There is a company called "solarstick" here: http://www.solarstik.com/education.php that has a complete setup with panels, tripod, and power converter. I think can probably buy just the components you need - like the power converter. They have very detailed user manuals available for download. You might get the theory you are looking for in the manual.
I have put in $12,000 and up commercial systems. I will caution you that the correct theory and implementation is bit complicated. There is a (1) panel, a (2) battery, and a (3) load. There are complex three-way, time-dependent interactions between all three components, none of which are linear, or even consistent (often). In between the three is a "controller," a little black box that does the tricky part. They don't cost much. Make sure you have a provision to measure current with a low-cost DVM and be sure to to put fuses everywhere. You can use low-cost in-line car-type fuse holders, which you can buy at a hardware store. Unprotected overloads in solar systems are ugly.
is in violation of law. Here is the law:
SECTION 3. (1) A person commits the crime of
(a) Furnishes to a minor a narrative account of sexual conduct;...This is a... Class C felony. Half the books on most high school reading lists provide "a narrative account of sexual conduct."
Suppose it is the 1920's. Some cars have locks on the doors, some don't. There are no license plates. Organized crime is stealing cars, using them to commit bank robberies, then abandoning the cars. This is a huge problem, with hundreds of robberies per day.
Might it be appropriate to pass a law requiring all cars to have locks on the doors?
IMHO, technology people are so adverse to gov't regulation (OK, with good reason) that they are not willing to recognize that SOME regulation can be a good thing in an economic community.
If all PCs were required to have anti-virus software, and all ISPs were required to verify this, or to disconnect the customer, I suggest that the number of bots out there might drop 90%.
Yes, I realize that neither of these requirements are perfect, and there will always be SPY v. SPY competition. But right now we have SPY v. (nothing). No competition for the bad guys at all, and so we have 100 billion spams a day.
This is capitalism at work! I don't understand the problem. Doesn't everyone know that capitalism is the world's best system of government and that we fought (and are fighting) wars to force everyone to this system. We should be celebrating--"Capitalism works in poor countries!"
Our politicians don't get any spam. (The ones, that is, who actually own a computer.) Cybercrime is not their problem. Let the market figure out a solution.
Humans are remarkably adaptable. As an engineer, I can tell you that increasing the "red delay" red is a very bad idea because drivers figure this out and simply run the red lights, knowing "its safe" for a couple of seconds. The big problem is that different cities, and different places within one city do not follow California's published standards for either length of yellow or red delay.
For example, in Palo Alto, CA, the City Council decided against the wishes of the Police Department (but with the wishes of residents)to lower the speed on one major 4-lane street (Embarcadero)to 25 MPH. This made it a "speed trap" by California court standards, and therefore prevents the police from using RADAR to issue speeding tickets.
The solution the city used was to shorten the yellow light to the POSTED speed, which is very much below the ACTUAL (critical) speed of traffic, allowing the police to issue tickets for running red lights, instead of speeding.
To avoid serious accidents, they also increased he red delay. However, local know this, and run the red lights all the time.
So now, that street is like wild West, with drivers adhering to different sets of rules.
Bottom line is that traffic standards are there for a reason, and people will adjust their behavior to whatever is put in front of them. If it were up to me, any red delay at all would be illegal.
At first it will be great...global, open, international. Then, just like most of the UN, like the "human rights commission," third world countries with their own, narrow, hidden, religious or political agenda will take over the Internet. You think its bad now...imagine having your domain pulled and Iran or Syria heading up the rotating position as head of your "review" committee. Nobody in a Western culture really wants the world to be democracy. One tenth the population, one half the wealth. Lets vote on that, shall we?
You want white noise, not random numbers. Or, maybe your tastes go to pink noise. Make yourself a UNIX filter to convert dev/random/ into white noise, and then, golly, you could probably get lots of IP and copyright protection. Plus, your speakers will thank you.
I have worked in this field for 30+ years. The idea as described has merit. It has been discussed extensively before. For example, one of the major arguments in favor of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), such as made by Xilinx and Actel, is that the designs are harder to steal.
Indeed, a large number of high value chips are commonly forged and sold in places like China and the Philippines where it is not economically feasible to enforce the law, even if the local law were favorable to the original owner. One might argue that much of the lost business would never have been paying customers (as is overwhelmingly true for stolen software), but companies such as CISCO have clearly lost billions of real sales in these countries.
There are well known technologies, such as SEM that can see the actual voltages at nodes inside an operating chip. The implementation would have to be quite tricky to block all known methods to read-out the "combination lock" of single a authorized chip. At one time we had to reverse engineer the "security" algorithm of one of the FPGA companies, for a valid internal business purpose. It took us only a few days to break their code and build hardware to not only replicate, but also add our own proprietary, automated chip serialization algorithm. The company was very unhappy with with us, but the whole idea that they had "secure" chips was joke.
I think a better system would be to implement a much more robust external key+challenge system like on the very best smart cards and security dongles, then buy and install a tiny key chip in final equipment, where the entire key is made by company whose only product was security.
I knew a guy who made these decades ago inside of "blue boxes" (don't ask). The electronics were potted along with a capsule of acid. Mechanical attempts to get to the ICs were just about guaranteed to dissolve everything. Even so, I think it would take today's hackers about a week to figure out a way around that system.
But just because chip counterfeiting is a constant game of spy v. spy doesn't mean that one side has to give up.
My neighbor and I each have a barn. I spent a pretty penny to make mine out of concrete, and I put in electric lights and have two fire extinguishers handy. My neighbor's barn is built out of wood and straw, and he still uses gas lamps. His hired help has drunken parties in the barn every weekend, and his son makes illegal fireworks in the barn for extra income.
Our health insurance company charges us the same premium, because it says we are the same age and live in the same county, so we have the same risk.
Well, last year my neighbor's barn burns down. The health insurance company wouldn't pay for a better barn, so he rebuilt it exactly the same as before, gas lamps, drunken parties and all.
I ran in my neighbor last week at a PTA meeting. I asked him if he was going to get any fire extinguishers. He said, naw, now that our health insurance premiums had tripled, he had no money left to pay for extinguishers. Beside, he said, the insurance company as going to pay for a new barn just the same whether he had extinguishers or not.
I called up my health insurance agent to see if I could get a better rate, seeing as I had extinguishers and concrete barn, and all. He said nope, and beside, the new law on barn privacy meant he wasn't even allowed to go out and inspect any barns any more.
I asked Hillary, and she said the solution was to force everybody to buy barn insurance, even if they didn't have a barn at all.
I'm thinkin' maybe I should just get out of the farmin' business altogether, but I was born with this here farm, so I'm not sure I can part with it that easily.
I paid $5.00 to paypal, including shipping. The little device fits on a keychain and generates a new six-digit code every 30 seconds. I simply add the six digits displayed to the end of my password when logging in. What is great, from the view of the web owners, is that there is no change to the visible user interface. It still looks like two fields: user-name and password.
This is genuine "two mode" authentication. Sure, if someone stole my computer AND my keychain the security is compromised. Or, if someone puts a gun to my head. But still, compared to current web login security, this system is a vast improvement.
All a bank has to do is say, "Here, this gizmo is free. And by the way, you have to use it if you want to do online banking."
Managing these devices isn't any harder than managing ATM cards. Which people lose every day, and its not that big a deal.
AT&T was so determined to get me off their old network, they finally made me an offer for a plan that was half the price of their cheapest new plan - including a 2-year contract and a free phone. Then, yesterday, I upgraded one of my kids from "pay as you go," to a copy of my dirt-cheap digital plan. They didn't want to do it, but finally agreed. So you see -- analog can be cheaper !
Well said! (I am the original poster.)
They don't let the Scientologists whitewash their pages, or the televangelist christians remove potentially negative facts about them either. Why should they remove factual information that Muslims don't like? I suggest that those change are indeed, "censorship," in that those groups object to certain facts. Whereas what I suggest is to respect a fundamental "sensitivity." It would change no facts to put off two small images to a third part site and provide links. People who wished to view the images could easily do so, and those who would be affended need merely not to follow the well-cautioned links.
Their mission is to host accurate information, not information that has been watered down and censored Perhaps "watered down" ever-so-slightly, but not censored. The trade-off is becoming and acceptable resource to another billion human beings.
they censor things they are required to censor by law Not quite. Porn is quite legal in the US. The choose to sensor porn in order to be taken seriously, and to maintain a good reputation within the student community.
Again, I don't see why they should. I respect your opinion. I simply wish to respectfully hold a different opinion.
Severely insulting one billion people is not the same thing as free speech. The US outlaws hate speech, and many western countries outlaw promotion of Nazi-ism, as examples. Wiki and its editors will now remove pornography, threats, copyright violations and libel. Images of Muhammed are every bit as offensive in much of world as those types of material are to western eyes. Wikipedia clearly wants to appeal to as many people on the planet as possible. They say now that the two small images are presented "respectfully, in an historical context," but under current (post 16th century) Islam it is not simply not possible to present any image, "respectfully." There is no need. Wikipedia could simply provide links to those images on a third party site, explaining precisely why they are doing so. (Or more correctly, an editor could do this.)
Everybody knows the place to buy an iPod is in an Apple Store, or Apple's web site. Citing sales of one dealer, Amazon, is like saying Jaguar outsells Fords, because a Jaguar dealer said so.
I support taxing software development 100%. As long as legal services, medical services, tax preparation services, hair cutting and car repair are included, too.
As bad as Microsoft products are, they are a d*sight better than our current health care system. Fewer bugs even. Really. I started a healthcare IT company. Our products have already saved 16 lives. Did you know there will be 500,000 medical errors in the US today? No, that is not a typo.
I think this may be the best thing Microsoft has ever done with their monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
I have put in $12,000 and up commercial systems. I will caution you that the correct theory and implementation is bit complicated. There is a (1) panel, a (2) battery, and a (3) load. There are complex three-way, time-dependent interactions between all three components, none of which are linear, or even consistent (often). In between the three is a "controller," a little black box that does the tricky part. They don't cost much. Make sure you have a provision to measure current with a low-cost DVM and be sure to to put fuses everywhere. You can use low-cost in-line car-type fuse holders, which you can buy at a hardware store. Unprotected overloads in solar systems are ugly.
I am all for anything that speeds up natural selection.
Might it be appropriate to pass a law requiring all cars to have locks on the doors?
IMHO, technology people are so adverse to gov't regulation (OK, with good reason) that they are not willing to recognize that SOME regulation can be a good thing in an economic community.
If all PCs were required to have anti-virus software, and all ISPs were required to verify this, or to disconnect the customer, I suggest that the number of bots out there might drop 90%.
Yes, I realize that neither of these requirements are perfect, and there will always be SPY v. SPY competition. But right now we have SPY v. (nothing). No competition for the bad guys at all, and so we have 100 billion spams a day.
Our politicians don't get any spam. (The ones, that is, who actually own a computer.) Cybercrime is not their problem. Let the market figure out a solution.
"Yeah!"
For example, in Palo Alto, CA, the City Council decided against the wishes of the Police Department (but with the wishes of residents)to lower the speed on one major 4-lane street (Embarcadero)to 25 MPH. This made it a "speed trap" by California court standards, and therefore prevents the police from using RADAR to issue speeding tickets.
The solution the city used was to shorten the yellow light to the POSTED speed, which is very much below the ACTUAL (critical) speed of traffic, allowing the police to issue tickets for running red lights, instead of speeding.
To avoid serious accidents, they also increased he red delay. However, local know this, and run the red lights all the time.
So now, that street is like wild West, with drivers adhering to different sets of rules.
Bottom line is that traffic standards are there for a reason, and people will adjust their behavior to whatever is put in front of them. If it were up to me, any red delay at all would be illegal.
Whining about pirates is like complaining about all the girls you could have dated. But didn't.
I think the only correct response is, Huh?
At first it will be great...global, open, international. Then, just like most of the UN, like the "human rights commission," third world countries with their own, narrow, hidden, religious or political agenda will take over the Internet. You think its bad now...imagine having your domain pulled and Iran or Syria heading up the rotating position as head of your "review" committee. Nobody in a Western culture really wants the world to be democracy. One tenth the population, one half the wealth. Lets vote on that, shall we?
You want white noise, not random numbers. Or, maybe your tastes go to pink noise. Make yourself a UNIX filter to convert dev/random/ into white noise, and then, golly, you could probably get lots of IP and copyright protection. Plus, your speakers will thank you.
Indeed, a large number of high value chips are commonly forged and sold in places like China and the Philippines where it is not economically feasible to enforce the law, even if the local law were favorable to the original owner. One might argue that much of the lost business would never have been paying customers (as is overwhelmingly true for stolen software), but companies such as CISCO have clearly lost billions of real sales in these countries.
There are well known technologies, such as SEM that can see the actual voltages at nodes inside an operating chip. The implementation would have to be quite tricky to block all known methods to read-out the "combination lock" of single a authorized chip. At one time we had to reverse engineer the "security" algorithm of one of the FPGA companies, for a valid internal business purpose. It took us only a few days to break their code and build hardware to not only replicate, but also add our own proprietary, automated chip serialization algorithm. The company was very unhappy with with us, but the whole idea that they had "secure" chips was joke.
I think a better system would be to implement a much more robust external key+challenge system like on the very best smart cards and security dongles, then buy and install a tiny key chip in final equipment, where the entire key is made by company whose only product was security.
I knew a guy who made these decades ago inside of "blue boxes" (don't ask). The electronics were potted along with a capsule of acid. Mechanical attempts to get to the ICs were just about guaranteed to dissolve everything. Even so, I think it would take today's hackers about a week to figure out a way around that system.
But just because chip counterfeiting is a constant game of spy v. spy doesn't mean that one side has to give up.
My neighbor and I each have a barn. I spent a pretty penny to make mine out of concrete, and I put in electric lights and have two fire extinguishers handy. My neighbor's barn is built out of wood and straw, and he still uses gas lamps. His hired help has drunken parties in the barn every weekend, and his son makes illegal fireworks in the barn for extra income.
Our health insurance company charges us the same premium, because it says we are the same age and live in the same county, so we have the same risk.
Well, last year my neighbor's barn burns down. The health insurance company wouldn't pay for a better barn, so he rebuilt it exactly the same as before, gas lamps, drunken parties and all.
I ran in my neighbor last week at a PTA meeting. I asked him if he was going to get any fire extinguishers. He said, naw, now that our health insurance premiums had tripled, he had no money left to pay for extinguishers. Beside, he said, the insurance company as going to pay for a new barn just the same whether he had extinguishers or not.
I called up my health insurance agent to see if I could get a better rate, seeing as I had extinguishers and concrete barn, and all. He said nope, and beside, the new law on barn privacy meant he wasn't even allowed to go out and inspect any barns any more.
I asked Hillary, and she said the solution was to force everybody to buy barn insurance, even if they didn't have a barn at all.
I'm thinkin' maybe I should just get out of the farmin' business altogether, but I was born with this here farm, so I'm not sure I can part with it that easily.
This is genuine "two mode" authentication. Sure, if someone stole my computer AND my keychain the security is compromised. Or, if someone puts a gun to my head. But still, compared to current web login security, this system is a vast improvement.
All a bank has to do is say, "Here, this gizmo is free. And by the way, you have to use it if you want to do online banking." Managing these devices isn't any harder than managing ATM cards. Which people lose every day, and its not that big a deal.
(this side of your brain intentionally left blank)
But it all died of heart failure due to too much salt.
AT&T was so determined to get me off their old network, they finally made me an offer for a plan that was half the price of their cheapest new plan - including a 2-year contract and a free phone. Then, yesterday, I upgraded one of my kids from "pay as you go," to a copy of my dirt-cheap digital plan. They didn't want to do it, but finally agreed. So you see -- analog can be cheaper !
Really. In a police state, we need to be able see everything. Slashdotters, if they were good citizens, would boycott all virtual worlds.
Severely insulting one billion people is not the same thing as free speech. The US outlaws hate speech, and many western countries outlaw promotion of Nazi-ism, as examples. Wiki and its editors will now remove pornography, threats, copyright violations and libel. Images of Muhammed are every bit as offensive in much of world as those types of material are to western eyes. Wikipedia clearly wants to appeal to as many people on the planet as possible. They say now that the two small images are presented "respectfully, in an historical context," but under current (post 16th century) Islam it is not simply not possible to present any image, "respectfully." There is no need. Wikipedia could simply provide links to those images on a third party site, explaining precisely why they are doing so. (Or more correctly, an editor could do this.)
Is an oxymoron.
http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html
Everybody knows the place to buy an iPod is in an Apple Store, or Apple's web site. Citing sales of one dealer, Amazon, is like saying Jaguar outsells Fords, because a Jaguar dealer said so.
I support taxing software development 100%. As long as legal services, medical services, tax preparation services, hair cutting and car repair are included, too.
Everyone knows that Microsoft operating systems require this for stable operation.
I think this may be the best thing Microsoft has ever done with their monopoly.