If they're using a heat pump, they're pulling heat from the water, which is much easier as it's warmer than the -50 air.
It's the same idea as with geothermal heat pumps. It's easier to dump heat into the relatively cold earth when it's summer out, and it's easier to draw heat from the relatively warm earth when it's winter. It's about minimizing the temperature gradient.
Drive through a reservation sometime. Look at Easter Island.
The Native Americans weren't so much concerned about being environmentally considerate as they were about making the best use of what resources they could gather because they were so limited technologically speaking. There's evidence that when they could, they'd do things like drive herds of animals over cliffs, harvesting only a fraction of the resources from the resulting dead animals.
If there had been 300 million native americans in the area that is now the USA, we'd have seen a whole lot more environmental impact.
Compression arch suspended-deck bridge is listed as a descendant of the truss-arch bridge. By the looks of it, it could probably stand a few failures of structure intact. On the other hand, wikipedia doesn't list any bridges that are longer than the 579 meters of the I35 bridge. China just completed a 550 meter one, so it's probably reachable though.
After all, we need to meet length requirements as well as keeping the bridge high and wide enough to not interfere with river traffic.
Still likely means that there were additional stresses on the bridge, resulting in it collapsing then. Construction equipment tends to be heavier than cars, after all.
I can understand where you're coming from - as a teenager traveling with my family I've eaten a few meals that were overall unsatisfactory because they were edible, I was hungry and tired and they took too long(to the point that my parents were considering walking out) to deliver. At that point it was just fuel.
As for your pizza deal - when you rejected the first pizza you should of told the place what the problem was. It sounds like you got bit either with false expectations from the advertising sprucing things up too much or the joint was making them wrong. The place that I ate about half the meal because I was so hungry was a spaghetti dish, and they must of spent all the extra time boiling the pasta, as it was basically mush. The sauce was no good either. I explained this in depth to the manager. I got my meal for free.
How does any of those call for a reserve as versus a minimum starting bid?
Unless you're using the auction to perform a market study in disguise, I don't see how just making the minimum bid at your selling point is much different from having a hidden reserve. For example, the friend case would effectively be the starting bid.
There ARE "cooling off" laws, but they only cover in-home purchases (i.e. door-to-door salesmen) and home refinancing contracts.
Depends on the state. For example, there's a state where anybody over 65 has two weeks to back out of any contract, even a car purchase, as long as the goods can still be returned.
The big 'AS-IS' stickers serve as a warning.
Besides, there's an additional amount of 'buyer beware' at auto auctions. All parties are assumed to be smart enough to know what to look for.
Generally speaking though, you should cease consuming the meal when you become aware that it's unsuitable. If you clean your plate it's generally considered that the meal was acceptible.
I think that it's more that he'd rather go find an item where as long as he's the winning bid he gets the item. He's probably been burned by the reserve idea(hidden minimum) too many times to like it. I think that the 'reserve' idea is to get bidding going and have people lose their heads and overbid, thus earning the seller more money while ensuring the item is not sold for less than he's willing to part with it.
But I agree with his point. If you're not going to sell the item for less than $100, then put the item out with a minimum starting bid of $100. Don't waste the buyer's time.
I specified off grid because on-grid doesn't make sense to me. The payoff time is too long. Whereas an off-grid install can be justified if the costs of hooking up to a distant grid is too high.
The economies are still the same though. Solar water heating is highly efficient and the panels are cheap. Solar electric panels are expensive and relatively inefficient.
There are people who install solar water heating without doing any sort of photovoltiac systems to save money.
That doesn't sound right to me... that would largely create segregated clusters of peers that don't talk to each other. That would likely hurt the swarm rather than help it.
That's why I said by preference
From what I understand, the bittorrent protocol tries to create a complete 'mini-swarm' in a given network segment, but sharing still happens between segments.
If part X is already on the network segment, it gets a lower priority to be sent to a different computer on that segment as compared to segment Y, which isn't on that segment. Clients, by preference, connect many or most of their connections within that segment.
These are all preferences and tendencies, not hard rules.
3 years to pay for themselves is not a big deal in the long term, most of the current panels that are the grade you would use to panel your roof are warrantied for 10 times that long last I checked.
I'd have to agree, however I think that he's getting his figures mixed up. Last time I priced out solar systems they ran over 30 years for financial payback assuming my electricity rate doubled. Into the infinite if you assumed 5% interest. IE you could take the money for your solar panels; invest it in funds earning 5%, cover your electricity bills for life, with interest left over.
The 3 year figure was for the time it took for them to generate more electricity than it cost to make them.
In such a setup, such as for a off-grid solar power house the cost benefits of using thermal solar for heating the water outweighs the loss of flexibility. Panels for solar water heating are generally at least an order of magnitude cheaper than solar electric panels. You simply oversize your water tank(and insulate it well) to last through a cloudy day/night.
Along with that getting specialized home appliances can be cost effective; special extreme efficiency 24 volt DC refridgerator, for example. Reducing your install by 1 panel can save several thousand dollars easy.
The fact that the costs are hidden doesn't mean it's there, so an intelligent person should realize that even if he's not charged everytime he goes to the doctor that it still costs money. Same with car insurance - the less people use it, the less the insurance has to be, which is why good drivers tend to be charged less for insurance.
Making all the costs hidden tends to encourage overconsumption, which ends up costing more money. When it's distributed like a government health care plan would be, it ends up costing us all money. Either that or you end up with waiting lists.
The US healthcare market isn't a failure of a free trade economy model, because we aren't one. Healthcare is provided by the employer - who doesn't really care for matching the plan to the individual family.
I believe that the bittorrent protocol already has means to detect whether or not it's on the same network segment, and shares packets in that segment by preference.
I don't think that it's very easy/efficent to separate most of these things when they're all together in a sort of mish-mosh.
It's not really that hard either given a properly set up smelter. Besides, they have to do it anyways even when working with raw ore.
Likewise, despite being cheap, you've gotta make sure the lead is disposed of properly, along with the various other nasty material that goes into making CRTs and capacitors.
Who's talking about disposing of it? Lead, despite being toxic, is still a valuable commodity - every ton we recover from old equipment is a ton we don't have to refine from raw ore.
Though you do have to contain it - Lead and mercury have relatively low boiling points, so go vaporous pretty easily - For example, iron has a melting point of ~1,538 C, while lead boils ~1,740 degrees. Mercury, with a boiling point of a mere 357 degrees, would be vapor long before the iron/steel melts. It's up to scrubbers to recover it. Again, replace 'safely disposed of' with 'sold at a profit'. While not used as much in things like thermometers as much today, there's still plenty of industrial uses for the material.
Silicon I'm hesitant about recycling - for one it's extremely common, two it's inert, so disposal is cheap, and they're rather sensitive about purity levels - which a smelter isn't going to give you.
Maybe a glass manufacturing plant could use it, maybe not.
My point still stands. NOTHING the government provides is free. There's always a price hidden somewhere - usually a quite outrageous one.
Let's take federal school subsidies. These are programs where schools get money from the feds for this or that, such as new computers, textbooks, security guards, whatever.
Because of the complexities that are federal programs only a third of the dollars that congress provides to the department reach the school. The rest are eaten up by 'operating expenses'. Many schools actually have employees dedicated to generating requests for federal dollars - if the employee manages to pull even 10% over what she costs the school, it's worth it. It's all horribly inefficient.
Going back to your hospital example - I pay nearly 10% of my income to support the social services program. Even at this relatively early point of my life, it'd take a heck of a lot of medical care to exceed what I've paid into the system, even at the outrageous prices they like to charge.
Even if the government doesn't charge for it, they borrow or print the money to provide the services, which leads to inflation, making my $20 bill able to purchase half of what it could when I was a teen.
I don't see why it's that big of a deal. Without the P2P option, blizzard would need a far larger server patch farm, increased bandwidth costs, etc...
Which means your subscription would have to be higher or blizzard wouldn't be able to provide as much content.
If this gets widespread enough, I could see larger ISPs contracting to have a permanent peer server on their network.
The idea would be that they keep their pipeline a little clearer by sharing out things like blizzard updates, microsoft patches. This keeps QoS higher, keeps their customers happier without the expense of upgrading their leased lines.
As it's on their own network, bandwidth availability is essentially unlimited. Individual subscribers can download at the full line speed of their connection.
All the more reason to wonder why they'd have to charge a fee to do it, you'd expect them to be able to turn a profit. 'We'll take your old computer for *FREE*!' As they gloat about the valuable elements in it.
After all, that's what many places will do with cars.
I'd have to agree with this. Especially given that certain materials in the components are indeed present in larger quantities than they are in raw ore, combined with that there are more metals period would tend to indicate that the only benefit to using raw ore would be that of quantity - you have to collect computer components from all over to get enough to make it worth firing up the smelter, while you can built your refinery on site of the mine and process however many tones of ore that you feel like. The disposal fee could be for transportation of the disposed devices to the center.
Let's see, average computer: Steel - valuable recyclable material pretty much from when we discovered it(and iron as well). Aluminum - valuable material, local places will buy aluminum if you bring it to them(cans are only one of the things they'll take) Copper - even better than steel Gold - even better than copper Lead - cheap, but very easy to recycle. As a shooter, for a couple hundred dollars investment I could start casting my own bullets. Scrap lead such as wheel weights are readily available. Along with the lead will be tin, silver, zinc, etc... Silicone is rather common, though you might be able to recycle it, and while plastic is recyclable it's generally not worth the hassle. Various other trace elements - present in things like capacitors and alloys for the steel and solder. You'll also get the occasional oddball like titanium.
Do you pay taxes? If so, it's not free. It's simply that you don't receive a separate bill for the service, it's bundled into your income/sales/property taxes. In the case of the article, it's now a separate fee, much like the tire disposal fee I paid when I last bought a set of tires. Sure, they disposed of my old ones, but I had to pay the fee even when I bought my snow tires - which wasn't a trade in set, I even bought separate rims for them. In exchange, any place that sells tires would have to take them in for disposal if I asked them to.
The government may provide services without a direct charge - but we all end up paying for them through taxes. As I'm a taxpayer, I don't consider those services free. The money has already been extracted from me, under threat of confiscation and/or force.
I suspect that newer "regular" machines (not power user boxes) use less power than they did back-when. Is that actually the case?
To an extent. They usually use about the same amount of power, but newer machines do far more with the power they do use.
For the previous poster - his website could probably be hosted on basic enterprise level machine with at least a thousand other small time websites. I wouldn't be surprised if you could host a hundred thousand with load balancing between five servers. Individual sites would be less likely to be slashdotted as a bonus.
Sure, it might use five times the power, but it's doing a thousand times the work. That and you don't have to worry about a ten year old laptop HD failing without notice.
People do tend to upgrade for a reason. Yes, we could do more reutilization - but after a point trying to deal with older, slower, no longer made or supported hardware isn't worth it. There are reasons why many companies will replace perfectly usable vehicles with new ones - It's actually cheaper to sell the old ones and maintain a limited number of models of vehicles. You don't have to train the techs in as many types of vehicle, keep fewer varieties of spare parts on hand, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
Umm... Not what I was talking about.
The native Americans themselves conducted cliff drives before the Europeans ever set foot in America.
If they're using a heat pump, they're pulling heat from the water, which is much easier as it's warmer than the -50 air.
It's the same idea as with geothermal heat pumps. It's easier to dump heat into the relatively cold earth when it's summer out, and it's easier to draw heat from the relatively warm earth when it's winter. It's about minimizing the temperature gradient.
Isn't there a difference?
Drive through a reservation sometime. Look at Easter Island.
The Native Americans weren't so much concerned about being environmentally considerate as they were about making the best use of what resources they could gather because they were so limited technologically speaking. There's evidence that when they could, they'd do things like drive herds of animals over cliffs, harvesting only a fraction of the resources from the resulting dead animals.
If there had been 300 million native americans in the area that is now the USA, we'd have seen a whole lot more environmental impact.
What would you use as an updated replacement?
Compression arch suspended-deck bridge is listed as a descendant of the truss-arch bridge. By the looks of it, it could probably stand a few failures of structure intact. On the other hand, wikipedia doesn't list any bridges that are longer than the 579 meters of the I35 bridge. China just completed a 550 meter one, so it's probably reachable though.
After all, we need to meet length requirements as well as keeping the bridge high and wide enough to not interfere with river traffic.
and the ones waiting for reinforcement collapsed.
;)
That's one way to speed up replacement, I guess. Still, I much prefer to ensure that nobody's on the bridge when it comes down.
Still likely means that there were additional stresses on the bridge, resulting in it collapsing then. Construction equipment tends to be heavier than cars, after all.
I can understand where you're coming from - as a teenager traveling with my family I've eaten a few meals that were overall unsatisfactory because they were edible, I was hungry and tired and they took too long(to the point that my parents were considering walking out) to deliver. At that point it was just fuel.
As for your pizza deal - when you rejected the first pizza you should of told the place what the problem was. It sounds like you got bit either with false expectations from the advertising sprucing things up too much or the joint was making them wrong. The place that I ate about half the meal because I was so hungry was a spaghetti dish, and they must of spent all the extra time boiling the pasta, as it was basically mush. The sauce was no good either. I explained this in depth to the manager. I got my meal for free.
How does any of those call for a reserve as versus a minimum starting bid?
Unless you're using the auction to perform a market study in disguise, I don't see how just making the minimum bid at your selling point is much different from having a hidden reserve. For example, the friend case would effectively be the starting bid.
There ARE "cooling off" laws, but they only cover in-home purchases (i.e. door-to-door salesmen) and home refinancing contracts.
Depends on the state. For example, there's a state where anybody over 65 has two weeks to back out of any contract, even a car purchase, as long as the goods can still be returned.
The big 'AS-IS' stickers serve as a warning.
Besides, there's an additional amount of 'buyer beware' at auto auctions. All parties are assumed to be smart enough to know what to look for.
Generally speaking though, you should cease consuming the meal when you become aware that it's unsuitable. If you clean your plate it's generally considered that the meal was acceptible.
I think that it's more that he'd rather go find an item where as long as he's the winning bid he gets the item. He's probably been burned by the reserve idea(hidden minimum) too many times to like it. I think that the 'reserve' idea is to get bidding going and have people lose their heads and overbid, thus earning the seller more money while ensuring the item is not sold for less than he's willing to part with it.
But I agree with his point. If you're not going to sell the item for less than $100, then put the item out with a minimum starting bid of $100. Don't waste the buyer's time.
I specified off grid because on-grid doesn't make sense to me. The payoff time is too long. Whereas an off-grid install can be justified if the costs of hooking up to a distant grid is too high.
The economies are still the same though. Solar water heating is highly efficient and the panels are cheap. Solar electric panels are expensive and relatively inefficient.
There are people who install solar water heating without doing any sort of photovoltiac systems to save money.
That doesn't sound right to me... that would largely create segregated clusters of peers that don't talk to each other. That would likely hurt the swarm rather than help it.
That's why I said by preference
From what I understand, the bittorrent protocol tries to create a complete 'mini-swarm' in a given network segment, but sharing still happens between segments.
If part X is already on the network segment, it gets a lower priority to be sent to a different computer on that segment as compared to segment Y, which isn't on that segment. Clients, by preference, connect many or most of their connections within that segment.
These are all preferences and tendencies, not hard rules.
3 years to pay for themselves is not a big deal in the long term, most of the current panels that are the grade you would use to panel your roof are warrantied for 10 times that long last I checked.
I'd have to agree, however I think that he's getting his figures mixed up. Last time I priced out solar systems they ran over 30 years for financial payback assuming my electricity rate doubled. Into the infinite if you assumed 5% interest. IE you could take the money for your solar panels; invest it in funds earning 5%, cover your electricity bills for life, with interest left over.
The 3 year figure was for the time it took for them to generate more electricity than it cost to make them.
But in places like California, solar panels indeed pay for themselves
I'd tend to say that that's mostly because of the messed up power regulations there and high subsidies for installing solar power.
In such a setup, such as for a off-grid solar power house the cost benefits of using thermal solar for heating the water outweighs the loss of flexibility. Panels for solar water heating are generally at least an order of magnitude cheaper than solar electric panels. You simply oversize your water tank(and insulate it well) to last through a cloudy day/night.
Along with that getting specialized home appliances can be cost effective; special extreme efficiency 24 volt DC refridgerator, for example. Reducing your install by 1 panel can save several thousand dollars easy.
The fact that the costs are hidden doesn't mean it's there, so an intelligent person should realize that even if he's not charged everytime he goes to the doctor that it still costs money. Same with car insurance - the less people use it, the less the insurance has to be, which is why good drivers tend to be charged less for insurance.
Making all the costs hidden tends to encourage overconsumption, which ends up costing more money. When it's distributed like a government health care plan would be, it ends up costing us all money. Either that or you end up with waiting lists.
The US healthcare market isn't a failure of a free trade economy model, because we aren't one. Healthcare is provided by the employer - who doesn't really care for matching the plan to the individual family.
I believe that the bittorrent protocol already has means to detect whether or not it's on the same network segment, and shares packets in that segment by preference.
I don't think that it's very easy/efficent to separate most of these things when they're all together in a sort of mish-mosh.
It's not really that hard either given a properly set up smelter. Besides, they have to do it anyways even when working with raw ore.
Likewise, despite being cheap, you've gotta make sure the lead is disposed of properly, along with the various other nasty material that goes into making CRTs and capacitors.
Who's talking about disposing of it? Lead, despite being toxic, is still a valuable commodity - every ton we recover from old equipment is a ton we don't have to refine from raw ore.
Though you do have to contain it - Lead and mercury have relatively low boiling points, so go vaporous pretty easily - For example, iron has a melting point of ~1,538 C, while lead boils ~1,740 degrees. Mercury, with a boiling point of a mere 357 degrees, would be vapor long before the iron/steel melts. It's up to scrubbers to recover it. Again, replace 'safely disposed of' with 'sold at a profit'. While not used as much in things like thermometers as much today, there's still plenty of industrial uses for the material.
Silicon I'm hesitant about recycling - for one it's extremely common, two it's inert, so disposal is cheap, and they're rather sensitive about purity levels - which a smelter isn't going to give you.
Maybe a glass manufacturing plant could use it, maybe not.
Nope - followed it all the way back.
My point still stands. NOTHING the government provides is free. There's always a price hidden somewhere - usually a quite outrageous one.
Let's take federal school subsidies. These are programs where schools get money from the feds for this or that, such as new computers, textbooks, security guards, whatever.
Because of the complexities that are federal programs only a third of the dollars that congress provides to the department reach the school. The rest are eaten up by 'operating expenses'. Many schools actually have employees dedicated to generating requests for federal dollars - if the employee manages to pull even 10% over what she costs the school, it's worth it. It's all horribly inefficient.
Going back to your hospital example - I pay nearly 10% of my income to support the social services program. Even at this relatively early point of my life, it'd take a heck of a lot of medical care to exceed what I've paid into the system, even at the outrageous prices they like to charge.
Even if the government doesn't charge for it, they borrow or print the money to provide the services, which leads to inflation, making my $20 bill able to purchase half of what it could when I was a teen.
I don't see why it's that big of a deal. Without the P2P option, blizzard would need a far larger server patch farm, increased bandwidth costs, etc...
Which means your subscription would have to be higher or blizzard wouldn't be able to provide as much content.
If this gets widespread enough, I could see larger ISPs contracting to have a permanent peer server on their network.
The idea would be that they keep their pipeline a little clearer by sharing out things like blizzard updates, microsoft patches. This keeps QoS higher, keeps their customers happier without the expense of upgrading their leased lines.
As it's on their own network, bandwidth availability is essentially unlimited. Individual subscribers can download at the full line speed of their connection.
All the more reason to wonder why they'd have to charge a fee to do it, you'd expect them to be able to turn a profit. 'We'll take your old computer for *FREE*!' As they gloat about the valuable elements in it.
After all, that's what many places will do with cars.
I'd have to agree with this. Especially given that certain materials in the components are indeed present in larger quantities than they are in raw ore, combined with that there are more metals period would tend to indicate that the only benefit to using raw ore would be that of quantity - you have to collect computer components from all over to get enough to make it worth firing up the smelter, while you can built your refinery on site of the mine and process however many tones of ore that you feel like. The disposal fee could be for transportation of the disposed devices to the center.
Let's see, average computer:
Steel - valuable recyclable material pretty much from when we discovered it(and iron as well).
Aluminum - valuable material, local places will buy aluminum if you bring it to them(cans are only one of the things they'll take)
Copper - even better than steel
Gold - even better than copper
Lead - cheap, but very easy to recycle. As a shooter, for a couple hundred dollars investment I could start casting my own bullets. Scrap lead such as wheel weights are readily available. Along with the lead will be tin, silver, zinc, etc...
Silicone is rather common, though you might be able to recycle it, and while plastic is recyclable it's generally not worth the hassle. Various other trace elements - present in things like capacitors and alloys for the steel and solder. You'll also get the occasional oddball like titanium.
Do you pay taxes? If so, it's not free. It's simply that you don't receive a separate bill for the service, it's bundled into your income/sales/property taxes. In the case of the article, it's now a separate fee, much like the tire disposal fee I paid when I last bought a set of tires. Sure, they disposed of my old ones, but I had to pay the fee even when I bought my snow tires - which wasn't a trade in set, I even bought separate rims for them. In exchange, any place that sells tires would have to take them in for disposal if I asked them to.
The government may provide services without a direct charge - but we all end up paying for them through taxes. As I'm a taxpayer, I don't consider those services free. The money has already been extracted from me, under threat of confiscation and/or force.
I suspect that newer "regular" machines (not power user boxes) use less power than they did back-when. Is that actually the case?
To an extent. They usually use about the same amount of power, but newer machines do far more with the power they do use.
For the previous poster - his website could probably be hosted on basic enterprise level machine with at least a thousand other small time websites. I wouldn't be surprised if you could host a hundred thousand with load balancing between five servers. Individual sites would be less likely to be slashdotted as a bonus.
Sure, it might use five times the power, but it's doing a thousand times the work. That and you don't have to worry about a ten year old laptop HD failing without notice.
People do tend to upgrade for a reason. Yes, we could do more reutilization - but after a point trying to deal with older, slower, no longer made or supported hardware isn't worth it. There are reasons why many companies will replace perfectly usable vehicles with new ones - It's actually cheaper to sell the old ones and maintain a limited number of models of vehicles. You don't have to train the techs in as many types of vehicle, keep fewer varieties of spare parts on hand, etc...