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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: engineer who wrote (9195)	2/6/2009 5:34:39 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12252

At first glance, it's an attractive idea = surf on the waves of energy being transmitted all over the place and use that for powering very low power identification and other devices. But a more reliable energy source which puts out a lot of energy is the sun, or simply plugging in another tiny battery, or refilling it with methanol for a tiny fuel cell. But in some situations, it might be cheaper to just use the ambient microwaves being delivered for no charge. It would be annoying to want identification and the source of power was turned off at the time. Auckland has been experiencing that because the people running the electricity system do a bad job so it conks out from time to time [once a year or so for some hours or even days rarely]. Being independent has some value. Zenbu has servers at Maxnet maxnet.co.nz which has three fibres running in, generator and quite secure, so it would take quite an assault to turn it off. Barrycourt [a hotel with Zenbu] has its own generator and when electricity goes down, they don't. barrycourt.co.nz Businesses in Remuera were all conked out for 3 hours a few days ago [and a lot of other areas, but Remuera is where I was]. Businesses lost a lot of business. But one good aspect was the traffic lights all over the place were not working, so the traffic flowed freely. It's obvious that traffic lights should be turned off other than at peak times. Or they should be treated as stop signs, with the main road left green constantly outside peak times and side road traffic simply stopping or merely giving way if there's no need to stop. Traffic engineers and governments seem to think the purpose of traffic management is to STOP vehicles using roads. They are also stuck in the mess, so either they are not very intelligent and can't see how to improve things, or they like it like that for some reason; maybe to force people onto their beloved public transport. To improve things further, vehicles could have transponders via cyberphones which bid for passage rights. The traffic flow with the high bid would get the green light. When there's enough bidding on a side road, the main road would be stopped and the side road could go. People wanting a free ride could have it, but they'd just travel a bit slower. Somebody on an urgent mission could set their bids to super-high and get a non-stop drive. The vehicles around them would enjoy that - they'd dial back their bids as they realized they were not in that much of a hurry. Frustration on roads would reduce as people could make choices and pay for the level of service they prefer. Traffic peaks would be reduced because the bids at peak times would be high and delays greater for those unwilling to bid. Democracy in action. Mqurice