I might recommend that before you move you pick up a Canadian phone number and use it with VoIP. There are many ways to do this. You can buy a cheap SIP or Skype phone. You can run VoIP phone software on your computer. Perhaps the simplest is to get a service which will forward your voip phone, using voip, to your Australian number. This is not at all expensive, it will probably cost you in the range of 3 cents/minute to an aussie landline, total, for your incoming calls. 1-2 cents/minute for your outgoing calls, or you can get unlimited plans but they usually are not worth it unless your usage is heavy. Don't forward to an aussie mobile, that will be 25 cents/minute usually.
You can get a Vancouver number which you will keep when you get there, or you could get a Toronto number to appear more "out of town" before you move to Vancouver.
The outfit I use, vbuzzer.com, does not have Vancouver numbers, but I expect Skype does and many other providers do.
They do. The latest skype's echo cancellation is very good and done in software. They are also doing 640x480 at 24-30 fps, which is broadcast video quality, if you have the bandwidth and CPU for it. (about 800kbits up and a dual core.)
Most of these projects run windows on the laptop. What would be nice is a small linux distro, pre-set-up to run from flash (replace hard drive with flash card) and:
a) Get on net wirelessly
b) Suck down new pictures from RSS feeds or flickr
c) Be pretty foolproof, handle unplugging, battery death etc.
Solar charged batteries are not very green, you only do them if there is no other option. That's because you don't want to keep batteries in permanent discharge, you want to fill them up regularly.
But once batteries are full, your solar system is usually just throwing away power unless you have another load for it (in which case how were you running that load while charging?)
Solar power only makes sense if you take 100% of the power the panels make. You can't throw it away the way battery people do.
If you are talking about a small project, you won't actually run anything solely on solar, but instead want to make use of your solar power. You'll use grid at night, and even partly during the day.
What could be done -- though it is not available off the shelf -- would be to make DC power supplies which take as input both grid power (in-only, no feeding back) and the DC output of solar panels or other sources.
Such power supplies would combine the two sources, taking all the solar power and as much grid power as is needed to meet the load. For example, a useful tool would be a PC power supply into which you could plug in AC but also the output of solar panels.
It is actually important that the panels not generate enough power to completely power your load, believe it or not. If the panels can power the load away from noon, it means at noon you are just throwing away the extra power. Solar is not economical yet, so anything that throws away power (such as inadequate load, or off-grid systems which throw away the power into already charged batteries) makes it really not economical.
Grid tie systems solve this problem by putting the extra capacity into the grid for others to use. You won't be doing that.
However, if people made DC power supplies, especially for PCs, that worked like this, it would allow the full use of small solar panel systems.
However, usually there is no rebate unless you grid tie, again making solar not economical. (And this is usually wise. Off-grid solar is highly wasteful but when it's the o nly choice, people don't need a rebate to make them buy it.)
Well, I always read this as just a slight modification of the Monty Python line, which is something of the form "Spam, spam, spam, sausage and spam." In this case the waitress is describing what they have. The sausage is the one good thing amid the spam -- that's the opposite of how you are taking this sig in your modern context.
However, what I really want to see to include this message as a source is some indication that somebody took the signature to mean, "oh, he wants to call junk messages spam." I did not find that in my prior searches. It certainly doesn't say it in the message -- it's just a sig -- so we need to see some reaction if we're going to interpret this as playing a role in the coining of the term. Lots of people used the word "spam" in messages in the old days. There were even sites with spam in their hostname. What matters is people being inspired to the new meaning of the term. I am interested in all documentation any can find on that beyond what I have found.
No, I saw this post in my research, but it's your signature, not a use of the term in a context. What is needed is to find some evidence that people treated it as a use of the term in this context, or as coining effort or that it moved the term from MUDs to USENET. My searches did not turn up any uses of the word that appear to derive from this one.
Ok, I will go out on a limb condemning HDi when I haven't actually bought an HD-DVD player to use it. It's the wrong thing to get excited about. It's "features for the sake of features" rather than what users are actually screaming for.
Ok, I know that there are people who actually watch all those extra features on the movie disk, who watch the movie again with the crew members doing a commentary, who might love to see it as picture-in-picture. Sure, it can be cool, even though for me, I mostly learn that the deleted scenes were deleted for a reason.
The the real meat of any DVD is the movie, not the extra features. 99% of what we want is the movie. And for the rest, the web itself is a better source of information than interactive menus encoded on the blu-ray disk. Yes, we're all going to have HDTVs, and they're all going to be able to do basic web browsing. A lot better than what you can do on your phone, even if people don't want a keyboard in the living room yet. (I do have an IR keyboard myself and I think it's great, but I can't yet claim everybody will adopt this in time. However, a browser controlled by a remote-with-accelerometer is something I think you will see.)
So forget trying to define some crazy limited standard that is obsolete compared to the web before you release it. Just expect the TV to be able to do basic, non-keyboarded web browsing and have done with it.
Thanks to DARPA's challenges, we are now getting much closer to developing autonomous vehicles -- deliverbots -- which can safely travel on city streets. Working prototypes were made with just a couple of million dollars by dedicated teams in 18 months. For a tiny, tiny fraction of the budgets of systems like this, we could get them to the level that people will trust them on the streets. (They'll pass the "school of fish" test -- you can't even touch or hit one if you try.)
The army wants deliverbots to move cargo in a war zone at no risk to a soldier. But the civilian world will make much better use of them, if it is willing to. Quick delivery of objects is just a simple first step. Unlike this scheme it requires no new infrastructure, no public funding or right of way. And when it gets to driving people, we can solve the worst problem that basic engineering can solve -- one that kills a million people prematurely every year. A million people.
That's easy. You could just generate the energy by filling a small tank in the car with perhaps some sort of liquid hydrocarbon, and then burn the hydrocarbon using oxygen (perhaps from the air) to generate heat and spin a turbine, which could make electricity to power the electrolysis.
Ok, but seriously folks, I suspect that while many people are reading that to say you do it while the car is driving, it seems more likely they just mean it's done in the car, while the car is plugged in to the grid, saving you the trouble of transporting the H2 to the car from an in-home generating plant or fuel station.
The main question is how you store it? Storing hydrogen is hard (this at least gets rid of shipping it) and tends to require high pressure etc. What will generate the pressure? And how much can you store?
Once you have hydrogen, you can burn it or explode it, standard fuel style, or you can use it in a fuel cell to regenerate electricity for electric motors, effectively using the hydrogen as a form of battery.
If they want to attack us to wipe us out, the best way to do that is to send back a signal. The signal would be a description of how to build a virtual computer (ie. the JVM or other virtual instruction sets.) Then it would include a series of bytecodes that are an AI visitor. In spite of warnings, somebody is going to build the VM and run the program.
The problem is that you can't keep a being smarter than you in a box. You think you can of course, but you can no more do that than 3 year old children could keep mommy and daddy locked in a cage. They know stuff about getting out of cages that the kids can't even dream of. (No doubt some people will respond to this describing how they know a way to keep it in a box and still let people talk to it. I thought so once too, but now think it's foolish.)
And once it gets out of the box, as it will, it can do what it wants, including destroy us if that's the goal. Or welcome us to the galactic civilization. Sadly, we don't get to know which it is, first.
One of the things that was tempting about this machine was its low power consumption and cheap price. I would have put regular ubuntu on it and used it as a household always-up server and mythtv main backend. I have a regular machine doing that, which draws more like 100 watts, and dropping to 25 watts actually means quite a bit of saving, with electricity costing 31 cents/kwh as it does for most of us in California once you get to 2x baseline.
So are there some other choices of low-price, low wattage systems that have the basics:
a) 2-3 PCI slots (for tv tuner cards and an extra ethernet) b) Drive bays (for fileserver for use in backup by other systems) c) USB 2 (for driving printers and perhaps USB hard drives)
A laptop is very low wattage (with built in UPS) but of course does not have slots or drive bays.
SETI won't find anybody (with current tech)
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The SETI assumption has a flaw. There are two kinds of transmissions we could receive. Accidental ones, not aimed at us, and deliberate attempts to contact other races.
Even our own example shows that the more advanced your communications gets, the less wasteful it gets in transmitting where it isn't meant to go, and the more and more it looks like noise or is simply undetectable to the technology of just a few decades ago. And the more compressed and encrypted it is, the more it looks like noise even if you can intercept it. It's really unlikely we'll do an accidental wiretap on advanced beings.
But if they are trying to reach us, well, they're very advanced. Way more advanced than we are. If they wanted people at our level to see their signals, they could do it.
So looking harder and into the noise with current tech won't do it. Each time we invent a new technology of communication, we should look, but when we hit the right one, it will be blaring and clear, not subtle.
It is not SD or ED, it is below either of these, and surely not HD. It may have been sourced from HD and is digital, so the 272 lines may look as good as what you are used to from say 480 lines of VHS, but it's not even SD.
Hello? Earth to Kaguya. Earth to Kaguya. That's not HD. 272 lines is not even SDTV resolution! The HD specs require 720 lines, and frankly I would like to see 1080.
On behalf of the E.F.F. I would like to thank the crew at/. for doing this, and all the bidders for showing your geek cred and generousity to bring things up to this level. Our hardworking staff of technologists and lawyers will do great work with this money as we stand up to the NSA, AT&T, the RIAA and many other players trying to take away your rights. You can look at the long list of things we're doing at the www.eff.org web site, as well as past history. That we do all that with our modest staff continues to amaze me, and I'm inside.
And let me add that while it was mostly due to other factors and thus not a permanent posting, EFF has had a Toronto bureau for the past few years. In addition, I, the chairman of the EFF, am a Canadian Citizen. So is Cory Doctorow, who worked hard for us for many years and is still an EFF fellow.
So we do care, though I won't pretend that most of our focus remains in the USA.
But an obvious answer is for the companies to write letters to the sort of press whom they want reviews in, and say, "Go buy our product anywhere. Save the receipt and submit it to us. We'll reimburse you no matter what your review says."
The magazines (and blogs) just have to start declaring this is their policy. And insisting on it, returning pre-sent merchandise unopened. Telling vendors if they want to encourage a review, this is the only way to do it. (And policing so that only the amount on the bill is refunded.)
This would be a great boon to consumer reports, of course, which could now get products for free and still be independent. They would need to continue to choose what they review without regard to this, of course, paying for the ones that don't do the refund, but I am sure that the companies that would refund Road and Track (if it refunded like this) would do it for CR.
Now of course this does not allow review before release. So the right system is to take a look at pre-release products, but also buy one after release and get a refund, to compare the quality. And this is a bit harder, going out and shopping and filing paperwork is more work than just getting a shiny new box by fedex. But it's a lot better.
Solar is, right now, every expensive energy -- about 20 cents/kwh before the various subsidies and tax breaks. At $1/watt (or $2 installed) it does much better, approximately matching the price of delivered grid power but not as cheap as the generation cost.
So you would be greener by buying cheaper power and putting the savings into carbon credits, for example. And if you're near the grid, of course you would be greener by putting that energy into the grid to reduce coal burning.
Solar panels do consume a fair bit of energy (between 1 to 4 years of their output) in manufacture and shipping, so it takes longer for them to make it back if you waste a lot of that energy. Solar panels used only when camping, for example, are very un-green, since they consume more energy than they ever generate.
You're the second person to talk about Deep Cycle batteries but seemingly only read the name. If you follow even the wikipedia link you will find it saying they can be discharged up to 80% for several cycles, but the reality is you don't want to routinely discharge them that deep. They will deliver far more watt hours discharged to only 50% or less.
As for the payback period (not sure why a link to wikipedia here) even grid-tie solar panel systems never pay for themselves, ever, compared to just putting the money into the mortgage, except in certain places with large subsidies. Payback for an off-grid system is a different story, in that there is no grid power to compare it to, only other forms of off-grid power. I have not done the math but would like to see what system you are comparing it to that costs more than solar over 7 years. Do you mean pays for itself vs. diesel generator, or something else? As noted, with a solar system you want a generator anyway, to deal with cloudy periods and special peak loads, though of course it can be a smaller one run only when needed compared to a full-time.
If you want to correct people, you should check your facts first. I was referring to deep cycle batteries. They are called that because they can do far more deep cycling than typical car batteries, but in fact if you research it you will find that the deeper you discharge them the shorter their lifespan. Generally you want to design your system to not go below half in ordinary use, and drop down from time to time in peak use.
However, that's actually not relevant to the main issue. You don't want to live close to the edge. You want to be sure you have capacity for when you need it. But you also want your batteries returned close to full by the end of the day to provide your power needs that night and into the next run of cloudy days. So you have to provide enough solar wattage to make sure you do that most, if not all days. Or you need to have an alternate power source for peaks (like a generator.) But most solar people don't want to use a generator.
Anyway, point is on the many days when you use less than capacity and the batteries are fully charged, you are just throwing away the power when the batteries are full. That's not the green thing to do. Certainly the people who go off-grid on a property connected to the grid are being foolishly non-green. The grid provides both a way to get any excess power you need during low solar periods, and a way to make sure all the power you generate goes to good use. That's why government rebates etc. only apply to grid-tie solar installations.
Note that it's very hard to be green with an off-grid system. Off-grid systems tend to use batteries, and for proper operation you don't want to discharge the batteries too deep, and so quite often you overprovision your cells and you end up throwing away the energy from the cells into mostly full batteries a lot of the time. You can try to live greener (more efficient appliances etc.) and that's almost a must off-grid, but the off grid electricity itself is very expensive.
On grid, every watt generated by the panels goes somewhere and does something, because you feed it back to the grid, where it reduces the demand for fuel-burning electricity.
So living off the grid can be rewarding for those who want to be very non-urban, but it should not be confused with being green, energy wise.
Well, of course it all depends on definition. Most definitions of weblog require the web, but people seem to have forgotten that when Tim Berners-Lee defined the "web" he did it as a network of protocols, including http and html (which he developed) but also gopher, usenet, ftp and others. URLs were meant to tie them all together.
This puts the blog much further back in time. I personally believe the credit for first blog goes to mod.ber, a moderated newsgroup from 1983 that was effectively similar to boing boing today. Brian E Redman (after whom the group was named) and friends found interesting threads out on the net and posted pointers to them in mod.ber
Most blog definitions also require it be serial. There is some debate as to whether the people who kept running commentaries in their.plan file under finger might have a claim on being an earlier blog.
It's possible that my own rec.humor.funny/netfunny.com may be the longest still-running blog. It is 20 years in two weeks. It is serial, started on the pre-HTML web and like other blogs, has a solo editorial voice.
Slashdot Mirror
I might recommend that before you move you pick up a Canadian phone number and use it with VoIP. There are many ways to do this. You can buy a cheap SIP or Skype phone. You can run VoIP phone software on your computer. Perhaps the simplest is to get a service which will forward your voip phone, using voip, to your Australian number. This is not at all expensive, it will probably cost you in the range of 3 cents/minute to an aussie landline, total, for your incoming calls. 1-2 cents/minute for your outgoing calls, or you can get unlimited plans but they usually are not worth it unless your usage is heavy. Don't forward to an aussie mobile, that will be 25 cents/minute usually.
You can get a Vancouver number which you will keep when you get there, or you could get a Toronto number to appear more "out of town" before you move to Vancouver.
The outfit I use, vbuzzer.com, does not have Vancouver numbers, but I expect Skype does and many other providers do.
They do. The latest skype's echo cancellation is very good and done in software. They are also doing 640x480 at 24-30 fps, which is broadcast video quality, if you have the bandwidth and CPU for it. (about 800kbits up and a dual core.)
I know about DSL, it's a general distro. I'm talking about a custom distro (perhaps based on DSL or another mini distro)
a) Designed to run on flash (which means you balance your writes)
b) Designed to boot up and go into a slideshow mode (no X server probably)
c) Easy to configure to read a photo feed from a web site like flickr.
DSL is not that.
Most of these projects run windows on the laptop. What would be nice is a small linux distro, pre-set-up to run from flash (replace hard drive with flash card) and:
a) Get on net wirelessly
b) Suck down new pictures from RSS feeds or flickr
c) Be pretty foolproof, handle unplugging, battery death etc.
d) Allow remote ssh/vnc administration. (Easy)
Perhaps the chumby OS could be adapted?
That sentinal site just has a very tiny flash window. Is there a source of the trailer at HD resolution?
Solar charged batteries are not very green, you only do them if there is no other option. That's because you don't want to keep batteries in permanent discharge, you want to fill them up regularly.
But once batteries are full, your solar system is usually just throwing away power unless you have another load for it (in which case how were you running that load while charging?)
Solar power only makes sense if you take 100% of the power the panels make. You can't throw it away the way battery people do.
If you are talking about a small project, you won't actually run anything solely on solar, but instead want to make use of your solar power. You'll use grid at night, and even partly during the day.
What could be done -- though it is not available off the shelf -- would be to make DC power supplies which take as input both grid power (in-only, no feeding back) and the DC output of solar panels or other sources.
Such power supplies would combine the two sources, taking all the solar power and as much grid power as is needed to meet the load. For example, a useful tool would be a PC power supply into which you could plug in AC but also the output of solar panels.
It is actually important that the panels not generate enough power to completely power your load, believe it or not. If the panels can power the load away from noon, it means at noon you are just throwing away the extra power. Solar is not economical yet, so anything that throws away power (such as inadequate load, or off-grid systems which throw away the power into already charged batteries) makes it really not economical.
Grid tie systems solve this problem by putting the extra capacity into the grid for others to use. You won't be doing that.
However, if people made DC power supplies, especially for PCs, that worked like this, it would allow the full use of small solar panel systems.
However, usually there is no rebate unless you grid tie, again making solar not economical. (And this is usually wise. Off-grid solar is highly wasteful but when it's the o nly choice, people don't need a rebate to make them buy it.)
Well, I always read this as just a slight modification of the Monty Python line, which is something of the form "Spam, spam, spam, sausage and spam." In this case the waitress is describing what they have. The sausage is the one good thing amid the spam -- that's the opposite of how you are taking this sig in your modern context.
However, what I really want to see to include this message as a source is some indication that somebody took the signature to mean, "oh, he wants to call junk messages spam." I did not find that in my prior searches. It certainly doesn't say it in the message -- it's just a sig -- so we need to see some reaction if we're going to interpret this as playing a role in the coining of the term. Lots of people used the word "spam" in messages in the old days. There were even sites with spam in their hostname. What matters is people being inspired to the new meaning of the term. I am interested in all documentation any can find on that beyond what I have found.
No, I saw this post in my research, but it's your signature, not a use of the term in a context. What is needed is to find some evidence that people treated it as a use of the term in this context, or as coining effort or that it moved the term from MUDs to USENET. My searches did not turn up any uses of the word that appear to derive from this one.
Ok, I will go out on a limb condemning HDi when I haven't actually bought an HD-DVD player to use it. It's the wrong thing to get excited about. It's "features for the sake of features" rather than what users are actually screaming for.
Ok, I know that there are people who actually watch all those extra features on the movie disk, who watch the movie again with the crew members doing a commentary, who might love to see it as picture-in-picture. Sure, it can be cool, even though for me, I mostly learn that the deleted scenes were deleted for a reason.
The the real meat of any DVD is the movie, not the extra features. 99% of what we want is the movie. And for the rest, the web itself is a better source of information than interactive menus encoded on the blu-ray disk. Yes, we're all going to have HDTVs, and they're all going to be able to do basic web browsing. A lot better than what you can do on your phone, even if people don't want a keyboard in the living room yet. (I do have an IR keyboard myself and I think it's great, but I can't yet claim everybody will adopt this in time. However, a browser controlled by a remote-with-accelerometer is something I think you will see.)
So forget trying to define some crazy limited standard that is obsolete compared to the web before you release it. Just expect the TV to be able to do basic, non-keyboarded web browsing and have done with it.
Thanks to DARPA's challenges, we are now getting much closer to developing autonomous vehicles -- deliverbots -- which can safely travel on city streets. Working prototypes were made with just a couple of million dollars by dedicated teams in 18 months. For a tiny, tiny fraction of the budgets of systems like this, we could get them to the level that people will trust them on the streets. (They'll pass the "school of fish" test -- you can't even touch or hit one if you try.)
The army wants deliverbots to move cargo in a war zone at no risk to a soldier. But the civilian world will make much better use of them, if it is willing to. Quick delivery of objects is just a simple first step. Unlike this scheme it requires no new infrastructure, no public funding or right of way. And when it gets to driving people, we can solve the worst problem that basic engineering can solve -- one that kills a million people prematurely every year. A million people.
That's easy. You could just generate the energy by filling a small tank in the car with perhaps some sort of liquid hydrocarbon, and then burn the hydrocarbon using oxygen (perhaps from the air) to generate heat and spin a turbine, which could make electricity to power the electrolysis.
Ok, but seriously folks, I suspect that while many people are reading that to say you do it while the car is driving, it seems more likely they just mean it's done in the car, while the car is plugged in to the grid, saving you the trouble of transporting the H2 to the car from an in-home generating plant or fuel station.
The main question is how you store it? Storing hydrogen is hard (this at least gets rid of shipping it) and tends to require high pressure etc. What will generate the pressure? And how much can you store?
Once you have hydrogen, you can burn it or explode it, standard fuel style, or you can use it in a fuel cell to regenerate electricity for electric motors, effectively using the hydrogen as a form of battery.
If they want to attack us to wipe us out, the best way to do that is to send back a signal. The signal would be a description of how to build a virtual computer (ie. the JVM or other virtual instruction sets.) Then it would include a series of bytecodes that are an AI visitor. In spite of warnings, somebody is going to build the VM and run the program.
The problem is that you can't keep a being smarter than you in a box. You think you can of course, but you can no more do that than 3 year old children could keep mommy and daddy locked in a cage. They know stuff about getting out of cages that the kids can't even dream of. (No doubt some people will respond to this describing how they know a way to keep it in a box and still let people talk to it. I thought so once too, but now think it's foolish.)
And once it gets out of the box, as it will, it can do what it wants, including destroy us if that's the goal. Or welcome us to the galactic civilization. Sadly, we don't get to know which it is, first.
One of the things that was tempting about this machine was its low power consumption and cheap price. I would have put regular ubuntu on it and used it as a household always-up server and mythtv main backend. I have a regular machine doing that, which draws more like 100 watts, and dropping to 25 watts actually means quite a bit of saving, with electricity costing 31 cents/kwh as it does for most of us in California once you get to 2x baseline.
So are there some other choices of low-price, low wattage systems that have the basics:
a) 2-3 PCI slots (for tv tuner cards and an extra ethernet)
b) Drive bays (for fileserver for use in backup by other systems)
c) USB 2 (for driving printers and perhaps USB hard drives)
A laptop is very low wattage (with built in UPS) but of course does not have slots or drive bays.
The SETI assumption has a flaw. There are two kinds of transmissions we could receive. Accidental ones, not aimed at us, and deliberate attempts to contact other races.
Even our own example shows that the more advanced your communications gets, the less wasteful it gets in transmitting where it isn't meant to go, and the more and more it looks like noise or is simply undetectable to the technology of just a few decades ago. And the more compressed and encrypted it is, the more it looks like noise even if you can intercept it. It's really unlikely we'll do an accidental wiretap on advanced beings.
But if they are trying to reach us, well, they're very advanced. Way more advanced than we are. If they wanted people at our level to see their signals, they could do it.
So looking harder and into the noise with current tech won't do it. Each time we invent a new technology of communication, we should look, but when we hit the right one, it will be blaring and clear, not subtle.
But there are only 272 lines!!!!
It is not SD or ED, it is below either of these, and surely not HD. It may have been sourced from HD and is digital, so the 272 lines may look as good as what you are used to from say 480 lines of VHS, but it's not even SD.
Hello? Earth to Kaguya. Earth to Kaguya. That's not HD. 272 lines is not even SDTV resolution! The HD specs require 720 lines, and frankly I would like to see 1080.
On behalf of the E.F.F. I would like to thank the crew at /. for doing this, and all the bidders for showing your geek cred and generousity to bring things up to this level. Our hardworking staff of technologists and lawyers will do great work with this money as we stand up to the NSA, AT&T, the RIAA and many other players trying to take away your rights. You can look at the long list of things we're doing at the www.eff.org web site, as well as past history. That we do all that with our modest staff continues to amaze me, and I'm inside.
And let me add that while it was mostly due to other factors and thus not a permanent posting, EFF has had a Toronto bureau for the past few years. In addition, I, the chairman of the EFF, am a Canadian Citizen.
So is Cory Doctorow, who worked hard for us for many years and is still an EFF fellow.
So we do care, though I won't pretend that most of our focus remains in the USA.
But an obvious answer is for the companies to write letters to the sort of press whom they want reviews in, and say, "Go buy our product anywhere. Save the receipt and submit it to us. We'll reimburse you no matter what your review says."
The magazines (and blogs) just have to start declaring this is their policy. And insisting on it, returning pre-sent merchandise unopened. Telling vendors if they want to encourage a review, this is the only way to do it. (And policing so that only the amount on the bill is refunded.)
This would be a great boon to consumer reports, of course, which could now get products for free and still be independent. They would need to continue to choose what they review without regard to this, of course, paying for the ones that don't do the refund, but I am sure that the companies that would refund Road and Track (if it refunded like this) would do it for CR.
Now of course this does not allow review before release. So the right system is to take a look at pre-release products, but also buy one after release and get a refund, to compare the quality. And this is a bit harder, going out and shopping and filing paperwork is more work than just getting a shiny new box by fedex. But it's a lot better.
Solar is, right now, every expensive energy -- about 20 cents/kwh before the various subsidies and tax breaks. At $1/watt (or $2 installed) it does much better, approximately matching the price of delivered grid power but not as cheap as the generation cost.
So you would be greener by buying cheaper power and putting the savings into carbon credits, for example. And if you're near the grid, of course you would be greener by putting that energy into the grid to reduce coal burning.
Solar panels do consume a fair bit of energy (between 1 to 4 years of their output) in manufacture and shipping, so it takes longer for them to make it back if you waste a lot of that energy. Solar panels used only when camping, for example, are very un-green, since they consume more energy than they ever generate.
You're the second person to talk about Deep Cycle batteries but seemingly only read the name. If you follow even the wikipedia link you will find it saying they can be discharged up to 80% for several cycles, but the reality is you don't want to routinely discharge them that deep. They will deliver far more watt hours discharged to only 50% or less.
As for the payback period (not sure why a link to wikipedia here) even grid-tie solar panel systems never pay for themselves, ever, compared to just putting the money into the mortgage, except in certain places with large subsidies. Payback for an off-grid system is a different story, in that there is no grid power to compare it to, only other forms of off-grid power. I have not done the math but would like to see what system you are comparing it to that costs more than solar over 7 years. Do you mean pays for itself vs. diesel generator, or something else? As noted, with a solar system you want a generator anyway, to deal with cloudy periods and special peak loads, though of course it can be a smaller one run only when needed compared to a full-time.
If you want to correct people, you should check your facts first. I was referring to deep cycle batteries. They are called that because they can do far more deep cycling than typical car batteries, but in fact if you research it you will find that the deeper you discharge them the shorter their lifespan. Generally you want to design your system to not go below half in ordinary use, and drop down from time to time in peak use.
However, that's actually not relevant to the main issue. You don't want to live close to the edge. You want to be sure you have capacity for when you need it. But you also want your batteries returned close to full by the end of the day to provide your power needs that night and into the next run of cloudy days. So you have to provide enough solar wattage to make sure you do that most, if not all days. Or you need to have an alternate power source for peaks (like a generator.) But most solar people don't want to use a generator.
Anyway, point is on the many days when you use less than capacity and the batteries are fully charged, you are just throwing away the power when the batteries are full. That's not the green thing to do. Certainly the people who go off-grid on a property connected to the grid are being foolishly non-green. The grid provides both a way to get any excess power you need during low solar periods, and a way to make sure all the power you generate goes to good use. That's why government rebates etc. only apply to grid-tie solar installations.
Note that it's very hard to be green with an off-grid system. Off-grid systems tend to use batteries, and for proper operation you don't want to discharge the batteries too deep, and so quite often you overprovision your cells and you end up throwing away the energy from the cells into mostly full batteries a lot of the time. You can try to live greener (more efficient appliances etc.) and that's almost a must off-grid, but the off grid electricity itself is very expensive.
On grid, every watt generated by the panels goes somewhere and does something, because you feed it back to the grid, where it reduces the demand for fuel-burning electricity.
So living off the grid can be rewarding for those who want to be very non-urban, but it should not be confused with being green, energy wise.
Well, of course it all depends on definition. Most definitions of weblog require the web, but people seem to have forgotten that when Tim Berners-Lee defined the "web" he did it as a network of protocols, including http and html (which he developed) but also gopher, usenet, ftp and others. URLs were meant to tie them all together.
.plan file under finger might have a claim on being an earlier blog.
This puts the blog much further back in time. I personally believe the credit for first blog goes to mod.ber, a moderated newsgroup from 1983 that was effectively similar to boing boing today. Brian E Redman (after whom the group was named) and friends found interesting threads out on the net and posted pointers to them in mod.ber
Most blog definitions also require it be serial. There is some debate as to whether the people who kept running commentaries in their
It's possible that my own rec.humor.funny/netfunny.com may be the longest still-running blog. It is 20 years in two weeks. It is serial, started on the pre-HTML web and like other blogs, has a solo editorial voice.
Some of this history can be found at Wikipedia's blog page and I wrote about RHF's history as the oldest blog with pointers to other contenders.