Comment Re:California power crisis of 2000 and 2001 (Score 1) 482
You're playing semantic games as well as lying about what others say. This is my last reply to you.
Falcon
You're playing semantic games as well as lying about what others say. This is my last reply to you.
Falcon
To get an idea, consider the energy output of a windmill and divide it by the span of the prop to get the amount of energy removed per centimetre of length, assuming the width is about the same all the way is good enough. That puts it at the scale of a small fragile bat. The number you get is very small because it is less than the pressure of the prevailing wind on an area the size of a bat since you can't get all the energy out of the wind due to bearing friction etc.
Now do you see why I am dismissing the "bats killed by pressure drop" stupid bullshit as the PR campaign lie it is? It's the sort of thing that sounds OK initially due to technical terms thrown in to hide the really stupid lie, but if you think about how a windmill works the audacious lie is apparent. People caught out with it are also likely to be embarrassed that they fell for something so stupid so it's hard to talk them out of it.
I don 't know if the length is directly proportional to the amount of energy captured by wind mills. I bet the area of the blade, as well as it's pitch, is more important. Oh, and obviously the height. The bottom of the blades are supposed to be higher than the tallest thing that can block the wind. That includes trees. And I bet that that is higher than most bats will be flying.
And no I don't expect your explanation as to why you dismiss the "bats killed by pressure drop" as stupid bullshit. For all I know what you said was bullshit. More of the NIMBY shit delaying wind farms, even off the coast. You still did not provide evidence which is what I asked for. Can you provide scientific studies supporting your position? That is what I'm looking for.
Now here are some of the things I found:
That's 5 links to science to your zero links. I found those by Googling wind turbines danger to bats pressure. All results are in the top 6, I didn't use the second result which was from the New York Times as it may be too biased for some people. I didn't even click on the link to read it.
Falcon
Your claim was that by deregulating the producers and distributors but leaving the *existing* price caps on the cost to consumers, the industry went aground.
I made no such claim. Throughout this thread I have said the opposite, that CA did not deregulate energy. "Deregulating the producers" is only partial, not full, deregulation. I have stated the state dropped some regulations but made new regulations too. That is reregulation, which I have been stating throughout though I admit I did not use the word "reregulation".
I think it's pretty obvious people either don't or can't read and if they do read they don't understand what they read. They also make ridiculous or outrageous claims about what others did say.
Falcon
No, I'm saying, as should have been very clear, that if bats are close enough to experience a significant pressure drop they would be in direct proximity with the blades and death would be due to blunt trauma instead of some bad SF story of their lungs exploding. So yes, I'm saying you've been mislead.
And where's your evidence of this? It is not clear.
Falcon
So what you're saying is that there is simply no way the free market could ever produce electricity as cheaply as a strongly regulated industry and so it was unfair to insist that it should? Doesn't that suggest that a strongly regulated industry is superior to the free market?
How in the world did you come up with this? In my post you replied to I said nothing about free markets. Because I didn't I also didn't say they couldn't produce electricity cheaper than a regulated market. As a matter of fact I do support free markets, however because power cables need government granted rights of way or easements I do agree there should be some regulations. Especially if a monopoly is granted as well. In the case of power transmission, ie cables, I believe the ownership of them should be separated from ownership of electrical generation. However unlike CA I would not cap how much electrical sellers could charge end users. I would allow prices to fluctuate with supply and demand. I believe the same about cable TV, fiber optics, and phone landlines. For instance the fiber Verizon is laying down. I would split the ownership of the fiber from the services that fiber can provide.The company that owned the fiber would then have to allow any others to use it to provide the services it can provide. That is the existing infrastructure. For new infrastructure I would require a separate entity to build it.
Falcon
The pressure drop isn't very large otherwise the things wouldn't need such big blades, and besides, if the bats are right next to the airfoil of the blade they are probably in the act of being hit by it and turned into roadkill by a far better understood means (blunt trauma).
I included the quote from the link saying it was pressure drops, not being hit And it says nothing about roadkill. Are you saying they are wrong? Some studies have shown cars do kill more birds than wind generators. So do cats, and buildings.
Smaller blades have to spin faster to generate the same amount of electricity. But obviously faster spinning blades kill more bats and birds than slower ones.
Falcon
Lol. In Linux or free unix desktop land you're a slave to software dependencies and chasing down half-assed solutions to common desktop application type tasks. On my mac, I spend a total of about 1 hour per 18 months on operating system upgrades. I've been there, done that, and will GLADLY pay the software licensing cost to get what I want done with a minimum of fucking about.
On my Mac I run Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 12.04 and I love the freedom to run whatever software I can. Now if Adobe were to port Photoshop CS to Linux, and drop the price, I and many other Linux users would use it too. Because I can't afford CS for OS X I'll try both CinePaint and Krita for deep color editing of my photos. I am willing to give up a little tyme maintaining my system for freedom to do what I want. Giving up freedom is what makes you a slave, not the other way around.
Falcon
Fukushima's problem was caused by flooding in the basement where diesel generators were.
Not according to Kirk Sorensen, a nuclear technologist who operates the site energyfromthorium.com who for Forbes wrote the article Explainer: What Caused The Incident At Fukushima-Daiichi. At first he writes "The tsunami destroyed the diesel generators that provide power to drive the pumps that circulate the water coolant through the reactor that removes decay heat." But a bit later he writes generators ran "until their day tanks emptied" of diesel fuel. If emergency generators were running then they could have been refueled. The hard part would of been finding the people who were willing to put their lives at risk. However anyone who supports nuclear power should be so willing, if they aren't willing to put their own lives at risk why do they support putting other people's lives at risk?
All of the mentioned things could potentially cause enough problems in nuclear plants, but they would need to huge (like >7.75 magnitude earthquake *directly* under the reactor)
The title of the article Earthquake threat to nuclear reactors far higher than realized sums it up pretty well. Risk from earthquake is up to 24 tymes higher than previously thought.
people should be smart enough to shutdown the reactor & do other preparations in time as hurricanes can be detected way earlier than tsunamis/earthquakes.
And what of tornadoes? They aren't as predicable as hurricanes. And at specific points they strike they are more powerful than hurricanes.
The biggest reason I oppose nuclear power though is because nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies
"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don’t. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
If all energy subsidies were dropped, including for fossil fuels and nuclear power then geothermal, solar, wind, and other clean(er) energy sources would be more cost competitive. Coal get tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Without government loan guaranties Wall Street would not finance nuclear power. And if fossil fuels had to pay all of it's costs, instead of passing on external cost to others, their cost would be higher.
Falcon
What specifically do you need to do that Linux does not do? MS Office isn't an answer, it is a specific application suite. The functions it does can be done by OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
While I don't "work" in IT, I am disabled and have disability income, I volunteer for Freegeek Twin Cities. There we take in donated PCs, test them, and build new PCs from good parts that meet our minimum standards. We then install Xubuntu 12.04 and sell them at low cost to those who can not otherwise afford PCs. As of yet I have not come across a software need that Linux can not do. The closest I know of is editing photos and graphic design. If Blender, CinePaint, GIMP, or Inkscape can not do what needs to be done then it is possible to install Photoshop CS5 using WINE.
Ooh, I just thought of something, run XCode to develop for iOS.
Falcon
I used to be a GNUStep proponent as well. But in the end it was the lack of apps that killed it. Well not killed it but put it in life support. If you want GIMP you have GTK+ as a dependency, same thing goes for Inkscape. Applications rule put simply. Otherwise you could just use a regular window manager.
There are CinePaint and Krita to replace GIMP with. To tell the truth I've been waiting 15 year for GIMP to edit in at least 16 bits per color channels and it still does not.
Falcon
Ubuntu is being moved to Window Maker as it's X11 window manager. It provides "integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment".
Honestly, GNOME 2 was a poor DE particularly compared to KDE3, and GNOME 3 just became more unusable, while reducing already minimal functionality.
As for which desktop environment is better, that is purely a personal matter of preference. Right now I use both KDE and Unity in Ubuntu 12.04 as well as Xubuntu 12.04. Soon I plan to install Linux Mint and use Cinnamon and KDE along with MATE. I also plan to install Arch Linux. I'll try all these out then decide which ones I will use regularly.
Falcon
i have not experienced any of the problems others have with Apple gear beyond the cyclical obsolesence problems where Apple not only renders software obsolete, but their hardware as well.
I have not experienced this "cyclical obsolesence" of Apple products. I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro r3.1 (Santa Rosa). It was released in the summer of 2007, and shortly thereafter is when I bought it. So in a few months my laptop will be 6 years old. Currently I have 10.6 (Snow Leopard) installed. I can install both Lion and Mountain Lion, the next 2 Mac OSes, to replace 10.6 but I don't want to. Actually because Apple is starting to act similar to MS, requiring Mountain Lion to be installed by downloading it from the app store and not providing it on disc, I may never buy another Apple product. I may by another Mac laptop but I don't think so.
Falcon
You're confused. It wasn't the $199 Wing Wang Wong China Special that had problems working with Linux. It was the Retina Macbook.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple_mbpr_linux&num=1
I think you have that backwards. It was the Linux devs. that had the onus of providing compatibility; not Apple.
That is difficult if Apple does not release what is needed to write drivers. In this case though it's an NVidia graphics system that isn't working right, and NVidia will not release the code it uses for Linux developers to write drivers. It has only been lately that NVidia has started releasing it's own binary blobs for Linux. And those don't work well.
Falcon
If this guy wants to sue, then power to him. I suppose he's standing on principle. But I'll pick more serious issues in my life to worry about.
And if it is a serious issue for a user? Bad displays can and do interfere with the work of graphic artists. Then again said artists should be using an external display for work. I own a MacBook Pro, I'm typing on it now. I am also a photographer, I used to develop film in a darkroom, but recently got a digicam so I'm looking for a new monitor. Now if my display did not work properly I would definitely go after the business I bought it from, and not the manufacturer.
Falcon
LG was the manufacturer of the defective screen
They should sue LG instead of Apple
I am no apple fanbois, it's just that if the defective part came from LG, why not home in to the manufacturer, instead of the seller?
Why Apple and not LG? Because Apple was selling a product it knew was defective. It is Apple's responsibility to make sure it's products work. Apple then should have went to LG about it. Apple used to have a pretty good rep about the quality of it's products but it this case they failed.
Falcon
BLISS is ignorance.
