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Comment Re:The Jetsons (Score 1) 407

It looks like the base of the buildings in The Jetsons... sounds to me like we will soon be selling real estate at the top of these towers... all the power for the building will be supplied by its own structure...

I can't wait to live at the exhaust port of power plant where I'm continually blasted by hot air in an already scorching hot neighborhood in the middle of nowhere where I also get to add a massive vertical component to my daily commute!

Comment Re:They should catch it on the way back down (Score 4, Insightful) 407

The idea is interesting, but it seems to me that a substantial portion of the solar energy is going towards gravitational potential energy - that is, lifting tons of air mass hundreds of feet in the air.

At some point, that air mass cools off, the air will want to drop back down towards the earth because of gravity. Seems like, in addition to generating 200MW on the 'exhaust' stack, they could build a second "cool air return" stack that generated power from the force of gravity pulling the cooled air back down to ground level?

-1 parent. The exhaust air at the top of the tower is going to keep rising because it will still be hotter than the ambient air. The cold air that falls to offset the rising mass is called the atmosphere. It's big, it's going to be moving slower than the air you just used to spin a turbine, and it's not cost effective to try to make electricity from it until it enters the greenhouse, gets heated, and funnels into the turbines that are already in the design (the one place where air is moving fast in the whole design.

The Courts

Submission + - Charles Nesson Ruled Jointly Liable to Pay RIAA (arstechnica.com)

eldavojohn writes: The highly anticipated Joel Tenenbaum trial ended in a disaster for Tenenbaum. But worse for his highly publicized lawyer, Charles Nesson, they are both liable for payment of the court's decision to the RIAA. Nesson's pro bono agreement with Tenenbaum may turn out to be a seriously expensive experiment for the Harvard Law Professor.

Comment Re:The classic double speak (Score 1) 441

Claim: 3% of users consume 40% of bandwidth.

Uh... should this statistic be shocking? At any given point in time, if you isolate out the top 3% of users, how much of the bandwidth SHOULD they be using? Should it be closer to 3%? That would mean everybody is using the exact same amount of data. All this statistic says is that data usage is not evenly distributed, but we're talking about a packet switched network. At no point in time does a packet switched network EXPECT equal usage of bandwidth. If they expected bandwidth to be used evenly across all users at all times, they would have built a circuit switched network. At any given point in time, most connections are just idling. Why don't they just release a statistic that reads "99% of network bandwidth is consumed by active connections." How about a billing plan where you pay for unlimited data, but if you don't use it, they'll refund your money?

Comment Keep blaming the consumer (Score 2, Interesting) 441

I am so tired of ISP's blaming their customers for the shortcomings of their network. The problem is with the way AT&T designed their network, not with the way customers are using it. Their network was not designed to handle TCP. They break TCP congestion control by not allowing packet loss. As soon a high traffic condition is reached, every affect TCP connection retransmits even more, and the situation quickly spirals out of control to where nobody can get a packet through.

Verizon has the same kinds of customers as AT&T and they manage to handle high traffic conditions without grinding to a halt. I can't wait for my AT&T contract to expire. The breaking point for me was at a football game when my phone failed to complete a call or send a text message for hours. The guy standing next to me had Verizon and it worked fine. He let me use his phone to call a friend. I got that friend's voice mail because he is also on AT&T.

Comment Re:Practical Application (Score 1) 575

From TFA...

Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light.

I choose to believe that this new model will be the basis of the Subspace Communicator from Star Trek. Such is my approach to science. Don't judge me.

Comment Re:Fucking moronic (Score 1) 212

Was the Emergency Broadcast System even used on 9/11? It seems like if there was ever a time to trigger that system, it would have been on that day. All I've ever seen it used for was interrupting my Saturday morning cartoons repeatedly through my whole childhood. And we put up with it because we think one day it could do some good. The whole system is BS. In a real emergency, we all just turn on the news so that we can get the latest update on what they don't know about the situation.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Does Information Want to be Free? (wunderkindpr.com)

Steve McAbee writes: The expression "information wants to be free" has been around for 24 years, first introduced by Stewart Brand at a Hackers Conference in 1984. "On the one hand," said Brand, "information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." I wonder if Mr. Brand knew how relevant his statement would become almost a quarter century later.

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