In fairness to Bill Gates, he's talking about poor farmers in poor countries where there is no real electrical grid.
He's not talking about whiny punks in rich countries and their damned cell phones. Or rich assholes with private yachts and jets.
Oddly enough, people in poor and remote areas are the ones who would stand to benefit from solar power the most, and they aren't the people who would be looking at reducing their energy consumption
How many of these boil down to "a system and methodology for doing something we already do all the time but in the cloud"?
So many computer patents these day are pretty much garbage.
I hope these actually have some merit instead of just having "in the cloud" tacked onto existing stuff. So many patents which get issues represent nothing new or novel, just "but on a cell phone" (which is a special case of computer), or "but with a network".
Part of me suspects a good chunk is neither new nor novel.
What I find most annoying about all this is less the could of smug, and more the fact that household electricity use is such a small slice of the pie of overall US energy use. From wind power to this DC nonsense, it's obsessing on feelgood measures of little importance to the big picture.
This biggest slice of the pie is industrial energy use where electricity isn't part of the picture: "Primary energy use" by heavy industry for blast furnaces and the like. Industrial electricity use is the next biggest slice, followed by IIRC industrial transportation.
+1, informative
thank you
i was talking about a more local electrical arrangement
but yes, long distance, that's a complicated topic, what distance are you really talking about and what other interconnections do you need? dc does have advantages in many cases, especially very long distance
but now we are very far away from the topic of a guy charging his laptop and running some LED lights
The advantage of AC has always been that it is easy to change the voltage up and down with a transformer; DC requires more equipment and some losses to convert.
That being said, transferring AC power between separate grids requires making sure the phase of the power transmitted matches from the two grids (so that the power from the two grids doesn't cancel or ring), which is difficult and expensive. This is not a problem for DC, so DC lines are used in cases such as where power is transferred from another grid to increase the capacity of an existing grid, or between countries that use different frequency power.
Capacitance between the AC phases (usually 3 phases are transmitted at once over a line) or between the line and the surrounding soil or water causes losses that are not a problem with DC. Therefore, undersea high voltage lines tend to be DC.
Overall line loss is also lower per 1,000 km, so very long distance transmission lines sometimes use DC.
thank you, dc genuinely has greater fire hazard implications than ac
as for health, it is a bit more nuanced and complex than i said:
Direct current (DC), because it moves with continuous motion through a conductor, has the tendency to induce muscular tetanus quite readily. Alternating current (AC), because it alternately reverses direction of motion, provides brief moments of opportunity for an afflicted muscle to relax between alternations. Thus, from the concern of becoming "froze on the circuit," DC is more dangerous than AC.
However, AC's alternating nature has a greater tendency to throw the heart's pacemaker neurons into a condition of fibrillation, whereas DC tends to just make the heart stand still. Once the shock current is halted, a "frozen" heart has a better chance of regaining a normal beat pattern than a fibrillating heart. This is why "defibrillating" equipment used by emergency medics works: the jolt of current supplied by the defibrillator unit is DC, which halts fibrillation and gives the heart a chance to recover.
... One of the reasons that AC might be considered more dangerous is that it arguably has more ways of getting into your body. Since the voltage alternates, it can cause current to enter and exit your body even without a closed loop, since your body (and what ground it's attached to) has capacitance. DC cannot do that. Also, AC is quite easily stepped up to higher voltages using transformers, while with DC that requires some relatively elaborate electronics. Finally, while your skin has a fairly high resistance to protect you, and the air is also a terrific insulator as long as you're not touching any wires, sometimes the inductance of AC transformers can cause high-voltage sparks that break down the air and I imagine can get through your skin a bit as well.
this experiment is fine if you're doing little LED lights and laptops, but if you're running something like air conditioning or a washing machine you're building a fire hazard and a mortality risk
the decision to use AC over DC was not random nor taken lightly, there are many factors involved (heck, it was a major engineering, corporate, and PR war between Edison and Westinghouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), but the right decision was made
for our modern world where some people only care about their laptop and smartphone, it does indeed seem silly and wasteful to convert to AC then back to DC, especially if you've ever tried charging electronics in a car. but there are of course many other uses for electricity, and the navel gazing small electronics crowd is but a minor topic
but i do see a time in the future as more people use local solar and other renewables, that a small DC subsystem is made available in the house for electronics like computers
The problem with using IE and Flash for your shit work is that IE with Flash is SO INCREDIBLY SLOW as to be unusable. Just as an extreme example, try loading some clickbait site with IE
If you're loading something you do not need for your job in IE with Flash enabled
I said to keep IE for those sites you are required to use for your job, and use something with it disabled it for the rest.
Whining about how slow Flash is for random sites means you bloody well deserve malware, because you haven't been paying attention to the fact that Flash has been a gaping security hole for around 15 years.
If you're going to a click bait site with IE and Flash, you're begging to be compromised, and you'll have nobody but yourself to blame. Because you're pretty much doing the thing which is going to guarantee you get hacked.
In my best Nelson voice I say to you "Ha ha!!".
I have found if you truly need Flash (by which I mean work not cat videos) you keep IE around as your insecure browser you only use for crap required for your job. For everything else, use a browser which doesn't have Flash enabled.
In no other circumstances should people be accessing the internet with Flash enabled for everything. Because that's just asking for it.
I've had Flash disabled for over a decade, and except one or two sites a year for something required by HR, I've never found myself thinking "gee, I really miss Flash".
Having Flash enabled by default is a self-inflicted injury I no longer feel any sympathy about. It's not like we haven't heard at least monthly for at least a decade about yet another Flash exploit.
You know what, stop telling us about Flash vulnerabilities
In the mean time, I assume Flash is the same old piece of shit security hole it has been for as long as it has existed.
Letting every web page execute arbitrary code on your machine has always been idiotic.
I'm with you, I'll continue to treat all ads as hostile entities and gaping security holes. Javascript will require whitelisting only if I really want your site and trust it somewhat, and Flash will always be blocked, because it's never been something you can trust.
Flash is defective, has always been defective, and it's time to make it go away.
Well, if Facebook is provably censoring outside of Turkey, instead of inside of Turkey to comply with Turkish laws
I see no evidence they are, but if Facebook starts applying this censorship globally then this is a scary precedent. Because next they'll ban blasphemy, ban criticizing the Thai PM, and basically start banning anything which is banned anywhere.
Of course, the problem is there is nothing to support this except the group which claims it is true.
But if it is true, then the fallout for Facebook should be swift and severe for them. Because you can't start censoring the whole world based on whims of one idiotic government.
Turkey is free to have their own laws, but the (unsubstantiated) claim they're globally censoring is an entirely different thing.
Honestly, there is not article to read here
Is the claim that if I post something on Facebook critical of Ataturk that I will get censored?
Because if Facebook is going to censor the whole world for a single country, then that would pretty much be the worst thing they can do for their stock price.
If your critical infrastructure for your dam and nuclear plant is sending stuff out to the internet, you likely have bigger problems.
However, I won't disagree with your point about vendors being impediments to security.
Honestly, if this is a problem
If your machine is a threat to the rest of us, cutting you off from the the internet might get your attention.
This way when you call your ISP and say the intertubes are broken they can see the flag on your account which says "banished" and tell you to fix your PC, or stay off the internet.
But let's not pretend Linux, Android, or Apple haven't had similar problems.
The problem with botnets is people might not even know they're infected. Aggressively disconnecting from the internet might actually achieve something.
Come on guys, what the hell are you doing posting URLs with so much tracking crap embedded in it?
The third URL is arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2015/08/we-can-rebuild-him-philadelphia-hackers-offer-brotherly-love-to-fallen-robot/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content)
And the entirety of "?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content)" is just tracking crap which shouldn't even be incluced.
Are you guys getting affiliate clicks? Or are you just too damned lazy to not give us URLs full of this crap?
To the guys offering to fix this, kudos and good on 'ya.
Happiness is twin floppies.
