While I agree with everything you've said, you're making false equivalences... One (huge) mistake doesn't turn a legit news organization into a supermarket tabloid, just as a few lies on one side doesn't balance out a voluminous blatant and continuous intentional disinformation campaign on the other side.
THAT is a perfectly valid reason why discussion on the topic tends to be one-sided, even if problems on the other side need to be resolved as well.
Should be trivial to construct a USB charging cable with inline fuses (or sacrificial caps/resistors/diodes), maybe adding $1 to the cost of the cable, and protecting your expensive devices from not just intentional sabotage, but also cheap, poorly engineered chargers, which might just kill you.
It was already bad hygiene to plug-in a USB cable that has the data lines intact into a public port, as all your data could be quietly siphoned off, and malware loaded on. If this new threat gets people to pay attention to previous threats, we might all be better off for it.
No. I was using residential PV installs only as one tiny example to put things in better context. There's no reason to debate the pros/cons of it here. Those issues are irrelevant to the question of whether solar power plants should be single multi-terrawatt beasts, or several smaller multi-megawatt sites.
So that's the largest solar plant in the world and it only outputs 648 MW? I'm having trouble finding something to compare this to since the nuclear plant near me generates 846 MW with one unit
Unlike nuclear, there's NO REASON to have one single huge central solar plant, so it's a terrible and dishonest comparison to make. Let me put it this way... How much power do you get out of the nuclear power plant at your house? Maybe on your roof or somewhere in your yard?
First you have to try and establish that having one big single central power generating plant is some sort of benefit. It's easy to argue that it's not, as distributed generation has fewer transmission losses, lower up-front build-out costs, greater flexibility (buy-up whatever land is available), etc., etc.
Why do tech companies even do this? Why can't everyone just agree on a standard and stick with it from the start instead of having a war that means us consumers who buy gear from the wrong side will suffer.
There's millions of reasons...
Waiting for an agreed standard is no good, because that takes forever. And most standards just merge together a few of the most popular proprietary methods and call it a standard, so you can't just start on step 2 in any case.
Adopting whatever came along first is no good, because what comes later might have higher requirements and crippling yourself to the older one gives you little or no benefit.
It can be slow and expensive to design something that makes everybody happy. Sometimes you have to do what's best, right now, for your product.
It's often less expensive to start simple and proprietary, then convert and adapt later, when something better comes along, or once it eventually becomes competitively priced.
Companies don't want to spend all their time and money designing and developing infrastructure, only to have some cheaper imitator with the 2nd mover advantage come along and undercut them and be able to use their work without effort.
Companies only need a big enough market to develop economies of scale. Making their market larger than necessary to do that offers them no extra benefits.
dvgrab works on Linux but you can't view the tape as it comes in.
That's not true at all. Linux has no file locking, so you can quite easily view the video file in real-time as they're being created and extended. A simple tail -F VIDEO.DV | mplayer -should work, though adjusting cache sizes might be necessary for some formats.
The coal business is dying from natural causes in the USA, and I don't think there's anything Trump can possibly do to turn that around.
Part of the reason coal is dying is because of clean air regulations. Trump and the GOP could kill those. In addition, power companies have asked for subsidies to keep their coal plants open. No takers, today, but Trump might hand them some cash to "create jobs" or similar farce.
Wind turbines have been going up in large numbers -- including here in Texas, where the wholesale price of electricity (dynamically auctioned via computer) has sometimes been pushed to zero.
Wind turbines are big in Texas because government subsidies pay them money for every MW they produce, no matter the demand for it, or current market price. If the GOP stops that, you'll stop seeing zero or negative wholesale electricity prices.
the only time they explode is when a charger is connected in reverse.
That's completely baseless. A lead-acid battery, operating normally, can explode at any time. Just ask NASA:
On May 17th, 2010 at approximately 10:00 am, the start-up battery on Generator #1 (not due to start-up) exploded for no apparent reason. [...] when one or more cells have a high concentration of hydrogen gas because the vent cap was plugged or defective and did not release the gas effectively an unsafe condition is created. In addition, when electrolyte levels fall below the top of the plates, a low resistive bridge can form at the top of the plates and when current starts to flow, it can cause an arc or spark in one of the cells to intensify that condition. This combination of events ignites the gas, blows the battery case cover off and spatters electrolyte with potentially injuring unaware personnel and to further damage associated equipment. http://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/28...
There's untold tomes of more info on the problem, if you'll set aside your ignorance and do some actual research for yourself.
There is no indication that her reviews are fake or incentivized, so I don't see how Amazon is going to remove them.
Amazon knows about all the cash-for-review services, and they monitor those sites. It wouldn't take long to show a trend that one reviewer is predominantly buying and reviewing products that are being promoted by one of those services.
In addition, failing to mention you were paid for your review, violates not just Amazon's terms, but FTC rules as well. Such bad-behaving reviewers could face a lawsuit with stiff penalties, along with the companies involved.
Plus, good reviews for bad products may get promoted at the start, but once real people start buying and are quite unhappy, some honest reviews will push through the noise, and those older reviews get down-voted and flagged by quite a few customers. Then some of those accounts start getting deleted en mass. I've seen it happen several times.
I'm pretty sure that whenever energy is both very dense and very accessible, you've made an explosive. Existing battery technology is already going that direction.
That's nonsense.
NiMH and LiFePo batteries are at least 2/3rds as power-dense as Li-Ion by volume, but are EXTREMELY stable and safe... Moreso than lower density Alkaline batteries.
Meanwhile, the least-dense battery technology being used is lead-acid, as found in your card battery, and they have a bad habit of exploding, too. Probably much more than Li-Ion batteries.
Power companies shortly will no longer be required to purchase electricity from homeowners, so the grid is not a storage alternative.
Electricity from the grid always costs less than electricity from batteries, for residential users. If you have excess solar and can't sell it, your best bet is just throwing it away.
But besides that, only Nevada has allowed electric companies to stop buying residential solar electricity. It's unlikely the rest will.
batteries are a backup solution in the event the grid doesn't supply power.
Lead-acid batteries may be. Li-Ion batteries are not. Tesla doesn't make Lead-acid batteries.
No, it doesn't. "Synergy is the creation of a whole that is greater than the simple sum of its parts."
There's zero reason to get your solar panels from your car-maker. It's just as easy to hire two different companies for those two very different jobs. There is no synergy here. Well, maybe a little bit of marketing (Solar City ads shown to Tesla customers), but that's it.
This looks like a complete bailout of one of Musk's failing business units, by another. The kind of thing Martin Shkreli is going to jail for.
I've found it best to assume everyone else on the road is deaf. This goes double for bicycles and triple for pedestrians.
So you drive about 5MPH, right? Because any faster than that and you just can't stop for the deaf guy who steps into the cross-walk right before you get there.
And in plenty of situations, you are dependent on pedestrians hearing cars and protecting themselves. You've got no hope of seeing the pedestrian walking behind cars through a parking-lot, and without any sound, they'll step right behind you as you're backing-up. Fortunately, low-speed keeps injuries relatively minor.
No. Many races are close. Hillary won the popular-vote by just 1-2%. It's not unreasonable to assume 2-3% of a population might be convicted felons. A politician who sees they're 5 points behind in polls, could suddenly decide they support shorter sentencing for some crimes.
The right for convicted criminals to vote should be a fundamental right in a proper democracy.
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."
The same should be said of felons learning they can vote for lighter criminal sentencing.
evil people in power could just make sure to outlaw, arrest and convict their opponents for whatever felony they could invent.
Felons voting, and felons running for public office are different matters entirely... There's no way to convict enough people to sway a major election. Just arresting many of them precisely on election day can work pretty well, though.
But more importantly, the right to trial-by-juries exists PRECISELY to prevent such government abuses, anyhow. Politicians can outlaw purple hoodies if they choose, but you'll never find a jury that will convict.
A better approach would be to divide the Electoral College votes proportionally to the vote cast in the sate. This would then still give candidates incentive to campaign in smaller or less populated states.
Gerrymandering is the only reason Republicans have a majority in the House. What you are proposing will allow much more cynical manipulation than is currently possible by winner-take-all, which is quite the wrong way to go.
people will complain that it is always the big states like California and New York that decide every election
Except that's the opposite of reality. It's the electoral college that makes entire states not worth bothering with, and renders forever worthless the vote of the large numbers of Republican voters in states like California, Democrats in Texas, etc. With heavy partisanship, candidates will go to the undecided voters, wherever they are... If there's many in New York, so be it, but the large number in fly-over country count for just as much, even if they're stuck in a strong red/blue state.
And your system of sub-dividing the electoral college won't do anything to obviate small state's concerns, anyhow, as it's just a coarser-grained popular-vote system.
The point of the EC is to ensure broad national support for the only elected executive position in the government.
No, the point was to get some way to utilize the large slave populations in some states, without letting them vote.
The point is to give low population states some equal footing in the say of the only executive position up for election.
No, they get only a tiny amount more say. Since you only need a simple majority of electoral votes, and it makes no difference if they are from large or small states, you can still easily skip the small ones.
Where were the candidates spending all their time? Florida, Pennsylvania, North Caroline, etc. Hardly tiny states... deciding the election.
POTUS would be selected by the cities because low population areas interests are overridden by the millions in one city.
That's still 100% true, candidates don't go campaign in rural areas, at best they're directed to cities in swing states.
The non-swing states, which reliably vote one party or the other, are 100% left-out today, whether they are large or SMALL, precisely BECAUSE of the electoral college. If it was purely a popular vote, the candidates would care about those few thousand undecided voters out in the middle of nowhere, just as much as the voters in the cities.
The swing-state issue is a ridiculous and unnecessary distraction, which ensures the few states with evenly divided party voters, have a blank check to make demands of presidential candidates, no matter how much those policies might be detrimental to the other states.
And by the way, we're already two-thirds of the way there... Just a few more states need to sign-on, to make it reality in the next presidential election.
Right now, it is 68F and sunny in Philadelphia. That should help Hillary. In fact, the weather is nice across most of the East Coast and Midwest, and Democrats do better when turnout is higher. She should have a good day.
For our overseas readers, each state is an all or nothing for the electoral votes:
Except for Nebraska and Maine.
you get all of the electoral votes from that state (unless the members of the electoral college "buck").
That's not a real concern. "Since the Civil War, all states have chosen presidential electors by popular vote. This process has been normalized to the point that the names of the electors appear on the ballot in only eight states". "Faithless electors have not changed the outcome of ANY presidential election to date" and "twenty-four states have laws to [prevent and/or] punish faithless electors."
"On four occasions the Electoral College system has resulted in the election of a candidate who did not receive the most popular votes"
the small investment in AZ paid off pretty well. (Presumably because Trump was pretty good at antagonizing minorities, of which there are plenty in AZ)
Nonsense. Trump was well-ahead in AZ for most of the race (even with his racist comments and supporters), and ONLY fell behind after the open-mic scandal broke, and John McCain repealed his endorsement. The race-baiting may have helped things, but it was the sexual assault that made a huge enough difference to change the color.
If Hillary loses Pennsylvania, then the polls are WRONG. Brexit level wrong. So many other states will likely break the "wrong" way too. She will be in trouble.
No, the polling in PA can prove to be wrong without any other state being affected by whatever issue there is in PA.
if she takes it, she will likely win.
She will likely win without it, so you're stating absolutely nothing, here. Sky is blue, water is wet, etc.
If she takes NC, then her vote is even better than her support in polls, and she will likely cruise to a strong victory.
No, same fallacy as PA above. Local issues can affect voting in NC without affecting others like a contagion. In short, you've said nothing of value at all.
Slashdot Mirror
As proof, I recommend putting your phone in a microwave and running it on high for several minutes.
While I agree with everything you've said, you're making false equivalences... One (huge) mistake doesn't turn a legit news organization into a supermarket tabloid, just as a few lies on one side doesn't balance out a voluminous blatant and continuous intentional disinformation campaign on the other side.
THAT is a perfectly valid reason why discussion on the topic tends to be one-sided, even if problems on the other side need to be resolved as well.
Should be trivial to construct a USB charging cable with inline fuses (or sacrificial caps/resistors/diodes), maybe adding $1 to the cost of the cable, and protecting your expensive devices from not just intentional sabotage, but also cheap, poorly engineered chargers, which might just kill you.
It was already bad hygiene to plug-in a USB cable that has the data lines intact into a public port, as all your data could be quietly siphoned off, and malware loaded on. If this new threat gets people to pay attention to previous threats, we might all be better off for it.
No. I was using residential PV installs only as one tiny example to put things in better context. There's no reason to debate the pros/cons of it here. Those issues are irrelevant to the question of whether solar power plants should be single multi-terrawatt beasts, or several smaller multi-megawatt sites.
Unlike nuclear, there's NO REASON to have one single huge central solar plant, so it's a terrible and dishonest comparison to make. Let me put it this way... How much power do you get out of the nuclear power plant at your house? Maybe on your roof or somewhere in your yard?
First you have to try and establish that having one big single central power generating plant is some sort of benefit. It's easy to argue that it's not, as distributed generation has fewer transmission losses, lower up-front build-out costs, greater flexibility (buy-up whatever land is available), etc., etc.
There's millions of reasons...
Waiting for an agreed standard is no good, because that takes forever. And most standards just merge together a few of the most popular proprietary methods and call it a standard, so you can't just start on step 2 in any case.
Adopting whatever came along first is no good, because what comes later might have higher requirements and crippling yourself to the older one gives you little or no benefit.
It can be slow and expensive to design something that makes everybody happy. Sometimes you have to do what's best, right now, for your product.
It's often less expensive to start simple and proprietary, then convert and adapt later, when something better comes along, or once it eventually becomes competitively priced.
Companies don't want to spend all their time and money designing and developing infrastructure, only to have some cheaper imitator with the 2nd mover advantage come along and undercut them and be able to use their work without effort.
Companies only need a big enough market to develop economies of scale. Making their market larger than necessary to do that offers them no extra benefits.
And that's just scratching the surface.
That's not true at all. Linux has no file locking, so you can quite easily view the video file in real-time as they're being created and extended. A simple tail -F VIDEO.DV | mplayer - should work, though adjusting cache sizes might be necessary for some formats.
Part of the reason coal is dying is because of clean air regulations. Trump and the GOP could kill those. In addition, power companies have asked for subsidies to keep their coal plants open. No takers, today, but Trump might hand them some cash to "create jobs" or similar farce.
Wind turbines are big in Texas because government subsidies pay them money for every MW they produce, no matter the demand for it, or current market price. If the GOP stops that, you'll stop seeing zero or negative wholesale electricity prices.
No, it works both ways. Sellers openly advertising for reviews generate a much higher volume of results, than does seeking out individual reviewers.
That's completely baseless. A lead-acid battery, operating normally, can explode at any time. Just ask NASA:
On May 17th, 2010 at approximately 10:00 am, the start-up battery on Generator #1 (not due to start-up) exploded for no apparent reason. [...] when one or more cells have a high concentration of hydrogen gas because the vent cap was plugged or defective and did not release the gas effectively an unsafe condition is created. In addition, when electrolyte levels fall below the top of the plates, a low resistive bridge can form at the top of the plates and when current starts to flow, it can cause an arc or spark in one of the cells to intensify that condition. This combination of events ignites the gas, blows the battery case cover off and spatters electrolyte with potentially injuring unaware personnel and to further damage associated equipment.
http://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/28...
There's untold tomes of more info on the problem, if you'll set aside your ignorance and do some actual research for yourself.
Amazon knows about all the cash-for-review services, and they monitor those sites. It wouldn't take long to show a trend that one reviewer is predominantly buying and reviewing products that are being promoted by one of those services.
In addition, failing to mention you were paid for your review, violates not just Amazon's terms, but FTC rules as well. Such bad-behaving reviewers could face a lawsuit with stiff penalties, along with the companies involved.
Plus, good reviews for bad products may get promoted at the start, but once real people start buying and are quite unhappy, some honest reviews will push through the noise, and those older reviews get down-voted and flagged by quite a few customers. Then some of those accounts start getting deleted en mass. I've seen it happen several times.
That's nonsense.
NiMH and LiFePo batteries are at least 2/3rds as power-dense as Li-Ion by volume, but are EXTREMELY stable and safe... Moreso than lower density Alkaline batteries.
Meanwhile, the least-dense battery technology being used is lead-acid, as found in your card battery, and they have a bad habit of exploding, too. Probably much more than Li-Ion batteries.
Quick everybody... Copy the highest up-voted comments from the last time this story was posted, and paste them here as your own:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
No need to thank me.
Electricity from the grid always costs less than electricity from batteries, for residential users. If you have excess solar and can't sell it, your best bet is just throwing it away.
But besides that, only Nevada has allowed electric companies to stop buying residential solar electricity. It's unlikely the rest will.
Lead-acid batteries may be. Li-Ion batteries are not. Tesla doesn't make Lead-acid batteries.
No, they do not. Batteries are an expensive and inefficient waste of money and energy, when you have a grid connection.
There are innumerable electricians out there, and they're all certified for such tasks.
No, it doesn't. "Synergy is the creation of a whole that is greater than the simple sum of its parts."
There's zero reason to get your solar panels from your car-maker. It's just as easy to hire two different companies for those two very different jobs. There is no synergy here. Well, maybe a little bit of marketing (Solar City ads shown to Tesla customers), but that's it.
This looks like a complete bailout of one of Musk's failing business units, by another. The kind of thing Martin Shkreli is going to jail for.
So you drive about 5MPH, right? Because any faster than that and you just can't stop for the deaf guy who steps into the cross-walk right before you get there.
And in plenty of situations, you are dependent on pedestrians hearing cars and protecting themselves. You've got no hope of seeing the pedestrian walking behind cars through a parking-lot, and without any sound, they'll step right behind you as you're backing-up. Fortunately, low-speed keeps injuries relatively minor.
No. Many races are close. Hillary won the popular-vote by just 1-2%. It's not unreasonable to assume 2-3% of a population might be convicted felons. A politician who sees they're 5 points behind in polls, could suddenly decide they support shorter sentencing for some crimes.
"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."
The same should be said of felons learning they can vote for lighter criminal sentencing.
Felons voting, and felons running for public office are different matters entirely... There's no way to convict enough people to sway a major election. Just arresting many of them precisely on election day can work pretty well, though.
But more importantly, the right to trial-by-juries exists PRECISELY to prevent such government abuses, anyhow. Politicians can outlaw purple hoodies if they choose, but you'll never find a jury that will convict.
Gerrymandering is the only reason Republicans have a majority in the House. What you are proposing will allow much more cynical manipulation than is currently possible by winner-take-all, which is quite the wrong way to go.
Except that's the opposite of reality. It's the electoral college that makes entire states not worth bothering with, and renders forever worthless the vote of the large numbers of Republican voters in states like California, Democrats in Texas, etc. With heavy partisanship, candidates will go to the undecided voters, wherever they are... If there's many in New York, so be it, but the large number in fly-over country count for just as much, even if they're stuck in a strong red/blue state.
And your system of sub-dividing the electoral college won't do anything to obviate small state's concerns, anyhow, as it's just a coarser-grained popular-vote system.
No, the point was to get some way to utilize the large slave populations in some states, without letting them vote.
No, they get only a tiny amount more say. Since you only need a simple majority of electoral votes, and it makes no difference if they are from large or small states, you can still easily skip the small ones.
Where were the candidates spending all their time? Florida, Pennsylvania, North Caroline, etc. Hardly tiny states... deciding the election.
That's still 100% true, candidates don't go campaign in rural areas, at best they're directed to cities in swing states.
The non-swing states, which reliably vote one party or the other, are 100% left-out today, whether they are large or SMALL, precisely BECAUSE of the electoral college. If it was purely a popular vote, the candidates would care about those few thousand undecided voters out in the middle of nowhere, just as much as the voters in the cities.
The swing-state issue is a ridiculous and unnecessary distraction, which ensures the few states with evenly divided party voters, have a blank check to make demands of presidential candidates, no matter how much those policies might be detrimental to the other states.
And by the way, we're already two-thirds of the way there... Just a few more states need to sign-on, to make it reality in the next presidential election.
It would seem the weather wasn't good enough...
Except for Nebraska and Maine.
That's not a real concern. "Since the Civil War, all states have chosen presidential electors by popular vote. This process has been normalized to the point that the names of the electors appear on the ballot in only eight states". "Faithless electors have not changed the outcome of ANY presidential election to date" and "twenty-four states have laws to [prevent and/or] punish faithless electors."
"On four occasions the Electoral College system has resulted in the election of a candidate who did not receive the most popular votes"
Nonsense. Trump was well-ahead in AZ for most of the race (even with his racist comments and supporters), and ONLY fell behind after the open-mic scandal broke, and John McCain repealed his endorsement. The race-baiting may have helped things, but it was the sexual assault that made a huge enough difference to change the color.
No, the polling in PA can prove to be wrong without any other state being affected by whatever issue there is in PA.
She will likely win without it, so you're stating absolutely nothing, here. Sky is blue, water is wet, etc.
No, same fallacy as PA above. Local issues can affect voting in NC without affecting others like a contagion. In short, you've said nothing of value at all.