We, the DoD, are not blocking websites by name. In order to prevent some of the abuses of the network we have a commercial filtering package installed. This has various categories that we allow or block. Very few sites are blocked manually, usually for a reason relating to scamming or local abuse. We can tell if the site was blocked manually, or by a category deny hit.
It's the commercial company that's blocking sites in this fashion, not us. We use the company's standard list. The only difference between us and libraries/schools who use censorware is that categories we block.
If I could remember what company's pattern we're using, I could submit the link to them for clarification. For example, CNN is allowed, but the blockpage comes up if you select any of the streaming media links/popups.
Most filter sites use bots to assign categories. If airamerica offers free streaming media, it could detect that far easier than Rush's subscription only service.
Also, like any list, it has problems and inconsistencies.
I checked out Rish Limbaugh's site, and it appears that he hosts his streaming media on a different server(stream.rushlimbaugh.com). It also takes being a subscriber(which I'm not) to get.
Being at work, air america's site is indeed, blocked. On the other hand, Al's site isn't blocked.
Can somebody with access to air america's site verify whether or not it has streaming media availabe from the same url?
But, and this I fail to understand at all, is whyinhell did they ever let a 23% penny's card get THAT far behind. Thats fscking financial stupidity at its worst if they had the money to pay it off.
Agreed. I use my credit cards like check cards, they're always paid off in full each month. I'm living with less than $3k of debt(0% loan on my car), and loving it. Interest adds up quick. Of course, I'm one of those guys who could semi-retire permanently with something like a quarter mil, invested smartly(though I'd be happier with a half mil, easier to survive fluxuations in the market).
I've dealt with penny's over their acceptance of a non-penny's card with a 40k line of credit on it, the bitch was gonna keep the card because it wasn't signed. It had been once, nearly 4 years back from that day, but wore off. I blew up loud enough they heard me all over the store and my permitted 38 was 5 seconds from coming out before she decided she'd give me back the card.
I'd suggest that you back off and cool down. I carry by permit as well, and pulling your piece over a bit of plastic is way over the top. I can understand the feeling of anger, but to say you're '5 seconds from' is way over the top. It's like saying 'I'll kill you if...', sure you might not mean it, but some people will take you literally. Remember, the piece is for the protection of life and limb, not a piece of plastic that costs about a quarter. Let her have it, call the cops for theft, call up and cancel the card and get a new one.
By the way, are you a current/former police officer?
I too, have worked as a network admin in the AOR. In my case, Air Force
For the most part, we use a standard commercial filtering package on a proxy server. This can vary by command.
In this case, I could easily see why air america was filtered. To conserve bandwidth, especially in the environment of limited bandwidth that is the AOR, streaming media sites are blocked. This explains the Air America blockings. Internet Radio/TV is the blocked category, not Politics/Opinion. The Forbidden page lists all categories the site belongs to.
Commonly blocked categories are forums/bulletin boards, porn, illegal activities, profanity, extreme, criminal skills, drugs, trading (like stocks and/or EBay). Web-ads by some of the smarter bases.
The forum/bulletin board filter tends to be very hit or miss.
Any sites blocked specifically by the administers of the site would present a webpage that says 'forbidden by local policy'.
Sites that would be in here are generally those that target military members for scams or other illegal activities that aren't otherwise caught by the filters.
Though there was those hours that I was told to block the major news sites as they had classified up there... Then the senior leadership realized that yes, the cat is out of the bag.
As for unblocking sites, that's generally difficult for official networks because the submitter has to show official need(not misc. browsing).
If it sucked so bad then why are people still considering a reusable delivery system today?
Because reusing something is great. It's just not always practical.
For example, look at reusable glass milk and soda bottles. They were used for years. They'd be delivered, used, then picked back up by the same guy who's delivering more. They'd be taken back to the factory where they'd be washed and refilled.
Why don't we do this anymore? Because of two things: First is safety. People got too paranoid about 'dirty' bottles being stored next to the filled ones, and the intensive washing and inspection required became too expensive Second was the cheapness of the disposable option: A plastic bottle costs less to make than it costs to wash a glass one. It's even more ludicris because the disposables take less energy and resources when you figure in the manufacturing/replacement costs for glass bottles, after all, they don't last forever, you only have an 'average' number of uses of a bottle before it's lost/destroyed.
This may change when our energy equations change more. Plastic products have to increase in cost, while cleaning and glassmaking (essentially water & heat) have to become cheaper.
One of the things about meth is that, if producing it was legal, it could be produced in pretty much the same setup as your cold medicenes, for the same cost, barring any additional 'sin taxes'. And yes, while it would still be dangerous, quite a bit of the danger comes from the crude manufactoring process.
Heroin could compete with Aspirin for cost. Cocaine could become an active ingredient in 'no-doze' pills. Well, maybe not no-doze, it'd have to be a product plastered with warning symbols. But I've read that chewing the raw leaf is quite effective.
Oh, back on the subject of banning legally usefull objects to preveand to prevent people from getting high off from dangerous stuff, we still have to ban paint and gasoline.
If I had my way, I'd legalize them all. I feel that it'd be a safer and better alternative to the current war on drugs. I'm sure the safer drugs would migrate into common use among the druggies, in safer contexts. Rather than jailing the dumbasses who do things like call the police station for weed(happened last month up here in ND), they have the jail space to go after real criminals.
It's most likely a best effort decision. Otherwise they pretty much have to worry about either making the thing in the size/shape of several hundred primary/secondary battery packs.
And not "all" support an extra battery at that location Then the people who bought those notebooks aren't getting to use one, at least internally.
At least at first, the biggest consumers for this product will probably willingly replace their laptops to get one that's compatible. They'll probably have laptops capable of accepting multiple batteries already.
Oooh, nuclear. All that uranium mining, transport, enrichment etc just burns up more oil.
Oh, like how setting up Solar and wind forms don't need oil at all?
Then of course you have to store the waste material somewhere 1. The waste is 98% Recyclable. 2. It's 24 tons of heavy metals a year for the average efficiency gigawatt plant of today 3. Subduction zones, anyone?
Storage takes massive amounts of concrete Maybe compared to a concrete patio, but it's quite reasonable compared to, say, a Dam. Besides, concrete's cheap.
so then you'll have to carry that away and bury it somewhere 24 tons of material a year to cart to and from a nuclear plant. Compared to 3.5 million tons of coal you need to cart to the coal plant and 200,000 tons of ash to cart away.
Not to mention the risk of meltdown, because goverments are too damn cheap to build pebble-bed reactors. Pebble-bed reactors are not the only meltdown proof reactor design out there. Part of the adjustments made after TMI was a number of changes to reactor designs to preclude meltdowns.
All technically true, however economics is a much tighter business. You not only have to be able to do something technically, but you have to do it cheaper than other methods.
Unfortunatly, slashing and burning rainforest is cheaper than your idea...
You might do better with mirrors directing more like to the domes rather than electrical solar panels.
I live 13 miles from work, in ND. There's like a dozen houses within 5 miles that I could theoretically move into(they're currently occupied). Ten of that is highway, of which the idea of biking on is scary...
In the wintertime, a heated vehicle is pretty much necessary. For that matter, so isn't a vehicle with 4 wheels.
I consider less than 2 miles walking/jogging range. Biking increases this to about 10.
I'll dispute your claim in a fashion. The poster was talking about highway usage. I've driven quite a few highway miles, and I hardly ever see a car of that type on the highway. Maybe it's different in your area.
They make great second/in town commute cars though.
My solution to bike thefts is to have an absolutly crappy looking bike. The ends handlebars are scratched up/half off, padding can be seen from the holes on the seat, etc...
I still throw a cheap lock on it to prevent 'joy rides'.
Because it costs resources to build, maintain, and heat those domes.
There's a limit to how much of a temperature differential you can get by building greenhouses without going to active heating/lighting.
Now, if people would go with my idea of building enough nuclear plants to more than replace all the dirty CO2 releasing coal plants... You might have enough cheap juice available to make it worth it.
They've charged him with three counts of juvenile possession of a handgun.
This has happened before with pictures showing teenagers drinking or using/possessing illegal drugs.
However, depending on how he got ahold of the handguns, his holding them was perfectly legal in Colorado. All that would be required would be his parent's permission.
I didn't specify any countries and spoke only in generalities. Military technology, and the reasons behind them, is definitly within the purview of slashdot. Some political commentary may occur and be on topic(ex: Why aren't we building nuke plants!). But yeah, ranting about WWI & II seems a bit far fetched.
Anyway, there have been many inventions that were created as a result of military or wartime research. Boycott *ALL* of those inventions then you can talk about this.
I'm in the military, I certainly ain't going to boycott my tools. The latest civilian 'innovation' I've seen is an adoptation of MRE technology to have shelf-stable 'TV Dinners'.
What does war have to do with making quiet engines?
Simple: It's easier to hide if you're quiet.
Many of the military forces on our planet now have the capability to destroy any vessel or vehicle. The difficult part is locating them closely enough to hit them before being detected and destroyed themselves.
When you're fighting sonar, this would allow a vessel to maintain greater speed for less noise, improving their chances for survival.
I'm not talking about cloning whole bodies, for one that's too expense, two, it takes too long, and three, it's unethical. Instead you do some teaking, create some stem cells, then use a matrix to just grow whatever you need. It could be a heart, liver, or lung, skin and bone are easy. Replacement blood vessels.
Makes me hope for a day when cloning techniques allow replacements to be grown from your own cells.
Of course, that still won't stop sh*t like this. Part of this problem stems from the fact that we're so paranoid about human parts(mostly deservably), that demand outstrips supply enough to inflate values into the stratosphere.
There's always somebody willing to save a buck by introducing or substituting substandard materials.
A big mistake that has been made with lots of technologies is building plants that are one-offs. Lots of coal fired electric plants, old refineries, and early nuke plants are like that. The AE (architect-engineer - e.g, Bechtel, BR, etc) would design an entire plant, with plenty of stupid differences between five others they were building at the same time. This time, I hope, the design certification will lead to 100 plants built cookie-cutter. Lots of advantages, including spare parts availability, and maintenance & operations people able to walk in and go to work - kinda like 747 pilots can fly most any one built.
While there'll always be minor differences due to geographical variables, making plants using as similiar a design as possible allows substantial savings. Beyond that, you have increases in safety. When you have a hundred plants of one design, when a problem occurs in one, you can inspect that point at all the other plants, and install a preventive measure for all of them, preventing future problems. Just like what they do with planes.
A test plant that's even 2 years older than the rest will tend to have the problems first. You keep a closer eye on it than the rest of the plants, saving money on inspections. When problems crop up, you fix the problem, the distribute the changes to other plants, preventing them a year and a half before it'd become an issue(on average). Of course, you don't stop observing, because if you have a hundred plants, odds are that some just won't happen at the test plant. For example the extreme cold of ND might exasperate or hide a problem.
We the morons of California have chosen to build dozens of silly natural gas plants for base load. In places with fresh air to the brain, they use natural gas for "peaking" because it is the most expensive fuel on the planet. So we've created a big demand for nat gas, driving the price up so the old folks in the rest of the US can't afford to heat their homes. We should be so proud. Agreed. When I read about natural gas plants under construction, my thought was that they'd never turn them on, as natural gas prices were already shooting up faster than oil, and the predictions I read had natural gas peaking before oil. But I guess demand for power in California just means that they end up paying more. That and they couldn't get clearance to build anything else.
Oh, and it's also caused me to decide that, if possible, I'll go with a geothermal heatpump for my heating/cooling needs.
The last numbers I saw for a wind farm did NOT include the cost to build it, which came mostly from tax money, As far a construction costs go, the same happened for the first nuclear plants, but then, the first ones were national plants that produced power as a side effect but were primarily for the nuclear weapons program. Later construction was meant to be almost prototype, with additional units built. Unfortuantly, the greenies stepped in and made construction unbearably expensive.
I will state that I don't object to state subsidation of test mills and such. Build a few dozen in different areas, figure out if it's reached the point of economical usage. It's relativly cheap, and you could get lucky. If it pans out, the companies should be able to use the research to expand the fields with commercial money.
nor did they include the cost of maintenance, which was huge bec the bearings didn't last long at all, and a host of other problems. I saw the maintenance issue occuring for wind. Even a nuclear plant's turbines have to undergo periodic maintenance, but that can be planned for, and you usually don't have more than four of the suckers.
While maintaining a wind turbine's generator isn't as messy or difficult, the simple fact that you have to have thousands of them to worry about to equal one nuke plant's output. The maintenence adds up very quickly.
I really like Solar, especially when the new breed are mounted on homes and parking garages. They can look decent, and are much more efficient than 20 years ago, the economy of scale and the electronic regulator boxes have driven costs way down. I hope to put a system on my next home. (Did you know there is open source software to monitor these systems?)
Living in North Dakota, I feel that you'll see 90+% installation in the southern states such as California, Florida, and Texas before you see even 10% up here. It's just the difference in climate. The weather is extreme enough up here, you get less sunlight, it's less intense, and electricity is cheaper. You're likely going to end up paying more to repair the cells than what they can save you. Electricity:I'm paying 5.97 cents/kilowatt hour, California's paying 10.81.
Somebody recently said that a solar setup is "Only" 25k, which with texas sunlight levels, would pay for itself in approx 60 years. When it actually starts saving people money, then everybody will want it, not just the greenies.
Heck, if solar worked well enough to beat buying power from the electric company, I'd be selling/renting/giving away 'proof-kits', containing a small solar panel and a meter. The person sticks it on their roof or whereever they're looking at installing solar panels. Leave it there for six months or so, read the meter every so often to find out how many kilowatt-hours would have been generated by a 1x1meter panel. Then they scale to their utility bill.
Then there is the problems with the sliced & diced birds, which you either care about or not. To some it's only important
A case in practice is the introduction of software patents in the USA. Has this led to any increase in genuine software research?
The trouble with using this as an example would be that, in the USA, software was traditionally protected by copyright, which already gives easier and longer protection than a patent. The only problem with this for businesses is that it's not as broad, in the sense that you can't copyright a 'method'.
On the other hand, the software realm is where many of the most stupid 'patents' are found. They're vague and predictive. Used frequently simply for carniverous operations, where the company is a shell that employs lawyers to collect royalties on their patents.
Heck, you even have the whole Rambus fiasco, where the same company went to meetings, then 'ammended' their patents to cover the technolgies decided upon in the meetings.
Yeah, it's like patents, but I'm against the entire concept of patents so there is no inconsistency.
So how do you propose to keep commercial research alive? I'd settle for simply tightening the patent system back to the point that you have to have a working prototype before you can patent. Oh, and chop back on how 'vague' they're allowed to be.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I'll have to say it outright.
We, the DoD, are not blocking websites by name. In order to prevent some of the abuses of the network we have a commercial filtering package installed. This has various categories that we allow or block. Very few sites are blocked manually, usually for a reason relating to scamming or local abuse. We can tell if the site was blocked manually, or by a category deny hit.
It's the commercial company that's blocking sites in this fashion, not us. We use the company's standard list. The only difference between us and libraries/schools who use censorware is that categories we block.
If I could remember what company's pattern we're using, I could submit the link to them for clarification. For example, CNN is allowed, but the blockpage comes up if you select any of the streaming media links/popups.
Most filter sites use bots to assign categories. If airamerica offers free streaming media, it could detect that far easier than Rush's subscription only service.
Also, like any list, it has problems and inconsistencies.
I checked out Rish Limbaugh's site, and it appears that he hosts his streaming media on a different server(stream.rushlimbaugh.com). It also takes being a subscriber(which I'm not) to get.
Being at work, air america's site is indeed, blocked. On the other hand, Al's site isn't blocked.
Can somebody with access to air america's site verify whether or not it has streaming media availabe from the same url?
But, and this I fail to understand at all, is whyinhell did they ever let a 23% penny's card get THAT far behind. Thats fscking financial stupidity at its worst if they had the money to pay it off.
Agreed. I use my credit cards like check cards, they're always paid off in full each month. I'm living with less than $3k of debt(0% loan on my car), and loving it. Interest adds up quick. Of course, I'm one of those guys who could semi-retire permanently with something like a quarter mil, invested smartly(though I'd be happier with a half mil, easier to survive fluxuations in the market).
I've dealt with penny's over their acceptance of a non-penny's card with a 40k line of credit on it, the bitch was gonna keep the card because it wasn't signed. It had been once, nearly 4 years back from that day, but wore off. I blew up loud enough they heard me all over the store and my permitted 38 was 5 seconds from coming out before she decided she'd give me back the card.
I'd suggest that you back off and cool down. I carry by permit as well, and pulling your piece over a bit of plastic is way over the top. I can understand the feeling of anger, but to say you're '5 seconds from' is way over the top. It's like saying 'I'll kill you if...', sure you might not mean it, but some people will take you literally. Remember, the piece is for the protection of life and limb, not a piece of plastic that costs about a quarter. Let her have it, call the cops for theft, call up and cancel the card and get a new one.
By the way, are you a current/former police officer?
I too, have worked as a network admin in the AOR. In my case, Air Force
For the most part, we use a standard commercial filtering package on a proxy server. This can vary by command.
In this case, I could easily see why air america was filtered. To conserve bandwidth, especially in the environment of limited bandwidth that is the AOR, streaming media sites are blocked. This explains the Air America blockings. Internet Radio/TV is the blocked category, not Politics/Opinion. The Forbidden page lists all categories the site belongs to.
Commonly blocked categories are forums/bulletin boards, porn, illegal activities, profanity, extreme, criminal skills, drugs, trading (like stocks and/or EBay). Web-ads by some of the smarter bases.
The forum/bulletin board filter tends to be very hit or miss.
Any sites blocked specifically by the administers of the site would present a webpage that says 'forbidden by local policy'.
Sites that would be in here are generally those that target military members for scams or other illegal activities that aren't otherwise caught by the filters.
Though there was those hours that I was told to block the major news sites as they had classified up there... Then the senior leadership realized that yes, the cat is out of the bag.
As for unblocking sites, that's generally difficult for official networks because the submitter has to show official need(not misc. browsing).
Well, to be honest, human life is worth quite a large amount of money in the capitalist system.
Good idea, bad implementation.
If it sucked so bad then why are people still considering a reusable delivery system today?
Because reusing something is great. It's just not always practical.
For example, look at reusable glass milk and soda bottles. They were used for years. They'd be delivered, used, then picked back up by the same guy who's delivering more. They'd be taken back to the factory where they'd be washed and refilled.
Why don't we do this anymore? Because of two things:
First is safety. People got too paranoid about 'dirty' bottles being stored next to the filled ones, and the intensive washing and inspection required became too expensive
Second was the cheapness of the disposable option: A plastic bottle costs less to make than it costs to wash a glass one. It's even more ludicris because the disposables take less energy and resources when you figure in the manufacturing/replacement costs for glass bottles, after all, they don't last forever, you only have an 'average' number of uses of a bottle before it's lost/destroyed.
This may change when our energy equations change more. Plastic products have to increase in cost, while cleaning and glassmaking (essentially water & heat) have to become cheaper.
It enables the party in power to actually do something, instead of be paralyzed by extremist parties who wield their 5% of the vote like a club.
I would argue that most times, I'd love my congress to be doing nothing.
One of the things about meth is that, if producing it was legal, it could be produced in pretty much the same setup as your cold medicenes, for the same cost, barring any additional 'sin taxes'. And yes, while it would still be dangerous, quite a bit of the danger comes from the crude manufactoring process.
Heroin could compete with Aspirin for cost. Cocaine could become an active ingredient in 'no-doze' pills. Well, maybe not no-doze, it'd have to be a product plastered with warning symbols. But I've read that chewing the raw leaf is quite effective.
Oh, back on the subject of banning legally usefull objects to preveand to prevent people from getting high off from dangerous stuff, we still have to ban paint and gasoline.
If I had my way, I'd legalize them all. I feel that it'd be a safer and better alternative to the current war on drugs. I'm sure the safer drugs would migrate into common use among the druggies, in safer contexts. Rather than jailing the dumbasses who do things like call the police station for weed(happened last month up here in ND), they have the jail space to go after real criminals.
Not me for one...
Well, I'm a bit off on the first two parts...
It's most likely a best effort decision. Otherwise they pretty much have to worry about either making the thing in the size/shape of several hundred primary/secondary battery packs.
And not "all" support an extra battery at that location
Then the people who bought those notebooks aren't getting to use one, at least internally.
At least at first, the biggest consumers for this product will probably willingly replace their laptops to get one that's compatible. They'll probably have laptops capable of accepting multiple batteries already.
Oooh, nuclear. All that uranium mining, transport, enrichment etc just burns up more oil.
Oh, like how setting up Solar and wind forms don't need oil at all?
Then of course you have to store the waste material somewhere
1. The waste is 98% Recyclable.
2. It's 24 tons of heavy metals a year for the average efficiency gigawatt plant of today
3. Subduction zones, anyone?
Storage takes massive amounts of concrete
Maybe compared to a concrete patio, but it's quite reasonable compared to, say, a Dam. Besides, concrete's cheap.
so then you'll have to carry that away and bury it somewhere
24 tons of material a year to cart to and from a nuclear plant. Compared to 3.5 million tons of coal you need to cart to the coal plant and 200,000 tons of ash to cart away.
Not to mention the risk of meltdown, because goverments are too damn cheap to build pebble-bed reactors.
Pebble-bed reactors are not the only meltdown proof reactor design out there. Part of the adjustments made after TMI was a number of changes to reactor designs to preclude meltdowns.
All technically true, however economics is a much tighter business. You not only have to be able to do something technically, but you have to do it cheaper than other methods.
Unfortunatly, slashing and burning rainforest is cheaper than your idea...
You might do better with mirrors directing more like to the domes rather than electrical solar panels.
I live 13 miles from work, in ND. There's like a dozen houses within 5 miles that I could theoretically move into(they're currently occupied). Ten of that is highway, of which the idea of biking on is scary...
In the wintertime, a heated vehicle is pretty much necessary. For that matter, so isn't a vehicle with 4 wheels.
I consider less than 2 miles walking/jogging range. Biking increases this to about 10.
I'll dispute your claim in a fashion. The poster was talking about highway usage. I've driven quite a few highway miles, and I hardly ever see a car of that type on the highway. Maybe it's different in your area.
They make great second/in town commute cars though.
My solution to bike thefts is to have an absolutly crappy looking bike. The ends handlebars are scratched up/half off, padding can be seen from the holes on the seat, etc...
I still throw a cheap lock on it to prevent 'joy rides'.
Because it costs resources to build, maintain, and heat those domes.
There's a limit to how much of a temperature differential you can get by building greenhouses without going to active heating/lighting.
Now, if people would go with my idea of building enough nuclear plants to more than replace all the dirty CO2 releasing coal plants... You might have enough cheap juice available to make it worth it.
Dangerous as far as the law goes as well.
Teenager arrested because of photo on myspace showing him holding handguns
They've charged him with three counts of juvenile possession of a handgun.
This has happened before with pictures showing teenagers drinking or using/possessing illegal drugs.
However, depending on how he got ahold of the handguns, his holding them was perfectly legal in Colorado. All that would be required would be his parent's permission.
I hope you're not talking about my post.
I didn't specify any countries and spoke only in generalities. Military technology, and the reasons behind them, is definitly within the purview of slashdot. Some political commentary may occur and be on topic(ex: Why aren't we building nuke plants!). But yeah, ranting about WWI & II seems a bit far fetched.
Anyway, there have been many inventions that were created as a result of military or wartime research. Boycott *ALL* of those inventions then you can talk about this.
I'm in the military, I certainly ain't going to boycott my tools. The latest civilian 'innovation' I've seen is an adoptation of MRE technology to have shelf-stable 'TV Dinners'.
What does war have to do with making quiet engines?
Simple: It's easier to hide if you're quiet.
Many of the military forces on our planet now have the capability to destroy any vessel or vehicle. The difficult part is locating them closely enough to hit them before being detected and destroyed themselves.
When you're fighting sonar, this would allow a vessel to maintain greater speed for less noise, improving their chances for survival.
I'm not talking about cloning whole bodies, for one that's too expense, two, it takes too long, and three, it's unethical. Instead you do some teaking, create some stem cells, then use a matrix to just grow whatever you need. It could be a heart, liver, or lung, skin and bone are easy. Replacement blood vessels.
Makes me hope for a day when cloning techniques allow replacements to be grown from your own cells.
Of course, that still won't stop sh*t like this. Part of this problem stems from the fact that we're so paranoid about human parts(mostly deservably), that demand outstrips supply enough to inflate values into the stratosphere.
There's always somebody willing to save a buck by introducing or substituting substandard materials.
A big mistake that has been made with lots of technologies is building plants that are one-offs. Lots of coal fired electric plants, old refineries, and early nuke plants are like that. The AE (architect-engineer - e.g, Bechtel, BR, etc) would design an entire plant, with plenty of stupid differences between five others they were building at the same time. This time, I hope, the design certification will lead to 100 plants built cookie-cutter. Lots of advantages, including spare parts availability, and maintenance & operations people able to walk in and go to work - kinda like 747 pilots can fly most any one built.
While there'll always be minor differences due to geographical variables, making plants using as similiar a design as possible allows substantial savings. Beyond that, you have increases in safety. When you have a hundred plants of one design, when a problem occurs in one, you can inspect that point at all the other plants, and install a preventive measure for all of them, preventing future problems. Just like what they do with planes.
A test plant that's even 2 years older than the rest will tend to have the problems first. You keep a closer eye on it than the rest of the plants, saving money on inspections. When problems crop up, you fix the problem, the distribute the changes to other plants, preventing them a year and a half before it'd become an issue(on average). Of course, you don't stop observing, because if you have a hundred plants, odds are that some just won't happen at the test plant. For example the extreme cold of ND might exasperate or hide a problem.
We the morons of California have chosen to build dozens of silly natural gas plants for base load. In places with fresh air to the brain, they use natural gas for "peaking" because it is the most expensive fuel on the planet. So we've created a big demand for nat gas, driving the price up so the old folks in the rest of the US can't afford to heat their homes. We should be so proud.
Agreed. When I read about natural gas plants under construction, my thought was that they'd never turn them on, as natural gas prices were already shooting up faster than oil, and the predictions I read had natural gas peaking before oil. But I guess demand for power in California just means that they end up paying more. That and they couldn't get clearance to build anything else.
Oh, and it's also caused me to decide that, if possible, I'll go with a geothermal heatpump for my heating/cooling needs.
The last numbers I saw for a wind farm did NOT include the cost to build it, which came mostly from tax money,
As far a construction costs go, the same happened for the first nuclear plants, but then, the first ones were national plants that produced power as a side effect but were primarily for the nuclear weapons program. Later construction was meant to be almost prototype, with additional units built. Unfortuantly, the greenies stepped in and made construction unbearably expensive.
I will state that I don't object to state subsidation of test mills and such. Build a few dozen in different areas, figure out if it's reached the point of economical usage. It's relativly cheap, and you could get lucky. If it pans out, the companies should be able to use the research to expand the fields with commercial money.
nor did they include the cost of maintenance, which was huge bec the bearings didn't last long at all, and a host of other problems.
I saw the maintenance issue occuring for wind. Even a nuclear plant's turbines have to undergo periodic maintenance, but that can be planned for, and you usually don't have more than four of the suckers.
While maintaining a wind turbine's generator isn't as messy or difficult, the simple fact that you have to have thousands of them to worry about to equal one nuke plant's output. The maintenence adds up very quickly.
I really like Solar, especially when the new breed are mounted on homes and parking garages. They can look decent, and are much more efficient than 20 years ago, the economy of scale and the electronic regulator boxes have driven costs way down. I hope to put a system on my next home. (Did you know there is open source software to monitor these systems?)
Living in North Dakota, I feel that you'll see 90+% installation in the southern states such as California, Florida, and Texas before you see even 10% up here. It's just the difference in climate. The weather is extreme enough up here, you get less sunlight, it's less intense, and electricity is cheaper. You're likely going to end up paying more to repair the cells than what they can save you.
Electricity:I'm paying 5.97 cents/kilowatt hour, California's paying 10.81.
Somebody recently said that a solar setup is "Only" 25k, which with texas sunlight levels, would pay for itself in approx 60 years. When it actually starts saving people money, then everybody will want it, not just the greenies.
Heck, if solar worked well enough to beat buying power from the electric company, I'd be selling/renting/giving away 'proof-kits', containing a small solar panel and a meter. The person sticks it on their roof or whereever they're looking at installing solar panels. Leave it there for six months or so, read the meter every so often to find out how many kilowatt-hours would have been generated by a 1x1meter panel. Then they scale to their utility bill.
Then there is the problems with the sliced & diced birds, which you either care about or not. To some it's only important
A case in practice is the introduction of software patents in the USA. Has this led to any increase in genuine software research?
The trouble with using this as an example would be that, in the USA, software was traditionally protected by copyright, which already gives easier and longer protection than a patent. The only problem with this for businesses is that it's not as broad, in the sense that you can't copyright a 'method'.
On the other hand, the software realm is where many of the most stupid 'patents' are found. They're vague and predictive. Used frequently simply for carniverous operations, where the company is a shell that employs lawyers to collect royalties on their patents.
Heck, you even have the whole Rambus fiasco, where the same company went to meetings, then 'ammended' their patents to cover the technolgies decided upon in the meetings.
Yeah, it's like patents, but I'm against the entire concept of patents so there is no inconsistency.
So how do you propose to keep commercial research alive? I'd settle for simply tightening the patent system back to the point that you have to have a working prototype before you can patent. Oh, and chop back on how 'vague' they're allowed to be.