Even if the above smearing was true, it would be pretty unalarming. Gays don't procreate too well. Over time, those with the higher birth rate win. Hence, if islamists and homosexuals were equally bad, the islamists would be the ones who posed a real threat.
If I actually was a homophobic nutcake, rather than simply demonstrating the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the original poster's propaganda through irony, I'd tell you that gays procreate through conversion of straights, and that the modern college environment (where the thing fundamentalists fear most, education, sometimes takes place) is the breeding ground of homosexuality. Then I'd go off into some weird disconnected rant about Jesus and George Bush.vs. Bill Clinton and Satan, and tell you that God will punish the USA for allowing gay adoption.
But actually I don't believe any of that crap (thus the irony). I have jewish and atheist and lesbian friends, and my children often invite their muslim friends to our house to play.
The mockery was probably not productive, but sometimes I just can't resist. Sorry.
As a system administrator who has recently spent time trying to mitigate the security consequences of using NFS for a large campus network, I wonder if Windows may not have some advantages.
I feel for you, but I've had extensive experience in both, and I can tell you that SMB/CIFS is just as bad as NFS.
NFS security is Unix security writ large and networked: if it's not root it's not important. If your machine has the right IP, and you've got root on the box, switch your UID and NFS gives you all priviliges for that user.
That's true. However, effectively Windows Networking is the same (effectively, I said - I know the details are quite different). If a user has full administrative rights on a Windows system that is a full domain member then network file storage as a whole is easily cracked; in fact you can probably easily derive everyone's cleartext passwords by requesting them in a weakly encrypted form and running them through some free software. In every networked file system I know of, if you have unrestricted access to a node that has full membership in the authentication protocol, you have the same ability. Some systems make this harder, by restricting the nodes that have full authentication capabilities (Kerberos comes to mind immediately) but again, if you have root on the Kerberos server or SASL store or whatever, you can get passwords, and if you p0wn a trusted multiuser machine you either exhaustively query the authentication system or stealthily pick up the user authentication converstations as they go by.
And NFS is the ubiquitous Unix Network Filesystem!
No. It seems that way if you hang out in "traditional academia" type shops but really NFS is merely popular, not ubiquitous. I have worked in computer science for decades in defense, research, industry, and finance, and most of the places I have worked had a total prohibition on NFS because of the inherent insecurity of the early implementations.
Goddamn, what a security mess. I'm looking at alternatives like OpenAFS or Coda -- but hell, those aren't very mainstream.
I think they are essentially immature, but fundamentally better in basic design. They do not make the assumptions that NFS makes (NFS works best with NIS or LDAP to co-ordinate user IDs, but NIS has horrible design flaws and LDAP is also immature despite fairly strong design). Tridge recommended Coda to me when I asked him about alternatives to NFS and SMB years ago, and I respect his opinion rather highly (we should all probably move to Coda or Andrew so that the implementations can mature!)
I could just use samba for everything I guess.
There are great advantages and small disadvantages to that approach. But you need LDAP to make it really integrate properly, and the samba team will always be facing challenges from Microsoft's evolving use of crypto that will make their product lag slightly behind Microsofts' implementation releases (granted, once the samba stuff catches up it's more robust and scaleable).
But why not go all the way and run Active Directory servers?
Because it's less secure than NFSv4 and LDAP, and far less cost-effective than Samba, and less compatible with non-microsoft systems than OpenLDAP or Red Hat directory server. If you have a highly skilled computer staff and relatively unskilled end-users (a situation often found in a profitable corporation) samba and OpenLDAP are a nice combination. Don't try it if your IS group is a bunch of talentless hacks, though!
Is this him? Don't much care for his website design, I must say. But I'm not much good at that either so I shouldn't really criticize!
I suspect given the NASA data on insolation of my area (rough average 3.5 kWh/m2/day, according to the site) and the amount of unshaded space on my property (roughly 100 m2 if we're being really, really optimistic) it would be pretty hard for me to get ROI from this technology. Cutting down trees would be a big mistake since the buildings would all wash away in the next flood.
Looks pretty cool for people in Oz and the US desert southwest, though.
I certainly don't claim to be a PV expert. Especially since the yearly insolation in my area sucks! My PVs are toys, although I've been playing with them off and on for several decades. The low-voltage RE system I'm trying to build to power my house is high-volume low-head hydro, which is more practical here on the US east coast fall line.
Any links for the sunball man? I'd love to learn more about his rig. But now you are talking about cooling the cells, introducing additional equipment and costs that were not previously part of this conversation. If I was lax in not investigating the possibilities and costs of cell cooling, surely you are just as much so for not including the costs when you say "a $10/m^2 aluminized polyester sheet"? Regardless, thanks for the info - I'd love to know more about your system, and your parents'... sounds very interesting, albeit higher maintenance than plain-jane PV. Around here any water feed that is exposed to open air has to be continually maintained to prevent mold or algae blockages, and anything with water running over it turns furry black or slick green rather quick (although a sacrifical anode and a chlorox drip works wonders in my wacky old house plumbing, and the victorian-era brass parts seem to be immune to everything).
Your comments about regulatory design by committee are spot on. I stand corrected!
The "browned" panels I spoke of come from the "big commercial solar power stations" you mention. I'm told it's profitable for them to overheat panels and replace them regularly.
Incidentally, I think we're getting dragged off into the weeds on the issue of ohmic heating of wires. You specifically referred to "cooling" in your reply to some other fellow's (made-up-for-humor-effect) "high-temperature superconductor" post, and I pointed out that he said "high temperature". I'm sorry I mentioned it now!
But in regards to cabling, I suppose I should have stuck to a simple proposition of "fatter cables resist DC less" and "stranded cabling resists DC less", with "less" empirically determined by measurement of voltage drop in a real 12 or 24 VDC RE system under load. Your explanations of that phenomena sound reasonable (although I personally can get a solid electrical and mechanical connection to any piece of copper, with a torch if necessary) but I note you said "most of it comes down to the fact" - was that just an idiom, or is there something more? Wrenches typically do not try to explain it, they just say it's related to surface area of the conductor and it's a small value compared to everything else, and thus mostly important to off-gridders who want every last volt. Theorists insist the phenomenon does not exist, and say only the cross-sectional area matters. The annoying Usenet people usually go on about skin effect and surface waves, but they aren't very believable.
I'm been operating on the idea that impedance to AC and resistance to DC are two different things, and wires that are sized for a high-volt AC distribution would likely be too small for low-volt DC to the same household. Would you agree? I'm also thinking that of all the solar-powered gizmos I've ever purchased, the ones with thicker wires from the panel worked better (your explanation of that sounds pretty reasonable, though).
Thank you. And before you have any ideas about me, I am not a militant Muslim and I reject most of what "islamic culture" is and loathe most "Islamists". I hate the fact that they make people think that what they are is what Islam is supposed to be.
So my personal preferences for both me and you are that you and I have the right to find happiness however we see fit provided that we do not harm anyone else.
I'm glad that you found my link on pedophiles informative. Believe me, the goal of homosexuals is to enforce gay rights on the entire world. They are everything that a conservative Christian fears about liberal democrats except one-hundred times worse. Gays will lie about their plans and desires in accordance with the homosexual agenda. I encourage you look up the gay concept of "ACT UP" which indicates why all agreements made with homosexuals are useless. (It gives insight into why Brett Lock offered a "truce".) The more straight people (that's you and I) who wake up to the threat to our life, liberty, and property the greater chance we have of the world not becoming one big gay empire. America may very well be lost, and that makes me very sad. I love America, but its future is rather dim.
You mean that for real? Like, your house would not fall down if you tore off all the drywall and siding and 2x4s and just had a naked frame holding up your roof and all your stuff? You have trunnels pinning your tenons?
My house is post and beam, but it's been around for a century or two. You gotta have the big bucks if you are building real post and beam these days! It's a better investment than a bunch of soon-to-be-worthless computers, though.
I can see both sides of this, though. I like to hire guys who have the efficiency bug, guys who want the most elegant solution to every problem, rather than guys who are so fascinated with technology that they aren't offended by baroque Rube Goldberg contraptions. On the other claw, a guy who is too obsessed with perfection never completes anything, and a guy who is not an explorer is unlikely to keep up with current technologies that could be very useful.
I presume that distinction was just too obvious to bother writing.
You presume correctly. But I agree with Mike Dobbs who once said something along the lines of "I believe that all criminals should be encouraged to publish detailed acounts of their crimes so that they can more easily be traced and apprehended". I don't see any real-life benefit to preventing criminals from disseminating records of their crimes, although I can certainly see the point of denying them monetary profit.
More on-topic, if someone wants to self-identify on Yahoo with an offensive name, that seems OK to me, it lets people know which posts will be offensive without having to read them. Remember those innocous-sounding links on slashdot that used to deliver you to goatse? You knew not to click on the ones posted by "goatsex" (and I still won't click on a tinyurl or makeashorterlink from a slashdot poster I don't know - my eyeballs are still hurting from the clorox and steel wool).
I usually get accused of being a commie pinko, or an America-hating liberal, so the "bleeding red white and blue" was kind of refreshing. Thanks!
Those 11/34s run a lot cooler than 11/70s, and the 3100 wasn't so bad, but aren't some of those 4000 class machines serious space-heaters?
I just recycled a whole bunch of old macs and an antique SPARC last month because they were never getting used for anything. I still have a 3100e with OpenVMS hobbyist but I never turn it on anymore... sad really.
The first page of that article was great, I agree. But the second page goes on to make false statements (such as, the president can't hurt you if he wants to - currently the president can seize you in broad daylight without making any charges and torture you to death in a secret prison without telling anyone) and ridiculous sweeping generalities (as if "radical Islam" and "Western media" were cohesive entities with a single mind each).
It also conveniently ignores the role of agents provocateur - most of the rioters have not seen the real cartoons, but supposedly many of them have seen extremely offensive cartoons, calculated to stir their emotions, distributed by.... who? Most of the rioters are said to be illiterate!
Most Arab Muslims have no access whatsoever to these cartoons. Their so-called "rioting" and "spontaneous demonstrations" are being orchestrated by somebody.
Mainstream Islam does not benefit from these "riots" and "demonstrations". In fact the principle benefactors of this activity are the USA, Israel, Iran, and oppressive Middle Eastern governments (Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc.) who want to let their dissatisfied masses blow off steam instead of revolting. These countries profit from either demonizing Islam or demonizing western secularism.
The essay's conclusion, that we should uphold freedom of speech, I totally agree with! Unlike the current majority opinion in the US, I might add, which is that publications offensive to mainstream christians - principally gay porn and paedophilic materials - should not be allowed.
...but I don't think you can single-handedly conquer the right-wing hate machine.
A lot of the kids at my children's elementary school won't play with the (few) muslim kids. They've been taught unthinking hatred by their Christian parents, I guess, or by Faux News. Some of the Muslim kids come over to my house to play, though, because my kids go to Unitarian Universalist church and have been trained to judge people as individuals.
We monitor our kids pretty closely, so we meet the parents of their friends before we'll let our kids visit their houses. The Muslim parents we've thus met are similarly cautious. So far they've been nice folks, just trying to get by like anybody else. They haven't freaked out because our church performs gay marriages, or anything like that, although I'm guessing they'd probably freak if their mosque started advocating gay rights.
Ecological environmentalism seeks to prevent any human-made effects in ecological systems -- preventing any human-made changes to pristine ecologies and removing the effects of humans from sullied ecologies.
That sounds like the definition used by radical authoritarians (i.e. the people currently in power in the USA, who love pollution because it creates scarcity).
All the environmentalists I know simply want to live within the constraints of an ecology capable of reliably supporting human life. They fear that current trends will result in cockroaches and scorpions being the best fitted organism to live on earth. Most of them love trees and free-running, self-maintaining, human-drinkable streams - but the point is to avoid human extinction, not to model it.
This subject is constantly discussed in the alternative energy community, with the battle generally being fought between the "wrenches" (guys working in the field, who build working systems for real customers and operate entirely on empirical evidence) and the "theorists" who usually claim that what the wrenches are doing is unsafe, impossible, or illegal.
I fall somewhere in the middle; I don't have decades of experience with multiple installed systems like the real wrenches (guys like Windy Dankoff, Bob-O Schultze, Richard Perez, Ian Woofendon, etc.) but what knowledge of electricity I do have was mostly gained in the field and not in a classroom.
Another guy "in the middle" (also with far more experience than I) is John Wiles. John has been living in a solar-powered house for quite a while, but he's a researcher at a New Mexico university whose work is funded by Sandia Labs. John has made multiple recommendations to the NEC, a few of which have been adopted (they all will eventually be adopted, I predict) into article 690, which deals with PV wiring specifically and low-voltage wiring in general.
This I know: In the field, wrenches use welding cables (specific brands of it) and DLO (Diesel Locomotive cabling) instead of huge, inflexible solid or thick-stranded wiring. They've been doing it for decades, illegally, without encountering any of the problems that the theorists have convinced the regulatory authorities will surely result. The theorists generally point to a single known instance where a welding cable's insulation cracked in use - ignoring dozens of similar instances where this did not happen, and dozens of instances where approved cables also experienced insulation failure - and say "welding cables are not safe".
In Real Life [tm] off-grid systems, fatter cables work better for low-voltage runs from power producing equipment to battery boxes, and from battery boxes to inverters. Surface area seems to be a factor since more strands works better (this is not true in AC wiring) for the same weight of copper. Within battery boxes, wrenches often use copper pipe tinned and flattened at the ends to bolt together battery strings at the lugs - this is cheap, safe and effective in actual use though most definitely not to code. I personally use 3/8" by 3/4" copper bar stock jacketed with rubber hose or heat-shrink tubing for battery interconnections (because I had some on hand) and I've noticed that the local telco uses even larger solid copper bars to connect their huge glass 2 volt lead-acid cells.
"Works better" in this context means that you can squeeze more run time off your loads given a set input of solar or hydro energy (wind is usually wild AC, a whole nother problem space). It also can mean "easier to install" since stranded cables are more flexible, but that's a secondary concern really.
As for focusing more light on PVs, a well designed installation might incorporate reflection or concentration, but it's rare because it's usually not as effective as increasing the surface area under sunlight. You have to remember that reflection is not perfect (to put it another way, mirrors get hot too) and a reflector has to be survivable in real use, which means it's going to be almost as expensive as adding solar panels. The same caveats apply to lenses, only more so; a lens that can survive as long as a PV panel might even be more expensive than additional PV - and if your lens gets dirty, power production degrades much less gracefully than with a reflector system. If you go overboard with concentration or reflection, you will burn up your PVs, or you will have to buy special super-duper high temp PVs that again cost more than just putting in more panels instead of lenses or mirrors. The "browned off" PV panels you can buy cheap, that have less than half their rated output, were burnt up by reflection/concentration schemes.
My girlfriend got one of these for Christmas, and it lasted through one use.
By that, I presume you mean your girlfriend's patience with her geek boyfriend's idea of a gift was very brief. If you mean it broke, what the heck were you doing with it? I've accidentally dropped one on a wood floor several times with no ill effects, but it's not supposed to be as sturdy as a claw hammer.
The guy who sold it was really nice about accepting returns and was very helpful,
Good to know. I haven't heard of anyone else returning one.
but the player sucks. There's no display and you have to learn to interpret its Flashing Light Language (tm) to understand what's going on.
I just turn it on and listen for music. If I don't hear anything I push "play", and if I don't want to hear that song I hit "skip forward" and if I want to hear it again I hit "skip back". If I want to adjust the volume up or down I use the buttons marked for that (well, it's really one button surrounded by the usual 4-way torus, but it's all marked as clearly as possible given the tiny size). What more could be "going on?".
But anyway, this is version 1.0, which I like because I want the battery's power to be directed to the music, not to run an LCD. You can always wait for 1.5 (Ogg Vorbelized, perhaps) or 2.0 (maybe that LCD screen you want) but I am happy with the simple, small, interfaces-with-any-USB-capable-computer current model.
One thing Pat won't tell you (because the PEZ lawyers are idiots) is that you usually have to modify a regular PEZ head if you want it to fit on the PEZmp3. A little dremel work on the chin area put Hello Kitty on my buddy's wife's PEZmp3, though, so it can be done.
Presumably, you won't need cooling for his "high-temperature" superconductor.
Off-grid houses sometimes use 5/0 wire or welding cable to minimize DC losses over distance. Most of the posters in this topic are saying high voltage AC power transmission is for reducing line loss, but I believe it's more for reducing the size of the conductor needed to prevent excessive loss. If your wire had the surface area of a football field, you probably wouldn't lose much juice at all.
In Real Life [TM] that is. I don't know much about theory but I've done a few miles of wiring.
You can spot poorly designed solar gadgets, such as are sold at Home Despot and K-Mart, by the thin wiring. It should be thick thick thick if you want to squeeze all you can out of a PV cell.
What kind of lame ass system would have bash, but not sed, grep, and friends??
Windows, of course!
Just kidding. Seriously, calling in additional codebases unnecessarily is a bad idea - as Alan Robertson likes to say "complexity is the enemy of reliability". Why bulk up the memory footprint, CPU requirements, and total lines of source where bugs can occur if you don't really need to?
I'm toying with the idea of rewriting the whole thing in gawk. Compiled C would be even better, although that would be overkill (even for me).
I've been shocked with 60 cps 120 VAC dozens if not hundreds of times. It doesn't particularly bother me regardless of humidity or capacity of the circuit. It's possible that I have a high pain threshold, but I'm certainly not a masochist. My doctor says my heart is normal, too.
For the last few decades I've double-checked 120 VAC lines to see if they were "live" by touching them with my bare hands. One hand on the neutral or ground, one finger tapping the (supposedly dead) screw holding down the hot lead. Every once in a while (more often now that I live in a building with over a hundred years of wiring by accretion) I get shocked due to inaccurate labels in a breaker box or carelessness. It's no big deal - if it was, I'd use a voltmeter, which is less convenient.
440 VAC, now I can tell you that hurts. I don't recommend taking a hit of more than 120VAC. And while some hackers will taste connectors for current (RS-232C feels like a weakish 9-volt battery on your tongue) you have to watch out for toxic metals like lead and cadmium and you should not stick a live phone wire in your mouth (if the phone were to ring, you'd have a non-fatal but really unpleasant experience).
Oh, and just because you can tap a live 120 VAC line with your finger and only feel a sharp tingle, doesn't mean you can't hurt yourself with house current. A short circuit with a metal object such as a screwdriver will produce noise, molten metal, and a flash bright and actinic enough to give you a nasty burn and a mild case of welder's eyes. And don't get yourself in a situation where high amps will be forcibly pumped through you by a collapsing circuit, I'm pretty sure that would be bad.
I support the Administration. I think Mr. Bush is doing a fine job. No, I'm not joking. I don't think he's Mt. Rushmore material, but I do think the majority opinion of him here is paranoid idiocy tempered only by urban liberal orthodoxy.
What, would you care to explain, is "urban liberal orthodoxy"? I know lots of urban liberals and they don't agree on anything - that's exactly why Bush is in power!
As for Slashdot, all opinions are tolerated except those that are conservative, americentric or at odds with the popularly accepted view in a given scientific field.
If you think Slashdot is not "americentric" I think you must not be very well traveled.
In other words, if you believe as you suggest that Slashdot is tolerant of all well-expressed views, you may be suffering from craniorectal inversion.
Well, that's probably true, despite Rob's best efforts; the moderation tends to work in waves, or pendulum swings if you prefer. Since your post got modded to +5 insightful, though, you yourself obviously represent the face of slashdot intolerance today. Tomorrow perhaps your 15 minutes of fame will pass.
The examples it pulled up for me all used sed, though, and I've already got a somewhat lame method that doesn't require anything but bash.
I always try to minimise my use of external calls, regardless of language, in order to keep my code as portable as possible. Obviously there are limits, I use Graham Barr's LDAP perl modules rather than try to write my own LDAP routines for every perl hack I might need! But for this job I'd rather not call sed, gawk, grep, and friends unless it's really absolutely necessary.
I've bookmarked codefetch for future reference. Thanks again!
Well, I did this, which solves the problem, but is not particularly elegant in my opinion:
ReadFields () {
local IFS=:
Host="#"
while [ `expr substr $Host 1 1` = "#" ]
do
read Host Key Interval Excludes Keep
done }
while ReadFields
do
(stuff gets done to each host)
done $ConfigFile
This method restricts commenting to lines with a first character of "#" and it reads a series of fields separated by colon characters (something like/etc/passwd or/etc/printcap format). The use of a function and a local variable prevents IFS getting polluted within the main while loop. I don't like it but it works in practice.
Please don't talk to me about clean water and electricy until I've got a computer with internet access.
You jest, but it's a real issue. Is giving the ability to support more people to any poorly educated populace with a traditional culture that is geared towards high infant mortality necessarily a good thing?
Death comes to us all, and no one can prevent it. But if you make it possible for more babies to survive to adulthood, and you don't change the culture to accomodate a population explosion, you may just be guaranteeing that more babies will eventually die (of starvation, most likely) than if you did nothing at all.
Screwing around with the load-carrying capacity of a local environment should not be done lightly, and definitely not by do-gooder foreigners who haven't extensively studied the local conditions and thought through the implications. If you give a people clean water today, you may well cause massive desertification in 30 years that could wipe out their entire ethnic group! All those people that didn't die from bad water will need fuel, housing, food, etc. and if they use the traditional means of satisfying those needs the local ecosystem may not be able to support their increased impact.
A starving man would rather have a sandwich than a textbook. But despite that, education is a better gift to a tribe on the edge of starvation than sandwiches.
Slashdot Mirror
But actually I don't believe any of that crap (thus the irony). I have jewish and atheist and lesbian friends, and my children often invite their muslim friends to our house to play.
The mockery was probably not productive, but sometimes I just can't resist. Sorry.
That's true. However, effectively Windows Networking is the same (effectively, I said - I know the details are quite different). If a user has full administrative rights on a Windows system that is a full domain member then network file storage as a whole is easily cracked; in fact you can probably easily derive everyone's cleartext passwords by requesting them in a weakly encrypted form and running them through some free software. In every networked file system I know of, if you have unrestricted access to a node that has full membership in the authentication protocol, you have the same ability. Some systems make this harder, by restricting the nodes that have full authentication capabilities (Kerberos comes to mind immediately) but again, if you have root on the Kerberos server or SASL store or whatever, you can get passwords, and if you p0wn a trusted multiuser machine you either exhaustively query the authentication system or stealthily pick up the user authentication converstations as they go by. No. It seems that way if you hang out in "traditional academia" type shops but really NFS is merely popular, not ubiquitous. I have worked in computer science for decades in defense, research, industry, and finance, and most of the places I have worked had a total prohibition on NFS because of the inherent insecurity of the early implementations. I think they are essentially immature, but fundamentally better in basic design. They do not make the assumptions that NFS makes (NFS works best with NIS or LDAP to co-ordinate user IDs, but NIS has horrible design flaws and LDAP is also immature despite fairly strong design). Tridge recommended Coda to me when I asked him about alternatives to NFS and SMB years ago, and I respect his opinion rather highly (we should all probably move to Coda or Andrew so that the implementations can mature!) There are great advantages and small disadvantages to that approach. But you need LDAP to make it really integrate properly, and the samba team will always be facing challenges from Microsoft's evolving use of crypto that will make their product lag slightly behind Microsofts' implementation releases (granted, once the samba stuff catches up it's more robust and scaleable). Because it's less secure than NFSv4 and LDAP, and far less cost-effective than Samba, and less compatible with non-microsoft systems than OpenLDAP or Red Hat directory server. If you have a highly skilled computer staff and relatively unskilled end-users (a situation often found in a profitable corporation) samba and OpenLDAP are a nice combination. Don't try it if your IS group is a bunch of talentless hacks, though!
Is this him? Don't much care for his website design, I must say. But I'm not much good at that either so I shouldn't really criticize!
I suspect given the NASA data on insolation of my area (rough average 3.5 kWh/m2/day, according to the site) and the amount of unshaded space on my property (roughly 100 m2 if we're being really, really optimistic) it would be pretty hard for me to get ROI from this technology. Cutting down trees would be a big mistake since the buildings would all wash away in the next flood.
Looks pretty cool for people in Oz and the US desert southwest, though.
I certainly don't claim to be a PV expert. Especially since the yearly insolation in my area sucks! My PVs are toys, although I've been playing with them off and on for several decades. The low-voltage RE system I'm trying to build to power my house is high-volume low-head hydro, which is more practical here on the US east coast fall line.
Any links for the sunball man? I'd love to learn more about his rig. But now you are talking about cooling the cells, introducing additional equipment and costs that were not previously part of this conversation. If I was lax in not investigating the possibilities and costs of cell cooling, surely you are just as much so for not including the costs when you say "a $10/m^2 aluminized polyester sheet"? Regardless, thanks for the info - I'd love to know more about your system, and your parents'... sounds very interesting, albeit higher maintenance than plain-jane PV. Around here any water feed that is exposed to open air has to be continually maintained to prevent mold or algae blockages, and anything with water running over it turns furry black or slick green rather quick (although a sacrifical anode and a chlorox drip works wonders in my wacky old house plumbing, and the victorian-era brass parts seem to be immune to everything).
Your comments about regulatory design by committee are spot on. I stand corrected!
The "browned" panels I spoke of come from the "big commercial solar power stations" you mention. I'm told it's profitable for them to overheat panels and replace them regularly.
Incidentally, I think we're getting dragged off into the weeds on the issue of ohmic heating of wires. You specifically referred to "cooling" in your reply to some other fellow's (made-up-for-humor-effect) "high-temperature superconductor" post, and I pointed out that he said "high temperature". I'm sorry I mentioned it now!
But in regards to cabling, I suppose I should have stuck to a simple proposition of "fatter cables resist DC less" and "stranded cabling resists DC less", with "less" empirically determined by measurement of voltage drop in a real 12 or 24 VDC RE system under load. Your explanations of that phenomena sound reasonable (although I personally can get a solid electrical and mechanical connection to any piece of copper, with a torch if necessary) but I note you said "most of it comes down to the fact" - was that just an idiom, or is there something more? Wrenches typically do not try to explain it, they just say it's related to surface area of the conductor and it's a small value compared to everything else, and thus mostly important to off-gridders who want every last volt. Theorists insist the phenomenon does not exist, and say only the cross-sectional area matters. The annoying Usenet people usually go on about skin effect and surface waves, but they aren't very believable.
I'm been operating on the idea that impedance to AC and resistance to DC are two different things, and wires that are sized for a high-volt AC distribution would likely be too small for low-volt DC to the same household. Would you agree? I'm also thinking that of all the solar-powered gizmos I've ever purchased, the ones with thicker wires from the panel worked better (your explanation of that sounds pretty reasonable, though).
Thank you. And before you have any ideas about me, I am not a militant Muslim and I reject most of what "islamic culture" is and loathe most "Islamists". I hate the fact that they make people think that what they are is what Islam is supposed to be.
So my personal preferences for both me and you are that you and I have the right to find happiness however we see fit provided that we do not harm anyone else.
I'm glad that you found my link on pedophiles informative. Believe me, the goal of homosexuals is to enforce gay rights on the entire world. They are everything that a conservative Christian fears about liberal democrats except one-hundred times worse. Gays will lie about their plans and desires in accordance with the homosexual agenda. I encourage you look up the gay concept of "ACT UP" which indicates why all agreements made with homosexuals are useless. (It gives insight into why Brett Lock offered a "truce".) The more straight people (that's you and I) who wake up to the threat to our life, liberty, and property the greater chance we have of the world not becoming one big gay empire. America may very well be lost, and that makes me very sad. I love America, but its future is rather dim.
You mean that for real? Like, your house would not fall down if you tore off all the drywall and siding and 2x4s and just had a naked frame holding up your roof and all your stuff? You have trunnels pinning your tenons?
My house is post and beam, but it's been around for a century or two. You gotta have the big bucks if you are building real post and beam these days! It's a better investment than a bunch of soon-to-be-worthless computers, though.
You should not try to compete with BadAnalogyGuy.
I can see both sides of this, though. I like to hire guys who have the efficiency bug, guys who want the most elegant solution to every problem, rather than guys who are so fascinated with technology that they aren't offended by baroque Rube Goldberg contraptions. On the other claw, a guy who is too obsessed with perfection never completes anything, and a guy who is not an explorer is unlikely to keep up with current technologies that could be very useful.
More on-topic, if someone wants to self-identify on Yahoo with an offensive name, that seems OK to me, it lets people know which posts will be offensive without having to read them. Remember those innocous-sounding links on slashdot that used to deliver you to goatse? You knew not to click on the ones posted by "goatsex" (and I still won't click on a tinyurl or makeashorterlink from a slashdot poster I don't know - my eyeballs are still hurting from the clorox and steel wool).
I usually get accused of being a commie pinko, or an America-hating liberal, so the "bleeding red white and blue" was kind of refreshing. Thanks!
Those 11/34s run a lot cooler than 11/70s, and the 3100 wasn't so bad, but aren't some of those 4000 class machines serious space-heaters?
I just recycled a whole bunch of old macs and an antique SPARC last month because they were never getting used for anything. I still have a 3100e with OpenVMS hobbyist but I never turn it on anymore... sad really.
The first page of that article was great, I agree. But the second page goes on to make false statements (such as, the president can't hurt you if he wants to - currently the president can seize you in broad daylight without making any charges and torture you to death in a secret prison without telling anyone) and ridiculous sweeping generalities (as if "radical Islam" and "Western media" were cohesive entities with a single mind each).
It also conveniently ignores the role of agents provocateur - most of the rioters have not seen the real cartoons, but supposedly many of them have seen extremely offensive cartoons, calculated to stir their emotions, distributed by.... who? Most of the rioters are said to be illiterate!
Most Arab Muslims have no access whatsoever to these cartoons. Their so-called "rioting" and "spontaneous demonstrations" are being orchestrated by somebody.
Mainstream Islam does not benefit from these "riots" and "demonstrations". In fact the principle benefactors of this activity are the USA, Israel, Iran, and oppressive Middle Eastern governments (Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc.) who want to let their dissatisfied masses blow off steam instead of revolting. These countries profit from either demonizing Islam or demonizing western secularism.
The essay's conclusion, that we should uphold freedom of speech, I totally agree with! Unlike the current majority opinion in the US, I might add, which is that publications offensive to mainstream christians - principally gay porn and paedophilic materials - should not be allowed.
...but I don't think you can single-handedly conquer the right-wing hate machine.
A lot of the kids at my children's elementary school won't play with the (few) muslim kids. They've been taught unthinking hatred by their Christian parents, I guess, or by Faux News. Some of the Muslim kids come over to my house to play, though, because my kids go to Unitarian Universalist church and have been trained to judge people as individuals.
We monitor our kids pretty closely, so we meet the parents of their friends before we'll let our kids visit their houses. The Muslim parents we've thus met are similarly cautious. So far they've been nice folks, just trying to get by like anybody else. They haven't freaked out because our church performs gay marriages, or anything like that, although I'm guessing they'd probably freak if their mosque started advocating gay rights.
All the environmentalists I know simply want to live within the constraints of an ecology capable of reliably supporting human life. They fear that current trends will result in cockroaches and scorpions being the best fitted organism to live on earth. Most of them love trees and free-running, self-maintaining, human-drinkable streams - but the point is to avoid human extinction, not to model it.
Ghods, I love a post that makes me sound concise and intelligible.
Keep up the good work, and next time log in!
This subject is constantly discussed in the alternative energy community, with the battle generally being fought between the "wrenches" (guys working in the field, who build working systems for real customers and operate entirely on empirical evidence) and the "theorists" who usually claim that what the wrenches are doing is unsafe, impossible, or illegal.
I fall somewhere in the middle; I don't have decades of experience with multiple installed systems like the real wrenches (guys like Windy Dankoff, Bob-O Schultze, Richard Perez, Ian Woofendon, etc.) but what knowledge of electricity I do have was mostly gained in the field and not in a classroom.
Another guy "in the middle" (also with far more experience than I) is John Wiles. John has been living in a solar-powered house for quite a while, but he's a researcher at a New Mexico university whose work is funded by Sandia Labs. John has made multiple recommendations to the NEC, a few of which have been adopted (they all will eventually be adopted, I predict) into article 690, which deals with PV wiring specifically and low-voltage wiring in general.
This I know: In the field, wrenches use welding cables (specific brands of it) and DLO (Diesel Locomotive cabling) instead of huge, inflexible solid or thick-stranded wiring. They've been doing it for decades, illegally, without encountering any of the problems that the theorists have convinced the regulatory authorities will surely result. The theorists generally point to a single known instance where a welding cable's insulation cracked in use - ignoring dozens of similar instances where this did not happen, and dozens of instances where approved cables also experienced insulation failure - and say "welding cables are not safe".
In Real Life [tm] off-grid systems, fatter cables work better for low-voltage runs from power producing equipment to battery boxes, and from battery boxes to inverters. Surface area seems to be a factor since more strands works better (this is not true in AC wiring) for the same weight of copper. Within battery boxes, wrenches often use copper pipe tinned and flattened at the ends to bolt together battery strings at the lugs - this is cheap, safe and effective in actual use though most definitely not to code. I personally use 3/8" by 3/4" copper bar stock jacketed with rubber hose or heat-shrink tubing for battery interconnections (because I had some on hand) and I've noticed that the local telco uses even larger solid copper bars to connect their huge glass 2 volt lead-acid cells.
"Works better" in this context means that you can squeeze more run time off your loads given a set input of solar or hydro energy (wind is usually wild AC, a whole nother problem space). It also can mean "easier to install" since stranded cables are more flexible, but that's a secondary concern really.
As for focusing more light on PVs, a well designed installation might incorporate reflection or concentration, but it's rare because it's usually not as effective as increasing the surface area under sunlight. You have to remember that reflection is not perfect (to put it another way, mirrors get hot too) and a reflector has to be survivable in real use, which means it's going to be almost as expensive as adding solar panels. The same caveats apply to lenses, only more so; a lens that can survive as long as a PV panel might even be more expensive than additional PV - and if your lens gets dirty, power production degrades much less gracefully than with a reflector system. If you go overboard with concentration or reflection, you will burn up your PVs, or you will have to buy special super-duper high temp PVs that again cost more than just putting in more panels instead of lenses or mirrors. The "browned off" PV panels you can buy cheap, that have less than half their rated output, were burnt up by reflection/concentration schemes.
I was thinking about buying one, but I couldn't find it on any english-language pages...
But anyway, this is version 1.0, which I like because I want the battery's power to be directed to the music, not to run an LCD. You can always wait for 1.5 (Ogg Vorbelized, perhaps) or 2.0 (maybe that LCD screen you want) but I am happy with the simple, small, interfaces-with-any-USB-capable-computer current model.
One thing Pat won't tell you (because the PEZ lawyers are idiots) is that you usually have to modify a regular PEZ head if you want it to fit on the PEZmp3. A little dremel work on the chin area put Hello Kitty on my buddy's wife's PEZmp3, though, so it can be done.
Presumably, you won't need cooling for his "high-temperature" superconductor.
Off-grid houses sometimes use 5/0 wire or welding cable to minimize DC losses over distance. Most of the posters in this topic are saying high voltage AC power transmission is for reducing line loss, but I believe it's more for reducing the size of the conductor needed to prevent excessive loss. If your wire had the surface area of a football field, you probably wouldn't lose much juice at all.
In Real Life [TM] that is. I don't know much about theory but I've done a few miles of wiring.
You can spot poorly designed solar gadgets, such as are sold at Home Despot and K-Mart, by the thin wiring. It should be thick thick thick if you want to squeeze all you can out of a PV cell.
Just kidding. Seriously, calling in additional codebases unnecessarily is a bad idea - as Alan Robertson likes to say "complexity is the enemy of reliability". Why bulk up the memory footprint, CPU requirements, and total lines of source where bugs can occur if you don't really need to?
I'm toying with the idea of rewriting the whole thing in gawk. Compiled C would be even better, although that would be overkill (even for me).
I've been shocked with 60 cps 120 VAC dozens if not hundreds of times. It doesn't particularly bother me regardless of humidity or capacity of the circuit. It's possible that I have a high pain threshold, but I'm certainly not a masochist. My doctor says my heart is normal, too.
For the last few decades I've double-checked 120 VAC lines to see if they were "live" by touching them with my bare hands. One hand on the neutral or ground, one finger tapping the (supposedly dead) screw holding down the hot lead. Every once in a while (more often now that I live in a building with over a hundred years of wiring by accretion) I get shocked due to inaccurate labels in a breaker box or carelessness. It's no big deal - if it was, I'd use a voltmeter, which is less convenient.
440 VAC, now I can tell you that hurts. I don't recommend taking a hit of more than 120VAC. And while some hackers will taste connectors for current (RS-232C feels like a weakish 9-volt battery on your tongue) you have to watch out for toxic metals like lead and cadmium and you should not stick a live phone wire in your mouth (if the phone were to ring, you'd have a non-fatal but really unpleasant experience).
Oh, and just because you can tap a live 120 VAC line with your finger and only feel a sharp tingle, doesn't mean you can't hurt yourself with house current. A short circuit with a metal object such as a screwdriver will produce noise, molten metal, and a flash bright and actinic enough to give you a nasty burn and a mild case of welder's eyes. And don't get yourself in a situation where high amps will be forcibly pumped through you by a collapsing circuit, I'm pretty sure that would be bad.
OK, that code exits dirty at EOF. Needs a small modification to pass exit status of read back through function return to main while loop:
ReadFields () {
local IFS=:
Host="#"
while [ `expr substr $Host 1 1` = "#" ]
do
read Host Key Interval Excludes Keep || return
done
}
Still ugly and inelegant, in my opinion, but at least it seems to work... and it has an explicit EOF return now, which is probably a good thing.
Thanks, that's a cool site!
The examples it pulled up for me all used sed, though, and I've already got a somewhat lame method that doesn't require anything but bash.
I always try to minimise my use of external calls, regardless of language, in order to keep my code as portable as possible. Obviously there are limits, I use Graham Barr's LDAP perl modules rather than try to write my own LDAP routines for every perl hack I might need! But for this job I'd rather not call sed, gawk, grep, and friends unless it's really absolutely necessary.
I've bookmarked codefetch for future reference. Thanks again!
Well, I did this, which solves the problem, but is not particularly elegant in my opinion:
/etc/passwd or /etc/printcap format). The use of a function and a local variable prevents IFS getting polluted within the main while loop. I don't like it but it works in practice.
ReadFields () {
local IFS=:
Host="#"
while [ `expr substr $Host 1 1` = "#" ]
do
read Host Key Interval Excludes Keep
done
}
while ReadFields
do
(stuff gets done to each host)
done $ConfigFile
This method restricts commenting to lines with a first character of "#" and it reads a series of fields separated by colon characters (something like
There's no "bash" or "bourne shell" listed in the drop-down box.
Which is unfortunate since I need a snippet to make my fielded read loop ignore comments and I'm lazy.
Ah, well.
Death comes to us all, and no one can prevent it. But if you make it possible for more babies to survive to adulthood, and you don't change the culture to accomodate a population explosion, you may just be guaranteeing that more babies will eventually die (of starvation, most likely) than if you did nothing at all.
Screwing around with the load-carrying capacity of a local environment should not be done lightly, and definitely not by do-gooder foreigners who haven't extensively studied the local conditions and thought through the implications. If you give a people clean water today, you may well cause massive desertification in 30 years that could wipe out their entire ethnic group! All those people that didn't die from bad water will need fuel, housing, food, etc. and if they use the traditional means of satisfying those needs the local ecosystem may not be able to support their increased impact.
A starving man would rather have a sandwich than a textbook. But despite that, education is a better gift to a tribe on the edge of starvation than sandwiches.