I don't know the particulars of gravity storage, but had heard it wasn't very impressive. Industrial sized molten salt batteries seemed to hold much more promise. But yes, the only advantage to hydrogen is that it can be quickly pumped. Which makes it much more useful for vehicles than any other storage medium. Batteries have to be replaced, contain dangerous chemicals, and charge very slowly. The only real option for batteries is to switch them out at replacement stations. The energy losses in hydrogen seem small to me compared to issues with batteries.
If you start with $.05/Kwh electricity it is. Let's say that each step is 50% efficient (pretty fair in the near future as current round trip efficiencies are 30-50%). So for every $.05/Kwh we start with, we end up with $.20/Kwh's to the wheels. To fill up the Tesla roadster would cost you $10 to go 220 miles, or $1 to go 22 miles in a sports car.
I realize the Tesla roadster is all electric, but these are back of envelope numbers to make the point that electric->hydrogen->electric is perfectly feasible if we had a huge source of cheap electricity that was environmentally sound. Like say, wind power. As an aside, wind is perfect for filling up hydrogen cars as your neighborhood hydrogen station only refills its tanks when electricity is cheap/the wind is blowing
Concerning the invasion, Hans Blix has bad things to say of the US administration, but he puts the blame for the invasion squarely at the feet of Saddam.
Bush didn't say he was buying more. He said there was intelligence that Saddam might be trying to buy more. But the CIA so cocked up the investigation by sending a retard and his simpleton wife to do the investigation we'll never know what was really going on (or at least that is how the 9/11 Commission felt).
They had tons of tagged, monitored and accounted for yellowcake. They didn't have any they could freely play with. Hans Blix made it clear that as soon as containment ended Saddam would build bombs.
That depends on if you are reading his NYT piece or his sworn testimony in front of Congress. The guy tells two opposite stories about his trip within a few weeks of his return, and is living proof that the agency in charge of investigating the Iraqi yellowcake incident sent fric, and his super duper secret spy wife, frac.
The 9/11 Commission debunks that Joe Wilson could debunk his way out of a paper bag.
I don't want to get into it, but for starters, showing most of Florida and NYC underwater. That may eventually happen, but it will take a lot longer than what the science can predict. At the time of his movie, all he had was the TAR to go on and not the AR4, but he still has about 7 major points where his "facts" directly contradict the TAR. I don't know about you, but I'll get my science from the, you know, scientists:) The AR4 even further shows his movie to be mostly scare mongering.
The problem is that Al Gore's information is so full of hyperbole and outright lies, he discredits the actual science. To understand just how full of shit he is, compare his works with the IPCC's.
Try to reconcile An Inconvenient Truth with the IPCC AR4. Do you notice any differences? Al Gore is a comedic hyperbolic snake oil salesman who's made millions from his carbon credit companies. He tells the world to live in poverty and cut their CO2 footprint while taking private planes around the world, holding multiple homes which uses a magnitude more electricity than the national average, and then having the gal to take a small SUV fleet everywhere he goes while telling us to ride a bicycle.
So no, the scientists do not back him up. And I have the UN IPCC document to back me up. What do you have?
The Declaration of Independence is the document pointing out the people have a right to revolution. The Constitution's 2nd amendment is just pointing out that people have a right to bear arms for all sorts of reasons that people have militias for (like putting down criminal gangs, outlaws, British royal fascists). At that point in history, militias were also considered part of law enforcement, and personal defence had been a given in English common law for centuries.
So it is Stevens who is confusing the issue by saying the 2nd amendment is solely for insurrection.
Yeah, and there are no chemist, machinist, engineers in the US who could make these things. The military would have no problems firing on US citizens, or stopping massive defections (most of the military is made up of red staters' kids). And a general insurgency wouldn't completely disrupt the military industrial complex and economic activities that support it. And the tooth fairy and santa claus are real.
Never mind that as long as citizens have access to weapons there will never be a need for an insurrection. So far we have no unelected assholes making our laws (our assholes are all elected). The only place I see unelected assholes making laws for the people is in the disarmed EU.
I don't think you are taking into account just how violent the US is. Look at all categories of murder in the US. Not looking at guns, the US has more murders in any individual category, per capita, than almost any other industrialized country's murders in all combined categories. Face it, the US is a violent place with or without guns. And removing the guns just means there will be more hangings/pills/slit wrists, and more stabbings, beating to deaths, and strangulations.
While the aboslute rate might drop a bit, for this tiny drop (after a long expensive removal of the hundreds of millions of guns in the US), we'll now be leaving US citizens (people entrusted to rule themselves, but apparently we can't trust them to lawfully use a firearm) helpless for the next 250lb bat wielding thug who kicks in their door at 3am (look at the UK's lovely rate and results of home invasions). And more importantly, the core reason the founding fathers put in the 2nd amendment, is that if the government ever stops listening to our votes, we the people need another method to make them listen to us.
And if you are a believer that the police can protect us, tell me what the average police response time is for the poor citizens that the "progressive" like to disarm in our inner cities? If I'm poor and live in a ghetto in DC, how long will I have to wait after I call in an intruder in my house at 3am? 5 minutes? 10? 20?
I'm not understanding the hand waving about variations in the processor instruction stream. Isn't there an agreed upon measure for super computing and isn't it double floating point operations per second?
And why would you assume the cell processor in the PS3 is so different from the Cell processor used in computing? From what I understand, the only difference is only 6 cores are available instead of 8.
Sure the are several huge differences between distributed super computing, but the only one that effects processing power is granularity of jobs.
On a side note, it is interesting to see people, without any real data, say something like folding@home can't be as powerful as a "real" supercomputer. Never mind there are a magnitude or two more modern cores being used in folding@home.
From Wikipedia: Jack Dongarra and his team demonstrated a 3.2 GHz Cell with 8 SPEs delivering a performance equal to 100 GFLOPS on an average double precision Linpack 4096x4096 matrix.
Since floating@home is scientific computing, those numbers are without a doubt comparable. The only difference is instead of super computing jobs being distributed over high speeds buses to the cores, the jobs are distributed over the internet.
Okay, I surrender. The experts and scientists have spoken and have agreed this thing is safe. But this was all news to me, and the idea of a tiny black hole slowly sucking in mass from the center the planet, and having scientists say we have 1,000 years before volcanoes start erupting all over the planet, is not what I want to see on the morning news:P
To build a high speed train from Philly to DC is taking a 20 year Environmental Impact Study. So why does something that could possibly destroy the entire planet, not get something similar?
I'd feel much better if a bunch of government agencies had signed off on this. While I'm sure they wouldn't actually accomplish anything themselves, they'd make sure all the science was fully vetted, in the public eye, by contractors.
$2-3B per GW plant, where 90% of the operating cost is servicing the $2-3B note, which still leaves the plant generating electricity cheaper than coal.
Yet we'd rather have acid rain, mercury poisoning, and massive CO2 emittance. We really are some silly monkeys.
The Japanese did a study in the 90's showing that uranium can be recovered from ocean water at about 10x the cost it is currently mined for. Since fuel is a tiny fraction of the operating cost of nuclear plants, we basically have an infinite (1,000 years from mining, magnitudes more from the oceans) supply of fuel, at negligible prices.
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I don't know the particulars of gravity storage, but had heard it wasn't very impressive. Industrial sized molten salt batteries seemed to hold much more promise. But yes, the only advantage to hydrogen is that it can be quickly pumped. Which makes it much more useful for vehicles than any other storage medium. Batteries have to be replaced, contain dangerous chemicals, and charge very slowly. The only real option for batteries is to switch them out at replacement stations. The energy losses in hydrogen seem small to me compared to issues with batteries.
If you start with $.05/Kwh electricity it is. Let's say that each step is 50% efficient (pretty fair in the near future as current round trip efficiencies are 30-50%). So for every $.05/Kwh we start with, we end up with $.20/Kwh's to the wheels. To fill up the Tesla roadster would cost you $10 to go 220 miles, or $1 to go 22 miles in a sports car.
I realize the Tesla roadster is all electric, but these are back of envelope numbers to make the point that electric->hydrogen->electric is perfectly feasible if we had a huge source of cheap electricity that was environmentally sound. Like say, wind power. As an aside, wind is perfect for filling up hydrogen cars as your neighborhood hydrogen station only refills its tanks when electricity is cheap/the wind is blowing
Concerning the invasion, Hans Blix has bad things to say of the US administration, but he puts the blame for the invasion squarely at the feet of Saddam.
Bush didn't say he was buying more. He said there was intelligence that Saddam might be trying to buy more. But the CIA so cocked up the investigation by sending a retard and his simpleton wife to do the investigation we'll never know what was really going on (or at least that is how the 9/11 Commission felt).
They had tons of tagged, monitored and accounted for yellowcake. They didn't have any they could freely play with. Hans Blix made it clear that as soon as containment ended Saddam would build bombs.
The 9/11 Commission debunks that Joe Wilson could debunk his way out of a paper bag.
Just realized we agreed on all points of fact :)
I don't want to get into it, but for starters, showing most of Florida and NYC underwater. That may eventually happen, but it will take a lot longer than what the science can predict. At the time of his movie, all he had was the TAR to go on and not the AR4, but he still has about 7 major points where his "facts" directly contradict the TAR. I don't know about you, but I'll get my science from the, you know, scientists :) The AR4 even further shows his movie to be mostly scare mongering.
They did about 50 years ago.
The problem is that Al Gore's information is so full of hyperbole and outright lies, he discredits the actual science. To understand just how full of shit he is, compare his works with the IPCC's.
So no, the scientists do not back him up. And I have the UN IPCC document to back me up. What do you have?
I had that exact same thought. Kennedy is the only one who actually seems to have read the Constitution.
So it is Stevens who is confusing the issue by saying the 2nd amendment is solely for insurrection.
Never mind that as long as citizens have access to weapons there will never be a need for an insurrection. So far we have no unelected assholes making our laws (our assholes are all elected). The only place I see unelected assholes making laws for the people is in the disarmed EU.
While the aboslute rate might drop a bit, for this tiny drop (after a long expensive removal of the hundreds of millions of guns in the US), we'll now be leaving US citizens (people entrusted to rule themselves, but apparently we can't trust them to lawfully use a firearm) helpless for the next 250lb bat wielding thug who kicks in their door at 3am (look at the UK's lovely rate and results of home invasions). And more importantly, the core reason the founding fathers put in the 2nd amendment, is that if the government ever stops listening to our votes, we the people need another method to make them listen to us.
And if you are a believer that the police can protect us, tell me what the average police response time is for the poor citizens that the "progressive" like to disarm in our inner cities? If I'm poor and live in a ghetto in DC, how long will I have to wait after I call in an intruder in my house at 3am? 5 minutes? 10? 20?
Thanks for the replies. They were friendly and quite instructive. And, I dare say, I even learned a few things.
I'm not understanding the hand waving about variations in the processor instruction stream. Isn't there an agreed upon measure for super computing and isn't it double floating point operations per second?
And why would you assume the cell processor in the PS3 is so different from the Cell processor used in computing? From what I understand, the only difference is only 6 cores are available instead of 8.
Sure the are several huge differences between distributed super computing, but the only one that effects processing power is granularity of jobs.
On a side note, it is interesting to see people, without any real data, say something like folding@home can't be as powerful as a "real" supercomputer. Never mind there are a magnitude or two more modern cores being used in folding@home.
Since floating@home is scientific computing, those numbers are without a doubt comparable. The only difference is instead of super computing jobs being distributed over high speeds buses to the cores, the jobs are distributed over the internet.
And yet this is still more than twice as fast as the #1 slot.
Okay, I surrender. The experts and scientists have spoken and have agreed this thing is safe. But this was all news to me, and the idea of a tiny black hole slowly sucking in mass from the center the planet, and having scientists say we have 1,000 years before volcanoes start erupting all over the planet, is not what I want to see on the morning news :P
I'd feel much better if a bunch of government agencies had signed off on this. While I'm sure they wouldn't actually accomplish anything themselves, they'd make sure all the science was fully vetted, in the public eye, by contractors.
You have that backwards. All rights to government are granted by the people. Or that's what that old musty document in DC says.
When you realize that 30% of US oil usage is for heating and electricity, not going nuclear is just crazy.
Yet we'd rather have acid rain, mercury poisoning, and massive CO2 emittance. We really are some silly monkeys.
The Japanese did a study in the 90's showing that uranium can be recovered from ocean water at about 10x the cost it is currently mined for. Since fuel is a tiny fraction of the operating cost of nuclear plants, we basically have an infinite (1,000 years from mining, magnitudes more from the oceans) supply of fuel, at negligible prices.