Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Do We Need Global Warming to Justify Wanting Clean Air?


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From the charts above, I note the following major California weather events; train stuck in Sierras, 1950. Winter Olympics at Squaw, 1960, major flooding Marin, 1982, hyper rain Jan 1997

Of late I've been delving into the sun induced global warming theorists, who claim the sun is getting either hotter or cooler, which is making the Earth hotter or cooler, but it is not even clear to me yet if they mean a hotter sun gets you a cooler earth, or vs. versa. One thing is for sure, the Japanese, have no less than 5 satellites watching the sun (they don't even have to wait for the sun to rise) and a body of data is being built up. Instead of relying on indirect measurements on Earth, we should have data from space to get closer to an answer on this issue.

But, for me this is all beside the point. I want clean air. Gas cars make dirty air, and so whatever comes along the gives us clean air, I am in favor of pursuing. I'd even consider a church that said God wants clean air and water as a top priority. I like clean water too, and plenty of it. Civilization, as the Greek culture has understood for many centuries, begins with a cool glass of fresh, clean water.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Ridgestock 2008 Pictures are Up, Check www.SierraDebates.com

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I posted my better and my promised pictures up at a site which you can locate by going to www.Sierradebates.com.

Also, you may start seeing little note cards posted every here and there about:

Western Nevada County's Pick of the Web

www.yubanet.com

www,ncvoices.us

www.Sierradebates.com

www.SierraRides.com

complete with a brief description of each of the sites. I'll publish a picture of one of the cards soon.

Friday, August 15, 2008

The Light at the End of the Tunnel is an on-rushing Solar Powered Train

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PGE buys 800 Megawatts, 233,000 homes, off of 9.5 sq miles of CA's 163,707.

"So what has changed too make constructing gargantuan PV power plants profitable?

“Lots of things have changed,” says SunPower’s Blunden. “Power prices are going up and public policy is requiring utilities to have a portfolio of renewables.” And after building some 40 megawatts of power plants in Spain, SunPower has been able to improve its manufacturing processes and cut costs, according to Blunden. “We could see where the cost reductions were coming down and the benefits of scale,” she says. “We saw there was a way for us to be competitive with other renewables.”

Goldstein says OptiSolar’s business model of owning the supply chain - from building its own machines to make solar cells to constructing, owning and operating power plants - will allow it to reduce costs.

Laizze-Fairing Down the River

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The Invisible Hand is what causes entrepreneurs to use ALL resources at their disposal to gain advantage in the market place. Thus, greasing the palms of legislators to get laws passed in their favor is part and parcel of the Invisible Hand and shall be forevermore. What part of Monopoly didn't you understand? When a complete history of Microsoft becomes available in 50 years, it will illustrate the process of buying up whatever's bugging you perfectly. In the meantime, read the classic, "Tammany Hall, Honest Graft vs Dishonest Graft," by Plunkett, written over 100 years ago, and ever so true today.

(dishonest graft is when you take the money, and then don't vote the way you were supposed to)

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Sierra Debates, It's All About You, and Having It Your Way

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www.SierraDebates.com

I am now beginning to put some flesh on these bones, and you can add in to the stew. If you have a particular neighborhood, cultural galaxy, media institution, governmental institution, blog, etc., that you'd like to post about, just write me @ Keachie101 andfurthermore.net. I have deliberately moved the at sign. You'll have to stick it back in the right place to mail me correctly.

When you write me, be sure to indicate what new sub board you'd like to have, and a brief description of it, and under which board you think it should go.

thanks,


Douglas Keachie

Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, AKA, Webmaster for www.SierraDebates.com and for www.SierraRides.com

PS please include a working phone number, at least a message phone, so that I can eliminate flakes easily, and avoid ID imposters.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

How Long Can You Tread Molten Rock?

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Folks,

The stuff released by burning coal and oil is stuff that has been locked away, underground, and not part of the surface biosphere, that thin fragile shell at most 10 miles thick, that we can live on in comfort.

By releasing all that stored CO2, all at once, after its been locked away for at least 65 million years, we are affecting the thin surface biosphere like crazy. Yes, the massive planet, 7,000 miles of for the most part molten rock, right through the center, is not affected at all.

How long can you tread molten rock?

Monday, August 11, 2008

VerizonWireless, Worthless for Uploading Anything Bigger than 500K

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Based on five months of using a tethered cell phone, and one month of using a Sierra 595 card, I have found that despite Verizon's ability to download updates to anti-virus programs at 800 - 1,000 kBits, they have effectively throttled any uploads at speeds that will NOT maintain a connection long enough to finish the work at hand.

What this means is that any upload will start right off at whatever the last speed was that you were using to surf the net, and then it will fall down to speeds in the effective rate of less than dialup (32 kBit), which causes many servers to time you out, and you have to start all over again. Every now and then you might get lucky, but I've never been lucky beyond the first five megabytes. I have wasted an enormous amount of time on this.

In addition I've wasted an enormous amount of time trying to trouble shoot this.

"How are you today?"
"I'm having the usual connection problems."
"Let's start by trouble shooting your card and computer combination. Are you sure you haven't picked up any viruses?"

"I am running ZoneAlarm, CA Assoicates, and Spyware Doctor at a combined cost of over $200/year, and you never have any trouble giving me those updates at your maximum speed. Does that have anything to do with keeping your network virus free?"

"oh NO!, That's just random chance. Remember, we just promise up to speeds, and every now and then you get lucky and get even faster! Lucky you!"

"Pretty darned amazing it always happens when updating antivirus, spyware, and firewall attack programs!"

Then they will reset the connection by erasing it, they may do a *228 or a *9228 to reset the card, and the BS will continue.

Finally they will declare that "I should take it to the nearest authorized tech center" which is Roseville, 70 minutes away. I have since learned that simply moving to a different tower fixes the problem. Apparently they throttle your home tower, but let you get a faster connection when away from home. There is never anything wrong with my card or computer.

They may also do a speed test, using easyspeed.net or any of a bunch of others. This is really cute, because it blasts short files up and down, and gives you a nice high speed reading. It is worthless when it comes to real world activities. Even there they try to fake you out by doing what I call "bursting." You will get one or two seconds of very high speed transfer followed by seconds, and sometimes even minutes, of extremely slow transfer, giving a net speed way lower than what some averaging speed detection devices would indicate.

I cannot recommend strongly enough the software NetMeter, which is free. This program has agreed consistently with the numbers given by Verizon's speedtest of the day, and it shows you in detail, from your machine's point of view, exactly what is happening, and when, and how. It also gives daily, weekly, monthly, yearly totals for up and downloads. Very good program, used it for phone lines and Sat dishes too.

It installs on your machine, and thus it's information is not dependent on any external site, or your connection to it.

http://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/index.php?PHPSESSID=59840c066af0d60a4a2013ab6698e179&action=tpmod;dl=item14

It has enabled me to see the "stutter" pattern when you get a short high speed burst, and then nothing, and more bursts and nothing in succession, leading to effectively way lower speeds that the peaks of the bursts.

The tethered cell phone cannot go as fast, but given all the monkeyshines around the pc card, and the fact that you can switch the phone OFF on a monthly basis, leads me to switch back to the phone. Effectively, the card is maybe 20% faster. Eventually ATT will get DSL out here, and I don't want to be stuck in a year's contract when it happens.

Saturday, August 02, 2008

Obama 10, McCain 90, the Ratio on Blogs

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If you do a search using Technorati, on the phrase "Barack Obama," you will find about 90% of the blog sites, where there are posts about Obama, are sites where they are rooting for McCain. I guess there are still planty of Ryghty bloggers out there after all. Or maybe it's just that they are the one's with the stuck pig, and thus make the most noises.

Obama vs Newspaper Spell Checkers, $100 Reward

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If you'd like to help Barack Obama get $100 out of my pocketbook, please read on, and send that email.

In Microsoft Word, since the beginning of time, you've been able to add new words in less than 30 seconds to the spelling dictionary. Newspaper Spell Checkers are racist. You can complain about this by writing to press@pluck.com. You can check this out by copying the stuff below into your spell checker at your local paper:

Coolidge Eisenhower Nixon Truman Taft all work fine, no red underlines.

Barack Obama, is red-lined, might as well be Osama. A complete lack of respect.

I will donate $100 to the Obama campaign once this is fixed in The Union, Grass Valley, CA, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Douglas Keachie

Please add your name and pass this on, if you think this is an issue.