Might the neighborhood burglar like realtime updated reports on when you're home and when you're not? Might your insurance carrier want to know if your daily patterns are outside the median? Might your stalker want to know where you are? Might your ex-wife's private investigator want to know who you're visiting? Might ClearChannel want to know which billboards you drive by most often? And so on. Draw on your paranoia and imagination and I think you'll see that Big Brother is just one of many brothers to be concerned about.
If Just Anyone is not allowed to bug your car, then that suggests it is a special power reserved for government, and you're going to have a hard time arguing it's not a violation of privacy (if it's not, then why can't I bug your car?) or that it doesn't require any sort of balances or limits of power for which the 4th amendment was intended to provide protection.
Lets see, burglary and stalking are illegal acts while investigating a suspect is not. If an insurance company has the resources to follow all their clients I would be surprised. For an ad agency to track a single person it must be a pretty important person. Probably the wife would want to know where you are rather than the ex-wife and, in my opinion, don't commit adultery.
In my mind a tracking device is just another means of tailing someone. Since I do not do anything illegal and do not associate with people who do I have no problem with the police tracking me. In fact, it is less dangerous as people being tailed do not do dangerous acts just in case they are being tailed. It is also less invasive than tailing as the driver is not looking aver their shoulder for vehicles. The reason you can't track my car is that you do not have a legitimate reason to do so and it constitutes stalking, an illegal act. Exactly the same as you following me around all day. The police on the other hand can, and do, follow anyone they want without a warrant.
The issue is the catch 22 that police forces are put into. They need to follow someone to gather evidence to get a search warrant to gather enough evidence to convict someone. If tracking is not allowed, they would need a search warrant to gather enough evidence to get a search warrant.
The prosecution must reveal all evidence to the defence as in all the location logs for the tracker. It happens all the time. One of the best ways to get a charge dropped is to find evidence that the prosecution knew about but did not reveal. It does not have to be important evidence as hiding any evidence is grounds for dismissal. I realize it may be a difficult task but showing that some of the location logs are missing should be pretty easy. At worst all location logs would be thrown out.
Actually the issue was that the dogs were trained to go under tanks and stay there. The problem was that they were trained by Russians using Russian tanks so they had a tenancy to blow up their own tanks because those were the ones the dogs were familiar with. Dogs have a very poor IFF.
There is a mandate in the US that states that cell phones must be tracked for 911 purposes. So Google must collect the info for 911 to use. Giving it to advertising companies is a different story.
You missed the point. When the iPad came out it was the first viable tablet. There were millions of people chomping at the bit to buy a tablet; any tablet. Now there have been millions of tablets sold fulfilling much of that need. Any new tablet will not sell as fast as the original iPad because many people already have a tablet and the new tablet is not the only option.
Lets see, when the iPad came out there was no other tablet on the market and years of marketing hype which created a pent up need. The iPad came out and they sold a crap load of them. There is also the Apple fanboy factor "If it is Apple I must have it". Many, if not most, people who would buy a tablet now have iPads thereby deceasing overall demand for tablets.
An Android pad with a real tablet OS comes out, is panned by the tech community and people wonder what it didn't sell as many as the iPad? Most people who want a tablet but have yet to buy a iPad are a patient bunch and will wait till the right one comes out. From all the reviews, the Zoom is not the right tablet.
If you want to compare sales compare how many iPads were sold in the same time period as the release of the Zoom. Then the comparison may be valid.
Lets look at a few holes in your argument. 1. Since 2/3 of the electricity in the US is currently coal based to make electricity clean and meet you goal you would have to replace that capacity in the next ten years. That is not going to happen as new plants are barely keeping up with rising demand. Some of that demand being driven by supplying electric cars. 2. The top surface area of a small car is about 24sq-ft. A solar cell I looked up created 13W/sq-ft. That mean that the cells on a car could produce 312W. The battery on a Leaf holds 24 kWh. To charge that battery with the solar panels on the car would take 24000/312 = 77 hours. That gives a 109 mile range. An eight hour charge gives you a eleven mile range. According to the US DoT 49% of commuters travel more than 11 miles one way to work. In fact if you travel more than six miles you will have to plug the car in some time. Another issue is that in most cities parking is underground so no sunlight (sorry but you will not be able to charge using inside lighting). 3. I am also not talking about what will happen in ten years. Right now car companies are touting electric cars as zero emission; that is not true right now. Right now the electric car companies are telling an untruth.
When all electricity used by electric cars is generated using zero emission technology the car companies are free to call them zero emission; until then that statement is false. That is the problem with absolute statements like "zero emission"; they are rarely true.
I agree that electricity is cleaner but it is not zero emission which is what is being touted by the electric car manufacturers. Tell it like it is; an electric car is only as clean as the technology used to generate the electricity. Vehicle manufacturers will not do that because it makes their products look less green. There are high mileage compact cars that emit less greenhouse gasses than some hybrids and I bet in some areas, such as the north east of the US where power is mostly coal, even better than pure electric.
How much energy does it take to make the aluminum? Considering that 2/3 of the electricity in the US is coal that could be an issue. How environmentally friendly is the production of lye? Same question for the vinegar. How will the waste products be collected and refined considering that it will be mostly water?
This process focuses on one "green" section of the chain and shows how simple it is. It neglects the other steps because they will be shown to be not green. It is the same thing for plug in electric cars. Sure the car has zero emissions but the coal power plants that generated the electricity to charge the car have lots of emissions.
So far there has been a huge hurdle to overcome in the production of biofuels with algae; contamination. Quite a few things grow in the same medium as biofuel algae and the algae that produces biofuel is easily overwhelmed. According to this page, http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/news.aspx , Exxon is still at the research phase and not in production.
Look at some real numbers. The Rice Solar Energy Project in California is a 150Mw plant recently approved. Look at the first bullet of the project location in this document http://ricesolarenergy.com/project_overview.html. I quote "Private land holding of 3,300 acres; approximately 1,500 acres will be occupied by the solar facility". So 1500 acres for a 150Mw plant is 50 acres for a 5Mv plant. These are real figures, not estimates.
I created a report by county for 2009 and accidentally selected total as well as non-residential and residential so the numbers were doubled. Even with that, $600/year is still a lot more than $284. And then they have to pay for the power. All the number also do not take into account any growth caused by things like electric cars.
Notice the source date on the web page you cite; 2001. The page I cited is 2009 and directly from the state energy database. The 7 acres is the area of the mirrors. This is a quote from the first bullet of the Project location section of the document I cited. "Private land holding of 3,300 acres; approximately 1,500 acres will be occupied by the solar facility"
1. The energy consumption is off by a factor of 2. According to the ECDMS http://www.ecdms.energy.ca.gov/ total electrical consumption in 1009 was 560 million Mwh. 2. Solar plants to not generate peek power 24/7. There are days, especially winter when the sun is low on the horizon that you will get less energy. Stormy days also cut power production. 3. The 7 acre number is the mirror size. Look at the Rice Solar energy Power project http://ricesolarenergy.com/project_overview.html. It will produce 150Mw and take up 1,500 acres. Scales to 5 Mw that would be 50 acres. 4. You don't factor interest into the costs of building. 5 Cost $750M-$850M for the Rice Project. Scaled would be $25M to $28
So run the numbers again. 560,000,000 Mwh/24/365 = 12785 plants 50 acres per plant = 639,250acres 28 million per plant = $358B= 9609 37,253,956 = $9,609/resident Amortized over 10 years with a 5% interest rate = $1224/year. Remember that is just the cost of the plant and not the total cost of running it. So for a family of three that would cost $3600/year to build these plants.
If you factor in redundancy for low sun days it may even be twice those figures. All my figures are cited or just math. Where are your citations?
Sorry but that is the area of the mirrors and not the area that the plant will cover. There are spaces between the mirrors and a large area in the centre that is unisable due to the angle on the tower.
On grid storage is the combination of grid and the storage technologies that have not been implemented yet. According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations , there are 62 pumped storage plants over 100 MW in the world totalling about 82.5Gw. Of those, 17 are in China and 13 in the US. Sixty two for the entire world is a very small number.
Molten salt plant work great in areas of consistent sunlight. I live on the west coast of BC. We have days on end of storms and rain where solar output is greatly decreased. Molten salt can only store so much energy and will become depleted over night. They do not work well in winter when the sun is lower. The few extra would more likely be two or three times as you can not guarantee that every plant can produce 100% at any given time (storms, winter, night).
The maintenance issue is to counter the delusion that solar energy is free one the plant is built.
The issue of energy density. How many acres of land would have to be covered with mirrors to supply the US with energy using molten salt plants? For California alone it would be over 100,000 and cost $Trillions. And that is with no redundancy.
Now try to scale this up to cover all of California. Based just on population California is 276 times the size of Humboldt County. Cost for power plants would be almost $3 Trillion and cover 345,000 acres. This is an example of how "green" solutions may work on dispersed rural areas but not urban areas where most of the power is used. This also does not take into account that Humboldt County does not have many plants like aluminum or steel smelters which use a lot of energy.
Molten salt plants are not cheap and require maintenance.
Quote from Wikipedia; "All turbines are equipped with protective features to avoid damage at high wind speeds, by feathering the blades into the wind which ceases their rotation, supplemented by brakes." When winds get too high the blades would almost be completely feathered to be slow enough and any gusts will cause over speed so they are stopped completely.
Planning for tidal means having something else to replace it. What do you use when solar and wind are not there? Tidal reservoirs are not the same as river reservoirs. Water goes in and out the same end.
The beauty of conventional power stations is that you can adjust the output. Try to turn up the wind , sun or tide when you need it. Sure smart appliances can help but what about street lights, commercial refrigeration, aluminum plants, manufacturing plants, stoves, electric heaters, etc. They are all big energy users that can not be scheduled.
Most of the "solutions" would increase costs to the point of being uneconomical.
How many of these storage devices have been made or even planned? The technology exists but has not been implemented on a large scale. I know of very few. You also forgot about flywheels and compressed air storage.
The raised water technology works great in the mountains but what about Kansas? Also you require space for two large reservoirs. How many valleys to we loose to energy storage? It also requires three separate sets of machinery that need to be built and maintained. All that equipment costs money and increasing the cost of energy produced. Pointing at at technology as a solution and implementing it is a very different thing.
I go back to my main issue with most "green" energy; what do you do at slack tide, at night, in the middle of a storm? Under those conditions there is no tidal power, no solar power and no wind power (all turbines have a max wind speed).
How big do you think a battery would have to be to supply electricity to New Your City for 8 hours at night? Batteries are not a viable solution for storing power on a large scale.
There is not an energy production problem there is an energy storage problem. Almost all green sources of energy have have down times. In the case of solar energy that is night. If we could store some of the energy produced in the day we would be much further ahead. There is some research and a few test being done but energy storage is not as "sexy" as energy production.
Why not a blind test? Instead of having two groups; users ans non-users, have three groups. non users, left hip and right hip. Every time a subject was tested he would not have his cell phone on and the technician would not know what group he was in. When the statistics were analyzed the doctor would not know which group was which; he would just be looking to see if there was a difference between the left and right. Only after the analysis was done would the groups be revealed. That would remove any possible bias.
I also agree that "statistically significant" may not be "medically significant".
And one final note; N=24? That seems like a very small study considering that only a total of 48 subjects were tested.
Thanks for missing the point. The useless satellites are in orbit with high value assets. As they decay they become projectiles that could harm other satellites. Just being up there they take up area that could be used by something useful. They are small but there is a minimum separation for objects in orbit. If they get knocked that become more dangerous as they can not correct themselves. (They have thrusters but they only produce micro newtons of power)
Had they been in a very low orbit, say 300Kms, which is below valuable satellite orbits and would decay quickly I would see not issue. It goes up; they do the experiment; it comes down and burn up; no problem. Now It will be up there for years if not decades and is a danger to valuable satellites s it comes down. Why did they have to put it so high? This is a great example of doing something because we can and not because we should.
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Might the neighborhood burglar like realtime updated reports on when you're home and when you're not? Might your insurance carrier want to know if your daily patterns are outside the median? Might your stalker want to know where you are? Might your ex-wife's private investigator want to know who you're visiting? Might ClearChannel want to know which billboards you drive by most often? And so on. Draw on your paranoia and imagination and I think you'll see that Big Brother is just one of many brothers to be concerned about.
If Just Anyone is not allowed to bug your car, then that suggests it is a special power reserved for government, and you're going to have a hard time arguing it's not a violation of privacy (if it's not, then why can't I bug your car?) or that it doesn't require any sort of balances or limits of power for which the 4th amendment was intended to provide protection.
Lets see, burglary and stalking are illegal acts while investigating a suspect is not. If an insurance company has the resources to follow all their clients I would be surprised. For an ad agency to track a single person it must be a pretty important person. Probably the wife would want to know where you are rather than the ex-wife and, in my opinion, don't commit adultery.
In my mind a tracking device is just another means of tailing someone. Since I do not do anything illegal and do not associate with people who do I have no problem with the police tracking me. In fact, it is less dangerous as people being tailed do not do dangerous acts just in case they are being tailed. It is also less invasive than tailing as the driver is not looking aver their shoulder for vehicles. The reason you can't track my car is that you do not have a legitimate reason to do so and it constitutes stalking, an illegal act. Exactly the same as you following me around all day. The police on the other hand can, and do, follow anyone they want without a warrant.
The issue is the catch 22 that police forces are put into. They need to follow someone to gather evidence to get a search warrant to gather enough evidence to convict someone. If tracking is not allowed, they would need a search warrant to gather enough evidence to get a search warrant.
The prosecution must reveal all evidence to the defence as in all the location logs for the tracker. It happens all the time. One of the best ways to get a charge dropped is to find evidence that the prosecution knew about but did not reveal. It does not have to be important evidence as hiding any evidence is grounds for dismissal. I realize it may be a difficult task but showing that some of the location logs are missing should be pretty easy. At worst all location logs would be thrown out.
Actually the issue was that the dogs were trained to go under tanks and stay there. The problem was that they were trained by Russians using Russian tanks so they had a tenancy to blow up their own tanks because those were the ones the dogs were familiar with. Dogs have a very poor IFF.
There is a mandate in the US that states that cell phones must be tracked for 911 purposes. So Google must collect the info for 911 to use. Giving it to advertising companies is a different story.
You missed the point. When the iPad came out it was the first viable tablet. There were millions of people chomping at the bit to buy a tablet; any tablet. Now there have been millions of tablets sold fulfilling much of that need. Any new tablet will not sell as fast as the original iPad because many people already have a tablet and the new tablet is not the only option.
Lets see, when the iPad came out there was no other tablet on the market and years of marketing hype which created a pent up need. The iPad came out and they sold a crap load of them. There is also the Apple fanboy factor "If it is Apple I must have it". Many, if not most, people who would buy a tablet now have iPads thereby deceasing overall demand for tablets.
An Android pad with a real tablet OS comes out, is panned by the tech community and people wonder what it didn't sell as many as the iPad? Most people who want a tablet but have yet to buy a iPad are a patient bunch and will wait till the right one comes out. From all the reviews, the Zoom is not the right tablet.
If you want to compare sales compare how many iPads were sold in the same time period as the release of the Zoom. Then the comparison may be valid.
Lets look at a few holes in your argument.
1. Since 2/3 of the electricity in the US is currently coal based to make electricity clean and meet you goal you would have to replace that capacity in the next ten years. That is not going to happen as new plants are barely keeping up with rising demand. Some of that demand being driven by supplying electric cars.
2. The top surface area of a small car is about 24sq-ft. A solar cell I looked up created 13W/sq-ft. That mean that the cells on a car could produce 312W. The battery on a Leaf holds 24 kWh. To charge that battery with the solar panels on the car would take 24000/312 = 77 hours. That gives a 109 mile range. An eight hour charge gives you a eleven mile range. According to the US DoT 49% of commuters travel more than 11 miles one way to work. In fact if you travel more than six miles you will have to plug the car in some time. Another issue is that in most cities parking is underground so no sunlight (sorry but you will not be able to charge using inside lighting).
3. I am also not talking about what will happen in ten years. Right now car companies are touting electric cars as zero emission; that is not true right now. Right now the electric car companies are telling an untruth.
When all electricity used by electric cars is generated using zero emission technology the car companies are free to call them zero emission; until then that statement is false. That is the problem with absolute statements like "zero emission"; they are rarely true.
I agree that electricity is cleaner but it is not zero emission which is what is being touted by the electric car manufacturers. Tell it like it is; an electric car is only as clean as the technology used to generate the electricity. Vehicle manufacturers will not do that because it makes their products look less green. There are high mileage compact cars that emit less greenhouse gasses than some hybrids and I bet in some areas, such as the north east of the US where power is mostly coal, even better than pure electric.
How much energy does it take to make the aluminum? Considering that 2/3 of the electricity in the US is coal that could be an issue.
How environmentally friendly is the production of lye?
Same question for the vinegar.
How will the waste products be collected and refined considering that it will be mostly water?
This process focuses on one "green" section of the chain and shows how simple it is. It neglects the other steps because they will be shown to be not green. It is the same thing for plug in electric cars. Sure the car has zero emissions but the coal power plants that generated the electricity to charge the car have lots of emissions.
So far there has been a huge hurdle to overcome in the production of biofuels with algae; contamination. Quite a few things grow in the same medium as biofuel algae and the algae that produces biofuel is easily overwhelmed. According to this page, http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/news.aspx , Exxon is still at the research phase and not in production.
Look at some real numbers. The Rice Solar Energy Project in California is a 150Mw plant recently approved. Look at the first bullet of the project location in this document http://ricesolarenergy.com/project_overview.html. I quote
"Private land holding of 3,300 acres; approximately 1,500 acres will be occupied by the solar facility".
So 1500 acres for a 150Mw plant is 50 acres for a 5Mv plant. These are real figures, not estimates.
I created a report by county for 2009 and accidentally selected total as well as non-residential and residential so the numbers were doubled. Even with that, $600/year is still a lot more than $284. And then they have to pay for the power. All the number also do not take into account any growth caused by things like electric cars.
Notice the source date on the web page you cite; 2001. The page I cited is 2009 and directly from the state energy database.
The 7 acres is the area of the mirrors. This is a quote from the first bullet of the Project location section of the document I cited.
"Private land holding of 3,300 acres; approximately 1,500 acres will be occupied by the solar facility"
few numbers you got wrong or neglected.
1. The energy consumption is off by a factor of 2. According to the ECDMS http://www.ecdms.energy.ca.gov/ total electrical consumption in 1009 was 560 million Mwh.
2. Solar plants to not generate peek power 24/7. There are days, especially winter when the sun is low on the horizon that you will get less energy. Stormy days also cut power production.
3. The 7 acre number is the mirror size. Look at the Rice Solar energy Power project http://ricesolarenergy.com/project_overview.html. It will produce 150Mw and take up 1,500 acres. Scales to 5 Mw that would be 50 acres.
4. You don't factor interest into the costs of building.
5 Cost $750M-$850M for the Rice Project. Scaled would be $25M to $28
So run the numbers again.
560,000,000 Mwh/24/365 = 12785 plants
50 acres per plant = 639,250acres
28 million per plant = $358B= 9609
37,253,956 = $9,609/resident
Amortized over 10 years with a 5% interest rate = $1224/year.
Remember that is just the cost of the plant and not the total cost of running it.
So for a family of three that would cost $3600/year to build these plants.
If you factor in redundancy for low sun days it may even be twice those figures. All my figures are cited or just math. Where are your citations?
Sorry but that is the area of the mirrors and not the area that the plant will cover. There are spaces between the mirrors and a large area in the centre that is unisable due to the angle on the tower.
On grid storage is the combination of grid and the storage technologies that have not been implemented yet. According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations , there are 62 pumped storage plants over 100 MW in the world totalling about 82.5Gw. Of those, 17 are in China and 13 in the US. Sixty two for the entire world is a very small number.
Molten salt plant work great in areas of consistent sunlight. I live on the west coast of BC. We have days on end of storms and rain where solar output is greatly decreased. Molten salt can only store so much energy and will become depleted over night. They do not work well in winter when the sun is lower. The few extra would more likely be two or three times as you can not guarantee that every plant can produce 100% at any given time (storms, winter, night).
The maintenance issue is to counter the delusion that solar energy is free one the plant is built.
The issue of energy density. How many acres of land would have to be covered with mirrors to supply the US with energy using molten salt plants? For California alone it would be over 100,000 and cost $Trillions. And that is with no redundancy.
Now try to scale this up to cover all of California. Based just on population California is 276 times the size of Humboldt County. Cost for power plants would be almost $3 Trillion and cover 345,000 acres. This is an example of how "green" solutions may work on dispersed rural areas but not urban areas where most of the power is used. This also does not take into account that Humboldt County does not have many plants like aluminum or steel smelters which use a lot of energy.
Molten salt plants are not cheap and require maintenance.
Quote from Wikipedia; "All turbines are equipped with protective features to avoid damage at high wind speeds, by feathering the blades into the wind which ceases their rotation, supplemented by brakes." When winds get too high the blades would almost be completely feathered to be slow enough and any gusts will cause over speed so they are stopped completely.
Planning for tidal means having something else to replace it. What do you use when solar and wind are not there? Tidal reservoirs are not the same as river reservoirs. Water goes in and out the same end.
The beauty of conventional power stations is that you can adjust the output. Try to turn up the wind , sun or tide when you need it. Sure smart appliances can help but what about street lights, commercial refrigeration, aluminum plants, manufacturing plants, stoves, electric heaters, etc. They are all big energy users that can not be scheduled.
Most of the "solutions" would increase costs to the point of being uneconomical.
How many of these storage devices have been made or even planned? The technology exists but has not been implemented on a large scale. I know of very few. You also forgot about flywheels and compressed air storage.
The raised water technology works great in the mountains but what about Kansas? Also you require space for two large reservoirs. How many valleys to we loose to energy storage? It also requires three separate sets of machinery that need to be built and maintained. All that equipment costs money and increasing the cost of energy produced. Pointing at at technology as a solution and implementing it is a very different thing.
I go back to my main issue with most "green" energy; what do you do at slack tide, at night, in the middle of a storm? Under those conditions there is no tidal power, no solar power and no wind power (all turbines have a max wind speed).
How big do you think a battery would have to be to supply electricity to New Your City for 8 hours at night? Batteries are not a viable solution for storing power on a large scale.
The case meerling is probably referring to was discussed on /. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/12/17/0610231/Judge-Declares-Mistrial-Because-of-Wikipedia. Notice there was no mention that the jurors asked for a definition. Any evidence must be presented by the attorney to be considered by the jury. Thar=t is the way the system works.
There is not an energy production problem there is an energy storage problem. Almost all green sources of energy have have down times. In the case of solar energy that is night. If we could store some of the energy produced in the day we would be much further ahead. There is some research and a few test being done but energy storage is not as "sexy" as energy production.
Why not a blind test? Instead of having two groups; users ans non-users, have three groups. non users, left hip and right hip. Every time a subject was tested he would not have his cell phone on and the technician would not know what group he was in. When the statistics were analyzed the doctor would not know which group was which; he would just be looking to see if there was a difference between the left and right. Only after the analysis was done would the groups be revealed. That would remove any possible bias.
I also agree that "statistically significant" may not be "medically significant".
And one final note; N=24? That seems like a very small study considering that only a total of 48 subjects were tested.
Thanks for missing the point. The useless satellites are in orbit with high value assets. As they decay they become projectiles that could harm other satellites. Just being up there they take up area that could be used by something useful. They are small but there is a minimum separation for objects in orbit. If they get knocked that become more dangerous as they can not correct themselves. (They have thrusters but they only produce micro newtons of power)
Had they been in a very low orbit, say 300Kms, which is below valuable satellite orbits and would decay quickly I would see not issue. It goes up; they do the experiment; it comes down and burn up; no problem. Now It will be up there for years if not decades and is a danger to valuable satellites s it comes down. Why did they have to put it so high? This is a great example of doing something because we can and not because we should.