Nothing like having to take a trip to the local gas station (presuming THEY have power) to fill up the generator every 8 hours or so.
THIS IS A MAJOR ISSUE.
When you have a massive area-wide power outage, three things happen with regards to gas stations.
First, many of them lose power. Gas pumps do not run without power. Until the station itself gets generators set up, it's useless.
Second, everybody else with generators is going to be crowding into the gas stations to try to buy fuel.
Third, odds are whatever caused the widespread power outage is also screwing up the fuel distribution system. The gas stations may not have any fuel to sell.
My friend did his study in the mid-70s. I don't think the Peacekeeper was designed until later, so no, he wasn't mistaken. None of the ICBMs that were in use at the time were adaptable as an orbital lift vehicle.
None of the ICBMs that were in use at the time that had not already been adapted as orbital launch vehicles were suitable for the task.
In the mid-1970s, the US had Minuteman I and II missiles, as well as Titan IIs which were in the process of being decommissioned. Titan IIs were quite capable of orbital launches, having been used for the Gemini program in the mid-60s. Fourteen of the decommissioned Titan IIs were hauled back out of mothballs and refurbished for space launches in the mid-80s.
Of the major US ICBM series (Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, and Peacekeeper), only the Minuteman hasn't been used for orbital launches.
You have two cows.... Don't forget that a cow has to produce a calf (with a 50% chance of being a bull) who consumes some of that milk. But then the calf grows up, and if it is a cow, it will also produce milk. Also, a cow's milk production decreases with age.
Increasing the number of cows does not increase the efficiency of each cow, assuming we've already taken advantage of economies of scale.
Doesn't matter. The efficiency in producing the energy for "calories in" goes up as well.
Given the amount of fossil energy we're putting into that side of the equation, I doubt the efficiency of producing grains has actually increased.
Sure, eventually it is, but we are so many orders of magnitude away from that limit that it is of no practical concern for now.
As far as getting milk out of a cow, we're probably within one order of magnitude. The term has a meaning, it's not just shorthand for "a whole bunch".
The universe doesn't force us to get milk from cows; improved technology could make it possible to synthesize it directly or to just have the milk glands without the rest of the cow.
The issue here is the interest on loans taken out to buy cows. The possibility of disruptive technologies makes the original statement that "them cows don't produce 3% more milk with each passing year" even more true. A market flooded with cheap mechanically produced milk would result in existing cows having negative growth in produced milk value, even if production volume increased.
Well I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure them cows don't produce 3% more milk with each passing year, nor do they yield 3% more meat. You can say what you want about wealth, but there is a fixed amount of natural, life-sustaining resources in the world, and printing more money isn't going to change that.
Wrong. The cows do, in fact, produce more milk every year (not the individual cow, but the average cow). More importantly the dairy industry becomes more efficient every year, making it possible to have more cows using fewer resources..
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
Production and efficiency in a single industry can only increase for so long before the results become absurd or impossible.
The average dairy cow in the US produces ~20,000 pounds of milk annually (rounded for simplicity). If we pretend we can get 3% improvements annually, then after 100 years we'll have nineteen times the milk we started with. At the end of 200 years, each cow is producing a pound of milk every four and a quarter seconds. In 300 years, 4.5 pounds/second. You'd have to stick a pipe down its throat just to prevent dehydration.
And as far as more cows using fewer resources goes, you run up against basic physics. Calories in >= calories out. Efficiency improvement is constrained by the universe.
Cobalt is toxic at high concentrations. At low concentrations, it is an essential trace nutrient (it makes up the core of the various Vitamin B12 molecules).
I have no idea what effect on cobalt exposure this technology would have.
You can make CFCs, HCFCs, HFCs and that kind of fun stuff with methane and ethane, but to make polymers you need ethylene or other hydrocarbons with double or triple bonds.
Where do you think we get ethylene on Earth? It's produced by putting ethane in a steam cracker.
The Internet today is worth anything because of the hundreds of other bits and protocols that were tacked on top of it. E.g., probably Tim Berners-Lee's WWW concept was _the_ one thing that took the Interent from the ivory tower of academic curiosities and made it useful for the common man.
So? That doesn't mean the Internet didn't exist before them.
You're arguing that writing didn't exist before Gutenberg because it was a pain in the ass to make books before movable type was invented.
The Mosaic browser, and thus the WWW as we know, it owe much to the "Gore Bill" funding the NCSA. To quote Marc Andreessen, "If it had been left to private industry, [Mosaic] wouldn't have happened, at least, not until years later."
What makes it _the_ Internet isn't just the underlying TCP/IP protocol, but the whole eidifice of applications and protocols on top of them.
None of which would be possible without TCP/IP and the network of networks underneath.
At any rate, what Gore championed wasn't that. It was ARPANET, a toy for the military
This is an outright lie.
The first ARPANET link went online in 1969, the same year Al Gore was enlisting in the Army. He was not elected to Federal office until 1977. By the time Gore was sworn in, ARPANET needed no champions.
Al Gore championed the educational NSFNet, whose importance was not apparent to most in Congress. In hindsight, it was the major step between the closed military ARPANET and the open public Internet.
So basically it's a bit like crediting Karl Benz with inventing the tank. You know, 'cause he made a car, and later someone else added a bigger engine, treads, armour and gun(s) and got a tank. But, hey, if you want to, you can still see it as just Karl Benz's car.
What you are doing is a like not giving Benz credit for the car because his car didn't have a radio, air conditioning, and air bags. You've moved the goalposts, redefining the word "Internet" to mean something other than the Internet.
Regardless of whether he "invented" the Internet or not, his taking credit for it is still highly misleading and a bit bullshit.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn say Al Gore's statement is accurate. Marc Andreessen gives him a measure of the credit for the web browser as we know it.
We would probably have the Internet without Al Gore. But we probably would have had to wait a bit without him greasing the governmental wheels.
I wonder if it would make sense to run the leftover heat through a series of heat engines, with each optimized for smaller temperature differentials than the last.
It's referred to as a combined cycle. Many gas power plants recover the heat from the gas turbine and use it to run a steam turbine. GE claims 60% efficiency for their combined cycle turbines, where a standalone gas turbine would get around 35%.
It does not make sense to continue the process indefinitely. Eventually one will reach a point where building the equipment requires more energy than is produced from the ever-dwindling temperature difference.
a) Research opportunities in microgravity (I know ISS has this but you could do bigger scope projects on the moon).
The Moon does not have a microgravity environment. If you let go of a feather and a bowling ball, they fall.
b) Mining. Finding rare minerals would be key.
No more likely there than on Earth.
c) Platform base for building missions to other planets. Sure going to Mars can be done without going to the moon. But it might be a good launching platform for missions to Jupiter, Saturn, etc. Also the aforementioned atomic methods could be usable from teh moon.
Where are you going to get the fuel? Launching fuel from Earth to the lunar surface just to burn it to get back off again does not save you any effort. The rocket equation is a harsh mistress.
d) Expand Scientific knowledge of the moon. Expanding mankind's knowledge is a good thing.
This is a question of whether using the resources to expand knowledge elsewhere or accomplish something else entirely would be more useful.
e) Building/Testing a Space Elevator. Building and testing of a space elevator would be much easier on the moon.
It's not that much easier. The Moon may have a sixth the gravity of Earth, but it also rotates very slowly and orbits an object much bigger than itself. This means that a lunar space elevator has to be twice as long as one on Earth, and will have an unstable counterweight that requires active rebalancing.
There is one major advantage, existing materials can be used due to the lower stresses.
To send the argument back the other way, why the hell should the American taxpayer be bailing out people (and banks, really mostly banks) that got in over their head with their mortgages? We should spend THAT money on space exploration!!
If, hypothetically, the economic system collapses, what money would we have to spend on space exploration?
Snicker behind my hand as I realize that Texas gets every bit as many tornadoes as the so-called "Tornado Alley".
"Having a bunch of tornadoes" is basically the definition of Tornado Alley. Accordingly, it is understood as including a significant fraction of Texas.
If you want to really engage in diabolical planning, you should do your homework first.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
--Arthur C. Clarke
"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right."
--Isaac Asimov
Shoes? You spoiled brats had shoes to put your rust-cones in? In my day we would have given our left arm for shoes. Well, we would, except we had already had them torn off by wild dogs.
We had to saw the tops of our heads off with stone tools and use our skulls as bowls. And in those days, you had to eat your rust-cone fast, so you could get your skull back on your head before the ravens started trying to eat your brain. The bone would still be cold, so you got brain freeze from two sides.
Remember Rita and how everyone evacuated and nothing actually happened?
You're kidding, right? It's like having a gun pointed at you, fired, and then saying "nothing happened" because the shooter's hand jerked at the last second and hit somebody else.
Houston dodged a bullet with Rita. Ask Beaumont and Lake Charles about their $11 billion damage bill.
Imagine if we could predict category 5 hurricanes weeks or months in advance. How many lives would have been spared in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita?
Not many. Katrina was the result of a long-term failure to take the hurricane threat to New Orleans seriously. I doubt a few weeks' warning would have significantly changed the result.
Rita only caused 7 direct deaths. More lead time would have kept elderly Houstonians from dying while stuck in evacuation traffic. Although that doesn't help if your bus catches fire in Dallas (23 of the 113 indirect deaths).
And both were only Category 3 hurricanes at landfall.
The only reason that TW is even testing this in a limited market is probably because there is 0 competition there. I'm pretty positive in a market where there is actual competition they will lose out.
AT&T DSL is available in Beaumont. I don't know if that actually counts as competition.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't expand the entire list there, buddy.
http://www.seis.utah.edu/req2webdir/recenteqs/Maps/Yellowstone_full.html
A background rumble of magnitude 1-2 quakes is a constant feature of Yellowstone. It is not a sign of imminent eruption.
Except for the fact that the area that these earthquakes are occuring contimues to rise and tilt the lake south
Of course it's still building up to an eruption. I'm saying that every little earthquake swarm cannot be taken as a sign of imminent eruption.
Look for reports of venting gas, or even minor lava eruptions around the edges. Then run.
Well... then if it DOES blow up in the next couple of days it'll all be YOUR fault that I stopped packing for Australia.
I will try to remember to apologize in that event.
Seriously Slashdot, you need to work on your reaction time. This was news two days ago.
These earthquake swarms happen frequently in Yellowstone, and this one has already ended. Yellowstone has dropped back to its ordinary low rumble.
Nothing like having to take a trip to the local gas station (presuming THEY have power) to fill up the generator every 8 hours or so.
THIS IS A MAJOR ISSUE.
When you have a massive area-wide power outage, three things happen with regards to gas stations.
First, many of them lose power. Gas pumps do not run without power. Until the station itself gets generators set up, it's useless.
Second, everybody else with generators is going to be crowding into the gas stations to try to buy fuel.
Third, odds are whatever caused the widespread power outage is also screwing up the fuel distribution system. The gas stations may not have any fuel to sell.
My friend did his study in the mid-70s. I don't think the Peacekeeper was designed until later, so no, he wasn't mistaken. None of the ICBMs that were in use at the time were adaptable as an orbital lift vehicle.
None of the ICBMs that were in use at the time that had not already been adapted as orbital launch vehicles were suitable for the task.
In the mid-1970s, the US had Minuteman I and II missiles, as well as Titan IIs which were in the process of being decommissioned. Titan IIs were quite capable of orbital launches, having been used for the Gemini program in the mid-60s. Fourteen of the decommissioned Titan IIs were hauled back out of mothballs and refurbished for space launches in the mid-80s.
Of the major US ICBM series (Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, and Peacekeeper), only the Minuteman hasn't been used for orbital launches.
You have two cows.... Don't forget that a cow has to produce a calf (with a 50% chance of being a bull) who consumes some of that milk. But then the calf grows up, and if it is a cow, it will also produce milk. Also, a cow's milk production decreases with age.
Increasing the number of cows does not increase the efficiency of each cow, assuming we've already taken advantage of economies of scale.
Doesn't matter. The efficiency in producing the energy for "calories in" goes up as well.
Given the amount of fossil energy we're putting into that side of the equation, I doubt the efficiency of producing grains has actually increased.
Sure, eventually it is, but we are so many orders of magnitude away from that limit that it is of no practical concern for now.
As far as getting milk out of a cow, we're probably within one order of magnitude. The term has a meaning, it's not just shorthand for "a whole bunch".
The universe doesn't force us to get milk from cows; improved technology could make it possible to synthesize it directly or to just have the milk glands without the rest of the cow.
The issue here is the interest on loans taken out to buy cows. The possibility of disruptive technologies makes the original statement that "them cows don't produce 3% more milk with each passing year" even more true. A market flooded with cheap mechanically produced milk would result in existing cows having negative growth in produced milk value, even if production volume increased.
Well I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure them cows don't produce 3% more milk with each passing year, nor do they yield 3% more meat. You can say what you want about wealth, but there is a fixed amount of natural, life-sustaining resources in the world, and printing more money isn't going to change that.
Wrong. The cows do, in fact, produce more milk every year (not the individual cow, but the average cow). More importantly the dairy industry becomes more efficient every year, making it possible to have more cows using fewer resources..
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
Production and efficiency in a single industry can only increase for so long before the results become absurd or impossible.
The average dairy cow in the US produces ~20,000 pounds of milk annually (rounded for simplicity). If we pretend we can get 3% improvements annually, then after 100 years we'll have nineteen times the milk we started with. At the end of 200 years, each cow is producing a pound of milk every four and a quarter seconds. In 300 years, 4.5 pounds/second. You'd have to stick a pipe down its throat just to prevent dehydration.
And as far as more cows using fewer resources goes, you run up against basic physics. Calories in >= calories out. Efficiency improvement is constrained by the universe.
Cobalt is toxic at high concentrations. At low concentrations, it is an essential trace nutrient (it makes up the core of the various Vitamin B12 molecules).
I have no idea what effect on cobalt exposure this technology would have.
You can make CFCs, HCFCs, HFCs and that kind of fun stuff with methane and ethane, but to make polymers you need ethylene or other hydrocarbons with double or triple bonds.
Where do you think we get ethylene on Earth? It's produced by putting ethane in a steam cracker.
The Internet today is worth anything because of the hundreds of other bits and protocols that were tacked on top of it. E.g., probably Tim Berners-Lee's WWW concept was _the_ one thing that took the Interent from the ivory tower of academic curiosities and made it useful for the common man.
So? That doesn't mean the Internet didn't exist before them.
You're arguing that writing didn't exist before Gutenberg because it was a pain in the ass to make books before movable type was invented.
The Mosaic browser, and thus the WWW as we know, it owe much to the "Gore Bill" funding the NCSA. To quote Marc Andreessen, "If it had been left to private industry, [Mosaic] wouldn't have happened, at least, not until years later."
What makes it _the_ Internet isn't just the underlying TCP/IP protocol, but the whole eidifice of applications and protocols on top of them.
None of which would be possible without TCP/IP and the network of networks underneath.
At any rate, what Gore championed wasn't that. It was ARPANET, a toy for the military
This is an outright lie.
The first ARPANET link went online in 1969, the same year Al Gore was enlisting in the Army. He was not elected to Federal office until 1977. By the time Gore was sworn in, ARPANET needed no champions.
Al Gore championed the educational NSFNet, whose importance was not apparent to most in Congress. In hindsight, it was the major step between the closed military ARPANET and the open public Internet.
So basically it's a bit like crediting Karl Benz with inventing the tank. You know, 'cause he made a car, and later someone else added a bigger engine, treads, armour and gun(s) and got a tank. But, hey, if you want to, you can still see it as just Karl Benz's car.
What you are doing is a like not giving Benz credit for the car because his car didn't have a radio, air conditioning, and air bags. You've moved the goalposts, redefining the word "Internet" to mean something other than the Internet.
Regardless of whether he "invented" the Internet or not, his taking credit for it is still highly misleading and a bit bullshit.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn say Al Gore's statement is accurate. Marc Andreessen gives him a measure of the credit for the web browser as we know it.
We would probably have the Internet without Al Gore. But we probably would have had to wait a bit without him greasing the governmental wheels.
I wonder if it would make sense to run the leftover heat through a series of heat engines, with each optimized for smaller temperature differentials than the last.
It's referred to as a combined cycle. Many gas power plants recover the heat from the gas turbine and use it to run a steam turbine. GE claims 60% efficiency for their combined cycle turbines, where a standalone gas turbine would get around 35%.
It does not make sense to continue the process indefinitely. Eventually one will reach a point where building the equipment requires more energy than is produced from the ever-dwindling temperature difference.
Your original statement implied that Texas is not in Tornado Alley, and that is what I was responding to.
And on a tangent, reading Slashdot from RSS means you never see new message notifications.
a) Research opportunities in microgravity (I know ISS has this but you could do bigger scope projects on the moon).
The Moon does not have a microgravity environment. If you let go of a feather and a bowling ball, they fall.
b) Mining. Finding rare minerals would be key.
No more likely there than on Earth.
c) Platform base for building missions to other planets. Sure going to Mars can be done without going to the moon. But it might be a good launching platform for missions to Jupiter, Saturn, etc. Also the aforementioned atomic methods could be usable from teh moon.
Where are you going to get the fuel? Launching fuel from Earth to the lunar surface just to burn it to get back off again does not save you any effort. The rocket equation is a harsh mistress.
d) Expand Scientific knowledge of the moon. Expanding mankind's knowledge is a good thing.
This is a question of whether using the resources to expand knowledge elsewhere or accomplish something else entirely would be more useful.
e) Building/Testing a Space Elevator. Building and testing of a space elevator would be much easier on the moon.
It's not that much easier. The Moon may have a sixth the gravity of Earth, but it also rotates very slowly and orbits an object much bigger than itself. This means that a lunar space elevator has to be twice as long as one on Earth, and will have an unstable counterweight that requires active rebalancing.
There is one major advantage, existing materials can be used due to the lower stresses.
To send the argument back the other way, why the hell should the American taxpayer be bailing out people (and banks, really mostly banks) that got in over their head with their mortgages? We should spend THAT money on space exploration!!
If, hypothetically, the economic system collapses, what money would we have to spend on space exploration?
Snicker behind my hand as I realize that Texas gets every bit as many tornadoes as the so-called "Tornado Alley".
"Having a bunch of tornadoes" is basically the definition of Tornado Alley. Accordingly, it is understood as including a significant fraction of Texas.
If you want to really engage in diabolical planning, you should do your homework first.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." --Arthur C. Clarke
"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right." --Isaac Asimov
Shoes? You spoiled brats had shoes to put your rust-cones in? In my day we would have given our left arm for shoes. Well, we would, except we had already had them torn off by wild dogs.
We had to saw the tops of our heads off with stone tools and use our skulls as bowls. And in those days, you had to eat your rust-cone fast, so you could get your skull back on your head before the ravens started trying to eat your brain. The bone would still be cold, so you got brain freeze from two sides.
T-cells are part of the immune system, and perhaps you remember this recent infamous TGN1412 experiment involving T-Cells
Thanks, I was thinking of that trial about a week ago on an unrelated subject, but couldn't remember enough to look it up.
Remember Rita and how everyone evacuated and nothing actually happened?
You're kidding, right? It's like having a gun pointed at you, fired, and then saying "nothing happened" because the shooter's hand jerked at the last second and hit somebody else.
Houston dodged a bullet with Rita. Ask Beaumont and Lake Charles about their $11 billion damage bill.
They're two tacos and an enchilada short of a combination platter.
Where is this mythical two taco combination platter and where can I get one?
Your proposal is not as silly as you might think.
May the Sun allow his soul to bask forever.
Not many. Katrina was the result of a long-term failure to take the hurricane threat to New Orleans seriously. I doubt a few weeks' warning would have significantly changed the result.
Rita only caused 7 direct deaths. More lead time would have kept elderly Houstonians from dying while stuck in evacuation traffic. Although that doesn't help if your bus catches fire in Dallas (23 of the 113 indirect deaths).
And both were only Category 3 hurricanes at landfall.
AT&T DSL is available in Beaumont. I don't know if that actually counts as competition.