Rooftop solar can power about two floors of a home, or a big box store that is the equivalent height. It can't power a restaurant or a tall building, they use too much per square foot to operate.
No utility or grid operator proposes using *only* solar power. But if it is the cheapest producer (which it is when running, because no fuel cost), then they prefer it whenever possible. This is why solar, wind, and natural gas have supplied the majority of new power plants in the US the last 5 years. All three are cheaper than coal or new nuclear. Building such plants isn't cheaper than already existing hydro, nuclear, or geothermal, so the plants already built will continue to run.
The end result is a mix of power sources, like we already have, and likely having 2.2 times the installed capacity relative to average demand (which is today's situation). We have more than twice the capacity for two reasons. Demand varies by time of day and season, and you need to meet the peak, not the average. Also, no power plant can run 100% of the time. They all need maintenance sometimes, or are unavailable for various reasons. For example, California had severe droughts in recent years, so they could not use much hydro, because there wasn't enough water.
So whenever people mention needing "backup" generation, it's bogus misdirection. We already have it, and we are not going to get rid of it. We are shifting the mix of power sources, but we will always have a mix.
Solar panels in the field degrade about 0.5-0.7% per year in output. They are silicon electronics which by their nature are exposed to a lot of solar UV. This degrades the junctions that make it function. Contrary to the misinformation spread around the web, solar panels are made from silicon, glass, aluminum, plastic, copper, and tiny amount of silver. The last is used for the cell electrical contacts, but it is the thickness of printed ink. All of these are recyclable. Since almost no solar panels (0.1%) are older than 30 years, essentially none have needed replacement due to degradation. Some of them have needed replacement because the weather seals in some early panels did not last well. It is likely parts like the panel mountings and panel-to-panel wiring will degrade faster than the panels themselves, because those parts are not encapsulated against the weather.
Actually, on a rolling 12-month basis, solar is up to 1.5% in the US as of Jun 2017 (the last month for which data is available). Wind power is 6.0%. Coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear account for 82.6% and Hydroelectric 7.2%. Misc other sources are the other 2.7%
Solar panels aren't made with slave labor. They are *electronics*, made in clean rooms with robots, like semiconductor chips are (which are also made from silicon). In fact, up until 2009, solar cells were made from the *same* silicon as electronics. But then the volume got so large, they made their own silicon foundries (as in the furnaces to refine the metal from silicon dioxide). "Solar grade" silicon has more defects than "electronics grade", because it does not affect the output much. Defects in electronics can make the chip not work properly. So solar grade silicon is about 20 times cheaper, hence the cells are cheap.
Burning coal *is* expensive, because natural coal contains all sorts of impurities, from sulfur (which produces acid rain) to bits of rock which contain heavy metals. You need to filter or otherwise dispose of all that junk that isn't carbon.
Natural gas, on the other hand, is nearly pure methane and ethane, so when it burns, nothing is left to dispose of except water vapor and CO2, which go out the exhaust.
> And I have no doubt that somewhere someone must be developing a system that is fully encrypted, untraceable, and de-centralized...
The story is about cracking down on websites. "Meta-Torrents" can eliminate the need for websites. These are files which contain magnet links and descriptions of torrent files, and are themselves torrented. So, say someone compiles a meta-torrent of popular recent movies. It would be a relatively small file, which can be distributed by multiple means, like email attachments, in addition to torrenting it. Open it up, and click one of the magnet links, and you are good to go.
Trumps white supremacist roots go deep. His dad was associated with the KKK, and their company refused to rent to black people until they were taken to court over it.
US Dollars are nearly entirely backed by debt. In the case of paper money, it is Treasury bonds and other suitable collateral, deposited by banks at the Federal Reserve, in exchange for the paper notes they give people at teller windows and ATMs. In the case of checking balances, those are backed by bank loans. Debt instruments are assets, which are bought and sold on the market all the time, but they are unwieldy for buying coffee or gasoline. Dollars are uniform sized units which are more convenient for those purposes.
I've been calling this method a "process compiler", by analogy to software compilers. You have a high level process in manufacturing, and want to convert it to individual steps for machines or people to execute, taking into account what their capabilities are, and schedule availability. The need for this comes up with flexible manufacturing, where you are not making a long series of identical items. To make it work, you need metadata on the CAD parts files, that identify materials and heat-treating and such, and similar information on what various pieces of equipment are capable of. If the factory doesn't have the right machines or equipment for a given step, it can be spit out as an order for an outside supplier or a new piece of equipment to add to the factory.
Like software, the compiled production process may benefit from hand-optimization by people who understand the details of production, but for routine flows you can let it go directly to the production floor as instructions for the computer-controlled machines and work orders for the humans.
> Why people are still customers of this corrupt organization is a mystery.
In my case, because I was moving to a new city, and my credit union didn't have nearby branches (nearest is 30 miles away). Since I didn't know where I would end up buying a house, I picked a big bank that had branches both at my old city, and all over the new one. This was all before the customer fraud stuff started. I kept my credit union account, and still use them for about half my banking, but a nearby branch and ATM was the main reason to go with WF.
Today, the question is are there any local banks who are less jerks than WF, and how do you tell?
The underlying value is an economic concept called "utility". People value food and houses because they are useful to us. Their "utility value" is what other things we are willing to trade for them (our labor, dollars, etc). The thing is, utility value varies per person and even for the same person at different times. If enough trades happen over a period of time, we can establish an average "market value" - what people are currently willing to trade for this item.
The usefulness of Bitcoin is in transferring economic value from place to place. Since it runs on the Internet, and is open-source software, it can do this function anywhere, for anyone. It is especially useful in circumstances where other methods (bank wires, credit cards, Western Union) are expensive or not available at all. If you are in Venezuela, for example, which is undergoing hyperinflation and economic collapse, you might want to move your assets out of the country. The government won't let you with the national currency (the Bolivar), but you can with bitcoin. Not surprisingly, bitcoin trading volumes are very high in that country.
If something better comes along that does the same job as Bitcoin, it's market value may disappear, the way 2400 baud modems are now pretty worthless.
Individual transactions are still valid on both chains, and the people who generate blocks (called "miners") of both types can include your transaction. There is still only one bitcoin network. But there are different versions of node, mining, and user wallet software which will track transactions in different ways.
> I assume everyone involved is working toward strengthening the currency as a whole and not trying to undermine it's success.
You assume wrong. Blockstream, Inc, a company financed by the second largest mainstream financial company (AXA), hired most of bitcoin's core developers, and drove off many of the rest. They have roadblocked bitcoin's expansion in order to force transactions "off-chain" onto private settlement networks, the kind that AXA can collect fees off of.
A "block" is a set of bitcoin transactions secured with a cryptographic hash, so you can verify the contents are correct. Until now, the block size limit has been 1 MB. Since blocks are generated every ten minutes on average, this works out to slightly less than old 14.4K telephone modem speed. This is an absurdly low limit on transaction rate, but was not a problem until last fall, when the volume of transactions hit that limit. The core developers had refused to raise the limit, so that instigated the software fork.
Bitcoin is open-source software, so it can be forked like any other OSS project. The split happening today is a simple change to the code, to allow up to 8 MB blocks. That amounts to 107 kbps, which is still well within modern broadband capacity. All the transaction up to this point is identical for both forks, but once the new fork generates a block > 1 MB, the other fork won't recognize it as valid. From that point forward their blockhains will have different histories. Any bitcoins you had previously will be represented on both ledgers, and it is up to the user to choose which software they want to use to handle future transactions.
> then why only one out of 13 for this particular Gallifreyan?
Because the TARDIS chameleon circuit was stuck all this time, and interfered with the regeneration. The boost of regeneration energy from the Time Lords has now unstuck it, and we can hope the TARDIS will now appear as something other than a blue box from time to time.
(that makes as much sense as any other explanation in a science fiction series that makes it up as it goes along)
The Doctor has said explicitly, even this past season, that the honorific of "Doctor" was named after him. In other words, he was the archetype. But what he fixed wasn't medical problems, but much larger ones. He runs around the Universe fixing things, more like an EMS paramedic than a GP in an office.
Sears has been dying since 2000. I learned it was dying back then because my girlfriend worked there, and I got the inside scoop on how messed up things were. The sad thing about that is they could have become Amazon. Sears had been doing catalog sales since forever, and they could have jumped into online sales, but they were too slow.
Microsoft now has a Senator, who previously was in the House of Representatives, and whose district included Redmond, WA. Many years ago, one of the politicians from that state was referred to as the "Senator from Boeing". When you get really big, your politicians take care of you, but you have to get big first.
Pumped storage is a specific example of "potential energy storage". If you are short on water, but have hills and rocks, you can raise and lower the rocks for energy storage. Electric motors can drive containers of rock uphill on rails or via cable to store energy, then bring them back downhill to release it.
Solar panels typically degrade at 0.5% per year from their original rated power. By their nature, they are exposed to solar UV all their lives. The high energy photons damage the relatively thin semiconductor junction layers in the cell. Other parts of the panel, like the aluminum frame, are likely to degrade faster than the cells themselves, and once the panel is no longer weather-tight, they can fail fairly fast. But then, so do houses, once the roof isn't weather-tight any more.
Perovskite panels aren't "piling up around the world" like the study says, because none of them have reached commercial use. Their operating life is too short, so they are still an item of research. For that matter, silicon solar panels, the most common type by far, are not piling up anywhere, either (except maybe warehouses and solar farms). That's because they have a useful life of ~30 years, and practically no solar panels are that old yet. Silicon panels contain silicon, obviously, and aluminum (the frame), glass (cover sheet), usually plastic for the back sheet, copper (wiring) and trace amounts of silver (electrical contacts on the cell itself). All of that is eminently recyclable and none of it is dangerous.
Solar *farms* as opposed to just the panels, also contain concrete and steel (the panel mounting structures), more wiring, and transformers at the point where the power goes to the transmission lines. But those are no different than what you find at any other power plant.
We still need "metallurgical coal" to produce new steel. This is the fairly hard and pure coal that can withstand being in a blast furnace, where it steals oxygen from iron oxide to leave metallic iron. This type of coal is only 5-10% of thermal coal used in power plants. There are a few misc other uses for coal, but power and steelmaking are the big ones.
> Offer Trump a place in history as the first political leader ever to take a trip into space
He was beat by Senator John Glenn, who flew on the Space Shuttle many years after his first flight in 1962. Also a Saudi prince flew on one of the Shuttle flights. Given that Saudi Arabia is a kingdom, the royal family counts as political leaders.
Slashdot Mirror
Rooftop solar can power about two floors of a home, or a big box store that is the equivalent height. It can't power a restaurant or a tall building, they use too much per square foot to operate.
No utility or grid operator proposes using *only* solar power. But if it is the cheapest producer (which it is when running, because no fuel cost), then they prefer it whenever possible. This is why solar, wind, and natural gas have supplied the majority of new power plants in the US the last 5 years. All three are cheaper than coal or new nuclear. Building such plants isn't cheaper than already existing hydro, nuclear, or geothermal, so the plants already built will continue to run.
The end result is a mix of power sources, like we already have, and likely having 2.2 times the installed capacity relative to average demand (which is today's situation). We have more than twice the capacity for two reasons. Demand varies by time of day and season, and you need to meet the peak, not the average. Also, no power plant can run 100% of the time. They all need maintenance sometimes, or are unavailable for various reasons. For example, California had severe droughts in recent years, so they could not use much hydro, because there wasn't enough water.
So whenever people mention needing "backup" generation, it's bogus misdirection. We already have it, and we are not going to get rid of it. We are shifting the mix of power sources, but we will always have a mix.
Solar panels in the field degrade about 0.5-0.7% per year in output. They are silicon electronics which by their nature are exposed to a lot of solar UV. This degrades the junctions that make it function. Contrary to the misinformation spread around the web, solar panels are made from silicon, glass, aluminum, plastic, copper, and tiny amount of silver. The last is used for the cell electrical contacts, but it is the thickness of printed ink. All of these are recyclable. Since almost no solar panels (0.1%) are older than 30 years, essentially none have needed replacement due to degradation. Some of them have needed replacement because the weather seals in some early panels did not last well. It is likely parts like the panel mountings and panel-to-panel wiring will degrade faster than the panels themselves, because those parts are not encapsulated against the weather.
> Solar is still less than 1%,
Actually, on a rolling 12-month basis, solar is up to 1.5% in the US as of Jun 2017 (the last month for which data is available). Wind power is 6.0%. Coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear account for 82.6% and Hydroelectric 7.2%. Misc other sources are the other 2.7%
Solar panels aren't made with slave labor. They are *electronics*, made in clean rooms with robots, like semiconductor chips are (which are also made from silicon). In fact, up until 2009, solar cells were made from the *same* silicon as electronics. But then the volume got so large, they made their own silicon foundries (as in the furnaces to refine the metal from silicon dioxide). "Solar grade" silicon has more defects than "electronics grade", because it does not affect the output much. Defects in electronics can make the chip not work properly. So solar grade silicon is about 20 times cheaper, hence the cells are cheap.
Burning coal *is* expensive, because natural coal contains all sorts of impurities, from sulfur (which produces acid rain) to bits of rock which contain heavy metals. You need to filter or otherwise dispose of all that junk that isn't carbon.
Natural gas, on the other hand, is nearly pure methane and ethane, so when it burns, nothing is left to dispose of except water vapor and CO2, which go out the exhaust.
> And I have no doubt that somewhere someone must be developing a system that is fully encrypted, untraceable, and de-centralized...
The story is about cracking down on websites. "Meta-Torrents" can eliminate the need for websites. These are files which contain magnet links and descriptions of torrent files, and are themselves torrented. So, say someone compiles a meta-torrent of popular recent movies. It would be a relatively small file, which can be distributed by multiple means, like email attachments, in addition to torrenting it. Open it up, and click one of the magnet links, and you are good to go.
Trumps white supremacist roots go deep. His dad was associated with the KKK, and their company refused to rent to black people until they were taken to court over it.
US Dollars are nearly entirely backed by debt. In the case of paper money, it is Treasury bonds and other suitable collateral, deposited by banks at the Federal Reserve, in exchange for the paper notes they give people at teller windows and ATMs. In the case of checking balances, those are backed by bank loans. Debt instruments are assets, which are bought and sold on the market all the time, but they are unwieldy for buying coffee or gasoline. Dollars are uniform sized units which are more convenient for those purposes.
MacKay's book is old enough to be out of copyright. You can download it for free from the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/te...
> Me, I'm holding out for TrumpCoin.
Already exists: https://coinmarketcap.com/curr...
Predictably, it is pretty worthless :-).
I've been calling this method a "process compiler", by analogy to software compilers. You have a high level process in manufacturing, and want to convert it to individual steps for machines or people to execute, taking into account what their capabilities are, and schedule availability. The need for this comes up with flexible manufacturing, where you are not making a long series of identical items. To make it work, you need metadata on the CAD parts files, that identify materials and heat-treating and such, and similar information on what various pieces of equipment are capable of. If the factory doesn't have the right machines or equipment for a given step, it can be spit out as an order for an outside supplier or a new piece of equipment to add to the factory.
Like software, the compiled production process may benefit from hand-optimization by people who understand the details of production, but for routine flows you can let it go directly to the production floor as instructions for the computer-controlled machines and work orders for the humans.
> Why people are still customers of this corrupt organization is a mystery.
In my case, because I was moving to a new city, and my credit union didn't have nearby branches (nearest is 30 miles away). Since I didn't know where I would end up buying a house, I picked a big bank that had branches both at my old city, and all over the new one. This was all before the customer fraud stuff started. I kept my credit union account, and still use them for about half my banking, but a nearby branch and ATM was the main reason to go with WF.
Today, the question is are there any local banks who are less jerks than WF, and how do you tell?
The underlying value is an economic concept called "utility". People value food and houses because they are useful to us. Their "utility value" is what other things we are willing to trade for them (our labor, dollars, etc). The thing is, utility value varies per person and even for the same person at different times. If enough trades happen over a period of time, we can establish an average "market value" - what people are currently willing to trade for this item.
The usefulness of Bitcoin is in transferring economic value from place to place. Since it runs on the Internet, and is open-source software, it can do this function anywhere, for anyone. It is especially useful in circumstances where other methods (bank wires, credit cards, Western Union) are expensive or not available at all. If you are in Venezuela, for example, which is undergoing hyperinflation and economic collapse, you might want to move your assets out of the country. The government won't let you with the national currency (the Bolivar), but you can with bitcoin. Not surprisingly, bitcoin trading volumes are very high in that country.
If something better comes along that does the same job as Bitcoin, it's market value may disappear, the way 2400 baud modems are now pretty worthless.
Individual transactions are still valid on both chains, and the people who generate blocks (called "miners") of both types can include your transaction. There is still only one bitcoin network. But there are different versions of node, mining, and user wallet software which will track transactions in different ways.
> I assume everyone involved is working toward strengthening the currency as a whole and not trying to undermine it's success.
You assume wrong. Blockstream, Inc, a company financed by the second largest mainstream financial company (AXA), hired most of bitcoin's core developers, and drove off many of the rest. They have roadblocked bitcoin's expansion in order to force transactions "off-chain" onto private settlement networks, the kind that AXA can collect fees off of.
A "block" is a set of bitcoin transactions secured with a cryptographic hash, so you can verify the contents are correct. Until now, the block size limit has been 1 MB. Since blocks are generated every ten minutes on average, this works out to slightly less than old 14.4K telephone modem speed. This is an absurdly low limit on transaction rate, but was not a problem until last fall, when the volume of transactions hit that limit. The core developers had refused to raise the limit, so that instigated the software fork.
Bitcoin is open-source software, so it can be forked like any other OSS project. The split happening today is a simple change to the code, to allow up to 8 MB blocks. That amounts to 107 kbps, which is still well within modern broadband capacity. All the transaction up to this point is identical for both forks, but once the new fork generates a block > 1 MB, the other fork won't recognize it as valid. From that point forward their blockhains will have different histories. Any bitcoins you had previously will be represented on both ledgers, and it is up to the user to choose which software they want to use to handle future transactions.
> then why only one out of 13 for this particular Gallifreyan?
Because the TARDIS chameleon circuit was stuck all this time, and interfered with the regeneration. The boost of regeneration energy from the Time Lords has now unstuck it, and we can hope the TARDIS will now appear as something other than a blue box from time to time.
(that makes as much sense as any other explanation in a science fiction series that makes it up as it goes along)
The Doctor has said explicitly, even this past season, that the honorific of "Doctor" was named after him. In other words, he was the archetype. But what he fixed wasn't medical problems, but much larger ones. He runs around the Universe fixing things, more like an EMS paramedic than a GP in an office.
Sears has been dying since 2000. I learned it was dying back then because my girlfriend worked there, and I got the inside scoop on how messed up things were. The sad thing about that is they could have become Amazon. Sears had been doing catalog sales since forever, and they could have jumped into online sales, but they were too slow.
Microsoft now has a Senator, who previously was in the House of Representatives, and whose district included Redmond, WA. Many years ago, one of the politicians from that state was referred to as the "Senator from Boeing". When you get really big, your politicians take care of you, but you have to get big first.
Pumped storage is a specific example of "potential energy storage". If you are short on water, but have hills and rocks, you can raise and lower the rocks for energy storage. Electric motors can drive containers of rock uphill on rails or via cable to store energy, then bring them back downhill to release it.
Solar panels typically degrade at 0.5% per year from their original rated power. By their nature, they are exposed to solar UV all their lives. The high energy photons damage the relatively thin semiconductor junction layers in the cell. Other parts of the panel, like the aluminum frame, are likely to degrade faster than the cells themselves, and once the panel is no longer weather-tight, they can fail fairly fast. But then, so do houses, once the roof isn't weather-tight any more.
Perovskite panels aren't "piling up around the world" like the study says, because none of them have reached commercial use. Their operating life is too short, so they are still an item of research. For that matter, silicon solar panels, the most common type by far, are not piling up anywhere, either (except maybe warehouses and solar farms). That's because they have a useful life of ~30 years, and practically no solar panels are that old yet. Silicon panels contain silicon, obviously, and aluminum (the frame), glass (cover sheet), usually plastic for the back sheet, copper (wiring) and trace amounts of silver (electrical contacts on the cell itself). All of that is eminently recyclable and none of it is dangerous.
Solar *farms* as opposed to just the panels, also contain concrete and steel (the panel mounting structures), more wiring, and transformers at the point where the power goes to the transmission lines. But those are no different than what you find at any other power plant.
We still need "metallurgical coal" to produce new steel. This is the fairly hard and pure coal that can withstand being in a blast furnace, where it steals oxygen from iron oxide to leave metallic iron. This type of coal is only 5-10% of thermal coal used in power plants. There are a few misc other uses for coal, but power and steelmaking are the big ones.
> Offer Trump a place in history as the first political leader ever to take a trip into space
He was beat by Senator John Glenn, who flew on the Space Shuttle many years after his first flight in 1962. Also a Saudi prince flew on one of the Shuttle flights. Given that Saudi Arabia is a kingdom, the royal family counts as political leaders.