> it sounds like a particularly irresponsible thing to urge people to do. Especially considering the harm done when the federal agents have to shoot your dog and possibly you if you twitch.
You don't think child porn consumers use their own connections do you?
Just the _risk_ of this happening, even if it's about the same as winning lotto, is enough for me. Just saying. I have a dog. They'd shoot her unless she was crated.
When friends and family, and my wife, asked me, after getting the dog killed and risking the lives of my kids, I'd sound like a Class A asshole if I started spouting off rhetoric about Freegan WiFi access. I assure you it's not worth the risk.
For real, what if some FBI agent with an itchy trigger finger slips up and blows your brains out? Oh well at least you were socially responsible.
Sure my rights are getting chipped away but I'd rather have a password protected wifi router and NOT have some guy's boot on the back of my neck with a bunch of self-important jerkoffs calling me a perv and child molester. Same goes for killing my dog, kids or wife and possibly blowing my head off because one of us twitched. It's pretty much a guarantee your dogs will get killed unless they happen to be crated.
It's your router, you are free to do whatever you want. While you are at it, leave your keys in your car and the front door to your house open too. No one has any right to use a private resource except the owner. If you think I'm wrong, show me a law that says different.
Cause a situation where the FBI is beating your door down in the middle of the night and you could very easily end up dead due to misadventure.
more important than "here" and "there" multiple backups is offline storage. Keeping your data backed up to a share (onsite or offsite) only helps until one of your employees decides to go bonkers and delete the live data _and_ backups on your network to really fuck the company. If you have an up to date tape locked up in a safe somewhere you can still get your data back in this scenario. If you are only backing up to SANs and an employee does this you are truly fucked.
The most dangerous (and most often overlooked) threat to your data is a malicious rogue employee.
The only protection from this is physically secured offline storage media which is updated/offloaded daily.
As well, 125 years would be more correct. Ironically 4 cycle engines 1876 were invented before 2 cycle (in 1889), which are actually simpler. The 2 cycle was invented to get around infringing on the 4 cycle patents. So much for patents fueling innovation....
Ignition devices are used for more than just gasoline engines.
Have a small issue with the text of the story; sparkplugs don't power engines, gasoline vapor and oxygen do. The spark plugs ignite the air/fuel mixture and the resulting explosion forces the pistons down, powering the engine..
A more correct first sentence would be "For more than 150 years, spark plugs have been used in engine ignition systems to start the combustion cycle."
Aluminum is around $2.65 USD per kg, wholesale, on the metal exchanges.(http://www.metalprices.com/pubcharts/Public/Aluminum_Price_Charts.asp?WeightSelect=KG&SizeSelect=M&ccs=1011&cid=0)
Gasoline is $3.75 per gallon USD.
My car gets ~61km per gallon on a flat open highway cruising at 55mph with properly inflated tires. Operating costs: Gasoline: $.06/km Aluminum: $.53/km (just for the aluminum, assuming my car is one ton, which it's not, it's heavier)
Given the fact that half the street urchins in the world are scavenging aluminum cans, often nearly immediately after someone tosses a can, and that there are metal recycling guys running around with trucks picking up every piece of scrap metal that isn't bolted to the ground (often they unbolt and steal stuff that is), the likelihood of running your car on free aluminum is nearly nil.
You might get Al at wholesale prices if you buy a ton at a time. I'm not sure how that industry works. Sit a ton of aluminum in your back yard and see how long it takes to get stolen. Well maybe in a lot of places it wouldn't be, but in my neighborhood, it'd be gone in a day.
they buy up domains, prop up content farms on them, and all links on the content farms go back to eHow. So it's not as simple as blocking robot traffic to the offending domains (ehow and the like), you need to also crawl the content farms (easy because the SEO people register the pages to be crawled and google is already crawling/ranking them). Pages on some random domain that only have links to eHow, which are not on eHow.com, are probably farm content. Ditto for other farm content pointing to other domains.
The trick is for the robots to be sophisticated enough to ignore hidden (to user's browsers) content on the pages, look at the visible links and make a decision as to whether or not the content is legitimate based on where the visible links go.
Of course the SEO people will be on top of this and figure out a way around the algorithms. They always do...
Actually finding more efficient ways to kill people DOES have long term benefits. Here are a few:
Microwave oven - heating properties of microwaves and magneto discovered by radar engineers 1945 at Raytheon Nuclear Power (not that I approve) Radar - used in airports, weather, to sport fish etc etc Improved medical technology/techniques used in shock/trauma centers everywhere Electronic computers (perfected during WW II) Bomb disposal robots
I could go on but need to get back to work. Military tech converted to peaceful use has completely shaped and changed our lives... Without war we'd be living a much different existence. I'm not saying war is good, only that there are long term benefits to the work people do to kill each other. Ironically the number of lives saved by such technology, is probably much greater than the lives lost creating the technology.
... should consider talking to the "best" minds of the last generation, who could easily and without hesitation tell them that ads are worthless (from a monetary standpoint), they do _not_ pay for themselves, and few if any people click on them, outside of armies of people in India paid to click them, click-bots, and maybe accidentally.
At the end of the day, this is not a social media bubble, it's another advertising bubble. The only difference is we've added social media to the equation and Zuckerburg & Co. have somehow convinced advertisers that ads dropped in Facebook or Twitter somehow work better than ads pushed to other types of media.
It will crash and burn too, give it time. The only real benefit from online advertising is branding. Branding is something very few people understand and cannot be monetized, tabulated, valued or tracked. Since it can't, the bean counters don't like it. Eventually, without any direct evidence of ROI, a lot of advertising programs at companies shut down and the marketing managers get fired. I've seen it happen over and over.
This is easily illustrated by example. I've lost track of the number of times I've either 1. seen an ad on the internet and bought the product later at a bricks and mortar Walmart when I actually needed it or 2. gone straight to amazon (or a bricks and mortar store) and bought something I've never seen an ad for, Like maybe my kid wants Pokemon Black for his birthday. On our way home from our weekend I stop at Game Stop and he buys it.
This stuff won't show up in anyone's conversion report.
usually, like someone else mentioned, people sign up, facebook like mad until they have everyone in there that they can remember, then their daily use drops off to nearly nil after the initial "shiny new toy" period wears off, or they become obsessed (usually while unemployed) and post about every time they lift a weight, fart or cook a chocolate cake.
My girlfriend actually gets disappointed with me because I don't post more about us. I'm at the point now where I'm ready to delete my account so I don't need to hear about it anymore. I really don't need to know about it every time someone farts, cooks grilled chicken salad for dinner, or twists their ankle. Call me insensitive.
My brother doesn't have an account. I'm ready to join him. I certainly don't want a potential employer reading about my friend Tom's bodily functions. I'm marked private but you never know...
Actually they _are_ parallel scenarios, and are a lot more parallel than you are considering. What if your friend downloads kiddie porn or tries to hack NSA through your connection. Now you are a pervert terrorist hacker and the FBI is beating down _your_ dorm room door in the middle of the night (not your buddies), putting a black bag over your head, kicking your ass, and hauling you to a windowless basement in some classified location to be interrogated. Do you REALLY want to go there?
Eventually they'd figure out they got the wrong guy. They'd release you with a "sorry charlie, you should really secure your connection next time" and release you with a smile and a smack on the ass.
Copyright infringement is the _least_ of your worries. Secure your connection or you are really asking for it. You can do a lot more (financial anyway) damage with a computer and a network connection than you ever could with a gun. I've heard of people shutting down power grids by running nmap (SYN/ACK fingerprinting tests) against the SCADA OS2 control systems. Granted they were the network people that worked for the power company, but anyone could have done it. That's all it takes.
Ironically as of this writing, that line has been removed. I had started to state that the article was wrong til I saw the snapshot of the page taken earlier.
They were right tho. If you have a wireless router, and others download stuff through it, you will get blamed for it. You may walk away unscathed but you'll have to defend yourself and that costs money. Your connection = your responsibility.
They were doing their students a favor by informing them of how that works. It's too bad it's gone because that article twisted the meaning of what BC was trying to tell it's students. Students (actually everyone) should probably be informed about it.
Copyright violation is the least of your worries though. The scary stuff is strangers downloading kiddie porn through your connection.
If the acct holder is not responsible for the activity that happened over their wi-fi, eventually they'll be cleared. The burden of proof is still on the government and they need to prove you did something. Traffic to your IP only leads them to your cable modem. It doesn't prove you downloaded anything. They still need to prove you possess(ed) whatever they are looking to nail you for. Only problem is in the mean time the feds will have confiscated every electronic device in their possession to do forensics on it. Then it all may sit in an evidence room for an indeterminate amount of time (usually years) waiting for trial.
In the mean time the accused has had all of their equipment taken and may as well write it off. It'll be depreciated by the time they get it back.
So despite not having any criminal charges that will stick to them, they are out many thousands of dollars for the gear that's now sitting in an evidence room.
It pays to secure your wireless connection... Even if you simply get accused of something you didn't do, it's rough, can be very costly, and will ruin your life for a considerable amount of time.
It's much easier to set a damned wireless password.
You could always just jailbreak the ipad, use tcpdump to find out where the connections are being made and what ports, then modify the hosts file on the iPad to point to your firewall, set up port forwarding on your firewall and forward the ports to the actual server that is serving the streams.
Then you could use your iPad from anywhere to watch TWC. You might need to do some creative routing to watch from within your house tho...
I guess it's ok if you are the channel cutting out the cable network (HBO, Starz, Showtime on Netflix) but not the other way around.../shrug
typical
Of course this is like watching two guys you hate beat the shit out of each other. You can't help but to cheer the fact they are beating each other senseless.
> But if you want to grab someone else's work and make a profit from it, you have to buy it (and get a license to resell it).
Not if you provide the source code of the software you used and make it available to all users, at least under GPLv2. You can take what you want as long as you provide the source. How do you think RedHat and everyone else are able to sell linux distributions with all that free software and make a profit? They provide the source.... they aren't paying license fees. In fact, if you give it away free, but don't provide the source, THAT is a violation. You can't distribute the software without the source. You can't even get red hat enterprise linux server for free. It's actually quite expensive.
I could burn 50000 cds with Gentoo on them and sell them for $4.99 at computer shows in a pretty case, as long as I provide the source.
More importantly, be good and other people might be good back, or at least won't kill you for being a douche.
The 10 commandments (or the equivalent for most religions) can basically be distilled to "don't fuck with other people".
I think that alone makes religion a good thing since if you do you will probably end up in jail, or worse, with your brains smashed in.
Of course most people fail on one or more commandments but society by and large has been formed around behavior guided by the commandments (or similar directives of other religions).
Where religion fails is "be good to other people like you but either convert or kill people from other religions" directives found in the more extreme versions of religions writings.
"Initial tests show that the system in Bath emits approximately half as much energy as heat than the previous AC powered system while running much faster."
This is because without a power supply, there's no transformer and rectifiers packed into a PSU within the case. Without a transformer and rectifiers generating heat in a PSU there's a lot less heat in the computer case.
As far as being faster? no way. I guarantee you the computers run at the exact same speed, with maybe a slight edge due to the inside of the case being cooler. Clock speeds are limited by chip quality, not the last few feet of the power supply. If there were a speed difference, it wouldn't be noticeable without instrumentation.
Most of the heat comes from the GPU and CPU, not the power supply, though the power supply heat is definitely considerable.
>I never understood why we don't have converters in every house. Simply deliver the power as A/C and provide for A/C and D/C in every house.
really? every wall wart you use is a converter. As is the power "supply" in your computer. We're already doing that.
As for DC appliances... One problem with DC motors is the brushes. They wear out. AC motors don't need them because they are inductive. As well you'd need one hell of a transformer to do the ac to dc conversion for the large motors in washers, dryers etc.
Another thing is that enough current to run a dryer is very dangerous when it's DC. With AC, when you get hit, you spaz. It may knock your arm back, or knock you back etc. With DC, your muscles tighten in one direction. So if you get your hand on something and the current starts flowing through you, you can't let go. It's a death sentence.
Safety is the number one reason DC motors above a few hundred milliwatts aren't used in home appliances.
I think aquaponics is the future. A 3000 sq foot greenhouse can produce 4000 lbs of organically grown produce per month, and several tons of fish per year.
One of the best species of fish to use is Tilapia, which is native to africa and is a vegetarian fish which can subsist mainly on duckweed with some protien supplements. Channel cats eat pretty much anything, and striped bass are predators, which is why I'll also be raising tree frogs (who will serve as pest control too) and composting their waste.
With some solar cells an aquaponics greenhouse can be totally self sufficient and is very water efficient. There's virtually no waste if the fish solid waste is composted, which can provide the worms and insect larvae necessary for the protein supplements. (provided you keep the effluent separated. Fish can't eat animals grown in their own feces. However animals grown in other species feces are fine)
Bacteria convert the ammonia from the fish waste into nitrates, which feed the plants, who filter the nitrates out of the water and help oxygenate it.
It's pure genius. Best thing is you can start an aquaponics setup with a kitty litter box, 50gal plastic container or aquarium and a $200 trip to home depot.You could grow 12 tomato plants in such a setup.
You can build and outfit a 3000 sq foot green house with $30k if you have the space for it on your land. There's no pesticide needed, no outside fertilizer. It's about as organic as you can get if you use lady bugs, lacewings and other natural pest control in your greenhouse.
I just aquired a 25 acre property and am starting my enterprise this summer. My end-game goal is to grow my own vegetables and fish. I'll probably mix channel catfish and striped bass with the tilapia, in different tanks of course;) I'm starting small (in my sun room) and studying aquaponics for now but I eventually plan on building a greenhouse and my GF and kids will be running a roadside stand to sell whatever extra vegetables we can't eat. The GF has always wanted to run a produce stand and a greenhouse. So she'll handle that while I work 9-5. She's quite excited about the idea.
I already have a business plan and someone writing up my grant papers now. Yes you can get grant money and farm subsidies for this, it's green, sustainable, and can be done year round even in a temperate climate. It's also good way to earn some extra pocket money. The best thing is you know your veggies are really organic and not FDA-Skirt-the-rules bullshit organic. You also know your fish doesn't have mercury and pesticides in it:-)
Slashdot Mirror
> it sounds like a particularly irresponsible thing to urge people to do.
Especially considering the harm done when the federal agents have to shoot your dog and possibly you if you twitch.
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/man-wrongly-accused-of-child-porn-learns-to-password-protect-wifi-the-hard-way-20110426/
You don't think child porn consumers use their own connections do you?
Just the _risk_ of this happening, even if it's about the same as winning lotto, is enough for me. Just saying. I have a dog. They'd shoot her unless she was crated.
When friends and family, and my wife, asked me, after getting the dog killed and risking the lives of my kids, I'd sound like a Class A asshole if I started spouting off rhetoric about Freegan WiFi access. I assure you it's not worth the risk.
For real, what if some FBI agent with an itchy trigger finger slips up and blows your brains out? Oh well at least you were socially responsible.
Sure my rights are getting chipped away but I'd rather have a password protected wifi router and NOT have some guy's boot on the back of my neck with a bunch of self-important jerkoffs calling me a perv and child molester. Same goes for killing my dog, kids or wife and possibly blowing my head off because one of us twitched. It's pretty much a guarantee your dogs will get killed unless they happen to be crated.
It's your router, you are free to do whatever you want. While you are at it, leave your keys in your car and the front door to your house open too. No one has any right to use a private resource except the owner. If you think I'm wrong, show me a law that says different.
Cause a situation where the FBI is beating your door down in the middle of the night and you could very easily end up dead due to misadventure.
more important than "here" and "there" multiple backups is offline storage. Keeping your data backed up to a share (onsite or offsite) only helps until one of your employees decides to go bonkers and delete the live data _and_ backups on your network to really fuck the company. If you have an up to date tape locked up in a safe somewhere you can still get your data back in this scenario. If you are only backing up to SANs and an employee does this you are truly fucked.
The most dangerous (and most often overlooked) threat to your data is a malicious rogue employee.
The only protection from this is physically secured offline storage media which is updated/offloaded daily.
As well, 125 years would be more correct. Ironically 4 cycle engines 1876 were invented before 2 cycle (in 1889), which are actually simpler. The 2 cycle was invented to get around infringing on the 4 cycle patents. So much for patents fueling innovation....
Ignition devices are used for more than just gasoline engines.
Have a small issue with the text of the story; sparkplugs don't power engines, gasoline vapor and oxygen do. The spark plugs ignite the air/fuel mixture and the resulting explosion forces the pistons down, powering the engine..
A more correct first sentence would be "For more than 150 years, spark plugs have been used in engine ignition systems to start the combustion cycle."
That works out to around 1kg Al per 5km.
Aluminum is around $2.65 USD per kg, wholesale, on the metal exchanges.(http://www.metalprices.com/pubcharts/Public/Aluminum_Price_Charts.asp?WeightSelect=KG&SizeSelect=M&ccs=1011&cid=0)
Gasoline is $3.75 per gallon USD.
My car gets ~61km per gallon on a flat open highway cruising at 55mph with properly inflated tires.
Operating costs:
Gasoline: $.06/km
Aluminum: $.53/km (just for the aluminum, assuming my car is one ton, which it's not, it's heavier)
Given the fact that half the street urchins in the world are scavenging aluminum cans, often nearly immediately after someone tosses a can, and that there are metal recycling guys running around with trucks picking up every piece of scrap metal that isn't bolted to the ground (often they unbolt and steal stuff that is), the likelihood of running your car on free aluminum is nearly nil.
You might get Al at wholesale prices if you buy a ton at a time. I'm not sure how that industry works. Sit a ton of aluminum in your back yard and see how long it takes to get stolen. Well maybe in a lot of places it wouldn't be, but in my neighborhood, it'd be gone in a day.
You are right, it's not a great way to run a car.
Nothing to see here, move along....
I believe he meant "not registered with the patent office yet" as opposed to "original" although even this distinction doesn't always matter.
they buy up domains, prop up content farms on them, and all links on the content farms go back to eHow. So it's not as simple as blocking robot traffic to the offending domains (ehow and the like), you need to also crawl the content farms (easy because the SEO people register the pages to be crawled and google is already crawling/ranking them). Pages on some random domain that only have links to eHow, which are not on eHow.com, are probably farm content. Ditto for other farm content pointing to other domains.
The trick is for the robots to be sophisticated enough to ignore hidden (to user's browsers) content on the pages, look at the visible links and make a decision as to whether or not the content is legitimate based on where the visible links go.
Of course the SEO people will be on top of this and figure out a way around the algorithms. They always do...
Actually finding more efficient ways to kill people DOES have long term benefits. Here are a few:
Microwave oven - heating properties of microwaves and magneto discovered by radar engineers 1945 at Raytheon
Nuclear Power (not that I approve)
Radar - used in airports, weather, to sport fish etc etc
Improved medical technology/techniques used in shock/trauma centers everywhere
Electronic computers (perfected during WW II)
Bomb disposal robots
I could go on but need to get back to work. Military tech converted to peaceful use has completely shaped and changed our lives... Without war we'd be living a much different existence. I'm not saying war is good, only that there are long term benefits to the work people do to kill each other. Ironically the number of lives saved by such technology, is probably much greater than the lives lost creating the technology.
... should consider talking to the "best" minds of the last generation, who could easily and without hesitation tell them that ads are worthless (from a monetary standpoint), they do _not_ pay for themselves, and few if any people click on them, outside of armies of people in India paid to click them, click-bots, and maybe accidentally.
At the end of the day, this is not a social media bubble, it's another advertising bubble. The only difference is we've added social media to the equation and Zuckerburg & Co. have somehow convinced advertisers that ads dropped in Facebook or Twitter somehow work better than ads pushed to other types of media.
It will crash and burn too, give it time. The only real benefit from online advertising is branding. Branding is something very few people understand and cannot be monetized, tabulated, valued or tracked. Since it can't, the bean counters don't like it. Eventually, without any direct evidence of ROI, a lot of advertising programs at companies shut down and the marketing managers get fired. I've seen it happen over and over.
This is easily illustrated by example. I've lost track of the number of times I've either
1. seen an ad on the internet and bought the product later at a bricks and mortar Walmart when I actually needed it
or
2. gone straight to amazon (or a bricks and mortar store) and bought something I've never seen an ad for, Like maybe my kid wants Pokemon Black for his birthday. On our way home from our weekend I stop at Game Stop and he buys it.
This stuff won't show up in anyone's conversion report.
usually, like someone else mentioned, people sign up, facebook like mad until they have everyone in there that they can remember, then their daily use drops off to nearly nil after the initial "shiny new toy" period wears off, or they become obsessed (usually while unemployed) and post about every time they lift a weight, fart or cook a chocolate cake.
My girlfriend actually gets disappointed with me because I don't post more about us. I'm at the point now where I'm ready to delete my account so I don't need to hear about it anymore. I really don't need to know about it every time someone farts, cooks grilled chicken salad for dinner, or twists their ankle. Call me insensitive.
My brother doesn't have an account. I'm ready to join him. I certainly don't want a potential employer reading about my friend Tom's bodily functions. I'm marked private but you never know...
Actually they _are_ parallel scenarios, and are a lot more parallel than you are considering. What if your friend downloads kiddie porn or tries to hack NSA through your connection. Now you are a pervert terrorist hacker and the FBI is beating down _your_ dorm room door in the middle of the night (not your buddies), putting a black bag over your head, kicking your ass, and hauling you to a windowless basement in some classified location to be interrogated. Do you REALLY want to go there?
Eventually they'd figure out they got the wrong guy. They'd release you with a "sorry charlie, you should really secure your connection next time" and release you with a smile and a smack on the ass.
Copyright infringement is the _least_ of your worries. Secure your connection or you are really asking for it. You can do a lot more (financial anyway) damage with a computer and a network connection than you ever could with a gun. I've heard of people shutting down power grids by running nmap (SYN/ACK fingerprinting tests) against the SCADA OS2 control systems. Granted they were the network people that worked for the power company, but anyone could have done it. That's all it takes.
Ironically as of this writing, that line has been removed. I had started to state that the article was wrong til I saw the snapshot of the page taken earlier.
They were right tho. If you have a wireless router, and others download stuff through it, you will get blamed for it. You may walk away unscathed but you'll have to defend yourself and that costs money. Your connection = your responsibility.
They were doing their students a favor by informing them of how that works. It's too bad it's gone because that article twisted the meaning of what BC was trying to tell it's students. Students (actually everyone) should probably be informed about it.
Copyright violation is the least of your worries though. The scary stuff is strangers downloading kiddie porn through your connection.
Pfft, there goes my idea of towing my son water skiing from the surplus F-4G I just got on ebay. I just put a $3500 towing attachment on it too :-/
If the acct holder is not responsible for the activity that happened over their wi-fi, eventually they'll be cleared. The burden of proof is still on the government and they need to prove you did something. Traffic to your IP only leads them to your cable modem. It doesn't prove you downloaded anything. They still need to prove you possess(ed) whatever they are looking to nail you for. Only problem is in the mean time the feds will have confiscated every electronic device in their possession to do forensics on it. Then it all may sit in an evidence room for an indeterminate amount of time (usually years) waiting for trial.
In the mean time the accused has had all of their equipment taken and may as well write it off. It'll be depreciated by the time they get it back.
So despite not having any criminal charges that will stick to them, they are out many thousands of dollars for the gear that's now sitting in an evidence room.
It pays to secure your wireless connection... Even if you simply get accused of something you didn't do, it's rough, can be very costly, and will ruin your life for a considerable amount of time.
It's much easier to set a damned wireless password.
You could always just jailbreak the ipad, use tcpdump to find out where the connections are being made and what ports, then modify the hosts file on the iPad to point to your firewall, set up port forwarding on your firewall and forward the ports to the actual server that is serving the streams.
Then you could use your iPad from anywhere to watch TWC. You might need to do some creative routing to watch from within your house tho...
I guess it's ok if you are the channel cutting out the cable network (HBO, Starz, Showtime on Netflix) but not the other way around... /shrug
typical
Of course this is like watching two guys you hate beat the shit out of each other. You can't help but to cheer the fact they are beating each other senseless.
> But if you want to grab someone else's work and make a profit from it, you have to buy it (and get a license to resell it).
Not if you provide the source code of the software you used and make it available to all users, at least under GPLv2. You can take what you want as long as you provide the source. How do you think RedHat and everyone else are able to sell linux distributions with all that free software and make a profit? They provide the source.... they aren't paying license fees. In fact, if you give it away free, but don't provide the source, THAT is a violation. You can't distribute the software without the source. You can't even get red hat enterprise linux server for free. It's actually quite expensive.
I could burn 50000 cds with Gentoo on them and sell them for $4.99 at computer shows in a pretty case, as long as I provide the source.
If the state did allow slave ownership, they still wouldn't be free, at least according to the slaves.
More importantly, be good and other people might be good back, or at least won't kill you for being a douche.
The 10 commandments (or the equivalent for most religions) can basically be distilled to "don't fuck with other people".
I think that alone makes religion a good thing since if you do you will probably end up in jail, or worse, with your brains smashed in.
Of course most people fail on one or more commandments but society by and large has been formed around behavior guided by the commandments (or similar directives of other religions).
Where religion fails is "be good to other people like you but either convert or kill people from other religions" directives found in the more extreme versions of religions writings.
The reason 24v is good is that like you said the wire sizes can be reasonable, but more importantly it won't arc easily.
"Initial tests show that the system in Bath emits approximately half as much energy as heat than the previous AC powered system while running much faster."
This is because without a power supply, there's no transformer and rectifiers packed into a PSU within the case. Without a transformer and rectifiers generating heat in a PSU there's a lot less heat in the computer case.
As far as being faster? no way. I guarantee you the computers run at the exact same speed, with maybe a slight edge due to the inside of the case being cooler. Clock speeds are limited by chip quality, not the last few feet of the power supply. If there were a speed difference, it wouldn't be noticeable without instrumentation.
Most of the heat comes from the GPU and CPU, not the power supply, though the power supply heat is definitely considerable.
>I never understood why we don't have converters in every house. Simply deliver the power as A/C and provide for A/C and D/C in every house.
really? every wall wart you use is a converter. As is the power "supply" in your computer. We're already doing that.
As for DC appliances... One problem with DC motors is the brushes. They wear out. AC motors don't need them because they are inductive. As well you'd need one hell of a transformer to do the ac to dc conversion for the large motors in washers, dryers etc.
Another thing is that enough current to run a dryer is very dangerous when it's DC. With AC, when you get hit, you spaz. It may knock your arm back, or knock you back etc. With DC, your muscles tighten in one direction. So if you get your hand on something and the current starts flowing through you, you can't let go. It's a death sentence.
Safety is the number one reason DC motors above a few hundred milliwatts aren't used in home appliances.
I think aquaponics is the future. A 3000 sq foot greenhouse can produce 4000 lbs of organically grown produce per month, and several tons of fish per year.
One of the best species of fish to use is Tilapia, which is native to africa and is a vegetarian fish which can subsist mainly on duckweed with some protien supplements. Channel cats eat pretty much anything, and striped bass are predators, which is why I'll also be raising tree frogs (who will serve as pest control too) and composting their waste.
With some solar cells an aquaponics greenhouse can be totally self sufficient and is very water efficient. There's virtually no waste if the fish solid waste is composted, which can provide the worms and insect larvae necessary for the protein supplements. (provided you keep the effluent separated. Fish can't eat animals grown in their own feces. However animals grown in other species feces are fine)
Bacteria convert the ammonia from the fish waste into nitrates, which feed the plants, who filter the nitrates out of the water and help oxygenate it.
It's pure genius. Best thing is you can start an aquaponics setup with a kitty litter box, 50gal plastic container or aquarium and a $200 trip to home depot.You could grow 12 tomato plants in such a setup.
You can build and outfit a 3000 sq foot green house with $30k if you have the space for it on your land. There's no pesticide needed, no outside fertilizer. It's about as organic as you can get if you use lady bugs, lacewings and other natural pest control in your greenhouse.
http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/aquaponic.html
I just aquired a 25 acre property and am starting my enterprise this summer. My end-game goal is to grow my own vegetables and fish. I'll probably mix channel catfish and striped bass with the tilapia, in different tanks of course ;) I'm starting small (in my sun room) and studying aquaponics for now but I eventually plan on building a greenhouse and my GF and kids will be running a roadside stand to sell whatever extra vegetables we can't eat. The GF has always wanted to run a produce stand and a greenhouse. So she'll handle that while I work 9-5. She's quite excited about the idea.
I already have a business plan and someone writing up my grant papers now. Yes you can get grant money and farm subsidies for this, it's green, sustainable, and can be done year round even in a temperate climate. It's also good way to earn some extra pocket money. The best thing is you know your veggies are really organic and not FDA-Skirt-the-rules bullshit organic. You also know your fish doesn't have mercury and pesticides in it :-)