Peak ncident solar radiation is typically ~ 1 kW per square meter. That the article claims efficiency of 12%, so the 120 watts is per square meter (under strong sun). It's interesting to me that this thing delivers at 110V.
Affordable solar has been on the horizon for a long, long time. There's a good amount of activity at present (Konarka is another interesting company); let's hope someone is actually able to deliver soon.
Also, let me pre-emptively respond to a few posts that I know we'll see:
- solar energy is transient, but if it's cheap enough, you can (gasp!) store the energy- compress air, lift water, etc.
- if the efficiency is high enough, you can generate a significant portion of U.S. electrical demand with solar.
To wit:
Annual U.S. electrical consumption: ~ 3.6 trillion kWh (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html)
Avg. daily solar insolation, U.S.: Around 5 kWh per sq. meter (http://www.windsun.com/Solar_Basics/Solar_maps.ht m)
Okay... 365 days in a year... 12% efficiency... that works out to 16 billion sq. meters of panels... that's 6400 sq. miles... U.S. has ~ 3.6M square miles... so you'd need to cover 0.2% of land area. So it's a matter of economics, not raw requirements.
I wonder what % of U.S. land area is rooftops & other available space.
Someone please check my math, but I've heard the '100 mi x 100 mi of panels powers the US' claim before, so I appear to be consistent with that (I arrived at 80 miles on a side).
But seriously, discovering unicellular life on Mars would be the greatest scientific discovery of the last 200 years.
I suppose it depends how you define scientific discovery, but I'll stick with, I don't know, let's say the general theory of relativity. That theory (I'd call it a discovery) has pretty profound implications about the nature of our universe. On the other hand, Mars is just the next rock over; I wouldn't find it all that shocking if life were found there (although it would certainly raise some interesting questions).
The real problem is that there just aren't enough turkey guts in the world to replace crude oil
Yes, but this is not a turkey-specific process. Consider, e.g., biomass (waste or otherwise). From TFA:
Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end , he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that.
Thermal depolymerization, Appel says, has proved to be 85 percent energy efficient for complex feedstocks, such as turkey offal: "That means for every 100 Btus in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the process." He contends the efficiency is even better for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics.
The Democrats and the Republicans... are exactly the same party.
Are you high? Sure, they are very similar in terms of vapidity and love of spin, and are both beholden to (largely different) monied 'special interests', but try looking at *what actually happened* under recent Democrat and Republican administrations regarding... say... environmental policy. Bush II's enviro officials have me harkening back to the good days of James Watt...
I used to use Yahoo Bookmarks, but then I discovered del.icio.us.
But I still use the unofficial Yahoo Toolbar for FF- it's configurable, and I use enough Yahoo services (though typically not search) that it's worth having.
IMHO, Yahoo services (address book, etc.) tend not to be the best available, but are generally good enough and pretty convenient.
Since survival is the process of maintaining life, it follows from these that a man must have the right to the products of his mind - the right to own property.
This is what is known as a logical leap. Why must ownership of ideas be *exclusive*, as the parent seems to suggest (i.e. if I own an idea, you can't own the same one)? Ideas are not like diamonds; the replacement cost of sharing an idea is nil.
If you deny that men can own their ideas, then you deny that men can survive by ideas, and you deny the right of man to survive at all.
Last I checked, no lion owned a patent for "How to identify, kill, and eat aged wildebeasts," and yet somehow they are able to implement said concept and survive. Curious.
Patent and copyrights represent a pragmatic balance of power between creators and consumers, nothing more, nothing less. To the extent that they inhibit creators for borrowing from existing ideas, they can be problematic.
There are no first-principle metaphysical requirements for ownership of ideas to be exclusive, as the parent suggests.
From TFA: "Each ZonePlayer offers a four-port Ethernet switch, and can access media files stored on Macintosh or Windows shares, or on Linux-based NAS volumes supporting CIFS."
It sounds like it should work with a Samba share (I think?). That's good enough for me.
"Ogg Vorbis is not supported in the initial firmware release, according to Sonos founder John MacFarlane (who previously founded software.com), but would be simple to add in subsequent revisions. He adds that the device is not intended for user modifications -- the company has no plans to offer an SDK for it -- but that "inevitably, users will hack it.""
This, however, seems dumb. If you know that your device is just so cool it needs to be hacked, embrace it! I would think that would make your product more popular -> more $ for you. Also, someone would develop OGG support (plus whatever obscure formats) at no cost to you.
Aaron Seigo's argument would be valid if Linux's desktop market share was 50%, or even 20%. In that case, making quality FOSS applications newly available on Windows might benefit windows.
But we aren't there yet, kids. With a market share of, what, 1-2%, what's needed now is a path for low-pain migration to desktop Linux.
There are two ways to do this: start using FOSS (or more generally, cross-platform) applications on Windows, then chuck Windows once you don't need it anymore, or start using Linux cold turkey, using WINE and/or CrossoverOffice (or a dedicated machine with VNC or similar) to support your Windows-only apps.
Either method works; it depends on your situation.
But for now, any porting to Windows that opens up a pathway for eventual migration to Linux (or BSD or whatever) is a Good Thing. In my opinion, the only FOSS applications that hurt Linux/FOSS platforms are those written exclusively for Windows.
Finally, if Linux does get to 20% or 50% market share, the balance is tipped, MS is largely screwed (let's see what card they play), and there will be less need to bother porting to Windows or updating those ports.
If the economics worked (they currently don't), I'd happily pay you to rent your roof space so that I could mount my solar panels there, so you'd have some extra income but wouldn't have to worry about maintenance, etc.
Of course, I'd start with warehouses and malls before I bothered with residences.
Three other thoughts: You are most likely in the heating and/or cooling business; why don't you outsource that (in some places you can)? Also, maybe I'm a freak, but the prospect of producing clean electricity on my roof DOES have a wow factor- the only issue is the cost; it's just not cost effective in most situations.
There's a difference between 'weather' and 'climate'. The latter has longer time scales (which makes things harder) and much less spatial resolution (which makes things easier).
As an analogy, say you pour cream into a hot cup of coffee. It's supremely difficult to model exactly how the cream swirls around in the cup due to the nonlinearity of turbulence. But it's pretty easy to accurately model the avg. concentration of cream, and the average temperature, etc., of that coffee cup 20 minutes later. That's not to say that climate models are supremely accurate, just that their success is not necessarily closely coupled with weather prediction.
Also, in regard to skepticism, there's this fundamental problem of certainty. Because environmental (like biological) systems are so frickin' complex, and it's so hard to do controlled experiments (here's an excellent counter-example), it's really hard to judge things by the reproducable results standard (and even when you do, polluters can muddy the waters anyway).
So what to do? I don't think it's inappropriate, in the face of provacative but uncertain evidence, to take measures to mitigate the risk. Does this indicate a lack of skepticism, or prudent risk management?
Same as today where the scientists are saying "It must be the humans!" because humans are Bad for the Earth(tm) when there is not near enough evidence to in any way conclusively state that.
I hate to feed the trolls, but...
It's well known, and not controversial, that CO2 traps heat.
It is well known, and not controversial, that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are increasing, thanks to us.
Arrhenius knew these things; he was the first to examine the impact of CO2 on global climate over 100 years ago.
Of course, there are a ton of other influences on global climate; the big question is what sort of negative feedback loops may exist, and how effective they might be at countering the forcing due to CO2 increases.
There is uncertainty because climate science is tough. You've got a combination of a ton of complicated physical, chemical, biological, etc., systems involved, and you can't do controlled experiments very easily (we're doing an interesting one now with CO2, but don't have a good control).
In addition to general warming, CO2 emissions pose other threats. There's the legitimate worry that warming will screw up oceanic circulation (this is the basic idea behind that movie that, um, took a little poetic license with the concept). Also, we're increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, so we're also increasing oceanic CO2 levels, and isn't it nice that CO2 + H2O => H2CO3 => H+ + HCO3-. That's right, we're acidifying the oceans, the effects of which aren't too well known.
I like flickr. I like their attitude- here's the first couple lines from a recent email:
Hello Most Excellent Flickr Beta Testr!
This is just a reminder to let you know that, not only do you rule, but...
I also like the tag approach to categorizing photos. Like del.icio.us for bookmarks, tagging lets you get orthogonal with your groupings (i.e. the same photo can belong to multiple groups- generally a useful thing).
Problem is there arn't any sources of energy that are both available in large quantities anywhere you want to produce it, and also plentiful for the forseeable future that I know of.
I think you should add the phrase 'and that is economically converted to useful energy'.
Solar energy is available in large quantities (yes, I've done the calculations to figure out how much area you'd need to supply 100% of US energy, either electric or total, from solar power; it's a lot in human terms, but a small percent of US land area, and yes, solar energy is intermittent- the solution is something called storage- thermal, hydro, compressed air, you name it), and is plentiful for the foreseeable future.
But no one has been able to figure out how to convert it into, say, electricity in a manner that is very economical. And no, that's not because of oil company conspiracies, it's because it's a difficult challenge, and fossil fuels are so damn cheap (excluding external costs)!
Slashdot Mirror
Solar Insolation Maps
Avg. solar radiation is surprisingly uniform. Sure, the southwest is higher, but it's at most 2x anywhere else in the U.S.
Yeah, this is definitely wrong.
s /us.html)
t m)
Peak ncident solar radiation is typically ~ 1 kW per square meter. That the article claims efficiency of 12%, so the 120 watts is per square meter (under strong sun). It's interesting to me that this thing delivers at 110V.
Affordable solar has been on the horizon for a long, long time. There's a good amount of activity at present (Konarka is another interesting company); let's hope someone is actually able to deliver soon.
Also, let me pre-emptively respond to a few posts that I know we'll see:
- solar energy is transient, but if it's cheap enough, you can (gasp!) store the energy- compress air, lift water, etc.
- if the efficiency is high enough, you can generate a significant portion of U.S. electrical demand with solar.
To wit:
Annual U.S. electrical consumption: ~ 3.6 trillion kWh (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geo
Avg. daily solar insolation, U.S.: Around 5 kWh per sq. meter (http://www.windsun.com/Solar_Basics/Solar_maps.h
Okay... 365 days in a year... 12% efficiency... that works out to 16 billion sq. meters of panels... that's 6400 sq. miles... U.S. has ~ 3.6M square miles... so you'd need to cover 0.2% of land area. So it's a matter of economics, not raw requirements.
I wonder what % of U.S. land area is rooftops & other available space.
Someone please check my math, but I've heard the '100 mi x 100 mi of panels powers the US' claim before, so I appear to be consistent with that (I arrived at 80 miles on a side).
(think about that for a second -- there is an entire industry dedicated to bribing government)
This is the best small-government argument I've heard in a long while. And I'm a big-government northeast liberal.
But seriously, discovering unicellular life on Mars would be the greatest scientific discovery of the last 200 years.
I suppose it depends how you define scientific discovery, but I'll stick with, I don't know, let's say the general theory of relativity. That theory (I'd call it a discovery) has pretty profound implications about the nature of our universe. On the other hand, Mars is just the next rock over; I wouldn't find it all that shocking if life were found there (although it would certainly raise some interesting questions).
The real problem is that there just aren't enough turkey guts in the world to replace crude oil
Yes, but this is not a turkey-specific process. Consider, e.g., biomass (waste or otherwise). From TFA:
Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end , he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that.
From TFA:
Thermal depolymerization, Appel says, has proved to be 85 percent energy efficient for complex feedstocks, such as turkey offal: "That means for every 100 Btus in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the process." He contends the efficiency is even better for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics.
POKE 53281,0
POKE 53280,0
POKE 646,15
SYS 64738
Ah yes. Change screen color, border color, cursor color, reboot (?).
I do miss that machine, sad to say.
The Democrats and the Republicans ... are exactly the same party.
Are you high? Sure, they are very similar in terms of vapidity and love of spin, and are both beholden to (largely different) monied 'special interests', but try looking at *what actually happened* under recent Democrat and Republican administrations regarding... say... environmental policy. Bush II's enviro officials have me harkening back to the good days of James Watt...
I used to use Yahoo Bookmarks, but then I discovered del.icio.us.
But I still use the unofficial Yahoo Toolbar for FF- it's configurable, and I use enough Yahoo services (though typically not search) that it's worth having.
IMHO, Yahoo services (address book, etc.) tend not to be the best available, but are generally good enough and pretty convenient.
This represents either a significant capitulation on the part of Microsoft, or the launch of a Trojan Horse.
Details to follow...
Dude, my grandfather is a chemical engineer and has 60+ patents. Whiteners, that ink-impregnated paper that replaced carbon paper, etc.
2. A man must use his mind in order to survive.
So must a lion.
Since survival is the process of maintaining life, it follows from these that a man must have the right to the products of his mind - the right to own property.
This is what is known as a logical leap. Why must ownership of ideas be *exclusive*, as the parent seems to suggest (i.e. if I own an idea, you can't own the same one)? Ideas are not like diamonds; the replacement cost of sharing an idea is nil.
If you deny that men can own their ideas, then you deny that men can survive by ideas, and you deny the right of man to survive at all.
Last I checked, no lion owned a patent for "How to identify, kill, and eat aged wildebeasts," and yet somehow they are able to implement said concept and survive. Curious.
Patent and copyrights represent a pragmatic balance of power between creators and consumers, nothing more, nothing less. To the extent that they inhibit creators for borrowing from existing ideas, they can be problematic.
There are no first-principle metaphysical requirements for ownership of ideas to be exclusive, as the parent suggests.
From TFA: "Each ZonePlayer offers a four-port Ethernet switch, and can access media files stored on Macintosh or Windows shares, or on Linux-based NAS volumes supporting CIFS."
It sounds like it should work with a Samba share (I think?). That's good enough for me.
"Ogg Vorbis is not supported in the initial firmware release, according to Sonos founder John MacFarlane (who previously founded software.com), but would be simple to add in subsequent revisions. He adds that the device is not intended for user modifications -- the company has no plans to offer an SDK for it -- but that "inevitably, users will hack it.""
This, however, seems dumb. If you know that your device is just so cool it needs to be hacked, embrace it! I would think that would make your product more popular -> more $ for you. Also, someone would develop OGG support (plus whatever obscure formats) at no cost to you.
Aaron Seigo's argument would be valid if Linux's desktop market share was 50%, or even 20%. In that case, making quality FOSS applications newly available on Windows might benefit windows.
But we aren't there yet, kids. With a market share of, what, 1-2%, what's needed now is a path for low-pain migration to desktop Linux.
There are two ways to do this: start using FOSS (or more generally, cross-platform) applications on Windows, then chuck Windows once you don't need it anymore, or start using Linux cold turkey, using WINE and/or CrossoverOffice (or a dedicated machine with VNC or similar) to support your Windows-only apps.
Either method works; it depends on your situation.
But for now, any porting to Windows that opens up a pathway for eventual migration to Linux (or BSD or whatever) is a Good Thing. In my opinion, the only FOSS applications that hurt Linux/FOSS platforms are those written exclusively for Windows.
Finally, if Linux does get to 20% or 50% market share, the balance is tipped, MS is largely screwed (let's see what card they play), and there will be less need to bother porting to Windows or updating those ports.
So port away, my good friends.
Oops, I was in a rush and decided to bag the 3rd other thought...
If the economics worked (they currently don't), I'd happily pay you to rent your roof space so that I could mount my solar panels there, so you'd have some extra income but wouldn't have to worry about maintenance, etc.
Of course, I'd start with warehouses and malls before I bothered with residences.
Three other thoughts: You are most likely in the heating and/or cooling business; why don't you outsource that (in some places you can)? Also, maybe I'm a freak, but the prospect of producing clean electricity on my roof DOES have a wow factor- the only issue is the cost; it's just not cost effective in most situations.
Anyone looking for a recent, comprehensive evaluation of wind power should look at the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Cape Wind project.
Two things:
There's a difference between 'weather' and 'climate'. The latter has longer time scales (which makes things harder) and much less spatial resolution (which makes things easier).
As an analogy, say you pour cream into a hot cup of coffee. It's supremely difficult to model exactly how the cream swirls around in the cup due to the nonlinearity of turbulence. But it's pretty easy to accurately model the avg. concentration of cream, and the average temperature, etc., of that coffee cup 20 minutes later. That's not to say that climate models are supremely accurate, just that their success is not necessarily closely coupled with weather prediction.
Also, in regard to skepticism, there's this fundamental problem of certainty. Because environmental (like biological) systems are so frickin' complex, and it's so hard to do controlled experiments (here's an excellent counter-example), it's really hard to judge things by the reproducable results standard (and even when you do, polluters can muddy the waters anyway).
So what to do? I don't think it's inappropriate, in the face of provacative but uncertain evidence, to take measures to mitigate the risk. Does this indicate a lack of skepticism, or prudent risk management?
Same as today where the scientists are saying "It must be the humans!" because humans are Bad for the Earth(tm) when there is not near enough evidence to in any way conclusively state that.
I hate to feed the trolls, but...
It's well known, and not controversial, that CO2 traps heat.
It is well known, and not controversial, that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are increasing, thanks to us.
Arrhenius knew these things; he was the first to examine the impact of CO2 on global climate over 100 years ago.
Of course, there are a ton of other influences on global climate; the big question is what sort of negative feedback loops may exist, and how effective they might be at countering the forcing due to CO2 increases.
There is uncertainty because climate science is tough. You've got a combination of a ton of complicated physical, chemical, biological, etc., systems involved, and you can't do controlled experiments very easily (we're doing an interesting one now with CO2, but don't have a good control).
In addition to general warming, CO2 emissions pose other threats. There's the legitimate worry that warming will screw up oceanic circulation (this is the basic idea behind that movie that, um, took a little poetic license with the concept). Also, we're increasing atmospheric CO2 levels, so we're also increasing oceanic CO2 levels, and isn't it nice that CO2 + H2O => H2CO3 => H+ + HCO3-. That's right, we're acidifying the oceans, the effects of which aren't too well known.
My 2-year-old twins listen to bird calls on the computer, and that's about it.
Then, they fight in the car about who's the barred owl, and who's the saw-whet.
Problem is there arn't any sources of energy that are both available in large quantities anywhere you want to produce it, and also plentiful for the forseeable future that I know of.
I think you should add the phrase 'and that is economically converted to useful energy'.
Solar energy is available in large quantities (yes, I've done the calculations to figure out how much area you'd need to supply 100% of US energy, either electric or total, from solar power; it's a lot in human terms, but a small percent of US land area, and yes, solar energy is intermittent- the solution is something called storage- thermal, hydro, compressed air, you name it), and is plentiful for the foreseeable future.
But no one has been able to figure out how to convert it into, say, electricity in a manner that is very economical. And no, that's not because of oil company conspiracies, it's because it's a difficult challenge, and fossil fuels are so damn cheap (excluding external costs)!
It's called DigSafe. I just learned this is a New England (sans CT) thing- what the hell do the rest of you do?
These guys have scoped out my lot two times in the past month, due to the start of a new addition, an (unrelated) emergency oil cleanup...
Mod parent up... (cdrudge, not mine)
I'm a little confused, though, because S.2192 looks pretty innocuous; it's H.R.2391 that contains the bad stuff