I have been thinking about sending a brief email about Frimp to each of the freecycle lists, but I don't want to spam. Sometimes it's hard to see the line between telling people about something that they want to know about and annoying spam.
Start small and just join your local freecycle group and make a few postings there - you know, give a way a few things, or maybe get your system to post a few local freebies to the freecycle group. That would also allow you to work out the bugs of the system. Once the system easily integrates with the local freecycle system, then other freecycle groups can start using it too, as they might desire.
I emailed the owners of Freecycle looking for a partnership, and got no response. My guess is that they thought a site that allowed local search would steal their thunder, and didn't want to pitch it to their users...
I think that freecycle is too decenteralized to even have anyone to "pitch to" - aren't each local mailing list almost completely self-organized?
Additionally, one of the big freecycle things is that the items need to be free, so since your website also lists "for sale" items, that might not fit with their philosophy (and the "free to use right now, but maybe later there will be some charge" feel of your website might not be within that philosophy either).
I think one of the freecycle strengths is that members see all of the things people are getting rid of, and thus are more likely to say "hey, I could use that" (or "my friend could use that"), rather than needing to actually go out and search for a particular item. If you are looking for something, you can search the archives, or ask for the particular thing and someone may say "hey, I have one of those I don't need", or "my friend has one of those they don't need", and thus things move around based on that. As others of stated, this does not scale very well as each group gets bigger, but it does scale well by starting up small groups in any place you happen to live.
The groups in the big cities of course might get so big that nobody uses them...which of course doesn't make much sense...
Yep, Mac OS X can be hit with a Trojan not a big suprise there. Symantec has some info on this 'MP3Concept Trojan Horse', which is benign. It does use a neat trick to imbed the code in an MP3, but other than that it isn't that special. Tricking someone to run your program isn't really something that we will ever make impossible under every circumstances, but I will admidt that using filename extensions to identify file types is one very stupid thing that Mac OS X copied from Windows, and then hiding them by default only compounds the stupidity.
But "opener" requires a previously comprimized system. A "rootkit" without a viable delivery mechinism isn't really a "virus" or "worm" or even a "trojan". Acording to McAfee: "This threat does not make use of an exploit, so to have the script run successfully on a system and make changes, the user account from which the script is run must have sufficient rights. If no superuser/root/admin access is available many of the subroutines will fail and generate errors." I don't know why McAfee classifies it as a virus/worm since it doesn't seem to have any propagation abilities.
True, the exploit mentioned is a tricky thing (potentially allowing code that was downloaded to be run as trusted), however I don't know if any was ever found in the wild - and even then it would still require an administrator's password to do system damage. The "hole" was supposedly patched by Apple's Security Update 2004-06-07 according to Unsanity who had released a little application to guard against the exploit.
If those are the only ones you've found, you haven't really shown any "exploit[s] for a Mac OS X vulnerability", although the MP3Concept Trojan I guess uses some "social hacking" types of tricks that would also work in Windows by hiding that it is an application rather than an mp3 file. Even if we accept a count of 3 (or ten or twenty), Mac OS X would still be comparitively malware-free.
But "opener" requires a previously comprimized system. A "rootkit" without a viable delivery mechinism isn't really a "virus" or "worm" or even a "trojan".
Acording to McAfee: "This threat does not make use of an exploit, so to have the script run successfully on a system and make changes, the user account from which the script is run must have sufficient rights. If no superuser/root/admin access is available many of the subroutines will fail and generate errors." I don't know why McAfee classifies it as a virus/worm since it doesn't seem to have any propagation abilities.
True, the exploit mentioned is a tricky thing (potentially allowing code that was downloaded to be run as trusted), however I don't know if any was ever found in the wild - and even then it would still require an administrator's password to do system damage. The "hole" was supposedly patched by Apple's Security Update 2004-06-07 according to Unsanity who had released a little application to guard against the exploit.
If those are the only two you've found, you haven't really shown any "In Wild, known Infections" in my opinion.
I would think that some of the things listed at Public Domain Movie Database, which includes a number of Dragnet episodes would be perfect for free distribution, in all the markets where the iTMS operates.
It's probably still not as efficient as the microwave solution, but with electricity already costing more, plus the fact that at least some of the loss can be put to use, I'm not convinced it's worth the installation cost either.
I am not at all convinced that microwaves have any significant benifit over conventional resistance heating, and I am highly doubtful of any benifit over heating with gas. If you have an older boiler heating the house you can probably find significan savings by replacing it with a newer one - the high efficiency heaters are probably 20 to 40% more efficient than anything put in place over 20 years ago. I think that some gas tankless systems can be used for radiant hot water house heating for additional savings over even a fairly new tanked system.
Even up here in Canada, solar hot water heating is very ecconomical, providing 40% or more of the hot water most families use. Combining that with a tankless system to "top up" the solar water, and maybe a waste heat recovery system for the shower drain from some place like gfxtechnology.com, and you could potentially see a significant monthly savings on your energy use.
If you are managing to extract all of the heat energy from the fuel and get it into the water, you are correct that losses in the tank will get into the house. Others have suggested that just getting into the house isn't the complete picture, since you really want the heat in the places where you live, and the basement isn't the best place to do that. I suspect that the themastat/furnace is probably going to cycle on/off the same regardless of the status of the water heater - the net effect is that your basement will just be at a higher equilibrium temperature. Perhaps closing down furnace heating to the basement might offset it.
However, probably the largest efficiency loss is up the flue. Most tanked water heaters do not do a very good job of extracting all of the heat energy from the gas in the first place, while tankless heaters do a much better job (as do modern furnaces). If that is the case, you are NOT getting all of the heat energy out of the fuel and into the house, so anything that limits the amount of fuel your water heater uses will improve efficiency.
Interesting, I had not thought that residential hot water on-demand gas usage would be a significant enough drain on the system to impose such measures.
I wonder how much a gas storage tank setup would cost to implement? If the peak/offpeak price differential was significant enough, it might become ecconomical to buffer one's gas usage by "filling the tank" at off-peak rates. I seem to recall residentail filling systems for natural gas automobiles - this would seem to be a similar set of technical issues.
What I don't know, is why nobody makes an all-electric car, with a small bank of batteries (eg. 50mile range), and then throw a small gas/electric generator in the back. You'll get fuel economy better than direct ICE cars even without the battery bank, and with the batteries, you can do 90% of your driving without any gasoline.
I've seen a few electric designs that come with a little trailer that you can drag the generator along with for long trips.
There are a number of people who have modified Prius hybrids with a few extra batteries and tried the same sort of thing. I recall some engineering school modifying a Ford Escape Hybrid to charge from a plug in the wall and to run its first 50 km on the batteries - supposedly that would cover the vast majority of most people's driving with no gas consumption at all.
There is also the added complication of taxation on the money that you save by buying a device that is more efficient. I think that this should be taken into account with a full "time-value-of-money" calculation, but it is often ignored. Bacially you need to remember that maney that you save/don't spend in the future is very similar to tax-free income. If you invest $100 today in the market and it earns $10 per year, you have to pay taxes on that $10. If you spend $100 on some fancy efficiency upgrades to your lifestyle which save you $10 per year, that extra $10 per year in your budget is not subject to any additional taxes.
Thus there may be additional significant financial benifit to reducing your fuel consumption that offset some of the financial costs expended to make that reduction.
Only for the "consumer" line (MacMini, iMac, iBook), the "pro" line (PowerBook, PowerMac) doesn't get the same software bundle. AppleWorks also comes with the consumer line - which will fill most people's word processing/spreadsheet needs.
Do you remember any more details who was developing it? And how far they got?
I think I was at an AAPT event where Mats Selens from UIUC said something about building their own and maybe setting up a company to produce them, but I do not recall in detail who and maybe it wasn't UIUC, but that sticks with me.
Adam Sarty at Saint Mary's University in Halifax (not SFX as previously stated) gave these two systems as references in a CAP Congress presentation last summer:
Personal Response System
http://www.educue.com/
Classroom Performance System
http://www.einstruction.com/
I think that St Francis Xavier physics http://www.stfx.ca/ was looking at a WiFi system that was pretty inexpensive, and I remember UIUC physics doing some investigation of building their own.
I guess I misunderstood you - I thought your oint was that energy input was greater than output, which it clearly is not.
I wasn't aware that silicon crystal solar panels were disposal problems. A quick web search turns up sites like this which seems to downplay the problems, but they are clearly larger than just disposing of silicon dioxide.
wikipedia doesn't say anything about either payback times or disposal issues.
You haven't read the recent (past five years) studies, have you? The one sighted takes cleanup, transport, etc. into account.
As a rough guide, ecconomic payback SHOULD give some measure of all forms of payback. If the energy costs are properly priced (which of course they are not perfectly priced, but they have some validity), then of course if there is an ecconimic payback time, the energy payback time should be shorter than that - otherwise you are somehow getting the energy being produced by the panel as being more valuable than the energy being used to make the panel.
I think that you are way behind the times on this. Financial payback for solar panel installations is on order of 15-25 years. Energy payback is on order of 3-5 years. See here for various studies.
Instant runoff is a form of "single transferrable voting". I think they do it in Australia for some elections and Ireland as well. BC (in Canada) came very close to implementing it for their provincial elections this Spring.
With a decrease in distribution costs (it is probably cheaper to deliver the content electronically than printing DVD's and shipping them to stores, etc.), a decrease in sales price might still result in increased per-sale profit.
And "the market" is not infalable - just because a business does one thing does not guarantee that it is doing the most profitable thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Start small and just join your local freecycle group and make a few postings there - you know, give a way a few things, or maybe get your system to post a few local freebies to the freecycle group. That would also allow you to work out the bugs of the system. Once the system easily integrates with the local freecycle system, then other freecycle groups can start using it too, as they might desire.
There is a Lebanon in Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and maybe some other places?
That's exactly what I was thinking.
I think that freecycle is too decenteralized to even have anyone to "pitch to" - aren't each local mailing list almost completely self-organized?
Additionally, one of the big freecycle things is that the items need to be free, so since your website also lists "for sale" items, that might not fit with their philosophy (and the "free to use right now, but maybe later there will be some charge" feel of your website might not be within that philosophy either).
I think one of the freecycle strengths is that members see all of the things people are getting rid of, and thus are more likely to say "hey, I could use that" (or "my friend could use that"), rather than needing to actually go out and search for a particular item. If you are looking for something, you can search the archives, or ask for the particular thing and someone may say "hey, I have one of those I don't need", or "my friend has one of those they don't need", and thus things move around based on that. As others of stated, this does not scale very well as each group gets bigger, but it does scale well by starting up small groups in any place you happen to live.
The groups in the big cities of course might get so big that nobody uses them...which of course doesn't make much sense...
Yep, Mac OS X can be hit with a Trojan not a big suprise there. Symantec has some info on this 'MP3Concept Trojan Horse', which is benign. It does use a neat trick to imbed the code in an MP3, but other than that it isn't that special. Tricking someone to run your program isn't really something that we will ever make impossible under every circumstances, but I will admidt that using filename extensions to identify file types is one very stupid thing that Mac OS X copied from Windows, and then hiding them by default only compounds the stupidity.
Exploit, infections from not known: http://www.macintouch.com/opener.html
But "opener" requires a previously comprimized system. A "rootkit" without a viable delivery mechinism isn't really a "virus" or "worm" or even a "trojan". Acording to McAfee: "This threat does not make use of an exploit, so to have the script run successfully on a system and make changes, the user account from which the script is run must have sufficient rights. If no superuser/root/admin access is available many of the subroutines will fail and generate errors." I don't know why McAfee classifies it as a virus/worm since it doesn't seem to have any propagation abilities.
In Wild exploit, known infections: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,390203 75,39155837,00.htm
True, the exploit mentioned is a tricky thing (potentially allowing code that was downloaded to be run as trusted), however I don't know if any was ever found in the wild - and even then it would still require an administrator's password to do system damage. The "hole" was supposedly patched by Apple's Security Update 2004-06-07 according to Unsanity who had released a little application to guard against the exploit.
If those are the only ones you've found, you haven't really shown any "exploit[s] for a Mac OS X vulnerability", although the MP3Concept Trojan I guess uses some "social hacking" types of tricks that would also work in Windows by hiding that it is an application rather than an mp3 file. Even if we accept a count of 3 (or ten or twenty), Mac OS X would still be comparitively malware-free.
But "opener" requires a previously comprimized system. A "rootkit" without a viable delivery mechinism isn't really a "virus" or "worm" or even a "trojan". Acording to McAfee: "This threat does not make use of an exploit, so to have the script run successfully on a system and make changes, the user account from which the script is run must have sufficient rights. If no superuser/root/admin access is available many of the subroutines will fail and generate errors." I don't know why McAfee classifies it as a virus/worm since it doesn't seem to have any propagation abilities.
Exploit, unknown level of infections: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/security/0,390203 75,39155837,00.htm
True, the exploit mentioned is a tricky thing (potentially allowing code that was downloaded to be run as trusted), however I don't know if any was ever found in the wild - and even then it would still require an administrator's password to do system damage. The "hole" was supposedly patched by Apple's Security Update 2004-06-07 according to Unsanity who had released a little application to guard against the exploit.
If those are the only two you've found, you haven't really shown any "In Wild, known Infections" in my opinion.
I would think that some of the things listed at Public Domain Movie Database, which includes a number of Dragnet episodes would be perfect for free distribution, in all the markets where the iTMS operates.
I am not at all convinced that microwaves have any significant benifit over conventional resistance heating, and I am highly doubtful of any benifit over heating with gas. If you have an older boiler heating the house you can probably find significan savings by replacing it with a newer one - the high efficiency heaters are probably 20 to 40% more efficient than anything put in place over 20 years ago. I think that some gas tankless systems can be used for radiant hot water house heating for additional savings over even a fairly new tanked system.
Even up here in Canada, solar hot water heating is very ecconomical, providing 40% or more of the hot water most families use. Combining that with a tankless system to "top up" the solar water, and maybe a waste heat recovery system for the shower drain from some place like gfxtechnology.com, and you could potentially see a significant monthly savings on your energy use.
These folk seem to have such a system available - and they claim 40+% efficiencies:
http://gfxtechnology.com/
http://www.gfxstar.ca/
However, probably the largest efficiency loss is up the flue. Most tanked water heaters do not do a very good job of extracting all of the heat energy from the gas in the first place, while tankless heaters do a much better job (as do modern furnaces). If that is the case, you are NOT getting all of the heat energy out of the fuel and into the house, so anything that limits the amount of fuel your water heater uses will improve efficiency.
I wonder how much a gas storage tank setup would cost to implement? If the peak/offpeak price differential was significant enough, it might become ecconomical to buffer one's gas usage by "filling the tank" at off-peak rates. I seem to recall residentail filling systems for natural gas automobiles - this would seem to be a similar set of technical issues.
I've seen a few electric designs that come with a little trailer that you can drag the generator along with for long trips.
There are a number of people who have modified Prius hybrids with a few extra batteries and tried the same sort of thing. I recall some engineering school modifying a Ford Escape Hybrid to charge from a plug in the wall and to run its first 50 km on the batteries - supposedly that would cover the vast majority of most people's driving with no gas consumption at all.
There is also the added complication of taxation on the money that you save by buying a device that is more efficient. I think that this should be taken into account with a full "time-value-of-money" calculation, but it is often ignored. Bacially you need to remember that maney that you save/don't spend in the future is very similar to tax-free income. If you invest $100 today in the market and it earns $10 per year, you have to pay taxes on that $10. If you spend $100 on some fancy efficiency upgrades to your lifestyle which save you $10 per year, that extra $10 per year in your budget is not subject to any additional taxes. Thus there may be additional significant financial benifit to reducing your fuel consumption that offset some of the financial costs expended to make that reduction.
Only for the "consumer" line (MacMini, iMac, iBook), the "pro" line (PowerBook, PowerMac) doesn't get the same software bundle. AppleWorks also comes with the consumer line - which will fill most people's word processing/spreadsheet needs.
I think I was at an AAPT event where Mats Selens from UIUC said something about building their own and maybe setting up a company to produce them, but I do not recall in detail who and maybe it wasn't UIUC, but that sticks with me. Adam Sarty at Saint Mary's University in Halifax (not SFX as previously stated) gave these two systems as references in a CAP Congress presentation last summer: Personal Response System http://www.educue.com/ Classroom Performance System http://www.einstruction.com/
I think that St Francis Xavier physics http://www.stfx.ca/ was looking at a WiFi system that was pretty inexpensive, and I remember UIUC physics doing some investigation of building their own.
You should read "Longitude"", it is really good
Alternatively for $10 you can get the album at the iTunes Music Store, no turntable required...
You could try just getting a torrent such as at http://www.google.ca/search?&q=alice%27s+restauran t+torrent
I wasn't aware that silicon crystal solar panels were disposal problems. A quick web search turns up sites like this which seems to downplay the problems, but they are clearly larger than just disposing of silicon dioxide.
wikipedia doesn't say anything about either payback times or disposal issues.
As a rough guide, ecconomic payback SHOULD give some measure of all forms of payback. If the energy costs are properly priced (which of course they are not perfectly priced, but they have some validity), then of course if there is an ecconimic payback time, the energy payback time should be shorter than that - otherwise you are somehow getting the energy being produced by the panel as being more valuable than the energy being used to make the panel.
I think that you are way behind the times on this. Financial payback for solar panel installations is on order of 15-25 years. Energy payback is on order of 3-5 years. See here for various studies.
There seems to be one here, but I have not tried it.
Instant runoff is a form of "single transferrable voting". I think they do it in Australia for some elections and Ireland as well. BC (in Canada) came very close to implementing it for their provincial elections this Spring.
And "the market" is not infalable - just because a business does one thing does not guarantee that it is doing the most profitable thing.