Just checked Germany. 0.8 kWh / person. I'm still consuming less energy than your country's average. So, again, fuck your self-righteous ignorance (as well as your government's insane anti-nuclear policies; way to let France carry your skittish asses).
"We you ranting instead of gogleing or wikipeding?"
Way to miss the point, trolldoll.
"Regardign yuor enxt post: who cares what a home is in power? It is a completely common reference unit in power generation."
It's "common" in the sense that it's constantly used; it's not "common" in the sense that it has no fixed value, and is therefore, fucking useless for comparison purposes. It's a way for technology companies to avoid putting their product up for real comparison.
"Asuming you are from teh USA... it does not matter anyway how much power one home uses, as YOU and YOUR home will need 3 to 4 times of it anyway."
You're an idiot... but that's ok. How about I illustrate:
My home contains myself and my wife. We live in about 800 sq ft, in a temperate climate that doesn't require as much heating and cooling as, say, someone in the far north or south, with mostly low power electronics and energy saver appliances and well maintained weathering. We live modestly and consume approximately 1.1 kWe averaged over the year (for 0.55 kWe/person), whereas the average for a US citizen is 1.6 kWe. France's average is, by comparison, 0.9 kWe/person. So fuck your snarky, self-righteous ass in that respect; I'm operating pretty damned efficiently.
Our home consumes ~1.1kWe. What does a family of four consume? You could/guess/ that it would consume 4 times the national average - 6.4 kWe - but you'd be way off the mark; individuals are responsible for some energy consumption, but most of it is due to lighting and climate control. Climate control based consumption can be correlated loosely to the square footage of the house, but is much more related to weathering control.
Anyway, point is that the term "homes" is ridiculously variable, not well agreed upon, and would change constantly with new technologies and new power sinks. It's fundamentally ignorant to pretend it's a "standard" in any sense.
800 kW is the device's peak output - it's a limit. What's the actual capacity factor? How much energy do they expect to produce in a year?
Research costs don't really tell me anything about production costs. £4 - £5.1 million buys me what? Aquamarine Power signed a £4 million contract for how much expected output?
And tell me, do you think I didn't search, read wikipedia, or otherwise do due diligence? For all your bluster, you didn't tell me anything here that wasn't in TFA - or the press release from which it was birthed.
"If you want to get engineering data, I suggest you contact the manufacturer"
That's kind of my point about reporting. Inhabitat should have contacted the manufacturer, gotten useful numbers, and published them. That's just responsible journalism - finding out the real value of a technology, not just acting as the marketing arm for the company producing it.
I will, eventually, find all this stuff out. On my own. By contacting the manufacturer. My point was that I am not a member of the press, and therefore, I shouldn't have to go through all this rigamorole every time I want to actually compare apples to apples for a new energy tech.
If you use natural uranium as your fuel, the significant amount of U-238 that is present can breed to Pu-239, Pu-240, and Pu-241.
If you use Thorium as your fuel, your bred fissile is U-233.
In a LCTR (throium breeder that has a fast reactor core of spent fuel), you breed plutonium, but you also fission it in real time. (The designed reactor geometry is such that one fission (producing 2.7 neutrons on average) gives 1 to the chain reaction, 1 to plutonium breeding, and.7 to U-233 breeding and material absorption.)
That's not actually accurate, but OP's comment was inaccurate anyway.
LFTR is one idea: You fission U-233 such that one neutron continues the chain reaction and another is absorbed by a thorium blanket; the resultant U-233 is extracted and placed in the fissile stream. You do this in a thermal spectrum, using a fluoride salt as carrier solvent for everything as well as being part of the moderator system.
Unfortunately, this won't work for spent LWR fuel; they've already given up all the goodies they can handle in the thermal spectrum. This is why you hear all the talk about fast reactors; much of the fissile load in spent LWR fuel is flavor of Pu, which only perform well in a fast neutron spectrum. Further, other trans-actinides only fissile at all with fast neutrons. Fluoride is too moderating, so that can't be used as a carrier salt.
What's used instead is a LCTR (Liquid Chloride Reactor). Works pretty much the same way, except (a) you have a much bigger core (fast neutrons go further), (b) the fissile stream is fueled ONLY by spent LWR fuel, (c) you shunt off the U-233 for seed material for LFTRs. This also puts you in the fortunate position that your fuel salt is already easily processed as a liquid, in a form that is commonly used for what's called "Pyroprocessing" anyway.
While you could, in theory, harvest the plutonium that occurs in this cycle, there are serious engineering challenges to that task. The expense alone to do it frequently enough to avoid significant amounts of Pu-240 and Pu-241 would be astronomical.
As a former nuclear engineer, I have to disagree. Current nuclear power plant designs are clean and safe. They emit fewer pollutants than you, personally, as a living human being do, and will likely kill fewer people.
Mind, I have misgivings the earlier plants; most of them have been retrofitted with lessons-learned-based safety features, rather than having them designed in.
Still, your statement is one of ignorance. You might want to learn about how nuclear energy works before declaring it unclean and unsafe.
Oh, so the combustion of coal no longer produced CO2? The mining of coal no longer fouls rivers or flattens mountaintops? Coal's lifecycle no longer/fucking kills people?/
Fuck your marketing. Coal is still filthy and blood-stained.
Yes, because that's cost-effective and efficient. Even the design phase proved to be a failure. The only benefit of going to space is modest gains via escaping atmospheric absorption - which are then lost by inefficiently converting that light to electricity, then inefficiently converting that electricity into a maser (while losing energy to positional maintenance). This is not to mention the cost of flinging the damned thing into space.
Space solar is a spherical cow. Any engineer can tell you.
"You seem to have forgotten about Chernobyl. Two workers died in the Tokaimura incident too."
Chernobyl was the result of people mucking about with an inherently unsafe reactor design; Tokaimura was an experimental reactor. Neither of these have anything to do with modern APWRs.
"You should also read up on solar thermal collectors."
Best one is 125 MW, it takes up a ridiculous amount of land to get that, and it cost us nearly $25/W to build. Nah, they're shit.
The financial and technical reality is that nuclear is cheap when compared to anything but coal, and safe when compared to virtually anything else.
"Things don't get anymore true because you repeat them over and over."
Take your own advice, then do some research before opening your mouth again.
"It is simply not true that coal (for example) is worse than nuclear."
A 1GW Coal plant belches about half of what TMI and Fukushima excreted in terms of long-lasting radionucleides, in the form of thorium and uranium/every year/. Oh, and that climate-changing stuff as well as SOx, NOx, and particulates. But hey, those don't count.
"How's that called. Nuclear strawman? Hahaha."
Ok. Tell me when you have a solar plant or wind farm that produces a gigawatt and doesn't consume insane amounts of land, and doesn't/require/ a carbon-belching natural gas plant to provide power back-up. Then we can talk about why asking to abandon nuclear is the realm of magical fantasy land.
I can't stand this shit: "new power generation technology; it's 250% more powerful than the last one!" Yeah, that's fucking awesome - except that you're not really telling us anything. It can take 800kW? Great. What do you expect the mean and standard deviation of that output to be like? How much do you expect one of these units to cost? What, precisely, do you have to quantify this technology's value to the human race other than vagaries about green energy? We've got renewables - wind, solar pv, solar therm, hydro, geo - why is this one special?
This is not a put-down of the technology; this is a put-down of shitty publish-the-press-release technology reporting. Give us fucking numbers.
The PS/2 port has been around since 1987 - over 20 years - and while it's at end of life, even in 2012 there will be those little PS/2 to USB adapters.
Why? Because it was a popular choice for keyboards, that's why. When people buy a new box, they never seem to want to buy a new keyboard.
So now USB is becoming the defacto standard for KB/M systems. PS/2 is creaking past it's lifespan. As such, a USB hard drive should do the trick. Preferably, stored in vacuum.
"if you haven't seen al gores 2005 movie as to why we need to reduce carbon footprints, then you should know we're already above the peak level that nature over the past 650,000 years has ever had (300 PPM CO2) to today's 385 PPM CO2..."
I've not seen Gore's documentary. I've, instead, actually done research on the matter. (and I'd like to know what in my original post implied that I'm not trying to reduce humanity's carbon footprint).
You quoted me out of context; the bit right after your quote was "to conserve it and minimize our use of non-renewables".
That implies reduction of carbon footprint. Conservation is reducing our overall footprint, but is trumped by efficiency.
For example, the best development in the environment in the past few years was CFL light bulbs. They generate comparatively little production pollution, cradle to grave, and save a hell of a lot of energy. This was an efficiency gain, not a conservation gain.
It's about getting products and solutions to market that reduce all of our footprints.
Mind you, they're not mutually exclusive. It's more of a sides of the coin thing. Efficiency is a better goal in my mind, simply because it's easier to have people use a new technology than it is to force a change in lifestyle - but maybe you like telling people how to live. Hell, I've had the urge to piss on a Hummer or two lately.
Still, at an industrial level, conservation is also about treading lightly; Algae may be an awesome silver bullet as you say - but to concentrate all of our dependance on a single technology is just stupid.
I prefer renewables, and algae fits right in there - but I prefer not to lay all of my dependancies in one place.
It's best to use a broad based approach, with renewable consumption at the top of the heap. With good planning and a bit of luck, we can get a negative balance of petroleum consumption versus natural and artificial carbon sequestration.
The problem to surmount, of course, is that creating a flexible network like this implies that we rely on electricity as our energy transport medium. I know this appears to go directly against the 'all eggs in one basket' concept I was talking about earlier, but electricity is not one basket; it's the eggs. The basket(s) are the various thousands of batteries, capacitors, wires, power stations, etc that spider-web this country.
Ok, say you have capacity. Whatever capacity is, it should be at least three times average demand (per milspec). So, nominally, demand = 0.33*capacity. Supply should be the average output of non-reliable sources over a year's span, and should be twice capacity.
Each source type has two flags: reliable, and fueled; and one valuation: emission output.
Reliable indicates that the source system, under normal circumstances, can be relied upon to provide continuous power. Conversely, non-reliable means that the power output in normal circumstances is continuously variant.
Fueled sources rely on a physical, human-provided external fuel source to provide power, such as refined fissionables or petroleum distillates.
Sort sources so that: Non-fueled sources are preferred to fueled sources. Past that, reliable sources are preferred to unreliable. Lastly, we should prefer nonpolluting sources over polluting.
Acting on fuzzy logic in an integrated power generation network: cSupply = current supply cDemand = current demand dvDemand = std deviation of demand in last 24 hours avDemand = average demand in last 24 hours
activate_next_source() - activates next source and returns its average output over last 24 hours of operation deactivate_previous source() - as read, returns current output from that source activate_all_sources - as read.
while (cSupply-avDemand<dvDemand*2) cSupply+=activate_next_source();
while (cSupply>avDemand*3) cSupply-=deactivate_previous_source();
if (cDemand>avDemand*3) activate_all_sources();
This would 1) give preference to hydro, wind and solar for generation, while maintaining the use of nuclear, natural gas, and finally coal infrastructure for handling outages.
The point of conservation is not to remove the use of petrol, it's to conserve it and minimize our use of non-renewables. We simply don't have the tech to efficiently get all the energy dumped into us by the sun - but we can get as much as we can and only use non-renewables as a back-up plan.
Maille, the word is... and while we're on the subject, there's also coin, scale, plate, and chain types of mailles, depending on their component units.
Plate maille is generally made up of interlocking plates, usually no larger than a hand each. Scale is similar, but no larger than a tablespoon. Coin maille is the smallest of this type, with parts no larger than a quarter. Chain and ring maille are also just a question of component size, with the exception that ring maille is often large rings held together with chain links.
And there's your quick anachronistic armor history lesson. Can we talk about transparent aluminum now?
Given: 4 x 1.25MW turbines; 1,300 individuals Known: Average output, in temperate zone conditions, of a turbine is 33%; Household continuous maximum power use is, on average 150W.
Inferences: 11.8% of the turbines' output, on average, is used by the populous; one turbine can reliably supply 2,750 individuals; a single 1.8kW turbine with a 25% efficient storage/retrieval system is sufficient to power the average temperate zone household; (the best consumer turbine I've seen does 1.1kW, and it's a helical type, so no efficiency loss due to finding the wind... so not far off).
Overall, wind seems to me a better option than, say, solar, but only if each and every person has one. Meanwhile, you're right; all energy we have, petrol included, is a residual of solar input. There's no shame in using that, so long as we don't scrape the barrel as quickly as we do.
An exception here is nuclear; while there's a near-endless supply of reactable material here, if you assume eventual adoption of thorium and spent uranium burning technologies in the future, near-endless is not the same as endless.
Mind you, if we start processing magma, I'm certain we'll find a lot more of the stuff; uranium doesn't float you know, and there's bound to be quite a bit of it in the layers beneath the mantle - but that's a bit like saying we're going to start processing solar corona for fusion fuel at this stage of technology - a bit of a far-reaching idea, and definitely not something in the forseeable future.
Anyway, yeah. Nuclear fissionables aren't generated by solar radiation, so eventually they'll come to an end - even if it's far off. Thus, they should be treated much the same as you say petroleum should be: the infrastructure should remain maintained and operational, to compensate for outages and low production times when necessary.
He made a crucial mistake: If you're going to build something you KNOW Blizzard won't like, the best way to ensure that it continues to exist and improve after they've stopped you developing it is for it to be OSS. This paying for shit is bollocks - especially when we're talking about a game bot.
But fine; he can charge whatever he wants - and have every cent taken away when Blizzard's lawyers play their trump card: Violation of Terms of Service.
In short: The article headline and synopsis is false, probably misunderstood by the joker that submitted it. From a licensing standpoint, NDISWrapper is GPL'd code. However, it loads non-GPL code, and should thus be treated as such by the kernel - disallowing GPLONLY symbol and module calls. Reading farther down the thread, it seems that this isn't a real serious problem, as the workflow module has already been reimplemented, and either a relaxation of the USB module's restrictions, or a userspace side workaround would solve it quickly.
I've seen this argument before, verbatim. It's bunk, of course.
The contents of a CD, DVD, or book have been released to the public already; they're copyrighted materials. The contents of my bank account or computer, are more akin to trade secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, so a few firkins per fortnight?
Just checked Germany. 0.8 kWh / person. I'm still consuming less energy than your country's average. So, again, fuck your self-righteous ignorance (as well as your government's insane anti-nuclear policies; way to let France carry your skittish asses).
"We you ranting instead of gogleing or wikipeding?"
... it does not matter anyway how much power one home uses, as YOU and YOUR home will need 3 to 4 times of it anyway."
/guess/ that it would consume 4 times the national average - 6.4 kWe - but you'd be way off the mark; individuals are responsible for some energy consumption, but most of it is due to lighting and climate control. Climate control based consumption can be correlated loosely to the square footage of the house, but is much more related to weathering control.
Way to miss the point, trolldoll.
"Regardign yuor enxt post: who cares what a home is in power? It is a completely common reference unit in power generation."
It's "common" in the sense that it's constantly used; it's not "common" in the sense that it has no fixed value, and is therefore, fucking useless for comparison purposes. It's a way for technology companies to avoid putting their product up for real comparison.
"Asuming you are from teh USA
You're an idiot... but that's ok. How about I illustrate:
My home contains myself and my wife. We live in about 800 sq ft, in a temperate climate that doesn't require as much heating and cooling as, say, someone in the far north or south, with mostly low power electronics and energy saver appliances and well maintained weathering. We live modestly and consume approximately 1.1 kWe averaged over the year (for 0.55 kWe/person), whereas the average for a US citizen is 1.6 kWe. France's average is, by comparison, 0.9 kWe/person. So fuck your snarky, self-righteous ass in that respect; I'm operating pretty damned efficiently.
Our home consumes ~1.1kWe. What does a family of four consume? You could
Anyway, point is that the term "homes" is ridiculously variable, not well agreed upon, and would change constantly with new technologies and new power sinks. It's fundamentally ignorant to pretend it's a "standard" in any sense.
No; only when an information source doesn't do their fucking job with regards to an important subject.
800 kW is the device's peak output - it's a limit. What's the actual capacity factor? How much energy do they expect to produce in a year?
Research costs don't really tell me anything about production costs. £4 - £5.1 million buys me what? Aquamarine Power signed a £4 million contract for how much expected output?
And tell me, do you think I didn't search, read wikipedia, or otherwise do due diligence? For all your bluster, you didn't tell me anything here that wasn't in TFA - or the press release from which it was birthed.
"If you want to get engineering data, I suggest you contact the manufacturer"
That's kind of my point about reporting. Inhabitat should have contacted the manufacturer, gotten useful numbers, and published them. That's just responsible journalism - finding out the real value of a technology, not just acting as the marketing arm for the company producing it.
I will, eventually, find all this stuff out. On my own. By contacting the manufacturer. My point was that I am not a member of the press, and therefore, I shouldn't have to go through all this rigamorole every time I want to actually compare apples to apples for a new energy tech.
What's a "home" in terms of power?
If you use natural uranium as your fuel, the significant amount of U-238 that is present can breed to Pu-239, Pu-240, and Pu-241.
.7 to U-233 breeding and material absorption.)
If you use Thorium as your fuel, your bred fissile is U-233.
In a LCTR (throium breeder that has a fast reactor core of spent fuel), you breed plutonium, but you also fission it in real time. (The designed reactor geometry is such that one fission (producing 2.7 neutrons on average) gives 1 to the chain reaction, 1 to plutonium breeding, and
That's not actually accurate, but OP's comment was inaccurate anyway.
LFTR is one idea: You fission U-233 such that one neutron continues the chain reaction and another is absorbed by a thorium blanket; the resultant U-233 is extracted and placed in the fissile stream. You do this in a thermal spectrum, using a fluoride salt as carrier solvent for everything as well as being part of the moderator system.
Unfortunately, this won't work for spent LWR fuel; they've already given up all the goodies they can handle in the thermal spectrum. This is why you hear all the talk about fast reactors; much of the fissile load in spent LWR fuel is flavor of Pu, which only perform well in a fast neutron spectrum. Further, other trans-actinides only fissile at all with fast neutrons. Fluoride is too moderating, so that can't be used as a carrier salt.
What's used instead is a LCTR (Liquid Chloride Reactor). Works pretty much the same way, except (a) you have a much bigger core (fast neutrons go further), (b) the fissile stream is fueled ONLY by spent LWR fuel, (c) you shunt off the U-233 for seed material for LFTRs. This also puts you in the fortunate position that your fuel salt is already easily processed as a liquid, in a form that is commonly used for what's called "Pyroprocessing" anyway.
While you could, in theory, harvest the plutonium that occurs in this cycle, there are serious engineering challenges to that task. The expense alone to do it frequently enough to avoid significant amounts of Pu-240 and Pu-241 would be astronomical.
The thing that bothers me about the Yucca NIMBY argument is that Yucca Mountain is not in ANYONES back yard. No one for TENS OF MILES lives there.
"Nuclear will never be clean, nor safe."
As a former nuclear engineer, I have to disagree. Current nuclear power plant designs are clean and safe. They emit fewer pollutants than you, personally, as a living human being do, and will likely kill fewer people.
Mind, I have misgivings the earlier plants; most of them have been retrofitted with lessons-learned-based safety features, rather than having them designed in.
Still, your statement is one of ignorance. You might want to learn about how nuclear energy works before declaring it unclean and unsafe.
Oh, so the combustion of coal no longer produced CO2? The mining of coal no longer fouls rivers or flattens mountaintops? Coal's lifecycle no longer /fucking kills people?/
Fuck your marketing. Coal is still filthy and blood-stained.
"We could do space solar today too."
Yes, because that's cost-effective and efficient. Even the design phase proved to be a failure. The only benefit of going to space is modest gains via escaping atmospheric absorption - which are then lost by inefficiently converting that light to electricity, then inefficiently converting that electricity into a maser (while losing energy to positional maintenance). This is not to mention the cost of flinging the damned thing into space.
Space solar is a spherical cow. Any engineer can tell you.
"You seem to have forgotten about Chernobyl. Two workers died in the Tokaimura incident too."
Chernobyl was the result of people mucking about with an inherently unsafe reactor design; Tokaimura was an experimental reactor. Neither of these have anything to do with modern APWRs.
"You should also read up on solar thermal collectors."
Best one is 125 MW, it takes up a ridiculous amount of land to get that, and it cost us nearly $25/W to build. Nah, they're shit.
"I am with those who insist that the main technical problem with nuclear energy is a sound regulatory framework. I don't see it."
Then you're fucking blind, mate. Nuclear energy is the most well-regulated technology the developed world engages in.
"financial/technical reality on the other hand."
/every year/. Oh, and that climate-changing stuff as well as SOx, NOx, and particulates. But hey, those don't count.
/require/ a carbon-belching natural gas plant to provide power back-up. Then we can talk about why asking to abandon nuclear is the realm of magical fantasy land.
The financial and technical reality is that nuclear is cheap when compared to anything but coal, and safe when compared to virtually anything else.
"Things don't get anymore true because you repeat them over and over."
Take your own advice, then do some research before opening your mouth again.
"It is simply not true that coal (for example) is worse than nuclear."
A 1GW Coal plant belches about half of what TMI and Fukushima excreted in terms of long-lasting radionucleides, in the form of thorium and uranium
"How's that called. Nuclear strawman? Hahaha."
Ok. Tell me when you have a solar plant or wind farm that produces a gigawatt and doesn't consume insane amounts of land, and doesn't
I can't stand this shit: "new power generation technology; it's 250% more powerful than the last one!" Yeah, that's fucking awesome - except that you're not really telling us anything. It can take 800kW? Great. What do you expect the mean and standard deviation of that output to be like? How much do you expect one of these units to cost? What, precisely, do you have to quantify this technology's value to the human race other than vagaries about green energy? We've got renewables - wind, solar pv, solar therm, hydro, geo - why is this one special?
This is not a put-down of the technology; this is a put-down of shitty publish-the-press-release technology reporting. Give us fucking numbers.
USB. I'll explain.
The PS/2 port has been around since 1987 - over 20 years - and while it's at end of life, even in 2012 there will be those little PS/2 to USB adapters.
Why? Because it was a popular choice for keyboards, that's why. When people buy a new box, they never seem to want to buy a new keyboard.
So now USB is becoming the defacto standard for KB/M systems. PS/2 is creaking past it's lifespan. As such, a USB hard drive should do the trick. Preferably, stored in vacuum.
"if you haven't seen al gores 2005 movie as to why we need to reduce carbon footprints, then you should know we're already above the peak level that nature over the past 650,000 years has ever had (300 PPM CO2) to today's 385 PPM CO2..."
I've not seen Gore's documentary. I've, instead, actually done research on the matter. (and I'd like to know what in my original post implied that I'm not trying to reduce humanity's carbon footprint).
You quoted me out of context; the bit right after your quote was "to conserve it and minimize our use of non-renewables".
That implies reduction of carbon footprint. Conservation is reducing our overall footprint, but is trumped by efficiency.
For example, the best development in the environment in the past few years was CFL light bulbs. They generate comparatively little production pollution, cradle to grave, and save a hell of a lot of energy. This was an efficiency gain, not a conservation gain.
It's about getting products and solutions to market that reduce all of our footprints.
Mind you, they're not mutually exclusive. It's more of a sides of the coin thing. Efficiency is a better goal in my mind, simply because it's easier to have people use a new technology than it is to force a change in lifestyle - but maybe you like telling people how to live. Hell, I've had the urge to piss on a Hummer or two lately.
Still, at an industrial level, conservation is also about treading lightly; Algae may be an awesome silver bullet as you say - but to concentrate all of our dependance on a single technology is just stupid.
I prefer renewables, and algae fits right in there - but I prefer not to lay all of my dependancies in one place.
It's best to use a broad based approach, with renewable consumption at the top of the heap. With good planning and a bit of luck, we can get a negative balance of petroleum consumption versus natural and artificial carbon sequestration.
The problem to surmount, of course, is that creating a flexible network like this implies that we rely on electricity as our energy transport medium. I know this appears to go directly against the 'all eggs in one basket' concept I was talking about earlier, but electricity is not one basket; it's the eggs. The basket(s) are the various thousands of batteries, capacitors, wires, power stations, etc that spider-web this country.
You're limiting yourself.
Ok, say you have capacity. Whatever capacity is, it should be at least three times average demand (per milspec). So, nominally, demand = 0.33*capacity. Supply should be the average output of non-reliable sources over a year's span, and should be twice capacity.
Each source type has two flags: reliable, and fueled; and one valuation: emission output.
Reliable indicates that the source system, under normal circumstances, can be relied upon to provide continuous power. Conversely, non-reliable means that the power output in normal circumstances is continuously variant.
Fueled sources rely on a physical, human-provided external fuel source to provide power, such as refined fissionables or petroleum distillates.
Sort sources so that:
Non-fueled sources are preferred to fueled sources. Past that, reliable sources are preferred to unreliable. Lastly, we should prefer nonpolluting sources over polluting.
Acting on fuzzy logic in an integrated power generation network:
cSupply = current supply
cDemand = current demand
dvDemand = std deviation of demand in last 24 hours
avDemand = average demand in last 24 hours
activate_next_source() - activates next source and returns its average output over last 24 hours of operation
deactivate_previous source() - as read, returns current output from that source
activate_all_sources - as read.
while (cSupply-avDemand<dvDemand*2) cSupply+=activate_next_source();
while (cSupply>avDemand*3) cSupply-=deactivate_previous_source();
if (cDemand>avDemand*3)
activate_all_sources();
This would 1) give preference to hydro, wind and solar for generation, while maintaining the use of nuclear, natural gas, and finally coal infrastructure for handling outages.
The point of conservation is not to remove the use of petrol, it's to conserve it and minimize our use of non-renewables. We simply don't have the tech to efficiently get all the energy dumped into us by the sun - but we can get as much as we can and only use non-renewables as a back-up plan.
Maille, the word is... and while we're on the subject, there's also coin, scale, plate, and chain types of mailles, depending on their component units.
Plate maille is generally made up of interlocking plates, usually no larger than a hand each. Scale is similar, but no larger than a tablespoon. Coin maille is the smallest of this type, with parts no larger than a quarter. Chain and ring maille are also just a question of component size, with the exception that ring maille is often large rings held together with chain links.
And there's your quick anachronistic armor history lesson. Can we talk about transparent aluminum now?
Given: 4 x 1.25MW turbines; 1,300 individuals
Known: Average output, in temperate zone conditions, of a turbine is 33%; Household continuous maximum power use is, on average 150W.
Inferences: 11.8% of the turbines' output, on average, is used by the populous; one turbine can reliably supply 2,750 individuals; a single 1.8kW turbine with a 25% efficient storage/retrieval system is sufficient to power the average temperate zone household; (the best consumer turbine I've seen does 1.1kW, and it's a helical type, so no efficiency loss due to finding the wind... so not far off).
Overall, wind seems to me a better option than, say, solar, but only if each and every person has one. Meanwhile, you're right; all energy we have, petrol included, is a residual of solar input. There's no shame in using that, so long as we don't scrape the barrel as quickly as we do.
An exception here is nuclear; while there's a near-endless supply of reactable material here, if you assume eventual adoption of thorium and spent uranium burning technologies in the future, near-endless is not the same as endless.
Mind you, if we start processing magma, I'm certain we'll find a lot more of the stuff; uranium doesn't float you know, and there's bound to be quite a bit of it in the layers beneath the mantle - but that's a bit like saying we're going to start processing solar corona for fusion fuel at this stage of technology - a bit of a far-reaching idea, and definitely not something in the forseeable future.
Anyway, yeah. Nuclear fissionables aren't generated by solar radiation, so eventually they'll come to an end - even if it's far off. Thus, they should be treated much the same as you say petroleum should be: the infrastructure should remain maintained and operational, to compensate for outages and low production times when necessary.
He made a crucial mistake: If you're going to build something you KNOW Blizzard won't like, the best way to ensure that it continues to exist and improve after they've stopped you developing it is for it to be OSS. This paying for shit is bollocks - especially when we're talking about a game bot.
But fine; he can charge whatever he wants - and have every cent taken away when Blizzard's lawyers play their trump card: Violation of Terms of Service.
In short: The article headline and synopsis is false, probably misunderstood by the joker that submitted it. From a licensing standpoint, NDISWrapper is GPL'd code. However, it loads non-GPL code, and should thus be treated as such by the kernel - disallowing GPLONLY symbol and module calls. Reading farther down the thread, it seems that this isn't a real serious problem, as the workflow module has already been reimplemented, and either a relaxation of the USB module's restrictions, or a userspace side workaround would solve it quickly.
In short, much ado about nothing. Move along.
Hm. There's quite a number of musicians that would disagree with you. And authors.
Just because you're a greedy bitch shill doesn't mean the rest of the human race is.
How about this, RIAA? You agree to stop lobbying for longer copyrights and against shorter ones, and we'll start buying your shit again.
I've seen this argument before, verbatim. It's bunk, of course.
The contents of a CD, DVD, or book have been released to the public already; they're copyrighted materials. The contents of my bank account or computer, are more akin to trade secrets.
In short, you fail at analogy.