But there IS a free lunch -- wind generators already built that sit idle when the wind blows because there's no grid capacity for the power. Let them spin and create storable, transportable energy.
The alternative letting them sit idle, doing nothing.
Sure, pumped water is better, provided you have the geography and a reservoir handy. Most places don't.
Measures of energy efficiency are meaningless if you're using renewable energy when it would otherwise go unused. The only real question in terms of efficiency is the cost and operational complexity of the facilities, especially in light of the gas yields from fracking.
The Germans have a plant that makes 300 cubic meters of methane per day from 6.6MW of power. The Alta Wind Energy Center can generate 1.3MW -- a scaled version of the German plant could make 50,000 cubic feet of gas a day. That's maximum output, but even if you could only get access to 10% of the wind power you're still creating over a million cubic feet of natural gas a year with energy you could generate but otherwise could not input into the grid.
Pumped water is nice if you have the geography, but what about hydrogen from electrolysis? Convert it to methane and add it to the natural gas network.
It makes the most sense with renewables like wind or solar when there's no grid demand but conditions are favorable for generation. In those conditions its free energy and the inefficiency of generation really doesn't matter. You could also use it as a grid sink for non-renewables in situations where it would be less practical to spin down other sources only to spin them back up soon after and waste energy in the process.
Another useful work option for excess capacity would be for desalination in arid areas.
Personally I am furious with Obama because he has continued the blatantly unconstitutional policies of the Bush years, but at least I am not lying through my teeth and supporting one executive while screeching like a stuck pig when a democrat does the same kind of crap.
But are you furious enough to dispense with your partisan dislike of the Republicans to stop voting for Democrats, too, when present and nearly certain future policies and actions are no different?
At this point, Obama has had plenty of opportunity to reject the policies of tyranny yet so many of his past and present supporters continue to blame Bush for these policies without recognizing that Obama's continuation, enhancement and refusal to change them makes him Bush's equal in this regard, if not more treacherous for parading under a banner of progressivism.
At this point, raging about Bush seems about as sensible as raging about Nixon.
Sunshine laws need to be updated. Regardless of whether the JPA entity owns anything or not, it provides ample opportunity to hide and obfuscate information, whether physically in JPA controlled offices or by misdirection ("We don't have that, contact XYZ county." "No, that information is controlled by the Joint Fubar corporation, we don't keep those records."). And more often than not such situations would probably result from general bureaucratic morass as much as malice.
I also find it curious that someone would even *ask* whether they were exempt from data practices laws. Why ask if you don't intend to disobey them? The intent of data practices laws is to promote open government, any organization controlled by the government should follow the rules as if they were a governmental organization.
The government should not ever have the ability to form organizations they can delegate authority to that are immune from laws regulating the government.
I know a couple of people who are slaves to Audi A4s, apparently there's a big aftermarket for stuff. The guy I know best has probably spent enough pimping his used Audi 1.8t that he probably could have bought an off lease S4.
The bracelet on my Tag chronograph recently broke/wore out and I bought a Seiko analog chronograph to wear while I get the Tag bracelet replaced. The Seiko is a solar quartz and charges via any kind of light and supposedly has nearly 30 days of reserve power when fully charged but otherwise never needs battery changes (from what I read in reviews it will stay charged from ambient light merely sitting on a dresser). I can't tell where the "solar panels" are on this watch face, either.
For me to wear it, it would have to look like a quality analog watch on the outside. The face should continuously display a high res view of an analog watch, adjusting the display image/brightness to ambient light (so in low light it would resemble an analog watch in low light, with just the luminescent glow of the hands and numbers/markers).
The battery should last at least a month without taking it off (which is where the technology doesn't exist part comes in).
Trouble is, I can't see what "smart" features I would care about. All I can think of is that it would be cool to load new watch faces (ie, with exposed 'mechanisms', chronographs, moon phases, etc).
Or more intelligently, disable something else so that my reserve power can keep running the crock pot so I can eat before 11 PM and/or not have to throw out a crock pot's worth of ingredients that stopped being dinner and started becoming weapons grade clostridium botulinum.
But there sure is a lot of money in selling threat paranoia.
Plus software vendors are apparently immune from product liability, so they never bear any costs for defects that lead to poor security or for implementing security poorly. If they had liability for this I think you'd see a lot fewer security defects, but probably a lot fewer features as well.
If this guy is responsible for people having accidents because they chose to troubleshoot their phones while driving, why isn't anyone whose software, hardware or design that causes cell phone glitches responsible for accidents caused when people decide to troubleshoot those problems?
Cell phone glitches happen -- blaming someone other than a driver who decided that troubleshooting their phone was more important that driving for the accident seems ridiculous, especially if you're willing to blame some mobile jammer when you're not willing to blame poor programming, poor hardware or poor design.
..to the usual experience with many registrars where just trying to make a simple change gets you umteen blinky, opted-in signups for perpetual web services.
I wonder if they are at risk of the same "problem" residential internet providers have.
Marketing and competition with DSL providers drove them to aggressively raise their base throughput from 5 Mbps to 10 to 20 or whatever they advertise. Engineering assured them "nobody actually uses this much bandwidth".
Then came torrent users and other heavy users who got not-so-hidden bandwidth caps, then the caps became sort-of policy for everyone, then streaming video took off and now 7-10 Mbps is basically an evening's entertainment in a household with two TVs and a laptop.
They still advertise cable as a 10-20 Mbps service, but now there's a public conflict over bandwidth, caps, etc.
I wonder if storage providers will have the same problem once people start finding some practical use for stashing 1 TB online.
I wonder if the "more likely to die" statistics between bees and sharks take into the respective populations place of residence.
People who live within NN miles of the ocean would be more likely to swim in the ocean, people like me thousands of miles would almost never have a chance to swim in the ocean.
People who had hair and lost it are likely to consume more resources as measured by the effort they put into trying to compensate for it (buying lots of products which don't work, marginal medical therapies, extra car trips in search of remedies, etc) than they would consume just maintaining good hygiene on hair that grew back reliably.
And even people who go bald and don't care often only have partial baldness and would consume styling products anyway, even if they used less of them due to less hair.
I know I've been on plenty of projects where the equipment was ordered by one person, physically installed by another, and then the configuration handled by several people, often who don't know each other or have much collaboration. And of course this all is without any deliberate sabotage, hostility, intra-vendor competition or any other skullduggery that might have gone into it.
Each person sees his job as what's exactly on the statement of work and barely has time allocated to do that let alone track down other bullshit outside of scope, ergo "I didn't do it" and "it wasn't my job" and "it was outside of scope".
I think if you could get the managers somehow personally responsible, the ideal justice would be letting the court seize assets of its choosing from the managers.
Don't just let them write a check to settle the matter, but let the court's special master come into their homes and choose things to sell on the open market at public auction to raise the cash. The defendant would be barred from bidding and the winning bidders must agree they may not give or sell the items to the defendant.
There's a special humiliation in seeing your home stripped of valuable art works, your cars repossessed, your yacht impounded, your wife's jewelry collection sold. Even if you could go buy replacement items on the open market at will.
Doing US currency right from new isn't easy, making an in-house operation at any scale tough to do, although I'm sure there's some kind of in-house counterfeiting operation to do small volumes of foreign currency.
Circumventing accounting at the printing plant would also be tough and risk a lot of exposure.
I'd guess that the easier way to do it is to hijack "old bills" on their way to destruction, now that I think about it, especially if they were destined for overseas use where their worn status would make them more acceptable. Plus they'd be "real" bills with valid SNs.
I always wondered why the CIA didn't just back a truck up to the bureau of engraving and drive away with 45' semi filled with currency. Or operate their own printing plants.
They probably use a ton of cash in covert operations anyway and @ 12.5 cents per $100 it's a hell of a lot cheaper. Given that M1 is 2.7 trillion and most of this would be spent overseas anyway where it would have little inflationary impact it seems like a cheap way to do dirty business.
Within the past 18 months along with the whole web site. It's gotten really JS heavy and the comments section (which is only allowed to fill the right 1/3 of the browser window), which makes it really painful to use and browse the comments.
I liked the older system which had the comments on the bottom of the news story instead of on the side.
It's may not be practical, but it would almost be nice to see an IMDB style comments section for every story the way IMDB has one for every cast member and every film/show entry. If IMDB can make it scale to ~8.8 million personalities and titles I would think the NY Times could. At 500 stories/day it would take them 48 years to hit IMDB scale.
And since when will the money be actually used to fix what we already have? You don't get nearly as far in the pork barrel game fixing stuff as you do building new stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
But there IS a free lunch -- wind generators already built that sit idle when the wind blows because there's no grid capacity for the power. Let them spin and create storable, transportable energy.
The alternative letting them sit idle, doing nothing.
Sure, pumped water is better, provided you have the geography and a reservoir handy. Most places don't.
Measures of energy efficiency are meaningless if you're using renewable energy when it would otherwise go unused. The only real question in terms of efficiency is the cost and operational complexity of the facilities, especially in light of the gas yields from fracking.
The Germans have a plant that makes 300 cubic meters of methane per day from 6.6MW of power. The Alta Wind Energy Center can generate 1.3MW -- a scaled version of the German plant could make 50,000 cubic feet of gas a day. That's maximum output, but even if you could only get access to 10% of the wind power you're still creating over a million cubic feet of natural gas a year with energy you could generate but otherwise could not input into the grid.
Pumped water is nice if you have the geography, but what about hydrogen from electrolysis? Convert it to methane and add it to the natural gas network.
It makes the most sense with renewables like wind or solar when there's no grid demand but conditions are favorable for generation. In those conditions its free energy and the inefficiency of generation really doesn't matter. You could also use it as a grid sink for non-renewables in situations where it would be less practical to spin down other sources only to spin them back up soon after and waste energy in the process.
Another useful work option for excess capacity would be for desalination in arid areas.
Personally I am furious with Obama because he has continued the blatantly unconstitutional policies of the Bush years, but at least I am not lying through my teeth and supporting one executive while screeching like a stuck pig when a democrat does the same kind of crap.
But are you furious enough to dispense with your partisan dislike of the Republicans to stop voting for Democrats, too, when present and nearly certain future policies and actions are no different?
At this point, Obama has had plenty of opportunity to reject the policies of tyranny yet so many of his past and present supporters continue to blame Bush for these policies without recognizing that Obama's continuation, enhancement and refusal to change them makes him Bush's equal in this regard, if not more treacherous for parading under a banner of progressivism.
At this point, raging about Bush seems about as sensible as raging about Nixon.
Sunshine laws need to be updated. Regardless of whether the JPA entity owns anything or not, it provides ample opportunity to hide and obfuscate information, whether physically in JPA controlled offices or by misdirection ("We don't have that, contact XYZ county." "No, that information is controlled by the Joint Fubar corporation, we don't keep those records."). And more often than not such situations would probably result from general bureaucratic morass as much as malice.
I also find it curious that someone would even *ask* whether they were exempt from data practices laws. Why ask if you don't intend to disobey them? The intent of data practices laws is to promote open government, any organization controlled by the government should follow the rules as if they were a governmental organization.
The government should not ever have the ability to form organizations they can delegate authority to that are immune from laws regulating the government.
I know a couple of people who are slaves to Audi A4s, apparently there's a big aftermarket for stuff. The guy I know best has probably spent enough pimping his used Audi 1.8t that he probably could have bought an off lease S4.
I don't think the technology exists.
The bracelet on my Tag chronograph recently broke/wore out and I bought a Seiko analog chronograph to wear while I get the Tag bracelet replaced. The Seiko is a solar quartz and charges via any kind of light and supposedly has nearly 30 days of reserve power when fully charged but otherwise never needs battery changes (from what I read in reviews it will stay charged from ambient light merely sitting on a dresser). I can't tell where the "solar panels" are on this watch face, either.
For me to wear it, it would have to look like a quality analog watch on the outside. The face should continuously display a high res view of an analog watch, adjusting the display image/brightness to ambient light (so in low light it would resemble an analog watch in low light, with just the luminescent glow of the hands and numbers/markers).
The battery should last at least a month without taking it off (which is where the technology doesn't exist part comes in).
Trouble is, I can't see what "smart" features I would care about. All I can think of is that it would be cool to load new watch faces (ie, with exposed 'mechanisms', chronographs, moon phases, etc).
Or more intelligently, disable something else so that my reserve power can keep running the crock pot so I can eat before 11 PM and/or not have to throw out a crock pot's worth of ingredients that stopped being dinner and started becoming weapons grade clostridium botulinum.
I remember a text dungeon game in the 1980s that had a dynamically generated map. If you set the seed to the same value, you always got the same map.
Seemed kind of revolutionary in 1984 for some reason because you could have a huge map without actually having to create a huge map.
But there sure is a lot of money in selling threat paranoia.
Plus software vendors are apparently immune from product liability, so they never bear any costs for defects that lead to poor security or for implementing security poorly. If they had liability for this I think you'd see a lot fewer security defects, but probably a lot fewer features as well.
I'm not sure why there are so many hostile replies. There's only two solutions to excessive demand -- increase supply or increase prices.
Since street parking supply probably can't be easily increased, increasing prices is the only alternative.
...accidents, too?
If this guy is responsible for people having accidents because they chose to troubleshoot their phones while driving, why isn't anyone whose software, hardware or design that causes cell phone glitches responsible for accidents caused when people decide to troubleshoot those problems?
Cell phone glitches happen -- blaming someone other than a driver who decided that troubleshooting their phone was more important that driving for the accident seems ridiculous, especially if you're willing to blame some mobile jammer when you're not willing to blame poor programming, poor hardware or poor design.
..to the usual experience with many registrars where just trying to make a simple change gets you umteen blinky, opted-in signups for perpetual web services.
I wonder if they are at risk of the same "problem" residential internet providers have.
Marketing and competition with DSL providers drove them to aggressively raise their base throughput from 5 Mbps to 10 to 20 or whatever they advertise. Engineering assured them "nobody actually uses this much bandwidth".
Then came torrent users and other heavy users who got not-so-hidden bandwidth caps, then the caps became sort-of policy for everyone, then streaming video took off and now 7-10 Mbps is basically an evening's entertainment in a household with two TVs and a laptop.
They still advertise cable as a 10-20 Mbps service, but now there's a public conflict over bandwidth, caps, etc.
I wonder if storage providers will have the same problem once people start finding some practical use for stashing 1 TB online.
I would imagine that "bee stings" is a generic term that also includes stings from wasps and hornets.
As for colony collapse, an economic analysis concludes that it's somewhat overblown.
http://perc.org/sites/default/...
I wonder if the "more likely to die" statistics between bees and sharks take into the respective populations place of residence.
People who live within NN miles of the ocean would be more likely to swim in the ocean, people like me thousands of miles would almost never have a chance to swim in the ocean.
Bees, however, are everywhere.
So they can go out of their way to try and stifle information on stingrays, but they can't make the BCC field work?
People who had hair and lost it are likely to consume more resources as measured by the effort they put into trying to compensate for it (buying lots of products which don't work, marginal medical therapies, extra car trips in search of remedies, etc) than they would consume just maintaining good hygiene on hair that grew back reliably.
And even people who go bald and don't care often only have partial baldness and would consume styling products anyway, even if they used less of them due to less hair.
#3 for sure.
I know I've been on plenty of projects where the equipment was ordered by one person, physically installed by another, and then the configuration handled by several people, often who don't know each other or have much collaboration. And of course this all is without any deliberate sabotage, hostility, intra-vendor competition or any other skullduggery that might have gone into it.
Each person sees his job as what's exactly on the statement of work and barely has time allocated to do that let alone track down other bullshit outside of scope, ergo "I didn't do it" and "it wasn't my job" and "it was outside of scope".
What's missing from punishing the very rich isn't the taking of their money -- they have so much, they wouldn't miss it. It's not a punishment.
What's missing is the humiliation of their possessions being taken from them against their will in public view.
I think if you could get the managers somehow personally responsible, the ideal justice would be letting the court seize assets of its choosing from the managers.
Don't just let them write a check to settle the matter, but let the court's special master come into their homes and choose things to sell on the open market at public auction to raise the cash. The defendant would be barred from bidding and the winning bidders must agree they may not give or sell the items to the defendant.
There's a special humiliation in seeing your home stripped of valuable art works, your cars repossessed, your yacht impounded, your wife's jewelry collection sold. Even if you could go buy replacement items on the open market at will.
Doing US currency right from new isn't easy, making an in-house operation at any scale tough to do, although I'm sure there's some kind of in-house counterfeiting operation to do small volumes of foreign currency.
Circumventing accounting at the printing plant would also be tough and risk a lot of exposure.
I'd guess that the easier way to do it is to hijack "old bills" on their way to destruction, now that I think about it, especially if they were destined for overseas use where their worn status would make them more acceptable. Plus they'd be "real" bills with valid SNs.
I always wondered why the CIA didn't just back a truck up to the bureau of engraving and drive away with 45' semi filled with currency. Or operate their own printing plants.
They probably use a ton of cash in covert operations anyway and @ 12.5 cents per $100 it's a hell of a lot cheaper. Given that M1 is 2.7 trillion and most of this would be spent overseas anyway where it would have little inflationary impact it seems like a cheap way to do dirty business.
Within the past 18 months along with the whole web site. It's gotten really JS heavy and the comments section (which is only allowed to fill the right 1/3 of the browser window), which makes it really painful to use and browse the comments.
I liked the older system which had the comments on the bottom of the news story instead of on the side.
It's may not be practical, but it would almost be nice to see an IMDB style comments section for every story the way IMDB has one for every cast member and every film/show entry. If IMDB can make it scale to ~8.8 million personalities and titles I would think the NY Times could. At 500 stories/day it would take them 48 years to hit IMDB scale.
What the hell does "too cheap" mean?
And since when will the money be actually used to fix what we already have? You don't get nearly as far in the pork barrel game fixing stuff as you do building new stuff.