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Sharp's Double-View LCD TV
HaloPhreak writes "Sharp has released that they will soon release products that will "allow viewers sitting to the right and left of a screen to watch different channels." This is a new breakthrough in LCD technology my the industry-leading LCD manufacturer. In the article by Reuters, more than just television use is anticipated for this new technology. According to the article, laptops, ATM's, PDA's, cellphones, and even billboards you see in malls could use this technology."
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj0 5cavallo
Oil: Caveat empty
By Alfred J. Cavallo
May/June 2005 pp. 16-18 (vol. 61, no. 03) © 2005 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Without any press conferences, grand announcements, or hyperbolic advertising campaigns, the Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the world's largest publicly owned petroleum companies, has quietly joined the ranks of those who are predicting an impending plateau in non-OPEC oil production. Their report, The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, forecasts a peak in just five years.
In the past, many who expressed such concerns were dismissed as eager catastrophists, peddling the latest Malthusian prophecy of the impending collapse of fossil-fueled civilization. Their reliance on private oil-reserve data that is unverifiable by other analysts, and their use of models that ignore political and economic factors, have led to frequent erroneous pronouncements. They were countered by the extreme optimists, who believed that we would never need to think about such problems and that the markets would take care of everything. Up to now, those who worried about limited petroleum supplies have been at best ignored, and at worst openly ridiculed.
Meanwhile, average consumers have taken their cue from the market, where rising prices have always been followed by falling prices, leading to the assumption that this pattern will continue forever. In truth, the market price of crude oil is completely decoupled from and independent of production costs, which average about $6 per barrel for non-OPEC producers and $1.50 per barrel for OPEC producers. This situation has nothing to do with a free market, and everything to do with what OPEC believes will be accepted or tolerated by the United States. The completely affordable market price--what consumers pay at the gasoline pump--provides magisterial profits to the owners of the resource and gives no warning of impending shortages.
All the more reason that the public should heed the silent alarm sounded by the ExxonMobil report, which is more credible than other predictions for several reasons. First and foremost is that the source is ExxonMobil. No oil company, much less one with so much managerial, scientific, and engineering talent, has ever discussed peak oil production before. Given the profound implications of this forecast, it must have been published only after a thorough review.
Second, the majority of non-OPEC producers such as the United States, Britain, Norway, and Mexico, who satisfy 60 percent of world oil demand, are already in a production plateau or decline. (All of ExxonMobil's crude oil production comes from non-OPEC fields.) Third, the production peak cited by the report is quite close at hand. If it were twenty-five years instead of five years in the future, one might be more skeptical, since new technologies or new discoveries could change the outlook during that longer period. But five years is too short a time frame for any new developments to have an impact on this result.
Also noteworthy is the manner in which the Outlook addresses so-called frontier resources, such as extra-heavy oil, "oil sands," and "oil shale." The report cites the existence of more than 4 trillion barrels of extra heavy oil and "oil sands"--producing potentially 800 billion barrels of oil, assuming a 20-25 percent extraction efficiency. The Outlook also cites an estimate of 3 trillion barrels of "oil shale." These numbers have figured prominently in advertisements that ExxonMobil and other petroleum companies have placed in newspapers and magazines, clearly in an attempt to reassure consumers (and perhaps stockholders) that there is no need to worry about resource constraints for many decades.
However, as with all advertisements, it's best to read the fine print. ExxonMobil's world oil production forecast shows no contribution from "oil shale" even by 2030. O
Fox News?
LOL!!!
This reminds me of something Rush Limbaugh did when he had his TV program in the late 80's, early 90's. One day Rush announced "I did not realize this, but there is a large audiance that can not understand me, people who we wish to turn to, to embrace. From now on, at the bottom 1/9th of the screen, the home viewer will be able to watch a translator, who will translate my show into ebonics". The bottom 1/9th of the screen, for the rest of that show had a black man, dressed like an African hunter, jumping up and down, turning in circles, and making a clicking noise with his mouth.
What Rush was really missing was the translator who would take the other 1/9th of the screen, and have a bottle of Lous III in a $1000 crystal glass, while he mumbles in a british accent "you will never be as rich as me, no matter how you smash the unions, you will never have old money. your corvette, i laugh at your corvette, you could not even afford an entry level ferarri, not that those are any better. *british laugh* dare i say, i believe the janitor is forcing you to pay him $5 an hour. you'll never be rich enough. never!!".
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."