Having worked with a lot of air compressors over the years I was suspicious of this as an efficient way to convert energy into a storage medium. After a quick Google I found a blurb on a manufacturer's website that up to 90% of electricity used to run a compressor is converted into heat.
I'd imagine that large-scale compressors are more efficient, and there would be some heat capture employed to utilize the energy lost there, but can this really compete?
This article is a ridiculous NIMBY hit-piece. Change is hard but inevitable.
Anything that gets people out of cars in hyper-traffic'ed LA is a win for me. With these, and also similar bikeshare systems, people can easily get around an urban center that does not have good public transit (ahem, Westside LA, or most of LA for that matter) quickly and without a car.
These take cars off the road and have zero emissions. LA is slowly losing it's unhealthy love affair with cars, but those in the throes of their passion for large metal boxes won't give up their prized possession's street privilege without a fight.
I had many notebooks and always preferred portability over horsepower. I mostly ran Linux on them - IBM, Asus, HP, Dell - and it took me a bit to move to MacOS. The under-the-hood BSD was good enough to ease my apprehension leaving Linux to make the change, but the hardware was the closer.
Now I still prefer Linux (my desktop is Fedora, don't judge) but you'd only pry my Air out of my hands with a newer, better Air. Give me 16G RAM and a better screen resolution and I am never leaving.
Fedora has been my go-to for over a decade. I've tried others, but it's modern, solid, has advanced features/libraries, and is architecturally similar to the most common Linux server OS I encounter - RHEL. Using Ubuntu would just be silly if 90% of the servers you work with are RHEL/CENTOS. My only regret is the rate of distro obsolescence... the churn is pretty high.
This is a classic case of linear human thought, which deals particularly poorly with quantum leaps and exponential curves. We've been picking away at the easily replaceable labor force with mechanization and automation for a century and a half or two while humans moved farther up the skill pyramid. Now we have absorbed much of the low-skill repetitive labor and are moving aggressively into thought/decision-based labor automation. This is the employment realm into which humans have retreated and there's really no where else to go but into higher thought-based work. The robots are hot on our trail in this area.
There are no more large resevoirs of low-skilled thought industries, much less repetitive labor industries, to absorb displaced workers as there have been in the past. The human skillset hasn't improved at nearly the rate of the mechanization/automation skillset. Evolution is slower than silicon valley.
Just do the math.
There are actually some compelling reasons to go to Venus first including cost and transit time but also more human-favorable gravity, greater protection from radiation and possibly the only other place in the solar system which currently offers temperatures and atmospheric pressures close Earth norm - albeit only at a 30-mile altitude. So, why not cloud cities on Venus?
BTW loved the Mars trilogy - have you read 2312 yet?
Two of the solar panels did unfurl and theoretically are producing power. Perhaps not enough to run all the instruments, but it's something and it's possible could be keeping the batteries charged.
Most of these probes, sensing loss of communication or other problem, go into a 'fault mode' where the bare minimum is kept going until instructions are received. The probe itself might be functional and alive, just with low power and unable to communicate with it's primary array.
I wonder if there is another way to communicate now that we know what's going on? Remember Gallileo had a problem unfurling it's primary antenna and was able to communicate, although much more slowly, through a secondary, low-power antenna.
What labor-intense industry will technology create? The current arc of innovation is not like that which enabled the move from rural farming to factory farming and sent workers to urban factories and then to work at Starbucks and Wal-Mart.
We'd better get used to a whole lot more socialism, or a whole lot fewer hours worked per week, or some other way to define value for compensation. The current winner-takes-almost-all system will collapse with no employment for the vast majority of humanity.
The biggest GDP expansion in this country was when incomes were extremely progressively taxed - up to 90%. It didn't slow down the "American Dream" - such as it was.
In fact, I think highly progressive income taxes make room for more success stories rather than a few very large economic players who can crowd out others. Honestly, there are tens of thousands of individuals who would make excellent CEOs who are never going to get the opportunity. If a CEO hits the 90% bracket and is 'discouraged from creating more value' then step away and make room.
While I fully agree we could make this place a Star Trek-like utopian society (a la The Economics of Star Trek), the point is that no matter how seaworthy you make a ship, it can still be sunk. The Earth could still suffer an extinction event that we can't prevent. Mars is really our best Plan B. We have to get in more boats to make sure we stay afloat as a species.
Mars is the easiest of the options. The others - the moon (too little gravity, can never be terraformed), a giant space station (extremely large structure required to contain 1 million humans), Venus (cloud cities perhaps), Jovian satellites (radiation, extreme cold) are tougher options.
Io’s ionosphere interacts with Jupiter’s magnetosphere, a layer of charged plasma that protects the planet from radiation, to create a frictional current that causes radio wave emissions.
Much like our magnetosphere on Earth protects us from radiation so too can that of a moon with an atmosphere and molten core. Mars doesn't have one and thus is hard-hit by solar radiation.
Your statement is accurate if you are talking about Earth's moon, but not correct in other cases.
It's from Wyse, so it's basically a "thin client". Don't get me wrong, Wyse makes good thin clients, but it's not fundamentally different than anything out there already. It's basically a way to run "VDI" (Virtual Desktop Interface) from your pocket.
OK, cool enough, but I can already do that with an app on my smart phone. I can run a plethora of thin client software - Citrix, VMware, Webex, PCAnywhere, Microsoft RDP, VNC... what else? The only unique thing I see here is that you can attach to a larger external screen. With an iPhone you can do that via an Apple TV with mirroring. The experience isn't fantastic but it's only a matter of time for that architecture to improve (same with Android equivalents).
I do not see myself carrying yet another device. I could see myself using my phone this way if the external graphics worked better - and there is nothing technically stopping that from happening now.
Apple or Google/Android could blink and destroy the market for this device.
From what I understand they tried to find a museum for the ship but there were no takers. The dock was in rusty/poor condition, but the ship looked garage-kept;-)
This is complete nonsense. There were more Nazi sympathizers in the US than in France at the time. Some of our 'captains of industry' were helping Germany build it's war machine.
When defeat was inevitable some in France looked around themselves - the British had been decimated on land and had retreated to their island. The US was uninterested. On France's borders were fascist Germany, fascist Spain, fascist Italy, aloof Switzerland and occupied territory. It looked as though Britain would fall quickly (few thought they could hold on alone as they did at the time) and that the new world order would be one of fascism or communism. It was a dark day, and in those times some people will choose a dark side versus the unknown.
And then come the opportunists - you have those kind in any country, who will gravitate to the winning side in hopes for gains for themselves.
But, the Maginot Line did work perfectly. The Germans were denied crossing that territory. The contingency of what to do when the Germans drove around it was not addressed sufficiently.
Well...not really. The "Schlieffen Plan" was the move through the Netherlands and Belgian plain, but that was not really what happened in WW2 - it was not the 'second time Germany pulled the same trick'. In WW2 the Germans 'faked' the Schlieffen Plan and lured the French and British into a trap.
The Schlieffen plan *WAS* anticipated by the French and British, and they placed the best of their units along the Belgian border. The Belgians were supposed to have allowed French and British troops to move into Belgium into forward prepared positions, but Belgium decided to declare neutrality until invaded (in some foolish hope that Germany would prefer to pound it's head against the French Maginot Line to the south instead). Silly Belgians.
As soon as Germany invaded Belgium the French troops were allowed to cross the border, but now were not able to reach their designated defensive positions (Germany having gotten a head start) and had to have meeting engagements in the field (losing the defender advantage).
However, THIS was the trick. The main German effort was planned to occur through the forests just to the NORTH of the Maginot Line, but also SOUTH of the more open land considered better suited for the warfare. The French and British thought the Ardennes forest was impassable to tanks, and as such put 2nd class divisions (with very few tanks) and reserve troops guarding it. So, as the British and French raced into Belgium to encounter what they thought was the main German attack (in a Schlieffen Plan replay), the real thrust was happening to the south of them. They were soon caught in a salient - a 'bulge' - and quickly the best Allied units were vulnerable to being cut off.
Despite being warned by their own reconnaissance aircraft and captured plans from a downed German aircraft, they ignored the Ardennes until it was too late. By then the Germans had a solid advance going, which thereafter cut off the Allied troops with amazing speed for the time (eg Blitzkrieg).. then there was Dunkerque and the loss of all the equipment of two major armies. 300,000 troops did manage to escape, including 100,000 French.
Now that the Germans had knocked out the British Army and defeated the best of the French units in the north, they turned south. They met occasional stiff resistance but now they severely outnumbered the French units and the end was only a matter of time.
Contrary to some popular beliefs, the Maginot Line was never breached from the front (once surrounded a few smaller forts were captured) and the French had more tanks with better armor and guns than the Germans did. The defeat was really one of leadership, strategy and tactics.
Slashdot Mirror
Having worked with a lot of air compressors over the years I was suspicious of this as an efficient way to convert energy into a storage medium. After a quick Google I found a blurb on a manufacturer's website that up to 90% of electricity used to run a compressor is converted into heat.
https://www.quincycompressor.com/the-benefits-of-efficient-air-compressors/
I'd imagine that large-scale compressors are more efficient, and there would be some heat capture employed to utilize the energy lost there, but can this really compete?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
This article is a ridiculous NIMBY hit-piece. Change is hard but inevitable. Anything that gets people out of cars in hyper-traffic'ed LA is a win for me. With these, and also similar bikeshare systems, people can easily get around an urban center that does not have good public transit (ahem, Westside LA, or most of LA for that matter) quickly and without a car. These take cars off the road and have zero emissions. LA is slowly losing it's unhealthy love affair with cars, but those in the throes of their passion for large metal boxes won't give up their prized possession's street privilege without a fight.
I had many notebooks and always preferred portability over horsepower. I mostly ran Linux on them - IBM, Asus, HP, Dell - and it took me a bit to move to MacOS. The under-the-hood BSD was good enough to ease my apprehension leaving Linux to make the change, but the hardware was the closer. Now I still prefer Linux (my desktop is Fedora, don't judge) but you'd only pry my Air out of my hands with a newer, better Air. Give me 16G RAM and a better screen resolution and I am never leaving.
Fedora has been my go-to for over a decade. I've tried others, but it's modern, solid, has advanced features/libraries, and is architecturally similar to the most common Linux server OS I encounter - RHEL. Using Ubuntu would just be silly if 90% of the servers you work with are RHEL/CENTOS. My only regret is the rate of distro obsolescence... the churn is pretty high.
This is a classic case of linear human thought, which deals particularly poorly with quantum leaps and exponential curves. We've been picking away at the easily replaceable labor force with mechanization and automation for a century and a half or two while humans moved farther up the skill pyramid. Now we have absorbed much of the low-skill repetitive labor and are moving aggressively into thought/decision-based labor automation. This is the employment realm into which humans have retreated and there's really no where else to go but into higher thought-based work. The robots are hot on our trail in this area. There are no more large resevoirs of low-skilled thought industries, much less repetitive labor industries, to absorb displaced workers as there have been in the past. The human skillset hasn't improved at nearly the rate of the mechanization/automation skillset. Evolution is slower than silicon valley. Just do the math.
This is an excellent presentation delivered to the City of Austin about exactly what you outline. I highly recommend it! http://www.austintexas.gov/blog/false-prosperity-hidden-cost-suburban-sprawl
There are actually some compelling reasons to go to Venus first including cost and transit time but also more human-favorable gravity, greater protection from radiation and possibly the only other place in the solar system which currently offers temperatures and atmospheric pressures close Earth norm - albeit only at a 30-mile altitude. So, why not cloud cities on Venus?
BTW loved the Mars trilogy - have you read 2312 yet?
Two of the solar panels did unfurl and theoretically are producing power. Perhaps not enough to run all the instruments, but it's something and it's possible could be keeping the batteries charged.
Most of these probes, sensing loss of communication or other problem, go into a 'fault mode' where the bare minimum is kept going until instructions are received. The probe itself might be functional and alive, just with low power and unable to communicate with it's primary array.
I wonder if there is another way to communicate now that we know what's going on? Remember Gallileo had a problem unfurling it's primary antenna and was able to communicate, although much more slowly, through a secondary, low-power antenna.
With robotics becoming more capable all the time even more skilled labor jobs will go away. A prediction is that one in three jobs will be gone by 2025 http://www.computerworld.com/article/2691607/one-in-three-jobs-will-be-taken-by-software-or-robots-by-2025.html and that trend is still ramping up.
What labor-intense industry will technology create? The current arc of innovation is not like that which enabled the move from rural farming to factory farming and sent workers to urban factories and then to work at Starbucks and Wal-Mart.
We'd better get used to a whole lot more socialism, or a whole lot fewer hours worked per week, or some other way to define value for compensation. The current winner-takes-almost-all system will collapse with no employment for the vast majority of humanity.
The biggest GDP expansion in this country was when incomes were extremely progressively taxed - up to 90%. It didn't slow down the "American Dream" - such as it was.
In fact, I think highly progressive income taxes make room for more success stories rather than a few very large economic players who can crowd out others. Honestly, there are tens of thousands of individuals who would make excellent CEOs who are never going to get the opportunity. If a CEO hits the 90% bracket and is 'discouraged from creating more value' then step away and make room.
There is a The Surprisingly Strong Case for Colonizing Venus.
Are you trying to make Mars the next Australia?
While I fully agree we could make this place a Star Trek-like utopian society (a la The Economics of Star Trek), the point is that no matter how seaworthy you make a ship, it can still be sunk. The Earth could still suffer an extinction event that we can't prevent. Mars is really our best Plan B. We have to get in more boats to make sure we stay afloat as a species.
Mars is the easiest of the options. The others - the moon (too little gravity, can never be terraformed), a giant space station (extremely large structure required to contain 1 million humans), Venus (cloud cities perhaps), Jovian satellites (radiation, extreme cold) are tougher options.
Tidal effects are relative to the nearness of the orbit. Such a grandoise statement is not accurate.
From TFA:
Io’s ionosphere interacts with Jupiter’s magnetosphere, a layer of charged plasma that protects the planet from radiation, to create a frictional current that causes radio wave emissions.
Much like our magnetosphere on Earth protects us from radiation so too can that of a moon with an atmosphere and molten core. Mars doesn't have one and thus is hard-hit by solar radiation.
Your statement is accurate if you are talking about Earth's moon, but not correct in other cases.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21551149
Researchers have found evidence for a landmass that would have existed between 2,000 and 85 million years ago.
This potentially places the landmass above sea level during a time when humanity could have been present on it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21551149
Researchers have found evidence for a landmass that would have existed between 2,000 and 85 million years ago.
This potentially places the landmass above sea level during a time when humanity could have been present on it.
It's from Wyse, so it's basically a "thin client". Don't get me wrong, Wyse makes good thin clients, but it's not fundamentally different than anything out there already. It's basically a way to run "VDI" (Virtual Desktop Interface) from your pocket.
OK, cool enough, but I can already do that with an app on my smart phone. I can run a plethora of thin client software - Citrix, VMware, Webex, PCAnywhere, Microsoft RDP, VNC... what else? The only unique thing I see here is that you can attach to a larger external screen. With an iPhone you can do that via an Apple TV with mirroring. The experience isn't fantastic but it's only a matter of time for that architecture to improve (same with Android equivalents).
I do not see myself carrying yet another device. I could see myself using my phone this way if the external graphics worked better - and there is nothing technically stopping that from happening now.
Apple or Google/Android could blink and destroy the market for this device.
...welcome our new Tau Cetian overlords!
... is that it's true whether you believe in it, or not.
Pretty cool. The ship was locked up though, so I only got to check out the outside. It's bigger than you'd think.
Sea Shadow in the floating dock
From what I understand they tried to find a museum for the ship but there were no takers. The dock was in rusty/poor condition, but the ship looked garage-kept ;-)
This is complete nonsense. There were more Nazi sympathizers in the US than in France at the time. Some of our 'captains of industry' were helping Germany build it's war machine.
When defeat was inevitable some in France looked around themselves - the British had been decimated on land and had retreated to their island. The US was uninterested. On France's borders were fascist Germany, fascist Spain, fascist Italy, aloof Switzerland and occupied territory. It looked as though Britain would fall quickly (few thought they could hold on alone as they did at the time) and that the new world order would be one of fascism or communism. It was a dark day, and in those times some people will choose a dark side versus the unknown.
And then come the opportunists - you have those kind in any country, who will gravitate to the winning side in hopes for gains for themselves.
But, the Maginot Line did work perfectly. The Germans were denied crossing that territory. The contingency of what to do when the Germans drove around it was not addressed sufficiently.
Well...not really. The "Schlieffen Plan" was the move through the Netherlands and Belgian plain, but that was not really what happened in WW2 - it was not the 'second time Germany pulled the same trick'. In WW2 the Germans 'faked' the Schlieffen Plan and lured the French and British into a trap.
The Schlieffen plan *WAS* anticipated by the French and British, and they placed the best of their units along the Belgian border. The Belgians were supposed to have allowed French and British troops to move into Belgium into forward prepared positions, but Belgium decided to declare neutrality until invaded (in some foolish hope that Germany would prefer to pound it's head against the French Maginot Line to the south instead). Silly Belgians.
As soon as Germany invaded Belgium the French troops were allowed to cross the border, but now were not able to reach their designated defensive positions (Germany having gotten a head start) and had to have meeting engagements in the field (losing the defender advantage).
However, THIS was the trick. The main German effort was planned to occur through the forests just to the NORTH of the Maginot Line, but also SOUTH of the more open land considered better suited for the warfare. The French and British thought the Ardennes forest was impassable to tanks, and as such put 2nd class divisions (with very few tanks) and reserve troops guarding it. So, as the British and French raced into Belgium to encounter what they thought was the main German attack (in a Schlieffen Plan replay), the real thrust was happening to the south of them. They were soon caught in a salient - a 'bulge' - and quickly the best Allied units were vulnerable to being cut off.
Despite being warned by their own reconnaissance aircraft and captured plans from a downed German aircraft, they ignored the Ardennes until it was too late. By then the Germans had a solid advance going, which thereafter cut off the Allied troops with amazing speed for the time (eg Blitzkrieg).. then there was Dunkerque and the loss of all the equipment of two major armies. 300,000 troops did manage to escape, including 100,000 French.
Now that the Germans had knocked out the British Army and defeated the best of the French units in the north, they turned south. They met occasional stiff resistance but now they severely outnumbered the French units and the end was only a matter of time.
Contrary to some popular beliefs, the Maginot Line was never breached from the front (once surrounded a few smaller forts were captured) and the French had more tanks with better armor and guns than the Germans did. The defeat was really one of leadership, strategy and tactics.