We do not know that this is forever. Natural Selection pressures which lead to the development of larger forewings my over the next few decades lead the butterflies right back to the larger wingspans. Or not.
That's evolution. There is no *should* - there is only what is; and what is, is constantly changing. Bigger wings, smaller wings, it's all the same to me, until you can show me species *dieing out*, or having abnormally high rates of birth defects (and smaller wings are NOT a birth defect if they otherwise function normally), cancers, etc.
We should keep watching, with interest, what happens in the areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima, but so far, the evidence doesn't suggest catastrophic failure of life, nor is it likely too - the increase in background radiation was temporarily very high, but quickly subsided as the radiactive substances released by the plant dispersed and dilluted.
Finally, I will need a chance to look in more depth at this "study", but I have to wonder if they really proved these changes were due to Fukushima, and not due to something else which was co-temporal (e.g. result of selective pressures do to local ecological changes due to the tsunami; or possibly from the lots of chemical contamination of the environment due to the tsunami washing out industrial facilities, hospitals, etc).
As others have said, I'm not sure that 11-Venn is useful for most people's comprehension, but I'd love to have it on a t-shirt. Mathematicians come up with some awesome abstract art, sometimes.
Yeah, more or less, FTTN is probably as good a classification as any. I live in an apartment building with like 40 apartments. I believe the entire building is serviced by a single fiber. However, I am also on the lowest speed tier they offer for the fiber service. I think it goes up to like 100/10 as the top tier, but that's pretty pricey. Inside the building, it essentially uses a high-speed form of DSL on the building's telephone lines to get the signal to each apartment - and television service over the coax lines.
I'm currently lucky in that I'm in a pretty small part of Cincinnati, OH that is currently served by Cincinnati Bell's fiber-optic service, so I get 10/2 service through them. The place where I find having the extra speed is nice is that I can better "multi-task". Previously, with slower-speed Internet offerings, if I was, say, downloading a large file (like a Linux distro.iso or game download on Steam or Direct2Drive), I could read webpages, of course, though they would load a bit slower, but I couldn't, for example, watch full-resolution Netflix or Hulu video (the resolution would downgrade pretty often).
With the higher speed offering, I can watch HD video streams while downloading stuff in the background, or have multiple file downloads going and they'll all download pretty fast, etc.
That's kind of nice - but I agree with the parent that it's not necessarily worth an extra $30/mo - but for me, the 10/2 tier on the fiber optic package is only $40/mo total, which is the same as I'd be paying for the lowest tier on Time-Warner Cable (which also offers comparable speeds), and I think is only about $10/mo more than I was paying for CB DSL (which was 5/1, IIRC) previously.
So, most organic compounds break down over time in the environment. Won't caffeine also break down? At what sort of rate does it break down?
The only way I'd really be worried about caffeine in the water is if it's going to keep accumulating forever, or at such a high rate that it reaches meaningful concentrations.
It doesn't really matter the reason. If property owners can legally restrict your use of camera flash, they can restrict other uses of technology too - for pretty much any reason they wish.
I'm not sure if the size of population matters - with more population, you have more money. So the question is, how does the economics of the system scale on a per-capita basis?
If it's affordable on a per-capita basis for 1400 people, why not 140 million people?
It's an interesting experiment at a small scale which will help answer either if solar is viable (technically and financially) at a smaller scale, or not.
I would point out that I doubt that this tiny pacific island has much in the way of heavy industry, however. I think wind and solar could potentially (if they get cheap enough), become a larger portion of the U.S. and other developed nations economies (perhaps something like 40-50% of total generation. I don't think for an industrialized nation, it can become 100% of the power grid - industry uses just too much power.
Also - I wonder how much air conditioning is used on that island? I imagine that, since historically their electric has been expensive, they probably largely haven't depended a lot on A/C? I also wonder what the weather is like there? South Pacific, I believe, is pretty much warm year 'round - but does it ever really get stiflingly hot like it does in places on the mainland (in Ohio, where I live, and surrounding states, back at the end of June and beginning of July, we had 2 or 3 weeks of 100+ degree days).
As someone else pointed out - you are free to use Wifi [em]outside the Olympic Park[/em] which is private property. You are only allowed on the grounds according to the rules by which they setup and you agree to when you purchase a ticket? Don't like the rules - then you become a trespasser and they eject you from the Park.
It sucks, but it would seem to be quite legal. They aren't regulating wireless spectrum, per se, they are regulating access to their property.
So, uhh, I'm a bit confused how anyone would provision outside internet access to their WiFi hotspot in the olympic park? The only answer which comes to mind is phones with built-in WiFi hotspots - but in Britain, if you're getting your phone data connection from BT (which you've paid for), why would they be able to stop you from using it?
It is, after all, a BT wifi hotspot which they have been paid for.
Well, if you're phone is getting service from BT, your phone in hotspot mode may possibly qualify as a sanctioned wifi hotspot. Interesting question, that.
1) Do you really understand how much power a nuclear reactor generates every day? A single decent mine can produce enough fuel each year to power multiple power plants.
I saw a nuclear engineer make a post once about a nuclear fuel enrichment facility in France (I believe it was called Georges-Besse). This was a gas diffusion plant. IIRC, he said it used the power output of four nuclear reactors to enrich enough fuel to run all of France's nuclear reactors (according to Wikipedia, there's 57 reactors in service).
So, you would far more than 'break-even' using power from nuclear plants to mine, transport, and enrich fuel. You might understand why that's the case if you can wrap your head around the mind-blowing fact that a pound of fissile material has the energy of over a million pounds of fossil fuels.
The problem is, with current nuclear economics, the fuel is *already* "cheap" - most of the costs of nuclear, from what I'm told, are the upfront costs of getting a nuclear plant sited, approved, constructed, then interest charges on the loans used to build the reactors when the construction inevitably hits delays from anti-nuke lawsuits designed to add a year or two to the construction schedule, etc.
The fact that it costs something like $5Bn-$10Bn per GW. Compared to that the fuel is already almost free, and making it cheaper won't really change the cost of nuclear-generated electricity.
So, I think GE just plans to increase its profit margins on fuel - I mean, if they are the exclusive licensee of the Australian patents and trade secrets on this tech, and because of proliferation concerns the government basically gives them additional levels of secrecy protection beyond normal IP protections, I don't see there being a lot of market pressure on them to sell the fuel any cheaper than their competition, do you?
Were they working with GE? Because I've heard of Laser Excitation Enrichment (I had heard GE was working on it), and that yeah, it dramatically reduces the power needed to enrich U. I've also heard about the fears of weapons proliferation, but that seems kind of like BS to me - those countries already have weapons programs.
So, I'm not sure how depriving ourselves of useful technology stops other countries from getting weapons. . .
Why can't Australia just build their own fuel facilities? They have, I believe, the worlds largest Uranium mine, or second largest, something like that. I guess they can't currently enrich it and fabricate fuel, but that seems like a problem they can fix, if they wanted to.
High Temp Gas Cooled Reactors do not need water cooling to attain reasonable efficiency. There are various designs approaches for this - in some, you use fuel "pebbles". There's also a concept called a molten salt reactor, which could be designed in a high-temp gas cooled configuration.
With such reactors, you just dump your heat into the air instead of the water. This would be a good idea for Africa, US West/SW, etc.
Well, for one thing, our current approach to nuclear waste is completely moronic. Trying to bury it for 100k years is a bit of a fool's errand.
The only sane solution to the nuclear waste problem is to force the long-lived waste (mostly plutonium, but some other actinides as well) to fission, and the only way to do that is in a fast nuclear reactor.
In truth, we've painted ourselves into a bit of a corner. We NEED to do R&D on fast reactors (especially molten salt fast reactors, and the Integral Fast Reactor), and start to build whatever is going to be the safest, most effective nuclear reactor.
When you burn off the long-lived waste in a fast reactor, you do get more radioactive waste as output BUT that waste cools off "quickly" - it becomes basically non-radioactive after 300 years (I say "basically non-radioactive" because you do get extremely low levels of lingering radiation for a long time - that's how half-lives work, mathematically, but the radiation is lower than average earth crust after about 300 years).
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a 300 year problem than a 100k year problem, wouldn't you?
Those types of problems can change pretty fast if need be. If we need more containment vessels per year, you build more foundries (that, itself, will take a few years, it's true, but the point is it *can* speed up over time).
The nuclear industry worldwide is trying to move to a relatively small number of standardized designs. If the demand to build them is there, while the first few of any given design will almost surely run into delays and budget overruns (such is the nature of building the first 2 or 3 units of anything remotely sophisticated), the nuclear construction industry will gain experience that will make the next few go faster and cheaper.
That is, there's a learning curve for anything, and we're at the very bottom of that curve right now.
Finally, factory-produced small modular reactors give the promise of having much higher construction throughput, with the tradeoff that the power plants may be a bit more expensive on a per-kW basis (but because of the economies of scale of factory production, the difference may not be much, and eventually, the smaller reactors might even end up cheaper on a per-unit-power basis).
Honestly, if all the sane nations get a majority of their energy from nuclear power, we can let those "fourth world" states burn all the fossil fuel they want - there will be a lot more supply available to sell to them at probably lower prices, and their consumption is not likely to be anywhere in the ballpark of what we are currently consuming.
In the meantime, we can build safer next-gen nuclear in many more stable third-world nations to help them develop. 5 or 10 small countries burning fossil fuels would be ok if everyone else dramatically cut their usage.
In addition to the other commentor's point about using nuclear power to extract, transport, and enrich fuel would allow you to dramatically decrease the carbon footprint of nuclear, there's also the points that:
2) Newer enrichment technology like centrifuges and, soon, laser excitation enrichment, dramatically reduce the energy needed to enrich uranium (which is a proliferation concern of course, but us keeping ourselves from having centrifuges doesn't seem likely to stop Iran from building them). I mean, the energy requirements for a gas centrifuge is something like 1/50 the power needed for the old gas diffusion plants (which were just horribly inefficient). I don't know what laser enrichment will be, but I gather it will use something like 1/100th the the power of gas diffusion facility.
3) If you use Thorium in a molten salt reactor, you don't need any enrichment at all (well, ok, you need startup fissile and for the first few decades, that probably means some enriched uranium or U/Pu mix, but eventually you can start new plants from the U-233 which was bred in old Thorium plants which will be being decommissioned, so you wouldn't need much Uranium mining at all), and it is currently a waste product of mining other minerals, so there's essentially no additional mining footprint (as demand grows, this may eventually change).
I will add, however, that I agree with most of your point - we need to start iterating new generations of nuclear plant designs - that's the only way they will ever improve. I do think that modern designs have some significant safety advantages. But, my Hoover Dam example, if it's not obvious, is meant to point out that just because something was designed and built before 1970 doesn't mean it's necessarily dangerous, even though it has the potential to be.
An old but well maintained structure or machine can be quite safe - and you don't hear anyone agitating to SHUT IT DOWN NOW when it comes to Hoover Dam - even though there have been several large Dam failures around the world in the last century.
My GOD we HAVE to shut down the Hoover Dam RIGHT NOW. That antique behemoth finished construction in 1936. That junker is over 70 years old and is going to cause a hydraulic catastrophe at any minute!!!!
It's really not that complicated. If it's cheap enough, and produces enough power, it will be useful for some people, but will probably not replace Grid Power (though it may help reduce consumption of Grid power, which is generally a win). For other people, because of their circumstances, it will not be so useful.
Therein lies the great, simple truth that most advocates on both sides of the argument ignore.
Solar power (and wind power) isn't a 100% solution for our national energy needs. That doesn't mean it can't play a useful role in reducing use of gas, coal, oil/diesel.
As an example, I live in an apartment. I have east facing, large windows which would be a great place to install some thin-film PV. However, I would only do that if the price wasn't so high that I can't recover the costs in about a year or two or three, because I might not be living in this apartment next year. I might be able to sell the PV to the next occupant of the apartment, or to some other person, even if I can't fully recover the costs through my own use.
But, best case scenario, I reduce my monthly power bills by maybe a few percent during the spring and fall months. I imagine if the film produces a pretty good amount of power, I would be able to run my computer, monitor, and speakers off the power it generates, charge my mobile phone, and perhaps run a ham radio from it.
I'm probably not going to run the fridge, AC, or apartment lighting from it.
That makes no sense. Even the example given, "party A dialed party B" *is* content. If they have to get information from you, that is content, isn't it?
Also, how is something "less illegal" - I mean, something is pretty much either legal or illegal. I don't see how there's exactly degrees of legality?
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We do not know that this is forever. Natural Selection pressures which lead to the development of larger forewings my over the next few decades lead the butterflies right back to the larger wingspans. Or not.
That's evolution. There is no *should* - there is only what is; and what is, is constantly changing. Bigger wings, smaller wings, it's all the same to me, until you can show me species *dieing out*, or having abnormally high rates of birth defects (and smaller wings are NOT a birth defect if they otherwise function normally), cancers, etc.
We should keep watching, with interest, what happens in the areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima, but so far, the evidence doesn't suggest catastrophic failure of life, nor is it likely too - the increase in background radiation was temporarily very high, but quickly subsided as the radiactive substances released by the plant dispersed and dilluted.
Finally, I will need a chance to look in more depth at this "study", but I have to wonder if they really proved these changes were due to Fukushima, and not due to something else which was co-temporal (e.g. result of selective pressures do to local ecological changes due to the tsunami; or possibly from the lots of chemical contamination of the environment due to the tsunami washing out industrial facilities, hospitals, etc).
As others have said, I'm not sure that 11-Venn is useful for most people's comprehension, but I'd love to have it on a t-shirt. Mathematicians come up with some awesome abstract art, sometimes.
Yeah, more or less, FTTN is probably as good a classification as any. I live in an apartment building with like 40 apartments. I believe the entire building is serviced by a single fiber. However, I am also on the lowest speed tier they offer for the fiber service. I think it goes up to like 100/10 as the top tier, but that's pretty pricey. Inside the building, it essentially uses a high-speed form of DSL on the building's telephone lines to get the signal to each apartment - and television service over the coax lines.
I'm currently lucky in that I'm in a pretty small part of Cincinnati, OH that is currently served by Cincinnati Bell's fiber-optic service, so I get 10/2 service through them. The place where I find having the extra speed is nice is that I can better "multi-task". Previously, with slower-speed Internet offerings, if I was, say, downloading a large file (like a Linux distro .iso or game download on Steam or Direct2Drive), I could read webpages, of course, though they would load a bit slower, but I couldn't, for example, watch full-resolution Netflix or Hulu video (the resolution would downgrade pretty often).
With the higher speed offering, I can watch HD video streams while downloading stuff in the background, or have multiple file downloads going and they'll all download pretty fast, etc.
That's kind of nice - but I agree with the parent that it's not necessarily worth an extra $30/mo - but for me, the 10/2 tier on the fiber optic package is only $40/mo total, which is the same as I'd be paying for the lowest tier on Time-Warner Cable (which also offers comparable speeds), and I think is only about $10/mo more than I was paying for CB DSL (which was 5/1, IIRC) previously.
So, most organic compounds break down over time in the environment. Won't caffeine also break down? At what sort of rate does it break down?
The only way I'd really be worried about caffeine in the water is if it's going to keep accumulating forever, or at such a high rate that it reaches meaningful concentrations.
*Whoosh*
It doesn't really matter the reason. If property owners can legally restrict your use of camera flash, they can restrict other uses of technology too - for pretty much any reason they wish.
I'm not sure if the size of population matters - with more population, you have more money. So the question is, how does the economics of the system scale on a per-capita basis?
If it's affordable on a per-capita basis for 1400 people, why not 140 million people?
It's an interesting experiment at a small scale which will help answer either if solar is viable (technically and financially) at a smaller scale, or not.
I would point out that I doubt that this tiny pacific island has much in the way of heavy industry, however. I think wind and solar could potentially (if they get cheap enough), become a larger portion of the U.S. and other developed nations economies (perhaps something like 40-50% of total generation. I don't think for an industrialized nation, it can become 100% of the power grid - industry uses just too much power.
Also - I wonder how much air conditioning is used on that island? I imagine that, since historically their electric has been expensive, they probably largely haven't depended a lot on A/C? I also wonder what the weather is like there? South Pacific, I believe, is pretty much warm year 'round - but does it ever really get stiflingly hot like it does in places on the mainland (in Ohio, where I live, and surrounding states, back at the end of June and beginning of July, we had 2 or 3 weeks of 100+ degree days).
As someone else pointed out - you are free to use Wifi [em]outside the Olympic Park[/em] which is private property. You are only allowed on the grounds according to the rules by which they setup and you agree to when you purchase a ticket? Don't like the rules - then you become a trespasser and they eject you from the Park.
It sucks, but it would seem to be quite legal. They aren't regulating wireless spectrum, per se, they are regulating access to their property.
So, uhh, I'm a bit confused how anyone would provision outside internet access to their WiFi hotspot in the olympic park? The only answer which comes to mind is phones with built-in WiFi hotspots - but in Britain, if you're getting your phone data connection from BT (which you've paid for), why would they be able to stop you from using it?
It is, after all, a BT wifi hotspot which they have been paid for.
Well, if you're phone is getting service from BT, your phone in hotspot mode may possibly qualify as a sanctioned wifi hotspot. Interesting question, that.
1) Do you really understand how much power a nuclear reactor generates every day? A single decent mine can produce enough fuel each year to power multiple power plants.
I saw a nuclear engineer make a post once about a nuclear fuel enrichment facility in France (I believe it was called Georges-Besse). This was a gas diffusion plant. IIRC, he said it used the power output of four nuclear reactors to enrich enough fuel to run all of France's nuclear reactors (according to Wikipedia, there's 57 reactors in service).
So, you would far more than 'break-even' using power from nuclear plants to mine, transport, and enrich fuel. You might understand why that's the case if you can wrap your head around the mind-blowing fact that a pound of fissile material has the energy of over a million pounds of fossil fuels.
The problem is, with current nuclear economics, the fuel is *already* "cheap" - most of the costs of nuclear, from what I'm told, are the upfront costs of getting a nuclear plant sited, approved, constructed, then interest charges on the loans used to build the reactors when the construction inevitably hits delays from anti-nuke lawsuits designed to add a year or two to the construction schedule, etc.
The fact that it costs something like $5Bn-$10Bn per GW. Compared to that the fuel is already almost free, and making it cheaper won't really change the cost of nuclear-generated electricity.
So, I think GE just plans to increase its profit margins on fuel - I mean, if they are the exclusive licensee of the Australian patents and trade secrets on this tech, and because of proliferation concerns the government basically gives them additional levels of secrecy protection beyond normal IP protections, I don't see there being a lot of market pressure on them to sell the fuel any cheaper than their competition, do you?
I found this with a quick Google search:
http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/laser.html
That mentions the process as being Australian, so I'm going to conclude that is likely the same process you refer to.
Looks like, at least in the US, it hasn't been buried. Maybe in AU they buried it, dunno.
Were they working with GE? Because I've heard of Laser Excitation Enrichment (I had heard GE was working on it), and that yeah, it dramatically reduces the power needed to enrich U. I've also heard about the fears of weapons proliferation, but that seems kind of like BS to me - those countries already have weapons programs.
So, I'm not sure how depriving ourselves of useful technology stops other countries from getting weapons. . .
Why can't Australia just build their own fuel facilities? They have, I believe, the worlds largest Uranium mine, or second largest, something like that. I guess they can't currently enrich it and fabricate fuel, but that seems like a problem they can fix, if they wanted to.
High Temp Gas Cooled Reactors do not need water cooling to attain reasonable efficiency. There are various designs approaches for this - in some, you use fuel "pebbles". There's also a concept called a molten salt reactor, which could be designed in a high-temp gas cooled configuration.
With such reactors, you just dump your heat into the air instead of the water. This would be a good idea for Africa, US West/SW, etc.
Well, for one thing, our current approach to nuclear waste is completely moronic. Trying to bury it for 100k years is a bit of a fool's errand.
The only sane solution to the nuclear waste problem is to force the long-lived waste (mostly plutonium, but some other actinides as well) to fission, and the only way to do that is in a fast nuclear reactor.
In truth, we've painted ourselves into a bit of a corner. We NEED to do R&D on fast reactors (especially molten salt fast reactors, and the Integral Fast Reactor), and start to build whatever is going to be the safest, most effective nuclear reactor.
When you burn off the long-lived waste in a fast reactor, you do get more radioactive waste as output BUT that waste cools off "quickly" - it becomes basically non-radioactive after 300 years (I say "basically non-radioactive" because you do get extremely low levels of lingering radiation for a long time - that's how half-lives work, mathematically, but the radiation is lower than average earth crust after about 300 years).
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a 300 year problem than a 100k year problem, wouldn't you?
Those types of problems can change pretty fast if need be. If we need more containment vessels per year, you build more foundries (that, itself, will take a few years, it's true, but the point is it *can* speed up over time).
The nuclear industry worldwide is trying to move to a relatively small number of standardized designs. If the demand to build them is there, while the first few of any given design will almost surely run into delays and budget overruns (such is the nature of building the first 2 or 3 units of anything remotely sophisticated), the nuclear construction industry will gain experience that will make the next few go faster and cheaper.
That is, there's a learning curve for anything, and we're at the very bottom of that curve right now.
Finally, factory-produced small modular reactors give the promise of having much higher construction throughput, with the tradeoff that the power plants may be a bit more expensive on a per-kW basis (but because of the economies of scale of factory production, the difference may not be much, and eventually, the smaller reactors might even end up cheaper on a per-unit-power basis).
Honestly, if all the sane nations get a majority of their energy from nuclear power, we can let those "fourth world" states burn all the fossil fuel they want - there will be a lot more supply available to sell to them at probably lower prices, and their consumption is not likely to be anywhere in the ballpark of what we are currently consuming.
In the meantime, we can build safer next-gen nuclear in many more stable third-world nations to help them develop. 5 or 10 small countries burning fossil fuels would be ok if everyone else dramatically cut their usage.
In addition to the other commentor's point about using nuclear power to extract, transport, and enrich fuel would allow you to dramatically decrease the carbon footprint of nuclear, there's also the points that:
2) Newer enrichment technology like centrifuges and, soon, laser excitation enrichment, dramatically reduce the energy needed to enrich uranium (which is a proliferation concern of course, but us keeping ourselves from having centrifuges doesn't seem likely to stop Iran from building them). I mean, the energy requirements for a gas centrifuge is something like 1/50 the power needed for the old gas diffusion plants (which were just horribly inefficient). I don't know what laser enrichment will be, but I gather it will use something like 1/100th the the power of gas diffusion facility.
3) If you use Thorium in a molten salt reactor, you don't need any enrichment at all (well, ok, you need startup fissile and for the first few decades, that probably means some enriched uranium or U/Pu mix, but eventually you can start new plants from the U-233 which was bred in old Thorium plants which will be being decommissioned, so you wouldn't need much Uranium mining at all), and it is currently a waste product of mining other minerals, so there's essentially no additional mining footprint (as demand grows, this may eventually change).
I will add, however, that I agree with most of your point - we need to start iterating new generations of nuclear plant designs - that's the only way they will ever improve. I do think that modern designs have some significant safety advantages. But, my Hoover Dam example, if it's not obvious, is meant to point out that just because something was designed and built before 1970 doesn't mean it's necessarily dangerous, even though it has the potential to be.
An old but well maintained structure or machine can be quite safe - and you don't hear anyone agitating to SHUT IT DOWN NOW when it comes to Hoover Dam - even though there have been several large Dam failures around the world in the last century.
My GOD we HAVE to shut down the Hoover Dam RIGHT NOW. That antique behemoth finished construction in 1936. That junker is over 70 years old and is going to cause a hydraulic catastrophe at any minute!!!!
And no, MacGruber doesn't count. . .
It's really not that complicated. If it's cheap enough, and produces enough power, it will be useful for some people, but will probably not replace Grid Power (though it may help reduce consumption of Grid power, which is generally a win). For other people, because of their circumstances, it will not be so useful.
Therein lies the great, simple truth that most advocates on both sides of the argument ignore.
Solar power (and wind power) isn't a 100% solution for our national energy needs. That doesn't mean it can't play a useful role in reducing use of gas, coal, oil/diesel.
As an example, I live in an apartment. I have east facing, large windows which would be a great place to install some thin-film PV. However, I would only do that if the price wasn't so high that I can't recover the costs in about a year or two or three, because I might not be living in this apartment next year. I might be able to sell the PV to the next occupant of the apartment, or to some other person, even if I can't fully recover the costs through my own use.
But, best case scenario, I reduce my monthly power bills by maybe a few percent during the spring and fall months. I imagine if the film produces a pretty good amount of power, I would be able to run my computer, monitor, and speakers off the power it generates, charge my mobile phone, and perhaps run a ham radio from it.
I'm probably not going to run the fridge, AC, or apartment lighting from it.
That makes no sense. Even the example given, "party A dialed party B" *is* content. If they have to get information from you, that is content, isn't it?
Also, how is something "less illegal" - I mean, something is pretty much either legal or illegal. I don't see how there's exactly degrees of legality?