bell labs existed because a monopoly ran the telephone system do you think thats a good idea... discuss ?
Bell Labs existed to spend money - provided it was on research that had SOME plausible connection to improving the state of the art of telephony.
This was because, as part of the legislative deal that gave Bell a near-monopoly on telephony, they were allowed to set their rates to return a regulated percentage on their expenses, and those expenses included such research.
Suppose this rate was 6%:
1. Spend a hundred million dollars researching, designing, and delivering telephone service.
2. Set the phone rates so you collect 106 million dollars.
3. Deliver the phone service and collect the money.
4. Profit! (six million dollars of it).
Spend more on research, raise the rates, make more profit. So the incentive is to shoehorn in as much basic research as you can possibly manage to SOMEHOW connect to telephony and spend as much as you can on it. So spending money in this profitable way is what Bell Labs was intended to do.
But they get to (were REQUIRED to) license their inventions. And the money from these licenses counts against their costs. From year one they made more on licensing inventions than they spent on research. So they were a "failure" at their original purpose, but the poster child that proved basic research was a money-maker, big time, even though you didn't know in advance HOW you'd end up making money off it.
This continued through the Bell breakup, the spinout as Lucent technologies, and didn't get broken until about the new millenium, when management pulled a standard loot-the-company stunt: improving the bottom line (and their bonuses and options) by cutting off research that wouldn't pay off until a few years down the road (when they're gone, their money is safe, and their successors get to take the blame when the house of cards collapses.) A few years back some of the old hands were brought back to revive the near-corpse, and it seems to be on the mend.
Xerox PARC's opportunity to create wonders out of basic research was also enabled by an accounting pathology - though of a much different sort.
Stop this dvd ripping tool and 20 others pop up anyway. What a waste of money
It's a software capability version of the Streisand Effect.
For anyone not allready familiar with it, the first sentence of the Wikipedia article gives a fine definition:
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.
Chop off one head of this software hydra and not one, but several, grow out to take its place.
It's distinct enough that it rates a name of its own. Any suggestions?
And, then it says, you just put hundreds of thousands of these things under highways, and start reaping a non-trivial amount of electricity
And cause a non-trivial increase in rolling resistance and reduction in mileage of the victim vehicles. That energy had to come from somewhere, and collecting it has side-effects.
TANSTAAFL: The first law of thermodynamics as well as economics.
The trees, on the other hand, may appreciate some energy-absorbing sway damping - especially in a storm. (As long as it doesn't interfere with pumping the water up the trunk to the leaves, of course.)
Oops, got the history horribly mixed up. Try this:
Written in 1976, under licensing granting source use in classes, suppressed with the release of System 7 in 1979, which didn't include this license term, (after which Unix source code was deleted from classes and the two-volume set became an underground copier-room classic), general distribution of "ancient source" (including System 6) authorized by SCO and the book reprinted with the 1977 version of the commentary (plus a forward by Ritchie) in 1996.
Written in 1976, under licensing granting source use in classes, suppressed with the release of System 7, which didn't include this license term, (after which Unix source code was deleted from classes and the two-volume set became an underground copier-room classic), general distribution of "ancient source" (including System 6) authorized by SCO in 1976, reprinted in 1977 with updated commentary and again with added historical commentary in 1996.
See the above-referenced Wikipedia article for ISBNs, more details, and links to more history.
SYS V needs to go open next, not that overloaded slowlaris, but lean mean SYS V
I was under the impression that the entire POINT of SYS V was for the major UNIX vendors to re-implement the guts of Unix as a clearly, enforceably, proprietary product (after the CONTU recommendations and the resulting copyright law changes explicitly extended copyright to software), then move to it and orphan the original development thread. (This might make opening it a hard sell to the members of the consortium.)
There were at least a couple issues with the proprietary status of the AT&T code:
One issue was that AT&T was still a government-regulated utility monopoly and there were some requirements about disclosing and releasing non-telephone-related inventions they came up with.
The big issue was that, before copyright applied and before software patents were hacked up (by recasting software as one embodiment of, or a component of, a patentable machine or process), the only protection was trade secret and the related contract law. Trade secrets generally stop being enforceable when the secret out of the bag (with some details about whether the claimant contributed to the leak). Bell Labs had shipped code to a LOT of educational institutions. When the U of New South Wales used the System 6 kernel code and an explanation of it as the two-volume text for an Operating System class, the textbooks became an underground classic. This, along with AT&T's benign-neglect licensing policies, led to the burst of little, cheap, generic UNIX boxes, as this was also when microcomputer chips were just becoming powerful enough to do the job.
Up to then a big barrier to entry was that every new machine needed a custom O.S. to deploy, and these were enormous, machine specific, and mostly in assembler. That made it an expensive, undertaking, suitable only for financial giants. But all but under 2,000 lines of Unix was in C, and the entire kernel, which included essentially all the platform-specific code as a subset, was well under 10,000 lines of code. If you had a C compiler and assembler for your new machine, it was a matter of a few man-months to port it and get it up and running. Essentially ALL the utilities and applications came right over. You didn't have to train users, either, because they all worked pretty much just like what they'd used in college.
The game was: 1. Grab a bootleg copy of the code. 2. Port it to your machine and get it working. 3. Go to AT&T and ask for a license "to port Unix to our new machine and sell it." 4. AT&T, as a matter of policy, completely ignores any "violations" you may have committed during the porting phase and cuts you a license at a very reasonable price. 5. You "port Unix in an AMAZINGLY short time" (like the ten minutes it takes to tell Sales to go to market) and you're in business. 6. You (with your new business) and AT&T (with their small cut) slap each other on the back and laugh all the way to the bank. PROFIT! for you. (profit) for AT&T. 7. Because of the policy in 4., everybody ELSE manearly everbody's king a new machine knows they can do the same thing. So many do. AT&T gets a rakeoff from ALL of them. PROFIT! for AT&T. Far more than if they went dog-in-the-manger, held up the first few for all the traffic would bear, and got no more customers for Unix.
And because of this, it was in nearly everbody's interest to NOT challenge the AT&T-proprietary status of Unix. And it stayed this way until SCO's management screwed up and altered step 4. (Even then the case turned on other issues, so it never did come to the point of attacking AT&T's claim that Unix code was proprietary.)
piezo generators have less than a percent of efficiency is why.
I thought it was closer to 80%, at least theoretically. Can you give me a reference for that "Less than 1%" number?
Whether this maps into anything like that number in a practical device for converting "found" mechanical power - such as tree sway or vibrations - is another matter entirely.
Can this be co-installed with the current version (for instance, 4.8.2.8 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the latest Long Term Support Ubuntu release)?
Or do you have collisions which require you to purge the old one in order to try the new one, or which cause foulups if you don't?
(Honest question. I've seen a lot of that kind of thing with other projects. So now I'm a bit shy of trying the latest-and-greatest release of any tool on the production machines I depend on for time-critical work.)
3D printed objects aren't the strongest due to the way the layers are laminated together. I imagine the last place you'd want a weak join is on a 150+ foot long blade swishing through the air.
You betcha.
Especially since a spinning blade gets more efficient as it gets faster. Higher speed = lower torque for a given horsepower density, so a higher tip speed ratio (TSR) wastes less energy "twisting" the air downwind.
Efficient wind turbines run at a TSR of 6 or higher - which means that in windy conditions the tips are running at an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound.
If one of those puppies breaks off it's NOT the kind of baseball bat or boomerang you want coming toward you, whether flying or summersaulting along the ground. (Imagine a caber toss with giants and redwood logs.) Not to mention what the resulting unbalanced spinning does to the other blades and the pylon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector mentions none of this.
You're right, it's bogus.
I was told that decades ago. But a little research (in the online patent databases) shows that there were ionization smoke detectors for decades before that (back in the tube era, even, when beta emitters were easily available to the common man). NASA says their only involvement with smoke detector design was (in collaboration with Honeywell) coming up with a variable-sensitivity design to stop annoying false alarms in Skylab.
The Appollo I martyrs are heroes in more ways than one.
One of NASA's responses to the fire was to design a detector for miniscule amounts of smoke particles, to provide an early warning of electrical problems that might lead to a fire - in time to evacuate the capsule if on the ground or hunt down and fix the problem if in space.
The detector used a miniscule amount of radioactive material to ionize the smoke particles and then detected the current conducted by the ions. (Radioactive materials were for NASA, a government agency, to design with, difficult for random inventors or corporations to even consider.)
The first, space-rated, low-volume prototypes were pricey. But the circuitry and the detection chamber were dog-simple and could be dirt-cheap when manufactured in volume.
So this was plowshared, and became the ionization-type smoke detector, the first practical, affordable, smoke detector suitable for broad deployment in residences. Even when this was the only type in use, it was quickly saving, first hundreds, then thousands of lives per year.
Modern detectors, combining ionization and photoelectric mechanisms, are credited with cutting the death toll from fires by somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2. They detect different types of fires, and the one detected by ionization accounts for somewhat less than half of them - which is still an enormous number.
So the loss of those three lives has been repaid with enormous interest in the decades that followed. The benefits are still flowing.
Even better if they boycotted all sites which block ad-blocking viewers,...
If you're blocking ads, you don't contribute to their revenue, but do contribute to their resource consumption. So the operators of such sites would RATHER be boycotted by people using ad-blockers.
But the rule has meant millions in lost profits for utilities. Those companies argued that the program impermissibly targets retail customers.
They should have argued that it was a "taking" and the government had to reimburse them for their losses.
The tail end of the Fifth Amendment reads:
[...] nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
and the Supremes have already ruled that new laws and regulations, and changes to existing ones, that suck part of the value out of property (in this case, the value of the power generation and transmission infrastructure, which is based on the profit it creates) constitute a "partial taking" and require the government to pay for what it took.
Getting the Supremes to recognize that a rule change which imposes a change in the flow of money from customers to the investors in a busines can constitute a fifth amendment taking of the value of the latter's investment would inhibit arbitrary economic winner-picking regulations and move the US economy away from Fascism (alias "crony capitalism) and toward (free-market) Capitalism.
So happy to see the Raspberry Pi 3D support. Thanks for the goodies!
Goes double.
Is anything similar planned for BeagleBones - especially BeagleBone Black, which is the current cutting edge?
I have to deal with them, and the last time I looked their kernels were coming out of a separate project - which distributes an archive of script to be applied to the corresponding version of the packages, to be overlaid on and applied to the corresponding kernel sources, to hack them into shape for the Bones. It would be far easier to keep up with kernel fixes if the Bones (or at least the Black) were supported directly by the official kernel distributions.
(Stupid Lenovo touchpad just hit "submit" before I was done. Fortunately, it did it when the first part of the post was pretty clean. Reposing with the rest - unless it does it again B-b )
Why should you be paid retail for generation? That totally ignores the part the grid takes in handling your energy...
You also pay a monthly "be connected to the grid" fee, which pays your share of the ongoing expenses of maintaining the grid, along with a one-shot "get connected to the grid" fee, often amounting to thousands of dollars, which literally pays for installing the infrastructure - poles, drop transformer, etc - to bring the grid to you.
(When the contractor building my rural retirement house connected it to the grid, without my orders, I paid many thousands - money I'd intended for a solar system. Part of that was half the price of the existing transformer that I now shared with my next-door neighbor, who had paid the whole price and was now rebated half of it.)
Utilities are very good at dividing the service into appropriate chunks and billing you reasonably fairly for what you actually use. The bulk of the background costs are already covered (with the standard profit margin), so sellers to the grid are not so much the parasites you might think.
Net metering was a cheap hack - based on the common, low-end, pre-"smart" mechanical meters, which ran equally well forward and backward. It doesn't account for the losses in transmission - but (as was mentioned elsewhere) in the case of distributed generation the power doesn't travel very far, so the losses are far lower than those for power shipped from major power plants to widely distributed residences (and since much of those losses are proportional to the square of the currents, local generation reduces them more than in proportion). Billing a rate that doesn't vary by time of day is ALSO a hack based on those meters: Solar and wind tend to produce surplus power when it's expensive and have a shortage when it's cheap, so net metering (when few enough are using it to not substantially affect grid management) is actually a good deal for the power companies.
Having said that: With arbitrarily capable smart meters available a truly fair pricing scheme would involve some offset between the "buy" and "sell" prices - but the "buy at wholesale" level is far too low.
Utilities, though sometimes privately owned, are generally regulated monopolies with pricing schemes imposed by governments in the interests of their citizens. Attempting to apply free market arguments to them is disingenuous. We're dealing with Fascism, not Capitalism, here.
Why should you be paid retail for generation? That totally ignores the part the grid takes in handling your energy...
You also pay a monthly "be connected to the grid" fee, which pays your share of the ongoing expenses of maintaining the grid, along with a one-shot "get connected to the grid" fee, often amounting to thousands of dollars, which literally pays for installing the infrastructure - poles, drop transformer, etc - to bring the grid to you.
When the contractor building my rural retirement house connected it to the grid, without my orders, I paid many thousands - money I'd intended for a solar system. Part of that was half the price of the existing transformer that I now shared with my next-door neighbor, who had paid the whole price and was now rebated half of it.)
I was thinking the same thing in regards to the Flint Michigan disaster. This isn't a natural disaster by any means. Someone in the state government should be tossed in jail, for 30-life.
(Speaking of "distinctions"...)
Why should somebody in the STATE govenment be locked up? Isn't the Flint debacle solely the result of actions by, and solely the responsibility of the, CITY government?
(Honest question here. I haven't been following it, and am curious as to why a city water screwup is being reported as the fault of a different level of government. Did the higher levels really have some responsibility? Is it just faulty reporting? Is it maybe the media cooperating with those actually responsible to blame it on their political opponents?)
1) Confer with the client. Find out what he wants. (He'll tell you what he wants ADDED to what he is replacing.) 2) Research the client's current operation: Consult his underlings, especially the front-line workers, who know what's REALLY going on. Make friends with them and try to help them out, too. Find out what he currently has. Figure out what (you think) he needs. 3) Propose to the client that he should want what you think he needs. 4) After he's had a chance to think about it, design and build what he NOW wants (which may be what he wanted before, what you think he needs, some mix, or something off in never-never land that he thought up after seeing what you came up with).
* Maybe he'll come around to your design and think you're the best and brightest consultant to ever come along. Build the spiffy thing and everybody's happy.
* Maybe he'll want something other than you think he needs. If so:
* Maybe he's right and you're wrong, because he understood something about his operation that you didn't. Doing it his way might turn out to be better than doing it your way.
* Maybe you're right and he's wrong, but it's his company and he's paying the bill. He had his chance and rejected your suggestions, so it's on his head. Build the goofy thing and laugh, or sigh, all the way to the bank.
Why is he getting involved in this at all? We already have several companies working toward this goal. The only answer that makes sense is that he wants to fund those companies closest to him or his party.
Well, there's picking winners - more importantly, designating losers. Government subsidies slow development by putting the non-subsidized at a market disadvantage - so they tend to drop and NOT innovate - while reducing the need of the subsidized to innovate to achieve market penetration.
And there's the opportunity to turn another 4 billion dollars of the taxpayers' money into a slush fund for looting by cronies, using operations on the model of Solyndra.
But my guess is that he's offering the money to bribe selected hi-tech companies, in trade for installing backdoors for US intelligence - both in their current and future products.
- It would (allegedly more than) cover their losses due to lower sales and usage of their products (especially internationally) .
- It would pay for installing the infrastructure to TRACK everyone using driverless cars - and forwarding this info to the government.
Ain't no such creature [as an unbiased source of news], son. The key is being fully aware of each source's biases and mapping the common ground among all of them, post-filter.
Unfortunately, one manifestation of bias is failing to report news that runs counter to the bias. This leaves you without information. You can't apply filters unless you have a signal.
So he other half of the key is actually GETTING the reporting from sources with other biases.
Al Jazeera America and Russia Today have been two such sources, readily available on cable and satellite TV throughout the US. AJA (and the many OTHER news feeds it aggregated) will be sorely missed.
Slashdot Mirror
bell labs existed because a monopoly ran the telephone system do you think thats a good idea... discuss ?
Bell Labs existed to spend money - provided it was on research that had SOME plausible connection to improving the state of the art of telephony.
This was because, as part of the legislative deal that gave Bell a near-monopoly on telephony, they were allowed to set their rates to return a regulated percentage on their expenses, and those expenses included such research.
Suppose this rate was 6%:
1. Spend a hundred million dollars researching, designing, and delivering telephone service.
2. Set the phone rates so you collect 106 million dollars.
3. Deliver the phone service and collect the money.
4. Profit! (six million dollars of it).
Spend more on research, raise the rates, make more profit. So the incentive is to shoehorn in as much basic research as you can possibly manage to SOMEHOW connect to telephony and spend as much as you can on it. So spending money in this profitable way is what Bell Labs was intended to do.
But they get to (were REQUIRED to) license their inventions. And the money from these licenses counts against their costs. From year one they made more on licensing inventions than they spent on research. So they were a "failure" at their original purpose, but the poster child that proved basic research was a money-maker, big time, even though you didn't know in advance HOW you'd end up making money off it.
This continued through the Bell breakup, the spinout as Lucent technologies, and didn't get broken until about the new millenium, when management pulled a standard loot-the-company stunt: improving the bottom line (and their bonuses and options) by cutting off research that wouldn't pay off until a few years down the road (when they're gone, their money is safe, and their successors get to take the blame when the house of cards collapses.) A few years back some of the old hands were brought back to revive the near-corpse, and it seems to be on the mend.
Xerox PARC's opportunity to create wonders out of basic research was also enabled by an accounting pathology - though of a much different sort.
Stop this dvd ripping tool and 20 others pop up anyway. What a waste of money
It's a software capability version of the Streisand Effect.
For anyone not allready familiar with it, the first sentence of the Wikipedia article gives a fine definition:
Chop off one head of this software hydra and not one, but several, grow out to take its place.
It's distinct enough that it rates a name of its own. Any suggestions?
And, then it says, you just put hundreds of thousands of these things under highways, and start reaping a non-trivial amount of electricity
And cause a non-trivial increase in rolling resistance and reduction in mileage of the victim vehicles. That energy had to come from somewhere, and collecting it has side-effects.
TANSTAAFL: The first law of thermodynamics as well as economics.
The trees, on the other hand, may appreciate some energy-absorbing sway damping - especially in a storm. (As long as it doesn't interfere with pumping the water up the trunk to the leaves, of course.)
Oops, got the history horribly mixed up. Try this:
Written in 1976, under licensing granting source use in classes, suppressed with the release of System 7 in 1979, which didn't include this license term, (after which Unix source code was deleted from classes and the two-volume set became an underground copier-room classic), general distribution of "ancient source" (including System 6) authorized by SCO and the book reprinted with the 1977 version of the commentary (plus a forward by Ritchie) in 1996.
What was the title of those text books?
Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code, a.k.a. "The Lions Book".
Written in 1976, under licensing granting source use in classes, suppressed with the release of System 7, which didn't include this license term, (after which Unix source code was deleted from classes and the two-volume set became an underground copier-room classic), general distribution of "ancient source" (including System 6) authorized by SCO in 1976, reprinted in 1977 with updated commentary and again with added historical commentary in 1996.
See the above-referenced Wikipedia article for ISBNs, more details, and links to more history.
To which version of System V are you referring? The original one, SVR2, SVR3, or SVR4 and later?
The entire project (or at least from the start through the initial deployment of SVR4.)
SYS V needs to go open next, not that overloaded slowlaris, but lean mean SYS V
I was under the impression that the entire POINT of SYS V was for the major UNIX vendors to re-implement the guts of Unix as a clearly, enforceably, proprietary product (after the CONTU recommendations and the resulting copyright law changes explicitly extended copyright to software), then move to it and orphan the original development thread. (This might make opening it a hard sell to the members of the consortium.)
There were at least a couple issues with the proprietary status of the AT&T code:
One issue was that AT&T was still a government-regulated utility monopoly and there were some requirements about disclosing and releasing non-telephone-related inventions they came up with.
The big issue was that, before copyright applied and before software patents were hacked up (by recasting software as one embodiment of, or a component of, a patentable machine or process), the only protection was trade secret and the related contract law. Trade secrets generally stop being enforceable when the secret out of the bag (with some details about whether the claimant contributed to the leak). Bell Labs had shipped code to a LOT of educational institutions. When the U of New South Wales used the System 6 kernel code and an explanation of it as the two-volume text for an Operating System class, the textbooks became an underground classic. This, along with AT&T's benign-neglect licensing policies, led to the burst of little, cheap, generic UNIX boxes, as this was also when microcomputer chips were just becoming powerful enough to do the job.
Up to then a big barrier to entry was that every new machine needed a custom O.S. to deploy, and these were enormous, machine specific, and mostly in assembler. That made it an expensive, undertaking, suitable only for financial giants. But all but under 2,000 lines of Unix was in C, and the entire kernel, which included essentially all the platform-specific code as a subset, was well under 10,000 lines of code. If you had a C compiler and assembler for your new machine, it was a matter of a few man-months to port it and get it up and running. Essentially ALL the utilities and applications came right over. You didn't have to train users, either, because they all worked pretty much just like what they'd used in college.
The game was:
1. Grab a bootleg copy of the code.
2. Port it to your machine and get it working.
3. Go to AT&T and ask for a license "to port Unix to our new machine and sell it."
4. AT&T, as a matter of policy, completely ignores any "violations" you may have committed during the porting phase and cuts you a license at a very reasonable price.
5. You "port Unix in an AMAZINGLY short time" (like the ten minutes it takes to tell Sales to go to market) and you're in business.
6. You (with your new business) and AT&T (with their small cut) slap each other on the back and laugh all the way to the bank. PROFIT! for you. (profit) for AT&T.
7. Because of the policy in 4., everybody ELSE manearly everbody's king a new machine knows they can do the same thing. So many do. AT&T gets a rakeoff from ALL of them. PROFIT! for AT&T. Far more than if they went dog-in-the-manger, held up the first few for all the traffic would bear, and got no more customers for Unix.
And because of this, it was in nearly everbody's interest to NOT challenge the AT&T-proprietary status of Unix. And it stayed this way until SCO's management screwed up and altered step 4. (Even then the case turned on other issues, so it never did come to the point of attacking AT&T's claim that Unix code was proprietary.)
piezo generators have less than a percent of efficiency is why.
I thought it was closer to 80%, at least theoretically. Can you give me a reference for that "Less than 1%" number?
Whether this maps into anything like that number in a practical device for converting "found" mechanical power - such as tree sway or vibrations - is another matter entirely.
Can this be co-installed with the current version (for instance, 4.8.2.8 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the latest Long Term Support Ubuntu release)?
Or do you have collisions which require you to purge the old one in order to try the new one, or which cause foulups if you don't?
(Honest question. I've seen a lot of that kind of thing with other projects. So now I'm a bit shy of trying the latest-and-greatest release of any tool on the production machines I depend on for time-critical work.)
3D printed objects aren't the strongest due to the way the layers are laminated together. I imagine the last place you'd want a weak join is on a 150+ foot long blade swishing through the air.
You betcha.
Especially since a spinning blade gets more efficient as it gets faster. Higher speed = lower torque for a given horsepower density, so a higher tip speed ratio (TSR) wastes less energy "twisting" the air downwind.
Efficient wind turbines run at a TSR of 6 or higher - which means that in windy conditions the tips are running at an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound.
If one of those puppies breaks off it's NOT the kind of baseball bat or boomerang you want coming toward you, whether flying or summersaulting along the ground. (Imagine a caber toss with giants and redwood logs.) Not to mention what the resulting unbalanced spinning does to the other blades and the pylon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector mentions none of this.
You're right, it's bogus.
I was told that decades ago. But a little research (in the online patent databases) shows that there were ionization smoke detectors for decades before that (back in the tube era, even, when beta emitters were easily available to the common man). NASA says their only involvement with smoke detector design was (in collaboration with Honeywell) coming up with a variable-sensitivity design to stop annoying false alarms in Skylab.
Sorry to have repeated a myth. B-b
The Appollo I martyrs are heroes in more ways than one.
One of NASA's responses to the fire was to design a detector for miniscule amounts of smoke particles, to provide an early warning of electrical problems that might lead to a fire - in time to evacuate the capsule if on the ground or hunt down and fix the problem if in space.
The detector used a miniscule amount of radioactive material to ionize the smoke particles and then detected the current conducted by the ions. (Radioactive materials were for NASA, a government agency, to design with, difficult for random inventors or corporations to even consider.)
The first, space-rated, low-volume prototypes were pricey. But the circuitry and the detection chamber were dog-simple and could be dirt-cheap when manufactured in volume.
So this was plowshared, and became the ionization-type smoke detector, the first practical, affordable, smoke detector suitable for broad deployment in residences. Even when this was the only type in use, it was quickly saving, first hundreds, then thousands of lives per year.
Modern detectors, combining ionization and photoelectric mechanisms, are credited with cutting the death toll from fires by somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2. They detect different types of fires, and the one detected by ionization accounts for somewhat less than half of them - which is still an enormous number.
So the loss of those three lives has been repaid with enormous interest in the decades that followed. The benefits are still flowing.
Even better if they boycotted all sites which block ad-blocking viewers, ...
If you're blocking ads, you don't contribute to their revenue, but do contribute to their resource consumption. So the operators of such sites would RATHER be boycotted by people using ad-blockers.
Sounds like a win-win. B-)
But the rule has meant millions in lost profits for utilities. Those companies argued that the program impermissibly targets retail customers.
They should have argued that it was a "taking" and the government had to reimburse them for their losses.
The tail end of the Fifth Amendment reads:
and the Supremes have already ruled that new laws and regulations, and changes to existing ones, that suck part of the value out of property (in this case, the value of the power generation and transmission infrastructure, which is based on the profit it creates) constitute a "partial taking" and require the government to pay for what it took.
Getting the Supremes to recognize that a rule change which imposes a change in the flow of money from customers to the investors in a busines can constitute a fifth amendment taking of the value of the latter's investment would inhibit arbitrary economic winner-picking regulations and move the US economy away from Fascism (alias "crony capitalism) and toward (free-market) Capitalism.
Console games? You mean like "robots" and "nethack", right? 'Cause you run them on the console, rather than in graphics mode?
Gaming console, not terminal-emulator-in-a-widow console.
I know you're probably trying to be funny. But some people may find your post confusing.
So happy to see the Raspberry Pi 3D support. Thanks for the goodies!
Goes double.
Is anything similar planned for BeagleBones - especially BeagleBone Black, which is the current cutting edge?
I have to deal with them, and the last time I looked their kernels were coming out of a separate project - which distributes an archive of script to be applied to the corresponding version of the packages, to be overlaid on and applied to the corresponding kernel sources, to hack them into shape for the Bones. It would be far easier to keep up with kernel fixes if the Bones (or at least the Black) were supported directly by the official kernel distributions.
(Stupid Lenovo touchpad just hit "submit" before I was done. Fortunately, it did it when the first part of the post was pretty clean. Reposing with the rest - unless it does it again B-b )
Why should you be paid retail for generation? That totally ignores the part the grid takes in handling your energy...
You also pay a monthly "be connected to the grid" fee, which pays your share of the ongoing expenses of maintaining the grid, along with a one-shot "get connected to the grid" fee, often amounting to thousands of dollars, which literally pays for installing the infrastructure - poles, drop transformer, etc - to bring the grid to you.
(When the contractor building my rural retirement house connected it to the grid, without my orders, I paid many thousands - money I'd intended for a solar system. Part of that was half the price of the existing transformer that I now shared with my next-door neighbor, who had paid the whole price and was now rebated half of it.)
Utilities are very good at dividing the service into appropriate chunks and billing you reasonably fairly for what you actually use. The bulk of the background costs are already covered (with the standard profit margin), so sellers to the grid are not so much the parasites you might think.
Net metering was a cheap hack - based on the common, low-end, pre-"smart" mechanical meters, which ran equally well forward and backward. It doesn't account for the losses in transmission - but (as was mentioned elsewhere) in the case of distributed generation the power doesn't travel very far, so the losses are far lower than those for power shipped from major power plants to widely distributed residences (and since much of those losses are proportional to the square of the currents, local generation reduces them more than in proportion). Billing a rate that doesn't vary by time of day is ALSO a hack based on those meters: Solar and wind tend to produce surplus power when it's expensive and have a shortage when it's cheap, so net metering (when few enough are using it to not substantially affect grid management) is actually a good deal for the power companies.
Having said that: With arbitrarily capable smart meters available a truly fair pricing scheme would involve some offset between the "buy" and "sell" prices - but the "buy at wholesale" level is far too low.
Utilities, though sometimes privately owned, are generally regulated monopolies with pricing schemes imposed by governments in the interests of their citizens. Attempting to apply free market arguments to them is disingenuous. We're dealing with Fascism, not Capitalism, here.
Why should you be paid retail for generation? That totally ignores the part the grid takes in handling your energy...
You also pay a monthly "be connected to the grid" fee, which pays your share of the ongoing expenses of maintaining the grid, along with a one-shot "get connected to the grid" fee, often amounting to thousands of dollars, which literally pays for installing the infrastructure - poles, drop transformer, etc - to bring the grid to you.
When the contractor building my rural retirement house connected it to the grid, without my orders, I paid many thousands - money I'd intended for a solar system. Part of that was half the price of the existing transformer that I now shared with my next-door neighbor, who had paid the whole price and was now rebated half of it.)
I was thinking the same thing in regards to the Flint Michigan disaster. This isn't a natural disaster by any means. Someone in the state government should be tossed in jail, for 30-life.
(Speaking of "distinctions"...)
Why should somebody in the STATE govenment be locked up? Isn't the Flint debacle solely the result of actions by, and solely the responsibility of the, CITY government?
(Honest question here. I haven't been following it, and am curious as to why a city water screwup is being reported as the fault of a different level of government. Did the higher levels really have some responsibility? Is it just faulty reporting? Is it maybe the media cooperating with those actually responsible to blame it on their political opponents?)
1) Confer with the client. Find out what he wants. (He'll tell you what he wants ADDED to what he is replacing.)
2) Research the client's current operation: Consult his underlings, especially the front-line workers, who know what's REALLY going on. Make friends with them and try to help them out, too. Find out what he currently has. Figure out what (you think) he needs.
3) Propose to the client that he should want what you think he needs.
4) After he's had a chance to think about it, design and build what he NOW wants (which may be what he wanted before, what you think he needs, some mix, or something off in never-never land that he thought up after seeing what you came up with).
* Maybe he'll come around to your design and think you're the best and brightest consultant to ever come along. Build the spiffy thing and everybody's happy.
* Maybe he'll want something other than you think he needs. If so:
* Maybe he's right and you're wrong, because he understood something about his operation that you didn't. Doing it his way might turn out to be better than doing it your way.
* Maybe you're right and he's wrong, but it's his company and he's paying the bill. He had his chance and rejected your suggestions, so it's on his head. Build the goofy thing and laugh, or sigh, all the way to the bank.
"Slowed down by gas, __________ settled into a distant elliptical orbit, where it still lurks today."
It must have been deficient in simethicone.
I love this new warning page!
I don't even see that. With all the issues of malware served from Forbes I'm not even doing a "temporarily allow" of their javascript in NoScript.
Why is he getting involved in this at all? We already have several companies working toward this goal. The only answer that makes sense is that he wants to fund those companies closest to him or his party.
Well, there's picking winners - more importantly, designating losers. Government subsidies slow development by putting the non-subsidized at a market disadvantage - so they tend to drop and NOT innovate - while reducing the need of the subsidized to innovate to achieve market penetration.
And there's the opportunity to turn another 4 billion dollars of the taxpayers' money into a slush fund for looting by cronies, using operations on the model of Solyndra.
But my guess is that he's offering the money to bribe selected hi-tech companies, in trade for installing backdoors for US intelligence - both in their current and future products.
- It would (allegedly more than) cover their losses due to lower sales and usage of their products (especially internationally) .
- It would pay for installing the infrastructure to TRACK everyone using driverless cars - and forwarding this info to the government.
I read "What Spotlighting Harassment in Astronomy Means" to say they were going to explain some harassment of astronomers by people with spotlights.
The headline should have said something about Sexual harassment, and "Implications of ..." rather than "What ... Means".
Is the headline's author not a native speaker of English?
Ain't no such creature [as an unbiased source of news], son. The key is being fully aware of each source's biases and mapping the common ground among all of them, post-filter.
Unfortunately, one manifestation of bias is failing to report news that runs counter to the bias. This leaves you without information. You can't apply filters unless you have a signal.
So he other half of the key is actually GETTING the reporting from sources with other biases.
Al Jazeera America and Russia Today have been two such sources, readily available on cable and satellite TV throughout the US. AJA (and the many OTHER news feeds it aggregated) will be sorely missed.