It either was - as you suggest - intentionally and therefore truly criminal or merely what we tend to euphemistically call collateral damage these days.
Hate can be a strong word. I do not see any evidence of hate towards us that did not already exist.
Would you agree that one of the most reliable way to generate hate is to spill innocent blood? If so you should be interested to get a grip on the number of Iraqi civilians that have been killed by American soldiers in Iraq.
One of the most remarkable initiatives to get a count of the death toll has been purely private. This one covers only March 21 - July 31, 2003 and the south of Iraq. The number for this region and about three month that it covers is 2066 civilian deaths 20% percent of them younger than 18. It has been conducted by locally teams volunteers and coordinated by the Iraqi Raed most of the entries in the database are identified by name and they are all civilians as defined by the Geneva convention. For a conservative estimate of the overall death toll multiply by about 8 (assuming that the death toll in the North was about the same and that the killing rate has been slowed after the 1st phase of the war. The latter probably doesn't hold any more because of the air raids on cities that are carried out frequently now). Given that Iraq has only about 24 Mio people this means that the US forces managed to kill about 7 out of 10,000 Iraqis by now. I.e. there will be hardly any Iraqi who at least doesn't know somebody else who lost friends or relatives to US fire power.
Hate being generated does not make us safer, on that point you are correct..it's the use of miltary power that does an dteh fear it generates. There are no countries that I am aware of that can take us out(or very few).
You seem to be caught in pre 9/11 thinking. It's the terrorist stupid! Some people who lost relatives in Iraq may already be hear in the states.
I guarantee you, the first enemy nuke ever to explode in the US will not be launched, but rather smuggled into or secretly assembled in the US.
And as time goes by and technology develops it will become increasingly easy for terrorists to acquire the means to inflict mass casualty. Politics that only focuse on militarily deterring other nations completely misses the point if it at the same time it also generates scores of people who want to seek vengeance against America.
What do you suggest we do to take care of our Enemies? Talk at them to death?
The US should be much smarter in going after the Islamists: Drying up the funding for them and focusing on politics that isolates them. The Iraq war proved Bin Laden right in the eyes of large parts of the Islamic world. Winning this war is 1st of all turning the masses away from this ideology of hate. Don't forget this has been achieved before. The US won against communism without any direct military confrontation.
that's why we usually do not assume things but rather measure them.
By all means go ahead and measure if you think it is worth your time. As I suggested in another post you can even build a little model system on your stove to measure if a slowdown of convection flow closer to a heat source will be offset by increase convection in layers of a medium further away from it. I.e. I am not saying there will be no effect if you completely plaster earth with windmills I just argue that the effect will in essence conserve the global heat transport.
That is why my - admittedly crude - theoretical deliberations lead me to believe there is nothing to worry about regarding wind mills. That is why I wouldn't waste time and effort on this - but again by all means don't listen to me and measure for yourself on what ever model system you feel is accurate enough (I think we can agree that measuring global wind mill effects in the real atmosphere is pretty much out of the question).
One word of caution though: The butterfly effect albeit a beautiful metaphor for non-linear systems should not be taken literally.
But it seems you agree, at least somewhat, on my hypotheses.
I think they key question there is if convection flows in the upper atmospheres can compensate for slowed down flows close to the ground.
It seems to me everyday experience suggests very much that it will (sorry if I am beating a dead horse here). But I just realized that you can conduct a little experiment on your stove to get some insight into this. After all the atmosphere is heated by the ground just like a liquid in a pot on your stove. It also happens to be the case that many liquids used for cooking actually increase their viscosity when heated up (i.e. the binding of a sauce or pudding - pretty much everything milk based or with flower in it).
If you heat a pot containing some sort of such liquid (e.g. pudding) on only one half without steering I think you will find that the heat transport from the hot to the cold side will not diminish even as the convection flows near the bottom of the hot side of the pot come to a crawl - the more liquid part closer to the surface will make up for it. Of course the price for this insight will most likely be a burned-in pot:)
Anyway, I am 100% with you in detesting fear-mongering. Personally I have high hopes for nano-technology.
Wass, no offense but I really don't think there is any practical validity in the scenario you are worrying about. Although it'll be a neat little play for a climate simulation if you have a couple of excess TFlops - along the lines of a Gedankenexperiment just for the heck of it.
I don't by the wall of windmills theory. The atmosphere's thickness and strata separation will very much contain the effects near to the ground. Again thinking and simulating it with somewhat higher viscosity of the air close to the ground seems to me a good assumption for a simplified model. In consequence the convection flow i.e. wind should rather speed up in the higher atmosphere to compensate for the slowed heat transport closer to the ground.
So no matter how I look at it I really don't think your concern has much merit - but in order to have some closure let me just say that I most certainly do not begrudge your undergrad degree and may have sounded a little bit harsher than I should. After all bringing up questions and concerns should not be punished. Unfortunately any alternative energy source is such a politically charged issue that many people that frequent/. are happy to run with any argument as long as it confirms their bias. And while your concern is fine to ponder as an academic exercise it really doesn't have the kind of grounding in reality that I would want it to go unchecked in this public forum.
Besides, the USA's CO2 is a drop in the bucket compared to Iceland's volcanos.
... and of course the output of Iceland has been steadily improving over the last couple of centuries. Small wonder they are the first to completly switch over to a hydrogen econmy. Poor bastards.
Seriously, have you wasted more than a split second on this BS comparison before posting? If your answere is 'yes' I think you are in serious denial.
I see from some of your past posts your a German living in the US. Have you ever compared your home city's latitude with one on the east coast of the USA, and their respective temperature differences each day? If many countries, eg around Northern Africa, Caribbean, etc, installed massive wind farms for their power, I think Europe would have the most to lose here. (Again, I'm not a meteorologist, so I don't know where the main warm air/water currents flow).
It is the golf stream that makes the difference. It is in part driven by the difference in salt content between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. Global warming melting Europe's glaciers is increasing the fresh water supply to the North Sea. That is why some climatologists predict that global warming could actually trigger a mini ice age for Europe. So it seems pretty clear to me that we need rather more then less wind energy.
Again even if humanity was to try to satisfy all its energy needs from wind I very much doubt that we'd see much of an effect. Partly because the overall energy in the convection flows is so much larger but also because we can only affect a very small layer - a couple of hundred meters - above ground of our atmosphere. Any slowing down of flows in that layer will easily be off-set by increased air flow at higher altitude. Add to this that wind-mills have to keep some distance from each other in order to not decrease their combined efficiency and you have a natural upper limit of how much energy you can harvest. It'll be a fun project to adjust for this in a climate model just to see what this upper limit could potentially be and to get some numbers for the overall effect on climate. My guess it we could theoretically harvest several times more energy from wind then the current world consumption without really altering any global weather patterns. Although micro climate may change significantly. All this is of course highly hypothetical since there are only so many places were wind mills are economically viable.
BTW, I take it your a scientist too, what's your field?
Actually my master thesis was on artificial neural networks although I am physicist by trade. Back then models developed for condensed matter (Ising etc.) were adapted to describe Hopfield networks and so it were actually sometimes physics departments that were breathing back life into this research area (after it has been foolishly killed off by Marvin Minsiki a couple of decades earlier).
My reason to believe that it rather goes along the Ghandi line is the fact that usually every new technology follows a certain life time cycle.
At the beginning a new technology creates a new market and premium prices can be charged until competition shows up. Over time the competition drives the prices down until the product becomes a mere commodity sold pretty much at marginal cost (think of light bulbs, telephone services, pocket calculators).
Microsoft managed to escape this fate by building artificial barriers of entry for the competition. (Not allowing PC makers to bundle OS/2 with Windows etc. We all know the long list of anti-competitive practices.)
This way MS kept the OS so long from becoming a commodity although the knowledge how to build an OS has been so wide spread that even an hobbyist community was able to create a superior OS.
Now it is pay-back time. You can outsmart the market forces only for so long.
Your references talk only about the magnitude of heat energy, it's far more complicated to deal w/ the kinetic energy.
It seems to me you misunderstand the nature of wind. Winds are nothing but gigantic convection flows and the heat energy differences in the atmosphere is what is powering it.
Do you at least see the difference between the wind's kinetic energy and the heat energy it can carry (in the form of warmer air)?
Make a simple model of a planet earth that is 1K warmer on one side then the other than you can divide the number I've given for the energy in 1K of the overall atmosphere by two in order to get the energy difference that will be driving a hell of convection flows of hurricane proportions in this model earth.
As far as your 'big planet' analogies, humanity has fucked that up consistently in the past (atmosphere is big, lets dump the smoke from coal-burning right up there, it won't matter. Similarly for CFC's, ground-produced ozone (causes problems at low altitudes, obviously good in the ozone-layer itself), CO2, CO, PCBs and other pollutants into the water, etc etc.
Relying for centuries primarily on one energy source will have an effect if it gradually changes the atmosphere's composition and heat content. If all of mankind's growing energy needs were to come from wind maybe you'd see an effect. I'll give you that much. But what would the effect be? Frankly, I think you could easily make the point that the effect will be fairly easy to model by assuming that the low atmosphere up to the level that wind mills can reach just has a somewhat higher viscosity in the sene that convection flows in this layer will be slowed down. I.e. more convection and heat transfer will happen in higher atmosphere layers.
But again to have a measurable effect it'll mean to plaster earth all over with with wind mills.
I'm a scientist
I take it you don't work in the line of meteorology or thermodynamics?
I want to see numbers (that first link you gave is actually off-topic to what I'm trying to say.
There are two ways to get numbers models and measurement. A good experimental physicist will not waste his time on something that is out of the reach of his/her measuring devices.
Even with very crude model calculations you should be able to convince yourself quickly that your proposed study is the equivalent of battling wind mills.
You can pretty much spin this as "see even Bill Gates says Linux will be around ten years from now".
This should give pointy hair bosses pause in claiming that Linux is just too risky.
What a huge step to be so publicly recognized as the most prominent threat to MS for an OS that is not controlled by any one cooperation.
In the end it will be inevitable that an OS becomes a commodity. MS tries to fight hard against this by building up the OS to do everything short of singing and dancing for you but I don't think that will save them in the long run.
I don't think it is that simple. Hitler was in part elected into power. And in comparison Japan is still much more vilified by their Asian neighbors because the perception persists that they never came clean with their past. A sentiment a Chinese colleague expressed to me just recently.
The world is full of examples were hatred can fester over centuries i.e. many Greeks are still mad at the Vatican for the sacking of Constantinople. On his last visit to Greek the pope had to apologize for this explicitly. Then there are the Serbs who feel that Europe still owes them because they were the first line in defense against the Ottomans.
Much of the Arab hatred towards the Western world goes back to the crusades. History has this awkward tendency of just not going away.
<sarcasm>
Now that even Russia signed on the USA will have to work so much harder to make it happen. But being the main global source of CO2 I am sure America will prevail.
</sarcasm>
Kerry has been a senator for over twenty years and served on the foreign intelligence committee more years than Bush has been in DC. Hardly somebody you could call an inexperienced politician.
The reason he doesn't stop talking about war is because the war in Iraq is a major blunder that makes America less safe by the hour.
Contrary to Bush he has seen real combat and knows when a situation is FUBAR. Stop talking about this war would be a terrible sin of omission. The reality on the ground has to be recognized and the only way to get the Bush administration out of LaLa land seems to relentlessly remind them how much they screwed up Iraq.
Of course as a Candian you are blessed in being able to ignore this mess since your country was smart enough to obstain from this war.
I think your posting illustrates perfectly that many Americans simply don't understand the paradigm shift that took place in Europe when it comes to securing your country.
When it comes to security all the US thinks about is military superiority. European countries simply prefer to not keep too many enemies. Keeps military spending down. But what is more important it is the only way to avoid major future blood shed.
Another posting further up the thread pointed out the absurdity of developing a questionable but very expensive missile defense system when the much likelier threat is the possibility of terrorists smuggling nuclear material into the country to assemble a nuke right next door.
In the last two centuries the ability of individual to inflict massive casualty has grown immensely. Just recall the Oklahoma City bombing. The likelihood that this ability will continue to increase exponentially within the next 100 years given the advent of nanotechnology is very high. A nation that is despised and has too many enemies dooms itself. That is why I am personally in awe of the politicians that managed to turn around the relationship between Germany and France and managed to get both Israel as well as Palestinians to regard Germany as friend. For a country to regain that much respect after it brought so much pain to millions of innocents is simply amazing. And being German I am very grateful for this political achievement.
Unfortunately the trend for the US goes into the opposite direction.
The first link in my earlier posting points specifically to a paper that has the telling title "MERIDIONAL ATMOSPHERE AND OCEAN HEAT TRANSPORTS".
The amount of energy that humans can draw out of the atmosphere with their puny machines (no matter how impressive the photos) simply pales in comparison to the amount of energy transported by wind throughout the atmosphere.
My calculation was just a simple illustration of the magnitudes of energy that you are dealing with when talking about atmospheric processes. People simply tend to forget that our planet is really, really large in comparison to all the shiny machinery that we can produce. Then again this is not really news. Throughout the ages humans tend to get drunken on their own cultural power and technical achievements. Already Sophocles put these words into the chorus of his play Antigone:
"Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, the unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year."
I wonder if there were any Greek philosophers around that were wondering what damage harvesting the wind in that fashion could do to upset the balance of nature.
Mod parent down. This is the most unscientific nonsense I've ever read on/. In comparison to the overall energy stored in the atmosphere the energy taken out of it by windmills is negligible.
I refer you to a paper like this one to confirm for yourself that if you talk about heat and energy transport in the atmosphere you are talking in terms of PW that is Petawatt i.e. 10^15 Watt. The energy stored in the atmosphere is many magnitudes larger than the current 0.013 PW of global human power consumption (the average power consumption is about 2000 W per person i.e. given there are about 6.5x10^9 people on this planet you get the 0.013 PW number).
If you take into consideration that the mass off our atmosphere is 5.1 x 10^18 Kg and the heat coefficient of our air is about 1.005 kJ/(kg K) you can easily verify that an increase in atmosphere temperature by one degree Celsius stores about an additional 5125500 PJ in the atmosphere.
That means even if all of the given the current world power consumption was to be drawn out of the atmospheres it'll take more than 12 years to just get the equivalent of one degree change. Given the current inverse trend in global warming that'll be actually quite welcome.
This is of course just a quick and simple back of the envelope calculation but it should give you an understanding of the magnitudes involved and lay any doubt at rest that some windmills could potentially affect the world climate.
Really don't know what to make of the parent post. Suspect for a second that this was just astroturfing but then the posting history doesn't support this. Wass even claims an undergrad degree in physics. He really should know better.
You'd probably have to have a material similar in property like for a space elevator in order to anchore a kite of that magnitude.
You will also have the issue of trasfering the energy to the ground. Cable is out of the question unless you can produce yet another magical material that combines the ability to carry large currents with minimal weight.
How many of the billion+ Chinese are already using a computer on a daily basis or even own one? According to this article less then 10% of all Chinese are using the internet.
This strongly suggests that Chinese users will be far less locked into Windows by sheer habit then it is the case in Europe and the US.
Add to this that entering Chinese characters is less then satisfactory with the current technology and you have the opportunity for a challenger to substitute Windows on the desktop in the Chinese market.
You assumption is flawed. Your logic only holds if you consider Windows to be superior to Linux. I have to use Windows for work but I generally have a much more pleasant desktop experience with Linux on my own machines.
There have been serious efforts at Chinese home grown Linux distributions such as Ref Flag Linux. I think this clearly suggests that there are Chinese that consider Linux to be the better OS. Since it is open source they can also have own localization and innovate for better input of Chinese characters. This is an advantage of Linux that MS will not be able to match unless they completly throw out their current business model.
Slashdot Mirror
This was in the context of fact checking thus there was immediate "balance" by also fact checking Kerry's statements.
Coming from Europe I can feel Jon Stewart's pain. What passes as news here is unbelievable.
Jon Stewart is my personal hero for exposing this sham.
BTW a transcript and links to clips (in the comments) can be found here.
Actually it is not quite clear when and how the libary was destroyed.
It either was - as you suggest - intentionally and therefore truly criminal or merely what we tend to euphemistically call collateral damage these days.
Did he say Iraq had Al Qaida ties? Did Bush say this?
Well, Cheney has been spouting this quite frequently. I think it is safe to assume he wouldn't do so if this wasn't cleared with Bush.
Hate can be a strong word. I do not see any evidence of hate towards us that did not already exist.
Would you agree that one of the most reliable way to generate hate is to spill innocent blood? If so you should be interested to get a grip on the number of Iraqi civilians that have been killed by American soldiers in Iraq.
One of the most remarkable initiatives to get a count of the death toll has been purely private. This one covers only March 21 - July 31, 2003 and the south of Iraq. The number for this region and about three month that it covers is 2066 civilian deaths 20% percent of them younger than 18. It has been conducted by locally teams volunteers and coordinated by the Iraqi Raed most of the entries in the database are identified by name and they are all civilians as defined by the Geneva convention. For a conservative estimate of the overall death toll multiply by about 8 (assuming that the death toll in the North was about the same and that the killing rate has been slowed after the 1st phase of the war. The latter probably doesn't hold any more because of the air raids on cities that are carried out frequently now). Given that Iraq has only about 24 Mio people this means that the US forces managed to kill about 7 out of 10,000 Iraqis by now. I.e. there will be hardly any Iraqi who at least doesn't know somebody else who lost friends or relatives to US fire power.
Hate being generated does not make us safer, on that point you are correct..it's the use of miltary power that does an dteh fear it generates. There are no countries that I am aware of that can take us out(or very few).
You seem to be caught in pre 9/11 thinking. It's the terrorist stupid! Some people who lost relatives in Iraq may already be hear in the states.
I guarantee you, the first enemy nuke ever to explode in the US will not be launched, but rather smuggled into or secretly assembled in the US.
And as time goes by and technology develops it will become increasingly easy for terrorists to acquire the means to inflict mass casualty. Politics that only focuse on militarily deterring other nations completely misses the point if it at the same time it also generates scores of people who want to seek vengeance against America.
What do you suggest we do to take care of our Enemies? Talk at them to death?
The US should be much smarter in going after the Islamists: Drying up the funding for them and focusing on politics that isolates them. The Iraq war proved Bin Laden right in the eyes of large parts of the Islamic world. Winning this war is 1st of all turning the masses away from this ideology of hate. Don't forget this has been achieved before. The US won against communism without any direct military confrontation.
that's why we usually do not assume things but rather measure them.
By all means go ahead and measure if you think it is worth your time. As I suggested in another post you can even build a little model system on your stove to measure if a slowdown of convection flow closer to a heat source will be offset by increase convection in layers of a medium further away from it. I.e. I am not saying there will be no effect if you completely plaster earth with windmills I just argue that the effect will in essence conserve the global heat transport.
That is why my - admittedly crude - theoretical deliberations lead me to believe there is nothing to worry about regarding wind mills. That is why I wouldn't waste time and effort on this - but again by all means don't listen to me and measure for yourself on what ever model system you feel is accurate enough (I think we can agree that measuring global wind mill effects in the real atmosphere is pretty much out of the question).
One word of caution though: The butterfly effect albeit a beautiful metaphor for non-linear systems should not be taken literally.
But it seems you agree, at least somewhat, on my hypotheses.
:)
I think they key question there is if convection flows in the upper atmospheres can compensate for slowed down flows close to the ground.
It seems to me everyday experience suggests very much that it will (sorry if I am beating a dead horse here). But I just realized that you can conduct a little experiment on your stove to get some insight into this. After all the atmosphere is heated by the ground just like a liquid in a pot on your stove. It also happens to be the case that many liquids used for cooking actually increase their viscosity when heated up (i.e. the binding of a sauce or pudding - pretty much everything milk based or with flower in it).
If you heat a pot containing some sort of such liquid (e.g. pudding) on only one half without steering I think you will find that the heat transport from the hot to the cold side will not diminish even as the convection flows near the bottom of the hot side of the pot come to a crawl - the more liquid part closer to the surface will make up for it. Of course the price for this insight will most likely be a burned-in pot
Anyway, I am 100% with you in detesting fear-mongering. Personally I have high hopes for nano-technology.
Wass, no offense but I really don't think there is any practical validity in the scenario you are worrying about. Although it'll be a neat little play for a climate simulation if you have a couple of excess TFlops - along the lines of a Gedankenexperiment just for the heck of it.
/. are happy to run with any argument as long as it confirms their bias. And while your concern is fine to ponder as an academic exercise it really doesn't have the kind of grounding in reality that I would want it to go unchecked in this public forum.
I don't by the wall of windmills theory. The atmosphere's thickness and strata separation will very much contain the effects near to the ground. Again thinking and simulating it with somewhat higher viscosity of the air close to the ground seems to me a good assumption for a simplified model. In consequence the convection flow i.e. wind should rather speed up in the higher atmosphere to compensate for the slowed heat transport closer to the ground.
So no matter how I look at it I really don't think your concern has much merit - but in order to have some closure let me just say that I most certainly do not begrudge your undergrad degree and may have sounded a little bit harsher than I should. After all bringing up questions and concerns should not be punished. Unfortunately any alternative energy source is such a politically charged issue that many people that frequent
In the international press it was widely reported that the WMD claims that the US made were very dubious e.g. compare this Guardian article from Feb 6, 2003 that took Powell's presentation to the UN security council apart bit by bit.
That is why the world opinion was so critical of this war as it was clear from the beginning that this was a war of choice and not necessity.
The scandal here is twofold:
1) An administration that set out to send troops into harms way for very dubious reasons (I still don't understand what they hoped to gain).
2) A complacent American press that allowed the American public to be suckered into this pointless war.
Besides, the USA's CO2 is a drop in the bucket compared to Iceland's volcanos.
... and of course the output of Iceland has been steadily improving over the last couple of centuries. Small wonder they are the first to completly switch over to a hydrogen econmy. Poor bastards.
Seriously, have you wasted more than a split second on this BS comparison before posting? If your answere is 'yes' I think you are in serious denial.
I see from some of your past posts your a German living in the US. Have you ever compared your home city's latitude with one on the east coast of the USA, and their respective temperature differences each day? If many countries, eg around Northern Africa, Caribbean, etc, installed massive wind farms for their power, I think Europe would have the most to lose here. (Again, I'm not a meteorologist, so I don't know where the main warm air/water currents flow).
It is the golf stream that makes the difference. It is in part driven by the difference in salt content between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. Global warming melting Europe's glaciers is increasing the fresh water supply to the North Sea. That is why some climatologists predict that global warming could actually trigger a mini ice age for Europe. So it seems pretty clear to me that we need rather more then less wind energy.
Again even if humanity was to try to satisfy all its energy needs from wind I very much doubt that we'd see much of an effect. Partly because the overall energy in the convection flows is so much larger but also because we can only affect a very small layer - a couple of hundred meters - above ground of our atmosphere. Any slowing down of flows in that layer will easily be off-set by increased air flow at higher altitude. Add to this that wind-mills have to keep some distance from each other in order to not decrease their combined efficiency and you have a natural upper limit of how much energy you can harvest. It'll be a fun project to adjust for this in a climate model just to see what this upper limit could potentially be and to get some numbers for the overall effect on climate. My guess it we could theoretically harvest several times more energy from wind then the current world consumption without really altering any global weather patterns. Although micro climate may change significantly. All this is of course highly hypothetical since there are only so many places were wind mills are economically viable.
BTW, I take it your a scientist too, what's your field?
Actually my master thesis was on artificial neural networks although I am physicist by trade. Back then models developed for condensed matter (Ising etc.) were adapted to describe Hopfield networks and so it were actually sometimes physics departments that were breathing back life into this research area (after it has been foolishly killed off by Marvin Minsiki a couple of decades earlier).
Actually I think if you read up on Kerry's time in the senate you will find that he brings considerable experience to the table.
My reason to believe that it rather goes along the Ghandi line is the fact that usually every new technology follows a certain life time cycle.
At the beginning a new technology creates a new market and premium prices can be charged until competition shows up. Over time the competition drives the prices down until the product becomes a mere commodity sold pretty much at marginal cost (think of light bulbs, telephone services, pocket calculators).
Microsoft managed to escape this fate by building artificial barriers of entry for the competition. (Not allowing PC makers to bundle OS/2 with Windows etc. We all know the long list of anti-competitive practices.)
This way MS kept the OS so long from becoming a commodity although the knowledge how to build an OS has been so wide spread that even an hobbyist community was able to create a superior OS.
Now it is pay-back time. You can outsmart the market forces only for so long.
Your references talk only about the magnitude of heat energy, it's far more complicated to deal w/ the kinetic energy.
It seems to me you misunderstand the nature of wind. Winds are nothing but gigantic convection flows and the heat energy differences in the atmosphere is what is powering it.
Do you at least see the difference between the wind's kinetic energy and the heat energy it can carry (in the form of warmer air)?
Make a simple model of a planet earth that is 1K warmer on one side then the other than you can divide the number I've given for the energy in 1K of the overall atmosphere by two in order to get the energy difference that will be driving a hell of convection flows of hurricane proportions in this model earth.
As far as your 'big planet' analogies, humanity has fucked that up consistently in the past (atmosphere is big, lets dump the smoke from coal-burning right up there, it won't matter. Similarly for CFC's, ground-produced ozone (causes problems at low altitudes, obviously good in the ozone-layer itself), CO2, CO, PCBs and other pollutants into the water, etc etc.
Relying for centuries primarily on one energy source will have an effect if it gradually changes the atmosphere's composition and heat content. If all of mankind's growing energy needs were to come from wind maybe you'd see an effect. I'll give you that much. But what would the effect be? Frankly, I think you could easily make the point that the effect will be fairly easy to model by assuming that the low atmosphere up to the level that wind mills can reach just has a somewhat higher viscosity in the sene that convection flows in this layer will be slowed down. I.e. more convection and heat transfer will happen in higher atmosphere layers.
But again to have a measurable effect it'll mean to plaster earth all over with with wind mills.
I'm a scientist
I take it you don't work in the line of meteorology or thermodynamics?
I want to see numbers (that first link you gave is actually off-topic to what I'm trying to say.
There are two ways to get numbers models and measurement. A good experimental physicist will not waste his time on something that is out of the reach of his/her measuring devices.
Even with very crude model calculations you should be able to convince yourself quickly that your proposed study is the equivalent of battling wind mills.
You can pretty much spin this as "see even Bill Gates says Linux will be around ten years from now".
This should give pointy hair bosses pause in claiming that Linux is just too risky.
What a huge step to be so publicly recognized as the most prominent threat to MS for an OS that is not controlled by any one cooperation.
In the end it will be inevitable that an OS becomes a commodity. MS tries to fight hard against this by building up the OS to do everything short of singing and dancing for you but I don't think that will save them in the long run.
I don't think it is that simple. Hitler was in part elected into power. And in comparison Japan is still much more vilified by their Asian neighbors because the perception persists that they never came clean with their past. A sentiment a Chinese colleague expressed to me just recently.
The world is full of examples were hatred can fester over centuries i.e. many Greeks are still mad at the Vatican for the sacking of Constantinople. On his last visit to Greek the pope had to apologize for this explicitly. Then there are the Serbs who feel that Europe still owes them because they were the first line in defense against the Ottomans.
Much of the Arab hatred towards the Western world goes back to the crusades. History has this awkward tendency of just not going away.
The USA seems to be very comitted to making this simualtion a realty though with not signing the Kyoto agrreement.
<sarcasm>
Now that even Russia signed on the USA will have to work so much harder to make it happen. But being the main global source of CO2 I am sure America will prevail.
</sarcasm>
Kerry has been a senator for over twenty years and served on the foreign intelligence committee more years than Bush has been in DC. Hardly somebody you could call an inexperienced politician.
The reason he doesn't stop talking about war is because the war in Iraq is a major blunder that makes America less safe by the hour.
Contrary to Bush he has seen real combat and knows when a situation is FUBAR. Stop talking about this war would be a terrible sin of omission. The reality on the ground has to be recognized and the only way to get the Bush administration out of LaLa land seems to relentlessly remind them how much they screwed up Iraq.
Of course as a Candian you are blessed in being able to ignore this mess since your country was smart enough to obstain from this war.
Indeed the 9/11 report makes good reading. It clearly states that there have been no operational ties between Al Qaida and Iraq.
Now the president of Iraq (put there by the US) even complains about the blood shed that the American military inflicts on Iraq.
It is foolish to believe that the additional hate that this war is generating towards the US is making America any safer.
I think your posting illustrates perfectly that many Americans simply don't understand the paradigm shift that took place in Europe when it comes to securing your country.
When it comes to security all the US thinks about is military superiority. European countries simply prefer to not keep too many enemies. Keeps military spending down. But what is more important it is the only way to avoid major future blood shed.
Another posting further up the thread pointed out the absurdity of developing a questionable but very expensive missile defense system when the much likelier threat is the possibility of terrorists smuggling nuclear material into the country to assemble a nuke right next door.
In the last two centuries the ability of individual to inflict massive casualty has grown immensely. Just recall the Oklahoma City bombing. The likelihood that this ability will continue to increase exponentially within the next 100 years given the advent of nanotechnology is very high. A nation that is despised and has too many enemies dooms itself. That is why I am personally in awe of the politicians that managed to turn around the relationship between Germany and France and managed to get both Israel as well as Palestinians to regard Germany as friend. For a country to regain that much respect after it brought so much pain to millions of innocents is simply amazing. And being German I am very grateful for this political achievement.
Unfortunately the trend for the US goes into the opposite direction.
The first link in my earlier posting points specifically to a paper that has the telling title "MERIDIONAL ATMOSPHERE AND OCEAN HEAT TRANSPORTS".
The amount of energy that humans can draw out of the atmosphere with their puny machines (no matter how impressive the photos) simply pales in comparison to the amount of energy transported by wind throughout the atmosphere.
My calculation was just a simple illustration of the magnitudes of energy that you are dealing with when talking about atmospheric processes. People simply tend to forget that our planet is really, really large in comparison to all the shiny machinery that we can produce. Then again this is not really news. Throughout the ages humans tend to get drunken on their own cultural power and technical achievements. Already Sophocles put these words into the chorus of his play Antigone:
"Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, the unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the ploughs go to and fro from year to year."
I wonder if there were any Greek philosophers around that were wondering what damage harvesting the wind in that fashion could do to upset the balance of nature.
Mod parent down. This is the most unscientific nonsense I've ever read on /. In comparison to the overall energy stored in the atmosphere the energy taken out of it by windmills is negligible.
I refer you to a paper like this one to confirm for yourself that if you talk about heat and energy transport in the atmosphere you are talking in terms of PW that is Petawatt i.e. 10^15 Watt. The energy stored in the atmosphere is many magnitudes larger than the current 0.013 PW of global human power consumption (the average power consumption is about 2000 W per person i.e. given there are about 6.5x10^9 people on this planet you get the 0.013 PW number).
If you take into consideration that the mass off our atmosphere is 5.1 x 10^18 Kg and the heat coefficient of our air is about 1.005 kJ/(kg K) you can easily verify that an increase in atmosphere temperature by one degree Celsius stores about an additional 5125500 PJ in the atmosphere.
That means even if all of the given the current world power consumption was to be drawn out of the atmospheres it'll take more than 12 years to just get the equivalent of one degree change. Given the current inverse trend in global warming that'll be actually quite welcome.
This is of course just a quick and simple back of the envelope calculation but it should give you an understanding of the magnitudes involved and lay any doubt at rest that some windmills could potentially affect the world climate.
Really don't know what to make of the parent post. Suspect for a second that this was just astroturfing but then the posting history doesn't support this. Wass even claims an undergrad degree in physics. He really should know better.
You'd probably have to have a material similar in property like for a space elevator in order to anchore a kite of that magnitude.
You will also have the issue of trasfering the energy to the ground. Cable is out of the question unless you can produce yet another magical material that combines the ability to carry large currents with minimal weight.
Sounds to me there is a real need that the Open Source community is not addressing
How many of the billion+ Chinese are already using a computer on a daily basis or even own one? According to this article less then 10% of all Chinese are using the internet.
This strongly suggests that Chinese users will be far less locked into Windows by sheer habit then it is the case in Europe and the US.
Add to this that entering Chinese characters is less then satisfactory with the current technology and you have the opportunity for a challenger to substitute Windows on the desktop in the Chinese market.
You assumption is flawed. Your logic only holds if you consider Windows to be superior to Linux. I have to use Windows for work but I generally have a much more pleasant desktop experience with Linux on my own machines.
There have been serious efforts at Chinese home grown Linux distributions such as Ref Flag Linux. I think this clearly suggests that there are Chinese that consider Linux to be the better OS. Since it is open source they can also have own localization and innovate for better input of Chinese characters. This is an advantage of Linux that MS will not be able to match unless they completly throw out their current business model.