Very true, but you seem to be ignoring the fact that other cars also cost thousands of dollars. Granted, their is a premium for a hybrid, but using your own numbers as an example (and my own experiences with a $17,000 regular civic vs. a $20,000 hybrid civic), your hybrid will pay back that $3000 premium in about 6 years assuming gas stays the same price (which intuition tells me it won't). Considering my last 2 cars have lasted me over a decade each before finally crapping out, that's a pretty good ROI. Granted, past performance of vehicles is no guarantee of future performance, so there's no telling if the hybrid will last me 12 years, but it's not unreasonable to believe that it probably will.
If you'll remember back to your high school biology class, most of the items Glug listed are what are widely accepted in the scientific community as density dependent limiting factors. Meaning that as a population increases, so do wars, plague, famine, etc. Global warming is debatable as a density dependent limiting factor, but you could make a strong case for it.
I hope it's better than "Thus Spake Zarathustra 2: The Autopsy."
Zarathustra: God is still dead! But we got the autopsy results back and unfortunately I misspoke before. He did not, in fact, die of pity for man. He was murdered!
Nietzsche totally sold out when he decided to bring in Angela Lansbury's character from "Murder, She Wrote" in to solve the murder.
My company gives me old computers like that every now and again and I try and rehab them and donate them to schools. Most school districts will jump at the chance to get free computers and it's a good way to keep them out of the dump and put them to good use. Some of them are very responsive to putting something like Edubuntu on them, but it's extremely dependent on the IT department you're dealing with.
I'm convinced that the next major breakthrough in artificial intelligence will come from spammers trying to develop more and more sophisticated programs to foil captchas. Eventually they will become so sophisticated that the true test of whether you are human is if you fail miserably at trying to figure out what the hell the captcha is, but the bots will get it instantly.
I for one, welcome our new captcha-killing overlords.
is fire up a computer running your favorite Linux distro (sans libdvdcss), then pop in a home made "Welcome" DVD of sorts that you and your students make (the unencrypted DVD works just fine... splendid!). Then, introduce him and announce that you have some examples of works that the MPAA has produced that the students may find memorable. Then proceed to pull out DVDs of movies that you rightly purchased, and attempt to play them on the computer (Oh dear... there seems to be a problem with the disks...).
Photocells are easy to adjust though, so if you wanted more light or less light, it would be a fairly simple thing to adjust the photocell and say, "hey, I need more light than that!" Then the photocell would respond accordingly. While your concerns are valid, when you have the ability to fine tune the settings it should not be a problem.
Just for reference, I'm an electrical engineer and we deal with daylighting controls on a regular basis. The biggest complaint we've received in the past is exactly what you describe and so now we build the ability for the user to easily fine tune the photocell into our designs now and the complaints have almost disappeared.
This is a very good point and I think it would be interesting if you integrate a photocell into the devices. When the photocell detects enough ambient light, you can turn the backlight off, but when there is no light, or very low light, you turn the backlight on, or possibly even dim it up and down. This way it can function in varying degrees of ambient light, but can also save a significant amount of energy.
I'll leave the whiz-bang computer stuff to the Computer related EEs here. I'm a building/sustainability related EE, though, so I'll happily offer my thoughts on the electrical system.
Some people have mentioned running separate conduit for data/electrical systems. I say don't waste your money. Run a few conduits here and there with a pull cord if you ever want to add a couple of power or data outlets, but there's really no point in running your initial stuff in conduit anyway. The contractor is going to want to use romex/MC cable for the power system anyway because it's cheaper and less labor intensive, and he will charge you out the ass to put conduit in a residential application.
For appliances, take a look at induction stoves. A lot of companies have them now so the prices are dropping pretty fast. They heat up your pots and pans ridiculously quick (although make sure you get steel pans of some sort... aluminum won't work) and use much less energy than a typical electric burner or gas burner (albeit it's a different type of energy being used, so I don't know if it's fair to compare the two). They also don't make the cook surface hot, which is always good if you have kids running around.
If you can afford it, I'd also suggest some PVs to produce at least a portion of your power. A company called OpenEnergy has some that look like regular shingles ( http://www.openenergycorp.com/solarsave/products.p hp#2 ) if your home owner's association has a problem with traditional PV panels (which can be rather ugly. If you're planning on being in your house 15-20 years or more, you'll probably see a payback in the energy/money you save. If you're going to move in a few years, it might not be worth the investment (unless you just want to do the environmental thing, which I encourage you to do!). One cool thing to do with PVs is to hook up some sort of Red/Green LED device to it so that it shines Green when you're net-positively exporting energy to the grid and Red when you're importing energy from the grid. It's a simple way to get your family involved and make them realize how much power the consume and perhaps convince them to keep better track of their power consumption.
Hope my comments helped a little. Best of luck in your endeavor!
In most cases, the grid actually acts as your batteries, so when your panels are not generating (say at night) you pull power from the grid. This is a pretty common setup since if you ever have a string of low-production days (if it rains for a few days in a row or something), you're still covered electricity wise. The only places I've really seen people use battery system is in off-grid applications. If you're out in the middle of nowhere and can't get utility service (or don't want to rely on utility service) or if you're just fed up with the utility company and don't want to put up with their BS anymore. The downside of off-grid applications is that then if you have a string of low-production days you're pretty much dead in the water.
CFLs that have electronic ballasts (which would be pretty much any CFL you see) "flicker" at a rate of 20,000 times a second. If your eye can see that flicker, be kind and donate your body to science so we can examine your uber-eyes. Also, CFLs are available in color temperatures as low as 2700 kelvin (linear fluorescents in offices are usually 3500k or 4100k to give some frame of reference), which is about the same as an incandescent, so if you do desire that warmer glow there are options available (although the color rendering will likely not be as good as incandescents).
doesn't the "cascading" portion of "cascading style sheets" sort of take care of the includes for you? if you organize your styles right, there shouldn't really be a need for includes. i'm by no means a css expert, so please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong on this point.
as far as aliases, i would also love to have something like that in css. it would make it much more easy to organize your styles.
the article states that they are shooting for a price around $2.4/watt, which I can assume ytou is well below what we are currently paying. i was recently quoted a price of $8/watt from solarsave (http://www.solarsave.com/) for a pv installation, so having to pay a third of that price is extremely reasonable from a cost per watt perspective, even if you don't get any added efficiency due to heat losses.
While I agree that there are a few elitists out there, I'd hardly say that the vast majority of linux users are snobs who won't give non-nix guys the time of day. The only reason I ever got into linux in the first place was because one such "snob" took the time to sit me down, help me install debian on my machine, and then walked me through setting things up, installing programs and even (and this one still surprises me to this day) recompiling my kernel. Now that I know how difficult it can be to explain a lot of this stuff to a non-nix person, I appreciate the time he spent explaining things to me that much more. I don't think he was an oddity in the field either, since most people I've met or have chatted with are more than willing to share their knowledge and help problem solve. I've found that that is a lot of the fun of linux: Figuring out how to fix something that goes wrong. There's nothing more satisfying than having someone come to you with a problem and seeing that rediculous amount of satisfaction on their faces when you finally are able to figure it out.
Granted, there are those nix users who don't want to lend a helping hand or will look down on anyone asking about something they see as "obvious" or something that even a "n00b" should know. However, you find a few of those wherever you go no matter what OS or software you use, Microsoft products included.
You can usually find Fat Tire in any major city you go to. It's not a widely appreciated beer, so not too many bars in the Northeast have it, but liquor stores and beer distributors will usually carry it (I'm currently in Pennsylvania, and it took a little time to find it, but eventually I found a distributor that carried New Belgium beers). They are looking to expand their production capabilities now, and even moreso in the future, so I'd imagine it will only get easier to find all around the nation soon enough. As far as being a publicly held company, I'm not sure. I'd like to invest a little cash in them as well if they are, so if you hear anything let me know!
I actually got to work on the New Belgium Brewery project (the makers of Fat Tire) and did an analysis of their Cogen unit. It's fantastic the way that they take the biproduct from their fermentation process (methane) and put it to good use creating electricity and generating heat (the brewing process requires a good amount of heat, especially to clean the equipment, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it). They mostly use their Cogen unit to reduce the coincident demand. The coincident demand is a charge the power company hits you with if your peak power consumption during the day comes at the same time as the power company's peak. The idea is to move your peak somewhere else during those times by generating your own electricity and putting less of a strain on the power company. So, while there are "green" benefits to this process, there is also a substantial monetary benefit since the coincident demand charges can often cost more than even regular demand charges.
what software do you use to play games on your comp? i've tried virtualdub, vlc and ati multimedia center, but they all produce delays that are unnacceptable for game play (even when setting the caching down to 0ms). any advice on how to eliminate or reduce the delay? i have an ati all-in-wonder x800xt, just for reference.
if you even try and touch my belgium beers i will have you flogged and strung up for all the townsfolk to see. mmmm... peche lembic..... framboise..... affligen trippel.... can heaven get any closer to earth? i think not.
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My math is terrible... I can't even tell weeks from months... Please don't listen to anything I just said.
Does this mean my geek card is revoked?
Very true, but you seem to be ignoring the fact that other cars also cost thousands of dollars. Granted, their is a premium for a hybrid, but using your own numbers as an example (and my own experiences with a $17,000 regular civic vs. a $20,000 hybrid civic), your hybrid will pay back that $3000 premium in about 6 years assuming gas stays the same price (which intuition tells me it won't). Considering my last 2 cars have lasted me over a decade each before finally crapping out, that's a pretty good ROI. Granted, past performance of vehicles is no guarantee of future performance, so there's no telling if the hybrid will last me 12 years, but it's not unreasonable to believe that it probably will.
Yes, and don't buy that new computer now, because in a few months it will be obsolete!
he tripped...
and fell on some bullets
If you'll remember back to your high school biology class, most of the items Glug listed are what are widely accepted in the scientific community as density dependent limiting factors. Meaning that as a population increases, so do wars, plague, famine, etc. Global warming is debatable as a density dependent limiting factor, but you could make a strong case for it.
I hope it's better than "Thus Spake Zarathustra 2: The Autopsy."
Zarathustra: God is still dead! But we got the autopsy results back and unfortunately I misspoke before. He did not, in fact, die of pity for man. He was murdered!
Nietzsche totally sold out when he decided to bring in Angela Lansbury's character from "Murder, She Wrote" in to solve the murder.
pullbox every 30m if you're a stickler for EIA/TIA/BiCSI standards
My company gives me old computers like that every now and again and I try and rehab them and donate them to schools. Most school districts will jump at the chance to get free computers and it's a good way to keep them out of the dump and put them to good use. Some of them are very responsive to putting something like Edubuntu on them, but it's extremely dependent on the IT department you're dealing with.
I'm convinced that the next major breakthrough in artificial intelligence will come from spammers trying to develop more and more sophisticated programs to foil captchas. Eventually they will become so sophisticated that the true test of whether you are human is if you fail miserably at trying to figure out what the hell the captcha is, but the bots will get it instantly. I for one, welcome our new captcha-killing overlords.
is fire up a computer running your favorite Linux distro (sans libdvdcss), then pop in a home made "Welcome" DVD of sorts that you and your students make (the unencrypted DVD works just fine... splendid!). Then, introduce him and announce that you have some examples of works that the MPAA has produced that the students may find memorable. Then proceed to pull out DVDs of movies that you rightly purchased, and attempt to play them on the computer (Oh dear... there seems to be a problem with the disks...).
Photocells are easy to adjust though, so if you wanted more light or less light, it would be a fairly simple thing to adjust the photocell and say, "hey, I need more light than that!" Then the photocell would respond accordingly. While your concerns are valid, when you have the ability to fine tune the settings it should not be a problem. Just for reference, I'm an electrical engineer and we deal with daylighting controls on a regular basis. The biggest complaint we've received in the past is exactly what you describe and so now we build the ability for the user to easily fine tune the photocell into our designs now and the complaints have almost disappeared.
This is a very good point and I think it would be interesting if you integrate a photocell into the devices. When the photocell detects enough ambient light, you can turn the backlight off, but when there is no light, or very low light, you turn the backlight on, or possibly even dim it up and down. This way it can function in varying degrees of ambient light, but can also save a significant amount of energy.
Yes, but unfortunately I have yet to see where Netcraft confirms that Netcraft has confirmed it. So, take this with a grain of salt.
in communist kernel, task schedules YOU!
I'll leave the whiz-bang computer stuff to the Computer related EEs here. I'm a building/sustainability related EE, though, so I'll happily offer my thoughts on the electrical system.
p hp#2 ) if your home owner's association has a problem with traditional PV panels (which can be rather ugly. If you're planning on being in your house 15-20 years or more, you'll probably see a payback in the energy/money you save. If you're going to move in a few years, it might not be worth the investment (unless you just want to do the environmental thing, which I encourage you to do!). One cool thing to do with PVs is to hook up some sort of Red/Green LED device to it so that it shines Green when you're net-positively exporting energy to the grid and Red when you're importing energy from the grid. It's a simple way to get your family involved and make them realize how much power the consume and perhaps convince them to keep better track of their power consumption.
Some people have mentioned running separate conduit for data/electrical systems. I say don't waste your money. Run a few conduits here and there with a pull cord if you ever want to add a couple of power or data outlets, but there's really no point in running your initial stuff in conduit anyway. The contractor is going to want to use romex/MC cable for the power system anyway because it's cheaper and less labor intensive, and he will charge you out the ass to put conduit in a residential application.
For appliances, take a look at induction stoves. A lot of companies have them now so the prices are dropping pretty fast. They heat up your pots and pans ridiculously quick (although make sure you get steel pans of some sort... aluminum won't work) and use much less energy than a typical electric burner or gas burner (albeit it's a different type of energy being used, so I don't know if it's fair to compare the two). They also don't make the cook surface hot, which is always good if you have kids running around.
If you can afford it, I'd also suggest some PVs to produce at least a portion of your power. A company called OpenEnergy has some that look like regular shingles ( http://www.openenergycorp.com/solarsave/products.
Hope my comments helped a little. Best of luck in your endeavor!
Yes, that's from "The art of war", chapter 6. Which, of course, is entitled "Total pwnage."
In most cases, the grid actually acts as your batteries, so when your panels are not generating (say at night) you pull power from the grid. This is a pretty common setup since if you ever have a string of low-production days (if it rains for a few days in a row or something), you're still covered electricity wise. The only places I've really seen people use battery system is in off-grid applications. If you're out in the middle of nowhere and can't get utility service (or don't want to rely on utility service) or if you're just fed up with the utility company and don't want to put up with their BS anymore. The downside of off-grid applications is that then if you have a string of low-production days you're pretty much dead in the water.
CFLs that have electronic ballasts (which would be pretty much any CFL you see) "flicker" at a rate of 20,000 times a second. If your eye can see that flicker, be kind and donate your body to science so we can examine your uber-eyes. Also, CFLs are available in color temperatures as low as 2700 kelvin (linear fluorescents in offices are usually 3500k or 4100k to give some frame of reference), which is about the same as an incandescent, so if you do desire that warmer glow there are options available (although the color rendering will likely not be as good as incandescents).
doesn't the "cascading" portion of "cascading style sheets" sort of take care of the includes for you? if you organize your styles right, there shouldn't really be a need for includes. i'm by no means a css expert, so please feel free to correct me if i'm wrong on this point.
as far as aliases, i would also love to have something like that in css. it would make it much more easy to organize your styles.
the article states that they are shooting for a price around $2.4/watt, which I can assume ytou is well below what we are currently paying. i was recently quoted a price of $8/watt from solarsave (http://www.solarsave.com/) for a pv installation, so having to pay a third of that price is extremely reasonable from a cost per watt perspective, even if you don't get any added efficiency due to heat losses.
While I agree that there are a few elitists out there, I'd hardly say that the vast majority of linux users are snobs who won't give non-nix guys the time of day. The only reason I ever got into linux in the first place was because one such "snob" took the time to sit me down, help me install debian on my machine, and then walked me through setting things up, installing programs and even (and this one still surprises me to this day) recompiling my kernel. Now that I know how difficult it can be to explain a lot of this stuff to a non-nix person, I appreciate the time he spent explaining things to me that much more. I don't think he was an oddity in the field either, since most people I've met or have chatted with are more than willing to share their knowledge and help problem solve. I've found that that is a lot of the fun of linux: Figuring out how to fix something that goes wrong. There's nothing more satisfying than having someone come to you with a problem and seeing that rediculous amount of satisfaction on their faces when you finally are able to figure it out.
Granted, there are those nix users who don't want to lend a helping hand or will look down on anyone asking about something they see as "obvious" or something that even a "n00b" should know. However, you find a few of those wherever you go no matter what OS or software you use, Microsoft products included.
You can usually find Fat Tire in any major city you go to. It's not a widely appreciated beer, so not too many bars in the Northeast have it, but liquor stores and beer distributors will usually carry it (I'm currently in Pennsylvania, and it took a little time to find it, but eventually I found a distributor that carried New Belgium beers). They are looking to expand their production capabilities now, and even moreso in the future, so I'd imagine it will only get easier to find all around the nation soon enough. As far as being a publicly held company, I'm not sure. I'd like to invest a little cash in them as well if they are, so if you hear anything let me know!
I actually got to work on the New Belgium Brewery project (the makers of Fat Tire) and did an analysis of their Cogen unit. It's fantastic the way that they take the biproduct from their fermentation process (methane) and put it to good use creating electricity and generating heat (the brewing process requires a good amount of heat, especially to clean the equipment, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it). They mostly use their Cogen unit to reduce the coincident demand. The coincident demand is a charge the power company hits you with if your peak power consumption during the day comes at the same time as the power company's peak. The idea is to move your peak somewhere else during those times by generating your own electricity and putting less of a strain on the power company. So, while there are "green" benefits to this process, there is also a substantial monetary benefit since the coincident demand charges can often cost more than even regular demand charges.
what software do you use to play games on your comp? i've tried virtualdub, vlc and ati multimedia center, but they all produce delays that are unnacceptable for game play (even when setting the caching down to 0ms). any advice on how to eliminate or reduce the delay? i have an ati all-in-wonder x800xt, just for reference.
if you even try and touch my belgium beers i will have you flogged and strung up for all the townsfolk to see. mmmm... peche lembic..... framboise..... affligen trippel.... can heaven get any closer to earth? i think not.