It is called on demand hot water, tank style heaters need to go.
That depends entirely on what the local energy mix is like. If you are drowning in nuclear power (few places are, these days), anything which can heat up at night and be usefully warm during the day is great.
Also, hot water storage is necessary if you use a solar water heater, but those are definitely on the way out. Most new installations are solar electric + heat pump.
* wave (Why do you think our planet even has a moon in the first place!)
Tidal energy just isn't there at the scale required. Sorry. Real wave energy has the required energy, but I just can't see it happening -- the energy per area is too low, you would need to make the harvesters extremely cheap per area.
Geothermal is being tried again and again, but drilling is expensive and in most areas the risk of not hitting sufficient amounts of hot water is high.
It IS a limitation of the base technology. The only way to rapidly respond to load changes in coal or nuclear (or wind) is to throw away some power. You cannot build a modern efficient plant based on heating water which will ramp up and down rapidly. Load following for nuclear is even worse, because once you have built the reactor, the power is pretty much free. If you load follow, you save a little bit of fuel, but you still have to pay back the same loans, now with less income.
And yes, if you don't care about efficiency and cost is not an issue, then you can load-follow anyway. France does it for their nuclear power stations, to the great benefit of the rest of Europe at night (but not rapidly, just hour-by-hour).
MRI's have massive potential for recapturing the helium. Right now they just vent it to the air when it evaporates. If it was valuable, it would be captured in a bag and recycled.
You can transport electricity with HVDC for thousands of km while losing less than 10%. Getting the last 10% back would obviously be nice, but it will not be a revolution.
It is almost certainly possible to build a seawall to protect Bangladesh. The country doesn't have the resources to do it. It would change the environment rather dramatically, but people are more important.
Indeed, there is absolutely no excuse for not going with play micro-USB like every other manufacturer. How they get away with it in the EU I have no idea.
I'm sure that Canada will be eager to welcome a hundred million immigrants from Bangladesh then. After all, Canada caused it to happen and benefited, whereas Bangladesh didn't cause it but did get harmed.
Not that you will understand what I am saying, if you were capable of reasoned discussion you would not link to such a ridiculous site in your signature.
It is not analogous. With proprietary software, you pay but you do not get to distribute whether you modify or not. With the GPL, you can distribute for whatever fee you want without having to give back anything at all. You simply pass on whatever you received from upstream and charge whatever you want. It is only if you share something different than what you received from upstream that it gets complicated, but that is very rarely allowed in proprietary licenses anyway.
The GPL is just a temporary measure to give Free Software a chance to survive until copyright on software is abolished. Once that happens, people can try to make Free Software proprietary all they want without any legal problems.
The easy way around that is probably to use a phosphor and filter which lowers the emission of red light, and then have a separate red diode for the data transmission. The downside is that it will make some reds look odd. With infinite resources the transmission and the filter could be made almost arbitrarily narrow-band, and that would solve the problem.
You can probably get away with only modulating 1/10th of the light though, at some cost to bandwidth. The other 9/10th will then be provided by the usual phosphor system, and that should make colour distortion practically imperceptible.
You keep arguing that you are fixing Florida. I have from the very start agreed with you: You are fixing Florida. Stop kicking that dead horse.
Also stop saying you agree when you do nothing of the sort. I am saying "don't have rules which care whether there is a tie or not", you say "I agree, the problem is that there are no rules for when it is a tie".
I think I have made my point clear enough that everyone who might stumble upon this discussion will understand it. Since I cannot make you understand it, there is no point for me in continuing.
The only reason it would have been easier is because that particular election WAS a tie. You're solving Florida and instead creating court battles in other places where there were none before.
The true solution is to have a well-defined procedure and follow it whether there is a tie or not. Then there is nothing to discuss.
You are consistently refusing to acknowledge that the current fights over whether a candidate received 50.0001% of the votes will be replaced by fights over whether a candidate received 52.0001% of the votes. You CANNOT define an undisputed standard for when an election is a tie. It will end up in courts, just like today.
What I want is recognition by law that an election might have an ambiguous result.
You can't do anything sensible with that information, except count again. Since any place with halfway sane people count at least twice already, that doesn't help much. Do you have any other useful proposal for what to do if an election had an ambiguous result?
Answers like "flip a coin" or "do a run-off" don't work, because that just means a fight over whether the result really was ambiguous. So what do you propose which is harmless enough that people will go along with it without a fight, yet effective enough to make voting better?
Vote selling is a non-problem if the buyer cannot be offered reasonable proof. If you know someone well enough that you know they can be trusted to vote the way you pay them, you probably have considerable input into who they vote for simply by debating them.
As to coercion, anyone powerful enough to do that on a large scale tends to be somewhat immune to prosecution.
Define the margin of error to be 2.0000% exactly. Now imagine that counting ends up with a result that is at 1.99%, i.e. the margin of error comes into play and a coin is flipped (or whatever happens). Do you recount then, to see if you get the magical 2.0000% and don't have to flip coins?
Voting by mail is not as secure against people trying to sell their vote. There are ways to mitigate the problem, and in civilized societies that won't happen anyway. A voting system should try to handle less-than-civilized times though, because it is important that democracy survives them.
You're just moving the problem. That means people will be fighting over whether a particular election is within the margin of error or not. You would need to keep recounting until you're sure of that...
If their ideas are so crazy, those ideas will be rejected and the legislation just will not pass. If the legislation is important enough, the opposition will help get it passed, with some concessions to them.
First past the post just teaches the politicians that they don't have to listen to the opposition, and that means their ideas are seldom tested in proper debate with people who disagree. The result is stupid and ineffective legislation.
Human population grows at 1% a year and falling. If we cannot make food production 1% more effective every year, we deserve to go extinct.
Obviously exponential growth in food production won't last forever, but luckily it doesn't have to. If trends continue, it only has to handle less than a doubling in total, which is trivial.
Slashdot Mirror
It is called on demand hot water, tank style heaters need to go.
That depends entirely on what the local energy mix is like. If you are drowning in nuclear power (few places are, these days), anything which can heat up at night and be usefully warm during the day is great.
Also, hot water storage is necessary if you use a solar water heater, but those are definitely on the way out. Most new installations are solar electric + heat pump.
* wave (Why do you think our planet even has a moon in the first place!)
Tidal energy just isn't there at the scale required. Sorry. Real wave energy has the required energy, but I just can't see it happening -- the energy per area is too low, you would need to make the harvesters extremely cheap per area.
Geothermal is being tried again and again, but drilling is expensive and in most areas the risk of not hitting sufficient amounts of hot water is high.
Please let me pick more than one. If I only get to pick one, gas is the only thing that will work.
It IS a limitation of the base technology. The only way to rapidly respond to load changes in coal or nuclear (or wind) is to throw away some power. You cannot build a modern efficient plant based on heating water which will ramp up and down rapidly. Load following for nuclear is even worse, because once you have built the reactor, the power is pretty much free. If you load follow, you save a little bit of fuel, but you still have to pay back the same loans, now with less income.
And yes, if you don't care about efficiency and cost is not an issue, then you can load-follow anyway. France does it for their nuclear power stations, to the great benefit of the rest of Europe at night (but not rapidly, just hour-by-hour).
Sorry, I should have used the word "expensive" rather than "valuable".
MRI's have massive potential for recapturing the helium. Right now they just vent it to the air when it evaporates. If it was valuable, it would be captured in a bag and recycled.
You can transport electricity with HVDC for thousands of km while losing less than 10%. Getting the last 10% back would obviously be nice, but it will not be a revolution.
It is almost certainly possible to build a seawall to protect Bangladesh. The country doesn't have the resources to do it. It would change the environment rather dramatically, but people are more important.
Indeed, there is absolutely no excuse for not going with play micro-USB like every other manufacturer. How they get away with it in the EU I have no idea.
Who said anything about India?
I'm sure that Canada will be eager to welcome a hundred million immigrants from Bangladesh then. After all, Canada caused it to happen and benefited, whereas Bangladesh didn't cause it but did get harmed.
Not that you will understand what I am saying, if you were capable of reasoned discussion you would not link to such a ridiculous site in your signature.
It is not analogous. With proprietary software, you pay but you do not get to distribute whether you modify or not. With the GPL, you can distribute for whatever fee you want without having to give back anything at all. You simply pass on whatever you received from upstream and charge whatever you want. It is only if you share something different than what you received from upstream that it gets complicated, but that is very rarely allowed in proprietary licenses anyway.
The GPL is just a temporary measure to give Free Software a chance to survive until copyright on software is abolished. Once that happens, people can try to make Free Software proprietary all they want without any legal problems.
The easy way around that is probably to use a phosphor and filter which lowers the emission of red light, and then have a separate red diode for the data transmission. The downside is that it will make some reds look odd. With infinite resources the transmission and the filter could be made almost arbitrarily narrow-band, and that would solve the problem.
You can probably get away with only modulating 1/10th of the light though, at some cost to bandwidth. The other 9/10th will then be provided by the usual phosphor system, and that should make colour distortion practically imperceptible.
why not take the linux or some other open source code and sell it without giving back to the community?
That is perfectly legal and encouraged. Go ahead!
You keep arguing that you are fixing Florida. I have from the very start agreed with you: You are fixing Florida. Stop kicking that dead horse.
Also stop saying you agree when you do nothing of the sort. I am saying "don't have rules which care whether there is a tie or not", you say "I agree, the problem is that there are no rules for when it is a tie".
I think I have made my point clear enough that everyone who might stumble upon this discussion will understand it. Since I cannot make you understand it, there is no point for me in continuing.
The only reason it would have been easier is because that particular election WAS a tie. You're solving Florida and instead creating court battles in other places where there were none before.
The true solution is to have a well-defined procedure and follow it whether there is a tie or not. Then there is nothing to discuss.
You are consistently refusing to acknowledge that the current fights over whether a candidate received 50.0001% of the votes will be replaced by fights over whether a candidate received 52.0001% of the votes. You CANNOT define an undisputed standard for when an election is a tie. It will end up in courts, just like today.
What I want is recognition by law that an election might have an ambiguous result.
You can't do anything sensible with that information, except count again. Since any place with halfway sane people count at least twice already, that doesn't help much. Do you have any other useful proposal for what to do if an election had an ambiguous result?
Answers like "flip a coin" or "do a run-off" don't work, because that just means a fight over whether the result really was ambiguous. So what do you propose which is harmless enough that people will go along with it without a fight, yet effective enough to make voting better?
I have never before heard proportional representation being accused of being too effective. I guess there is a first time for everything.
Vote selling is a non-problem if the buyer cannot be offered reasonable proof. If you know someone well enough that you know they can be trusted to vote the way you pay them, you probably have considerable input into who they vote for simply by debating them.
As to coercion, anyone powerful enough to do that on a large scale tends to be somewhat immune to prosecution.
Define the margin of error to be 2.0000% exactly. Now imagine that counting ends up with a result that is at 1.99%, i.e. the margin of error comes into play and a coin is flipped (or whatever happens). Do you recount then, to see if you get the magical 2.0000% and don't have to flip coins?
You have just moved the problem.
Voting by mail is not as secure against people trying to sell their vote. There are ways to mitigate the problem, and in civilized societies that won't happen anyway. A voting system should try to handle less-than-civilized times though, because it is important that democracy survives them.
You're just moving the problem. That means people will be fighting over whether a particular election is within the margin of error or not. You would need to keep recounting until you're sure of that...
If their ideas are so crazy, those ideas will be rejected and the legislation just will not pass. If the legislation is important enough, the opposition will help get it passed, with some concessions to them.
First past the post just teaches the politicians that they don't have to listen to the opposition, and that means their ideas are seldom tested in proper debate with people who disagree. The result is stupid and ineffective legislation.
Human population grows at 1% a year and falling. If we cannot make food production 1% more effective every year, we deserve to go extinct.
Obviously exponential growth in food production won't last forever, but luckily it doesn't have to. If trends continue, it only has to handle less than a doubling in total, which is trivial.