99% of all home owners will NOT get out there every 2 weeks to wash off the solar panels
Maybe that's necessary in the desert, or near an active volcano, or somesuch. The company that runs our solar array doesn't bother washing the solar panels, because they found that the labor costs of washing them outweigh the benefits of the additional power. Instead they just size the array slightly larger to account for dust buildup, and let the occasional rainshower do the work.
Solar also requires the homeowner to understand electricity... maintain that battery pack or understand the back feed inverter and know to go downstairs to re-set it after a power failure because it will drop off when power is lost to protect line workers and unexpected backfeed.
Most installs will be grid-tied and not require batteries. As for resetting the inverter after a power failure, I think most inverters will do that automatically -- and if there are those that don't, that's a minor hassle, but hardly a show stopper.
It will not happen. solar for the typical dumb homeowner will never happen
In fact, it's happening now. There are companies that will install the array for you, maintain the array for you, and monitor the array's performance for you, all at no cost to you -- instead, they split the profit from your electric-bill savings with you. There is literally nothing that the 'dumb homeowner' needs to do except sign a contract and then pay less for power every month.
I don't know what standard of competence you're measuring the industry on, but one major incident (caused mostly by a natural disaster) in several decades of nuclear power is a pretty damned good track record in my book.
If the consequences of the one major incident are bad enough, then one major incident is one incident too many.
But seriously, it is very disappointing to see the Germans make a rash decision from a scared gut-feeling instead of sticking to science and intelligent logic...
Yes, they should listen only to the serious and careful reports of the nuclear industry, like Japan did.
is it enough and easy enough to get to to make colonisation somewhat practical?
Maybe -- what you need to do is send to the moon a robot that is able to mine and store water, and to manufacture these things: (1) solar panels to capture additional power, (2) more robots like itself.
Then wait 10 years, at which point there will be a large human-habitable area dug out below the moon, complete with swimming pools.
I'm not *that* old, but I still feel that I could look up "stuck aileron" in the glossary and then find the correct page in the manual faster than I could type those words in on the touchscreen and wait for it to return the results.
Really? I just tested it -- I timed how long it took me to google "stuck aileron" on my iPhone (starting with the iPhone in screen-off mode). I had results in 14 seconds (including the time it took to switch to my computer to start and stop the timer, and the time it took to fetch the data over Wifi).
I suppose someone who was really familiar with a paper manual might be able to beat that -- but only if they knew in advance roughly where the page they were looking for was. If they had to first find the glossary, then manually scan through it to find "stuck aileron", then manually turn to the indicated page, I doubt they could do it in less than 30 seconds.
OTOH, the upside of the paper manual is that even if it is slower, it's more likely to work as expected.
So the technical answer really is "they're assholes"? Good to know!
If by "assholes", you mean that they're prioritizing the safety of everyone on the plane over your desire to read an e-book during takeoff and landing, then yes, they're assholes.
Anyone know what Lockheed's plans are for this system? Complex fluid dynamics? Something else?
It will be used for solving difficult budget problems: in particular, it will optimize the padding-out of this year's expenditures to match the funds allocated, so that next year's budget doesn't get reduced. (/cynic)
I guess I am just have to wait for the Apple Quantum Computer User Experience
Me too -- in particular I'm looking forward to the quantum MWI version of FaceTime, which connects you to various alternate-universe versions of yourself, so you can compare notes and see who made the better decisions.
Slashdot posts these articles about dark energy every 6 months, but nothing ever makes it to consumers. Let me know when Dark Energy generators are available at my local Home Depot, then I'll be interested.
I'd be interested to know how everything bitcoin does with it's 21 million possible coins could not have been done at no computational expense by simply setting up a non-trading limited company that holds 21 million shares in itself, and sells them at prices governed by the same difficulty curve that bitcoin uses.
That would accomplish some of the same things, but it would be relying on the people running the trading company to work (in particular, you'd be relying on their continued existence, and trusting them not to change their minds and create more shares than promised). Also, it wouldn't be anonymous or decentralized anymore.
Wasn't eGold equivalent to what you describe? The value of eGold collapsed when the government raided their offices and accused them of money laundering. Bitcoin, otoh, has no office to raid.
So, essentially, we're burning CPU cycles (and thus, electricity, and thus, fossil fuels in most cases) simply to give an electronic currency scarcity?
If you know of a more energy-efficient method to enforce scarcity, let's hear it. The traditional method (establish and maintain a judicial system and police force to catch and punish counterfeiters) isn't exactly low-overhead either.
That's where they'll get you. Or Visa/Mastercard will stop processing for wherever bitcoin.org is hosted after a friendly call from a Senator.
Bitcoin.org could be lawyered right off the face of the Earth and it wouldn't make any difference. You'd still be able to trade BTC for USD (or vice versa) with any of the thousands of other Bitcoin owners. It's all P2P, remember?
Imagine a world where there are no factories and no power stations on Earth. That's what's on the table. We just have to decide to go get it.
It's not just a matter of "deciding to go get it", we also have to develop technology that would make getting significant amounts of material into and out of Earth's gravity well economical.
A space elevator (or better yet, several space elevators) might do the trick -- if building a space elevator is possible. I don't think rockets ever will; they simply don't scale up. For every additional pound of cargo, you've got to add more fuel, and for every additional pound of fuel, you've got to add yet more fuel in order to lift the previously added additional fuel, and there simply isn't that much rocket fuel available to support that kind of geometric expansion of overhead.
I look at that video and I think, "that's a shit-load of resources that we could be making use of"
The asteroids' resources are only useful if the value derived from putting those resources into use is greater than the cost of obtaining them.
Given the current costs of getting mining equipment into orbit, I doubt that asteroid mining is a good buy at the moment. Even if the asteroids were made out of solid gold, it might not be worth dragging them back to Earth. Space is really, really big, and minerals are heavy.
Note that the video is misleading, because the asteroids are represented as pixels. In reality, they are much much smaller than one pixel at that scale. A video that showed the asteroids to scale would look a lot like empty space:)
Once they detect another civilization they move to wipe it out.
For that to be a successful (and hence common) strategy, the benefit of destroying competing civilizations would have to be greater than the cost of destroying them.
Given the current state of known physics, the benefit of destroying another race looks to be small or zero (since the other race will be too far away to threaten your solar system anyway), and the cost of destroying the other race looks to be quite large (interstellar space travel being prohibitively expensive for any significant amount of material).
Of course if there is some amazing space-folding technology possible that can reduce the cost of interstellar space travel, things might be different -- but that's not the way to bet.
why not just use a whole field full of the things on the ground to produce the energy, and load it onto the plane in the form of (say) hydrogen?
You're pretty much right, this is largely a publicity stunt. No reasonably sized aircraft would be able to replenish a significant portion of its energy budget from the sunlight that lands on its body.
However, there is one niche where a solar powered aircraft would make sense -- lightweight drones that are meant run autonomously and stay up in the air for months or years at a time. For them, being able to "refuel" every day without landing anywhere would be a big plus.
Slashdot Mirror
99% of all home owners will NOT get out there every 2 weeks to wash off the solar panels
Maybe that's necessary in the desert, or near an active volcano, or somesuch. The company that runs our solar array doesn't bother washing the solar panels, because they found that the labor costs of washing them outweigh the benefits of the additional power. Instead they just size the array slightly larger to account for dust buildup, and let the occasional rainshower do the work.
Solar also requires the homeowner to understand electricity... maintain that battery pack or understand the back feed inverter and know to go downstairs to re-set it after a power failure because it will drop off when power is lost to protect line workers and unexpected backfeed.
Most installs will be grid-tied and not require batteries. As for resetting the inverter after a power failure, I think most inverters will do that automatically -- and if there are those that don't, that's a minor hassle, but hardly a show stopper.
It will not happen. solar for the typical dumb homeowner will never happen
In fact, it's happening now. There are companies that will install the array for you, maintain the array for you, and monitor the array's performance for you, all at no cost to you -- instead, they split the profit from your electric-bill savings with you. There is literally nothing that the 'dumb homeowner' needs to do except sign a contract and then pay less for power every month.
I don't know what standard of competence you're measuring the industry on, but one major incident (caused mostly by a natural disaster) in several decades of nuclear power is a pretty damned good track record in my book.
If the consequences of the one major incident are bad enough, then one major incident is one incident too many.
There is no money in human survival. There just isn't.
I know some health care executives who would disagree.
But seriously, it is very disappointing to see the Germans make a rash decision from a scared gut-feeling instead of sticking to science and intelligent logic...
Yes, they should listen only to the serious and careful reports of the nuclear industry, like Japan did.
They should use grey goo instead. That would clean things up even better, and they'd only need to apply a little bit of it.
is it enough and easy enough to get to to make colonisation somewhat practical?
Maybe -- what you need to do is send to the moon a robot that is able to mine and store water, and to manufacture these things: (1) solar panels to capture additional power, (2) more robots like itself.
Then wait 10 years, at which point there will be a large human-habitable area dug out below the moon, complete with swimming pools.
I'm not *that* old, but I still feel that I could look up "stuck aileron" in the glossary and then find the correct page in the manual faster than I could type those words in on the touchscreen and wait for it to return the results.
Really? I just tested it -- I timed how long it took me to google "stuck aileron" on my iPhone (starting with the iPhone in screen-off mode). I had results in 14 seconds (including the time it took to switch to my computer to start and stop the timer, and the time it took to fetch the data over Wifi).
I suppose someone who was really familiar with a paper manual might be able to beat that -- but only if they knew in advance roughly where the page they were looking for was. If they had to first find the glossary, then manually scan through it to find "stuck aileron", then manually turn to the indicated page, I doubt they could do it in less than 30 seconds.
OTOH, the upside of the paper manual is that even if it is slower, it's more likely to work as expected.
So the technical answer really is "they're assholes"? Good to know!
If by "assholes", you mean that they're prioritizing the safety of everyone on the plane over your desire to read an e-book during takeoff and landing, then yes, they're assholes.
Anyone know what Lockheed's plans are for this system? Complex fluid dynamics? Something else?
It will be used for solving difficult budget problems: in particular, it will optimize the padding-out of this year's expenditures to match the funds allocated, so that next year's budget doesn't get reduced. (/cynic)
I guess I am just have to wait for the Apple Quantum Computer User Experience
Me too -- in particular I'm looking forward to the quantum MWI version of FaceTime, which connects you to various alternate-universe versions of yourself, so you can compare notes and see who made the better decisions.
Who backs bitcoins?
The network of computers running the Bitcoin software (and in particular, the (alleged) cryptographic security of its algorithms).
How are they going to compel people into accepting them?
They aren't. Nobody is going to compel anyone to do anything.
People might voluntarily choose to accept bitcoins for their own reasons, however.
Slashdot posts these articles about dark energy every 6 months, but nothing ever makes it to consumers. Let me know when Dark Energy generators are available at my local Home Depot, then I'll be interested.
If you want to ride; don't ride the white horse.
I'd be interested to know how everything bitcoin does with it's 21 million possible coins could not have been done at no computational expense by simply setting up a non-trading limited company that holds 21 million shares in itself, and sells them at prices governed by the same difficulty curve that bitcoin uses.
That would accomplish some of the same things, but it would be relying on the people running the trading company to work (in particular, you'd be relying on their continued existence, and trusting them not to change their minds and create more shares than promised). Also, it wouldn't be anonymous or decentralized anymore.
Wasn't eGold equivalent to what you describe? The value of eGold collapsed when the government raided their offices and accused them of money laundering. Bitcoin, otoh, has no office to raid.
So, essentially, we're burning CPU cycles (and thus, electricity, and thus, fossil fuels in most cases) simply to give an electronic currency scarcity?
If you know of a more energy-efficient method to enforce scarcity, let's hear it. The traditional method (establish and maintain a judicial system and police force to catch and punish counterfeiters) isn't exactly low-overhead either.
That's where they'll get you. Or Visa/Mastercard will stop processing for wherever bitcoin.org is hosted after a friendly call from a Senator.
Bitcoin.org could be lawyered right off the face of the Earth and it wouldn't make any difference. You'd still be able to trade BTC for USD (or vice versa) with any of the thousands of other Bitcoin owners. It's all P2P, remember?
So by this logic I should throw out all my classic movies that I'm not currently watching? :\
Well, yeah -- at least the ones that you can stream in via Netflix (or similar) any time you want...
(nb: by "throw out" I mean sell, or give away; somebody without broadband access will still have a use for them)
Imagine a world where there are no factories and no power stations on Earth. That's what's on the table. We just have to decide to go get it.
It's not just a matter of "deciding to go get it", we also have to develop technology that would make getting significant amounts of material into and out of Earth's gravity well economical.
A space elevator (or better yet, several space elevators) might do the trick -- if building a space elevator is possible. I don't think rockets ever will; they simply don't scale up. For every additional pound of cargo, you've got to add more fuel, and for every additional pound of fuel, you've got to add yet more fuel in order to lift the previously added additional fuel, and there simply isn't that much rocket fuel available to support that kind of geometric expansion of overhead.
Too late, the Catholics beat them to it.
I look at that video and I think, "that's a shit-load of resources that we could be making use of"
The asteroids' resources are only useful if the value derived from putting those resources into use is greater than the cost of obtaining them.
Given the current costs of getting mining equipment into orbit, I doubt that asteroid mining is a good buy at the moment. Even if the asteroids were made out of solid gold, it might not be worth dragging them back to Earth. Space is really, really big, and minerals are heavy.
Note that the video is misleading, because the asteroids are represented as pixels. In reality, they are much much smaller than one pixel at that scale. A video that showed the asteroids to scale would look a lot like empty space :)
Once they detect another civilization they move to wipe it out.
For that to be a successful (and hence common) strategy, the benefit of destroying competing civilizations would have to be greater than the cost of destroying them.
Given the current state of known physics, the benefit of destroying another race looks to be small or zero (since the other race will be too far away to threaten your solar system anyway), and the cost of destroying the other race looks to be quite large (interstellar space travel being prohibitively expensive for any significant amount of material).
Of course if there is some amazing space-folding technology possible that can reduce the cost of interstellar space travel, things might be different -- but that's not the way to bet.
No one wants to trade in decimal values if it explodes.
That is actually true. Most current Bitcoin users prefer octal.
why not just use a whole field full of the things on the ground to produce the energy, and load it onto the plane in the form of (say) hydrogen?
You're pretty much right, this is largely a publicity stunt. No reasonably sized aircraft would be able to replenish a significant portion of its energy budget from the sunlight that lands on its body.
However, there is one niche where a solar powered aircraft would make sense -- lightweight drones that are meant run autonomously and stay up in the air for months or years at a time. For them, being able to "refuel" every day without landing anywhere would be a big plus.
Let me know when they have Live Nude Justice.
When you think of brains splattering against the wall, think of Disney!