mink

Well, Richard, I did not plan to go into detail about growing crops, so I mentioned only the ingredients that form most of the mass of a green plant. Of course fertilizer is needed too if you harvest crops. However, you do not need additional "nutrients" as by definition fertilizer is the one or more nutrients a plant needs in small quantities. These are just different words for essentially the same thing. When growing energy crops it is not important what kind of green plant you use. If you are really concerned about the ammonia, you could grow e.g. lupins, who live in symbiosis with a bacterium called Rhizobium which is able to produce this from the Nitrogen contained in the air and make it available to the plant. But even in this case you still need phosphorus and potassium and a few others. But the main point is, that the energy you need to produce the fertilizer, deploy it, seed the crops and harvest them is by magnitudes smaller than the energy you can gain from the resulting biomass. And the nice point is, that you can recycle the fertilizer used when the hydrogen is produced in the reformer. If this is the better way or using nuclear plants to produce hydrogen is just a matter of belief as you put it. Mr. Tetzlaff, however, has calculated all this, and his conclusion was that nuklear power is by far more expensive in this context. Karl

I looked in fuelcells.org and found: This makes the system more complex, more expensiveand less efficient, and it emits CO2. When thinking of a decentralized usage of fuel cells, only hydrogen fuel allows emission-free operation. Transformation of any fuel to hydrogen is done more efficiently in a centralized hydrogen factory, where it is possible to take care of the CO2 produced and the mineral ash as a fertilizer. This is solar energy - the fuel crops like any green plants use the sunlight, CO2 and water to build their biomass. Karl

This weekend I googled for information about fuel cells and found this site which was in German language for the most part. However, there was also an English paper (PDF-File 3,9 MB), which contains a comprehensible abstract of the site. I was very impressed of what I read there. Much of this was new to me, and I did not find anything there that sounded not logically. I highly recommend to read the paper or the website if you understand sufficient German. The terms "Hydrogen fuel cells" and "hydrogen economy" were mentioned in some posts in the global warming thread, but these threads read like the misinformation spread by the oil and power industry is in most minds, as it was in my own. Karl-Heinz Tetzlaff, the owner of the site, is an retired engineer who was working for a big German chemical company. His task was to plan industrial installations and calculate the investment and operational costs for them. He continued to do this after his retirement but not targeting a company anymore but the whole economy. Tetzlaff's idea is to replace electricity by hydrogen as the major secondary energy. This could be used for heating and generation of electrical power in homes and business as well as for transport. In any case, fuel cells should transform the hydrogen to electrical power and heat. Energy transportation should be done by the gas tube networks which are currently used for natural gas. 50% of German homes and nearly all major industry plants are already connected to this network. Transport loss of energy is much less this way compared to electricity transport via high voltage lines. For the production of the hydrogen he claims that small scale reactors are not very economic, and this is the reason why e.g. cars that have a built-in reactor that generates the hydrogen from some liquid fuel are too expensive. But if the car just has a hydrogen tank, a fuel cell and an electrical engine, it would be much cheaper both in terms of fuel consumption and manufacturing costs. An interesting aspect of his work is that he first thought the hydrogen should be mainly produced using natural gas, oil and coal. But when the oil price raise in the last 2 years he changed his mind and is now proposing that it should mainly be won out of bio-mass, simply because this is much cheaper than oil even if the farmers are paid a very fair price for their energy crops. This shows that is work is not driven by green ideology or any ideology at all. Everywhere in his site his reasoning is based on economical considerations, and he does not believe that in demonstrations or good will of individuals might change anything. Enjoy reading the paper. Karl

1. I would have adjusted to 4S= even before I sub, this way saving time for the subsequent boards. 2. I would ask both sides who was responsible for the delay. If I come to the conclusion that one pair is responsible I would adjust in favor of the other pair. If I cannot find out, I probably adjust to 4!H-1, because I think it is more likely that the contract will not make after this start. Karl

This really makes no sense. If I start to play in a tourney I have to have enough time available to finish it, and I intend to play that long. If I have little success in the tourney, maybe at some point I wish to leave (seldom). But for sure I do not wish to leave after the first round, with one unlucky board and the second unfinished, and the TD has no time to adjust the unfinished board. Karl

If I was defender in this hand I would not accept the claim, an I would be very astonished if declarer ducked after that. This is a case where knowledge of defenders hand is not required to get it right. So even a player who had just lost hist memory would play this correctly. Consequently, I would adjust according to law 71.C if I was director, provided I was called by the dummy in time. Karl

not a good idea I think - login invisible should be an exception, and I seldom do this twice in a row. Karl

This is easier to judge if we see the situation when play stops:[hv=d=e&v=n&n=s85hjt94djtc&w=sk9hak875dct&e=sath6dack986&s=s63hd87cqj43]399|300|Scoring: IMP 3nt by East N/S won 3 tricks E/W won 2 tricks last card played ♠6 by S [/hv] East has 6 additional top tricks, making 8 tricks altogether, and there is no easy way to find a winning line, even double-dummy. So -1 is the correct adjust for sure. However, if declarer wins 3 tricks in the dummy and then plays ♠, South is squeezed in the minors: he has to hold 3 ♣ cards and therefore must discard one of his ♦ cards. Declarer cashes ♦A and then endplays South in ♣. He must be careful to discard !C10 in the dummy on the ♦A, otherwise South can avoid the endplay by letting the dummy win the ♣10. Karl

If we want to discuss this, what is most needed is the situation when the ruling has to be made: [hv=n=saq95hdcq5&w=skj8ht64dc&e=st62hdckj6&s=s743hqj9dc]399|300|Scoring: IMP[/hv] According to the OP, ♣5 is played next. It looks quite obvoius to me now that the declarer can make 2 more trump tricks and 2 more ♠ tricks, making 9 tricks altogether. Therefore I would set the score to 4♥-1. Awarding an aritficial score is easier of course, but it would be in favor for the declarer. I think you should always try to find the most likely table result and adjust to it; artificial scores most time are good for one side and therefore might make people believe the letting the time run out is an option. Karl

Thanks Fred. No problem for me to let him know that. I shall do so at once. Karl

Having finished a free money tourney I right-clicked on a friends name while I was still in the tourney area and became a kib at his table. But the buttons at the lower edge of the window remained the same as they were in the tourney, including the $ button. I though I better do not try it there. --- My settings are such that I have 8 lines of text displayed in the chat area. Sometimes one of the famous private bridge clubs sends a club chat that is excactly 8 lines long (including one blank line). When this text is scrolled out of the display area by other chat messages, it is not possible to scroll back pagewise. Rather, I have to scroll up one line, which causes the whole message to appear, and then can scroll further back pagewise. Karl

These are the rules of the unibridge club we can find on the website given by calabres: A nice set of rules, and I entirely agree with them. The same set of rules is posted along with each tourney, and you can read them before the tourney at any time when you feel like you should refresh your memory concerning the rules. However, I failed to find the rule about undos there. Of couse, when I was new in the club, I had read the text that is posted by the host in every tourney right after it started, but of course, I did not read it every time. Also, I always thought that this is only a reminder for those who did not care to read the rules in the web or attached to the tournament. I never imagined that additional rules are posted by chat. This is especially true as rule number 1 cited here is in contradiction with the undo rule. I also think that chat is not a reasonable method to post a portion of text that requires scrolling by the user in order to be entirely read, and that the start of the tourney is not the moment where I would expect players to pay much attention to such a long text - they are busy greeting partner and opps, annonuncing the system, reading opps' announcements, viewing the own hand and starting to bid. Requiring them to carefully read some longer poprtion of text is in contradiction with the requirement to play in time. At the time when the incident took place I actually was not aware of the undo rule, but I was aware of the rules of this site. I remembered the undo rule at some time after the tourney. I think you cannot really blame me for that. Thanks for all the replies to my original post. Two ascpects of the incident have not been commented on. First, the opp who had asked for undo do so again and again promptly after I had rejected the request. I think the right way to handle this is to call the TD right after the first reject. Asking for undo again is trying to force the opp directly to do what this fellow believed was right, and I consider this was extremely rude and made me angry. Also, threatening to call the TD instead of really calling him is rude. Finally I had to call the TD myself. I have asked calabres by email if he did something about this, but he chose not to answer me but instead to post in this thread and leave this question unanswered. The parter of the undo-requester, who is among the 20 top-ranked players of the unibridge club, had called me "not fair" in table chat after I had rejected several undos. I did not have the time to tell the TD about that. However, this remark was rude, too. I think he would not have made this remark if he felt that the repeated undo requests by his partner were rude. This shows that this partnership was not very sensible concerning rudeness. Clearly, I was not in the mood to change my mind and grant the undo request after this. This might have been different if opps called the TD right after the first request was rejected and the TD suggested to me the it really was a misclick by his judgement and he would recommend to accept the request. But what happened was that the TD told me to accept the request (the last of the series of requests was still pending). I immediately followed the TD's order. But I strongly believe, even if the rule to accpet undos is in effect, he cannot order me to accept. All he can do is adjust the score, assign a penalty to my partnership or throw me out of his private club. According to the Laws of Duplicate Contract Bridge, Law 45C1, there is no undo if the other defender had seen the card, as Jillybean2 pointed out already. So if a sponsering organization really thinks a rule should be in effect that directly violates this law, I cannot cite a law directly telling us what the TD should do in such a situation. But the general notion of the laws is that the TD explains the choices and the player choses, not the TD tells what to chose. Only if it was a crystal-clear misclick, e.g. a card played that was clearly absurd and therefore clearly not intended, you might argue that the TD tells the player that, but even then, if I was the TD I would just recommend it to the player and ask him for his final decision. After all, accepting an undo is a favor I do. I think I have given many reasons why in this particular case I refused to do that favor. But I learnt that there is in automatism in this club and I am forced to do the favor, no matter how clear it is that it was a misclick and no matter how rude opps behaved. Consequently, I shall not play there anymore. Karl

Some hours ago I was told by the TD, host, and owner of a well-run private club to accept an undo for a card played by a defender. I had called the TD because that opp had immediately repeated the undo request each time I had rejected it. He had insisted that it was a miscklick and also threatened to call the TD. The other opp had called me unfair. As a matter of fact that private club indeed has a rule that undos have to be accepted if it was a misclick. This of course boils down to "undos must always be accepted", because nobody would admit it was not a misclick. However, this private club rule is in contradiction with "The rules of this Site" (see Bridge Library): I would really like to know if the the rules of a private club can overrule the rules of the site, and if they can, I would think this is bad for BBO. In this particular case, I think the rule to accept miscklick undos has its merits, and in principle I support the attitude behind this rule. However, if it turns out that you are forced to believe in any case that it was a misclick, then the rule is really bad. And even if it was a misclick, if it was made by defense the other defender can use the knowledge that his partner has the card that was exposed, and maybe make better decisions subsequently. Here are some reasons why I do not believe this was a misclick: That opp was accused of bad play by his partner in the previous hand, and he apologized with a misclick (he did not request an undo there). I have replayed the board now several times and I was not able to see what might have been the misclick - rather, his partner who accused him had made the error. opp said he immediately did request an undo, but I had already played a card from the dummy before the first undo request, and I think I remember that undo request took much longer to occur than "immediately" He repeated his undo request instead of calling the TD He threatened to call the TD instead of really calling him And there is another reason why I believe the misclick story was a lie: his cards were ♦K ♦5 ♥J ♣J. ♦ was trump, and therefore the client sorts the cards in the order given here. He originally played the ♣J and replaced that by the ♦K after I finally accepted the undo when the TD had told me to do so. Maybe he can convince his grandmother that he misclicked on the card that was most far away from the intended card, but not me. It is much more reasonable that he suddenly remembered there was excactly one trump left in declarers hand, and he should better draw it. Of course, when I was asked by the TD why I rejected I was not able to explain all this, and I had not really realized what made me suspicious. All I knew was I was already down 3 for sure, and they should know that too, and the only difference the undo might make was to decide between 800 or 1100 for them. I felt it was really greedy to ask for an undo in such a situation. And as it turned out, the other opp discarded a stupid card in that very trick and it was 800 for them finally. They got about 12 IMPs for that. Karl

Well Robert, I see our ideas differ completely, and I am on duckys side here. My idea when I read your post was to use the survivor mechanism to give the players an additional reason to play in time. But being bumped out because my opps play slow or because I am just some seconds slower than most of the other tables would be no fun for me. Karl

Good idea. The space for explanation could be visible all the time, allowing to type in explanations in advance. Karl

There should be a minimum amount of time for each round, however, as it would be silly to exclude a table after 5'30'' with only one trick left to be played. And, not the slowest tables but the slowest pairs should be excluded - this would require measuring the time each player uses, of course. For the fast pairs at slow tables who are allowed to continue, the hand could be finished by robots. Karl

ulven, you are right that on your harddisk you do not find what others did to the board you see. But just trymyhands and all is there. There, you can replay a hand that was played at a different table like you can replay your own, and this is by far superior to any email solution, where you cannot even replay your own hand. I find it very hard to figure out what happened when the tricks are just printed. Karl

We are talking about leading a 9 or lower card. There are 2 possible strategies here: show count or show presence/absence of an honor. I think it is not a good idea to mix these 2, as I have no idea how to find out if a particular lead shows count or attitude. Leading a suit with no honor is not recommended most time, so I would suggest to show count with the lead. I think it is no big deal wether a low card shows odd count (3rd/5th) or even count (2nd/4th). But I find it more natural if the lead is consistant with your general way of showing count, so I perfer to play 3rd/5th with standard carding and 2nd/4th with udca. Up to now I had no idea that the English interpretation of 2nd/4th existed, and it sounds most strange to me. Karl

Of course, if I was visiting e.g. the United States, I would give tips, too, and not cheat waitors just because I do not like the tipping system. However, I have decided never to travel to the US, for other reasons. Karl

We have to distinguish 3 type of tipping systems: 1. No tipping or only voluntary tipps for outstanding service. Wages are the same like in other comparable areas of the economy. 2. Tips are voluntary but needed by the waitors as their wages are not a fair payment for their work, and they could not make a living without the tips. 3. Tips are required the customer cannot avoid them, and the waitor can take legal actions if the customer refuses to pay. Type 1 and 3 is pretty much the same: The waitor gets money for his work, and he is entitled for this money. The problematic type is 2. Legally, a customer signs 2 contracts when entering a restaurant: One with the restaurant owner about providing dishes and drinks, and one with the waiter about the transportation of the food. While the prices for the restaurant are set by the owner and payment of these prices can be legally enforced, the waiter has to hope for the goodwill of the guests: they can pay the usual rate, or more if they liked the service, or less - maybe even nothing - if they disliked the service. The problematical part is the last one: Nobody expects the customers of a restaurant judge the service objectively. The customer can use what kind of criteria he likes to judge the waitor's performance, and no matter how unjust the judgement is, the waitor has no right to get a payment for his work. In my view, depending on the mood of the customers (and his ability to calcualte 15% or whatever the usual rate is) is much worse than being a beggar: If a beggar is not paid by somebody who passes by, he has not lost anything, as he did not work, but the waitor works for the customer and trusted to get payed for it, and then maybe gets nothing, though he did his work properly. This is much the same like you write an individual computer program for somebody, test it, it works and meets its specification, you deliver it to the customer, but he says "I do not like the way it was coded, so I will not pay for it". Nevertheless, he keeps and uses it. It is just ridiculous, and I cannot believe that anybody defends such a system. Karl

I would add the following to candybar's wish list: Clocked tourneys produce unfinished boards. Unclocked tourneys tend to last forever. Therefore create another kind of tourney format where a round lasts for a predefined number of minutes like in clocked tourneys, but tables that are still playing at end-of-round time are allowed to finish the current board and then start the next round. In the new round, if there is not enough time for all boards, the last board(s) of the round are skipped automatically. This is the way the problem is handled in face-to-face tourneys, and I see no reason why not implement the same procedure online, but I realize some progamming effort is needed for this. Let the software measure times of inactivity (no bid or card played and and no chat, no matter if disconnected or not), and if some predefined limits are exceeded, automatically remove that player/pair from the tourney. Design the movement such that it can handle a shrinking number of contestants. This already possible with survivor tourneys today, but there are some drawbacks with the current implementation such as a pair is removed if a player loses connection two seconds before the round ends, though it would not have been a problem as he reconnects after 10 seconds. If the tourneys can handle slow players this way, the issue of players who leave on purpose would be no longer something to worry about - just let them leave, and record their leaving rate, so that potential partners can avoid them. I know I have made these two suggestions several times in the past, but please forgive me that I do it again, because I believe that these two improvements would reduce the the TD's workload by more than 90% - no more substitutions and no need to adjust unfinished boards. Many items of candybars wishlist would become much less important if TD calls for substitution and because of slow play were no longer necessary. Karl

Every user who is logged in BBO causes considerable traffic on the BBO server, even if he is idle completely. Therefore it makes much sense to log off an inactive player after some time. If you intend to work on a FD convention card for a longer period of time, I would recommend to open te FD application independently of BBO. It is called bidedit.exe and resides in the "Bridge Base Online" directory. Karl

I tested the money thing this moring. When I logged in I was alone, but short time after mrdct joined me and we played a few boards, with default settings. This was the second one (mrdct west and I south): [hv=d=n&v=e&n=s4hqt743dktcat875&w=st963hadaq8643cj9&e=sk872hk9652d975c3&s=saqj5hj8dj2ckq642]399|300|Scoring: IMP[/hv] West North East South - 1♥ Pass 2♣ 2♦ 3♣ 3♠ Dbl Pass Pass 6♦ Dbl Pass Pass Pass S4 S2 SJ S3 H8 HA H3 H2 C9 CT C3 C2 H7 HK HJ ST D5 D2 DQ DK HQ H5 DJ DA CJ C8 D9 C4 D7 S5 D3 DT HT H6 C6 D4 S6 C7 S7 SQ CK D6 C5 S8 S9 H4 SK SA CQ D8 CA H9 Result: -5 and 1400 for NS Maybe no surprise that mrdct cursed his GIB partner with open chat when he saw the dummy. Maybe instead of doing this total points, there could be a second table with GIB players in all seats and IMPs computed by comparing the results of the 2 tables. However, this would not prevent an incident like this one. Karl

Most penalty cards are "big" (major) ones. "Small" (minor) penalty cards only occur if a defender drops a card in the range 9-2 with no intention to play it. Such a minor penalty card is only required to be played if the holder wants to play a low card of that suit. That means that he can play any honor, ruff or discard another suit tough he has a minor penalty card. Karl This is the text of law 50:

Defrag only helps a bit for performance, but has no influence on the reliability of internet connections. And I would guess the original poster has problems regardless how long the computer was already running. Karl