if there's a malfunction during liftoff, having a fission reactor coming down isn't such a great thing
Don't worry about liftoff... an unused reactor core pretty much by definition has none of the highly dangerous waste byproducts in it... because... it's unused. A new reactor core is fundamentally mostly harmless, not really worth worrying about.
On the other hand, when landing, its still super hot, still streaming out delayed neutrons, full of extremely nasty waste isotopes, if the burnup ratio is high enough its physically weak and "crumbly", probably neutron-activated otherwise non-radioactive components nearby the reactor... Just bad news all around.
It would be unwise to land a fission powered vehicle on the earth.. Best used between planets.
No access here. I'm guessing the "pillars" are little quarter wave antennas, with a diode at the base, vaguely like a crystal radio but operating at light wavelengths instead of radio? A really old idea that has never been built (until now?)
In that case, why are the pillars so long? 500 nm quarter wavelength pillars work best with an optimum wavelength of 2000 nm.
Now, 2000 nm is way off in the invisible infrared.
I'm guessing in true journalist fashion, they reinterpreted the story to be it works w/ wavelengths of 500 nm (vaguely greenish light) therefore pillar length around 125 nm tall? At least the journalists spelled it silicon instead of silicone...
So, if walmart buys a new cash register, or opens a jewelry counter, is walmart a "totally new company", or is it just another day in the distributor/retailer business?
In the olden days, they bought stuff there, transported it, and sold it for a profit here. Exactly the same line of business, only the technology and tools have changed a little.
The wiki article goes into detail about some of their more obscure modern sidelines like thrifty car rental, but also touches on obscure ancient sidelines, like printing their own paper money. A minor sideline simply does not matter compared to their business plan of buy it cheap in location A and sell it for big bucks in location B.
This also applies to the folks whom think IBM is totally different because they used to make widget A and now they make widget Z. No, IBM was in, and remains in, the office automation business.
Lunakhod 1 carried a French retroreflector array for Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) but unfortunately, contact was lost and no one knows where it is.
I checked the wikipedia and there is no mention, but I thought it was "generally known" that because it worked for a year or so and then "suddenly failed" it was because the optics cracked due to thermal stresses. An earth year is about 12 lunar days, and the hot/cold cycles are pretty intense. A cracked retroreflector isn't going to work.
Given realistic spot diameter on the moon vs possible landing area position error, and the difference in cost between having grad students blast away randomly (virtually free) vs the cost of launching another mission, I don't think its just "unknown location".
if you do the math, lifting 100lbs from floor to above your head takes a LOT of energy.
About half the energy required for a 200 lbs body to climb one flight of stairs... Not much. If you take the stairs to a different floor of the building every time you go to the can, visit people in person instead of calling, and never use the elevator, you'll burn far more energy thru the day on the stairs than during a short workout.
Everything else you wrote is completely 100% correct except for this minor thing, that the actual energy burned during lifting isn't much... Another amusing thing for IT workers is to lift weights such as old equipment, although your cow orkers will laugh at you. Military press an old rack mount 6U server, just make sure the drive trays don't slip out onto your head.
That feeling you get that you're "starving" yourself is a product of the fact that you've conditioned yourself to eat when you feel stressed.
Actually, its a very common symptom of type2 diabetes, along with dehydration that gets worse when you drink sugar-soda, thirsty all the time, tired out, heavy central body buildup of fat, perhaps you have foot problems to some extent, etc... Conveniently the treatment for type2 boils down to lower carb diet, exercise, and lose some weight, at least at the start, which seems to be the treatment plan everyone else is suggesting for merely being fat. There are of course expensive pills that may or may not help you, but would absolutely make someone a lot of money.
Needless to say I'm not a (medical) doctor, although I can diagnose that anyone asking for medical advice on slashdot is obviously showing clinical indications of mental insanity. A MD can quickly and trivially check your blood sugar levels to either prove this or rule it out, more or less. Probably worth checking out. Probably a good idea to visit your MD before beginning an exercise routine anyway.
Basically, universal default means if you're having "a problem" with one financial institution, all other financial institutions are legally allowed to pile onto you and attack you along with the problem institution. Currently our financial lives are a gang fight, you fight one you better be ready to fight them all at the same time.
Anyway, I suspect something similar to universal default, but larger, is a major purpose of a national database. In theory, currently if you don't register for the draft and keep your address current, you can't get college financial aid. This kind of "reasoning" can easily be expanded with a national ID system.
If you have a late library book, your garbage man will not be legally allowed to haul away your trash. Also you'll be unable to buy anything at any retail establishment until your account is cleared up at the library. Basically any establishment will be able to very publicly subject you to a society-wide "consumer death penalty". Like wearing a big scarlet "A", or one of those yellow stars, except it'll be an id card in your pocket so that's OK.
Customer service dispute with one gas station? Blacklisted, No gas station will sell you gas under any circumstances, even on a cash and carry basis. Being blacklisted for the duration of the memory of the bouncers at one bar is bad. Being blacklisted from all bars forever based on the arbitrary decision of one individual, is quite a harsh penalty, especially when you might be targeted for nefarious reasons (dating some bar bouncer's ex-girlfriend, or made a fool out of someone more powerful, etc).
Late return of a rental DVD? No library books for you! Bought alcohol? No medical services for you. A a "service death penalty" if you ever did something politically incorrect. Shop at the adult toy store (and I don't mean the local computer store)? That means no entrance to church (except maybe confessional session)! Once bought a gas guzzler car? Random targeted punishment for the rest of your life.
Bought "Budweiser" beer at the quickie mart? No admittance to "Miller Park" stadium for you! A very strange merger of private activity and corporate owned public spaces is about to arrive.
Basically what used to be individual problems between you and one entity, while you and the rest of the world were all good, will soon be punished as you against the entire freaking world.
My bet is that the iPhone problem is also GPS related.
My somewhat ancient Garmin GPS runs for somewhat over a day continuous on two AA batteries. It has a nice full color screen about the size of a iphone although much lower resolution. It is an inch or two larger than an iphone in all dimensions but that's mostly empty space... its engineered to be less dense than water, so as to float.
So, thats about 3 volts at about 1.5 amp-hours equals about 4.5 watt-hours.
Dividing 4.5 watthours by a pessimistic 24 hours, gives 188 milliwatts.
I'm sure a decade or so newer engineering results in much lower power consumption. Checking out the technical specifications PDF for the first google I found:
You're looking at about 23 mA at about 3 volts, for a whopping 70 milliwatts, almost a third less for an "april of 2009" GPS module. Technology marches onward I guess.
1) A quarter watt dumped in a case that large is not going to be detectably warmer, but it'll probably be almost enough to stop dew from condensing on the surface, most of the time. Dew will condense on the surface of my powered up GPS in extreme weather conditions. To get "warm" with a quarter watt, compare the tiny volume and tiny surface area of a typical quarter-watt power resistor to an iphone.
2) Considering handheld cellphones are allowed to transmit 600 mW and I suspect the overall RF section is less than 50% efficient, the phone probably dumps at least 3 times the heat from its RF section than its GPS section. Then probably about half the emitted RF gets adsorbed by the users hands, figure about a watt of total heat in the hands just from the transmitter. GPS or no, will not be noticeable.
The problem is not the GPS module. Now a GPS application could "require" a multi-core GHZ class pentium processor at full blast, but thats a software engineering problem not a "GPS" problem, since obviously a "real handheld GPS" does the same task without turning into a handwarmer. A bad enough programmer could make a tetris that would burn your hands, but that doesn't mean tetris is the problem.
In full disclosure: I work in the financial industry currently.
Could it be that Blizzard is planning on inflating their virtual gold economy less than the local central banks?
Virtual gold might not be as stable of an investment as real gold, but it might be become better than currency. I'm sure virtual gold is more stable than Zimbabwe money...
It just seems this isn't the real or whole story, though.
Encrypting the client-server protocols, makes it harder to hack the "game". Sort of.
That also makes it a great tool for secret communication about counter-revolutionary activities ranging from simple gossip about Tienanmen square, to money laundering.
Its an interesting public admission that a video game company can make a government-proof encryption/authentication/communication system.
I also used to believe that. Technology and mass production have dropped prices dramatically. Back when asterisk was a "new idea to me", seems like at least a decade ago, sip phones were hundreds of dollars, so I said, forget about asterisk.
I was surprised when I priced out ip phones a couple years ago.
This is by no means a stripped down phone. It has most features you'd expect in a desk phone. I have no connection with Grandstream or Voipsupply other than being a happy customer w/ three of those phones, and absolutely no problems whatsoever, they just work...
Somewhere in my office, I have the remains of a bulk pack of ATA (analog telephone adapters) that I bought on sale for something like $50 for five. You have to shop carefully to spend less on the ATA than on the long CAT-5 cables to connect them. The "worst buy" $50 25 foot cat-5 cable is a bit unreasonable to connect a $10 ATA that has a $15 analog phone plugged into it. For testing, experimentation, and educational purposes, a couple $10 ATAs, 7 foot patch cables, and $5 walmart phones works pretty well.
Let's get closer to the mark and make it a felony for a candidate to accept money from anyone who isn't eligible to vote for them. Fewer felons to keep track of that way.:)
In some states, some felons lose the right to vote, that makes the candidate liable if they accept money from "anyone". Maybe that should be accepted as the cost to the politician of playing a fundamentally bribery based game. So, we'd need an accurate nationwide list of felons that have not been pardoned or expunged. Good Luck.
Make it a felony to contribute to more than one candidate for any election. Face it, a grand for the Repub abd another grand for the Dem, and no matter which candidate loses, the briber/contributor wins. Contributing to more than one candidate in any given race is an ill-disguised bribe, and it should be a felony.
Maybe you could restrict it a little further and market it better as "contributing twice is like voting twice". Exactly one contribution per election seems fair to me, just like one vote per election seems fair to me.
This also cuts back slightly on bribery, as you'd be unable to do the "half the money upfront to prove we're serious, then the other half the money after the politician makes the correct/profitable decision"
If that ROE is reasonable, why aren't zillions of commercial solar farms popping up everywhere? Or at least co-located with the wind farms that are being installed?
I could buy a couple acres in downtown LA for my solar farm, and sell the electricity at a nice price, but land and property tax costs would bankrupt me.
Or
I could buy a couple acres in the middle of nowhere, with cheap land and property tax, but I'd have no one to sell the electricity to.
On the other hand, regardless of the number of panels on my roof, I'm paying for my lot and property tax, so the land and property tax is "free" for a SFH-scale solar power system. If I were renting my roof for a billboard or a heli-pad then there would be opportunity costs.
As for colocated solar and wind, don't know about everywhere, but around here the game is lease out pillar mounted windmills in the middle of yer farmland for free electricity and/or a nominal rent check. Very similar to the cell tower on farmland game. The windmill doesn't really block that much sunlight, so the crops grow more or less just as well, just don't run into the tower with your tractor/harvester machine. Building a ceiling of panels over the crops isn't going to work.
Guarantee? Yeah, right! Have a look at the "Valid From" date at the end of that PDF. You can't fool me!
I don't know if a Japanese company would "get" april fools day.
Just for fun I checked the wikipedia and there are no reports of any 4/1 events in Japan. Doesn't exactly prove a negative, but it seems like 4/1 events are solely in english speaking areas or at least "nearby" english speaking areas.
Solar module guarantees are all pretty much the same from all manufacturers due to competition, just bad luck to have selected one that took effect 4/1.
You need to add dividends to that. That will improve your return slightly.
And forgot to subtract inflation, lowering it much more.
Dividends are out of style due to USA income tax code. Individual investors have no control over when they're paid, so they will probably get stuck paying at their peak marginal rate. Whereas, if the company keeps its cash and expands or buys other companies, or just sits on the cash, the stock price goes up and the individual investor can sell at their leisure, like after the retire and drop to a minimally low marginal tax rate.
I imagine it would be bad to run A/C stuff inverted from a variable DC line as well. If you are trying to run normal household stuff straight off the power output of the panels, as it gets later in the day, you'd start getting your own 'brownouts' in the house wouldn't you?
I suppose you could intentionally buy stuff that fails that way. I don't.
Most switching mode supplies don't care as long as it's above a certain minimum.
For example, I have a perfectly nice "twelve volt" input ATX supply in my server from powerstream. It doesn't much care as long as the input voltage is above 9 volts and below 18. At 9 volts the lead-acid backup batteries are about 99.99% empty so theres not much lost capacity. If the battery is above 18 volts, its probably on fire or something. So pretty much, as long as there's the tiniest fraction of a KWh left in the batteries, my server runs.
"1997 Jul. 30 Rises 80.36 to close at 8,254.89, first close above 8,200.00"
So, thats about 68 increase in 12 years for a TOTAL percentage gain of 0.82%, or divided by 12 (admittedly not using the proper compounding formula) that's a whopping annual percentage rate of 0.068654 %. Not exactly going to retire to a private Caribbean island on that ROI...
For a good time, contemplate the effect of a generation of baby boomers flooding money into the market.. demand soars, prices soar... until they retire and pull the money out of the market for a generation... demand collapses, prices collapse...
BP Solar was reorganized into existence also in 1973, but who cares about org charts and marketing names. BP has been around since 1901 to 1909 depending on how you look at it, just round it to a cool century.
The odds of a solar panel mfgr being around to pay the guarantee that I will probably not need to collect, are probably far higher than the odds of GM replacement parts being available in 25 years...
The other aspect is that due to 25 years of technological improvement and inflation, refunding my money would probably barely buy me a starbucks coffee, and replacement panels would probably only cost as much as a major appliance for the same power level so who cares, from a financial standpoint its like doing all kinds of crazy accounting regarding replacing my fridge.
They guarantee 90% at 20 years since manufacture, or 80% at 20 years after sale date (from reseller or whatever)
So, at about 30 grand, at least for the first 20 years, it loses about $150 of output per year.
Basically decreased output is no longer economically relevant compared to disaster type problems. Now that we get "100 year floods" every year for the past 4 years, the house will rot out from underneath. Or a 'nado will blow it away. Or X percent of homes burn down per century, so in twenty years across millions of homes you'd lose X*20/100 percent due to fire vaporizing the entire structure including panels. Insurance for theft. Hail destroys the entire roof including the panels (note that panels are actually tougher than "old" asphalt shingles)
A bash script that runs unison on certain directories if that directory exists. About ten for different directories (like ~/music, ~/movies, etc) I have no interest in backing up dot files like.kde as what works on my 7 inch battery powered "netbook" is probably not applicable to my giant monitor high powered desktop. My tiny laptop for space reasons does not have a ~/audiobooks directory thus the script does not sync ~/audiobooks. The script of course distributes itself and updates itself into/usr/local/bin all by itself somewhat virally.
For system backup (closely related) I only back up config files and have my unisonsync script back it up to all my machines. There is no point in backing up/bin/bash since there are about 300 world wide debian mirrors that back that up much better than I could ever dream of doing, and an amd64/bin/bash would be of little use on a replacement i386 machine, etc. All my machines share a unison'ed ~/backup directory... structure like ~/backup/server/stuff ~/backup/media/stuff ~/backup-mythtv-upstairs/stuff So, all my machines have a backup copy of all important config files or changed files on all the machines I control. For the eight or so machines it consumes only a couple megs. I backup things like/etc/network/interfaces or/etc/ntp.conf etc. mysqldump makes an appearance or two. When I recently set up "mythtv-downstairs" frontend, I pretty much worked thru each file I backup for "mythtv-upstairs" and it worked, so its of much more use than disaster recovery.
My script also runs certain monitoring scripts and dumps their output into the backup system. run cpuid and dump the output into ~/backup/machinename/cpuid. So in the event of total and utter system failure I know the exact specs of the dead box without any memorization or googling. (did it have one gig or two? easy, read the file ~/backup/machinename/free) I save a copy of the output of lsmod, cpuid, free, df, cfdisk -P s/dev/whatever, cat/proc/mdstat as appropriate, lots of other stuff.
On the big server, a cron job weekly tars up ~/backup and stashes it. Occasionally I burn this vast collection of backup files to a CD or copy to a flash and then store it offsite. I also make offsite copies of my relevant ~/whatever directories as I see fit.
Unlike crude oil, its unrealistic to trade and transport natgas around the world. Theoretically possible to move small quantities, but not enough to say, heat an entire country in the summer, or manufacture a countries worth of fertilizer. Storage of natgas is a bit problematic, compared to, for example, coal.
Peak natural gas in England was in 2000. The issue arrived in 2000 for the gov.uk. Any home or industry that uses natgas is pretty much economically screwed. Production has dropped about 25% from peak in 2000 to 2007 and the rate of drop will only increase.
Each country will experience peak natgas individually. It is interesting watching the gov.uk scramble. Glad I don't live there (well, in addition to the 1984 style govt and financial meltdown). Watch them to see what will happen elsewhere, as politicians, like cockroaches, are pretty much the same everywhere.
You remove all saltwater fish from the world and the food problem we have now is going to look like small potatoes.
Well, soon we won't be able to cook fish (or anything) on gas stoves, so unless you like tiliapa / catfish/ carp sushi, you're pretty much screwed anyway. Won't be cooking the "small pratties" either for that matter. This is sounding like the monty python ham and eggs deal, I'd bake fish for dinner if only I had natgas to bake with, well if only I had some fish, then I could make baked fish, or however that goes exactly.
So your kids watch TV from 3 feet on a 10" screen?
Uh, yes, yes they do? A scene right out of my own childhood with a little TV on a kids desk. Its actually a nearly ideal angular dimension... My livingroom couch is about nine feet way from about a 30 inch screen, same ratio. Then there's our portable DVD player, about 5 inch screen at 1.5 feet, same ratio. Your point?
Don't forget dye fading, and that weird fungus/mold stuff that literally eats some negative materials.
My wife has old negatives where that weird fungus stuff started eating the negatives. Seems stable now, at a lower humidity.
It's very educational / depressing to find a scan from the early 90s, then scan again just 15 years later, and see how much the negatives and prints have decayed.
I've been thinking of buying one of those 50 degree wine cooler fridges for my negatives... is that a good idea, if I black out the clear door?
Slashdot Mirror
if there's a malfunction during liftoff, having a fission reactor coming down isn't such a great thing
Don't worry about liftoff... an unused reactor core pretty much by definition has none of the highly dangerous waste byproducts in it... because... it's unused. A new reactor core is fundamentally mostly harmless, not really worth worrying about.
On the other hand, when landing, its still super hot, still streaming out delayed neutrons, full of extremely nasty waste isotopes, if the burnup ratio is high enough its physically weak and "crumbly", probably neutron-activated otherwise non-radioactive components nearby the reactor... Just bad news all around.
It would be unwise to land a fission powered vehicle on the earth.. Best used between planets.
No access here. I'm guessing the "pillars" are little quarter wave antennas, with a diode at the base, vaguely like a crystal radio but operating at light wavelengths instead of radio? A really old idea that has never been built (until now?)
In that case, why are the pillars so long? 500 nm quarter wavelength pillars work best with an optimum wavelength of 2000 nm.
Now, 2000 nm is way off in the invisible infrared.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum
I'm guessing in true journalist fashion, they reinterpreted the story to be it works w/ wavelengths of 500 nm (vaguely greenish light) therefore pillar length around 125 nm tall? At least the journalists spelled it silicon instead of silicone...
Hudson is still a fur trading company, right?
You fail it.
So, if walmart buys a new cash register, or opens a jewelry counter, is walmart a "totally new company", or is it just another day in the distributor/retailer business?
In the olden days, they bought stuff there, transported it, and sold it for a profit here. Exactly the same line of business, only the technology and tools have changed a little.
The wiki article goes into detail about some of their more obscure modern sidelines like thrifty car rental, but also touches on obscure ancient sidelines, like printing their own paper money. A minor sideline simply does not matter compared to their business plan of buy it cheap in location A and sell it for big bucks in location B.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson's_Bay_Company
This also applies to the folks whom think IBM is totally different because they used to make widget A and now they make widget Z. No, IBM was in, and remains in, the office automation business.
Lunakhod 1 carried a French retroreflector array for Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) but unfortunately, contact was lost and no one knows where it is.
I checked the wikipedia and there is no mention, but I thought it was "generally known" that because it worked for a year or so and then "suddenly failed" it was because the optics cracked due to thermal stresses. An earth year is about 12 lunar days, and the hot/cold cycles are pretty intense. A cracked retroreflector isn't going to work.
Given realistic spot diameter on the moon vs possible landing area position error, and the difference in cost between having grad students blast away randomly (virtually free) vs the cost of launching another mission, I don't think its just "unknown location".
How many such people actually exist?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Moon_Landing_hoax_conspiracy_theories
About 6% of the population, as of 1999. Not bad, compared to the percentages believing in religion, intelligent design, etc.
Honestly, I think about 6% of the population is high or drunk at any given moment, so I'm not sure its a relevant figure.
It makes me wonder why these people (whoever they are) get under people's skin so much.
Well, sometimes its hard to interpret "get under skin" vs "laughing my * off"
if you do the math, lifting 100lbs from floor to above your head takes a LOT of energy.
About half the energy required for a 200 lbs body to climb one flight of stairs... Not much. If you take the stairs to a different floor of the building every time you go to the can, visit people in person instead of calling, and never use the elevator, you'll burn far more energy thru the day on the stairs than during a short workout.
Everything else you wrote is completely 100% correct except for this minor thing, that the actual energy burned during lifting isn't much... Another amusing thing for IT workers is to lift weights such as old equipment, although your cow orkers will laugh at you. Military press an old rack mount 6U server, just make sure the drive trays don't slip out onto your head.
That feeling you get that you're "starving" yourself is a product of the fact that you've conditioned yourself to eat when you feel stressed.
Actually, its a very common symptom of type2 diabetes, along with dehydration that gets worse when you drink sugar-soda, thirsty all the time, tired out, heavy central body buildup of fat, perhaps you have foot problems to some extent, etc... Conveniently the treatment for type2 boils down to lower carb diet, exercise, and lose some weight, at least at the start, which seems to be the treatment plan everyone else is suggesting for merely being fat. There are of course expensive pills that may or may not help you, but would absolutely make someone a lot of money.
Needless to say I'm not a (medical) doctor, although I can diagnose that anyone asking for medical advice on slashdot is obviously showing clinical indications of mental insanity. A MD can quickly and trivially check your blood sugar levels to either prove this or rule it out, more or less. Probably worth checking out. Probably a good idea to visit your MD before beginning an exercise routine anyway.
Now your whole life is tracked.
But you forget the equally annoying problem, similar to the phenomenon of "Universal Default"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_default
Basically, universal default means if you're having "a problem" with one financial institution, all other financial institutions are legally allowed to pile onto you and attack you along with the problem institution. Currently our financial lives are a gang fight, you fight one you better be ready to fight them all at the same time.
Anyway, I suspect something similar to universal default, but larger, is a major purpose of a national database. In theory, currently if you don't register for the draft and keep your address current, you can't get college financial aid. This kind of "reasoning" can easily be expanded with a national ID system.
If you have a late library book, your garbage man will not be legally allowed to haul away your trash. Also you'll be unable to buy anything at any retail establishment until your account is cleared up at the library. Basically any establishment will be able to very publicly subject you to a society-wide "consumer death penalty". Like wearing a big scarlet "A", or one of those yellow stars, except it'll be an id card in your pocket so that's OK.
Customer service dispute with one gas station? Blacklisted, No gas station will sell you gas under any circumstances, even on a cash and carry basis. Being blacklisted for the duration of the memory of the bouncers at one bar is bad. Being blacklisted from all bars forever based on the arbitrary decision of one individual, is quite a harsh penalty, especially when you might be targeted for nefarious reasons (dating some bar bouncer's ex-girlfriend, or made a fool out of someone more powerful, etc).
Late return of a rental DVD? No library books for you! Bought alcohol? No medical services for you. A a "service death penalty" if you ever did something politically incorrect. Shop at the adult toy store (and I don't mean the local computer store)? That means no entrance to church (except maybe confessional session)! Once bought a gas guzzler car? Random targeted punishment for the rest of your life.
Bought "Budweiser" beer at the quickie mart? No admittance to "Miller Park" stadium for you! A very strange merger of private activity and corporate owned public spaces is about to arrive.
Basically what used to be individual problems between you and one entity, while you and the rest of the world were all good, will soon be punished as you against the entire freaking world.
My bet is that the iPhone problem is also GPS related.
My somewhat ancient Garmin GPS runs for somewhat over a day continuous on two AA batteries. It has a nice full color screen about the size of a iphone although much lower resolution. It is an inch or two larger than an iphone in all dimensions but that's mostly empty space... its engineered to be less dense than water, so as to float.
So, thats about 3 volts at about 1.5 amp-hours equals about 4.5 watt-hours.
Dividing 4.5 watthours by a pessimistic 24 hours, gives 188 milliwatts.
I'm sure a decade or so newer engineering results in much lower power consumption. Checking out the technical specifications PDF for the first google I found:
http://www.latitudetechnology.com/gps_module.html
You're looking at about 23 mA at about 3 volts, for a whopping 70 milliwatts, almost a third less for an "april of 2009" GPS module. Technology marches onward I guess.
1) A quarter watt dumped in a case that large is not going to be detectably warmer, but it'll probably be almost enough to stop dew from condensing on the surface, most of the time. Dew will condense on the surface of my powered up GPS in extreme weather conditions. To get "warm" with a quarter watt, compare the tiny volume and tiny surface area of a typical quarter-watt power resistor to an iphone.
2) Considering handheld cellphones are allowed to transmit 600 mW and I suspect the overall RF section is less than 50% efficient, the phone probably dumps at least 3 times the heat from its RF section than its GPS section. Then probably about half the emitted RF gets adsorbed by the users hands, figure about a watt of total heat in the hands just from the transmitter. GPS or no, will not be noticeable.
The problem is not the GPS module. Now a GPS application could "require" a multi-core GHZ class pentium processor at full blast, but thats a software engineering problem not a "GPS" problem, since obviously a "real handheld GPS" does the same task without turning into a handwarmer. A bad enough programmer could make a tetris that would burn your hands, but that doesn't mean tetris is the problem.
In full disclosure: I work in the financial industry currently.
Could it be that Blizzard is planning on inflating their virtual gold economy less than the local central banks?
Virtual gold might not be as stable of an investment as real gold, but it might be become better than currency. I'm sure virtual gold is more stable than Zimbabwe money...
It just seems this isn't the real or whole story, though.
Encrypting the client-server protocols, makes it harder to hack the "game". Sort of.
That also makes it a great tool for secret communication about counter-revolutionary activities ranging from simple gossip about Tienanmen square, to money laundering.
Its an interesting public admission that a video game company can make a government-proof encryption/authentication/communication system.
(SIP phones cost $90+)
I also used to believe that. Technology and mass production have dropped prices dramatically. Back when asterisk was a "new idea to me", seems like at least a decade ago, sip phones were hundreds of dollars, so I said, forget about asterisk.
I was surprised when I priced out ip phones a couple years ago.
http://www.voipsupply.com/gs-200
$54 each plus shipping.
This is by no means a stripped down phone. It has most features you'd expect in a desk phone. I have no connection with Grandstream or Voipsupply other than being a happy customer w/ three of those phones, and absolutely no problems whatsoever, they just work...
Somewhere in my office, I have the remains of a bulk pack of ATA (analog telephone adapters) that I bought on sale for something like $50 for five. You have to shop carefully to spend less on the ATA than on the long CAT-5 cables to connect them. The "worst buy" $50 25 foot cat-5 cable is a bit unreasonable to connect a $10 ATA that has a $15 analog phone plugged into it. For testing, experimentation, and educational purposes, a couple $10 ATAs, 7 foot patch cables, and $5 walmart phones works pretty well.
Let's get closer to the mark and make it a felony for a candidate to accept money from anyone who isn't eligible to vote for them. Fewer felons to keep track of that way. :)
In some states, some felons lose the right to vote, that makes the candidate liable if they accept money from "anyone". Maybe that should be accepted as the cost to the politician of playing a fundamentally bribery based game. So, we'd need an accurate nationwide list of felons that have not been pardoned or expunged. Good Luck.
Make it a felony to contribute to more than one candidate for any election. Face it, a grand for the Repub abd another grand for the Dem, and no matter which candidate loses, the briber/contributor wins. Contributing to more than one candidate in any given race is an ill-disguised bribe, and it should be a felony.
Maybe you could restrict it a little further and market it better as "contributing twice is like voting twice". Exactly one contribution per election seems fair to me, just like one vote per election seems fair to me.
This also cuts back slightly on bribery, as you'd be unable to do the "half the money upfront to prove we're serious, then the other half the money after the politician makes the correct/profitable decision"
If that ROE is reasonable, why aren't zillions of commercial solar farms popping up everywhere? Or at least co-located with the wind farms that are being installed?
I could buy a couple acres in downtown LA for my solar farm, and sell the electricity at a nice price, but land and property tax costs would bankrupt me.
Or
I could buy a couple acres in the middle of nowhere, with cheap land and property tax, but I'd have no one to sell the electricity to.
On the other hand, regardless of the number of panels on my roof, I'm paying for my lot and property tax, so the land and property tax is "free" for a SFH-scale solar power system. If I were renting my roof for a billboard or a heli-pad then there would be opportunity costs.
As for colocated solar and wind, don't know about everywhere, but around here the game is lease out pillar mounted windmills in the middle of yer farmland for free electricity and/or a nominal rent check. Very similar to the cell tower on farmland game. The windmill doesn't really block that much sunlight, so the crops grow more or less just as well, just don't run into the tower with your tractor/harvester machine. Building a ceiling of panels over the crops isn't going to work.
Guarantee? Yeah, right! Have a look at the "Valid From" date at the end of that PDF. You can't fool me!
I don't know if a Japanese company would "get" april fools day.
Just for fun I checked the wikipedia and there are no reports of any 4/1 events in Japan. Doesn't exactly prove a negative, but it seems like 4/1 events are solely in english speaking areas or at least "nearby" english speaking areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fool's_Day
Solar module guarantees are all pretty much the same from all manufacturers due to competition, just bad luck to have selected one that took effect 4/1.
You need to add dividends to that. That will improve your return slightly.
And forgot to subtract inflation, lowering it much more.
Dividends are out of style due to USA income tax code. Individual investors have no control over when they're paid, so they will probably get stuck paying at their peak marginal rate. Whereas, if the company keeps its cash and expands or buys other companies, or just sits on the cash, the stock price goes up and the individual investor can sell at their leisure, like after the retire and drop to a minimally low marginal tax rate.
I imagine it would be bad to run A/C stuff inverted from a variable DC line as well. If you are trying to run normal household stuff straight off the power output of the panels, as it gets later in the day, you'd start getting your own 'brownouts' in the house wouldn't you?
I suppose you could intentionally buy stuff that fails that way. I don't.
Most switching mode supplies don't care as long as it's above a certain minimum.
For example, I have a perfectly nice "twelve volt" input ATX supply in my server from powerstream. It doesn't much care as long as the input voltage is above 9 volts and below 18. At 9 volts the lead-acid backup batteries are about 99.99% empty so theres not much lost capacity. If the battery is above 18 volts, its probably on fire or something. So pretty much, as long as there's the tiniest fraction of a KWh left in the batteries, my server runs.
http://www.powerstream.com/DC-PC-12V.htm
This is all off the shelf stuff, no big deal, nothing special.
and the historic performance of the stock market over the timespan being talked about has been the best ROI for investors.
Serious? No sarcasm tag? That's hilarious that we're talking about 12 year returns here in 2009...
Today close 8322
2009-12 = 1997
According to http://www.mdleasing.com/djia.htm
"1997 Jul. 30 Rises 80.36 to close at 8,254.89, first close above 8,200.00"
So, thats about 68 increase in 12 years for a TOTAL percentage gain of 0.82%, or divided by 12 (admittedly not using the proper compounding formula) that's a whopping annual percentage rate of 0.068654 %. Not exactly going to retire to a private Caribbean island on that ROI...
For a good time, contemplate the effect of a generation of baby boomers flooding money into the market.. demand soars, prices soar... until they retire and pull the money out of the market for a generation... demand collapses, prices collapse...
These same manufacturers have guarantees that they will be in business in 25 years?
Kyocera's been around since 1959, only 50 years this year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyocera
Hyundai Heavy Industries has only been around since 1973, a relative newcomer to the business at 36 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_Heavy_Industries
BP Solar was reorganized into existence also in 1973, but who cares about org charts and marketing names. BP has been around since 1901 to 1909 depending on how you look at it, just round it to a cool century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BP_Solar
The odds of a solar panel mfgr being around to pay the guarantee that I will probably not need to collect, are probably far higher than the odds of GM replacement parts being available in 25 years...
The other aspect is that due to 25 years of technological improvement and inflation, refunding my money would probably barely buy me a starbucks coffee, and replacement panels would probably only cost as much as a major appliance for the same power level so who cares, from a financial standpoint its like doing all kinds of crazy accounting regarding replacing my fridge.
According to it's decreased output overtime? ...... and you expect zero output after 50 years
Check out a typical actual warranty for a kyocera module:
http://www.kyocerasolar.com/pdf/specsheets/kc_warraty.pdf
They guarantee 90% at 20 years since manufacture, or 80% at 20 years after sale date (from reseller or whatever)
So, at about 30 grand, at least for the first 20 years, it loses about $150 of output per year.
Basically decreased output is no longer economically relevant compared to disaster type problems. Now that we get "100 year floods" every year for the past 4 years, the house will rot out from underneath. Or a 'nado will blow it away. Or X percent of homes burn down per century, so in twenty years across millions of homes you'd lose X*20/100 percent due to fire vaporizing the entire structure including panels. Insurance for theft. Hail destroys the entire roof including the panels (note that panels are actually tougher than "old" asphalt shingles)
A bash script that runs unison on certain directories if that directory exists. About ten for different directories (like ~/music, ~/movies, etc) .kde as what works on my 7 inch battery powered "netbook" is probably not applicable to my giant monitor high powered desktop. /usr/local/bin all by itself somewhat virally.
I have no interest in backing up dot files like
My tiny laptop for space reasons does not have a ~/audiobooks directory thus the script does not sync ~/audiobooks.
The script of course distributes itself and updates itself into
For system backup (closely related) I only back up config files and have my unisonsync script back it up to all my machines. /bin/bash since there are about 300 world wide debian mirrors that back that up much better than I could ever dream of doing, and an amd64 /bin/bash would be of little use on a replacement i386 machine, etc. /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/ntp.conf etc.
There is no point in backing up
All my machines share a unison'ed ~/backup directory... structure like ~/backup/server/stuff ~/backup/media/stuff ~/backup-mythtv-upstairs/stuff
So, all my machines have a backup copy of all important config files or changed files on all the machines I control. For the eight or so machines it consumes only a couple megs.
I backup things like
mysqldump makes an appearance or two.
When I recently set up "mythtv-downstairs" frontend, I pretty much worked thru each file I backup for "mythtv-upstairs" and it worked, so its of much more use than disaster recovery.
My script also runs certain monitoring scripts and dumps their output into the backup system. run cpuid and dump the output into ~/backup/machinename/cpuid. So in the event of total and utter system failure I know the exact specs of the dead box without any memorization or googling. (did it have one gig or two? easy, read the file ~/backup/machinename/free) I save a copy of the output of lsmod, cpuid, free, df, cfdisk -P s /dev/whatever, cat /proc/mdstat as appropriate, lots of other stuff.
On the big server, a cron job weekly tars up ~/backup and stashes it. Occasionally I burn this vast collection of backup files to a CD or copy to a flash and then store it offsite. I also make offsite copies of my relevant ~/whatever directories as I see fit.
peak gas ...... is a ways off
Unlike crude oil, its unrealistic to trade and transport natgas around the world. Theoretically possible to move small quantities, but not enough to say, heat an entire country in the summer, or manufacture a countries worth of fertilizer. Storage of natgas is a bit problematic, compared to, for example, coal.
Peak natural gas in England was in 2000. The issue arrived in 2000 for the gov.uk. Any home or industry that uses natgas is pretty much economically screwed. Production has dropped about 25% from peak in 2000 to 2007 and the rate of drop will only increase.
Official .gov.uk figures at:
https://www.og.berr.gov.uk/information/bb_updates/appendices/Appendix10.htm
Each country will experience peak natgas individually. It is interesting watching the gov.uk scramble. Glad I don't live there (well, in addition to the 1984 style govt and financial meltdown). Watch them to see what will happen elsewhere, as politicians, like cockroaches, are pretty much the same everywhere.
You remove all saltwater fish from the world and the food problem we have now is going to look like small potatoes.
Well, soon we won't be able to cook fish (or anything) on gas stoves, so unless you like tiliapa / catfish/ carp sushi, you're pretty much screwed anyway. Won't be cooking the "small pratties" either for that matter. This is sounding like the monty python ham and eggs deal, I'd bake fish for dinner if only I had natgas to bake with, well if only I had some fish, then I could make baked fish, or however that goes exactly.
So your kids watch TV from 3 feet on a 10" screen?
Uh, yes, yes they do? A scene right out of my own childhood with a little TV on a kids desk. Its actually a nearly ideal angular dimension... My livingroom couch is about nine feet way from about a 30 inch screen, same ratio. Then there's our portable DVD player, about 5 inch screen at 1.5 feet, same ratio. Your point?
Don't forget dye fading, and that weird fungus/mold stuff that literally eats some negative materials.
My wife has old negatives where that weird fungus stuff started eating the negatives. Seems stable now, at a lower humidity.
It's very educational / depressing to find a scan from the early 90s, then scan again just 15 years later, and see how much the negatives and prints have decayed.
I've been thinking of buying one of those 50 degree wine cooler fridges for my negatives... is that a good idea, if I black out the clear door?