I'm confused... unless you are. Not sure if your mention of natural gas was just a digression or what, but to be clear the compressed air has nothing to do with natural gas, other then requiring similar geological requirements for storage. You can find details of their energy storage plan on page 2 of the article online.
Did you read the whole article? They specifically suggest a long-term storage solution that addresses your critiques (compressed air). It would seem to me that hydrogen would also bee a good solution, though it might not be as efficient. It has other benefits (portability & the ability to use it as an auto fuel) that might make up for some of the lost efficiency for some uses. Molten salt is useful as a short-term storage solution, but cools to quickly to be useful for storage for long periods.
BTW, if you read the comments about the cited article on the SciAm site, comment #54, 57 and 59 (and probably others) all deal directly with the environmental costs of solar power.
...the equipment used for solar power electricity generation isn't all sustainably-harvested wood gathered by Amazon forest natives at a liveable wage. There's some severe heavy metal usage in most electrical power generation, regardless of source, and heavy metals aren't going to decay into harmless elements.
This is true, but it's a bit of a red herring. As you yourself point out, ALL power generation has some degree of a downside, the real question is how big of one. In the case of solar, the downside is that there are some exotic metals used in the cells, some of which might not be environmentally ideal. The figure to look at is what is the overall lifetime effect of any given energy source on the environment relative to its energy roduction. I'm not enough of an expert to know for sure, but I suspect that solar will win that comparison easily, if not now, then in the very near future.
Nuclear might be great, but I think it's highly unlikely that there will ever be any substantial rebirth of the nuclear industry in the US. The risks are just to high (or at least they are perceived as such) to win over the public.
Solar, on the other hand has nearly no downside other then it's current low efficiency. That is improving rapidly, though, and with substantial investment, could easily be improved even faster. See this article in this months Scientific American for an in depth plan to use Solar to replace much of America's energy.
The question wasn't which plant SELLS electricity for $0.06, but which plant PRODUCES it for that cost. I'll admit, I'm not expert, but everything that I've ever read has said that Nuclear has never proven to be anywhere near as cheap as it theoretically should have been. I'd really be interested if you could point to something that contradicts that.
Umm... Sorry to be nitpicky, but salt is a metal. And you know the reason that they choose to use it for the storage media? Because it stores heat well.
I suspect that this is the difference between this latest invention and the the current tech, though it's certainly not clear from the article. The January '08 issue of Scientific American covers this topic, and they say that one of the breakthroughs needed for molten salt solar is to be able to directly use the molten salt as the transfer fluid. The article doesn't go into a lot of detail on this topic, but here's the quote:
Engineers are also investigating how to us molten salt itself as the heat-transfer fluid, reducing heat losses as well as capital costs. Salt is corrosive, however, so more resilient piping systems are needed.
The article is available online, and I highly recommend anyone interested in solar check it out. They outline a plan that could provide 69% of the countries electricity & 35% of it's total energy from solar by 2050.
True, but in order to get punitive damages, I believe that he would have to prove the Christie's knowingly participated in the fraud. Assuming that they acted in good faith (extremely likely considering the potential damage to their reputation otherwise), than he would only seem to have a legitimate claim for the value of the item plus interest and legal fees. (Of course IANAL, so...)
Damn. You had my hopes up there. Before I actually read the description, I thought this was a very cool new astronomy toyl (somewhere between a toy and a tool). Oh, well. SkyTag does sound fun, though.
Well, actually, that's exactly what he said. He said that the purpose of copyright was to encourage creators to "keep churning out more things" (or some such). While that might not be as eloquently worded as the constitution, it basically means the same thing.
It's also important to remember that under the original law, copyright terms were 14 years + one renewal. The current Life + 70 years term does nothing to encourage artists to create new works-- in fact they may have the opposite effect in some cases since both an artist and their children can now live on the royalties of a single work for more then a century in many cases (granted, most works won't be generating substantial royalties for that period, but it happens in isolated cases such as the famous "happy birthday" case). The only real benefactors of the copyright extensions are major corporations who want the royalties, but even more importantly, they want the control of the work. I have no problem with reasonable copyright terms (20 + 20 seems to serve the original intent of the law) but the current terms are a sham.
I was going to reply that you are an idiot, but others have done so much more eloquently than I could ever be ("Idiot horse"! Brilliant!).
I'll just point out that you clearly don't understand the law in question. Regulating people whose statements will be admitted into court as fact (and whose allegations are the basis for the lawsuit in the first place) is by no means "twisting the law". Oh, and I'll also point out that your response has absolutely nothing to do with my post that you responded to. I answered someone's question about piracy, and you swung it around to spam & PI's. Granted, that is the subject of the thread as a whole, but it's not relevant to the specific post that you're responding to.
So, if somebody paid me to investigate the source of spam they were getting, I would need a license to do the work, otherwise the spamming victim would not be able to use my results to go after the spammers? Wonderful logic...
Yes, it is actually. Your arguing that it isn't just shows that you understand neither the law nor what being a "private investigator" entails. If you are a licensed computer consultant (IE, you have a business license and pay taxes in Texas) then the situation that you suggest is perfectly legal. As long as you are using only publicly available tools, and you provide the information to law enforcement so they can pursue the legal options, then no PI license is required. When you use tools that are not available to an ordinary citizen, and you are providing information directly to the client who presents that info as fact in a court of law, then a new set of rules applies and you need to be properly licensed. IANAL, so I can't tell you exactly where that line is, but there is a line, and it's very reasonable that that line exists.
The problem is the loaded term "piracy". Is it bad to download a few songs from an artist that you've heard of but never heard? I've done that several times. In the vast majority of those cases, I would not have bought the artists albums if I had not downloaded their songs first. In some cases, I didn't like what I heard & left it at that. In several other cases I have since bought albums by those artists, and in at least a few cases, I now own every CD available from the artist. So would you call my "piracy" in these cases a bad thing, even though they ended up resulting in more money in the artists pocket?
You can still get them, though possibly not in Radio Shack stores. RatShack still sells them online (http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102913) and Amazon has an even better selection (such as http://www.amazon.com/Vintage-Sports-Cards-Inc-MX-906/dp/B00005K2SY/). They're also considerably more advanced then the ones that we used as kids. Unfortunately, the one big thing that hasn't changed from the older models is that the instructions still don't cover any theory on how your circuit works. Once you've built the example projects, you're pretty much on your own from there, and for most kids that means that these kits will be lost in the closet before too long...
In the past, minority groups, while keeping many of their tradtions, tried also to 'meld' into the US culture, learn English, etc. You now no longer see this really....so manythings now are now labeled in at least 2 freakin' languages. People are coming here, and not even trying to learn English
The fact that things are labeled in two languages doesn't indicate that people aren't trying to learn the language. That's always been true to some extent, as evidenced by the number of elderly women who have lived here their entire adult lives but never learned the language. Products are labeled in two languages is simply because it's more profitable for companies to do it that way. There are an awful lot of Spanish speakers in the US, many of whom don't speak English at all or fluently, so having Spanish on your products label makes it a whole lot more appealing compared to your competitors product who is labeled in English only. If anything, these products are enabling the Spanish-only speakers, not responding to them.
To the shown apparatus generates too little power to be of any use at all.
None, huh? So why does he show the device powering a radio and a clock in the video? You're right, 40mW isn't much power, but according to the video the device costs $2-$5. For that price, you can easily build a few of them & you start to get to a more useful amount of power. But even 40mW is enough to do things like maintain the charge on a cell phone or charge a flashlight. I'm sure someone with more knowledge of low power systems could come up with even more useful ideas. Is 40mW enough to power a small water filter? I bet it is if it's designed properly. And remember, the generator can run 24/7 (wind permitting, at least), so it can be used to charge a battery for times when you need more current for short periods of time. Seems like it might have some use after all...
His question was clear: "Why do so many nerds seem to lean toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum?". The key word in there is seem. In other words, he is asking a question based on his experiences, not based on hard data. Based on that explicit context, no citations are needed. Ignoring the misdirected condescension, your second question is a reasonable response. Asking for citations isn't reasonable in this context and just makes you look like you have poor reading comprehension.
Right, and he seems to be suggesting that Libertarians are leftists.
Umm... No, he doesn't. His post is a tiny bit vague in that he doesn't cite his profession, but he says that most of the people who he meets in a similar profession do not share his leftist views. Without more information, it's hard to be absolutely certain, but based on the forum where he asked his question I would assume that he is a "nerd" of some sort.
tend to think that libertarianism is the greatest thing that ever happened to the Republicans because it makes a lot of people who have liberal social values like not caring what drugs people take on the weekends or how others have sex feel that somehow their views are better expressed by the Republicans than the Democrats. I agree the twin parties both suck at this point and that the Democrats hardly seem like an alternative, but I know people who clearly have liberal social values and take drugs and have kinky sex lives who, due to their faith in libertarianism, actually vote Republican because they think it is closer to this libertarian ideal that they have in their minds.
Here, you're almost right on. On a traditional right-left political scale, Libertarians are more closely aligned with Republicans. Unfortunately, in the case of every Republican Presidential candidate after Goldwater, that has been far from true. They have without fail been very socially conservative. The only real commonality between Libertarians and Republicans has been that they both support low taxes, low regulation and, theoretically at least, fiscal responsibility. Despite that disconnect, Libertarians have historically voted with the Republicans.
The real irony comes in with how many so called Libertarians still support Bush. While his popularity has greatly diminished, there are a few (maybe 10%) who still like Bush despite the fact that he is almost diametrically opposed to Libertarian ideals in every category except deregulation. Socially, politically, and in most areas fiscally, Bush is among the least Libertarian presidents that we've ever had. Bush has done more to increase the power of the presidency then anyone before him. Based on his views, the presidency is an unchecked position, and Congress has no right to oversight over him. This is a fundamentally anti-conservative and anti-Libertarian position, but for whatever reason Republicans (and a smaller percentage of Libertarians) don't seem to get that. Things like Bush prioritizing his war on pornography over the war on terror, his illegal warrantless wiretapping programs, etc. all should drive Libertarians far, far away from him, but a few still seem to be drinking the Bush Kool-Aid. Even in the areas where his ideals seem to be in line with Libertarianism, he's not really-- he doesn't support true capitalism, but crony capitalism-- his form of deregulation is almost always designed to benefit those who support him, not the free market.
All that said, depending on who the final candidate is, I suspect that the vast majority of Libertarians will almost certainly vote for a Dem in the next election. The majority of Libertarians seem to have had more then enough of modern Republicanism, and none of the Republican candidates (other than Ron Paul) really have anything close to Libertarian ideals.
The reality is that socially, Democrats are FAR more closely aligned with the Libertarians on social issues then the Republicans. The problem that the Dems have is that they don't believe in corporate deregulation. To me, that has always been a no-brainer-- Corporations seem to have enough trouble following the rules that we already have, so why should we expect them to behave when we have even fewer rules? Considering how few cases of deregulation seem to have been successful in the long term (for the nation at large, not necessarily for the individual corporations), this seems obvious to me, but for some reason the Libertarians don't seem to get it.
No troll intended... As I said, perhaps I just misunderstood you. That said, I'm sure they are very saddened by your decision to not use Torrentspy any longer. I suspect that they are losing sleep over it every night.
Seriously, what would you have them do? It seems like they have three options: 1) They can just roll over and hand the MPAA/RIAA their user logs. 2) They can fight any subpeonas using their own funds-- likely an expensive proposal that they probably can't afford. Or 3) do what they did. While you may disagree with their decision, unless you are willing to personally fund their legal defense I'd say that you have no right to criticize them for their decision.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm confused... unless you are. Not sure if your mention of natural gas was just a digression or what, but to be clear the compressed air has nothing to do with natural gas, other then requiring similar geological requirements for storage. You can find details of their energy storage plan on page 2 of the article online.
Did you read the whole article? They specifically suggest a long-term storage solution that addresses your critiques (compressed air). It would seem to me that hydrogen would also bee a good solution, though it might not be as efficient. It has other benefits (portability & the ability to use it as an auto fuel) that might make up for some of the lost efficiency for some uses. Molten salt is useful as a short-term storage solution, but cools to quickly to be useful for storage for long periods.
Sorry, you're correct. I was referring to pure sodium.
BTW, if you read the comments about the cited article on the SciAm site, comment #54, 57 and 59 (and probably others) all deal directly with the environmental costs of solar power.
This is true, but it's a bit of a red herring. As you yourself point out, ALL power generation has some degree of a downside, the real question is how big of one. In the case of solar, the downside is that there are some exotic metals used in the cells, some of which might not be environmentally ideal. The figure to look at is what is the overall lifetime effect of any given energy source on the environment relative to its energy roduction. I'm not enough of an expert to know for sure, but I suspect that solar will win that comparison easily, if not now, then in the very near future.
Nuclear might be great, but I think it's highly unlikely that there will ever be any substantial rebirth of the nuclear industry in the US. The risks are just to high (or at least they are perceived as such) to win over the public.
Solar, on the other hand has nearly no downside other then it's current low efficiency. That is improving rapidly, though, and with substantial investment, could easily be improved even faster. See this article in this months Scientific American for an in depth plan to use Solar to replace much of America's energy.
The question wasn't which plant SELLS electricity for $0.06, but which plant PRODUCES it for that cost. I'll admit, I'm not expert, but everything that I've ever read has said that Nuclear has never proven to be anywhere near as cheap as it theoretically should have been. I'd really be interested if you could point to something that contradicts that.
Umm... Sorry to be nitpicky, but salt is a metal. And you know the reason that they choose to use it for the storage media? Because it stores heat well.
Err... that should be "69% of the -country's- electricity". Sorry.
True, but in order to get punitive damages, I believe that he would have to prove the Christie's knowingly participated in the fraud. Assuming that they acted in good faith (extremely likely considering the potential damage to their reputation otherwise), than he would only seem to have a legitimate claim for the value of the item plus interest and legal fees. (Of course IANAL, so...)
Damn. You had my hopes up there. Before I actually read the description, I thought this was a very cool new astronomy toyl (somewhere between a toy and a tool). Oh, well. SkyTag does sound fun, though.
You are technically wiretapping.
Umm... No. nslookup & whois don't count as wiretapping, no more so then having caller ID on your phone does.
You've got it the wrong way round.
Well, actually, that's exactly what he said. He said that the purpose of copyright was to encourage creators to "keep churning out more things" (or some such). While that might not be as eloquently worded as the constitution, it basically means the same thing.
It's also important to remember that under the original law, copyright terms were 14 years + one renewal. The current Life + 70 years term does nothing to encourage artists to create new works-- in fact they may have the opposite effect in some cases since both an artist and their children can now live on the royalties of a single work for more then a century in many cases (granted, most works won't be generating substantial royalties for that period, but it happens in isolated cases such as the famous "happy birthday" case). The only real benefactors of the copyright extensions are major corporations who want the royalties, but even more importantly, they want the control of the work. I have no problem with reasonable copyright terms (20 + 20 seems to serve the original intent of the law) but the current terms are a sham.
I was going to reply that you are an idiot, but others have done so much more eloquently than I could ever be ("Idiot horse"! Brilliant!).
I'll just point out that you clearly don't understand the law in question. Regulating people whose statements will be admitted into court as fact (and whose allegations are the basis for the lawsuit in the first place) is by no means "twisting the law". Oh, and I'll also point out that your response has absolutely nothing to do with my post that you responded to. I answered someone's question about piracy, and you swung it around to spam & PI's. Granted, that is the subject of the thread as a whole, but it's not relevant to the specific post that you're responding to.
So, if somebody paid me to investigate the source of spam they were getting, I would need a license to do the work, otherwise the spamming victim would not be able to use my results to go after the spammers? Wonderful logic...
Yes, it is actually. Your arguing that it isn't just shows that you understand neither the law nor what being a "private investigator" entails. If you are a licensed computer consultant (IE, you have a business license and pay taxes in Texas) then the situation that you suggest is perfectly legal. As long as you are using only publicly available tools, and you provide the information to law enforcement so they can pursue the legal options, then no PI license is required. When you use tools that are not available to an ordinary citizen, and you are providing information directly to the client who presents that info as fact in a court of law, then a new set of rules applies and you need to be properly licensed. IANAL, so I can't tell you exactly where that line is, but there is a line, and it's very reasonable that that line exists.
When is piracy not bad?
The problem is the loaded term "piracy". Is it bad to download a few songs from an artist that you've heard of but never heard? I've done that several times. In the vast majority of those cases, I would not have bought the artists albums if I had not downloaded their songs first. In some cases, I didn't like what I heard & left it at that. In several other cases I have since bought albums by those artists, and in at least a few cases, I now own every CD available from the artist. So would you call my "piracy" in these cases a bad thing, even though they ended up resulting in more money in the artists pocket?
Been so long that I posted here, I almost forgot that I can make real HTML links... Sorry about that.
Radio Shack
Amazon
You can still get them, though possibly not in Radio Shack stores. RatShack still sells them online (http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102913) and Amazon has an even better selection (such as http://www.amazon.com/Vintage-Sports-Cards-Inc-MX-906/dp/B00005K2SY/). They're also considerably more advanced then the ones that we used as kids. Unfortunately, the one big thing that hasn't changed from the older models is that the instructions still don't cover any theory on how your circuit works. Once you've built the example projects, you're pretty much on your own from there, and for most kids that means that these kits will be lost in the closet before too long...
Umm... I think the parent was being sarcastic. Not terribly subtly, either.
D'Oh! What an incredibly simple solution. Isn't it amazing how these "difficult" questions often have such easy answers?
The fact that things are labeled in two languages doesn't indicate that people aren't trying to learn the language. That's always been true to some extent, as evidenced by the number of elderly women who have lived here their entire adult lives but never learned the language. Products are labeled in two languages is simply because it's more profitable for companies to do it that way. There are an awful lot of Spanish speakers in the US, many of whom don't speak English at all or fluently, so having Spanish on your products label makes it a whole lot more appealing compared to your competitors product who is labeled in English only. If anything, these products are enabling the Spanish-only speakers, not responding to them.
To the shown apparatus generates too little power to be of any use at all.
None, huh? So why does he show the device powering a radio and a clock in the video? You're right, 40mW isn't much power, but according to the video the device costs $2-$5. For that price, you can easily build a few of them & you start to get to a more useful amount of power. But even 40mW is enough to do things like maintain the charge on a cell phone or charge a flashlight. I'm sure someone with more knowledge of low power systems could come up with even more useful ideas. Is 40mW enough to power a small water filter? I bet it is if it's designed properly. And remember, the generator can run 24/7 (wind permitting, at least), so it can be used to charge a battery for times when you need more current for short periods of time. Seems like it might have some use after all...
His question was clear: "Why do so many nerds seem to lean toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum?". The key word in there is seem. In other words, he is asking a question based on his experiences, not based on hard data. Based on that explicit context, no citations are needed. Ignoring the misdirected condescension, your second question is a reasonable response. Asking for citations isn't reasonable in this context and just makes you look like you have poor reading comprehension.
Right, and he seems to be suggesting that Libertarians are leftists.
Umm... No, he doesn't. His post is a tiny bit vague in that he doesn't cite his profession, but he says that most of the people who he meets in a similar profession do not share his leftist views. Without more information, it's hard to be absolutely certain, but based on the forum where he asked his question I would assume that he is a "nerd" of some sort.
tend to think that libertarianism is the greatest thing that ever happened to the Republicans because it makes a lot of people who have liberal social values like not caring what drugs people take on the weekends or how others have sex feel that somehow their views are better expressed by the Republicans than the Democrats. I agree the twin parties both suck at this point and that the Democrats hardly seem like an alternative, but I know people who clearly have liberal social values and take drugs and have kinky sex lives who, due to their faith in libertarianism, actually vote Republican because they think it is closer to this libertarian ideal that they have in their minds.
Here, you're almost right on. On a traditional right-left political scale, Libertarians are more closely aligned with Republicans. Unfortunately, in the case of every Republican Presidential candidate after Goldwater, that has been far from true. They have without fail been very socially conservative. The only real commonality between Libertarians and Republicans has been that they both support low taxes, low regulation and, theoretically at least, fiscal responsibility. Despite that disconnect, Libertarians have historically voted with the Republicans.
The real irony comes in with how many so called Libertarians still support Bush. While his popularity has greatly diminished, there are a few (maybe 10%) who still like Bush despite the fact that he is almost diametrically opposed to Libertarian ideals in every category except deregulation. Socially, politically, and in most areas fiscally, Bush is among the least Libertarian presidents that we've ever had. Bush has done more to increase the power of the presidency then anyone before him. Based on his views, the presidency is an unchecked position, and Congress has no right to oversight over him. This is a fundamentally anti-conservative and anti-Libertarian position, but for whatever reason Republicans (and a smaller percentage of Libertarians) don't seem to get that. Things like Bush prioritizing his war on pornography over the war on terror, his illegal warrantless wiretapping programs, etc. all should drive Libertarians far, far away from him, but a few still seem to be drinking the Bush Kool-Aid. Even in the areas where his ideals seem to be in line with Libertarianism, he's not really-- he doesn't support true capitalism, but crony capitalism-- his form of deregulation is almost always designed to benefit those who support him, not the free market.
All that said, depending on who the final candidate is, I suspect that the vast majority of Libertarians will almost certainly vote for a Dem in the next election. The majority of Libertarians seem to have had more then enough of modern Republicanism, and none of the Republican candidates (other than Ron Paul) really have anything close to Libertarian ideals.
The reality is that socially, Democrats are FAR more closely aligned with the Libertarians on social issues then the Republicans. The problem that the Dems have is that they don't believe in corporate deregulation. To me, that has always been a no-brainer-- Corporations seem to have enough trouble following the rules that we already have, so why should we expect them to behave when we have even fewer rules? Considering how few cases of deregulation seem to have been successful in the long term (for the nation at large, not necessarily for the individual corporations), this seems obvious to me, but for some reason the Libertarians don't seem to get it.
No troll intended... As I said, perhaps I just misunderstood you. That said, I'm sure they are very saddened by your decision to not use Torrentspy any longer. I suspect that they are losing sleep over it every night.
Seriously, what would you have them do? It seems like they have three options: 1) They can just roll over and hand the MPAA/RIAA their user logs. 2) They can fight any subpeonas using their own funds-- likely an expensive proposal that they probably can't afford. Or 3) do what they did. While you may disagree with their decision, unless you are willing to personally fund their legal defense I'd say that you have no right to criticize them for their decision.