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Comment Re:Doesn't add up (Score 1) 198

The AC isn't on the generator, but the air movers are, and the refrigerators and the sump pumps, kitchen lines for a toaster over, and a line n the garage so my elderly relatives can start the snow blower if I'm not home, some other water pumps. I'm not lecturing, although since you can't be bothered to read what I wrote about having to design for the surge load or the generator stalls, because I not being the genius that you apparently are, can't tell in advance when the power is going to go out and have everything turned off before the generator tries to start up.

Given that the generator keeps my house from flooding in long heavy rains, my pipes from freeze because I don't have heat in the winter, or the food from going bad during a rolling summer blackout. I would say that most people can't afford *not* to have plans for backup power. If you live somewhere that the power goes out a lot in bad weather this isn't "luxury" for the rich, its called a cheap investment to avoid much higher weather related losses

Comment Re:Doesn't add up (Score 1) 198

All the replies complaining that I can't possible need 10KW should go and read some list like this
http://www.generatorsales.com/wattage-calculator.asp
and look at both what you would want to run not just for a short time, but in the case of a generator for say days at a time in a major outage, and also since my generator is auto start/auto switch over, look at the *peak* loads that might be generated by devices like sump pumps air conditioners, the various submersed pumps in the house to pump 'stuff' from the basement sink/bathroom/washing machine up to the level of the septic system, refrigerators, at the time the power fails. Also remember that when you bring the power back on many devices that weren't even running will still give you a turn on power surge. If that is higher than the generator's capacity it will stall and fail to start up.

So no it doesn't use that all the time, but when the power goes out an this single battery system for multiple houses kicks in, who is going to remember to turn off their AC? Who is going to say "well the other people will turn off their AC so I can leave mine own" Thinking "if I optimize I can make the power last X hours" isn't how it would work out in the real world for most people. And if it doesn't work for most people then it isn't as great an idea as people think.

Comment When it was the exception rather than the rule. (Score 1) 500

When H.F.T. first came out the approach of "buy when its going up and sell as soon as it ticked down" made some people a lot of money, because the H.F.T was just piggybacking on some human that had decided to move the stock for some reason that made sense. Now that so many of the trades are from H.F.T. algorithms what you have are computers piggybacking on computers moving the stock price all by themselves, and thus we have a feedback system with less and less damping as the percent of the trades that don't involve a person gets larger and larger.

Which of the many suggestions to prevent H.F.T. should be implemented is a whole topic by itself, but at this point H.F.T is now actively harming the purpose of the stock markets, that of providing a way for companies to get liquidity and for people to be able to *invest* in companies. It was good while it lasted for some people but it is time for H.F.T. to be consigned to the history books.

Submission + - How Paul Ryan Changes This Election (northmobilepost.com)

nmpost writes: "Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate has fundamentally altered the 2012 presidential election. What was once thought to be a referendum on President Obama has suddenly morphed into the largest debate on entitlements we have had in nearly half a century. The mud slinging will continue, but it will now come within the context of entitlement issues. The Obama campaign has long sought to tie Romney to the Ryan budget plan, and now Romney has helped them out. The reason for this tectonic shift is the budget plan Paul Ryan proposed back in 2011. In that plan, Medicare was transformed into a premium support service, much like a voucher program. It would give seniors money to purchase private insurance, and they would not have access to the current system of Medicare. That system would be put into place for citizens that were below the age of 55, with those over 55 keeping the current system. The budget plan was very unpopular, and was ultimately voted down. A later version of the Ryan plan made the premium support optional, allowing citizens to choose between traditional Medicare and premium support."

Comment Re:How much time? (Score 1) 638

Realizing how many links there already were to the page in question from other sites, the fact that it still doesn't appear in the googlecache now seems quite strange. Either that or there is some other tag I am missing that is preventing any indexing of the site.

Comment Re:How much time? (Score 3, Interesting) 638

I'm too lazy to dig up wherever I read it, maybe it was a comment on hacker news, but it sounded like it had about another week to go before expiration.

Actually you can't look it up. I was surprised when I did a search for the link that no hits from the actual site came up. So I tried forcing the link in googlecache and still got nothing so I checked the page source at petitions.whitehouse.gov and all the links have no-follow on them. Strange really, why would such an exercise in open government want to make sure there were no search engine results that brought people to the petitions or any record of what had appeared on the site.

I'm thinking someone needs to set up a shadow copy of the site with links to all the pages created on petitions.whitehouse.gov so they get seeded into the search engines, since supposedly the no-follow only stops the initial indexing, if the page gets in from some other link it should stay in the search engine.

Piracy

Submission + - Here's Proof that the Lendink Lynch Mob was Created By Idiot Authors (the-digital-reader.com)

Nate the greatest writes: Lendink was a site that connected Kindle owners who wanted to legitimately loan ebooks. It wasn't the biggest, but it did quietly hum along — right up until last week, when a bunch of authors freaked out over what they thought was piracy. None of these authors bothered to look into what Lendink was doing, but that wasn't enough to stop them from forming a lynch mob. They got together and sent dozens if not hundreds of demands that Lendink stop pirating the ebooks they weren't pirating. This was enough to kill the site.

But have you ever wondered what it looked like from the viewpoint of the lynch mob? One author has come forward with her jsutufications for joining the lynch mob. You're going to be surprised at how little she knows about the contracts she signed with Amazon or about how ebooks are sold.

Wikipedia

Submission + - Let The Campaign Edit Wars Begin

Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Megan Garber writes that in high school, Paul Ryan's classmates voted him as his class's "biggest brown noser," a juicy tidbit that is a source of delight for his political opponents but considered an irrelevant piece of youthful trivia to his supporters. "But it's also a tension that will play out, repeatedly, in the most comprehensive narrative we have about Paul Ryan as a person and a politician and a policy-maker: his Wikipedia page," writes Garber. Late last night, just as news of the Ryan choice leaked in the political press — the first substantial edit to that page removed the "brown noser" mention which had been on the page since June 16. The Wikipedia deletion has given rise to a whole discussion of whether the mention is a partisan attack, whether "brown noser" is a pejorative, and whether an old high school opinion survey is notable or relevant. As of this writing, "brown noser" stands as does a maybe-mitigating piece of Ryan-as-high-schooler trivia: that he was also voted prom king. But that equilibrium could change, again, in an instant. "Today is the glory day for the Paul Ryan Wikipedia page," writes Garber. "Yesterday, it saw just 10 [edits]. Today, however — early on a Saturday morning, East Coast time — it's already received hundreds of revisions. And the official news of the Ryan selection, of course, is just over an hour old." Now Ryan's page is ready to host debates about biographical details and their epistemological relevance. "Like so many before it, will be a place of debate and dissent and derision. But it will also be a place where people can come together to discuss information and policy and the intersection between the two — a town square for the digital age.""

Comment Re:Not true that fighting back doesn't work. (Score 3, Insightful) 320

I guess I'm just not sure how the first half of your post relates to the second. What actually happened sounds fairly reasonable and not anything like what TFA is talking about; they didn't try to smoke the attacker, they found them and reported them.

You are missing that in order to report them they had to break into all the machines on the control path back to the source. If using exploit penetration tools to compromise attack machines and their command/control nodes isn't "hacking" I'm not sure what your definition of the word is.

Comment Re:Not true that fighting back doesn't work. (Score 1) 320

Equal to "If someone breaks into your home, you should be able to break into their home."

More like, "your neighbor is throwing rocks through your windows from inside his house and the police can't be troubled to do anything about it so you go over and stop him, and if his door is locked you may have to break it down"

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