Oh, I didn't realise that sequenced music couldn't be transcribed into musical notation and then played by humans.
Some of it physically can't be played by a human. At least, not the single human that the sequenced version sounds like. Multiple humans could play multiple copies of the same instrument and take turns playing parts of their track.
Of course such music usually isn't all that interesting. It's so fast or so strange that it smears together.
Before N.A.S.A. wastes too much of its ever dwindling budget (insert here comment about how we have so much money that we can give the poor free Internet and Obamaphones), they should create a set of standards and see if they can get the industry to willingly adopt them with the expectation that it would facilitate service in the future.
I would guess that NASA is going to arrive a day late and a dollar short to this particular party. SpaceX intends to put up a constellation of a whopping 4000 satellites. OneWeb plans to put up a constellation of 700 satellites. The SpaceX satellites are classified as small-sats, and due to volume production, should be considerably cheaper than the equivalent tonnage in larger satellites, but a small-sat is still up to 500kg. It may be worthwhile to perform on-orbit servicing of something the weight and complexity of a small car. OneWeb satellites will be bigger, heavier, and presumably more expensive, which would make on-orbit servicing even more useful.
Given the vast numbers SpaceX and OneWeb intend to deploy (which would more than triple the number of operational satellites currently in orbit), all it would take to create a de facto standard is for one of them to include orbital servicing features in their design. And SpaceX, at least, moves incredibly quickly compared to NASA, so they'll be done designing, building, and launching before NASA even finishes their "standard".
On the other hand, it remains to be seen just how far down SpaceX can push launch costs with a reusable first stage. If they push it far enough, and simultaneously push down satellite costs with their strategy of building many small ones, disposable satellites may be cheaper than servicing. An unserviceable electrical design is usually more reliable because soldered connections survive rocket vibrations better than replaceable boards.
On the gripping hand, putting 4700 satellites in orbit will take a lot of launches, even for little ones. The logistics of launching replacements may be untenable. Air Force range services is not accustomed to anything like that kind of operational tempo. If the satellites continue functioning electrically, without component failures, it may still be more practical to launch a couple of Falcon 9 Heavies with refueling tankage and a "tug" satellite than it is to launch replacement satellites. Drag is an eternal problem in low Earth orbit. It may be easier to keep a constellation that size aloft through refueling rather than replacement.
Of course in the REAL WORLD you have to put up with the crap along with all the others:(
For quite a few years, the word for Charter tech support was "Linux." As in, "sorry, I don't have a start menu, the router runs Linux." That short-circuited whole swaths of the script. They even stopped asking me to reboot.
Nowadays, Tier 1 support is a robot. They stopped outsourcing to India after they hired a lowest bidder who would very quickly answer the phone, very carefully take down your name, address, and phone number (the necessary information so they could bill Charter for providing support), then instantly forward your call back to the US call center. It was a great time for customers, who got Tier 2 practically instantly. Punching through the robot's script is much harder.
1. Actually decrypt the files and figure out who people are from the files.
2. Tally up the list of known spies with the list from the files and nod sagely when all are accounted for. 3. Wonder when the UK government is going to stop sending 6' tall 17 stone florid-faced white guys to creep around Beijing with a suitcase full of wigs. 4. Profit.
That explains why you are willing to accept a Sunday Times story completely devoid of verifiable facts and reeking of the stench of propaganda claiming it has happened.
One senior Home Office official accused Snowden of having “blood on his hands”, although Downing Street said there was “no evidence of anyone being harmed”.
bleats the article, in literally the same sentence, and you're supposed to simultaneously believe that the UK Home Office has evidence that UK spies have been hurt or killed as a result of encryption being cracked on Snowden documents while the UK prime minister's office has evidence that UK spies haven't suffered so much as a papercut. If you happen to notice the contradiction, you're instead supposed to believe that UK spies have been hurt or killed because of encryption being cracked on two year old Snowden documents, instead of realizing that UK spies still in place after two years would be hurt or killed by the UK government's own incompetence and inability to get their story straight. Or maybe it's just bullshit. Occam's Razor.
Maybe you should be questioning the propaganda that doesn't even make sense, instead of suffering confirmation bias. This is about stampeding the UK public into supporting the efforts of their MPs to pass yet another spying law. It's not even about Snowden documents. It's about fear, nothing more.
Your post is bullshit. Snowden had AES available to him, the same encryption method authorized to encrypt TOP SECRET information for the US government. NSA wouldn't let it be used if there was a meaningful weakness for protecting TOP SECRET information.
So now the sock puppet propaganda account is claiming, in its own words, that the Sunday Times article is a lie, because Mr. Snowden probably used AES, encryption so strong that the US government uses it for classified data, blessed by the NSA itself. So neither Russia nor China could have broken the encryption on the data Mr. Snowden gave to Glenn Greenwald. So the article that spawned this entire thread is false.
And some blah blah about what Mr. Snowden may or may not have done, using the false interrogative that Fox News is so fond of to mask pure speculation.
"Does cold fjord REALLY fuck small fluffy bunnies to death with his wart-covered penis? More news at 11:00."
Without confirmation, this is just as likely to be a false flag attempt to charge Snowden with something serious as it is to be an actual news story.
When referring to any Murdoch property, I have a hard time with the "false flag" label. The Sunday Times is an unabashed propaganda arm of the UK government. This isn't false flag. It's a planted "story" by a propaganda rag known for planting stories. As near as I can tell, the Sunday Times flies the "We Are Liars" flag quite proudly.
Because he is the one that arrogantly ignored the democratic process, stole a massive store of intelligence documents, incompetently encrypted them...
The NSA didn't make the documents available to China and Russia. Snowden did.
And here we have the real reason for the Sunday Times article. It's not reporting. It's 100% devoid of facts. It's 100% propaganda. But now it can be quoted as truth by other propaganda channels, like the cold fjord account. Two sentences in one post that implicitly assume that the propaganda is true, and immediately jump to absurd conclusions that aren't even justified if the article was true, which it isn't.
So we start with "anonymous UK government sources", a.k.a. pulled out of the "reporter's" ass because his editor told him to make some shit up, and here we see the very next step in the process, namely quoted as truth by second line fake "grass roots" propaganda arm. (I had to put "reporter" in quotes, because the author wasn't reporting anything. He was fabricating a fiction to be used for propaganda purposes.)
To be clear, Mr. Snowden competently encrypted the documents. Mr. Snowden did not make any documents available to China or Russia. The Sunday Times article is an example of The Big Lie style of propaganda. The Big Lie is now being quoted in Slashdot posts as truth, and we're supposed to believe it.
Some days I wonder why the cold fjord account is still active, when Slashdot so actively resists its attempts at agitprop.
Of course it wasn't worth it, because your privacy is far less important than your security.
My privacy is part of my security. When anyone, anywhere can know every account number you have, every pin number you have, every password you have, you have no security. Passwords secure my privacy. Encryption secures my privacy. See? We even use the damn verb form of the noun in this context.
But grownups already have society modeled out, and are able to calculate through the end scenario of what actually does happen: "That bad thing you're worried about is possible because we have these other systematic checks which are also going to be subverted, subsumed, and suppressed in order to subjugate the peons."
Fixed that for you. But you were half right to begin with, since you said "is possible." Half right, while being totally wrong.
Like, right now, you actually think your privacy rights is more important than your competitive economic advantages you may have over Russian or China (economics is the REAL issue behind the Snowden leaks...)
I'm quite certain of it. My privacy rights are a competitive economic advantage. Real capitalism as it is practiced today absolutely depends on information asymmetry. On secrets. There are no secrets without privacy.
But fools like you are perfectly willing to believe that the wealthy elite should be the only people with secrets, the only people on the high side of information asymmetry. And in the usual mental gymnastic move of the deluded American, you put yourself into the category of temporarily embarrassed millionaire, who will one day benefit from all this unfettered economically motivated spying.
What's sad about Glen Greenwald's response is what the Sunday Times will do later. Mr. Greenwald's article repeatedly uses the phrase "retraction-worthy fabrications," but the actions of the Times already indicates that we're past that now. Newspapers as propaganda arms of the UK government, in the worst traditions of Soviet Russia and East Germany during the Cold War, are now firmly entrenched.
One of the extremely few verifiable lies (as opposed to the numerous unverifiable lies) has been silently deleted from the online version of the Sunday Times. It was not retracted. It was not corrected. It was not apologized for. It just vanished. The Times claimed David Miranda was "seized at Heathrow in 2013" in possession of 58,000 NSA documents after meeting Mr. Snowden in Moscow. (Because it quoted a number, it must be true, right?) At the time, David Miranda had never been to Moscow and had never met Mr. Snowden. That blatant, verifiable lie got stuffed into the memory hole. Which improved the quality of the writing a microscopic amount. David Miranda was detained, not seized, but "seized" has a higher negative connotation rating in the thesaurus all Murdoch properties use to compose their texts and they were going for maximum negativity in this article, which is why they squeezed in the reference to David Miranda at all. Times readers were to be reminded that Glenn Greenwald is gay, so they would instantly ignore any rebuttal or response. Overreaching for the anti-gay, got caught in a lie.
Given what they did with the verifiable lie, we can readily guess that the unverifiable lies will simply stand. They will never be retracted. They will never be corrected. They will never be apologized for. The Times will maintain the blatant lies for all time, and the readers of the Times will never know they have been lied to, because the readers of the Times don't read anything else. It's Soviet propaganda at its finest. Mikhail Suslov would be proud of Rupert Murdoch.
I understand the nuclear reactor for the U.S. Navy's NR-1 is about the size of a garbage can.
The containment vessel, maybe. By the time you add on all the piping and three steam turbines and a generator, your backyard is still quite full and you still need a heckuva lot more water than is usually available.
Mostly it's because installers severely gouge customers. German solar panels are now $1/watt, delivered. A pallet of panels with a nameplace capacity of 6615 watts is $6590 + $70 delivery fee.
Panels used to be such a huge fraction of the price that vendors marked up all other components outrageously and it still looked small. That pricing is lingering in the US. Cabling for panels runs $10/meter. Inverter prices have little or nothing to do with inverter capacity, and nothing at all to do with component prices, so a 2kW pure sine wave inverter costs the same as a 7 kW. Both run about $2500.
So a 6.6kW system costs $9k in parts. And $30,000+ in installation fees, most everywhere. Installers haven't yet adjusted to the fact that panel prices have plummeted, and suddenly their fees look as outrageous as they always have been.
Hydrocarbon energy shills are going to be badmouthing solar up to the very day everyone has blue shiny roof shingles and we all have a smart decentralized and resilient power grid with lots of local, municipal, and regional storage.
I dunno about you, but when I have blue shiny roof shingles and "lots of local... storage", I'm unplugging from the grid entirely. No fees for maintaining infrastructure I don't need, no worries about EMP from either natural or man-made sources (however tiny the possibility), and eventually no more poles on my street. I don't want a smart decentralized resilient power grid. I want no more grid, at least in suburbia, where our roofs are large enough to provide over 65 kWh/day, using the conservative 5 hour/day estimate and off the shelf cell efficiencies. Once we can get our hands on cells with higher than 16% efficiency, that number only goes up.
Yes, there's going to be much whining about their inability to build more infrastructure we don't want anymore. They're going to have to start charging their industrial and commercial customers more, instead of nickel and diming millions of individuals in order to subsidize unnaturally low rates for those customers.
I've often wondered though if there is some fosilization phenomena that could cause them to grow over time.
There isn't. A story ran on/. several months (years?) ago about an experiment where someone leeched all the minerals out of a fossil dinosaur bone. The result behaves just like a modern bone when you leech all the calcium out of it. It was the same length and width after the procedure. Just floppier. They really were that big. (Except for the little ones, which weren't.)
Elon Musk's philosophy is apparently, "If you want something done right, do it yourself." It seems to be working for him, so I guess you can't argue with it.
I wonder what Iridium thinks, considering they have a launch contract with SpaceX. For which they have undoubtedly put money down, thereby helping to fund this effort.
Republican corporate welfware? You couldn't even finish reading the summary before you rushed to mouth off in the comments?
The satellites will likely be built using the $1 billion that SpaceX raised mostly from Google earlier this year.
The satellites are privately funded. The rocket is privately funded. The launch is privately funded. The US government didn't spend one thin dime for this experiment, and will in fact get paid to enable the launch (range launch services aren't free, you know).
Seriously, am I the only one noticing that? I mean, whenever there is some kind of blatant incompetence in anything people are dealing with on a semi-regular base, you may rest assured that some comedy troupe or at least some comedian will start a routine about it.
Any comedian you have heard of can fly to his gigs. And prefers to...
The Gibson guitar factory got raided by the FBI for having rare woods... finger boards... and they said something about how that was a violation of some law from the 1920s that makes no sense.
Uh, what? The Gibson guitar factory got raided for violating a law proposed by George W. Bush in 2003. And eventually signed into law by George W. Bush when Congress agreed with his initiative and passed the law. It worked, too. Illegal logging is down around the world. Boohoo, contributing to the party that made your actions illegal doesn't get you a "get out of jail free" card. How sad for you.
The Justice Department may or may not be engaged in politically motivated prosecution, but your choice of examples is feeble.
Did you actually RTFA? The author specifically talked about 12V DC power being the "low voltage" standard that we need to convert to in the home because it's the native battery voltage.
But it's not. It's not the native voltage of any battery chemistry. Lead-acid cells are native 2.0VDC. Lithium cells are native 3.0VDC. Carbon-zinc is native 1.5VDC. Nickel-cadmium is native 1.2VDC. Nickel-hydride is native 1.2VDC. Zinc-air is native 1.5VDC.
All double digit voltages are an artifact of series connection of cells, and the author missed one crucial fact when invoking the Powerwall product: native cell voltage of lithium ion is 3.0VDC, but the Powerwall puts out 400VDC. It is a high voltage product.
When my 3yr old sticks a forked prong in my DC electrical outlet, what is the safety factor compared to the current AC plugs?
That depends entirely on the voltage the DC outlet provides. If it's a USB outlet, it provides 5VDC and your 3 year old feels nothing at all. If it's a USB 3.1 Power Distribution outlet, it provides 5VDC unless you plug in a qualified cable which can negotiate its way up to 48VDC, and again your fork-wielding 3 year old feels nothing.
If it's the native 400VDC coming off of the Tesla pack, your child dies. High voltage DC tends to make the muscles clench, freezing the victim in place, rather than blowing the victim across the room as high voltage AC does. High voltage anything is dangerous, but low voltage DC requires big fat conductors to power large appliances, and we've lived with high voltage for so long that we're accustomed to the permanent danger. If you have high voltage DC outlets, you want child-resistant designs, exactly as you do for your existing AC outlets.
That takes care of the first 20%... but what about the cheap AC->DC transformers that sit between your house wiring and your devices? I'd love to be able to switch each outlet I have between 110VAC/15a, 12VDC/3-5a and 9VDC/500Ma-2a, and do away with wall warts altogether.
You already can come close, since these are products. As more and more devices switch to USB power ports, you'll want more and more wall outlets with USB ports and fewer and fewer with AC ports (of the various and sundry flavors in use worldwide).
It's a little depressing to realize that the one thing that will make AC power in the home hang on long after it should be dead and buried is the humble vacuum cleaner.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, no, we're not going to start using that word. Sorry.
Oh, I didn't realise that sequenced music couldn't be transcribed into musical notation and then played by humans.
Some of it physically can't be played by a human. At least, not the single human that the sequenced version sounds like. Multiple humans could play multiple copies of the same instrument and take turns playing parts of their track.
Of course such music usually isn't all that interesting. It's so fast or so strange that it smears together.
Before N.A.S.A. wastes too much of its ever dwindling budget (insert here comment about how we have so much money that we can give the poor free Internet and Obamaphones), they should create a set of standards and see if they can get the industry to willingly adopt them with the expectation that it would facilitate service in the future.
I would guess that NASA is going to arrive a day late and a dollar short to this particular party. SpaceX intends to put up a constellation of a whopping 4000 satellites. OneWeb plans to put up a constellation of 700 satellites. The SpaceX satellites are classified as small-sats, and due to volume production, should be considerably cheaper than the equivalent tonnage in larger satellites, but a small-sat is still up to 500kg. It may be worthwhile to perform on-orbit servicing of something the weight and complexity of a small car. OneWeb satellites will be bigger, heavier, and presumably more expensive, which would make on-orbit servicing even more useful.
Given the vast numbers SpaceX and OneWeb intend to deploy (which would more than triple the number of operational satellites currently in orbit), all it would take to create a de facto standard is for one of them to include orbital servicing features in their design. And SpaceX, at least, moves incredibly quickly compared to NASA, so they'll be done designing, building, and launching before NASA even finishes their "standard".
On the other hand, it remains to be seen just how far down SpaceX can push launch costs with a reusable first stage. If they push it far enough, and simultaneously push down satellite costs with their strategy of building many small ones, disposable satellites may be cheaper than servicing. An unserviceable electrical design is usually more reliable because soldered connections survive rocket vibrations better than replaceable boards.
On the gripping hand, putting 4700 satellites in orbit will take a lot of launches, even for little ones. The logistics of launching replacements may be untenable. Air Force range services is not accustomed to anything like that kind of operational tempo. If the satellites continue functioning electrically, without component failures, it may still be more practical to launch a couple of Falcon 9 Heavies with refueling tankage and a "tug" satellite than it is to launch replacement satellites. Drag is an eternal problem in low Earth orbit. It may be easier to keep a constellation that size aloft through refueling rather than replacement.
I'm pretty sure Putin has nukes, blackjack, and hookers.
Yes, there was an extended discussion about Jenny further up in the comments.
Shibboleet
https://xkcd.com/806/
Of course in the REAL WORLD you have to put up with the crap along with all the others :(
For quite a few years, the word for Charter tech support was "Linux." As in, "sorry, I don't have a start menu, the router runs Linux." That short-circuited whole swaths of the script. They even stopped asking me to reboot.
Nowadays, Tier 1 support is a robot. They stopped outsourcing to India after they hired a lowest bidder who would very quickly answer the phone, very carefully take down your name, address, and phone number (the necessary information so they could bill Charter for providing support), then instantly forward your call back to the US call center. It was a great time for customers, who got Tier 2 practically instantly. Punching through the robot's script is much harder.
1. Actually decrypt the files and figure out who people are from the files.
2. Tally up the list of known spies with the list from the files and nod sagely when all are accounted for.
3. Wonder when the UK government is going to stop sending 6' tall 17 stone florid-faced white guys to creep around Beijing with a suitcase full of wigs.
4. Profit.
I was 100% sure this would happen.
That explains why you are willing to accept a Sunday Times story completely devoid of verifiable facts and reeking of the stench of propaganda claiming it has happened.
One senior Home Office official accused Snowden of having “blood on his hands”, although Downing Street said there was “no evidence of anyone being harmed”.
bleats the article, in literally the same sentence, and you're supposed to simultaneously believe that the UK Home Office has evidence that UK spies have been hurt or killed as a result of encryption being cracked on Snowden documents while the UK prime minister's office has evidence that UK spies haven't suffered so much as a papercut. If you happen to notice the contradiction, you're instead supposed to believe that UK spies have been hurt or killed because of encryption being cracked on two year old Snowden documents, instead of realizing that UK spies still in place after two years would be hurt or killed by the UK government's own incompetence and inability to get their story straight. Or maybe it's just bullshit. Occam's Razor.
Maybe you should be questioning the propaganda that doesn't even make sense, instead of suffering confirmation bias. This is about stampeding the UK public into supporting the efforts of their MPs to pass yet another spying law. It's not even about Snowden documents. It's about fear, nothing more.
Your post is bullshit. Snowden had AES available to him, the same encryption method authorized to encrypt TOP SECRET information for the US government. NSA wouldn't let it be used if there was a meaningful weakness for protecting TOP SECRET information.
So now the sock puppet propaganda account is claiming, in its own words, that the Sunday Times article is a lie, because Mr. Snowden probably used AES, encryption so strong that the US government uses it for classified data, blessed by the NSA itself. So neither Russia nor China could have broken the encryption on the data Mr. Snowden gave to Glenn Greenwald. So the article that spawned this entire thread is false.
And some blah blah about what Mr. Snowden may or may not have done, using the false interrogative that Fox News is so fond of to mask pure speculation.
"Does cold fjord REALLY fuck small fluffy bunnies to death with his wart-covered penis? More news at 11:00."
Without confirmation, this is just as likely to be a false flag attempt to charge Snowden with something serious as it is to be an actual news story.
When referring to any Murdoch property, I have a hard time with the "false flag" label. The Sunday Times is an unabashed propaganda arm of the UK government. This isn't false flag. It's a planted "story" by a propaganda rag known for planting stories. As near as I can tell, the Sunday Times flies the "We Are Liars" flag quite proudly.
Because he is the one that arrogantly ignored the democratic process, stole a massive store of intelligence documents, incompetently encrypted them...
The NSA didn't make the documents available to China and Russia. Snowden did.
And here we have the real reason for the Sunday Times article. It's not reporting. It's 100% devoid of facts. It's 100% propaganda. But now it can be quoted as truth by other propaganda channels, like the cold fjord account. Two sentences in one post that implicitly assume that the propaganda is true, and immediately jump to absurd conclusions that aren't even justified if the article was true, which it isn't.
So we start with "anonymous UK government sources", a.k.a. pulled out of the "reporter's" ass because his editor told him to make some shit up, and here we see the very next step in the process, namely quoted as truth by second line fake "grass roots" propaganda arm. (I had to put "reporter" in quotes, because the author wasn't reporting anything. He was fabricating a fiction to be used for propaganda purposes.)
To be clear, Mr. Snowden competently encrypted the documents. Mr. Snowden did not make any documents available to China or Russia. The Sunday Times article is an example of The Big Lie style of propaganda. The Big Lie is now being quoted in Slashdot posts as truth, and we're supposed to believe it.
Some days I wonder why the cold fjord account is still active, when Slashdot so actively resists its attempts at agitprop.
Of course it wasn't worth it, because your privacy is far less important than your security.
My privacy is part of my security. When anyone, anywhere can know every account number you have, every pin number you have, every password you have, you have no security. Passwords secure my privacy. Encryption secures my privacy. See? We even use the damn verb form of the noun in this context.
But grownups already have society modeled out, and are able to calculate through the end scenario of what actually does happen: "That bad thing you're worried about is possible because we have these other systematic checks which are also going to be subverted, subsumed, and suppressed in order to subjugate the peons."
Fixed that for you. But you were half right to begin with, since you said "is possible." Half right, while being totally wrong.
Like, right now, you actually think your privacy rights is more important than your competitive economic advantages you may have over Russian or China (economics is the REAL issue behind the Snowden leaks...)
I'm quite certain of it. My privacy rights are a competitive economic advantage. Real capitalism as it is practiced today absolutely depends on information asymmetry. On secrets. There are no secrets without privacy.
But fools like you are perfectly willing to believe that the wealthy elite should be the only people with secrets, the only people on the high side of information asymmetry. And in the usual mental gymnastic move of the deluded American, you put yourself into the category of temporarily embarrassed millionaire, who will one day benefit from all this unfettered economically motivated spying.
I have news for you, cupcake. You're fired.
What's sad about Glen Greenwald's response is what the Sunday Times will do later. Mr. Greenwald's article repeatedly uses the phrase "retraction-worthy fabrications," but the actions of the Times already indicates that we're past that now. Newspapers as propaganda arms of the UK government, in the worst traditions of Soviet Russia and East Germany during the Cold War, are now firmly entrenched.
One of the extremely few verifiable lies (as opposed to the numerous unverifiable lies) has been silently deleted from the online version of the Sunday Times. It was not retracted. It was not corrected. It was not apologized for. It just vanished. The Times claimed David Miranda was "seized at Heathrow in 2013" in possession of 58,000 NSA documents after meeting Mr. Snowden in Moscow. (Because it quoted a number, it must be true, right?) At the time, David Miranda had never been to Moscow and had never met Mr. Snowden. That blatant, verifiable lie got stuffed into the memory hole. Which improved the quality of the writing a microscopic amount. David Miranda was detained, not seized, but "seized" has a higher negative connotation rating in the thesaurus all Murdoch properties use to compose their texts and they were going for maximum negativity in this article, which is why they squeezed in the reference to David Miranda at all. Times readers were to be reminded that Glenn Greenwald is gay, so they would instantly ignore any rebuttal or response. Overreaching for the anti-gay, got caught in a lie.
Given what they did with the verifiable lie, we can readily guess that the unverifiable lies will simply stand. They will never be retracted. They will never be corrected. They will never be apologized for. The Times will maintain the blatant lies for all time, and the readers of the Times will never know they have been lied to, because the readers of the Times don't read anything else. It's Soviet propaganda at its finest. Mikhail Suslov would be proud of Rupert Murdoch.
I understand the nuclear reactor for the U.S. Navy's NR-1 is about the size of a garbage can.
The containment vessel, maybe. By the time you add on all the piping and three steam turbines and a generator, your backyard is still quite full and you still need a heckuva lot more water than is usually available.
But don't let that stop you. :)
Why is is so expensive in the USA?
Mostly it's because installers severely gouge customers. German solar panels are now $1/watt, delivered. A pallet of panels with a nameplace capacity of 6615 watts is $6590 + $70 delivery fee.
Panels used to be such a huge fraction of the price that vendors marked up all other components outrageously and it still looked small. That pricing is lingering in the US. Cabling for panels runs $10/meter. Inverter prices have little or nothing to do with inverter capacity, and nothing at all to do with component prices, so a 2kW pure sine wave inverter costs the same as a 7 kW. Both run about $2500.
So a 6.6kW system costs $9k in parts. And $30,000+ in installation fees, most everywhere. Installers haven't yet adjusted to the fact that panel prices have plummeted, and suddenly their fees look as outrageous as they always have been.
Hydrocarbon energy shills are going to be badmouthing solar up to the very day everyone has blue shiny roof shingles and we all have a smart decentralized and resilient power grid with lots of local, municipal, and regional storage.
I dunno about you, but when I have blue shiny roof shingles and "lots of local ... storage", I'm unplugging from the grid entirely. No fees for maintaining infrastructure I don't need, no worries about EMP from either natural or man-made sources (however tiny the possibility), and eventually no more poles on my street. I don't want a smart decentralized resilient power grid. I want no more grid, at least in suburbia, where our roofs are large enough to provide over 65 kWh/day, using the conservative 5 hour/day estimate and off the shelf cell efficiencies. Once we can get our hands on cells with higher than 16% efficiency, that number only goes up.
Yes, there's going to be much whining about their inability to build more infrastructure we don't want anymore. They're going to have to start charging their industrial and commercial customers more, instead of nickel and diming millions of individuals in order to subsidize unnaturally low rates for those customers.
Usually one reads the initial story before commenting.
You must be new here...
I've often wondered though if there is some fosilization phenomena that could cause them to grow over time.
There isn't. A story ran on /. several months (years?) ago about an experiment where someone leeched all the minerals out of a fossil dinosaur bone. The result behaves just like a modern bone when you leech all the calcium out of it. It was the same length and width after the procedure. Just floppier. They really were that big. (Except for the little ones, which weren't.)
Elon Musk's philosophy is apparently, "If you want something done right, do it yourself." It seems to be working for him, so I guess you can't argue with it.
I wonder what Iridium thinks, considering they have a launch contract with SpaceX. For which they have undoubtedly put money down, thereby helping to fund this effort.
Republican corporate welfware? You couldn't even finish reading the summary before you rushed to mouth off in the comments?
The satellites will likely be built using the $1 billion that SpaceX raised mostly from Google earlier this year.
The satellites are privately funded. The rocket is privately funded. The launch is privately funded. The US government didn't spend one thin dime for this experiment, and will in fact get paid to enable the launch (range launch services aren't free, you know).
Quitcher bitchin'.
Seriously, am I the only one noticing that? I mean, whenever there is some kind of blatant incompetence in anything people are dealing with on a semi-regular base, you may rest assured that some comedy troupe or at least some comedian will start a routine about it.
Any comedian you have heard of can fly to his gigs. And prefers to...
The Gibson guitar factory got raided by the FBI for having rare woods... finger boards... and they said something about how that was a violation of some law from the 1920s that makes no sense.
Uh, what? The Gibson guitar factory got raided for violating a law proposed by George W. Bush in 2003. And eventually signed into law by George W. Bush when Congress agreed with his initiative and passed the law. It worked, too. Illegal logging is down around the world. Boohoo, contributing to the party that made your actions illegal doesn't get you a "get out of jail free" card. How sad for you.
The Justice Department may or may not be engaged in politically motivated prosecution, but your choice of examples is feeble.
Did you actually RTFA? The author specifically talked about 12V DC power being the "low voltage" standard that we need to convert to in the home because it's the native battery voltage.
But it's not. It's not the native voltage of any battery chemistry. Lead-acid cells are native 2.0VDC. Lithium cells are native 3.0VDC. Carbon-zinc is native 1.5VDC. Nickel-cadmium is native 1.2VDC. Nickel-hydride is native 1.2VDC. Zinc-air is native 1.5VDC.
All double digit voltages are an artifact of series connection of cells, and the author missed one crucial fact when invoking the Powerwall product: native cell voltage of lithium ion is 3.0VDC, but the Powerwall puts out 400VDC. It is a high voltage product.
When my 3yr old sticks a forked prong in my DC electrical outlet, what is the safety factor compared to the current AC plugs?
That depends entirely on the voltage the DC outlet provides. If it's a USB outlet, it provides 5VDC and your 3 year old feels nothing at all. If it's a USB 3.1 Power Distribution outlet, it provides 5VDC unless you plug in a qualified cable which can negotiate its way up to 48VDC, and again your fork-wielding 3 year old feels nothing.
If it's the native 400VDC coming off of the Tesla pack, your child dies. High voltage DC tends to make the muscles clench, freezing the victim in place, rather than blowing the victim across the room as high voltage AC does. High voltage anything is dangerous, but low voltage DC requires big fat conductors to power large appliances, and we've lived with high voltage for so long that we're accustomed to the permanent danger. If you have high voltage DC outlets, you want child-resistant designs, exactly as you do for your existing AC outlets.
That takes care of the first 20%... but what about the cheap AC->DC transformers that sit between your house wiring and your devices? I'd love to be able to switch each outlet I have between 110VAC/15a, 12VDC/3-5a and 9VDC/500Ma-2a, and do away with wall warts altogether.
You already can come close, since these are products. As more and more devices switch to USB power ports, you'll want more and more wall outlets with USB ports and fewer and fewer with AC ports (of the various and sundry flavors in use worldwide).
It's a little depressing to realize that the one thing that will make AC power in the home hang on long after it should be dead and buried is the humble vacuum cleaner.
So, you call it an ivory tower when it's intellectual, what do you call it when it's just a tower made of stacked-up money?
A money bin.