It depends on how you measure it. For example, here it says that solar is rapidly nearing cost parity except in places where restrictions and fees on net metering are in replace. But it's only fair that there should be such fees.
Part of the reason for this battle in the US is the stupid way US consumers are billed, you usually pay a single per-kWh fee. Here in Iceland our electricity bills are broken down into a "distribution fee", for the infrastructure, and a "generation fee", for the power. Surprise surprise, all of that infrastructure costs some serious money, about as much as the cost of generation itself. If a person uses solar and net-meters out at zero, they're still using all of that infrastructure (unless they're off-grid, but nobody's arguing that off-grid is anywhere near price parity). Even more than that you're relying on the existence and functionality of power plants to keep the lights on during the day. If everyone did like you, then there'd have to be instead of power plants massive daytime-energy-storage buffers, be they batteries, pumped hydro, etc (in addition to all of the wires, transformers, etc).
Now if you don't have to pay the utility, who exactly is supposed to fund this stuff? It's not cheap.
Yes, many US states require free net metering and power resale. It's the law, so utilities have to do it. But all you're doing at the time being is transferring the solar-generators' share of the infrastructure costs onto the non-solar-generators share. So when you report that these people can "break even", is that really a fair comparison?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big solar fan. And I think that to reach true parity subsidies - such as these free net metering laws - are a great way to help get solar to that point. But let's not kid ourselves, it is a subsidy.
(Things would be a lot less controversial if you'd properly break up your power bills into distribution vs. generation costs. Personally I think bills should be even further broken down to time intervals over the course of the day and have the purchase / sale price of electricity match the actual market price for that time. It'd be a big boon for solar users, at least in warm places with low to moderate market penetration where midday electricity is expensive and nighttime electricity is cheap)
Actually, the statistics are precisely opposite. The lower the turbine and the higher the RPM, the more birds it kills, while the higher the turbine and the lower the RPM (aka, the wider the blade radius), the fewer birds it kills. Also, tower design plays a major role. Those truss-style towers popular with small-scale turbines are the worst, as birds see them as potential perches / roosts.
The worst wind farm in the US for bird deaths by far is Altamont Pass, especially their older turbines, which look like this. They're pretty much a bird cuisinart, they kill thousands of raptors every year and have had a significant impact on California's bird of prey population, while most wind farms have an irrelevant impact on bird populations.
There is a such thing as people who want to be killed and eaten by cannibals, but that doesn't mean that the general case of people being killed and cannibalized is a happy relation of choice. No, most people in the sex industry do not want to be there. This is shown time and time again in international studies. Why the heck do you think sex trafficking exists?
The concept of a sex industry packed full of people who secretly lust after pleasing you is just part of the image people profitting from the industry want to sell customers on. It's marketing, not reality. Sex workers by choice absolutely do exist, but they're a very small minority. Most are there because of desperation, and a disturbing number in some places are not there of choice (a very common tactic is tricking people from poorer countries to travel to wealthier countries with promises of regular work, only to have them find out after they arrive that the work available to them is sex work and they have no means to get back to their home country nor any form of support network in a country they know nothing about).
Oh, no, I'm totally sure that the "particular and very specific claim about her personal life" that they wanted to dox her on has absolutely nothing to do with her sex life. Surely not. It's probably about what brand of coffee she drinks or something.
But it seems some "feminist" think that any job where women are in sex service means women are object or something
Right, I mean, in what way could having people oggle your body like a piece of meat or choose which person to buy from a catalog be interpreted as objectification? Pish, stupid feminists!
to sell their body on their own, and *exploit* the men for all their money worth
Sure, because that's totally the general case, right? Sorry, but as someone who's known several people who've worked in the sex industry, and is currently watching a friend struggle with choosing between starving or have his daughter have a "whore" (his words) as a father (he's straight, in case it matters... not like it actually does), this "prostitution is an empowering industry of choice" meme rings really f*ing hollow to me.
(to head you off, yes, I have been trying to help him, and am probably the only reason that he hasn't had to resort to it so far)
Right, because there's nobody more oppressed and powerless in the US, more incapable of handling PR, than corporations, right?
Those evil journalists! We should just assassinate them all with polonium! Especially ones that mention that they find a company working with an escort service to be sexist!
I don't care if she wrote that she feels Uber is in league with Satan , Doxxing Journalists Is Never Acceptable. And the reason for the focus on her in particular is because, and I quote, "In particular, Michael wished to target Pando founder Sarah Lacy after her publication’s repeated attacks against Uber." It says that right there in TFA. And in the article linked by the TFA, wherein Emil apparently went on at length about his rage against Sarah.
Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.
At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column and said that women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers. He said that he thought Lacy should be held “personally responsible” for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted.
Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.
It's such a F'ing gamergate attitude. Female journalist finds something you do sexist? Reveal details of her personal life - that'll teach the f*ing c*** to shut up, right?
Only very high pressure hydrogen stations can pull off such rapid fills, more common lower pressure stations can take several times longer.
And as much as I don't want a large tank of an extremely combustible gas (yes, it's far, far more combustible than gasoline, see above), near me, I really don't want the same amount of hydrogen at extreme pressures.
And it's so pointless. The hydrogen fuel cycle is so wasteful that it defeats its purpose right off the bat.
SOFCs are neat, but they have long warmup times and are bulky. They're efficient in continuous operation but wasteful in short operation. They're not really ideally suited to vehicles.
And make the process even less efficient? The hydrogen fuel cycle is as-is about 1/3rd as efficient as simply using electricity to power BEVs directly - and that's with efficient industrial H2 electrolysis. Trying to scale down dand "localize" H2 just makes it even worse.
And honestly, given how much hydrogen - completely unlike gasoline - likes to detonate rather than just burn, no, I'm not too fond of large numbers of potential points of failure. Yes, gasoline burns with a tremendous amount of energy. So does hydrogen. Except that the hydrogen does so in a small fraction of a percent as much time.
Gasoline does not explode (detonate) under STP conditions, no matter what the concentration, distribution, environment geometry, you name it. It simply doesn't. In ideal situations you can get a rapid conflagration, but even that requires very specific, often hard to achieve conditions. What you linked is a page about car fires, not explosions. Simply burning the gasoline, over a period of minutes.
Hydrogen does explode (detonate) under STP conditions, given a proper environment for a DTD transition. It does burn rapidly in almost any fuel-air mixture. It ignites with a spark of only around a tenth as much energy as gasoline - even trivial static sparks and discharges from common household electronics are enough to ignite it. Liquid hydrogen is even worse - for example, if air gets accidentally entrained in liquid hydrogen, it freezes out and can detonate with properties similar to high explosives.
Both gasoline and hydrogen pool in the right condition - but while gasoline pools on the floor, especially in low points, hydrogen pools in ceilings, especially overhangs. Hydrogen does tend to dissipate faster (although this is countered by its wider combustion range). Two additional problems occur with hydrogen. One, it embrittles metals very easily, both from rapid leaks and from slow leaks. Two, when it pools, it tends to seep into pipes and then follow them to their destinations; there have been cases where a hydrogen leak in one builing has caused an explosion in a completely different building (which is why whenever pipes are in a series and one contains hydrogen, it's always supposed to be the highest up).
There are plenty of chemicals more dangerous than hydrogen, no question. But the simple matter is, hydrogen is far more combustible than gasoline. It's just a basic fact. Which is obvious just by looking at, say, NASA's hydrogen handling guidelines. I mean, any building that handles more than 10kg is supposed to have a roof that's designed to be blown off in an explosion.
On the upside, hydrogen is nontoxic, unlike gasoline! Surface environmental consequences of leaks are minimum to none, although it does destroy high-altitude ozone, at a rate that would be a serious concern if hydrogen became a common fuel given typical leakage rates.
You could, if it's rotating around you at 30 or 60 or however many frames per second you want your film in. Of course, you can't just save the raw data for that. If you wanted literal direct camera data for all points and if we say a person can perceive a rotation of 0,1 degrees (it's probably a lot less than that) then a 30fps movie filmed by a rotating camera would actually have to film at 108k FPS (and a 60FPS movie at 216k FPS) to capture the view at each perceiptible point along its travel. Clearly that's an unreasonable amount of data. But as per above, you could use the stability and precisely known positions of the camera between frames to assist in quick mutual-point registration to get a measure of parallax and thus z-depth across your footage as the camera rotates, and thus could texture a series of discontinous simple surfaces around the user. The required texture data wouldn't be that much larger than simple stitched 3d stills of the same quality, and the 3d geometry resolution could probably be half an order of magnitude less than the texture resolution and still look right. And because you no longer need to film at each point the user can perceive, just enough to build up your textured geometry, you could probably film at more like a couple hundred frames per second. Or use a dozen or so stationary sensors cameras positioned around a head-sized sphere.
Specifically two cameras? Why? If you're picturing simple stereoscopy, that doesn't work if the viewer can turn their head.
If we're talking turning the head on just one axis, I picture something along the lines of a single camera sweeping in a horizontal circle at 60rpm (or two cameras at 30rpm, 3 at 20 rpm, etc, or any equivalent non-rotating setup using many sensors). The rotation (or virtual rotation) would be around an offset axis, where the center of rotation is the center of rotation of a human neck and the distance to the focal point is the distance to the focal point of a human eye. This would of course be a tremendous data stream, but you wouldn't actually be saving all of that. Instead you'd be building up a z-buffer based on the parallax or another ranging method and using that to create and texture simple discontinous 3d surfaces around the user.
Displaying the resulant movie would be not quite as simple as mere billboarding, but a lot easier than full 3d (no lighting / shadowing calculations, very simple obstruction culling, etc). That the surfaces would be discontunous isn't a problem - unless the goal would be to let people walk around freely, you don't need to know what's behind the gaps that the camera can't see. You could potentially even use data from earlier frames to remove the cameraman - the cameraman would just need to be sure to stand in areas where nothing has changed (even shadows / reflections / indirect lighting / etc, to the extent that's possible).
If you want full 2-axis VR, not just one axis, I don't think actual physically rotating cameras would work, I'd expect you'd have no option but to use many sensors on the outside of a sphere roughly the size of a human head.
That totally depends on what sort of work you want to do with your coding skills in the future, now doesn't it?
Personally I find most people who know C/C++ know little to nothing of the great capabilities of C++11 (and the small improvements from there to C++14). If you have an interest in C++ coding there's no shortage you could learn and practice there, and that's all offline stuff - just get a bleeding-edge g++ and all of the docs you can find. But really, it depends totally on what sort of stuff you want to do with coding in the future.
(That said, if you're up there, why not just go herd some yaks for a year or something? If I was in a little village in the Himalayas for a year I don't think "enhancing my coding skills" would be on the top of my TODO list...)
Because as we all know, feminists love nothing more than having women being dominant in the workforce only in traditionally-female, low-wage jobs like non-management positions in lower education.
That's teleporting information in the same way that writing down, "At 3:00 I'm going to do X, at 4:15 I'm going to do Y, at 4:50 I'm going to do Z..." on a letter and sending it to another party is teleporting information. The steps on which they take actions could just as well have been any source of non-random, pseudo-random, or random data of a reproduceable nature. They could just as well both have, for example, traditional random number generators keyed to the same key. Are traditional random number generators "information teleportation" because a person may have a list of planned activities in response to certain random values?
Here's how collapse of the waveform works. If you take a measurement, you will get a value.
1. The value you get is completely random to you. 2. You cannot in any way choose the value. 3. You cannot know, by reading it, if anyone else has already collapsed the waveform, or if the value you're getting is new. 4. If someone does collapse the waveform, however, when the other side tries to measure it, they'll get the same value - instantaneously.
The problem with trying to use this as some sort of instantaneous information teleportation system is that while it is instantaneous, it's not sending information. Your reading it does not give any information to the other side. You don't choose the value and they can't tell that you've read it. All they get is random noise.
It is, however, potentially valuable for cryptography, in that you can simultaneously generate the same one-time pad in two locations without any snoopable channel, which you can then use to encode or decode data. The data still has to be sent by conventional means - as mentioned above, you're not sending any information by measuring quantum states, the other side has no clue what you've done or not done - but the pad itself is perfectly random and unsnoopable.
Right, because when people want action on climate change, they're somehow not doing it to stop the extinction of species and save natural landscapes? Really?
And really, oygenation agents are your boogieman here? Guess what? They *do* reduce emissions. The use of oygenation agents has roughly contributed as much to reducing non-CO2 emissions as tighter emissions standards on cars, give or or take depending on the emission in question. The reduction in mileage isn't because you burn more gasoline, it's simply becaue the oxygenation agents don't contain as much energy as gasoline does.
You're then conflating all oxygenation agents together and totally screwing up in the process. The groundwater chemical you're thinking of MTBE. Yes, it's an oxygenate, but the main reason it was added was as an anti-knock agent. You know what it replaced? Tetraethyl lead. Now, MTBE groundwater contamination isn't a good thing, but it's sure a heck of a lot better than lead contamination. And MTBE is steadily being phased out in favor of cleaner anti-knock agents.
No oxygenation agent is perfect, they all have their drawbacks in specific fields. But overall the environmental benefits indisputably way outweigh the drawbacks. Unless you like lung damage and cancer, that is.
Now, having some level of oxygenates (a few percent) should be a no-brainer, to everyone who's not an idiot that is, and they have little measurable effect on fuel economy. The actual debate comes in when you start adding way more than is necessary to control pollution - for example, E10 and E15. These are more examples of trying to get people to burn an alternative fuel - which is primarily Big Ag, not environmentalists, who by and large strongly dislike corn ethanol.
And lastly, I love the sort of websites you're apparently reading, given your link;) To get out of the nut-o-sphere: the meadow-jumping-mouse is only endangered because its land has been heavily overgrazed by cattle (not just affecting the mice, but everything in the area, even local water supplies). The mouse used to be a keystone species in the area and the bottom of food chains but is now down to 29 small surviving populations. The logical response to the damage in all regards is to stop heavily overgrazing the land - something that the goverment has been working towards in the area for three decades. But I guess everyone has a right to graze land into a barren wasteland, right?
FYI, I live in Iceland where we long ago went down that road. The results aren't good.
The funny thing is, they're only trying to protect the riverbanks from being grazed into oblivion, which should be a no-brainer - the amount of land lost is comparatively quite small. But the guy doesn't even want to have to pipe water to his cattle, he'd much rather have his cattle destroy the riparian environment and drive a species to extinction than run a freaking hose.
Okay, I'll bite. Let's look at a few of what major environmental movements actions were around in the general ballpark of 1914 (let's say, 1910 to 1920) which met controversy from industry. Tell me which of them you think weren't in the right.
Let's first remember that the first real "conservationist president", Theodore Roosevelt, had just served, and taken vast swaths of land away from industrial interests. Lumber interests especially despised him. George Bird Grinnell had just made hunters mad by banning the killing of buffalo and limiting hunting / fur rights in many areas. But let's get to 1910-1920, by the time which a solid "green lobby" had managed become a powerful force in congress. What wins did those eco-nuts manage to pull off?
Establishment of Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Haleakala, Hawaii Volcanoes, Lassen Volcanic, Denali, Acadia, Grand Canyon, and Zion national parks. Most of which met with industry resistance, sometimes major. They'd been trying to make Grand Canyon a national park, for example, since 1882, but it encountered so much resistance that it took 37 years to achieve; its success was considered one of the greatest successes o the conservation movement at the time.
Protection of the most magificent forests of the US. 1914 was the year that famous conservationist John Muir died. It's largely due to his efforts and those who worked with him, for example, that logging of the Giant Sequoias was mostly stopped. The logging industry, one of the biggest in the US at the time, was not amused.
The New York State Audubon Plumage Law banned the sale of plumes of wild birds in the state in 1910 - birds had been widely killed left and right for the fashion industry, and you better believe that the (sizeable) NYC fashion industry fought against that one. But they lost. And by the end of the decade, 12 more states had passed similar laws. Those eco-nuts in the new Audubon Society also got the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 passed, against hunting and fashion interests. It passed a limited but still major earlier victory, the Weeks-McLean Act of 1913.
So, do you think the world would be a better place with the American Buffalo extinct, over half a dozen fewer popular national parks, all of the large sequoias gone, and countless local bird species exinct? Oh, but the economic impact all of those eco-nuts were causing back then, why won't someone please think of the economy...
Not to mention, the coal plants aren't just simply going to disappear. I really doubt Denmark is just going to dismantle them, at least in the near future - they'll surely just maintain them and keep them around for emergencies (such as an energy war with Russia or whatnot).
I question how much it's still "oil". Oil, outside of reservoirs, evolves. The volatiles slowly separate out; their ultimate fate is evaporation and photodegradation. The shortest chains are lost rapidly, but the longer they get, the longer they take to disappear. As volatiles are lost, the oil thickens. It eventually becomes tar, and then basically asphalt.
As for pronunciation: Á is said "ow". BOWR-dthar-BOON-ka. The R is an alveolar tap or trill. If that's too hard for you, you can also call it Holuhraun (HOLE-ih-HROYN), Nornahraun (NORDN-uh-HROYN), THorbjargarhraun (THOR-Byardg-ar-HROYN), or a bunch of other names (the TH should really be a thorn, but again, Slashdot silently eats thorns). Among the many proposals for names was Holuhraunshraunshraunshraun, which was suggested because it would be fun watching foreigners try to pronounce it;) It was never actually a serious contender, but I wrote an article poking fun at the concept on Uncyclopedia at one point;)
Slashdot Mirror
Nice job with the assumptions, but I actually live in Iceland (probably one of the least prudish countries on the planet), not the US, so try again.
It depends on how you measure it. For example, here it says that solar is rapidly nearing cost parity except in places where restrictions and fees on net metering are in replace. But it's only fair that there should be such fees.
Part of the reason for this battle in the US is the stupid way US consumers are billed, you usually pay a single per-kWh fee. Here in Iceland our electricity bills are broken down into a "distribution fee", for the infrastructure, and a "generation fee", for the power. Surprise surprise, all of that infrastructure costs some serious money, about as much as the cost of generation itself. If a person uses solar and net-meters out at zero, they're still using all of that infrastructure (unless they're off-grid, but nobody's arguing that off-grid is anywhere near price parity). Even more than that you're relying on the existence and functionality of power plants to keep the lights on during the day. If everyone did like you, then there'd have to be instead of power plants massive daytime-energy-storage buffers, be they batteries, pumped hydro, etc (in addition to all of the wires, transformers, etc).
Now if you don't have to pay the utility, who exactly is supposed to fund this stuff? It's not cheap.
Yes, many US states require free net metering and power resale. It's the law, so utilities have to do it. But all you're doing at the time being is transferring the solar-generators' share of the infrastructure costs onto the non-solar-generators share. So when you report that these people can "break even", is that really a fair comparison?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big solar fan. And I think that to reach true parity subsidies - such as these free net metering laws - are a great way to help get solar to that point. But let's not kid ourselves, it is a subsidy.
(Things would be a lot less controversial if you'd properly break up your power bills into distribution vs. generation costs. Personally I think bills should be even further broken down to time intervals over the course of the day and have the purchase / sale price of electricity match the actual market price for that time. It'd be a big boon for solar users, at least in warm places with low to moderate market penetration where midday electricity is expensive and nighttime electricity is cheap)
Actually, the statistics are precisely opposite. The lower the turbine and the higher the RPM, the more birds it kills, while the higher the turbine and the lower the RPM (aka, the wider the blade radius), the fewer birds it kills. Also, tower design plays a major role. Those truss-style towers popular with small-scale turbines are the worst, as birds see them as potential perches / roosts.
The worst wind farm in the US for bird deaths by far is Altamont Pass, especially their older turbines, which look like this. They're pretty much a bird cuisinart, they kill thousands of raptors every year and have had a significant impact on California's bird of prey population, while most wind farms have an irrelevant impact on bird populations.
There is a such thing as people who want to be killed and eaten by cannibals, but that doesn't mean that the general case of people being killed and cannibalized is a happy relation of choice. No, most people in the sex industry do not want to be there. This is shown time and time again in international studies. Why the heck do you think sex trafficking exists?
The concept of a sex industry packed full of people who secretly lust after pleasing you is just part of the image people profitting from the industry want to sell customers on. It's marketing, not reality. Sex workers by choice absolutely do exist, but they're a very small minority. Most are there because of desperation, and a disturbing number in some places are not there of choice (a very common tactic is tricking people from poorer countries to travel to wealthier countries with promises of regular work, only to have them find out after they arrive that the work available to them is sex work and they have no means to get back to their home country nor any form of support network in a country they know nothing about).
Oh, no, I'm totally sure that the "particular and very specific claim about her personal life" that they wanted to dox her on has absolutely nothing to do with her sex life. Surely not. It's probably about what brand of coffee she drinks or something.
But it seems some "feminist" think that any job where women are in sex service means women are object or something
Right, I mean, in what way could having people oggle your body like a piece of meat or choose which person to buy from a catalog be interpreted as objectification? Pish, stupid feminists!
to sell their body on their own, and *exploit* the men for all their money worth
Sure, because that's totally the general case, right? Sorry, but as someone who's known several people who've worked in the sex industry, and is currently watching a friend struggle with choosing between starving or have his daughter have a "whore" (his words) as a father (he's straight, in case it matters... not like it actually does), this "prostitution is an empowering industry of choice" meme rings really f*ing hollow to me.
(to head you off, yes, I have been trying to help him, and am probably the only reason that he hasn't had to resort to it so far)
Right, because there's nobody more oppressed and powerless in the US, more incapable of handling PR, than corporations, right?
Those evil journalists! We should just assassinate them all with polonium! Especially ones that mention that they find a company working with an escort service to be sexist!
I don't care if she wrote that she feels Uber is in league with Satan , Doxxing Journalists Is Never Acceptable. And the reason for the focus on her in particular is because, and I quote, "In particular, Michael wished to target Pando founder Sarah Lacy after her publication’s repeated attacks against Uber." It says that right there in TFA. And in the article linked by the TFA, wherein Emil apparently went on at length about his rage against Sarah.
It's such a F'ing gamergate attitude. Female journalist finds something you do sexist? Reveal details of her personal life - that'll teach the f*ing c*** to shut up, right?
Only very high pressure hydrogen stations can pull off such rapid fills, more common lower pressure stations can take several times longer.
And as much as I don't want a large tank of an extremely combustible gas (yes, it's far, far more combustible than gasoline, see above), near me, I really don't want the same amount of hydrogen at extreme pressures.
And it's so pointless. The hydrogen fuel cycle is so wasteful that it defeats its purpose right off the bat.
SOFCs are neat, but they have long warmup times and are bulky. They're efficient in continuous operation but wasteful in short operation. They're not really ideally suited to vehicles.
And make the process even less efficient? The hydrogen fuel cycle is as-is about 1/3rd as efficient as simply using electricity to power BEVs directly - and that's with efficient industrial H2 electrolysis. Trying to scale down dand "localize" H2 just makes it even worse.
And honestly, given how much hydrogen - completely unlike gasoline - likes to detonate rather than just burn, no, I'm not too fond of large numbers of potential points of failure. Yes, gasoline burns with a tremendous amount of energy. So does hydrogen. Except that the hydrogen does so in a small fraction of a percent as much time.
Gasoline does not explode (detonate) under STP conditions, no matter what the concentration, distribution, environment geometry, you name it. It simply doesn't. In ideal situations you can get a rapid conflagration, but even that requires very specific, often hard to achieve conditions. What you linked is a page about car fires, not explosions. Simply burning the gasoline, over a period of minutes.
Hydrogen does explode (detonate) under STP conditions, given a proper environment for a DTD transition. It does burn rapidly in almost any fuel-air mixture. It ignites with a spark of only around a tenth as much energy as gasoline - even trivial static sparks and discharges from common household electronics are enough to ignite it. Liquid hydrogen is even worse - for example, if air gets accidentally entrained in liquid hydrogen, it freezes out and can detonate with properties similar to high explosives.
Both gasoline and hydrogen pool in the right condition - but while gasoline pools on the floor, especially in low points, hydrogen pools in ceilings, especially overhangs. Hydrogen does tend to dissipate faster (although this is countered by its wider combustion range). Two additional problems occur with hydrogen. One, it embrittles metals very easily, both from rapid leaks and from slow leaks. Two, when it pools, it tends to seep into pipes and then follow them to their destinations; there have been cases where a hydrogen leak in one builing has caused an explosion in a completely different building (which is why whenever pipes are in a series and one contains hydrogen, it's always supposed to be the highest up).
There are plenty of chemicals more dangerous than hydrogen, no question. But the simple matter is, hydrogen is far more combustible than gasoline. It's just a basic fact. Which is obvious just by looking at, say, NASA's hydrogen handling guidelines. I mean, any building that handles more than 10kg is supposed to have a roof that's designed to be blown off in an explosion.
On the upside, hydrogen is nontoxic, unlike gasoline! Surface environmental consequences of leaks are minimum to none, although it does destroy high-altitude ozone, at a rate that would be a serious concern if hydrogen became a common fuel given typical leakage rates.
You could, if it's rotating around you at 30 or 60 or however many frames per second you want your film in. Of course, you can't just save the raw data for that. If you wanted literal direct camera data for all points and if we say a person can perceive a rotation of 0,1 degrees (it's probably a lot less than that) then a 30fps movie filmed by a rotating camera would actually have to film at 108k FPS (and a 60FPS movie at 216k FPS) to capture the view at each perceiptible point along its travel. Clearly that's an unreasonable amount of data. But as per above, you could use the stability and precisely known positions of the camera between frames to assist in quick mutual-point registration to get a measure of parallax and thus z-depth across your footage as the camera rotates, and thus could texture a series of discontinous simple surfaces around the user. The required texture data wouldn't be that much larger than simple stitched 3d stills of the same quality, and the 3d geometry resolution could probably be half an order of magnitude less than the texture resolution and still look right. And because you no longer need to film at each point the user can perceive, just enough to build up your textured geometry, you could probably film at more like a couple hundred frames per second. Or use a dozen or so stationary sensors cameras positioned around a head-sized sphere.
Specifically two cameras? Why? If you're picturing simple stereoscopy, that doesn't work if the viewer can turn their head.
If we're talking turning the head on just one axis, I picture something along the lines of a single camera sweeping in a horizontal circle at 60rpm (or two cameras at 30rpm, 3 at 20 rpm, etc, or any equivalent non-rotating setup using many sensors). The rotation (or virtual rotation) would be around an offset axis, where the center of rotation is the center of rotation of a human neck and the distance to the focal point is the distance to the focal point of a human eye. This would of course be a tremendous data stream, but you wouldn't actually be saving all of that. Instead you'd be building up a z-buffer based on the parallax or another ranging method and using that to create and texture simple discontinous 3d surfaces around the user.
Displaying the resulant movie would be not quite as simple as mere billboarding, but a lot easier than full 3d (no lighting / shadowing calculations, very simple obstruction culling, etc). That the surfaces would be discontunous isn't a problem - unless the goal would be to let people walk around freely, you don't need to know what's behind the gaps that the camera can't see. You could potentially even use data from earlier frames to remove the cameraman - the cameraman would just need to be sure to stand in areas where nothing has changed (even shadows / reflections / indirect lighting / etc, to the extent that's possible).
If you want full 2-axis VR, not just one axis, I don't think actual physically rotating cameras would work, I'd expect you'd have no option but to use many sensors on the outside of a sphere roughly the size of a human head.
That totally depends on what sort of work you want to do with your coding skills in the future, now doesn't it?
Personally I find most people who know C/C++ know little to nothing of the great capabilities of C++11 (and the small improvements from there to C++14). If you have an interest in C++ coding there's no shortage you could learn and practice there, and that's all offline stuff - just get a bleeding-edge g++ and all of the docs you can find. But really, it depends totally on what sort of stuff you want to do with coding in the future.
(That said, if you're up there, why not just go herd some yaks for a year or something? If I was in a little village in the Himalayas for a year I don't think "enhancing my coding skills" would be on the top of my TODO list...)
Because as we all know, feminists love nothing more than having women being dominant in the workforce only in traditionally-female, low-wage jobs like non-management positions in lower education.
That's teleporting information in the same way that writing down, "At 3:00 I'm going to do X, at 4:15 I'm going to do Y, at 4:50 I'm going to do Z..." on a letter and sending it to another party is teleporting information. The steps on which they take actions could just as well have been any source of non-random, pseudo-random, or random data of a reproduceable nature. They could just as well both have, for example, traditional random number generators keyed to the same key. Are traditional random number generators "information teleportation" because a person may have a list of planned activities in response to certain random values?
Here's how collapse of the waveform works. If you take a measurement, you will get a value.
1. The value you get is completely random to you.
2. You cannot in any way choose the value.
3. You cannot know, by reading it, if anyone else has already collapsed the waveform, or if the value you're getting is new.
4. If someone does collapse the waveform, however, when the other side tries to measure it, they'll get the same value - instantaneously.
The problem with trying to use this as some sort of instantaneous information teleportation system is that while it is instantaneous, it's not sending information. Your reading it does not give any information to the other side. You don't choose the value and they can't tell that you've read it. All they get is random noise.
It is, however, potentially valuable for cryptography, in that you can simultaneously generate the same one-time pad in two locations without any snoopable channel, which you can then use to encode or decode data. The data still has to be sent by conventional means - as mentioned above, you're not sending any information by measuring quantum states, the other side has no clue what you've done or not done - but the pad itself is perfectly random and unsnoopable.
"If the pizzaman truly loves this babysitter, why does he keep slapping her rear?" (beat) "Perhaps she's done something wrong..."
Right, because when people want action on climate change, they're somehow not doing it to stop the extinction of species and save natural landscapes? Really?
And really, oygenation agents are your boogieman here? Guess what? They *do* reduce emissions. The use of oygenation agents has roughly contributed as much to reducing non-CO2 emissions as tighter emissions standards on cars, give or or take depending on the emission in question. The reduction in mileage isn't because you burn more gasoline, it's simply becaue the oxygenation agents don't contain as much energy as gasoline does.
You're then conflating all oxygenation agents together and totally screwing up in the process. The groundwater chemical you're thinking of MTBE. Yes, it's an oxygenate, but the main reason it was added was as an anti-knock agent. You know what it replaced? Tetraethyl lead. Now, MTBE groundwater contamination isn't a good thing, but it's sure a heck of a lot better than lead contamination. And MTBE is steadily being phased out in favor of cleaner anti-knock agents.
No oxygenation agent is perfect, they all have their drawbacks in specific fields. But overall the environmental benefits indisputably way outweigh the drawbacks. Unless you like lung damage and cancer, that is.
Now, having some level of oxygenates (a few percent) should be a no-brainer, to everyone who's not an idiot that is, and they have little measurable effect on fuel economy. The actual debate comes in when you start adding way more than is necessary to control pollution - for example, E10 and E15. These are more examples of trying to get people to burn an alternative fuel - which is primarily Big Ag, not environmentalists, who by and large strongly dislike corn ethanol.
And lastly, I love the sort of websites you're apparently reading, given your link ;) To get out of the nut-o-sphere: the meadow-jumping-mouse is only endangered because its land has been heavily overgrazed by cattle (not just affecting the mice, but everything in the area, even local water supplies). The mouse used to be a keystone species in the area and the bottom of food chains but is now down to 29 small surviving populations. The logical response to the damage in all regards is to stop heavily overgrazing the land - something that the goverment has been working towards in the area for three decades. But I guess everyone has a right to graze land into a barren wasteland, right?
FYI, I live in Iceland where we long ago went down that road. The results aren't good.
The funny thing is, they're only trying to protect the riverbanks from being grazed into oblivion, which should be a no-brainer - the amount of land lost is comparatively quite small. But the guy doesn't even want to have to pipe water to his cattle, he'd much rather have his cattle destroy the riparian environment and drive a species to extinction than run a freaking hose.
Okay, I'll bite. Let's look at a few of what major environmental movements actions were around in the general ballpark of 1914 (let's say, 1910 to 1920) which met controversy from industry. Tell me which of them you think weren't in the right.
Let's first remember that the first real "conservationist president", Theodore Roosevelt, had just served, and taken vast swaths of land away from industrial interests. Lumber interests especially despised him. George Bird Grinnell had just made hunters mad by banning the killing of buffalo and limiting hunting / fur rights in many areas. But let's get to 1910-1920, by the time which a solid "green lobby" had managed become a powerful force in congress. What wins did those eco-nuts manage to pull off?
Establishment of Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Haleakala, Hawaii Volcanoes, Lassen Volcanic, Denali, Acadia, Grand Canyon, and Zion national parks. Most of which met with industry resistance, sometimes major. They'd been trying to make Grand Canyon a national park, for example, since 1882, but it encountered so much resistance that it took 37 years to achieve; its success was considered one of the greatest successes o the conservation movement at the time.
Protection of the most magificent forests of the US. 1914 was the year that famous conservationist John Muir died. It's largely due to his efforts and those who worked with him, for example, that logging of the Giant Sequoias was mostly stopped. The logging industry, one of the biggest in the US at the time, was not amused.
The New York State Audubon Plumage Law banned the sale of plumes of wild birds in the state in 1910 - birds had been widely killed left and right for the fashion industry, and you better believe that the (sizeable) NYC fashion industry fought against that one. But they lost. And by the end of the decade, 12 more states had passed similar laws. Those eco-nuts in the new Audubon Society also got the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 passed, against hunting and fashion interests. It passed a limited but still major earlier victory, the Weeks-McLean Act of 1913.
So, do you think the world would be a better place with the American Buffalo extinct, over half a dozen fewer popular national parks, all of the large sequoias gone, and countless local bird species exinct? Oh, but the economic impact all of those eco-nuts were causing back then, why won't someone please think of the economy...
Not to mention, the coal plants aren't just simply going to disappear. I really doubt Denmark is just going to dismantle them, at least in the near future - they'll surely just maintain them and keep them around for emergencies (such as an energy war with Russia or whatnot).
I question how much it's still "oil". Oil, outside of reservoirs, evolves. The volatiles slowly separate out; their ultimate fate is evaporation and photodegradation. The shortest chains are lost rapidly, but the longer they get, the longer they take to disappear. As volatiles are lost, the oil thickens. It eventually becomes tar, and then basically asphalt.
Oh, and for the record, lava and snow are IMHO a beautiful reaction. :) Fire and ice, baby!
I just typed it. But Slashdot simply "disappears" thorn characters, which is annoying.
Bárðarbunga is full of eye candy. I can point to abundant examples including no shortage of videos on Youtube / Vimeo.
As for pronunciation: Á is said "ow". BOWR-dthar-BOON-ka. The R is an alveolar tap or trill. If that's too hard for you, you can also call it Holuhraun (HOLE-ih-HROYN), Nornahraun (NORDN-uh-HROYN), THorbjargarhraun (THOR-Byardg-ar-HROYN), or a bunch of other names (the TH should really be a thorn, but again, Slashdot silently eats thorns). Among the many proposals for names was Holuhraunshraunshraunshraun, which was suggested because it would be fun watching foreigners try to pronounce it ;) It was never actually a serious contender, but I wrote an article poking fun at the concept on Uncyclopedia at one point ;)