Bennett explains that this is important because (pay attention now) the same judge that wasn't able to determine what spam looks like also sits more vital cases like child custody, property damage, and rape.
This is news? I thought everybody realized that judges (lawyers in robes) are just as vile and worthless as lawyers in suits. The civil legal system is an old boy's network, but with smarter old boys running it. Regardless of whether you win or lose a case, the lawyers all get their cut.
Appearing Pro Se is worthless except in the most brain-dead of circumstances because decisions are primarily about rules and precedent rather than reason. Unless you have hundreds of hours to devote to becoming an expert, you'd better plan on losing the case. The lawyer in a suit will cite a couple of precedents and the lawyer in a robe will make a decision against you, regardless of your reason-based argument. He might throw you a bone and give you some Latin words that explain why your reason-based argument doesn't matter, even if it is right.
Will a solar cell manage to produce more power than was required to make it in its normal lifetime?
Yes, from Home Power #80:
Our study examined energy costs for two types of Siemens PV modules--single-crystalline silicon (SC-Si) and thin film copper indium diselenide (CIS). Crystalline silicon modules achieve an energy break-even in a little over three years. The energy payback time for thin film copper indium diselenide modules in full production is just under two years. Over their lifetime, these solar panels generate nine to seventeen times the energy required to produce them. Real Costs Our research was based on direct investigation of the energy requirements and net energy production of manufactured photovoltaic modules. Other studies employ production models with assumed process recipes, equipment sets, materials yields, and module efficiencies. None of them have used actual utility bills and accounting records. By contrast, our study didn't have to make any assumptions about yields. We just took energy requirements right off the utility bills and the materials requirements right off the bill of materials. This allowed us to include indirect materials as well, which as far as we can tell have never been included before. These include things like argon, nitrogen, etchants, cleaners, and so forth, all the way down to the cardboard box the modules get shipped in.
You can find full PDF's in the files section of the Yahoo group RunningOnEmpty3, "+pvpayback.pdf" and "+PV payback.pdf". You'll have to join the group to access them, or find them elsewhere.
You can buy optical cable for this purpose, but achieving the light levels most people want is difficult to do without longevity problems with the cable. You typically get about 1.5% light attenuation per foot of cable, and UV light is very bad for the cables (the less expensive plastic stuff anyway, glass cable probably doesn't have this issue). For home lighting solutions windows and solar tubes are much more cost effective for most rooms. Basements or interior rooms where windows and solar tubes can't reach can be lit with optical cable, but I think that if you are designing a small building it would be better to avoid creating spaces that require that sort of solution.
And if you know just enough to demand the speedy trial and to plead the 5th when asked for access codes?
Furthermore, you know that the 5th Amendment protection does not extend to keys, combinations and passwords? The court can compel you to produce these things because they, in and of themselves, do not incriminate you, it is the evidence that they reveal that does that, and you do not have a protected right to hide evidence that incriminates you.
This is why microsoft/vmware provide free virtual machine software.
I use Microsoft VPC with a Win2k image. Install SVN and connect to a repository on the network, set up a startup script to set the time system date to Jan 1st then save and backup the VHD. Adjust the settings file to disable time syncing. When you want to evaluate software, copy (or inherit from) the image. Turn on 'undo disks' and you have the option to discard all changes made during the run.
I ran the numbers recently as well, here is what I came up with. Note that I didn't do any actual measurements and relied only on what I could find in google with a few minutes searching. I've made some pretty generous (read, unrealistically optimistic) assumptions about what the human body is capable of and what people will put up with to have power.
Here is a ballpark estimation of the practicality of human power generation.
Let's assume that a person who's profession was power generation would be highly fit and well suited to long hours turning a generator at high output. If such a person could maintain an electrical output of 400W for 10 hours a day he would produce 4 kilowatt hours of electrical energy (ignoring conversion loss for the sake of simplicity). This is beyond mere 'Olympic' performance and well into the realm of the 'heroic', similar to a good bicycle sprint for 10 hours.
Given a heroic muscular efficiency of 30% (beyond the human normal range of 14-27%) this 4 kilowatt hours represents about 13kWh of input power, or food. This is about 11,000 dietary calories. I'll presume that the waste heat is too low-grade for power generation, but could be used to offset living space heating requirements during cold weather.
If we feed our hero nothing but soybeans (inexpensive and fairly energy dense at 1.75cal/gram and 0.00025 cents per gram in bulk ($6.80 for 60lb) he will need about 6.25 kilos of beans a day, at a price of about $1.60.
So your human power will cost in the range of 40 cents per kilowatt hour, or about 4 times the price of grid electrical power, presuming you can find teams of heroes willing to donate their time for free.
The US consumes around 4,000,000,000,000 kilowatt hours per year. At a rate of 1460 kWh per hero per year, you will need to employ 2,700,000,000 people (almost half the world population) each year to produce the required electrical power. Feeding them will require about 6,100,000,000,000 kilos of beans a year, or about 90 times the annual US soybean crop. You may be able to reduce the number of people required slightly with a methane capture system:) You can probably increase efficiency by feeding the heros that die in the line of duty to the living heros, thereby recyling a hundred or 2 pounds of material.
A typical household in the US consumes about 30 kWh per day. Consider that this is about 8 heroes pedaling generators in your basement, consuming a 40 pound bag of soybeans each day.
Powering a typical smallish refrigerator requires about one kilowatt-hour per day, so it would only take one hero two and a half hours to keep your food cold (or, if he is charging a battery, 5 hours after losses).
A typical real person could reasonably be expected to produce 200W for an hour a day (maybe 2 for extremely dedicated individuals), certainly enough to charge small devices like laptops, but just a drop in the bucket next to the power used by a typical person.
Kinda puts the power of fossil fuels into perspective.
What really threw me was when I went to get the insurance. All they asked me for was the address. They pulled up the floorplan for the house. It wasn't exactly the blueprints, but it did have an accurate description of the size and layout of every room in the house. They also knew how many feet it was to the nearest fire hydrant, crime and fire statistics for both the immediate neighborhood, and the general area.
I know there's lots of information available out there, but I didn't know any insurance agent had it immediately available.
No need to be an insurance agent, most anybody can get that information pretty quickly. The tax assessor here has a nice website where you can enter a property address or owner name to look up property details. It also gives you a nice web app that lets you browse around in a Google Maps-like interface for property information, then links you to the property details, often including a photo of the property. The web app even includes aerial photography of most of the county.
It's pretty cool, check it out. You may have to zoom out to see some stuff. Turn on the Parcel layer (right sidebar) to see the individual properties. Clikk the info tool (i) in the tool pallet on the left and click on a parcel to see who owns it, address, and a link to the web page detailing the property.
Maybe Oracle should have hired him as an off-site Java contractor at a rate of about $40k per year. If they needed him to answer any more Java questions they'd have his full attention. The 405k would have been enough to cover his income tax on the 'consulting' postion and the 25k in taxes for the free ride.
The government might not be smart enough to fall for that, but surely Oracle has some clever lawyers to work it out.
If a typical Nuclear power plant costs a billion dollars, what would happen if instead the money was spend on solar panels for individual homes, in the form of tax breaks and rebates for homeowners that put them up?
PV panels have an energy return on energy investment somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1. That is, for each watt you invest manufacturing and installing the panels you can get back somewhere between 1 and 2 watts.
Since PV panel manufacturers use traditional power sources (fossil fuel for mining the raw materials, grid electricity for manufacturing) you can think of a PV panel, until it reaches energy break-even, as a really compact battery. You put in the energy of a ton of coal all at once, then for the first two decades you get that energy back out, very slowly. After the panel as paid back it's energy debt and begins to return more power on top of what was used to manufacture it, then you are finally using 'green' power.
If you spent a billion dollars on solar panels you'd be taking a huge volume of grid electricity (produced from whatever the local grid runs on, hydroelectric would be good) and, effectively, packing it into a form (PV panels) that can easily be moved around and installed where power is needed. If the power used to produce the panels was coal-based, you'd burn a huge volume of coal now in trade for burning the same amount over the next 20 years.
The energy return on energy invested for nuclear isn't that great either, mostly because it takes a lot of energy to mine and process fuel, reprocess fuel, dispose of waste and construct and decommission the power plants. It is better than photovoltaic though, at least for now.
Oil has a very high EROEI, anywhere from 100:1 (the really easy to get to oil they found 100 years ago) to around 40:1 (the harder to extract oil we have today). Because fossil fuels are so widely used and so cheap, it's easy to forget how much they subsidize many other forms of power. Wind power for example. Mining, transporting and manufacturing the metals for the windmill all currently require lots of fossil fuels. These cheap energy sources make the embodied energy of the windmill cheap enough that the power produced by the mill is economical. But wind power is about sustainability and green-ness. What happens if you take the fossil fuels out of the equation and try to close the loop, manufacturing wind mills using only renewable power sources? The price of the windmill goes way up, because you have to pay more for the energy required to produce it.
Cheap energy underpins a huge part of the world economy. As we use up the easily-accessable fuels (the first oil wells were only a couple thousand feet deep, now we're drilling many thousands of feet, often under thousands of feet of water), the harder-to extract fuels cost more in energy to produce. For example, while tar-sands can be processed to make useful fuels, it takes much more power to do so than it does to pump light sweet crude out of Arabian desert. As the energy yeild on investment from these operations declines toward 1:1 it gets harder to make money. By using more effective technology you can maintain the overall energy output, but this comes at the expense of faster depletion of non-renewable fossil fuels. Somewhere down the line the fossil fuels will be so hard to find and so expensive to process that they will effectively be 'gone' (this could be generations away, or if you are a 'doomer', it could be next year).
The answer is to use the cheap power we have now to increase efficiency and reduce our demand, doing more things with less energy. This allows us to develop our renewable sources using cheap energy we have now, greatly extending the time we have fossil fuels available. Eventually they'll stop being profitable (e.g. 'run out') but with good planning we can make that something that happens far in the future.
It's a fairly simple matter to do this. The neighbors install two large AC induction motor couple the shafts together via a belt drive with a slight (around 2%) difference in diameter. Both motors are connected to the grid. One motor will consume power from the grid, the other will generate power.
This could be done electronically as well, but but it would probably be cheaper to pick up a couple of surplus motors.
Most meters now include tamper switches to defeat the 'flip the meter' trick. Most of the electronic meters (I have an iTron remote read meter) actually continue to correctly meter the power if they are inverted. They also can monitor reverse power flow and can report that as well.
I couldn't tell from the literature, but I think they can measure the energy flowing into and out of the house, so they can charge different rates for net metered power (e.g., you pay them 10 cents per kwh for incoming power and they pay you 5 cents per kwh for outgoing power)
As far as it 'wasting half the energy in the coal', well, the bottom line is "what does it cost me for A vs B", not what's the ultimate bio-ecological efficiency of a system.
I disagree, I think overall efficiency is more important than cost, up to a point (gaining small increases in efficiency for large piles of money isn't pratical). Where that point is depends on a number of factors, one of which is the budget you have for energy.
My main point is mostly just that the analysis of heating a space isn't always as easy as 'electric power is 100% efficient at the point of use' and that the dollar cost of a energy consumption is not necessarily the most important factor.
Guys, we're not wasting ANY energy, at least during the heating season.
Sort of true. If you are heating with electricity then no, that is not waste heat. But, if you are heating with gas then that electric heat costs double or triple what the gas heat it displaced would have cost. You are also using the energy in a very wasteful way, burning coal to make heat to make electricity, delivering the electricity, then turning it right back into heat. You've probably lost half the heat energy of the coal. Electricity for general space heating is wasteful if gas is available. Gas would probably be wastful if district heating from the waste heat of the coal burning power plant was available.
Also, there is a question of where that waste heat goes. My electric dryer heats up the laundry room and the basement (where the exhaust pipe runs). That heat is mostly wasted because it isn't somewhere useful (and unfortunately because of the layout of the place I can't really get it somewhere useful).
I cannot believe that no one has designed a remote control code for true POWER ON, POWER OFF signals, rather than a POWER FLIP signal.
Well, some code sets do actually have seperate ON and OFF codes as well as a power toggle. The problem is that the remotes only have one power button and the remote doesn't know if the device is on or off. I guess seperate ON and OFF buttons are too confusing.
But yeah, there is an amazing amount of stupidity in AV equipment. I think it must be deliberate.
Turn everything off and go look at your meter. it's still chugging along rather nicely.
Speaking of, how do you read a digital meter? No, I don't mean big 7 segment numbers indicating the total kWh used, that I can read. I mean since it lacks a spinning disk indicating the current rate of usage, I do I know how much power I'm using without standing there waiting for the numbers to change?
A lot of equipment is completely oblivious to this shift in frequency.
In fact, a lot of equipment with switching power supplies will run just fine on 100V DC power. Not that I recommend trying it, but if you ever find that you need to play warcraft and you have 10 car batteries and no inverter, well, there ya go.
Seabed and currents don't have anything to do with it (well, they can have as they influence the gravity, but that is so weak, that it is not measurable at all).
But I wonder where that statement of "a million times more sensitive than humans" comes from - I bet it's something some journalist guessed at 100 years ago that we are all passing on as if it were the definitive answer.
Journalist:... and this dog's nose is ten times better than a human's. Journalist's Assistant: aside::scoffs:: more like a hundred times. Journalist: Ok,... and this dog's nose is a HUNDRED times better than a human's. Assistant:::scoffs:: more like a THOUSAND times better. Journalist: exasperated Ok, where are we going with this?
I find that sex also happens to warm the bedroom nicely;
That's a great idea, do you know where I can find a couple to have sex in my bedroom? Can I post on Craig's list for that? It's okay if they are shy, they can shut the door.
Slashdot Mirror
Bennett explains that this is important because (pay attention now) the same judge that wasn't able to determine what spam looks like also sits more vital cases like child custody, property damage, and rape.
This is news? I thought everybody realized that judges (lawyers in robes) are just as vile and worthless as lawyers in suits. The civil legal system is an old boy's network, but with smarter old boys running it. Regardless of whether you win or lose a case, the lawyers all get their cut.
Appearing Pro Se is worthless except in the most brain-dead of circumstances because decisions are primarily about rules and precedent rather than reason. Unless you have hundreds of hours to devote to becoming an expert, you'd better plan on losing the case. The lawyer in a suit will cite a couple of precedents and the lawyer in a robe will make a decision against you, regardless of your reason-based argument. He might throw you a bone and give you some Latin words that explain why your reason-based argument doesn't matter, even if it is right.
Yes, from Home Power #80:
You can find full PDF's in the files section of the Yahoo group RunningOnEmpty3, "+pvpayback.pdf" and "+PV payback.pdf". You'll have to join the group to access them, or find them elsewhere.
You can buy optical cable for this purpose, but achieving the light levels most people want is difficult to do without longevity problems with the cable. You typically get about 1.5% light attenuation per foot of cable, and UV light is very bad for the cables (the less expensive plastic stuff anyway, glass cable probably doesn't have this issue). For home lighting solutions windows and solar tubes are much more cost effective for most rooms. Basements or interior rooms where windows and solar tubes can't reach can be lit with optical cable, but I think that if you are designing a small building it would be better to avoid creating spaces that require that sort of solution.
And if you know just enough to demand the speedy trial and to plead the 5th when asked for access codes?
Furthermore, you know that the 5th Amendment protection does not extend to keys, combinations and passwords? The court can compel you to produce these things because they, in and of themselves, do not incriminate you, it is the evidence that they reveal that does that, and you do not have a protected right to hide evidence that incriminates you.
True, but until they fix it you can have you cake without buying it.
They mean that people haven't invested in mining uranium lately. There is plenty of easy (for uranium) stuff in the US.
Uranium mining is great, but you can't do it in my state! (It's the one with a vowel in the name). Do it somewhere else.
This is why microsoft/vmware provide free virtual machine software.
I use Microsoft VPC with a Win2k image. Install SVN and connect to a repository on the network, set up a startup script to set the time system date to Jan 1st then save and backup the VHD. Adjust the settings file to disable time syncing. When you want to evaluate software, copy (or inherit from) the image. Turn on 'undo disks' and you have the option to discard all changes made during the run.
I call the image 'Groundhog day'.
I ran the numbers recently as well, here is what I came up with. Note that I didn't do any actual measurements and relied only on what I could find in google with a few minutes searching. I've made some pretty generous (read, unrealistically optimistic) assumptions about what the human body is capable of and what people will put up with to have power.
:) You can probably increase efficiency by feeding the heros that die in the line of duty to the living heros, thereby recyling a hundred or 2 pounds of material.
Here is a ballpark estimation of the practicality of human power generation.
Let's assume that a person who's profession was power generation would be highly fit and well suited to long hours turning a generator at high output. If such a person could maintain an electrical output of 400W for 10 hours a day he would produce 4 kilowatt hours of electrical energy (ignoring conversion loss for the sake of simplicity). This is beyond mere 'Olympic' performance and well into the realm of the 'heroic', similar to a good bicycle sprint for 10 hours.
Given a heroic muscular efficiency of 30% (beyond the human normal range of 14-27%) this 4 kilowatt hours represents about 13kWh of input power, or food. This is about 11,000 dietary calories. I'll presume that the waste heat is too low-grade for power generation, but could be used to offset living space heating requirements during cold weather.
If we feed our hero nothing but soybeans (inexpensive and fairly energy dense at 1.75cal/gram and 0.00025 cents per gram in bulk ($6.80 for 60lb) he will need about 6.25 kilos of beans a day, at a price of about $1.60.
So your human power will cost in the range of 40 cents per kilowatt hour, or about 4 times the price of grid electrical power, presuming you can find teams of heroes willing to donate their time for free.
The US consumes around 4,000,000,000,000 kilowatt hours per year. At a rate of 1460 kWh per hero per year, you will need to employ 2,700,000,000 people (almost half the world population) each year to produce the required electrical power. Feeding them will require about 6,100,000,000,000 kilos of beans a year, or about 90 times the annual US soybean crop. You may be able to reduce the number of people required slightly with a methane capture system
A typical household in the US consumes about 30 kWh per day. Consider that this is about 8 heroes pedaling generators in your basement, consuming a 40 pound bag of soybeans each day.
Powering a typical smallish refrigerator requires about one kilowatt-hour per day, so it would only take one hero two and a half hours to keep your food cold (or, if he is charging a battery, 5 hours after losses).
A typical real person could reasonably be expected to produce 200W for an hour a day (maybe 2 for extremely dedicated individuals), certainly enough to charge small devices like laptops, but just a drop in the bucket next to the power used by a typical person.
Kinda puts the power of fossil fuels into perspective.
refs:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us.ht ml
http://www.los-gatos.ca.us/davidbu/pedgen.html
http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_detail.cfm?I ndicatorID=46&Country=US
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice &dbid=79
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/03/06032 2113511.htm
http://coachesinfo.com/category/rowing/77/
http://homepage.mac.com/moises.santillan/paper
What really threw me was when I went to get the insurance. All they asked me for was the address. They pulled up the floorplan for the house. It wasn't exactly the blueprints, but it did have an accurate description of the size and layout of every room in the house. They also knew how many feet it was to the nearest fire hydrant, crime and fire statistics for both the immediate neighborhood, and the general area.
I know there's lots of information available out there, but I didn't know any insurance agent had it immediately available.
No need to be an insurance agent, most anybody can get that information pretty quickly. The tax assessor here has a nice website where you can enter a property address or owner name to look up property details. It also gives you a nice web app that lets you browse around in a Google Maps-like interface for property information, then links you to the property details, often including a photo of the property. The web app even includes aerial photography of most of the county.
It's pretty cool, check it out. You may have to zoom out to see some stuff. Turn on the Parcel layer (right sidebar) to see the individual properties. Clikk the info tool (i) in the tool pallet on the left and click on a parcel to see who owns it, address, and a link to the web page detailing the property.
Great stuff for stalkers.
Maybe Oracle should have hired him as an off-site Java contractor at a rate of about $40k per year. If they needed him to answer any more Java questions they'd have his full attention. The 405k would have been enough to cover his income tax on the 'consulting' postion and the 25k in taxes for the free ride.
The government might not be smart enough to fall for that, but surely Oracle has some clever lawyers to work it out.
If a typical Nuclear power plant costs a billion dollars, what would happen if instead the money was spend on solar panels for individual homes, in the form of tax breaks and rebates for homeowners that put them up?
PV panels have an energy return on energy investment somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1. That is, for each watt you invest manufacturing and installing the panels you can get back somewhere between 1 and 2 watts.
Since PV panel manufacturers use traditional power sources (fossil fuel for mining the raw materials, grid electricity for manufacturing) you can think of a PV panel, until it reaches energy break-even, as a really compact battery. You put in the energy of a ton of coal all at once, then for the first two decades you get that energy back out, very slowly. After the panel as paid back it's energy debt and begins to return more power on top of what was used to manufacture it, then you are finally using 'green' power.
If you spent a billion dollars on solar panels you'd be taking a huge volume of grid electricity (produced from whatever the local grid runs on, hydroelectric would be good) and, effectively, packing it into a form (PV panels) that can easily be moved around and installed where power is needed. If the power used to produce the panels was coal-based, you'd burn a huge volume of coal now in trade for burning the same amount over the next 20 years.
The energy return on energy invested for nuclear isn't that great either, mostly because it takes a lot of energy to mine and process fuel, reprocess fuel, dispose of waste and construct and decommission the power plants. It is better than photovoltaic though, at least for now.
Oil has a very high EROEI, anywhere from 100:1 (the really easy to get to oil they found 100 years ago) to around 40:1 (the harder to extract oil we have today). Because fossil fuels are so widely used and so cheap, it's easy to forget how much they subsidize many other forms of power. Wind power for example. Mining, transporting and manufacturing the metals for the windmill all currently require lots of fossil fuels. These cheap energy sources make the embodied energy of the windmill cheap enough that the power produced by the mill is economical. But wind power is about sustainability and green-ness. What happens if you take the fossil fuels out of the equation and try to close the loop, manufacturing wind mills using only renewable power sources? The price of the windmill goes way up, because you have to pay more for the energy required to produce it.
Cheap energy underpins a huge part of the world economy. As we use up the easily-accessable fuels (the first oil wells were only a couple thousand feet deep, now we're drilling many thousands of feet, often under thousands of feet of water), the harder-to extract fuels cost more in energy to produce. For example, while tar-sands can be processed to make useful fuels, it takes much more power to do so than it does to pump light sweet crude out of Arabian desert. As the energy yeild on investment from these operations declines toward 1:1 it gets harder to make money. By using more effective technology you can maintain the overall energy output, but this comes at the expense of faster depletion of non-renewable fossil fuels. Somewhere down the line the fossil fuels will be so hard to find and so expensive to process that they will effectively be 'gone' (this could be generations away, or if you are a 'doomer', it could be next year).
The answer is to use the cheap power we have now to increase efficiency and reduce our demand, doing more things with less energy. This allows us to develop our renewable sources using cheap energy we have now, greatly extending the time we have fossil fuels available. Eventually they'll stop being profitable (e.g. 'run out') but with good planning we can make that something that happens far in the future.
It's a fairly simple matter to do this. The neighbors install two large AC induction motor couple the shafts together via a belt drive with a slight (around 2%) difference in diameter. Both motors are connected to the grid. One motor will consume power from the grid, the other will generate power.
This could be done electronically as well, but but it would probably be cheaper to pick up a couple of surplus motors.
Most meters now include tamper switches to defeat the 'flip the meter' trick. Most of the electronic meters (I have an iTron remote read meter) actually continue to correctly meter the power if they are inverted. They also can monitor reverse power flow and can report that as well.
I couldn't tell from the literature, but I think they can measure the energy flowing into and out of the house, so they can charge different rates for net metered power (e.g., you pay them 10 cents per kwh for incoming power and they pay you 5 cents per kwh for outgoing power)
What sort of maintenance did you have to do on the solar water heater?
As far as it 'wasting half the energy in the coal', well, the bottom line is "what does it cost me for A vs B", not what's the ultimate bio-ecological efficiency of a system.
I disagree, I think overall efficiency is more important than cost, up to a point (gaining small increases in efficiency for large piles of money isn't pratical). Where that point is depends on a number of factors, one of which is the budget you have for energy.
My main point is mostly just that the analysis of heating a space isn't always as easy as 'electric power is 100% efficient at the point of use' and that the dollar cost of a energy consumption is not necessarily the most important factor.
You feel a lot more comfortable if you have warm feet, even if the actual room-temperature is slightly lower than normal
I noticed this too. Instead of installing underfloor heating everywhere I just spent $10 on some nice slippers.
Guys, we're not wasting ANY energy, at least during the heating season.
Sort of true. If you are heating with electricity then no, that is not waste heat. But, if you are heating with gas then that electric heat costs double or triple what the gas heat it displaced would have cost. You are also using the energy in a very wasteful way, burning coal to make heat to make electricity, delivering the electricity, then turning it right back into heat. You've probably lost half the heat energy of the coal. Electricity for general space heating is wasteful if gas is available. Gas would probably be wastful if district heating from the waste heat of the coal burning power plant was available.
Also, there is a question of where that waste heat goes. My electric dryer heats up the laundry room and the basement (where the exhaust pipe runs). That heat is mostly wasted because it isn't somewhere useful (and unfortunately because of the layout of the place I can't really get it somewhere useful).
Are you using dimmable CF bulbs?
Are you dimming them with a triac-based (chopper) circuit or with a variac (transformer) circuit?
I've read that dimmable CF bulbs do not work with triac-based circuits as found in most X10 home automation hardware.
I cannot believe that no one has designed a remote control code for true POWER ON, POWER OFF signals, rather than a POWER FLIP signal.
Well, some code sets do actually have seperate ON and OFF codes as well as a power toggle. The problem is that the remotes only have one power button and the remote doesn't know if the device is on or off. I guess seperate ON and OFF buttons are too confusing.
But yeah, there is an amazing amount of stupidity in AV equipment. I think it must be deliberate.
Turn everything off and go look at your meter. it's still chugging along rather nicely.
Speaking of, how do you read a digital meter? No, I don't mean big 7 segment numbers indicating the total kWh used, that I can read. I mean since it lacks a spinning disk indicating the current rate of usage, I do I know how much power I'm using without standing there waiting for the numbers to change?
A lot of equipment is completely oblivious to this shift in frequency.
In fact, a lot of equipment with switching power supplies will run just fine on 100V DC power. Not that I recommend trying it, but if you ever find that you need to play warcraft and you have 10 car batteries and no inverter, well, there ya go.
Seabed and currents don't have anything to do with it (well, they can have as they influence the gravity, but that is so weak, that it is not measurable at all).
Not so, the sea level differences due to gravitational variations of the seabed have been used to generate maps of the entire seabed
Not that this has anything to do with rising sea levels.
But I wonder where that statement of "a million times more sensitive than humans" comes from - I bet it's something some journalist guessed at 100 years ago that we are all passing on as if it were the definitive answer.
... and this dog's nose is ten times better than a human's. ::scoffs:: more like a hundred times. ... and this dog's nose is a HUNDRED times better than a human's. ::scoffs:: more like a THOUSAND times better.
Journalist:
Journalist's Assistant: aside
Journalist: Ok,
Assistant:
Journalist: exasperated Ok, where are we going with this?
I find that sex also happens to warm the bedroom nicely;
That's a great idea, do you know where I can find a couple to have sex in my bedroom? Can I post on Craig's list for that? It's okay if they are shy, they can shut the door.
real men don't care about scratchy pants.
Real men wear long underwear under their scratchy pants and keep the thermostat at 60F in the winter.
I'm a Real Man, but my wife makes me keep the thermostat up at 65.