While I haven't used Zycam, I have, a number of times over the last few years, used zinc gluconate tablets (dissolved in the mouth and gargled up toward the nose) to try to mitigate an oncoming cold.
And I have also noticed, over that period, a significant reduction in my sense of smell (which I hadn't connected with anything and assumed might just be due to age).
Needless to say I'll be skipping the zinc treatments in the future, at least until this is resolved.
I'm trying to think of a downside to making all medications and supplements require FDA approval.
The downside is that the process produces both:
- long delays (during which people suffer and perhaps die) and:
- enormous costs (which keep some safe-and-effective drugs from reaching the market and raise the costs of medications which DO make it through the gauntlet - and must pay for both themselves and their share of the ones that fail).
When the legislation was first proposed it was estimated that if it added six months to the introduction of new medications it was a net loss. Now it takes years and tens of millions of dollars per new drug that starts testing.
One estimate of these costs - in a Wall Street Journal headline - is that the delay required for approving the use of Beta Blockers in the US to prevent secondary heart attacks (after they were approved for that in Europe) resulted in 100,000 deaths.
The Navy picked up the option to fund the next step.
Now it's funded the step after that, and included a request for a proposal for it to fund the third and final step.
At the end of that step (if it all works) we have a practical first demo power plant - about 100 megawatts of fusion power out from cheap and very abundant fuel. Proof of concept, a practical design good enough to displace fossil fuel and fission power plants (and perhaps aircraft carrier and battleship engines) that can be replicated, and probably enough engineering data to design something much better.
Now we're up to sustaining it, and getting net power out of it, which are harder than the previous problems.
Or even getting net power out WITHOUT sustaining it.
You can get power from a fueled heat engine with continuous combustion. (Steam engines - both mobile and power plants - for example.) But repeated pulses of power work fine too (diesel cycle, otto cycle,...) and may have engineering advantages in some situations (i.e. trading efficiency for light weight, high power-to-weight ratio, and broad torque curve to make engines practical for vehicles). Fusion also might be practical on a putt-putt rather than long continuous burn basis.
It is supposed to be bad practice to argue different things in different courts at the same time.
Huh?
Heck: Sometimes it's good practice to argue different (and contradictory) things in the SAME court at the same time. It's called "pleading the alternative".
Granted it's usually used in criminal law (where the prosecution has to prove ALL the points of the crime and the defendant only has to show that the prosecution failed to prove one of them). But I see no reason SCO shouldn't try both these approaches (though I wish they'd lose, die, and get it over with - without creating a successor that could carry on the battle).
Nuclear weapons are a fantastic peace maker in the hands of responsible government.
According to a close friend who is a Muslim (of a different madab), they have been ruled as forbidden by the Shia version of Sharia law. Variant on burning the enemy. Big no-no. (This would apply to using them in a mutual-assured-destruction threat as well.)
Presuming that's correct and the government is actually following the ruling, it would lend some credence to the claims that their nuclear program is just for power and other miscellaneous non-weapon tech. (Which they have a right to - and the US has an obligation to AID them in pursuing - under the Nonproliferation Treaty.)
But last I heard it moves essentially in a circle or otherwise wanders around near the rotational north pole, rather than heading south for the winter.
So how fast it's moving is no big deal - but a change in the direction of its motion might be.
Tinfoil hats would help protect against really high-frequency hertzian transverse electromagnetic waves - high enough frequency that the "hat" is much bigger than a quarter wavelength. But for the low frequency electric-field capacitive coupling of a Tesla system a they would just increase the "elevated capacitance" between your head and the ionosphere, increasing the current in your body.
They'd do the same for a vertically-polarized electromagnetic wave of the same low frequency (which also produces a vertical AC electromagnetic field - and would be present in Tesla's cavity system as a side-effect of how the electric field changes.)
In fact the equivalent antenna-current-enhancer is actually called a "capacitive hat". B-)
The particles do tend to become polarized, with the nuclei leaning in the direction of the negative charge and the electrons toward the positive charge in the strong electric field, and this does affect the propagation of the AC wave down the cables, slowing it slightly compared to how fast it would go if the wires were surrounded by vacuum. This is like air, water, or glass slowing light, or the insulation in a printed circuit or coaxial cable slowing radio waves. But it isn't necessarily for propagation.
It also doesn't represent a loss. Unless the molecules come apart or are set spinning it's like cocking a frictionless spring: The energy that went into partially separating the charges comes back out when they come back together as the electric field falls later in the cycle. (It does lower the impedance of the transmission line slightly, leading to higher current and higher I-squared-R losses than the same separation would produce in a vacuum. But this can be compensated for by slightly increasing the separation of the wires - and is designed into the line in the first place.)
DC would leak only by corona discharge. You could still pick up some power. But capacitive and inductive coupling wouldn't work.
The air doesn't (necessarily) become ionized in order for the power to be transferred. The particles do tend to become polarized, with the nuclei leaning in the direction of the negative charge and the electrons toward the positive charge in the strong electric field, and this does affect the propagation of the AC wave down the cables, slowing it slightly compared to how fast it would go if the wires were surrounded by vacuum. This is like air, water, or glass slowing light, or the insulation in a printed circuit or coaxial cable slowing radio waves. But it isn't necessarily for propagation.
The voltage is kept low enough that the air generally doesn't become ionized near the wire. It DOES get ionized near irregularities - nicks, dust particles, raindrops, corners of nuts on fittings, etc. - where the field becomes focussed. There you get a corona discharge which represents a leakage current and a power loss. Really high voltage transmission lines have rounded guards around the fittings to produce a smooth surface and avoid this phenomenon somewhat.
DC carries power better than AC for several reasons:
- Resistive losses go with the SQUARE of the current. So the AC averages more loss during the high current part of the cycle than it makes up during the low-current part.
- Losses from current leakage go with the square of the voltage in a pure resistance - and leakage from corona (for a particular wire geometry) goes up much faster than linear with voltage. So a given technology of wire and fittings will have less leakage from a given DC voltage than from AC with an equivalent RMS "average" voltage, because the AC will again lose more over the peaks than it saves during the valleys of the waveform.
- The current in the wire creates a magnetic field around it, and part of the field from the current in the inner part of the wire is actually embedded in the outer part. With DC this is no big deal. With AC, as the current reverses the field first expands out of the wire then contracts back into it (pointing the other way). The current can't get moving in the inner part of the wire until the mag field penetrates, so it is reduced somewhat. The result is that the current is not evenly distributed, but is concentrated more near the outer part of the wire, causing what it known as the "skin effect". This increases the apparent resistance of the wire. Alternatively, you could observe that because the losses are proportional to the SQUARE of the current (density), the uneven distribution of current loses more where it is concentrated than it gains where it is dispersed.
Electric field coupling through capacitance and magnetic field coupling through induction won't work for parasitizing a DC transmission line, because it requres a CHANGE in the voltage or current to couple using them. This leaves only collecting the charged air particles from corona losses. It should be possible to pick up some power from broad conductive surfaces located where they would intercept some of this charged air (i.e. metal mesh/screen fencing on insulators). But that would be the limit. (Also: I've seen the west coast DC transmission line: It's two wires 'way up there compared to their separation. So the corona generated carriers will be mostly up in the air near the wires, moving from one to the other.)
The power doesn't actually flow IN the wires. It flows in the fields AROUND the wires. It falls off pretty fast. But there's a LOT of power in a high-line so there's a non-trivial amount at ground level outside the right-of-way.
Back in the '60s at EE school I heard a story (from the prof). Seems a farmer who had the local power company eminent-domain a right-of-way through his land to put in a high-line, but still wanted tens of thousands to run a service drop to his farm. This guy got ticked. So he strung his own line under the high-line, thus coupling to it (both inductively and capacitively) and used ordinary utility transformers to convert the tapped power to a voltage suitable to run his milking barn.
Power company noticed the drain and tried to bill him. He told 'em to get stuffed. So they sued him. Judge told 'em if they couldn't keep their power in their lines they had no claim on it if somebody picked up and used what had leaked outside their right-of-way. Nyah-nyah. Power company said that doing this was dangerous. Farmer said he'd keep doing it regardless of their claims.
Then the power company did a little switching of the line. This threw some big transients down it. The farmer's equipment arced over and burned down his barn.
At least that's how the story went. It was a lead-in to a lesson on the problems of switching transients in power transmission lines. So I have no idea how much of it is apocryphal, whether there are precedents since, or how a judge might rule in a current case.
But if I were to try it I'd make sure the lines were outside their right-of-way (so I could argue that if they didn't want to give away the power they should have bought enough of a right-of-way to contain it and put up shielding wire runs inside the boundary to keep it in - cheapskates exposing people to their EM fields etc.) and be sure to include surge arresters at the load end my wiring.
the right to an attorney and the right against self-incrimination do not apply in civil trials. Further, the Fifth Amendment attaches only to persons...
I agree that you are correctly stating the current legal paradigm.
However, IMHO the seizure of property in a civil action because it is alleged to be the fruit of a crime is itself a penalty for an alleged criminal activity (illegally obtaining the property). As such, it should not be a civil matter and subject only to civil proceedings unless the alleged criminal act which makes it the fruit of a crime has already been proven under criminal law procedures and standards of proof. To do otherwise is, again IMHO, a "taking" and/or "deprivation of... property" "without due process" under the Fifth Amendment.
(Similarly, the state level treatment of traffic violations as "civil infractions" is also a transparent move to impose what are indistinguishable from criminal penalties under the more lax civil law procedures and standards of proof. These procedures should also be banned and the associated laws stricken.)
Hertz came up with the math for (transverse) electromagnetic waves.
Tesla was into broadcast power - which he apparently visualized as using capacitive coupling to the ionosphere at high impedance and low frequency) along with conduction in it and the ground below it as the transport medium. That's just electric fields and conduction (or longitudinal waves in the ionosphere's plasma) rather than electromagnetic waves.
It happens that his systems would also generate electromagnetic radiation and propagate power with it. But it's apparently not the particular mechanism he had in mind. (It's also not as efficient as the one he envisioned, since EM waves radiate in all directions and falls off as inverse square, while Tesla's system would essentially pump energy into a resonant cavity and contain it between the ground and the ionosphere until it was dissipated by loads or parasitic resistances).
Now the devices in question in TFA are designed around Hertz's EM radiation rather than Tesla's "elevated capacitance" system. But it was Tesla, not Hertz, who was the big cheerleader for broadcast power using electric and magnetic phenomena (if not precisely Hertizan waves).
As the saying goes: "Freedom isn't Free." It takes someone standing up and defending freedom. Sometimes that is on a battlefield with a gun. Sometimes its in a jail cell waiting for a court date.
Agreed.
Yet it would be nice if there were a way to bring a constitutional test of a law to court without having to bet your life, fortune, and sacred honor to do it.
After all, the congresscritters can pass as many unconstitutional laws as they think they can get away with just by doing a few hours of office work - over and over again. Why should it be drastically more expensive, hazardous, and time-consuming for us to undo their work when it is out-of-bounds?
Let's say you wanted a "speech code" law overturned. The only way to do that, other than lobbying for the legislature to repeal the law, is to break the law by speaking in an illegal manner, and getting arrested. At this time, you now have recourse to try to get the law overturned.
And that puts you at risk: You have to carry through and win - which may take years and millions of dollars. Unless you win (and UNTIL you win) your rights are reduced because of the accusation of lawbreaking and the ongoing legal proceeding. And if you lose (or drop out) you also have a penalty applied for your "criminal behavior" in breaking the law in order to obtain the standing to argue for its unconstitutionality.
Not only that, but you have to take it all the way to the supreme court to make it stick nationally (or you and others have to take it to the appellate level in all of the federal circuits). And you have to LOSE at the trial level (and either lose at the appellate level or win but have the prosecutor appeal your win) to get to the supremes. And you have to have the prosecutor keep pushing rather than throw in the towel on your PARTICULAR case - something he may not do if you're fighting back and have a good point. And at the appellate level it may take two passes - once with a three-judge subset, a second time with the full set. Also: Once you've lost at the appellate level there's no guarantee that the Supremes will agree to hear the case - and they usually won't unless there are divergent rulings on two near-identical cases in two appellate districts.
To get through that process you need some people typically more expert in law than you to think that you're wrong. So that means your case has to be iffy. Which means you might not win even if you navigate the maze correctly and the Supremes deign to spend time on you. You're playing "court roulette" with only one empty chamber in the revolver.
I think this is one piece of politics/law where the French have a better idea.
(*cough* AIG, Bank of America, Chase, GM, WaMu *cough*)
Please don't dump on WaMu. The rest might have overextended on bad loans. But as I hear it WaMu was solvent.
I hear they got into a cash crunch after an unfounded flame by Barney Frank started a run on them. Then the regulators, instead of doing their job and loaning them the money to tide them over while they pay off the depositors and gracefully liquidate some assets to cover it, forced them into the deal with Chase - essentially looting WaMu and letting their cronies buy the swag at fence prices.
It appears as though our grammar nazis, in addition to being tactless and unsympathetic, are also unaware that this "rule" in English is merely a suggestion, and not an actual rule.
Too true.
The "Standard English" movement was a creation of east-coast education bureaucrats, trying to impose their ideas on the rest of the country (and perhaps define people from other regions as being less literate).
Note that the "never use a preposition to end a sentence with" pseudo-rule was never a part of colloquial American English grammar. It was part of Latin grammar which they chose to impose on the children of America. They also tried eliminating "ain't", the use of a double-negative for emphasis (which conflicts with symbolic logic but was exactly as valid as sucking a period inside a trailing parenthesis), and the second-person plural "you all".
...but the satellites that make up GPS are pretty outdated and falling apart. Unless someone forks over the money for new satellites we can say goodbye to GPS in a year or two.
That's overstating the case.
Some of the satellites are getting old and may break down before replacements are installed. Maybe. If they do the resolution of the system may intermittently drop or the system may intermittently fail in some areas when too few working satellites are currently in view. But it will be a "goes out temporarily, occasionally" situation, as others come by in their orbits and things start working well again.
GPS (especially differential GPS, with ground-based correction transmitters) is currently used for a lot of important stuff - including navigating cargo ships into ports in the fog. If/when it starts to get occasionally flakey there will be a lot of constituency pushing for it to be fixed up before more satellites go out and the flaked-out periods become more common. Especially since some of the alternatives have been decommissioned due to GPS doing a better job.
Additionally, affective disorders are associated with creativity and periods of intense productivity. Though they may lead to suicide, they may also lead to considerable economic and/or political power advantage for self and family. Sometimes in the same individual. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was apparently a bipolar who made major political and nontrivial scientific and technological contributions. Affective disorders seem as common among artists as Asperger Syndrome among techies.
For an extreme case of a "win some, lose some" genetic system, consider sickle-cell anemia. Surviving malaria is SO successful that a gene where a quarter of the offspring of heterozygous parents are unprotected and a quarter are very likely to die if they become too short of breath, yet the other half are able to survive malaria and live essentially normal lives, is actually advantageous.
There are a number of ways that FAX machines can be made to work in such a system.
1) The DSL signal is synchronized to the network clock. (It's typically just another ATM carrier system.) Both phone/internet boxes and PBX equipment can recover this clock and synchronize their D/A converters and other phone switching timing to it. This gives you full-quality POTS signal - just as if you had a T1 line unit in your building.
2) The PBX or VoIP equipment can recognize the FAX or high-speed modem signal and take over: It acts as the far-end modem, recovering the digital signal, and packetizes THAT for transport to/from far-end equipment that also acts as a modem to construct a new signal. (Think of it as a benign man-in-the-middle attack.) Because the A/D conversion is only done at the modems, not to pack the analog signal onto a digital carrier, the timing is not as critical: The modems sync to each other rather than to the network clock. The protocols for FAX and most things you might send on a high-speed modem have gaps that can be stretched or shrunk to accommodate the minor timing differences between the two ends.
3) If the FAX machine or modem has fallen back to a REALLY SLOW signaling standard it can still make it through flakey timing.
Too true. Paintings are still done in various old-masters styles, too.
However the point is (and always was) that:
a) 90% (or whatever) of EVERYTHING is crap. (It's the few oysters WITH the pearl that matter.) Even at the peak of a form's "golden age" there's still only a little gold in a lot of ore.
b) After a form has been done for a while there's an accumulation of good old stuff. So the PERCENTAGE of new good stuff in any given year versus the total amount of both stuff and good stuff declines still further.
So 95% of blogs still online being abandoned doesn't mean a darn thing about the health of blogging. It just means that the Sturgeon's Law fraction tend to go dormant after a while - but tend to stay online because the hosting cost of an UNpopular blog is trivial (while choosing to kill it is an explicit admission of defeat).
Note that this is would only extend a few tens of kilometers. It's to the edge of space, whereas a full elevator is aimed at getting *out* of Earth's gravity well.
Well if you just use it as a regular elevator and stop at the top, it's a nice tall observation deck where the atmosphere is really thin but not quite "into space".
But if it can support the weight of the elevator and observation platform, it should be able to provide an equal upward force to a lighter payload that is being accelerated. Such a projectile might leave the top of the structure with enough velocity to put the apogee of its trajectory in low-earth-orbit altitudes.
You'd have to provide additional thrust during that hop to bring the PERIGEE above significant atmospheric braking in less than half an orbit. But you've won half the battle by getting above the significant atmosphere on electric power rather than rocket reaction.
Perhaps lean the thing over to get significant downrange velocity - and support its less-vertical run with more compression members of a similar construction while building a broader structure of multiple members to avoid bending between supports. (Octagon truss, anyone?)
And the payload might also be composed of something like a long, thin, "cannon" with a "bullet" that is your final payload. "Fire" it (electromagnetically again) when near apogee. Then the "bullet" is circularized and the "cannon" returns to Earth for reuse with less momentum than when it left the elevator/catapult. Reenter and glide down - or land into another similar elevator structure and be gently lowered for reuse while the energy from the cannon stage's momentum and altitude is recycled into electric power.
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For what it's worth...
While I haven't used Zycam, I have, a number of times over the last few years, used zinc gluconate tablets (dissolved in the mouth and gargled up toward the nose) to try to mitigate an oncoming cold.
And I have also noticed, over that period, a significant reduction in my sense of smell (which I hadn't connected with anything and assumed might just be due to age).
Needless to say I'll be skipping the zinc treatments in the future, at least until this is resolved.
I'm trying to think of a downside to making all medications and supplements require FDA approval.
The downside is that the process produces both:
- long delays (during which people suffer and perhaps die) and:
- enormous costs (which keep some safe-and-effective drugs from reaching the market and raise the costs of medications which DO make it through the gauntlet - and must pay for both themselves and their share of the ones that fail).
When the legislation was first proposed it was estimated that if it added six months to the introduction of new medications it was a net loss. Now it takes years and tens of millions of dollars per new drug that starts testing.
One estimate of these costs - in a Wall Street Journal headline - is that the delay required for approving the use of Beta Blockers in the US to prevent secondary heart attacks (after they were approved for that in Europe) resulted in 100,000 deaths.
The Navy picked up the option to fund the next step.
Now it's funded the step after that, and included a request for a proposal for it to fund the third and final step.
At the end of that step (if it all works) we have a practical first demo power plant - about 100 megawatts of fusion power out from cheap and very abundant fuel. Proof of concept, a practical design good enough to displace fossil fuel and fission power plants (and perhaps aircraft carrier and battleship engines) that can be replicated, and probably enough engineering data to design something much better.
Now we're up to sustaining it, and getting net power out of it, which are harder than the previous problems.
Or even getting net power out WITHOUT sustaining it.
You can get power from a fueled heat engine with continuous combustion. (Steam engines - both mobile and power plants - for example.) But repeated pulses of power work fine too (diesel cycle, otto cycle, ...) and may have engineering advantages in some situations (i.e. trading efficiency for light weight, high power-to-weight ratio, and broad torque curve to make engines practical for vehicles). Fusion also might be practical on a putt-putt rather than long continuous burn basis.
It is supposed to be bad practice to argue different things in different courts at the same time.
Huh?
Heck: Sometimes it's good practice to argue different (and contradictory) things in the SAME court at the same time. It's called "pleading the alternative".
Granted it's usually used in criminal law (where the prosecution has to prove ALL the points of the crime and the defendant only has to show that the prosecution failed to prove one of them). But I see no reason SCO shouldn't try both these approaches (though I wish they'd lose, die, and get it over with - without creating a successor that could carry on the battle).
Nuclear weapons are a fantastic peace maker in the hands of responsible government.
According to a close friend who is a Muslim (of a different madab), they have been ruled as forbidden by the Shia version of Sharia law. Variant on burning the enemy. Big no-no. (This would apply to using them in a mutual-assured-destruction threat as well.)
Presuming that's correct and the government is actually following the ruling, it would lend some credence to the claims that their nuclear program is just for power and other miscellaneous non-weapon tech. (Which they have a right to - and the US has an obligation to AID them in pursuing - under the Nonproliferation Treaty.)
I stand corrected.
(But it is moving more NORTH at the moment.)
But last I heard it moves essentially in a circle or otherwise wanders around near the rotational north pole, rather than heading south for the winter.
So how fast it's moving is no big deal - but a change in the direction of its motion might be.
Tinfoil hats would help protect against really high-frequency hertzian transverse electromagnetic waves - high enough frequency that the "hat" is much bigger than a quarter wavelength. But for the low frequency electric-field capacitive coupling of a Tesla system a they would just increase the "elevated capacitance" between your head and the ionosphere, increasing the current in your body.
They'd do the same for a vertically-polarized electromagnetic wave of the same low frequency (which also produces a vertical AC electromagnetic field - and would be present in Tesla's cavity system as a side-effect of how the electric field changes.)
In fact the equivalent antenna-current-enhancer is actually called a "capacitive hat". B-)
The particles do tend to become polarized, with the nuclei leaning in the direction of the negative charge and the electrons toward the positive charge in the strong electric field, and this does affect the propagation of the AC wave down the cables, slowing it slightly compared to how fast it would go if the wires were surrounded by vacuum. This is like air, water, or glass slowing light, or the insulation in a printed circuit or coaxial cable slowing radio waves. But it isn't necessarily for propagation.
It also doesn't represent a loss. Unless the molecules come apart or are set spinning it's like cocking a frictionless spring: The energy that went into partially separating the charges comes back out when they come back together as the
electric field falls later in the cycle. (It does lower the impedance of the transmission line slightly, leading to higher current and higher I-squared-R losses than the same separation would produce in a vacuum. But this can be compensated for by slightly increasing the separation of the wires - and is designed into the line in the first place.)
DC would leak only by corona discharge. You could still pick up some power. But capacitive and inductive coupling wouldn't work.
The air doesn't (necessarily) become ionized in order for the power to be transferred. The particles do tend to become polarized, with the nuclei leaning in the direction of the negative charge and the electrons toward the positive charge in the strong electric field, and this does affect the propagation of the AC wave down the cables, slowing it slightly compared to how fast it would go if the wires were surrounded by vacuum. This is like air, water, or glass slowing light, or the insulation in a printed circuit or coaxial cable slowing radio waves. But it isn't necessarily for propagation.
The voltage is kept low enough that the air generally doesn't become ionized near the wire. It DOES get ionized near irregularities - nicks, dust particles, raindrops, corners of nuts on fittings, etc. - where the field becomes focussed. There you get a corona discharge which represents a leakage current and a power loss. Really high voltage transmission lines have rounded guards around the fittings to produce a smooth surface and avoid this phenomenon somewhat.
DC carries power better than AC for several reasons:
- Resistive losses go with the SQUARE of the current. So the AC averages more loss during the high current part of the cycle than it makes up during the low-current part.
- Losses from current leakage go with the square of the voltage in a pure resistance - and leakage from corona (for a particular wire geometry) goes up much faster than linear with voltage. So a given technology of wire and fittings will have less leakage from a given DC voltage than from AC with an equivalent RMS "average" voltage, because the AC will again lose more over the peaks than it saves during the valleys of the waveform.
- The current in the wire creates a magnetic field around it, and part of the field from the current in the inner part of the wire is actually embedded in the outer part. With DC this is no big deal. With AC, as the current reverses the field first expands out of the wire then contracts back into it (pointing the other way). The current can't get moving in the inner part of the wire until the mag field penetrates, so it is reduced somewhat. The result is that the current is not evenly distributed, but is concentrated more near the outer part of the wire, causing what it known as the "skin effect". This increases the apparent resistance of the wire. Alternatively, you could observe that because the losses are proportional to the SQUARE of the current (density), the uneven distribution of current loses more where it is concentrated than it gains where it is dispersed.
Electric field coupling through capacitance and magnetic field coupling through induction won't work for parasitizing a DC transmission line, because it requres a CHANGE in the voltage or current to couple using them. This leaves only collecting the charged air particles from corona losses. It should be possible to pick up some power from broad conductive surfaces located where they would intercept some of this charged air (i.e. metal mesh/screen fencing on insulators). But that would be the limit. (Also: I've seen the west coast DC transmission line: It's two wires 'way up there compared to their separation. So the corona generated carriers will be mostly up in the air near the wires, moving from one to the other.)
The power doesn't actually flow IN the wires. It flows in the fields AROUND the wires. It falls off pretty fast. But there's a LOT of power in a high-line so there's a non-trivial amount at ground level outside the right-of-way.
Back in the '60s at EE school I heard a story (from the prof). Seems a farmer who had the local power company eminent-domain a right-of-way through his land to put in a high-line, but still wanted tens of thousands to run a service drop to his farm. This guy got ticked. So he strung his own line under the high-line, thus coupling to it (both inductively and capacitively) and used ordinary utility transformers to convert the tapped power to a voltage suitable to run his milking barn.
Power company noticed the drain and tried to bill him. He told 'em to get stuffed. So they sued him. Judge told 'em if they couldn't keep their power in their lines they had no claim on it if somebody picked up and used what had leaked outside their right-of-way. Nyah-nyah. Power company said that doing this was dangerous. Farmer said he'd keep doing it regardless of their claims.
Then the power company did a little switching of the line. This threw some big transients down it. The farmer's equipment arced over and burned down his barn.
At least that's how the story went. It was a lead-in to a lesson on the problems of switching transients in power transmission lines. So I have no idea how much of it is apocryphal, whether there are precedents since, or how a judge might rule in a current case.
But if I were to try it I'd make sure the lines were outside their right-of-way (so I could argue that if they didn't want to give away the power they should have bought enough of a right-of-way to contain it and put up shielding wire runs inside the boundary to keep it in - cheapskates exposing people to their EM fields etc.) and be sure to include surge arresters at the load end my wiring.
the right to an attorney and the right against self-incrimination do not apply in civil trials. Further, the Fifth Amendment attaches only to persons ...
I agree that you are correctly stating the current legal paradigm.
However, IMHO the seizure of property in a civil action because it is alleged to be the fruit of a crime is itself a penalty for an alleged criminal activity (illegally obtaining the property). As such, it should not be a civil matter and subject only to civil proceedings unless the alleged criminal act which makes it the fruit of a crime has already been proven under criminal law procedures and standards of proof. To do otherwise is, again IMHO, a "taking" and/or "deprivation of ... property" "without due process" under the Fifth Amendment.
(Similarly, the state level treatment of traffic violations as "civil infractions" is also a transparent move to impose what are indistinguishable from criminal penalties under the more lax civil law procedures and standards of proof. These procedures should also be banned and the associated laws stricken.)
Hertz came up with the math for (transverse) electromagnetic waves.
Tesla was into broadcast power - which he apparently visualized as using capacitive coupling to the ionosphere at high impedance and low frequency) along with conduction in it and the ground below it as the transport medium. That's just electric fields and conduction (or longitudinal waves in the ionosphere's plasma) rather than electromagnetic waves.
It happens that his systems would also generate electromagnetic radiation and propagate power with it. But it's apparently not the particular mechanism he had in mind. (It's also not as efficient as the one he envisioned, since EM waves radiate in all directions and falls off as inverse square, while Tesla's system would essentially pump energy into a resonant cavity and contain it between the ground and the ionosphere until it was dissipated by loads or parasitic resistances).
Now the devices in question in TFA are designed around Hertz's EM radiation rather than Tesla's "elevated capacitance" system. But it was Tesla, not Hertz, who was the big cheerleader for broadcast power using electric and magnetic phenomena (if not precisely Hertizan waves).
As the saying goes: "Freedom isn't Free." It takes someone standing up and defending freedom. Sometimes that is on a battlefield with a gun. Sometimes its in a jail cell waiting for a court date.
Agreed.
Yet it would be nice if there were a way to bring a constitutional test of a law to court without having to bet your life, fortune, and sacred honor to do it.
After all, the congresscritters can pass as many unconstitutional laws as they think they can get away with just by doing a few hours of office work - over and over again. Why should it be drastically more expensive, hazardous, and time-consuming for us to undo their work when it is out-of-bounds?
Let's say you wanted a "speech code" law overturned. The only way to do that, other than lobbying for the legislature to repeal the law, is to break the law by speaking in an illegal manner, and getting arrested. At this time, you now have recourse to try to get the law overturned.
And that puts you at risk: You have to carry through and win - which may take years and millions of dollars. Unless you win (and UNTIL you win) your rights are reduced because of the accusation of lawbreaking and the ongoing legal proceeding. And if you lose (or drop out) you also have a penalty applied for your "criminal behavior" in breaking the law in order to obtain the standing to argue for its unconstitutionality.
Not only that, but you have to take it all the way to the supreme court to make it stick nationally (or you and others have to take it to the appellate level in all of the federal circuits). And you have to LOSE at the trial level (and either lose at the appellate level or win but have the prosecutor appeal your win) to get to the supremes. And you have to have the prosecutor keep pushing rather than throw in the towel on your PARTICULAR case - something he may not do if you're fighting back and have a good point. And at the appellate level it may take two passes - once with a three-judge subset, a second time with the full set. Also: Once you've lost at the appellate level there's no guarantee that the Supremes will agree to hear the case - and they usually won't unless there are divergent rulings on two near-identical cases in two appellate districts.
To get through that process you need some people typically more expert in law than you to think that you're wrong. So that means your case has to be iffy. Which means you might not win even if you navigate the maze correctly and the Supremes deign to spend time on you. You're playing "court roulette" with only one empty chamber in the revolver.
I think this is one piece of politics/law where the French have a better idea.
(*cough* AIG, Bank of America, Chase, GM, WaMu *cough*)
Please don't dump on WaMu. The rest might have overextended on bad loans. But as I hear it WaMu was solvent.
I hear they got into a cash crunch after an unfounded flame by Barney Frank started a run on them. Then the regulators, instead of doing their job and loaning them the money to tide them over while they pay off the depositors and gracefully liquidate some assets to cover it, forced them into the deal with Chase - essentially looting WaMu and letting their cronies buy the swag at fence prices.
It appears as though our grammar nazis, in addition to being tactless and unsympathetic, are also unaware that this "rule" in English is merely a suggestion, and not an actual rule.
Too true.
The "Standard English" movement was a creation of east-coast education bureaucrats, trying to impose their ideas on the rest of the country (and perhaps define people from other regions as being less literate).
Note that the "never use a preposition to end a sentence with" pseudo-rule was never a part of colloquial American English grammar. It was part of Latin grammar which they chose to impose on the children of America. They also tried eliminating "ain't", the use of a double-negative for emphasis (which conflicts with symbolic logic but was exactly as valid as sucking a period inside a trailing parenthesis), and the second-person plural "you all".
...but the satellites that make up GPS are pretty outdated and falling apart. Unless someone forks over the money for new satellites we can say goodbye to GPS in a year or two.
That's overstating the case.
Some of the satellites are getting old and may break down before replacements are installed. Maybe. If they do the resolution of the system may intermittently drop or the system may intermittently fail in some areas when too few working satellites are currently in view. But it will be a "goes out temporarily, occasionally" situation, as others come by in their orbits and things start working well again.
GPS (especially differential GPS, with ground-based correction transmitters) is currently used for a lot of important stuff - including navigating cargo ships into ports in the fog. If/when it starts to get occasionally flakey there will be a lot of constituency pushing for it to be fixed up before more satellites go out and the flaked-out periods become more common. Especially since some of the alternatives have been decommissioned due to GPS doing a better job.
Speaking of terrorists...
This should get interesting for the Alzheimer's patients when they try to get on a plane and the TSA thinks they are wearing shoe bombs.
And can you imagine the poor Alzheimer's patient in the security isolation room trying to explain what's with the electronics in the shoe?
Additionally, affective disorders are associated with creativity and periods of intense productivity. Though they may lead to suicide, they may also lead to considerable economic and/or political power advantage for self and family. Sometimes in the same individual. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was apparently a bipolar who made major political and nontrivial scientific and technological contributions. Affective disorders seem as common among artists as Asperger Syndrome among techies.
For an extreme case of a "win some, lose some" genetic system, consider sickle-cell anemia. Surviving malaria is SO successful that a gene where a quarter of the offspring of heterozygous parents are unprotected and a quarter are very likely to die if they become too short of breath, yet the other half are able to survive malaria and live essentially normal lives, is actually advantageous.
There are a number of ways that FAX machines can be made to work in such a system.
1) The DSL signal is synchronized to the network clock. (It's typically just another ATM carrier system.) Both phone/internet boxes and PBX equipment can recover this clock and synchronize their D/A converters and other phone switching timing to it. This gives you full-quality POTS signal - just as if you had a T1 line unit in your building.
2) The PBX or VoIP equipment can recognize the FAX or high-speed modem signal and take over: It acts as the far-end modem, recovering the digital signal, and packetizes THAT for transport to/from far-end equipment that also acts as a modem to construct a new signal. (Think of it as a benign man-in-the-middle attack.) Because the A/D conversion is only done at the modems, not to pack the analog signal onto a digital carrier, the timing is not as critical: The modems sync to each other rather than to the network clock. The protocols for FAX and most things you might send on a high-speed modem have gaps that can be stretched or shrunk to accommodate the minor timing differences between the two ends.
3) If the FAX machine or modem has fallen back to a REALLY SLOW signaling standard it can still make it through flakey timing.
[people do write new "classical" music...
Too true. Paintings are still done in various old-masters styles, too.
However the point is (and always was) that:
a) 90% (or whatever) of EVERYTHING is crap. (It's the few oysters WITH the pearl that matter.) Even at the peak of a form's "golden age" there's still only a little gold in a lot of ore.
b) After a form has been done for a while there's an accumulation of good old stuff. So the PERCENTAGE of new good stuff in any given year versus the total amount of both stuff and good stuff declines still further.
So 95% of blogs still online being abandoned doesn't mean a darn thing about the health of blogging. It just means that the Sturgeon's Law fraction tend to go dormant after a while - but tend to stay online because the hosting cost of an UNpopular blog is trivial (while choosing to kill it is an explicit admission of defeat).
(Octagon truss, anyone?)
Make that "octahedron truss".
Note that this is would only extend a few tens of kilometers. It's to the edge of space, whereas a full elevator is aimed at getting *out* of Earth's gravity well.
Well if you just use it as a regular elevator and stop at the top, it's a nice tall observation deck where the atmosphere is really thin but not quite "into space".
But if it can support the weight of the elevator and observation platform, it should be able to provide an equal upward force to a lighter payload that is being accelerated. Such a projectile might leave the top of the structure with enough velocity to put the apogee of its trajectory in low-earth-orbit altitudes.
You'd have to provide additional thrust during that hop to bring the PERIGEE above significant atmospheric braking in less than half an orbit. But you've won half the battle by getting above the significant atmosphere on electric power rather than rocket reaction.
Perhaps lean the thing over to get significant downrange velocity - and support its less-vertical run with more compression members of a similar construction while building a broader structure of multiple members to avoid bending between supports. (Octagon truss, anyone?)
And the payload might also be composed of something like a long, thin, "cannon" with a "bullet" that is your final payload. "Fire" it (electromagnetically again) when near apogee. Then the "bullet" is circularized and the "cannon" returns to Earth for reuse with less momentum than when it left the elevator/catapult. Reenter and glide down - or land into another similar elevator structure and be gently lowered for reuse while the energy from the cannon stage's momentum and altitude is recycled into electric power.