If their data really support this, why won't they go on record and become famous? They could win at least $2,000,000 (from the Nobel committee and from James Randi).
I dunno. First I would take advantage of net-metering laws to eliminate my power bill and turn it into as much income as I could get away with. Then, I'd be sorely tempted (and likely give in) to start setting up what appear to be ordinary power plants and start selling electricity to the utilities at slightly lower rates than the conventional companies. Set up near locations with large data centers to make good bank. By selling at a bit below normal you don't raise many eyebrows until you clearly have a corner on the market or are getting close to one.
You then use the profits from this endeavor to start setting up power plants in California. You wouldn't even need to charge less than market rates here. Hell if you combined your secret tech with something like solar you could probably get government to pay for part of your costs. The big opportunity in CA is the fact that they don't have enough to meet demand. If you can supply enough to cover the gap between what is needed now and what is provided now, and you had costs that were half of everyone else's you'd make a fortune.
"California uses 265,000 Gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. Consumption is growing at a rate of two percent annually." -CA DoE
If you could supply just the annual growth difference with a 3 cents/KwH profit you would be looking at a profit of about 160 million/year. If you could supply 10% of CA's electricity needs you'd be raking in over three quarters of a billion dollars/year.
You'd get there by starting to buy out the smaller plants and "improve" their efficiency - by hooking your system in. If you really had a cheap/easy source for "free energy" as above you could easily get away with this process for quite some time. Of course, it would behoove you to start building plants in other demand-dominated markets By purchasing the small power plants, and by making large numbers of smaller areas not dependent on the big grid (while still feeding it with your larger "plants") you create a position of strength as the newer areas are connected to your "local grid" and thus less likely to ever leave. You also focus on the older plants. Here your "efficiency improvements" can be dramatic but seen as not that unusual for "upgrading" 30-40 yar old systems. As much as 40% of the CA energy system is that old. Seems reasonable that you could rather easily manage to acquire said 40%.
By taking over the older plants (many of which the existing companies might well be happy to let go) your company/you would be viewed as a very positive thing for the state because you'd be modernizing the grid while decreasing the planned rolling blackouts. Good press there.
Once you have achieved about a third of the CA energy market, and perhaps 10% of the national electricity market you put in plans and plants for expanding to fill 60% of CA and a third of the US. Then you start building desalination plants (the cost here is electricity and well if your electricty is blindingly cheap...) in California to solidify your position by diversifying your income sources by leveraging your NON-monopoly position as the person with the cheapest electricity. (Note: there is a bit of a trend to co-locate desalination and power generation). You also start making smaller home-level units. This sets you up for many new markets.
By getting your hands in these other pots prior to becoming anything close to a monopoly, you don't have to worry about "unfairly leveraging your monopoly".
From this position you also start bying the infrastructure you need to support your own equipment. You purchase the supply side of the key components of your system. This will insulate you from the mass buy that will occur when the public finds out what you have. By rolling in the profit from these you further reduce your costs.
Then you patent and announce. You've had sa
Re:I'm reminded of what Colnel Kurtz said
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iPods at War
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There is more than a mere grain of truth to it. The truth runs deeper. It runs to the core of problems with war today. It's too easy. Now, before any of you keyboard commandos fire off, I served. I served as advance recon - two man deep recon teams. I've seen it firsthand, and no your console/pc games don't count (yes I play them from time to time).
War is too easy. The extent to which come countries go to to avoid "collateral damage" is absurd. Worse, it is seen as a good thing. Israel's advance notification that they were going to target an area (dropping leaflets for crying out loud) is a prime example of absurdity. It reminds me of a classic Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon". In this episode the Enterprise visits a planet that is "at war" with another.
The war had "raged" for a long time. But there were no bombs, fighters, missiles, military. it was all virtual. Except for the death. They reasoned that rather than find an end to the war, they would eliminate all but the actual killing. So a pair of computers fought their war WOPR-style and people in affected areas would be rounded up and vaporized. Meanwhile trhe "culture" and "civilization" would continue. It was the ultimate civilized war. In the end, of course, Kirk and crew destroy the system and essentially force them to either carry out a real war or call it quits. Incidentally this episode was specifically related to Vietnam.
While the "humanity" and prior soldier in me would like to see the individual soldier suffer less in war, it is the case that the less the soldiers and affected parties suffer, the more palatable war becomes. The more palatable it becomes, the more prevalent it becomes.
No he said it was a strong piece. He is right. For appropriate context:
In the beginning was the Plan. Then came the Assumptions.
But the Assumptions were without form, And the plan was completely without substance.
And the darkness was upon the faces of the workers. So they spoke unto their group heads, saying: "It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh!"
And the group heads went unto their section heads, and sayeth: "It is a pail of dung, such that none can stand it!"
And the section heads went unto their managers, and sayeth unto them: "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none here may abide the odour therof."
And the managers went unto their Director, and sayeth unto him: "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."
And the Director went unto the Director-General, and sayeth unto him: "It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
And the Director-General went unto the Assistant Deputy Minister, and sayeth unto him: "It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Assistant Deputy Minister went unto the Deputy Minister, and sayeth unto him: "This powerful new plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of the department, and this area in particular!"
And the Deputy Minister looked upon the plan, And saw that the plan was good.
And the plan became policy..
Thus is truly is a "strong piece of infrastructure"!
Even if Vista is far more secure and much harder to hack, if it has the largest install base it will have the most vunerabilities.
No, no no no no! This is not true. There is absolutely no correlation between usage volume and the presence of vulnerabilities. None whatsoever. It is nonsensical to even imply that there would be. Code is written, compiled, and then run. No matter how many people run the individual binaries, the number of vulnerabilities in said code will not change.
There may be more profit and thus motivation to find them, but that has no impact on their existence.
However, I question that MS has more known vulnerabilities because "more people are trying". The counter is that old "given enough eyes all bugs are shallow" maxim. MS products may hav emore peolpe working against their binary distributions, but (popular) open source products have more people viewing the source of the bugs.
Lest I stray from my point, I'll reiterate and finish: The number of users of individual programs has zero bearing on the number of defects and/or vulnerabilities in the code. If you think about it, saying that "more people use it" is why MS has more vulnerabilities/defects is essentially blaming the user for coder mistakes. Again, this is nonsense.
Modern digital sensors can often see the stars even in the daytime, even though most developments of the file would not show them. But if you map the blue tones at the top of the data curve across a much wider space, suddenly there they are -- in a deep blue, detailed sky -- even though you shot on a clear summer's day. The point is that those stars aren't fake, or exaggerated in any absolute sense. They're THERE and the sensor saw them. The only question is how that data is mapped to human visual space. I as the photographer have to choose.
But did you add MORE stars that were NOT there? That's the issue here as I see it. Does your California Beach sky now look like the heart of the Mily Way? Is the point of the picture to show stars in the sky?
Adjusting color tones is one thing, even contrast et al.. But adding smoke that was not there to existing smoke that is qualifies as non-technical enhancements. If you take a picture of a celebrity and "improve it's color" or it's contrast perhaps to highlight an existing feature, that is fine. But if you chop in a slogan on their clothing, or a tattoo on their face, or digitally remove clothing to make them appear nude, you are lying. If you do it as an "art piece" it can be passed off. If you do it as "news", you'd be a liar, a fraud, and worthy of high disdain.
You as photographer do NOT get to add things that were not in the picture. You do not get to "paint" the duckies with oil that didn't exist, you don't get to rig the truck to explode, you don't get to add smoke, you don't get to chop in people who were not there, you don't get to write slogans on people's shirts, you don't get to change red smoke to green, you don't get to put heads on the wrong bodies - and pass it off as reporting. Artists do photojournalists do not.
And that is what the issue/concern is. Not what shade of blue the sky is or how bright the fluffy clouds are.
I agree. The oil companies and right-wing have poured millions for many years into discrediting global warming and environmentalists in general. This has been profusely documented.
Yeah because Gore and his family have never been tied with big oil.
The history of the Gore family and Occidental Petroleum have been intertwined for generations. Al Gore Sr. was such a loyal political ally that Occidental's founder and longtime CEO, Armand Hammer, liked to say that he had Gore "in my back pocket." When Gore Sr. left the Senate in 1970, Hammer gave him a half a million dollar a year job at an Occidental subsidiary and a seat on the company's board of directors. Money from Occidental and its subsidiaries formed the basis of the Gore family fortune.
But it is not only the land of Indigenous Colombians that Occidental is drilling against the wishes of the residents and indigenous inhabitants. In late 1997, Al Gore supported the federal government's three and a half billion dollar sale of the Elk Hills oil field in Bakersfield, California, to Occidental Petroleum. This was the largest privatization of federal property in US history. Occidental's plans to drill for oil in Elk Hills will disturb traditional burial sites for the Yokuts indigenous peoples of southern California. At stake are at least 100 ancient sites in the Buena Vista Lake region where Yokuts peoples once lived.
Yeah, it's OK to drill on ancient burial sites, but not a remote arctic wilderness. The difference? it wasn't Occidental wanting to drill in ANWR.
Face it: all the power-mongers are tied to each other.
And let us be perfecty honest here. Most global warming advocates do need "discredited" as they are flat out wrong. For example when they claim there is "universal consensus" and that "all scientists" agree. Or they claim there is nothing we can do to stop it, that it started a hundred years ago, and so on. Extremists on both sides need to be kept in check.
And most of the vocal environmentalsists are really concerned about doing things for the environment, they are about changing how YOU behave. They don't go for changes that are not invasive but yield high results. Where is Al Gore when efforts to increase tractor trailer weight limits are underway? These changes would increase net efficiency as well as safety on the road. But it is a cheap change. It is a conservation change that doesn't make you the consumer "stop and think" about what good people they are for making you do this. Nevermind that it would be the equivalent of going from 5 MPG to 12.5 MPG. Yeah a ~40-60% drop in trucking industry isn't worth making political hay over since it doesn't make people give anything up.
And therin lies one of the big problems with government politics. If it isn't controversial, it doesn't get press. If it doesn't get press, the politicians are much less interested in it. All of them.
to select all the posts about Verisign doing this, doing a quick replace from Verisign to Cameroon, and placing them in this thread (or the inevitable dupe story) would save us all a lot of time on this one.
I'm at my work right now, where I am employed as an energy analyst. It is the opinion of every single person in the industry that there is no real possibility of replacing gasoline with ethanol. It would take the entire corn harvest of the United States to make that much ethanol, not even counting how much ethanol you would have to burn to harvest the corn. We will continue to burn gasoline until it becomes so expensive that people use alternate transportation, or until we all die in some horrible war. The whole ethanol thing is just another wall street fad that's brought in a bunch of suckers.
Because you are seriously incorrect here. For example BP Oil is investing in ethanol research, and has acknowledged it's potential to supplant gasoline. Shell is actually the largest ethanol purchaser of ethanol and marketer of ethanol blended fuels. Shell is also investing in cellusic ethanol technology (they have also partnered with IOGen) Thus your first statement is totally without merit.
There are several facts about Ethanol you are either ignorant of or avoiding to make your biased point.
1. An ethanol driven infrastructure is more efficient.
Flex-fuel E85 vehicles today only get slightly betyter to a little less mileage on E85 than gasoline due to the need to run low compression for gasoline. An engine only running E85 can be run at approximately 19 to 1 compression ratio. This means better economy. By way of example, diesel only has about 12-15% more energy by content but generally acheives 25%+ better fuel economy. The source of the increase is the higher compression. While E85 has less energy, you get more energy out of it. What good is having more energy than you can extract? There is no good there. I'd rather have a system that extracted 40% of 80 than 20% of 100.
Also, higher compression (and even "low compression") E85 engines are more efficient under load. This means you can run a smaller engine in place of a larger one without the performance and economy losses of the larger engine. A four cylinder E85 engine can generally substitute for a G100 (gasoline) six cylinder engine. This, too decreases overall fuel consumption. Indeed, E85 is a more efficient fuel under a broader engine speed range than a gasoline engine is.
Reductions in fuel consumption for an E85 driven infrastructure are on the order of 35-50% better than gasoline. Better fuel economy means you need less. Thus your "calulations" (and I do use the term lightly here) are based on woefully inaccurate assumptions. If tomorrow the entire US car/truck fleet and infrastructure were magically converted to E85, we'd see a reduction in US transportation oil demand of about 70%. The fuel demand for ethanol would be about 35-50% less than the current demand for gasoline.
Additionally, ethanol is a distributed system. By colocating ethanol plants with other industries[1] the production of transportation fuel is spread out and localized. This increases security by redundancy as well as reduces the need to transport as much fuel as far. This reduces pressure on the trucking/transport industry.
Yield increases. Even short of "full blown" cellulosic ethanol plants (see below), the addition of current cellulosic technology is underway. DuPont, for example, is working to add corn stover processing to existing plants. This would use the stalks and leaves that currently the farmers don't have a use for. This one change doubles the ethanol output of a field of corn. This one technology would allow all existing US corn fields to collect their current "wastes" and convert them to ethanol. No additional fertilizers, no additional fields. The only additional energy use would be transporting the wastes to the processing plant. Larger farms installations would do this locally keeping transportation costs and pressure low.
Indeed if we were to accept your claims above, that it would take 100% of todays corn fields, this one change would supply over 50% of our need. Using yo
Why ? Think about it from the management's point of view. The choices they face are:
1. Listen to the your tech department and make a decision based on their (hopefully realistic) estimate. The company continues steadily onward and you get fired since you didn't manage to improve it, and therefore the stock doesn't rise enough to meet the stockholder's demands.
2. Listen to claims you know full well are sweet lies and make estimates based on them. The company gets a hopelessly overoptimistic estimate on its future fortunes, the stock price goes up, and you get a fat bonus. When the lie is found out, you can claim that you were lied to and can't be blamed for anything.
Which one should a sane manager choose ? Getting fired or getting a bonus ?
I think the real question is "Which one would an ethical manager choose?
When Congress quits titleing bills in a way intended to make you think it is a good thing, or intended to make you think the title has something to do with the reality of the proposed legislation (you know, things like USAPATRIOT Act, Child Protection and Safety Act , et al.) maybe they'll get some modicum of credibility on the subject.
While this diversity is probably wise in the long run, it also represents a huge investment of time and effort into each source. And as the fossil fuels run out and energy becomes more expensive, the research becomes more difficult and our options more constrained. There is a risk, I think, of spreading ourselves too thin and not having a viable replacement for petroleum when its time is up.
You'd prefer to put all of our eggs in one basket? No thanks. What you propose would be like a football team "self-downing" for their first three downs and relying on the "hail mary pass" to get them a touchdown on the fourth.
More specifically, smaller implementations have much greater impact over time. Particularly if standardized. Say for example that solar-thermal was used to reduce grid energy usage (electric, coal, heating oil, natural gas) in homes. Say it reduced grid energy use for that home by 10% for that resource. Say this was standardized for all new homes in that region (market, regulation, etc.) You've now not only reduced current demand by retrofit, you have also slowed the advance. The slowing the advance is the more important aspect. A decreased grid demand reduces energy spent on the grid itself.
Slowing the advance provides more time for the hail mary options to acheive maturity. There is only so much money/time/energy that can effectively be used to advance fusion research. The most critical factors, human intelligence, insight, and plain old serendipity and "AHA!", can not be improved by throwing money at a single solution as opposed to multiple solutions. Indeed, it is quite often the case that research in one area will produce insight for another. Losing this would be folly.
Ultimately, a diverse "ecosystem" of energy is much more robust and effective than investing heavily in a single technology, be it solar, fusion, or anything else. After all, what good is a massive fusion research facility if it loses power every third day due to rolling blackouts caused by too much current demand while waiting on the hail mary pass? You will have lost 1/3 of your available time.
Until a real 'free energy" system is created, the solution to our energy concerns will require a three pronged assault. 1) Slow down the rise in demand 2) provide more short term energy sources, and 3) research long term "hail mary" solutions. Item #1 can be accomplished by a combination of conservation and improved local efficiency. Item #2 supports #1 and when combined with it provides more opportunity for #3 to succeed. Particularly when it (it being fusion) has always been 20-50 years away. Apparently it needs a lot of 20-50 year increments.;)
Finally, your argument that "alternative sources" are hard is not entirely accurate. It is only accurate if you mean to do a wholesale replacement, particularly over a short period of time. We view our current system as easy because it's already been done. Incremental changes are generally easy. If a collective investment of 5,000 USD in a single year applied to 100,000 homes results in a 25% reduction in grid energy from that day forward, that area is now the benficiary of an incremental change.
That incremental change carried forward is a massive reduction of energy demand, and if successful will likely cause all future homes in that area to be built that way from the beginning. I have several routes in mind for this one, proven routes. This is retrofit. New construction has lower costs. One could argue that spending that money on yet more fusion research that might pay off some thirty years in the future is the waste. Particularly if an energy crisis looms in the next decade or two. If the payback period on the investment was 5 years, you would have a net decrease on future energy spending. This frees up funding and energy for additional research.
As far as spreading ourselves thin, there are some 5 billion people on this planet. If one hundredth of one percent have the ability and p
Now lets be generous and let our panel "superheat" the stuff up to 80C or so, and put the cold reservoir in a bucket of ice.
That gives us a heat source at 353.15K and a sink at 273.15.
Efficiency = 1.0 - cold/hot = 1.0 - (273.15/353.15) = 0.226, or about 23% efficient.
Not great.
Well gee whiz wally anyone can just make up numbers to plug into the formula and "make a point". But how about we use numbers actually commonly acheived, rather than some feel good alleged "generosity"?
80C is not a difficult target for flat-plate collectors, so there is no generosity in assuming it. It's actually a "bottom end" figure. Concentrators such as dishes and troughs routinely achieve 200C+, with some reaching 3+ times as high.
So assuming you had the capacity for cooling to handle the concentrator produced 150C steam heat, with a cold temp of slightly above freezing (we added water and salt to the bucket of ice) we would be in the mid-thirties range for carnot efficiency. If you used geobanking (subsurface thermal transfer using the earth at depth) for a 52 degree cold temp, you would have about a 32.8% carnot efficiency. Much better. Naturally, increasing the temperature up to say 250C brings the carnot efficiency to about 46%. Still not too shabby.
But why talk about the solar heating aspect? Because you want to talk efficiency of the cycle. That said, I have a stong suspicion that the Carnot efficiency here is a bit of a canard. After all it is only one peice of a much larger pie. The key issue for these folks appears to be about making low temperature economically viable by doing it for much cheaper. If "traditional" solar thermal systems have a payback period of 5-10 years (they do - the payback on mine w/o incentives is just under 5 years on the NG reductions alone), and the low temp route could offer a graduated implementation with shorter paybacks it could lead to more adoption.
If it only takes (hypothetically) say 1000 dollars to get in the door with a payback time of two years, you can scale up every two years. Bringing the initial cost down will open it to a larger market. If the carnot efficiency is low but is good enough to meet the needs (using "renewables" such as sunlight) and lower carbon emissions and grid load, reducing rolling blackouts, etc. then the carnot efficiency isn't all that important. This is particularly true if the process supplants even less efficient methods. Local generation reduces infrastructure costs and losses, and these must be taken into consideration of efficiency as well.
If your central system is 80% efficient but it and the distribution infrastructure can not deliver to the whole user base at the same time, it's not that great either. If there is no distribution system, the cost and embedded energy costs of building the infrastructure may well overwhelm any effeciency gains over local generation.
n a steam/turban plant the energy to move the turban doesn't _really_ come from boiling the water, it comes from super-heating the steam. You have to move the steam through the turban energetically enough to move the machinery (which cools the steam as the pressure is relieved (etc).
Errr.. I don't normally correct or point out typos or incorrect words on/. but there is a huge difference between a "turban" and a "turbine". The latter is the correct word here. A steam turban won't really produce much electricity. That said, applying super-heated steam to a turban in use will definitely cause an energetic movement of the accompanying machinery.
what about solar cell technology to power these laptops? Was this even considered?
Doubtful. Solar is not cheap. Last I recall PV is still around 3.5-4 USD per watt. At a 20 watt target that'd cost you about 70-80 bucks. Not a good cost for a 100 USD laptop. This device is supposed to cost ~10 USD. From solar you'd only be getting 2-3 watts or so for that price.
As impractical as it might be, I, being a software developer think the best way to go about removing this crap isn't on the receiving end. It won't be fixed by filters. It won't be fixed by blockers. The way to fix it is through putting some sort of tax, fee, whatever you might have it, on email getting sent.
Before you flip out and throw the "OMGOOSES MY FREEDOM" argument around, answer me this:
If you were being sent text messages to your cellphone, and being charged ten cents per text message, how long would you tolerate that?
The reason nothing is being done to combat this is due to the fact that when people spend hours cleaning off spam, they aren't even thinkinga bout the "Time = Money" equation. If they were, I think they'd be pretty hot about getting the senders punished.
Well I as a software engineer think the worst way to go about it is to rely on impractical statism (your proposal). First, even by your own admission, it won't work since it is "impractical".
So you would have us create a new bureaucracy to ostensibly collect money from people who are sending email. And since it is entriely unenforcable or practical, it won't stop the problem you claim to be working against. Nevermind "freedom", this is just dumb and wasteful. At worst, this becomes a tax on people who follow the rules. Spammers do not, and will not, follow these rules and so who will be paying this fee? I'd rather have the spam thank you.
There is a software/process means that prevent spam from reaching your inbox. I have a publically available email address that gets zero spam. For this account I use a Key system (PKI) and anything that is not signed with an approved key is not accepted. Yes this means there has to be some communication before you can send me email to that addess. But in practice this has not been an issue. If someone snags an approved key and sends me spam, I remove that key from the valid key list and the problem goes away. End result is I don't get spam.
Mailing lists get a per-list address that passes through a few filters akin to greylisting.
This is similar to having a private telephone number, only better. No, it may not be a solution for everyone. But it works for me and for others. It is thus proof of a solution that is primarily software based, and does work.
In regards to your cell phone/text message there is a crucial difference. If you are charged on outgoing it's one thing. But to charge the recipient is asinine. If I had a carrier that did that, and could not opt out of text messages, I'd not drop the carrier. You proposal seems to the equivalent to the asinine method - make recipient pay. Making the recipient pay will not solve anything.
Sender pays is impractical as it would require a reimplementation of the infrastructure and create a tiered network where those not on the government's "approved senders" list get low priority if at all. And that is one slippery cliff. Nonetheless, that tiered network will require software to solve the problem.
Why should the threat of consumption from snakes (snakes! of all things!) have driven us to evolve incredibly good eyesight? Why not hearing? Why not some more obvious and simple snake defense mechanism (like, immunity from snake poison?) At no time in our evolutionary history did snakes actually represent a dominant predatory force (To deal with this, some "experts" claim generalization from dinosaur tails. Right). Just because it has the word "evolution" in it doesn't mean it's right.
Regarding your idea of evolution, I'll paraphrase you: "The idea the evolution was a conscious process, and almost every instantiation of this idea, is total crap, and should be treated this way."
You, like millions of others, make a mistake in thinking evolution is a conscious process. With genetic manipulation it may become that way in humans, but otherwise it is not. It isn't like the proto-humans/early humans sat around and said "You know these snakes are a deadly threat. We shall form a comittee and decide on how best to evolve to defeat them.". If that had happened we would have snake venom immunity.[1]
IF snakes were a deadly threat, than whatever provided an advantage in escaping the threat would have sufficed. If better vision provided "good enough" advantage for the being with those genes to pass on their DNA then that would happen (with regard to that threat). It could well be that several advantages produced a set of genes that provided multiple avenues of threat avoidance. Particularly if these advantages were useful for more than snakes.
Evolution is explanatory, not proactive. Yet. Sadly, scientists working in the field often use stupid and ridiculous statemets such as "in response to" when they should be saying "as a result of...". The headline for the article here on/. also reflects this lack of understanding.
If conceived of today evolution would be termed an "emergent phenomenon". The primary principle of evolution is "good enough". If it works, it works - that is all that is required. There is no planning, no intentional process.
Regarding snakes being a threat... you who live your your comfy controlled environment may not regard snakes as a threat. However, thos eof us who have had to live and work in open areas with posionous snakes know otherwise. Snakes are particularly deadly to smaller bodies such as children. Whether it be poisonous snakes or constrictors, if snakes are taking out younglings that lack the ability to get away (lack of perception, speed, recognition, whatever) then they certainly would be a factor in the evolution of creatures they consume.
1) Venom immunity would not have sufficed. What good is immunity to venom if the wounds get infected and you die from infection? A Committe would have produced venom immunity and then we'd have died out from secondary snake bite infections. A clear example of the phrase "to each and every problem there is solution that is simple and obvious. Said answer is also wrong."
Hearing would have been a likewise poor choice given the sensitivity and limited range of perception it would have produced. Early humans occupied multiple niches and thus were open to many predators of a wide range of "features".
Much safer to use something like 15 gallons of liquid petrolium distillate that is highly inflammable at room temperature.
Actually yes it is. Ever been involved with a large lithium fire? I'll take a gasoline sourced fire over that any day.
Lithium fires are nasty 1. They don't actually need an external ignition source such as spark or flame 2. Lithium fires can melt metal 3. Lithium fires put of very noxious fumes requiring self contained breathing apparatus to fight it. Sucks to be nearby.
In a shipment of closely packed lithium batteries, should one battery catch fire, a chain reaction results. The fire spreads from battery to battery in an explosive conflagration of molten lithium, according to the Technical Center report. The examination of lithium battery fires was undertaken after a pallet of such batteries caught fire on the ground at Los Angeles International Airport in April 1999. The pallet was inadvertently dropped onto the tarmac, and a battery fire resulted, despite there being no external ignition source.
Lithium fires are very hot and difficult to extinguish unless they are caught early. Lith-X is recommended for lithium fires. It acts by smothering the lithium. Because much heat is retained under the Lith-X, re-ignition can easily occur if the Lith-X blanket is disturbed before ambient temperatures are again reached. Dense white clouds of caustic and choking lithium oxide are formed when lithium burns. A self-contained breathing apparatus must, therefore, be worn when fighting lithium fires. If a lithium fire reaches large proportions, nothing can be done but to let it burn. In a sealed room such as a dry room, remember that the supply of oxygen is quickly consumed in feeding a lithium fire....
Using a steel test chamber to simulate an aircraft cargo hold, the FAA tests show that a runaway fire involving a shipment of lithium batteries might well result in loss of the aircraft. The batteries involved were those used commonly in consumer electronic products (e.g., video cameras). Advertisement
Batteries were tested singly, and in groups of 32, 64 and 128. Tests also involved groups of batteries packed in rows inside cardboard boxes.
For test purposes, the battery fires were started by igniting a "fire pan" filled with alcohol. The findings were fearful. To summarize:
* A relatively small fire source was sufficient to start a lithium battery fire.
* The heat from a single battery afire was sufficient to ignite adjacent batteries.
* The outer plastic coating on the batteries easily melted, fusing the batteries together, adding to the intensity of the fire.
* The chain reaction ignition continued until all batteries were consumed.
* The molten lithium burned explosively, spraying white-hot lithium to a radius of several feet as the batteries bounced around.
* The duration of the peak temperature increased with the number of batteries, reaching as high as 1,400[degrees] F (as a matter of interest, the melting temperature of aluminum is around 1,200[degrees] F).
* The cardboard packing proved highly flammable. The packing delayed battery ignition by about 30-60 seconds, but once ignited, the fire among the close-packed batteries was worse.
* While thick-wall cargo liners were able to contain the fire (barely), thin-walled fire liners proved ineffective. The battery fire ignited the resin in the liner, and the liner was completely penetrated by molten lithium.
* Halon fire-suppressing agent, injected in sufficient concentration to "knock down" a fire, proved totally ineffective, even when injected after just the first battery had caught fire. Nor did it have any effect on the peak temperature. The fire continued as if Halon were not present.
I agree with you. However in 200 years when synthetic pure white diamond is used commercially in very large crystals, when corundums(i.e. saphires) are used for windows, our great grandchildren will wonder about us wearing what is to them just glass. I wonder what jewelry will be like when our physical scarcity matches our current digital scarcity. How will we adapt to such abundance?
Simple. By creating new and rare objects of jewelry. They may be difficult to create multi-color gems, gems with embeddded holograms, gems with holograms that are different for each facet, flexible gems you can use as clothes, etc..
Slashdot Mirror
Why is he described as outspoken when his opinion is in the majority?
Because outspoken != majority. You can be outspoken on your views regardless of the acceptance level of them.
If their data really support this, why won't they go on record and become famous? They could win at least $2,000,000 (from the Nobel committee and from James Randi).
I dunno. First I would take advantage of net-metering laws to eliminate my power bill and turn it into as much income as I could get away with. Then, I'd be sorely tempted (and likely give in) to start setting up what appear to be ordinary power plants and start selling electricity to the utilities at slightly lower rates than the conventional companies. Set up near locations with large data centers to make good bank. By selling at a bit below normal you don't raise many eyebrows until you clearly have a corner on the market or are getting close to one.
You then use the profits from this endeavor to start setting up power plants in California. You wouldn't even need to charge less than market rates here. Hell if you combined your secret tech with something like solar you could probably get government to pay for part of your costs. The big opportunity in CA is the fact that they don't have enough to meet demand. If you can supply enough to cover the gap between what is needed now and what is provided now, and you had costs that were half of everyone else's you'd make a fortune.
"California uses 265,000 Gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. Consumption is growing at a rate of two percent annually." -CA DoE
If you could supply just the annual growth difference with a 3 cents/KwH profit you would be looking at a profit of about 160 million/year. If you could supply 10% of CA's electricity needs you'd be raking in over three quarters of a billion dollars/year.
You'd get there by starting to buy out the smaller plants and "improve" their efficiency - by hooking your system in. If you really had a cheap/easy source for "free energy" as above you could easily get away with this process for quite some time. Of course, it would behoove you to start building plants in other demand-dominated markets By purchasing the small power plants, and by making large numbers of smaller areas not dependent on the big grid (while still feeding it with your larger "plants") you create a position of strength as the newer areas are connected to your "local grid" and thus less likely to ever leave. You also focus on the older plants. Here your "efficiency improvements" can be dramatic but seen as not that unusual for "upgrading" 30-40 yar old systems. As much as 40% of the CA energy system is that old. Seems reasonable that you could rather easily manage to acquire said 40%.
By taking over the older plants (many of which the existing companies might well be happy to let go) your company/you would be viewed as a very positive thing for the state because you'd be modernizing the grid while decreasing the planned rolling blackouts. Good press there.
Once you have achieved about a third of the CA energy market, and perhaps 10% of the national electricity market you put in plans and plants for expanding to fill 60% of CA and a third of the US. Then you start building desalination plants (the cost here is electricity and well if your electricty is blindingly cheap...) in California to solidify your position by diversifying your income sources by leveraging your NON-monopoly position as the person with the cheapest electricity. (Note: there is a bit of a trend to co-locate desalination and power generation). You also start making smaller home-level units. This sets you up for many new markets.
By getting your hands in these other pots prior to becoming anything close to a monopoly, you don't have to worry about "unfairly leveraging your monopoly".
From this position you also start bying the infrastructure you need to support your own equipment. You purchase the supply side of the key components of your system. This will insulate you from the mass buy that will occur when the public finds out what you have. By rolling in the profit from these you further reduce your costs.
Then you patent and announce. You've had sa
There is more than a mere grain of truth to it. The truth runs deeper. It runs to the core of problems with war today. It's too easy. Now, before any of you keyboard commandos fire off, I served. I served as advance recon - two man deep recon teams. I've seen it firsthand, and no your console/pc games don't count (yes I play them from time to time).
War is too easy. The extent to which come countries go to to avoid "collateral damage" is absurd. Worse, it is seen as a good thing. Israel's advance notification that they were going to target an area (dropping leaflets for crying out loud) is a prime example of absurdity. It reminds me of a classic Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon". In this episode the Enterprise visits a planet that is "at war" with another.
The war had "raged" for a long time. But there were no bombs, fighters, missiles, military. it was all virtual. Except for the death. They reasoned that rather than find an end to the war, they would eliminate all but the actual killing. So a pair of computers fought their war WOPR-style and people in affected areas would be rounded up and vaporized. Meanwhile trhe "culture" and "civilization" would continue. It was the ultimate civilized war. In the end, of course, Kirk and crew destroy the system and essentially force them to either carry out a real war or call it quits. Incidentally this episode was specifically related to Vietnam.
While the "humanity" and prior soldier in me would like to see the individual soldier suffer less in war, it is the case that the less the soldiers and affected parties suffer, the more palatable war becomes. The more palatable it becomes, the more prevalent it becomes.
From TFA:
Tiger Direct lists the 770 at 379. I'd say that 350 is not significantly less than 379, particularly given the clear advantages of the 770.
Thus is truly is a "strong piece of infrastructure"!
If this were a political website, the equivalent to what you just did would be a Democrat posting a story saying "Dubya eats babies!"
Actually, since this is a technical site (and I am not a Democrat) I claim he might by applying a well-known assertion from "the right wing".
Assertion 1:
Fetuses are babies that have not been born[1]
Assertion 2:
George Bush eats (chicken) eggs
Conclusion:
George Bush eats (not-born) babies.
Back in the mainstream he likely still does "eat babies" if he eats veal.
1: "not born" is the right term. One can not be "unborn" as that requires being born first. Just as you have to do before you can undo.
Even if Vista is far more secure and much harder to hack, if it has the largest install base it will have the most vunerabilities.
No, no no no no! This is not true. There is absolutely no correlation between usage volume and the presence of vulnerabilities. None whatsoever. It is nonsensical to even imply that there would be. Code is written, compiled, and then run. No matter how many people run the individual binaries, the number of vulnerabilities in said code will not change.
There may be more profit and thus motivation to find them, but that has no impact on their existence.
However, I question that MS has more known vulnerabilities because "more people are trying". The counter is that old "given enough eyes all bugs are shallow" maxim. MS products may hav emore peolpe working against their binary distributions, but (popular) open source products have more people viewing the source of the bugs.
Lest I stray from my point, I'll reiterate and finish:
The number of users of individual programs has zero bearing on the number of defects and/or vulnerabilities in the code. If you think about it, saying that "more people use it" is why MS has more vulnerabilities/defects is essentially blaming the user for coder mistakes. Again, this is nonsense.
But did you add MORE stars that were NOT there? That's the issue here as I see it. Does your California Beach sky now look like the heart of the Mily Way? Is the point of the picture to show stars in the sky?
Adjusting color tones is one thing, even contrast et al.. But adding smoke that was not there to existing smoke that is qualifies as non-technical enhancements. If you take a picture of a celebrity and "improve it's color" or it's contrast perhaps to highlight an existing feature, that is fine. But if you chop in a slogan on their clothing, or a tattoo on their face, or digitally remove clothing to make them appear nude, you are lying. If you do it as an "art piece" it can be passed off. If you do it as "news", you'd be a liar, a fraud, and worthy of high disdain.
You as photographer do NOT get to add things that were not in the picture. You do not get to "paint" the duckies with oil that didn't exist, you don't get to rig the truck to explode, you don't get to add smoke, you don't get to chop in people who were not there, you don't get to write slogans on people's shirts, you don't get to change red smoke to green, you don't get to put heads on the wrong bodies - and pass it off as reporting. Artists do photojournalists do not.
And that is what the issue/concern is. Not what shade of blue the sky is or how bright the fluffy clouds are.
Yeah because Gore and his family have never been tied with big oil.
Yeah, it's OK to drill on ancient burial sites, but not a remote arctic wilderness. The difference? it wasn't Occidental wanting to drill in ANWR.
Face it: all the power-mongers are tied to each other.
And let us be perfecty honest here. Most global warming advocates do need "discredited" as they are flat out wrong. For example when they claim there is "universal consensus" and that "all scientists" agree. Or they claim there is nothing we can do to stop it, that it started a hundred years ago, and so on. Extremists on both sides need to be kept in check.
And most of the vocal environmentalsists are really concerned about doing things for the environment, they are about changing how YOU behave. They don't go for changes that are not invasive but yield high results. Where is Al Gore when efforts to increase tractor trailer weight limits are underway? These changes would increase net efficiency as well as safety on the road. But it is a cheap change. It is a conservation change that doesn't make you the consumer "stop and think" about what good people they are for making you do this. Nevermind that it would be the equivalent of going from 5 MPG to 12.5 MPG. Yeah a ~40-60% drop in trucking industry isn't worth making political hay over since it doesn't make people give anything up.
And therin lies one of the big problems with government politics. If it isn't controversial, it doesn't get press. If it doesn't get press, the politicians are much less interested in it. All of them.
to select all the posts about Verisign doing this, doing a quick replace from Verisign to Cameroon, and placing them in this thread (or the inevitable dupe story) would save us all a lot of time on this one.
Maybe they will. We already have pre/post-Watergate.
Because you are seriously incorrect here. For example BP Oil is investing in ethanol research, and has acknowledged it's potential to supplant gasoline. Shell is actually the largest ethanol purchaser of ethanol and marketer of ethanol blended fuels. Shell is also investing in cellusic ethanol technology (they have also partnered with IOGen) Thus your first statement is totally without merit.
There are several facts about Ethanol you are either ignorant of or avoiding to make your biased point.
1. An ethanol driven infrastructure is more efficient.
Flex-fuel E85 vehicles today only get slightly betyter to a little less mileage on E85 than gasoline due to the need to run low compression for gasoline. An engine only running E85 can be run at approximately 19 to 1 compression ratio. This means better economy. By way of example, diesel only has about 12-15% more energy by content but generally acheives 25%+ better fuel economy. The source of the increase is the higher compression. While E85 has less energy, you get more energy out of it. What good is having more energy than you can extract? There is no good there. I'd rather have a system that extracted 40% of 80 than 20% of 100.
Also, higher compression (and even "low compression") E85 engines are more efficient under load. This means you can run a smaller engine in place of a larger one without the performance and economy losses of the larger engine. A four cylinder E85 engine can generally substitute for a G100 (gasoline) six cylinder engine. This, too decreases overall fuel consumption. Indeed, E85 is a more efficient fuel under a broader engine speed range than a gasoline engine is.
Reductions in fuel consumption for an E85 driven infrastructure are on the order of 35-50% better than gasoline. Better fuel economy means you need less. Thus your "calulations" (and I do use the term lightly here) are based on woefully inaccurate assumptions. If tomorrow the entire US car/truck fleet and infrastructure were magically converted to E85, we'd see a reduction in US transportation oil demand of about 70%. The fuel demand for ethanol would be about 35-50% less than the current demand for gasoline.
Additionally, ethanol is a distributed system. By colocating ethanol plants with other industries[1] the production of transportation fuel is spread out and localized. This increases security by redundancy as well as reduces the need to transport as much fuel as far. This reduces pressure on the trucking/transport industry.
Yield increases. Even short of "full blown" cellulosic ethanol plants (see below), the addition of current cellulosic technology is underway. DuPont, for example, is working to add corn stover processing to existing plants. This would use the stalks and leaves that currently the farmers don't have a use for. This one change doubles the ethanol output of a field of corn. This one technology would allow all existing US corn fields to collect their current "wastes" and convert them to ethanol. No additional fertilizers, no additional fields. The only additional energy use would be transporting the wastes to the processing plant. Larger farms installations would do this locally keeping transportation costs and pressure low.
Indeed if we were to accept your claims above, that it would take 100% of todays corn fields, this one change would supply over 50% of our need. Using yo
I think the real question is "Which one would an ethical manager choose?
When Congress quits titleing bills in a way intended to make you think it is a good thing, or intended to make you think the title has something to do with the reality of the proposed legislation (you know, things like USAPATRIOT Act, Child Protection and Safety Act , et al.) maybe they'll get some modicum of credibility on the subject.
Until then, hands off.
Once money becomes the driving goal above all else quality and innovation suffers.
You've just described one of the problems government as well. There, money is the driving goal as well.
You'd prefer to put all of our eggs in one basket? No thanks. What you propose would be like a football team "self-downing" for their first three downs and relying on the "hail mary pass" to get them a touchdown on the fourth.
;)
More specifically, smaller implementations have much greater impact over time. Particularly if standardized. Say for example that solar-thermal was used to reduce grid energy usage (electric, coal, heating oil, natural gas) in homes. Say it reduced grid energy use for that home by 10% for that resource. Say this was standardized for all new homes in that region (market, regulation, etc.) You've now not only reduced current demand by retrofit, you have also slowed the advance. The slowing the advance is the more important aspect. A decreased grid demand reduces energy spent on the grid itself.
Slowing the advance provides more time for the hail mary options to acheive maturity. There is only so much money/time/energy that can effectively be used to advance fusion research. The most critical factors, human intelligence, insight, and plain old serendipity and "AHA!", can not be improved by throwing money at a single solution as opposed to multiple solutions. Indeed, it is quite often the case that research in one area will produce insight for another. Losing this would be folly.
Ultimately, a diverse "ecosystem" of energy is much more robust and effective than investing heavily in a single technology, be it solar, fusion, or anything else. After all, what good is a massive fusion research facility if it loses power every third day due to rolling blackouts caused by too much current demand while waiting on the hail mary pass? You will have lost 1/3 of your available time.
Until a real 'free energy" system is created, the solution to our energy concerns will require a three pronged assault. 1) Slow down the rise in demand 2) provide more short term energy sources, and 3) research long term "hail mary" solutions. Item #1 can be accomplished by a combination of conservation and improved local efficiency. Item #2 supports #1 and when combined with it provides more opportunity for #3 to succeed. Particularly when it (it being fusion) has always been 20-50 years away. Apparently it needs a lot of 20-50 year increments.
Finally, your argument that "alternative sources" are hard is not entirely accurate. It is only accurate if you mean to do a wholesale replacement, particularly over a short period of time. We view our current system as easy because it's already been done. Incremental changes are generally easy. If a collective investment of 5,000 USD in a single year applied to 100,000 homes results in a 25% reduction in grid energy from that day forward, that area is now the benficiary of an incremental change.
That incremental change carried forward is a massive reduction of energy demand, and if successful will likely cause all future homes in that area to be built that way from the beginning. I have several routes in mind for this one, proven routes. This is retrofit. New construction has lower costs. One could argue that spending that money on yet more fusion research that might pay off some thirty years in the future is the waste. Particularly if an energy crisis looms in the next decade or two. If the payback period on the investment was 5 years, you would have a net decrease on future energy spending. This frees up funding and energy for additional research.
As far as spreading ourselves thin, there are some 5 billion people on this planet. If one hundredth of one percent have the ability and p
58f = 14.4C or 287.6K
Now lets be generous and let our panel "superheat" the stuff up to 80C or so, and put the cold reservoir in a bucket of ice.
That gives us a heat source at 353.15K and a sink at 273.15.
Efficiency = 1.0 - cold/hot = 1.0 - (273.15/353.15) = 0.226, or about 23% efficient.
Not great.
Well gee whiz wally anyone can just make up numbers to plug into the formula and "make a point". But how about we use numbers actually commonly acheived, rather than some feel good alleged "generosity"?
80C is not a difficult target for flat-plate collectors, so there is no generosity in assuming it. It's actually a "bottom end" figure. Concentrators such as dishes and troughs routinely achieve 200C+, with some reaching 3+ times as high.
So assuming you had the capacity for cooling to handle the concentrator produced 150C steam heat, with a cold temp of slightly above freezing (we added water and salt to the bucket of ice) we would be in the mid-thirties range for carnot efficiency. If you used geobanking (subsurface thermal transfer using the earth at depth) for a 52 degree cold temp, you would have about a 32.8% carnot efficiency. Much better. Naturally, increasing the temperature up to say 250C brings the carnot efficiency to about 46%. Still not too shabby.
But why talk about the solar heating aspect? Because you want to talk efficiency of the cycle. That said, I have a stong suspicion that the Carnot efficiency here is a bit of a canard. After all it is only one peice of a much larger pie. The key issue for these folks appears to be about making low temperature economically viable by doing it for much cheaper. If "traditional" solar thermal systems have a payback period of 5-10 years (they do - the payback on mine w/o incentives is just under 5 years on the NG reductions alone), and the low temp route could offer a graduated implementation with shorter paybacks it could lead to more adoption.
If it only takes (hypothetically) say 1000 dollars to get in the door with a payback time of two years, you can scale up every two years. Bringing the initial cost down will open it to a larger market. If the carnot efficiency is low but is good enough to meet the needs (using "renewables" such as sunlight) and lower carbon emissions and grid load, reducing rolling blackouts, etc. then the carnot efficiency isn't all that important. This is particularly true if the process supplants even less efficient methods. Local generation reduces infrastructure costs and losses, and these must be taken into consideration of efficiency as well.
If your central system is 80% efficient but it and the distribution infrastructure can not deliver to the whole user base at the same time, it's not that great either. If there is no distribution system, the cost and embedded energy costs of building the infrastructure may well overwhelm any effeciency gains over local generation.
Errr
Doubtful. Solar is not cheap. Last I recall PV is still around 3.5-4 USD per watt. At a 20 watt target that'd cost you about 70-80 bucks. Not a good cost for a 100 USD laptop. This device is supposed to cost ~10 USD. From solar you'd only be getting 2-3 watts or so for that price.
You underestimate the power of porn.
Geeks will always have one massive forearm.
Iyam what Iyam and thats all that iyam - I'm Popeye the software man!
Well I as a software engineer think the worst way to go about it is to rely on impractical statism (your proposal). First, even by your own admission, it won't work since it is "impractical".
So you would have us create a new bureaucracy to ostensibly collect money from people who are sending email. And since it is entriely unenforcable or practical, it won't stop the problem you claim to be working against. Nevermind "freedom", this is just dumb and wasteful. At worst, this becomes a tax on people who follow the rules. Spammers do not, and will not, follow these rules and so who will be paying this fee? I'd rather have the spam thank you.
There is a software/process means that prevent spam from reaching your inbox. I have a publically available email address that gets zero spam. For this account I use a Key system (PKI) and anything that is not signed with an approved key is not accepted. Yes this means there has to be some communication before you can send me email to that addess. But in practice this has not been an issue. If someone snags an approved key and sends me spam, I remove that key from the valid key list and the problem goes away. End result is I don't get spam.
Mailing lists get a per-list address that passes through a few filters akin to greylisting.
This is similar to having a private telephone number, only better. No, it may not be a solution for everyone. But it works for me and for others. It is thus proof of a solution that is primarily software based, and does work.
In regards to your cell phone/text message there is a crucial difference. If you are charged on outgoing it's one thing. But to charge the recipient is asinine. If I had a carrier that did that, and could not opt out of text messages, I'd not drop the carrier. You proposal seems to the equivalent to the asinine method - make recipient pay. Making the recipient pay will not solve anything.
Sender pays is impractical as it would require a reimplementation of the infrastructure and create a tiered network where those not on the government's "approved senders" list get low priority if at all. And that is one slippery cliff. Nonetheless, that tiered network will require software to solve the problem.
Regarding your idea of evolution, I'll paraphrase you:
"The idea the evolution was a conscious process, and almost every instantiation of this idea, is total crap, and should be treated this way."
You, like millions of others, make a mistake in thinking evolution is a conscious process. With genetic manipulation it may become that way in humans, but otherwise it is not. It isn't like the proto-humans/early humans sat around and said "You know these snakes are a deadly threat. We shall form a comittee and decide on how best to evolve to defeat them.". If that had happened we would have snake venom immunity.[1]
IF snakes were a deadly threat, than whatever provided an advantage in escaping the threat would have sufficed. If better vision provided "good enough" advantage for the being with those genes to pass on their DNA then that would happen (with regard to that threat). It could well be that several advantages produced a set of genes that provided multiple avenues of threat avoidance. Particularly if these advantages were useful for more than snakes.
Evolution is explanatory, not proactive. Yet. Sadly, scientists working in the field often use stupid and ridiculous statemets such as "in response to" when they should be saying "as a result of...". The headline for the article here on
If conceived of today evolution would be termed an "emergent phenomenon". The primary principle of evolution is "good enough". If it works, it works - that is all that is required. There is no planning, no intentional process.
Regarding snakes being a threat
1) Venom immunity would not have sufficed. What good is immunity to venom if the wounds get infected and you die from infection? A Committe would have produced venom immunity and then we'd have died out from secondary snake bite infections. A clear example of the phrase "to each and every problem there is solution that is simple and obvious. Said answer is also wrong."
Hearing would have been a likewise poor choice given the sensitivity and limited range of perception it would have produced. Early humans occupied multiple niches and thus were open to many predators of a wide range of "features".
Nor would run on DC.
Actually yes it is. Ever been involved with a large lithium fire? I'll take a gasoline sourced fire over that any day.
Lithium fires are nasty
1. They don't actually need an external ignition source such as spark or flame
2. Lithium fires can melt metal
3. Lithium fires put of very noxious fumes requiring self contained breathing apparatus to fight it. Sucks to be nearby.
Simple. By creating new and rare objects of jewelry. They may be difficult to create multi-color gems, gems with embeddded holograms, gems with holograms that are different for each facet, flexible gems you can use as clothes, etc..