These kids should know all too well by about 3rd grade that teachers are incapable of learning. These NEA worshiping zombies spew out what they are told to and nothing more.
If the kids try to think for themselves or do anything remotely defiant they call the cops. Kid gets bored and writes something mildly violent, call the cops and have the kids dumped in the psych ward.
Too many urban blacks move to your white town, goof off in school and threaten to pull down average test scores, hell why not, bring in the drug sniffing dogs, have weekly drug raids, and put in metal detectors.
If that fails you can launch an "at risk" program. Dump your undesirable dark skins in there until their parents get sick of it all and put their kids into a private school. And when the parents of the white kids start doing it go on the news and cry and whine about privatization eating away at your funding.
These kids are obviously pretty clueless. Activism of this sort was obsolete in the 70s. You want to make a point of something you need shrub style "shock and awe". Sell those numbers to illegal aliens, street thugs, druggies who need to launder money under someone elses name.
Maybe after 20-30 years of this happening every time some two-bit bureucrat collects SS#s and keeps them in some insecure stash they'll wise up. My bet is it won't really happen until it becomes a federal offense for SS# hoarding in an insecure database. After a few thousand of these paper pushers end up in Club Fed it just MIGHT send a tiny little signal to the other idiots to take these security issues seriously, or don't collect the numbers in the first place.
Best example I could give would be cyantian.net the comic kind of sucks, the plotline is lame, but man can she sleaze money out of people who visit the site. Add banners, sleazing guest art off people who can draw and having them hype the comic on their site. The sad thing was the early stips were not so bad, but she got lazy. I think the guy coloring the strip is probably helping improve the RAW product.
A 7 stage vetting process for a startup project ? Fine for sifting data you are going to be putting it into an expert systems AI where debugging is critical, but for the web ? Why bother, its the web!
Here the deal, I'm dinking around wikipedia on a lunchbreak, or some other idle time. I notice someone has a stub here or a stub there on some topic I happen to know a lot about. I can probably draw each of the parts for the device, know its lore, history, etc. I don't have an account, and I don't have the time in whats left of my lunch break to fool around getting an account. So I bang out 2-3 paragraphs off the top of my head for each stub.
Months pass, I go back and someone has spell checked and cleaned up the paragraphs, someone else has fleshed out some of the leaner parts, another person adds a photo. I've got another 10-15 min I can burn so I add another section to it.
A few more months down the line, I visit again. My material is a little bit spread thin because another page on similar device has merged with one I helped write. And now people are tacking on things left and right. Its a bit sloppy here and there at the end, but I see from the page history that add-ons are getting cleaned up in a fairly timely fashion.
Now I'm not a doctor of library science, I have no academic certifications of being a research assistant for 12 years. But I can very easily fill out stubs on very very wide array of topics. Far well enough for anyone who runs across one of these learn more than enough to get a better idea of what they need to know. They can then refine their search on google and find what they are looking for. But on google you now have 70 web pages of all sorts of info. This eats a lot of time, and if its not what you are looking for its easier to find out with a few fast and dirty paragraphs on wikipedia, jump to the next thing and the next thing until you find the specific item you are after.
They can then expand that even further by hitting google. In visiting those web pages they might get a fire lit under them and say, hey, that wiki entry was pretty lame, I should go back there and add in these things I found out.
And so it goes.
Unless you are to the stage where you have a 5 DVD set of data ready to burn you don't have to worry about weeding out the bad data. The big issue is getting the structure there in the first place.
You'll get vandals on the hot button issue pages, but meanwhile theres 30 geeks, techies, machinists, and assorted sorts keying in all sorts of archane info most people never knew existed. And of course you won't get that vandal marking up a 13 page wiki on x-ray crystalography because they aren't likely to stumble on it.
Just like in a real library. the vandals are too busy ripping out pages of hot rod magazine to tack up on their walls. The actual book stacks are too strange and confusing for them to even venture into.
And when it is big enough to burn onto DVDs for use in a place without much net connectivity you can always jump back in the page history and pick out the best result on those few chewed up topics to burn onto that DVD set.
Come on guys, why do you even bother posting this stuff on here ? Everything on 3rd world tech turns into a huge troll for all the knuckleheads who say they don't need technology or electricity, they need food, water, english and some form of the xtian religion noone finds too offensive.
Ahh, so thats why I keep getting e-mails from nowhere on how to make a dark matter seive, and use that dark matter to make an anti-proton stream generator.
I thought it was some odd 419 scam or something. Make anti protons 20 grams at a time for fun and family amusement!
Was reading some of Chuck Yeager bio the other day. Was interesting when he talked about going up to around 104-108 thousand feet in this peroxide rocket powered F-104. One time he did it dead perfect, the next time, he was neerly dead. Sucker got into a flat spin, and there was no forward velocity enough to get the jet engines going.
That alway was the dangerous thing about spaceplanes. You don't really want to store fuel on reenty since it would be prone to expanding or igniting at just the wrong time. So you have fly one no power on every reentry.
Or at least that will be the case until they figure out some clever way to store a lot of energy in a package that wont blow up when it get too hot. Maybe a flywheel to store enough electrical power to drive some sort of propulsion mechanism thats just enough emergency power, but isn't so big that it alters flight in any serious way.
Yeah, war is hell isn't it ? No place to be for a penny pinching CPA with no sense of humor. The place for those people to be is working for the medical or medial drug industry. On one end of the equation you charge uninsured people $15 for a tylenol, on the other end of it, you cut the benefits and lower the wages of the guys working the incinerator and handling the medical waste. All while your PR people scam the general public and government to kiss their ass for opeing up a "burn ward for children"
War profiteering has nothing on day to day medical industry scams.
And I'm sure the prospect of spending a nice warm dusty summer in saudi has nothing at all to do with it.;) Some people can take the heat, others move to michigan and enjoy the snow.
Hmm, exploit people, play with guns in the sun, and get paid buckets of cash ? Sounds like a plan or GTA vice city.;)
You also have to factor in just how many people love playing that game, some so much that they tried taking it into the real world.
Only a tiny portion of the population have the right mis-sequences of DNA to be fluffy bunny hugging nader voting commie vegans.
The rest of the population needs an outlet for those energies. What better way to channel them than to use their energies to cancel out those of knuckleheads in nations who we need so many hundred of supertankers in oil from a month ?
But if you want to see something real ugly, wait until we have a serious nationwide disruption of oil flow, and some batch of nader voting commie vegans is protesting the opening of a new reactor. If they are lucky the cops will drag them off before the rednecks with pipes and broken bottles gets to them.
Actually, that gives me like inspiration. You could have a million UAVs the size of a paperback zipping around when gunfire started, loaded full of explosives and BBs(like a flying claymore mine) that homed in on the sonic boom noise signature of AK-47 fire. You could perhaps use the explosive for propellant. Since things like C4 just burn white hot until hit with a detonation wave front from a blasting cap.
Even if they clued in they could never afford to up or down load the ammo the cheap and expendable foot soldiers of the resistance use.
Great, you've moved to a sandheap so desolate and wasted that farmers from there who have moved to mexico made "unfarmable" land in mexico bloom and thought it was easy.
So lets look at the logic here, you have gone to great effort to go live in a wasted sandheap with other crazy people.
Hmm. ((Pondering....)) Now if we in the US could only make up some sort of bogus "holy land" for rednecks and white trash in some burned out hell pit it would be all good. Wait a minute...((coffee kicking in)) oh yeah, thats right, they call it arizona. Silly me.
Then theres that one called "utah" where other crazy people go. Hmm. Maybe there is a "God" after all who does a public service by luring the crazies out into the wastelands to cull them from the sane breeding populations in the temperate zones.
Now to find out how many desert rats have mod points today.;)
I've worked in a lot of places in even small town america that weren't safe. Never got paid a hazard premium for bimbos in SUVs weaving all over the road while putting on lipstick, or trying to dodge a squirrel.
If you work in some area that's in the middle of a civil war, like northern ireland many years back, those who are likely targets usually get basic escape and evasion training for driving around. If offered this by all means TAKE IT, if nothing else you get to do crazy stunts in the company car and learn skills that can be translated to your urban driving needs.
But for even a clerk working overnight in crappy neighborhood 7-11 up to someone working in some yugoslav free fire zone one basic rule applies. NEVER ESTABLISH A ROUTINE! A moving irregular taget it hard to hit. Be late, be early, use different routes around the work place, going to work. Its the ones who park themselves at the counter and zone out(in the 7-11 situation) that make prime targets to get robbed. Or the guy who picks up the other workers at checkpoint B at 9:14 every day on the dot for the last 3 months that get hit first.
And best of all, in a zone where people are getting shot at, you don't have 4 hours meetings 3 days a week about why productivity is taking a dive since the meetings started 6 months ago. You gotta love a work environment where getting the job done, and not getting shot at are pretty much the ONLY goals.
Theres also the perks of being paid insane sums, having quality foreign goods for dirt cheap prices, and spending money on only small high quality goods that can be shipped back easily. Rather than getting stupid and buring tons of money on cheap bulky K-mart grade throw away crap every week like when you are back home.
You could probably go with a super high frequency driver IC on the main transformer and get Class D amp type efficiancy. That tends to be expensive though, and not a good plan when you'll end up having to redesign and re-spec every time the motherboard and CPU makers come up with yet another power supply standard.
This is probably the reason why most switching power supplys stick to a basic and more or less reliable front end design. Or as reliable as you are likely to get with a switcher.
Then all you have to mess with is getting the back end redisigned for yet another voltage tap off the main transformer.
Or in some cases you have a switcher section for every voltage tap, or a mix of each.(i.e. you can get +5 and -5 off the same driven transformer real easy)
Hard to really generalize with so many years of switchers in PCs, and so many attempted solutions to the same basic problems.
One set of generalization is that the biggest problem in a switcher is the high frequencies, voltages, and need for lots and lots of filtration caps. And if a filtration cap gets funny and starts to "ring" or you get high freq noise on the front end, or the back end that gets into the feedback loop, things will go kaboom pretty fast.
For those of you into adventures with high voltage equipment, if repairing the bad solders, and obviously black/exploded parts doesn't do the trick the first couple of times, chuck that sucker and go to the next junk power supply. If you get a pile of dead power supplies from a computer store or a friend for none or very little $ you might as well cherry pick and keep your working neurons from burning out over something as trivial as a power supply.
Its not exactly the ONLY story dating back to that time. India has several legends going back to that time. Most of it has been simplified over time, and a little bit too much cheesy drama added, but you still have some basis in collective BS of an event, if not fact. Sometimes the BS can tell you more than any truth anyone of the time is willing to tell.
Was there some advanced civilization back then ? Maybe. If you look to someting in more recent history you have this massive tome by Galen that it took 1800+ years to catch up with.
Just because you get lucky now and then with some freak talent super genius doesn't mean its will keep going.
I hate to say it but in the end, its the lowest common denominator of a society that gets passed on as a sure thing though the ages. When the library of alexandria went it was only the most popular, and probably cheesy tales that carried on over the ages because EVERYONE retold the tales.
Farenheit 451 was based in the purest fact. Maybe noone is trying to kill every idea, but entropy will eat up anything that isn't massively distributed and repeated. Think to your most interesting paperback in your collection. Maybe a one off book by some unknown author. It will no doubt fall apart in less than 15 years.
Now think of some book everyone has, even though it wasn't that great. Piers Anthony and Terry Prattchet are gonna be around in some archive in 1200 years like it or not. The works of Vernor Vinge, Patrick McManus, Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling will be nothing but dust most likely.
Maybe there will be some saving grace in the future and they will have some Niven, Heinlein, Clarke, and Hunter S Thompson will survive. No doubt it probably won't be their best work. Entropy sucks doesn't it ?
Using viruses to release a genetic payload is nothing new. K. Eric Drexler talked about uses of T4 phages and other things a long long time ago in one of his books.
Ideally you get a bug that has most of what you need already. Like encephelitus or west nile virus to deliver a payload to cure schizophrenia. You have something that gets into the brain and nervous system as is, you just modify it here and there to be a little less agressive, make sure your modifications are not so radical that minor environmental stresses wildly mutate it, then work your way through the initial tests, approval processes, etc etc.
Not that they'd likely risk a bug that speads like encephelitus, and certainly not carrying a schizophrenia cure. If it got into the wild everyone but people with temporal lobe epilespy and some forms of OCD would stop going to church in a matter of months.;)
Yeah, sure, that'll work. It doesn't work with people who set forest fires, it doesn't work with making prisoners pay to be locked up. You send someone a bill for $4 million in S&R fees, they won't pay that off in six lifetimes, now the park service and S&R have someone with an axe to grind because they tried to screw them with a billing scam.
And you open up the door to liability insurance problems. If you now charge for a service, and that service is botched they get to play who wants to be a multi millionaire on the govt's dime.
The jails and prisons try that scam because you are now owed X amount of money, and can borrow against that "asset", the prisoners don't complain because they only get garnished on their offical job paychecks(if they have one) and not on their under the table work or dope dealing money.
You try that on someone in the middle class, they'll raise hell, tell all their friends who actually vote, and people in elective office WILL fry for it. They in turn will burn every underling they can to try to save their own asses.
In the end you've burned the people who love the parks, and since its no longer safe to go out and enjoy, might as well let the farmers or land development people have it. Or maybe a nice strip mine or landfill could go there.
The people who can't breathe smog won't be in much of a position to fight the ones who can.
You can threaten to nuke china, mexico, and the entire 3rd world who burn coal in plants with no electro static filtration and so on, but thats not going to do much good.
But I suspect breating atomic weapon waste is a few orders of magnitude worse than coal waste.
Easier to get em used to non grid power items like solar, wind, efficiant building design before they get tied into a grid power/coal plant dependancy like the US is.
It's easy to forget that the US produces oil itself. And a lot of the toys we burn energy on are not exactly life and death. When the price of oil in the middle east gets too high, it then becomes reasonable to extract oil in the US, or produce methanol from coal and start making cars with stainless steal tanks/lines/carbs that can use it.
The evil SUVs on the road now can be rechipped, have the rear ends and/or transmissions changed to become normal vehicles that get semi normal mileage.
Or you can bite the bullet, and park the thing(until the rare occasion when you really need it for heavy duty work), and drive your 35mpg econobox for routine driving. An advantage we have today, but didn't in the 70s is that you can get a nice selection of rice burning 35mpg products that fit a lot of needs and price ranges.
Plastics don't really use a lot of premium oil product. They started out using unusable waste products from oil. Some of the same stuff they use for making blacktop, roof tar, and so on.
An easier way to think of it is how long does it take you to use 50 gallons of gas vs how long does it take to use up 50 gallons in the form of plastics. And even when the plastic is worn out, its not totally gone like gasoline is.
This is using the bulk consumption compete with coal model of thinking. Your payoff comes in sending power to a location(s) that cannot be easily tied into the grid, or where grid loses would be too high.
If you could do thousands of spotbeams, and have a sight just unfold a "cloth" of microwave dipoles on the ground to collect it, it would be a godsend for construction sights in the middle of nowhere. Or something a little more mundane like thawing runways, heating up the ground in winter for excavation. Or warm up an orchard if they were going to get potentially frozen.
And ultimately (dr evil laugh here) weather control and world domination.
Utah had some luck with solar powered energy improvement. But too many sportos OD'ed on the ephedra plants collecting all that energy in the desert. Now it just sits there preventing soil erosion.
I'm sure you could plant other things there to soak up all the spare energy, but if this is done too well it won't be the desert anymore. It'll cool down, the clouds will move in and there goes your good solar energy days down the drain. Not to mention ability to use your swamp chiller efficiantly.
Well, you need the arc of the covenant to keep the 60 mpg carb from from clogging with airborn debris and becomming a standard 40mph carb, and you need the solar cell to keep the arc charged up with static electricity so the electrostatic precipitation effect keeps up.
Have to clean all the bones, stone tablet debris and other crud out of the arc first. Maybe regrind all of it, and paste it on the roof of the warehouse to keep the heat down inside. (evil grin)
Making the silicon is the primary energy cost. When the doping burns out you still have the silicon and backing material in good shape. Recycle and redope it, and your energy payback time is even faster.
It will be at least a century or more before you find technology that is cheaper than coal. Because coal is cheaper than dirt. For someone who lives in the city or close to the grid PV to power all your needs are not going to be cost practical for a long time.
There are several ways to skin a cat though. You can reduce your A/C costs a LOT by having a roof some other color than black. Or in the North by using solar water heating, solar air heating, ground exchange heating/cooling.
Or if you live in a really dry place, design/redisgn your house to use a swamp/evaporation cooling system.
PV makes sense when you live in a place where grid energy costs a fortune, or it will cost a fortune to have em run that line 20 miles up the mountain to your lone cabin. Blackout protection is another factor. If you have occasions where the grid pukes half a dozen or more times a week, and you need at least some power at all costs to run whatever, a small PV system and battery bank will be usefull.
You could probably get by with a gasoline powered 5kw generator to keep your UPS from dying, at least until the local cop caller in your neighborhood nags the cops about the noise. Which is really a cherry on top after having dragged the thing out of the garage, cleaning the rotten gas out of it(remember to dump some stabil in the tank before storing one of those) and running the extension cords all over the place. And don't forget having to power down, and regas the thing every 3 hours. This is usually happening in the WORST weather.
Having been without power in a variety of urban/rural situations and weather I can say that investing even $40 in a small portable PV panel pays for itself many times over when you really need it. Ideally having a $300 panel, a marine deep cycle battery, and 1500W or better TrueSine inverter as backup is ideal. You then have portablity as well as low cost.
You can go above and beyond this depending on needs. And if for some reason you sell your house to go live in a concrete cube in downtown seattle when the sun never shines, you can always find some dirty hippie commie vegan to take your old solar gear off your hands for a reasonable price.
Home Power magazine used to be the place to learn all you needed to know about everything solar & alternate energy related. Now that you have to register to download the huge PDF, I'd say just surf the newsgroups and blogs.
Fuel Cell technology is great if you want to run your house off natural gas, propane, whatever. Unfortunately the price has gone sky high because california sucked up every cubic meter they could so THEY could have clean electric power. Now its no longer a cheap way to heat your house. Might as well go back to electric and choke down that coal plant radon/throium ash leakage.
But anyway, batteries, even though they contain evil awefull lead, are basicly fuel cells and hydrogen storage in one. You charge em, they generate hydrogen ions, and burn em when they discharge. Maintaining them, and knowing when your charging module is starting to buy it, or you have a bad cell, or a bad solder/connection on the bank is a black art in itself. But well worth it once you get all the details down.
Knowing what you absolutely need to have for non generating hours reserves if you get bumped off the grid, learning to get all your high wattage tasks done at peak generating hours is all part of being mostly off the grid.
If your going to cough up the bucks, I'd recomend getting the CD archives of homepower magazine. They're about $10 per (5-6 issues per CD), and less for the whole collection. Lots of diagrams, case studies for power systems. Dirt cheap compared to the cost of your first replacement inverter(also a regular replacement item).
As an end note, lead cells are cleanly recycled when you dump em off at the right places. The problems come along when you chuck thin walled car batteries into the local landfill to join all the dead Ni-Cads(really toxic to people) and old metal junk. CRT glass by itself is relatively safe and inert, but makes more sense to recycle.
Lead is not so bad as toxic waste is concerned, but you typically can use up a whole lot real fast and it piles up if not recycled. And being a slow reacting metal, it'll seep into groundwater for eons. Thinks like manganese run off the fields, into the groundwater, and you get a whole lot of younger people with parkinsons 10-20 years later. Cadmium is somewhere between the two for nasty side effects and reactivity.
Forget nuclear war for making mutant babies, dead cell phones batteries in the landfill will do that just fine. (doctor evil laugh here)
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These kids should know all too well by about 3rd grade that teachers are incapable of learning. These NEA worshiping zombies spew out what they are told to and nothing more.
If the kids try to think for themselves or do anything remotely defiant they call the cops. Kid gets bored and writes something mildly violent, call the cops and have the kids dumped in the psych ward.
Too many urban blacks move to your white town, goof off in school and threaten to pull down average test scores, hell why not, bring in the drug sniffing dogs, have weekly drug raids, and put in metal detectors.
If that fails you can launch an "at risk" program. Dump your undesirable dark skins in there until their parents get sick of it all and put their kids into a private school. And when the parents of the white kids start doing it go on the news and cry and whine about privatization eating away at your funding.
These kids are obviously pretty clueless. Activism of this sort was obsolete in the 70s. You want to make a point of something you need shrub style "shock and awe". Sell those numbers to illegal aliens, street thugs, druggies who need to launder money under someone elses name.
Maybe after 20-30 years of this happening every time some two-bit bureucrat collects SS#s and keeps them in some insecure stash they'll wise up. My bet is it won't really happen until it becomes a federal offense for SS# hoarding in an insecure database. After a few thousand of these paper pushers end up in Club Fed it just MIGHT send a tiny little signal to the other idiots to take these security issues seriously, or don't collect the numbers in the first place.
Best example I could give would be cyantian.net the comic kind of sucks, the plotline is lame, but man can she sleaze money out of people who visit the site. Add banners, sleazing guest art off people who can draw and having them hype the comic on their site. The sad thing was the early stips were not so bad, but she got lazy. I think the guy coloring the strip is probably helping improve the RAW product.
Yep, looks like the Farnsworth Fusor AND the conventional rasterscan TV are both going down in the same era.
Not like they didn't have a good run as pretty much the ONLY kids on the block for each application.
The king is dead, long live the king.
A 7 stage vetting process for a startup project ? Fine for sifting data you are going to be putting it into an expert systems AI where debugging is critical, but for the web ? Why bother, its the web! Here the deal, I'm dinking around wikipedia on a lunchbreak, or some other idle time. I notice someone has a stub here or a stub there on some topic I happen to know a lot about. I can probably draw each of the parts for the device, know its lore, history, etc. I don't have an account, and I don't have the time in whats left of my lunch break to fool around getting an account. So I bang out 2-3 paragraphs off the top of my head for each stub. Months pass, I go back and someone has spell checked and cleaned up the paragraphs, someone else has fleshed out some of the leaner parts, another person adds a photo. I've got another 10-15 min I can burn so I add another section to it. A few more months down the line, I visit again. My material is a little bit spread thin because another page on similar device has merged with one I helped write. And now people are tacking on things left and right. Its a bit sloppy here and there at the end, but I see from the page history that add-ons are getting cleaned up in a fairly timely fashion. Now I'm not a doctor of library science, I have no academic certifications of being a research assistant for 12 years. But I can very easily fill out stubs on very very wide array of topics. Far well enough for anyone who runs across one of these learn more than enough to get a better idea of what they need to know. They can then refine their search on google and find what they are looking for. But on google you now have 70 web pages of all sorts of info. This eats a lot of time, and if its not what you are looking for its easier to find out with a few fast and dirty paragraphs on wikipedia, jump to the next thing and the next thing until you find the specific item you are after. They can then expand that even further by hitting google. In visiting those web pages they might get a fire lit under them and say, hey, that wiki entry was pretty lame, I should go back there and add in these things I found out. And so it goes. Unless you are to the stage where you have a 5 DVD set of data ready to burn you don't have to worry about weeding out the bad data. The big issue is getting the structure there in the first place. You'll get vandals on the hot button issue pages, but meanwhile theres 30 geeks, techies, machinists, and assorted sorts keying in all sorts of archane info most people never knew existed. And of course you won't get that vandal marking up a 13 page wiki on x-ray crystalography because they aren't likely to stumble on it. Just like in a real library. the vandals are too busy ripping out pages of hot rod magazine to tack up on their walls. The actual book stacks are too strange and confusing for them to even venture into. And when it is big enough to burn onto DVDs for use in a place without much net connectivity you can always jump back in the page history and pick out the best result on those few chewed up topics to burn onto that DVD set.
Come on guys, why do you even bother posting this stuff on here ? Everything on 3rd world tech turns into a huge troll for all the knuckleheads who say they don't need technology or electricity, they need food, water, english and some form of the xtian religion noone finds too offensive.
Ahh, so thats why I keep getting e-mails from nowhere on how to make a dark matter seive, and use that dark matter to make an anti-proton stream generator.
I thought it was some odd 419 scam or something. Make anti protons 20 grams at a time for fun and family amusement!
Was reading some of Chuck Yeager bio the other day. Was interesting when he talked about going up to around 104-108 thousand feet in this peroxide rocket powered F-104. One time he did it dead perfect, the next time, he was neerly dead. Sucker got into a flat spin, and there was no forward velocity enough to get the jet engines going.
That alway was the dangerous thing about spaceplanes. You don't really want to store fuel on reenty since it would be prone to expanding or igniting at just the wrong time. So you have fly one no power on every reentry.
Or at least that will be the case until they figure out some clever way to store a lot of energy in a package that wont blow up when it get too hot. Maybe a flywheel to store enough electrical power to drive some sort of propulsion mechanism thats just enough emergency power, but isn't so big that it alters flight in any serious way.
Yeah, war is hell isn't it ? No place to be for a penny pinching CPA with no sense of humor. The place for those people to be is working for the medical or medial drug industry. On one end of the equation you charge uninsured people $15 for a tylenol, on the other end of it, you cut the benefits and lower the wages of the guys working the incinerator and handling the medical waste. All while your PR people scam the general public and government to kiss their ass for opeing up a "burn ward for children"
War profiteering has nothing on day to day medical industry scams.
And I'm sure the prospect of spending a nice warm dusty summer in saudi has nothing at all to do with it. ;) Some people can take the heat, others move to michigan and enjoy the snow.
Hmm, exploit people, play with guns in the sun, and get paid buckets of cash ? Sounds like a plan or GTA vice city. ;)
You also have to factor in just how many people love playing that game, some so much that they tried taking it into the real world.
Only a tiny portion of the population have the right mis-sequences of DNA to be fluffy bunny hugging nader voting commie vegans.
The rest of the population needs an outlet for those energies. What better way to channel them than to use their energies to cancel out those of knuckleheads in nations who we need so many hundred of supertankers in oil from a month ?
But if you want to see something real ugly, wait until we have a serious nationwide disruption of oil flow, and some batch of nader voting commie vegans is protesting the opening of a new reactor. If they are lucky the cops will drag them off before the rednecks with pipes and broken bottles gets to them.
Actually, that gives me like inspiration. You could have a million UAVs the size of a paperback zipping around when gunfire started, loaded full of explosives and BBs(like a flying claymore mine) that homed in on the sonic boom noise signature of AK-47 fire. You could perhaps use the explosive for propellant. Since things like C4 just burn white hot until hit with a detonation wave front from a blasting cap. Even if they clued in they could never afford to up or down load the ammo the cheap and expendable foot soldiers of the resistance use.
Great, you've moved to a sandheap so desolate and wasted that farmers from there who have moved to mexico made "unfarmable" land in mexico bloom and thought it was easy.
;)
So lets look at the logic here, you have gone to great effort to go live in a wasted sandheap with other crazy people.
Hmm. ((Pondering....)) Now if we in the US could only make up some sort of bogus "holy land" for rednecks and white trash in some burned out hell pit it would be all good. Wait a minute...((coffee kicking in)) oh yeah, thats right, they call it arizona. Silly me.
Then theres that one called "utah" where other crazy people go. Hmm. Maybe there is a "God" after all who does a public service by luring the crazies out into the wastelands to cull them from the sane breeding populations in the temperate zones.
Now to find out how many desert rats have mod points today.
I've worked in a lot of places in even small town america that weren't safe. Never got paid a hazard premium for bimbos in SUVs weaving all over the road while putting on lipstick, or trying to dodge a squirrel.
If you work in some area that's in the middle of a civil war, like northern ireland many years back, those who are likely targets usually get basic escape and evasion training for driving around.
If offered this by all means TAKE IT, if nothing else you get to do crazy stunts in the company car and learn skills that can be translated to your urban driving needs.
But for even a clerk working overnight in crappy neighborhood 7-11 up to someone working in some yugoslav free fire zone one basic rule applies. NEVER ESTABLISH A ROUTINE! A moving irregular taget it hard to hit. Be late, be early, use different routes around the work place, going to work. Its the ones who park themselves at the counter and zone out(in the 7-11 situation) that make prime targets to get robbed. Or the guy who picks up the other workers at checkpoint B at 9:14 every day on the dot for the last 3 months that get hit first.
And best of all, in a zone where people are getting shot at, you don't have 4 hours meetings 3 days a week about why productivity is taking a dive since the meetings started 6 months ago. You gotta love a work environment where getting the job done, and not getting shot at are pretty much the ONLY goals.
Theres also the perks of being paid insane sums, having quality foreign goods for dirt cheap prices, and spending money on only small high quality goods that can be shipped back easily. Rather than getting stupid and buring tons of money on cheap bulky K-mart grade throw away crap every week like when you are back home.
You could probably go with a super high frequency driver IC on the main transformer and get Class D amp type efficiancy. That tends to be expensive though, and not a good plan when you'll end up having to redesign and re-spec every time the motherboard and CPU makers come up with yet another power supply standard.
This is probably the reason why most switching power supplys stick to a basic and more or less reliable front end design. Or as reliable as you are likely to get with a switcher.
Then all you have to mess with is getting the back end redisigned for yet another voltage tap off the main transformer.
Or in some cases you have a switcher section for every voltage tap, or a mix of each.(i.e. you can get +5 and -5 off the same driven transformer real easy)
Hard to really generalize with so many years of switchers in PCs, and so many attempted solutions to the same basic problems.
One set of generalization is that the biggest problem in a switcher is the high frequencies, voltages, and need for lots and lots of filtration caps. And if a filtration cap gets funny and starts to "ring" or you get high freq noise on the front end, or the back end that gets into the feedback loop, things will go kaboom pretty fast.
For those of you into adventures with high voltage equipment, if repairing the bad solders, and obviously black/exploded parts doesn't do the trick the first couple of times, chuck that sucker and go to the next junk power supply. If you get a pile of dead power supplies from a computer store or a friend for none or very little $ you might as well cherry pick and keep your working neurons from burning out over something as trivial as a power supply.
Its not exactly the ONLY story dating back to that time. India has several legends going back to that time. Most of it has been simplified over time, and a little bit too much cheesy drama added, but you still have some basis in collective BS of an event, if not fact. Sometimes the BS can tell you more than any truth anyone of the time is willing to tell.
Was there some advanced civilization back then ? Maybe. If you look to someting in more recent history you have this massive tome by Galen that it took 1800+ years to catch up with.
Just because you get lucky now and then with some freak talent super genius doesn't mean its will keep going.
I hate to say it but in the end, its the lowest common denominator of a society that gets passed on as a sure thing though the ages. When the library of alexandria went it was only the most popular, and probably cheesy tales that carried on over the ages because EVERYONE retold the tales.
Farenheit 451 was based in the purest fact. Maybe noone is trying to kill every idea, but entropy will eat up anything that isn't massively distributed and repeated. Think to your most interesting paperback in your collection. Maybe a one off book by some unknown author. It will no doubt fall apart in less than 15 years.
Now think of some book everyone has, even though it wasn't that great. Piers Anthony and Terry Prattchet are gonna be around in some archive in 1200 years like it or not. The works of Vernor Vinge, Patrick McManus, Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling will be nothing but dust most likely.
Maybe there will be some saving grace in the future and they will have some Niven, Heinlein, Clarke, and Hunter S Thompson will survive. No doubt it probably won't be their best work. Entropy sucks doesn't it ?
Using viruses to release a genetic payload is nothing new. K. Eric Drexler talked about uses of T4 phages and other things a long long time ago in one of his books.
;)
Ideally you get a bug that has most of what you need already. Like encephelitus or west nile virus to deliver a payload to cure schizophrenia. You have something that gets into the brain and nervous system as is, you just modify it here and there to be a little less agressive, make sure your modifications are not so radical that minor environmental stresses wildly mutate it, then work your way through the initial tests, approval processes, etc etc.
Not that they'd likely risk a bug that speads like encephelitus, and certainly not carrying a schizophrenia cure. If it got into the wild everyone but people with temporal lobe epilespy and some forms of OCD would stop going to church in a matter of months.
Yeah, sure, that'll work. It doesn't work with people who set forest fires, it doesn't work with making prisoners pay to be locked up. You send someone a bill for $4 million in S&R fees, they won't pay that off in six lifetimes, now the park service and S&R have someone with an axe to grind because they tried to screw them with a billing scam.
And you open up the door to liability insurance problems. If you now charge for a service, and that service is botched they get to play who wants to be a multi millionaire on the govt's dime.
The jails and prisons try that scam because you are now owed X amount of money, and can borrow against that "asset", the prisoners don't complain because they only get garnished on their offical job paychecks(if they have one) and not on their under the table work or dope dealing money.
You try that on someone in the middle class, they'll raise hell, tell all their friends who actually vote, and people in elective office WILL fry for it. They in turn will burn every underling they can to try to save their own asses.
In the end you've burned the people who love the parks, and since its no longer safe to go out and enjoy, might as well let the farmers or land development people have it. Or maybe a nice strip mine or landfill could go there.
The people who can't breathe smog won't be in much of a position to fight the ones who can.
You can threaten to nuke china, mexico, and the entire 3rd world who burn coal in plants with no electro static filtration and so on, but thats not going to do much good.
But I suspect breating atomic weapon waste is a few orders of magnitude worse than coal waste.
Easier to get em used to non grid power items like solar, wind, efficiant building design before they get tied into a grid power/coal plant dependancy like the US is.
It's easy to forget that the US produces oil itself. And a lot of the toys we burn energy on are not exactly life and death. When the price of oil in the middle east gets too high, it then becomes reasonable to extract oil in the US, or produce methanol from coal and start making cars with stainless steal tanks/lines/carbs that can use it.
The evil SUVs on the road now can be rechipped, have the rear ends and/or transmissions changed to become normal vehicles that get semi normal mileage.
Or you can bite the bullet, and park the thing(until the rare occasion when you really need it for heavy duty work), and drive your 35mpg econobox for routine driving. An advantage we have today, but didn't in the 70s is that you can get a nice selection of rice burning 35mpg products that fit a lot of needs and price ranges.
Plastics don't really use a lot of premium oil product. They started out using unusable waste products from oil. Some of the same stuff they use for making blacktop, roof tar, and so on.
An easier way to think of it is how long does it take you to use 50 gallons of gas vs how long does it take to use up 50 gallons in the form of plastics. And even when the plastic is worn out, its not totally gone like gasoline is.
This is using the bulk consumption compete with coal model of thinking. Your payoff comes in sending power to a location(s) that cannot be easily tied into the grid, or where grid loses would be too high.
If you could do thousands of spotbeams, and have a sight just unfold a "cloth" of microwave dipoles on the ground to collect it, it would be a godsend for construction sights in the middle of nowhere. Or something a little more mundane like thawing runways, heating up the ground in winter for excavation. Or warm up an orchard if they were going to get potentially frozen.
And ultimately (dr evil laugh here) weather control and world domination.
Utah had some luck with solar powered energy improvement. But too many sportos OD'ed on the ephedra plants collecting all that energy in the desert. Now it just sits there preventing soil erosion. I'm sure you could plant other things there to soak up all the spare energy, but if this is done too well it won't be the desert anymore. It'll cool down, the clouds will move in and there goes your good solar energy days down the drain. Not to mention ability to use your swamp chiller efficiantly.
Well, you need the arc of the covenant to keep the 60 mpg carb from from clogging with airborn debris and becomming a standard 40mph carb, and you need the solar cell to keep the arc charged up with static electricity so the electrostatic precipitation effect keeps up.
Have to clean all the bones, stone tablet debris and other crud out of the arc first. Maybe regrind all of it, and paste it on the roof of the warehouse to keep the heat down inside. (evil grin)
Making the silicon is the primary energy cost. When the doping burns out you still have the silicon and backing material in good shape. Recycle and redope it, and your energy payback time is even faster.
It will be at least a century or more before you find technology that is cheaper than coal. Because coal is cheaper than dirt. For someone who lives in the city or close to the grid PV to power all your needs are not going to be cost practical for a long time.
There are several ways to skin a cat though. You can reduce your A/C costs a LOT by having a roof some other color than black. Or in the North by using solar water heating, solar air heating, ground exchange heating/cooling.
Or if you live in a really dry place, design/redisgn your house to use a swamp/evaporation cooling system.
PV makes sense when you live in a place where grid energy costs a fortune, or it will cost a fortune to have em run that line 20 miles up the mountain to your lone cabin. Blackout protection is another factor. If you have occasions where the grid pukes half a dozen or more times a week, and you need at least some power at all costs to run whatever, a small PV system and battery bank will be usefull.
You could probably get by with a gasoline powered 5kw generator to keep your UPS from dying, at least until the local cop caller in your neighborhood nags the cops about the noise. Which is really a cherry on top after having dragged the thing out of the garage, cleaning the rotten gas out of it(remember to dump some stabil in the tank before storing one of those) and running the extension cords all over the place. And don't forget having to power down, and regas the thing every 3 hours. This is usually happening in the WORST weather.
Having been without power in a variety of urban/rural situations and weather I can say that investing even $40 in a small portable PV panel pays for itself many times over when you really need it. Ideally having a $300 panel, a marine deep cycle battery, and 1500W or better TrueSine inverter as backup is ideal. You then have portablity as well as low cost.
You can go above and beyond this depending on needs. And if for some reason you sell your house to go live in a concrete cube in downtown seattle when the sun never shines, you can always find some dirty hippie commie vegan to take your old solar gear off your hands for a reasonable price.
Home Power magazine used to be the place to learn all you needed to know about everything solar & alternate energy related. Now that you have to register to download the huge PDF, I'd say just surf the newsgroups and blogs.
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Fuel Cell technology is great if you want to run your house off natural gas, propane, whatever. Unfortunately the price has gone sky high because california sucked up every cubic meter they could so THEY could have clean electric power. Now its no longer a cheap way to heat your house. Might as well go back to electric and choke down that coal plant radon/throium ash leakage.
But anyway, batteries, even though they contain evil awefull lead, are basicly fuel cells and hydrogen storage in one. You charge em, they generate hydrogen ions, and burn em when they discharge. Maintaining them, and knowing when your charging module is starting to buy it, or you have a bad cell, or a bad solder/connection on the bank is a black art in itself. But well worth it once you get all the details down.
Knowing what you absolutely need to have for non generating hours reserves if you get bumped off the grid, learning to get all your high wattage tasks done at peak generating hours is all part of being mostly off the grid.
If your going to cough up the bucks, I'd recomend getting the CD archives of homepower magazine. They're about $10 per (5-6 issues per CD), and less for the whole collection. Lots of diagrams, case studies for power systems. Dirt cheap compared to the cost of your first replacement inverter(also a regular replacement item)
As an end note, lead cells are cleanly recycled when you dump em off at the right places. The problems come along when you chuck thin walled car batteries into the local landfill to join all the dead Ni-Cads(really toxic to people) and old metal junk. CRT glass by itself is relatively safe and inert, but makes more sense to recycle.
Lead is not so bad as toxic waste is concerned, but you typically can use up a whole lot real fast and it piles up if not recycled. And being a slow reacting metal, it'll seep into groundwater for eons. Thinks like manganese run off the fields, into the groundwater, and you get a whole lot of younger people with parkinsons 10-20 years later. Cadmium is somewhere between the two for nasty side effects and reactivity.
Forget nuclear war for making mutant babies, dead cell phones batteries in the landfill will do that just fine. (doctor evil laugh here)