If you read the German-language discussion, they do dispose of returned merchandise in secondary markets whenever they can. It is only stuff that they can't dispose of through secondary markets that is destroyed.
If you read the second of the links on the German language website (which you have to click through to get to-- should have been linked here but it wasn't), it makes exactly these points: the "Scandal" is mostly invented; Amazon doesn't destroy stuff it doesn't have to, and they go to some amount of effort to sell at lower cost, or donate, stuff that is returned but can't be resold "as new".
https://www.wortfilter.de/wp/h...
(translate: https://translate.google.com/t... )
*allegedly*... we still have the concept of "innocent until proven guilty"
Yep. And the ability to hold off making a judgement until we know the details.
It is entirely plausible that he could both be working on increasing security, and also be responsible for malware himself. But it is also plausible that the prosecutors are overreaching, or misinterpreting actions that were not malicious.
without seeing the evidence, it's impossible to tell either way.
England also has a 'right to remain silent'. But they can hold your silence against you, if you later claim a defense you didn't speak about during initial interrogation.
In England, maybe, but not in America.
You can't bring up a new defense after the trial, but no, you don't have to bring up a defense until after you talk to a lawyer, and being silent before you consult a lawyer explicitly can not legally be used against you.
The Constitution applies to all people on US soil, not just citizens.
Except the ones accused of being terrorists, or knowing terrorists, or living in an area where terrorists were once suspected to also live. They don't get rights. Especially not the parts about "speedy trial" and the right "to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation" (6th amendment).
I know the field. If you're going to be scared by PV production chemicals, you should be scared by nuclear waste. If you're not scared by nuclear waste, you shouldn't be scared by PV production either. Pick a level of scaredness and stick with it.
As I said, I'm not particularly "scared" of nuclear waste, I'm annoyed by it. Nuclear waste is not dealt with well. There should be no such thing as low-level nuclear waste; the "low level" stuff should be processed to remove and concentrate the actual radioactive elements, which should be then separated out and used. And storing used fuel at the bottom of swimming pools that have a pretty blue Cherenkov glow that nobody sees because they are guarded 24/7-- that is just plain silly.
As I said, I would be scared of it if it were not dealt with correctly, but at the moment (at least in the US), there isn't a whole lot of dumping of high-level radioactive waste in neighborhoods, so the fact that the US doesn't have a clue what to do with it isn't scary, just annoying. There's a lot of things that I'd be scared of when they are not dealt with correctly. If you want something to be realistically scared of, about 150 million tons of ammonia are used as fertilizer per year. Now, ammonia really is something to be scared of-- it's both reactive and poisonous. All that ammonia really should scare you.
Really. If you are not scared of nuclear waste, you should really really not be scared of solar array production waste. Use the same standards of "scaryness" for both.
Can you not read? I never said I was scared of chemicals used in PV tech.
The assertion was that chemicals used in photovoltaic panel production produced dangerous waste. They don't.
Really, it's not a problem.
(Several other chemicals are named later on in the article... which are not used in current technology panels.)
And, BTW, most of those chemicals are still used, they are just used in lesser amounts.
Not the particular ones named in the article, no. Nitrogen trifluoride is an interesting gas (although not one I'm "scared" of)-- but not one used in solar array production. It's more a chemical used in integrated circuit and microelectronics production, not commercial production solar arrays..
Why are you scared of nuclear waste? You, nor anyone else with no business near it, are never likely to get anywhere near it. Can you say that for other toxic wastes that you don't fret about?
I'm not particularly scared by nuclear waste. I'm annoyed by nuclear waste, since it is useful material that should be reprocessed and used, but I'm not particularly scared by it, unless you don't deal with it correctly.
I would say that "seeing the potential" for 1 cent per kW-hr is not the same as predicting 1 cent per kW-hr.
However, I will admit I don't know that particular guy. Energie SA is a French utility-- I tend to know the scientists and engineers, not the utility managers. But it does make sense to pay some attention to the utilities, since they're the ones distributing power.
So, I'll concede half a point: some people, although not the ones I know, are looking toward 1 cent per kW-ht.
I will also note that the statement was "below $10-megawatt hour (1/kWh) in the sunniest climates by 2025."
What I had said was:
Cost per kilowatt hour is very location dependent, by the way. Is that a prediction of 1 cent per kilowatt hour in the Australian desert? Or in Norway?
the answer is "the sunniest climates", so: Australian desert.
I'm not worried about solder. But clearly you didn't even take time to google PV production chemicals before responding.
I don't need to, because I actually know the technology. You seem to be not afraid of nuclear waste because it is "easy to manage, highly inert". Well, in turn, I'm not afraid of the chemicals named in that site
Let me help;
No, let me help. As I said, I actually know the technology. The chemicals named in that site are: "Hydrochloric acid, copper, trichlorosilane gas and silicon waste."
Hydrochloric acid: Wow, sounds scary! Acid! Well, uh, except just mix the waste with dilute sodium hydroxide, and it turns into salt and water.
copper: You know what? I'm not afraid of copper. Sorry. I even have it in my house-- it's in the wires!
trichlorosilane gas: Solar production don't want to waste the silane-- it's your feedstock-- but if there is waste? Burn it. It turns into silicon dioxide (sand), water, and hydrochloric acid (see above).
and silicon waste: Silicon is pretty inert.
Really. If you are not scared of nuclear waste, you should really really not be scared of solar array production waste. Use the same standards of "scaryness" for both.
(Several other chemicals are named later on in the article... which are not used in current technology panels.)
I know a lot of solar scientists and engineers, and I don't know any of them predicting 1 cent per kilowatt-hour price in ten years. That's a bit of an optimistic projection: a good target to aim for, indeed, but not something to predict.
Cost per kilowatt hour is very location dependent, by the way. Is that a prediction of 1 cent per kilowatt hour in the Australian desert? Or in Norway?
On the other hand, the old ERDA (and later DOE) target for solar panels back in 1978 was a long-term price goal of 50 cents per watt... and you can buy panels for under that now. (And that was 50 cents in *1978 dollars*!!) So, sometimes the technology does meet and exceed the goal.
You don't need direct Sun light. Solar panels can generate around 80% of peak during dismal overcast days.
No.
Solar panels do still work on cloudy days, but nothing like 80%. Here's a typical graph of power production on a partly-cloudy day, notice the dips in output when clouds block the sun: power indeed doesn't go down to zero, but it does drop significantly:
http://uk-solarpanels.blogspot.com/2012/05/solar-panels-low-peak-output.html
This is a myth that seem to have been going around for a long time, but it's not really true. By mass, solar panels are mostly glass; after that, they are mostly silicon. About the only "dangerous" chemical used in solar panels today is the lead in lead-based solder used on the leads, no different from any other device that uses solder. And you don't need lead-based solder--- there are alternatives that are slightly more expensive, but since the price of solder is not a major price driver for module cost, it's not really a big deal. And if you're the kind of person who thinks of nuclear waste as "easy to manage, highly inert", then I doubt you're worried about solder.
If we switched to GaAs-based or CdTe based solar panel technologies, you might have had a point. But silicon cells? Nothing really dangerous about them.,
Reporters probably aren't going to introduce a mistake specifying uW, especially not using the proper letter mu instead of u.
correction - 10uW/cm^3. Forgot that Slashdot doesn't support unicode.
And the correction shows why the assumption in the first point is not a good one to make. Errors can be introduced in formatting and editing even if the original article as written was correct.
Also worth watching for, a mu (micron symbol) will turn into the letter m if the original text used a symbol font for mu, and at any point in the process the font gets changed from the reporter's font choice to some standard used by the publication. This happens.
More notably, from reading thousands of these science press releases, I can say that the question you should be asking is "why are they giving us theoretical capacity when the press release says that they have made an actual device?
The answer to that question is always: they don't want to tell us the actual performance because it is so incredibly bad.
Always be skeptical when you see great numbers for "theoretical" performance but not a single mention of real device performance.
Nuclear batteries and chemical batteries both share the word "battery" in the name and produce electricity, but other than that, they have nothing in common.
A NiFe battery is completely different from a betavoltaic cell, even one based on a Nickel isotope.
yes, whoever wrote the article made a bad word choice. CFCs have many properties, but toxicity isn't one of them.
the original Nature article being commented on doesn't use that adjective. This is typical of popular science journalism, using high-impact words to make a story seem more important, instead of sticking to the actual words of the work being reported on.
Yes, but the article is about a project that has been tracking CFCs in the atmosphere for many years seeing a new source of CFC-11 starting around 2012. That's not "millions of years".
And, not seeing a new source of other CFCs, just CFC-11. Volcanoes don't emit CFC-11 (there just aren't any magma sources for fluorine-- volcanic gasses to worry about are hydrogen sulfide and sulfur di- and tri-oxide.)
It is certainly one group of feds spying on another.
No, I expect it's every single spy agency of every single country in the world. I'd be surprised if other countries don't do it.
...but come to think of it, I bet the if you don't care who listens to your conversations, Washington DC probably has the best cell coverage in the world, what with all the intercepting cell towers out there in addition to the legit ones.
Yes, I'm not surprised. I'm only surprised that other people seem to be surprised. The local TV news even reported this weeks ago: https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
No, volcanoes emit a large amount of many noxious gases (most notably sulfur oxides), but CFCs aren't among them-- these are man made, and have no natural sources.
The original article https://www.nature.com/article... (which would have been a better reference) said that the increase in northern hemisphere CFC-11 started in 2012, which is years before the current Hawaiian eruption.
Oh, he knows it, the anonymous coward is simply trolling. The fact that the greenhouse gas in question is CFC-11 is clear in the article linked, and it takes some very deliberate misreading to not see that it is in the summary.
Slashdot Mirror
https://www.wortfilter.de/wp/hintergruende-zum-amazon-skandal-amazon-mitarbeiter-enthuellen-sie-vernichten-im-auftrag-des-onlineriesen-taeglich-zehntausende-neue-produkte/
If you read the second of the links on the German language website (which you have to click through to get to-- should have been linked here but it wasn't), it makes exactly these points: the "Scandal" is mostly invented; Amazon doesn't destroy stuff it doesn't have to, and they go to some amount of effort to sell at lower cost, or donate, stuff that is returned but can't be resold "as new". https://www.wortfilter.de/wp/h... (translate: https://translate.google.com/t... )
yes, the real answer is we haven't seen the evidence, and we simply don't know; we don't have the information to know.
He says he didn't do it. But that doesn't really count for much.
*allegedly* ... we still have the concept of "innocent until proven guilty"
Yep. And the ability to hold off making a judgement until we know the details.
It is entirely plausible that he could both be working on increasing security, and also be responsible for malware himself. But it is also plausible that the prosecutors are overreaching, or misinterpreting actions that were not malicious.
without seeing the evidence, it's impossible to tell either way.
England also has a 'right to remain silent'. But they can hold your silence against you, if you later claim a defense you didn't speak about during initial interrogation.
In England, maybe, but not in America.
You can't bring up a new defense after the trial, but no, you don't have to bring up a defense until after you talk to a lawyer, and being silent before you consult a lawyer explicitly can not legally be used against you.
The Constitution applies to all people on US soil, not just citizens.
Except the ones accused of being terrorists, or knowing terrorists, or living in an area where terrorists were once suspected to also live. They don't get rights. Especially not the parts about "speedy trial" and the right "to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation" (6th amendment).
I know the field. If you're going to be scared by PV production chemicals, you should be scared by nuclear waste. If you're not scared by nuclear waste, you shouldn't be scared by PV production either. Pick a level of scaredness and stick with it.
As I said, I'm not particularly "scared" of nuclear waste, I'm annoyed by it. Nuclear waste is not dealt with well. There should be no such thing as low-level nuclear waste; the "low level" stuff should be processed to remove and concentrate the actual radioactive elements, which should be then separated out and used. And storing used fuel at the bottom of swimming pools that have a pretty blue Cherenkov glow that nobody sees because they are guarded 24/7-- that is just plain silly.
As I said, I would be scared of it if it were not dealt with correctly, but at the moment (at least in the US), there isn't a whole lot of dumping of high-level radioactive waste in neighborhoods, so the fact that the US doesn't have a clue what to do with it isn't scary, just annoying. There's a lot of things that I'd be scared of when they are not dealt with correctly. If you want something to be realistically scared of, about 150 million tons of ammonia are used as fertilizer per year. Now, ammonia really is something to be scared of-- it's both reactive and poisonous. All that ammonia really should scare you.
Really. If you are not scared of nuclear waste, you should really really not be scared of solar array production waste. Use the same standards of "scaryness" for both.
Can you not read? I never said I was scared of chemicals used in PV tech.
The assertion was that chemicals used in photovoltaic panel production produced dangerous waste. They don't.
Really, it's not a problem.
(Several other chemicals are named later on in the article... which are not used in current technology panels.) And, BTW, most of those chemicals are still used, they are just used in lesser amounts.
Not the particular ones named in the article, no. Nitrogen trifluoride is an interesting gas (although not one I'm "scared" of)-- but not one used in solar array production. It's more a chemical used in integrated circuit and microelectronics production, not commercial production solar arrays..
Why are you scared of nuclear waste? You, nor anyone else with no business near it, are never likely to get anywhere near it. Can you say that for other toxic wastes that you don't fret about?
I'm not particularly scared by nuclear waste. I'm annoyed by nuclear waste, since it is useful material that should be reprocessed and used, but I'm not particularly scared by it, unless you don't deal with it correctly.
However, I will admit I don't know that particular guy. Energie SA is a French utility-- I tend to know the scientists and engineers, not the utility managers. But it does make sense to pay some attention to the utilities, since they're the ones distributing power.
So, I'll concede half a point: some people, although not the ones I know, are looking toward 1 cent per kW-ht.
I will also note that the statement was "below $10-megawatt hour (1/kWh) in the sunniest climates by 2025."
What I had said was:
Cost per kilowatt hour is very location dependent, by the way. Is that a prediction of 1 cent per kilowatt hour in the Australian desert? Or in Norway?
the answer is "the sunniest climates", so: Australian desert.
I'm not worried about solder. But clearly you didn't even take time to google PV production chemicals before responding.
I don't need to, because I actually know the technology. You seem to be not afraid of nuclear waste because it is "easy to manage, highly inert". Well, in turn, I'm not afraid of the chemicals named in that site
Let me help;
No, let me help. As I said, I actually know the technology. The chemicals named in that site are: "Hydrochloric acid, copper, trichlorosilane gas and silicon waste."
Hydrochloric acid: Wow, sounds scary! Acid! Well, uh, except just mix the waste with dilute sodium hydroxide, and it turns into salt and water.
copper: You know what? I'm not afraid of copper. Sorry. I even have it in my house-- it's in the wires!
trichlorosilane gas: Solar production don't want to waste the silane-- it's your feedstock-- but if there is waste? Burn it. It turns into silicon dioxide (sand), water, and hydrochloric acid (see above).
and silicon waste: Silicon is pretty inert.
Really. If you are not scared of nuclear waste, you should really really not be scared of solar array production waste. Use the same standards of "scaryness" for both.
(Several other chemicals are named later on in the article... which are not used in current technology panels.)
... Consequently, there are probably wells deeper than life ever lived in the ground, that will never be tapped.
Probably not. Titan is in the cold outer solar system. The inner solar system is not the outer solar system.
I know a lot of solar scientists and engineers, and I don't know any of them predicting 1 cent per kilowatt-hour price in ten years. That's a bit of an optimistic projection: a good target to aim for, indeed, but not something to predict.
Cost per kilowatt hour is very location dependent, by the way. Is that a prediction of 1 cent per kilowatt hour in the Australian desert? Or in Norway?
On the other hand, the old ERDA (and later DOE) target for solar panels back in 1978 was a long-term price goal of 50 cents per watt... and you can buy panels for under that now. (And that was 50 cents in *1978 dollars*!!) So, sometimes the technology does meet and exceed the goal.
You don't need direct Sun light. Solar panels can generate around 80% of peak during dismal overcast days.
No.
Solar panels do still work on cloudy days, but nothing like 80%. Here's a typical graph of power production on a partly-cloudy day, notice the dips in output when clouds block the sun: power indeed doesn't go down to zero, but it does drop significantly:
http://uk-solarpanels.blogspot.com/2012/05/solar-panels-low-peak-output.html
or this one; https://www.transgrid.com.au/n...
If we switched to GaAs-based or CdTe based solar panel technologies, you might have had a point. But silicon cells? Nothing really dangerous about them.,
Reporters probably aren't going to introduce a mistake specifying uW, especially not using the proper letter mu instead of u.
correction - 10uW/cm^3. Forgot that Slashdot doesn't support unicode.
And the correction shows why the assumption in the first point is not a good one to make. Errors can be introduced in formatting and editing even if the original article as written was correct.
Also worth watching for, a mu (micron symbol) will turn into the letter m if the original text used a symbol font for mu, and at any point in the process the font gets changed from the reporter's font choice to some standard used by the publication. This happens.
How much shielding does such a battery need?
Betas don't penetrate very far. You need a few hundred microns of shielding-- the thickness of the case is going to be fine.
The answer to that question is always: they don't want to tell us the actual performance because it is so incredibly bad.
Always be skeptical when you see great numbers for "theoretical" performance but not a single mention of real device performance.
A NiFe battery is completely different from a betavoltaic cell, even one based on a Nickel isotope.
NOT toxic.
yes, whoever wrote the article made a bad word choice. CFCs have many properties, but toxicity isn't one of them.
the original Nature article being commented on doesn't use that adjective. This is typical of popular science journalism, using high-impact words to make a story seem more important, instead of sticking to the actual words of the work being reported on.
detected 4 years ago.
Kilauea has been there for millions of years.
Yes, but the article is about a project that has been tracking CFCs in the atmosphere for many years seeing a new source of CFC-11 starting around 2012. That's not "millions of years".
And, not seeing a new source of other CFCs, just CFC-11. Volcanoes don't emit CFC-11 (there just aren't any magma sources for fluorine-- volcanic gasses to worry about are hydrogen sulfide and sulfur di- and tri-oxide.)
What's this?
"This" is a news article that says of the geothermal plant at Puna "a flammable gas called pentane is used as part of the process."
Pentane isn't a chlorofluorocarbon (although it's a contributor to photochemical smog.)
Reptiles aren't slimy. You're thinking of amphibians.
Or maybe eels-- you're thinking of eels.
It is certainly one group of feds spying on another.
No, I expect it's every single spy agency of every single country in the world. I'd be surprised if other countries don't do it.
...but come to think of it, I bet the if you don't care who listens to your conversations, Washington DC probably has the best cell coverage in the world, what with all the intercepting cell towers out there in addition to the legit ones.
Otherwise known as "Stingrays".
Yes, I'm not surprised. I'm only surprised that other people seem to be surprised. The local TV news even reported this weeks ago: https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Don't volcanoes release mass quantities of CFC's?
No, volcanoes emit a large amount of many noxious gases (most notably sulfur oxides), but CFCs aren't among them-- these are man made, and have no natural sources.
The original article https://www.nature.com/article... (which would have been a better reference) said that the increase in northern hemisphere CFC-11 started in 2012, which is years before the current Hawaiian eruption.
Oh, he knows it, the anonymous coward is simply trolling. The fact that the greenhouse gas in question is CFC-11 is clear in the article linked, and it takes some very deliberate misreading to not see that it is in the summary.
CFC-11 is trichlorofluoromethane, for what it's worth. A better reference is here: https://www.nature.com/article...