Hrm, please provide references for your "Saving the Third World requires gigawatts" estimate.
Suppose just one watt of electricity per person is all you need to make a huge difference to peoples' lives. One watt per person times 3 gigapeople in poverty = 3 gigawatts.
Your LED light bulb, by the way, is going to draw around a watt. A compact fluorescent, ten times that.
But tell us about your prototype power generator for the 3rd world. If you don't have one,
I don't have one, but I'm not the one getting headlined on Slashdot. However, I will say that if a $5 40-mW power generator could save the world, we'd all have gotten to Happyland in 1980, when we gave every man, woman, and child a pocket-sized solar cell and a D-cell NiCd. Oh right, that didn't happen, because milliwatts per person gets you *nowhere*, even if you could distribute the generators, which you can't.
But I do have a better idea, but it's not for a power generator. Wanna save the developing world? Build them some good roads and rails. China did, and look what happened. Sure, China's no bed of roses, but your average Ghanaian would kill for a Chinese standard of living. No time to go into detail here, but transportation and access to markets is what separates the developing world from the rest.
The authors just chose to plot vs r^2, rather than r. Since the data is noisy and Earth's orbit is only slightly elliptical, the data would correlate just as well to r.
While I agree with your overall point that bird strikes are not a major problem with carefully-sited modern wind turbines, I just want to point out that those German turbines only *look* like they're moving slowly, because they're so big.
A modern turbine has a blade-tip speed about 6 times the wind speed, so in a 15-mph wind, those suckers are moving at 90 miles an hour. Watch your head.
Unfortunately, many of the best wind generation sites are on annoyingly flat ground, with no nearby hills to pump water to the top of. You could use underground storage, but that requires a hell of a lot of digging.
Have you any idea what fraction of U.S. energy consumption goes toward rail transit? Let's just say that you're going to need a razor blade to slice up that pie chart.
Oh, and for extra credit, do you know what the vast majority of America's freight cars are carrying? Coal for power plants.
And finally, energy costs are not the limiting factor holding back widespread rail use. The problem is that you can't exactly park a train at the loading dock of your local Home Depot.
Electrification of railways won't make a dent in America's energy usage. I understand you've got an ulterior motive, using the rail right-of-way for power transmission. But if that's your goal, why not be up-front about it? I'm sure CSX would consider leasing you some air rights.
Federal power grid = feds have the power to give a non-compliant region "power failure." Keep it to the states, folks. Read your tenth amendment and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
You're welcome to mistrust The Gubmint, but look at your options.
With the federal government in charge, power flows freely from a Columbia River hydro plant in to L.A. -- so long as the Feds wish it to.
With state governments in charge, the power flows from Washington state to L.A. -- so long as the State of Washington, the State of Oregon, AND the State of California wish it to. And let's be honest, the feds can stick their noses in too, if they like.
If you mistrust government, don't restrict your mistrust to just the feds. You're better off minimizing the number of governments with jurisdiction.
The founding fathers gave the Feds control of interstate commerce because otherwise, every podunk little government along the route could shut it down whenever it liked.
Look at it this way. You're making solar power in the Mojave. You need to get that power to, say, L.A. How you gonna do it?
A) Run three copper wires from Mojave to L.A. B) Run a gigantic cryogenic liquid hydrogen pipeline to L.A.
Let me tell you option A) is far, far cheaper and about ten billion times safer.
If L.A. actually wants hydrogen to fuel its vehicles, you put your hydrolysis plants *inside* the city, and run them off the electrical power grid. Hell, just install one in every filling station in town, or even in peoples' garages -- no pipelines needed.
Really? I thought most modern coal plants crushed the coal into a powder and used it to fire a turbine, much the same as you would with Natural Gas.
No. Coal plants do powder the coal to form a fluid fuel/air mixture, but they use it to fire a furnace which heats a boiler: the steam is used to turn a turbine. It takes time to start one up because you have to bring the water to a boil.
Natural gas turbines burn the fuel directly in a turbine. I'm not sure, but I suspect the reason you can't do this with coal is that the fuel powder particles will raise hell with the moving parts of the turbine.
That was a helpful link. Reading that story, it's clear that lawyers have already bled the studios for millions over the past few decades on this title, before filming even started. Quit-claims and distribution licenses and oh my god my eyes are bleeding...
Take this and Dukes of Hazzard and every other massive copyright clusterf* together, and maybe the studios will decide that chasing after rights to 30-year-old properties is just too much of a pain in the ass. Maybe they'll start making new movies with new stories, rather than just pushing out sequels and remakes and retreads all summer long?
The U.S. has very different design requirements for rockets that launch people. Everything down to the last bolt has to be designed with human safety in mind. (Not that that's done us a lot of good, but them's the rules.)
No other nation makes a rocket that would be rated for human launches in the U.S.. That includes European rockets as well as Russian rockets. The latter clearly *can* launch people into space, but the Russian approach to safety makes American administrators wet themselves in fear.
Err, correction, that should be "Shuttle and DIRECT" which fail badly if one SRB fails. Orion, with only a single first-stage booster, just sits there on the pad.
I'm sure NASA already has enough Powerpoints and impressive 3d animations.
The key difference between the DIRECT proposal and Orion is that the DIRECT spacecraft has two solid rocket boosters as its first stage. The ten billion dollar question nobody's had a good answer for since the beginning of the Shuttle program is, "what happens if one SRB ignites but the other doesn't?" With the Shuttle and Orion, the answer is "total mission failure, crew death, and possible destruction of the launch facility."
This isn't pogo, which you linked to, which affects only liquid-fueled rockets. This is an "organ pipe" oscillation characteristic of solid rocket boosters.
Still an old problem, but not quite what you describe.
There was an article on this in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago. In addition to drug use and prostitution, people would leave so much trash in the toilets that the automatic scrubbers had to be disabled or they jammed on the trash... and as a result, the toilets became so disgusting that even the druggies avoided them.
""I'm not going to lie: I used to smoke crack in there," said one homeless woman, Veronyka Cordner, nodding toward the toilet behind Pike Place Market. "But I won't even go inside that thing now. It's disgusting.""
IMO, the reason this works in other countries but not in the U.S. has nothing to do with our "puritanical mindset": instead, it's because Americans have no concept of public common space. We feel that everything on Earth is for our exclusive personal use until someone tries to stop us.
Bringing in immigrants to do half the jobs in the U.S. does not mean half of us are out of work. Those immigrants will want and need food, housing, and eventually cell phones, computers, automobiles, TV shows, banking services, airline tickets, and every other product of a first-world economy.
Bringing more people into an economy grows that economy, opening up new job possibilities and business opportunities. The economy grows and becomes more powerful. The growth of the United States' economy in the 19th century was driven by immigration. The growth of China in the late 20th century is also driven by immigration. (Not foreigners moving into China, but rural Chinese moving into the cities.)
Basically, thanks to globalization and the world being 'flat' and all that, our standard of living is going to get reduced to the lowest common denominator worldwide one way or the other.
You're right, we're damned if we do, damned if we don't. But here's the key: open immigration depresses our wages, but gives us a big pile of talented, smart people living, assimilating, and spending money in the U.S. Closed immigration and offshoring also depresses our wages, but leaves those talented folks and their wages in their home countries.
Put it this way, and the choice is obvious.
Also, I want to point out that the "lowest common denominator" might be higher than you think. When international workers have a broad choice of places to work, they can and will demand higher wages. Wages in a "flat Earth" won't even out at the bottom of the wage spectrum, but somewhere in the middle.
America became a great nation by being a giant labor magnet, drawing in hard-working and talented people from around the globe. This scheme has worked for three hundred years: let's not stop now.
Or to put it another way: to make stuff, you can either bring the workers to where the factories are, or vice versa. US immigration policy prevents the labor from moving... so the factories move to where the labor is.
It's futile to restrict labor while allowing free flow of goods.
Tech jobs are an extreme case: there are no raw materials, there is no factory, the products are nothing but data bits. Moving the jobs elsewhere is a piece of cake, so restricting immigration is utterly pointless.
I'd mod parent down, but I'd rather explain why I disagree. In what follows, "you" refers to "libertarian Slashdotters", not necessarily to the parent.
You say "open borders are more libertarian than the H1-B system", which is true, but a generous H-1B program would mean a more open border than what we have now. The grandparent is correct, that it's hypocritical to oppose a step in what you claim is the "right" direction.
You say a generous H-1B program would "create an underclass of workers" -- but a truly open border would be even worse in this respect, since it would drastically increase the number of U.S. resident programmers willing to work for bottom dollar.
And the elephant in the room here is that visas are irrelevant in this case. I can't think of a job that can be more easily offshored than computer programming. If you tightly restrict immigration of programmers into the U.S., they'll all set up shop in their home countries, where they can charge even less due to lower cost of living.
And if you as a programmer don't think you're going to be seriously competing against China- and India-resident programmers in a few years, you haven't been paying attention.
I say, open the borders, let everybody in, in every profession. It'll depress our wages, but at least it'll keep immigrant workers spending their money in *our* economy, and hopefully some of them will decide to become citizens and come to expect our standards of living.
Slashdot Mirror
Hrm, please provide references for your "Saving the Third World requires gigawatts" estimate.
Suppose just one watt of electricity per person is all you need to make a huge difference to peoples' lives. One watt per person times 3 gigapeople in poverty = 3 gigawatts.
Your LED light bulb, by the way, is going to draw around a watt. A compact fluorescent, ten times that.
But tell us about your prototype power generator for the 3rd world. If you don't have one,
I don't have one, but I'm not the one getting headlined on Slashdot. However, I will say that if a $5 40-mW power generator could save the world, we'd all have gotten to Happyland in 1980, when we gave every man, woman, and child a pocket-sized solar cell and a D-cell NiCd. Oh right, that didn't happen, because milliwatts per person gets you *nowhere*, even if you could distribute the generators, which you can't.
But I do have a better idea, but it's not for a power generator. Wanna save the developing world? Build them some good roads and rails. China did, and look what happened. Sure, China's no bed of roses, but your average Ghanaian would kill for a Chinese standard of living. No time to go into detail here, but transportation and access to markets is what separates the developing world from the rest.
This guy is genius.
If your prototype makes milliwatts and Saving the Third World requires gigawatts, that makes you 10^(-12) of a genius.
When he makes one that generates a kilowatt for under $500, *then* I'll start paying attention.
What it would have (if it is similar to how I use them, and yes I am a WAN specialist) is a phone-line for dial in access in case of emergencies.
So what you're saying is, there's probably a secret phone number that gives backdoor modem access to the San Francisco city government?
That loud ringing noise you hear is every phone in San Francisco getting slashdotted by demon-dial.
Start with being 60-1600 meters below the ocean surface, and it only gets more difficult from there.
Now, if one of *these* network devices goes missing, *then* you've got a problem. traceroute might not help much, either...
Because his nick is "Lord Apathy".
That's enough verbal onanism for one day.
Don't get too hot and bothered, gents, they're clearly using a butt double.
At the moment, parent is modded +1, Informative.
I'm hereby modding the moderator -1, Moron, and -2, No Detectable Sense of Humor.
The authors just chose to plot vs r^2, rather than r. Since the data is noisy and Earth's orbit is only slightly elliptical, the data would correlate just as well to r.
While I agree with your overall point that bird strikes are not a major problem with carefully-sited modern wind turbines, I just want to point out that those German turbines only *look* like they're moving slowly, because they're so big.
A modern turbine has a blade-tip speed about 6 times the wind speed, so in a 15-mph wind, those suckers are moving at 90 miles an hour. Watch your head.
Unfortunately, many of the best wind generation sites are on annoyingly flat ground, with no nearby hills to pump water to the top of. You could use underground storage, but that requires a hell of a lot of digging.
Have you any idea what fraction of U.S. energy consumption goes toward rail transit? Let's just say that you're going to need a razor blade to slice up that pie chart.
Oh, and for extra credit, do you know what the vast majority of America's freight cars are carrying? Coal for power plants.
And finally, energy costs are not the limiting factor holding back widespread rail use. The problem is that you can't exactly park a train at the loading dock of your local Home Depot.
Electrification of railways won't make a dent in America's energy usage. I understand you've got an ulterior motive, using the rail right-of-way for power transmission. But if that's your goal, why not be up-front about it? I'm sure CSX would consider leasing you some air rights.
Federal power grid = feds have the power to give a non-compliant region "power failure." Keep it to the states, folks. Read your tenth amendment and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
You're welcome to mistrust The Gubmint, but look at your options.
With the federal government in charge, power flows freely from a Columbia River hydro plant in to L.A. -- so long as the Feds wish it to.
With state governments in charge, the power flows from Washington state to L.A. -- so long as the State of Washington, the State of Oregon, AND the State of California wish it to. And let's be honest, the feds can stick their noses in too, if they like.
If you mistrust government, don't restrict your mistrust to just the feds. You're better off minimizing the number of governments with jurisdiction.
The founding fathers gave the Feds control of interstate commerce because otherwise, every podunk little government along the route could shut it down whenever it liked.
Look at it this way. You're making solar power in the Mojave. You need to get that power to, say, L.A. How you gonna do it?
A) Run three copper wires from Mojave to L.A.
B) Run a gigantic cryogenic liquid hydrogen pipeline to L.A.
Let me tell you option A) is far, far cheaper and about ten billion times safer.
If L.A. actually wants hydrogen to fuel its vehicles, you put your hydrolysis plants *inside* the city, and run them off the electrical power grid. Hell, just install one in every filling station in town, or even in peoples' garages -- no pipelines needed.
Really? I thought most modern coal plants crushed the coal into a powder and used it to fire a turbine, much the same as you would with Natural Gas.
No. Coal plants do powder the coal to form a fluid fuel/air mixture, but they use it to fire a furnace which heats a boiler: the steam is used to turn a turbine. It takes time to start one up because you have to bring the water to a boil.
Natural gas turbines burn the fuel directly in a turbine. I'm not sure, but I suspect the reason you can't do this with coal is that the fuel powder particles will raise hell with the moving parts of the turbine.
That was a helpful link. Reading that story, it's clear that lawyers have already bled the studios for millions over the past few decades on this title, before filming even started. Quit-claims and distribution licenses and oh my god my eyes are bleeding...
Take this and Dukes of Hazzard and every other massive copyright clusterf* together, and maybe the studios will decide that chasing after rights to 30-year-old properties is just too much of a pain in the ass. Maybe they'll start making new movies with new stories, rather than just pushing out sequels and remakes and retreads all summer long?
Nah, probably not.
The U.S. has very different design requirements for rockets that launch people. Everything down to the last bolt has to be designed with human safety in mind. (Not that that's done us a lot of good, but them's the rules.)
No other nation makes a rocket that would be rated for human launches in the U.S.. That includes European rockets as well as Russian rockets. The latter clearly *can* launch people into space, but the Russian approach to safety makes American administrators wet themselves in fear.
Err, correction, that should be "Shuttle and DIRECT" which fail badly if one SRB fails. Orion, with only a single first-stage booster, just sits there on the pad.
I'm sure NASA already has enough Powerpoints and impressive 3d animations.
The key difference between the DIRECT proposal and Orion is that the DIRECT spacecraft has two solid rocket boosters as its first stage. The ten billion dollar question nobody's had a good answer for since the beginning of the Shuttle program is, "what happens if one SRB ignites but the other doesn't?" With the Shuttle and Orion, the answer is "total mission failure, crew death, and possible destruction of the launch facility."
This isn't pogo, which you linked to, which affects only liquid-fueled rockets. This is an "organ pipe" oscillation characteristic of solid rocket boosters.
Still an old problem, but not quite what you describe.
There was an article on this in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago. In addition to drug use and prostitution, people would leave so much trash in the toilets that the automatic scrubbers had to be disabled or they jammed on the trash... and as a result, the toilets became so disgusting that even the druggies avoided them.
""I'm not going to lie: I used to smoke crack in there," said one homeless woman, Veronyka Cordner, nodding toward the toilet behind Pike Place Market. "But I won't even go inside that thing now. It's disgusting.""
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/17toilets.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=seattle%20public%20toilet&st=cse&oref=slogin
IMO, the reason this works in other countries but not in the U.S. has nothing to do with our "puritanical mindset": instead, it's because Americans have no concept of public common space. We feel that everything on Earth is for our exclusive personal use until someone tries to stop us.
Absolutely dead wrong.
Bringing in immigrants to do half the jobs in the U.S. does not mean half of us are out of work. Those immigrants will want and need food, housing, and eventually cell phones, computers, automobiles, TV shows, banking services, airline tickets, and every other product of a first-world economy.
Bringing more people into an economy grows that economy, opening up new job possibilities and business opportunities. The economy grows and becomes more powerful. The growth of the United States' economy in the 19th century was driven by immigration. The growth of China in the late 20th century is also driven by immigration. (Not foreigners moving into China, but rural Chinese moving into the cities.)
An economy is not a game of musical chairs.
Basically, thanks to globalization and the world being 'flat' and all that, our standard of living is going to get reduced to the lowest common denominator worldwide one way or the other.
You're right, we're damned if we do, damned if we don't. But here's the key: open immigration depresses our wages, but gives us a big pile of talented, smart people living, assimilating, and spending money in the U.S. Closed immigration and offshoring also depresses our wages, but leaves those talented folks and their wages in their home countries.
Put it this way, and the choice is obvious.
Also, I want to point out that the "lowest common denominator" might be higher than you think. When international workers have a broad choice of places to work, they can and will demand higher wages. Wages in a "flat Earth" won't even out at the bottom of the wage spectrum, but somewhere in the middle.
America became a great nation by being a giant labor magnet, drawing in hard-working and talented people from around the globe. This scheme has worked for three hundred years: let's not stop now.
Or to put it another way: to make stuff, you can either bring the workers to where the factories are, or vice versa. US immigration policy prevents the labor from moving ... so the factories move to where the labor is.
It's futile to restrict labor while allowing free flow of goods.
Tech jobs are an extreme case: there are no raw materials, there is no factory, the products are nothing but data bits. Moving the jobs elsewhere is a piece of cake, so restricting immigration is utterly pointless.
I'd mod parent down, but I'd rather explain why I disagree. In what follows, "you" refers to "libertarian Slashdotters", not necessarily to the parent.
You say "open borders are more libertarian than the H1-B system", which is true, but a generous H-1B program would mean a more open border than what we have now. The grandparent is correct, that it's hypocritical to oppose a step in what you claim is the "right" direction.
You say a generous H-1B program would "create an underclass of workers" -- but a truly open border would be even worse in this respect, since it would drastically increase the number of U.S. resident programmers willing to work for bottom dollar.
And the elephant in the room here is that visas are irrelevant in this case. I can't think of a job that can be more easily offshored than computer programming. If you tightly restrict immigration of programmers into the U.S., they'll all set up shop in their home countries, where they can charge even less due to lower cost of living.
And if you as a programmer don't think you're going to be seriously competing against China- and India-resident programmers in a few years, you haven't been paying attention.
I say, open the borders, let everybody in, in every profession. It'll depress our wages, but at least it'll keep immigrant workers spending their money in *our* economy, and hopefully some of them will decide to become citizens and come to expect our standards of living.