I went to California in February and they had to close the coastal highway because the sea had smashed it up.
Pacific Coast Highway is unlike any other road in the world, let alone the US. It was specifically built to be dangerously close to the ocean, for the sheer scenic value. Hence, it is also more susceptible to the whims of nature than any normal road would be. However, it seems to be enough of a tourist draw that the maintenance is more than paid for.
Now I realise that the Pilgrims were essentially an extreme religious cult who got booted out of the Netherlands for being too nutty
If I recall correctly, a looming war had a lot to do with the Pilgrims choosing to leave the Netherlands. Good old Europe...
Of course, despite leaving, Americans were still stupid enough to go back and opt to get involved in several European conflicts (3 come to mind immediately).
Any day of the year, anywhere in the country, you can step outside for the whole day and you won't die.
With the exception of perhaps Antarctica, people can survive in any climate they have adjusted to.
People RUN marathons on asphalt roads, through Death Valley, in the middle of summer. Meanwhile, someone from the desert, going to England in shorts and a T-Shirt will find themselves freezing to death in short order.
More to the point, it's pretty well established that humans spread out of Africa. As fast, 2-legged, fur-less, animals, you would be AMAZED how well-suited humans are to extremely hot climates. In truth, we don't NEED air conditioning.
there's some ivy or crocodile waiting to give you grievous pain.
Large predators don't exactly walk through city centers... If you're running across them, it's because you went out of your way to be in a wilderness area they inhabit. Ivy doesn't automatically spring up in every garden,
What's more, large predators are actually quite well-behaved. Humans are, in fact, large predators themselves, and neither has any particular desire for the aggravation.
The number of deaths from wildlife is really quite tiny... Ditto for the vast majority of bad weather/natural disasters.
When it comes down to energy conservation, do you never hover your finger over the thermostat, hesitate and think "Wouldn't it be a lot more energy efficient if I lived somewhere else entirely?".
Here in the desert, swamp coolers work wonderfully, and draw very, very little power. Basically just a fan moving moist air. I have no doubt heating costs just about anywhere in Europe are infinitely higher.
Besides that, until recently, energy costs were so low that it wasn't even worth adjusting the thermostat. Houses often had the minimum legal insulation, because the higher mortgage couldn't make up for the higher heating/cooling bills.
I don't foresee many issues with local government in the middle of the desert.
I've got some BAD NEWS for you... Those long stretches of completely empty desert in the southwest... It's basically ALL managed by the BLM.
"BLM California manages 15.2 million acres of public lands, nearly 15% of the state's land area." http://www.blm.gov/ca/st/en.html
"The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) administers nearly 48 million acres of public land in Nevada. BLM public lands make up about 67 percent of Nevada's land base." http://www.blm.gov/nv/st/en.html
Personally I think it's probably better to distribute the power-generation facility onto the roofs of all the residents in these 'southwestern states'...
You want to put a 100MW steam turbine on your roof?
PV panels are NOT what is being used for large-scale solar power facilities (with very few exceptions). Solar-thermal is much, much cheaper, much more efficient in large installations, etc. You can't just stick them on a roof, any more than you could a large-scale wind-farm.
This is the Helendale radar cross sectional research facility operated by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, the folks that brought you the F-117 Nighthawk and the B-2 Stealth Bomber among many other historic vehicles like the U2 and SR-71 Blackbird.
Would an "an aircraft freak like [you]" care to explain what part Lockheed's Skunkworks played in designing/building the Northrop/Grumman B-2?
Nice photos, though. My flights seem to ALWAYS be overcast/low visibility, so I really haven't seen much of that, despite repeatedly flying over.
It seems all the nuclear advocates I run across here are stuck in 1985 with this problem - will a nuclear advocate with a clue please stand up?
Nuclear's big problem is high initial costs. Sure, natural gas fuel is expensive, but if you consider that a sort of long-term financing, you'll probably make it up in interest on the money you've saved. It's the same problem as any other "infrastructure" issues. Government needs to be the tie-breaker.
Things like pebble-bed reactors seem not-too-far in the future, which will distance us from the "bloody difficult way to boil water" methods currently in-use.
Additionally, it's sad that nuclear is all exclusively about "reactors". RTGs have shown themselves to be incredibly robust in the space program, and SRGs (Radioactive heat source, running a Sterling Engine) look to increase efficiency/production by an order of magnitude. I'd kill to have an RTG/SRG in the trunk of my electric car, sized to about 1/3rd max load, giving infinite range, and powering your home or the grid when it's parked, idle, at home. With 80-year life-spans, you could buy one for life, and transfer it from vehicle to vehicle over the years. You could have large SRGs at the end of every city block, practically un-manned, in an almost Edison-esque vision of distributed power generation.
the price of energy is the only thing that's going to have a substantial impact on the amount of fuel we use.
You're missing a big piece of the picture... Energy prices are sky high right now. But when they drop (and they will drop quite notably when the bubble bursts) we're just as bad off as when we started.
What really works, is using fuel costs as an impetus for stricter regulations. In the 70s, fuel efficiency standards were raised dramatically, and we've kept them at those levels... Unfortunately, they haven't improved, but that's better than nothing. Similarly, if the EPA finally sets some high standards, we'll reap the benefits for a long time, long after the price of oil falls back down to something... reasonable.
When my Dad was my age, the loan on his (our) house was up - and he was a factory worker. Today, I make almost four times what he did, and can't even afford a three bedroom house. So much for the American Dream.
Your Dad obviously didn't try to buy a house in the middle of one of the most crowded cities in the country...
You don't HAVE TO work where you currently do. You WANT to, and you pay the price in vastly higher cost of living. You could move, find a job that is a big pay cut, and yet end up being able to afford a house... For a really extreme example, you could quit your job, move your family to an impoverished sub-Saharan African country, and live like a king for the rest of your lives for a fraction the cost of a house here.
And as a somewhat incidental tip... Look very closely at the available mass transit. Looking for a home in Los Angeles, I've charted ALL the Metro (link/rail) stops, and judge any home on how close it is to a stop. I've never been an especially big fan of public transit, but in many cases, it is extremely convenient... If you're a frequent business traveler, you're set... all roads lead to LAX (so to speak).
"[The Earth] is a classic type 13 planet, which typically destroys itself at this stage of its development. Sometimes through war, often through environmental catastrophe. But more commonly, a type 13 planet is inadvertently collapsed into a pea-sized object by scientists attempting to determine the mass of the Higgs boson particle." 790/Robot Head (LEXX, Series4 Ep?)
What the submitter was asking for isn't necessarily relevant. Discussions often move off-topic.
With that said, I suggest you read the submitter's words more closely:
"explain the reasoning and theory"
"future solar projects are not out of the question"
"Something that starts with basic theory and ends with the ability to wire a house would be perfect."
Finally, as for CFLs, 1/4 of a hell of a lot of electricity, is still a hell of a lot of electricity. Even with a small house, you're still almost certain to draw more power for just lighting than a large appliance would.
Sure you did... Suggesting you can't burn your house down with 12/24V (as opposed to 120/240V).
I just said it does not require an electrician by law (AFAIK - but of course it's as far as I know).
And for the record, you ARE wrong, BTW.
These are for lighting systems not ovens or dish-washers or other things.
A full-scale home lighting system is going to use vast amounts of electricity. In excess of a single oven, refrigerator, or the like.
Besides, you've already LISTED the large appliances you want to be power from this: "such as fridges, computers etc."
Why are you assuming that the designer was so stupid as to design a system that could not cope with the designated load?
Because it's a DIY project, requested by someone without basic electrical knowledge. And your tips are providing clearly bad advice.
What are fuses for?
Fuses are to prevent an appliance that has malfunctioned from destroying the whole works. They help avoid a fire ONLY in a few specific circumstances, like a sudden short. They will not protect you from a fundamentally under-designed wiring system... They will also not do anything when the person installing them doesn't know how they should be sized.
Nobody is saying you have to do it at AC 110V (or 240V / 220V). AFAIK running 12V or 24V cabling through your house does not require an electrician
The fact that you think low current 120/240v is dangerous, but very high current 12/24V is safe, throughly proves the point that you do NOT understand electricity, and should certainly NOT be giving advice to others.
and to achieve low resistance you can use T-bars or other large metal structures (or just some automotive copper)
With amateur-installed T-Bars, I would fully expect the frame of your house to start slowly roasting itself in short order, if you're lucky, and not using quite enough current, it might not catch fire until the next heavy rain.
Automotive cables are designed to carry the current of ONE small car battery over just a meter or perhaps two. Drawing power from multiple batteries, or over much longer distances, and those cables will be getting very hot. It won't take long for the insulation to melt off, and start cooking adjacent objects.
From TFA (on NPR.org): "Seventy degrees is a lovely, comfortable temperature for most people. And the same turns out to be true for all sorts of tree species."
Which is another way of saying 'less than 5% of the population of the world still uses Fahrenheit'.
It's also another way of saying:
'More than 75% of native English speakers use Fahrenheit'.
'Almost 66% of fluent English speakers use Fahrenheit'.
'About 50% of all Internet users (any language) use Fahrenheit'.
Complaining about the use of Fahrenheit not being notated is fine (at least if you would similarly complain about Celsius not being notated)... Complaining about it being used AT ALL... on an English-language website, whose readers are Americans by an easy majority, located in America, in an article provided by an American submitter, which links to an American news organization, and finalized by American editors, is pretty damn ridiculous. You're not getting the colonies back... Get over it. Spend 2 seconds to convert the damn units.
Is nVidia even paying attention to this, or are they just going to let AMD have the majority of the Linux graphics market?
That's a long way off, yet.
Remember, NVidia still provides decent (proprietary) drivers for its cards. ATI has Linux drivers that are utter crap... Now, you just happen to get that "utter crap" sooner, and on a shiny plastic disc.
The specs they're releasing aren't going to convince me to buy their products, and struggle with their horrible proprietary drivers in hopes that open source drivers will appear, someday.
1) Your truck load of fuel can be up to 1000 miles away from your soldiers. Kind of a big deal when you are worried about the danger of "forward positions".
As distance increases, fuel requirements go up exponentially. Even with the most EFFICIENT existing commercial cargo aircraft, a cargo flight of that distance is going to burn twice it's weight in fuel. With this thing, I wouldn't be surprised if it's many, many times that.
2) You're the only one saying this is just going to carry water. It's not.
The amount of water it can carry is simply for context. Food, ammo, etc, is similarly very heavy. 400 lbs is simply a ridiculously tiny amount of cargo that won't keep a small numbers of soldiers supplied for any length of time. And you're dedicating a LOT of resources to this thing to supply them with that very small amount of supplies.
If air-resupply was a practical necessity in modern warfare, you'd see traditional (WWII-era) mass parachute air-drops to soldiers. How often do you seen that in Iraq/Afghanistan?
And who said we were going to make dumb ass judgements on when to use these and when to spend on something else?
Spending on a new aircraft will necessarily, inherently take away from other military spending.
You'll note I didn't say "we were going to make dumb ass judgements". I firmly believe the US Military will make the right decision, and ignore this idiotic concept entirely. That said, they may be able to scam a (relatively) tiny amount of funding out of some separate group.
Show me the DARPA vehicle that is going to navigate 1000 miles of a war zone and deliver a 400 lb + payload right now.
Funny how you want to dismiss all criticisms about this concept because it "doesn't exist yet" when that suits you, then demand an alternative that exists "right now".
Although they've only been tested in such a scenario for 150-miles (not 1000), there are several successful Grand Challenge vehicles that would very likely to be capable of being extended to such ranges with only the most minor modifications. Without question, every single one of them could easily carry at least 4X as much cargo, with a tiny fraction of the fuel consumption, not to mention far lower initial and maintenance costs.
if every soldier needed 4 gallons of water *airlifted* in every day, they'd all be dead.
That's some impressive backpedaling there...
you certainly can't assume that all missions are in 110 degree mean temperatures (= 43 celsius).
"Mean" temperatures don't matter much. Soldiers are either marching in the heat (during the day) in which case they'll be on the high end of that water consumption regime, or they're not.
not every mission is going to be in Iraq in July.
Iraq averages triple-digit (F) temperatures throughout summer. Pretty much half the year soldiers will need that much water.
You're really arguing about a whole lot of nothing, anyhow. Even in the winter, when it isn't nearly so hot, water requirements are still quite similar. You don't even double the time they can survive on that amount of water.
The point isn't that 400 lbs is that much per se, the point is that 400 lbs of ADDITIONAL cargo could be a big deal if it requires zero man power to get it there and arrives quickly.
You need to go read my original comment again, because you clearly didn't get the idea the first time around.
That 400 lbs of cargo isn't flown in by magical faeries. It's carried through the air on a dense cloud of jet fuel exhaust. Moving truck loads of fuel into a forward position gets LOTS of soldiers killed, every week, in Iraq. Convoy duty is a very dangerous job.
Hauling in a truck-load of fuel, to move 400 lbs of water, to supply a few soldiers for a day or two, is going to kill FAR more people than just having someone transport supplies to those soldiers by traditional means, or avoiding putting those soldiers so far out there in the first place that they get cut off.
And besides lives, you have all kinds of questions of COST, MAINTENANCE, RELIABILITY, etc. If one of these ridiculously low-capacity supply planes means that a dozen Humvees don't get armor because of cost or lack of manpower, then you're making an incredibly stupid mistake.
In addition, I specifically pointed out that there are alternatives which could do the job INFINITELY better than this far-fetched creation.
cargo of 400 pounds [...] weighing in at 2,400 pounds
So it can carry 1/6th of its weight in cargo? Damn that's lousy...
With aircraft, weight is huge. Every pound of weight you have to lift dramatically increases the amount of fuel you're going to burn. And when you're starting off with a heavier than hell plane, which can only haul a tiny amount, you're just throwing away fuel. And guess what? Bringing in fuel for equipment is just as much a logistical problem as getting supplies to troops in the field.
And with such a tiny capacity, they'll need to send tons of these out on a regular basis to keep even a few troops supplied. Let's see... If they load it with nothing else but WATER, this can carry enough to keep 12 marching soldiers going for just 1 day...
No doubt they'd be far better served by one of the autonomous vehicles coming out of the DARPA Grand Challenge. Fuel costs won't be nearly so astronomical, and cargo capacity for even the smallest truck will easily put this aircraft's capacity to shame.
#2 I remain convinced the conversion system was simply set up by woefully unqualified individuals. I've done several such systems that are surely much more complicated. Traveling to the Bay Area in person would be prohibitive. Oh well.
it's interesting to see how high Firefox penetration is in Eastern Europe. I wonder if that's a function of very connected economies without a lot of love for Microsoft and a strong desire for free software?
I wouldn't be surprised if it's both directly and indirectly fueled by the far superior native language support included in Moz.
Way back when Mozilla was still early milestones, I directed a Russia exchange student to try it, when IE wouldn't allow the proper entry of Russian characters for a URL.
No doubt he went back home, spread the word about Mozilla, and is single-handedly responsible for the popularity of Firefox across Eastern Europe... *cough*
#1 Why aren't archived pages modified very slightly to insert a tag, so that archived images, sub-pages, and the like will be fetched from the archive, rather than linking to non-existent locations on the current server? Surely the current server operators don't like the dozens of hit for everyone that visits the archive...
But more than that, it's a PITA to visit an archived page, and manually copy and paste every single link, one at a time. And I'm sure most people don't realize that they can even do that, and just give up on finding the content they want...
#2 Why is the video encoding so incredibly horrible? Terrible ghosting on the low-res / low-bitrate versions, and a 30fps frame-rate like you've just stupidly deinterlaced the pulldown/telecine.
At 320x240, and 256kbps, those movies should look great, not HORRIBLE. That, combined with the fact that you almost never provide a full resolution (around 720x480) low-bitrate version, no doubt forces a large number of people to download the HUGE (4+ GB) interlaced MPEG-2 copy of a film, rather than the (completely screwed up) 250MB copy...
And don't complain about lack of skill, manpower, etc. I've e-mailed you, TWICE, personally volunteering to take care of everything, from getting the proper software compiled and installed (that was mentioned as a problem long ago) to writing an automatic conversion script to detect the encoding, and do the job without human intervention. I received no responses, either time.
#3 I'm on Verizon DSL in Southern CA. Why does my (dynamic) IP address seem to be blocked the majority of the time I try to access the archives, while it's fine on the rest of the site? Are you just having capacity problems these days?
As opposed to buying a copy of XP from someone else for $150?
Ironically, Microsoft will happily sell you a copy of XP for half price, if you visit their website and try to use Windows Update (or other "verified" downloads) and WGA detects that your copy is pirated...
That page is dynamic, however, and most people will see it as $150 for "XP Pro". If you are using Internet Explorer on Windows XP Home when you visit that link, however, it will display "XP Home" for $99.
In either case, you can call 1-866-530-6599 to purchase the version you want.
Everyone gets damn excited about algae, because the "potential" is enormous. HOWEVER, the REALITY is, 20+ years of development by the US DoE, starting in the 1970s, still didn't even result in oil-producing algae that could STAY ALIVE in small quantities, let alone staying alive in industrial production conditions, let alone producing a profitable product, let alone in quantities that could have the slightest dent in the world supply of oil.
Try to stay a little closer down to earth when you hear about algae vaporware...
In reality: Algae can produce huge amounts of bio-oil. That oil, however, immediately pollutes the water-based environment of the algae, and quickly kills the algae off. The huge potential of algae appears to be self-limited by an inherently self-contradictory system.
In truth, we don't NEED oil. We can use ANYTHING that will burn, that we can produce in large quantities (see: vegetable oil vehicles). If we could produce enough cheap flour, you'd see flour-burning engines in no time. If you can just keep the algae ALIVE and reproducing at speed, it's damn easy to scrape a few of them off every day, and squeeze them into some form of combustible liquid. It's not worth the effort to turn it into "oil". If ANYONE can come up with ANYTHING flammable that we can produce in large enough quantities to supply the energy needs of the cars across this country, the oil problem will be solved, instantly.
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Pacific Coast Highway is unlike any other road in the world, let alone the US. It was specifically built to be dangerously close to the ocean, for the sheer scenic value. Hence, it is also more susceptible to the whims of nature than any normal road would be. However, it seems to be enough of a tourist draw that the maintenance is more than paid for.
If I recall correctly, a looming war had a lot to do with the Pilgrims choosing to leave the Netherlands. Good old Europe...
Of course, despite leaving, Americans were still stupid enough to go back and opt to get involved in several European conflicts (3 come to mind immediately).
With the exception of perhaps Antarctica, people can survive in any climate they have adjusted to.
People RUN marathons on asphalt roads, through Death Valley, in the middle of summer. Meanwhile, someone from the desert, going to England in shorts and a T-Shirt will find themselves freezing to death in short order.
More to the point, it's pretty well established that humans spread out of Africa. As fast, 2-legged, fur-less, animals, you would be AMAZED how well-suited humans are to extremely hot climates. In truth, we don't NEED air conditioning.
Large predators don't exactly walk through city centers... If you're running across them, it's because you went out of your way to be in a wilderness area they inhabit. Ivy doesn't automatically spring up in every garden,
What's more, large predators are actually quite well-behaved. Humans are, in fact, large predators themselves, and neither has any particular desire for the aggravation.
The number of deaths from wildlife is really quite tiny... Ditto for the vast majority of bad weather/natural disasters.
Here in the desert, swamp coolers work wonderfully, and draw very, very little power. Basically just a fan moving moist air. I have no doubt heating costs just about anywhere in Europe are infinitely higher.
Besides that, until recently, energy costs were so low that it wasn't even worth adjusting the thermostat. Houses often had the minimum legal insulation, because the higher mortgage couldn't make up for the higher heating/cooling bills.
That's positively idiotic. Solar-thermal tech hasn't improved notably in the past 30 years. 2 more years isn't going to do a damn thing.
I've got some BAD NEWS for you... Those long stretches of completely empty desert in the southwest... It's basically ALL managed by the BLM.
"BLM California manages 15.2 million acres of public lands, nearly 15% of the state's land area." http://www.blm.gov/ca/st/en.html
"The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) administers nearly 48 million acres of public land in Nevada. BLM public lands make up about 67 percent of Nevada's land base." http://www.blm.gov/nv/st/en.html
"BLM Arizona administers 12.2 million surface acres of public lands" http://www.blm.gov/az/st/en.html
"The BLM manages nearly 22.9 million acres of public lands in Utah, representing about 42 percent of the state." http://www.blm.gov/ut/st/en.2.html
Colorado: "8.3 million acres of public lands in the State." http://www.blm.gov/co/st/en/BLM_Information/newsroom/2008/blm_resource_advisory.html
In fact, just look at the BLM's official map: http://www.blm.gov/pgdata/etc/medialib/blm/national.Par.54506.Image.-1.-1.1.gif
It's pretty clear, the BLM manages most of the available land, pretty much everywhere that solar power would be practical (except Texas).
They addressed that in TFA. Private land is FAR more expensive.
You want to put a 100MW steam turbine on your roof?
PV panels are NOT what is being used for large-scale solar power facilities (with very few exceptions). Solar-thermal is much, much cheaper, much more efficient in large installations, etc. You can't just stick them on a roof, any more than you could a large-scale wind-farm.
Would an "an aircraft freak like [you]" care to explain what part Lockheed's Skunkworks played in designing/building the Northrop/Grumman B-2?
Nice photos, though. My flights seem to ALWAYS be overcast/low visibility, so I really haven't seen much of that, despite repeatedly flying over.
Nuclear's big problem is high initial costs. Sure, natural gas fuel is expensive, but if you consider that a sort of long-term financing, you'll probably make it up in interest on the money you've saved. It's the same problem as any other "infrastructure" issues. Government needs to be the tie-breaker.
Things like pebble-bed reactors seem not-too-far in the future, which will distance us from the "bloody difficult way to boil water" methods currently in-use.
Additionally, it's sad that nuclear is all exclusively about "reactors". RTGs have shown themselves to be incredibly robust in the space program, and SRGs (Radioactive heat source, running a Sterling Engine) look to increase efficiency/production by an order of magnitude. I'd kill to have an RTG/SRG in the trunk of my electric car, sized to about 1/3rd max load, giving infinite range, and powering your home or the grid when it's parked, idle, at home. With 80-year life-spans, you could buy one for life, and transfer it from vehicle to vehicle over the years. You could have large SRGs at the end of every city block, practically un-manned, in an almost Edison-esque vision of distributed power generation.
You're missing a big piece of the picture... Energy prices are sky high right now. But when they drop (and they will drop quite notably when the bubble bursts) we're just as bad off as when we started.
What really works, is using fuel costs as an impetus for stricter regulations. In the 70s, fuel efficiency standards were raised dramatically, and we've kept them at those levels... Unfortunately, they haven't improved, but that's better than nothing. Similarly, if the EPA finally sets some high standards, we'll reap the benefits for a long time, long after the price of oil falls back down to something... reasonable.
Your Dad obviously didn't try to buy a house in the middle of one of the most crowded cities in the country...
You don't HAVE TO work where you currently do. You WANT to, and you pay the price in vastly higher cost of living. You could move, find a job that is a big pay cut, and yet end up being able to afford a house... For a really extreme example, you could quit your job, move your family to an impoverished sub-Saharan African country, and live like a king for the rest of your lives for a fraction the cost of a house here.
And as a somewhat incidental tip... Look very closely at the available mass transit. Looking for a home in Los Angeles, I've charted ALL the Metro (link/rail) stops, and judge any home on how close it is to a stop. I've never been an especially big fan of public transit, but in many cases, it is extremely convenient... If you're a frequent business traveler, you're set... all roads lead to LAX (so to speak).
"[The Earth] is a classic type 13 planet, which typically destroys itself at this stage of its development. Sometimes through war, often through environmental catastrophe. But more commonly, a type 13 planet is inadvertently collapsed into a pea-sized object by scientists attempting to determine the mass of the Higgs boson particle." 790/Robot Head (LEXX, Series4 Ep?)
Also See: http://8128.org/_a009.php
What the submitter was asking for isn't necessarily relevant. Discussions often move off-topic.
With that said, I suggest you read the submitter's words more closely:
"explain the reasoning and theory"
"future solar projects are not out of the question"
"Something that starts with basic theory and ends with the ability to wire a house would be perfect."
Finally, as for CFLs, 1/4 of a hell of a lot of electricity, is still a hell of a lot of electricity. Even with a small house, you're still almost certain to draw more power for just lighting than a large appliance would.
Sure you did... Suggesting you can't burn your house down with 12/24V (as opposed to 120/240V).
And for the record, you ARE wrong, BTW.
A full-scale home lighting system is going to use vast amounts of electricity. In excess of a single oven, refrigerator, or the like.
Besides, you've already LISTED the large appliances you want to be power from this: "such as fridges, computers etc."
Because it's a DIY project, requested by someone without basic electrical knowledge. And your tips are providing clearly bad advice.
Fuses are to prevent an appliance that has malfunctioned from destroying the whole works. They help avoid a fire ONLY in a few specific circumstances, like a sudden short. They will not protect you from a fundamentally under-designed wiring system... They will also not do anything when the person installing them doesn't know how they should be sized.
The fact that you think low current 120/240v is dangerous, but very high current 12/24V is safe, throughly proves the point that you do NOT understand electricity, and should certainly NOT be giving advice to others.
With amateur-installed T-Bars, I would fully expect the frame of your house to start slowly roasting itself in short order, if you're lucky, and not using quite enough current, it might not catch fire until the next heavy rain.
Automotive cables are designed to carry the current of ONE small car battery over just a meter or perhaps two. Drawing power from multiple batteries, or over much longer distances, and those cables will be getting very hot. It won't take long for the insulation to melt off, and start cooking adjacent objects.
From TFA (on NPR.org): "Seventy degrees is a lovely, comfortable temperature for most people. And the same turns out to be true for all sorts of tree species."
It's also another way of saying:
'More than 75% of native English speakers use Fahrenheit'.
'Almost 66% of fluent English speakers use Fahrenheit'.
'About 50% of all Internet users (any language) use Fahrenheit'.
Complaining about the use of Fahrenheit not being notated is fine (at least if you would similarly complain about Celsius not being notated)... Complaining about it being used AT ALL... on an English-language website, whose readers are Americans by an easy majority, located in America, in an article provided by an American submitter, which links to an American news organization, and finalized by American editors, is pretty damn ridiculous. You're not getting the colonies back... Get over it. Spend 2 seconds to convert the damn units.
That's a long way off, yet.
Remember, NVidia still provides decent (proprietary) drivers for its cards. ATI has Linux drivers that are utter crap... Now, you just happen to get that "utter crap" sooner, and on a shiny plastic disc.
The specs they're releasing aren't going to convince me to buy their products, and struggle with their horrible proprietary drivers in hopes that open source drivers will appear, someday.
As distance increases, fuel requirements go up exponentially. Even with the most EFFICIENT existing commercial cargo aircraft, a cargo flight of that distance is going to burn twice it's weight in fuel. With this thing, I wouldn't be surprised if it's many, many times that.
The amount of water it can carry is simply for context. Food, ammo, etc, is similarly very heavy. 400 lbs is simply a ridiculously tiny amount of cargo that won't keep a small numbers of soldiers supplied for any length of time. And you're dedicating a LOT of resources to this thing to supply them with that very small amount of supplies.
If air-resupply was a practical necessity in modern warfare, you'd see traditional (WWII-era) mass parachute air-drops to soldiers. How often do you seen that in Iraq/Afghanistan?
Spending on a new aircraft will necessarily, inherently take away from other military spending.
You'll note I didn't say "we were going to make dumb ass judgements". I firmly believe the US Military will make the right decision, and ignore this idiotic concept entirely. That said, they may be able to scam a (relatively) tiny amount of funding out of some separate group.
Funny how you want to dismiss all criticisms about this concept because it "doesn't exist yet" when that suits you, then demand an alternative that exists "right now".
Although they've only been tested in such a scenario for 150-miles (not 1000), there are several successful Grand Challenge vehicles that would very likely to be capable of being extended to such ranges with only the most minor modifications. Without question, every single one of them could easily carry at least 4X as much cargo, with a tiny fraction of the fuel consumption, not to mention far lower initial and maintenance costs.
That's some impressive backpedaling there...
"Mean" temperatures don't matter much. Soldiers are either marching in the heat (during the day) in which case they'll be on the high end of that water consumption regime, or they're not.
Iraq averages triple-digit (F) temperatures throughout summer. Pretty much half the year soldiers will need that much water.
You're really arguing about a whole lot of nothing, anyhow. Even in the winter, when it isn't nearly so hot, water requirements are still quite similar. You don't even double the time they can survive on that amount of water.
You need to go read my original comment again, because you clearly didn't get the idea the first time around.
That 400 lbs of cargo isn't flown in by magical faeries. It's carried through the air on a dense cloud of jet fuel exhaust. Moving truck loads of fuel into a forward position gets LOTS of soldiers killed, every week, in Iraq. Convoy duty is a very dangerous job.
Hauling in a truck-load of fuel, to move 400 lbs of water, to supply a few soldiers for a day or two, is going to kill FAR more people than just having someone transport supplies to those soldiers by traditional means, or avoiding putting those soldiers so far out there in the first place that they get cut off.
And besides lives, you have all kinds of questions of COST, MAINTENANCE, RELIABILITY, etc. If one of these ridiculously low-capacity supply planes means that a dozen Humvees don't get armor because of cost or lack of manpower, then you're making an incredibly stupid mistake.
In addition, I specifically pointed out that there are alternatives which could do the job INFINITELY better than this far-fetched creation.
Well, actually, that's a fairly conservative estimate...
"a person performing hard work in the sun at 43 degrees C requires 19 liters of water daily." http://www.aircav.com/survival/asch13/asch13p02.html
"A general guide for planning to meet the water requirements in an arid zone is 3-6 gallons per individual per day" http://www.cs.amedd.army.mil/dphs/EQB/doc/Instructor%20Manual/L004LP%20Water%20Supply%20LP.doc
Interesting... Because most of them appear to be quite alive...
So it can carry 1/6th of its weight in cargo? Damn that's lousy...
With aircraft, weight is huge. Every pound of weight you have to lift dramatically increases the amount of fuel you're going to burn. And when you're starting off with a heavier than hell plane, which can only haul a tiny amount, you're just throwing away fuel. And guess what? Bringing in fuel for equipment is just as much a logistical problem as getting supplies to troops in the field.
And with such a tiny capacity, they'll need to send tons of these out on a regular basis to keep even a few troops supplied. Let's see... If they load it with nothing else but WATER, this can carry enough to keep 12 marching soldiers going for just 1 day...
No doubt they'd be far better served by one of the autonomous vehicles coming out of the DARPA Grand Challenge. Fuel costs won't be nearly so astronomical, and cargo capacity for even the smallest truck will easily put this aircraft's capacity to shame.
#1 I hate Javascript...
#2 I remain convinced the conversion system was simply set up by woefully unqualified individuals. I've done several such systems that are surely much more complicated. Traveling to the Bay Area in person would be prohibitive. Oh well.
#3 Thanks for the explanation.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's both directly and indirectly fueled by the far superior native language support included in Moz.
Way back when Mozilla was still early milestones, I directed a Russia exchange student to try it, when IE wouldn't allow the proper entry of Russian characters for a URL.
No doubt he went back home, spread the word about Mozilla, and is single-handedly responsible for the popularity of Firefox across Eastern Europe... *cough*
#1 Why aren't archived pages modified very slightly to insert a tag, so that archived images, sub-pages, and the like will be fetched from the archive, rather than linking to non-existent locations on the current server? Surely the current server operators don't like the dozens of hit for everyone that visits the archive...
But more than that, it's a PITA to visit an archived page, and manually copy and paste every single link, one at a time. And I'm sure most people don't realize that they can even do that, and just give up on finding the content they want...
#2 Why is the video encoding so incredibly horrible? Terrible ghosting on the low-res / low-bitrate versions, and a 30fps frame-rate like you've just stupidly deinterlaced the pulldown/telecine.
At 320x240, and 256kbps, those movies should look great, not HORRIBLE. That, combined with the fact that you almost never provide a full resolution (around 720x480) low-bitrate version, no doubt forces a large number of people to download the HUGE (4+ GB) interlaced MPEG-2 copy of a film, rather than the (completely screwed up) 250MB copy...
And don't complain about lack of skill, manpower, etc. I've e-mailed you, TWICE, personally volunteering to take care of everything, from getting the proper software compiled and installed (that was mentioned as a problem long ago) to writing an automatic conversion script to detect the encoding, and do the job without human intervention. I received no responses, either time.
#3 I'm on Verizon DSL in Southern CA. Why does my (dynamic) IP address seem to be blocked the majority of the time I try to access the archives, while it's fine on the rest of the site? Are you just having capacity problems these days?
Ironically, Microsoft will happily sell you a copy of XP for half price, if you visit their website and try to use Windows Update (or other "verified" downloads) and WGA detects that your copy is pirated...
If you don't have a copy of XP that has been activated improperly, just follow this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/downloads/nonGenuine.aspx?displaylang=en&cCode=USA&Error=8&submit=1
That page is dynamic, however, and most people will see it as $150 for "XP Pro". If you are using Internet Explorer on Windows XP Home when you visit that link, however, it will display "XP Home" for $99.
In either case, you can call 1-866-530-6599 to purchase the version you want.
The 70s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaxploitation
The 80s and 90s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimpmobile
And the 00s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimp_My_Ride
You're not remotely too old... You were just simply an unpopular and stodgy individual.
Everyone gets damn excited about algae, because the "potential" is enormous. HOWEVER, the REALITY is, 20+ years of development by the US DoE, starting in the 1970s, still didn't even result in oil-producing algae that could STAY ALIVE in small quantities, let alone staying alive in industrial production conditions, let alone producing a profitable product, let alone in quantities that could have the slightest dent in the world supply of oil.
Try to stay a little closer down to earth when you hear about algae vaporware...
In reality: Algae can produce huge amounts of bio-oil. That oil, however, immediately pollutes the water-based environment of the algae, and quickly kills the algae off. The huge potential of algae appears to be self-limited by an inherently self-contradictory system.
In truth, we don't NEED oil. We can use ANYTHING that will burn, that we can produce in large quantities (see: vegetable oil vehicles). If we could produce enough cheap flour, you'd see flour-burning engines in no time. If you can just keep the algae ALIVE and reproducing at speed, it's damn easy to scrape a few of them off every day, and squeeze them into some form of combustible liquid. It's not worth the effort to turn it into "oil". If ANYONE can come up with ANYTHING flammable that we can produce in large enough quantities to supply the energy needs of the cars across this country, the oil problem will be solved, instantly.