The Federal Western Area Power Administration says there's at least 72TW of accessible wind power in the world:
Researchers from Stanford University collected wind speed measurements from 7,500 surface stations and 500 balloon-launch stations to determine global wind speeds at 80 m above surface, equivalent to the hub height of modern turbines. When results are interpolated over the world, authors Cristina Archer and Mark Jacobson estimate that 13 percent of the world experiences winds with average annual speeds of 6.9 m per second, which is strong enough for power generation.
Such wind speeds were found in every region of the world, although North America was found to have the greatest potential, they explain in the Journal of Geophysical Research, published by the American Geophysical Union. Locations with suitable wind resources could generate 72 trillion watts of power, compared with an estimate from the U.S. Department of Energy of 3.5 trillion watts.
Of course, cell biologists have a vested interest in biofuels, not wind, and the US DoE is completely in the pocket of the nukes business, when it isn't dancing to the tune of the oil and coal business. Wind, not so much.
But I didn't say that wind is the only way to do it. I mentioned others, especially in the long run. I just said that wind is the easy way to do it now. With the extra energy we get from leaving the petrofuels and nukes traps, we can make a diverse portfolio that is clean, reliable and cheap.
FWIW, there's no reason wind can't generate electric to produce various fuels that fuelcells burn later.
Read the article to which I linked, instead of pulling "a turbine every 50 feet" out of your "hat". And look at the large availablity of offshore, with its 50% higher power.
You also don't seem to know that the kinds of droughts the US already experiences is already cutting significantly into our hydroelectric power reliability.
I did not argue that a single turbine could replace every single oil well. I just offered a comparison of oil wells to turbines, because people tend to picture a towering gusher when thinking of oil wells, but turbines are directly comparable. And we never had an oil well every 50 feet. My actual argument was that we don't have the dire emergency requiring nukes that this article's subject now likes to claim. The nuke biz has always presented the alternatives to nukes as absolute paradise vs absolute hell, with no alternatives, and I'm pointing out that wind is quite a viable alternative.
Just because things are finite doesn't mean they're not extremely large. Something like 5% of the Sahara could power the world with existing solar tech right now if we wanted. Wind is also plentiful. Read the article.
Calculate in the costs of building a nuke plant, and then the (open-ended) costs of getting its fuel, of managing its waste, of securing the entire lifecycle, and the costs of occasional leaks (no engineering is perfect)...
Oh, and there's no reason we can't use the same electric distribution grid we currently waste so much power employing. BTW, 25% overcapacity isn't "incredibly over-building". Neither is 100 wind farms such an unreasonable amount.
Both wind and solar need more work to be better solutions. If we'd subsidized them the past 60 years (OK, 40 years since NASA) the way we have oil and nukes, we might not have even noticed any energy crises at all.
But even so, the Mid-Atlantic is just one place. There's lots of others, like across the Great Lakes, and all over the damn place. And that 330GW is just that accessible to current engineering near the ground, not really in the whole atmosphere. To say nothing of cyclones.
Also, I don't know where you're getting your 10% energy for solar cells stats. PVs aren't just harnessing IR, but rather much of the spectrum. There are perfectly good 25% efficient cells out there in the sunlight, with 42% efficiency achieved this year from concentrators (which are cheaper than their equivalent area in actual cells).
We're not limited to today's tech. We've got about 5-10 more years where we can use petrofuels without committing to shifting the planet's ecosystems into a new one in which our civilization is likely to fail. We've got decades, centuries after that to perfect it. Or to stare at a pile of nuke waste that will just become a bigger pollution and security problem every year instead.
There's no reason we can't use wind generated power to generate fuel for fuel cells, or "natural" gas for pipelines, and store and transport it. Oil comes from a lot further away.
There certainly is enough wind energy to power the world. Just the Mid-Atlantic US coast has up to 330GW of power. And that's not even counting the onshore, or the Great Lakes. And besides, I'm just talking about replacing filthy nukes, not every energy source - I even named some more. But eventually harnessing the power of cyclones could probably deliver enough power for the whole world, and reduce the cyclone damage that all that petrofuel pollution has created.
The rain stops too - but not everywhere at once. Neither does the wind. That's got to be one of the silliest arguments against wind. Oh, and the wind charges batteries, too.
More silliness - so what if little oil is burned for electricity? What does that have to do with wind vs nukes, or wind vs coal/gas? Nothing. OK, so that's probably lthe silliest argument.
Why don't you read the article to which I linked, before lying about wind's economy? It's written by an economist, with facts instead of pure silliness.
Actually, the most obvious way to get past petroleum is not dirty, insecure, expensive nukes, but clean, safe, cheap wind turbines. Solar has a lot of promise, geothermal probably the best longterm prospects (though space-based solar is probably the most exciting), and lots of niches for biofuel.
But just keep in mind that US oil wells average about 10.5 barrels of crude per day (down from a peak about 18.5 in the early 1970s) at 3510Mj:bbl, burned at about 40% efficiency for about 171KW per US oil well (from a peak of 300KW). Which is enough to power about 35 US homes.
300KW is the about the smallest wind turbine in use commercially. Already. And the US is a leader in the wind turbine tech and industry, despite doing it without any real leadership, and competing with the vast subsidies to petrofuels and nukes.
But I guess when you're an expert in nukes, even though there's no money or fame left in opposing them, why not just flip sides - especially when there's so much bribe money, and you're so old now that you can hope that the waste won't hit the fan until after you're dead from something else.
I saw this latest _Blade Runner_ remaster a couple months ago at the Ziegfield, the biggest screen in NYC. I'd seen it there about 7-8 years ago, the last time it was rereleased in theaters. It was a tremendous spectacle, perfectly balanced in pace and quiet inevitability. Like a light sculpture at the end of a huge room, telling a story about humans and our creations.
Don't miss it if you can catch it. I hope they do remaster it again sometime, just so there's an excuse to show it at the Ziegfield again.
The Turing Test supposedly says that any artificial intelligence that can convince a human in a teletype conversation that the AI is human is therefore actually intelligent.
That's total BS. Of course it depends on the human. I suppose there's some kind of NP-complete version which says any AI tested OK by Marvin Minsky is intelligent enough, though Minsky might just be playing favorites. Minsky might not pass many humans on the test, who are the kind who fall for this bot.
The fact is that the whole idea that there's some actual definition of "intelligence", that all humans can recognize and have, is completely naive - dumb.
The Turing Test is valuable in its most basic, obvious sense, though: any machine that can fool any quantitiy of humans into thinking the AI is human is worth having, because there all kinds of things we want to do with humans, but which we can't actually make humans do. Like have conversations pretending to be an easily-laid woman getting it on with some idiot loser with a bank account. Sounds like a marriage made in heaven.com .
CompUSA was founded in 1984 as software seller Soft Warehouse, then branched out into computers. It took on the CompUSA name and went public in 1991. It bought Tandy's Computer City chain.
I always wondered why Radio Shack didn't turn into a huge computer retailer, which was a perfect growth for the only store like that until PCs got huge, even selling the first laptop to sell well, the TRS-80 Model 100. Evidently it was CompUSA that contractually obligated the Shack to stay mainly a Battery Club. I be the Shack would have made something closer to Fry's, but instead with actual live nerds all too willing to explain the inventory.
If only the NY Times were saying anything about the "SAFE Act", that the House just passed to force all ISPs to take responsibility for all content they host or transport, even if they don't moderate it, in direct contradiction of the landmark CDA which let ISPs be like telcos always have. Lots of child molesters trap children in telephone conversations, but the telco has no liability, because holding them responsible requires tapping every conversation, which is what the SAFE Act (not the one with the same name that sanely deregulated crypto export) now does: forces ISPs to monitor and analyze the content of your every Internet communication. But the Times has said nothing.
I thought Gates was leaving MS to that apey guy to run, while Gates concentrated on "giving away" all that money. What's he doing meeting with developers and demanding to know what the hell is going on like the rest of us?
I just dropped out of college rather than rewrite a 12 page rant about John Milton for an unsympathetic English major prof. Then I got flown out to Silicon Valley to program - they didn't care that I'd abandoned my English major.
Under a decade later I retired from the computer biz (for several years, anyway), having read (and understood) more Milton during my frequent sabbaticals than that old crank could ruin for me in a semester.
Google owns a lot of fiber WANs, a telco operations system, and all kinds of content positioned to deliver a modern version of an "open AOL" that incorporates the entire Internet's content, to compete with AOL, MSN, Verizon, AT&T, the cablecos, and now finally the "last mile" of wireless/mobile. They're going to own spectrum, as surely as they own the other infrastructure they could be outsourcing with effectively the same content/transaction/community model. They have proven in all those other holdings that they want to own them.
And then I hope they use that even stronger position to prove, by using it to compete most effectively, that all those other network operators have to open their networks to equal access.
Especially the mobile networks. Could you imagine if you had to pay "roaming charges" every time your packets deviated between remote hosts (eg. websites) from the default route initially found at the time you registered with your ISP? The "Internet" would never have gotten off the ground. Freed from that kind of shortsighted proprietary greed, mobile (and just wireless) networks with flat rates and unbundled access, connections and content services would explode like the Internet did. All that "available roaming capacity" in the segregated radio networks is unused capacity and reliable redundancy. I hope Google forces that open, and I expect owning one will make it easier for them to do so.
I once accidentally pressed "power off" instead of "save" on a dedicated wordprocessor terminal on which I'd just written my term paper in a single draft during the morning it was due, the last class of the semester.
What makes this disaster unusual is that it actually happened. No, the prof didn't believe it either.
OK, so now you confess that you can't even read. Otherwise, why would you cite Toyota's lower prices, a result of their lower costs that exclude "socialist" healthcare, being a leading competitive advantage over GM, proving my point and destroying yours?
Maybe it's because you don't understand the most basic economics, that lower costs mean lower prices means more competitive in the market. Probably that's it, because you also don't understand that since the jump in debt is larger than the reduction in taxes, that all those tax reductions (that haven't done any good, except further enrich the rich) would have lowered the debt with the same (insane, like the $TRILLION on Iraq that's only 1/10 of the debt) spending. Let me repeat that for the illiterate: No tax cuts with the same excessive spending would have given us less debt.
I bet you can't understand that. But then, you claim you built a radio, but couldn't even master Morse code, which a century and a half of frequently unschooled key operators mastered better than you type.
Now go waste someone else's time posing as the model obnoxious, childishly ignorant libertarian. I already know all I need to about your breed. You think government is something anyone can build from the Heathkit, but don't realize that it doesn't just operate itself, because it's made of live, actual people, not a pretty diagram.
And your redundant post is a sneaky attempt to suppress a post that you have failed to successfully argue against in this thread by making the same attempted points that I debunked.
I bet the Chinese program is just buying new pix made by NASA to present as their own, so NASA can ask for bigger budgets to compete. Someone at NASA is trying to keep China down by photoshopping the crater - in their Capricorn One Lunar Simulator.
But the question remains - who inserted the ' into the Chinese probe's English propaganda name? NASA doesn't have that tech in its budget - must be Russia or Japan.
This new space race is getting really interesting! For Korea's special effects houses, anyway.
No, I'm pointing out that the entire treatment of corporations as people at all is absurd. Just because I'm "excluding the middle" that corporations have some human rights but not all, doesn't mean the middle is worth including. The only basis for treating corporations as people with rights to any degree is an old fraud that's been perpetuated solely for profit, and insulting to the basis for the actual rights of actual people.
Saying a corporation is a person is what corporations do to obtain rights at least equal to humans (sometimes better, because they're not subject to liabilities including imprisonment or death). That's no straw man, it's precisely the target of what we're talking about, a central point in the story we're discussing: whether a corporation has a right to a jury trial. It might be treated as if it does, but that's the only real fallacy here.
So, since corporations are "persons", can a person on a jury consist of the corporation, with its board of directors voting to instruct its designated executive to report the voted decision? Otherwise, corporations aren't getting their rights protected.
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Of course, cell biologists have a vested interest in biofuels, not wind, and the US DoE is completely in the pocket of the nukes business, when it isn't dancing to the tune of the oil and coal business. Wind, not so much.
But I didn't say that wind is the only way to do it. I mentioned others, especially in the long run. I just said that wind is the easy way to do it now. With the extra energy we get from leaving the petrofuels and nukes traps, we can make a diverse portfolio that is clean, reliable and cheap.
FWIW, there's no reason wind can't generate electric to produce various fuels that fuelcells burn later.
Total bullshit. "Environmental types"? I guess you're the other type, who doesn't have an environment.
Read the link I posted before posting your rightwing talkradio gibberish.
Read the article to which I linked, instead of pulling "a turbine every 50 feet" out of your "hat". And look at the large availablity of offshore, with its 50% higher power.
You also don't seem to know that the kinds of droughts the US already experiences is already cutting significantly into our hydroelectric power reliability.
I did not argue that a single turbine could replace every single oil well. I just offered a comparison of oil wells to turbines, because people tend to picture a towering gusher when thinking of oil wells, but turbines are directly comparable. And we never had an oil well every 50 feet. My actual argument was that we don't have the dire emergency requiring nukes that this article's subject now likes to claim. The nuke biz has always presented the alternatives to nukes as absolute paradise vs absolute hell, with no alternatives, and I'm pointing out that wind is quite a viable alternative.
Just because things are finite doesn't mean they're not extremely large. Something like 5% of the Sahara could power the world with existing solar tech right now if we wanted. Wind is also plentiful. Read the article.
Calculate in the costs of building a nuke plant, and then the (open-ended) costs of getting its fuel, of managing its waste, of securing the entire lifecycle, and the costs of occasional leaks (no engineering is perfect)...
Reported nuke costs don't reflect reality. Carbon costs do.
Oh, and there's no reason we can't use the same electric distribution grid we currently waste so much power employing. BTW, 25% overcapacity isn't "incredibly over-building". Neither is 100 wind farms such an unreasonable amount.
Both wind and solar need more work to be better solutions. If we'd subsidized them the past 60 years (OK, 40 years since NASA) the way we have oil and nukes, we might not have even noticed any energy crises at all.
But even so, the Mid-Atlantic is just one place. There's lots of others, like across the Great Lakes, and all over the damn place. And that 330GW is just that accessible to current engineering near the ground, not really in the whole atmosphere. To say nothing of cyclones.
Also, I don't know where you're getting your 10% energy for solar cells stats. PVs aren't just harnessing IR, but rather much of the spectrum. There are perfectly good 25% efficient cells out there in the sunlight, with 42% efficiency achieved this year from concentrators (which are cheaper than their equivalent area in actual cells).
We're not limited to today's tech. We've got about 5-10 more years where we can use petrofuels without committing to shifting the planet's ecosystems into a new one in which our civilization is likely to fail. We've got decades, centuries after that to perfect it. Or to stare at a pile of nuke waste that will just become a bigger pollution and security problem every year instead.
There's no reason we can't use wind generated power to generate fuel for fuel cells, or "natural" gas for pipelines, and store and transport it. Oil comes from a lot further away.
There certainly is enough wind energy to power the world. Just the Mid-Atlantic US coast has up to 330GW of power. And that's not even counting the onshore, or the Great Lakes. And besides, I'm just talking about replacing filthy nukes, not every energy source - I even named some more. But eventually harnessing the power of cyclones could probably deliver enough power for the whole world, and reduce the cyclone damage that all that petrofuel pollution has created.
The rain stops too - but not everywhere at once. Neither does the wind. That's got to be one of the silliest arguments against wind. Oh, and the wind charges batteries, too.
More silliness - so what if little oil is burned for electricity? What does that have to do with wind vs nukes, or wind vs coal/gas? Nothing. OK, so that's probably lthe silliest argument.
Why don't you read the article to which I linked, before lying about wind's economy? It's written by an economist, with facts instead of pure silliness.
Actually, the most obvious way to get past petroleum is not dirty, insecure, expensive nukes, but clean, safe, cheap wind turbines. Solar has a lot of promise, geothermal probably the best longterm prospects (though space-based solar is probably the most exciting), and lots of niches for biofuel.
But just keep in mind that US oil wells average about 10.5 barrels of crude per day (down from a peak about 18.5 in the early 1970s) at 3510Mj:bbl, burned at about 40% efficiency for about 171KW per US oil well (from a peak of 300KW). Which is enough to power about 35 US homes.
300KW is the about the smallest wind turbine in use commercially. Already. And the US is a leader in the wind turbine tech and industry, despite doing it without any real leadership, and competing with the vast subsidies to petrofuels and nukes.
But I guess when you're an expert in nukes, even though there's no money or fame left in opposing them, why not just flip sides - especially when there's so much bribe money, and you're so old now that you can hope that the waste won't hit the fan until after you're dead from something else.
I saw this latest _Blade Runner_ remaster a couple months ago at the Ziegfield, the biggest screen in NYC. I'd seen it there about 7-8 years ago, the last time it was rereleased in theaters. It was a tremendous spectacle, perfectly balanced in pace and quiet inevitability. Like a light sculpture at the end of a huge room, telling a story about humans and our creations.
Don't miss it if you can catch it. I hope they do remaster it again sometime, just so there's an excuse to show it at the Ziegfield again.
The Turing Test supposedly says that any artificial intelligence that can convince a human in a teletype conversation that the AI is human is therefore actually intelligent.
That's total BS. Of course it depends on the human. I suppose there's some kind of NP-complete version which says any AI tested OK by Marvin Minsky is intelligent enough, though Minsky might just be playing favorites. Minsky might not pass many humans on the test, who are the kind who fall for this bot.
The fact is that the whole idea that there's some actual definition of "intelligence", that all humans can recognize and have, is completely naive - dumb.
The Turing Test is valuable in its most basic, obvious sense, though: any machine that can fool any quantitiy of humans into thinking the AI is human is worth having, because there all kinds of things we want to do with humans, but which we can't actually make humans do. Like have conversations pretending to be an easily-laid woman getting it on with some idiot loser with a bank account. Sounds like a marriage made in heaven.com .
I always wondered why Radio Shack didn't turn into a huge computer retailer, which was a perfect growth for the only store like that until PCs got huge, even selling the first laptop to sell well, the TRS-80 Model 100. Evidently it was CompUSA that contractually obligated the Shack to stay mainly a Battery Club. I be the Shack would have made something closer to Fry's, but instead with actual live nerds all too willing to explain the inventory.
If only the NY Times were saying anything about the "SAFE Act", that the House just passed to force all ISPs to take responsibility for all content they host or transport, even if they don't moderate it, in direct contradiction of the landmark CDA which let ISPs be like telcos always have. Lots of child molesters trap children in telephone conversations, but the telco has no liability, because holding them responsible requires tapping every conversation, which is what the SAFE Act (not the one with the same name that sanely deregulated crypto export) now does: forces ISPs to monitor and analyze the content of your every Internet communication. But the Times has said nothing.
I thought Gates was leaving MS to that apey guy to run, while Gates concentrated on "giving away" all that money. What's he doing meeting with developers and demanding to know what the hell is going on like the rest of us?
I just dropped out of college rather than rewrite a 12 page rant about John Milton for an unsympathetic English major prof. Then I got flown out to Silicon Valley to program - they didn't care that I'd abandoned my English major.
Under a decade later I retired from the computer biz (for several years, anyway), having read (and understood) more Milton during my frequent sabbaticals than that old crank could ruin for me in a semester.
Google owns a lot of fiber WANs, a telco operations system, and all kinds of content positioned to deliver a modern version of an "open AOL" that incorporates the entire Internet's content, to compete with AOL, MSN, Verizon, AT&T, the cablecos, and now finally the "last mile" of wireless/mobile. They're going to own spectrum, as surely as they own the other infrastructure they could be outsourcing with effectively the same content/transaction/community model. They have proven in all those other holdings that they want to own them.
And then I hope they use that even stronger position to prove, by using it to compete most effectively, that all those other network operators have to open their networks to equal access.
Especially the mobile networks. Could you imagine if you had to pay "roaming charges" every time your packets deviated between remote hosts (eg. websites) from the default route initially found at the time you registered with your ISP? The "Internet" would never have gotten off the ground. Freed from that kind of shortsighted proprietary greed, mobile (and just wireless) networks with flat rates and unbundled access, connections and content services would explode like the Internet did. All that "available roaming capacity" in the segregated radio networks is unused capacity and reliable redundancy. I hope Google forces that open, and I expect owning one will make it easier for them to do so.
I once accidentally pressed "power off" instead of "save" on a dedicated wordprocessor terminal on which I'd just written my term paper in a single draft during the morning it was due, the last class of the semester.
What makes this disaster unusual is that it actually happened. No, the prof didn't believe it either.
Because Microsoft is entitled to have that publicly-subsidized platform train a new generation of global Windows slaves.
OK, so now you confess that you can't even read. Otherwise, why would you cite Toyota's lower prices, a result of their lower costs that exclude "socialist" healthcare, being a leading competitive advantage over GM, proving my point and destroying yours?
Maybe it's because you don't understand the most basic economics, that lower costs mean lower prices means more competitive in the market. Probably that's it, because you also don't understand that since the jump in debt is larger than the reduction in taxes, that all those tax reductions (that haven't done any good, except further enrich the rich) would have lowered the debt with the same (insane, like the $TRILLION on Iraq that's only 1/10 of the debt) spending. Let me repeat that for the illiterate: No tax cuts with the same excessive spending would have given us less debt.
I bet you can't understand that. But then, you claim you built a radio, but couldn't even master Morse code, which a century and a half of frequently unschooled key operators mastered better than you type.
Now go waste someone else's time posing as the model obnoxious, childishly ignorant libertarian. I already know all I need to about your breed. You think government is something anyone can build from the Heathkit, but don't realize that it doesn't just operate itself, because it's made of live, actual people, not a pretty diagram.
"Machines, Business International"
And your redundant post is a sneaky attempt to suppress a post that you have failed to successfully argue against in this thread by making the same attempted points that I debunked.
So I must insist that you are myopic.
I bet the Chinese program is just buying new pix made by NASA to present as their own, so NASA can ask for bigger budgets to compete. Someone at NASA is trying to keep China down by photoshopping the crater - in their Capricorn One Lunar Simulator.
But the question remains - who inserted the ' into the Chinese probe's English propaganda name? NASA doesn't have that tech in its budget - must be Russia or Japan.
This new space race is getting really interesting! For Korea's special effects houses, anyway.
No, I'm pointing out that the entire treatment of corporations as people at all is absurd. Just because I'm "excluding the middle" that corporations have some human rights but not all, doesn't mean the middle is worth including. The only basis for treating corporations as people with rights to any degree is an old fraud that's been perpetuated solely for profit, and insulting to the basis for the actual rights of actual people.
Saying a corporation is a person is what corporations do to obtain rights at least equal to humans (sometimes better, because they're not subject to liabilities including imprisonment or death). That's no straw man, it's precisely the target of what we're talking about, a central point in the story we're discussing: whether a corporation has a right to a jury trial. It might be treated as if it does, but that's the only real fallacy here.
So, since corporations are "persons", can a person on a jury consist of the corporation, with its board of directors voting to instruct its designated executive to report the voted decision? Otherwise, corporations aren't getting their rights protected.