if your going to make that argument you must accept that the same will happen with oil, denouncing the peak oil theory your crowd is so fond of. your claim about indium is also misleading, because while there is lots of indium in the crust it's not possible to extract it.
Oil is so obviously not the same as Indium I cannot see how you could make this statement. Oil is a fossil created by biological activity around 200-300 million years ago. Indium is part of the Earth itself. Did you read the link to the Indium Corporation? Indium Production has increased 7-fold since 1980 and is still less that one sixtieth that of Silver production, which is on average 3-times rarer. The Worlds Geologists will find more Indium as the market tells them it is profitable to do so.
Also unlike Oil, Indium can be recycled and reused and this is this is happening now. See the link to the Indium Corporation in the Parent post.
Do those lifecycle analysis also factor in water vapor? Water vapor is more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. With the greater surface area of lakes behind dams, more water is allowed to evaporate. Then there's the methane, which is more than 20 tymes more potent than CO2, generated.
Most lifecycle analyses in the literature do not include methane production. My guess is that methane production from a dam is far too hard to estimate in a general case. I suppose each dam would need it's own specific investigation. Water vapour production is likewise not included.
Dams also require vast amounts of concrete which uses Portland cement as the main ingredient. Portland cement is made by heating limestone to 1450C in a kiln which requires a lot of energy. Along with the concrete dams also require a lot of steel which like concrete requires a lot of heat.
All true but doing full lifecycle calculations the CO2 emissions from Hydro are about as low any competing technology, though nuclear gives it a run from for its money in the right circumstances. (Rich Uranium ores and centrifugal enrichment).
See (Donnes et al International Journal LifeCycle Analayis 10 (1) 10 - 23 (2005)) which calculates 5 gram CO2 per KWhr for centrifuge enrichment powering a PWR.
I've seen Hydro emission rates as low as 3 gm CO2 per Kwhr but I don't have a reference handy.
I guess the point is that is if the World used only Nuclear Power to generate electricity, no one would be concerned about their CO2 footprint from using Electricity. It you add up all those externalities to Nuclear power you get a CO2 emission rate similar to Wind Power.
Estimates for Nuclear Power.
Estimates for Wind and Solar PV
If the professor worked at my uni and tried to sell his notes to the students, his "quality of teaching" assessment from his students would be so low he'd have to be removed from classroom.
Which is how it should be. He should provide the best education he can for his students which clearly includes his lecture notes.
While it may well cost Nanoslar 90 cents per watt to make these panels, I don't think they would sell them too far under the current commercial price of $4-$5 per watt. If there is demand at $4 why sell them for $1?
In any case this is incredibly good news. If they can make 430 MW of product per year at $4 million per MW from a $100 million dollar facility, that gives them well over $1 Billion per year to expand production. So in 2011 they may have 10 plants in full operation and another 100 under construction or ramping up. This has the potential to become very big, very fast.
Minor information injection here: Nanosolar _is_ making solar 'sheets' now... no wishful thinking involved. They've contracted with a German company who has ordered roughly 600 megawatts worth of sheets....at.... drumroll please..... 90 cents per watt.
Do you have a reference for this? It is very interesting news.
I must admit that SETI this is likely to not find anything since the obvious answer to the Fermi Paradox is that that there are no (other) advanced civilizations within the Galaxy. (Further reasoning is that although life appeared on Earth almost as soon is it was possible to be here, yet humans required over 4000 million years of evolution to appear, which is 25% of the age of the Universe.)
However it is interesting to speculate and look since if we did find something it would be an event of outstanding significance. Normally when looking for rare events without success, a scientist places an upper limit of how unlikely that event is.
So, could SETI discover an Earth-style civilization if it existed around another star? If so what distance away from Earth is excluded from containing an Earth-style civilization by SETI's current non-observation?
Nuclear fanatics seem to forget the process it takes from digging up something that is one of the rarest elements on our planet and then disposing of such elements when we are done.
This is total and easily disproved FUD put out by anti-nuclear activists.
Uranium is not particularly rare. It has the same crustal abundance as tin which has been mined mined throughout human history (over 5000 years).
Here is a link to the operating data of lowest grade mine currently in production. Rossing in Namibia which mines Ore at a grade of 300 PPM
If you hunt through the data here you'll see Rossing consumes 1.3 PJ of energy while producing 4000 tonnes of U3O8 per year. This is sufficient for at least 15 1 GW reactors per year. Each 1 GW reactor produces 30 PJ of electrical energy per year. So Rossing consumes 1.3 PJ and supplies Uranium sufficient for 450 PJ. That is an energy gain of over 400.
Regarding disposal, I agree the technology has not been fully developed but it is not that much of stretch from where the nordic countries are now. Plus Gen IV reactors could actually turn a large fraction of the waste into energy when they become available.
I personally think the energy future will be some combination of nuclear and direct solar. Solar has been making huge strides recently.
We support ODF. It is the default file format for our biggest deployment, the OLPC laptops. As far as I can tell it is now lossless for the OLPC implementation of AbiWord. We will continue to work to improve ou support for ODF.
We're in the business of helping our users whoever they may be.
I loved the Niven known space series with the Bussard ramjets.
After reading through the presentation and arguments above I have not no hope that his polywell device will work. I guess we might have more info some time next year.
"In my experience most people (religious or otherwise) get irrational when their core beliefs are challenged. Not always hostile, but definitely irrational. They will spout logical fallacies left and right, seeming to have suddenly lost their ability to detect them, when only moments before they were pointing them out (as fallacies) in rival belief systems."
Yep! Try talking to a member of GreenPeace about Nuclear Power:-)
Well for 6 months at least if was at the North or South Pole:-) I guess sit would have to work out some tricky aerodynamics to keep the solar cells facing the sun though.
The original post starts: As a leftist..., I think of a leftist as someone who believes in a benevolent government that taxes the wealthy to provide benefits to the have-nots. This equates to Big Government.
To me, a libertarian is someone who wants as little government involvement in their life as possible. This equates to Small Government.
So is the original poster, as a leftist, is disagreement with the majority of/.'ers?
My pure guess is that life originated somewhere else in the galaxy and some proto-stuff survived on an asteroid/commet to land on a very early earth.
Basically for the reasons you stated. Life appeared on earth almost instantly it was possible. It has taken 25% of the age of the Universe for that early proto-stuff to be come self-aware and advanced enough to understand a reasonable fraction of the Universe.
Comments like this fail to appreciate how long was the time before humans. It is vastly more likely that if other intelligent life existed we would have been colonized some time within the last thousand million years.
Given our sample of size of exactly one planet where life is known to exist....
1. Life arrived here really quickly => Life is likely to arise quickly elsewhere 2. Intelligent life arrived after 4 billion years of evolution, which is 25% of the age of the universe.
My guess is that intelligent life is very unlikely and we are likely alone in the galaxy even if life is abundant. It would be great to be able to expand our sample size.
My peeve is that this is not a story, nor an editorial, and not even a book review. It's an invitation to discussion for a topic that barely interests a lot of/.
Over 700 comments so far. This puts it up above about 95% of/. stories.
Slashdot Mirror
Oil is so obviously not the same as Indium I cannot see how you could make this statement. Oil is a fossil created by biological activity around 200-300 million years ago. Indium is part of the Earth itself. Did you read the link to the Indium Corporation? Indium Production has increased 7-fold since 1980 and is still less that one sixtieth that of Silver production, which is on average 3-times rarer. The Worlds Geologists will find more Indium as the market tells them it is profitable to do so.
Also unlike Oil, Indium can be recycled and reused and this is this is happening now. See the link to the Indium Corporation in the Parent post.
Most lifecycle analyses in the literature do not include methane production. My guess is that methane production from a dam is far too hard to estimate in a general case. I suppose each dam would need it's own specific investigation. Water vapour production is likewise not included.
All true but doing full lifecycle calculations the CO2 emissions from Hydro are about as low any competing technology, though nuclear gives it a run from for its money in the right circumstances. (Rich Uranium ores and centrifugal enrichment).
See (Donnes et al International Journal LifeCycle Analayis 10 (1) 10 - 23 (2005)) which calculates 5 gram CO2 per KWhr for centrifuge enrichment powering a PWR.
I've seen Hydro emission rates as low as 3 gm CO2 per Kwhr but I don't have a reference handy.
I guess the point is that is if the World used only Nuclear Power to generate electricity, no one would be concerned about their CO2 footprint from using Electricity. It you add up all those externalities to Nuclear power you get a CO2 emission rate similar to Wind Power.
Estimates for Nuclear Power.
Estimates for Wind and Solar PV
I dunno what google do, but I get about 1 spam per 3 days on an account that receives about 50 messages a day.
My work MS exchange address with the latest anti-spam stuff gets about 10 spams per day with the same legitimate email rate.
Without anti-spam I get about 200 spams a day at work.
Because the drivers are open source and work out the box on every modern Linux distro.
I like my compiz eye-candy and Intel delivers more than enough performance for it.
If the professor worked at my uni and tried to sell his notes to the students, his "quality of teaching" assessment from his students would be so low he'd have to be removed from classroom.
Which is how it should be. He should provide the best education he can for his students which clearly includes his lecture notes.
Jon showed how you can interface second life with the real world at LCA 2008.
Videos here http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2008/Wed/mel8-039a.ogg
and here: http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2008/Wed/mel8-039b.ogg
While it may well cost Nanoslar 90 cents per watt to make these panels, I don't think they would sell them too far under the current commercial price of $4-$5 per watt. If there is demand at $4 why sell them for $1?
In any case this is incredibly good news. If they can make 430 MW of product per year at $4 million per MW from a $100 million dollar facility, that gives them well over $1 Billion per year to expand production. So in 2011 they may have 10 plants in full operation and another 100 under construction or ramping up. This has the potential to become very big, very fast.
Do you have a reference for this? It is very interesting news.
The G1G1 program raised 33 million which implies around 150,000 laptops ordered. Quanta won;t be able to supply them all until the end of January.
The production lines are not sitting idle at all.
I must admit that SETI this is likely to not find anything since the obvious answer to the Fermi Paradox is that that there are no (other) advanced civilizations within the Galaxy. (Further reasoning is that although life appeared on Earth almost as soon is it was possible to be here, yet humans required over 4000 million years of evolution to appear, which is 25% of the age of the Universe.)
However it is interesting to speculate and look since if we did find something it would be an event of outstanding significance. Normally when looking for rare events without success, a scientist places an upper limit of how unlikely that event is.
So, could SETI discover an Earth-style civilization if it existed around another star?
If so what distance away from Earth is excluded from containing an Earth-style civilization by SETI's current non-observation?
This is total and easily disproved FUD put out by anti-nuclear activists.
Uranium is not particularly rare. It has the same crustal abundance as tin which has been mined mined throughout human history (over 5000 years).
Here is a link to the operating data of lowest grade mine currently in production. Rossing in Namibia which mines Ore at a grade of 300 PPM
http://www.rossing.com/2006performance.htm
If you hunt through the data here you'll see Rossing consumes 1.3 PJ of energy while producing 4000 tonnes of U3O8 per year. This is sufficient for at least 15 1 GW reactors per year. Each 1 GW reactor produces 30 PJ of electrical energy per year. So Rossing consumes 1.3 PJ and supplies Uranium sufficient for 450 PJ. That is an energy gain of over 400.
Regarding disposal, I agree the technology has not been fully developed but it is not that much of stretch from where the nordic countries are now. Plus Gen IV reactors could actually turn a large fraction of the waste into energy when they become available.
I personally think the energy future will be some combination of nuclear and direct solar. Solar has been making huge strides recently.
We support ODF. It is the default file format for our biggest deployment, the OLPC laptops. As far as I can tell it is now lossless for the OLPC implementation of AbiWord. We will continue to work to improve ou support for ODF.
We're in the business of helping our users whoever they may be.
As an AbiWord developer all I can say is we want to support any format that our users have on their computer.
The work that Jody does helps in this regard.
If the KOffice guys want to not import ooxml then they're making their program less useful to their users.
Martin Sevior
I loved the Niven known space series with the Bussard ramjets.
After reading through the presentation and arguments above I have not no hope that his polywell device will work. I guess we might have more info some time next year.
"In my experience most people (religious or otherwise) get irrational when their core beliefs are challenged. Not always hostile, but definitely irrational. They will spout logical fallacies left and right, seeming to have suddenly lost their ability to detect them, when only moments before they were pointing them out (as fallacies) in rival belief systems."
:-)
Yep! Try talking to a member of GreenPeace about Nuclear Power
Well for 6 months at least if was at the North or South Pole :-) I guess sit would have to work out some tricky aerodynamics to keep the solar cells facing the sun though.
The original post starts: As a leftist..., I think of a leftist as someone who believes in a benevolent government that taxes the wealthy to provide benefits to the have-nots. This equates to Big Government.
/.'ers?
To me, a libertarian is someone who wants as little government involvement in their life as possible. This equates to Small Government.
So is the original poster, as a leftist, is disagreement with the majority of
"it is mind boggling that people actually think we are the only ones in the universe [especially when Mars and Europa could have or had life."
To quote Enrico Fermi, "So where are they then?"
They've had billions of years to find earth, but there is no evidence whatsoever of them.
My pure guess is that life originated somewhere else in the galaxy and some proto-stuff survived on an asteroid/commet to land on a very early earth.
Basically for the reasons you stated. Life appeared on earth almost instantly it was possible. It has taken 25% of the age of the Universe for that early proto-stuff to be come self-aware and advanced enough to understand a reasonable fraction of the Universe.
My guess is that we're alone.
Comments like this fail to appreciate how long was the time before humans. It is vastly more likely that if other intelligent life existed we would have been colonized some time within the last thousand million years.
Given our sample of size of exactly one planet where life is known to exist....
1. Life arrived here really quickly => Life is likely to arise quickly elsewhere
2. Intelligent life arrived after 4 billion years of evolution, which is 25% of the age of the universe.
My guess is that intelligent life is very unlikely and we are likely alone in the galaxy even if life is abundant. It would be great to be able to expand our sample size.
No need for your beast. Just use gasoline in the Plugin Prius if you need to go further.
That's the beauty of this.
My peeve is that this is not a story, nor an editorial, and not even a book review. It's an invitation to discussion for a topic that barely interests a lot of /.
/. stories.
Over 700 comments so far. This puts it up above about 95% of