Being a flaming liberal, I find it odd to agree... At least on the surface.
The world is a finite entity and American's hold an increasingly privileged position in it. Ultimately, we will be forced to accept less disparity in the total wealth of the world.
Current trends are oddly contrary: while our invasion of Afghanistan has yielded a previously stalled agreement for a trans-Afghan pipeline, and our invasion of Iraq has taken from French and Russian companies $10T worth of oil and flipped the pre-invasion decision to price that oil in Euros thereby contributing to the sustenance of our standard of living through military force, economic and domestic security trends exert the opposite pressure. Wealth flees the country; our trade imbalance is funded by loans from potential military enemies, leaving our economy a hostage and potential casualty in a conflict. Rules about sharing information and knowledge with foreign nationals have staunched the flow of the world's smartest to the US, and in some segments that flow has reversed. Foreign universities grow in stature and resources as the best and brightest of their populations keep their talents home.
In the end, wealth is a relative measure, and as such we cannot sustain a disparity and our wealth will necessarily diminish, even if it is not foregone that our basic needs will be less well met. We will consume our per capita share of the world's resources and emit our per capita share of pollutants; sooner or later. Those resources can be allocated frivolously or usefully, but they are finite.
The adjustment is going to hurt.
But the process by which we end up in that steady state condition is of our choosing. Economic systems are entirely human constructs, a chosen and somewhat arbitrary solution to meeting our basic needs. We can, at our whim, choose other methods of ensuring our needs are met. So far we haven't had much luck with alternatives, but it's arguable that the strength of a monetized economy is the intrinsic accounting and the failure of other methods of organization is for the lack of the resources to meet the organizational requirements in an efficient and productive manner. To the extent that this is true, technology may open new solutions to these problems, heretofore intractable.
Perhaps, given that the currently accepted rules of economics appear to lead inexorably to a rather unpleasant conclusion, it's time to change those rules.
I could not agree more. Terrorism has proven to be an irrelevant risk to the American populace. In the week including 9/11 more people died from smoking than the attack.
Further, there is a fundamental disconnect in the procedural criticism of legislation that utterly fails to relate the results with the methods. While it is entirely appropriate to ask why 9/11 and how do we prevent such disasters in the future, we must measure every solution in it's value in achieving the goal and compare that value to it's cost.
The Patriot act, among other recent trends in jurisprudence undermine, even negate, many of the freedoms on which American's have counted since the founding of the republic. To read the words of our founders, of patriots through the years, these basic freedoms have been considered beyond compromise, literally worth dying for.
No evidence has been provided that the freedoms we have lost have earned us any security, not even temporary.
The tree of liberty is parched, yet those that most vociferously proclaim themselves such, only prove Johnson right.
I am writing to suggest you reconsider your bill imposing penalties for WiFi access points that fail to meet various arbitrary criteria intended to control access.
There are three reasons why this legislation is fundamentally flawed:
1) It is an utterly ineffectual way to protect the LAN. A firewall, as required by law, is merely a complication in the process that may or may not provide any useful security depending on the way it's set up. The term itself is effectively meaningless and the function far too technical for any typical user to understand. To be effective, the city would have to hire enough personal technology consultants to train every single resident. Otherwise a firewall that filters packets between the LAN and the WAN does nothing to protect a wLAN attack. Filtering between the wLAN and the LAN merely breaks the functionality of being able to attach devices wireless to the LAN. Strong filtering on the wLAN breaks the value of offering free WiFi hotspots.
Every single installation has installation specific security concerns unique to that particular installation. What works in one, won't work in another.
2) It is utterly irrelevant to the stated goal of reducing identity theft. Nobody bothers driving around to steal credit card numbers. It would be beyond stupid to waste time and gas and money to actually drive somewhere to just maybe catch the odd not SSL encrypted email containing a credit card number. Normally financial transactions are carried out over SSL encrypted web sites and sniffing the LAN, firewall or not, provides no useful information without breaking the SSL encryption. Identity theft happens by phishing or by breaking into company servers. Punishing end users for bad server security with a pointless and ill-considered law might sound like fun, but it does nothing to reduce the theft of financial information. Any cracker smart enough to hack into a server will hack into the server of a company that stores credit card data en masse, like CDnow or something, and steal hundreds of thousands at a time, not one by one. This bill is like trying to stop bank robberies by forcing people to lock their doors.
3) It is heinously intrusive. It is like passing a law to fine people for not locking their doors and windows, even second story windows, and sending cops around to check up on them, even if they have other means of security like an alarm system, a security dog, or being good friends with their neighbors who keep an eye out for them. It seems fundamentally wrong for government to micro manage people's lives in such an intrusive and unjustified way.
I am sympathetic to the goal, but any legislation should address the crime itself, not dictate a method for reducing it (especially when the method is merely onerous and irrelevant). A valuable bill would make companies liable for customer information and the cost of mishandling it. If a business requires information from me that represents a liability, they should be required to take responsibility for that information as a cost of doing business in that way. If they take and store my credit card information, and fail to secure it, they should pay the cost of that failure. They should not be given a safe harbor for having installed some easily circumvented "firewall."
Merrill's Steven Milunovich believes the new technology makes HP more competitive, and that "the foundation for longer-term price competition is evident." In a research note, he said that competitors may be pressured to introduce similar photolithographic capability. While HP claims to have a years-long head start with the technology, Milunovich says it may take that long for HP's new technology to trickle down to mainstream price points. - Forbes
Oh yeah, do that research Forbes... later heard to say "duh... what's google?"
Canon Full-photolithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering (FINE) uses a high-performance 1,856-nozzle print head that ejects precise, consistent droplets as small as 1 picoliter, resulting in beautiful photos with virtually no detectable grain.
Frobes might also have check Amazon for those prices:
Refills of HP's new color Vivera ink cartridges will sell for $9.99, while older color ink cartridges can run $30 or more.
It'd be one thing if maybe the exact key words weren't so easily googled...
Fact checking, a lost art.
Canon's print head is not "built in" to the printer, meaning they've even developed a non-disposable printer too! Of course that's done really well for them...
Survey results show that 85.6% of respondents reported they would most likely purchase an Epson printer, while no other vendor reached even 7%.
If we were to cover 1/2 the land area we've paved in the US with solar panels of standard efficiency, we'd generate as much electricity as we consume in all forms of energy in the US. The rest of the world is quite parsimonious by comparison, though they could so too meet all their needs and live as profligately as we do without environmental impact.
It has been suggested by people not bothering to do the math that the change in albedo from the solar cells themselves would cause warming, but we've already paved twice that area.
Biofuels are relatively inefficient compared to solar cells, but fairly simple as well and carbon net-neutral. Biofuels and solar hydrogen could meet our mobile and nightime needs easily.
We can live as we do, with all the juice and cars and whatnot, so long as we do not too grossly expand our population, in a closed loop, steady state system. We could live quite comfortably if we overturned the Ford coup of the 1920s and reversed the graft-based decision to build roads and the 1950's military decision to build suburbs. With a predominantly urban population moving by train (or working close to home/at home) we could buy the solar cells with a few year's oil expenditures.
Unfortunately Solar doesn't have the profit margin of oil, so there's no political/industrial interest. There's $10 trillion worth of oil in Iraq we took ownership of for a mere $1 trillion in military expenditures (at the current burn rate, given the time it will take to pump it out). The usual profit sharing (if we chose to share with the Defeated People) is 50/50, meaning at least 5:1 profit on that adventure for the country as a whole, but since Haliburton is actually getting paid for their efforts (and then some) and the profit will accrue directly to the oil companies and not back to We the People, it's an amazingly shrewd business deal, the greatest heist in the history of mankind: $10 trillion. Almost the entire US gross domestic product for a year.
Nobody building solar factories is going to see that kind of profit, and without it they can't compete in the congressional auction. Laws aren't bought flat rate, they're sold to the highest bidder and no industry can outbid the oil industry.
It would be far cheaper to convert the global energy economy to solar (as a combination of solar-thermal, solar-electric, and solar-biofuel with the only other long-term viable power source as a backup--breeder nuclear, which (not ignoring the very real waste problem) is the only other energy source we have that can meaningfully contribute to our long term power needs) than to build a great space ring. The low range costs are small compared to the current value of the known oil reserves (roughly $80 trillion, proven plus mid-range USGS unproven estimates at $40/bbl).
It's technically easy to solve, but politically impossible.
This is the fundamental question: what are patents and copyrights for? The answer is right there, clearly in our constitution: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts."
Most people, most patent lawyers, most congress people, most patent holders, certainly all representatives of the copyright industry would love to erase those simple words.
Because patents and copyrights are not, have never been about rewarding creators for the act of creation.
It is this fundamental error, promoted by the copyright industry, that poisons copyright and patent law to consider inventions "property." We do not, as a people, offer inventors "embarrassing monopolies" on that which intrinsically cannot be subject to ownership, the "fugitive fermentations of the individual mind," as a reward and certainly not ever as a right.
It is a mechanism by which we reward creators for sharing their work with us, for enriching the public domain, not for creating it in the first place. We as a society do not automatically gift inventors with ownership of their ideas, the very idea is preposterous, we grant them a temporary monopoly for the act of sharing. It is not the moment of invention, which is itself worthless to society, but about sharing an invention with society.
This leads to the most obvious test: no copyright law, no patent law is constitutional if it does not optimize the value of the public domain. If so doing means revoking all patents and all copyrights than we the people have that right "without claim or complaint by anyone."
If we applied that test the economically irrelevant entertainment industry would not be allowed to retard the progress of society with idiotic laws like the DMCA, laws which not only fail to meet the constitutional test but which obviously directly contradict it.
As for patenting software vs. simply copyrighting it, the whole issue has become muddied. The reason for not issuing patents is that you cannot patent a discovery, that is something you did not actually invent but merely found. Mathematical algorithms are found, they always existed, they are not invented. Software loosely fits the category of an extended mathematical algorithm, but perhaps not usefully. The constitution provides a clear guide out of this seeming quagmire: if the public domain is most enriched by copyright protection, than copyright should be used; if the public domain is most enriched by patents, then patents should be used. If the public domain is most enriched by stripping all monopoly protection, then all monopoly protection must be stripped.
Patents still reference their constitutional reason for being, unlike copyright anymore: patents speak of teaching the art in exchange for a temporary monopoly. Failing to properly teach the art (how to accurately and precisely implement the idea being protected, and to do so by the inventors best known method) is cause for revoking the patent. Copyrights are granted on inventions believed self-evident, so there's no parallel test. A book or song is the book or song, not the method of it's production (design patents are a bit of a fly in the ointment of this argument, but I'm choosing to ignore them). Copyrights were originally issued for 17 years, same as patents; it's an amazing testament to the power of graft that Disney and Grewshwin got their monopoly rights extended without showing any benefit for society.
As for obvious and poor patents, there are complex issues as to the cost of litigation. It's not immediately clear who should pay the cost of careful review, though the cost of such review relative to the value of the system as a whole is small, and would seem a prudent investment for society, at least if the system would actually work for society instead of for the "special interests" that own the legislative process.
If it were up to me:
Copyrights owned by the inventor (creator) would be for the life of the individual.
Years ago, during a heatwave in Oakland, I built a homebrew swamp cooler with some muffin fans and a mist nozzle from McMaster (like 32215K11).
From thermodynamics, the say you have 1kg of water to work with:
Changing it from ice to water: 334kJ Raising it from 0C to 25C: 104kJ Converting from liquid to vapor: 2,260kJ
Compared with vaporizing water, melting ice is trivial.
For swamp coolers to work, the humidity has to be low--if it's high the ice bucket trick is a good one. But for those in dry hot climates, a swamp cooler works well.
I connected mine to a hose spigot with 1/8" tubing, which supplied a continuous flow of water to the mist nozzle, which was mixed with a good flow of hot dry air from the fans, and resulted in a good flow of cool slightly damp air.
Does anyone who ever worked on Outlook ever get on a plane? Ever? Do they know what a time zone is?
There is only one program I've found that handles time zones correctly: TrueSync Desktop and it is abandonware. I kept buying motorola P8167s for years just so I could stick with TSD.
There are two features of TrueSync Desktop that no other PIM seems to do correctly, and there is only one correct method. The two features are:
1) When you create an standard event, you specify the time zone the event will happen in. All time zone math is handled automatically. This is the only correct method of handling events for people who travel outside their time zone regularly.
2) When you mark a special day, say a birthday or a holiday, TSD remembers the date, rather than creating a 24 hour event from 0:00 to 23:59. This is the only correct way to handle special days.
Consider the following scenarios, which I face almost every week:
A) You are in California on the phone with someone in Boston planning a phone conference from 10:00-11:30am for next week at which time you'll be in London. What time should you set the conference for? Can you do the math? How about if you're in Phoenix in April? There are 31 time zones and almost all contain some regions that observe and some that do not observe DST. This is the sort of irritating arithmetic my computer should do, and only True Sync Desktop does it the right way.
With Outlook can set your system time zone to the time zone the event will happen in, then create the event, then set your time zone back to the time zone you're in. Oh yeah, that's really convenient.
B) You make a new friend on a visit a trip that includes a visit to Hawaii and Boston and put her birthday in your outlook/phone tools calendar. You get to San Francisco. What day is her birthday? With outlook when you change time zones the event straddles two days, only one of them the actual correct day. Depending on whether you travel east or west, the correct date is either the first or the second of the two days marked. How flabbergastingly stupid is that?
Now one would think that _someone_ (anyone) involved in the development of outlook would, sooner or later, actually travel to a different time zone and realize just how utterly brain dead their handling of time zones really is (yes, outlook supports two (2)whole time zones, and for purely bicoastal people that's fine, but some of us actually travel to the flyover states occasionally. And some people even travel outside the US, which is still legal.)
I personally can't stand the outlook look and feel. I find it sort of smothering, though I acknowledge that there are some good features to it, but if there's one good model for how a PIM should work it's True Sync Desktop, but since it won't sync to a modern phone, it's just not all that useful anymore, sadly.
Thanks to my incessant whining, BVRP has put time zones on it's feature path, so Motorola's PhoneTools might soon correctly implement time zones and all-day events, probably more quickly if more people encourage them to.
I hate reading about the "revolution" of LED lighting. LEDs are very cool for lighting, I use a lot of them in my house for various reasons, but efficiency is not one of them. Anytime a journalist regurgitates some LED company's marketing department drivel about the pending energy revolution in LED lighting, smack them hard with a clue by four and tell them to check their facts before publishing.
The basics: There's a difference between radiant efficiency and luminous efficiency. Radiance is the radiometric output, regardless of wavelength. 1 watt of light (over 2pi steradians) at 555nm (yellow/green) equals 683 lumens. At that exact wavelength, radiant and luminous efficiency are the same, and a 100% efficient green light would put out 683 lm/w. In radiance the same watts quantify the optical output as the electrical input, so efficiency is easy to calculate. In photometry (where the human eye is involved), lumens are the measure of light output; while a watt of light at 555nm is 683 lumens, a watt of light at 470nm (a typical blue LED peak wavelength) is 62 lumens.
The eye's sensitivity as a function of wavelength is a curve, the photopic curve, with it's peak normalized to 555nm (or the scotopic curve for rod response in dim light., peaking at 507nm) and asymptotically approaching zero at about 425nm as blue blends into ultraviolet and at 690nm as red blends into infrared. True white light with a color rendering index of 100 can only generate 199 lm/w at 100% theoretical efficiency.
Typical fluorescent lights achieve about 50% total plug efficiency. The best white LEDs achieve about 20% efficiency (40lm/w), not including power supply losses. Also, "white" LEDs still have worse Color Rendition Indices (CRIs) than fluorescent, though both efficiency and CRI are improving, they have a long, long way to go to improve on florescent lights in terms of efficiency and quality of light. LEDs are physically smaller than fluorescents and usually have a longer life, though the brightest ones (e.g. Luxeon 5W single emitters) do not last as long as a typical CCFL.
As to the comments about the "warmth" of incandescent, it's because the effective blackbody temperature is cooler (confusing, no?). Planck's equation describes the emission spectra, but the color temperature is the peak of the emission curve in absolute temperature, Kelvin, for the equivalent blackbody (i.e. 6500K for D65 standard proofing, or 9300K for standard CRTs), which becomes more blue, which means more energetic, the hotter the blackbody gets. This is why halogen bulbs are cooler (in color) than typical incandescents, because the filaments run hotter (and yet don't burn out faster because the halide gas in the bulb works to scavenge the evaporated tungsten off the glass and back to the filament.) Color rendition is more important than just the color temperature of the light: a continuous, even spectrum, like that of sunlight, is required to minimize metameric errors, that is a color appearing differently under the light in question than it would in daylight.
The reason halogen lights are more efficient than non-halogen incandescent bulbs is because the blackbody emission curve of the hotter filament more closely matches the photopic curve. The blackbody curve never matches the photopic curve exactly, so incandescent bulbs (or any technology where a material is heated to incandescence to emit light by thermal radiation) can never be even close to 100% efficient.
Plug efficiency includes the losses of the power supply, but the total plug efficiency is hard to find. There is no plug efficiency loss for 110V incandescents, but there is for low voltage halogen, and of course for low voltage LEDs, and typically for most high efficiency lighting systems. The following lists typical manufacturer stated efficiencies. LED efficiencies do not include the power supply, so derate by whatever your power supply's efficiency is. High efficiency lighting is reported as plug efficiency.
True enough, but not the complete answer. The regulations that were applied in return for the grant of monopoly (anybody see the parallel to monopolies granted for invention here? That is you get it if and only if you give back to We the People something of equal or greater value. With patents this is teaching society not just how to implement the invention but the best known method. Failing to teach correctly or failing to teach the best method is reason for revoking the 20 year monopoly. And copyright holders have to give up what in exchange for their 100 plus year monopoly that we the people give them?)
Anyway, in return for monopoly rights, as in granting broadcast bandwidth, the recipient (bell) agreed to offer services then considered essential. Everybody wins.
But if we take away the monopoly (e.g. by permitting VoIP) then we also reduce the value of that monopoly, and therefore have less bargaining power for essential services (e.g. 911). We could, of course, pass a law requiring all comms providers to meet reliability requirements and provide universal "lifeline" service, but that sort of arbitrary regulation is not the way we've traditionally done it.
In general the current trend is to stop collectively working for the best of everyone and to singularly work for the best for ourselves. If that mode of thought dominates, the poor can walk to the fire station (and be lucky to find one still staffed). Or we can decide that there is a basic reliable comm level we consider essential and recognizing that we have no monopoly bargaining power to trade to a private entity in return for providing that comm service, we can provide it by collective action, that is through municipal last mile service.
It works quite well for roads, which have been tremendously successful at subsidizing and promoting car and oil sales, as well as being essential to just about every business in the US. Municipal common carriage data services would seem, at least at first blush, to have the same potential to promote growth of IT services and business as roads have had with almost every other business, except with far less environmental destruction to screw future generations.
Well, given the quality or lack thereof of current digital projectors (I saw THX1138 on the newest equipment at Telluride, it failed during the movie and was harsh and sort of unpleasant compared to the clean 35mm prints being shown) second run theaters might become more popular with the people who actually care about picture quality.
One of the things I am willing to pay for is exceptional image quality, the lushness and shadow detail of film. If it's just a digital projector, some DMD/DLP POS really no better than the office unit I borrowed for the weekend, then why bother? I'm really not that interested in the clever audience commentary.
If it were me, I'd fight the home theater battle and the rapidly improving equipment on that front with 70mm film and Imax installations. That's worth going out for. Give me Cinerama (3 synchronized projectors in ultra wide screen wrap around) or I'll stay home.
Digital projection democratizes the equipment, ultimately, quantizing the quality differences between home equipment and professional out of existence. Bits are bits, but analog leaves infinite room for tweaking to at least give users the warm, fuzzy belief in quality differences, even if they're largely illusory.
For the next couple of years, real film projection will have real quality advantages over digital projection for live action film. Ultimately it will go the way of the "advantage" of LPs over CDs... But when it does, what value will the $10pp theater have over the barcolounger?
you know, you're probably right. I'm sure it is more effective to cut the invective and simply say "I oppose SB XXXX" as the only sentence thereby saving the intern's time scanning for which box to check. But even when I do that, half the time I get a response along the lines of "we appreciate your support of SB XXXX, thank you." It's almost a statistical wash. The only notes that get a careful read are the ones written on checks.
But of the phrases you find objectionable, I'd agree with "bribe," "moronic," and "stupid," and maybe "removed from office," but "investigate him for ethics violations"
Perhaps you prefer this letter:
Dear Assemblymember Pavley,
I understand (from prwire) that you are supporting Herb Vest's bill to punish his competitors in the on-line dating business.
I would be very interested to know why you feel this bill is worthy of support.
I have not read the bill, but I have read several news accounts of it's scope, and at first blush it seems like a clear case of a special interest bill which aids a particular corporation at the expense of it's competitors by institutionalizing it's particular (and peculiar) business model in law.
Mr. Vest's effort seems so clearly to serve no useful social purpose, that despite reading true.com's somewhat incomprehensible and illogical self-justification, I am, alas, still incapable of positing a logical argument in support of any sort, let alone a persuasive one. Perhaps I am missing something.
True.com's own model, by their own admission, serves no useful purpose as there is no method to verify that the information that's provided by users is accurate. If a person was bent on nefarious purposes, they'd merely use a false name.
Further, the idea that an ex-con is somehow less acceptable as a human being is contrary to the precepts of our criminal law which hold that a person who has served a sentence is largely or completely restored to society, and that they deserve a second chance, and that ongoing retribution is a violation of the Ex Post Facto clause of the constitution. We do not, as a matter of law, embrace the biblical concept of "once unclean, always unclean, and so too the saddle on which he rides."
Lastly, without building an authoritative infrastructure for maintaining a civilian accessible database of both criminal records and marriage records, as well as providing a means for consumer challenges to inaccurate information, and cross referencing that information with unique identifiers, innocent users will be falsely tarred in an extremely destructive manner, with a breadth and significance of consequence that would make the mistakes on the no-fly list pale in comparison.
Mr. Vest seems to have a fundamentalist attitude toward extra-marital affairs and seems inclined to use his resources to punish those who either believe that marriage does not imply physical fidelity, or, for example, who begin dating before their divorces are final. But adultery is not a crime in California and in light of Lawrence v. Texas states that do have adultery laws on the books are reexamining them.
It seems clear that this effort will do nothing to protect on-line daters from predators and other nefarious characters, it will falsely accuse innocent users, it will provide a false sense of security to the users of Mr. Vest's service and a false sense of insecurity to the users of his competitors services. it's only viable purpose would seem to be to aid Mr. Vest's personal jihad against what he apparently considers unchristian, amoral practices and increase his income. Why that effort deserves legislative support escapes me.
Sincerely,....
I'm quite certain that both will get the same degree of high quality scrutiny and have the same 50/50 chance of being intepreted consistent with my position, but the former was a lot more fun to write.
I read with tremendous dismay that True.com has managed to bribe at least one assemblymember into introducing their special interest legislation. I assume it will be crushed immediately, it's just so astonishingly moronic. My confidence in democracy would be somewhat improved if Fran Pavley is removed from office as expeditiously as possible. It's incomprehensible to me that anyone could be so naive and stupid as to believe that this legislation is in the public interest or anything but a bald-faced attempt to create legislative favor for a specific company. I would think that unless Fran Pavley has some plausible excuse, it would be appropriate to investigate him for ethics violations.
First, let me cop to my impulse to dismiss breathless press release news. The depolymerization technology is cool. What offends me is the "it'll save the world singlehandledly" hyperventilation that post-wired science journalists seem to think is essential to selling the story.
It won't, but neither would solar power alone. And there was a time, not so very long ago, that solar power advocates got press by promising to solve all of humanities social problems and cure acne with a few flakes of silicon. Some still do, but they don't end up in Fortune.
I generally like the orbiting solar platform concept, not because it makes sense, but because it would serve to increase spending on space research. It's really not practically necessary and the advocates tend to distort numbers in their advocacy, viz Smally's talk at the Army of the Future conference in FL in 2003, who promoted orbiting and Lunar platforms by claiming that terrestrial solar would cause problematic albedo effects (a claim 2 orders of magnitude out of reality).
Still the cost of solar becomes stratospheric, literally, if you add launch costs. If solar panels could be continuously fabricated out of Lunar materials, it would (in the rather longer term) be more practical. And fun. And really, really cool.
Solar cell costs will come down dramatically with volume, just the same as everything else does. Imagine having a machine shop build you a car from scratch - every little part - using general purpose equipment. As continuous fabrication lines come up, solar panels will become very inexpensive.
But, even so, it's not a complete solution. If I were in charge of energy policy, I'd:
Build large scale pilot plants (solar, and, OK, depolymerization) to meet all federal energy needs from domestic sources. This is of obvious strategic value and would protect our interests economically as well as militarily. I would encourage technology transfer to the private sector, but keep federal production on-line to enforce price pressure against private industry.
I'd build a hydrogen distribution system, with hydrogen generated by many means, including solar hydrolysis. This is one solution to "what to do when the sun sets." The calculations I used for the total energy consumption and solar availability are 24/7, year round. But they do not include the efficiency losses for storing energy for night time use (for which I couldn't find any supporting data, i.e. power consumption as a function of time and weather and lattitude, though pieces of that data are available).
A complete answer would include social reorganization to cities and towns that encourage public rail transportation, the elimination of suburban subsidies, the elimination of subsidies that support big-box stores and other "parking lot" retail, elimination of subsidies that encourage companies to locate outside of urban centers, etc. Ill-informed pseudo-libertarian types typically argue that such restructuring is morally suspect government interference in the preferred social order, but that's just not true: the current suburban/car culture was entirely manufactured for military and economic reasons and is completely unnatural. Even the general desire for a "white picket fence and yard in the suburbs" is merely the result of propaganda from the '50s which served to justify strategic roadways to protect in the event of a massive invasion. The goal would be to shift the energy required for transportation to modes more efficient and amenable to electrification than private cars, which would both reduce total energy consumption and make transportation more amenable to renewable resources.
I do not believe that nuclear waste is a trivial issue, nor that we can leave it for mythically inventive future alchemists to magically convert to gold (and I was course 22). But breeder reactors do represent a serious energy source, roughly 3X the total known hydrocarbon reserves. Standard US style therm
If I could mod your reply up, I would. I've been having this conversation as a debate for some years. We're doing the best we can to glean facts from what's available. I'll give you my sources for ag energy efficiency in line - if you read this response please reply with yours. I'd be very glad to learn that ag wastes are a viable source, as they are obviously carbon neutral and mobile energy consumption is so obviously amenable to liquid fuels.
>There's simply not enough food waste to supply the system.
You're kidding right? Here in Iowa, we're having huge problems with all of the ag waste that we don't know how to get rid of. Hog farming alone is posing a serious threat to our rivers, as they can't use the *manure* fast enough (natural fertilizer, in the corn belt, and they can't even use that fast enough!).
Can you tell me what the total energy content of that waste is? Where do you get the numbers? Are they neutral and unbiased? I know the ponds of hog effluent would drown a town, but even so energy numbers are so huge, that it's hard to believe it's not just a drop in the bucket. I couldn't find really good ag numbers, but I got mine from http://newton.umsl.edu/infophys/lsp.html wh ich references E. P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, Saunders 1971 at 1/40th of incident energy into calories in biomass
> Growing targeted crops would be absurdly inefficient. At best photosynthesis > is 2.5% efficient, compared to 12% for commercially available solar panels.
So very wrong. At best, photosynthesis is 11% efficient - 45% of light is PAR (photosynthetically active radiation), of which due to limitations on how much energy is needed per CO2 molecule brings it down to 25%; factoring in the whole cycle, you get 11%. On average, plants get 3-6% efficiency.
E. P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, Saunders 1971 at 1/40th of incident energy into calories in biomass
Where did you get 3-6% efficiency? That's roughly 2X what I got, though you correctly identified a mistake - that is incorrectly substituting "photosynthesis" for "caloric conversion efficiency". Still, if our goal is electricity to run our computers, commercial cells get 12%, and the best cells get 40%.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/25410.pdf
My calculations say it would take about 1.4% of the US surface area to meet US domestic energy consumption needs, which is plausible given that 1.7% of the US surface area is paved. In desert areas less area would be required because of higher average irradiance compared to the national average, and it would be out of the way, assuming 12% efficient cells.
Taking my referenced number of 2.5% efficiency as a starting point (but remember it could be twice that), it would take 7X as much land to get the equivalent biomass calories, then depolymerize it at a self-reported efficiency of 85% (impressive, if true) and then 45% mechanical efficiency in the generator http://news.thomasnet.com/fullstory/18175/612. to get electricity, which means 17.5X the land area or 25% of the total US land mass. Unfortunately the total arable land of the US is only 19%.
If 2.5% net conversion to calorie efficiency for biomass is correct, it would simply be impossible to grow enough plants to convert to fuel even if we stopped growing food. If it's 6% then we could, if we all ate a lot less.... that wouldn't be a bad thing... And if you can show me 5-6% efficiency I'll be corrected from "can't work at all" to "a serious contender for supplying some of the US energy demand."
I think a valid claim is that if we were to undo the horrible mistake of the 1920s when Ford and Firestone bribed congress and the president into subsidizing their new inventions and spending public money building roads so those rich bastards could sell cars, and the even more idiotic national defense measures of the '50's which flooded the US with suburban bliss propaganda creating the ecological and social disaster we call "th
It's a useful minor energy source, but primarily it's good for converting a stinky, unpleasant, difficult to handle waste stream into something useful. There's simply not enough food waste to supply the system. Growing targeted crops would be absurdly inefficient. At best photosynthesis is 2.5% efficient, compared to 12% for commercially available solar panels. Take system inefficiencies in the stream from sunlight to depolymerizable crop and there isn't enough arable land on earth to meet our energy demands.
There's a basic energy balance concept that seems to escape most supposedly intelligent pundits on this issue. It's the sort of thing you're supposed to learn in 7th grade with rate problems: the world is a closed system, with energy in and energy out. Energy in comes from the sun, energy out is radiated heat. Over time there has been very slightly more energy in than out, which is stored as fossil fuels.
Ignoring the consequences of liberating all the CO2 ever captured in the history of the world over the next century, there's neither enough fossil fuel to last nor enough arable land to build an economy around a sustainable biofuel stream.
But Solar is trivial. It easily answers the world's energy needs at an entirely manageable cost.
A 16kWh/day (5.8E3 kWh/y) complete grid tie system costs $15k (12% efficient BP panels). 2E10 of these systems would power the whole world (volume discount?) which would cost $3.1E14 at today's retail which is roughly the GDP of the world for 7.5 years. Now figure you're asking BP to manufacture 4E11 solar panels... that's 400,000,000,000 panels. Maybe they'd be bit cheaper at that volume.
But we can reasonably assume typical cost reductions and a combination of PV and solar heating; the world uses 1.2E14 total kwh/year for all purposes, but only 1.3E13 kWh global consumption of electricity. If we replaced only electricity consumption for the whole world at RETAIL prices it would cost only 70% of the world GDP for one year and require only 4E10 panels and 5.6E10 square meters of land area - out of 1.3E14 available in the world, or 0.04% of the planet's land (0.4% to replace all energy consumed for all reasons with PV).
The US used 2.8E13 kWh total energy in all forms last year (3.6E12 kWh electricity) which would require 9.6E10 solar panels to generate or 1.3E11 square meters and $7.2E13 at retail. This would occupy 1.4% of our land area of 9.4E12 square meters..
We've paved 1.6E11 square meters: that is we've subsidized the auto and petroleum industry with a welfare gift of 1.7% of the total land area of the nation, more than it would take to be entirely energy independent.
Continuing the car comparison, our roadways, taxpayer financed at a cost of about $2M/lane mile or $340/sq meter, cost $1.9E13 in today's dollars compared to $7.2E13 to convert the entire country's entire energy use to PV. Realistically we'd convert only the electricity consumption of 3.6E12 kWh at $9.3E12 at RETAIL, less than half of what we taxpayers have given the auto and oil industry, not including the value of the real estate.
Converting the entire world to PV entirely as a collective effort would piss off the libertarians and the oil magnates (generally for different reasons) but doing so would cost less than the corporate welfare we've dumped on the oil and auto industries. Even today it's hardly insurmountable. Compared to the value of a zero emissions, entirely sustainable energy economy, it's trivial.
One argument I had with a friend about our capture of the Iraqi oil was over the counter argument presented by some math challenged conservative pundits (are any conservative pundits not math challenged?) that the oil costs would not offset the cost of taking Iraq, as if the suggestion that we are there to protect our oil was somehow ludicrous.
This argument ignores the most obvious counter that taxpayers are footing the $200B bill while Haliburton takes the profits, which before the invasion were going to Fr
This is disruptive, at least if the disks production cost/retail price is in line with existing recordable media (DVD/CD).
If this progresses quickly and gets publicity it could kill blu-ray by creating FUD about the lifetime of a 25/50GB disk with a 1TB disk around the corner.
The obvious commercial application is to distribute HD series television using MPEG-2, which would be unwieldy as a stack of blu-ray disks.
Using MPEG-4 one could easily see the "Disney Disk" with 750 or so movies on it. You buy the disk with one key, buy more keys as you want.
It's an excellent backup media. HD's are convenient for backup, but cumbersome for rotating backups with offsite storage (which is why I still use archaic DAT archives even though the media alone costs more than a pair of HDs would).
In theory people are not simply passive consumers of commercial content, but rather creators of their own. As HD cams become affordable, people will want to store stacks of HD content, as they now have stacks of tapes or DVD-Rs of their vacations and children's first steps.
And then there's more wack concepts like being able to store everything you see and hear all your life, which could go through these disks pretty quickly.
That's the half of it. The whole of it includes the limitation: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts..." It is unconstitutional to offer an "embarrassing monopoly" [Thomas Jefferson] on the dissemination of invention such that the result of that monopoly is to retard the progress of science and the useful arts.
The author has no intrinsic right to his or her creation, there is no property right, unauthorized distribution is not theft, the only piracy is of the public domain. Copyright is a government granted monopoly, offered by We The People as a quid pro quo, for which we demand an increase in output, quality, and availability of invention.
The principles of copyright were utterly obfuscated by the publishing industry (particularly Disney and the Gershwin foundation) in the 1970s. Patent law retains the character intended by the founding fathers. A patent is clearly still a temporary (20 year) monopoly in return for "teaching the art." Indeed, a patent is invalid if the inventor does not teach in the embodiments, with sufficient detail for one skilled in the art not only exactly how to implement the invention, but the best known method of doing so at the time of filing.
As to copyright, it is incomprehensible to me how extending the term of the monopoly nearly indefinitely increases the dissemination of invention, rather than the seemingly obvious outcome of impoverishing the public domain. Further, I cannot comprehend the computations that underlie a decision to retard the computer industry, which contributes trillions dollars to the economy and is obviously a true engine of ongoing invention, to protect a minuscule, economically irrelevant ($20B/year) entertainment industry that's greatest invention seems to be Brittany Spears.
By what argument can our bought and paid for by the entertainment industry legislators think they are fulfilling their sworn duty to uphold the constitution? Abject ignorance?
No really, report spam to the RBLs. They'll work better the more they're used and the more timely. And they really piss off spammers, which is a Good Thing.
1) The only acceptable removable media option is Compact Flash.
2) The only acceptable power source is AA cells.
CF: why? highest capacity at the lowest cost. It's "small enough" and WTF do we need with 5 different, incompatible memory formats. If only people had rejected the newcomers as they arrived, we wouldn't be in this mess. It's not too late, boycott lame memory card formats!
AAs. LiOn echargable batteries are great until something happens when the battery has been in the drawer for a month - hey hang there for an hour 'till the batterie's charged! Or you're on vacation - just let me bring the charger for each device I carry! Or the battery runs out after 110 minutes - sure I'll just buy a few extra - at $100 each! Or your out in some foreign country: good luck finding that random LiOn at the local market, just dig through that bin of AA's, I'm sure there's one in there somewhere.
I agree with the sentiment. I want a phone first, not a PDA, not a game boy, not a video player. I want something that fits in my front pocket (and doing so doesn't risk grievous bodily harm to sensitive bodily regions when I sit down). I also don't want it to call my friends when I do sit down.
Dear phone people: release a phone with the following features: I promise I will buy it.
1) Flip style smart phone like the i500. Flat phones are too big and I hate making accidental calls.
2) Palm OS. I simply won't let Microsoft into my phone. They've made a horrible mess of my laptop and I'm desperately trying to get my application providers to move to Linux so I can finally end the nightmare of their miserable security flaws and stop supporting their criminal behavior. (PTC: Pro Mechanica Linux Please!). Other options are acceptable, CE isn't. I just won't do that. A real, open source phone with an extensible, repairable, verifiable OS would be very nice - no secret spy features.
3) A camera would be nice. 1.3 Mpix would be nice. A flash would be nice. Seems to be the emerging standard. Short video clips with audio would be nice. I can see the utility of camera features and probably wouldn't buy a new phone without them.
4) CF would be a bonus. I hate SD cards, too expensive for the capacity. Why anybody thought we needed 5 approximately equal removable media formats is beyond me. They should be fired, especially Sony with their stupid Memory stick. What were they thinking? I have lots of CF cards, I'd love to be able to use them with my phone. Plus if the phone could support the 802.11, bluetooth, and wired network cards and other great features you can add via CF that you can't with any other removable media it could address the huge variety of non-critical but highly desired features people complain about.
5) If it's got CF, it should have good quality MP3 playback through a headphone jack. I'd be happy to have MP3 playback integrated into my phone, to play off my CF cards. If one want's, one can get 8GB CF cards now, plenty of music for a long flight.
6) Any phone MUST integrate with TrueSync Desktop (which is why I prefer Palm). I realize it's abandondware, but it is the ONLY PIM that handles time zones correctly. (try setting a full day meeting in outlook then changing your time zone. Which day was that meeting?)
7) Worldphone. Optimally it would be CDMA/GSM/Analog as CDMA coverage in the US is much better than GSM. But I travel places that only have analog service, so I need that (the first purpose of the phone is to get out of trouble even if you're 65km down a dirt road in the mountains of Mexico). I'd be happy with GSM/Analog, but I won't buy another phone without GSM: I'm tired of renting phones in other countries.
8) Hi Speed USB connector: I should be able to see the contents of the CF card on my computer. This is key.
Re:MPC: possibly the next standard? Um.Nooooo....
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
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· Score: 3, Insightful
No. This is just moronic marketing hype from people who should know better targeting people who don't.
First of all it's not a new idea - we looked into it at apple in the mid 80's as a way of getting more brightness out of LCDs. Using a CMYG pattern for example.
Second, a cursory glance at the CIE diagram teaches those who understand how it works that well placed RGB primaries cover almost the entire visible gamut (90% or so). There just isn't 20% left to add with a few more primaries, let alone 65%. That's not how vision works. (A cyan primary might add about 10%, but a yellow doesn't do much of anything and magenta just isn't a primary).
And third, neither video nor movies are color matched anyway. There's no "right" color for a tv program. It's what you want it to be. That's why NTSC stands for Never Twice the Same Color. Expanding the gamut is just like turning up the saturation on your TV. Is your saturation maxed? If so, you'd probably like a TV with a larger gamut (OK, it's not quite that simple, but video programming is targeted to the typical gamut of a TV, so the new technologies typically have to be turned down or they look a unnatural, as the article described. That is, if you really use the new gamut, it looks borked anyway, unless you like that sort of thing.)
If you've got crappy, unsaturated primaries, then adding more colors can expand the range, but at the expense of monumental complexity in the color math. Comon - getting color matching to work even marginally right with only three primaries is a task yet to be even partially achieved - how many of you have color calibrated monitors? And you want to add more primaries? Get a grip on the 3 you've got!
The press release does speak of a truth in subtractive color displays (like LCDs but not CRTs) that there is an intrinsic trade off between color purity (gamut) and brightness. Of course you can always use a brighter lightbulb/backlight... Or an alternative primary color technology like CRTs LEDs OLEDs Lasers... etc today. Large screen OLEDS would have a far better gamut than this crap anyway.
If you want to see amazing color look to laser displays or Sony's new reflective ribbon technology (that uses a laser as the source) with pure RGB primaries, there's no advantage to be had...
As for the technology being unique or special (not short bus special, though it is that) it's not. Your 5/6/7/etc. color inkjet printer does exactly the same thing. With reflective images (subtractive color) you don't really have primaries, you've got inks, and long ago people chose to print in RGB complement CMY (the K part is just because most inks suck and CMY all togehter would be grey, not black, so they added the black - sound familiar to the story? That's only about 100 years old). Anyway, looking back at our old CIE diagram we see that Cyan Magenta and Yellow inscribe a wee triangle even with fully saturated inks, so Epson chose to add a few more colors (and then more, and more) and figure out the color math behind the transformation from CRT RGB primaries (or CIE LAB) to CMYKC2Y2M2 etc. It works well with printers (Epson was actually copying Pantone's Hexachrome offset process, which itself is probably not the first).
It's an OK idea to improve the image quality of the color mixing functions used to filter incoming light for color cameras (typicaly CMYG, though some cameras now use RGB), but it's just silly with LCDs. If you're really a color fanatic you're probably using a CRT anyway.
As an aside, in the persuit of some research about 10 years ago I found a paper article presenting research in capturing archival images of paintings and other works of art, and seeking to eliminate all possible metamerism between the color mixing functions of the detector and the human visual system. The authors found that to do so required a 7 primary system. I haven't been able to find the article again and I'm not
I was there. It was cool. There were lots of variations and one that went into production and was sold in Japan, briefly, before it was pulled for fear of competing with Newton.
As a variation on my last name, when I was a student at MIT, I chose "guess@mit.edu" as my address on Athena. It was open... I was young...
Athena was, at the time, marginally connected to Arpanet, the internet as such did not exist yet.
Everyone was new to email; it was such an exciting new medium for flirting, a combination that led to some unfortunate experiments. A really surprising number of people seemed to think it was cute to cc "guess" as a joke when they were sending out their little love notes...
For a while it was fun to reply to all and ask when we were getting together for whatever it was they were proposing to each other, or to respond with "I can't make it at 11:00, can we do it at 1:00 instead?" Nobody ever wrote back... or cc'd "guess" twice.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a flaming liberal, I find it odd to agree... At least on the surface.
The world is a finite entity and American's hold an increasingly privileged position in it. Ultimately, we will be forced to accept less disparity in the total wealth of the world.
Current trends are oddly contrary: while our invasion of Afghanistan has yielded a previously stalled agreement for a trans-Afghan pipeline, and our invasion of Iraq has taken from French and Russian companies $10T worth of oil and flipped the pre-invasion decision to price that oil in Euros thereby contributing to the sustenance of our standard of living through military force, economic and domestic security trends exert the opposite pressure. Wealth flees the country; our trade imbalance is funded by loans from potential military enemies, leaving our economy a hostage and potential casualty in a conflict. Rules about sharing information and knowledge with foreign nationals have staunched the flow of the world's smartest to the US, and in some segments that flow has reversed. Foreign universities grow in stature and resources as the best and brightest of their populations keep their talents home.
In the end, wealth is a relative measure, and as such we cannot sustain a disparity and our wealth will necessarily diminish, even if it is not foregone that our basic needs will be less well met. We will consume our per capita share of the world's resources and emit our per capita share of pollutants; sooner or later. Those resources can be allocated frivolously or usefully, but they are finite.
The adjustment is going to hurt.
But the process by which we end up in that steady state condition is of our choosing. Economic systems are entirely human constructs, a chosen and somewhat arbitrary solution to meeting our basic needs. We can, at our whim, choose other methods of ensuring our needs are met. So far we haven't had much luck with alternatives, but it's arguable that the strength of a monetized economy is the intrinsic accounting and the failure of other methods of organization is for the lack of the resources to meet the organizational requirements in an efficient and productive manner. To the extent that this is true, technology may open new solutions to these problems, heretofore intractable.
Perhaps, given that the currently accepted rules of economics appear to lead inexorably to a rather unpleasant conclusion, it's time to change those rules.
I could not agree more. Terrorism has proven to be an irrelevant risk to the American populace. In the week including 9/11 more people died from smoking than the attack.
Further, there is a fundamental disconnect in the procedural criticism of legislation that utterly fails to relate the results with the methods. While it is entirely appropriate to ask why 9/11 and how do we prevent such disasters in the future, we must measure every solution in it's value in achieving the goal and compare that value to it's cost.
The Patriot act, among other recent trends in jurisprudence undermine, even negate, many of the freedoms on which American's have counted since the founding of the republic. To read the words of our founders, of patriots through the years, these basic freedoms have been considered beyond compromise, literally worth dying for.
No evidence has been provided that the freedoms we have lost have earned us any security, not even temporary.
The tree of liberty is parched, yet those that most vociferously proclaim themselves such, only prove Johnson right.
I wrote to the dynamic looking and very photogenic Andy Spano via his web site: http://andyspano.com/contact.html
r eless.htm
Dear Andy Spano,
I am writing to suggest you reconsider your bill imposing penalties for WiFi access points that fail to meet various arbitrary criteria intended to control access.
http://www.westchestergov.com/WhatsNew/Press/PRwi
There are three reasons why this legislation is fundamentally flawed:
1) It is an utterly ineffectual way to protect the LAN. A firewall, as required by law, is merely a complication in the process that may or may not provide any useful security depending on the way it's set up. The term itself is effectively meaningless and the function far too technical for any typical user to understand. To be effective, the city would have to hire enough personal technology consultants to train every single resident. Otherwise a firewall that filters packets between the LAN and the WAN does nothing to protect a wLAN attack. Filtering between the wLAN and the LAN merely breaks the functionality of being able to attach devices wireless to the LAN. Strong filtering on the wLAN breaks the value of offering free WiFi hotspots.
Every single installation has installation specific security concerns unique to that particular installation. What works in one, won't work in another.
2) It is utterly irrelevant to the stated goal of reducing identity theft. Nobody bothers driving around to steal credit card numbers. It would be beyond stupid to waste time and gas and money to actually drive somewhere to just maybe catch the odd not SSL encrypted email containing a credit card number. Normally financial transactions are carried out over SSL encrypted web sites and sniffing the LAN, firewall or not, provides no useful information without breaking the SSL encryption. Identity theft happens by phishing or by breaking into company servers. Punishing end users for bad server security with a pointless and ill-considered law might sound like fun, but it does nothing to reduce the theft of financial information. Any cracker smart enough to hack into a server will hack into the server of a company that stores credit card data en masse, like CDnow or something, and steal hundreds of thousands at a time, not one by one. This bill is like trying to stop bank robberies by forcing people to lock their doors.
3) It is heinously intrusive. It is like passing a law to fine people for not locking their doors and windows, even second story windows, and sending cops around to check up on them, even if they have other means of security like an alarm system, a security dog, or being good friends with their neighbors who keep an eye out for them. It seems fundamentally wrong for government to micro manage people's lives in such an intrusive and unjustified way.
I am sympathetic to the goal, but any legislation should address the crime itself, not dictate a method for reducing it (especially when the method is merely onerous and irrelevant). A valuable bill would make companies liable for customer information and the cost of mishandling it. If a business requires information from me that represents a liability, they should be required to take responsibility for that information as a cost of doing business in that way. If they take and store my credit card information, and fail to secure it, they should pay the cost of that failure. They should not be given a safe harbor for having installed some easily circumvented "firewall."
...woo hoo... what an advance:
Merrill's Steven Milunovich believes the new technology makes HP more competitive, and that "the foundation for longer-term price competition is evident." In a research note, he said that competitors may be pressured to introduce similar photolithographic capability. While HP claims to have a years-long head start with the technology, Milunovich says it may take that long for HP's new technology to trickle down to mainstream price points. - Forbes
Oh yeah, do that research Forbes... later heard to say "duh... what's google?"
Canon Full-photolithography Inkjet Nozzle Engineering (FINE) uses a high-performance 1,856-nozzle print head that ejects precise, consistent droplets as small as 1 picoliter, resulting in beautiful photos with virtually no detectable grain.
Frobes might also have check Amazon for those prices:
Refills of HP's new color Vivera ink cartridges will sell for $9.99, while older color ink cartridges can run $30 or more.
Canon BCI-6BK Black Ink Tank $9.99.
It'd be one thing if maybe the exact key words weren't so easily googled...
Fact checking, a lost art.
Canon's print head is not "built in" to the printer, meaning they've even developed a non-disposable printer too! Of course that's done really well for them...
Survey results show that 85.6% of respondents reported they would most likely purchase an Epson printer, while no other vendor reached even 7%.
If we were to cover 1/2 the land area we've paved in the US with solar panels of standard efficiency, we'd generate as much electricity as we consume in all forms of energy in the US. The rest of the world is quite parsimonious by comparison, though they could so too meet all their needs and live as profligately as we do without environmental impact.
It has been suggested by people not bothering to do the math that the change in albedo from the solar cells themselves would cause warming, but we've already paved twice that area.
Biofuels are relatively inefficient compared to solar cells, but fairly simple as well and carbon net-neutral. Biofuels and solar hydrogen could meet our mobile and nightime needs easily.
We can live as we do, with all the juice and cars and whatnot, so long as we do not too grossly expand our population, in a closed loop, steady state system. We could live quite comfortably if we overturned the Ford coup of the 1920s and reversed the graft-based decision to build roads and the 1950's military decision to build suburbs. With a predominantly urban population moving by train (or working close to home/at home) we could buy the solar cells with a few year's oil expenditures.
Unfortunately Solar doesn't have the profit margin of oil, so there's no political/industrial interest. There's $10 trillion worth of oil in Iraq we took ownership of for a mere $1 trillion in military expenditures (at the current burn rate, given the time it will take to pump it out). The usual profit sharing (if we chose to share with the Defeated People) is 50/50, meaning at least 5:1 profit on that adventure for the country as a whole, but since Haliburton is actually getting paid for their efforts (and then some) and the profit will accrue directly to the oil companies and not back to We the People, it's an amazingly shrewd business deal, the greatest heist in the history of mankind: $10 trillion. Almost the entire US gross domestic product for a year.
Nobody building solar factories is going to see that kind of profit, and without it they can't compete in the congressional auction. Laws aren't bought flat rate, they're sold to the highest bidder and no industry can outbid the oil industry.
It would be far cheaper to convert the global energy economy to solar (as a combination of solar-thermal, solar-electric, and solar-biofuel with the only other long-term viable power source as a backup--breeder nuclear, which (not ignoring the very real waste problem) is the only other energy source we have that can meaningfully contribute to our long term power needs) than to build a great space ring. The low range costs are small compared to the current value of the known oil reserves (roughly $80 trillion, proven plus mid-range USGS unproven estimates at $40/bbl).
It's technically easy to solve, but politically impossible.
Most people, most patent lawyers, most congress people, most patent holders, certainly all representatives of the copyright industry would love to erase those simple words.
Because patents and copyrights are not, have never been about rewarding creators for the act of creation.
It is this fundamental error, promoted by the copyright industry, that poisons copyright and patent law to consider inventions "property." We do not, as a people, offer inventors "embarrassing monopolies" on that which intrinsically cannot be subject to ownership, the "fugitive fermentations of the individual mind," as a reward and certainly not ever as a right.
It is a mechanism by which we reward creators for sharing their work with us, for enriching the public domain, not for creating it in the first place. We as a society do not automatically gift inventors with ownership of their ideas, the very idea is preposterous, we grant them a temporary monopoly for the act of sharing. It is not the moment of invention, which is itself worthless to society, but about sharing an invention with society.
This leads to the most obvious test: no copyright law, no patent law is constitutional if it does not optimize the value of the public domain. If so doing means revoking all patents and all copyrights than we the people have that right "without claim or complaint by anyone."
If we applied that test the economically irrelevant entertainment industry would not be allowed to retard the progress of society with idiotic laws like the DMCA, laws which not only fail to meet the constitutional test but which obviously directly contradict it.
As for patenting software vs. simply copyrighting it, the whole issue has become muddied. The reason for not issuing patents is that you cannot patent a discovery, that is something you did not actually invent but merely found. Mathematical algorithms are found, they always existed, they are not invented. Software loosely fits the category of an extended mathematical algorithm, but perhaps not usefully. The constitution provides a clear guide out of this seeming quagmire: if the public domain is most enriched by copyright protection, than copyright should be used; if the public domain is most enriched by patents, then patents should be used. If the public domain is most enriched by stripping all monopoly protection, then all monopoly protection must be stripped.
Patents still reference their constitutional reason for being, unlike copyright anymore: patents speak of teaching the art in exchange for a temporary monopoly. Failing to properly teach the art (how to accurately and precisely implement the idea being protected, and to do so by the inventors best known method) is cause for revoking the patent. Copyrights are granted on inventions believed self-evident, so there's no parallel test. A book or song is the book or song, not the method of it's production (design patents are a bit of a fly in the ointment of this argument, but I'm choosing to ignore them). Copyrights were originally issued for 17 years, same as patents; it's an amazing testament to the power of graft that Disney and Grewshwin got their monopoly rights extended without showing any benefit for society.
As for obvious and poor patents, there are complex issues as to the cost of litigation. It's not immediately clear who should pay the cost of careful review, though the cost of such review relative to the value of the system as a whole is small, and would seem a prudent investment for society, at least if the system would actually work for society instead of for the "special interests" that own the legislative process.
If it were up to me:
Years ago, during a heatwave in Oakland, I built a homebrew swamp cooler with some muffin fans and a mist nozzle from McMaster (like 32215K11).
From thermodynamics, the say you have 1kg of water to work with:
Changing it from ice to water: 334kJ
Raising it from 0C to 25C: 104kJ
Converting from liquid to vapor: 2,260kJ
Compared with vaporizing water, melting ice is trivial.
For swamp coolers to work, the humidity has to be low--if it's high the ice bucket trick is a good one. But for those in dry hot climates, a swamp cooler works well.
I connected mine to a hose spigot with 1/8" tubing, which supplied a continuous flow of water to the mist nozzle, which was mixed with a good flow of hot dry air from the fans, and resulted in a good flow of cool slightly damp air.
Does anyone who ever worked on Outlook ever get on a plane? Ever? Do they know what a time zone is?
There is only one program I've found that handles time zones correctly: TrueSync Desktop and it is abandonware. I kept buying motorola P8167s for years just so I could stick with TSD.
There are two features of TrueSync Desktop that no other PIM seems to do correctly, and there is only one correct method. The two features are:
1) When you create an standard event, you specify the time zone the event will happen in. All time zone math is handled automatically. This is the only correct method of handling events for people who travel outside their time zone regularly.
2) When you mark a special day, say a birthday or a holiday, TSD remembers the date, rather than creating a 24 hour event from 0:00 to 23:59. This is the only correct way to handle special days.
Consider the following scenarios, which I face almost every week:
A) You are in California on the phone with someone in Boston planning a phone conference from 10:00-11:30am for next week at which time you'll be in London. What time should you set the conference for? Can you do the math? How about if you're in Phoenix in April? There are 31 time zones and almost all contain some regions that observe and some that do not observe DST. This is the sort of irritating arithmetic my computer should do, and only True Sync Desktop does it the right way.
With Outlook can set your system time zone to the time zone the event will happen in, then create the event, then set your time zone back to the time zone you're in. Oh yeah, that's really convenient.
B) You make a new friend on a visit a trip that includes a visit to Hawaii and Boston and put her birthday in your outlook/phone tools calendar. You get to San Francisco. What day is her birthday? With outlook when you change time zones the event straddles two days, only one of them the actual correct day. Depending on whether you travel east or west, the correct date is either the first or the second of the two days marked. How flabbergastingly stupid is that?
Now one would think that _someone_ (anyone) involved in the development of outlook would, sooner or later, actually travel to a different time zone and realize just how utterly brain dead their handling of time zones really is (yes, outlook supports two (2)whole time zones, and for purely bicoastal people that's fine, but some of us actually travel to the flyover states occasionally. And some people even travel outside the US, which is still legal.)
I personally can't stand the outlook look and feel. I find it sort of smothering, though I acknowledge that there are some good features to it, but if there's one good model for how a PIM should work it's True Sync Desktop, but since it won't sync to a modern phone, it's just not all that useful anymore, sadly.
Thanks to my incessant whining, BVRP has put time zones on it's feature path, so Motorola's PhoneTools might soon correctly implement time zones and all-day events, probably more quickly if more people encourage them to.
I hate reading about the "revolution" of LED lighting. LEDs are very cool for lighting, I use a lot of them in my house for various reasons, but efficiency is not one of them. Anytime a journalist regurgitates some LED company's marketing department drivel about the pending energy revolution in LED lighting, smack them hard with a clue by four and tell them to check their facts before publishing.
The basics:
There's a difference between radiant efficiency and luminous efficiency. Radiance is the radiometric output, regardless of wavelength. 1 watt of light (over 2pi steradians) at 555nm (yellow/green) equals 683 lumens. At that exact wavelength, radiant and luminous efficiency are the same, and a 100% efficient green light would put out 683 lm/w. In radiance the same watts quantify the optical output as the electrical input, so efficiency is easy to calculate. In photometry (where the human eye is involved), lumens are the measure of light output; while a watt of light at 555nm is 683 lumens, a watt of light at 470nm (a typical blue LED peak wavelength) is 62 lumens.
The eye's sensitivity as a function of wavelength is a curve, the photopic curve, with it's peak normalized to 555nm (or the scotopic curve for rod response in dim light., peaking at 507nm) and asymptotically approaching zero at about 425nm as blue blends into ultraviolet and at 690nm as red blends into infrared. True white light with a color rendering index of 100 can only generate 199 lm/w at 100% theoretical efficiency.
Typical fluorescent lights achieve about 50% total plug efficiency. The best white LEDs achieve about 20% efficiency (40lm/w), not including power supply losses. Also, "white" LEDs still have worse Color Rendition Indices (CRIs) than fluorescent, though both efficiency and CRI are improving, they have a long, long way to go to improve on florescent lights in terms of efficiency and quality of light. LEDs are physically smaller than fluorescents and usually have a longer life, though the brightest ones (e.g. Luxeon 5W single emitters) do not last as long as a typical CCFL.
As to the comments about the "warmth" of incandescent, it's because the effective blackbody temperature is cooler (confusing, no?). Planck's equation describes the emission spectra, but the color temperature is the peak of the emission curve in absolute temperature, Kelvin, for the equivalent blackbody (i.e. 6500K for D65 standard proofing, or 9300K for standard CRTs), which becomes more blue, which means more energetic, the hotter the blackbody gets. This is why halogen bulbs are cooler (in color) than typical incandescents, because the filaments run hotter (and yet don't burn out faster because the halide gas in the bulb works to scavenge the evaporated tungsten off the glass and back to the filament.) Color rendition is more important than just the color temperature of the light: a continuous, even spectrum, like that of sunlight, is required to minimize metameric errors, that is a color appearing differently under the light in question than it would in daylight.
The reason halogen lights are more efficient than non-halogen incandescent bulbs is because the blackbody emission curve of the hotter filament more closely matches the photopic curve. The blackbody curve never matches the photopic curve exactly, so incandescent bulbs (or any technology where a material is heated to incandescence to emit light by thermal radiation) can never be even close to 100% efficient.
Plug efficiency includes the losses of the power supply, but the total plug efficiency is hard to find. There is no plug efficiency loss for 110V incandescents, but there is for low voltage halogen, and of course for low voltage LEDs, and typically for most high efficiency lighting systems. The following lists typical manufacturer stated efficiencies. LED efficiencies do not include the power supply, so derate by whatever your power supply's efficiency is. High efficiency lighting is reported as plug efficiency.
True enough, but not the complete answer. The regulations that were applied in return for the grant of monopoly (anybody see the parallel to monopolies granted for invention here? That is you get it if and only if you give back to We the People something of equal or greater value. With patents this is teaching society not just how to implement the invention but the best known method. Failing to teach correctly or failing to teach the best method is reason for revoking the 20 year monopoly. And copyright holders have to give up what in exchange for their 100 plus year monopoly that we the people give them?)
Anyway, in return for monopoly rights, as in granting broadcast bandwidth, the recipient (bell) agreed to offer services then considered essential. Everybody wins.
But if we take away the monopoly (e.g. by permitting VoIP) then we also reduce the value of that monopoly, and therefore have less bargaining power for essential services (e.g. 911). We could, of course, pass a law requiring all comms providers to meet reliability requirements and provide universal "lifeline" service, but that sort of arbitrary regulation is not the way we've traditionally done it.
In general the current trend is to stop collectively working for the best of everyone and to singularly work for the best for ourselves. If that mode of thought dominates, the poor can walk to the fire station (and be lucky to find one still staffed). Or we can decide that there is a basic reliable comm level we consider essential and recognizing that we have no monopoly bargaining power to trade to a private entity in return for providing that comm service, we can provide it by collective action, that is through municipal last mile service.
It works quite well for roads, which have been tremendously successful at subsidizing and promoting car and oil sales, as well as being essential to just about every business in the US. Municipal common carriage data services would seem, at least at first blush, to have the same potential to promote growth of IT services and business as roads have had with almost every other business, except with far less environmental destruction to screw future generations.
Well, given the quality or lack thereof of current digital projectors (I saw THX1138 on the newest equipment at Telluride, it failed during the movie and was harsh and sort of unpleasant compared to the clean 35mm prints being shown) second run theaters might become more popular with the people who actually care about picture quality.
One of the things I am willing to pay for is exceptional image quality, the lushness and shadow detail of film. If it's just a digital projector, some DMD/DLP POS really no better than the office unit I borrowed for the weekend, then why bother? I'm really not that interested in the clever audience commentary.
If it were me, I'd fight the home theater battle and the rapidly improving equipment on that front with 70mm film and Imax installations. That's worth going out for. Give me Cinerama (3 synchronized projectors in ultra wide screen wrap around) or I'll stay home.
Digital projection democratizes the equipment, ultimately, quantizing the quality differences between home equipment and professional out of existence. Bits are bits, but analog leaves infinite room for tweaking to at least give users the warm, fuzzy belief in quality differences, even if they're largely illusory.
For the next couple of years, real film projection will have real quality advantages over digital projection for live action film. Ultimately it will go the way of the "advantage" of LPs over CDs... But when it does, what value will the $10pp theater have over the barcolounger?
you know, you're probably right. I'm sure it is more effective to cut the invective and simply say "I oppose SB XXXX" as the only sentence thereby saving the intern's time scanning for which box to check. But even when I do that, half the time I get a response along the lines of "we appreciate your support of SB XXXX, thank you." It's almost a statistical wash. The only notes that get a careful read are the ones written on checks.
....
But of the phrases you find objectionable, I'd agree with "bribe," "moronic," and "stupid," and maybe "removed from office," but "investigate him for ethics violations"
Perhaps you prefer this letter:
Dear Assemblymember Pavley,
I understand (from prwire) that you are supporting Herb Vest's bill to punish his competitors in the on-line dating business.
I would be very interested to know why you feel this bill is worthy of support.
I have not read the bill, but I have read several news accounts of it's scope, and at first blush it seems like a clear case of a special interest bill which aids a particular corporation at the expense of it's competitors by institutionalizing it's particular (and peculiar) business model in law.
Mr. Vest's effort seems so clearly to serve no useful social purpose, that despite reading true.com's somewhat incomprehensible and illogical self-justification, I am, alas, still incapable of positing a logical argument in support of any sort, let alone a persuasive one. Perhaps I am missing something.
True.com's own model, by their own admission, serves no useful purpose as there is no method to verify that the information that's provided by users is accurate. If a person was bent on nefarious purposes, they'd merely use a false name.
Further, the idea that an ex-con is somehow less acceptable as a human being is contrary to the precepts of our criminal law which hold that a person who has served a sentence is largely or completely restored to society, and that they deserve a second chance, and that ongoing retribution is a violation of the Ex Post Facto clause of the constitution. We do not, as a matter of law, embrace the biblical concept of "once unclean, always unclean, and so too the saddle on which he rides."
Lastly, without building an authoritative infrastructure for maintaining a civilian accessible database of both criminal records and marriage records, as well as providing a means for consumer challenges to inaccurate information, and cross referencing that information with unique identifiers, innocent users will be falsely tarred in an extremely destructive manner, with a breadth and significance of consequence that would make the mistakes on the no-fly list pale in comparison.
Mr. Vest seems to have a fundamentalist attitude toward extra-marital affairs and seems inclined to use his resources to punish those who either believe that marriage does not imply physical fidelity, or, for example, who begin dating before their divorces are final. But adultery is not a crime in California and in light of Lawrence v. Texas states that do have adultery laws on the books are reexamining them.
It seems clear that this effort will do nothing to protect on-line daters from predators and other nefarious characters, it will falsely accuse innocent users, it will provide a false sense of security to the users of Mr. Vest's service and a false sense of insecurity to the users of his competitors services. it's only viable purpose would seem to be to aid Mr. Vest's personal jihad against what he apparently considers unchristian, amoral practices and increase his income. Why that effort deserves legislative support escapes me.
Sincerely,
I'm quite certain that both will get the same degree of high quality scrutiny and have the same 50/50 chance of being intepreted consistent with my position, but the former was a lot more fun to write.
I wrote to my state senator:
I read with tremendous dismay that True.com has managed to bribe at least one assemblymember into introducing their special interest legislation. I assume it will be crushed immediately, it's just so astonishingly moronic. My confidence in democracy would be somewhat improved if Fran Pavley is removed from office as expeditiously as possible. It's incomprehensible to me that anyone could be so naive and stupid as to believe that this legislation is in the public interest or anything but a bald-faced attempt to create legislative favor for a specific company. I would think that unless Fran Pavley has some plausible excuse, it would be appropriate to investigate him for ethics violations.
You bring up good points.
First, let me cop to my impulse to dismiss breathless press release news. The depolymerization technology is cool. What offends me is the "it'll save the world singlehandledly" hyperventilation that post-wired science journalists seem to think is essential to selling the story.
It won't, but neither would solar power alone. And there was a time, not so very long ago, that solar power advocates got press by promising to solve all of humanities social problems and cure acne with a few flakes of silicon. Some still do, but they don't end up in Fortune.
I generally like the orbiting solar platform concept, not because it makes sense, but because it would serve to increase spending on space research. It's really not practically necessary and the advocates tend to distort numbers in their advocacy, viz Smally's talk at the Army of the Future conference in FL in 2003, who promoted orbiting and Lunar platforms by claiming that terrestrial solar would cause problematic albedo effects (a claim 2 orders of magnitude out of reality).
Still the cost of solar becomes stratospheric, literally, if you add launch costs. If solar panels could be continuously fabricated out of Lunar materials, it would (in the rather longer term) be more practical. And fun. And really, really cool.
Solar cell costs will come down dramatically with volume, just the same as everything else does. Imagine having a machine shop build you a car from scratch - every little part - using general purpose equipment. As continuous fabrication lines come up, solar panels will become very inexpensive.
But, even so, it's not a complete solution. If I were in charge of energy policy, I'd:
Build large scale pilot plants (solar, and, OK, depolymerization) to meet all federal energy needs from domestic sources. This is of obvious strategic value and would protect our interests economically as well as militarily. I would encourage technology transfer to the private sector, but keep federal production on-line to enforce price pressure against private industry.
I'd build a hydrogen distribution system, with hydrogen generated by many means, including solar hydrolysis. This is one solution to "what to do when the sun sets." The calculations I used for the total energy consumption and solar availability are 24/7, year round. But they do not include the efficiency losses for storing energy for night time use (for which I couldn't find any supporting data, i.e. power consumption as a function of time and weather and lattitude, though pieces of that data are available).
A complete answer would include social reorganization to cities and towns that encourage public rail transportation, the elimination of suburban subsidies, the elimination of subsidies that support big-box stores and other "parking lot" retail, elimination of subsidies that encourage companies to locate outside of urban centers, etc. Ill-informed pseudo-libertarian types typically argue that such restructuring is morally suspect government interference in the preferred social order, but that's just not true: the current suburban/car culture was entirely manufactured for military and economic reasons and is completely unnatural. Even the general desire for a "white picket fence and yard in the suburbs" is merely the result of propaganda from the '50s which served to justify strategic roadways to protect in the event of a massive invasion. The goal would be to shift the energy required for transportation to modes more efficient and amenable to electrification than private cars, which would both reduce total energy consumption and make transportation more amenable to renewable resources.
I do not believe that nuclear waste is a trivial issue, nor that we can leave it for mythically inventive future alchemists to magically convert to gold (and I was course 22). But breeder reactors do represent a serious energy source, roughly 3X the total known hydrocarbon reserves. Standard US style therm
If I could mod your reply up, I would. I've been having this conversation as a debate for some years. We're doing the best we can to glean facts from what's available. I'll give you my sources for ag energy efficiency in line - if you read this response please reply with yours. I'd be very glad to learn that ag wastes are a viable source, as they are obviously carbon neutral and mobile energy consumption is so obviously amenable to liquid fuels.
>There's simply not enough food waste to supply the system.
You're kidding right? Here in Iowa, we're having huge problems with all of the ag waste that we don't know how to get rid of. Hog farming alone is posing a serious threat to our rivers, as they can't use the *manure* fast enough (natural fertilizer, in the corn belt, and they can't even use that fast enough!).
Can you tell me what the total energy content of that waste is? Where do you get the numbers? Are they neutral and unbiased? I know the ponds of hog effluent would drown a town, but even so energy numbers are so huge, that it's hard to believe it's not just a drop in the bucket. I couldn't find really good ag numbers, but I got mine from
http://newton.umsl.edu/infophys/lsp.html
wh ich references
E. P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, Saunders 1971
at 1/40th of incident energy into calories in biomass
> Growing targeted crops would be absurdly inefficient. At best photosynthesis
> is 2.5% efficient, compared to 12% for commercially available solar panels.
So very wrong. At best, photosynthesis is 11% efficient - 45% of light is PAR (photosynthetically active radiation), of which due to limitations on how much energy is needed per CO2 molecule brings it down to 25%; factoring in the whole cycle, you get 11%. On average, plants get 3-6% efficiency.
E. P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, Saunders 1971
at 1/40th of incident energy into calories in biomass
Where did you get 3-6% efficiency? That's roughly 2X what I got, though you correctly identified a mistake - that is incorrectly substituting "photosynthesis" for "caloric conversion efficiency". Still, if our goal is electricity to run our computers, commercial cells get 12%, and the best cells get 40%.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/25410.pdf
My calculations say it would take about 1.4% of the US surface area to meet US domestic energy consumption needs, which is plausible given that 1.7% of the US surface area is paved. In desert areas less area would be required because of higher average irradiance compared to the national average, and it would be out of the way, assuming 12% efficient cells.
Taking my referenced number of 2.5% efficiency as a starting point (but remember it could be twice that), it would take 7X as much land to get the equivalent biomass calories, then depolymerize it at a self-reported efficiency of 85% (impressive, if true) and then 45% mechanical efficiency in the generator http://news.thomasnet.com/fullstory/18175/612. to get electricity, which means 17.5X the land area or 25% of the total US land mass. Unfortunately the total arable land of the US is only 19%.
If 2.5% net conversion to calorie efficiency for biomass is correct, it would simply be impossible to grow enough plants to convert to fuel even if we stopped growing food. If it's 6% then we could, if we all ate a lot less.... that wouldn't be a bad thing... And if you can show me 5-6% efficiency I'll be corrected from "can't work at all" to "a serious contender for supplying some of the US energy demand."
I think a valid claim is that if we were to undo the horrible mistake of the 1920s when Ford and Firestone bribed congress and the president into subsidizing their new inventions and spending public money building roads so those rich bastards could sell cars, and the even more idiotic national defense measures of the '50's which flooded the US with suburban bliss propaganda creating the ecological and social disaster we call "th
It's a useful minor energy source, but primarily it's good for converting a stinky, unpleasant, difficult to handle waste stream into something useful. There's simply not enough food waste to supply the system. Growing targeted crops would be absurdly inefficient. At best photosynthesis is 2.5% efficient, compared to 12% for commercially available solar panels. Take system inefficiencies in the stream from sunlight to depolymerizable crop and there isn't enough arable land on earth to meet our energy demands.
There's a basic energy balance concept that seems to escape most supposedly intelligent pundits on this issue. It's the sort of thing you're supposed to learn in 7th grade with rate problems: the world is a closed system, with energy in and energy out. Energy in comes from the sun, energy out is radiated heat. Over time there has been very slightly more energy in than out, which is stored as fossil fuels.
Ignoring the consequences of liberating all the CO2 ever captured in the history of the world over the next century, there's neither enough fossil fuel to last nor enough arable land to build an economy around a sustainable biofuel stream.
But Solar is trivial. It easily answers the world's energy needs at an entirely manageable cost.
A 16kWh/day (5.8E3 kWh/y) complete grid tie system costs $15k (12% efficient BP panels). 2E10 of these systems would power the whole world (volume discount?) which would cost $3.1E14 at today's retail which is roughly the GDP of the world for 7.5 years. Now figure you're asking BP to manufacture 4E11 solar panels... that's 400,000,000,000 panels. Maybe they'd be bit cheaper at that volume.
But we can reasonably assume typical cost reductions and a combination of PV and solar heating; the world uses 1.2E14 total kwh/year for all purposes, but only 1.3E13 kWh global consumption of electricity. If we replaced only electricity consumption for the whole world at RETAIL prices it would cost only 70% of the world GDP for one year and require only 4E10 panels and 5.6E10 square meters of land area - out of 1.3E14 available in the world, or 0.04% of the planet's land (0.4% to replace all energy consumed for all reasons with PV).
The US used 2.8E13 kWh total energy in all forms last year (3.6E12 kWh electricity) which would require 9.6E10 solar panels to generate or 1.3E11 square meters and $7.2E13 at retail. This would occupy 1.4% of our land area of 9.4E12 square meters..
We've paved 1.6E11 square meters: that is we've subsidized the auto and petroleum industry with a welfare gift of 1.7% of the total land area of the nation, more than it would take to be entirely energy independent.
Continuing the car comparison, our roadways, taxpayer financed at a cost of about $2M/lane mile or $340/sq meter, cost $1.9E13 in today's dollars compared to $7.2E13 to convert the entire country's entire energy use to PV. Realistically we'd convert only the electricity consumption of 3.6E12 kWh at $9.3E12 at RETAIL, less than half of what we taxpayers have given the auto and oil industry, not including the value of the real estate.
Converting the entire world to PV entirely as a collective effort would piss off the libertarians and the oil magnates (generally for different reasons) but doing so would cost less than the corporate welfare we've dumped on the oil and auto industries. Even today it's hardly insurmountable. Compared to the value of a zero emissions, entirely sustainable energy economy, it's trivial.
One argument I had with a friend about our capture of the Iraqi oil was over the counter argument presented by some math challenged conservative pundits (are any conservative pundits not math challenged?) that the oil costs would not offset the cost of taking Iraq, as if the suggestion that we are there to protect our oil was somehow ludicrous.
This argument ignores the most obvious counter that taxpayers are footing the $200B bill while Haliburton takes the profits, which before the invasion were going to Fr
Nobody will ever need more than 640kB.
This is disruptive, at least if the disks production cost/retail price is in line with existing recordable media (DVD/CD).
If this progresses quickly and gets publicity it could kill blu-ray by creating FUD about the lifetime of a 25/50GB disk with a 1TB disk around the corner.
The obvious commercial application is to distribute HD series television using MPEG-2, which would be unwieldy as a stack of blu-ray disks.
Using MPEG-4 one could easily see the "Disney Disk" with 750 or so movies on it. You buy the disk with one key, buy more keys as you want.
It's an excellent backup media. HD's are convenient for backup, but cumbersome for rotating backups with offsite storage (which is why I still use archaic DAT archives even though the media alone costs more than a pair of HDs would).
In theory people are not simply passive consumers of commercial content, but rather creators of their own. As HD cams become affordable, people will want to store stacks of HD content, as they now have stacks of tapes or DVD-Rs of their vacations and children's first steps.
And then there's more wack concepts like being able to store everything you see and hear all your life, which could go through these disks pretty quickly.
"OLED display responses are 1,000 times faster than liquid crystal displays (LCDs), thus enabling greater resolution."
Perhaps it's related to superman flying backwards around the world fast enough to reverse time so the pixels shrink to their infant state...
That's the half of it. The whole of it includes the limitation: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts..." It is unconstitutional to offer an "embarrassing monopoly" [Thomas Jefferson] on the dissemination of invention such that the result of that monopoly is to retard the progress of science and the useful arts.
The author has no intrinsic right to his or her creation, there is no property right, unauthorized distribution is not theft, the only piracy is of the public domain. Copyright is a government granted monopoly, offered by We The People as a quid pro quo, for which we demand an increase in output, quality, and availability of invention.
The principles of copyright were utterly obfuscated by the publishing industry (particularly Disney and the Gershwin foundation) in the 1970s. Patent law retains the character intended by the founding fathers. A patent is clearly still a temporary (20 year) monopoly in return for "teaching the art." Indeed, a patent is invalid if the inventor does not teach in the embodiments, with sufficient detail for one skilled in the art not only exactly how to implement the invention, but the best known method of doing so at the time of filing.
As to copyright, it is incomprehensible to me how extending the term of the monopoly nearly indefinitely increases the dissemination of invention, rather than the seemingly obvious outcome of impoverishing the public domain. Further, I cannot comprehend the computations that underlie a decision to retard the computer industry, which contributes trillions dollars to the economy and is obviously a true engine of ongoing invention, to protect a minuscule, economically irrelevant ($20B/year) entertainment industry that's greatest invention seems to be Brittany Spears.
By what argument can our bought and paid for by the entertainment industry legislators think they are fulfilling their sworn duty to uphold the constitution? Abject ignorance?
No really, report spam to the RBLs. They'll work better the more they're used and the more timely. And they really piss off spammers, which is a Good Thing.
1) The only acceptable removable media option is Compact Flash.
2) The only acceptable power source is AA cells.
CF: why? highest capacity at the lowest cost. It's "small enough" and WTF do we need with 5 different, incompatible memory formats. If only people had rejected the newcomers as they arrived, we wouldn't be in this mess. It's not too late, boycott lame memory card formats!
AAs. LiOn echargable batteries are great until something happens when the battery has been in the drawer for a month - hey hang there for an hour 'till the batterie's charged! Or you're on vacation - just let me bring the charger for each device I carry! Or the battery runs out after 110 minutes - sure I'll just buy a few extra - at $100 each! Or your out in some foreign country: good luck finding that random LiOn at the local market, just dig through that bin of AA's, I'm sure there's one in there somewhere.
AA/CF.
I agree with the sentiment. I want a phone first, not a PDA, not a game boy, not a video player. I want something that fits in my front pocket (and doing so doesn't risk grievous bodily harm to sensitive bodily regions when I sit down). I also don't want it to call my friends when I do sit down.
Dear phone people: release a phone with the following features: I promise I will buy it.
1) Flip style smart phone like the i500. Flat phones are too big and I hate making accidental calls.
2) Palm OS. I simply won't let Microsoft into my phone. They've made a horrible mess of my laptop and I'm desperately trying to get my application providers to move to Linux so I can finally end the nightmare of their miserable security flaws and stop supporting their criminal behavior. (PTC: Pro Mechanica Linux Please!). Other options are acceptable, CE isn't. I just won't do that. A real, open source phone with an extensible, repairable, verifiable OS would be very nice - no secret spy features.
3) A camera would be nice. 1.3 Mpix would be nice. A flash would be nice. Seems to be the emerging standard. Short video clips with audio would be nice. I can see the utility of camera features and probably wouldn't buy a new phone without them.
4) CF would be a bonus. I hate SD cards, too expensive for the capacity. Why anybody thought we needed 5 approximately equal removable media formats is beyond me. They should be fired, especially Sony with their stupid Memory stick. What were they thinking? I have lots of CF cards, I'd love to be able to use them with my phone. Plus if the phone could support the 802.11, bluetooth, and wired network cards and other great features you can add via CF that you can't with any other removable media it could address the huge variety of non-critical but highly desired features people complain about.
5) If it's got CF, it should have good quality MP3 playback through a headphone jack. I'd be happy to have MP3 playback integrated into my phone, to play off my CF cards. If one want's, one can get 8GB CF cards now, plenty of music for a long flight.
6) Any phone MUST integrate with TrueSync Desktop (which is why I prefer Palm). I realize it's abandondware, but it is the ONLY PIM that handles time zones correctly. (try setting a full day meeting in outlook then changing your time zone. Which day was that meeting?)
7) Worldphone. Optimally it would be CDMA/GSM/Analog as CDMA coverage in the US is much better than GSM. But I travel places that only have analog service, so I need that (the first purpose of the phone is to get out of trouble even if you're 65km down a dirt road in the mountains of Mexico). I'd be happy with GSM/Analog, but I won't buy another phone without GSM: I'm tired of renting phones in other countries.
8) Hi Speed USB connector: I should be able to see the contents of the CF card on my computer. This is key.
No. This is just moronic marketing hype from people who should know better targeting people who don't.
First of all it's not a new idea - we looked into it at apple in the mid 80's as a way of getting more brightness out of LCDs. Using a CMYG pattern for example.
Second, a cursory glance at the CIE diagram teaches those who understand how it works that well placed RGB primaries cover almost the entire visible gamut (90% or so). There just isn't 20% left to add with a few more primaries, let alone 65%. That's not how vision works. (A cyan primary might add about 10%, but a yellow doesn't do much of anything and magenta just isn't a primary).
And third, neither video nor movies are color matched anyway. There's no "right" color for a tv program. It's what you want it to be. That's why NTSC stands for Never Twice the Same Color. Expanding the gamut is just like turning up the saturation on your TV. Is your saturation maxed? If so, you'd probably like a TV with a larger gamut (OK, it's not quite that simple, but video programming is targeted to the typical gamut of a TV, so the new technologies typically have to be turned down or they look a unnatural, as the article described. That is, if you really use the new gamut, it looks borked anyway, unless you like that sort of thing.)
If you've got crappy, unsaturated primaries, then adding more colors can expand the range, but at the expense of monumental complexity in the color math. Comon - getting color matching to work even marginally right with only three primaries is a task yet to be even partially achieved - how many of you have color calibrated monitors? And you want to add more primaries? Get a grip on the 3 you've got!
The press release does speak of a truth in subtractive color displays (like LCDs but not CRTs) that there is an intrinsic trade off between color purity (gamut) and brightness. Of course you can always use a brighter lightbulb/backlight... Or an alternative primary color technology like CRTs LEDs OLEDs Lasers... etc today. Large screen OLEDS would have a far better gamut than this crap anyway.
If you want to see amazing color look to laser displays or Sony's new reflective ribbon technology (that uses a laser as the source) with pure RGB primaries, there's no advantage to be had...
As for the technology being unique or special (not short bus special, though it is that) it's not. Your 5/6/7/etc. color inkjet printer does exactly the same thing. With reflective images (subtractive color) you don't really have primaries, you've got inks, and long ago people chose to print in RGB complement CMY (the K part is just because most inks suck and CMY all togehter would be grey, not black, so they added the black - sound familiar to the story? That's only about 100 years old). Anyway, looking back at our old CIE diagram we see that Cyan Magenta and Yellow inscribe a wee triangle even with fully saturated inks, so Epson chose to add a few more colors (and then more, and more) and figure out the color math behind the transformation from CRT RGB primaries (or CIE LAB) to CMYKC2Y2M2 etc. It works well with printers (Epson was actually copying Pantone's Hexachrome offset process, which itself is probably not the first).
It's an OK idea to improve the image quality of the color mixing functions used to filter incoming light for color cameras (typicaly CMYG, though some cameras now use RGB), but it's just silly with LCDs. If you're really a color fanatic you're probably using a CRT anyway.
As an aside, in the persuit of some research about 10 years ago I found a paper article presenting research in capturing archival images of paintings and other works of art, and seeking to eliminate all possible metamerism between the color mixing functions of the detector and the human visual system. The authors found that to do so required a 7 primary system. I haven't been able to find the article again and I'm not
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa fe=off&q=apple+penmac&btnG=Search
I was there. It was cool. There were lots of variations and one that went into production and was sold in Japan, briefly, before it was pulled for fear of competing with Newton.
As a variation on my last name, when I was a student at MIT, I chose "guess@mit.edu" as my address on Athena. It was open... I was young...
Athena was, at the time, marginally connected to Arpanet, the internet as such did not exist yet.
Everyone was new to email; it was such an exciting new medium for flirting, a combination that led to some unfortunate experiments. A really surprising number of people seemed to think it was cute to cc "guess" as a joke when they were sending out their little love notes...
For a while it was fun to reply to all and ask when we were getting together for whatever it was they were proposing to each other, or to respond with "I can't make it at 11:00, can we do it at 1:00 instead?" Nobody ever wrote back... or cc'd "guess" twice.