In the not-so-distant future, we may see a large number of electric vehicles on the road, with increasing policy support. The batteries in these vehicles could provide a very good distributed storage solution through an intelligent charging infrastructure.
One of the biggest arguments against wind power has been intermittency and the inability to tailor demand to supply volatility. An on-site storage can provide stability of output from the wind farm to the grid, but the options are either too ecologically-damaging (normal lead-acid batteries), or too radical (underground compressed air storage), or too debatable (hydrogen, in terms of efficiency of electrolysis, transport / storage and reconversion) and in all cases too expensive and unproven. A high capital cost of the wind farm itself ($1.5 - 1.8 mUSD / MW) and low capacity utilisation factors (27% - 35% at Class I windy sites) mean that given the current utility offtake rates in the US make the project barely viable by itself, and no developer would want to add a hugely expensive backup facility.
On the other hand, the anti-EV lobby opposes the claim of a reduced carbon footprint by a switchover to electric, by calculating the emissions related to power generation, whether through coal or gas. In this case, it would make imminent sense to use renewable sources to generate electricity for charging EV batteries. This still does not solve the issue of a limited range, which is the chief criticism of EVs.
Companies like Better Place (http://www.betterplace.com) have started lobbying hard, tying up with governments in Denmark, Israel, Australia, and local bodies in places such as San Francisco and taxis in Tokyo, to establish an EV-charging and battery swapping network to provide an innovative and seemingly practical solution to the range problem. The network they are proposing to build will keep talking to the car (such as the Nissan Leaf) to keep track of the charging status, the vehicle's position and availability of nearby swapping stations.
Further, in order to address the issue of peak demand, they also propose to charge intelligently, especially during non-peak hours. This can be done for both the battery in the car and the stock in the swapping station. Better Place also talks of buying power from renewable sources to keep the carbon footprint low.
In India, the wind power producer need not be a dedicated utility. Power can be generated by an industrial unit, fed into the grid, and a credit in terms of kWh supplied is available in the industrial unit's power bill, with banking facilities to help adjust excess generation and excess consumption. In some places, time of day metering and credit mechanism is also used to reward generation during peak hours. Similarly, a wind farm can sell power to an unrelated industrial unit too. Such a system could be introduced in the US and elsewhere.
Not just floppies. Word documents with macros, and as the internet was hardly heard of, any stray antivirus was unpatched.
It was a nice little dance. Get floppy. Scan for virus. Get Abort, Retry, Fail? Scan for bad sectors. Recover file. Open file. Lol pwned it had a macro virus newly released 12 months ago and your antivirus had sig files 24 months old.
Pressing the shift key while inserting a CD also famously broke DRM and posting this fact, for example the present comment, on public forums invited invocation of the DMCA.
Now, as far as best practices go, I keep the shift key pressed every time I insert a USB key or an SD card in my laptop. The downside of this practice on XP was that it routinely invoked accessibility options and activated StickyKeys. Getting the system to its normal operational mode was a bit of a pain.
Heck, I've gotten to the point these days that seeing 'your' and 'you're' used _correctly_ in any sort of non-formal writing often makes me do a double take (and such errors are starting to be seen in formal communications like news articles, company memos and resumes).
I don't like Apple at all, but to say that the iPhone and the iPad were sandboxes for OS X is downright insane. The iPhone has been around for about three years, and the iPad has just been launched. OS X was launched in 1999 as a *Server* OS first.
Some EU countries are already seizing shipments of cheap generics being sent from India to other developing nations, if they happen to transit through European ports.
It just goes towards exposing the hypocrisy of such countries that keep on shrieking about aid convoys being attacked and privacy being trampled upon elsewhere.
What is the cost in terms of human lives when right to medicine and right to cheap medicine are denied?
Yes that may be where the surplus comes from, but now the Australian Government has promised AGL and others that they will segregate the credits. AGL is sitting on a 350+ MW wind power project that could go through if that happens.
Australia Gas and Light is building gas-fired power stations along with wind farms. This is apart from the wind farm they set up for a desalination plant.
Their idea is to use natural gas, which is roughly half as polluting as thermal coal, and one-fourth as polluting as your brown coal apart from yielding to a better control over output, in conjunction with intermittent, renewable and non-polluting sources of power such as wind, so that the power generation from combined sources can be evened out to a degree.
This would mean that you could penetrate a higher amount of wind power into the grid, without causing serious issues with scheduling.
However, AGL had frozen all its wind power plans early this year, because an overflow of cheap green credits from the small-scale and household sectors meant that their project viability went down significantly. Now they, and other renewable energy project promoters are lobbying the Government to separate green credits from the small-scale sector, so that their large-scale projects are able to trade credits separately and realize a better value for them.
The revised legislation is expected to be tabled before your Parliament later this month.
TFA really lacks depth. There is no thorough critical evaluation of the needs for a patent license, examination of the patent co-operation between proprietary software vendors and the impact it has on the market, the virtues and pitfalls of GPL v3 etc.
There is no evaluation of why anyone would want to join a DPL alliance, whether they are a whale or a minnow. No corporation will give up its rights, assets and advantages without very compelling reasons. You could try it with universities, but they again subsist on funding through joint development projects and licensing to corporations.
Lastly, why do we keep on seeing so many articles linked from Network World? I have returned to slashdot after a long time, and I don't remember hearing much about them some years back. I must say that I am no fan of the quality of their stories I have seen so far.
How would we feel about extra-terrestrial creatures coming to Earth and seeding it with THEIR kind of life, which might be actually harmful to us?
If there is life on extra-solar planets, or even other planets in our solar system, it may have arisen uniquely, taken different biochemical routes, evolved differently.
Considering the question from the viewpoint of the golden rule, should we be really polluting other systems just to push our own biological agenda?
Other extraterrestrial civilizations may also evolve their own Stephen Hawking one day!
The featured article talks about magnetite possibly formed by microbes. There is no mention of nucleotides. How can organic molecules from microbes survive fossilization for billions of years, form part of a meteorite, survive its journey through our atmosphere and yet be analyzed?
After all, it would be an extremely rare chance to find surviving DNA from even dinosaur fossils here on earth. The scientific method followed for studying genetic evolution happens mostly by triangulation of molecular information in present-day genes of surviving species, to form a bit of a speculative idea about the genetic makeup of its ancestor of millions of years ago.
If probably you mean that one day, we may find active microbial life on Mars, that indeed would be a great breakthrough, as it will allow us to compare its origin and evolution with ours, and thereby provide us better tools to understand how it arises in the first place. You know, the spark that ignited it all.
All around me, I see the otherwise-paranoid IT administrators allowing people to install VLC, because that is the easiest way to allow DVDs to play on a Win XP laptop.
I used to think I was a snarky anarchist installing free software to people's computers, and now they have gone and taken away my joy.
Microsoft will be hard pressed to explain why it would choose to not completely support competing mail clients with its frontline applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. That is, if somebody has a stick big enough to get them to explain.
Slashdot Mirror
In the not-so-distant future, we may see a large number of electric vehicles on the road, with increasing policy support. The batteries in these vehicles could provide a very good distributed storage solution through an intelligent charging infrastructure.
One of the biggest arguments against wind power has been intermittency and the inability to tailor demand to supply volatility. An on-site storage can provide stability of output from the wind farm to the grid, but the options are either too ecologically-damaging (normal lead-acid batteries), or too radical (underground compressed air storage), or too debatable (hydrogen, in terms of efficiency of electrolysis, transport / storage and reconversion) and in all cases too expensive and unproven. A high capital cost of the wind farm itself ($1.5 - 1.8 mUSD / MW) and low capacity utilisation factors (27% - 35% at Class I windy sites) mean that given the current utility offtake rates in the US make the project barely viable by itself, and no developer would want to add a hugely expensive backup facility.
On the other hand, the anti-EV lobby opposes the claim of a reduced carbon footprint by a switchover to electric, by calculating the emissions related to power generation, whether through coal or gas. In this case, it would make imminent sense to use renewable sources to generate electricity for charging EV batteries. This still does not solve the issue of a limited range, which is the chief criticism of EVs.
Companies like Better Place (http://www.betterplace.com) have started lobbying hard, tying up with governments in Denmark, Israel, Australia, and local bodies in places such as San Francisco and taxis in Tokyo, to establish an EV-charging and battery swapping network to provide an innovative and seemingly practical solution to the range problem. The network they are proposing to build will keep talking to the car (such as the Nissan Leaf) to keep track of the charging status, the vehicle's position and availability of nearby swapping stations.
Further, in order to address the issue of peak demand, they also propose to charge intelligently, especially during non-peak hours. This can be done for both the battery in the car and the stock in the swapping station. Better Place also talks of buying power from renewable sources to keep the carbon footprint low.
In India, the wind power producer need not be a dedicated utility. Power can be generated by an industrial unit, fed into the grid, and a credit in terms of kWh supplied is available in the industrial unit's power bill, with banking facilities to help adjust excess generation and excess consumption. In some places, time of day metering and credit mechanism is also used to reward generation during peak hours. Similarly, a wind farm can sell power to an unrelated industrial unit too. Such a system could be introduced in the US and elsewhere.
Continued...
Said http://addons.videolan.org/ just redirects to http://www.videolan.org/ as of now. Hopefully just an oversight.
What about the small matter of the C&D letters apparently from AOL? Forged headers?
$10 with google 'goodness'
Not just floppies. Word documents with macros, and as the internet was hardly heard of, any stray antivirus was unpatched.
It was a nice little dance. Get floppy. Scan for virus. Get Abort, Retry, Fail? Scan for bad sectors. Recover file. Open file. Lol pwned it had a macro virus newly released 12 months ago and your antivirus had sig files 24 months old.
By the way, did lol pwned exist then?
Pressing the shift key while inserting a CD also famously broke DRM and posting this fact, for example the present comment, on public forums invited invocation of the DMCA.
Now, as far as best practices go, I keep the shift key pressed every time I insert a USB key or an SD card in my laptop. The downside of this practice on XP was that it routinely invoked accessibility options and activated StickyKeys. Getting the system to its normal operational mode was a bit of a pain.
I guess you have never witnessed, or participated in, a good quiz.
Heck, I've gotten to the point these days that seeing 'your' and 'you're' used _correctly_ in any sort of non-formal writing often makes me do a double take (and such errors are starting to be seen in formal communications like news articles, company memos and resumes).
You missed plural's
I don't like Apple at all, but to say that the iPhone and the iPad were sandboxes for OS X is downright insane. The iPhone has been around for about three years, and the iPad has just been launched. OS X was launched in 1999 as a *Server* OS first.
Some EU countries are already seizing shipments of cheap generics being sent from India to other developing nations, if they happen to transit through European ports.
It just goes towards exposing the hypocrisy of such countries that keep on shrieking about aid convoys being attacked and privacy being trampled upon elsewhere.
What is the cost in terms of human lives when right to medicine and right to cheap medicine are denied?
Who knows, if you pray hard enough, you might be able to avert this disaster for yourself and bestow it to someone some generations down the line?
What is this diphthong you speak about? Around here some people pronounce it "edalvisi". I don't know why...they also call Macquarie "muccouree"
I once had a habanero laced masala dosa at a fancy eatery in SF. I thought I'd try to flaunt my 'credentials'.
Ohhh my gourd!
Anyways, lots of traditional therapies for pain relief depend upon capsaicin, some depend upon poisons such as bella donna, etc. etc.
meh
or a symptom of synaesthesia? Now we will know if orange smells like orange.
Yes that may be where the surplus comes from, but now the Australian Government has promised AGL and others that they will segregate the credits. AGL is sitting on a 350+ MW wind power project that could go through if that happens.
Australia Gas and Light is building gas-fired power stations along with wind farms. This is apart from the wind farm they set up for a desalination plant.
Their idea is to use natural gas, which is roughly half as polluting as thermal coal, and one-fourth as polluting as your brown coal apart from yielding to a better control over output, in conjunction with intermittent, renewable and non-polluting sources of power such as wind, so that the power generation from combined sources can be evened out to a degree.
This would mean that you could penetrate a higher amount of wind power into the grid, without causing serious issues with scheduling.
However, AGL had frozen all its wind power plans early this year, because an overflow of cheap green credits from the small-scale and household sectors meant that their project viability went down significantly. Now they, and other renewable energy project promoters are lobbying the Government to separate green credits from the small-scale sector, so that their large-scale projects are able to trade credits separately and realize a better value for them.
The revised legislation is expected to be tabled before your Parliament later this month.
And the exemplary damages they charge him will go towards organizing a data backup policy seminar for US Government officials?
TFA really lacks depth. There is no thorough critical evaluation of the needs for a patent license, examination of the patent co-operation between proprietary software vendors and the impact it has on the market, the virtues and pitfalls of GPL v3 etc.
There is no evaluation of why anyone would want to join a DPL alliance, whether they are a whale or a minnow. No corporation will give up its rights, assets and advantages without very compelling reasons. You could try it with universities, but they again subsist on funding through joint development projects and licensing to corporations.
Lastly, why do we keep on seeing so many articles linked from Network World? I have returned to slashdot after a long time, and I don't remember hearing much about them some years back. I must say that I am no fan of the quality of their stories I have seen so far.
I almost posted a critical comment as I had misread your statements, especially about Occam's Razor.
Luckily, I read your post again. You are very correct!
Where did that bit about the structure and size of the possible organisms come from? I could not find it when I did RTFA. It talks about magnetites.
How would we feel about extra-terrestrial creatures coming to Earth and seeding it with THEIR kind of life, which might be actually harmful to us?
If there is life on extra-solar planets, or even other planets in our solar system, it may have arisen uniquely, taken different biochemical routes, evolved differently.
Considering the question from the viewpoint of the golden rule, should we be really polluting other systems just to push our own biological agenda?
Other extraterrestrial civilizations may also evolve their own Stephen Hawking one day!
The featured article talks about magnetite possibly formed by microbes. There is no mention of nucleotides. How can organic molecules from microbes survive fossilization for billions of years, form part of a meteorite, survive its journey through our atmosphere and yet be analyzed?
After all, it would be an extremely rare chance to find surviving DNA from even dinosaur fossils here on earth. The scientific method followed for studying genetic evolution happens mostly by triangulation of molecular information in present-day genes of surviving species, to form a bit of a speculative idea about the genetic makeup of its ancestor of millions of years ago.
If probably you mean that one day, we may find active microbial life on Mars, that indeed would be a great breakthrough, as it will allow us to compare its origin and evolution with ours, and thereby provide us better tools to understand how it arises in the first place. You know, the spark that ignited it all.
Just like those stock markets indices
All around me, I see the otherwise-paranoid IT administrators allowing people to install VLC, because that is the easiest way to allow DVDs to play on a Win XP laptop.
I used to think I was a snarky anarchist installing free software to people's computers, and now they have gone and taken away my joy.
Microsoft will be hard pressed to explain why it would choose to not completely support competing mail clients with its frontline applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. That is, if somebody has a stick big enough to get them to explain.
IIRC, this was about who controls the internet. Anyway, you are trying to troll / flamebait and I am trying to help by biting.