Reading that Wired article, I feel like the brain cells were dying under the weight of mis-information (not to mention opinion being reported as fact) contained in that article.
The United States & Canadian power grids (of which there are 3 AC systems running in parallel) is currently controlled by a number of Regional Transmission Companies, also working in parallel, and I happen to work for one of them. Fortunately, California & everything west of the rockies are AC-isolated from our Eastern Interconnection, so we east coast fellows (who happen to be running things correctly, not to mention profitably) won't have to suffer if they crash out.
But to your comments, you might want to take a look at recent distributed generation projects, like what's being built in APS territory. Secondly, anyone in the deregulated markets can form an electric co-operative, and buy/sell power to the bulk market. The rules are already in place. (aren't you curious why so many states are fighting deregulation?) The only problem is telemetry... the more distributed you get, the harder (and more costly) it is to collect the individual meters. PP&L is experimenting with automated meter reading using the telephone network, so there is progress in distributed data collection...
The next phase is demand-side response, which is the ability for the customers to adjust their load, and get paid locational pricing for decreasing their consumption. The key here is, you can't play in the spot market only when it's profitable, you have to play 100% of the year. Show me the public utility commission who's willing to risk raw pricing for its citizens...
As for the article, almost every example given was the Midwest-ISO & California-ISO version of how things are done, and frankly, they are in 2nd & last for a reason. And you're correct, the infrastructure does not exist for us to monitor everyone's generation in real-time. But then again, that's what state estimators are for.
p.s. EPRI doesn't exactly have the best reputation, which makes me wonder what agenda Wired had in chatting with them
Having one centralized solar farm would almost guarantee the project's failure. Because..
1) One geographic source means that one heavy cloud day would eliminate all production.
2) Once the electricity is produced, you have to send it over transmission lines to the load (customers). Too much energy over one set of lines will melt it.
3) Build more transmission lines, and your local communities will complain about all the electric lines in the area, driving down the local value.
4) Natural disaster. One hurricane, tornado, hail or earthquake, and you've broken all of the glass in the whole plant.
So, the key to PV is decentralization. This means many many installations spread over hundreds (to thousands) of miles) at about 1 station per square mile. Each one would need its own DC to AC converter (to put energy on the grid), not to mention voltage regulators, plus telemetry so you can get the reading from the devices, all of which drives up the costs.
Ok, so science has proven that the effect of gravity travels at the speed of light. Again, the speed is relative to the frame of reference of the observer... if gravity is wave-like, then it can be compressed by accellerating the object. So, take a Jupiter-sized object, and fling it. The mass of the object generates gravity waves in the forward direction of movement, but wouldn't they be compressed (blue-shifted of sorts) outside of the the time-compressed reference? Does that mean that the effect of gravity can be time-adjusted, or does the compression increase the amplitude of the gravity wave...
Einstein has also hypothesized the existance of wormholes, shortcuts in space but not time. Suppose that you have a star, and you put one end of the wormhole close to the gravity source... do gravity waves propogate through the hole? If yes, then is mass at the other end of the wormhole attracted towards the mouth of the hole (gravity waves spewing like water out of a hose), or towards the original location of the star in 3-space? Since the ends of a wormhole are linked, does the wave "resonate" the other end of the hole? If gravity does not pass through the hole, is gravity attracting the near end of the hole and moving it in 3-space? And what about an object that is accellerated into a wormhole by the gravity of the star?
When will you people.... Nothing was banned! The US government simply said that it will not provide government money to private research firms to conduct studies on an morally ambiguous process. Whether or not you believe that scooping the dna out of fertilized embryos is equivalent to killing, there is a significant number of Americans who do, and they do not want their tax money supporting what they believe is murder.
Besides, if the same celebrities (the majority of which don't know a stem cell from a make-up applicator) put their effort into supporting adult stem cell research, we'd have a much better attitude towards celluar sciences.
I don't believe this is a case of mono-poles; a field produced must still sink back into the object. A "traditional" bar magnet is a 3-dimensional cylender with a field emitter at one end and a sink at the other, while this substance has a non-uniform shape to it's magnetic field.
What they've done is discovered a magnetic material that, when cooled to a sufficiently low temperature, will re-organized its structure into a fractal pattern. Additionally, the (repeating) fractal nature creates tiny stable field "pockets" in organized patterns accross the material, at predictable locations once the pattern of the fractal is known.
It seems to me that what they're hoping is that they can exploit the pockets to hold a voltage charge, so that they can convert this material into a data storage device. The material would have a incredible number of stable pockets at extremely small spacing (thanks to the nature of fractals), which would make for more dense storage of information, leading to even more miniturization of electronics.
Yep, my alma mater had their share of pranksters too...
"They dropped pumpkins, typewriters and bags of McDonald's hamburgers down a nine-story stairwell of the Center for Industrial Innovation. Then the Drop Squad made a mistake. They sent police a videotape of themselves and were finally caught and punished."
And the Federal Supreme Court wouldn't have had to step in if the Democrat-dominated State Supreme Court had not overstepped their constitutional bounds. The party didn't like the democratically-generated results, so they tried to win by legal means, when the rules were plainly laid out and followed.
Funny, I interpret this as the current administration is willing to review and investigate other scientific findings that are currently censored and degraded by the national media -- media such as the NYT that are aligned with the political party opposed to the current administration. This willingness fully embodies the concept of "The Land of the Free", because we are free to hold any ideas we wish, even if those ideas go against the "teachings" of the national media.
Governments aren't the only organizations we should distrust.
I wouldn't under-rate flood recovery... If my house were flooded, I would like to preserve the deed to my house, my stock receipts, bank statements, my diploma... When I watch disaster shows on TV, the thing the survivors complain the most about losing is their photographs, years of memories gone...
On the flipside, we don't have the full specs on this new type of "paper"... is it safe for 1-year-old kids to chew on (which they will)? does it biodegrade? We know that computer printer ink degrades in ~5 years, so how will this printing method hold up? Does it feel like paper or like celophane? Can I still get a paperback for $4.95?
Hot damn that's cool! This appears to be the same robot that was advertised in the Sony commercials delivering the mail... except the one in the commercial was life-size (and slower). The SDR-4X has one hell of a promotional video...
I spent my masters degree learning about control theory, with a helping of robots on the side... there's some neat stuff coming down the pike in vision recognition (in my opinion). And I agree with that last statement, the US needs to get its rear in gear. I don't know what you'd call it, the residential robot industry? Our nation's technological slowdown is a systematic problem of many sectors of our society, but that's an issue for another day.
The Slashdot crowd spends most of their time bitching about the copyright escapades of the Disney corporation, but you cannot forget that they are a world leader in robotics applications. If you ever want to see some awesome electronics, watch the Travel Channel's behind the scenes shows some times; they show the maintenance side of the parks, and how much "small" stuff is going on (audio systems & minor mechanicals) that you don't always consciously notice.
Besides, in a battle of the (mega-)corporations, I'd root for Disney to beat Sony any time... Disney just has that knack for making their toys visually pleasing & fun to use. Plus, I've always wanted a pet dinosaur, and if we can't genetically engineer one ala Jurassic Park, might as well go for the next best substitute (and robots don't pee on your carpets)
I agree with you, Maxis isn't usually one to deliver products late (some would argue that games like Simcity3k should have been tested more). The Simcity series has been in development for quite some time, and I think the Sims series caught them by surprise with its popularity.
It would make sense to push the better selling series over the Christmas period, with the release of SimsOnline, since that has the potential to lock a lot of customers into a monthly billing revenue cycle.
But passphrases are sooo hard to remember! If it were up to me, I'd use my voice as my passport, to verify me.
On the other end of the spectrum, you want to avoid what I see at work... I use 12+ different Oracle databases which expire in uneven rotations (# includes dev/test/production), an NT account, SAP software payroll account, and if I want to work off-campus, they're now giving out these RSA fob-number-generators, where you have to enter the 8 digit number generated every minute (and synchronized to the base station) into the VPN software you use to dial in. Not exactly the most user-friendly authentication system.
$113,383,000 of this was liquid assets, compared to $47 mil puts them at about 41% debt load. Not a good place to be, when normal industry worries when they're at 10-15% debt ratios.
They need to blow Electronics Boutique out of the water for trafficking in used DVDs (including music video DVDs)... not to mention played (and presumably copied) games.
Then they can go after Walmart because they re-release some of their products after editing the content.
After that, might as well go after Borders & FYE, because of those machines that let you listen to the music before you buy. After all, not buying a CD because it sucks is bad for business.
... And most of your response was leftwing propaganda centered on increased government regulations and programs requiring increases in taxation.
Schools deserve no more money until they become efficient with the money they already have, and unions are not encouraging that.
That counts for efficiency in college governance too, not just in the elementaries; there's no reason tuition needs to outpace inflation.
I'd agree with your message on tax breaks, but everyone should be entitled to tax breaks, and Universities shouldn't be eligible for corporate money unless they can guarantee that 100% of it goes to research.
As for drugs, how about we get some of these foreign governments to actually pay for the health of their own populations, so we don't have to subsidise their governments by increasing the price at home.
Lastly, if we rely on the government to fund research, then the public will never be truely free to take science in directions that are counter to the government's interests; the government hasn't outlawed embreyonic stem-cell research, they only said they weren't paying for it...
They're saying it's a monstrous waste of money because it is a monstrous waste of money. It's been covered on Slashdot before, the ISS as it exists now (and its immediate future) does not support the kind of research that needs to be done to facilitate the further exploration of our solar system.
Of course, I would differ with you... I argue that the baby-boomer generation is the "lost" one (who is it with the mid-life crisis buying those SUVs), and it is up to us to dream our way out of this nanny-state security blanket that they put us in, and get back to taking some risks & facing the future. It's not going to happen by giving up & pushing it off for another 30 years...
Slashdot Mirror
Reading that Wired article, I feel like the brain cells were dying under the weight of mis-information (not to mention opinion being reported as fact) contained in that article.
The United States & Canadian power grids (of which there are 3 AC systems running in parallel) is currently controlled by a number of Regional Transmission Companies, also working in parallel, and I happen to work for one of them. Fortunately, California & everything west of the rockies are AC-isolated from our Eastern Interconnection, so we east coast fellows (who happen to be running things correctly, not to mention profitably) won't have to suffer if they crash out.
But to your comments, you might want to take a look at recent distributed generation projects, like what's being built in APS territory. Secondly, anyone in the deregulated markets can form an electric co-operative, and buy/sell power to the bulk market. The rules are already in place. (aren't you curious why so many states are fighting deregulation?) The only problem is telemetry... the more distributed you get, the harder (and more costly) it is to collect the individual meters. PP&L is experimenting with automated meter reading using the telephone network, so there is progress in distributed data collection...
The next phase is demand-side response, which is the ability for the customers to adjust their load, and get paid locational pricing for decreasing their consumption. The key here is, you can't play in the spot market only when it's profitable, you have to play 100% of the year. Show me the public utility commission who's willing to risk raw pricing for its citizens...
As for the article, almost every example given was the Midwest-ISO & California-ISO version of how things are done, and frankly, they are in 2nd & last for a reason. And you're correct, the infrastructure does not exist for us to monitor everyone's generation in real-time. But then again, that's what state estimators are for.
p.s. EPRI doesn't exactly have the best reputation, which makes me wonder what agenda Wired had in chatting with them
Having one centralized solar farm would almost guarantee the project's failure. Because..
1) One geographic source means that one heavy cloud day would eliminate all production.
2) Once the electricity is produced, you have to send it over transmission lines to the load (customers). Too much energy over one set of lines will melt it.
3) Build more transmission lines, and your local communities will complain about all the electric lines in the area, driving down the local value.
4) Natural disaster. One hurricane, tornado, hail or earthquake, and you've broken all of the glass in the whole plant.
So, the key to PV is decentralization. This means many many installations spread over hundreds (to thousands) of miles) at about 1 station per square mile. Each one would need its own DC to AC converter (to put energy on the grid), not to mention voltage regulators, plus telemetry so you can get the reading from the devices, all of which drives up the costs.
Watching South Park can screw with your brain...
Ok, so science has proven that the effect of gravity travels at the speed of light. Again, the speed is relative to the frame of reference of the observer... if gravity is wave-like, then it can be compressed by accellerating the object. So, take a Jupiter-sized object, and fling it. The mass of the object generates gravity waves in the forward direction of movement, but wouldn't they be compressed (blue-shifted of sorts) outside of the the time-compressed reference? Does that mean that the effect of gravity can be time-adjusted, or does the compression increase the amplitude of the gravity wave...
Einstein has also hypothesized the existance of wormholes, shortcuts in space but not time. Suppose that you have a star, and you put one end of the wormhole close to the gravity source... do gravity waves propogate through the hole? If yes, then is mass at the other end of the wormhole attracted towards the mouth of the hole (gravity waves spewing like water out of a hose), or towards the original location of the star in 3-space? Since the ends of a wormhole are linked, does the wave "resonate" the other end of the hole? If gravity does not pass through the hole, is gravity attracting the near end of the hole and moving it in 3-space? And what about an object that is accellerated into a wormhole by the gravity of the star?
"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long... ...and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy." -- Dr. Tyrell, Blade Runner
When will you people.... Nothing was banned! The US government simply said that it will not provide government money to private research firms to conduct studies on an morally ambiguous process. Whether or not you believe that scooping the dna out of fertilized embryos is equivalent to killing, there is a significant number of Americans who do, and they do not want their tax money supporting what they believe is murder.
Besides, if the same celebrities (the majority of which don't know a stem cell from a make-up applicator) put their effort into supporting adult stem cell research, we'd have a much better attitude towards celluar sciences.
I don't believe this is a case of mono-poles; a field produced must still sink back into the object. A "traditional" bar magnet is a 3-dimensional cylender with a field emitter at one end and a sink at the other, while this substance has a non-uniform shape to it's magnetic field.
What they've done is discovered a magnetic material that, when cooled to a sufficiently low temperature, will re-organized its structure into a fractal pattern. Additionally, the (repeating) fractal nature creates tiny stable field "pockets" in organized patterns accross the material, at predictable locations once the pattern of the fractal is known.
It seems to me that what they're hoping is that they can exploit the pockets to hold a voltage charge, so that they can convert this material into a data storage device. The material would have a incredible number of stable pockets at extremely small spacing (thanks to the nature of fractals), which would make for more dense storage of information, leading to even more miniturization of electronics.
1960s: You must use Union Labor for this important work
Now that's a fascist system...
Yep, my alma mater had their share of pranksters too...
"They dropped pumpkins, typewriters and bags of McDonald's hamburgers down a
nine-story stairwell of the Center for Industrial Innovation. Then the Drop
Squad made a mistake. They sent police a videotape of themselves and were
finally caught and punished."
Doh! Hate when that happens!
And the Federal Supreme Court wouldn't have had to step in if the Democrat-dominated State Supreme Court had not overstepped their constitutional bounds. The party didn't like the democratically-generated results, so they tried to win by legal means, when the rules were plainly laid out and followed.
Funny, I interpret this as the current administration is willing to review and investigate other scientific findings that are currently censored and degraded by the national media -- media such as the NYT that are aligned with the political party opposed to the current administration. This willingness fully embodies the concept of "The Land of the Free", because we are free to hold any ideas we wish, even if those ideas go against the "teachings" of the national media.
Governments aren't the only organizations we should distrust.
I wouldn't under-rate flood recovery... If my house were flooded, I would like to preserve the deed to my house, my stock receipts, bank statements, my diploma... When I watch disaster shows on TV, the thing the survivors complain the most about losing is their photographs, years of memories gone...
On the flipside, we don't have the full specs on this new type of "paper"... is it safe for 1-year-old kids to chew on (which they will)? does it biodegrade? We know that computer printer ink degrades in ~5 years, so how will this printing method hold up? Does it feel like paper or like celophane? Can I still get a paperback for $4.95?
Hot damn that's cool! This appears to be the same robot that was advertised in the Sony commercials delivering the mail... except the one in the commercial was life-size (and slower). The SDR-4X has one hell of a promotional video...
I spent my masters degree learning about control theory, with a helping of robots on the side... there's some neat stuff coming down the pike in vision recognition (in my opinion). And I agree with that last statement, the US needs to get its rear in gear. I don't know what you'd call it, the residential robot industry? Our nation's technological slowdown is a systematic problem of many sectors of our society, but that's an issue for another day.
I wish I had mod points, because this just made my day :) Crunchy visitors
Rawr!
The Slashdot crowd spends most of their time bitching about the copyright escapades of the Disney corporation, but you cannot forget that they are a world leader in robotics applications. If you ever want to see some awesome electronics, watch the Travel Channel's behind the scenes shows some times; they show the maintenance side of the parks, and how much "small" stuff is going on (audio systems & minor mechanicals) that you don't always consciously notice.
Besides, in a battle of the (mega-)corporations, I'd root for Disney to beat Sony any time... Disney just has that knack for making their toys visually pleasing & fun to use. Plus, I've always wanted a pet dinosaur, and if we can't genetically engineer one ala Jurassic Park, might as well go for the next best substitute (and robots don't pee on your carpets)
I agree with you, Maxis isn't usually one to deliver products late (some would argue that games like Simcity3k should have been tested more). The Simcity series has been in development for quite some time, and I think the Sims series caught them by surprise with its popularity.
It would make sense to push the better selling series over the Christmas period, with the release of SimsOnline, since that has the potential to lock a lot of customers into a monthly billing revenue cycle.
Master of Orion 3, since 2001... no, Nov 2002, December 4th... Maybe January?
Shadowbane, a MMORPG without all that pesky RPG stuff
SimCity 4, delayed 'till January. "It's in 3D, trust us", except you can't swivel the camera
But passphrases are sooo hard to remember! If it were up to me, I'd use my voice as my passport, to verify me.
On the other end of the spectrum, you want to avoid what I see at work... I use 12+ different Oracle databases which expire in uneven rotations (# includes dev/test/production), an NT account, SAP software payroll account, and if I want to work off-campus, they're now giving out these RSA fob-number-generators, where you have to enter the 8 digit number generated every minute (and synchronized to the base station) into the VPN software you use to dial in. Not exactly the most user-friendly authentication system.
$113,383,000 of this was liquid assets, compared to $47 mil puts them at about 41% debt load. Not a good place to be, when normal industry worries when they're at 10-15% debt ratios.
Oh boy!, $300,000... throw a parade. err, yay.
That's going to go real far against the $63,846,000 in losses that they've raked in in the last 4 financial quarters...
I think you need to read the ingredients list on your software...
Then you'd notice... E.A., it's in the game.
They need to blow Electronics Boutique out of the water for trafficking in used DVDs (including music video DVDs)... not to mention played (and presumably copied) games.
Then they can go after Walmart because they re-release some of their products after editing the content.
After that, might as well go after Borders & FYE, because of those machines that let you listen to the music before you buy. After all, not buying a CD because it sucks is bad for business.
... And most of your response was leftwing propaganda centered on increased government regulations and programs requiring increases in taxation.
Schools deserve no more money until they become efficient with the money they already have, and unions are not encouraging that.
That counts for efficiency in college governance too, not just in the elementaries; there's no reason tuition needs to outpace inflation.
I'd agree with your message on tax breaks, but everyone should be entitled to tax breaks, and Universities shouldn't be eligible for corporate money unless they can guarantee that 100% of it goes to research.
As for drugs, how about we get some of these foreign governments to actually pay for the health of their own populations, so we don't have to subsidise their governments by increasing the price at home.
Lastly, if we rely on the government to fund research, then the public will never be truely free to take science in directions that are counter to the government's interests; the government hasn't outlawed embreyonic stem-cell research, they only said they weren't paying for it...
They're saying it's a monstrous waste of money because it is a monstrous waste of money. It's been covered on Slashdot before, the ISS as it exists now (and its immediate future) does not support the kind of research that needs to be done to facilitate the further exploration of our solar system.
Of course, I would differ with you... I argue that the baby-boomer generation is the "lost" one (who is it with the mid-life crisis buying those SUVs), and it is up to us to dream our way out of this nanny-state security blanket that they put us in, and get back to taking some risks & facing the future. It's not going to happen by giving up & pushing it off for another 30 years...
How about, they pay royalties to the people, in the form of price reductions and eventually public domain?
In this case, I'd have to say that Mir has fallen the hardest of all...