Nope, disagree, the old way with paper ballots means anyone can look at the ballots and count them, using any computerized system, closed source, open source, whatever, means you need to be an extremely well versed programmer with years of experience to even start to make sense out of the code and the vote tally at the end of the day. It fails the publicly auditable and verifiable test immediately because of that. We don't need computerized voting at all. We could stand a 24 hour voting cycle though, and simplified ballots, even if it meant multiple election days instead of the kitchen sink on one ballot. And a "none of the listed" option to "vote" for, to help eliminate the "lesser of two evils" phenomenon we all get to enjoy.
If the 18,000 familes did a bulk group buy, so they could get wholesale prices, they should be able to each get a single solar panel, a storage battery and some DC lighting for not that much. And for that matter you can build wind chargers that work, there's plans out there for that. In ye olden hippy days, we just had two vehicle batteries and a backup light from the junkyard for "alternative energy" for in the cabins/hovels lighting. Just swapped the batteries out in the vehicle before they got too run down to start it again. Of course, that means you need fuel, and a vehicle, and I imagine pickups and tractors might be useful for them, so maybe they would need to develop biofuels onsite. Agave cactus can make some good fuel, if you can resist drinking what you make. Maybe there are some more desert crops they can grow for that.
Anyway, the point is, there are ways around being able to both live remotely and also have a modicum of normal technology. As to getting internet access out there, there really isn't any option right now except to go to some wireless tech,not the way they were doing it but some other way, probably microwave relays going to...wildcard, depends on where the families are. Wifi-N to motorola canopy to I have no clue. Doing wired or fiber seems remotely unpossible given the distances though. Heck, I know what they are going through even here in a transition area that is half suburb and half rural, being at the end of the powerpoles/phone string, we won't ever get decent consistent clean grid power (goes down 1-3 times a week, especially in the summer, mostly short time though, but it is *dirty* power all the time) nor any sort of DSL (dialup is it, but it works OK enough), even though this is a two lane blacktop and quite literally only 15 minutes to a walmart or office depot or all the other stores in town. You have to look at the developing world to see how they are doing it, and that is much more governmental involvement in pushing wireless tech and getting it out there, leapfrogging as you said last generation wired tech for both power and data transfer. In the US it seems to be hampered and locked down to a few huge for profit companies. No easy answer there other than I have the opinion that the public spectrum is a big fat lie and mostly not public and they won't let the regular public really do some interesting things, but they will let a few billion dollar companies-we'll call them the normal telco cartel- do interesting things.
Governments of the world should all chip in some big bux, hand them guys some billions, and open source all their patents, just to help save the global economy and the climate. I think this is one of those deals we shouldn't wait on, 50 cent a watt solar PV that can be printed on demand would be the most serious energy game changer since...dunno, fire?
50 years ago was 1958. Interestingly enough., that was the year the first solar panels went to space. Today, you can sit right there in your chair, do some googling, whip out your credit card and have dandy solar panels shipped right to your house at less than NASA cost plus pricing levels. That's pretty significant. A few years previous to that, some of the first ones were running $1,785 dollars per watt, and those are unadjusted dollars. Today you can look for deals and get them at around 5 bucks a watt. Not too shabby. And nanosolar started shipping this year, albeit all of it to Germany where demand is higher and they will pay a bit more now, because they know conventional will be going up fast later, so they did a whole nation push for it starting some years ago. That and it is cleaner.
I bought mine at actually a little under 5 bucks a watt some years ago. silicon demand has been going more for throw away gadgets and so on in the meantime, but several new fabs go online this year and next year so prices will be dropping again.
Use Seamonkey. You can download and use just the browser if you want to (look around their downloads). It works like you want it, type one letter, gives you the top listings you visited that start with that letter. Type one more letter, it matches and does the same, and so on. Plus, you have one big url bar, not two small ones.
Why FF went to two addy bars is beyond me, less space than anyone else, hides the full urls without hoop jumping meaning checking for a phishing scam is harder. Lame. One big addy bar, two small buttons, search or go, works just fine.
A flat carbon tax is still a stick approach, I propose a full carrot approach, don't tax, give full tax *credits* for those new ways of doing things you want to promote. We have some partial credits now, but it isn't enough, then need to be full, and carryover for some years if we want to see widespread adoption of alternative cleaner energy sources and better cars, etc.
You nailed it exactly. You can get tremendous price breaks on rural land by being one mile from the telephone/electric poles. That price difference pays for (or severely drops) the solar install by eliminating the expense of paying to put the poles in. It's the same money you are spending, but it goes to something YOU own and not bigelectrico, inc.. Most places they charge you per pole and it is a lot. It also can help keep your local property tax lower, a perpetual cost benefit. And solar with batteries means you have a whole house UPS system, plus it is much cleaner power than what the grid usually provides. "Peace of mind" is an intangible but worthwhile consideration. If the grid was all that reliable, why do data centers have huge UPSs and generators? It just depends on what people want, me, I want the independence and the reliability of home made power. Ask folks what it might have been worth who went through week long outages and lost their plumbing from freezing and had no heat and lost their food, etc what that peace of mind might be worth, or opposite,a heat wave and "rolling blackouts" or dirty power brownouts because the grid can't cut it. We were living previously on an estate that had whole house solar, we had an ice storm, near a week the area was without power, we didn't miss a thing, everything just kept on working as normal. Dang cool beans and stuff. I didn't even realize the local grid was down until at night and I saw no lights all around, very few. we were up a mountain and I was used to seeing streetlights and houselights, etc in the distance and it was near total blackout.
Solar roofing panels have been out for a long time now, you can buy them already from several sources, since years ago, google "integrated solar roofing panels" or "BIPV". Now, there are "near" roofing solutions called solar shingles, those only replace..the shingles.. but you can get the full roof things as well. It guess it depends on how far down you want to call the roof. On a normal stick frame, if you want to call from the entire truss on up the roof, no, they don't exist, but on top of that, yes, they do exist.
Variable cylinder engines. They made some in the past (cadillac that I remember but probably others) that worked but still sucked, but the tech is better now. They completely shut off cylinders on the highway once you are rolling good.
good link and info. I have one, low tech, when I was up in Maine I saw a lot of the farms who had hay bank their houses in the winter right up the walls with bales and bales. I mean a lot of them. In the spring it turns into garden mulch. On the one dairy I worked on, the farmer there used over 300 bales a winter on his house (small bales, this was in the years before they had large custom bales). Drop in the bucket to what we hayed though, over 10,000 per cutting, three times a season. Cows are some hungry guys! That farm was neat, designed for cold weather, had seven buildings total all enclosed with enclosed walkways so you didn't have to go outside as much in the winter, the house, a woodshed (15 cords inside!!), a carpentry shop, machine shop, bulk tank barn, free stall/milking parlor barn, then the bunker barn for silage feeding. There were also some odd buildings built off that you could access, a chicken coop for eggs, a big sort of combo smokehouse and pantry, etc. In *real* extreme nasty weather you only had to go outside in the winter to take the bobcat to the silage pile and bring in feed daily, and once a week go to the separate hugemongous haybarn and bring in a big wagon load of bales. That was really a nice farm, he ran around 120 or so head, with around 100 milking at any time.
Sorry I didn't write an entire technical construction book in my reply, I was under the impression this is just casual conversation. If you want one of many solutions to the condensation problem, here's one, don't build stick frame in the first place, do solid thick walls, cordwood masonry is sorta nice and good looking. Want another, it is called active versus passive venting and dehumdifiers, real air "conditioning" beyond just heating and cooling, with the superinsulated like I said you have planned air in AND out, and there's ways to go about it. Go partial earth bermed, whatever. I noticed the wiki link had some additional links, it is enough to get folks started if they feel like it.
Like I said, I am out of the biz, not trying to sell folks anything, just provided a bit of a lead and a wiki link so they can go explore further, to see what might could work for them. There is no one size fits all energy solution, situations are different, budgets are different, needs are different, but there are a variety of steps people can take from ten bucks and one hour labor on up to help with the bills. Or, they can hang around and do nothing but kvetch about stuff. Their call, and yours.
We did what I would call just a mild retrofit for this lady at her house, complete with before and after infrared imagery. So some days go by after we are finished, she calls up "You broke my air conditioner!!" "What?? sez I" "It's not coming on!" "Is your house still cool, ma'am?" "Well....yes...." "It's working, you got what you contracted for"
Yep, that's it, it is such a profound change that you really can't get it across to folks until they have seen it working. Here's another one I worked on, a home in New England, another retrofit, this one was a little more than the other and we put extra non load bearing walls on the inside and blew in some loose insulation, then some other stuff like resizing the ridiculously large and leaky windows.. where in January and February the heat barely if ever turned on, the guy just skipped the trasditional heat (oil and backup electric resistance) almost entirely and built one small wimpy little mostly ambience fire in a nice woodstove in the evening. Piped in air to the woodstove, none of that just random sucking in air from cracks in the house. Winter fuel bills from lotsa hundreds to a dozen bucks a month or something ridiculous like that. People just don't think it is possible, or think it will quadruple the price of their house or something, or they will be forced to wear birkenstocks and eat only granola three meals a day and have to join the secret club. Nuts. Everything has to always be "more studies needed, years from now...hey look, shiny, hydrogen fusion fuel cells are coming" yada yada. And what is funny is..the future got here, it is the new century, that last big go around with all the bad energy news back in the 70s and 80s popped out some nice rad stuff that was reasonable and actually worked, they came up with some solutions to this or that energy problem, but few if any people are using them. They believe in the exxon and detroit and wallstreet commodities speculators axis of maximum energy profits and propoganda bureau press releases when it comes to possible fuel efficiency and reliability of cars, and heating and cooling their houses, along with getting their science from like rush limbaugh shows. Nuts. Stuff like that.
Doesn't bother me that much other than we are sure globally wasting a ton of energy when there is no outright need for it right now, and we sure have a lot more pollution than we should have right now, we sure are getting closer to more major dangerous freekin resource wars than we need to right now, and I still have a scosh of feelings for my fellow actual real world joe sixpack workers when it comes to being able to afford to live today. The lifestyle bloat and ridicule crowd, nope, they can go bankrupt for all I care. Let them burn expensive furniture in their fireplaces, who cares.
Intellectually, a lot of folks may read the words but they still won't get it..hmm..kinda sorta like folks may have maybe heard something about "linux" when it comes to operating systems but just can't believe something free and cheap can replace the hundreds of dollars of software perpetual vendor lockin model with the associated aggravation with what the current computer "industry standard" is. They go "well, gee, why isn't everyone doing that if it is so good?" Nuts. Always wait for this "they" guy to "do it". Same with a good quality solar PV installation, they think that if you don't go immediately for an entire house solution, that they can't go to any solar, not realizing you can do *one* circuit at a time if you want to. I've seen that a lot, "I can't afford it, it is 10-60 grand!". Well, ya, it is, depending on what you want and how much of the work you want to do yourself, which could be like most of it, but nothing stopping people from using this high tech device called a subpanel and just doing one or two important circuits in the house either, then maybe 5 years later do some more, etc. But it falls under the "either/or" deal for them so they just dismiss it entirely, wait again another coupla deca
Actually, no, this is incorrect by most of the examples out there (it is more common in the northern Scandinavian nations), the houses not only stay warmer, they stay loads cleaner than most houses because of the planned air in and out plus the good filter systems, the air is a lot cleaner and your mold and dust and pollen/allergies, etc problems drop. Plus, the house is a lot quieter, another advantage. Being more sanely climate controlled, it doesn't suffer as much of the expansion you mention, because you don't get the huge temp swings, and usually it is just built better. Really, been there, done that, experienced it, was in that biz for awhile before they dropped all the nice tax credits to encourage people to go that way, and conventional energy prices dropped so people just gave up on it, same as they did with good mileage cars and so on. (all of that was working and I think it scared the big energy guys too much, just an opinion). We lost serious ground since the mid 80s bad when it comes to conservation and alternative energies, and this was back when we really could have afforded it better.
People just lost interest and switched back to energy hog cars and larger and ever more energy hog houses and other buildings, thinking cheap energy would be here forever and a day and no worries. I just removed myself from the business when that happened, and said heck with it because most folks just didn't give a crap and were going to wait until they got "saved" by big oil or government or something if there ever was a crisis again. Now it is decades later and they are all acting so surprised and going "well, golly gee, stuff sure got expensive all of a sudden! How did that happen?? When are they going to do something about it??". Anyone but themselves, always this vague "they" guy is going to "do something" for them. Uh huh.
Old joke, fits. An around the bend extreme fundy is sitting on his roof in a flood praying as hard as possible. Rescue boat comes by, dude yells, "hop in!" "Nope, waiting for the FSM to save me!" "OK, see ya". Helicopter comes by "Climb in the bucket, we'll pull you to safety!" "Nope, waiting for the FSM to save me!". The idiot finally drowns, comes before the FSM and man he gets cussed out, "You bonehead, sent ya a boat and a helicopter, what the *(*&^ did you want??"
Well, duh, "they" aren't going to even be doing that, there are no energy rescue boats or helicopters coming, it doesn't work that way and never will. If you are in the lack of affordable energy flood you are going to have to be a bit more proactive about things or you will drown. "They" are never are going to save you, it is not their job, "they's" job is to extract as much cash from your wallet as they possibly can. And that is it, they are not interested in making you a deal. "They" have absolutely and positively zero interest in getting you energy independent or at least a lot less dependent from their monthly bill for your utilities or at the gas pump for your transportation needs. None. "They" are not going to be doing that, they exist with vendor lockin, that is their business model, cartel and monopoly price fixing and vendor lockin.. "They" must keep you tied to their monthly utility bill and filler-up idea, else they stop rolling in the dough, so they just ain't gonna be doing that anytime soon. To believe otherwise is believing in some fairy tale.
As to pricing, even at todays costs, more and beter insulation and a few more better engineering techniques are still the best ROI out there when it comes to energy. Nothing else comes close, fastest payback and they it is "profit" in a way, so no, I really don't see that as expensive looking at a multi year big "investment" in a home. You are going to shel the money out, want to make your home better, or feed the meter? I love solar PV and I tell folks to do the insulation first. I like better mileage cars but I would tell people to seal the cracks around their windows and doors first if they want to s
Few US homes, even new ones, reach superinsulation levels of construction. for one, look at the walls, they just aren't thick enough, don't have enough space for all the insulation needed. You'll need at least, raw minimum, six-nine inches in the walls and at least a foot in the ceilings, something like that. I used to always say R55 all around, that's more or less what we used to shoot for, the linked article says now they call it R40 walls and R60 ceiling, close enough. We don't have exact legally defined codes to qualify it yet (AFAIK), but it isn't 2.5 inches that fits inside of a normal stud wall like is more common. In order to achieve really good levels of insulation you have to have planned air in and planned air out, this is actual ducting and fans and air filters, because all cracks are sealed, and there are a lot of them, and it is done in stages as the different layers of the house are built. You need an active heat exchanger for this planned air intake and exhaust. Your windows are multipane and gas filled and are not cheap, and should be smallish, and usually you would have an insulated tight fitting interior cover for the windows for real cold or hot spells. And so on. A house that achieves really good superinsulation levels can get by most of the time without much in the way of planned heating, even in the winter, as just heat from the humans in there, cooking, running lights and appliances, hot water use, etc is usually sufficient to maintain a decent enough comfort level. Anyway, there's some good engineering to it, I've worked on some, it really does work, the drop in use of air conditioning and heating is just *phenomenal*, strikingly so, I mean they just don't come on that much, you should be able to go a day or days with no activation where before your heating or cooling might be coming on several times a day, that's the difference.. Here is the wikipedia writeup on it, Superinsulation.
Very good point, surfing today takes a bit more power than ten years ago for sure. That's why I wanted to upgrade my backup machine, that PB1400m that is a 1997 model, just not enough processor or RAM to be of much use for much longer. Thankfully you can still get an iCab browser for it that works pretty fair. Thanks for the link to that new Dell review! Getting closer! I'm still going to hold out a bit longer though, joe cheap here, heh.
Cheap is definetly part of the appeal of a small portable low specced computing device. In fact it is right up there in the article summary ->""Lately it's hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks -- the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC." We had small and light before, but they were expensive. The asus was an immediate hit because the original one was *loads* cheaper than anything else out there, and the OLPC XO project suffered terminal extreme dumbness and couldn't get it into gear to really hit a hundred bucks and get them out onto the market. Asus changed the cheap part of the equation, but then they got weird about it and they started moving away from the smaller part of the equation, and started bumping the price back up and making them bigger and now they are back to getting medium expensive again and are in the same price range as low end normal laptops. Yes, right now people who are buying them want that ultra lightness, but a lot more people would be buying something similar as the price goes down, and they can stay small and low specced. There's a huge market for small AND cheap, not just one or the other. One of those big companies is going to grok this and hit the market with it. Hmm, bad car analogy time! Sport! Tata motors grokked that with cars and came out with their 2500 dollar nano car. They will sell zillions of them because around the planet none of the other car companies grokked that! they were going the opposite direction, bigger, more bloat, worsening mileage, getting way too expensive. Good for some I guess, but not for everyone. Cheap is a prime criteria for a few billion people. At 25 grand, they would never get to have a new car, at 2.5 grand, it starts to get really affordable for a lot more people, and you make your profit in volume sales.
ya, but already at the same price or getting more than a regular 14 inch laptop I can snag at local wallyworld off the shelf, and being a regular manual laborer, a pound or three difference means absolutely nothing to me, just not that big of a deal with me when it comes down to it, I carry around more weight than that with various tools stuck in my pockets all the time, 2 lbs or 5 lbs, meh, I don't care, 50 lbs sacks of mineral are at my low end of crap I have to move by hand all the time. I was more interested in portability with the built in battery and wireless connect action and low power and low price and comes with linux pre installed. Power goes out all the time here and my backup to run off a truck battery right now is an ancient powerbook, just thinking of getting something a little newer and more powerful for when that happens. Laptop size of today or smaller, just don't care that much as I'd be sitting right on top of the screen anyway, it can be smallish. Re; the keyboards..I wonder why they don't have a full size one that just folds out? Keep the small form factor but have a keyboard twice as big once it is opened up. Flip screen, left fold out, right fold out, done, full size. Yes it would have to be some thicker, but overall that would be nice. But...anyway..first the mega XO disappointment now these things right back up to expensive again (this new one in the article I don't see a price for yet). I'll wait, no biggee, no giant need for one, except once they get to a hundred bucks I'd get three of them-one for me and two for gifting- but at three hundred and higher I want none of them, I'd get a used newer laptop or a new one on sale at Christmas.
It is headed the opposite direction, they are getting more expensive, not less, and gaining in size. When that first eeePC hit I thought "cool, pretty soon now the hundred buck blisterpack small notebook". Man, I was wrong.
Eliminating the failed prohibition model "war on some drugs" would result in being able to fire 25,000 cops as "not needed at all", as the main result of said war has been an accelerated crime rate related to black market prices and the associated violence with those huge sums of money. No telling how much savings there, but I would imagine it is in the billions. Switching to free and open source, just with governmental use on governmental machines, and especially if magically it could be retroactive back 10 years or better, would have freed up enough cash to give every person in ohio a free computer on savings over software licensing fees, said fees based completely on the "artificial scarcity" model of busy-ness as it relates to digital copies. And probably allow them to give upgrades every few years as well, using the same exact cash levels they are spending now.
Now mine is thin air and I admit it, but at least it is closer to reality than the BSA and MAFIAA "enron styled" accounting figures, and that tie in with cops and crime was just too obviously *lame*.
The ghost that walks. That idea would be closer to reality and easier to pull off because it is an anonymous but hereditary superhero position. As the older phantom slows down, his kid takes over. He also bends to obvious combat reality and packs two.45s. You still get to wear a spiffy leotard suit though, but no cape.
I don't have that modest specced machine anymore to recheck for exact seconds, but it was a Pentium Pro 200 CPU with 224 RAM, boot was just noticeably fairly zippy. It loads directly to RAM and then ejects the disk, and being small once you get it loaded it runs really fast. I never installed it to hard drive, just ran it that way from the live CD version. I haven't tried his newest release though, I think I am a few behind in checking it out, I notice he is at 1.7.2 release, I think 1.6.0 was the last I looked at it. It is mostly a distro for Latvian language, the English support is somewhat there but for full time use it would have to be remastered if you wanted "your" language to be fully supported. It just really stood out when I was playing with the minis, noticeably faster than damn small, puppy, etc and was very solidly put together as in everything worked really good as opposed to the debian based minis which at best only sort of worked OK on that machine.
Austrumi Linux, fastest by far, booting and running, of any of the mini linux distros I have tried, and will work on (not ridiculously, but modest) older hardware pretty well.
That would actually be interesting if they ever encountered tail winds and could adjust the angle of one of the panels to act as a sail, or even the canopy. Would be a nice "sleeper" bit of tech to surprise the opposition.
Slashdot Mirror
Indiana Jones and the Search for the Low Interest Rate Fixed Mortgage
Indiana Jones and the Quest for the 50 MPG Car
Indiana Jones and the Hunt for a Politician who isn't Corrupt and Stupid
Indiana Jones and the Case of the Evil Shareholder Value
Indiana Jones and the Expedition for Desktop Linux Preinstalled
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Indiana Jones and the Development of a Cheap Working Shuttle Replacement
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Starbucks
Nope, disagree, the old way with paper ballots means anyone can look at the ballots and count them, using any computerized system, closed source, open source, whatever, means you need to be an extremely well versed programmer with years of experience to even start to make sense out of the code and the vote tally at the end of the day. It fails the publicly auditable and verifiable test immediately because of that. We don't need computerized voting at all. We could stand a 24 hour voting cycle though, and simplified ballots, even if it meant multiple election days instead of the kitchen sink on one ballot. And a "none of the listed" option to "vote" for, to help eliminate the "lesser of two evils" phenomenon we all get to enjoy.
If the 18,000 familes did a bulk group buy, so they could get wholesale prices, they should be able to each get a single solar panel, a storage battery and some DC lighting for not that much. And for that matter you can build wind chargers that work, there's plans out there for that. In ye olden hippy days, we just had two vehicle batteries and a backup light from the junkyard for "alternative energy" for in the cabins/hovels lighting. Just swapped the batteries out in the vehicle before they got too run down to start it again. Of course, that means you need fuel, and a vehicle, and I imagine pickups and tractors might be useful for them, so maybe they would need to develop biofuels onsite. Agave cactus can make some good fuel, if you can resist drinking what you make. Maybe there are some more desert crops they can grow for that.
Anyway, the point is, there are ways around being able to both live remotely and also have a modicum of normal technology. As to getting internet access out there, there really isn't any option right now except to go to some wireless tech,not the way they were doing it but some other way, probably microwave relays going to...wildcard, depends on where the families are. Wifi-N to motorola canopy to I have no clue. Doing wired or fiber seems remotely unpossible given the distances though. Heck, I know what they are going through even here in a transition area that is half suburb and half rural, being at the end of the powerpoles/phone string, we won't ever get decent consistent clean grid power (goes down 1-3 times a week, especially in the summer, mostly short time though, but it is *dirty* power all the time) nor any sort of DSL (dialup is it, but it works OK enough), even though this is a two lane blacktop and quite literally only 15 minutes to a walmart or office depot or all the other stores in town. You have to look at the developing world to see how they are doing it, and that is much more governmental involvement in pushing wireless tech and getting it out there, leapfrogging as you said last generation wired tech for both power and data transfer. In the US it seems to be hampered and locked down to a few huge for profit companies. No easy answer there other than I have the opinion that the public spectrum is a big fat lie and mostly not public and they won't let the regular public really do some interesting things, but they will let a few billion dollar companies-we'll call them the normal telco cartel- do interesting things.
Governments of the world should all chip in some big bux, hand them guys some billions, and open source all their patents, just to help save the global economy and the climate. I think this is one of those deals we shouldn't wait on, 50 cent a watt solar PV that can be printed on demand would be the most serious energy game changer since...dunno, fire?
50 years ago was 1958. Interestingly enough., that was the year the first solar panels went to space. Today, you can sit right there in your chair, do some googling, whip out your credit card and have dandy solar panels shipped right to your house at less than NASA cost plus pricing levels. That's pretty significant. A few years previous to that, some of the first ones were running $1,785 dollars per watt, and those are unadjusted dollars. Today you can look for deals and get them at around 5 bucks a watt. Not too shabby. And nanosolar started shipping this year, albeit all of it to Germany where demand is higher and they will pay a bit more now, because they know conventional will be going up fast later, so they did a whole nation push for it starting some years ago. That and it is cleaner.
here's the wiki ref for the figures, Solar timeline
I bought mine at actually a little under 5 bucks a watt some years ago. silicon demand has been going more for throw away gadgets and so on in the meantime, but several new fabs go online this year and next year so prices will be dropping again.
Use Seamonkey. You can download and use just the browser if you want to (look around their downloads). It works like you want it, type one letter, gives you the top listings you visited that start with that letter. Type one more letter, it matches and does the same, and so on. Plus, you have one big url bar, not two small ones.
Why FF went to two addy bars is beyond me, less space than anyone else, hides the full urls without hoop jumping meaning checking for a phishing scam is harder. Lame. One big addy bar, two small buttons, search or go, works just fine.
A flat carbon tax is still a stick approach, I propose a full carrot approach, don't tax, give full tax *credits* for those new ways of doing things you want to promote. We have some partial credits now, but it isn't enough, then need to be full, and carryover for some years if we want to see widespread adoption of alternative cleaner energy sources and better cars, etc.
You nailed it exactly. You can get tremendous price breaks on rural land by being one mile from the telephone/electric poles. That price difference pays for (or severely drops) the solar install by eliminating the expense of paying to put the poles in. It's the same money you are spending, but it goes to something YOU own and not bigelectrico, inc.. Most places they charge you per pole and it is a lot. It also can help keep your local property tax lower, a perpetual cost benefit. And solar with batteries means you have a whole house UPS system, plus it is much cleaner power than what the grid usually provides. "Peace of mind" is an intangible but worthwhile consideration. If the grid was all that reliable, why do data centers have huge UPSs and generators? It just depends on what people want, me, I want the independence and the reliability of home made power. Ask folks what it might have been worth who went through week long outages and lost their plumbing from freezing and had no heat and lost their food, etc what that peace of mind might be worth, or opposite,a heat wave and "rolling blackouts" or dirty power brownouts because the grid can't cut it. We were living previously on an estate that had whole house solar, we had an ice storm, near a week the area was without power, we didn't miss a thing, everything just kept on working as normal. Dang cool beans and stuff. I didn't even realize the local grid was down until at night and I saw no lights all around, very few. we were up a mountain and I was used to seeing streetlights and houselights, etc in the distance and it was near total blackout.
Solar roofing panels have been out for a long time now, you can buy them already from several sources, since years ago, google "integrated solar roofing panels" or "BIPV". Now, there are "near" roofing solutions called solar shingles, those only replace..the shingles.. but you can get the full roof things as well. It guess it depends on how far down you want to call the roof. On a normal stick frame, if you want to call from the entire truss on up the roof, no, they don't exist, but on top of that, yes, they do exist.
The cap and trade scam just creates another huge middle man skimming market. Like we don't have enough of them already.
Variable cylinder engines. They made some in the past (cadillac that I remember but probably others) that worked but still sucked, but the tech is better now. They completely shut off cylinders on the highway once you are rolling good.
good link and info. I have one, low tech, when I was up in Maine I saw a lot of the farms who had hay bank their houses in the winter right up the walls with bales and bales. I mean a lot of them. In the spring it turns into garden mulch. On the one dairy I worked on, the farmer there used over 300 bales a winter on his house (small bales, this was in the years before they had large custom bales). Drop in the bucket to what we hayed though, over 10,000 per cutting, three times a season. Cows are some hungry guys! That farm was neat, designed for cold weather, had seven buildings total all enclosed with enclosed walkways so you didn't have to go outside as much in the winter, the house, a woodshed (15 cords inside!!), a carpentry shop, machine shop, bulk tank barn, free stall/milking parlor barn, then the bunker barn for silage feeding. There were also some odd buildings built off that you could access, a chicken coop for eggs, a big sort of combo smokehouse and pantry, etc. In *real* extreme nasty weather you only had to go outside in the winter to take the bobcat to the silage pile and bring in feed daily, and once a week go to the separate hugemongous haybarn and bring in a big wagon load of bales. That was really a nice farm, he ran around 120 or so head, with around 100 milking at any time.
Sorry I didn't write an entire technical construction book in my reply, I was under the impression this is just casual conversation. If you want one of many solutions to the condensation problem, here's one, don't build stick frame in the first place, do solid thick walls, cordwood masonry is sorta nice and good looking. Want another, it is called active versus passive venting and dehumdifiers, real air "conditioning" beyond just heating and cooling, with the superinsulated like I said you have planned air in AND out, and there's ways to go about it. Go partial earth bermed, whatever. I noticed the wiki link had some additional links, it is enough to get folks started if they feel like it.
Like I said, I am out of the biz, not trying to sell folks anything, just provided a bit of a lead and a wiki link so they can go explore further, to see what might could work for them. There is no one size fits all energy solution, situations are different, budgets are different, needs are different, but there are a variety of steps people can take from ten bucks and one hour labor on up to help with the bills. Or, they can hang around and do nothing but kvetch about stuff. Their call, and yours.
We did what I would call just a mild retrofit for this lady at her house, complete with before and after infrared imagery. So some days go by after we are finished, she calls up "You broke my air conditioner!!" "What?? sez I" "It's not coming on!" "Is your house still cool, ma'am?" "Well....yes...." "It's working, you got what you contracted for"
Yep, that's it, it is such a profound change that you really can't get it across to folks until they have seen it working. Here's another one I worked on, a home in New England, another retrofit, this one was a little more than the other and we put extra non load bearing walls on the inside and blew in some loose insulation, then some other stuff like resizing the ridiculously large and leaky windows.. where in January and February the heat barely if ever turned on, the guy just skipped the trasditional heat (oil and backup electric resistance) almost entirely and built one small wimpy little mostly ambience fire in a nice woodstove in the evening. Piped in air to the woodstove, none of that just random sucking in air from cracks in the house. Winter fuel bills from lotsa hundreds to a dozen bucks a month or something ridiculous like that. People just don't think it is possible, or think it will quadruple the price of their house or something, or they will be forced to wear birkenstocks and eat only granola three meals a day and have to join the secret club. Nuts. Everything has to always be "more studies needed, years from now...hey look, shiny, hydrogen fusion fuel cells are coming" yada yada. And what is funny is..the future got here, it is the new century, that last big go around with all the bad energy news back in the 70s and 80s popped out some nice rad stuff that was reasonable and actually worked, they came up with some solutions to this or that energy problem, but few if any people are using them. They believe in the exxon and detroit and wallstreet commodities speculators axis of maximum energy profits and propoganda bureau press releases when it comes to possible fuel efficiency and reliability of cars, and heating and cooling their houses, along with getting their science from like rush limbaugh shows. Nuts. Stuff like that.
Doesn't bother me that much other than we are sure globally wasting a ton of energy when there is no outright need for it right now, and we sure have a lot more pollution than we should have right now, we sure are getting closer to more major dangerous freekin resource wars than we need to right now, and I still have a scosh of feelings for my fellow actual real world joe sixpack workers when it comes to being able to afford to live today. The lifestyle bloat and ridicule crowd, nope, they can go bankrupt for all I care. Let them burn expensive furniture in their fireplaces, who cares.
Intellectually, a lot of folks may read the words but they still won't get it..hmm..kinda sorta like folks may have maybe heard something about "linux" when it comes to operating systems but just can't believe something free and cheap can replace the hundreds of dollars of software perpetual vendor lockin model with the associated aggravation with what the current computer "industry standard" is. They go "well, gee, why isn't everyone doing that if it is so good?" Nuts. Always wait for this "they" guy to "do it". Same with a good quality solar PV installation, they think that if you don't go immediately for an entire house solution, that they can't go to any solar, not realizing you can do *one* circuit at a time if you want to. I've seen that a lot, "I can't afford it, it is 10-60 grand!". Well, ya, it is, depending on what you want and how much of the work you want to do yourself, which could be like most of it, but nothing stopping people from using this high tech device called a subpanel and just doing one or two important circuits in the house either, then maybe 5 years later do some more, etc. But it falls under the "either/or" deal for them so they just dismiss it entirely, wait again another coupla deca
Actually, no, this is incorrect by most of the examples out there (it is more common in the northern Scandinavian nations), the houses not only stay warmer, they stay loads cleaner than most houses because of the planned air in and out plus the good filter systems, the air is a lot cleaner and your mold and dust and pollen/allergies, etc problems drop. Plus, the house is a lot quieter, another advantage. Being more sanely climate controlled, it doesn't suffer as much of the expansion you mention, because you don't get the huge temp swings, and usually it is just built better. Really, been there, done that, experienced it, was in that biz for awhile before they dropped all the nice tax credits to encourage people to go that way, and conventional energy prices dropped so people just gave up on it, same as they did with good mileage cars and so on. (all of that was working and I think it scared the big energy guys too much, just an opinion). We lost serious ground since the mid 80s bad when it comes to conservation and alternative energies, and this was back when we really could have afforded it better.
People just lost interest and switched back to energy hog cars and larger and ever more energy hog houses and other buildings, thinking cheap energy would be here forever and a day and no worries. I just removed myself from the business when that happened, and said heck with it because most folks just didn't give a crap and were going to wait until they got "saved" by big oil or government or something if there ever was a crisis again. Now it is decades later and they are all acting so surprised and going "well, golly gee, stuff sure got expensive all of a sudden! How did that happen?? When are they going to do something about it??". Anyone but themselves, always this vague "they" guy is going to "do something" for them. Uh huh.
Old joke, fits. An around the bend extreme fundy is sitting on his roof in a flood praying as hard as possible. Rescue boat comes by, dude yells, "hop in!" "Nope, waiting for the FSM to save me!" "OK, see ya". Helicopter comes by "Climb in the bucket, we'll pull you to safety!" "Nope, waiting for the FSM to save me!". The idiot finally drowns, comes before the FSM and man he gets cussed out, "You bonehead, sent ya a boat and a helicopter, what the *(*&^ did you want??"
Well, duh, "they" aren't going to even be doing that, there are no energy rescue boats or helicopters coming, it doesn't work that way and never will. If you are in the lack of affordable energy flood you are going to have to be a bit more proactive about things or you will drown. "They" are never are going to save you, it is not their job, "they's" job is to extract as much cash from your wallet as they possibly can. And that is it, they are not interested in making you a deal. "They" have absolutely and positively zero interest in getting you energy independent or at least a lot less dependent from their monthly bill for your utilities or at the gas pump for your transportation needs. None. "They" are not going to be doing that, they exist with vendor lockin, that is their business model, cartel and monopoly price fixing and vendor lockin.. "They" must keep you tied to their monthly utility bill and filler-up idea, else they stop rolling in the dough, so they just ain't gonna be doing that anytime soon. To believe otherwise is believing in some fairy tale.
As to pricing, even at todays costs, more and beter insulation and a few more better engineering techniques are still the best ROI out there when it comes to energy. Nothing else comes close, fastest payback and they it is "profit" in a way, so no, I really don't see that as expensive looking at a multi year big "investment" in a home. You are going to shel the money out, want to make your home better, or feed the meter? I love solar PV and I tell folks to do the insulation first. I like better mileage cars but I would tell people to seal the cracks around their windows and doors first if they want to s
Few US homes, even new ones, reach superinsulation levels of construction. for one, look at the walls, they just aren't thick enough, don't have enough space for all the insulation needed. You'll need at least, raw minimum, six-nine inches in the walls and at least a foot in the ceilings, something like that. I used to always say R55 all around, that's more or less what we used to shoot for, the linked article says now they call it R40 walls and R60 ceiling, close enough. We don't have exact legally defined codes to qualify it yet (AFAIK), but it isn't 2.5 inches that fits inside of a normal stud wall like is more common. In order to achieve really good levels of insulation you have to have planned air in and planned air out, this is actual ducting and fans and air filters, because all cracks are sealed, and there are a lot of them, and it is done in stages as the different layers of the house are built. You need an active heat exchanger for this planned air intake and exhaust. Your windows are multipane and gas filled and are not cheap, and should be smallish, and usually you would have an insulated tight fitting interior cover for the windows for real cold or hot spells. And so on. A house that achieves really good superinsulation levels can get by most of the time without much in the way of planned heating, even in the winter, as just heat from the humans in there, cooking, running lights and appliances, hot water use, etc is usually sufficient to maintain a decent enough comfort level. Anyway, there's some good engineering to it, I've worked on some, it really does work, the drop in use of air conditioning and heating is just *phenomenal*, strikingly so, I mean they just don't come on that much, you should be able to go a day or days with no activation where before your heating or cooling might be coming on several times a day, that's the difference.. Here is the wikipedia writeup on it, Superinsulation.
Very good point, surfing today takes a bit more power than ten years ago for sure. That's why I wanted to upgrade my backup machine, that PB1400m that is a 1997 model, just not enough processor or RAM to be of much use for much longer. Thankfully you can still get an iCab browser for it that works pretty fair. Thanks for the link to that new Dell review! Getting closer! I'm still going to hold out a bit longer though, joe cheap here, heh.
Cheap is definetly part of the appeal of a small portable low specced computing device. In fact it is right up there in the article summary ->""Lately it's hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks -- the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC." We had small and light before, but they were expensive. The asus was an immediate hit because the original one was *loads* cheaper than anything else out there, and the OLPC XO project suffered terminal extreme dumbness and couldn't get it into gear to really hit a hundred bucks and get them out onto the market. Asus changed the cheap part of the equation, but then they got weird about it and they started moving away from the smaller part of the equation, and started bumping the price back up and making them bigger and now they are back to getting medium expensive again and are in the same price range as low end normal laptops. Yes, right now people who are buying them want that ultra lightness, but a lot more people would be buying something similar as the price goes down, and they can stay small and low specced. There's a huge market for small AND cheap, not just one or the other. One of those big companies is going to grok this and hit the market with it. Hmm, bad car analogy time! Sport! Tata motors grokked that with cars and came out with their 2500 dollar nano car. They will sell zillions of them because around the planet none of the other car companies grokked that! they were going the opposite direction, bigger, more bloat, worsening mileage, getting way too expensive. Good for some I guess, but not for everyone. Cheap is a prime criteria for a few billion people. At 25 grand, they would never get to have a new car, at 2.5 grand, it starts to get really affordable for a lot more people, and you make your profit in volume sales.
ya, but already at the same price or getting more than a regular 14 inch laptop I can snag at local wallyworld off the shelf, and being a regular manual laborer, a pound or three difference means absolutely nothing to me, just not that big of a deal with me when it comes down to it, I carry around more weight than that with various tools stuck in my pockets all the time, 2 lbs or 5 lbs, meh, I don't care, 50 lbs sacks of mineral are at my low end of crap I have to move by hand all the time. I was more interested in portability with the built in battery and wireless connect action and low power and low price and comes with linux pre installed. Power goes out all the time here and my backup to run off a truck battery right now is an ancient powerbook, just thinking of getting something a little newer and more powerful for when that happens. Laptop size of today or smaller, just don't care that much as I'd be sitting right on top of the screen anyway, it can be smallish. Re; the keyboards..I wonder why they don't have a full size one that just folds out? Keep the small form factor but have a keyboard twice as big once it is opened up. Flip screen, left fold out, right fold out, done, full size. Yes it would have to be some thicker, but overall that would be nice. But...anyway..first the mega XO disappointment now these things right back up to expensive again (this new one in the article I don't see a price for yet). I'll wait, no biggee, no giant need for one, except once they get to a hundred bucks I'd get three of them-one for me and two for gifting- but at three hundred and higher I want none of them, I'd get a used newer laptop or a new one on sale at Christmas.
It is headed the opposite direction, they are getting more expensive, not less, and gaining in size. When that first eeePC hit I thought "cool, pretty soon now the hundred buck blisterpack small notebook". Man, I was wrong.
Eliminating the failed prohibition model "war on some drugs" would result in being able to fire 25,000 cops as "not needed at all", as the main result of said war has been an accelerated crime rate related to black market prices and the associated violence with those huge sums of money. No telling how much savings there, but I would imagine it is in the billions. Switching to free and open source, just with governmental use on governmental machines, and especially if magically it could be retroactive back 10 years or better, would have freed up enough cash to give every person in ohio a free computer on savings over software licensing fees, said fees based completely on the "artificial scarcity" model of busy-ness as it relates to digital copies. And probably allow them to give upgrades every few years as well, using the same exact cash levels they are spending now.
Now mine is thin air and I admit it, but at least it is closer to reality than the BSA and MAFIAA "enron styled" accounting figures, and that tie in with cops and crime was just too obviously *lame*.
The ghost that walks. That idea would be closer to reality and easier to pull off because it is an anonymous but hereditary superhero position. As the older phantom slows down, his kid takes over. He also bends to obvious combat reality and packs two .45s. You still get to wear a spiffy leotard suit though, but no cape.
I don't have that modest specced machine anymore to recheck for exact seconds, but it was a Pentium Pro 200 CPU with 224 RAM, boot was just noticeably fairly zippy. It loads directly to RAM and then ejects the disk, and being small once you get it loaded it runs really fast. I never installed it to hard drive, just ran it that way from the live CD version. I haven't tried his newest release though, I think I am a few behind in checking it out, I notice he is at 1.7.2 release, I think 1.6.0 was the last I looked at it. It is mostly a distro for Latvian language, the English support is somewhat there but for full time use it would have to be remastered if you wanted "your" language to be fully supported. It just really stood out when I was playing with the minis, noticeably faster than damn small, puppy, etc and was very solidly put together as in everything worked really good as opposed to the debian based minis which at best only sort of worked OK on that machine.
Austrumi Linux, fastest by far, booting and running, of any of the mini linux distros I have tried, and will work on (not ridiculously, but modest) older hardware pretty well.
That would actually be interesting if they ever encountered tail winds and could adjust the angle of one of the panels to act as a sail, or even the canopy. Would be a nice "sleeper" bit of tech to surprise the opposition.