Speaking of evolution, we're already damaging our gene pool by "curing" otherwise fatal gene mutations and stupid people actually thrive quite well. I'll use the word non-viable mutation instead of "defect" to be politically correct here. So, if these non-viable mutations continue to propagate, I can see in the future that all humans born will be incapable of living without computer brain modifications. We won't be able to live without brain augmentation. In essence, the machine will become who we are.
After looking over the site a bit more, I see its a different tidal technology than I was familiar with. However, it would still likely require anchoring this "ten foot turbine" in the main channel of the waterway;-).
To use this idea, he would have to dam up the river (impossible) or have some substantially large basin (not practical) on his property for the water to flow in and out of in addition to several feet (5-10?) of river height fluctuation each day. Since he says that he's between 2 dams, my guess would be that the 4-6' rise/fall mentioned in the post would be seasonal or sporadic.
If you analyze the post carefully, they're not talking about a waterwheel with some stream feeding it, they're talking about a substantially large "paddle-wheel" sitting out in the river (such as the ones driving old 1800's steam ships). A waterwheel such as the ones powering a mill would require a vertical drop at least as tall as the wheel. With the river conditions he's describing, there is no such vertical drop. Being from England, you're obviously not familiar with laws regarding navigable waterways here in the US. The US Army Corps of Engineers is probably in charge of this river and therefore a huge set of rules apply to any structures built on it.
He says he's between 2 damns on a slow-moving (almost no-moving?) river? The only way a tidal system would work would be to have an incredibly large tank (impractical) or damn up some cove for the water to flow in and out of. That would also require a large rate of fluctuation in river level to keep the water moving in and out of it and 4-6 feet over the course of even daily wouldn't cut it. From what he describes, it wouldn't seem like the river flows fast enough to keep a paddle-wheel going. Basicly, put a 2x6 plank in the water.. if you can hold it in-place just give that idea up because you'd need some ridiculously large paddle-wheel.
When they're taking them apart, becareful of the capacitors. I assume you're already aware, but they can hold a few hundred volts for quite some time. An old guy with a heart problem might have a bad day.
The theories on that site are just way too crazy. I didn't think anything could be worse than what I read on/. but appearantly I was wrong.
Dust explosions? If there were enough dust in the atmosphere to burn you wouldn't be able to see 100'. The static discharges produced by volcanic clouds leads to the idea of micro-discharges from volcanic dust. *sigh* Flammable gas from volcanoes? What would that have to do with wires catching on fire? Solar discharges?.. and it only seems to be happening there?
I didn't see anything on that site that was remotely plausible. At least he could have come up with something like subterrainean quartz deposits along a fault generating electrical discharges. While unlikely, that would be more believable.
If they unthrottle your connection, then it already works that way. 100 people on a line will split it 100 ways. 1 person on the line will get the full bandwith (minus hardware and destination site restrictions). But, the issue is that the cable company doesn't want people maxing out the bandwidth all the time. I believe that, at the ISP level, bandwidth is often metered. *someone* has to pay for all that additional bandwidth being used.
If the cable companies let everyone use all the bandwidth they could, then prices would go way up because of the additional expense of buying large trunks to support all that traffic. It looks like you're getting 2.7MB/s. That's quite good, actually unless you mean Kb/s instead of KB/s. Another proposal in the past has been to limit the overall amount of data you can transfer. Such as give a user 30GB per month or something. Then your speed would be unthrottled, but once you hit that 30GB mark you'd start paying for additional data transfered. This way, the high bandwidth users pay for their extra share. Since I transfer VERY large amounts of data, I'd personally rather just wait a bit longer than pay extra to get it faster.
To further your point a bit, cable lines usually have a few channels allocated to them. For the systems I'm familiar with, its usually 30Mb/s downstream and a fraction of that for upstream. Using the current technology as I know it, you couldn't offer 100Mb/s service on cable (yes, I know you *could*, but I'm refering to what we have now).
Inspite of all the theories on "shared bandwidth" the absolute truth of the matter is that your experience will vary. In the Austin area, cable is much faster than DSL. I guess Time Warner is doing a good job of balancing the load. DSL here through SWB is 1.2/128 while cable is 3.0/384 (or very close for the perfection freaks out there). I don't know anyone here on cable that doesn't get speeds faster than any affordable DSL package in the area. Of course, I'm sure in some places the scenario exists that the cable company has overloaded the cable segment and the system crawls at peak times. This could also happen with DSL if there are too many lines coming into the CO and not enough bandwidth at the CO to support them well. So, my point is that you can't say that either is better than the other without doing some research at your specific location.
Here in Austin (near San Antonio), I always get 2.7 - 2.8 Mb/s down and 320-360Kb/s up even during peak times on Time Warner Cable. So, I'm sure he was talking about those speeds.
Meteoroid - still in space
Meteor - currently falling to earth and burning up
Meteorite - a rock on the ground
Soooo... you can't be hit by a Meteorite unless someone throws it at you and the only way to be hit by a meteoroid is if you're in space. Meteor is not a synonym for meteoroid.
To further clarify, when you're on the ISS or Space Shuttle, you're not exactly in zero gravity. You're constantly free-falling towards Earth. Anything that's not traveling fast enough along the curve of the earth outside of the atmosphere will fall back down rather fast.
Spacecraft and satellites don't *escape* the earth's gravity. They just reach high enough speeds such that for every meter they fall toward the earth, they've gained a meter in altitude by traveling forward along the curve of the earth. If you're going faster than orbital velocity, you'll leave the Earth, if you're going slower, you'll spiral inward until you crash.
Oh great! A way to contribute to the obesity level. Can you imagine the sales increases at McDonalds if every couple hours a biodeisel truck came through the neighborhood and made everything smell like fresh french fries? *grin* That's almost as bad as someone at work cooking popcorn. There's an immediate line at the microwave at the first whiff. On the other hand, if every car were burning biodeisel, maybe french fries would become rather unappetizing.
Alright, I can see where you're coming from with the corn and biodeisel. This would be the same thing as requiring the growth of X acres of corn for every gallon of regular deisel consumed. However, the trees for the paper products were going to be grown for paper anyway, so whether or not you burn them as fuel, they'll still exist and will have removed CO2 from the atmosphere... as opposed to the corn that won't be grown unless its made into the deisel and thus profited from. I just think greasy big Mac wrappers wouldn't be a very clean fuel. So, at least we're halfway agreeing now;-).
To clarify, regardless of if something was recently living, plant or otherwise, you're still contributing relatively the same amount of CO2 regardless of what you burn. So why would you burn paper and grease which has a lot of contaminants and other chemicals when you could pick a cleaner fuel such as natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, etc.?
ummmm.. where do you thing coal and oil come from? They're decomposed plants. Burning gasoline is no different than burning paper. Anything you burn that puts CO2 into the atmosphere is just as bad as anything else.
Paper and grease *DO* release CO2. Organic material + Oxygen = carbon residue + CO2 (and various amounts of other stuff). This paper/grease burning oven would pollute a lot worse than something like natural gas.
Considering what life was like before technology, I think I can welcome the stress. I don't have to worry as much about dieing from a broken leg. If my house isn't built before winter, I can just stay in my apartment with the heat on 80 instead of freezing solid in the first blizzard. I get email notifications on my cell phone telling me that my flight is cancelled. My bills are auto-paid for me.... and the list goes on.
Technology, for better or worse, has put more structure in our lives. I drives our daily schedules telling you when to wake up, when to proceed through the intersection and that you're probably going to die in 5 months from the headache you have now. For me, technology only becomes stressful when its something that I've failed to keep up with.
If you leave your car parked in front of a fire hydrant the city will tow it. If your home doesn't meet certain guidelines the city will condemn it. Perhaps you've interpreted my post to the extreme, but I wanted to make a point with out 3 paragraphs of exceptions. Every case such as this has to be individully interpreted. I wouldn't expect the government to confiscate every computer that was involved in a hacking attack. Hmmmmm.. its hard to draw parallels, but the closest thing would be the crackhouse laws. A responsible club owner can't be at fault for someone dieing in his club. However, if that same club owner had shown gross neglect and his club was well-known for drug use, he would share in some of the responsibility including force closure of the club.... even if he had not directly contributed to the death, his lack of responsibility for facilities under his care did. Thus said, I would agree with you that permanent confiscation was probably extreme. Its just my view that there has to be some consequence to grossly neglecting security such that people will realize they need to take at least minimal action. Although computer hacking isn't likely to kill someone, when you're on a public network you're bound to the same ethical rules that apply to use/possession of cars, guns, dogs, etc.
If you don't responsibly maintain security on your systems then you're at fault to subjecting your equipment to confiscation. Its the same with condemned houses and clubs closed because of patron's drug use. Even if its the University mail server I would confiscate it. It would be a great lesson that you have a responsibility to not contribute to a public nuisance (hacking, spam, etc.)
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Speaking of evolution, we're already damaging our gene pool by "curing" otherwise fatal gene mutations and stupid people actually thrive quite well. I'll use the word non-viable mutation instead of "defect" to be politically correct here. So, if these non-viable mutations continue to propagate, I can see in the future that all humans born will be incapable of living without computer brain modifications. We won't be able to live without brain augmentation. In essence, the machine will become who we are.
"Mandrake official released" ? They should just thrown away the key.
After looking over the site a bit more, I see its a different tidal technology than I was familiar with. However, it would still likely require anchoring this "ten foot turbine" in the main channel of the waterway ;-).
To use this idea, he would have to dam up the river (impossible) or have some substantially large basin (not practical) on his property for the water to flow in and out of in addition to several feet (5-10?) of river height fluctuation each day. Since he says that he's between 2 dams, my guess would be that the 4-6' rise/fall mentioned in the post would be seasonal or sporadic.
If you analyze the post carefully, they're not talking about a waterwheel with some stream feeding it, they're talking about a substantially large "paddle-wheel" sitting out in the river (such as the ones driving old 1800's steam ships). A waterwheel such as the ones powering a mill would require a vertical drop at least as tall as the wheel. With the river conditions he's describing, there is no such vertical drop. Being from England, you're obviously not familiar with laws regarding navigable waterways here in the US. The US Army Corps of Engineers is probably in charge of this river and therefore a huge set of rules apply to any structures built on it.
.. and yes, I misspelled dam. ;-)
He says he's between 2 damns on a slow-moving (almost no-moving?) river? The only way a tidal system would work would be to have an incredibly large tank (impractical) or damn up some cove for the water to flow in and out of. That would also require a large rate of fluctuation in river level to keep the water moving in and out of it and 4-6 feet over the course of even daily wouldn't cut it. From what he describes, it wouldn't seem like the river flows fast enough to keep a paddle-wheel going. Basicly, put a 2x6 plank in the water.. if you can hold it in-place just give that idea up because you'd need some ridiculously large paddle-wheel.
When they're taking them apart, becareful of the capacitors. I assume you're already aware, but they can hold a few hundred volts for quite some time. An old guy with a heart problem might have a bad day.
The theories on that site are just way too crazy. I didn't think anything could be worse than what I read on /. but appearantly I was wrong.
.. and it only seems to be happening there?
Dust explosions? If there were enough dust in the atmosphere to burn you wouldn't be able to see 100'.
The static discharges produced by volcanic clouds leads to the idea of micro-discharges from volcanic dust. *sigh*
Flammable gas from volcanoes? What would that have to do with wires catching on fire?
Solar discharges?
I didn't see anything on that site that was remotely plausible. At least he could have come up with something like subterrainean quartz deposits along a fault generating electrical discharges. While unlikely, that would be more believable.
If they unthrottle your connection, then it already works that way. 100 people on a line will split it 100 ways. 1 person on the line will get the full bandwith (minus hardware and destination site restrictions). But, the issue is that the cable company doesn't want people maxing out the bandwidth all the time. I believe that, at the ISP level, bandwidth is often metered. *someone* has to pay for all that additional bandwidth being used.
If the cable companies let everyone use all the bandwidth they could, then prices would go way up because of the additional expense of buying large trunks to support all that traffic. It looks like you're getting 2.7MB/s. That's quite good, actually unless you mean Kb/s instead of KB/s. Another proposal in the past has been to limit the overall amount of data you can transfer. Such as give a user 30GB per month or something. Then your speed would be unthrottled, but once you hit that 30GB mark you'd start paying for additional data transfered. This way, the high bandwidth users pay for their extra share. Since I transfer VERY large amounts of data, I'd personally rather just wait a bit longer than pay extra to get it faster.
To further your point a bit, cable lines usually have a few channels allocated to them. For the systems I'm familiar with, its usually 30Mb/s downstream and a fraction of that for upstream. Using the current technology as I know it, you couldn't offer 100Mb/s service on cable (yes, I know you *could*, but I'm refering to what we have now).
Inspite of all the theories on "shared bandwidth" the absolute truth of the matter is that your experience will vary. In the Austin area, cable is much faster than DSL. I guess Time Warner is doing a good job of balancing the load. DSL here through SWB is 1.2/128 while cable is 3.0/384 (or very close for the perfection freaks out there). I don't know anyone here on cable that doesn't get speeds faster than any affordable DSL package in the area. Of course, I'm sure in some places the scenario exists that the cable company has overloaded the cable segment and the system crawls at peak times. This could also happen with DSL if there are too many lines coming into the CO and not enough bandwidth at the CO to support them well. So, my point is that you can't say that either is better than the other without doing some research at your specific location.
Here in Austin (near San Antonio), I always get 2.7 - 2.8 Mb/s down and 320-360Kb/s up even during peak times on Time Warner Cable. So, I'm sure he was talking about those speeds.
Meteoroid - still in space
Meteor - currently falling to earth and burning up
Meteorite - a rock on the ground
Soooo... you can't be hit by a Meteorite unless someone throws it at you and the only way to be hit by a meteoroid is if you're in space.
Meteoroid - still in space Meteor - currently falling to earth and burning up Meteorite - a rock on the ground Soooo... you can't be hit by a Meteorite unless someone throws it at you and the only way to be hit by a meteoroid is if you're in space. Meteor is not a synonym for meteoroid.
To further clarify, when you're on the ISS or Space Shuttle, you're not exactly in zero gravity. You're constantly free-falling towards Earth. Anything that's not traveling fast enough along the curve of the earth outside of the atmosphere will fall back down rather fast.
Spacecraft and satellites don't *escape* the earth's gravity. They just reach high enough speeds such that for every meter they fall toward the earth, they've gained a meter in altitude by traveling forward along the curve of the earth. If you're going faster than orbital velocity, you'll leave the Earth, if you're going slower, you'll spiral inward until you crash.
Oh great! A way to contribute to the obesity level. Can you imagine the sales increases at McDonalds if every couple hours a biodeisel truck came through the neighborhood and made everything smell like fresh french fries? *grin* That's almost as bad as someone at work cooking popcorn. There's an immediate line at the microwave at the first whiff. On the other hand, if every car were burning biodeisel, maybe french fries would become rather unappetizing.
Alright, I can see where you're coming from with the corn and biodeisel. This would be the same thing as requiring the growth of X acres of corn for every gallon of regular deisel consumed. However, the trees for the paper products were going to be grown for paper anyway, so whether or not you burn them as fuel, they'll still exist and will have removed CO2 from the atmosphere... as opposed to the corn that won't be grown unless its made into the deisel and thus profited from. I just think greasy big Mac wrappers wouldn't be a very clean fuel. So, at least we're halfway agreeing now ;-).
To clarify, regardless of if something was recently living, plant or otherwise, you're still contributing relatively the same amount of CO2 regardless of what you burn. So why would you burn paper and grease which has a lot of contaminants and other chemicals when you could pick a cleaner fuel such as natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, etc.?
ummmm.. where do you thing coal and oil come from? They're decomposed plants. Burning gasoline is no different than burning paper. Anything you burn that puts CO2 into the atmosphere is just as bad as anything else.
Paper and grease *DO* release CO2. Organic material + Oxygen = carbon residue + CO2 (and various amounts of other stuff). This paper/grease burning oven would pollute a lot worse than something like natural gas.
Considering what life was like before technology, I think I can welcome the stress. I don't have to worry as much about dieing from a broken leg. If my house isn't built before winter, I can just stay in my apartment with the heat on 80 instead of freezing solid in the first blizzard. I get email notifications on my cell phone telling me that my flight is cancelled. My bills are auto-paid for me.... and the list goes on. Technology, for better or worse, has put more structure in our lives. I drives our daily schedules telling you when to wake up, when to proceed through the intersection and that you're probably going to die in 5 months from the headache you have now. For me, technology only becomes stressful when its something that I've failed to keep up with.
If you leave your car parked in front of a fire hydrant the city will tow it. If your home doesn't meet certain guidelines the city will condemn it. Perhaps you've interpreted my post to the extreme, but I wanted to make a point with out 3 paragraphs of exceptions. Every case such as this has to be individully interpreted. I wouldn't expect the government to confiscate every computer that was involved in a hacking attack. Hmmmmm.. its hard to draw parallels, but the closest thing would be the crackhouse laws. A responsible club owner can't be at fault for someone dieing in his club. However, if that same club owner had shown gross neglect and his club was well-known for drug use, he would share in some of the responsibility including force closure of the club. ... even if he had not directly contributed to the death, his lack of responsibility for facilities under his care did. Thus said, I would agree with you that permanent confiscation was probably extreme. Its just my view that there has to be some consequence to grossly neglecting security such that people will realize they need to take at least minimal action. Although computer hacking isn't likely to kill someone, when you're on a public network you're bound to the same ethical rules that apply to use/possession of cars, guns, dogs, etc.
If you don't responsibly maintain security on your systems then you're at fault to subjecting your equipment to confiscation. Its the same with condemned houses and clubs closed because of patron's drug use. Even if its the University mail server I would confiscate it. It would be a great lesson that you have a responsibility to not contribute to a public nuisance (hacking, spam, etc.)