I'm not sure what you're trying to say with that comment about "parallel construction". Perhaps you're commenting about something else.
There's nobody making you use a cell phone. If you don't like how you're being treated (either by the phone company or by the government), you can always use a landline. I don't know where you're getting your facts from.
The FISA courts won't try or convict you of a crime, nor will they put you in prison. From what I've heard, they will only issue a warrant ex-parte if the government can show a threshold risk to national security.
I'm shilling for people who want the truth and fair discussion of the involvement of their government. Ignoramuses like you are the problem.
You know, there is a reason that we have these things called "judges": they are there to avoid would-be monarchs such as you from applying their own, independent law. No one would be free under your version.
Tracking without the consent of the user is illegal wiretapping. The responsible persons at "whisper" should prepare for criminal law suits against them.
1. You are tracked every day without your consent. Have you ever examined an email header? It contains these magical things called "usernames", "domain names", "timestamps" and "IP addresses" that authenticate who you are and when you did things. Do you ever drive a car? Then you have to present your license (containing your identity) to any officer who asks. Ever send an SMS message? Do you ever carry your phone around with you turned on so you can receive a call? Got a pass for the bus? Your "illegal wiretapping" is a fantasy.
2. Do you really think the same government that is asking for and/or collecting this data is going to prosecute the provider?
AC: have you ever heard of a diary? Do you ever prepare advanced drafts of your tax return? Have you ever had the occasion to speak to an attorney? There are three examples of words not delivered outside of your control.
If you send messages through this "Whisper App" to your friends, then the government has every right to ask those friends what you said. (It's called "investigating", in case you didn't know.)
There is no explicit constitutional right to privacy. Look for it all you want: you won't find it. There is only a prohibition against "unreasonable" searches and seizures. The meaning of the word unreasonable has been defined in the caselaw by the courts over the decades; in some cases the police and the government do get to smell your dirty shorts. Your baggage will be searched at the airport, in one example, because the "right" to privacy that you think you have is unreasonable against the danger you might pose to the other passengers.
I'm not trying to "launch" anything, stupid. I'm just stating the way the law is. But I'd really prefer that you don't listen to me, AC: I'd really enjoy watching you pay attorney's fees up the wazoo defending your point of view...
You have a right to free speech (or perhaps a lesser equivalent outside the U.S.) You never had a right to be free from the consequences of your speech. You also do not have a right to anonymity, or to a privacy attached to words that you have delivered outside of your control. You have no right to be free of your own foolishness, if you choose to act like a fool.
That said, this company might get it's backside sued off by a class action lawsuit if it can be shown that it was tracking its clients without their consent or against their wishes. I'll bet that in at least in one state there's a law prohibiting that, even if there's a clause in their license or contract that permits it (which apparently their new terms of service has.) Extraordinary terms in a contract are not necessarily enforced, as any first year law school student can tell you.
Any data gleaned by such measures would likely be ruled to be inadmissible in a criminal action: it is merely the government attempting to use a third party to engage in an unreasonable search and seizure. It might be a stupid thing for a soldier to use this app on a military base against regulations, but the government would be even more stupid to try to use "the fruit of the poisonous tree" (evidence that would not have been gathered but for the unlawful search) against one of its citizens.
All of this goes to show that you can't stop others from being stupid...
To be fair, there is an incubation period of about a week (the time between infection and transmissibility). You can still have geometric progression and not really know it for a couple of months before it becomes a crisis.
That said, Ebola has been around for years in Africa, where people don't have some basic sanitary practices. Even with a long incubation period, we'd have already seen a global outbreak if this virus were really as bad as the fear-mongerers are making it out to be.
Keep in mind that there's a difference between an exposure from one viral particle (as you might get from being handed a beverage cup) and a mass of them (handling the bodily fluids of the exposed as a nurse would). With one particle, your immune system has time to detect and react. It is those exposed to the mass particulates who will likely die.
I'll do what I can to avoid being exposed. I'll wash my hands, cook my food, and stay away from obviously sick people. Since I'd have done that anyway, my life hasn't changed much...
The thickness of your head is astounding. Removing and depositing are two entirely different things!
You would be right, if I had made arguments about depositing heat into the atmosphere. But I didn't!
LISTEN TO ME CAREFULLY: it does not matter which method of generation you use. You will not REMOVE energy from the atmosphere in any substantial way by using wind turbines or any other mode of electric generation.
Conservation of energy applies. Wind turbines don't just create energy out of nowhere, they're converting kinetic energy from wind movement into electricity... Only some of that energy is re-emitted as heat. Or do you not have any lights in your country? Or electric motors of any kind?
Really? And do you think that the energy bound up in the light absorbed in the walls and seat disappears into the ether? Do you know what happens when a motor stops? All of that kinetic energy is converted into heat (assuming that most people don't have elevators. A first-year engineering student would acknowledge that... ultimately the electricity delivered to your house winds up heating it up. They must not have engineering degrees in your country, AC...
AC: you should know, very well, that a coal-powered plant can be located closer to population centers (preferably down-wind of them). And you should realize that maintaining a transmission network on land is more convenient (and correspondingly cheaper) than over the water. Furthermore, you don't block shipping lanes: when ships have to travel further, then you have another "externality" to consider, part of which being an increase in combustion and corresponding particulate matter.
A coal-powered plant is the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of wind turbines; when you have one plant, then you have one set of transmission lines to each population center. When you have many generators, then you have many lines to maintain and secure the land/water rights to. That increases the direct costs, too.
But if you ignore the practicalities, I'm sure you're right...
Oh, I'd never heard that definition of "remove". It's sort of like walking into the electronics store, putting a set of earbuds for your phone in your pocket, walking around the store for half an hour deciding whether you're a shoplifter, and then putting the earbuds back on the rack after you noticed the surveillance cameras. I suppose technically you'd "removed" the earbuds from your pocket at one particular moment, but the net result is that you had exactly what you had before you walked in.
If you and Dadoo wanted to say that "the use of wind power keeps the atmosphere from warming up due to global warming", I think that's what you should have said. Of course, that would have been saying that it "produce(s) no CO2", which is redundant given that's Dadoo's first alternative.
It would be nice if you'd stop putting words in my mouth. Dadoo made the claim that "wind power" had the "advantage" that wind power "removes energy from the atmosphere". Now you're trying to shift the argument that if we somehow hooked up that wind generation to endothermic reactions, we'd be removing a substantial amount of heat from the atmosphere. In this universe with its physical laws, that just don't work.
There is no advantage to using wind turbines over any other generating method that will remove energy or heat from the atmosphere. Get over it, and move on...
No it doesn't, and the position of the article isn't limited to the summary. I said that "if this author were correct", and in the body of his article the author did claim that wind was cheaper than coal, even without considering these "externalized costs". I'll say it again for you: if that were true, and this author were correct, there's be a wind turbine within sight of every population center with any practical prevailing wind.
I know you'd like to limit the examination of his credibility to those parts of the article that promote your interpretation, but if you read the entire article, it doesn't agree with reality. I don't choose to believe others' psychopathic versions of the world.
What you're describing is an endothermic reaction, which requires the application of heat. Several applications in the petrochemical realm are described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
But, where you've got petrochemicals that you can burn to get the heat for the endothermic reaction readily available, it seems just a bit silly to be transferring electricity from somewhere else to do the same thing. (And, combustion ordinarily produces temperatures higher than electric heaters, particularly where large masses to be heated are involved.)
My point still remains: most consumers of electricity don't use it in endothermic reactions, hence most of what they use results in waste heat at the consumer's location. It is the movement of a heat differential at the electric source to a heat differential at the consumer's location.
That's pure foolishness. The owners of the power companies do not care where their power derives from socially. They care about making a profit for their shareholders. They do that either by charging their customers more, or by reducing their costs. Their rates are usually regulated by the government where they are located; that leaves reducing costs as the only realistic way to produce profits.
The power companies do not operate in your hypothetical "free market". They are restricted by the demands of their customers, by standards, by technological limitations, and by laws imposed upon them. The reason that power companies do not utilize solar power is mainly because a solar junction produces DC at about 1 volt. To efficiently transmit that energy across the miles of wires from the sunny parts of the world to the places people live requires AC at hundreds of thousands of volts. The conversion is possible (using a very high-current waveform generator), but it is not cheap to do.
Wind turbines, on the other hand, generate AC and can be synchronized to their connected grid just like any other power-generating turbine.
Your recitation of unprovable generalizations and your attempt to steer the discussion toward solar betrays your purpose against power companies: this article was a comparison solely between the costs of wind- and coal-sourced electricity. If you want to stick a solar panel in your back yard, then be my guest.
Um... I'm not a chemical engineer, but I didn't think that applying a charge to materials makes a plastic. I thought that making plastic materials required the application of heat (coming from your "electric energy" or more probably from the application of heat from the burning of fossil fuels). Molding plastics certainly does require the application of heat to bring those materials into a liquid, injectable state. Feel free to educate me, but I can't say that I believe you at this moment.
But, even if what you say is true, most consumers of electricity are not plastic manufacturers, nor are they practicing chemical transformations by means of electricity.
So, you're telling me that you're persuaded by the summary of an article, never actually released (only leaked), utilizing these admittedly nebulous "externalized costs", in the face of undisputed evidence over decades that the power companies have never found wind energy to be cheaper.
Nope. Global warming is the effect of solar radiation being trapped by accumulated carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses. What we're talking about here is tiny compared to that.
All power generation, except for nuclear, originates from power delivered by the Sun. The power harvested and used by "renewables" such as wind energy capture a tiny part of that solar-delivered power. I can't tell you off the top of my head how much power the Sun delivers to the Earth regularly, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a trillion times your Terawatts of energy or more.
Most devices (especially the ones that need a lot of power) that use electricity convert all of that power into heat. Even motors (such as the one in your vacuum cleaner) do it. If the heat differential doesn't transfer to the consumer's location, then you'd have a very inefficient transfer.
Of course, when you "distribute" your plants off-shore, you also need wires and supporting towers to transfer the electricity to the grid. (Science hasn't quite developed phasor transmission yet.) And when you factor in the "externalities" of building and maintaining that infrastructure (to get the power from where the wind blows to where people actually live), and the "externality" of power loss through the wires and transformers connecting those wind generators to the main grid, I'll bet the actual costs for wind-power aren't as favorable as you think.
The cost of mining and burning coal is basically the same, and there's nothing new in wind-turbine technology to make it more effective. What has changed are the government-imposed costs (taxes) and the recent adverse public opinion to coal.
The costs of building electric-generation plants are substantially the same as they were 50 years ago. There's no new rush for wind-generating operations because there's nothing new to "phase in".
No, I'm not forgetting anything. The article claims that wind is cheaper even when not factoring in these "externalized" costs. (And you should not forget that no one has actually proven these "externalized costs": people who are prone to asthma or to
dying will likely suffer the same fate by a different particulate injected into their atmosphere, whether that be from independent natural sources such as pollen or from self-chosen sources such as those smoked.)
Furthermore, this is a "leaked" article: the authors don't have to take responsibility for the misleading "facts" they propound. They'll just come along later (when the criticism develops exposing their silliness) and claim they hadn't finished their analysis.
This is just another bogus "study" by an interested party, cherry-picking the facts and analytic inputs to reach the result they desire. Coal has been around for a very long time, and hasn't gotten significantly more expensive to mine except by government-imposed costs such as taxes.
I would prefer to see a wind turbine than a smokestack in my community, but I won't be persuaded by this scrap.
If this author were correct, the power companies would already be rushing to build wind-driven turbines. They already have people carefully weighing the costs and benefits of each power-generation method. When I see wind-driven turbines appearing on the windy parts of my horizon, then I'll believe that wind is cheaper than coal.
It doesn't remove it. Except for light emitted into space, it merely moves the heat differential that makes the wind blow to the heat differential that drives the steam coming from the previously frozen-dinner in your microwave.
Slashdot Mirror
"You are appealing to authority. Just because judges say something doesn't make it right."
And just because you say it doesn't make it right. Which do you think I'm going to trust more. A judge, or you?
AC: you seem to be a bit mixed up about this:
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with that comment about "parallel construction". Perhaps you're commenting about something else.
There's nobody making you use a cell phone. If you don't like how you're being treated (either by the phone company or by the government), you can always use a landline. I don't know where you're getting your facts from.
The FISA courts won't try or convict you of a crime, nor will they put you in prison. From what I've heard, they will only issue a warrant ex-parte if the government can show a threshold risk to national security.
I'm shilling for people who want the truth and fair discussion of the involvement of their government. Ignoramuses like you are the problem.
Oh, I see. I have to accept your personal view.
You know, there is a reason that we have these things called "judges": they are there to avoid would-be monarchs such as you from applying their own, independent law. No one would be free under your version.
Tracking without the consent of the user is illegal wiretapping. The responsible persons at "whisper" should prepare for criminal law suits against them.
1. You are tracked every day without your consent. Have you ever examined an email header? It contains these magical things called "usernames", "domain names", "timestamps" and "IP addresses" that authenticate who you are and when you did things. Do you ever drive a car? Then you have to present your license (containing your identity) to any officer who asks. Ever send an SMS message? Do you ever carry your phone around with you turned on so you can receive a call? Got a pass for the bus? Your "illegal wiretapping" is a fantasy.
2. Do you really think the same government that is asking for and/or collecting this data is going to prosecute the provider?
AC: have you ever heard of a diary? Do you ever prepare advanced drafts of your tax return? Have you ever had the occasion to speak to an attorney? There are three examples of words not delivered outside of your control.
If you send messages through this "Whisper App" to your friends, then the government has every right to ask those friends what you said. (It's called "investigating", in case you didn't know.)
There is no explicit constitutional right to privacy. Look for it all you want: you won't find it. There is only a prohibition against "unreasonable" searches and seizures. The meaning of the word unreasonable has been defined in the caselaw by the courts over the decades; in some cases the police and the government do get to smell your dirty shorts. Your baggage will be searched at the airport, in one example, because the "right" to privacy that you think you have is unreasonable against the danger you might pose to the other passengers.
I'm not trying to "launch" anything, stupid. I'm just stating the way the law is. But I'd really prefer that you don't listen to me, AC: I'd really enjoy watching you pay attorney's fees up the wazoo defending your point of view...
then do not speak them.
You have a right to free speech (or perhaps a lesser equivalent outside the U.S.) You never had a right to be free from the consequences of your speech. You also do not have a right to anonymity, or to a privacy attached to words that you have delivered outside of your control. You have no right to be free of your own foolishness, if you choose to act like a fool.
That said, this company might get it's backside sued off by a class action lawsuit if it can be shown that it was tracking its clients without their consent or against their wishes. I'll bet that in at least in one state there's a law prohibiting that, even if there's a clause in their license or contract that permits it (which apparently their new terms of service has.) Extraordinary terms in a contract are not necessarily enforced, as any first year law school student can tell you.
Any data gleaned by such measures would likely be ruled to be inadmissible in a criminal action: it is merely the government attempting to use a third party to engage in an unreasonable search and seizure. It might be a stupid thing for a soldier to use this app on a military base against regulations, but the government would be even more stupid to try to use "the fruit of the poisonous tree" (evidence that would not have been gathered but for the unlawful search) against one of its citizens.
All of this goes to show that you can't stop others from being stupid...
To be fair, there is an incubation period of about a week (the time between infection and transmissibility). You can still have geometric progression and not really know it for a couple of months before it becomes a crisis.
That said, Ebola has been around for years in Africa, where people don't have some basic sanitary practices. Even with a long incubation period, we'd have already seen a global outbreak if this virus were really as bad as the fear-mongerers are making it out to be.
Keep in mind that there's a difference between an exposure from one viral particle (as you might get from being handed a beverage cup) and a mass of them (handling the bodily fluids of the exposed as a nurse would). With one particle, your immune system has time to detect and react. It is those exposed to the mass particulates who will likely die.
I'll do what I can to avoid being exposed. I'll wash my hands, cook my food, and stay away from obviously sick people. Since I'd have done that anyway, my life hasn't changed much...
The thickness of your head is astounding. Removing and depositing are two entirely different things!
You would be right, if I had made arguments about depositing heat into the atmosphere. But I didn't!
LISTEN TO ME CAREFULLY: it does not matter which method of generation you use. You will not REMOVE energy from the atmosphere in any substantial way by using wind turbines or any other mode of electric generation.
DO YOU GET IT NOW?????
Conservation of energy applies. Wind turbines don't just create energy out of nowhere, they're converting kinetic energy from wind movement into electricity ... Only some of that energy is re-emitted as heat. Or do you not have any lights in your country? Or electric motors of any kind?
Really? And do you think that the energy bound up in the light absorbed in the walls and seat disappears into the ether? Do you know what happens when a motor stops? All of that kinetic energy is converted into heat (assuming that most people don't have elevators. A first-year engineering student would acknowledge that ... ultimately the electricity delivered to your house winds up heating it up. They must not have engineering degrees in your country, AC...
AC: you should know, very well, that a coal-powered plant can be located closer to population centers (preferably down-wind of them). And you should realize that maintaining a transmission network on land is more convenient (and correspondingly cheaper) than over the water. Furthermore, you don't block shipping lanes: when ships have to travel further, then you have another "externality" to consider, part of which being an increase in combustion and corresponding particulate matter.
A coal-powered plant is the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of wind turbines; when you have one plant, then you have one set of transmission lines to each population center. When you have many generators, then you have many lines to maintain and secure the land/water rights to. That increases the direct costs, too.
But if you ignore the practicalities, I'm sure you're right...
Oh, I'd never heard that definition of "remove". It's sort of like walking into the electronics store, putting a set of earbuds for your phone in your pocket, walking around the store for half an hour deciding whether you're a shoplifter, and then putting the earbuds back on the rack after you noticed the surveillance cameras. I suppose technically you'd "removed" the earbuds from your pocket at one particular moment, but the net result is that you had exactly what you had before you walked in.
If you and Dadoo wanted to say that "the use of wind power keeps the atmosphere from warming up due to global warming", I think that's what you should have said. Of course, that would have been saying that it "produce(s) no CO2", which is redundant given that's Dadoo's first alternative.
It would be nice if you'd stop putting words in my mouth. Dadoo made the claim that "wind power" had the "advantage" that wind power "removes energy from the atmosphere". Now you're trying to shift the argument that if we somehow hooked up that wind generation to endothermic reactions, we'd be removing a substantial amount of heat from the atmosphere. In this universe with its physical laws, that just don't work.
There is no advantage to using wind turbines over any other generating method that will remove energy or heat from the atmosphere. Get over it, and move on...
No it doesn't, and the position of the article isn't limited to the summary. I said that "if this author were correct", and in the body of his article the author did claim that wind was cheaper than coal, even without considering these "externalized costs". I'll say it again for you: if that were true, and this author were correct, there's be a wind turbine within sight of every population center with any practical prevailing wind.
I know you'd like to limit the examination of his credibility to those parts of the article that promote your interpretation, but if you read the entire article, it doesn't agree with reality. I don't choose to believe others' psychopathic versions of the world.
What you're describing is an endothermic reaction, which requires the application of heat. Several applications in the petrochemical realm are described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
But, where you've got petrochemicals that you can burn to get the heat for the endothermic reaction readily available, it seems just a bit silly to be transferring electricity from somewhere else to do the same thing. (And, combustion ordinarily produces temperatures higher than electric heaters, particularly where large masses to be heated are involved.)
My point still remains: most consumers of electricity don't use it in endothermic reactions, hence most of what they use results in waste heat at the consumer's location. It is the movement of a heat differential at the electric source to a heat differential at the consumer's location.
That's pure foolishness. The owners of the power companies do not care where their power derives from socially. They care about making a profit for their shareholders. They do that either by charging their customers more, or by reducing their costs. Their rates are usually regulated by the government where they are located; that leaves reducing costs as the only realistic way to produce profits.
The power companies do not operate in your hypothetical "free market". They are restricted by the demands of their customers, by standards, by technological limitations, and by laws imposed upon them. The reason that power companies do not utilize solar power is mainly because a solar junction produces DC at about 1 volt. To efficiently transmit that energy across the miles of wires from the sunny parts of the world to the places people live requires AC at hundreds of thousands of volts. The conversion is possible (using a very high-current waveform generator), but it is not cheap to do.
Wind turbines, on the other hand, generate AC and can be synchronized to their connected grid just like any other power-generating turbine.
Your recitation of unprovable generalizations and your attempt to steer the discussion toward solar betrays your purpose against power companies: this article was a comparison solely between the costs of wind- and coal-sourced electricity. If you want to stick a solar panel in your back yard, then be my guest.
Um ... I'm not a chemical engineer, but I didn't think that applying a charge to materials makes a plastic. I thought that making plastic materials required the application of heat (coming from your "electric energy" or more probably from the application of heat from the burning of fossil fuels). Molding plastics certainly does require the application of heat to bring those materials into a liquid, injectable state. Feel free to educate me, but I can't say that I believe you at this moment.
But, even if what you say is true, most consumers of electricity are not plastic manufacturers, nor are they practicing chemical transformations by means of electricity.
So, you're telling me that you're persuaded by the summary of an article, never actually released (only leaked), utilizing these admittedly nebulous "externalized costs", in the face of undisputed evidence over decades that the power companies have never found wind energy to be cheaper.
Wonna buy a bridge?
Nope. Global warming is the effect of solar radiation being trapped by accumulated carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses. What we're talking about here is tiny compared to that.
All power generation, except for nuclear, originates from power delivered by the Sun. The power harvested and used by "renewables" such as wind energy capture a tiny part of that solar-delivered power. I can't tell you off the top of my head how much power the Sun delivers to the Earth regularly, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a trillion times your Terawatts of energy or more.
Most devices (especially the ones that need a lot of power) that use electricity convert all of that power into heat. Even motors (such as the one in your vacuum cleaner) do it. If the heat differential doesn't transfer to the consumer's location, then you'd have a very inefficient transfer.
But wind doesn't have the "advantage" of removing heat from the atmosphere, as claimed. Even it did, that wouldn't impact global warming anyway.
Of course, when you "distribute" your plants off-shore, you also need wires and supporting towers to transfer the electricity to the grid. (Science hasn't quite developed phasor transmission yet.) And when you factor in the "externalities" of building and maintaining that infrastructure (to get the power from where the wind blows to where people actually live), and the "externality" of power loss through the wires and transformers connecting those wind generators to the main grid, I'll bet the actual costs for wind-power aren't as favorable as you think.
As I commented elsewhere:
The cost of mining and burning coal is basically the same, and there's nothing new in wind-turbine technology to make it more effective. What has changed are the government-imposed costs (taxes) and the recent adverse public opinion to coal.
The costs of building electric-generation plants are substantially the same as they were 50 years ago. There's no new rush for wind-generating operations because there's nothing new to "phase in".
dying will likely suffer the same fate by a different particulate injected into their atmosphere, whether that be from independent natural sources such as pollen or from self-chosen sources such as those smoked.)
Furthermore, this is a "leaked" article: the authors don't have to take responsibility for the misleading "facts" they propound. They'll just come along later (when the criticism develops exposing their silliness) and claim they hadn't finished their analysis.
This is just another bogus "study" by an interested party, cherry-picking the facts and analytic inputs to reach the result they desire. Coal has been around for a very long time, and hasn't gotten significantly more expensive to mine except by government-imposed costs such as taxes.
I would prefer to see a wind turbine than a smokestack in my community, but I won't be persuaded by this scrap.
If this author were correct, the power companies would already be rushing to build wind-driven turbines. They already have people carefully weighing the costs and benefits of each power-generation method. When I see wind-driven turbines appearing on the windy parts of my horizon, then I'll believe that wind is cheaper than coal.
It doesn't remove it. Except for light emitted into space, it merely moves the heat differential that makes the wind blow to the heat differential that drives the steam coming from the previously frozen-dinner in your microwave.