I have been looking at building a house in the next few years that uses solar for everything except for A/C...
Seems to me that solar PV and A/C (assuming you're talking about air conditioning and not alternating current) go together as the peak need for A/C and the peak available solar power mostly coincide well.
Seems like it would take some careful calibration to make a laser that would burn off wet leaves plastered to the rail and yet not soften the hardened steel of the rail that's going to have a multi-ton train passing over it in seconds.
Of course there are measures to prevent voter fraud. In the first place you have to register to vote. Any questions about whether a person is eligible to vote should be taken care of when they register. Second when you walk in to vote your name is checked off on the list of registered voters. (Here in Oregon with mail in ballots you signature on the outside of the ballot envelope is compared to the signature on your voter registration card.) The people who advocate for voter ID have searched hard for the last decade for evidence to support their contention that voter IS is needed and haven't been able to come up with anything significant. What voter ID amounts to is a poll tax because of the time, effort and cost of obtaining the necessary ID which falls heaviest on the lowest levels of the population and poll taxes are illegal.
Why did the author of the article only run a simulation in NC?
Obviously because the mathematicians involved are looking for a lucrative grant to extend it to all 50 states (actually only 43 since 7 only have 1 Rep.)/snark
You'd get more sympathy from me if there was enough voter fraud to worry about. The fact is that since 2000 out of 100's of millions of votes cast there have been less than 50 cases of attempted voter fraud of the kind that voter ID would prevent. To illustrate how miniscule that is lets assume they're only catching 1 out of 100 cases of voter fraud than that there were 5,000 cases and that there were 500 million votes cast (it's got to way more than that). That would give you a fraud percentage of 0.01%. In person voter fraud is not a problem.
I think he meant that the Constitution sets 2 Senators from each state and proportional representation by population for the House of Representatives. That limits the ability to have proportional representation by party preference. Personally I think it would make more sense to make the Senate proportional by party preference. That would reduce the power of the states so a low population state like Wyoming wouldn't have the same representation as a high population state like California but it would give a better representation of where the country is politically.
So you think the fact that nobody in the US besides the two nurses who were caring for Duncan at his sickest have come down with Ebola is just dumb luck? The fact is the Ebola virus unlike the flu virus does not survive outside of the body for any length of time. Once any Ebola containing mucus dries out the virus is history. If there were any examples of random people catching it by the methods you speculate about I'd be more sympathetic to your viewpoint but it hasn't happened. I won't be wetting my pants until it does.
If Ebola was that easy to catch don't you think some of the people on the airplane with the Dallas nurse or some of the people who were on the subway with the New York doctor or especially some of the people Thomas Eric Duncan was staying with in Dallas would have caught it? The only people I know of who have caught Ebola are medical workers caring for those who are at the vomiting/diarrhea stage of the disease. I think the chances of a major outbreak in the US are close to zero.
Obviously Ebola it pretty hard to catch unless you're caring for someone who's in the vomiting/diarrhea stage of the disease and if you're that sick you're not going to be in supermarkets and packed subway trains. It's been long enough now that we know neither the Dallas nurse who had it and flew in an airplane nor the doctor who went bowling and took the subway in NYC gave it to anybody. None of the folks who Thomas Eric Duncan lived with in Dallas came down with it. If it's that hard to catch I'm not that concerned about here in the US. But until the outbreak in West Africa is contained the threat of it coming to the US remains so we need to attack it there.
Back when I had punch card voting (Benton Co., OR,1970's) there was a serial number on a tear off strip on the card. When the punch card was voted the serial number strip was torn off and saved. After the election the election officials could verify they still had every serial number they had printed either on the unvoted ballots or the torn off SN strips and they had no duplicates. They could also make sure the number of torn off strips was the same as the number of voted ballots. It was a decent system and kind of the high tech of its time. After all it was computer punch cards just like I used to run my FORTRAN programs on the mainframe.
Our backup requirements aren't as strict as yours but we make daily backups to tape (LTO-6), clone it and send it offsite for 5 weeks before it becomes eligible for recycling. Monthly archival backups we make 2 copies of and send one offsite for 10 years. Next year we will get a deduplicating disk backup system but we'll still copy the backups to tape and send them offsite. Between backup and clones of backups we have around 200 tapes in the rotation. Tape is still the most cost effective way to get our backups offsite. LTO tapes aren't going anywhere soon.
I agree that for home backups an LTO drive and tapes aren't cost effective but for business use with daily backups and offsite requirements it still fits the bill.
The Sun is the source of essentially all of the energy at the Earth's surface. Without it the temperature of the surface of the planet would be close to absolute zero. The Sun is constantly raining energy on the Earth, much of it gets reflected (albedo) but a substantial portion of it gets absorbed. When that absorbed energy gets re-emitted it's in the infrared radiation range. This is where the greenhouse gases (water vapor, CO2, methane, etc.) come into play. Without GHG's in the atmosphere that re-emitted IR radiation would just shoot straight through the atmosphere lost to space and the surface of the Earth would be around -17.8 degrees C (0 F), about the same as the average temperature on the Moon. Because of GHG's (mostly) the average temperature of the surface of the Earth is about 32 C (58 F) warmer than that. The discovery of the greenhouse effect is nearly 200 years old now. Joseph Fourier figured out that the Earth was warmer than it should be just given the Sun's input in the 1820's. In the late 1850's John Tyndall's work the effect of various gases on radiant energy quantified the effect of GHG's on IR.
So CO2 combines with a lot of other things to determine the temperature at the Earth's surface and changes in any of those things will affect it. CO2 happens to be one of those things that is changing the most and also something we could have some control over unlike incoming sunlight and water vapor in the atmosphere, etc.
That article was about the thermosphere which is from around 85 km to 600 km above the surface of the Earth. The ISS orbits in the thermosphere FFS. The effects of CO2 in the near vacuum of the thermosphere doesn't have much to do with the effects of CO2 in the troposphere. Even in the stratosphere increased CO2 has a bit of a cooling effect but it doesn't change what it does in the troposphere.
I'm not sure the cost of nuclear reactors in the US is that much greater than it is in a more nuclear friendly country like say France. If they show around the world that they can be built for significantly less than what it costs in the US I might be convinced but not until then.
I agree with you that people are too focused on immediate events rather than the long term statistical data that climate research shows. It's human nature and I've been guilty of it myself from time to time but I'm getting better at it.
While the humidity may change rather drastically in short times it's the long term average that matters. Since the IR absorption bands of water vapor and CO2 overlap some when the humidity goes down the effect of CO2 goes up. I'd go into more detail but I've got an event to attend. Maybe later.
It's that source of the carbon in the CO2 that matters when it comes to the increasing level of CO2 in the atmosphere and the carbon cycle in general.
The CO2 you exhale comes from carbon that plants absorbed from the atmosphere so when you exhale it the net change in CO2 in the carbon cycle is zero. There are plants busy absorbing more CO2 from the atmosphere right now that you will eat (or the animals you eat will eat). It's all a zero sum cycle.
The CO2 from burning fossil fuels comes from carbon that's been sequestered from the active carbon cycle for millions of years so releasing it causes CO2 levels to increase.
As I said if you don't understand the difference you're clueless.
Not to mention that battery packs degrade in capacity as they age, so someone with their brand new off the lot Tesla could get the batter swapped out for a crummy one that has degraded range. Nobody would go for that.
The answer to that is to just start them off with used batteries in the first place. Let the battery swap stations worry about taking old used up batteries out of operation and introducing new ones.
It was climate change before it was global warming. Gilbert Plass published a paper in 1958 titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change". The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1989. "Catastrophic" was just something the climate science deniers added so they could try and mock climate change.
Nuclear power's biggest problem is how expensive it is. In the US right now new nuclear power plants can't be built without federal loan guarantees and the liability coverage of the Price-Anderson Act. As wind and solar continue to drop in price it's going to be difficult for nuclear to compete in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been looking at building a house in the next few years that uses solar for everything except for A/C ...
Seems to me that solar PV and A/C (assuming you're talking about air conditioning and not alternating current) go together as the peak need for A/C and the peak available solar power mostly coincide well.
If you have a line and an account there's going to be a minimum monthly charge regardless whether you draw power or not.
In the /. meme world wouldn't it be "Trains May Soon Come Equipped With Sharks"?
RTFA? This is /. Why would I break tradition and do that?
Seems like it would take some careful calibration to make a laser that would burn off wet leaves plastered to the rail and yet not soften the hardened steel of the rail that's going to have a multi-ton train passing over it in seconds.
Of course there are measures to prevent voter fraud. In the first place you have to register to vote. Any questions about whether a person is eligible to vote should be taken care of when they register. Second when you walk in to vote your name is checked off on the list of registered voters. (Here in Oregon with mail in ballots you signature on the outside of the ballot envelope is compared to the signature on your voter registration card.) The people who advocate for voter ID have searched hard for the last decade for evidence to support their contention that voter IS is needed and haven't been able to come up with anything significant. What voter ID amounts to is a poll tax because of the time, effort and cost of obtaining the necessary ID which falls heaviest on the lowest levels of the population and poll taxes are illegal.
Why did the author of the article only run a simulation in NC?
Obviously because the mathematicians involved are looking for a lucrative grant to extend it to all 50 states (actually only 43 since 7 only have 1 Rep.) /snark
You'd get more sympathy from me if there was enough voter fraud to worry about. The fact is that since 2000 out of 100's of millions of votes cast there have been less than 50 cases of attempted voter fraud of the kind that voter ID would prevent. To illustrate how miniscule that is lets assume they're only catching 1 out of 100 cases of voter fraud than that there were 5,000 cases and that there were 500 million votes cast (it's got to way more than that). That would give you a fraud percentage of 0.01%. In person voter fraud is not a problem.
Now that would get a +1 Funny mod if I had the points.
I think he meant that the Constitution sets 2 Senators from each state and proportional representation by population for the House of Representatives. That limits the ability to have proportional representation by party preference. Personally I think it would make more sense to make the Senate proportional by party preference. That would reduce the power of the states so a low population state like Wyoming wouldn't have the same representation as a high population state like California but it would give a better representation of where the country is politically.
So you think the fact that nobody in the US besides the two nurses who were caring for Duncan at his sickest have come down with Ebola is just dumb luck? The fact is the Ebola virus unlike the flu virus does not survive outside of the body for any length of time. Once any Ebola containing mucus dries out the virus is history. If there were any examples of random people catching it by the methods you speculate about I'd be more sympathetic to your viewpoint but it hasn't happened. I won't be wetting my pants until it does.
If Ebola was that easy to catch don't you think some of the people on the airplane with the Dallas nurse or some of the people who were on the subway with the New York doctor or especially some of the people Thomas Eric Duncan was staying with in Dallas would have caught it? The only people I know of who have caught Ebola are medical workers caring for those who are at the vomiting/diarrhea stage of the disease. I think the chances of a major outbreak in the US are close to zero.
Obviously Ebola it pretty hard to catch unless you're caring for someone who's in the vomiting/diarrhea stage of the disease and if you're that sick you're not going to be in supermarkets and packed subway trains. It's been long enough now that we know neither the Dallas nurse who had it and flew in an airplane nor the doctor who went bowling and took the subway in NYC gave it to anybody. None of the folks who Thomas Eric Duncan lived with in Dallas came down with it. If it's that hard to catch I'm not that concerned about here in the US. But until the outbreak in West Africa is contained the threat of it coming to the US remains so we need to attack it there.
Back when I had punch card voting (Benton Co., OR,1970's) there was a serial number on a tear off strip on the card. When the punch card was voted the serial number strip was torn off and saved. After the election the election officials could verify they still had every serial number they had printed either on the unvoted ballots or the torn off SN strips and they had no duplicates. They could also make sure the number of torn off strips was the same as the number of voted ballots. It was a decent system and kind of the high tech of its time. After all it was computer punch cards just like I used to run my FORTRAN programs on the mainframe.
Our backup requirements aren't as strict as yours but we make daily backups to tape (LTO-6), clone it and send it offsite for 5 weeks before it becomes eligible for recycling. Monthly archival backups we make 2 copies of and send one offsite for 10 years. Next year we will get a deduplicating disk backup system but we'll still copy the backups to tape and send them offsite. Between backup and clones of backups we have around 200 tapes in the rotation. Tape is still the most cost effective way to get our backups offsite. LTO tapes aren't going anywhere soon.
I agree that for home backups an LTO drive and tapes aren't cost effective but for business use with daily backups and offsite requirements it still fits the bill.
The Sun is the source of essentially all of the energy at the Earth's surface. Without it the temperature of the surface of the planet would be close to absolute zero. The Sun is constantly raining energy on the Earth, much of it gets reflected (albedo) but a substantial portion of it gets absorbed. When that absorbed energy gets re-emitted it's in the infrared radiation range. This is where the greenhouse gases (water vapor, CO2, methane, etc.) come into play. Without GHG's in the atmosphere that re-emitted IR radiation would just shoot straight through the atmosphere lost to space and the surface of the Earth would be around -17.8 degrees C (0 F), about the same as the average temperature on the Moon. Because of GHG's (mostly) the average temperature of the surface of the Earth is about 32 C (58 F) warmer than that. The discovery of the greenhouse effect is nearly 200 years old now. Joseph Fourier figured out that the Earth was warmer than it should be just given the Sun's input in the 1820's. In the late 1850's John Tyndall's work the effect of various gases on radiant energy quantified the effect of GHG's on IR.
So CO2 combines with a lot of other things to determine the temperature at the Earth's surface and changes in any of those things will affect it. CO2 happens to be one of those things that is changing the most and also something we could have some control over unlike incoming sunlight and water vapor in the atmosphere, etc.
That article was about the thermosphere which is from around 85 km to 600 km above the surface of the Earth. The ISS orbits in the thermosphere FFS. The effects of CO2 in the near vacuum of the thermosphere doesn't have much to do with the effects of CO2 in the troposphere. Even in the stratosphere increased CO2 has a bit of a cooling effect but it doesn't change what it does in the troposphere.
I'm not sure the cost of nuclear reactors in the US is that much greater than it is in a more nuclear friendly country like say France. If they show around the world that they can be built for significantly less than what it costs in the US I might be convinced but not until then.
I agree with you that people are too focused on immediate events rather than the long term statistical data that climate research shows. It's human nature and I've been guilty of it myself from time to time but I'm getting better at it.
While the humidity may change rather drastically in short times it's the long term average that matters. Since the IR absorption bands of water vapor and CO2 overlap some when the humidity goes down the effect of CO2 goes up. I'd go into more detail but I've got an event to attend. Maybe later.
It's that source of the carbon in the CO2 that matters when it comes to the increasing level of CO2 in the atmosphere and the carbon cycle in general.
The CO2 you exhale comes from carbon that plants absorbed from the atmosphere so when you exhale it the net change in CO2 in the carbon cycle is zero. There are plants busy absorbing more CO2 from the atmosphere right now that you will eat (or the animals you eat will eat). It's all a zero sum cycle.
The CO2 from burning fossil fuels comes from carbon that's been sequestered from the active carbon cycle for millions of years so releasing it causes CO2 levels to increase.
As I said if you don't understand the difference you're clueless.
If everyone fucking starves wouldn't that fix the overpopulation problem?
Not to mention that battery packs degrade in capacity as they age, so someone with their brand new off the lot Tesla could get the batter swapped out for a crummy one that has degraded range. Nobody would go for that.
The answer to that is to just start them off with used batteries in the first place. Let the battery swap stations worry about taking old used up batteries out of operation and introducing new ones.
It was climate change before it was global warming. Gilbert Plass published a paper in 1958 titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change". The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1989. "Catastrophic" was just something the climate science deniers added so they could try and mock climate change.
No, they're just getting more and more desperate as reality continues to argue against them.
Nuclear power's biggest problem is how expensive it is. In the US right now new nuclear power plants can't be built without federal loan guarantees and the liability coverage of the Price-Anderson Act. As wind and solar continue to drop in price it's going to be difficult for nuclear to compete in the long run.