Another interesting point: My current vehicle can travel almost double that distance on a tank of gasoline, and takes seconds to refill. This is important because it's almost 500 miles to the next city from where I live -- I can travel to the next city with one tank of gas, but I'd need to refill the battery 3 times to comfortably make it by electric car, since I'm not going to let my batteries run to 0%.
Will the 8 hour drive to the next town become a multiple day journey? Will I need to start planning to visit hotels where now I can just ignore the towns? Will we see a re-emergence of small refueling towns, as we saw in the age of coal-based rail, thanks to the significantly reduced range of our vehicles?
To be honest, I've got a bit of a natural filter. I don't like anyone on the extreme left OR the extreme right. They tend to destroy legitimate discussion.
It feels like being in a room where the internet just cut out and two people are arguing over whether to restart the router or the modem. Both have legitimate points, but it turns out the problem was that there was a cable unplugged.
I'm certain I'm not alone when I say "Way to go, nintendo".
I know why they did it, there has been a constant worry from closed-source developers that the GPL would force closed source code open. Nintendo is just covering their ass.
Of course, Majesco made Psychonaughts, so the idea of booting their content off of a console for any reason sounds like a suicidal path.
I live in Canada. When our prairie provinces were settled, farmers planted hundreds of thousands of trees. Today, you can see trees lining both sides of the highway for thousands of miles when you cross the prairies.
The reason they planted the trees was the insanely high winds. The 'dust bowl' of the US that helped cause the great depression was caused in part by these same winds, paired with the lack of deep roots keeping the soil seated. Planting trees caused the soil to become more firm, but also had the effect of slowing the prairie winds.
But the problem is we don't get away from fossil fuels, we're just transferring.
Unlike most people you'd call 'skeptic', I actually think protecting the earth is a good thing to do. The only thing is, we need to actually protect the earth, rather than doing things that makes us feel good. In other posts, I liken it to diet food. Millions of fat people buy diet food, but never bother doing the things they need to do in order to lose weight. By contrast, I lost 200lbs on a diet of my own creation, and have kept it off, and the way I did it was looking at the facts instead of things that made me feel good -- drinking water instead of juice or soda, or cutting out entire meals, or eating low calorie snacks instead of 'feel good' higher calorie snacks.
In this thread, I've been called brainwashed, I've been accused of being paid, and all sorts of things, just becuase I don't think we should ignore the environmental costs of our alternatives.
Maybe the reason is that I live in the north, where protesters routinely hate hydroelectric dams, which are about as environmentally friendly as things get -- kill a few acres of forest in exchange for hundreds of years of high volume electricity.
Here in the north, there are massive protests over hydroelectric dams.
Hydroelectric dams.
One of the single most practical and environmentally-safe forms of electricty in existence, and we're hearing protests over a few dams.
Where I live, whenever someone turns on a light, it's hydroelectricity that powers the bulb. Not coal, not oil, not natural gas. Water rushing through a turbine. There are huge protests. It's incredibly controversial.
True environmentalism isn't some simple quick fix. You can't just start sucking up diet energy and hope that'll make the problem go away. You need to realise that we live in a global ecosystem that's impossible to live in without changing it, and we need to figure out the best way to move towards a truly sustainable existence. This existence will NOT be some quick fix that'll let a few companies get rich quick. If you want to fuck the environent up beyond recognition, go ahead and buy into every single 'get green quick' scheme you can find.
Of course, I'm one of the engineers you'll need to rely on to actually get these schemes to work. Every day I work at increasing energy efficiency, so unlike the brainwashed proles on both sides of the debate, I have some idea of what's involved.
YOU are part of the fucking problem. People like me have legitimate problems with the feasibility of the current ideas, and automatically we're bought and paid for, as if nobody on your side (black liquor/diesel hybrid subsidy anyone?) is a shill trying to get government tax dollars.
I've already determined (check my journal) that current electrical capacity isn't even close to what we're going to need to transition away from fossil fuels -- we're looking at a factor of 10. Given that, how about YOU tell me how many millions or billions of windmills we're going to have to create to meet those needs, and what the environmental impact of that will be?
Of course, unlike me, you're not going to do the math because you're either a shill or a brainwashed prole. You're either paid not to care or you're too comfortable with your dogma to care.
Many years ago, I weighed 400lbs. I managed to very quickly get my weight down to 160lbs, and I've kept it around 200lbs for years afterwards.
The first step in the process was NOT buying a bunch of stuff with "diet" slapped next to the name. The first step in the process was figuring out what was going on in my body, figuring out how weight loss and gain happened, figuring out energy inputs and outputs, and building a plan that would get the results I wanted.
Along the way, lots of people tried to give me "common sense" that was misguided or just plain wrong. People would give me muffins, nuts, orange juice, and other high calorie foods that had no place in my plan. Before I'd even hit my safe BMI range, people would beg me to stop, saying I'd lost too much weight and I was going to kill myself (Keep in mind my final weight was exactly in my BMI range).
That's what all this renewable stuff is. It's 'diet energy'. It's almost completely meaningless without looking at the whole picture, like I did when I was dieting.
If you don't think that putting billions of wind turbines anywhere we can stick one will have a bigger ecological impact than coal mining, you're not thinking hard enough, and all the mods modding me down for saying this simple and reasonable truth need to take a long look in the mirror.
If the goal is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, electrical consumption will need to increase many times. Ammonia production(Critical for the human race to keep on eating) takes energy equivilent to one fifth of total world electricity generating capacity, and that's just one industry. Metals refining, cement kilns, there's countless examples of things that would use a significant amount of humanity's electricity generating capacity except they use fossil fuels.
Domestic use is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of energy we'd need to displace to get rid of physical petroleum products.
I've written already about the huge subsidy electricity provides. The reason electrical use is so low is that we tend to use fossil fuels to provide fuel to practically everything we do. If process industries started using electricity instead of fossil fuels, we'd be looking at a several-fold increase in electrical usage. If vehicles started using electricity, we'd be looking at another massive increase in electrical usage. If we started looking at heating homes with electricity instead of natural gas, we'd be looking at yet another huge increase.
Even ignoring the fact that electricity usage would have to go up by a factor of 10 easily, you're talking about putting these massive obelisks over a surface area larger than Europe. Fact is, this alone would be the largest engineering project in human history, even at 1/40th of the scale. The effects of construction would be felt world-wide.
Compared to what's being proposed? You better fucking believe it.
This isn't a few coal mines somewhere. What's being proposed is covering the entire globe in massive obelisks. If you can't comprehend how insanely destuctive this undertaking would be, it's because it would basically constitue an engineering project larger than the sum of human endeavor's to this point.
It seems to me we'd have to rape the earth in a way most of us would consider fairly extreme to erect giant concrete towers on every square meter of ocean and land. The ecolgical impact of billions of tonnes of raw materials being mined would be astronomical.
I've installed XP many many times over the past few weeks. Besides 3 service packs (you must install 1a before you can install 3, but 2 isn't required), autopatcher ends up grabbing about a gigabyte worth of patches and updates and upgrades before your base XP is up to date.
It's actually pretty shocking -- The patches for XP are larger than XP's install media.
Manpower is expensive. If the current methods fulfil all the requirements, why exactly would they waste time re-engineering all their software? They could likely buy hardware with the same money that'd allow greater expansion of capability than re-engineering the software AND adding new hardware.
Yeah, The Internet is a fucking hypocrite. It's almost like it's an amalgamation of a huge number of people with a huge number of differing opinions instead of a single entity. Doesn't it know it must be internally consistent, ideologically!?
So they lied about linux containing unix code. Then they lied about owning full unix rights. Then they lied constantly about their ability to handle it in court. Then they lied to the court by using stalling tactics pretending they needed information.
Maybe they're lying? You know, flat-out, bald faced shameless lying? They're already so badly in trouble in the courts, what's one more lie if it helps stave off death a bit longer?
After seeing the tech for myself, I don't see any reason why a reliable fanless mid-range system can't exist. All the tools already exist. After this discussion, now I'm seriously considering building one just to show that it's possible to cool a reasonably powerful machine entirely with convection currents and smart vent placement.
See, even though it's been about every 5 years, that's partially because of the rapid growth of capability. By the time 5 years had passed, there was new and incredible things that current hardware simply couldn't do.
In 2001, you'd be playing games on a Geforce 2, with the Geforce 3 just coming out in March. In 2005, by contrast, you'd be playing on a 6800 or 7800. The playing field fundamentally changed.
Contrast this with today. There are new video cards, but the 6800 and 7800 are perfectly reasonable video cards for most games. There have been incremental changes, but nothing that popped out of nowhere to change the landscape.
In processing power, the same was true. In 2001, you'd be playing on an Athlon XP, tops. By 2005, you'd be running on a dual-core Athlon 64. Today, you're running on....a dual-core Athlon 64.
I'm not saying we'll see the lifespan double, but we're going to have to see much more improvements in technology to justify both consumers and companies spending the money rolling out new consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no such thing as either an AC engine or a DC engine.
They're called motors.
Every manufacturer test-marketed electric vehicles in the California market, not just GM.
None of them panned out because the cars were ridiculously expensive to build so they had to lease them at a fraction of cost.
GM is bankrupt. How would building yet another unprofitable vehicle help them?
Another interesting point: My current vehicle can travel almost double that distance on a tank of gasoline, and takes seconds to refill. This is important because it's almost 500 miles to the next city from where I live -- I can travel to the next city with one tank of gas, but I'd need to refill the battery 3 times to comfortably make it by electric car, since I'm not going to let my batteries run to 0%.
Will the 8 hour drive to the next town become a multiple day journey? Will I need to start planning to visit hotels where now I can just ignore the towns? Will we see a re-emergence of small refueling towns, as we saw in the age of coal-based rail, thanks to the significantly reduced range of our vehicles?
To be honest, I've got a bit of a natural filter. I don't like anyone on the extreme left OR the extreme right. They tend to destroy legitimate discussion.
It feels like being in a room where the internet just cut out and two people are arguing over whether to restart the router or the modem. Both have legitimate points, but it turns out the problem was that there was a cable unplugged.
Since when?
I've never seen anything even remotely close to such a thing.
I'm certain I'm not alone when I say "Way to go, nintendo".
I know why they did it, there has been a constant worry from closed-source developers that the GPL would force closed source code open. Nintendo is just covering their ass.
Of course, Majesco made Psychonaughts, so the idea of booting their content off of a console for any reason sounds like a suicidal path.
I live in Canada. When our prairie provinces were settled, farmers planted hundreds of thousands of trees. Today, you can see trees lining both sides of the highway for thousands of miles when you cross the prairies.
The reason they planted the trees was the insanely high winds. The 'dust bowl' of the US that helped cause the great depression was caused in part by these same winds, paired with the lack of deep roots keeping the soil seated. Planting trees caused the soil to become more firm, but also had the effect of slowing the prairie winds.
But the problem is we don't get away from fossil fuels, we're just transferring.
Unlike most people you'd call 'skeptic', I actually think protecting the earth is a good thing to do. The only thing is, we need to actually protect the earth, rather than doing things that makes us feel good. In other posts, I liken it to diet food. Millions of fat people buy diet food, but never bother doing the things they need to do in order to lose weight. By contrast, I lost 200lbs on a diet of my own creation, and have kept it off, and the way I did it was looking at the facts instead of things that made me feel good -- drinking water instead of juice or soda, or cutting out entire meals, or eating low calorie snacks instead of 'feel good' higher calorie snacks.
In this thread, I've been called brainwashed, I've been accused of being paid, and all sorts of things, just becuase I don't think we should ignore the environmental costs of our alternatives.
Maybe the reason is that I live in the north, where protesters routinely hate hydroelectric dams, which are about as environmentally friendly as things get -- kill a few acres of forest in exchange for hundreds of years of high volume electricity.
Who is brainwashed here?
Here in the north, there are massive protests over hydroelectric dams.
Hydroelectric dams.
One of the single most practical and environmentally-safe forms of electricty in existence, and we're hearing protests over a few dams.
Where I live, whenever someone turns on a light, it's hydroelectricity that powers the bulb. Not coal, not oil, not natural gas. Water rushing through a turbine. There are huge protests. It's incredibly controversial.
True environmentalism isn't some simple quick fix. You can't just start sucking up diet energy and hope that'll make the problem go away. You need to realise that we live in a global ecosystem that's impossible to live in without changing it, and we need to figure out the best way to move towards a truly sustainable existence. This existence will NOT be some quick fix that'll let a few companies get rich quick. If you want to fuck the environent up beyond recognition, go ahead and buy into every single 'get green quick' scheme you can find.
Of course, I'm one of the engineers you'll need to rely on to actually get these schemes to work. Every day I work at increasing energy efficiency, so unlike the brainwashed proles on both sides of the debate, I have some idea of what's involved.
YOU are part of the fucking problem. People like me have legitimate problems with the feasibility of the current ideas, and automatically we're bought and paid for, as if nobody on your side (black liquor/diesel hybrid subsidy anyone?) is a shill trying to get government tax dollars.
I've already determined (check my journal) that current electrical capacity isn't even close to what we're going to need to transition away from fossil fuels -- we're looking at a factor of 10. Given that, how about YOU tell me how many millions or billions of windmills we're going to have to create to meet those needs, and what the environmental impact of that will be?
Of course, unlike me, you're not going to do the math because you're either a shill or a brainwashed prole. You're either paid not to care or you're too comfortable with your dogma to care.
Let me tell you something about common sense.
Many years ago, I weighed 400lbs. I managed to very quickly get my weight down to 160lbs, and I've kept it around 200lbs for years afterwards.
The first step in the process was NOT buying a bunch of stuff with "diet" slapped next to the name. The first step in the process was figuring out what was going on in my body, figuring out how weight loss and gain happened, figuring out energy inputs and outputs, and building a plan that would get the results I wanted.
Along the way, lots of people tried to give me "common sense" that was misguided or just plain wrong. People would give me muffins, nuts, orange juice, and other high calorie foods that had no place in my plan. Before I'd even hit my safe BMI range, people would beg me to stop, saying I'd lost too much weight and I was going to kill myself (Keep in mind my final weight was exactly in my BMI range).
That's what all this renewable stuff is. It's 'diet energy'. It's almost completely meaningless without looking at the whole picture, like I did when I was dieting.
If you don't think that putting billions of wind turbines anywhere we can stick one will have a bigger ecological impact than coal mining, you're not thinking hard enough, and all the mods modding me down for saying this simple and reasonable truth need to take a long look in the mirror.
If the goal is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, electrical consumption will need to increase many times. Ammonia production(Critical for the human race to keep on eating) takes energy equivilent to one fifth of total world electricity generating capacity, and that's just one industry. Metals refining, cement kilns, there's countless examples of things that would use a significant amount of humanity's electricity generating capacity except they use fossil fuels.
Domestic use is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of energy we'd need to displace to get rid of physical petroleum products.
I've written already about the huge subsidy electricity provides. The reason electrical use is so low is that we tend to use fossil fuels to provide fuel to practically everything we do. If process industries started using electricity instead of fossil fuels, we'd be looking at a several-fold increase in electrical usage. If vehicles started using electricity, we'd be looking at another massive increase in electrical usage. If we started looking at heating homes with electricity instead of natural gas, we'd be looking at yet another huge increase.
Even ignoring the fact that electricity usage would have to go up by a factor of 10 easily, you're talking about putting these massive obelisks over a surface area larger than Europe. Fact is, this alone would be the largest engineering project in human history, even at 1/40th of the scale. The effects of construction would be felt world-wide.
Compared to what's being proposed? You better fucking believe it.
This isn't a few coal mines somewhere. What's being proposed is covering the entire globe in massive obelisks. If you can't comprehend how insanely destuctive this undertaking would be, it's because it would basically constitue an engineering project larger than the sum of human endeavor's to this point.
It seems to me we'd have to rape the earth in a way most of us would consider fairly extreme to erect giant concrete towers on every square meter of ocean and land. The ecolgical impact of billions of tonnes of raw materials being mined would be astronomical.
OBJECTION!
Everyone who has used Windows 7 knows it runs great on 1GB of memory! In fact, it runs on most netbooks without even installing new drivers!
(slams hands on the desk)
Your argument isn't based on fact, only your own blind hatred!
(Seriously, I need to stop playing that game...)
No security can withstand the incredible power of having huge balls.
Listen Steve, I'm going to beat you to death with my maglite during your morning commute if you don't lay off on this stupid shit.
Those two patches aren't all it takes.
I've installed XP many many times over the past few weeks. Besides 3 service packs (you must install 1a before you can install 3, but 2 isn't required), autopatcher ends up grabbing about a gigabyte worth of patches and updates and upgrades before your base XP is up to date.
It's actually pretty shocking -- The patches for XP are larger than XP's install media.
Manpower is expensive. If the current methods fulfil all the requirements, why exactly would they waste time re-engineering all their software? They could likely buy hardware with the same money that'd allow greater expansion of capability than re-engineering the software AND adding new hardware.
I'm positive there's been a bong involved the whole time.
Yeah, The Internet is a fucking hypocrite. It's almost like it's an amalgamation of a huge number of people with a huge number of differing opinions instead of a single entity. Doesn't it know it must be internally consistent, ideologically!?
Hang on.
So they lied about linux containing unix code.
Then they lied about owning full unix rights.
Then they lied constantly about their ability to handle it in court.
Then they lied to the court by using stalling tactics pretending they needed information.
Maybe they're lying? You know, flat-out, bald faced shameless lying? They're already so badly in trouble in the courts, what's one more lie if it helps stave off death a bit longer?
After seeing the tech for myself, I don't see any reason why a reliable fanless mid-range system can't exist. All the tools already exist. After this discussion, now I'm seriously considering building one just to show that it's possible to cool a reasonably powerful machine entirely with convection currents and smart vent placement.
I've got a bit of an issue there.
See, even though it's been about every 5 years, that's partially because of the rapid growth of capability. By the time 5 years had passed, there was new and incredible things that current hardware simply couldn't do.
In 2001, you'd be playing games on a Geforce 2, with the Geforce 3 just coming out in March. In 2005, by contrast, you'd be playing on a 6800 or 7800. The playing field fundamentally changed.
Contrast this with today. There are new video cards, but the 6800 and 7800 are perfectly reasonable video cards for most games. There have been incremental changes, but nothing that popped out of nowhere to change the landscape.
In processing power, the same was true. In 2001, you'd be playing on an Athlon XP, tops. By 2005, you'd be running on a dual-core Athlon 64. Today, you're running on....a dual-core Athlon 64.
I'm not saying we'll see the lifespan double, but we're going to have to see much more improvements in technology to justify both consumers and companies spending the money rolling out new consoles.