>Manufacturers usually painted their pencils if they were looking to cover up imperfections in the wood. Accordingly, typical paint colors were dark: purple, red, maroon, or black.
But Hardtmuth was looking for a way to advertise the caliber of its graphite rather than its wood.
Bright color to stand out, as opposed to dark colors hiding imperfections. Another stretch, perhaps.
Not very dense compared to the cost of digging a big hole in the ground with Caterpillars and the number of truck loads of pellets you would need to bring in. This is all assuming that just covering the wood over with dirt is enough to keep it sequestered, a big pile of biomass could start emitting methane.
Sounds like you're confident you (or the FOSS community collective) can spot cleverly hidden backdoors.
I'm not, and I find that position naieve. For the overwhelming majority of people who are not a cross between Bruce Schneier and Linus Torvalds, a threat model that tries to protect against the NSA and GRU and MSS pretty much requires avoiding anything with a network connection. If you have a smartphone, you should probably just use its default application store.
Electricity isn't a great market. End-users with solar power are allowed to use the grid as a perfectly free battery, which is why everyone is dumping power on the grid at high noon.
> Where I live its about 25c (of Australian Dollar) for 1kwh but you only get 7c back
I've read about places that don't actually do "net metering" and implement this with two separate meters, one for inflow and one for outflow.
Is that the case where you are? Are there any time-of-use options available that might sweeten the deal?
> So a real battery would be much preferable.
Assuming it were free (even to purchase, with only charge/inverter efficiency losses), of course it would. However, as much of the discussion in the thread points out, storage is very capital (if not maintenance) intensive, even at utility scale.
That's true, in that, if the metering is purely electronic, the only thing "separate" would be two different readouts. For electro-mechanical metering, I'd still expect a need for two physically separate ones.
Regardless, substituting "readouts" for "meters" is irrelevant to my question.
I don't think that's the case. Depending on where you are, you either get paid retail or wholesale rates, and still have to pay some monthly service fee regardless of surplus or deficit. I've never heard of any utility in the US buying solar production at more than retail rates.
So above market rates. Sorry, your 10kw of intermittent unreliable power provided at your whim into a random neighborhood grid is not worth the same amount per kwh as reliable base/load following generation. And that's wholesale.
Retail priced net zero metering is even worse - that's simply poor people subsidizing rich folks with solar panels.
Maybe the subsidization is ok overall due to the system changes it (might) bring about - but man it's bothered me for decades that rich folks who can afford to blow $25k+ on solar installs act so smug about net-metering - when it's them simply stealing from other ratepayers for their free battery.
> I've never heard of any utility in the US buying solar production at more than retail rates.
That doesn't refute the parent's claim of it being greater than the market rate. The residential retail rate [1] usually doesn't change, except on a long time scale, after regulatory approval, while the market rate changes intra-day, based on supply and demand.
If peak sun doesn't correspond to peak demand (and, from what I've read, it doesn't), those periods are where the utility could be taking a huge loss. For example, if PG&E has a customer in the top marginal usage tier is "selling" power at 25c/kWh when the wholesale market is selling it at 4c, that's a pretty tremendous loss.
[1] Often not even a single rate but a tiered one, so a heavy residential user could be "selling back" power at a particularly high retail rate, much higher than average.
End-users who produce electricity aren‘t a problem for the grid, they produce electricity very close to where it‘s mostly consumed (typically they consume most of it themselves). Wind farms on the other hand are built where it‘s cheapest and yields are best, often far away from any relevant consumers.
With their own batteries for 24h+ (soon...), end-users will be the best thing that can happen to the grid.
I see you downvoted my comment, but I think you do not understand the practical issues: there is a limit to the divisibility of Bitcoin : 1 Satoshi, or 0.00000001 which is easier to write as 1x10^-8
In Bitcoin, Dogecoin is priced in almost the smallest fraction you can divide a Bitcoin in: about 39 Satoshis, or 3.9x10^-7 BTC
You can indeed buy fractions of a bitcoin, but no smaller than 1 Satoshi. Even before you reach that hard limit, the issue with transaction costs make small amounts of Bitcoin "dust", that is not economically recoverable if the transaction cost is greater than the amount that could be recovered.
Most exchange are limited by their use of floating point precision: if the price of Bitcoin to another currency changes by less than 1 Satoshi, it will not be reflected in this crypto to Bitcoin price.
So Dogecoin/Bitcoin is more stable than another pair for which this division would be possible, simply because a 2% variation would mean less that a 1 Satoshi (0.02x39=0.78)
0.78<1 so Dogecoin/Bitcoin will not change for fluctuations of less than 2% around its current price.
Even better: there are something like 1.15x10^11 Dogecoins. If you buy in Dogecoins, you can buy things that would cost less than what you can price in Bitcoin.
So for sell/buy, Dogecoin brings you more arithmetic precision.
Simply because it is old (therefore ubiquitous on the exchanges) and also so cheap, I think the issues with floating point gives Dogecoin a bright future!
EDIT: and yes, many exchange seem to be using floating point to deal with monetary values. Maybe for database or frontend optimization? Anyway if you don't believe it, try to place 2 different order with the 2nd one different from the 1st one by 1 Satoshi, then see how it goes if they execute. Or look at their API and see what precision they advertise, and how by pure coincidence it seems to match limits that floating point would impose!
God I hope exchanges don’t use floating point math for anything, that’s literally dealing with money 101. If you can’t even manage to do that how can you be trusted with storing value? This is why God (and I use that term VERY loosely) gave us arbitrary precision arithmetic libraries. Kidding aside anyone who proposes using floats to track money is getting fired.
1 Satoshi is currently worth $0.000069, and transactions are being approved for as low as 2¢. So this isn't currently a big problem.
In the future, bitcoin could be extended to have more digits. Or perhaps this will be dealt with on a second layer. Lightning transactions could deal with sub-satoshi quantities.
With this setup, the router only does _routing_, so you also need a Wireless Access Point (WAP). Connect it like so: Modem->Router->Switch->WAP.
Install pfSense on the router, configure the Unifi using Ubiquiti's Java app, and you're done. It's about $250 all together which _is_ more expensive than consumer routers, but IMHO it's worth the superior quality. The APU board is well-documented (PCEngines provides schematics!) and the firmware is based on Coreboot. The processor supports AES acceleration for faster encryption (great if you use VPNs!) PfSense is an enterprise-grade router/firewall with scads of graphs and features. And the Unifi has a great antenna with excellent range. Not to mention this setup leaves you with six spare ethernet ports on the switch.
I am sympathetic to the discussion of the government. The emphasis on line cutting and gawking is interesting as a foreigner (experienced gawking too in Seoul) but it does seem to contradict the author's contention that the reason for leaving has nothing to do with Chinese people and culture.
I don’t believe uncivil behavior has anything to do with Chinese people and culture, it is only something that the government leads society and is less prevalent in other Chinese societies (Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc...).
No, it begins with: "In early November 2017, the HSBC Business School informed me they would not renew my contract. In March 2018 they informed me they wished to sever all ties by April 1, 2018."
Yes, which is quite sad both because of the amount of effort put into this and because there's nothing quite similar to migrate to. CopperheadOS was a bit unique.
Bright color to stand out, as opposed to dark colors hiding imperfections. Another stretch, perhaps.