When I say "prices went up", it's simply a factor of supply and demand. While we have subsidies for production ethanol, we also have subsidies (CRP) for leaving fields fallow. Since CRP subsidies are there to keep farmers from over producing, when corn prices stabilize above what the CRP pays, farmers will give up the subsidy and grow corn. Just like they'll change from wheat or soybeans when they can get a better return on corn. On the other side of the equation, producers won't take advantage of ethanol subsidies if producing too much lowers the selling price.
Current methods of making corn into ethanol require more fuel than they produce. It's a "burn two gallons of gas to get 1 and a half gallons of ethanol" situation - a net-loss energy producer, which is why it's so absurd that it's mandated for energy efficiency.
Your argument isn't relevant to the discussion. The GP post stated that more people would starve because food was being used for energy. And the parent countered that we could just grow more potatoes. And my response was that was the same argument used with ethanol, whose manufacture HAS resulted in people in Mexico not being able to afford corn and an increase in the price of HFCS, leading to higher processed food prices in the US.
On top of that, all the studies I've read comparing the 'cost' of ethanol versus petroleum have been highly biased. I'm not aware of any study that says it cost more energy to produce ethanol than it returns that hasn't been discounted. We don't take the cost of the military needed to stabilize oil producing regions or ecological disasters into the petroleum cost either. If you really wanted to determine if ethanol is viable, you'd have to look at the labor vs efficiency equation first. Is saving energy and getting lower yields a reasonable trade-off for more expensive labor costs?
This conversation is about using potatoes as a power source. And even if you didn't effect food supply would potatoes be a reasonable approach? With their approach, as primitive batteries, the raw or boiled potatoes have a very limited shelf life. As other have mentioned, distilling alcohol and using that for their lamps and generators would be a much better solution.
Corn itself is probably one of the worst things that ever happened to the US,
I would agree with that, although possibly not for the same reasons as you. 30 years ago 'grain fed beef' was the premium beef. Now it's the norm. Beef is a staple of the American diet and it comes from factory farms. Feeding a cow grain reduces the omega-3s in the meat and it turns their stomach acidic, encouraging e-coli. Couple that with the feeder lots and you end up with a meat that is full of antibiotics and hormones with none of the healthy elements. We'll go broke paying the medical bills that are the result of cost cutting on food.
What you say would be true only if potato production were limited to current levels and if there were no surplus.
I live in the midwest, and they said the same thing about corn and ethanol. Then corn prices went up, affecting the price of food sweeteners (it's not a coincidence that we have seen 'throwback' soft drinks using sugar in place of HFCS on the market recently) and food grade corn exported to poorer countries. As well as causing concerns about the amount of water used making the ethanol.
Tell me *that* is not the result of short term thinking pushed by the most egregious greed.
It's not short term thinking because they didn't believe they were increasing their risks. They had been able to get away with things for so long they discounted the reasoning behind the safeguards they were flaunting.
In 30 years I've never been involved in a car accident that was my fault. Statistically I could say buying liability insurance is an unneeded expense. If I then have an accident everyone would say I've been short sighted. If I continue as in the past it would be easy to think that the risks of not carrying insurance were exaggerated.
It doesn't relieve any of BP's responsibility, it points to a different systemic problem. Rather than it being optimizing profits from quarter to quarter, it's discounting risks as being unlikely/inconsequential without determining the true costs.
Based on my experience with T-Mobile, they're the shittiest customer service out of everyone.
I used to think that, then I signed up with Verizon Wireless. In less than two weeks I have already had a run in with them over a billing issue.
Irony is when your 'automatic' payment system requires manual payments because said 'automatic' payment system can't communicate properly with billing system.
In what way does the iPhone/iPad function that causes it to "use an excessive amount of bandwidth"? It's bandwidth usage is no different than other devices.
You have to consider the technology that was in use when these 'unlimited' plans were created. Cell phones with a 2" screen browsing WAP web sites. Now you have devices that can stream movies from Netflix and they're worried that their networks are going to be overwhelmed.
The problem isn't that they are looking to limit bandwidth, it's that they keep trying to sell 'unlimited' plans that aren't unlimited and they aren't picking reasonable limits for their new 'limited' plans. Back in the days of dial-up internet I knew people that signed up for $10 'unlimited' dial-up plans and then stayed connected 24 hours a day. The ISP couldn't pay for the incoming line for $10 a month, so how could they provide unlimited access to any given user at that price?
Cell phone (and cable) ISPs are having the same problem. Some marketing moron said "we'll out do the competition, we'll call our plan Unlimited". If they had set a reasonable limit and raised it as technology improved no one would be complaining. Nobody complains that cable internet was 2mbit when they signed up 10 years ago and is pushing 14 or 16mbit now. The problem with AT&T's plans are that 200 meg is a joke, I used more than that just getting my new Droid set up. And 2g is nowhere near what a heavy user will be looking for. If, OTOH, Verizon discontinues their unlimited and replaces it with the 5g limited plan they are selling for tethering, most people won't care. (They are the same price) From there they can pick up PR wins by increasing the base limit as technology improves.
A profit opportunity exists for them, not because of anything valuable up there we can get to, but because we need to keep the ISS going.
Even without ISS there would still be satellite launches. I seem to remember reading earlier this week that SpaceX won a contract to launch the new Iridium constellation. There are a lot of launches not related in any way to the ISS.
Space X has done what exactly? Create a LEO capable rocket. Yay! Something NASA pulled off in the 50s.
I used to have a boss that liked to say "what have you done for me lately?" SpaceX may be using 1960s rocket technology with current guidance technology. And NASA is using a 1980's shuttle fleet with at space station that could have been built in the 70's. (Skylab, Mir)
Government agencies breaking ground in new industries is fine, but at some point you need to turn day-to-day business over to private industry so that it can be streamlined. Imagine if we had never allowed private parcel carriers. We'd be sitting here saying that FedEx and UPS are only doing what the USPS have been doing for a century.
BP executives may be responsible for many bad decisions, but I doubt the disaster at Deepwater Horizon is the result of short term thinking. They have been getting away with so many things that they simply discounted the risks as being over-inflated. BP has been fined 760 times for OHSA violations compared to Exxon's 1 time. If those violations didn't result in employee lawsuits then the fines were trivial and not really a risk factor. And if you went back a few months and discussed oil spills and natural disasters, Exxon Valdez would be top of the list and BP might not have even been mentioned.
Even now, oil company executives don't believe the US government will shut down off shore drilling, even though Congress has mentioned it as an option until all the rigs can be properly inspected. They assume that the economic damage it would cause makes the risk of a shutdown minimal. I personally thought we should have shut down every rig until the blowout preventers were tested as soon as we knew that Deepwater Horizon's failed it's sole task.
We can't build more coal plants, as they pollute and cause acid rain and other ills.
We don't want to build more coal plants as we currently build them. We could clean up their emissions considerably if we were willing to pay to do it. Unless we discover super efficient solar cells (and build a distributed grid to go with it) or commercial nuclear fusion reactors, the US has too much coal to abandon coal plants. Some of the costs of cleaning the emissions could even be recovered with CO2 sequestration technologies used for algae farming. (bio-fuel generation) And switching to bio-diesel cars should reduce their emissions enough to offset what couldn't be cleaned at the power plant.
It's definitely worth further investigation, but currently I'm not convinced that it will ever bring improvements.
Fortunately the difference between real research (like this) and not a company doing "let's find a way to modify our product and create a new revenue stream" is that even if it doesn't work it tells us something. It might simply be "this won't work", or it might lead to research in a new direction, or it might improve other processes that do work.
Thomas Edison is quoted as saying "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
What surprises me is the amount of research going into photovoltaic research compared to solar thermal. As a homeowner, what would you give for an air conditioner that worked better (or cheaper) the hotter it gets? Yet no one builds a solar (thermal) collector attached to a 2-5 ton absorption chiller. And that's more of a manufacturing exercise scaling down a commercial chiller to residential size than real research. Ammonia chillers are nearly a century old and have been upgraded to LiBr for decades. Attach a 60 watt PV and it would cool your house for free (energy wise).
we could be crippled around the country by fuel shortages if they took out the rigs, which could be done very easily with submarines and torpedoes.
And I'll bet those big supertankers would be fat stupid targets for wolfpacks too. Worrying that someone is going to go offshore and attack each individual 2.5GW turbine is ridiculous in the beginning. But with the oil industry you have instability in the gulf and Asia. Tankers that could be taken out by a zodiac and an RPG. And those don't even require coming near our territorial waters to mess with the off shore rigs or offload facilities.
The oil problem isn't "fueled" (if you'll pardon my pun) by electricity demand, but by transportation.
I would say currently transportation is an oil problem, unaffected by electricity generation capacity. I don't think that is going to be the case in the future. BP's disaster has brought things to a head.
Like you mentioned, infrastructure is a big problem. Utilities have sat back fat and happy with their tariff monopolies that allowed them a guaranteed (cost plus) profit and so no need to invest in research and infrastructure investment beyond minimum requirements. That mentality seems to be changing in Washington. Now the question is whether they'll be required to pay for the upgrades or if we'll pass it on to tax payers. Ultimately, rate payers and tax payers are the same though.
With the focus of politicians we're likely to see more electric public transportation. Or maybe think outside the box. Let railroads become electricity interconnects. They could wire their main lines, convert from diesel-electric to electric, and get paid to connect various regions. And there are a lot of places out west where you could run wind farms in parallel with railroad lines. Also, at least in this region, there is a big push to build inter-modal facilities. The railroads could connect their main line power distribution to charging stations at these facilities and encourage local delivery companies to go electric and establish depot and break bulk operations there.
If you're talking about starting the change with everyone getting plug-in cars, you're starting at the wrong end of things. Not only does everyone have to buy a new, untested and immature technology to get them to work daily, but it requires installing new charging stations, upgrading the local electricity grid, upgrading backbone and interconnects, and adding generation capacity. This is the same reason the choice of Ethanol over Bio-diesel was such a boondoggle, they went after a lot of small users rather than a few big users. Your average OTR truck carries 300 gallons of fuel, and they focus on sub compacts with 15 gallon tanks.
For the record, I'm not necessarily in favor of replacing current generation capacity with wind farms. I would rather we cleaned up coal plants and continued to use our vast coal reserves. Even if it means taxpayers pay for the emissions equipment for the utility. It certainly makes more sense than all the money spent trying to clean up tailpipes on cars.
Contracts really aren't an issue. The change in terms only affects new customers. I you already have an unlimited contract it will stay unlimited at least until the contract expires. At that point if you are unhappy with the terms for a new contract you are free to move on.
It appears that AT&T is betting heavily on their exclusivity contracts. So those hoping for an iPhone/iPad on another carrier might have a long wait.
Asus should remarket themselves as "Snapple", call the device the "iPud" and appoint a new CEO with glasses called "Steve Jibs".
Their CEO should be Stevie Jubs and SHE should demonstrate how the iPud can be used for enjoying flash porn sites. Just think of the subscription and accessories market....
That's why this endeavor is wholly useless for the operation in far-away places such as Mars, Europa (the Jovian moon), Titan, etc. By dicking around with remote controlled robots, we will learn next to nothing useful for colonizing the more hospitable planets of the solar system.
It's unlikely that robots on the moon would be remotely operated, although it would be an option in certain cases. They'll be programmed to do their tasks and controllers will move on to other things. But when you're on Mars and you need to change something it takes hours to do it and confirm that it worked. And years to send a replacement if you screw it up. How long would it have taken controllers to figure out what method will get a rover unstuck on the moon vs Mars? On Mars if you get the rover free you continue on being very careful where you drive. On the moon you might choose to get it stuck again and test which procedure works best.
Unless energy becomes free, or something really valuable or unique is found on the moon, we won't be sending materials back to earth. It's just not financially practical. And once you get past science it's about money. It might be practical to launch materials to orbit for a space station or to build vehicles in space.
The real value is in robotics and telepresence research. Sure, we can do that on Mars, but once you have a mission ready to launch, how long does it take to get there. Any experimentation on Mars is going to be extremely conservative. Are you more likely to install a software update on the server under your desk or the one in the datacenter on the other side of the country?
Then there is also the exploration aspect. People say "we've already been there, we know everything we could learn from the moon." We haven't even learned every the Earth could teach us, we've barely scratched the surface on what we can learn from the moon.
What does a network port have to do with Linux and Samba? I use both, and since my printer has it's own network port I can either print through the server or directly from the desktop. I paid $50 for the network print server that attached to the parallel port on my printer, but if I bought a new printer now the network capable printers are only about $20 higher. And I can save that much by not having to power a PC print server. Also, I'm not limited by the number of parallel ports on my server, just by the number of ports on my switch.
As far as reliability, in 5 years I've never had to reboot this dedicated print server. And I've never had to install a software update or security patch. Like the printer it was install, configure, and simply use.
Most people would rather buy a cheap $50 inkjet then spend $500 on a decent laser model, even though the lifetime costs are far, far less.
If we are talking black and white laser, they are easily available for under $100. I bought mine about 5 years ago for $100, then added a NIC to it's parallel port for a total of around $150. I bought a newer model of the same printer, network capable, for my mom about 4 years ago for $80. Just watch Office Depot, OfficeMax, or Staples for a sale. And Dell sells a color laser for under $200.
The biggest advantage for me since I don't print often, no ink to dry out. My last inkjet I got ONE use out of it, then had to buy a new print cartridge because the printhead was clogged.
Questions: Do laser printers do good photos on photo paper?
I didn't use photo paper, I used card stock. And they look just as good as anything I ever printed on a color inkjet. And unlike HP inkjets, each toner color was in it's own cartridge.
It was several years ago, and admittedly at the time it was a $1000 printer. But I never heard of any complaints about the $300 color lasers of the same brand that we had, and that $1000 laser now sells for $500.
Clinton managed to balance the budget by cutting the fat.
I don't have the budget totals in front of me to verify, but I don't think it was as much cutting spending as it was limiting increases, and allowing the revenue to grow faster than the spending. Unfortunately, I don't think it's an option to do that today. Debt maintenance on $12 trillion is too high. We will soon be at a point where debt surpasses GDP. Clinton's balanced budget is a myth, even in his best year he still spent $17 billion more than was brought in.
If you want the bald facts of 'Tax and Spend';
Reagan, the conservative icon, nearly tripled the national debt through military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy. We broke the $1 trillion mark during his presidency. Overall, we increased the debt by $1.7 trillion during those 8 years.
Bush Sr, $1.5 trillion additional debt in only 4 years. And note that the debt rose faster than GDP. Carter, another 1 term president and often criticized for stagflation oversaw a term where GDP grew at more than twice the growth in debt.
Clinton, $1.6 trillion additional debt and GDP grew twice that. We were certainly on the right track then.
Bush Jr, $4.3 trillion additional debt and $4.5 trillion GDP growth. And we crossed the $10 trillion debt mark. Just to put this in perspective, the tax cuts and military spending increased the debt during his presidency by an amount more than the debt of ALL administrations prior to Clinton's, combined. When Bush Sr left office we had $4 trillion in debt.
As far as a net drop in debt, there hasn't been one since 1957-Eisenhower (year over year).
The numbers, btw, are actual debt numbers from the Treasury Departments web site. They are facts, not numbers manipulated by the CBO or partisan politics. And if the Republicans are looking for a real fiscal icon, maybe they should look at Coolidge, the last president to lower the debt during his term.
But you can at least bleed BP dry and hope that it makes other oil companies secure their facilities more.
If you really want to strike fear in the hearts of oil executives, tell them you are going to shut down ALL of their off shore operations until they certify that their blowout preventers actually work.
While the effects of everything BP/Transocean had done at this site has been tragic, it wouldn't have been catastrophic if the BOP has performed it's sole task. And in my mind that raises doubts on the entire industry. If a component on an aircraft failed like this, every aircraft using it would have been grounded until they were re-certified.
Slashdot works amazingly well on the Droid's browser.
The front page and articles work reasonably well (retro mode), with the exception of when comments get threaded too deep. If you start going into user info though you start running into things like the right column overwriting the center column and save boxes being off the bottom of the screen.
The article says they used Ubuntu, but doesn't say whether they're using regular desktop Ubuntu or the Netbook remix.
Actually they said they used the "regular Ubuntu edition" rather than the netbook version because the display resolution was close to a normal desktop. I would say any power management analysis they did is next to useless.
Where are the cheap netbooks that I thought were the intent of the product?!
Well, we lost the NET in netbooks. Like others have mentioned, they started pushing them as desktop replacements with faster processors and Windows. Also, somehow netbooks got defined as sub 12" displays with 160+ gigabyte hard drives. Netbooks were supposed to be small, light, and with a long battery life that ran simple applications and connected to the Internet. And wifi is being replaced with 3g for web access so that cell companies can sell contracts.
I'm still using my eeePC 701 (right now, actually) and storage space and processor speed has never been an issue. I have a few 2g SD cards, and some thumb drives but rarely use them. I use the Internet for storage or my server when I'm home. My only complaint with wifi is I wish I had an external antenna jack. If I want 3g, I'll break down and finally buy a smart phone. With a little tinkering a Droid can provide a hotspot, so no need for a contract just for the netbook.
OTOH, I would be much happier with a larger display and keyboard. A 12" version of the 701 would be considerably larger, but not much heavier. There are just too many sites that don't support small displays. Even slashdot has some issues.
Slashdot Mirror
When I say "prices went up", it's simply a factor of supply and demand. While we have subsidies for production ethanol, we also have subsidies (CRP) for leaving fields fallow. Since CRP subsidies are there to keep farmers from over producing, when corn prices stabilize above what the CRP pays, farmers will give up the subsidy and grow corn. Just like they'll change from wheat or soybeans when they can get a better return on corn. On the other side of the equation, producers won't take advantage of ethanol subsidies if producing too much lowers the selling price.
Current methods of making corn into ethanol require more fuel than they produce. It's a "burn two gallons of gas to get 1 and a half gallons of ethanol" situation - a net-loss energy producer, which is why it's so absurd that it's mandated for energy efficiency.
Your argument isn't relevant to the discussion. The GP post stated that more people would starve because food was being used for energy. And the parent countered that we could just grow more potatoes. And my response was that was the same argument used with ethanol, whose manufacture HAS resulted in people in Mexico not being able to afford corn and an increase in the price of HFCS, leading to higher processed food prices in the US.
On top of that, all the studies I've read comparing the 'cost' of ethanol versus petroleum have been highly biased. I'm not aware of any study that says it cost more energy to produce ethanol than it returns that hasn't been discounted. We don't take the cost of the military needed to stabilize oil producing regions or ecological disasters into the petroleum cost either. If you really wanted to determine if ethanol is viable, you'd have to look at the labor vs efficiency equation first. Is saving energy and getting lower yields a reasonable trade-off for more expensive labor costs?
This conversation is about using potatoes as a power source. And even if you didn't effect food supply would potatoes be a reasonable approach? With their approach, as primitive batteries, the raw or boiled potatoes have a very limited shelf life. As other have mentioned, distilling alcohol and using that for their lamps and generators would be a much better solution.
Corn itself is probably one of the worst things that ever happened to the US,
I would agree with that, although possibly not for the same reasons as you. 30 years ago 'grain fed beef' was the premium beef. Now it's the norm. Beef is a staple of the American diet and it comes from factory farms. Feeding a cow grain reduces the omega-3s in the meat and it turns their stomach acidic, encouraging e-coli. Couple that with the feeder lots and you end up with a meat that is full of antibiotics and hormones with none of the healthy elements. We'll go broke paying the medical bills that are the result of cost cutting on food.
What you say would be true only if potato production were limited to current levels and if there were no surplus.
I live in the midwest, and they said the same thing about corn and ethanol. Then corn prices went up, affecting the price of food sweeteners (it's not a coincidence that we have seen 'throwback' soft drinks using sugar in place of HFCS on the market recently) and food grade corn exported to poorer countries. As well as causing concerns about the amount of water used making the ethanol.
Tell me *that* is not the result of short term thinking pushed by the most egregious greed.
It's not short term thinking because they didn't believe they were increasing their risks. They had been able to get away with things for so long they discounted the reasoning behind the safeguards they were flaunting.
In 30 years I've never been involved in a car accident that was my fault. Statistically I could say buying liability insurance is an unneeded expense. If I then have an accident everyone would say I've been short sighted. If I continue as in the past it would be easy to think that the risks of not carrying insurance were exaggerated.
It doesn't relieve any of BP's responsibility, it points to a different systemic problem. Rather than it being optimizing profits from quarter to quarter, it's discounting risks as being unlikely/inconsequential without determining the true costs.
Based on my experience with T-Mobile, they're the shittiest customer service out of everyone.
I used to think that, then I signed up with Verizon Wireless. In less than two weeks I have already had a run in with them over a billing issue.
Irony is when your 'automatic' payment system requires manual payments because said 'automatic' payment system can't communicate properly with billing system.
In what way does the iPhone/iPad function that causes it to "use an excessive amount of bandwidth"? It's bandwidth usage is no different than other devices.
You have to consider the technology that was in use when these 'unlimited' plans were created. Cell phones with a 2" screen browsing WAP web sites. Now you have devices that can stream movies from Netflix and they're worried that their networks are going to be overwhelmed.
The problem isn't that they are looking to limit bandwidth, it's that they keep trying to sell 'unlimited' plans that aren't unlimited and they aren't picking reasonable limits for their new 'limited' plans. Back in the days of dial-up internet I knew people that signed up for $10 'unlimited' dial-up plans and then stayed connected 24 hours a day. The ISP couldn't pay for the incoming line for $10 a month, so how could they provide unlimited access to any given user at that price?
Cell phone (and cable) ISPs are having the same problem. Some marketing moron said "we'll out do the competition, we'll call our plan Unlimited". If they had set a reasonable limit and raised it as technology improved no one would be complaining. Nobody complains that cable internet was 2mbit when they signed up 10 years ago and is pushing 14 or 16mbit now. The problem with AT&T's plans are that 200 meg is a joke, I used more than that just getting my new Droid set up. And 2g is nowhere near what a heavy user will be looking for. If, OTOH, Verizon discontinues their unlimited and replaces it with the 5g limited plan they are selling for tethering, most people won't care. (They are the same price) From there they can pick up PR wins by increasing the base limit as technology improves.
A profit opportunity exists for them, not because of anything valuable up there we can get to, but because we need to keep the ISS going.
Even without ISS there would still be satellite launches. I seem to remember reading earlier this week that SpaceX won a contract to launch the new Iridium constellation. There are a lot of launches not related in any way to the ISS.
Space X has done what exactly? Create a LEO capable rocket. Yay! Something NASA pulled off in the 50s.
I used to have a boss that liked to say "what have you done for me lately?" SpaceX may be using 1960s rocket technology with current guidance technology. And NASA is using a 1980's shuttle fleet with at space station that could have been built in the 70's. (Skylab, Mir)
Government agencies breaking ground in new industries is fine, but at some point you need to turn day-to-day business over to private industry so that it can be streamlined. Imagine if we had never allowed private parcel carriers. We'd be sitting here saying that FedEx and UPS are only doing what the USPS have been doing for a century.
BP executives may be responsible for many bad decisions, but I doubt the disaster at Deepwater Horizon is the result of short term thinking. They have been getting away with so many things that they simply discounted the risks as being over-inflated. BP has been fined 760 times for OHSA violations compared to Exxon's 1 time. If those violations didn't result in employee lawsuits then the fines were trivial and not really a risk factor. And if you went back a few months and discussed oil spills and natural disasters, Exxon Valdez would be top of the list and BP might not have even been mentioned.
Even now, oil company executives don't believe the US government will shut down off shore drilling, even though Congress has mentioned it as an option until all the rigs can be properly inspected. They assume that the economic damage it would cause makes the risk of a shutdown minimal. I personally thought we should have shut down every rig until the blowout preventers were tested as soon as we knew that Deepwater Horizon's failed it's sole task.
We can't build more coal plants, as they pollute and cause acid rain and other ills.
We don't want to build more coal plants as we currently build them. We could clean up their emissions considerably if we were willing to pay to do it. Unless we discover super efficient solar cells (and build a distributed grid to go with it) or commercial nuclear fusion reactors, the US has too much coal to abandon coal plants. Some of the costs of cleaning the emissions could even be recovered with CO2 sequestration technologies used for algae farming. (bio-fuel generation) And switching to bio-diesel cars should reduce their emissions enough to offset what couldn't be cleaned at the power plant.
It's definitely worth further investigation, but currently I'm not convinced that it will ever bring improvements.
Fortunately the difference between real research (like this) and not a company doing "let's find a way to modify our product and create a new revenue stream" is that even if it doesn't work it tells us something. It might simply be "this won't work", or it might lead to research in a new direction, or it might improve other processes that do work.
Thomas Edison is quoted as saying "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
What surprises me is the amount of research going into photovoltaic research compared to solar thermal. As a homeowner, what would you give for an air conditioner that worked better (or cheaper) the hotter it gets? Yet no one builds a solar (thermal) collector attached to a 2-5 ton absorption chiller. And that's more of a manufacturing exercise scaling down a commercial chiller to residential size than real research. Ammonia chillers are nearly a century old and have been upgraded to LiBr for decades. Attach a 60 watt PV and it would cool your house for free (energy wise).
we could be crippled around the country by fuel shortages if they took out the rigs, which could be done very easily with submarines and torpedoes.
And I'll bet those big supertankers would be fat stupid targets for wolfpacks too. Worrying that someone is going to go offshore and attack each individual 2.5GW turbine is ridiculous in the beginning. But with the oil industry you have instability in the gulf and Asia. Tankers that could be taken out by a zodiac and an RPG. And those don't even require coming near our territorial waters to mess with the off shore rigs or offload facilities.
The oil problem isn't "fueled" (if you'll pardon my pun) by electricity demand, but by transportation.
I would say currently transportation is an oil problem, unaffected by electricity generation capacity. I don't think that is going to be the case in the future. BP's disaster has brought things to a head.
Like you mentioned, infrastructure is a big problem. Utilities have sat back fat and happy with their tariff monopolies that allowed them a guaranteed (cost plus) profit and so no need to invest in research and infrastructure investment beyond minimum requirements. That mentality seems to be changing in Washington. Now the question is whether they'll be required to pay for the upgrades or if we'll pass it on to tax payers. Ultimately, rate payers and tax payers are the same though.
With the focus of politicians we're likely to see more electric public transportation. Or maybe think outside the box. Let railroads become electricity interconnects. They could wire their main lines, convert from diesel-electric to electric, and get paid to connect various regions. And there are a lot of places out west where you could run wind farms in parallel with railroad lines. Also, at least in this region, there is a big push to build inter-modal facilities. The railroads could connect their main line power distribution to charging stations at these facilities and encourage local delivery companies to go electric and establish depot and break bulk operations there.
If you're talking about starting the change with everyone getting plug-in cars, you're starting at the wrong end of things. Not only does everyone have to buy a new, untested and immature technology to get them to work daily, but it requires installing new charging stations, upgrading the local electricity grid, upgrading backbone and interconnects, and adding generation capacity. This is the same reason the choice of Ethanol over Bio-diesel was such a boondoggle, they went after a lot of small users rather than a few big users. Your average OTR truck carries 300 gallons of fuel, and they focus on sub compacts with 15 gallon tanks.
For the record, I'm not necessarily in favor of replacing current generation capacity with wind farms. I would rather we cleaned up coal plants and continued to use our vast coal reserves. Even if it means taxpayers pay for the emissions equipment for the utility. It certainly makes more sense than all the money spent trying to clean up tailpipes on cars.
I'm just waiting for some Calamity to hit.
Yeah, can you just imagine a turbine failure and wind gushing everywhere... talk about a natural disaster.
Contracts really aren't an issue. The change in terms only affects new customers. I you already have an unlimited contract it will stay unlimited at least until the contract expires. At that point if you are unhappy with the terms for a new contract you are free to move on.
It appears that AT&T is betting heavily on their exclusivity contracts. So those hoping for an iPhone/iPad on another carrier might have a long wait.
Asus should remarket themselves as "Snapple", call the device the "iPud" and appoint a new CEO with glasses called "Steve Jibs".
Their CEO should be Stevie Jubs and SHE should demonstrate how the iPud can be used for enjoying flash porn sites. Just think of the subscription and accessories market....
That's why this endeavor is wholly useless for the operation in far-away places such as Mars, Europa (the Jovian moon), Titan, etc. By dicking around with remote controlled robots, we will learn next to nothing useful for colonizing the more hospitable planets of the solar system.
It's unlikely that robots on the moon would be remotely operated, although it would be an option in certain cases. They'll be programmed to do their tasks and controllers will move on to other things. But when you're on Mars and you need to change something it takes hours to do it and confirm that it worked. And years to send a replacement if you screw it up. How long would it have taken controllers to figure out what method will get a rover unstuck on the moon vs Mars? On Mars if you get the rover free you continue on being very careful where you drive. On the moon you might choose to get it stuck again and test which procedure works best.
Unless energy becomes free, or something really valuable or unique is found on the moon, we won't be sending materials back to earth. It's just not financially practical. And once you get past science it's about money. It might be practical to launch materials to orbit for a space station or to build vehicles in space.
The real value is in robotics and telepresence research. Sure, we can do that on Mars, but once you have a mission ready to launch, how long does it take to get there. Any experimentation on Mars is going to be extremely conservative. Are you more likely to install a software update on the server under your desk or the one in the datacenter on the other side of the country?
Then there is also the exploration aspect. People say "we've already been there, we know everything we could learn from the moon." We haven't even learned every the Earth could teach us, we've barely scratched the surface on what we can learn from the moon.
What does a network port have to do with Linux and Samba? I use both, and since my printer has it's own network port I can either print through the server or directly from the desktop. I paid $50 for the network print server that attached to the parallel port on my printer, but if I bought a new printer now the network capable printers are only about $20 higher. And I can save that much by not having to power a PC print server. Also, I'm not limited by the number of parallel ports on my server, just by the number of ports on my switch.
As far as reliability, in 5 years I've never had to reboot this dedicated print server. And I've never had to install a software update or security patch. Like the printer it was install, configure, and simply use.
Most people would rather buy a cheap $50 inkjet then spend $500 on a decent laser model, even though the lifetime costs are far, far less.
If we are talking black and white laser, they are easily available for under $100. I bought mine about 5 years ago for $100, then added a NIC to it's parallel port for a total of around $150. I bought a newer model of the same printer, network capable, for my mom about 4 years ago for $80. Just watch Office Depot, OfficeMax, or Staples for a sale. And Dell sells a color laser for under $200.
The biggest advantage for me since I don't print often, no ink to dry out. My last inkjet I got ONE use out of it, then had to buy a new print cartridge because the printhead was clogged.
Questions: Do laser printers do good photos on photo paper?
I didn't use photo paper, I used card stock. And they look just as good as anything I ever printed on a color inkjet. And unlike HP inkjets, each toner color was in it's own cartridge.
It was several years ago, and admittedly at the time it was a $1000 printer. But I never heard of any complaints about the $300 color lasers of the same brand that we had, and that $1000 laser now sells for $500.
Clinton managed to balance the budget by cutting the fat.
I don't have the budget totals in front of me to verify, but I don't think it was as much cutting spending as it was limiting increases, and allowing the revenue to grow faster than the spending. Unfortunately, I don't think it's an option to do that today. Debt maintenance on $12 trillion is too high. We will soon be at a point where debt surpasses GDP. Clinton's balanced budget is a myth, even in his best year he still spent $17 billion more than was brought in.
If you want the bald facts of 'Tax and Spend';
Reagan, the conservative icon, nearly tripled the national debt through military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy. We broke the $1 trillion mark during his presidency. Overall, we increased the debt by $1.7 trillion during those 8 years.
Bush Sr, $1.5 trillion additional debt in only 4 years. And note that the debt rose faster than GDP. Carter, another 1 term president and often criticized for stagflation oversaw a term where GDP grew at more than twice the growth in debt.
Clinton, $1.6 trillion additional debt and GDP grew twice that. We were certainly on the right track then.
Bush Jr, $4.3 trillion additional debt and $4.5 trillion GDP growth. And we crossed the $10 trillion debt mark. Just to put this in perspective, the tax cuts and military spending increased the debt during his presidency by an amount more than the debt of ALL administrations prior to Clinton's, combined. When Bush Sr left office we had $4 trillion in debt.
As far as a net drop in debt, there hasn't been one since 1957-Eisenhower (year over year).
The numbers, btw, are actual debt numbers from the Treasury Departments web site. They are facts, not numbers manipulated by the CBO or partisan politics. And if the Republicans are looking for a real fiscal icon, maybe they should look at Coolidge, the last president to lower the debt during his term.
But you can at least bleed BP dry and hope that it makes other oil companies secure their facilities more.
If you really want to strike fear in the hearts of oil executives, tell them you are going to shut down ALL of their off shore operations until they certify that their blowout preventers actually work.
While the effects of everything BP/Transocean had done at this site has been tragic, it wouldn't have been catastrophic if the BOP has performed it's sole task. And in my mind that raises doubts on the entire industry. If a component on an aircraft failed like this, every aircraft using it would have been grounded until they were re-certified.
Slashdot works amazingly well on the Droid's browser.
The front page and articles work reasonably well (retro mode), with the exception of when comments get threaded too deep. If you start going into user info though you start running into things like the right column overwriting the center column and save boxes being off the bottom of the screen.
The article says they used Ubuntu, but doesn't say whether they're using regular desktop Ubuntu or the Netbook remix.
Actually they said they used the "regular Ubuntu edition" rather than the netbook version because the display resolution was close to a normal desktop. I would say any power management analysis they did is next to useless.
Where are the cheap netbooks that I thought were the intent of the product?!
Well, we lost the NET in netbooks. Like others have mentioned, they started pushing them as desktop replacements with faster processors and Windows. Also, somehow netbooks got defined as sub 12" displays with 160+ gigabyte hard drives. Netbooks were supposed to be small, light, and with a long battery life that ran simple applications and connected to the Internet. And wifi is being replaced with 3g for web access so that cell companies can sell contracts.
I'm still using my eeePC 701 (right now, actually) and storage space and processor speed has never been an issue. I have a few 2g SD cards, and some thumb drives but rarely use them. I use the Internet for storage or my server when I'm home. My only complaint with wifi is I wish I had an external antenna jack. If I want 3g, I'll break down and finally buy a smart phone. With a little tinkering a Droid can provide a hotspot, so no need for a contract just for the netbook.
OTOH, I would be much happier with a larger display and keyboard. A 12" version of the 701 would be considerably larger, but not much heavier. There are just too many sites that don't support small displays. Even slashdot has some issues.