What do these recycling companies do with these phones anyway?
One division of a cell phone seller that I'm familiar with wipes them with windex, therefore marks the value up on the books to about $150 because its now "reconditioned", donates them to battered women, homeless people, etc, as 911 emergency phones, marks the $150 loss/donation on their tax return, and uses that to balance against their income earned from selling phones. Essentially its a tax dodge. Don't know how it works with separate companies or non-profit, all the donation credits in the world are useless from a tax perspective unless you have taxable profits...
The only dodge I can think of for a church would be something like take an income stream of $1M of sunday donations and 1000 junk cellphones, mark up the value of the phones to $1000 each using some windex and give them away, so you gave away $1000 * 1000 phones = $1M. Now you've got $1M cash unaccountable for, which as a good christian evangelist televangelist you can spend on cocaine and male prostitutes, in other words, blow and... blow, I guess, while publishing that you took in $1M and some phones and send out $1M and some phones so superficially there's nothing fishy going on with the finances.
What would make something like this work is if I can integrate this with my cable box.
I wonder if its going to be "push" like my cablebox was or "pull" like my mythtv. I like the pull model because with a few minutes configuration I can expunge entire channels. I don't even see Univision, ESPN, QVC or EWTN as existing. I like it that way. I much prefer scrolling thru 20 channels that I actually watch than almost 80 of which 60 I never watch. The expensive fee movie channels are not grayed out on my mythtv like they are on a settop, they just don't exist.
I'm worried a commercial settop or integrated settop or whatever is going to be intensely push. So I can watch the youtube video I want, after spend time and mindshare scrolling past the vendor's advertising suggestion, etc. 10000 channels of home shopping and religious preaching to scroll thru while searching for actual content.. Just wait until you get the TV equivalent of foul loud animated flashing internet browser ads, without the virtue of adblock+ for the TV. Or maybe someone is developing something like adblock+ for TV?
Its the "see the beautiful countryside" vs "see the commercial billboards" problem, coming now to your TV.
Run it over a mostly anonymous networking layer like freenet / i2p / something else, and it might even be "kind of" safe to participate in. One big problem is going to be local ad insertion. Ever noticed local ads during network shows? Yeah. I use mythtv with hands off automatic commercial detection and skipping so I don't see ads, and if everyone used this, this we'd all theoretically have more or less identical streams, I think?
So, for me, the question is: which free software package is going to port themselves to a sub-$100 HDMI out solution that can hide behind a flat panel first: Ubuntu, or XBMC?
Doesn't it already run Debian, in which case it's just "apt-get install mythtv-frontend" and tada its done? I also had to configure, if I recall, GDM as a login manager, modified the GDM config files to autologin as the mythtv user, installed ratpoison as the display manager which is never used buy mythtv got worked up unless run under a window manager, did something to make ratpoison start off mythtv-frontend (or was it some.x file?) and it just worked?
Its all a puppet recipe for me, that I set up several years ago, so when I deployed my newest FE I didn't actually "do" any of the above, I just told puppet its a mythtv-frontend and a couple minutes later magically it started working. But I could look up what puppet is doing if I wanted.
I know my old tube TV started up in about 3 seconds and the picture was stabilizing for about 10 to 15 seconds.
My current very new LCD starts up in about 10 maybe 15 seconds I haven't timed it, but its much slower than the tube it replaced. Spends a weird amount of time displaying the LG logo when its "up" but doing... something, I guess.
My old cable settop DVR box, before I cancelled/returned it, took a good solid 5 minutes to boot. More than even the longest TV commercial break, anyway. Analysis with a power meter shows that "off" merely meant it output a black screen, no change in consumption, which I thought was interesting. Obviously it came out of "blank screensaver mode" in about one second, I'm talking about power on boot time, or after it locked up, which it did all the time.
My current mythtv frontend using all solid state on a vanilla Debian install takes, eh maybe 2 minutes to boot from power to the mythtv frontend screen. It basically never locks up, and I never shut it off because it draws approximately no power (around 5 watts) and it would be extremely environmentally damaging to destroy it by repetitive power cycling, so I do not.
So that's the real world boot time data I have. Any/.er with a "smart TV" either inside the TV itself or an addon box want to provide some real world data?
The conventional wisdom which I'm sure we'll soon be subjected to, is the problem this device has is content, where will they get the TV equivalent of top40 content, etc.
The real problem this device has, is why would someone buy it instead of apple/roku/homebrew mythtv/boxee/tivo/xmbc/android tv... any others I've missed? What makes this one special other than its a different manufacturer trying to do the same thing. If anything I'm curious how well this device conforms from a user perspective to the boring standard model all the other developers are using. Even the idea that something new or unique could exist in this market is unthinkable.
The/. car analogy is good luck trying to tell commuter vehicles apart when trying to purchase a new car. The marketing materials are useless because they either insist that you'll get laid if you select their car, or they're puffed up with useless comparison charts (stereotypically you'll have a column of something like "number of tires" all being 4 in each row, or ships with a steering wheel all having a "Y". Why have that column?). The salespeople just want to sell you the most expensive car with the most expensive dealer addons and the most expensive possible financing package. Your friends will provide mostly useless anecdotes about their individual car's maintenance history and peculiar favorite parts, which mostly tells you more about them than about the car model in general. Any decision making data about use, comfort, reliability, economics are simply unobtainable.
Last time I looked, admittedly, a couple years ago, scrap steel wasn't worth hauling in unless you had a dozen tons of it and were within 10 miles of the recycling center. Otherwise, you weren't even making gas money.
Oh I wouldn't go that far. You're looking at least at $250 per ton, maybe as much as $500 for high quality stampings from a factory. Now that is darn near an order of magnitude less than copper, but you certainly run a profit vs gas money on steel/cast iron. Lets say you have a 1 ton trailer on the back of your 10 MPG pickup truck, that's costing at least 50 cents per mile so you don't lose money until you drive more than 500 miles. Very few thieves live more than 500 miles from a junkyard, but I suppose its possible in the wilds of alaska, although there's probably not much to steal there.
To give you an idea, there are scrap services in my area who will drive to your location, and dispose of your old stove or washer/dryer for you, for free. They burn some gas to drive to your house, burn an hour of windshield and loading time, and recycle the steel to pay themselves. They make an "ok" living doing this. If they can make an "ok" living for a normal person, I assume a meth head could keep himself in rocks pretty well as an illegal recycler. Note this is an "ok" income for unskilled work such as working at mcdonalds or walmart, not "ok" income as in I'm going to quit my computer science related job and buy a truck... Also these guys don't just crush and recycle, they sell the parts on ebay, so if you need a new timer for a '98 kenmore, they've probably got it. And this whole business is rotten to the core, so you know there's very little income tax being paid, used parts are going to be boxed up and sold by repairmen as new parts, etc, so its actually more profitable that you'd think on the surface.
Some have steel core, some dont. I think you may be confusing this with the much more common cable TV aerial drop cable that has a steel leader line with RG-6 hanging beneath it.
Or it could just create an underground gray market for the stuff... copper traffickers... copper laundering facilities
You don't need anything that complicated. You just need one plumber with an addiction problem to accept copper pipe and brass fittings, and one electrician with an addiction problem to accept wire/cable. That's all. No complicated hollywood movie plot required. You don't need the whole mafia thing to pull this off.
Coincidentally, when the missing pipe/cable is discovered, the addicted plumber/electrician is going to make a handy profit installing new pipe/cable, so its not like they're going to be in opposition to the idea.
It may not stop the initial damage caused by the attempt, but cutting anything of the size required for grid-scale power transmission is not going to work out well for the would-be thief.
Sure about that? I've done a fair amount of metalwork, and frankly anything less than an inch around cuts almost as fast under a cutting torch as it does in a shear, almost. Hand held abrasive saws go pretty quick, although they're loud.
I've done some metalworking with copper and its ductility and gumminess makes it pretty hard to work. Shears work up to a certain small diameter. Then its agony with the cold saw, or a gummed up hacksaw... I suppose a thief with a lot of spare time could use an axe? I'm curious how electricians cut large diameter copper wire. In the machine shop we clamp blocks of copper down to the milling machine table, try all kinds of cutting fluids none of which help (supposedly milk works but when it sours the stench must be amazing) and we swear a lot, which other than the swearing isn't going to be possible for an electrician in the field.
... since they can't tell if any target is going to pay-off or not....
Sure they can tell. A nasty side effect is criminalization of magnets, private ownership of a magnet while on public property means felony possession of burglary tools or whatever, but its quite possible... Tell a meth head they're only getting 50 cents for meth instead of 50 bucks for meth a couple times, they'll figure out that using a magnet might be a good idea.
This product is extremely large copperweld antenna wire, which has been around a lot longer than I have been around. I should try a piece at home and see if its magnetic. I would expect it is. If so, I would expect large power cables to be magnetic.
On thing no one has discussed (as far as I've seen so far) is copperweld used to be famous for corroding and having the copper flake off then rusting and snapping thru. Plated "anything" doesn't last forever outdoors. Instead of putting up copper for 50 years, and randomly replacing it every 10 years as its stolen, you'll be putting up new copperweld every 5 years or so. Labor costs will be "interesting".
Another thing no one has discussed is the whole point of using copperweld antenna wire is you can space your supports much further apart. So at least in the long run, theoretically, you could get rid of half your "telephone poles". Also this is because you can place steel cored copperweld under much higher tension, so when lines do snap instead of just taking off someones head, the whiplash will probably slice cars in two, carve furrows into blacktop, etc. I'm not sure the linemen are going to be all that enthusiastic about this product.
Finally, the most effective solution to casual copper theft I've ever seen is called burial. Not killing and burying the thieves, although that would work, but burying the cable. I've never heard in 20 years of an outage being caused by buried cable being dug up by thieves. It's always aerial fiber being mistaken for power line, or POP lost power because thieves cut the lines, etc. Our POPs in built up urban areas with underground power distribution (skyscrapers, etc) never seem to have their copper stolen, its always sites with aerial feeds.
... the next chapter in their careers evolving toward...
Whats a "career"? We don't have those around here in "IT related fields". I suppose if you live in silicon valley there is a chance of upward mobility, or maybe TLA.gov jobs, but for everyone else, its just luck that got us in a good spot in a downsizing economy in a downsizing company and downsizing department where they haven't axed us yet.
"Career" in general would be a more entertaining "ask/." topic. Work in the above plus the "ha ha noobs don't realize than even the concept of my job didn't exist when I was their age" and plenty of ageism whining and funny stories about nepotism and stuff like that.
My guess is its a subtle attempt at a philosophical statement that OLTP and OLAP are such wildly different problem domains that it may as well be like trying to horizontally jump from being a fluffer to being a farmer, despite them starting with the same letter and occasionally being confused, at least on/.
Personally I disagree with that viewpoint. You're still in the realm of high performance computing, blah blah blah. They have different enough needs that maybe they need to be separate groups underneath separate supervisors, or at a big enough firm, maybe separate depts, etc, but I'm not seeing a huge fundamental difference. Consider yourself lucky to be at a firm that separates those roles at all. In the last decimal place the problem solving techniques are going to be different, but I'm sure 99.9999% of it is the same, which is probably how a OLTP guy got a OLAP job without the HR filter of "must have 9245 years experience with this specific version of software" filter which theoretically caused this whole discussion. I'm sure a guy who can figure out OLTP can probably figure out OLAP rather quickly and vice versa.
Admittedly I've spent probably a hundred times more career effort on OLAP tasks than OLTP tasks, but very few firms have the luxury of full time personnel for those jobs, so I've spent most of my time doing other stuff.
If anything, I'd say take some more risks. You fail at a OLTP task and customers and sales and marketing scream and data might be lost or corrupted permanently. You fail at a OLAP task and, eh, the TPS reports are released a little later today, we'll survive... Admittedly OLAP stuff is usually a lot more complicated that OLTP, which means you're used to poor / no documentation, maybe you should be worried about doing more documentation of OLAP stuff.
Maybe another way to describe it, is fail once at OLTP and you get fired, fail repeatedly badly enough at OLAP and the company goes out of business before they figure out to fire you?
So what is going to make fusion obsolete? Directly tapping into the vast energies of Hyperspace(TM)?
My guess is some sort of biological organism that takes our current day tough plants at a fraction of a percent efficiency and adjusts the tradeoffs for intense human supervision combined with maybe 50% efficiency. Also I'd like to see a yeast genetically engineered that can ferment up to about 90% purity, to reduce the costs of distillation. Even if you could buy the reactor for free, it would be hard to compete.
You don't even need the fusion reactor for mobile and military purposes, because with that much free energy floating around you go antimatter for stored energy...
LOL for about 70 days just above idle, yeah. Think about it, 100 kilomiles is a at least "well broken in". Thats about the age old Saturn GM engines started drinking a quart per kilomile due to valve wear. Assume a mile a minute on the freeway (I live in a civilized area where we can drive that fast, not on the coasts). Thats 100 kilominutes to got 100 kilomiles. div 60 to get hours, div 24 to get days, thats almost exactly 70 days. The capital markets will freak if you try to finance a 70 day electrical plant... They like a nice calm 20 year depreciation schedule, not two months.
The problem is car engines run at a survivable low throttle for almost their entire lives, and at high throttle they don't live very long at all, maybe a tenth or hundredth the time. But we sell on nameplate peak capacity. So I can run just above idle for 70 days and then buy a new engine, or at full throttle, what, maybe a week with luck? Watch some real police car chase shows, they always seem to end in a couple minutes with a blown engine. I'm guessing real world you'd be doing well to run a car engine at full rated output for more than a week. Full throttle = short life.
Now you can, off the shelf, buy truly gigantic diesel engines that will generate a MW or so practically forever, in any weather condition, for hospital generators and large cruise ships and locomotive engines... however expect to spend around a million bucks for around a megawatt, which works out to $1000/KW, and its not nearly as reliable and maintainable as an electric plant needs to be. Or at the small end I can buy a milspec "portable" generator new for just a couple thousand for a couple kilowatts.
Its weird how over many orders of magnitude of power level, we have to pay about the same cost per watt. Its not like that with transistors or electronic components in general. You'd think there would be something fundamental that would change the economics between a little honda portagen and a gigawatt class nuke but whatever market forces shove them to cost about the same per watt despite being 7 orders of magnitude different in power level.
Like many on/., maybe, I've purchased bare LCD modules. You know the type, HM(whatever it was) protocol, in the olden days you'd have to provide offboard neg voltage to control contrast. Anyway the relevant point is there's about ten companies between my OEM LCD modules and some dude digging stuff outta the ground. One company does nothing but turn purified chemicals into glass. Another company runs the refinery that makes the resin that gets mixed by another company with fiberglass and has a sheet of copper stuck on to it to make bare PCB material. Another mixes ingots of lead and tin (in the past, anyway) and a couple other elements and casts ingots of solder for the wave soldering machine (since replaced by reflow process using paste). I might have a window into the LCD board stuffing assembly plant, but I have no idea whats going on at ye olde tin smelter or the other 99% of the people who built my LCD modules.
I know many apple products are mostly OEM devices. They hardly make their own accelerometers in their own silicon foundries. I'm not sure if its relevant to even bother watching the 1% of the population at the assembly plant... In fact the further you are from final assembly, the worse things seem to be, at least in my factory experience.
It outputs to rhino, and rhino outputs (with some effort relating to units conversion, or so I hear) to makerbot, so yeah, you could make a model of a X-1 or X-15 or similar rocket powered plane, make a cylindrical cavity in the model for a little estes model rocket engine, and you'd almost be flying, except for the little problem that it might model aerodynamically, but the center of gravity is pretty much ignored, you you're going to have to figure that part out.
If you remember the microsoft flightsimulators of the 80s/90s you could list specs and it would make you a plane, like make me a plane with a 50 foot wingspan and then you would attempt to fly it. This is pretty much the same idea for spec'ing a plane but instead of simulating flying it, it dumps out a file containing the model that you can do "whatever" with. Something like clippy for aerospace cad "so you seem to be trying to make a twin engine turboprop, would you like a wizard to help with that?".
They do not distribute a pre-compiled packaged linux version. Download source, compile, install locally, or wait for the inevitable Debian package to be created (assuming its "open source" license is DFSG free, I have not bothered to analyze it in detail)
And one good way to tell is the use of wrong metrics: 100 and 150 US$/kW doesn't mean shit.
$/KW cost of installed capacity is the standard metric in the electric power industry. Its rarely the conceptually simple direct accounting measurement of total overall plant construction project cost divided by capacity, its all excruciating NPV calcs and frankly making stuff up is done to shoehorn non-applicable data into that model. You'll see lots of rolling estimated labor and theoretical financial costs into the capital $/KW figure. If you know what it actually cost, and can compare it to the reported imaginary accounting numbers, you can tell how corrupt they are, which is an interesting management metric for investment planning, which I am personally involved in from long term utility investment. You'd probably not be surprised to know that my management corruption metric has a weak negative correlation with returns and an extremely strong positive correlation with price fluctuations.
Anyway... for example, most modern nukes end up costing about $3000/KW to install, as in, if by some miracle, the cost were perfectly linear regardless of capacity, going from bare dirt to a brand new ready to heat up imaginary one kilowatt reactor in my back yard would cost three grand.
Because the numbers are abused to meet the pre-existing decision, you'll see crazy wild variations in estimates for the same project of at least a factor of two, sometimes three.
One thing is certain, if the guy is quoting plant costs of only $150/KW that literally won't pay for the buildings, turbine hall, or maybe even the switchgear. $150/KW is like, what, the employee parking lot? That does not prove fraud, but certainly smell a stink of it.
But other than that last clause, doesn't this also describe the state of conventional nuclear fusion, as well? Hasn't fusion been 20 years away for the past 50 years, or so?
That quote is a confusion of political posturing and engineering critical path project planning.
Here's the standard/. car analogy. For political reasons we will advertise that we will sell a car getting 10 MPG more than our current model. It takes a year or two to design, a year or two to develop and get the assembly line up and running (not a year or two of actual work, but a year or two of calendar time to shut down one line, get everyone ready for the new one, about two weeks of millright time to move the machines...) The newest announced car model is ALWAYS about 3 years away, because thats how long it takes from "say go" to "drive off the stealership lot". At some point, probably early, in the 3 year process, its cancelled.
Another good analogy is we're always 15 years away from men on mars, because every couple years its proposed, they figure it'll take 15 years to get there, they cancel, repeat.
Fusion has always been 20 years away because it takes 20 years from "say go" to "plant pushing power into the grid". As long as its politically useful to put on a big show about how we're starting a new initiative, and later cancel it, we'll continue to do so.
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What do these recycling companies do with these phones anyway?
One division of a cell phone seller that I'm familiar with wipes them with windex, therefore marks the value up on the books to about $150 because its now "reconditioned", donates them to battered women, homeless people, etc, as 911 emergency phones, marks the $150 loss/donation on their tax return, and uses that to balance against their income earned from selling phones. Essentially its a tax dodge. Don't know how it works with separate companies or non-profit, all the donation credits in the world are useless from a tax perspective unless you have taxable profits...
The only dodge I can think of for a church would be something like take an income stream of $1M of sunday donations and 1000 junk cellphones, mark up the value of the phones to $1000 each using some windex and give them away, so you gave away $1000 * 1000 phones = $1M. Now you've got $1M cash unaccountable for, which as a good christian evangelist televangelist you can spend on cocaine and male prostitutes, in other words, blow and ... blow, I guess, while publishing that you took in $1M and some phones and send out $1M and some phones so superficially there's nothing fishy going on with the finances.
What would make something like this work is if I can integrate this with my cable box.
I wonder if its going to be "push" like my cablebox was or "pull" like my mythtv. I like the pull model because with a few minutes configuration I can expunge entire channels. I don't even see Univision, ESPN, QVC or EWTN as existing. I like it that way. I much prefer scrolling thru 20 channels that I actually watch than almost 80 of which 60 I never watch. The expensive fee movie channels are not grayed out on my mythtv like they are on a settop, they just don't exist.
I'm worried a commercial settop or integrated settop or whatever is going to be intensely push. So I can watch the youtube video I want, after spend time and mindshare scrolling past the vendor's advertising suggestion, etc. 10000 channels of home shopping and religious preaching to scroll thru while searching for actual content.. Just wait until you get the TV equivalent of foul loud animated flashing internet browser ads, without the virtue of adblock+ for the TV. Or maybe someone is developing something like adblock+ for TV?
Its the "see the beautiful countryside" vs "see the commercial billboards" problem, coming now to your TV.
Run it over a mostly anonymous networking layer like freenet / i2p / something else, and it might even be "kind of" safe to participate in.
One big problem is going to be local ad insertion. Ever noticed local ads during network shows? Yeah.
I use mythtv with hands off automatic commercial detection and skipping so I don't see ads, and if everyone used this, this we'd all theoretically have more or less identical streams, I think?
So, for me, the question is: which free software package is going to port themselves to a sub-$100 HDMI out solution that can hide behind a flat panel first: Ubuntu, or XBMC?
Doesn't it already run Debian, in which case it's just "apt-get install mythtv-frontend" and tada its done? I also had to configure, if I recall, GDM as a login manager, modified the GDM config files to autologin as the mythtv user, installed ratpoison as the display manager which is never used buy mythtv got worked up unless run under a window manager, did something to make ratpoison start off mythtv-frontend (or was it some .x file?) and it just worked?
Its all a puppet recipe for me, that I set up several years ago, so when I deployed my newest FE I didn't actually "do" any of the above, I just told puppet its a mythtv-frontend and a couple minutes later magically it started working. But I could look up what puppet is doing if I wanted.
Whats the boot time on a "smart TV"?
I know my old tube TV started up in about 3 seconds and the picture was stabilizing for about 10 to 15 seconds.
My current very new LCD starts up in about 10 maybe 15 seconds I haven't timed it, but its much slower than the tube it replaced. Spends a weird amount of time displaying the LG logo when its "up" but doing ... something, I guess.
My old cable settop DVR box, before I cancelled/returned it, took a good solid 5 minutes to boot. More than even the longest TV commercial break, anyway. Analysis with a power meter shows that "off" merely meant it output a black screen, no change in consumption, which I thought was interesting. Obviously it came out of "blank screensaver mode" in about one second, I'm talking about power on boot time, or after it locked up, which it did all the time.
My current mythtv frontend using all solid state on a vanilla Debian install takes, eh maybe 2 minutes to boot from power to the mythtv frontend screen. It basically never locks up, and I never shut it off because it draws approximately no power (around 5 watts) and it would be extremely environmentally damaging to destroy it by repetitive power cycling, so I do not.
So that's the real world boot time data I have. Any /.er with a "smart TV" either inside the TV itself or an addon box want to provide some real world data?
The conventional wisdom which I'm sure we'll soon be subjected to, is the problem this device has is content, where will they get the TV equivalent of top40 content, etc.
The real problem this device has, is why would someone buy it instead of apple/roku/homebrew mythtv/boxee/tivo/xmbc/android tv... any others I've missed? What makes this one special other than its a different manufacturer trying to do the same thing. If anything I'm curious how well this device conforms from a user perspective to the boring standard model all the other developers are using. Even the idea that something new or unique could exist in this market is unthinkable.
The /. car analogy is good luck trying to tell commuter vehicles apart when trying to purchase a new car. The marketing materials are useless because they either insist that you'll get laid if you select their car, or they're puffed up with useless comparison charts (stereotypically you'll have a column of something like "number of tires" all being 4 in each row, or ships with a steering wheel all having a "Y". Why have that column?). The salespeople just want to sell you the most expensive car with the most expensive dealer addons and the most expensive possible financing package. Your friends will provide mostly useless anecdotes about their individual car's maintenance history and peculiar favorite parts, which mostly tells you more about them than about the car model in general. Any decision making data about use, comfort, reliability, economics are simply unobtainable.
Last time I looked, admittedly, a couple years ago, scrap steel wasn't worth hauling in unless you had a dozen tons of it and were within 10 miles of the recycling center. Otherwise, you weren't even making gas money.
Oh I wouldn't go that far. You're looking at least at $250 per ton, maybe as much as $500 for high quality stampings from a factory. Now that is darn near an order of magnitude less than copper, but you certainly run a profit vs gas money on steel/cast iron. Lets say you have a 1 ton trailer on the back of your 10 MPG pickup truck, that's costing at least 50 cents per mile so you don't lose money until you drive more than 500 miles. Very few thieves live more than 500 miles from a junkyard, but I suppose its possible in the wilds of alaska, although there's probably not much to steal there.
To give you an idea, there are scrap services in my area who will drive to your location, and dispose of your old stove or washer/dryer for you, for free. They burn some gas to drive to your house, burn an hour of windshield and loading time, and recycle the steel to pay themselves. They make an "ok" living doing this. If they can make an "ok" living for a normal person, I assume a meth head could keep himself in rocks pretty well as an illegal recycler. Note this is an "ok" income for unskilled work such as working at mcdonalds or walmart, not "ok" income as in I'm going to quit my computer science related job and buy a truck... Also these guys don't just crush and recycle, they sell the parts on ebay, so if you need a new timer for a '98 kenmore, they've probably got it. And this whole business is rotten to the core, so you know there's very little income tax being paid, used parts are going to be boxed up and sold by repairmen as new parts, etc, so its actually more profitable that you'd think on the surface.
Some have steel core, some dont. I think you may be confusing this with the much more common cable TV aerial drop cable that has a steel leader line with RG-6 hanging beneath it.
Or it could just create an underground gray market for the stuff... copper traffickers ... copper laundering facilities
You don't need anything that complicated. You just need one plumber with an addiction problem to accept copper pipe and brass fittings, and one electrician with an addiction problem to accept wire/cable. That's all. No complicated hollywood movie plot required. You don't need the whole mafia thing to pull this off.
Coincidentally, when the missing pipe/cable is discovered, the addicted plumber/electrician is going to make a handy profit installing new pipe/cable, so its not like they're going to be in opposition to the idea.
It may not stop the initial damage caused by the attempt, but cutting anything of the size required for grid-scale power transmission is not going to work out well for the would-be thief.
Sure about that? I've done a fair amount of metalwork, and frankly anything less than an inch around cuts almost as fast under a cutting torch as it does in a shear, almost. Hand held abrasive saws go pretty quick, although they're loud.
I've done some metalworking with copper and its ductility and gumminess makes it pretty hard to work. Shears work up to a certain small diameter. Then its agony with the cold saw, or a gummed up hacksaw... I suppose a thief with a lot of spare time could use an axe? I'm curious how electricians cut large diameter copper wire. In the machine shop we clamp blocks of copper down to the milling machine table, try all kinds of cutting fluids none of which help (supposedly milk works but when it sours the stench must be amazing) and we swear a lot, which other than the swearing isn't going to be possible for an electrician in the field.
... since they can't tell if any target is going to pay-off or not....
Sure they can tell. A nasty side effect is criminalization of magnets, private ownership of a magnet while on public property means felony possession of burglary tools or whatever, but its quite possible... Tell a meth head they're only getting 50 cents for meth instead of 50 bucks for meth a couple times, they'll figure out that using a magnet might be a good idea.
This product is extremely large copperweld antenna wire, which has been around a lot longer than I have been around. I should try a piece at home and see if its magnetic. I would expect it is. If so, I would expect large power cables to be magnetic.
On thing no one has discussed (as far as I've seen so far) is copperweld used to be famous for corroding and having the copper flake off then rusting and snapping thru. Plated "anything" doesn't last forever outdoors. Instead of putting up copper for 50 years, and randomly replacing it every 10 years as its stolen, you'll be putting up new copperweld every 5 years or so. Labor costs will be "interesting".
Another thing no one has discussed is the whole point of using copperweld antenna wire is you can space your supports much further apart. So at least in the long run, theoretically, you could get rid of half your "telephone poles". Also this is because you can place steel cored copperweld under much higher tension, so when lines do snap instead of just taking off someones head, the whiplash will probably slice cars in two, carve furrows into blacktop, etc. I'm not sure the linemen are going to be all that enthusiastic about this product.
Finally, the most effective solution to casual copper theft I've ever seen is called burial. Not killing and burying the thieves, although that would work, but burying the cable. I've never heard in 20 years of an outage being caused by buried cable being dug up by thieves. It's always aerial fiber being mistaken for power line, or POP lost power because thieves cut the lines, etc. Our POPs in built up urban areas with underground power distribution (skyscrapers, etc) never seem to have their copper stolen, its always sites with aerial feeds.
How exactly would the market correct this? I don't quite have the black-is-white-yes-is-no imagination for this one.
The scrap dealers will earn money and donate it to the lawmakers re-election campaign, obviously. Everyone important wins!
... the next chapter in their careers evolving toward ...
Whats a "career"? We don't have those around here in "IT related fields". I suppose if you live in silicon valley there is a chance of upward mobility, or maybe TLA .gov jobs, but for everyone else, its just luck that got us in a good spot in a downsizing economy in a downsizing company and downsizing department where they haven't axed us yet.
"Career" in general would be a more entertaining "ask /." topic. Work in the above plus the "ha ha noobs don't realize than even the concept of my job didn't exist when I was their age" and plenty of ageism whining and funny stories about nepotism and stuff like that.
My guess is its a subtle attempt at a philosophical statement that OLTP and OLAP are such wildly different problem domains that it may as well be like trying to horizontally jump from being a fluffer to being a farmer, despite them starting with the same letter and occasionally being confused, at least on /.
Personally I disagree with that viewpoint. You're still in the realm of high performance computing, blah blah blah. They have different enough needs that maybe they need to be separate groups underneath separate supervisors, or at a big enough firm, maybe separate depts, etc, but I'm not seeing a huge fundamental difference. Consider yourself lucky to be at a firm that separates those roles at all. In the last decimal place the problem solving techniques are going to be different, but I'm sure 99.9999% of it is the same, which is probably how a OLTP guy got a OLAP job without the HR filter of "must have 9245 years experience with this specific version of software" filter which theoretically caused this whole discussion. I'm sure a guy who can figure out OLTP can probably figure out OLAP rather quickly and vice versa.
Admittedly I've spent probably a hundred times more career effort on OLAP tasks than OLTP tasks, but very few firms have the luxury of full time personnel for those jobs, so I've spent most of my time doing other stuff.
If anything, I'd say take some more risks. You fail at a OLTP task and customers and sales and marketing scream and data might be lost or corrupted permanently. You fail at a OLAP task and, eh, the TPS reports are released a little later today, we'll survive... Admittedly OLAP stuff is usually a lot more complicated that OLTP, which means you're used to poor / no documentation, maybe you should be worried about doing more documentation of OLAP stuff.
Maybe another way to describe it, is fail once at OLTP and you get fired, fail repeatedly badly enough at OLAP and the company goes out of business before they figure out to fire you?
So what is going to make fusion obsolete? Directly tapping into the vast energies of Hyperspace(TM)?
My guess is some sort of biological organism that takes our current day tough plants at a fraction of a percent efficiency and adjusts the tradeoffs for intense human supervision combined with maybe 50% efficiency. Also I'd like to see a yeast genetically engineered that can ferment up to about 90% purity, to reduce the costs of distillation. Even if you could buy the reactor for free, it would be hard to compete.
You don't even need the fusion reactor for mobile and military purposes, because with that much free energy floating around you go antimatter for stored energy...
Your car engine does something like $20/KW.
LOL for about 70 days just above idle, yeah. Think about it, 100 kilomiles is a at least "well broken in". Thats about the age old Saturn GM engines started drinking a quart per kilomile due to valve wear. Assume a mile a minute on the freeway (I live in a civilized area where we can drive that fast, not on the coasts). Thats 100 kilominutes to got 100 kilomiles. div 60 to get hours, div 24 to get days, thats almost exactly 70 days. The capital markets will freak if you try to finance a 70 day electrical plant... They like a nice calm 20 year depreciation schedule, not two months.
The problem is car engines run at a survivable low throttle for almost their entire lives, and at high throttle they don't live very long at all, maybe a tenth or hundredth the time. But we sell on nameplate peak capacity. So I can run just above idle for 70 days and then buy a new engine, or at full throttle, what, maybe a week with luck? Watch some real police car chase shows, they always seem to end in a couple minutes with a blown engine. I'm guessing real world you'd be doing well to run a car engine at full rated output for more than a week. Full throttle = short life.
Now you can, off the shelf, buy truly gigantic diesel engines that will generate a MW or so practically forever, in any weather condition, for hospital generators and large cruise ships and locomotive engines... however expect to spend around a million bucks for around a megawatt, which works out to $1000/KW, and its not nearly as reliable and maintainable as an electric plant needs to be. Or at the small end I can buy a milspec "portable" generator new for just a couple thousand for a couple kilowatts.
Its weird how over many orders of magnitude of power level, we have to pay about the same cost per watt. Its not like that with transistors or electronic components in general. You'd think there would be something fundamental that would change the economics between a little honda portagen and a gigawatt class nuke but whatever market forces shove them to cost about the same per watt despite being 7 orders of magnitude different in power level.
I haven't checked but if thingverse doesn't already have planes and lawn darts I'd be surprised.
Now a copyrighted patented trademarked plane is where it gets messy. Maybe some Anime / Transformers thing, sure.
How many steps?
Like many on /., maybe, I've purchased bare LCD modules. You know the type, HM(whatever it was) protocol, in the olden days you'd have to provide offboard neg voltage to control contrast. Anyway the relevant point is there's about ten companies between my OEM LCD modules and some dude digging stuff outta the ground. One company does nothing but turn purified chemicals into glass. Another company runs the refinery that makes the resin that gets mixed by another company with fiberglass and has a sheet of copper stuck on to it to make bare PCB material. Another mixes ingots of lead and tin (in the past, anyway) and a couple other elements and casts ingots of solder for the wave soldering machine (since replaced by reflow process using paste). I might have a window into the LCD board stuffing assembly plant, but I have no idea whats going on at ye olde tin smelter or the other 99% of the people who built my LCD modules.
I know many apple products are mostly OEM devices. They hardly make their own accelerometers in their own silicon foundries. I'm not sure if its relevant to even bother watching the 1% of the population at the assembly plant... In fact the further you are from final assembly, the worse things seem to be, at least in my factory experience.
It outputs to rhino, and rhino outputs (with some effort relating to units conversion, or so I hear) to makerbot, so yeah, you could make a model of a X-1 or X-15 or similar rocket powered plane, make a cylindrical cavity in the model for a little estes model rocket engine, and you'd almost be flying, except for the little problem that it might model aerodynamically, but the center of gravity is pretty much ignored, you you're going to have to figure that part out.
All I can get from the website/wiki is thats its a tool that processes things, which is kind of vague.
I found this paper via google:
http://www.mae.virginia.edu/meclab/images/AIAA%20Paper%20--%20VSP.pdf
Not a goatse link, honest.
If you remember the microsoft flightsimulators of the 80s/90s you could list specs and it would make you a plane, like make me a plane with a 50 foot wingspan and then you would attempt to fly it. This is pretty much the same idea for spec'ing a plane but instead of simulating flying it, it dumps out a file containing the model that you can do "whatever" with. Something like clippy for aerospace cad "so you seem to be trying to make a twin engine turboprop, would you like a wizard to help with that?".
There doesn't seem to be a Linux port at the moment?
The link you're looking for is
http://www.openvsp.org/zips/OpenVSP_2.0_community_src.zip
They do not distribute a pre-compiled packaged linux version. Download source, compile, install locally, or wait for the inevitable Debian package to be created (assuming its "open source" license is DFSG free, I have not bothered to analyze it in detail)
20 years ago... Einstein thinks black holes should exist but most think he's nuts
Seance?
And one good way to tell is the use of wrong metrics: 100 and 150 US$/kW doesn't mean shit.
$/KW cost of installed capacity is the standard metric in the electric power industry. Its rarely the conceptually simple direct accounting measurement of total overall plant construction project cost divided by capacity, its all excruciating NPV calcs and frankly making stuff up is done to shoehorn non-applicable data into that model. You'll see lots of rolling estimated labor and theoretical financial costs into the capital $/KW figure. If you know what it actually cost, and can compare it to the reported imaginary accounting numbers, you can tell how corrupt they are, which is an interesting management metric for investment planning, which I am personally involved in from long term utility investment. You'd probably not be surprised to know that my management corruption metric has a weak negative correlation with returns and an extremely strong positive correlation with price fluctuations.
Anyway... for example, most modern nukes end up costing about $3000/KW to install, as in, if by some miracle, the cost were perfectly linear regardless of capacity, going from bare dirt to a brand new ready to heat up imaginary one kilowatt reactor in my back yard would cost three grand.
Because the numbers are abused to meet the pre-existing decision, you'll see crazy wild variations in estimates for the same project of at least a factor of two, sometimes three.
One thing is certain, if the guy is quoting plant costs of only $150/KW that literally won't pay for the buildings, turbine hall, or maybe even the switchgear. $150/KW is like, what, the employee parking lot? That does not prove fraud, but certainly smell a stink of it.
But other than that last clause, doesn't this also describe the state of conventional nuclear fusion, as well? Hasn't fusion been 20 years away for the past 50 years, or so?
That quote is a confusion of political posturing and engineering critical path project planning.
Here's the standard /. car analogy. For political reasons we will advertise that we will sell a car getting 10 MPG more than our current model. It takes a year or two to design, a year or two to develop and get the assembly line up and running (not a year or two of actual work, but a year or two of calendar time to shut down one line, get everyone ready for the new one, about two weeks of millright time to move the machines...) The newest announced car model is ALWAYS about 3 years away, because thats how long it takes from "say go" to "drive off the stealership lot". At some point, probably early, in the 3 year process, its cancelled.
Another good analogy is we're always 15 years away from men on mars, because every couple years its proposed, they figure it'll take 15 years to get there, they cancel, repeat.
Fusion has always been 20 years away because it takes 20 years from "say go" to "plant pushing power into the grid". As long as its politically useful to put on a big show about how we're starting a new initiative, and later cancel it, we'll continue to do so.
I would much rather have a Debian Swiss Army knife... mine is somewhere between Switzerland and the US right now...
http://wiki.debian.org/Merchandise/SwissKnives