Energy is like the universal currency whether it takes the form of heat, electricity or the chemical potential energy in an easily stored liquid. You can convert them at various rates of efficiency, and there are financial markets for each type of energy. Given the low efficiency of thermal depolymerization, I suspect it's worth more to use your solar collector to run a steam turbine and sell power to the grid.
The metric here is Energy Return On Energy Investment (EROEI). Oil is a very concentrated source of energy. In the early days of oil, EROEI was 50-100:1. These days it's still over 10:1 (http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/8/2/114144/2387). Thermal depolymerization is nowhere close to that, and it's probably a net negative. Then remember that the feedstock for it is much less energy-dense, and you're moving a huge amount of mass for a small amount of oil. You can mitigate that by locating the plant at a garbage dump where it's already being collected, but there's not enough garbage to replace more than a tiny fraction of our oil use. If you collect virgin feedstock, you're back to the same old problem.
Bio-crude from thermal depolymerization needs to be refined too. No difference there. The EROEI of refining is typically 10:1, 1 unit of energy (usually natural gas) in for finished product worth 10 units of energy.
Crude oil is the stored solar energy of millions of years of biomass cooked by the heat of the Earth. The energy we invest is just to drill and pump it out of the ground. The amount of energy needed to cook it out of garbage is much higher.
Nah, suburban people are more fearful than urban people. "White flight" was all about getting away from the scary brown people. The gated communities and cul-de-sac mazes of the suburbs are all about isolation and escape. Plus, unlike rural people, suburbanites avail themselves of the full array of public safety services like police, fire, ambulance, and sewage (the "city cocoon" as you put it). Suburban people may or may not have an edge in outdoor survival skills, but considering that nobody walks in the suburbs, they probably spend less time outdoors than urban people.
The problem is that it inherently finds the most efficient equilibrium at any cost. When we reach peak oil--capitalism will re-stabilize the system. But if that means purging mass sections of the population from the equation... that's what it'll do.
At some point in that collapse, markets break down and the old rules no longer apply. This is the biggest folly of Libertarianism: the idea that markets and contracts reign supreme, that people priced out of the food market will go away meekly and die, and that any violation of that natural order can be ascribed to criminality and solved with law enforcement. Well, I have a newsflash. You can't have commerce without political stability. Starving people will riot for food, and such riots are bad for political stability. Just see the role of bread riots through history.
Slightly higher because of the higher chance of rolling over. Otherwise, it's about the same as two cars of the same size. Also assume the same level of crash protection engineering. Newer vehicles have much better crash protection than older ones.
Back when they were around, Good Guys tried to avoid sales tax the same way, spun off their e-commerce site to a subsidiary with "no presence" in the state. It didn't work.
The EFF and ACLU have no political influence per se. They're 501(c)(3) charitable organizations just like, say, Focus on the Family, and it's already illegal for them to participate in partisan political campaigning. Here's the IRS pub.
There's still the loophole of "issue advocacy". Here's another story about that. The IRS is cracking down on issues advocacy ads that attempt to influence an election, but aside from that, charities can advocate all they want on partisan issues, say abortion or media decency.
Just to clarify, I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, and I didn't bother looking up his vote on immunity (yeah, shame on me). Just saying that he talks a good game and generally supports the 4th Amendment.
Sorry, welcome to America. The Supreme Court has ruled that campaign contributions are "Free Speech" protected by the First Amendment. Limits on individual contributions are still constitutional, but you'll still find plenty of Republicans and Libertarians who advocate no contribution limits under the guise of Free Speech, Steve Forbes for one.
It gets complicated because it's more than just direct contributions from PACs to individual campaigns. There are various PACS like the ones belonging to Blue Dogs caucus and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, that collect corporate contributions and distribute to House members. The Blue Dogs are a group of about 30 fiscally conservative Democrats in the House. They're reliably in the pocket of corporate lobbyists, so right off the bat, the Democrats were 30 votes behind on stopping immunity.
The lobbyists have an easier job flipping the Democrats on these votes. The Republicans generally vote as a block because they're all AT&T's bitch (except for Ron Paul who still cares about the 4th Amendment). With the House majority, they only needed to flip 1/3 of the Democrats to win the vote, and that's about how it ended up. 2/3 of the House Democrats voted against it.
The Ford Sync (based on Windows CE) can connect to a bluetooth phone and read text messages with text-to-speech. You can even dictate outgoing messages with voice recognition. I have no idea how well it works.
Unless you're playing 3d games, it might be easier to get a laptop instead of building your own. Don't bother with Atom, it's too underpowered for desktop use.
The 360 and PS3 have both had 2 die shrinks since release. The newest ones should use about 60W less than the earliest. Judging from the 30W difference between the 360 and PS3 in TFA, the 360 was probably one generation newer than the PS3.
If people were "fine" with it, why would the admin. be trying to keep their violations of NSLs secret? And be trying to grant retroactive immunity to the Telecoms?
There's "fine with it" and then there's "fine with it". Opinion polls about warrantless wiretapping run about 50-something percent against/40-something percent for. That's a solid majority, but far from the overwhelming majority it takes for Washington to pay attention. That's not even a big enough majority to break a Senate filibuster. The secrecy surrounding NSL and the push for telecom immunity is just to be double-extra sure they get away with it.
I think you're understating the prevalence of the fat gene. I don't have the fat gene myself. In the first ten years after college I ate like a pig, barely exercised, and gained a whopping 15 lbs. which I've since lost. Most people aren't as lucky as me. I'm not saying that having the fat gene excuses you from nutrition and exercise; it means you have to work harder at it.
Just about every US state has a law that slower traffic must keep right. In California and Virginia it's this applies *regardless of speed limits*. Blocking the left lane because somebody appointed themselves speed limit enforcer is more dangerous than the act of speeding itself.
Different social groups have different status symbols. But signaling wealth through status symbols is definitely one way to impress the ladies. If you're talking about monster trucks and which ladies they impress, look up up "bro ho" on urbandictionary.com.
The million dollar price tags on the McLaren F1 and Ferrari Enzo paid for a lot more than carbon fiber construction and crash engineering. The Mosler MT900S is made from carbon fiber, weighs 2500 lbs, and costs $190,000. It passes US safety and emissions standards, and a lot of that cost and weight goes into a big V8 engine and engineering a high performance sports car. Nobody has ever tried building a carbon composite economy car, but there have been affordable fiberglass bodied cars like the Meyers Manx.
Depends which EOL date you're talking about. XP license availability was supposed to be discontinued 6/30/08, but Microsoft extended that to 1/20/09 for System Builders and probably longer than that for UMPCs. XP Home, Pro and MCE are all supported with bugfixes and security updates through 4/8/14. There's another good 6 years left in XP.
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Energy is like the universal currency whether it takes the form of heat, electricity or the chemical potential energy in an easily stored liquid. You can convert them at various rates of efficiency, and there are financial markets for each type of energy. Given the low efficiency of thermal depolymerization, I suspect it's worth more to use your solar collector to run a steam turbine and sell power to the grid.
The metric here is Energy Return On Energy Investment (EROEI). Oil is a very concentrated source of energy. In the early days of oil, EROEI was 50-100:1. These days it's still over 10:1 (http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/8/2/114144/2387). Thermal depolymerization is nowhere close to that, and it's probably a net negative. Then remember that the feedstock for it is much less energy-dense, and you're moving a huge amount of mass for a small amount of oil. You can mitigate that by locating the plant at a garbage dump where it's already being collected, but there's not enough garbage to replace more than a tiny fraction of our oil use. If you collect virgin feedstock, you're back to the same old problem.
Bio-crude from thermal depolymerization needs to be refined too. No difference there. The EROEI of refining is typically 10:1, 1 unit of energy (usually natural gas) in for finished product worth 10 units of energy.
Crude oil is the stored solar energy of millions of years of biomass cooked by the heat of the Earth. The energy we invest is just to drill and pump it out of the ground. The amount of energy needed to cook it out of garbage is much higher.
Actually, that's for just the battery *cells*. There's much more that goes into the battery pack: White Paper from Tesla Motors. Warning pdf.
Nah, suburban people are more fearful than urban people. "White flight" was all about getting away from the scary brown people. The gated communities and cul-de-sac mazes of the suburbs are all about isolation and escape. Plus, unlike rural people, suburbanites avail themselves of the full array of public safety services like police, fire, ambulance, and sewage (the "city cocoon" as you put it). Suburban people may or may not have an edge in outdoor survival skills, but considering that nobody walks in the suburbs, they probably spend less time outdoors than urban people.
At some point in that collapse, markets break down and the old rules no longer apply. This is the biggest folly of Libertarianism: the idea that markets and contracts reign supreme, that people priced out of the food market will go away meekly and die, and that any violation of that natural order can be ascribed to criminality and solved with law enforcement. Well, I have a newsflash. You can't have commerce without political stability. Starving people will riot for food, and such riots are bad for political stability. Just see the role of bread riots through history.
Slightly higher because of the higher chance of rolling over. Otherwise, it's about the same as two cars of the same size. Also assume the same level of crash protection engineering. Newer vehicles have much better crash protection than older ones.
Back when they were around, Good Guys tried to avoid sales tax the same way, spun off their e-commerce site to a subsidiary with "no presence" in the state. It didn't work.
The EFF and ACLU have no political influence per se. They're 501(c)(3) charitable organizations just like, say, Focus on the Family, and it's already illegal for them to participate in partisan political campaigning. Here's the IRS pub.
There's still the loophole of "issue advocacy". Here's another story about that. The IRS is cracking down on issues advocacy ads that attempt to influence an election, but aside from that, charities can advocate all they want on partisan issues, say abortion or media decency.
Just to clarify, I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, and I didn't bother looking up his vote on immunity (yeah, shame on me). Just saying that he talks a good game and generally supports the 4th Amendment.
Sorry, welcome to America. The Supreme Court has ruled that campaign contributions are "Free Speech" protected by the First Amendment. Limits on individual contributions are still constitutional, but you'll still find plenty of Republicans and Libertarians who advocate no contribution limits under the guise of Free Speech, Steve Forbes for one.
It gets complicated because it's more than just direct contributions from PACs to individual campaigns. There are various PACS like the ones belonging to Blue Dogs caucus and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, that collect corporate contributions and distribute to House members.
The Blue Dogs are a group of about 30 fiscally conservative Democrats in the House. They're reliably in the pocket of corporate lobbyists, so right off the bat, the Democrats were 30 votes behind on stopping immunity.
The lobbyists have an easier job flipping the Democrats on these votes. The Republicans generally vote as a block because they're all AT&T's bitch (except for Ron Paul who still cares about the 4th Amendment). With the House majority, they only needed to flip 1/3 of the Democrats to win the vote, and that's about how it ended up. 2/3 of the House Democrats voted against it.
Bah, that's easy with an electric razor. Let's see someone try it with shaving cream and a Bic.
The Ford Sync (based on Windows CE) can connect to a bluetooth phone and read text messages with text-to-speech. You can even dictate outgoing messages with voice recognition. I have no idea how well it works.
Unless you're playing 3d games, it might be easier to get a laptop instead of building your own. Don't bother with Atom, it's too underpowered for desktop use.
The 360 and PS3 have both had 2 die shrinks since release. The newest ones should use about 60W less than the earliest. Judging from the 30W difference between the 360 and PS3 in TFA, the 360 was probably one generation newer than the PS3.
There's "fine with it" and then there's "fine with it". Opinion polls about warrantless wiretapping run about 50-something percent against/40-something percent for. That's a solid majority, but far from the overwhelming majority it takes for Washington to pay attention. That's not even a big enough majority to break a Senate filibuster. The secrecy surrounding NSL and the push for telecom immunity is just to be double-extra sure they get away with it.
I think you're understating the prevalence of the fat gene. I don't have the fat gene myself. In the first ten years after college I ate like a pig, barely exercised, and gained a whopping 15 lbs. which I've since lost. Most people aren't as lucky as me.
I'm not saying that having the fat gene excuses you from nutrition and exercise; it means you have to work harder at it.
Just about every US state has a law that slower traffic must keep right. In California and Virginia it's this applies *regardless of speed limits*. Blocking the left lane because somebody appointed themselves speed limit enforcer is more dangerous than the act of speeding itself.
http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
Different social groups have different status symbols. But signaling wealth through status symbols is definitely one way to impress the ladies. If you're talking about monster trucks and which ladies they impress, look up up "bro ho" on urbandictionary.com.
The million dollar price tags on the McLaren F1 and Ferrari Enzo paid for a lot more than carbon fiber construction and crash engineering. The Mosler MT900S is made from carbon fiber, weighs 2500 lbs, and costs $190,000. It passes US safety and emissions standards, and a lot of that cost and weight goes into a big V8 engine and engineering a high performance sports car. Nobody has ever tried building a carbon composite economy car, but there have been affordable fiberglass bodied cars like the Meyers Manx.
The Smart car is overbuilt for safety. Compared to a Geo Metro, the Smart fortwo is 40 in shorter and 200 lbs heavier, although it is 8 in taller.
Depends which EOL date you're talking about. XP license availability was supposed to be discontinued 6/30/08, but Microsoft extended that to 1/20/09 for System Builders and probably longer than that for UMPCs. XP Home, Pro and MCE are all supported with bugfixes and security updates through 4/8/14. There's another good 6 years left in XP.