Java is also the perfect high security language, because you can't make security holes with it. Same with C#. Same with VB.NET. We've heard this again and again from people who simply don't understand the problem.
High security languages aren't about fixing things so you CAN'T have bugs. (You always can, because you can write different programs to do different things in them, and a program that does ONE thing - even if perfectly - is horribly buggy if the intent is to do something else.)
High security languages are about making it easier to avoid bugs.
Like with clear syntax. And compiler helping out by checking everything it can possibly check. Just for starters.
(Which is not to say that ADA is such a language. B-) But pre-ANSI C, for instance, is a fine example of being simple and clear while handing you as much rope as you need to fashion your personal noose.)
Sounds like a few too many people at DARPA liked 'The Phantom Menace' a little too much.
More like "The Incredibles".
In particular: The scene where Mr Incredible is being flown to Syndrome's island-of-military-tech-fabrication in an automated plane which (for no discernible reason) lands by smoothly "flying" into the water and cruises underwater into an underground/underwater hanger which drains and fills with air.
Let's send some messages into the future, for one!
Sending messages to the future is trivial: Put 'em in a box.
If you can break the speed of light you can send 'em to the past. THAT's more useful.
Even if it only goes a little way. For instance: We could show the congresscritters that passing the bailout bill would spread the pain from the mortgage sector and crash the REST of the economy, changing 6 months of "subprime borrowers lose their houses and go back to renting" into "Stock market tanks and we have a decade or two of 'greater depression'."
Wait a minute: We already TOLD them that and they passed it ANYHOW.
The appellate court... recognized that an open source licensor does gain an economic benefit from releasing open source software,... better reputation, business opportunities, and the improvement of the released software
Another gain is access to far more software than he himself contributed. Granted this is not a contingent benefit: He'd have access to most of this whether he contributed or not (though his personal contributions may result in bug fixes to his code and/or the redirection of some projects to be more to his advantage). But the total regime is necessary to set up a "prosperity of the commons", where each contributor receives much more in benefits than his personal investment.
You need less than 15 horses of engine/genny to run even a big car continuously. You might even be able to go below that by depending on the batteries more, making sure they're charged up before hitting mountains, running the engine at rest areas, etc. An onboard engine is also very useful to avoid accidental out-of-power evenets even for a commuter/shopping car and simplify trip planning.
"Rental for long trips" is a common suggestion - and it's just not practical. Try it yourself: If you have more than one car, sell the surplus. Fill the gas tank of the remaining car with enough rocks that it only holds 60 miles worth of gas and get a storage tank to fill it every night (or stop at the gas station on the way home, but no more than once per day). Go on a 500-mile round-trip campout/weekend vacation event every month using a rental. Get back to us in a year and tell us how it went.
There is enough water storage that this can be done only at offpeak times, and enough power used that doing it only at offpeak times can be used to level the power load. So that's what they do.
Well, actually that was the case up to a couple decades ago. At this point the population has expanded enough that there is about a 3:2 peak/offpeak power consumption ratio. But that WAS the case earlier and the metering for the population boom was done under regulations assuming things were balanced. (PG&E is now trying to get people to deploy a remote-controlled air conditioner dialback device to shave the peak.)
Adding plug-in cars to the mix should be enough to push the economics to result in some regulation change that (financially) encourages offpeak charging.
For everyone else, utility companies need to come up with a way to vary their rates generally according to load on the system - by introducing smarter metering systems.
They already have them. They're deployed in many areas - where the economics of providing peak/offpeak rate differentials makes sense.
At the moment providing such differentials in California does NOT make sense. Much of the electricity in California is used for moving large amounts of water around the state. There is enough water storage that this can be done only at offpeak times, and enough power used that doing it only at offpeak times can be used to level the power load. So that's what they do. Thus there isn't enough economic advantage from moving utility customer load to offpeak times to pay for a differential-billing infrastructure.
A large deployment of plug-in cars - being plugged in after the evening commute at peak load time - might overwhelm this leveling. Or encouraging them as an antipollution measure might be politically advantageous. So once they're available you can expect the utility regulations to be modified to encourage electric cars - with separate, lower, rates for charging cars and offpeak-timing built into the new infrastructure. (Also: California utilities have a sliding-scale electric rate that drastically penalizes large residential electric consumers - with rates doubling or more for consumption sufficiently above a freeze-in-the-dark "baseline" rate. This will have to change for electric car recharging from residential power to be economically feasible.)
In some Alaskan cities the parking meters already have an outlet - for the engine's block heater. Power bill is included in the parking fee and the power goes off when the meter expires.
Saves 'em money on parking enforcement, too. Forget to feed the meter in the winter and your car won't start. B-)
For over half a century we've had the technology for such devices. Two meters, one with a clock-driven switch and a lower per-KWHr cost.
It was used by utilities to feed power to customers with electric water heaters which had two heating elements. The lower heater in the tank came on at night and heated the whole tank. The upper heater was on the regular meter and would come on any time you were about to run out of hot water. So most of your water was heated at the lower power rate but you still had hot water 24/7 if you didn't take long showers. (Or turn off the switch to disable the upper element if you'd rather run out than pay the high rate.)
Substitute an outlet for the car for the connection to the lower heater. And it's the utility's job to keep the clock synchronized with their rate times. (Nowadays they'd remote-control it.)
In my case I need a plug-in hybrid with a large range for long trips. Something with a 100 mile or so range on batteries plus a motor-generator to get it further and up mountains.
Such a vehicle would be a SINGLE vehicle replacement for my current car: Commute on batteries, start a long trip on batteries then continue with fuel, capture the energy from coming down 8,000 feet of mountains to use crossing the long flats after the foothills.
This cycle is about the same as doing a commute in the SF Bay area (on batteries) and taking vacation trips to Tahoe or Reno (on batteries plus gas, recapturing mountain altitude-energy on the return trip), or commuting in LA and vacationing in Las Vegas. The Bay Area has a very high concentration of fanatical environmentalists with large disposable incomes and an early-adopter mentality. First car company to come up with such a single-vehicle solution gets those bucks.
... the guy with the gold makes the rules. Or is it the other way around now? I sort of forget.
Depends on whether the bailout passes. If it does the guys with the rules will make the money (about 700 billion THIS time, and then more later). But it will be paper and bookkeeping entries, not gold.
Eventually, solar will work too, but since solar isn't reliable it will never be a primary power source until someone invents a magic battery.
They already invented it. It's called the "vanadium redox flow battery". (Also a good match for wind power in single-mill residential applications. Added bonus: DC voltage conversion is free, simplifying peak power tracking controllers for wind and solar.)
It's already being deployed in power-grid sized units, used as an alternative to local peaking-generation plants. (Charge during off-peak and discharge during peak. Cuts line losses, eliminates local noise and pollution, lets you power more locally than you have lines to supply during peak times, and moves power from cheap times to expensive times while losing less than the price difference to battery inefficiency.)
Home-sized and electric-vehicle-sized units will probably be available when somebody decides there's a demand, licenses the patents, does a bit of product and manufacturing engineering, and starts supplying them. If something better doesn't come along first, that is. (The new fast-charge long-life lithium ion batteries, for example, might beat them, due to simplicity and high power-to-weight ratio for vehicle applications, followed by economy-of-scale price advantages once they're adopted for buses and autos.)
Is it just me or does the wife seem really really indifferent. Here is the possbility her husband's remains have been found, and she's "monitoring the situation"?
Sounds to me like she told a newsie vulture to go away and leave her alone.
(I'm reminded of the school shooting in Oregon, where the news media descended like a cloud of buzzards and the students told 'em to go to hell - going so far as to moon them from a school bus.)
The US taps phone calls in an attempt to uncover evidence of violent crimes, to prevent them from happening, and to prosecute and jail those responsible.
And the US intelligence and law enforcement agencies - at all levels and over essentially all time - have a long track record of misusing their investigations for suppressing political enemies, both individual and movements.
This happens over and over and over. (For starters look at the FBI for a number of examples, including J. Edgar Hover's political blackmail files and the COINTELPRO program.) It normally comes to light only a decade or more later, because it happens in secrecy and is only discovered through chance or later examination of records. So it always looks like "It used to be that way but we've cleaned it up now."
You have to keep a tight rein on the government at all times because such power will ALWAYS be misused.
If the front page at Linke's lab is related to whatever inspired the article: I bet they're trying to make a microscopic fan (with an external power source) as a linear motor, not a perpetual motion machine. They're not trying to scavenge the power from the heat. They're trying to move the hot molecules around.
Such a fan could be in the form of a structure of electrodes on the top of the chip which moves the coolant by creating intermittent sloped potential wells, using the brownian motion from the heat to accomplish part of the motion of the surrounding coolant.
You'd still be providing the energy to move the molecules when you create and then dissipate the potential wells. You make a "traench with a sloped bottom", the molecules fall into it and slide to one end, you raise the bottom of the hole, lifting them, and they scatter, with some of them ending up over the NEXT trench location next time. No free lunch - you provided the energy to move them by lifting them out of the potential well when you demolished it.
I suspect that they are using brownian ratchets for the motors, rather than trying to move the molecules directly, because they found a way to implement the former efficiently.
But I'd like to see how it works and what makes it better than creating a similar array of stepwise-moving potential wells ala charge-coupled devices. More efficient? Fewer drivers? Sloped potential wells easy to make using triangular or other interesting electrode shapes? Larger structures that can be fabricated at current semiconductor feature sizes?
Main one: Google maps and the internet were used to recruit a lot of eyeballs in an attempt to find him. Many of the slashdot users were involved in either the online or physical search. So news of where he was found (and how the search missed him) is apropos.
Another: Fossett was an "air nerd" and funded a number of projects to push the envelope of aircraft, watercraft, and balloon technology. Some of these projects have been of interest to Slashdot users. He was a major customer of Rutan's Scaled Composites corporation, which later made Spaceship One.
So, this is a review of WIMAX, except it's not of WIMAX it's of something else? Can we review Wifi next to see how T-Mobile's 3G service is in my area too?
Much of the WiMax standard settled early. The physical layer was part of that. But there was a long time while some details were being hammered out.
During this time a number of vendors came to market with equipment that conformed to as much of the standard as seemed stable and took a guess at how to fill in the rest or how the arguments would settle out. Perhaps they'd be able to meet the final standard with a firmware change, perhaps they'd need to change the hardware somewhat.
This interim equipment worked about the same way, and as well in terms of coverage, noise immunity, multipath immunity/use, speed, etc., as equipment conforming to the final standard would. The downside for a customer WISP was potential inability to interoperate with standardized, cheap, multi-supplier equipment without reflashing, or possibly replacing, the early-adopter hardware - leading to higher costs and potential loss of future customers (such as those with conforming-only chipsets built into their laptops). The upside was that they could deploy their networks RIGHT AWAY, getting investment when money was available, establishing a footprint and a customer base (who would be hard to lure away with service only about equivalent), getting revenue from the expensive bandwidth licenses, and so on.
So a number of companies, such as Clearwire, chose to take the risk in order to get a jump on the competition and become established in broadband-underserved areas.
So the nearly-WiMax in question will have essentially the same properties as true WiMax, with the primary exception of interoperability with commodity WiMax hardware, making the review a useful one.
And possibly one other thing: One of the issues with the early versions of the WiMax spec was its poor handling of doppler shift, making it unsuitable for use on cars, busses, and trains - at least when moving at freeway/railroad speed toward/away from the associated base station. (I'm not sure what happened to that. I think they did NOT fix it in the final standard. I was working with a couple colleagues on a potential WiMax startup and we threw in the towel when it became apparent that you couldn't get prototype silicon or specs from the vendors unless you were already a {VERY} large company with an established relationship.)
When you pave your lot with solar panels and the car makers make an electric (or plug-in hybrid) SUV.
The area of a vehicle is a postage stamp compared to the area needed to collect the solar power to run it, even with 100% efficient panels.
(You will notice that the self-solar-powered experimental cars are built like racing bicycles with aircraft fairings and run on nearly level courses. No throwing the family and two weeks supplies and luggage into the vehicle, hooking up the camper trailer, and driving into the mountains at highway speed...)
With eight hours of sunlight per day the average house needs less than four square metres.
Figure roughly five "solar hours" per day (depending on location, climate, access to sky, etc.).
The "solar rating" is the number of hours with the panel directly facing the noonday sun it would take for the panel to receive the same sun exposure as a panel aimed at the noonday sun and not tracking it would receive during a day.
Tracking the sun improves things somewhat. But sunlight has more energy to collect at noon than when it's going through more of the atmosphere the rest of the time, so even with a tracker you can't count all hours as equivalent. Trackers cost a bunch. So (at least with current panels) it's usually a better deal to spend the money on more panels and just leave them aimed due south and tilted to the latitude (perahps with a tilt adjustment for the season.)
Eventually the Navy dribbled out enough money for the next set of lab work, which should have been done as of last month. Now we're waiting for the Navy to decide whether to release the results and/or (if it went well) give his company the two hundred million they need to build a working 100MW demo plant. That's $2/watt, much better than solar panels - and includes the one-time development costs. If it works as Bussard expected it could then be cloned for $20M/unit, or 20 cents/watt, or even better stuff designed and built.
... by putting a piece of material with nanoscopic holes in it directly on the explosive and zapping it with a laser strongly enough for it to emit light?
I'd expect there to be no problem detecting explosives that way - except for having any explosive left after you detect it. B-(
In heavily saturated markets, the wireless mic frequency may sit between a TV video signal and the same channel's audio signal.
At least until things go all digital, then audio and video are muxed into one square wave leaving no room to stick a mic signal. This exasperates the dilemma facing wireless mic operators.
And if the wireless mic being tested was sharing a channel with an ANALOG TV transmitter the test was totally bogus: The situation they tested would no longer occur after Feb '09 because there would be no more analog TV signals to confuse the whitespace device.
Interestingly, the vagueness about whether it's the username or password that's at fault is deliberate. It's to keep an attacker from being able to confirm that a guessed user ID exists and just attack its password. Having to guess both at once makes the job much harder.
Slashdot Mirror
Java is also the perfect high security language, because you can't make security holes with it. Same with C#. Same with VB.NET. We've heard this again and again from people who simply don't understand the problem.
High security languages aren't about fixing things so you CAN'T have bugs. (You always can, because you can write different programs to do different things in them, and a program that does ONE thing - even if perfectly - is horribly buggy if the intent is to do something else.)
High security languages are about making it easier to avoid bugs.
Like with clear syntax. And compiler helping out by checking everything it can possibly check. Just for starters.
(Which is not to say that ADA is such a language. B-) But pre-ANSI C, for instance, is a fine example of being simple and clear while handing you as much rope as you need to fashion your personal noose.)
Sounds like a few too many people at DARPA liked 'The Phantom Menace' a little too much.
More like "The Incredibles".
In particular: The scene where Mr Incredible is being flown to Syndrome's island-of-military-tech-fabrication in an automated plane which (for no discernible reason) lands by smoothly "flying" into the water and cruises underwater into an underground/underwater hanger which drains and fills with air.
Let's send some messages into the future, for one!
Sending messages to the future is trivial: Put 'em in a box.
If you can break the speed of light you can send 'em to the past. THAT's more useful.
Even if it only goes a little way. For instance: We could show the congresscritters that passing the bailout bill would spread the pain from the mortgage sector and crash the REST of the economy, changing 6 months of "subprime borrowers lose their houses and go back to renting" into "Stock market tanks and we have a decade or two of 'greater depression'."
Wait a minute: We already TOLD them that and they passed it ANYHOW.
Never mind.
The appellate court ... recognized that an open source licensor does gain an economic benefit from releasing open source software, ... better reputation, business opportunities, and the improvement of the released software
Another gain is access to far more software than he himself contributed. Granted this is not a contingent benefit: He'd have access to most of this whether he contributed or not (though his personal contributions may result in bug fixes to his code and/or the redirection of some projects to be more to his advantage). But the total regime is necessary to set up a "prosperity of the commons", where each contributor receives much more in benefits than his personal investment.
You need less than 15 horses of engine/genny to run even a big car continuously. You might even be able to go below that by depending on the batteries more, making sure they're charged up before hitting mountains, running the engine at rest areas, etc. An onboard engine is also very useful to avoid accidental out-of-power evenets even for a commuter/shopping car and simplify trip planning.
"Rental for long trips" is a common suggestion - and it's just not practical. Try it yourself: If you have more than one car, sell the surplus. Fill the gas tank of the remaining car with enough rocks that it only holds 60 miles worth of gas and get a storage tank to fill it every night (or stop at the gas station on the way home, but no more than once per day). Go on a 500-mile round-trip campout/weekend vacation event every month using a rental. Get back to us in a year and tell us how it went.
Maybe this will finally get people charged up about bringing back paper and pencil voting.
Power to the people!
There is enough water storage that this can be done only at offpeak times, and enough power used that doing it only at offpeak times can be used to level the power load. So that's what they do.
Well, actually that was the case up to a couple decades ago. At this point the population has expanded enough that there is about a 3:2 peak/offpeak power consumption ratio. But that WAS the case earlier and the metering for the population boom was done under regulations assuming things were balanced. (PG&E is now trying to get people to deploy a remote-controlled air conditioner dialback device to shave the peak.)
Adding plug-in cars to the mix should be enough to push the economics to result in some regulation change that (financially) encourages offpeak charging.
For everyone else, utility companies need to come up with a way to vary their rates generally according to load on the system - by introducing smarter metering systems.
They already have them. They're deployed in many areas - where the economics of providing peak/offpeak rate differentials makes sense.
At the moment providing such differentials in California does NOT make sense. Much of the electricity in California is used for moving large amounts of water around the state. There is enough water storage that this can be done only at offpeak times, and enough power used that doing it only at offpeak times can be used to level the power load. So that's what they do. Thus there isn't enough economic advantage from moving utility customer load to offpeak times to pay for a differential-billing infrastructure.
A large deployment of plug-in cars - being plugged in after the evening commute at peak load time - might overwhelm this leveling. Or encouraging them as an antipollution measure might be politically advantageous. So once they're available you can expect the utility regulations to be modified to encourage electric cars - with separate, lower, rates for charging cars and offpeak-timing built into the new infrastructure. (Also: California utilities have a sliding-scale electric rate that drastically penalizes large residential electric consumers - with rates doubling or more for consumption sufficiently above a freeze-in-the-dark "baseline" rate. This will have to change for electric car recharging from residential power to be economically feasible.)
In some Alaskan cities the parking meters already have an outlet - for the engine's block heater. Power bill is included in the parking fee and the power goes off when the meter expires.
Saves 'em money on parking enforcement, too. Forget to feed the meter in the winter and your car won't start. B-)
For over half a century we've had the technology for such devices. Two meters, one with a clock-driven switch and a lower per-KWHr cost.
It was used by utilities to feed power to customers with electric water heaters which had two heating elements. The lower heater in the tank came on at night and heated the whole tank. The upper heater was on the regular meter and would come on any time you were about to run out of hot water. So most of your water was heated at the lower power rate but you still had hot water 24/7 if you didn't take long showers. (Or turn off the switch to disable the upper element if you'd rather run out than pay the high rate.)
Substitute an outlet for the car for the connection to the lower heater. And it's the utility's job to keep the clock synchronized with their rate times. (Nowadays they'd remote-control it.)
In my case I need a plug-in hybrid with a large range for long trips. Something with a 100 mile or so range on batteries plus a motor-generator to get it further and up mountains.
Such a vehicle would be a SINGLE vehicle replacement for my current car: Commute on batteries, start a long trip on batteries then continue with fuel, capture the energy from coming down 8,000 feet of mountains to use crossing the long flats after the foothills.
This cycle is about the same as doing a commute in the SF Bay area (on batteries) and taking vacation trips to Tahoe or Reno (on batteries plus gas, recapturing mountain altitude-energy on the return trip), or commuting in LA and vacationing in Las Vegas. The Bay Area has a very high concentration of fanatical environmentalists with large disposable incomes and an early-adopter mentality. First car company to come up with such a single-vehicle solution gets those bucks.
... the guy with the gold makes the rules. Or is it the other way around now? I sort of forget.
Depends on whether the bailout passes. If it does the guys with the rules will make the money (about 700 billion THIS time, and then more later). But it will be paper and bookkeeping entries, not gold.
Eventually, solar will work too, but since solar isn't reliable it will never be a primary power source until someone invents a magic battery.
They already invented it. It's called the "vanadium redox flow battery". (Also a good match for wind power in single-mill residential applications. Added bonus: DC voltage conversion is free, simplifying peak power tracking controllers for wind and solar.)
It's already being deployed in power-grid sized units, used as an alternative to local peaking-generation plants. (Charge during off-peak and discharge during peak. Cuts line losses, eliminates local noise and pollution, lets you power more locally than you have lines to supply during peak times, and moves power from cheap times to expensive times while losing less than the price difference to battery inefficiency.)
Home-sized and electric-vehicle-sized units will probably be available when somebody decides there's a demand, licenses the patents, does a bit of product and manufacturing engineering, and starts supplying them. If something better doesn't come along first, that is. (The new fast-charge long-life lithium ion batteries, for example, might beat them, due to simplicity and high power-to-weight ratio for vehicle applications, followed by economy-of-scale price advantages once they're adopted for buses and autos.)
Is it just me or does the wife seem really really indifferent. Here is the possbility her husband's remains have been found, and she's "monitoring the situation"?
Sounds to me like she told a newsie vulture to go away and leave her alone.
(I'm reminded of the school shooting in Oregon, where the news media descended like a cloud of buzzards and the students told 'em to go to hell - going so far as to moon them from a school bus.)
The US taps phone calls in an attempt to uncover evidence of violent crimes, to prevent them from happening, and to prosecute and jail those responsible.
And the US intelligence and law enforcement agencies - at all levels and over essentially all time - have a long track record of misusing their investigations for suppressing political enemies, both individual and movements.
This happens over and over and over. (For starters look at the FBI for a number of examples, including J. Edgar Hover's political blackmail files and the COINTELPRO program.) It normally comes to light only a decade or more later, because it happens in secrecy and is only discovered through chance or later examination of records. So it always looks like "It used to be that way but we've cleaned it up now."
You have to keep a tight rein on the government at all times because such power will ALWAYS be misused.
One of my friends got her degree in Linke's lab: http://www.uoregon.edu/~linke/res_ratchet.html .
If the front page at Linke's lab is related to whatever inspired the article: I bet they're trying to make a microscopic fan (with an external power source) as a linear motor, not a perpetual motion machine. They're not trying to scavenge the power from the heat. They're trying to move the hot molecules around.
Such a fan could be in the form of a structure of electrodes on the top of the chip which moves the coolant by creating intermittent sloped potential wells, using the brownian motion from the heat to accomplish part of the motion of the surrounding coolant.
You'd still be providing the energy to move the molecules when you create and then dissipate the potential wells. You make a "traench with a sloped bottom", the molecules fall into it and slide to one end, you raise the bottom of the hole, lifting them, and they scatter, with some of them ending up over the NEXT trench location next time. No free lunch - you provided the energy to move them by lifting them out of the potential well when you demolished it.
I suspect that they are using brownian ratchets for the motors, rather than trying to move the molecules directly, because they found a way to implement the former efficiently.
But I'd like to see how it works and what makes it better than creating a similar array of stepwise-moving potential wells ala charge-coupled devices. More efficient? Fewer drivers? Sloped potential wells easy to make using triangular or other interesting electrode shapes? Larger structures that can be fabricated at current semiconductor feature sizes?
Main one: Google maps and the internet were used to recruit a lot of eyeballs in an attempt to find him. Many of the slashdot users were involved in either the online or physical search. So news of where he was found (and how the search missed him) is apropos.
Another: Fossett was an "air nerd" and funded a number of projects to push the envelope of aircraft, watercraft, and balloon technology. Some of these projects have been of interest to Slashdot users. He was a major customer of Rutan's Scaled Composites corporation, which later made Spaceship One.
I could go on.
A) When can we BUY it?
B) When can we buy it in QUANTITY for a REASONABLE PRICE?
So, this is a review of WIMAX, except it's not of WIMAX it's of something else? Can we review Wifi next to see how T-Mobile's 3G service is in my area too?
Much of the WiMax standard settled early. The physical layer was part of that. But there was a long time while some details were being hammered out.
During this time a number of vendors came to market with equipment that conformed to as much of the standard as seemed stable and took a guess at how to fill in the rest or how the arguments would settle out. Perhaps they'd be able to meet the final standard with a firmware change, perhaps they'd need to change the hardware somewhat.
This interim equipment worked about the same way, and as well in terms of coverage, noise immunity, multipath immunity/use, speed, etc., as equipment conforming to the final standard would. The downside for a customer WISP was potential inability to interoperate with standardized, cheap, multi-supplier equipment without reflashing, or possibly replacing, the early-adopter hardware - leading to higher costs and potential loss of future customers (such as those with conforming-only chipsets built into their laptops). The upside was that they could deploy their networks RIGHT AWAY, getting investment when money was available, establishing a footprint and a customer base (who would be hard to lure away with service only about equivalent), getting revenue from the expensive bandwidth licenses, and so on.
So a number of companies, such as Clearwire, chose to take the risk in order to get a jump on the competition and become established in broadband-underserved areas.
So the nearly-WiMax in question will have essentially the same properties as true WiMax, with the primary exception of interoperability with commodity WiMax hardware, making the review a useful one.
And possibly one other thing: One of the issues with the early versions of the WiMax spec was its poor handling of doppler shift, making it unsuitable for use on cars, busses, and trains - at least when moving at freeway/railroad speed toward/away from the associated base station. (I'm not sure what happened to that. I think they did NOT fix it in the final standard. I was working with a couple colleagues on a potential WiMax startup and we threw in the towel when it became apparent that you couldn't get prototype silicon or specs from the vendors unless you were already a {VERY} large company with an established relationship.)
When can I get a solar powered SUV!
When you pave your lot with solar panels and the car makers make an electric (or plug-in hybrid) SUV.
The area of a vehicle is a postage stamp compared to the area needed to collect the solar power to run it, even with 100% efficient panels.
(You will notice that the self-solar-powered experimental cars are built like racing bicycles with aircraft fairings and run on nearly level courses. No throwing the family and two weeks supplies and luggage into the vehicle, hooking up the camper trailer, and driving into the mountains at highway speed...)
With eight hours of sunlight per day the average house needs less than four square metres.
Figure roughly five "solar hours" per day (depending on location, climate, access to sky, etc.).
The "solar rating" is the number of hours with the panel directly facing the noonday sun it would take for the panel to receive the same sun exposure as a panel aimed at the noonday sun and not tracking it would receive during a day.
Tracking the sun improves things somewhat. But sunlight has more energy to collect at noon than when it's going through more of the atmosphere the rest of the time, so even with a tracker you can't count all hours as equivalent. Trackers cost a bunch. So (at least with current panels) it's usually a better deal to spend the money on more panels and just leave them aimed due south and tilted to the latitude (perahps with a tilt adjustment for the season.)
Dude, if you have fusion going, then wtf are you doing applying to google for some share of a 10MM grant?! You could have billions in VC funding.
You really missed the begging Bussard did between the time he DID have fusion going and the time he died, didn't you?
He even begged Google. They put his talk on their web site and didn't give him any bux.
= = = =
Eventually the Navy dribbled out enough money for the next set of lab work, which should have been done as of last month. Now we're waiting for the Navy to decide whether to release the results and/or (if it went well) give his company the two hundred million they need to build a working 100MW demo plant. That's $2/watt, much better than solar panels - and includes the one-time development costs. If it works as Bussard expected it could then be cloned for $20M/unit, or 20 cents/watt, or even better stuff designed and built.
... by putting a piece of material with nanoscopic holes in it directly on the explosive and zapping it with a laser strongly enough for it to emit light?
I'd expect there to be no problem detecting explosives that way - except for having any explosive left after you detect it. B-(
In heavily saturated markets, the wireless mic frequency may sit between a TV video signal and the same channel's audio signal.
At least until things go all digital, then audio and video are muxed into one square wave leaving no room to stick a mic signal. This exasperates the dilemma facing wireless mic operators.
And if the wireless mic being tested was sharing a channel with an ANALOG TV transmitter the test was totally bogus: The situation they tested would no longer occur after Feb '09 because there would be no more analog TV signals to confuse the whitespace device.
Interestingly, the vagueness about whether it's the username or password that's at fault is deliberate. It's to keep an attacker from being able to confirm that a guessed user ID exists and just attack its password. Having to guess both at once makes the job much harder.