Rather than attributing to malice that witch(!) could have be adequitely(!) explained buy(!) simple comprehension, why don't you do some calculations for me and show me that TD is a better choice for agricultural waste than something like Cellulosic ethanol. Without hard numbers your argument is worthless.
How does the rapid degradation of soil fit with your plan to remove all waste from farms? How much energy is required to ship the vast, low grade energy to the TD plant?
The trace is designed to provide a stiff supply on its own and seemlessly move to interactive when available. This is a very different design requirement to a grid interactive only inverter. (My parents have a SW3024, and I've done power electronics for my degree).
Fried linesmen is probably a myth, as a) the lines men around here do everything on live wires (we had an outage last week, and the tech calmly drove up and hoisted his cherrypicker into the live 22kV lines and pulled a fuse out with his hand - made a nice flash when he put in the new one...) b) a 1kW array at peak would not produce enough power to support even a single phase in one block and it is easy to monitor for falling voltage and out of tolerance frequency (just a little bit of software on a chip).
Yes SMPs convert to high voltage DC, but if they don't use a large input cap (and new ones don't I've found) they are operating close to 50Hz already. 'universal' suppies operate from about 80V to 300V, and automatically do better power factor correction by tracking the input voltage more closely.
Nick Pine points out that a standard triac type light dimmer is perfectly acceptable for harmonic distortion, and it is conceivable that a simple modified sinewave inverter could be connected to the grid directly if it were synchronised (easy to do - wait until the voltage reachs say 50V, then connect your DC-DC to the line, when it drops, disconnect) and filtered (using the same LC circuit used in light dimmers).
p.s. the trace works by switching three different windings on and off in offset-ternary(-1, 0, 1). Work out what the windings are, and how many steps of sine it can produce. Is it worth adding an extra winding? I had my parents one connected to an oscilloscope years back, it's quite fun to watch, particularly as the load changes:) Many other inverters without the requirement for stiffness just use PWM on a 300V DC supply. I've wondered if a 300V series string of panels could be directly connected to the grid using an H-bridge and an LC filter. That might cost $10 for 2kW: $5 pic controller, $3 H-bridge, $2 inductor and cap. It would have better power factor than a light dimmer as the panels are current sources and the power is symmetric.
For your education: When we consider solar power (PV, DHW, space heating), we talk about the peak watt cost of the system (this is a figure of merit, like the capacity of your shower heat). That is, how many watts maximum can the system produce on noon on the equator on a perfectly clear day (something like 1100W/m^2 input). Then the system will produce energy depending on the climate. Standard commercial panels, mounted perpendicular to the sun will produce about 90% of their peak capacity in summer at noon in Melbourne, if kept cool. (I know this because I've measured it on my parent's array)
Energy is usually sold as a non-time dependent cost in $/J, or $/kWh. The numbers I was quoting are the peak rating cost of those systems, compared with about $10/W for commercial panels fixed mounted at the latitude. You can look at the sunball site yourself and work out the number by dividing the cost in $US by the peak output in W.
Converting peak watts to actual energy production accurately requires a good database of insolation data over many years and knowledge of the positioning and cooling. Or you can get a yearly average and use that as a rough guide. My parents produce about 6kWh per day on average from their 1.5kW peak array, so you might expect 4kWh/day kWpeak average in melbourne using fixed panels. This equates to about 1500kW hour/ year kWpeak worth about $230 a year.
The sunball costs $1100au for a third of a kWpeak, paying itself off (ignoring interest) in about 5 years.
Dead people are only good if their bodies are completely converted to energy by being lowered into a blackhole.
p.s. we grow all our own fruit and veggies on a 580m^2 block of land (i.e.suburban). Last time I calculated it, our footprint was about a quarter of a hectare.
I read it perfectly clearly, and understand what it means. It means that for every J of (gibbs) free energy presented to the machine, it produces 0.85J of useful energy on the output (a dubious claim in itself). My point is that there aren't that many J of useful energy lying around. We already use most of them more profitably elsewhere. It doesn't matter how efficient TD is, even if it were 100% efficient you are still only getting a second order effect.
I understand that TD can handle a wide range of mostly organic substances, but most of those are already better used in other ways (such as recycling, composting and cellulose ethanol production). Do the math and give me some numbers that show that TD could really replace our oil dependence. I suspect that TD appeals to people who want things to be solved without having to change any aspect of their lifestyle. It also has a certain startrekness (a sort of inverse replicator) to it which probably appeals to the average geek.
I'd rather have really cheap, 100% renewable, existing energy sources such as solar heating and hot water. Whilst TD returns 85% of the input energy, my simple solar system returns 5000% of the input energy and costs 2c/peak watt.
I live in.au (You can tell from my website url:). The middle east (and particularly Israel and SA) already understand that oil isn't forever and have been quietly making very good progress in sun based energy. A lot of the really good, and practical ideas that may have first been thought up elsewhere are now only in common use in the middle east. For example, there are solar desalination plants that also produce tomatos, passive cooling techniques (such as the arab cooling tower invented back in the 12C), ice and water makes that work on the night sky and so on. Keep up the good work - the rest of the world will beat a path to your door some day soon.
Let see, lets say my tires last 1 year, and weigh 1kg each. lets say that synthetic rubber needs 3kg of oil for each kg of rubber. That means I need to buy 6kg of oil for my bike each year. Lets say that everyone in the US did this, at 6*22e7 = 132e9kg of crude a year. That's 11785714 barrels of oil a year, or equivalent to 0.15% of the current US crude demand. Now, in practice tires can last longer, weigh less and need less crude per kg of tyre.
How much damage does 1kg of rubber plantation make? How much energy?
Yeah, there is some 35% efficient panels (which are much more expensive) and a (from memory) 6:1 concentrating fresnel lens in front and a system to move the waste heat to the outside.
I think grid tie inverters are about 20 times over priced from what they would be if they were made with the same technology as computer power supplies. Considering modern computer powersupplies (500W for $45AU) are required to have powerfactor correction in them I suspect that they are practically grid interactive already.
I'm waiting until the sunball stops having a 6month waiting list, then I'll consider buying one.
There's plenty of waste already around to be converted - and we'll continue to produce waste in the future.
Waste made from what? It seems to me that we can either recycle (or reuse) this 'waste', or convert it to crude oil. But we can't do both with the same kg of waste. And producing a kg of the most efficient plastics still takes 2kg of crude. Yes, we can use bio-waste as a source, but why use TD for that when we have things like algal-diesel and cellulose based ethanol with far higher return on input.
I spent $350 to build a new solar water heater. It will remove all of my heating and domestic hot water needs for the whole year, and heat my greenhouse and hottub. As I already cycle to work all of that energy offsets fossil fuel use, enough for two cars to commute 50km each day. $350. And anyone can see how it works and how to fix it if it fails.
I can only fathom that you've got a ton of money tied up in a boondoggle that is great for some people
Do you spend money heating your house? Do you spend money heating water? My original water heater and sunroom paid themselves off in 3 months.
but won't get me to work from the gas station.
I sold my car 5 years ago, gaining $5200 a year spending money (of which I've spent $500 on bicycle bits) plus a once off of $10k for a total of $36k unspent money (I bought a house instead). I ride 30 minutes to work 3 days a week for meetings, and telecomute the other 2. It takes me less time to ride than it takes for my work mate to drive, who lives 1km away.
Instead you advocate building a big machine to convert small amounts of waste into fuel. As you are scared to estimate real numbers, let me have a go instead. You are blinded by the big numbers, but think about it this way: How much waste do you personally produce each day, that isn't better recycled (i.e. remove the scrap iron, the reusable plastics, the aluminum, the compost, the clean white office paper). I (over-)estimate I produce about 2kg of TD suitable waste a day. My wife used to drive to work (she now catches the train, so that's harder to estimate) and she used 20L/week (2.8l/day) of petrol to get to work (and that's frugal). So TD for us would not even produce enough fuel to drive one person to work. We haven't accounted for the energy used to move the waste to the TD plant, or the energy required to make the waste in the first place, or transport it to my house.
Now you need to do this same calculation for say a farm, or a hospital and you will find that even were TD able to extract 100% of the energy in the waste stream, it will not provide enough fuel to remove dependance on fossil fuel.
Let me also re-iterate: I agree that TD is an excellent solution for waste processing, far better than dumping it or incinerating it. But it is not a solution to our energy needs. Perhaps you have invested lots of your personal well-being on believing in TD and that is why you are so set in your position? A lot of people like to put hope in future technologies rather than trying to do something now.
p.s. about 40% of cars in my city use LPG, extracted from natural gas. It's fairly common outside the US (which seems jammed on gasoline for some reason).
on the pro side: you don't need to work as hard riding one, they are good friends and I would love to have a horse of my own to ride, good manure.
on the cons: higher capital cost, higher maintanance, extra food bill, needs more storage space, produces exhaust even when parked, not as fast, not suited to modern road pavements.
I guess a horse uses less energy (and certainly much less fossil fuel) than a car.
I want to seem some real numbers. Yes there is lots of waste, but all of that waste required energy to produce it. Give me some hard numbers and I'm with you all the way (I'm heading off to a conference on sustainable living on sat.), but without them all I can see is yet another company with an interesting sideshow. If a relatively direct collection system like canola biodiesel gets only 3:1 gain on input fuel what makes you think that hard to burn things like offal and watery poo are going to be net-positive? Just heating the watery poo up probably uses half the available energy.
The wikipedia article claims a return of 85% on available input energy for offal, i.e. the system uses more energy than it gets back. The 560% figure is nonsense, as they aren't including the energy required to produce the feedstock - I could equally say that carrying a tin of petrol 20 yards is 10000% efficient.
I agree that we should be using TD for waste (and it's vastly superior to high temp incinerators, which are mostly just dioxin factories), but I also think people should be looking at real sustainable solutions, such as solar space and DHW heating. I currently collect 5kW peak of solar domestic hot water heat using $100 in parts. Considering heating is the largest domestic load in the US, ytf doesn't everyone use solar heat. I also collect 100kWh of hot air using a cheap greenhouse on sunny days in winter.
A photo test section of my soon to be installed 35kW peak (120kWhr in mid winter, 280kWhr in summer) solar array:
It collects enough heat in winter on one sunny day to keep my house warm for 2 cloudy days, plus all my DHW needs. It has cost me $350 in parts and should take about 2 hours in install the lot. It uses an average of 50W to produce 10kW, a return of 200:1. If people removed the heating, DHW, lighting and cooling portion of first world energy then TD might be viable.
Well, you've got to make the organic waste first. And currently organic waste uses a lot of fossil energy. It might buy us a few years whilst we burn all our reserves (landfill, e.g.) but you need to do the full energy calculations and show that TD is energy positive if you want to run an economy on it.
It's a very nice way to get rid of offal, I agree, but I doubt it even produces 50% of the energy required to produce the offal in the first place.
http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au/ is $2.5US/W, perhaps as high as $3US/W including a regulation grid interactive inverter. And neither the sunball, nor the GI-inverter are being mass produced at the moment. I know someone who is getting $1.2US/W including inverter, without subsidies or magic. He just uses a large, cheap, concentrator and water cooling.
(However, I agree that PV is not economical in the current economy)
Actually, it took a lot of talented programs a long time to solve the y2k problem. There was a lot more to the problem than changing from 2 digit to 4 digit fields.
Even if TD were 100% efficient it would only double the amount of fossil-oil in the system available for transport. And once the oil runs out the TD runs out too.
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
No, FOSS exists mostly because the very low cost of duplication makes motives other than profit viable. Your argument was that low duplication would make new innovation impossible, I pointed out that FOSS demonstrates this is not true. The existance of the GPL has very little to do with this other than the fact that it encodes the society rules to discourage stealing.
I also believe that piracy is harmful to the software industry (and as such, consider it a crime), but if we were to have a duplicator the development model would have to change - it would not lead to the death of innovation, only to existing business models (and probably in the same way that linux has so far completely replaced Windows). That seems quite a reasonable thing, as long as people don't steal to get there. (Yes, duplicating a currently manufactured and patented car design would be stealing, duplicating a 100 year old design not so)
Re:Yup as long as Dell isn't doing it
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So free software (FOSS) doesn't exist? And it doesn't make any wealth?
Your argument is so flawed, that I can't believe it is still consistently raised as a legitimate defense of proprietary software.
well yes... one could incinerate the arm, for example. I was pondering something that destroyed the electronics but had no effect on the surrounding tissue. Considering how easy it is to destroy electronics using a suitably crafted emp I was thinking of a device that could be placed in a car outside the company and destroy all the rfids as they walk past.
Perhaps it is possible to destroy the chip whilst it is in your arm, using something like a blast of suitable frequency microwaves.
In any case, this sounds like fake-security. What reason would having an RFID tag attached to a person would make this more secure than just carrying a card. It's probably more an attempt to watch where employees go or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than attributing to malice that witch(!) could have be adequitely(!) explained buy(!) simple comprehension, why don't you do some calculations for me and show me that TD is a better choice for agricultural waste than something like Cellulosic ethanol. Without hard numbers your argument is worthless.
How does the rapid degradation of soil fit with your plan to remove all waste from farms? How much energy is required to ship the vast, low grade energy to the TD plant?
The trace is designed to provide a stiff supply on its own and seemlessly move to interactive when available. This is a very different design requirement to a grid interactive only inverter. (My parents have a SW3024, and I've done power electronics for my degree).
:) Many other inverters without the requirement for stiffness just use PWM on a 300V DC supply. I've wondered if a 300V series string of panels could be directly connected to the grid using an H-bridge and an LC filter. That might cost $10 for 2kW: $5 pic controller, $3 H-bridge, $2 inductor and cap. It would have better power factor than a light dimmer as the panels are current sources and the power is symmetric.
Fried linesmen is probably a myth, as a) the lines men around here do everything on live wires (we had an outage last week, and the tech calmly drove up and hoisted his cherrypicker into the live 22kV lines and pulled a fuse out with his hand - made a nice flash when he put in the new one...) b) a 1kW array at peak would not produce enough power to support even a single phase in one block and it is easy to monitor for falling voltage and out of tolerance frequency (just a little bit of software on a chip).
Yes SMPs convert to high voltage DC, but if they don't use a large input cap (and new ones don't I've found) they are operating close to 50Hz already. 'universal' suppies operate from about 80V to 300V, and automatically do better power factor correction by tracking the input voltage more closely.
Nick Pine points out that a standard triac type light dimmer is perfectly acceptable for harmonic distortion, and it is conceivable that a simple modified sinewave inverter could be connected to the grid directly if it were synchronised (easy to do - wait until the voltage reachs say 50V, then connect your DC-DC to the line, when it drops, disconnect) and filtered (using the same LC circuit used in light dimmers).
p.s. the trace works by switching three different windings on and off in offset-ternary(-1, 0, 1). Work out what the windings are, and how many steps of sine it can produce. Is it worth adding an extra winding? I had my parents one connected to an oscilloscope years back, it's quite fun to watch, particularly as the load changes
For your education: When we consider solar power (PV, DHW, space heating), we talk about the peak watt cost of the system (this is a figure of merit, like the capacity of your shower heat). That is, how many watts maximum can the system produce on noon on the equator on a perfectly clear day (something like 1100W/m^2 input). Then the system will produce energy depending on the climate. Standard commercial panels, mounted perpendicular to the sun will produce about 90% of their peak capacity in summer at noon in Melbourne, if kept cool. (I know this because I've measured it on my parent's array)
Energy is usually sold as a non-time dependent cost in $/J, or $/kWh. The numbers I was quoting are the peak rating cost of those systems, compared with about $10/W for commercial panels fixed mounted at the latitude. You can look at the sunball site yourself and work out the number by dividing the cost in $US by the peak output in W.
Converting peak watts to actual energy production accurately requires a good database of insolation data over many years and knowledge of the positioning and cooling. Or you can get a yearly average and use that as a rough guide. My parents produce about 6kWh per day on average from their 1.5kW peak array, so you might expect 4kWh/day kWpeak average in melbourne using fixed panels. This equates to about 1500kW hour/ year kWpeak worth about $230 a year.
The sunball costs $1100au for a third of a kWpeak, paying itself off (ignoring interest) in about 5 years.
Does that help you understand?
Dead people are only good if their bodies are completely converted to energy by being lowered into a blackhole.
p.s. we grow all our own fruit and veggies on a 580m^2 block of land (i.e.suburban). Last time I calculated it, our footprint was about a quarter of a hectare.
I read it perfectly clearly, and understand what it means. It means that for every J of (gibbs) free energy presented to the machine, it produces 0.85J of useful energy on the output (a dubious claim in itself). My point is that there aren't that many J of useful energy lying around. We already use most of them more profitably elsewhere. It doesn't matter how efficient TD is, even if it were 100% efficient you are still only getting a second order effect.
I've just had this argument with someone else:o ld=-1&commentsort=3&mode=flat&cid=14731470
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177589&thresh
I understand that TD can handle a wide range of mostly organic substances, but most of those are already better used in other ways (such as recycling, composting and cellulose ethanol production). Do the math and give me some numbers that show that TD could really replace our oil dependence. I suspect that TD appeals to people who want things to be solved without having to change any aspect of their lifestyle. It also has a certain startrekness (a sort of inverse replicator) to it which probably appeals to the average geek.
I'd rather have really cheap, 100% renewable, existing energy sources such as solar heating and hot water. Whilst TD returns 85% of the input energy, my simple solar system returns 5000% of the input energy and costs 2c/peak watt.
I live in .au (You can tell from my website url :). The middle east (and particularly Israel and SA) already understand that oil isn't forever and have been quietly making very good progress in sun based energy. A lot of the really good, and practical ideas that may have first been thought up elsewhere are now only in common use in the middle east. For example, there are solar desalination plants that also produce tomatos, passive cooling techniques (such as the arab cooling tower invented back in the 12C), ice and water makes that work on the night sky and so on. Keep up the good work - the rest of the world will beat a path to your door some day soon.
Let see, lets say my tires last 1 year, and weigh 1kg each. lets say that synthetic rubber needs 3kg of oil for each kg of rubber. That means I need to buy 6kg of oil for my bike each year. Lets say that everyone in the US did this, at 6*22e7 = 132e9kg of crude a year. That's 11785714 barrels of oil a year, or equivalent to 0.15% of the current US crude demand. Now, in practice tires can last longer, weigh less and need less crude per kg of tyre.
How much damage does 1kg of rubber plantation make? How much energy?
I suspect the frame is more significant.
Yeah, there is some 35% efficient panels (which are much more expensive) and a (from memory) 6:1 concentrating fresnel lens in front and a system to move the waste heat to the outside.
o r/rac_index.htm
I think grid tie inverters are about 20 times over priced from what they would be if they were made with the same technology as computer power supplies. Considering modern computer powersupplies (500W for $45AU) are required to have powerfactor correction in them I suspect that they are practically grid interactive already.
I'm waiting until the sunball stops having a 6month waiting list, then I'll consider buying one.
This might be a good basis for one too:
http://www.svvti.com/projects/ringarrayconcentrat
There's plenty of waste already around to be converted - and we'll continue to produce waste in the future.
Waste made from what? It seems to me that we can either recycle (or reuse) this 'waste', or convert it to crude oil. But we can't do both with the same kg of waste. And producing a kg of the most efficient plastics still takes 2kg of crude. Yes, we can use bio-waste as a source, but why use TD for that when we have things like algal-diesel and cellulose based ethanol with far higher return on input.
I spent $350 to build a new solar water heater. It will remove all of my heating and domestic hot water needs for the whole year, and heat my greenhouse and hottub. As I already cycle to work all of that energy offsets fossil fuel use, enough for two cars to commute 50km each day. $350. And anyone can see how it works and how to fix it if it fails.
I can only fathom that you've got a ton of money tied up in a boondoggle that is great for some people
Do you spend money heating your house? Do you spend money heating water? My original water heater and sunroom paid themselves off in 3 months.
but won't get me to work from the gas station.
I sold my car 5 years ago, gaining $5200 a year spending money (of which I've spent $500 on bicycle bits) plus a once off of $10k for a total of $36k unspent money (I bought a house instead). I ride 30 minutes to work 3 days a week for meetings, and telecomute the other 2. It takes me less time to ride than it takes for my work mate to drive, who lives 1km away.
Instead you advocate building a big machine to convert small amounts of waste into fuel. As you are scared to estimate real numbers, let me have a go instead. You are blinded by the big numbers, but think about it this way: How much waste do you personally produce each day, that isn't better recycled (i.e. remove the scrap iron, the reusable plastics, the aluminum, the compost, the clean white office paper). I (over-)estimate I produce about 2kg of TD suitable waste a day. My wife used to drive to work (she now catches the train, so that's harder to estimate) and she used 20L/week (2.8l/day) of petrol to get to work (and that's frugal). So TD for us would not even produce enough fuel to drive one person to work. We haven't accounted for the energy used to move the waste to the TD plant, or the energy required to make the waste in the first place, or transport it to my house.
Now you need to do this same calculation for say a farm, or a hospital and you will find that even were TD able to extract 100% of the energy in the waste stream, it will not provide enough fuel to remove dependance on fossil fuel.
Let me also re-iterate: I agree that TD is an excellent solution for waste processing, far better than dumping it or incinerating it. But it is not a solution to our energy needs. Perhaps you have invested lots of your personal well-being on believing in TD and that is why you are so set in your position? A lot of people like to put hope in future technologies rather than trying to do something now.
p.s. about 40% of cars in my city use LPG, extracted from natural gas. It's fairly common outside the US (which seems jammed on gasoline for some reason).
on the pro side: you don't need to work as hard riding one, they are good friends and I would love to have a horse of my own to ride, good manure.
on the cons: higher capital cost, higher maintanance, extra food bill, needs more storage space, produces exhaust even when parked, not as fast, not suited to modern road pavements.
I guess a horse uses less energy (and certainly much less fossil fuel) than a car.
oops, that link should have been
p g
:-(
http://njhurst.com/solar/20060215/p200602150001.j
not sure what went wrong
I want to seem some real numbers. Yes there is lots of waste, but all of that waste required energy to produce it. Give me some hard numbers and I'm with you all the way (I'm heading off to a conference on sustainable living on sat.), but without them all I can see is yet another company with an interesting sideshow. If a relatively direct collection system like canola biodiesel gets only 3:1 gain on input fuel what makes you think that hard to burn things like offal and watery poo are going to be net-positive? Just heating the watery poo up probably uses half the available energy.
0 1.jpg
The wikipedia article claims a return of 85% on available input energy for offal, i.e. the system uses more energy than it gets back. The 560% figure is nonsense, as they aren't including the energy required to produce the feedstock - I could equally say that carrying a tin of petrol 20 yards is 10000% efficient.
I agree that we should be using TD for waste (and it's vastly superior to high temp incinerators, which are mostly just dioxin factories), but I also think people should be looking at real sustainable solutions, such as solar space and DHW heating. I currently collect 5kW peak of solar domestic hot water heat using $100 in parts. Considering heating is the largest domestic load in the US, ytf doesn't everyone use solar heat. I also collect 100kWh of hot air using a cheap greenhouse on sunny days in winter.
A photo test section of my soon to be installed 35kW peak (120kWhr in mid winter, 280kWhr in summer) solar array:
http://njhurst.com/solar/20060215clou/p2006021500
It collects enough heat in winter on one sunny day to keep my house warm for 2 cloudy days, plus all my DHW needs. It has cost me $350 in parts and should take about 2 hours in install the lot. It uses an average of 50W to produce 10kW, a return of 200:1. If people removed the heating, DHW, lighting and cooling portion of first world energy then TD might be viable.
Well, you've got to make the organic waste first. And currently organic waste uses a lot of fossil energy. It might buy us a few years whilst we burn all our reserves (landfill, e.g.) but you need to do the full energy calculations and show that TD is energy positive if you want to run an economy on it.
It's a very nice way to get rid of offal, I agree, but I doubt it even produces 50% of the energy required to produce the offal in the first place.
http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au/ is $2.5US/W, perhaps as high as $3US/W including a regulation grid interactive inverter. And neither the sunball, nor the GI-inverter are being mass produced at the moment. I know someone who is getting $1.2US/W including inverter, without subsidies or magic. He just uses a large, cheap, concentrator and water cooling.
(However, I agree that PV is not economical in the current economy)
What do you propose as a feedstock? I'd like to see some numbers before claiming that TDP will solve all the worlds problems.
Actually, it took a lot of talented programs a long time to solve the y2k problem. There was a lot more to the problem than changing from 2 digit to 4 digit fields.
Even if TD were 100% efficient it would only double the amount of fossil-oil in the system available for transport. And once the oil runs out the TD runs out too.
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
Is cycling ok?
No, FOSS exists mostly because the very low cost of duplication makes motives other than profit viable. Your argument was that low duplication would make new innovation impossible, I pointed out that FOSS demonstrates this is not true. The existance of the GPL has very little to do with this other than the fact that it encodes the society rules to discourage stealing.
I also believe that piracy is harmful to the software industry (and as such, consider it a crime), but if we were to have a duplicator the development model would have to change - it would not lead to the death of innovation, only to existing business models (and probably in the same way that linux has so far completely replaced Windows). That seems quite a reasonable thing, as long as people don't steal to get there. (Yes, duplicating a currently manufactured and patented car design would be stealing, duplicating a 100 year old design not so)
So free software (FOSS) doesn't exist? And it doesn't make any wealth?
Your argument is so flawed, that I can't believe it is still consistently raised as a legitimate defense of proprietary software.
Vellmont (569020) writes: the defense is "dummy.. you thought I was serious? It was a joke!"?
But you used that defence first:
apparently you're someone that has no sense of humor, and takes everything literally.
I also read your sig and thought 'another gun nut'.
Cogito ergot some. I think I ate some ergot?
well yes... one could incinerate the arm, for example. I was pondering something that destroyed the electronics but had no effect on the surrounding tissue. Considering how easy it is to destroy electronics using a suitably crafted emp I was thinking of a device that could be placed in a car outside the company and destroy all the rfids as they walk past.
Perhaps it is possible to destroy the chip whilst it is in your arm, using something like a blast of suitable frequency microwaves.
In any case, this sounds like fake-security. What reason would having an RFID tag attached to a person would make this more secure than just carrying a card. It's probably more an attempt to watch where employees go or something.