There is a difference between burning biodiesel hydrocarbons and petroleum hydrocarbons with respect to CO2. With biodiesel, you can recycle the carbon into new biodiesel, so the process can be considered carbon-neutral. It may even be carbon-negative with respect to the atmosphere, since not all of the carbon that gets locked up in the plant is burned in biodiesel; the non-oil parts can be buried or turned into fertilizer.
As for the cost, well, that remains to be seen. It may or may not scale well. But there are reasons to use biodiesel even if it costs more, reduced net C02 emissions and reducing dependence on foreign oil being the two that come to mind first. It may not totally eliminate dependence on fossil fuels, but even a 10% drop would have advantages over not doing it at all.
Oh, and I wouldn't call Daryl Hannah washed up. She was just in a movie recently, Kill Bill vol. 1 and 2. You might have heard of it. And she was more of an 80s pinup than a 70s pinup, but she's held together pretty darn well.
Interesting analysis. I haven't double-checked your numbers, but they look OK. It seems remarkable that we take out of the ground so much oil per year that it would take a sizeable fraction of the earth to replace it. But we'd be growing it in a very, very thin film on top, whereas oil reservoirs are deep.
Still, even if we can readily replace only 10% of our oil consumption, that would provide considerable relief in the system. It's been said that the US could be self-sustaining if only we could increase mileage by some small percentage. (A quick google search didn't uncover the number, and it's probably apocryphal anyway, but I'm hoping it'll sustain my point here anyway.)
I'm more curious about the energy economics. I've heard it said that ethanol doesn't work as a substitute for gasoline because it requires more energy to process than we get out of it. I've heard that disputed, but the breakeven point does appear to be rather high. But since oils are more energy-dense, maybe it works out better for biodiesel. And maybe the leftover cellulose material can be converted into fertilizer and/or ethanol.
Sadly, I have no numbers, and I'm not gonna put forth the same effort you did in collecting yours (for which I applaud you).
Re:where have we heard this before?
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You are correct. The DMA does not itself send spam; it's an organization of people who do.
The DMA itself actually predates spam; it started in 1917. Its members are also responsible for junk mail and telemarketing. Any sort of "direct marketing", as opposed to broadcast advertising.
In other words, their purpose is to be irritating, but not so irritating that they get what they do made illegal.
They've always been considered a legitimate, if somewhat unpleasant, business.
Re:where have we heard this before?
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It actually makes some sense. The DMA wants to be able to send you "legitimate" spam, marketing legal products. They hate being drowned out by Nigerian scam artists and people peddling bogus pills and illegal stock tips, not to mention porn ads sent to four year olds. They think it gives spam a bad name.
Phillip Morris, on the other hand, is unwillingly paying off the results of a lawsuit.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy to make spam safe, legal, and filterable. You send it, my server rejects it without my ever seeing it. The easier it is to filter, the better it is for me. If it comes from the DMA, and clearly so marked, I'm happy with that, and if the thieves' guild wants to punish unlicensed thieves, I'm thrilled.
Mr. Sterling may well be a fool; I've never enjoyed his writing as much as many seem to. But there are a couple of differences to the present period of global warming:
1. The last time the weather was this warm, we weren't dumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. True, natural events can dump even larger amounts of greenhouse gas into the air, but it doesn't necessarily mean we should be helping them along, especially in light of:
2. The last time, we didn't have such a sophisticated world economy on which we depend. Life, of course, will adapt, including our own species. But in many ways our technological culture may prove less adaptable: hundreds of millions of people living on coastlines, trillions of dollars in immobile physical infrastructure designed for particular climates, and a concentration of agriculture that supports a far larger human population.
In other words, I can't dismiss the present global warming trend as "live with it or die". I presume your goal was to oppose Sterlings article, and support nuclear power, which would (hopefully) end one source of global warming, so you and I appear to be on the same page there, if for different reasons (I'm much more interested in ending the flow of petrochemical dollars to totalitarian countries). But I do hope that we don't have to move New York three miles inland. That would be really expensive.
An interesting scenario: two objects, one revolving on its own axis, the other rotating the same way, looking as if there were no gravity at all. Fascinating.
If you were standing on the surface of the Earth, you could detect the Earth's revolution by throwing a ball north from the equator. If you look very closely, you can observe that the ball drifts off to the west. Hurricanes do precisely that.
From that you could derive that the moon was orbiting around it.
You can also feel it by tunneling towards the center of the earth, or (equivalently) going upwards to the moon. You'd find you'd have to gain horizontal speed to catch up to the moon. If you just went straight up, you'd miss the moon.
The MAY^H^H^HCAN-SPAM act does make sending certain emails against the law. I believe that this guy's activities predated the CAN-SPAM act, so it's not relevant.
Trying to hide your identity when sending commercial email is one of the things made illegal by the act. It was illegal already, but law has always been something of a patchwork.
I agree with your sentiment, but I need to quibble on a few details.
One: Police officers are given a special protected status because their jobs are risks taken for the public safety. Injuring one is treated as an attack not just on a person but on the public safety in general, because it makes it harder for the police to do their jobs. So the sentences are harsher. (Whether harsher sentences actually deter crime is a different question.)
Two: I don't think you'd find three to five years in prison, or even six months, to be a slap on the wrist. It's wildly unpleasant and wrecks your life for decades to come. That "ghetto-born" men might consider it a risk worth taking speaks a lot to just how much their lives suck to start with.
Strictly speaking, they're both orbiting each other. Most of the time when we see orbiting, it's a very large thing attracting a very small thing. But since everything attracts everything else, the big thing is also orbiting some point as well. It just so happens that that point is really, really near the center of the planet. But you can observe it anyway: if you have a large body of water on the surface, it'll go sloshing around as the planet orbits that point near its center, and thus you end up with tides.
You're exactly right that you can determine the mass of something by looking at something orbiting around it. That's how we compute the mass of the sun. All you need to know is how far away the thing is and how fast it's orbiting.
So what direction are they orbiting? It's some plane which contains the line connecting the two planets. Exactly which plane is up to the circumstance of how they came together.
The math is a lot easier of you pick a reference frame which is relative to that point-in-the-center, which is in most cases essentially identical to the center of the larger body. So you can claim that the big body is standing still, and the little one is orbiting it.
The point-in-the-center is, itself, probably not actually "still" with respect to the rest of the universe; it's probably orbiting some star or the center of some galaxy or something. But it's in free fall, so you can ignore all those other bodies (at least until it goes crashing into one of them).
So, in the end, bodies in free fall can pretend that they are the only thing in the universe: they don't feel any force. An observer on the moon can pretend the earth doesn't exist, as long as he doesn't look up. There's a force on him, but because it's a constant force everywhere (on both him and the moon) it's equivalent to no force at all.
So to sum up:
* There's no absolute space against which to measure velocity; you just pick a point and go with it. You usually pick yourself.
* So you can always pretend your velocity is zero.
* You can pick a point outside yourself if you see it and observe that relative to it you are actually moving, and even accelerating.
* But if you're in free fall, you can't feel that acceleration. It's as though it doesn't exist, and you can pretend it doesn't unless you're measuring some other body.
* But if you come into contact with something that causes you to move, you can measure that acceleration. That something can be a car door as the car turns, or exhaust from your rocket engine.
This is all more or less just Newtonian physics, with the added notion that you don't really need a fixed universe to measure against: you just pick any object in free fall. Which worked for Newton, because he picked the Sun as the object in free fall and figured it was pretty much constant with respect to the rest of the universe, and he was pretty much right for every observation he was ever going to make.
Proving him wrong is actually pretty tricky, and depends on the fixed limit on the speed (not the velocity) of light. Basically, everybody measures a photon of light to be the same speed, even if they're moving relative to that photon. The math all works out, but you have to "warp" space to do it, and observe that lengths and times change when they're moving relative to you. That correction factor is sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), which works out to 1 for any v much less than c, which it is for pretty much everything you're ever likely to encounter.
You can measure your acceleration with respect to yourself. You don't need to measure the velocity itself relative to anything. It doesn't matter if you're accelerating from 0 KPH to 10 KPH or 100 KPH to 10 KPH; the acceleration is the same. All you need to measure it in your windowless spaceship is a scale: your change in weight tells you how much you're accelerating.
Or you can throw a ball and watch it curve. (That curve is really the ball moving in a straight line with respect to an outside reference frame. We call the "force" that makes it move "centrifugal force", but there isn't really any such thing: it's moving straight and you're accelerating. Like when you take a turn in your car: you feel yourself pressing against the car door, but it's really your car door pressing agaisnt you.
Now, if your weight is zero (not your mass, your weight), then you're an inertial reference frame. Everything moves in a completely straight line.
If you're in orbit, then you _are_ falling, continuously. You just keep missing the planet. The math works this way:
Say you're just above the surface of the earth, at ISS height (about 13,000 km). In one second, you're going to fall about 10 meters. But if we move you some distance off to the west, the earth will get further away by 10 meters. That's "straight west", perpendicular to gravity. Do a bunch of math, and you'll find a particular speed which exactly counteracts that 10 meter fall. That speed is constant; it's only the direction that changes.
Effectively, you're always falling, and continuously missing the earth.
But relative to your spaceship (and your scale on the spaceship), you're not accelerating at all. If you don't look outside the window, you'll never know. Your velocity is zero, and doesn't change. You're accelerating with respect to the earth, but you're not accelerating with respect to yourself, which is the only acceleration which counts here.
(This applies only to a small spaceship, actually. If you look long distances away from your spaceship, gravity isn't constant, and you can see all sorts of fancy effects, like light not moving in a straight line. But let's not make this any more complicated than we have to.)
That's all kind of roundabout way of saying you don't need any universal reference frame to measure your acceleration against. If a satellite is orbiting, from it's own point of view it's standing still. Or moving at a constant velocity, which is indistinguishable from standing still. That's just a matter of picking your reference frame.
So there's nothing special about orbiting; it's just moving at a constant velocity. The earth's gravitational field makes "constant" a bit weird, in that the speed is constant but the direction is not. That's where it starts to get really hard, and you get these "frame dragging" effects I can't really claim to understand myself, so I just kind of let it go. Those non-Newtonian effects are generally so small you can't measure them, and it requires insanely fancy stuff to detect them at all, so I ignore them.
I'm not sure I'm making this much clearer, actually, but I hope I've given you a few ideas to chew on.
Special relativity says you can't distinguish between inertial reference frames, but a rocket is not an inertial reference frame. It's accelerating, and you can tell that without looking at the outside: you can feel your butt squishing against the seat. That's how you know that you're accelerating away from the earth, and not the other way around.
It's a small point, but the article calls it 92 Tbps, not 92 TBps. Which means its really 19 terabytes per second, which works out to some ungodly number of libraries of congress per fortnight. Either way, it's a lot.
Actually, soldiers who abuse prisoners can receive a lot more than a year in prison. The first guy got one year because he wasn't directly involved; he just took the pictures. Look for stiffer sentences in the future.
In addition, it generates its own energy to power the plant, and uses the steam naturally created by the process to heat incoming feedstock, In addition, TCP produces no emissions and no secondary hazardous waste streams.
So we're getting 200 barrels of oil a day, for "free" (that is, no oil going in). That's critical, of course, since if it took 300 barrels of oil (or even 190) it wouldn't be worth it.
I think hydrogen may have potential in that application. It's a reasonably efficient way to move energy around. You have to use some kind of energy to produce the hydrogen, and it would be far better to do it with solar than with fossil fuels.
Or it might be a way to bridge the energy gap in ethanol (either for combustion or in fuel cells), where currently you have to burn an amount of fossil fuels to produce the ethanol, some say more than you get out.
At least, I hope one of these works out, or some other improvement in battery technology. At the moment I'm more worried about being in thrall to a rather unstable part of the world for oil than I am about the atmosphere's CO2 load, but it is also pretty scary.
The article is woefully skimpy on details, but it sounds like he's planning to sew a bunch of Peltier devices onto a sheet of nylon.
Perhaps, though the article doesn't make this at all clear, he thinks he's got some way to build a thermoelectric device out of a sheet of nylon. It would be a good and useful trick, especially when accomplished by a first-year physics student.
Either way, it sounds to me like you're going to have to combine this with a fan if you're going to get anything useful out of it. Thermoelectric devices move heat a few centimeters and concentrate it, but if you just let it dissipate it'll eventually warm up the other side of the device, sapping a lot of your power. You need to blow a fan past it so you can use the air as a heat exchanger.
One could move the bonding one step further: require each user to post a "bond" to you of $20 when they sign up.
That doesn't work, since I don't want to have to give Amazon $20 to send me confirmation emails. But a centralized user-validation service might be cost effective.
I think that in spending $100M animating it, they've added some value to the IP. And that's the part they want to protect. You can still perform Hamlet; you just can't do Disney's Lion King version of it.
True, but I suspect that you consider pointing a video camera at your screen to be unacceptably low rez. They can't make duplication impossible, but they want to make it not worth the effort.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a difference between burning biodiesel hydrocarbons and petroleum hydrocarbons with respect to CO2. With biodiesel, you can recycle the carbon into new biodiesel, so the process can be considered carbon-neutral. It may even be carbon-negative with respect to the atmosphere, since not all of the carbon that gets locked up in the plant is burned in biodiesel; the non-oil parts can be buried or turned into fertilizer.
As for the cost, well, that remains to be seen. It may or may not scale well. But there are reasons to use biodiesel even if it costs more, reduced net C02 emissions and reducing dependence on foreign oil being the two that come to mind first. It may not totally eliminate dependence on fossil fuels, but even a 10% drop would have advantages over not doing it at all.
Oh, and I wouldn't call Daryl Hannah washed up. She was just in a movie recently, Kill Bill vol. 1 and 2. You might have heard of it. And she was more of an 80s pinup than a 70s pinup, but she's held together pretty darn well.
Interesting analysis. I haven't double-checked your numbers, but they look OK. It seems remarkable that we take out of the ground so much oil per year that it would take a sizeable fraction of the earth to replace it. But we'd be growing it in a very, very thin film on top, whereas oil reservoirs are deep.
Still, even if we can readily replace only 10% of our oil consumption, that would provide considerable relief in the system. It's been said that the US could be self-sustaining if only we could increase mileage by some small percentage. (A quick google search didn't uncover the number, and it's probably apocryphal anyway, but I'm hoping it'll sustain my point here anyway.)
I'm more curious about the energy economics. I've heard it said that ethanol doesn't work as a substitute for gasoline because it requires more energy to process than we get out of it. I've heard that disputed, but the breakeven point does appear to be rather high. But since oils are more energy-dense, maybe it works out better for biodiesel. And maybe the leftover cellulose material can be converted into fertilizer and/or ethanol.
Sadly, I have no numbers, and I'm not gonna put forth the same effort you did in collecting yours (for which I applaud you).
You are correct. The DMA does not itself send spam; it's an organization of people who do.
The DMA itself actually predates spam; it started in 1917. Its members are also responsible for junk mail and telemarketing. Any sort of "direct marketing", as opposed to broadcast advertising.
In other words, their purpose is to be irritating, but not so irritating that they get what they do made illegal.
They've always been considered a legitimate, if somewhat unpleasant, business.
It actually makes some sense. The DMA wants to be able to send you "legitimate" spam, marketing legal products. They hate being drowned out by Nigerian scam artists and people peddling bogus pills and illegal stock tips, not to mention porn ads sent to four year olds. They think it gives spam a bad name.
Phillip Morris, on the other hand, is unwillingly paying off the results of a lawsuit.
Personally, I'm perfectly happy to make spam safe, legal, and filterable. You send it, my server rejects it without my ever seeing it. The easier it is to filter, the better it is for me. If it comes from the DMA, and clearly so marked, I'm happy with that, and if the thieves' guild wants to punish unlicensed thieves, I'm thrilled.
Mr. Sterling may well be a fool; I've never enjoyed his writing as much as many seem to. But there are a couple of differences to the present period of global warming:
1. The last time the weather was this warm, we weren't dumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. True, natural events can dump even larger amounts of greenhouse gas into the air, but it doesn't necessarily mean we should be helping them along, especially in light of:
2. The last time, we didn't have such a sophisticated world economy on which we depend. Life, of course, will adapt, including our own species. But in many ways our technological culture may prove less adaptable: hundreds of millions of people living on coastlines, trillions of dollars in immobile physical infrastructure designed for particular climates, and a concentration of agriculture that supports a far larger human population.
In other words, I can't dismiss the present global warming trend as "live with it or die". I presume your goal was to oppose Sterlings article, and support nuclear power, which would (hopefully) end one source of global warming, so you and I appear to be on the same page there, if for different reasons (I'm much more interested in ending the flow of petrochemical dollars to totalitarian countries). But I do hope that we don't have to move New York three miles inland. That would be really expensive.
binary digits:
>>> math.floor(math.log(2**24036583-1,2))
24036583.0
I assume you realize that any number of the form 2^n -1 is going to take n bits to represent.
On most jobs, prints or transparencies need to be delivered anyway because its so difficult to set up a consistent digital workflow.
I wonder how long that will be true. Some service bureaus have already gone all-digital, and "camera ready" has really become "scanner ready".
An interesting scenario: two objects, one revolving on its own axis, the other rotating the same way, looking as if there were no gravity at all. Fascinating.
If you were standing on the surface of the Earth, you could detect the Earth's revolution by throwing a ball north from the equator. If you look very closely, you can observe that the ball drifts off to the west. Hurricanes do precisely that.
From that you could derive that the moon was orbiting around it.
You can also feel it by tunneling towards the center of the earth, or (equivalently) going upwards to the moon. You'd find you'd have to gain horizontal speed to catch up to the moon. If you just went straight up, you'd miss the moon.
The MAY^H^H^HCAN-SPAM act does make sending certain emails against the law. I believe that this guy's activities predated the CAN-SPAM act, so it's not relevant.
Trying to hide your identity when sending commercial email is one of the things made illegal by the act. It was illegal already, but law has always been something of a patchwork.
I agree with your sentiment, but I need to quibble on a few details.
One: Police officers are given a special protected status because their jobs are risks taken for the public safety. Injuring one is treated as an attack not just on a person but on the public safety in general, because it makes it harder for the police to do their jobs. So the sentences are harsher. (Whether harsher sentences actually deter crime is a different question.)
Two: I don't think you'd find three to five years in prison, or even six months, to be a slap on the wrist. It's wildly unpleasant and wrecks your life for decades to come. That "ghetto-born" men might consider it a risk worth taking speaks a lot to just how much their lives suck to start with.
Strictly speaking, they're both orbiting each other. Most of the time when we see orbiting, it's a very large thing attracting a very small thing. But since everything attracts everything else, the big thing is also orbiting some point as well. It just so happens that that point is really, really near the center of the planet. But you can observe it anyway: if you have a large body of water on the surface, it'll go sloshing around as the planet orbits that point near its center, and thus you end up with tides.
You're exactly right that you can determine the mass of something by looking at something orbiting around it. That's how we compute the mass of the sun. All you need to know is how far away the thing is and how fast it's orbiting.
So what direction are they orbiting? It's some plane which contains the line connecting the two planets. Exactly which plane is up to the circumstance of how they came together.
The math is a lot easier of you pick a reference frame which is relative to that point-in-the-center, which is in most cases essentially identical to the center of the larger body. So you can claim that the big body is standing still, and the little one is orbiting it.
The point-in-the-center is, itself, probably not actually "still" with respect to the rest of the universe; it's probably orbiting some star or the center of some galaxy or something. But it's in free fall, so you can ignore all those other bodies (at least until it goes crashing into one of them).
So, in the end, bodies in free fall can pretend that they are the only thing in the universe: they don't feel any force. An observer on the moon can pretend the earth doesn't exist, as long as he doesn't look up. There's a force on him, but because it's a constant force everywhere (on both him and the moon) it's equivalent to no force at all.
So to sum up:
* There's no absolute space against which to measure velocity; you just pick a point and go with it. You usually pick yourself.
* So you can always pretend your velocity is zero.
* You can pick a point outside yourself if you see it and observe that relative to it you are actually moving, and even accelerating.
* But if you're in free fall, you can't feel that acceleration. It's as though it doesn't exist, and you can pretend it doesn't unless you're measuring some other body.
* But if you come into contact with something that causes you to move, you can measure that acceleration. That something can be a car door as the car turns, or exhaust from your rocket engine.
This is all more or less just Newtonian physics, with the added notion that you don't really need a fixed universe to measure against: you just pick any object in free fall. Which worked for Newton, because he picked the Sun as the object in free fall and figured it was pretty much constant with respect to the rest of the universe, and he was pretty much right for every observation he was ever going to make.
Proving him wrong is actually pretty tricky, and depends on the fixed limit on the speed (not the velocity) of light. Basically, everybody measures a photon of light to be the same speed, even if they're moving relative to that photon. The math all works out, but you have to "warp" space to do it, and observe that lengths and times change when they're moving relative to you. That correction factor is sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), which works out to 1 for any v much less than c, which it is for pretty much everything you're ever likely to encounter.
You can measure your acceleration with respect to yourself. You don't need to measure the velocity itself relative to anything. It doesn't matter if you're accelerating from 0 KPH to 10 KPH or 100 KPH to 10 KPH; the acceleration is the same. All you need to measure it in your windowless spaceship is a scale: your change in weight tells you how much you're accelerating.
Or you can throw a ball and watch it curve. (That curve is really the ball moving in a straight line with respect to an outside reference frame. We call the "force" that makes it move "centrifugal force", but there isn't really any such thing: it's moving straight and you're accelerating. Like when you take a turn in your car: you feel yourself pressing against the car door, but it's really your car door pressing agaisnt you.
Now, if your weight is zero (not your mass, your weight), then you're an inertial reference frame. Everything moves in a completely straight line.
If you're in orbit, then you _are_ falling, continuously. You just keep missing the planet. The math works this way:
Say you're just above the surface of the earth, at ISS height (about 13,000 km). In one second, you're going to fall about 10 meters. But if we move you some distance off to the west, the earth will get further away by 10 meters. That's "straight west", perpendicular to gravity. Do a bunch of math, and you'll find a particular speed which exactly counteracts that 10 meter fall. That speed is constant; it's only the direction that changes.
Effectively, you're always falling, and continuously missing the earth.
But relative to your spaceship (and your scale on the spaceship), you're not accelerating at all. If you don't look outside the window, you'll never know. Your velocity is zero, and doesn't change. You're accelerating with respect to the earth, but you're not accelerating with respect to yourself, which is the only acceleration which counts here.
(This applies only to a small spaceship, actually. If you look long distances away from your spaceship, gravity isn't constant, and you can see all sorts of fancy effects, like light not moving in a straight line. But let's not make this any more complicated than we have to.)
That's all kind of roundabout way of saying you don't need any universal reference frame to measure your acceleration against. If a satellite is orbiting, from it's own point of view it's standing still. Or moving at a constant velocity, which is indistinguishable from standing still. That's just a matter of picking your reference frame.
So there's nothing special about orbiting; it's just moving at a constant velocity. The earth's gravitational field makes "constant" a bit weird, in that the speed is constant but the direction is not. That's where it starts to get really hard, and you get these "frame dragging" effects I can't really claim to understand myself, so I just kind of let it go. Those non-Newtonian effects are generally so small you can't measure them, and it requires insanely fancy stuff to detect them at all, so I ignore them.
I'm not sure I'm making this much clearer, actually, but I hope I've given you a few ideas to chew on.
It's because of acceleration.
Special relativity says you can't distinguish between inertial reference frames, but a rocket is not an inertial reference frame. It's accelerating, and you can tell that without looking at the outside: you can feel your butt squishing against the seat. That's how you know that you're accelerating away from the earth, and not the other way around.
I figure badly. Arithmetic error. Sorry.
And in other news, computer science majors suck at basic arithmetic.
Thanks for the catch.
It's a small point, but the article calls it 92 Tbps, not 92 TBps. Which means its really 19 terabytes per second, which works out to some ungodly number of libraries of congress per fortnight. Either way, it's a lot.
Actually, soldiers who abuse prisoners can receive a lot more than a year in prison. The first guy got one year because he wasn't directly involved; he just took the pictures. Look for stiffer sentences in the future.
From the article:
In addition, it generates its own energy to power the plant, and uses the steam naturally created by the process to heat incoming feedstock, In addition, TCP produces no emissions and no secondary hazardous waste streams.
So we're getting 200 barrels of oil a day, for "free" (that is, no oil going in). That's critical, of course, since if it took 300 barrels of oil (or even 190) it wouldn't be worth it.
Fascinating. I hope it scales.
I think hydrogen may have potential in that application. It's a reasonably efficient way to move energy around. You have to use some kind of energy to produce the hydrogen, and it would be far better to do it with solar than with fossil fuels.
Or it might be a way to bridge the energy gap in ethanol (either for combustion or in fuel cells), where currently you have to burn an amount of fossil fuels to produce the ethanol, some say more than you get out.
At least, I hope one of these works out, or some other improvement in battery technology. At the moment I'm more worried about being in thrall to a rather unstable part of the world for oil than I am about the atmosphere's CO2 load, but it is also pretty scary.
The article is woefully skimpy on details, but it sounds like he's planning to sew a bunch of Peltier devices onto a sheet of nylon.
Perhaps, though the article doesn't make this at all clear, he thinks he's got some way to build a thermoelectric device out of a sheet of nylon. It would be a good and useful trick, especially when accomplished by a first-year physics student.
Either way, it sounds to me like you're going to have to combine this with a fan if you're going to get anything useful out of it. Thermoelectric devices move heat a few centimeters and concentrate it, but if you just let it dissipate it'll eventually warm up the other side of the device, sapping a lot of your power. You need to blow a fan past it so you can use the air as a heat exchanger.
To skip the rather unnecessary Flash intro, go here
One could move the bonding one step further: require each user to post a "bond" to you of $20 when they sign up.
That doesn't work, since I don't want to have to give Amazon $20 to send me confirmation emails. But a centralized user-validation service might be cost effective.
Mutually Assured Destruction, anybody?
I think that in spending $100M animating it, they've added some value to the IP. And that's the part they want to protect. You can still perform Hamlet; you just can't do Disney's Lion King version of it.
True, but I suspect that you consider pointing a video camera at your screen to be unacceptably low rez. They can't make duplication impossible, but they want to make it not worth the effort.
You might check eBay. I've seen them in the $100 to $150 range there, though I can't vouch for quality.