but the FCC is still insisting that it's technically a good idea.
No even the stupidest poltical ops in the FCC know its technically useless. They are insisting for political reasons. If you have a "marketplace of competitors" then you don't need monopoly regulation of RICO act like megacorps.
If it were not for those pesky laws of physics, BPL and LS would be great market competitors to the established operators, and there would be no and/or less reason to regulate the existing corrupt monopolies, because "look, its a free competitive market so regulation is unnecessary"
FYI, it's the GPS fault for making the presumption that the adjacent spectrum would always be quiet. With this ruling the FCC admits that the GPS receivers are in violation of their license.
LOL the adjacent spectrum was legally declared to be for satellite based transmission (air to ground) only by the FCC. You have it about as backwards as possible.
Standard/. car analogy would be we drive on the right in the US, Ford want to sell a UK drive on the left car in the US, DOT says ha ha go away, now you want to sue all other car manufacturers for assuming we'd always have right-side-drive in the US therefore they are the problem and if we just allowed people to randomly select whichever side of the road we preferred at that moment using cars where the driver and passenger dashboard can be instantly swapped, then it would all be good in the world.
Most GPS equiptment on... airplanes are a lot older and less resistant. The GPS in your phone is better than the GPS on an (older) aircraft.
Not really. The onboard aircraft mode C transponder is a couple watts around 1090-ish MHz which is not too far from the GPS spectrum, so they're tougher than you'd think. Thats before you get to the zillion watt air band voice transmitters, admittedly at a much lower frequency. Then again they're probably older. Then again, microwave filter technology was pretty much figured out in the 50s and not too much has changed since then. Then again microwave amp technology has drastically improved over the past two decades or so WRT MMICs and IP3 and IMD specs, so a new cellphone Might perform better than aircraft instruments. Then again, the whole "subscription model" for GPS maps and autoloaded waypoints means there are not as many "old" aircraft GPS out there as you'd think, compared to say, old altimeters or old airspeed gauges.
Theoretically there probably exists a GPS moving map display where the manufacturer hasn't shipped current nav data since '97 therefore it lays in the junk pile unused although theoretically if you'd power it up on the bench and compare to a 2012 iphone GPS, the iphone might outperform it. maybe.
This is the 4th or 5th story I have read about LightSquared and so far the only thing I know about them is that their shit messes up GPS.
Its the tech version of a soap opera. You know how my wife loves those TV dramas where diane was flirting with jake while he was dating cindy but actually cody had a crush on diane and it doesn't matter because jake is gay and cindy is lesbo and they're just pretending to be together to stop cindys boss john from flirting with her? Yeah its like that but with RF microwave technology and stuff.
So lets try this again in female TV drama mode using the standard crypto protocol names. So Bob asked drunken crack addict Alice for a date using a GPG signed irrefutable email and Alice said, eh Bob's kinda cute if you're drunk and high enough, yeah, maybe I'll think about it, so Bob went shopping at (product placement) and maxed out his (product placement) credit card on a (product placement) tux and a (product placement) marriage ring and (product placement) body spray and showed up on her doorstep the morning of his scheduled marriage to her (which she doesn't even know about), ready to get some premarital (sweep week ratings boosting) action. So Alice's brother Charlie finally figures out whats going on, shows up at Alice's door, thinks Bob is completely Fing out of his mind to even imagine Bob will hook up with his sister Alice, and beats the S out of him and throws him to the curb, staples an ASBO to his forehead, and leaves him bleeding in the gutter, and posts it all to/.. Then Alice stops her drug and booze binge long enough to realize she totally F'ed up and posts to facebook that she only lead Bob on because she was on a crack cocaine binge and now she's waaaay too sober to F him and Bob can just go back under his rock now please. Which pisses off Bob who plans to take her anyway no matter if she's willing or not, and pisses off Bob's credit card company because they know Bob will never pay them back a penny unless he gets some. Meanwhile everyone gets pissed off both at Alice for being a trashy crack whore on a binge unable to control herself from leading Bob on, and everyone's also pissed off at Bob for being such a profound jerk for not understanding "no means no" or whatever the trendy phrase is, and everyone's pissed off at Bob's (product placement) credit card provider for giving Bob, who is apparently an idiot, a limitless credit balancing knowing he has no way to pay it off (although when Bob goes bankrupt, "we will all" pay off his loans in higher fees, govt bailouts, etc, so at least they are the "winners" in this scenario)
What Monsato needs to do is prevent their seeds from getting loose, as well as the pollen. Cross pollination should be the problem of the patent holder.
No, if you're small or medium sized business and you have a stupid business plan, then you go out of business.
If you're big business and you have a stupid business plan, then you hire the government to make everyone else suffer until you make money.
Are you from the US? This is the same business model as RIAA, MPAA, the entire financial industry, blah blah blah. Not exactly anything new.
Get big, purchase the govt as hired guns, become a parasitical tax on the population.
I can't be bothered to figure out the exact quantity of refrigerant needed in a GW class cooling plant, I'm sure its a lot, but when you're dealing with a gigagallon cooling system my gut level guess is if the leak takes more than a couple hours to vent then nobody ecologically speaking notices.
Hmm. So if my car pushes a couple KW of heat around with a couple pounds of freon, I'm guessing a total system venting incident would drop something like mega-Kg of ammonia into giga-gallons of water if it took a day to leak out... so you're looking a a gram-level quantity of NH3 in a Kg quantity of H2O.
The big question is why you'd wanna vent that, or physically how you'd open all the loop simultaneously. I bet a tactical nuke could do it, but that leads to other MUCH more pressing issues.
The best way to "clean up" an ammonia spill is dissolve it in water... you don't get to do that at a refrigerated food warehouse, but a cooling tower at a nuke plant has a lot of water laying around.
It'll be OK unless they almost intentionally screw it up.
You've met a real-life eco-wingnut straw man who actually believes that becoming more eco-friendly requires a Unabomber lifestyle and genocide?
You haven't? Listen carefully for explanations about how we'll have to rapidly reduce the human population to save the endangered housefly or prevent the sea level from raising a centimeter.
LOL read the article. Cultural rules vs legal rules. You'll be mightly lonely, and probably poor, if you insist on only following the legal rules. That applies to other areas of life too. Cultural rule says you live in the USA, you buy your kids gifts for dec 25 and do all that Santa and pine tree and rudolf the reindeer stuff and christmas lights hanging from raingutters. Christians also do extra things like attend church, but whatever that's been marginalized pretty far. Yes, there is no law that says you must display a decorated pine tree in your house in December. Does not mean that a sociological study article explaining the Santa Claus story is irrelevant solely because its not part of the US constitution. Does mean life gets hard if you chose to live life in a way that rubs your neighbors wrong.
ptorrone am I accurately summarizing the article as "Don't be a jerk"?
I would advise that people who don't get it wrt social interaction in open hardware ecosystem are probably going to continue to "not get" that social interaction thing therefore respond unfavorably to having it pointed out to them. Its funny to read for those who already get it, but I donno how to get people who don't get it, to get it.
I've got another good unrelated question, what is the prevailing theory on why the Venn diagram of ham radio experimenters and "makers" is approximately zero people despite having pretty much the same tools, ethic, motivations, attitudes, etc? I've never seen a good explanation of that. Maybe I should write an article for Make magazine about that.
The objective is a sustainable, post-industrial, agrarian economy... with one tenth of the present population.
And whenever you ask the cowards who the 9/10th are supposed to be, the cowards always dodge the question and imply its gonna be someone else who gets the axe. No, not us of course because we are the elite enlightened ones. No not you guys, we need your support to carry out our genocide. Um, the 9/10th will be, uh, um, someone else.. Probably brown people.
The only difference between a nuclear plant and a coal/gas plant is that a nuclear plant can concentrate more generating capacity at a single location, which then can require more water.
And the delta T of a nuke is much lower and the cycles have historically been simpler (less stuff to contaminate or break)... lower thermal efficiency means if you want 1 GWe at the substation, then a nuke needs like 3 GWt but a hot hot hot coal plant might only need to dump 2 GWt (well, to get 50% eff on a coal plant you need something bonkers like a liquid mercury combined cycle, but that's how they rolled a century or so ago...)
So two plants, one nuke one coal/whatever at the same nameplate capacity, the nuke will output about 50% more thermal heat energy to make the identical amount of electricity.
Any energy you expend to refrigerate the cooling water will exceed the benefit you get.
Unless your condenser coils hang in air, not back into the same water you're trying to cool.
Lets see... COP of 4 is relatively unambitious for ammonia refrigerant, if I remember correctly. So you dump 1/4 GW into some ammonia compressors, hang the condensers in the air so they dump out around one GW or so, then around a GW or so of heat gets sucked out via the evap coils in the water.
It is technically possible, but it is probably cheaper to move the plant somewhere that is nicer to live and operate, and install some HVDC power lines. Really, there is no point in installing anything other than solar geo and wind anywhere out west... water is to valuable for drinking and growing plants. Out east we have more water than we know what to do with... Ring the great lakes with plants, no problemo, and the Mississippi river too.
According to TFA: "more than one billion aquatic organisms" are killed annually by NY's Indian Point plant.
No definition of what they mean by "aquatic organism" is given. Blue whales? Minnows? Paramecium?
That means one organism per 2.5 * 365 = about 912 gallons. That can't be distinct algae cells unless its nearly sterile water. Then again my 40 gallon tropical fish freshwater tank has around 10 fish, admittedly that is a pretty high loading but doable, at around 4 gallons per fish. They are probably talking about fish and are probably counting everything from hatched egg on up.
You'd think at those numbers, a nuke would be surrounded by a sea of floating bloated bodies, but when I toured one I didn't see that. Weird. Maybe after a couple decades everything nearby was already long since dead?
Only in the American South. Seriously. Not even a weird anti-science joke.
You blow water thru the air or air thru the water and the water temp, air temp, and dew point of the air all eventually converge to the same number, usually dropping the temp of the water considerably. Works really well in a low dew point area like a desert. Of course low dew point areas usually don't have the spare water to waste evaporating it away. So the cost is a lot of extra water evaporation and quite a bit of electricity to run the pumps. You don't have to get all aquarium tube-y, this can be as simple as an artificial pumped waterfall or a really elaborate water fountain appearing thing. Oxygenates the water too.
Can someone digest the data and give me a distance equivalent in miles? For example, I live about 30 miles south of a great lakes nuke. I know a lot about nukes. I don't know enough about ecology to figure the distance.
What I'm getting at is obviously the water in lake michigan is warmer in Milwaukee than at the Point Beach nuke. So building the Point Beach plant did the equivalent of picking up that splotch of lake michigan and dropping it further south. How much further south? 100 feet? 100 miles? I'm guessing having boated and sailed in both general areas that its much closer to the 100 feet figure than the 100 miles figure. I guarantee the fishing around Pt Beach does not result in tropical aquarium fish.
Obviously the effect on a little creek of a river is much more pronounced, but I'm sure a figure can be made up, where its just like digging a new river channel X miles south of its current position.
Also in a closely related question, could someone express global warming in miles per hour to the south? I'm guessing this is a scientific notation type of problem, so I'll accept miles per century or whatever.
Analogy: LightSquared tried to buy a plot of cheap residential land to start a chemical/manufacturing plant, which affects nearby residents. They should have bought a piece of commercial land that supports their requirements.
/. car analogy: They bought property zoned for slot car racing tracks surrounded by residential. Then they said, forget this slot car stuff I'm building a full scale 1000 horsepower indy car / f1 / nascar track and they line up billions of bucks of investment for viewer stands, pork rind fryers, and network broadcast contracts. Then add a dose of blame the victim, those residents complaining about the full size race track being installed in a slot car zoned property should have known better when they moved in decades before the F1 track plan was proposed, after all this is a nation of corruption not a nation of laws, anyone who doesn't know that is a fool who gets what they deserve, just like a woman in a miniskirt in a dark alley (sickeningly distasteful, isn't it?). Finally the indy car / f1 / nascar gets the smackdown from the govt for being complete idiots for trying to install a full scale race track in a slot car strip mall zone and the only people surprised seem to be the track investors who were told it was a guaranteed thing.
rather the GPS equipment that got interference were just poorly designed. If the GPS equipment was held to the standards it should have been,
Blatantly false. Ask your closest EE to run the numbers. The numbers are utterly insane. You need something like multiple superconducting resonant cavities to pull this off. IF you were willing to ten-tuple the size of your cellphone and include a liquid helium fill port and dewar then it'll work, just fine. At least the liq He dewar will stop the phone from physically heating up as you talk on it.
Also they were very well designed to operate within and around a satellite to ground transmission band. Playing legal games decades later and adding high powered ground transmitters is a massive legal failure, not a design failure. This is a FCC has egg on its face moment, as in, don't they have any technically skilled people in the commission anymore?
"A proposed wireless broadband network that would provide voice and Internet service using airwaves once reserved for satellite-telephone transmissions should be shelved because it interferes with GPS technology, the Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday
That's a massive simplification. They sell mobile satellite internet, and have done so for a long time, and will do so into the indeterminate future, this has nothing to do with that.
The LS idea was to provide a backend carrier to local on ground cellular providers for internet traffic. Same as your off the shelf 3G service you now "enjoy" but instead of your greedy provider paying AT&T (or whoever) for fiber to the cell phone tower, they'd use the satellite service.
Except... they didn't have an allocation for their ground network. Hmm. What if we reuse the satellite freqs, yeah that'll work. Well, except that the would ruin/destroy/eliminate the possibility of anyone on the ground hearing the satellites without a huge dish or technically impossible filtering. OK no problemo we'll dump all our satellite customers and focus on the ground guys, and use the marketing for satellite "as if" we're not a ground 3G provider. Whoops that'll kill all the adjacent satellite services too. Oh Oh, GPS is adjacent.
Well, so much for that bad idea.
Note there is no reason that instead of paying AT&T for fiber to a cell tower in the middle of nowhere, LS can't provide slow and high latency service RIGHT NOW to that cell tower... this FCC bar only stops them from setting up their own tower and using the satellite freqs to set up something like a 3G service.
The standard/. car analogy is this is kind of like getting rid of the SUV exception where hyper obese ultra low MPG passenger cars are permitted under the legal fiction they are classified as trucks not cars. That takes care of the analogy "why the F are they installing 100 watt ground transmitters on an allocation for satellite transmitters only?". Or maybe a better analogy is LS thought it would be fun to build a network of hydrogen fueling stations, and figured no one would have any problem if they used an off the shelf gasoline filling nozzle instead of a technically correct solution that would not result in an infinite number of burnout fires. That takes care of the analogy "why the F are they installing 100 watt ground transmitters right next to satellite receivers and even daydreaming that won't knock out the receivers".
But are such efforts working? The answer, judging by the GSK effort, seems to be a cautious 'yes.'
Another way to make money by being "open" is to blow billions researching 10K molecules and discovering its a dead end, realize you're F'd unless you can convince the competition to screw up their finances just as bad, then release your pre-research plans without mentioning you've already blew the cash on the research and ask the competition to cooperatively research it for you. After they blow billions down a dead end rathole, then all you guys are "even". Everyone's poorer but at least you didn't get fired.
Another business model you can try is to get the competition to reproduce your research because you've got a crook/mole in your organization who you know pencil-whipped SOME of the research and you want a cheap way to get someone else to figure out which research was pencil whipped and which was real. As long as you can stay ahead of the pack, you "win".
Yes, yes I am an evil genius, although I assure you these business models were not implemented by me, these are merely practically read off my cards. I was going to publish a "card based business simulation" game kind of like MtG but all cutthroat crony capitalism, you know, like the world we live in. Daydream was much like monopoly was The Game of the 1st great depression, my card game would be The Game of the 2nd great depression we're currently in and I'd end up dotcom-rich. But it never went anywhere, I got distracted and busy and finally disinterested. I guess that means I ended up dotcom-rich after all.
As a meta-game I could license and release my card game IP under some CC license and try to get you all to "fix it up" for me, but actually use one of the two strategies above, that would be recursively funny. Sure, mattel inc, you guys get right to work on my business simulation card game, that's just a great idea that I'm sure will end well.
My guess is something like the cover story will be the PS4 can plug directly into the power outlet on the back of a sony TV, but the outlet on the TV is limited via cheapness or just sheer desire to complicate stuff to only 2 amps, so unless you authenticate as a genuine 2 amp or less (Sony branded) load, the outlet will click off to protect the TV circuitry. Add a marketing blitz that the PS4 is the only blue ray video center thingy that can be powered directly off the TV and... profit.
I'm sure we'll have "sony outlets" and "sony chargers" deployed to the world, right after we deploy X-10 home automation across the world, 40 years for that and waiting.
The other game I can see playing is something weird along the line of advancing the tech, running USB over power lines, which only activates the USB-over-power circuitry if the authentication system verifies its good. I donno why you'd wanna run USB over power lines, but... power lines don't work for networking, all the internet-over-power companies have failed and gone out of business, correct?
I thought Nortel was outsourcing everything to India, not China. I suppose this is an important story if you live in China or India, but pretty much "eh" for everyone else.
If a company is intentionally outsourcing everything, does it really matter fundamentally matter if their stuff gets "involuntarily outsourced" or diverted to yet another foreign country?
I can't feel any sympathy for Nortel at all. A traitor to their own country got screwed. boo hoo.
The question is, do purples, indigos, and violets seem stronger to you then before?
As a follow up, I bet some similar pigments have strangely different UV reflectivity. Do different paint colors still "match" appropriately?
For example. Everyone knows from the myspace era than dark blue text on black background is beautiful, edgy, trendy, and shows you're high tech. What if different UV pass characteristics result in brilliant UV output from the blue pigment, therefore dark blue appears bright to you, therefore ultra high contrast only to you.
Also can you see clothing fluoresce? I know from fooling with a prospector / geologist blacklight that some detergents glow brilliantly in UV. So its not beyond the realm of possibility that you can see underclothes glowing thru an non glowing outer layer.
Finally have you started UV grafitti yet and/or do you know of a UV responsive paint that only you can see, in other words its pretty clear above 400 nm and looks (purple, I assume?) to you? This might not be a paint, but maybe an obscure poly finish that only you can see, or... something.
What you've basically just said is that a teachers have too many kids in their class rooms to make eye contact with each one of them every 2-3 minutes, which is all it takes to tell if a student isn't paying attention and once you know that it's pretty easy to figure out why.
There are also other issues. A central teaching of schools is authoritarianism. The same thinking pattern you propose WRT to distraction potential of hotties in short skirts simply gets short skirts banned in school. Distracting (cool) tee shirts, simply gets those shirts banned in school. Ditto the pants hanging down to the knees, etc.
The whole point of that part of schooling is to indoctrinate a worldview where if its not compulsory its forbidden and if its not forbidden its compulsory. Wifi must either be used in class or must be banned in class. If it can't be used for whatever reason then it must be utterly banished. This "case by case judgment" stuff smacks of independent thought and must not be implemented.
A half way solution is to hire more teachers to crack down on misuse of wifi. The full solution, which is considerably cheaper, and better fits educational philosophy, is to unplug the wifi. I was suggesting hiring more teachers as a joke, because its not as good of a solution and is impossibly expensive anyway.
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but the FCC is still insisting that it's technically a good idea.
No even the stupidest poltical ops in the FCC know its technically useless. They are insisting for political reasons. If you have a "marketplace of competitors" then you don't need monopoly regulation of RICO act like megacorps.
If it were not for those pesky laws of physics, BPL and LS would be great market competitors to the established operators, and there would be no and/or less reason to regulate the existing corrupt monopolies, because "look, its a free competitive market so regulation is unnecessary"
FYI, it's the GPS fault for making the presumption that the adjacent spectrum would always be quiet. With this ruling the FCC admits that the GPS receivers are in violation of their license.
LOL the adjacent spectrum was legally declared to be for satellite based transmission (air to ground) only by the FCC. You have it about as backwards as possible.
Standard /. car analogy would be we drive on the right in the US, Ford want to sell a UK drive on the left car in the US, DOT says ha ha go away, now you want to sue all other car manufacturers for assuming we'd always have right-side-drive in the US therefore they are the problem and if we just allowed people to randomly select whichever side of the road we preferred at that moment using cars where the driver and passenger dashboard can be instantly swapped, then it would all be good in the world.
Most GPS equiptment on... airplanes are a lot older and less resistant. The GPS in your phone is better than the GPS on an (older) aircraft.
Not really. The onboard aircraft mode C transponder is a couple watts around 1090-ish MHz which is not too far from the GPS spectrum, so they're tougher than you'd think. Thats before you get to the zillion watt air band voice transmitters, admittedly at a much lower frequency. Then again they're probably older. Then again, microwave filter technology was pretty much figured out in the 50s and not too much has changed since then. Then again microwave amp technology has drastically improved over the past two decades or so WRT MMICs and IP3 and IMD specs, so a new cellphone Might perform better than aircraft instruments. Then again, the whole "subscription model" for GPS maps and autoloaded waypoints means there are not as many "old" aircraft GPS out there as you'd think, compared to say, old altimeters or old airspeed gauges.
Theoretically there probably exists a GPS moving map display where the manufacturer hasn't shipped current nav data since '97 therefore it lays in the junk pile unused although theoretically if you'd power it up on the bench and compare to a 2012 iphone GPS, the iphone might outperform it. maybe.
This is the 4th or 5th story I have read about LightSquared and so far the only thing I know about them is that their shit messes up GPS.
Its the tech version of a soap opera. You know how my wife loves those TV dramas where diane was flirting with jake while he was dating cindy but actually cody had a crush on diane and it doesn't matter because jake is gay and cindy is lesbo and they're just pretending to be together to stop cindys boss john from flirting with her? Yeah its like that but with RF microwave technology and stuff.
So lets try this again in female TV drama mode using the standard crypto protocol names. So Bob asked drunken crack addict Alice for a date using a GPG signed irrefutable email and Alice said, eh Bob's kinda cute if you're drunk and high enough, yeah, maybe I'll think about it, so Bob went shopping at (product placement) and maxed out his (product placement) credit card on a (product placement) tux and a (product placement) marriage ring and (product placement) body spray and showed up on her doorstep the morning of his scheduled marriage to her (which she doesn't even know about), ready to get some premarital (sweep week ratings boosting) action. So Alice's brother Charlie finally figures out whats going on, shows up at Alice's door, thinks Bob is completely Fing out of his mind to even imagine Bob will hook up with his sister Alice, and beats the S out of him and throws him to the curb, staples an ASBO to his forehead, and leaves him bleeding in the gutter, and posts it all to /.. Then Alice stops her drug and booze binge long enough to realize she totally F'ed up and posts to facebook that she only lead Bob on because she was on a crack cocaine binge and now she's waaaay too sober to F him and Bob can just go back under his rock now please. Which pisses off Bob who plans to take her anyway no matter if she's willing or not, and pisses off Bob's credit card company because they know Bob will never pay them back a penny unless he gets some. Meanwhile everyone gets pissed off both at Alice for being a trashy crack whore on a binge unable to control herself from leading Bob on, and everyone's also pissed off at Bob for being such a profound jerk for not understanding "no means no" or whatever the trendy phrase is, and everyone's pissed off at Bob's (product placement) credit card provider for giving Bob, who is apparently an idiot, a limitless credit balancing knowing he has no way to pay it off (although when Bob goes bankrupt, "we will all" pay off his loans in higher fees, govt bailouts, etc, so at least they are the "winners" in this scenario)
What Monsato needs to do is prevent their seeds from getting loose, as well as the pollen. Cross pollination should be the problem of the patent holder.
No, if you're small or medium sized business and you have a stupid business plan, then you go out of business.
If you're big business and you have a stupid business plan, then you hire the government to make everyone else suffer until you make money.
Are you from the US? This is the same business model as RIAA, MPAA, the entire financial industry, blah blah blah. Not exactly anything new.
Get big, purchase the govt as hired guns, become a parasitical tax on the population.
I can't be bothered to figure out the exact quantity of refrigerant needed in a GW class cooling plant, I'm sure its a lot, but when you're dealing with a gigagallon cooling system my gut level guess is if the leak takes more than a couple hours to vent then nobody ecologically speaking notices.
Hmm. So if my car pushes a couple KW of heat around with a couple pounds of freon, I'm guessing a total system venting incident would drop something like mega-Kg of ammonia into giga-gallons of water if it took a day to leak out... so you're looking a a gram-level quantity of NH3 in a Kg quantity of H2O.
The big question is why you'd wanna vent that, or physically how you'd open all the loop simultaneously. I bet a tactical nuke could do it, but that leads to other MUCH more pressing issues.
The best way to "clean up" an ammonia spill is dissolve it in water... you don't get to do that at a refrigerated food warehouse, but a cooling tower at a nuke plant has a lot of water laying around.
It'll be OK unless they almost intentionally screw it up.
You've met a real-life eco-wingnut straw man who actually believes that becoming more eco-friendly requires a Unabomber lifestyle and genocide?
You haven't? Listen carefully for explanations about how we'll have to rapidly reduce the human population to save the endangered housefly or prevent the sea level from raising a centimeter.
LOL read the article. Cultural rules vs legal rules. You'll be mightly lonely, and probably poor, if you insist on only following the legal rules.
That applies to other areas of life too. Cultural rule says you live in the USA, you buy your kids gifts for dec 25 and do all that Santa and pine tree and rudolf the reindeer stuff and christmas lights hanging from raingutters. Christians also do extra things like attend church, but whatever that's been marginalized pretty far. Yes, there is no law that says you must display a decorated pine tree in your house in December. Does not mean that a sociological study article explaining the Santa Claus story is irrelevant solely because its not part of the US constitution. Does mean life gets hard if you chose to live life in a way that rubs your neighbors wrong.
ptorrone am I accurately summarizing the article as "Don't be a jerk"?
I would advise that people who don't get it wrt social interaction in open hardware ecosystem are probably going to continue to "not get" that social interaction thing therefore respond unfavorably to having it pointed out to them. Its funny to read for those who already get it, but I donno how to get people who don't get it, to get it.
I've got another good unrelated question, what is the prevailing theory on why the Venn diagram of ham radio experimenters and "makers" is approximately zero people despite having pretty much the same tools, ethic, motivations, attitudes, etc? I've never seen a good explanation of that. Maybe I should write an article for Make magazine about that.
standard /. car analogy for AT&T mgmt:
1. The new Ford Focus seems to be selling well. .....
2. I know, lets manufacturer fewer of them!
3.
4. Profit!
The objective is a sustainable, post-industrial, agrarian economy... with one tenth of the present population.
And whenever you ask the cowards who the 9/10th are supposed to be, the cowards always dodge the question and imply its gonna be someone else who gets the axe. No, not us of course because we are the elite enlightened ones. No not you guys, we need your support to carry out our genocide. Um, the 9/10th will be, uh, um, someone else.. Probably brown people.
The only difference between a nuclear plant and a coal/gas plant is that a nuclear plant can concentrate more generating capacity at a single location, which then can require more water.
And the delta T of a nuke is much lower and the cycles have historically been simpler (less stuff to contaminate or break)... lower thermal efficiency means if you want 1 GWe at the substation, then a nuke needs like 3 GWt but a hot hot hot coal plant might only need to dump 2 GWt (well, to get 50% eff on a coal plant you need something bonkers like a liquid mercury combined cycle, but that's how they rolled a century or so ago...)
So two plants, one nuke one coal/whatever at the same nameplate capacity, the nuke will output about 50% more thermal heat energy to make the identical amount of electricity.
Any energy you expend to refrigerate the cooling water will exceed the benefit you get.
Unless your condenser coils hang in air, not back into the same water you're trying to cool.
Lets see... COP of 4 is relatively unambitious for ammonia refrigerant, if I remember correctly. So you dump 1/4 GW into some ammonia compressors, hang the condensers in the air so they dump out around one GW or so, then around a GW or so of heat gets sucked out via the evap coils in the water.
It is technically possible, but it is probably cheaper to move the plant somewhere that is nicer to live and operate, and install some HVDC power lines. Really, there is no point in installing anything other than solar geo and wind anywhere out west... water is to valuable for drinking and growing plants. Out east we have more water than we know what to do with... Ring the great lakes with plants, no problemo, and the Mississippi river too.
According to TFA: "more than one billion aquatic organisms" are killed annually by NY's Indian Point plant.
No definition of what they mean by "aquatic organism" is given. Blue whales? Minnows? Paramecium?
That means one organism per 2.5 * 365 = about 912 gallons. That can't be distinct algae cells unless its nearly sterile water. Then again my 40 gallon tropical fish freshwater tank has around 10 fish, admittedly that is a pretty high loading but doable, at around 4 gallons per fish. They are probably talking about fish and are probably counting everything from hatched egg on up.
You'd think at those numbers, a nuke would be surrounded by a sea of floating bloated bodies, but when I toured one I didn't see that. Weird. Maybe after a couple decades everything nearby was already long since dead?
Point i) is a thermodynamics fail.
Only in the American South. Seriously. Not even a weird anti-science joke.
You blow water thru the air or air thru the water and the water temp, air temp, and dew point of the air all eventually converge to the same number, usually dropping the temp of the water considerably. Works really well in a low dew point area like a desert. Of course low dew point areas usually don't have the spare water to waste evaporating it away. So the cost is a lot of extra water evaporation and quite a bit of electricity to run the pumps. You don't have to get all aquarium tube-y, this can be as simple as an artificial pumped waterfall or a really elaborate water fountain appearing thing. Oxygenates the water too.
Can someone digest the data and give me a distance equivalent in miles? For example, I live about 30 miles south of a great lakes nuke. I know a lot about nukes. I don't know enough about ecology to figure the distance.
What I'm getting at is obviously the water in lake michigan is warmer in Milwaukee than at the Point Beach nuke. So building the Point Beach plant did the equivalent of picking up that splotch of lake michigan and dropping it further south. How much further south? 100 feet? 100 miles? I'm guessing having boated and sailed in both general areas that its much closer to the 100 feet figure than the 100 miles figure. I guarantee the fishing around Pt Beach does not result in tropical aquarium fish.
Obviously the effect on a little creek of a river is much more pronounced, but I'm sure a figure can be made up, where its just like digging a new river channel X miles south of its current position.
Also in a closely related question, could someone express global warming in miles per hour to the south? I'm guessing this is a scientific notation type of problem, so I'll accept miles per century or whatever.
Analogy:
LightSquared tried to buy a plot of cheap residential land to start a chemical/manufacturing plant, which affects nearby residents.
They should have bought a piece of commercial land that supports their requirements.
/. car analogy: They bought property zoned for slot car racing tracks surrounded by residential. Then they said, forget this slot car stuff I'm building a full scale 1000 horsepower indy car / f1 / nascar track and they line up billions of bucks of investment for viewer stands, pork rind fryers, and network broadcast contracts. Then add a dose of blame the victim, those residents complaining about the full size race track being installed in a slot car zoned property should have known better when they moved in decades before the F1 track plan was proposed, after all this is a nation of corruption not a nation of laws, anyone who doesn't know that is a fool who gets what they deserve, just like a woman in a miniskirt in a dark alley (sickeningly distasteful, isn't it?). Finally the indy car / f1 / nascar gets the smackdown from the govt for being complete idiots for trying to install a full scale race track in a slot car strip mall zone and the only people surprised seem to be the track investors who were told it was a guaranteed thing.
rather the GPS equipment that got interference were just poorly designed. If the GPS equipment was held to the standards it should have been,
Blatantly false. Ask your closest EE to run the numbers. The numbers are utterly insane. You need something like multiple superconducting resonant cavities to pull this off. IF you were willing to ten-tuple the size of your cellphone and include a liquid helium fill port and dewar then it'll work, just fine. At least the liq He dewar will stop the phone from physically heating up as you talk on it.
Also they were very well designed to operate within and around a satellite to ground transmission band. Playing legal games decades later and adding high powered ground transmitters is a massive legal failure, not a design failure. This is a FCC has egg on its face moment, as in, don't they have any technically skilled people in the commission anymore?
"A proposed wireless broadband network that would provide voice and Internet service using airwaves once reserved for satellite-telephone transmissions should be shelved because it interferes with GPS technology, the Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday
That's a massive simplification. They sell mobile satellite internet, and have done so for a long time, and will do so into the indeterminate future, this has nothing to do with that.
The LS idea was to provide a backend carrier to local on ground cellular providers for internet traffic. Same as your off the shelf 3G service you now "enjoy" but instead of your greedy provider paying AT&T (or whoever) for fiber to the cell phone tower, they'd use the satellite service.
Except... they didn't have an allocation for their ground network. Hmm. What if we reuse the satellite freqs, yeah that'll work. Well, except that the would ruin/destroy/eliminate the possibility of anyone on the ground hearing the satellites without a huge dish or technically impossible filtering. OK no problemo we'll dump all our satellite customers and focus on the ground guys, and use the marketing for satellite "as if" we're not a ground 3G provider. Whoops that'll kill all the adjacent satellite services too. Oh Oh, GPS is adjacent.
Well, so much for that bad idea.
Note there is no reason that instead of paying AT&T for fiber to a cell tower in the middle of nowhere, LS can't provide slow and high latency service RIGHT NOW to that cell tower... this FCC bar only stops them from setting up their own tower and using the satellite freqs to set up something like a 3G service.
The standard /. car analogy is this is kind of like getting rid of the SUV exception where hyper obese ultra low MPG passenger cars are permitted under the legal fiction they are classified as trucks not cars. That takes care of the analogy "why the F are they installing 100 watt ground transmitters on an allocation for satellite transmitters only?". Or maybe a better analogy is LS thought it would be fun to build a network of hydrogen fueling stations, and figured no one would have any problem if they used an off the shelf gasoline filling nozzle instead of a technically correct solution that would not result in an infinite number of burnout fires. That takes care of the analogy "why the F are they installing 100 watt ground transmitters right next to satellite receivers and even daydreaming that won't knock out the receivers".
But are such efforts working? The answer, judging by the GSK effort, seems to be a cautious 'yes.'
Another way to make money by being "open" is to blow billions researching 10K molecules and discovering its a dead end, realize you're F'd unless you can convince the competition to screw up their finances just as bad, then release your pre-research plans without mentioning you've already blew the cash on the research and ask the competition to cooperatively research it for you. After they blow billions down a dead end rathole, then all you guys are "even". Everyone's poorer but at least you didn't get fired.
Another business model you can try is to get the competition to reproduce your research because you've got a crook/mole in your organization who you know pencil-whipped SOME of the research and you want a cheap way to get someone else to figure out which research was pencil whipped and which was real. As long as you can stay ahead of the pack, you "win".
Yes, yes I am an evil genius, although I assure you these business models were not implemented by me, these are merely practically read off my cards. I was going to publish a "card based business simulation" game kind of like MtG but all cutthroat crony capitalism, you know, like the world we live in. Daydream was much like monopoly was The Game of the 1st great depression, my card game would be The Game of the 2nd great depression we're currently in and I'd end up dotcom-rich. But it never went anywhere, I got distracted and busy and finally disinterested. I guess that means I ended up dotcom-rich after all.
As a meta-game I could license and release my card game IP under some CC license and try to get you all to "fix it up" for me, but actually use one of the two strategies above, that would be recursively funny. Sure, mattel inc, you guys get right to work on my business simulation card game, that's just a great idea that I'm sure will end well.
My guess is something like the cover story will be the PS4 can plug directly into the power outlet on the back of a sony TV, but the outlet on the TV is limited via cheapness or just sheer desire to complicate stuff to only 2 amps, so unless you authenticate as a genuine 2 amp or less (Sony branded) load, the outlet will click off to protect the TV circuitry. Add a marketing blitz that the PS4 is the only blue ray video center thingy that can be powered directly off the TV and ... profit.
I'm sure we'll have "sony outlets" and "sony chargers" deployed to the world, right after we deploy X-10 home automation across the world, 40 years for that and waiting.
The other game I can see playing is something weird along the line of advancing the tech, running USB over power lines, which only activates the USB-over-power circuitry if the authentication system verifies its good. I donno why you'd wanna run USB over power lines, but... power lines don't work for networking, all the internet-over-power companies have failed and gone out of business, correct?
I thought Nortel was outsourcing everything to India, not China. I suppose this is an important story if you live in China or India, but pretty much "eh" for everyone else.
If a company is intentionally outsourcing everything, does it really matter fundamentally matter if their stuff gets "involuntarily outsourced" or diverted to yet another foreign country?
I can't feel any sympathy for Nortel at all. A traitor to their own country got screwed. boo hoo.
The question is, do purples, indigos, and violets seem stronger to you then before?
As a follow up, I bet some similar pigments have strangely different UV reflectivity. Do different paint colors still "match" appropriately?
For example. Everyone knows from the myspace era than dark blue text on black background is beautiful, edgy, trendy, and shows you're high tech. What if different UV pass characteristics result in brilliant UV output from the blue pigment, therefore dark blue appears bright to you, therefore ultra high contrast only to you.
Also can you see clothing fluoresce? I know from fooling with a prospector / geologist blacklight that some detergents glow brilliantly in UV. So its not beyond the realm of possibility that you can see underclothes glowing thru an non glowing outer layer.
Finally have you started UV grafitti yet and/or do you know of a UV responsive paint that only you can see, in other words its pretty clear above 400 nm and looks (purple, I assume?) to you? This might not be a paint, but maybe an obscure poly finish that only you can see, or ... something.
Thats actually pretty cheap as far as tax rates go. I wish my local sales tax was only 2 percent, or my income tax was only 2 percent.
What you've basically just said is that a teachers have too many kids in their class rooms to make eye contact with each one of them every 2-3 minutes, which is all it takes to tell if a student isn't paying attention and once you know that it's pretty easy to figure out why.
There are also other issues. A central teaching of schools is authoritarianism. The same thinking pattern you propose WRT to distraction potential of hotties in short skirts simply gets short skirts banned in school. Distracting (cool) tee shirts, simply gets those shirts banned in school. Ditto the pants hanging down to the knees, etc.
The whole point of that part of schooling is to indoctrinate a worldview where if its not compulsory its forbidden and if its not forbidden its compulsory. Wifi must either be used in class or must be banned in class. If it can't be used for whatever reason then it must be utterly banished. This "case by case judgment" stuff smacks of independent thought and must not be implemented.
A half way solution is to hire more teachers to crack down on misuse of wifi. The full solution, which is considerably cheaper, and better fits educational philosophy, is to unplug the wifi. I was suggesting hiring more teachers as a joke, because its not as good of a solution and is impossibly expensive anyway.