Well, it does offer the advantage of having more carbon per pound than other forms of coal. Even if processing is necessary to remove impurities, you're buying less impurities per unit mass when you acquire the coal in the first place. That was the point I was trying to make.
One of the problems is mining of coal. That isn't as clean or safe as it could (or should) be. The mass strip mine operations have given way to mountaintop removal which gets really ugly if the mining company can't (or won't) control runoff from the site. That's a very good way for people's water supply to turn orange if they use local wellwater for anything.
The other problem is the amount of energy it takes to store up CO2 somewhere. Realistically speaking we're going to need lots of dense (preferably mineral) carbon in the future for when carbon nanotubes (and similar carbon nanomaterials) take off, and burning coal sort of makes it harder to utilize all the raw carbon locked inside. Anthracite can be up to 98% pure carbon. Converting all that into CO2 + energy and then attempting to produce nanotubes from all that CO2 is sort of backwards. Better just to harvest all the raw carbon and throw the rest away.
Understandably that is a different application than energy production but coal will be one of the most attractive sources of carbon for nanotubes in my opinion (up there with graphite).
Your analysis of MMOs present and past seems a tad flawed.
Dark Age of Camelot never had the same total share of MMO users that UO or Everquest had during their respective primes. It's not like a bunch of people gravitated away from that game to EQ and WoW since their subscriber base was never all that large.
Your typical MMO migration went a bit like this:
UO -> EQ -> WoW
There were plenty of other games that distracted people from this basic progression (such as DAoC) but subscriber numbers will show that they were not long-term destinations for many. Lineage and Lineage 2 sort of throw a monkey-wrench into that progression but they are their own peculiar beasts.
Also, claiming that DAoC was too "hardcore" for some people is a bit silly. That game was a cakewalk compared to pre-Kunark EQ (or even post-Kunark and post-Velious EQ). Everquest was possibly the "hardest" mainstream MMO ever given how tedious it could be, how inflexible group dynamics could be, and how much time it took to accomplish anything in that silly game. It took them far too long to realize that punishing players with downtime, absurdly slow leveling, and ridiculous travel times did not necessarily bring the fun.
DAoC offered some boredome but overall it was a simpler game that had a lot more to offer to players that wanted to get away from that style of tedium. Too bad it had shortcomings in other departments. Nevertheless, DAoC had many features that were a direct response to people's complaints about old-school EQ (horses for quicker land travel, faster leveling, the ability to solo, more group flexibility, better PvP, etc). I'm sure it has become more complex since release, but I played it in beta and after release and boy howdy, playing any caster class in that game was so simplistic compared to the mess that old-school EQ casters were. My EQ Enchanter was like a Swiss army knife with dozens of different spells and spell-lines, some of which were bizarre or useless (Minor Illusion? Bind Sight? And do you think any MMO will ever get away with something as crazy as the original Gravity Flux? The damage that spell used to do to players . . . oy). My DAoC Enchanter had maybe six spell lines and that was it. Summon pet, buff pet, heal pet, single-target blast stuff (actually had two spell lines that did that), stun stuff, and I forget what else. I was Light spec so it was pretty limited in scope.
If anything, UO and EQ were much more "difficult/hardcore" than DAoC. DAoC and WoW are two titles that really stick out when it comes to being intellectual successors to EQ in that both built on the gameplay style of EQ and both went well out of their way to make the gameplay experience smoother and more rewarding. WoW just took it to a new level with a better interface, and look where that got them. The legacy of UO has been largely abandoned by developers, for good reason.
That's how many of the early devices worked. A former used car sales company known as Nice Cars (which went bankrupt in a huge books-cooking scandal not too long ago) was one of the regional pioneers near where I live.
Nowadays I think some have switched to GPS devices.
Used car salesmen use the same thing
on
Cellular Repo Man
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
We have had several used car lots around here that will basically do the same thing: if you don't make your weekly or monthly payments, they send a signal to a device attached to the starter and the car won't start.
At least with the car, eventually you pay it off so that little cloud is no longer hanging over your head unless some idiot at the lot mistakes you for being in non-payment and kills your starter. With one of these notebooks, you'll always have that threat looming that your notebook will shut down if someone steals your only CC and you have to cancel it or what not at the wrong time in the billing cycle.
One would hope nobody involved would be so draconian but you never know.
Seriously, humor is subjective. Some of us adore repeated memes and tired, stale attempts at nonsense. Don't lump us in with people who refuse to articles linked in the summary.
There are multiple ways. One way is with a thermoelectric generator that utilizes the Seebeck effect. There are numerous other heat engines available to carry out the process.
There was a product announced by Barnabus Energy called the SunCone back in 2006 that more or less did what you describe. Sadly, it has gone MIA; I can find no recent news about the technology or its deployment.
Ugh! I hated that show. Never have I wanted to see a Koala die a painful death more than I did after watching this wretched mess on the USA Cartoon Express. Of course, I did watch it, so it's my own damn fault for subjecting myself to the pain and agony brought on by Kwicky Koala.
You can kill someone with crotch-shots in Fallout and Fallout 2. Instantly. Ever seen what happens to a raider taking a critical from an M72 Gauss rifle? It's ugly. Mega power fists work just as well. Yes, that's right, death from being racked. Not even Johnny Cage could pull that off with a single Ball Breaker.
That's one way of going about it, but that's way more meta than just skimping on agriculture in every city. I found slavery to be problematic because I liked having large, well-populated cities on the edges of my empire. A garrison stack of 4-8 peasant units could tamp down rebellion long enough to start replacing buildings with Roman buildings to reduce culture penalties.
Plus, if you had an advanced city far far away with tons of people and nice buildings, you could recruit some truly killer units on your enemy's front doorstep, which was always nice.
Actually, you could manage cities in Rome: Total War by making sure you could micromanage build orders without a governor (admit it; you moved all your family members into the field to bolster your ranks with free heavy cavalry units, right?) and then built nothing but basic agricultural upgrades. As long as you maximized the health/public order buildings and minimized the number of buildings that would add to population growth rate (agricultural upgrades, fertility temples, etc) you could get a city with stagnant population growth in most instances without missing out on any of your city upgrades. Usually the city would crap out on population growth at around 20-30k people which was manageable. In those pesky cities that would keep growing, either due to favorable conditions or due to the AI building up agricultural upgrades that you could not tear down prior to your conquest of said city, you could depopulate you city peacefully by recruiting tons of peasants (it helped if you had units sizes set to the largest size) and using them as garrison forces on the edges of your empire to keep down rebellions. Peasants were the best, cheapest unit for garrison duty. With sufficient experience (Temple of Mars anyone?) they made halfway-decent troops when deployed correctly.
Also, you had to remember to NEVER take slaves or otherwise you'd have infusions of populace throughout your empire which could make growth sporadic and difficult to control. Not historically accurate for Roman growth but eh, whatever.
While the National Archives obviously must catalog and make available all the data in some form or another (honestly I do not know their rules & regs for that sort of thing, and it seems a good bit is missing), the mere act of storing 100 terabytes hardly seems all that daunting. NewEgg has 1TB Samsung Spinpoint harddrives available for $100 with free shipping. You can't tell me the folks over at the National Archives couldn't afford 100 of those plus some additional hardware to oversee the transfer of all applicable data to the drives for storage, at least until a better solution could be found. Hell, have the Bush/Cheney crew do it for them and stick the drives in a closet somewhere until they can sort through all that mess. It doesn't take a $144 million computer system to handle 100 TB of data.
Honestly, I do not think that room temperature superconductors should be necessary in order to give us incentive to utilize superconducting transistors in products of some sort. A superconducting transistor capable of functioning properly at temperatures that could be maintained by liquid nitrogen would be more than sufficient to give rise to viable commercial products, albeit only for a small niche within the greater computing market. Obviously LN2 just isn't going to work in a handheld or portable device; however, it should be simple enough to keep even a desktop processor chilled by LN2 without having to resort to frequent trips to a supplier to refill numerous dewars.
You know, the idea to check with the EFF never quite entered my mind. It should have, though. Thanks for pointing that out.
I am in agreement that it is extraordinarily difficult to share technological ideas (yes, even bad ones) thanks to the existing system of patents. It is even more difficult to figure out what you can do without violating someone's IP rights, which seems odd when you're trying to share something that is one's own invention (or would-be invention, or concept at the very least).
Is open-source hardware ever going to be a reality outside of circuit designs and/or designs for odd gizmos that are either in the public domain due to expired patents or have flown under the radar of patent trolls? Can you, for example, apply something like the GPL to "meatspace" hardware, such as an efficient solar heater? I had an idea for a solar heater that could heat water, or potentially other fluids, to temperatures in excess of 1500C, and I had wanted to create a development community for it by open-sourcing it using a license such as the GPL, but we (meaning myself and others interested in the design) instantly ran into problems on the legal front. For one thing, there was the spectre of hidden sandbag patents that we would probably want to/have to pay a high-priced IP lawyer thousands of dollars to find. If such patents did not exist, then there would be the question of whether or not the design would be covered by an existing, expired patent (thereby making it public domain and furthermore off-limits to licenses such as the GPL). And, beyond that, there was the question of whether or not a patent troll would attempt to file for their own sandbag patent regardless of whether or not the device was previously unpatented, patented, or in the public domain due to expired patents. To make a long story short, it sure looked like we would have to patent it ourselves (if possible) before we could open-source it just to prevent anyone else from patenting it. And if we did that, we'd be paying out the nose just for the patent, not to mention any of the lawsuits and other challenges that might arise in the course of defending the patent.
Naturally the design itself has not yet been taken as far as some of the other designs mentioned in TFA; specifically, a prototype has not been built, nor are there instructions (yet) or a bill of parts. A development community sufficiently interested in the project might be able to fill in the blanks, so to speak, and make the design into a more robust product, which would please me greatly.
The greatest fear I (and others prithee to the project) have had is that there appears to be nothing stopping some scrooge from patenting the device and preventing anyone from being able to build or use products based on the design should I simply release the design I have "for free" and let people tinker with it as they please. In fact, there's no way to even compel those who might be interested in the project to release their results to others in the development community should one ever form short of receiving a patent and then applying something like the GPL.
If I wanted to release the design plus notes that might lead to a working prototype, bill of parts, etc. without having to worry about a patent holding firm locking up the design to quash all discussion of the product, much less production of units for personal/internal use or sale, what could I do? I'm not 100% sure that the granting of a sandbag patent would enable the IP troll to stop people from discussing the design or using devices based on the design personally or internally (should a corporation or government agency build units for their own use), but it sure seems likely that said patent troll would be able to halt sales of devices based on the design, which would be pretty disappointing.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing really matters anymore.
Damn, and here I was thinking you were going to make an off-hand reference to Big O.
Well, it does offer the advantage of having more carbon per pound than other forms of coal. Even if processing is necessary to remove impurities, you're buying less impurities per unit mass when you acquire the coal in the first place. That was the point I was trying to make.
One of the problems is mining of coal. That isn't as clean or safe as it could (or should) be. The mass strip mine operations have given way to mountaintop removal which gets really ugly if the mining company can't (or won't) control runoff from the site. That's a very good way for people's water supply to turn orange if they use local wellwater for anything.
The other problem is the amount of energy it takes to store up CO2 somewhere. Realistically speaking we're going to need lots of dense (preferably mineral) carbon in the future for when carbon nanotubes (and similar carbon nanomaterials) take off, and burning coal sort of makes it harder to utilize all the raw carbon locked inside. Anthracite can be up to 98% pure carbon. Converting all that into CO2 + energy and then attempting to produce nanotubes from all that CO2 is sort of backwards. Better just to harvest all the raw carbon and throw the rest away.
Understandably that is a different application than energy production but coal will be one of the most attractive sources of carbon for nanotubes in my opinion (up there with graphite).
Your analysis of MMOs present and past seems a tad flawed.
Dark Age of Camelot never had the same total share of MMO users that UO or Everquest had during their respective primes. It's not like a bunch of people gravitated away from that game to EQ and WoW since their subscriber base was never all that large.
Your typical MMO migration went a bit like this:
UO -> EQ -> WoW
There were plenty of other games that distracted people from this basic progression (such as DAoC) but subscriber numbers will show that they were not long-term destinations for many. Lineage and Lineage 2 sort of throw a monkey-wrench into that progression but they are their own peculiar beasts.
Also, claiming that DAoC was too "hardcore" for some people is a bit silly. That game was a cakewalk compared to pre-Kunark EQ (or even post-Kunark and post-Velious EQ). Everquest was possibly the "hardest" mainstream MMO ever given how tedious it could be, how inflexible group dynamics could be, and how much time it took to accomplish anything in that silly game. It took them far too long to realize that punishing players with downtime, absurdly slow leveling, and ridiculous travel times did not necessarily bring the fun.
DAoC offered some boredome but overall it was a simpler game that had a lot more to offer to players that wanted to get away from that style of tedium. Too bad it had shortcomings in other departments. Nevertheless, DAoC had many features that were a direct response to people's complaints about old-school EQ (horses for quicker land travel, faster leveling, the ability to solo, more group flexibility, better PvP, etc). I'm sure it has become more complex since release, but I played it in beta and after release and boy howdy, playing any caster class in that game was so simplistic compared to the mess that old-school EQ casters were. My EQ Enchanter was like a Swiss army knife with dozens of different spells and spell-lines, some of which were bizarre or useless (Minor Illusion? Bind Sight? And do you think any MMO will ever get away with something as crazy as the original Gravity Flux? The damage that spell used to do to players . . . oy). My DAoC Enchanter had maybe six spell lines and that was it. Summon pet, buff pet, heal pet, single-target blast stuff (actually had two spell lines that did that), stun stuff, and I forget what else. I was Light spec so it was pretty limited in scope.
If anything, UO and EQ were much more "difficult/hardcore" than DAoC. DAoC and WoW are two titles that really stick out when it comes to being intellectual successors to EQ in that both built on the gameplay style of EQ and both went well out of their way to make the gameplay experience smoother and more rewarding. WoW just took it to a new level with a better interface, and look where that got them. The legacy of UO has been largely abandoned by developers, for good reason.
That's how many of the early devices worked. A former used car sales company known as Nice Cars (which went bankrupt in a huge books-cooking scandal not too long ago) was one of the regional pioneers near where I live.
Nowadays I think some have switched to GPS devices.
We have had several used car lots around here that will basically do the same thing: if you don't make your weekly or monthly payments, they send a signal to a device attached to the starter and the car won't start.
At least with the car, eventually you pay it off so that little cloud is no longer hanging over your head unless some idiot at the lot mistakes you for being in non-payment and kills your starter. With one of these notebooks, you'll always have that threat looming that your notebook will shut down if someone steals your only CC and you have to cancel it or what not at the wrong time in the billing cycle.
One would hope nobody involved would be so draconian but you never know.
Da comrade, the power of the meme is within you. Embrace it and, IN SOVIET RUSSIA, destiny meets YOU!
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, meme eludes YOU!
. . . evidence lacks YOU!
Amateurs!
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, karma points rev up YOU!
. . . jokes wear out YOU!
. . . summaries don't read YOU!
Seriously, humor is subjective. Some of us adore repeated memes and tired, stale attempts at nonsense. Don't lump us in with people who refuse to articles linked in the summary.
Incorrect. Honda has the FCX Clarity. It can be purchased in limited markets.
In South Korea, only old people waive their rights.
They're using acrylic because it's cheap. Other materials would probably be more expensive and serve as a barrier to adoption.
There are multiple ways. One way is with a thermoelectric generator that utilizes the Seebeck effect. There are numerous other heat engines available to carry out the process.
There was a product announced by Barnabus Energy called the SunCone back in 2006 that more or less did what you describe. Sadly, it has gone MIA; I can find no recent news about the technology or its deployment.
Ugh! I hated that show. Never have I wanted to see a Koala die a painful death more than I did after watching this wretched mess on the USA Cartoon Express. Of course, I did watch it, so it's my own damn fault for subjecting myself to the pain and agony brought on by Kwicky Koala.
And to think Tex Avery died for this garbage.
. . . System Shock. Seriously, who wants Shodan taking over your cell phone network?
You can kill someone with crotch-shots in Fallout and Fallout 2. Instantly. Ever seen what happens to a raider taking a critical from an M72 Gauss rifle? It's ugly. Mega power fists work just as well. Yes, that's right, death from being racked. Not even Johnny Cage could pull that off with a single Ball Breaker.
It's life Jim, but not as we know it.
That's one way of going about it, but that's way more meta than just skimping on agriculture in every city. I found slavery to be problematic because I liked having large, well-populated cities on the edges of my empire. A garrison stack of 4-8 peasant units could tamp down rebellion long enough to start replacing buildings with Roman buildings to reduce culture penalties.
Plus, if you had an advanced city far far away with tons of people and nice buildings, you could recruit some truly killer units on your enemy's front doorstep, which was always nice.
Actually, you could manage cities in Rome: Total War by making sure you could micromanage build orders without a governor (admit it; you moved all your family members into the field to bolster your ranks with free heavy cavalry units, right?) and then built nothing but basic agricultural upgrades. As long as you maximized the health/public order buildings and minimized the number of buildings that would add to population growth rate (agricultural upgrades, fertility temples, etc) you could get a city with stagnant population growth in most instances without missing out on any of your city upgrades. Usually the city would crap out on population growth at around 20-30k people which was manageable. In those pesky cities that would keep growing, either due to favorable conditions or due to the AI building up agricultural upgrades that you could not tear down prior to your conquest of said city, you could depopulate you city peacefully by recruiting tons of peasants (it helped if you had units sizes set to the largest size) and using them as garrison forces on the edges of your empire to keep down rebellions. Peasants were the best, cheapest unit for garrison duty. With sufficient experience (Temple of Mars anyone?) they made halfway-decent troops when deployed correctly.
Also, you had to remember to NEVER take slaves or otherwise you'd have infusions of populace throughout your empire which could make growth sporadic and difficult to control. Not historically accurate for Roman growth but eh, whatever.
While the National Archives obviously must catalog and make available all the data in some form or another (honestly I do not know their rules & regs for that sort of thing, and it seems a good bit is missing), the mere act of storing 100 terabytes hardly seems all that daunting. NewEgg has 1TB Samsung Spinpoint harddrives available for $100 with free shipping. You can't tell me the folks over at the National Archives couldn't afford 100 of those plus some additional hardware to oversee the transfer of all applicable data to the drives for storage, at least until a better solution could be found. Hell, have the Bush/Cheney crew do it for them and stick the drives in a closet somewhere until they can sort through all that mess. It doesn't take a $144 million computer system to handle 100 TB of data.
Honestly, I do not think that room temperature superconductors should be necessary in order to give us incentive to utilize superconducting transistors in products of some sort. A superconducting transistor capable of functioning properly at temperatures that could be maintained by liquid nitrogen would be more than sufficient to give rise to viable commercial products, albeit only for a small niche within the greater computing market. Obviously LN2 just isn't going to work in a handheld or portable device; however, it should be simple enough to keep even a desktop processor chilled by LN2 without having to resort to frequent trips to a supplier to refill numerous dewars.
You know, the idea to check with the EFF never quite entered my mind. It should have, though. Thanks for pointing that out. I am in agreement that it is extraordinarily difficult to share technological ideas (yes, even bad ones) thanks to the existing system of patents. It is even more difficult to figure out what you can do without violating someone's IP rights, which seems odd when you're trying to share something that is one's own invention (or would-be invention, or concept at the very least).
Is open-source hardware ever going to be a reality outside of circuit designs and/or designs for odd gizmos that are either in the public domain due to expired patents or have flown under the radar of patent trolls? Can you, for example, apply something like the GPL to "meatspace" hardware, such as an efficient solar heater? I had an idea for a solar heater that could heat water, or potentially other fluids, to temperatures in excess of 1500C, and I had wanted to create a development community for it by open-sourcing it using a license such as the GPL, but we (meaning myself and others interested in the design) instantly ran into problems on the legal front. For one thing, there was the spectre of hidden sandbag patents that we would probably want to/have to pay a high-priced IP lawyer thousands of dollars to find. If such patents did not exist, then there would be the question of whether or not the design would be covered by an existing, expired patent (thereby making it public domain and furthermore off-limits to licenses such as the GPL). And, beyond that, there was the question of whether or not a patent troll would attempt to file for their own sandbag patent regardless of whether or not the device was previously unpatented, patented, or in the public domain due to expired patents. To make a long story short, it sure looked like we would have to patent it ourselves (if possible) before we could open-source it just to prevent anyone else from patenting it. And if we did that, we'd be paying out the nose just for the patent, not to mention any of the lawsuits and other challenges that might arise in the course of defending the patent.
Naturally the design itself has not yet been taken as far as some of the other designs mentioned in TFA; specifically, a prototype has not been built, nor are there instructions (yet) or a bill of parts. A development community sufficiently interested in the project might be able to fill in the blanks, so to speak, and make the design into a more robust product, which would please me greatly.
The greatest fear I (and others prithee to the project) have had is that there appears to be nothing stopping some scrooge from patenting the device and preventing anyone from being able to build or use products based on the design should I simply release the design I have "for free" and let people tinker with it as they please. In fact, there's no way to even compel those who might be interested in the project to release their results to others in the development community should one ever form short of receiving a patent and then applying something like the GPL.
If I wanted to release the design plus notes that might lead to a working prototype, bill of parts, etc. without having to worry about a patent holding firm locking up the design to quash all discussion of the product, much less production of units for personal/internal use or sale, what could I do? I'm not 100% sure that the granting of a sandbag patent would enable the IP troll to stop people from discussing the design or using devices based on the design personally or internally (should a corporation or government agency build units for their own use), but it sure seems likely that said patent troll would be able to halt sales of devices based on the design, which would be pretty disappointing.