Give me a call when those fuel cells are ready for deployment, then we can talk about all these wonderful uses. No talk about the carbon footprint of operating fuel cells?
Natural gas (methane) has the highest energy/carbon emission ration of any saturated hydrocarbon (gas or oil) and beats the HELL out of coal. If you're going to use fossil fuels (or renewable fuel from biodegrading vegetable waste, sewage, or cow flops), and a fuel cell is in the efficiency ballpark with a grid plant, why not put the fuel cell in the rack?
The article mixes the use of fuel cells as a power source with efficiency improvements. The only place that makes sense is with the minor savings that may be seen by eliminating DC converters, but you will still need DC regulators which will have some losses.
Fuel cells are not limited by the carnot cycle efficiency limt. They can be FAR MORE EFFICIENT than a heat-engine based power plant.
Modern circuit boards in servers ALREADY HAVE switching regulators near the chips. With the very low operating voltages of modern electronics, the supply currents are SO high that you lose less energy by running 48V on the power planes of the PC board and regulating it down at the load than you do running, say 3.3, 2.5, or 1.8 volts and a correspondingly higher current across several inches of thin copper.
Remember: I-squared-R losses go up with the SQUARE of the current. So running 1.2V across a board to your chips loses 400 TIMES as much power as running 48V to the regulator next to them. It's like high-tension transmission lines in miniature. (They'd go higher except that over 50V gets you out of the easy part of the electrical code and into the region where electrocution becomes a major issue.)
Putting the switching regulator next to the chip also gives you much more stable voltage. When it's already there to save power, this makes good regulation "cheaper than free".
A major oversight of this article is the fact that fuel cells are major heat generators, not something you want in a data center. They would need to be installed in a separated structure, therefore idea that "Rack-level fuel cells would do away with data-centre-wide electricity distribution for servers" is hard to imagine.
They also need and external air supply and to have their exhaust removed rather than dumped into the room air. So you're going to give them their own plumbing. You want to SAVE that heat to keep the oxygen-transport style cells at operating temperature without wasting fuel or power to do it. So you insulate the box and run the ventilation plumbing like a stove pipe - coaxial, with the hot exhaust in the middle and the cool incoming air on the outside. This minimizes the heat loss to the room and acts like a counter-current heat exchanger to preheat the fresh air with the heat from the exhaust, while cooling the exhaust.
It's similar to what I did with my first unix box, back in the '80s or so: The thing put out as much heat as a space heater. So I hooked up a dryer vent hose to the 4" exhaust fan and dumped the hot air outside. Cooling problem solved. (In the winter I dumped it INSIDE to save on heating bills.)
Right now, if I don't have electric and gas, my water heater and furnace become inoperable.
In my remote house my heat and water heater both work fine on only propane. As long as the tank is not empty we're fine (and the tank only needs filling about three times a year).
The water heater is gas with a pilot light and no electric controls (except for the pilot light safety thermocouple, which generates enough power from the flame's heat to control the safety shutdown).
While the regular furnace has electronic controls and blower, I also have a backup: A propane "fireplace" stove in the great room, with a room layout that lets it heat the living area and keep the pipes from freezing.
Again it works with a pilot light, and the thermocouple's few millivolts also provide enough power, controlled by a mechanical-switch thermostat in the middle of the house, to operate the main gas valve as well. Though the stove's room blower will also fail in an outage, convection is more than adequate to circulate the heat in the big-open-space-in-the-middle house design. Kept things nice and comfy when we had a day-long outage in deep winter.
When away the stats are set to 55 for the furnace, 50 for the backup stove. This worked just fine one winter, when the furnace's draft sensor failed and the furnace was dead for weeks until we got there and discovered the issue. That definitely paid for the stove in one event.
If you have a fuel cell that burns methane (i.e. Natural gas) or other fuels the fuel cell will have to reform it into Hydrogen (releasing CO2) before it's used.
And if you're ultimately running from fossil fuels, methane is the least carbon-emitting choice.
Burning the hydrogen atoms to water produces MOST of the power from fossil fuels. Burning the carbon to CO2 produces a little more. But in gas and oil it's mostly there to make the hydrogen easier to handle than H2.
Methane has four hydrogens per carbon (4:1), the best ratio of all hydrocarbons. Ethane: (6: 2 = 3:1), propane: 8:3 = 2.666..."1, and so on. As you transition from gasses to oil you're approaching the large saturated hydrocarbon molecule limit of 2:1.
Then there's coal, where you're JUST burning the carbon. All CO2, much less energy (though still plenty if you burn ENOUGH of it).
Tell me when they come up with a range of affordable, small, light weight, fuel cells that efficiently make a couple hundred to a couple thousand watts by burning odorized propane with ambient air. I want one for my car, one for my travel trailer, and one for each house.
Electrolysis is not cost effective and requires more electrical power than your fuel cell could produce.
By the same argument, power grids "are not cost effective" because they require more electrical power input than they deliver to the cu stomer.
Electrolysis may be VERY cost effective. Just think of it as a different sort of energy distribution system, not as a conversion of fuel to electricity, and compare its costs to what it replaces.
(This is similar to the bogus argument against solar panels: "They take more energy to make than they deliver over their lifetime." First that's false - they reach energy breakeven very early in their life. Second, they produce post-carnot-cycle electricity, while most of the energy going into making them is pre-carnot-cycle heat. Third, you need to compare their energy consumption apples-to-apples: How much energy does it take to build and fuel the fraction of the power grid that would deliver the same amount of electricity to the same site - from melting steel to build transformers, to clearing trees and stringing poles, to building power plants and switchgear, to fueling the plants to make the electricity (digging for and transporting coal, drilling for and pumping oil, disposing of radioactive waste,...) to losing a fraction of that to carnot cycle efficiency, transformer losses, corona discharge, resistive heating of transmission lines,...)
Those so-called "Death Panels" already exist. Why is it alright for Insurance Companies to pick and choose who gets to live, and who must die, while bankrupting even more people in the process? I'd feel much safer if "profit" wasnt a primary variable in whether me or my loved ones get to live or die.
A rhetorical question deserves a rhetorical answer:
Because, with private insurance companies, you can either change policies or insurance companies, to get policy terms (and "death panels") more to your liking. Or you can dump the insurance company altogether and pay the hospitals as many buck as they ask to get as much health care as you both need and can afford.
With Obama care:
- You're forced to buy insurance.
- You're forced to buy a plan the government approved.
- You're forced to buy a plan with some very expensive coverage that you may not need or want.
- And the government picks your "death panel". Don't like that one? Find another country.
Top performers burn out fast and do not return to the IT field.
And now they get ripped off, too.
People with links to other talented, employable, people have been getting finder's bonuses from their employers for recommending a good candidate.
Now Google has patented mining their email and social network metadata so THEY can get a hiring fee. They just monitized the money out of their subscribers' pockets into their own.
looking at question 6, I see immediately, based on the language, that there are at least two answers: 2 and 6. The test writer only meant for one answer to be correct,
Reminds me of a standardized test I hit back in the 6th (or so) grade. It was a "what's the missing number to this series?" question. One of the five options completed an arithmetic series, another a geometric series.
This was one of those that also measured speed, by throwing too many questions at you to answer them all. I recall I hung on that question long enough, trying to figure out which one they wanted, that I could have answered perhaps five more.
(That's the one where, while thinking about it afterward, I figured out that good test strategy includes abandoning a question that is taking too long.)
The government seems to treat the population, in many ways, much as a farmer treats his livestock. But when it comes to getting old, how DOES a farmer treat livestock?
On a farm, while livestock is healthy and producing profit, they're valuable. Once they're costing more than they're producing, it's time to get rid of them. A particularly beloved animal might be kept on as a pet. But the anonymous mass has to go.
Since at lest the late '70s or early '80s, the impending bankruptcy of Social Security has been a worry for government officials. I recall one of them making a "slip of the tongue" on a CNN interview, back when the channel was new: She lamented that small families and the success of the '60s anti-population-growth propaganda was leading to too many retired and two few working, and they had to "get the death rate up to match the birth rate" to save the program. That may not be the official position, but that sort of thinking is pervasive.
In past generations oldsters could be counted on for votes. But aging boomers aren't as solid a voting block for the party in power as some of the later generations - particularly the new, undocumented, immigrants.
What if our current party-in-power has decided that, now that the Baby Boomers are aging out of the work force, becoming a drain on, rather than paying into, the government coffers, it's time to kill them off? How could they go about it?
Just setting up "Death Panels" and picking who's going to be left to die isn't too popular. (Look at the bad press they got when they included that in a companion bill to Obamacare.)
But how about this:
- Nationalize the bulk of the medical insurance industry. - Change the rules on all of it, so the prices for private plans goes 'way up, and the insurance companies can dump the sickly from their current, lower-priced, plans because they don't conform to the new rules. - Then botch the rollout, so those dumped can't get new insurance, either.
Result:
- The poor boomers are dumped from their insurance. The moderately well-to-do boomers have their healthcare prices skyrocket, quickly draining them into "poor boomer" status. (Give 'em six months to three years without insurance and see how many are left.) Only the truly rich can afford to stay alive and healthy. - With the "It's a really GREAT program, there's just a few bugs in the rollout." claim they can stretch it out and leave the oldsters uninsured for years.
- Meanwhile the politicians who orchestrated this get to claim they're doing it to HELP the population, not to kill them off. (They even get to claim it's their opposition who is trying to kill off grandma.)
Maybe it's not what's happening. But it fits so well with the rest of their track records and the party's historical roots. I ask myself, "If they were doing this deliberately, WHAT would they do differently?". And I can't think of a single thing.
The Sookie Stackhouse (southern vampire series) books (and the "True Blood" TV adaptation) come to mind as well.
For those unaware of the series: They start from shortly after the big reveal, where the vampires came out of the closet after the Japanese invent a blood substitute that provides adequate nutrition for vampires, allowing them to live without hunting people.
I disagree with your assertion that it'll take years to get healthcare.gov working.
That's just the first step. Then there's getting the exchange behind it working, i.e. having affordable plans that actually pay for anything, with deductables low enough that the patient doesn't end up just paying their own bill in addition to the premiums.
But "disagree" isn't an issue with future events. We both make our best guesses, but the real world will tell us what really happens if we just wait a bit. Let's hang around (if we live that long) and see which of us has the pool bet closer to the actual date.
By the time they turn 65, they qualify for Medicare. Or are you considering Medicare to constitute "the bulk of the medical insurance industry"?
Already there and on it. Even before the Obamacare tweaks it was far inferior to the coverage I had from my last job before I went on it - insurance that was canceled when I became of age for Medicare coverage.
Look up "medigap" and "the donut hole". Look up "IRMA" (Income Related Monthly Adjustment), which doesn't take into account the local cost of living.
Then they cut benefits further, "as part of funding Obamacare".
Meanwhile my wife isn't eligible for it for another half-decade. Her private individual insurance is already almost a thousand bux a month with a monster deductable - and we're waiting to find out if it's being canceled, along with most of the private plans in CA, or its premium doubling or worse, thanks to Obamacare regulation changes.
The government seems to treat the population, in many ways, much as a farmer treats his livestock. But when it comes to getting old, how DOES a farmer treat livestock?
On a farm, while livestock is healthy and producing profit, they're valuable. Once they're costing more than they're producing, it's time to get rid of them. A particularly beloved animal might be kept on as a pet. But the anonymous mass has to go.
Since at lest the late '70s or early '80s, the impending bankruptcy of Social Security has been a worry for government officials. I recall one of them making a "slip of the tongue" on a CNN interview, back when the channel was new: She lamented that small families and the success of the '60s anti-population-growth propaganda was leading to too many retired and two few working, and they had to "get the death rate up to match the birth rate" to save the program. That may not be the official position, but that sort of thinking is pervasive.
In past generations oldsters could be counted on for votes. But aging boomers aren't as solid a voting block for the party in power as some of the later generations - particularly the new, undocumented, immigrants.
What if our current party-in-power has decided that, now that the Baby Boomers are aging out of the work force, becoming a drain on, rather than paying into, the government coffers, it's time to kill them off? How could they go about it?
Just setting up "Death Panels" and picking who's going to be left to die isn't too popular. (Look at the bad press they got when they included that in a companion bill to Obamacare.)
But how about this:
- Nationalize the bulk of the medical insurance industry. - Change the rules on all of it, so the prices for private plans goes 'way up, and the insurance companies can dump the sickly from their current, lower-priced, plans because they don't conform to the new rules. - Then botch the rollout, so those dumped can't get new insurance, either.
Result:
- The poor boomers are dumped from their insurance. The moderately well-to-do boomers have their healthcare prices skyrocket, quickly draining them into "poor boomer" status. (Give 'em six months to three years without insurance and see how many are left.) Only the truly rich can afford to stay alive and healthy. - With the "It's a really GREAT program, there's just a few bugs in the rollout." claim they can stretch it out and leave the oldsters uninsured for years.
- Meanwhile the politicians who orchestrated this get to claim they're doing it to HELP the population, not to kill them off. (They even get to claim it's their opposition who is trying to kill off grandma.)
Maybe it's not what's happening. But it fits so well with the rest of their track records and the party's historical roots. I ask myself, "If they were doing this deliberately, WHAT would they do differently?". And I can't think of a single thing.
... the only reason said asshole has a job is because someone coded the [infrastructure] that he's posting from to claim this.
Actually, the Telegraph is an old line newspaper.
Granted it's one of the few that has established a strong Web presence. But, like other old-line papers, it's having serious business model problems, as the readership abandons mainstream "news is really infotainment-like art product" operations for actual reporting of information on the Internet.
So those coders have created the juggernaut that is crashing his opportunities for employment.
I read his posting as sour grapes, taking a swipe at the people he sees as a threat.
Here in Silicon Valley I've seen both companies and municipalities putting in conduit for fiber. In both cases they don't just run one conduit.
The smaller was a drilling operation that buried bundles of three or four flexible conduits (with maybe 2" ID, so each could run a LOT of cabling). The larger was a dig-up that put in multi-manhole equipment vaults with arrays of stiff conduit between them.
Well there's your answer. Seoul has a population density of 17,288 people per sq km.
Not only that, most of them (I think it's more than 80%) live in these GIANT apartment buildings, big enough to have their own telephone central offices in the basement.
The result is that it's trivial to put a router in that central office and either string fiber through the phone conduit to the apartment or put high speed DSL or even Ethernet on the existing wiring, giving every apartment 100 Mbps or far better to the switch. Similarly it's trivial to light up some of the dark fibers in the apartment building's bundle to provide multiple gigabit backhaul to the NOC.
Try THAT in rural, or even suburban, America.
Heck, try it in urban USA. You still have to dig up the streets - in some of the priciest areas of the country. South Korea modernized in a short-term push post WWII. The US urban areas grew up over centuries.
Also: Govenment officials are so clueless they think it's a "competitive market" when there are TWO providers.
This has been built into communication regulations (and the thinking of regulators) at least since the original analog cellphone spectrum allocations - where they broke the available spectrum in half and gave half to the incumbent telco in the area and half to ONE "competitor".
This is the theory they used when the supreme court and FCC decided that the market was "competitive" when there was a telco and a cable company in the area, and dropped most of the requirements to unbundle access to legacy infrastructure. Thus the "duopoly" of one telco-based ISP, one cable-based ISP forming the total landline Internet access market.
Unfortunately, market forces, even without anticompetitive collusion, drive two competitors to match and raise prices and roughly split the market. Three competitors MAY also split the market and keep prices high, though it's less stable.
It's when you have four or more competitors that the little guy(s) can be relied on to break the balance and go for market share, starting the competitive cycle that drives the price down toward cost plus adequate profit, and service levels up.
The US is a strange case, though. You have an enormous prison population as a proportion of your general population. Money becomes an issue when such a large percentage of the population is incarcerated, but when you have a more reasonable justice system (and a social security net which removes a large percentage of the impetus for crime...
The US' enormous prison population is largely a result of the details of the way the social security net was implemented. (Here we call it the "social safety net", and the subset in question "welfare programs", because "Social Security" is reserved for a particular government-operated retirement benefit.)
The primary culprit is LBJ's "Great Society" push, which created and/or increased welfare programs, especially those related to child support. Starting in that period they included rules that ended the benefits if an adult male was living in the house with, or married to, a mother raising children. (It was presumed that the male in question was, or was acting as, husband/lover and father, and should be providing the support for the family.) The rules also reduced benefits if the mother got a job. The reduction was dollar-for-dollar (or worse), with no allowance for costs of working (such as transport, uniforms, or babysitting).
Though blacks were only about half the welfare receiving population, they were a far smaller portion of the general population - especially as the benefits were selectively extended to them in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the related riots. So the effects of these programs was greater on the black population than the rest of the citizenry.
The results of these rules were, for the poor blacks, the destruction of the (formerly notoriously strong) black family - removing any productive male role model from the household of any welfare recipient- and the conversion of welfare programs from a temporary emergency measure to a way of life. Children of long-term welfare families tended to see living off welfare as how resources are obtained and have no experience with alternatives - resulting in their going on welfare (and recruiting others) for generation after generation. Welfare mothers tend to have more children than those in families supporting themselves. Others are recruited to this lifestyle, and once in it find themselves trapped. Thus the fraction of single-mother families with no male role model rises. At this point about 72% of US (non-Hispanic) blacks are born to unmarried mothers, versus 30% for (non-Hispanic) whites and about half that for asians.
One of the problems with single-mother families is that single mother is usually unable to socialize an adolescent male child. (The differences in violent crime rates between ethnic groups in the US completely disappear if you adjust for the illegitimacy rate.)
So the social safety net seems to be the entire cause of the rise in violent crime. Like government in general, these social programs seem to be a disease masquerading as its own cure.
... if you are doing this at radar frequencies (for spatial resolution) wouldn't the harmonics be difficult to detect?
Piece of cake. Just pick a fundamental where the second harmonic is in a quiet frequency. Your second harmonic signal will stand out like a sore thumb.
It's also phase-coherent with your transmitter so you can use a synchronous demodulator to pick it out of a hell of a lot of noise, if there is noise. Phase-locked is as narrowband and accurately tuned as it gets: Your bandwidth is the short-term stability of your transmitter over the round-trip time.
Would the semiconductor junctions of the size used in current semiconductor devices be sufficiently efficient radiators at the harmonic frequency?
Yep. Especially these days, when the only diodes in sight are likely to be the very fast anti-static diodes behind the pins of chips whose signals, which themselves, may be in the gigahertz range, and the parasitic diodes between the substrates and the active regions of even faster logic gates.
Of course a microwave diode, connected to wiring with a geometry optimized to act as an antenna at the two frequencies involved, will be still better.
One of the things described was comparing returns from a positive and a negative pulse, to detect the presence of rectification. Good idea, but...
There is another way to do that, which I believe is much more sensitive: Send the pulse on one frequency, listen for the return on a harmonic. Only nonlinear devices (mainly semiconductor junctions - constructed or accidental, like corroded metal joints) will produce the harmonic reflection.
This is how the "bury diodes in the drywall" bug works. The diode(s) sends a strong second harmonic reflection, essentially nothing else does. When the wall moves slightly, due to ambient sound it, varies the length of the transmitter-diode-receiver path, phase modulating the harmonic signal with the audio signal.
Because only change in phase matters, many diodes in the wall don't interfere with each other, but combine their randomly-phased reflections to make the wall more reflective (just like OFDM reception improving when you have multipath "interference").
"Illluminate" the building with a stable microwave carrier and listen to the second harmonic (shifted down) with an FM receiver - recovering the sound from the room adjacent to the diode-doped wall. Nothing to it.
If we'd have left [the terrorists in Afghanistan] there and did absolutely not one damn thing to try and stop/kill them, well, how much did 9/11 cost the economy?
Quite a bit, actually. Took out a lot of infrastructure (including a major telecommunications hub and a number of business headquarters with all their personnel).
Then there was the cost of the reaction. For starters it stopped air traffic for days, and led to the creation of Homeland Security and all its costs - both direct and indirect (such as the large number of people who now drive rather than submit to the airport security theater.)
But I agree it was far less than the cost of the war that followed.
If someone walks in and shoots the party planning committee, how much does the next party cost the company? Trick question, there isn't one. Same with terrorists.
Actually, not the same with terrorists. Look up the term "blowback". Terrorists are hydras: Killing them tends to make martyrs, leading to the recruiting of more new terrorists than were killed
It also leads to diversification: The longer the tit-for-tat goes on, the less centralized and connected, the more independent and self-sufficient, the factions of the opposition become.
9/11 itself (along with his previous shot at the Twin Towers) was, according to Bin Laden, retaliation for the US bombing of a similar tower on his side of the world.
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Give me a call when those fuel cells are ready for deployment, then we can talk about all these wonderful uses. No talk about the carbon footprint of operating fuel cells?
Natural gas (methane) has the highest energy/carbon emission ration of any saturated hydrocarbon (gas or oil) and beats the HELL out of coal. If you're going to use fossil fuels (or renewable fuel from biodegrading vegetable waste, sewage, or cow flops), and a fuel cell is in the efficiency ballpark with a grid plant, why not put the fuel cell in the rack?
The article mixes the use of fuel cells as a power source with efficiency improvements. The only place that makes sense is with the minor savings that may be seen by eliminating DC converters, but you will still need DC regulators which will have some losses.
Fuel cells are not limited by the carnot cycle efficiency limt. They can be FAR MORE EFFICIENT than a heat-engine based power plant.
Modern circuit boards in servers ALREADY HAVE switching regulators near the chips. With the very low operating voltages of modern electronics, the supply currents are SO high that you lose less energy by running 48V on the power planes of the PC board and regulating it down at the load than you do running, say 3.3, 2.5, or 1.8 volts and a correspondingly higher current across several inches of thin copper.
Remember: I-squared-R losses go up with the SQUARE of the current. So running 1.2V across a board to your chips loses 400 TIMES as much power as running 48V to the regulator next to them. It's like high-tension transmission lines in miniature. (They'd go higher except that over 50V gets you out of the easy part of the electrical code and into the region where electrocution becomes a major issue.)
Putting the switching regulator next to the chip also gives you much more stable voltage. When it's already there to save power, this makes good regulation "cheaper than free".
A major oversight of this article is the fact that fuel cells are major heat generators, not something you want in a data center. They would need to be installed in a separated structure, therefore idea that "Rack-level fuel cells would do away with data-centre-wide electricity distribution for servers" is hard to imagine.
They also need and external air supply and to have their exhaust removed rather than dumped into the room air. So you're going to give them their own plumbing. You want to SAVE that heat to keep the oxygen-transport style cells at operating temperature without wasting fuel or power to do it. So you insulate the box and run the ventilation plumbing like a stove pipe - coaxial, with the hot exhaust in the middle and the cool incoming air on the outside. This minimizes the heat loss to the room and acts like a counter-current heat exchanger to preheat the fresh air with the heat from the exhaust, while cooling the exhaust.
It's similar to what I did with my first unix box, back in the '80s or so: The thing put out as much heat as a space heater. So I hooked up a dryer vent hose to the 4" exhaust fan and dumped the hot air outside. Cooling problem solved. (In the winter I dumped it INSIDE to save on heating bills.)
Right now, if I don't have electric and gas, my water heater and furnace become inoperable.
In my remote house my heat and water heater both work fine on only propane. As long as the tank is not empty we're fine (and the tank only needs filling about three times a year).
The water heater is gas with a pilot light and no electric controls (except for the pilot light safety thermocouple, which generates enough power from the flame's heat to control the safety shutdown).
While the regular furnace has electronic controls and blower, I also have a backup: A propane "fireplace" stove in the great room, with a room layout that lets it heat the living area and keep the pipes from freezing.
Again it works with a pilot light, and the thermocouple's few millivolts also provide enough power, controlled by a mechanical-switch thermostat in the middle of the house, to operate the main gas valve as well. Though the stove's room blower will also fail in an outage, convection is more than adequate to circulate the heat in the big-open-space-in-the-middle house design. Kept things nice and comfy when we had a day-long outage in deep winter.
When away the stats are set to 55 for the furnace, 50 for the backup stove. This worked just fine one winter, when the furnace's draft sensor failed and the furnace was dead for weeks until we got there and discovered the issue. That definitely paid for the stove in one event.
If you have a fuel cell that burns methane (i.e. Natural gas) or other fuels the fuel cell will have to reform it into Hydrogen (releasing CO2) before it's used.
And if you're ultimately running from fossil fuels, methane is the least carbon-emitting choice.
Burning the hydrogen atoms to water produces MOST of the power from fossil fuels. Burning the carbon to CO2 produces a little more. But in gas and oil it's mostly there to make the hydrogen easier to handle than H2.
Methane has four hydrogens per carbon (4:1), the best ratio of all hydrocarbons. Ethane: (6: 2 = 3:1), propane: 8:3 = 2.666..."1, and so on. As you transition from gasses to oil you're approaching the large saturated hydrocarbon molecule limit of 2:1.
Then there's coal, where you're JUST burning the carbon. All CO2, much less energy (though still plenty if you burn ENOUGH of it).
Tell me when they come up with a range of affordable, small, light weight, fuel cells that efficiently make a couple hundred to a couple thousand watts by burning odorized propane with ambient air. I want one for my car, one for my travel trailer, and one for each house.
Electrolysis is not cost effective and requires more electrical power than your fuel cell could produce.
By the same argument, power grids "are not cost effective" because they require more electrical power input than they deliver to the cu
stomer.
Electrolysis may be VERY cost effective. Just think of it as a different sort of energy distribution system, not as a conversion of fuel to electricity, and compare its costs to what it replaces.
(This is similar to the bogus argument against solar panels: "They take more energy to make than they deliver over their lifetime." First that's false - they reach energy breakeven very early in their life. Second, they produce post-carnot-cycle electricity, while most of the energy going into making them is pre-carnot-cycle heat. Third, you need to compare their energy consumption apples-to-apples: How much energy does it take to build and fuel the fraction of the power grid that would deliver the same amount of electricity to the same site - from melting steel to build transformers, to clearing trees and stringing poles, to building power plants and switchgear, to fueling the plants to make the electricity (digging for and transporting coal, drilling for and pumping oil, disposing of radioactive waste, ...) to losing a fraction of that to carnot cycle efficiency, transformer losses, corona discharge, resistive heating of transmission lines, ...)
Those so-called "Death Panels" already exist. Why is it alright for Insurance Companies to pick and choose who gets to live, and who must die, while bankrupting even more people in the process? I'd feel much safer if "profit" wasnt a primary variable in whether me or my loved ones get to live or die.
A rhetorical question deserves a rhetorical answer:
Because, with private insurance companies, you can either change policies or insurance companies, to get policy terms (and "death panels") more to your liking. Or you can dump the insurance company altogether and pay the hospitals as many buck as they ask to get as much health care as you both need and can afford.
With Obama care:
- You're forced to buy insurance.
- You're forced to buy a plan the government approved.
- You're forced to buy a plan with some very expensive coverage that you may not need or want.
- And the government picks your "death panel". Don't like that one? Find another country.
Top performers burn out fast and do not return to the IT field.
And now they get ripped off, too.
People with links to other talented, employable, people have been getting finder's bonuses from their employers for recommending a good candidate.
Now Google has patented mining their email and social network metadata so THEY can get a hiring fee. They just monitized the money out of their subscribers' pockets into their own.
looking at question 6, I see immediately, based on the language, that there are at least two answers: 2 and 6. The test writer only meant for one answer to be correct,
Reminds me of a standardized test I hit back in the 6th (or so) grade. It was a "what's the missing number to this series?" question. One of the five options completed an arithmetic series, another a geometric series.
This was one of those that also measured speed, by throwing too many questions at you to answer them all. I recall I hung on that question long enough, trying to figure out which one they wanted, that I could have answered perhaps five more.
(That's the one where, while thinking about it afterward, I figured out that good test strategy includes abandoning a question that is taking too long.)
My take on it (as I've posted previously):
The government seems to treat the population, in many ways, much as a farmer treats his livestock. But when it comes to getting old, how DOES a farmer treat livestock?
On a farm, while livestock is healthy and producing profit, they're valuable. Once they're costing more than they're producing, it's time to get rid of them. A particularly beloved animal might be kept on as a pet. But the anonymous mass has to go.
Since at lest the late '70s or early '80s, the impending bankruptcy of Social Security has been a worry for government officials. I recall one of them making a "slip of the tongue" on a CNN interview, back when the channel was new: She lamented that small families and the success of the '60s anti-population-growth propaganda was leading to too many retired and two few working, and they had to "get the death rate up to match the birth rate" to save the program. That may not be the official position, but that sort of thinking is pervasive.
In past generations oldsters could be counted on for votes. But aging boomers aren't as solid a voting block for the party in power as some of the later generations - particularly the new, undocumented, immigrants.
What if our current party-in-power has decided that, now that the Baby Boomers are aging out of the work force, becoming a drain on, rather than paying into, the government coffers, it's time to kill them off? How could they go about it?
Just setting up "Death Panels" and picking who's going to be left to die isn't too popular. (Look at the bad press they got when they included that in a companion bill to Obamacare.)
But how about this:
- Nationalize the bulk of the medical insurance industry.
- Change the rules on all of it, so the prices for private plans goes 'way up, and the insurance companies can dump the sickly from their current, lower-priced, plans because they don't conform to the new rules.
- Then botch the rollout, so those dumped can't get new insurance, either.
Result:
- The poor boomers are dumped from their insurance. The moderately well-to-do boomers have their healthcare prices skyrocket, quickly draining them into "poor boomer" status. (Give 'em six months to three years without insurance and see how many are left.) Only the truly rich can afford to stay alive and healthy.
- With the "It's a really GREAT program, there's just a few bugs in the rollout." claim they can stretch it out and leave the oldsters uninsured for years.
- Meanwhile the politicians who orchestrated this get to claim they're doing it to HELP the population, not to kill them off. (They even get to claim it's their opposition who is trying to kill off grandma.)
Maybe it's not what's happening. But it fits so well with the rest of their track records and the party's historical roots. I ask myself, "If they were doing this deliberately, WHAT would they do differently?". And I can't think of a single thing.
That sounds nuts, but it is a time-tested method of data transfer, after all.
And it can be expected to be a handy way to bypass firewalls far into the future as well. B-)
1.8 cm x 0.00178cm
Or 8 1/3 GHz and quite narrowband.
The Sookie Stackhouse (southern vampire series) books (and the "True Blood" TV adaptation) come to mind as well.
For those unaware of the series: They start from shortly after the big reveal, where the vampires came out of the closet after the Japanese invent a blood substitute that provides adequate nutrition for vampires, allowing them to live without hunting people.
I disagree with your assertion that it'll take years to get healthcare.gov working.
That's just the first step. Then there's getting the exchange behind it working, i.e. having affordable plans that actually pay for anything, with deductables low enough that the patient doesn't end up just paying their own bill in addition to the premiums.
But "disagree" isn't an issue with future events. We both make our best guesses, but the real world will tell us what really happens if we just wait a bit. Let's hang around (if we live that long) and see which of us has the pool bet closer to the actual date.
By the time they turn 65, they qualify for Medicare. Or are you considering Medicare to constitute "the bulk of the medical insurance industry"?
Already there and on it. Even before the Obamacare tweaks it was far inferior to the coverage I had from my last job before I went on it - insurance that was canceled when I became of age for Medicare coverage.
Look up "medigap" and "the donut hole". Look up "IRMA" (Income Related Monthly Adjustment), which doesn't take into account the local cost of living.
Then they cut benefits further, "as part of funding Obamacare".
Meanwhile my wife isn't eligible for it for another half-decade. Her private individual insurance is already almost a thousand bux a month with a monster deductable - and we're waiting to find out if it's being canceled, along with most of the private plans in CA, or its premium doubling or worse, thanks to Obamacare regulation changes.
My take on it:
The government seems to treat the population, in many ways, much as a farmer treats his livestock. But when it comes to getting old, how DOES a farmer treat livestock?
On a farm, while livestock is healthy and producing profit, they're valuable. Once they're costing more than they're producing, it's time to get rid of them. A particularly beloved animal might be kept on as a pet. But the anonymous mass has to go.
Since at lest the late '70s or early '80s, the impending bankruptcy of Social Security has been a worry for government officials. I recall one of them making a "slip of the tongue" on a CNN interview, back when the channel was new: She lamented that small families and the success of the '60s anti-population-growth propaganda was leading to too many retired and two few working, and they had to "get the death rate up to match the birth rate" to save the program. That may not be the official position, but that sort of thinking is pervasive.
In past generations oldsters could be counted on for votes. But aging boomers aren't as solid a voting block for the party in power as some of the later generations - particularly the new, undocumented, immigrants.
What if our current party-in-power has decided that, now that the Baby Boomers are aging out of the work force, becoming a drain on, rather than paying into, the government coffers, it's time to kill them off? How could they go about it?
Just setting up "Death Panels" and picking who's going to be left to die isn't too popular. (Look at the bad press they got when they included that in a companion bill to Obamacare.)
But how about this:
- Nationalize the bulk of the medical insurance industry.
- Change the rules on all of it, so the prices for private plans goes 'way up, and the insurance companies can dump the sickly from their current, lower-priced, plans because they don't conform to the new rules.
- Then botch the rollout, so those dumped can't get new insurance, either.
Result:
- The poor boomers are dumped from their insurance. The moderately well-to-do boomers have their healthcare prices skyrocket, quickly draining them into "poor boomer" status. (Give 'em six months to three years without insurance and see how many are left.) Only the truly rich can afford to stay alive and healthy.
- With the "It's a really GREAT program, there's just a few bugs in the rollout." claim they can stretch it out and leave the oldsters uninsured for years.
- Meanwhile the politicians who orchestrated this get to claim they're doing it to HELP the population, not to kill them off. (They even get to claim it's their opposition who is trying to kill off grandma.)
Maybe it's not what's happening. But it fits so well with the rest of their track records and the party's historical roots. I ask myself, "If they were doing this deliberately, WHAT would they do differently?". And I can't think of a single thing.
... the only reason said asshole has a job is because someone coded the [infrastructure] that he's posting from to claim this.
Actually, the Telegraph is an old line newspaper.
Granted it's one of the few that has established a strong Web presence. But, like other old-line papers, it's having serious business model problems, as the readership abandons mainstream "news is really infotainment-like art product" operations for actual reporting of information on the Internet.
So those coders have created the juggernaut that is crashing his opportunities for employment.
I read his posting as sour grapes, taking a swipe at the people he sees as a threat.
You throw salt out, hover around a bit, then land. Problem solved.
That only works above 0 degrees F (at least for pure water ice at about 15 PSI pressure). (Which is how 0F was originally defined, by the way.)
Here in Silicon Valley I've seen both companies and municipalities putting in conduit for fiber. In both cases they don't just run one conduit.
The smaller was a drilling operation that buried bundles of three or four flexible conduits (with maybe 2" ID, so each could run a LOT of cabling). The larger was a dig-up that put in multi-manhole equipment vaults with arrays of stiff conduit between them.
Well there's your answer. Seoul has a population density of 17,288 people per sq km.
Not only that, most of them (I think it's more than 80%) live in these GIANT apartment buildings, big enough to have their own telephone central offices in the basement.
The result is that it's trivial to put a router in that central office and either string fiber through the phone conduit to the apartment or put high speed DSL or even Ethernet on the existing wiring, giving every apartment 100 Mbps or far better to the switch. Similarly it's trivial to light up some of the dark fibers in the apartment building's bundle to provide multiple gigabit backhaul to the NOC.
Try THAT in rural, or even suburban, America.
Heck, try it in urban USA. You still have to dig up the streets - in some of the priciest areas of the country. South Korea modernized in a short-term push post WWII. The US urban areas grew up over centuries.
Also: Govenment officials are so clueless they think it's a "competitive market" when there are TWO providers.
This has been built into communication regulations (and the thinking of regulators) at least since the original analog cellphone spectrum allocations - where they broke the available spectrum in half and gave half to the incumbent telco in the area and half to ONE "competitor".
This is the theory they used when the supreme court and FCC decided that the market was "competitive" when there was a telco and a cable company in the area, and dropped most of the requirements to unbundle access to legacy infrastructure. Thus the "duopoly" of one telco-based ISP, one cable-based ISP forming the total landline Internet access market.
Unfortunately, market forces, even without anticompetitive collusion, drive two competitors to match and raise prices and roughly split the market. Three competitors MAY also split the market and keep prices high, though it's less stable.
It's when you have four or more competitors that the little guy(s) can be relied on to break the balance and go for market share, starting the competitive cycle that drives the price down toward cost plus adequate profit, and service levels up.
The US is a strange case, though. You have an enormous prison population as a proportion of your general population. Money becomes an issue when such a large percentage of the population is incarcerated, but when you have a more reasonable justice system (and a social security net which removes a large percentage of the impetus for crime...
The US' enormous prison population is largely a result of the details of the way the social security net was implemented. (Here we call it the "social safety net", and the subset in question "welfare programs", because "Social Security" is reserved for a particular government-operated retirement benefit.)
The primary culprit is LBJ's "Great Society" push, which created and/or increased welfare programs, especially those related to child support. Starting in that period they included rules that ended the benefits if an adult male was living in the house with, or married to, a mother raising children. (It was presumed that the male in question was, or was acting as, husband/lover and father, and should be providing the support for the family.) The rules also reduced benefits if the mother got a job. The reduction was dollar-for-dollar (or worse), with no allowance for costs of working (such as transport, uniforms, or babysitting).
Though blacks were only about half the welfare receiving population, they were a far smaller portion of the general population - especially as the benefits were selectively extended to them in the wake of the Civil Rights movement and the related riots. So the effects of these programs was greater on the black population than the rest of the citizenry.
The results of these rules were, for the poor blacks, the destruction of the (formerly notoriously strong) black family - removing any productive male role model from the household of any welfare recipient- and the conversion of welfare programs from a temporary emergency measure to a way of life. Children of long-term welfare families tended to see living off welfare as how resources are obtained and have no experience with alternatives - resulting in their going on welfare (and recruiting others) for generation after generation. Welfare mothers tend to have more children than those in families supporting themselves. Others are recruited to this lifestyle, and once in it find themselves trapped. Thus the fraction of single-mother families with no male role model rises. At this point about 72% of US (non-Hispanic) blacks are born to unmarried mothers, versus 30% for (non-Hispanic) whites and about half that for asians.
One of the problems with single-mother families is that single mother is usually unable to socialize an adolescent male child. (The differences in violent crime rates between ethnic groups in the US completely disappear if you adjust for the illegitimacy rate.)
So the social safety net seems to be the entire cause of the rise in violent crime. Like government in general, these social programs seem to be a disease masquerading as its own cure.
... if you are doing this at radar frequencies (for spatial resolution) wouldn't the harmonics be difficult to detect?
Piece of cake. Just pick a fundamental where the second harmonic is in a quiet frequency. Your second harmonic signal will stand out like a sore thumb.
It's also phase-coherent with your transmitter so you can use a synchronous demodulator to pick it out of a hell of a lot of noise, if there is noise. Phase-locked is as narrowband and accurately tuned as it gets: Your bandwidth is the short-term stability of your transmitter over the round-trip time.
Would the semiconductor junctions of the size used in current semiconductor devices be sufficiently efficient radiators at the harmonic frequency?
Yep. Especially these days, when the only diodes in sight are likely to be the very fast anti-static diodes behind the pins of chips whose signals, which themselves, may be in the gigahertz range, and the parasitic diodes between the substrates and the active regions of even faster logic gates.
Of course a microwave diode, connected to wiring with a geometry optimized to act as an antenna at the two frequencies involved, will be still better.
One of the things described was comparing returns from a positive and a negative pulse, to detect the presence of rectification. Good idea, but...
There is another way to do that, which I believe is much more sensitive: Send the pulse on one frequency, listen for the return on a harmonic. Only nonlinear devices (mainly semiconductor junctions - constructed or accidental, like corroded metal joints) will produce the harmonic reflection.
This is how the "bury diodes in the drywall" bug works. The diode(s) sends a strong second harmonic reflection, essentially nothing else does. When the wall moves slightly, due to ambient sound it, varies the length of the transmitter-diode-receiver path, phase modulating the harmonic signal with the audio signal.
Because only change in phase matters, many diodes in the wall don't interfere with each other, but combine their randomly-phased reflections to make the wall more reflective (just like OFDM reception improving when you have multipath "interference").
"Illluminate" the building with a stable microwave carrier and listen to the second harmonic (shifted down) with an FM receiver - recovering the sound from the room adjacent to the diode-doped wall. Nothing to it.
It's a tort. Civil, not criminal.
(Though the **AA is trying to change that and I'm not up-to-data on how much they've succeeded.)
If we'd have left [the terrorists in Afghanistan] there and did absolutely not one damn thing to try and stop/kill them, well, how much did 9/11 cost the economy?
Quite a bit, actually. Took out a lot of infrastructure (including a major telecommunications hub and a number of business headquarters with all their personnel).
Then there was the cost of the reaction. For starters it stopped air traffic for days, and led to the creation of Homeland Security and all its costs - both direct and indirect (such as the large number of people who now drive rather than submit to the airport security theater.)
But I agree it was far less than the cost of the war that followed.
If someone walks in and shoots the party planning committee, how much does the next party cost the company? Trick question, there isn't one. Same with terrorists.
Actually, not the same with terrorists. Look up the term "blowback". Terrorists are hydras: Killing them tends to make martyrs, leading to the recruiting of more new terrorists than were killed
It also leads to diversification: The longer the tit-for-tat goes on, the less centralized and connected, the more independent and self-sufficient, the factions of the opposition become.
9/11 itself (along with his previous shot at the Twin Towers) was, according to Bin Laden, retaliation for the US bombing of a similar tower on his side of the world.
Of course the cost of the civil war, when it collapses the economy, will be even greater.
Do you count that as also "way more" than the cost of Obamacare, or part of that cost?