the reason why 'film' has crazy all over the place resolutions is because 'analog' film cameras, can use 'less' film by shooting on the same width film but with a narrower top to bottom exposure. that's why film is all over the place, but if digital film cameras ever replace 'analog film' for shooting, then they'll all be nice and standard size, or maybe they'll still let you screw around with the ratio to get tighter compression... oh well...
"Anyone that talks about a single true energy source is either selling something or has been tricked by salesfolk."
There can be Only Sun. For all matter is the dust of stars, and there CAN BE ONLY SUN.
All power even atomic energy is derived from the one true natural source of energy, the sun. therefor all energy is solar, if it was made 100 billion years ago, or today.
now the true differential is not the source of the energy, for as i have stated all energy comes from stars, but rather if the energy is positive for carbon/hydrogen based lifeforms of the essential types. your definition of 'essential' is up for debate. some would say that we don't need rain forests, we should mow them over and replace them all with palm oil plantations to provide the world with 'green' energy that require the deaths of billions of life forms.
some people would call nuclear fuel 'green' because it's mostly harmless to plants, and can be kept quite far from sentient lifeforms for the requisite 300 million years.
some would call algae green, because they grow with energy from the sun, even though the costs of converting the world to algae might completely wipe out all desert forms of life, if no sanctuaries/DNA data banks are preserved.
Some would say, reducing our energy consumption levels to the point where a fraction of the energy we now use perhaps 1% of what the typical American uses, and having specific regions for energy production and storage, as well as for populations and food growth, and vast vast tracks of land perhaps 90% of the surface of the world relegated as sanctuaries is the only way to go 'green' even though such egalitarian approaches would require grandiose reductions of the world human population and the way we live, and interact with nature..
I can't recall the link, but I think somewhere on the US DOE website they predicted that roughly 40% of the US energy supply could realistically be met with wind farms near population centers. Some states, like north dakota could go as high as 100%, because of the flatness and the population concentrations in the flat regions.. and some states couldn't even go to 10% wind energy, but if we used wind turbines to produce 40% of our electricity, and used algae to produce 100% of your transportation energy, and perhaps up to 40% of your electric energy, then nuclear at 20% could put us at 80% renewable green energy/20% carbon neutral but cheap if you don't count the cost of storing nuclear waste safely energy.. yeah, and before you go off saying we couldn't grow that much algae, we easily could.
algae is the most efficient energy source in nature, since it's simple cells store the energy efficiently and don't make complex cell walls or other energy wasting compounds other than those needed to reproduce. algae is 30-100 times more efficient than soybeans, depending on if you only use the oil vs using the whole algae plant for bioenergy.
the nicest thing about algae is that it can be stored, BD99 can be stored, for example in tanks for as long as needed without bacteria forming, petrol diesel is THAT toxic that 1% will stop any concerns about mold. the plant portion can be dried for storage, and the amount of petrol needed to make BD99 or 99-SVO/1-diesel is so insignificant that we'd never worry about running out of petroleum.
so circa 1970's (or older) technology we could go 100% green on energy(or at least 80%), now if only we'd do something about the landfill crisis while we're at it...
"The point of conservation is not to remove the use of petrol"
But With Algae ponds we, the United States Of America, could conceivably produce about 28 times as much energy as we consume in the form of petrol(all forms of it), just by covering every inch of land not dedicated to existing forests, farms, or cities, towns and roads... to algae ponds.
although pumping enough salt water to places without sufficient freshwater might be hard, just doing 3X as much energy is vastly easier in logistics... i think it's fairly easy to logistically gradually expand algae pond usage up to about 15 times as much petrol as we now use.. which means a renewable green energy could be used to replace not only petrol, but part of our coal and gas reserves as well..
for Europe they could try to cultivate in oceans, although they'd have to either grow some algae just to feed fish to offset the cultivated algae losses, to be truly green... and there are loads of deserts in the middle east, and Africa that could all be turned into energy growing reservoirs... South America has plenty of land that could be used for algae production as well, and Australia has a big desert region, i know not where in asia they would be able to do algae, but not every region of the world has to produce algae for us to make enough of it, to reduce global carbon footprints, if we also focus on reducing energy use as well as using technology to reverse our growing carbon footprint.
if you haven't seen al gores 2005 movie as to why we need to reduce carbon footprints, then you should know we're already above the peak level that nature over the past 650,000 years has ever had (300 PPM CO2) to today's 385 PPM CO2...
and if you think these numbers are biased, the historical numbers are from ice bores made in Antarctica, and the modern numbers from mauna loa, out in the middle of the pacific ocean, as far from civilization and it's effects as one can get.
You really really should consider Algae production as a viable solar energy source, for both vehicles, and electric production. they say algae ponds the size of the state of Maryland could replace all our reliance on oil, but what they forget to mention, is that you only get about 30% of the energy in the plant as extracted algae oil... the rest is STILL usable as an energy source, it can either be converted to ethanol (it's not cellulose, because algae are a simple water organism, not a thick gravity defying plant) and it's also usable as animal feedstock, and as fertilizer... and when dried is combustible.
best of all, algae live in both seawater and freshwater. so we could pump billions of gallons of seawater perhaps with giant wind powered pumps (coastal area tends to be windy enough, and you don't loose energy to electric conversion etc) to ponds in areas that have little or not economic use (deserts, non areable soil areas, etc) algea is easier to cultivate in ponds, or closed systems, but ocean cultivation is not entirely outside the equasion either... the main problem is water is slow to transfer oxygen and carbon dioxide, so simple fishtank style areators are needed to get maximum algeal bloom density... but algea also need te be free of certain pollutants and need certain additives to grow faster than in nature... but like any technology the true cost is subject to economies of scale...
it might cost too much right now for algea to replace anything but $4 a gallon diesel right now, with just one energy company seriously exploring algea ponds, but if 50% of energy companies were running millions of algea ponds world wide the costs for all the componets needed would be less, and the profitiability would likely be better. as long as all the byproducts were used, anyways.
carbon footprints are not restricted to electricity, unless you're driving an electric car of golf cart. there is a huge carbon footprint for vehicles as well as things like gas or charcoal grills (for summer cook outs, etc) grills are notoriously inefficient, basically a thin metal box with a big flame at the bottom, if gas grills were required to be insulated (but still allowed needed air flows) they'd heat up faster, stay hot longer, and heat food more evenly, as well as needing a much smaller flame at the bottom... but who cares, gas grills are a tiny portion of the market, and charcoal has to burn a long time and waste a lot of energy before it's ready to cook food, so even if you reduce the amount of coals you need, you'll never approach the energy efficiency of electric cooking... or even more efficient microwave cooking... you know bakeries were the first to look for ways to reduce the cost of baking bread, they started in a wood and coal era to use stone which retained heat for hours to our modern insulated electric bakeries...
well, microwaves aren't necessarily an energy saver either though, since most food has to be cooked then frozen to be microwaveable at least most store bought food, although with canned food it is more efficient, and those shelf stable microwave foods might be energy efficient, since cooking food in mass tends to be more energy efficient than small batch cooking...
well, the carbon footprint of food doesn't stop with cooking either, growing, harvesting, feeding animals, freezing and refrigeration, and distribution all have carbon footprints...
then there's the carbon footprint of the clothes and personal items we buy, and of course all our electric devices all have carbon footprints before the monthly electric bill ever arrives...
the good thing is that we only have to reduce the footprint enough to cause our emissions to be somewhere below the 1950 world carbon production levels... well into the industrial revolution, with a lot of energy being used... the bad is that any system has to be scalable to the amount of energy demand increase caused by a worldwide population boom that has shown little sign of slowing... aids has made a dent, but the trend is still up up and away. currently at the rate of 60 million more humans a year.
just to be precise, line loss occurs at roughly the rate of 0.5% per mile of line, although in truth it is a diminishing return, eg: if you start at 220 KVs at the power generation you loose about 0.5% of 220 KVs or 1.1 KV for the first mile but then the next mile you loose 0.5% of about 219 KVs or about 1.09 KVs and the practical limit of conducting AC current is 350 miles, although a lot of energy is lost if you go 350 miles...
but anyways, AC power is very efficient for very long distances, unlike DC which creates a lot of heat in the line and looses power fast... that's why we have giant AC generating power plants, even when DC has to be inverted to AC to ship the AC anywhere.
but yeah, wind power can't surpass physics, if you locate the wind farm 13 miles away you need half as many as if the wind farm is 100 miles away, the good thing is that power is consumed EVERYWHERE so you rarely ship power long distances, although they do ship a lot of power from Texas, to California, because California has tough environmental laws, and Texas has lax environmental laws. I think the new generation of Kyoto convention capable coal plants will eventually be built in California, rather than shipping from Texas, simply because if the plant is Kyoto equipped they can still build it in California. the main way of making coal Kyoto convention capable is with a large, closed algae farm that takes significant space, and the algae can then be sold for as biofuel for cars and Trucks.
FWIW Minnesota is going to be the first state with 20% of the entire states energy produced from green energy sources, as NSP (the largest energy company in Minnesota) is required to be 20% green energy by 2020, and the rest of the states energy companies by 2040. many many large wind farms are being built, and consider that Minnesota has 8 seats in the house, it's not a small chunk of energy to be from 'green' energy.
Minnesota is also the only state that will soon require BD2 (2% biodiesel) state wide.
Since dried algae can be combusted, i kind of wonder if any energy companies are considering algae as an alternative to wind farms etc, because algae can be burned on demand, and is a green energy source... but i suppose it depends on the wording of the law that requires 20% 'green' energy if they're exploring new green technologies or not.
America is more than just only 250 years old, we also love to tear down old buildings, demolition is a huge business in the states, because it's the easiest way to redevelop land, plus Americans like to spend money on the places they live and work, they like at least the illusion of unlimited wealth. part of the reason the dot com bubble collapsed so horribly wasn't because companies couldn't make money making products etc, it was because they spent loads of money on stuff that killed internal productivity... having a game room, and making employees play games on the weekends with fun outings can really kill a company living on borrowed dollars quickly...
fortunately America is leaking money like a sieve, to the tune of 600-700 billion a year, and the national government is already well past 9 trillion in debt, aiming for the 15 billion cap that the house will automatically raise the budget deficit to without new laws being enacted.
the senate with their 6 year terms actually vote on raising the deficit, but thats because 2/3rds of them can vote yes in an election year, with the other 1/3 voting no because they're up for re-election.
People refused to buy DIVX players, because the movies required that call in to activate etc...
I think game developers will find that gamers are equally capable of boycotting titles that require inane internet connectivity to play single player mode. If I ever find a person wiling to buy such a game, I'm going to do my best to convince them that it's in their own best interest to boycott clueless developers, and how easily they can get a nice cleanly hacked warez version of the game, if they only wait for the hacked version to come online.
if anything this kind of stupidity will increase piracy because of how stupid it is to require internet to play a video game in single player mode. The pirate version not only won't need internet IT will cost less. giving it 2 really big advantages.
eventually computers and cameras will get to the point where we don't need people watching the camera footage to solve the crimes. but right now it's not practical, if CCTV was in 720P faces and clothing become a lot easier to recognize, both by humans and by computers, but it drives up the power the computers have to have to do the processing fast enough... i would think that the ideal processor for that kind of work is actually a high end nvidia gaming card, if someone just wrote the code for an nvidia card to do facial and clothing recognition...
All i was trying to point out is that the 4th state of matter, plasma, can conduct electricity like wires can. I mean being able to safely or otherwise beam energy at targets with precision is harder, but i was pointing out that you can move power around for short distances without wires, and with just a little knowledge. if there really are 1.5 million of those 'amway espring' devices most likely are only 'wireless' in the aspect that they've got a big, glass tube of neon inside them to generate suitable levels of UV light to destroy some harmful bacteria.
so most likely the companies touting wireless power haven't broken new ground, but are still retracing the past 120 years of physics that have been learned.
"The structures need to be melted for only a fraction of a millionth of a second,"
wow and i thought I was fast.... TFA suggests that 'correction' could be automatic, although they used an electron microscope to fix chips, I'm guessing that the laser could simply be provided with the chip map, fire the laser along the parts that need to be fixed to make the chip work, (with the quartz either touching the chip, or slightly above it, the slightly above it making the lines narrow and tall a desirable trait for chips) well, if it really works without checking the chip optically to program the the laser, then it could easily be used soon, and make faster chips for everyone.
very cool, and yet another technology thanks to our 'national defense' budget...
Wireless power has been used as long as I've been alive. Granted, this has been in lighting devices, such as neon and fluorescent lights... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp
I mean I'm surprised that you didn't know, that like neon signs don't have a filament, and neither do fluorescent lights... haven't you ever broken one? haven't you ever looked at one up close when it was off?
And for you lucky Plasma TV owners, didn't you ever wonder, where the wires ended, and where the pixelated happiness begins? did you think the name was just a buzz word? didn't you realize they are actually sending electricity through a gas, to make the screen glow... as the name 'plasma tv' implies?
for a lighting device it's very efficient to send power through a noble gas, but it's very bad for transmitting power for miles and miles. In fact it was Nikola Tesla who displayed his neon lights at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.
the crazy man who through electricity could go through air(or at least neon), was the first to display technology confirming it... and people still called him a mad scientist.
"Of course it's a sham. It destroyed Tesla's reputation. There is no way to transmit electricity and hope to get anything approaching a meaningful level of efficiency."
Of course, there is might not be a way nitrogen or oxygen are ever going to efficiently conduct electricity as a gas, but Neon and Xenon.. those are another matter...
Ah yes, plasma, we use it routinely in television displays now, and trust me those electric bills for new high def TVs aren't nearly as bad as the gaming rig needed to produce full 1080P in video games.
yes, electricity without wires! what a shock, that one could use a gas to transmit electricity wireless, of course the holy grail is to create a plasma conduit without needing a concentrated noble gas, and without massive energy bills for creating the plasma.
I've heard at one point of a company that was trying to make a wireless taser for the military, and to increase they range by creating a temporary plasma conduit with lasers or some such, not sure if that project ever got off the ground though.
you forgot the stick of bubble gum, but we'll forgive you...
if you miss stories of the past, shortly after i got my first cable modem, it started having problems, i lived in my sister's basement at the time (and worked at taco hell) so i had to go to the computer store by my work, buy a $2.50 cent pack of chipset coolers, then on a whim, i figured out how to use an old univeral power AC/CD adaptors and a piece of duct tape to fix up the old heatsink fan from my 233 MHZ amd processor (that it had already replaced with a 450 MHz processor, though my board only ran it at 333 MHZ as far as it would overclock, but my board would go in 1 mhz increments with DIP switches man with dip switches) so i has 2 chipset coolers on the 2 hot chips in my cable modem, but there wasn't room inside the cable modem case, so i got out my dremel and MADE room and cut out half the slats for better airflow, and i had 1 HSF and 1 chipset cooler mod for my new cable modem, and that baby ran for 5 years straight never losing it's ip not once.
so there you go, a Dremel, $2.50 in parts plus some scavenged from a part bin, duct tape, an old used universal DC power brick, to fix a problem that should have never existed except some idiot engineer chose to believe some dumb companies marketing department claiming their chip could run 100C without a chipset cooler.
if by conventional construction techniques you mean buying rolls of aluminum foil backed wallpaper, then yes, it's quite easy to make a cellphone proof building.
also there are simple devices that can make cellphones useless by interfering with their broadcast frequency (cellphone jammers) but i would think that aluminum foil backed wallpaper would be cheaper long term than a jammer, the advantage of a jammer is that it can be disabled from when the credits roll until the film starts...
i think the main reason not to jam/build a cheap aluminum based Faraday cage is simple. it's cheaper not to, and people can't sue you for missing a phone call that was a life or death situation (eg: a doctor who was on call trying to catch the latest film, getting called in for a medical emergency)
a little far fetched, but even doctors like movies. if their cellphone doesn't work at the movies, they might not go there...
the market valuation is based on where they expect yahoo to be in the next 2-3 months, not where they're going to be 10 years down the road when a 32-core processor costs $25.99.
I realize it's hard to understand that wall street only cares about next Week, and I realize the cost is dropping FOR everyone, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo everyone benefits from cheaper tech. Still, IMO Microsoft made a move when they believed the street had greatly undervalued yahoo, and when they'd say that Microsoft was vastly overpaying for a company, that is second fiddle to Google.
The street worries about next year when they can predict how it will effect companies bottom lines, not until then. when yahoo beat their own estimates by $15 million dollars they only went up 5 cents per share. Yahoo a company that is BEATING it's estimates...
yahoo is growing even though they're not growing as quickly as google, they are a strong company, they also have over 8 million subscribers to insulate their company from advertising price drops (which are occurring and at least short term) but as i said, the true valuation of yahoo in 10 years from now isn't in todays stock prices, todays stock prices reflect what wall street expects over the next 2 months from the company.
I expect yahoo to be worth as much as it was in the bubble within the next 20 years because of 2 factors. 1. more people world wide having computers and internet. 2. the dropping price of computers, and bandwidth prices.
the street doesn't look into the faraway profitability of a company 20 years from now, a small individual investor planning his retirement might, but not a stock broker.
as far as I'm concerned right now yahoo is a buy for long term investors, so is google, i think microsoft's future is bleaker than any other tech company (long term anyways) dell, HP, apple, i consider holds, eg: if you have it keep it. I think that in 4 year from now they might downgrade to sells though. I can see the writing on the wall, computers will become an appliance that people occasional fix as needed, and they don't replace every 4 years because there is no compelling reason to.
and i strongly think that linux with a couple million here a couple million there could overnight become the standard OS for 'value' computers, the kind that only do internet, printing and digital music. the kind that is growing the most rapidly and where OEMs might start to consider paying even $10 to microsoft is too much for a machine that can't play video games in the first place.
"By the way, just what IS the ideal average temperature of the Earth, and when was the Earth ever stable at this magical temperature for any appreciable amount of time?"
that's not what is worrisome. what is worrisome is that in the antarctic, the concentration of CO2 gas has NEVER gone above 300 PPM in the past 650,000 years of antarctic ice. As of this year, at the mauna loa observatory (middle of the pacific ocean, as far away from civilization as one can get) we hit 385 PPM of CO2 gas
It's getting about time to start cloning those dinosaurs, because at the rate we're going only cold blooded reptiles will be able to survive the heat without central air.
True, the concentrations in the peak of dinosaur era are estimated as 20 times higher than they are now, but at the current rate of expansion in another 80 years we will have halved the distance to the goal of 'dinosaur CO2 levels' and another 50 years from then and we'll be at the goal line, and you can be assured that any mammal larger than a mouse is going to find itself dead from heat exhaustion, while reptiles come to rule the earth again.
the fact that humans can in 3 generations of their lifespans undo 300 million years of natural changes to the environment is frightening.
"You have to do subsidies because you are competing with the energy prices with places like China."
didn't see that the first go round.. That isn't really true, China has a notorious reputation for producing sub standard products. It's a reputation well earned, it's true that producing a higher quality product costs more, and even companies known for their quality are sub contracting parts of their businesses to china to stay cost competitive.. but you don't have to compete with china for cost of energy.
why? right now china has the cheapest energy, followed by America, followed by Europe, i don't off hand know where japan falls into the mix, but even though energy prices are higher in Europe (coal has been mined there for a lot longer than anywhere else) they still have manufacturing companies, and the like.
Europe and the USA have better reputations for quality, and so people who want quality products buy from American and European companies. This is enough to keep their production from moving entirely to china, but a lot of production especially products purchased by clueless consumers are still made in china, because they don't research purchases other than cost.
If America switches to local energy sources, it doesn't matter if they cost 20% more than importing foreign energy, Because all that money is Going directly back into the US economy, rather than creating a trade deficit for energy imported. If 200 billion dollars A YEAR go to local algae farmers, and local algae processors, it's going to cause a massive economic recovery in the united states beyond what any politician so far could ever have hoped for, EVEN IF THE COST OF DOING THIS IS DOUBLING THE COST OF ELECTRICITY.
because instead of sending 200 billion dollars to the mideast where it only costs them $1 a barrel to pump the stuff out of the ground and refine it, that means to the mid east they're making $20 profit a barrel, and they've got an elite billionaire class created by American stupidity.
Lawmakers could have forced the electric or other industries to take the burden of cost to build wide scale algae biofuel production and refining when they first realized it was feasible in the 1970's but instead we chose to import energy, and drain the American coffers until we all became a nation of debtors.
Just ten years of forcing say the electric utilities to put money into algae production, would be enough to have shifted enough money for the feds to start worrying about how fast our economy was growing as a result of relying on local bioenergy... even if every aluminum smelting plant in the country went overseas, dropping our trade deficit by 25-30% by using locally grown bioenergy would be worth it.
almost 1/3 of our trade deficit is from oil imports. we could fix this withing 5 years with strong legislation. the rest of the trade deficit is harder to tackle, but i believe that as America's economy grows to be profitable again, that our status as debtors will reduce quickly. even if the cost is higher, it's actually massively better for the USA to spend all their energy dollars on US grown energy.
"America's current petroleum demand, which continues to rise steadily, poses ever growing environmental problems, and dependence on foreign petroleum. U.S. oil consumption is approximately 21 million barrels/day, yet production is only 6 million barrels per day (950,000 mÂ/d). Cost to import oil is approximately $200 billion dollars a year"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States
Why apply a carbon tax, when most coal fired power plants are located in locations where an algae based carbon recovery system (and combo pollution scrubbing system) can create not only vast amounts of vegetable oil, but even larger quantities of vegetable matter that can be feed to livestock, or combusted for energy, or converted to ethanol.
If you required all coal fired plants to use an algae based carbon recovery system, you would instantly create a massive system capable of producing enough biofuel to permanently kill our oil addiction.
I mean permanently. In order to sequester the carbon completely then the same quantity of fuel as burned in the coal plants is created, mostly from the energy of sunlight. while the bulk of this is as vegetable mass, and only about 20-25% of it is recoverable vegetable oil, it's still vastly more than we use.
no need to even convert it to biodiesel if we mandate that every coal fired plant sequester it's CO emissions with algae, because it will be cheaper to kit existing diesel engined to SVO compatible parts, and change the specs on all new diesel engines to be SVO engines. and a SVO engine, can still burn diesel, but not as efficiently. but if we're producing enough SVO to switch every diesel vehicle in America to a SVO vehicle, well, it's worth it.
True, this switches the burden of cost to electric companies, but electricity is way cheap, and forcing them by law to create a fuel stream of 'cheap bioenergy' to kill off the oil and gas markets, well, that doesn't strike me as bad.
Although market forces for oil prices are now sufficiently high that biofuel from algae has suddenly become a realistic enterprise that could be profitable for an energy company, or at least one oil and gas company in texas thinks they're going to make money creating biofuel from algae.
so it is entirely possible that coal power plants might want to create algae based CO sequestering even without pressure from the government, to create an alternative energy revenue stream to boost their bottom lines.
At least, if diesel stays above $4 a gallon, and gasoline stays above $3.50 a gallon, they will..
if the prices trend higher then energy companies would have to be crazy not to consider algae production as an alternative to oil and gas.
I still remember when yahoo was worth $500 a share... sure they've had 2 2:1 stock splits since then, and plus the internet bubble collapsed int he interim, but still at yahoo's Highest valuation, adjusted for stock splits they would be worth $125 a share, or 180 billion dollars... true, it was a bubble, but if the company was at one point worth over 378% more than what was offered... and the execs for whatever reason believe that they are currently undervalued by the street... well... they are, the stock market is way down, on concerns over the economy, and yahoo is worth way more than 47.5 billion dollars, when you consider that every year the technology they rely on is getting cheaper and better, while the over head costs are going down, and demand for their services are rising...
really the stock market DOSE NOT currently value yahoo for where technology is going, because for all the computers they use to keep track of stocks, they don't fundamentally understand how to value a company that will halve it's operating costs ever ten years, so long as certain technologies get better every year...
nobody knows exactly when or how technology prices will bottom out, because even if we no longer can shrink the size of transistors etc, the economy of scales might still drive prices lower, as they already have for microprocessors... just 5 years ago, a viable single core server processor cost $1,000 but today, a quad core server processor costs $230-$300 because of economies of scale for both multi-core consumer and server products...
honestly in another 5 years, when a 16-core mutli-processor sells for $49.99 and uses the same electricity of today's quad core processor, do you really think that then, in that far away future land that yahoo or google will have fewer customers than they do today? they will have more, and the cost per customer will be lower, and the cost of advertising higher.
Even if google or some other competitor is ahead of yahoo, yahoo will still have an enormous customer base... and technology keeps kgetting better.
being acquired by Microsoft would also have killed BSD. Yahoo runs on Yahoo BSD and a lot of yahoo's internal coders are important in various BSD projects in their spare time...
right now running FreeBSD really doesn't make sense compared to say, Ubuntu because Ubuntu makes desktop Linux easy, but for a simple server, FreeBSD is still a viable choice, thanks in large part to yahoo.
Microsoft was running FreeBSD machines to host hotmail for a long time after acquiring them, but eventually they shifted them to MS operating systems just to demonstrate to customers that MS could run a complex free webmail site with computers 20 times more powerful that they needed to run it with a BSD os..
so having the experience, microsoft would have killed BSD and force upgraded all of yahoos servers from a lean custom built OS to a bloated general purpose OS that was never really designed to be a server platform.
just to say 'this is how you use microsoft server to quadruple the cost of running a massive web portal' yeah, yeah i know they would have pretended like it was cheaper, with FUD about how much it costs to 'maintain' a custom light weight OS designed to be used in server farms...
"What does sound like a hobbyist project to me, is building a homebrew windmill, using it to charge a UPS, and using that to power, say your low-voltage garden lighting, and your garage lighting."
I realize the UPS has a lot of the requires circuitry, and it can charge the battery up, or let the current through, or do both... but usually UPSes have Maintenance free batteries. i like good old maintainable lead acids, that you top off once a month to deal with evaporation or electrolysis to hydrogen gas.. there is no way for the hydrogen to build up if the battery isn't enclosed, and thus no way for it to explode.
that means doing more of the wiring on your own, or at least buying kits off the net, but still it's SAFER, even if you have the UPS in the garage away from flammables it's not pretty trying to clean up an exploded UPS.
plus it's harder to recycle/replace the battery and batteries and electronics SHOULD NEVER GO IN A LANDFILL (even though most do)
making a home brew windmill is definitely a cool weekend project and it would be pointless to put 4x the cost of the total home brew project just to tie in a small.
the problem with solar panels is really simple, they use deogygenated silicon. also called '99.9% pure silicon' also called silicon wafers. and guess who has all the silicon wafer production in the entire world contract locked up? Intel, AMD, IBM, and Motorola... fortunately this silicon wafer shortage has lead to an increase in silicon wafer recycling. so solar panel makers can buy recycled silicon from processor makers waste streams. it would also be nice if there was enough post consumer recycling to allow greater solar panel installation. but sadly most electronic waste winds up in the landfill, polluting the water tables for generations to come.
in 135 years when all the major us landfills 'safer barriers' fail, the entire US water table could wind up so full of heavy metals that it could kill a lot of life forms, humans among them.
assuming of course there is no way for 'legacy' landfills to be dug up and have their barriers replaced... renewable energy sources might mean that there could be governments capable of dealing with the threat, but replacing all our coal and oil and gas and atomic energy usage purely with algae based energy economy would be a logistic nightmare, at least the way we use energy now.
only with a great reduction of energy per person could such a system maintain a technological society. and digging up landfills to compensate for the shortsightedness of the past few generations (including the current one) will mean it's an uphill battle to get those heavy metals out of water table isolated landfills, and into long term heavy metal storage.
Solar power panels might not even make the cut as a 'realistic' alternative energy, when the total cost of producing the silicon making the panels, and transporting and using them, Vs the energy output and the lifetime of the panels, even if you use a couple $10 mirrors to make them more efficient.
as far as electric toothbrushes goes, I've always used the spinbrush, since crest bought them out and switched to AA batteries, I haven't yet had to change my 'disposable' alkaline batteries (the AAA model only lasted a few months before replacement, the AAs are way better)
Why an electric toothbrush? they clean better. when i used a regular toothbrush my dentist was always telling me to brush longer, and get certain spots better. Since i switched to the spinbrush he always tells me my teeth are being brushed good all around. he still tells me to floss more, but i can't tolerate flossing i have perpetually soft gums...
I also started using crest pro health, but the dirty truth is that the alcohol in mouthwash evaporates too quickly to kill plaque, any effective mouthwash has to remain on your mouth and gums for AT LEAST an hour to be effective against plaque. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouthwash
quite sad that anyone sells alcohol based mouthwashes when the alcohol just makes it burn and can only kill saliva based bacteria...
Slashdot Mirror
the reason why 'film' has crazy all over the place resolutions is because 'analog' film cameras, can use 'less' film by shooting on the same width film but with a narrower top to bottom exposure. that's why film is all over the place, but if digital film cameras ever replace 'analog film' for shooting, then they'll all be nice and standard size, or maybe they'll still let you screw around with the ratio to get tighter compression... oh well...
"Anyone that talks about a single true energy source is either selling something or has been tricked by salesfolk."
There can be Only Sun. For all matter is the dust of stars, and there CAN BE ONLY SUN.
All power even atomic energy is derived from the one true natural source of energy, the sun. therefor all energy is solar, if it was made 100 billion years ago, or today.
now the true differential is not the source of the energy, for as i have stated all energy comes from stars, but rather if the energy is positive for carbon/hydrogen based lifeforms of the essential types. your definition of 'essential' is up for debate. some would say that we don't need rain forests, we should mow them over and replace them all with palm oil plantations to provide the world with 'green' energy that require the deaths of billions of life forms.
some people would call nuclear fuel 'green' because it's mostly harmless to plants, and can be kept quite far from sentient lifeforms for the requisite 300 million years.
some would call algae green, because they grow with energy from the sun, even though the costs of converting the world to algae might completely wipe out all desert forms of life, if no sanctuaries/DNA data banks are preserved.
Some would say, reducing our energy consumption levels to the point where a fraction of the energy we now use perhaps 1% of what the typical American uses, and having specific regions for energy production and storage, as well as for populations and food growth, and vast vast tracks of land perhaps 90% of the surface of the world relegated as sanctuaries is the only way to go 'green' even though such egalitarian approaches would require grandiose reductions of the world human population and the way we live, and interact with nature..
As i said the definition of 'green' may vary...
I can't recall the link, but I think somewhere on the US DOE website they predicted that roughly 40% of the US energy supply could realistically be met with wind farms near population centers. Some states, like north dakota could go as high as 100%, because of the flatness and the population concentrations in the flat regions.. and some states couldn't even go to 10% wind energy, but if we used wind turbines to produce 40% of our electricity, and used algae to produce 100% of your transportation energy, and perhaps up to 40% of your electric energy, then nuclear at 20% could put us at 80% renewable green energy/20% carbon neutral but cheap if you don't count the cost of storing nuclear waste safely energy.. yeah, and before you go off saying we couldn't grow that much algae, we easily could.
algae is the most efficient energy source in nature, since it's simple cells store the energy efficiently and don't make complex cell walls or other energy wasting compounds other than those needed to reproduce. algae is 30-100 times more efficient than soybeans, depending on if you only use the oil vs using the whole algae plant for bioenergy.
the nicest thing about algae is that it can be stored, BD99 can be stored, for example in tanks for as long as needed without bacteria forming, petrol diesel is THAT toxic that 1% will stop any concerns about mold. the plant portion can be dried for storage, and the amount of petrol needed to make BD99 or 99-SVO/1-diesel is so insignificant that we'd never worry about running out of petroleum.
so circa 1970's (or older) technology we could go 100% green on energy(or at least 80%), now if only we'd do something about the landfill crisis while we're at it...
"The point of conservation is not to remove the use of petrol"
But With Algae ponds we, the United States Of America, could conceivably produce about 28 times as much energy as we consume in the form of petrol(all forms of it), just by covering every inch of land not dedicated to existing forests, farms, or cities, towns and roads... to algae ponds.
although pumping enough salt water to places without sufficient freshwater might be hard, just doing 3X as much energy is vastly easier in logistics... i think it's fairly easy to logistically gradually expand algae pond usage up to about 15 times as much petrol as we now use..
which means a renewable green energy could be used to replace not only petrol, but part of our coal and gas reserves as well..
for Europe they could try to cultivate in oceans, although they'd have to either grow some algae just to feed fish to offset the cultivated algae losses, to be truly green... and there are loads of deserts in the middle east, and Africa that could all be turned into energy growing reservoirs... South America has plenty of land that could be used for algae production as well, and Australia has a big desert region, i know not where in asia they would be able to do algae, but not every region of the world has to produce algae for us to make enough of it, to reduce global carbon footprints, if we also focus on reducing energy use as well as using technology to reverse our growing carbon footprint.
if you haven't seen al gores 2005 movie as to why we need to reduce carbon footprints, then you should know we're already above the peak level that nature over the past 650,000 years has ever had (300 PPM CO2) to today's 385 PPM CO2...
and if you think these numbers are biased, the historical numbers are from ice bores made in Antarctica, and the modern numbers from mauna loa, out in the middle of the pacific ocean, as far from civilization and it's effects as one can get.
You really really should consider Algae production as a viable solar energy source, for both vehicles, and electric production. they say algae ponds the size of the state of Maryland could replace all our reliance on oil, but what they forget to mention, is that you only get about 30% of the energy in the plant as extracted algae oil... the rest is STILL usable as an energy source, it can either be converted to ethanol (it's not cellulose, because algae are a simple water organism, not a thick gravity defying plant) and it's also usable as animal feedstock, and as fertilizer... and when dried is combustible.
best of all, algae live in both seawater and freshwater. so we could pump billions of gallons of seawater perhaps with giant wind powered pumps (coastal area tends to be windy enough, and you don't loose energy to electric conversion etc)
to ponds in areas that have little or not economic use (deserts, non areable soil areas, etc) algea is easier to cultivate in ponds, or closed systems, but ocean cultivation is not entirely outside the equasion either... the main problem is water is slow to transfer oxygen and carbon dioxide, so simple fishtank style areators are needed to get maximum algeal bloom density... but algea also need te be free of certain pollutants and need certain additives to grow faster than in nature... but like any technology the true cost is subject to economies of scale...
it might cost too much right now for algea to replace anything but $4 a gallon diesel right now, with just one energy company seriously exploring algea ponds, but if 50% of energy companies were running millions of algea ponds world wide the costs for all the componets needed would be less, and the profitiability would likely be better. as long as all the byproducts were used, anyways.
carbon footprints are not restricted to electricity, unless you're driving an electric car of golf cart. there is a huge carbon footprint for vehicles as well as things like gas or charcoal grills (for summer cook outs, etc) grills are notoriously inefficient, basically a thin metal box with a big flame at the bottom, if gas grills were required to be insulated (but still allowed needed air flows) they'd heat up faster, stay hot longer, and heat food more evenly, as well as needing a much smaller flame at the bottom... but who cares, gas grills are a tiny portion of the market, and charcoal has to burn a long time and waste a lot of energy before it's ready to cook food, so even if you reduce the amount of coals you need, you'll never approach the energy efficiency of electric cooking... or even more efficient microwave cooking... you know bakeries were the first to look for ways to reduce the cost of baking bread, they started in a wood and coal era to use stone which retained heat for hours to our modern insulated electric bakeries...
well, microwaves aren't necessarily an energy saver either though, since most food has to be cooked then frozen to be microwaveable at least most store bought food, although with canned food it is more efficient, and those shelf stable microwave foods might be energy efficient, since cooking food in mass tends to be more energy efficient than small batch cooking...
well, the carbon footprint of food doesn't stop with cooking either, growing, harvesting, feeding animals, freezing and refrigeration, and distribution all have carbon footprints...
then there's the carbon footprint of the clothes and personal items we buy, and of course all our electric devices all have carbon footprints before the monthly electric bill ever arrives...
the good thing is that we only have to reduce the footprint enough to cause our emissions to be somewhere below the 1950 world carbon production levels... well into the industrial revolution, with a lot of energy being used... the bad is that any system has to be scalable to the amount of energy demand increase caused by a worldwide population boom that has shown little sign of slowing... aids has made a dent, but the trend is still up up and away. currently at the rate of 60 million more humans a year.
just to be precise, line loss occurs at roughly the rate of 0.5% per mile of line, although in truth it is a diminishing return, eg: if you start at 220 KVs at the power generation you loose about 0.5% of 220 KVs or 1.1 KV for the first mile but then the next mile you loose 0.5% of about 219 KVs or about 1.09 KVs and the practical limit of conducting AC current is 350 miles, although a lot of energy is lost if you go 350 miles...
but anyways, AC power is very efficient for very long distances, unlike DC which creates a lot of heat in the line and looses power fast... that's why we have giant AC generating power plants, even when DC has to be inverted to AC to ship the AC anywhere.
but yeah, wind power can't surpass physics, if you locate the wind farm 13 miles away you need half as many as if the wind farm is 100 miles away, the good thing is that power is consumed EVERYWHERE so you rarely ship power long distances, although they do ship a lot of power from Texas, to California, because California has tough environmental laws, and Texas has lax environmental laws. I think the new generation of Kyoto convention capable coal plants will eventually be built in California, rather than shipping from Texas, simply because if the plant is Kyoto equipped they can still build it in California. the main way of making coal Kyoto convention capable is with a large, closed algae farm that takes significant space, and the algae can then be sold for as biofuel for cars and Trucks.
FWIW Minnesota is going to be the first state with 20% of the entire states energy produced from green energy sources, as NSP (the largest energy company in Minnesota) is required to be 20% green energy by 2020, and the rest of the states energy companies by 2040. many many large wind farms are being built, and consider that Minnesota has 8 seats in the house, it's not a small chunk of energy to be from 'green' energy.
Minnesota is also the only state that will soon require BD2 (2% biodiesel) state wide.
Since dried algae can be combusted, i kind of wonder if any energy companies are considering algae as an alternative to wind farms etc, because algae can be burned on demand, and is a green energy source... but i suppose it depends on the wording of the law that requires 20% 'green' energy if they're exploring new green technologies or not.
America is more than just only 250 years old, we also love to tear down old buildings, demolition is a huge business in the states, because it's the easiest way to redevelop land, plus Americans like to spend money on the places they live and work, they like at least the illusion of unlimited wealth. part of the reason the dot com bubble collapsed so horribly wasn't because companies couldn't make money making products etc, it was because they spent loads of money on stuff that killed internal productivity... having a game room, and making employees play games on the weekends with fun outings can really kill a company living on borrowed dollars quickly...
fortunately America is leaking money like a sieve, to the tune of 600-700 billion a year, and the national government is already well past 9 trillion in debt, aiming for the 15 billion cap that the house will automatically raise the budget deficit to without new laws being enacted.
the senate with their 6 year terms actually vote on raising the deficit, but thats because 2/3rds of them can vote yes in an election year, with the other 1/3 voting no because they're up for re-election.
People refused to buy DIVX players, because the movies required that call in to activate etc...
I think game developers will find that gamers are equally capable of boycotting titles that require inane internet connectivity to play single player mode. If I ever find a person wiling to buy such a game, I'm going to do my best to convince them that it's in their own best interest to boycott clueless developers, and how easily they can get a nice cleanly hacked warez version of the game, if they only wait for the hacked version to come online.
if anything this kind of stupidity will increase piracy because of how stupid it is to require internet to play a video game in single player mode. The pirate version not only won't need internet IT will cost less. giving it 2 really big advantages.
eventually computers and cameras will get to the point where we don't need people watching the camera footage to solve the crimes. but right now it's not practical, if CCTV was in 720P faces and clothing become a lot easier to recognize, both by humans and by computers, but it drives up the power the computers have to have to do the processing fast enough... i would think that the ideal processor for that kind of work is actually a high end nvidia gaming card, if someone just wrote the code for an nvidia card to do facial and clothing recognition...
All i was trying to point out is that the 4th state of matter, plasma, can conduct electricity like wires can. I mean being able to safely or otherwise beam energy at targets with precision is harder, but i was pointing out that you can move power around for short distances without wires, and with just a little knowledge. if there really are 1.5 million of those 'amway espring' devices most likely are only 'wireless' in the aspect that they've got a big, glass tube of neon inside them to generate suitable levels of UV light to destroy some harmful bacteria.
so most likely the companies touting wireless power haven't broken new ground, but are still retracing the past 120 years of physics that have been learned.
"The structures need to be melted for only a fraction of a millionth of a second,"
wow and i thought I was fast.... TFA suggests that 'correction' could be automatic, although they used an electron microscope to fix chips, I'm guessing that the laser could simply be provided with the chip map, fire the laser along the parts that need to be fixed to make the chip work, (with the quartz either touching the chip, or slightly above it, the slightly above it making the lines narrow and tall a desirable trait for chips) well, if it really works without checking the chip optically to program the the laser, then it could easily be used soon, and make faster chips for everyone.
very cool, and yet another technology thanks to our 'national defense' budget...
Wireless power has been used as long as I've been alive. Granted, this has been in lighting devices, such as neon and fluorescent lights... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorescent_lamp
I mean I'm surprised that you didn't know, that like neon signs don't have a filament, and neither do fluorescent lights... haven't you ever broken one? haven't you ever looked at one up close when it was off?
And for you lucky Plasma TV owners, didn't you ever wonder, where the wires ended, and where the pixelated happiness begins? did you think the name was just a buzz word? didn't you realize they are actually sending electricity through a gas, to make the screen glow... as the name 'plasma tv' implies?
for a lighting device it's very efficient to send power through a noble gas, but it's very bad for transmitting power for miles and miles. In fact it was Nikola Tesla who displayed his neon lights at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893.
the crazy man who through electricity could go through air(or at least neon), was the first to display technology confirming it... and people still called him a mad scientist.
"Of course it's a sham. It destroyed Tesla's reputation. There is no way to transmit electricity and hope to get anything approaching a meaningful level of efficiency."
Of course, there is might not be a way nitrogen or oxygen are ever going to efficiently conduct electricity as a gas, but Neon and Xenon.. those are another matter...
for instance: the long time used neon lamp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_lamp
But wait, what about Plasma, the 4th state of matter!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_(physics)
Ah yes, plasma, we use it routinely in television displays now, and trust me those electric bills for new high def TVs aren't nearly as bad as the gaming rig needed to produce full 1080P in video games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_display
yes, electricity without wires! what a shock, that one could use a gas to transmit electricity wireless, of course the holy grail is to create a plasma conduit without needing a concentrated noble gas, and without massive energy bills for creating the plasma.
I've heard at one point of a company that was trying to make a wireless taser for the military, and to increase they range by creating a temporary plasma conduit with lasers or some such, not sure if that project ever got off the ground though.
you forgot the stick of bubble gum, but we'll forgive you...
if you miss stories of the past, shortly after i got my first cable modem, it started having problems, i lived in my sister's basement at the time (and worked at taco hell) so i had to go to the computer store by my work, buy a $2.50 cent pack of chipset coolers, then on a whim, i figured out how to use an old univeral power AC/CD adaptors and a piece of duct tape to fix up the old heatsink fan from my 233 MHZ amd processor (that it had already replaced with a 450 MHz processor, though my board only ran it at 333 MHZ as far as it would overclock, but my board would go in 1 mhz increments with DIP switches man with dip switches) so i has 2 chipset coolers on the 2 hot chips in my cable modem, but there wasn't room inside the cable modem case, so i got out my dremel and MADE room and cut out half the slats for better airflow, and i had 1 HSF and 1 chipset cooler mod for my new cable modem, and that baby ran for 5 years straight never losing it's ip not once.
so there you go, a Dremel, $2.50 in parts plus some scavenged from a part bin, duct tape, an old used universal DC power brick, to fix a problem that should have never existed except some idiot engineer chose to believe some dumb companies marketing department claiming their chip could run 100C without a chipset cooler.
if by conventional construction techniques you mean buying rolls of aluminum foil backed wallpaper, then yes, it's quite easy to make a cellphone proof building.
also there are simple devices that can make cellphones useless by interfering with their broadcast frequency (cellphone jammers) but i would think that aluminum foil backed wallpaper would be cheaper long term than a jammer, the advantage of a jammer is that it can be disabled from when the credits roll until the film starts...
i think the main reason not to jam/build a cheap aluminum based Faraday cage is simple. it's cheaper not to, and people can't sue you for missing a phone call that was a life or death situation (eg: a doctor who was on call trying to catch the latest film, getting called in for a medical emergency)
a little far fetched, but even doctors like movies. if their cellphone doesn't work at the movies, they might not go there...
the market valuation is based on where they expect yahoo to be in the next 2-3 months, not where they're going to be 10 years down the road when a 32-core processor costs $25.99.
I realize it's hard to understand that wall street only cares about next Week, and I realize the cost is dropping FOR everyone, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo everyone benefits from cheaper tech. Still, IMO Microsoft made a move when they believed the street had greatly undervalued yahoo, and when they'd say that Microsoft was vastly overpaying for a company, that is second fiddle to Google.
The street worries about next year when they can predict how it will effect companies bottom lines, not until then. when yahoo beat their own estimates by $15 million dollars they only went up 5 cents per share. Yahoo a company that is BEATING it's estimates...
yahoo is growing even though they're not growing as quickly as google, they are a strong company, they also have over 8 million subscribers to insulate their company from advertising price drops (which are occurring and at least short term) but as i said, the true valuation of yahoo in 10 years from now isn't in todays stock prices, todays stock prices reflect what wall street expects over the next 2 months from the company.
I expect yahoo to be worth as much as it was in the bubble within the next 20 years because of 2 factors. 1. more people world wide having computers and internet. 2. the dropping price of computers, and bandwidth prices.
the street doesn't look into the faraway profitability of a company 20 years from now, a small individual investor planning his retirement might, but not a stock broker.
as far as I'm concerned right now yahoo is a buy for long term investors, so is google, i think microsoft's future is bleaker than any other tech company (long term anyways) dell, HP, apple, i consider holds, eg: if you have it keep it. I think that in 4 year from now they might downgrade to sells though. I can see the writing on the wall, computers will become an appliance that people occasional fix as needed, and they don't replace every 4 years because there is no compelling reason to.
and i strongly think that linux with a couple million here a couple million there could overnight become the standard OS for 'value' computers, the kind that only do internet, printing and digital music. the kind that is growing the most rapidly and where OEMs might start to consider paying even $10 to microsoft is too much for a machine that can't play video games in the first place.
"By the way, just what IS the ideal average temperature of the Earth, and when was the Earth ever stable at this magical temperature for any appreciable amount of time?"
that's not what is worrisome. what is worrisome is that in the antarctic, the concentration of CO2 gas has NEVER gone above 300 PPM in the past 650,000 years of antarctic ice. As of this year, at the mauna loa observatory (middle of the pacific ocean, as far away from civilization as one can get) we hit 385 PPM of CO2 gas
It's getting about time to start cloning those dinosaurs, because at the rate we're going only cold blooded reptiles will be able to survive the heat without central air.
True, the concentrations in the peak of dinosaur era are estimated as 20 times higher than they are now, but at the current rate of expansion in another 80 years we will have halved the distance to the goal of 'dinosaur CO2 levels' and another 50 years from then and we'll be at the goal line, and you can be assured that any mammal larger than a mouse is going to find itself dead from heat exhaustion, while reptiles come to rule the earth again.
the fact that humans can in 3 generations of their lifespans undo 300 million years of natural changes to the environment is frightening.
"You have to do subsidies because you are competing with the energy prices with places like China."
didn't see that the first go round.. That isn't really true, China has a notorious reputation for producing sub standard products. It's a reputation well earned, it's true that producing a higher quality product costs more, and even companies known for their quality are sub contracting parts of their businesses to china to stay cost competitive.. but you don't have to compete with china for cost of energy.
why? right now china has the cheapest energy, followed by America, followed by Europe, i don't off hand know where japan falls into the mix, but
even though energy prices are higher in Europe (coal has been mined there for a lot longer than anywhere else) they still have manufacturing companies, and the like.
Europe and the USA have better reputations for quality, and so people who want quality products buy from American and European companies. This is enough to keep their production from moving entirely to china, but a lot of production especially products purchased by clueless consumers are still made in china, because they don't research purchases other than cost.
If America switches to local energy sources, it doesn't matter if they cost 20% more than importing foreign energy, Because all that money is Going directly back into the US economy, rather than creating a trade deficit for energy imported. If 200 billion dollars A YEAR go to local algae farmers, and local algae processors, it's going to cause a massive economic recovery in the united states beyond what any politician so far could ever have hoped for, EVEN IF THE COST OF DOING THIS IS DOUBLING THE COST OF ELECTRICITY.
because instead of sending 200 billion dollars to the mideast where it only costs them $1 a barrel to pump the stuff out of the ground and refine it, that means to the mid east they're making $20 profit a barrel, and they've got an elite billionaire class created by American stupidity.
Lawmakers could have forced the electric or other industries to take the burden of cost to build wide scale algae biofuel production and refining when they first realized it was feasible in the 1970's but instead we chose to import energy, and drain the American coffers until we all became a nation of debtors.
Just ten years of forcing say the electric utilities to put money into algae production, would be enough to have shifted enough money for the feds to start worrying about how fast our economy was growing as a result of relying on local bioenergy... even if every aluminum smelting plant in the country went overseas, dropping our trade deficit by 25-30% by using locally grown bioenergy would be worth it.
almost 1/3 of our trade deficit is from oil imports. we could fix this withing 5 years with strong legislation. the rest of the trade deficit is harder to tackle, but i believe that as America's economy grows to be profitable again, that our status as debtors will reduce quickly. even if the cost is higher, it's actually massively better for the USA to spend all their energy dollars on US grown energy.
"America's current petroleum demand, which continues to rise steadily, poses ever growing environmental problems, and dependence on foreign petroleum. U.S. oil consumption is approximately 21 million barrels/day, yet production is only 6 million barrels per day (950,000 mÂ/d). Cost to import oil is approximately $200 billion dollars a year"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States
"But let's say that a carbon tax is applied."
Why apply a carbon tax, when most coal fired power plants are located in locations where an algae based carbon recovery system (and combo pollution scrubbing system) can create not only vast amounts of vegetable oil, but even larger quantities of vegetable matter that can be feed to livestock, or combusted for energy, or converted to ethanol.
If you required all coal fired plants to use an algae based carbon recovery system, you would instantly create a massive system capable of producing enough biofuel to permanently kill our oil addiction.
I mean permanently. In order to sequester the carbon completely then the same quantity of fuel as burned in the coal plants is created, mostly from the energy of sunlight. while the bulk of this is as vegetable mass, and only about 20-25% of it is recoverable vegetable oil, it's still vastly more than we use.
no need to even convert it to biodiesel if we mandate that every coal fired plant sequester it's CO emissions with algae, because it will be cheaper to kit existing diesel engined to SVO compatible parts, and change the specs on all new diesel engines to be SVO engines. and a SVO engine, can still burn diesel, but not as efficiently. but if we're producing enough SVO to switch every diesel vehicle in America to a SVO vehicle, well, it's worth it.
True, this switches the burden of cost to electric companies, but electricity is way cheap, and forcing them by law to create a fuel stream of 'cheap bioenergy' to kill off the oil and gas markets, well, that doesn't strike me as bad.
Although market forces for oil prices are now sufficiently high that biofuel from algae has suddenly become a realistic enterprise that could be profitable for an energy company, or at least one oil and gas company in texas thinks they're going to make money creating biofuel from algae.
http://gas2.org/2008/03/29/first-algae-biodiesel-plant-goes-online-april-1-2008/
so it is entirely possible that coal power plants might want to create algae based CO sequestering even without pressure from the government, to create an alternative energy revenue stream to boost their bottom lines.
At least, if diesel stays above $4 a gallon, and gasoline stays above $3.50 a gallon, they will..
if the prices trend higher then energy companies would have to be crazy not to consider algae production as an alternative to oil and gas.
I still remember when yahoo was worth $500 a share... sure they've had 2 2:1 stock splits since then, and plus the internet bubble collapsed int he interim, but still at yahoo's Highest valuation, adjusted for stock splits they would be worth $125 a share, or 180 billion dollars... true, it was a bubble, but if the company was at one point worth over 378% more than what was offered... and the execs for whatever reason believe that they are currently undervalued by the street... well... they are, the stock market is way down, on concerns over the economy, and yahoo is worth way more than 47.5 billion dollars, when you consider that every year the technology they rely on is getting cheaper and better, while the over head costs are going down, and demand for their services are rising...
really the stock market DOSE NOT currently value yahoo for where technology is going, because for all the computers they use to keep track of stocks, they don't fundamentally understand how to value a company that will halve it's operating costs ever ten years, so long as certain technologies get better every year...
nobody knows exactly when or how technology prices will bottom out, because even if we no longer can shrink the size of transistors etc, the economy of scales might still drive prices lower, as they already have for microprocessors... just 5 years ago, a viable single core server processor cost $1,000 but today, a quad core server processor costs $230-$300 because of economies of scale for both multi-core consumer and server products...
honestly in another 5 years, when a 16-core mutli-processor sells for $49.99 and uses the same electricity of today's quad core processor, do you really think that then, in that far away future land that yahoo or google will have fewer customers than they do today? they will have more, and the cost per customer will be lower, and the cost of advertising higher.
Even if google or some other competitor is ahead of yahoo, yahoo will still have an enormous customer base... and technology keeps kgetting better.
being acquired by Microsoft would also have killed BSD. Yahoo runs on Yahoo BSD and a lot of yahoo's internal coders are important in various BSD projects in their spare time...
right now running FreeBSD really doesn't make sense compared to say, Ubuntu because Ubuntu makes desktop Linux easy, but for a simple server, FreeBSD is still a viable choice, thanks in large part to yahoo.
Microsoft was running FreeBSD machines to host hotmail for a long time after acquiring them, but eventually they shifted them to MS operating systems just to demonstrate to customers that MS could run a complex free webmail site with computers 20 times more powerful that they needed to run it with a BSD os..
so having the experience, microsoft would have killed BSD and force upgraded all of yahoos servers from a lean custom built OS to a bloated general purpose OS that was never really designed to be a server platform.
just to say 'this is how you use microsoft server to quadruple the cost of running a massive web portal' yeah, yeah i know they would have pretended like it was cheaper, with FUD about how much it costs to 'maintain' a custom light weight OS designed to be used in server farms...
"What does sound like a hobbyist project to me, is building a homebrew windmill, using it to charge a UPS, and using that to power, say your low-voltage garden lighting, and your garage lighting."
I realize the UPS has a lot of the requires circuitry, and it can charge the battery up, or let the current through, or do both... but usually UPSes have Maintenance free batteries. i like good old maintainable lead acids, that you top off once a month to deal with evaporation or electrolysis to hydrogen gas.. there is no way for the hydrogen to build up if the battery isn't enclosed, and thus no way for it to explode.
that means doing more of the wiring on your own, or at least buying kits off the net, but still it's SAFER, even if you have the UPS in the garage away from flammables it's not pretty trying to clean up an exploded UPS.
plus it's harder to recycle/replace the battery and batteries and electronics SHOULD NEVER GO IN A LANDFILL (even though most do)
making a home brew windmill is definitely a cool weekend project and it would be pointless to put 4x the cost of the total home brew project just to tie in a small.
the problem with solar panels is really simple, they use deogygenated silicon. also called '99.9% pure silicon' also called silicon wafers. and guess who has all the silicon wafer production in the entire world contract locked up? Intel, AMD, IBM, and Motorola... fortunately this silicon wafer shortage has lead to an increase in silicon wafer recycling. so solar panel makers can buy recycled silicon from processor makers waste streams. it would also be nice if there was enough post consumer recycling to allow greater solar panel installation. but sadly most electronic waste winds up in the landfill, polluting the water tables for generations to come.
in 135 years when all the major us landfills 'safer barriers' fail, the entire US water table could wind up so full of heavy metals that it could kill a lot of life forms, humans among them.
assuming of course there is no way for 'legacy' landfills to be dug up and have their barriers replaced... renewable energy sources might mean that there could be governments capable of dealing with the threat, but replacing all our coal and oil and gas and atomic energy usage purely with algae based energy economy would be a logistic nightmare, at least the way we use energy now.
only with a great reduction of energy per person could such a system maintain a technological society. and digging up landfills to compensate for the shortsightedness of the past few generations (including the current one) will mean it's an uphill battle to get those heavy metals out of water table isolated landfills, and into long term heavy metal storage.
Solar power panels might not even make the cut as a 'realistic' alternative energy, when the total cost of producing the silicon making the panels, and transporting and using them, Vs the energy output and the lifetime of the panels, even if you use a couple $10 mirrors to make them more efficient.
as far as electric toothbrushes goes, I've always used the spinbrush, since crest bought them out and switched to AA batteries, I haven't yet had to change my 'disposable' alkaline batteries (the AAA model only lasted a few months before replacement, the AAs are way better)
Why an electric toothbrush? they clean better. when i used a regular toothbrush my dentist was always telling me to brush longer, and get certain spots better. Since i switched to the spinbrush he always tells me my teeth are being brushed good all around. he still tells me to floss more, but i can't tolerate flossing i have perpetually soft gums...
I also started using crest pro health, but the dirty truth is that the alcohol in mouthwash evaporates too quickly to kill plaque, any effective mouthwash has to remain on your mouth and gums for AT LEAST an hour to be effective against plaque. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouthwash
quite sad that anyone sells alcohol based mouthwashes when the alcohol just makes it burn and can only kill saliva based bacteria...