I used to know a bunch of fanatical libertarian theorists. the people behind Xanadu (a pre-WWW pay-per-view network), and this sounds like something they would come up with.
Some of the people from that group are working on the E programming language now if you're interested. Could be used in a similar application as Xanadu.
Re:Something similar can be found here...
on
Crushing Experience
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· Score: 2
Oh no! Don't they know that using a BIG RED BUTTON is a surefire way of getting people to press it?!? They're doomed!
Thanks. I also mentioned wind power. Solar is not the only way to generate renewable energy. It's typically the one associated with it, and good enough for most people though.
I don't know where you get this crap. Solar is incredibly expensive to install in Canada, and it's only good if you're basically a hermit already and don't have a fridge.
Please see http://www.arisetech.com. Solar home installations starting at $15,000 to over $40,000 for the full monty.
Maintenance free for 20 years? What the fuck are you storing all the energy from the cells in, your back pocket? The batteries are good for about three years then the whole bank needs to be replaced.
If you already have the power grid in your area (which most do), you stay connected to that. You then sell your surplus power back to the power company, and buy back what you need when you're not generating. Try not being such an ignorant twit next time and you won't look like such an idiot.
Yes, I do. Every month I pay heating and electric bills. I believe I'm paying the true cost for these things, or even a bit more, and that society at large is not subsidizing my consumption.
Society at large is indeed (most likely) subsidizing your consumption (depending on where you live). Power is regulated in Canada for example.
I seriously doubt that I have an option for decentralized power generation (say putting something in my backyard) that when all factors are taken into account would cost less than what I'm currently doing.
I never actually said that it would the cheapest solution, just the best one. It's the most robust and makes optimal use of freely available clean energy coming to us from the sun.
Even if I had someone missed noticing such, then others would noticed and there would now be a wave of conversion to this inexpensive decentralized power across the U.S. and Canada.
I'm sure you've heard of the phrase "vested interests". Conspiracy theories aside, as I said, people think far too short term and the immediate benefits of solar energy are non-existant. But after a hundred years of heavy fossil fuel use, we're now seeing the negative impacts on our own health, and clean solutions will become ever more important.
First question, have you done this yourself?
I don't own my own home yet. I just graduated from electrical engineering, it'll take me awhile to make enough money for that. But I will when I buy my own home.
Can you be more specific -- what solar panels and how and where installed?
Roof, either as part of the roof as tiles, or built on top of the roof as a separate unit. The idea is to utilize space that is already not in use. Putting them in your backyard would be horrendously ugly and inconvenient for instance. Companies have also built photovoltaics into glass and made window shades out of them. The point is, just about any surface with exposure to the sun can be mode of or covered in photovoltaics.
Have you really considered all the costs? For example, does the above include the cost of someone installing it? Or are you assuming that you will do it and discounting your labor (and mistakes) as free?
These are installation details from actual companies that perform these installations. See here for more detailed info answering many of your questions.
But do you really know this to be the truth? I've heard the opposite, that substantial amounts of pollution are produced in fabrication and mining
Current photovoltaics utilize rejected silicon from IC fabrication. Therefore, it was material that was going to be waste which is being put to good use.
and that significant energy consumption is required also
More energy than searching for underground reserves of oil, building large drilling platforms out in the middle of the ocean, manning them, maintaining them, then drilling, pumping, and finally transporting oil to then be refined, then altered for actual use in a power plant? Do you seriously believe constructing solar cells, which involves taking rejected silicon, layering it in a simple manufacturing process and snipping it to the desired dimensions, requires that much energy?
I'd like to see real numbers. I imagine energy conversion efficiency fades with time, I wonder how fast.
Photovoltaics are simply a dual layer of silicon. Using them doesn't degrade the material as far as I've learned, so I don't see why power generated should diminish.
Where is the energy produced by the solar cells stored till it's actually used? Doesn't that require another whole system? And what are its maintenance requirements?
Many ways of doing this depending on your situation. If you're connected to the grid, you can just sell energy back to the power company and make money. Then, when you aren't generating (like nighttime), you buy back what power you need. If you actually want to store the power yourself, there are many options as well: capacitor banks, batteries, flywheel systems, etc. Batteries are most common though, but the grid is obviously the most useful and beneficial.
so that if we are really going to look at the pollution impact we need to include all this in the accounting. Which scenario is true, I don't know. Whichever, wouldn't it be desirable to have a detailed accounting?
Yes, it's called cost-benefit analysis, something engineers do all the time. The following will answer all your subsequent questions about what air quality and public health has to do with the monetary value of using solar technology.
Governments place a dollar value on public impact of everything. For example, saving 5 minutes by driving a new route your city built actually has a dollar value in the cost-benefit analysis they did before the route was built. Similarly, clean air, water and public health have dollar values associated with them. So I was simply saying that these are under-appreciated in the current analysis. As things worsen, as asthma increases due to dangerous compounds released into the atmosphere from our current ways of generating power these parameters will shift. I'm saying we should have a little forethought and realize this is going to happen and take steps to prevent it.
You assert decentralized renewable power generation is the only option. How does this result in clean air and water?
Umm... practically zero emissions throughout it's entire lifecycle, ie. extraction from ground to construction and use as panels while still generating the power we need. Thus it results in us not further polluting our water; nature cleans the water for us.
I think the best guess right now based on what we know currently is that asthma is caused by the clean environments we currently raise children in.
Are you suggesting the sulfides and other compounds and particulate matter (which all make up smog) we regularly release into the atmosphere in billions of tons per year have nothing to do with it?
wouldn't it be worthwhile documenting exhaustively all the costs, pollution, monetary and other metrics also, of the solar installation you're speaking of?
It's evaluated on a case-by-case basis based on the conversion and what you as the home owner want as well.
Centralized means single points of failure. Centralized means expensive to distribute. Do you really think installing power lines and distributing power over them across an entire country is less expensive and more efficient than generating the power close to where you are using it?
A solar installation for a home costs between 10,000 and 30,000 dollars (Canadian), and will pay itself off in 10-15 years. Maintenance is practically zero for the first 20 years (barring major accidents like a high impact on the panels).
Solar does generate very little pollution, the only pollutants being in the fabrication process. Even there, they are small and with time, techniques improve and pollutants drop.
Ten times costlier than currently available schemes? What are you factoring into this? How much is clean air and water worth to you? How much is avoiding asthma for you and your children worth? How much is ensuring a future for our children and humanity as a whole worth? Our current weights for these factors are almost non-existent, so of course the current system looks more attractive. Think long-term, not short-term. You get into stock market investments for the long term, so why not power? Furthermore, with increasing demand and more production, photovoltaics will drop in price.
Nuclear is my vote for meeting the needs of the future, but i suppose your millage may vary.
I hope you're kidding. Decentralized power generation via renewable means is the only way we should go: solar and wind on every home and everywhere you have empty space (parking lots anyone?) will generate enough electricity to meet our current needs and future needs.
Unfortunately, it may still be necessary to agree to the GPL even to use software. It frees the developer from liabilities by disclaiming all warranties including fitness for any purpose.
now, if the linear response of a material to EM fields is complex, I guess you can have negative (or imaginary) n.
If n=c/sqrt(mu * epsilon) as you suggest, then negative n would simply result from the negative roots of the sqrt. No fancy gymnastics with complex roots necessary.
Some physicists have speculated particles called tachyons which stem from the imaginary results of the relativity equations. Normally, they travel faster than light and require great energy to approach light.
Interesting third point; I never considered that possibility. Or, as the article states, the apparent "paradoxes" are self-resolving in the sense that any time travel has already happened and is part of history already, ie. not travelling to the past would create a real paradox. So you intend to go back and kill your mother before giving birth to you, but you never succeed because something gets in your way (obviously since you were born).
Why the hell does everyone insist that nothing can go faster than light when no one can give me a reason WHY.
Basic premise of relativity and thus a fundamental feature of its' time/velocity equations. I don't feel like looking around for them right now though (it's some sort of square root relationship between time and velocity). Since relativity has been proven time and again, physicists have generally accepted it's way of looking at things.
I'm glad you concede that it's possible to pay at least lip service to individuality while destroying freedom.
Very well, if you want to be anal about it, allow me to rephrase: Any support of individuality is in support of freedom. Therefore, it does not actually have to support freedom, but it is in the spirit of supporting freedom.
I've already adressed this in another comment, but also consider that admitting to an objective reality does not mean that all things must be viewed objectively. We can decide that some matters have room for subjectivity.
You seem to embrace subjectivity for convenience's sake, and I take issue with this. It's akin to the "worse is better" programming philosophy; it gets things done quickly, but in the long run it breaks down and has to be done over again. Instead why not put more upfront effort and design it right the first time? Do you think the founding fathers just pulled crap out of their hats when they wrote the constitution? I'm sure they went through painstaking effort to try and balance the system such that freedom would be maintained. And it's still going today.
Most interesting scientific truths are also relative in this way; there are several correct ways of viewing them. Weight, speed, length, are all relative. This is a consequence of Relativity
They are relative to a frame of reference but are absolute within that frame. Similarly, a conclusion is relative to the set of premises you begin with, but within any given set of premises, there is an absolute, best solution.
No, it doesn't. Private ownership means nothing of the sort unless it is accompanied by private control. For a difference between the two without even having to examine the practices of the world's most evil capitalist regimes, pick up a copy of the DMCA.
You are taking a purely legal view of this, I am taking a practical view. If you were allowed to own guns even though you didn't "control" them as per the DMCA, and the government suddenly said you couldn't own guns anymore, you can still use them to fight back. If you have physical access to it, then you can use it.
Your delusion that someone must be either an absolutist or a total moral relativist is revealing.
Can you explain how it could be any other way? Either morals are fixed and are thus absolute, or they can change and are thus relative. Saying they are both is violating the Principle of Non-Contradiction.
Actually, the FAQ page states that it is a non-profit organization. My bad. You can justify a non-profit venture because of the type of world we currently live in which gives people incentives to donate.
Look, the most infamous dictatorship in history, the German regime of 1933-1945, supported private ownership (albiet only in full for German citizens who showed no signs of being of "impure" origin.)
Then it didn't support full undiscriminated private ownership did it?
Fact is, private ownership means individual people have resources that allow them to live independently of goverment. If government tries to raise arms against it, the people have the resources to fight back.
a false support for individuality which actually undermines it
If it's false support, then it's not actual support now is it.
witness some of the mindless drivel on Slashdot decrying traditions for the simple, sole reason that they are traditions
What does this have to do with individualism?
We are individuals, but we are not/only/ individuals; I become my greatest when I accept others, not just myself.
This is so poetically vague that I'm not even sure what you are talking about.
Economically, the individual is the sole source of decisions for a huge number of reasons; but socially, a large number of additional conditions have to hold in order for freedom to mean anything, and individualism actively undermines some of these.
n : an economic system based on private ownership of capital
[syn: {capitalist economy}] [ant: {socialism}]
On quick inspection it appears you are right, but I believe capitalism is inextricably linked with freedom. Private ownership implies individual choice and responsibility. Any support of individuality supports freedom.
By that same logic, Dubya is directly responsible for the economic slump and it has nothing to do with the boom-bust cycle that began in the 90s.
lol. I'll buy that. Everyone is so depressed about their president, they're just sitting around at home mumbling to themselves instead of going out and spending.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I used to know a bunch of fanatical libertarian theorists. the people behind Xanadu (a pre-WWW pay-per-view network), and this sounds like something they would come up with.
Some of the people from that group are working on the E programming language now if you're interested. Could be used in a similar application as Xanadu.
Oh no! Don't they know that using a BIG RED BUTTON is a surefire way of getting people to press it?!? They're doomed!
Manufacturers guarantee their panels for at least 15 to 20 years.
See here for more information on photovoltaic degradation.
Thanks. I also mentioned wind power. Solar is not the only way to generate renewable energy. It's typically the one associated with it, and good enough for most people though.
I don't know where you get this crap. Solar is incredibly expensive to install in Canada, and it's only good if you're basically a hermit already and don't have a fridge.
Please see http://www.arisetech.com. Solar home installations starting at $15,000 to over $40,000 for the full monty.
Maintenance free for 20 years? What the fuck are you storing all the energy from the cells in, your back pocket? The batteries are good for about three years then the whole bank needs to be replaced.
If you already have the power grid in your area (which most do), you stay connected to that. You then sell your surplus power back to the power company, and buy back what you need when you're not generating. Try not being such an ignorant twit next time and you won't look like such an idiot.
Yes, I do. Every month I pay heating and electric bills. I believe I'm paying the true cost for these things, or even a bit more, and that society at large is not subsidizing my consumption.
Society at large is indeed (most likely) subsidizing your consumption (depending on where you live). Power is regulated in Canada for example.
I seriously doubt that I have an option for decentralized power generation (say putting something in my backyard) that when all factors are taken into account would cost less than what I'm currently doing.
I never actually said that it would the cheapest solution, just the best one. It's the most robust and makes optimal use of freely available clean energy coming to us from the sun.
Even if I had someone missed noticing such, then others would noticed and there would now be a wave of conversion to this inexpensive decentralized power across the U.S. and Canada.
I'm sure you've heard of the phrase "vested interests". Conspiracy theories aside, as I said, people think far too short term and the immediate benefits of solar energy are non-existant. But after a hundred years of heavy fossil fuel use, we're now seeing the negative impacts on our own health, and clean solutions will become ever more important.
First question, have you done this yourself?
I don't own my own home yet. I just graduated from electrical engineering, it'll take me awhile to make enough money for that. But I will when I buy my own home.
Can you be more specific -- what solar panels and how and where installed?
Roof, either as part of the roof as tiles, or built on top of the roof as a separate unit. The idea is to utilize space that is already not in use. Putting them in your backyard would be horrendously ugly and inconvenient for instance. Companies have also built photovoltaics into glass and made window shades out of them. The point is, just about any surface with exposure to the sun can be mode of or covered in photovoltaics.
Have you really considered all the costs? For example, does the above include the cost of someone installing it? Or are you assuming that you will do it and discounting your labor (and mistakes) as free?
These are installation details from actual companies that perform these installations. See here for more detailed info answering many of your questions.
But do you really know this to be the truth? I've heard the opposite, that substantial amounts of pollution are produced in fabrication and mining
Current photovoltaics utilize rejected silicon from IC fabrication. Therefore, it was material that was going to be waste which is being put to good use.
and that significant energy consumption is required also
More energy than searching for underground reserves of oil, building large drilling platforms out in the middle of the ocean, manning them, maintaining them, then drilling, pumping, and finally transporting oil to then be refined, then altered for actual use in a power plant? Do you seriously believe constructing solar cells, which involves taking rejected silicon, layering it in a simple manufacturing process and snipping it to the desired dimensions, requires that much energy?
I'd like to see real numbers. I imagine energy conversion efficiency fades with time, I wonder how fast.
Photovoltaics are simply a dual layer of silicon. Using them doesn't degrade the material as far as I've learned, so I don't see why power generated should diminish.
Where is the energy produced by the solar cells stored till it's actually used? Doesn't that require another whole system? And what are its maintenance requirements?
Many ways of doing this depending on your situation. If you're connected to the grid, you can just sell energy back to the power company and make money. Then, when you aren't generating (like nighttime), you buy back what power you need. If you actually want to store the power yourself, there are many options as well: capacitor banks, batteries, flywheel systems, etc. Batteries are most common though, but the grid is obviously the most useful and beneficial.
so that if we are really going to look at the pollution impact we need to include all this in the accounting. Which scenario is true, I don't know. Whichever, wouldn't it be desirable to have a detailed accounting?
Yes, it's called cost-benefit analysis, something engineers do all the time. The following will answer all your subsequent questions about what air quality and public health has to do with the monetary value of using solar technology.
Governments place a dollar value on public impact of everything. For example, saving 5 minutes by driving a new route your city built actually has a dollar value in the cost-benefit analysis they did before the route was built. Similarly, clean air, water and public health have dollar values associated with them. So I was simply saying that these are under-appreciated in the current analysis. As things worsen, as asthma increases due to dangerous compounds released into the atmosphere from our current ways of generating power these parameters will shift. I'm saying we should have a little forethought and realize this is going to happen and take steps to prevent it.
You assert decentralized renewable power generation is the only option. How does this result in clean air and water?
Umm... practically zero emissions throughout it's entire lifecycle, ie. extraction from ground to construction and use as panels while still generating the power we need. Thus it results in us not further polluting our water; nature cleans the water for us.
I think the best guess right now based on what we know currently is that asthma is caused by the clean environments we currently raise children in.
Are you suggesting the sulfides and other compounds and particulate matter (which all make up smog) we regularly release into the atmosphere in billions of tons per year have nothing to do with it?
wouldn't it be worthwhile documenting exhaustively all the costs, pollution, monetary and other metrics also, of the solar installation you're speaking of?
It's evaluated on a case-by-case basis based on the conversion and what you as the home owner want as well.
Centralized means single points of failure. Centralized means expensive to distribute. Do you really think installing power lines and distributing power over them across an entire country is less expensive and more efficient than generating the power close to where you are using it?
A solar installation for a home costs between 10,000 and 30,000 dollars (Canadian), and will pay itself off in 10-15 years. Maintenance is practically zero for the first 20 years (barring major accidents like a high impact on the panels).
Solar does generate very little pollution, the only pollutants being in the fabrication process. Even there, they are small and with time, techniques improve and pollutants drop.
Ten times costlier than currently available schemes? What are you factoring into this? How much is clean air and water worth to you? How much is avoiding asthma for you and your children worth? How much is ensuring a future for our children and humanity as a whole worth? Our current weights for these factors are almost non-existent, so of course the current system looks more attractive. Think long-term, not short-term. You get into stock market investments for the long term, so why not power? Furthermore, with increasing demand and more production, photovoltaics will drop in price.
Nuclear is my vote for meeting the needs of the future, but i suppose your millage may vary.
I hope you're kidding. Decentralized power generation via renewable means is the only way we should go: solar and wind on every home and everywhere you have empty space (parking lots anyone?) will generate enough electricity to meet our current needs and future needs.
Hydrogen burns up, not down, so your lap would be safe, but your eyebrows not so lucky.
Unfortunately, it may still be necessary to agree to the GPL even to use software. It frees the developer from liabilities by disclaiming all warranties including fitness for any purpose.
now, if the linear response of a material to EM fields is complex, I guess you can have negative (or imaginary) n.
If n=c/sqrt(mu * epsilon) as you suggest, then negative n would simply result from the negative roots of the sqrt. No fancy gymnastics with complex roots necessary.
I've never seen a cop deter a crime
That's because you don't hear about events that didn't happen.
Some physicists have speculated particles called tachyons which stem from the imaginary results of the relativity equations. Normally, they travel faster than light and require great energy to approach light.
Interesting third point; I never considered that possibility. Or, as the article states, the apparent "paradoxes" are self-resolving in the sense that any time travel has already happened and is part of history already, ie. not travelling to the past would create a real paradox. So you intend to go back and kill your mother before giving birth to you, but you never succeed because something gets in your way (obviously since you were born).
Why the hell does everyone insist that nothing can go faster than light when no one can give me a reason WHY.
Basic premise of relativity and thus a fundamental feature of its' time/velocity equations. I don't feel like looking around for them right now though (it's some sort of square root relationship between time and velocity). Since relativity has been proven time and again, physicists have generally accepted it's way of looking at things.
I'm glad you concede that it's possible to pay at least lip service to individuality while destroying freedom.
Very well, if you want to be anal about it, allow me to rephrase: Any support of individuality is in support of freedom. Therefore, it does not actually have to support freedom, but it is in the spirit of supporting freedom.
I've already adressed this in another comment, but also consider that admitting to an objective reality does not mean that all things must be viewed objectively. We can decide that some matters have room for subjectivity.
You seem to embrace subjectivity for convenience's sake, and I take issue with this. It's akin to the "worse is better" programming philosophy; it gets things done quickly, but in the long run it breaks down and has to be done over again. Instead why not put more upfront effort and design it right the first time? Do you think the founding fathers just pulled crap out of their hats when they wrote the constitution? I'm sure they went through painstaking effort to try and balance the system such that freedom would be maintained. And it's still going today.
Most interesting scientific truths are also relative in this way; there are several correct ways of viewing them. Weight, speed, length, are all relative. This is a consequence of Relativity
They are relative to a frame of reference but are absolute within that frame. Similarly, a conclusion is relative to the set of premises you begin with, but within any given set of premises, there is an absolute, best solution.
No, it doesn't. Private ownership means nothing of the sort unless it is accompanied by private control. For a difference between the two without even having to examine the practices of the world's most evil capitalist regimes, pick up a copy of the DMCA.
You are taking a purely legal view of this, I am taking a practical view. If you were allowed to own guns even though you didn't "control" them as per the DMCA, and the government suddenly said you couldn't own guns anymore, you can still use them to fight back. If you have physical access to it, then you can use it.
Your delusion that someone must be either an absolutist or a total moral relativist is revealing.
Can you explain how it could be any other way? Either morals are fixed and are thus absolute, or they can change and are thus relative. Saying they are both is violating the Principle of Non-Contradiction.
Actually, the FAQ page states that it is a non-profit organization. My bad. You can justify a non-profit venture because of the type of world we currently live in which gives people incentives to donate.
Look, the most infamous dictatorship in history, the German regime of 1933-1945, supported private ownership (albiet only in full for German citizens who showed no signs of being of "impure" origin.)
Then it didn't support full undiscriminated private ownership did it?
Fact is, private ownership means individual people have resources that allow them to live independently of goverment. If government tries to raise arms against it, the people have the resources to fight back.
a false support for individuality which actually undermines it
/only/ individuals; I become my greatest when I accept others, not just myself.
If it's false support, then it's not actual support now is it.
witness some of the mindless drivel on Slashdot decrying traditions for the simple, sole reason that they are traditions
What does this have to do with individualism?
We are individuals, but we are not
This is so poetically vague that I'm not even sure what you are talking about.
Economically, the individual is the sole source of decisions for a huge number of reasons; but socially, a large number of additional conditions have to hold in order for freedom to mean anything, and individualism actively undermines some of these.
Such as?
Someone who turned out "normal" would be an exception. In fact, there probably is no such thing.
capitalism
n : an economic system based on private ownership of capital
[syn: {capitalist economy}] [ant: {socialism}]
On quick inspection it appears you are right, but I believe capitalism is inextricably linked with freedom. Private ownership implies individual choice and responsibility. Any support of individuality supports freedom.
By that same logic, Dubya is directly responsible for the economic slump and it has nothing to do with the boom-bust cycle that began in the 90s.
;-)
lol. I'll buy that. Everyone is so depressed about their president, they're just sitting around at home mumbling to themselves instead of going out and spending.