You are totally correct, you need to examine life cycle costs.
Costs can include:
Economic (intial, use, disposal) Environmental Personal (inconvieniece) Local (big stinky local plant) National (security) Global (sustainable)
So really it is a neat multi objective optimization problem, Pareto optimality and Nash equilibria and all that stuff. Your objective function is a weighted objective:
obj = w1 E + w2 P + w3 L + w4 N + w5 G
Since those values aren't all $ costs, it also depends on how you evaluate each function and there is some uncertainty in how you evaluate them. You pick your weighting values wi and how you evaluate the function to find your best solution.
You pay $50 a month for "basic" cable and they still dump ads on you. They make you pay for stuff that is nothing but ads (QVC, MTV).
I have even heard ads on XM recently on the music channels. Sat radio was founded on a no-ad policy, but they are sneaking in.
This is why projects like mythtv are important. Open source PVR technology. Problem is, next generation HDMI / Blue Ray / HD DVD won't let you save DRM material to your HD (AFAIK). You will get the broadcast HD unencrypted, but the cable will not be recordable.
I am sure the pirates will think of something, but I want to be able to skip commercials if possible.
Right, both parties have different things they hate.
Why ban anything? Why not make violent video games require adult (18 year old) to buy? I think some states are doing that.
I think nudie magazine require an ID in most places.
Most hard core porn web sites require credit card, so kids can't get access (usually). You can set what businesses a credit card works at, so parents that get CCs for kids can limit that.
The problem I see is the free access, click here if you are 18 sites that make money off advertising. How do you control that? How do you make sure it is for 18 year olds? How do you decide what content goes behind that wall?
As a parent, I will be looking into whitelist technology for my home computers in about 5 years. For everyone else, I would not force my morality on them, but technology to block porn sites should be encouraged for people with kids. If my kid is smart enough to get around the blocking software, he and she should be able to see what crazy crap is out there and make their own minds up.
Reminds me of a friend who grew up next to a XXX drive in. He used his telescope as an excuse to get out of the house (HA). He also learned all his sex ed from the films, so growing up he had some odd misconceptions about sex.
It is not the government's job to tell you what books to read or what sites to visit. You can't legislate personal responsibility for parents.
You sorta alluded to fertilizer. I think most fertilizers are produced from petrochemicals, natural gas I think. All those great strides in increasing our crop output are built on continued availability of petrochem for fertilizer production.
I have been pushing the Firefox series of books on friends. Great intro to living off the land, I think. Wish I had time to have a decent garden and live more natural a life. My HOA won't let me have solar, and my yard is not big enough for a decent garden...
I doubt the battery technology will last 100k, especially in the heat and cold.
You always have capacity fade with time. Maybe you can get 100k, but the last 25k may be 50 mile charges, not 200.
And what do you do with 6000+ bats? They are not very environmentally friendly or cheap to dispose of. I don't think you can just melt it down and make a new humvee like you can with steel.
I see your point on long distance travel, most people commute. When you do have a long trip, maybe a gas / EtOH rental would work. What about medium trips to grandma's about 2.5 hours away or a day trip to the beach? There are a good many cases where 250 miles may not cut it, and you don't want the problems of a rental. People like convenience, and the US generally will pay for it.
The thing I would like to see are mandates for every new car to be outfitted to run E85. I read the sensors / modifications for this add maybe $50 to the cost of the car. That frees up a bit of option for those in the us. I would also like to see hookups included in all cars so you could add a Propane or LP tank (which takes trunk space and costs a bit more). Gas IC engines can run all four fuels with minor mods and would help develop infrastructure and lower costs.
I don't like taxes as a solution either, but it could work to discourage undesirable behaviors, like our dependence on oil.
The way we usually do it here in the states is offer tax breaks, so it does not generate new income to be mis-managed by the gubbament, only reduces the budget.
If you are mostly driven by environmental concerns (global warming / cooling / change) you run into the kyoto problem, where a boatload of countries don't have the same standards and you end up just costing a group of people a lot of money without doing much impact on your target goals.
The long term way is to get a variety of technologies viable so the market can compete and find a new equilibrium that is hopefully better than the last.
Right, Ethanol may not be the best way. Energy costs to harvest, energy costs to convert biomass to ethanol, and land use issues get in the way. You only get 1-2 harvests per year, while PV solar goes on any sunny day.
Tesla costs what, $100k? That is a bit unreasonable. And the batteries need replacing periodically.
Coolest tech I have seen recently are mutant algae that produces butanol. Butanol should separate from water easily (ethanol separation from water is quite energy intensive). Algae ponds can be very efficient conversion for land mass and have limited harvest energy costs. When growing, the algae makes fuel, later you can harvest biomass and convert that to energy as well.
Problem in these methods lies in maintenance. How long do pipes in the sea or underground last? Depends on how you install them or what they are made of. If you have to dig up your backyard 10 feet down every ten years, is it worth it? Maybe, maybe not.
Solar hot water is fairly easy to do and not too complex.
PV Solar would be great, since you have no moving anything (liquid and turbines lead to failures). Stick them out, keep leaves off them, and out comes power.
There are new advances in manufacturing coming online as well. PV cells on flexible material printed like a printing press, leading to half the efficiency but at 1/10 the cost... We should get there, especially if the middle east keeps oil up.
And they are getting more expensive. I think a lot of the PV solar industries use off-spec or lower grade silicon (refuse?) from the high end CPU / RAM chip fabs.
With chip demand increasing, the supplies are getting tight on silane in some cases, so the lower cost PV that operates closer to margin gets the shaft.
Did you see that high school wrestler that had lost his legs? He could wrestle in a much lower weight class. His upper body strength was huge compared to his scrawny opponents, but he had trouble with leverage in some cases. Useless legs...
People buy SUVs because they work. You can haul a boat or your entire basketball team. You can't do that in your EV1 or prius.
People buy SUVs because they are convenient. You can refuel in 5-10 minutes almost anywhere and drive 300 miles. Your EV1 is ready to go 100 miles (maybe) in just a few hours using a special charger.
People buy SUVs because they last. You can drive a SUV into the ground, while you need to replace batteries in your EV1 in just a few years.
Electrolosys causes maybe 85% energy loss, you would never generate hydrogen that way.
Batteries are a decent storage medium for electricity (but maybe not due to energy density issues). Hydrogen is a good storage medium for chemical energy (maybe nuclear if they get new high temp hydrogen cycles working).
Gas prices may not be so bad, due to inflation. We are not 2x, just equal to the max value: http://zfacts.com/p/35.html
We need choices, and bio-diesel is one of them. Ethanol from corn or sugar or switch grass is an option, cellulosic ethanol is another (harder to get ethanol from cellulose) Solar and wind are some of my favorites, and we certainly could use new nuclear plants. They even are developing new nuclear cycles that generate hydrogen efficiently.
We need lots of options, and maybe a few will be viable. You can't just bet on one, they all need to be looked at to some extent. Diversification in the energy realm will also make us more robust.
Do you have any clue about fuel cell technology? PV solar cells? You can't just spout off "oil companies are bad, mmmkay."
Current PEMFC fuel cells use a lot of platinum and are generally pretty big for automotive use. There are a lot of hurdles to get past (including hydrogen storage).
And hydrogen is not energy, it is a way to transport / store energy. Hydrogen won't solve all our problems.
And soloer has been five years out for thirty years. They are getting better, but it still is not economically viable.
If oil stays up above $60, maybe we will see more new technology. Most likely, we will see a lot of coal gasification plants go up, since we have 200 years of coal in the US.
You personally can get all the hippee environmental technology you want, you just have to pay 2x or 3x or 10x for it. Have fun.
Exactly. But latex is best for math and complex documents (cross reference and citation stuff).
Colors and lines and pictures of the family and art stuff may not be easy in latex.
PS- Anyone using LaTeX on a PC, check out the new 1.4.2 version of LyX with a installer that does everythging for you (GS, latex, spellchecker libs). LyX is a great front end to LaTeX, but getting it to work under cygwin once was a beast. I have used it for nearly ten years and have been quite happy with the results. Math you can see, tables, figures that look like tables and figures. Beautiful!
Thank you so very much! You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Leave it up to some CS nerds to make a totally non-intuitive interface. Why would personal preferences not be in your personal preferences section? And what is up with the heiroglifics in the little section window? Did they really think that was comprehensible? Insane.
Now for bonus points, how do I get rid of tagging? And what the heck is that garbage? Back in my day we had html, and we liked it! vi or emacs was all you needed to make pages work in mosaic. Bah!
Anyone figured out how to turn off these silly backslash articles?
If I want to read an article, I will read an article. I don't need it summarized so idiots can comment on comments that comment on a some silly web page.
For that matter, I thought we once were able to selectively choose what topics we want to read on/.. I can't find that in my preferences any more...
Also, how do I turn off that silly tagging deal? It just clutters the page.
Finally, could someone help me print out my email? HA.
If you are in a technical field, consider LaTeX. I personally love LyX, a frontend for LaTeX that lets you see what you are doing (instead of just use a text editor to hack tex code).
Great output, great control, great everything but rough learning curve, unless you use LyX.
I still have tex files from over a decade ago that work fine. How many Word files from 1995 work fine for you?
And the new 1.4.2 PC LyX installer is 10x better than the old one, it automatically installs all you need (ghostscript, latex, dictionary, others).
There are even tex2word and word2tex converters (non free) in case you do need to convert a few files.
I keep Office / OOo / Crossover for reading email attachments and rarely use them in the real world.
It is pretty obvious you weren't whoring. Standard practice here is to cut and past some lengthy thoughtful (?) comment from the original or some previous version of the story to get karma with limited work. You wrote a simple one-liner.
And apologies on/.? What are we coming to? only flames please...
And then use google to automatically find highly rated comments from the previous dupe and post them automagically to karma whore on/.
Speaking of automatic, could someone develop coordinated automatic scripts to take over digg? If they vote on front page stories, how many zombie clients would it take to push your stupid story or slashvertisement to their page or maybe make a couple stories dupe or trupe. I think I read they do have some sort of uber editor that does promote and kill stories, so it is not total control...
Slashdot Mirror
You are totally correct, you need to examine life cycle costs.
Costs can include:
Economic (intial, use, disposal)
Environmental
Personal (inconvieniece)
Local (big stinky local plant)
National (security)
Global (sustainable)
So really it is a neat multi objective optimization problem, Pareto optimality and Nash equilibria and all that stuff. Your objective function is a weighted objective:
obj = w1 E + w2 P + w3 L + w4 N + w5 G
Since those values aren't all $ costs, it also depends on how you evaluate each function and there is some uncertainty in how you evaluate them. You pick your weighting values wi and how you evaluate the function to find your best solution.
You pay $50 a month for "basic" cable and they still dump ads on you. They make you pay for stuff that is nothing but ads (QVC, MTV).
I have even heard ads on XM recently on the music channels. Sat radio was founded on a no-ad policy, but they are sneaking in.
This is why projects like mythtv are important. Open source PVR technology. Problem is, next generation HDMI / Blue Ray / HD DVD won't let you save DRM material to your HD (AFAIK). You will get the broadcast HD unencrypted, but the cable will not be recordable.
I am sure the pirates will think of something, but I want to be able to skip commercials if possible.
Right, both parties have different things they hate.
Why ban anything? Why not make violent video games require adult (18 year old) to buy? I think some states are doing that.
I think nudie magazine require an ID in most places.
Most hard core porn web sites require credit card, so kids can't get access (usually). You can set what businesses a credit card works at, so parents that get CCs for kids can limit that.
The problem I see is the free access, click here if you are 18 sites that make money off advertising. How do you control that? How do you make sure it is for 18 year olds? How do you decide what content goes behind that wall?
As a parent, I will be looking into whitelist technology for my home computers in about 5 years. For everyone else, I would not force my morality on them, but technology to block porn sites should be encouraged for people with kids. If my kid is smart enough to get around the blocking software, he and she should be able to see what crazy crap is out there and make their own minds up.
Reminds me of a friend who grew up next to a XXX drive in. He used his telescope as an excuse to get out of the house (HA). He also learned all his sex ed from the films, so growing up he had some odd misconceptions about sex.
It is not the government's job to tell you what books to read or what sites to visit. You can't legislate personal responsibility for parents.
And if you are logged in, you can turn off sigs in your preferences. I have no clue what this thread is about as a result...
You sorta alluded to fertilizer. I think most fertilizers are produced from petrochemicals, natural gas I think. All those great strides in increasing our crop output are built on continued availability of petrochem for fertilizer production.
I have been pushing the Firefox series of books on friends. Great intro to living off the land, I think. Wish I had time to have a decent garden and live more natural a life. My HOA won't let me have solar, and my yard is not big enough for a decent garden...
I doubt the battery technology will last 100k, especially in the heat and cold.
You always have capacity fade with time. Maybe you can get 100k, but the last 25k may be 50 mile charges, not 200.
And what do you do with 6000+ bats? They are not very environmentally friendly or cheap to dispose of. I don't think you can just melt it down and make a new humvee like you can with steel.
I see your point on long distance travel, most people commute. When you do have a long trip, maybe a gas / EtOH rental would work. What about medium trips to grandma's about 2.5 hours away or a day trip to the beach? There are a good many cases where 250 miles may not cut it, and you don't want the problems of a rental. People like convenience, and the US generally will pay for it.
The thing I would like to see are mandates for every new car to be outfitted to run E85. I read the sensors / modifications for this add maybe $50 to the cost of the car. That frees up a bit of option for those in the us. I would also like to see hookups included in all cars so you could add a Propane or LP tank (which takes trunk space and costs a bit more). Gas IC engines can run all four fuels with minor mods and would help develop infrastructure and lower costs.
I don't like taxes as a solution either, but it could work to discourage undesirable behaviors, like our dependence on oil.
The way we usually do it here in the states is offer tax breaks, so it does not generate new income to be mis-managed by the gubbament, only reduces the budget.
If you are mostly driven by environmental concerns (global warming / cooling / change) you run into the kyoto problem, where a boatload of countries don't have the same standards and you end up just costing a group of people a lot of money without doing much impact on your target goals.
The long term way is to get a variety of technologies viable so the market can compete and find a new equilibrium that is hopefully better than the last.
Right, Ethanol may not be the best way. Energy costs to harvest, energy costs to convert biomass to ethanol, and land use issues get in the way. You only get 1-2 harvests per year, while PV solar goes on any sunny day.
Tesla costs what, $100k? That is a bit unreasonable. And the batteries need replacing periodically.
Coolest tech I have seen recently are mutant algae that produces butanol. Butanol should separate from water easily (ethanol separation from water is quite energy intensive). Algae ponds can be very efficient conversion for land mass and have limited harvest energy costs. When growing, the algae makes fuel, later you can harvest biomass and convert that to energy as well.
Take a class in engineering thermodynamics, or just read up on the topic. Amazing stuff.
IC/Diesel/HVAC cycles are neat to see.
And remember, don't open your refrigerator to cool your house.
Problem in these methods lies in maintenance. How long do pipes in the sea or underground last? Depends on how you install them or what they are made of. If you have to dig up your backyard 10 feet down every ten years, is it worth it? Maybe, maybe not.
Solar hot water is fairly easy to do and not too complex.
PV Solar would be great, since you have no moving anything (liquid and turbines lead to failures). Stick them out, keep leaves off them, and out comes power.
There are new advances in manufacturing coming online as well. PV cells on flexible material printed like a printing press, leading to half the efficiency but at 1/10 the cost... We should get there, especially if the middle east keeps oil up.
And they are getting more expensive. I think a lot of the PV solar industries use off-spec or lower grade silicon (refuse?) from the high end CPU / RAM chip fabs.
With chip demand increasing, the supplies are getting tight on silane in some cases, so the lower cost PV that operates closer to margin gets the shaft.
http://renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?i
Did you see that high school wrestler that had lost his legs? He could wrestle in a much lower weight class. His upper body strength was huge compared to his scrawny opponents, but he had trouble with leverage in some cases. Useless legs...
People buy SUVs because they work. You can haul a boat or your entire basketball team. You can't do that in your EV1 or prius.
- 8232-4e9d-89f6-622a5327b670
People buy SUVs because they are convenient. You can refuel in 5-10 minutes almost anywhere and drive 300 miles. Your EV1 is ready to go 100 miles (maybe) in just a few hours using a special charger.
People buy SUVs because they last. You can drive a SUV into the ground, while you need to replace batteries in your EV1 in just a few years.
Electrolosys causes maybe 85% energy loss, you would never generate hydrogen that way.
Batteries are a decent storage medium for electricity (but maybe not due to energy density issues). Hydrogen is a good storage medium for chemical energy (maybe nuclear if they get new high temp hydrogen cycles working).
Gas prices may not be so bad, due to inflation. We are not 2x, just equal to the max value:
http://zfacts.com/p/35.html
And your hybrid may not be the way to go, using a full life cycle analysis:
http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?7a1f3b0c
We need choices, and bio-diesel is one of them. Ethanol from corn or sugar or switch grass is an option, cellulosic ethanol is another (harder to get ethanol from cellulose) Solar and wind are some of my favorites, and we certainly could use new nuclear plants. They even are developing new nuclear cycles that generate hydrogen efficiently.
We need lots of options, and maybe a few will be viable. You can't just bet on one, they all need to be looked at to some extent. Diversification in the energy realm will also make us more robust.
Do you have any clue about fuel cell technology? PV solar cells? You can't just spout off "oil companies are bad, mmmkay."
Current PEMFC fuel cells use a lot of platinum and are generally pretty big for automotive use. There are a lot of hurdles to get past (including hydrogen storage).
And hydrogen is not energy, it is a way to transport / store energy. Hydrogen won't solve all our problems.
And soloer has been five years out for thirty years. They are getting better, but it still is not economically viable.
If oil stays up above $60, maybe we will see more new technology. Most likely, we will see a lot of coal gasification plants go up, since we have 200 years of coal in the US.
You personally can get all the hippee environmental technology you want, you just have to pay 2x or 3x or 10x for it. Have fun.
Exactly. But latex is best for math and complex documents (cross reference and citation stuff).
Colors and lines and pictures of the family and art stuff may not be easy in latex.
PS- Anyone using LaTeX on a PC, check out the new 1.4.2 version of LyX with a installer that does everythging for you (GS, latex, spellchecker libs). LyX is a great front end to LaTeX, but getting it to work under cygwin once was a beast. I have used it for nearly ten years and have been quite happy with the results. Math you can see, tables, figures that look like tables and figures. Beautiful!
Thank you so very much! You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Leave it up to some CS nerds to make a totally non-intuitive interface. Why would personal preferences not be in your personal preferences section? And what is up with the heiroglifics in the little section window? Did they really think that was comprehensible? Insane.
Now for bonus points, how do I get rid of tagging? And what the heck is that garbage? Back in my day we had html, and we liked it! vi or emacs was all you needed to make pages work in mosaic. Bah!
Why not just browse at 4+ or 3+? I have been doing that recently and it cuts things down to about 5-15 responses. Or use alterslash.org.
Posting a summary is just a officially sanctioned dupe.
Anyone figured out how to turn off these silly backslash articles?
/.. I can't find that in my preferences any more...
If I want to read an article, I will read an article. I don't need it summarized so idiots can comment on comments that comment on a some silly web page.
For that matter, I thought we once were able to selectively choose what topics we want to read on
Also, how do I turn off that silly tagging deal? It just clutters the page.
Finally, could someone help me print out my email? HA.
And I get modded offtopic? The freaking story was posted three times, I think that is relevant.
Is there more original ontopic stuff to say about a story we have seen THREE TIMES?
At one point we were calling these "trupes" instead, following along the "dupe" lines.
Tripe is especially funny, as it is a real word and fitting at that. Frrom Dictionary.com.
tripe
1. The rubbery lining of the stomach of cattle or other ruminants, used as food.
2. Informal. Something of no value; rubbish.
doc is broken, why keep using that format?
If you are in a technical field, consider LaTeX. I personally love LyX, a frontend for LaTeX that lets you see what you are doing (instead of just use a text editor to hack tex code).
Great output, great control, great everything but rough learning curve, unless you use LyX.
I still have tex files from over a decade ago that work fine. How many Word files from 1995 work fine for you?
And the new 1.4.2 PC LyX installer is 10x better than the old one, it automatically installs all you need (ghostscript, latex, dictionary, others).
There are even tex2word and word2tex converters (non free) in case you do need to convert a few files.
I keep Office / OOo / Crossover for reading email attachments and rarely use them in the real world.
It is pretty obvious you weren't whoring. Standard practice here is to cut and past some lengthy thoughtful (?) comment from the original or some previous version of the story to get karma with limited work. You wrote a simple one-liner.
And apologies on
And then use google to automatically find highly rated comments from the previous dupe and post them automagically to karma whore on /.
Speaking of automatic, could someone develop coordinated automatic scripts to take over digg? If they vote on front page stories, how many zombie clients would it take to push your stupid story or slashvertisement to their page or maybe make a couple stories dupe or trupe. I think I read they do have some sort of uber editor that does promote and kill stories, so it is not total control...
We complain about /. but try digg. You will think a million monkeys are out there banging on keyboards.