There are *lots* of sellers of oil. The US domestically produces almost as much oil as it imports from *all* OPEC countries put together. The US imports more oil from _Canada_ (and then some - around 2.5M bbl/day vs 1.5M bbl/day) than Saudi Arabia. The UK is a net exporter of oil, as is Norway. There are dozens of oil producing countries, many having nothing to do with OPEC.
Oil is a global market, and the Saudis can only influence the price a bit because they can change the output on cheap, easy oil, fairly easily. The Saudis - not even OPEC alone, can bring a return of oil prices down to even $30/bbl.
It's even more so than that - some root servers are spread over several countries. They use IP anycast, so, for example, the C root server isn at a single location, the C root server exists in more than one continent. The C, F, I, J, K, L and M servers exist in multiple locations on different continents.
We already use WiMAX at work (and have been for over a year). WiMAX is only available here because the monopoly telco charges so much for leased lines (five times the going rate elsewhere. Yes, five times) that it was economical for a firm to start up and offer WiMAX business class internet service.
It's been every bit as reliable as the equivalent wired service. However, we aren't using cheap 'consumer grade' kit to connect, we have a fairly expensive and solid transceiver mounted very solidly to the wall of the building.
There are kits for Sinclair Spectrum clones (with a bit more stuff than the original machine) around. Of course, you can design and build your own 8 bit machine too, one of the things I did last year was roll my own Z80 based system. (It even has ethernet!)
You need: - Plug in solderless breadboard. Get something reasonably big. - An assortment of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Many suppliers sell bags of common values for these. - Some transistors: get some NPN and PNP small signal bipolar transistors. Get some N and P channel small signal MOSFETs. - A few 555 timer ICs. - A handful of 74-series logic ICs (typical quad gates, flip flops, shift registers).
And of course a whole heap of LEDs. You need some blinkenlights when learning.
With this you can look at the 'net - for example, while reading 'Lessons in Electric Circuits' http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ you can devise circuits to expand your knowledge on what you've just read.
You also need at least a reasonable multimeter. As you start getting into stuff that oscillates at more than a few hertz, and if you are enjoying what you're doing, it's worth looking on ebay for a reasonable 2nd hand oscilloscope.
As you get more advanced, you can get microcontrollers, for example, get some Atmel AVR 8 bit microcontrollers - they are supported by GCC and you can make your own parallel programmer with an old printer lead and 4 resistors. Or build a proper computer with external memory - the Z80 microprocessor is still made, and is cheap, and is great for tinkering because it is a 'static' design and run at sub 1Hz clock frequencies where you can see what's happening by putting LEDs on the data and address bus.
If you want your kids to be able to have programming, get a Speccy off ebay. I'm serious. Get a +3 with a disc drive. You just turn it on and it's ready to program and it's still absolutely fine for learning the foundations. (Or even get an emulator, but it's not the same!)
Get into assembler and you can learn the principles that still underlie today's PCs. You very quickly learn why buffer overflows are bad when you see your assembly program write too much data and stomp all over its return address.
Water ice does sublimate, and it even does it on Earth (notice how ice cubes shrink if left in the freezer for a long time - they are losing mass well below the freezing point of water). Water ice sublimates very readily at low atmospheric pressure as is found on Mars.
I live on an island in the north Irish Sea, but despite this, I have Medeterranean dwarf fan palms growing pretty vigorously in my garden (the Gulf Stream keeps us from getting much in the way of freezing weather in the winter). I've also got a couple of Canary Island Date Palms (rather slow growers here) and a couple of washingtonia (native of southern California/Mexico).
No one was hurt or irradiated in Three Mile Island. Not one single injury.
No one in the world except the Soviets have ever built power reactors as insanely dangerous as the RMBK type power reactor at Chernobyl - the thing was fail dangerousm by design (everyone else goes for fail safe), for several reasons - such as having a positive void coefficient (meaning, in the case of the coolant heating so it boiled - resulting in voids in the coolant which was also the neutron moderator, the reaction would speed up further still). The reactor also had hollow ends in the control rods so when they dropped the rods to shut it down, it actually sped up the reaction initially (and that's why the lid blew off). It didn't even have a containment building. Only the Soviets ever made such insanely dangerous types of power reactors. No one else anywhere in the world did it like that.
Saying nuclear in the USA is bad because of Chernobyl is disingenious in the extreme, and obviously so to anyone with a modicum of understanding of the subject. No one builds reactors like the Soviets did, especially not in the west.
I'd rather filter on the right (unless turning left, and then *extremely* cautiously, and never past an HGV because the HGV driver often just can't see you). The thing is motorists don't expect to be passed between the kerb and their left side, and passengers may do things like throw doors open without looking (not expecting anyone to be there). So I filter where the motorbikes do - on the right, where drivers are expecting overtaking traffic.
If in doubt, I wait in the traffic (especially if it's frequent stop/start traffic) right in the middle of the lane, if traffic's like that I have no problem keeping up with traffic (generally, it's moving less than 20 mph), and 'taking the lane' discourages the drivers who believe Cyclists Must Be Overtaken Regardless Of Speed (i.e. they'll half-overtake you if they have the chance, but can't make any more progress due to the car in front and will sit dangerously off your right side. 'Taking the lane' when you can keep up with traffic prevents this).
One reason why California is expensive is that it's a highly desirable place to live. And people want to work in desirable places, despite the expense.
By 25 most programmers are "used up"... at least by their standards.
And another nail in Google's eventual coffin; the obsession with youth isn't all it's cracked up to be. In my experience, most software developers don't come into their prime until they are at least 25. Before then, they are still too inexperienced and make too many mistakes due to inexperience.
The military still have vets? How much horse cavalry is there?
(Seriously, over here a 'vet' is a vetinary surgeon. I did a bit of a double take when I was living in Houston and I saw a bumper sticker saying 'If you value your freedom, thank a vet' - and I thought, well, it's all very nice having someone to give my cat his annual FIV vaccination, but I didn't realise vetinary surgeons were the vanguard of freedom fighters too!).
I am both a motorist (I have an Audi I enjoy driving) and a cyclist (which I commute on). I think life expectancy when cycling is predicated on being predictable to other road users - i.e. following the Highway Code. Some numpty from the CTC a while back was trying to justify running red lights (a thing about female cyclists generally obeying the highway code but having a much higher death rate than male cyclists, who were generally law breakers). It turns out that the reason "cautious" cyclists were getting killed because they were getting left hooked by the HGV they were sitting right next to when the light went green.
The lesson, unlike the idiot from the CTC was suggesting, was NOT running red lights, but not creeping up on the left hand side (if you drive on the left) of traffic.
Incidentally, as a car driver, it *is* my responsibility to anticipate the idiocy of other road users. Even if a cyclist pulled out in front of me, I'd be emotionally crushed if I killed them even if it wasn't my fault. It's all about defensive driving - I don't care who's fault it is, I'd rather not have a crash at all. So when I'm driving, if I see a cyclist I assume they will do something stupid and take care while passing them (for example, like the Highway Code says, giving them as much room as I would give a car). Cyclists die, they don't dent. I would rather wait 10 or 15 seconds until the opposite lane is completely clear, than squeeze by between the oncoming traffic and the guy on the bike.
If a cyclist can kick your car, you are passing much, much too close - and it's only a matter of time before someone gets hurt. So please don't pass that close, even if (especially if) you are passing an obvious idiot.
They are heavy, but they aren't unreliable: they are so simple that the US didn't even bother to test the design before using it at Hiroshima. The more complex Nagasaki bomb was tested first (the Trinity test).
It's not a matter of there being plenty of oil, it's a matter of there not being plenty of CHEAP oil. The remaining recoverable oil is progressively more and more expensive to extract, at a slower and slower rate. The issue that's going to be upon us is the CHEAP, easy to extract, easy to refine oil peaking.
The quality of the products at that time was abysmal, though. Win95 was unstable and poorly documented. Parts of WinNT were completely undocumented as far as we could tell - we had a US $40,000/yr support contract with Microsoft because we needed to write a replacement GINA since our application was 'appliance like' (and a stub GINA wasn't enough). The WinNT developers didn't seem to have any more documentation than the really basic 'how to write a stub GINA' doc that we had - we had to figure it out by reverse engineering since the WinNT developers couldn't actually help us!
I can understand the abysmal quality now I understand it was all done with excessive overtime. We went through that too at one stage, and I discovered that once you're at the stage where people are sleeping in the office you're now into 'negative productivity' each hour of work creates two hours of bug fixing. Two years later we were actaully doing MORE work in 40 hour work weeks merely by having a good software process and sticking to it.
It's the other way around - most of the population lives in cities, it's actually the minority of people who are in rural areas.
Riding a bike to work is not mutually exclusive with car ownership. I own a car, and I ride to work too - 25 miles a day on hilly terrain. It saves a great deal of money and fuel, but I still have the car when I really need it.
Why build it all in one place? Even here in northern Europe, my roof has enough space for today's commercial solar panels to provide more than enough power for the entire house that's underneath, and the roof isn't even south facing.
The problem isn't the amount of light or amount of space, the problem is photovoltaic cells are ruinously expensive.
Efficiency is not the only part of the equation. The killer application part of liquid fuels is that they have very good energy density, and are easy to store and transport.
Electricity storage has very poor energy density, the storage medium (batteries) are short lived and may have significant self discharge problems, and are expensive. So what you gain from the efficiency of generating the power, you lose in the poor storage system.
In the lab, the storage density of lithium ion batteries has been increased around eight to tenfold, but based on past performance, battery technologies that are currently working in the lab are 20 years away from market, so we aren't going to see anything even verging on decent for some time to come. There's also the matter of creating an electrical distribution system that can handle the demands of charging up millions of cars. For liquid fuels, the infrastructure is already available.
Walking or biking to work isn't necessarily mutually exclusive with car ownership. Biking to work where I live isn't exactly fun in the winter (frequent wind speeds exceeding 50 mph), however, in the summer I can do my 25 mile round trip commute on the bike every day. I still have a car. But because I bike some of the time I use a hell of a lot less fuel than I otherwise would. And besides, it's more fun to ride than drive in the summer.
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A US gallon is only 3.8 litres, so petrol at 116/l is 440p per US gallon, or about $8.80 per US gallon.
There are *lots* of sellers of oil. The US domestically produces almost as much oil as it imports from *all* OPEC countries put together. The US imports more oil from _Canada_ (and then some - around 2.5M bbl/day vs 1.5M bbl/day) than Saudi Arabia. The UK is a net exporter of oil, as is Norway. There are dozens of oil producing countries, many having nothing to do with OPEC.
Oil is a global market, and the Saudis can only influence the price a bit because they can change the output on cheap, easy oil, fairly easily. The Saudis - not even OPEC alone, can bring a return of oil prices down to even $30/bbl.
It's even more so than that - some root servers are spread over several countries. They use IP anycast, so, for example, the C root server isn at a single location, the C root server exists in more than one continent. The C, F, I, J, K, L and M servers exist in multiple locations on different continents.
We already use WiMAX at work (and have been for over a year). WiMAX is only available here because the monopoly telco charges so much for leased lines (five times the going rate elsewhere. Yes, five times) that it was economical for a firm to start up and offer WiMAX business class internet service.
It's been every bit as reliable as the equivalent wired service. However, we aren't using cheap 'consumer grade' kit to connect, we have a fairly expensive and solid transceiver mounted very solidly to the wall of the building.
Well, I prefer this one :-)
http://vimeo.com/1109226
There are kits for Sinclair Spectrum clones (with a bit more stuff than the original machine) around. Of course, you can design and build your own 8 bit machine too, one of the things I did last year was roll my own Z80 based system. (It even has ethernet!)
Seriously - make your own kit.
You need:
- Plug in solderless breadboard. Get something reasonably big.
- An assortment of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Many suppliers sell bags of common values for these.
- Some transistors: get some NPN and PNP small signal bipolar transistors. Get some N and P channel small signal MOSFETs.
- A few 555 timer ICs.
- A handful of 74-series logic ICs (typical quad gates, flip flops, shift registers).
And of course a whole heap of LEDs. You need some blinkenlights when learning.
With this you can look at the 'net - for example, while reading 'Lessons in Electric Circuits' http://www.ibiblio.org/kuphaldt/electricCircuits/ you can devise circuits to expand your knowledge on what you've just read.
You also need at least a reasonable multimeter. As you start getting into stuff that oscillates at more than a few hertz, and if you are enjoying what you're doing, it's worth looking on ebay for a reasonable 2nd hand oscilloscope.
As you get more advanced, you can get microcontrollers, for example, get some Atmel AVR 8 bit microcontrollers - they are supported by GCC and you can make your own parallel programmer with an old printer lead and 4 resistors. Or build a proper computer with external memory - the Z80 microprocessor is still made, and is cheap, and is great for tinkering because it is a 'static' design and run at sub 1Hz clock frequencies where you can see what's happening by putting LEDs on the data and address bus.
If you want your kids to be able to have programming, get a Speccy off ebay. I'm serious. Get a +3 with a disc drive. You just turn it on and it's ready to program and it's still absolutely fine for learning the foundations. (Or even get an emulator, but it's not the same!)
Get into assembler and you can learn the principles that still underlie today's PCs. You very quickly learn why buffer overflows are bad when you see your assembly program write too much data and stomp all over its return address.
Water ice does sublimate, and it even does it on Earth (notice how ice cubes shrink if left in the freezer for a long time - they are losing mass well below the freezing point of water). Water ice sublimates very readily at low atmospheric pressure as is found on Mars.
I live on an island in the north Irish Sea, but despite this, I have Medeterranean dwarf fan palms growing pretty vigorously in my garden (the Gulf Stream keeps us from getting much in the way of freezing weather in the winter). I've also got a couple of Canary Island Date Palms (rather slow growers here) and a couple of washingtonia (native of southern California/Mexico).
No one was hurt or irradiated in Three Mile Island. Not one single injury.
No one in the world except the Soviets have ever built power reactors as insanely dangerous as the RMBK type power reactor at Chernobyl - the thing was fail dangerousm by design (everyone else goes for fail safe), for several reasons - such as having a positive void coefficient (meaning, in the case of the coolant heating so it boiled - resulting in voids in the coolant which was also the neutron moderator, the reaction would speed up further still). The reactor also had hollow ends in the control rods so when they dropped the rods to shut it down, it actually sped up the reaction initially (and that's why the lid blew off). It didn't even have a containment building. Only the Soviets ever made such insanely dangerous types of power reactors. No one else anywhere in the world did it like that.
Saying nuclear in the USA is bad because of Chernobyl is disingenious in the extreme, and obviously so to anyone with a modicum of understanding of the subject. No one builds reactors like the Soviets did, especially not in the west.
I'd rather filter on the right (unless turning left, and then *extremely* cautiously, and never past an HGV because the HGV driver often just can't see you). The thing is motorists don't expect to be passed between the kerb and their left side, and passengers may do things like throw doors open without looking (not expecting anyone to be there). So I filter where the motorbikes do - on the right, where drivers are expecting overtaking traffic.
If in doubt, I wait in the traffic (especially if it's frequent stop/start traffic) right in the middle of the lane, if traffic's like that I have no problem keeping up with traffic (generally, it's moving less than 20 mph), and 'taking the lane' discourages the drivers who believe Cyclists Must Be Overtaken Regardless Of Speed (i.e. they'll half-overtake you if they have the chance, but can't make any more progress due to the car in front and will sit dangerously off your right side. 'Taking the lane' when you can keep up with traffic prevents this).
One reason why California is expensive is that it's a highly desirable place to live. And people want to work in desirable places, despite the expense.
And another nail in Google's eventual coffin; the obsession with youth isn't all it's cracked up to be. In my experience, most software developers don't come into their prime until they are at least 25. Before then, they are still too inexperienced and make too many mistakes due to inexperience.
The military still have vets? How much horse cavalry is there?
(Seriously, over here a 'vet' is a vetinary surgeon. I did a bit of a double take when I was living in Houston and I saw a bumper sticker saying 'If you value your freedom, thank a vet' - and I thought, well, it's all very nice having someone to give my cat his annual FIV vaccination, but I didn't realise vetinary surgeons were the vanguard of freedom fighters too!).
I am both a motorist (I have an Audi I enjoy driving) and a cyclist (which I commute on). I think life expectancy when cycling is predicated on being predictable to other road users - i.e. following the Highway Code. Some numpty from the CTC a while back was trying to justify running red lights (a thing about female cyclists generally obeying the highway code but having a much higher death rate than male cyclists, who were generally law breakers). It turns out that the reason "cautious" cyclists were getting killed because they were getting left hooked by the HGV they were sitting right next to when the light went green.
The lesson, unlike the idiot from the CTC was suggesting, was NOT running red lights, but not creeping up on the left hand side (if you drive on the left) of traffic.
Incidentally, as a car driver, it *is* my responsibility to anticipate the idiocy of other road users. Even if a cyclist pulled out in front of me, I'd be emotionally crushed if I killed them even if it wasn't my fault. It's all about defensive driving - I don't care who's fault it is, I'd rather not have a crash at all. So when I'm driving, if I see a cyclist I assume they will do something stupid and take care while passing them (for example, like the Highway Code says, giving them as much room as I would give a car). Cyclists die, they don't dent. I would rather wait 10 or 15 seconds until the opposite lane is completely clear, than squeeze by between the oncoming traffic and the guy on the bike.
If a cyclist can kick your car, you are passing much, much too close - and it's only a matter of time before someone gets hurt. So please don't pass that close, even if (especially if) you are passing an obvious idiot.
The timing tolerances aren't all that hard - one set of detonating control electronics, and make all the wires the same length.
They are heavy, but they aren't unreliable: they are so simple that the US didn't even bother to test the design before using it at Hiroshima. The more complex Nagasaki bomb was tested first (the Trinity test).
It's not a matter of there being plenty of oil, it's a matter of there not being plenty of CHEAP oil. The remaining recoverable oil is progressively more and more expensive to extract, at a slower and slower rate. The issue that's going to be upon us is the CHEAP, easy to extract, easy to refine oil peaking.
The Z80 ain't obscure, it's still in production!
The quality of the products at that time was abysmal, though. Win95 was unstable and poorly documented. Parts of WinNT were completely undocumented as far as we could tell - we had a US $40,000/yr support contract with Microsoft because we needed to write a replacement GINA since our application was 'appliance like' (and a stub GINA wasn't enough). The WinNT developers didn't seem to have any more documentation than the really basic 'how to write a stub GINA' doc that we had - we had to figure it out by reverse engineering since the WinNT developers couldn't actually help us!
I can understand the abysmal quality now I understand it was all done with excessive overtime. We went through that too at one stage, and I discovered that once you're at the stage where people are sleeping in the office you're now into 'negative productivity' each hour of work creates two hours of bug fixing. Two years later we were actaully doing MORE work in 40 hour work weeks merely by having a good software process and sticking to it.
It's the other way around - most of the population lives in cities, it's actually the minority of people who are in rural areas.
Riding a bike to work is not mutually exclusive with car ownership. I own a car, and I ride to work too - 25 miles a day on hilly terrain. It saves a great deal of money and fuel, but I still have the car when I really need it.
Why build it all in one place? Even here in northern Europe, my roof has enough space for today's commercial solar panels to provide more than enough power for the entire house that's underneath, and the roof isn't even south facing.
The problem isn't the amount of light or amount of space, the problem is photovoltaic cells are ruinously expensive.
Efficiency is not the only part of the equation. The killer application part of liquid fuels is that they have very good energy density, and are easy to store and transport.
Electricity storage has very poor energy density, the storage medium (batteries) are short lived and may have significant self discharge problems, and are expensive. So what you gain from the efficiency of generating the power, you lose in the poor storage system.
In the lab, the storage density of lithium ion batteries has been increased around eight to tenfold, but based on past performance, battery technologies that are currently working in the lab are 20 years away from market, so we aren't going to see anything even verging on decent for some time to come. There's also the matter of creating an electrical distribution system that can handle the demands of charging up millions of cars. For liquid fuels, the infrastructure is already available.
Walking or biking to work isn't necessarily mutually exclusive with car ownership. Biking to work where I live isn't exactly fun in the winter (frequent wind speeds exceeding 50 mph), however, in the summer I can do my 25 mile round trip commute on the bike every day. I still have a car. But because I bike some of the time I use a hell of a lot less fuel than I otherwise would. And besides, it's more fun to ride than drive in the summer.