Solar power into electrolysis to create hydrogen and oxygen and store as needed for cloudy/still days.
> 1. You can site them anywhere. Solar and wind
> have to be sited where there is solar and wind.
Fuel Transport - Oil and Coal aren't everywhere either yet they seem to work just peachy pretty much anywhere.
> 2. They are available 24/7. Solar and wind are
> up to mother nature.
See #1 rebuttal - transport fuel from generation to usage location.
>3. They have a higher power density. You need
>less area to power a bunch of homes. This >translates into more safety, and ultimately a >lower land use footprint, leaving more room for,
>well, things that live in the environment.
I wont argue solar/wind have high densities, that's not their focus. They are low impact solutions that can be widely distributed where they will function best. And as a benefit they function best in areas that we generally don't occupy (deserts, mountains, crop fields). The nuclear 'sheds' as proposed are also an example of this, rather than a single massive plant, lots of smaller plants throughout the area. Same concept but a very different implementation.
> 4. Lower environmental risk. We have barely
>studied the long term effects caused by draining
>energy out of the wind, or, of robbing the ground
>from solar energy to convert to electricity. The
>aggregate effects of billions of windmills and
>solar panels upon the earth are not understood.
>With nukes, we know the risks. We might have a
>meltdown, some radiation, and a leak, but that's
>about it.
You're claiming that NUCLEAR has lower environmental RISK? please tell me you'll be at my local comedy club soon, friggin hilarious. Lower environ EFFECT? *possibly* IF nothing bad happens, but risk? no chance in hell it's lower.
I'd say that if robbing wind energy were at all a detriment to life, trees pretty much would have killed us by now. Mountains too for that matter.
Trees again rob precious sunlight from the ground, as do clouds.
Maybe you'll claim that robbing water of it's gravity energy is bad too? (Dams)
As for 'we might have a meltdown, some radiation, and leaks' go ask Chernobyl k?
Yes, there's some amount nuclear waste, but there sure isn't much.
So we can drop off that 'not much' waste in your backyard? Nuclear waste is bad stuff, even in small amounts.
Nuclear is only 'green' when you exclude the waste issue.
Anything that produces waste that must be maintained for thousands of years isn't a sustainable process.
It's funny in that it's the reverse of fossil fuels which use thousands/millions of years worth of buildup for a few days/weeks of power. With nuclear you get a few days/weeks of power in exchange for thousands of years of management of the after affects.
Coal/Oil is perfectly green if you don't consider the waste it produces too.
as an aside, in my fantasy world couldn't we fire the nuclear waste into the Sun? It strikes of the anti-environ folks who claim that humans can't possibly affect the global climate. But as a serious question, could we as a planet possibly produce enough nuclear waste to actually affect the Sun significantly enough to matter to us? If we shorten it's life by a million years, isn't that still 2-3 million years before we get there?
Yes a bigger screen with large objects won't have too much trouble, but what if you have a TV broadcast on screen and want to touch a small area of a scrolling banner like a stock ticker or something similar?
Surface is just another type of old style touchscreen. You operate it from the front, so your hands and fingers are still in the way of line of sight.
This tech would be if you were reaching under the table. And given they've marketed 'Surface' as something that would be used in a bar...I'm thinking this wouldn't be a fun 'surface' to touch;-)
agreed, but lets say that compressing a solid caused it to:
a) generate electricty which in turn
b) generates heat
Vent the heat to the atmosphere and you've converted your mechanical into electrical using only the already existing forces. While it isn't 'free' by energy standards, it is 'free' in terms of the inputs of the closed system you're talking about.
My brain wants to equate it with regenerative braking in hybrid cars. You have the extra 10% (total guess) weight of the regen system to lower your mileage a bit, but you get the regenerative force of 100% vehicle weight in return. Not 'free' obviously, but in this case you're recouping some of the energy you converted from fuel into kinetic potential energy back into electrical. There's a small payment for a larger return.
Like I said though it all depends on how much energy is required to roll from one tile to the next, that's the 'cost'. If it's not significantly lower than the energy generated it obviously doesn't work.
You make a good point. The issue is the amount of compression. If it's on the molecular scale, you like *do* get something resembling free energy.
The extra 'work' you mention comes when the wheel rolls off of a compressed tile and 'up' onto the next non-compressed tile. If that height is negligible compared to the rolling resistance it would present, it would seem to give you energy with little in the way of 'cost'.
Of course I don't know details about this technology (mostly because i didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night I'm guessing) so I might be wildly wrong, but I think that's what the GP was probably angling at.
one slight difference, email is external, so has to pass through filters and gateways to every get inside the organization.
USB drives start out *inside*.
Systems are generally pretty well hardened against external threats, or at least to the point of diminishing returns. It's the internal threats that are wildly unaddressed in many cases.
My first thought was "Blair Witch" will have *nothing* on the nausea inspiring motion of a human eye when someone views this recorded video stream on a stationary screen...
My understanding is something like "personal use accounts are free with a capped amount of data, but if you want it all and/or to use it for business, that costs money"
And the PHB here wants to just use multiple 'personal' accounts to get around that stipulation.
DST served a useful purpose at one time. It *does* reduce energy usage...for lighting. Back in the early part of the 20th century, the largest portion of home electrical usage was for lighting. Nowadays it's such a small part this savings has no measurable effect.
The effect it does have is actually increasing energy usage as people crank on the AC when they get home earlier in the daylight of afternoon and it's hotter. And AC is vastly more expensive to operate than a bulb.
Indeed the show "Ice Road Truckers" shows the invaluable use of driving over ice.
However, it's a lot easier to freeze an ice cube than an entire bath tub. Lakes/rivers will freeze a lot faster than the ocean. Hence having years of ice buildup is necessary for comparable ice thickness in the oceans.
one other point, lakes and rivers are generally 'fresh' water while the oceans are salty. Another reason why they freeze quicker and thicker. Even those 'ice roads' are being reduced in their duration every year due to global warming.
Agreed. My point is that the 'new' ice that is forming is at that perimeter (which is now farther from shore). So not only are they on 'thin ice' but it's much farther away from where it has been.
*polar* bears don't go anywhere near the arctic? bzzzt fail
They *LIVE* on the sea ice in the winter, and they're going to be extinct in the wild because now it's so far from shore they have to swim miles further out. Once they do get there, the 'season' is much shorter so they have less time to feed on the seals. linky The seals themselves are threatened even more because they have to birth on the ice.
Do you want to walk on ice that froze an hour ago? or ice that's been solidly frozen for decades?
The ice 'recovery' is a misnomer, even if it covers the entire arctic at peak winter, it won't be very thick compared with persistent perennial ice cover that has existed and built up thickness for hundreds/thousands of years.
Replacing 'steel' with 'balsa wood' doesn't mean the structure can hold up the same weight. i.e. polar bears.
Or you have the computer print out a scanable paper ballot once you've selected your votes. You verify it's correct and then hand put that *paper* into the ballot box (or the system puts it in it's own box).
All the benefits of computer tabulation, none of the mysterious 'deletion' downside. You have the computer count to verify against the existing paper count.
Nothing like a separate count to verify the official count.
it's not 'evaporation' but decomposition and yes that does produce quite a lot of gaseous emissions.
from linky:
"The chemical aspects of plant decomposition always involve the release of carbon dioxide."
It's also the basis for quite a few methane recoupment projects at landfills; stuff decays and becomes gaseous. Microbes, bacteria, etc all work to decompose matter into various parts of the original.
As for how long a tree lasts, I'd pull a figure out of the ether and say 100 yrs on average for all trees. We know a few are a cpl thousand, but even that is very young in terms of the cyclical nature of the environment of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, even millions.
You're right on the money about not having a good idea of the actual cost to benefit ratio.
But some factors to consider:
how much will it cost to relocate the hundreds of millions of people as sea levels rise? That won't be cheap.
how expensive to farm land that's now a desert?
how much more A/C used in areas that are hotter now (obviously offset by some less heating costs used in arctic/cold regions - but most people don't live there)
I'm sure there are lots of other factors going both ways on cost, but I think it's reasonable to assume the vast majority of the effect will be increasing costs associated with global warming.
Assuming you can run the towers on solar, and the transport vehicles are run on hydrogen produced from solar, etc, the 'costs' of running the system can be reduced pretty significantly.
the tree *is* carbon. if it 'goes away' the carbon comes back into the environment, whether from burning or decay.
CO2 goes into tree, O2 comes out. The carbon stays in the tree. If the tree disappears the 'C' didn't disappear, it just changed it's properties (solid -> gas).
Look at a graph of seasonal CO2 levels and in the fall and winter, it goes up as the leaves fall off and decay. Same thing happens when the tree dies, just on a bigger and longer scale.
Some shops will keep him in that position forever if he lets them.
Same difference. If he doesn't actively try and move up in what he's admitting is an inferior environment to his skillset, how's he going to pan out when he's working with peers or more advanced people? If he quit and went to another company after 3 months because of no promotion, then that says something about his character. Having a "I'll sit here and take it" attitude isn't exactly a winning strategy in interviews.
Slashdot Mirror
try reading the previous line, solar/wind converts into hydrogen gas via electrolysis. You truck/pipe the hydrogen around....
Next point:
Cars have existed for, lets see, maybe a hundred and fifty years? Fossil fuel combustion engines for slightly longer than that.
How long have trees been around again?
Solar power into electrolysis to create hydrogen and oxygen and store as needed for cloudy/still days.
> 1. You can site them anywhere. Solar and wind
> have to be sited where there is solar and wind.
Fuel Transport - Oil and Coal aren't everywhere either yet they seem to work just peachy pretty much anywhere.
> 2. They are available 24/7. Solar and wind are
> up to mother nature.
See #1 rebuttal - transport fuel from generation to usage location.
>3. They have a higher power density. You need
>less area to power a bunch of homes. This
>translates into more safety, and ultimately a
>lower land use footprint, leaving more room for,
>well, things that live in the environment.
I wont argue solar/wind have high densities, that's not their focus. They are low impact solutions that can be widely distributed where they will function best. And as a benefit they function best in areas that we generally don't occupy (deserts, mountains, crop fields). The nuclear 'sheds' as proposed are also an example of this, rather than a single massive plant, lots of smaller plants throughout the area. Same concept but a very different implementation.
> 4. Lower environmental risk. We have barely
>studied the long term effects caused by draining
>energy out of the wind, or, of robbing the ground
>from solar energy to convert to electricity. The
>aggregate effects of billions of windmills and
>solar panels upon the earth are not understood.
>With nukes, we know the risks. We might have a
>meltdown, some radiation, and a leak, but that's
>about it. You're claiming that NUCLEAR has lower environmental RISK? please tell me you'll be at my local comedy club soon, friggin hilarious. Lower environ EFFECT? *possibly* IF nothing bad happens, but risk? no chance in hell it's lower.
I'd say that if robbing wind energy were at all a detriment to life, trees pretty much would have killed us by now. Mountains too for that matter.
Trees again rob precious sunlight from the ground, as do clouds.
Maybe you'll claim that robbing water of it's gravity energy is bad too? (Dams)
As for 'we might have a meltdown, some radiation, and leaks' go ask Chernobyl k?
Solar = Electricity = Electrolysis = hydrogen = infinite storage of the energy for fuel cells.
So we can drop off that 'not much' waste in your backyard? Nuclear waste is bad stuff, even in small amounts.
Nuclear is only 'green' when you exclude the waste issue.
Anything that produces waste that must be maintained for thousands of years isn't a sustainable process.
It's funny in that it's the reverse of fossil fuels which use thousands/millions of years worth of buildup for a few days/weeks of power. With nuclear you get a few days/weeks of power in exchange for thousands of years of management of the after affects.
Coal/Oil is perfectly green if you don't consider the waste it produces too.
as an aside, in my fantasy world couldn't we fire the nuclear waste into the Sun? It strikes of the anti-environ folks who claim that humans can't possibly affect the global climate. But as a serious question, could we as a planet possibly produce enough nuclear waste to actually affect the Sun significantly enough to matter to us? If we shorten it's life by a million years, isn't that still 2-3 million years before we get there?
it all depends on the resolution used.
Yes a bigger screen with large objects won't have too much trouble, but what if you have a TV broadcast on screen and want to touch a small area of a scrolling banner like a stock ticker or something similar?
Surface is just another type of old style touchscreen. You operate it from the front, so your hands and fingers are still in the way of line of sight.
;-)
This tech would be if you were reaching under the table. And given they've marketed 'Surface' as something that would be used in a bar...I'm thinking this wouldn't be a fun 'surface' to touch
agreed, but lets say that compressing a solid caused it to:
a) generate electricty which in turn
b) generates heat
Vent the heat to the atmosphere and you've converted your mechanical into electrical using only the already existing forces. While it isn't 'free' by energy standards, it is 'free' in terms of the inputs of the closed system you're talking about.
My brain wants to equate it with regenerative braking in hybrid cars. You have the extra 10% (total guess) weight of the regen system to lower your mileage a bit, but you get the regenerative force of 100% vehicle weight in return. Not 'free' obviously, but in this case you're recouping some of the energy you converted from fuel into kinetic potential energy back into electrical. There's a small payment for a larger return.
Like I said though it all depends on how much energy is required to roll from one tile to the next, that's the 'cost'. If it's not significantly lower than the energy generated it obviously doesn't work.
Wait wait...I have the solution!
;-)
Install some of the piezo-things under the train and have the train roll over the tiles, creating the energy to levitate it!!!
Brilliant!
You make a good point. The issue is the amount of compression. If it's on the molecular scale, you like *do* get something resembling free energy.
The extra 'work' you mention comes when the wheel rolls off of a compressed tile and 'up' onto the next non-compressed tile. If that height is negligible compared to the rolling resistance it would present, it would seem to give you energy with little in the way of 'cost'.
Of course I don't know details about this technology (mostly because i didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night I'm guessing) so I might be wildly wrong, but I think that's what the GP was probably angling at.
depends...did these people eat at Taco Bell recently?
one slight difference, email is external, so has to pass through filters and gateways to every get inside the organization.
USB drives start out *inside*.
Systems are generally pretty well hardened against external threats, or at least to the point of diminishing returns. It's the internal threats that are wildly unaddressed in many cases.
My first thought was "Blair Witch" will have *nothing* on the nausea inspiring motion of a human eye when someone views this recorded video stream on a stationary screen...
My understanding is something like "personal use accounts are free with a capped amount of data, but if you want it all and/or to use it for business, that costs money"
And the PHB here wants to just use multiple 'personal' accounts to get around that stipulation.
DST served a useful purpose at one time. It *does* reduce energy usage...for lighting. Back in the early part of the 20th century, the largest portion of home electrical usage was for lighting. Nowadays it's such a small part this savings has no measurable effect.
The effect it does have is actually increasing energy usage as people crank on the AC when they get home earlier in the daylight of afternoon and it's hotter. And AC is vastly more expensive to operate than a bulb.
Indeed the show "Ice Road Truckers" shows the invaluable use of driving over ice.
However, it's a lot easier to freeze an ice cube than an entire bath tub. Lakes/rivers will freeze a lot faster than the ocean. Hence having years of ice buildup is necessary for comparable ice thickness in the oceans.
one other point, lakes and rivers are generally 'fresh' water while the oceans are salty. Another reason why they freeze quicker and thicker. Even those 'ice roads' are being reduced in their duration every year due to global warming.
Agreed. My point is that the 'new' ice that is forming is at that perimeter (which is now farther from shore). So not only are they on 'thin ice' but it's much farther away from where it has been.
let me get this straight...
*polar* bears don't go anywhere near the arctic? bzzzt fail
They *LIVE* on the sea ice in the winter, and they're going to be extinct in the wild because now it's so far from shore they have to swim miles further out. Once they do get there, the 'season' is much shorter so they have less time to feed on the seals. linky The seals themselves are threatened even more because they have to birth on the ice.
Lets ask this question:
Do you want to walk on ice that froze an hour ago? or ice that's been solidly frozen for decades?
The ice 'recovery' is a misnomer, even if it covers the entire arctic at peak winter, it won't be very thick compared with persistent perennial ice cover that has existed and built up thickness for hundreds/thousands of years.
Replacing 'steel' with 'balsa wood' doesn't mean the structure can hold up the same weight. i.e. polar bears.
Or you have the computer print out a scanable paper ballot once you've selected your votes. You verify it's correct and then hand put that *paper* into the ballot box (or the system puts it in it's own box).
All the benefits of computer tabulation, none of the mysterious 'deletion' downside. You have the computer count to verify against the existing paper count.
Nothing like a separate count to verify the official count.
Couldn't you upgrade to a single modern machine and run VM's instead of 2 physical machines?
it's not 'evaporation' but decomposition and yes that does produce quite a lot of gaseous emissions.
from linky:
"The chemical aspects of plant decomposition always involve the release of carbon dioxide."
It's also the basis for quite a few methane recoupment projects at landfills; stuff decays and becomes gaseous. Microbes, bacteria, etc all work to decompose matter into various parts of the original.
As for how long a tree lasts, I'd pull a figure out of the ether and say 100 yrs on average for all trees. We know a few are a cpl thousand, but even that is very young in terms of the cyclical nature of the environment of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, even millions.
You're right on the money about not having a good idea of the actual cost to benefit ratio.
But some factors to consider:
how much will it cost to relocate the hundreds of millions of people as sea levels rise? That won't be cheap.
how expensive to farm land that's now a desert?
how much more A/C used in areas that are hotter now (obviously offset by some less heating costs used in arctic/cold regions - but most people don't live there)
I'm sure there are lots of other factors going both ways on cost, but I think it's reasonable to assume the vast majority of the effect will be increasing costs associated with global warming. Assuming you can run the towers on solar, and the transport vehicles are run on hydrogen produced from solar, etc, the 'costs' of running the system can be reduced pretty significantly.
Sure about that?
;-)
Yes we're sure about that.
the tree *is* carbon. if it 'goes away' the carbon comes back into the environment, whether from burning or decay. CO2 goes into tree, O2 comes out. The carbon stays in the tree. If the tree disappears the 'C' didn't disappear, it just changed it's properties (solid -> gas).
Look at a graph of seasonal CO2 levels and in the fall and winter, it goes up as the leaves fall off and decay. Same thing happens when the tree dies, just on a bigger and longer scale.
Some shops will keep him in that position forever if he lets them.
Same difference. If he doesn't actively try and move up in what he's admitting is an inferior environment to his skillset, how's he going to pan out when he's working with peers or more advanced people? If he quit and went to another company after 3 months because of no promotion, then that says something about his character. Having a "I'll sit here and take it" attitude isn't exactly a winning strategy in interviews.
fortunately the US trials known as 'elections' have no such silly rules regarding evidence ;-)
As to whether this helps or hurts Palin (victim or criminal), that remains to be seen.