There's other options too, a flywheel for example could be more practical than lifting a weight (similar idea but much more compact).
A long time ago, there were some experimental buses in Sweden which used a specially-designed flywheel in a vacuum can, with magnetic bearings, to store energy rather than batteries. This is practical for a mobile system because the stored rotational energy can be used to directly drive generators.
In contrast to the steam-engine flywheels of days gone by, the Swedish bus flywheels were thicker toward the middle because of their reportedly extreme rotational speed.
Trouble is you need very large tanks of water, or to seperate them a long way. For instance a house might use 2 kWh overnight, that's about 7 MJ.
It isn't intended to be your primary source. Just as with other pumped systems, it's a supplement which stores during periods of excess and supplements during periods of shortage (or higher expense... some systems are now charging more for peak-period usage).
Pumped storage wasn't available UNTIL a couple of decades ago. I worked for an engineering company designing one and it was groundbreaking for its day.
I don't really care what he wrote. He remained a slave owner which says everything that needs to be said about his opinions on the matter. Jefferson was a remarkable man but also a very flawed one.
Spoken like someone who truly doesn't understand history, or even the recent past, for that matter.
30 years ago, if you told someone that gay marriage would be legal in many states, as likely as not they'd have looked at you like you were completely crazy.
And yet Washington and Jefferson owned slaves until the day they died so clearly they didn't really believe that even if they said so. Actions speak much louder than words. Yes I'm viewing it with modern day viewpoints but the fact remains that they had the choice to free their slaves and I'm quite sure they were aware of that at the time and chose against it.
I really have no choice but to say WHOOSH!
First off, they were products of their day. They weren't born today, and it is unrealistic to expect them to live like someone born today.
But second, and more important: they realized the political reality of their day. If they wanted a Constitution that states would ratify, they had to bow to the realities of their day. It's that simple.
And third, even more important than the first two: they created a country in which slavery could be abolished. They laid the groundwork.
If you read your history, you will learn that Jefferson abhorred slavery, but he thought that trying to free them all at once would lead to economic upheaval and disaster. While you may not like the fact that he kept them, he did have reason for thinking that way, and he may even have been right.
You don't want that. Maybe you are too young, maybe you just forgot what search engines were like back when they did just give execute the regex you typed in and return the raw results.
Look, let's not get ridiculous. Google's primary ranking is through visits and links to a site. That's all fine... I *do* want my search results ranked by general popularity in that manner.
But those are pretty much objective measures. Now Google is ranking sites according not to what others think, but to what GOOGLE thinks about the content of the site.
That's a completely different animal, and I am completely NOT interested.
For a small-scale pumped-storage system, you should also have a catch tank downstream from your generating turbine. No sense letting all that water go to waste. You just pump it back up high when you have excess generating capacity.
There are other -- probably cheaper -- solutions for local storage than batteries.
A couple of off-the-cuff examples: lifting a very large weight with your excess electricity, then running a generator with it during peak loads or periods. (Did I say VERY large weight?)
Another would be pumped hydro storage. Build a -- yet again very large -- tank at a height. During excess generation periods, use the electricity to pump water into the tank. During peak periods, use the water to turn a generator and reclaim the electricity.
All such systems have inefficiencies, even batteries. But pumped storage and other such solutions are used on a very large scale today... and should be quite workable for the small scale as well. Another advantage of pumped storage is that you now have a nice, big, full water tank with gravity feed in case of zombie apocalypse or whatever.
They already have too much of my online attention. Sharing anything except my searches with them is a non-starter. It doesn't matter how well implemented the service is. Because it's Google, there's just absolutely no way I'm using it.
I've started moving away from their search, too, now that they decide for me what constitutes "mobile friendly" and what doesn't. Fact is, some "desktop" work better on my phone than a lot of the "mobile" sites do.
I don't want a nanny-search moving the things I'm looking for down the page. Just give me what I searched for, nothing more, nothing less, no "judgment" about what I want to see.
FWIW, I think it was the "single real name policy" that actually killed Google+. At that point I stopped commenting on YouTube, stopped using Google+, and in fact just stopped "signing in" to anything at all Google.
No... more like 480 BC. It seems reasonable to think that "Spartan" refers to "Sparta" which in turn implies (with deference to Slashdot's notably horrible character handling): "Molon labe"... which would mean in this context: "Come and get it." The reply to Xerces when he demanded they lay down their weapons was "come and get them".
The historical reference hit me right away, and if Microsoft didn't really intend it, they screwed up bigtime. Because the name of their browser is historically a challenge to "try to go through me". So...
Let's go try it. I kind of doubt if seriously attacked it would stand as they did.
The barriers are exactly the issue I think that voters should focus on.
And I repeat: that's where Net Neutrality comes in. It serves to keep those barriers low, in a "market" (ISP) that is not competitive. Otherwise you'd get "tiered" service which keeps those small players small.
Of course. Did you not see in my sample calculation "$3.5M given 1M users"?
However, the economies do not scale linearly. You make an investment in infrastructure, and it's good up to X users. Then you make another investment, it's good up to X times 10 users. Etc. In practice it's mostly a step function, not a straight line.
Then why did she dispute the fact that women are a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc.?
Because your original statement
No, you're just part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc.
Can be interpreted at least two ways:
"part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc."
or
"part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc."
I admit, I read it pretty fast, but it struck me the second way. I could have thought about it more. I did wonder why you were saying I was in a position of power.:)
But just FYI, I didn't claim to be any particular gender, or belong to a minority, or be in a position of power.
Yeah, you know why? Because they didn't have the horsepower to drive the resolution that users expected from a display at larger sizes. It's only recently that the hardware has become efficient enough to actually provide a larger display with the features users expect.
I repeat: my Tungsten at 320x480 was very nice, pretty fast, and the graphics were pretty impressive for their day. As I mentioned before, Bejeweled (for one example) played and looked great.
My point -- which you still seem to be not getting -- is that if they'd simply stuck a phone in it, we'd have CLOSE TO what we have today, years before it actually happened. No, the screen was not AS big. No, it did not have AS HIGH a pixel size. But neither did anything else. It would have been a phone that decently ran apps, AND had pretty good (again for its day) handwriting recognition.
Well, my comment was really meant in the context of ISPs.
Sure, there are small innovative companies. Like Instagram and even Netflix (it didn't start out big). BUT... what about companies that bring those services to the consumer? The ISPs? That's where Net Neutrality really comes in, and they have erected huge barriers to entry for anybody small (or innovative).
Oh no, they understand it just fine.. they just don't care or feel it should apply to them.
No, I don't believe that's true. While they might know the words, they haven't really studied it, or its history, enough to UNDERSTAND the intent of the words when they were written.
Further, many of them think they don't have to... that it's a "living document" that changes meaning over time.
I call bullshit.
---
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson, founding father
Twitter's hypocrisy was eyeroll worthy before, but it's just outright silly now.
I could be wrong, but I took your "SJW" comment to be a reference to those who abuse the "report for abuse" button.
This is a real phenomenon. Twitter has a history of suspending people for reported abuse, when in fact the "offending" party hadn't abused anyone or anything at all. For some people, like modding "troll" rather than "disagree", it has become synonymous for "I don't like this person, so I'm going to do something nasty".
To compound the problem further, Twitter doesn't tell the "offending" party what they did wrong. Occasionally -- not always by any means -- they will let people know what the "offending" Tweet was, but not specifically what was wrong with it or why anyone objected.
Twitter could easily do that without revealing the name or names of the complainants. But insisting that people stop "abuse" when they don't even know WHAT people complained about, is completely unreasonable in an atmosphere of "report abuse because I don't agree".
Yes, the out-of-context issue is a very real danger, what with comments people make in one conversation taken out and presented in the context of something else, making it seem as if that person meant one thing when they really meant another.
I know this one well; it has been pulled on me many times.
Look, it's really simple: we live in the Surveillance Age now, there's absolutely nothing we can do about it, might as well find a few upsides. You know the old saying "when rape is inevitable, relax and try to enjoy it"?
Another "downside" to pervasive surveillance: a disturbing degree of fatalism.
No, you're just part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc.
The word "minority" has a pretty well established definition, and that isn't it. I think you mean "protected group", which is something altogether different.
If you offer a viable alternative, look for "something really, really unfortunate" to arrive with an innocuous name like "Net Neutrality", or something.
Since you brought up Net Neutrality: can you give me one example of a small, innovative startup in the ISP business in the last 10 years?
No? Why not?
I'll tell you why not: it is not a competitive market. It's a de facto oligopoly, with barriers to entry that are far to high for the little guy to vault.
That's where government's legitimate role begins: by regulating or breaking up oligopolies and monopolies, so that there can be competition in the marketplace.
Don't expect market forces to fix a problem when there isn't a real competitive market in the first place. That's not very realistic.
And I'll answer my own question: the only "new" broadband ISP to make a name for itself in many years now is Google, and they can hardly be called a "little guy". They are one of the few groups that has the money and muscle to elbow its way in to a business that is very hostile to outsiders.
Slashdot Mirror
There's other options too, a flywheel for example could be more practical than lifting a weight (similar idea but much more compact).
A long time ago, there were some experimental buses in Sweden which used a specially-designed flywheel in a vacuum can, with magnetic bearings, to store energy rather than batteries. This is practical for a mobile system because the stored rotational energy can be used to directly drive generators.
In contrast to the steam-engine flywheels of days gone by, the Swedish bus flywheels were thicker toward the middle because of their reportedly extreme rotational speed.
Trouble is you need very large tanks of water, or to seperate them a long way. For instance a house might use 2 kWh overnight, that's about 7 MJ.
It isn't intended to be your primary source. Just as with other pumped systems, it's a supplement which stores during periods of excess and supplements during periods of shortage (or higher expense... some systems are now charging more for peak-period usage).
Pumped storage wasn't available UNTIL a couple of decades ago. I worked for an engineering company designing one and it was groundbreaking for its day.
I don't really care what he wrote. He remained a slave owner which says everything that needs to be said about his opinions on the matter. Jefferson was a remarkable man but also a very flawed one.
Spoken like someone who truly doesn't understand history, or even the recent past, for that matter.
30 years ago, if you told someone that gay marriage would be legal in many states, as likely as not they'd have looked at you like you were completely crazy.
And yet Washington and Jefferson owned slaves until the day they died so clearly they didn't really believe that even if they said so. Actions speak much louder than words. Yes I'm viewing it with modern day viewpoints but the fact remains that they had the choice to free their slaves and I'm quite sure they were aware of that at the time and chose against it.
I really have no choice but to say WHOOSH!
First off, they were products of their day. They weren't born today, and it is unrealistic to expect them to live like someone born today.
But second, and more important: they realized the political reality of their day. If they wanted a Constitution that states would ratify, they had to bow to the realities of their day. It's that simple.
And third, even more important than the first two: they created a country in which slavery could be abolished. They laid the groundwork.
If you read your history, you will learn that Jefferson abhorred slavery, but he thought that trying to free them all at once would lead to economic upheaval and disaster. While you may not like the fact that he kept them, he did have reason for thinking that way, and he may even have been right.
You don't want that. Maybe you are too young, maybe you just forgot what search engines were like back when they did just give execute the regex you typed in and return the raw results.
Look, let's not get ridiculous. Google's primary ranking is through visits and links to a site. That's all fine... I *do* want my search results ranked by general popularity in that manner.
But those are pretty much objective measures. Now Google is ranking sites according not to what others think, but to what GOOGLE thinks about the content of the site.
That's a completely different animal, and I am completely NOT interested.
I should have added:
For a small-scale pumped-storage system, you should also have a catch tank downstream from your generating turbine. No sense letting all that water go to waste. You just pump it back up high when you have excess generating capacity.
There are other -- probably cheaper -- solutions for local storage than batteries.
A couple of off-the-cuff examples: lifting a very large weight with your excess electricity, then running a generator with it during peak loads or periods. (Did I say VERY large weight?)
Another would be pumped hydro storage. Build a -- yet again very large -- tank at a height. During excess generation periods, use the electricity to pump water into the tank. During peak periods, use the water to turn a generator and reclaim the electricity.
All such systems have inefficiencies, even batteries. But pumped storage and other such solutions are used on a very large scale today... and should be quite workable for the small scale as well. Another advantage of pumped storage is that you now have a nice, big, full water tank with gravity feed in case of zombie apocalypse or whatever.
They already have too much of my online attention. Sharing anything except my searches with them is a non-starter. It doesn't matter how well implemented the service is. Because it's Google, there's just absolutely no way I'm using it.
I've started moving away from their search, too, now that they decide for me what constitutes "mobile friendly" and what doesn't. Fact is, some "desktop" work better on my phone than a lot of the "mobile" sites do.
I don't want a nanny-search moving the things I'm looking for down the page. Just give me what I searched for, nothing more, nothing less, no "judgment" about what I want to see.
FWIW, I think it was the "single real name policy" that actually killed Google+. At that point I stopped commenting on YouTube, stopped using Google+, and in fact just stopped "signing in" to anything at all Google.
Having the ultimate cartel, the government, manage the rules is not the same as actual marketplace competition
Of course. But when you don't have competition anyway, nor any good way to create any, regulation is a better-then-the-alternative last resort.
The "information highway"? WTF is this, 1995?
No... more like 480 BC. It seems reasonable to think that "Spartan" refers to "Sparta" which in turn implies (with deference to Slashdot's notably horrible character handling): "Molon labe"... which would mean in this context: "Come and get it." The reply to Xerces when he demanded they lay down their weapons was "come and get them".
The historical reference hit me right away, and if Microsoft didn't really intend it, they screwed up bigtime. Because the name of their browser is historically a challenge to "try to go through me". So...
Let's go try it. I kind of doubt if seriously attacked it would stand as they did.
The barriers are exactly the issue I think that voters should focus on.
And I repeat: that's where Net Neutrality comes in. It serves to keep those barriers low, in a "market" (ISP) that is not competitive. Otherwise you'd get "tiered" service which keeps those small players small.
The cost would seem proportional to the users.
Of course. Did you not see in my sample calculation "$3.5M given 1M users"?
However, the economies do not scale linearly. You make an investment in infrastructure, and it's good up to X users. Then you make another investment, it's good up to X times 10 users. Etc. In practice it's mostly a step function, not a straight line.
They have discovered that both of these effects are actually the same thing - it is fact the Gremlin that causes the previous fast lane to slow down.
The GURPS_NPC Law: Sooner or later every difficult problem in physics is attributed to Gremlins.
Mod up.
Then why did she dispute the fact that women are a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc.?
Because your original statement
No, you're just part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc.
Can be interpreted at least two ways:
:)
"part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc."
or
"part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc."
I admit, I read it pretty fast, but it struck me the second way. I could have thought about it more. I did wonder why you were saying I was in a position of power.
But just FYI, I didn't claim to be any particular gender, or belong to a minority, or be in a position of power.
Yeah, you know why? Because they didn't have the horsepower to drive the resolution that users expected from a display at larger sizes. It's only recently that the hardware has become efficient enough to actually provide a larger display with the features users expect.
I repeat: my Tungsten at 320x480 was very nice, pretty fast, and the graphics were pretty impressive for their day. As I mentioned before, Bejeweled (for one example) played and looked great.
My point -- which you still seem to be not getting -- is that if they'd simply stuck a phone in it, we'd have CLOSE TO what we have today, years before it actually happened. No, the screen was not AS big. No, it did not have AS HIGH a pixel size. But neither did anything else. It would have been a phone that decently ran apps, AND had pretty good (again for its day) handwriting recognition.
The problem is precisely that often nobody knows who they are. THEY get protected, but the people they abuse do not.
Well, my comment was really meant in the context of ISPs.
Sure, there are small innovative companies. Like Instagram and even Netflix (it didn't start out big). BUT... what about companies that bring those services to the consumer? The ISPs? That's where Net Neutrality really comes in, and they have erected huge barriers to entry for anybody small (or innovative).
Oh no, they understand it just fine.. they just don't care or feel it should apply to them.
No, I don't believe that's true. While they might know the words, they haven't really studied it, or its history, enough to UNDERSTAND the intent of the words when they were written.
Further, many of them think they don't have to... that it's a "living document" that changes meaning over time.
I call bullshit.
---
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson, founding father
Twitter's hypocrisy was eyeroll worthy before, but it's just outright silly now.
I could be wrong, but I took your "SJW" comment to be a reference to those who abuse the "report for abuse" button.
This is a real phenomenon. Twitter has a history of suspending people for reported abuse, when in fact the "offending" party hadn't abused anyone or anything at all. For some people, like modding "troll" rather than "disagree", it has become synonymous for "I don't like this person, so I'm going to do something nasty".
To compound the problem further, Twitter doesn't tell the "offending" party what they did wrong. Occasionally -- not always by any means -- they will let people know what the "offending" Tweet was, but not specifically what was wrong with it or why anyone objected.
Twitter could easily do that without revealing the name or names of the complainants. But insisting that people stop "abuse" when they don't even know WHAT people complained about, is completely unreasonable in an atmosphere of "report abuse because I don't agree".
People mocked the idea that corporations are essentially people. And yet here we are, giving the same rights to chimps.
Point is noted. There isn't much difference between them, so why should one have rights but not the other?
Yes, the out-of-context issue is a very real danger, what with comments people make in one conversation taken out and presented in the context of something else, making it seem as if that person meant one thing when they really meant another.
I know this one well; it has been pulled on me many times.
Look, it's really simple: we live in the Surveillance Age now, there's absolutely nothing we can do about it, might as well find a few upsides. You know the old saying "when rape is inevitable, relax and try to enjoy it"?
Another "downside" to pervasive surveillance: a disturbing degree of fatalism.
No, you're just part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc.
The word "minority" has a pretty well established definition, and that isn't it. I think you mean "protected group", which is something altogether different.
If you offer a viable alternative, look for "something really, really unfortunate" to arrive with an innocuous name like "Net Neutrality", or something.
Since you brought up Net Neutrality: can you give me one example of a small, innovative startup in the ISP business in the last 10 years?
No? Why not?
I'll tell you why not: it is not a competitive market. It's a de facto oligopoly, with barriers to entry that are far to high for the little guy to vault.
That's where government's legitimate role begins: by regulating or breaking up oligopolies and monopolies, so that there can be competition in the marketplace.
Don't expect market forces to fix a problem when there isn't a real competitive market in the first place. That's not very realistic.
And I'll answer my own question: the only "new" broadband ISP to make a name for itself in many years now is Google, and they can hardly be called a "little guy". They are one of the few groups that has the money and muscle to elbow its way in to a business that is very hostile to outsiders.