Just follow management's leadership, as in many other things. If you work for a place where morals and ethics are #1 above all else, then follow their lead. If you work for a place where the almighty dollar is #1 and morals and ethics are for suckers and fools (most corporations), then follow their lead.
Whatever you do, don't get caught doing something you'd not want to be on the evening news.
Note that its a lot like having a police scanner or listening to mobile phone calls, or intercept pocsag digital pagers. Sounds technologically fascinating. It, in fact, IS technologically fascinating. Then you get the ability to do so, and it is boring beyond belief. Gossip monger types are always going to be gossip monger types and the addition or removal of technology will not change them. "Golly, person A is having an affair with person B, using some high tech pager or whatever". Ditto the non gossip monger types are not going to be very interested, beyond the interesting nature of the new technology itself. "Golly, this 8 bit A/D decoder sure works a heck of a lot better on noisy signals than a 1-bit data slicer for pocsag decoding, look at the borderline SNR on this page about some dork's affair or whatever."
I worked at a place decades ago where part of the job was to monitor old fashioned PCM T1 analog phone lines on occasion. Signed lots of secrecy papers to do it. Sounded cool, before I had to do it. It was boring as hell, trust me. I kind of miss listening for slips and echo can malfunctions in this VOIP era. Another funny one was listening for ulaw vs alaw encoding malfunctions on international ckts. And verbal fighting with vendors who couldn't understand the 80 different type of E+M signalling. Good times, I guess, but not from listening to boring phone calls.
Detain. I remember that stuff from bio labs. One of the dumbest labs I ever did. First, they expected freshmen undergrads to have the skill to catch a paramecium with a dropper and a dissecting microscope. Then, they expected us to know just how much detain to add to the slide so that we could find the damn thing, but not so much that it was totally immobilized. Then, they expected that if we added some food to the slide, we would be able to observe it eating...
I don't think anyone in my lab class managed all three. I remember wishing I was still at home, in my bed...
And the joke ends thus:... immobile, covered in slime stuff, and eating?
I did all the math in my head. If you need a calculator to divide 6000 / 60 you got problems. Doing 5280/60 in my head is a waste of time. There is no point in calculating to 8 decimal places if you only have about one significant figure (or technically less, if you aren't even sure what order of magnitude is correct).
Would have been more accurate to spec as "divide thousands by tens and get hundreds"
From the article: 'Cherie Anderson runs a travel company in southern California, and she's convinced the federal government is reading her emails. But she's all right with that. "I assume it's part of the Patriot Act and I really don't mind," she says. "I figure I'm probably boring them to death."'"
What an idiot. The problem is not a boring civil servant reading her emails and at most noting "oh how interesting, someone ordered flowers for Charles Manson again". The problem is her competitor donating money to a politicians campaign and inadvertently getting a copy of her emailed sales plan. The problem is a subcontractor of a contractor getting a copy of all emailed credit card numbers, ID thefting them, and she must be to blame, after all, she is the "only" common link. The problem is the civil servant's drug addicted gang member brother getting a copy of her bank statements, and noticing she makes all her weekly cash deposits at 3 pm on wednesdays, and being california, he's heavily armed, and she is completely disarmed. The problem is she tries to negotiate a better contract with her flower supplier, but thru "national technical means" her flower supplier has a copy of all her emailed communication with her accountant, and knows exactly how much profit he can extract from her. The problem is her local political muscle noticing via emailed sales figures that she is not donating the "correct" percentage of gross revenue to the politicians re-election campaign. The problem is the police notice, and blame her, when recipients of her "welcome home" gift baskets have their houses broken into and ransacked after the basket is ordered and before the basket arrives. The problem is she dates a police officer, it doesn't work out, she gets stalked by a guy with total electronic access to her life. Or a disgruntled client happens to work at the station, and has access to all her future emailed delivery plans, and knows just the dark alley to drag her into, and via the emailed schedule, knows just the right time to grab her.
Rapid prototyping isn't just an empty name. I've noticed a strange hesitation to use rapid prototype frameworks to rapidly prototype something and see what happens.
Its not Java; you'll have something up and working in a day or less. Try them all for a short period of time, see where you're "stuck"/"working" for each platform, then decide which to pursue. Last time I tried this, the optimum framework where I am, for the in house internal app I was working on, was RoR. Your mileage will vary.
The only thing worse than "wasting" a couple days doing research, is having to scrap weeks/months of development merely to switch to something else. Don't get hemmed in too early.
I am unclear on how badly it'll mess up GPSDOs and GPS clocks, which indirectly is a big problem both for the general public and also some of my obscure hobbies. My at work onnet NTP "stratum 1s" are all GPS clocks, which worries me, and at home I'm on the fence about converting my ham radio microwave transverters to GPSDOs. If the GPSDO is going to be unusable "soon" then why bother dropping a couple hundred bucks, may as well buy like 20 Rb clocks and toss them as they burn out. Supposedly Rb clocks start up very fast and survive quite a few power cycles so maybe just go Rb and forget about it, just like old fashioned vacuum tubes are a consumable disposable item. Or invest in a really freaking expensive TCVXO unit although how I'd initially align it is unclear (so once you're within 0.01 ppm of WWV at 10 MHZ... then what? At 24 GHz that is not good enough short term stability for narrowband digital)
This seems like a reasonable inquiry.... can someone enlighten me as to why it isn't?
Check his election donation records, all available online. As near as I can tell, his owners are the healthcare industry, which would superficially have nothing to do with this. The people who purchased him did so with the idea he would help them rip off the American Medical Consumer not the American Telecom Consumer. Why he would piss off his owners by not doing his job is the unclear question. Its very much like purchasing a slave for a cotton plantation who steadfastly insists on constructing igloos instead of picking cotton. If you cannot tell, I have little respect for competent owned property of lobbyists, but he apparently is not even competent at being a good little slave, so that makes it even worse.
Its possible his bribe records are not up to date online, or not properly categorized, perhaps its a future looking handshake agreement where a mobile phone PAC will donate $500K to him NEXT year. Or a trade agreement with another corporate owned slave where they support each others causes so as not to appear to be too directly of a bribe. Hard to say.
and he doesn't appear to get much money from telcos. He seems primarily a slave of the medical industrial complex. It could be he's doing a favor for a slave owned by the telcos, in exchange the telco-owned-slave will promote some medical industrial complex ripoff for his owner's interests..
But at least directly, he's not getting involved in something related to his owners interests. Hard to imagine what a Hospital/Nursing Home could care about LightSquared. Big money donors don't like loose cannons, he'd best look out. He's supposed to be devising new ways for healthcare to rip us off, not networking.
It would probably not cost me damn near 10 bucks to send a couple 5.25 floppies to a fellow retro computer dude if the USPS was not charging 0.01 cents per pound to drive around 400lbs of junk mail daily, in the 3+ $ a gallon gas age.
Sorry, you have it completely backwards. My wife was the postman's daughter, I know about this. "Junk Mail" is a lot more expensive to send that you think. Without it, you'd probably have to pay $20 or $30 to send those floppies.
well I f'd that up pretty well. a mile is about 6000 feet and theres about 60 minutes in an hour so 3 mph is about 6000 / 60 * 3 = 300 feet per minute, so that would imply my car is 150 feet long if I'm going two car lengths per minute.
In car speed that would be a lot more like two car lengths is 2 * 10 feet = 20 feet per minute, times 60 to get about 1200, call that 1000 Kft, divided by about 5000 Kft per mile, thats about a fifth of a mile per hour.
If they're 0.000000312 kilometers per hour how fast is that "scale speed"? If they were the size of a car, how fast would they be traveling?
That's kinda variable, like how fast is a person, you mean a kenyan olympic sprinter or a 600 pound walmart shopper?
None the less, figure "about a dozen microns" within an order of magnitude bigger or smaller. I do not have a prepared slide of those for my little microscope, but I have a gut sense they are about that big based on pictures. Figure about one an a half times the diameter of a red blood cell? Supposedly they vary a lot more in size than a RBC.
In "car speed" for the standard/. car analogy, that would be like three mph or so.
It's the backend. When you have too many connections on too few servers, with not enough storage you usually see this kinda issue.
Knowing the speed and flexibility of university upgrade policies, and knowing sendmail was born around 4.1BSD, and knowing the -BSDs were VAX only until 4.2 or 4.3 or so in the 80s, I'm guessing they're still using the original VAX it was developed on?
Change is inevitable, it's probably my biggest gripe against people that are vehement about global warming, this idea that nothing should ever change. Just because a bird species used to stop at this place means that it should always stop at this place.
In some ways its even more extreme... I looked it up and there was no mine there until 1955, relatively recently in the evolutionary history of birdies by any timescale. Living in glacial territory, there are no lakes of any sort in my area older than ten thousand years or so.
The numbers are impressive, a good fraction of a cubic mile was scooped up and hauled away in less than a quarter century. Wowzers. I'm sure more rock was moved in my little city over the last 20 years building mcmansions for the housing bubble, but obviously not all in one hole.
"BP-owned toxic lake" I'll be the last to support our crony commie-capitalist system, but that's pretty far fetched agitprop. ARCO ran the place until '82, mothballed it, and then BP bought ARCO 18 years later in '00. Its a "sins of the father afflicting the sons" argument at best. At worst its a "my great-great-great grandfather immigrated here two decades after the civil war ended, therefore I'm liable and should pay restitution to the g-g-g-g-g-g-great grandsons of former slaves.". BP has about as much to do with what happened to this mine, as I do with what happened on plantations in the 1830s. Anyone painting with a broad brush, no matter how noble the goal, is usually a crook. Thanks but no thanks.
My geologist ex-roomie did some fieldwork involving acid runoff from mining operations "somewhere out west" donno if this was related. Its a pretty serious local problem. Ironically the more toxic the water, the more likely you'll find someone wanting to refine metals out of the water, making the problem go completely away. Unfortunately sounds like this site is a local maxima of destruction, if the concentration were lower it would just be another boring manmade pond, and if the concentration were higher, you'd have armies of refineries fighting over who gets the refine valuable metal outta the water.
Silicon 277200 ppm second only to oxygen Carbon 300 ppm second to pretty much everything but vanadium and stuff like that. By weight the earth has about as much Rb as C.
For all intents and purposes the earth is not the idea place for a carbon based life form. Its the equivalent of a unit train full of high fructose corn syrup tank cars for a silicon lifeform. If they can't form here and absolutely gorge themselves on what to them would be the equivalent of a giant pizza, there is not a more ideal place out there to form...
The reason why we're made out of relatively rare C instead of tremendously available Si is C chemistry is incredibly better than Si chemistry for bio, or heck, chemistry in general. The fine article didn't give it enough justice or maybe the editors edited out the chemistry rants. Lets just say that Xe biochem is not all that more unlikely or difficult than Si biochem would be (in other words, nearly totally freaking almost incomprehendibly impossible vs just merely incredibly extremely impossibly unlikely)
It all has an air of speculative fantasy fiction, like trying to intellectually debate if its easier to make vampires, werewolves, or zombies...
Lower voltages require larger conductors to carry the same current. Copper isn't that cheap.
And you're limited on the high end by state electrician licensing boards who require "high voltage license" instead of regular license somewhere around 440 volts to 600 volts. So however cool you think it might be to design your entire infrastructure around 1024 volt DC, the cost of electricians would be much cheaper if you can keep it under 400 volts.
Obviously there are some states where this doesn't matter, all I can say is I've heard of cutover points of 440 volts, 600 volts, in some weird combination of TN , WI, and a couple other states.
I am told the main thing they teach you in high voltage continuing education class is that for all practical purposes, all accidents are fatal above 500 volts. That's pretty much what I've heard from the grapevine... 120 volt deaths are always two parters, like grayhair's heart couldn't take it or the shock made him fall off the ladder and the broken neck is what killed him, whereas 440 threephase and above its always "condolence cards can be sent to..." except for true miracles. That and they put you thru the ringer about threephase and wye vs delta and figuring out rotation directions without destroying industrial equipment, none of which matters in a data center.
Why they put something titled "not for public distribution" on a google accessible server is a mystery. If your country has an extradition treaty with Sweden then google for another whitepaper instead of this one. Whatever.
The article says that 380v DC is the sweet spot, but why? Here in the US 440v (3 phase) AC is pretty common, as is 220v AC. I realize there's a world of difference between AC and DC, but that's about all I can think of. 380/4=95 x 4v rails I suppose? Someone with an EE degree or master electrician jump in here and explain this to me please.
OK
Look at the input stage of a stereotypical switchmode power supply. in 120 volt mode you see a voltage doubler config. In 220 volt config you see a plain ole straight rectifier. (If you ever wondered why you can run a switcher configured for 220 on 120 with no fireworks, but config for 120 and plug into 220 and it blows up, now you know) Your DC voltage to the input of the switch mode chopper is gonna hover right around......... 380 volts. No point getting overly precise because line voltage and component tolerance is not overly precise, but pretty much you take an off the shelf switcher, rip out the input rectifier and filter, dump in raw 380 VDC and off ye go.
Now the "pretty much" relates to all kinds of fun like inrush current limiting for the chopper may have relied on the resistance of the rectifier and filter, or maybe your chopper controller runs off a tiny little AC transformer.
But to a first approximation, if you're reading this on a desktop PC, you are already using a more or less 380 volt DC power supply, so its pretty easy to bodge anything using 380 VDC.
The original low speed USB electrical spec was pretty much classical 5 volt NRZI TTL. So insisting on 12 volt supply would mean every USB device would require a 5 volt regulator inside it to talk to the data lines, and the data lines would need protection circuitry on both momma boards and all USB devices because TTL traditionally gets really pissed off when an input voltage rises about its power voltage in case of a short. CMOS gets pissed off too at over voltage. It would just be a bad scene.
Something like RS-485 but really faster would have been "better", but...
4) Done right with a positive ground system, leads to less corrosion problems with outside plant. Admittedly "inside" the data center, if you're got corrosion, you're doin it wrong.
5) Less AC hum. We had some microwave site to site short hop gear back in ye olde NTSC days that could only be run off battery without 60 hz interference bars on the screen. Not technologically relevant anymore, but the point remains that DC is always going to be cleaner than AC.
6) Better lightning protection. I'm sure its happened, but I've never heard of losing a telco DC bus. Big conductors, giant batteries across them, lightning is just not an issue anymore at the power level (still need to ground feedlines / waveguide / whatever you've got at home like that)
7) dump most of the power conversion heat in the battery room where its all built to handle high temp and no one visits (other than occasional battery maint). Cheaper cooling in the data center, data center is somewhat more habitable, etc.
For certain you'd want to have a different kind of plug for DC devices, but even that would give us an opportunity to 1) standardize on one global plug standard, at least for DC, and 2) allow us to design a small, rugged, safe type of plug.
Aka the famous (in some circles) Anderson Power Pole. Go ask a ham radio guy.
The thing I love about in house DC distribution, which I have in my house, is it forces at least a token effect at "green power reduction". Suddenly given the choice of a 12 volt 6 watt LED fed by $2 of small gauge wire vs something resembling welding cable wire to run a 200 watt halogen, you make the ecologically correct choice.
I used to use cast off surplus 200 watt desktops for my mythtv frontends. Unholy pain to run on 12 V. Now I use 5 watt Zotac boxes. Good for everyone in every way.
Randainism only works in a rational free market. On the other hand, if you end up in a real world where only crazy nuts psychopaths seek and gain power over others, then you don't get a rational free market and it doesn't work. Whoops. Nice idea though, if you had a social structure or eugenics program that eradicated nuts instead of putting them in power. Maybe if you used recent mosquito genetic research to modify CEOs and politicians to prevent them from flying private jets, making it harder for them to flee the country and breed, then after a few generations....
The more practical problem is its already too late for China. Its like debating passenger pigeon extinction prevention plans. There gonna be a lot of starving people in Asia in the next couple decades... Best get used to that idea now, rather than waiting for later. Starving people do crazy stuff. I wouldn't want to be in Taiwan, for example, not for any rational thing they'd do, but for the irrational things they're likely to do.
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Just follow management's leadership, as in many other things.
If you work for a place where morals and ethics are #1 above all else, then follow their lead.
If you work for a place where the almighty dollar is #1 and morals and ethics are for suckers and fools (most corporations), then follow their lead.
Whatever you do, don't get caught doing something you'd not want to be on the evening news.
Note that its a lot like having a police scanner or listening to mobile phone calls, or intercept pocsag digital pagers. Sounds technologically fascinating. It, in fact, IS technologically fascinating. Then you get the ability to do so, and it is boring beyond belief. Gossip monger types are always going to be gossip monger types and the addition or removal of technology will not change them. "Golly, person A is having an affair with person B, using some high tech pager or whatever". Ditto the non gossip monger types are not going to be very interested, beyond the interesting nature of the new technology itself. "Golly, this 8 bit A/D decoder sure works a heck of a lot better on noisy signals than a 1-bit data slicer for pocsag decoding, look at the borderline SNR on this page about some dork's affair or whatever."
I worked at a place decades ago where part of the job was to monitor old fashioned PCM T1 analog phone lines on occasion. Signed lots of secrecy papers to do it. Sounded cool, before I had to do it. It was boring as hell, trust me. I kind of miss listening for slips and echo can malfunctions in this VOIP era. Another funny one was listening for ulaw vs alaw encoding malfunctions on international ckts. And verbal fighting with vendors who couldn't understand the 80 different type of E+M signalling. Good times, I guess, but not from listening to boring phone calls.
Detain. I remember that stuff from bio labs. One of the dumbest labs I ever did. First, they expected freshmen undergrads to have the skill to catch a paramecium with a dropper and a dissecting microscope. Then, they expected us to know just how much detain to add to the slide so that we could find the damn thing, but not so much that it was totally immobilized. Then, they expected that if we added some food to the slide, we would be able to observe it eating...
I don't think anyone in my lab class managed all three. I remember wishing I was still at home, in my bed...
And the joke ends thus: ... immobile, covered in slime stuff, and eating?
I did all the math in my head. If you need a calculator to divide 6000 / 60 you got problems. Doing 5280/60 in my head is a waste of time. There is no point in calculating to 8 decimal places if you only have about one significant figure (or technically less, if you aren't even sure what order of magnitude is correct).
Would have been more accurate to spec as "divide thousands by tens and get hundreds"
From the article: 'Cherie Anderson runs a travel company in southern California, and she's convinced the federal government is reading her emails. But she's all right with that. "I assume it's part of the Patriot Act and I really don't mind," she says. "I figure I'm probably boring them to death."'"
What an idiot. The problem is not a boring civil servant reading her emails and at most noting "oh how interesting, someone ordered flowers for Charles Manson again". The problem is her competitor donating money to a politicians campaign and inadvertently getting a copy of her emailed sales plan. The problem is a subcontractor of a contractor getting a copy of all emailed credit card numbers, ID thefting them, and she must be to blame, after all, she is the "only" common link. The problem is the civil servant's drug addicted gang member brother getting a copy of her bank statements, and noticing she makes all her weekly cash deposits at 3 pm on wednesdays, and being california, he's heavily armed, and she is completely disarmed. The problem is she tries to negotiate a better contract with her flower supplier, but thru "national technical means" her flower supplier has a copy of all her emailed communication with her accountant, and knows exactly how much profit he can extract from her. The problem is her local political muscle noticing via emailed sales figures that she is not donating the "correct" percentage of gross revenue to the politicians re-election campaign. The problem is the police notice, and blame her, when recipients of her "welcome home" gift baskets have their houses broken into and ransacked after the basket is ordered and before the basket arrives. The problem is she dates a police officer, it doesn't work out, she gets stalked by a guy with total electronic access to her life. Or a disgruntled client happens to work at the station, and has access to all her future emailed delivery plans, and knows just the dark alley to drag her into, and via the emailed schedule, knows just the right time to grab her.
Rapid prototyping isn't just an empty name. I've noticed a strange hesitation to use rapid prototype frameworks to rapidly prototype something and see what happens.
Its not Java; you'll have something up and working in a day or less. Try them all for a short period of time, see where you're "stuck"/"working" for each platform, then decide which to pursue. Last time I tried this, the optimum framework where I am, for the in house internal app I was working on, was RoR. Your mileage will vary.
The only thing worse than "wasting" a couple days doing research, is having to scrap weeks/months of development merely to switch to something else. Don't get hemmed in too early.
I am unclear on how badly it'll mess up GPSDOs and GPS clocks, which indirectly is a big problem both for the general public and also some of my obscure hobbies. My at work onnet NTP "stratum 1s" are all GPS clocks, which worries me, and at home I'm on the fence about converting my ham radio microwave transverters to GPSDOs. If the GPSDO is going to be unusable "soon" then why bother dropping a couple hundred bucks, may as well buy like 20 Rb clocks and toss them as they burn out. Supposedly Rb clocks start up very fast and survive quite a few power cycles so maybe just go Rb and forget about it, just like old fashioned vacuum tubes are a consumable disposable item. Or invest in a really freaking expensive TCVXO unit although how I'd initially align it is unclear (so once you're within 0.01 ppm of WWV at 10 MHZ ... then what? At 24 GHz that is not good enough short term stability for narrowband digital)
This seems like a reasonable inquiry.... can someone enlighten me as to why it isn't?
Check his election donation records, all available online. As near as I can tell, his owners are the healthcare industry, which would superficially have nothing to do with this. The people who purchased him did so with the idea he would help them rip off the American Medical Consumer not the American Telecom Consumer. Why he would piss off his owners by not doing his job is the unclear question. Its very much like purchasing a slave for a cotton plantation who steadfastly insists on constructing igloos instead of picking cotton. If you cannot tell, I have little respect for competent owned property of lobbyists, but he apparently is not even competent at being a good little slave, so that makes it even worse.
Its possible his bribe records are not up to date online, or not properly categorized, perhaps its a future looking handshake agreement where a mobile phone PAC will donate $500K to him NEXT year. Or a trade agreement with another corporate owned slave where they support each others causes so as not to appear to be too directly of a bribe. Hard to say.
Why do I get the feeling that there is some motivation (other than lost farming equipment) behind the resistance to the LightSquared network?
I checked out Grassley on opensecrets.org
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/industries.php?cycle=2012&cid=n00001758&type=I&newmem=N
and he doesn't appear to get much money from telcos. He seems primarily a slave of the medical industrial complex. It could be he's doing a favor for a slave owned by the telcos, in exchange the telco-owned-slave will promote some medical industrial complex ripoff for his owner's interests..
But at least directly, he's not getting involved in something related to his owners interests. Hard to imagine what a Hospital/Nursing Home could care about LightSquared. Big money donors don't like loose cannons, he'd best look out. He's supposed to be devising new ways for healthcare to rip us off, not networking.
It would probably not cost me damn near 10 bucks to send a couple 5.25 floppies to a fellow retro computer dude if the USPS was not charging 0.01 cents per pound to drive around 400lbs of junk mail daily, in the 3+ $ a gallon gas age.
Sorry, you have it completely backwards. My wife was the postman's daughter, I know about this. "Junk Mail" is a lot more expensive to send that you think. Without it, you'd probably have to pay $20 or $30 to send those floppies.
well I f'd that up pretty well. a mile is about 6000 feet and theres about 60 minutes in an hour so 3 mph is about 6000 / 60 * 3 = 300 feet per minute, so that would imply my car is 150 feet long if I'm going two car lengths per minute.
In car speed that would be a lot more like two car lengths is 2 * 10 feet = 20 feet per minute, times 60 to get about 1200, call that 1000 Kft, divided by about 5000 Kft per mile, thats about a fifth of a mile per hour.
If they're 0.000000312 kilometers per hour how fast is that "scale speed"? If they were the size of a car, how fast would they be traveling?
That's kinda variable, like how fast is a person, you mean a kenyan olympic sprinter or a 600 pound walmart shopper?
None the less, figure "about a dozen microns" within an order of magnitude bigger or smaller. I do not have a prepared slide of those for my little microscope, but I have a gut sense they are about that big based on pictures. Figure about one an a half times the diameter of a red blood cell? Supposedly they vary a lot more in size than a RBC.
In "car speed" for the standard /. car analogy, that would be like three mph or so.
Come to think of it, paramecium can move pretty fast, too.
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/RossKrupnik.shtml
2 mm/sec?
I believe it. Those things are a PITA to observe under a scope without adding this slime stuff that slows them down.
It's the backend. When you have too many connections on too few servers, with not enough storage
you usually see this kinda issue.
Knowing the speed and flexibility of university upgrade policies, and knowing sendmail was born around 4.1BSD, and knowing the -BSDs were VAX only until 4.2 or 4.3 or so in the 80s, I'm guessing they're still using the original VAX it was developed on?
Change is inevitable, it's probably my biggest gripe against people that are vehement about global warming, this idea that nothing should ever change. Just because a bird species used to stop at this place means that it should always stop at this place.
In some ways its even more extreme... I looked it up and there was no mine there until 1955, relatively recently in the evolutionary history of birdies by any timescale. Living in glacial territory, there are no lakes of any sort in my area older than ten thousand years or so.
The numbers are impressive, a good fraction of a cubic mile was scooped up and hauled away in less than a quarter century. Wowzers. I'm sure more rock was moved in my little city over the last 20 years building mcmansions for the housing bubble, but obviously not all in one hole.
"BP-owned toxic lake"
I'll be the last to support our crony commie-capitalist system, but that's pretty far fetched agitprop.
ARCO ran the place until '82, mothballed it, and then BP bought ARCO 18 years later in '00.
Its a "sins of the father afflicting the sons" argument at best. At worst its a "my great-great-great grandfather immigrated here two decades after the civil war ended, therefore I'm liable and should pay restitution to the g-g-g-g-g-g-great grandsons of former slaves.". BP has about as much to do with what happened to this mine, as I do with what happened on plantations in the 1830s.
Anyone painting with a broad brush, no matter how noble the goal, is usually a crook. Thanks but no thanks.
My geologist ex-roomie did some fieldwork involving acid runoff from mining operations "somewhere out west" donno if this was related. Its a pretty serious local problem. Ironically the more toxic the water, the more likely you'll find someone wanting to refine metals out of the water, making the problem go completely away. Unfortunately sounds like this site is a local maxima of destruction, if the concentration were lower it would just be another boring manmade pond, and if the concentration were higher, you'd have armies of refineries fighting over who gets the refine valuable metal outta the water.
Why not evolve Si life here?
Dorminey — WHERE ARE THE LARGEST CONCENTRATIONS OF SILICON HERE?
IN SAND?
Bernstein — In sand or rock. There are literally megatons of silicate minerals on Earth.
Talk to a geologist like my ex roommate. I knew there was something fishy about that so I checked the actual numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust
Silicon 277200 ppm second only to oxygen
Carbon 300 ppm second to pretty much everything but vanadium and stuff like that. By weight the earth has about as much Rb as C.
For all intents and purposes the earth is not the idea place for a carbon based life form. Its the equivalent of a unit train full of high fructose corn syrup tank cars for a silicon lifeform. If they can't form here and absolutely gorge themselves on what to them would be the equivalent of a giant pizza, there is not a more ideal place out there to form...
The reason why we're made out of relatively rare C instead of tremendously available Si is C chemistry is incredibly better than Si chemistry for bio, or heck, chemistry in general. The fine article didn't give it enough justice or maybe the editors edited out the chemistry rants. Lets just say that Xe biochem is not all that more unlikely or difficult than Si biochem would be (in other words, nearly totally freaking almost incomprehendibly impossible vs just merely incredibly extremely impossibly unlikely)
It all has an air of speculative fantasy fiction, like trying to intellectually debate if its easier to make vampires, werewolves, or zombies...
Lower voltages require larger conductors to carry the same current. Copper isn't that cheap.
And you're limited on the high end by state electrician licensing boards who require "high voltage license" instead of regular license somewhere around 440 volts to 600 volts. So however cool you think it might be to design your entire infrastructure around 1024 volt DC, the cost of electricians would be much cheaper if you can keep it under 400 volts.
Obviously there are some states where this doesn't matter, all I can say is I've heard of cutover points of 440 volts, 600 volts, in some weird combination of TN , WI, and a couple other states.
I am told the main thing they teach you in high voltage continuing education class is that for all practical purposes, all accidents are fatal above 500 volts. That's pretty much what I've heard from the grapevine... 120 volt deaths are always two parters, like grayhair's heart couldn't take it or the shock made him fall off the ladder and the broken neck is what killed him, whereas 440 threephase and above its always "condolence cards can be sent to..." except for true miracles. That and they put you thru the ringer about threephase and wye vs delta and figuring out rotation directions without destroying industrial equipment, none of which matters in a data center.
Here's a google provided whitepaper on the exact topic:
http://www.directpowertech.com/docs/Whitepaper_AC_units_on_DC_rev%20A.pdf
Why they put something titled "not for public distribution" on a google accessible server is a mystery. If your country has an extradition treaty with Sweden then google for another whitepaper instead of this one. Whatever.
The article says that 380v DC is the sweet spot, but why? Here in the US 440v (3 phase) AC is pretty common, as is 220v AC. I realize there's a world of difference between AC and DC, but that's about all I can think of. 380/4=95 x 4v rails I suppose? Someone with an EE degree or master electrician jump in here and explain this to me please.
OK
Look at the input stage of a stereotypical switchmode power supply. in 120 volt mode you see a voltage doubler config. In 220 volt config you see a plain ole straight rectifier. (If you ever wondered why you can run a switcher configured for 220 on 120 with no fireworks, but config for 120 and plug into 220 and it blows up, now you know) Your DC voltage to the input of the switch mode chopper is gonna hover right around......... 380 volts. No point getting overly precise because line voltage and component tolerance is not overly precise, but pretty much you take an off the shelf switcher, rip out the input rectifier and filter, dump in raw 380 VDC and off ye go.
Now the "pretty much" relates to all kinds of fun like inrush current limiting for the chopper may have relied on the resistance of the rectifier and filter, or maybe your chopper controller runs off a tiny little AC transformer.
But to a first approximation, if you're reading this on a desktop PC, you are already using a more or less 380 volt DC power supply, so its pretty easy to bodge anything using 380 VDC.
The original low speed USB electrical spec was pretty much classical 5 volt NRZI TTL. So insisting on 12 volt supply would mean every USB device would require a 5 volt regulator inside it to talk to the data lines, and the data lines would need protection circuitry on both momma boards and all USB devices because TTL traditionally gets really pissed off when an input voltage rises about its power voltage in case of a short. CMOS gets pissed off too at over voltage. It would just be a bad scene.
Something like RS-485 but really faster would have been "better", but ...
4) Done right with a positive ground system, leads to less corrosion problems with outside plant. Admittedly "inside" the data center, if you're got corrosion, you're doin it wrong.
5) Less AC hum. We had some microwave site to site short hop gear back in ye olde NTSC days that could only be run off battery without 60 hz interference bars on the screen. Not technologically relevant anymore, but the point remains that DC is always going to be cleaner than AC.
6) Better lightning protection. I'm sure its happened, but I've never heard of losing a telco DC bus. Big conductors, giant batteries across them, lightning is just not an issue anymore at the power level (still need to ground feedlines / waveguide / whatever you've got at home like that)
7) dump most of the power conversion heat in the battery room where its all built to handle high temp and no one visits (other than occasional battery maint). Cheaper cooling in the data center, data center is somewhat more habitable, etc.
For certain you'd want to have a different kind of plug for DC devices, but even that would give us an opportunity to 1) standardize on one global plug standard, at least for DC, and 2) allow us to design a small, rugged, safe type of plug.
Aka the famous (in some circles) Anderson Power Pole. Go ask a ham radio guy.
The thing I love about in house DC distribution, which I have in my house, is it forces at least a token effect at "green power reduction". Suddenly given the choice of a 12 volt 6 watt LED fed by $2 of small gauge wire vs something resembling welding cable wire to run a 200 watt halogen, you make the ecologically correct choice.
I used to use cast off surplus 200 watt desktops for my mythtv frontends. Unholy pain to run on 12 V. Now I use 5 watt Zotac boxes. Good for everyone in every way.
Randainism only works in a rational free market. On the other hand, if you end up in a real world where only crazy nuts psychopaths seek and gain power over others, then you don't get a rational free market and it doesn't work. Whoops. Nice idea though, if you had a social structure or eugenics program that eradicated nuts instead of putting them in power. Maybe if you used recent mosquito genetic research to modify CEOs and politicians to prevent them from flying private jets, making it harder for them to flee the country and breed, then after a few generations....
The more practical problem is its already too late for China. Its like debating passenger pigeon extinction prevention plans. There gonna be a lot of starving people in Asia in the next couple decades... Best get used to that idea now, rather than waiting for later. Starving people do crazy stuff. I wouldn't want to be in Taiwan, for example, not for any rational thing they'd do, but for the irrational things they're likely to do.
We have killed ..., beavers, ...
I always knew shaving them would lead to problems in the long run.
I don't think a few humans dying warrants the eradication of an entire species.
LOL the stereotypical off the shelf traditional response to this is "you and your family first". I say, wipe out the mosquito.