As far as I can tell from the article this looks familiar from 37 years ago.
As I read the article in your (corrected) link, the project 37 years ago got the plasmid to form and last for 5 MICROseconds, then ran out of money and got mothballed for a couple decades and had their equipment reactivated in a (never heard from again) lab around the turn of the millenium.
Maybe if they'd had funding to keep going, and figured out what these guys did (or something else) to keep things stable for three orders of magnitude more time and beyond, we'd have fusion power by now. It's been the perpetual 30 years and then some. B-b
to do what they want means they need 3 billion degrees to ignite and they are at 10 million
Each electronvolt is equivalent to 11,500 degrees Kelvin. So they need to run at about 200 kV instead of 870V. Piece of cake.
This is whyFarnsworth fusors are tabletop "gassy vacuum tubes" and the issues with polywell machines are things like geometry and electromagnet wiring rather than applying excitation energy.
Kelvin is the same size degree as celsius but offset by a couple hundred degrees so zero is absolute zero. At 3 billion degrees the difference between water freezing and absolute zero is noise. If TFA's degrees are fahrenheit the offset is still noise but scale the voltage back to 144 kV.
We have been expecting cold fusion in 30 years for about 50 years now.
Actually it's HOT fusion we've been expecting in 30 years for a long time. (Cold fusion, other than the apparently useless muon-catalyzed form, was a "maybe it's possible - no apparently not" flash in the pan)
But THIS one is big: It's not that it lasted 5 ms. It's that it lasted 5 ms WITHOUT DECAYING. That almost certainly means that:
- either they've completely solved the instability issues and it's just a matter of scaling up (and using superconductors or adequate cooling so they can run continuously),
- or they've solved them well enough to hold the plasma ball together until it's paid for itself several times over, then make another one (repeat continuously) and it's just a matter of scaling up (and using superconductors or adequate cooling so they can putt-putt-putt continuously).
Now if other problem show up (but aren't a fundamental refutation of this indication of stability) we might end up expecting fusion in five years for another fifteen or so. But I think the "30 years forever" thing has just been evicted from fusion and is living with its brother in copyright extension.
Bird deaths caused by wind and solar are minimal compared to the bird deaths caused by traditional fossil fueled infrastructure.
Thanks.
I was already aware that wind power, despite the "bird kill" hype, was not all that large a problem. (I'd also thought it might be overestimated, too: Birds die where they live, and wind farms are good hunting sites for raptors and feeding sites for other birds.) It's good to have references to studies actually comparing it to other sources of power - and the comparison to power TRANSMISSION is a really big deal - and might swamp any bird-death issues with heliostats.
Unfortunately, that article seems to be addressing only wind power and not large central-focus collection systems.
I'd be happy to see a study estimating the magnitude of the problem (and whether it IS a substantial problem), and will be overjoyed if the problem is trivial, or at least no more than on a par with "traditional" power sources.
Meanwhile I just wanted to caution that there MAY BE a problem, which needs to be examined.
Why people keep repeating that nonsense is beyond me.
Because rumor spreads fast, with screaming headlines, and retractions spread slower, are low-key, and often aren't believed or discounted.
A lot of people don't trust the "medical establishment" and won't believe "its pronouncements". If they've even heard that this is a fraud, they'll believe that the debunking research was comparable to the stuff the tobacco companies put out for decades.
Unfortunately, this has resulted in substantial numbers of uninoculated children. (The article I cited claims it's as high as 20% for measles innoculations in some areas.) This has lead to the resurgence of dangerous childhood diseases. (What counts for disease spread is not the percentage of uninoculated hosts, but the absolute density of susceptible individuals.)
Now you might think of it as evolution in action, with the children of those susceptible to the fraud being selectively infected, with a non-trivial number of them being crippled and/or killed. Unfortunately, immunizations are not 100% effective, by a long shot. If there is an infection hot-spot or an epidemic, some of the kids who got their shots (along with the immune-compromised) will still get the disease, and take damage.
Part of the drill is to produce "herd immunity" - reducing "k" in the exponential function to below one, so hot-spots of infection tie out, rather than explode into a calamity. The large number of people who don't let their kids be immunized have now prevented this, and (apparently thanks to a few starter cases that came in during the border crisis) we're now seeing a resurgence of measles and several other diseases.
Sure, having universal flu protection would be nice. But I don't know how I would feel about having THAT many autisms injected into me.
Ha ha. But seriously... As I understand it:
A large number of researchers (many funded by sources with no connection to drug companies) attempted to reproduce the research claiming to find a link between vaccinations and autism. They were not able to do so.
It was discovered that the original researcher who claimed the connection was funded by a consortium of trial lawyers.
The journal (BMJ), in which the original research was published, retracted it, investigated the study, and concluded that the author had "misrepresented or altered" the medical histories of the 12 subjects in question, in what appears to be a deliberate hoax.
I've been waiting for this for several years - after reading of similar (perhaps the same) work in Europe.
As with this story, they went after a "conserved region" on one of the critical viral proteins. This is a region that doesn't change substantially as the virus evolves, because it's the way it has to be for the virus to work, so viruses with changes to this part generally don't reproduce . (The bulk of the antibody-accessible portion of the virus is structural or "deliberate" camouflage, and mutates rapidly, which is why the viruses and ordinary vaccines keep changing.)
They cloned the conserved region onto a plasmid and made a strain of bacteria that pumped out the artificial antigen by the bucketful, suitable for making vaccine on industrial scale.
Story was they got one that worked for ALL the "A" strains of influenza. But they were having a hard time doing the same for "B" strains and didn't want to go for approval and production until they had a mix that could get them both.
Perhaps this story explains the problem with the B strains - and announces the solution?
One problem with industrial-scale central-focus concentrating solar systems is "smokers" - birds that were fried by the concentrated light.
- The concentrated light isn't visible as a bright spot in the air from below and the sides. It IS visible from above, as is the small percentage reflected from the object at the focus.
- This light attracts insects.
- The insects attract birds wishing to eat them
- The birds fly into the focus.
- The large amount of focussed sunlight kills them quickly and ignites them.
- The birds fall out of the air, trailing a plume of smoke, and are known a "smokers" by people in the trade.
Similarly with birds that see the object at the focus - typically the highest thing in the middle of a big flat region, and thus an especially attractive roosting place for predatory birds. - and decide to land on it..
It's like the cruel kid with the magnifying glass frying ants - but written large.
At 150 kW output (and substantially more input) it's not clear to me whether the birds would be instantly killed or merely blinded, badly burned, and left to suffer and die on the ground. But I bet even this village-scale heliostat system will suffer from this problem.
The government is taking the position that saying things that disagree with the official government position on things are subversive, anti-American, defeatist, comfort-to-the-enemony traitors? Color me surprised!
It was the McCarthy era - the American Inquisition. He wasn't hauled up in front of HUAC (The House {of representatives} Un-Ameracan Activities Committee), so I presume, if he was investigated, the FBI (and the other witch-hunters) didn't find any evidence of an actual association between Bradbury and any of the Communist regimes.
Having said that: Bradbury's dystopias always struck me as an attempt to transplant mainstream literature's techniques and biases into Science Fiction.
SF is the art of the technical class. The central message is "You can fix it or create wonders by applying intelligence and dilligence to the problem." Even the dystopias a subset of "cautionary tales", with the central message being "Be careful not the break it THIS way, because that could wreck it so badly you CAN'T fix it.
Mainstream fiction is the propaganda of control of the general population: The central message is futility: "Do what the authorities tell you to do. No matrer HOW badly they're doing and HOW bad things get, don't try to improve them. Anything you try will make them worse."
My impression of Bradbury is that he tried to use mainstream fiction techniques and in the process imported the mainstream fiction message.
But there could be unintended consequences. Taxes may go up, giving companies an incentive to locate elsewhere, and the wealthy an incentive to emigrate.
If they set the parameters right they can let this handle the "progressive" aspect of the tax code, too. They can flatten the income tax and eliminate the paperwork and special-cases - to the point where the income tax can be collected directly from employer withholding at a flat rate and no action by the employee, or employee forms beyond "this much paid as wages, this much withheld (here it is)" are needed at all. High-income earners might come out ahead, workers at all levels would have a LOT easier time climbing the income ladder (or starting their own businesses).
If the benefits are generous, they may pull in non-working immigrants from the rest of the EU.
That (along with fraud multiple-registering or registering pseudo-people for the benefit) could be a killer. (The other killer would be opposition from the government tax bureaucrats facing being thrown out to live on the dole plus whatever they could earn elsewhere.)
I have always wondered how they managed [printing hardcopy bills for millions of customers].
I remember back when the iphone first came out att had to ship people their bills in boxes because they were so big.
They have many, big, fast, printers (that don't use region-locked ink cartridges). B-)
Their paper-handling systems stuff the bill into the envelopes automatically (along with the other miscellany), too, and the postage is also under permit, so there's a preprinted license indicator on the envelope and no stamps. The whole pile goes straight to the post office, and is printed pre-sorted to eliminate their first-hop sorting (and reduce the company's postal bill).
(I don't know what they do for the box-sized ones, but I wouldn't be surprised if they route them to pritnters with paper handlers that can fill and label boxes, or have an auxiliary label-printer for workers who package the bills: Box-sized bills, even with a really fast printer, would be slow enough for human handling.)
Cuz this shit is why you get, "Hurr, climate change isn't reel". Because look - look at all the bad science and bullshit studies.
Actually it's looking more and more like that's EXACTLY were we got "Hockey stick! We're all going to die! (Unless we give governments the power to regulate the economy back into the bronze age and Al Gore a carbon-credit market from which he can make billions in profits {even after paying for his movie}.)"
Which is really annoying, because if there REALLY IS a DANGEROUS climate change PROBLEM that DOES NEED FIXING and CAN BE FIXED, "climate science" has been so discredited that it will no longer be possible to convince people this is the case. B-b
Human brain activity starts at ~12 weeks. 22 is the taking of a human life.
Which "brain activity" are you referring to?
I was under the impression that the inter-neuronal interconnections of the cognitive portion of the human brain did not begin to form until about a week into the third trimester. Before that those sections were essentially "a kit of parts, not yet assembled into a computer".
So are you talking about other "brain functions" - like low-level automation of body functions? Or are you claiming that the timing of the interconnection of the high-function neurons is different? (Note that these are not exclusive.)
There were several in the version of Chrome the IT department installed.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was the inability to remove a typo-squatting, not-safe-for-work, website address from the drop-down autocomplete suggestions in the address bar.
I guess nothing would go wrong with "automatically installing firmware updates".
Will the code be open (or its algorithms unpatented)? Will any other aspect of this be proprietary?
If not, and it does work better and "play well with others", it can be ported into open router projects such as OpenWRT. With those you can have control of the updates (if any), rather than accepting Google's choices.
You can also avoid any "Phone Home" and other malware inclusions - at least in the official releases. B-)
OnHub searches the airwaves and selects the best channel for the fastest connection. A unique antenna design and smart software keep working in the background, automatically adjusting OnHub to avoid interference and keep your network at peak performance.
Will it play nice with BLE (and other users of the unlicensed ISM bands?)
The Internet of Things (IoT) is deploying now.
A big enabler is the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, as specfied in the 4.0, 4.2, (and presumably beyond) Bluetooth spec. This provides for three connection establishment "advertising" channels "in the cracks" between the common 2.4G WiFI channels, plus occasional actual traffic hopping around on 37 other "data" channels, of which all but nine are within the common 2.4g WiFi channels or their skirts (and of those nine, seven, plus one of the advert channels, overlap ZigBee).
IoT devices are dirt cheap: They can typically run for years on a button battery, have substantial brainpower, and the rest of the device often costs less than the wholesale price of the battery. (As of the 4.2 spec they also have a 6LowPAN variant encoding and can be directly on the IPv6 internet.) So you can expect them to be deployed by the billions and become pervasive. Which means that, even if each one of them is only on the radio very occasionally, all together they'll be on it a LOT.
So when Google designed this new WiFi air-time management software, did they do it in a way that won't jam the oncoming flood of BLE devices and/or be jammed by them? Did they even take them into account? Or did they just optimize for a WiFi-filled chunk of bandwidth?
"optimizing for streaming and sharing" == bufferbloat ?
Not if it has CoDel!
Or even RED.
Counterintuitively: dropping an occasional packet when the queue is getting long enough that delay is becoming a problem, rather than letting the queue grow to a limit and then dropping them because there's no more storage, doesn't actually increase the average number of packets dropped when the channel is oversubscribed. It just drops DIFFERENT packets, resulting in shortening the queue (and fairly signalling the senders of the TCP flows that they need to slow down a bit to keep the queues from bloating.)
if you are worried about hackers, buy a car without any wireless features.
The federal government mandates a radio-based tire pressure telemetry system on all new cars. That means there's a digital radio monitoring the transmitters in the tires and reporting to the computer that displays alarms on the dashboard.
At least one such system has ALREADY been cracked, giving the attacker control of the car's data bus via the mandated tire pressure receiver.
(Also: These systems are inherently useful for tracking cars: Each wheel reports its pressure, along with a serial number (so the vehicle's system knows which are IT's tires and which ones are underinflated). This can be received by radios other than the one in the vehicle, including systems using loop antennas buried in the roadway.)
If you want a modern car, you're just going to have to accept that right now, they're all full of closed-source, black-box computer stuff. Short of going to work for the manufacturer and signing an NDA, you're never going to be able to get access to the inner workings of these things.
And they're also locked down against even other people in the company.
Much of the low emission and long lifetime performance is the result of the ability of the engine control computer to fine-tune the engine's characteristics on the fly, far better than the mechanical/electrical/pneumatic/hydraulic "computation" systems - where every arithmetic operation is several hardware parts - ever could.
The automakers keep tight controls over the code that runs the engine. This is not just to maintain competitive advantage, but to keep people from changing the engine's (and transmission's) operating parameters - which could give you better performance but completely wreck the fine balance that keeps emissions and fuel mileage within government mandates.
Making the powertrain computers less susceptible to cracking is a really good idea. Replacing them with something other than a powerful computer is not doable, without reducing the performance (especially the pollutant emissions) to something not much better than that of vehicles just before engine control computers were first deployed.
Yeah. Automotive electronics are designed to be pretty EMP-resistant from the beginning because the ignition coils produce what amounts to small EMPs - and they're connected to the power rails!
Though they're nowhere as hostile an environment as a diesel-electric locomotive - which switches megawatts of electric power and gets REALLY HOT when running across a desert in the summer. B-)
After the early EMP experiments killed the experimenters' cars' early electronic ignition systems - in the parking lots (which they discovered when they tried to drive home), and the government got concerned about this being an issue for military vehicles, the auto makers got really serious about EMP resistance. I hear GM made an EMP test cell (for their design center's type approval process - not for testing the vehicles on their way to customers) that delivers a pulse strong enough to bend the car's sheet metal. The car has to start and drive out of the cell for the design to be approved.
Keith can give you the accurate and current story on it.
But as I recall it (from the proposals in the early days of the L5 society and some experience with microwave and synthetic aperture techniques):
The powersat has many transmitters. Each single transmitter, even with a very directional antenna, puts out a very wide beam. (It might cover the whole face of the planet (and beyond)). One transmitter would look more like a radar transmitter at least (26,199 - 3,959) = 22,240 miles away - about 9 times the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
The transmitter/antenna devices distributed across the platform are phase-synchronized by a pilot signal transmitted from the ground rectenna site. They compute the complex conjugate of the (equivelnt at their frequency) signal they receive and transmit that. This orchestrates them so they form a beam that retraces the path through space, correcting for flexing of the powersat structure, the turbulence of the atmosphere, clouds, aircraft - metal, wood, or feathered - rainstorms, ionospheric distortions, etc. and focuses on the pilot transmitting antenna(s), like a hologram.
A number of factors defocus the beam somewhat, so you get a spot that covers the rectenna efficiently rather than tightly focussed on the pilot transmitting antenna(s), or leaking all over the surrounding county. The main one is the diffraction limit at the frequency involved, given the size of the transmitting array and distance from it: The bigger the transmitting array, the more tightly focussed the spot on the rectenna site can be. You don't want it TOO tight, to keep the power density reasonable (like a few times sunlight's power density). But the battle is to get it tight enough so your rectenna farm isn't city-sized, not to keep it from being too tight.
If pilot lock is lost by a single transmitter, it no longer stays locked to the rest of them - its signal spreads out like that of any lone transmitter. It stops contributing to the power in the rectenna and "shines" on the whole face of the planet - becoming microwave background noise. If pilot lock fails completely, all the transmitters VERY quickly go out of sync with each other (and can be deliberately given individual drift rates to insure this happens quickly). They ALL shine, incoherently, all over the world. All the power spreads out over the whole face of the planet and beyond. That part of the sky gets loud in microwaves, so you don't want to park a commsat there. But it's not going to toast Tokyo, or cause malfunctions in old-style pacemakers in Cleveland.
Of course you can design the transmitters so any that doesn't have pilot lock just shut down, if the solar array can accept the loss of the load. You can also modulate the pilot with a cryptographic identifier, to keep people from stealing power - or warming Central Park slightly - by setting up a second pilot transmitter at another site and making the "hologram" deliver a second spot.
Meanwhile you're not going to have roast birds falling out of the sky (like you do with the point-focus solar power systems). Microwave ovens cook because they use a frequency that is strongly absorbed by water. Milimeter-wave power systems use a frequency that is chosen to NOT be strongly absorbed by water. This lets it go THROUGH clouds, and birds, rather than being absorbed and heating them. They're not PERFECTLY transparent to it. But at the frequencies and power levels involved at the best focus you can get it's more like having an incandescent lamp in the room than like being in a microwave oven.
Meanwhile the rectenna is spidery enough that most of the sunlight passes through it, and efficient enough that most of the power does not. You can put it up on poles and graze cattle under it, without cooking the cows or the grass.
free public domain cartoons means people get exposed to the character. but you can't make money on those videos because the character isn't trademarked by you.
I though public domain on the work but active trademark on the character meant you can make money on copies of the work but you can't CHANGE it, making a new work with the trademarked character, without violating the trademark.
Farmers that think they can drill as much water as they want out of the ground and to hell with everyone else can pound sand.
Farmers think:
- they can pump as much water out of the ground, or the waterway, per year, as their water right entitles them to.
- But they don't get the water if there isn't any left after those with water rights more seinor to theirs have consumed the amount THEIR rights entitle them to.
- And people with more junior water rights to the same source don't get to take any unless the farmer with the more senior right has gotten as much of his rightful amount as he has chosen to take.
This is because water rights in California, like much of the west, are on the "prior appropriation" system: First, historically, to use, gets a right to keep on using - like homesteading land.
Most of the eastern part of the US uses a "riparian rights" system, where bodies of water are a commons, everybody with land abutting the water gets to use it (but not remove it from the watershed), and the collection of people with rights to a body get together and form a regulatory body to make rules to fairly apportion the water. California does NOT work this way, no matter how much the immigrants from the East Coast wish it did.
My wife and I, at our place in Nevada, have a "homestead water right" to three acre-feet per year. That's a moderately junior right to enough water to plumb a house, irrigate a small veggie garden, and water a couple horses, a milk cow, and some chickens, but not to irrigate our five-ish acres for crops. (I found out more than I wished to know about water rights when I spent a few grand on a lawyer to defend when we, and a few thousand others, were mistakenly made defendants in a water rights suit by a confused Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrat.)
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can tell from the article this looks familiar from 37 years ago.
As I read the article in your (corrected) link, the project 37 years ago got the plasmid to form and last for 5 MICROseconds, then ran out of money and got mothballed for a couple decades and had their equipment reactivated in a (never heard from again) lab around the turn of the millenium.
Maybe if they'd had funding to keep going, and figured out what these guys did (or something else) to keep things stable for three orders of magnitude more time and beyond, we'd have fusion power by now. It's been the perpetual 30 years and then some. B-b
to do what they want means they need 3 billion degrees to ignite and they are at 10 million
Each electronvolt is equivalent to 11,500 degrees Kelvin. So they need to run at about 200 kV instead of 870V. Piece of cake.
This is whyFarnsworth fusors are tabletop "gassy vacuum tubes" and the issues with polywell machines are things like geometry and electromagnet wiring rather than applying excitation energy.
Kelvin is the same size degree as celsius but offset by a couple hundred degrees so zero is absolute zero. At 3 billion degrees the difference between water freezing and absolute zero is noise. If TFA's degrees are fahrenheit the offset is still noise but scale the voltage back to 144 kV.
We have been expecting cold fusion in 30 years for about 50 years now.
Actually it's HOT fusion we've been expecting in 30 years for a long time. (Cold fusion, other than the apparently useless muon-catalyzed form, was a "maybe it's possible - no apparently not" flash in the pan)
But THIS one is big: It's not that it lasted 5 ms. It's that it lasted 5 ms WITHOUT DECAYING. That almost certainly means that:
- either they've completely solved the instability issues and it's just a matter of scaling up (and using superconductors or adequate cooling so they can run continuously),
- or they've solved them well enough to hold the plasma ball together until it's paid for itself several times over, then make another one (repeat continuously) and it's just a matter of scaling up (and using superconductors or adequate cooling so they can putt-putt-putt continuously).
Now if other problem show up (but aren't a fundamental refutation of this indication of stability) we might end up expecting fusion in five years for another fifteen or so. But I think the "30 years forever" thing has just been evicted from fusion and is living with its brother in copyright extension.
Not sure about this installation, but one I read about in Australia was in the desert, where there are no birds.
Huh?
There are LOTS of birds in deserts.
Bird deaths caused by wind and solar are minimal compared to the bird deaths caused by traditional fossil fueled infrastructure.
Thanks.
I was already aware that wind power, despite the "bird kill" hype, was not all that large a problem. (I'd also thought it might be overestimated, too: Birds die where they live, and wind farms are good hunting sites for raptors and feeding sites for other birds.) It's good to have references to studies actually comparing it to other sources of power - and the comparison to power TRANSMISSION is a really big deal - and might swamp any bird-death issues with heliostats.
Unfortunately, that article seems to be addressing only wind power and not large central-focus collection systems.
I'd be happy to see a study estimating the magnitude of the problem (and whether it IS a substantial problem), and will be overjoyed if the problem is trivial, or at least no more than on a par with "traditional" power sources.
Meanwhile I just wanted to caution that there MAY BE a problem, which needs to be examined.
Why people keep repeating that nonsense is beyond me.
Because rumor spreads fast, with screaming headlines, and retractions spread slower, are low-key, and often aren't believed or discounted.
A lot of people don't trust the "medical establishment" and won't believe "its pronouncements". If they've even heard that this is a fraud, they'll believe that the debunking research was comparable to the stuff the tobacco companies put out for decades.
Unfortunately, this has resulted in substantial numbers of uninoculated children. (The article I cited claims it's as high as 20% for measles innoculations in some areas.) This has lead to the resurgence of dangerous childhood diseases. (What counts for disease spread is not the percentage of uninoculated hosts, but the absolute density of susceptible individuals.)
Now you might think of it as evolution in action, with the children of those susceptible to the fraud being selectively infected, with a non-trivial number of them being crippled and/or killed. Unfortunately, immunizations are not 100% effective, by a long shot. If there is an infection hot-spot or an epidemic, some of the kids who got their shots (along with the immune-compromised) will still get the disease, and take damage.
Part of the drill is to produce "herd immunity" - reducing "k" in the exponential function to below one, so hot-spots of infection tie out, rather than explode into a calamity. The large number of people who don't let their kids be immunized have now prevented this, and (apparently thanks to a few starter cases that came in during the border crisis) we're now seeing a resurgence of measles and several other diseases.
Sure, having universal flu protection would be nice. But I don't know how I would feel about having THAT many autisms injected into me.
Ha ha. But seriously... As I understand it:
A large number of researchers (many funded by sources with no connection to drug companies) attempted to reproduce the research claiming to find a link between vaccinations and autism. They were not able to do so.
It was discovered that the original researcher who claimed the connection was funded by a consortium of trial lawyers.
The journal (BMJ), in which the original research was published, retracted it, investigated the study, and concluded that the author had "misrepresented or altered" the medical histories of the 12 subjects in question, in what appears to be a deliberate hoax.
More in this CNN article.
I've been waiting for this for several years - after reading of similar (perhaps the same) work in Europe.
As with this story, they went after a "conserved region" on one of the critical viral proteins. This is a region that doesn't change substantially as the virus evolves, because it's the way it has to be for the virus to work, so viruses with changes to this part generally don't reproduce . (The bulk of the antibody-accessible portion of the virus is structural or "deliberate" camouflage, and mutates rapidly, which is why the viruses and ordinary vaccines keep changing.)
They cloned the conserved region onto a plasmid and made a strain of bacteria that pumped out the artificial antigen by the bucketful, suitable for making vaccine on industrial scale.
Story was they got one that worked for ALL the "A" strains of influenza. But they were having a hard time doing the same for "B" strains and didn't want to go for approval and production until they had a mix that could get them both.
Perhaps this story explains the problem with the B strains - and announces the solution?
One problem with industrial-scale central-focus concentrating solar systems is "smokers" - birds that were fried by the concentrated light.
- The concentrated light isn't visible as a bright spot in the air from below and the sides. It IS visible from above, as is the small percentage reflected from the object at the focus.
- This light attracts insects.
- The insects attract birds wishing to eat them
- The birds fly into the focus.
- The large amount of focussed sunlight kills them quickly and ignites them.
- The birds fall out of the air, trailing a plume of smoke, and are known a "smokers" by people in the trade.
Similarly with birds that see the object at the focus - typically the highest thing in the middle of a big flat region, and thus an especially attractive roosting place for predatory birds. - and decide to land on it..
It's like the cruel kid with the magnifying glass frying ants - but written large.
At 150 kW output (and substantially more input) it's not clear to me whether the birds would be instantly killed or merely blinded, badly burned, and left to suffer and die on the ground. But I bet even this village-scale heliostat system will suffer from this problem.
The government is taking the position that saying things that disagree with the official government position on things are subversive, anti-American, defeatist, comfort-to-the-enemony traitors? Color me surprised!
It was the McCarthy era - the American Inquisition. He wasn't hauled up in front of HUAC (The House {of representatives} Un-Ameracan Activities Committee), so I presume, if he was investigated, the FBI (and the other witch-hunters) didn't find any evidence of an actual association between Bradbury and any of the Communist regimes.
Having said that: Bradbury's dystopias always struck me as an attempt to transplant mainstream literature's techniques and biases into Science Fiction.
SF is the art of the technical class. The central message is "You can fix it or create wonders by applying intelligence and dilligence to the problem." Even the dystopias a subset of "cautionary tales", with the central message being "Be careful not the break it THIS way, because that could wreck it so badly you CAN'T fix it.
Mainstream fiction is the propaganda of control of the general population: The central message is futility: "Do what the authorities tell you to do. No matrer HOW badly they're doing and HOW bad things get, don't try to improve them. Anything you try will make them worse."
My impression of Bradbury is that he tried to use mainstream fiction techniques and in the process imported the mainstream fiction message.
But there could be unintended consequences. Taxes may go up, giving companies an incentive to locate elsewhere, and the wealthy an incentive to emigrate.
If they set the parameters right they can let this handle the "progressive" aspect of the tax code, too. They can flatten the income tax and eliminate the paperwork and special-cases - to the point where the income tax can be collected directly from employer withholding at a flat rate and no action by the employee, or employee forms beyond "this much paid as wages, this much withheld (here it is)" are needed at all. High-income earners might come out ahead, workers at all levels would have a LOT easier time climbing the income ladder (or starting their own businesses).
If the benefits are generous, they may pull in non-working immigrants from the rest of the EU.
That (along with fraud multiple-registering or registering pseudo-people for the benefit) could be a killer. (The other killer would be opposition from the government tax bureaucrats facing being thrown out to live on the dole plus whatever they could earn elsewhere.)
I have always wondered how they managed [printing hardcopy bills for millions of customers].
I remember back when the iphone first came out att had to ship people their bills in boxes because they were so big.
They have many, big, fast, printers (that don't use region-locked ink cartridges). B-)
Their paper-handling systems stuff the bill into the envelopes automatically (along with the other miscellany), too, and the postage is also under permit, so there's a preprinted license indicator on the envelope and no stamps. The whole pile goes straight to the post office, and is printed pre-sorted to eliminate their first-hop sorting (and reduce the company's postal bill).
(I don't know what they do for the box-sized ones, but I wouldn't be surprised if they route them to pritnters with paper handlers that can fill and label boxes, or have an auxiliary label-printer for workers who package the bills: Box-sized bills, even with a really fast printer, would be slow enough for human handling.)
Cuz this shit is why you get, "Hurr, climate change isn't reel". Because look - look at all the bad science and bullshit studies.
Actually it's looking more and more like that's EXACTLY were we got "Hockey stick! We're all going to die! (Unless we give governments the power to regulate the economy back into the bronze age and Al Gore a carbon-credit market from which he can make billions in profits {even after paying for his movie}.)"
Which is really annoying, because if there REALLY IS a DANGEROUS climate change PROBLEM that DOES NEED FIXING and CAN BE FIXED, "climate science" has been so discredited that it will no longer be possible to convince people this is the case. B-b
And your characterization is part of the problem.
Human brain activity starts at ~12 weeks. 22 is the taking of a human life.
Which "brain activity" are you referring to?
I was under the impression that the inter-neuronal interconnections of the cognitive portion of the human brain did not begin to form until about a week into the third trimester. Before that those sections were essentially "a kit of parts, not yet assembled into a computer".
So are you talking about other "brain functions" - like low-level automation of body functions? Or are you claiming that the timing of the interconnection of the high-function neurons is different? (Note that these are not exclusive.)
There were several in the version of Chrome the IT department installed.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was the inability to remove a typo-squatting, not-safe-for-work, website address from the drop-down autocomplete suggestions in the address bar.
I guess nothing would go wrong with "automatically installing firmware updates".
Will the code be open (or its algorithms unpatented)? Will any other aspect of this be proprietary?
If not, and it does work better and "play well with others", it can be ported into open router projects such as OpenWRT. With those you can have control of the updates (if any), rather than accepting Google's choices.
You can also avoid any "Phone Home" and other malware inclusions - at least in the official releases. B-)
Will it play nice with BLE (and other users of the unlicensed ISM bands?)
The Internet of Things (IoT) is deploying now.
A big enabler is the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, as specfied in the 4.0, 4.2, (and presumably beyond) Bluetooth spec. This provides for three connection establishment "advertising" channels "in the cracks" between the common 2.4G WiFI channels, plus occasional actual traffic hopping around on 37 other "data" channels, of which all but nine are within the common 2.4g WiFi channels or their skirts (and of those nine, seven, plus one of the advert channels, overlap ZigBee).
IoT devices are dirt cheap: They can typically run for years on a button battery, have substantial brainpower, and the rest of the device often costs less than the wholesale price of the battery. (As of the 4.2 spec they also have a 6LowPAN variant encoding and can be directly on the IPv6 internet.) So you can expect them to be deployed by the billions and become pervasive. Which means that, even if each one of them is only on the radio very occasionally, all together they'll be on it a LOT.
So when Google designed this new WiFi air-time management software, did they do it in a way that won't jam the oncoming flood of BLE devices and/or be jammed by them? Did they even take them into account? Or did they just optimize for a WiFi-filled chunk of bandwidth?
Or even RED.
Counterintuitively: dropping an occasional packet when the queue is getting long enough that delay is becoming a problem, rather than letting the queue grow to a limit and then dropping them because there's no more storage, doesn't actually increase the average number of packets dropped when the channel is oversubscribed. It just drops DIFFERENT packets, resulting in shortening the queue (and fairly signalling the senders of the TCP flows that they need to slow down a bit to keep the queues from bloating.)
if you are worried about hackers, buy a car without any wireless features.
The federal government mandates a radio-based tire pressure telemetry system on all new cars. That means there's a digital radio monitoring the transmitters in the tires and reporting to the computer that displays alarms on the dashboard.
At least one such system has ALREADY been cracked, giving the attacker control of the car's data bus via the mandated tire pressure receiver.
(Also: These systems are inherently useful for tracking cars: Each wheel reports its pressure, along with a serial number (so the vehicle's system knows which are IT's tires and which ones are underinflated). This can be received by radios other than the one in the vehicle, including systems using loop antennas buried in the roadway.)
If you want a modern car, you're just going to have to accept that right now, they're all full of closed-source, black-box computer stuff. Short of going to work for the manufacturer and signing an NDA, you're never going to be able to get access to the inner workings of these things.
And they're also locked down against even other people in the company.
Much of the low emission and long lifetime performance is the result of the ability of the engine control computer to fine-tune the engine's characteristics on the fly, far better than the mechanical/electrical/pneumatic/hydraulic "computation" systems - where every arithmetic operation is several hardware parts - ever could.
The automakers keep tight controls over the code that runs the engine. This is not just to maintain competitive advantage, but to keep people from changing the engine's (and transmission's) operating parameters - which could give you better performance but completely wreck the fine balance that keeps emissions and fuel mileage within government mandates.
Making the powertrain computers less susceptible to cracking is a really good idea. Replacing them with something other than a powerful computer is not doable, without reducing the performance (especially the pollutant emissions) to something not much better than that of vehicles just before engine control computers were first deployed.
Yeah. Automotive electronics are designed to be pretty EMP-resistant from the beginning because the ignition coils produce what amounts to small EMPs - and they're connected to the power rails!
Though they're nowhere as hostile an environment as a diesel-electric locomotive - which switches megawatts of electric power and gets REALLY HOT when running across a desert in the summer. B-)
After the early EMP experiments killed the experimenters' cars' early electronic ignition systems - in the parking lots (which they discovered when they tried to drive home), and the government got concerned about this being an issue for military vehicles, the auto makers got really serious about EMP resistance. I hear GM made an EMP test cell (for their design center's type approval process - not for testing the vehicles on their way to customers) that delivers a pulse strong enough to bend the car's sheet metal. The car has to start and drive out of the cell for the design to be approved.
Like it's going to be in Virginia until the last of those elected through the use of these machines are gone.
Or re-elected by a more trustworthy system.
Keith can give you the accurate and current story on it.
But as I recall it (from the proposals in the early days of the L5 society and some experience with microwave and synthetic aperture techniques):
The powersat has many transmitters. Each single transmitter, even with a very directional antenna, puts out a very wide beam. (It might cover the whole face of the planet (and beyond)). One transmitter would look more like a radar transmitter at least (26,199 - 3,959) = 22,240 miles away - about 9 times the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
The transmitter/antenna devices distributed across the platform are phase-synchronized by a pilot signal transmitted from the ground rectenna site. They compute the complex conjugate of the (equivelnt at their frequency) signal they receive and transmit that. This orchestrates them so they form a beam that retraces the path through space, correcting for flexing of the powersat structure, the turbulence of the atmosphere, clouds, aircraft - metal, wood, or feathered - rainstorms, ionospheric distortions, etc. and focuses on the pilot transmitting antenna(s), like a hologram.
A number of factors defocus the beam somewhat, so you get a spot that covers the rectenna efficiently rather than tightly focussed on the pilot transmitting antenna(s), or leaking all over the surrounding county. The main one is the diffraction limit at the frequency involved, given the size of the transmitting array and distance from it: The bigger the transmitting array, the more tightly focussed the spot on the rectenna site can be. You don't want it TOO tight, to keep the power density reasonable (like a few times sunlight's power density). But the battle is to get it tight enough so your rectenna farm isn't city-sized, not to keep it from being too tight.
If pilot lock is lost by a single transmitter, it no longer stays locked to the rest of them - its signal spreads out like that of any lone transmitter. It stops contributing to the power in the rectenna and "shines" on the whole face of the planet - becoming microwave background noise. If pilot lock fails completely, all the transmitters VERY quickly go out of sync with each other (and can be deliberately given individual drift rates to insure this happens quickly). They ALL shine, incoherently, all over the world. All the power spreads out over the whole face of the planet and beyond. That part of the sky gets loud in microwaves, so you don't want to park a commsat there. But it's not going to toast Tokyo, or cause malfunctions in old-style pacemakers in Cleveland.
Of course you can design the transmitters so any that doesn't have pilot lock just shut down, if the solar array can accept the loss of the load. You can also modulate the pilot with a cryptographic identifier, to keep people from stealing power - or warming Central Park slightly - by setting up a second pilot transmitter at another site and making the "hologram" deliver a second spot.
Meanwhile you're not going to have roast birds falling out of the sky (like you do with the point-focus solar power systems). Microwave ovens cook because they use a frequency that is strongly absorbed by water. Milimeter-wave power systems use a frequency that is chosen to NOT be strongly absorbed by water. This lets it go THROUGH clouds, and birds, rather than being absorbed and heating them. They're not PERFECTLY transparent to it. But at the frequencies and power levels involved at the best focus you can get it's more like having an incandescent lamp in the room than like being in a microwave oven.
Meanwhile the rectenna is spidery enough that most of the sunlight passes through it, and efficient enough that most of the power does not. You can put it up on poles and graze cattle under it, without cooking the cows or the grass.
free public domain cartoons means people get exposed to the character. but you can't make money on those videos because the character isn't trademarked by you.
I though public domain on the work but active trademark on the character meant you can make money on copies of the work but you can't CHANGE it, making a new work with the trademarked character, without violating the trademark.
But IANAL...
Farmers that think they can drill as much water as they want out of the ground and to hell with everyone else can pound sand.
Farmers think:
- they can pump as much water out of the ground, or the waterway, per year, as their water right entitles them to.
- But they don't get the water if there isn't any left after those with water rights more seinor to theirs have consumed the amount THEIR rights entitle them to.
- And people with more junior water rights to the same source don't get to take any unless the farmer with the more senior right has gotten as much of his rightful amount as he has chosen to take.
This is because water rights in California, like much of the west, are on the "prior appropriation" system: First, historically, to use, gets a right to keep on using - like homesteading land.
Most of the eastern part of the US uses a "riparian rights" system, where bodies of water are a commons, everybody with land abutting the water gets to use it (but not remove it from the watershed), and the collection of people with rights to a body get together and form a regulatory body to make rules to fairly apportion the water. California does NOT work this way, no matter how much the immigrants from the East Coast wish it did.
My wife and I, at our place in Nevada, have a "homestead water right" to three acre-feet per year. That's a moderately junior right to enough water to plumb a house, irrigate a small veggie garden, and water a couple horses, a milk cow, and some chickens, but not to irrigate our five-ish acres for crops. (I found out more than I wished to know about water rights when I spent a few grand on a lawyer to defend when we, and a few thousand others, were mistakenly made defendants in a water rights suit by a confused Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrat.)