A good programmer (especially a consultant) comes to the job with maybe HALF the knowlege needed to complete it - plus the ability to quickly learn the rest.
Actually it's more like 85%. But you get the idea. B-)
EGO -... noone will admit that what they wrote thet were learning while they were coding it, etc.
I'll freely admit that. I built a carreer on it.
A programmer is a particular sort of lazy person: One who will spend six hours doing something right ONCE rather than fifteen minutes doing it twice. As such he is usually working on something new - and bored stiff if he's writing-from-scratch a third version of something he's done before. Further: Having him do the same thing over is a horrendous waste of resources. He's already done it: Take that code, make minor tweaks if necessary to get it to work in the new context, and use that.
So he's always working on something that's at least partially new to him.
A good programmer (especially a consultant) comes to the job with maybe HALF the knowlege needed to complete it - plus the ability to quickly learn the rest.
By the way: Though the example was process automation, the same applies to all fields of software application. The drastically lowered cost of creating a complex computation was enabling - allowing things to be done that were too complex, and thus too costly, to do by non-software-driven methods.
When the blueprint IS the product it's possible to do far more than when it's a first step in an expensive process.
What makes software so hard? The enormous complexity of the software constructions.
Why is it so complex? Because it's so EASY to build it.
Example: Pre-computers, the moment-to-moment computations necessary to run an automobile engine were performed by mechanical devices, mainly the distributor and carburator. Every term in every computation was manufactured as a number of physical components, several of which are moving parts.
For instance: The RPM input to the spark advance was computed by two weights on pivots, with springs and stops, rotating a sleeve on a shaft. The shaft was driven by the camshft through a gear and the sleeve carried the cam driving the contact points or (in an electronic ignition) the starwheel that passed the sensor coil. Adding this computation (compared to no RMP spark advance) added five moving and four stationary parts, to be assembeled, and a test stand the volume of an office cube to test the result, and allow a worker to adjust the constants by bending the spring supports with a screwdiver.
In software this computation can be done by PART of ONE line of code. (In real engine controls it's actually done by more - mainly so the computation can be more complex and thus better approximate ideal running conditions.)
Software changed the game completely: When adding a piece of a compuation requires a moment of thought, a minute with a text editor, and issuing a compile command (plus whatever testing is necessary to convince yourself you got it right), rather than months of an engineer's and draftsman's time, manufacuture of dies, lab work to check the result, repeat through three layers of departments (to prove it can be done, to prove it can be done reliably, and to prove it can be manufactured affordablly), the amount of work and time to implement one bit of complexity reduced drastically.
The result was that the amount of complexity that can be afforded rose in proportion. Given that the proportion was hysterically large, the amount of complexity handled by each person became enormous.
Unfortunately, programming is NOT formulaic. Portions are - and as they are identified they are rendered into algorithms and software is written to perform them. The result is that the part people work on is ALWAYS the part that is "fuzzy" and difficult to formalize.
Programming consists of rendering a set of requirements into a correct specification for meeting the requirements. (The reset is automated.) This is not an easy task - and it gets more difficult with increasing complexity of function. Unfortunately, methodologies for performing it have remained in a catch-up game: The better the tools, the more complexity a worker can handle. The more he can handle, the more he is assigned.
To quote McClary's Third Law of Computer Technology: Software complexity expands to exceed the capability of any software development methodology.
I was under the impression that student work is patentable and copyrightable (and auto-copyrighted) by the STUDENT, as inventor and author respectively.
If the student does the work as part of a funded project the terms of the funding may result in assignment of the patent rights. Similarly, if he is employed by the university and develops an invention on paid time and/or with school equipment, this may also give the school a claim. And if the student develops an invention at school he may solicit and receive help from others (notably professors) that would make them co-inventors.
I strongly doubt that distributing the firmware code to owners of the corresponding devices can properly be seen as distribution against the permission of the copyright holder. It may even not be considered to be "distribution" in the sense of the IP laws....
I am more uncertain about the inclusion of the firmware blob in e.g. Linux distributions. Instead linux distributions could be equipped with software that automatically searches the net for the binary blob.
Perhaps including the firmware blob in a driver that checks for the manufacturer code and refuses to load the blob from a particular manufacturer in other manufacturer's products would be arguably proper under the "sold the rights" argument?
can still be exposed to prions from external Check out protein folding and how one prion causes other proteins to fold wrong. sources and continue to produce prions.
Prions don't just misfold ANY old protein. They cause a PARTICLUAR protien to fold wrong. These cows have been altered so they don't MAKE that protein.
Don't they usually start out without prions? You have to infect them.
That depends on whether you define "prion" to mean "the prion protien" or "the prion protien folded into the pathological shape".
These are cows with the prion protien gene "knocked out" so the protien is not produced. They are thus "prion free" by the first definition.
They will also remain prion free (except for the introduced prions) by the second definition as well, since they won't amplify the prions by folding more instances of the protein into the same shape.
I went cow-shopping and I remember prions were strictly an option.
Check the basic option package - it's there as "protein feed suplement".
I miss read the title the first time, the joke being I do heat my office with computers. I have three of them in the room and the 4800 dual core puts out a fair amount of heat on it's own keeping it toasty compared to the rest of the house....
I did the same "back in the day" when I got my first personal Unix box - an Altos 68000 - one of crowd of generic Motorols 60x0 unix boxes that came out before PCs squeezed them out. With a meg of RAM and an 8" hard drive it put out enough heat to keep the computer room and the adjacent living room toasty in a Michigan winter.
Of course this was an issue in a Michigan summer. Fortunately the 4" fan blew OUTWARD at the rear of the box. I modified a drier vent to mount over the fan and ran a 4" drier hose to a similar vent mounted in an insert in the window. Then the heat was exhuseted outdoors. B-)
Ops/watt were a lot fewer in those days. But the dissipation per room without cooling and power available per outlet is still the same. It's interesting that we now have enough uses for crunch that the old room-heat issue is still (or once again) with us.
From what I understand, cellphones work by associating themselves with "cells" of coverage. The closer they are, the less power they use, and so on. When the user moves cells, the network switches them over to the new cell.
Right.
From the air, a cellphone will see many, many different cells as being equally good.
The issue is partly that. But it's mainly the inverse: Many cells see the phone as a strong signal.
On the ground it would be talking through and to some extent around obstructions (i.e. by bouncing off a partially reflecting wall), sending a signal propagating near the ground or som other resistive medium (and thus penetrating it and being partially absorbed), combing direct signals with delayed reflections, and so on - all of which quickly reduce the signal seen by towers and/or degrade it toward being background noise.
In the air it has a clear line-of-sight to many towers, so the signal is strong at them. And over the considerable distance the additional distance to the next tower makes very little inverse-square-law drop in the signal at the further tower. So with its transmitter turned up to hit the best tower it is heard by may other near-best towers - which must allocate a channel/time-slot for its interference or otherwise have their received signals degraded.
It's like the way one on-the-ground cellphone might be talking to one tower but chewing up resources on maybe two others. But from the air it's a lot more than two that are affected.
It will also have to switch across cells much faster than normal.
It may. But that's mitigated in some systems by a handoff scheme where the phone doesn't get handed off until its signal is degrading.
But in time-division schemes the motion of the phone relative to the cell means the cell has to keep adjusting which time slot the phone transmits in, which has much the same effect. And its motion from cell to cell also means all the cells its starting to affect have to adjust the rest of their herds of operating phones to work around its presence - and keep adjusting as it keeps moving rapidly and thus requires different workarounds.
This could be mitigated by adding an upward-facing antenna to a sparse subset of the cells. Then these would be the "best" cells as seen by an airborne phone. The link there would also be stronger so the phone's transmitter could be turned down to the point that it doesn't bother the ground-aimed antennas of the nearby cells. (Those farther away would have it "in their sights" - but with the signal attenuated by the great distance.)
Perhaps, if the regulators allow cellphone use in aircraft (without an in-aircraft cell), the cellphone network operators will do exactly that.
You should have mentioned electric hot water heaters and air conditioning.
I did. Water heaters are an instance of "other heating appliances" (though I didn't explicitly mention them).
Air conditioners are explicitly discussed under "motors", along with heat pumps for heating (which come in less expensive than resistive hearters but {unless the outdoor temperature is merely cool} more expensive than fuel heating).
Only if you're considering just the local_electricity->heat step.
If you include the fuel->electricity steps it's truly horrible compared to fuel->heat. (Even if you neglect the remote->local step for the electricity).
That fuel->electricity step includes a carnot-cycle heat engine, which throws away a BUNCH of the energy as low-grade heat in the local heat dump. You'd rather you got ALL the heat energy from that fuel (minus maybe a bit up a chimbney) turned into HEAT in YOUR HOUSE - and thus burn a bunch less fuel.
This is just another example of the government protecting monopolies.... We'd all be better off if the FCC would just allow some good old fashioned competition.
If you think the FCC is a pro-monopoly bottleneck NOW, just WAIT until the Democrats rehack it, the next time they have a president and a congressional majority all at once.
The FCC under the recent regimes has been solidly behind keeping hands off the Internet, and keeping everybody ELSE's hands off it, too. To the point of suing to keep both the Federal court and state regulators' hands off. This is expected to change. (D's have a history of trying to control it.)
AT&T is deploying IPTV as a data service, as part of their (unregulated) internet service, and the rest of the ISPs are doing the same. IP networking is a "disruptive technology", breaking the locks of the air-broadcast, wired-broadcast, and satelite-broadcast carriers on video distribution, and opening it, not just to ISPs, but also to all who have a broadband connection.
Letting regulators at all governmental levels get their hands on networking content because it can emulate broadcast/cable services would spike this big time. So far the FCC has said a resounding "NO!" and wielded the power to make it stick. It's essentially the only regulatory body to actually defend openness (rather than using its power to increase its control). It's doing EXACTLY what you're asking for - against opposition by corportations and governmental organizations at all levels.
The hierarchy of power consumption is:
- Electric heating (resistive heating: Driers, room heaters, heating appliances.)
- Motors
- Lighting
- Consumer electronics.
Electric heating (by resisitance heaters) consumes an ENORMOUS amount of power.
Switching from electric to gas drying (so the electric load is just the motor) will cause a big savings in the electric bill, while the gas bill won't go up anywhere neer enough to compensate. Ditto (even more so) if the house has electric heat.
Same is true of the other heating appliances (hair driers, toasters, stoves and ovens, etc.) But (except for ovens if you do a LOT of baking) they tend to only run a short time so it doesn't make all THAT much difference on your bill.
Motors are the next big load. Air conditioners are the worst, due to the heat pump. But moving anything around (even air) is costly. One horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 KW (and motors can be very efficient - 80s to 90s percent - but they're still not lossless). (Nevertheless, using a heat-pump for HEATING - especially if the weather outside is above freezing or so - uses a lot less power than resistive heating. But except for merely cool days it's still more expensive than gas.)
Lighting is next. Incandescents are especially hot heaters, and the light is the visible part of the hot-wire glow. Much more is heat. Switch to fluorescents (compact or otherwise) and you get about four times as much light per watt. (LEDs may beat that in a few years but right now they're trailing fluorescents.)
Consumer electronics is 'way down there - because it's improved a lot and because there has been serious effort to increase its efficiency and reduce its losses - as well as to reduce localized heating of the components. (When I got my first linux box it was a good space heater - and most of that was the disk drive. Nowdays things take a LOT less power.) With cheap semiconductors modern power supplies are now highly-efficient switching-mode devices, which also helps a lot.
(Other appliances have also been re-engineered for efficiency, so switching to a modern large appliance may save you significant power and/or fuel. But electronics has had a much bigger improvement.)
Under The Real ID Act, though, the state ID authority (usually the DMV) will be required not only to examine your birth certificate and social security card, but also to scan and create digital copies of them in their system, as well as collecting further information on their forms.
So here's another shoe to drop:
This is exactly the information necessary to use the IDs and related databases as the foundation of a system to insure that:
- Voters are real people.
- Voters are qualified to vote, i.e.:
- Are citizens (in states that don't explicitly permit non-citizens to vote)
- Are of age to vote.
- Are residents of the place where they vote.
- Are not barred from voting (for instance: By felony convictions in states where felons aren't allowed to vote)
- Voters are only registered once, in one place.
- Voters vote no more than once.
Half of vote fraud is bogus counting (such as the black-box voting flap). The other half is bogus voters (such as the cemetary vote, the virtual voters created en masse by the combination of motor-voter "vote drives" with no-excuse absentee voting, illegal alien signups, multiple registration, and so on.)
The data collected for this national I.D. card is exactly what's needed to purge the voting rolls of fake voters. Once it's collected and federalized the Fed can check it for authenticity and lack of duplication. Then:
- include a "where registered" field in the database entry for each federal I.D. record
- open that field for checking and update by voter registration clerks, and
- add a federal mandate that the federal I.D. number be used, and checked, for registration for federal elections, and you've got a solution for the second class of ballot-box stuffing (modulo corruption in THIS system, which could be construed to be a "security" crime as well as vote fraud).
So if you want to oppose this, bring up this "benefit". You'll immediately have a rush of machine politicians to vote against the whole I.D. scheme. B-)
You'll have to ask the firemen who took it to the station.
(We were considering it, but it was iffy whether it met the wife's food rules. Then the firemen expressed an interest and we thought that, after risking their lives on downed power lines while waiting for PG&E to respond, they deserved it.)
You haven't seen Mythbusters Episode #67 "Firearms Folklore" yet have you?:)
No, but thanks for the reference.
My current sig is in response to the bogus anti-gun argument that arming yourself for self-defense is useless because the bad guys will just get bigger guns. (I coined it, launched it here, and will be interested to see if it becomes a soundbite in the gun debate.)
Batteries are neither cheap or clean: they contain lots of toxic chemicals, have a limited life time, and due to Ohm law, can only give back only half of the energy that was put into them.
You're confusing two issues: Maximum POWER versus maximum ENERGY when pulling power from a voltage source through a fixed resistance.
If you want the maximum amount of POWER (rate of energy delivery) and the resistance is fixed, you get it when half the power is delivered to your load and half wasted in the series resistance. Efficiency is 50%. (This assumes ideal fixed voltage source and resistance - a bad assumption when loading a battery with a near-short.)
If you want the maximum ENERGY from your battery you pull much more slowly. Efficiency would approach 100% as discharge time approaches "forever" (though a real battery has leakage and a real load usually requires more than a trickle, so you waste a few percent to do things at practical rates and power levels).
Same is true for the power grid. The system of generators, transmission lines, transformers, and miscelaney has overall efficiency far above 50%. You don't put so little copper in your wires that you're loading it at the peak of the power curve and half is wasted heating (and melting!) the system. You put in a BUNCH MORE and never draw power anywhere near the maximum you could draw.
Example: My neighborhood has something like 50 houses served by a "bank" of three paralleled "pole pig" transformers on one edge of a primary delta - call it 12 KV. Rule of thumb for homes is they draw about a KW each, so call it 50 KW and a tad over 4 amps in the primary wiring. It's fed with bare #10 copper, which would easily carry 30A embedded in insulation in a wall without noticable warming.
A couple years ago a goose flew into the primary wiring. The current melted the #20 in two places in less than a second and draped the primary wires all over the street. That means the goose was getting FAR over 30A. Let's be conservative and say it was 300A and dragged the voltage across the goose (and the arc to it) down to zero, which would put the half-power point at 150A and 4 KV - 600 KW. Normal load current would be about 2.7% of that, and resistive losses in the grid (as a percentage of power delivered) would be about 1.3%.
Here are some Google ads at the site that seem full of fraud: "Sponsored Links (Ads by Google) -- The Next Oil Boom... Free Top Energy Profits..." An honest organization would never allow advertising like that, I think.
If they are using Google to sell ads they don't control the ads. Their site relates to energy issues, so ads for energy-related scams will match in the placement algorithms.
Why would VMware, XenSource etc. want to go after a market which will be difficult to support, and not provide them with the money they need to keep going?
Because as long as they don't support video hardware there will be extra pressure for both other vendors and open source authors to attempt it.
If an open source project does it and gets it right, when the closed source vendors haven't got it, the open soucre project is likely to be adopted, not just by home users, but by commercial users who want to efficiently virtualize the video (along with others who just want another solution). Then the closed-source vendors' market starts to erode.
Unlike the desktop market (where MS' plethora of integrated applications makes displacing them difficult), virtualization tools have a narrow and well-defined scope. That makes a small and well-defined target for authors of competing products/projects.
That's right. But consider: if it can be fully explained by the classical physics approximations, then by the laws of causal closure included there we cannot possibly have free will...
Doesn't say that to me...... there's nothing [in classical mechanics] like the impossible gap [in quantum mechanics] which the classical approximations can't resolve.
Quite the contrary: You can hide free will just as easily behind the chaos barriers of catastrophy theory as you can behind quantum mechanical uncertainty. They're both unpredictable by measurement and calculation.
(And what makes you think that our inability to predict a wave-function collaps makes quantum-mechanical uncertainty is any less predetermined than classical mechanics?)... you're discussing what it would take to model consciousness, rather than what it would take to instantiate it...
I think this is our most fundamental disconnect: You're making a distinction here that I'm not. When I say "model" I'm talking about instantiation, not prediction.
In particular, I'm talking about whether it's possible to create a valid instance of a human-style intelligence, absent growing it in a human body, rather than something else that qualifies as "intelligent" and having "free will" but is forever open to quibbles becuse of its fundamental structural differences in function from a human mind.
I think the point of the criticisms of Penrose isn't over whether quantum-mechanical stuff is going on, but whether quantum-mechanical wierdness (such as entanglement) is involved in the brain's computations or whether they can be fully explained by the classical physics and chemistry approximations (and can thus be adequately modeled by algorithms run on ordinary computers rather than requiring a quantum computer).
A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine."
On the smaller end of things, subatomic physics is in a glass of beer.
For instance: The bubble chamber detector for moving charged particles was invented by a physicist while he was sitting at a restaurant near the University of Michigan and wondering what started the bubbles in the beer forming.
Logic says the same thing is going to happen in every place that is outsourced to. Maybe that is the point to make to the CIOs.
The group to teach this to is not so much the management (who operate on short time scales and dance to their investors' tune) but the Venture Capitalists (who are in it for a long-enough haul to cash out, and write the tune).
A few years ago I was working with some people who were trying a startup. They couldn't get funding without having an "outsourcing strategy". Over 95% of the venture money from the Sand Hill gang was going to companies whose business plans had the bulk of the labor done offshore - mainly in India - and only a "core team" of architects and special-skill experts onshore.
If these people realize that offshoring your labor means giving away your IP before you can achieve success, they'll drive management in at least the new and expanding companies back toward use of domestic labor.
Slashdot Mirror
A good programmer (especially a consultant) comes to the job with maybe HALF the knowlege needed to complete it - plus the ability to quickly learn the rest.
Actually it's more like 85%. But you get the idea. B-)
EGO - ... noone will admit that what they wrote thet were learning while they were coding it, etc.
I'll freely admit that. I built a carreer on it.
A programmer is a particular sort of lazy person: One who will spend six hours doing something right ONCE rather than fifteen minutes doing it twice. As such he is usually working on something new - and bored stiff if he's writing-from-scratch a third version of something he's done before. Further: Having him do the same thing over is a horrendous waste of resources. He's already done it: Take that code, make minor tweaks if necessary to get it to work in the new context, and use that.
So he's always working on something that's at least partially new to him.
A good programmer (especially a consultant) comes to the job with maybe HALF the knowlege needed to complete it - plus the ability to quickly learn the rest.
By the way: Though the example was process automation, the same applies to all fields of software application. The drastically lowered cost of creating a complex computation was enabling - allowing things to be done that were too complex, and thus too costly, to do by non-software-driven methods.
When the blueprint IS the product it's possible to do far more than when it's a first step in an expensive process.
What makes software so hard? The enormous complexity of the software constructions.
Why is it so complex? Because it's so EASY to build it.
Example: Pre-computers, the moment-to-moment computations necessary to run an automobile engine were performed by mechanical devices, mainly the distributor and carburator. Every term in every computation was manufactured as a number of physical components, several of which are moving parts.
For instance: The RPM input to the spark advance was computed by two weights on pivots, with springs and stops, rotating a sleeve on a shaft. The shaft was driven by the camshft through a gear and the sleeve carried the cam driving the contact points or (in an electronic ignition) the starwheel that passed the sensor coil. Adding this computation (compared to no RMP spark advance) added five moving and four stationary parts, to be assembeled, and a test stand the volume of an office cube to test the result, and allow a worker to adjust the constants by bending the spring supports with a screwdiver.
In software this computation can be done by PART of ONE line of code. (In real engine controls it's actually done by more - mainly so the computation can be more complex and thus better approximate ideal running conditions.)
Software changed the game completely: When adding a piece of a compuation requires a moment of thought, a minute with a text editor, and issuing a compile command (plus whatever testing is necessary to convince yourself you got it right), rather than months of an engineer's and draftsman's time, manufacuture of dies, lab work to check the result, repeat through three layers of departments (to prove it can be done, to prove it can be done reliably, and to prove it can be manufactured affordablly), the amount of work and time to implement one bit of complexity reduced drastically.
The result was that the amount of complexity that can be afforded rose in proportion. Given that the proportion was hysterically large, the amount of complexity handled by each person became enormous.
Unfortunately, programming is NOT formulaic. Portions are - and as they are identified they are rendered into algorithms and software is written to perform them. The result is that the part people work on is ALWAYS the part that is "fuzzy" and difficult to formalize.
Programming consists of rendering a set of requirements into a correct specification for meeting the requirements. (The reset is automated.) This is not an easy task - and it gets more difficult with increasing complexity of function. Unfortunately, methodologies for performing it have remained in a catch-up game: The better the tools, the more complexity a worker can handle. The more he can handle, the more he is assigned.
To quote McClary's Third Law of Computer Technology: Software complexity expands to exceed the capability of any software development methodology.
I was under the impression that student work is patentable and copyrightable (and auto-copyrighted) by the STUDENT, as inventor and author respectively.
If the student does the work as part of a funded project the terms of the funding may result in assignment of the patent rights. Similarly, if he is employed by the university and develops an invention on paid time and/or with school equipment, this may also give the school a claim. And if the student develops an invention at school he may solicit and receive help from others (notably professors) that would make them co-inventors.
But IANAL so I could be wrong.
I strongly doubt that distributing the firmware code to owners of the corresponding devices can properly be seen as distribution against the permission of the copyright holder. It may even not be considered to be "distribution" in the sense of the IP laws. ...
I am more uncertain about the inclusion of the firmware blob in e.g. Linux distributions. Instead linux distributions could be equipped with software that automatically searches the net for the binary blob.
Perhaps including the firmware blob in a driver that checks for the manufacturer code and refuses to load the blob from a particular manufacturer in other manufacturer's products would be arguably proper under the "sold the rights" argument?
can still be exposed to prions from external
Check out protein folding and how one prion causes other proteins to fold wrong. sources and continue to produce prions.
Prions don't just misfold ANY old protein. They cause a PARTICLUAR protien to fold wrong. These cows have been altered so they don't MAKE that protein.
Don't they usually start out without prions? You have to infect them.
That depends on whether you define "prion" to mean "the prion protien" or "the prion protien folded into the pathological shape".
These are cows with the prion protien gene "knocked out" so the protien is not produced. They are thus "prion free" by the first definition.
They will also remain prion free (except for the introduced prions) by the second definition as well, since they won't amplify the prions by folding more instances of the protein into the same shape.
I went cow-shopping and I remember prions were strictly an option.
Check the basic option package - it's there as "protein feed suplement".
I miss read the title the first time, the joke being I do heat my office with computers. I have three of them in the room and the 4800 dual core puts out a fair amount of heat on it's own keeping it toasty compared to the rest of the house. ...
I did the same "back in the day" when I got my first personal Unix box - an Altos 68000 - one of crowd of generic Motorols 60x0 unix boxes that came out before PCs squeezed them out. With a meg of RAM and an 8" hard drive it put out enough heat to keep the computer room and the adjacent living room toasty in a Michigan winter.
Of course this was an issue in a Michigan summer. Fortunately the 4" fan blew OUTWARD at the rear of the box. I modified a drier vent to mount over the fan and ran a 4" drier hose to a similar vent mounted in an insert in the window. Then the heat was exhuseted outdoors. B-)
Ops/watt were a lot fewer in those days. But the dissipation per room without cooling and power available per outlet is still the same. It's interesting that we now have enough uses for crunch that the old room-heat issue is still (or once again) with us.
From what I understand, cellphones work by associating themselves with "cells" of coverage. The closer they are, the less power they use, and so on. When the user moves cells, the network switches them over to the new cell.
Right.
From the air, a cellphone will see many, many different cells as being equally good.
The issue is partly that. But it's mainly the inverse: Many cells see the phone as a strong signal.
On the ground it would be talking through and to some extent around obstructions (i.e. by bouncing off a partially reflecting wall), sending a signal propagating near the ground or som other resistive medium (and thus penetrating it and being partially absorbed), combing direct signals with delayed reflections, and so on - all of which quickly reduce the signal seen by towers and/or degrade it toward being background noise.
In the air it has a clear line-of-sight to many towers, so the signal is strong at them. And over the considerable distance the additional distance to the next tower makes very little inverse-square-law drop in the signal at the further tower. So with its transmitter turned up to hit the best tower it is heard by may other near-best towers - which must allocate a channel/time-slot for its interference or otherwise have their received signals degraded.
It's like the way one on-the-ground cellphone might be talking to one tower but chewing up resources on maybe two others. But from the air it's a lot more than two that are affected.
It will also have to switch across cells much faster than normal.
It may. But that's mitigated in some systems by a handoff scheme where the phone doesn't get handed off until its signal is degrading.
But in time-division schemes the motion of the phone relative to the cell means the cell has to keep adjusting which time slot the phone transmits in, which has much the same effect. And its motion from cell to cell also means all the cells its starting to affect have to adjust the rest of their herds of operating phones to work around its presence - and keep adjusting as it keeps moving rapidly and thus requires different workarounds.
This could be mitigated by adding an upward-facing antenna to a sparse subset of the cells. Then these would be the "best" cells as seen by an airborne phone. The link there would also be stronger so the phone's transmitter could be turned down to the point that it doesn't bother the ground-aimed antennas of the nearby cells. (Those farther away would have it "in their sights" - but with the signal attenuated by the great distance.)
Perhaps, if the regulators allow cellphone use in aircraft (without an in-aircraft cell), the cellphone network operators will do exactly that.
You should have mentioned electric hot water heaters and air conditioning.
I did. Water heaters are an instance of "other heating appliances" (though I didn't explicitly mention them).
Air conditioners are explicitly discussed under "motors", along with heat pumps for heating (which come in less expensive than resistive hearters but {unless the outdoor temperature is merely cool} more expensive than fuel heating).
Resistive heating is 100% efficient, at least.
Only if you're considering just the local_electricity->heat step.
If you include the fuel->electricity steps it's truly horrible compared to fuel->heat. (Even if you neglect the remote->local step for the electricity).
That fuel->electricity step includes a carnot-cycle heat engine, which throws away a BUNCH of the energy as low-grade heat in the local heat dump. You'd rather you got ALL the heat energy from that fuel (minus maybe a bit up a chimbney) turned into HEAT in YOUR HOUSE - and thus burn a bunch less fuel.
This is just another example of the government protecting monopolies. ... We'd all be better off if the FCC would just allow some good old fashioned competition.
If you think the FCC is a pro-monopoly bottleneck NOW, just WAIT until the Democrats rehack it, the next time they have a president and a congressional majority all at once.
The FCC under the recent regimes has been solidly behind keeping hands off the Internet, and keeping everybody ELSE's hands off it, too. To the point of suing to keep both the Federal court and state regulators' hands off. This is expected to change. (D's have a history of trying to control it.)
AT&T is deploying IPTV as a data service, as part of their (unregulated) internet service, and the rest of the ISPs are doing the same. IP networking is a "disruptive technology", breaking the locks of the air-broadcast, wired-broadcast, and satelite-broadcast carriers on video distribution, and opening it, not just to ISPs, but also to all who have a broadband connection.
Letting regulators at all governmental levels get their hands on networking content because it can emulate broadcast/cable services would spike this big time. So far the FCC has said a resounding "NO!" and wielded the power to make it stick. It's essentially the only regulatory body to actually defend openness (rather than using its power to increase its control). It's doing EXACTLY what you're asking for - against opposition by corportations and governmental organizations at all levels.
Be careful when wishing for changes.
The hierarchy of power consumption is:
- Electric heating (resistive heating: Driers, room heaters, heating appliances.)
- Motors
- Lighting
- Consumer electronics.
Electric heating (by resisitance heaters) consumes an ENORMOUS amount of power.
Switching from electric to gas drying (so the electric load is just the motor) will cause a big savings in the electric bill, while the gas bill won't go up anywhere neer enough to compensate. Ditto (even more so) if the house has electric heat.
Same is true of the other heating appliances (hair driers, toasters, stoves and ovens, etc.) But (except for ovens if you do a LOT of baking) they tend to only run a short time so it doesn't make all THAT much difference on your bill.
Motors are the next big load. Air conditioners are the worst, due to the heat pump. But moving anything around (even air) is costly. One horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 KW (and motors can be very efficient - 80s to 90s percent - but they're still not lossless). (Nevertheless, using a heat-pump for HEATING - especially if the weather outside is above freezing or so - uses a lot less power than resistive heating. But except for merely cool days it's still more expensive than gas.)
Lighting is next. Incandescents are especially hot heaters, and the light is the visible part of the hot-wire glow. Much more is heat. Switch to fluorescents (compact or otherwise) and you get about four times as much light per watt. (LEDs may beat that in a few years but right now they're trailing fluorescents.)
Consumer electronics is 'way down there - because it's improved a lot and because there has been serious effort to increase its efficiency and reduce its losses - as well as to reduce localized heating of the components. (When I got my first linux box it was a good space heater - and most of that was the disk drive. Nowdays things take a LOT less power.) With cheap semiconductors modern power supplies are now highly-efficient switching-mode devices, which also helps a lot.
(Other appliances have also been re-engineered for efficiency, so switching to a modern large appliance may save you significant power and/or fuel. But electronics has had a much bigger improvement.)
If you were B.G. what would YOU do?
... Take the money and run!"
Hand the company to somebody else.
Cash out.
"Come on
Under The Real ID Act, though, the state ID authority (usually the DMV) will be required not only to examine your birth certificate and social security card, but also to scan and create digital copies of them in their system, as well as collecting further information on their forms.
So here's another shoe to drop:
This is exactly the information necessary to use the IDs and related databases as the foundation of a system to insure that:
- Voters are real people.
- Voters are qualified to vote, i.e.:
- Are citizens (in states that don't explicitly permit non-citizens to vote)
- Are of age to vote.
- Are residents of the place where they vote.
- Are not barred from voting (for instance: By felony convictions in states where felons aren't allowed to vote)
- Voters are only registered once, in one place.
- Voters vote no more than once.
Half of vote fraud is bogus counting (such as the black-box voting flap). The other half is bogus voters (such as the cemetary vote, the virtual voters created en masse by the combination of motor-voter "vote drives" with no-excuse absentee voting, illegal alien signups, multiple registration, and so on.)
The data collected for this national I.D. card is exactly what's needed to purge the voting rolls of fake voters. Once it's collected and federalized the Fed can check it for authenticity and lack of duplication. Then:
- include a "where registered" field in the database entry for each federal I.D. record
- open that field for checking and update by voter registration clerks, and
- add a federal mandate that the federal I.D. number be used, and checked, for registration for federal elections,
and you've got a solution for the second class of ballot-box stuffing (modulo corruption in THIS system, which could be construed to be a "security" crime as well as vote fraud).
So if you want to oppose this, bring up this "benefit". You'll immediately have a rush of machine politicians to vote against the whole I.D. scheme. B-)
You'll have to ask the firemen who took it to the station.
(We were considering it, but it was iffy whether it met
the wife's food rules. Then the firemen expressed an
interest and we thought that, after risking their lives
on downed power lines while waiting for PG&E to respond,
they deserved it.)
You haven't seen Mythbusters Episode #67 "Firearms Folklore" yet have you? :)
No, but thanks for the reference.
My current sig is in response to the bogus anti-gun argument that arming yourself for self-defense is useless because the bad guys will just get bigger guns. (I coined it, launched it here, and will be interested to see if it becomes a soundbite in the gun debate.)
Batteries are neither cheap or clean: they contain lots of toxic chemicals, have a limited life time, and due to Ohm law, can only give back only half of the energy that was put into them.
You're confusing two issues: Maximum POWER versus maximum ENERGY when pulling power from a voltage source through a fixed resistance.
If you want the maximum amount of POWER (rate of energy delivery) and the resistance is fixed, you get it when half the power is delivered to your load and half wasted in the series resistance. Efficiency is 50%. (This assumes ideal fixed voltage source and resistance - a bad assumption when loading a battery with a near-short.)
If you want the maximum ENERGY from your battery you pull much more slowly. Efficiency would approach 100% as discharge time approaches "forever" (though a real battery has leakage and a real load usually requires more than a trickle, so you waste a few percent to do things at practical rates and power levels).
Same is true for the power grid. The system of generators, transmission lines, transformers, and miscelaney has overall efficiency far above 50%. You don't put so little copper in your wires that you're loading it at the peak of the power curve and half is wasted heating (and melting!) the system. You put in a BUNCH MORE and never draw power anywhere near the maximum you could draw.
Example: My neighborhood has something like 50 houses served by a "bank" of three paralleled "pole pig" transformers on one edge of a primary delta - call it 12 KV. Rule of thumb for homes is they draw about a KW each, so call it 50 KW and a tad over 4 amps in the primary wiring. It's fed with bare #10 copper, which would easily carry 30A embedded in insulation in a wall without noticable warming.
A couple years ago a goose flew into the primary wiring. The current melted the #20 in two places in less than a second and draped the primary wires all over the street. That means the goose was getting FAR over 30A. Let's be conservative and say it was 300A and dragged the voltage across the goose (and the arc to it) down to zero, which would put the half-power point at 150A and 4 KV - 600 KW. Normal load current would be about 2.7% of that, and resistive losses in the grid (as a percentage of power delivered) would be about 1.3%.
Here are some Google ads at the site that seem full of fraud: "Sponsored Links (Ads by Google) -- The Next Oil Boom ... Free Top Energy Profits ..." An honest organization would never allow advertising like that, I think.
If they are using Google to sell ads they don't control the ads. Their site relates to energy issues, so ads for energy-related scams will match in the placement algorithms.
Why would VMware, XenSource etc. want to go after a market which will be difficult to support, and not provide them with the money they need to keep going?
Because as long as they don't support video hardware there will be extra pressure for both other vendors and open source authors to attempt it.
If an open source project does it and gets it right, when the closed source vendors haven't got it, the open soucre project is likely to be adopted, not just by home users, but by commercial users who want to efficiently virtualize the video (along with others who just want another solution). Then the closed-source vendors' market starts to erode.
Unlike the desktop market (where MS' plethora of integrated applications makes displacing them difficult), virtualization tools have a narrow and well-defined scope. That makes a small and well-defined target for authors of competing products/projects.
That's right. But consider: if it can be fully explained by the classical physics approximations, then by the laws of causal closure included there we cannot possibly have free will ...
... there's nothing [in classical mechanics] like the impossible gap [in quantum mechanics] which the classical approximations can't resolve.
... you're discussing what it would take to model consciousness, rather than what it would take to instantiate it ...
Doesn't say that to me...
Quite the contrary: You can hide free will just as easily behind the chaos barriers of catastrophy theory as you can behind quantum mechanical uncertainty. They're both unpredictable by measurement and calculation.
(And what makes you think that our inability to predict a wave-function collaps makes quantum-mechanical uncertainty is any less predetermined than classical mechanics?)
I think this is our most fundamental disconnect: You're making a distinction here that I'm not. When I say "model" I'm talking about instantiation, not prediction.
In particular, I'm talking about whether it's possible to create a valid instance of a human-style intelligence, absent growing it in a human body, rather than something else that qualifies as "intelligent" and having "free will" but is forever open to quibbles becuse of its fundamental structural differences in function from a human mind.
I think the point of the criticisms of Penrose isn't over whether quantum-mechanical stuff is going on, but whether quantum-mechanical wierdness (such as entanglement) is involved in the brain's computations or whether they can be fully explained by the classical physics and chemistry approximations (and can thus be adequately modeled by algorithms run on ordinary computers rather than requiring a quantum computer).
A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine."
On the smaller end of things, subatomic physics is in a glass of beer.
For instance: The bubble chamber detector for moving charged particles was invented by a physicist while he was sitting at a restaurant near the University of Michigan and wondering what started the bubbles in the beer forming.
Logic says the same thing is going to happen in every place that is outsourced to. Maybe that is the point to make to the CIOs.
The group to teach this to is not so much the management (who operate on short time scales and dance to their investors' tune) but the Venture Capitalists (who are in it for a long-enough haul to cash out, and write the tune).
A few years ago I was working with some people who were trying a startup. They couldn't get funding without having an "outsourcing strategy". Over 95% of the venture money from the Sand Hill gang was going to companies whose business plans had the bulk of the labor done offshore - mainly in India - and only a "core team" of architects and special-skill experts onshore.
If these people realize that offshoring your labor means giving away your IP before you can achieve success, they'll drive management in at least the new and expanding companies back toward use of domestic labor.