Actually, as Edison & The Electric Chair documents quite nicely, Edison originally intended to run all of his utilities through purpose-built subsurface channels. It actually made economic sense with late eighteen-hundreds technology. Almost. Unfortunately, waterproofing technology wasn't ready yet, so he eventually gave in and used raised power lines. Why we *still* do this over a hundred years later isn't so easy to justify. And the fraud that this kind of approach makes very easy helps protect the telecoms at times like this. I suspect that one of the many reasons that they fear the prospect of municipal service-providers is that once a few have been built, it will start becoming obvious how much the telcos lie about their costs and procedures.
As many of you have seen me say before, I think that we should build more public service tunnels along our rights of way of the sorts that private business have used for generations. You may know them better as the "steam tunnels" so key to many cheesy seventies slasher flicks.
Yes. That's a very good way to put what I was saying. It is crucial for some people sometimes. It is validly but questionably useful for many more people many more times. But it's expensive and I wanted to point out that cost, a thing that I think gets forgotten or dismissed around here far too readily. I'm very wary of words like "evil" but overall, yes, you've definitely got it right.
a lot (if not most) of the judges in this country are ancient old farts . ..
Really? I've only met about fifteen or twenty judges so maybe I'm missing something. But in my experience and from what I hear from various lawyers, most judges know quite a lot about computers and really aren't all that old. Do you have numbers to back this up?
I'm finding this whole trend on this thread and in general that "judges and lawyers and legislators know nothing about computers" increasingly annoying. What is your basis for this? Do you people know anything about how the courts work? Do you know what WESTLAW is? Or EDGAR? Or LEXIS-NEXIS? Or SOX? Or how key PDFs are to many kinds of jurisprudence? How modern filings are done? Document disclosure? Due diligence? Let alone how much computers have permeated law schools for quite a while now?
Are there a few idiots who give good quotes? Duh. We all know about the "collection of pipes". But I think that y'all are way too ready to dismiss the people in all aspects of the law as clueless and not worth the effort to understand.
Twenty years ago, anybody gay would have been in the position you're in now. It is only because people like the Mattachine Society went public over FORTY years ago anyway and many since that this changed. Even then it took a hell of a long time and many fights. But fights that only could be won because more and more people would disclose. Ten years ago BDSM people were in your position. Now most tame forms of BDSM are about as risky to disclose in most jobs as a taste for rum raisin ice cream. Again, Madonna and others made this possible by disclosing. Fiction is nice but it's only when the average person understands that other "average" people do a thing that it truly becomes relatively free of risk to disclose.
You are making a choice. Frankly, given what I see these days at the average comics convention, one that's not so very risky anymore in plenty of circles. You are choosing to stay in some field where this is an issue. If you were in most parts of design or some kinds of programming or any number of other fields, being a furry would be no more important than your taste in movies. Possibly less from what I've seen. Yes, Risk is not equal to zero. But Cost is not equal to zero either. You gamble with your family's future all the time. Do you drive on public roads? Very real chance of death when you do that one. Do you buy things online? Everybody here knows the issues in that one. And so on.
Recent surveys have increasingly focused on how Americans judge risk and the results have come back saying that not only the average American, but most corporate decisionmakers are somewhere between not very good and flat out incompetent at cataloging what the relevant risk factors are, judging which are more and less risky, and efficiently allocating their "basket of goods" to best address those risks and opportunities. It's a particular kind of innumeracy intersecting with a particular absence of self-knowledge that I have found quite common among/.ers, as it happens.
Personally, I sacrificed one of the best gigs I ever had by disclosing something sexually suspect in their eyes (would you believe having polish on my toenails?) and while losing that gig pisses me off, put me back there and I would do it all over again. Probably louder. And while I haven't disclosed each and every thing I've ever done, I've been loud and proud in many ways for a long, long time now. At, I say again, considerable cost.
Why? Because the longer everybody waits for "somebody else" to go public with a thing that they do and/or believe, the worse for everybody. The costs are very real, including, I suspect, costs to you.
You don't read so good, do you? Looks to me like you just scanned my post for keywords and then just went on to rant about whatever you happened to feel like ranting about.
How does demanding all of that information follow from what I said? My points are: 1.) that anonymity is used to avoid accountability and 2.) that a society in which anonymity is frequent is one in which people will lie about important parts of their lives in ways that make it harder for all of us and that strengthen McCarthyite tactics. Was the bolding too subtle for you last time? Do I need to make the type flash and surround it with arrows? How do my disclosing my height and weight or any of those other things relate to either of those points?
I never denied that there is a place for anonymity. Quite the contrary. But from what I can see, it is used as a crutch by many who shouldn't at times that they shouldn't. If I were female I would be more reluctant to be as public as I am. If I had a lot of money or were better known I would be more careful.
I already have to do damage control occasionally when false or misleading things about me turn up online. Damage control, btw, that is made considerably easier by my habit of disclosing the truth of what I do whenever possible.
Maybe it's worth noting that this is a habit I got into when dealing with people like the NSA while still in my teens and have continued over a career that has involved quite enough spook activity of many sorts, from cryptography to sharing a house with ELF activists. When I talk about privacy issues I do so from a position of broad personal experience with all sorts of intrusive behaviors. And, btw, as a former sysadmin who has been in charge of things like accounting records and email servers many times.
Oh, and since you bring it up, pretty much all of those things ARE publicly disclosed about me. Google my name and you'll find just about all of them. I'm not an idiot so my SSN isn't public, but that's about all that isn't. Nice try but wrong again.
You're barking plenty loud but you're doing it at the wrong tree. Better luck next time.
Now if only *you* would post under a real name.
Interesting example, isn't it? Why would somebody decide to post such a thing anonymously? It makes the poster look informed, helpful, attentive, and polite. Is the poster afraid of being caught/.ing at work? And, if so, that's a perfect example of anonymity supporting continuing bad policy. It was a running joke because it was so true that the most widely installed software on old minis was Rogue, a game. Those of us in the operations field have always known that users always use their computers to do more than read work-related email or equivalent. And human behavior scientists have long since proven that people work better if they're managed on the basis of net contribution, not of micromanaged data about what keystrokes they made or what windows they had open at any given second. But as long as just about everybody takes part in the conspiracy of denial about this, managers can get away with managing by keystroke and claim that they're being rational. I point you to this book for plenty of data on how and why.
But they only get away with this because people don't fight hard enough to spread the word that their approaches don't even maximize profits, let alone inspire creative work.
Y'all love sitting around posting here about the evils of The Man when things like keystroke tracking software get more widely implemented. Whatever. You want to really fight it? Post under your own fucking names for a change and admit at work that you're doing it. That you Slashdot from your job. AND that it doesn't impede your productivity. Otherwise you're just wanking.
This is basic game theory, folks. As long as most people conceal their behavior it is viable for many people, if not most, to decry things that they do themselves in private. This rewards dishonesty.
The more of you hide behind anonymity, the more denial will take place.
The more denial there is, the fewer decisions will be made rationally.
The less rational decisionmaking is, the worse our laws will be. The more of you hide behind anonymity, the easier it is for the things you value to stay illegal or otherwise subject to sanction.
Speaking as somebody who is here under his real name, I think that there's an awful lot of bullshit out there traceable precisely back to the anonymity of the internet. An anonymity that was never more than an artifact of the system in the first place. I agree that in certain places there is a valid need for anonymity. If I still had a corporate job maybe I would be more reluctant to do things as openly as I do. But otoh, I think that people have used the internet in particular and turning a blind eye in general as a way to keep being dishonest with themselves and each other about their lives.
I read porn. I like it. I've got a nice little trove of pictures of naked women on my computer. So do most of you, correcting for gender where appropriate. I don't believe in any sort of sky god or attend any sort of church. I eat meat, support full legal abortion, and do quite a few other things that are considered offensive to many folks out there, some of whom won't buy my products or otherwise deal with me if and when they find this stuff out. And I get a little tired of how few of you are willing to stand out here in public as I have chosen to do.
Grow a pair, people. Stand up and start admitting under your own names what you do and why. Until you do, the right wing slimebags will always not only have you by the short hairs, they'll keep punishing the people like me who stand up and try to help your sorry lazy selves.
Once I started RTFAing the repeated comments about concentration and ability to shift modes starting getting my attention. Modern pentathalon started out as a way to simulate certain kinds of combat, and, for its time, made quite a bit of sense. I'm willing to bet that we'll see some very serious people start to get into this as a way to hone skills used for activities that aren't cheesy at all. A way to test one's ability to think strategically and tactically while out of breath and in pain is a damn good thing for anybody who is expected to function in combat. Even first responders in non-violent professions might gain from this.
Gotta say, not for me, to say the least, but I'll be very curious to see how this evolves and what kinds of people end up getting into it.
No, my logic is that if there are billions of dollars worth of corporations making their money satisfying demand for DIY materials and tools, then a large number of people are spending a lot of time and money doing DIY-related activities. I could have used number of stores on Etsy or any of a hundred different measures, but I'm a big believer in measuring things in dollars spent rather than storefronts or other measures that may not correlate as well with commitment and market size. Numbers? Did you *read* my post? The reference to the store locators seems like a nice, concrete example of pointing to numbers to me.
Your comparison to homeopathy is false. I am not talking about effectiveness, just market size. If we were discussing the market for homeopathy, then, yes, it is quite large. How does "it still doesn't work" relate to how many dollars are going into the cash register at the bookstore?
From the looks of it, you are right here in Portland. Well, if billion dollar corporations don't seem somehow real to you, howsabout you go the the next Craftganza? They're usually at Doug Fir on Burnside. Not my scene, to put it mildly, but the few times I've gone the dense mobs of DIY types making it hard to even get down the aisles have usually seemed pretty obvious indicators to me. Or I could point to the recent bead show that filled up two of the largest halls at the Oregon Convention Center. Or the upcoming Portland Zine Symposium, which reliably runs out of tables well before the show. Last year I had to accept a half table in a changed location because they simply couldn't fit everybody in.
Dude, I could keep giving examples all day long. Examples that give you places to find attendance figures, subscriber bases, and so on. It's not my problem that you're too lazy to follow up on any of them.
Yep. I think that all of us have improvised a generator at some point as kids out of a motor that we've rewired a bit. The generator part is pretty easy, though such an approach obviously pushes the efficiency equation even further. And then power storage and such do require some time and more parts.
The hard part is the fluid dynamics. Man, it seems like every time I look at the design of hydroturbines they've advanced another generation, because they've found that based on velocity, concern for noise, desired RPM, and so on, the right blade shape is far from a given and, once found, usually pretty hard to cast or otherwise make. Do things like stereolithography change this equation? Yes. But it's still non-trivial if it's meant to be anything beyond a proof of principle.
Yes, looking at the post again, I realize that I misread what was meant by "solar". But my point still stands. The answer to "how do renewable sources provide 10KWhrs/hr?" is "they don't; we change our behaviors to reduce usage."
Bubeleh, I've been active on Slashdot, off and on, for about ten years. I've posted something like eight hundred comments and written several hundred journal entries. If just once the time comes that a post I just spent about nine hours writing is right on target for a thread, I'm going to link to it. As always around here, RTFA. Or at least look at my user profile before you make accusations.
But oh, yes, this is exactly why anonymous comments are labeled as they are: because some people are too lazy to think before they post and haven't the stones to stand behind what they say because they know that they're just blowing smoke out their anonymous asses.
Well, coward, you show yourself and what you've written and we'll see whose posts are "shitty" let alone relevant.
Okay, first of, thanks for the numbers. It's always so much better to use those than handwaving. Having said that, a typical family can quite possibly see a toilet flushed 3 or 4 times that frequently. (Ask anybody with teenagers if this sounds likely to them.) But if you have one drop for a floor and add the water from a tub or shower, as our original poster did, those numbers easily quadruple. 3.5 * 4 * $.04 = $0.56.
Which is still a tiny number.
But if you have a multifamily residence like an apartment building, one floor of a building may well have 10 apartments, increasing those numbers tenfold again, to $5.60. Or more if we include kitchen water. Let alone washing machines, dishwashers, etc., which double it again to $11.20. So we're now talking about something three hundred times the numbers you got. Still small but getting there. I agree, that, assuming 30% efficiency, we're still only at less than $4 per year.
Well, now we get to your next point, price per kilowatt/hour. As of over a year ago, some people were already paying nearly twice your estimate. Would you consider it valid that prices have gone up a bit since then? Looking at my bill, unless I'm reading it wrong, these bastards are charging me 30 cents per kw/h and just recently announced that they'll be raising rates again soon. Taking this into account, our little dealie will be generating $12 worth of power per year. I'm not even beginning to get into what these numbers would look like at European or Japanese power prices.
Now if we assume that it costs $100, it starts looking pricy but possible. If it gets down to $50, it's a no-brainer, especially if power rates keep going up, which looks likely to me.
As for your last point, even ignoring the case of apartment buildings (I lived for over thirty years in an apartment that was about a hundred and thirty feet above ground level) the original poster said that his "3rd-floor shower drains all the way to below ground-level". I assumed a height of 9 feet per floor, giving me 18 feet right there. I then added more based on local homes here, which usually drain to a pipe below the basement floor, with a 6.5 foot basement height, 1 foot for joists, and a few more to get below the pad. Is 27 feet not close enough to 30 for you? Given how many homes have more than 8 feet, floor to floor, including joists, I was being conservative. I would say that not only "anyone", but actually quite a few people have at least 30 feet of drop, if not more.
None of which, btw, addresses that I was never talking about toilets in the first place. Quite the contrary.
So, having gone through all of that, does this make more sense to you now?
Well, actually, downspouts are what the folks I know are looking at first. In fact, just last night I shared a few drinks with one of the folks in the local downspout disconnection program and we talked about this a bit. Keep in mind, though, that I live in one of the rainiest places in North America and even here, even focusing on industrial buildings with flat roofs, everybody I know who is working on it is having trouble making it pay.
Ain't it cool? I'm enough of an old fart to have been around as young geeks no longer routinely learned direct calls to the processor or understood things like TTL logic. Almost all of us, including me, bemoaned the "inevitable" and "permanent" shift to a world of push-button, abstracted understandings. I am beyond delighted that we were all proven wrong.
Your math and your understanding both need some work. First of all, nobody is suggesting just randomly putting PV everywhere to "fix everything". While the average may make PV look like a bad idea, if you live in, say, Phoenix, Arizona, where there's plenty of sun year-round, PV works just fine.
As people keep having to point out, nobody is presenting one form of sustainable power generation as some sort of panacea. Where it's windy, use wind; where currents and tides are strong, use hydro; where it's sunny, use PV, where there's trash land, grow switchgrass; and so on. And even beyond this, per capita demand is a result of many behaviors that people like me are working to change. It's not just about power generation. It's about all kinds of changes from better insulated houses to more mass transit, to eating more food that's grown locally. (Food is actually the biggest energy cost for many Americans.) This doesn't require moving into a teepee and living on uncooked twigs. It's possible to live very elegantly and very comfortably indeed in a sustainable way. We just need to make the changes that make that possible.
and don't lump everybody in together. I don't know what part of Fox "News" you get your information from, but speaking as an environmentalist and the son of an actual environmental scientist (yaknow, a real doctorate and everything), most of us out here in the reality-based consensus are more than willing to see all sorts of installations go in. In fact, the big party I went to last night had to work around the huge steel frames being built by some real world environmentalists I know to put in a few kilowatts of solar at a farm not too far away. And the rocket stove workshop currently underway in our building. And the several vehicles being stripped out and rebuilt as electrics or biofuel-optimized.
Again, I don't know what world you're living in, but there are millions of us who are getting this stuff done as fast as we can, including plenty of real companies like Sequential, with stock and everything, who are making quite a nice living selling biodiesel and are already tying up every rational source of supply they can get their hands on. Oh, and those of us who understand things like cellulosic sources never thought that corn-based approaches were ever anything but yet another bit of agribusiness welfare.
You could always greenroof part or all of it and, at the least, superinsulate that way, not to mention perhaps having fresh munchies if you have easy access to it. I'm also seeing more and more people phasing this kind of approach in by getting a fifty or hundred dollar panel that is connected to a battery charger and little by little switching to battery-powered devices, including using it to charge their laptops. The toxics from most batteries are an obvious downside, but it's still a good start for some folks.
Hi there. Haven't been working on the umbrellas, though I'll be getting back to those this month through my work here. The galleries are now written up in far more put together form here and I'm going to be talking with some folks in Portland government about them tomorrow, including the policy head for the incoming mayor.
In short, the fire and moving back west and getting my product line built has kept me from those two but they're both, as it happens, back on my tasklist for the next few weeks.
It's always funny to me how so many slashdotters are rabidly enraged at just about every large corporation in fields they understand, such as Microsoft, the ISPs, the music, movie, and television companies, but are so quick to assume that monolithic, corporate-controlled and/or government-controlled solutions are the best approach to things outside their expertise.
Trust me folks, General Electric and the other companies who end up in charge of most huge power stations are even more corrupt and untrustworthy than Microsoft. And while a bad copy of Windows may corrupt your files, a badly run power plant can kill you.
As for economies of scale, think about the physics. A steam turbine may be more efficient if it's bigger, beyond a square meter or so, a photovoltaic panel won't. And given the huge loss of power (up to sixty percent) that comes from having to step the power up, put it over power lines that have their own resistance problems, step it back down again to 110 volt, and route it that "last mile" to your home, even a power source like a wind turbine may be more energy efficient being within sight of the person using it than being part of some huge installation trying to meet the demand of several million people.
And even beyond this, part of how sustainable power systems work best is taking advantage of changes in conditions on a tiny scale, one far too small to merit utility power involvement. Somebody further up suggested a regenerative door stop. Another suggestion was of using the power from water dropping within a structure as it leaves something like a sink. Think of the power that could be recovered doing this in a modern twenty story residential tower, let alone a fifty story office building. Especially since putting back an old-fashioned water tower within the building would make it possible to disproportionately push that water up to the top in the first place in the middle of the night or other times when power is cheap.
There is a place for centralized power generation. But the less power we get that way, the closer we get our lives to being what all this open source stuff is supposed to be all about. Both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech".
You people really need to get out more. DIY is one of the biggest trends in the industrialized world. Let me suggest an exercise: go to Barnes & Noble or some other megacorp outlet and just bloody well look at the number of DIY-oriented magazines out there. Now I agree that many of them are, to some degree, "aspirational". I used to work for This Old House Magazine so I know this all too well. But plenty of people actually do customize things in just these ways. While you've got one of these magazines in your hand, look at the ads. Those ads aren't from non-profits, my friends. People advertise all of that stuff, and its equivalent in Popular Mechanics and the magazines you'll find in Home Despot, and auto stores, and a dozen other huge demographic pools because people buy assloads of the sorts of DIY tools and parts that those advertisers make.
I hate to break it to y'all but we're not marginal anymore. Customization, the kind that involves wrenches and soldering and sandpaper, has gone mainstream.
. . . you'll discover that while he used the term "sewer line" he was talking specifically about one with, I would guess, about thirty feet of drop. Now, for water from the toilet, I agree that it's a seriously bad idea to introduce obstructions in that path, at least for now while this stuff is still being invented. Otoh, if the water from "greywater" sources like the bathtub and kitchen sink were to be separated from the "blackwater" from the toilet, which would be a good reason for a whole bunch of other reasons in most parts of the country, then that flow would be ideal for a tiny little turbine.
The problem I see is mostly that somebody needs to start manufacturing such turbines, complete with standard output to a battery, the way that they do with some solar panels, and putting it in the retail channel, all tidy and consumer friendly. If I weren't already running a publishing company and working on five different local green-oriented projects, I'd take the damn job on myself.
As it happens, I just this morning finished a huge blog post on just this. There are tons of possible ways to start weaning one's self off the grid. What limits them is in large part the complexity and capital outlay of the project. Not to mention the conceptual familiarity issue; folks simply don't do anything that seems to unfamiliar to them. Though, as we saw in the seventies, once energy prices stay high long enough people get far more willing to stress their comfort zone to cut their bills down to size.
I can tell you this much: Walmart, of all places, now sells a little set of LED room lights, all connected to one little power block, and designed to plug into a solar panel. And more and more solar panels, not just ones for cars, are designed with little suction cups to attach to the inside of a window. When Walmart does it, you *know* that it's going mainstream.
Oh, and fwiw, here in Portland where we get 37 inches of rain a year, I've met several people who are working on tiny little hydroturbines on downspouts and other water lines, both within and outside of a building.
You've clearly never been to a Michael's, Or a Joann's. The market for anydamnthing that can be used for sewing projects is absolutely HUGE. And, having spoken to plenty of the folks in such stores (after all, I publish a DIY manifesto poster, so I care about this stuff), I've found that many of them make things like curtains at least in part with an intent of saving money. And, interestingly enough, even when they discover that their projects are costing more than something mass-produced from China that they could have bought assembled, they just shrug their shoulders and, for half a dozen reasons, usually keep doing it themselves.
And, moving right along, look at the growth of things like Maker Faires. Or of Make, itself. Plenty of people are doing just this sort of thing.
I could go into waaaay more detail on this but frankly, afaic the store locator on either of those sites says it all. No. You are wrong. Plenty of people do just this kind of thing all across the developed and developing world. Evidently they just don't hang out with you.
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Actually, as Edison & The Electric Chair documents quite nicely, Edison originally intended to run all of his utilities through purpose-built subsurface channels. It actually made economic sense with late eighteen-hundreds technology. Almost. Unfortunately, waterproofing technology wasn't ready yet, so he eventually gave in and used raised power lines. Why we *still* do this over a hundred years later isn't so easy to justify. And the fraud that this kind of approach makes very easy helps protect the telecoms at times like this. I suspect that one of the many reasons that they fear the prospect of municipal service-providers is that once a few have been built, it will start becoming obvious how much the telcos lie about their costs and procedures.
As many of you have seen me say before, I think that we should build more public service tunnels along our rights of way of the sorts that private business have used for generations. You may know them better as the "steam tunnels" so key to many cheesy seventies slasher flicks.
Yes. That's a very good way to put what I was saying. It is crucial for some people sometimes. It is validly but questionably useful for many more people many more times. But it's expensive and I wanted to point out that cost, a thing that I think gets forgotten or dismissed around here far too readily. I'm very wary of words like "evil" but overall, yes, you've definitely got it right.
a lot (if not most) of the judges in this country are ancient old farts . . .
Really? I've only met about fifteen or twenty judges so maybe I'm missing something. But in my experience and from what I hear from various lawyers, most judges know quite a lot about computers and really aren't all that old. Do you have numbers to back this up?
I'm finding this whole trend on this thread and in general that "judges and lawyers and legislators know nothing about computers" increasingly annoying. What is your basis for this? Do you people know anything about how the courts work? Do you know what WESTLAW is? Or EDGAR? Or LEXIS-NEXIS? Or SOX? Or how key PDFs are to many kinds of jurisprudence? How modern filings are done? Document disclosure? Due diligence? Let alone how much computers have permeated law schools for quite a while now?
Are there a few idiots who give good quotes? Duh. We all know about the "collection of pipes". But I think that y'all are way too ready to dismiss the people in all aspects of the law as clueless and not worth the effort to understand.
Twenty years ago, anybody gay would have been in the position you're in now. It is only because people like the Mattachine Society went public over FORTY years ago anyway and many since that this changed. Even then it took a hell of a long time and many fights. But fights that only could be won because more and more people would disclose. Ten years ago BDSM people were in your position. Now most tame forms of BDSM are about as risky to disclose in most jobs as a taste for rum raisin ice cream. Again, Madonna and others made this possible by disclosing. Fiction is nice but it's only when the average person understands that other "average" people do a thing that it truly becomes relatively free of risk to disclose.
/.ers, as it happens.
You are making a choice. Frankly, given what I see these days at the average comics convention, one that's not so very risky anymore in plenty of circles. You are choosing to stay in some field where this is an issue. If you were in most parts of design or some kinds of programming or any number of other fields, being a furry would be no more important than your taste in movies. Possibly less from what I've seen.
Yes, Risk is not equal to zero. But Cost is not equal to zero either. You gamble with your family's future all the time. Do you drive on public roads? Very real chance of death when you do that one. Do you buy things online? Everybody here knows the issues in that one. And so on.
Recent surveys have increasingly focused on how Americans judge risk and the results have come back saying that not only the average American, but most corporate decisionmakers are somewhere between not very good and flat out incompetent at cataloging what the relevant risk factors are, judging which are more and less risky, and efficiently allocating their "basket of goods" to best address those risks and opportunities. It's a particular kind of innumeracy intersecting with a particular absence of self-knowledge that I have found quite common among
Personally, I sacrificed one of the best gigs I ever had by disclosing something sexually suspect in their eyes (would you believe having polish on my toenails?) and while losing that gig pisses me off, put me back there and I would do it all over again. Probably louder. And while I haven't disclosed each and every thing I've ever done, I've been loud and proud in many ways for a long, long time now. At, I say again, considerable cost.
Why? Because the longer everybody waits for "somebody else" to go public with a thing that they do and/or believe, the worse for everybody. The costs are very real, including, I suspect, costs to you.
You don't read so good, do you? Looks to me like you just scanned my post for keywords and then just went on to rant about whatever you happened to feel like ranting about.
How does demanding all of that information follow from what I said? My points are: 1.) that anonymity is used to avoid accountability and 2.) that a society in which anonymity is frequent is one in which people will lie about important parts of their lives in ways that make it harder for all of us and that strengthen McCarthyite tactics. Was the bolding too subtle for you last time? Do I need to make the type flash and surround it with arrows? How do my disclosing my height and weight or any of those other things relate to either of those points?
I never denied that there is a place for anonymity. Quite the contrary. But from what I can see, it is used as a crutch by many who shouldn't at times that they shouldn't. If I were female I would be more reluctant to be as public as I am. If I had a lot of money or were better known I would be more careful.
I already have to do damage control occasionally when false or misleading things about me turn up online. Damage control, btw, that is made considerably easier by my habit of disclosing the truth of what I do whenever possible.
Maybe it's worth noting that this is a habit I got into when dealing with people like the NSA while still in my teens and have continued over a career that has involved quite enough spook activity of many sorts, from cryptography to sharing a house with ELF activists. When I talk about privacy issues I do so from a position of broad personal experience with all sorts of intrusive behaviors. And, btw, as a former sysadmin who has been in charge of things like accounting records and email servers many times.
Oh, and since you bring it up, pretty much all of those things ARE publicly disclosed about me. Google my name and you'll find just about all of them. I'm not an idiot so my SSN isn't public, but that's about all that isn't. Nice try but wrong again.
You're barking plenty loud but you're doing it at the wrong tree. Better luck next time.
Now if only *you* would post under a real name. /.ing at work? And, if so, that's a perfect example of anonymity supporting continuing bad policy. It was a running joke because it was so true that the most widely installed software on old minis was Rogue, a game. Those of us in the operations field have always known that users always use their computers to do more than read work-related email or equivalent. And human behavior scientists have long since proven that people work better if they're managed on the basis of net contribution, not of micromanaged data about what keystrokes they made or what windows they had open at any given second. But as long as just about everybody takes part in the conspiracy of denial about this, managers can get away with managing by keystroke and claim that they're being rational. I point you to this book for plenty of data on how and why.
Interesting example, isn't it? Why would somebody decide to post such a thing anonymously? It makes the poster look informed, helpful, attentive, and polite. Is the poster afraid of being caught
But they only get away with this because people don't fight hard enough to spread the word that their approaches don't even maximize profits, let alone inspire creative work.
Y'all love sitting around posting here about the evils of The Man when things like keystroke tracking software get more widely implemented. Whatever. You want to really fight it? Post under your own fucking names for a change and admit at work that you're doing it. That you Slashdot from your job. AND that it doesn't impede your productivity. Otherwise you're just wanking.
This is basic game theory, folks. As long as most people conceal their behavior it is viable for many people, if not most, to decry things that they do themselves in private. This rewards dishonesty.
The more of you hide behind anonymity, the more denial will take place.
The more denial there is, the fewer decisions will be made rationally.
The less rational decisionmaking is, the worse our laws will be.
The more of you hide behind anonymity, the easier it is for the things you value to stay illegal or otherwise subject to sanction.
Speaking as somebody who is here under his real name, I think that there's an awful lot of bullshit out there traceable precisely back to the anonymity of the internet. An anonymity that was never more than an artifact of the system in the first place. I agree that in certain places there is a valid need for anonymity. If I still had a corporate job maybe I would be more reluctant to do things as openly as I do. But otoh, I think that people have used the internet in particular and turning a blind eye in general as a way to keep being dishonest with themselves and each other about their lives.
I read porn. I like it. I've got a nice little trove of pictures of naked women on my computer. So do most of you, correcting for gender where appropriate. I don't believe in any sort of sky god or attend any sort of church. I eat meat, support full legal abortion, and do quite a few other things that are considered offensive to many folks out there, some of whom won't buy my products or otherwise deal with me if and when they find this stuff out. And I get a little tired of how few of you are willing to stand out here in public as I have chosen to do.
Grow a pair, people. Stand up and start admitting under your own names what you do and why. Until you do, the right wing slimebags will always not only have you by the short hairs, they'll keep punishing the people like me who stand up and try to help your sorry lazy selves.
Once I started RTFAing the repeated comments about concentration and ability to shift modes starting getting my attention. Modern pentathalon started out as a way to simulate certain kinds of combat, and, for its time, made quite a bit of sense. I'm willing to bet that we'll see some very serious people start to get into this as a way to hone skills used for activities that aren't cheesy at all. A way to test one's ability to think strategically and tactically while out of breath and in pain is a damn good thing for anybody who is expected to function in combat. Even first responders in non-violent professions might gain from this.
Gotta say, not for me, to say the least, but I'll be very curious to see how this evolves and what kinds of people end up getting into it.
Your comparison to homeopathy is false. I am not talking about effectiveness, just market size. If we were discussing the market for homeopathy, then, yes, it is quite large. How does "it still doesn't work" relate to how many dollars are going into the cash register at the bookstore?
From the looks of it, you are right here in Portland. Well, if billion dollar corporations don't seem somehow real to you, howsabout you go the the next Craftganza? They're usually at Doug Fir on Burnside. Not my scene, to put it mildly, but the few times I've gone the dense mobs of DIY types making it hard to even get down the aisles have usually seemed pretty obvious indicators to me. Or I could point to the recent bead show that filled up two of the largest halls at the Oregon Convention Center. Or the upcoming Portland Zine Symposium, which reliably runs out of tables well before the show. Last year I had to accept a half table in a changed location because they simply couldn't fit everybody in.
Dude, I could keep giving examples all day long. Examples that give you places to find attendance figures, subscriber bases, and so on. It's not my problem that you're too lazy to follow up on any of them.
The hard part is the fluid dynamics. Man, it seems like every time I look at the design of hydroturbines they've advanced another generation, because they've found that based on velocity, concern for noise, desired RPM, and so on, the right blade shape is far from a given and, once found, usually pretty hard to cast or otherwise make. Do things like stereolithography change this equation? Yes. But it's still non-trivial if it's meant to be anything beyond a proof of principle.
Yes, looking at the post again, I realize that I misread what was meant by "solar". But my point still stands. The answer to "how do renewable sources provide 10KWhrs/hr?" is "they don't; we change our behaviors to reduce usage."
But oh, yes, this is exactly why anonymous comments are labeled as they are: because some people are too lazy to think before they post and haven't the stones to stand behind what they say because they know that they're just blowing smoke out their anonymous asses.
Well, coward, you show yourself and what you've written and we'll see whose posts are "shitty" let alone relevant.
Which is still a tiny number.
But if you have a multifamily residence like an apartment building, one floor of a building may well have 10 apartments, increasing those numbers tenfold again, to $5.60. Or more if we include kitchen water. Let alone washing machines, dishwashers, etc., which double it again to $11.20. So we're now talking about something three hundred times the numbers you got. Still small but getting there. I agree, that, assuming 30% efficiency, we're still only at less than $4 per year.
Well, now we get to your next point, price per kilowatt/hour. As of over a year ago, some people were already paying nearly twice your estimate. Would you consider it valid that prices have gone up a bit since then? Looking at my bill, unless I'm reading it wrong, these bastards are charging me 30 cents per kw/h and just recently announced that they'll be raising rates again soon. Taking this into account, our little dealie will be generating $12 worth of power per year. I'm not even beginning to get into what these numbers would look like at European or Japanese power prices.
Now if we assume that it costs $100, it starts looking pricy but possible. If it gets down to $50, it's a no-brainer, especially if power rates keep going up, which looks likely to me.
As for your last point, even ignoring the case of apartment buildings (I lived for over thirty years in an apartment that was about a hundred and thirty feet above ground level) the original poster said that his "3rd-floor shower drains all the way to below ground-level". I assumed a height of 9 feet per floor, giving me 18 feet right there. I then added more based on local homes here, which usually drain to a pipe below the basement floor, with a 6.5 foot basement height, 1 foot for joists, and a few more to get below the pad. Is 27 feet not close enough to 30 for you? Given how many homes have more than 8 feet, floor to floor, including joists, I was being conservative. I would say that not only "anyone", but actually quite a few people have at least 30 feet of drop, if not more.
None of which, btw, addresses that I was never talking about toilets in the first place. Quite the contrary.
So, having gone through all of that, does this make more sense to you now?
Oh, as for toilets, folks are actually starting to design raised tank toilets again.
Well, actually, downspouts are what the folks I know are looking at first. In fact, just last night I shared a few drinks with one of the folks in the local downspout disconnection program and we talked about this a bit. Keep in mind, though, that I live in one of the rainiest places in North America and even here, even focusing on industrial buildings with flat roofs, everybody I know who is working on it is having trouble making it pay.
Ain't it cool? I'm enough of an old fart to have been around as young geeks no longer routinely learned direct calls to the processor or understood things like TTL logic. Almost all of us, including me, bemoaned the "inevitable" and "permanent" shift to a world of push-button, abstracted understandings. I am beyond delighted that we were all proven wrong.
As people keep having to point out, nobody is presenting one form of sustainable power generation as some sort of panacea. Where it's windy, use wind; where currents and tides are strong, use hydro; where it's sunny, use PV, where there's trash land, grow switchgrass; and so on. And even beyond this, per capita demand is a result of many behaviors that people like me are working to change. It's not just about power generation. It's about all kinds of changes from better insulated houses to more mass transit, to eating more food that's grown locally. (Food is actually the biggest energy cost for many Americans.) This doesn't require moving into a teepee and living on uncooked twigs. It's possible to live very elegantly and very comfortably indeed in a sustainable way. We just need to make the changes that make that possible.
Again, I don't know what world you're living in, but there are millions of us who are getting this stuff done as fast as we can, including plenty of real companies like Sequential, with stock and everything, who are making quite a nice living selling biodiesel and are already tying up every rational source of supply they can get their hands on. Oh, and those of us who understand things like cellulosic sources never thought that corn-based approaches were ever anything but yet another bit of agribusiness welfare.
You could always greenroof part or all of it and, at the least, superinsulate that way, not to mention perhaps having fresh munchies if you have easy access to it. I'm also seeing more and more people phasing this kind of approach in by getting a fifty or hundred dollar panel that is connected to a battery charger and little by little switching to battery-powered devices, including using it to charge their laptops. The toxics from most batteries are an obvious downside, but it's still a good start for some folks.
In short, the fire and moving back west and getting my product line built has kept me from those two but they're both, as it happens, back on my tasklist for the next few weeks.
Trust me folks, General Electric and the other companies who end up in charge of most huge power stations are even more corrupt and untrustworthy than Microsoft. And while a bad copy of Windows may corrupt your files, a badly run power plant can kill you.
As for economies of scale, think about the physics. A steam turbine may be more efficient if it's bigger, beyond a square meter or so, a photovoltaic panel won't. And given the huge loss of power (up to sixty percent) that comes from having to step the power up, put it over power lines that have their own resistance problems, step it back down again to 110 volt, and route it that "last mile" to your home, even a power source like a wind turbine may be more energy efficient being within sight of the person using it than being part of some huge installation trying to meet the demand of several million people.
And even beyond this, part of how sustainable power systems work best is taking advantage of changes in conditions on a tiny scale, one far too small to merit utility power involvement. Somebody further up suggested a regenerative door stop. Another suggestion was of using the power from water dropping within a structure as it leaves something like a sink. Think of the power that could be recovered doing this in a modern twenty story residential tower, let alone a fifty story office building. Especially since putting back an old-fashioned water tower within the building would make it possible to disproportionately push that water up to the top in the first place in the middle of the night or other times when power is cheap.
There is a place for centralized power generation. But the less power we get that way, the closer we get our lives to being what all this open source stuff is supposed to be all about. Both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech".
You people really need to get out more. DIY is one of the biggest trends in the industrialized world. Let me suggest an exercise: go to Barnes & Noble or some other megacorp outlet and just bloody well look at the number of DIY-oriented magazines out there. Now I agree that many of them are, to some degree, "aspirational". I used to work for This Old House Magazine so I know this all too well. But plenty of people actually do customize things in just these ways. While you've got one of these magazines in your hand, look at the ads. Those ads aren't from non-profits, my friends. People advertise all of that stuff, and its equivalent in Popular Mechanics and the magazines you'll find in Home Despot, and auto stores, and a dozen other huge demographic pools because people buy assloads of the sorts of DIY tools and parts that those advertisers make.
I hate to break it to y'all but we're not marginal anymore. Customization, the kind that involves wrenches and soldering and sandpaper, has gone mainstream.
The problem I see is mostly that somebody needs to start manufacturing such turbines, complete with standard output to a battery, the way that they do with some solar panels, and putting it in the retail channel, all tidy and consumer friendly. If I weren't already running a publishing company and working on five different local green-oriented projects, I'd take the damn job on myself.
I can tell you this much: Walmart, of all places, now sells a little set of LED room lights, all connected to one little power block, and designed to plug into a solar panel. And more and more solar panels, not just ones for cars, are designed with little suction cups to attach to the inside of a window. When Walmart does it, you *know* that it's going mainstream.
Oh, and fwiw, here in Portland where we get 37 inches of rain a year, I've met several people who are working on tiny little hydroturbines on downspouts and other water lines, both within and outside of a building.
And, moving right along, look at the growth of things like Maker Faires. Or of Make, itself. Plenty of people are doing just this sort of thing.
I could go into waaaay more detail on this but frankly, afaic the store locator on either of those sites says it all. No. You are wrong. Plenty of people do just this kind of thing all across the developed and developing world. Evidently they just don't hang out with you.