I COULD go out, find a couple of flint stones, make a few blades from it, build a trap to catch a deer, proceed to make a fire all by hand and get something to eat. I could, on the other hand, also go to fridge for food and turn on my stove for cooking.
Go to google scholar, research anything and you'll inevitable bumb into those extortionists. What is the point of having all that knowledge theoretically at your fingertips, if people cannot have access to it? No matter what it is - an icelandic volcano erupting and you want to know what this means for your plans to fly somewhere? Well, there are plenty of papers that will tell you about ash emissions, the impact of ash on airplanes, the concentrations of ash in the air and so on and so forth.
A nuclear reactor has a problem and you want to know what engineers found out about the likely consequences or progression of the accident, or what people in this country and other countries did about mitigation? It's right there. BUT:
$30.00 for reading a paper (which more likely than not will not contain what you are looking for) just makes it impossible to research anything at all - unless you are at least a millionaire. Just having access to one research paper per day will cost you $11000 a year. That has nothing to do with copyrights or protecting intellectual property or anything else.
It is all about extortion - thank you for trying to stop it.
GWB set up a program that he knew he couldn't finance and thus put all the expenses on whoever would come after him. Of course, this didn't stop them from handing out heaps of money for useless non-development - like $450,000,000 dollars for the "Ares-1x" - an ordinary surplus shuttle booster with a mockup stage strapped on top of it, that didn't even manage to separate properly and couldn't tell anything about the flight characteristics of the real Ares-1 (with a longer 5-segment booster) anyway. For comparison: the cost of that flight was more than two full flights of the Ariane-5.
Nope. It is breaking the currents that were observed from 1995 until the early 2000's, then entering a new regime until today. Beyond that, no such observations exist due to lack of suitable satellite data.This is research, not theology.
China, India, the rest of Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America... basically, the other 6.7billion people not living in the US (which seems to be paranoid about car-safety regulations, but for some reason hasn't banned quads or motorcycles that are much less safe any microcar...)
So, yes. The price should not be $3700 but 3000 Euro.
Micro cars don't require airbags by law in most juristictions as far as I know. As the maximum speed would be limited anyway (to save on battery drain) they are still safe enough - much more so than quads or motorbikes anyway. And if electrics are so expensive, than that's one place where you should start to save on costs, they became a whole lot cheaper since the 20ies, you know?
You are out of your mind is almost exactly what people told Henry Ford when he started making cars. By 1925 or so the Model T ended up selling for around $3000 in todays money.
$3700 is the kind of price when people would be much less bothered whether a car can go for 600km or 60km. Qualitatively less performance on almost all counts for over twice the price of an ordinary car just doesn't make sense beyond the idealistic fringe with very deep pockets, trying to polish their better-than-thou attitude to the rest of the world.
However, qualitatively less performance for a much smaller price of entry is justifable. Netbooks did this. Of course their performance rather laughable compared to a proper laptop - but you couldn't get laptop for $200. It satisfies the need of a basic mobile universal computer for a price below all other offers. The same would work for cars for a lot of commuters - it need not be all or even most. There are 300 million americans, even if it only appeals to 3 in 100 people, that's 10 mio customers.
As a former Air Force electronic warfare technician, I'm guessing that Iran just flooded the area with high-amplitude noise jamming to trigger an automatic landing routine.
Why are you contradicting yourself?
Knowing what countermeasure to use and how to exploit an automatic routine isn't technical wizardry?
Erm, that's not a contradiction at all. It's like lockpicking vs. smashing the door. There isn't a lot of subtlety involved (or required) to jam such a signal. Drones require shitloads of bandwidth to operate (i read something like 500mbit/s) and if he was still alive, I would suggest asking Claude Shannon about difficulty of jamming high-bandwidth signals (almost none). A bit of noise and the whole thing breaks down.
1912 is an interesting year. The largest volcanic eruption of the last century happened and it took 4 years until someone assembled an expedition to find out what happened (in the middle of WWI, no less). So yes, we should take "measurements" of that time with a grain of salt or two.
The US wants to be able to attack any place on earth within 60min. It wants to be able to prevent any other country from retailiation. Space and air supremacy is the stated policy of the USA, basically world domination.
Your example only goes to prove that you haven't got the slightest clue about what words like energy and power mean. The PEAK power production that solar propaganda keeps citing bears no relationship with either the total energy thus provided nor the actual usefulness of this energy. Since you are trolling this forum in ignorance of the former, I won't even discuss the latter.
Well, over a hundred billion dollars worth of subsidies and a 2% share in energy production of PV in Germany have conclusively proven your statement to be bullshit.
I don't care about profit margins, but I do care when people lie about the price and actual effectiveness of PV or wind power. I would love to live in the world that some environmentalists think we are living in, in which PV can generate cheap electricity in huge quantities on small areas. But unfortunately those claims are based on a gross distortion of reality that a lot of people have fallen for.
I'm all for using renewable energy at a scale in which they are doing less damage than conventional energy. And no, that's not 100%. Note that not everything that is feasible in America with 20 people per square kilometer and stupidly sprawling cities is feasible in other parts of the world. Even Africa has 40 people/km^2 despite the Sahara and rainforest. The rest of the world has about 100/km^2. India will soon have 400/km^2. As for price, I don't care if it is more expensive or not, but I do care about whether it is affordable for the population as a whole or not - which is also a matter of how it is being paid. And everybody paying for the wealthy few who can afford to buy huge PV installations, which are insanely profitable thanks to stupidly high feed-in tariffs, is neither fair, nor affordable, nor something that is so much as being talked about.
Renewable energy is feasible in a supporting role, even with relatively small storage - I guess something on the order of 10%-20%. This depends a lot on usage patterns - but so does energy efficiency and usually it's a trade-off not a synergy between the two. The most energy efficient way to use energy is usually to use it continuously. But the amount also depends on the technology employed, solar thermal is pretty good in such a supporting role, as it already has a short-term energy storage included. But it is also extremely expensive, despite other claims.
Hydro is good when it is continuously fed by rain or melting snow, but as a storage it is actually quite miserable beyond a couple of GWh. It requires paving whole mountain valleys in concrete to get any significant amount of storage.
The real numbers for wind turbines are closer to 500MW installed power, to get an average of 100MW. (On-shore, given that you said "all over the country" I assume that's what you meant.) However, if you actually want a reliable supply of energy, then "some wind somewhere" won't do. You'll have to store energy on a mass scale. Using current technology you need about 4 kWh to get 1 kWh back (true for all technologies using electrolysis of water and hydrogen at its core, whether you store it in the form of liquid H2, CH4 or NH3), this may be improved to a 1:3 ratio. In this case you'd still need to install about twice as much to ensure a reliable supply.
All things considered, a reliable supply of 100MW requires almost 1GW of installed power on-shore, somewhat over 500MW off-shore. (All depending on the exact conditions of the location and demand patterns.)
I didn't actually expect you to have the money (given the savings quota in the US), but if I had assumed that the investment was financed on credit, it would have been an outright loss - and unfortunately the ideologues don't take kindly towards people describing a clear picture of reality. So I just assumed to you had the money hanging around and showed that even in this case it wasn't what you call an investment.
Where do you get those 6-7% from? The example in the post I answered to had $14k profit on $30k initial investment after 25 years. That's less than 2% per annum.
All of them extremely expensive and short-term or extremely dilute and unsuitable for urban settings. Solar Millenium went bust because they kept making promises about the price of thermal storage (and the rest of their installations) they couldn't keep. Such as reducing the price of electricity to $0.04 per kWh - but practically solar-thermal stills need subsidized prices on the order of $0.40 per kWh to make the plants viable, despite having large-scale installations that should be more cost-efficient. Worse yet, new installations such as the Desertec "reference plant" to be build in Morocco are as expensive as the old ones (the "demonstration plant" in Spain, Andasol), indicating no progress.
Storing energy as heat is insanely inefficient if you want to generate electricity - and heating purposes are a whole 'nother can of worms that effectively competes with electricity generation via roof-top solar. (Even if you combine PV and thermal collectors, the high outlet temperatures are limiting PV efficiency and vice versa.) Storing heat in aquifers is not only depended on a conveniently located aquifer, but also limited in scale. Fine for rural settlements, but not for cities. And what the former safe in terms of heating, they much more than make up for due to increased transport and other energy use.
Slashdot Mirror
I COULD go out, find a couple of flint stones, make a few blades from it, build a trap to catch a deer, proceed to make a fire all by hand and get something to eat. I could, on the other hand, also go to fridge for food and turn on my stove for cooking.
Go to google scholar, research anything and you'll inevitable bumb into those extortionists. What is the point of having all that knowledge theoretically at your fingertips, if people cannot have access to it? No matter what it is - an icelandic volcano erupting and you want to know what this means for your plans to fly somewhere? Well, there are plenty of papers that will tell you about ash emissions, the impact of ash on airplanes, the concentrations of ash in the air and so on and so forth.
A nuclear reactor has a problem and you want to know what engineers found out about the likely consequences or progression of the accident, or what people in this country and other countries did about mitigation? It's right there. BUT:
$30.00 for reading a paper (which more likely than not will not contain what you are looking for) just makes it impossible to research anything at all - unless you are at least a millionaire. Just having access to one research paper per day will cost you $11000 a year. That has nothing to do with copyrights or protecting intellectual property or anything else.
It is all about extortion - thank you for trying to stop it.
Your president, not mine. The world consists of over 7 billion people, among them 0.3 billion Americans.
GWB set up a program that he knew he couldn't finance and thus put all the expenses on whoever would come after him. Of course, this didn't stop them from handing out heaps of money for useless non-development - like $450,000,000 dollars for the "Ares-1x" - an ordinary surplus shuttle booster with a mockup stage strapped on top of it, that didn't even manage to separate properly and couldn't tell anything about the flight characteristics of the real Ares-1 (with a longer 5-segment booster) anyway. For comparison: the cost of that flight was more than two full flights of the Ariane-5.
Nope. It is breaking the currents that were observed from 1995 until the early 2000's, then entering a new regime until today. Beyond that, no such observations exist due to lack of suitable satellite data.This is research, not theology.
China, India, the rest of Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America ... basically, the other 6.7billion people not living in the US (which seems to be paranoid about car-safety regulations, but for some reason hasn't banned quads or motorcycles that are much less safe any microcar...)
So, yes. The price should not be $3700 but 3000 Euro.
Micro cars don't require airbags by law in most juristictions as far as I know. As the maximum speed would be limited anyway (to save on battery drain) they are still safe enough - much more so than quads or motorbikes anyway. And if electrics are so expensive, than that's one place where you should start to save on costs, they became a whole lot cheaper since the 20ies, you know?
You are out of your mind is almost exactly what people told Henry Ford when he started making cars. By 1925 or so the Model T ended up selling for around $3000 in todays money.
$3700 is the kind of price when people would be much less bothered whether a car can go for 600km or 60km. Qualitatively less performance on almost all counts for over twice the price of an ordinary car just doesn't make sense beyond the idealistic fringe with very deep pockets, trying to polish their better-than-thou attitude to the rest of the world.
However, qualitatively less performance for a much smaller price of entry is justifable. Netbooks did this. Of course their performance rather laughable compared to a proper laptop - but you couldn't get laptop for $200. It satisfies the need of a basic mobile universal computer for a price below all other offers. The same would work for cars for a lot of commuters - it need not be all or even most. There are 300 million americans, even if it only appeals to 3 in 100 people, that's 10 mio customers.
Yes, absolutely. But it's not an airplane, it's a drone.
As a former Air Force electronic warfare technician, I'm guessing that Iran just flooded the area with high-amplitude noise jamming to trigger an automatic landing routine.
Why are you contradicting yourself?
Knowing what countermeasure to use and how to exploit an automatic routine isn't technical wizardry?
Erm, that's not a contradiction at all. It's like lockpicking vs. smashing the door. There isn't a lot of subtlety involved (or required) to jam such a signal. Drones require shitloads of bandwidth to operate (i read something like 500mbit/s) and if he was still alive, I would suggest asking Claude Shannon about difficulty of jamming high-bandwidth signals (almost none). A bit of noise and the whole thing breaks down.
1912 is an interesting year. The largest volcanic eruption of the last century happened and it took 4 years until someone assembled an expedition to find out what happened (in the middle of WWI, no less). So yes, we should take "measurements" of that time with a grain of salt or two.
The US wants to be able to attack any place on earth within 60min. It wants to be able to prevent any other country from retailiation. Space and air supremacy is the stated policy of the USA, basically world domination.
Why doesn't that figure on the clock? Oh, right.
Efficiency has nothing to do with peak power vs. total energy provided.
Your ignorance is stupefying to say the least. Try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
12TWh/600TWh = 2%
Your example only goes to prove that you haven't got the slightest clue about what words like energy and power mean. The PEAK power production that solar propaganda keeps citing bears no relationship with either the total energy thus provided nor the actual usefulness of this energy. Since you are trolling this forum in ignorance of the former, I won't even discuss the latter.
The past.
Well, over a hundred billion dollars worth of subsidies and a 2% share in energy production of PV in Germany have conclusively proven your statement to be bullshit.
I don't care about profit margins, but I do care when people lie about the price and actual effectiveness of PV or wind power. I would love to live in the world that some environmentalists think we are living in, in which PV can generate cheap electricity in huge quantities on small areas. But unfortunately those claims are based on a gross distortion of reality that a lot of people have fallen for.
I'm all for using renewable energy at a scale in which they are doing less damage than conventional energy. And no, that's not 100%. Note that not everything that is feasible in America with 20 people per square kilometer and stupidly sprawling cities is feasible in other parts of the world. Even Africa has 40 people/km^2 despite the Sahara and rainforest. The rest of the world has about 100/km^2. India will soon have 400/km^2. As for price, I don't care if it is more expensive or not, but I do care about whether it is affordable for the population as a whole or not - which is also a matter of how it is being paid. And everybody paying for the wealthy few who can afford to buy huge PV installations, which are insanely profitable thanks to stupidly high feed-in tariffs, is neither fair, nor affordable, nor something that is so much as being talked about.
Renewable energy is feasible in a supporting role, even with relatively small storage - I guess something on the order of 10%-20%. This depends a lot on usage patterns - but so does energy efficiency and usually it's a trade-off not a synergy between the two. The most energy efficient way to use energy is usually to use it continuously. But the amount also depends on the technology employed, solar thermal is pretty good in such a supporting role, as it already has a short-term energy storage included. But it is also extremely expensive, despite other claims.
I've written about this at length.
Hydro is good when it is continuously fed by rain or melting snow, but as a storage it is actually quite miserable beyond a couple of GWh. It requires paving whole mountain valleys in concrete to get any significant amount of storage.
The real numbers for wind turbines are closer to 500MW installed power, to get an average of 100MW. (On-shore, given that you said "all over the country" I assume that's what you meant.) However, if you actually want a reliable supply of energy, then "some wind somewhere" won't do. You'll have to store energy on a mass scale. Using current technology you need about 4 kWh to get 1 kWh back (true for all technologies using electrolysis of water and hydrogen at its core, whether you store it in the form of liquid H2, CH4 or NH3), this may be improved to a 1:3 ratio. In this case you'd still need to install about twice as much to ensure a reliable supply.
All things considered, a reliable supply of 100MW requires almost 1GW of installed power on-shore, somewhat over 500MW off-shore. (All depending on the exact conditions of the location and demand patterns.)
I didn't actually expect you to have the money (given the savings quota in the US), but if I had assumed that the investment was financed on credit, it would have been an outright loss - and unfortunately the ideologues don't take kindly towards people describing a clear picture of reality. So I just assumed to you had the money hanging around and showed that even in this case it wasn't what you call an investment.
He is saving $1800 a year for 8 years after having used those savings for 17 years to pay for his investment.
Where do you get those 6-7% from? The example in the post I answered to had $14k profit on $30k initial investment after 25 years. That's less than 2% per annum.
All of them extremely expensive and short-term or extremely dilute and unsuitable for urban settings. Solar Millenium went bust because they kept making promises about the price of thermal storage (and the rest of their installations) they couldn't keep. Such as reducing the price of electricity to $0.04 per kWh - but practically solar-thermal stills need subsidized prices on the order of $0.40 per kWh to make the plants viable, despite having large-scale installations that should be more cost-efficient. Worse yet, new installations such as the Desertec "reference plant" to be build in Morocco are as expensive as the old ones (the "demonstration plant" in Spain, Andasol), indicating no progress.
Storing energy as heat is insanely inefficient if you want to generate electricity - and heating purposes are a whole 'nother can of worms that effectively competes with electricity generation via roof-top solar. (Even if you combine PV and thermal collectors, the high outlet temperatures are limiting PV efficiency and vice versa.) Storing heat in aquifers is not only depended on a conveniently located aquifer, but also limited in scale. Fine for rural settlements, but not for cities. And what the former safe in terms of heating, they much more than make up for due to increased transport and other energy use.