Store power during the cheap period of the night (ie buying it from the grid during the night, off peak tariff, economy 7 whatever you want to call it)
As for the efficeincy you are not beating 100% for the entire system, thereby obeying the laws of thermo dynamics, but since you are storing 20kWh and have 24KWh in waste heat to use then when you measure energy in that you paid for against energy out that you want, you beat 100% (I think this is termed the economic effieciency but I could be wrong on terminology)
Where does that heat come from? From the air - if you compress air and want to keep it at the same temperature you are going to have to take a lot of energy out - see the combined gas law (and Boyles law + Charles law). this has to have a side effect right? Of cours e- the air is going to be cold when you decompress it. But in our case thats useful - free air conditioning.
1 lot of energy in, useful effect out in 3 different ways (as I said actually reading the original post is such a novel idea)
You can save more money if you store energy during the cheap period of the night.
There is a rather interesting alternative to batteries as power storage - unfortunately its a little expensive on setup costs.
Compressed air storage. The same thing you hear is powering those new cars, its also used in a couple of large sclae power stations world wide (one in the US and one in Germany iirc)
The idea is you store air in high presure cylynders, 6000psi 540 cubic feet of air ones are quite good - these are standard and used for filling smaller cylynders (eg for diving) normally. The advantage is as these type of things go they are relatively commodity while being very high pressure. One of these will store about 1Kwh and is about 3' tall and 1' diameter. Lets say you are going to need about 16kWh during the day for lighting and electricy (you won't need any for air con, we'll get to that)
During the night you compress air into these empty tanks (you calibrate the day use to make sure they are empty by the end of the day) Compressing the air generates heat, so you use water to cool this, you should be able to extract enough heat in the water to fill your average hot water tank 4 or 5 times. This can be used for normal hot water, heating a swimming pool or in colder places/times of year for heating (under floor ideally). Compression is about 80% efficient in terms of energy in to potential electricy generating cpacity of the stored air. However factor in the heat you have stored for hot water and you are doing better than 100% - assuming you do use that hot water.
During the day the compressed air is used to run a gas turbine, you should be able to get about 80% efficency again and be able to run a 2-3 kW generator, however the "waste product" is nice cold air - hence no need for an airconditioning system, you just pump this air around your house.
So overall:
During the night you use 24kWh of electricy at cheap rates to store air into 20 of these tanks. You also end up with about 24kWh of waste heat used to heat your hot water for free - thats definitely your normal hot water use covered, under floor central heating and probably atleast part of your swimming pool if you have one. During the day you get about 16kWh of useful electricy, plus you get all that nice cold air to cool your house down (about 10,000 cubic feet at a very very low temperature)
Not only do you get a net out of nearly double what you put in, you are also paying less for what you put in that you would if you used that power normally during the day, add a few solar panels and you are laughing.
The draw back?
Cost, you are looking at atleast $40k to install this type of system, plus its not exactly off the self - all the individual components are but you can't just buy it as a package, be nice if it was though!!
No you are completely wrong, think tanks perform a valuable service giving thoughtful insight and independant opinion on a variety of wide ranging and often specialist topics.
This report was provided by the commitee for think tank research, a think tank for the research industry. It has been funded by various large industry think tanks and we would like to thank them for the expense account they have provided during this period
Ever since the IRC days online has been popular with adult chat rooms, at the more extreme end are chat rooms that deal with imaginary rape.
Ok its not everyone's thing but I personally know several women that do fantasise about it - its a thrill, something they are afraid off, they have morethan enough sense to know not to do it or even realistically crave it in real life but they enjoy being able to act out a role as a victim online.
I've never played second life but I've heard eough about it to know that this kind of role play is equally pressent there.
Its story telling, fantasy, imagination.
I agree, doing it with a minor should be illegal, but adults are able to make their own choices, and if you don't enjoy it or want it you can choose to leave, click ban, log off or pull the power out of you computer if you are that desparate. A crime it certainly is not!!
Ok Adium uses libgaim (or libpidgin now I presume) but the interface is so much nicer.
It looks better, is easier to use and to configure - I much prefered using it - sadly I no longer have a mac and Adium is only on OSX - I sincerely wish it would be ported to linux!!
China holds a huge reserve in US dollars - so much that even threatening to ofload a reasonable chuck of it would significantly weaken the dollar in the money markets (even more than it already is)
If they actually dumped that money then the US could be in serious trouble.
Think the cost of all imports to the US effectively doubling or more in cost (including oil), huge inflation, probably massive interest rises - it would not be a pretty picture for the US.
True the US is a huge market for chineese goods, but china does have other markets.
In an economic war china would win - the chances of it happening are pretty slim, the chances of the US seriously forcing ultimatums down chinas throat on copyright are even more unlikely.
China will start to respect copyright when it decides its in its own best interests and not before (not much different from the US really then)
"Put it in writing or buy the licenses, I won't risk my ass over this - or I can install this free program thats just as good and we don't have to pay for it, legally"
The boss already knows its against the law and has proved that by his response - given the email trail you are certainly on your own if you go and install.
If you get sacked then you sue for wrongful dismisal and you collect the whistle blower fee from the relavant software policing agency (BSA, FACT whichever)
Either way you send your CV out to the recruitment agencies (shouldn't need to update it, I find it more sensible to keep my CV always up to date, its not exactly difficult to do)
If you leave on bad terms then you still can go collect the whistle blower reward - even better you have not done anything wrong.
As I told my manager once - completely truthfully "I have as much loyalty to the company as the company has to me", I even said it with a smile on my face. The manager for some reasoned beleived the BS side of this statement, in actual fact I meant it as the truth, ie when it comes to the crunch, its zero.
I've played multiplayer quake based on an office I used to work in (quite a large complex of buildings)
Its was created using a converter from architectual schematics to the quake map... I don't know the exact method - I just saw the before and after but basically it went into a cad program, out into some format that could be read and 30 seconds later a new quake map file was made...
Given schools are public buildings I always wondered if the schematics would be publically available to use for this type of thing...
In making beer (and I do this at home so I feel I know atleast a little about it) you have several stages with "waste" product - but I wouldn't exactly describe them as starch, sugar and alcahol - to be honest its mostly fibre... or atleast so I thought...
First you malt the barley (basically a slow roast though thats an oversimplification).... can't really see any waste coming from here.
Then you mash the grains, ie keep in water at about 60-65C for a couple of hours, this causes the enzymes in the grain to convert the stored starch in the grain into sugar that yeast can later consume. You then sparge the grain (think pouring a watering can with a fine spray) over the grain the gentle extract this sugar. How you throw whats left of the grain away (waste product 1 - mashed grain) Now you boil the water you collected along with hops to add flavour, strain off the water and you are left with hops (waste product 2, hops that have been boiled in high sugar content water) Then you leave the beer to ferment and for a commerical brewery parsturising, carbonate and can/bottle the beer (a terrible and evil process, but then not everyone has the taste for real ale) there will be sediment left in the fermenter than is the final waste product, this will also have some beer in it... waste product 3.
So we have the malted barely that has been mashed and sparged, mashing should have converted as much of the starch to sugar as possible. Spraying should has washed off as much of that sugar as possible, the remains? the non starch part of the grain
The hops will have soaked up some of the wort (effectively sugared water) and then you have the material the hops are made of, some starch and mostly fibre like any seed.
The sediment should not contain and sugar, but it will hard the same or close) alacohol content as the final beer... it probably also contains plenty of yeast (dead and still viable)
Actually I think writing this out I may have convinced myself.... its stuff that they would be throwing out anyway and it is fairly well concentrated (atleast compared to raw harvesting of bio matter) as long as the alcohol is not too toxic to the baterial breaking it down I start to see how this would work...
Interesting idea... not worth trying myself - making 5 gallons of beer I wouldn't have enough waste product to fill a 1 gallon bucket, but scaled up it would be interesting to see!!
Ah now I get your reference - true that it is set now but they would just ignore this planet as unbeleivably strange and primitive - though thats a fairly standard twist for science fiction in general
I rather like the character of "Meatfucker" - and the Culture novel universe in general - its certainly a future I can relate to and would be very happy living in - without it being too shiny happy optimistic about the way things will turn out
Ask any sky diver - its not hiting the group that kills you!! Well atleast not the first time.
When you hit the ground you bounce - at the same time as smashing every bone in your body, then after bouncing you hit the ground again and your shatter bones laccerate your insides.
The trick therefore is to hug the ground and make sure you don't bounce - this is why you occasionally read about sky divers surviving falls without parachutes.
In our next installment: Why parachutes go up when they open - The ground reverberation echo effect.
I have both the.com and.co.uk of the same domain for my site... they both point to the same location in the apache config (with or without the www) as I uk business I simply want to cover both of the most common options for my customers.
Is there any particular way I can make this set up as google friendly as possible?
Epson cartriges are not worth refilling. Unlike many other printers the printing head is not on the cartridge, its in the printer (atleast on all the epsons I've ever had). This means the cartridges are a lot cheaper to make, true epson still charge an arm and a leg, but the clones are very easy to find cheaply and I've never had a problem with them.
I think I pay about 3GBP for black and 5GBP for 3 color for my 740 - the printer is also 7 years old now and still works fine.
I think I'll stick with epson in future - mainly for the sheer ease of buying good quality cheap clone cartridges.
Having the printing head on the printer has a down side - if it breaks its time to bin the printer - too expensive to replace/repair - the up side it they can use a better quality one than the disposable ones on the majority of cartridges
If I can't do it with my free software on my free OS using open source tools on a piece of hardware I built but I can do it on an overpriced box that they license be then it isn't fair use.
If fair use laws say a customer should be able to make a backup copy of media they own then its that simple - they should be able to make a back up copy. If the law where you are says you should be able to format shift then same thing.
Since the law doesn't say you should be able to as long as you buy an extra piece of hardware licensed by these people then it obviously isn't fair use (and is possibly leveraging a monopoly/cartel position for control of a different market)
Please try to be a little realistic here - yes I am no fan of microsoft. I've worked on products that were trying to implement protocols to interface with MS servers from unix servers so I know first hand how bad it can be.
MS does have a legitimate business model, they don't tend to use it very often because it involves less profit than the ones they prefer to use but it is there.
Bankrupting them is not going to happen, its in no ones interests in the short term, no matter what long term benefits may or may not apply. The threat would not be taken seriously by microsoft even if the EU threatened to do it, unlikely.
What is far more likely is that through ever increasing fines they will make not complying less profitable than complying until microsoft capitulates - its probably going to be a lengthy process.
Slashdot Mirror
Try reading the post ;)
Store power during the cheap period of the night (ie buying it from the grid during the night, off peak tariff, economy 7 whatever you want to call it)
As for the efficeincy you are not beating 100% for the entire system, thereby obeying the laws of thermo dynamics, but since you are storing 20kWh and have 24KWh in waste heat to use then when you measure energy in that you paid for against energy out that you want, you beat 100% (I think this is termed the economic effieciency but I could be wrong on terminology)
Where does that heat come from? From the air - if you compress air and want to keep it at the same temperature you are going to have to take a lot of energy out - see the combined gas law (and Boyles law + Charles law). this has to have a side effect right? Of cours e- the air is going to be cold when you decompress it. But in our case thats useful - free air conditioning.
1 lot of energy in, useful effect out in 3 different ways (as I said actually reading the original post is such a novel idea)
You can save more money if you store energy during the cheap period of the night.
There is a rather interesting alternative to batteries as power storage - unfortunately its a little expensive on setup costs.
Compressed air storage. The same thing you hear is powering those new cars, its also used in a couple of large sclae power stations world wide (one in the US and one in Germany iirc)
The idea is you store air in high presure cylynders, 6000psi 540 cubic feet of air ones are quite good - these are standard and used for filling smaller cylynders (eg for diving) normally. The advantage is as these type of things go they are relatively commodity while being very high pressure. One of these will store about 1Kwh and is about 3' tall and 1' diameter. Lets say you are going to need about 16kWh during the day for lighting and electricy (you won't need any for air con, we'll get to that)
During the night you compress air into these empty tanks (you calibrate the day use to make sure they are empty by the end of the day) Compressing the air generates heat, so you use water to cool this, you should be able to extract enough heat in the water to fill your average hot water tank 4 or 5 times. This can be used for normal hot water, heating a swimming pool or in colder places/times of year for heating (under floor ideally). Compression is about 80% efficient in terms of energy in to potential electricy generating cpacity of the stored air. However factor in the heat you have stored for hot water and you are doing better than 100% - assuming you do use that hot water.
During the day the compressed air is used to run a gas turbine, you should be able to get about 80% efficency again and be able to run a 2-3 kW generator, however the "waste product" is nice cold air - hence no need for an airconditioning system, you just pump this air around your house.
So overall:
During the night you use 24kWh of electricy at cheap rates to store air into 20 of these tanks.
You also end up with about 24kWh of waste heat used to heat your hot water for free - thats definitely your normal hot water use covered, under floor central heating and probably atleast part of your swimming pool if you have one.
During the day you get about 16kWh of useful electricy, plus you get all that nice cold air to cool your house down (about 10,000 cubic feet at a very very low temperature)
Not only do you get a net out of nearly double what you put in, you are also paying less for what you put in that you would if you used that power normally during the day, add a few solar panels and you are laughing.
The draw back?
Cost, you are looking at atleast $40k to install this type of system, plus its not exactly off the self - all the individual components are but you can't just buy it as a package, be nice if it was though!!
perl -ML -e '$C->t<$L->t?$C->P()->F():$C->P()->F()'
;)
;)
Who needs brackets?
I make that 51, anyone fancy bettering it?
oh assume the Law.pm module has kindly been rewritten to L.pm by a congress that decided too many characters would be too expensive to store
(teach me to use preview and better markup)
perl -ML -e '$C->tt?$C->P()->F():$C->P()->F()'
;)
;)
Who needs brackets?
I make that 51, anyone fancy bettering it?
oh assume the Law.pm module has kindly been rewritten to L.pm by a congress that decided too many characters would be too expensive to store
No you are completely wrong, think tanks perform a valuable service giving thoughtful insight and independant opinion on a variety of wide ranging and often specialist topics.
This report was provided by the commitee for think tank research, a think tank for the research industry. It has been funded by various large industry think tanks and we would like to thank them for the expense account they have provided during this period
RMS's GPL. This is the weapon of a Free Software Advocate. Not as clumsy or random as a lawyer. An elegant weapon for a more civilized age. ;)
"A bug in the comments/documentation is worth 2 in the code"
Ever since the IRC days online has been popular with adult chat rooms, at the more extreme end are chat rooms that deal with imaginary rape.
Ok its not everyone's thing but I personally know several women that do fantasise about it - its a thrill, something they are afraid off, they have morethan enough sense to know not to do it or even realistically crave it in real life but they enjoy being able to act out a role as a victim online.
I've never played second life but I've heard eough about it to know that this kind of role play is equally pressent there.
Its story telling, fantasy, imagination.
I agree, doing it with a minor should be illegal, but adults are able to make their own choices, and if you don't enjoy it or want it you can choose to leave, click ban, log off or pull the power out of you computer if you are that desparate. A crime it certainly is not!!
Ok Adium uses libgaim (or libpidgin now I presume) but the interface is so much nicer.
It looks better, is easier to use and to configure - I much prefered using it - sadly I no longer have a mac and Adium is only on OSX - I sincerely wish it would be ported to linux!!
Who beat who with economic sticks?
China holds a huge reserve in US dollars - so much that even threatening to ofload a reasonable chuck of it would significantly weaken the dollar in the money markets (even more than it already is)
If they actually dumped that money then the US could be in serious trouble.
Think the cost of all imports to the US effectively doubling or more in cost (including oil), huge inflation, probably massive interest rises - it would not be a pretty picture for the US.
True the US is a huge market for chineese goods, but china does have other markets.
In an economic war china would win - the chances of it happening are pretty slim, the chances of the US seriously forcing ultimatums down chinas throat on copyright are even more unlikely.
China will start to respect copyright when it decides its in its own best interests and not before (not much different from the US really then)
Just remember:
Documentation is like sex, when its good, its very very good, and when its bad its better than nothing.
"Put it in writing or buy the licenses, I won't risk my ass over this - or I can install this free program thats just as good and we don't have to pay for it, legally"
The boss already knows its against the law and has proved that by his response - given the email trail you are certainly on your own if you go and install.
If you get sacked then you sue for wrongful dismisal and you collect the whistle blower fee from the relavant software policing agency (BSA, FACT whichever)
Either way you send your CV out to the recruitment agencies (shouldn't need to update it, I find it more sensible to keep my CV always up to date, its not exactly difficult to do)
If you leave on bad terms then you still can go collect the whistle blower reward - even better you have not done anything wrong.
As I told my manager once - completely truthfully "I have as much loyalty to the company as the company has to me", I even said it with a smile on my face. The manager for some reasoned beleived the BS side of this statement, in actual fact I meant it as the truth, ie when it comes to the crunch, its zero.
I've played multiplayer quake based on an office I used to work in (quite a large complex of buildings)
Its was created using a converter from architectual schematics to the quake map... I don't know the exact method - I just saw the before and after but basically it went into a cad program, out into some format that could be read and 30 seconds later a new quake map file was made...
Given schools are public buildings I always wondered if the schematics would be publically available to use for this type of thing...
Ok so what waste material are they talking about?
In making beer (and I do this at home so I feel I know atleast a little about it) you have several stages with "waste" product - but I wouldn't exactly describe them as starch, sugar and alcahol - to be honest its mostly fibre... or atleast so I thought...
First you malt the barley (basically a slow roast though thats an oversimplification).... can't really see any waste coming from here.
Then you mash the grains, ie keep in water at about 60-65C for a couple of hours, this causes the enzymes in the grain to convert the stored starch in the grain into sugar that yeast can later consume.
You then sparge the grain (think pouring a watering can with a fine spray) over the grain the gentle extract this sugar. How you throw whats left of the grain away (waste product 1 - mashed grain)
Now you boil the water you collected along with hops to add flavour, strain off the water and you are left with hops (waste product 2, hops that have been boiled in high sugar content water)
Then you leave the beer to ferment and for a commerical brewery parsturising, carbonate and can/bottle the beer (a terrible and evil process, but then not everyone has the taste for real ale) there will be sediment left in the fermenter than is the final waste product, this will also have some beer in it... waste product 3.
So we have the malted barely that has been mashed and sparged, mashing should have converted as much of the starch to sugar as possible. Spraying should has washed off as much of that sugar as possible, the remains? the non starch part of the grain
The hops will have soaked up some of the wort (effectively sugared water) and then you have the material the hops are made of, some starch and mostly fibre like any seed.
The sediment should not contain and sugar, but it will hard the same or close) alacohol content as the final beer... it probably also contains plenty of yeast (dead and still viable)
Actually I think writing this out I may have convinced myself.... its stuff that they would be throwing out anyway and it is fairly well concentrated (atleast compared to raw harvesting of bio matter) as long as the alcohol is not too toxic to the baterial breaking it down I start to see how this would work...
Interesting idea... not worth trying myself - making 5 gallons of beer I wouldn't have enough waste product to fill a 1 gallon bucket, but scaled up it would be interesting to see!!
Ah now I get your reference - true that it is set now but they would just ignore this planet as unbeleivably strange and primitive - though thats a fairly standard twist for science fiction in general
Yep - its a completely fucked up universe but I think it would suit me.
I'll freely admit I'd certainly prefer being part of the Culture or the Ulterior - but within those parts I could be quite content
I rather like the character of "Meatfucker" - and the Culture novel universe in general - its certainly a future I can relate to and would be very happy living in - without it being too shiny happy optimistic about the way things will turn out
No no no no no!!!
Ask any sky diver - its not hiting the group that kills you!! Well atleast not the first time.
When you hit the ground you bounce - at the same time as smashing every bone in your body, then after bouncing you hit the ground again and your shatter bones laccerate your insides.
The trick therefore is to hug the ground and make sure you don't bounce - this is why you occasionally read about sky divers surviving falls without parachutes.
In our next installment: Why parachutes go up when they open - The ground reverberation echo effect.
I have both the .com and .co.uk of the same domain for my site... they both point to the same location in the apache config (with or without the www) as I uk business I simply want to cover both of the most common options for my customers.
Is there any particular way I can make this set up as google friendly as possible?
Pretty much, that and hving to clean the heads now and then
Epson cartriges are not worth refilling. Unlike many other printers the printing head is not on the cartridge, its in the printer (atleast on all the epsons I've ever had). This means the cartridges are a lot cheaper to make, true epson still charge an arm and a leg, but the clones are very easy to find cheaply and I've never had a problem with them.
I think I pay about 3GBP for black and 5GBP for 3 color for my 740 - the printer is also 7 years old now and still works fine.
I think I'll stick with epson in future - mainly for the sheer ease of buying good quality cheap clone cartridges.
Having the printing head on the printer has a down side - if it breaks its time to bin the printer - too expensive to replace/repair - the up side it they can use a better quality one than the disposable ones on the majority of cartridges
If I can't do it with my free software on my free OS using open source tools on a piece of hardware I built but I can do it on an overpriced box that they license be then it isn't fair use.
If fair use laws say a customer should be able to make a backup copy of media they own then its that simple - they should be able to make a back up copy. If the law where you are says you should be able to format shift then same thing.
Since the law doesn't say you should be able to as long as you buy an extra piece of hardware licensed by these people then it obviously isn't fair use (and is possibly leveraging a monopoly/cartel position for control of a different market)
Ok so they want to:
"to make things simpler for the consumer"
and they feel that
"DRM must be made to work without constricting consumers"
Isn't the point of DRM to constrict customers? The only way not to do so is to not have DRM.
Since its well known that DRM does not prevent piracy then the only purpose DRM can possibly have is restricting customers.
For those in the RIAA that failed logic 101 then you can not constrict customers if and only if you do not have DRM
I wouldn't give good odds on them getting this through their skulls any time soon....
Specifically bury the charcoal in your fields - it increase the fertility of the soil (same effects as peat soil or volcanic soil)
Please try to be a little realistic here - yes I am no fan of microsoft. I've worked on products that were trying to implement protocols to interface with MS servers from unix servers so I know first hand how bad it can be.
MS does have a legitimate business model, they don't tend to use it very often because it involves less profit than the ones they prefer to use but it is there.
Bankrupting them is not going to happen, its in no ones interests in the short term, no matter what long term benefits may or may not apply. The threat would not be taken seriously by microsoft even if the EU threatened to do it, unlikely.
What is far more likely is that through ever increasing fines they will make not complying less profitable than complying until microsoft capitulates - its probably going to be a lengthy process.
Unfortunately MS isn't going anywhere for a while