It's news because it's a fucking missile test. Nobody cares about the satellite, but the rest of the world should care that old US missile tech still works fine and can reliably place a satellite into orbit.
Oh, there is plenty of interest about the payload satellite. It's a "look and listen" and "orbit-changing" satellite, and one that looks at other satellites in geosynchronous orbit. It is for developing the capability to spy on them (or, in more NASA-mission verbiage: investigating the short-range, weak radio emissions that other satellites emit, and their characteristics).
In other words. . . . . laying the groundwork for an inspector satellite. . . . . something the NRO would build later. This current launch is probably intended for just studying the extent of capability of detecting radio leakage of microelectronic circuitry from existing satellites (spying on other satellites) by tooling around the geosynchronous orbital space. You know..... seeing what frequencies satellites tend to leak (SR broadcast), and can be reliably read. Unlike your home computer – which by FCC rules must keep its motherboard inside a Faraday cage-like enclosure – satellites are not built to shield their emissions..... only a very nearby object could spy on them in this way. NASA is just building the science and engineering knowledge-base that such a satellite would rely upon.
SHORT ANSWER: The satellite is doing feasibility tests for a satellite inspector, which would be an NRO and USAF/SMC project – and quite probably a dark program.
GOAL: Spy on other satellites.
Send up a geosynchronous satellite that has a bay with a micro-satellite or nano-satellite (5 feet to 10 inches). Smaller is better. Being in geosynchronous orbit, it could launch the inspector satellite. The inspector satellite would be stuck in an orbital plane, but with small amounts of thrust could move itself to anywhere in that orbital plane. So it sneaks up an adversary's satellite. It remains undetected because it would be too small to show up on radar, and most satellites do not have the capability to monitor their immediate surroundings.
The inspector satellite matches the target's orbit, flies in close (LiDAR range), and listens to the unshielded electronics said target satellite for a while. It simply intercepts and stores signals in various radio bands. Once full of samples, it returns to the mother-satellite. Data is encrypted and streamed over a short-range frequency/power from micro-sat to the mother-sat. Data is then included with whatever innocuous data the mother-sat is already streaming back to earth. Analysis is done on the ground.
Every microelectronic circuit emits radiation; it leaks. Digital computer circuits in particular. A lot can be learned about the target satellite's emissions by surreptitiously spying / listening to the (especially digital) circuit leakage. [REF: See Snowden leaks]
It transforms the previously mere collision-avoidance concerns in space, into to one where spy-satellite spying-on-spy-satellites is a real possibility, and extends our field for intel-gathering to include spying in the space domain by spying on other satellites.
It turns space into yet another theater for spying, where satellites spy on other (spy) satellites. This will be an expensive vulnerability to compensate for......
... running an OS that's been cost-shaved by a company that REFUSES TO LET ITS SECURITY TEAM MAKE CRITICAL CHANGES because the Security Director is told, every single fucking time "your proposed security improvement will cost us money. get lost and come back when you have a quotes security quotes fix that actually makes us some money".
...
Not off-topic here...
That is what I think of every time I boot into Windows 8.1, which insists on telling me that I am exposing myself to danger (my fault) if I turn off the Microsoft-written and integrated "Windows Virus Defender" (or whatever it's called) from scanning and updating whenever it feels like doing so.
I mean, really... Come on... The "antivirus protection" comes WITH the OS that I installed, and was written by the same company! It's basically a tacit admission that "we write bug-riddled code, which must be monitored, so included in the OS itself is a 'threat-monitor'."
Who the fuck made the decision to make that argument to the purchaser, and who the fuck wrote that system dialog? It defies all logic.
I'd suggest backing everything up to a hard disk and sticking it in a safe deposit box at a bank. To save trips, have two disks; drop one off and pick the other one up, swapping them out again next cycle. It takes more work than an internet-based solution that runs automatically overnight, but it may be cheaper and (if you encrypt the drives) the security is hard to beat.
Yes, easiest, and within the budget of the poster. Within the budget he mentioned, he could buy two 4 TB external drives, and a safe-deposit box. Just don't get clunky 3.5" drives––get the drive-types that have laptop HDs, and are powered by the USBx/Firewire/eSATA cable. Plug and play.
I had put a 4 TB in mine, but am upgrading to a 10 GB to completely cover needs.
It is internationally accessible for backups or use as a personal streaming media drive.
(Why 10 TB? Not a bunch of 'pirated' movies, although my family's music collection is on there. It's three people with laptops. One a scientist with huge datasets, another an artist/photographer. Those two need lots of space.)
* Get a used Apple Airport 2 off of ebay. * Replace its internal hard drive with a WD Red (or a NAS-worthy Seagate). * Plug the Airport into your router via CAT-5 cable. * Turn off the Airport's WiFi capability. * Use the public IP address of the AirPort to log in and remember for each machine.
Alternatively, buy a small web-host or host package from an internet provider (like HostGator.com). Set up your backup script to do it there. I think Carbon Copy Cloner, which does scheduled backups, will back up to an sftp address. If not that, there are plenty of others. Or set up a cron job to do it (or use Apple's "Automator", which records your actions to create macro scripts).
... every major retail company sells private-label goods....
Yep.
The Nordstrom Rack has a reputation for being Nordstrom's garage sale – designer and mid-range for cheap. That it certainly is. But also, in order to keep the racks full, Nordstrom's also has some labels specifically for the 'Rack' only.
Evergreen-brand T-shirts. I'm wearing one right now.
FTA:"You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it and that's very valuable," he said. "It's a defensive measure." Another person confirmed the tactic, telling us, "That's Microsoft Research's whole model."
Tell me again how we have a STEM shortage in the US?
It's the lack of this attitude from Apple that will be it's eventual downfall. Maybe thats the wrong word, I don't think they'll ever go away entirely. But they'll start to lose out to competition again just like when they fired Jobs. It was his attitude to customers and products that brought success. He was clearly about making money, but he also cared about the products and the ideas behind them. The tech world really is worse off without him.
Apple has kind of gone down this path of late, but seems to have recognized the error of their ways. We will see within the next 12 months when the new Mac Pro, iPhone 8, and whatever else gets a rev comes out.
... In this form, the iPod lasts about nine hours longer than it originally did, never needs to waste time "spinning up", and of course if I drop it, no harm done....
IIRC, the iPod was the first Apple product to incorporate an acceleration sensor that allowed it to park the HD in cases where it was dropped.
In any case, the classic iPod, with the actually spinning wheel, would spin-up to load 2-3 songs into the buffer, and then spin back down again. That little trick was a real battery-saver. . . unless you were playing a 14+ minute track, in which case the HD would remain spinning for the entire song, draining the battery pretty quickly.
I spent a year in Germany, and all over the place were portable CD players that could also play MP3 files (meaning 10 albums on one CD). EU had VAT, so I figured I'd just pick one up when I got back to the States – for cheaper.
WRONG. Every electronics store back in the US would tell me that no such thing existed, and that I was stupid. Yeah, whatever, pimple-boy. I had to wait almost two years for the iPod to come out. It was another year or two before CD-player boom boxes that could play MP3 CDs would appear in the US. The first ones for car-stereo replacement all had terrible problems with skipping, or 'blanking', due to insufficient size of MP3 data buffer and/or inadequate mechanical isolation.
Had a little portable Sony MP3 CD player until the iPod came out. It skipped. Then I got an iPod––it never skipped. It doesn't take much memory to buffer 3 seconds of MP3 data, but Sony was too cheap to go that route. Just another reason that I have not bought Sony in almost 20 years.
I agonized on the decision between the Archos and the iPod, but made the right choice. I bought one of the first iPods to fly off of the shelves. Those Archos things were heavy, and as I recall, had a non-intuitive, click-button based interface. The iPod––you could grab it without looking to hit 'next song' or whatever.
The iPod replaced radio in my car (no ads, and I had already ripped my 300+ CDs with N2MP3, the first Mac CD ripper. This was long before iTunes had the ability to rip CDs. Remember the ad campaign: "Rip, Mix, Burn"?, and the RIAA's fit over their misinterpretation of those three words?
In use, it was funny to watch people's reactions to the iPod when they'd ride in my car. "Here, it's intuitive, and it's got about 40 albums-worth of music on it. Try it." They'd get confused and have to be told to scroll the wheel and to click the button. Within two minutes, however, they always 'got it' and were hooked. Well, except for my PhD advisor, who hit play with random engaged, and as luck would (not) have it, a song from John Lennon's Shaved Fish came on – "Woman is the Ni..." The title scrolled across the screen. Questions. I had a little explaining about how John liked to write smash-mouth lyrics, and explained the meaning of John's lyrics on this one... I told him to hit "next song" and he was OK after that. Man – 40 albums and that one song comes up when I'm giving my advisor a lift! Anyway, he bought an iPod very soon after.
I've still got an 80 GB iPod lying around here somewhere. I hear that they can handle installation of up to a 256 GB HD, which would be plenty for my entire music collection + books-on-tape. 65 days-worth of music might as well be a radio station, but with no ads.:-) But without a car, that project is on hold.
Until "The Greatest Generation" – the Baby Boomers – cough-up to reair the damage that they have knowingly wrought on the earth's environment (earth, water, and sky), I will keep on keeping-on like they did.
The "Greatest Generation"--the ones who won WWII--were the parents of the Baby Boomers. Environmental concerns were secondary to defeating fascism.
If you wanted to be remembered as part of a great generation, you'd emulate them and do what needs to be done regardless of the cost, instead of contributing to a death spiral of apathy.
Oh, I have solved some 'Grand Challenges' in a few fields of science and medicine, and have performed research in solar cells and LED lighting, so I can sleep easy as far as having 'done my part'. I don't do any more of that because I am too busy suing those who have ripped-off my patented improvements for huge financial gains––it is a waste of my time and energy. (The situation is kind of sad because I'd rather be working along with everyone else to do my part to try and save the world.)
But, the horrific fact is that we are past the tipping-point. Anything we do now only slows the inevitable. Anthropogenic global warming was suggested to be a likely outcome of the industrial revolution over 100 years ago. Nobody listened. We have, in-hand, technologies that can supplant fossil fuels, and they are affordable––There is money to be made there, but the entrenched energy interests have astro-turfed and funded denialism even though they themselves had warnings from their own scientists at least 40 years ago (Exxon). The carbon-extraction energy companies should have (They actually did.) realized that the party would come to an end. But they have fought tooth and nail to the bitter end, rather than, say, maneuvering to develop or buy-up the most promising renewable technologies in order to control those markets – which are the future of energy; it's just that such a shift would make them get up off of their asses and do something. They chose the cheaper option to lobby and spread FUD and poo-poo anything related to this inevitable and catastrophically late shift that humanity is finally making.
So, that generation had a party. Now, global CO2 levels, air-temperatures, and ocean-temperatures are all increasing along what we scientists call an exponential curve. Extrapolate. The next 20 years will be fraught with the world trying to deal with 100's of millions of climate refugees. That sort of thing typically leads to the election of reactionary leaders, and then into war. Wars increase manufacturing by a significant amount (see the WW-II 'bump' in the global CO2 curve). So, busy killing off the unfortunate, humanity will set that "global warming theory" stuff to the back burner – pun intended.
There's a good Robert Frost Poem that sums it up:
Fire and Ice (c) Robert Frost (academic use here) Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To know that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
Ice being the indifference to humanity of people's own individual actions.
Even if we switched over to (solar + wind + geothermal + hydro + batteries) today, in an instant, it would be too late. It would slow things enough that those born today might live full-length lives, but that's about it.
We have passed the tipping point. I'm sure the orchestra on the Titanic played beautiful renditions of their last-performance pieces. An analogic example would be Elon Musk. He is one person doing just what the orchestra did––he can't change when he was born, and is doing great things to blast solar and batteries through to acceptance and general citizen use. But alas, that exponential curve ext
Rechargeable alkaline batteries aren't something new, if anything battery manufacturers have tried to make the chemistry and cells _less_ rechargeable over the years to earn more. I read an article in the 90's that described charging alkaline batteries then (using cells not intended to be recharged) and also told the history of the batteries and charging with examples from the technical evolution that didn't significantly increase capacity but made the cells much harder to recharge. Can't remember where I read it sadly.
With that said I'll applaud all _real_ improvements in batteries no matter their chemistry.
I can remember buying plenty of recharge-able alkaline batteries in the late 1980's and early 1990's. They did kind of get flakier and less reliable (newer batteries bought, that is) over time. At the time, why an established product became less reliable over time really pissed me off.
I learned that you had to go to the trouble of completely discharging them before a recharge. That was a pain in the ass. Oh, but they came out with a recharger that first drained the batteries completely before recharge to avoid imprint. This NEW recharger was only $60. What a bargain!
I dumped recharge-ables after falling for and seeing that scam. And, also, being an engineering undergraduate, where you learn about the concept of the "designed lifetime" of consumable products. Think lightbulbs here. The original, first-ever, vacuum-filament lightbulb is still working. The 20-year CFLs I bought in the 1990's pooped-out in two years – just past the warranty period.
At least Ni-Cd batteries don't catch on fire when they fail. But, then again, cadmium is probably just as poisonous as lead (same group on the periodic table), but insufficient studies have been published. At least there are battery-recycling bins around now.
Last thought, lead-less solder. It uses Indium, another one of the heavy metals. All of the heavy metals attack your nervous system if ingested, but we haven't had "lead-free solder" electronic components around long enough for the general populace to catch on. They will, in about 30 years, when leaching from garbage dumps into aquifers, and thus tap water, really gets going.
Those of us who warn of "Love Canal"-type situations are shouted down by lobbyists as Cassandras. Fuck it. So be it. Some of us can see over the horizon, but get bashed for it (or intellectually raped), so we have learned to keep our mouths shut and let you plebes who put more stock in what politicians say control the manner in which your children will be poisoned. We warn, as is proper, but don't harp on it and become political warriors––that is not the reason that we became scientists. Society chooses its own fate.
As for myself, I say fuck humanity, and throw Ni-Cd batteries, worn-out lithium batteries, mercury thermometers, glass, aluminum, plastics. . . right in with the banana peels, chicken bones, and hog-bones and fat. . . all into the trash. Why? The previous generations knowingly fucked us with their "gravel pit" disposal of perc and other polluting behaviors. Until "The Greatest Generation" – the Baby Boomers – cough-up to reair the damage that they have knowingly wrought on the earth's environment (earth, water, and sky), I will keep on keeping-on like they did. They knew they were shitting in their grandchildren's nest, and we are past the tipping-point with AGW already. There is no fucking way that I am going to pay the cost of their sudden (historical) prosperity by spending my money cleaning up their mess.
Let the Earth burn. It doesn't need saving. It has done just fine for 4.3 billion years, and humanity will be but a flash of events in geological time. A time that brought on the Anthropocene Era and the Sixth Great Extinction. Humans will be gone within 200 years. And good riddance to them.
So they are using aluminum instead of zinc. Zinc forms sub-oxides quite easily, but aluminum is strongly ionic, and just turns to Al2O3. (Look up the ionization energies.)
Reducing the zinc (recharging the battery) is a well-developed rechargeable battery technology. Reducing Al2O3 is, well, very energy intensive. The typical process is the Hall–Héroult process (with thanks to Born & Haber), which as I recall involves very high temperatures. So what is their trick?
If their trick is in the halogenic elements used in the Al2O3 reduction process, then they are potentially infringing on my patents. More importantly: If they can reduce Al2O3 to Al without the energy-investment of heating the thing during recharge, then they have also hit the big time. The aluminum-production market is much larger than the rechargeable battery market.
Don't tell me that the price of paper and printing varies that much just by the words put onto the pages.
I didn't tell you that. Did you read what I wrote? I said that you cannot determine that producing a "magazine" is cheap just because you get some of them for free. There are hidden cost-payers for those free magazines.
You stated that there was a cost to production and distribution. That cost is pretty much fixed––it does not vary much.
In writing my example, I assumed that you would make the mental leap that I was referring to the (nominally fixed) cost you described ("printing and mailing of X is paid for by Y"). You are correct in that point, but were missing my point.
Journal subscription prices actually charged vary wildly (and did even before internet access was common). I was sharing because few know this fact – including many scientists.
The firsten masse resignation of the entire Editorial Staff from an extortative publisher, who went off to create an effective clone journal having identical goals and editorial staff, but with an open-access policy – AND the same prestige from the get-gobecause this was led by the Editors, and all stayed on-board to start it – was another mathematics journal.
Some other journals have followed in these footsteps. A top-tier journal in Linguistics. A respected journal in physics and chemistry. Others...
Slashdot Mirror
It's news because it's a fucking missile test. Nobody cares about the satellite, but the rest of the world should care that old US missile tech still works fine and can reliably place a satellite into orbit.
Oh, there is plenty of interest about the payload satellite. It's a "look and listen" and "orbit-changing" satellite, and one that looks at other satellites in geosynchronous orbit. It is for developing the capability to spy on them (or, in more NASA-mission verbiage: investigating the short-range, weak radio emissions that other satellites emit, and their characteristics).
In other words. . . . . laying the groundwork for an inspector satellite. . . . . something the NRO would build later. This current launch is probably intended for just studying the extent of capability of detecting radio leakage of microelectronic circuitry from existing satellites (spying on other satellites) by tooling around the geosynchronous orbital space. You know..... seeing what frequencies satellites tend to leak (SR broadcast), and can be reliably read. Unlike your home computer – which by FCC rules must keep its motherboard inside a Faraday cage-like enclosure – satellites are not built to shield their emissions..... only a very nearby object could spy on them in this way. NASA is just building the science and engineering knowledge-base that such a satellite would rely upon.
SHORT ANSWER: The satellite is doing feasibility tests for a satellite inspector, which would be an NRO and USAF/SMC project – and quite probably a dark program.
GOAL: Spy on other satellites.
Send up a geosynchronous satellite that has a bay with a micro-satellite or nano-satellite (5 feet to 10 inches). Smaller is better. Being in geosynchronous orbit, it could launch the inspector satellite. The inspector satellite would be stuck in an orbital plane, but with small amounts of thrust could move itself to anywhere in that orbital plane. So it sneaks up an adversary's satellite. It remains undetected because it would be too small to show up on radar, and most satellites do not have the capability to monitor their immediate surroundings.
The inspector satellite matches the target's orbit, flies in close (LiDAR range), and listens to the unshielded electronics said target satellite for a while. It simply intercepts and stores signals in various radio bands. Once full of samples, it returns to the mother-satellite. Data is encrypted and streamed over a short-range frequency/power from micro-sat to the mother-sat. Data is then included with whatever innocuous data the mother-sat is already streaming back to earth. Analysis is done on the ground.
Every microelectronic circuit emits radiation; it leaks. Digital computer circuits in particular. A lot can be learned about the target satellite's emissions by surreptitiously spying / listening to the (especially digital) circuit leakage. [REF: See Snowden leaks]
It transforms the previously mere collision-avoidance concerns in space, into to one where spy-satellite spying-on-spy-satellites is a real possibility, and extends our field for intel-gathering to include spying in the space domain by spying on other satellites.
It turns space into yet another theater for spying, where satellites spy on other (spy) satellites. This will be an expensive vulnerability to compensate for......
This will never fly. It's not a jet. It has no power-off life savings. It won't work within the national airspace systems.
Ehud Gavron
US FAA commercial helicopter pilot
Their design includes, as a standard, a quick-deploy parachute/parafoil system. This is for instances of failure.
And true, it's not a jet, but ducted electric props. No combustion == not a jet.
You're thinking of a different incident.
It was a battleship, not a carrier.
And yes, it did indeed require towage back to port.
... running an OS that's been cost-shaved by a company that REFUSES TO LET ITS SECURITY TEAM MAKE CRITICAL CHANGES because the Security Director is told, every single fucking time "your proposed security improvement will cost us money. get lost and come back when you have a quotes security quotes fix that actually makes us some money".
...
Not off-topic here...
That is what I think of every time I boot into Windows 8.1, which insists on telling me that I am exposing myself to danger (my fault) if I turn off the Microsoft-written and integrated "Windows Virus Defender" (or whatever it's called) from scanning and updating whenever it feels like doing so.
I mean, really... Come on... The "antivirus protection" comes WITH the OS that I installed, and was written by the same company! It's basically a tacit admission that "we write bug-riddled code, which must be monitored, so included in the OS itself is a 'threat-monitor'."
Who the fuck made the decision to make that argument to the purchaser, and who the fuck wrote that system dialog? It defies all logic.
I'd suggest backing everything up to a hard disk and sticking it in a safe deposit box at a bank. To save trips, have two disks; drop one off and pick the other one up, swapping them out again next cycle. It takes more work than an internet-based solution that runs automatically overnight, but it may be cheaper and (if you encrypt the drives) the security is hard to beat.
Yes, easiest, and within the budget of the poster. Within the budget he mentioned, he could buy two 4 TB external drives, and a safe-deposit box. Just don't get clunky 3.5" drives––get the drive-types that have laptop HDs, and are powered by the USBx/Firewire/eSATA cable. Plug and play.
... Then pick a storage plan, not sure what you expect as far as availability, throughput and cost but there are Google, Amazon, Box, Dropbox.
Also Apple iCloud, which has encrypted cloud storage for reasonable monthly rates.
For any of the above, I hope that you have a fast internet connection at home.
I had put a 4 TB in mine, but am upgrading to a 10 GB to completely cover needs.
It is internationally accessible for backups or use as a personal streaming media drive.
(Why 10 TB? Not a bunch of 'pirated' movies, although my family's music collection is on there. It's three people with laptops. One a scientist with huge datasets, another an artist/photographer. Those two need lots of space.)
This is easy:
* Get a used Apple Airport 2 off of ebay.
* Replace its internal hard drive with a WD Red (or a NAS-worthy Seagate).
* Plug the Airport into your router via CAT-5 cable.
* Turn off the Airport's WiFi capability.
* Use the public IP address of the AirPort to log in and remember for each machine.
Alternatively, buy a small web-host or host package from an internet provider (like HostGator.com). Set up your backup script to do it there. I think Carbon Copy Cloner, which does scheduled backups, will back up to an sftp address. If not that, there are plenty of others. Or set up a cron job to do it (or use Apple's "Automator", which records your actions to create macro scripts).
Sears *HAD* Craftsman, recently sold it though
Really? Those things have a lifetime guarantee. Or maybe had... Good tools.
Who bought the brand?
... every major retail company sells private-label goods. ...
Yep.
The Nordstrom Rack has a reputation for being Nordstrom's garage sale – designer and mid-range for cheap. That it certainly is. But also, in order to keep the racks full, Nordstrom's also has some labels specifically for the 'Rack' only.
Evergreen-brand T-shirts. I'm wearing one right now.
That song is one of Johns greatest songs. And it was true as well. The lyrics are very fitting and true.
Agreed.
It was a little embarrassing having him read the title out loud, with a "WTF" raise in pitch of the voice at the end of the sentence.
No, we had those in the states as well. They just stopped selling once the iPod and it's various clones came down to a reasonable price point.
I returned to the US in the Fall of 2000. There were none to be found, at least in my extensive search at the time (in a major US city).
FTA:"You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it and that's very valuable," he said. "It's a defensive measure." Another person confirmed the tactic, telling us, "That's Microsoft Research's whole model."
Tell me again how we have a STEM shortage in the US?
It's the lack of this attitude from Apple that will be it's eventual downfall. Maybe thats the wrong word, I don't think they'll ever go away entirely. But they'll start to lose out to competition again just like when they fired Jobs. It was his attitude to customers and products that brought success. He was clearly about making money, but he also cared about the products and the ideas behind them. The tech world really is worse off without him.
Apple has kind of gone down this path of late, but seems to have recognized the error of their ways. We will see within the next 12 months when the new Mac Pro, iPhone 8, and whatever else gets a rev comes out.
... In this form, the iPod lasts about nine hours longer than it originally did, never needs to waste time "spinning up", and of course if I drop it, no harm done. ...
IIRC, the iPod was the first Apple product to incorporate an acceleration sensor that allowed it to park the HD in cases where it was dropped.
In any case, the classic iPod, with the actually spinning wheel, would spin-up to load 2-3 songs into the buffer, and then spin back down again. That little trick was a real battery-saver. . . unless you were playing a 14+ minute track, in which case the HD would remain spinning for the entire song, draining the battery pretty quickly.
It's a different world one lives in when one laughs off ones kids losing 100 dollar gifts.
Yeah, fucking billionaires. They're all the same.
I spent a year in Germany, and all over the place were portable CD players that could also play MP3 files (meaning 10 albums on one CD). EU had VAT, so I figured I'd just pick one up when I got back to the States – for cheaper.
WRONG. Every electronics store back in the US would tell me that no such thing existed, and that I was stupid. Yeah, whatever, pimple-boy. I had to wait almost two years for the iPod to come out. It was another year or two before CD-player boom boxes that could play MP3 CDs would appear in the US. The first ones for car-stereo replacement all had terrible problems with skipping, or 'blanking', due to insufficient size of MP3 data buffer and/or inadequate mechanical isolation.
Had a little portable Sony MP3 CD player until the iPod came out. It skipped. Then I got an iPod––it never skipped. It doesn't take much memory to buffer 3 seconds of MP3 data, but Sony was too cheap to go that route. Just another reason that I have not bought Sony in almost 20 years.
I agonized on the decision between the Archos and the iPod, but made the right choice. I bought one of the first iPods to fly off of the shelves. Those Archos things were heavy, and as I recall, had a non-intuitive, click-button based interface. The iPod––you could grab it without looking to hit 'next song' or whatever.
The iPod replaced radio in my car (no ads, and I had already ripped my 300+ CDs with N2MP3, the first Mac CD ripper. This was long before iTunes had the ability to rip CDs. Remember the ad campaign: "Rip, Mix, Burn"?, and the RIAA's fit over their misinterpretation of those three words?
In use, it was funny to watch people's reactions to the iPod when they'd ride in my car. "Here, it's intuitive, and it's got about 40 albums-worth of music on it. Try it." They'd get confused and have to be told to scroll the wheel and to click the button. Within two minutes, however, they always 'got it' and were hooked. Well, except for my PhD advisor, who hit play with random engaged, and as luck would (not) have it, a song from John Lennon's Shaved Fish came on – "Woman is the Ni..." The title scrolled across the screen. Questions. I had a little explaining about how John liked to write smash-mouth lyrics, and explained the meaning of John's lyrics on this one... I told him to hit "next song" and he was OK after that. Man – 40 albums and that one song comes up when I'm giving my advisor a lift! Anyway, he bought an iPod very soon after.
I've still got an 80 GB iPod lying around here somewhere. I hear that they can handle installation of up to a 256 GB HD, which would be plenty for my entire music collection + books-on-tape. 65 days-worth of music might as well be a radio station, but with no ads. :-) But without a car, that project is on hold.
Until "The Greatest Generation" – the Baby Boomers – cough-up to reair the damage that they have knowingly wrought on the earth's environment (earth, water, and sky), I will keep on keeping-on like they did.
The "Greatest Generation"--the ones who won WWII--were the parents of the Baby Boomers. Environmental concerns were secondary to defeating fascism.
If you wanted to be remembered as part of a great generation, you'd emulate them and do what needs to be done regardless of the cost, instead of contributing to a death spiral of apathy.
Oh, I have solved some 'Grand Challenges' in a few fields of science and medicine, and have performed research in solar cells and LED lighting, so I can sleep easy as far as having 'done my part'. I don't do any more of that because I am too busy suing those who have ripped-off my patented improvements for huge financial gains––it is a waste of my time and energy. (The situation is kind of sad because I'd rather be working along with everyone else to do my part to try and save the world.)
But, the horrific fact is that we are past the tipping-point. Anything we do now only slows the inevitable. Anthropogenic global warming was suggested to be a likely outcome of the industrial revolution over 100 years ago. Nobody listened. We have, in-hand, technologies that can supplant fossil fuels, and they are affordable––There is money to be made there, but the entrenched energy interests have astro-turfed and funded denialism even though they themselves had warnings from their own scientists at least 40 years ago (Exxon). The carbon-extraction energy companies should have (They actually did.) realized that the party would come to an end. But they have fought tooth and nail to the bitter end, rather than, say, maneuvering to develop or buy-up the most promising renewable technologies in order to control those markets – which are the future of energy; it's just that such a shift would make them get up off of their asses and do something. They chose the cheaper option to lobby and spread FUD and poo-poo anything related to this inevitable and catastrophically late shift that humanity is finally making.
So, that generation had a party. Now, global CO2 levels, air-temperatures, and ocean-temperatures are all increasing along what we scientists call an exponential curve. Extrapolate. The next 20 years will be fraught with the world trying to deal with 100's of millions of climate refugees. That sort of thing typically leads to the election of reactionary leaders, and then into war. Wars increase manufacturing by a significant amount (see the WW-II 'bump' in the global CO2 curve). So, busy killing off the unfortunate, humanity will set that "global warming theory" stuff to the back burner – pun intended.
There's a good Robert Frost Poem that sums it up:
Fire and Ice (c) Robert Frost (academic use here)
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Ice being the indifference to humanity of people's own individual actions.
Even if we switched over to (solar + wind + geothermal + hydro + batteries) today, in an instant, it would be too late. It would slow things enough that those born today might live full-length lives, but that's about it.
We have passed the tipping point. I'm sure the orchestra on the Titanic played beautiful renditions of their last-performance pieces. An analogic example would be Elon Musk. He is one person doing just what the orchestra did––he can't change when he was born, and is doing great things to blast solar and batteries through to acceptance and general citizen use. But alas, that exponential curve ext
Rechargeable alkaline batteries aren't something new, if anything battery manufacturers have tried to make the chemistry and cells _less_ rechargeable over the years to earn more. I read an article in the 90's that described charging alkaline batteries then (using cells not intended to be recharged) and also told the history of the batteries and charging with examples from the technical evolution that didn't significantly increase capacity but made the cells much harder to recharge. Can't remember where I read it sadly.
With that said I'll applaud all _real_ improvements in batteries no matter their chemistry.
I can remember buying plenty of recharge-able alkaline batteries in the late 1980's and early 1990's. They did kind of get flakier and less reliable (newer batteries bought, that is) over time. At the time, why an established product became less reliable over time really pissed me off.
I learned that you had to go to the trouble of completely discharging them before a recharge. That was a pain in the ass. Oh, but they came out with a recharger that first drained the batteries completely before recharge to avoid imprint. This NEW recharger was only $60. What a bargain!
I dumped recharge-ables after falling for and seeing that scam. And, also, being an engineering undergraduate, where you learn about the concept of the "designed lifetime" of consumable products. Think lightbulbs here. The original, first-ever, vacuum-filament lightbulb is still working. The 20-year CFLs I bought in the 1990's pooped-out in two years – just past the warranty period.
At least Ni-Cd batteries don't catch on fire when they fail. But, then again, cadmium is probably just as poisonous as lead (same group on the periodic table), but insufficient studies have been published. At least there are battery-recycling bins around now.
Last thought, lead-less solder. It uses Indium, another one of the heavy metals. All of the heavy metals attack your nervous system if ingested, but we haven't had "lead-free solder" electronic components around long enough for the general populace to catch on. They will, in about 30 years, when leaching from garbage dumps into aquifers, and thus tap water, really gets going.
Those of us who warn of "Love Canal"-type situations are shouted down by lobbyists as Cassandras. Fuck it. So be it. Some of us can see over the horizon, but get bashed for it (or intellectually raped), so we have learned to keep our mouths shut and let you plebes who put more stock in what politicians say control the manner in which your children will be poisoned. We warn, as is proper, but don't harp on it and become political warriors––that is not the reason that we became scientists. Society chooses its own fate.
As for myself, I say fuck humanity, and throw Ni-Cd batteries, worn-out lithium batteries, mercury thermometers, glass, aluminum, plastics. . . right in with the banana peels, chicken bones, and hog-bones and fat. . . all into the trash. Why? The previous generations knowingly fucked us with their "gravel pit" disposal of perc and other polluting behaviors. Until "The Greatest Generation" – the Baby Boomers – cough-up to reair the damage that they have knowingly wrought on the earth's environment (earth, water, and sky), I will keep on keeping-on like they did. They knew they were shitting in their grandchildren's nest, and we are past the tipping-point with AGW already. There is no fucking way that I am going to pay the cost of their sudden (historical) prosperity by spending my money cleaning up their mess.
Let the Earth burn. It doesn't need saving. It has done just fine for 4.3 billion years, and humanity will be but a flash of events in geological time. A time that brought on the Anthropocene Era and the Sixth Great Extinction. Humans will be gone within 200 years. And good riddance to them.
So they are using aluminum instead of zinc. Zinc forms sub-oxides quite easily, but aluminum is strongly ionic, and just turns to Al2O3. (Look up the ionization energies.)
Reducing the zinc (recharging the battery) is a well-developed rechargeable battery technology. Reducing Al2O3 is, well, very energy intensive. The typical process is the Hall–Héroult process (with thanks to Born & Haber), which as I recall involves very high temperatures. So what is their trick?
If their trick is in the halogenic elements used in the Al2O3 reduction process, then they are potentially infringing on my patents. More importantly: If they can reduce Al2O3 to Al without the energy-investment of heating the thing during recharge, then they have also hit the big time. The aluminum-production market is much larger than the rechargeable battery market.
Don't tell me that the price of paper and printing varies that much just by the words put onto the pages.
I didn't tell you that. Did you read what I wrote? I said that you cannot determine that producing a "magazine" is cheap just because you get some of them for free. There are hidden cost-payers for those free magazines.
You stated that there was a cost to production and distribution. That cost is pretty much fixed––it does not vary much.
In writing my example, I assumed that you would make the mental leap that I was referring to the (nominally fixed) cost you described ("printing and mailing of X is paid for by Y"). You are correct in that point, but were missing my point.
Journal subscription prices actually charged vary wildly (and did even before internet access was common). I was sharing because few know this fact – including many scientists.
Some scientific journals cost 30x or more than others (page-for-page comparison).
Don't tell me that the price of paper and printing varies that much just by the words put onto the pages.
Ok.
I know nothing about this... But how the heck are they going to get paid, or pay for rent, hosting, etc. if there is no charge to the readers?
Let's start with: what do the costs of a print journal work out to per paper carried? Now compare the cost of online publication.
Print is cheap. I get what are essentially magazines or journals (in that they are printed on paper) for FREE all the time.
Catalogs
Alumni magazines
Trade magazines
More catalogs...
The first en masse resignation of the entire Editorial Staff from an extortative publisher, who went off to create an effective clone journal having identical goals and editorial staff, but with an open-access policy – AND the same prestige from the get-gobecause this was led by the Editors, and all stayed on-board to start it – was another mathematics journal.
Some other journals have followed in these footsteps. A top-tier journal in Linguistics. A respected journal in physics and chemistry. Others...
May there be many more!