time. it would only use at most the top 25% of your battery, so you would be 75% charged whenever you needed it. And if you had a sudden impulse journey, it is highly likely that 75% charge will do you. You might head out on an impulse to see a move five miles away, you are unlikely to do a hundred mile drive on an impulse. If you know you are going on a hundred mile journey soon, you can opt out and get a full charge.
I don't know whether you have noticed it, but America is having economic problems at the moment. Building to satisfy peak demand would cost trillions and be incredibly inefficient. If you are going to spend that money, roads would be a better place to start. By definition, the last power station would only be needed for the peak minutes of the biggest surge of demand in the year. On the other hand, drivers will have spent a lot of money buying expensive battery storage which they use only a little bit of the time. There is a huge gap between sharing nothing and sharing so much that it actually causes problems. But people. particularly Americans, seem to hate the idea of sharing anything at all. Without asking what would be the /real/ inconvenience, how often it would be used, how much, how easy it is to opt out, you have a knee jerk response "it's mine - hands off".
See previous response: the only suggestion is cutting margins from generous to good. Your freezer has masses of space "cold capacity". Most peaks are in the evening, and your car would be recharged by morning. Cutting the top 1% of peaks, using perhaps 10% of your car's battery 20 evenings a year, would be very valuable to utilities. Of course, you don't have to opt in.
Your response is typically American - me, me, me, and damn the community, even if it is to my financial advantage to share. You have bought capacity you don't need, but you won't consider sharing it (for money) just in case you might on a rare occasion want to use it. I bought it, so it is mine not to use.
Most freezers have a large allowance for power cuts. If you get a power cut and do not open the freezer, it should stay cold for 24 hours. If you cut that margin to 18 hours, that will get them through the evening peak, and possibly stop you getting the power cut at all.
The care would probably be only the top, say, 25% of the capacity so you always have 75% if you need to go out in a hurry. Since peaks are in the evening, if you do not intend to use the car again until morning, overnight charging will have topped it back up to 100% by morning.
Of course, having only 18 hours instead of 24 of safety and risking the car being at 75% if you need to make an unexpected journey are both losses to you. But the utilities should be saving enough money to make the difference to your power bills significant.
Put it another way: you paid a lot for that big battery in your car. Why use it only when driving? Why not make that investment earn money for you while it is sat outside your door?
According to TFA, the smart meters will do more than that. They are intended in the medium term to allow power control within the house. So that the meter can signal to, say, the freezer that power demand is particularly high, and if it could hold off consuming power for a while it would be appreciated. And if you have electric cars, could they not charge at peak times, but turn on quickly as the peak subsides rather than doing it on a crude timer (or, in the most optimistic scenario, turn around and return power to the grid at extreme peaks).. In principle, this could save trillions in new power stations and power distribution.
Not only does Wireshark run on Linux, it runs better. I run Wireshark on both Windows and Linux on identical CPUs. The Linux one captures packets about 25% faster than the Windows one, meaning fewer dropped packets on high-load links (750 Mbit/sec vs 600 on a 1Gig link, Centos 5 vs Win Vista). The Windows IP stack is seriously less efficient than the Linux one.
And O(n^2) is polynomial - it has a ^2 in it. And, apparently, they have proved there is no shortcut which is not polynomial unless P=NP. They have shown that this is one of a class of problems for which time to solve increases fast enough that for some value of n it must become uncomputable.
I was told by a Muslim that the actual ruling in the Koran is that you should not "allow alcohol to rule you". His interpretation was that he should not get drunk, and was quite happy to drink a single beer.
All I can say is that you seriously do not understand the technology of fusion. The residual heat etc is less energy than, say, a tanger of gasoline. If every single erg of energy from the fusion chamber of a fusion reactor escapes, we merely have a significant industrial incident. But much smaller than some recent refinery blowups.
A fission reactor is ten years fuel being let out slowly - you hope. A fusion reactor is one tenth of a seconds fuel being coerced to react against it's will. Look up the physics for heavens sake. A fission reactor is distantly related to a fission bomb. A fusion reactor is no relationship at all to a fusion bomb, which needs a fission bomb to start it
Irrelevent, an accident from fusion reactor is far more dangerous than a fission rector, no matter how much fuel is used at any time. Neither fission nor fusion should be used
This is simply false. I invite you to provide some evidence for that assertion.
A fusion reactor cannot produce a bomb-style thermonuclear explosion. No should not, not ought not. Can not, The matter is not in the reactor. Matter that is not present cannot explode, no matter what man may do to cock it up.
Usuable areas of land aready exist for both solar and wind
I said nothing about area of land used. I am talking about the use of concrete and steel. Concrete production is one of the biggest polluters around. Rinning roads through wilderness areas destroys ecosystems.
Fusion is not combustion under any sane definition.
One of the virtues of is fusion is its inability to cause disasters.
How can efficient power production cause power shortages?
Why should fusion cause monopolies? Nobody is suggesting a single fusion reactor any more than anybody is suggesting a single ginormous wind farm. If the system in TFA worked (which I doubt) it would be far more distributed than wind power: you could have a fusion reactor in every house. The fusion reactors which I expect to be built will be smaller than a large hydropower system, and lower power (and hence more distributed) than the wind farms we would need to power our current cities.
You have made some colossal and false assumptions about how fusion power would work, if it did. You are running in fear from a bogye man which does not exist.
It is not a matter of expectations, it is the behaviour of the proponent, Schectman (admirably) stuck to the scientific method despite the scorn of his peers, and had all his results available for inspection. This guy is not: he has restricted observers to what he wants them to see. The establishment way well be, and has been, wrong. But when rejected by the establishment, good scientists react one way, and fraudsters or crackpots another. This guy is behaving like the latter, not the former. Which does not prove him to be a fraudster or crackpot, but has my alarm systems on edge.
Explain "major disaster". It seems to me that you are extrapolating to fusion reactors the failings of fission reactors, when one of the major virtues of fusion reactors is that they are inherently not susceptible such failings. A fission reactor is fuelled up with about ten of years of fuel, and has days of energy unstoppably being generated at any moment, so it is a disaster waiting to happen. Where as a fusion reactor has tenths of a second of fuel in the reactor at any moment and can be turned of in milliseconds. The energy available to cause a disaster is several orders of magnitude different.
The problem with solar and wind are that they are so diffuse. We have to cover many acres of land with concrete and some sort of energy collector. A fusion reactor would be one building delivering the outputs of several thousand of the largest windmills, or several square miles of solar collectors. the environmental cost of building the solar farms (concrete, roads, solar cells, pylons) is something to be avoided.
The heat pollution results after the power is used. Even if the generating system produces no waste heat at all (thermodynamically impossible), all the energy beamed down ends up as heat after it is used. Your computer needs fans to get rid of the used heat from its operation. And bussard ramjets are overkill - as I said, Jupiter contains more hydrogen than we can safely use.
If the fusion fuel is hydrogen, and we use it reasonably efficiently, then when it runs out the so-called renewables will have run out as well. They are just second hand fusion power derived from a fusion reactor 93 million miles away, running on the same hydrogen as we are using for our fusion. Hydrogen has run out, the sun will be cooling as well. There is enough hydrogen in Jupiter that if we fuse it all on Earth, we will have killed ourselves with waste heat and be in danger of melting the Earth.
Not that I believe this particular project is real, but if we did get very cheap hydrogen fusion power, heat pollution would be a problem long, long before running out of hydrogen was a problem.
Agreed. I am due to upgrade from my current non-smart phone in Dec, and I think this has just changed my choices. I was going to go Android - partly to compare with my iPad: have one from either side. But I want something with proper and timely updates.
And I could, no doubt, root it and install some better software. But my phone is a phone, not a workbench. I spend enough of my day fighting cranky systems. I want my phone/web/email system to Just Work. And it sounds like Apple is doing that far better than Android. Certainly the iPad just Works.