Although, you'll constantly hear from proponents of nuclear energy, that a nuclear plant can product "nigh-limitless" (!) amounts of electricity, somehow they never do.
But supposing they did produce the absurd amount of energy they could potentially create, would a purpose-built nuclear powered hydrogen plant be capable of obviating any hydrogen deficit, and eventually create a surplus? And then, so too, with helium, via a separate process?
Uses like this are perfectly suited for PV or wind. You run your Hydrogen or helium (or desalination) plant when there is generation and stop when there is none.
PV and wind are perfectly suited toward essentials because they are sources of energy we'll never feel guilty about. We should use and perfect methods of energy extraction that are conscionable, so that we have ideals methods of providing for ourselves.
Meanwhile, to produce surpluses, and exploit gains for experimental luxuries, use riskier methods. This balances the premise of the risk, such that you don't push the risk taking too far, out of desperation for a necessity. Rather than worry about a power failure at a hospital, accept a negligible decline against production targets at a plant, and temporarily shut down the pile, for safety's sake, whenever needed. No?
Hydrogen is great for rockets. Helium is great for MRI machines and water is great for agriculture, which is a great way to use all the CO2 we dump into the atmosphere. Absolutely safe and stable sources (nuclear, hydro, hydrogen/gas/coal thermo) are great for hospitals.
For this to work, every aspect of the simulation would
have to match up with real world circumstances.
...which would mean no secrets.
...or weapons that, when used, obviate many degrees of
secrecy, like nuclear weapons.
Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with cell phones, and in particular, the high bandwidth data consumption of smart phones.
Look toward a city skyline at night. Or even a small town. You'll see a blended haze of light reaching up into the sky. Probably a similar deal with the general radio spectrum emissions, now that everyone's carrying the equivalent of pocket RF flash lights, and walking in proximity to the RF street lamps that cell phone towers have become.
Cell phones are running several receivers at the same time they're transmitting. The Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi, and GSM receivers all have to receive cleanly while the Bluetooth, WiFi, and GSM transmitters are transmitting. It's amazing that this works. Spurious RF noise from any of those transmitters would interfere with the receivers only a few millimeters away. So cell phone designers have to put effort into getting RF isolation right.
Computers were once big RF emitters, but the FCC cracked down on that successfully in the 1980s. In the early days of personal computing, a Radio Shack TRS-80 and a Milton Bradley Big Trak would both crash if close. In recent years, most computers got radio receivers for at least WiFi, and thus had to be built well enough not to knock out their own receivers.
Analog TV sets tended to emit loudly at the local oscillator frequency. The UK used to drive around with "television detector" vans to find people who didn't pay their TV tax, which funds the BBC. But tuners quieted down years ago, as they became tiny RF-tight sealed units.
The worst behavior comes from switching power supplies, especially for lighting. The cost pressure is very high. They don't receive, so they have no receiver to protect. Another big source of noise is leaky cable TV systems. Again, since they don't receive, they aren't affected by their own leakage. The cable industry has successfully lobbied to escape tight restrictions on cable system leakage. Those two sources are probably the source of most problems.
Low-cost spectrum analyzers are available, and some are laptop peripherals.[1] There are ones as cheap as $69 on eBay, but the consensus in EDN is that you have to pay a few hundred dollars to get something that produces useful measurements. People who install and maintain WiFi networks in large buildings usually have one. Then you can find what's blithering all over the spectrum.
> Analog TV sets tended to emit loudly at the local oscillator frequency. The UK used to drive around with "television detector" vans to find people who didn't pay their TV tax, which funds the BBC. But tuners quieted down years ago, as they became tiny RF-tight sealed units.
CRTs used to emit the picture on their screen well enough you could receive it over a nontrivial distance. This is called Van Eck phreaking.
OTOH, being able to receive a signal and being able to nail down where it's coming from and who's broadcasting it are two very different things, and the location part is substantially harder. Using the Van Eck technique, or any other, to crack down on people not paying the BBC license fee would have cost more than the fee was worth. Psychological ploys with faked-up vans, however, are a lot cheaper, and can be fairly effective.
TV detector vans, despite being theoretically possible to build, are a myth and just propaganda spread by the TV license collection agency. At most they drove around in vans with some random gear in it as PR stunt.
>The Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi, and GSM receivers all have to receive cleanly while the Bluetooth, WiFi, and GSM transmitters are transmitting. It's amazing that this works.
Um, yeah, about that, that would be really nice if it were true. Maybe sometimes for some hardware in some situations. For a 1st gen motorola droid X I can personally guarantee when the wifi gets unusually frisky the bluetooth drops out. Very annoying when listening to music on a BT earpiece. A hardwired headphone never drops out, but a main marketing point of USB-C is to get rid of headphone jacks because they work well and they're too cheap to profit off.
The cable leakage thing was true in the 80s, but the FCC wisely put pretty low transmit level limits on all the two-way gear (settop boxes, cablemodems, cable phone modems). To make a long story short if signals are getting out, interference is getting in and is measurable and is likely causing an upload/upstream problem. If you think microwatts of output power from a cracked cable is annoying to a fm radio listener, imagine a "miles long" cable with a crack acting like an antenna across the street from a 50 kilowatt am transmitter and consider its effect on modem upstream speeds. Problems will happen, but it'll get fixed pretty fast, unlike the 80s or something. Maybe a decade ago the journalists made a sport of complaining about digital phone service being unable to dial 911 and that was the end of unrepaired cable leakage problems.
> when the wifi gets unusually frisky the bluetooth drops out
Oh so that is why my bluetooth audio gets choppy when I walk past the wifi access point in the hallway? I've never even thought about that before other than been annoyed by it.
How utterly inconvenient that they occupy the exact same frequencies. I should probably get a 5 GHz wifi access point...
My issue is money and space. I'd like to cram it into the same tiny little box that already houses the fibre-to-ethernet converter as well as the router. I'm also not sure if it would penetrate the walls and reach all rooms.
The major source of RFI from switching power supplies is not the switching frequency or its harmonics. It is a parasitic LC oscillator formed by the capacitance across the switching transistor, and the parasitic inductance between the capacitor and its DC voltage source. Every time the power supply transistor switches, that parasitic LC tank is struck and rings like a bell. 1-10 MHz is a common range for this ringing in a big supply (10's of kW and up). As the components get smaller, the first parasitic ringing frequency goes up, too.
I'm a radio ham. No, it has little-to-nothing to do with smartphones, which are incredibly tightly regulated and operate in very tightly defined bands of the EM spectrum.
My guess (and it is only a guess) is that the problem is mostly from unregulated imported electronics that emit all kinds of broadband RF noise as a consequence of being made cheaply.
Continuing your analogy, cell phones are like supermarket barcode scanners: weak and clearly red. It does not really matter how many of them you cram into a room, you can still send morse code with a green laser.
All devices have small daylight lamp attached to them, the power of which is rather strictly regulated (IEC-61000, if anyone is interested). If you cram a lot of them into a room, morse coding with that green laser becomes difficult. You could increase power/brightness of the laser and call the problem solved. But then try to measure brightness of your lighting fixtures - becomes quite difficult.
So no, proliferation of cell phones is only a problem for cell phones (one of the reasons for migrations 2G -> 3G -> 4G). The real problem are other devices transmitting in cell phone spectra effectively DDoS'ing them.
2004 study found that for
each extra inch of height
above average, someone could
expect to earn per working
year of his or her life up
to $789 more (about $976 in
today's money)
The disturbing statistic there is that in 2004, whatever you could get with $789, now you need $976 to do the same thing.
Actually I think it is a continuously declining by generation.
For example my grandfather absolutely hated credit cards with a passion. He was convinced the credit card companies were an invasion of privacy as well as the antitrust acts (there are still only three credit bureaus). My parents and I despite his recommendations still use credit cards (he in fact later had to get a credit card later in life as it is fairly impossible shockingly to purchase/own a car with just check or cash).
Now I'm the old fart complaining to my younger peers about Facebook.
People can trade for things. They want a service. They are OK with being cattle. Who are you to get mad? It's like when the US got mad that the Palestinians elected Hamas. They get to vote. Let them have their way.
That's a really bogus argument. Many people can be easily misled even if they don't actually support what they are REALLY voting for.
Manipulating masses for votes is a science ever since the ancient Rome, if not even earlier.
This however is an off-topic and I apologize. I simply wanted to point out that voting is yet another deeply flawed but still massively used system and it's part of the problem that this thread tries to address. Emphasis: this is my opinion.
This type of argument is complete nonsense. You might as well say "it's legal for me to insult you, so who are you to complain?" or "telling people that my message is bad is censorship".
"Let them have their way"‽ Well, by that measure what the heck business do you have telling the US not to get mad? Let them, the US, have their way in terms of getting mad. It's their right to get mad.
You're replying to someone complaining about people's bad decisions. Well, that poster wants to complain. Who are you to object to them complaining?
Sure, so let's build something that will attract their votes and will better represent the direction we want it to go. I can't see where you are coming from, why shouldn't I try to convince the "cattle" to "vote" differently just because they currently aren't? The reason they are voting the way they currently are is because of the campaigning of my opponents.
Privacy is a form of security. This view of them as opposing forces only makes sense if you view "security" as only meaning the security of those in power against those they have power over.
That's one type of security, and the security of your state isn't unimportant, but it's not the only kind and for those in the western world it's not even close to the most important.
I think you're missing the point. In the modern world there comes a point where we either have to sacrifice some privacy for increased security or we can have total privacy (encrypt everything) and lose our security. If you think it is any other way you are foolish.
I get the point, I just think that the idea that total privacy would "lose our security" to be completely unconvincing. Encrypt everything would only be a real problem for mass surveillance technologies.
I guess the difference is that I see mass surveillance and any movement towards a panopticon as much more dangerous than terrorism or espionage have ever been. There is no rolling back a panopticon as that's very close to complete and unlimited political power.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, because you're absolutely right. Most human architecture is highly procedural, with many tradesmen specializing in highly repetitive, focused tasks, that have predictable, reliable outcomes, in order to produce safe structures based on well-understood principles.
As for the VR thing, I think that will gain less traction because the idea of sleeping one's life away, strapped into goggles and headphones, is only so attractive.
Most human architecture is highly procedural, with many tradesmen specializing in highly repetitive, focused tasks, that have predictable, reliable outcomes
Yes, but human architecture is shaped by forces following from function. (As in Alexander's Pattern Language of Design.) That's why it becomes interesting, because we can relate to how the architecture relates to human needs and perceptions.
In America, lots of excessively toxic, obnoxious bastards get much farther along in life than so many others by trading on unsophisticated deception, intimidation and betrayal, and not much else.
After a while, you get tired of being smart and getting nowhere for all the effort you expend.
Then, knowing what you know, and having noticed what's surrounded you for so long, well... intellectuals can decide for themselves a logical corollary to this.
But supposing they did produce the absurd amount of energy they could potentially create, would a purpose-built nuclear powered hydrogen plant be capable of obviating any hydrogen deficit, and eventually create a surplus? And then, so too, with helium, via a separate process?