When rudely swiping at other people, at least stop dribbling nonsense like "several hundred thousand orders of magnitude greater". I don't think you know what you are talking about. >>10^100000?
So I discount the rest of your "contribution" accordingly. Actually, several other parts of your answer are independently rubbish too: have you considered a career in tabloid journalism? Wish I had mod points...
In practice you can mitigate the problem (which will only be a problem at all in dense population areas) by capturing solar heat in summer, eg excess not needed for solar hot water, and using that to warm the ground. Then the ground is a straight-forward heat-store, maybe a little like this: http://www.earth.org.uk/milk-tanker-thermal-store.html
Everyone seems to be assuming that a fossil-fuel-powered generator is *the* answer and the only questions are "how big?" and "is the widow-maker male plug fine?"...
Goodness.
Try (say) solar and or wind and several days worth of lead-acid batteries with a suitable inverter such as Sunny Island or Sunny Backup or the Outback or Xantrex equivalents, which won't kill you with carbon monoxide and bad wiring, you don't have to refuel, and which doesn't destroy the planet in passing...
Oh, and you might get a subsidy or a tax-break for installing such a renewable-energy system too. And you can export excess to the grid and get paid for it when the grid isn't out...
Well, I've run an ISP, and separately I've been CTO in a tech company and fought tooth-and-nail with marketing over their take on reality, so I can't disagree too much with that... Please may I have a laptop with a sharpened edge? B^>
OK, but other public-facing retailers *do* oversell without explicitly saying so, and usually without too much opprobrium, eg airlines.
And if everyone did turn all their taps (or electric heaters) on at once they'd all soon be fairly disappointed, so there's an 'oversell' there too, implicitly, and probably with rather less understanding of the physics by ordinary users.
Agreed, ISPs have to stop telling lies or at least being horribly misleading to non-technical users...
Another view, howerver, is that your ISP is telling you the *maximum* bandwidth available, like the maximum speed of your CPU or rating of your electricity meter/supply, but you wouldn't expect things to go well if you turned every water tap and electric appliance in the house on full all the time to the get the maximum that you are allowed, would you?
(Disclaimer: I used to run an early ISP and had to do a fair amount of customer education.)
Indeed, that's exactly the sort of charging mechanism that I'm talking about, and I agree that some places have it already.
I guess what I'm suggesting is that we may see more of it, since I don't see the ethically-challenged bandwidth hogs reforming without such an incentive.
(And yes, it is unethical to take more and more and more of something just because you can, and then whine at your supplier when it all goes wrong. It's also unethical of ISPs to claim 'unlimited' when they don't mean it of course, so the peak-time per-unit charge would clear up a lot of defective thinking on both sides, IMHO...)
I don't have any grannies of my own left, but I have no reason to believe that every otherwise canny granny has a slower connection than you or that she hasn't discovered the delights of FasterFox or premium service or whatever! Try to give up the annoying and patronising stereotypes...
Back to the point: it's called the tragedy of the commons. Shared and limited resources are misused by the greedy or impatient or desperate.
Perhaps we'll need peak-hour kWh and MB charges to help persuade people to use those resources sensibly and fairly, and not be too anti-social.
I just paid 3x more than baseline up front, negotiated with my ISP, volunteered an AUP for my own usage, and I down-regulate my traffic when there is Net congestion, and hey-ho! I'm not disappointed with my service.
The (Tory) UK government of the day many many years ago mooted a law where all encryption keys would have to be filed with "Trusted Third Parties" (TTPs).
I had a stand-up row with the DTI minister at a Commons meeting about this. He said that British Telecom could be one of those TTPs. I said that they couldn't even bill me reliably, so how was I to trust them with all my banking keys and private data; if they compromised my keys and possibly caused me horrible inconvenience and/or embarrassment could he even see someone in charge being fired? He went rather red.
I argue that the fuss last time was why this didn't happen, and why we have the very-marginally-less-egregious RIP Act, though that alone was one of the reasons I gave up running an ISP.
Precisely my situation: I was due to travel to the US a few days ago as it happens, and didn't want to risk my primary dev/email/etc MacBook to some inquisitive goon, so bought an EEE.
Sort of wasted my money without having to go, but the EEE is much nicer to have for meetings, etc.
Yes, the USA's rudeness to foreigners has real financial consequences for us and for them. I'm strongly resisting ANY travel there, though I am happy to work for good US firms of course.
"Natural gas makes a small amount of electricity" you say!
As of May 2007 the UK's significant generation plant stock included, by fuel: 68 gas, 18 coal, 10 nuclear. In 2007Q3, of the 13Mt of coal burnt for electricity generation ~10Mt was imported. Source BERR.
And that translates to approx 1/3rd of the UK's electricity TWh from natural gas, 1/3rd from coal, and 1/3rd all the rest in the UK.
This 'dash for gas' is almost the only reason why the UK will meet its Kyoto targets AFAIK.
It's certainly stopping me travelling to the US, on top of other aspects of security farce^Wtheatre.
I've been in job negotiations (not instigated by me, after 5? times of asking) with a very large and very well known US corp with its HQ in California and said that I'd love to visit California again, but not until this unnecessary unpleasantness stops.
So far, application process is on hold, as you might imagine...
Slashdot Mirror
When rudely swiping at other people, at least stop dribbling nonsense like "several hundred thousand orders of magnitude greater". I don't think you know what you are talking about. >>10^100000?
So I discount the rest of your "contribution" accordingly. Actually, several other parts of your answer are independently rubbish too: have you considered a career in tabloid journalism? Wish I had mod points...
Rgds
Damon
I'm sorry, but I *do* have to ask... Does it run NetBSD 5.0 or Linux?
Rgds
Damon
Umm, a company I co-founded (entropay.com) does this, and is not alone.
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
Have a look at http://www.withouthotair.com/ where Prof MacKay deals with this.
In practice you can mitigate the problem (which will only be a problem at all in dense population areas) by capturing solar heat in summer, eg excess not needed for solar hot water, and using that to warm the ground. Then the ground is a straight-forward heat-store, maybe a little like this: http://www.earth.org.uk/milk-tanker-thermal-store.html
Rgds
Damon
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-dynamic-demand-value.html
Rgds
Damon
Nah, use a laptop...
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html
My main Internet server (for that page for example) is well under 20W and running a couple of Java VMs and all the rest...
Rgds
Damon
Everyone seems to be assuming that a fossil-fuel-powered generator is *the* answer and the only questions are "how big?" and "is the widow-maker male plug fine?"...
Goodness.
Try (say) solar and or wind and several days worth of lead-acid batteries with a suitable inverter such as Sunny Island or Sunny Backup or the Outback or Xantrex equivalents, which won't kill you with carbon monoxide and bad wiring, you don't have to refuel, and which doesn't destroy the planet in passing...
Oh, and you might get a subsidy or a tax-break for installing such a renewable-energy system too.
And you can export excess to the grid and get paid for it when the grid isn't out...
http://solarjohn.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieldlines.com/section/homebrew
Those widow-maker setups have that name for a reason, BTW.
Rgds
Damon
http://gallery.hd.org/ ?
No, wait...
There *was* a lot of Linux in those data centres, with my code running on it! B^>
Rgds
Damon
Well, I've run an ISP, and separately I've been CTO in a tech company and fought tooth-and-nail with marketing over their take on reality, so I can't disagree too much with that... Please may I have a laptop with a sharpened edge? B^>
Rgds
Damon
OK, but other public-facing retailers *do* oversell without explicitly saying so, and usually without too much opprobrium, eg airlines.
And if everyone did turn all their taps (or electric heaters) on at once they'd all soon be fairly disappointed, so there's an 'oversell' there too, implicitly, and probably with rather less understanding of the physics by ordinary users.
Rgds
Damon
Agreed, ISPs have to stop telling lies or at least being horribly misleading to non-technical users...
Another view, howerver, is that your ISP is telling you the *maximum* bandwidth available, like the maximum speed of your CPU or rating of your electricity meter/supply, but you wouldn't expect things to go well if you turned every water tap and electric appliance in the house on full all the time to the get the maximum that you are allowed, would you?
(Disclaimer: I used to run an early ISP and had to do a fair amount of customer education.)
Rgds
Damon
Indeed, that's exactly the sort of charging mechanism that I'm talking about, and I agree that some places have it already.
I guess what I'm suggesting is that we may see more of it, since I don't see the ethically-challenged bandwidth hogs reforming without such an incentive.
(And yes, it is unethical to take more and more and more of something just because you can, and then whine at your supplier when it all goes wrong. It's also unethical of ISPs to claim 'unlimited' when they don't mean it of course, so the peak-time per-unit charge would clear up a lot of defective thinking on both sides, IMHO...)
Rgds
Damon
I don't have any grannies of my own left, but I have no reason to believe that every otherwise canny granny has a slower connection than you or that she hasn't discovered the delights of FasterFox or premium service or whatever! Try to give up the annoying and patronising stereotypes...
Back to the point: it's called the tragedy of the commons. Shared and limited resources are misused by the greedy or impatient or desperate.
Perhaps we'll need peak-hour kWh and MB charges to help persuade people to use those resources sensibly and fairly, and not be too anti-social.
I just paid 3x more than baseline up front, negotiated with my ISP, volunteered an AUP for my own usage, and I down-regulate my traffic when there is Net congestion, and hey-ho! I'm not disappointed with my service.
Rgds
Damon
So, a retraction?
Stand down all the lawyer-hating "it's security through obscurity" flames?
Never!!!!
Rgds
Damon
"If it's illegal we do it immediately, if it's unconstitutional it takes a bit longer" -- Kissinger
Rgds
Damon
The (Tory) UK government of the day many many years ago mooted a law where all encryption keys would have to be filed with "Trusted Third Parties" (TTPs).
I had a stand-up row with the DTI minister at a Commons meeting about this. He said that British Telecom could be one of those TTPs. I said that they couldn't even bill me reliably, so how was I to trust them with all my banking keys and private data; if they compromised my keys and possibly caused me horrible inconvenience and/or embarrassment could he even see someone in charge being fired? He went rather red.
I argue that the fuss last time was why this didn't happen, and why we have the very-marginally-less-egregious RIP Act, though that alone was one of the reasons I gave up running an ISP.
Rgds
Damon
That's how I've gotten rid of most of my accumulated junk.
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
Precisely my situation: I was due to travel to the US a few days ago as it happens, and didn't want to risk my primary dev/email/etc MacBook to some inquisitive goon, so bought an EEE.
Sort of wasted my money without having to go, but the EEE is much nicer to have for meetings, etc.
Yes, the USA's rudeness to foreigners has real financial consequences for us and for them. I'm strongly resisting ANY travel there, though I am happy to work for good US firms of course.
Rgds
Damon
!
No, you'll be thinking of hotmale.com.
Boy, I wish I'd registered that way back when, to make my megabucks!
Rgds
Damon
"Natural gas makes a small amount of electricity" you say!
As of May 2007 the UK's significant generation plant stock included, by fuel: 68 gas, 18 coal, 10 nuclear. In 2007Q3, of the 13Mt of coal burnt for electricity generation ~10Mt was imported. Source BERR.
And that translates to approx 1/3rd of the UK's electricity TWh from natural gas, 1/3rd from coal, and 1/3rd all the rest in the UK.
This 'dash for gas' is almost the only reason why the UK will meet its Kyoto targets AFAIK.
Rgds
Damon
It's certainly stopping me travelling to the US, on top of other aspects of security farce^Wtheatre.
I've been in job negotiations (not instigated by me, after 5? times of asking) with a very large and very well known US corp with its HQ in California and said that I'd love to visit California again, but not until this unnecessary unpleasantness stops.
So far, application process is on hold, as you might imagine...
Rgds
Damon
Exponential in at least common mathematical and engineering use would be 2 raised to the power of the speed; ie x^2 is not exponential whereas 2^x is.
Rgds
Damon
Polynomial, not "exponential". "Exponential" doesn't just mean "lots and lots"!
Rgds
Damon