The short answer to your questions is this: you make hydrogen from methane. Why do you bother? Because in an electric car, hydrogen-from-methane is still twice as efficient as any other fuel source: i.e in dollars per vehicle mile, it costs half of gasoline. Why? Because electric motors are just much, much better than internal combustion engines, and probably always will be.
Good enough? But there's more!
Electrolysis *IS* good enough: you can still take 3c / KWh grid electicity, make hydrogen, and run a fuel cell car cheaper than a gasoline vehicle.
Not much cheaper, but it's a start.
And here's the kicker: renewables can power hydrogen cars, so as well as cheaper driving now, you get to build the infrastructure of a renewable economy while you're at it.
Now, do I believe even 50% of the hydrogen hype? No, but it's a viable alternative for some situations now, and people are going to explore those first: hydrogen fuel cell car and bus fleets will be here in a few years.
If those work, then let's talk about a hydrogen economy.
I think we're at least two decades from that kind of system. Hydrogen for office buildings and commecial plants, yes, but nobody is going to run house-to-house pipe anytime soon, and most domestic gas won't carry hydrogen safely, as far as I know. (Will it? that would change things)
Actually, you often make the hydrogen from oil. At the Reformation stage, you can strip off the carbon. At the moment it comes off as carbon monoxide which then becomes carbon dioxide and gets vented, but there are some patents for systems which would give off the carbon as lamp black - soot, essentially, which you can just bury as landfill with no toxicity or climate impact.
Run the windmill for a few years, it usually pays for itself in carbon terms: i.e. the amount of carbon emission it saves is equal to that produced in it's manufacture. I'm pulling that number from memory, but it's certainly not much off.
Coal and nuclear put all of your generation capacity at large, centralized locations which are very reliant on the National Grid to move the power around.
And as we've recently seen, you can't put complete faith in the Grid. It is not a completely secure system, nor can it be made so.
Solar and Wind are both *very* reliable - over a long enough baseline period. Over a period of, say, a year the total solar energy available varies by only a few percent.
So what does that mean? Well, either you need energy storage (not for a whole year, but say for two or three days) or you need to have other power sources, like natural gas generators, that you run with the sun is away.
It's not a simple as you think: really very sophisticated approaches are needed to provide reliable power, and it's not "either, or". You need redundancy not just in terms of multipe instances of coal or nat. gas or solar, but in terms of a mix of technologies and scales of deployment. Even an all-gas power system can benefit from a mix of large plants and microturbines.
What does that mean in real terms? Not windmills and solar everywhere, but about 8 - 15% wind and solar at carefully picked positions, augmented by microturbines.
It's a good book, if you can make it through four hundred pages about loadhsap matching and energy futures.
Basically, if you distribute the system it's less prone to breakdown, and that's now economically feasible using things like microturbines and solar power to provide, say, 35% of the power of a city.
AND it's actually profitable to do so for about 200 reasons involving maintainence, grid losses and risk and capital management.
For the chapter and verse on why the power grid has these problems, check out Brittle Power - full text online at this URL.
No pun intended, but this is really why the fight over who owns your personal data is so fookin' important. In ten or twenty years, the decisions made today about who owns your medical records, which databases can be legally connected or correlated and who the FBI has to talk to to see that data are going to vitally effect our civil rights on a scale we can't quite imagine.
It's not unreasonable to imagine that in 20 years it will be as easy to pick up your identity from a retinal scan, a fingerprint or even trace DNA is it currently is to pick up your identity from your credit card or your supermarket discount card, and if we don't have more stringent policies around handling of personal data we're all screwed. There's no place to hide when your body constantly sheds ID packets. Your cells are you.
Identity Commons is trying to get some stuff off the ground using a "governance-based" identity system: where the people who's identities are being stored actually get to vote on how the system is run.
It's an interesting idea, and might (in the long run) offer some answers to that age old question: who watches the watchmen?
What about the false-positive case, where a number is issued fradulently, and a vote is cast.
This is standard vote fraud: vote twice, or more times. This system does nothing to prevent it. Yes, it ensures that a given vote was correctly recorded, but at the price of making it possible to track down an individual and see how they voted, which is basically sacrificing the principle of secret ballot for some theoretical gains.
What if armed gangs grab people outside of the voting booths and record their numbers? Well, either people encode or destroy their numbers, or they can be coerced...
It's clear that America isn't, meaningfully, a democracy in the sense of "rule of the people." The people want to ban abortion, make homosexually compulsory, and bring firearms to school.
Yes, people vote, but financial and structural factors constrain the possible range of choices to a tiny percentage of political views. There is choice, but 99% of the possibilities are removed long before the ballot box: if the owners of TV stations (i.e. large corporations) hate you, they'll tell the populace you're a satan worshipping baby eater, as will the co-owned magazines and radio stations.
Similarly, if you're really, really anti-military, you'll end up the way of Kennedy. Who knows who really killed the guy but some kind of conspiracy or collusion seems fairly easy to prove: the Warren Comission report is totally bogus, magic bullets and all.
But still, we have some choices.
Rigged voting machines could change that.
It's an extension of the infrastructure problems of the internet: when a handful of companies own the backbone, the net becomes vulnerable to physical coercion.
Similarly, if voting machines are owned by a company with political interests, they can subvert the process almost regardless of the security measures put in place: hardly anybody can do analysis of the VLSIs inside of a voting machine, for example. It's just too damn hard.
This is why paper works: anybody can make ballots. Anybody can count them. They're a completly open, manageable commodity. Yes, you can lose them, mis-count them, design bad ballots, ban people from voting based on bogus data or any number of other stunts, but the basic infrastructure is built on open "standards."
In as much as open source and comodity hardware are like paper, there's a case for putting the voting system on an open source basis. But you have to have trust all the way down to the VLSI or you're back in a situation where a politically interested party (Intel or AMD) could, in theory, subvert your democracy.
Because of these factors, I'm against electronic voting for the moment. I do think that a hybrid system, such as the systems which count paper ballots automatically might be acceptable, but in general, we're safer using technologies which do not have owners and which are completely transparent: pen and paper.
Not, necessarily from this particular release, but in general the whole objective/functional thing which Python is doing really is very interesting and ought to be pushed further.
Some way to use Perl libraries would really kick ass too but I guess that's impossible without Parrot coming into reality.
20 Hydrogen Myths paper covers a lot of the issues wrt. hydrogen pipelines.
There are upsides, and there are downsides.
There's also an interesting blog entry about the relationship between information and energy by Joi Ito. Puts the whole thing in a certain kind of perspective.
Small is Profitable by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute is about the benefits of generating your electricity using small, modular power systems where you need them. It turns out that grid infrastructure is often well over 50% of the cost of providing power, and that if you simply install systems like microturbines or small-scale combined wind/solar installations (explained below), you can significantly outperform the grid in terms of end-user price and capital requirement.
That's not a big deal here, where we already have a grid, but it's a huge, huge deal in the third world.
The combined solar/wind thing works like this. Electricity demands have a thing called a "load shape" - basically demand graphed against time. It turns out that solar energy supplies match the load shape of things like air conditioners pretty well, but when the clouds come out, your solar supply goes to hell.
However, wind systems work best when there's a sudden change in temperature, causing new low or high pressure areas, so usually cloudy days have ample wind. If you combine local solar and wind systems in a single "local area grid" you get a hybrid system which produces power in almost exactly the same loadshape as your actual demand, reducing expensive overcapacity, and with excellent availability in all weather conditions.
Renewable energy requires a lot more smarts than "this is a huge factory which produces megawatts a day" - you don't see nearly the full benefit unless you actually take advantages of the full range of renewable solutions, using factors like their modularity, size, loadshape matching, low capital requirements, grid independence and many other subtle factors.
Small is Profitable is a hard read: about 400 pages of really densely argued financial and technical analysis, but it's pretty much the definitive work in the area. If you want to know more, it's the book to get.
Seriously. I really think that a couple of hundred thousand mechanically activated (or perhaps solar so they come awake when they're dug up?) landmines are the answer.
Yes, there'll be a few casualties, but by god what ever our pig ignorant descendents make of the situation, they'll be wary investigators. Death is a pretty fucking good keep out sign, and probably a lot less loss of life will result than if they carve their way inside and start wearing uranium as jewelery from the ancient gods...
If a five year old was concieved by rape, killing them is still murder.
If you *really* believe that it is a *killing* to abort, then conception via rape should make no difference. A foetus is a foetus.
So, in your story, why is aborting a foetus created in rape OK, but killing a foetus created in some other way is not?
Or is it a pragmatic issue? That rape is sufficiently brutal that it is OK to "kill" the resulting foetus?
At that point, it is all shades of grey. If rape is a reason to abort, what about betrayal?
It really is all or nothing. Either foetuses are people, and killing them is murder, or they're a few hundred cells half stuck to a womb that can be gotten rid of at the will of the mother. Making an exception for rape really destroys your case utterly.
It makes a difference on this issue. I happen to be male.
Yes, there are large, often fundamentalist christian groups who consider that a woman can't choose whether or not to carry a child. I pity us if they ever come to power.
Something like 70% of internet backbone is owned by half a dozen companies. The RIAA & co are putting increasing pressure on businesses and universities, and backbone providers may be next.
The Government is, frankly, outright hostile to many forms of free expression, and some basic civil rights we've come to take for granted (abortion rights, for starters, never mind the Bill of Rights).
This project may teach valuable lessons about using open standards to form a non-owned, alternative internet backbone.
We all know (don't we?) that The Matrix is basically a somewhat mismashed version of the Perennial Philosophy. Life is a dream, God is real, Synchronicity is normal. The Matrix (like Stranger in a Strange Land) adds some SF tropes, and does a better job than most of presenting the material in an interesting way, by picking up the gnostic tropes of the Demiurge, an evil creator god who runs the system.
The interesting thing is how powerfully The Matrix affects people who watch it. Much like ritual theater has done through the ages, some kind of genuine awakening (not in the Buddhist sense, necessarily) seems to often occur.
One question is, of course, how to maintain the awakening. How to stay aware that, in some sense, life is real-and-unreal.
Another is the status of the "demiurge" - the thread (or blanket) of evil which we find in the world around us. It's not for nothing that Agents look like people from the government; there has ever been the conciet that government somehow causes spiritual enslavement, rather than being the mere result of it.
Of course, for what it's worth, I recon that the people are sleeping because it is night-time.
Why not use a useful computation rather than something useless like hash colissions?
If we're going to have all of this crunch going on to prevent spammers, it ought to achieve something rather than just burn cycles (and energy!) for no good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
into hydrogen, and carbon.
i.e. it's a new market for them, and it might get them off the hook with regards to climate change.
sigh
Ok, all of this is answered quite comprehensively in 20 Hydrogen Myths a paper by the Rocky Mountain Institute.
The short answer to your questions is this: you make hydrogen from methane. Why do you bother? Because in an electric car, hydrogen-from-methane is still twice as efficient as any other fuel source: i.e in dollars per vehicle mile, it costs half of gasoline. Why? Because electric motors are just much, much better than internal combustion engines, and probably always will be.
Good enough? But there's more!
Electrolysis *IS* good enough: you can still take 3c / KWh grid electicity, make hydrogen, and run a fuel cell car cheaper than a gasoline vehicle.
Not much cheaper, but it's a start.
And here's the kicker: renewables can power hydrogen cars, so as well as cheaper driving now, you get to build the infrastructure of a renewable economy while you're at it.
Now, do I believe even 50% of the hydrogen hype? No, but it's a viable alternative for some situations now, and people are going to explore those first: hydrogen fuel cell car and bus fleets will be here in a few years.
If those work, then let's talk about a hydrogen economy.
Yes, it's a delightful system. But if you put hydrogen in those pipes a lot of it leaks away. Right through the metal in many cases.
But yes, sorry, I should have said "nobody is going to run *new* pipe any time soon".
I think we're at least two decades from that kind of system. Hydrogen for office buildings and commecial plants, yes, but nobody is going to run house-to-house pipe anytime soon, and most domestic gas won't carry hydrogen safely, as far as I know. (Will it? that would change things)
I don't think this approach is feasible.
Actually, you often make the hydrogen from oil. At the Reformation stage, you can strip off the carbon. At the moment it comes off as carbon monoxide which then becomes carbon dioxide and gets vented, but there are some patents for systems which would give off the carbon as lamp black - soot, essentially, which you can just bury as landfill with no toxicity or climate impact.
Believe me, these guys are all about hydrogen.
Run the windmill for a few years, it usually pays for itself in carbon terms: i.e. the amount of carbon emission it saves is equal to that produced in it's manufacture. I'm pulling that number from memory, but it's certainly not much off.
Coal and nuclear put all of your generation capacity at large, centralized locations which are very reliant on the National Grid to move the power around.
And as we've recently seen, you can't put complete faith in the Grid. It is not a completely secure system, nor can it be made so.
Solar and Wind are both *very* reliable - over a long enough baseline period. Over a period of, say, a year the total solar energy available varies by only a few percent.
So what does that mean? Well, either you need energy storage (not for a whole year, but say for two or three days) or you need to have other power sources, like natural gas generators, that you run with the sun is away.
It's not a simple as you think: really very sophisticated approaches are needed to provide reliable power, and it's not "either, or". You need redundancy not just in terms of multipe instances of coal or nat. gas or solar, but in terms of a mix of technologies and scales of deployment. Even an all-gas power system can benefit from a mix of large plants and microturbines.
$0.02.
Small Is Profitable - The Hidden Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size by the Rocky Mountain Institute covers the technical, financial and quality of service arguments for making a mixed power generation economy the standard approach to service provision.
What does that mean in real terms? Not windmills and solar everywhere, but about 8 - 15% wind and solar at carefully picked positions, augmented by microturbines.
It's a good book, if you can make it through four hundred pages about loadhsap matching and energy futures.
Small is Profitable - the hidden benefits of making electrical resources the right size or words to that effect.
Basically, if you distribute the system it's less prone to breakdown, and that's now economically feasible using things like microturbines and solar power to provide, say, 35% of the power of a city.
AND it's actually profitable to do so for about 200 reasons involving maintainence, grid losses and risk and capital management.
For the chapter and verse on why the power grid has these problems, check out Brittle Power - full text online at this URL.
No pun intended, but this is really why the fight over who owns your personal data is so fookin' important. In ten or twenty years, the decisions made today about who owns your medical records, which databases can be legally connected or correlated and who the FBI has to talk to to see that data are going to vitally effect our civil rights on a scale we can't quite imagine.
It's not unreasonable to imagine that in 20 years it will be as easy to pick up your identity from a retinal scan, a fingerprint or even trace DNA is it currently is to pick up your identity from your credit card or your supermarket discount card, and if we don't have more stringent policies around handling of personal data we're all screwed. There's no place to hide when your body constantly sheds ID packets. Your cells are you.
Identity Commons is trying to get some stuff off the ground using a "governance-based" identity system: where the people who's identities are being stored actually get to vote on how the system is run.
It's an interesting idea, and might (in the long run) offer some answers to that age old question: who watches the watchmen?
What about the false-positive case, where a number is issued fradulently, and a vote is cast.
This is standard vote fraud: vote twice, or more times. This system does nothing to prevent it. Yes, it ensures that a given vote was correctly recorded, but at the price of making it possible to track down an individual and see how they voted, which is basically sacrificing the principle of secret ballot for some theoretical gains.
What if armed gangs grab people outside of the voting booths and record their numbers? Well, either people encode or destroy their numbers, or they can be coerced...
No gain here, as far as I can see.
It's clear that America isn't, meaningfully, a democracy in the sense of "rule of the people." The people want to ban abortion, make homosexually compulsory, and bring firearms to school.
Yes, people vote, but financial and structural factors constrain the possible range of choices to a tiny percentage of political views. There is choice, but 99% of the possibilities are removed long before the ballot box: if the owners of TV stations (i.e. large corporations) hate you, they'll tell the populace you're a satan worshipping baby eater, as will the co-owned magazines and radio stations.
Similarly, if you're really, really anti-military, you'll end up the way of Kennedy. Who knows who really killed the guy but some kind of conspiracy or collusion seems fairly easy to prove: the Warren Comission report is totally bogus, magic bullets and all.
But still, we have some choices.
Rigged voting machines could change that.
It's an extension of the infrastructure problems of the internet: when a handful of companies own the backbone, the net becomes vulnerable to physical coercion.
Similarly, if voting machines are owned by a company with political interests, they can subvert the process almost regardless of the security measures put in place: hardly anybody can do analysis of the VLSIs inside of a voting machine, for example. It's just too damn hard.
This is why paper works: anybody can make ballots. Anybody can count them. They're a completly open, manageable commodity. Yes, you can lose them, mis-count them, design bad ballots, ban people from voting based on bogus data or any number of other stunts, but the basic infrastructure is built on open "standards."
In as much as open source and comodity hardware are like paper, there's a case for putting the voting system on an open source basis. But you have to have trust all the way down to the VLSI or you're back in a situation where a politically interested party (Intel or AMD) could, in theory, subvert your democracy.
Because of these factors, I'm against electronic voting for the moment. I do think that a hybrid system, such as the systems which count paper ballots automatically might be acceptable, but in general, we're safer using technologies which do not have owners and which are completely transparent: pen and paper.
Not, necessarily from this particular release, but in general the whole objective/functional thing which Python is doing really is very interesting and ought to be pushed further.
Some way to use Perl libraries would really kick ass too but I guess that's impossible without Parrot coming into reality.
20 Hydrogen Myths paper covers a lot of the issues wrt. hydrogen pipelines.
There are upsides, and there are downsides.
There's also an interesting blog entry about the relationship between information and energy by Joi Ito. Puts the whole thing in a certain kind of perspective.
Small is Profitable by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute is about the benefits of generating your electricity using small, modular power systems where you need them. It turns out that grid infrastructure is often well over 50% of the cost of providing power, and that if you simply install systems like microturbines or small-scale combined wind/solar installations (explained below), you can significantly outperform the grid in terms of end-user price and capital requirement.
That's not a big deal here, where we already have a grid, but it's a huge, huge deal in the third world.
The combined solar/wind thing works like this. Electricity demands have a thing called a "load shape" - basically demand graphed against time. It turns out that solar energy supplies match the load shape of things like air conditioners pretty well, but when the clouds come out, your solar supply goes to hell.
However, wind systems work best when there's a sudden change in temperature, causing new low or high pressure areas, so usually cloudy days have ample wind. If you combine local solar and wind systems in a single "local area grid" you get a hybrid system which produces power in almost exactly the same loadshape as your actual demand, reducing expensive overcapacity, and with excellent availability in all weather conditions.
Renewable energy requires a lot more smarts than "this is a huge factory which produces megawatts a day" - you don't see nearly the full benefit unless you actually take advantages of the full range of renewable solutions, using factors like their modularity, size, loadshape matching, low capital requirements, grid independence and many other subtle factors.
Small is Profitable is a hard read: about 400 pages of really densely argued financial and technical analysis, but it's pretty much the definitive work in the area. If you want to know more, it's the book to get.
Seriously. I really think that a couple of hundred thousand mechanically activated (or perhaps solar so they come awake when they're dug up?) landmines are the answer.
Yes, there'll be a few casualties, but by god what ever our pig ignorant descendents make of the situation, they'll be wary investigators. Death is a pretty fucking good keep out sign, and probably a lot less loss of life will result than if they carve their way inside and start wearing uranium as jewelery from the ancient gods...
If a five year old was concieved by rape, killing them is still murder.
If you *really* believe that it is a *killing* to abort, then conception via rape should make no difference. A foetus is a foetus.
So, in your story, why is aborting a foetus created in rape OK, but killing a foetus created in some other way is not?
Or is it a pragmatic issue? That rape is sufficiently brutal that it is OK to "kill" the resulting foetus?
At that point, it is all shades of grey. If rape is a reason to abort, what about betrayal?
It really is all or nothing. Either foetuses are people, and killing them is murder, or they're a few hundred cells half stuck to a womb that can be gotten rid of at the will of the mother. Making an exception for rape really destroys your case utterly.
God damned moron
Ach, ya stupid fundamentalist bastard. There is no god who damns people, they do that for themselves.
Save Roe is a site about the current Republican, Fundamentalist attack on abortion rights.
Are you male or female?
It makes a difference on this issue. I happen to be male.
Yes, there are large, often fundamentalist christian groups who consider that a woman can't choose whether or not to carry a child. I pity us if they ever come to power.
Yo, we've gotten used to abortion as a basic civil right. You may disagree, but we treat abortion-on-request as a basic part of life.
You may disagree, of course. But de facto, its a civil right.
Something like 70% of internet backbone is owned by half a dozen companies. The RIAA & co are putting increasing pressure on businesses and universities, and backbone providers may be next.
The Government is, frankly, outright hostile to many forms of free expression, and some basic civil rights we've come to take for granted (abortion rights, for starters, never mind the Bill of Rights).
This project may teach valuable lessons about using open standards to form a non-owned, alternative internet backbone.
We all know (don't we?) that The Matrix is basically a somewhat mismashed version of the Perennial Philosophy. Life is a dream, God is real, Synchronicity is normal. The Matrix (like Stranger in a Strange Land) adds some SF tropes, and does a better job than most of presenting the material in an interesting way, by picking up the gnostic tropes of the Demiurge, an evil creator god who runs the system.
The interesting thing is how powerfully The Matrix affects people who watch it. Much like ritual theater has done through the ages, some kind of genuine awakening (not in the Buddhist sense, necessarily) seems to often occur.
One question is, of course, how to maintain the awakening. How to stay aware that, in some sense, life is real-and-unreal.
Another is the status of the "demiurge" - the thread (or blanket) of evil which we find in the world around us. It's not for nothing that Agents look like people from the government; there has ever been the conciet that government somehow causes spiritual enslavement, rather than being the mere result of it.
Of course, for what it's worth, I recon that the people are sleeping because it is night-time.
window.....
"Just trying to get you to focus on the issues, M. Antoinette".
Why not use a useful computation rather than something useless like hash colissions?
If we're going to have all of this crunch going on to prevent spammers, it ought to achieve something rather than just burn cycles (and energy!) for no good reason.