To put the above numbers in context, Each GPS satellite transmits less power than one of the ground-stations. And it has to cover a whole hemisphere of the earth. There don't really exist filters good enough to overcome that disparity.
You misunderstand how switching power supplies work. They have a sticker number '1000W' - this is (ideally) the maximum amount of power they supply. They will also have an efficiency curve, which may vary from - say - 50% at 10W to 90% at 700W, and 80% at 1000W.
The important thing is the efficiency at the amount the load draws. If the efficiency is 90%, the load draws 600W, then the amount drawn from the line is 660W. If the load draws 600W, with a 600W power supply that's 80% efficient, it's 750W.
Read the actual decision. There were a number of reasons why the actual decision is sane. To recap the high points of the slashdot thread. The actual claim forbidden was something like "Drinking water regularly can help prevent dehydration".
Dehydration, in its medically significant form - is not usually caused by the lack of water. Drinking water when dehydrated for reasons other than not having access to water may do nothing, or be counter-productive. Drinking water regularly does nothing to stop you needing water in the future. Water is not special in providing hydration - coffee, fruit-juice, grapes, oranges,... all do the same thing, as well, or better than water.
There is a function of cost to perform a given task vs risk.
At one end, it goes up because your launch platform is not reliable enough, and you need to make too many satellites or whatever before one succeeds in being launched. At the other end, it goes up as you've spent too much money on the launcher.
Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot of minimum cost. If however, you insist that no precaution must be omitted to keep astronauts safe, then the cost rises - perhaps prohibitively.
As a proportion of the costs of the entire program, the costs of training astronauts who go on to die in accidents, and their life insurance is a small one.
Certainly, astronaut safety should be pushed as far as is reasonably possible - but you have to at some point accept there is a risk, present it to the astronauts, and ask if they're OK with it, rather than pretending accidents are impossible, and coming up with numbers like the reliabilities quoted of the shuttle prior to the first accident.
To bring this back to the earlier example I was putting.
Why is it desired socially to absolutely minimise risk beyond the minimisation of operating cost including life insurance and training for astronauts, but not fishermen?
Why is an astronaut - as a special little snowflake - more valuable than the fisherman.
Why is it socially permissable for low waged unskilled workers to undertake risky careers, knowing the risks, when it's not permissable for astronauts?
Why are the lives of astronauts any more precious than those of fishermen? Over a 30 year career, according to dept of labour statistics, 5% will die. If you asked the average trawlerman if they would prefer to make 3 or 4 flights in shirt-sleeve conditions, taking perhaps a week at a time, and make what they would make over 10-15 years, a huge fraction will leap at it, even knowing the risks.
Consider this. SpaceX designed and built Falcon 9 for under 20% of what it would have cost NASA.
The proposed new launcher from NASA would cost 30 billion over the next decade, and provide 2 launches, totalling around a hundred tons. If the money was spent purchasing Falcon 9 launches, you would get 7500 tons in LEO.
With the development of Falcon heavy, that rises to 20000 tons. If you can't bootstrap a decent space industry with what in an earlier age would be a respectable mass for an aircraft carrier - you're doing it wrong. And this assumes SpaceX fails in their goal of making the rockets partially reusable, which will significantly lower costs. The fuel is under a percent of the costs.
An increasingly common way to get powersaving is to divide the chip into oodles and oodles of blocks. These blocks are rapidly turned off and on as they are needed. This is what lets your phone last a week on battery, while staying logged into wifi and 3G.
My point was that many people in the 'free energy' community have a similar knowledge of the underlying physics, and hence will get as ridiculed for their extreme claims, as that (purported) author was for his discoveries in archaeology.
This does not inherently make their discoveries impossible - that's dependant on the real physics of the universe, which probably differs from what we understand. It does however mean that their discoveries, even if true, will likely be framed in ways that will make the discoverer not publishable by peer-reviewed journals.
Fusion fuel in general basically cannot run out, there is simply too much of it. There are 1.4*10^21 Kg of water in the hydrosphere. About 1*10^20 Kg of that is hydrogen. 3*10^16Kg of that is Deuterium, or 1.5*10^19 moles, or 10^42 atoms.
In D-D fusion, the energy released per nucleus is about 8MeV, so that's 10^49eV of energy.
4*10^23kWh. Assuming a hundred billion people, that's 4*10^12kWh, or assuming a hundred kilowatts per person, 4 billion hours from D-D fusion. Around half a million years. And this is neglecting hydrogen.
Taking cells all the way to 'zero' in a battery is generally a bad plan, it both stresses the cells more - discharging them at high currents at the very end of the discharge is harsh on them, causes extra wear due to deeper cycle life, and risks overdischarging weaker cells in the battery.
This assumes that the CPU is also completely non-volatile, and all the other hardware elements. It's likely not to be the case, at least in the short term, hardware will absolutely require some shutdown time, to get to a stable standby state.
You do not go from a billion operations a second to zero cleanly, just by yanking the power.
As I understood the speech - at this point he took off onto what was achievable in the far future. It's reasonable to assume that with a mature technology - you can get an order of magnitude or two on launch cycles, with a similar mass fraction. Can the current hardware do 100 launches - even with service - vanishingly unlikely.
Commercially, without massive amounts of money spent on lobbying, and showing you can do it by generating significant results rather than shiny piles of paper that do not fly.
I note in the speech - at around 33 minutes - one telling quote. (Paraphrasing, as it was yesterday I watched it) "We have 1% of the lobbying power of Boeing and Lockmart. If the decision depends on lobbying power, we're screwed'.
This was about the decision to extend the sole-source monopoly for airforce rockets. And he notes also that the rationale to do this is to keep the industry alive. Engines for those rockets are built in russia, other parts in switzerland, whereas SpaceX builds all key subsystems themselves in the US.
Not an issue. It doesn't lock it to windows 8. It locks it to people who have the proper key to sign their executables. As only microsoft and the hardware maker will have this, microsoft can easily sign windows 9 so it will boot on this system.
If you read carefully that - it says only if the HDCP signal goes all the way to the display. It doesn't. Inside the monitor, the cable from the mainboard of the monitor to the LCD screen contains an unencrypted LVDS signal still, which can be snooped.
This is not as simple as some people think to block. A simple random load added to the mains signal will not do it. In order to find out if you're watching a given TV program - first you take the TV program, and measure every 5 second periods average brightness.. This gives you 720 samples for an hour. Now, you load up 720 5 second samples from the targets electricity meter.
You subtract the average value from each of these, so they're symmetrical about 0.
Now, you go through the list, multiplying the first brightness by the first measured energy use, and add this to a total. Repeat this 720 times.
Now, you have the correlation of the power with the TV program. This is _MUCH_LARGER_ than the correlation of any single time period, and any noise or random non-correlated signal such as fridges or freezers drops out to a large degree.
Random signals have to be of the order of sqrt(720) - 36 times larger than the signal to mask it.
(It's not quite this bad, as there will be some false correlation, epecially given there will be millions of candidate programs, and 5s offsets that can occur) And yes, LCDs, especially LCDs with newer variable power 'energy saving' backlights that dim or brighten along with the program content to optimise contrast and power use will work for this just fine.
Space-X's Falcon heavy, which admittedly has not launched - will launch 50 tons to LEO, for around $125 million.
For 30 billion, you can simply stick it in the bank, and launch 12 a year for the next decade, using only the interest on that 30 billion.
Actually spending the 30 billion would get you 250 launches or so - neglecting any volume discount.
So. A) Big expensive launcher - launching 100 tons in the next decade. B) Let it be developed commercially, and launch 12500 tons in the next decade.
If you can't do a _really_ good kickstart of a truly awesome space program with twelve thousand tons of launch, you deserve to stop pretending you're interested in space.
This is not a space project, it's a welfare project for the usual suspects.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/awx/2011/06/09/awx_06_09_2011_p0-334122.xmlheadline=LightSquared%20Tests%20Confirm%20GPS%20Jamming&channel=busav
"Simulations conducted by aviation standards developer RTCA for the FAA concluded 'GPS is likely to be unavailable over the who
le US East Coast' based on LightSquared's deployment plans, Robert Frazier, of the FAAs spectrum planning and international office, told the meeting."
This is a fairly reasonable question to raise.
To put the above numbers in context,
Each GPS satellite transmits less power than one of the ground-stations.
And it has to cover a whole hemisphere of the earth.
There don't really exist filters good enough to overcome that disparity.
You misunderstand how switching power supplies work.
They have a sticker number '1000W' - this is (ideally) the maximum amount of power they supply.
They will also have an efficiency curve, which may vary from - say - 50% at 10W to 90% at 700W, and 80% at 1000W.
The important thing is the efficiency at the amount the load draws.
If the efficiency is 90%, the load draws 600W, then the amount drawn from the line is 660W.
If the load draws 600W, with a 600W power supply that's 80% efficient, it's 750W.
Read the actual decision.
There were a number of reasons why the actual decision is sane.
To recap the high points of the slashdot thread.
The actual claim forbidden was something like "Drinking water regularly can help prevent dehydration".
Dehydration, in its medically significant form - is not usually caused by the lack of water. ... all do the same thing, as well, or better than water.
Drinking water when dehydrated for reasons other than not having access to water may do nothing, or be counter-productive.
Drinking water regularly does nothing to stop you needing water in the future.
Water is not special in providing hydration - coffee, fruit-juice, grapes, oranges,
There is a function of cost to perform a given task vs risk.
At one end, it goes up because your launch platform is not reliable enough, and you need to make too many satellites or whatever before one succeeds in being launched.
At the other end, it goes up as you've spent too much money on the launcher.
Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot of minimum cost.
If however, you insist that no precaution must be omitted to keep astronauts safe, then the cost rises - perhaps prohibitively.
As a proportion of the costs of the entire program, the costs of training astronauts who go on to die in accidents, and their life insurance is a small one.
Certainly, astronaut safety should be pushed as far as is reasonably possible - but you have to at some point accept there is a risk, present it to the astronauts, and ask if they're OK with it, rather than pretending accidents are impossible, and coming up with numbers like the reliabilities quoted of the shuttle prior to the first accident.
To bring this back to the earlier example I was putting.
Why is it desired socially to absolutely minimise risk beyond the minimisation of operating cost including life insurance and training for astronauts, but not fishermen?
Why is an astronaut - as a special little snowflake - more valuable than the fisherman.
Why is it socially permissable for low waged unskilled workers to undertake risky careers, knowing the risks, when it's not permissable for astronauts?
Certainly.
Who were not making rockets at the time.
Why are the lives of astronauts any more precious than those of fishermen?
Over a 30 year career, according to dept of labour statistics, 5% will die.
If you asked the average trawlerman if they would prefer to make 3 or 4 flights in shirt-sleeve conditions, taking perhaps a week at a time, and make what they would make over 10-15 years, a huge fraction will leap at it, even knowing the risks.
Consider this.
SpaceX designed and built Falcon 9 for under 20% of what it would have cost NASA.
The proposed new launcher from NASA would cost 30 billion over the next decade, and provide 2 launches, totalling around a hundred tons.
If the money was spent purchasing Falcon 9 launches, you would get 7500 tons in LEO.
With the development of Falcon heavy, that rises to 20000 tons.
If you can't bootstrap a decent space industry with what in an earlier age would be a respectable mass for an aircraft carrier - you're doing it wrong.
And this assumes SpaceX fails in their goal of making the rockets partially reusable, which will significantly lower costs.
The fuel is under a percent of the costs.
The space shuttle cost between a billion, and half a billion dollars per launch.
Of that, well under a percent was the fuel.
A Falcon 9 launch retails at $50m, and of that perhaps .4% is fuel. (300 tons of propellant at $1/Kg, which is a high estimate)
There are plans to make portions of the falcon reusable.
There is _CONSIDERABLE_ room for launch cost reduction, if they suceed.
It also increases the number of operations.
This is bad.
Adding more steps adds cost.
An increasingly common way to get powersaving is to divide the chip into oodles and oodles of blocks.
These blocks are rapidly turned off and on as they are needed.
This is what lets your phone last a week on battery, while staying logged into wifi and 3G.
My point was that many people in the 'free energy' community have a similar knowledge of the underlying physics, and hence will get as ridiculed for their extreme claims, as that (purported) author was for his discoveries in archaeology.
This does not inherently make their discoveries impossible - that's dependant on the real physics of the universe, which probably differs from what we understand.
It does however mean that their discoveries, even if true, will likely be framed in ways that will make the discoverer not publishable by peer-reviewed journals.
Fusion fuel in general basically cannot run out, there is simply too much of it.
There are 1.4*10^21 Kg of water in the hydrosphere.
About 1*10^20 Kg of that is hydrogen.
3*10^16Kg of that is Deuterium, or 1.5*10^19 moles, or 10^42 atoms.
In D-D fusion, the energy released per nucleus is about 8MeV, so that's 10^49eV of energy.
4*10^23kWh.
Assuming a hundred billion people, that's 4*10^12kWh, or assuming a hundred kilowatts per person, 4 billion hours from D-D fusion.
Around half a million years.
And this is neglecting hydrogen.
/me strokes evil white pussy.
And it's not quite true that 'he would have published if it was real'.
If you have sufficiently ridiculous claims, journals may not accept your paper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shechtman - as one example of work ridiculed at the time that went on to win a Nobel prize.
Unfortunately, for example, there are also people that write letters like this: http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/smithsonian.asp
If it is true, I would send the guy my heartfelt thanks, and not buy the expensive heatpump for this winter.
Taking cells all the way to 'zero' in a battery is generally a bad plan, it both stresses the cells more - discharging them at high currents at the very end of the discharge is harsh on them, causes extra wear due to deeper cycle life, and risks overdischarging weaker cells in the battery.
This assumes that the CPU is also completely non-volatile, and all the other hardware elements.
It's likely not to be the case, at least in the short term, hardware will absolutely require some shutdown time, to get to a stable standby state.
You do not go from a billion operations a second to zero cleanly, just by yanking the power.
As I understood the speech - at this point he took off onto what was achievable in the far future.
It's reasonable to assume that with a mature technology - you can get an order of magnitude or two on launch cycles, with a similar mass fraction.
Can the current hardware do 100 launches - even with service - vanishingly unlikely.
Commercially, without massive amounts of money spent on lobbying, and showing you can do it by generating significant results rather than shiny piles of paper that do not fly.
I note in the speech - at around 33 minutes - one telling quote.
(Paraphrasing, as it was yesterday I watched it) "We have 1% of the lobbying power of Boeing and Lockmart. If the decision depends on lobbying power, we're screwed'.
This was about the decision to extend the sole-source monopoly for airforce rockets.
And he notes also that the rationale to do this is to keep the industry alive. Engines for those rockets are built in russia, other parts in switzerland, whereas SpaceX builds all key subsystems themselves in the US.
ETOOLITTLETHERMITE
This is why HDCP was dead-in-the-water, and most video links to monitors are not encrypted.
Not an issue.
It doesn't lock it to windows 8.
It locks it to people who have the proper key to sign their executables.
As only microsoft and the hardware maker will have this, microsoft can easily sign windows 9 so it will boot on this system.
A second TV is merely noise, from the perspective of the program you're checking.
You simply get two results out, not one.
If you read carefully that - it says only if the HDCP signal goes all the way to the display. It doesn't.
Inside the monitor, the cable from the mainboard of the monitor to the LCD screen contains an unencrypted LVDS signal still, which can be snooped.
This is not as simple as some people think to block. A simple random load added to the mains signal will not do it.
In order to find out if you're watching a given TV program - first you take the TV program, and measure every 5 second periods average brightness..
This gives you 720 samples for an hour.
Now, you load up 720 5 second samples from the targets electricity meter.
You subtract the average value from each of these, so they're symmetrical about 0.
Now, you go through the list, multiplying the first brightness by the first measured energy use, and add this to a total. Repeat this 720 times.
Now, you have the correlation of the power with the TV program.
This is _MUCH_LARGER_ than the correlation of any single time period, and any noise or random non-correlated signal such as fridges or freezers drops out to a large degree.
Random signals have to be of the order of sqrt(720) - 36 times larger than the signal to mask it.
(It's not quite this bad, as there will be some false correlation, epecially given there will be millions of candidate programs, and 5s offsets that can occur)
And yes, LCDs, especially LCDs with newer variable power 'energy saving' backlights that dim or brighten along with the program content to optimise contrast and power use will work for this just fine.
Are you on crack?
Space-X's Falcon heavy, which admittedly has not launched - will launch 50 tons to LEO, for around $125 million.
For 30 billion, you can simply stick it in the bank, and launch 12 a year for the next decade, using only the interest on that 30 billion.
Actually spending the 30 billion would get you 250 launches or so - neglecting any volume discount.
So.
A) Big expensive launcher - launching 100 tons in the next decade.
B) Let it be developed commercially, and launch 12500 tons in the next decade.
If you can't do a _really_ good kickstart of a truly awesome space program with twelve thousand tons of launch, you deserve to stop pretending you're interested in space.
This is not a space project, it's a welfare project for the usual suspects.