I did see a similar product recently from a link from a different site (not sure if this is the same one, since we've killed their server)-- and it worked by charging a *separate* 12v battery system. The problem was that they didn't want to screw with directly charging the hybrid battery since the controls were not designed to do that while the car was off. So they add another battery to store up the solar energy, which then dumps into the big battery (presumably through some sort of voltage conversion) when the car is running.
Not a terrible idea, but not great either. I think you'd be better off sticking the same number of panels on your roof, and selling the power to the grid. Same power saved, less hassle, fewer unnecessary lead-acid batteries, less weight on the car. The right way to charge the hybrid would require the hybrid to be designed for "plug-in" charging from the get-go.
The worst part of this whole deal is that apparently everybody can track me using my cell phone *except me*. I'd love to be able to download some mapping software and use my phone like a GPS when I'm somewhere unfamiliar-- but apparently, only other people can get my location. All the third-party software for the treo I've seen requires an external bluetooth GPS receiver, even though the phone has GPS tracking built-in for E911 (and apparently employer tracking.)
If you have examples of the same people making both arguments, you have a point. Otherwise, just chalk it up to the fact that a bazillion people post here, and it's likely there are a lot of people on both sides of the issue. "Slashdot" is not a guy with two sets of opinions that contradict, it's a lot of people with their own opinions in one place.
I'm not opposed to GM anything. I do, however, wish we'd spend a little more time testing things out before deploying them on a large scale, and a little less time suing farmers whose crops accidentally cross-pollinated with a patented GM species next door.
I tried that-- it gets the sweat off your skin, but it ain't helpin' your ratty, stinky hair. Believe me, I've tried everything I can think of. I figure it will be easier once I finish going bald.
And although you may *believe* you don't stink after the wipes, that is not necessarily the case. Find a brutally honest friend, and get a real assesment. I got away with it for awhile when I was a junior coder who didn't talk much with other people, but now that I have to actually speak with other humans, I can't do it.
I suppose it depends on what kind of 45-minute drive we're talking about. If it's all low-traffic interstate where you can cruise in at 75mph, then we're talking about a lot of time on the bike, and an unrealistic commute.
I replaced a 45-minutes-in-traffic commute with a 30-minute bike commute in 2000. I could take the bike on small neighborhood roads and paths that skirted the traffic, but which no car could drive. Now, there's nowhere to shower at work, so I drive. (Dammit, install a shower!)
But total time is not the only consideration-- if, like me, you would end up going for a run or a bike ride to work out when you got home anyway, the equation for figuring out if the ride saves time is whether your ride time is greater or less than your commute PLUS how long your workout takes.
I was saving something like 90 minutes a day riding my bike. The commute was 30 minutes shorter overall, and my workout (normally about an hour) took no additional time. I miss the extra time and money, and it's all because I can't find a practical way to get clean at this office.:(
We were both wrong. I didn't think the mainstream media would report it, and you didn't think it would receive fair treatment, since it was a democratic congressman.
Here's the breakdown on the mainstream media's headlines on this issue:
Slashdot Headline: "Wikipedia Entries 'Cleaned' By Political Staffers"
CNN Headline: "Democratic Staffers edit World Wide Web Encyclopedia"
Fox News Headline: "Democrats attempt to Rewrite History; Republicans clarify Wikipedia entries."
MSNBC: "Tonight: Chris Matthews Examines the Democratic attempt to modify web databases."
It certainly appears that the "liberal media" is directly calling attention to the fact that it was democrats, fox is claiming republicans fixed it (i'm sure many did, but I was in there fixing, too), and slashdot is remaining neutral, since the original report suggests that staffers from both sides are making changes. It looks to me as if the mainstream media has erred on the side of calling the democrats to task for their actions.
I can't comment on any sort of confirmed media bias, since I haven't seen anything I'd consider a reputable study on the matter that wasn't also filtered through the media.
But my personal experience seems to lend credence to the fact that the media is simply lazy and sensationalist (for ratings). Drudge broke the Clinton story, to be sure. But that's only because the media is lazy, and the internet is an easy publishing medium. You'll notice that this wiki story is *also* being broken first on the internet, as most stories probably will be from here on out.
Of course, once a story with real sensational value has been tossed to the media (god forbid they get out and find a real story on their own), they're gonna run with it like there's no tomorrow. This is true of the left, the right, and the criminally insane. There was nonstop coverage of Clinton's shenanigans from here to hell and back, and he deserved it.
The media may or may not have a real political bias, but their biggest problem is that they won't find their own goddamn stories anymore, and the only thing they're willing to air as drivel designed to raise as many eyebrows as possible.
I'm fairly left-leaning, but you can count me among the "outraged." It certainly doesn't seem like he's gotten a free pass, although I don't believe we'd see a mainstream media story about wikipedia edit-fights no matter *who* did it.
I believe it should be brought to the forefront, as it's a sleazy tactic-- I just don't see it happening, regardless of who did it. Our media is lazy and ratings-hungry, and lets a lot of what I would consider important information slide into obscurity.
Regardless, this alone ought to be enough to kick the guy from office. You lie or remove facts, and we catch you-- that's it. Why is it so hard to fire the bad ones?
The idea that the administration is doing science is as valid as the idea that this scientist is playing politics. They're both correct, but to such a tiny degree as to be laughable.
I am not troubled by the administration's own speech-- they are free to say "we disagree with this research" as much as they want. Additionally, I have no problem with firing him. To me, there is a difference between saying you disagree with someone and censoring the research.
I am not much troubled by a government scientist's airing of policy suggestions or voting preferences. It has about as much weight to me as it would if it came from a movie star. (Which is to say, none.)
It's a bit of a stretch to construe a suggested solution to a problem uncovered by research as "playing politics." It's not as if anyone would mistake him for one of the people who makes policy. Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I thought the distinction between "scientist" and "congressman" was a fairly obvious one.
If the current elected administration wants to play scientist, they should resign and get a research job.
Somebody else hires a guy 20 years before you're in office
The American people pay you to pay his salary, in order to do research on their behalf
You ask him to do some research
You don't like the results
Some of the people who paid for it would like to see the results
Since you used other people's money to pay a guy you didn't hire to do the job he was doing decades before you arrived, do you have the right to bury his research?
Never mind what is "right" or "better," the question is: if you pay for something with public money and it isn't classified military actions, do you have the right to bury the results?
Say whatever you want about the credibility of one side of this debate or another, the fact that our scientists can't talk to the media without a babysitter is truly and spectacularly wrong.
Is there an easy way to disable BIOS writes? A jumper or some such? The sort of person who would be upgrading their BIOS could reasonably be expected to move one jumper.
I have always wondered why viruses didn't do this before-- virus rewriting tools are all over the place waiting to be bundled up with a worm for internet delivery.
Fair enough on the lack of anyone currently able to give a conclusive diagnosis. We quite desperately need to be researching this in greater detail than we are now.
Say what you want about Kyoto, it quite clearly does not call for what you state-- but rather emphasises gradual reduction. Cold turkey is out of the question, but Kyoto is light years from that. I believe it specifies a reduction in the ballpark of 5% from 1990 levels, which is an overall reduction of about 30% in 2010 if trends continued without Kyoto through 2010. Hardly an unreasonable target, but certainly not one without financial impact.
Your reasoning makes sense, even if I disagree with your conclusion. What I *don't* understand is the line of thought that says "we don't know what's happening, so we shouldn't do anything."
A conservative approach would take stock of what we do know: the environment is changing, we dump things into it, and we're not 100% sure if we're changing it. Now, given those facts, it would seem that the prudent approach is to try to dump less into it while doing as much research as we can. The level of effort given to both of these things currently is tiny, given the importance of the issue.
If your kid started getting sick right after mealtime, you'd probably stop feeding him the same stuff and take him to the doctor, whether you were sure it was the food or not. Our current approach is along the lines of gradually feeding the kid more of the same food, while waiting for definite confirmation on whether it's making him sick.
If it doesn't make any difference in people's lives to know where they came from, then there is as little need for any religious form of explanation as there is for a scientific one. I think it's quite clear that people need some form of explanation, or nobody would argue about it. There would be no creation myths, no debate, and this area of science would be a boring backwater with no funding.
Your time/relativity comparison makes little sense here. The "why" and "how" of creation clearly matters to people a great deal. The reason it becomes important is that when your unconcerned-with-evolution "average person" becomes the majority, and actively works to change the science curriculum taught to students, they have an immediate impact on everyone-- including the ones who would grow up to have science jobs in that particular field. We end up teaching everyone, including the folks that you argue are the only ones who really need to know, information that runs counter to what we can observe and test.
This is not a good way to educate our scientists, whether the rest of the kids in the class will ever care or not.
Yeah, that's what I figured. And of course, 100 P4 chips and the associated 20,000 watt PSU isn't nearly as cheap as a resistive heating element.
It's a pipe dream, but it would be nice if we could be doing useful work with all the electricity we dump into resistive heat. After all, it doesn't really matter *what* you do with it-- you'll still get most of it back as heat.
For places where the temperature isn't too cold for their use, heat pumps generate heat at roughly 400% efficiency. For every watt they use for power, they drag four watts of heat in from outside. (they work like a fridge in reverse, stealing heat from outside)
I'm not saying this negates the significant disadvantage of line losses, because I don't know the numbers for that. Just be aware that a fair comparison is slightly more complex. Obviously, the ideal is a system as efficient as a heat pump with locally generated power.
Of course, a good heat pump is about four times as efficient as resistive heating, which makes the price difference vs. gas about neutral. This assumes you live somewhere where the winter temps are above -10C where the heat pumps are effective, or have a ground-source heat pump.
There are still transmission losses with electricity, as you point out.
They're not common anywhere with truly cold winters (below about -10C). In those cases, it's generally either gas, or some form of resistive heater. Ground-source heat pumps fix this by using the relatively constant underground temp as a starting point, but they're still relatively new.
Your original post was correct when compared to resistive heaters, though-- anything you leave on when you're heating your house in that fashion is just doing its part to heat your house. Better it be something usefulish, like a PC running one of the various distributed computing projects, than a purely resistive device.
I wonder if there's a market for supercomputer-heaters? A nice, big, electric furnace with 100 P4 chips in it, and you could sell the processor time to universities. All your resistive heat would at least be doing something.
His post wasn't crystal-clear, but he's not trying to say the draw from the IR receiver is 1-4W, he's trying to say that the total draw of a set you've turned off is 1-4W. You are indeed correct about that particular component. It is not, however, the source of most of the power draw when the TV is off. Most of that comes from the power supply.
It's not as "off" as you think it is, and his estimate for the total draw when on standby is ballpark correct. Just about anything with a AC to DC power supply like that, even a switching design, is drawing power even when the load is off. Just for kicks, see if you can find or borrow a power meter, and check out your various "off" devices. The total for your house is a stupendous amount of wasted power. Anything with a power supply or a transformer will draw power all the time-- chargers for stuff, the paper shredder you have plugged in in the office, all your "off" computer peripherals (unless you shut off at the power strip), all your home theater crapola, every DC kitchen appliance you leave plugged in, etc... it's a few watts here and a few there, but it's not hard to have a steady 100W draw from things you thought were off. Odds are at least one device in your house will be a "surprise offender," too, with an idle draw that is *unbelieveably* high.
For a simple meter, try kill-a-watt. For an easy way to fix it (besides just a switch), try an intelligent power strip. These generally have one "control" plug that can tell the difference between "standby" and "on". All the other plugs are truly off if the "control" device is on standby. This allows you to have a PC that turns off your printer, USB hub, speakers, etc... or a TV that turns off your receiver, game consoles, dvd player, and so forth. Turning on the key device reactivates power to the other outlets on the strip.
Of course, none of this should even be an issue. There's no reason these devices should consume more than a watt when idle, even the ones that need some power for a remote control. But since people aren't aware of it, and electricity is cheap, it's not cost effective to care about it yet.
It's definitely easy to tell those are separate now. I'll take anything that makes it clearer. Even now that I *know* those articles aren't some sort of malfunctioning "footnote" or "related article" system, my brain just wants to see them as part of the article above.
I was thinking much along the same lines. Because the "little stories" have bars that curve the opposite direction from the "big stories," they all look like they're grouped together. I was thinking the new stuff was some sort of broken "related articles" system before I saw this article. Change the bar so it's a gray version of the main story bar, or do what the previous poster suggested. Anything to end the unintentional appearance of "grouping related topics" that is there now.
Slashdot Mirror
I did see a similar product recently from a link from a different site (not sure if this is the same one, since we've killed their server)-- and it worked by charging a *separate* 12v battery system. The problem was that they didn't want to screw with directly charging the hybrid battery since the controls were not designed to do that while the car was off. So they add another battery to store up the solar energy, which then dumps into the big battery (presumably through some sort of voltage conversion) when the car is running.
Not a terrible idea, but not great either. I think you'd be better off sticking the same number of panels on your roof, and selling the power to the grid. Same power saved, less hassle, fewer unnecessary lead-acid batteries, less weight on the car. The right way to charge the hybrid would require the hybrid to be designed for "plug-in" charging from the get-go.
The worst part of this whole deal is that apparently everybody can track me using my cell phone *except me*. I'd love to be able to download some mapping software and use my phone like a GPS when I'm somewhere unfamiliar-- but apparently, only other people can get my location. All the third-party software for the treo I've seen requires an external bluetooth GPS receiver, even though the phone has GPS tracking built-in for E911 (and apparently employer tracking.)
Why does everybody get to track me but me?
If you have examples of the same people making both arguments, you have a point. Otherwise, just chalk it up to the fact that a bazillion people post here, and it's likely there are a lot of people on both sides of the issue. "Slashdot" is not a guy with two sets of opinions that contradict, it's a lot of people with their own opinions in one place.
I'm not opposed to GM anything. I do, however, wish we'd spend a little more time testing things out before deploying them on a large scale, and a little less time suing farmers whose crops accidentally cross-pollinated with a patented GM species next door.
I tried that-- it gets the sweat off your skin, but it ain't helpin' your ratty, stinky hair. Believe me, I've tried everything I can think of. I figure it will be easier once I finish going bald.
And although you may *believe* you don't stink after the wipes, that is not necessarily the case. Find a brutally honest friend, and get a real assesment. I got away with it for awhile when I was a junior coder who didn't talk much with other people, but now that I have to actually speak with other humans, I can't do it.
I suppose it depends on what kind of 45-minute drive we're talking about. If it's all low-traffic interstate where you can cruise in at 75mph, then we're talking about a lot of time on the bike, and an unrealistic commute.
:(
I replaced a 45-minutes-in-traffic commute with a 30-minute bike commute in 2000. I could take the bike on small neighborhood roads and paths that skirted the traffic, but which no car could drive. Now, there's nowhere to shower at work, so I drive. (Dammit, install a shower!)
But total time is not the only consideration-- if, like me, you would end up going for a run or a bike ride to work out when you got home anyway, the equation for figuring out if the ride saves time is whether your ride time is greater or less than your commute PLUS how long your workout takes.
I was saving something like 90 minutes a day riding my bike. The commute was 30 minutes shorter overall, and my workout (normally about an hour) took no additional time. I miss the extra time and money, and it's all because I can't find a practical way to get clean at this office.
We were both wrong. I didn't think the mainstream media would report it, and you didn't think it would receive fair treatment, since it was a democratic congressman.
Here's the breakdown on the mainstream media's headlines on this issue:
Slashdot Headline: "Wikipedia Entries 'Cleaned' By Political Staffers"
CNN Headline: "Democratic Staffers edit World Wide Web Encyclopedia"
Fox News Headline: "Democrats attempt to Rewrite History; Republicans clarify Wikipedia entries."
MSNBC: "Tonight: Chris Matthews Examines the Democratic attempt to modify web databases."
from here.
It certainly appears that the "liberal media" is directly calling attention to the fact that it was democrats, fox is claiming republicans fixed it (i'm sure many did, but I was in there fixing, too), and slashdot is remaining neutral, since the original report suggests that staffers from both sides are making changes. It looks to me as if the mainstream media has erred on the side of calling the democrats to task for their actions.
I can't comment on any sort of confirmed media bias, since I haven't seen anything I'd consider a reputable study on the matter that wasn't also filtered through the media.
But my personal experience seems to lend credence to the fact that the media is simply lazy and sensationalist (for ratings). Drudge broke the Clinton story, to be sure. But that's only because the media is lazy, and the internet is an easy publishing medium. You'll notice that this wiki story is *also* being broken first on the internet, as most stories probably will be from here on out.
Of course, once a story with real sensational value has been tossed to the media (god forbid they get out and find a real story on their own), they're gonna run with it like there's no tomorrow. This is true of the left, the right, and the criminally insane. There was nonstop coverage of Clinton's shenanigans from here to hell and back, and he deserved it.
The media may or may not have a real political bias, but their biggest problem is that they won't find their own goddamn stories anymore, and the only thing they're willing to air as drivel designed to raise as many eyebrows as possible.
I'm fairly left-leaning, but you can count me among the "outraged." It certainly doesn't seem like he's gotten a free pass, although I don't believe we'd see a mainstream media story about wikipedia edit-fights no matter *who* did it.
I believe it should be brought to the forefront, as it's a sleazy tactic-- I just don't see it happening, regardless of who did it. Our media is lazy and ratings-hungry, and lets a lot of what I would consider important information slide into obscurity.
Regardless, this alone ought to be enough to kick the guy from office. You lie or remove facts, and we catch you-- that's it. Why is it so hard to fire the bad ones?
The idea that the administration is doing science is as valid as the idea that this scientist is playing politics. They're both correct, but to such a tiny degree as to be laughable.
I am not troubled by the administration's own speech-- they are free to say "we disagree with this research" as much as they want. Additionally, I have no problem with firing him. To me, there is a difference between saying you disagree with someone and censoring the research.
I am not much troubled by a government scientist's airing of policy suggestions or voting preferences. It has about as much weight to me as it would if it came from a movie star. (Which is to say, none.)
It's a bit of a stretch to construe a suggested solution to a problem uncovered by research as "playing politics." It's not as if anyone would mistake him for one of the people who makes policy. Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I thought the distinction between "scientist" and "congressman" was a fairly obvious one.
If the current elected administration wants to play scientist, they should resign and get a research job.
Never mind what is "right" or "better," the question is: if you pay for something with public money and it isn't classified military actions, do you have the right to bury the results?
I'm siding with the little guy on this one.
Say whatever you want about the credibility of one side of this debate or another, the fact that our scientists can't talk to the media without a babysitter is truly and spectacularly wrong.
Is there an easy way to disable BIOS writes? A jumper or some such? The sort of person who would be upgrading their BIOS could reasonably be expected to move one jumper.
I have always wondered why viruses didn't do this before-- virus rewriting tools are all over the place waiting to be bundled up with a worm for internet delivery.
Fair enough on the lack of anyone currently able to give a conclusive diagnosis. We quite desperately need to be researching this in greater detail than we are now.
Say what you want about Kyoto, it quite clearly does not call for what you state-- but rather emphasises gradual reduction. Cold turkey is out of the question, but Kyoto is light years from that. I believe it specifies a reduction in the ballpark of 5% from 1990 levels, which is an overall reduction of about 30% in 2010 if trends continued without Kyoto through 2010. Hardly an unreasonable target, but certainly not one without financial impact.
(We can argue about its usefulness separately)
Heh-- depending on where you live, it may require convincing several million neighbors to aslo flip a switch.
Your reasoning makes sense, even if I disagree with your conclusion. What I *don't* understand is the line of thought that says "we don't know what's happening, so we shouldn't do anything."
A conservative approach would take stock of what we do know: the environment is changing, we dump things into it, and we're not 100% sure if we're changing it. Now, given those facts, it would seem that the prudent approach is to try to dump less into it while doing as much research as we can. The level of effort given to both of these things currently is tiny, given the importance of the issue.
If your kid started getting sick right after mealtime, you'd probably stop feeding him the same stuff and take him to the doctor, whether you were sure it was the food or not. Our current approach is along the lines of gradually feeding the kid more of the same food, while waiting for definite confirmation on whether it's making him sick.
If it doesn't make any difference in people's lives to know where they came from, then there is as little need for any religious form of explanation as there is for a scientific one. I think it's quite clear that people need some form of explanation, or nobody would argue about it. There would be no creation myths, no debate, and this area of science would be a boring backwater with no funding.
Your time/relativity comparison makes little sense here. The "why" and "how" of creation clearly matters to people a great deal. The reason it becomes important is that when your unconcerned-with-evolution "average person" becomes the majority, and actively works to change the science curriculum taught to students, they have an immediate impact on everyone-- including the ones who would grow up to have science jobs in that particular field. We end up teaching everyone, including the folks that you argue are the only ones who really need to know, information that runs counter to what we can observe and test.
This is not a good way to educate our scientists, whether the rest of the kids in the class will ever care or not.
Yeah, that's what I figured. And of course, 100 P4 chips and the associated 20,000 watt PSU isn't nearly as cheap as a resistive heating element.
It's a pipe dream, but it would be nice if we could be doing useful work with all the electricity we dump into resistive heat. After all, it doesn't really matter *what* you do with it-- you'll still get most of it back as heat.
For places where the temperature isn't too cold for their use, heat pumps generate heat at roughly 400% efficiency. For every watt they use for power, they drag four watts of heat in from outside. (they work like a fridge in reverse, stealing heat from outside)
I'm not saying this negates the significant disadvantage of line losses, because I don't know the numbers for that. Just be aware that a fair comparison is slightly more complex. Obviously, the ideal is a system as efficient as a heat pump with locally generated power.
Of course, a good heat pump is about four times as efficient as resistive heating, which makes the price difference vs. gas about neutral. This assumes you live somewhere where the winter temps are above -10C where the heat pumps are effective, or have a ground-source heat pump.
There are still transmission losses with electricity, as you point out.
This is a much more coherent and accurate explanation than the grandparent. Shame it's posted AC, since nobody will ever find it and read it.
They're not common anywhere with truly cold winters (below about -10C). In those cases, it's generally either gas, or some form of resistive heater. Ground-source heat pumps fix this by using the relatively constant underground temp as a starting point, but they're still relatively new.
Your original post was correct when compared to resistive heaters, though-- anything you leave on when you're heating your house in that fashion is just doing its part to heat your house. Better it be something usefulish, like a PC running one of the various distributed computing projects, than a purely resistive device.
I wonder if there's a market for supercomputer-heaters? A nice, big, electric furnace with 100 P4 chips in it, and you could sell the processor time to universities. All your resistive heat would at least be doing something.
His post wasn't crystal-clear, but he's not trying to say the draw from the IR receiver is 1-4W, he's trying to say that the total draw of a set you've turned off is 1-4W. You are indeed correct about that particular component. It is not, however, the source of most of the power draw when the TV is off. Most of that comes from the power supply.
It's not as "off" as you think it is, and his estimate for the total draw when on standby is ballpark correct. Just about anything with a AC to DC power supply like that, even a switching design, is drawing power even when the load is off. Just for kicks, see if you can find or borrow a power meter, and check out your various "off" devices. The total for your house is a stupendous amount of wasted power. Anything with a power supply or a transformer will draw power all the time-- chargers for stuff, the paper shredder you have plugged in in the office, all your "off" computer peripherals (unless you shut off at the power strip), all your home theater crapola, every DC kitchen appliance you leave plugged in, etc... it's a few watts here and a few there, but it's not hard to have a steady 100W draw from things you thought were off. Odds are at least one device in your house will be a "surprise offender," too, with an idle draw that is *unbelieveably* high.
For a simple meter, try kill-a-watt. For an easy way to fix it (besides just a switch), try an intelligent power strip. These generally have one "control" plug that can tell the difference between "standby" and "on". All the other plugs are truly off if the "control" device is on standby. This allows you to have a PC that turns off your printer, USB hub, speakers, etc... or a TV that turns off your receiver, game consoles, dvd player, and so forth. Turning on the key device reactivates power to the other outlets on the strip.
Smart power strips.
Of course, none of this should even be an issue. There's no reason these devices should consume more than a watt when idle, even the ones that need some power for a remote control. But since people aren't aware of it, and electricity is cheap, it's not cost effective to care about it yet.
It's definitely easy to tell those are separate now. I'll take anything that makes it clearer. Even now that I *know* those articles aren't some sort of malfunctioning "footnote" or "related article" system, my brain just wants to see them as part of the article above.
You get my vote!
I was thinking much along the same lines. Because the "little stories" have bars that curve the opposite direction from the "big stories," they all look like they're grouped together. I was thinking the new stuff was some sort of broken "related articles" system before I saw this article. Change the bar so it's a gray version of the main story bar, or do what the previous poster suggested. Anything to end the unintentional appearance of "grouping related topics" that is there now.