Due to a freaky legal issue, PBS continues to provide a C-band ANALOG service, the "PBS Satellite Service" on SES Americom Satellite AMC 4, Transponder 16-C, horizontal polarity, at 101 degrees West longitude.
PBS has satellite distribution to stations in the clear (again, odd legal reason) on C-band Digital DVB-S QPSK on AMC 1 at 103W and Ku-band digital DVB-S QPSK on AMC 21 @ 125W.
There is only one way to answer what a true price is, and that is to ask the market through auction. The buyers will purchase based on the net present value of the helium based on its potential resale price now and in the future.
Helium prices will likely rise, and eventually other natural gas producers (such as Russia) will retool to extract helium once the gas reaches a level where it is economically reasonable to do produce it.
Perhaps the price of helium will rise so high that it is less practical for toy balloon use, but only reasonable for MRIs and scientific research.
If the price of helium rises enough, it might even become reasonable to extract it from air distillation plants, or possible even helium from fission.
Many research institutes (like the university I work at) have rationed helium...This is set by the suppliers, who get their helium from the US government...As long as stockpiles are sold off at fixed, below-market prices (TFA says helium should be 20 to 50 times more expensive), no one can economically afford to capture and purify the helium which is available
I don't understand why the basic science of economics is so often ignored. If government fixes prices, you get shortages. Moreover, you reduce the incentives to find new sources, and you reduce the incentives to obtain the most efficient use of the resources you have.
This is ECON 101. Thinking that price fixing does not product shortages and inefficient use is the equivalent of physicists thinking that heavier objects fall faster than light objects in a vacuum.
It should also be noticed that the history of "predicting" resource extinction is full of major mistakes, almost always on the side of thinking things will run out when they actually never do, such as the Simon-Ehrlich Wager. Similarly, estimates of the total amount of oil resources in the world grew throughout the 20th century from 60 billion barrels in 1920 to over 1200 billion barrels today.
isps may negotiate carriage agreements with OTHER ISPS. they cannot discriminate against CONTENT on the internet according to its SOURCE. please, dont bullshit.
There was a time when government-funded ISPs discriminated against commercial content. And then USENET distribution was filtered in many places to avoid spam or porn.
I was personally involved in a product that provided Yahoo! Broadcast using satellite multicast to some ISPs. During 9/11, when most unicast video streams were maxed out, our customer ISPs were able to deliver Yahoo! Broadcast multicast streams to their customers. Was that breaking "network neutrality"?
It is true that there is not much evidence of commercial ISPs filtering typical Web traffic due to content. Generally that is because their customers pay them to have "Internet access", not "less than Internet access". No one has ever been able to make a business out of "less than Internet access", but if someone really wants to buy that (or if a locality wishes to grant a monopoly charter to some local access Internet provider to do so), I guess that is their business.
f you prefer, we can go back to the good old days when monopolies ran wild and stock market crashes happend at least once a decade.
And stock market crashes haven't happened once a decade when? I seem to remember 1987, 2001, 2008...
Not to mention bear markets in general - The Dow entered two long downturns in 1970 and 1974; during the latter, it fell nearly 45% to the bottom of a 20-year range.
The difference between government regulation and business is that you can sell your business position whenever you want to, you have to get 51% of the idiots in the country to get rid of a stupid law.
Regulations are great when the misbehavior targeted is clear, well-understood, and it is difficult to bring individually judged torts against (food safety falls into that category, proving you got sick from a particular food provider in court is tough).
Regulations are bad when government has no idea what it is doing or is trying to prevent something that has never happened before, which I'd say is the case of "net neutrality", whatever the heck that is.
if they had any kind of memory and cognitive ability, they would realize that net neutrality was the de facto rule of internet up to this point,
ISPs have always negotiated carriage agreements. It is up to ISPs if they charge other ISPs bandwidth costs to interconnect, or freely peer. There has NEVER been a federal rule forcing ISPs to exchange traffic, or how to exchange traffic. Sometimes ISPs that though they were "all that" and demanded free peering got cut off (briefly, then their customers complained, and the ISP would have to purchase carriage). That is the true history of the commercial Internet. I was there.
ISPs had access to per-port and per-application "throttling" technologies way back in the later 1990's. For end-user dial-up and DSL ISPs that only had a DS-3 connection, they often had to limit the amount of FTP or USENET traffic access by their users to keep them from killing everyone else's web experience.
When they can explain how South Korea, Taiwan, Japan etc all have 50-100Mbps edge links to consumers... in the U.S. we seem stuck around 10Mbps. There's really no excuse for this.
The excuse is local loop length. Most countries have built telephone networks with shorter local loops than the US, thus their DSL is 2-3 times as fast. Other places in the US have limited FTTH, and this is being built out in the US (FiOS, where you can get 25Mbps), and of course FTTN is also being built out (FTTN to DSL by AT&T uVerse, FTTN to shared DOCSIS QAM by cable companies). Internetworking bandwidth is a minor cost compared to the local loop costs.
Comcast is limiting torrent traffic because DOCIS QAM last mile bandwidth is shared between multiple dwellings, and they prefer your neighbors don't get pissed when you hog their bandwidth with your torrents.
Your local government is free to make it a requirement with their chartered cable and telephone monopolies that they have to invest lots of capital in decreasing loop length or moving to FTTx architectures. Your local voters will laugh at you if you try to push through the required fee increases to achieve this.
There should be no role for the Federal government in this, as the appropriate strategies need to be determined on a local basis.
. You should have 2 or 3 (or more in really heavily trafficed areas) co-runs of track so you can run any combination of freight or passenger traffic you need to.
There is another problem with this - high speed passenger rail and freight rail have different characteristics. The radii of curves are larger for high-speed trains generally 4-7 km or larger. High speed passenger trains can have rails with steeper gradients (such as 3.5%) than slow freight. Standard freight right-of-way is 50 feet, LGV line width is 40 meters.
The way I see it, there are four main problems with holograms. First, they are static
There are several efforts underway to create video holograms using acousto-optical crystals or spatial light modulators, such as the Holovideo project at MIT.
I don't think anyone wants to mix high-speed rail on freight rail networks. That's just a waste, and is only the half-assed solution that Amtrak uses because Acela was underfunded.
Acela on the Northeast corridor is better than most. Amtrak (and in some places, states) own the line between Washington and Boston. Amtrak trains are primary on this line. Freight service is provided on the Northeast Corridor by trackage rights to CSX, Norfolk Southern, and some others.
But try to go south of Washington, DC, where CSX owns the lines. Freight there is primary, and you can get stuck behind a slow freight for miles. My worst experience was a Virginia commuter train that got stuck next to a freight train full of trash cars. It was the worst smell I have ever experienced, and we were stuck for a half and hour!
Rebuilding existing lines for high-speed or expanding to multiple tracks faces two major problems: expansions of rights-of-way (buying people's houses, businesses, etc.), NIMBYism, and environmental laws.
Regarding Acela/Northeast Corridor, this story claims: "One of the reasons the Northeast Corridor did not get more money from the $8 billion high-speed pot is a lack of a recent environmental-impact study of the corridor."
In addition, there are many tunnels that cannot be easily expanded to multi-track, such as under the Hudson river, or under Baltimore.
The Economist has a great article subtitled "America's system of rail freight is the world's best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it".
Europe has an awesome high-speed passenger rail network, but a messed-up freight rail network. The US is the opposite, we have one of the world's most efficient freight rail networks, but not a great passenger network.
Passenger rail doesn't tend to pay for itself. Freight rail does.
Freight rail is a much more energy efficient way to haul bulk freight long-distance compared with trucks.
Trying to mix low-speed freight and high-speed passenger trains on the same track results in one or the other losing a lot of efficiency.
On the other hand, a great deal of US freight trains carry huge amounts of coal...should coal ever carry a carbon tax, that might drop off.
If we want fast pipes, we should be asking for pay as you go data plans
I'm really not sure this is the issue. US broadband speeds are most limited by our longer local loops compared with other developed countries.
The networking bandwidth costs are a very minor issue compared to the capital costs of rebuilding shorter copper loops (AT&T uVerse FTTN) or putting in new fiber ones (Verizon FiOS FTTH).
So indeed, the "speed tier" plan makes sense, but only if the money you pay to get a faster tier actually goes to building you a better local loop.
most "slowness" is likely to be because of poorly configured customer equipment rather than wide-scale "lying" by the ISP.
The sad truth is that MANY cheap home routers can't keep streams of more than a few Mbps going. I needed a bunch of cheap routers on a commercial 10 Mbps connection, and I found I really had to shop around to find a "gamer" quality router to keep the TCP streams flowing near that speed.
In an age where you can pick up GigE Ethernet switches for under $10/port, it amazes me that some routers can't push TCP down the line at more than 1-2 Mbps.
You do not understand the insights of the modern (anti-conservative) right wing and their Tea Party intellectual shock troops. Government is always evil in everything it does and private corporations never do wrong
That is only true when it does not gore their ox. For example, try to let the free market open a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero.
And to the Tea Party, government is OK when it is fighting wars or throwing foreigners out of the country (even if they are working for private corporations).
You have to remember that Obama can't change the current situation too much
Last time I checked the Constitution, Obama is the "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" and can order all American troops home immediately.
Sure, he might not be voted back into office, Congress could block military spending, and may even be impeached, but that can't stop him in the short term.
But the focal length of your eyes has to remain adjusted to the distance to the screen; a very unusual exercise for your eyes, and one that will give some people headaches.
The research on convergence/focus mismatch indicates that for movie screen viewing distances, this is not a problem.
It could be more of a problem for 3D TV viewing distances with certain content. More info in the second part of this presentation.
Slashdot Mirror
Due to a freaky legal issue, PBS continues to provide a C-band ANALOG service, the "PBS Satellite Service" on SES Americom Satellite AMC 4, Transponder 16-C, horizontal polarity, at 101 degrees West longitude.
PBS has satellite distribution to stations in the clear (again, odd legal reason) on C-band Digital DVB-S QPSK on AMC 1 at 103W and Ku-band digital DVB-S QPSK on AMC 21 @ 125W.
How much is the helium worth at current price?
There is only one way to answer what a true price is, and that is to ask the market through auction. The buyers will purchase based on the net present value of the helium based on its potential resale price now and in the future.
Helium prices will likely rise, and eventually other natural gas producers (such as Russia) will retool to extract helium once the gas reaches a level where it is economically reasonable to do produce it.
Perhaps the price of helium will rise so high that it is less practical for toy balloon use, but only reasonable for MRIs and scientific research.
If the price of helium rises enough, it might even become reasonable to extract it from air distillation plants, or possible even helium from fission.
Many research institutes (like the university I work at) have rationed helium...This is set by the suppliers, who get their helium from the US government...As long as stockpiles are sold off at fixed, below-market prices (TFA says helium should be 20 to 50 times more expensive), no one can economically afford to capture and purify the helium which is available
I don't understand why the basic science of economics is so often ignored. If government fixes prices, you get shortages. Moreover, you reduce the incentives to find new sources, and you reduce the incentives to obtain the most efficient use of the resources you have.
This is ECON 101. Thinking that price fixing does not product shortages and inefficient use is the equivalent of physicists thinking that heavier objects fall faster than light objects in a vacuum.
It should also be noticed that the history of "predicting" resource extinction is full of major mistakes, almost always on the side of thinking things will run out when they actually never do, such as the Simon-Ehrlich Wager. Similarly, estimates of the total amount of oil resources in the world grew throughout the 20th century from 60 billion barrels in 1920 to over 1200 billion barrels today.
isps may negotiate carriage agreements with OTHER ISPS. they cannot discriminate against CONTENT on the internet according to its SOURCE. please, dont bullshit.
There was a time when government-funded ISPs discriminated against commercial content. And then USENET distribution was filtered in many places to avoid spam or porn.
I was personally involved in a product that provided Yahoo! Broadcast using satellite multicast to some ISPs. During 9/11, when most unicast video streams were maxed out, our customer ISPs were able to deliver Yahoo! Broadcast multicast streams to their customers. Was that breaking "network neutrality"?
It is true that there is not much evidence of commercial ISPs filtering typical Web traffic due to content. Generally that is because their customers pay them to have "Internet access", not "less than Internet access". No one has ever been able to make a business out of "less than Internet access", but if someone really wants to buy that (or if a locality wishes to grant a monopoly charter to some local access Internet provider to do so), I guess that is their business.
f you prefer, we can go back to the good old days when monopolies ran wild and stock market crashes happend at least once a decade.
And stock market crashes haven't happened once a decade when? I seem to remember 1987, 2001, 2008...
Not to mention bear markets in general - The Dow entered two long downturns in 1970 and 1974; during the latter, it fell nearly 45% to the bottom of a 20-year range.
The difference between government regulation and business is that you can sell your business position whenever you want to, you have to get 51% of the idiots in the country to get rid of a stupid law.
Regulations are great when the misbehavior targeted is clear, well-understood, and it is difficult to bring individually judged torts against (food safety falls into that category, proving you got sick from a particular food provider in court is tough).
Regulations are bad when government has no idea what it is doing or is trying to prevent something that has never happened before, which I'd say is the case of "net neutrality", whatever the heck that is.
if they had any kind of memory and cognitive ability, they would realize that net neutrality was the de facto rule of internet up to this point,
ISPs have always negotiated carriage agreements. It is up to ISPs if they charge other ISPs bandwidth costs to interconnect, or freely peer. There has NEVER been a federal rule forcing ISPs to exchange traffic, or how to exchange traffic. Sometimes ISPs that though they were "all that" and demanded free peering got cut off (briefly, then their customers complained, and the ISP would have to purchase carriage). That is the true history of the commercial Internet. I was there.
ISPs had access to per-port and per-application "throttling" technologies way back in the later 1990's. For end-user dial-up and DSL ISPs that only had a DS-3 connection, they often had to limit the amount of FTP or USENET traffic access by their users to keep them from killing everyone else's web experience.
When they can explain how South Korea, Taiwan, Japan etc all have 50-100Mbps edge links to consumers... in the U.S. we seem stuck around 10Mbps. There's really no excuse for this.
The excuse is local loop length. Most countries have built telephone networks with shorter local loops than the US, thus their DSL is 2-3 times as fast. Other places in the US have limited FTTH, and this is being built out in the US (FiOS, where you can get 25Mbps), and of course FTTN is also being built out (FTTN to DSL by AT&T uVerse, FTTN to shared DOCSIS QAM by cable companies). Internetworking bandwidth is a minor cost compared to the local loop costs.
Comcast is limiting torrent traffic because DOCIS QAM last mile bandwidth is shared between multiple dwellings, and they prefer your neighbors don't get pissed when you hog their bandwidth with your torrents.
Your local government is free to make it a requirement with their chartered cable and telephone monopolies that they have to invest lots of capital in decreasing loop length or moving to FTTx architectures. Your local voters will laugh at you if you try to push through the required fee increases to achieve this.
There should be no role for the Federal government in this, as the appropriate strategies need to be determined on a local basis.
The only "right" place for a male fanboy to seek love is at a "Twilight" or "True Blood" fan event.
No, the women there want the undead ON THE SCREEN, or at least the actors that play them, not some random guy dressed up like an undead.
Is it in case of a derailment and protecting nearby people and structures?
Here is what happens when a high-speed train derails...
. You should have 2 or 3 (or more in really heavily trafficed areas) co-runs of track so you can run any combination of freight or passenger traffic you need to.
There is another problem with this - high speed passenger rail and freight rail have different characteristics. The radii of curves are larger for high-speed trains generally 4-7 km or larger. High speed passenger trains can have rails with steeper gradients (such as 3.5%) than slow freight. Standard freight right-of-way is 50 feet, LGV line width is 40 meters.
The way I see it, there are four main problems with holograms. First, they are static
There are several efforts underway to create video holograms using acousto-optical crystals or spatial light modulators, such as the Holovideo project at MIT.
I don't think anyone wants to mix high-speed rail on freight rail networks. That's just a waste, and is only the half-assed solution that Amtrak uses because Acela was underfunded.
Acela on the Northeast corridor is better than most. Amtrak (and in some places, states) own the line between Washington and Boston. Amtrak trains are primary on this line. Freight service is provided on the Northeast Corridor by trackage rights to CSX, Norfolk Southern, and some others.
But try to go south of Washington, DC, where CSX owns the lines. Freight there is primary, and you can get stuck behind a slow freight for miles. My worst experience was a Virginia commuter train that got stuck next to a freight train full of trash cars. It was the worst smell I have ever experienced, and we were stuck for a half and hour!
Rebuilding existing lines for high-speed or expanding to multiple tracks faces two major problems: expansions of rights-of-way (buying people's houses, businesses, etc.), NIMBYism, and environmental laws.
Regarding Acela/Northeast Corridor, this story claims: "One of the reasons the Northeast Corridor did not get more money from the $8 billion high-speed pot is a lack of a recent environmental-impact study of the corridor."
In addition, there are many tunnels that cannot be easily expanded to multi-track, such as under the Hudson river, or under Baltimore.
The Economist has a great article subtitled "America's system of rail freight is the world's best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it".
Europe has an awesome high-speed passenger rail network, but a messed-up freight rail network. The US is the opposite, we have one of the world's most efficient freight rail networks, but not a great passenger network.
Passenger rail doesn't tend to pay for itself. Freight rail does.
Freight rail is a much more energy efficient way to haul bulk freight long-distance compared with trucks.
Trying to mix low-speed freight and high-speed passenger trains on the same track results in one or the other losing a lot of efficiency.
On the other hand, a great deal of US freight trains carry huge amounts of coal...should coal ever carry a carbon tax, that might drop off.
If we want fast pipes, we should be asking for pay as you go data plans
I'm really not sure this is the issue. US broadband speeds are most limited by our longer local loops compared with other developed countries.
The networking bandwidth costs are a very minor issue compared to the capital costs of rebuilding shorter copper loops (AT&T uVerse FTTN) or putting in new fiber ones (Verizon FiOS FTTH).
So indeed, the "speed tier" plan makes sense, but only if the money you pay to get a faster tier actually goes to building you a better local loop.
It's standard marketing bullshit. Every time you see "up to" in an ad, replace it with "less than"
Indeed, your local loop distance (and to a smaller extent other issues like loop noise and loop quality) will affect your broadband speed.
most "slowness" is likely to be because of poorly configured customer equipment rather than wide-scale "lying" by the ISP.
The sad truth is that MANY cheap home routers can't keep streams of more than a few Mbps going. I needed a bunch of cheap routers on a commercial 10 Mbps connection, and I found I really had to shop around to find a "gamer" quality router to keep the TCP streams flowing near that speed.
In an age where you can pick up GigE Ethernet switches for under $10/port, it amazes me that some routers can't push TCP down the line at more than 1-2 Mbps.
I'd be happiest if they had video out.
You can get a Mini2440 with a VGA out card.
Here is a shot of a SheevaPlug dmesg screenshot.
I also have a Mini2440, which is a bit easier to access its GPIO, serial port, etc.
But SheevaPlug ships with Python, which is awesome!
You do not understand the insights of the modern (anti-conservative) right wing and their Tea Party intellectual shock troops. Government is always evil in everything it does and private corporations never do wrong
That is only true when it does not gore their ox. For example, try to let the free market open a mosque two blocks away from Ground Zero.
And to the Tea Party, government is OK when it is fighting wars or throwing foreigners out of the country (even if they are working for private corporations).
You have to remember that Obama can't change the current situation too much
Last time I checked the Constitution, Obama is the "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" and can order all American troops home immediately.
Sure, he might not be voted back into office, Congress could block military spending, and may even be impeached, but that can't stop him in the short term.
How about when AAA teams up with hotel chains to give me a discount, is that evil too?
Obviously your are breaking "hotel room neutrality"! Shame on you!
My parents stayed at the Colony 7 hotel on the first night of their honeymoon...
"I can haz toeburger?"
But the focal length of your eyes has to remain adjusted to the distance to the screen; a very unusual exercise for your eyes, and one that will give some people headaches.
The research on convergence/focus mismatch indicates that for movie screen viewing distances, this is not a problem.
It could be more of a problem for 3D TV viewing distances with certain content. More info in the second part of this presentation.