Right now, I have 26 2yr old "265W" panels. They should still put out at least 75% of their rated power in 25 years (those are the replacement warranty terms, they can lose 1% per year, but most don't lose that much, though the curve isn't linear)
I actually look forward to replacing a handful of them in 20 years or so, with the inexpensive ~400W panels that will likely exist by then, which will bring the system back up over the capacity that I have now. That's if I haven't already expanded the system by then, which I probably will.
It's possible (though unlikely) that I'll have to replace (some of) the micro-inverters in the 10-25 year timeframe, though they're cheap, and easy to replace. The system will have paid for itself already by then, even if there weren't any subsidies. The subsidies (and RECs) will allow me to purchase storage in the coming years as well, though I'd probably do that anyway, since the grid isn't super-reliable where I live, and at some point I'd get sick of maintaining my emergency gas generator.
The sticker shock for solar is 100% upfront. Ongoing costs over time are definitely going to be less than other methods of generating electricity, mostly for the obvious reason: you're not paying for fuel -- granted, there are labor costs with any retrofits or replacements, though for a correctly installed system, the hit there shouldn't be too bad either. On my system you remove eight bolts to take a panel off the rack. The inverters have modular connectors. Replacing an inverter or a whole panel should take about 10 minutes.
It shouldn't be, really. Though in this case, snopes is *ABSOLUTELY CORRECT* that there is no strike by Puerto Rican truck drivers. Period. Anyone saying there is, is simply lying. There isn't a single shred of evidence anywhere that this "story" is true, and more to the point, the whole thing is absurd. There simply isn't enough fuel for the trucks, and in many cases, there are no longer roads to drive the trucks on.
We should be sending flotillas of ships and boats with supplies (water, food and medical supplies) anywhere along the coast where ships and supply boats can dock, or even using beaches where possible. The fact that there is not more help forthcoming from the mainland is a shame.
First off. I also agree that the 16th amendment should never have happened. Ideally we should probably just repeal it and have all tax collection fall back to the state (or even local) level, and let it "trickle" up -- but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
On those figures though: most retail shops aim for 50% (known as keystone) markup on the sale price. If you're bringing in $1M in stock each month, you should have receipts of $2M, or more, since most businesses these days provide value-added services that increase their margins beyond pure product sales.
Oh, and food? (A very low-margin business.) Shouldn't be taxed (or subsidized) at all, but I digress.
Anyway, You wouldn't have to pay your employees as much, and would get to keep more of your profits as salary if there were no personal income tax.
Broken/stolen stock is a write off.
I'm not sure if a tax purely on gross corporate income is the way to go or not, to replace the personal income tax, but something like that would probably work better than what we have now. Clearly any such scheme would have to be designed so that businesses could still exist, and the owners and employees would have to be able to earn a living. It's somewhat nonsensical to suggest that a (hypothetical) taxation scheme would fail to recognize that it would shutter 100% of all businesses. Humans are stupid, but not *THAT* stupid. At least taken in aggregate.
In any event, businesses would treat this tax essentially like a sales tax (which it essentially would be) and pass it on to the consumer anyway, but if it were designed properly, It would keep more wealth in circulation (i.e. use) than the current system.
Eliminating the personal income tax and taxing wealth earned (and held) by corporations is (IMO) one of the few things that could reverse the trend of increasing wealth concentration, where literally (yes, really literally!) a few people have as much wealth as half the world. It's an untenable situation.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, it could also spur efficient economic activity, since if people have more money to spend, businesses would have higher revenue. Businesses also wouldn't have to deal with the bureaucracy of payroll taxes. It would also discourage corporations from hoarding cash, rather than reinvesting wealth in the broader economy. On the government side, instead of keeping track of what 300M Americans make, The IRS could just keep track of what a few million or so businesses make, which it already does anyway, so *poof* there goes a huge bureaucratic machine.
You're right, of course, and my comment (particularly taken out of context) rightly deserves your sarcasm.
Sometimes the police look more like state-sponsored gangs than people "protecting and serving" -- which might be the most scathing indictment of our system, and definitely ticks a box on the "Are we fascist yet" list.
Yeah, we have Fascism Lite. Now With Longer Elections!
Seriously though, The US doesn't (often) extra-judiciously kill it's own citizens. But it admits to torturing people, and has innocent blood on its hands.
There's a case to be made that it genuinely does all this in the name of getting the "bad guys", but how hard is it for us to get our government to stop torturing people, even people who have done terrible things, and stop killing innocent civilians in our name? If we still have this power, as a people, then, no, we do not live in a fascist state.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I think the incumbent utilities do have a lot to worry about (in the long-term) since entire communities may decide that they can pool their panels and storage at a lower cost than the utilities can provide. It will make sense to have as many homes as possible be self-sufficient, but it will also make sense to have the capability for neighbors to share power resources. This process will be very complex to navigate, since it's unlikely that the utilities will be willing to just abandon their equipment and let it be used (and upgraded) by localities.
Also at some point, it will make economic sense to not only feed the grid with power when storage is full on a sunny day, but also feed the grid with stored power when you know it's going to be sunny tomorrow. That still doesn't solve the base-load problem (for when you know it's NOT going to be sunny for a week), but it's a start.
It may be that utility-scale power will eventually only directly serve metro areas. Maybe they'll like that? Not having to maintain roadside lines and domestic interconnects in the less populated places?
Solar only for the rich is indeed a scary prospect -- though if only the rich get solar, the utilities will still have plenty of customers, since the "rich" are, at most, 10% of the US population, and it's commerce and industry that use the lion's share of generated electricity.
Also, I'd bet at least half of those 1 million homes have solar city or the like, with no out-of-pocket expense by the homeowner. I'd expect that to continue, especially in areas with higher than average electricity costs.
How about: Whether or not you have automatic updates enabled, don't ever put a windows box on a public-facing IP, unless it's super-dooper-hardened/firewalled and has a 24/7 NOC staff to monitor it.
I realize this is just an anecdote, and other localities may have the opposite situation, but I live in a small New England town, served by a private power company. I currently pay ~$.23/kWh for residential electrical service (when my PV array isn't pushing into the grid). There is a neighboring town that maintains a municipal (town-owned and operated) electrical system, and they pay ~$.06/kWh, and their system is better in almost every way, including buried lines instead of overhead lines on poles in their town center, and better overall reliability. I don't know all the details or the history of their municipal system, but that certainly seems better to me.
Of course they did, because I just got my RPI3 yesterday, and I had been hemming and hawing for months about what device to get for an HTPC. Decided on PI3 for software and community support, so while this one looks real nice spec-wise, I might still have gone with the PI had I seen this one first. My initial impressions of the RPI3 is that it's surprisingly responsive for such a modest machine. It'd probably be usable as a primary desktop for most non-gamers. I've only played with it for a short time, but it's pretty neat for $35, and LibreELEC seems quite snappy, and was installed within minutes of powering up the board.
5. A massive speaker system. Great if its actually working and actually calibrated. Most theatres I've been to lately present blown-sounding subwoofers and barely audible mid-range.
This. I haven't been to a theater (except for real imax) in over 20 years that had decent audio. Even supposedly "certified" or whatever theaters have crappy sound that is usually:
1. TOO LOUD. It's not a rock concert. It's a movie. Go ahead and make it nice and loud if it's an action movie or whatever, but what is unforgivable is:
2. Crappy and blown to all heck. Clearly clipped bass, midrange, and on at least one occasion clearly crackling high end. Leaving some dialog too muddy and distorted to hear, and any loud booming sounds painfully distorted. Like literally, fingernails on the chalkboard painful.
Both of these (in most theaters) could be fixed by simply "calibrating" the system by having someone sit in the theater with a test loop playing, and turning the volume down until the distortion goes away, and if that happens at a level that leaves the sound too low, then someone needs to upgrade their amplifiers. Christ, I could outfit a decent sized theater myself with clean nice loud power for a few grand. It's not rocket science, and it's not even that expensive these days to buy decent gear.
I can't figure out how people put up with such crappy sound in theaters. The sound quality in a film is actually MORE important than the visual image quality. It's almost like they don't want people to enjoy going to the theater.
I have a 20-year old system in my living room that can get VERY loud if I want it to without clipping, so I simply don't understand why this problem exists to the extent that it does.
Hrrmmm.... Don't care about an "app" -- I just want to be able to go to netflix.com in a real web browser, and quickly manage my streaming queue AND my DVD/bluray queue -- right now, it's a PITA because when you're looking at the disc detail for a title, it won't tell you whether it's available on streaming, which it did for years, but is gone now.
It's annoying to have to load up two tabs, and do a search for the title on both sites to figure out if I need to order the disc or can watch on streaming, especially since the streaming catalog changes all the time. It also used to tell you right in the disc queue if a title was available on streaming. Also gone.
The disc queue is AWFUL now if you have more than a few dozen titles, it takes forever to load and times out with a browser warning half the time before it paints the whole screen. I guess I could purge out a lot of crap I might never watch, but I shouldn't have to. They should be able to write an interface that can quickly and easily display 400 items in a modern browser. Their old interface (2-3 years ago) handled it just fine, and my queue was much bigger then.
I'd cancel the disc feature, but there are a LOT of titles they only have on disc that I'm not interested in buying or paying amazon five bucks to watch.
I bet that netflix figured that the studios would be on board by now with streaming for back-catalog stuff (like what spotify did for back catalog albums), so that the disc rental service could just go away for everything but new releases, but apparently the studios still aren't ready to do that.
The only bright side is that their disc library is still getting new stuff added to it weekly, though they might be losing older stuff faster than they add new ones.
I wish someone could figure out how to offer a service that has every film and tv show ever produced available (in some format, don't care what) -- I'd gladly pay $50/month or even more if it was good, even if it didn't have new releases.
Becky Chambers "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" and it's sequel, "Closed & Common Orbit" come to mind. They're sci-fi with good plot and intrigue, but without being overly dark and heavy, as is the case with so much sci-fi and fantasy of late...
I've been doing something similar for years. It's probably not as complex as what google is doing, but with little more than a few tricks with a hashed timestamp, and making sure that javascript works, it stops most bots.
That site is hardly unbiased. It was created by "Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now" which is an organization created by the companies with everything to gain from the pipeline, specifically to spin PR.
I was actually referring to this part of the wikipedia article (emphasis mine):
According to a report done by The Associated Press, North Dakota had nearly 300 oil pipeline spills in less than two years, all of which went unreported to the public. According to the report, from January 2012 to September 2013, those pipeline spills were only a part of approximately 750 “oil field incidents” involving over four thousand barrels of oil that were spilled without the public’s knowledge.
I don't know what the accident rate for trains and trucks hauling crude is, but If there were more than 150/year in one region of the country, it might have made the news, though I guess since most of the pipeline spills didn't make the news, maybe the trucks and trains that spilled crude didn't either:(
However, I think a major concern with pipelines is that a single leak can produce a much larger spill than an incident with a truck or even a fully loaded train, and that they have a track record that leaves much to be desired. The fact that many of these leaks (in un-populated places) go unreported demonstrates that the operators realize that there's a problem.
I realize that we still need to get our energy from somewhere, but the crux of this particular issue seems (IMO) to be that water safety and common courtesy are being observed for some (the people of Bismark) but not others (the Standing Rock Sioux). Not to mention that the response by militarized police is unjustified and unwarranted.
The risk to fresh water supplies is very real. The pipeline has already been rerouted once due to concerns of water supply contamination in the event of a spill for Bismark:
The current route would take it right past the water supply for the reservation. Contrary to information that's circulating, the tribe has been very active in it's opposition to the pipeline being near their water supply since it was proposed to reroute through their land. They most certainly didn't "wait around" just so they could protest. The the objection has nothing to do with "burial grounds" but access to clean drinking water. This is complete and total misinformation.
Pipelines aren't safer, just more profitable. Maybe they _could_ be made safer than truck and train tankers, but my guess is that then they wouldn't be any more profitable.
Did you look at the link, or try it on google maps? It's precisely applicable, as the map I posted does exactly what the OP asked for: Hartford to Baltimore via the Tappan Zee, without the need to drag the route line.
Some of these "password requirements" actively force weaker passwords, in that they enforce a maximum length! I've seen some that force a 12 character maximum, making the xkcd 4 common word technique unusable, especially since they often stupidly require mixed case and a numeric and a special char.
As much as I don't want to -- after almost 20 years of being on Verizon DSL, I'm going to have to switch to "xfinity".
I can only get ~3Mbit via DSL, due to my distance from the CO, combined with Verizon's aging equipment (circa 1992!) in my semi-rural location. There are people in all directions about 10 miles away from me that have FIOS as an option, which I'd gladly pay more for, but Verizon (in a surprise bit of candor) has told me that we'll "never get" FIOS at our location.
I can pay about the same for 20Mbit cable internet (or a lot more for 50Mbit) but then lose the dry copper pair that I've had forever and that's literally never gone down (we have virtually no cell service at home, so we have to have a landline). The DSL has been nearly 100% as well.
I've been putting off the switch for quite a while, since I'm nervous about being left with no comm at all when there's an (inevitable) outage, but eventually I'll have to bite the bullet and get "xfinity", since I simply don't have any other (affordable) options.
I've looked at voipo for VOIP, since comcast's overpriced "voice" option leaves a lot to be desired. I don't have and don't want premium cable TV. I'd happily pay (a reasonable sum) for local broadcast TV signals over clear QAM cable, since our OTA TV reception isn't great, but they won't sell it to me. I don't want their crappy cable box, when my TV has a perfectly good built-in tuner. Gets my goat, and is half the reason I haven't switched yet.
I wonder how many of those new comcast subscribers are internet-only? I'd guess many of them are verizon refugees in similar situations to myself.
Huh. I didn't even know that AT&T still sold residential internet service.
For our "Representative" democracy, as many others are saying, electronic voting simply makes no sense. Too easy for coercion, too hard for identity confirmation, etc.
However, a "teledemocracy" system makes sense in the form of a national referendum, or maybe more like a national conversation about specific issues. It could pull some issues back into the realm of direct democracy. Probably not for everything, and probably not all at once, but having a serious system (unlike previous attempts which were largely ignored by our representatives) that could guide reps and congresspeople more directly than the current system(s) of "polling", which is again, all too-often ignored.
Such a system could be not unlike the one here on slashdot, with moderation, karma, etc., which though perhaps less than ideal, could lead to a system where the American People actually get to set (or at least nudge) the agenda, rather than the status quo, where lobbyists, and power-brokers get to not only set the agenda, but write the legislation.
I'm sure it wouldn't be perfect, any maybe not any better, but it's hard to see how it could be any worse than what we have now.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, I have 26 2yr old "265W" panels. They should still put out at least 75% of their rated power in 25 years (those are the replacement warranty terms, they can lose 1% per year, but most don't lose that much, though the curve isn't linear)
I actually look forward to replacing a handful of them in 20 years or so, with the inexpensive ~400W panels that will likely exist by then, which will bring the system back up over the capacity that I have now. That's if I haven't already expanded the system by then, which I probably will.
It's possible (though unlikely) that I'll have to replace (some of) the micro-inverters in the 10-25 year timeframe, though they're cheap, and easy to replace. The system will have paid for itself already by then, even if there weren't any subsidies. The subsidies (and RECs) will allow me to purchase storage in the coming years as well, though I'd probably do that anyway, since the grid isn't super-reliable where I live, and at some point I'd get sick of maintaining my emergency gas generator.
The sticker shock for solar is 100% upfront. Ongoing costs over time are definitely going to be less than other methods of generating electricity, mostly for the obvious reason: you're not paying for fuel -- granted, there are labor costs with any retrofits or replacements, though for a correctly installed system, the hit there shouldn't be too bad either. On my system you remove eight bolts to take a panel off the rack. The inverters have modular connectors. Replacing an inverter or a whole panel should take about 10 minutes.
It shouldn't be, really. Though in this case, snopes is *ABSOLUTELY CORRECT* that there is no strike by Puerto Rican truck drivers. Period. Anyone saying there is, is simply lying. There isn't a single shred of evidence anywhere that this "story" is true, and more to the point, the whole thing is absurd. There simply isn't enough fuel for the trucks, and in many cases, there are no longer roads to drive the trucks on.
We should be sending flotillas of ships and boats with supplies (water, food and medical supplies) anywhere along the coast where ships and supply boats can dock, or even using beaches where possible. The fact that there is not more help forthcoming from the mainland is a shame.
First off. I also agree that the 16th amendment should never have happened. Ideally we should probably just repeal it and have all tax collection fall back to the state (or even local) level, and let it "trickle" up -- but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
On those figures though: most retail shops aim for 50% (known as keystone) markup on the sale price. If you're bringing in $1M in stock each month, you should have receipts of $2M, or more, since most businesses these days provide value-added services that increase their margins beyond pure product sales.
Oh, and food? (A very low-margin business.) Shouldn't be taxed (or subsidized) at all, but I digress.
Anyway, You wouldn't have to pay your employees as much, and would get to keep more of your profits as salary if there were no personal income tax.
Broken/stolen stock is a write off.
I'm not sure if a tax purely on gross corporate income is the way to go or not, to replace the personal income tax, but something like that would probably work better than what we have now. Clearly any such scheme would have to be designed so that businesses could still exist, and the owners and employees would have to be able to earn a living. It's somewhat nonsensical to suggest that a (hypothetical) taxation scheme would fail to recognize that it would shutter 100% of all businesses. Humans are stupid, but not *THAT* stupid. At least taken in aggregate.
In any event, businesses would treat this tax essentially like a sales tax (which it essentially would be) and pass it on to the consumer anyway, but if it were designed properly, It would keep more wealth in circulation (i.e. use) than the current system.
Eliminating the personal income tax and taxing wealth earned (and held) by corporations is (IMO) one of the few things that could reverse the trend of increasing wealth concentration, where literally (yes, really literally!) a few people have as much wealth as half the world. It's an untenable situation.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, it could also spur efficient economic activity, since if people have more money to spend, businesses would have higher revenue. Businesses also wouldn't have to deal with the bureaucracy of payroll taxes. It would also discourage corporations from hoarding cash, rather than reinvesting wealth in the broader economy. On the government side, instead of keeping track of what 300M Americans make, The IRS could just keep track of what a few million or so businesses make, which it already does anyway, so *poof* there goes a huge bureaucratic machine.
You're right, of course, and my comment (particularly taken out of context) rightly deserves your sarcasm.
Sometimes the police look more like state-sponsored gangs than people "protecting and serving" -- which might be the most scathing indictment of our system, and definitely ticks a box on the "Are we fascist yet" list.
Yeah, we have Fascism Lite. Now With Longer Elections!
Seriously though, The US doesn't (often) extra-judiciously kill it's own citizens. But it admits to torturing people, and has innocent blood on its hands.
There's a case to be made that it genuinely does all this in the name of getting the "bad guys", but how hard is it for us to get our government to stop torturing people, even people who have done terrible things, and stop killing innocent civilians in our name? If we still have this power, as a people, then, no, we do not live in a fascist state.
Microgrids and community storage? Power co-ops?
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I think the incumbent utilities do have a lot to worry about (in the long-term) since entire communities may decide that they can pool their panels and storage at a lower cost than the utilities can provide. It will make sense to have as many homes as possible be self-sufficient, but it will also make sense to have the capability for neighbors to share power resources. This process will be very complex to navigate, since it's unlikely that the utilities will be willing to just abandon their equipment and let it be used (and upgraded) by localities.
Also at some point, it will make economic sense to not only feed the grid with power when storage is full on a sunny day, but also feed the grid with stored power when you know it's going to be sunny tomorrow. That still doesn't solve the base-load problem (for when you know it's NOT going to be sunny for a week), but it's a start.
It may be that utility-scale power will eventually only directly serve metro areas. Maybe they'll like that? Not having to maintain roadside lines and domestic interconnects in the less populated places?
Solar only for the rich is indeed a scary prospect -- though if only the rich get solar, the utilities will still have plenty of customers, since the "rich" are, at most, 10% of the US population, and it's commerce and industry that use the lion's share of generated electricity.
Also, I'd bet at least half of those 1 million homes have solar city or the like, with no out-of-pocket expense by the homeowner. I'd expect that to continue, especially in areas with higher than average electricity costs.
How about: Whether or not you have automatic updates enabled, don't ever put a windows box on a public-facing IP, unless it's super-dooper-hardened/firewalled and has a 24/7 NOC staff to monitor it.
I realize this is just an anecdote, and other localities may have the opposite situation, but I live in a small New England town, served by a private power company. I currently pay ~$.23/kWh for residential electrical service (when my PV array isn't pushing into the grid). There is a neighboring town that maintains a municipal (town-owned and operated) electrical system, and they pay ~$.06/kWh, and their system is better in almost every way, including buried lines instead of overhead lines on poles in their town center, and better overall reliability. I don't know all the details or the history of their municipal system, but that certainly seems better to me.
Of course they did, because I just got my RPI3 yesterday, and I had been hemming and hawing for months about what device to get for an HTPC. Decided on PI3 for software and community support, so while this one looks real nice spec-wise, I might still have gone with the PI had I seen this one first. My initial impressions of the RPI3 is that it's surprisingly responsive for such a modest machine. It'd probably be usable as a primary desktop for most non-gamers. I've only played with it for a short time, but it's pretty neat for $35, and LibreELEC seems quite snappy, and was installed within minutes of powering up the board.
5. A massive speaker system.
Great if its actually working and actually calibrated. Most theatres I've been to lately present blown-sounding subwoofers and barely audible mid-range.
This. I haven't been to a theater (except for real imax) in over 20 years that had decent audio. Even supposedly "certified" or whatever theaters have crappy sound that is usually:
1. TOO LOUD. It's not a rock concert. It's a movie. Go ahead and make it nice and loud if it's an action movie or whatever, but what is unforgivable is:
2. Crappy and blown to all heck. Clearly clipped bass, midrange, and on at least one occasion clearly crackling high end. Leaving some dialog too muddy and distorted to hear, and any loud booming sounds painfully distorted. Like literally, fingernails on the chalkboard painful.
Both of these (in most theaters) could be fixed by simply "calibrating" the system by having someone sit in the theater with a test loop playing, and turning the volume down until the distortion goes away, and if that happens at a level that leaves the sound too low, then someone needs to upgrade their amplifiers. Christ, I could outfit a decent sized theater myself with clean nice loud power for a few grand. It's not rocket science, and it's not even that expensive these days to buy decent gear.
I can't figure out how people put up with such crappy sound in theaters. The sound quality in a film is actually MORE important than the visual image quality. It's almost like they don't want people to enjoy going to the theater.
I have a 20-year old system in my living room that can get VERY loud if I want it to without clipping, so I simply don't understand why this problem exists to the extent that it does.
Or even better: Danny Deckchair http://www.imdb.com/title/tt03...
Since Trump got elected, we can just project everything on to him, even if it makes the people doing so look like raving lunatics.
Seriously, he has been in office a whopping 6 weeks. Keep this up and in a few months nobody will be listening ...
*Thanks* Obama!
Hrrmmm.... Don't care about an "app" -- I just want to be able to go to netflix.com in a real web browser, and quickly manage my streaming queue AND my DVD/bluray queue -- right now, it's a PITA because when you're looking at the disc detail for a title, it won't tell you whether it's available on streaming, which it did for years, but is gone now.
It's annoying to have to load up two tabs, and do a search for the title on both sites to figure out if I need to order the disc or can watch on streaming, especially since the streaming catalog changes all the time. It also used to tell you right in the disc queue if a title was available on streaming. Also gone.
The disc queue is AWFUL now if you have more than a few dozen titles, it takes forever to load and times out with a browser warning half the time before it paints the whole screen. I guess I could purge out a lot of crap I might never watch, but I shouldn't have to. They should be able to write an interface that can quickly and easily display 400 items in a modern browser. Their old interface (2-3 years ago) handled it just fine, and my queue was much bigger then.
I'd cancel the disc feature, but there are a LOT of titles they only have on disc that I'm not interested in buying or paying amazon five bucks to watch.
I bet that netflix figured that the studios would be on board by now with streaming for back-catalog stuff (like what spotify did for back catalog albums), so that the disc rental service could just go away for everything but new releases, but apparently the studios still aren't ready to do that.
The only bright side is that their disc library is still getting new stuff added to it weekly, though they might be losing older stuff faster than they add new ones.
I wish someone could figure out how to offer a service that has every film and tv show ever produced available (in some format, don't care what) -- I'd gladly pay $50/month or even more if it was good, even if it didn't have new releases.
Becky Chambers "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" and it's sequel, "Closed & Common Orbit" come to mind. They're sci-fi with good plot and intrigue, but without being overly dark and heavy, as is the case with so much sci-fi and fantasy of late...
I've been doing something similar for years. It's probably not as complex as what google is doing, but with little more than a few tricks with a hashed timestamp, and making sure that javascript works, it stops most bots.
That site is hardly unbiased. It was created by "Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now" which is an organization created by the companies with everything to gain from the pipeline, specifically to spin PR.
I was actually referring to this part of the wikipedia article (emphasis mine):
According to a report done by The Associated Press, North Dakota had nearly 300 oil pipeline spills in less than two years, all of which went unreported to the public. According to the report, from January 2012 to September 2013, those pipeline spills were only a part of approximately 750 “oil field incidents” involving over four thousand barrels of oil that were spilled without the public’s knowledge.
I don't know what the accident rate for trains and trucks hauling crude is, but If there were more than 150/year in one region of the country, it might have made the news, though I guess since most of the pipeline spills didn't make the news, maybe the trucks and trains that spilled crude didn't either :(
However, I think a major concern with pipelines is that a single leak can produce a much larger spill than an incident with a truck or even a fully loaded train, and that they have a track record that leaves much to be desired. The fact that many of these leaks (in un-populated places) go unreported demonstrates that the operators realize that there's a problem.
I realize that we still need to get our energy from somewhere, but the crux of this particular issue seems (IMO) to be that water safety and common courtesy are being observed for some (the people of Bismark) but not others (the Standing Rock Sioux). Not to mention that the response by militarized police is unjustified and unwarranted.
... decrease the amount of energy and risk of transporting it via conventional methods..
Only problem is that doesn't seem to be true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The risk to fresh water supplies is very real. The pipeline has already been rerouted once due to concerns of water supply contamination in the event of a spill for Bismark:
http://bismarcktribune.com/new...
The current route would take it right past the water supply for the reservation. Contrary to information that's circulating, the tribe has been very active in it's opposition to the pipeline being near their water supply since it was proposed to reroute through their land. They most certainly didn't "wait around" just so they could protest. The the objection has nothing to do with "burial grounds" but access to clean drinking water. This is complete and total misinformation.
Pipelines aren't safer, just more profitable. Maybe they _could_ be made safer than truck and train tankers, but my guess is that then they wouldn't be any more profitable.
Why would they be asking customers to discard, instead of send them back?
Because Soylent is people?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Did you look at the link, or try it on google maps? It's precisely applicable, as the map I posted does exactly what the OP asked for: Hartford to Baltimore via the Tappan Zee, without the need to drag the route line.
Google maps has had multi-destination directions for years. I use it all the time:
https://www.google.com/maps/di...
If slashcode mangles the link, there's a + in a circle where you can add a destination.
Some of these "password requirements" actively force weaker passwords, in that they enforce a maximum length! I've seen some that force a 12 character maximum, making the xkcd 4 common word technique unusable, especially since they often stupidly require mixed case and a numeric and a special char.
As much as I don't want to -- after almost 20 years of being on Verizon DSL, I'm going to have to switch to "xfinity".
I can only get ~3Mbit via DSL, due to my distance from the CO, combined with Verizon's aging equipment (circa 1992!) in my semi-rural location. There are people in all directions about 10 miles away from me that have FIOS as an option, which I'd gladly pay more for, but Verizon (in a surprise bit of candor) has told me that we'll "never get" FIOS at our location.
I can pay about the same for 20Mbit cable internet (or a lot more for 50Mbit) but then lose the dry copper pair that I've had forever and that's literally never gone down (we have virtually no cell service at home, so we have to have a landline). The DSL has been nearly 100% as well.
I've been putting off the switch for quite a while, since I'm nervous about being left with no comm at all when there's an (inevitable) outage, but eventually I'll have to bite the bullet and get "xfinity", since I simply don't have any other (affordable) options.
I've looked at voipo for VOIP, since comcast's overpriced "voice" option leaves a lot to be desired. I don't have and don't want premium cable TV. I'd happily pay (a reasonable sum) for local broadcast TV signals over clear QAM cable, since our OTA TV reception isn't great, but they won't sell it to me. I don't want their crappy cable box, when my TV has a perfectly good built-in tuner. Gets my goat, and is half the reason I haven't switched yet.
I wonder how many of those new comcast subscribers are internet-only? I'd guess many of them are verizon refugees in similar situations to myself.
Huh. I didn't even know that AT&T still sold residential internet service.
For our "Representative" democracy, as many others are saying, electronic voting simply makes no sense. Too easy for coercion, too hard for identity confirmation, etc.
However, a "teledemocracy" system makes sense in the form of a national referendum, or maybe more like a national conversation about specific issues. It could pull some issues back into the realm of direct democracy. Probably not for everything, and probably not all at once, but having a serious system (unlike previous attempts which were largely ignored by our representatives) that could guide reps and congresspeople more directly than the current system(s) of "polling", which is again, all too-often ignored.
Such a system could be not unlike the one here on slashdot, with moderation, karma, etc., which though perhaps less than ideal, could lead to a system where the American People actually get to set (or at least nudge) the agenda, rather than the status quo, where lobbyists, and power-brokers get to not only set the agenda, but write the legislation.
I'm sure it wouldn't be perfect, any maybe not any better, but it's hard to see how it could be any worse than what we have now.
Wow, I forgot FORTRAN. How could I have forgotten FORTRAN :/