When you go to the grocery store, do you whine about the Kellogs tax on your Corn Flakes?
No, because I have the option of buying some other brand like Post or Malt-o-Meal, or the house brand. Micro$oft is doing everything it can to make sure you don't get a choice and have to pay them even if you use someone else's software.
Want Android? Pay M$. Want Apple? You're probably paying M$. Want a PC? Unless you build it yourself, you're paying M$. Even if you don't, they're still controlling the hardware specs.
This is extortion and monopolization at its finest.
Meanwhile, my blood ran cold when I read this knowing that LadyAda sold out. I guess she needed the money. So much for Adafruit.
There are so many wrong "facts" and conjectures here, I had to log in and correct them. I was born in Reno and raised nearby, and I've been in the area many times, unlike just about all of you.
What is now an industrial park was formerly a ranch, and, despite being in the middle of a mountain range, has enough flat land within to allow all of this building. At the north end of this ranch is the Truckee River, along with runs Interstate-80 (old US Highway 400 and the Southern Pacific Railroad, the first trans-continental railroad. The first trans-con telegraph and telephone also ran through here, and a lot of fiber does as well, Reno to Salt Lake City.
This is high desert, around 4-5k-feet in elevation at the bottom, and gets snow in winter, usually not more than a couple of inches, very rarely several feet via backdoor fronts (from the east so the Sierra Nevada and Cascade rain shadow has no effect). Typical winter lows are single digits and teens (in Fahrenheit), with records dropping well below zero. Summer highs used to be only 100 a couple days of the year, but thanks to that climate change, 100+ is becoming somewhat more common now. The all time record high is 108.
The location for the Gigafactory and these datacenters is directly off I-80 about 11 miles east of Sparks (USA Parkway aka NV-439, I-80 Exit 32 to Vista Blvd Exit 21; these exit numbers are miles from the California state line). It is nowhere near Lake Tahoe: from the Gigafactory to Incline Village, Google Maps shows 56.4 miles, or 34 miles using the measurement tool (as the crow flies).
As I mentioned, there is a lot of fiber in this canyon: ones I know about from 8 years ago when I left are MCI, Worldcom (separate systems), Williams, and Nevada Bell (now AT&T once again, but their local version). Sprint enters Reno from the north as it uses the Union Pacific RR, while AT&T doesn't follow a railroad, and their eastbound fiber instead goes down to the state capital Carson City before going east (they didn't care about latency back then). There are also now direct fiber connections to Las Vegas (the signs say Nevada Bell, but I have good word there is a lot of dark/dim fiber being utilized there), which follows US-95, and a 3rd party fiber running down US-395 to provide broadband to the California communities on the east side of the Sierra, though the south end terminates in Barstow and the north end in Reno. One issue here is that all these fiber routes converge on Reno, so some sort of ring will have to be used to prevent the "eggs in one basket" scenario discussed by some posters as far as connectivity. (Outside of connectivity, you should have multiple data centers, obviously.)
Power may be a problem. There is a planned 500kV line running between Reno and Las Vegas, but AFAIK it still hasn't been built: the original intention was to ship (renewable) power between north and south, as N/S connections east of California are lacking. However, they may be needed to supply all these new data centers instead, though some power has become available thanks to a lot of the casinos going belly-up. Presently the vast majority of power in western Nevada comes from two 345 kV lines, one coming from Alturas and thence from the Columbia River, and the other, older one coming from NE Nevada from some coal plants that may be going away soon. There are also some peaker and upgraded-to-combined-cycle plants at Tracy very close to the Gigafactory and datacenters. The Path 27 HVDC line runs N/S around 20 miles to the east and has no connections here, its mid-path.
Meanwhile, despite the latitude (39.5), this area gets LOTS of sunshine, particularly in summer, helped by the Sierra/Cascade rain shadow as I mentioned, along with being far enough west (119.5--120 West is the California/Nevada state line as well as the Alberta/BC line and is further west than Los Angeles) to miss out on most of the North American Monsoon that gives the 4 Corners states their summer rainy season. The only catch is that, being mountain
I did the free upgrade on our guest lobby computer. After seeing the fallout, including guest account disappearing and other issues, I think I'll just use the restore utility (this was an el-cheap HP Black Friday special from a few years ago running an AMD E-300...yes, it's VERY slooowwww...) to put win-7 back on it.
but even in the case of Google -- with whom I share a great deal of data -- I'm selective about what I do share.
This sums up my beliefs / hopes (I can't call them more than that) about Google vs the Twin Towers of Redmond and Cupertino: I use Google (through Startpage and Android on my phones) because I have to, and I toggle everything off I reasonably can. Yeah, I turn on location data and use GMaps, but not to go anywhere that could get me in trouble (I hope--besides, they can always track the carrier location register). I access my bank through my phone's bank app sometimes, but only because I'm so poor that the convenience outweights the security dangers. For anything REALLY security-serious, I use my old laptop running Slackware and Firefox with all the usual privacy extensions. I worry about the talk of getting serious about remotely rooting and BIOS attacks, but ultimately I don't have the money or time to put into a CoreBooted machine, Silent Black phone (I'm not important enough for that, anyway), or what-not.
So, yeah, choice of lesser evils, but--so far--Google has been far less evil than their bretheren, at least in public. Of course, I'm always afraid of what we'll see when the curtain is pulled back from them like Snowden did with our government (and, as we saw, by extension ALL western governments!) since their ties with the CIA, NRO, and NG(I)A continue to this day. But what's the alternative other than going down the path of RMS?
Noticeably missing from both linked TFAs. As discussed here and elsewhere previously, 48V would probably have too much ohmic loss unless this A/C is right next to the supply. Higher voltage would work better, but call into question safety issues you don't have with AC due to it passing through zero volts 100-120 times a second.
here in the UK our Met Office sometimes can't even get it right 12 hours in advance.
Here in the western USA, reading the AFD's (Area Forecast Discussions), whenever model tendencies come up, the Euro and Canadian models tend to be way off, perhaps because, despite being global models, they're optimized for high northern latitudes whereas we're in the Horse latitudes. Only a guess, but it's a constant. Further south, for tropical eastern Pacific hurricanes, the results tend to be hilariously off and are dismissed by the forecasters almost immediately.
Really? That's your approach to this? Yet another young guy trying to find a way to get rich by setting up a system built from the ground up to infringe on others' copyrights, and which gave laughable lip service to take-down notices (ripped off material that was removed re-appeared more or less instantly). Foul play? The foul play was on his part, and of course the chickens came home to roost, which is why he gave up on the scheme. Whether or how yet another failure of a Piracy-As-A-Service "start-up" might have contributed to his death remains to be seen.
OPNSense is more of a fork of pfSense and competes with that project. In fact, OPNSense was pretty much born of the fact that the pfSense developers made their development tools proprietary-licensed and pissed off some 3rd party developers as well as scaring a larger group of people that the whole project might become closed-source. SmallWall keeps the tiny aspect of M0n0Wall as a firewall and little else while *Sense are network security appliances, Asterisk servers, and pretty much anything else you want--something Manuel never liked. All of these and more trace their origin to M0n0Wall so, technically, they're all successors.
None of these are as small as *WRT distros and they still to this day only run on x86 and x64, but you get OpenBSD's packet filter (claimed by most to be superior to Linux's) bolted onto FreeBSD (for better hardware support?) and a BSD license if that matters to you.
A *nuclear* one, sure. But that would require someone to explode a nuclear bomb over the US.
North Korea successfully launched a satellite into LEO. Russia and China do this all the time. Iran will be able to do it soon. This is a very real threat!
Absolutely, positively *NOT* true! If that WERE true, we wouldn't have satellites flying around in and through the Van Allen RADIATION Belts, surviving solar wind storms, and so on! What do you think the reactors rely on internally when they're operating? Radiation-hardened electronics feeding to non-hardened electronics on the outside, that's what.
At the very worst, you can always go back to vacuum tubes (that's "valves" in the Queen's English) which, by definition, are rad-hard.
A few facts that, for some reason, haven't been stated in this discussion:
1. EMI/RFI--AC systems radiate a lot of noise. Some come from lines discharging through a natural diode and the rest is the lower frequency 50/60 cycle AC and its harmonics. Even discounting the EMI-sensitive people out there (whether you believe them or not), there's no question that it affects receivers and some other electronics, and occasionally magnetics like a credit card. DC normally shouldn't have this problem.
2. Outside of motors and other heavy loads, most loads outside of factories and such are light loads, thus 48-60 volts with light gauge wiring might be sufficient for short (household or small business) distances.
3. A *BIG* safety issue no one has talked about is the increasing danger with voltage and going DC. This is a 2 pronged problem:
A. with AC the voltage goes down to zero every half-cycle, which is why switches can be made relatively simple under that 400 volts mentioned. But this disappears at DC and an arc or spark that fires WILL *STAY* FIRED as long as the power remains applied! I learned this at a GM discussion for mechanics when they were discussing the (new then) Chevy EV1 and its competition from Honda and Toyota when they talked about why they chose 36 volts for that car: its the highest voltage that won't carry a stable arc. The speaker pointed out that a pin hole, which would self-heal and not normally cause a problem on normal 12 volt circuit, would cause a self-maintaining arc at 48 volts if the hole came into contact with the frame. Of course, we all know what happened: the car failed due to lack of range (using lead acid!) and power (ohmic loss). But the safety issues remain, even on modern cars with high voltage DC battery packs, even though they seem to be solved...
B. Above 400 volts or so flash danger becomes a real threat, as lots of Youtube videos attest. Going to DC this could be a lot worse, I would think, as the arcs wouldn't self-extinguish. Combine this with heating inside the cells due to internal resistance and you could see a big BOOM!
As it currently stands, commercial buildings often have 277V lighting circuits (this is in the US) because it involves installing less copper in the ceilings.
Perhaps that was the reason in the old days, but more likely (especially for newer construction) it's because this is the voltage you get between a leg and neutral from a 3-phase wye transformer at 480 volts leg to leg AKA 480/277Y. Here in Phoenix you see this a lot at the bigger retailers where that 480 volts is used to drive the freezers and general building refrigeration needed in summer. It makes sense, from a safety standpoint, to use the lower 277 volts where the power draw doesn't necessitate a higher voltage. (Of course, that doesn't mean I'm not wrong here, and your Cu cost argument is totally sound, especially these days!)
The lower voltage version (here in NA) is 208/120Y and is VERY common in certain places such as the motel where I work where 120v is needed most, but 3 phase is needed by a few things (in our case, the washing machines and outdoor sign). The A/C units are wired to accept the lower 208 volts instead of 240 and we buy them that way from the retailer (they can still be rewired to 240 if necessary).
I still have my AT&T V3xx, and the charge port is a very standard mini-USB rather than the micro-USB that's standard now; however, it's still a USB device and will talk to your computer just fine. Oh, and this particular device was one of the first UMTS phones so it will still work when GSM is switched off. (I'm worried about my Nokia N900 in this regard since it only does UMTS on Band 4 AKA AWS 1.7/2.1 GHz.)
As for the tools, I looked a couple of years ago, but not that hard, so not sure. I do know the open source tools that used to work with it haven't been maintained since the smartphone explosion (which also corresponded to the recession, so a 1-2 punch).
Finally, a word to the wise: when the Batteries Plus guy says that you need to knock out a piece of plastic so his battery will fit, turn around and walk out. Since I punched that that tiny piece of plastic, the battery will not stay in and the door does not apply enough pressure to keep it in there. The case does, but only barely, and the back of the phone flies apart if I drop it. (On the plus side, the case works: the phone is still fine after all these years!)
4) NASA does some really great stuff that benefits every american citizen immensely. Like your 10 day weather forecasts? LIke your GPS navigation. Thank NASA.
Ah, no:
Weather? That's NOAA, not NASA. Yes, 4 letters and starts with "N" and they both do stuff in space, but that's about the limit of similarity. Oh, and the US DOD has their own weather bureau as well--what better way to waste lots of money than duplicating the functions of a "civilian" agency?
GPS? That's the US Air Force, just like the X-37B, not NASA. The fact that the US Military Industrial Complex controls GPS is one of the driving reasons behind Galileo (and, to some extent, other GNSS's), despite Galileo being built by the European Military Industrial Complex but assumably under "civilian" control. Suuure...
Have to play Devil's Advocate here, but it could also be for development of defense AGAINST weapons. Think about it: China (and the US, I believe) has already blown a satellite in LEO out of the sky. The 60 Minutes piece on the weaponization of space (and especially AGAINST space) is not just over-hyped (for a change), but a real threat. If someone can make a weapon that can take out satellites in MEO (GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, etc) and GEO (both geo-sync and sun-sync), there will be a real problem. Of course, this isn't to take away from the denial of near-space around the Earth altogether due to the creation of massive amounts of debris, and the creation of a maneuvering system that uses much smaller amounts of fuel than before could be the prelude to "garbage trucks" in space to clean things up.
In fact, it just occurred to me that the X-37B may be the most visible sign of a new arms race that's mostly taking place behind the scenes because China in particular is so secretive (much more than the old Soviet Union).
Pretty sure "blew up and failed safe" is an oxymoron.
Not at all, rockets being launched into space (or as ICBMs) are blown up with explosives carried on board in order to insure the safety of those on the ground. In this case, NOT blowing up and being out of control means a missile is about to hit something and make a big boom on the ground!
Oh, and transformers blowing up, yes they are spectacular--haven't been there myself, but I've seen the aftermath. Might have something to do with up to hundreds of gallons of oil inside to cool the thing combined with banning of PCBs to keep that oil from catching fire in these situations.
In any case: tens to hundreds of kilovolts (near a megavolt in the highest voltage systems) combined with thousands of amperes is a whole lot of power waiting to burst out in a gigantic arc that will set fire or melt everything in a spectacular way! Oh, and it would probably generate X-rays, so I guess you would get some ionizing radiation, at least until the safety tripped.
I have personally encountered AUTOMOTIVE drivers weaving side to side, tailgating and making sudden lane changes (the worst one was also in heavy rain just as I was about to pass a AUTOMOBILE) - and I don't even drive that much. I blame all that activity on drivers who either don't pay attention, are possibly sleep deprived and/or are trying to make some arbitrary (and possibly illegally imposed) mileage requirement. If that can be eliminated then the roads will be a safer place to be.
There, fixed that for you. Your entire argument can be applied to cars, pickups, buses, even bikes. Your bias is showing.
What I was thinking, too. Like they have on Android (built-in to Lollipop, add-in on older versions) and iOS where the thing will lock (possibly scream) when you and your "security dongle" (which can be anything) walk away from each other.
For this kind of laptop security, I'm thinking a Class-3 bluetooth dongle (1 meter range) or even an IR blaster might work.
Another thing that hit me looking at the code: invoking a gentle "shutdown -h now" may not be fast enough. If you're this paranoid, perhaps you should just force immediate power off (crash dirty with no flushing) and take your chances.
Killing cancer cells is easy. Killing cancer cells without also destroying everything else is a very hard problem to solve. If this protein can force cancer cells back into healthy cells (or at least self-destruct) WITHOUT negatively affecting healthy tissues then this would be significant.
Exactly! This is precisely why this is not a small step, and hopefully will lead to similar research and treatments on other cancers.
Another way to put the significance of this is a magic chemical or drug that turns zombies back into normal people. (Ok, cancer is the opposite of a zombie, but you get the point.)
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When you go to the grocery store, do you whine about the Kellogs tax on your Corn Flakes?
No, because I have the option of buying some other brand like Post or Malt-o-Meal, or the house brand. Micro$oft is doing everything it can to make sure you don't get a choice and have to pay them even if you use someone else's software.
Want Android? Pay M$.
Want Apple? You're probably paying M$.
Want a PC? Unless you build it yourself, you're paying M$. Even if you don't, they're still controlling the hardware specs.
This is extortion and monopolization at its finest.
Meanwhile, my blood ran cold when I read this knowing that LadyAda sold out. I guess she needed the money. So much for Adafruit.
There are so many wrong "facts" and conjectures here, I had to log in and correct them. I was born in Reno and raised nearby, and I've been in the area many times, unlike just about all of you.
What is now an industrial park was formerly a ranch, and, despite being in the middle of a mountain range, has enough flat land within to allow all of this building. At the north end of this ranch is the Truckee River, along with runs Interstate-80 (old US Highway 400 and the Southern Pacific Railroad, the first trans-continental railroad. The first trans-con telegraph and telephone also ran through here, and a lot of fiber does as well, Reno to Salt Lake City.
This is high desert, around 4-5k-feet in elevation at the bottom, and gets snow in winter, usually not more than a couple of inches, very rarely several feet via backdoor fronts (from the east so the Sierra Nevada and Cascade rain shadow has no effect). Typical winter lows are single digits and teens (in Fahrenheit), with records dropping well below zero. Summer highs used to be only 100 a couple days of the year, but thanks to that climate change, 100+ is becoming somewhat more common now. The all time record high is 108.
The location for the Gigafactory and these datacenters is directly off I-80 about 11 miles east of Sparks (USA Parkway aka NV-439, I-80 Exit 32 to Vista Blvd Exit 21; these exit numbers are miles from the California state line). It is nowhere near Lake Tahoe: from the Gigafactory to Incline Village, Google Maps shows 56.4 miles, or 34 miles using the measurement tool (as the crow flies).
As I mentioned, there is a lot of fiber in this canyon: ones I know about from 8 years ago when I left are MCI, Worldcom (separate systems), Williams, and Nevada Bell (now AT&T once again, but their local version). Sprint enters Reno from the north as it uses the Union Pacific RR, while AT&T doesn't follow a railroad, and their eastbound fiber instead goes down to the state capital Carson City before going east (they didn't care about latency back then). There are also now direct fiber connections to Las Vegas (the signs say Nevada Bell, but I have good word there is a lot of dark/dim fiber being utilized there), which follows US-95, and a 3rd party fiber running down US-395 to provide broadband to the California communities on the east side of the Sierra, though the south end terminates in Barstow and the north end in Reno. One issue here is that all these fiber routes converge on Reno, so some sort of ring will have to be used to prevent the "eggs in one basket" scenario discussed by some posters as far as connectivity. (Outside of connectivity, you should have multiple data centers, obviously.)
Power may be a problem. There is a planned 500kV line running between Reno and Las Vegas, but AFAIK it still hasn't been built: the original intention was to ship (renewable) power between north and south, as N/S connections east of California are lacking. However, they may be needed to supply all these new data centers instead, though some power has become available thanks to a lot of the casinos going belly-up. Presently the vast majority of power in western Nevada comes from two 345 kV lines, one coming from Alturas and thence from the Columbia River, and the other, older one coming from NE Nevada from some coal plants that may be going away soon. There are also some peaker and upgraded-to-combined-cycle plants at Tracy very close to the Gigafactory and datacenters. The Path 27 HVDC line runs N/S around 20 miles to the east and has no connections here, its mid-path.
Meanwhile, despite the latitude (39.5), this area gets LOTS of sunshine, particularly in summer, helped by the Sierra/Cascade rain shadow as I mentioned, along with being far enough west (119.5--120 West is the California/Nevada state line as well as the Alberta/BC line and is further west than Los Angeles) to miss out on most of the North American Monsoon that gives the 4 Corners states their summer rainy season. The only catch is that, being mountain
I did the free upgrade on our guest lobby computer. After seeing the fallout, including guest account disappearing and other issues, I think I'll just use the restore utility (this was an el-cheap HP Black Friday special from a few years ago running an AMD E-300...yes, it's VERY slooowwww...) to put win-7 back on it.
but even in the case of Google -- with whom I share a great deal of data -- I'm selective about what I do share.
This sums up my beliefs / hopes (I can't call them more than that) about Google vs the Twin Towers of Redmond and Cupertino: I use Google (through Startpage and Android on my phones) because I have to, and I toggle everything off I reasonably can. Yeah, I turn on location data and use GMaps, but not to go anywhere that could get me in trouble (I hope--besides, they can always track the carrier location register). I access my bank through my phone's bank app sometimes, but only because I'm so poor that the convenience outweights the security dangers. For anything REALLY security-serious, I use my old laptop running Slackware and Firefox with all the usual privacy extensions. I worry about the talk of getting serious about remotely rooting and BIOS attacks, but ultimately I don't have the money or time to put into a CoreBooted machine, Silent Black phone (I'm not important enough for that, anyway), or what-not.
So, yeah, choice of lesser evils, but--so far--Google has been far less evil than their bretheren, at least in public. Of course, I'm always afraid of what we'll see when the curtain is pulled back from them like Snowden did with our government (and, as we saw, by extension ALL western governments!) since their ties with the CIA, NRO, and NG(I)A continue to this day. But what's the alternative other than going down the path of RMS?
Noticeably missing from both linked TFAs. As discussed here and elsewhere previously, 48V would probably have too much ohmic loss unless this A/C is right next to the supply. Higher voltage would work better, but call into question safety issues you don't have with AC due to it passing through zero volts 100-120 times a second.
here in the UK our Met Office sometimes can't even get it right 12 hours in advance.
Here in the western USA, reading the AFD's (Area Forecast Discussions), whenever model tendencies come up, the Euro and Canadian models tend to be way off, perhaps because, despite being global models, they're optimized for high northern latitudes whereas we're in the Horse latitudes. Only a guess, but it's a constant. Further south, for tropical eastern Pacific hurricanes, the results tend to be hilariously off and are dismissed by the forecasters almost immediately.
Really? That's your approach to this? Yet another young guy trying to find a way to get rich by setting up a system built from the ground up to infringe on others' copyrights, and which gave laughable lip service to take-down notices (ripped off material that was removed re-appeared more or less instantly). Foul play? The foul play was on his part, and of course the chickens came home to roost, which is why he gave up on the scheme. Whether or how yet another failure of a Piracy-As-A-Service "start-up" might have contributed to his death remains to be seen.
Paid for by your friends in the MPAA and RIAA.
...Nicola Tesla. Yeah, I know Edison founded it, but isn't a hundred-year grudge just a bit too much?
OPNSense is more of a fork of pfSense and competes with that project. In fact, OPNSense was pretty much born of the fact that the pfSense developers made their development tools proprietary-licensed and pissed off some 3rd party developers as well as scaring a larger group of people that the whole project might become closed-source. SmallWall keeps the tiny aspect of M0n0Wall as a firewall and little else while *Sense are network security appliances, Asterisk servers, and pretty much anything else you want--something Manuel never liked. All of these and more trace their origin to M0n0Wall so, technically, they're all successors.
None of these are as small as *WRT distros and they still to this day only run on x86 and x64, but you get OpenBSD's packet filter (claimed by most to be superior to Linux's) bolted onto FreeBSD (for better hardware support?) and a BSD license if that matters to you.
North Korea successfully launched a satellite into LEO. Russia and China do this all the time. Iran will be able to do it soon. This is a very real threat!
Absolutely, positively *NOT* true! If that WERE true, we wouldn't have satellites flying around in and through the Van Allen RADIATION Belts, surviving solar wind storms, and so on! What do you think the reactors rely on internally when they're operating? Radiation-hardened electronics feeding to non-hardened electronics on the outside, that's what.
At the very worst, you can always go back to vacuum tubes (that's "valves" in the Queen's English) which, by definition, are rad-hard.
...if this Slashvertisement would tell us what the hell JIRA is!
A few facts that, for some reason, haven't been stated in this discussion:
1. EMI/RFI--AC systems radiate a lot of noise. Some come from lines discharging through a natural diode and the rest is the lower frequency 50/60 cycle AC and its harmonics. Even discounting the EMI-sensitive people out there (whether you believe them or not), there's no question that it affects receivers and some other electronics, and occasionally magnetics like a credit card. DC normally shouldn't have this problem.
2. Outside of motors and other heavy loads, most loads outside of factories and such are light loads, thus 48-60 volts with light gauge wiring might be sufficient for short (household or small business) distances.
3. A *BIG* safety issue no one has talked about is the increasing danger with voltage and going DC. This is a 2 pronged problem:
A. with AC the voltage goes down to zero every half-cycle, which is why switches can be made relatively simple under that 400 volts mentioned. But this disappears at DC and an arc or spark that fires WILL *STAY* FIRED as long as the power remains applied! I learned this at a GM discussion for mechanics when they were discussing the (new then) Chevy EV1 and its competition from Honda and Toyota when they talked about why they chose 36 volts for that car: its the highest voltage that won't carry a stable arc. The speaker pointed out that a pin hole, which would self-heal and not normally cause a problem on normal 12 volt circuit, would cause a self-maintaining arc at 48 volts if the hole came into contact with the frame. Of course, we all know what happened: the car failed due to lack of range (using lead acid!) and power (ohmic loss). But the safety issues remain, even on modern cars with high voltage DC battery packs, even though they seem to be solved...
B. Above 400 volts or so flash danger becomes a real threat, as lots of Youtube videos attest. Going to DC this could be a lot worse, I would think, as the arcs wouldn't self-extinguish. Combine this with heating inside the cells due to internal resistance and you could see a big BOOM!
As it currently stands, commercial buildings often have 277V lighting circuits (this is in the US) because it involves installing less copper in the ceilings.
Perhaps that was the reason in the old days, but more likely (especially for newer construction) it's because this is the voltage you get between a leg and neutral from a 3-phase wye transformer at 480 volts leg to leg AKA 480/277Y. Here in Phoenix you see this a lot at the bigger retailers where that 480 volts is used to drive the freezers and general building refrigeration needed in summer. It makes sense, from a safety standpoint, to use the lower 277 volts where the power draw doesn't necessitate a higher voltage. (Of course, that doesn't mean I'm not wrong here, and your Cu cost argument is totally sound, especially these days!)
The lower voltage version (here in NA) is 208/120Y and is VERY common in certain places such as the motel where I work where 120v is needed most, but 3 phase is needed by a few things (in our case, the washing machines and outdoor sign). The A/C units are wired to accept the lower 208 volts instead of 240 and we buy them that way from the retailer (they can still be rewired to 240 if necessary).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
OMFG, does the evil Empire really need to strike again?!?
I still have my AT&T V3xx, and the charge port is a very standard mini-USB rather than the micro-USB that's standard now; however, it's still a USB device and will talk to your computer just fine. Oh, and this particular device was one of the first UMTS phones so it will still work when GSM is switched off. (I'm worried about my Nokia N900 in this regard since it only does UMTS on Band 4 AKA AWS 1.7/2.1 GHz.)
As for the tools, I looked a couple of years ago, but not that hard, so not sure. I do know the open source tools that used to work with it haven't been maintained since the smartphone explosion (which also corresponded to the recession, so a 1-2 punch).
Finally, a word to the wise: when the Batteries Plus guy says that you need to knock out a piece of plastic so his battery will fit, turn around and walk out. Since I punched that that tiny piece of plastic, the battery will not stay in and the door does not apply enough pressure to keep it in there. The case does, but only barely, and the back of the phone flies apart if I drop it. (On the plus side, the case works: the phone is still fine after all these years!)
4) NASA does some really great stuff that benefits every american citizen immensely. Like your 10 day weather forecasts? LIke your GPS navigation. Thank NASA.
Ah, no:
Weather? That's NOAA, not NASA. Yes, 4 letters and starts with "N" and they both do stuff in space, but that's about the limit of similarity. Oh, and the US DOD has their own weather bureau as well--what better way to waste lots of money than duplicating the functions of a "civilian" agency?
GPS? That's the US Air Force, just like the X-37B, not NASA. The fact that the US Military Industrial Complex controls GPS is one of the driving reasons behind Galileo (and, to some extent, other GNSS's), despite Galileo being built by the European Military Industrial Complex but assumably under "civilian" control. Suuure...
Have to play Devil's Advocate here, but it could also be for development of defense AGAINST weapons. Think about it: China (and the US, I believe) has already blown a satellite in LEO out of the sky. The 60 Minutes piece on the weaponization of space (and especially AGAINST space) is not just over-hyped (for a change), but a real threat. If someone can make a weapon that can take out satellites in MEO (GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, etc) and GEO (both geo-sync and sun-sync), there will be a real problem. Of course, this isn't to take away from the denial of near-space around the Earth altogether due to the creation of massive amounts of debris, and the creation of a maneuvering system that uses much smaller amounts of fuel than before could be the prelude to "garbage trucks" in space to clean things up.
In fact, it just occurred to me that the X-37B may be the most visible sign of a new arms race that's mostly taking place behind the scenes because China in particular is so secretive (much more than the old Soviet Union).
WE SLEEP
Pretty sure "blew up and failed safe" is an oxymoron.
Not at all, rockets being launched into space (or as ICBMs) are blown up with explosives carried on board in order to insure the safety of those on the ground. In this case, NOT blowing up and being out of control means a missile is about to hit something and make a big boom on the ground!
Oh, and transformers blowing up, yes they are spectacular--haven't been there myself, but I've seen the aftermath. Might have something to do with up to hundreds of gallons of oil inside to cool the thing combined with banning of PCBs to keep that oil from catching fire in these situations.
In any case: tens to hundreds of kilovolts (near a megavolt in the highest voltage systems) combined with thousands of amperes is a whole lot of power waiting to burst out in a gigantic arc that will set fire or melt everything in a spectacular way! Oh, and it would probably generate X-rays, so I guess you would get some ionizing radiation, at least until the safety tripped.
I have personally encountered AUTOMOTIVE drivers weaving side to side, tailgating and making sudden lane changes (the worst one was also in heavy rain just as I was about to pass a AUTOMOBILE) - and I don't even drive that much. I blame all that activity on drivers who either don't pay attention, are possibly sleep deprived and/or are trying to make some arbitrary (and possibly illegally imposed) mileage requirement. If that can be eliminated then the roads will be a safer place to be.
There, fixed that for you. Your entire argument can be applied to cars, pickups, buses, even bikes. Your bias is showing.
Signed, a CDL holder.
Someone should make a wireless version
What I was thinking, too. Like they have on Android (built-in to Lollipop, add-in on older versions) and iOS where the thing will lock (possibly scream) when you and your "security dongle" (which can be anything) walk away from each other.
For this kind of laptop security, I'm thinking a Class-3 bluetooth dongle (1 meter range) or even an IR blaster might work.
Another thing that hit me looking at the code: invoking a gentle "shutdown -h now" may not be fast enough. If you're this paranoid, perhaps you should just force immediate power off (crash dirty with no flushing) and take your chances.
Killing cancer cells is easy. Killing cancer cells without also destroying everything else is a very hard problem to solve. If this protein can force cancer cells back into healthy cells (or at least self-destruct) WITHOUT negatively affecting healthy tissues then this would be significant.
Exactly! This is precisely why this is not a small step, and hopefully will lead to similar research and treatments on other cancers.
Another way to put the significance of this is a magic chemical or drug that turns zombies back into normal people. (Ok, cancer is the opposite of a zombie, but you get the point.)
"I'm a time traveller. I point and laugh at archaeologists!" (TV: Silence in the Library)
"Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over."