Generally that's true, but I've seen the reverse, also. A young ref (I'd say he was under 20) at one of our home games actually red-carded the opposition's coach after warning him to stop abusive language. "Remove your ID badge and leave the field" - I was impressed.
Actually, I was hoping the guy would be stubborn and refuse to leave - the ref might have awarded the game to us, and the other team would have got a very nasty letter from the federation.
Anyway, I get cranky with incompetent referees and linesmen - we pay our fees, we shouldn't have trainees foisted on us. Teenagers are the age group MOST in need of firm, reliable discipline.
I take a lot of photos at my son's games, and I've occasionally caught stills of that sort of stuff. I've even contemplated asking our team for accreditation to film the games - for training purposes, of course. I suspect certain coaches, players and referees would behave a lot better if they knew they were being filmed.
Yes - but at school or junior/middle club level many of them are, shall we say, in need of further training, assessment and oversight. My son plays in the under-15 team for our local club, and there's one team in the region who are well known as a bunch of thugs - it's frustrating for our players who are taught to use their skills to play the game, as opposed to their elbows. We were approached by another team's manager one day and asked if we'd like to be part of a joint submission to complain about this team and the referees they supply for home games. I take photos at the games and I have one great but sad shot of one of the offenders laughing in the face of the referee when he was shown a yellow card for a blatant rule violation. Did the ref do anything about this disrespect? No.
Mod this up - there is a line between the audience and the show - whether film, TV, or theatre. That line partly defines the relationship between entertainer and audience. The line can change and blur (e.g. "break the fourth wall"), and there's nothing wrong with highly-realistic footage, I think it just means that our methods of storytelling will have to adapt.
Theatre isn't dead by a long shot, and it's one of the least realistic ways to tell a story. We just have different expectations when we sit down to watch a play, compared to watching TV, compared to watching a film in cinema.
A somewhat partisan view http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla yet if I can believe it's all true, then there are some things there that I didn't know before.
Um, the aboriginal people of Australia, to the best of my knowledge, have never had a treaty with the crown. So there are no such things as "aboriginal treaty rights". Sure, successive governments, their bureaucracies, farmers/squatters, rednecks, and others have trampled all over aboriginal people and their traditions, beliefs, and moral rights - but there's never been a treaty to break. The maori people of New Zealand have a treaty, but not the aboriginals of Australia.
That's the theory - in fact, line voltages are all over the place. When I first moved here, I was renting for 8 months until I found my current home. The rented place had a standard connection to the grid - my wife worked from home and complained about brown-outs during the day - they were sufficient to cause her computer to reboot - not fun while editing a newsletter. Also, there'd be a transient dip at 10pm every night - I eventually figured out it must have been everyone's off-peak hot water systems coming online - so it's a nice theory that we get 230VAC, but it doesn't happen in practice, and lampmakers should take that into account.
This particular subsidy program was specifically targeted at off-grid non-commercial users, ie.domestic households. It was also subject to a comparison test for getting the mains put in. You either had to be more than 1 kilometre from the grid, or submit a grid connection quote if under 1KM. My quote exceeded the amount necessary to qualify for the subsidy (although it DIDN'T include tree-clearing costs to put in power poles, and can you imagine what my neighbours would say if I had half the trees in the street removed?). The program was originally aimed at remote communities that rely on stonking big diesel generators to power their small towns - the govt got tired of subsidising their diesel, and decided to subsidise solar PV instead.
And yes, I pay my share of taxes - I've only been unemployed for about 3 months in my whole working life - I'll take everything I'm entitled to, and give credit to the government initiatives that try to do something positive with tax $$$. Would you believe it was a conservative, right-wing government that allocated something like AUD$134 milllion for this program (spread over about 3 years), and a left-leaning labour govt that took away what was left to give to grid-connect subsidies?
Yes, off-grid since 1996. The house had 600W of PV on the roof and 580 amphours of batteries when we moved in, with a modified square-wave inverter. Immediately upgraded to a sine-wave inverter (1500W continuous, 3000W surge), and a new washing machine (Fisher & Paykel smartdrive). Circa 2000, and we replaced batteries with 1100ah, and an additional 900W of PV. In 2008, we replaced the batteries again (had 2 children by this time), and added another kilowatt of PV to the roof. We could always do with more PV, but in sunny weather we can run three or four 240 volt appliances at once without overloading the inverter or needing to top up the batteries with the backup generator, e.g. 4 computers, or 2 computers and the washing machine, etc. The house is dual-wired - 240 volt power and the lighting circuit is 24 volt and uses incandescant and halogen bi-pin bulbs, but I'm going to cut those circuits over to 240 volts to take advantage of CFL and LED lamps - 24-volt bulbs are expensive, and the inverter inefficiency will be more than offset by the reduced energy consumption of CFL/LED lamps. I've already tried CFLs in some lamps running off the 240 volt power circuit, and difference in energy consumption is amazing. I've got a 240 volt fridge, and a 24 volt freezer.
I've never had a blackout that lasted more than 2 minutes (deliberately overloaded the lighting circuit to test the safety breakers). The downside is having to run the backup generator during rainy weather.
How can I afford all this? Well, the most recent upgrade cost ~AUD$23K, and was subsidised 50%, so we only paid about AUD$11K. That's NOT free or even cheap power, but it would cost us over AUD$40K to have the mains extended to our house, so it's a no-brainer, financially speaking.
Could be - but I'd have thought they could handle 10% over-voltage (although the peak of the sine wave could be significantly higher than the design can cope with). The thing is, I don't get brownouts, and it's the only the one brand/model that's been a problem. They were *just* out of warranty, so I sent a polite email expressing my disappointment that my bulbs lasted such a short time. The reply explained that warranties are calculated on how long HALF a sample of bulbs last under testing conditions - obviously my batch came from the shorter-lived "half". There was a happy ending - even though the warranty had expired, they sent me four bulbs as a gesture of goodwill. It pays to be polite.
I've got a sine-wave inverter powering my house - and if it overloads, it just shuts down. Otherwise, It's a stable 245 VAC day and night - no dips or spikes. I've had Osram, Phillips, and GE CFLs - and the Osrams have typically lasted about half their claimed lifespan.
Want to change things? Write a letter (NOT a tweet or email, or facebook posting) to the sponsors' PR departments. Say something like "I'm aware that you've paid $BIGNUM for sponsorship and associated exclusive marketing rights, but guess what? I'm not going to watch, and I'm not going to buy your products." Make sure you CC a copy to the IOC, and one to the local broadcaster.
There was, IIRC, an estimate from marketing research that went something along the lines of "one person who actually takes the trouble to complain represents x number of people who are unhappy, but don't take the trouble to complain". If enough people made their views known to the sponsors, LOC and broadcasters, they just might take notice and change their ways.
That wasn't what I was thinking, but I've remembered it now - it was in one of the "Ringworld" PC games that one of the characters uses a spray-can of fog to defeat a security laser.
The slaver sunflowers would toast anything that flew over them - mostly birds, but also the occasional Kzin.
My off-grid system was audited (part of the subsidy conditions) for safety and performance. The guy who did the audit very kindly brought out his specialist device for calculating theoretical performance based on environmental conditions. It was a very fancy data logger/field computer, equipped with GPS receiver, and a camera with a 180-degree lens, i.e. it could "see" from the eastern horizon to the western horizon. He placed it dead centre on my PV panels and pressed the "go" button. This was very close to midday.
Then he plugged it into his laptop and it produced a report on theoretical performance. It was able to extrapolate the sun's angle over the course of the year, account for shading by trees (a lot less than I thought - there's shading, but it happens so late in the afternoon that the incident angle of the sunlight is very low anyway), insert the projected position of the sun over the year into the images of the trees that it could see, and so on. It came up with a theoretical performance value of over 90% - and he said it was quite rare for domestic systems to exceed 90%. Anyway, the device costs about AUD$3000.00 - a bit too much for a one-off use. There's quite a bit of Android software available for this purpose - search on "PV performance" or similar.
Why "troll"? Abortion should be safe, legal, and these days EXTREMELY RARE. If all our children were given adequate access to education and when of a suitable age, access to birth control, I think abortion rates (and over-population) would become less and less.
I've had success using chilli-based sprays against grasshoppers. Put some bright red birds-eyes (similar to tabascos) in a blender with vinegar, and blend until it won't chop the chillies any finer. Let it sit for a day or two, and strain into a sprayer. Then squirt the grasshoppers with it. Poor little things start wiping and wiping at their eyes until they fall off the plant.
I'm also told that putting some dead grasshoppers in the blender with the chillies boosts the effect.
Perhaps the chilli/vinegar mix would suffice for squirrels. I can't imagine grinding up a dead squirrel to test the theory.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't the self-driving mole one of Thunderbird 2's pod payloads? Carry on, then. International Rescue on standby.
by Brian Stableford. Entertaining, interesting stories, but I just wanted to bitch-slap the main character repeatedly.
On a similar note - "Down to a sunless sea" - full of tragedy and hope, right until the last chapter.
There might be some additional benefits: Superhero vision http://www.komar.org/faq/colorado-cataract-surgery-crystalens/
Generally that's true, but I've seen the reverse, also. A young ref (I'd say he was under 20) at one of our home games actually red-carded the opposition's coach after warning him to stop abusive language. "Remove your ID badge and leave the field" - I was impressed.
Actually, I was hoping the guy would be stubborn and refuse to leave - the ref might have awarded the game to us, and the other team would have got a very nasty letter from the federation.
Anyway, I get cranky with incompetent referees and linesmen - we pay our fees, we shouldn't have trainees foisted on us. Teenagers are the age group MOST in need of firm, reliable discipline.
I take a lot of photos at my son's games, and I've occasionally caught stills of that sort of stuff. I've even contemplated asking our team for accreditation to film the games - for training purposes, of course. I suspect certain coaches, players and referees would behave a lot better if they knew they were being filmed.
Yes - but at school or junior/middle club level many of them are, shall we say, in need of further training, assessment and oversight. My son plays in the under-15 team for our local club, and there's one team in the region who are well known as a bunch of thugs - it's frustrating for our players who are taught to use their skills to play the game, as opposed to their elbows. We were approached by another team's manager one day and asked if we'd like to be part of a joint submission to complain about this team and the referees they supply for home games. I take photos at the games and I have one great but sad shot of one of the offenders laughing in the face of the referee when he was shown a yellow card for a blatant rule violation. Did the ref do anything about this disrespect? No.
Mod this up - there is a line between the audience and the show - whether film, TV, or theatre. That line partly defines the relationship between entertainer and audience. The line can change and blur (e.g. "break the fourth wall"), and there's nothing wrong with highly-realistic footage, I think it just means that our methods of storytelling will have to adapt.
Theatre isn't dead by a long shot, and it's one of the least realistic ways to tell a story. We just have different expectations when we sit down to watch a play, compared to watching TV, compared to watching a film in cinema.
Hey - don't be an AC! I don't waste mod points on ACs, and you deserve a +1.
A somewhat partisan view http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla yet if I can believe it's all true, then there are some things there that I didn't know before.
Um, the aboriginal people of Australia, to the best of my knowledge, have never had a treaty with the crown. So there are no such things as "aboriginal treaty rights". Sure, successive governments, their bureaucracies, farmers/squatters, rednecks, and others have trampled all over aboriginal people and their traditions, beliefs, and moral rights - but there's never been a treaty to break. The maori people of New Zealand have a treaty, but not the aboriginals of Australia.
*cough*IBM typewriters*cough*
That's the theory - in fact, line voltages are all over the place. When I first moved here, I was renting for 8 months until I found my current home. The rented place had a standard connection to the grid - my wife worked from home and complained about brown-outs during the day - they were sufficient to cause her computer to reboot - not fun while editing a newsletter. Also, there'd be a transient dip at 10pm every night - I eventually figured out it must have been everyone's off-peak hot water systems coming online - so it's a nice theory that we get 230VAC, but it doesn't happen in practice, and lampmakers should take that into account.
This particular subsidy program was specifically targeted at off-grid non-commercial users, ie.domestic households. It was also subject to a comparison test for getting the mains put in. You either had to be more than 1 kilometre from the grid, or submit a grid connection quote if under 1KM. My quote exceeded the amount necessary to qualify for the subsidy (although it DIDN'T include tree-clearing costs to put in power poles, and can you imagine what my neighbours would say if I had half the trees in the street removed?). The program was originally aimed at remote communities that rely on stonking big diesel generators to power their small towns - the govt got tired of subsidising their diesel, and decided to subsidise solar PV instead.
And yes, I pay my share of taxes - I've only been unemployed for about 3 months in my whole working life - I'll take everything I'm entitled to, and give credit to the government initiatives that try to do something positive with tax $$$. Would you believe it was a conservative, right-wing government that allocated something like AUD$134 milllion for this program (spread over about 3 years), and a left-leaning labour govt that took away what was left to give to grid-connect subsidies?
Yes - http://www.sinfin.com.au/products.php?filter=Bulbs+12v+-+24v
but when I went to see their showroom, they didn't have one - it's just an office, so I wasn't impressed.
Yes, off-grid since 1996. The house had 600W of PV on the roof and 580 amphours of batteries when we moved in, with a modified square-wave inverter. Immediately upgraded to a sine-wave inverter (1500W continuous, 3000W surge), and a new washing machine (Fisher & Paykel smartdrive). Circa 2000, and we replaced batteries with 1100ah, and an additional 900W of PV. In 2008, we replaced the batteries again (had 2 children by this time), and added another kilowatt of PV to the roof. We could always do with more PV, but in sunny weather we can run three or four 240 volt appliances at once without overloading the inverter or needing to top up the batteries with the backup generator, e.g. 4 computers, or 2 computers and the washing machine, etc. The house is dual-wired - 240 volt power and the lighting circuit is 24 volt and uses incandescant and halogen bi-pin bulbs, but I'm going to cut those circuits over to 240 volts to take advantage of CFL and LED lamps - 24-volt bulbs are expensive, and the inverter inefficiency will be more than offset by the reduced energy consumption of CFL/LED lamps. I've already tried CFLs in some lamps running off the 240 volt power circuit, and difference in energy consumption is amazing. I've got a 240 volt fridge, and a 24 volt freezer.
I've never had a blackout that lasted more than 2 minutes (deliberately overloaded the lighting circuit to test the safety breakers). The downside is having to run the backup generator during rainy weather.
How can I afford all this? Well, the most recent upgrade cost ~AUD$23K, and was subsidised 50%, so we only paid about AUD$11K. That's NOT free or even cheap power, but it would cost us over AUD$40K to have the mains extended to our house, so it's a no-brainer, financially speaking.
Could be - but I'd have thought they could handle 10% over-voltage (although the peak of the sine wave could be significantly higher than the design can cope with). The thing is, I don't get brownouts, and it's the only the one brand/model that's been a problem. They were *just* out of warranty, so I sent a polite email expressing my disappointment that my bulbs lasted such a short time. The reply explained that warranties are calculated on how long HALF a sample of bulbs last under testing conditions - obviously my batch came from the shorter-lived "half". There was a happy ending - even though the warranty had expired, they sent me four bulbs as a gesture of goodwill. It pays to be polite.
I've got a sine-wave inverter powering my house - and if it overloads, it just shuts down. Otherwise, It's a stable 245 VAC day and night - no dips or spikes. I've had Osram, Phillips, and GE CFLs - and the Osrams have typically lasted about half their claimed lifespan.
Want to change things? Write a letter (NOT a tweet or email, or facebook posting) to the sponsors' PR departments. Say something like "I'm aware that you've paid $BIGNUM for sponsorship and associated exclusive marketing rights, but guess what? I'm not going to watch, and I'm not going to buy your products." Make sure you CC a copy to the IOC, and one to the local broadcaster.
There was, IIRC, an estimate from marketing research that went something along the lines of "one person who actually takes the trouble to complain represents x number of people who are unhappy, but don't take the trouble to complain". If enough people made their views known to the sponsors, LOC and broadcasters, they just might take notice and change their ways.
And pigs might fly, I know.
That wasn't what I was thinking, but I've remembered it now - it was in one of the "Ringworld" PC games that one of the characters uses a spray-can of fog to defeat a security laser.
The slaver sunflowers would toast anything that flew over them - mostly birds, but also the occasional Kzin.
Yes, and what about salty seawater spray that gets deposited on the mirrors and then dries, leaving a reflective white crust ........oh, never mind.
Didn't Larry Niven use a cloud of water vapour to attenuate laser energy - can't remember if it was a "Known Space" book, or Footfall.
My off-grid system was audited (part of the subsidy conditions) for safety and performance. The guy who did the audit very kindly brought out his specialist device for calculating theoretical performance based on environmental conditions. It was a very fancy data logger/field computer, equipped with GPS receiver, and a camera with a 180-degree lens, i.e. it could "see" from the eastern horizon to the western horizon. He placed it dead centre on my PV panels and pressed the "go" button. This was very close to midday.
Then he plugged it into his laptop and it produced a report on theoretical performance. It was able to extrapolate the sun's angle over the course of the year, account for shading by trees (a lot less than I thought - there's shading, but it happens so late in the afternoon that the incident angle of the sunlight is very low anyway), insert the projected position of the sun over the year into the images of the trees that it could see, and so on. It came up with a theoretical performance value of over 90% - and he said it was quite rare for domestic systems to exceed 90%. Anyway, the device costs about AUD$3000.00 - a bit too much for a one-off use. There's quite a bit of Android software available for this purpose - search on "PV performance" or similar.
Why "troll"? Abortion should be safe, legal, and these days EXTREMELY RARE. If all our children were given adequate access to education and when of a suitable age, access to birth control, I think abortion rates (and over-population) would become less and less.
One man's opinion, obviously.
Call me when there's a functional Voight-Kampff machine.
And a nexus-6 pleasure model to test it on.
I've had success using chilli-based sprays against grasshoppers. Put some bright red birds-eyes (similar to tabascos) in a blender with vinegar, and blend until it won't chop the chillies any finer. Let it sit for a day or two, and strain into a sprayer. Then squirt the grasshoppers with it. Poor little things start wiping and wiping at their eyes until they fall off the plant.
I'm also told that putting some dead grasshoppers in the blender with the chillies boosts the effect.
Perhaps the chilli/vinegar mix would suffice for squirrels. I can't imagine grinding up a dead squirrel to test the theory.