No, energy goes up with the square of the wind speed.
Cube:
- Energy per unit of air goes with the square.
- Units of air per unit of time goes with the first power.
v^2 * v = v^3
This is a MAJOR issue when designing wind turbines. It represents an enormous amount of energy that must be dealt with or avoided in storm conditions, compared with the energy that must be efficiently captured during the bulk of their operational time.
There's PLENTY of power to be had WITHOUT disrupting the traffic airflow and canabalizing the fuel of the cars.
A freeway or toll road is a clear area and there will be plenty of winds ABOVE it that are essentially unrelated to the airflow near the ground. They're also faster - with energy going up with the CUBE of the airspeed.
By building a wind turbine that starts significantly above the ground the turbines can avoid disturbing the flow at traffic level while collecting plenty of energy.
Also: A Darrieus wants linear airflow THROUGH it. It would be great for salvaging power from crosswind, but rotten for snagging power from opposing winds on the two sides of its axes.
And they're a major hazard: Darrieus turbines fly at tip speeds of about 7 times the wind speed and their narrow blades experience drag loads about equivalent to a wind barrier with a cross-section the size of the swept area - reversing twice per rotation. This has tended to produce fatigue in their materials, sometimes ending with the mill coming apart in high winds some years after construction, with massive pieces flying around at a goodly fraction of the speed of sound.
A savonius-derived design (like the Sandia configuration) would be a better choice. Though it only collects about 2/3s as much power for a given swept area, it rotates at about an eighth the speed and has broad blades that can be much more solidly constructed.
But the cars are the wind generators, not the turbines. If a turbine generated any significant wind itself, then it wouldn't be a very effective generator, would it?
The stream of cars generates an air motion along their path. Like geese (though through a different mechanism) the leading cars reduce the amount of air drag experienced by following cars. This improves their fuel economy. (The phenomenon is even more pronounced with semi-trucks. "Drafting": following another truck closely to save even more fuel, is a common practice.
A smooth central barrier separating the two directions of traffic improves the situation by letting the two sides of the freeway have separate airstreams traveling in opposite directions. The barrier reduces energy lost to turbulence, improving the airflow.
Replacing the barrier with turbines will suck energy out of the air streams on both sides to generate electricity. The result will be to decelerate the airstreams that had been giving following vehicles an advantage.
While some of the power comes from captured crosswinds and some from capturing energy that would have been lost to turbulence anyhow, a large portion of it comes from increasing the drag on following vehicles by putting friction on the "following wind": Fuel economy for the trailing vehicles in a bunch is reduced to something near that of lone or leading vehicles.
... breaking A5/1 in a passive attack requires a significant amount of precomputation and storage that though one could buy of the self, I find it unlikely any private citizen will set up a cluster of two dozen computers to crack GSM for the fun of it, though obviously a large evil corparation or a small company would easily have the resources.
A "cluster of two dozen supercomputers"? How much is that in graphics processors on video cards?
(How about on one-generation-back video cards that the stores are selling at "get them off the shelves to make room before we have to pay a hazmat disposal fee" prices?)
Thanks. But I asked the question here deliberately, so the answers would also appear here. That saves others the effort of hunting it down individually.
Why should some putatively large percentage of the slashdot readership be required to go web-searching just because the original author and the posting editor incorrectly assumed some non-techie slang term was so well-known as to require no explanation?
Especially when the forum provides a simple mechanism DESIGNED for discussing all aspects of the original posting, of which this is one.
The power receiver would have to do a bit of voltage conversion and regulation anyhow. No reason it can't do overvoltage protection at the same time.
So why bother having a variable-output base if the receiver needs to convert anyway? Plus, what if you toss multiple devices on the pad at the same time, each with different power requirements? This is the reason I'd want one of these, to eliminate multiple chargers.
Where did it say the output was variable?
The only thing I saw in TFA was that the power was switched off from those sections of the transmitter that didn't have a load sitting on them. This is reasonable: Thin printed conductors means resistive losses. Why waste power heating the coils where nothing is sitting there to be powered?
That doesn't in any way imply that the transmitter changes its output in some way to match the voltage requirements of the ultimate load: That's the function of the antenna and associated electronics on the load.
The transmitter system, like any other transformer or transformer-analog, will change the amount of CURRENT it pulls from ITS power source, depending on how much energy is sucked out of the field it generates. But that's inherent in the physics, not a separate bunch of equipment to perform an additional function.
Uh, in the digital world, if MS gets paid...for the copy then they are the supplier.
The issue is "who is the manufacturer" - Microsoft, or the guys who built the box and loaded the software onto it.
The patents cover the final system. (That's because you can't patent the software itself, only the total system using the software.) The software is a component of the system, like a chip full of AND gates, a capacitor, or even a complex integrated circuit that was designed specifically to perform the patented functionality.
If you look at the documentation that comes with your typical chip, you'll see a manufacturers disclaimer of patent liability. Essentially "If you use this chip to do something patented, getting a license from the patent holder, fighting his suit, or paying the judgement is your problem."
Microsoft just wants to be in the same position as a chip manufacturer with respect to the computerized-device manufacturer who builds a final product that incorporates their software and somebody else's chips.
The supreme court just said that Microsoft gets the same deal as Intel, AMD, Broadcom, etc.
Hang around for a few years. Last time I looked LED assemblies are comparable in efficiency to incandescents.
In the last year or so some white-light LEDs were manufactured which slightly beat CFs - but they're still way too expensive to build into lamps.
Meanwhile the efficiency of the LEDs is improving rapidly and mass production will bring the price down. Expect to see first efficiency, then price/service-life crossovers at the fixture level some time in the next few years.
The issue is when you take 5mg of mercury and multiply it by the number of people who just toss these in landfills. Let us take a reasonably small number of say 40,000 bulbs in your local landfill that is 200,000 mg of mercury.
There was a similar issue with atomic fluorescent lighting.
Back in the post-WWII heyday of civilian atomic energy there was a design for a nuclear-powered fluorescent lamp replacement. Basically a fluorescent tube with a small amount of radioactive material in it to stimulate the fluorescent material.
External ionizing radiation is small to nil - far less than the X-rays from the era's TV sets (and that was BEFORE color TVs, with the multi-kilovolt electrons slamming into the shadow-mask just behind the screen).
No power needed: Stays lit for decades, cover it with a shield when you want darkness. Make it out of the radioactive by-products of power reactors, which otherwise would have to be disposed of.
Would have been quite safe - individually. But then somebody calculated what the radiological environment would have been in a warehouse full of 'em...
Sure, but you've got to plug each device in with a specific adaptor plug. Wireless charging would greatly increase the chance of accidentally frying your appliance(s).
Hardly:
The power receiver would have to do a bit of voltage conversion and regulation anyhow. No reason it can't do overvoltage protection at the same time.
As to different power transmitter bases: Different brands would likely use different technologies and couple less efficiently, if at all, to receivers designed for a different version. Your main risk from putting your wireless power enabled device on the wrong type of base would be having its battery run down when you thought it would be charged.
* The honeybees are stressed (diet, environment, travel, etc) and can't fight the infection * The plants the bees pollenate are favoring growth of this fungus like never before (GMO's, pesticides, fertilizers, etc) * Hives are being kept in containers/conditions that favor fungus growth * The fungus is an invasive species and hence, the bees have no/little natural defense against it
How about: * The fungus MUTATED and the bees aren't as resistant to the new mutation.
This kind of stuff happens all the time with microorganisms. With the beekeepers hauling hives all over the country this stuff can spread pretty fast.
Eventually some bees will develop resistance (or some have it already). But (as with any plague) you still need a big die-off to separate the ones that are resistant from the great mass of are very vulnerable.
And remember that with hive insects it's the hive that's the reproducing individual while the bees within it are effectively organs of one distributed body. So a lot of bees dying is very little sorting-out.
Except that a novel isn't a big chunk of data on todays networks.
What are you talking about? I'm simply using "novel" as an example, accessible to a layman, of a chunk of data bigger than a packet.
Even as ASCII text a novel is is on the order of a megabyte, which is bigger than the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) of ANY network link I'm familiar with. It's certainly larger than both the 1500 byte MTU of ethernet, which is how most hosts get to their routers and the 1490 of PPP-over-ethernet, which is the standard for many ISPs. Its orders of magnitude larger than even "jumbo packets". So it must be broken into smaller chunks for transmission.
That misses the connectionless nature of the internet.
It's more like a collection of shipping companies that let you write a delivery and return address on a package of data and then carry each package to the destination, handing it off from one company to another if necessary, until it gets there (or gets lost).
Maybe just call it "series of tubes"? Stevens is pretty layman, so I wouldn't be surprised most people can understand better with description like that.
I think criticisms of Stevens' "series of tubes" comment are a tad overblown. After all, the engineers DO use "pipes" as a term of art for the connections between routers. I suspect Stevens heard some of this talk and was trying to repeat it, but warped "pipe" into "tube" - a reasonable layman mistake.
"Informaiton superhighway" is actually not all that bad (with packets as little mail trucks carrying postcards, core routers as interchanges, and edge routers as on ramps).
Personally I like "container shipping", though:
- Data is shipped from any computer (big company) to any other.
- Data is packed into little shipping containers, called "packets", and mounted on little trucks (or whatever) for shipping.
- You write the destination and return address on each packet, so the shipper knows where to send it and who to notify if something goes awry, and the recipient knows who it's from. For some kinds of packets you also add a sending and receiving department. You may also label it with what sort of thing it contains and how to handle it: (Perishable: get it there fast or throw it out. Important: Take extra care to get it there even if it goes slower. Junkmail: Dump it before you'd dump something important.) And you label it with a maximum number of sorting centers to go through (so it won't keep getting shipped around forever if the shippers get confused about routes).
- The capacity of a packet is pretty small, so if you have a big chunk of data (like a novel, the encyclopedia brittanica, or a continuous data feed like frames of film or a magazine subscription) you have to break it up into multiple packets to ship it. You number the pieces so your big chunk, or continuous stream, can be reassembled at the other end. (Actually your shipping department does this for you: See TCP.)
- Every port on every host is a loading dock with a distinct address. (The loading docks on shipping centers have distinct addresses, too.)
- The packets are each loaded onto a distinct delivery van or container-shipping flatbed truck.
- A link between a host and a router, or between two routers, is a way to ship packets. It might be a road, or a scheduled or intermittent stream of ships, cargo planes, or trains. Roads come in various sizes, from country dirt roads (dialup modem links), through paved private roads (DSL links, T1s) to giant, multilane, interstate/autobahn arteries (fiber optic lines). It might be a conveyor belt, where you get regularly-scheduled slots, or one where you can use the next empty slot.
- IP core networks are freeways. TDM networks (digitized telephone backbones) are conveyor belts. Satellite links are regularly (or irregularly) scheduled cargo spacecraft. And so on.
- The shipping company might stuff the packet in a bag and put its own outer label on it, with the address of the next sorting center. Depends on the particular carrier's procedures.
- Core routers are sorting centers.
- Edge routers are the first/last shipping center - where the pickup/delivery vans to the customers bring the packages.
- Peering points are where two shipping companies hand off containers to each other.
- Subscriber management boxes are shipping centers where extra work is done: Inspecting the package and dumping bombs, dope, and junkmail. Collecting postage or tolls. Checking that the customer is paying his bills and not shipping too many packages at a time, etc. Sometimes this is done at the "edge" shipping center. Sometimes the company only has one or a few, and routes all the packages through one.
- Packets might be transshipped between different kinds of transport: Delivery bike (dialup), truck (IP network), bullet train (fibe
... a disabled single mother in Oregon who lives on Social Security Disability...
How is her condition relevant to the case?
She claims her disabling medical condition was worsened by the stress imposed due to the illegal actions of the RIAA's agents. As a result, rather than being able to return to work she is now worse off physically than before.
This is central to the amount of the damage awards she is seeking. Also, in at least one of her claims the dollar value of the amount of damage sought must pass a threshold for that type of claim to be litigated.
Heating something to 900 degrees also takes energy, which would have to be carbon neutral energy for the process not to be pointless.
However, counter-current heat exchangers can recycle most of the heat. Then once it's running you only have to add the heat of solution/formation to get the CO2 loose, plus makeup heat for the inefficiencies in the heat exchanger and leakage through the insulation.
(A guy once invented a low-pressure desalinization still that worked on the same principle to recycle the heat of condensation to provide heat of vaporization, in a tower configuration so gravity would provide a pressure differential between the low-pressure region where the distillation took place and the atmospheric-pressure region where the salt water was fed and the fresh water and brine extracted - thus recycyling most of the pumping power as well. You still had to add the heat of solution of salt-in-water, plus inefficiencies. Which he had to show the patent office, which initially rejected his device as a perpetual-motion variant.)
This leaves a field in which no idea is used until the patent expires, significantly slowing innovation.
I hear 'ya. (Perhaps "levels the mine field" would be a better analogy.)
I agree that it leads to serious paralysis of innovation. I'd be willing to discuss whether it's harder on little or big guys but don't have the time at the moment. But I think we're on the same page about it being another brick in the wall for everybody.
Let us hope it also leads to significant reform - and not another ratchet-click for the big guys' lock on "IP law".
But I've only got 5 acres on a valley floor. AT&T already has a cell on a nearby peak that covers this end of the valley just fine. They just don't want to spend the bux to upgrade it.
But what's the point? What's the convergance of a) a person who would trust the information in Wikipedia, with b) have access to a computer, that c) wouldn't also have net access?
Would be handy for me at my vacation/retirement house.
For about 5 years it had no network connection whatsoever. Finally needed network on a vacation so now it has a dialup line that typically connects at 28.8 kbps. That's the best available in the area other than $atellite. But using it ties up the landline.
Nearest WiMax is Clearwire, 23 mi away on the other side of the mountain - on which I can't mount a relay. The area is served only by the LAST cell in the old AT&T network, which they haven't converted from TDMA (even though they're charging me extra for refusing to convert to GSM and thus make my cell phone stop working there.)
I'm sure that there are places in the world where browsing wikipedia would be far more troublesome, expensive, or flat-out impossible.
Also, with such a small subset of articles, does this have any value beyond "gee, look what we did?"
Probably.
Of course this is just a beta. If I read things correctly 1.0 will eventually be available on DVD once they get a suitable subset of articles picked and vetted.
Ask yourself "What good was a paper Encyclopedia Britannica?" Especially when you only had part of the set...
The State does have a duty to protect its citizens...
Actually, no, it doesn't.
They'd like you to think it does. But the state's duties are things like preserving order, providing equal justice, and having a Republican form of government.
Individuals are just cannon fodder. In the mass the state MAY try to protect them in various ways, as part of preserving order or some other compelling state interest. But they have no duty to protect any particular one of them - unless they've explicitly created an extraordinary and risk for some particular one.
Don't believe it? Try suing the cops for failing to protect you against a crook - say, one you've repeatedly complained about or one you're a witness against.
(That's why it's so hard to get witnesses, especially against possible gang members, in states that restrict personal carry of guns for self-protection.)
Up to now only the big guys could enforce patents. Patents were ignored in new designs. Portfolios of patents were accumulated to use as cross-licensing bargaining chips when another big player squalked.
This innovation - financing the suit for a cut of the potential payment via a bond - lets anybody with a patent play in the enforcement game without putting the rest of their operations at risk. A little guy can enforce a patent on a big guy. The investors take the loss if he loses, a cut if he wins. Meanwhile his capital is safe and his ongoing operations (if any) can continue. Risk is assumed by people with enough money to survive losses and experience in spreading it appropriately and balancing risk and reward to achieve reasonable investment income and security.
Of course that will change the game entirely: A player financing his suit this way has little incentive to agree to a payoff in the form of a cross-license. And the less operation he has for a counter-suit to disrupt the less opportunity there is for counter-blackmail. (Limiting case is for a "patent troll", of course. But for a small enough operation taking on a big enough opponent it might be a better deal to respond to a counter-claim by folding the actual operation and living off the proceeds of the patent suit.)
The result, of course, is that a large number of patents held by little guys that are being blatantly infringed by big guys will now become enforcible and trigger an explosion of such suits.
Possible fallout:
- The big guys have to pay all the little guys for all the patents they've been blatantly infringing for years.
- Companies (ESPECIALLY large ones) will have to start paying attention to patented prior art.
- IP law gets rewritten to abort this scenario.
All of these - except SOME forms of the last - seem like they might end up being a good deal for the little guys.
Meanwhile the little guys have shallow pockets and aren't at significantly more risk from this than they already were from the big guys and the existing patent trolls.
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No, energy goes up with the square of the wind speed.
Cube:
- Energy per unit of air goes with the square.
- Units of air per unit of time goes with the first power.
v^2 * v = v^3
This is a MAJOR issue when designing wind turbines. It represents an enormous amount of energy that must be dealt with or avoided in storm conditions, compared with the energy that must be efficiently captured during the bulk of their operational time.
By the way:
There's PLENTY of power to be had WITHOUT disrupting the traffic airflow and canabalizing the fuel of the cars.
A freeway or toll road is a clear area and there will be plenty of winds ABOVE it that are essentially unrelated to the airflow near the ground. They're also faster - with energy going up with the CUBE of the airspeed.
By building a wind turbine that starts significantly above the ground the turbines can avoid disturbing the flow at traffic level while collecting plenty of energy.
Also: A Darrieus wants linear airflow THROUGH it. It would be great for salvaging power from crosswind, but rotten for snagging power from opposing winds on the two sides of its axes.
And they're a major hazard: Darrieus turbines fly at tip speeds of about 7 times the wind speed and their narrow blades experience drag loads about equivalent to a wind barrier with a cross-section the size of the swept area - reversing twice per rotation. This has tended to produce fatigue in their materials, sometimes ending with the mill coming apart in high winds some years after construction, with massive pieces flying around at a goodly fraction of the speed of sound.
A savonius-derived design (like the Sandia configuration) would be a better choice. Though it only collects about 2/3s as much power for a given swept area, it rotates at about an eighth the speed and has broad blades that can be much more solidly constructed.
But the cars are the wind generators, not the turbines. If a turbine generated any significant wind itself, then it wouldn't be a very effective generator, would it?
The stream of cars generates an air motion along their path. Like geese (though through a different mechanism) the leading cars reduce the amount of air drag experienced by following cars. This improves their fuel economy. (The phenomenon is even more pronounced with semi-trucks. "Drafting": following another truck closely to save even more fuel, is a common practice.
A smooth central barrier separating the two directions of traffic improves the situation by letting the two sides of the freeway have separate airstreams traveling in opposite directions. The barrier reduces energy lost to turbulence, improving the airflow.
Replacing the barrier with turbines will suck energy out of the air streams on both sides to generate electricity. The result will be to decelerate the airstreams that had been giving following vehicles an advantage.
While some of the power comes from captured crosswinds and some from capturing energy that would have been lost to turbulence anyhow, a large portion of it comes from increasing the drag on following vehicles by putting friction on the "following wind": Fuel economy for the trailing vehicles in a bunch is reduced to something near that of lone or leading vehicles.
... breaking A5/1 in a passive attack requires a significant amount of precomputation and storage that though one could buy of the self, I find it unlikely any private citizen will set up a cluster of two dozen computers to crack GSM for the fun of it, though obviously a large evil corparation or a small company would easily have the resources.
A "cluster of two dozen supercomputers"? How much is that in graphics processors on video cards?
(How about on one-generation-back video cards that the stores are selling at "get them off the shelves to make room before we have to pay a hazmat disposal fee" prices?)
Here's another term you should learn: google.
Thanks. But I asked the question here deliberately, so the answers would also appear here. That saves others the effort of hunting it down individually.
Why should some putatively large percentage of the slashdot readership be required to go web-searching just because the original author and the posting editor incorrectly assumed some non-techie slang term was so well-known as to require no explanation?
Especially when the forum provides a simple mechanism DESIGNED for discussing all aspects of the original posting, of which this is one.
The power receiver would have to do a bit of voltage conversion and regulation anyhow. No reason it can't do overvoltage protection at the same time.
So why bother having a variable-output base if the receiver needs to convert anyway? Plus, what if you toss multiple devices on the pad at the same time, each with different power requirements? This is the reason I'd want one of these, to eliminate multiple chargers.
Where did it say the output was variable?
The only thing I saw in TFA was that the power was switched off from those sections of the transmitter that didn't have a load sitting on them. This is reasonable: Thin printed conductors means resistive losses. Why waste power heating the coils where nothing is sitting there to be powered?
That doesn't in any way imply that the transmitter changes its output in some way to match the voltage requirements of the ultimate load: That's the function of the antenna and associated electronics on the load.
The transmitter system, like any other transformer or transformer-analog, will change the amount of CURRENT it pulls from ITS power source, depending on how much energy is sucked out of the field it generates. But that's inherent in the physics, not a separate bunch of equipment to perform an additional function.
Uh, in the digital world, if MS gets paid ...for the copy then they are the supplier.
The issue is "who is the manufacturer" - Microsoft, or the guys who built the box and loaded the software onto it.
The patents cover the final system. (That's because you can't patent the software itself, only the total system using the software.) The software is a component of the system, like a chip full of AND gates, a capacitor, or even a complex integrated circuit that was designed specifically to perform the patented functionality.
If you look at the documentation that comes with your typical chip, you'll see a manufacturers disclaimer of patent liability. Essentially "If you use this chip to do something patented, getting a license from the patent holder, fighting his suit, or paying the judgement is your problem."
Microsoft just wants to be in the same position as a chip manufacturer with respect to the computerized-device manufacturer who builds a final product that incorporates their software and somebody else's chips.
The supreme court just said that Microsoft gets the same deal as Intel, AMD, Broadcom, etc.
I want good environmental LED lights dag nabbit.
Hang around for a few years. Last time I looked LED assemblies are comparable in efficiency to incandescents.
In the last year or so some white-light LEDs were manufactured which slightly beat CFs - but they're still way too expensive to build into lamps.
Meanwhile the efficiency of the LEDs is improving rapidly and mass production will bring the price down. Expect to see first efficiency, then price/service-life crossovers at the fixture level some time in the next few years.
The issue is when you take 5mg of mercury and multiply it by the number of people who just toss these in landfills. Let us take a reasonably small number of say 40,000 bulbs in your local landfill that is 200,000 mg of mercury.
...
There was a similar issue with atomic fluorescent lighting.
Back in the post-WWII heyday of civilian atomic energy there was a design for a nuclear-powered fluorescent lamp replacement. Basically a fluorescent tube with a small amount of radioactive material in it to stimulate the fluorescent material.
External ionizing radiation is small to nil - far less than the X-rays from the era's TV sets (and that was BEFORE color TVs, with the multi-kilovolt electrons slamming into the shadow-mask just behind the screen).
No power needed: Stays lit for decades, cover it with a shield when you want darkness. Make it out of the radioactive by-products of power reactors, which otherwise would have to be disposed of.
Would have been quite safe - individually. But then somebody calculated what the radiological environment would have been in a warehouse full of 'em
Sure, but you've got to plug each device in with a specific adaptor plug. Wireless charging would greatly increase the chance of accidentally frying your appliance(s).
Hardly:
The power receiver would have to do a bit of voltage conversion and regulation anyhow. No reason it can't do overvoltage protection at the same time.
As to different power transmitter bases: Different brands would likely use different technologies and couple less efficiently, if at all, to receivers designed for a different version. Your main risk from putting your wireless power enabled device on the wrong type of base would be having its battery run down when you thought it would be charged.
What the heck does "Jumped the Shark" mean? This is the first time I have heard this phrase.
If we're going to have a sensible discussion we need to understand the terms - especially those used in the original question that kicked it off.
* The honeybees are stressed (diet, environment, travel, etc) and can't fight the infection
* The plants the bees pollenate are favoring growth of this fungus like never before (GMO's, pesticides, fertilizers, etc)
* Hives are being kept in containers/conditions that favor fungus growth
* The fungus is an invasive species and hence, the bees have no/little natural defense against it
How about:
* The fungus MUTATED and the bees aren't as resistant to the new mutation.
This kind of stuff happens all the time with microorganisms. With the beekeepers hauling hives all over the country this stuff can spread pretty fast.
Eventually some bees will develop resistance (or some have it already). But (as with any plague) you still need a big die-off to separate the ones that are resistant from the great mass of are very vulnerable.
And remember that with hive insects it's the hive that's the reproducing individual while the bees within it are effectively organs of one distributed body. So a lot of bees dying is very little sorting-out.
How so? When people talk to each other (when they 'network'), it's a connectionless activity.
I guess I should have quoted the parent, which was talking specifically about the telephone network.
Except that a novel isn't a big chunk of data on todays networks.
What are you talking about? I'm simply using "novel" as an example, accessible to a layman, of a chunk of data bigger than a packet.
Even as ASCII text a novel is is on the order of a megabyte, which is bigger than the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) of ANY network link I'm familiar with. It's certainly larger than both the 1500 byte MTU of ethernet, which is how most hosts get to their routers and the 1490 of PPP-over-ethernet, which is the standard for many ISPs. Its orders of magnitude larger than even "jumbo packets". So it must be broken into smaller chunks for transmission.
That misses the connectionless nature of the internet.
It's more like a collection of shipping companies that let you write a delivery and return address on a package of data and then carry each package to the destination, handing it off from one company to another if necessary, until it gets there (or gets lost).
Maybe just call it "series of tubes"? Stevens is pretty layman, so I wouldn't be surprised most people can understand better with description like that.
I think criticisms of Stevens' "series of tubes" comment are a tad overblown. After all, the engineers DO use "pipes" as a term of art for the connections between routers. I suspect Stevens heard some of this talk and was trying to repeat it, but warped "pipe" into "tube" - a reasonable layman mistake.
"Informaiton superhighway" is actually not all that bad (with packets as little mail trucks carrying postcards, core routers as interchanges, and edge routers as on ramps).
Personally I like "container shipping", though:
- Data is shipped from any computer (big company) to any other.
- Data is packed into little shipping containers, called "packets", and mounted on little trucks (or whatever) for shipping.
- You write the destination and return address on each packet, so the shipper knows where to send it and who to notify if something goes awry, and the recipient knows who it's from. For some kinds of packets you also add a sending and receiving department. You may also label it with what sort of thing it contains and how to handle it: (Perishable: get it there fast or throw it out. Important: Take extra care to get it there even if it goes slower. Junkmail: Dump it before you'd dump something important.) And you label it with a maximum number of sorting centers to go through (so it won't keep getting shipped around forever if the shippers get confused about routes).
- The capacity of a packet is pretty small, so if you have a big chunk of data (like a novel, the encyclopedia brittanica, or a continuous data feed like frames of film or a magazine subscription) you have to break it up into multiple packets to ship it. You number the pieces so your big chunk, or continuous stream, can be reassembled at the other end. (Actually your shipping department does this for you: See TCP.)
- Every port on every host is a loading dock with a distinct address. (The loading docks on shipping centers have distinct addresses, too.)
- The packets are each loaded onto a distinct delivery van or container-shipping flatbed truck.
- A link between a host and a router, or between two routers, is a way to ship packets. It might be a road, or a scheduled or intermittent stream of ships, cargo planes, or trains. Roads come in various sizes, from country dirt roads (dialup modem links), through paved private roads (DSL links, T1s) to giant, multilane, interstate/autobahn arteries (fiber optic lines). It might be a conveyor belt, where you get regularly-scheduled slots, or one where you can use the next empty slot.
- IP core networks are freeways. TDM networks (digitized telephone backbones) are conveyor belts. Satellite links are regularly (or irregularly) scheduled cargo spacecraft. And so on.
- The shipping company might stuff the packet in a bag and put its own outer label on it, with the address of the next sorting center. Depends on the particular carrier's procedures.
- Core routers are sorting centers.
- Edge routers are the first/last shipping center - where the pickup/delivery vans to the customers bring the packages.
- Peering points are where two shipping companies hand off containers to each other.
- Subscriber management boxes are shipping centers where extra work is done: Inspecting the package and dumping bombs, dope, and junkmail. Collecting postage or tolls. Checking that the customer is paying his bills and not shipping too many packages at a time, etc. Sometimes this is done at the "edge" shipping center. Sometimes the company only has one or a few, and routes all the packages through one.
- Packets might be transshipped between different kinds of transport: Delivery bike (dialup), truck (IP network), bullet train (fibe
How is her condition relevant to the case?
She claims her disabling medical condition was worsened by the stress imposed due to the illegal actions of the RIAA's agents. As a result, rather than being able to return to work she is now worse off physically than before.
This is central to the amount of the damage awards she is seeking. Also, in at least one of her claims the dollar value of the amount of damage sought must pass a threshold for that type of claim to be litigated.
Heating something to 900 degrees also takes energy, which would have to be carbon neutral energy for the process not to be pointless.
However, counter-current heat exchangers can recycle most of the heat. Then once it's running you only have to add the heat of solution/formation to get the CO2 loose, plus makeup heat for the inefficiencies in the heat exchanger and leakage through the insulation.
(A guy once invented a low-pressure desalinization still that worked on the same principle to recycle the heat of condensation to provide heat of vaporization, in a tower configuration so gravity would provide a pressure differential between the low-pressure region where the distillation took place and the atmospheric-pressure region where the salt water was fed and the fresh water and brine extracted - thus recycyling most of the pumping power as well. You still had to add the heat of solution of salt-in-water, plus inefficiencies. Which he had to show the patent office, which initially rejected his device as a perpetual-motion variant.)
It will be interesting to see how much of its leg must be knawed off.
This leaves a field in which no idea is used until the patent expires, significantly slowing innovation.
I hear 'ya. (Perhaps "levels the mine field" would be a better analogy.)
I agree that it leads to serious paralysis of innovation. I'd be willing to discuss whether it's harder on little or big guys but don't have the time at the moment. But I think we're on the same page about it being another brick in the wall for everybody.
Let us hope it also leads to significant reform - and not another ratchet-click for the big guys' lock on "IP law".
Nice idea.
But I've only got 5 acres on a valley floor. AT&T already has a cell on a nearby peak that covers this end of the valley just fine. They just don't want to spend the bux to upgrade it.
Someone said Moglen is the Thomas Jefferson of the information age, and I'm inclined to agree.
What does that make RMS then, Thomas Paine?
Sounds about right, actually.
But what's the point? What's the convergance of a) a person who would trust the information in Wikipedia, with b) have access to a computer, that c) wouldn't also have net access?
Would be handy for me at my vacation/retirement house.
For about 5 years it had no network connection whatsoever. Finally needed network on a vacation so now it has a dialup line that typically connects at 28.8 kbps. That's the best available in the area other than $atellite. But using it ties up the landline.
Nearest WiMax is Clearwire, 23 mi away on the other side of the mountain - on which I can't mount a relay. The area is served only by the LAST cell in the old AT&T network, which they haven't converted from TDMA (even though they're charging me extra for refusing to convert to GSM and thus make my cell phone stop working there.)
I'm sure that there are places in the world where browsing wikipedia would be far more troublesome, expensive, or flat-out impossible.
Also, with such a small subset of articles, does this have any value beyond "gee, look what we did?"
Probably.
Of course this is just a beta. If I read things correctly 1.0 will eventually be available on DVD once they get a suitable subset of articles picked and vetted.
Ask yourself "What good was a paper Encyclopedia Britannica?" Especially when you only had part of the set...
The State does have a duty to protect its citizens...
Actually, no, it doesn't.
They'd like you to think it does. But the state's duties are things like preserving order, providing equal justice, and having a Republican form of government.
Individuals are just cannon fodder. In the mass the state MAY try to protect them in various ways, as part of preserving order or some other compelling state interest. But they have no duty to protect any particular one of them - unless they've explicitly created an extraordinary and risk for some particular one.
Don't believe it? Try suing the cops for failing to protect you against a crook - say, one you've repeatedly complained about or one you're a witness against.
(That's why it's so hard to get witnesses, especially against possible gang members, in states that restrict personal carry of guns for self-protection.)
Up to now only the big guys could enforce patents. Patents were ignored in new designs. Portfolios of patents were accumulated to use as cross-licensing bargaining chips when another big player squalked.
This innovation - financing the suit for a cut of the potential payment via a bond - lets anybody with a patent play in the enforcement game without putting the rest of their operations at risk. A little guy can enforce a patent on a big guy. The investors take the loss if he loses, a cut if he wins. Meanwhile his capital is safe and his ongoing operations (if any) can continue. Risk is assumed by people with enough money to survive losses and experience in spreading it appropriately and balancing risk and reward to achieve reasonable investment income and security.
Of course that will change the game entirely: A player financing his suit this way has little incentive to agree to a payoff in the form of a cross-license. And the less operation he has for a counter-suit to disrupt the less opportunity there is for counter-blackmail. (Limiting case is for a "patent troll", of course. But for a small enough operation taking on a big enough opponent it might be a better deal to respond to a counter-claim by folding the actual operation and living off the proceeds of the patent suit.)
The result, of course, is that a large number of patents held by little guys that are being blatantly infringed by big guys will now become enforcible and trigger an explosion of such suits.
Possible fallout:
- The big guys have to pay all the little guys for all the patents they've been blatantly infringing for years.
- Companies (ESPECIALLY large ones) will have to start paying attention to patented prior art.
- IP law gets rewritten to abort this scenario.
All of these - except SOME forms of the last - seem like they might end up being a good deal for the little guys.
Meanwhile the little guys have shallow pockets and aren't at significantly more risk from this than they already were from the big guys and the existing patent trolls.