Lots of good discussion here of how feasible solar PV is, but I think people are overlooking one important thing: most of our energy use goes to moving heat around.
This is something solar can do very, very well -- far more efficiently than current photovoltaic technology. A typical home burns most of its energy on air conditioning, refridgeration, space heating, water heating, cooking, and clothes drying. All of these can be done with solar thermal technology far more cost effectively than with a bunch of PV panels and batteries.
If you're really interested in going off-grid, or solving U.S. energy problems, start with solar space heating and solar water heating. Then look at solar refridgeration, air conditioning, and cooking. Worry about photovoltaic loads (like running computers and light bulbs) last. And before you start buying PV, assess where your electricity is going. Chances are you're wasting most of it.
My interest in audio equipment nearly died after I learned an instrument. Performing music is much more satisfying than listening to a canned recording of someone else performing music.
I suspect audiophiles have a misdirected desire to make music.
> A ten-fold increase in capacity will support 5% annual growth for almost fifty years.
Yep, and that's not a long-term solution. That's 50 years of investment to end up where we are today, only with a lot more pollution. Approaching from the demand side, we don't end up back here in 50 years, and we don't have the pollution. What's your point?
The 5% may be off by a couple. I've seen different figures, from 2 to 5. The basic picture is still this: We're wasting most of the power we produce. Most of the power we're not wasting goes to space and water heating that can be done with solar. Solar scales with the number of building we build -- generating plants are nearly irrelevant to this growth when using solar. We have to implement this at some point, because we can't sustain the growth indefinately. It make more sense to do it now than to make a mess trying to delay it a few years.
> We will need huge amounts, or huge changes in the way energy is consumed.
The way energy is consumed is this: not very much is consumed at night. Thus the low rates. Thus all the schemes like pumping water back up dams during the night.
U.S. demand has been growing exponentially around 5% a year. There is no supply-side solution that can keep this up forever, or even for very long. A ten-fold increase in generating capacity will roughly double the time until demand exceeds supply. Then we'd have to fix the demand problem. This isn't "silly", it's just the math of this situation. We can fix the demand problem later, and have huge investment and environmental costs of making thousands of new plants. Or we can fix the demand problem now, and not have those costs.
Whatever the impact of the internet boom, people are still using nearly all of their energy for space and water heating -- things that are easily done with solar.
So once the demand problem is fixed, the plants won't be need. We'll have thousands of nuclear plants sitting around. Thousands of acres of land covered with useless generating plants.
And no, it's not wrong that demand is much, much lower in the evening. That's why evening prices are so much lower. Solar homes are usually spec'd to have a week of storage. For grid-tied solutions we don't need that much. We just need to get the majority of homes through the night. I'm not claiming we could completely eliminate all power generation except solar and wind. With conservation and solar, most homes could meet nearly all of their energy demands. The remainder, in non-sunlight hours, could be met by modest storage systems, and modest use of conventional generating technologies.
Regarding cutting demand for coal, the only way demand is going to be cut is for the price to accurately reflect how much the fuel costs us. That means letting the consumer price go up, and perhaps taxing it for the environmental cost.
Regarding Kyoto, what's the problem with cutting coal consumption by cutting demand?
For the last few weeks I've been measuring energy usage with a digital watt-hour meter, and comparing energy usage in different households. A conservative estimate of energy waste in American households is perhaps 50%. It's probably higher than that, and American businesses are worse.
It makes no sense at all to talk about building new plants when were wasting energy at this rate. It's just absurd.
If you've kicked the bottom out of your bucket, having a bigger hose isn't going to help you fill it.
The situation in California has exactly nothing to do with "severe restriction", if by that you mean environmental measures. There have been 13 plants delayed or blocked. 12 were opposed by utility companies. One was opposed by Cisco. Environmental groups have actually been in favor of building new plants, so old, dirty generating plants can be closed. In particular, none of the plants have been blocked by the air quality standards that Bush wants to ditch.
The growth in demand has been documented many places. Look it up. The Economist had graphs of the supply and demand a month or two ago. (Unfortunately the rest of their article was complete fiction). The growth in demand is exponentially growing. That it hit the supply limit first in California is incidental. The fact remains that no amount of plant building is going to keep up with this growth. Stopping the growth is the only solution.
Our energy use could be dropping every year, instead of growing, because we're currently wasting so much of it. This is by far the cleanest, cheapest, and easiest solution.
Regarding solar and wind, energy demand is much, much lower in the evening, so you don't really need that much storage.
I absolutely agree that getting the consumer price of energy to accurately reflect its true cost is critical. Solar and wind would be viable today if the price of fossil fuels weren't artificially low.
The new California rebates make PV fairly viable in the short-term, though.
At some point population growth will have to be dealt with.
But the more immediate problems can be address by cutting demand and using solar and wind generation. Demand can be cut dramatically, without lowering standard of living. For a baseline, consider that people who go off-grid typically reduce their electricity consumption by 80 or 90%, without upsetting their lifestyle. It's all about being aware of where your energy is going, using efficient appliances, and using the right energy source for the right job.
More people have electric water heaters than watt-hour meters. It's crazy.
Right now California's energy woes revolve around natural gas prices. Meanwhile we're all burning it in our gas water heaters, while we run 100 watt attic fans all day because that pesky sun keeps overheating our attics. Putting panels on the roof eliminates both of these.
This gross waste of energy is typical across the US.
Nuclear is not the only option -- it's only the second most stupid option, after fossil fuels.
The energy "crisis" we're facing is not a supply-side crisis, it's a demand-side crisis. Demand is growing exponentially, for no particularly good reason. No amount of new generating capacity can keep up with this. The only thing it gains us is a slight delay before we have to fix our moronic usage habits.
Most of the energy we "use" goes to waste, through inefficiency, and neglect.
If we fix our usage problem now, we won't need nuclear plants. If we don't fix our usage problem, the nuclear plants won't help.
I know several people who have worked for standardized test manufacturers (there's a big one locally). They all left because the entire process was such a crock. From the way the tests are created, to the way the results are interpreted, it's all a pile of assumptions and conjectures.
And the company was held to no standard whatever by any of their clients (various state school districts). Because of the "high standards!" craze sweeping the nation, they have guaranteed fat money coming down the pipe. They would ship tests that weren't normed correctly, bill clients extra hours to fund parties, etc., with no thought that maybe the money would dry up. It won't, as long as this political craziness continues.
We can all speculate about where their corporate campaign contributions were going.
>Remember, it's the cost per megawatt that counts and solar isn't cost competative yet even if you could run a data center on only solar.
Solar is very cost competative, especially when you factor in things that aren't explictly in the price of fossil fuels: cost of clean-up, quality of life, and the cost of maintaining a dependence on foreign oil. Protecting interests in foreign oil is very, very expensive.
The U.S could have spent far less simply by investing in renewables.
errr... What? I've worked with the BSD code and I've worked with the IOS code. I'm having a really hard time connecting these dots. Are you sure about this?
If these are CCD cameras, I wonder if you could carry a bright IR source and saturate the image -- effectively editing yourself out of the picture. Ramsey electronics sells a cheap kit with a bunch of bright IR LEDs, for night-vision applications (combined with a CCD camera). They compare the beam strength to a strong flash light. Seems to me the same source pointed at a CCD should saturate it.
Maybe ThinkGeek should sell a hat studded with IR LEDs, for the geek paranoid.;)
anyone under extreme stress experiences tunnel vision. part of that fight-or-flight mechanism. the movie "trainspotting" had a fairly wonderful sequence depicting it.
Amen to that. computer hum drives me nuts. I've put my machines in a closet, but they're pretty loud even through the sliding door (mostly because of wood floors, I think). Anyone know a good sound-proofing material that's cheaper that egg-crate foam?
I'd been thinking about trying to do a very long cable run to the garage, with video and usb, which could potentially be all the cable I'd need. With usb serial, parallel, keyboard, mouse, mic, and maybe cd burner. Only trouble is the abysmal selection of usb drivers for linux. I'd have to buy win 98 and spend a few months reverse engineering usb drivers. Maybe if I get downsized by the new new economy I'll have time to do this...;)
Hm... I know some kids who are being home schooled, by a fairly moderate (i.e. not frothing-at-the-mouth fundamentalists) family, and they seem if anything much more mature socially than other kids their age.
Makes me wonder if spending all day being "socialized" by people as immature as yourself is really a good model of socialization. Maybe spending time with a variety of age groups, and particularly older people actually provides better examples. (Not that adults are always the best examples...)
But I have to disagree about the public schools being "screwed up". Most people in the U.S. think the public schools are falling apart, but that their own local schools are ok. If everyone's local school is ok.... well, something doesn't add up. Most evidence (note: not the SAT, not TIMSS, or other poorly designed measures) suggest the public schools aren't so broken.
Personally, I think it would make more sense to create more charter schools with multi-age classrooms, and other forward-looking programs, than to have everyone home school.
As has been pointed out in other places, no society has ever become literate through private education.
hehehe. That's pretty funny. Microsoft knows better than I do how I want my UI to work? I don't have to tweak everything in my computer?
Well, turns out I know better than Microsoft how I want my UI to work. I find Microsoft's window managing to be completely unusable. Window arrangements that I use all the time on X aren't even possible with Microsoft.
And standard keyboard layouts give me RSI problems. But who am I to avoid nerve damage by using a keyboard layout that's not approved by Microsoft UI gurus? Just some stupid user that thinks he knows what he wants.
Right.
Meanwhile, people who have no choice but to use Microsoft are doing crazy things like writing kernel mode code to do key remapping. This is just brain-damaged design.
Used to be slashdot was where you'd hang out for discussions with people into free software.
These days it's one long Microsoft love-fest.
I wonder if these folk really think they're going to get/. admins to like m$ by incessantly pointing out how great m$ products are. There are thousands of m$-centric sites on the web. Now/. has to be one, too?
I gave win2K a whirl, when we were given new laptops recently. It's the same old same old. The window manager sucks, and is totally unconfigurable. Re-mapping the keyboard requires building a dll, or paying per-cpu licenses for a program to do it. IE barfs pretty regularly.
I don't want to become a warez dood just so I can use the freaking keyboard.
> In fact, guns are far more difficult to get than they've ever been.
This is so false. Guns these days are everywhere. 200 years ago, or 100 years ago guns were expensive, and poorly built. Owning a gun was a really, really big deal, and they weren't half as lethal as they are today.
There were probably half a dozen guns in my house when I was growing up, and they were practically different machines compared to a 200 year old gun.
No one imagined 200 years ago that "arms" would come to mean devices that could wipe out all life on earth. But we've reached that point today, and we've made the decision that not every hot-head on the block should have The Button on their remote control. Because someone will be stupid enough to use it.
The right to "arms" has already been abridged. At this point it's only a matter of arguing about where that line is drawn.
Dabney house at Caltech used to have (perhaps still has) a parabolic mirror from an old telescope. About 5 feet across. A 2x4 at the focal point at noon would burst into flames immediately. It could melt brick (in a spot about the size of a quarter).
Very, very dangerous, because you can't see the focal point. If left unattended, people could easily be permanently scarred, or blinded.
It really gives you appriciation for the energy in sunlight. Makes you want to wear long sleves and sun screen all the time. Maybe stay inside.;)
> In any case, cloning will NOT be the end of the world, nor will genetic engineering, as so many on Slashdot predict. If people are going to make statements about the effects of a field, they'd do best to actually have some knowledge in that field
Unfortunately, people who have knowledge in the field have repeatedly fucked up royally when messing with the environment. Two examples: pesticides that we were assured by specialists were "safe" nearly wiped out the bird-of-prey population in the U.S., and "safe" fertilizers have made most of the ground water in the midwest poisonous. Have your own well in rural kansas? Too bad, you can't safely drink from it.
While not a biologist, I've worked enough with biologists to know how damn little is understood about genetics. This "we know what we're doing" attitude is such crap. We don't have a freaking clue, and the potential disasters are much greater than the many that "experts in the field" have already visited upon us.
not really. It's still a procedural language pretending to be an oo language. It's completely random which function are class functions and which aren't (do I do list.len() or len(list)? err... gotta look that up). The data hiding, like perl, is by convention.
It's a marginal improvement from perl, at best, mostly because the notation is cleaner.
... and then there's that damn whitespace issue.
After all the HYPE HYPE HYPE I was horribly disappointed with python.
> I'm intending to learn the guitar which will be more entertaining than listening to the latest pop pap.
Yep. I used to care a lot more about my audio collection, quality stereo, etc. After learning an instrument listening to recordings just wasn't as interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of good discussion here of how feasible solar PV is, but I think people are overlooking one important thing: most of our energy use goes to moving heat around.
This is something solar can do very, very well -- far more efficiently than current photovoltaic technology. A typical home burns most of its energy on air conditioning, refridgeration, space heating, water heating, cooking, and clothes drying. All of these can be done with solar thermal technology far more cost effectively than with a bunch of PV panels and batteries.
If you're really interested in going off-grid, or solving U.S. energy problems, start with solar space heating and solar water heating. Then look at solar refridgeration, air conditioning, and cooking. Worry about photovoltaic loads (like running computers and light bulbs) last. And before you start buying PV, assess where your electricity is going. Chances are you're wasting most of it.
My interest in audio equipment nearly died after I learned an instrument. Performing music is much more satisfying than listening to a canned recording of someone else performing music.
I suspect audiophiles have a misdirected desire to make music.
> A ten-fold increase in capacity will support 5% annual growth for almost fifty years.
Yep, and that's not a long-term solution. That's 50 years of investment to end up where we are today, only with a lot more pollution. Approaching from the demand side, we don't end up back here in 50 years, and we don't have the pollution. What's your point?
The 5% may be off by a couple. I've seen different figures, from 2 to 5. The basic picture is still this: We're wasting most of the power we produce. Most of the power we're not wasting goes to space and water heating that can be done with solar. Solar scales with the number of building we build -- generating plants are nearly irrelevant to this growth when using solar. We have to implement this at some point, because we can't sustain the growth indefinately. It make more sense to do it now than to make a mess trying to delay it a few years.
> We will need huge amounts, or huge changes in the way energy is consumed.
The way energy is consumed is this: not very much is consumed at night. Thus the low rates. Thus all the schemes like pumping water back up dams during the night.
Ok, let's try this again.
U.S. demand has been growing exponentially around 5% a year. There is no supply-side solution that can keep this up forever, or even for very long. A ten-fold increase in generating capacity will roughly double the time until demand exceeds supply. Then we'd have to fix the demand problem. This isn't "silly", it's just the math of this situation. We can fix the demand problem later, and have huge investment and environmental costs of making thousands of new plants. Or we can fix the demand problem now, and not have those costs.
Whatever the impact of the internet boom, people are still using nearly all of their energy for space and water heating -- things that are easily done with solar.
So once the demand problem is fixed, the plants won't be need. We'll have thousands of nuclear plants sitting around. Thousands of acres of land covered with useless generating plants.
And no, it's not wrong that demand is much, much lower in the evening. That's why evening prices are so much lower. Solar homes are usually spec'd to have a week of storage. For grid-tied solutions we don't need that much. We just need to get the majority of homes through the night. I'm not claiming we could completely eliminate all power generation except solar and wind. With conservation and solar, most homes could meet nearly all of their energy demands. The remainder, in non-sunlight hours, could be met by modest storage systems, and modest use of conventional generating technologies.
Regarding cutting demand for coal, the only way demand is going to be cut is for the price to accurately reflect how much the fuel costs us. That means letting the consumer price go up, and perhaps taxing it for the environmental cost.
Regarding Kyoto, what's the problem with cutting coal consumption by cutting demand?
For the last few weeks I've been measuring energy usage with a digital watt-hour meter, and comparing energy usage in different households. A conservative estimate of energy waste in American households is perhaps 50%. It's probably higher than that, and American businesses are worse.
It makes no sense at all to talk about building new plants when were wasting energy at this rate. It's just absurd.
If you've kicked the bottom out of your bucket, having a bigger hose isn't going to help you fill it.
The situation in California has exactly nothing to do with "severe restriction", if by that you mean environmental measures. There have been 13 plants delayed or blocked. 12 were opposed by utility companies. One was opposed by Cisco. Environmental groups have actually been in favor of building new plants, so old, dirty generating plants can be closed. In particular, none of the plants have been blocked by the air quality standards that Bush wants to ditch.
The growth in demand has been documented many places. Look it up. The Economist had graphs of the supply and demand a month or two ago. (Unfortunately the rest of their article was complete fiction). The growth in demand is exponentially growing. That it hit the supply limit first in California is incidental. The fact remains that no amount of plant building is going to keep up with this growth. Stopping the growth is the only solution.
Our energy use could be dropping every year, instead of growing, because we're currently wasting so much of it. This is by far the cleanest, cheapest, and easiest solution.
Regarding solar and wind, energy demand is much, much lower in the evening, so you don't really need that much storage.
I absolutely agree that getting the consumer price of energy to accurately reflect its true cost is critical. Solar and wind would be viable today if the price of fossil fuels weren't artificially low.
The new California rebates make PV fairly viable in the short-term, though.
At some point population growth will have to be dealt with.
But the more immediate problems can be address by cutting demand and using solar and wind generation. Demand can be cut dramatically, without lowering standard of living. For a baseline, consider that people who go off-grid typically reduce their electricity consumption by 80 or 90%, without upsetting their lifestyle. It's all about being aware of where your energy is going, using efficient appliances, and using the right energy source for the right job.
More people have electric water heaters than watt-hour meters. It's crazy.
Right now California's energy woes revolve around natural gas prices. Meanwhile we're all burning it in our gas water heaters, while we run 100 watt attic fans all day because that pesky sun keeps overheating our attics. Putting panels on the roof eliminates both of these.
This gross waste of energy is typical across the US.
Nuclear is not the only option -- it's only the second most stupid option, after fossil fuels. The energy "crisis" we're facing is not a supply-side crisis, it's a demand-side crisis. Demand is growing exponentially, for no particularly good reason. No amount of new generating capacity can keep up with this. The only thing it gains us is a slight delay before we have to fix our moronic usage habits. Most of the energy we "use" goes to waste, through inefficiency, and neglect. If we fix our usage problem now, we won't need nuclear plants. If we don't fix our usage problem, the nuclear plants won't help.
there's nothing like a wire mesh wall for blocking rf.... though you do have to mount an antenna if you want to listen to the radio
On the other hand, local assessments are still (emperically) better predictors of future success than standardized assessments.
More bluntly: standardized tests don't work.
I know several people who have worked for standardized test manufacturers (there's a big one locally). They all left because the entire process was such a crock. From the way the tests are created, to the way the results are interpreted, it's all a pile of assumptions and conjectures.
And the company was held to no standard whatever by any of their clients (various state school districts). Because of the "high standards!" craze sweeping the nation, they have guaranteed fat money coming down the pipe. They would ship tests that weren't normed correctly, bill clients extra hours to fund parties, etc., with no thought that maybe the money would dry up. It won't, as long as this political craziness continues.
We can all speculate about where their corporate campaign contributions were going.
>Remember, it's the cost per megawatt that counts and solar isn't cost competative yet even if you could run a data center on only solar.
Solar is very cost competative, especially when you factor in things that aren't explictly in the price of fossil fuels: cost of clean-up, quality of life, and the cost of maintaining a dependence on foreign oil. Protecting interests in foreign oil is very, very expensive.
The U.S could have spent far less simply by investing in renewables.
errr... What? I've worked with the BSD code and I've worked with the IOS code. I'm having a really hard time connecting these dots. Are you sure about this?
If these are CCD cameras, I wonder if you could carry a bright IR source and saturate the image -- effectively editing yourself out of the picture. Ramsey electronics sells a cheap kit with a bunch of bright IR LEDs, for night-vision applications (combined with a CCD camera). They compare the beam strength to a strong flash light. Seems to me the same source pointed at a CCD should saturate it.
;)
Maybe ThinkGeek should sell a hat studded with IR LEDs, for the geek paranoid.
anyone under extreme stress experiences tunnel vision. part of that fight-or-flight mechanism. the movie "trainspotting" had a fairly wonderful sequence depicting it.
Amen to that. computer hum drives me nuts. I've put my machines in a closet, but they're pretty loud even through the sliding door (mostly because of wood floors, I think). Anyone know a good sound-proofing material that's cheaper that egg-crate foam?
;)
I'd been thinking about trying to do a very long cable run to the garage, with video and usb, which could potentially be all the cable I'd need. With usb serial, parallel, keyboard, mouse, mic, and maybe cd burner. Only trouble is the abysmal selection of usb drivers for linux. I'd have to buy win 98 and spend a few months reverse engineering usb drivers. Maybe if I get downsized by the new new economy I'll have time to do this...
Hm... I know some kids who are being home schooled, by a fairly moderate (i.e. not frothing-at-the-mouth fundamentalists) family, and they seem if anything much more mature socially than other kids their age.
Makes me wonder if spending all day being "socialized" by people as immature as yourself is really a good model of socialization. Maybe spending time with a variety of age groups, and particularly older people actually provides better examples. (Not that adults are always the best examples...)
But I have to disagree about the public schools being "screwed up". Most people in the U.S. think the public schools are falling apart, but that their own local schools are ok. If everyone's local school is ok.... well, something doesn't add up. Most evidence (note: not the SAT, not TIMSS, or other poorly designed measures) suggest the public schools aren't so broken.
Personally, I think it would make more sense to create more charter schools with multi-age classrooms, and other forward-looking programs, than to have everyone home school.
As has been pointed out in other places, no society has ever become literate through private education.
html format:
http://www.rpmdp.org/rpmbook/
among other places. do a web search.
b.c.
hehehe. That's pretty funny. Microsoft knows better than I do how I want my UI to work? I don't have to tweak everything in my computer?
Well, turns out I know better than Microsoft how I want my UI to work. I find Microsoft's window managing to be completely unusable. Window arrangements that I use all the time on X aren't even possible with Microsoft.
And standard keyboard layouts give me RSI problems. But who am I to avoid nerve damage by using a keyboard layout that's not approved by Microsoft UI gurus? Just some stupid user that thinks he knows what he wants.
Right.
Meanwhile, people who have no choice but to use Microsoft are doing crazy things like writing kernel mode code to do key remapping. This is just brain-damaged design.
Used to be slashdot was where you'd hang out for discussions with people into free software.
/. admins to like m$ by incessantly pointing out how great m$ products are. There are thousands of m$-centric sites on the web. Now /. has to be one, too?
These days it's one long Microsoft love-fest.
I wonder if these folk really think they're going to get
I gave win2K a whirl, when we were given new laptops recently. It's the same old same old. The window manager sucks, and is totally unconfigurable. Re-mapping the keyboard requires building a dll, or paying per-cpu licenses for a program to do it. IE barfs pretty regularly.
I don't want to become a warez dood just so I can use the freaking keyboard.
> In fact, guns are far more difficult to get than they've ever been.
This is so false. Guns these days are everywhere. 200 years ago, or 100 years ago guns were expensive, and poorly built. Owning a gun was a really, really big deal, and they weren't half as lethal as they are today.
There were probably half a dozen guns in my house when I was growing up, and they were practically different machines compared to a 200 year old gun.
No one imagined 200 years ago that "arms" would come to mean devices that could wipe out all life on earth. But we've reached that point today, and we've made the decision that not every hot-head on the block should have The Button on their remote control. Because someone will be stupid enough to use it.
The right to "arms" has already been abridged. At this point it's only a matter of arguing about where that line is drawn.
Dabney house at Caltech used to have (perhaps still has) a parabolic mirror from an old telescope. About 5 feet across. A 2x4 at the focal point at noon would burst into flames immediately. It could melt brick (in a spot about the size of a quarter).
;)
Very, very dangerous, because you can't see the focal point. If left unattended, people could easily be permanently scarred, or blinded.
It really gives you appriciation for the energy in sunlight. Makes you want to wear long sleves and sun screen all the time. Maybe stay inside.
> In any case, cloning will NOT be the end of the world, nor will genetic engineering, as so many on Slashdot predict. If people are going to make statements about the effects of a field, they'd do best to actually have some knowledge in that field
Unfortunately, people who have knowledge in the field have repeatedly fucked up royally when messing with the environment. Two examples: pesticides that we were assured by specialists were "safe" nearly wiped out the bird-of-prey population in the U.S., and "safe" fertilizers have made most of the ground water in the midwest poisonous. Have your own well in rural kansas? Too bad, you can't safely drink from it.
While not a biologist, I've worked enough with biologists to know how damn little is understood about genetics. This "we know what we're doing" attitude is such crap. We don't have a freaking clue, and the potential disasters are much greater than the many that "experts in the field" have already visited upon us.
>Python Is More Deeply Object-Oriented.
not really. It's still a procedural language pretending to be an oo language. It's completely random which function are class functions and which aren't (do I do list.len() or len(list)? err... gotta look that up). The data hiding, like perl, is by convention.
It's a marginal improvement from perl, at best, mostly because the notation is cleaner.
... and then there's that damn whitespace issue.
After all the HYPE HYPE HYPE I was horribly disappointed with python.
> I'm intending to learn the guitar which will be more entertaining than listening to the latest pop pap.
Yep. I used to care a lot more about my audio collection, quality stereo, etc. After learning an instrument listening to recordings just wasn't as interesting.