I have a whitelist of websites that are allowed to set cookies - the places I visit regularly where I want them to remember who I am. Everywhere else is blocked, although if it makes something stop working then I'll consider putting it on "allow for session" just to get around some piece of bullshit that requires cookies. NoScript is the same - whitelist based protection, so that after you've been using it for a while you'll find that the things you use are automatically allowed, whereas random attack sites are strangely ineffective.
It's possible that a site I've decided to trust will turn out to not be trustworthy, but I'm doing what I can to block out the unnecessary shit while still allowing things to work when I want them to.
Rather than trying to direct the beam onto people, why not float through on that airship Anonymous Monkey mentioned, capture the beam onto your own reflector, and start drawing power from it, which you then use to power a conventional death ray on the underside of the airship.
People don't like stuff they can't see and don't understand, they're pretty crazy that way.
If you can see it, you don't feel like you have to fear it, because there's no way that nice windmill could be doing anything wrong. But an invisible microwave ray from space? That just sounds like something out of a bad scifi/horror film.
In conclusion, people are stupid and should be quiet when experts in a field say stuff. The end.
80% isn't so bad, means it sucks in 4 times more CO2 than it produces via power generation. Plus we can hook them up to clean energy sources to go to 100% carbon capture.
Where we put the captured carbon is of course the key issue, I was reading something from New Scientist just now about a new form of methane trapped in ice crystals becoming exploitable (first thought: "Oh great, a new source of fossil fuels, that'll help") but alongside that the suggestion of getting at the methane by pumping CO2 into the ice to displace it, which could actually make it a carbon sink.
That or push it back into the spaces left from extracting fossil fuels in the first place, so long as it stays sealed in then we're fine.
I think the reason we put so much effort into continuing to live in a destructive way is obvious... we like living this way and wish to continue with our various (stupid) luxuries. There's some less reasons, but generally speaking that's why - resistance to change even when it's for our own good.
Last point, that we still need to solve those other things, accepted and understood. But these fake trees don't make those problems worse, if anything it can only help those cases were warming causes desertification or loss of diversity. It's not really connected to the other problems but so long as we don't start doing something idiotic like setting out to replace all the existing trees with fake ones then I don't see the harm.
The only problem trees have is that they need a lot of time to grow (like into a forest), and people constantly want to cut them all down to make room for houses, shopping centers, and agriculture to feed an ever-increasing population of people.
That taken into account, why not use these machines instead of trees? They take no time at all to grow (when compared to a forest) and no-one wants to cut them down.
I am amused by you, you accuse me of dismissing you by making you 2-dimensional, then call me a troll to allow yourself to ignore the point beneath my sarcasm. My apologies if said sarcasm was unwarranted, but to be quite honest I was sick of all the people going "why not just plant trees" without really looking at the numbers.
Yes, trees are great, they do all kinds of neat things, but ultimately they aren't an efficient means of removing carbon from the atmosphere compared to these artificial alternatives. If we want protection from soil erosion or sun exposure, or assistance with water conservation, or we need some timber, then yes, trees are awesome and I'm all in favour of trees.
On the other hand when the problem we face is an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere, the best solution to that problem is the device that specialises in removing CO2 from the atmosphere, even if it doesn't do all those other useful things.
You missed the part where it pulls more CO2 out of the atmosphere than a real tree?
Be honest, you just like things being "natural" instead of artificial, even where artificial things do the job better, because "natural" sounds safe and warm and friendly.
And the carbon math is best appreciated by an auditor from Arthur Anderson: creating CO2 to harvest CO2 for a "net gain"?
If they were talking about collecting CO2 and turning it into fuel to power their CO2 collection machine, then it would be ridiculous to expect a net gain. But burning fossil fuels to make power and CO2, then using a small amount of that power to collect a large amount of that CO2 and store it out of the way somewhere... that could work as a way of reducing atmospheric CO2.
If the numbers quoted in the summary are correct, then you could soak up all the CO2 from their 'average power plant' at a cost of about 22% of the energy. So you end up with a power plant running at reduced efficiency, but it's carbon neutral (assuming we find a good place to store the carbon). You could take that to an extreme and build a power plant that's used exclusively to power carbon capture, and find that it pays for itself several times over (again, assuming we find a good place to store the carbon). Or hook these things up to a nuclear plant and get all the CO2 removal without the corresponding CO2 production.
The only issue is finding a place to put the carbon, and it sounds like they've got some ideas for that... old natural gas wells, or under the pressure of the deep oceans. I'd kinda prefer we keep it somewhere we have good control over which would rule out the bottom of the sea, but I'm sure we can find somewhere suitable.
Do we have a thousand acres going spare to plant and maintain a new forest on? Well, ok, maybe we do, but you try organising that.
But why not have a thousand acres of high-tech porta-cabins? Or however many acres of high-tech porta-cabins we need to effectively reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, and cover the rest in an aesthetically pleasing forest... couple hundred acres of each should satisfy both the need for efficient CO2 removal, and the need for pleasant walking spaces.
Oh, so we can put 1,000,000,000 trees in the Arizona desert this year and everything will be fine. No? Oh, right, so you're saying that trees need water. like I said. awesome.
Yes, trees here need water. They get everything they need from the regular rainfall. It's not like someone has to go around watering all the wild trees, as you imply with your "they need water" comment. Hence, natural trees are maintenance-free, unlike these so-called artificial trees. Needing water is not a problem for natural trees; in fact, another way trees contribute to the ecology is by preventing erosion.
The point isn't that natural trees need to be watered (because they don't) but that, in general, trees need water, which is in limited supply (whether that supply is rainfall or not). If there were enough rainfall to support them, there would already be more trees growing naturally.
These artificial trees don't need water, so you can continue installing more of them even when you've got no more spare water to use on planting trees.
You forget, real trees are natural, and organic and probably fat-free too. This makes them inherently superior to anything that human ingenuity might specifically design for our purposes. After all, there's no way we could ever deliberately create something that does a particular job more efficiently than naturally evolved organisms that do a sort of similar thing.
It's the same response that GM crops get; just because we decided to do something directly, instead of having nature make it for us, it's automatically dangerous and wrong.
Probably rooted in cracks in the concrete, who needs soil... all that's really needed to grow is water, sunlight and CO2, the various minerals the trees could pull up from the ground are a useful extra. They won't be healthy trees without good soil, but that won't stop them trying.
Letterman didn't make a rape joke, he made a joke about her daughter getting "knocked up". Seems somewhat justifiable considering the daughter in question had in fact recently been knocked up.
HBN says it best; "David Letterman didn't sexualise Bristol Palin, her boyfriend did, and not with a throwaway monologue joke, but with, y'know, his penis.
Using the masculine form as a generic is pretty much standard practice, the alternative to push for isn't to simply switch the gender of that standard practice to have female pronouns everywhere, instead you could try promoting a gender-neutral pronoun. I believe I've seen "yo" suggested for that purpose...
That or accept that grammatically, the way it's gone down is to have 'masculine' pronouns serve dual use as both masculine and neutral - you can try alternatives like "huwoman" or "herstory", but it does come off as a little excessive for a point of grammatical political incorrectness.
Well sure, we could make them give you what they say they're selling, but then you'd have to pay for what you're buying. Overselling made sense when most people would use the internet for maybe a couple hours in a day - the network was fully capable of giving people their full speed so long as it didn't have to provide it to all of them at once (especially given normal web-surfing behaviour of pauses for reading between requests for a new page).
It now doesn't work because more and more people want to make use of their connection at all hours, which wasn't expected or accounted for, and someone's going to have to pay for the upgrades. If the world was fair the money would come from the profits they made by overselling, or that mass amount of cash I keep hearing was given to the telcos for infrastructure (maybe in the form of tax breaks, I'm not sure). But more likely than not it'll be paid for by charging the cost of a better connection to anyone who wants one.
That, or they'll find that the real cost of a good connection is more than anyone's willing to pay, decide not to offer it because uptake would be too low, and leave everyone complaining until the costs come down or demand grows.
I would imagine they were thinking about making their solar panel and wind turbine more visible by putting them on the sign. Then they didn't think about the position of the sign with respect to the buildings, and found the only way to attach a solar panel to the sign was to have it east-facing. Then they also didn't think about that being a bad idea.
They're not proposing putting them in random places, as many people have explained (including yourself) that would be a stupid way to waste fuel. But if they're put in the right place then instead of your brakes leeching energy out of the car's motion and turning it into waste heat, the plate can leech energy out of the car's motion and turn it into electricity.
Just need to find places where every car is guaranteed to be braking and you've installed regenerative braking into the road surface. You could still complain that the driver sees no benefit from this form of regenerative braking, and it would be far better if you had proper regenerative brakes on all the cars, but it's not a total waste of time to have these things.
Actually he's right - the plate leeches energy from the car but so do your brakes. The difference is that your brakes don't capture that energy to make electricity (unless you have regenerative brakes) but the plate does. The trick is to make sure that they only put the plates in places where everyone wants to slow down anyway, so the plate will simultaneously help them slow down (less energy wasted as heat in the brakes) and generate a little electricity.
What if they put some of these energy-extracting plates in the floors of the store? People walk over them, it slows them down slightly or forces them to put a tiny bit more effort into lifting themselves up out of the little dip in the ground, but who's going to notice that? Besides, human bodies run on renewable energy sources (food could be seen as a form of biomass energy)/
Driving a car to the roof of a carpark just so they can be lowered down again would be a horribly inefficient way to generate power. It'd be exactly like the worst possible us of these road plates, but on a massive scale.
Now if they were to install such an elevator on the side of an existing multilevel car park, and use it to extract energy from cars that were going to be making the journey up and down anyway, then you might have something worthwhile. Except for the part where you've got to haul the platform back up to the top of the carpark when the car's driven off (you could have a pair that go up/down in tandem, but it's still a cost to the system). And the part where you can't just let the car freefall all the way down (the people in the car might be a bit unhappy about the sudden stop at the bottom) so you'd have to spend energy on keeping it at a safe speed.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a whitelist of websites that are allowed to set cookies - the places I visit regularly where I want them to remember who I am. Everywhere else is blocked, although if it makes something stop working then I'll consider putting it on "allow for session" just to get around some piece of bullshit that requires cookies. NoScript is the same - whitelist based protection, so that after you've been using it for a while you'll find that the things you use are automatically allowed, whereas random attack sites are strangely ineffective.
It's possible that a site I've decided to trust will turn out to not be trustworthy, but I'm doing what I can to block out the unnecessary shit while still allowing things to work when I want them to.
Rather than trying to direct the beam onto people, why not float through on that airship Anonymous Monkey mentioned, capture the beam onto your own reflector, and start drawing power from it, which you then use to power a conventional death ray on the underside of the airship.
People don't like stuff they can't see and don't understand, they're pretty crazy that way.
If you can see it, you don't feel like you have to fear it, because there's no way that nice windmill could be doing anything wrong. But an invisible microwave ray from space? That just sounds like something out of a bad scifi/horror film.
In conclusion, people are stupid and should be quiet when experts in a field say stuff. The end.
80% isn't so bad, means it sucks in 4 times more CO2 than it produces via power generation. Plus we can hook them up to clean energy sources to go to 100% carbon capture.
Where we put the captured carbon is of course the key issue, I was reading something from New Scientist just now about a new form of methane trapped in ice crystals becoming exploitable (first thought: "Oh great, a new source of fossil fuels, that'll help") but alongside that the suggestion of getting at the methane by pumping CO2 into the ice to displace it, which could actually make it a carbon sink.
That or push it back into the spaces left from extracting fossil fuels in the first place, so long as it stays sealed in then we're fine.
I think the reason we put so much effort into continuing to live in a destructive way is obvious... we like living this way and wish to continue with our various (stupid) luxuries. There's some less reasons, but generally speaking that's why - resistance to change even when it's for our own good.
Last point, that we still need to solve those other things, accepted and understood. But these fake trees don't make those problems worse, if anything it can only help those cases were warming causes desertification or loss of diversity. It's not really connected to the other problems but so long as we don't start doing something idiotic like setting out to replace all the existing trees with fake ones then I don't see the harm.
The only problem trees have is that they need a lot of time to grow (like into a forest), and people constantly want to cut them all down to make room for houses, shopping centers, and agriculture to feed an ever-increasing population of people.
That taken into account, why not use these machines instead of trees? They take no time at all to grow (when compared to a forest) and no-one wants to cut them down.
I am amused by you, you accuse me of dismissing you by making you 2-dimensional, then call me a troll to allow yourself to ignore the point beneath my sarcasm. My apologies if said sarcasm was unwarranted, but to be quite honest I was sick of all the people going "why not just plant trees" without really looking at the numbers.
Yes, trees are great, they do all kinds of neat things, but ultimately they aren't an efficient means of removing carbon from the atmosphere compared to these artificial alternatives. If we want protection from soil erosion or sun exposure, or assistance with water conservation, or we need some timber, then yes, trees are awesome and I'm all in favour of trees.
On the other hand when the problem we face is an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere, the best solution to that problem is the device that specialises in removing CO2 from the atmosphere, even if it doesn't do all those other useful things.
You missed the part where it pulls more CO2 out of the atmosphere than a real tree?
Be honest, you just like things being "natural" instead of artificial, even where artificial things do the job better, because "natural" sounds safe and warm and friendly.
And the carbon math is best appreciated by an auditor from Arthur Anderson: creating CO2 to harvest CO2 for a "net gain"?
If they were talking about collecting CO2 and turning it into fuel to power their CO2 collection machine, then it would be ridiculous to expect a net gain. But burning fossil fuels to make power and CO2, then using a small amount of that power to collect a large amount of that CO2 and store it out of the way somewhere... that could work as a way of reducing atmospheric CO2.
If the numbers quoted in the summary are correct, then you could soak up all the CO2 from their 'average power plant' at a cost of about 22% of the energy. So you end up with a power plant running at reduced efficiency, but it's carbon neutral (assuming we find a good place to store the carbon). You could take that to an extreme and build a power plant that's used exclusively to power carbon capture, and find that it pays for itself several times over (again, assuming we find a good place to store the carbon). Or hook these things up to a nuclear plant and get all the CO2 removal without the corresponding CO2 production.
The only issue is finding a place to put the carbon, and it sounds like they've got some ideas for that... old natural gas wells, or under the pressure of the deep oceans. I'd kinda prefer we keep it somewhere we have good control over which would rule out the bottom of the sea, but I'm sure we can find somewhere suitable.
Do we have a thousand acres going spare to plant and maintain a new forest on? Well, ok, maybe we do, but you try organising that.
But why not have a thousand acres of high-tech porta-cabins? Or however many acres of high-tech porta-cabins we need to effectively reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, and cover the rest in an aesthetically pleasing forest... couple hundred acres of each should satisfy both the need for efficient CO2 removal, and the need for pleasant walking spaces.
Oh, so we can put 1,000,000,000 trees in the Arizona desert this year and everything will be fine. No? Oh, right, so you're saying that trees need water. like I said. awesome.
Yes, trees here need water. They get everything they need from the regular rainfall. It's not like someone has to go around watering all the wild trees, as you imply with your "they need water" comment. Hence, natural trees are maintenance-free, unlike these so-called artificial trees. Needing water is not a problem for natural trees; in fact, another way trees contribute to the ecology is by preventing erosion.
The point isn't that natural trees need to be watered (because they don't) but that, in general, trees need water, which is in limited supply (whether that supply is rainfall or not). If there were enough rainfall to support them, there would already be more trees growing naturally.
These artificial trees don't need water, so you can continue installing more of them even when you've got no more spare water to use on planting trees.
You forget, real trees are natural, and organic and probably fat-free too. This makes them inherently superior to anything that human ingenuity might specifically design for our purposes. After all, there's no way we could ever deliberately create something that does a particular job more efficiently than naturally evolved organisms that do a sort of similar thing.
It's the same response that GM crops get; just because we decided to do something directly, instead of having nature make it for us, it's automatically dangerous and wrong.
Probably rooted in cracks in the concrete, who needs soil... all that's really needed to grow is water, sunlight and CO2, the various minerals the trees could pull up from the ground are a useful extra. They won't be healthy trees without good soil, but that won't stop them trying.
Letterman didn't make a rape joke, he made a joke about her daughter getting "knocked up". Seems somewhat justifiable considering the daughter in question had in fact recently been knocked up.
HBN says it best; "David Letterman didn't sexualise Bristol Palin, her boyfriend did, and not with a throwaway monologue joke, but with, y'know, his penis.
Or when Jobs eventually dies, they just keep his corpse on as CEO. After all, a dead leader can't possibly make any bad decisions or mistakes.
Huh... well, that is less than I expected.
Ok, I'm with you then, it's a nigh-inexcusable oversight that they don't do that.
I suppose we could be like the French and assume the male gender.
I thought that was already the normal way of doing things. It's how we operate around things like "mankind" or "all men are created equal".
Unfortunately your credentials might be questioned on the basis of your inability to spell "cite".
Using the masculine form as a generic is pretty much standard practice, the alternative to push for isn't to simply switch the gender of that standard practice to have female pronouns everywhere, instead you could try promoting a gender-neutral pronoun. I believe I've seen "yo" suggested for that purpose...
That or accept that grammatically, the way it's gone down is to have 'masculine' pronouns serve dual use as both masculine and neutral - you can try alternatives like "huwoman" or "herstory", but it does come off as a little excessive for a point of grammatical political incorrectness.
The only problem would be that a big backslash would look like a big forward slash from behind, and just a vertical line from either side...
Well sure, we could make them give you what they say they're selling, but then you'd have to pay for what you're buying. Overselling made sense when most people would use the internet for maybe a couple hours in a day - the network was fully capable of giving people their full speed so long as it didn't have to provide it to all of them at once (especially given normal web-surfing behaviour of pauses for reading between requests for a new page).
It now doesn't work because more and more people want to make use of their connection at all hours, which wasn't expected or accounted for, and someone's going to have to pay for the upgrades. If the world was fair the money would come from the profits they made by overselling, or that mass amount of cash I keep hearing was given to the telcos for infrastructure (maybe in the form of tax breaks, I'm not sure). But more likely than not it'll be paid for by charging the cost of a better connection to anyone who wants one.
That, or they'll find that the real cost of a good connection is more than anyone's willing to pay, decide not to offer it because uptake would be too low, and leave everyone complaining until the costs come down or demand grows.
East? What were they thinking?
I would imagine they were thinking about making their solar panel and wind turbine more visible by putting them on the sign. Then they didn't think about the position of the sign with respect to the buildings, and found the only way to attach a solar panel to the sign was to have it east-facing. Then they also didn't think about that being a bad idea.
They're not proposing putting them in random places, as many people have explained (including yourself) that would be a stupid way to waste fuel. But if they're put in the right place then instead of your brakes leeching energy out of the car's motion and turning it into waste heat, the plate can leech energy out of the car's motion and turn it into electricity.
Just need to find places where every car is guaranteed to be braking and you've installed regenerative braking into the road surface. You could still complain that the driver sees no benefit from this form of regenerative braking, and it would be far better if you had proper regenerative brakes on all the cars, but it's not a total waste of time to have these things.
Actually he's right - the plate leeches energy from the car but so do your brakes. The difference is that your brakes don't capture that energy to make electricity (unless you have regenerative brakes) but the plate does. The trick is to make sure that they only put the plates in places where everyone wants to slow down anyway, so the plate will simultaneously help them slow down (less energy wasted as heat in the brakes) and generate a little electricity.
What if they put some of these energy-extracting plates in the floors of the store? People walk over them, it slows them down slightly or forces them to put a tiny bit more effort into lifting themselves up out of the little dip in the ground, but who's going to notice that? Besides, human bodies run on renewable energy sources (food could be seen as a form of biomass energy)/
Driving a car to the roof of a carpark just so they can be lowered down again would be a horribly inefficient way to generate power. It'd be exactly like the worst possible us of these road plates, but on a massive scale.
Now if they were to install such an elevator on the side of an existing multilevel car park, and use it to extract energy from cars that were going to be making the journey up and down anyway, then you might have something worthwhile. Except for the part where you've got to haul the platform back up to the top of the carpark when the car's driven off (you could have a pair that go up/down in tandem, but it's still a cost to the system). And the part where you can't just let the car freefall all the way down (the people in the car might be a bit unhappy about the sudden stop at the bottom) so you'd have to spend energy on keeping it at a safe speed.