Advances in communication and transportation in the last century mean that members of these three groups are migrating away from the areas their ancestors lived in. I live in Australia but my ancestors came from England. My wife was born in Malaysia but her ancestors came from China. Our son is a mix of two of the groups defined by TFA.
Yesterday he brought home a school project to work on. Each child in the class has to fill in a page in a scrap book about themselves. His classmates come from England, Spain, China, Egypt, Australia (one Aboriginal boy) and Turkey. The next generation here will be even more mixed than the last.
Why would you use a laptop and a dongle to transfer data over this thing? What was the submitter thinking, why wouldn't you just use wifi?
Because there won't be any wifi. Cellular networking won the battle when the iphone came out and phone companies started selling netbooks on contract. Ten years from now small to medium businesses won't have any networking gear in their offices at all. They will use cellular networks for all their traffic. Bigger businesses may have private networks or microcells like this.
The wiki article talks about 5 to 10 ohm ground resistance.
I know a guy who worked for Telstra, which is our main telco as far as domestic wiring is concerned. In one part of Melbourne you have trains going north/south, trams going east/west and off to the south west. Phone lines in the ground all over the place. Earth currents were extremely high in that area. They had to keep replacing phone cable because of the corrosion.
Okay everybody is having a go at me over that. My intention was to point out that we have a finite supply of uranium, just like coal. I didn't mean that uranium comes from dead plant material.
My son plays a lot of computer games and most have a pause function. I have noticed that the games he plays in the playground with other kids have also acquired a pause function.
I think the last five months have demonstrated that apple can operate perfectly well without Steve Jobs anyway. Thats much better than having a single point of failure.
It doesn't come down to organ damage, it comes down to interfering with the electrical signals controlling the heart. 20ma is what is necessary to send you into defibrilation. That comes out to 20 cm^2, not a lot of area and less than the cross sectional area of the heart.
Not sure where your 20 cm^2 comes from. If the heart is 10cm wide its cross section would be 100cm^2 and the current would be 10mA.
Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.
That would make a current density of 10 amps/meter^2. It only takes 20ma to kill you.
10 A/meter^2 == 10uA/mm^2
It would come down to whether the organs which fail at 20mA provide an easy path for current. I suspect the answer is no because things which get damaged tend to have moderate resistance and high energy dissipation.
Single Wire Earth Return is a standard way to distribute electrical power to remote places in my country. The current density in the return path is very low because the medium which carries it has a high cross sectional area.
Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.
Personally I use copper wire to move electrons from place to place. My state runs partly on hydro electricity from Tasmania, 200km to the south across a substantial body of water. Apparently the submarine cable which does the job only carries electrons in one direction. The return path is through the water, which comes built in with charge carriers.
FinalAnkleHealer sends along an IBTimes article proposing that $500 ultra-thin laptops, capable of multitasking and editing multimedia content, could be the next market contested by Intel and AMD.
Good to know they are not running MSDOS, DRDOS, CP/M, RSTS, RT-11, Windows95 or MacOS9.
I have a computer science degree but I taught myself programming in my teens. A lot of people who learn at school will learn how to find the Run button in Eclipse. They may learn the syntax of Java. But they won't see it as a vocation, so the bits they learn won't connect.
Bradbury isn't an SF writer the way Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov were. His work always had the thinnest possible skin of technology surrounding a story about people. We was one of the more humanist writers of the day and the technology in his stories often made little sense.
Any story that isn't central to people is a waste of time. Be a parent for a few years and you should realize this.. everything else is a distraction.
Well I have been a parent for seven years but my taste in SF hasn't changed much in that time. If anything it has stopped changing because I have less time to read.
I like humanist stories. Bradbury's short story Kaleidoscope comes to mind. In a similar vein I would count "Wait it Out" by Larry Niven and "Transit of Earth" by Arthur C Clarke. I don't see a need for a flame war about it. I was just pointing out that Bradbury had a different style from many other SF writers. Along with Kurt Vonnegut he is a writer more accessible to non-SF readers.
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Lets say my boss is hanging around, waiting for something important to him to get done. My password is a very rude word...
Hey, that's not funny!
Other types of lubricant are way too expensive.
The forces involved in an earthquake are so far beyond what man can control or cause that it is not even funny.
What about lubricating a fault with water?
Meta-woosh.
New Zealand is known for its negative attitude toward Californians.
The sheer weight of them would cause earth quakes.
Yes, I'm sure that is what it would be used for. Also, how do you do this from space? we need to be able to do it from space..
Why go to space? If you need to evacuate California couldn't you just send them to New Zealand for a month?
It should be possible to avoid the Big One and instead have a lot of small quakes at predictable places and times.
Advances in communication and transportation in the last century mean that members of these three groups are migrating away from the areas their ancestors lived in. I live in Australia but my ancestors came from England. My wife was born in Malaysia but her ancestors came from China. Our son is a mix of two of the groups defined by TFA.
Yesterday he brought home a school project to work on. Each child in the class has to fill in a page in a scrap book about themselves. His classmates come from England, Spain, China, Egypt, Australia (one Aboriginal boy) and Turkey. The next generation here will be even more mixed than the last.
Why would you use a laptop and a dongle to transfer data over this thing? What was the submitter thinking, why wouldn't you just use wifi?
Because there won't be any wifi. Cellular networking won the battle when the iphone came out and phone companies started selling netbooks on contract. Ten years from now small to medium businesses won't have any networking gear in their offices at all. They will use cellular networks for all their traffic. Bigger businesses may have private networks or microcells like this.
The wiki article talks about 5 to 10 ohm ground resistance.
I know a guy who worked for Telstra, which is our main telco as far as domestic wiring is concerned. In one part of Melbourne you have trains going north/south, trams going east/west and off to the south west. Phone lines in the ground all over the place. Earth currents were extremely high in that area. They had to keep replacing phone cable because of the corrosion.
Okay everybody is having a go at me over that. My intention was to point out that we have a finite supply of uranium, just like coal. I didn't mean that uranium comes from dead plant material.
My son plays a lot of computer games and most have a pause function. I have noticed that the games he plays in the playground with other kids have also acquired a pause function.
Sorry if I offended you. That was a Suzanne Vega reference. Maybe SV isn't geeky enough for /.
She looks like a really good girl, as girls go.
I think the last five months have demonstrated that apple can operate perfectly well without Steve Jobs anyway. Thats much better than having a single point of failure.
That 20cm^2 is cross sectional area, not 20cm on a side. If it were square, it would be 4.5cm on a side.
Ah then you mean 20^2 cm^2.
"clean" coal (aka carbon sequestration) as a pipe dream
Can someone please tell me what coal is if it is not carbon sequestration?
Coal burning is carbon sequestration in reverse.
In other news, atomic energy could definitely cover our energy needs.
Until we run out of Uranium. Thats a fossil fuel too.
It doesn't come down to organ damage, it comes down to interfering with the electrical signals controlling the heart. 20ma is what is necessary to send you into defibrilation. That comes out to 20 cm^2, not a lot of area and less than the cross sectional area of the heart.
Not sure where your 20 cm^2 comes from. If the heart is 10cm wide its cross section would be 100cm^2 and the current would be 10mA.
Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.
That would make a current density of 10 amps/meter^2. It only takes 20ma to kill you.
10 A/meter^2 == 10uA/mm^2
It would come down to whether the organs which fail at 20mA provide an easy path for current. I suspect the answer is no because things which get damaged tend to have moderate resistance and high energy dissipation.
Single Wire Earth Return is a standard way to distribute electrical power to remote places in my country. The current density in the return path is very low because the medium which carries it has a high cross sectional area.
Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.
Personally I use copper wire to move electrons from place to place. My state runs partly on hydro electricity from Tasmania, 200km to the south across a substantial body of water. Apparently the submarine cable which does the job only carries electrons in one direction. The return path is through the water, which comes built in with charge carriers.
FinalAnkleHealer sends along an IBTimes article proposing that $500 ultra-thin laptops, capable of multitasking and editing multimedia content, could be the next market contested by Intel and AMD.
Good to know they are not running MSDOS, DRDOS, CP/M, RSTS, RT-11, Windows95 or MacOS9.
I have a computer science degree but I taught myself programming in my teens. A lot of people who learn at school will learn how to find the Run button in Eclipse. They may learn the syntax of Java. But they won't see it as a vocation, so the bits they learn won't connect.
IMO that seems more like wandering into an architecture school looking for welders.
Thats funny because my wife is a qualified architect and welder. But I suppose she is non-typical ;)
Excuse me.
Bradbury isn't an SF writer the way Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov were. His work always had the thinnest possible skin of technology surrounding a story about people. We was one of the more humanist writers of the day and the technology in his stories often made little sense.
Any story that isn't central to people is a waste of time. Be a parent for a few years and you should realize this.. everything else is a distraction.
Well I have been a parent for seven years but my taste in SF hasn't changed much in that time. If anything it has stopped changing because I have less time to read.
I like humanist stories. Bradbury's short story Kaleidoscope comes to mind. In a similar vein I would count "Wait it Out" by Larry Niven and "Transit of Earth" by Arthur C Clarke. I don't see a need for a flame war about it. I was just pointing out that Bradbury had a different style from many other SF writers. Along with Kurt Vonnegut he is a writer more accessible to non-SF readers.