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The California seafloor leaks are much larger. I don't think they know exactly how much, but this source quotes "8-80 Exxon Valdez spills", I would guess they mean annually. That's somewhere between 86.4 and 864 million gallons.

Actually, I believe it's much less than that:

Oil content of sediments is highest closest to the seeps and tails off with distance, creating an oil fallout shadow. The amount of oil in the sediments down current from the seeps is the equivalent of approximately 8 to 80 Exxon Valdez oil spills, the study said.

Sounds more like the sum over the whole time of the spill

There is an oil spill everyday at Coal Oil Point (COP), the natural seeps off Santa Barbara, where 20-25 tons of oil have leaked from the seafloor each day for the last several hundred thousand years.

And here we have an estimate not only for that duration, but also one for the daily spill - though the "tons" could mean a lot of things, it's likely following this, so 20-25 tons of crude oil are about 145 to 185 barrels. For an Exxon Valdez (250,000 barrels) spill this would take a little over 4 years - but they only talk about the oil in the sediments, not the one that got eaten by bacteria, or drifted ashore or into the Pacific.

..and 2000 *barrels* @42 gal/per = 84,000 *gallons* per day. (Barrels to gallons conversion made because otherwise the numbers seem so disparate...).

The California seafloor leaks are much larger. I don't think they know exactly how much, but this source quotes "8-80 Exxon Valdez spills", I would guess they mean annually. That's somewhere between 86.4 and 864 million gallons.

Everyone can see that. Can you not see that the person you're replying to insisted that this isn't a closed system?

It's a poorly explained system. It's probably something like this. In any case, a system like this is perfectly workable and does not violate any physical laws. The process to create the hydrogen uses less electricity than the process of burning it. That's not magic, that's chemistry. Eventually, you pay for it when you recycle the aluminum in the linked case. Not sure how it works in the Genepax system, but doubtless it's something similar.

On the contrary, offshoring has been part of the steady erosion of the middle class, and it doesn't receive enough attention. During the post-war boom, it was common to graduate high school and make $20 an hour at a unionized manufacturing job. Good luck doing that today; many struggle to make that much with a college degree.

First went the unions, then went the manufacturing, and now the white collar jobs are leaving, and all so the top 1% can see their annual 15% increase in income. Smashing, yea capitalism.

In the same way right-to-work laws free workers from having to pay a thousand dollars a year in union dues AND making another five dollars an hour with twice as much vacation time. It's a penny wise, pound stupid decision, because the vast majority of all cost reductions are not passed down to the consumer, they just go straight into the executives' pockets.

Take a look at the ISA CSE License. There might be other certifications and licenses but the CSE License is a major one for sure.

(ISA is the Instrument Society of America, CSE is Control Systems Engineers)

There is another article here with some extra details. http://www.isa.org/PrinterTemplate.cfm?Template=/C ontentManagement/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=42102&F useFlag=1 I supposed what he is doing is trying to devise NEW methods to allow chips to work properly if they have errors. That is why he is getting the big grant money. For example in data transmission if you miss a bit it can be filled in with parity checking. I am of course guessing that it could be done this way. But the point is that it is not some conspiracy to trick you into buying crappy videocards. Firms know very well that the market will prevent that or they don't get to produce.

Yes you need to replace them sometime after 20+ years. In order to curb this waste people are working on organic solar panels to both bring down the cost of solar and reduce the environmental impact that the panels have when thrown away.

How many times have we read about a new display technology that's going to be better/faster/higher quality/cheaper/stronger/smarter/prettier/jumps higher/etc than LCDs and Plasma.

Yeah, but Plasma,LCD and OLED's were revolutionary in the way they produce the light in the displays. FED's only use the existing phosphore pixels technology that we have been using in our CRT's for decades.

The revolutionary (and therefore expensive) part of Field Emission Displays are the nanotube arrays replacing the bulky vacuum tubes. About freakin' time I'd say. I always had the idea that smaller vacuum tubes could be arranged in arrays to flatten the displays - i was stunned to find out that nanotech would do the trick. So actually, nanotube-based FED's are not a true revolution, but rather an evolution of the existing CRT model. They use revolutionary technology, but that's a minor detail.

A couple of months ago I found out in nanoapex that a new method of nanotubes mass-production was discovered. I don't doubt that other methods are discovered within the next 2 years, dropping production costs.

However, nanotubes have similar properties to graphene (single sheets of graphite), and maybe using simple graphite instead of nanotubes could do the trick (nobody has tried, tho, and I don't have gazillion dollars to do the research myself :P ).

Whatever the delay is, I expect nanotube FED's to replace all CRT's afterwards.

I've seen a lot of discussion here about hiring people with CS, Math, Theoretical Physics degrees, etc... If you are insistant on a 4-year degree, maybe an Applied Physics degree would be good, but if you are really looking for an "all around lab hacker" and none of you want to do it, maybe it's not a job for a scientist. If what you really want is someone who can get your lab equipment to talk to each other and automate some of your research, look for someone with maybe a two-year Technology degree and a process control type background. Try searching for keywords such as "Wonderware", "Lab View" or "Instrumentation". You may find just the person you are looking for in a 28 year-old Technician at a refinery who is tired of climbing a cracking tower at 2 AM on a winter morning to re-calibrate a temperature transmitter. This person also likely has over 5 years experience networking the types of equipment found in a typical lab. This would include several different serial standards (RS-232, RS-485) and protocols (Modbus, Data Highway+)and probably some scripts (I use perl myself) to get these things to talk nice to each other. A place to look for people like this would be the ISA web site.