Piracy (the hijacking of boats on the high seas) was never legal. You can't define a word which means "doing an illegal act" and have it be legal or legalized.
This was not the blizzard of 78 by a long shot. It was also a very typical winter storm for Massachusetts. Also, how does government having some responsibility translate to average citizens being arrested for attempting to travel?
Aside from the total math fail on how many solar cells would be needed and the logic fail on assuming that solar power means only solar cells, you've also failed to recognize that you can put solar cells in places where people just don't live and that, even if people want to live there, solar cells can go on top of houses.
I've seen others run the calculations. There's a reason you can't fly a commercial airliner using exclusively the solar panels you'd be able to coat the top of it. If the Sun were getting the same amount of energy into a m^3 as is contained in a m^3 of fuel pellets, we'd be toast.
Commercial jets, or anything else that requires high portable power density are a bit of a special use case. I would like to note that we don't have good nuclear options for those applications either, so your objection is a little confusing. Comparing a cubic meter of solar... something to a cubic meter of fuel pellets is a little confusing as well. The term "apples and oranges" springs to mind. Are you talking about a square meter of surface area being hit by sunlight vs. a cubic meter of fuel pellets? Why only stack them a meter high? Stack them a kilometer high! Or arbitrarily high, then you can make your comparison arbitrarily favourable to the fuel pellets. Or were you talking about a cubic meter of actual sun? In that case, you'd be talking about more than 8 times the mass of the fuel pellets in hydrogen which, being a fusion fuel, is going to produce a lot more power per kilogram than the fission fuel. So, a cubic meter of the sun is going to have dozens of times the power density of a cubic meter of fuel pellets. This is all pretty meaningless comparison of course.
With modern power transmission lines, electricity doesn't have to be produced anywhere near to where it's used. There are some liabilities in importing your power and grid upgrades might be required, but there's no reason Anchorage can't get its power from a solar plant at the equator. For that matter, there's no reason Anchorage can't get it's power from a solar plant at the equator on the opposite side of the planet. It's probably more practical to use some form of local power storage for the times when local solar or wind can't cut it, but have the option of buying power from far away as well.
Molten salt sounds great. All I am saying is that on-demand energy will always be needed.
Molten salt is on demand. It's not unlimited and obviously the heat needs to be replenished, but all on-demand power methods require some sort of refueling. You need to make sure you have capacity to only need other power a small fraction of the time and then you import power the rest of the time.
mostly annoying asteroid that broke Russian windows.
Right, the mostly annoying half megaton explosion that injured over a thousand people and hospitalized over a hundred, and caused tens of millions of dollars of property damage. Most of the damage was broken glass, but it did manage to collapse the roof of one factory. If it had managed to last another half a second or so before exploding, it probably would have killed a hundred thousand or more people. I guess, in the grand scheme of things, that might only count as mostly annoying, but not to the people who live there.
Russia stopped Germany from moving too far north. The would not have beaten Germany back into it's own country... Lets not over blow things
Umm... What parallel universe are you getting your history from? The Soviets not only beat the Germans back into their own country, they marched right into Berlin, effectively winning the European part of the war. You may have heard of the country of East Germany that existed for 40 years that was created from the territory the Soviets seized.
Well, Richards herself made comments about how the guys involved felt safe in their anonymity. That seems to strongly suggest that they weren't trying to be overheard.
Also, what's with this "you geeks" stuff? Not only is it an unfair generalization that geeks/nerds don't have manners, it's also unusual to hear on Slashdot since, if you aren't a geek yourself, what are you doing here?
Without the exploitation of fossil fuel reserves, we probably wouldn't have gotten to where we are as a civilization. Where we are as a civilization is not necessarily all good, but we can ignore that for a moment. It's pretty clear that, with current technology, we couldn't feed our population without fossil fuels, but our population is growing, and the fossil fuels will run out. However long we might be able to extend useful extraction for, we know that there's an end coming, and we're not likely to be able to shrink our population back down ourselves when we reach that point. If we don't have replacements in place at that time, reality will quickly and efficiently reduce our population to sustainable levels for us. That kind of dependence isn't great for society.
As grim a picture as you paint, however, predicting how things would have gone without some particular accident of history is difficult. Unless it's somehow impossible to use renewable resources to power a civilization like ours, it's entirely possible that, without ready fossil fuels, civilization might have evolved to one as good as what we have now. Cutting down forests for firewood or to make charcoal was an unfortunate problem of the past, but one that could be mitigated or fully corrected by responsible forestry.
The main point is that, unless we can move to alternatives, then the civilization we take for granted will just be a brif blip on the timeline of history.
Inefficient compared to what? Pretty much all the carbon in plants and in fossil fuels got there through that kind of process, so it's clearly more efficient than fossil fuels if you actually consider the entire cycle. pretty much all plant and animal life is reliant on such a cycle. If you actually want to use hydrocarbons for fuel for any decent amount of time (millenia or centuries, or maybe even just decades more) then there aren't really any other choices.
Best bet would seem to be to use a radioisotope generator with a Stirling engine. No steam required that way. Driving wheels directly with a Stirling engine wouldn't be practical for a car, so you'd need to make it a hybrid where the engine charges a modest battery bank which runs the electric motor(s) which turn the wheels. The ideal radioisotope would be plutonium 238 due to its high safety and low shielding requirements. Provided, that is, that you could somehow manage to get enough to put a few hundred kilograms of it into millions of cars, which seems a little unlikely.
The GP is talking about generating fuel for things like internal combustion engines using, for example, water and atmospheric CO2. That's the idea behind most biofuels, for example. Plants pull CO2 from the atmosphere, then make carbohydrates and lipids, etc. to store energy. You then directly burn the lipids, or ferment the carbohydrates, or chemically process into hydrocarbons, etc. to get a replacement for petrol or diesel. Otherwise, you can directly create methane (main component of natural gas) using CO2 from the atmosphere and the Sabatier process, then use that to directly run engines or as a feedstock for chemical processes to create more complex hydrocarbons.
Fourth paragraph of the Wikipedia article you linked contains: "High-voltage direct-current (HVDC) technology is used for greater efficiency in very long distances (typically hundreds of miles (kilometres))"
I'm not claiming that "natural" always means good myself, but is using a farm animal as an example really a good example of "natural"? You're reminding me of that preacher who thought that bananas were a perfect example of the hand of god in designing the universe because they're so convenient. He was apparently completely unaware that the bananas he's used to are the result of extensive manipulation through human cultivation over millenia.
To be fair "I've heard of the people waiting in lines in the old [United States] for the chance to buy bread and then to find that there was none to buy after a certain point." For that matter, every time there's been any decent sized snowfall where I live this winter, the gas stations have run out of fuel. Supply problems just aren't unique to socialism. As you say though, the important thing is balance.
You do know that "subsidized oil" is used to manufacture and transport solar collection equipment. If we devoted our entire GNP to making solar cells for the next ten years we couldn't make enough to replace fossil fuels and we would need to burn twice what we use now to just to try
$15.3 trillion GNP and power usage of about 2.94 terawatts. So, spending the entire GNP on solar cells (which are not the most cost efficient way to gather solar power when building power plants), would allow $5.20 per watt. I personally abhor the way solar cells are rated in plain watts, but as an average, it's not too far off. Anyway, current prices are anywhere from $0.50 to $0.70 per watt. So, using the entire current GNP on solar cells would seem to be enough, by far, to cover paying for that many solar cells. We probably would have to burn a lot more fossil fuels on the short term to make them, and rapidly ramping up production would be quite a feat. With the generous funding you propose, however, ten years would be way more time than we would need.
Pea soup fog, mine fires burning for decades, mining towns, oil tycoons with private armies, ocean acidification, all kinds of other air pollution, war after war after war, etc. There are counterpoints to all of these. Relatively cheap, plentiful energy is a counterpoint. Nevertheless, there are enough points on the horrible side that "Read that. Analyze it. Know that it's nonsensical." is nonsensical in its own right. You can argue the point, but you can't just tritely wave it aside like that.
This is Slashdot, I can tell by your low UID that you've been here a while. We're not typically the kind of crowd that accepts claims of invention from political types whose only input was to vote on funding.
Cannabis is illegal because its effects are more pronounced than tobacco (which had addicted too many people by the time its effects were clear to realistically ban) and it's not as widely used and available as alcohol.
I spent a five hour stretch today with a heavy smoker who didn't have access to cigarettes for that five hours. He was off the wall crazy for most of that time. I would call it a pretty pronounced effect. Now, admittedly, that's a withdrawal symptom rather than a direct effect, but that desperate, almost constant need for nicotine in smokers really stands out to me.
Which is it then? Does the crime of money laundering require the money to come from illegal sources, or is dodging reporting requirements for legally obtained profit also money laundering?
There are prostitutes, strippers, and dancers that made a fair choice about their jobs, but it'd be hard to say what percentage got pushed into the field due to unreasonable social pressures and/or firm backhands.
It's especially hard to say because they're afraid to step forward and say anything due to the fact that they'll be thrown in prison themselves. One of the reasons pimps have always had such an easy time preying on women already working as prostitutes or women that they force into prostitution is that, once a woman is working as a prostitute, her (generally correct) assumption is that the authorities won't really want to help her, but rather will want to punish her.
As has been mentioned, it could be some kind of power condition that the UPS is letting through. Some sort of long term monitoring, or some expensive power-cleaning equipment seem to be the only ways to figure that out. Why that would affect a desktop and not a laptop is a bit of a mystery, but maybe the power filtering in laptops is just better.
It could also be something environmental. Iron filings in the air (more likely to affect a desktop than a laptop since desktop designs tend to circulate more air directly over electronic components rather than just heat sink radiators) or some other chemical in the air. I read once about an epidemic of electrical problems in a neighbourhood where it turned out that cheap, sulphur-laden drywall was causing everything metallic nearby to corrode. Could also be high humidity causing condensation and a desktop is probably a better humidity trap than a laptop. Aside from that, someone else mentioned a microwave transmitter. There could be a transmitter, or a piece of industrial equipment, or even some kind of natural source from some sort of seismic activity somewhere nearby. Once again, a laptop could very well be better shielded than a desktop. Aside from EM it could also be sonic. Low frequency vibrations from some sort of industrial equipment? For that matter, does he live at the end of a runway?
Then, of course, that expensively created sine wave feeds into the power supplies of various devices which almost universally internally demand flat, DC current. There's something very wrong with us.
Slashdot Mirror
Piracy (the hijacking of boats on the high seas) was never legal. You can't define a word which means "doing an illegal act" and have it be legal or legalized.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque
This was not the blizzard of 78 by a long shot. It was also a very typical winter storm for Massachusetts. Also, how does government having some responsibility translate to average citizens being arrested for attempting to travel?
Aside from the total math fail on how many solar cells would be needed and the logic fail on assuming that solar power means only solar cells, you've also failed to recognize that you can put solar cells in places where people just don't live and that, even if people want to live there, solar cells can go on top of houses.
I've seen others run the calculations. There's a reason you can't fly a commercial airliner using exclusively the solar panels you'd be able to coat the top of it. If the Sun were getting the same amount of energy into a m^3 as is contained in a m^3 of fuel pellets, we'd be toast.
Commercial jets, or anything else that requires high portable power density are a bit of a special use case. I would like to note that we don't have good nuclear options for those applications either, so your objection is a little confusing. Comparing a cubic meter of solar... something to a cubic meter of fuel pellets is a little confusing as well. The term "apples and oranges" springs to mind. Are you talking about a square meter of surface area being hit by sunlight vs. a cubic meter of fuel pellets? Why only stack them a meter high? Stack them a kilometer high! Or arbitrarily high, then you can make your comparison arbitrarily favourable to the fuel pellets. Or were you talking about a cubic meter of actual sun? In that case, you'd be talking about more than 8 times the mass of the fuel pellets in hydrogen which, being a fusion fuel, is going to produce a lot more power per kilogram than the fission fuel. So, a cubic meter of the sun is going to have dozens of times the power density of a cubic meter of fuel pellets. This is all pretty meaningless comparison of course.
With modern power transmission lines, electricity doesn't have to be produced anywhere near to where it's used. There are some liabilities in importing your power and grid upgrades might be required, but there's no reason Anchorage can't get its power from a solar plant at the equator. For that matter, there's no reason Anchorage can't get it's power from a solar plant at the equator on the opposite side of the planet. It's probably more practical to use some form of local power storage for the times when local solar or wind can't cut it, but have the option of buying power from far away as well.
Molten salt sounds great. All I am saying is that on-demand energy will always be needed.
Molten salt is on demand. It's not unlimited and obviously the heat needs to be replenished, but all on-demand power methods require some sort of refueling. You need to make sure you have capacity to only need other power a small fraction of the time and then you import power the rest of the time.
mostly annoying asteroid that broke Russian windows.
Right, the mostly annoying half megaton explosion that injured over a thousand people and hospitalized over a hundred, and caused tens of millions of dollars of property damage. Most of the damage was broken glass, but it did manage to collapse the roof of one factory. If it had managed to last another half a second or so before exploding, it probably would have killed a hundred thousand or more people. I guess, in the grand scheme of things, that might only count as mostly annoying, but not to the people who live there.
Actually it is, since XY females are usually, but not always, sterile.
Russia stopped Germany from moving too far north. The would not have beaten Germany back into it's own country ...
Lets not over blow things
Umm... What parallel universe are you getting your history from? The Soviets not only beat the Germans back into their own country, they marched right into Berlin, effectively winning the European part of the war. You may have heard of the country of East Germany that existed for 40 years that was created from the territory the Soviets seized.
Well, Richards herself made comments about how the guys involved felt safe in their anonymity. That seems to strongly suggest that they weren't trying to be overheard.
Also, what's with this "you geeks" stuff? Not only is it an unfair generalization that geeks/nerds don't have manners, it's also unusual to hear on Slashdot since, if you aren't a geek yourself, what are you doing here?
Without the exploitation of fossil fuel reserves, we probably wouldn't have gotten to where we are as a civilization. Where we are as a civilization is not necessarily all good, but we can ignore that for a moment. It's pretty clear that, with current technology, we couldn't feed our population without fossil fuels, but our population is growing, and the fossil fuels will run out. However long we might be able to extend useful extraction for, we know that there's an end coming, and we're not likely to be able to shrink our population back down ourselves when we reach that point. If we don't have replacements in place at that time, reality will quickly and efficiently reduce our population to sustainable levels for us. That kind of dependence isn't great for society.
As grim a picture as you paint, however, predicting how things would have gone without some particular accident of history is difficult. Unless it's somehow impossible to use renewable resources to power a civilization like ours, it's entirely possible that, without ready fossil fuels, civilization might have evolved to one as good as what we have now. Cutting down forests for firewood or to make charcoal was an unfortunate problem of the past, but one that could be mitigated or fully corrected by responsible forestry.
The main point is that, unless we can move to alternatives, then the civilization we take for granted will just be a brif blip on the timeline of history.
Inefficient compared to what? Pretty much all the carbon in plants and in fossil fuels got there through that kind of process, so it's clearly more efficient than fossil fuels if you actually consider the entire cycle. pretty much all plant and animal life is reliant on such a cycle. If you actually want to use hydrocarbons for fuel for any decent amount of time (millenia or centuries, or maybe even just decades more) then there aren't really any other choices.
But they're not separate crimes. The law they used to go after the farmer was the Bank Secrecy Act, which is a money laundering statute.
Best bet would seem to be to use a radioisotope generator with a Stirling engine. No steam required that way. Driving wheels directly with a Stirling engine wouldn't be practical for a car, so you'd need to make it a hybrid where the engine charges a modest battery bank which runs the electric motor(s) which turn the wheels. The ideal radioisotope would be plutonium 238 due to its high safety and low shielding requirements. Provided, that is, that you could somehow manage to get enough to put a few hundred kilograms of it into millions of cars, which seems a little unlikely.
The GP is talking about generating fuel for things like internal combustion engines using, for example, water and atmospheric CO2. That's the idea behind most biofuels, for example. Plants pull CO2 from the atmosphere, then make carbohydrates and lipids, etc. to store energy. You then directly burn the lipids, or ferment the carbohydrates, or chemically process into hydrocarbons, etc. to get a replacement for petrol or diesel. Otherwise, you can directly create methane (main component of natural gas) using CO2 from the atmosphere and the Sabatier process, then use that to directly run engines or as a feedstock for chemical processes to create more complex hydrocarbons.
Fourth paragraph of the Wikipedia article you linked contains:
"High-voltage direct-current (HVDC) technology is used for greater efficiency in very long distances (typically hundreds of miles (kilometres))"
I'm not claiming that "natural" always means good myself, but is using a farm animal as an example really a good example of "natural"? You're reminding me of that preacher who thought that bananas were a perfect example of the hand of god in designing the universe because they're so convenient. He was apparently completely unaware that the bananas he's used to are the result of extensive manipulation through human cultivation over millenia.
To be fair "I've heard of the people waiting in lines in the old [United States] for the chance to buy bread and then to find that there was none to buy after a certain point." For that matter, every time there's been any decent sized snowfall where I live this winter, the gas stations have run out of fuel. Supply problems just aren't unique to socialism. As you say though, the important thing is balance.
You do know that "subsidized oil" is used to manufacture and transport solar collection equipment. If we devoted our entire GNP to making solar cells for the next ten years we couldn't make enough to replace fossil fuels and we would need to burn twice what we use now to just to try
$15.3 trillion GNP and power usage of about 2.94 terawatts. So, spending the entire GNP on solar cells (which are not the most cost efficient way to gather solar power when building power plants), would allow $5.20 per watt. I personally abhor the way solar cells are rated in plain watts, but as an average, it's not too far off. Anyway, current prices are anywhere from $0.50 to $0.70 per watt. So, using the entire current GNP on solar cells would seem to be enough, by far, to cover paying for that many solar cells. We probably would have to burn a lot more fossil fuels on the short term to make them, and rapidly ramping up production would be quite a feat. With the generous funding you propose, however, ten years would be way more time than we would need.
Pea soup fog, mine fires burning for decades, mining towns, oil tycoons with private armies, ocean acidification, all kinds of other air pollution, war after war after war, etc. There are counterpoints to all of these. Relatively cheap, plentiful energy is a counterpoint. Nevertheless, there are enough points on the horrible side that "Read that. Analyze it. Know that it's nonsensical." is nonsensical in its own right. You can argue the point, but you can't just tritely wave it aside like that.
This is Slashdot, I can tell by your low UID that you've been here a while. We're not typically the kind of crowd that accepts claims of invention from political types whose only input was to vote on funding.
Cannabis is illegal because its effects are more pronounced than tobacco (which had addicted too many people by the time its effects were clear to realistically ban) and it's not as widely used and available as alcohol.
I spent a five hour stretch today with a heavy smoker who didn't have access to cigarettes for that five hours. He was off the wall crazy for most of that time. I would call it a pretty pronounced effect. Now, admittedly, that's a withdrawal symptom rather than a direct effect, but that desperate, almost constant need for nicotine in smokers really stands out to me.
Which is it then? Does the crime of money laundering require the money to come from illegal sources, or is dodging reporting requirements for legally obtained profit also money laundering?
There are prostitutes, strippers, and dancers that made a fair choice about their jobs, but it'd be hard to say what percentage got pushed into the field due to unreasonable social pressures and/or firm backhands.
It's especially hard to say because they're afraid to step forward and say anything due to the fact that they'll be thrown in prison themselves. One of the reasons pimps have always had such an easy time preying on women already working as prostitutes or women that they force into prostitution is that, once a woman is working as a prostitute, her (generally correct) assumption is that the authorities won't really want to help her, but rather will want to punish her.
As has been mentioned, it could be some kind of power condition that the UPS is letting through. Some sort of long term monitoring, or some expensive power-cleaning equipment seem to be the only ways to figure that out. Why that would affect a desktop and not a laptop is a bit of a mystery, but maybe the power filtering in laptops is just better.
It could also be something environmental. Iron filings in the air (more likely to affect a desktop than a laptop since desktop designs tend to circulate more air directly over electronic components rather than just heat sink radiators) or some other chemical in the air. I read once about an epidemic of electrical problems in a neighbourhood where it turned out that cheap, sulphur-laden drywall was causing everything metallic nearby to corrode. Could also be high humidity causing condensation and a desktop is probably a better humidity trap than a laptop. Aside from that, someone else mentioned a microwave transmitter. There could be a transmitter, or a piece of industrial equipment, or even some kind of natural source from some sort of seismic activity somewhere nearby. Once again, a laptop could very well be better shielded than a desktop. Aside from EM it could also be sonic. Low frequency vibrations from some sort of industrial equipment? For that matter, does he live at the end of a runway?
Then, of course, that expensively created sine wave feeds into the power supplies of various devices which almost universally internally demand flat, DC current. There's something very wrong with us.