I no longer have a television, in part because of the ads. I would far rather read a book than watch TV with ads at an airport. I don't mind print ads, and I don't mind the ads on Google/GMail, because they are easy to ignore unless (as sometimes happens) I am interested. But anything in the form "watch this before you get what you want" will put me off very, very soon. A lot of videos I come across on Stumbleupon are now like this: watch 20-30 seconds of ad before you get whatever you came to see. I am usually clicking away within five seconds.
All right, I realise that I am at the extreme end, but if this gets between users and functionality they want, I can see it getting very unpopular.
Particularly, Google has a reflexive "never destroy data" mentality, Part of what Google does, what it sees as part of its culture, is to store vast amounts of data, Allegedly, it took a real fight to allow there to be a delete function on Gmail: much of the company thought that, since they were storing it for free and with their indexing, there was no reason anybody should ever need to delete anything.
I think they have a real problem in their lack of understanding of people's desire for privacy, and people's desire sometimes to wipe the slate of past mistakes. There is nothing evil here, just the simple fact that people with differing concerns see the same world differently. It is exactly the same as the concerns about big government databases: people whose every working minute is spent worrying about terrorists and criminals really see the world differently from those to whom such threats are a peripheral nuisance.
But if you have reason to believe that the attacker has a grudge against you, and not against your five year old granddaughter - which he did - it is reasonable to leave the granddaughter, who is probably safe, and save yourself.
That is the problem with characterizing the attacker as a madman. He wasn't mad at all, he was completely sane. Driven by a religious ideology totally at variance with the cartoonist, but perfectly sane. He wanted to wreak the vengeance of Allah on the person who, in his opinion, had insulted Allah. Had he been a genuine madman, genuinely insane, your remark would make sense. But it was obvious that he was a sane zealot, not insane.
How much cheaper will one 240Hz display be than two 120Hz displays - which will have the advantage of avoiding the dimming already mentioned? And extends to 3, 4, N players without further dimming or even higher frequency displays. And can be used for two separate games/programs if you are not in two-player mode.
Stereo is necessary because you cannot put your eyeballs in different places.But you can (and often do) put two players in different places.
Not really. You can have H and V polarisation, which was used for the first polarized 3D displays, but that doesn't work well because you have to keep your head strictly vertical to avoid crossover. Cinema screens use clock and anticlock polarisation, and there are only two such polarisations.
In Soviet Russia... they have power lines 6000 km long
Wikipedia says "As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for electricity was 7,000 km (4,300 mi)", and that losses on long transmission lines are typically 6-7%. Transmission within the continental US should not be uneconomical with current technology, and certainly not upe and down the West Coast.
As long as the courts keep telling him to shut up, no problem. Balance of powers works. It is not impeachable until he starts to use force or to ignore the courts in other ways. The Constitution is designed on the basis that politicians can be stupid.
At a price... If you don't want your state built over (and I sympathize with you), keep doubling the price. That is the way the market works, and America loves the market...
I agree that the costs are high, though I don't think enormous. The current Grids were expensive - but worthwhile. New ones will also be - but you have to have the haggle to get the returns distributed fairly between all participants (including involuntary ones). People are already doing exactly what you describe in Texas, building grids from the windy Panhandle to the energy consuming South. people seem to have been able to build oil and gas pipelines quite effectively over the years. Nearly all people will sell you a way-leave, which is all you need; it you are willing to pay enough, it is only a tiny number you need to take to court.
Without intending to be critical, US law with its view that there is always more empty space "out there" is particularly ill-adapted for this particular purpose. It will therefore take more time and more grief than in a European "socialist" country. It can reasonably be argued that this is a reasonable price to pay for individual property rights. But should you so argue, don't complain when you hit the downside of it.
And the Grid defines perfectly valid safety requirement, and locks the windmills off the grid. And if the court overrides, they should "people will die" and politicians override the court.
You say that "have" to - but as far as the grid companies are concerned, the obvious profits go to the windmill companies, who are a minority of their customers. They are not inclined to raise large amounts of capital when they feel that they will not get the major amounts of benefit. The California grid has an obligation to deliver power from California generators to California consumers, and ditto for Oregon. But they do not have any obligation to each other. All parties want to pay as little as possible for the upgrade and gain as much profit as possible. Since future energy costs, energy demand, and green premium are all unknown, they each have their own idea of how risky such an investment will be, and would rather others take the big risks.
This often happens in infrastructure problems: the owner of the infrastructure acts obstinate in order to extract the maximum value from the users. The same thing happened when my parents built a house on a small island: the local power company tried to get them to pay for upgrading the line all the way back to the main spine rather than just for the spur needed for their house, because the whole branch was overloaded. My parents just said that they would do without electricity, and two years later the power company offered a link at a decent price.
Sure. But the President probably does not have the power to kick butt in that way. Separation of powers probably means that it is a jealously-guarded state right, and if he comes in giving orders the states will just dig their heels in. He can only cajole, organize summits, appoint powerless Czars to co-ordinate etc.
Particularly with the US, the President has much less power than most people think (e.g. those worried he will ban guns - he has no power at all to do so). The Constitution was deliberately devised to stop the president being able to kick butt unless other parts of the system support him. In Foreign Affairs, which are much, much bigger than the founders ever anticipated, the Presidency has managed to accumulate serious power, and the so-called PATRIOT Act gave him a lot more. But actually, on internal affairs the President is pretty weak.
It is logical, and it is what will probably happen eventually. But the various parties involved are all waiting for the others to move first - and probably suffer the greatest pain. The last mover will probably be able to charge a premium for joining in once others have committed themselves.
The market works best when there are thousands, or preferable millions, of transactions between hundreds of essentially equal buyers and sellers. This is a one-off transaction whose costs are huge and whose participants are fixed and known to each other. In some ways it has more of the characteristics of a duel or a three-way standoff than a market. Each of the participants is feinting, and eventually one will leap. But it is not obvious whether the first mover, last mover, organiser, or holder-to-ransom will make the greatest profit.
As I said, consumer demand spikes are generally predictable, so that generating capacity can be warmed up in advance. When consumers are being unpredictable, they tend to cancel out.
I have never said that renewables cannot generate enough electricity. However, in order to produce a reliable supply, renewables must be backed up by storage sufficient to cover the troughs in renewable supply by storing energy from the peaks. If you add in the entirely necessary cost for this storage, the total bill becomes much greater. We should still do it, but we must recognize the extra cost.
Wind power is particularly bad in this respect: Its peak-to-trough ratio is very high, very unpredictable, and troughs can be very long. The latest solar generators, by using thermal instead of photoelectric conversion, are able to store heat overnight in baths of molten salt and flatten out the day/night variation. These provide a much more tractable form of renewable energy.
No, the problem is not magnitude, it is rate of change - the derivative. It is perfectly safe to brake to a halt from 60 to 0, but it is not safe to do the same by hitting a wall. This is like a plane hitting turbulence.
Because there are millions of consumers, demand can be predicted. Either they are not co-ordinated, in which case their various actions roughly cancel out and changes are smooth, or they can be predicted (power surges in breaks in major sporting events). The problem with wind is that a sudden unpredictable increase can cause hundreds of windmills over a huge area to suddenly increase or decrease their input. We don't have an oversupply - as stated, California is begging for the energy. But it cannot be delivered to them in a safe manner.
I don't agree. Doing everything in your own back garden is extremely inefficient. Things should be done where they can be done most efficiently - allowing for the cost of transport. You generate wind power where the wind is, solar power where the sun is, wave power where the waves are. Then transport it to where the users are
By your logic, California should only burn oil pumped in California. In fact, why allow a whole state to share - why not require SF to used only oil pumped in SF.
And certainly California should not import water in the way it does. Which would lead to most of Southern California being abandoned - it survives only on water imported from the north.
Certainly. But we have a frog-in-hot-water situation here, with political complications. The grid as built can take a small amount of wind power. But as the amount of wind power increases, the limits of its adaptability are reached. And now you have the problem of who pays for the necessary upgrades. The guy who added the last windmill that exceeded the limit? All windmill owners? The Oregon grid, which needs upgrading? The California consumers who want this green power? Everybody says it is not their responsibility and the US, with its dislike of government control, does not have the mechanisms for someone to take charge and decide who pays for it in the short term, and how they are going to get paid back buy the other beneficiaries.
The trouble is that, since this is a huge one-off, market forces don't work very well. Of course, eventually the pain caused will open a market opportunity and business will find a way to solve the problem. But without a so-called socialist supervisor authority to predict and control, business are going to wait until the pain is excruciating before suppling the demand. In the long term the market will work; in the short term the economy and people will suffer.
No, it is a grid designed for slow turn on/off generators (coal, oil, nuclear) being fed with fast turn on/off generators. It is like taking a truck off-road. A truck perfectly suitable for is normal job is not fit for purpose on un-metalled road. The grid is not fit for the purpose to which it is now being put.
This is indeed a god idea. Unfortunately it is also very expensive to build, and there are relatively few places near the grid with steep hills and lakes (or land suitable for creating lakes) near top and bottom. Particularly, they tend to be quite a long way from the relatively flat areas over which the wind whistles and wind power is generated.
The problem is not in California, it is in Oregon. The demand is in California, but they cannot get the supply out of Oregon. It is not the case of the grid being in bad condition (though it is not in good condition), it is the case of the grid being built for fossil, nuclear, and hydroelectric power which turns on/off predictably and controllably, without major surges, now being used for wind power which surges unpredictably. Water is not a good analogy - surges in the water supply are on a matter of days or even weeks, whereas surges in the wind are a matter of. a second or so.
Because wind power varies, it has to be backed up by another power source which is turned down and up to fill in the gaps in the wind. But most power stations take at least a few seconds for the most agile (gas turbine) to many hours (nuclear) to turn on and off. If the wind varies too fast, this cannot be done and net grid power - the sum of wind and other - varies in a dangerous manner. The solution is for the wind power not to use the highest peaks, wasting the energy that California would like but preventing damage to the grid and equipment attached to it.
The only place it works in my house is in the glass-walled conservatory, and even then it goes wrong if someone stands in the wrong place. Inside my house, it doesn't work at all. And I am not in the back of beyond: I am five miles from a major transmission aerial in southern England, but there is a hill in the way. Why should I buy a DAB radio?
Eh? Helium is not the only component used in MRI - there is a lot of metal and computers. If helium is 5% of the machine cost - and this is a high estimate because of the aforementioned low price - going up by 20 time will double the capital cost of am MRI scanner. Which, since staffing and running costs also figure, will add maybe 50% to the cost of each scan. Which is better than being unable to do them at all in 50 years time.
No - I once worked on a computer installed in a Naval base. The computer had to be placed in a shielded room with airlock-style shielded double doors because the radars outside caused the entire computer to malfunction.
Slashdot Mirror
I no longer have a television, in part because of the ads. I would far rather read a book than watch TV with ads at an airport. I don't mind print ads, and I don't mind the ads on Google/GMail, because they are easy to ignore unless (as sometimes happens) I am interested. But anything in the form "watch this before you get what you want" will put me off very, very soon. A lot of videos I come across on Stumbleupon are now like this: watch 20-30 seconds of ad before you get whatever you came to see. I am usually clicking away within five seconds.
All right, I realise that I am at the extreme end, but if this gets between users and functionality they want, I can see it getting very unpopular.
Particularly, Google has a reflexive "never destroy data" mentality, Part of what Google does, what it sees as part of its culture, is to store vast amounts of data, Allegedly, it took a real fight to allow there to be a delete function on Gmail: much of the company thought that, since they were storing it for free and with their indexing, there was no reason anybody should ever need to delete anything.
I think they have a real problem in their lack of understanding of people's desire for privacy, and people's desire sometimes to wipe the slate of past mistakes. There is nothing evil here, just the simple fact that people with differing concerns see the same world differently. It is exactly the same as the concerns about big government databases: people whose every working minute is spent worrying about terrorists and criminals really see the world differently from those to whom such threats are a peripheral nuisance.
But if you have reason to believe that the attacker has a grudge against you, and not against your five year old granddaughter - which he did - it is reasonable to leave the granddaughter, who is probably safe, and save yourself.
That is the problem with characterizing the attacker as a madman. He wasn't mad at all, he was completely sane. Driven by a religious ideology totally at variance with the cartoonist, but perfectly sane. He wanted to wreak the vengeance of Allah on the person who, in his opinion, had insulted Allah. Had he been a genuine madman, genuinely insane, your remark would make sense. But it was obvious that he was a sane zealot, not insane.
How much cheaper will one 240Hz display be than two 120Hz displays - which will have the advantage of avoiding the dimming already mentioned? And extends to 3, 4, N players without further dimming or even higher frequency displays. And can be used for two separate games/programs if you are not in two-player mode.
Stereo is necessary because you cannot put your eyeballs in different places.But you can (and often do) put two players in different places.
Yawn
Not really. You can have H and V polarisation, which was used for the first polarized 3D displays, but that doesn't work well because you have to keep your head strictly vertical to avoid crossover. Cinema screens use clock and anticlock polarisation, and there are only two such polarisations.
In Soviet Russia...
they have power lines 6000 km long
Wikipedia says "As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for electricity was 7,000 km (4,300 mi)", and that losses on long transmission lines are typically 6-7%. Transmission within the continental US should not be uneconomical with current technology, and certainly not upe and down the West Coast.
As long as the courts keep telling him to shut up, no problem. Balance of powers works. It is not impeachable until he starts to use force or to ignore the courts in other ways. The Constitution is designed on the basis that politicians can be stupid.
At a price... If you don't want your state built over (and I sympathize with you), keep doubling the price. That is the way the market works, and America loves the market...
I agree that the costs are high, though I don't think enormous. The current Grids were expensive - but worthwhile. New ones will also be - but you have to have the haggle to get the returns distributed fairly between all participants (including involuntary ones). People are already doing exactly what you describe in Texas, building grids from the windy Panhandle to the energy consuming South. people seem to have been able to build oil and gas pipelines quite effectively over the years. Nearly all people will sell you a way-leave, which is all you need; it you are willing to pay enough, it is only a tiny number you need to take to court.
Without intending to be critical, US law with its view that there is always more empty space "out there" is particularly ill-adapted for this particular purpose. It will therefore take more time and more grief than in a European "socialist" country. It can reasonably be argued that this is a reasonable price to pay for individual property rights. But should you so argue, don't complain when you hit the downside of it.
And the Grid defines perfectly valid safety requirement, and locks the windmills off the grid. And if the court overrides, they should "people will die" and politicians override the court.
You say that "have" to - but as far as the grid companies are concerned, the obvious profits go to the windmill companies, who are a minority of their customers. They are not inclined to raise large amounts of capital when they feel that they will not get the major amounts of benefit. The California grid has an obligation to deliver power from California generators to California consumers, and ditto for Oregon. But they do not have any obligation to each other. All parties want to pay as little as possible for the upgrade and gain as much profit as possible. Since future energy costs, energy demand, and green premium are all unknown, they each have their own idea of how risky such an investment will be, and would rather others take the big risks.
This often happens in infrastructure problems: the owner of the infrastructure acts obstinate in order to extract the maximum value from the users. The same thing happened when my parents built a house on a small island: the local power company tried to get them to pay for upgrading the line all the way back to the main spine rather than just for the spur needed for their house, because the whole branch was overloaded. My parents just said that they would do without electricity, and two years later the power company offered a link at a decent price.
Sure. But the President probably does not have the power to kick butt in that way. Separation of powers probably means that it is a jealously-guarded state right, and if he comes in giving orders the states will just dig their heels in. He can only cajole, organize summits, appoint powerless Czars to co-ordinate etc.
Particularly with the US, the President has much less power than most people think (e.g. those worried he will ban guns - he has no power at all to do so). The Constitution was deliberately devised to stop the president being able to kick butt unless other parts of the system support him. In Foreign Affairs, which are much, much bigger than the founders ever anticipated, the Presidency has managed to accumulate serious power, and the so-called PATRIOT Act gave him a lot more. But actually, on internal affairs the President is pretty weak.
It is logical, and it is what will probably happen eventually. But the various parties involved are all waiting for the others to move first - and probably suffer the greatest pain. The last mover will probably be able to charge a premium for joining in once others have committed themselves.
The market works best when there are thousands, or preferable millions, of transactions between hundreds of essentially equal buyers and sellers. This is a one-off transaction whose costs are huge and whose participants are fixed and known to each other. In some ways it has more of the characteristics of a duel or a three-way standoff than a market. Each of the participants is feinting, and eventually one will leap. But it is not obvious whether the first mover, last mover, organiser, or holder-to-ransom will make the greatest profit.
As I said, consumer demand spikes are generally predictable, so that generating capacity can be warmed up in advance. When consumers are being unpredictable, they tend to cancel out.
I have never said that renewables cannot generate enough electricity. However, in order to produce a reliable supply, renewables must be backed up by storage sufficient to cover the troughs in renewable supply by storing energy from the peaks. If you add in the entirely necessary cost for this storage, the total bill becomes much greater. We should still do it, but we must recognize the extra cost.
Wind power is particularly bad in this respect: Its peak-to-trough ratio is very high, very unpredictable, and troughs can be very long. The latest solar generators, by using thermal instead of photoelectric conversion, are able to store heat overnight in baths of molten salt and flatten out the day/night variation. These provide a much more tractable form of renewable energy.
No, the problem is not magnitude, it is rate of change - the derivative. It is perfectly safe to brake to a halt from 60 to 0, but it is not safe to do the same by hitting a wall. This is like a plane hitting turbulence.
Because there are millions of consumers, demand can be predicted. Either they are not co-ordinated, in which case their various actions roughly cancel out and changes are smooth, or they can be predicted (power surges in breaks in major sporting events). The problem with wind is that a sudden unpredictable increase can cause hundreds of windmills over a huge area to suddenly increase or decrease their input. We don't have an oversupply - as stated, California is begging for the energy. But it cannot be delivered to them in a safe manner.
I don't agree. Doing everything in your own back garden is extremely inefficient. Things should be done where they can be done most efficiently - allowing for the cost of transport. You generate wind power where the wind is, solar power where the sun is, wave power where the waves are. Then transport it to where the users are
By your logic, California should only burn oil pumped in California. In fact, why allow a whole state to share - why not require SF to used only oil pumped in SF.
And certainly California should not import water in the way it does. Which would lead to most of Southern California being abandoned - it survives only on water imported from the north.
Certainly. But we have a frog-in-hot-water situation here, with political complications. The grid as built can take a small amount of wind power. But as the amount of wind power increases, the limits of its adaptability are reached. And now you have the problem of who pays for the necessary upgrades. The guy who added the last windmill that exceeded the limit? All windmill owners? The Oregon grid, which needs upgrading? The California consumers who want this green power? Everybody says it is not their responsibility and the US, with its dislike of government control, does not have the mechanisms for someone to take charge and decide who pays for it in the short term, and how they are going to get paid back buy the other beneficiaries.
The trouble is that, since this is a huge one-off, market forces don't work very well. Of course, eventually the pain caused will open a market opportunity and business will find a way to solve the problem. But without a so-called socialist supervisor authority to predict and control, business are going to wait until the pain is excruciating before suppling the demand. In the long term the market will work; in the short term the economy and people will suffer.
Yes, that is perhaps a better analogy. The tubes have not been designed for shock loads, and windpower is delivering them.
No, it is a grid designed for slow turn on/off generators (coal, oil, nuclear) being fed with fast turn on/off generators. It is like taking a truck off-road. A truck perfectly suitable for is normal job is not fit for purpose on un-metalled road. The grid is not fit for the purpose to which it is now being put.
This is indeed a god idea. Unfortunately it is also very expensive to build, and there are relatively few places near the grid with steep hills and lakes (or land suitable for creating lakes) near top and bottom. Particularly, they tend to be quite a long way from the relatively flat areas over which the wind whistles and wind power is generated.
The problem is not in California, it is in Oregon. The demand is in California, but they cannot get the supply out of Oregon. It is not the case of the grid being in bad condition (though it is not in good condition), it is the case of the grid being built for fossil, nuclear, and hydroelectric power which turns on/off predictably and controllably, without major surges, now being used for wind power which surges unpredictably. Water is not a good analogy - surges in the water supply are on a matter of days or even weeks, whereas surges in the wind are a matter of. a second or so.
Because wind power varies, it has to be backed up by another power source which is turned down and up to fill in the gaps in the wind. But most power stations take at least a few seconds for the most agile (gas turbine) to many hours (nuclear) to turn on and off. If the wind varies too fast, this cannot be done and net grid power - the sum of wind and other - varies in a dangerous manner. The solution is for the wind power not to use the highest peaks, wasting the energy that California would like but preventing damage to the grid and equipment attached to it.
The only place it works in my house is in the glass-walled conservatory, and even then it goes wrong if someone stands in the wrong place. Inside my house, it doesn't work at all. And I am not in the back of beyond: I am five miles from a major transmission aerial in southern England, but there is a hill in the way. Why should I buy a DAB radio?
Eh? Helium is not the only component used in MRI - there is a lot of metal and computers. If helium is 5% of the machine cost - and this is a high estimate because of the aforementioned low price - going up by 20 time will double the capital cost of am MRI scanner. Which, since staffing and running costs also figure, will add maybe 50% to the cost of each scan. Which is better than being unable to do them at all in 50 years time.
No - I once worked on a computer installed in a Naval base. The computer had to be placed in a shielded room with airlock-style shielded double doors because the radars outside caused the entire computer to malfunction.
Small detail - I am in the UK. Whatever President Clinton may have signed does not apply here.