Plus there's the little fact that "natural gas" is a by-product of petroleum refining. Which really makes the whole "it's not a fossil fuel" arugment moot.
But really, how long have wind farms been around? I'm having trouble believing it's long enough to make observations that are statistically significant.. let alone that all other possible influences, such as global warming, have been isolated as possible causes/contributors.
fact: did you guys know that costa rica is only using wind and water power?
Blah blah blah..
It's actually about 2% from fossil fuels, which is still outstanding, but that's only because 83% comes from hydro power alone. Costa Rica is a very small country with huge elevation extremes (3,810M to sea level), which makes hyrdo power much more practical than in other locations. Additionally, the energy consumption per capita in Costa Rica is on the order of 1,800kWH per capita per anum compared to 13,700kWH in the US.
"We've never seen a dead bird at our test site." Likely this is because birds dont normally fly into solid walls.
Well that explains why I almost never see a flock of birds embedded in the side of my house.
He notes that his company has been able to secure permission to install their turbine in several California counties where propeller turbines are banned because of the known bird carnage.
I'm sorry, did you say.. bird carnage? California has banned pollution-free power generation because some birds flew into the props? Is this some sort of epidemic? Are the birds, literally, flocking to the propellors?
One of the primary environmental drawbacks of the propeller wind turbines is that...the tips of the blades spin much faster than the wind speed, chopping through the air sometimes at speeds of 200 mph. The birds generally just don't see them coming.
Well isn't this for the best? The smart birds will fly around the propellors, and the rest will be killed. Eventually we'll have smart birds, and the world will be a better place for it. Natural selection at work.
(I just hope Californians never find out that a staggering amount of birds are killed by the common house cat. Wait a minute, I hate cats. I think I'll write a letter, and with any luck they'll ban cats in California.)
We hope you've enjoyed looking at these pictures of a socket. Be sure to check out next week's article when we use high-speed photography to watch paint dry in slow motion.
As it turns out, small boats, especially those the size of a rowboat, do not have a significant radar reflection, and certainly no greater reflection than even extremely small waves. Aside from the fact that a cruise ship is not likely to be equipped with a tactical radar, radar operators have to squelch a minimum return in order to get a clear picture of their surroundings. The minimum is subject to wave height, atmospheric conditions, and to some extent the range setting. If the returns weren't squelched, the display would appear as either thousands of points or sheer "whiteout." It's not like radar/sonar in the movies where you see a picture of a plane or boat moving continuously in some direction. There's a blip on your screen which may or may not be noise or interference, which does not move, and is only repainted once per revolution of the sweep. By turning the decay rate down it's possible to see rows of successive dots, but there's a fine line between confirming a trail of dots attributable to a small craft and seeing elephants in the clouds.
A port is a completely different story. While almost all ports have entry and exit lanes, and navigational laws, these may not be clearly defined or enforced in third world countries. It's likely you're going to have fishing boats everywhere, along with ferries, pleasure craft, shuttles taking crew back and forth from large ships, etc. The biggest concern is risk of a collision, so large vessels usually post watches to maintain visual confirmation of every target (other boat) within sight, to monitor their speed and heading, updated at regular intervals, and report any possibility of collision. In spite of the risks, small craft will often pass directly in front of large ships, just like cars that dart across the railroad tracks. (And much like a train, there's basically nothing the ship can do to prevent a collision in those circumstances.)
So in the first case, on open ocean, you're unlikely to see a small boat on radar, or even visually until it's rather close. In the second case you have a plethera of small craft all around you. If you were driving around in traffic and I told you were was a car full of men with guns who were going to open fire on you when they got close enough, you could be as paranoid and suspicious as you wanted, but there'd be no way to pick them out until they reveal themselves by opening fire.
Now in THIS case, the craft was identified as a threat as it was approaching; probably because one of the watches saw a guy with an RPG perched on his shoulder. Likely the "pirates" were relying on the display of force to gain compliance. If the pirates had employed even the slightest amount of subtrifuge and gotten close enough, the cruise ship may not have had the opportunity to test their new defense. Although given the fact that they were waving and smiling at the photographer, it doesn't seem likely that they were actually prepared to use violence.
I'm sure it'll be justified in ways such as lost opportunities, black marks on the education record that will cause certain undergraduate schools to shy away from such as candidate, and so forth.
You were one of the ones who fell for the permanent record ploy, eh? It's amazing how many students we get with that.
Krabappel: As you know, Bart, your permanent record will one day
disqualify you from all but the hottest and noisiest jobs. Skinner: What do you say, son? You keep our secret and some other
student can inherit your gloomy, windblown future. [holds
up Milhouse's noticeably thinner file]
Somebody posted that quote in the teacher's lounge a few years back. Still makes me laugh.
Nonsense. I gave my old P3-500(550? something in that range) to my mom a few years back, which had XP on it, a 40GB HD, and 256MB of RAM. It did everything she needed it to, never had spyware, and worked flawlessly until a few months ago when the integrated CPU fan froze. It booted just as fast as my P4-2.6G, with only 1 or 2 more apps loading at startup on my machine. When she upgraded to an Athlon-64 2800, she complained that it seemed *slower*. After I removed the OEM bloatware (finally by just performing a clean XP install), she said it felt the same as her old computer.. probably because she was gauging the speed of the internet, which is what most people do. Aside from internet speeds, the mainstream ~$100 HD really hasn't seen much of an increase in sustained transfer rates over the past 5 years or so. Certainly nothing on the scale of capacity increases. Unfortunately transfer rates make the biggest difference in user-perceived performance.
So far, in all our technology, we have only managed to exploit DIFFERENCES in energy. In a heat engine for example it is the difference in pressure and temperature that enables it to do useful work. In a hydroelectric station it is the difference in the potential energy of the water at the two elevations that is utilized by the turbine to do useful work. It is the difference in voltage that drives electrons through a circuit that provides power.
Well, right, but that's not likely to change, uh, ever. To use your example of electricity, you could have +5KV at one terminal and +5KV at another, hook up a light between them, and nothing would happen. When using energy to affect matter, it's the difference that matters (no pun intended). Energy is useless unless you can convince it to travel, and the only way to get it to do that is to have a different potential. So saying our technology is limited because it only exploits the differences in energies is sort of like saying moving is limited because we can only do it by changing our location.
Hmm.. a troll with backward arguments, no supporting evidence, and an "I won't bother to point out actual problems," is modded insightful. I'm not sure why that's at all surprising, but I'll respond to your speculative arguments anyway.
the % necessary to even begin to make up the difference would be insanely high.
The % has been calculated at 23%. Is that high? Sure. But not as high as the 28% I paid on my income, plus the time and money I spent to do my taxes (which I did "myself," but the software was still $30). But even if that figure is inaccurate, and the percent would need to be exactly the same -- 28% -- the simplification of the tax system would save billions, which would (theoretically) lower my taxes in the long run. At worst, it frees up money for other programs while at the same time creating other benefits (listed at http://www.fairtax.org/).
the poor and middle class get screwed out and the rich get a massive tax break.
That's the claim in every tax change. Nobody ever says, "the rich sure get screwed on this one!" No matter what the tax plan, no matter what party passes the bill, the poor and middle class are always the "victims." But whose interests are really served by maintaining the status quo? I submit that it's certainly not the poor and middle class.
Here's the reality: the plan would provide a monthly tax credit based on family size to ensure that people (all people) aren't paying taxes on necessities. (It works out to credit on roughly the first $400 of spending per month per person).
In reality, the wealthy already have huge tax breaks with the current system. That's the problem. They have tax shelters, massive writeoffs, nonprofits, shell corporations, etc., etc. Corporations get even larger tax breaks, incentives, and other stealth subsidies. By taxing spending instead of earnings, everyone would be paying their fair share, especially corporations.
Whether it's rampant opportunities for fraud(With no IRS, how will you make sure people pay the sales tax?)
There's no greater opportunity for fraud than with the current system. In fact, there's less opportunity because the system is simplified. Maybe you've heard the theory that the more complex a system becomes, the more difficult it is to prevent catastrophic failures? It only takes a nick in an o-ring to bring down a rocket. Business will still need to submit paperwork listing their sales and submitting a check for the taxes, but the IRS won't be anything like the monstrosity it is today.
to the massive invasion of privacy necessary to enforce it (now, instead of tracking your income, the gov't tracks *all* your purchases)
That's simply nonsense and you know it. I pay sales tax every day, and the state doesn't track my purchases. And yet several states' governments are funded through sales tax alone. The businesses are held accountable, and there's zero incentive for them to sell without taxing.
Here, I'll toss you some legitimate arguments in case you ever want to shill for the rich corporations again: "This could cause 'sticker shock,' and consumer spending might drop significantly as a direct result," or "Saving billions sounds good, but it's really just a drop in the bucket when you're talking about the federal budget. Additionally, it would take years for the cost savings to balance out the initial expendature needed to overhaul the tax system."
Gasoline won't burn if you drop a cigarette in it; gasoline doesn't even burn in liquid form because there's no oxygen present. The vapors (fumes) however are flammable, which also explains the sibling's gripe about the plane in Die Hard 2 (although there's no question it was purely for gratuitous explosions; and who doesn't like explosions?!?)
Energy is lost in the friction of moving parts, in overcoming rolling resistance (e.g., from irregularities in the road and flexing of tires), from air resistance, and from power-train resistance.
All of those inefficiencies would also be present in a fuel-cell vehicle, unless you had one of those fuel-cell vehicles that didn't move.
Anyway, that doesn't answer the question of how efficient is it to burn that same gasoline at a power plant, convert it to electricity, transport the electricity to the hydrogen plant, perform electrolysis, compress the hydrogen, transport it to the hydrogen station, and then convert it back to electricity to drive the motors. I suspect it's far more efficient to burn it directly, despite an efficiency of only 15%.
The only undebatable upside is that this allows us to search for better sources of electricity, which is reason enough for me.
Two tons is nothing. The "car," is actually more like a minivan, and 2 tons is about what minivans weigh; the Honda Odyssey weighs ~4400lbs. Everyone seems to think their vehicle weighs a half ton (because they see ads for "half ton" pickups and think their vehicle must weigh less than a truck?). Take a look at the sticker in the door.. unless you drive something like a Festiva, your car weighs at least 1 ton; more likely around 3000lbs (1.5 tons).
It's hard to get people to take this seriously, but the idea of abolishing the IRS, income tax, capital gains and estate taxes, and implementing a National sales tax makes a lot of sense. Filing, auditing, and the whole bureaucratic nightmare would be eliminated, saving billions of dollars per year.
That's a bit off track.. obviously we benefit in some way from just about any state/country on earth. Brazil is producing quite a bit of oxygen (although that's been decreasing at a rapid pace), so let's send them some money, shall we?
Income taxes don't pay for services, they give money to the state government, who then decides how your money is spent. Whether or not you benefit from what the government spends your money on is irrelevant; the point is that you have a representative who decides how to spend the money.
Of course, in reality, even if he lived in New York it's unlikely that he'd have any significant influence over how his money was spent, but that's a separate argument.
Since when did not having a physical presence in a place exempt you from from their laws?
Since, uh, forever? I mean, that hasn't stopped some countries *cough*ourown*cough* from trying to enforce their laws outside of their borders. You don't happen to work for the RIAA or MPAA do you? I think most people agree that they are not subject to the laws outside of the place they live.
But.. if you feel you're subject to the laws of everywhere, then I declare my apartment to be the sovreign state of Stikypadica. We have a 100% income tax in Stikypadica; I give all of my money to me and you'll be expected to do the same. Please send a cashier's check or money order with your YTD earnings by no later than tomorrow. You may, of course, deduct the cost of postage from your check; we're not unreasonable.
More likely it's spy/adware you already had. Alot of programs put their hooks (literally) into IExplore.exe and make it look like the webpage is to blame.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus there's the little fact that "natural gas" is a by-product of petroleum refining. Which really makes the whole "it's not a fossil fuel" arugment moot.
Sunny beaches?!? What a travesty...
But really, how long have wind farms been around? I'm having trouble believing it's long enough to make observations that are statistically significant.. let alone that all other possible influences, such as global warming, have been isolated as possible causes/contributors.
Besides, everyone knows it's the pirates' fault.
fact: did you guys know that costa rica is only using wind and water power?
Blah blah blah..
It's actually about 2% from fossil fuels, which is still outstanding, but that's only because 83% comes from hydro power alone. Costa Rica is a very small country with huge elevation extremes (3,810M to sea level), which makes hyrdo power much more practical than in other locations. Additionally, the energy consumption per capita in Costa Rica is on the order of 1,800kWH per capita per anum compared to 13,700kWH in the US.
"We've never seen a dead bird at our test site." Likely this is because birds dont normally fly into solid walls.
Well that explains why I almost never see a flock of birds embedded in the side of my house.
He notes that his company has been able to secure permission to install their turbine in several California counties where propeller turbines are banned because of the known bird carnage.
I'm sorry, did you say.. bird carnage? California has banned pollution-free power generation because some birds flew into the props? Is this some sort of epidemic? Are the birds, literally, flocking to the propellors?
One of the primary environmental drawbacks of the propeller wind turbines is that...the tips of the blades spin much faster than the wind speed, chopping through the air sometimes at speeds of 200 mph. The birds generally just don't see them coming.
Well isn't this for the best? The smart birds will fly around the propellors, and the rest will be killed. Eventually we'll have smart birds, and the world will be a better place for it. Natural selection at work.
(I just hope Californians never find out that a staggering amount of birds are killed by the common house cat. Wait a minute, I hate cats. I think I'll write a letter, and with any luck they'll ban cats in California.)
We hope you've enjoyed looking at these pictures of a socket. Be sure to check out next week's article when we use high-speed photography to watch paint dry in slow motion.
As it turns out, small boats, especially those the size of a rowboat, do not have a significant radar reflection, and certainly no greater reflection than even extremely small waves. Aside from the fact that a cruise ship is not likely to be equipped with a tactical radar, radar operators have to squelch a minimum return in order to get a clear picture of their surroundings. The minimum is subject to wave height, atmospheric conditions, and to some extent the range setting. If the returns weren't squelched, the display would appear as either thousands of points or sheer "whiteout." It's not like radar/sonar in the movies where you see a picture of a plane or boat moving continuously in some direction. There's a blip on your screen which may or may not be noise or interference, which does not move, and is only repainted once per revolution of the sweep. By turning the decay rate down it's possible to see rows of successive dots, but there's a fine line between confirming a trail of dots attributable to a small craft and seeing elephants in the clouds.
A port is a completely different story. While almost all ports have entry and exit lanes, and navigational laws, these may not be clearly defined or enforced in third world countries. It's likely you're going to have fishing boats everywhere, along with ferries, pleasure craft, shuttles taking crew back and forth from large ships, etc. The biggest concern is risk of a collision, so large vessels usually post watches to maintain visual confirmation of every target (other boat) within sight, to monitor their speed and heading, updated at regular intervals, and report any possibility of collision. In spite of the risks, small craft will often pass directly in front of large ships, just like cars that dart across the railroad tracks. (And much like a train, there's basically nothing the ship can do to prevent a collision in those circumstances.)
So in the first case, on open ocean, you're unlikely to see a small boat on radar, or even visually until it's rather close. In the second case you have a plethera of small craft all around you. If you were driving around in traffic and I told you were was a car full of men with guns who were going to open fire on you when they got close enough, you could be as paranoid and suspicious as you wanted, but there'd be no way to pick them out until they reveal themselves by opening fire.
Now in THIS case, the craft was identified as a threat as it was approaching; probably because one of the watches saw a guy with an RPG perched on his shoulder. Likely the "pirates" were relying on the display of force to gain compliance. If the pirates had employed even the slightest amount of subtrifuge and gotten close enough, the cruise ship may not have had the opportunity to test their new defense. Although given the fact that they were waving and smiling at the photographer, it doesn't seem likely that they were actually prepared to use violence.
Or The Grateful Dead to speed freaks.
Or either of those to the rest of the population.
I'm sure it'll be justified in ways such as lost opportunities, black marks on the education record that will cause certain undergraduate schools to shy away from such as candidate, and so forth.
You were one of the ones who fell for the permanent record ploy, eh? It's amazing how many students we get with that.
Krabappel: As you know, Bart, your permanent record will one day
disqualify you from all but the hottest and noisiest jobs.
Skinner: What do you say, son? You keep our secret and some other
student can inherit your gloomy, windblown future. [holds
up Milhouse's noticeably thinner file]
Somebody posted that quote in the teacher's lounge a few years back. Still makes me laugh.
Nonsense. I gave my old P3-500(550? something in that range) to my mom a few years back, which had XP on it, a 40GB HD, and 256MB of RAM. It did everything she needed it to, never had spyware, and worked flawlessly until a few months ago when the integrated CPU fan froze. It booted just as fast as my P4-2.6G, with only 1 or 2 more apps loading at startup on my machine. When she upgraded to an Athlon-64 2800, she complained that it seemed *slower*. After I removed the OEM bloatware (finally by just performing a clean XP install), she said it felt the same as her old computer.. probably because she was gauging the speed of the internet, which is what most people do. Aside from internet speeds, the mainstream ~$100 HD really hasn't seen much of an increase in sustained transfer rates over the past 5 years or so. Certainly nothing on the scale of capacity increases. Unfortunately transfer rates make the biggest difference in user-perceived performance.
You really think anyone that serious about their vid card is using an LCD?
He probably had the CSI song stuck in his head. %$&#ing CSI.
It appears to be waxing, but with any luck it will begin waning soon.
4. New compression algorithm can be used repeatedly for infinite compression: all inputs can be compressed to 1 bit given enough compression cycles!!
You joke, but your post losslessly compresses to 0.
(Sorry, sorry, not an actual dig at your post; it was just too easy).
the solid state inside the Earth is another matter to consider.
Ba dum bum!
So far, in all our technology, we have only managed to exploit DIFFERENCES in energy. In a heat engine for example it is the difference in pressure and temperature that enables it to do useful work. In a hydroelectric station it is the difference in the potential energy of the water at the two elevations that is utilized by the turbine to do useful work. It is the difference in voltage that drives electrons through a circuit that provides power.
Well, right, but that's not likely to change, uh, ever. To use your example of electricity, you could have +5KV at one terminal and +5KV at another, hook up a light between them, and nothing would happen. When using energy to affect matter, it's the difference that matters (no pun intended). Energy is useless unless you can convince it to travel, and the only way to get it to do that is to have a different potential. So saying our technology is limited because it only exploits the differences in energies is sort of like saying moving is limited because we can only do it by changing our location.
They let us live in them, and in exchange, we don't kill them. Except sometimes in fires.
As an explaination of 'how the universe works', Newton's laws are long gone.
GD it.. I've been obeying the law of inertia my whole life. Why don't people tell me when laws of physics are repealed?!?
Hmm.. a troll with backward arguments, no supporting evidence, and an "I won't bother to point out actual problems," is modded insightful. I'm not sure why that's at all surprising, but I'll respond to your speculative arguments anyway.
the % necessary to even begin to make up the difference would be insanely high.
The % has been calculated at 23%. Is that high? Sure. But not as high as the 28% I paid on my income, plus the time and money I spent to do my taxes (which I did "myself," but the software was still $30). But even if that figure is inaccurate, and the percent would need to be exactly the same -- 28% -- the simplification of the tax system would save billions, which would (theoretically) lower my taxes in the long run. At worst, it frees up money for other programs while at the same time creating other benefits (listed at http://www.fairtax.org/).
the poor and middle class get screwed out and the rich get a massive tax break.
That's the claim in every tax change. Nobody ever says, "the rich sure get screwed on this one!" No matter what the tax plan, no matter what party passes the bill, the poor and middle class are always the "victims." But whose interests are really served by maintaining the status quo? I submit that it's certainly not the poor and middle class.
Here's the reality: the plan would provide a monthly tax credit based on family size to ensure that people (all people) aren't paying taxes on necessities. (It works out to credit on roughly the first $400 of spending per month per person).
In reality, the wealthy already have huge tax breaks with the current system. That's the problem. They have tax shelters, massive writeoffs, nonprofits, shell corporations, etc., etc. Corporations get even larger tax breaks, incentives, and other stealth subsidies. By taxing spending instead of earnings, everyone would be paying their fair share, especially corporations.
Whether it's rampant opportunities for fraud(With no IRS, how will you make sure people pay the sales tax?)
There's no greater opportunity for fraud than with the current system. In fact, there's less opportunity because the system is simplified. Maybe you've heard the theory that the more complex a system becomes, the more difficult it is to prevent catastrophic failures? It only takes a nick in an o-ring to bring down a rocket. Business will still need to submit paperwork listing their sales and submitting a check for the taxes, but the IRS won't be anything like the monstrosity it is today.
to the massive invasion of privacy necessary to enforce it (now, instead of tracking your income, the gov't tracks *all* your purchases)
That's simply nonsense and you know it. I pay sales tax every day, and the state doesn't track my purchases. And yet several states' governments are funded through sales tax alone. The businesses are held accountable, and there's zero incentive for them to sell without taxing.
Here, I'll toss you some legitimate arguments in case you ever want to shill for the rich corporations again: "This could cause 'sticker shock,' and consumer spending might drop significantly as a direct result," or "Saving billions sounds good, but it's really just a drop in the bucket when you're talking about the federal budget. Additionally, it would take years for the cost savings to balance out the initial expendature needed to overhaul the tax system."
Gasoline won't burn if you drop a cigarette in it; gasoline doesn't even burn in liquid form because there's no oxygen present. The vapors (fumes) however are flammable, which also explains the sibling's gripe about the plane in Die Hard 2 (although there's no question it was purely for gratuitous explosions; and who doesn't like explosions?!?)
Energy is lost in the friction of moving parts, in overcoming rolling resistance (e.g., from irregularities in the road and flexing of tires), from air resistance, and from power-train resistance.
All of those inefficiencies would also be present in a fuel-cell vehicle, unless you had one of those fuel-cell vehicles that didn't move.
Anyway, that doesn't answer the question of how efficient is it to burn that same gasoline at a power plant, convert it to electricity, transport the electricity to the hydrogen plant, perform electrolysis, compress the hydrogen, transport it to the hydrogen station, and then convert it back to electricity to drive the motors. I suspect it's far more efficient to burn it directly, despite an efficiency of only 15%.
The only undebatable upside is that this allows us to search for better sources of electricity, which is reason enough for me.
the car weighs two tons(!)
Two tons is nothing. The "car," is actually more like a minivan, and 2 tons is about what minivans weigh; the Honda Odyssey weighs ~4400lbs. Everyone seems to think their vehicle weighs a half ton (because they see ads for "half ton" pickups and think their vehicle must weigh less than a truck?). Take a look at the sticker in the door.. unless you drive something like a Festiva, your car weighs at least 1 ton; more likely around 3000lbs (1.5 tons).
It's hard to get people to take this seriously, but the idea of abolishing the IRS, income tax, capital gains and estate taxes, and implementing a National sales tax makes a lot of sense. Filing, auditing, and the whole bureaucratic nightmare would be eliminated, saving billions of dollars per year.
That's a bit off track.. obviously we benefit in some way from just about any state/country on earth. Brazil is producing quite a bit of oxygen (although that's been decreasing at a rapid pace), so let's send them some money, shall we?
Income taxes don't pay for services, they give money to the state government, who then decides how your money is spent. Whether or not you benefit from what the government spends your money on is irrelevant; the point is that you have a representative who decides how to spend the money.
Of course, in reality, even if he lived in New York it's unlikely that he'd have any significant influence over how his money was spent, but that's a separate argument.
Since when did not having a physical presence in a place exempt you from from their laws?
Since, uh, forever? I mean, that hasn't stopped some countries *cough*ourown*cough* from trying to enforce their laws outside of their borders. You don't happen to work for the RIAA or MPAA do you? I think most people agree that they are not subject to the laws outside of the place they live.
But.. if you feel you're subject to the laws of everywhere, then I declare my apartment to be the sovreign state of Stikypadica. We have a 100% income tax in Stikypadica; I give all of my money to me and you'll be expected to do the same. Please send a cashier's check or money order with your YTD earnings by no later than tomorrow. You may, of course, deduct the cost of postage from your check; we're not unreasonable.
More likely it's spy/adware you already had. Alot of programs put their hooks (literally) into IExplore.exe and make it look like the webpage is to blame.