I we could develop a cheap solar panel for paving our roads and parking lots, we could solve two problems at once.
According to Yahoo answers there are 61,000 square miles of pavement in the US. Assuming about 750 watt/meter, with about 2 hours of sunlight per day, and 10% efficiency, that works out to an average power of 1000 Gigawatts. That should put a real dent in our power consumption.
The space based solar panels basically 'step down' sunlight to radio waves; these can be collected on the ground at a much higher efficiency than the original sun light. Also, they can be concentrated to a strength that is more efficient for collection, but not strong enough to damage anything.
In the book I had read, the author proposed using a wire collector grid with mesh large enough to pass the bulk of the sunlight. The grid could be sited over pasture and it would interfere with neither grass nor livestock.
SunNight Solar Enterprises Corp has been selling something like this for a few years. You can purchase a pair of rechargeable LED flashlights - one for you, one for charity - for between $50 to $60.
You can choose where in the world you would like the donated flashlight to go.
The two I have are best flashlights I've ever owned. They're solid, heavy duty plastic with a durable power switch. I've been using my first one for two years now. The original rechargeable batteries are still working, and the light *just works*.
Maybe I'm different than the rest of you, but if I worked for it, I would like to keep it. I'm sick of being taxed out of 50% of everything I earn, so that it can be given to someone who doesn't deserve it.
Why do you think the money is all yours? Just because you're lucky enough to get someone to pay it to you? Is everyone entitled to every last cent of what they "earn" regardless of how they obtained it?
You and I would have virtually nothing if it wasn't for the society we live in. Left to our own devices, we'd be lucky to have a fraction of what we enjoy (I'd probably be eating the squirrels in my back yard).
And, if the society we live in is sick and needs the money, I'm certainly not going to complain.
While we can argue about how to fix the country, or whether the country is actually broken, there's no excuse for complaining about paying taxes if taxes are what's needed.
Maybe electric transmission lines would be difficult to pressurize, but what about applications like superconducting magnets or electric current storage rings? These shouldn't be so hard to maintain in a pressurized environment.
If anything Fischer's legacy outside of chess should be to show people that extreme talent and insight in a small area gives no one any special insight into anything else. Maybe actors and singers should take note of that.
Even more so, politicians should take note of that, judging from recent history.
Under Unix, you could configure time zone changes yourself with zic.
For example, the following input to zic will create the four zone info
files US/Eastern, US/Central, US/Mountain and US/Pacific. These will
be under your ZONEINFO directory (mine is/usr/share/zoneinfo).
# Rule NAME FROM TO TYPE IN ON AT SAVE LETTER/S Rule DST 2007 2017 - Mar Sun>=8 2:00 1:00 D Rule DST 2007 2017 - Nov Sun<=7 2:00 0 S
#Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES/SAVE FORMAT [UNTIL] Zone US/Eastern -5:00 DST E%sT Zone US/Central -6:00 DST C%sT Zone US/Mountain -7:00 DST M%sT Zone US/Pacific -8:00 DST P%sT
The input above configures the time change for the years 2007 to 2017 (an
arbitrary end year) so that DST starts the second Sunday in March, and ends the
first Sunday in November, as specified in the
Energy Policy Act of 2005.
You can test your resulting files using the zdump command, like this
> zdump US/Eastern > zdump -v US/Eastern
You might have to refresh links to these new files, check/etc/localtime.
Disclaimer: I'm not a time zone expert, so don't take this on faith.
Ubuntu install easier than XP initial startup
on
Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This past week I've install Ubuntu on my old gateway laptop, and help a friend set up (not install) XP on her new HP laptop.
The Ubuntu install was suprisingly easy. I answered 3 or 4 questions, like my name and my time zone, and do I want to install Ubuntu on the entire hard drive (I answered yes). After the install finished, my wireless was working without a hitch, and I had a nice clean desktop to enjoy.
In comparison, the XP setup was mystifying, and it was *already* installed. During bootup, windows kept popping up, sometimes several unrelated windows at once. First, a registration window came up. While we were trying to answer the list of questions there, an Anti-Virus wizard popped up. Next a little window came up to tells use that XP had found my wireless network, but strangely enough the registration app didn't know how to use it.
Next, a Recovery wizard popped up and recommended that we make recovery disks (using 1 double layer DVD, 2 single layer DVDs, or 13! CDs). Another little window told use to install an XP update, so I completed that first. Then, we took the suggestion of the Anti-Virus wizard to reboot, and we've never seen the Recovery wizard since. We even went searching the disk and the help system - couldn't find it.
Wireless never came up by itself, we had to drill into the Control Panel to enable it.
When we were all done, we were greeted by a desktop festooned with icon/ads. There was an icon for Blockbuser, AOL dialup, AOL broadband, MS Office 2003 60 day trial, etc.
Another point of comparison, when I inserted my USB key in the Ubuntu laptop, a folder appears with a list of files on the key. Nice. Under XP, before I can even view the contents, I have to choose who to see it. It is a photo album? A slideshow? There were more choices than could fit in the pop-window, one had to scroll down to see the Ubuntu equivalent option, view files.
In every way I preferred Ubuntu experience, and I'm sure my grey-haired Mom would feel the same.
What makes Spam and Malware unmanagable is the sheer number of vulnerable and hacked systems.
When vulnerable boxes disappear, the bad guys would have little ammunition. My guess is that over time, as computing matures and our OSes stabilize, security holes will be plugged faster than they are created. When that happens, vulnerable boxen will become rare, and the bad guys will find it harder and harder to send Spam and Malware with impunity.
And then the rainbows will soar and unicorns will return.
Use sudo to revoke root from a single user
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
One advantage of sudo occurs when a box has multiple admins, because a single admin can have his root privilege revoked without affects other admins.
But when you share a root account, revoking privilege from a single admin means that every remaining admin has to learn a new password.
Our government's priorities regarding science and education is so screwed up that the *Pentagon* feels the need to step in and encourage science. What about the Department of Education? The National Science Foundtion? The president's science advisor? These get no respect from our president - who is more corfortable with creationism than with science.
Only the Pentagon commands sufficient respect from our *war* president to attempt to address the public preception of science.
I think they should include a KVM.
on
Mac mini's New Friend
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think what the Mac Mini really needs is a KVM ability.
It would be great if I could plop a new MacMini next to my existing PC, plug my current Keyboard,Video,Mouse in the MacMini, and then connect the MacMini to my existing PC. Then I could press the switch on the MacMini and toggle between the two machines.
I could then have the best of my old and new systems at the same time.
I've read this make-believe story and now I can't get it out of my head... oooww!
Please yank this article to protect future victims, and replace it with a true story. Or maybe turn this into a meta-article about how the original article got so screwed up.
I'd like to second this opinion. I also pay the $5/year. It's so cheap how can you resist?
One of their features I like is their weather photos. Users (I don't recall if you need to be a paying user or not) can upload their weather related photos. Recent photos are displayed in rotation on the site. What I especially like is that you get photos from all over the world. It's almost (well not quite) like travelling for free.
he quickly jumped on the "not me" wagon by trying to control the discussion
Saying 'not me'? Quite the opposite I think. Perhaps you saw his testimony to Congress, when he apologized to the country for not preventing 9/11 and said among other things ".. I failed you..".
Wow. Saying that out loud for the grieving 9/11 family members and the rest of the country took incredible courage. Contrast Clarke's plain speaking with the circumlocutions spouted by the Bush inner circle.
By the way, I read his book. It was excellent. Clarke's a straight talker who give a clear idea of life in government. (You might want to save the first chapter till the end though, it's easier to follow once you've digested the reset of the book.)
Remember when King Kong falls in love with Faye Wray? Didn't you wonder about the likelihood of cross-species romance among primates? Now is Science's chance to find out. I propose they include photos of Faye Wray with the female monkey photos and see how well the male monkeys like her.
A great number of people, including myself,
believe that George W. Bush (whether you like
him or not--I don't) is doing a good job
with regard to the war on terror, and consider it the main issue of the day
I don't understand why people think GW is doing a good job on terror. While we can agree he is doing *a* job on terrorism, I find it at best noisy and attention getting (don't forget, he was a college cheer leader), at worst brutal, uninformed and ineffective. If you've read the accounts of Richard Clarke, Woodward, Ron Susskind, etc and still think GW
is doing fine, then I'm totally confused.
Kerry at least appears reasonable, hardworking and open minded, in a word normal, unlike the Bush who lacks experience (10 years ago he was an unsuccessful busisness man with no administrative experience), doesn't read and seems unwilling to learn or take advice outside his small insular circle. Even if Kerry's policy stands aren't exactly to your taste, his views are moderate and he seems much more willing to listen and compromise.
I you want to read a good account of Bush's presidency, try this article
Without a Doubt
by Ron Suskind in the New York Times.
I've found that the fumes from chlorine bleach can remove smells from my bathroom. Typically I'd wipe the bleach on a few surfaces, close the door, and come back in a few hours. Sometimes when I came back it smelled like a meadow after a thunderstorm, to quote a previous post.
You might want to try this experiment. Wipe a keyboard with enought cholorine bleach to generate fumes then seal it in a plastic bag for a few hours or overnight, and see how it smells afterwards.
Sorry for the shameless plug but I find
ipaudit
and
ipstrings useful. Available from
sourceforge.
ipaudit
similar to netflow, it
summarizes network traffic byte count for every
host pair, protocol, and port pair.
ipstrings
reads string data off the wire similar to
unix utility strings. It's included
in the ipaudit package.
Slashdot Mirror
Just cook the drive on the grill for 15 minutes or so. The heat should demagnetize the drives. You might want to watch out for toxic fumes though.
I we could develop a cheap solar panel for paving our roads and parking lots, we could solve two problems at once.
According to Yahoo answers there are 61,000 square miles of pavement in the US. Assuming about 750 watt/meter, with about 2 hours of sunlight per day, and 10% efficiency, that works out to an average power of 1000 Gigawatts. That should put a real dent in our power consumption.
Maybe on your Home Planet of Oh, yeah sure.?
Sorry. I couldn't help it.
I've read about this idea years ago.
The space based solar panels basically 'step down' sunlight to radio waves; these can be collected on the ground at a much higher efficiency than the original sun light. Also, they can be concentrated to a strength that is more efficient for collection, but not strong enough to damage anything.
In the book I had read, the author proposed using a wire collector grid with mesh large enough to pass the bulk of the sunlight. The grid could be sited over pasture and it would interfere with neither grass nor livestock.
SunNight Solar Enterprises Corp has been selling something like this for a few years. You can purchase a pair of rechargeable LED flashlights - one for you, one for charity - for between $50 to $60. You can choose where in the world you would like the donated flashlight to go.
The two I have are best flashlights I've ever owned. They're solid, heavy duty plastic with a durable power switch. I've been using my first one for two years now. The original rechargeable batteries are still working, and the light *just works*.
http://www.bogolight.com/
Maybe I'm different than the rest of you, but if I worked for it, I would like to keep it. I'm sick of being taxed out of 50% of everything I earn, so that it can be given to someone who doesn't deserve it.
Why do you think the money is all yours? Just because you're lucky enough to get someone to pay it to you? Is everyone entitled to every last cent of what they "earn" regardless of how they obtained it?
You and I would have virtually nothing if it wasn't for the society we live in. Left to our own devices, we'd be lucky to have a fraction of what we enjoy (I'd probably be eating the squirrels in my back yard).
And, if the society we live in is sick and needs the money, I'm certainly not going to complain.
While we can argue about how to fix the country, or whether the country is actually broken, there's no excuse for complaining about paying taxes if taxes are what's needed.
Maybe electric transmission lines would be difficult to pressurize, but what about applications like superconducting magnets or electric current storage rings? These shouldn't be so hard to maintain in a pressurized environment.
If you want to learn more about this issue, Glen Greenwald has been covering it well for a long time.
Today he posted an item called FISA 101 which is a good place to start.
Under Unix, you could configure time zone changes yourself with zic.
For example, the following input to zic will create the four zone info files US/Eastern, US/Central, US/Mountain and US/Pacific. These will be under your ZONEINFO directory (mine is /usr/share/zoneinfo).
The input above configures the time change for the years 2007 to 2017 (an arbitrary end year) so that DST starts the second Sunday in March, and ends the first Sunday in November, as specified in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
You can test your resulting files using the zdump command, like this
You might have to refresh links to these new files, check /etc/localtime.
Disclaimer: I'm not a time zone expert, so don't take this on faith.
This past week I've install Ubuntu on my old gateway laptop, and help a friend set up (not install) XP on her
new HP laptop.
The Ubuntu install was suprisingly easy. I answered 3 or 4 questions, like my name and my time zone, and
do I want to install Ubuntu on the entire hard drive (I answered yes). After the install finished, my wireless was working
without a hitch, and I had a nice clean desktop to enjoy.
In comparison, the XP setup was mystifying, and it was *already* installed. During bootup, windows kept popping up,
sometimes several unrelated windows at once. First, a registration window came up. While we were trying to answer
the list of questions there, an Anti-Virus wizard popped up. Next a little window came up to tells use that XP had found
my wireless network, but strangely enough the registration app didn't know how to use it.
Next, a Recovery wizard popped up and recommended that we make recovery disks (using 1 double layer DVD, 2 single layer DVDs,
or 13! CDs). Another little window told use to install an XP update, so I completed that first. Then, we took the suggestion of
the Anti-Virus wizard to reboot, and we've never seen the Recovery wizard since. We even went searching the disk and the
help system - couldn't find it.
Wireless never came up by itself, we had to drill into the Control Panel to enable it.
When we were all done, we were greeted by a desktop festooned with icon/ads. There was an icon for Blockbuser,
AOL dialup, AOL broadband, MS Office 2003 60 day trial, etc.
Another point of comparison, when I inserted my USB key in the Ubuntu laptop, a folder appears with a list of files on the key. Nice. Under XP,
before I can even view the contents, I have to choose who to see it. It is a photo album? A slideshow? There were more choices than could
fit in the pop-window, one had to scroll down to see the Ubuntu equivalent option, view files.
In every way I preferred Ubuntu experience, and I'm sure my grey-haired Mom would feel the same.
What makes Spam and Malware unmanagable is the sheer number of vulnerable and hacked systems.
When vulnerable boxes disappear, the bad guys would have little ammunition. My guess is that over
time, as computing matures and our OSes stabilize, security holes will be plugged faster than they
are created. When that happens, vulnerable boxen will become rare, and the bad guys will find it
harder and harder to send Spam and Malware with impunity.
And then the rainbows will soar and unicorns will return.
But when you share a root account, revoking privilege from a single admin means that every remaining admin has to learn a new password.
They should research Perpetual Motion instead. It's just as doable but the return on investment will be much bigger!!!
Our government's priorities regarding science and education is so screwed up that the *Pentagon* feels the need to step in and encourage science. What about the Department of Education? The National Science Foundtion? The president's science advisor? These get no respect from our president - who is more corfortable with creationism than with science.
Only the Pentagon commands sufficient respect from our *war* president to attempt to address the public preception of science.
I think what the Mac Mini really needs is a KVM ability.
It would be great if I could plop a new MacMini next to my existing PC, plug my current Keyboard,Video,Mouse in the MacMini, and then connect the MacMini to my existing PC. Then I could press the switch on the MacMini and toggle between the two machines.
I could then have the best of my old and new systems at the same time.
I've read this make-believe story and now I can't get it out of my head ... oooww!
Please yank this article to protect future victims, and replace it with a true story. Or maybe turn this into a meta-article about how the original article got so screwed up.
Thanks.
I'd like to second this opinion. I also pay the $5/year. It's so cheap how can you resist?
One of their features I like is their weather photos. Users (I don't recall if you need to be a paying user or not) can upload their weather related photos. Recent photos are displayed in rotation on the site. What I especially like is that you get photos from all over the world. It's almost (well not quite) like travelling for free.
he quickly jumped on the "not me" wagon by trying to control the discussion
..".
Saying 'not me'? Quite the opposite I think. Perhaps you saw his testimony to Congress, when he
apologized to the country for not preventing 9/11 and said among other things ".. I failed you
Wow. Saying that out loud for the grieving 9/11 family members and the rest of the country took incredible courage. Contrast Clarke's plain speaking with the circumlocutions spouted by the Bush inner circle.
By the way, I read his book. It was excellent. Clarke's a straight talker who give a clear idea of life in government. (You might want to save the first chapter till the end though, it's easier to follow once you've digested the reset of the book.)
Remember when King Kong falls in love with Faye Wray? Didn't you wonder about the likelihood of cross-species romance among primates? Now is Science's chance to find out. I propose they include photos of Faye Wray with the female monkey photos and see how well the male monkeys like her.
If they're trying to woo the iPod users, they should provide a built-in iPod dock, and help reduce cable sprawl.
How does that compare with the performance of brick and mortar stores? How items does WalMart sell
in one day across all their stores?
I don't understand why people think GW is doing a good job on terror. While we can agree he is doing *a* job on terrorism, I find it at best noisy and attention getting (don't forget, he was a college cheer leader), at worst brutal, uninformed and ineffective. If you've read the accounts of Richard Clarke, Woodward, Ron Susskind, etc and still think GW is doing fine, then I'm totally confused.
Kerry at least appears reasonable, hardworking and open minded, in a word normal, unlike the Bush who lacks experience (10 years ago he was an unsuccessful busisness man with no administrative experience), doesn't read and seems unwilling to learn or take advice outside his small insular circle. Even if Kerry's policy stands aren't exactly to your taste, his views are moderate and he seems much more willing to listen and compromise.
I you want to read a good account of Bush's presidency, try this article Without a Doubt by Ron Suskind in the New York Times.
I've found that the fumes from chlorine bleach can remove smells from my bathroom. Typically I'd wipe the bleach on a few surfaces, close the door, and come back in a few hours. Sometimes when I came back it smelled like a meadow after a thunderstorm, to quote a previous post.
You might want to try this experiment. Wipe a keyboard with enought cholorine bleach to generate fumes then seal it in a plastic bag for a few hours or overnight, and see how it smells afterwards.
Hope it works for you.
Sorry for the shameless plug but I find ipaudit and ipstrings useful. Available from sourceforge.
ipaudit similar to netflow, it summarizes network traffic byte count for every host pair, protocol, and port pair.ipstrings reads string data off the wire similar to unix utility strings. It's included in the ipaudit package.