We bought a seasons pass for a TV show on iTunes on the ATV. It took us a surprisingly long time to figure out how to watch this on the Mac laptop.
The purchase did not appear in the item called "purchases", nor "TV", which only showed the things we already downloaded. Going into the Store, we found the show, and double clicking on it cause a smaller all-black window to appear with an episode list. Clicking on these played the preview. Eventually we figured out that clicking the cloud icon would download the episode. We could then go to the Downloads screen, and double-click to watch it as it streamed.
So logical.
As if this were not enough, last night we could no longer make this work. The episode list that used to open when we double clicked... somewhere... no longer appears. We tried everything.
> You act like lithium is some expensive, precious metal. It is priced at 10-20 USD per pound
Iron ore is currently running around 7 cents a pound. Copper's going around 6 bux, and that's considered outrageous. So yeah, but just about any definition, it's expensive. Precious? I don't recall anything like that.
> Working with lithium is not that dangerous. It is more dangerous than some other metals
Ok, so it's dangerous, we agree.
Now what if I infuse radioactive gas into it so it contains many megabecquerels of extremely bioactive light gas that has a habit of leaking through solid metal, embrittling containers, and constantly reaching the environment in spite of our best efforts?
Do you think that might be more dangerous then?
> And this is not taking into account the relative cost of fission safety and disposal versus fusion construction and maintenance costs.
Disposal and decom costs for fission is considerably less than 0.1 cent/kW.
LOLZ. Yeah, if you include energy that isn't captured
> Interestingly, D production is much like Aluminum production, it primarily is electrically driven. > And if you have a working fusion reactor, you conveniently have... free electricity, therefore free D.
Ummm, yeah. So I burn extremely expensive fuel to produce more fuel and that's supposed to get magically cheaper?
1) with enough time and money we will get a working fusion reactor 2) and then everything will be great
I suspect #1 is largely true. However, I am largely of the opinion that #2 is absolutely *not* true.
Let's compare a fission reactor with a fusion one. To start with, the vast majority of the generation side of the system is the same - pumps cycle some sort of working fluid through the "core", cooling the core and heating the fluid. The heat in the fluid is then used to drive a turbine. So far so good, one might expect that the cost of this section of the system will be roughly the same between the two designs - or a coal-fired plant for that matter.
Now let's examine the core. The core of a fission reactor is basically a large steel boiler. There are numerous holes into the boiler, through which pass the cooling system and the control rods. Both can be extremely simple, to the point of being manually operated if you're brave enough. Now then there is the fusion core. It consists of a fantastically complicated vessel built out of extremely expensive materials (a number of which are mentioned above). The vessel is then wrapped in a series of superconducting magnets, which are even more fantastically expensive. Around that comes the lithium blanket, which is also expensive (and we have better things to do with that lithium, like make electric cars) and requires a complex and expensive system to recycle the tritium out of it. Controlling all of this is a ridiculously expensive control system which requires real-time reactions down to the milliseconds (again, as noted in the article) based on readings we don't even really know how to make.
And finally, the fuel. Uranium and thorium fuels are literally lying around for the taking, and processing them is essentially identical to the process for making iron - dump rock in, heat, separate layers of fluid, let cool. On the other hand, fusion reactors are based on deuterium, much of it supplied from a heavy water process that is far, far more expensive than nuclear fuel it's currently used with (Pickering, Darlington). That fuel is then used with tritium, even more expensive and crazy dangerous, to breed additional tritium. The breeding takes place in lithium, a flammable metal, which could release its entire load to the air if it catches on fire.
So, does anyone ever expect this to become practical? In order for that to happen, the price of U would have to rise several orders of magnitude, and the cost of D would have to fall close to zero. I grant this a probability that my calculator represents as 0.
"China also has more than 3,000 front companies in the U.S. 'for the sole purpose of acquiring our technology,' said former CIA officer S. Eugene Poteat"
Does anyone else get the feeling that Mr. Poteat has placed *every* Chinese company in that category?
For instance, when I open the map to my local region near Toronto, Toronto does not appear. Vaughan and Brampton, suburbs, do. Now admittedly, there are many "cities" in the area of Toronto, so one might suspect this has something to do with Z-layering or such.
But, no, that does not appear to be a problem.
At the same zoom level, far away in northern Ontario, Haileybury appears. This is a town of a few thousand people. The cites of Sudbury, about 100,000, and North Bay, about 50,000, do not appear at all. Even stranger, when one zooms in on Sudbury (you can see the nest of roads around it on the map), it *never* appears.
If one searches for the city, the hits are places in the UK and USA. If one adds "canada" to the search terms, you get lots of streets and such.
One will not find the city until you select *Greater Sudbury*, the official legal name of the area. Clicking this scrolls to the middle of the town and places an arrow.
> and they could buy a $11,000 Versa to park in the driveway for those "long trips" that theoretically kill the electric car
Or even better?
free/subsidized rental cars of a similar model with zero paperwork.
IE, Toyota signs a deal with Budget to stock a number of (what is the Leaf, the Matrix?) cars as normal rental models. If a Leaf owner comes in, they simply hand in their keys and take a set for the rental model.
> You would still need the same base load provided by something other than solar
Yes, solar is a peaker play.
> more scope for malfunctioning poorly maintained equipment causing problems
More smaller units would generally be more reliable than single larger ones.
> Solar may reduce the bills of those who have the panels, but only due to government subsidy
Until we hit grid parity. This has happened in a number of places already, and it expected to hit about 1/4 to 1/3rd of the US by 2016.
And that number, whatever it is where you live, is only the number that it is due to huge subsidies previously (and in many cases, currently) to those forms of power. Cutting those subsidies would not have a large impact, but it would level the playing field.
> Oil executives might be trying to kill solar power for other reasons
Actually, they largely created cheap PV. They were paying a fortune to power bouys and anti-corrosion systems on oil platforms. Cheap PV was a much better option, so they invented it. It's no coincidence that the largest PV vendors 15 years ago were Exxon and BP.
"The article continues, 'As the market was flooded by both silicon (from silicon producers) and thin-film panels (by Chinese manufacturers), the price for thin-film panels came crashing down – along with Solyndra’s business model..."
This statement is misleading, and largely wrong. The whole idea of thin-film was to lower cost of materials and produce cheaper panels. The lines were engineered from the start to hit price points that were far below conventional techniques.
But just like the semicon world as a whole, rapid upscaling of production largely solved the cost issues on the conventional techniques, and soon those panels were the same price as thin-film. At that point the inherent disadvantages of thin-film made them far less interesting.
These are called "run of river" systems. Instead of a dam that creates an artificial height difference, they are based on using natural changes in height of the landscape. What you do is dig a tube between two points on the river, and the difference in height between the two provides the power.
Although everyone things of dams, run-of-river systems are very common. Niagara Falls is a good example. This project has little visual impact, and none of the detrimental effects normally associated with hydro. The failure modes are also quite benign, generally loss-of-power, not loss-of-life.
I've never seen a good argument not to build these where possible. Except for financial, of course.
"This recommendation would essentially make navigation unusable."
Paper maps don't scroll OR indicate where you are. They've been providing perfectly usable navigation services for thousands of years.
Oh, you mean "automated I'm too lazy to figure out where I'm going before I start the trip because I can't be bothered to learn which way is north" navigation?
I don't see anything outlawing voice systems. Do you?
> but just that he didn't directly speak to people he claimed to speak with
No.
"The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show."
Basically he stated that all of the "bad stories" were simply made up.
> it makes sense to use one good efficient power supply for multiple computers
Yeah, except for the fact that:
1) lower voltages, like those used in computers, have massive losses over even short distances 2) low voltages carry less energy per electron so you have to supply more electrons, which requires MUCH larger wires. copper is frigging expensive
You're almost always better off carrying medium-voltage AC to the components and then stepping it down locally. That's exactly what this article concluded.
That said, I'm still not clear on why the US doesn't use 600V three-phase like we do up here in the GWN. That would help.
No, we're seeing *one* built, and it's purely experimental. And they don't expect to have it until 2020 or so.
"There will always be something that damages some part of the environment"
It doesn't make a difference. Nuclear power is *not* a savour even under the best-case scenarios. Lead times are so huge, and fuel lifetimes so short (like 20 years or less) that the overall impact they'll make is basically zero.
We are *far* better off investing in CCAS technology on large coal plants deploying all the wind and solar we can. Those can go in today and have long operational lifetimes. By the time we get even one *really* new plant up and running, we could have converted the vast majority of existing plants and brought on huge amounts of renewables.
Slashdot Mirror
We bought a seasons pass for a TV show on iTunes on the ATV. It took us a surprisingly long time to figure out how to watch this on the Mac laptop.
The purchase did not appear in the item called "purchases", nor "TV", which only showed the things we already downloaded. Going into the Store, we found the show, and double clicking on it cause a smaller all-black window to appear with an episode list. Clicking on these played the preview. Eventually we figured out that clicking the cloud icon would download the episode. We could then go to the Downloads screen, and double-click to watch it as it streamed.
So logical.
As if this were not enough, last night we could no longer make this work. The episode list that used to open when we double clicked... somewhere... no longer appears. We tried everything.
Its time for this to die.
I run ClickToPlugin in Safari for all the reasons above. During general browsing my fan no longer turns on and my battery lasts days.
Great, so now we'll have a fix for a problem that has caused what, one accident?
Meanwhile, people are still mistaking the gas pedal for the brake all the time.
This "fix" doesn't do anything for the real problem.
> You act like lithium is some expensive, precious metal. It is priced at 10-20 USD per pound
Iron ore is currently running around 7 cents a pound. Copper's going around 6 bux, and that's considered outrageous. So yeah, but just about any definition, it's expensive. Precious? I don't recall anything like that.
> Working with lithium is not that dangerous. It is more dangerous than some other metals
Ok, so it's dangerous, we agree.
Now what if I infuse radioactive gas into it so it contains many megabecquerels of extremely bioactive light gas that has a habit of leaking through solid metal, embrittling containers, and constantly reaching the environment in spite of our best efforts?
Do you think that might be more dangerous then?
> And this is not taking into account the relative cost of fission safety and disposal versus fusion construction and maintenance costs.
Disposal and decom costs for fission is considerably less than 0.1 cent/kW.
LOLZ. Yeah, if you include energy that isn't captured
> None of what you say is individually wrong, but you're very wrong with the overall statement you are making.
If you say so.
> Not all energy advances must make things cheaper per KW directly, not having to deal with (relatively) huge amounts of radioactive waste
There's not a lot of radioactive waste from hydro. And hydro is about 50% built out in the US, and even less in Canada.
So why would I build redunculously expensive fusion when there's lots of hydro left? Or NG, or solar, or wind?
> You're not wrong, but you are so wrong
If you say so.
> Interestingly, D production is much like Aluminum production, it primarily is electrically driven. ... free electricity, therefore free D.
> And if you have a working fusion reactor, you conveniently have
Ummm, yeah. So I burn extremely expensive fuel to produce more fuel and that's supposed to get magically cheaper?
Show me your math. Seriously.
Note the overriding theme of the answers:
1) with enough time and money we will get a working fusion reactor
2) and then everything will be great
I suspect #1 is largely true. However, I am largely of the opinion that #2 is absolutely *not* true.
Let's compare a fission reactor with a fusion one. To start with, the vast majority of the generation side of the system is the same - pumps cycle some sort of working fluid through the "core", cooling the core and heating the fluid. The heat in the fluid is then used to drive a turbine. So far so good, one might expect that the cost of this section of the system will be roughly the same between the two designs - or a coal-fired plant for that matter.
Now let's examine the core. The core of a fission reactor is basically a large steel boiler. There are numerous holes into the boiler, through which pass the cooling system and the control rods. Both can be extremely simple, to the point of being manually operated if you're brave enough. Now then there is the fusion core. It consists of a fantastically complicated vessel built out of extremely expensive materials (a number of which are mentioned above). The vessel is then wrapped in a series of superconducting magnets, which are even more fantastically expensive. Around that comes the lithium blanket, which is also expensive (and we have better things to do with that lithium, like make electric cars) and requires a complex and expensive system to recycle the tritium out of it. Controlling all of this is a ridiculously expensive control system which requires real-time reactions down to the milliseconds (again, as noted in the article) based on readings we don't even really know how to make.
And finally, the fuel. Uranium and thorium fuels are literally lying around for the taking, and processing them is essentially identical to the process for making iron - dump rock in, heat, separate layers of fluid, let cool. On the other hand, fusion reactors are based on deuterium, much of it supplied from a heavy water process that is far, far more expensive than nuclear fuel it's currently used with (Pickering, Darlington). That fuel is then used with tritium, even more expensive and crazy dangerous, to breed additional tritium. The breeding takes place in lithium, a flammable metal, which could release its entire load to the air if it catches on fire.
So, does anyone ever expect this to become practical? In order for that to happen, the price of U would have to rise several orders of magnitude, and the cost of D would have to fall close to zero. I grant this a probability that my calculator represents as 0.
"China also has more than 3,000 front companies in the U.S. 'for the sole purpose of acquiring our technology,' said former CIA officer S. Eugene Poteat"
Does anyone else get the feeling that Mr. Poteat has placed *every* Chinese company in that category?
I'm not so sure its even great at that.
For instance, when I open the map to my local region near Toronto, Toronto does not appear. Vaughan and Brampton, suburbs, do. Now admittedly, there are many "cities" in the area of Toronto, so one might suspect this has something to do with Z-layering or such.
But, no, that does not appear to be a problem.
At the same zoom level, far away in northern Ontario, Haileybury appears. This is a town of a few thousand people. The cites of Sudbury, about 100,000, and North Bay, about 50,000, do not appear at all. Even stranger, when one zooms in on Sudbury (you can see the nest of roads around it on the map), it *never* appears.
If one searches for the city, the hits are places in the UK and USA. If one adds "canada" to the search terms, you get lots of streets and such.
One will not find the city until you select *Greater Sudbury*, the official legal name of the area. Clicking this scrolls to the middle of the town and places an arrow.
This really isn't useful.
Doesn't every product, everywhere, pass this test?
So, this is worthy of the front page why?
> and they could buy a $11,000 Versa to park in the driveway for those "long trips" that theoretically kill the electric car
Or even better?
free/subsidized rental cars of a similar model with zero paperwork.
IE, Toyota signs a deal with Budget to stock a number of (what is the Leaf, the Matrix?) cars as normal rental models. If a Leaf owner comes in, they simply hand in their keys and take a set for the rental model.
Yes? Would this do it?
> You would still need the same base load provided by something other than solar
Yes, solar is a peaker play.
> more scope for malfunctioning poorly maintained equipment causing problems
More smaller units would generally be more reliable than single larger ones.
> Solar may reduce the bills of those who have the panels, but only due to government subsidy
Until we hit grid parity. This has happened in a number of places already, and it expected to hit about 1/4 to 1/3rd of the US by 2016.
And that number, whatever it is where you live, is only the number that it is due to huge subsidies previously (and in many cases, currently) to those forms of power. Cutting those subsidies would not have a large impact, but it would level the playing field.
> Oil executives might be trying to kill solar power for other reasons
Actually, they largely created cheap PV. They were paying a fortune to power bouys and anti-corrosion systems on oil platforms. Cheap PV was a much better option, so they invented it. It's no coincidence that the largest PV vendors 15 years ago were Exxon and BP.
"The article continues, 'As the market was flooded by both silicon (from silicon producers) and thin-film panels (by Chinese manufacturers), the price for thin-film panels came crashing down – along with Solyndra’s business model. .."
This statement is misleading, and largely wrong. The whole idea of thin-film was to lower cost of materials and produce cheaper panels. The lines were engineered from the start to hit price points that were far below conventional techniques.
But just like the semicon world as a whole, rapid upscaling of production largely solved the cost issues on the conventional techniques, and soon those panels were the same price as thin-film. At that point the inherent disadvantages of thin-film made them far less interesting.
"You may have noticed that we've posted quite a few original videos on Slashdot in the past few months"
Yes, and I hate them. Please stop putting them in the stream.
> ...and their environmental effect.
I think you missed this part:
"produce power from underwater turbines"
These are called "run of river" systems. Instead of a dam that creates an artificial height difference, they are based on using natural changes in height of the landscape. What you do is dig a tube between two points on the river, and the difference in height between the two provides the power.
Although everyone things of dams, run-of-river systems are very common. Niagara Falls is a good example. This project has little visual impact, and none of the detrimental effects normally associated with hydro. The failure modes are also quite benign, generally loss-of-power, not loss-of-life.
I've never seen a good argument not to build these where possible. Except for financial, of course.
> How is that "better" than a browser open you can Alt-Tab to and refresh in two keystrokes?
Because you can watch where each piece of code ends up on the screen.
That is *not* obvious when using a classic preview system.
"This recommendation would essentially make navigation unusable."
Paper maps don't scroll OR indicate where you are. They've been providing perfectly usable navigation services for thousands of years.
Oh, you mean "automated I'm too lazy to figure out where I'm going before I start the trip because I can't be bothered to learn which way is north" navigation?
I don't see anything outlawing voice systems. Do you?
"Therefore, a superconductor which would allow us to eliminate the massive amounts of wastage in our electrical infrastructure "
The wastage in the electric infrastructure, on a whole, is about 7% in the US. Speaking of long-distance transmission only, it's closer to 3%
There's not much to fix here, so unless the new superconductor is also free, I don't think you'd see the massive uptake people imagine.
The main upside would be size, not cost. Assuming it has higher current density, piping power into urban areas becomes easier.
> How would YOU feel if you just went to bed at 9 or 10, and then suddenly your
> bosses wake you up at midnight to work another 12 hour shift?
I don't know, but you could ask anyone who was cogent in 1940.
> was spelled "Wu", not "Woo".
Spelling is often lost in translation.
Until my great grandfather got to Ellis, our family name was "Smith"
> but just that he didn't directly speak to people he claimed to speak with
No.
"The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show."
Basically he stated that all of the "bad stories" were simply made up.
Phew, I wasn't the only one.
> it makes sense to use one good efficient power supply for multiple computers
Yeah, except for the fact that:
1) lower voltages, like those used in computers, have massive losses over even short distances
2) low voltages carry less energy per electron so you have to supply more electrons, which requires MUCH larger wires. copper is frigging expensive
You're almost always better off carrying medium-voltage AC to the components and then stepping it down locally. That's exactly what this article concluded.
That said, I'm still not clear on why the US doesn't use 600V three-phase like we do up here in the GWN. That would help.
"liquid fueled molten salt reactors"
No, we're seeing *one* built, and it's purely experimental. And they don't expect to have it until 2020 or so.
"There will always be something that damages some part of the environment"
It doesn't make a difference. Nuclear power is *not* a savour even under the best-case scenarios. Lead times are so huge, and fuel lifetimes so short (like 20 years or less) that the overall impact they'll make is basically zero.
We are *far* better off investing in CCAS technology on large coal plants deploying all the wind and solar we can. Those can go in today and have long operational lifetimes. By the time we get even one *really* new plant up and running, we could have converted the vast majority of existing plants and brought on huge amounts of renewables.