I don't think all of this would happen if they realized that Slashdot's value doesn't stem from it as a news site (of which there are thousands), but as a news discussion site.
Messing with the comment, moderation and social functionalities and their design over here is playing with fire.
I don't think these folks understand that people don't come to Slashdot to read carefully selected news (which are not, BTW) in a pretty-glossy presentation, but to participate in or consume/read the discussion. And the new Beta demolishes that.
If someone else better skilled in writing would make a petition on http://www.petitiononline.com/ and direct it at those guys, that would be so much more effective than ranting here in comments, which these people probably had never looked at, or trying to organize boycotts among a disorganized crowd.
I don't think all of this would happen if they realized that Slashdot's value doesn't stem from it as a news site (of which there are thousands), but as a news discussion site.
Messing with the comment, moderation and social functionalities and their design over here is playing with fire.
I don't think these folks understand that people don't come to Slashdot to read carefully selected news (which are not, BTW) in a pretty-glossy presentation, but to participate in or consume/read the discussion. And the new Beta demolishes that.
If someone else better skilled in writing would make a petition on http://www.petitiononline.com/ and direct it at those guys, that would be so much more effective than ranting here in comments, which these people probably had never looked at, or harassing random rank-and-file Dice employees.
Although, Her Twitter seems a more promising contact channel. Still active.
After reading through other linked profles from her Google Plus profile, especially the CrunchBase one, I'm getting pretty confident that I've nailed it.
Who else would have the power to force through such a profound destruction of value, stretched through such a long time period without any checks?
If someone else better skilled in writing would make a petition on http://www.petitiononline.com/ and direct it at those guys, that would be so much more effective than ranting here in comments, which these people probably had never looked at.
Although, Her Twitter seems a more promising contact channel. Still active.
After reading through other linked profles from her Google Plus profile, especially the CrunchBase one, I'm getting pretty confident that I've nailed it:
Hill was named Managing Director of Dice.com in November 2010. She is responsible for the development and direction of all activities for Dice.com, with particular emphasis on product development and innovation, building and maintaining industry presence, and managing large account sales. Dice.com, a Dice Holdings company, is the leading career website for technology and engineering professionals, and the companies that seek to employ them. NYSE: DHX
in 2012 Hill was appointed President of Slashdot Media - running the SF and NY-based company and its three media properties, SourceForge, Slashdot and FreeCode. Slashdot Media is owned by parent Company Dice Holdings, Inc.
Who else would have the power to force through such a profound destruction of value, stretched through such a long time period without any checks?
"10+ years experience managing large-scale consumer Web properties from conceptualization and staffing, to product innovation, large-scale redesigns and platform overhauls, mobile versions, multi-lingual content creation/production, international engineering team management, and next-stage product growth/roadmap development.".
Of course, I might be wrong, but that's what I came up with after 30 seconds of Googling (which, apparently, noone else in this thread bothered to do).
BTW, she has a handle here on Slashdot (no activity since 2004, though - talk about eating one's own dogfood... I mean, it's almost 10 years of no activity) - you can try asking her directly...
Although, Her Twitter seems a more promising contact channel. Still active.
"10+ years experience managing large-scale consumer Web properties from conceptualization and staffing, to product innovation, large-scale redesigns and platform overhauls, mobile versions, multi-lingual content creation/production, international engineering team management, and next-stage product growth/roadmap development.".
Of course, I might be wrong, but that's what I came up with after 30 seconds of Googling (which, apparently, noone else in this thread bothered to do).
when NT Server terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son's utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl.
I think that dogfood's gone bad and grown some mushrooms. Also, how does a T-Rex imitate a Pterodactyl... flapping its little arms vainly?
I think that now we can see clearly, where ~BadAnalogyGuy has gone to...
Ok so you add a unique hardware ID (burned into the card when its manufactured and unchangeable) and the data stored on the card is tied to it. If the card data is cloned, the card its cloned to wont have the correct ID and will fail to work.
Its not like the people cloning these cards to get free bus travel are going to be spending dollars on equipment that can somehow create cards with the correct unique ID for the cards they are copying. Plus, a cloned card wont have the correct transit company logos on it (unless you can replicate that too which also costs dollars to do properly) meaning inspectors or drivers looking to see your card (which happens on the transit network in my city which also has a card system) will see that its a fake.
How do you propose to practically achieve this "burned" ID?
How can you prevent the attacker from obtaining cards from a different manufacturer who doesn't do this "burning in" and lets the users to set any value in any stored field?
The whole aim of having the cards being "smart" is that they can be equipped with a protected private key that they don't allow to be read from the outside world and that these cards perform cryptographic signing internally, without letting any secret information about performed cryptography out.
As far as I understand, the flaws in various public transit card systems are mostly due to weak implementations of cryptography. Your proposed solution, on the other hand, is completely wide open to attacks, so it's much worse.
Why is it that transit smart cards always seem to take longer to roll out than promised, cost more than promised, end up being more complex than promised and end up being less secure than they should be?
You dont even need to make the cards themselves "smart", you can make the cads just data storage devices that can store an encrypted data blob and do all the cryptography and stuff in the readers. And you can use good strong well-tested cryptography instead of inventing your own crypto.
Cards would be cheaper because they wouldn't contain much logic, just a memory chip, RFID/NFC/whatever antenna and some logic to read from and write to the memory chip. Anyone who builds a reader and reads their card out will simply get an encrypted/signed blob that they cant mess with.
Do you really think it's that simple? If it was, there would be no problem.
Your proposed non-smart card solution (as any stored value one) is inherently susceptible to cloning. Anybody with a RFID/NFC reader can pass close to you just once, then produce a card that's an identical copy (from the perspective of the system) of yours. He can then have a few rides at your cost and discard the cloned card or load another individual's captured data onto it so that he can avoid using a particular person's card for too long.
The transport company could see symptoms of duplication (rides by the same customer at the same time observed in different areas), but good luck with distinguishing between the original user and the clone! They'd have to employ careful analysis of riding patterns to isolate the individual who uses cloned cards (assuming that his transport usage patterns are uniform).
There are numerous client apps for Android (e.g. Tower Collector) that allow you collect logs of GPS coordinates+visible tower cell IDs and submit these logs to OpenCellID.
It seems that in this case, indeed, Helium would be the byproduct. More specifically, Helium-4 according to the list of important fusion reactions on Wikipedia.
But as you can see from this list, there are several fusion reactions theoretically available for terrestrial use - most produce Helium, but there are also ones that produce isotopes of Beryllium, Tritium, Lithium and even an aneutronic one that produces Carbon.
Nonetheless, the high energy yield of fusion reactions means that, although we'd get immense amounts of energy from them, the amount of Helium created as a byproduct would be negligible, so it would be unlikely to solve our helium shortage problems. Much more likely is that availability of cheap, safe and clean energy from fusion would make it feasible to establish permanent mining colonies on the moon to extract helium from its soil and deliver it to Earth.
1) Windows 8 install will not overwrite the *whole* contents of your disk, only the parts that will be written to during the installation process - that's only as much as the OS needs for its system files. The rest of the disk content will remain untouched.
2) You can always configure your disk wipe tool so that the last passes over the disk will write non random content - e.g. only zeros or ones, and random writes will only be used with preceding intermediate passes. So the disk will end up guaranteed holding non-random, non-incriminating content.
3) The probability of random data creating incriminating stuff you refer to is so negligible that you suffer from larger risk of being hit and killed by a meteorite falling from the sky during the next minute. That is considering that there has only been a single recorded case in human history of a person being killed by a meteorite, and, coming from a 1677 italian manuscript, it cannot be considered a verified fact. In other words, you have much more probable risks to worry about than that.
Statistically speaking, you almost certainly lost more of your lifetime only by thinking about that risk just now, than lost to the actual risk. Please, read this article so that you're more rational about thinking about your risks.
To fully secure our VPN, I've now built a CA on a non-Internet connected machine which sits behind lock and key. I use it to create SSL certificates for our VPN routers. I'm not building these Certs for Joe Average to connect to my servers, I'm building them so I can be sure that communications between my VPN endpoints is secure, and by securing the CA I can be certain that the likelihood of anyone, including the NSA, can break into my VPN tunnels with any kind of non-local exploit is low to nil.
Did you secure the machine against passive electromagnetic emissions eavesdropping when it is powered on? That would require making a full faraday cage out of your CA machine's server room, with a fully self-contained power source (possibly a fossil-fueled powered generator?) within and no communication wires whatsoever crossing the cage's boundary.
Are the private keys of your VPN nodes stored in secure, physically tamper-proof hardware security module devices both resitant to electromagnetic eavesdropping and trusted to not have NSA backdoors, or are they on disks or other non protected memory?
Depending on answers to those questions, your precautions against NSA spying may not be effective at all.
With everything being in the cloud, what if the cloud is gone someday. The google reader is just an example here.
If google reader is just a desktop app, we can happily conitnue to use it even it is abandoned.
But if it is in the cloud, we are screwed.
If "the cloud" (the whole of it) is gone someday, there also won't be any RSS/ATOM feeds left for you to use your desktop app with.
My point is, "the cloud" being gone isn't very probable - some services like Google Reader may disappear, but if they are popular, others will immediately spot the opportunity to take their place (like presently feedly.com, netvibes.com or newsblur.com), possibly even improving upon these on their way out.
The 95% of business that you had experience with must have been from some bottom of the barrel places, intelectually-wise.
In the three companies I've worked for in the last 12 years (the last two counting > 10k employees), the "track changes" functionality, along with all related stuff (review comments, automated tracked change merging, accept/reject) was in active, constant use as an integrated part of work processes and culture. This extended to all of those companies' partners throughout any collaborative work on any set of documents.
That's not to say that the dreaded document versioning scheme using name suffixes (Document_2012-11-28.docx, etc.) wasn't in use - one practice doesn't exclude the other. It has been a common sight to see multiple document copies with different versions in their names cluttering a shared network drive, SVN directory (!) or a SharePoint document library, even when the underlying store was capable of versioning by itself. Still, lots of those versions were "draft" ones with tracked changes and comments inside them.
Too many software projects/architects have an easy-in, hard-out policy on features. "We can't drop feature X, it's been there for years and some crazy people in siberia still use it". It's ok to drop features on major-cycle releases. Perhaps even necessary for long-term project health.
What for? In the name of what? With such approach, when breaking feature-level backward compatibility, you'd give lots of people (not only "crazy people in Siberia") loads of pain since they would be forced to devise a strategy for getting rid of/replacing those deprecated features.
On the other hand, the model of "old things become outdated, new things emerge, some people stick with the old and are happy, some jump onto the new stuff because it suits them better" works quite well IMHO. It's the natural way the world works. Including nature, civilization, science, technology and so on. Do you imply that there's something wrong with that and we should artificially force some change upon those who are unwilling to take it?
Not quite. Without PV, lots of solar enerdy would simply get reflected (assuming that the tents would be made of a bright material - you could even possibly use bare sheet metal roofs that would act like mirrors, reflecting most of that energy with just a fraction of complexity of the system involving PV and Peltier).
With PV, you are deliberately accepting that energy using dark solar panels and have to do something with it.
You need to solve the problem of transporting the heat away, otherwise you're doing a thing that amounts to (pardon my French) shitting next to your dining table.
Yes, that's obvious, but what do you do about the unmanageably hot sides of the elements that hang outside the tents? They will emit heat into the air, the air will circulate and reheat the surroundings and possibly the insides of the tents... What about people who travel between the tents?
Wouldn't that only add to the heat present in the system? Unless you solve the problem of moving the waste heat somewhere away from the place, you'll just introduce more heat produced by thermodynamic inefficiencies of the process involving transport of heat using Peltier elements - the laws of thermodynamics, especially the first one, are ruthless.
True, the air heated by radiators attached to Peltier elements might get hot enough to raise upwards and travel away from the camp, but you'd need to perform real world tests to really know whether the effect that you achieve would be that of cooling, or warming.
Wouldn't that add to the heat? The waste heat transported by Peltier elements needs to be moved somewhere else, otherwise you'll just get more heat stemming from the thermodynamic inefficiency of the process.
Sure, the hot air might rise upwards and the tents might gain some cooling from such a setup, but I think this needs testing in real life in order to determine whether the real effect will be that of cooling, or warming.
The trust has to do not with sexual activity, but with people generally being possessive with regards to each other in a relationship (especially women towards men but this may be a cultural bias, not necessary evolutional/biological).
This is a universal trait of humans and it's not dependent on religion. It has more to do with inherent egoism and self interest.
Take a look at any ancient epics like Greek myths or Norse sagas.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, given the diversity of Slashdot audience and their nonexistent ability to organize, a boycott is unlikely to effect any real change.
On the other hand, Alice Hill - President at Slashdot Media or some of her bosses from Dice Holdings, like Michael P. Durney - President and CEO or Klavs Miller - Senior Vice President, Technology can be quite effective in stopping this madness and idiotic destruction of value, if they care to understand the problem at hand.
I don't think all of this would happen if they realized that Slashdot's value doesn't stem from it as a news site (of which there are thousands), but as a news discussion site.
Messing with the comment, moderation and social functionalities and their design over here is playing with fire.
I don't think these folks understand that people don't come to Slashdot to read carefully selected news (which are not, BTW) in a pretty-glossy presentation, but to participate in or consume/read the discussion. And the new Beta demolishes that.
If someone else better skilled in writing would make a petition on http://www.petitiononline.com/ and direct it at those guys, that would be so much more effective than ranting here in comments, which these people probably had never looked at, or trying to organize boycotts among a disorganized crowd.
Well, a receptionist is really unlikely to effect any real change.
On the other hand, Alice Hill - President at Slashdot Media or some of her bosses from Dice Holdings, like Michael P. Durney - President and CEO or Klavs Miller - Senior Vice President, Technology can be quite effective in stopping this madness and idiotic destruction of value, if they care to undersand the problem at hand.
I don't think all of this would happen if they realized that Slashdot's value doesn't stem from it as a news site (of which there are thousands), but as a news discussion site.
Messing with the comment, moderation and social functionalities and their design over here is playing with fire.
I don't think these folks understand that people don't come to Slashdot to read carefully selected news (which are not, BTW) in a pretty-glossy presentation, but to participate in or consume/read the discussion. And the new Beta demolishes that.
If someone else better skilled in writing would make a petition on http://www.petitiononline.com/ and direct it at those guys, that would be so much more effective than ranting here in comments, which these people probably had never looked at, or harassing random rank-and-file Dice employees.
Although, Her Twitter seems a more promising contact channel. Still active.
After reading through other linked profles from her Google Plus profile, especially the CrunchBase one, I'm getting pretty confident that I've nailed it.
Who else would have the power to force through such a profound destruction of value, stretched through such a long time period without any checks?
If you really want this madness stopped, petition the boss of Dice Holdings, Michael P. Durney - President and CEO or possibly Klavs Miller - Senior Vice President, Technology.
If someone else better skilled in writing would make a petition on http://www.petitiononline.com/ and direct it at those guys, that would be so much more effective than ranting here in comments, which these people probably had never looked at.
Although, Her Twitter seems a more promising contact channel. Still active.
After reading through other linked profles from her Google Plus profile, especially the CrunchBase one, I'm getting pretty confident that I've nailed it:
Hill was named Managing Director of Dice.com in November 2010. She is responsible for the development and direction of all activities for Dice.com, with particular emphasis on product development and innovation, building and maintaining industry presence, and managing large account sales. Dice.com, a Dice Holdings company, is the leading career website for technology and engineering professionals, and the companies that seek to employ them. NYSE: DHX
in 2012 Hill was appointed President of Slashdot Media - running the SF and NY-based company and its three media properties, SourceForge, Slashdot and FreeCode. Slashdot Media is owned by parent Company Dice Holdings, Inc.
Who else would have the power to force through such a profound destruction of value, stretched through such a long time period without any checks?
A person directed the Slashdot redesign.
Who is he?
I think that either SHE (Alice Hill - President at Slashdot Media) did or she knows exactly who did. Quoting from her experience:
"10+ years experience managing large-scale consumer Web properties from conceptualization and staffing, to product innovation, large-scale redesigns and platform overhauls, mobile versions, multi-lingual content creation/production, international engineering team management, and next-stage product growth/roadmap development.".
Her or her subordinates' actions currently directly undermine the business of HER (Joyce Goh, Director, Ad Operations at Slashdot Media (Dice Holdings, Inc.)).
Of course, I might be wrong, but that's what I came up with after 30 seconds of Googling (which, apparently, noone else in this thread bothered to do).
BTW, she has a handle here on Slashdot (no activity since 2004, though - talk about eating one's own dogfood... I mean, it's almost 10 years of no activity) - you can try asking her directly...
Although, Her Twitter seems a more promising contact channel. Still active.
A person directed the Slashdot redesign.
Who is he?
I think that either SHE (Alice Hill - President at Slashdot Media) did or she knows exactly who did. Quoting from her experience:
"10+ years experience managing large-scale consumer Web properties from conceptualization and staffing, to product innovation, large-scale redesigns and platform overhauls, mobile versions, multi-lingual content creation/production, international engineering team management, and next-stage product growth/roadmap development.".
Her or her subordinates' actions currently directly undermine the business of HER (Joyce Goh, Director, Ad Operations at Slashdot Media (Dice Holdings, Inc.)).
Of course, I might be wrong, but that's what I came up with after 30 seconds of Googling (which, apparently, noone else in this thread bothered to do).
when NT Server terrorized the data center landscape with the confidence of a T-Rex born to yuppie dinosaur parents who fully bought into the illusion of their son's utter uniqueness because the big-mouthed, tiny-armed monster infant could mimic the gestures of The Itsy-Bitsy Pterodactyl.
I think that dogfood's gone bad and grown some mushrooms. Also, how does a T-Rex imitate a Pterodactyl... flapping its little arms vainly?
I think that now we can see clearly, where ~BadAnalogyGuy has gone to...
Ok so you add a unique hardware ID (burned into the card when its manufactured and unchangeable) and the data stored on the card is tied to it. If the card data is cloned, the card its cloned to wont have the correct ID and will fail to work.
Its not like the people cloning these cards to get free bus travel are going to be spending dollars on equipment that can somehow create cards with the correct unique ID for the cards they are copying. Plus, a cloned card wont have the correct transit company logos on it (unless you can replicate that too which also costs dollars to do properly) meaning inspectors or drivers looking to see your card (which happens on the transit network in my city which also has a card system) will see that its a fake.
How do you propose to practically achieve this "burned" ID?
How can you prevent the attacker from obtaining cards from a different manufacturer who doesn't do this "burning in" and lets the users to set any value in any stored field?
The whole aim of having the cards being "smart" is that they can be equipped with a protected private key that they don't allow to be read from the outside world and that these cards perform cryptographic signing internally, without letting any secret information about performed cryptography out.
That's also why there's so much effort put into making smart cards tamper-evident (see Design principles for Tamper-Resistant Smartcard Processors (1999)) and withstand electromagnetic eavesdropping (see ElectroMagnetic Analysis (EMA): Measures and Counter-measures for Smart Cards) - so that you can't just put a receiver close to them when a transaction is being performed and steal their private key.
As far as I understand, the flaws in various public transit card systems are mostly due to weak implementations of cryptography. Your proposed solution, on the other hand, is completely wide open to attacks, so it's much worse.
Why is it that transit smart cards always seem to take longer to roll out than promised, cost more than promised, end up being more complex than promised and end up being less secure than they should be?
You dont even need to make the cards themselves "smart", you can make the cads just data storage devices that can store an encrypted data blob and do all the cryptography and stuff in the readers. And you can use good strong well-tested cryptography instead of inventing your own crypto.
Cards would be cheaper because they wouldn't contain much logic, just a memory chip, RFID/NFC/whatever antenna and some logic to read from and write to the memory chip. Anyone who builds a reader and reads their card out will simply get an encrypted/signed blob that they cant mess with.
Do you really think it's that simple? If it was, there would be no problem.
Your proposed non-smart card solution (as any stored value one) is inherently susceptible to cloning. Anybody with a RFID/NFC reader can pass close to you just once, then produce a card that's an identical copy (from the perspective of the system) of yours. He can then have a few rides at your cost and discard the cloned card or load another individual's captured data onto it so that he can avoid using a particular person's card for too long.
The transport company could see symptoms of duplication (rides by the same customer at the same time observed in different areas), but good luck with distinguishing between the original user and the clone! They'd have to employ careful analysis of riding patterns to isolate the individual who uses cloned cards (assuming that his transport usage patterns are uniform).
It is trying to build a public (or so it says) database of where there is cell towers and or wifi, all geolocated by GPS.
For cell towers, there alredy exists such a database:
OpenCellID.org
There are numerous client apps for Android (e.g. Tower Collector) that allow you collect logs of GPS coordinates+visible tower cell IDs and submit these logs to OpenCellID.
It seems that in this case, indeed, Helium would be the byproduct. More specifically, Helium-4 according to the list of important fusion reactions on Wikipedia.
But as you can see from this list, there are several fusion reactions theoretically available for terrestrial use - most produce Helium, but there are also ones that produce isotopes of Beryllium, Tritium, Lithium and even an aneutronic one that produces Carbon.
Nonetheless, the high energy yield of fusion reactions means that, although we'd get immense amounts of energy from them, the amount of Helium created as a byproduct would be negligible, so it would be unlikely to solve our helium shortage problems. Much more likely is that availability of cheap, safe and clean energy from fusion would make it feasible to establish permanent mining colonies on the moon to extract helium from its soil and deliver it to Earth.
Some flaws with your argument and proposal:
Statistically speaking, you almost certainly lost more of your lifetime only by thinking about that risk just now, than lost to the actual risk. Please, read this article so that you're more rational about thinking about your risks.
To fully secure our VPN, I've now built a CA on a non-Internet connected machine which sits behind lock and key. I use it to create SSL certificates for our VPN routers. I'm not building these Certs for Joe Average to connect to my servers, I'm building them so I can be sure that communications between my VPN endpoints is secure, and by securing the CA I can be certain that the likelihood of anyone, including the NSA, can break into my VPN tunnels with any kind of non-local exploit is low to nil.
Did you secure the machine against passive electromagnetic emissions eavesdropping when it is powered on? That would require making a full faraday cage out of your CA machine's server room, with a fully self-contained power source (possibly a fossil-fueled powered generator?) within and no communication wires whatsoever crossing the cage's boundary.
Are the private keys of your VPN nodes stored in secure, physically tamper-proof hardware security module devices both resitant to electromagnetic eavesdropping and trusted to not have NSA backdoors, or are they on disks or other non protected memory?
Depending on answers to those questions, your precautions against NSA spying may not be effective at all.
I think you'll be hard pressed to find a service that will support the export of google reader data.
I've tried feedly, and it integrates on-line with Google authentication, asking access to my Reader data:
feedly is requesting permission to:
Perform these operations when I'm not using the application
Then it has seamlessly and practically instantly imported all my feeds, categorized, and all starred items.
With everything being in the cloud, what if the cloud is gone someday. The google reader is just an example here. If google reader is just a desktop app, we can happily conitnue to use it even it is abandoned. But if it is in the cloud, we are screwed.
If "the cloud" (the whole of it) is gone someday, there also won't be any RSS/ATOM feeds left for you to use your desktop app with.
My point is, "the cloud" being gone isn't very probable - some services like Google Reader may disappear, but if they are popular, others will immediately spot the opportunity to take their place (like presently feedly.com, netvibes.com or newsblur.com), possibly even improving upon these on their way out.
The 95% of business that you had experience with must have been from some bottom of the barrel places, intelectually-wise.
In the three companies I've worked for in the last 12 years (the last two counting > 10k employees), the "track changes" functionality, along with all related stuff (review comments, automated tracked change merging, accept/reject) was in active, constant use as an integrated part of work processes and culture. This extended to all of those companies' partners throughout any collaborative work on any set of documents.
That's not to say that the dreaded document versioning scheme using name suffixes (Document_2012-11-28.docx, etc.) wasn't in use - one practice doesn't exclude the other. It has been a common sight to see multiple document copies with different versions in their names cluttering a shared network drive, SVN directory (!) or a SharePoint document library, even when the underlying store was capable of versioning by itself. Still, lots of those versions were "draft" ones with tracked changes and comments inside them.
What for? In the name of what? With such approach, when breaking feature-level backward compatibility, you'd give lots of people (not only "crazy people in Siberia") loads of pain since they would be forced to devise a strategy for getting rid of/replacing those deprecated features.
On the other hand, the model of "old things become outdated, new things emerge, some people stick with the old and are happy, some jump onto the new stuff because it suits them better" works quite well IMHO. It's the natural way the world works. Including nature, civilization, science, technology and so on. Do you imply that there's something wrong with that and we should artificially force some change upon those who are unwilling to take it?
Poor performance, high cost? That sounds exactly like systems that big business love the best (judging from looking around me).
Sorry, took a minute to reread what you said about albedo and convection. Are you sure that you don't overestimate convection here?
Not quite. Without PV, lots of solar enerdy would simply get reflected (assuming that the tents would be made of a bright material - you could even possibly use bare sheet metal roofs that would act like mirrors, reflecting most of that energy with just a fraction of complexity of the system involving PV and Peltier).
With PV, you are deliberately accepting that energy using dark solar panels and have to do something with it.
You need to solve the problem of transporting the heat away, otherwise you're doing a thing that amounts to (pardon my French) shitting next to your dining table.
Yes, that's obvious, but what do you do about the unmanageably hot sides of the elements that hang outside the tents? They will emit heat into the air, the air will circulate and reheat the surroundings and possibly the insides of the tents... What about people who travel between the tents?
Wouldn't that only add to the heat present in the system? Unless you solve the problem of moving the waste heat somewhere away from the place, you'll just introduce more heat produced by thermodynamic inefficiencies of the process involving transport of heat using Peltier elements - the laws of thermodynamics, especially the first one, are ruthless.
True, the air heated by radiators attached to Peltier elements might get hot enough to raise upwards and travel away from the camp, but you'd need to perform real world tests to really know whether the effect that you achieve would be that of cooling, or warming.
Wouldn't that add to the heat? The waste heat transported by Peltier elements needs to be moved somewhere else, otherwise you'll just get more heat stemming from the thermodynamic inefficiency of the process.
Sure, the hot air might rise upwards and the tents might gain some cooling from such a setup, but I think this needs testing in real life in order to determine whether the real effect will be that of cooling, or warming.
The trust has to do not with sexual activity, but with people generally being possessive with regards to each other in a relationship (especially women towards men but this may be a cultural bias, not necessary evolutional/biological).
This is a universal trait of humans and it's not dependent on religion. It has more to do with inherent egoism and self interest.
Take a look at any ancient epics like Greek myths or Norse sagas.