Well it's a shame then the FCC rules under discussion would have nothing whatsoever to do with that,.
Except this is exactly what it's about, and it's something that Comcast has already been caught doing. Allowing "fast lanes" would just be a way for them to legitimize the practice of stymieing competing services and/or extorting money from content providers. =Smidge=
This doesn't address what is the true threat: It's not about ISPs choking bandwidth to individual consumers, it's about ISPs choking bandwidth to their competitors.
For example, Comcast offers, internet, streaming video, cable television and telephone services.
If I, as a third party, want to offer telephone services that use broadband internet (VoIP), Comcast will be able to make my access to their consumers so crap that I can't compete with their telephone service. The only way around that would be to pay them for "fast lane" access which will also ruin my ability to compete as it cuts deeply into my budget.
The end user can have all the bandwidth the infrastructure can provide, and it won't mean a damn thing because my traffic, specifically, will be choked by the monopoly ISP guarding the gates. =Smidge=
In the wind. There is no capital cost for making the wind blow.
There's a capital cost for building and maintaining the equipment required to tap that energy, but the energy itself is free once you've covered that initial cost.
Also, the Model S is not their "entry level" vehicle. That vehicle is still under development. Tesla aimed to cover the high cost of relatively low volume early production vehicles by producing their high end sport offering (Roadster) first, then their luxury offering (Model S). Part of the reason the gigafactory is such a big deal is it would help lower the cost of the battery packs, reducing the price of future vehicles. =Smidge=
Basically you're saying that just because the presence of a knife in someone's chest correlates with their death, is no reason to assume causation between these two things.
After all, plenty of people have been stabbed in the chest and lived, and there are no witnesses, so even though the coroner has ruled out every other possible cause of death we can't say for sure the knife is the problem.
To bring it back: There have not yet been any proposed totally-natural mechanisms that account for the current warming trends we see. There are natural mechanisms of course, but none of them add up to what is being observed. The only explanation is that human activity is indeed significantly impacting the global climate. This should not be terribly hard to believe, considering the damage we do almost routinely; Lifeless sea floor in the gulf of Mexico, dozens if not hundreds of once flourishing species now extinct, entire mountains cut down, entire forests leveled, ect. =Smidge=
The requirements are standard. The actual manner of teaching is not. Education standards are about what to teach, not how to teach.
You might find recommendations on how to teach, but they are not enforced as requirements. Find me an example of enforced methods of teaching, rather than curricula (which is just a laundry list of what needs to be taught, not how). =Smidge=
So swapping a battery mid-race would be "a close equivalent to juggling a live bomb" but for nearly two decades it was acceptable to fling around a massive fuel hose?
Not to mention what those NASCAR guys do, carrying a giant jug and often spilling it everywhere.
Pretty sure that if the battery is safe to be inside the car at all, it's safe enough to be replaced in the pits. Why they haven't gone with this strategy I don't really know... they claim it's for safety but I've never seen any elaboration on that point. =Smidge=
You sound bitter and frustrated. For example, it doesn't matter one iota what the head of FIA is up to...
As to attendance figures, I had to Google that because I don't really follow F1 as a sport. I've seen speculation on everything from prohibitive costs for tickets to better television/internet access to simply fewer people being interested, but the only people who say it's because of the "lack of noise" are a handful of seemingly bitter dipshits like yourself who always throw in non sequitur arguments like you did. Makes me think that the "noise hypothesis" isn't particularly powerful.
Lastly, it seems attendance has been dwindling for several years now - so it doesn't seem likely that only the most recent change is the cause. =Smidge=
F1 has had energy recovery (aka "hybrid") drivetrains for a few years now. The big difference is they've basically doubled the size and capacity, and added a turbine to the exhaust to recover energy from that instead of just regenerative brakes.
I can't say I'm much of a racing fan but the technology is quite interesting in and of itself. =Smidge=
Sounds like you've got a much higher essential demand than what I figured on - desalinization?
Sorry for the delayed reply but I was re-running the numbers:)
When I was doing the calcs originally, I was really only interested in staving off power outages like we had with Sandy, which was about two weeks worth... not being completely off-grid. So focusing on hurricane season as a baseline, a 7kW system with 6kWh of storage would provide essentially unlimited off-grid capability from April through December *if* I managed my power consumption to essentials with just a little bit of creature comfort.
The winter months, however, result in a deep, DEEP deficit. I'd need 10kW of PV with 80 kWh of storage to be completely off-grid based on PVWatts data (with no power management). Of course, that's still relying only on Solar, and being completely off-grid was never the intention.
I don't pertain my own home is a good proxy for a regional or national grid, though;) =Smidge=
Except you can not exceed the solar power that hits the surface of the planet from the sun.
...which is a hell of a lot of energy. Collectively it's several orders of magnitude more than we as a species could ever reasonably harness, let alone use.
You could, for example, generate more kWh of electricity by putting 15% nominal efficiency PV systems on the roofs of ONLY single-family homes in the US, based on 2010 census data (67% of 130 million residences being single-family homes, with an average size of 2,400 sq.ft.).
In other words, we could hypothetically generate more than 100% of the electricity we need in 7800 square miles - about 5 Rhode Islands. That's at 15% nominal efficiency, assuming only 4 hours per day of operation. In other words, an extremely conservative value.
What resources did you use to model these inputs? PVWatts I can understand for solar, but I'm not aware of any similar tools for wind and micro-hydro. Genuinely interested in what your data sources were.
Not that I'm yet convinced your model is applicable to a regional or national scale grid. Did you account for geographical diversity? Availability of these resources spread out over maybe 200-300 mile radius?
Also, peak demand of 5kW for 3 hours? My home has all electric appliances and I rarely, if ever, hit that... including the 3kW clothes dryer. This observation is neither here nor there, but that just strikes me as a high value.
To put things into perspective, I've been collecting minute-by-minute data for my own home's electrical usage (Got one of these things) and based on incomplete-at-the-time data it was looking like I could get away completely off-grid with a 6-7kW PV system and about 6kWH of storage. Less if I was smarter about how and when I used that power. Maybe your data doesn't have good enough resolution to really optimize the system. =Smidge=
1. Solar Thermal plants are built in the desert because that's where they have the most ideal operating conditions. The fact that there are more birds in forests than deserts is completely irrelevant because they don't build concentrating solar plants in forests.
2. We would expect the casualties to scale roughly with the number of plants, so is you had 1,000 such plants, that would be 1,000x the casualties. Still a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of birds killed by feral cats every year in North America.
3. You are right, of course, however you have to consider a cost-benefit as well. The cost of preventing bird deaths from not building concentrating solar plants (both monetarily and environmentally) versus, say, the cost of preventing bird deaths by doing something about the cat population. If saving the birds is the priority, then perhaps your dollar would be better spent on programs to reduce feral cat populations than preventing solar thermal plants from being built.
A single home isn't a very good proxy for a regional or even national scale grid.
With your house example, the only options are solar and generator. In reality you would have more than these two options. For example, add wind to the mix. You can argue that it's not 100% but it will cover a lot of run time at night, saving you battery capacity and reducing the required over-sizing of your PV system. Perhaps instead of 400% oversizing on PV, you only need 200% PV+Wind oversize.
Now add in something else... biogas perhaps. That covers you a little bit more and you can again reduce your oversizing.
Now add geothermal, hydro, solar-thermal (which works at night), and you start to easily fill in the gaps.
The US had 1,153 billion watts of generating capacity as of 2011 (Nameplate ratings, spreadsheet) and used ~3,797 billion kilowatthours that year. Naively we can say that if all our powerplants ran at 100% nameplate capacity, we could generate an entire year's worth of electrical energy in just about 3300 hours, or about 4 months... giving us a roughly 300% oversize on our electrical generating capacity *now*.
The key, of course, is that none of those plants are operating 24/7/365, and rarely are any of them operating at peak capacity. =Smidge=
I'd also point out that Germany's accelerated decommissioning of nuclear power plants (all shutdown in 8 years) has a lot more to do with the coal plants than the increase in renewables.
Doesn't make sense: Coal power has actually decreased since 2000 when it was first decided that Germany should ween themselves off of Nuclear power, and the slight increase in coal power in the past two years is only a fraction of retired nuclear capacity, both in total and as a percent of total generation.
Germany's renewable energy push is what's filling that gap. If it wasn't for the nuclear phase-out, they'd probably have lost a third of their coal plants instead. =Smidge=
That one project comes nowhere near the total scope of the upgrades planned an in progress. Despite the delays, work is in fact continuing even per your own article.
Germany is actually a net exporter - Their total gross production (Bruttoerzeugung insgesamt) for 2013 was 629.0 TWh, while their total consumption (Brutto-Inlandsstromverbrauch) was 596.0 TWh for that same year... resulting in a net import of -33 TWh, aka an export. Of course, these are year averages and they almost certainly import during some times of the year, and when they do most of it comes from France, Denmark, Sweden and Czech Republic.
I also do think it's somewhat unfair to use numbers all the way back to 1990. If we are interested in the impact of renewables, then it would be more appropriate to go back to 2001 at the earliest, when the Renewables Energy Act went into effect. That's when they started getting serious about it.
We can instead consider 1990-2000 as a baseline decade to compare the 2001-2013 decade to, in terms of growth by fuel type.
In the 1990-2000 decade, coal decreased and was supplanted by nuclear and natural gas. In the 2001-2013 numbers, total coal decreases slightly overall but nuclear drops considerably post-Fukushima. Natural gas ramped up to nearly double mid-decade but dropped back down to about 20% higher than it was in 2001. The resulting gaps between these decreased outputs and increased demand is filled entirely by renewables which nearly quadrupled in capacity to become the second largest energy source in the country, just a hair's width (15 TWh) behind soft coal. =Smidge=
Slashdot Mirror
Well it's a shame then the FCC rules under discussion would have nothing whatsoever to do with that,.
Except this is exactly what it's about, and it's something that Comcast has already been caught doing. Allowing "fast lanes" would just be a way for them to legitimize the practice of stymieing competing services and/or extorting money from content providers.
=Smidge=
This doesn't address what is the true threat: It's not about ISPs choking bandwidth to individual consumers, it's about ISPs choking bandwidth to their competitors.
For example, Comcast offers, internet, streaming video, cable television and telephone services.
If I, as a third party, want to offer telephone services that use broadband internet (VoIP), Comcast will be able to make my access to their consumers so crap that I can't compete with their telephone service. The only way around that would be to pay them for "fast lane" access which will also ruin my ability to compete as it cuts deeply into my budget.
The end user can have all the bandwidth the infrastructure can provide, and it won't mean a damn thing because my traffic, specifically, will be choked by the monopoly ISP guarding the gates.
=Smidge=
Free kinetic energy? Where?
In the wind. There is no capital cost for making the wind blow.
There's a capital cost for building and maintaining the equipment required to tap that energy, but the energy itself is free once you've covered that initial cost.
Also, the Model S is not their "entry level" vehicle. That vehicle is still under development. Tesla aimed to cover the high cost of relatively low volume early production vehicles by producing their high end sport offering (Roadster) first, then their luxury offering (Model S). Part of the reason the gigafactory is such a big deal is it would help lower the cost of the battery packs, reducing the price of future vehicles.
=Smidge=
Basically you're saying that just because the presence of a knife in someone's chest correlates with their death, is no reason to assume causation between these two things.
After all, plenty of people have been stabbed in the chest and lived, and there are no witnesses, so even though the coroner has ruled out every other possible cause of death we can't say for sure the knife is the problem.
To bring it back: There have not yet been any proposed totally-natural mechanisms that account for the current warming trends we see. There are natural mechanisms of course, but none of them add up to what is being observed. The only explanation is that human activity is indeed significantly impacting the global climate. This should not be terribly hard to believe, considering the damage we do almost routinely; Lifeless sea floor in the gulf of Mexico, dozens if not hundreds of once flourishing species now extinct, entire mountains cut down, entire forests leveled, ect.
=Smidge=
Still not burning "record amounts" of brown coal.
=Smidge=
Except that they aren't burning "record amounts" of brown coal, and total coal burning is down quite significantly.
http://www.ag-energiebilanzen.... (PDF)
=Smidge=
As an astronaut, I wonder which would appeal to me more? The "Exciting Choice" or the "Safe Choice?"
Depends... is your surname "Kerman" ?
=Smidge=
The requirements are standard. The actual manner of teaching is not. Education standards are about what to teach, not how to teach.
You might find recommendations on how to teach, but they are not enforced as requirements. Find me an example of enforced methods of teaching, rather than curricula (which is just a laundry list of what needs to be taught, not how).
=Smidge=
"...but is there a way to improve on what we face now?"
Sure there is. If you want to stymie this sort fo thing in the future, all you have to do is stop equipping foreign forces with US hardware.
If you're not selling/giving the hardware to non-US forces, it will be very difficult for non-US forces to get a hold of it.
Pretty simple, though that might cut into some weapon manufacturer's profits so it's probably not tenable.
=Smidge=
So swapping a battery mid-race would be "a close equivalent to juggling a live bomb" but for nearly two decades it was acceptable to fling around a massive fuel hose?
Not to mention what those NASCAR guys do, carrying a giant jug and often spilling it everywhere.
Pretty sure that if the battery is safe to be inside the car at all, it's safe enough to be replaced in the pits. Why they haven't gone with this strategy I don't really know... they claim it's for safety but I've never seen any elaboration on that point.
=Smidge=
You sound bitter and frustrated. For example, it doesn't matter one iota what the head of FIA is up to...
As to attendance figures, I had to Google that because I don't really follow F1 as a sport. I've seen speculation on everything from prohibitive costs for tickets to better television/internet access to simply fewer people being interested, but the only people who say it's because of the "lack of noise" are a handful of seemingly bitter dipshits like yourself who always throw in non sequitur arguments like you did. Makes me think that the "noise hypothesis" isn't particularly powerful.
Lastly, it seems attendance has been dwindling for several years now - so it doesn't seem likely that only the most recent change is the cause.
=Smidge=
F1 has had energy recovery (aka "hybrid") drivetrains for a few years now. The big difference is they've basically doubled the size and capacity, and added a turbine to the exhaust to recover energy from that instead of just regenerative brakes.
I can't say I'm much of a racing fan but the technology is quite interesting in and of itself.
=Smidge=
You are in a maze of twisty little subway lines, all different.
What happens if you try shouting "xyzzy" ? Or I suppose you'd need to translate it into Japanese first...
=Smidge=
Seriously, they charge an arm and a leg for prosthetic limbs!
=Smidge=
Sounds like you've got a much higher essential demand than what I figured on - desalinization?
Sorry for the delayed reply but I was re-running the numbers :)
When I was doing the calcs originally, I was really only interested in staving off power outages like we had with Sandy, which was about two weeks worth... not being completely off-grid. So focusing on hurricane season as a baseline, a 7kW system with 6kWh of storage would provide essentially unlimited off-grid capability from April through December *if* I managed my power consumption to essentials with just a little bit of creature comfort.
The winter months, however, result in a deep, DEEP deficit. I'd need 10kW of PV with 80 kWh of storage to be completely off-grid based on PVWatts data (with no power management). Of course, that's still relying only on Solar, and being completely off-grid was never the intention.
I don't pertain my own home is a good proxy for a regional or national grid, though ;)
=Smidge=
Except you can not exceed the solar power that hits the surface of the planet from the sun.
...which is a hell of a lot of energy. Collectively it's several orders of magnitude more than we as a species could ever reasonably harness, let alone use.
You could, for example, generate more kWh of electricity by putting 15% nominal efficiency PV systems on the roofs of ONLY single-family homes in the US, based on 2010 census data (67% of 130 million residences being single-family homes, with an average size of 2,400 sq.ft.).
In other words, we could hypothetically generate more than 100% of the electricity we need in 7800 square miles - about 5 Rhode Islands. That's at 15% nominal efficiency, assuming only 4 hours per day of operation. In other words, an extremely conservative value.
Just putting things into perspective.
=Smidge=
What resources did you use to model these inputs? PVWatts I can understand for solar, but I'm not aware of any similar tools for wind and micro-hydro. Genuinely interested in what your data sources were.
Not that I'm yet convinced your model is applicable to a regional or national scale grid. Did you account for geographical diversity? Availability of these resources spread out over maybe 200-300 mile radius?
Also, peak demand of 5kW for 3 hours? My home has all electric appliances and I rarely, if ever, hit that... including the 3kW clothes dryer. This observation is neither here nor there, but that just strikes me as a high value.
To put things into perspective, I've been collecting minute-by-minute data for my own home's electrical usage (Got one of these things) and based on incomplete-at-the-time data it was looking like I could get away completely off-grid with a 6-7kW PV system and about 6kWH of storage. Less if I was smarter about how and when I used that power. Maybe your data doesn't have good enough resolution to really optimize the system.
=Smidge=
1. Solar Thermal plants are built in the desert because that's where they have the most ideal operating conditions. The fact that there are more birds in forests than deserts is completely irrelevant because they don't build concentrating solar plants in forests.
2. We would expect the casualties to scale roughly with the number of plants, so is you had 1,000 such plants, that would be 1,000x the casualties. Still a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of birds killed by feral cats every year in North America.
3. You are right, of course, however you have to consider a cost-benefit as well. The cost of preventing bird deaths from not building concentrating solar plants (both monetarily and environmentally) versus, say, the cost of preventing bird deaths by doing something about the cat population. If saving the birds is the priority, then perhaps your dollar would be better spent on programs to reduce feral cat populations than preventing solar thermal plants from being built.
=Smidge=
A single home isn't a very good proxy for a regional or even national scale grid.
With your house example, the only options are solar and generator. In reality you would have more than these two options. For example, add wind to the mix. You can argue that it's not 100% but it will cover a lot of run time at night, saving you battery capacity and reducing the required over-sizing of your PV system. Perhaps instead of 400% oversizing on PV, you only need 200% PV+Wind oversize.
Now add in something else... biogas perhaps. That covers you a little bit more and you can again reduce your oversizing.
Now add geothermal, hydro, solar-thermal (which works at night), and you start to easily fill in the gaps.
The US had 1,153 billion watts of generating capacity as of 2011 (Nameplate ratings, spreadsheet) and used ~3,797 billion kilowatthours that year. Naively we can say that if all our powerplants ran at 100% nameplate capacity, we could generate an entire year's worth of electrical energy in just about 3300 hours, or about 4 months... giving us a roughly 300% oversize on our electrical generating capacity *now*.
The key, of course, is that none of those plants are operating 24/7/365, and rarely are any of them operating at peak capacity.
=Smidge=
I'd also point out that Germany's accelerated decommissioning of nuclear power plants (all shutdown in 8 years) has a lot more to do with the coal plants than the increase in renewables.
Doesn't make sense: Coal power has actually decreased since 2000 when it was first decided that Germany should ween themselves off of Nuclear power, and the slight increase in coal power in the past two years is only a fraction of retired nuclear capacity, both in total and as a percent of total generation.
Germany's renewable energy push is what's filling that gap. If it wasn't for the nuclear phase-out, they'd probably have lost a third of their coal plants instead.
=Smidge=
"A short distance" often being across national boarders.
=Smidge=
Except that you are. My bad for not scrolling down a bit more:
"My point is that hydro is essentially distributed solar power"
You are adding nothing but smart-ass pedantry to this topic. Fuck off.
=Smidge=
That one project comes nowhere near the total scope of the upgrades planned an in progress. Despite the delays, work is in fact continuing even per your own article.
For a glimpse at the larger picture, consider:
http://energy.gov/oe/downloads...
Google search indeed, Mr. Coward.
=Smidge=
Germany is actually a net exporter - Their total gross production (Bruttoerzeugung insgesamt) for 2013 was 629.0 TWh, while their total consumption (Brutto-Inlandsstromverbrauch) was 596.0 TWh for that same year... resulting in a net import of -33 TWh, aka an export. Of course, these are year averages and they almost certainly import during some times of the year, and when they do most of it comes from France, Denmark, Sweden and Czech Republic.
I also do think it's somewhat unfair to use numbers all the way back to 1990. If we are interested in the impact of renewables, then it would be more appropriate to go back to 2001 at the earliest, when the Renewables Energy Act went into effect. That's when they started getting serious about it.
We can instead consider 1990-2000 as a baseline decade to compare the 2001-2013 decade to, in terms of growth by fuel type.
In the 1990-2000 decade, coal decreased and was supplanted by nuclear and natural gas. In the 2001-2013 numbers, total coal decreases slightly overall but nuclear drops considerably post-Fukushima. Natural gas ramped up to nearly double mid-decade but dropped back down to about 20% higher than it was in 2001. The resulting gaps between these decreased outputs and increased demand is filled entirely by renewables which nearly quadrupled in capacity to become the second largest energy source in the country, just a hair's width (15 TWh) behind soft coal.
=Smidge=
Are you going to be one of those assholes who claims all energy is nuclear energy, because the sun uses nuclear reactions?
If so, please remove yourself from the conversation.
=Smidge=