But the heat will be _exactly_ as much energy as was put into the battery. You've just converted chemical energy to heat energy, but it's still the same amount, just a different form. There's probably some good links you could google up on this sort of thing.
You're confusing power with, well, something else. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. You buy energy, and it's either put to it's intended use (charging your laptop batteries or whatever), or it's "waste" heat. If you're buying heat, that's not waste. Further, if you use your laptop in the place you'd be heating, it's heating that place. 100 watts of heat is 100 watts of heat no matter what steps it goes through between source and heat.
Dan, ask your physics friend where that waste energy goes if not into heat. If he finds a way to show that heat being gained or lost, a Nobel Prize is in his future. And he's absolutely and completely wrong about a transformer drawing the same regardless of load. There will be a "fixed cost" of energy loss due to core losses, mechanical resonance (that lovely 50 or 60 hz hum that transformers have - which turns into heat eventually), and all that good stuff.
It's either usable energy output, or waste heat. There is no other output path. I'd love to discuss this with you and/or your buddy over a few beers. Bar napkins and handwaving will be involved. I don't suppose you're in/near Milwaukee?
As long as I can turn it off, or turn it off for certain types of sites, that's fine. I'm not sure what this does for me that, say, Netcraft Toolbar doesn't. Is the data stream encrypted back to Opera? Can others intercept that and use it as a spam-target tool somehow? All questions I'd want answered before I'd use it.
Let's take the case of a 40 watt light bulb and a 40 watt space heater. The 40 watt bulb consumes electricity and produces light and heat.
Right. And what happens to those photons when they hit something? They turn back into...heat. 100% of the energy is maintained; if you've found otherwise the Nobel Prize folks would like to talk to you. More to this point, a wall wart is going to produce power to whatever it's powering, and it's going to produce heat. Directly. I'm paying for energy for heat, and I'm getting heat. That few watts of heat will make my furnace need to run for a few seconds less.
A heating appliance doesn't know why it's got resistance and makes heat when electricity is applied to it, it's just following the laws of physics.
Now let me address your exact question, because it doesn't have the benefit of the light to simplify the example. Let's say that we have a 20 watt transformer hooked onto nothing; it's just an open circuit with a transformer slapped in there. The transformer produces heat for several reasons, including the resistance it produces in the circuit. On the other hand, a space heater doesn't have nearly as many non-heat losses as a transformer. (It doesn't have magnetostriction, mechanical losses, or hysteresis losses for instance.)
Close, but wrong. All of these losses, at the end point, turn into heat. The laminations in the transformer vibrate, making noise, which ends up as heat. The magnetic losses cause heating of the cores, causing heat. That heat continues to leak out. 100W of power in, 100W of power out, one way or another. Heat, is heat.
Look at in terms of a datacenter. The heat load, and the power requirements, are amazingly well matched. Why do you suppose that is?
I don't see how saving two hundred dollars a year by using electricity rather than propane, affects which electrical source produces heat most efficiently.
All electrical sources produce heat at a 100% efficiency. There is no such thing as "waste heat" from an electrical device, when you're paying for heat anyway. A space heater is no different from a light bulb is no different than a transformer in that the energy, at end point, manifests itself as heat. I suppose you could talk about leakage (the shade is open so 1/100th of that light bulb's light output is escaping and not heating the interior) but let's keep a sense of perspective. That wall wart being warm, makes my furnace run calculably less.
While your devices may produce waste heat, they don't produce it as efficiently as something designed for the purpose. A space heater would save you more money. Suggesting that devices continue to be designed in a deliberately inefficient matter strikes me as somewhat foolish.
Perhaps you can explain to me how, say 20 watts, is any different being turned into heat by a dedicated heating device vs, say, a transformer. Hint: you can't. It isn't. Sure, in the summertime parasitic loads actually matter, but during heating season, that's just that much less propane I have to buy. I've done the math and I'm saving a couple hundred bucks a year by switching from propane to electric heat based on the on-peak vs. off-peak electric rates. Not a ton of money but significant. A wall wart makes a few watts worth of heat just as well as any other few watts of electrical heat.
You know, for about half of the year, I'm paying for heat in one form or another. This "wasted energy" helps to heat my house during that part of the year. Additionally, I pay less for electricity during nights and weekends - it's cheaper than propane to heat with electricity during those hours. So, an "inefficient" electrical device, actually _saves_ me money if I'm paying to heat the house.
The cleanest alternative seems to come from a little known company that created a compressed air motor. They use it in conjuction with a standard engine for starting the vehicle
Few pollution whatsoever, you need a little bit of electricity to run a compressor, and get almost 2000 km in one go...
here : http://www.theaircar.com/
Ah yes, the air car. One of the all-time classic recurring vaporware schemes. These guys have been claiming, for about a decade, to be having it ready "real soon now", yet they won't let anyone actually inspect their prototype, and the math doesn't work. Other than that, yuppers, it's sure a _clean_ alternative. Just not so good if you want to actually buy one.
How can so many of you people get this stuff so wrong? It's not like what I'm describing is a deep arcane mystery. It's obvious to anyone who spends more than two minutes considering how evolution works.
Might I suggest that, while your point has some merits, the astonishingly arrogant tone you have chosen to use to take in delivering it isn't likely to be an effective teaching technique?
I've read the August 6th memo, or at least the parts of it we're allowed to see, and you have to admit that it comes down to "This guy who attacked us before still doesn't like us". And "Strike in US"? That's hardly specific enough to be actionable, don't you think?
Further, if you really think _any_ President's "vacation" is much different than a day in the oval office, I fear you're delusional.
A "warning" that says "this specific bad guy is determined to strike somehow, maybe involving airplanes, somewhere in the US, at some vague undefined time in the future" isn't something you can act on. Best it can do is get a "Yeah, no kidding, we know he doesn't like us" response. All the monday-morning quarterbacking in the world doesn't change the fact that there wasn't jack shiat in there that anyone could work with.
That's a bit insulting, don't you think, to those of us who _have_ been "doing something" with this topic for years or decades? Also, I don't know or care what your personal politics are, but Clinton's record for actually doing things based on factual scientific data isn't exactly a strong one.
While I'd love for this to turn into something useful, with Clinton heading it up, I can only see it turning into a "not so hidden agenda" for one political purpose or another. I'd love to be wrong on that first impression, but based on his performace on other issues (pretending 7 arrests was "millions of criminals stopped" in the case of the Brady Bill stuff, for instance), I just don't see it going anywhere useful.
Oh, but at least someone is "doing something". Sometimes, someone doing nothing, is preferable to them getting in, muddying up the waters, and doing the _wrong thing_. Time will tell.
I sell a fair amount of stuff on eBay, buy nearly as much. I would pay extra to list items with an option to allow bidding to continue as long as people were bidding on the item. I would also be more likely to bid on items with that option. An auction should be about how much the marketplace wants to pay for an item, not about who has the fastest sniping software.
Cue the inevitable "you don't understand!!!" responses. Yes, I do. You snipe because you want to get in as low of a bid as possible, and deny me the chance to counter your lowball offer.
Back before 9/11, I flew into London from Denmark, and was leaving the country the next day for the states. Hadn't bought much so customs wouldn't be a problem. But, they have a "red line", and a "green line" - red for "I have something to declare (and pay tax on)". The red line was empty aside from a few people watching and profiling those walking through. The green line was forever long, and I was tired. So, off I went, up the red line, right to the counter. "Well, I have this sweater that I bought in Norway for (number) Norwegian Kronur, which works out to about (number) Pounds. I'm leaving for the US tomorrow, not sure if I need to pay something on this or not?"
I pretty much already knew the answer (no as long as you're not planning to sell it here), but by going up through the shorter line and having a plausible reason for doing so, I was able to save an hour. So yeah, you can get some time savings doing this sort of thing. Not sure I'd go for the body cavity search route to save waiting in the ID line, though. I guess that depends on if it's a business trip, or a recreational one.
It's been about 5 years so my experience isn't current, but unless they've suddenly become highly trained, clueful, and motivated, I can't see this being any more successful than the other failed outsourcing to India attempts. The software developers over there working on our projects ignored requirements, standards, and schedules. They were hard to communicate with (culturally _and_ linguistically), and timing was of course always delayed because they're not working when you need to talk to them.
So, of course, they're cheaper, and people will go with them. Eventually they'll either fail, or get smart, and need someone local. By then they'll hire whoever India is outsourcing _their_ stuff to. There's whole continents we haven't started to do this with, yet.
No idea why this was modded "funny", the guy makes a very insightful point. Without basic protections, we'd be free at the whim of the government. When the people have those basic protections however, the government governs at the whim of the people. The difference is profound.
Note to those who don't get it: you don't get it. That's fine, but you're wrong.
I wrote:You need to price out a system for a home and find out just how prohibitive it is. Oh, and how often do you get hail in your area? What's the attrition rate of panels going to be just from weather, let alone electrical and other mechanical failures?
to which you responded
You've fallen in the same trap I mentioned in the previous line. I was referring to solar thermal energy (solar heating, aka passive solar).
Sorry, but you're the one making assumptions now. I designed and built my house. Southern exposure with a glass-ceilinged room, as a sunroom. This passive solar energy is absorbed by a 16'x24'x12" concrete slab, with hydronic tubing in it. It's a textbook case of passive solar.
In the ten years since I built the house, hail has taken out windows _twice_, despite them being properly rated for the application I'm using them for. Once it even penetrated and caused water damage, the other time merely was a window replacement and many hours of labor. If that had been billable time (if I hadn't done it) it would have been quite expensive indeed. Does it work? Sure, but you need to have an effective way to mitigate those same solar gains during the summer. Shades aren't effective. Vines aren't effective. The deciduous trees I've planted south of the house, will never be tall enough to block summer sun from coming in. So I need to dump excess heat from that area with an exhaust fan, completely negating the whole purpose of having a super-insulated house. Plywood covers on the outside may be an answer, but I'm on a windy hill. What I'm saying is that the logistics aren't as simple as the theory, as they never are. PV is even more of a non-starter, yes. But passive isn't the no-brainer that it would seem to be; also, it's hardly an option for city dwellers or anyone who can't design a house to take advantage of the geography.
So you have no issues with Iran building new reactors?
How is pointing out that nuclear power is environmentally sound, in any way whatsoever related to a terrorist country building breeder reactors?
Nor have we solved the waste storage problem - nuclear power produces large amounts of low grade waste (such as contaminated overalls) which we just keep shuffling around.
Yeah, let's talk about that. Somewhere, in some storage facility, are dozens or hundreds of "contaminated overalls" worn by me when I was doing hotlab work. Also cardboard boxes, styrofoam, and all the other packaging materials. The sources in question were about equivalent to your smoke detector (you do have smoke detectors, right? I mean, let's worry about real risks here) but the NRC's rules state that if I'm handling radioactive sources, even though they're solids, encapsulated in epoxy, encased in plastic, shipped in lead surrounded by styrofoam in a cardboard box, all that stuff gets put into "low grade waste" storage. How much radiation is in there? NDA. No Detectable Activity. Zero. Zip. Same as your sandwich you brought for lunch. None at all.
Nuclear energy currently contributes somewhere around 10% of the total world energy, so the waste problem will get 10 times worse if we use nuclear wholesale. Considering the current handling of things like electronics waste I have no confidence that the situation will improve.
Another pointless leap of non-logic there. "used electronics are thrown in the landfill so spent nuke fuel will be too?" Give me a break. Arguments and illogic like yours are the exact reason why your point of view is impossible to take seriously.
Considering that half or more of domestic energy use is to make low grade thermal energy (space heating and DHW), and that people have demonstrated hundreds of practical and effective solar heating systems (for example, the Barra design in italy, sunspace and solar closet designs, clear attic collectors with radiant ceiling storage), I wonder why a rational environmentalist isn't promoting those instead?
I've got 30 acres, on a sunny hill. Great site for wind, and for solar. Not doing either. Why? Because the usual size of wind generator for home use is 400 watts. 400 WATTS. I can't spend 5 or 10 grand on a setup that will produce, at peak, on a good day, a mere 400 watts. Solar doesn't have the payback either. These are great technologies if you're forced to be off-grid and have no option. If you have the option, it's cheaper, sometimes by a factor of 10, to buy from the grid. I've done the math. I'm motivated to do the right thing. I can't justify doing it, even to myself, even including the coolness factor.
One reason perhaps is that solar energy is constantly hijacked by PV enthusiasts who go off talking about PV arrays in the desert and other giant projects. These cost lots of money, are dubious economically and move the problem out into some location requiring massive infrastructure investment.
You need to price out a system for a home and find out just how prohibitive it is. Oh, and how often do you get hail in your area? What's the attrition rate of panels going to be just from weather, let alone electrical and other mechanical failures?
I'm not bothering to comment on the rest, as it's all the same stuff that shows you haven't done your homework regarding prices and payback times, which if you're lucky will be several _decades_.
You _do_ know that the USA'n design has no resemblance whatsoever to the open-pile primitive disaster-waiting-to-happen that Chernobyl was, right? If you don't, please educate yourself before you make your decision firm in your own mind. It's an entirely different thing; comparing today's technology to their primitive one is like comparing today's top of the line desktop PCs to the ENIAC.
I've been an environmentalist all my life; planted close to 10,000 trees, maintain habitat for the critters, that sort of thing. No small expense or effort. I consider myself to be more of an environmentalist than some bozo with a "save the (whatever)" pin that only gets angry about things and doesn't actually do anything to improve the situation.
That said, I'm puzzled at the attitude the submitter apparently has, in that he seems to be describing environmentalists, and pro-nuke-power people, as two separate groups. To me, nuke is an obvious choice. If you need no other explaination, see how the anti-nuke people resort to blatant lies and unrealistic comparisons in order to get people to _feel_ that it's bad. The pro-nuke side goes with science so people _think_ about, and _understand_ the issues.
My point, I guess, is that this isn't surprising or new, some guy who left Greenpeace when it diverted from his POV is just saying what so many other environmentalists have known for decades. I'm not sure this is news, other than that whoever this guy is, is saying it.
This just in:
on
Sudo vs. Root
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· Score: 5, Informative
News flash: Sudo, like many other tools, has a configuration file, which allows you to customize it's behavior. Details will be provided as they become available.
C'mon, anyone with even a passing involvement with sudo has looked at the sudoers file. You can configure pretty much any group or role based permission you want; if you can describe it as a logical statement, you can do it in sudo. Yes, out of the box, you can sudo to a shell (or to an app which has a shell escape).
I've actually created my own internet outages with my (now sold) backhoe, twice. Neither of them the obvious. I had a 802.11b feed from a neighbor's house, 1.1 miles away (my hill to his tower). Worked great, almost always. Finally figured out that if I parked my backhoe at --> that end of the back yard, it was enough into the fresnel zone of the wireless link that things got wodgy.
Next time I created backhoe fade, was again in an unexpected way. I'd been trenching along the driveway, after dutifully and carefully marking the underground phone line to the house (that the brain-trust from the phone company decided to run next to my driveway, despite instructions not to). I carefully and successfully avoided the cable, no worries there. Then, when reaching juuuuuuust a bit too far over, I got the backhoe stuck in the muddy ditch along the road. Apparently, in the effort to get un-stuck, I pressed down on the cable, which then stretched over a rock in the trench and broke.
The phone company (eventually) got out there and tried to say I dug it up. I showed 'em exactly what happened - yes, I'd been digging. Yes, the wire was marked. Yes, none of my digging was along the wire's path (all true). The cable had clear marks of a pull over a rock, not a cut from a hoe. Shear vs. tension, obvious from inspection.
Phone company guy didn't want any part of explainations until I (a) bet him that I could dig right (made an X) here and find a big rock with a sharp edge "that you people left in the trench of this improperly installed wire", and (b) pointed out that if he's gonna dig the trench, he's standing in poison ivy while doing so, and I could just go get the backhoe and make it easier for all involved.
He called his boss, explained the high points of the situation (including the poison ivy, which inexplicably a guy in his job didn't recognize without help), and they fixed the cable no charge. But, I bet I'm one of those statistcs in the article.
FTW?
FTW Face the World
FTW Families Than Work
FTW Feel The Wind
FTW Fight to Win
FTW Florida Tax Watch
FTW Flying Training Wing
FTW For the Win
FTW Forever Two Wheels
FTW Forget The World (polite form)
FTW Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien (Vienna, Austria)
FTW Fort Wainwright, Alaska
FTW Fort Worth Meacham Field (Airport Code)
FTW Free the Weed
FTW Free the Whales
FTW Free Trade Wharf
FTW Future Technology Workshop
Since when does free enterprise business offerings of service have anything to do with politics?
That said, I've got wireless broadband to my house, better-than-T1 speeds, for $24.95 a month. (you clicky linky) I'm in a rural area, and a local ISP has gone to providing broadband wireless using Motorola's Canopy system. It doesn't suck.
Why can't this be done elsewhere? It can. Get a feed, get a spot on a tower, and start selling your service. For a rural, "last miles" solution, it's ideal, might be good for city use too, I dunno (check Motorola's site, I suppose). Broadband options are out there, and it has nothing to do with politics.
Slashdot Mirror
But the heat will be _exactly_ as much energy as was put into the battery. You've just converted chemical energy to heat energy, but it's still the same amount, just a different form. There's probably some good links you could google up on this sort of thing.
You're confusing power with, well, something else. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. You buy energy, and it's either put to it's intended use (charging your laptop batteries or whatever), or it's "waste" heat. If you're buying heat, that's not waste. Further, if you use your laptop in the place you'd be heating, it's heating that place. 100 watts of heat is 100 watts of heat no matter what steps it goes through between source and heat.
Dan, ask your physics friend where that waste energy goes if not into heat. If he finds a way to show that heat being gained or lost, a Nobel Prize is in his future. And he's absolutely and completely wrong about a transformer drawing the same regardless of load. There will be a "fixed cost" of energy loss due to core losses, mechanical resonance (that lovely 50 or 60 hz hum that transformers have - which turns into heat eventually), and all that good stuff. It's either usable energy output, or waste heat. There is no other output path. I'd love to discuss this with you and/or your buddy over a few beers. Bar napkins and handwaving will be involved. I don't suppose you're in/near Milwaukee?
I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition...
Sigh...nobody ever does...
As long as I can turn it off, or turn it off for certain types of sites, that's fine. I'm not sure what this does for me that, say, Netcraft Toolbar doesn't. Is the data stream encrypted back to Opera? Can others intercept that and use it as a spam-target tool somehow? All questions I'd want answered before I'd use it.
Let's take the case of a 40 watt light bulb and a 40 watt space heater. The 40 watt bulb consumes electricity and produces light and heat.
Right. And what happens to those photons when they hit something? They turn back into...heat. 100% of the energy is maintained; if you've found otherwise the Nobel Prize folks would like to talk to you. More to this point, a wall wart is going to produce power to whatever it's powering, and it's going to produce heat. Directly. I'm paying for energy for heat, and I'm getting heat. That few watts of heat will make my furnace need to run for a few seconds less. A heating appliance doesn't know why it's got resistance and makes heat when electricity is applied to it, it's just following the laws of physics.
Now let me address your exact question, because it doesn't have the benefit of the light to simplify the example. Let's say that we have a 20 watt transformer hooked onto nothing; it's just an open circuit with a transformer slapped in there. The transformer produces heat for several reasons, including the resistance it produces in the circuit. On the other hand, a space heater doesn't have nearly as many non-heat losses as a transformer. (It doesn't have magnetostriction, mechanical losses, or hysteresis losses for instance.)
Close, but wrong. All of these losses, at the end point, turn into heat. The laminations in the transformer vibrate, making noise, which ends up as heat. The magnetic losses cause heating of the cores, causing heat. That heat continues to leak out. 100W of power in, 100W of power out, one way or another. Heat, is heat.
Look at in terms of a datacenter. The heat load, and the power requirements, are amazingly well matched. Why do you suppose that is?
I don't see how saving two hundred dollars a year by using electricity rather than propane, affects which electrical source produces heat most efficiently.
All electrical sources produce heat at a 100% efficiency. There is no such thing as "waste heat" from an electrical device, when you're paying for heat anyway. A space heater is no different from a light bulb is no different than a transformer in that the energy, at end point, manifests itself as heat. I suppose you could talk about leakage (the shade is open so 1/100th of that light bulb's light output is escaping and not heating the interior) but let's keep a sense of perspective. That wall wart being warm, makes my furnace run calculably less.
While your devices may produce waste heat, they don't produce it as efficiently as something designed for the purpose. A space heater would save you more money. Suggesting that devices continue to be designed in a deliberately inefficient matter strikes me as somewhat foolish.
Perhaps you can explain to me how, say 20 watts, is any different being turned into heat by a dedicated heating device vs, say, a transformer. Hint: you can't. It isn't. Sure, in the summertime parasitic loads actually matter, but during heating season, that's just that much less propane I have to buy. I've done the math and I'm saving a couple hundred bucks a year by switching from propane to electric heat based on the on-peak vs. off-peak electric rates. Not a ton of money but significant. A wall wart makes a few watts worth of heat just as well as any other few watts of electrical heat.
You know, for about half of the year, I'm paying for heat in one form or another. This "wasted energy" helps to heat my house during that part of the year. Additionally, I pay less for electricity during nights and weekends - it's cheaper than propane to heat with electricity during those hours. So, an "inefficient" electrical device, actually _saves_ me money if I'm paying to heat the house.
The cleanest alternative seems to come from a little known company that created a compressed air motor. They use it in conjuction with a standard engine for starting the vehicle Few pollution whatsoever, you need a little bit of electricity to run a compressor, and get almost 2000 km in one go... here : http://www.theaircar.com/
Ah yes, the air car. One of the all-time classic recurring vaporware schemes. These guys have been claiming, for about a decade, to be having it ready "real soon now", yet they won't let anyone actually inspect their prototype, and the math doesn't work. Other than that, yuppers, it's sure a _clean_ alternative. Just not so good if you want to actually buy one.
How can so many of you people get this stuff so wrong? It's not like what I'm describing is a deep arcane mystery. It's obvious to anyone who spends more than two minutes considering how evolution works.
Might I suggest that, while your point has some merits, the astonishingly arrogant tone you have chosen to use to take in delivering it isn't likely to be an effective teaching technique?
I've read the August 6th memo, or at least the parts of it we're allowed to see, and you have to admit that it comes down to "This guy who attacked us before still doesn't like us". And "Strike in US"? That's hardly specific enough to be actionable, don't you think?
Further, if you really think _any_ President's "vacation" is much different than a day in the oval office, I fear you're delusional.
A "warning" that says "this specific bad guy is determined to strike somehow, maybe involving airplanes, somewhere in the US, at some vague undefined time in the future" isn't something you can act on. Best it can do is get a "Yeah, no kidding, we know he doesn't like us" response. All the monday-morning quarterbacking in the world doesn't change the fact that there wasn't jack shiat in there that anyone could work with.
(Finally) Someone is doing something.
That's a bit insulting, don't you think, to those of us who _have_ been "doing something" with this topic for years or decades? Also, I don't know or care what your personal politics are, but Clinton's record for actually doing things based on factual scientific data isn't exactly a strong one.
While I'd love for this to turn into something useful, with Clinton heading it up, I can only see it turning into a "not so hidden agenda" for one political purpose or another. I'd love to be wrong on that first impression, but based on his performace on other issues (pretending 7 arrests was "millions of criminals stopped" in the case of the Brady Bill stuff, for instance), I just don't see it going anywhere useful.
Oh, but at least someone is "doing something". Sometimes, someone doing nothing, is preferable to them getting in, muddying up the waters, and doing the _wrong thing_. Time will tell.
I sell a fair amount of stuff on eBay, buy nearly as much. I would pay extra to list items with an option to allow bidding to continue as long as people were bidding on the item. I would also be more likely to bid on items with that option. An auction should be about how much the marketplace wants to pay for an item, not about who has the fastest sniping software.
Cue the inevitable "you don't understand!!!" responses. Yes, I do. You snipe because you want to get in as low of a bid as possible, and deny me the chance to counter your lowball offer.
Back before 9/11, I flew into London from Denmark, and was leaving the country the next day for the states. Hadn't bought much so customs wouldn't be a problem. But, they have a "red line", and a "green line" - red for "I have something to declare (and pay tax on)". The red line was empty aside from a few people watching and profiling those walking through. The green line was forever long, and I was tired. So, off I went, up the red line, right to the counter. "Well, I have this sweater that I bought in Norway for (number) Norwegian Kronur, which works out to about (number) Pounds. I'm leaving for the US tomorrow, not sure if I need to pay something on this or not?"
I pretty much already knew the answer (no as long as you're not planning to sell it here), but by going up through the shorter line and having a plausible reason for doing so, I was able to save an hour. So yeah, you can get some time savings doing this sort of thing. Not sure I'd go for the body cavity search route to save waiting in the ID line, though. I guess that depends on if it's a business trip, or a recreational one.
It's been about 5 years so my experience isn't current, but unless they've suddenly become highly trained, clueful, and motivated, I can't see this being any more successful than the other failed outsourcing to India attempts. The software developers over there working on our projects ignored requirements, standards, and schedules. They were hard to communicate with (culturally _and_ linguistically), and timing was of course always delayed because they're not working when you need to talk to them.
So, of course, they're cheaper, and people will go with them. Eventually they'll either fail, or get smart, and need someone local. By then they'll hire whoever India is outsourcing _their_ stuff to. There's whole continents we haven't started to do this with, yet.
No idea why this was modded "funny", the guy makes a very insightful point. Without basic protections, we'd be free at the whim of the government. When the people have those basic protections however, the government governs at the whim of the people. The difference is profound.
Note to those who don't get it: you don't get it. That's fine, but you're wrong.
I wrote:You need to price out a system for a home and find out just how prohibitive it is. Oh, and how often do you get hail in your area? What's the attrition rate of panels going to be just from weather, let alone electrical and other mechanical failures?
to which you responded
You've fallen in the same trap I mentioned in the previous line. I was referring to solar thermal energy (solar heating, aka passive solar).
Sorry, but you're the one making assumptions now. I designed and built my house. Southern exposure with a glass-ceilinged room, as a sunroom. This passive solar energy is absorbed by a 16'x24'x12" concrete slab, with hydronic tubing in it. It's a textbook case of passive solar. In the ten years since I built the house, hail has taken out windows _twice_, despite them being properly rated for the application I'm using them for. Once it even penetrated and caused water damage, the other time merely was a window replacement and many hours of labor. If that had been billable time (if I hadn't done it) it would have been quite expensive indeed. Does it work? Sure, but you need to have an effective way to mitigate those same solar gains during the summer. Shades aren't effective. Vines aren't effective. The deciduous trees I've planted south of the house, will never be tall enough to block summer sun from coming in. So I need to dump excess heat from that area with an exhaust fan, completely negating the whole purpose of having a super-insulated house. Plywood covers on the outside may be an answer, but I'm on a windy hill. What I'm saying is that the logistics aren't as simple as the theory, as they never are. PV is even more of a non-starter, yes. But passive isn't the no-brainer that it would seem to be; also, it's hardly an option for city dwellers or anyone who can't design a house to take advantage of the geography.
So you have no issues with Iran building new reactors?
How is pointing out that nuclear power is environmentally sound, in any way whatsoever related to a terrorist country building breeder reactors?
Nor have we solved the waste storage problem - nuclear power produces large amounts of low grade waste (such as contaminated overalls) which we just keep shuffling around.
Yeah, let's talk about that. Somewhere, in some storage facility, are dozens or hundreds of "contaminated overalls" worn by me when I was doing hotlab work. Also cardboard boxes, styrofoam, and all the other packaging materials. The sources in question were about equivalent to your smoke detector (you do have smoke detectors, right? I mean, let's worry about real risks here) but the NRC's rules state that if I'm handling radioactive sources, even though they're solids, encapsulated in epoxy, encased in plastic, shipped in lead surrounded by styrofoam in a cardboard box, all that stuff gets put into "low grade waste" storage. How much radiation is in there? NDA. No Detectable Activity. Zero. Zip. Same as your sandwich you brought for lunch. None at all.
Nuclear energy currently contributes somewhere around 10% of the total world energy, so the waste problem will get 10 times worse if we use nuclear wholesale. Considering the current handling of things like electronics waste I have no confidence that the situation will improve.
Another pointless leap of non-logic there. "used electronics are thrown in the landfill so spent nuke fuel will be too?" Give me a break. Arguments and illogic like yours are the exact reason why your point of view is impossible to take seriously.
Considering that half or more of domestic energy use is to make low grade thermal energy (space heating and DHW), and that people have demonstrated hundreds of practical and effective solar heating systems (for example, the Barra design in italy, sunspace and solar closet designs, clear attic collectors with radiant ceiling storage), I wonder why a rational environmentalist isn't promoting those instead?
I've got 30 acres, on a sunny hill. Great site for wind, and for solar. Not doing either. Why? Because the usual size of wind generator for home use is 400 watts. 400 WATTS. I can't spend 5 or 10 grand on a setup that will produce, at peak, on a good day, a mere 400 watts. Solar doesn't have the payback either. These are great technologies if you're forced to be off-grid and have no option. If you have the option, it's cheaper, sometimes by a factor of 10, to buy from the grid. I've done the math. I'm motivated to do the right thing. I can't justify doing it, even to myself, even including the coolness factor.
One reason perhaps is that solar energy is constantly hijacked by PV enthusiasts who go off talking about PV arrays in the desert and other giant projects. These cost lots of money, are dubious economically and move the problem out into some location requiring massive infrastructure investment.
You need to price out a system for a home and find out just how prohibitive it is. Oh, and how often do you get hail in your area? What's the attrition rate of panels going to be just from weather, let alone electrical and other mechanical failures?
I'm not bothering to comment on the rest, as it's all the same stuff that shows you haven't done your homework regarding prices and payback times, which if you're lucky will be several _decades_.
Chernobyl
You _do_ know that the USA'n design has no resemblance whatsoever to the open-pile primitive disaster-waiting-to-happen that Chernobyl was, right? If you don't, please educate yourself before you make your decision firm in your own mind. It's an entirely different thing; comparing today's technology to their primitive one is like comparing today's top of the line desktop PCs to the ENIAC.
So why are you planting trees again?
Two words for you, AC, "Tree farm".
I've been an environmentalist all my life; planted close to 10,000 trees, maintain habitat for the critters, that sort of thing. No small expense or effort. I consider myself to be more of an environmentalist than some bozo with a "save the (whatever)" pin that only gets angry about things and doesn't actually do anything to improve the situation.
That said, I'm puzzled at the attitude the submitter apparently has, in that he seems to be describing environmentalists, and pro-nuke-power people, as two separate groups. To me, nuke is an obvious choice. If you need no other explaination, see how the anti-nuke people resort to blatant lies and unrealistic comparisons in order to get people to _feel_ that it's bad. The pro-nuke side goes with science so people _think_ about, and _understand_ the issues.
My point, I guess, is that this isn't surprising or new, some guy who left Greenpeace when it diverted from his POV is just saying what so many other environmentalists have known for decades. I'm not sure this is news, other than that whoever this guy is, is saying it.
News flash: Sudo, like many other tools, has a configuration file, which allows you to customize it's behavior. Details will be provided as they become available.
C'mon, anyone with even a passing involvement with sudo has looked at the sudoers file. You can configure pretty much any group or role based permission you want; if you can describe it as a logical statement, you can do it in sudo. Yes, out of the box, you can sudo to a shell (or to an app which has a shell escape).
I've actually created my own internet outages with my (now sold) backhoe, twice. Neither of them the obvious. I had a 802.11b feed from a neighbor's house, 1.1 miles away (my hill to his tower). Worked great, almost always. Finally figured out that if I parked my backhoe at --> that end of the back yard, it was enough into the fresnel zone of the wireless link that things got wodgy.
Next time I created backhoe fade, was again in an unexpected way. I'd been trenching along the driveway, after dutifully and carefully marking the underground phone line to the house (that the brain-trust from the phone company decided to run next to my driveway, despite instructions not to). I carefully and successfully avoided the cable, no worries there. Then, when reaching juuuuuuust a bit too far over, I got the backhoe stuck in the muddy ditch along the road. Apparently, in the effort to get un-stuck, I pressed down on the cable, which then stretched over a rock in the trench and broke.
The phone company (eventually) got out there and tried to say I dug it up. I showed 'em exactly what happened - yes, I'd been digging. Yes, the wire was marked. Yes, none of my digging was along the wire's path (all true). The cable had clear marks of a pull over a rock, not a cut from a hoe. Shear vs. tension, obvious from inspection.
Phone company guy didn't want any part of explainations until I (a) bet him that I could dig right (made an X) here and find a big rock with a sharp edge "that you people left in the trench of this improperly installed wire", and (b) pointed out that if he's gonna dig the trench, he's standing in poison ivy while doing so, and I could just go get the backhoe and make it easier for all involved.
He called his boss, explained the high points of the situation (including the poison ivy, which inexplicably a guy in his job didn't recognize without help), and they fixed the cable no charge. But, I bet I'm one of those statistcs in the article.
Hartford WI ftw
FTW?
FTW Face the World
FTW Families Than Work
FTW Feel The Wind
FTW Fight to Win
FTW Florida Tax Watch
FTW Flying Training Wing
FTW For the Win
FTW Forever Two Wheels
FTW Forget The World (polite form)
FTW Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien (Vienna, Austria)
FTW Fort Wainwright, Alaska
FTW Fort Worth Meacham Field (Airport Code)
FTW Free the Weed
FTW Free the Whales
FTW Free Trade Wharf
FTW Future Technology Workshop
Which FTW do you mean, please?
Since when does free enterprise business offerings of service have anything to do with politics?
That said, I've got wireless broadband to my house, better-than-T1 speeds, for $24.95 a month. (you clicky linky) I'm in a rural area, and a local ISP has gone to providing broadband wireless using Motorola's Canopy system. It doesn't suck.
Why can't this be done elsewhere? It can. Get a feed, get a spot on a tower, and start selling your service. For a rural, "last miles" solution, it's ideal, might be good for city use too, I dunno (check Motorola's site, I suppose). Broadband options are out there, and it has nothing to do with politics.