The number of designs for vertical wind-power turbines is growing because they’re efficient, small, and cheaper to build than regular windmills. Sound familiar? One of the companies that seem to be making real headway in this market is Mariah Power, with a propeller-free vertical axis windmill called the WindSpire. Rotorweb_2 At a height of 30 ft. tall and only 2 feet wide, the WindSpire converts wind energy into measurable electricity through a vertical design, a rotor/generator system (with a low speed giromill and rotating ‘air core’ motors), and a wireless modem that an owner can track on a computer. It produces about 1900 kilowatt hours per year in 12 mile per hour average winds, which is about a quarter of the total energy used by a regular U.S. house. But the key promise is that if the spire was twice as thick, it could likely produce 100% of the energy needs of a household. There is one thing about this windmill that I’m not entirely sold on, however. That the faster speed of the windmill’s revolutions will prevent collisions with birds. I’m not well versed in aviary predilections, but this just seems like rubbish to me. […]
ARBIL, IRAQ — American negotiators have not yet succeeded in getting Iraqi officials to agree to keep US troops well into the next president’s first term, the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, confirmed yesterday. On a surprise visit to Baghdad, Rice denied earlier reports this week that the two sides had ironed out the last disputes in a heavily contested draft agreement that is due to replace the UN mandate covering the US-led occupation. President George Bush wants the pact to authorise a troop presence at least until 2011 so that he can trumpet it as proof of his policy’s success. But the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has adopted the rise in nationalist feeling in the Iraqi parliament and among the public and is insisting on a clear timetable for withdrawal, the lifting of judicial immunity for US troops who commit abuses, and a veto on US military operations, including the arrest of Iraqis. The pact has been downgraded into a ‘memorandum of understanding’ to avoid the need for the US Senate to approve it. In Iraq, it has to clear several hurdles. ‘Once a breakthrough has really been achieved, the draft will be presented to the […]
A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges. The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold. The flawed software is on both touch screen and optical scan voting machines made by Premier and the problem with vote counts is most likely to affect larger jurisdictions that feed many memory cards to a central counting database rapidly. Riggall said he was ‘confident’ that elections officials through the years would have realized votes had been dropped when they crosschecked their tallies to certify final elections results and would have reloaded cards so as not to lose votes. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has said no Ohio votes were lost because the nine Ohio counties that found the problem caught it before primary results were finalized. As recently as May, Premier said […]
BAGHDAD — A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who’d joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country’s security forces. American officials have credited the militias, known as the Sons of Iraq or Awakening councils, with undercutting support for the group al Qaida in Iraq and bringing peace to large swaths of the country, including Anbar province and parts of Baghdad. Under the program, the United States pays each militia member a stipend of about $300 a month and promised that they’d get jobs with the Iraqi government. But the Iraqi government, which is led by Shiite Muslims, has brought only a relative handful of the more than 100,000 militia members into the security forces. Now officials are making it clear that they don’t intend to include most of the rest. ‘We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently,’ said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the issue. ‘Many of them were part of al Qaida despite […]
ACCRA, Ghana — Negotiators meet in Ghana this week to resume work on a new climate change treaty and discuss ways to prod developing countries to join the fight against global warming. But the latest round of talks comes at an awkward moment, with the world’s poor more worried about the immediate cost of food and fuel than the uncertain long-term effects of climate change. The weeklong U.N. climate conference opens Thursday, with nearly 1,600 delegates and environmental experts from more than 150 countries in attendance, to work on an agreement to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases. Scientists say the gases trap the earth’s heat and already have begun to cause more severe tropical storms, harsher droughts in arid areas and melting ice packs in the Arctic. U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said it was significant the latest round of talks were being held in Ghana, where climate change already is being felt. Rainfall has decreased 20 percent in the last 30 years, he said on the eve of the conference, and rising sea levels threatens to swamp up to 385 square miles in the Volta Delta. A report last year by the Nobel […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
