Here's a study that says that oil and gas will run out too fast and prevent any type of doomsday global warming. Actually, it's not the fact that oil will run out, it's the fact that oil and gas will peak and so we won't be able consume them at a fast enough rate.
That is of course if we don't replace the depleted oil with coal, which may be a possibility. But even still, it seems as if there are enough signs of global warming already and the oceans will be releasing so much CO2 that even if we stop using fossil fuels today there will still be net CO2 emissions.
There is a silicon shortage. Overcapacity in all other materials but a shortage in silicon, this means that they can't manufacture the PV cells. Prices have gone up by 15% lately and there is still no guarantee that those people paying high prices will get their solar panels. Germany and Japan are paying top $$$ but still can't get enough.
Any solar technology that doesn't use silicon is definitely a good thing these days. The Photovoltaic industry is the "poor cousin of the microchip industry", and so microchips get all the good silicon while PV gets the leftover crap that Intel et al. don't want. For this reason, and a general shortage of poly-silicon, there is a huge shortage of PV panels all over the world. Germany and Japan gobble up all they can and at a fair price too, leaving hardly anything for the rest of the world.
It's good to see the Stirling engine being used like this because in my opinion, the PV industry has some serious problems, especially if they have to compete with the Slashdot crowd for silicon!
Well, if you want your grandchildren to live in the stoneage, don't compromise. I don't think many people realize how hooked we are on oil. We need oil to make absolutely everything. Plastics, drugs, cars (not just the energy requirements, the hydrocarbon chains of oil are actually an ingredient), absolutely everything is made with oil. With the reserves that we know of today, oil will be gone in less than 70 years, but that doesn't matter, because way before then we won't be able to afford oil. Oil at $60/bbl isn't a coincidence, it's because we don't have enough of a supply.
Peak oil is actually acknowledged by the US Geological survey and the International Energy Agency officially, they think it will happen in 30 years, some people think it'll be well before then (like before 2010). Also, we can't replace it with nucelar reactors, because we've almost used up all of the uranium (Thorium is a possibility and maybe some experimental nuclear reactor will be more efficient). The only thing we can do (that is, if we want our grandchildren to have any type of life similar to ours) is stop consuming like we're consuming today. Exponential growth is impossible unless we populate another planet.
The best thing we can do to get off of our oil dependency is to all become vegetarians and stop driving. Growing meat requires 10 times the amount of hydrocarbons as it does to grow vegetables. The US uses 25% of the world's total daily oil production, 2/3rds of that oil is used to fuel the 200 million cars in the US so 16% of the world's oil is used to fill up cars just in the US. The only solution is stop driving the way we drive today. We have to make public transportation work otherwise we're not going to be able to afford to eat meat in about 30 years (when peak oil hits).
Bascally, the cost is $1-2 million, the engine is 86 kilowatt fuel cell with an ultracapacitor which is charged from regenerative brakes, the car can go about 190 miles before a fill up the fuel efficiency is about 57 miles per gallon of gasoline equivalent.
We'll see if this makes podcasting more mainstream. From what I've heard apple seems to be fairly committed to podcast support in iTunes, they've been consulting with some of the podcasting community so they obviously feel that podcasting is on the up-and-up.
They must envision an economic model for podcasting one day, similar to their iTunes store I'm guessing, it'll be interesting to see how this develops.
This is what patents are for! Everybody in their right mind knows that they should be doing a patent search before coming up with a technology like this. The patent was filed on July 17 2002, it's DVForge's own fault.
I highly recommend JabRef. I've been using it for a while now and it just works. Basically if you don't know. JabRef will format everything as a bibtex file so that you can use it easily with Latex. You can also export your bibliography database as an endnote database if you want and a couple of others.
For actually writing your thesis, I just use a text editor for Latex code...I find that it makes much more sense to do this than to use Kile. My fav. is Nedit, it highlights the syntax and everything...you can also make simple macros. Also, I would recommend xfig if you every want to make any type of drawings/cartoons for your thesis. It works just as well as the MS Word drawing does and you can save it as an eps file reday to go into your Latex document.
From what I hear, latex is by far the best way to build a thesis (I'll be doing this in the next few years)...espeicailly if you have lots of equations...I can't go back to word anymore. There is a lreaning curve but it's well well worth it.
A few weeks ago there was a British team that wanted to break the electric car speed record (by driving 252 mph over a distance of at least 1 kilometer). They said that a geared car can achieve 100 mph in a few seconds but their rate of acceleration falls away much more quickly compared to the acceleration of this electric car that can accelerate past the 300 mph mark. Also, electric vehicles have, theoretically at least, infinite torque (at 0 velocity).
Re:Is biodiesel the answer?
on
Filling Up On Algae
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· Score: 4, Informative
With biofuels though, the idea is that to make biodiesel, you grow a crop. When the crop grows, it will suck up the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere as was released when burning it as biodiesel or ethanol fuel. so the carbon cycle should be neutral.
But, in saying this, growing crops for fuel is just not sustainable, for one thing it requires a lot of land, for another it sucks up all of the soil nutrients and so you can't continue to grow crops in the same location indefinitely.
But there are a couple of things that are being done about this problem. For instance, the biotech industry doesn't want to use corn/wheat directly, they focusing on using the waste streams of agricultural products (such as corn stover) to extract sugars using advanced enzyme systems. We can also make ethanol from by products of making paper using the same techniques.
It will be economically viable, one day
on
Filling Up On Algae
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· Score: 3, Insightful
So, like the same old story goes for all alternative fuels and energy, we'll just have to wait for peak oil to make it economically viable.
Ok, fine, it's in the first line of the Economist story. Predicted by: Advertising Age. And they do have 4% of global advertising, but you obviously saw the picture but didn't read the story (or even my comment) since I wrote that Google and Yahoo ad revenues will rival prime-time ad revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC. The point is online advertising is doing better
The Economist on the other hand....that's an $89 subscription (for just the online content) that's well worth it. Actually, if you're a student like me you get it half price.
All these subscriptions at the same time as online advertising is on the rise...or at least so the Economist says it is. Advertising revenues by Google and Yahoo are predicted to rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America's three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC. And the NY Times uses google ads, so if google ads are making cash, then the NY Times is also probably making cash from those google ads...I guess just not enough. Nothing's ever enough though.
To listen to podcasts, all you really need is an mp3 player because they are mp3 files. For windows winamp is standard, for Linux xmms is pretty similar. There is a way of subscribing to a podcast, where you can have a program run in the background, checking for new podcasts that you have subscribed to via an rss feed and if it finds a news one, it automatically downloads it for you. If you want to "subscribe" in this way, iPodder is the standard cross platform program to use.
They have to screen each mp3 file that they play to make sure they don't get their asses sued by playing illegal content...that'll take a lot of hours, I can imagine that every podcaster and their dogs will be submitting something to these guys.
Openpodcast.org does exactly this, they've been doing this now for a long time. And, there may even be plans to do the same thing over satellite radio (although you'd have to listen to about a 2hr podcast from Adam Curry to learn more)
shameless plug for my podcast: theWatt Weekly - energy news and discussion in mp3 format
I don't know much about how that flying car works but if you consider the engine, it's limited by the carnot efficiency (sure carnot can get pretty big theoretical efficiencies at say, 900C) but I'd have to think that a car running off of a battery would be more efficient since the engine is MUCH smaller (I mean, that flying vehicle would need an engine much larger than any SUV on the road today) and batteries are not limited by carnot and could probably get maybe 40-50% efficiency.
If the flying car was a glyder, then maybe it would be comparable but it probably wouldn't go 300mph. Actually, if the flying car had a micro-turbine then perhaps, but still, it would use a lot of fuel.
Damn...and I thought people were finally getting the idea that we have to conserve energy. Imagine how much oil/jet fuel that flying car would go through? It has four sets of rotary engines! I'd much rather see people driving an electric vehicle like this Reva NXG that can go 200km after a 6 hour charge.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a study that says that oil and gas will run out too fast and prevent any type of doomsday global warming. Actually, it's not the fact that oil will run out, it's the fact that oil and gas will peak and so we won't be able consume them at a fast enough rate.
That is of course if we don't replace the depleted oil with coal, which may be a possibility. But even still, it seems as if there are enough signs of global warming already and the oceans will be releasing so much CO2 that even if we stop using fossil fuels today there will still be net CO2 emissions.
There is a silicon shortage. Overcapacity in all other materials but a shortage in silicon, this means that they can't manufacture the PV cells. Prices have gone up by 15% lately and there is still no guarantee that those people paying high prices will get their solar panels. Germany and Japan are paying top $$$ but still can't get enough.
Woops, I actually meant to say something in the title like: "The fact that the stirling engine doesn't use silicon is a good thing"
Any solar technology that doesn't use silicon is definitely a good thing these days. The Photovoltaic industry is the "poor cousin of the microchip industry", and so microchips get all the good silicon while PV gets the leftover crap that Intel et al. don't want. For this reason, and a general shortage of poly-silicon, there is a huge shortage of PV panels all over the world. Germany and Japan gobble up all they can and at a fair price too, leaving hardly anything for the rest of the world.
It's good to see the Stirling engine being used like this because in my opinion, the PV industry has some serious problems, especially if they have to compete with the Slashdot crowd for silicon!
Peak oil is actually acknowledged by the US Geological survey and the International Energy Agency officially, they think it will happen in 30 years, some people think it'll be well before then (like before 2010). Also, we can't replace it with nucelar reactors, because we've almost used up all of the uranium (Thorium is a possibility and maybe some experimental nuclear reactor will be more efficient). The only thing we can do (that is, if we want our grandchildren to have any type of life similar to ours) is stop consuming like we're consuming today. Exponential growth is impossible unless we populate another planet.
The best thing we can do to get off of our oil dependency is to all become vegetarians and stop driving. Growing meat requires 10 times the amount of hydrocarbons as it does to grow vegetables. The US uses 25% of the world's total daily oil production, 2/3rds of that oil is used to fuel the 200 million cars in the US so 16% of the world's oil is used to fill up cars just in the US. The only solution is stop driving the way we drive today. We have to make public transportation work otherwise we're not going to be able to afford to eat meat in about 30 years (when peak oil hits).
Bascally, the cost is $1-2 million, the engine is 86 kilowatt fuel cell with an ultracapacitor which is charged from regenerative brakes, the car can go about 190 miles before a fill up the fuel efficiency is about 57 miles per gallon of gasoline equivalent.
For once I don't regret using slashcode then! I'm sure there must be other reasons...
They must envision an economic model for podcasting one day, similar to their iTunes store I'm guessing, it'll be interesting to see how this develops.
This is what patents are for! Everybody in their right mind knows that they should be doing a patent search before coming up with a technology like this. The patent was filed on July 17 2002, it's DVForge's own fault.
For actually writing your thesis, I just use a text editor for Latex code...I find that it makes much more sense to do this than to use Kile. My fav. is Nedit, it highlights the syntax and everything...you can also make simple macros. Also, I would recommend xfig if you every want to make any type of drawings/cartoons for your thesis. It works just as well as the MS Word drawing does and you can save it as an eps file reday to go into your Latex document.
From what I hear, latex is by far the best way to build a thesis (I'll be doing this in the next few years)...espeicailly if you have lots of equations...I can't go back to word anymore. There is a lreaning curve but it's well well worth it.
Yes, yes I am retarded. I should have said angular velocity.
torque = Power / (angular velocity)
A few weeks ago there was a British team that wanted to break the electric car speed record (by driving 252 mph over a distance of at least 1 kilometer). They said that a geared car can achieve 100 mph in a few seconds but their rate of acceleration falls away much more quickly compared to the acceleration of this electric car that can accelerate past the 300 mph mark. Also, electric vehicles have, theoretically at least, infinite torque (at 0 velocity).
But, in saying this, growing crops for fuel is just not sustainable, for one thing it requires a lot of land, for another it sucks up all of the soil nutrients and so you can't continue to grow crops in the same location indefinitely.
But there are a couple of things that are being done about this problem. For instance, the biotech industry doesn't want to use corn/wheat directly, they focusing on using the waste streams of agricultural products (such as corn stover) to extract sugars using advanced enzyme systems. We can also make ethanol from by products of making paper using the same techniques.
So, like the same old story goes for all alternative fuels and energy, we'll just have to wait for peak oil to make it economically viable.
Ok, fine, it's in the first line of the Economist story. Predicted by: Advertising Age. And they do have 4% of global advertising, but you obviously saw the picture but didn't read the story (or even my comment) since I wrote that Google and Yahoo ad revenues will rival prime-time ad revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC. The point is online advertising is doing better
The Economist on the other hand....that's an $89 subscription (for just the online content) that's well worth it. Actually, if you're a student like me you get it half price.
All these subscriptions at the same time as online advertising is on the rise...or at least so the Economist says it is. Advertising revenues by Google and Yahoo are predicted to rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America's three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC. And the NY Times uses google ads, so if google ads are making cash, then the NY Times is also probably making cash from those google ads...I guess just not enough. Nothing's ever enough though.
To listen to podcasts, all you really need is an mp3 player because they are mp3 files. For windows winamp is standard, for Linux xmms is pretty similar. There is a way of subscribing to a podcast, where you can have a program run in the background, checking for new podcasts that you have subscribed to via an rss feed and if it finds a news one, it automatically downloads it for you. If you want to "subscribe" in this way, iPodder is the standard cross platform program to use.
They have to screen each mp3 file that they play to make sure they don't get their asses sued by playing illegal content...that'll take a lot of hours, I can imagine that every podcaster and their dogs will be submitting something to these guys.
shameless plug for my podcast: theWatt Weekly - energy news and discussion in mp3 format
This 28mpg is for cruising (like highway driving). The take off would be much less than that.
If the flying car was a glyder, then maybe it would be comparable but it probably wouldn't go 300mph. Actually, if the flying car had a micro-turbine then perhaps, but still, it would use a lot of fuel.
Sure they're $50,000 but you'd be spending at least as much on the fuel even though oil has gone down in price a bit lately.
Damn...and I thought people were finally getting the idea that we have to conserve energy. Imagine how much oil/jet fuel that flying car would go through? It has four sets of rotary engines! I'd much rather see people driving an electric vehicle like this Reva NXG that can go 200km after a 6 hour charge.