This is America. We already produce more food than we could ever need. You're right, we should probably continue to do so, and to export that food to the rest of the world in exchange for their energy resources. But at any point that becomes unprofitable, we need large-scale, clean, renewable primary energy sources to fall back on. Luckily the same infrastructure can be used for both.
But do the math on the efficiency of capturing that energy and storing it, and using it again, and there's no way it's worth 10 pounds, let alone 40.
Okay so lithium ion probably doesn't charge quickly enough to make this work well, and the implementation is botched. But the theory is sound. Even if you only capture and re-use half of the energy, it adds up even in a moderately hilly area.
I agree that Sanyo is doing a terrible job of conveying exactly what the benefit of this thing actually is. I certainly wouldn't pay $2000 for a half-assed electric moped.
After a certain trip length it requires more energy to move the batteries+cables+motor than the batteries are able to hold. So no batteries at all will always be more efficient.
No, you still miss the point. The idea is not that you charge up the battery and then take it for a long trip over flat road. It's still a bicycle, not a motorcycle.
The idea is that biking along a flat road, even with 40 extra pounds of battery and motor, is faster and more efficient than walking, and healthier than driving. So the battery and motor are only there to smooth out the hills. The battery only needs to be big enough to get over the biggest hill, and the regenerative braking handles the rest.
The point is that the batteries don't really weigh that much, and are used for regenerative braking so that all the effort used to climb a hill isn't lost on the way down.
Search e-bay under "gas scooter", or look at cheap tool stores like Harbor Freight or whatever your local equivalent is. These things are horrible, of course, basically a weed-whacker engine mated to a skate board. America's response to environmental responsibility is a $300, dangerous, smoke-spewing, big-tire toy for adult children*.
Yeah, you can get a Honda Metropolitan for less than $2000. It's less eco-friendly, but also less gay looking, more useful and has a higher resale value. The downside I guess is that you can't really get away with riding a scooter on the sidewalk.
This is what I was going to say. I'm not sure that Boeing actually invented the concept, but they were one of the first ones to try to use it for maintenance and repair. I don't recall hearing whether it was a success or not, since I believe at the time the airline industry was going through a major crisis, and innovations such as these tend to get placed aside in the face of poor labor relations and financial difficulties.
Without borders, there is no state. This is the way it ought to work. The distinction is between rights in a country and those outside a country, and specifically the right to move goods and people across that threshold.
It's ironic, though, that you conflate "modern civilization" with the notion of individual rights. When modern civilization (the US city-state at least) was divorced from the land and underlying resources necessary to sustain it, it became incompatible with natural rights, necessarily. I should hope by now the evidence for this is clear, though I would be happy to provide it.
I agree with you 100%. I've developed an intolerance to crappy food. And, believe me, it's nearly impossible to avoid corn syrup. It's in everything. It's in every single type of salad dressing. It's in mustard. Mustard. The recipe for mustard didn't change for a thousand years. Mustard seeds, vinegar, salt. Now it needs corn syrup too, for some reason.
I get the impression that most of the cameras were working at some point, but failed. And this is why the company started sending fake (cached) images. I wonder how many were damaged by unhappy citizens. And I wonder what the company was thinking when they signed up to be responsible for replacing security cameras that they should have known were likely to come under attack.
Really this should almost be unsurprising. In any business, there's a huge incentive to outsource the most risky tasks just to have someone to blame when things go wrong. Personally, as a contractor, I hate working by the hour and would rather have my work judged on it's merits rather than by how long it takes. And for that reason I always have to carefully manage the amount of risk I'm willing to take for any job, and to weigh it against the fees offered.
Clearly in this case the contractor in question did not account for the amount of risk he was taking on. And clearly the Moscow police didn't have much incentive to take enough of the responsibility of securing their cameras on themselves. The result is the contractor in jail and the police acting like they had no idea there was any problem. Typical, really.
Thermal efficiency of solar power is absolutely irrelevant to anything. It is quite possibly the single dumbest thing I have ever seen discussed on Slashdot. And, believe me, you're not the first to bring it up.
Sunshine is free. Land is abundant. The sun will continue burning whether we collect solar power or not. Every single solar energy technology is more efficient than plants. Efficiency means nothing. It is cost that matters.
I see what you are saying. Share a turbine with an existing power plant. It would cut down on capital costs. But really the odds of that happening on large scale plant are basically zero, for a whole host of reasons. It would be an interesting idea for a home CHP system.
No, it isn't stored. Energy from the radiation that strikes the earth would dissipate as heat, creating thermal updrafts, regardless. Harnessing it to use for productive purpose is much less wasteful.
No rational investor is going to build a high-rise anywhere except where the cost of land is already high, where they can expect high rents or sales prices.
This proves my point, you know. Investors only build high-rises where the land is too expensive otherwise. Instead of buying a large amount of land, he buys a small amount of land and builds a high-rise to put on it. The high rise reduces the cost of the land he has to buy.
The land is not expensive because the high-rise exists. The high-rise exists because the land is expensive.
The same people who watched Star Wars and wanted to build the Death Star are now working on turning The Matrix into reality.
This has been in the works for a while, driven by a collusion between security agencies and high tech industry. This is what they meant when they were "caught off guard" by 9/11, and decided to "wage war on the internet" as a response to dissent during Operation Iraqi Liberation. When the entire plot of America's next blatant power grab becomes common knowledge within a matter of weeks thanks to a free global individual communications medium, FBI agents with 486's could no longer successfully pull off the kind of false flag operations they could when television was dominant. They had to pick their donut-stuffed asses out of their plastic chairs and resort to the good old fashioned foot-work of personal attacks, disappearances and discrediting anyone who questions the official line to keep the blood money flowing.
Profit is of course the motive, but not profit for society at large, profit at your expense. The initial purpose is to enable more reliable monitoring of communications by making identification more reliable. Stick your smart-card enabled driver's-license-slash-food-stamp-card into a reader in order to access the internet. Copy a song or movie, or pose a sufficient threat to society, and your access can be revoked. Government are the only ones who might be motivated to pay for such a scheme, with no clear benefit to anyone but the types of delusional control freaks government attracts.
The next step will be to take everything you say or communicate electronically, and to use it against you. This is where the profit comes in. Your ideas are copied, stolen, and then black-holed. Your views are distorted. Everyone from your employer to your landlord to concerned parents would pay for information on you. Those who control it's collection will control it's perception and use, and profit from it. Your health insurance may be cancelled. Your boss may not recommend you for a raise. Your parents may decide to cut you out of their will. Your bank may reduce your credit limit. They will have no qualms about doing so. You will never see it coming. The information they base their decisions on comes from the government, and government is trusted. The information is thus trusted as well, thanks to step one above.
The final step is segmentation. The internet is no longer global. You get your own personal copy. Every search result you get and every website you go to is filtered and personalized. The internet is no longer your link to a larger world, but a fictional creation used to manipulate and control you. Freedom of speech is no longer liberating, but a jail for your mind. This will take a while. But it is coming. It's just targeted advertising for now, but wait ten years and see what it becomes with the Federal government picking up the tab.
Consider this: There is a $200 trillion financial derivatives market in the United States. At 3% growth, this represents $70,000/yr for each and every US household, nearly every dollar earned by working Americans. And it's already accounted for. They know you will spend it. They know to 99% certainty how you will spend it. And if they happen to be wrong, they will get bailed out. There is no room for error. There is no tolerance of paradigm-changing technologically innovative ideas. Every economic transaction is now backed by the force of government. And they have every incentive to increase their intrusion into and control over your everyday life.
My response is to be careful what you wish for. Sometimes it is better not to know whether the cat is dead or not.
Oh, I see. Prices being dependent upon supply and demand is just a "theory". I can tell already that this is going to be a fun discussion.
Las Vegas is a good example. High density condos were built on the strip (overbuilt actually), driving down values of the surrounding suburban homes.
High density housing projects are notorious examples. They are no longer built for exactly this reason, so that there is no obvious dead zone of crime and poverty surrounding them, for working citizens to turn into a political issue. It still exists, of course. It just isn't as noticeable.
I can point directly to a neighborhood I used to live in. It evolved as a mixed development of single-family homes and small apartments due to lack of zoning. Landlords who owned a few houses next to each other could tear them all down and build a small apartment complex, making lots of money in the process. The apartments attracted crime and poverty, immigrants and drug dealers. As a result, rents for the surrounding single-family homes were the lowest in the city. A guy I went to college with actually purchased a two bedroom house in the neighborhood, while still in school.
You're confusing cause and effect. Building the high-rise reduces the price of land. Filling it with productive people creates a resource that attracts other people to the area, and increases the price of surrounding land.
You could just as easily fill a high rise with crack heads and welfare queens and reduce the price of the surrounding area.
And I suppose you meant "no wonder real estate is so screwed up these days". Since it was realtors and lenders who manipulated the financial system to hand out loans and sell houses to people who couldn't afford them, not city planners. All those extraneous houses aren't being paid for, but they do have functional sewer systems.
the ones that handled money and inventory were the important ones.
Like the ATM machines that now run a consumer OS and crash regularly?
Consider the point of view of someone in 1999 (the vast majority of people really) who didn't deal with "important" computers for a living, and you'll have an idea of what I mean when I talk about the ridiculousness of Y2K.
People literally thought that electronic ignition systems on their cars would stop working and crops wouldn't get planted because tractors were GPS-enabled.
It's perfectly reasonable to view Y2K, from the point of view of a computer professional, as a serious but completely understood crisis that was averted through much completely worthwhile effort. But that misses out on the much larger social phenomenon of Y2K, including all the fears and anxieties of a blue-collar workforce hit by job losses to more automated foreign competitors, and manifesting itself as a millennial apocalyptic technological backlash. Don't forget to add in the fact that those same people were losing out as 300 billion dollars were diverted into fixing a problem most of them couldn't begin to grasp.
You make it sound so bleak, as though there were only the two options. It is possible to build some things well so that they last a long time, and others not so much. The important thing is to keep them sufficiently separated, and to keep track of which is which so that you don't invest too much in something that will not last.
One of my driers broke last week. A tree limb fell on it. A tree limb fell on it three years ago also. Last time it cost $10 to fix. This time it will cost $15. I will fix it, and keep using it, because it doesn't cost anything to operate, and is environmentally responsible. In the mean time, I will use the other one, the one that costs $50/yr to operate and runs on coal.
It's funny that you think it wasn't. I agree that the computers that "mattered" were far and above the average. But those were well out of sight of most people. And much of the ridiculousness of Y2K was driven by perception more than reality. Small businesses employ over half of US workers. Even today, they still overwhelmingly use personal computers for everything. In 1999, for the majority of people, IT *was* "personal computers". It's likely that it still is.
Slashdot Mirror
This is America. We already produce more food than we could ever need. You're right, we should probably continue to do so, and to export that food to the rest of the world in exchange for their energy resources. But at any point that becomes unprofitable, we need large-scale, clean, renewable primary energy sources to fall back on. Luckily the same infrastructure can be used for both.
But do the math on the efficiency of capturing that energy and storing it, and using it again, and there's no way it's worth 10 pounds, let alone 40.
Okay so lithium ion probably doesn't charge quickly enough to make this work well, and the implementation is botched. But the theory is sound. Even if you only capture and re-use half of the energy, it adds up even in a moderately hilly area.
I agree that Sanyo is doing a terrible job of conveying exactly what the benefit of this thing actually is. I certainly wouldn't pay $2000 for a half-assed electric moped.
After a certain trip length it requires more energy to move the batteries+cables+motor than the batteries are able to hold. So no batteries at all will always be more efficient.
No, you still miss the point. The idea is not that you charge up the battery and then take it for a long trip over flat road. It's still a bicycle, not a motorcycle.
The idea is that biking along a flat road, even with 40 extra pounds of battery and motor, is faster and more efficient than walking, and healthier than driving. So the battery and motor are only there to smooth out the hills. The battery only needs to be big enough to get over the biggest hill, and the regenerative braking handles the rest.
The point is that the batteries don't really weigh that much, and are used for regenerative braking so that all the effort used to climb a hill isn't lost on the way down.
Search e-bay under "gas scooter", or look at cheap tool stores like Harbor Freight or whatever your local equivalent is. These things are horrible, of course, basically a weed-whacker engine mated to a skate board. America's response to environmental responsibility is a $300, dangerous, smoke-spewing, big-tire toy for adult children*.
*baby boomers
Yeah, you can get a Honda Metropolitan for less than $2000. It's less eco-friendly, but also less gay looking, more useful and has a higher resale value. The downside I guess is that you can't really get away with riding a scooter on the sidewalk.
Make it self-replicating. Program it to build and operate all of the machinery necessary to make it's component parts, and then to assemble itself.
This has been on the cards for about two years now.
"In the cards" refers to something that is fated to happen, as in Tarot cards. "On the table" refers to a proposal.
This is what I was going to say. I'm not sure that Boeing actually invented the concept, but they were one of the first ones to try to use it for maintenance and repair. I don't recall hearing whether it was a success or not, since I believe at the time the airline industry was going through a major crisis, and innovations such as these tend to get placed aside in the face of poor labor relations and financial difficulties.
Without borders, there is no state. This is the way it ought to work. The distinction is between rights in a country and those outside a country, and specifically the right to move goods and people across that threshold.
It's ironic, though, that you conflate "modern civilization" with the notion of individual rights. When modern civilization (the US city-state at least) was divorced from the land and underlying resources necessary to sustain it, it became incompatible with natural rights, necessarily. I should hope by now the evidence for this is clear, though I would be happy to provide it.
I agree with you 100%. I've developed an intolerance to crappy food. And, believe me, it's nearly impossible to avoid corn syrup. It's in everything. It's in every single type of salad dressing. It's in mustard. Mustard. The recipe for mustard didn't change for a thousand years. Mustard seeds, vinegar, salt. Now it needs corn syrup too, for some reason.
I get the impression that most of the cameras were working at some point, but failed. And this is why the company started sending fake (cached) images. I wonder how many were damaged by unhappy citizens. And I wonder what the company was thinking when they signed up to be responsible for replacing security cameras that they should have known were likely to come under attack.
Really this should almost be unsurprising. In any business, there's a huge incentive to outsource the most risky tasks just to have someone to blame when things go wrong. Personally, as a contractor, I hate working by the hour and would rather have my work judged on it's merits rather than by how long it takes. And for that reason I always have to carefully manage the amount of risk I'm willing to take for any job, and to weigh it against the fees offered.
Clearly in this case the contractor in question did not account for the amount of risk he was taking on. And clearly the Moscow police didn't have much incentive to take enough of the responsibility of securing their cameras on themselves. The result is the contractor in jail and the police acting like they had no idea there was any problem. Typical, really.
I was under the impression that selective availability is still more accurate than 200 meters.
Thermal efficiency of solar power is absolutely irrelevant to anything. It is quite possibly the single dumbest thing I have ever seen discussed on Slashdot. And, believe me, you're not the first to bring it up.
Sunshine is free. Land is abundant. The sun will continue burning whether we collect solar power or not. Every single solar energy technology is more efficient than plants. Efficiency means nothing. It is cost that matters.
I see what you are saying. Share a turbine with an existing power plant. It would cut down on capital costs. But really the odds of that happening on large scale plant are basically zero, for a whole host of reasons. It would be an interesting idea for a home CHP system.
No, it isn't stored. Energy from the radiation that strikes the earth would dissipate as heat, creating thermal updrafts, regardless. Harnessing it to use for productive purpose is much less wasteful.
Not fire lord, space lord.
"We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population"
heh, I think making a CEO actually have to say this should get some kind of trolling reward or something.
No rational investor is going to build a high-rise anywhere except where the cost of land is already high, where they can expect high rents or sales prices.
This proves my point, you know. Investors only build high-rises where the land is too expensive otherwise. Instead of buying a large amount of land, he buys a small amount of land and builds a high-rise to put on it. The high rise reduces the cost of the land he has to buy.
The land is not expensive because the high-rise exists. The high-rise exists because the land is expensive.
The same people who watched Star Wars and wanted to build the Death Star are now working on turning The Matrix into reality.
This has been in the works for a while, driven by a collusion between security agencies and high tech industry. This is what they meant when they were "caught off guard" by 9/11, and decided to "wage war on the internet" as a response to dissent during Operation Iraqi Liberation. When the entire plot of America's next blatant power grab becomes common knowledge within a matter of weeks thanks to a free global individual communications medium, FBI agents with 486's could no longer successfully pull off the kind of false flag operations they could when television was dominant. They had to pick their donut-stuffed asses out of their plastic chairs and resort to the good old fashioned foot-work of personal attacks, disappearances and discrediting anyone who questions the official line to keep the blood money flowing.
Profit is of course the motive, but not profit for society at large, profit at your expense. The initial purpose is to enable more reliable monitoring of communications by making identification more reliable. Stick your smart-card enabled driver's-license-slash-food-stamp-card into a reader in order to access the internet. Copy a song or movie, or pose a sufficient threat to society, and your access can be revoked. Government are the only ones who might be motivated to pay for such a scheme, with no clear benefit to anyone but the types of delusional control freaks government attracts.
The next step will be to take everything you say or communicate electronically, and to use it against you. This is where the profit comes in. Your ideas are copied, stolen, and then black-holed. Your views are distorted. Everyone from your employer to your landlord to concerned parents would pay for information on you. Those who control it's collection will control it's perception and use, and profit from it. Your health insurance may be cancelled. Your boss may not recommend you for a raise. Your parents may decide to cut you out of their will. Your bank may reduce your credit limit. They will have no qualms about doing so. You will never see it coming. The information they base their decisions on comes from the government, and government is trusted. The information is thus trusted as well, thanks to step one above.
The final step is segmentation. The internet is no longer global. You get your own personal copy. Every search result you get and every website you go to is filtered and personalized. The internet is no longer your link to a larger world, but a fictional creation used to manipulate and control you. Freedom of speech is no longer liberating, but a jail for your mind. This will take a while. But it is coming. It's just targeted advertising for now, but wait ten years and see what it becomes with the Federal government picking up the tab.
Consider this: There is a $200 trillion financial derivatives market in the United States. At 3% growth, this represents $70,000/yr for each and every US household, nearly every dollar earned by working Americans. And it's already accounted for. They know you will spend it. They know to 99% certainty how you will spend it. And if they happen to be wrong, they will get bailed out. There is no room for error. There is no tolerance of paradigm-changing technologically innovative ideas. Every economic transaction is now backed by the force of government. And they have every incentive to increase their intrusion into and control over your everyday life.
My response is to be careful what you wish for. Sometimes it is better not to know whether the cat is dead or not.
Oh, I see. Prices being dependent upon supply and demand is just a "theory". I can tell already that this is going to be a fun discussion.
Las Vegas is a good example. High density condos were built on the strip (overbuilt actually), driving down values of the surrounding suburban homes.
High density housing projects are notorious examples. They are no longer built for exactly this reason, so that there is no obvious dead zone of crime and poverty surrounding them, for working citizens to turn into a political issue. It still exists, of course. It just isn't as noticeable.
I can point directly to a neighborhood I used to live in. It evolved as a mixed development of single-family homes and small apartments due to lack of zoning. Landlords who owned a few houses next to each other could tear them all down and build a small apartment complex, making lots of money in the process. The apartments attracted crime and poverty, immigrants and drug dealers. As a result, rents for the surrounding single-family homes were the lowest in the city. A guy I went to college with actually purchased a two bedroom house in the neighborhood, while still in school.
You're confusing cause and effect. Building the high-rise reduces the price of land. Filling it with productive people creates a resource that attracts other people to the area, and increases the price of surrounding land.
You could just as easily fill a high rise with crack heads and welfare queens and reduce the price of the surrounding area.
And I suppose you meant "no wonder real estate is so screwed up these days". Since it was realtors and lenders who manipulated the financial system to hand out loans and sell houses to people who couldn't afford them, not city planners. All those extraneous houses aren't being paid for, but they do have functional sewer systems.
the ones that handled money and inventory were the important ones.
Like the ATM machines that now run a consumer OS and crash regularly?
Consider the point of view of someone in 1999 (the vast majority of people really) who didn't deal with "important" computers for a living, and you'll have an idea of what I mean when I talk about the ridiculousness of Y2K.
People literally thought that electronic ignition systems on their cars would stop working and crops wouldn't get planted because tractors were GPS-enabled.
It's perfectly reasonable to view Y2K, from the point of view of a computer professional, as a serious but completely understood crisis that was averted through much completely worthwhile effort. But that misses out on the much larger social phenomenon of Y2K, including all the fears and anxieties of a blue-collar workforce hit by job losses to more automated foreign competitors, and manifesting itself as a millennial apocalyptic technological backlash. Don't forget to add in the fact that those same people were losing out as 300 billion dollars were diverted into fixing a problem most of them couldn't begin to grasp.
You make it sound so bleak, as though there were only the two options. It is possible to build some things well so that they last a long time, and others not so much. The important thing is to keep them sufficiently separated, and to keep track of which is which so that you don't invest too much in something that will not last.
One of my driers broke last week. A tree limb fell on it. A tree limb fell on it three years ago also. Last time it cost $10 to fix. This time it will cost $15. I will fix it, and keep using it, because it doesn't cost anything to operate, and is environmentally responsible. In the mean time, I will use the other one, the one that costs $50/yr to operate and runs on coal.
It's funny that you think it wasn't. I agree that the computers that "mattered" were far and above the average. But those were well out of sight of most people. And much of the ridiculousness of Y2K was driven by perception more than reality. Small businesses employ over half of US workers. Even today, they still overwhelmingly use personal computers for everything. In 1999, for the majority of people, IT *was* "personal computers". It's likely that it still is.