Plastic solar panels, for thirty cents a watt of panels (so an 80w panel would cost, say, $24 to manufacture), giving a probable cost per killowatt hour of around 1 cent.
What you're talking about is a compromise of the certificate chain. I understand that it's possible, but that's an explicit vulnerability of HTTPS and why we tried hard to keep people from getting dud certs. If you do have a dodgy cert, there's all kinds of approaches to messing business up - DNS hacking, most prominently.
So what you're saying is that if you provide a fake certificate, HTTPS is insecure.
Well.... yes, of course. But that's nothing to do with fancy routers or having both ends of the conversation going over your pipes, that's just a basic property of public key cryptography.
Hm, excuse me, but that sounds like total horse****. In HTTPS, you have a public key for the server, and use it to perform an exchange of a symmetric key. HTTPS is secure even if you can see every byte exchanged between the two devices, that's the point.
At the end of the day, you can't use somebody else's computer, and expect privacy. You can't use somebody else's network, and expect privacy. If I jack into your ethernet hub, you're going to have the possibility of reading my traffic unless I use HTTPS / SSH / GPG etc.
That's our real relationship with Comcast, with AT&T and so on. They're snoopy sysadmins on a gigantic scale, and we should treat them like snoopy sysadmins of any other kind: encrypt and tunnel all traffic, and push back technically as hard as we can. P2P has led the way on this, but it's really time we stopped dinking around and started defaulting to HTTPS even on sites like Slashdot.
On the broader level, I did some work on this (ironically, the first draft of the work was done for the USG.)
It's a system - built on open source software for the most part (and the remaining stuff could be built) - which provides for a rock solid personal identity card which has three critical properties:
* all your personal data is encrypted, and only a court can decrypt it * the card has no unique identifiers on it, and you have dozens of cards (that you leave with institutions like your bank to "anchor" your account) * it's dirt cheap and secure enough to entrust with biometric data like DNA fingerprints.
Concerted effort to produce an open alternative which offers strong security *AND* strong privacy by carrying the debate to a higher technical level than schemes like RealID is long past due.
Phil Zimmerman settled the encryption issue for most of a generation with PGP. It's time for us to consider doing the same for general communications snooping, and then moving out into areas like the poor protection of identity in systems like the Social Security Number-based credit reporting system.
* Your site has patterns for the 6 footer, and the stretch 6. Any patterns for the bigger ones?
We found the roof cones were more or less impossible to document like the building process for the smaller hexayurts, so we switched to video instructions. It might be somebody skilled with making instructions could do it, though.
* What tape are you using? I saw passing references, but I'm not sure of the details.
Any bidirectional filament tape - 3M 8959 is one good option. Regular filament tape may also be enough. 3" wide or wider in all cases.
* Have you given any thought to ways to scale this up slightly and make it more permanent? Maybe using structural insulated panels? I realize that's totally off-topic for your immediate purpose, but it might help win acceptance if it were seen as more mainstream.
Yes. If you go to regular SIPs this geometry is probably not optimal any more, but (for example) Thermax HD is a plausible lightweight SIP for this application, or we could go to hexacomb cardboard, which was used for making SIPs in the 1980s.
I haven't looked at wax impregnated cardboard - do you have somewhere to start learning about it?
Well, do bear in mind that people arriving at the site may be people interested in things like the mass evacuation plan ("Networked Domestic Disaster Relief") or refugee use. I did put the technical stuff just one click off the home page.
But point taken, I will try and put more technical stuff back up front.
Those are valid criticisms of lifestraw, I'm afraid.
Better options are things like Solar Water Pasteurization which don't require a repurchase for each family member and reduce other problems, like firewood supply.
I do agree that the general issues around water supply need better "quick fix" technologies, however. We can't wait for society to change, we have to move on technology. Now.
Libertarianism is a very simple philosophy. A couple of axioms you reason from, and the whole thing just falls right out.
That's its strength, and it's weakness.
An example: the limited liability corporation has no place in a Libertarian society, because the government has no business transferring risk and liability from one person to another, any more than it does taxing people.
Simple.
The problem is that the world is not apparently all that interested in these kinds of simple axiomatic systems, as shown by the incredible complexity of dealing with issues like the environment, mental illness or the status of children in a libertarian society.
Not to say that these things cannot be resolved, but the further you get away from Person As Atom and into the complex biology of society, the harder it gets.
The Microwriter Agenda was a perfect little PDA
on
Five Finger Keyboards
·
· Score: 1
It used a chord keyboard exactly like the one outlined, although it was burdened with alphabet keys also because they wanted to appeal to everybody. I seem to remember hitting 30 WPM on this thing without any kind of predictive text input. Really good kit.
Let me second the shout out on Pacsafe. They do really good gear - steel mesh bags that are only slightly heavier than regular bags, and which can be locked by a steel cable to objects like radiators.
Now, there's an upside, and a downside. The upside is your gear is safe from somebody just opening your door, swiping something and legging it. The downside it it screams "I HAVE SOMETHING WORTH STEALING" and nothing will survive bolt cutters. So you have to be careful: keep the fact the bag is locked to the radiator fairly discreet for a start. Don't take stupid chances.
On the lock front, I searched long and hard before setting on the Pelilock. Four digits, solid heavy brass, by the company that makes Pelican cases. These can be tricky to get in and out of the pacsafe holes, so check for a fit before buying. Otherwise, small padlocks are universally garbage as any lockpicker will tell you.
I'd add: a monocular can be incredible useful. Cheap, small, let's you figure out if it's worth trecking across the bay to see if that cafe is open.
On the laptop front? No. If you *must* take a laptop, buy an old Thinkpad and throw Linux on it. The further you're traveling, the more that puppy is worth and the more of a boat anchor it becomes. Really, we're waiting for, say, the Apple Subnotebook or an OLPC device here. Travel with a laptop is just no good.
The other really good option for email and web access is a Palm TX and a bluetooth folding keyboard. I tried that but had serious stability issues due to a flakey keyboard driver, but that was a while ago. I've heard other people raving about the combination, however.
Winning The Oil End Game is a newly released, 400ish page technical manifesto for getting America completely off oil in twenty years.
This is not a lightweight document. The previous book by these authors, Small Is Profitable was The Economist's Book of the Year in 2003, and this book has heavy, heavy political and scientific credibility. The foreword is by George Shultz.
What's the plan? Roughly:
1> Double the average efficiency of the current vehicle fleet over twenty years, using established technologies like hybrid power trains, and new technologies like lightweight car bodies.
2> Replace the fuel supply, half-biodiesel, half hydrogen. Hydrogen initially to be made from natural gas, and transitioning over to renewable resource hydrogen, mainly from wind.
The entire book is available for download. I suggest you read it, and actually take a look at the numbers, before casually suggesting that the plan won't work.
They're RMI. They've been right about every major innovation in the energy sector for about thirty years, as far as I can tell. They know which way the wind blows, and their technical and scientific approaches are impeccable. This isn't some eco-hippie dream, this is a plan. America can get out of the Middle East completely by 2025 and make Arab Power a thing of the past.
It doesn't work IN AMERICA which is what we're talking about, Narl. Show me a non-subsidized, American nuclear power project, then I'll take you seriously.
Nuclear power is VERY VERY VERY EXPENSIVE. The only reason the nuclear industry exists at all is massive, massive government subsidies to the power industry.
Yucca Mountain? Taxpayer dollars at work, my friend.
Nuclear power can't pay it's own way in the world. That's why they stopped building reactors about twenty years ago. They're just too expensive to run relative to other energy sources.
Winning The Oil End Game is a newly released, 400ish page technical manifesto for getting America completely off oil in twenty years.
This is not a lightweight document. The previous book by these authors, Small Is Profitable was The Economist's Book of the Year in 2003, and this book has heavy, heavy political and scientific credibility. The foreword is by George Shultz.
What's the plan? Roughly:
1> Double the average efficiency of the current vehicle fleet over twenty years, using established technologies like hybrid power trains, and new technologies like lightweight car bodies.
2> Replace the fuel supply, half-biodiesel, half hydrogen. Hydrogen initially to be made from natural gas, and transitioning over to renewable resource hydrogen, mainly from wind.
The entire book is available for download. I suggest you read it, and actually take a look at the numbers, before casually suggesting that the plan won't work.
They're RMI. They've been right about every major innovation in the energy sector for about thirty years, as far as I can tell. They know which way the wind blows, and their technical and scientific approaches are impeccable. This isn't some eco-hippie dream, this is a plan. America can get out of the Middle East completely by 2025 and make Arab Power a thing of the past.
Suppose there is massive fraud involving electronic voting machines, either through rewriting votes, having machines in democratic (or republican) areas just not work...
Then what?
The Supreme Court seems to have made it's feelings clear last time around... what's the smart plan?
I'd like to suggest that a certified open source voting system - completely minimal, based on some kind of well secured version of the OS, vetted by independent auditors, distributed as a CD with a known checksum, might be a useful thing to have done after the last election, but I don't know of any such project.
I guess if the chaos repeats, perhaps we'll have one ready for the next election?
There's a better model than blacksmiths: musicians.
Before the advent of recorded music, if you wanted music, you paid musicians to come around and play it for you. It was expensive to keep them, they became status symbols, but they were commonplace in wealthy households and courts.
After recorded music came, the number of musicians required dropped off amazingly. Just tanked.
Programmers are increasingly headed in that direction because of automation: better and better libraries, software packages with increased configurability, better management of software projects. It's gradually getting easier to make a given problem go away with fewer and fewer programmers.
The countertendancy - as large problems become cheaper to solve, more people pay for them to be solved - is sustaining us for the moment, but there is no guarentee that those two forces will remain in step indefinitely.
But even in the age of fluidly configurable, massively integrated software packages (try: Apache 2, MySQL4 and WordPress - millions of lines of code with a nice user interface, and all it does is run your blog) there's still a need for the "rockstars" - the programmers who actually produce those systems.
Professional musicians these days have to fight to stay in the game, and they have to be really, really good at *something* even if it's just pouting on posters.
Programming is going the same way: it's no longer the easy option. If you're programming right now for a reason other than "I'm really good at this" or "I love this" and, preferably, both - get out of the game while you still have an income. You have less than ten years, possibly more like five.
Two more jobs, if you're lucky.
But for the rest of us? The people who can hack it under these conditions? I think it's going to be a return to the Golden Age of Hacking - the time when it was a game for the profoundly talented and educated - rather than these hordes of analgorithmic munchkins we've been competing with for years.
Rock star programmers, dude. Not garage mechanics, rock stars. You can see it already in the celebrity accorded to people like Linus, or EvHead. As software is increasingly "one hit, one kill" - packages which simply dominate an entire category - that kind of rapid rise and fall is going to be the norm, rather than the exception, in the publically popular software sphere.
That's the rock star niche.
And the rest of us will be like those touring rock bands you see all over America, or the players at your local symphony hall.
The Internet is just rowdy. Bruce Sterling's take on it: one of the few places the Average American is daily approached by criminals attempting to steal everything they own! [referring to 419 scams, and I'm paraphrasing]
Freedom is a double edged sword.
If we ask the Government to police spam, or if we ourselves don't keep copyrighted material off file sharing systems, we're inviting Government to come and police what we, the geeks, have not self-policied. What we will not govern, they will.
Nature abhors a vaccume, and The State abhors an anarchy.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.celsias.com/2007/11/23/nanosolars-breakthrough-technology-solar-now-cheaper-than-coal/
Plastic solar panels, for thirty cents a watt of panels (so an 80w panel would cost, say, $24 to manufacture), giving a probable cost per killowatt hour of around 1 cent.
You know? **CHEAP**
I think this is done.
for a change :)
What you're talking about is a compromise of the certificate chain. I understand that it's possible, but that's an explicit vulnerability of HTTPS and why we tried hard to keep people from getting dud certs. If you do have a dodgy cert, there's all kinds of approaches to messing business up - DNS hacking, most prominently.
So what you're saying is that if you provide a fake certificate, HTTPS is insecure.
Well.... yes, of course. But that's nothing to do with fancy routers or having both ends of the conversation going over your pipes, that's just a basic property of public key cryptography.
Hm, excuse me, but that sounds like total horse****. In HTTPS, you have a public key for the server, and use it to perform an exchange of a symmetric key. HTTPS is secure even if you can see every byte exchanged between the two devices, that's the point.
At the end of the day, you can't use somebody else's computer, and expect privacy. You can't use somebody else's network, and expect privacy. If I jack into your ethernet hub, you're going to have the possibility of reading my traffic unless I use HTTPS / SSH / GPG etc.
That's our real relationship with Comcast, with AT&T and so on. They're snoopy sysadmins on a gigantic scale, and we should treat them like snoopy sysadmins of any other kind: encrypt and tunnel all traffic, and push back technically as hard as we can. P2P has led the way on this, but it's really time we stopped dinking around and started defaulting to HTTPS even on sites like Slashdot.
On the broader level, I did some work on this (ironically, the first draft of the work was done for the USG.)
http://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php
It's a system - built on open source software for the most part (and the remaining stuff could be built) - which provides for a rock solid personal identity card which has three critical properties:
* all your personal data is encrypted, and only a court can decrypt it
* the card has no unique identifiers on it, and you have dozens of cards (that you leave with institutions like your bank to "anchor" your account)
* it's dirt cheap and secure enough to entrust with biometric data like DNA fingerprints.
Concerted effort to produce an open alternative which offers strong security *AND* strong privacy by carrying the debate to a higher technical level than schemes like RealID is long past due.
Phil Zimmerman settled the encryption issue for most of a generation with PGP. It's time for us to consider doing the same for general communications snooping, and then moving out into areas like the poor protection of identity in systems like the Social Security Number-based credit reporting system.
We can do better, and we must.
* How do you tie the hexayurts down so they don't blow away in the first breeze? I don't see any hard points to tie a rope to.
Tape anchors. The straps of tape that go up and over the point of the building terminate in these:
http://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt_playa_checklist#Assemble_the_Roof_Cone
http://www.archive.org/stream/Hexayurt_Clips_From_Combined_Endeavor/Hexayurt_Tape_Anchors_Old_Method_256kb.mp4
* Your site has patterns for the 6 footer, and the stretch 6. Any patterns for the bigger ones?
We found the roof cones were more or less impossible to document like the building process for the smaller hexayurts, so we switched to video instructions. It might be somebody skilled with making instructions could do it, though.
* What tape are you using? I saw passing references, but I'm not sure of the details.
Any bidirectional filament tape - 3M 8959 is one good option. Regular filament tape may also be enough. 3" wide or wider in all cases.
* Have you given any thought to ways to scale this up slightly and make it more permanent? Maybe using structural insulated panels? I realize that's totally off-topic for your immediate purpose, but it might help win acceptance if it were seen as more mainstream.
Yes. If you go to regular SIPs this geometry is probably not optimal any more, but (for example) Thermax HD is a plausible lightweight SIP for this application, or we could go to hexacomb cardboard, which was used for making SIPs in the 1980s.
I haven't looked at wax impregnated cardboard - do you have somewhere to start learning about it?
Thanks!
Well, do bear in mind that people arriving at the site may be people interested in things like the mass evacuation plan ("Networked Domestic Disaster Relief") or refugee use. I did put the technical stuff just one click off the home page.
But point taken, I will try and put more technical stuff back up front.
Ah! Yes, I'm so close to it I forget that people are seeing it for the first time!
I'm going to be overhauling and reorganizing the web sites soon, make things like http://disastr.org/ and http://cheapid.guptaoption.com/ more visible.
Will bear this in mind then!
http://bellcomb.com/ or http://www.plascore.com/honeycomb/aramid.asp
:)
a lot lighter than sandbags
Sorry you were having trouble with the web site. I'm Vinay, the guy who designed the hexayurt. What did you want to know that you couldn't find there?
Those are valid criticisms of lifestraw, I'm afraid.
Better options are things like Solar Water Pasteurization which don't require a repurchase for each family member and reduce other problems, like firewood supply.
http://solarcooking.org/pasteurization/default.htm
I do agree that the general issues around water supply need better "quick fix" technologies, however. We can't wait for society to change, we have to move on technology. Now.
It just has to be the right technology.
Libertarianism is a very simple philosophy. A couple of axioms you reason from, and the whole thing just falls right out.
That's its strength, and it's weakness.
An example: the limited liability corporation has no place in a Libertarian society, because the government has no business transferring risk and liability from one person to another, any more than it does taxing people.
Simple.
The problem is that the world is not apparently all that interested in these kinds of simple axiomatic systems, as shown by the incredible complexity of dealing with issues like the environment, mental illness or the status of children in a libertarian society.
Not to say that these things cannot be resolved, but the further you get away from Person As Atom and into the complex biology of society, the harder it gets.
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~len/boog/gifs/ag500. jpg
It used a chord keyboard exactly like the one outlined, although it was burdened with alphabet keys also because they wanted to appeal to everybody. I seem to remember hitting 30 WPM on this thing without any kind of predictive text input. Really good kit.
Let me second the shout out on Pacsafe. They do really good gear - steel mesh bags that are only slightly heavier than regular bags, and which can be locked by a steel cable to objects like radiators.
Now, there's an upside, and a downside. The upside is your gear is safe from somebody just opening your door, swiping something and legging it. The downside it it screams "I HAVE SOMETHING WORTH STEALING" and nothing will survive bolt cutters. So you have to be careful: keep the fact the bag is locked to the radiator fairly discreet for a start. Don't take stupid chances.
On the lock front, I searched long and hard before setting on the Pelilock. Four digits, solid heavy brass, by the company that makes Pelican cases. These can be tricky to get in and out of the pacsafe holes, so check for a fit before buying. Otherwise, small padlocks are universally garbage as any lockpicker will tell you.
http://www.pacsafe.com/www/index.php
http://pelican.com/miscellaneous.php
I'd add: a monocular can be incredible useful. Cheap, small, let's you figure out if it's worth trecking across the bay to see if that cafe is open.
On the laptop front? No. If you *must* take a laptop, buy an old Thinkpad and throw Linux on it. The further you're traveling, the more that puppy is worth and the more of a boat anchor it becomes. Really, we're waiting for, say, the Apple Subnotebook or an OLPC device here. Travel with a laptop is just no good.
The other really good option for email and web access is a Palm TX and a bluetooth folding keyboard. I tried that but had serious stability issues due to a flakey keyboard driver, but that was a while ago. I've heard other people raving about the combination, however.
Justice Department, where they could keep an eye on him.
Loose, and not surrounded by watchful eyes, who knows *what* he'll get up to?
Winning The Oil End Game is a newly released, 400ish page technical manifesto for getting America completely off oil in twenty years.
This is not a lightweight document. The previous book by these authors, Small Is Profitable was The Economist's Book of the Year in 2003, and this book has heavy, heavy political and scientific credibility. The foreword is by George Shultz.
What's the plan? Roughly:
1> Double the average efficiency of the current vehicle fleet over twenty years, using established technologies like hybrid power trains, and new technologies like lightweight car bodies.
2> Replace the fuel supply, half-biodiesel, half hydrogen. Hydrogen initially to be made from natural gas, and transitioning over to renewable resource hydrogen, mainly from wind.
The entire book is available for download. I suggest you read it, and actually take a look at the numbers, before casually suggesting that the plan won't work.
They're RMI. They've been right about every major innovation in the energy sector for about thirty years, as far as I can tell. They know which way the wind blows, and their technical and scientific approaches are impeccable. This isn't some eco-hippie dream, this is a plan. America can get out of the Middle East completely by 2025 and make Arab Power a thing of the past.
It doesn't work IN AMERICA which is what we're talking about, Narl. Show me a non-subsidized, American nuclear power project, then I'll take you seriously.
Nuclear power is VERY VERY VERY EXPENSIVE. The only reason the nuclear industry exists at all is massive, massive government subsidies to the power industry.
Yucca Mountain? Taxpayer dollars at work, my friend.
Nuclear power can't pay it's own way in the world. That's why they stopped building reactors about twenty years ago. They're just too expensive to run relative to other energy sources.
Winning The Oil End Game is a newly released, 400ish page technical manifesto for getting America completely off oil in twenty years.
This is not a lightweight document. The previous book by these authors, Small Is Profitable was The Economist's Book of the Year in 2003, and this book has heavy, heavy political and scientific credibility. The foreword is by George Shultz.
What's the plan? Roughly:
1> Double the average efficiency of the current vehicle fleet over twenty years, using established technologies like hybrid power trains, and new technologies like lightweight car bodies.
2> Replace the fuel supply, half-biodiesel, half hydrogen. Hydrogen initially to be made from natural gas, and transitioning over to renewable resource hydrogen, mainly from wind.
The entire book is available for download. I suggest you read it, and actually take a look at the numbers, before casually suggesting that the plan won't work.
They're RMI. They've been right about every major innovation in the energy sector for about thirty years, as far as I can tell. They know which way the wind blows, and their technical and scientific approaches are impeccable. This isn't some eco-hippie dream, this is a plan. America can get out of the Middle East completely by 2025 and make Arab Power a thing of the past.
everybody would know that Jobs was here from Another Dimension to accelerate human evolution.
Duh!
Suppose there is massive fraud involving electronic voting machines, either through rewriting votes, having machines in democratic (or republican) areas just not work...
Then what?
The Supreme Court seems to have made it's feelings clear last time around... what's the smart plan?
I'd like to suggest that a certified open source voting system - completely minimal, based on some kind of well secured version of the OS, vetted by independent auditors, distributed as a CD with a known checksum, might be a useful thing to have done after the last election, but I don't know of any such project.
I guess if the chaos repeats, perhaps we'll have one ready for the next election?
There's a better model than blacksmiths: musicians.
Before the advent of recorded music, if you wanted music, you paid musicians to come around and play it for you. It was expensive to keep them, they became status symbols, but they were commonplace in wealthy households and courts.
After recorded music came, the number of musicians required dropped off amazingly. Just tanked.
Programmers are increasingly headed in that direction because of automation: better and better libraries, software packages with increased configurability, better management of software projects. It's gradually getting easier to make a given problem go away with fewer and fewer programmers.
The countertendancy - as large problems become cheaper to solve, more people pay for them to be solved - is sustaining us for the moment, but there is no guarentee that those two forces will remain in step indefinitely.
But even in the age of fluidly configurable, massively integrated software packages (try: Apache 2, MySQL4 and WordPress - millions of lines of code with a nice user interface, and all it does is run your blog) there's still a need for the "rockstars" - the programmers who actually produce those systems.
Professional musicians these days have to fight to stay in the game, and they have to be really, really good at *something* even if it's just pouting on posters.
Programming is going the same way: it's no longer the easy option. If you're programming right now for a reason other than "I'm really good at this" or "I love this" and, preferably, both - get out of the game while you still have an income. You have less than ten years, possibly more like five.
Two more jobs, if you're lucky.
But for the rest of us? The people who can hack it under these conditions? I think it's going to be a return to the Golden Age of Hacking - the time when it was a game for the profoundly talented and educated - rather than these hordes of analgorithmic munchkins we've been competing with for years.
Rock star programmers, dude. Not garage mechanics, rock stars. You can see it already in the celebrity accorded to people like Linus, or EvHead. As software is increasingly "one hit, one kill" - packages which simply dominate an entire category - that kind of rapid rise and fall is going to be the norm, rather than the exception, in the publically popular software sphere.
That's the rock star niche.
And the rest of us will be like those touring rock bands you see all over America, or the players at your local symphony hall.
Import and export of commodities is taxes, regularted, lobbied for... Orange Juice imports are taxed, to protect domestic growers.
Why not code?
The Internet is just rowdy. Bruce Sterling's take on it: one of the few places the Average American is daily approached by criminals attempting to steal everything they own! [referring to 419 scams, and I'm paraphrasing]
Freedom is a double edged sword.
If we ask the Government to police spam, or if we ourselves don't keep copyrighted material off file sharing systems, we're inviting Government to come and police what we, the geeks, have not self-policied. What we will not govern, they will.
Nature abhors a vaccume, and The State abhors an anarchy.
And with good reason!