Why can't this be done with pluripotent cells, anyhow?
It probably can.
Embryonic stem cells are mainly about figuring out how these things work - and getting farther back toward the simple states than you can with more differentiated lines.
While some initial treatments (especially on tissues isolated from the immune system) have been, and may still be, tried with them, on the model of transfusions and transplants, the target will always be using the patient's own cells, some cell-bank equivalent, or some other mechanism than harvesting them (destructively) from embryos.
For instance, such treatments could work by taking tissue samples from the patient, by inducing them to "back up" (induced pluripotency) and then re-differentiate into the desired target cell line(s). (Indeed, work on that, for instance starting from fat cells, is already being done.)
Using cells from the patient (absent an autoimmune disease) sidesteps rejection issues. Meanwhile, embryonic stem cell treatments tend to produce cancers, as the too-undifferentiated cell lines get confused about what they're supposed to become.
Tesla is making many if not most of the parts there in the factory right next to the assembly line. Having also been to Ford and GM assembly lines, and seen many others on TV (How it's Made!), Tesla's approach is radically different!
Been to Ford's River Rouge plant? Looked at a documentary of it in its early days?
The Rouge Plant was built as a machine that took in coal, iron ore, and other raw materials at one end and spit out finished cars at the other. This was how Ford tried to do it when he was the Musk of his day.
These days things are spread out more.
Also: Tesla doesn't build EVERYTHING at the plant (though they are partial to suppliers located within a few miles, so they can interact and ship stuff around in a matter of minutes to hours, rather than days or weeks. (Much like the chassis and final assembly plants at the GM complex in Detroit, which function as a two-part line with a gap measured in city blocks.)
The biggest impact of air pollution was measured in farm workers in California's Central Valley, who were paid by the volume of grapes and blueberries they collected. On days that had higher readings of ground-level ozone -- a harmful gas formed when tailpipe emissions mix with sunlight -- worker productivity slumped.
I'd be curious about how (or whether) they controlled for other factors from the weather phenomena that generated the ozone exposure: Temperature, humidity, sunlight vs. cloudy vs. rain. Also other pollution components: Smoke, NOx, CO, etc.
Major reason being: Now you need a smartphone with google maps. Google is no longer optional to your life.
And that gives Google access to essentially everything on your smartphone (as I just discovered when trying to shut down some unwanted apps.)
Google Maps itself claims it only needs permission for "your location". Reasonable, you'd think.
But disable Google Play Services and Google Maps starts complaining about how it "won't work unless you enable" it. So it has an unannounced (until you break it) proprietary pipe to the other app.
Google Play Services wants permissions for:
- Body Sensors,
- Calendar,
- Camera,
- Contacts,
- Microphone,
- Phone,
- SMS, and
- Storage (and you EXPECT it to be "phoning home" to google.) Combine that with Maps' permission to
- your location and you've got quite the collection of information on you that you've just given Google's app framework permission to report to Google and/or modify.
Seems to me the android Apps -> Permissions interface, by not calling out the other apps that a given app communicates with, along with THEIR permissions, nor refusing an app permission to talk to another with additional permissions, is deceptive and gives false confidence.
Some years ago I heard that shrinks were playing with the idea that there might be TWO circardian clocks, and that the manic/depressive cycles of bipolar disorder might be the beat between them if one of them didn't sync properly to the day/night cycle, but free-ran. (This could explain things like the wildly different length of different people's cycles and how depression can be alleviated TEMPORARILY {like for a few days} by shifting wakeup time forward a couple hours - though doing it repeatedly doesn't work.)
No idea if anything came of this or if it turned out to be bogus.
I am still astonished that people who refer to "Crooked Hillary" voted for Trump with a straight face.
A lot of people who voted for Trump did it while holding their noses, rather than with a straight face.
And a lot who normally would not vote for a lesser-evil (either staying home or voting for a third-party candidate with a better stated position, to show the major-party candidates which way to change) nevertheless voted for Trump in this case, often because they perceived the "greater evil" as SO great that ONE MORE PRESIDENCY would break the country beyond fixing.
Nose-holders have been pleasantly surprised by how much better than expected Trump has done - at least up to the fallout from the recent school shooting. Now they're really hoping the "grab the guns now, due process later" comment was a fire-for-effect shake-up-the-other-party or distract-the-press negotiating noise (like many of his statements and tweets) rather than a measure of his actual beliefs.
That is actually the problem. The more accurately you adjust it, the longer you have to wait for the clock to drift again so you know which way to adjust it some more.
Or you can sample the 32 kHz crystal oscillator signal, beat it against a reference from a broadcast standard, and HEAR the error as you adjust the control. That lets you get it into whack in a few seconds (once you're properly set up).
At 32,768 Hz a one-cycle-per-second beat corresponds to about 3.4 seconds per month.
Who knows? Maybe Edison was right after all, especially if you think about newer DC power lines that looses less energy in transport.
From the standpoint of long distance power transmission line losses for a given cost of equipment, DC is most efficient and 3-phase polyphase (Tesla/Westinghouse) is the next best.
But for long distance you need high voltage. Before electronics that meant rotating converters. Those limited DC to about 600V, because higher voltages made the commutators arc over. AC, on the other hand, could be easily boosted to tens of thousands of volts (and back down) by transformers.
(There are other advantages to AC, too. For instance, DC is hard to switch off - switches, circuit breakers, fuses - because the arc is driven continuously. In AC the current stops twice per cycle, so if you can clear the ion path before the driving voltage builds up again you're done. Also: The fields around high-voltage DC transmission lines do things like make trees grow toward one of the wires, so they have to be reversed occasionally, while the ground currents from the "ground is one conductor while we work on one of the wires" backup mode can do things like confuse train signals, limiting the currents available in such modes.)
Beginning about the mid 50s, converters to and from high-voltage, high-current DC (using gas discharge tubes) became efficient enough to make DC transmission lines possible. Now we use semiconductors which do better. But the advantage is not all that large, due to the cost of the voltage conversion equipment. So there are only a few, typically very long (so you have only a few converters), DC transmission lines in operation.
In order to have an electric grid, to have many power stations interconnected, they all need to switch from positive to negative at exactly the same time. The easiest way to have them all running in sync is to agree they'll all run at exactly 50 Hz. That establishes the frequency of the grid as a whole. Then if one generator is slightly ahead of or behind the grid it can sense the difference and speed up or slow down as needed.
You speak as if this is something that is controlled directly and continuously on each generator. In fact, it's not.
Generators, once initially synchronized and connected, also act like synchronous motors. When one gets a tad ahead the load on it goes up, and when it gets a tad behind the load goes down (all the way to negative load - the grid can even give it a push). So they stay in sync (barring catastrophic screwups that usually result in a blackout).
But when the load gets heavy they slow down. So the drill is:
- Use a speed control to give them a bigger push when they're getting behind, smaller when they're getting ahead. This keeps them about on target and adjusts the energy fed to the generators to match the energy pulled from the grid (plus the grid's losses).
- Watch the overall accumulation of cycle-count error. (Easy way: Use a synchronous-motor clock hung on the mains.) Tweak the speed control to push a little harder if the grid is behind, ease off if it's ahead. (Your operation gets paid for what it feeds, so it's no skin off your bottom line to push harder than your share if the others are having trouble keeping up.)
It will be interesting if some of these services try just dropping their presence in the countries in question. Close any offices, shut down any data centers, not take adds from or sell services to any operation in the country in question.
Sure it might hurt their bottom line a tad. But it would cause severe pain to the countries' own businesses.
Trade wars usually consist of both sides shooting themselves in the foot. But they can consist of shooting the other guy in the leg while only blowing off a couple of your own toes. It would be interesting to see a trade war like event where one side is a multinational corporation rather than a country's government.
"In my experience all these quartz china clocks run fast, some a few seconds and others gain a whole minute a week."
If you hang a variable capacitor in the circuit and adjust it to tune the crystal close to dead-on (at your room temperature), you can achieve seconds per year.
But the cheaper "quartz china clocks" leave out the pricey part to save a few cents per unit and the time spent tuning it. This is like setting it to its highest adjustment point.
Slightly less cheap ones put in a fixed capacitor that is about right for typical crystals, but skip the per-unit tuning step. Those are a lot better, but still far from what could have been achieved.
"And the funny thing is, the old technology does it better because the frequency was controlled by a large physical inertia."
It wasn't really just inertia. The generators also act as synchronous motors. Each ends up loaded more by the grid more when they're getting a bit ahead of the "consensus" frequency and less when they get behind. So once they get synchronized they stay that way. (Barring the occasional screw-up - which usually leads to a regional blackout.)
But if they're heavily loaded they slow down, and if lightly loaded they speed up. They have no inherent absolute speed referenc. So the power companies have to keep them "on time" by comparing them to a good time reference and giving a little extra push (with more steam or whatever) when they're getting behind, less when they're getting ahead - or by lowering the voltage (a brownout) or cutting off parts of the grid (rotating blackouts) when the load is getting too big for them to keep up to speed. If they don't, the generators get slowed down a tad and the clocks slow down. (That's what happened in Europe.)
Apparently, it is much more harder to maintain the correct number of cycles a day with DC sources like some wind and solar.
Only for you as a user of a private DC power system owner/user.
- If you have a DC supply, you have to come up with an accurate time reference built-into, or driving, your clock.
- If you have mains power (and your supplier is on the ball, unlike these European companies), your big power company has access to a good clock (like listening to the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) time reference broadcasts and adjusting the frequency to keep it totalling the right number of cycles per day on the average. (This is easy: Just hang a sync-motor electric clock across the mains and tweak frequency now and then to keep it on time.) Just as expensive, but the power company does it ONCE and keeps ALL THEIR CUSTOMERS' clock on speed.
- If you have a DC system and an inverter, either the inverter is synchronized by something accurate or your synchronous-motor clocks will drift.
I think AC grid power systems have been doing this since Tesla/Westinghouse first started setting them up. It was one of AC's selling points in the Tesla/Edison AC/DC utility wars.
Nowadays, though, WWV transmits an atomic-clock referenced time code signal on a 60 kHz VLF carrier that's detectable anywhere in the US at some time during pretty much every day. Inexpensive clocks are available that use a crystal for the basic timing (achieving accuracies of a fraction of a second per day) and using the radio time signal to resynchronize when available (to avoid accumulating a drift). So a wall clock running on a battery can now do better than a synchronous-motor clock running on the mains.
(Your typical electronic bedside alarm clock, though, doesn't include the WWVB radio. Instead it runs its timer by counting the cycles of mains power, achieving the same long-term accuracy as a sync-motor clock. If it has a battery and crystal oscillator it only uses them to keep (decent) time during power outages.)
The first line of my previous post was a quote from the one I was replying to (with me pointing out other reasons that starting your own was impractical)
Seriously, just... setup your own website,... then stream YOUR videos to YOUR hearts content.
Part of the point is to reach an audience outside the echo chamber. Most of them are looking at services like Google/YouTube, for searching and hosted content.
If it/they are not being a fair player, making "the masses" aware that they need to look beyond is a prerequisite for getting them to do so. Thus griping like that in TFA.
Related arguments apply to demonitizing. Getting any infrastructure in place for alternative content - let alone something with the necessary depth of coverage and economies of scale - again starts with making people aware that there's an unserved market.
We saw the same when mainstream news execs thought the viewers were only after entertainment leading to the opening for the creation of CNN. We saw it again with mainstream news going full-bore left-wing (and CNN first doing the same and eventually literally selling out to them) creating the opening for Fox News. (I'm hoping that Fox News' turn to the Neocon side of the force leads to one or more tea-party/freedom caucus/libertarian news outlets.) Perhaps we'll see something similar with the politicization of these market leaders leading to more competition and a better-served populace.
Soon the NSA will be able to drive people away to their secret bases for "interrogation".
Soon the terrorists will be able to simultaneously turn THOUSANDS of cars, all over the country, into drive-through-the-crowd projectiles - without requiring thousands of suicidal drivers to operate them.
[less growth in developed world due to wealth concentration... Little guys have] Less money means smaller homes, less activity, fewer new electrical devices and above all fewer children. Combine that with new tech (LED bulbs, LCDs, new air conditioners and heaters) and it was bound to happen.
IMHO the big issue is that the cost per watt for solar photovoltaic, in a reasonably sunny mid-latitude site, crossed-over that of grid power - and then dropped farther. It's not just the drastic efficiency of the new devices (Like LEDs, at about 1/8th the power of incandescents and only about a factor of two above theoretical perfection). It's that it's becoming cheaper to go solar even with paying the up-front cost.
And some of that IS accessible to the allegedly impoverished 99% masses: There are a number of companies that will cut you (or your landlord) a deal where THEY lease your roof area, buy, install, and maintain the new equipment, then sell you electricity at a rate that splits the savings with you.
IMHO the utilities are in for a hard time - and would be on their way to join the dinosaurs in the tar pits if it weren't for electric cars coming on line. It takes a LOT of power to move vehicles. Even with hystreically good efficiency and regenerative braking they need enough that it may be better to feed them from the grid than pave your yard with panels, too.
Which is good for those who AREN'T in a sunny area, as it might keep utilities afloat and their prices affordable.
What is next? If I breathe air and exhale carbon dioxide I can be blamed for contributing to global warming?
That argument HAS been made. Also if you fart. Especially if you're a cow.
No, really! They've passed laws (at least in California) requiring cow farts to be collected, rather than letting the methane (several times more3 greenhousey than CO2) be released into the atmosphere to cause global warming. Since it's not practical to build a machine to suck them out of the cows, cattle operations now have to keep the cows in sealed barns and do some pricey processing of the air.
Couldn't POSSibly be the vegans trying to make hamburger prohibitively expensive, nope, nope.
I can't imagine why the NRA would do this.... Neither [the "university of firearms" nor the "preserve firearms civil rights" branch] has any business taking a stand on any particular regulations r[e]lated to things around principles of network neutrality.
That's because it's not about network neutrality. It's about coolly sticking to your principles and working toward your goals (especially politically-charged goals) in the face of threats and pressure. (That falls under the "preserve civil rights" branch for several reasons.)
"The rifle is awarded 'when someone has stood up under pressure with grace and dignity and principled discipline...'' "Previous recipients of the award include Vice President Mike Pence and Sheriff David Clarke."
Don't think the pressure on Agit Pai was great? Don't think it might have turned violent? Just look at the postings here, and in the flood of previous articles mentioning him on Slashdot. Then look at things like the demonstrations in front of his house, with signs attacking his children and other family members (while also engaging in other constant harassment, such as ordering pizzas in his name every half hour).
Then think of them in the context of other demonstrations at the time, blocking conservatives or others with non-leftist ideas from speaking on college campuses, with gangs of masked thugs beating people using Krav Maga destroy-your-opponent fighting techniques or smashing skulls with bicycle locks (all on the premise that politically incorrect speech is an "attack" suitable for being "defended against" using deadly force). What might they have done to someone they perceived as not just talking against their interests, but making an actual change in a government policy?
That is exactly the kind of powerful opposition that the civil rights branch of the NRA is dedicated to enabling people to survive, and to work for their own goals despite such pressure. Whether it's coming from the Antifa, the KKK, government agent provocateurs, foreign "meddlers", political parties, organized crime, racists, or whatever.
(It's also the kind of pressure the NRA itself is subjected to, in its efforts to preserve civil rights for its supporters and detractors alike. So the NRA also benefits by reminding others about the similarity of its own struggle to that of the person they're honoring.)
Ever wonder why I post under a handle? Among other politically-incorrect things, I've been saying for years that most of the problems that "Net Neutrality" tries to address are either anticompetitive practices or consumer fraud, and that both are better handled by the FTC than the FCC. What Pai got his award, and massive threats and harassment, for, is working toward half of that change. I have no interest in being on the receiving end of even the petty harassment (such as complaints to my employers or pizza orders), let alone crowds on my lawn threatening me and my family.
Godwin's Law does not apply here, in any way, shape, or form.
Acdtually it does. Because Godwins law is just that, if a thread goes on long enough, Nazis or Nazism will be mentioned.
What does not apply are a couple of the usual misinterpretations of Godwin's law (which are very handy for neo-Naziis): That any mention of Nazis is just trolling rather than an honest attempt to learn from history to avoid repeating it, or that once Nazis are mentioned the discussion is over.
Another issue with antidepressants is that they get an undeserved bad reputation for promoting violent behavior - because some people committing horrendous crimes turn out to have recently been put on a course of them.
What's happening there is that psychopathy and depression are separate issues and a few people have both. So you have this handful of psychopaths who'd commit atrocities but are too bummed out to get around to it. Treat their depression and you have a fully functional psychopath. Oops! (Thus there is some debate among mental health professionals about whether it's more ethical to treat, or withhold treatment, of violent psychopaths for depression.)
Depressives, though, even when treated, average FAR less likely to commit, or attempt, improper violence than the general population - by enough to bury the excesses of this handful of re-enabled bad guys.
They'll have to be careful with the coding scheme.
Otherwise it would be possible to write an actual virus just by storing appropriate data into a file.
Note that both DNA and RNA can have enzymatic activity - including functions that would cut them out of the backbone and form them into a viral genome, along with the molecular machinery to package and deliver it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't this be done with pluripotent cells, anyhow?
It probably can.
Embryonic stem cells are mainly about figuring out how these things work - and getting farther back toward the simple states than you can with more differentiated lines.
While some initial treatments (especially on tissues isolated from the immune system) have been, and may still be, tried with them, on the model of transfusions and transplants, the target will always be using the patient's own cells, some cell-bank equivalent, or some other mechanism than harvesting them (destructively) from embryos.
For instance, such treatments could work by taking tissue samples from the patient, by inducing them to "back up" (induced pluripotency) and then re-differentiate into the desired target cell line(s). (Indeed, work on that, for instance starting from fat cells, is already being done.)
Using cells from the patient (absent an autoimmune disease) sidesteps rejection issues. Meanwhile, embryonic stem cell treatments tend to produce cancers, as the too-undifferentiated cell lines get confused about what they're supposed to become.
Was this wet AMD or dry AMD
Two wet ones so far.
They plan to test on more, including dry also.
Tesla is making many if not most of the parts there in the factory right next to the assembly line. Having also been to Ford and GM assembly lines, and seen many others on TV (How it's Made!), Tesla's approach is radically different!
Been to Ford's River Rouge plant? Looked at a documentary of it in its early days?
The Rouge Plant was built as a machine that took in coal, iron ore, and other raw materials at one end and spit out finished cars at the other. This was how Ford tried to do it when he was the Musk of his day.
These days things are spread out more.
Also: Tesla doesn't build EVERYTHING at the plant (though they are partial to suppliers located within a few miles, so they can interact and ship stuff around in a matter of minutes to hours, rather than days or weeks. (Much like the chassis and final assembly plants at the GM complex in Detroit, which function as a two-part line with a gap measured in city blocks.)
The biggest impact of air pollution was measured in farm workers in California's Central Valley, who were paid by the volume of grapes and blueberries they collected. On days that had higher readings of ground-level ozone -- a harmful gas formed when tailpipe emissions mix with sunlight -- worker productivity slumped.
I'd be curious about how (or whether) they controlled for other factors from the weather phenomena that generated the ozone exposure: Temperature, humidity, sunlight vs. cloudy vs. rain. Also other pollution components: Smoke, NOx, CO, etc.
Major reason being: Now you need a smartphone with google maps. Google is no longer optional to your life.
And that gives Google access to essentially everything on your smartphone (as I just discovered when trying to shut down some unwanted apps.)
Google Maps itself claims it only needs permission for "your location". Reasonable, you'd think.
But disable Google Play Services and Google Maps starts complaining about how it "won't work unless you enable" it. So it has an unannounced (until you break it) proprietary pipe to the other app.
Google Play Services wants permissions for:
- Body Sensors,
- Calendar,
- Camera,
- Contacts,
- Microphone,
- Phone,
- SMS, and
- Storage
(and you EXPECT it to be "phoning home" to google.) Combine that with Maps' permission to
- your location
and you've got quite the collection of information on you that you've just given Google's app framework permission to report to Google and/or modify.
Seems to me the android Apps -> Permissions interface, by not calling out the other apps that a given app communicates with, along with THEIR permissions, nor refusing an app permission to talk to another with additional permissions, is deceptive and gives false confidence.
Some years ago I heard that shrinks were playing with the idea that there might be TWO circardian clocks, and that the manic/depressive cycles of bipolar disorder might be the beat between them if one of them didn't sync properly to the day/night cycle, but free-ran. (This could explain things like the wildly different length of different people's cycles and how depression can be alleviated TEMPORARILY {like for a few days} by shifting wakeup time forward a couple hours - though doing it repeatedly doesn't work.)
No idea if anything came of this or if it turned out to be bogus.
I am still astonished that people who refer to "Crooked Hillary" voted for Trump with a straight face.
A lot of people who voted for Trump did it while holding their noses, rather than with a straight face.
And a lot who normally would not vote for a lesser-evil (either staying home or voting for a third-party candidate with a better stated position, to show the major-party candidates which way to change) nevertheless voted for Trump in this case, often because they perceived the "greater evil" as SO great that ONE MORE PRESIDENCY would break the country beyond fixing.
Nose-holders have been pleasantly surprised by how much better than expected Trump has done - at least up to the fallout from the recent school shooting. Now they're really hoping the "grab the guns now, due process later" comment was a fire-for-effect shake-up-the-other-party or distract-the-press negotiating noise (like many of his statements and tweets) rather than a measure of his actual beliefs.
That is actually the problem. The more accurately you adjust it, the longer you have to wait for the clock to drift again so you know which way to adjust it some more.
Or you can sample the 32 kHz crystal oscillator signal, beat it against a reference from a broadcast standard, and HEAR the error as you adjust the control. That lets you get it into whack in a few seconds (once you're properly set up).
At 32,768 Hz a one-cycle-per-second beat corresponds to about 3.4 seconds per month.
Who knows? Maybe Edison was right after all, especially if you think about newer DC power lines that looses less energy in transport.
From the standpoint of long distance power transmission line losses for a given cost of equipment, DC is most efficient and 3-phase polyphase (Tesla/Westinghouse) is the next best.
But for long distance you need high voltage. Before electronics that meant rotating converters. Those limited DC to about 600V, because higher voltages made the commutators arc over. AC, on the other hand, could be easily boosted to tens of thousands of volts (and back down) by transformers.
(There are other advantages to AC, too. For instance, DC is hard to switch off - switches, circuit breakers, fuses - because the arc is driven continuously. In AC the current stops twice per cycle, so if you can clear the ion path before the driving voltage builds up again you're done. Also: The fields around high-voltage DC transmission lines do things like make trees grow toward one of the wires, so they have to be reversed occasionally, while the ground currents from the "ground is one conductor while we work on one of the wires" backup mode can do things like confuse train signals, limiting the currents available in such modes.)
Beginning about the mid 50s, converters to and from high-voltage, high-current DC (using gas discharge tubes) became efficient enough to make DC transmission lines possible. Now we use semiconductors which do better. But the advantage is not all that large, due to the cost of the voltage conversion equipment. So there are only a few, typically very long (so you have only a few converters), DC transmission lines in operation.
Manual frequency corrections are becoming less and less common in the US, as described ...
Yep. As long as you're automating stuff, this is one more task that can be done by a process control system rather than a human.
(But it is interesting that it's simple and infrequent enough that it's STILL being done manually in some places.)
In order to have an electric grid, to have many power stations interconnected, they all need to switch from positive to negative at exactly the same time. The easiest way to have them all running in sync is to agree they'll all run at exactly 50 Hz. That establishes the frequency of the grid as a whole. Then if one generator is slightly ahead of or behind the grid it can sense the difference and speed up or slow down as needed.
You speak as if this is something that is controlled directly and continuously on each generator. In fact, it's not.
Generators, once initially synchronized and connected, also act like synchronous motors. When one gets a tad ahead the load on it goes up, and when it gets a tad behind the load goes down (all the way to negative load - the grid can even give it a push). So they stay in sync (barring catastrophic screwups that usually result in a blackout).
But when the load gets heavy they slow down. So the drill is:
- Use a speed control to give them a bigger push when they're getting behind, smaller when they're getting ahead. This keeps them about on target and adjusts the energy fed to the generators to match the energy pulled from the grid (plus the grid's losses).
- Watch the overall accumulation of cycle-count error. (Easy way: Use a synchronous-motor clock hung on the mains.) Tweak the speed control to push a little harder if the grid is behind, ease off if it's ahead. (Your operation gets paid for what it feeds, so it's no skin off your bottom line to push harder than your share if the others are having trouble keeping up.)
It will be interesting if some of these services try just dropping their presence in the countries in question. Close any offices, shut down any data centers, not take adds from or sell services to any operation in the country in question.
Sure it might hurt their bottom line a tad. But it would cause severe pain to the countries' own businesses.
Trade wars usually consist of both sides shooting themselves in the foot. But they can consist of shooting the other guy in the leg while only blowing off a couple of your own toes. It would be interesting to see a trade war like event where one side is a multinational corporation rather than a country's government.
"In my experience all these quartz china clocks run fast, some a few seconds and others gain a whole minute a week."
If you hang a variable capacitor in the circuit and adjust it to tune the crystal close to dead-on (at your room temperature), you can achieve seconds per year.
But the cheaper "quartz china clocks" leave out the pricey part to save a few cents per unit and the time spent tuning it. This is like setting it to its highest adjustment point.
Slightly less cheap ones put in a fixed capacitor that is about right for typical crystals, but skip the per-unit tuning step. Those are a lot better, but still far from what could have been achieved.
"And the funny thing is, the old technology does it better because the frequency was controlled by a large physical inertia."
It wasn't really just inertia. The generators also act as synchronous motors. Each ends up loaded more by the grid more when they're getting a bit ahead of the "consensus" frequency and less when they get behind. So once they get synchronized they stay that way. (Barring the occasional screw-up - which usually leads to a regional blackout.)
But if they're heavily loaded they slow down, and if lightly loaded they speed up. They have no inherent absolute speed referenc. So the power companies have to keep them "on time" by comparing them to a good time reference and giving a little extra push (with more steam or whatever) when they're getting behind, less when they're getting ahead - or by lowering the voltage (a brownout) or cutting off parts of the grid (rotating blackouts) when the load is getting too big for them to keep up to speed. If they don't, the generators get slowed down a tad and the clocks slow down. (That's what happened in Europe.)
Apparently, it is much more harder to maintain the correct number of cycles a day with DC sources like some wind and solar.
Only for you as a user of a private DC power system owner/user.
- If you have a DC supply, you have to come up with an accurate time reference built-into, or driving, your clock.
- If you have mains power (and your supplier is on the ball, unlike these European companies), your big power company has access to a good clock (like listening to the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) time reference broadcasts and adjusting the frequency to keep it totalling the right number of cycles per day on the average. (This is easy: Just hang a sync-motor electric clock across the mains and tweak frequency now and then to keep it on time.) Just as expensive, but the power company does it ONCE and keeps ALL THEIR CUSTOMERS' clock on speed.
- If you have a DC system and an inverter, either the inverter is synchronized by something accurate or your synchronous-motor clocks will drift.
I think AC grid power systems have been doing this since Tesla/Westinghouse first started setting them up. It was one of AC's selling points in the Tesla/Edison AC/DC utility wars.
Nowadays, though, WWV transmits an atomic-clock referenced time code signal on a 60 kHz VLF carrier that's detectable anywhere in the US at some time during pretty much every day. Inexpensive clocks are available that use a crystal for the basic timing (achieving accuracies of a fraction of a second per day) and using the radio time signal to resynchronize when available (to avoid accumulating a drift). So a wall clock running on a battery can now do better than a synchronous-motor clock running on the mains.
(Your typical electronic bedside alarm clock, though, doesn't include the WWVB radio. Instead it runs its timer by counting the cycles of mains power, achieving the same long-term accuracy as a sync-motor clock. If it has a battery and crystal oscillator it only uses them to keep (decent) time during power outages.)
We're on the same page,
The first line of my previous post was a quote from the one I was replying to (with me pointing out other reasons that starting your own was impractical)
Sorry for any confusion.
Seriously, just ... setup your own website, ... then stream YOUR videos to YOUR hearts content.
Part of the point is to reach an audience outside the echo chamber. Most of them are looking at services like Google/YouTube, for searching and hosted content.
If it/they are not being a fair player, making "the masses" aware that they need to look beyond is a prerequisite for getting them to do so. Thus griping like that in TFA.
Related arguments apply to demonitizing. Getting any infrastructure in place for alternative content - let alone something with the necessary depth of coverage and economies of scale - again starts with making people aware that there's an unserved market.
We saw the same when mainstream news execs thought the viewers were only after entertainment leading to the opening for the creation of CNN. We saw it again with mainstream news going full-bore left-wing (and CNN first doing the same and eventually literally selling out to them) creating the opening for Fox News. (I'm hoping that Fox News' turn to the Neocon side of the force leads to one or more tea-party/freedom caucus/libertarian news outlets.) Perhaps we'll see something similar with the politicization of these market leaders leading to more competition and a better-served populace.
Soon the NSA will be able to drive people away to their secret bases for "interrogation".
Soon the terrorists will be able to simultaneously turn THOUSANDS of cars, all over the country, into drive-through-the-crowd projectiles - without requiring thousands of suicidal drivers to operate them.
AND without even having to pay for a rental.
[less growth in developed world due to wealth concentration ... Little guys have] Less money means smaller homes, less activity, fewer new electrical devices and above all fewer children. Combine that with new tech (LED bulbs, LCDs, new air conditioners and heaters) and it was bound to happen.
IMHO the big issue is that the cost per watt for solar photovoltaic, in a reasonably sunny mid-latitude site, crossed-over that of grid power - and then dropped farther. It's not just the drastic efficiency of the new devices (Like LEDs, at about 1/8th the power of incandescents and only about a factor of two above theoretical perfection). It's that it's becoming cheaper to go solar even with paying the up-front cost.
And some of that IS accessible to the allegedly impoverished 99% masses: There are a number of companies that will cut you (or your landlord) a deal where THEY lease your roof area, buy, install, and maintain the new equipment, then sell you electricity at a rate that splits the savings with you.
IMHO the utilities are in for a hard time - and would be on their way to join the dinosaurs in the tar pits if it weren't for electric cars coming on line. It takes a LOT of power to move vehicles. Even with hystreically good efficiency and regenerative braking they need enough that it may be better to feed them from the grid than pave your yard with panels, too.
Which is good for those who AREN'T in a sunny area, as it might keep utilities afloat and their prices affordable.
Electric wholesalers prefer natural gas, wind, and solar.
Because the fuel is cheap or free while the plant is scalable and reasonably inexpensive. What a deal.
What is next? If I breathe air and exhale carbon dioxide I can be blamed for contributing to global warming?
That argument HAS been made. Also if you fart. Especially if you're a cow.
No, really! They've passed laws (at least in California) requiring cow farts to be collected, rather than letting the methane (several times more3 greenhousey than CO2) be released into the atmosphere to cause global warming. Since it's not practical to build a machine to suck them out of the cows, cattle operations now have to keep the cows in sealed barns and do some pricey processing of the air.
Couldn't POSSibly be the vegans trying to make hamburger prohibitively expensive, nope, nope.
I can't imagine why the NRA would do this. ... Neither [the "university of firearms" nor the "preserve firearms civil rights" branch] has any business taking a stand on any particular regulations r[e]lated to things around principles of network neutrality.
That's because it's not about network neutrality. It's about coolly sticking to your principles and working toward your goals (especially politically-charged goals) in the face of threats and pressure. (That falls under the "preserve civil rights" branch for several reasons.)
"The rifle is awarded 'when someone has stood up under pressure with grace and dignity and principled discipline ...'' "Previous recipients of the award include Vice President Mike Pence and Sheriff David Clarke."
Don't think the pressure on Agit Pai was great? Don't think it might have turned violent? Just look at the postings here, and in the flood of previous articles mentioning him on Slashdot. Then look at things like the demonstrations in front of his house, with signs attacking his children and other family members (while also engaging in other constant harassment, such as ordering pizzas in his name every half hour).
Then think of them in the context of other demonstrations at the time, blocking conservatives or others with non-leftist ideas from speaking on college campuses, with gangs of masked thugs beating people using Krav Maga destroy-your-opponent fighting techniques or smashing skulls with bicycle locks (all on the premise that politically incorrect speech is an "attack" suitable for being "defended against" using deadly force). What might they have done to someone they perceived as not just talking against their interests, but making an actual change in a government policy?
That is exactly the kind of powerful opposition that the civil rights branch of the NRA is dedicated to enabling people to survive, and to work for their own goals despite such pressure. Whether it's coming from the Antifa, the KKK, government agent provocateurs, foreign "meddlers", political parties, organized crime, racists, or whatever.
(It's also the kind of pressure the NRA itself is subjected to, in its efforts to preserve civil rights for its supporters and detractors alike. So the NRA also benefits by reminding others about the similarity of its own struggle to that of the person they're honoring.)
Ever wonder why I post under a handle? Among other politically-incorrect things, I've been saying for years that most of the problems that "Net Neutrality" tries to address are either anticompetitive practices or consumer fraud, and that both are better handled by the FTC than the FCC. What Pai got his award, and massive threats and harassment, for, is working toward half of that change. I have no interest in being on the receiving end of even the petty harassment (such as complaints to my employers or pizza orders), let alone crowds on my lawn threatening me and my family.
Godwin's Law does not apply here, in any way, shape, or form.
Acdtually it does. Because Godwins law is just that, if a thread goes on long enough, Nazis or Nazism will be mentioned.
What does not apply are a couple of the usual misinterpretations of Godwin's law (which are very handy for neo-Naziis): That any mention of Nazis is just trolling rather than an honest attempt to learn from history to avoid repeating it, or that once Nazis are mentioned the discussion is over.
Another issue with antidepressants is that they get an undeserved bad reputation for promoting violent behavior - because some people committing horrendous crimes turn out to have recently been put on a course of them.
What's happening there is that psychopathy and depression are separate issues and a few people have both. So you have this handful of psychopaths who'd commit atrocities but are too bummed out to get around to it. Treat their depression and you have a fully functional psychopath. Oops! (Thus there is some debate among mental health professionals about whether it's more ethical to treat, or withhold treatment, of violent psychopaths for depression.)
Depressives, though, even when treated, average FAR less likely to commit, or attempt, improper violence than the general population - by enough to bury the excesses of this handful of re-enabled bad guys.
They'll have to be careful with the coding scheme.
Otherwise it would be possible to write an actual virus just by storing appropriate data into a file.
Note that both DNA and RNA can have enzymatic activity - including functions that would cut them out of the backbone and form them into a viral genome, along with the molecular machinery to package and deliver it.