1) Use a form of power generation that's decentralized and require everyone to come up with their own power.
This is reasonable, and is already in practice through what is called "distributed generation". It is the generation that is provided by rooftop solar panels, backyard wind turbines, sewage/landfill gas turbines and similar small generators. Virtually all power companies have a DG program that allows small producers to connect to the grid and sell power if they choose to.
2) Have all the decisions made by someone central who has the authority to push things through.
I think we need more of this. There is one authority recently granted to the DoE (I believe in the 2005 energy bill) called National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors that begins to address this issue. It gives the Department of Energy some authority in overriding state and local governments and various other legal challenges on major transmission projects when they have met the criteria for being in the "National Interest". There is a one-year period during which anyone can object to the project, there are meetings, reviews, studies, etc and if the benefits outweigh the costs the project continues and the legal challenges are overruled. There hasn't been a major test of this system yet to my knowledge although there are a number of projects nationwide that have been declared to meet the criteria.
big Aluminum companies site their plants near hydro power, but could there be a wind farm with an aluminum plant in the middle of it?
Wind farms cannot produce even close to the amount of energy that an aluminum smelter or steel mill requires. As soon as the smelter struck an arc it would stall every turbine in the field. Metal processing plants already have a lot of specialized electrical distribution often with dedicated power plants, massive capacitor banks, harmonic filters and the like to provide them with the power they need.
Physics is really at play here. The towers must be very strong to hold up the heavy lines during the highest wind/snow/ice load predicted for the area. They also must be relatively narrow to fit inside the right-of-way, and they must hold the lines high enough and with great enough separation from each other and from the tower so as to not allow arcing under the maximum expected sway and sag. They also must be durable and last outdoors with little or no maintenance for decades.
Add on top of that people want the lowest possible power bill and fastest construction methods, and I don't see many other options than monopoles with arms or basic steel framework structures.
Geronimo whereby they built nine Suzlon turbine windmills next to my hometown (PDF) to produce enough electricity for 6,500
I have heard of this project in some industry publications. I think it's a good one, but I will add some comments. The stated output of the wind farm is 18MW nameplate. That means under ideal wind conditions, so on the average day it will probably produce something like 12MW and maybe single digits on a bad day. A small coal plant produces 600MW rain or shine and a large plant can do 1200W; a nuclear plant can do 2000W. It takes a lot, lot, lot of turbines to offset one traditional plant making wind more expensive per megawatt.
My question for you is simply whether or not you think small towns across the US would want nine to forty windmills next to their town so they could have cheap renewable power nearby?
I would. A lot of people do not for many reasons.
The first is that it's more expensive. Try raising electrical bills 1% to raise capital for a major wind project. Again hearings, lawsuits, studies, public meetings, congressional acts, it goes on and on. It would be an unnoticeable amount of money on the average bill and huge groups will fight tooth and nail to block it. Regardless of the long term advantage.
Second is the environment, scenic, conservationist, NIMBY groups who all have factions that hate wind turbines for a myriad of often conflicting reasons and ideology. When you pose the option, "would you prefer coal or NG?" They always reply with canned bullshit about everyone should conserve and use less therefore requiring no new power plants, which is a reasonable goal to reach for, but is not a realistic energy plan given population growth and basic freedoms.
Third are the entrenched power plant owners who do not want competition in markets where they have enjoyed near monopolies for decades. They are a major force of lobbying against wind development both in government and "grass roots" efforts to clandestinely support the first two groups. If you follow the money that the first two use to hire their lawyers a lot of it comes indirectly from power plant owners.
But if you're in the industry, you're telling me that's not a good business plan?
Compared to producing the equivalent power with coal or natural gas, the distributed wind option is more difficult and expensive. One major reason is that it's harder to operate because the output of wind generators is not constant, consistent or controllable. That means you also need "back-up" generation powered by traditional fuels on standby and expensive power electronic control devices to correct the power factor on line-commutated turbines. What this essentially means in less technical language is that the way wind turbines work is somewhat passive to the grid; they cannot operate without the larger generators online to regulate and control the voltage level. Given a stable voltage and frequency, wind generators can inject supplemental power into the grid but without large generators nearby to provide control and regulation the wind turbines are essentially useless. The equipment that allows wind generators to stand-alone and self-regulate is very, very expensive and not worth the relatively small amount of power wind turbines produce.
It's a complicated balancing act that is harder to set up and manage than a coal or NG plant which essentially has a knob the operator can set and that plant will kick out that much power, voltage and frequency 24/7. There is also the issue of having many more assets out in the field that require annual maintenance and skilled labor.
This is why I'm a huge advocate of nuclear power with wind and solar supplements. Nuclear power is fantastic at supplying base load generation and stability in the grid without the pollution of coal or NG. Wind and nuclear compliment each other very well and reduce the emissions to basically zero while providing ple
Why don't they just buy up a bunch of (relatively) cheap farmland in Minnesota?
Because it is almost impossible in the current legal climate to build the power lines from rural areas into the cities where the power is needed and can be sold at a price high enough to finance the project. There are a LOT of transmission line projects on drawing boards across the country all tied up in endless legal disputes and injunctions. There are complaints from environmental groups about lines going through wetlands, forests, and virtually any other habitat. Complaints from pseudoscience scaremongers about lines going through populated areas giving off "toxic radiation". Complaints from towns, villages, homeowners associations about nearby power lines decreasing property values. Endless permits, plans, documents, studies to upgrade the lines on existing right-of-ways. Every inch of the process is an uphill battle for the power companies, and a huge multi-hundred million dollar project can be held up or torpedoed by any judge in any district along the planned path of the line forcing expensive delays or re-designs. The few major lines that have been built in recent history have taken decades from the first plans to in-service and actually cost more money in legal costs than the cost entire planning, engineering and construction combined.
It is terribly frustrating for those of us in this industry. We know what needs to be done and many ways that it can be done, but our hands are tied.
The only answer here is LTO tape stored at a contracted record archival facility. Optical media degrades and is easily damaged, hard drives fail ALL THE TIME and will have obsolete interfaces in a few years. Tape has very long shelf life when stored properly -- it is time tested and trusted. It is not that expensive to get one tape drive and a few carts for each customer.
If you want to see what is actually collected - sign up for an account and look at the dashboard, you will see that we are tracking the content, not the user.
Doesn't signing up for an account with you kinda defeat the purpose of not giving you any of my information? Even signing up for your vaporware opt out gives you information about me that you will no doubt exploit in some way. In order to opt me out you need to be able to uniquely identify me.
No, it's a different situation. Other businesses can publish responses to critisim. They can refute claims -- a restaurant owner can write a letter to the editor to complain about a bad review. A doctor is legally prohibited from disclosing _any_ information about his interaction with a patient, even if the patient completely lied or fabricated a review.
It's not really a problem: a good doctor - just like a good restaurant - will generate good reviews, too. Statistically it's very unlikely that all whining patients use the same doctor, everybody will have a few.
Yes that's true, but there are bad, dishonest patients out there who will go out of their way to harm a doctor's business, and there's really nothing the doctor can do about it. That is what I see as unfair in the reviewing system.
Consider that doctors are forbidden by Federal HIPPA laws from responding to or even acknowledging that they have treated a given patient without that patient's written consent. It really is not fair that the patient is able to post whatever review he wants about a doctor on some website, yet the doctor is forbidden from posting a counter argument or defense of himself against this patients claims.
Perhaps the patient ignored the doctor's advice, skipped checkups, won't stop eating nachos or failed to take medication which contributed to his opinion of poor service from the doctor when in fact it wasn't the doctor's fault. It seems only fair that when a patient publishes a public complaint against a doctor the doctor should be able to publicly address those complaints to clear his name.
Extensive facial disfigurement cannot be corrected by one skin graft. It must be done in many small pieces with current technology. Do you have any idea how severely an automobile collision or a fire can damage a person's tissue?
Although this article clearly opposes facial transplants, it supports the assertation that current grafting methodologies are slow, painful, and dangerous; and new procedures are needed to reconstruct facial tissue in larger pieces with fewer surgeries. Dr Thomas Stevenson, president of the Plastic Surgery Educational Foundation and a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said:
The difficulty with previous techniques was harvesting a thick, uniform piece of skin and closing the wound where the incision was made, to minimise scarring. Through this combination of surgical techniques, a burn patient has only one operation rather than multiple procedures, reducing pain and recovery time.
While loss of facial skin is disfiguring, it can be treated by transplants from the patient's own body, which is much safer.
It is actually suspected that the transplant procedure may be safer in the long run due to the incredible number of surgeries that traditional facial reconstruction requires. For example, a person with severe facial mutilation may need 20 surgical procedures or more to completely graft his own buttock skin onto the damaged areas. Each surgery carries its own risk of infection, complications, and rehabilition time. The transplant procedure could reduce this process to one or two surgeries thereby sparing the patient years of constant surgery and rehabilitation.
You don't have control over the users, the machines, or the routers; so what the hell can you expect to do?
Sounds like the best option is to unplug the offending machines from the patch panel until they can demonstrate they are virus-free. Although that is likely not a viable solution if these are paying customers.
Do whichever one you like more. If you try to choose a major based on the future job market, you will be forever chasing a carrot on a string. Take a course or two from each discipline and decide which one feels better and which one you understand more intuitively.
No, but he will charge you for his time to drain your tank and lines and replace your fuel filter and whatever else may have been damaged by the bad gas. Then he will tell you never to get that gas again. Same goes for spyware.
Power plants are always producing power whether or not you use it
That's impossible. The sum of all generation equals the sum of all loads plus the sum of all losses. Always.
It's true that they may keep their boilers fired overnight despite lower generation, but they do so to minimize fuel usage. Think the power companies like buying more coal than they have to?
Also, the US is the only place i've lived where local calls were free.
They usually aren't exactly free. Typically if you read the fine print, there's some deal where the monthly service will include 400 or 500 local calls "free", and then you pay through the nose for additional local calls. I would bet these clauses are there to specifically prevent a re-seller situation like this. An open public line could probably hit the 500 call mark rather quickly.
...not like it's hard to find one anyway. Just go to that big brown and yellow building near the airport with "UPS" on the outside about 7:00am. Follow one of the big brown trucks that pulls out of the lot.
Re:Why not some mainstream fallacies?
on
Bad Science Awards
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· Score: 0
I prefer the "real" forensic science shows on Discovery, TLC, and A&E. They tend to focus more on the hard work and real science involved in the forensic process than in the neat-hour-long drama. These shows usually have interviews with the actual detectives and scientists who work cases which I find interesting. CSI is boring; heavy on the drama, light on the science.
In reality, they probably called the police because you were a jackass playing obscenely load video game sounds while others were trying to sleep or study. I doubt it had anything to do with thinking there was actual gunfire.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Use a form of power generation that's decentralized and require everyone to come up with their own power.
This is reasonable, and is already in practice through what is called "distributed generation". It is the generation that is provided by rooftop solar panels, backyard wind turbines, sewage/landfill gas turbines and similar small generators. Virtually all power companies have a DG program that allows small producers to connect to the grid and sell power if they choose to.
2) Have all the decisions made by someone central who has the authority to push things through.
I think we need more of this. There is one authority recently granted to the DoE (I believe in the 2005 energy bill) called National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors that begins to address this issue. It gives the Department of Energy some authority in overriding state and local governments and various other legal challenges on major transmission projects when they have met the criteria for being in the "National Interest". There is a one-year period during which anyone can object to the project, there are meetings, reviews, studies, etc and if the benefits outweigh the costs the project continues and the legal challenges are overruled. There hasn't been a major test of this system yet to my knowledge although there are a number of projects nationwide that have been declared to meet the criteria.
big Aluminum companies site their plants near hydro power, but could there be a wind farm with an aluminum plant in the middle of it?
Wind farms cannot produce even close to the amount of energy that an aluminum smelter or steel mill requires. As soon as the smelter struck an arc it would stall every turbine in the field. Metal processing plants already have a lot of specialized electrical distribution often with dedicated power plants, massive capacitor banks, harmonic filters and the like to provide them with the power they need.
Physics is really at play here. The towers must be very strong to hold up the heavy lines during the highest wind/snow/ice load predicted for the area. They also must be relatively narrow to fit inside the right-of-way, and they must hold the lines high enough and with great enough separation from each other and from the tower so as to not allow arcing under the maximum expected sway and sag. They also must be durable and last outdoors with little or no maintenance for decades.
Add on top of that people want the lowest possible power bill and fastest construction methods, and I don't see many other options than monopoles with arms or basic steel framework structures.
Geronimo whereby they built nine Suzlon turbine windmills next to my hometown (PDF) to produce enough electricity for 6,500
I have heard of this project in some industry publications. I think it's a good one, but I will add some comments. The stated output of the wind farm is 18MW nameplate. That means under ideal wind conditions, so on the average day it will probably produce something like 12MW and maybe single digits on a bad day. A small coal plant produces 600MW rain or shine and a large plant can do 1200W; a nuclear plant can do 2000W. It takes a lot, lot, lot of turbines to offset one traditional plant making wind more expensive per megawatt.
My question for you is simply whether or not you think small towns across the US would want nine to forty windmills next to their town so they could have cheap renewable power nearby?
I would. A lot of people do not for many reasons.
The first is that it's more expensive. Try raising electrical bills 1% to raise capital for a major wind project. Again hearings, lawsuits, studies, public meetings, congressional acts, it goes on and on. It would be an unnoticeable amount of money on the average bill and huge groups will fight tooth and nail to block it. Regardless of the long term advantage.
Second is the environment, scenic, conservationist, NIMBY groups who all have factions that hate wind turbines for a myriad of often conflicting reasons and ideology. When you pose the option, "would you prefer coal or NG?" They always reply with canned bullshit about everyone should conserve and use less therefore requiring no new power plants, which is a reasonable goal to reach for, but is not a realistic energy plan given population growth and basic freedoms.
Third are the entrenched power plant owners who do not want competition in markets where they have enjoyed near monopolies for decades. They are a major force of lobbying against wind development both in government and "grass roots" efforts to clandestinely support the first two groups. If you follow the money that the first two use to hire their lawyers a lot of it comes indirectly from power plant owners.
But if you're in the industry, you're telling me that's not a good business plan?
Compared to producing the equivalent power with coal or natural gas, the distributed wind option is more difficult and expensive. One major reason is that it's harder to operate because the output of wind generators is not constant, consistent or controllable. That means you also need "back-up" generation powered by traditional fuels on standby and expensive power electronic control devices to correct the power factor on line-commutated turbines. What this essentially means in less technical language is that the way wind turbines work is somewhat passive to the grid; they cannot operate without the larger generators online to regulate and control the voltage level. Given a stable voltage and frequency, wind generators can inject supplemental power into the grid but without large generators nearby to provide control and regulation the wind turbines are essentially useless. The equipment that allows wind generators to stand-alone and self-regulate is very, very expensive and not worth the relatively small amount of power wind turbines produce.
It's a complicated balancing act that is harder to set up and manage than a coal or NG plant which essentially has a knob the operator can set and that plant will kick out that much power, voltage and frequency 24/7. There is also the issue of having many more assets out in the field that require annual maintenance and skilled labor.
This is why I'm a huge advocate of nuclear power with wind and solar supplements. Nuclear power is fantastic at supplying base load generation and stability in the grid without the pollution of coal or NG. Wind and nuclear compliment each other very well and reduce the emissions to basically zero while providing ple
Why don't they just buy up a bunch of (relatively) cheap farmland in Minnesota?
Because it is almost impossible in the current legal climate to build the power lines from rural areas into the cities where the power is needed and can be sold at a price high enough to finance the project. There are a LOT of transmission line projects on drawing boards across the country all tied up in endless legal disputes and injunctions. There are complaints from environmental groups about lines going through wetlands, forests, and virtually any other habitat. Complaints from pseudoscience scaremongers about lines going through populated areas giving off "toxic radiation". Complaints from towns, villages, homeowners associations about nearby power lines decreasing property values. Endless permits, plans, documents, studies to upgrade the lines on existing right-of-ways. Every inch of the process is an uphill battle for the power companies, and a huge multi-hundred million dollar project can be held up or torpedoed by any judge in any district along the planned path of the line forcing expensive delays or re-designs. The few major lines that have been built in recent history have taken decades from the first plans to in-service and actually cost more money in legal costs than the cost entire planning, engineering and construction combined.
It is terribly frustrating for those of us in this industry. We know what needs to be done and many ways that it can be done, but our hands are tied.
They collected information which was publicly available from the street. Big deal.
The only answer here is LTO tape stored at a contracted record archival facility. Optical media degrades and is easily damaged, hard drives fail ALL THE TIME and will have obsolete interfaces in a few years. Tape has very long shelf life when stored properly -- it is time tested and trusted. It is not that expensive to get one tape drive and a few carts for each customer.
If you want to see what is actually collected - sign up for an account and look at the dashboard, you will see that we are tracking the content, not the user.
Doesn't signing up for an account with you kinda defeat the purpose of not giving you any of my information? Even signing up for your vaporware opt out gives you information about me that you will no doubt exploit in some way. In order to opt me out you need to be able to uniquely identify me.
this is the situation *any* business is in.,
No, it's a different situation. Other businesses can publish responses to critisim. They can refute claims -- a restaurant owner can write a letter to the editor to complain about a bad review. A doctor is legally prohibited from disclosing _any_ information about his interaction with a patient, even if the patient completely lied or fabricated a review.
It's not really a problem: a good doctor - just like a good restaurant - will generate good reviews, too. Statistically it's very unlikely that all whining patients use the same doctor, everybody will have a few.
Yes that's true, but there are bad, dishonest patients out there who will go out of their way to harm a doctor's business, and there's really nothing the doctor can do about it. That is what I see as unfair in the reviewing system.
http://www.greendisk.com
Consider that doctors are forbidden by Federal HIPPA laws from responding to or even acknowledging that they have treated a given patient without that patient's written consent. It really is not fair that the patient is able to post whatever review he wants about a doctor on some website, yet the doctor is forbidden from posting a counter argument or defense of himself against this patients claims.
Perhaps the patient ignored the doctor's advice, skipped checkups, won't stop eating nachos or failed to take medication which contributed to his opinion of poor service from the doctor when in fact it wasn't the doctor's fault. It seems only fair that when a patient publishes a public complaint against a doctor the doctor should be able to publicly address those complaints to clear his name.
if( something = something ) ...
Extensive facial disfigurement cannot be corrected by one skin graft. It must be done in many small pieces with current technology. Do you have any idea how severely an automobile collision or a fire can damage a person's tissue?
Paragraphs 32, 33
Please note the risks, complications, and expected recovery times for each full skin graft.
Although this article clearly opposes facial transplants, it supports the assertation that current grafting methodologies are slow, painful, and dangerous; and new procedures are needed to reconstruct facial tissue in larger pieces with fewer surgeries. Dr Thomas Stevenson, president of the Plastic Surgery Educational Foundation and a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, said:
While loss of facial skin is disfiguring, it can be treated by transplants from the patient's own body, which is much safer.
It is actually suspected that the transplant procedure may be safer in the long run due to the incredible number of surgeries that traditional facial reconstruction requires. For example, a person with severe facial mutilation may need 20 surgical procedures or more to completely graft his own buttock skin onto the damaged areas. Each surgery carries its own risk of infection, complications, and rehabilition time. The transplant procedure could reduce this process to one or two surgeries thereby sparing the patient years of constant surgery and rehabilitation.
It really sounds like you're wasting your time.
You don't have control over the users, the machines, or the routers; so what the hell can you expect to do?
Sounds like the best option is to unplug the offending machines from the patch panel until they can demonstrate they are virus-free. Although that is likely not a viable solution if these are paying customers.
Do whichever one you like more. If you try to choose a major based on the future job market, you will be forever chasing a carrot on a string. Take a course or two from each discipline and decide which one feels better and which one you understand more intuitively.
Weg is the German word for way. Thus, Way to go.
No, but he will charge you for his time to drain your tank and lines and replace your fuel filter and whatever else may have been damaged by the bad gas. Then he will tell you never to get that gas again. Same goes for spyware.
That's impossible. The sum of all generation equals the sum of all loads plus the sum of all losses. Always.
It's true that they may keep their boilers fired overnight despite lower generation, but they do so to minimize fuel usage. Think the power companies like buying more coal than they have to?
Also, the US is the only place i've lived where local calls were free.
They usually aren't exactly free. Typically if you read the fine print, there's some deal where the monthly service will include 400 or 500 local calls "free", and then you pay through the nose for additional local calls. I would bet these clauses are there to specifically prevent a re-seller situation like this. An open public line could probably hit the 500 call mark rather quickly.
...not like it's hard to find one anyway. Just go to that big brown and yellow building near the airport with "UPS" on the outside about 7:00am. Follow one of the big brown trucks that pulls out of the lot.
Spot on, dasunt.
I prefer the "real" forensic science shows on Discovery, TLC, and A&E. They tend to focus more on the hard work and real science involved in the forensic process than in the neat-hour-long drama. These shows usually have interviews with the actual detectives and scientists who work cases which I find interesting. CSI is boring; heavy on the drama, light on the science.
In reality, they probably called the police because you were a jackass playing obscenely load video game sounds while others were trying to sleep or study. I doubt it had anything to do with thinking there was actual gunfire.
...freedom to kill unborn humans, but not freedom to make a new breed of corn.