A problem exists when data is cherry picked to show results the "scientist" is being paid to produce.
Dr. U. Bet UrPaycheck.
This thread began with some commentary that "it's a scorcher worldwide..." yet here in NorCal, we had a below average July. August is starting very cool. So, yeah, weather isn't climate, and figures don't lie. But liars do figure.
First it was Global Warming, and when the corrected data showed none for over a decade, the mantra became Climate Change. Global Colding - oh, NO!!!
My boss was recently killed in a Toy where the mats were reportedly found by the cops in the trunk.
If it turns out she was killed by Toyota playing games with lives, I'll cheerfully swear off their crap for life. Currently I have two Toyotas, but there were plenty of good alternatives.
I agree with your comments about electric hot water heaters. That also applies to natural gas or propane hot water heaters.
Another extremely annoying issue is that, at least in my neck of the woods (NoCal), I can't buy a gas hot water heater without a pilot light! 24x7 that light helps heat my water, but I'll bet well over half of the energy goes out the flue, wasting me a couple of hundred dollars a year.
I've been told it's the fault of Underwriter Labs, who haven't the first clue about engineering, it seems. A fail-safe igniter with flame, heat, and gas sensors and a micro-controller should be simple to build and test. Even if it adds $50 to the price of a hot water heater, that cost should easily be paid back in a year. And the same for gas heaters and furnaces.
Very good post! And quite accurate regarding the radioactive material blowing in the wind + concentrated heavy metals in the ash.
In my view, Nat Gas turbines are another bad choice - horribly expensive fuel gotten from folks who want to kill us, and it's a polluter, just not as bad as Coal.
As to the topic of this thread...
I would really, really like to see the 10 year net MWH (Megawatt Hours) of electricity forecast from this monstrosity.
The 4 mile greenhouse is going to get dirty from sand and probably pitted from sand storms. Power plants are usually rated at peak max power.
Somebody care to check my arithmetic - I'm just pouring this out with the fat pencil.
So it puts out 200MWe at noon on a cloudless day with the sun at it's northern most point. At any other time - between 2PM and 10AM every day, and worse on all other days of the year, or if it's cloudy, this thing is going to put out a lot less net electricity. I'd give it 800MWHe from 10AM-2PM for two months a year, and 25 to 50% less the other 10 months a year. And I'd give it 8 hours more sun at an average of 80MW = 640MWH in peak months and 4 hours at 50MW = 200 MWH the other 10 months.
(800 MWH + 640 MWH) * 60 days = 85 GWH peak "summer" days
(130 MW*4 hrs + 50MW *4 hrs ) * 300 days = 216 GWH the rest of the year
So I'll throw out a 300 GWH annual total output
Let's see what a "base load" plant might put out. Their capacity factors (amount of electricity actually produced vs. what they can produce) are above 90% - 24 hours a day, every day. Yes, that includes maint and refueling shutdowns.
200MW * 24 * 365 *.9 = 1577 GWH, more than FIVE TIMES what this many square mile hipposaurus can generate.
Ooops - sorry, I failed to factor in the capacity factor on this thing. ONE generator hanging in a chimney. Yeah, that will work well - single point of failure is good. Anybody seen figures on wind generators out of service for generator bearing problems? You don't want to. Well, I'm betting this has 30% down time for the first five years and 10% for a number of years after that. It's all new pie in the sky.
Yours is the first intelligent comment in this thread.
For all the alphabet soup behind their names, these "scientists" are in need of wall-to-wall counseling and probably a little time in "general population". The Americans should go in a federal lockup, and the Brit wherever they put the nasty buggers.
I use a Logitech mouse and MS keyboard - both Bluetooth - on a docked ThinkPad. Like above poster, both hang up for a while several times a day, sometimes causing XP to make the disconnected chime. A couple of seconds later they reconnect.
I've considered Communist Plots, Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, and Those Who Cannot Be Named. I have not eliminated Country Music or the Current Administration.
For now, I tend to blame Windows, because after that happens my VPN often loses heartbeat and drops.
So, here we have some guy, the department director, whose immediate deputy is a crook. Bribing / taking bribes, along with at least one other.
In the real world, he would be Accountable and Responsible. But, it would seem, not in DCland. The guy should NOT be allowed in the Administration.
And, after the number of crooks this Administration has tried to bring on board, I wonder if some other heads at 1600 Pennsy don't need to roll. Does anybody do background investigations on these clowns?
At this point, I'd be looking for a new Chief of Staff. This is CHANGE???
The logic in the bill is that, "Scumbags is as scumbags does". People who do crimes usually continue to do crimes.
So by collecting DNA (and prints) of thieves and vandals, the cops will more likely be able to track them down when they graduate to the nastier leagues. I really, really like the idea of being able to snap up rapists, burglars, home invaders and other scum most skosh.
Collecting DNA from misdemeanor convicts is where I have some concern. I do think any non-citizen convicted of a non-traffic misdemeanor should be sent home. Bye, Bitch {flush}.
But I'm not sure I'm in favor of collecting DNA from every CITIZEN pot smoker, shoplifter, and street fighter in the land. And I'll echo the first poster's "Yeah, right" regarding always pitching the DNA record if the arrestee is not convicted.
What about Juveniles? If they are convicted, whether tried as an adult or not, is their DNA kept on record?
This is an issue that will not go away, with 50 states to fight it out, and it will probably go to the Supremes. DNA is a great way to convict and a great way to show innocence. As a privacy advocate and big fan of Liberty, I expect to revise my thinking a few times in the coming years.
The antenna problem is going to affect mostly rural viewers. An interesting thing is that most of the Digital Super-Whamadyne Antannas have the same UHF yagi as they've had for years. Getting a new antenna may not help much, unless they do some research.
Most outside antennas have a pre-amplifier at the antenna that is powered in the house. If that preamp has died or the power is no longer getting up the coax or twinlead to the amp, the DTV signal is going to be awful. Suggest that folks check that out before getting a new system.
You can be sure that Fred's TV and Gizmo will cheerfully come out, remove all of the mostly good stuff to haul to the landfill, and replace with all new stuff at about $300 - $500, including installation.
If the homeowner is unlucky, all that wandering around on the roof and poking holes will destroy the roof, which can be replaced for a mere $10,000.
Keep your fingers crossed for your non-cable and non-satellite friends. Advise caution.
CAUTION: YOU MAY KILL SOMEONE IF YOU DO NOT TURN YOUR HOUSE'S MAIN BREAKERS TO OFF!
* If you leave the Main Breakers ON you will backfeed power to the entire neighborhood, and the power workers think the lines are dead. Very bad.
* Technically, you need an electrician to wire a breaker/cut-off switch to the generator. In this manner when you switch the generator connection to ON you also switch the Main Breakers to OFF. Expensive, but safe and complies with NEC.
* Most people just use a male to male plug, plug one end into the generator, and the other into some house outlet. If you turn the Main Breakers OFF ~BEFORE~ you do this, it is possible to get power to everything in your house, limited by the breaker capacity and the power generation capacity, and not feed the neighborhood. The relative safety of this is up to others to argue.
* IF THIS MAKES NO SENSE TO YOU, SEEK PROFESSIONAL HELP. Or at least a neighbor with a subscription to Popular Electronics. Your local linemen will thank you!
This is perhaps the most important post in the thread. In addition to electrocuting someone, if you don't open the utility main breaker, you will try to pick up a lot of other loads and your generator breaker will probably open, perhaps repeatedly, making you curse and mebbe do something stupid.
Another warning: if you wire an extension cord to plug into a 220 or 110 outlet in the house, be careful - do not close the generator output breaker until you plug it into the house. A friend's g.daughter tried to "help" and picked the plug up by the shiny part. She's had many operations, but has fair use of her hand after several years.
Be careful - electricity is especially dangerous if you are either doing stuff you rarely do, or doing unsafe stuff you do often and get sloppy. That's how linemen get fried, btw.
Take the previous post seriously - if this is not your forte, get professional help.
If you want a position for sysadmin in the Microsoft world, you're going to have to spend a few thousand getting certifications. You'll need those whether you have a degree or not.
If you're going for a position with Linux or Unix, check out a local LUG (Linux Users Group) for some great resources and job leads.
Don't stop there though.... You never know when opportunities pop up and where, so keep your eyes open.
This is close, I think, if you want to work for a bigger shop.
As above posters have said, the HR Nazis read the spec and it says "degree in cs or related dis" and the door stays shut unless you know someone.
Get yourself enrolled in a college and go after that degree. You owe it to your future to expand your horizons.
But small and medium biz need help, and in this economy if they can get somebody junior to help BigBuxBob, there's a good chance you can get in the door, study your ass off - learn about EVERYTHING: mail, databases, LDAP, Active Directory, Web Application Servers, IIS & Apache, Linux, Unix, Windoz. Expect to take your lumps and pay your dues. Be ready when Bob has a vacation coming to fill his shoes!
A few tips:
- NETWORK - join users groups and meet people.
- Volunteer to help Non Profits with IT Stuff - heck, even helping cable a network is a good thing for your resume.
- Learn everything about networking and IP.
- Consume slashdot, sourceforge, and support sites.
- Keep a paper brain or a huge doc file that contains urls and commands you have used.
- Have a thumb-drive with a toolkit you can use to fix probs on unix, linux, windows. There are plenty out there - find and compile them for your self.
- Publish - have a blog people can find (which means having useful content, not just drivel).
- Never, ever, be without a current resume ready to email or hand out with 30 minutes notice!
Within a year or so, something will pop.
One final thought: Ask colleagues with degrees what their degree is in. Then ask if they are working in the field of their major. Approx 2/3 in tech will say no. Ask the rest how many hours (not credit hours - actual hours of class and study only) in their four years were in their Major. The answer is probably fewer than 1000. First two years and much of last two years is to make a well-rounded student who can (should be able to) read and write. The extremely competent may have LOTS more hours or be extremely bright, but the average joe... um, maybe not.
Do NOT be impressed by MS degrees from University of Boom Chalawalla or East Cha-ching. I've worked with a lot of guys with MS who can't write a script, couldn't troubleshoot a sick Apache.
The taxpayers will only hold still for a certain amount of screwing. We won't continue to fund every scheme somebody dreams up. The fact that we've continued to fund Fusion research, now into it's - at least - 40th year with no payback in sight continues to amaze me. And it's only because the payback may be so great that we do so, decade in and decade out.
Some great things come out of academic research, but others are a huge money sink and have to be whacked. If it is so great, good chance somebody else will pick it up and carry on.
Very good start on the subject. The key is - doh! - recycling. There are huge reserves of nuclear fuel to be recycled, and reactors should be built to make more nuclear fuel - called "breeders".
"Spent fuel" is hardly spent - most of the original fissionables are still in the bundle, waiting for wastes to be removed and new fuel bundles made. There are hundreds of highly-enriched U-235 reactors that can be recycled to make commercial fuel (lightly-enriched with U-235).
Some fairly smart people made very bad decisions in the 70's that haunt us today.
Have a look at the GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) http://www.gnep.energy.gov/gnepPublicInformation.html for a plan to get rid of the nuclear waste we have (by burning it in reactors), and supply a lot of energy worldwide.
As an aside, we need to think about multiple sources of energy - Perhaps bio-diesel from algae http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html for transportation. Solar and Nuclear for electricity and heating.
Conservation via insulating, is another great solution. My home has R-46 insulation. Try to get someone to build one of those for ya! "No can do!", says the builder, because he's never done it.
We're between a rock and a hard place with Natural Gas and Propane this winter - demand has outstripped the supply, and (us) idiots in California and other places built Nat Gas fueled electrical plants - the most expensive fuel on planet earth and we use it for base load. Incredibly stupid.
I read an article recently that most of the Sierra Club consists of geezers. Since they kind of missed the point on a lot off issues, drinking bad ju-ju koolaid, it's probably best that they trundle off in their birks to history and leave Environmentalism to those who can think things through. We can use technology (and computer modeling using _all_ of the relevant variables) to peer through the haze and find good solutions for the future.
I don't know what portions of the world this poster has visited, but more than half of the world population lives in places there wouldn't even have been a hearing before the guy in the clink was in the clink - maybe permanently, and perhaps never to be heard from again.
Freedom isn't free, and the guy in jail is paying his dues - good for him for standing up for his beliefs. One of my fears is that I'll someday be in court and run my mouth - at which I'm fairly talented - and the judge will use the classic "One more outburst and I'll find you in contempt." I will, of course, have to reply "Too late, chum." In this country we have pretty clear rights, but they disappear if we don't stand to protect them. As the old bumper sticker says "Question Authority".
That said, it's good he has the freedom to play "three hots and a cot" for a half year. Most folks either have far less resolve or the need to feed a family / make their Lexus payments crumbles their cement. If he worked for NimNode NewsCorp he'd have Peter Combover to remind us each of the 27 days of his resolve before some slimy - er, slick - lawyer could work his side of the street and get him freed to the flashes of cameras and streets full of Live11News trucks.
I really need to see some _hard data_ that wind power will ever be be a good deal. I drive past a huge wind farm - Altamont Pass - east of San Francisco regularly. Many hundreds of wind gens there. I have never seen more than 10% actually turning. Most are idle. Samo Tehachapi. I've only been past one in Texas twice, but same deal.
Note that the rated output of a generator is at full speed, and the output varies as the cube of the wind velocity. If the gennie puts out a megawatt at 40MPH, it can only put out 1/8 MWe at 20MPH and 1/64MW at 10MPH - That's 16KW - enough to power a dozen homes on a hot day.
I've never seen $$$ for wind power that included cost of construction and maintenance and tax credits when calculating the cost of power. Wheeeee! It's FREE!
Not.
I believe wind power, when you include those hard dollar costs, is even more expensive that Natural Gas generation by several times - in some cases by an order of magnitude. As you probably know, Nat Gas is the most expensive fuel on earth for making electricity. In most places it is used for "peaking" plants because of the cost. And, of course, it is still a global warming contributor (if you believe in global warming), comes from the Middle East where they are trying to kill us for taking it.
I'm afraid to ask - what is a "radiation suit" in your mind? Since I've worked with radiation for much of 40 years, I'm interested.
There are plastic or cloth suits designed to keep radioactive contamination off you. Sometimes they are worn with filter type respirators, or airline respirators to keep the contamination from getting inside you. Those are external and internal contamination. External is not bad, internal is much worse.
A radiation suit would, presumably, keep the radiation from getting to your tissues. If you are talking about alpha or beta, a little distance is your best bet - a couple of inches for alpha, a couple of feet for beta.
Leaving Gamma. Most of the gamma emitters of interest have a half-life of less than 5ish years, so they are mostly gone. We use very dense materials - like lead - to shield against hard gammas. Pretty hard to wear a lead suit whilst riding a motorcycle, although it would make a great clown skit, I think.
My guess is that a GM tube detector would be useless farther than 5 miles from the accident site. I'd want a scintillator or an ion chamber.
The Health Physics Journal had a paper on Chernobyl after 20 years. Sadly, I don't have access to it now. I do recall that levels were much below some expectations. Since science is based on laws, one must presume that the assumptions made 15 or more years ago were incorrect - less total deposition of isotopes, the isotopic mix is different, more permeable soil, etc.
Exploration is dangerous. Cowards and those expecting to live forever need not apply. We salute heroes, including those who live and those whose lives are taken for the advancement of humankind.
I don't know any astronauts, but I know plenty of others who go "once more into the breach", and they pretty uniformly have a quirky view of life, death and I suspect they can hang with the jokes.
For my money, we need to kick NASA to the curb and get space exploration going. I think the commercial ventures (for example Virgin Galactic) have great promise to actually DO something. 30 years ago NASA was doing great things, but in the last 20, much of what has happened is just bus driving - with some great science as the beneficiary.
The ISS is a goat rodeo, and we should never have partnered with the Russians - it was and is a political game, and we've ended up having to rebuild all of the junk they provided.
nor did they include the cost of maintenance, which was huge bec the bearings didn't last long at all, and a host of other problems.
My complaint is they don't count maintenance costs in the numbers and those maintenence costs were huge. Everything needs maintenance (and, we hope, gets it), and with experience we build stuff with better parts that is more maintainable. Good example was a Dodge car they built that you needed to remove a fender shroud to replace the rear spark plugs.
A big mistake that has been made with lots of technologies is building plants that are one-offs. Lots of coal fired electric plants, old refineries, and early nuke plants are like that. The AE (architect-engineer - e.g, Bechtel, BR, etc) would design an entire plant, with plenty of stupid differences between five others they were building at the same time. This time, I hope, the design certification will lead to 100 plants built cookie-cutter. Lots of advantages, including spare parts availability, and maintenance & operations people able to walk in and go to work - kinda like 747 pilots can fly most any one built.
I agree with most of what you say. Most people seem to think that there are maybe 5 to 10 nuclear plants operating in the US. They are incredulous when they find there are over 100, most of which have been producing nearly a gigawatt electrical day in and day out for 15 to 30 years. In the last ten years the average capacity factor (power actually produced vs. the power that could be produced) has grown to well over 90%. Some plants are running at 98%, which is amazing to me.
Harvard School of Public Health did a study over 10 years ago that showed that the coal fired plants in a 100 mile radius of Chicago were responsible for a huge number of deaths due to respiratory disease from the polution. I don't have the paper, but I think the number was around 1000 deaths a year, and a huge number of people with respiratory illness. Sorry if my recollection is not as good as I wish it was. I don't recall the amount of nasty chemicals (including radioactive) in the ash, but they are tremendously concentrated.
I'd love to see some Pebble Bed Modular Reactors built here, but nobody has tried to run a design basis through the NRC, while we have a certified design of a Advanced PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) by Westinghouse, and an Advanced BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) by GE. And a couple of other guys are coming on strong. The number of companies feeling their way toward getting sites approved is impressive to me. Nobody wants to be the first bec they know they are going to draw the I-flunked-3rd-grade-science dopes.
From my perspective, whether Global Warming is the real deal, or we're just in a weather cycle, is less important than the fact that only a nut-ball would continue to burn a finite resource like coal, natural gas, and oil that creates greenhouse gases and annoys people to the point that they want to kill us. Let's move on and leave them and their oil in peace.
We the morons of California have chosen to build dozens of silly natural gas plants for base load. In places with fresh air to the brain, they use natural gas for "peaking" because it is the most expensive fuel on the planet. So we've created a big demand for nat gas, driving the price up so the old folks in the rest of the US can't afford to heat their homes. We should be so proud.
One poster mentioned that Wind is getting close to economic viability, but I doubt that. I've driven past a lot of wind farms in California and Texas in recent months and most of the turbines are IDLE - stopped - doing nothing. Zip. Realize that the power output is a cube function of the wind speed. The gens can run up to their design velocity, but wind rarely approaches the design speed - they are usually loafing and turning out nada for juice. When the wind gets too strong, they have to be stopped because the blades could be torn off if they spin too fast, like spinning a rock on a rope, at some speed the rope will break. The last numbers I saw for a wind farm did NOT include the cost to build it, which came mostly from tax money, nor did they include the cost of maintenance, which was huge bec the bearings didn't last long at all, and a host of other problems. Then there is the problems with the sliced & diced birds, which you either care about or not. To some it's only important if you are saving a few owls from the a lumberjack, but it's ok to samarai thousands of birds with windmills.
I really like Solar, especially when the new breed are mounted on homes and parking garages. They can look decent, and are much more efficient than 20 years ago, the economy of scale and the electronic regulator boxes have driven costs way down. I hope to put a system on my next home. (Did you know there is open source software to monitor these systems?)
I hope we in the US can build another TWe of Nuclear capacity in the next 30 years. I rue Jimmy Carter's decision to disallow reprocessing of nuclear fuel, and I think we should revisit that decision in the next dozen years. We have the ability to proliferation-proof repro
I'm getting to really hate SBC, my phone company. They refuse to provide DSL in rural areas, although they deployed the proper equipment, which reduced our dialup connects from 50Kbps to 26.4.
They pulled the money earmarked to run fiber to the RT in order to do Fiber to the Premises in urban areas, and are vigorously fighting anybody trying to solve our problem.
They don't give a fat rat's patoot about their customers, only about protecting their market, should they ever choose to serve it.
To blazes with them and their many million-dollar campaigns to keep small government from providing decent service, while SBC and others continue to screw us. The Cal PUC is in their pocket and does nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Dr. U. Bet UrPaycheck.
This thread began with some commentary that "it's a scorcher worldwide..." yet here in NorCal, we had a below average July. August is starting very cool. So, yeah, weather isn't climate, and figures don't lie. But liars do figure.
First it was Global Warming, and when the corrected data showed none for over a decade, the mantra became Climate Change. Global Colding - oh, NO!!!
My boss was recently killed in a Toy where the mats were reportedly found by the cops in the trunk. If it turns out she was killed by Toyota playing games with lives, I'll cheerfully swear off their crap for life. Currently I have two Toyotas, but there were plenty of good alternatives.
I agree with your comments about electric hot water heaters. That also applies to natural gas or propane hot water heaters.
Another extremely annoying issue is that, at least in my neck of the woods (NoCal), I can't buy a gas hot water heater without a pilot light! 24x7 that light helps heat my water, but I'll bet well over half of the energy goes out the flue, wasting me a couple of hundred dollars a year.
I've been told it's the fault of Underwriter Labs, who haven't the first clue about engineering, it seems. A fail-safe igniter with flame, heat, and gas sensors and a micro-controller should be simple to build and test. Even if it adds $50 to the price of a hot water heater, that cost should easily be paid back in a year. And the same for gas heaters and furnaces.
Very good post! And quite accurate regarding the radioactive material blowing in the wind + concentrated heavy metals in the ash.
In my view, Nat Gas turbines are another bad choice - horribly expensive fuel gotten from folks who want to kill us, and it's a polluter, just not as bad as Coal.
As to the topic of this thread...
I would really, really like to see the 10 year net MWH (Megawatt Hours) of electricity forecast from this monstrosity.
The 4 mile greenhouse is going to get dirty from sand and probably pitted from sand storms. Power plants are usually rated at peak max power.
Somebody care to check my arithmetic - I'm just pouring this out with the fat pencil.
So it puts out 200MWe at noon on a cloudless day with the sun at it's northern most point. At any other time - between 2PM and 10AM every day, and worse on all other days of the year, or if it's cloudy, this thing is going to put out a lot less net electricity. I'd give it 800MWHe from 10AM-2PM for two months a year, and 25 to 50% less the other 10 months a year. And I'd give it 8 hours more sun at an average of 80MW = 640MWH in peak months and 4 hours at 50MW = 200 MWH the other 10 months.
(800 MWH + 640 MWH) * 60 days = 85 GWH peak "summer" days
(130 MW*4 hrs + 50MW *4 hrs ) * 300 days = 216 GWH the rest of the year
So I'll throw out a 300 GWH annual total output
Let's see what a "base load" plant might put out. Their capacity factors (amount of electricity actually produced vs. what they can produce) are above 90% - 24 hours a day, every day. Yes, that includes maint and refueling shutdowns.
200MW * 24 * 365 * .9 = 1577 GWH, more than FIVE TIMES what this many square mile hipposaurus can generate.
Ooops - sorry, I failed to factor in the capacity factor on this thing. ONE generator hanging in a chimney. Yeah, that will work well - single point of failure is good. Anybody seen figures on wind generators out of service for generator bearing problems? You don't want to. Well, I'm betting this has 30% down time for the first five years and 10% for a number of years after that. It's all new pie in the sky.
Yours is the first intelligent comment in this thread.
For all the alphabet soup behind their names, these "scientists" are in need of wall-to-wall counseling and probably a little time in "general population". The Americans should go in a federal lockup, and the Brit wherever they put the nasty buggers.
I use a Logitech mouse and MS keyboard - both Bluetooth - on a docked ThinkPad. Like above poster, both hang up for a while several times a day, sometimes causing XP to make the disconnected chime. A couple of seconds later they reconnect.
I've considered Communist Plots, Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, and Those Who Cannot Be Named. I have not eliminated Country Music or the Current Administration.
For now, I tend to blame Windows, because after that happens my VPN often loses heartbeat and drops.
The Net Knows.
So, here we have some guy, the department director, whose immediate deputy is a crook. Bribing / taking bribes, along with at least one other.
In the real world, he would be Accountable and Responsible. But, it would seem, not in DCland. The guy should NOT be allowed in the Administration.
And, after the number of crooks this Administration has tried to bring on board, I wonder if some other heads at 1600 Pennsy don't need to roll. Does anybody do background investigations on these clowns?
At this point, I'd be looking for a new Chief of Staff. This is CHANGE???
Too bad this post got crushed by the Mod Squad.
The logic in the bill is that, "Scumbags is as scumbags does". People who do crimes usually continue to do crimes.
So by collecting DNA (and prints) of thieves and vandals, the cops will more likely be able to track them down when they graduate to the nastier leagues. I really, really like the idea of being able to snap up rapists, burglars, home invaders and other scum most skosh.
Collecting DNA from misdemeanor convicts is where I have some concern. I do think any non-citizen convicted of a non-traffic misdemeanor should be sent home. Bye, Bitch {flush}.
But I'm not sure I'm in favor of collecting DNA from every CITIZEN pot smoker, shoplifter, and street fighter in the land. And I'll echo the first poster's "Yeah, right" regarding always pitching the DNA record if the arrestee is not convicted.
What about Juveniles? If they are convicted, whether tried as an adult or not, is their DNA kept on record?
This is an issue that will not go away, with 50 states to fight it out, and it will probably go to the Supremes. DNA is a great way to convict and a great way to show innocence. As a privacy advocate and big fan of Liberty, I expect to revise my thinking a few times in the coming years.
Most outside antennas have a pre-amplifier at the antenna that is powered in the house. If that preamp has died or the power is no longer getting up the coax or twinlead to the amp, the DTV signal is going to be awful. Suggest that folks check that out before getting a new system.
You can be sure that Fred's TV and Gizmo will cheerfully come out, remove all of the mostly good stuff to haul to the landfill, and replace with all new stuff at about $300 - $500, including installation.
If the homeowner is unlucky, all that wandering around on the roof and poking holes will destroy the roof, which can be replaced for a mere $10,000.
Keep your fingers crossed for your non-cable and non-satellite friends. Advise caution.
CAUTION: YOU MAY KILL SOMEONE IF YOU DO NOT TURN YOUR HOUSE'S MAIN BREAKERS TO OFF! * If you leave the Main Breakers ON you will backfeed power to the entire neighborhood, and the power workers think the lines are dead. Very bad. * Technically, you need an electrician to wire a breaker/cut-off switch to the generator. In this manner when you switch the generator connection to ON you also switch the Main Breakers to OFF. Expensive, but safe and complies with NEC. * Most people just use a male to male plug, plug one end into the generator, and the other into some house outlet. If you turn the Main Breakers OFF ~BEFORE~ you do this, it is possible to get power to everything in your house, limited by the breaker capacity and the power generation capacity, and not feed the neighborhood. The relative safety of this is up to others to argue. * IF THIS MAKES NO SENSE TO YOU, SEEK PROFESSIONAL HELP. Or at least a neighbor with a subscription to Popular Electronics. Your local linemen will thank you!
This is perhaps the most important post in the thread. In addition to electrocuting someone, if you don't open the utility main breaker, you will try to pick up a lot of other loads and your generator breaker will probably open, perhaps repeatedly, making you curse and mebbe do something stupid.
Another warning: if you wire an extension cord to plug into a 220 or 110 outlet in the house, be careful - do not close the generator output breaker until you plug it into the house. A friend's g.daughter tried to "help" and picked the plug up by the shiny part. She's had many operations, but has fair use of her hand after several years.
Be careful - electricity is especially dangerous if you are either doing stuff you rarely do, or doing unsafe stuff you do often and get sloppy. That's how linemen get fried, btw.
Take the previous post seriously - if this is not your forte, get professional help.
If you want a position for sysadmin in the Microsoft world, you're going to have to spend a few thousand getting certifications. You'll need those whether you have a degree or not.
If you're going for a position with Linux or Unix, check out a local LUG (Linux Users Group) for some great resources and job leads.
Don't stop there though. ... You never know when opportunities pop up and where, so keep your eyes open.
This is close, I think, if you want to work for a bigger shop.
As above posters have said, the HR Nazis read the spec and it says "degree in cs or related dis" and the door stays shut unless you know someone.
Get yourself enrolled in a college and go after that degree. You owe it to your future to expand your horizons.
But small and medium biz need help, and in this economy if they can get somebody junior to help BigBuxBob, there's a good chance you can get in the door, study your ass off - learn about EVERYTHING: mail, databases, LDAP, Active Directory, Web Application Servers, IIS & Apache, Linux, Unix, Windoz. Expect to take your lumps and pay your dues. Be ready when Bob has a vacation coming to fill his shoes!
A few tips:
- NETWORK - join users groups and meet people.
- Volunteer to help Non Profits with IT Stuff - heck, even helping cable a network is a good thing for your resume.
- Learn everything about networking and IP.
- Consume slashdot, sourceforge, and support sites.
- Keep a paper brain or a huge doc file that contains urls and commands you have used.
- Have a thumb-drive with a toolkit you can use to fix probs on unix, linux, windows. There are plenty out there - find and compile them for your self.
- Publish - have a blog people can find (which means having useful content, not just drivel).
- Never, ever, be without a current resume ready to email or hand out with 30 minutes notice!
Within a year or so, something will pop.
One final thought: Ask colleagues with degrees what their degree is in. Then ask if they are working in the field of their major. Approx 2/3 in tech will say no. Ask the rest how many hours (not credit hours - actual hours of class and study only) in their four years were in their Major. The answer is probably fewer than 1000. First two years and much of last two years is to make a well-rounded student who can (should be able to) read and write. The extremely competent may have LOTS more hours or be extremely bright, but the average joe... um, maybe not.
Do NOT be impressed by MS degrees from University of Boom Chalawalla or East Cha-ching. I've worked with a lot of guys with MS who can't write a script, couldn't troubleshoot a sick Apache.
Be confident. You will make it.
Some great things come out of academic research, but others are a huge money sink and have to be whacked. If it is so great, good chance somebody else will pick it up and carry on.
"Spent fuel" is hardly spent - most of the original fissionables are still in the bundle, waiting for wastes to be removed and new fuel bundles made. There are hundreds of highly-enriched U-235 reactors that can be recycled to make commercial fuel (lightly-enriched with U-235).
Some fairly smart people made very bad decisions in the 70's that haunt us today.
Have a look at the GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) http://www.gnep.energy.gov/gnepPublicInformation.html for a plan to get rid of the nuclear waste we have (by burning it in reactors), and supply a lot of energy worldwide.
As an aside, we need to think about multiple sources of energy - Perhaps bio-diesel from algae http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html for transportation. Solar and Nuclear for electricity and heating.
Conservation via insulating, is another great solution. My home has R-46 insulation. Try to get someone to build one of those for ya! "No can do!", says the builder, because he's never done it.
We're between a rock and a hard place with Natural Gas and Propane this winter - demand has outstripped the supply, and (us) idiots in California and other places built Nat Gas fueled electrical plants - the most expensive fuel on planet earth and we use it for base load. Incredibly stupid.
I read an article recently that most of the Sierra Club consists of geezers. Since they kind of missed the point on a lot off issues, drinking bad ju-ju koolaid, it's probably best that they trundle off in their birks to history and leave Environmentalism to those who can think things through. We can use technology (and computer modeling using _all_ of the relevant variables) to peer through the haze and find good solutions for the future.
Yeah - I'ma geezer, too. Let's rock.
I don't know what portions of the world this poster has visited, but more than half of the world population lives in places there wouldn't even have been a hearing before the guy in the clink was in the clink - maybe permanently, and perhaps never to be heard from again.
Freedom isn't free, and the guy in jail is paying his dues - good for him for standing up for his beliefs. One of my fears is that I'll someday be in court and run my mouth - at which I'm fairly talented - and the judge will use the classic "One more outburst and I'll find you in contempt." I will, of course, have to reply "Too late, chum." In this country we have pretty clear rights, but they disappear if we don't stand to protect them. As the old bumper sticker says "Question Authority".
That said, it's good he has the freedom to play "three hots and a cot" for a half year. Most folks either have far less resolve or the need to feed a family / make their Lexus payments crumbles their cement. If he worked for NimNode NewsCorp he'd have Peter Combover to remind us each of the 27 days of his resolve before some slimy - er, slick - lawyer could work his side of the street and get him freed to the flashes of cameras and streets full of Live11News trucks.
I really need to see some _hard data_ that wind power will ever be be a good deal. I drive past a huge wind farm - Altamont Pass - east of San Francisco regularly. Many hundreds of wind gens there. I have never seen more than 10% actually turning. Most are idle. Samo Tehachapi. I've only been past one in Texas twice, but same deal. Note that the rated output of a generator is at full speed, and the output varies as the cube of the wind velocity. If the gennie puts out a megawatt at 40MPH, it can only put out 1/8 MWe at 20MPH and 1/64MW at 10MPH - That's 16KW - enough to power a dozen homes on a hot day. I've never seen $$$ for wind power that included cost of construction and maintenance and tax credits when calculating the cost of power. Wheeeee! It's FREE! Not. I believe wind power, when you include those hard dollar costs, is even more expensive that Natural Gas generation by several times - in some cases by an order of magnitude. As you probably know, Nat Gas is the most expensive fuel on earth for making electricity. In most places it is used for "peaking" plants because of the cost. And, of course, it is still a global warming contributor (if you believe in global warming), comes from the Middle East where they are trying to kill us for taking it.
I'm afraid to ask - what is a "radiation suit" in your mind? Since I've worked with radiation for much of 40 years, I'm interested.
There are plastic or cloth suits designed to keep radioactive contamination off you. Sometimes they are worn with filter type respirators, or airline respirators to keep the contamination from getting inside you. Those are external and internal contamination. External is not bad, internal is much worse.
A radiation suit would, presumably, keep the radiation from getting to your tissues. If you are talking about alpha or beta, a little distance is your best bet - a couple of inches for alpha, a couple of feet for beta.
Leaving Gamma. Most of the gamma emitters of interest have a half-life of less than 5ish years, so they are mostly gone. We use very dense materials - like lead - to shield against hard gammas. Pretty hard to wear a lead suit whilst riding a motorcycle, although it would make a great clown skit, I think.
My guess is that a GM tube detector would be useless farther than 5 miles from the accident site. I'd want a scintillator or an ion chamber.
The Health Physics Journal had a paper on Chernobyl after 20 years. Sadly, I don't have access to it now. I do recall that levels were much below some expectations. Since science is based on laws, one must presume that the assumptions made 15 or more years ago were incorrect - less total deposition of isotopes, the isotopic mix is different, more permeable soil, etc.
Exploration is dangerous. Cowards and those expecting to live forever need not apply. We salute heroes, including those who live and those whose lives are taken for the advancement of humankind.
I don't know any astronauts, but I know plenty of others who go "once more into the breach", and they pretty uniformly have a quirky view of life, death and I suspect they can hang with the jokes.
For my money, we need to kick NASA to the curb and get space exploration going. I think the commercial ventures (for example Virgin Galactic) have great promise to actually DO something. 30 years ago NASA was doing great things, but in the last 20, much of what has happened is just bus driving - with some great science as the beneficiary.
The ISS is a goat rodeo, and we should never have partnered with the Russians - it was and is a political game, and we've ended up having to rebuild all of the junk they provided.
nor did they include the cost of maintenance, which was huge bec the bearings didn't last long at all, and a host of other problems.
My complaint is they don't count maintenance costs in the numbers and those maintenence costs were huge. Everything needs maintenance (and, we hope, gets it), and with experience we build stuff with better parts that is more maintainable. Good example was a Dodge car they built that you needed to remove a fender shroud to replace the rear spark plugs.
A big mistake that has been made with lots of technologies is building plants that are one-offs. Lots of coal fired electric plants, old refineries, and early nuke plants are like that. The AE (architect-engineer - e.g, Bechtel, BR, etc) would design an entire plant, with plenty of stupid differences between five others they were building at the same time. This time, I hope, the design certification will lead to 100 plants built cookie-cutter. Lots of advantages, including spare parts availability, and maintenance & operations people able to walk in and go to work - kinda like 747 pilots can fly most any one built.
I agree with most of what you say. Most people seem to think that there are maybe 5 to 10 nuclear plants operating in the US. They are incredulous when they find there are over 100, most of which have been producing nearly a gigawatt electrical day in and day out for 15 to 30 years. In the last ten years the average capacity factor (power actually produced vs. the power that could be produced) has grown to well over 90%. Some plants are running at 98%, which is amazing to me.
Harvard School of Public Health did a study over 10 years ago that showed that the coal fired plants in a 100 mile radius of Chicago were responsible for a huge number of deaths due to respiratory disease from the polution. I don't have the paper, but I think the number was around 1000 deaths a year, and a huge number of people with respiratory illness. Sorry if my recollection is not as good as I wish it was. I don't recall the amount of nasty chemicals (including radioactive) in the ash, but they are tremendously concentrated.
I'd love to see some Pebble Bed Modular Reactors built here, but nobody has tried to run a design basis through the NRC, while we have a certified design of a Advanced PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) by Westinghouse, and an Advanced BWR (Boiling Water Reactor) by GE. And a couple of other guys are coming on strong. The number of companies feeling their way toward getting sites approved is impressive to me. Nobody wants to be the first bec they know they are going to draw the I-flunked-3rd-grade-science dopes.
From my perspective, whether Global Warming is the real deal, or we're just in a weather cycle, is less important than the fact that only a nut-ball would continue to burn a finite resource like coal, natural gas, and oil that creates greenhouse gases and annoys people to the point that they want to kill us. Let's move on and leave them and their oil in peace.
We the morons of California have chosen to build dozens of silly natural gas plants for base load. In places with fresh air to the brain, they use natural gas for "peaking" because it is the most expensive fuel on the planet. So we've created a big demand for nat gas, driving the price up so the old folks in the rest of the US can't afford to heat their homes. We should be so proud.
One poster mentioned that Wind is getting close to economic viability, but I doubt that. I've driven past a lot of wind farms in California and Texas in recent months and most of the turbines are IDLE - stopped - doing nothing. Zip. Realize that the power output is a cube function of the wind speed. The gens can run up to their design velocity, but wind rarely approaches the design speed - they are usually loafing and turning out nada for juice. When the wind gets too strong, they have to be stopped because the blades could be torn off if they spin too fast, like spinning a rock on a rope, at some speed the rope will break. The last numbers I saw for a wind farm did NOT include the cost to build it, which came mostly from tax money, nor did they include the cost of maintenance, which was huge bec the bearings didn't last long at all, and a host of other problems. Then there is the problems with the sliced & diced birds, which you either care about or not. To some it's only important if you are saving a few owls from the a lumberjack, but it's ok to samarai thousands of birds with windmills.
I really like Solar, especially when the new breed are mounted on homes and parking garages. They can look decent, and are much more efficient than 20 years ago, the economy of scale and the electronic regulator boxes have driven costs way down. I hope to put a system on my next home. (Did you know there is open source software to monitor these systems?)
I hope we in the US can build another TWe of Nuclear capacity in the next 30 years. I rue Jimmy Carter's decision to disallow reprocessing of nuclear fuel, and I think we should revisit that decision in the next dozen years. We have the ability to proliferation-proof repro
I'm getting to really hate SBC, my phone company. They refuse to provide DSL in rural areas, although they deployed the proper equipment, which reduced our dialup connects from 50Kbps to 26.4.
They pulled the money earmarked to run fiber to the RT in order to do Fiber to the Premises in urban areas, and are vigorously fighting anybody trying to solve our problem.
They don't give a fat rat's patoot about their customers, only about protecting their market, should they ever choose to serve it.
To blazes with them and their many million-dollar campaigns to keep small government from providing decent service, while SBC and others continue to screw us. The Cal PUC is in their pocket and does nothing.
Note: the 900+ bugs are in production. There were LOTS more in dev, which is how the CMU 20+ bugs/KLOC came about. Comparing apples to iguanas.