... we're supposed to spend literally trillions of dollars to fix global warming, yet we can't see the raw data... [also] when is the source code used for the climate models going to be published...?
This reminds me of the Club of Rome's "limits to growth" predictions back in the late early '70s. The work was based on a computer model's predictions and would have had us choking to death on industrial pollution and starving for lack of food and overpopulation by the mid '80s.
Not only didn't it happen, but the computer model used (which required a lot of expensive computer time back then) is trivial for any home computer these days. It was analyzed and deconstructed by some computer types and was found to be hotwired to produce the "doom unless government takes over everything and drives us back to the stone age" result.
(Examples: Increased technology and increased industrial production was assumed to always mean increased pollution, rather than, for instance, reducing pollution while improving fuel and resource efficiency in order to produce cost reductions. Technological developments were date-controlled switches on parameters, all of which had expired by the time of the original publication.)
Jerry Pournelle did a fine article on the flaws of that model. And though the CofR is still around you don't hear much about them any more.
At the time publishing the data and models wasn't a serious risk to the study's credibility. You'd need major funding just to run the model once, let alone the many times you need to reverse-engineer it and most of the major fund sources, as with "global warming", were either governmental and just fine with a study that said they should have more power, or industrial / energy resource suppliers, easily discredited as having an axe to grind. With "global warming" you have the same situation except that the models and data are trivially run by anyone with access to them. So withholding them is necessary if they're faulty - and doubly suspicious as a result.
"Where does that leave the hobbyist researchers then?"
You have to get out of the basement, go outside and talk to people. Same as all the professional researchers...
Shove that where the sun don't shine.
If the data is being used as an input to the making of public policy that includes coercive programs applied to the general population, it's the business of the general population and they are entitled to free access to it.
Why should a person interested in using the data solely to check whether the politicians are lying to him be required to act as slave labor for an academic in the advancement of HIS career, or clear ANY other hurdle, merely to get access?
My personal experience is that the more beautiful a woman is, the less she likes to, um... procreate.
Perhaps this is because the more beautiful a woman is the more likely she is to hold out for someone with a higher income and/or social standing than yours.
One of Ted Nelson's insights that went into the planning of the Xanadu hypertext project: To replace paper publication you first have to do all the useful things it does at least as well as it did.
This is an instance of that: Once they're out of the store or library (and ignoring quibbles about DNA analysis of fingerprint material if a copy is later recovered by forensic types) dead-tree books don't leave a handy record of who read them. Reading a "book" on an electronic server does, as does purchasing and downloading a copy. (And DRM is explicitly designed to keep those copies from circulating, so additional readers have to go back to the source and leave additional tracks.)
AHA! Another argument against DRM and the DMCA: Loss of the readers' right to privacy.
Spy agencies have been doing this kind of thing for decades.... They used to have a major problem with classified material being leaked to the press by congressional staffers.
Now you know why "Deep Throat" was so cagey, vague, and just pointed Woodward and Bernstein to the right lines of investigation and insisted they hunt down other sources and confirmation, rather than letting them use him as an unnamed direct source.
With 2 layers of error-prone translation, there's bound to be many random substitutions.
But they don't necessarily hit the particular words which encode the information. Even if they do corrupt some of 'em the info is inserted redundantly and error correcting codes are straightforward and applicable.
Just because you're much closer to 102.5's radio tower doesn't mean you can't listen to 93.3.
Get close enough to 102.5's tower and it does. And the farther it is from 93.3's, the farther you have to be from 102.5's tower to hear 93.3.
Look up "receiver quieting".
Yes they're different frequencies. But the sharp tuned circuits are AFTER the first few stages. Saturate the front end and you can forget listening to the quiet stuff.
So things like this need to be in bands far enough removed from the signals of interest that the minimal tuned circuits at the front end of the receiver can reject them adequately to keep the front end's electronics working correctly.
During the remodel I ran cat-5e from the designated computer room to several other sites around that room and at least one run to every other room (including garage) in the house, plus satellite TV cable, an extra cat-5e loop for phones, and two 20A circuits (combinable for 240V) in each bedroom/potential office. (In hindsight the cat-5e should have been conduit, to future-proof by providing a path to pull whatever the next technologies turn out to be. Also: The DSL phone line might have done better in the single run of the thicker phone-company's cat-3(?) to reduce high-frequency attenuation.) That eliminates room-to-room stuff and one desk-to-desk ethernet line in the comp room / office but does nearly squat for the cable nest near the servers.
I got some plastic cable ways at Fry's. Couple inches square with snap-on cover.
I had already mounted shelf brackets on the wall behind the computer bench so I just mounted these under one row of their mounting screws and ran all the signal and low-volt power in the plastic cable ways, a few inches above the outlets. Looped the slack back-and-forth in the cable ways so the wires are all straight right-angle shot up or down the wall to the equipment. This cleaned things up a BUNCH.
Power is still going from the wall or plug strips directly to the equipment (which is mostly at one end except for the monitors). I also got some plug strips to mount below the cableway. Plan to run the power cords to that and bundle the slack with twist ties to avoid slop lying about.
IMVHO, only two things will pitch ICE's off the top of the pile: 1) a radical, cheap, viable, ready-to-go, drop-in-now replacement, or 2) time, a long time.
A plug-in hybrid with enough energy storage to recycle the power of coming down 8,500 feet of mountain for going up the next hills or across the valley, the way a normal hybrid recycles stopping from 55 MPH to start back up and cruise a bit, with a smart enough controller to keep the engine off until needed, would do it.
You'd be able to commute on stored grid power (equiv. of well under a dollar per gallon at the moment). You'd still need some power plant for long trips - which might still be a small I.C. engine or might be something else, like a fuel cell sysstem.
If we've got the hydrogen storage problem licked,... then why use an IC engine over a fuel cell? In a FC + electric motor configuration,... and probably other advantages I've overlooked.
A big one is efficiency.
In an internal combustion engine you burn the fuel energy into heat, then use the heat to run a heat engine before dumping it outside. This means you pay the "carnot cycle tax" - which means you lose something like 2/3 of your energy when operating at the relatively low temperatures a mobile IC engine must to avoid massive generation of nitrogen oxides from the air.
A fuel cell, on the other hand, can in principle convert virtually ALL of the energy of the fuel into electricity, suitable for powering a motor which can, also in principal, convert virtually all of that into controllable torque and horsepower. Real motors can easily get well over 85% (and pretty much have to in an automotive application, where two wasted horsepower is about 1,500 watts of heat). I'm not sure where real fuel cells are these days. But build and sell a few million a year into a competitive market and you can bet they'll improve. B-)
... the real idea is to prevent people who never originally saw the message from reading it down the road.
So a US corporation using this on its internal email (or even receiving email encrypted with this tool) would be in violation of the record-keeping requirements of the the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (unless they decrypted and kept an in-the-clear copy of EVERY such letter that arrived), even if they automatically archive all email they handle.
I bet a number of VPs of IT need a change of pants about now.
- Look at a daily power demand curve. Or at the hours your utility considers "peak" and "offpeak" for rates.
- Look at a daily wind curve at any good R.E. wind site (sorry, none handy right now) - and consider that available power goes up with the CUBE of the wind speed. Or consider the mechanism of "lake effect winds" - because all the exceptionally good wind sites are where there are variants on the lake effect. (For instance: Altamont Pass uses the Pacific Ocean for the "lake", California's Central Valley for the "land".)
The lake effect is a heat engine. Bodies of land heat and cool faster than bodies of water. So in the mid-to-late afternoon there's a strong wind from the water to the land, driven by air sinking over the cool water and rising over the hot land. (In the late night to early morning there's a similar, but smaller, wind the other way.)
An additional effect: Load for heating and air conditioning goes up with heat loss/gain through walls, and that increases with increasing winds. So higher winds drive higher power needs for HVAC. (That, in the form of the the sun driving both the lake effect wind and the need for air conditioning through both direct heating and hot winds, is much of the reason the peak load occurs in the late afternoon/early evening when the lake effect winds are up.)
Is wind really "free"? If we install enough wind turbines, wouldn't we slow the spin of the earth because of the collective resistance of the turbines?
Nope. Angular momentum is conserved. You'd just be modifying the distribution of it between the atmosphere and the ground's motion - and the planet is a LOT more massive than the atmosphere. (Also: In the temperate zone you'd SPEED UP the Earth by slowing the wind. But not by enough to measure.)
As for weather effects and the like: A wind farm has about as much effect as growing a forest or raising some skyscrapers. It's a drop in the bucket, atmospherically speaking.
Give me a call when they're powering the whole planet by using dirigible-borne wind turbines to slow the jet stream by a few percent. It might make a detectable difference in storm tracks.
Of course you can't do this with ALL the grid's load - just a (big) fraction of it. You have to keep your "use the grid as a battery" fraction of the load low enough that it doesn't end up trying to run the world's power plants backward.
But by the time we get enough renewable energy generation going to start retiring fuel-driven plants the grid operators will be deploying things like vanadium-redox batteries, additional pumped-water energy storage, and the like. (Unless proton-boron fusion works out at the "Mr. Fusion" scale and we all dump the grid.)
... you are using wind power when you are drawing from the wind, and grid power (using whatever technology the grid there uses to generate) when you are drawing from the grid. The "grid" isn't some sort of battery.
If you have a reliable source of power to feed the grid - say, during peak hours, which happen also to be peak for wind generation but not server load - feeding it to the grid lets the grid operators correspondingly reduce the consumption of fuel at generation plants. If you later pull some when the wind is low you cause the consumption of fuel (though perhaps cheaper fuel at off-peak times).
The net result is that your wind/server farm can have a net zero, or even negative, fuel consumption.
So though the grid isn't a battery you can use it like one and have the same effect on average resource consumption as if you had your own batteries and ran purely off the wind.
(And you can pay for the line losses and inefficiencies by feeding extra wind power to the grid, just as you'd feed extra wind power to the batteries to pay for their leakage and inefficiencies.)
Wind turbines are great and all, except for the fact they need tons of copper, aluminum, fiberglass and other resources which require a heck of a lot of energy to mine and produce.
So do fuel-burning plants (though not precisely the same amount or mix of materials). Whether the fuel is combustible or nuclear.
But the "fuel" for the wind turbine is just wind - which is free (except for the cost of using the site). And the "ash" is slower wind (typically in a place where using the land involves raising windbreaks anyhow). Beat THAT with your nuclear reactors and their uranium mines, processing plants, and waste disposal issues.
Call me when somebody gets a practical hydrogen-boron fusion design working and we'll compare costs over the life of the device.
can someone explain to me why server farms and wind farms are "farms"?
Probably by analogy with "antenna farm" - an old radio term for a site with a number and usually a variety of antennas. (These were typically a radio amateur running on many bands but some commercial and military "farms" also existed.) It was a joking reference to the crowded cluster of antennas "growing up" from the plot of land like a crop of trees or other cultivated plants in a farm or garden.
Slashdot Mirror
About half a page down. B-)
It's the judge's job to set the parameters of the case,
No, it's not.
It's the judges job to maintain order in the courtroom and advise the jury on points of law. It's the jury's job to judge the facts AND the law.
"To use a hotspot, the customer must install software that works only on computers with Windows Vista or XP installed. ..."
How long until THAT is reverse-engineered? (And/or will it run under WINE? Is it a control app or something that goes into the protocol stack?)
... would have had us ... starving for lack of food and overpopulation
Well, duh.
Make that "inadequate agricultural production growth" due to pollution, lack of suitable land, damage to/exhaustion of farmland, etc.
... we're supposed to spend literally trillions of dollars to fix global warming, yet we can't see the raw data ... [also] when is the source code used for the climate models going to be published ...?
This reminds me of the Club of Rome's "limits to growth" predictions back in the late early '70s. The work was based on a computer model's predictions and would have had us choking to death on industrial pollution and starving for lack of food and overpopulation by the mid '80s.
Not only didn't it happen, but the computer model used (which required a lot of expensive computer time back then) is trivial for any home computer these days. It was analyzed and deconstructed by some computer types and was found to be hotwired to produce the "doom unless government takes over everything and drives us back to the stone age" result.
(Examples: Increased technology and increased industrial production was assumed to always mean increased pollution, rather than, for instance, reducing pollution while improving fuel and resource efficiency in order to produce cost reductions. Technological developments were date-controlled switches on parameters, all of which had expired by the time of the original publication.)
Jerry Pournelle did a fine article on the flaws of that model. And though the CofR is still around you don't hear much about them any more.
At the time publishing the data and models wasn't a serious risk to the study's credibility. You'd need major funding just to run the model once, let alone the many times you need to reverse-engineer it and most of the major fund sources, as with "global warming", were either governmental and just fine with a study that said they should have more power, or industrial / energy resource suppliers, easily discredited as having an axe to grind. With "global warming" you have the same situation except that the models and data are trivially run by anyone with access to them. So withholding them is necessary if they're faulty - and doubly suspicious as a result.
"Where does that leave the hobbyist researchers then?"
You have to get out of the basement, go outside and talk to people. Same as all the professional researchers ...
Shove that where the sun don't shine.
If the data is being used as an input to the making of public policy that includes coercive programs applied to the general population, it's the business of the general population and they are entitled to free access to it.
Why should a person interested in using the data solely to check whether the politicians are lying to him be required to act as slave labor for an academic in the advancement of HIS career, or clear ANY other hurdle, merely to get access?
My personal experience is that the more beautiful a woman is, the less she likes to, um... procreate.
Perhaps this is because the more beautiful a woman is the more likely she is to hold out for someone with a higher income and/or social standing than yours.
One of Ted Nelson's insights that went into the planning of the Xanadu hypertext project: To replace paper publication you first have to do all the useful things it does at least as well as it did.
This is an instance of that: Once they're out of the store or library (and ignoring quibbles about DNA analysis of fingerprint material if a copy is later recovered by forensic types) dead-tree books don't leave a handy record of who read them. Reading a "book" on an electronic server does, as does purchasing and downloading a copy. (And DRM is explicitly designed to keep those copies from circulating, so additional readers have to go back to the source and leave additional tracks.)
AHA! Another argument against DRM and the DMCA: Loss of the readers' right to privacy.
Spy agencies have been doing this kind of thing for decades. ... They used to have a major problem with classified material being leaked to the press by congressional staffers.
Now you know why "Deep Throat" was so cagey, vague, and just pointed Woodward and Bernstein to the right lines of investigation and insisted they hunt down other sources and confirmation, rather than letting them use him as an unnamed direct source.
With 2 layers of error-prone translation, there's bound to be many random substitutions.
But they don't necessarily hit the particular words which encode the information. Even if they do corrupt some of 'em the info is inserted redundantly and error correcting codes are straightforward and applicable.
Just because you're much closer to 102.5's radio tower doesn't mean you can't listen to 93.3.
Get close enough to 102.5's tower and it does. And the farther it is from 93.3's, the farther you have to be from 102.5's tower to hear 93.3.
Look up "receiver quieting".
Yes they're different frequencies. But the sharp tuned circuits are AFTER the first few stages. Saturate the front end and you can forget listening to the quiet stuff.
So things like this need to be in bands far enough removed from the signals of interest that the minimal tuned circuits at the front end of the receiver can reject them adequately to keep the front end's electronics working correctly.
So THAT's what "his noodly appendages" are about.
During the remodel I ran cat-5e from the designated computer room to several other sites around that room and at least one run to every other room (including garage) in the house, plus satellite TV cable, an extra cat-5e loop for phones, and two 20A circuits (combinable for 240V) in each bedroom/potential office. (In hindsight the cat-5e should have been conduit, to future-proof by providing a path to pull whatever the next technologies turn out to be. Also: The DSL phone line might have done better in the single run of the thicker phone-company's cat-3(?) to reduce high-frequency attenuation.) That eliminates room-to-room stuff and one desk-to-desk ethernet line in the comp room / office but does nearly squat for the cable nest near the servers.
I got some plastic cable ways at Fry's. Couple inches square with snap-on cover.
I had already mounted shelf brackets on the wall behind the computer bench so I just mounted these under one row of their mounting screws and ran all the signal and low-volt power in the plastic cable ways, a few inches above the outlets. Looped the slack back-and-forth in the cable ways so the wires are all straight right-angle shot up or down the wall to the equipment. This cleaned things up a BUNCH.
Power is still going from the wall or plug strips directly to the equipment (which is mostly at one end except for the monitors). I also got some plug strips to mount below the cableway. Plan to run the power cords to that and bundle the slack with twist ties to avoid slop lying about.
IMVHO, only two things will pitch ICE's off the top of the pile: 1) a radical, cheap, viable, ready-to-go, drop-in-now replacement, or 2) time, a long time.
A plug-in hybrid with enough energy storage to recycle the power of coming down 8,500 feet of mountain for going up the next hills or across the valley, the way a normal hybrid recycles stopping from 55 MPH to start back up and cruise a bit, with a smart enough controller to keep the engine off until needed, would do it.
You'd be able to commute on stored grid power (equiv. of well under a dollar per gallon at the moment). You'd still need some power plant for long trips - which might still be a small I.C. engine or might be something else, like a fuel cell sysstem.
If we've got the hydrogen storage problem licked, ... then why use an IC engine over a fuel cell? In a FC + electric motor configuration, ... and probably other advantages I've overlooked.
A big one is efficiency.
In an internal combustion engine you burn the fuel energy into heat, then use the heat to run a heat engine before dumping it outside. This means you pay the "carnot cycle tax" - which means you lose something like 2/3 of your energy when operating at the relatively low temperatures a mobile IC engine must to avoid massive generation of nitrogen oxides from the air.
A fuel cell, on the other hand, can in principle convert virtually ALL of the energy of the fuel into electricity, suitable for powering a motor which can, also in principal, convert virtually all of that into controllable torque and horsepower. Real motors can easily get well over 85% (and pretty much have to in an automotive application, where two wasted horsepower is about 1,500 watts of heat). I'm not sure where real fuel cells are these days. But build and sell a few million a year into a competitive market and you can bet they'll improve. B-)
... the real idea is to prevent people who never originally saw the message from reading it down the road.
So a US corporation using this on its internal email (or even receiving email encrypted with this tool) would be in violation of the record-keeping requirements of the the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (unless they decrypted and kept an in-the-clear copy of EVERY such letter that arrived), even if they automatically archive all email they handle.
I bet a number of VPs of IT need a change of pants about now.
Whooooosh!
My name? It's ... Barak Obama.......
And what is your date and place of birth?
= = = =
(Moderators: Google "Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories".)
You can figure it out yourself:
- Look at a daily power demand curve. Or at the hours your utility considers "peak" and "offpeak" for rates.
- Look at a daily wind curve at any good R.E. wind site (sorry, none handy right now) - and consider that available power goes up with the CUBE of the wind speed. Or consider the mechanism of "lake effect winds" - because all the exceptionally good wind sites are where there are variants on the lake effect. (For instance: Altamont Pass uses the Pacific Ocean for the "lake", California's Central Valley for the "land".)
The lake effect is a heat engine. Bodies of land heat and cool faster than bodies of water. So in the mid-to-late afternoon there's a strong wind from the water to the land, driven by air sinking over the cool water and rising over the hot land. (In the late night to early morning there's a similar, but smaller, wind the other way.)
An additional effect: Load for heating and air conditioning goes up with heat loss/gain through walls, and that increases with increasing winds. So higher winds drive higher power needs for HVAC. (That, in the form of the the sun driving both the lake effect wind and the need for air conditioning through both direct heating and hot winds, is much of the reason the peak load occurs in the late afternoon/early evening when the lake effect winds are up.)
Is wind really "free"? If we install enough wind turbines, wouldn't we slow the spin of the earth because of the collective resistance of the turbines?
Nope. Angular momentum is conserved. You'd just be modifying the distribution of it between the atmosphere and the ground's motion - and the planet is a LOT more massive than the atmosphere. (Also: In the temperate zone you'd SPEED UP the Earth by slowing the wind. But not by enough to measure.)
As for weather effects and the like: A wind farm has about as much effect as growing a forest or raising some skyscrapers. It's a drop in the bucket, atmospherically speaking.
Give me a call when they're powering the whole planet by using dirigible-borne wind turbines to slow the jet stream by a few percent. It might make a detectable difference in storm tracks.
Of course you can't do this with ALL the grid's load - just a (big) fraction of it. You have to keep your "use the grid as a battery" fraction of the load low enough that it doesn't end up trying to run the world's power plants backward.
But by the time we get enough renewable energy generation going to start retiring fuel-driven plants the grid operators will be deploying things like vanadium-redox batteries, additional pumped-water energy storage, and the like. (Unless proton-boron fusion works out at the "Mr. Fusion" scale and we all dump the grid.)
... you are using wind power when you are drawing from the wind, and grid power (using whatever technology the grid there uses to generate) when you are drawing from the grid. The "grid" isn't some sort of battery.
If you have a reliable source of power to feed the grid - say, during peak hours, which happen also to be peak for wind generation but not server load - feeding it to the grid lets the grid operators correspondingly reduce the consumption of fuel at generation plants. If you later pull some when the wind is low you cause the consumption of fuel (though perhaps cheaper fuel at off-peak times).
The net result is that your wind/server farm can have a net zero, or even negative, fuel consumption.
So though the grid isn't a battery you can use it like one and have the same effect on average resource consumption as if you had your own batteries and ran purely off the wind.
(And you can pay for the line losses and inefficiencies by feeding extra wind power to the grid, just as you'd feed extra wind power to the batteries to pay for their leakage and inefficiencies.)
... is there any reason why anyone hasn't bought cheap land and/or politicians in Mexico ...
The land is cheap - but US citizens can't own it.
The politicians are too expensive: Once you've got some money coming in they want it all.
Wind turbines are great and all, except for the fact they need tons of copper, aluminum, fiberglass and other resources which require a heck of a lot of energy to mine and produce.
So do fuel-burning plants (though not precisely the same amount or mix of materials). Whether the fuel is combustible or nuclear.
But the "fuel" for the wind turbine is just wind - which is free (except for the cost of using the site). And the "ash" is slower wind (typically in a place where using the land involves raising windbreaks anyhow). Beat THAT with your nuclear reactors and their uranium mines, processing plants, and waste disposal issues.
Call me when somebody gets a practical hydrogen-boron fusion design working and we'll compare costs over the life of the device.
can someone explain to me why server farms and wind farms are "farms"?
Probably by analogy with "antenna farm" - an old radio term for a site with a number and usually a variety of antennas. (These were typically a radio amateur running on many bands but some commercial and military "farms" also existed.) It was a joking reference to the crowded cluster of antennas "growing up" from the plot of land like a crop of trees or other cultivated plants in a farm or garden.