Just as likely that they picked it up from some raw meat in a landfill or somebody's garbage pile. Think about it... Raw meat from somebody's BBQ harboring the antibiotic-resistant bacteria gets eaten by seagulls. The bacteria hitch a ride in seagulls and end up in poop.
But as the companies finally begin mass production — Solyndra just flipped the switch on a $733 million factory here last month — they are finding that the economics of the industry have already been transformed, by the Chinese. Chinese manufacturers, heavily subsidized by their own government and relying on vast economies of scale, have helped send the price of conventional solar panels plunging and grabbed market share far more quickly than anyone anticipated.
You mean for a business paying an IT department for support? For tech-savvy home user, there's no recurring cost. One license from 2002 still entitles you to all updates, both security and feature updates.
Which distro release from 2002 is still supported? Maybe the rolling releases, but they're an exception. I love Linux as much as anyone here, but that always bothered me, needing to upgrade distro releases to stay current on userspace apps.
Try running 200 million cars on natural gas and those reserves won't be so vast any more. We use it for 20% of our electricity, and it's already one of the most expensive sources of power, useful more for peak load than base load.
CNG vehicles are already subsidized in some cities for air quality reasons. It's ok for buses and local delivery vehicles, but it's a long way from being practical for long haul trucking and personal use.
You make a good point about spare capacity, but you contradict yourself by referring to supply concerns as FUD. If Saudi Arabia is the only producer with significant spare capacity, that in itself is a big risk to supply. Add to that Saudi Aramco's secrecy about actual reserves and production data from their (very old) oilfields, their lack of ability to ramp up production in 2008, plus growing domestic demand, and you'll see there's good reason to be concerned about supply.
Algae biodiesel is vaporware. Nobody is close to having a commercial process that can scale up at a reasonable price. The highest yielding process needs closed bioreactors (clear tubes) to keep out other algae species. A square mi of clear tubing don't come cheap. Open ponds are cheaper, but still not exactly cheap to build.
I think you're underestimating the financial side side of the problem. Our debt-based economy grew up in a world with an expanding resource base. It's easy to pay back loans when there's a future of more and plenty. Yes, as oil gets more scarce and expensive, other forms of energy become viable, but guess what? They'll still be more expensive and less plentiful than oil today!
It's easy enough to say we'll adjust to more expensive energy, but in case you haven't noticed, there's a lot of money tied up in oil based investments: car and truck loans, mortgages for McMansions in the suburbs (far from everything and cost a fortune to heat and cool), shopping malls with huge parking lots. When that money goes poof (debt gets defaulted on), good luck scraping any money together for your alternative energy project. That's why everything from the bailouts to the stimulus was all about propping up the real estate market and hiding the bad debt.
>Electronic Stability Control on the other hand has been found to be effective at reducing accidents.
I've seen those studies too. That just means Americans are more careful about cornering speed than following distance. That's what I've seen. Everybody tailgates like crazy on the freeway, but they slow way down for curves like exit ramps.
Household income adjusted for inflation has been flat since the 70s. All this consumption was paid for by credit and cheap manufactured goods from China.
I'm all for simplifying, but the question is how to get there. A lot of powerful forces are arrayed against us simplifying. The Century of the Self might be a good film to watch now.
I really doubt toxoplasma infection would help the *players* at all. One of the effects of infection is slower reaction time, not something that would improve athletic performance.
They're rarely enforced, but almost every state has laws for "slower traffic keep right" or "left pane for passing only". http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
In California, it specificically states "Notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits" in CVC 21654(a). Even if you are already driving faster than the speed limit, drivers must yield the left lane to traffic that's moving faster.
Re:in other news, cementing the BP CEO has started
on
Gulf Oil Leak Plugged?
·
· Score: 1
There's (at least) two ways to look at it.
From a practical view, we need oil for everything in our lives: get to work to pay the bills, feed ourselves from the food trucked in to stores, you could even say for our money that's propped up by oil. We'll probably drill everywhere we can to keep things running, and even that won't be enough to keep the old fossil-fuel economy going. If you think we have a chance at a clean-energy future, wouldn't it be a good idea to cut back on oil use to stretch out the last of our fossil fuel inheritance and give us a better chance of getting there?
From an ethical view, we all share some responsibility for the oil spill as customers of the oil companies. In general, Americans just want to fill up our cars for cheap, no questions asked, and the oil companies are our faithful servants to that end. Now that we're reminded that getting the oil to fill up our cars is a dirty job, shouldn't we take responsibility for our share of the damage and maybe reduce our oil use and not waste so much?
It won't happen overnight, but making long term plans to get off of oil wouldn't hurt either. *Hint*, you don't have to wait for the government to act or the energy companies to invent the next thing. Gardening, relocalizing, and reconnecting with your neighbors is the most powerful thing you can do. These people are working on the plan: http://transitionus.org/
If you build an engine for stationary use at constant load, you can optimize for much higher efficiency than mobile use at variable load. Car engines need to be light weight. They're sized for peak power and acceleration, but spend most of their time at a tiny fraction of that load. They spend a lot of time idling in traffic. Non-hybrid cars waste lots of energy braking in city traffic.
That won't reduce the cost. When Toyota sold Rav4 EVs, which were made in a foreign country with cheap labor, the thing still cost $45000 to purchase.
Labor in Japan is not cheap. As you said, the extra component cost was in the battery. Toyota lost money at that price with all the one-off engineering going into a limited-production model, but $45k is probably a reasonable guesstimate of pricing with mass production.
The Rav4 EV was also costly to maintain. The battery required replacement every 100,000 miles - that's a cost equal to replacing an engine in a normal car, but about 3 times more frequently.
Do engines and transmissions typically go 300,000 mi without expensive major repairs? Might want to rethink that assumption. As durable as Toyota engines are, 300k is still pushing it. Since the NiMH battery packs were never sold as spare parts thanks to Chevron/Cobasys, we'll never know.
You don't need to warm the whole interior for emergencies. An electric vest, the kind used by motorcyclists and snowmobile riders, sucks 50-100W and will run all day and night on 12V power.
You mean like felling a few trees into power lines? The reason we haven't been attacked lately is because nobody with a serious plan has bothered trying. We do a good enough job ourselves neglecting critical infrastructure.
You need a maintenance contract to download software patches now, including security patches. Not that they were good with security patches before, they were months behind the Linux distros on releasing them.
Check out TrueCrypt for full disk encryption. Not many FDE vendors left after Symantec scoops up these two. FreeOTFE does volume encryption but no boot loader for FDE.
Of course, if you're not stuck on Windows many recent distros support installing on an encrypted root volume. The Ubuntu alternate install CD is one of them.
EC2 costs $.085/hr for a default standard on-demand instance: 1.7GB RAM, 160GB storage. Data transfer out costs $.15/GB. Pretty expensive just to serve out one desktop with FreeNX, but it supports multiple users. It could be a decent number with 1.7GB RAM.
You mean organic? Going vegan would probably let us double the world population considering the huge amount of grain and soy that's fed to animals.
Oil and natural gas won't last forever. The most optimistic estimates says 30 years before peak production rate, and we hit shortages on a growing planet. What's the plan to feed ourselves after that? Grow bigger and crash harder?
Nitrogen fertilizer (ammonia) is made from natural gas through the Haber Bosch process. Phosphorus is produced in a relatively small number of huge mines and shipped around the world by a supply chain powered by oil
Laptop batteries all use a standard cell which is slightly larger than AA. What you need are unprotected 18650 Li-Ion cells. You can find made in China cells for $3/ea from places like DealExtreme.
Just keep in mind you assume all the risk yourself when you rebuild Li-Ion packs. The cells aren't intended to be sold to end users because they must be certified together with the electronics that protect from overcharging and discharging. That said, there isn't nearly as much specialization in cell selection as some posters imply. 18650 cells may be rated for different capacities, but they're all compatible with any other 18650 charger. Just don't mix new and old or different capacities.
What's also remarkable about the period of extremely high oil prices was that production of oil didn't change much. High prices are an incentive to invest in production. Biofuels and oil exploration & production (E&P) were in fact a booming business right up until the 2008 crash. Shouldn't that investment have increased supply?
I wouldn't blame OPEC for the flat production. They're ineffective as a cartel, with individual members inflating reserves and exceeding quotas all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Not Facebook or Google? Do you do Google searches while logged in to your Gmail account?
Just as likely that they picked it up from some raw meat in a landfill or somebody's garbage pile. Think about it... Raw meat from somebody's BBQ harboring the antibiotic-resistant bacteria gets eaten by seagulls. The bacteria hitch a ride in seagulls and end up in poop.
There's something called rain and runoff. Seagull shit gets to more places than just where you see the dropping.
That's exactly this analyst's take on the situation, from that dirty hippie magazine, Forbes:
What Solyndra's Bankruptcy Means For Silicon Valley Solar Startups
You mean for a business paying an IT department for support? For tech-savvy home user, there's no recurring cost. One license from 2002 still entitles you to all updates, both security and feature updates.
Which distro release from 2002 is still supported? Maybe the rolling releases, but they're an exception. I love Linux as much as anyone here, but that always bothered me, needing to upgrade distro releases to stay current on userspace apps.
Try running 200 million cars on natural gas and those reserves won't be so vast any more. We use it for 20% of our electricity, and it's already one of the most expensive sources of power, useful more for peak load than base load.
CNG vehicles are already subsidized in some cities for air quality reasons. It's ok for buses and local delivery vehicles, but it's a long way from being practical for long haul trucking and personal use.
You make a good point about spare capacity, but you contradict yourself by referring to supply concerns as FUD. If Saudi Arabia is the only producer with significant spare capacity, that in itself is a big risk to supply. Add to that Saudi Aramco's secrecy about actual reserves and production data from their (very old) oilfields, their lack of ability to ramp up production in 2008, plus growing domestic demand, and you'll see there's good reason to be concerned about supply.
Algae biodiesel is vaporware. Nobody is close to having a commercial process that can scale up at a reasonable price. The highest yielding process needs closed bioreactors (clear tubes) to keep out other algae species. A square mi of clear tubing don't come cheap. Open ponds are cheaper, but still not exactly cheap to build.
I think you're underestimating the financial side side of the problem. Our debt-based economy grew up in a world with an expanding resource base. It's easy to pay back loans when there's a future of more and plenty. Yes, as oil gets more scarce and expensive, other forms of energy become viable, but guess what? They'll still be more expensive and less plentiful than oil today!
It's easy enough to say we'll adjust to more expensive energy, but in case you haven't noticed, there's a lot of money tied up in oil based investments: car and truck loans, mortgages for McMansions in the suburbs (far from everything and cost a fortune to heat and cool), shopping malls with huge parking lots. When that money goes poof (debt gets defaulted on), good luck scraping any money together for your alternative energy project. That's why everything from the bailouts to the stimulus was all about propping up the real estate market and hiding the bad debt.
>Electronic Stability Control on the other hand has been found to be effective at reducing accidents.
I've seen those studies too. That just means Americans are more careful about cornering speed than following distance. That's what I've seen. Everybody tailgates like crazy on the freeway, but they slow way down for curves like exit ramps.
Household income adjusted for inflation has been flat since the 70s. All this consumption was paid for by credit and cheap manufactured goods from China.
I'm all for simplifying, but the question is how to get there. A lot of powerful forces are arrayed against us simplifying. The Century of the Self might be a good film to watch now.
I really doubt toxoplasma infection would help the *players* at all. One of the effects of infection is slower reaction time, not something that would improve athletic performance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Behavioral_changes
They're rarely enforced, but almost every state has laws for "slower traffic keep right" or "left pane for passing only".
http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
In California, it specificically states "Notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits" in CVC 21654(a). Even if you are already driving faster than the speed limit, drivers must yield the left lane to traffic that's moving faster.
There's (at least) two ways to look at it.
From a practical view, we need oil for everything in our lives: get to work to pay the bills, feed ourselves from the food trucked in to stores, you could even say for our money that's propped up by oil. We'll probably drill everywhere we can to keep things running, and even that won't be enough to keep the old fossil-fuel economy going. If you think we have a chance at a clean-energy future, wouldn't it be a good idea to cut back on oil use to stretch out the last of our fossil fuel inheritance and give us a better chance of getting there?
From an ethical view, we all share some responsibility for the oil spill as customers of the oil companies. In general, Americans just want to fill up our cars for cheap, no questions asked, and the oil companies are our faithful servants to that end. Now that we're reminded that getting the oil to fill up our cars is a dirty job, shouldn't we take responsibility for our share of the damage and maybe reduce our oil use and not waste so much?
It won't happen overnight, but making long term plans to get off of oil wouldn't hurt either. *Hint*, you don't have to wait for the government to act or the energy companies to invent the next thing. Gardening, relocalizing, and reconnecting with your neighbors is the most powerful thing you can do. These people are working on the plan: http://transitionus.org/
If you build an engine for stationary use at constant load, you can optimize for much higher efficiency than mobile use at variable load. Car engines need to be light weight. They're sized for peak power and acceleration, but spend most of their time at a tiny fraction of that load. They spend a lot of time idling in traffic. Non-hybrid cars waste lots of energy braking in city traffic.
Labor in Japan is not cheap. As you said, the extra component cost was in the battery. Toyota lost money at that price with all the one-off engineering going into a limited-production model, but $45k is probably a reasonable guesstimate of pricing with mass production.
Do engines and transmissions typically go 300,000 mi without expensive major repairs? Might want to rethink that assumption. As durable as Toyota engines are, 300k is still pushing it. Since the NiMH battery packs were never sold as spare parts thanks to Chevron/Cobasys, we'll never know.
You don't need to warm the whole interior for emergencies. An electric vest, the kind used by motorcyclists and snowmobile riders, sucks 50-100W and will run all day and night on 12V power.
You mean like felling a few trees into power lines? The reason we haven't been attacked lately is because nobody with a serious plan has bothered trying. We do a good enough job ourselves neglecting critical infrastructure.
You need a maintenance contract to download software patches now, including security patches. Not that they were good with security patches before, they were months behind the Linux distros on releasing them.
Check out TrueCrypt for full disk encryption. Not many FDE vendors left after Symantec scoops up these two. FreeOTFE does volume encryption but no boot loader for FDE.
Of course, if you're not stuck on Windows many recent distros support installing on an encrypted root volume. The Ubuntu alternate install CD is one of them.
EC2 costs $.085/hr for a default standard on-demand instance: 1.7GB RAM, 160GB storage. Data transfer out costs $.15/GB. Pretty expensive just to serve out one desktop with FreeNX, but it supports multiple users. It could be a decent number with 1.7GB RAM.
You mean organic? Going vegan would probably let us double the world population considering the huge amount of grain and soy that's fed to animals.
Oil and natural gas won't last forever. The most optimistic estimates says 30 years before peak production rate, and we hit shortages on a growing planet. What's the plan to feed ourselves after that? Grow bigger and crash harder?
Nitrogen fertilizer (ammonia) is made from natural gas through the Haber Bosch process. Phosphorus is produced in a relatively small number of huge mines and shipped around the world by a supply chain powered by oil
Laptop batteries all use a standard cell which is slightly larger than AA. What you need are unprotected 18650 Li-Ion cells. You can find made in China cells for $3/ea from places like DealExtreme.
Just keep in mind you assume all the risk yourself when you rebuild Li-Ion packs. The cells aren't intended to be sold to end users because they must be certified together with the electronics that protect from overcharging and discharging. That said, there isn't nearly as much specialization in cell selection as some posters imply. 18650 cells may be rated for different capacities, but they're all compatible with any other 18650 charger. Just don't mix new and old or different capacities.
What's also remarkable about the period of extremely high oil prices was that production of oil didn't change much. High prices are an incentive to invest in production. Biofuels and oil exploration & production (E&P) were in fact a booming business right up until the 2008 crash. Shouldn't that investment have increased supply?
I wouldn't blame OPEC for the flat production. They're ineffective as a cartel, with individual members inflating reserves and exceeding quotas all the time.