The whole point of evanescent waves is that they are standing perfectly still. They're present, but they don't oscillate, they don't move, they don't grow and shrink, so they don't transmit anything : there's no energy available for that.
So how would you get a system without energy to transmit ?
That's not the same. Both hemispheres are still linked up to the same body in your split-brain case. If you were to sever all connections (not just the interlink, but the central nervous system connection to that hemisphere too), that person would not be able to walk at all, even though his nerves (well, most of them) are really linked up to both hemispheres, so there is still a path to each muscle, and so he might be able to -very long term- make a recovery. But even minimal re-routing in the brain involves massive function losses.
So once you link 2 brains directly (with a signal delay that is not much greater than, say 1/10th of a second), splitting them will be like a callosotomy, only a lot worse.
There are lots of experiments that merely involve effects of unidirectional links (ie : only input to the brain from the exterior). Once you get used to that input, losing it *will* impair function. Even if it's just a rhythmic pulse that conveys no useful information whatsoever (try this for fun : go into an office building and find a nice office with no windows, lit by CFL light (which has a strong 50hz pulse in it). Stay inside the room for 8 hours, then try some stairs in sunlight. Warning : you will stumble, or fall, so please pick a stair in a somewhat intelligent fashion. Some people fall down merely when they see the sun (because sunlight easily drowns out the 50Hz pulse of the building lighting, making it undetectable for your brain, and your brain has learned to transform the 50Hz pulse into neural commands to make your body walk. So once you walk like this, removing the 50Hz pulse causes you to fall down)).
If one links up a resource to a brain that allows you to use 100 billion additional neurons, odds are severing that connection will create a huge loss of function, maybe huge enough to kill you (callosotomies can also lead to death, and they're tiny little ants compared to the elephant herd being proposed here).
Don't worry, if one links your mind to another, we're only hours away from there no longer being anything that could be called "I". Link 2 neural networks together, even with but a few nerves, and they become one single network, single mind. Re-separation will cripple both parts. Literally. Once there is no longer any for the 2 individual networks to remember how to walk, they won't do it anymore. Detach the networks and one body is in for a fast and thorough encounter with the ground.
To be fair, it was probably the pppoe terminator that throttled your connection. It's the only device in the network that has the correct position to be able to throttle efficiently on a per-customer basis, for both the upstream and the downstream direction, as well as the information required to do this "dynamic" throttling you talk about.
The issue technical support has which leads to bufferbloat is equally simple "but your add said 10 Mbit download speed and I'm getting 9.8 according to speedtest.net". The amount of customers that scream bloody murder and "demand their rights" is ridiculous.
You should check one of the discussions on the so-called "net neutrality" to see how flexible slashdotters are on the subject of isp's delivering slightly less bandwidth than advertised (which will always be the case without huge buffers) to see the problem. Or, God forbid, an isp that demands netflix pays for a customer line instead of a peering line when it is in fact a customer, and not a peer. This results in a *slightly* longer path to netflix, and thus apparently quite a few heathens had to be rounded up and thoroughly burned, despite the fact that this obviously did not involve giving preferential treatment to anyone. Quite the reverse, in fact.
One problem is CFL's production costs far exceed what normal light bulbs cost to make (easily a factor 10). In return you get somewhere near 40% savings on the power required for lighting (40%, as lots of things aren't fixed merely by changing the light bulb).
So they only become good for the environment after a number of hours of light, and that's over a year for better models, up to 3 years for sucky bulbs. Obviously the large majority fall at least halfway on the "sucky" scale.
In reality therefore, CFL's are only good for the environment in the places where the assumption that they burn a lot more than a year holds true. They won't survive much longer than 5 years in any case (burning or not), so any CFL burning less than 20% of the time (which is most every lamp in the house except those in the living room in my house) are a net-negative for the environment.
But it's a massive subsidy for firms who claim to be green, but obviously aren't. So politicians are happy : money for cronies. Lunatic lefties are happy : another government supported industry, heavily regulated. Loony greens are happy : "green" companies "do well". Socialists are happy : "jobs are created". And everyone suffers yet again to make lunatics feel good.
Of course, real jobs are lost. The environment has to bear the increased fossil fuel usage, the athmosphere has to swallow even more CO2 (but don't worry : it's mostly emitted in China, and thus Obama can look good while destroying the environment even more), and by forcing these companies out of America, gaia can find fewer polluted creeks : they can't report on those in China or Indonesia at all.
The result is of course, very predictable. The environment does bad so "more intervention is clearly needed". CO2 increases so "it's yet again even more worse than we thought !". Jobs are lost so "more regulation/stimulus is needed". And government cronies, "surprisingly" do well so "it's all really the fault of the rich Jewish bankers in wall street !".
Lunacy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results - Albert Einstein
In reality things are simple : energy costs money. Transport cost money. Mining costs (lots and lots) of money. People cost money. All these things are bad for the environment. So you want to do what's best for the environment ? Really ? It's simple : save every last penny you have and DON'T BUY STUFF YOU DON'T NEED. Of course, greenies have become exactly what they accuse their "enemies" to be : they're little more than deluded spoiled rich kids, who feel an irresistible need to take other's toys to feel big, and throw a tantrum if they're asked to go a single day with an last year's model of the iphone. (because apple really is the worst brand you can buy for the environment, or labor laws,...).
As long as people prefer deluding themselves to facing the truth, things won't change, and obviously lunatics are attracted by fringe parties that want to change everything to their design. Nothing new there. Forcing others is all leftist greens have left. Green policy intents have been reduced over the years to amassing power, and destroying the environment in order to justify putting more power in their hands. Furthermore : lunatics only find fault in others, and not in their own behavior. That's why they needed 3 full airports, with expanded parking space, to put all the private jets at the latest "anti-co2" conference.
If we were to put a huge import tax on lightbulbs (and smartphones, perhaps ?), they would have to be produced cheaply inside America, under our stringent environmental laws. Now *that*
He's right, in a way. The mistake is in which subject we're talking about : LOFAR isn't trying to approach the diffraction limit at all. It's simply looking at the same signal from multiple vantage points, producing a picture from that.
In general, diffraction limit is a problem when trying to observe things that are comparable in size to a light wavelength of light, or smaller. Galaxies, stars and planets (for any reasonable frequency) are obviously much bigger than a wavelength. If you're trying to take pictures from parts of individual molecules or atoms, then you'll run into the diffraction limit.
The problem is you should multiply all those factors.
First you have theoretical cell efficiency. Let's call it 30% (broken cells, minus production costs, maintenance equipment, infrastructure and personnel : we'll never get anywhere near 30% even with 50% efficiency solar panels, murphy won't let that happen without a fight). Then you have internal transmission within the power plant and storage (for the night), that's a difficult problem, let's say 10% efficient all in all. Then you have transmission to outside the powerplant. Let's say that is reasonably efficient, but it does involve somewhat less efficient voltage conversion, so let's say 80% - 90% - 80% efficiency before we get to a tanking station. Charging the battery : at the very best 40% efficient (I doubt it, but let's say we can get it that efficient by 2015 or so). Voltage changes within the car have to occur as well, and you have to feed internal circuitry, let's say 80% efficieny for power getting into the motor. Then power fed into the engine versus actual movement. While electric motors are very efficient indeed, mechanical transmission is not, let's call it 70% efficiency.
So this would give you 30% * 10% * 80% * 90% * 80% * 40% * 80% * 70% = 0.387072% total efficiency. Incoming solar power -> movement on the road
(power delivered into houses, due to the involvement of several more conversion steps should not be that far from this number either, certainly it'd be lower for remote regions, both due to transmission distance *and* lower-quality equipment. Btw : before you propose not providing power to the rocky mountains : that's not allowed by federal law : everyone gets to have power from the grid)
(incidentally this is why electrical engineers are always working so hard to get "conversion steps" out of the way)
And yes, rebuilding the entire infrastructure from scratch always allows for nice savings (though nowhere near what you're claiming to be possible). Believe it or not, but I think this was probably true 2000 years ago as much as today. That doesn't mean it's a viable option.
So your 251*251 kilometer square has just been upscaled to a 251 * sqrt(100/0.4) side square, that's 4000 km * 4000 km (assuming pure electric cars, hydrogen cars would require more). And this would only work if everyone lived... I don't know... below the covered surface perhaps ? Certainly they couldn't live very far from the edge before transmission losses would be bigger.
So you hate facebook's policy, a sentiment I can't but support. Great. Continue. At this point I'd rather share my pictures with someone who demands you sign the EULA with blood than with facebook. Yep, even microsoft.
But why work out your anger on the military doing a bit of spying and/or astroturfing ? It's their job. If I were tasked with protecting citizens I would pick up as much data as possible too, I'd want a few hundred instruments like this, including real live people doing the spying and astroturfing.
Propaganda is used to extract compliance and MONEY
So is facebook. Why are you so forgiving when your own girlfriend pictures being used to extract money and compliance from you and your friends ? If you don't do that, there's no problem at all.
But MeeGo is intel's 100th attempt to get some embedded OS (or distro) like this off the ground. Everyone always abandons the platform, before it gets very far. Always. Always the same reason : intel's chips just aren't cost-competitive for small electronics, and intel (understandably) refuses to develop for anything else.
But for example OMAP3530 can play quite complex games, maybe even better ones than intel's power-efficient atoms with the built-in chipset and are a third of the cost per chip, and at least equally efficient.
The sad fact is that this is despite the obvious intel advantages : their fab facilities are second to none, not in quantity, nor in quality. Logic would seem to indicate that therefore their chips should be the cheapest, but they never seem to be.
The only reason anyone buys intel chips (other than their really cool SSD disks) seems to be that windows refuses to run on anything else, and therefore one only finds intel chips in (cost-efficient) server hardware.
You might want to look into what sort of voltage solar cells are capable of generating (even when connected in series). At those voltages, AC wins the efficiency race by a few oceanlengths.
So you're right : we'll need a conversion chain : DC (solar power) -> AC (to the interconnection point) -> DC AC (for voltage upscaling) -> DC (HVDC transmission) -> DC-AC (voltage downscaling and distribution) -> AC (to the local distributions) -> AC (to your home meter) -> AC (to the actual sockets)
You're making the assumption that people like greenpeace won't find anything wrong with HVDC. Let's face it : these people think that 1W radiation at 20cm distance can cook your brain.
Exactly, it is. But who doesn't have a fake facebook account ?
I have 2, for personal use (so that facebook leaves me alone with game "announcements" in my serious mailboxes). Am I alone ? And I'm not even in Sales.
In my company's sales team most everybody has at least a "commercial" and a private account. That means our company "has" euhm... a dozen facebook accounts perhaps, something like that. You could call it "astroturfing" probably, because it kinda is. Everybody does it.
Free energy ? Is that what liberals think renewables are ? Oh dear God.
Renewable energy is only free in exactly the same way food is free : given land, very long-term investments, huge risk, and a *LOT* of patience you can make it "for free".
Now tell me : where can I get me food for free ?
And now let's compare : the price of oil, per unit of energy, currently stands at 5.8e6 BTU for $100 (let's round it seriously upward) : let's say $20 per million BTU your "free" energy, should be within a factor of 10 of current agricultural energy prices : 150 BTU per pound, 3300 pounds per acre (you need oil-based fertilizer for these yields, but let's ignore that), 14 cents per pound =150*3300 BTU for 3300*0.14$ = 5e5 for $462 = about $1000 per million BTU (this is for corn, one of the more efficient plant species)
Let's suppose we can make renewables 10 times more efficient than they are now. That would be an accomplishment that far surpasses putting a man on the moon btw.
That would make the price per kilometer travelled for your car... 5 times what it was during the oil crisis...
"free"... I think you're going to find "expensive" to be cheaper... and that's ignoring the fact that there is going to be a (long) period with fundamentally less energy. Who gets to die ?
Talking about "first steps", could someone explain something to me. It's simple, and it's a stupid question, but I'd still like it answered :
Today's energy cycle : Sun -> plants -> animals -> bacteria -> (adding geothermal energy) -> digging them up & using them
Tomorrow's energy cycle: Sun -> using it Sun -> athmospheric pressure differences -> using it
Anyone else notice what's missing from tomorrow's cycle ?
How is this good for plants and/or animals (or bacteria for that matter) ? When the usage of renewable energy grows we will have to take more and more energy away (directly) from the rest of the biosphere.
Now anyone who's learned the least little bit of thermodynamics or eveolution can tell you this : the biosphere can function perfectly well when it's warm. Not when it's cold (before idiots reply : deserts are caused by COLD, not heat). The biosphere can function perfectly well with pollution. It can function perfectly well with more water. With less water... in general : the biosphere can function with what we're doing now.
It CANNOT function without energy.
And yes, we don't see these effects right now because there's only a truly tiny installed base of renewable energy (just like global warming was a totally negligible effect the first 100 years of oil use). When we install anywhere near the capacity needed to get 10% of worldwide energy from renewables, we will have no choice : we will have to make a region the size of a small continent entirely lifeless. For 100% we will absolutely need to "steal" so much energy half the atlantic ocean would no longer contain so much as a s single fish.
My impression from all this is that HBGary were incompetent and as a Government contractor, they should be investigated for fraud.
Absolutely. Now how does that excuse attacks, stalking, or even "mere" vandalism ?
Why is this ridiculous sort of mob justice tolerated ? We've all been in the playground, we've all seen mob justice in action, and we all know what WILL happen. So why do these people get any support whatsoever ?
Are we truly such hypocrites ? Insist on rights, when it's about us... And then demand and defend swift illegal and criminal action against anyone we don't like ? Is that what is meant by "internet protest" ? Because if it is, frankly, it must be squashed with any amount of violence necessary.
Djeez... "psychopathic minority nut"... do you come up with these terms in front of the mirror ?
I am interested in just who this evil minority is... the Jews perhaps ? Or maybe the "rich arms-dealers" ? Because it sure sounds like you get this stuff from the German translation of "my struggle" by AH.
Have you *looked* at those graphs ? Sure they've diverged a tiny little bit in the last 30 years, but please. Compare them to even a little bit before 1970.
And then compare them to the 19th century. Or to countries where policy "makes all people equal", like North Korea.
Or why don't we look at where income inequality is greatest... where govt. interferes... or where it doesn't... Judge for yourself
Slashdot Mirror
So every (even slowly) oscillating magnetic field can be made to generate light simply by putting a piece of glass near it ?
Doesn't that violate conservation of energy ?
The whole point of evanescent waves is that they are standing perfectly still. They're present, but they don't oscillate, they don't move, they don't grow and shrink, so they don't transmit anything : there's no energy available for that.
So how would you get a system without energy to transmit ?
That's not the same. Both hemispheres are still linked up to the same body in your split-brain case. If you were to sever all connections (not just the interlink, but the central nervous system connection to that hemisphere too), that person would not be able to walk at all, even though his nerves (well, most of them) are really linked up to both hemispheres, so there is still a path to each muscle, and so he might be able to -very long term- make a recovery. But even minimal re-routing in the brain involves massive function losses.
So once you link 2 brains directly (with a signal delay that is not much greater than, say 1/10th of a second), splitting them will be like a callosotomy, only a lot worse.
There are lots of experiments that merely involve effects of unidirectional links (ie : only input to the brain from the exterior). Once you get used to that input, losing it *will* impair function. Even if it's just a rhythmic pulse that conveys no useful information whatsoever (try this for fun : go into an office building and find a nice office with no windows, lit by CFL light (which has a strong 50hz pulse in it). Stay inside the room for 8 hours, then try some stairs in sunlight. Warning : you will stumble, or fall, so please pick a stair in a somewhat intelligent fashion. Some people fall down merely when they see the sun (because sunlight easily drowns out the 50Hz pulse of the building lighting, making it undetectable for your brain, and your brain has learned to transform the 50Hz pulse into neural commands to make your body walk. So once you walk like this, removing the 50Hz pulse causes you to fall down)).
If one links up a resource to a brain that allows you to use 100 billion additional neurons, odds are severing that connection will create a huge loss of function, maybe huge enough to kill you (callosotomies can also lead to death, and they're tiny little ants compared to the elephant herd being proposed here).
Don't worry, if one links your mind to another, we're only hours away from there no longer being anything that could be called "I". Link 2 neural networks together, even with but a few nerves, and they become one single network, single mind. Re-separation will cripple both parts. Literally. Once there is no longer any for the 2 individual networks to remember how to walk, they won't do it anymore. Detach the networks and one body is in for a fast and thorough encounter with the ground.
To be fair, it was probably the pppoe terminator that throttled your connection. It's the only device in the network that has the correct position to be able to throttle efficiently on a per-customer basis, for both the upstream and the downstream direction, as well as the information required to do this "dynamic" throttling you talk about.
The issue technical support has which leads to bufferbloat is equally simple "but your add said 10 Mbit download speed and I'm getting 9.8 according to speedtest.net". The amount of customers that scream bloody murder and "demand their rights" is ridiculous.
You should check one of the discussions on the so-called "net neutrality" to see how flexible slashdotters are on the subject of isp's delivering slightly less bandwidth than advertised (which will always be the case without huge buffers) to see the problem. Or, God forbid, an isp that demands netflix pays for a customer line instead of a peering line when it is in fact a customer, and not a peer. This results in a *slightly* longer path to netflix, and thus apparently quite a few heathens had to be rounded up and thoroughly burned, despite the fact that this obviously did not involve giving preferential treatment to anyone. Quite the reverse, in fact.
I don't see this getting fixed any time soon.
One problem is CFL's production costs far exceed what normal light bulbs cost to make (easily a factor 10). In return you get somewhere near 40% savings on the power required for lighting (40%, as lots of things aren't fixed merely by changing the light bulb).
So they only become good for the environment after a number of hours of light, and that's over a year for better models, up to 3 years for sucky bulbs. Obviously the large majority fall at least halfway on the "sucky" scale.
In reality therefore, CFL's are only good for the environment in the places where the assumption that they burn a lot more than a year holds true. They won't survive much longer than 5 years in any case (burning or not), so any CFL burning less than 20% of the time (which is most every lamp in the house except those in the living room in my house) are a net-negative for the environment.
But it's a massive subsidy for firms who claim to be green, but obviously aren't. So politicians are happy : money for cronies. Lunatic lefties are happy : another government supported industry, heavily regulated. Loony greens are happy : "green" companies "do well". Socialists are happy : "jobs are created". And everyone suffers yet again to make lunatics feel good.
Of course, real jobs are lost. The environment has to bear the increased fossil fuel usage, the athmosphere has to swallow even more CO2 (but don't worry : it's mostly emitted in China, and thus Obama can look good while destroying the environment even more), and by forcing these companies out of America, gaia can find fewer polluted creeks : they can't report on those in China or Indonesia at all.
The result is of course, very predictable. The environment does bad so "more intervention is clearly needed". CO2 increases so "it's yet again even more worse than we thought !". Jobs are lost so "more regulation/stimulus is needed". And government cronies, "surprisingly" do well so "it's all really the fault of the rich Jewish bankers in wall street !".
Lunacy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results - Albert Einstein
In reality things are simple : energy costs money. Transport cost money. Mining costs (lots and lots) of money. People cost money. All these things are bad for the environment. So you want to do what's best for the environment ? Really ? It's simple : save every last penny you have and DON'T BUY STUFF YOU DON'T NEED. Of course, greenies have become exactly what they accuse their "enemies" to be : they're little more than deluded spoiled rich kids, who feel an irresistible need to take other's toys to feel big, and throw a tantrum if they're asked to go a single day with an last year's model of the iphone. (because apple really is the worst brand you can buy for the environment, or labor laws, ...).
As long as people prefer deluding themselves to facing the truth, things won't change, and obviously lunatics are attracted by fringe parties that want to change everything to their design. Nothing new there. Forcing others is all leftist greens have left. Green policy intents have been reduced over the years to amassing power, and destroying the environment in order to justify putting more power in their hands. Furthermore : lunatics only find fault in others, and not in their own behavior. That's why they needed 3 full airports, with expanded parking space, to put all the private jets at the latest "anti-co2" conference.
If we were to put a huge import tax on lightbulbs (and smartphones, perhaps ?), they would have to be produced cheaply inside America, under our stringent environmental laws. Now *that*
The "global communicator" used in earth final conflict. Huge screen, the size of a big pen. Or small screen : roll it out halfway ...
He's right, in a way. The mistake is in which subject we're talking about : LOFAR isn't trying to approach the diffraction limit at all. It's simply looking at the same signal from multiple vantage points, producing a picture from that.
In general, diffraction limit is a problem when trying to observe things that are comparable in size to a light wavelength of light, or smaller. Galaxies, stars and planets (for any reasonable frequency) are obviously much bigger than a wavelength. If you're trying to take pictures from parts of individual molecules or atoms, then you'll run into the diffraction limit.
The problem is you should multiply all those factors.
First you have theoretical cell efficiency. Let's call it 30% (broken cells, minus production costs, maintenance equipment, infrastructure and personnel : we'll never get anywhere near 30% even with 50% efficiency solar panels, murphy won't let that happen without a fight). Then you have internal transmission within the power plant and storage (for the night), that's a difficult problem, let's say 10% efficient all in all. Then you have transmission to outside the powerplant. Let's say that is reasonably efficient, but it does involve somewhat less efficient voltage conversion, so let's say 80% - 90% - 80% efficiency before we get to a tanking station. Charging the battery : at the very best 40% efficient (I doubt it, but let's say we can get it that efficient by 2015 or so). Voltage changes within the car have to occur as well, and you have to feed internal circuitry, let's say 80% efficieny for power getting into the motor. Then power fed into the engine versus actual movement. While electric motors are very efficient indeed, mechanical transmission is not, let's call it 70% efficiency.
So this would give you 30% * 10% * 80% * 90% * 80% * 40% * 80% * 70% = 0.387072% total efficiency. Incoming solar power -> movement on the road
(power delivered into houses, due to the involvement of several more conversion steps should not be that far from this number either, certainly it'd be lower for remote regions, both due to transmission distance *and* lower-quality equipment. Btw : before you propose not providing power to the rocky mountains : that's not allowed by federal law : everyone gets to have power from the grid)
(incidentally this is why electrical engineers are always working so hard to get "conversion steps" out of the way)
And yes, rebuilding the entire infrastructure from scratch always allows for nice savings (though nowhere near what you're claiming to be possible). Believe it or not, but I think this was probably true 2000 years ago as much as today. That doesn't mean it's a viable option.
So your 251*251 kilometer square has just been upscaled to a 251 * sqrt(100/0.4) side square, that's 4000 km * 4000 km (assuming pure electric cars, hydrogen cars would require more). And this would only work if everyone lived ... I don't know ... below the covered surface perhaps ? Certainly they couldn't live very far from the edge before transmission losses would be bigger.
The presidential thank-you notes are probably for the cool toys alone.
Some very cool toys.
So you hate facebook's policy, a sentiment I can't but support. Great. Continue. At this point I'd rather share my pictures with someone who demands you sign the EULA with blood than with facebook. Yep, even microsoft.
But why work out your anger on the military doing a bit of spying and/or astroturfing ? It's their job. If I were tasked with protecting citizens I would pick up as much data as possible too, I'd want a few hundred instruments like this, including real live people doing the spying and astroturfing.
Propaganda is used to extract compliance and MONEY
So is facebook. Why are you so forgiving when your own girlfriend pictures being used to extract money and compliance from you and your friends ? If you don't do that, there's no problem at all.
But MeeGo is intel's 100th attempt to get some embedded OS (or distro) like this off the ground. Everyone always abandons the platform, before it gets very far. Always. Always the same reason : intel's chips just aren't cost-competitive for small electronics, and intel (understandably) refuses to develop for anything else.
But for example OMAP3530 can play quite complex games, maybe even better ones than intel's power-efficient atoms with the built-in chipset and are a third of the cost per chip, and at least equally efficient.
The sad fact is that this is despite the obvious intel advantages : their fab facilities are second to none, not in quantity, nor in quality. Logic would seem to indicate that therefore their chips should be the cheapest, but they never seem to be.
The only reason anyone buys intel chips (other than their really cool SSD disks) seems to be that windows refuses to run on anything else, and therefore one only finds intel chips in (cost-efficient) server hardware.
Anyone else notice that the youtube demo video has been taken down for "violation of youtube's policy on nudity of sexual content" ?
Or is it just me ? Mirror, anyone ?
*sigh* that's the ratio between incoming solar power to what theoretically hits the first power plane inside the solar cell.
We won't be anywhere near 5% efficiency when arriving at the power socket in your home. It'll take a miracle to get near 0.1%.
You might want to look into what sort of voltage solar cells are capable of generating (even when connected in series). At those voltages, AC wins the efficiency race by a few oceanlengths.
So you're right : we'll need a conversion chain : DC (solar power) -> AC (to the interconnection point) -> DC AC (for voltage upscaling) -> DC (HVDC transmission) -> DC-AC (voltage downscaling and distribution) -> AC (to the local distributions) -> AC (to your home meter) -> AC (to the actual sockets)
With each of those at some 80-90% efficiency.
You're making the assumption that people like greenpeace won't find anything wrong with HVDC. Let's face it : these people think that 1W radiation at 20cm distance can cook your brain.
Greenpeace has already decided they'll hate fusion when it comes out.
Let's not kid ourselves here : HVDC will be hated by the green nutcases, the only question is what stupid excuse they'll have for hating it.
On facebook ?
Exactly, it is. But who doesn't have a fake facebook account ?
I have 2, for personal use (so that facebook leaves me alone with game "announcements" in my serious mailboxes). Am I alone ? And I'm not even in Sales.
In my company's sales team most everybody has at least a "commercial" and a private account. That means our company "has" euhm ... a dozen facebook accounts perhaps, something like that. You could call it "astroturfing" probably, because it kinda is. Everybody does it.
Another storm in a glass of water. Jeuj.
Free energy ? Is that what liberals think renewables are ? Oh dear God.
Renewable energy is only free in exactly the same way food is free : given land, very long-term investments, huge risk, and a *LOT* of patience you can make it "for free".
Now tell me : where can I get me food for free ?
And now let's compare : the price of oil, per unit of energy, currently stands at 5.8e6 BTU for $100 (let's round it seriously upward) : let's say $20 per million BTU
your "free" energy, should be within a factor of 10 of current agricultural energy prices : 150 BTU per pound, 3300 pounds per acre (you need oil-based fertilizer for these yields, but let's ignore that), 14 cents per pound =150*3300 BTU for 3300*0.14$ = 5e5 for $462 = about $1000 per million BTU (this is for corn, one of the more efficient plant species)
Let's suppose we can make renewables 10 times more efficient than they are now. That would be an accomplishment that far surpasses putting a man on the moon btw.
That would make the price per kilometer travelled for your car ... 5 times what it was during the oil crisis ...
"free" ... I think you're going to find "expensive" to be cheaper ... and that's ignoring the fact that there is going to be a (long) period with fundamentally less energy. Who gets to die ?
Talking about "first steps", could someone explain something to me. It's simple, and it's a stupid question, but I'd still like it answered :
Today's energy cycle :
Sun -> plants -> animals -> bacteria -> (adding geothermal energy) -> digging them up & using them
Tomorrow's energy cycle:
Sun -> using it
Sun -> athmospheric pressure differences -> using it
Anyone else notice what's missing from tomorrow's cycle ?
How is this good for plants and/or animals (or bacteria for that matter) ? When the usage of renewable energy grows we will have to take more and more energy away (directly) from the rest of the biosphere.
Now anyone who's learned the least little bit of thermodynamics or eveolution can tell you this : the biosphere can function perfectly well when it's warm. Not when it's cold (before idiots reply : deserts are caused by COLD, not heat). The biosphere can function perfectly well with pollution. It can function perfectly well with more water. With less water ... in general : the biosphere can function with what we're doing now.
It CANNOT function without energy.
And yes, we don't see these effects right now because there's only a truly tiny installed base of renewable energy (just like global warming was a totally negligible effect the first 100 years of oil use). When we install anywhere near the capacity needed to get 10% of worldwide energy from renewables, we will have no choice : we will have to make a region the size of a small continent entirely lifeless. For 100% we will absolutely need to "steal" so much energy half the atlantic ocean would no longer contain so much as a s single fish.
No, actually I condoned swift legal police action, preferably nonviolent, but definitely violent if necessary.
You know, the same thing I'd like if I were attacked.
My impression from all this is that HBGary were incompetent and as a Government contractor, they should be investigated for fraud.
Absolutely. Now how does that excuse attacks, stalking, or even "mere" vandalism ?
Why is this ridiculous sort of mob justice tolerated ? We've all been in the playground, we've all seen mob justice in action, and we all know what WILL happen. So why do these people get any support whatsoever ?
Are we truly such hypocrites ? Insist on rights, when it's about us ... And then demand and defend swift illegal and criminal action against anyone we don't like ? Is that what is meant by "internet protest" ? Because if it is, frankly, it must be squashed with any amount of violence necessary.
Djeez ... "psychopathic minority nut" ... do you come up with these terms in front of the mirror ?
I am interested in just who this evil minority is ... the Jews perhaps ? Or maybe the "rich arms-dealers" ? Because it sure sounds like you get this stuff from the German translation of "my struggle" by AH.
Have you *looked* at those graphs ? Sure they've diverged a tiny little bit in the last 30 years, but please. Compare them to even a little bit before 1970.
And then compare them to the 19th century. Or to countries where policy "makes all people equal", like North Korea.
Or why don't we look at where income inequality is greatest ... where govt. interferes ... or where it doesn't ... Judge for yourself