Trying to improve the efficiency of ICE engines is good as a short-term solution, but eventually we will need to wean ourselves out of petroleum. I know the subject has been hammered onto every slashdotter's heads, but I think BEVs are the way to go.
I wonder if this method could be potentially useful for refrigeration. Attach a laser and a mirror to anything you want to cool, and it could act like a heat sink.
Maybe if the heat produced by the laser is less than the amount of cooling that it results in, it would be different than any kind of current refrigeration, where the net effect is always more heat. If this were possible, then refrigeration could happen in an enclosed space. Though somehow I think this proposition violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Totally agreed. The first thought that went through my mind when I saw this slashdot topic is that, chimpanzees have what I consider a barbaric social system. Males violently dominate other males for the right to reproduce, almost like a harem. The victorious ones also violently dominate the females, and have no qualms about rape. Maybe we can punish ourselves for certain way we hurt them, but it almost sounds like a double standard that they get a free pass for the way they hurt themselves.
Also, I wonder whether they would pass the law on a cousin of the chimpanzee (or other closely related species), the Bonobo. That ape hardly gets any press, and from what I understand, the major difference from the chimpanzee due to a completely different social structure.
Incidentally, I don't want to sound insensitive - one of the reasons why I'm a very strict vegetarian is because I'd like to minimize unnecessary suffering - but this law sounds pretty silly even to someone like me.
She's going to have tethers to keep her down. As a runner, I think it would be an interesting approximation of running.
While the impact against the treadmill could well be compared to gravity, I wonder whether the zero-gravity will make it harder for her heart to pump blood to her legs. I couldn't imagine running upside down.
Also, having run on the treadmill, I think a good approximation of running outside would be to set the incline to about 1.5%. Of course, that starts to disproportionately work out your quads as opposed to your hamstrings.
You've just hit the nail on the head, at least for my company. Here, it's the salesmen whose careers are more upwardly mobile, while us peon engineers sit at the bottom. It makes a lot of sense - they're good at spinning reality and selling themselves, regardless of the veracity of their managing ability. So because of personal appeal to their superiors, they tend to get promoted. (and upper management is always claiming that we're a meritocracy - yeah right!)
I have lots of misgivings about this, because in my particular company, the manager who's really great at sales, is good at pitching the product in untruthful ways. I suppose that might be good for our company, because he brings in business (sometimes unprofitably), but when he starts "selling" to us employees, we may initially be happy, but we become very unhappy, and later disenfranchised when we find out his pitch is really only bait and switch. And because he's not an engineer, he makes lots of stupid decisions. The morale of my company is now at an all-time low, and I'm about to start losing coworkers left and right.
I've become accustomed to distrusting salesmen. My opinion is that, to be a successful salesman, they really can't be 100% honest. Their goal is to do what is best for the company, which is not necessarily what is best for the customer. And from my experience, it's a personality thing - not something they can turn off and on. As a developer, you really can't sell your design to another developer (or the computer) if your design doesn't have merit. The developers that I know have always been more straightforward and honest than salesmen. And much more in touch with reality.
But I used to work for a solar photovoltaic system installer, and I was very well-versed with the prices for the common residential customer, at least in California, and I have somewhat kept up to date with what's going on in the industry.
Back in 2003, a 2.5 kw AC system cost about $10k to $12k to install, depending on various conditions, such the type of roof. Prices usually scale proportionally as you increase the size of the system. Nowadays, I hear the figure is about $16k to $18k.
Why the increase of the prices?
One of the biggest factors is that, at least in California, the CEC rebate (for customers of most power utility companies) was $4.50 per watt back around ~2002, going down by twenty to fifty cents every six months. It used to cover more than half the cost of any installation up to 30 kW.
These days it's $2.60 per watt. While solar panel prices have gone down a bit, it no longer covers more than half the cost.
Other factors resulting in higher prices: the value of the dollar has gone down in the last couple years, and since many major photovoltaic panel manufacturers (ie: sharp, kyocera) and inverter manufacturers(Sunny Boy) are foreign, that results in higher prices here. Also, due to worldwide demand of silicon in the last couple years, there has actually been a shortage of panels for the company I used to work with. (though I don't expect the shortage to last forever)
Beyond that, the labor part of the installation usually significantly adds to the bill -- my guess, probably around $5k for a typical residential installation of 2.5kW, depending on the contractor.
That's not to discourage people from getting a solar photovoltaic system installed. Technology and mass production will always result in a downward force on prices. Even if solar photovoltaic systems increase in price, it's really the cost per watt from the local energy utility company in comparison to the cost of solar installations that customers consider. And energy utility prices in California are some of the highest in the country, and mostly continue to increase.
I've been a vegan for five years now, so I feel like it would be appropriate for someone like me to respond to your post. Although this is just from my own perspective - I'd be you'd get wide varieties of differing opinions from other vegans.
In addition to the numerous and complicated reasons for being vegan, the key reason that answers your question about my lifestyle choice is the assembly-line style raising/killing of animals. How about well-treated livestock, you ask? Besides the reasons unrelated to my empathy to livestock, I really can't be guaranteed that the animal I was eating was sufficiently well-treated before the kill. For me to eat meat/consume dairy/use leather, I'd have to raise the animal myself and kill it. It's more personal that way. Just like how, in nature, every carnivorous act is personal.
they actually performed an experiment with plants growing next to a boombox. The ones growing to hip-hop did the best...
that'd probably be a fairly cheap way to destress the plants over there. bring a bunch of hip-hop cd's to mars and play them 24-7 for the martian plants to under.:)
What if someone links to a site, and later on that site puts up something illegal? Does this mean that I have to monitor my links daily to see whether they're suddenly doing something illegal?
Alternatively, can I get my "referers" in trouble now by posting up mp3s? Ridiculous.
personally, I have about 130 now in permanent storage, give or take a few. sometimes it comes and it goes, but sometimes I manage to hit 150 on some lucky days. I think I memorized it when I was about 15-16, and at the time I had about 500 memorized.
I was really bored in high school. I also memorized morse code, which I complete forgot (but rememorized again very recently)
my wife is currently (and halfheartedly) trying to memorize it. She's closing in on 50. We play stupid games like alternating between us while reciting it.
what's challenging though, is trying to recite it in a different, non-native language. That's hard.
I memorized about 500 back in high school when I was really bored. It's beena about ten years since, and I retained about 130 of it in permanent memory storage.
I've actually never tried it before, but I've read about a tool called triangle boy that utilizes third-party freedom-of-speech advocate servers that allow you to redirect url requests.
I recall a company called safeweb develops this tool. I heard about this about three years ago though, so I'm not sure whether it still works.
one thing that I've never really understood is, for whom does time slow down for? Since everything is relative, I am a bit confused.
My confusion lies in this example: we have object B accelerating away from object A, and as I understand it, time slows down for object A. I then extend this example and have an object C taking off from object B in the direction of object A.
I would understand that object C is in fact deccelerating, and time should speed up as a result. However, if object A never existed, then I wouldn't consider C deccelerating, but accelerating, in which case time should slow down for C, and not speed up. And what if A was already moving? It seems that to know whether time should increase or decrease requires prior knowledge about the object you're moving away from. (and this example is only operating 2 dimensionally -- I wonder if, in this example, if you introduce the third dimension, you could get into a recursive contradiction based on my misunderstanding how it all works)
I suppose my confusion is centered mainly on the idea that accelerating/decceleration is based on a frame of reference (ie: is C accelerating from B or is C deccelerating from A?), given that everything is relative and there is no center of the universe.
I actually worked closely with Stan Zdonik and Mike Stonebraker on the research project Aurora which preceded Streambase, before I graduated Brown.
the reason why Streambase is considered a database is because it uses traditional database querying mechanisms to process the data. It isn't meant to store data for the purposes of later retrieval; it only needs to store "windows" of streams that may be required for certain queries such as join.
Consider it a traditional database turned upside down. Whereas traditional databases process queries in realtime and store data, a streaming database processes data in realtime and stores the queries.
this technology is useless unless it is affordable. much of the time, space isn't an issue -- it's cost per watt. If this new technology is prohibitively expensive than no customer is going to be interested in it.
along those lines, current solar modules being installed on residential rooftops usually have an efficiency of about
14%, not the 5% that the article claims.
A javascript-based web utility that allows you to calculate your annual electric bill savings with a rooftop solar electric photovoltaic depending on your electricity provider.
if you live in California, you're pretty lucky -- there are statewide rebates that used to pay for more than half of a solar electric photovoltaic system -- but are decreasing by 20 cents/watt every half year. If you're lucky, and you live in the sunny desert, your solar photovoltaic system can pay for itself in about 8 years, and after that it's doing nothing but saving cold hard cash in your bank.
as a Taiwanese-American, I can appreciate the olive branch that you're holding out to us, and trust that you're being sincere.
However, when your government holds out that similar olive branch with its right hand and holds a gun with its left hand, it's very hard for it to engender trust among us Taiwanese.
Back in the 60's when the Kuomingtang was a brutal totalitarian government like yours is, my parents dreamed of unification with a seemingly people-oriented government of the PRC. Now that my relatives in Taiwan are free and elect their own government, they have a lot to lose by unification. And because of the threats and the sporadic missile lobbing, my parents absolutely hate the mainland.
if the PRC was truly democratic and our freedoms were absolutely, unconditionally guaranteed, I'd have no objection to unification and to calling you a brother.
robin
one correction - EV1's were never sold. They were only leased, and when the leases ended, their owners were forced (under huge duress) to give them up. They were "pulled" from the market because they are a threat to an industry that would rather see us buy their hydrogen with (currently questionable) technology when their oil runs out.
The only EVs that were ever sold were Toyota RAV4 EVs, and they were gobbled up pretty quickly. I'd challenge you to find a Toyota dealership that still has them around -- if you could, I could find plenty of customers willing to buy them!!
it's a shame that the oil industry was able to put a lid on electric vehicle production by making them pretty much impossible to get.
the charging infrastructure is already there, (as opposed to hydrogen)
the range is already greater than hydrogen (~120 miles/charge on NmH, imagine what it'd be like with Lithium ion??)
maintenance is minimal -- no oil changes, no transmission to worry about
No oily messiness on your driveway
no explosions
no pollution
single-person access to carpool lanes
no contribution to the oil industry. (which is why the laws mandating EVs in California are gone)
immunity to rising gas prices
cost per mile in a EV is a small fraction of the cost per mile in an equivalent gas car
it's just a different paradigm for charging up that people aren't used to -- since the daily, overnight chargeup is more than sufficient for your daily commute, you actually save more time charging up than going to a gas station for your weekly gas up.
By the way, I work with a couple of people who drive toyota Rav4 EVs with solar electric photovoltaic systems. Seems the right way to do things -- they're short-circuiting the use of non-renewable, polluting solar energy stored up from dead dinosaur flesh and instead, deriving it directly from the sun!
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to improve the efficiency of ICE engines is good as a short-term solution, but eventually we will need to wean ourselves out of petroleum. I know the subject has been hammered onto every slashdotter's heads, but I think BEVs are the way to go.
I wonder if this method could be potentially useful for refrigeration. Attach a laser and a mirror to anything you want to cool, and it could act like a heat sink.
Maybe if the heat produced by the laser is less than the amount of cooling that it results in, it would be different than any kind of current refrigeration, where the net effect is always more heat. If this were possible, then refrigeration could happen in an enclosed space. Though somehow I think this proposition violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Totally agreed. The first thought that went through my mind when I saw this slashdot topic is that, chimpanzees have what I consider a barbaric social system. Males violently dominate other males for the right to reproduce, almost like a harem. The victorious ones also violently dominate the females, and have no qualms about rape. Maybe we can punish ourselves for certain way we hurt them, but it almost sounds like a double standard that they get a free pass for the way they hurt themselves.
Also, I wonder whether they would pass the law on a cousin of the chimpanzee (or other closely related species), the Bonobo. That ape hardly gets any press, and from what I understand, the major difference from the chimpanzee due to a completely different social structure.
Incidentally, I don't want to sound insensitive - one of the reasons why I'm a very strict vegetarian is because I'd like to minimize unnecessary suffering - but this law sounds pretty silly even to someone like me.
She's going to have tethers to keep her down. As a runner, I think it would be an interesting approximation of running.
While the impact against the treadmill could well be compared to gravity, I wonder whether the zero-gravity will make it harder for her heart to pump blood to her legs. I couldn't imagine running upside down.
Also, having run on the treadmill, I think a good approximation of running outside would be to set the incline to about 1.5%. Of course, that starts to disproportionately work out your quads as opposed to your hamstrings.
The DJ of my favorite internet radio stations, Radio Paradise, has a very informative blog concerning this issue.
Also, if you're interested in taking action, check out Save Net Radio.
You've just hit the nail on the head, at least for my company. Here, it's the salesmen whose careers are more upwardly mobile, while us peon engineers sit at the bottom. It makes a lot of sense - they're good at spinning reality and selling themselves, regardless of the veracity of their managing ability. So because of personal appeal to their superiors, they tend to get promoted. (and upper management is always claiming that we're a meritocracy - yeah right!)
I have lots of misgivings about this, because in my particular company, the manager who's really great at sales, is good at pitching the product in untruthful ways. I suppose that might be good for our company, because he brings in business (sometimes unprofitably), but when he starts "selling" to us employees, we may initially be happy, but we become very unhappy, and later disenfranchised when we find out his pitch is really only bait and switch. And because he's not an engineer, he makes lots of stupid decisions. The morale of my company is now at an all-time low, and I'm about to start losing coworkers left and right.
I've become accustomed to distrusting salesmen. My opinion is that, to be a successful salesman, they really can't be 100% honest. Their goal is to do what is best for the company, which is not necessarily what is best for the customer. And from my experience, it's a personality thing - not something they can turn off and on. As a developer, you really can't sell your design to another developer (or the computer) if your design doesn't have merit. The developers that I know have always been more straightforward and honest than salesmen. And much more in touch with reality.
But I used to work for a solar photovoltaic system installer, and I was very well-versed with the prices for the common residential customer, at least in California, and I have somewhat kept up to date with what's going on in the industry.
Back in 2003, a 2.5 kw AC system cost about $10k to $12k to install, depending on various conditions, such the type of roof. Prices usually scale proportionally as you increase the size of the system. Nowadays, I hear the figure is about $16k to $18k.
Why the increase of the prices?
One of the biggest factors is that, at least in California, the CEC rebate (for customers of most power utility companies) was $4.50 per watt back around ~2002, going down by twenty to fifty cents every six months. It used to cover more than half the cost of any installation up to 30 kW.
These days it's $2.60 per watt. While solar panel prices have gone down a bit, it no longer covers more than half the cost.
Other factors resulting in higher prices: the value of the dollar has gone down in the last couple years, and since many major photovoltaic panel manufacturers (ie: sharp, kyocera) and inverter manufacturers(Sunny Boy) are foreign, that results in higher prices here. Also, due to worldwide demand of silicon in the last couple years, there has actually been a shortage of panels for the company I used to work with. (though I don't expect the shortage to last forever)
Beyond that, the labor part of the installation usually significantly adds to the bill -- my guess, probably around $5k for a typical residential installation of 2.5kW, depending on the contractor.
That's not to discourage people from getting a solar photovoltaic system installed. Technology and mass production will always result in a downward force on prices. Even if solar photovoltaic systems increase in price, it's really the cost per watt from the local energy utility company in comparison to the cost of solar installations that customers consider. And energy utility prices in California are some of the highest in the country, and mostly continue to increase.
I've been a vegan for five years now, so I feel like it would be appropriate for someone like me to respond to your post. Although this is just from my own perspective - I'd be you'd get wide varieties of differing opinions from other vegans.
In addition to the numerous and complicated reasons for being vegan, the key reason that answers your question about my lifestyle choice is the assembly-line style raising/killing of animals. How about well-treated livestock, you ask? Besides the reasons unrelated to my empathy to livestock, I really can't be guaranteed that the animal I was eating was sufficiently well-treated before the kill. For me to eat meat/consume dairy/use leather, I'd have to raise the animal myself and kill it. It's more personal that way. Just like how, in nature, every carnivorous act is personal.
It's possible to get a free viewer for all the MSOffice apps from Microsoft's web site, just like what Acrobat provides for their PDF files.
they actually performed an experiment with plants growing next to a boombox. The ones growing to hip-hop did the best ...
that'd probably be a fairly cheap way to destress the plants over there. bring a bunch of hip-hop cd's to mars and play them 24-7 for the martian plants to under. :)
What if someone links to a site, and later on that site puts up something illegal? Does this mean that I have to monitor my links daily to see whether they're suddenly doing something illegal?
Alternatively, can I get my "referers" in trouble now by posting up mp3s? Ridiculous.
high five, in being in the over 100 club.
personally, I have about 130 now in permanent storage, give or take a few. sometimes it comes and it goes, but sometimes I manage to hit 150 on some lucky days. I think I memorized it when I was about 15-16, and at the time I had about 500 memorized.
I was really bored in high school. I also memorized morse code, which I complete forgot (but rememorized again very recently)
my wife is currently (and halfheartedly) trying to memorize it. She's closing in on 50. We play stupid games like alternating between us while reciting it.
what's challenging though, is trying to recite it in a different, non-native language. That's hard.
I memorized about 500 back in high school when I was really bored. It's beena about ten years since, and I retained about 130 of it in permanent memory storage.
my sequences are:
3.1415926535 8979 3638 46264 3383 279 502 884 197 169 3663 7510 582 097 49445 923 0878 164 0628620 8998 628 034825 34 2117 0679 8214 808 651 3282 3066 470 93844 609 5505 8223 172 535940 8128481117 450 284 ....
it's interesting to see how different people break it up in different sequences when they memorized it.
characters. But you can always post images of characters that can't be easily checked by a computer.
I've actually never tried it before, but I've read about a tool called triangle boy that utilizes third-party freedom-of-speech advocate servers that allow you to redirect url requests. I recall a company called safeweb develops this tool. I heard about this about three years ago though, so I'm not sure whether it still works.
Comparing apples and oranges.
The last dollar that I earn is worth a LOT more to me than the last dollar the Bill Gates earns.
one thing that I've never really understood is, for whom does time slow down for? Since everything is relative, I am a bit confused.
My confusion lies in this example: we have object B accelerating away from object A, and as I understand it, time slows down for object A. I then extend this example and have an object C taking off from object B in the direction of object A.
I would understand that object C is in fact deccelerating, and time should speed up as a result. However, if object A never existed, then I wouldn't consider C deccelerating, but accelerating, in which case time should slow down for C, and not speed up. And what if A was already moving? It seems that to know whether time should increase or decrease requires prior knowledge about the object you're moving away from. (and this example is only operating 2 dimensionally -- I wonder if, in this example, if you introduce the third dimension, you could get into a recursive contradiction based on my misunderstanding how it all works)
I suppose my confusion is centered mainly on the idea that accelerating/decceleration is based on a frame of reference (ie: is C accelerating from B or is C deccelerating from A?), given that everything is relative and there is no center of the universe.
I actually worked closely with Stan Zdonik and Mike Stonebraker on the research project Aurora which preceded Streambase, before I graduated Brown.
the reason why Streambase is considered a database is because it uses traditional database querying mechanisms to process the data. It isn't meant to store data for the purposes of later retrieval; it only needs to store "windows" of streams that may be required for certain queries such as join.
Consider it a traditional database turned upside down. Whereas traditional databases process queries in realtime and store data, a streaming database processes data in realtime and stores the queries.
you're right.
this technology is useless unless it is affordable. much of the time, space isn't an issue -- it's cost per watt. If this new technology is prohibitively expensive than no customer is going to be interested in it.
along those lines, current solar modules being installed on residential rooftops usually have an efficiency of about 14%, not the 5% that the article claims.
check this out.
http://eesolar.com/economics.php
A javascript-based web utility that allows you to calculate your annual electric bill savings with a rooftop solar electric photovoltaic depending on your electricity provider.
if you live in California, you're pretty lucky -- there are statewide rebates that used to pay for more than half of a solar electric photovoltaic system -- but are decreasing by 20 cents/watt every half year. If you're lucky, and you live in the sunny desert, your solar photovoltaic system can pay for itself in about 8 years, and after that it's doing nothing but saving cold hard cash in your bank.
as a Taiwanese-American, I can appreciate the olive branch that you're holding out to us, and trust that you're being sincere. However, when your government holds out that similar olive branch with its right hand and holds a gun with its left hand, it's very hard for it to engender trust among us Taiwanese. Back in the 60's when the Kuomingtang was a brutal totalitarian government like yours is, my parents dreamed of unification with a seemingly people-oriented government of the PRC. Now that my relatives in Taiwan are free and elect their own government, they have a lot to lose by unification. And because of the threats and the sporadic missile lobbing, my parents absolutely hate the mainland. if the PRC was truly democratic and our freedoms were absolutely, unconditionally guaranteed, I'd have no objection to unification and to calling you a brother. robin
one correction - EV1's were never sold. They were only leased, and when the leases ended, their owners were forced (under huge duress) to give them up. They were "pulled" from the market because they are a threat to an industry that would rather see us buy their hydrogen with (currently questionable) technology when their oil runs out.
The only EVs that were ever sold were Toyota RAV4 EVs, and they were gobbled up pretty quickly. I'd challenge you to find a Toyota dealership that still has them around -- if you could, I could find plenty of customers willing to buy them!!
it's a shame that the oil industry was able to put a lid on electric vehicle production by making them pretty much impossible to get.
- the charging infrastructure is already there, (as opposed to hydrogen)
- the range is already greater than hydrogen (~120 miles/charge on NmH, imagine what it'd be like with Lithium ion??)
- maintenance is minimal -- no oil changes, no transmission to worry about
- No oily messiness on your driveway
- no explosions
- no pollution
- single-person access to carpool lanes
- no contribution to the oil industry. (which is why the laws mandating EVs in California are gone)
- immunity to rising gas prices
- cost per mile in a EV is a small fraction of the cost per mile in an equivalent gas car
it's just a different paradigm for charging up that people aren't used to -- since the daily, overnight chargeup is more than sufficient for your daily commute, you actually save more time charging up than going to a gas station for your weekly gas up.http://www.darelldd.com/ev/
By the way, I work with a couple of people who drive toyota Rav4 EVs with solar electric photovoltaic systems. Seems the right way to do things -- they're short-circuiting the use of non-renewable, polluting solar energy stored up from dead dinosaur flesh and instead, deriving it directly from the sun!