Rather than do an all at once buy - equipment should be allowed to lock in a price and the grid tell it when to start drawing power - and bring stuff online at a ramp rate that is below the grid's rate.
That's how the smart grid is advertised as working, because that's a picture people can understand. Raise the price by $.0005 per minute and stop raising it once you've cut enough demand. But it doesn't have to be both instantaneous and simultaneous. The power company can tell one-fourth of the meters to raise the price at 19:58:00, the second quarter of the meters to raise their price at 19:58:15, etc. Or they can fine grain 1/60th of the meters per second.
But this is a lot of complex talking to meters, scheduled to the second. It's hard to make sure every meter is always working properly, and that each meter has its own correct rate. Do you really want to build a system that harvests a million "I'm meter 1234 and my rate is now $0.0015" messages, and maps every meter in a table? Do you instantly re-poll the meters that don't respond to the rate changes? Are you getting the most value from such a complex centralized system?
Much easier is a distributed system. Send all the meters a common ramp profile: from $0.1500/kWh at 19:50 to $0.1600/kWh at 20:10. Each meter could randomly pick a time during the ramp up period (between 19:50 and 20:10) when they would set their price to $0.1600. That way you send only one message, and it's the same message to all meters at the same time, and yet you still achieve a slow and predictable shedding of demand. Management of rates is much simpler. You don't even need feedback from the meters, you simply trust they're listening. For more reliability, you continually broadcast the current rate schedule, and if a particular meter misses the message at 19:49:50 they'll get it again at 19:49:51. Of course there's more to it than that, there are different classes of service and rate schedules would be a large set of meter classes, but the idea's the same for all.
I wish I knew how they were really implemented. But that's how I'd design it.
Be nice. Rupert Murdoch has a kind heart. I heard he was listening to some of the tribute messages that the fans were leaving Amy Winehouse on her voice mail after she passed, and apparently he was moved to tears.
No, piloting one for commercial purposes means a whole new set of rules. What hours are you permitted to fly them? What kind of lights do they need? Who radios the tower? What radio spectrum is reserved for their safe control? Who regulates collisions in that band? Are NOTAMs required when they're operating in an area? What are the altitude limits? How many can you operate in an area? How many can one operator own? How many can one operator control? Are they allowed to be autonomous? What kind of safety equipment is required?
Hobbyists can get away without many of those answers because their enjoyment is "interruptible" without loss, and they're operated in spaces that are open to avoid loss or damage to their expensive craft, and to avoid endangering others. A commercial news operator would need to be where the newsworthy events are, and at the time they are occurring, which is generally crowded populated areas. A drone buzzing 10 feet over traffic on the I-5 is likely to cause several accidents just by its presence. A drone flying three feet from a Senator might be carrying a weapon (or with a sharpened prop might BE the weapon.)
Opening them up to commercial use would quickly lead to a host of problems. And once you've allowed them, it's very hard to prohibit them again.
And Microdrones is safely in Deutschland, far away from the rules of the FAA. They can market them for whatever purposes are allowable in Germany. So I can only assume commercial use by real estate agents is legal there.
. People do in real life - most people have distinct (possibly overlapping) groups of colleagues and friends, and don't behave in the same way at work and in the pub.
Well, I do. And let me tell you, trotting out a powerpoint presentation at the pub is a total buzzkill.
He confused his dollars and cents. In the middle of the U.S. where I live I pay $0.11544 per kWh from June through August. (That's 11.544 cents.) So yes, you still pay three times what we do. But not 450 times more.
My electric co-op also offers a controlled interruptible service plan. For all my heat pump electricity, instead of $0.11544/kWh I pay only $0.0480/kWh year round, but it's hooked to a controller that can interrupt electricity to it during peak seasons or during emergencies. During peak usage periods, they send out a radio signal to everyone's interrupters. Each interrupter shuts off its load for 20 minutes out of each hour. Spread across the thousands of subscribers, they are able to reduce their peak demand during the hottest days of the year. Reducing peak demand means they were able to delay purchasing additional generating capacity, saving the co-op millions of dollars. The "inconvenience" to me is that my house gets a little bit warmer for a few hours on the hottest days. According to my wife, the rise in temperature is indicating the end of the civilized world, but I barely even notice, and for that I think I save about $40 a month on the electric bill in the summer.
Energy-wise, the average American is a ravenous beast so the average house here draws a lot, as you pointed out. But the average house in Japan is what TFA used as their basis, and their usage habits are much more in line with the scenario above. Due to housing density, city dwellers also don't generally have the physical space to mount a 7.5 kWh generator, which is a large machine that needs outdoor air for intake and exhaust..
During a blackout, you're mindful of the things you need to keep running (indeed, you listed them.) And now, Japan has a lot of problems to deal with, and periodic blackouts are among them. Without space for a generator, the car looks like a pretty good idea.
We're talking about building a kitchen table nuclear reactor, and your safety concern is that the junk-car turbo might not have been properly operated?
Choice quote: "To get it to generate electricity you would need a turbine and a generator and that is very difficult to build yourself".
On its face, the quote is correct. A turbine and generator would be hard to build yourself. From scratch.
However, you can go to an automotive junkyard and pick up a used turbo unit for a few bucks, and while you're there, you can pick up an alternator, too. Now the problem is no harder than piping the steam from a pressure cooker through the turbo, and hooking the turbo to the alternator. Just add fission and you're on the grid!
A lot of people are playing with homemade turbine engines made from junked car parts. Perhaps they are deliberately trying to make it sound hard to discourage other Swedes with too many smoke detectors from trying a similar experiment.
Funny, but heavy advertising is generally a good indicator of a lame movie. To me it says that the studio has no confidence in their product. And they get that early on when the first cuts are seen, and the general reaction is "meh."
3D printing addresses one component of "stuff". Electronics, servomotors, glass, ceramics, metals, all those are components that may need to play a functional part in anything much more complicated than a Lego brick.
Don't get me wrong: I've been in complete awe of 3D printing since I saw one in 1991 at IMTS in Chicago. They used lasers to spot-harden UV-curable resin, then lowered the support table by 0.1 mm and drew in the next layer. After it was complete, they drained the resin and rinsed the part off. It was absolutely amazing, and that was 20 years ago. Modern additive machines are even cooler, with the ability to combine different materials and colors, making a finished part with a much cleaner process.
But they still have to affordably produce a sufficient number of end-user-usable things before we'll see them in the average home. Need a 100 cc measuring cup because all you have are imperial measuring cups? No problem! Need a TV remote control, or a toaster? Sorry.
It's all about dependencies. What I'm browsing on one tab sometimes has a relationship to what's in another tab, but generally that's not true. I'll often have a dozen tabs or more open to different things going on. One may be shoutcast, one may be to a blog, etc. None of those needs to "mute" or "unmute" the others. There is no actual dependency between what I'm looking at and what I want to hear.
Since I run Adblock, Flashblock, and Noscript everywhere, I didn't actually realize that ads commonly played audio. I've kind of seen it happen on other people's browsers, but wasn't aware that it was a giant problem in the industry.
So I'm supposed to give up my privacy because idiots get viruses? That's attacking the wrong problem.
Secure the failing systems, or if they can't be secured, the ISP's should isolate them until they stop emitting spam or other automated attacks. But the problem's not with my email.
Because we know the government should be babysitting our email. They should protect us from having to click delete on advertising that might trick us. "Please, o benevolent governments of the world, save us from being stupid."
His technical credentials may be crap, but he'll have a hard time flushing those away as his morals have filled the septic tank.
Meditate for a while on the evolutionary basis for having such a fine-tuned mechanism
OK, consider the reason why trophy-sized fish are often considered wily, and have reputations for not taking bait. A fish that old has seen and rejected dozens of bait fish before. Possibly it has seen a schoolmate strike an uncanny minnow, or even struck an oddly behaving meal itself and learned that a hook in the mouth hurts. The next one it sees moving wrong - AVOID!
(It also explains why some people are much better fishermen than others. They've learned how to present the bait so that it looks natural to the predator fish.)
This could be ancient, inherited knowledge, wired into the brains of all the vertebrates from way, way back.
Slashdot Mirror
i'd rather be free and poor than a well-to-do slave
I'd like to believe I'd think that, too, except I have never experienced poverty. Those are easy-to-say words.
Free can mean many different things, but even in a free country there are lots of rules.
+1, they approve of this message.
I thought Spamford had turned over a new leaf? Giving interviews, promising no more spam.
Good heavens. A spammer lied to us.
Rather than do an all at once buy - equipment should be allowed to lock in a price and the grid tell it when to start drawing power - and bring stuff online at a ramp rate that is below the grid's rate.
That's how the smart grid is advertised as working, because that's a picture people can understand. Raise the price by $.0005 per minute and stop raising it once you've cut enough demand. But it doesn't have to be both instantaneous and simultaneous. The power company can tell one-fourth of the meters to raise the price at 19:58:00, the second quarter of the meters to raise their price at 19:58:15, etc. Or they can fine grain 1/60th of the meters per second.
But this is a lot of complex talking to meters, scheduled to the second. It's hard to make sure every meter is always working properly, and that each meter has its own correct rate. Do you really want to build a system that harvests a million "I'm meter 1234 and my rate is now $0.0015" messages, and maps every meter in a table? Do you instantly re-poll the meters that don't respond to the rate changes? Are you getting the most value from such a complex centralized system?
Much easier is a distributed system. Send all the meters a common ramp profile: from $0.1500/kWh at 19:50 to $0.1600/kWh at 20:10. Each meter could randomly pick a time during the ramp up period (between 19:50 and 20:10) when they would set their price to $0.1600. That way you send only one message, and it's the same message to all meters at the same time, and yet you still achieve a slow and predictable shedding of demand. Management of rates is much simpler. You don't even need feedback from the meters, you simply trust they're listening. For more reliability, you continually broadcast the current rate schedule, and if a particular meter misses the message at 19:49:50 they'll get it again at 19:49:51. Of course there's more to it than that, there are different classes of service and rate schedules would be a large set of meter classes, but the idea's the same for all.
I wish I knew how they were really implemented. But that's how I'd design it.
Yay Ghostery and NoScript!
and adamandeve.com sells buttplugs...what's your point?
He sells "bedazzled butt plugs".
Be nice. Rupert Murdoch has a kind heart. I heard he was listening to some of the tribute messages that the fans were leaving Amy Winehouse on her voice mail after she passed, and apparently he was moved to tears.
No, piloting one for commercial purposes means a whole new set of rules. What hours are you permitted to fly them? What kind of lights do they need? Who radios the tower? What radio spectrum is reserved for their safe control? Who regulates collisions in that band? Are NOTAMs required when they're operating in an area? What are the altitude limits? How many can you operate in an area? How many can one operator own? How many can one operator control? Are they allowed to be autonomous? What kind of safety equipment is required?
Hobbyists can get away without many of those answers because their enjoyment is "interruptible" without loss, and they're operated in spaces that are open to avoid loss or damage to their expensive craft, and to avoid endangering others. A commercial news operator would need to be where the newsworthy events are, and at the time they are occurring, which is generally crowded populated areas. A drone buzzing 10 feet over traffic on the I-5 is likely to cause several accidents just by its presence. A drone flying three feet from a Senator might be carrying a weapon (or with a sharpened prop might BE the weapon.)
Opening them up to commercial use would quickly lead to a host of problems. And once you've allowed them, it's very hard to prohibit them again.
And Microdrones is safely in Deutschland, far away from the rules of the FAA. They can market them for whatever purposes are allowable in Germany. So I can only assume commercial use by real estate agents is legal there.
Here's an engraved picture of Benjamin Franklin to attest to my identity. If you still doubt me, here's a picture of his brother.
Obtaining a valid certificate from one of the hundreds that are no doubt polluting your trusted root certificate store is not much harder than that.
Whoa, chill out. Facebook is threatening noone who isn't signing up voluntarily.
And people who visit pages with Facebook tags. And people who send you Facebook links...
Holy crap, PANIC!
. People do in real life - most people have distinct (possibly overlapping) groups of colleagues and friends, and don't behave in the same way at work and in the pub.
Well, I do. And let me tell you, trotting out a powerpoint presentation at the pub is a total buzzkill.
He confused his dollars and cents. In the middle of the U.S. where I live I pay $0.11544 per kWh from June through August. (That's 11.544 cents.) So yes, you still pay three times what we do. But not 450 times more.
My electric co-op also offers a controlled interruptible service plan. For all my heat pump electricity, instead of $0.11544/kWh I pay only $0.0480/kWh year round, but it's hooked to a controller that can interrupt electricity to it during peak seasons or during emergencies. During peak usage periods, they send out a radio signal to everyone's interrupters. Each interrupter shuts off its load for 20 minutes out of each hour. Spread across the thousands of subscribers, they are able to reduce their peak demand during the hottest days of the year. Reducing peak demand means they were able to delay purchasing additional generating capacity, saving the co-op millions of dollars. The "inconvenience" to me is that my house gets a little bit warmer for a few hours on the hottest days. According to my wife, the rise in temperature is indicating the end of the civilized world, but I barely even notice, and for that I think I save about $40 a month on the electric bill in the summer.
Energy-wise, the average American is a ravenous beast so the average house here draws a lot, as you pointed out. But the average house in Japan is what TFA used as their basis, and their usage habits are much more in line with the scenario above. Due to housing density, city dwellers also don't generally have the physical space to mount a 7.5 kWh generator, which is a large machine that needs outdoor air for intake and exhaust..
During a blackout, you're mindful of the things you need to keep running (indeed, you listed them.) And now, Japan has a lot of problems to deal with, and periodic blackouts are among them. Without space for a generator, the car looks like a pretty good idea.
We're talking about building a kitchen table nuclear reactor, and your safety concern is that the junk-car turbo might not have been properly operated?
I like your style!
Choice quote: "To get it to generate electricity you would need a turbine and a generator and that is very difficult to build yourself".
On its face, the quote is correct. A turbine and generator would be hard to build yourself. From scratch.
However, you can go to an automotive junkyard and pick up a used turbo unit for a few bucks, and while you're there, you can pick up an alternator, too. Now the problem is no harder than piping the steam from a pressure cooker through the turbo, and hooking the turbo to the alternator. Just add fission and you're on the grid!
A lot of people are playing with homemade turbine engines made from junked car parts. Perhaps they are deliberately trying to make it sound hard to discourage other Swedes with too many smoke detectors from trying a similar experiment.
Funny, but heavy advertising is generally a good indicator of a lame movie. To me it says that the studio has no confidence in their product. And they get that early on when the first cuts are seen, and the general reaction is "meh."
3D printing addresses one component of "stuff". Electronics, servomotors, glass, ceramics, metals, all those are components that may need to play a functional part in anything much more complicated than a Lego brick.
Don't get me wrong: I've been in complete awe of 3D printing since I saw one in 1991 at IMTS in Chicago. They used lasers to spot-harden UV-curable resin, then lowered the support table by 0.1 mm and drew in the next layer. After it was complete, they drained the resin and rinsed the part off. It was absolutely amazing, and that was 20 years ago. Modern additive machines are even cooler, with the ability to combine different materials and colors, making a finished part with a much cleaner process.
But they still have to affordably produce a sufficient number of end-user-usable things before we'll see them in the average home. Need a 100 cc measuring cup because all you have are imperial measuring cups? No problem! Need a TV remote control, or a toaster? Sorry.
Let's just hope that it's the Reverend's program marrying them and not Eliza:
"Why do you feel like you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?"
It's all about dependencies. What I'm browsing on one tab sometimes has a relationship to what's in another tab, but generally that's not true. I'll often have a dozen tabs or more open to different things going on. One may be shoutcast, one may be to a blog, etc. None of those needs to "mute" or "unmute" the others. There is no actual dependency between what I'm looking at and what I want to hear.
Since I run Adblock, Flashblock, and Noscript everywhere, I didn't actually realize that ads commonly played audio. I've kind of seen it happen on other people's browsers, but wasn't aware that it was a giant problem in the industry.
So I'm supposed to give up my privacy because idiots get viruses? That's attacking the wrong problem.
Secure the failing systems, or if they can't be secured, the ISP's should isolate them until they stop emitting spam or other automated attacks. But the problem's not with my email.
Without doubt the most stupid thing on slashdot today. So far.
"Day ain't over yet."
Because we know the government should be babysitting our email. They should protect us from having to click delete on advertising that might trick us. "Please, o benevolent governments of the world, save us from being stupid."
His technical credentials may be crap, but he'll have a hard time flushing those away as his morals have filled the septic tank.
No one is getting groped over the phone, so most people don't give a damn.
You mean most Americans are too stupid to realize they're getting groped over the internet.
Meditate for a while on the evolutionary basis for having such a fine-tuned mechanism
OK, consider the reason why trophy-sized fish are often considered wily, and have reputations for not taking bait. A fish that old has seen and rejected dozens of bait fish before. Possibly it has seen a schoolmate strike an uncanny minnow, or even struck an oddly behaving meal itself and learned that a hook in the mouth hurts. The next one it sees moving wrong - AVOID!
(It also explains why some people are much better fishermen than others. They've learned how to present the bait so that it looks natural to the predator fish.)
This could be ancient, inherited knowledge, wired into the brains of all the vertebrates from way, way back.