Back in the days of "smart" (and "dumb") terminals, live chat enabled some attacks.
For instance: sending a control sequence that reprogrammed a "soft key" and then "pressed" it, allowing the attacker to execute commands as if the victim had typed them. (This could include suppressing the visibility on his screen so he didn't know it had been done.)
I wonder if these systems have an analogous vulnerability?
I'm torn between feeling sorry for and laughing at the folks that voted for Trump because of his promises to keep factories open.
You think TRUMP is to blame for trouble at "Government Motors"? ROTFL!
In case you don't recall: GM is the company where Obama meddled with its Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to pay off the unions, his donors at Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., and other cronies for their support by reanimating the corpse under the management of said cronies. (Think "a bigger Solyndra that makes cars instead of solar panels and is marginally profitable rather than belly-up.")
To do this he looted the taxpayers of about 8 billion net, and abrogated the financial laws to loot the late bondholders (largely retirement funds) of their preferred interest in the assets (which dropped their bond principal value by far more than the hit they'd contracted to risk).
Also (as usual) those connected with the investment banks got in on the re-opening IPO while shares for the general public were hard to find. The corporate bond market may NEVER recover from the loss in confidence that resulted from the U.S. government breaking its own laws to rescind the legal guarantees that (used to) protect investors trying to rescue a troubled company in hard times.
(It's nothing compared to what he did to Chrysler. He PAID Fiat to TAKE them! Then the Fiat executives had so little clue about the company's market that they then broke the recession-proofness of the Jeep line (by eliminating the features of the vehicle that made it recession-proof) and closed so many dealerships that western-state owners who needed service might have to take their vehicles more than 500 miles to get it.)
But with Obama's crew and/or their legacy in charge, don't blame Trump for any layoffs GM might make.
Single-threading is falling off the Moore's Law style scaling. Lots of programs are sequential even if they could have been parallelized, so the lazy-man approach of just buying a new machine in one-point-five-ish years to get the same program to run twice as fast is no longer
But the real Moore's law - transistors per chip with adequate yield for market penetration - is still going strong. Parallelizable computations continue to benefit in proportion.
Human minds are built of 'WAY slow logic elements but achieve prodigious computational feats by massive parallelism. They serve as a proof-of-concept that practical and useful massively-parallel computations are possible.
The original problem was the Google News would show enough of the story that people didn't go to the originating site to read it. When asked to reduce it to the headline and a link...
On the other hand, headlnes are often bogus attention-grabbers, serving as both eye- and click-bait. Allowing aggregators to post only headline plus link encourages news sites to accelerate this trend.
The user needs enough context beyond the headline to determine whether the article is about something he actually wants to read. Of course, giving him this means he doesn't follow some links, which might be what is producing the signal that the EU legislators are concerned about.
There's a (thick) line between giving enough context to let the user skip the uninteresting and irrelevant chaff (good) and enough more that he gets the valuable reporting without following the link (I.P. appropriation).
Allowing aggregators to occupy some patch on that line is an application of "fair use". Legislation to define that region needs to take this into account. "Just headline plus link" is clearly outside that patch.
I'd rather loose my job than be injected with a chip.
Since at least the 1970s I've been refusing to give my SS # to anybody who didn't have a legal authorization to demand it (i.e. banks, lenders, employers, tax preparers, etc.) If you haven't done this you have NO idea how hard it was to deal on those terms with health insurers, hospitals, and utilities in those decades.
So an implanted chip that gives out such an ID number to any radio requester? It is to laugh.
And its name is a misnomer, since anything that works over RF can be accessed at an arbitrary distance, given a large enough antenna and the proper electronics.
Not necessarily. You also need:
- An adequate signal to noise ratio.
- A propagating wave.
An evanescent wave - one that decays exponentially rather than propagating - doesn't launch energy on a non-return path and is drastically weak after a quarter wavelength or so. Examples include the field just above the surface of a material containing a beam that's totally-internally-reflecting from it. The idea of near field communication was to use that so devices could communicate if within a few inches and couldn't be tapped, even with fancy equipment, beyond a few feet.
Even antennas that DO launch a propagating electromagnetic wave have an additional non-propagating near field that typically is comparable in energy density once you're within a quarter wavelength or so of the structure.
Unfortunately, the implementation of NFC didn't use an evanescent-wave antenna. It used a magnetic coil - just as much a dipole wave-launcher as a similarly-scaled electrical dipole. The near field from that falls off inverse cube and it DOES launch a propagating wave that falls off inverse square. The coil is much smaller than a half-wavelength so the propagating wave is weak compared to the nearfield. Nevertheless: Oops!
If I'm reading this correctly, the exact same technology also enables faster-than-light communication.
Yep.
And if you can fling things around fast enough, faster-than-light communication enables future-to-past information transfer.
Bye, bye, grandma. (The grandfather paradox, female version, doesn't suffer from the "but it turns out grandpa was a cuckold" loophole.)
Fortunately for those of us who depend on causality for countinued existence, Bell's theorem says the radar doesn't really work.
(Though one that passes entangled photons past both sides of the plane, then measures their interference, might in principle detect the plane without exposing it to the photons. THAT one doesn't violate bell, lightspeed, or causality, but is pretty spooky.)
China's Fusion Reactor Reaches 100 Million Degrees Celsius
Plasma energy sounds really large when you express it in temperature. But a more convenient gauge may be the voltage needed to accelerate the particles to velocity magnitudes correspondng to that sort of energy. This is also directly applicable to fusion systems, such as the Farnsworth-Hirsch or Bussard's Polywell, which use electric fields to accelerate the particles into the reaction volume.
Both electrons and hydrogen nuclei have a charge magnitude of 1, so dropping them across a potential difference of N volts adds N electron volts of energy to each particle. Then, if you let the plasma thermalize to a Maxwellâ"Boltzmann distribution, the electron temperature will be (by definition) the temperature of the distribution is about 2/3 that corresponding to the average electron energy.
So to go from degrees Celsius degrees (of a thermalized plasma) to electron volts:
- Subtract 273.15 - a.003% drop in the bucket. (Kelvin step sizes are the same but Celsius starts at 273.15 Kelvin.)
- Divide by 11,605 to get electron volts.
- Multiply by 2/3 to get the average energy of the electrons and ions.
That's an acceleration voltage of 6,025 volts (or 9,037 if you're going to react them before they thermalize). That's right in the ballpark for high-end vacuum tube technology - like the second anode on a CRT. (Those ran about 3000 to 6000 V in the 1940s, and about 25,000 V when modern color tubes were being replaced by flat panels.)
You can see why we all had high hopes for things like Polywell, where (if it worked as expected) a "gassy vacuum tube" that would fit in a strip-mall store's back room, with all supporting equipment (mostly mid-20th-century style electronics), and provide 100 MW of DC at cross-country power line voltages.
Of course many of the other methods for directly heating plasma heat the electrons much more than the ions. So the average energy of the plasma may be substantially lower.
Geologic time (absent extreme temperatures or magnetic fields) wouldn't surprise me.
Seabed minerals have retained the magnetization that they fossilized when they cooled below their curie point, creating a geologic record of Earth's magnetic field reversals in the spreading seabed. (That's how we know that/when the Earth's field reversed from time to time.)
While this isn't the same structure, electron spins flipping in an environment conducive to them being stable is not something that tends to happen spontaneously.
The algorithm achieved 100 percent sensitivity at detecting the disease an average of more than six years prior to the final diagnosis.
So no false negatives. But how many false positives? TFA doesn't say.
You can get 100% detection of fires by sounding the alarm continuously. But that's not very useful. Without that other number we don't know if this is useful or bull generated fertilizer.
Red light cameras are sold as, among other things, reducing accidents, by reducing the number of people who run the light.
Turns out they increase them. They do it by reducing the number of people who run the red light, too.
At intersections with red light cameras, some drivers who notice the light went yellow (but missed the event and don't know just how long ago it happened) slam on the brakes rather than risk a ticket - and get rear-ended by someone who knew there was plenty of time left.
It looks like "Relamping" them means replacing the fixture.
And that actually makes sense. LEDs are still more than a factor of two short of 100% efficient and still improving. By the time these fixtures need relamping it would probably be better to replace them even if the "lamps" were a replaceable part.
So why make them more complicated and expensive by making what amounts to the entire guts a removable unit, in the hopes somebody will buy some more of that piece ten or twenty years later?
If the installer of the surveillance equipment did their job properly, why would Bubba be doing more than just changing the bulb?
What bulb? This is an LED fixture.
While I haven't yet found a picture of it, the LED fixtures that are getting installed where I drive seem to have integral LEDs. It looks like "Relamping" them means replacing the fixture.
My question is will the voters keep going along with [alleged voter suppression].
My question is whether the voters, along with relatively honest politician, will continue to go along with a system where unverified mail-in registration and abentee balloting can be com bined to create an unlimited number of extra votes from imaginary voters.
Cries of "There isn't a lot of fake voting." cut no ice with me. What they really mean is "There isn't a lot of fake voting being caught and prosecuted." This could just as easily mean there is no effort by the current winners to upset the system that got them their jobs - perhaps because that system WAS corrupt and they KNOW it.
Getting the list of absentee voters into the hands of people who want to check whether the voters in question actually exist is the first step in finding out whether such fraud is common, and in stopping it if it is.
Since it IS public information, which is supposed to be easily available to anyone who wants to see it, any attempt to hamper access to it is not merely obstructionist, but may actually be a crime.
Meanwhile, electoral politics is merely "war by more peaceful means". A voter is a volunteer soldier in these wars. Letting other people know you've joined the battle is part of signing up to fight it, part of the cost of injecting your preferences into the policy making of the government.
What about an entire bionic eye? It could have zooming...
I'll be happy to settle for a lens that flexes like mine did in my youth, so I can autofocus again, and replacement corneas if/when mine become darkened or cataract ridden.
Especially if they're of a curvature that doesn't require 6.5 diopters of spherical and 1.5 of crossed-cylinder correction perched on my nose.
Also: Biology gets REALLY CLOSE to getting the lens and cornea shapes right, but a cultured replacement, like some experimental lasic surgery, can be substantially better. 20/20 is for pikers. I had 20/10 in my teens with unaltered (though corrected) natural eyes. Lasic can go farther (though I didn't find how much farther in a cursory web search).
The solution is to enact the death penalty for bank overdrafts, jaywalking, making fun of creimer, etc...
Though China is trying it (and Clinton tried something similar when governor of Arkansas), we haven't gotten the "Organ Bank Problem" of Niven's "Known Space" series for a simple list of reasons:
- AIDS
- Hepatitis
- Alzheimers
- CJD and so on.
People in jail, as a result of drug use and other factors, are a population often infected with difficult diseases that would be transplanted along with thane organ. The risk is far too high, and testing has far too many false negatives..
So transplants are from donors, and research into cultured replacement parts is well funded and starting to produce good results.
Some is already in use. Example: the replacement skin technology for burn victims developed by the Shriner's hospitals.
They could choose to change the days, they could choose to make it DST year-round, or they could choose to makee it standard time year-round (i would vote for the latter).
Federal law mandates that, if a state does daylight savings time, it makes the change at the federally mandated dates and times.
If it chooses not to do the biannual clock dance (oh PLEASE!) CA could chose to go with PST or pick (or define) another fixed time zone. (MST would be equivalent to permanent PDT.)
Note that not all time zones are at one-hour offsets from each other.
[with] a steel production plant right in the middle of a solar array. During the day, it could run off direct solar. At night, you would have giant vats of molten steel. You could run a generator off the heat from that.
There'd be a LOT of value in scavenging the heat from the molten metal to make more electricity. But it passes through the carnot cycle, so it won't generate enough to make a similar amount of steel (and approach a perpetual motion steel plant), by a long shot. Solar hours are ballpark 5 per day and generation varies with time of day, so if you want to run at full steel making capacity 24/7, you need far more energy storage than the heat in the molten steel to level your power supply.
Alternatively, if the equipment is cheap enough, you can use it at less than full capacity, consuming the power that's available at any given time - and just enough to keep from wrecking the equipment with cool-down flexing when it's scarce.
... it would presumably still be dirty if the electricity came from fossil fuels. It would probably be less dirty though.
If they're using coal to make electricity it will be more dirty.
- For heat the blast furnace uses the heat of the reaction directly, while electricity generation runs it through a heat engine and takes a substantial carnot cycle penalty, plus transmission losses, before using what's left 100% efficiently in resistive heating.
- For pull-the-oxygen-off, the blast furnace also does that directly (also getting some useful heat from it, though not as much as from burning the carbon in air) while using grid power also passes the heat from the same reaction through the heat-engine and transport penalties.
- On the other hand, the blast furnace is dumping a lot of waste heat from the combustion in the carbon-oxide exhaust, which the new process doesn't lose. If that's not being scavenged for co-generation it's a loss, though still less than the losses in the coal power plant and grid.
If the power plant fuel is hydrocarbons (oil or gas) the situation is much better. Most of the energy in hydrocarbons comes from burning the hydrogen. You get non-trivial amounts from burning the carbon part, but it's mostly there to hold the hydrogen in a convenient package. Methane (most of natural gas) is four hydrogens per carbon, ethane three, propane 2 2/3, butane 2 1/2. Liquid oil is also a mix of compounds with two hydrogens per carbon plus two extra per molecule, so it approaches 2 to 1 as you go to heavier oils. Figuring out whether you're ahead with, say, gas-fired plants would require more details of the process (and the plants).
Solar, wind, and hydro don't emit carbon (except for the ammortized carbon from their construction) and biomass is net carbon-neutral (if you're not using fossil fuels in your farming equipment). Win for the new process.
Also: The new process gives usable oxygen, rather than waste carbon oxides, as its exhaust. Another win there.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I checked, Grumman was a private company when the 1st lander was made.
I understand Ford Aerospace was building all or part of the last of them, as well.
Back in the days of "smart" (and "dumb") terminals, live chat enabled some attacks.
For instance: sending a control sequence that reprogrammed a "soft key" and then "pressed" it, allowing the attacker to execute commands as if the victim had typed them. (This could include suppressing the visibility on his screen so he didn't know it had been done.)
I wonder if these systems have an analogous vulnerability?
I'm torn between feeling sorry for and laughing at the folks that voted for Trump because of his promises to keep factories open.
You think TRUMP is to blame for trouble at "Government Motors"? ROTFL!
In case you don't recall: GM is the company where Obama meddled with its Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order to pay off the unions, his donors at Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., and other cronies for their support by reanimating the corpse under the management of said cronies. (Think "a bigger Solyndra that makes cars instead of solar panels and is marginally profitable rather than belly-up.")
To do this he looted the taxpayers of about 8 billion net, and abrogated the financial laws to loot the late bondholders (largely retirement funds) of their preferred interest in the assets (which dropped their bond principal value by far more than the hit they'd contracted to risk).
Also (as usual) those connected with the investment banks got in on the re-opening IPO while shares for the general public were hard to find. The corporate bond market may NEVER recover from the loss in confidence that resulted from the U.S. government breaking its own laws to rescind the legal guarantees that (used to) protect investors trying to rescue a troubled company in hard times.
(It's nothing compared to what he did to Chrysler. He PAID Fiat to TAKE them! Then the Fiat executives had so little clue about the company's market that they then broke the recession-proofness of the Jeep line (by eliminating the features of the vehicle that made it recession-proof) and closed so many dealerships that western-state owners who needed service might have to take their vehicles more than 500 miles to get it.)
But with Obama's crew and/or their legacy in charge, don't blame Trump for any layoffs GM might make.
Single-threading is falling off the Moore's Law style scaling. Lots of programs are sequential even if they could have been parallelized, so the lazy-man approach of just buying a new machine in one-point-five-ish years to get the same program to run twice as fast is no longer
But the real Moore's law - transistors per chip with adequate yield for market penetration - is still going strong. Parallelizable computations continue to benefit in proportion.
Human minds are built of 'WAY slow logic elements but achieve prodigious computational feats by massive parallelism. They serve as a proof-of-concept that practical and useful massively-parallel computations are possible.
The original problem was the Google News would show enough of the story that people didn't go to the originating site to read it. When asked to reduce it to the headline and a link...
On the other hand, headlnes are often bogus attention-grabbers, serving as both eye- and click-bait. Allowing aggregators to post only headline plus link encourages news sites to accelerate this trend.
The user needs enough context beyond the headline to determine whether the article is about something he actually wants to read. Of course, giving him this means he doesn't follow some links, which might be what is producing the signal that the EU legislators are concerned about.
There's a (thick) line between giving enough context to let the user skip the uninteresting and irrelevant chaff (good) and enough more that he gets the valuable reporting without following the link (I.P. appropriation).
Allowing aggregators to occupy some patch on that line is an application of "fair use". Legislation to define that region needs to take this into account. "Just headline plus link" is clearly outside that patch.
Or BOTH! B-)
If they don't want to build it, maybe they might chose to open-source the hardware?
Does anyone know: Are there any ASICs in it, or is it stock hardware parts and a firmware load?
I'd rather loose my job than be injected with a chip.
Since at least the 1970s I've been refusing to give my SS # to anybody who didn't have a legal authorization to demand it (i.e. banks, lenders, employers, tax preparers, etc.) If you haven't done this you have NO idea how hard it was to deal on those terms with health insurers, hospitals, and utilities in those decades.
So an implanted chip that gives out such an ID number to any radio requester? It is to laugh.
(Or cry.)
And its name is a misnomer, since anything that works over RF can be accessed at an arbitrary distance, given a large enough antenna and the proper electronics.
Not necessarily. You also need:
- An adequate signal to noise ratio.
- A propagating wave.
An evanescent wave - one that decays exponentially rather than propagating - doesn't launch energy on a non-return path and is drastically weak after a quarter wavelength or so. Examples include the field just above the surface of a material containing a beam that's totally-internally-reflecting from it. The idea of near field communication was to use that so devices could communicate if within a few inches and couldn't be tapped, even with fancy equipment, beyond a few feet.
Even antennas that DO launch a propagating electromagnetic wave have an additional non-propagating near field that typically is comparable in energy density once you're within a quarter wavelength or so of the structure.
Unfortunately, the implementation of NFC didn't use an evanescent-wave antenna. It used a magnetic coil - just as much a dipole wave-launcher as a similarly-scaled electrical dipole. The near field from that falls off inverse cube and it DOES launch a propagating wave that falls off inverse square. The coil is much smaller than a half-wavelength so the propagating wave is weak compared to the nearfield. Nevertheless: Oops!
If I'm reading this correctly, the exact same technology also enables faster-than-light communication.
Yep.
And if you can fling things around fast enough, faster-than-light communication enables future-to-past information transfer.
Bye, bye, grandma. (The grandfather paradox, female version, doesn't suffer from the "but it turns out grandpa was a cuckold" loophole.)
Fortunately for those of us who depend on causality for countinued existence, Bell's theorem says the radar doesn't really work.
(Though one that passes entangled photons past both sides of the plane, then measures their interference, might in principle detect the plane without exposing it to the photons. THAT one doesn't violate bell, lightspeed, or causality, but is pretty spooky.)
It is around 2 electron volts.
No, it's in the 6 thousand to 9 thousand eV range. See the end of the grandfather post.
China's Fusion Reactor Reaches 100 Million Degrees Celsius
Plasma energy sounds really large when you express it in temperature. But a more convenient gauge may be the voltage needed to accelerate the particles to velocity magnitudes correspondng to that sort of energy. This is also directly applicable to fusion systems, such as the Farnsworth-Hirsch or Bussard's Polywell, which use electric fields to accelerate the particles into the reaction volume.
Both electrons and hydrogen nuclei have a charge magnitude of 1, so dropping them across a potential difference of N volts adds N electron volts of energy to each particle. Then, if you let the plasma thermalize to a Maxwellâ"Boltzmann distribution, the electron temperature will be (by definition) the temperature of the distribution is about 2/3 that corresponding to the average electron energy.
So to go from degrees Celsius degrees (of a thermalized plasma) to electron volts: .003% drop in the bucket. (Kelvin step sizes are the same but Celsius starts at 273.15 Kelvin.)
- Subtract 273.15 - a
- Divide by 11,605 to get electron volts.
- Multiply by 2/3 to get the average energy of the electrons and ions.
That's an acceleration voltage of 6,025 volts (or 9,037 if you're going to react them before they thermalize). That's right in the ballpark for high-end vacuum tube technology - like the second anode on a CRT. (Those ran about 3000 to 6000 V in the 1940s, and about 25,000 V when modern color tubes were being replaced by flat panels.)
You can see why we all had high hopes for things like Polywell, where (if it worked as expected) a "gassy vacuum tube" that would fit in a strip-mall store's back room, with all supporting equipment (mostly mid-20th-century style electronics), and provide 100 MW of DC at cross-country power line voltages.
Of course many of the other methods for directly heating plasma heat the electrons much more than the ions. So the average energy of the plasma may be substantially lower.
For how long?
Geologic time (absent extreme temperatures or magnetic fields) wouldn't surprise me.
Seabed minerals have retained the magnetization that they fossilized when they cooled below their curie point, creating a geologic record of Earth's magnetic field reversals in the spreading seabed. (That's how we know that/when the Earth's field reversed from time to time.)
While this isn't the same structure, electron spins flipping in an environment conducive to them being stable is not something that tends to happen spontaneously.
The algorithm achieved 100 percent sensitivity at detecting the disease an average of more than six years prior to the final diagnosis.
So no false negatives. But how many false positives? TFA doesn't say.
You can get 100% detection of fires by sounding the alarm continuously. But that's not very useful. Without that other number we don't know if this is useful or bull generated fertilizer.
I wonder just exactly how many fixtures, retailing at $22k and $28K, could've been purchased for this insidious TLA deployment?
TFA said the DEA paid $22k and ICE $28k, not per fixture, but total. It seems unlikely that they each bought only one fixture for that money.
These could be a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of installing them (especially if a new lamppost is needed to put it where they want it).
Red light cameras are sold as, among other things, reducing accidents, by reducing the number of people who run the light.
Turns out they increase them. They do it by reducing the number of people who run the red light, too.
At intersections with red light cameras, some drivers who notice the light went yellow (but missed the event and don't know just how long ago it happened) slam on the brakes rather than risk a ticket - and get rear-ended by someone who knew there was plenty of time left.
It looks like "Relamping" them means replacing the fixture.
And that actually makes sense. LEDs are still more than a factor of two short of 100% efficient and still improving. By the time these fixtures need relamping it would probably be better to replace them even if the "lamps" were a replaceable part.
So why make them more complicated and expensive by making what amounts to the entire guts a removable unit, in the hopes somebody will buy some more of that piece ten or twenty years later?
If the installer of the surveillance equipment did their job properly, why would Bubba be doing more than just changing the bulb?
What bulb? This is an LED fixture.
While I haven't yet found a picture of it, the LED fixtures that are getting installed where I drive seem to have integral LEDs. It looks like "Relamping" them means replacing the fixture.
My question is will the voters keep going along with [alleged voter suppression].
My question is whether the voters, along with relatively honest politician, will continue to go along with a system where unverified mail-in registration and abentee balloting can be com bined to create an unlimited number of extra votes from imaginary voters.
Cries of "There isn't a lot of fake voting." cut no ice with me. What they really mean is "There isn't a lot of fake voting being caught and prosecuted." This could just as easily mean there is no effort by the current winners to upset the system that got them their jobs - perhaps because that system WAS corrupt and they KNOW it.
Getting the list of absentee voters into the hands of people who want to check whether the voters in question actually exist is the first step in finding out whether such fraud is common, and in stopping it if it is.
Since it IS public information, which is supposed to be easily available to anyone who wants to see it, any attempt to hamper access to it is not merely obstructionist, but may actually be a crime.
Meanwhile, electoral politics is merely "war by more peaceful means". A voter is a volunteer soldier in these wars. Letting other people know you've joined the battle is part of signing up to fight it, part of the cost of injecting your preferences into the policy making of the government.
What about an entire bionic eye? It could have zooming ...
I'll be happy to settle for a lens that flexes like mine did in my youth, so I can autofocus again, and replacement corneas if/when mine become darkened or cataract ridden.
Especially if they're of a curvature that doesn't require 6.5 diopters of spherical and 1.5 of crossed-cylinder correction perched on my nose.
Also: Biology gets REALLY CLOSE to getting the lens and cornea shapes right, but a cultured replacement, like some experimental lasic surgery, can be substantially better. 20/20 is for pikers. I had 20/10 in my teens with unaltered (though corrected) natural eyes. Lasic can go farther (though I didn't find how much farther in a cursory web search).
The solution is to enact the death penalty for bank overdrafts, jaywalking, making fun of creimer, etc...
Though China is trying it (and Clinton tried something similar when governor of Arkansas), we haven't gotten the "Organ Bank Problem" of Niven's "Known Space" series for a simple list of reasons:
- AIDS
- Hepatitis
- Alzheimers
- CJD
and so on.
People in jail, as a result of drug use and other factors, are a population often infected with difficult diseases that would be transplanted along with thane organ. The risk is far too high, and testing has far too many false negatives..
So transplants are from donors, and research into cultured replacement parts is well funded and starting to produce good results.
Some is already in use. Example: the replacement skin technology for burn victims developed by the Shriner's hospitals.
They could choose to change the days, they could choose to make it DST year-round, or they could choose to makee it standard time year-round (i would vote for the latter).
Federal law mandates that, if a state does daylight savings time, it makes the change at the federally mandated dates and times.
If it chooses not to do the biannual clock dance (oh PLEASE!) CA could chose to go with PST or pick (or define) another fixed time zone. (MST would be equivalent to permanent PDT.)
Note that not all time zones are at one-hour offsets from each other.
[with] a steel production plant right in the middle of a solar array. During the day, it could run off direct solar. At night, you would have giant vats of molten steel. You could run a generator off the heat from that.
There'd be a LOT of value in scavenging the heat from the molten metal to make more electricity. But it passes through the carnot cycle, so it won't generate enough to make a similar amount of steel (and approach a perpetual motion steel plant), by a long shot. Solar hours are ballpark 5 per day and generation varies with time of day, so if you want to run at full steel making capacity 24/7, you need far more energy storage than the heat in the molten steel to level your power supply.
Alternatively, if the equipment is cheap enough, you can use it at less than full capacity, consuming the power that's available at any given time - and just enough to keep from wrecking the equipment with cool-down flexing when it's scarce.
Also: The new process gives usable oxygen, rather than waste carbon oxides, as its exhaust. Another win there.
Though that win isn't a "less carbon" win unless you can use the oxygen for something else that replaces or reduces carbon emissions.
... it would presumably still be dirty if the electricity came from fossil fuels. It would probably be less dirty though.
If they're using coal to make electricity it will be more dirty.
- For heat the blast furnace uses the heat of the reaction directly, while electricity generation runs it through a heat engine and takes a substantial carnot cycle penalty, plus transmission losses, before using what's left 100% efficiently in resistive heating.
- For pull-the-oxygen-off, the blast furnace also does that directly (also getting some useful heat from it, though not as much as from burning the carbon in air) while using grid power also passes the heat from the same reaction through the heat-engine and transport penalties.
- On the other hand, the blast furnace is dumping a lot of waste heat from the combustion in the carbon-oxide exhaust, which the new process doesn't lose. If that's not being scavenged for co-generation it's a loss, though still less than the losses in the coal power plant and grid.
If the power plant fuel is hydrocarbons (oil or gas) the situation is much better. Most of the energy in hydrocarbons comes from burning the hydrogen. You get non-trivial amounts from burning the carbon part, but it's mostly there to hold the hydrogen in a convenient package. Methane (most of natural gas) is four hydrogens per carbon, ethane three, propane 2 2/3, butane 2 1/2. Liquid oil is also a mix of compounds with two hydrogens per carbon plus two extra per molecule, so it approaches 2 to 1 as you go to heavier oils. Figuring out whether you're ahead with, say, gas-fired plants would require more details of the process (and the plants).
Solar, wind, and hydro don't emit carbon (except for the ammortized carbon from their construction) and biomass is net carbon-neutral (if you're not using fossil fuels in your farming equipment). Win for the new process.
Also: The new process gives usable oxygen, rather than waste carbon oxides, as its exhaust. Another win there.