It's funny you should talk about energy because the technology world has a huge footprint in meatspace and human labor. Things like digging fuel out of the ground and cutting back trees from power lines. At some point, I suppose someday an AI could bootstrap itself with self-assembling solar panels or maybe beam mind control rays to make humans do its bidding, but until then, computers are utterly dependent on humans for electricity.
There's an alternative but less convenient than streaming. There's plenty of free Youtube downloader utilities. Download the FLV file and play it in Media Player Classic or VLC. Of course, if there's a vulnerability in MPC's or VLC's FLV decoder...
I'm talking about the energy inputs into "modern" farming. You can change toxicity by juggling a few atoms around, but there's no getting around the energy inputs into a physical process. Ammonia for fertilizer is made from natural gas at the rate of 33.5 MMBTU per ton. Nitrogen fertilizer is the second highest cost of growing corn after rent for land, and that's before prices for fertilizer nearly doubled. It's easy to say we'll just pay more if that's what it costs. 75 cents of fertilizer for a bushel of corn may not sound like much when you're buying corn at retail, but for an industrial scale buyer of corn like a cattle feedlot that's real money. Then consider that heating and electricity also use natural gas, and we'll get to decide which is worth more to us: food, heat or power. Right now fertilizer doesn't compete for the same natural gas supplies because it's nearly all imported. Domestic gas is too expensive. Ammonia is easy to liquefy compared to methane and is more readily imported than LNG. But don't worry. We're working on LNG terminals and gas-to-liquid plants to exploit remote supplies of gas and push ammonia prices up even more.
Do you know how much natural gas goes into making chemical fertilizers? (hint, a LOT) Corn is one of the most fertilizer-intensive crops, but wheat and soybean aren't far behind. Don't think you eat a whole lot of grain or vegetables? Think again. About 10 lbs of grain feed go into every lb of beef. We are literally eating fossil fuels, and natural gas production is about to fall off a cliff in the next few decades. Like it or not, "natural" farming is the wave of the future.
The need for patching will never go away. Self-propagating network worms aren't as big as they used to be, but in its heyday, they were modular. They would reverse engineer the Microsoft patch and plug in the new exploit shortly after Patch Tuesday.
These days, an unpatched machine is vulnerable to drive by downloads, say, from a shady banner ad. It's not just an IE problem; I've seen adware toolbars for Mozilla, and XUL is just as full-featured as ActiveX. If someone finds a vulnerability in an image decoding lib similar to the Windows GDI bug, a drive by download could own your computer through Mozilla just as well as through IE.
In fact, courteous, on-topic replies by polygraph critics have been routinely deleted and those posting them (including myself and Dr. Drew Richardson) have been banned.
There may be a gray area between trolling/flaming and disagreeing, but if posters are really "courteous, on-topic" banning them is clearly censorship and not moderation.
In the short term, yes, but remember that commercial airlines will ride the downward spiral to Greyhound levels of service and worse before finally collapsing probably due to fuel prices. There are few enough wealthy people that the total impact of private jets may be small, but the takeaway lesson is that the elites have no stake in the survival of commercial aviation. They'll just let it collapse.
Sounds pretty complex to me. That huge an area of photovoltaic cells is hugely expensive. Plus, electricity isn't getting any cheaper, so it may be more valuable to just sell that power to the grid. If it's PV, there's no reason to centralize it in a solar farm either. You're better off distributing it out to rooftops closer to the consumers, even after the expense of inverters and smart meters.
It does make sense to centralize solar if you're doing concentrating thermal power. You can even store the heat from solar thermal to generate after dark. http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/3882
Density is definitely a problem for aircraft because aerodynamic drag is proportional to frontal area. Wider bodies have more drag. Stretching the fuselage doesn't increase drag, but does increase weight. Also, forget about storing hydrogen in wing tanks because you can't insulate a thin tank like that for liquid H2.
Algae definitely beats out crop plants especially if we could use salt water, but there are still problems logistically. You could grow it in open ponds, but then you'd have problems with contamination from other algae species with lower oil production. A bioreactor (enclosed clear tubes) is much more efficient, but try pricing out an acre of glass or plastic tubing.
Part of that was that check clearing was still done by paper through US mail that was flown around the country. That was a big motivation for finally getting electronic clearing checks.
If you can't afford a private jet there's Day Jet and Net Jet. They're like buying a time share in a private jet. Either way, you don't deal with the crowds and hassles of commercial airports.
You're talking about economists here, and economists have no problem extrapolating exponential growth indefinitely to the future, never mind the physical limits of the planet. You're right about US aviation collapsing. Anybody who can afford it, meaning corporate VPs and up, are abandoning commercial flights in droves. You'd be a fool not to.
You may be underestimating the effect of government power on wealth. Much of US wealth is tied to the dollar's strength as a reserve currency, and much of that is tied to our political status as a world superpower. The dollar was stronger before Frat Boy went on a spending spree with the US Treasury's credit card, but even now, dollars are pretty valuable in the grand scheme of things.
Market segmentation. Car nav units are mass market and cheap. Motorcycle nav units are specialty market and expensive. Marine nav units are similarly expensive, though not quite as overpriced. I got the Magellan 2200T myself. It's more splashproof than waterproof.
Sure a smaller device like that internet tablet works too. I just figured you could get more power or put a better antenna on a laptop wireless adapter.
That's definitely something to worry about. I was shopping for a GPS to use in the car and motorcycle. While car GPS units have dropped to $150 or less, motorcycle GPS units are still $500+. The only other waterproof nav units are the Magellan Crossover or Magellan 2200T (now discontinued). Or you could put it away when it rains, but that's easy to do for a tiny GPS unit.
If you're just logging access points you can wardrive with a laptop in a backpack plus a GPS w/ serial interface. Who needs the huge screen? You can set up an audio alert when it finds one.
You're missing the point. The two parties' ideologies leave them open to different criticisms. If it was a Democrat, people would blame Democrats for being "soft on crime". If it was a Republican, people would call him a hypocrite because Republicans "tough on crime" in a knee jerk way.
The other advantage is that large stationary power plants are optimized for thermal efficiency. Even charging a Tesla on the dirtiest coal fired electricity emits the same CO2 per mile as running a similar car, e.g. a Lotus Elise, on gasoline.
Seriously. Get a time-of-use electric meter and charge it overnight at cheap off-peak rates. EVs are good PR for electric utilities, so I'd expect most will be happy to accommodate you.
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I'm pretty sure he meant keeping 98SE and skipping ME to wait for a suitable replacement.
It's funny you should talk about energy because the technology world has a huge footprint in meatspace and human labor. Things like digging fuel out of the ground and cutting back trees from power lines. At some point, I suppose someday an AI could bootstrap itself with self-assembling solar panels or maybe beam mind control rays to make humans do its bidding, but until then, computers are utterly dependent on humans for electricity.
Hey, I said it was less convenient. Still, sometimes you want to save the file for later or to put on your smartphone/PDA.
There's an alternative but less convenient than streaming. There's plenty of free Youtube downloader utilities. Download the FLV file and play it in Media Player Classic or VLC. Of course, if there's a vulnerability in MPC's or VLC's FLV decoder...
I'm talking about the energy inputs into "modern" farming. You can change toxicity by juggling a few atoms around, but there's no getting around the energy inputs into a physical process. Ammonia for fertilizer is made from natural gas at the rate of 33.5 MMBTU per ton. Nitrogen fertilizer is the second highest cost of growing corn after rent for land, and that's before prices for fertilizer nearly doubled. It's easy to say we'll just pay more if that's what it costs. 75 cents of fertilizer for a bushel of corn may not sound like much when you're buying corn at retail, but for an industrial scale buyer of corn like a cattle feedlot that's real money. Then consider that heating and electricity also use natural gas, and we'll get to decide which is worth more to us: food, heat or power. Right now fertilizer doesn't compete for the same natural gas supplies because it's nearly all imported. Domestic gas is too expensive. Ammonia is easy to liquefy compared to methane and is more readily imported than LNG. But don't worry. We're working on LNG terminals and gas-to-liquid plants to exploit remote supplies of gas and push ammonia prices up even more.
Do you know how much natural gas goes into making chemical fertilizers? (hint, a LOT) Corn is one of the most fertilizer-intensive crops, but wheat and soybean aren't far behind. Don't think you eat a whole lot of grain or vegetables? Think again. About 10 lbs of grain feed go into every lb of beef. We are literally eating fossil fuels, and natural gas production is about to fall off a cliff in the next few decades. Like it or not, "natural" farming is the wave of the future.
The need for patching will never go away. Self-propagating network worms aren't as big as they used to be, but in its heyday, they were modular. They would reverse engineer the Microsoft patch and plug in the new exploit shortly after Patch Tuesday.
These days, an unpatched machine is vulnerable to drive by downloads, say, from a shady banner ad. It's not just an IE problem; I've seen adware toolbars for Mozilla, and XUL is just as full-featured as ActiveX. If someone finds a vulnerability in an image decoding lib similar to the Windows GDI bug, a drive by download could own your computer through Mozilla just as well as through IE.
There may be a gray area between trolling/flaming and disagreeing, but if posters are really "courteous, on-topic" banning them is clearly censorship and not moderation.
In the short term, yes, but remember that commercial airlines will ride the downward spiral to Greyhound levels of service and worse before finally collapsing probably due to fuel prices. There are few enough wealthy people that the total impact of private jets may be small, but the takeaway lesson is that the elites have no stake in the survival of commercial aviation. They'll just let it collapse.
Sounds pretty complex to me. That huge an area of photovoltaic cells is hugely expensive. Plus, electricity isn't getting any cheaper, so it may be more valuable to just sell that power to the grid. If it's PV, there's no reason to centralize it in a solar farm either. You're better off distributing it out to rooftops closer to the consumers, even after the expense of inverters and smart meters.
It does make sense to centralize solar if you're doing concentrating thermal power. You can even store the heat from solar thermal to generate after dark.
http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/3882
Density is definitely a problem for aircraft because aerodynamic drag is proportional to frontal area. Wider bodies have more drag. Stretching the fuselage doesn't increase drag, but does increase weight. Also, forget about storing hydrogen in wing tanks because you can't insulate a thin tank like that for liquid H2.
Algae definitely beats out crop plants especially if we could use salt water, but there are still problems logistically. You could grow it in open ponds, but then you'd have problems with contamination from other algae species with lower oil production. A bioreactor (enclosed clear tubes) is much more efficient, but try pricing out an acre of glass or plastic tubing.
Part of that was that check clearing was still done by paper through US mail that was flown around the country. That was a big motivation for finally getting electronic clearing checks.
If you can't afford a private jet there's Day Jet and Net Jet. They're like buying a time share in a private jet. Either way, you don't deal with the crowds and hassles of commercial airports.
You're talking about economists here, and economists have no problem extrapolating exponential growth indefinitely to the future, never mind the physical limits of the planet. You're right about US aviation collapsing. Anybody who can afford it, meaning corporate VPs and up, are abandoning commercial flights in droves. You'd be a fool not to.
You may be underestimating the effect of government power on wealth. Much of US wealth is tied to the dollar's strength as a reserve currency, and much of that is tied to our political status as a world superpower. The dollar was stronger before Frat Boy went on a spending spree with the US Treasury's credit card, but even now, dollars are pretty valuable in the grand scheme of things.
Market segmentation. Car nav units are mass market and cheap. Motorcycle nav units are specialty market and expensive. Marine nav units are similarly expensive, though not quite as overpriced. I got the Magellan 2200T myself. It's more splashproof than waterproof.
Sure a smaller device like that internet tablet works too. I just figured you could get more power or put a better antenna on a laptop wireless adapter.
That's definitely something to worry about. I was shopping for a GPS to use in the car and motorcycle. While car GPS units have dropped to $150 or less, motorcycle GPS units are still $500+. The only other waterproof nav units are the Magellan Crossover or Magellan 2200T (now discontinued). Or you could put it away when it rains, but that's easy to do for a tiny GPS unit.
If you're just logging access points you can wardrive with a laptop in a backpack plus a GPS w/ serial interface. Who needs the huge screen? You can set up an audio alert when it finds one.
Not to mention very distracting while you're riding it!
So we should be tough on crime except when it doesn't make sense to be tough on crime? You sound like a Democrat already!
You're missing the point. The two parties' ideologies leave them open to different criticisms. If it was a Democrat, people would blame Democrats for being "soft on crime". If it was a Republican, people would call him a hypocrite because Republicans "tough on crime" in a knee jerk way.
The other advantage is that large stationary power plants are optimized for thermal efficiency. Even charging a Tesla on the dirtiest coal fired electricity emits the same CO2 per mile as running a similar car, e.g. a Lotus Elise, on gasoline.
Seriously. Get a time-of-use electric meter and charge it overnight at cheap off-peak rates. EVs are good PR for electric utilities, so I'd expect most will be happy to accommodate you.