Anything that can cover the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant (e.g. provide a Gigawatt electrical power within minutes without advance notice) can cope with the variations in wind power output.
These solutions exist and are part of the grid. It does not really matter how often you have to turn them on once you built them.
A few years ago the summer in europe was so hot, that they almost had to shut down all nuclear power plants along the river rhine at once because there wasn't enough water for cooling. Again: Situations like these are less frequent with nuclear or coal compared to wind, but that does not make it any easier to provide technology to deal with them.
It's just the same as with UPS for servers: Mine has not been needed since I purchased it. In a devlopment country I might have need for it once a week. Still the one I installed in my home is not less expensive or simpler.
That argument does not hold. Every power plant has downtimes for scheduled maintainance or because of accidents. You need backup power plants anyway for that. The fact that the downtimes happen more often for wind power than for nuclear power does not make it a lot more expensive or complicated to provide the backup power.
For some of these scenarious (emergency shutdown of a power plant) you need special power plants (gas turbines usually) that can quickly produce additional power. Both coal and nuclear are completely unsuited to fulfil that task.
As far as the environment is concerned it does not really matter what type of plant you use for backup power as they run a relatively small portion of time. The vast majory of energy can be produce by a mix of unreliable sources without brownouts as long as the resulting variance the you get after mixing can be covered by some quickly reacting reliable source with relatively low capacity.
I do not think that signing such a contract would effect third parties much. In many cases a third party does have no right to use your name to begin with, but there also are many situation where you yourself cannot prevent the public use of your name and clearly signing a contract with anyone cannot change this. The IOC hardly can gain more right over your name from the contract than you had yourself.
I believe that the problem was not that 0.1s could not be represented. After all, the article states that there were 0.1s ticks and they likely counted ticks as integers. No problem there. However, I gues that 0.1s was no integer multiple of the system clock. If for example the tick should occur after 6,666,666.67 clock cycles, the system likely emitted a tick after 6,666,667 clock cycles. Such a system would accumulate 3.3 clock cycles of error each second.
The solution is to keep an explicit error term: Use Bresenhams line drawing algorithm. Imagine drawing a line where X are the clock cycles and Y are the ticks. Minimum error integer algorithms are known for decades for this problem and Bresenham is a very elegant one.
For a fair comparison you need to compare Skype with SIP clients that are delivered pre configured by the service provider. Those usually work out of the box. So you start by finding a service provider (as you do in the case of skype) and if any of the other task that you describe still need to be done you ask the provider for help. Sipgate for example provides configuration files for dozens of SIP devices.
If you want a general solution you need configurability and this means you can configure it wrongly.
Well, long before there was the Skype protocol there was SIP, an open standard. There are dozens of SIP implementations around and thousand of SIP to POTS and POTS to SIP gateway providers that allow you to call landlines and provide a phone number.
When Skype was invented it was a solution without a problem, but the marketing clearly was better than for any SIP implementation so it prevailed.
Also, the paradox of choice scares people away from sip, but it actually is a GOOD thing that there are so many providers around as they are all interoperable.
My post you are citing was a response to: "I wonder if Amazon US would ship Windows 7 to Germany..."
"Amazon US" is NOT an UK store. Distribution from the US to the EU is only legal with consent of the copyright holder.
A UK store not shipping to Germany is in deed violation of EU law. I allready wrote that in my post immediately preceeding the one that you are citing.
A copyright holder can limit distribution of a work to regional markets, therefore it might be illegal to do so, but 5 years ago this worked flawlessly for a game that I ordered.
This happen all the time near earth and is not dangerous at all. This is nothing unknown, or mystic or strange. AFAIK the LHC is not even the first accelerator to create black holes.
I love how people defend the abusive practices of google, apple, tmobile, etc. "But, but, theyre watching out for us. Clearly you cant have VoIP over a cell data network!"
Hmm. You mean Skype? The company that uses its marketing force to replace well established open source international standards like Jabber and SIP with some secret proprietary protocol?
If GoogleTalk works on that phone that is far preferable over Skype because with that you can call using any of thousands of SIP providers. With skype you can just call skype.
> So, yes, I'm still saying that _some_ CO2 is removed in the process.
You do not need to know the process to estimate the effect of that. The CO2 is bound into the biomass around us. Mainly plants, soil (humus and microorganism, but not clay an the like) and algae.
To trap significant amounts of CO2 the humus layer must become thicker. While this is true for some area, you woul espect that process to have stabilized of the last millenia. E.g. in most areas there should be an equilibrum between absorbed and produced CO2.
Significant changes in the amount of bound CO2 per area are either due to a change in the type of land. (Deforestation, erosion, planting new forests, etc. A tree contains more Carbon than no tree.) Or signifant wheather changes that change the equilibrum.
To use your analogy: While part of the corpse remains in the cemetary for a long time, at the same time humus that has been there much longer than the corpse is converted into CO2.
If the cemetery would bind large amount of CO2 (for example by the grass growing there) you would not see any tombstones after a while because of all the CO2 lying around on the ground (in the form of soil and microorganisms)
>I'm sure you can use nuclear power instead, which, for whatever other sins it may have, has exactly zero CO2 emissions.
False. For the same reasons that biofuel is not free of emissions.
Depending on the ore quality and the institute that did the comparison nuclear power has anything from 15% to 100% of the emissions of a coal plant. There are a couple of technologies that beat it in the CO2 category.
In germany (and probably in the UK, too) each type of use of a work must be licensed seperately and explicitely. Licensing of unknown future uses is not possible (e.g. downloading).
Reproducing the armor in a movie and building more armors are comletely different uses and it might well be, that the contract covers only one of those.
Remeber that copyright contracts in the 70ies were not as elaborate as they are today.
If the future uses restriction is the same as in germany, it is clear, that there was no license to use the armor in computer games or on websites. This would put the designer in a pretty good position for negotiations.
> The residents of Sderot have every right to expect their government to protect them
Actually, they have not. The settlements are illegal under articel 49 of the Geneva Convention. Why should an illegal settlement have the right to protection?
If the settlement was founded or promoted by the Israelian government the settlers might be able to hold the government liable for that and request land on which a settlement is legal as a replacement.
The problem with this is that a lot of the question that caused trouble with the GPL and similar licenses will pop up and need to be resolved again.
Especially the old debate about what constitutes linking rises again: If I use a GPLed VHDL core in my FPGA, which part of my design do I need to publish under the GPL: Modifications to the core? The whole FPGA design? The design of cores in other FPGAs on the same board? The board layout and schematics? The system the board is used in? Am I allowed to use proprietary ASICs on the same boards? What about software executed by the GPLed hardware?
Using the GPL for hardware requires at least extra statements by the author clarifying these things.
Unfortunately there is no link to the original story. I do not know alot about the topic at hand, but in other areas of global warming I have often seen a fallacy that works like this:
A study is published that says: Wait a minute, when your burn 1MJ of energy in you car, you really use up more than that, because of refinement, transport, clearing of land, etc. This is than taken by the press or lobyy organizations that use it to "proof" that you emit more CO2 with bio fuel than with fossil fuels. While the conclusion might be correct, the proof is flawed.
1. The energy provided for refinement and transport does not need to be provided by fossil fuels. (A nuclear power plant needs tens of Megawatts of power, and I never heard anyone complain that the solar cells to produce that amount are too expensive. When comparing energy technologies the analysis should allow the technologies to fuel themselves)
2. Last time I checked fossil fuels were transported and refined as well (Crude oil SUV anyone?). Transport is usually over much longer distances than for bio fuel, so there should be a big plus for bio in the transport section. Instead, the article lists transport as a minus, which make me very suspicious about the other claims.
The same issues came up during the soccer world championchips. (FIFA tried to sell licenses for public viewing) Here is how they were resolved in Europe.
1.
A soccer game is not an original work in the sense of copyright law. As the landlord of the stadion they can control who puts up cameras there, but there is no copyright on the games themselves as they are lacking the creative process. (When I thing about it, wrestling matches might fall under copyright)
2.
The TV shows produced by the people owning the cameras in the stadion falls under copyright law. They license this for broadcasting to TV stations.
3.
The copyright law in germany protects an explicit list of actions that needs to be licensed like "public performace", "distribution", "broadcasting", "copying". The assumption is that any act can be classified as one and only one of these categories. Live TV viewing requires a "broadcasting" license paid for by the TV company. Turning on the TV in a public place does not make it an additional "public performce" as the broadcasting is public anyway. If record it onto tape. (copying) and replay it later in public you are doing a "public performce". But watching while the show is aired requires only the "broadcasting" license.
This was tested in court and it makes perfectly sense to me.
Interestingly the main argument in the case at hand is NOT that the machines are faulty or can be manipulated.
Until now elections in germany are held in public. This means that anybody can come in and watch the votes beeing counted. However with the voting machines used the people are requested to believe the government that they operate correctly. This trust should be based on secret reviews of the machines hard and software conducted by the government.
The CCC argues that his does not qualify as a public election. Elections are all about controlling the government and not about trusting it.
Using open source machines probably would meet at least this criterion of a public election.
This was proposed by Manfred Kanther in germany a long time ago and had quite strong backing politically.
Then someone in the EU found out that the US is mining long distance communication for trade secrets to give to US companies.
Suddly encryption was officially encouraged by the government because the threat of terrorism might justify the demolition of civil right, but not giving technology to another country.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even bother to read my post?
Anything that can cover the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant (e.g. provide a Gigawatt electrical power within minutes without advance notice) can cope with the variations in wind power output.
These solutions exist and are part of the grid. It does not really matter how often you have to turn them on once you built them.
A few years ago the summer in europe was so hot, that they almost had to shut down all nuclear power plants along the river rhine at once because there wasn't enough water for cooling. Again: Situations like these are less frequent with nuclear or coal compared to wind, but that does not make it any easier to provide technology to deal with them.
It's just the same as with UPS for servers: Mine has not been needed since I purchased it. In a devlopment country I might have need for it once a week. Still the one I installed in my home is not less expensive or simpler.
That argument does not hold. Every power plant has downtimes for scheduled maintainance or because of accidents. You need backup power plants anyway for that. The fact that the downtimes happen more often for wind power than for nuclear power does not make it a lot more expensive or complicated to provide the backup power.
For some of these scenarious (emergency shutdown of a power plant) you need special power plants (gas turbines usually) that can quickly produce additional power. Both coal and nuclear are completely unsuited to fulfil that task.
As far as the environment is concerned it does not really matter what type of plant you use for backup power as they run a relatively small portion of time.
The vast majory of energy can be produce by a mix of unreliable sources without brownouts as long as the resulting variance the you get after mixing can be covered by some quickly reacting reliable source with relatively low capacity.
OTOH, if they use the drons against US cititzens more frequently they could save a lot on police, courts and prisons:
http://www.wanttoknow.info/a-US-citizen-killed-drone-strike
I do not think that signing such a contract would effect third parties much.
In many cases a third party does have no right to use your name to begin with, but there also are many situation where you yourself cannot prevent the public use of your name and clearly signing a contract with anyone cannot change this. The IOC hardly can gain more right over your name from the contract than you had yourself.
I believe that the problem was not that 0.1s could not be represented. After all, the article states that there were 0.1s ticks and they likely counted ticks as integers. No problem there.
However, I gues that 0.1s was no integer multiple of the system clock. If for example the tick should occur after 6,666,666.67 clock cycles, the system likely emitted a tick after 6,666,667 clock cycles. Such a system would accumulate 3.3 clock cycles of error each second.
The solution is to keep an explicit error term: Use Bresenhams line drawing algorithm. Imagine drawing a line where X are the clock cycles and Y are the ticks. Minimum error integer algorithms are known for decades for this problem and Bresenham is a very elegant one.
For a fair comparison you need to compare Skype with SIP clients that are delivered pre configured by the service provider. Those usually work out of the box.
So you start by finding a service provider (as you do in the case of skype) and if any of the other task that you describe still need to be done you ask the provider for help. Sipgate for example provides configuration files for dozens of SIP devices.
If you want a general solution you need configurability and this means you can configure it wrongly.
Well, long before there was the Skype protocol there was SIP, an open standard.
There are dozens of SIP implementations around and thousand of SIP to POTS and POTS to SIP gateway providers that allow you to call landlines and provide a phone number.
When Skype was invented it was a solution without a problem, but the marketing clearly was better than for any SIP implementation so it prevailed.
Also, the paradox of choice scares people away from sip, but it actually is a GOOD thing that there are so many providers around as they are all interoperable.
My post you are citing was a response to: "I wonder if Amazon US would ship Windows 7 to Germany ..."
"Amazon US" is NOT an UK store. Distribution from the US to the EU is only legal with consent of the copyright holder.
A UK store not shipping to Germany is in deed violation of EU law. I allready wrote that in my post immediately preceeding the one that you are citing.
RTFP
A copyright holder can limit distribution of a work to regional markets, therefore it might be illegal to do so, but 5 years ago this worked flawlessly for a game that I ordered.
I expect them to sell the German version in the UK, as there are German users in the UK.
While this probably is not widely advertised you should be able to order it from a MS representative.
There definitely are UK and US locale versions available in Germany.
Any customer in the EU is free to purchase from UK retailers.
If Microsoft tries to prevent this they could be fined by the comission. (Happend before to VW and others.)
Here is a picture of a simulated collision in the ATLAS detector that creates a black hole:
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/936914
This happen all the time near earth and is not dangerous at all. This is nothing unknown, or mystic or strange. AFAIK the LHC is not even the first accelerator to create black holes.
It is an X440 Engine. (The first number specifies the thrust)
If the fuel lasts for one second it is an I440, if it lasts for two seconds it is an J440, and so on.
Considering the weight of the engine it is probably far beyond O440.
I love how people defend the abusive practices of google, apple, tmobile, etc. "But, but, theyre watching out for us. Clearly you cant have VoIP over a cell data network!"
Hmm. You mean Skype? The company that uses its marketing force to replace well established open source international standards like Jabber and SIP with some secret proprietary protocol?
If GoogleTalk works on that phone that is far preferable over Skype because with that you can call using any of thousands of SIP providers. With skype you can just call skype.
> So, yes, I'm still saying that _some_ CO2 is removed in the process.
You do not need to know the process to estimate the effect of that. The CO2 is bound into the biomass around us. Mainly plants, soil (humus and microorganism, but not clay an the like) and algae.
To trap significant amounts of CO2 the humus layer must become thicker. While this is true for some area, you woul espect that process to have stabilized of the last millenia. E.g. in most areas there should be an equilibrum between absorbed and produced CO2.
Significant changes in the amount of bound CO2 per area are either due to a change in the type of land. (Deforestation, erosion, planting new forests, etc. A tree contains more Carbon than no tree.) Or signifant wheather changes that change the equilibrum.
To use your analogy: While part of the corpse remains in the cemetary for a long time, at the same time humus that has been there much longer than the corpse is converted into CO2.
If the cemetery would bind large amount of CO2 (for example by the grass growing there) you would not see any tombstones after a while because of all the CO2 lying around on the ground (in the form of soil and microorganisms)
>I'm sure you can use nuclear power instead, which, for whatever other sins it may have, has exactly zero CO2 emissions.
False. For the same reasons that biofuel is not free of emissions.
Depending on the ore quality and the institute that did the comparison nuclear power has anything from 15% to 100% of the emissions of a coal plant. There are a couple of technologies that beat it in the CO2 category.
So, you actually read the article?
In germany (and probably in the UK, too) each type of use of a work must be licensed seperately and explicitely. Licensing of unknown future uses is not possible (e.g. downloading).
Reproducing the armor in a movie and building more armors are comletely different uses and it might well be, that the contract covers only one of those.
Remeber that copyright contracts in the 70ies were not as elaborate as they are today.
If the future uses restriction is the same as in germany, it is clear, that there was no license to use the armor in computer games or on websites. This would put the designer in a pretty good position for negotiations.
> The residents of Sderot have every right to expect their government to protect them
Actually, they have not. The settlements are illegal under articel 49 of the Geneva Convention.
Why should an illegal settlement have the right to protection?
If the settlement was founded or promoted by the Israelian government the settlers might be able
to hold the government liable for that and request land on which a settlement is legal as a replacement.
The problem with this is that a lot of the question that caused trouble with the GPL and similar licenses will pop up and need to be resolved again.
Especially the old debate about what constitutes linking rises again: If I use a GPLed VHDL core in my FPGA, which part of my design do I need to publish under the GPL: Modifications to the core? The whole FPGA design? The design of cores in other FPGAs on the same board? The board layout and schematics? The system the board is used in?
Am I allowed to use proprietary ASICs on the same boards?
What about software executed by the GPLed hardware?
Using the GPL for hardware requires at least extra statements by the author clarifying these things.
Unfortunately there is no link to the original story. I do not know alot about the topic at hand, but in other areas of global warming I have often seen a fallacy that works like this:
A study is published that says: Wait a minute, when your burn 1MJ of energy in you car, you really use up more than that, because of refinement, transport, clearing of land, etc.
This is than taken by the press or lobyy organizations that use it to "proof" that you emit more CO2 with bio fuel than with fossil fuels. While the conclusion might be correct, the proof is flawed.
1. The energy provided for refinement and transport does not need to be provided by fossil fuels. (A nuclear power plant needs tens of Megawatts of power, and I never heard anyone complain that the solar cells to produce that amount are too expensive. When comparing energy technologies the analysis should allow the technologies to fuel themselves)
2. Last time I checked fossil fuels were transported and refined as well (Crude oil SUV anyone?). Transport is usually over much longer distances than for bio fuel, so there should be a big plus for bio in the transport section. Instead, the article lists transport as a minus, which make me very suspicious about the other claims.
The same issues came up during the soccer world championchips. (FIFA tried to sell licenses for public viewing) Here is how they were resolved in Europe. 1. A soccer game is not an original work in the sense of copyright law. As the landlord of the stadion they can control who puts up cameras there, but there is no copyright on the games themselves as they are lacking the creative process. (When I thing about it, wrestling matches might fall under copyright) 2. The TV shows produced by the people owning the cameras in the stadion falls under copyright law. They license this for broadcasting to TV stations. 3. The copyright law in germany protects an explicit list of actions that needs to be licensed like "public performace", "distribution", "broadcasting", "copying". The assumption is that any act can be classified as one and only one of these categories. Live TV viewing requires a "broadcasting" license paid for by the TV company. Turning on the TV in a public place does not make it an additional "public performce" as the broadcasting is public anyway. If record it onto tape. (copying) and replay it later in public you are doing a "public performce". But watching while the show is aired requires only the "broadcasting" license. This was tested in court and it makes perfectly sense to me.
Interestingly the main argument in the case at hand is NOT that the machines are faulty or can be manipulated.
Until now elections in germany are held in public. This means that anybody can come in and watch the votes beeing counted. However with the voting machines used the people are requested to believe the government that they operate correctly. This trust should be based on secret reviews of the machines hard and software conducted by the government.
The CCC argues that his does not qualify as a public election. Elections are all about controlling the government and not about trusting it.
Using open source machines probably would meet at least this criterion of a public election.
This was proposed by Manfred Kanther in germany a long time ago and had quite strong backing politically. Then someone in the EU found out that the US is mining long distance communication for trade secrets to give to US companies. Suddly encryption was officially encouraged by the government because the threat of terrorism might justify the demolition of civil right, but not giving technology to another country.
He is comparing with a hard drive that will be connected to the same or a slower bus than the graphics board.