Posts by Chestislav Achterkamp

Phased out: IT architect plugs hole in clean-freak admin's wiring design

Re: Huh?

What? Your standard 120v panel has 2 "phases" in it, and if industrial kit had to have separate panels for each phase, the result would be frigging huge. Beyond that, even at the utility level we have combined panels for three phase power. Why the hell you'd ever want separate panels for each phase is beyond me, it would make the protection systems basically impossible to build easily, the disconnects dangerous as sin, and load balancing and monitoring basically impossible.

I'm going to guess you've only ever worked on residential style power systems. I'd personally place input and output circuit breakers unless the damage from shutting down would be worse than setting it on fire. Now, 3 phase circuits are supposed to have their breakers ganged(linked with a small pin through the breaker toggles). It is possible to run a three phase system with over a hundred amps of current imbalance between phases, but it takes life off the equipment(and the wimpy stuff in your normal three phase UPS would kind of explode) so the utility has imbalance monitoring systems on at least the transmission lines(the big towers/cables) but the relays to control the breakers for that are $5,000 apiece.

But I understand how you could get the idea from residential power.

US Navy robot war-jet refuels in air: But Mav and Iceman are going down fighting

No quite, drones are not as reliable, nor are they as good at adapting to changing situations. And with the UN stating that developing killer robots should not be done, you have to have a human in the loop for fire control, meaning that the critical reaction time is far increased, making drones less accurate. That might not matter right now, due to the choice of munitions(anti armor weapons against soft targets?), but should the selectivity of drones increase, that timing will be critical for averting as much collateral damage as possible. Drones are also not as secure, pilots cannot be hacked mid flight by an enemy programmer.

Drones are not bad, but neither are they going to make pilots become obsolete.

SPY FRY: Smart meters EXPLODE in Californian power surge

Re: disinformation

If it's power, that would be Watt's law(same as the unit we measure electrical power in, watts) Ohm's law is V=I*R. As for America, we only tap one phase in most homes, but we actually generate and distribute three. As for the rest of your math, power line loss calculations can be found here. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/harting1/

As for smart meters, I have no idea why they might be tapped directly to the power lines, because things like this happen(they have transformers, but it would be safer to put battery packs inside and inductively couple the thing to the line for it to make it's measurements, because there are such things as no contact ammeter, just replace the battery pack every couple of years, or set it to recharge at off peak hours). We had two across each other for the about 20 minutes it took to a line crew rolled to shut the thing off and remove the branches that entangled it, both of our smart meters were absolutely fine and none of our electronics were damaged(probably because all of the breakers were flipped open as is our habit when the power is out).

As for trying to install underground lines in California, it's a problem with constant earthquakes, the lines at least you can get to and repair without a backhoe. New York actually has a super conducting distribution network underground(I am unsure if it's all back together after Sandy).

'Modernise' safe harbour laws for the tech oligarch era – IP czar

Not crippling expensive?

You want Joe Random to have to pay for something like that to have his own website with user content? The reason why the burden is on the owner is because there's more of them, and some of them either don't mind or encourage such behavior(s3rl with songs like "nightcore this" being an example). That and it removes the requirement that you have margins big enough or pockets deep enough to pay for filtering. Safe harbour is broken, just in favor of the big copyright companies, because they have no burden of proof, it's guilty until you prove yourself innocent.

Why has the Russian economy plunged SO SUDDENLY into the toilet?

Re: All this reminds me of something from Jerry Pornuelle

Pretty much every nuclear reactor is extremely safe, a few are less so and recommendations are made to improve those. Pebble beds might be what you mean by safer, as it is impossible for them to enter meltdown(all self sustaining nuclear reactions are critical), even with every possible thing going wrong in the worst way.