I'm not concerned about legionella. I just used that as an example of fatal pathogens that you can occasionally blast people with when using FRESH TAP water to fill these things.
I'm concerned about the vast assortment of human pathogens (and nutrients for their growth) that you'd find in gray water. IMHO that would make these devices orders of magnitude more dangerous.
- You run the cooling water through a heat exchanger, picking up the heat from the refrigerant.
- Then you run the warmed cooling water over a series of baffles in front of a fan.
- The baffles break the water up into small droplets. The fan encourages part of each droplet to evaporate, cooling the rest.
- Then you collect the droplets and run them past through the heat exchanger again.
- You also monitor the water level in the droplet collector and add new water to replace what evaporated.
It's like dumping the heat by boiling off water, but at roughly ambient temperature rather than boiling. Much less power needed for the air conditioner heat pumps.
Downside: Some of the droplets are small enough that they evaporate completely - or nearly so - leaving their impurities as a dust particle or a very muddy microdroplet. These are blown out into the surrounding air by the big fans.
You see these devices as boxes on the top or side of large buildings, spewing out clouds of what looks like fog when the air is humid. (You also see them as giant hyperbolic towers near nuclear power plants.)
Legionaire's disease is a pathogen that lives in the soil. It's pretty fragile and not normally an issue. But occasionally, when a little dirt gets into one of these evaporative cooling devices, the water becomes an ideal culture medium. The bugs multiply. Then they're efficiently encapsulated and sprayed out into the surrounding air by the mechanism I described. Walk past a contaminated cooler and you can breathe in enough to get a massive, often fatal, infection going in your lungs. Such coolers are associated with, and generally located near, the air conditioning equipment. If there's an opening (like an access plate that fell off on the air return duct) and a loose or missing air filter, you can fill the building with the aerosolized bugs and kill BUNCHES of people. (That's what happened to the American Legion convention, where the cluster of deaths lead to the identification and naming of the bug. Before that it there had been a lot of scattered cases, often at hospitals where landscaping work had thrown dirt into the air and the air conditioning coolers.)
But now, instead of using tap water to refill these things, Microsoft plans to use partially-treated sewage, which is just FULL of a grand assortment of human pathogens.
Microsoft chose San Antonio for a huge data center so it could use the local utility's recycled water ('gray water') service for the 8 million gallons it will use each month."
I don't know about the rest of you. But *I* certainly don't want to breathe the air near a cooling tower fed with gray water. The risk of Legionella from CLEAN water in a cooling tower's spray that was contaminated by a bit of local dirt is bad enough. Imagine the risk from breathing the dust particles from partially-treated sewage aerosolized to the tune of 180 gallons per minute.
Sounds like another good reason to avoid Microsoft sites. (Bet they're doing this elsewhere, too.)
SONET fiber is in a ring, so there are two routes to every box. These cuts were very widely separated and the outages affect areas beyond them. So I doubt they'd be cuts on the same ring and would expect there to be FOUR cuts, not two.
Of course maybe the telcos were putting in some stuff on the cheap, with the fibers for both halves of the ring going along the same path or using a tree rather than a ring topology and merely having redundant fibers but still a long stretch of potential single-points-of-failure (close to the same thing). But I wouldn't expect that of even a modern phone company. Service requirements are too high.
Like other switching power supplies they're charging the raw supply cap(s) through a rectifier. Current is mainly on the later part of the first half of each half-cycle, which is well ahead of the center of the half-cycle.
Mike Grather, of Lumenaire Testing Laboratory, 'checked the power factor for the CFLs and found they ranged from.45 to.50. Their "real" load was about twice that implied by their wattage.'
Oh, good grief!
It's a LEADING power factor, a load with a large CAPACITIVE component.
The main problem with electric grids is all the INDUCTIVE loads with a LAGGING power factor - like big induction motors. The power company has to hang capacitors (or other power-factor correctors, such as certain synchronous motors) all over the grid to "generate" the VARs that are "consumed" by the inductive loads. So until they're responsible for more reactive power than the motors, transformers, and such the compact fluorescents will be HELPING the power company.
Neglecting harmonics (which are a whole 'nother can of squiggles) the main issues for power transmission are:
- "Real Power" ("watts" = volts times amps) (current is in-phase with voltage).
- "Reactive power" ("VARs" {"volt-amps reactive"} = volts time reactive current) (current is 90 degrees out of phase with voltage, either "leading" or "lagging").
Cycle-by-cycle:
- Real Power generation must match consumption.
- Reactive Power "generation" (current into a load leading voltage) must match "consumption" (current into a load lagging voltage).
Whatever mismatch occurs in the field will be supplied by the generators and transmitted across the grid to the load. The Reactive Power (or "imaginary power" - because it's times sqrt(-1) when you use complex numbers to represent real and reactive at once) represents current thrown back-and-forth between capacitances and inductances. But when it gets transmitted on the lines or generated by a rotating machine it vector-sums with the real current, resulting in a higher current magnitude.
The losses in the lines and the generator and transformer coils are current-squared-times-resistance, and those are REAL energy losses that must be made up by the prime mover applying torque to the generator's shaft, regardless of the relative phases of the current and voltage. Also, the limit on transformer and generator capacity is heating due to current, so it's this vector-sum current that is the limit.
The power company would like to run their generators and lines as close to power factor 1 (all the current is in-phase) as possible, to get the most out of their equipment and to minimize the resistive losses that they have to make up for with fuel.
But most of the "reactive load" on the grid is induction from transformers and motors. So an inductive load is (arbitrarily) defined as "consuming" reactive power - thus defining a capacitive load as "generating" it. The power company buys and installs a lot of expensive capacitors (and switching equipment to turn them on and off as needed) all over the net, to "generate" much of the reactive power needs, making most regions as a whole close to resistive as possible and minimize VAR transmission and the resulting extra line losses.
The compact fluorescents will actually HELP this. Your neighborhood and its nearby business districts no doubt has far more inductive load (from normal fluorescents, arc lights, refrigerators, fans, blowers, compressors, etc.) than capacitive load (from switching power supplies, including those in compact fluorescent and electronic "balasts" for tube fluorescents). This will continue to be true even if ALL the lamps are replaced by CFs and electronic-ballasted fluorescents. So the reactive current from your CF lamps will flow only through a small amount of wiring before canceling out that from some inductor. This means they produce virtually no wiring loss. Indeed, it will likely keep VARs from motors from being sucked across more line resistance from a nearby pole-installation or substation's capacitors or over the long-haul grid from further away, for a net gain.
Hell, did I lose the memo that said that crap scifi (or is it syfy?) can't be entertaining?
A while back we used to pronounce it "Skiffy". We made the distinction:
- SF was a significant work of science fiction.
- SciFi was "Sun of the Fifty Foot Toad devours Cleveland".
You missed a couple things:
- It only shuts down one PART of the immune system - the part that kills and eats large stuff.
- It only shuts it down for a couple weeks - actually, teaches it that anything present during those two weeks is "friendly" - after which it turns back on again (including its memory of all the OTHER enemies it's seen before and is ready to pounce on that AREN'T present right now).
... even then, immunosuppressants are useful for a lot of things outside the whole tissue transplant area.
Even for vat-grown tissue you may need immunosuppressants. Examples:
- The organ failed due to auto-immune disease.
- The new organ was needed because a genetic defect made the old one faulty - and the new one must be genetically and (especially) antigenically distinct to function properly. Etc.
Heck: This therapy looks like it could also become a cure for auto-immune diseases. Two weeks wearing filter masks and hanging out at the clinic, then no more:
- Graves' syndrome
- Lupus
- MS
- Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Diabetes type I (WITHOUT a transplant if caught in time)
- Guillain-Barré syndrome
-...
So is this basically just shutting the immune system off? Wouldn't that cause serious problems, unless you're a "boy in a bubble"?
You're shutting down one part of the immune system for a couple weeks - and teaching it that anything it currently sees is OK once it's turned back on.
So you have things like increased cancer risk (because a mini-cancer that's currently held at bay by this branch of the immune system becomes "OK" - and ditto with a pre-cancerous lesion which may also be attacked less effectively once it takes the next steps.) And some types of infection will not be fought as effectively - possibly making a minor infection become limb- or life-threatening.
So the recipient would have to keep very clean (but avoid harsh scrubbing), wear a filter mask, avoid scratches, etc. until things are back to approximately normal. (See all the stock treatments for immune-suppressed transplant recipients.) And he'll have to be watched more carefully and treated more aggressively infections now and cancers now and in the future.
But it's a heck of a lot better than turning off this AND OTHER parts of the immune system for YEARS or a LIFETIME.
... or buying a SUV to get your groceries. Oh, wait...
Well the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards killed the station wagon so the SUV became the smallest vehicle not part of the CAFE average pool available. (They're considered a "truck".)
Ban or restrict SUVs and watch people buy vans and pickups for shopping.
Charge more for higher QoS. Give a discount for lower QoS.
That's a given.
I'd expect plans to include some small amount of VoIP quality 2-way high-QoS as standard (about a couple phone calls' worth plus whatever is needed for the plan's special services). Higher amounts could be obtained by subscribing to a higher-priced plan or dynamically-configured as needed - perhaps for a fee (like dialing a toll phone call or subscribing to a pay-per-view).
Want your packets to get reserved bandwidth and better treatment on the backbone? Pay up your fair share (and let the ISPs and backbone providers split the swag according to their contracts). Or take best effort delivery, in competition with file transfers and whatnot, and accept the hiccups when the intertubes get cloggerated.
ISPs don't implement the QoS (Type of Service) field because (back before THEY needed it for services) Microsoft deployed an IP stack in Windows that "improved" their own file transfers and other IP traffic by demanding high QoS for everything.
Because of that (and the threat of bad guys cheating) the ISPs don't trust the field when coming from a customer. So there wasn't a strong driver for implementing QoS in the ISPs and backbone
IMHO the right solution is for ISPs to:
- Write service level agreements that guarantee a certain bandwidth of high QoS traffic - for the whole feed to the customer, not per flow.
- Start honoring the ToS field and policing the data rate at the edge router, and
- When a packet would be dropped for exceeding the data rate for the enhanced service, instead REWRITE THE ToS FIELD for best-effort delivery (or whatever lower service level seems appropriate) and try to forward it under those terms.
That way:
- The ISP doesn't have to classify the flow according to traffic type to give the user high QoS for his critical services.
- The ISP doesn't have to do a packet-recombine if the packet is fragmented to identify the flow for the trailing fragments (which don't carry the TCP/UDP port number).
- The user / application can specify what special handling he / it wants.
- Applications that try to "cheat" can only do so up to the bandwidth cap for the special handling. (But the user paid for that. So he can use his bandwidth for whatever he wants. It's not "cheating" any more.)
- Excess traffic will still go through as well as it does now.
- A "cheating" application WILL hurt the user's own really-needs-high-QoS service, giving users and applications providers an incentive not to request excessive QoS. (But it won't hurt ANYBODY ELSE's traffic.)
- Authors of applications that need high QoS will have an incentive to specify it, since doing so will work.
What are the odds that one or more of the "prosecutors" were planted by Stevens or his allies?
You think one would deliberately commit a major felony intending to GET CAUGHT, kicked out of legal practice, and probably thrown into federal PMITA prison, in the hope that his crime gets Stevens off (when Stevens will STILL be out of office)? Get real! Even if the Republicans had such martyrs available this would not be the place to expend one.
How about fixing the code so that the {FOO}.slashdot.org servers honor my login and selection of "classic" mode, so I can read and comment on stories that are hosted on the subsidiary servers?
I have a number of machines from which I read and post. Unfortunately, some of them (unavoidably) have ancient browsers that are REALLY unhappy with the new features.
While I may chose to play with or switch to the new functionality on machines where it works, I don't appreciate being cut off from participation in slashdot when the only machines I can use are those where it's broken.
It may be that no living person or existing corporate entity does.
Doesn't happen - short of a copyright holder releasing the book into public domain.
What DOES happen is things like an author dying, the copyright passing to his estate, and the existence of the asset being unknown to the executor and heirs. The copyright has an "owner" but nobody living knows who it is and the owner and his agents are unaware of their status.
Similarly if a corporation dissolves. Similarly if a corporation's records are flaky. Similarly if a corporation goes through a merger or several. Similarly if there is a turnover in personnel. Etc.
You're just being silly. There's no way that a tightly-provisioned radio packet service could ever be made to service both latency-sensitive and bulk traffic at the same time.
Garbage. (And I work for a company that makes some of the boxes in question, in the applicable section of the engineering department. They may not be doing it NOW. But it's NOT HARD. And doing such stuff is our bread-and-butter.)
(I'd describe how but I might need to keep it close to my chest due to patent issues.)
What's really important here is that they're making good money selling it the way it is, and therefore what you suggest is "not possible" until that changes.
We're on the same page there.
But go about three stories down on the slashdot front page and you'll see the story where the FCC may be about to force them to write terms-of-service where they'll have to drop that sort of pricing and restrictions. Then they'll be in a position where they'll pretty much have to go to such a traffic model to maximize their own use of the bandwidth.
Now, you could just say, "To hell with it," and remove all caps and restrictions, making every bit equal. But, you'd lose customers as people get pissed at the terrible voice quality.
Or you could sell a plan that honors QoS tagging and includes a small (good for a VoIP connection) rate of high QoS packets - with high QoS packets exceeding the contracted rate demoted to "best effort". (And yes it's OK to rewrite the type-of-service field.)
Then the limited-but-quality-sensitive VoIP (or whatever) stream(s) can go through, whether they're the carrier's calls or VoIP/streaming apps, the file transfers (and any excess streaming traffic) get "use what's left and take the quality hit", and both the carrier's and the customer's interests are protected.
Except for the carrier's interest in overcharging for voice transport, of course. B-)
If it is in violation... wouldn't they already be having problems with their no-tethering rules...?
That comes apart into two issues:
1) Wouldn't no-tethering rules also be in violation?
IMHO: Yes.
(If it's a bandwidth issue they should cap the sustained data rate in the plan and its pricing, not distinguish between the handset with crippled apps and an attached device that is likely to impose higher loads.)
2) Wouldn't they already be having legal issues over them?
Not necessarily. The affected consumer constituency for full functionality over a tether is smaller. Also the violation of the policy is less obvious.
The limits on the Skype app are an obvious attempt to protect the billing structure of the old phone-call infrastructure by suppressing the development of VoIP over broadband, in violation of the FCC's policy. As such it has both an obvious violation AND a much larger constituency of consumers who are harmed by the policy - anybody using an internet-enabled cellphone capable of running the Skype or another VoIP app. So the pressure is on for the FCC to act.
Once the precedent is established, the tether-users can try to expand it to force removal of the tether limits.
Let the big army with the just cause break the first hole in the empire's wall. B-)
1) If the paper thin loudspeaker moved back-and-forth A LOT. The thickness of the speaker doesn't matter. It's how much it moves the air. (What's important is area times displacement. It's harder to get lows from a small area speaker than a wide one.) The problem for a lot of thin speakers is that they can't move as far as cone types.
2) If the paper thin loudspeaker PUMPS AIR THROUGH IT instead of moving to displace it. You could use that all the way down to DC: Pumping air into or out of a room to produce a long-term low or high pressure. (That might be interesting to accompany scenes showing storms. Or mishaps in spacecraft or submarines.)
Politicians use these procedural tricks all the time, why do you think that said tricks exist?
Among other reasons: This lets them pass unpopular legislation without taking a hit in the next election. Rather than be on record as voting for it they can just not be there and claim the designated bad guys pulled one over on the whole country. The designated bad guys are the ones who are either from districts where the legislation is popular or who are otherwise safe despite the vote. They rotate so nobody accumulates enough bad karma to get kicked out come election time.
You know the rest are in on it because, if there were enough votes against the legislation to trounce it, once the whole gang is back they COULD bring it back up and undo it (or if necessary modify the rules so they could and THEN do it). But they don't.
Have you ever watched C-SPAN? Seems like every five minutes, they're having a Quorum Call.
Quorum calls are also used to put the meeting activity on hold for a fixed time so the members can discuss things with each other without risking having something pulled on them while their attention is diverted. (Or when somebody needs a potty break, ditto.) Think "recess" but much lighter weight.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not concerned about legionella. I just used that as an example of fatal pathogens that you can occasionally blast people with when using FRESH TAP water to fill these things.
I'm concerned about the vast assortment of human pathogens (and nutrients for their growth) that you'd find in gray water. IMHO that would make these devices orders of magnitude more dangerous.
No you don't.
- You run the cooling water through a heat exchanger, picking up the heat from the refrigerant.
- Then you run the warmed cooling water over a series of baffles in front of a fan.
- The baffles break the water up into small droplets. The fan encourages part of each droplet to evaporate, cooling the rest.
- Then you collect the droplets and run them past through the heat exchanger again.
- You also monitor the water level in the droplet collector and add new water to replace what evaporated.
It's like dumping the heat by boiling off water, but at roughly ambient temperature rather than boiling. Much less power needed for the air conditioner heat pumps.
Downside: Some of the droplets are small enough that they evaporate completely - or nearly so - leaving their impurities as a dust particle or a very muddy microdroplet. These are blown out into the surrounding air by the big fans.
You see these devices as boxes on the top or side of large buildings, spewing out clouds of what looks like fog when the air is humid. (You also see them as giant hyperbolic towers near nuclear power plants.)
Legionaire's disease is a pathogen that lives in the soil. It's pretty fragile and not normally an issue. But occasionally, when a little dirt gets into one of these evaporative cooling devices, the water becomes an ideal culture medium. The bugs multiply. Then they're efficiently encapsulated and sprayed out into the surrounding air by the mechanism I described. Walk past a contaminated cooler and you can breathe in enough to get a massive, often fatal, infection going in your lungs. Such coolers are associated with, and generally located near, the air conditioning equipment. If there's an opening (like an access plate that fell off on the air return duct) and a loose or missing air filter, you can fill the building with the aerosolized bugs and kill BUNCHES of people. (That's what happened to the American Legion convention, where the cluster of deaths lead to the identification and naming of the bug. Before that it there had been a lot of scattered cases, often at hospitals where landscaping work had thrown dirt into the air and the air conditioning coolers.)
But now, instead of using tap water to refill these things, Microsoft plans to use partially-treated sewage, which is just FULL of a grand assortment of human pathogens.
Microsoft chose San Antonio for a huge data center so it could use the local utility's recycled water ('gray water') service for the 8 million gallons it will use each month."
I don't know about the rest of you. But *I* certainly don't want to breathe the air near a cooling tower fed with gray water. The risk of Legionella from CLEAN water in a cooling tower's spray that was contaminated by a bit of local dirt is bad enough. Imagine the risk from breathing the dust particles from partially-treated sewage aerosolized to the tune of 180 gallons per minute.
Sounds like another good reason to avoid Microsoft sites. (Bet they're doing this elsewhere, too.)
SONET fiber is in a ring, so there are two routes to every box. These cuts were very widely separated and the outages affect areas beyond them. So I doubt they'd be cuts on the same ring and would expect there to be FOUR cuts, not two.
Of course maybe the telcos were putting in some stuff on the cheap, with the fibers for both halves of the ring going along the same path or using a tree rather than a ring topology and merely having redundant fibers but still a long stretch of potential single-points-of-failure (close to the same thing). But I wouldn't expect that of even a modern phone company. Service requirements are too high.
So I'm wondering where the other two cuts are.
Like other switching power supplies they're charging the raw supply cap(s) through a rectifier. Current is mainly on the later part of the first half of each half-cycle, which is well ahead of the center of the half-cycle.
Mike Grather, of Lumenaire Testing Laboratory, 'checked the power factor for the CFLs and found they ranged from .45 to .50. Their "real" load was about twice that implied by their wattage.'
Oh, good grief!
It's a LEADING power factor, a load with a large CAPACITIVE component.
The main problem with electric grids is all the INDUCTIVE loads with a LAGGING power factor - like big induction motors. The power company has to hang capacitors (or other power-factor correctors, such as certain synchronous motors) all over the grid to "generate" the VARs that are "consumed" by the inductive loads. So until they're responsible for more reactive power than the motors, transformers, and such the compact fluorescents will be HELPING the power company.
Neglecting harmonics (which are a whole 'nother can of squiggles) the main issues for power transmission are:
- "Real Power" ("watts" = volts times amps) (current is in-phase with voltage).
- "Reactive power" ("VARs" {"volt-amps reactive"} = volts time reactive current) (current is 90 degrees out of phase with voltage, either "leading" or "lagging").
Cycle-by-cycle:
- Real Power generation must match consumption.
- Reactive Power "generation" (current into a load leading voltage) must match "consumption" (current into a load lagging voltage).
Whatever mismatch occurs in the field will be supplied by the generators and transmitted across the grid to the load. The Reactive Power (or "imaginary power" - because it's times sqrt(-1) when you use complex numbers to represent real and reactive at once) represents current thrown back-and-forth between capacitances and inductances. But when it gets transmitted on the lines or generated by a rotating machine it vector-sums with the real current, resulting in a higher current magnitude.
The losses in the lines and the generator and transformer coils are current-squared-times-resistance, and those are REAL energy losses that must be made up by the prime mover applying torque to the generator's shaft, regardless of the relative phases of the current and voltage. Also, the limit on transformer and generator capacity is heating due to current, so it's this vector-sum current that is the limit.
The power company would like to run their generators and lines as close to power factor 1 (all the current is in-phase) as possible, to get the most out of their equipment and to minimize the resistive losses that they have to make up for with fuel.
But most of the "reactive load" on the grid is induction from transformers and motors. So an inductive load is (arbitrarily) defined as "consuming" reactive power - thus defining a capacitive load as "generating" it. The power company buys and installs a lot of expensive capacitors (and switching equipment to turn them on and off as needed) all over the net, to "generate" much of the reactive power needs, making most regions as a whole close to resistive as possible and minimize VAR transmission and the resulting extra line losses.
The compact fluorescents will actually HELP this. Your neighborhood and its nearby business districts no doubt has far more inductive load (from normal fluorescents, arc lights, refrigerators, fans, blowers, compressors, etc.) than capacitive load (from switching power supplies, including those in compact fluorescent and electronic "balasts" for tube fluorescents). This will continue to be true even if ALL the lamps are replaced by CFs and electronic-ballasted fluorescents. So the reactive current from your CF lamps will flow only through a small amount of wiring before canceling out that from some inductor. This means they produce virtually no wiring loss. Indeed, it will likely keep VARs from motors from being sucked across more line resistance from a nearby pole-installation or substation's capacitors or over the long-haul grid from further away, for a net gain.
Hell, did I lose the memo that said that crap scifi (or is it syfy?) can't be entertaining?
A while back we used to pronounce it "Skiffy". We made the distinction:
- SF was a significant work of science fiction.
- SciFi was "Sun of the Fifty Foot Toad devours Cleveland".
You missed a couple things:
- It only shuts down one PART of the immune system - the part that kills and eats large stuff.
- It only shuts it down for a couple weeks - actually, teaches it that anything present during those two weeks is "friendly" - after which it turns back on again (including its memory of all the OTHER enemies it's seen before and is ready to pounce on that AREN'T present right now).
... even then, immunosuppressants are useful for a lot of things outside the whole tissue transplant area.
Even for vat-grown tissue you may need immunosuppressants. Examples:
- The organ failed due to auto-immune disease.
- The new organ was needed because a genetic defect made the old one faulty - and the new one must be genetically and (especially) antigenically distinct to function properly.
Etc.
Heck: This therapy looks like it could also become a cure for auto-immune diseases. Two weeks wearing filter masks and hanging out at the clinic, then no more: ...
- Graves' syndrome
- Lupus
- MS
- Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Diabetes type I (WITHOUT a transplant if caught in time)
- Guillain-Barré syndrome
-
So is this basically just shutting the immune system off? Wouldn't that cause serious problems, unless you're a "boy in a bubble"?
You're shutting down one part of the immune system for a couple weeks - and teaching it that anything it currently sees is OK once it's turned back on.
So you have things like increased cancer risk (because a mini-cancer that's currently held at bay by this branch of the immune system becomes "OK" - and ditto with a pre-cancerous lesion which may also be attacked less effectively once it takes the next steps.) And some types of infection will not be fought as effectively - possibly making a minor infection become limb- or life-threatening.
So the recipient would have to keep very clean (but avoid harsh scrubbing), wear a filter mask, avoid scratches, etc. until things are back to approximately normal. (See all the stock treatments for immune-suppressed transplant recipients.) And he'll have to be watched more carefully and treated more aggressively infections now and cancers now and in the future.
But it's a heck of a lot better than turning off this AND OTHER parts of the immune system for YEARS or a LIFETIME.
... or buying a SUV to get your groceries. Oh, wait...
Well the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards killed the station wagon so the SUV became the smallest vehicle not part of the CAFE average pool available. (They're considered a "truck".)
Ban or restrict SUVs and watch people buy vans and pickups for shopping.
It will be very interesting to see what happens to sales on this.
There is a price where profit is maximized. Go too high and the sales drop eats more then the added profit per unit provides.
Old saying: "Fast nickels are better than slow dimes." Let's see if Apple has switched from the former to the latter.
Charge more for higher QoS. Give a discount for lower QoS.
That's a given.
I'd expect plans to include some small amount of VoIP quality 2-way high-QoS as standard (about a couple phone calls' worth plus whatever is needed for the plan's special services). Higher amounts could be obtained by subscribing to a higher-priced plan or dynamically-configured as needed - perhaps for a fee (like dialing a toll phone call or subscribing to a pay-per-view).
Want your packets to get reserved bandwidth and better treatment on the backbone? Pay up your fair share (and let the ISPs and backbone providers split the swag according to their contracts). Or take best effort delivery, in competition with file transfers and whatnot, and accept the hiccups when the intertubes get cloggerated.
... if they'd managed to build a web site that displayed correctly (or displayed the essay collection AT ALL) on Firefox 2.0.0.8.
As I understand it:
ISPs don't implement the QoS (Type of Service) field because (back before THEY needed it for services) Microsoft deployed an IP stack in Windows that "improved" their own file transfers and other IP traffic by demanding high QoS for everything.
Because of that (and the threat of bad guys cheating) the ISPs don't trust the field when coming from a customer. So there wasn't a strong driver for implementing QoS in the ISPs and backbone
IMHO the right solution is for ISPs to:
- Write service level agreements that guarantee a certain bandwidth of high QoS traffic - for the whole feed to the customer, not per flow.
- Start honoring the ToS field and policing the data rate at the edge router, and
- When a packet would be dropped for exceeding the data rate for the enhanced service, instead REWRITE THE ToS FIELD for best-effort delivery (or whatever lower service level seems appropriate) and try to forward it under those terms.
That way:
- The ISP doesn't have to classify the flow according to traffic type to give the user high QoS for his critical services.
- The ISP doesn't have to do a packet-recombine if the packet is fragmented to identify the flow for the trailing fragments (which don't carry the TCP/UDP port number).
- The user / application can specify what special handling he / it wants.
- Applications that try to "cheat" can only do so up to the bandwidth cap for the special handling. (But the user paid for that. So he can use his bandwidth for whatever he wants. It's not "cheating" any more.)
- Excess traffic will still go through as well as it does now.
- A "cheating" application WILL hurt the user's own really-needs-high-QoS service, giving users and applications providers an incentive not to request excessive QoS. (But it won't hurt ANYBODY ELSE's traffic.)
- Authors of applications that need high QoS will have an incentive to specify it, since doing so will work.
What are the odds that one or more of the "prosecutors" were planted by Stevens or his allies?
You think one would deliberately commit a major felony intending to GET CAUGHT, kicked out of legal practice, and probably thrown into federal PMITA prison, in the hope that his crime gets Stevens off (when Stevens will STILL be out of office)? Get real! Even if the Republicans had such martyrs available this would not be the place to expend one.
How does Redmond make an 80% gain in netbook market share without the sales numbers reflecting that gain?
By giving it away? B-)
How about fixing the code so that the {FOO}.slashdot.org servers honor my login and selection of "classic" mode, so I can read and comment on stories that are hosted on the subsidiary servers?
I have a number of machines from which I read and post. Unfortunately, some of them (unavoidably) have ancient browsers that are REALLY unhappy with the new features.
While I may chose to play with or switch to the new functionality on machines where it works, I don't appreciate being cut off from participation in slashdot when the only machines I can use are those where it's broken.
It may be that no living person or existing corporate entity does.
Doesn't happen - short of a copyright holder releasing the book into public domain.
What DOES happen is things like an author dying, the copyright passing to his estate, and the existence of the asset being unknown to the executor and heirs. The copyright has an "owner" but nobody living knows who it is and the owner and his agents are unaware of their status.
Similarly if a corporation dissolves. Similarly if a corporation's records are flaky. Similarly if a corporation goes through a merger or several. Similarly if there is a turnover in personnel. Etc.
You're just being silly. There's no way that a tightly-provisioned radio packet service could ever be made to service both latency-sensitive and bulk traffic at the same time.
Garbage. (And I work for a company that makes some of the boxes in question, in the applicable section of the engineering department. They may not be doing it NOW. But it's NOT HARD. And doing such stuff is our bread-and-butter.)
(I'd describe how but I might need to keep it close to my chest due to patent issues.)
What's really important here is that they're making good money selling it the way it is, and therefore what you suggest is "not possible" until that changes.
We're on the same page there.
But go about three stories down on the slashdot front page and you'll see the story where the FCC may be about to force them to write terms-of-service where they'll have to drop that sort of pricing and restrictions. Then they'll be in a position where they'll pretty much have to go to such a traffic model to maximize their own use of the bandwidth.
Now, you could just say, "To hell with it," and remove all caps and restrictions, making every bit equal. But, you'd lose customers as people get pissed at the terrible voice quality.
Or you could sell a plan that honors QoS tagging and includes a small (good for a VoIP connection) rate of high QoS packets - with high QoS packets exceeding the contracted rate demoted to "best effort". (And yes it's OK to rewrite the type-of-service field.)
Then the limited-but-quality-sensitive VoIP (or whatever) stream(s) can go through, whether they're the carrier's calls or VoIP/streaming apps, the file transfers (and any excess streaming traffic) get "use what's left and take the quality hit", and both the carrier's and the customer's interests are protected.
Except for the carrier's interest in overcharging for voice transport, of course. B-)
If it is in violation ... wouldn't they already be having problems with their no-tethering rules ...?
That comes apart into two issues:
1) Wouldn't no-tethering rules also be in violation?
IMHO: Yes.
(If it's a bandwidth issue they should cap the sustained data rate in the plan and its pricing, not distinguish between the handset with crippled apps and an attached device that is likely to impose higher loads.)
2) Wouldn't they already be having legal issues over them?
Not necessarily. The affected consumer constituency for full functionality over a tether is smaller. Also the violation of the policy is less obvious.
The limits on the Skype app are an obvious attempt to protect the billing structure of the old phone-call infrastructure by suppressing the development of VoIP over broadband, in violation of the FCC's policy. As such it has both an obvious violation AND a much larger constituency of consumers who are harmed by the policy - anybody using an internet-enabled cellphone capable of running the Skype or another VoIP app. So the pressure is on for the FCC to act.
Once the precedent is established, the tether-users can try to expand it to force removal of the tether limits.
Let the big army with the just cause break the first hole in the empire's wall. B-)
Sure. Two ways:
1) If the paper thin loudspeaker moved back-and-forth A LOT. The thickness of the speaker doesn't matter. It's how much it moves the air. (What's important is area times displacement. It's harder to get lows from a small area speaker than a wide one.) The problem for a lot of thin speakers is that they can't move as far as cone types.
2) If the paper thin loudspeaker PUMPS AIR THROUGH IT instead of moving to displace it. You could use that all the way down to DC: Pumping air into or out of a room to produce a long-term low or high pressure. (That might be interesting to accompany scenes showing storms. Or mishaps in spacecraft or submarines.)
Politicians use these procedural tricks all the time, why do you think that said tricks exist?
Among other reasons: This lets them pass unpopular legislation without taking a hit in the next election. Rather than be on record as voting for it they can just not be there and claim the designated bad guys pulled one over on the whole country. The designated bad guys are the ones who are either from districts where the legislation is popular or who are otherwise safe despite the vote. They rotate so nobody accumulates enough bad karma to get kicked out come election time.
You know the rest are in on it because, if there were enough votes against the legislation to trounce it, once the whole gang is back they COULD bring it back up and undo it (or if necessary modify the rules so they could and THEN do it). But they don't.
Have you ever watched C-SPAN? Seems like every five minutes, they're having a Quorum Call.
Quorum calls are also used to put the meeting activity on hold for a fixed time so the members can discuss things with each other without risking having something pulled on them while their attention is diverted. (Or when somebody needs a potty break, ditto.) Think "recess" but much lighter weight.