Do you have any idea how much foreign id money has gone into the pockets of corrupt politicians and gangsters?
That is the problem, isn't it? One can make an argument that the most valuable thing we could give them would be our laws, courts and police. On the other hand, it might be a good subsidy for our own renewable energy industry just to export the gear. If nothing else it would make a good example, and as the unofficial leader of the developed nations the USA is expected to make gestures from time to time.
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If I recall correctly they weren't running it without coolant, they were running it at extremely low power without a load. The idiots running the plant also had most of the safety systems shut off, or it would have shut itself down.
Nuclear reactors actually appear to be safer than airliners; even experienced people sometimes get overwhelmed trying to fly an airliner and crash it, while creating a serious accident with a nuclear reactor (even one as badly designed as an RMBK) seems to require a heapin' helpin' of damn-foolishness.
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I've seen enough documentary material on the incident to recognize some of this stuff. If I am not missing something, http://polyn.net.kiae.su/ins/ltsm/f/f421.gif shows some Chernobylite spilling from a pipe, and http://polyn.net.kiae.su/ins/ltsm/f/r421.gif shows the distribution of material within the reactor building. As I do not read Russian I can't tell you the difference between the red stuff and the green stuff in the latter drawing.
One of the interesting things about Chernobylite is that it appears to be made from fuel melting into the sand which surrounded the reactor itself. We are working on converting radwaste into a glass form for final disposal, and this got there quite by accident. It also did a remarkable job of flowing without melting through things; it's all over the floors, but doesn't appear to have gone any significant distance though them. If someone wanted to budget the money for the robots and such, it shouldn't be terribly hard to break the stuff into chunks using hammers and shovel it up into canisters to cart away. In any event, it's not an immediate problem because it's quite well immobilized as-is. The bigger problem is the stuff on the ground floor of the building that's in small particles or dust form, because it can be leached or blown into the air by a building collapse or just the wind.
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The problem is that the plant was over-moderated, and as the moderator efficiency decreased with increasing temperature the reaction sped up. My understanding is that US designs are under-moderated (so a loss of moderator cuts the reaction), but there's nothing that says you can't do the same with graphite; I seem to recall that several designs for gas-cooled pebble-bed reactors use graphite and self-limit their temperature using Doppler broadening and other effects not employed in the RMBK.
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One of the biggest issues hanging over the Former Soviet Union is how that electric infrastructure will be replaced. Getting rid of the RMBK reactors and their explosion and proliferation risks (they were designed for continuous refuelling, and are thus almost ideal for making weapons-grade material) is one thing; putting that part of the world back into the 20th century with a clean and reliable electric supply (which is a prerequisite for the economy to grow) is quite another.
Maybe we (the USA and EU) need a Marshall plan for that part of the world, selling them wind turbines and combined-cycle gas turbine generators and taking their spent fuel so we know where it's going (better here than Iraq).
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so basically this is sending geologists back to square one in terms of how the earth's structure was formed.
Not by a long shot. It takes geologists back a couple of orders of magnitude about how long it takes granite intrusions to move into place. It doesn't change anything about how long it takes crystals of a given size to form, nor about how long it's been since different rocks crystallized; if anything, potassium-argon dating (which depends on the decay rate of K-40 into Ar-40 and the fact that molten rocks hold potassium but not argon), uranium-lead dating, and other radiometric methods keep getting more and more solid as the confirming data piles up. If there were something wrong with the dating methods, you'd see more and more evidence of inconsistency as the data accumulated. I've heard nothing to indicate that. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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you forget that in some areas customers have no option to decamp.
Web sites always have the option to decamp. Content can be hosted anywhere. This is why there is no excuse for the ISP to host the spamware-vendor.
Block the single static ip thats being used for abusing...thats ok.
Is it only okay because it has no impact on the ISP?
your attitude to forced censorship of major routes/backbones on the internet is totally disgusting.
That got a chuckle. First, it isn't forced (MAPS is totally voluntary) and second, it isn't censorship, it's a counter-attack upon an ISP committing treason to the Internet (giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war, and make no mistake, this is war).
I don't see how you can live with yourself when you are claiming up and down that SPAMSUCKS on the one hand but defending an ISP's declaration of war on your mailbox on the other hand. Isn't your head threatening to explode under the pressure of the contradictions? " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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If the domain is being black-holed by the router, do you have any logs to check? Would you have any content to examine to confirm that the mail was spam?
Apparently this incident involves the global (not just e-mail) black-holing of all IP addresses held by a spammer-friendly ISP. The ISP hosts a site which sells spamware. Their placement on the RBL is designed to get their customers to decamp; the ISP has the option of choosing to keep the spamware-providers, or the rest of them. If the ISP is not pressured by hitting them in the revenue stream, they have no reason to quit providing service to the spamware-provider.
I happen to agree with MAPS. This time.
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There's a legitimate reason to do that, and that's to pressure the ISP to stop hosting providers of spam-ware. Black-holing sites which provide web-hosting for spammers is probably justified too; see response 162.
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What I don't understand is why anybody is using MAPS for anything other than their mail server.
If the spam came through an open relay but the spammer's web site was on the RBL, the spammer would not get any click-throughs nor would any of their web bugs, Javascript/ActiveX exploits, or other tricks work. It's not the best reason in the world for blackholing a site for all access, but it's at least plausible. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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The solution the ISS is using is to keep the modules warm enough that they don't get condensation on the outer walls. That's why they didn't open the new module until they had the power available to heat it. (Why they didn't just design the modules for solar heating is a mystery to me, it's not like they have too many cloudy days up there.) " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Since when did the propagation of EM fields along a conductor (such as the earth) become such a huge mystery that only the disciples of Tesla can know the secrets?
Since the day people like you proclaimed there's nothing else to learn about them.
Your contempt for Tesla and for everyone who doesn't shoot down his radical thinking is quite clear as well.
Now you're proving that you never read what I wrote. Tesla was brilliant. Tesla came up with things that literally re-made industry and large parts of society (where would we be without the fractional-horsepower motors which we have long taken for granted?). Tesla was radical... for his time. So were Schroedinger, Einstein, Crooks, Roentgen, and even the Wright brothers. Today their work is solidly main-stream and taught in undergrad and even high school curricula. The people I hold in contempt are those who:
Claim that Tesla had some mystical understanding of electricity or whatever which is not part of current knowledge or art, and
Cannot or will not demonstrate anything to back up those claims.
That's you, in case you didn't recognize yourself.
Oh, really? What do you think the loopstick antenna in a portable AM receiver is?
You're jumping to conclusions again. What makes you believe I don't know that?
Maybe it was when I said "Since you're already starting with RF, it would make more sense to just have a set of taps on a small transformer driven directly from the ambient field" and you responded "It's not as magical as "tapping the ether" as Tau Zero wants to do with his transformer." It is painfully clear that you had no idea what I was talking about, until I explained it and made a fool of you.
I believe that [in general] Slashdot geeks must have respect and not blast the ones with different ideas by making assumptions which lead to incriminating facts.
In other words, you demand that everyone on Slashdot keep their minds open so far that their brains fall out. (Is that what happened to yours?)
I work differently. If it looks like a crank, walks like a crank and sounds like a crank, it has the burden of demonstrating that its ideas do not fall into the zone of crankdom before having the right to be taken seriously. Showing that something works as described is sufficient. I'd even believe Joseph Newman's machine worked if he could hook up a flat battery to it, start it going and come back some time later to a fully-charged battery. I've never heard of him being able to do this under controlled conditions, so he's a crank.
If you can't think of a way to achieve high efficiency and long range wireless energy transmission, don't claim that's impossible.
Oh, I'm sure that it's possible. There appears to be nothing physically impossible about creating beams of very short wavelength microwaves and beaming them through space to a receiver a considerable distance away (hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of miles). Space is lossless, and sufficiently large antennas can guarantee that any desired fraction of the transmitted power gets to the receiver. Sending power around the curve of the earth using very low frequencies, using a resistive Earth and lossy ionosphere as the two surfaces of a waveguide, at high efficiency, is a completely different matter. I want some evidence that conventional wisdom is in error before I give it the time of day. People who don't demand such evidence tend to be parted from both their money and credibility in short order. I prefer to give the readers of Slashdot something to chew on when they see fantastic claims. A little critical thinking, that's all I ask. Not of you, you've failed that test, but the others out there reading this will be served well. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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The subject of "harm" is perhaps one place to look.... In the case of spam, a whole lot of users press delete, maybe an ISP bears some bandwidth or mail server load...
Maybe the ISP's mail server crashes under the load of the hate-mail.
Maybe the ISP's staff spends dozens or hundreds of hours fielding the responses from people who were spammed demanding that the ISP do something about the spammer.
Maybe the ISP finds itself blocked by hundreds or thousands of mail admins around the world, and its subscribers decamp en masse because they can no longer get mail through. The ISP then goes belly-up.
Unless the spammer is willing to bear ALL of those costs (and has an agreement with the ISP holding the ISP harmless, sufficient credit to pay the costs, etc. etc.), s/he should go to jail as the thief and vandal s/he is.
Spam is theft of service. Spammers have no business existing. Anyone who spams should have to pay back the trebled costs of their damages (including people's time to download, recognize and delete the spam) preferably from wages earned from a work-release program shoveling muck out of sewer pipes (one of the few poetically just outcomes). Or they could just die painfully. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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I'm obviously discussing this with someone with more than grade school knowledge this time, but you don't pay attention to what I write anyway.
You're so far out of your league, you don't have the sense to know when you're not making sense. This amuses me.
You again miss the point. We're not dealing with normal RF propagation through vacuum here, but with electricity transmission using the atmosphere and the ground.
Since when did the propagation of EM fields along a conductor (such as the earth) become such a huge mystery that only the disciples of Tesla can know the secrets? Solving wave functions is an undergraduate double-E exercise; transmission of low-frequency EM waves across the earth has been extensively studied as a byproduct of AM radio, LORAN, Omega and WWVB.
And STOP bullshitting (driving a transformer from the ambient field? get real.)
Oh, really? What do you think the loopstick antenna in a portable AM receiver is? I'll give you a hint: it's the secondary coil of a tuned RF transformer. If you made one big enough and placed close enough to a sufficiently powerful transmitter, you could drive bulbs from it... just like Tesla.
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I cannot offhand think of anything she wrote which would contradict that seriously. Then again, it's been years since I studied with Randroids. I'll have to settle for not disagreeing with you (and mention that my memory agrees pretty much with your statements). " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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> Fantastic transmission losses. Some enormously large percentage of the power pumped in would be lost (as in 'not serve a useful purpose'.)
And based on what do you claim that?
You're thinking of physics in the conventional way, as did Ampere 200 years ago.
Have you noticed that we still use Newtonian physics for most of our useful work (because relativistic/quantum calculations yield indistinguishable results under normal conditions, and they are vastly more involved)? Most of what Ampere did is still good science; for the most part it has only been refined, not replaced.
You disconsider that Tesla was one of the first people to think about subatomic particles and quantum physics as part of a realm where "normal things don't happen very often".
Tesla's work follows from well-understood principles such as Maxwell's equations. These are purely classical physics. On what grounds do you claim that Tesla understood, let alone used, any quantum phenomena?
By working at specific frequencies, work cycles and high voltages it might be possible to reduce resistance.
By working at high voltage and low current you do reduce resistive losses, but you do nothing to reduce resistance. The higher your frequency the less current can penetrate into the bulk of a conductor, leading to increased losses. This is well-understood and is known as "skin effect". It's also why you can get burns on your skin from RF, but your heart is largely immune (it's deep inside and sees little current due to skin effect).
You're throwing around words that sound good to the ignorant ("subatomic particles", "quantum physics", "specific frequencies", "work cycles") and trying to use them to baffle people into taking you seriously. I take you as an idiot or a troll (same difference).
I believe that Tesla, as the brilliant man he was, knew exactly what he was doing with his Wardenclyffe coil. He didn't have the theoretical quantum physics explanation for what he designed, but he had the practical knowledge to make it work.
There's a story about Tesla lighting up lightbulbs 100 miles away using such a system. I prefer not to give much credit to this, but I believe Tesla wouldn't fail.
I believe! Halleluia!
Anyone with an RF voltmeter and a little bit of gear (more or less equivalent to a crystal radio) could measure the transmission efficiency from an AM radio tower to a receiving antenna of a particular size and design. From this, they wouldn't have much trouble calculating how much power you'd need to light a fluorescent bulb at 100 miles given a similar transmitter and receiver; with the right licenses and equipment you could proceed to actually do it. There is nothing divine about this ability, it only takes a decent education, money and (different from Tesla's day) regulatory relief.
> Wildly variable service. In the clear power would theoretically follow the inverse-square law
Inverse-square-law rule? Once again, Tesla's system doesn't deal with classic physics. And even if it did, this system doesn't have much to do with this law.
Yeah, inverse-square law. This is modified somewhat if the waves are confined by the ionosphere because you're no longer transmitting to infinite space, but conservation says that all energy has to come from somewhere and geometry says that you spread that energy to cover every point on the surface surrounding the point from which it radiates; if the energy isn't spread evenly, then you have hot spots and dead spots. If you are asserting that you do not have any reduction in areal power density in inverse proportion to the increase of area of the boundary surface, you are claiming that the total amount of energy goes up with distance and energy is not conserved.
This is an utterly extraordinary, nay, fantastic claim. State your evidence in support of it.
> Disrupt the very devices it was intended to supply. For simple object like a fluorescent tube Tesla coils are great but the minute you try to run something with sophisticated requirements you're hosed.
No you're not because you can rectify and filter the AC signal, thus making it high-voltage DC. Now run it through a switched power supply and generate AC in any possible voltage and any possible frequency. Rectify again to get DC at that new voltage.
Since you're already starting with RF, it would make more sense to just have a set of taps on a small transformer driven directly from the ambient field and rectify at the desired voltage straight from those, but that would require understanding what you're talking about. You don't; you're just bullshitting. You're trying to practice physics as if it were theology. I'll give you a hint: your performance is miserable, and you'd be laughed out of any high-school class worthy of the name.
Based on WHAT do you say that?
My God, don't comment on what you don't know!
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At the time AC was known to be easier to produce and more efficient to transmit but had to be rectified (turned to DC) to drive motors. this was very inefficient and the motors wore out quickly. AC motors have only 1 moving part so are more economical.
DC motors can last a good long time; how many times have you ever had to fix a motor in a vacuum cleaner? How about in a sewing machine, or a blender? Electric drill? Those are "universal motors", which will run on AC or DC, and they have brushes and commutators just the same. They work just about as well as most mechanical things did at the time, and did not require an undue amount of maintenance.
The thing that really made AC and killed DC was the cost of generation and transmission. Because DC cannot use transformers, the voltage of generation, transmission and consumption all have to be more or less the same (before resistive losses, which are considerable at voltages like 110). AC was always more desirable, because DC required all kinds of little generating stations everywhere in order to keep voltage drops down to an acceptable level. When Tesla demonstrated the induction motor (which could operate off of AC current), he removed the last roadblock to big, centralized, efficient, cost-effective AC power stations. All the induction motor did was remove a critical amount of the logjam placed there by entrenched interests and Edison PR; once that was gone, it was all over for DC distribution (except in subways and other electric rail systems, oddly enough). " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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She advocated the right to be paid a fair amount for one's efforts...
Show me where this is stated, either in one of her treatises or in one of her fictional works. Go ahead, I'll wait.
I'll bet you won't be able to find this in as many words, because the concept of "a fair amount" is foreign to the philosophy. Consider the example of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. He did an enormous amount of work on a housing project for nothing, because it was an interesting problem and he wanted the satisfaction of seeing it done. In other words, he did it as art. Consider John Galt, who didn't demand anything other than the value of his work considered as a market good (and refused to put his work on the un-free market when he was subject to arbitrary and capricious re-valuation of his labor). What's "fair"? Unless you define fair as what you get when free bidders and free sellers agree to exchange money, I don't think that you can find anything in Rand to support your assertion. Furthermore, given the loaded meanings given to "fairness" these days (like "a living wage" for completely unskilled work performed by an indifferent worker) and the incompatibility of these meanings with Rand's philosophy, you should probably not be using that word at all. (In other words, it's not efficacious.) " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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There was a modern power solution to collect solar energy via satellite and beam it to earth with [1] a narrow microwave beam that everybody could avoid. This would [2] only work with some new kind of microwave laser technology, [3]other wise you couldn't get it narrow enough.
False on all counts.
The window of frequencies which can be used to send power through air, clouds, etc. is low enough in frequency (and thus long in wavelength) that you can't make "really narrow beams that everybody could avoid". The original schemes called for receivers literally miles across, and safe zones for some distance beyond. The power density was only 70 watts/m^2 at the peak, to avoid thermal blooming and defocussing of the beam from atmospheric effects.
There is no requirement for any "new microwave laser". Any set of amplifiers which can drive a phased array will do the job; electronically-steered radars do exactly this, and prove that it requires nothing more sophisticated than the technology of 20 years ago.
Having a coherent source doesn't automatically create a tiny beamwidth. You need an aperture that's wide enough to focus the radiation. Ever wonder why big telescopes can see more detail than small telescopes (up to the point where the atmosphere doesn't allow any further improvement)? It's called the diffraction limit; look it up.
All in all, it looks like you should do some studying. You can start with the demonstrations which were done at Goldstone, beaming power through just as much air as a beam coming down from orbit would have to transit. You should find all of this very informative. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Well the ISPs could start by checking the CC numbers they are given by the spammer. Facilities exist to do this but guess what - it costs to do each check, and they're just not prepare to pay.
If you validate the card number, you get used by fraudsters to validate randomly-generated card numbers for them. This can cost you an enormous amount of money before you can shut your service down. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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I've attracted a reply from the Phil Karn. What a thrill.;)
I agree with you 100% about the minute-by-minute pricing. I think the one extra thing you could use is a co-generating furnace. If you were buying gas even for the outrageous price of $1.00/therm, burning it in a co-generator of 35% efficiency would give you electricity at under $0.10/KWH... and you'd still have the heat. With the price at $0.25/KWH you would be making out like a bandit under the current situation. Unfortunately, San Diego doesn't need heat enough of the year to make it pay to have much invested in a furnace. You might as well have a fireplace and use that for the little supplemental heat you need, and get the atmosphere in the bargain. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Your idealized world in which everyone is making a profit off their hot water heater is one where people have time to hassle with it without scanting something else they'd rather be doing.
You'd no more pay attention to the water heater moment to moment than you pay attention to your furnace. You set a thermostat on the furnace, probably a time-of-day feature so that the house isn't heated or cooled while you're away, and you leave the machinery to do its job. Same thing.
If you had a co-generating water heater you'd buy it because it could save you money. You'd plumb it into the gas pipe and hook it up to the electric panel, and maybe you'd have a little control box somewhere so that you could tell it when you typically use hot water (so that it could have it ready for you). After that, you'd ignore it. One typical cycle might be for the heater to sink its reserves to almost zero in the morning when people are getting ready for work, then sit full of cold water until the afternoon demand peak. When electric rates were nice and high it would kick into action, making watts for the grid and heating water with the waste heat. You'd come home to all the hot water you needed for bathing, washing clothes, and the like; overnight, the water heater might even use electricity instead of gas to top up heat losses, if the rates were low enough. If you could combine appliance cycles you might have the clothes washer run first thing in the morning after you leave (when electricity is cheap) and then have the water heater re-heat itself in the afternoon (when co-generation would command premium prices); if you had an electric dryer you could then have it run late the next night. This would give savings to people willing to work their schedule around the electric rates, or even give them a small profit. It would certainly move to eliminate price spikes, because the flexibility of both demand and generation would be far greater than what we have today.
If power distribution isn't a natural monopoly, for cripes' sake, what is?
This isn't distribution, it's generation (which is NOT a natural monopoly). The people who run the grid have a rather cozy relationship with the big generating firms (they used to be one and the same), and that's not an easy thing to break in to. There's also the little fact that dealing with a few big suppliers is a heck of a lot easier to manage than thousands or millions of small ones. Just because there are huge efficiencies to be obtained and enormous possible cost savings doesn't mean that it'll be done without a push from someone in authority. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Meters which can charge differently by time have been available for decades in other parts of the world.
And a binary peak/off-peak distinction gets you where? How does it help you incrementally shed load when power reserves keep falling? Are any of these meters going to give you enough information to decide when to start your co-generator? Will they collect enough information to get the billing (or credit) right when you've generated more than you've consumed?
There's a whole bunch of issues there that need to be addressed. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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I didn't know about the price cap. Of course you are going to have shortages when you have price caps and market conditions call for higher than price cap prices.
Listening to the crypto-socialist NPR, you hear that electricity goes to Arizona and elsewhere when prices hit the cap... but do they call for lifting the cap, or give air time to anyone who does? They haven't taken Econ 101 either.
If internet dependent businesses like mine are going to buy these cells to keep us up and running irrespective of the grid, we are going to essentially be going off-grid as far as the power company is concerned.
Why not locate outside of California, where the idiots haven't had a chance to bugger both the markets and the infrastructure? It's a lot cheaper than providing your own electric supply along with everything else. Once you've gone and built your own parallel utilities you would have been better off putting down roots in the Nevada desert or an Iowa cornfield; you'd be paying a lot less for real estate! " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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The answer? More goddamn power plants. Solar, nuclear, tidal, I don't care, but put them in, put them in service.
Tell me something: How does this prevent shortages and blackouts when it gets cloudy, you've got a neap tide, the nukes are down for fuel exchange, and you've got a demand spike?
The demand spike alone is enough. The real problem is that there is no market in electricity at the consumer level. In general, people pay one rate per KWH regardless of time-of-day or state of the grid, and anyone can tell you that a KWH at 4 PM on a scorcher is worth a lot more than a KWH at 3 AM on any day of the year. But people pay no more for the 4 PM KWH, and they have no incentive to shift their demand to 3 AM.
There's a huge problem with lack of infrastructure, and I don't mean turbines and wires and transformers. The infrastructure that's lacking is the market at the consumer level, and the information technology required to support it. People can and do drive around until they see gasoline at an acceptably low price, but they have no way to put the dishwasher on standby until the price of electricity is reasonable. You could make a huge dent in your peak-hour electic consumption if you had an air-conditioner that froze water overnight and cooled your house with the ice during the day, but if your electric meter can't distinguish (or just as badly, can't tell you) the difference between a 4 PM and 3 AM kilowatt-hour, you have no way to benefit from this. The consumer could make a big cut in the capital costs of the grid, but the consumer has no way to reap the benefits even if they'd pay for the hardware. This is a failure of the market: the pricing information is not getting where it needs to go.
The power companies probably don't want this to happen. If people could actually be full participants in the market, they could sell power as well as buying it. They could stuff KWH into batteries overnight and try to make a profit by selling back to the grid during the day, and you'd see lots of guerilla solar installations (except they wouldn't be guerillas any more). You'd see lots of people running co-generators, and the real sophisticates would be doing things like burning natural gas to re-heat their water tanks between 3 PM and 8 PM while selling the electricity, and running off the grid for electricity the rest of the day. If electricity was a quarter a KWH, you could make a rather tidy profit off your hot water heater. But none of this can happen unless and until there is a real, minute-by-minute market in electric power where everyone can participate, and you know who's not going to let that happen. " / \ ASCII ribbon against e-mail
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Slashdot Mirror
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Nuclear reactors actually appear to be safer than airliners; even experienced people sometimes get overwhelmed trying to fly an airliner and crash it, while creating a serious accident with a nuclear reactor (even one as badly designed as an RMBK) seems to require a heapin' helpin' of damn-foolishness.
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One of the interesting things about Chernobylite is that it appears to be made from fuel melting into the sand which surrounded the reactor itself. We are working on converting radwaste into a glass form for final disposal, and this got there quite by accident. It also did a remarkable job of flowing without melting through things; it's all over the floors, but doesn't appear to have gone any significant distance though them. If someone wanted to budget the money for the robots and such, it shouldn't be terribly hard to break the stuff into chunks using hammers and shovel it up into canisters to cart away. In any event, it's not an immediate problem because it's quite well immobilized as-is. The bigger problem is the stuff on the ground floor of the building that's in small particles or dust form, because it can be leached or blown into the air by a building collapse or just the wind.
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The problem is that the plant was over-moderated, and as the moderator efficiency decreased with increasing temperature the reaction sped up. My understanding is that US designs are under-moderated (so a loss of moderator cuts the reaction), but there's nothing that says you can't do the same with graphite; I seem to recall that several designs for gas-cooled pebble-bed reactors use graphite and self-limit their temperature using Doppler broadening and other effects not employed in the RMBK.
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One of the biggest issues hanging over the Former Soviet Union is how that electric infrastructure will be replaced. Getting rid of the RMBK reactors and their explosion and proliferation risks (they were designed for continuous refuelling, and are thus almost ideal for making weapons-grade material) is one thing; putting that part of the world back into the 20th century with a clean and reliable electric supply (which is a prerequisite for the economy to grow) is quite another.
Maybe we (the USA and EU) need a Marshall plan for that part of the world, selling them wind turbines and combined-cycle gas turbine generators and taking their spent fuel so we know where it's going (better here than Iraq).
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I don't see how you can live with yourself when you are claiming up and down that SPAMSUCKS on the one hand but defending an ISP's declaration of war on your mailbox on the other hand. Isn't your head threatening to explode under the pressure of the contradictions?
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Apparently this incident involves the global (not just e-mail) black-holing of all IP addresses held by a spammer-friendly ISP. The ISP hosts a site which sells spamware. Their placement on the RBL is designed to get their customers to decamp; the ISP has the option of choosing to keep the spamware-providers, or the rest of them. If the ISP is not pressured by hitting them in the revenue stream, they have no reason to quit providing service to the spamware-provider.
I happen to agree with MAPS. This time.
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There's a legitimate reason to do that, and that's to pressure the ISP to stop hosting providers of spam-ware. Black-holing sites which provide web-hosting for spammers is probably justified too; see response 162.
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The solution the ISS is using is to keep the modules warm enough that they don't get condensation on the outer walls. That's why they didn't open the new module until they had the power available to heat it. (Why they didn't just design the modules for solar heating is a mystery to me, it's not like they have too many cloudy days up there.)
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- Claim that Tesla had some mystical understanding of electricity or whatever which is not part of current knowledge or art, and
- Cannot or will not demonstrate anything to back up those claims.
That's you, in case you didn't recognize yourself. Maybe it was when I said "Since you're already starting with RF, it would make more sense to just have a set of taps on a small transformer driven directly from the ambient field" and you responded "It's not as magical as "tapping the ether" as Tau Zero wants to do with his transformer." It is painfully clear that you had no idea what I was talking about, until I explained it and made a fool of you. In other words, you demand that everyone on Slashdot keep their minds open so far that their brains fall out. (Is that what happened to yours?)I work differently. If it looks like a crank, walks like a crank and sounds like a crank, it has the burden of demonstrating that its ideas do not fall into the zone of crankdom before having the right to be taken seriously. Showing that something works as described is sufficient. I'd even believe Joseph Newman's machine worked if he could hook up a flat battery to it, start it going and come back some time later to a fully-charged battery. I've never heard of him being able to do this under controlled conditions, so he's a crank.
Oh, I'm sure that it's possible. There appears to be nothing physically impossible about creating beams of very short wavelength microwaves and beaming them through space to a receiver a considerable distance away (hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of miles). Space is lossless, and sufficiently large antennas can guarantee that any desired fraction of the transmitted power gets to the receiver. Sending power around the curve of the earth using very low frequencies, using a resistive Earth and lossy ionosphere as the two surfaces of a waveguide, at high efficiency, is a completely different matter. I want some evidence that conventional wisdom is in error before I give it the time of day. People who don't demand such evidence tend to be parted from both their money and credibility in short order. I prefer to give the readers of Slashdot something to chew on when they see fantastic claims. A little critical thinking, that's all I ask. Not of you, you've failed that test, but the others out there reading this will be served well."
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Maybe the ISP's staff spends dozens or hundreds of hours fielding the responses from people who were spammed demanding that the ISP do something about the spammer.
Maybe the ISP finds itself blocked by hundreds or thousands of mail admins around the world, and its subscribers decamp en masse because they can no longer get mail through. The ISP then goes belly-up.
Unless the spammer is willing to bear ALL of those costs (and has an agreement with the ISP holding the ISP harmless, sufficient credit to pay the costs, etc. etc.), s/he should go to jail as the thief and vandal s/he is.
Spam is theft of service. Spammers have no business existing. Anyone who spams should have to pay back the trebled costs of their damages (including people's time to download, recognize and delete the spam) preferably from wages earned from a work-release program shoveling muck out of sewer pipes (one of the few poetically just outcomes). Or they could just die painfully.
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It's entertaining to shoot you down like Snoopy on his little doghouse, but I have to get some work done now.
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I cannot offhand think of anything she wrote which would contradict that seriously. Then again, it's been years since I studied with Randroids. I'll have to settle for not disagreeing with you (and mention that my memory agrees pretty much with your statements).
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You're throwing around words that sound good to the ignorant ("subatomic particles", "quantum physics", "specific frequencies", "work cycles") and trying to use them to baffle people into taking you seriously. I take you as an idiot or a troll (same difference).
I believe! Halleluia!Anyone with an RF voltmeter and a little bit of gear (more or less equivalent to a crystal radio) could measure the transmission efficiency from an AM radio tower to a receiving antenna of a particular size and design. From this, they wouldn't have much trouble calculating how much power you'd need to light a fluorescent bulb at 100 miles given a similar transmitter and receiver; with the right licenses and equipment you could proceed to actually do it. There is nothing divine about this ability, it only takes a decent education, money and (different from Tesla's day) regulatory relief.
Yeah, inverse-square law. This is modified somewhat if the waves are confined by the ionosphere because you're no longer transmitting to infinite space, but conservation says that all energy has to come from somewhere and geometry says that you spread that energy to cover every point on the surface surrounding the point from which it radiates; if the energy isn't spread evenly, then you have hot spots and dead spots. If you are asserting that you do not have any reduction in areal power density in inverse proportion to the increase of area of the boundary surface, you are claiming that the total amount of energy goes up with distance and energy is not conserved.This is an utterly extraordinary, nay, fantastic claim. State your evidence in support of it.
Since you're already starting with RF, it would make more sense to just have a set of taps on a small transformer driven directly from the ambient field and rectify at the desired voltage straight from those, but that would require understanding what you're talking about. You don't; you're just bullshitting. You're trying to practice physics as if it were theology. I'll give you a hint: your performance is miserable, and you'd be laughed out of any high-school class worthy of the name. "First remove the beam that is in your own eye...""
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The thing that really made AC and killed DC was the cost of generation and transmission. Because DC cannot use transformers, the voltage of generation, transmission and consumption all have to be more or less the same (before resistive losses, which are considerable at voltages like 110). AC was always more desirable, because DC required all kinds of little generating stations everywhere in order to keep voltage drops down to an acceptable level. When Tesla demonstrated the induction motor (which could operate off of AC current), he removed the last roadblock to big, centralized, efficient, cost-effective AC power stations. All the induction motor did was remove a critical amount of the logjam placed there by entrenched interests and Edison PR; once that was gone, it was all over for DC distribution (except in subways and other electric rail systems, oddly enough).
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I'll bet you won't be able to find this in as many words, because the concept of "a fair amount" is foreign to the philosophy. Consider the example of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. He did an enormous amount of work on a housing project for nothing, because it was an interesting problem and he wanted the satisfaction of seeing it done. In other words, he did it as art. Consider John Galt, who didn't demand anything other than the value of his work considered as a market good (and refused to put his work on the un-free market when he was subject to arbitrary and capricious re-valuation of his labor). What's "fair"? Unless you define fair as what you get when free bidders and free sellers agree to exchange money, I don't think that you can find anything in Rand to support your assertion. Furthermore, given the loaded meanings given to "fairness" these days (like "a living wage" for completely unskilled work performed by an indifferent worker) and the incompatibility of these meanings with Rand's philosophy, you should probably not be using that word at all. (In other words, it's not efficacious.)
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- The window of frequencies which can be used to send power through air, clouds, etc. is low enough in frequency (and thus long in wavelength) that you can't make "really narrow beams that everybody could avoid". The original schemes called for receivers literally miles across, and safe zones for some distance beyond. The power density was only 70 watts/m^2 at the peak, to avoid thermal blooming and defocussing of the beam from atmospheric effects.
- There is no requirement for any "new microwave laser". Any set of amplifiers which can drive a phased array will do the job; electronically-steered radars do exactly this, and prove that it requires nothing more sophisticated than the technology of 20 years ago.
- Having a coherent source doesn't automatically create a tiny beamwidth. You need an aperture that's wide enough to focus the radiation. Ever wonder why big telescopes can see more detail than small telescopes (up to the point where the atmosphere doesn't allow any further improvement)? It's called the diffraction limit; look it up.
All in all, it looks like you should do some studying. You can start with the demonstrations which were done at Goldstone, beaming power through just as much air as a beam coming down from orbit would have to transit. You should find all of this very informative."
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I agree with you 100% about the minute-by-minute pricing. I think the one extra thing you could use is a co-generating furnace. If you were buying gas even for the outrageous price of $1.00/therm, burning it in a co-generator of 35% efficiency would give you electricity at under $0.10/KWH... and you'd still have the heat. With the price at $0.25/KWH you would be making out like a bandit under the current situation. Unfortunately, San Diego doesn't need heat enough of the year to make it pay to have much invested in a furnace. You might as well have a fireplace and use that for the little supplemental heat you need, and get the atmosphere in the bargain.
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If you had a co-generating water heater you'd buy it because it could save you money. You'd plumb it into the gas pipe and hook it up to the electric panel, and maybe you'd have a little control box somewhere so that you could tell it when you typically use hot water (so that it could have it ready for you). After that, you'd ignore it. One typical cycle might be for the heater to sink its reserves to almost zero in the morning when people are getting ready for work, then sit full of cold water until the afternoon demand peak. When electric rates were nice and high it would kick into action, making watts for the grid and heating water with the waste heat. You'd come home to all the hot water you needed for bathing, washing clothes, and the like; overnight, the water heater might even use electricity instead of gas to top up heat losses, if the rates were low enough. If you could combine appliance cycles you might have the clothes washer run first thing in the morning after you leave (when electricity is cheap) and then have the water heater re-heat itself in the afternoon (when co-generation would command premium prices); if you had an electric dryer you could then have it run late the next night. This would give savings to people willing to work their schedule around the electric rates, or even give them a small profit. It would certainly move to eliminate price spikes, because the flexibility of both demand and generation would be far greater than what we have today.
This isn't distribution, it's generation (which is NOT a natural monopoly). The people who run the grid have a rather cozy relationship with the big generating firms (they used to be one and the same), and that's not an easy thing to break in to. There's also the little fact that dealing with a few big suppliers is a heck of a lot easier to manage than thousands or millions of small ones. Just because there are huge efficiencies to be obtained and enormous possible cost savings doesn't mean that it'll be done without a push from someone in authority."
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There's a whole bunch of issues there that need to be addressed.
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The demand spike alone is enough. The real problem is that there is no market in electricity at the consumer level. In general, people pay one rate per KWH regardless of time-of-day or state of the grid, and anyone can tell you that a KWH at 4 PM on a scorcher is worth a lot more than a KWH at 3 AM on any day of the year. But people pay no more for the 4 PM KWH, and they have no incentive to shift their demand to 3 AM.
There's a huge problem with lack of infrastructure, and I don't mean turbines and wires and transformers. The infrastructure that's lacking is the market at the consumer level, and the information technology required to support it. People can and do drive around until they see gasoline at an acceptably low price, but they have no way to put the dishwasher on standby until the price of electricity is reasonable. You could make a huge dent in your peak-hour electic consumption if you had an air-conditioner that froze water overnight and cooled your house with the ice during the day, but if your electric meter can't distinguish (or just as badly, can't tell you) the difference between a 4 PM and 3 AM kilowatt-hour, you have no way to benefit from this. The consumer could make a big cut in the capital costs of the grid, but the consumer has no way to reap the benefits even if they'd pay for the hardware. This is a failure of the market: the pricing information is not getting where it needs to go.
The power companies probably don't want this to happen. If people could actually be full participants in the market, they could sell power as well as buying it. They could stuff KWH into batteries overnight and try to make a profit by selling back to the grid during the day, and you'd see lots of guerilla solar installations (except they wouldn't be guerillas any more). You'd see lots of people running co-generators, and the real sophisticates would be doing things like burning natural gas to re-heat their water tanks between 3 PM and 8 PM while selling the electricity, and running off the grid for electricity the rest of the day. If electricity was a quarter a KWH, you could make a rather tidy profit off your hot water heater. But none of this can happen unless and until there is a real, minute-by-minute market in electric power where everyone can participate, and you know who's not going to let that happen.
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