It might be more understandable to the ordinary citizen, but I doubt it would get them any more enraged. If you walk out on the street and start picking people at random to ask if they think NSA should be tapping our phone lines, I'd wager that the majority couldn't care less. Tell them that the Feds want to tap the Internet backbones as well, and I suspect the results will be much the same.
Perhaps the top 1% pays most of the taxes, but just because I pay less in taxes than Bill Gates or Warren Buffet doesn't mean that taxes aren't taken from me.
I'll buy your argument if you can show how the recent erosion of privacy has had a meaningful impact on counter-terrorism or pedophile investigations. The last news article I remember reading that claimed that the Patriot Act and its ilk had lead to a major coup in a counter-terrorism investigation was debunked very shortly afterwards.
Didn't this exact same load of crap happen about every 50 years ago or so? sed "s/communism/terrorism/g" and you've transformed McCarthyism to, for lack of a better term, Bushism.
You get an A+ for effort, but you missed the point. Here's why:
So the same amount of light is spread over a greater distance, meaning each square centimeter of the paper is getting less light.
True, but I said that in my original post:
In the tropics, the solar radiation is concentrated Maybe I didn't say it as clearly as I could have, so let me try again. In the arctic, the light shining on any given area of land for any given period of time is less intense than the light shining on any given area of land in the tropics for that same period of time. This, if I understand you correctly, is your argument against my thesis statement, and it is correct.
However, in the tropics, you only get about 12 hours of daylight throughout the year. In the arctic, however, you get 24 hours of sunlight in the summer. So, if you are getting ~71% of the same energy on a patch of land in a 1 hour period in the arctic as you would get on the same sized patch of land in one hour in the tropics, but you are getting that energy for twice as long, then that patch of land in the arctic is getting 142% of the solar radiation as the tropics get, no? That extra energy, however, is offset by the significantly shorter hours of daylight in the winter, leading to approximately the same solar radiation per year in both the tropics and the arctic, discounting factors such as atmospheric absorption.
Think of it this way: suppose you win the lottery. Do you get more dollars in your pocket if you take an immediate lump sum payment of one million dollars, or if you take one payment of one hundred thousand dollars every year for ten years (assuming that you ignore economic factors such as inflation, present value of money and taxes)? 1,000,000 = (10 x 100,000), so it's the same regardless, right?
Okay, continuing...:
I mean it's just common sense too. If this weren't the case, the day would keep getting warmer until the sun set below the horizon at night instead of cooling off in the afternoon and evening. I had to think about this one for a bit before I was ready to answer, but I do have a rebuttal. To some extent, this is what happens in extreme northern lattitudes. In the summer in Anchorage, an hour or two after sunrise on a clear day, it's pretty chilly outside -- like 45-50F. As the day progresses, it gets warmer and warmer, sometimes reaching 80F or better. In Fairbanks, it's even more extreme, since Anchorage's temperatures are moderated by Cook Inlet. In Fairbanks, 90+ is common in the summer. However, unlike in the lower 48 states, we don't hit our peak at 10:00-2:00; it's usually more like 1:00--4:00, for the very reasons you describe. But it stays quite warm until much later, like 6:00-8:00. Okay, but there is still cooling in the evening, it just happens later in the day in Alaska, you say. That's true, but consider this: as the earth warms, the sunlight heats the ground, warming the air above the ground. This air, being warmer and therefore less dense than the surrounding air, rises, leaving an area of relatively low pressure next to the earth. The cooler, heavier air in the upper atmosphere descends to fill this relative low pressure area near the earth's surface, keeping temperatures moderate.
...and the issue of keeping the mirrors clear or snow/frost...
I am deeply embarrassed to admit that this didn't even occur to me, even after 19 years in Alaska. But yeah, use the CSP to augment other forms of energy production like natural gas or geothermal -- I like it!
Outside the tropics you never get the sun coming straight down, it's always at an angle. The straighter down the sun shines on you the more energy you get in the same land area. Places like the arctic would be horrible for this because the sun would barely shine on the ground for months of the year.
Nope. The arctic gets the same solar radiation as the tropics; it just doesn't get the same amount per hour. In the tropics, the solar radiation is concentrated between ~6:00am and ~6:00pm. In the arctic, you get the solar radiation 24 hours a day during the summer. I suspect there is a little loss due to absorption in the atmosphere, but not as much as you'd suspect.
But on the flip side, those parts of Alaska that get little to no sun during the winter get lots to 24 hours of sun in the summer. In Anchorage, where I live, we see 18+ hours of sunlight in the summer.
Not being a power plant engineer, I don't know if this would work, but couldn't you build a hybrid design in areas like Alaska? In the winter, use natural gas to heat the water and switch to CSP in the summer. It's still burning fossil fuels part of the time, but all summer you would be generating 100% renewable energy.
I know the article mentions using this in the middle latitudes where temperatures are pretty warm, and bright, sunny days are pretty common, but I wonder how well this would work in more northern climates? For example, I'm a couple hundred miles south of the arctic circle, and I can't help but think that 18+ hours of daylight would make for a heck of a solar thermal plant, even if the air temperatures aren't quite what they are in the Nevada desert. If you are concentrating solar energy on a boiler, does ambient air temperature make that much of a difference? Of course in the winter, with 18+ hours of darkness, it would be kind of useless so maybe it's not such a great idea up here, after all...;)
I'm not entirely sure that I'm with you all the way to your conclusion, but I've got to agree that trying to start a conversation about Battlestar Galactica would have convinced me the author was an idiot, even if I wasn't already uptight like Dirk obviously was. We're discussing a major outage over the weekend and you're wanting to waste my time talking about a T.V. show? Yeah, call me when you grow up. This guy sounds like a twenty-something entry-level geek, not a V.P.
Riiiiight....because the Pontiac GTO from about three years ago (don't know if they still make them) with a 6.0L engine isn't hideously oversized. The car was only slightly larger than the 2.0L Talon TSi I used to own, but had three times the displacement.
Although, perhaps the A.C. above would have been more precise to say "Hideously overpowered engines...", which would cover your 200 H.P. Honda and my Talon TSi.
That's not a bad idea, and to some extent we are doing it where I work right now. Friday, we locked a particular problem user's network port to only allow HTTP, HTTPS and Telnet past our firewall.
But like I said above, there is a limit to how many times the IT staff will let users break things before they decide to lock it down for everyone unless you can show that you need an exception. The reason for that is that there is a limit to how many times my boss will ask me why the same problem happened with yet another user before he cans me. But you're right -- it's a good tool to use when possible.
IT is failing, but not in the way you claim. IT's failure is in successfully communicating *why* things are the way they are, IMHO. In the company where I work, most of our users gripe at us when we first implement a policy. Then, when we answer their complaints with a calm, logical and reasoned explanation for why the policy was necessary -- and how they should accomplish the tasks that are impacted by the new policy -- they usually go "oh, okay." It doesn't hurt that they also know that we will rescind any policies that prove to be too much of a burden.
However, when IT implements a policy without explaining why the policy was necessary, then people view IT as a roadblock to getting their work done, which of course makes people angry.
Yes, Clam does do a better job, but IIRC, Clam won't do scanning on access of a file -- it only runs in batch mode when scheduled. McAfee, crappy though it is, will scan files whenever a user or process touches them.
IT staff, however, are "control freaks" because its our jobs on the line when some idiot user causes data loss or a virus to take down our network. The problem users are control freaks because they don't like being told what to do. One is necessary to keep the network running smoothly, the other is a disruptive factor that potentially puts the whole network at risk.
My wife started a business, and asked me to design her network and computer systems for her. However, she decided to buy proprietary software against my recommendations (I don't like proprietary software). The company providing one of those pieces of software recently changed the SSL certificate on the web site from which she downloads tax information. She called the vendor to get a patch to use the new SSL certificate, and was told that her version of the software was no longer supported; she would need to upgrade to a new version of the program...which wouldn't run on her operating system (Win2K -- the new version of the software requires XP).
The problem with the computing utopia you describe is that not everyone has the level of knowledge required to make it possible. What's worse, a very large percentage of people who don't have a clue don't realize that they don't have a clue.
Where I work, if we have users who have demonstrated an ability to tinker, the judgment to know when to tinker and when to leave it the **** alone, and who have a legitimate need to work on their systems, we let them. It makes less work for us, and that's a good thing.
On the other hand, there are also a number of users who have demonstrated (many times) that they shouldn't be trusted with anything more complex than a slide rule because they constantly tinker, and they usually can't fix things when they break them. Unlike your ideal world, and the users I described in the previous paragraph, these people make my life far more difficult than it needs to be, and consequently, I try to secure their computers as much as I can, because I don't want to fix their computers every other week after they screwed them up by tweaking something unnecessary...again.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be more understandable to the ordinary citizen, but I doubt it would get them any more enraged. If you walk out on the street and start picking people at random to ask if they think NSA should be tapping our phone lines, I'd wager that the majority couldn't care less. Tell them that the Feds want to tap the Internet backbones as well, and I suspect the results will be much the same.
Perhaps the top 1% pays most of the taxes, but just because I pay less in taxes than Bill Gates or Warren Buffet doesn't mean that taxes aren't taken from me.
True, but it makes me want to write a program (well, script -- I'm much better at Perl than C/C++) to do that just to see if I could do it :)
Why? IPSEC sucks. OpenVPN, for example, is alive and well, and IMHO, it's much better than S/WAN.
You're assuming that you ever get to trial. How long have those folks in Gitmo been there?
Riiiiight. And the FBI hasn't been caught improperly issuing National Security Letters recently ahref=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/washington/25justice.htmlrel=url2html-11383http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/washington/25justice.html>. And the NSA hasn't conducted domestic wiretapping in violation of the 4th amendment http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm. And the executive branch hasn't claimed that the right to a writ of habeas corpus is not granted by the Constitution http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2007/011907Parry.shtml
Not to be rude, but do you believe in the tooth fairy, too?
I'll buy your argument if you can show how the recent erosion of privacy has had a meaningful impact on counter-terrorism or pedophile investigations. The last news article I remember reading that claimed that the Patriot Act and its ilk had lead to a major coup in a counter-terrorism investigation was debunked very shortly afterwards.
Didn't this exact same load of crap happen about every 50 years ago or so? sed "s/communism/terrorism/g" and you've transformed McCarthyism to, for lack of a better term, Bushism.
So the same amount of light is spread over a greater distance, meaning each square centimeter of the paper is getting less light.
True, but I said that in my original post: In the tropics, the solar radiation is concentrated Maybe I didn't say it as clearly as I could have, so let me try again. In the arctic, the light shining on any given area of land for any given period of time is less intense than the light shining on any given area of land in the tropics for that same period of time. This, if I understand you correctly, is your argument against my thesis statement, and it is correct.
However, in the tropics, you only get about 12 hours of daylight throughout the year. In the arctic, however, you get 24 hours of sunlight in the summer. So, if you are getting ~71% of the same energy on a patch of land in a 1 hour period in the arctic as you would get on the same sized patch of land in one hour in the tropics, but you are getting that energy for twice as long, then that patch of land in the arctic is getting 142% of the solar radiation as the tropics get, no? That extra energy, however, is offset by the significantly shorter hours of daylight in the winter, leading to approximately the same solar radiation per year in both the tropics and the arctic, discounting factors such as atmospheric absorption.
Think of it this way: suppose you win the lottery. Do you get more dollars in your pocket if you take an immediate lump sum payment of one million dollars, or if you take one payment of one hundred thousand dollars every year for ten years (assuming that you ignore economic factors such as inflation, present value of money and taxes)? 1,000,000 = (10 x 100,000), so it's the same regardless, right?
Okay, continuing...:
I mean it's just common sense too. If this weren't the case, the day would keep getting warmer until the sun set below the horizon at night instead of cooling off in the afternoon and evening. I had to think about this one for a bit before I was ready to answer, but I do have a rebuttal. To some extent, this is what happens in extreme northern lattitudes. In the summer in Anchorage, an hour or two after sunrise on a clear day, it's pretty chilly outside -- like 45-50F. As the day progresses, it gets warmer and warmer, sometimes reaching 80F or better. In Fairbanks, it's even more extreme, since Anchorage's temperatures are moderated by Cook Inlet. In Fairbanks, 90+ is common in the summer. However, unlike in the lower 48 states, we don't hit our peak at 10:00-2:00; it's usually more like 1:00--4:00, for the very reasons you describe. But it stays quite warm until much later, like 6:00-8:00. Okay, but there is still cooling in the evening, it just happens later in the day in Alaska, you say. That's true, but consider this: as the earth warms, the sunlight heats the ground, warming the air above the ground. This air, being warmer and therefore less dense than the surrounding air, rises, leaving an area of relatively low pressure next to the earth. The cooler, heavier air in the upper atmosphere descends to fill this relative low pressure area near the earth's surface, keeping temperatures moderate.
The answer is a couple of posts above you: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=524754&cid=23093444 :)
That, and roasting coffee in an enclosed space has the aroma of burning popcorn :/
...and the issue of keeping the mirrors clear or snow/frost...I am deeply embarrassed to admit that this didn't even occur to me, even after 19 years in Alaska. But yeah, use the CSP to augment other forms of energy production like natural gas or geothermal -- I like it!
Just out of curiosity, did you patent the idea?
Nope. The arctic gets the same solar radiation as the tropics; it just doesn't get the same amount per hour. In the tropics, the solar radiation is concentrated between ~6:00am and ~6:00pm. In the arctic, you get the solar radiation 24 hours a day during the summer. I suspect there is a little loss due to absorption in the atmosphere, but not as much as you'd suspect.
But on the flip side, those parts of Alaska that get little to no sun during the winter get lots to 24 hours of sun in the summer. In Anchorage, where I live, we see 18+ hours of sunlight in the summer.
Not being a power plant engineer, I don't know if this would work, but couldn't you build a hybrid design in areas like Alaska? In the winter, use natural gas to heat the water and switch to CSP in the summer. It's still burning fossil fuels part of the time, but all summer you would be generating 100% renewable energy.
I know the article mentions using this in the middle latitudes where temperatures are pretty warm, and bright, sunny days are pretty common, but I wonder how well this would work in more northern climates? For example, I'm a couple hundred miles south of the arctic circle, and I can't help but think that 18+ hours of daylight would make for a heck of a solar thermal plant, even if the air temperatures aren't quite what they are in the Nevada desert. If you are concentrating solar energy on a boiler, does ambient air temperature make that much of a difference? Of course in the winter, with 18+ hours of darkness, it would be kind of useless so maybe it's not such a great idea up here, after all... ;)
I'm not entirely sure that I'm with you all the way to your conclusion, but I've got to agree that trying to start a conversation about Battlestar Galactica would have convinced me the author was an idiot, even if I wasn't already uptight like Dirk obviously was. We're discussing a major outage over the weekend and you're wanting to waste my time talking about a T.V. show? Yeah, call me when you grow up. This guy sounds like a twenty-something entry-level geek, not a V.P.
Riiiiight....because the Pontiac GTO from about three years ago (don't know if they still make them) with a 6.0L engine isn't hideously oversized. The car was only slightly larger than the 2.0L Talon TSi I used to own, but had three times the displacement.
Although, perhaps the A.C. above would have been more precise to say "Hideously overpowered engines...", which would cover your 200 H.P. Honda and my Talon TSi.
That's not a bad idea, and to some extent we are doing it where I work right now. Friday, we locked a particular problem user's network port to only allow HTTP, HTTPS and Telnet past our firewall.
But like I said above, there is a limit to how many times the IT staff will let users break things before they decide to lock it down for everyone unless you can show that you need an exception. The reason for that is that there is a limit to how many times my boss will ask me why the same problem happened with yet another user before he cans me. But you're right -- it's a good tool to use when possible.
I disagree.
IT is failing, but not in the way you claim. IT's failure is in successfully communicating *why* things are the way they are, IMHO. In the company where I work, most of our users gripe at us when we first implement a policy. Then, when we answer their complaints with a calm, logical and reasoned explanation for why the policy was necessary -- and how they should accomplish the tasks that are impacted by the new policy -- they usually go "oh, okay." It doesn't hurt that they also know that we will rescind any policies that prove to be too much of a burden.
However, when IT implements a policy without explaining why the policy was necessary, then people view IT as a roadblock to getting their work done, which of course makes people angry.
Yes, Clam does do a better job, but IIRC, Clam won't do scanning on access of a file -- it only runs in batch mode when scheduled. McAfee, crappy though it is, will scan files whenever a user or process touches them.
For my money, I like Nod32 by Eset Software http://eset.com/.
I wish I could mod you up -- this is exactly the crux of the problem.
IT staff, however, are "control freaks" because its our jobs on the line when some idiot user causes data loss or a virus to take down our network. The problem users are control freaks because they don't like being told what to do. One is necessary to keep the network running smoothly, the other is a disruptive factor that potentially puts the whole network at risk.
No doubt.
;)
My wife started a business, and asked me to design her network and computer systems for her. However, she decided to buy proprietary software against my recommendations (I don't like proprietary software). The company providing one of those pieces of software recently changed the SSL certificate on the web site from which she downloads tax information. She called the vendor to get a patch to use the new SSL certificate, and was told that her version of the software was no longer supported; she would need to upgrade to a new version of the program...which wouldn't run on her operating system (Win2K -- the new version of the software requires XP).
I just said "I told you to go Open Source."
You've got to be joking.
The problem with the computing utopia you describe is that not everyone has the level of knowledge required to make it possible. What's worse, a very large percentage of people who don't have a clue don't realize that they don't have a clue.
Where I work, if we have users who have demonstrated an ability to tinker, the judgment to know when to tinker and when to leave it the **** alone, and who have a legitimate need to work on their systems, we let them. It makes less work for us, and that's a good thing.
On the other hand, there are also a number of users who have demonstrated (many times) that they shouldn't be trusted with anything more complex than a slide rule because they constantly tinker, and they usually can't fix things when they break them. Unlike your ideal world, and the users I described in the previous paragraph, these people make my life far more difficult than it needs to be, and consequently, I try to secure their computers as much as I can, because I don't want to fix their computers every other week after they screwed them up by tweaking something unnecessary...again.