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Comment Re:Of course they don't need the full spectrum (Score 2) 80

The problem is that a 6MHz channel only allows ~18Mbps of usable bandwidth using 8VSB (current ATSC standard OTA encoding) which isn't a lot if you're using MPEG2 for 1080i/720p @30fps, cutting it down to ~9Mbps means you're getting worse than DVD bandwidth for what's supposed to be an HD signal.

Comment Re:I don't see how MS can comply (Score 1) 123

I imagine that criminal law has been updated to the same standards as civil law, under FRCP you can no longer bury the opponent with paper, if they make a request for digital records in a digital format then you must supply the records in that format if it is at all reasonable to do so (ie if you ask for PDFs from email that is reasonable, as would be TIFF, but .123 files would probably not be reasonable unless the source documents were in that format)

Comment Re:Fracking takes water out of action (Score 1) 191

and """contiminated""" frac water isn't any more polluted.

Really, you say that with such conviction. Would you drink untreated, or lightly treated fracking water every day for a year? Because AFAIK nobody but the fracking companies knows exactly what they're putting into their mixtures (and often not even then, many wildcaters buy from Halliburton and friends). The companies have fought extremely hard against any attempt to have them disclose what they are using, or at having and independent scientific analysis of the safety of the fracking effluent. One of the few scholarly articles I've found shows significant risks:

The analysis of effluent samples collected prior to the PADEP’s request supports our first hypothesis that concentrations of analytes in effluent were above water quality criteria (Table 1). Ba, Sr, and bromides are of particular public health concern. For the metals strontium and barium, both surpassed the federal MCL for drinking water
link

Comment Re:Excellent Question (Score 1) 191

Bullshit. There was a case here locally where a farm that had had fine drinking water for almost 200 years suddenly had flammable water with Benzene levels 5-10x the allowable limit. They have water reports from as little as 2 years before the fracking began because they were contemplating selling the farm (they ended up donating most of the land to the county for a park and taking a 100 year tax abatement on the homestead instead, which is how the land ended up being fracked to begin with, talk about no good deed going unpunished). You can check out the story yourself if you think I'm some fringe lunatic.

Comment Re:Transition fuel (Score 1) 191

Trains will probably never run on synth fuel, with a train storage is a complete non-issue, fuel takes up a tiny fraction of the available cargo room and towing capacity so trains will just use lightly compressed natural gas directly, it's WAY more energy efficient that way and the conversion from traditional diesel is trivial (Berkshire owned CSX is already starting to convert their fleet)..

Comment Re:Transition fuel (Score 2) 191

Natural gas basically just subsidizes the cost of drilling, the profit comes from the liquid petroleum fraction, that's why BP recently pulled out of their holdings in SE Ohio, their test wells were all much drier than expected resulting in wells that had ROIs well below other global areas so they shifted their capital elsewhere. So as long as they can find large pockets of wet gas there will be as much supply as the transportation network can handle, and if they're finding enough wet gas then liquification will become economical and we'll start shipping natural gas to Europe, which will have interesting geopolitical impacts as it will neuter Putin.

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