I venture that it's simply not a concern unless you're being tailed by FBI agents. There is no chance for any Echelon-flavored detection network operating from 'hibernating' cellphones. The market wouldn't allow it.
There are several ways to tell that your phone is activated and transmitting enough power to reach a tower a mile away: the phone physically heats up, battery life goes way down. Battery life on powerdown needs to be the same as battery life on powerup a day later. The phones that last six hours, turned on or off, are never going to be bought.
In this case, it's probable that the high-value suspect only had his cellphone activated when visual surveillance indicated that he was meeting with other high-value suspects. Visual surveillance is not cheap. At least, here in the states it's not.
Europeans drive around half as much as Americans, full circle. That is still a lot of driving.
Of course there are those who spend their entire lives behind the wheel in both regions, but as a whole, there are less of them in Europe. Higher density towns and much more mass transit do it.
After WW2, the US was the only country that didn't have to rebuild anything. We were the world's best supplier of oil and automobiles. And we had vast tract of unused or low-value land. The VA projects alone put out more than a million single-family homes a year into the car-necessary suburbs. More than half of us grew up in suburban communities where childhood was basically whatever you could do in your single-family house to amuse yourself until you got a Driver's License and were free to explore the town, because you sure as hell weren't going to walk through it.
In the NPOV political spectrum (before people in the US started using certain places in the spectrum with the same vehemence that their counterparts used sexuality slurs twenty years ago or racial slurs forty years ago):
Regressives reach back to the history of a nation for ideas that have been thrown out, and try to bring them back - 'You modern panzies need to get used to coal - I worked the mines until I was 16, and I'm healthy as an ox. Isn't it a great symbol of our strength that we can decapitate a MOUNTAIN? We could get even more GREEN energy by damming up this river, if you're one of those hippy types.'
Conservatives are comfortable with the old ways, but are mostly cautiously optimistic about the way things are, and are opposed to major change. 'Really, oil and natural gas will probably last forever, and if they don't, we'll just shift to other things like coal, tar sands, oil shales, etc. we have plenty of stuff, why try to fix something that isn't broken? The market will handle it.'
Moderates acknowledge that some isolated changes to the current order are probably beneficial, but that the overall system is sound. 'I'd be happy putting solar panels on my roof if you subsidize it, but riding a bike? Come on, in this weather? Have you seen my new Prius? We'll pull through, you'll see.'
Liberals believe that major changes are needed for the nation to prosper, but accept the general framework of government they are presented with. 'We may need to plunge several trillion dollars into alternative energy to get something that doesn't contribute to global warming, and still allows the >50% of us that live in the car-enabled suburbs to survive. I can sacrifice a lot if it means my kids have it as good as I had it.'
Radicals believe that drastic change is needed at the most basic level, and often revolution is the only means to get that done. 'This drek cannot continue - we're raping Mother Earth, and she's not gonna let us do that much longer without fighting back. The smokestacks have to go down NOW - the development has to stop NOW. Corporations have no conscience whatsoever and if government won't force them into a better path of action, I will. Or rather, the explosive fertilizer I've skimmed off my organic farm will.'
But there is a certain amount of fungibility in energy. If it takes 10x our current coal production to propogate suburbia via CTL for personal transit vehicles, where does the price of electricity go then? What happens to natural gas prices (and, by extension, natural gas generators) if home heating oil drastically increases in price?
What happens to a majority-importer country if exportors decide that they're better off saving oil for domestic economies than keeping them on a feeding tube of petrobucks? Resource nationalism is expanding in South America - better hope it doesn't hit Africa, and that the Middle East doesn't grow a big enough economy to feed.
What happens to the environment in a coal-primary hydrocarbon economy? Goodbye, mountaintops. Goodbye, barrier islands. Goodbye, horizon. Hello, lung-equivalent of smoking several packs a day. Hello, London Fog.
The range of serious informed opinions on a peak range from around 2005-2025. CERA's predictions have been proven wrong time and time again. For short-term matters they're a quite decent auditor of a less-than-transparent market. For long-term matters they are a yes-man expert for oilmen to dismiss alternatives that they don't own. Their chairman, Daniel Yergin, is a political scientist rather than a geologist - as long as the Middle East doesn't break down into civil war, he believes that the Cornucopian horn of plenty will keep expanding production forever (or at least until we're all dead).
The Peak Oil movement does not as a whole assert that it will happen at any particular time in that 20 or so year window - but they're scared as hell that it's closer to the lower bound than the upper. I think that we were reassured somewhat as to the complete breakdown of society positted by 'doomers,' by the recent trial of $3/gallon gas, and the fact that it didn't ruin our economy. Perhaps $10/gallon gas by 2010 combined with the housing glut would only bring us to a Great-Depression level, rather than a preindustrial level.
Heavy water is unable to sustain cell division, by not forming hydrogen bonds necessary for our biochemistry with the same ease. But apparently, it doesn't really interfere either.
It depends on the process - I believe that 'flash' chemical vapor deposition leaves behind metal seeds (I forget which metal) detectable using a spectrometer. The slower-growth technology, where a bigger diamond crystal is grown from a seed diamond crystal and sliced off when it's reached an appropriate size, is detectable only for its lack of inclusions, its perfection. The latter is being eyed for semiconductor apps.
By nature, we take the low-hanging fruit first. Any near-surface ore or finite resource that's accessibly with iron-age tools is already mined. With a major breakdown of society (and ensuing breakdown of machinery), we're pretty heavily screwed as far as using nonrenewable resources is concerned. Which is one reason the people discussing peak oil are so scared.
The landfills of today will be the mines of tomorrow - and we havn't developed the technology yet to mine them.
It's breaking - very obviously for anyone who cares to listen. We can either let it shatter all at once and potentially cause a die-off of those who can't survive without daily imported oil, or work HARD at trying to replace it. WW2-war-effort hard. We're trying to put together a massive paradigm shift from techniques we've been ever more dependant on since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It's not a coincidence that it gets written off as a cult - because a decent portion of peak oil researchers get to a point where they conclude that there is no reasonable way forward, and they should buy secure rural compounds and stockpile food. The rest of us (optimists, let's call us) think there's a chance that the alarm can be sounded before the country's on fire, if we're loud, intelligent, and persuasive enough. Oil goes into nearly everything you do, eat, or use.
It's hardly a 'free market,' unsteered by government - trillions have been poured into roads, oil wars + warriors, bankruptsy bailouts, all on your dime. Oil is a fulcrum that destroys superpowers(as the USSR found out). Much of it is controlled by governments which interact with us on a diplomatic level. We've proven that we don't have the balls to wage an all-out war over oil supplies - we can either keep pretending that the Carter Doctrine (and US military superiority) applies to 4th generation warfare (and move slowly through WW3 without a drop of oil to show for it), or we can develop alternatives. Now. High taxes allow us to use the good aspects of a competitive market - rational actors (as opposed to emotional, uninformed politicians with an eye for PR) don't end up exploring a negative ROIE corn ethanol strategy. Or an impossible and pointless hydrogen strategy. Competitive markets actively seek any solutions to a problem, rather than fixating on one solution and holding commitees for 20 years on whether Indiana deserves to lose jobs because its fuel-producing pilot plant is a deadend technology.
More popular than the empiricist 'peak is now' viewpoint is the economical POV that we'll see world EXPORTS rapidly decline - the oil-producing countries are going to hit a point where their domestic population needs it more than green American IOU's, and they don't necessarily want to pump it all out at once. Resource nationalism is all the rage - rapidly accelerating through the energy markets.
This is being done now. CAFE standards allow manufacturers to cheat - a flexfuel car's CAFE contribution averages how much gasoline it uses in gasoline mode, and how much gasoline it has to use in ethanol mode. So a gasoline / E100 car automatically has double fuel efficiency, even if not a drop of ethanol hits the gas tank. As expected, they're beginning to jump on it.
The problem with ethanol isn't conversion (which in most cases is a software matter of timing changes and trivial construction differences), it's that it's nowhere near scalable enough (and too low ROIE), even considering cellulosic potential, to make up a significant chunk of current car fuel usage.
Farmed biodiesel is somewhat better (is much easier to produce, has a much higher ROIE, drop-in replacement for petrodiesel, lower maintenance engines), but it's also not scalable enough.
Algal biodiesel is the only biofuel promising adequate everything, but it's still in its infancy.
Oil shales are interesting, but they're damn hard to work with - the pre-oil substance (kerogen) is in impermeable rock. The best developments so far try to freeze ice walls around a volume of land, and then heat the center for a period of months to liquify the waxy substance. Then they need to extract it via pumping or crushing. THEN they get to the business of upgrading it to actual oil. This is hard, high-loss work.
Harder to extract energy resources are unique natural commodities in that they have a definite floor to feasability - a return on invested energy of 1. Some oil shales dip below that, I'm told some don't.
On breeders: Nuclear power is amazingly insensitive to uranium prices. Breeders become cost effective at something like $500-$1000/lb. Furthermore, we have quite a lot of low quality uranium deposits, enough for millenia at current technology/consumption levels, before ROIE comes anywhere close to 1. I favor breeders because uranium mining is ecologically damaging, and there can be much, much less waste to deal with, but they're not strictly needed as the uranium mining industry is revived (as the reactors wean themselves off warheads and scrapped warhead stockpiles).
I'm all for increased fuel taxes - my system involves paying $1 per the carbon content of 1 gallon gasoline equivalent, $1 per the depletion prospects of 1 gallon gasoline equivalent, and $1 per the percent imported energy of 1 gallon gasoline equivalent. This provides a floor for alternative energy research which guarentees a 20 year project won't be shut down because of some 6 month commodities shift.
Some plans put this into a fund and return it to taxpayers at a flat rate - which is HIGHLY preferable as a means of communicating fossil fuel externalities to any kind of quota system. I favor shifting the income tax brackets further downward, to the point where one or two may go negative. Or dumping the whole sum into alternative energy research, which equates to about a Manhatten Project a year, or 5.2 Clinton Libraries per Fortnight.
It's a broad mixture of viewpoints. The wide consensus is that the peak will be somewhere from 2005-2025. We're really, really running in the blind here. I read "I hope to god that it's not this decade" several times a day.
Those who do follow daily developments in conventional oil tend to be more pessimistic - there was a month late last year that we still havn't surpassed in production. They generally wholly reject OPEC's paper recoverable reserves war of the '80's (wherein OPEC one by one doubled their estimated reserves, to protect themselves in the case of a rules change where national reserves would determine allowable experts), and tend to follow decline rates as much as they can - because oil companies making projections almost refuse to acknowledge them, and use advanced drilling techniques that greatly shorten the chronological life of the well, in order to keep yields up. The End Of Oil begins: with a particularly good passage. We have list of fields coming online, but delays are widespread, and depletion rates are even less predictable.
So there is a small, well educated movement that says the peak is now. Most people tell them 'The peak may well be now, but if you run with that, the first price downturn the public sees, they'll dismiss you, and the inevitable will come in 10 years without anyone paying attention because you cried wolf now.' The community will always be a balance of alarmism and counter-alarmism because of this. We saw that type of criticism come to fruition when the Jack II "data" (actually a single 6000 barrel per day well tested for a few hours, which was extrapolated to thousands of $100m wells accross an area the size of Alaska operating for decades to produce a theoretical 50% increase in US reserves) was released, and newspaper columns everywhere declared that that Peak Oil was a millenial cult, and we have infinite reserves. This came in the middle of a commodities market shift away from oil.
The concept of oil depletion itself is older than Malthus and Hubbert. And yes, it's been pushed as an imminent event several times since the 1860's. It may be an imminent event now. It may not be. That doesn't make it any less of a threat - there is a steady trend in reserve discovery, which peaked 42 years ago. We now consume four times as much oil as we discover every year. Production is gonna start declining at some point, and we're gonna see the effects in our lifetimes - hopefully, those effects won't shorten them.
So... just to pull the last few books of Heinlein's I've read off the shelf and flip through them...
Stranger in a Strange Land blurb: "The best-selling underground novel by the dean of American science fiction writers" features: Martian psychokinetic abilities which include teleportation and mentally causing matter to cease to exist/
Starship Troopers blurb: "the classic novel by the greatest science fiction writers of all time" features a "brain bug" which controls a colony psychically, as well as good old-fashioned human psychics.
Glory Road blurb: "the irrepressible science fiction classic!" features: Magicians and transdimentional portals
I Will Fear No Evil blurb: "Magnificent - a science fiction masterpiece" features: A body which, after a complete brain transplant, interjects the donor body's personality into the consciousness of the new composite as a self-aware, sentient split personality.
Not much of Heinlein's work qualifies as science fiction under your definition.
Like it or not, but "science fiction" has become a genre based primarily upon finding necessary in the reader a willing suspension of disbelief in order to experience the story within the parameters given. The disbelief is generated because the story usually violates current scientific understanding. What we classify as 'hard sci-fi' as advancing only technology, rather than fundamentally changing what we know of science - and in its true form it's a rather small genre.
The primary objective of the creationist movement (as opposed to evangelicals as a whole) right now involves getting an unprovable class of hypotheses (many elements of which have ended up disprovable) into textbooks for public school science classes.
That is, by definition, anti-science.
It's also an assault on a more basic element of civilization, the perpetual fall of which is what really depresses intellectuals: critical thinking. Placing creationism on the same level as science is discounting thousands of years of painfully tedious work accumulating basic knowledge about the world around us, so that we don't have to challenge the beliefs we already were indoctrinated in. No, don't look behind that curtain, it might confuse you! You might be forced to mesh your already existing beliefs with new ones. Here's a conveniant way to explain it away - noone knows how
Creationist "science" is merely a portion of the devout followers religion who havn't mastered doublethink, struggling against cognitive dissonance. The goal is not to discover causes and effects of phenomena that already exist, it's to create an explanation, any explanation, that's 'good enough' to fit in with as high a level of science as they are educated in, to stop the headaches in church as they think in circles. I think they should be applauded for this among those of us who have been heavily indoctrinated from infancy, because at least they're trying.
The only incompatibily is natural rubber fuel hoses (phased out 20 years ago for economic, not green reasons), which biodiesel tends to eat away.
In hot climates, B100 is pretty much a drop-in replacement, with one catch: it'll eat away built up corrosion from years of petrodiesel, causing your fuel filter to clog up initially.
Straight vegetable oil (SVO) works as a fuel, but needs to be at high temperature to have the necessary viscosity, and engines need to be modified with heaters. We fix that by transesterifying it with methanol and turning it into biodiesel. This still doesn't have the cold weather ease of use of petrodiesel, though.
The only major issue with pure biodiesel is that its gel point is in the neighborhood of 25-30F, resulting in fuel lines that clog. For people who will be operating in subfreezing weather for significant amounts of time, various additives are available, including basic petrodiesel (this is why B20 is so much more prevalent in the US than B100). For subfreezing weather over an entire season, an electric heater system is highly recommended - there are already products available tailored to extreme low temperature petrodiesel use.
Tivo is great for wealthy professionals who don't get much leisure time when they'd like to because of work hours. And that's the demographic they're targetting.
Some people lack a proper sense of scale... We're talking about a geek audio codec. Much of the planet is still waiting for telephone service. You could do a poll of 10,000 people randomly distributed throughout the planet and probably still only have 1 or 2 who recognise OGG.
I've found the opposite - sponge/scouring pads seem to be surprisingly low grit compared to liquid abrasives - less rough than steel wool, but not by that much. Paintjobs have been sacrificed to find this out - I don't recommend it.
Reversed that somehow, the neighborhood switchbox only needs to be transmitting what the neighborhood is watching, it recieves every channel over high capacity lines. Switching is so that they don't need a ton more last-mile cable slinging.
Cable card has its flaws - unlike boxen, it's not capable of transmitting info, and the best means of simulcasting digital (often HD) and analog cable involves neighborhood-level switching, so that the regional office is only transmitting the 60 stations or so that your community is watching to the neighborhood master switchbox.
Cable card capability was here... and the feature (which was a slight price markup) is disappearing from production sets, on the basis that consumers as a whole, really don't care. Congress and the FCC doesn't design and market technologies well.
Cable Card 2.0 has been spoken of, with additional features.
The Google founders are pouring money into Nanosolar, which is one of the companies developing a new form of solar cell that might actually be economical for widespread use - thereby giving your hypothetical African village power to pump + purify water, and irrigate their own farmlands.
Slashdot Mirror
Blame the Geiger counters.
I venture that it's simply not a concern unless you're being tailed by FBI agents. There is no chance for any Echelon-flavored detection network operating from 'hibernating' cellphones. The market wouldn't allow it.
There are several ways to tell that your phone is activated and transmitting enough power to reach a tower a mile away: the phone physically heats up, battery life goes way down. Battery life on powerdown needs to be the same as battery life on powerup a day later. The phones that last six hours, turned on or off, are never going to be bought.
In this case, it's probable that the high-value suspect only had his cellphone activated when visual surveillance indicated that he was meeting with other high-value suspects. Visual surveillance is not cheap. At least, here in the states it's not.
Europeans drive around half as much as Americans, full circle. That is still a lot of driving.
Of course there are those who spend their entire lives behind the wheel in both regions, but as a whole, there are less of them in Europe. Higher density towns and much more mass transit do it.
After WW2, the US was the only country that didn't have to rebuild anything. We were the world's best supplier of oil and automobiles. And we had vast tract of unused or low-value land. The VA projects alone put out more than a million single-family homes a year into the car-necessary suburbs. More than half of us grew up in suburban communities where childhood was basically whatever you could do in your single-family house to amuse yourself until you got a Driver's License and were free to explore the town, because you sure as hell weren't going to walk through it.
In the NPOV political spectrum (before people in the US started using certain places in the spectrum with the same vehemence that their counterparts used sexuality slurs twenty years ago or racial slurs forty years ago):
Regressives reach back to the history of a nation for ideas that have been thrown out, and try to bring them back - 'You modern panzies need to get used to coal - I worked the mines until I was 16, and I'm healthy as an ox. Isn't it a great symbol of our strength that we can decapitate a MOUNTAIN? We could get even more GREEN energy by damming up this river, if you're one of those hippy types.'
Conservatives are comfortable with the old ways, but are mostly cautiously optimistic about the way things are, and are opposed to major change. 'Really, oil and natural gas will probably last forever, and if they don't, we'll just shift to other things like coal, tar sands, oil shales, etc. we have plenty of stuff, why try to fix something that isn't broken? The market will handle it.'
Moderates acknowledge that some isolated changes to the current order are probably beneficial, but that the overall system is sound. 'I'd be happy putting solar panels on my roof if you subsidize it, but riding a bike? Come on, in this weather? Have you seen my new Prius? We'll pull through, you'll see.'
Liberals believe that major changes are needed for the nation to prosper, but accept the general framework of government they are presented with. 'We may need to plunge several trillion dollars into alternative energy to get something that doesn't contribute to global warming, and still allows the >50% of us that live in the car-enabled suburbs to survive. I can sacrifice a lot if it means my kids have it as good as I had it.'
Radicals believe that drastic change is needed at the most basic level, and often revolution is the only means to get that done. 'This drek cannot continue - we're raping Mother Earth, and she's not gonna let us do that much longer without fighting back. The smokestacks have to go down NOW - the development has to stop NOW. Corporations have no conscience whatsoever and if government won't force them into a better path of action, I will. Or rather, the explosive fertilizer I've skimmed off my organic farm will.'
No, we don't use much for electricity.
But there is a certain amount of fungibility in energy. If it takes 10x our current coal production to propogate suburbia via CTL for personal transit vehicles, where does the price of electricity go then? What happens to natural gas prices (and, by extension, natural gas generators) if home heating oil drastically increases in price?
What happens to a majority-importer country if exportors decide that they're better off saving oil for domestic economies than keeping them on a feeding tube of petrobucks? Resource nationalism is expanding in South America - better hope it doesn't hit Africa, and that the Middle East doesn't grow a big enough economy to feed.
What happens to the environment in a coal-primary hydrocarbon economy? Goodbye, mountaintops. Goodbye, barrier islands. Goodbye, horizon. Hello, lung-equivalent of smoking several packs a day. Hello, London Fog.
The range of serious informed opinions on a peak range from around 2005-2025. CERA's predictions have been proven wrong time and time again. For short-term matters they're a quite decent auditor of a less-than-transparent market. For long-term matters they are a yes-man expert for oilmen to dismiss alternatives that they don't own. Their chairman, Daniel Yergin, is a political scientist rather than a geologist - as long as the Middle East doesn't break down into civil war, he believes that the Cornucopian horn of plenty will keep expanding production forever (or at least until we're all dead).
The Peak Oil movement does not as a whole assert that it will happen at any particular time in that 20 or so year window - but they're scared as hell that it's closer to the lower bound than the upper. I think that we were reassured somewhat as to the complete breakdown of society positted by 'doomers,' by the recent trial of $3/gallon gas, and the fact that it didn't ruin our economy. Perhaps $10/gallon gas by 2010 combined with the housing glut would only bring us to a Great-Depression level, rather than a preindustrial level.
Yes.
Heavy water is unable to sustain cell division, by not forming hydrogen bonds necessary for our biochemistry with the same ease. But apparently, it doesn't really interfere either.
It depends on the process - I believe that 'flash' chemical vapor deposition leaves behind metal seeds (I forget which metal) detectable using a spectrometer. The slower-growth technology, where a bigger diamond crystal is grown from a seed diamond crystal and sliced off when it's reached an appropriate size, is detectable only for its lack of inclusions, its perfection. The latter is being eyed for semiconductor apps.
By nature, we take the low-hanging fruit first. Any near-surface ore or finite resource that's accessibly with iron-age tools is already mined. With a major breakdown of society (and ensuing breakdown of machinery), we're pretty heavily screwed as far as using nonrenewable resources is concerned. Which is one reason the people discussing peak oil are so scared.
The landfills of today will be the mines of tomorrow - and we havn't developed the technology yet to mine them.
It's breaking - very obviously for anyone who cares to listen. We can either let it shatter all at once and potentially cause a die-off of those who can't survive without daily imported oil, or work HARD at trying to replace it. WW2-war-effort hard. We're trying to put together a massive paradigm shift from techniques we've been ever more dependant on since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It's not a coincidence that it gets written off as a cult - because a decent portion of peak oil researchers get to a point where they conclude that there is no reasonable way forward, and they should buy secure rural compounds and stockpile food. The rest of us (optimists, let's call us) think there's a chance that the alarm can be sounded before the country's on fire, if we're loud, intelligent, and persuasive enough. Oil goes into nearly everything you do, eat, or use.
It's hardly a 'free market,' unsteered by government - trillions have been poured into roads, oil wars + warriors, bankruptsy bailouts, all on your dime. Oil is a fulcrum that destroys superpowers(as the USSR found out). Much of it is controlled by governments which interact with us on a diplomatic level. We've proven that we don't have the balls to wage an all-out war over oil supplies - we can either keep pretending that the Carter Doctrine (and US military superiority) applies to 4th generation warfare (and move slowly through WW3 without a drop of oil to show for it), or we can develop alternatives. Now. High taxes allow us to use the good aspects of a competitive market - rational actors (as opposed to emotional, uninformed politicians with an eye for PR) don't end up exploring a negative ROIE corn ethanol strategy. Or an impossible and pointless hydrogen strategy. Competitive markets actively seek any solutions to a problem, rather than fixating on one solution and holding commitees for 20 years on whether Indiana deserves to lose jobs because its fuel-producing pilot plant is a deadend technology.
More popular than the empiricist 'peak is now' viewpoint is the economical POV that we'll see world EXPORTS rapidly decline - the oil-producing countries are going to hit a point where their domestic population needs it more than green American IOU's, and they don't necessarily want to pump it all out at once. Resource nationalism is all the rage - rapidly accelerating through the energy markets.
This is being done now. CAFE standards allow manufacturers to cheat - a flexfuel car's CAFE contribution averages how much gasoline it uses in gasoline mode, and how much gasoline it has to use in ethanol mode. So a gasoline / E100 car automatically has double fuel efficiency, even if not a drop of ethanol hits the gas tank. As expected, they're beginning to jump on it.
The problem with ethanol isn't conversion (which in most cases is a software matter of timing changes and trivial construction differences), it's that it's nowhere near scalable enough (and too low ROIE), even considering cellulosic potential, to make up a significant chunk of current car fuel usage.
Farmed biodiesel is somewhat better (is much easier to produce, has a much higher ROIE, drop-in replacement for petrodiesel, lower maintenance engines), but it's also not scalable enough.
Algal biodiesel is the only biofuel promising adequate everything, but it's still in its infancy.
Oil shales are interesting, but they're damn hard to work with - the pre-oil substance (kerogen) is in impermeable rock. The best developments so far try to freeze ice walls around a volume of land, and then heat the center for a period of months to liquify the waxy substance. Then they need to extract it via pumping or crushing. THEN they get to the business of upgrading it to actual oil. This is hard, high-loss work.
Harder to extract energy resources are unique natural commodities in that they have a definite floor to feasability - a return on invested energy of 1. Some oil shales dip below that, I'm told some don't.
On breeders: Nuclear power is amazingly insensitive to uranium prices. Breeders become cost effective at something like $500-$1000/lb. Furthermore, we have quite a lot of low quality uranium deposits, enough for millenia at current technology/consumption levels, before ROIE comes anywhere close to 1. I favor breeders because uranium mining is ecologically damaging, and there can be much, much less waste to deal with, but they're not strictly needed as the uranium mining industry is revived (as the reactors wean themselves off warheads and scrapped warhead stockpiles).
I'm all for increased fuel taxes - my system involves paying $1 per the carbon content of 1 gallon gasoline equivalent, $1 per the depletion prospects of 1 gallon gasoline equivalent, and $1 per the percent imported energy of 1 gallon gasoline equivalent. This provides a floor for alternative energy research which guarentees a 20 year project won't be shut down because of some 6 month commodities shift.
Some plans put this into a fund and return it to taxpayers at a flat rate - which is HIGHLY preferable as a means of communicating fossil fuel externalities to any kind of quota system. I favor shifting the income tax brackets further downward, to the point where one or two may go negative. Or dumping the whole sum into alternative energy research, which equates to about a Manhatten Project a year, or 5.2 Clinton Libraries per Fortnight.
Yeah... that was (unfortunately) bullshit. And to compound it, conveniantly timed bullshit.
It's a broad mixture of viewpoints. The wide consensus is that the peak will be somewhere from 2005-2025. We're really, really running in the blind here. I read "I hope to god that it's not this decade" several times a day.
Those who do follow daily developments in conventional oil tend to be more pessimistic - there was a month late last year that we still havn't surpassed in production. They generally wholly reject OPEC's paper recoverable reserves war of the '80's (wherein OPEC one by one doubled their estimated reserves, to protect themselves in the case of a rules change where national reserves would determine allowable experts), and tend to follow decline rates as much as they can - because oil companies making projections almost refuse to acknowledge them, and use advanced drilling techniques that greatly shorten the chronological life of the well, in order to keep yields up. The End Of Oil begins: with a particularly good passage. We have list of fields coming online, but delays are widespread, and depletion rates are even less predictable.
So there is a small, well educated movement that says the peak is now. Most people tell them 'The peak may well be now, but if you run with that, the first price downturn the public sees, they'll dismiss you, and the inevitable will come in 10 years without anyone paying attention because you cried wolf now.' The community will always be a balance of alarmism and counter-alarmism because of this. We saw that type of criticism come to fruition when the Jack II "data" (actually a single 6000 barrel per day well tested for a few hours, which was extrapolated to thousands of $100m wells accross an area the size of Alaska operating for decades to produce a theoretical 50% increase in US reserves) was released, and newspaper columns everywhere declared that that Peak Oil was a millenial cult, and we have infinite reserves. This came in the middle of a commodities market shift away from oil.
The concept of oil depletion itself is older than Malthus and Hubbert. And yes, it's been pushed as an imminent event several times since the 1860's. It may be an imminent event now. It may not be. That doesn't make it any less of a threat - there is a steady trend in reserve discovery, which peaked 42 years ago. We now consume four times as much oil as we discover every year. Production is gonna start declining at some point, and we're gonna see the effects in our lifetimes - hopefully, those effects won't shorten them.
So... just to pull the last few books of Heinlein's I've read off the shelf and flip through them...
Stranger in a Strange Land
blurb: "The best-selling underground novel by the dean of American science fiction writers"
features: Martian psychokinetic abilities which include teleportation and mentally causing matter to cease to exist/
Starship Troopers
blurb: "the classic novel by the greatest science fiction writers of all time"
features a "brain bug" which controls a colony psychically, as well as good old-fashioned human psychics.
Glory Road
blurb: "the irrepressible science fiction classic!"
features: Magicians and transdimentional portals
I Will Fear No Evil
blurb: "Magnificent - a science fiction masterpiece"
features: A body which, after a complete brain transplant, interjects the donor body's personality into the consciousness of the new composite as a self-aware, sentient split personality.
Not much of Heinlein's work qualifies as science fiction under your definition.
Like it or not, but "science fiction" has become a genre based primarily upon finding necessary in the reader a willing suspension of disbelief in order to experience the story within the parameters given. The disbelief is generated because the story usually violates current scientific understanding. What we classify as 'hard sci-fi' as advancing only technology, rather than fundamentally changing what we know of science - and in its true form it's a rather small genre.
The primary objective of the creationist movement (as opposed to evangelicals as a whole) right now involves getting an unprovable class of hypotheses (many elements of which have ended up disprovable) into textbooks for public school science classes.
That is, by definition, anti-science.
It's also an assault on a more basic element of civilization, the perpetual fall of which is what really depresses intellectuals: critical thinking. Placing creationism on the same level as science is discounting thousands of years of painfully tedious work accumulating basic knowledge about the world around us, so that we don't have to challenge the beliefs we already were indoctrinated in. No, don't look behind that curtain, it might confuse you! You might be forced to mesh your already existing beliefs with new ones. Here's a conveniant way to explain it away - noone knows how
Creationist "science" is merely a portion of the devout followers religion who havn't mastered doublethink, struggling against cognitive dissonance. The goal is not to discover causes and effects of phenomena that already exist, it's to create an explanation, any explanation, that's 'good enough' to fit in with as high a level of science as they are educated in, to stop the headaches in church as they think in circles. I think they should be applauded for this among those of us who have been heavily indoctrinated from infancy, because at least they're trying.
Brings up an interesting point - do native ASL thinkers understand rhyme? Does there exist a visual form consisting of similarities of gesture?
The only incompatibily is natural rubber fuel hoses (phased out 20 years ago for economic, not green reasons), which biodiesel tends to eat away.
In hot climates, B100 is pretty much a drop-in replacement, with one catch: it'll eat away built up corrosion from years of petrodiesel, causing your fuel filter to clog up initially.
Straight vegetable oil (SVO) works as a fuel, but needs to be at high temperature to have the necessary viscosity, and engines need to be modified with heaters. We fix that by transesterifying it with methanol and turning it into biodiesel. This still doesn't have the cold weather ease of use of petrodiesel, though.
The only major issue with pure biodiesel is that its gel point is in the neighborhood of 25-30F, resulting in fuel lines that clog. For people who will be operating in subfreezing weather for significant amounts of time, various additives are available, including basic petrodiesel (this is why B20 is so much more prevalent in the US than B100). For subfreezing weather over an entire season, an electric heater system is highly recommended - there are already products available tailored to extreme low temperature petrodiesel use.
Tivo is great for wealthy professionals who don't get much leisure time when they'd like to because of work hours. And that's the demographic they're targetting.
Some people lack a proper sense of scale... We're talking about a geek audio codec. Much of the planet is still waiting for telephone service. You could do a poll of 10,000 people randomly distributed throughout the planet and probably still only have 1 or 2 who recognise OGG.
I've found the opposite - sponge/scouring pads seem to be surprisingly low grit compared to liquid abrasives - less rough than steel wool, but not by that much. Paintjobs have been sacrificed to find this out - I don't recommend it.
Reversed that somehow, the neighborhood switchbox only needs to be transmitting what the neighborhood is watching, it recieves every channel over high capacity lines. Switching is so that they don't need a ton more last-mile cable slinging.
Cable card has its flaws - unlike boxen, it's not capable of transmitting info, and the best means of simulcasting digital (often HD) and analog cable involves neighborhood-level switching, so that the regional office is only transmitting the 60 stations or so that your community is watching to the neighborhood master switchbox.
Cable card capability was here... and the feature (which was a slight price markup) is disappearing from production sets, on the basis that consumers as a whole, really don't care. Congress and the FCC doesn't design and market technologies well.
Cable Card 2.0 has been spoken of, with additional features.
The Google founders are pouring money into Nanosolar, which is one of the companies developing a new form of solar cell that might actually be economical for widespread use - thereby giving your hypothetical African village power to pump + purify water, and irrigate their own farmlands.
Garbage in, garbage out. A scaler's job is "not doing such a crappy job of displaying the signal," but it can't add detail.