So their solution is to lobby government the world over to reverse net metering laws and end solar subsidies.
They were fine with allowing those subsidies to be passed when they knew no one would be using them. Now that solar cell production has radically ramped up and is finally enjoying actual economies of scale and people are actually using the subsidy, they're howling and crying to have it removed.
At the moment those costs are hidden in the average cost of a kWh.
Speak for yourself. My electric co-op charges me an explicit infrastructure charge, itemized separately from my usage-based power consumption bill. It's a flat rate. It's 50 cents per day. And before you fluff up and fume and fuss, that is a sustainable price. It has not changed in over a decade. It is also the correct price. It's a co-op. I'm a part owner. I attend the annual meetings when I can, and always read the financial statements they publish every year. I know every detail of the financial workings of the co-op. I can go to their home office and read the contracts, if it suits me. I'm an owner.
50 cents per meter per day is sufficient to keep an award-winning grid in good repair. And this is a rural grid too, with a relatively low density of meters per mile of wire. State law forbids co-ops to operate inside of incorporated city limits, one of the finer examples of crony capitalism to be found. Only the for-profit corporations are allowed to serve cities, with their much higher density of meters per mile of wire. So not only is my co-op sustainably servicing my house for 50 cents per day, they're doing it while lugging power across mostly empty rural counties. If they were allowed to serve all of the residents, that fee would go down, since the average number of meters per mile would go up.
No, the government does not need to take them over. The customers do. They simply won't be profitable anymore. Power will still be delivered, the lights will still stay on, average outage frequency and duration will go down (I have numbers to prove it), and fat cats will no longer get fatter at the expense of the poor and middle class. Oh what a crying shame.
Which in turn prevented renewables from being hooked to the network, because you cannot hook wind or solar to network without almost entire capacity worth of spinning reserve sitting on the network - you risk grid collapse and those rules are there for that very reason. The situation is utterly ridiculous and is a great example of just how dysfunctional the current German model is.
And they're perfectly aware of it and are moving to solve it by investing in development of home battery storage. A story that was covered on Slashdot in 2013.
Yes it's a real problem. There's a known solution. Not a high tech solution, either. Battery storage on that scale is extremely well understood. Business has been using battery backup systems designed to serve whole buildings for decades. The buildings are called data centers. Practically every data center in the world has what you'd call "utility scale" battery backup, good for at least several minutes for the whole building, to give local generators time to spin up. Expanding the capacity enough to eliminate the generator part for a house and shrinking the size enough to reasonably install in a house is what the German initiative is all about, and that's just engineering. Something Germans are exceedingly good at.
It is an acknowledged problem with a solution that has been under development for nearly a year already. It will be solved, and solved fairly soon. It will be deployed over the course of the next several years, and at the end of that time, much if not most of that spinning reserve will be shut down. Possibly permanently. It's conceivable that within my lifetime, there will be no operating fossil fuel electrical generation plants in Germany at all. Germans will enjoy individual energy independence. Their personal generation + storage systems will pay for themselves, a personal capital investment outcome that is exceedingly unusual, and then go on generating literally free power for years after the investment is paid off.
Watch the establishment try to stop this product through such excuses as building codes etc..
They won't have to lift a finger. Nobody is mass-producing the photovoltaic cells that can accept the whopping concentration of sunlight the thing uses, and even if they were, almost nobody has access to sufficient water flow to keep it cooled. Cool water goes in, really stinking hot water comes out. It's illegal to dump high volumes of water that warm into rivers and lakes in the US (which is why nuclear power plants have huge cooling towers, despite being located next to rivers and lakes). So even if you could get your hands on the cells it uses, odds are you can't keep them from melting into slag if you build the dish.
It's mostly useful in tropical islands, which have easy access to lots of water and currently have expensive electricity.
And still, it's IBM. They're a services company. They don't like to make hardware anymore. But they adore patents. So none of these will be built, anywhere.
...but at smaller offices, if you are un-insured, you can get routine visits for a fairly affordable price. Before you call BS on me, I have done this before, as me and my family went without insurance for a year or two when I was getting my own business going.
I know you can, if you're quite lucky, find a cheap primary care physician, especially pediatricians. I heavily emphasized cheapness, but "readily available" and "universally applicable" were also in there, and your post is full of exactly how neither of those apply.
It is almost always better to self insure portions of risk if you can reasonable do do -- why pay middlemen? Do you buy the "extended warranty" on every USB cable you buy from BestBuy or NewEgg?
No, but that's a useless analogy. There is NO medical equivalent of the USB cable I buy from NewEgg. Readily available, universally applicable, and most of all, cheap. There is nothing whatsoever in the US healthcare system that qualifies as cheap. Anywhere. Even the most trivial of routine checkups required by law (e.g. college admissions) has a cash price of hundreds of dollars. It only costs less than that if you (or your employer) has paid money into the protection racket called health "insurance." Which a) is not insurance and; b) serves as nothing other than a profit-taking gatekeeper to the services you actually want.
The Affordable Care Act, better known as RomneyCare, because that's the closest system that had previously been enacted in the US, is indeed a travesty. It's a giant giveaway to an industry that does not provide health care! The insurance industry. It's crony capitalism at its finest, sold to the American people with the carrot dangled by the Democratic party and the stick wielded by the Republican party. Only in America can a population of 300 million be fooled into paying so incredibly much for so very little.
If we were a civilized nation, we'd have enacted single-payer when Canada did in 1966 and we wouldn't be having this conversation. But we're not. We're blind and stupid and consistently vote against our own interests by voting for the interests of oligarchs.
Similarly if you start inhabiting Siberia and Antarctica with more human activity resulting in greater melting of these regions you'll simply be flooding coastal regions elsewhere and making them uninhabitable.
But think of the savings in air conditioning costs. It's a huge win-win.
Florida shouldn't be populated by anybody but the alligators anyway.
Fuel for an imaginary reactor you hope you can build at some indeterminate point in the future. Or are you aware of someone building a commercial one?
Yes, he is. Did you not see the reference to China? China sent representatives to tour Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They patiently listened to all the nanotech PR, then asked about molten salt reactors. They got everything. They're working on continuing the work Oak Ridge stopped doing decades ago, starting from what Oak Ridge had.
He made up the bit about 2020, since they said nothing about schedule, but they've publicly admitted to working on molten salt designs.
Oh, and the person leading the project is very tightly connected to the ruling party. Meaning they will get resources and approvals and whatever it takes to get the job done. China has a massive latent appetite for electrical energy. They're pursuing every possibility in order to get more.
That battery will NOT last forever, and when it needs a new one you'd be better off scrapping the entire car and buying a new one.
At today's battery prices, sure. But the whole premise of the gigafactory is today's battery prices need to be made obsolete, and a new factory could do it. Will do it, unless every number crunched by Tesla is wrong, and that doesn't seem likely.
Today, yeah, replacing a complete lithium ion battery pack is prohibitively expensive. Tomorrow? Likely it will be a lot less.
Why the fuck does Boeing get $1.6 Billion extra for the same job?
Because it isn't the same job. Boeing hasn't built anything. They have a pile of paper they have to turn into a spacecraft. SpaceX has been flying the pressure vessel they're using for over a year, on three missions. They have a lot less to do.
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill because they pissed me off." --Seen on the desk of a secretary in the Psychology Department
anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) is a fact. In fact, it's so simply even you could devise a test. 1) Visible light strikes the earth Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes 2) Visible light has nothing for CO2 to absorb, so it pass right on through. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes 3) When visible light strike an object, IR is generated. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes 4) Green house gasses, such as CO2, absorb energy(heat) from IR. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes 5) Humans produce more CO2(and other green house gasses) then can be absorbed through the cycle. Testable?...
...and right there your argument runs off the rails. The answer to #5 is No. No one can devise a test. Why? Because no one understands the entire system. You can not test a cycle that you can not describe.
But all of the blah blah above doesn't even matter. If it was as simple as you persistently and repeatedly claim, no climate model would ever be wrong. But looking around, we discover that, in fact, not a single climate model has always been right. Not one. Every single one of them has been wrong in its predictions, some of them laughably wrong. Yes, each one of those tiny little factoids you like to write is true. And if the Earth was a bell jar full of CO2 that might matter. It's not. A bell jar full of CO2 is an utterly useless model of Earth when talking about temperatures. It has nothing to do with anything. It's so far removed from reality that it makes a spherical cow look like an optimal model of friction. The real system is vastly more complex. It's so complex that no current climate model contains every aspect of it, as evidenced by their continued failure to match reality, by the (published, peer-reviewed) admission of their own creators.
If and when a model successfully predicts half a century to within the commonly accepted rate of statistical significance, we will know the model is a reasonable simulation of reality. Predicting next year or next decade is not enough: that's just weather. Until then, they're just spitballing. Unless and until the model meets the commonly accepted evidentiary standards of science, it's neither complete nor worthy of consideration as a guide for public policy, especially when some of the public policy proposed on the basis of unproven models will actively harm a very large number of humans. Possibly all humans everywhere.
Perhaps before you advocate actively harming each and every living and future member of the human race, you should have a more accurate model.
According to the structural engineer, yes a 20 km tower is probably possible. There's nothing in material science preventing it. The detailed engineering to figure out how to build and assemble the largest structural members in the base have not been worked out, but at least in theory, it can be done.
Presumably Neal Stephenson will finish a story telling us what the hell it's for.
Whether you like or dislike net neutrality, you should NOT like government regulatory agencies setting public policy unilaterally without legislators involved.
The legislators were involved. This whole situation was supposed to be a good thing.
The theory was the government could be more responsive and more able to keep up with changing times than the legislature could be, so the law was written to broadly authorize the Executive branch to come up with the details on its own, rather than having every tiny little thing argued over by Congress itself. All the various federal commissions and most of the administrations were set up under that theory. Congress broadly sets policy and writes up the authorizations and the Executive branch takes care of the details. In an attempt to preserve a little democracy, Congress did mandate this public comment thing. At least the part where comments have to be solicited. Of course, odds are good that nothing says those comments have to be in any way heeded.
If regulatory capture wasn't a thing, it wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, the phrase "for the public good" has fallen out of favor. The Almighty Dollar speaks, and the government falls all over itself to listen. As if somehow all things business does are guaranteed to be good for the general public. Apparently all of history happened in vain. People never learn.
It's very possible that this method of charging was mandated by safety considerations. A direct electric connection to a sweaty wrist worn device is sort of scary.
It's not at all possible because it's not scary. All smart watches run on low voltage DC, just like every other battery-powered watch since the dawn of the electronic age. Human skin has no difficulty resisting the voltages involved. Have you ever licked a 9 volt battery? Or know someone who has? They don't have a burned tongue. And smart watches run on less than 9 volts. Sweat is only a corrosion problem, not a conductivity problem.
Household power should be low voltage DC, not AC. Edison was right, at short distances. It's much much safer than even the 110 AC we use in the US, let alone the higher voltages used elsewhere in the world.
You can also plug it into other boards (termed 'bricks',
You included links to SparkFun but still called them bricks? They're called blocks, not bricks.
There was a time when SGI held a trademark on calling computer expansion parts 'bricks'. Not sure if that trademark has lapsed or not. If Intel was calling them bricks and is now calling them blocks, one can surmise the trademark is still extant and it took a while for the lawyers to notice.
Ariane 1 - second and fifth launches failed Ariane 2 - only 6 launches, first failed Ariane 3 - fifth launch failed Ariane 4 - eighth launch failed Ariane 5 - first launch failed, two partial failures in first 11 Atlas A - only 8 launches, 5 failed Atlas B - only 10 launches, 3 failed Atlas C - only 6 launches, 2 failed Delta - first launch failed Delta II - first twelve successful, partial failure on the 42nd launch which substantially reduced the satellites operational lifespan (55th was first total failure) Falcon 1 - only five launches, first three failed Falcon 9 - first twelve launches successful, although a secondary payload on the fourth launch was aborted as a precaution Long March 1 - only 2 launches, both successful Long March 2 - first launch failed Long March 3 - no complete failures in first 11, but 1 and 8 were partial failures N-1 - only four launches, all failed horribly Proton - third launch failed Proton-K - second, third, fourth and sixth launches failed Proton-M - eleventh launch failed Saturn I - only ten launches, all successful Saturn IB - only nine launches, all successful (unless you count Apollo 1 - it didn't launch but still killed three astronauts) Saturn V - second launch (Apollo 6) failed, Apollo 13 doesn't count because it was a payload, not launcher, failure Soyuz - third launch failed, with fatalities Soyuz-U - seventh launch failed Soyuz-FG - first twelve launches successful (all 46 to date completely successful, including lots and lots of astronauts delivered to ISS) Space Shuttle - first twelve successful (19th was first partial failure (ATO), 25th was first full failure) Titan I - fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth launches failed Titan II - ninth and eleventh launches failed Titan III - first and sixth launches failed Titan IV - seventh launch failed Zenit-2 - first and second launches failed
Falcon 9 will remain one of four until it beats (or fails to beat) Shuttle's record, probably sometime in 2016. Then it's likely to take many years to beat Delta II (which had a three decade head start). It may only beat Soyuz-FG if the Russians foul up, since they're still being launched quite regularly.
This is a major fallacy of economic thinking that really needs to be put to bed. It isn't true. Thinking like this is the basis for the Trickle Down Theory of economics, which has been soundly falsified. No, we won't always want more. Unbridled all-consuming unsatisfiable greed is a neurosis. It is abnormal and very unusual. Adults who suffer from the condition are considered stunted, little more than children. Children are expected to grow out of it, if they ever go through that phase at all. If you always want more, everybody around you thinks there's something wrong with you, and will usually avoid being around you any more after a while.
Normal people, by definition most people, are satisfiable. And satisfiable without actually all that many resources, in the grand scheme of things. Yes we all want more than a 19th century standard of living, but that's because the ancient Romans had a better standard of living than most of the world in the 19th century. It didn't take much to do better than that. Our needs get satisfied in a hurry. A variety of food, some indoor plumbing, and a roof that doesn't leak covers most of it. Add on some form of personal transportation if you live in a large, mostly empty continent like North America, and you're done. The wants that go on top of that are actually quite minimal. Almost nobody has more than two cell phones, and the vast majority of the world has only one. Practically every type of consumer electronics and appliance follows the same pattern. People have one cell phone, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop (they forgot they had), one blender, one microwave, one toaster oven, one deep fryer. The only people who have six cell phones are neurotic or app developers (but I repeat myself).
Yes, once you have one of everything, you can just go bigger. But again, there are pretty serious upper limits. Most people don't want a 700 room palace on the order of Versailles. Even those who did had a tendency to stuff 3000 permanent residents into that space. Most people don't want their own yacht, let alone their very own cruise ship, or there would be many more yachts in the world. So it goes for every thing you can possess.
So no, most people won't always want more. Most people in developed nations are quite satisfied with what they have. Sure they dream about palaces and fleets of sports cars, but drop unlimited funds on their cringing heads and they still won't buy all that. They'd be uncomfortable trying to live in a palace.
People's needs can be trivially satisfied. People's wants can be easily satisfied. Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?
The fact that in their private lives they decided to indulge in an activity that lots of people do isn’t something that should even be reported, much less held against them or effect their careers.
Held against them or affect their careers? I don't read mainstream news or pay attention to celebrities, so when this story hit the Slashdot front page, I didn't recognize any of the names, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the people named are all pretty girls. I'm quite certain that in Hollywood, naked pictures of already famous pretty girls are only a help to their careers, not a hindrance. With the possible exception of Disney stars, but that's probably only momentary. They'll just sign with Sony instead.
All the false outrage over naked people is just that: false outrage. The rumor-mongering, scandal-spreading, gossip-loving general public laps this shit up and begs for more. It sells papers (metaphorically), it drives hits, it pushes up ratings, and a bunch of pretty girls are going to see their star currency ratings climb substantially for a while.
In the end, much sound and fury signifying nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
So their solution is to lobby government the world over to reverse net metering laws and end solar subsidies.
They were fine with allowing those subsidies to be passed when they knew no one would be using them. Now that solar cell production has radically ramped up and is finally enjoying actual economies of scale and people are actually using the subsidy, they're howling and crying to have it removed.
Because in the face of profit, policy dies.
At the moment those costs are hidden in the average cost of a kWh.
Speak for yourself. My electric co-op charges me an explicit infrastructure charge, itemized separately from my usage-based power consumption bill. It's a flat rate. It's 50 cents per day. And before you fluff up and fume and fuss, that is a sustainable price. It has not changed in over a decade. It is also the correct price. It's a co-op. I'm a part owner. I attend the annual meetings when I can, and always read the financial statements they publish every year. I know every detail of the financial workings of the co-op. I can go to their home office and read the contracts, if it suits me. I'm an owner.
50 cents per meter per day is sufficient to keep an award-winning grid in good repair. And this is a rural grid too, with a relatively low density of meters per mile of wire. State law forbids co-ops to operate inside of incorporated city limits, one of the finer examples of crony capitalism to be found. Only the for-profit corporations are allowed to serve cities, with their much higher density of meters per mile of wire. So not only is my co-op sustainably servicing my house for 50 cents per day, they're doing it while lugging power across mostly empty rural counties. If they were allowed to serve all of the residents, that fee would go down, since the average number of meters per mile would go up.
No, the government does not need to take them over. The customers do. They simply won't be profitable anymore. Power will still be delivered, the lights will still stay on, average outage frequency and duration will go down (I have numbers to prove it), and fat cats will no longer get fatter at the expense of the poor and middle class. Oh what a crying shame.
No, it's not a free lunch. But it is lunch money.
Which in turn prevented renewables from being hooked to the network, because you cannot hook wind or solar to network without almost entire capacity worth of spinning reserve sitting on the network - you risk grid collapse and those rules are there for that very reason. The situation is utterly ridiculous and is a great example of just how dysfunctional the current German model is.
And they're perfectly aware of it and are moving to solve it by investing in development of home battery storage. A story that was covered on Slashdot in 2013.
Yes it's a real problem. There's a known solution. Not a high tech solution, either. Battery storage on that scale is extremely well understood. Business has been using battery backup systems designed to serve whole buildings for decades. The buildings are called data centers. Practically every data center in the world has what you'd call "utility scale" battery backup, good for at least several minutes for the whole building, to give local generators time to spin up. Expanding the capacity enough to eliminate the generator part for a house and shrinking the size enough to reasonably install in a house is what the German initiative is all about, and that's just engineering. Something Germans are exceedingly good at.
It is an acknowledged problem with a solution that has been under development for nearly a year already. It will be solved, and solved fairly soon. It will be deployed over the course of the next several years, and at the end of that time, much if not most of that spinning reserve will be shut down. Possibly permanently. It's conceivable that within my lifetime, there will be no operating fossil fuel electrical generation plants in Germany at all. Germans will enjoy individual energy independence. Their personal generation + storage systems will pay for themselves, a personal capital investment outcome that is exceedingly unusual, and then go on generating literally free power for years after the investment is paid off.
I don't know why you were modded down.
Anonymous Cowards start with a score of 0. He was modded up, not down.
Watch the establishment try to stop this product through such excuses as building codes etc..
They won't have to lift a finger. Nobody is mass-producing the photovoltaic cells that can accept the whopping concentration of sunlight the thing uses, and even if they were, almost nobody has access to sufficient water flow to keep it cooled. Cool water goes in, really stinking hot water comes out. It's illegal to dump high volumes of water that warm into rivers and lakes in the US (which is why nuclear power plants have huge cooling towers, despite being located next to rivers and lakes). So even if you could get your hands on the cells it uses, odds are you can't keep them from melting into slag if you build the dish.
It's mostly useful in tropical islands, which have easy access to lots of water and currently have expensive electricity.
And still, it's IBM. They're a services company. They don't like to make hardware anymore. But they adore patents. So none of these will be built, anywhere.
...but at smaller offices, if you are un-insured, you can get routine visits for a fairly affordable price. Before you call BS on me, I have done this before, as me and my family went without insurance for a year or two when I was getting my own business going.
I know you can, if you're quite lucky, find a cheap primary care physician, especially pediatricians. I heavily emphasized cheapness, but "readily available" and "universally applicable" were also in there, and your post is full of exactly how neither of those apply.
USB, it ain't. It's a travesty is what it is.
It is almost always better to self insure portions of risk if you can reasonable do do -- why pay middlemen? Do you buy the "extended warranty" on every USB cable you buy from BestBuy or NewEgg?
No, but that's a useless analogy. There is NO medical equivalent of the USB cable I buy from NewEgg. Readily available, universally applicable, and most of all, cheap. There is nothing whatsoever in the US healthcare system that qualifies as cheap. Anywhere. Even the most trivial of routine checkups required by law (e.g. college admissions) has a cash price of hundreds of dollars. It only costs less than that if you (or your employer) has paid money into the protection racket called health "insurance." Which a) is not insurance and; b) serves as nothing other than a profit-taking gatekeeper to the services you actually want.
The Affordable Care Act, better known as RomneyCare, because that's the closest system that had previously been enacted in the US, is indeed a travesty. It's a giant giveaway to an industry that does not provide health care! The insurance industry. It's crony capitalism at its finest, sold to the American people with the carrot dangled by the Democratic party and the stick wielded by the Republican party. Only in America can a population of 300 million be fooled into paying so incredibly much for so very little.
If we were a civilized nation, we'd have enacted single-payer when Canada did in 1966 and we wouldn't be having this conversation. But we're not. We're blind and stupid and consistently vote against our own interests by voting for the interests of oligarchs.
Still, though, my cat has never figured out he will never catch the Red Dot of Mystery.
My mother's cat HAS figured out that the Red Dot is uncatchable. It's a little disturbing. She refuses to be baited into chasing it anymore.
Fortunately she doesn't have thumbs.
Similarly if you start inhabiting Siberia and Antarctica with more human activity resulting in greater melting of these regions you'll simply be flooding coastal regions elsewhere and making them uninhabitable.
But think of the savings in air conditioning costs. It's a huge win-win.
Florida shouldn't be populated by anybody but the alligators anyway.
Fuel for an imaginary reactor you hope you can build at some indeterminate point in the future. Or are you aware of someone building a commercial one?
Yes, he is. Did you not see the reference to China? China sent representatives to tour Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They patiently listened to all the nanotech PR, then asked about molten salt reactors. They got everything. They're working on continuing the work Oak Ridge stopped doing decades ago, starting from what Oak Ridge had.
He made up the bit about 2020, since they said nothing about schedule, but they've publicly admitted to working on molten salt designs.
Oh, and the person leading the project is very tightly connected to the ruling party. Meaning they will get resources and approvals and whatever it takes to get the job done. China has a massive latent appetite for electrical energy. They're pursuing every possibility in order to get more.
It's not like Zombie Jobs is holding a gun to your head.
Zombie Jobs does not hold a gun to your head. A spoon, maybe. But not a gun.
That battery will NOT last forever, and when it needs a new one you'd be better off scrapping the entire car and buying a new one.
At today's battery prices, sure. But the whole premise of the gigafactory is today's battery prices need to be made obsolete, and a new factory could do it. Will do it, unless every number crunched by Tesla is wrong, and that doesn't seem likely.
Today, yeah, replacing a complete lithium ion battery pack is prohibitively expensive. Tomorrow? Likely it will be a lot less.
Why the fuck does Boeing get $1.6 Billion extra for the same job?
Because it isn't the same job. Boeing hasn't built anything. They have a pile of paper they have to turn into a spacecraft. SpaceX has been flying the pressure vessel they're using for over a year, on three missions. They have a lot less to do.
Corporations do not pay taxes. They simply pass along the money from consumers to the government.
Yes they do and no they don't.
See here.
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill because they pissed me off." --Seen on the desk of a secretary in the Psychology Department
anthropomorphic global warming (AGW) is a fact.
In fact, it's so simply even you could devise a test.
1) Visible light strikes the earth Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes
2) Visible light has nothing for CO2 to absorb, so it pass right on through. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes
3) When visible light strike an object, IR is generated. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes
4) Green house gasses, such as CO2, absorb energy(heat) from IR. Testable? Yes. Tested? Yes. Could anyone devise a test? Yes
5) Humans produce more CO2(and other green house gasses) then can be absorbed through the cycle. Testable?...
...and right there your argument runs off the rails. The answer to #5 is No. No one can devise a test. Why? Because no one understands the entire system. You can not test a cycle that you can not describe.
But all of the blah blah above doesn't even matter. If it was as simple as you persistently and repeatedly claim, no climate model would ever be wrong. But looking around, we discover that, in fact, not a single climate model has always been right. Not one. Every single one of them has been wrong in its predictions, some of them laughably wrong. Yes, each one of those tiny little factoids you like to write is true. And if the Earth was a bell jar full of CO2 that might matter. It's not. A bell jar full of CO2 is an utterly useless model of Earth when talking about temperatures. It has nothing to do with anything. It's so far removed from reality that it makes a spherical cow look like an optimal model of friction. The real system is vastly more complex. It's so complex that no current climate model contains every aspect of it, as evidenced by their continued failure to match reality, by the (published, peer-reviewed) admission of their own creators.
If and when a model successfully predicts half a century to within the commonly accepted rate of statistical significance, we will know the model is a reasonable simulation of reality. Predicting next year or next decade is not enough: that's just weather. Until then, they're just spitballing. Unless and until the model meets the commonly accepted evidentiary standards of science, it's neither complete nor worthy of consideration as a guide for public policy, especially when some of the public policy proposed on the basis of unproven models will actively harm a very large number of humans. Possibly all humans everywhere.
Perhaps before you advocate actively harming each and every living and future member of the human race, you should have a more accurate model.
According to the structural engineer, yes a 20 km tower is probably possible. There's nothing in material science preventing it. The detailed engineering to figure out how to build and assemble the largest structural members in the base have not been worked out, but at least in theory, it can be done.
Presumably Neal Stephenson will finish a story telling us what the hell it's for.
Whether you like or dislike net neutrality, you should NOT like government regulatory agencies setting public policy unilaterally without legislators involved.
The legislators were involved. This whole situation was supposed to be a good thing.
The theory was the government could be more responsive and more able to keep up with changing times than the legislature could be, so the law was written to broadly authorize the Executive branch to come up with the details on its own, rather than having every tiny little thing argued over by Congress itself. All the various federal commissions and most of the administrations were set up under that theory. Congress broadly sets policy and writes up the authorizations and the Executive branch takes care of the details. In an attempt to preserve a little democracy, Congress did mandate this public comment thing. At least the part where comments have to be solicited. Of course, odds are good that nothing says those comments have to be in any way heeded.
If regulatory capture wasn't a thing, it wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, the phrase "for the public good" has fallen out of favor. The Almighty Dollar speaks, and the government falls all over itself to listen. As if somehow all things business does are guaranteed to be good for the general public. Apparently all of history happened in vain. People never learn.
The major difference is Germany didn't manage to cut supplies to the Allied concentration camps.
The main difference is the Germans built ovens and gas chambers and the Allies didn't.
It's very possible that this method of charging was mandated by safety considerations. A direct electric connection to a sweaty wrist worn device is sort of scary.
It's not at all possible because it's not scary. All smart watches run on low voltage DC, just like every other battery-powered watch since the dawn of the electronic age. Human skin has no difficulty resisting the voltages involved. Have you ever licked a 9 volt battery? Or know someone who has? They don't have a burned tongue. And smart watches run on less than 9 volts. Sweat is only a corrosion problem, not a conductivity problem.
Household power should be low voltage DC, not AC. Edison was right, at short distances. It's much much safer than even the 110 AC we use in the US, let alone the higher voltages used elsewhere in the world.
You can also plug it into other boards (termed 'bricks',
You included links to SparkFun but still called them bricks? They're called blocks, not bricks.
There was a time when SGI held a trademark on calling computer expansion parts 'bricks'. Not sure if that trademark has lapsed or not. If Intel was calling them bricks and is now calling them blocks, one can surmise the trademark is still extant and it took a while for the lawyers to notice.
Your mom is a visible light detector every time anyone looks at her.
Put differently, the moon is not being turned into a detector of anything, but "astronomers are building a telescope" is not a very catchy headline.
That's no moom...
Wait. What?
Yo momma's so fat, astronomers can use her to detect cosmic rays.
There we go. I knew there was a kitschy joke in there somewhere.
Ariane 1 - second and fifth launches failed
Ariane 2 - only 6 launches, first failed
Ariane 3 - fifth launch failed
Ariane 4 - eighth launch failed
Ariane 5 - first launch failed, two partial failures in first 11
Atlas A - only 8 launches, 5 failed
Atlas B - only 10 launches, 3 failed
Atlas C - only 6 launches, 2 failed
Delta - first launch failed
Delta II - first twelve successful, partial failure on the 42nd launch which substantially reduced the satellites operational lifespan (55th was first total failure)
Falcon 1 - only five launches, first three failed
Falcon 9 - first twelve launches successful, although a secondary payload on the fourth launch was aborted as a precaution
Long March 1 - only 2 launches, both successful
Long March 2 - first launch failed
Long March 3 - no complete failures in first 11, but 1 and 8 were partial failures
N-1 - only four launches, all failed horribly
Proton - third launch failed
Proton-K - second, third, fourth and sixth launches failed
Proton-M - eleventh launch failed
Saturn I - only ten launches, all successful
Saturn IB - only nine launches, all successful (unless you count Apollo 1 - it didn't launch but still killed three astronauts)
Saturn V - second launch (Apollo 6) failed, Apollo 13 doesn't count because it was a payload, not launcher, failure
Soyuz - third launch failed, with fatalities
Soyuz-U - seventh launch failed
Soyuz-FG - first twelve launches successful (all 46 to date completely successful, including lots and lots of astronauts delivered to ISS)
Space Shuttle - first twelve successful (19th was first partial failure (ATO), 25th was first full failure)
Titan I - fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth launches failed
Titan II - ninth and eleventh launches failed
Titan III - first and sixth launches failed
Titan IV - seventh launch failed
Zenit-2 - first and second launches failed
Falcon 9 will remain one of four until it beats (or fails to beat) Shuttle's record, probably sometime in 2016. Then it's likely to take many years to beat Delta II (which had a three decade head start). It may only beat Soyuz-FG if the Russians foul up, since they're still being launched quite regularly.
... we wanted more. (And probably always will.)
No, we won't.
This is a major fallacy of economic thinking that really needs to be put to bed. It isn't true. Thinking like this is the basis for the Trickle Down Theory of economics, which has been soundly falsified. No, we won't always want more. Unbridled all-consuming unsatisfiable greed is a neurosis. It is abnormal and very unusual. Adults who suffer from the condition are considered stunted, little more than children. Children are expected to grow out of it, if they ever go through that phase at all. If you always want more, everybody around you thinks there's something wrong with you, and will usually avoid being around you any more after a while.
Normal people, by definition most people, are satisfiable. And satisfiable without actually all that many resources, in the grand scheme of things. Yes we all want more than a 19th century standard of living, but that's because the ancient Romans had a better standard of living than most of the world in the 19th century. It didn't take much to do better than that. Our needs get satisfied in a hurry. A variety of food, some indoor plumbing, and a roof that doesn't leak covers most of it. Add on some form of personal transportation if you live in a large, mostly empty continent like North America, and you're done. The wants that go on top of that are actually quite minimal. Almost nobody has more than two cell phones, and the vast majority of the world has only one. Practically every type of consumer electronics and appliance follows the same pattern. People have one cell phone, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop (they forgot they had), one blender, one microwave, one toaster oven, one deep fryer. The only people who have six cell phones are neurotic or app developers (but I repeat myself).
Yes, once you have one of everything, you can just go bigger. But again, there are pretty serious upper limits. Most people don't want a 700 room palace on the order of Versailles. Even those who did had a tendency to stuff 3000 permanent residents into that space. Most people don't want their own yacht, let alone their very own cruise ship, or there would be many more yachts in the world. So it goes for every thing you can possess.
So no, most people won't always want more. Most people in developed nations are quite satisfied with what they have. Sure they dream about palaces and fleets of sports cars, but drop unlimited funds on their cringing heads and they still won't buy all that. They'd be uncomfortable trying to live in a palace.
People's needs can be trivially satisfied. People's wants can be easily satisfied. Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?
The fact that in their private lives they decided to indulge in an activity that lots of people do isn’t something that should even be reported, much less held against them or effect their careers.
Held against them or affect their careers? I don't read mainstream news or pay attention to celebrities, so when this story hit the Slashdot front page, I didn't recognize any of the names, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the people named are all pretty girls. I'm quite certain that in Hollywood, naked pictures of already famous pretty girls are only a help to their careers, not a hindrance. With the possible exception of Disney stars, but that's probably only momentary. They'll just sign with Sony instead.
All the false outrage over naked people is just that: false outrage. The rumor-mongering, scandal-spreading, gossip-loving general public laps this shit up and begs for more. It sells papers (metaphorically), it drives hits, it pushes up ratings, and a bunch of pretty girls are going to see their star currency ratings climb substantially for a while.
In the end, much sound and fury signifying nothing.