Not sure what your point is, mainly because your example doesn't make any sense.
Your comparison appears to be that telling the truth ("The ads that you're all hating are the things that are paying for the content you want to view.") vs lying to incite a (presumably negative) response ("calling the Pope a gynophobic Nazi paedophile-protector") is somehow the same?
If I'd gone to the Vatican website and called the Pope that, then obviously I would be trolling and attempting to start a flame-war. Whereas all I did was tell the truth (granted as I see it, but I've seen no evidence to the contrary) in discussion about flash (and specifically how bad flash is because of the uses of it).
However saying it on slashdot? I don't know about you but I prefer the intelligent (yes I know bits of slashdot aren't, but significant bits are) conversation on here, where I might actually learn something and I have to say I really don't know what you'll learn from deluding yourself. Granted I tend to define learning as learning new beneficial skills, or information etc. I don't really consider it 'learning' if what you've learnt isn't correct, or at least approximately correct.
Denying that ads do pay for content on a site that is partially funded by advertising revenue is a little odd. It may be unpleasant but it's still true, and you can only change things for the better (other than blind chance) if you start from what's true not just what you want to be true.
Once you have had the education about copyright and how what you are doing is bad you can no longer claim that you didn't realise, or didn't understand. You are educated, and there is a record of your education.
And as I understand it, wilful infringement hits you with triple damages... Hmm, well it appears to be that way for patent infringement but a quick scan doesn't seem to have the triple damages rule for wilful copyright infringement but does impact your damages.
There is a point to it, quite a nasty one.
1. Google gets to look good, educating the copyright infringers. Helps get the *IAAs off their back, probably because of point 2. 2. The *IAAs get to get higher damages and lower burden of proof for repeating offenders. After all if you've violated copyright many times before and been educated it's going to have a bearing on the trial judge and jury.
I agree, it's the use to which it is put that's a problem.
The thing is, I can understand why there are flashing, bouncing annoying ads. Simply put they catch your attention and advertising is about catching your attention (well for a generic 'your'). The second issue is that the ads work, it's depressing and makes me weep for the species (well exaggerated there) but flashy ads work (or at least I assume they would, otherwise they'd soon disappear). I don't actually know about any click-through / conversion rates as I've never posted any ads (nor directly hosted any - I presume wordpress have slapped some on my blogs) but I suspect that they do generate more for the advertiser, hence they exist. Ads don't have to be socially acceptable, they aren't going for acceptance they're going for clicks and potentially sales.
Maybe I'm just not visiting any of the most annoying sites, but I don't find the flash ads that intrusive anymore, few flashy, bells whistles and running around the screen ads - they used to be appalling so I wonder what's changed? Is it just me not bothering to return to sites with sucky ads or have they actually improved?
You have to remember who is seeing these ads, annoying as it is to acknowledge, we're in the minority. Tech savy users are few and far between compared to the average person on the web, which means those ads aren't interested in you, they're interested in your neighbour because your neighbour might click on the flashy ad, or respond to the 411 scam, or click 'scan my machine for viruses'. It's all social engineering and it's not targeted at you, you're just an unfortunate bystander.
As for the numbers? Who knows, I've seen some decent flash ones, and I've seen some appalling ones. You're probably right that the majority are sucky, but that doesn't make it flash's fault, it's the use that's a problem. Assuming flash dies then something else will take up the slack as unfortunately sucky ads work for some people.
Oh yes, if you don't have flash you can't access flash, if you don't have javascript you can't use javascript - meaning that if you turn off the ads or whatever then you run the risk of not seeing what you want to see.
Frankly if the website is that annoying, then go to a different one, or create your own content to rival it.
What might be nice actually is a plugin control that allowed you to load individual objects on the page, so load this JS script (not that it really has a visual element tho) or load this flash object (which does have a visual element), but then again a fair few of them may interlink and break if they are partially loaded.. Sigh.
But I suspect that Adobe might bring out the lawyers to take care of that if there was one.
I remember back when I used to run Windows on my laptop, if the battery suddenly dropped 50% in ten minutes I'd go to the task manager and find some minimized Firefox window maxing out a core running some Flash crap. Firefox seems to handle that better these days, or maybe Linux Flash does.
It really is an evil monstrosity.
This statement has always bugged me about flash and why some people seem to detest it.
Hasn't it occurred to you that it's to do with what you use flash for rather than flash itself?
Animation, sounds all that junk in those ads takes CPU time, it's pretty much the same as playing lots of little movies on your system. Why shoot the messenger when it's to do with the ads developer, or the site developer?
Flash may not be efficient (I have no idea as to the relative efficiency compared to other ways to achieve the same thing) but I'm pretty sure it's the content that causes the issue. I suspect that a text only flash ad wouldn't be as draining. Once HTML 5 is present sufficiently and has the same capabilities then there's a real likelihood that this conversation will be about how HTML 5 feature X drains battery massively, not once realising that it's what you do with it thats the problem.
I'm a little puzzled as to why you left any pop-under windows up on your system - they really annoyed me when they launched so I'd just kill them. And since firefox has had tabs for a long time there never really was a major reason to have loads of windows open (that I could see) making pop-unders even more obvious.
I've got a couple of points to make:
1. On Android you can (and it appeared to be default for me) have it set to load plugins only when requested.. So no flash unless there's something particular I want to see (in fact no plugins at all unless there's something particular I want to see). 2. The ads that you're all hating are the things that are paying for the content you want to view. You have visited these websites, sat there long enough for them to max out your cores in order to view the content. That's the exchange you're making. No ads, eventually no content - and people don't seem all that willing to pay for everything.
About the only other solution is a paywall, or getting rid of the web and going for pay-for apps only..
Frankly why not let them create an account for you?
I mean does it matter? They're creating false profiles about you in their banking system - in a lot of places that's actionable. Just like if someone else opened an account in your name in Bank of America, or Barclays, it doesn't make you liable. And should their demonstrably false information materially harm you then you can recover that cost, and pretty much recover the cost of recovering the costs, etc. It's hassle, but you add that to the costs that facebook would have to host. Not to mention the legal minefield of libel when your 'friends' say unpleasant things about you on their (or your) walls and it suddenly increases the cost of your mortgage as you're now a higher risk. Would facebook assume that liability? Because some has to, giving random people the ability to materially detriment your life is going to be a lawyers wet dream I'd expect.
The article mentions 680million facebook users, the facebook stats themselves http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics say 500+million users, and then goes on to say that only 50% of them log on per day. Then a quick look at the number of farmville users http://www.facebook.com/FarmVille gives us about 48million users active in the last month. Now maybe this is just me, (and yes I'm aware that facebook games are more than just farmville) but I would suggest that the vast majority of the 'active' facebook users don't play games, and probably don't spend money to do it - so few of them would be using facebook credits, the underpinning of this idea in the first place.
It sounds like the stats have been inflated to say that everyone using facebook plays games, and everyone playing games gushes money into facebook, this really isn't the case.
Why would companies suddenly try and use facebook (and on Mark's terms, not theirs) to data mine and find out which people are good or bad credit risks? For that matter how truthful is facebook? Is all the stuff you put up there real? Or as I've seen so many times exaggerated to make the poster seem a much 'cooler' person.
It's good for headlines, but I'm pretty suspicious that it has any real world possibilities.
What did you think you were going to achieve with a troll post, other than a troll response.
If you want a reasoned debate about something you have to start with being reasonable, blowing everything out of proportion and attacking like you did doesn't achieve anything.
You can be as sarcastic as you like, but remember again you're using a medium that does not convey emotional content easily, and different people from different backgrounds will interpret the same words in a different manner, especially when they are removed from the context of tone.
If you believe as you do that the phase 'Nuklear hysteria' is terrible and denigrates people to that extent I'd suggest saying that, disagree with what the person is saying and say that specifically, do not jump on the hysteria bandwagon to attempt to disprove it. Hysteria only begets hysteria.
I have a friend in Japan, a moderate distance from from the affected area and he's not too worried about it - at least he's certainly not obviously in a panic - but as this is second hand unsubstanciated information and of course incredibly subjective I wouldn't expect you to take that as a calming influence.
Two things I would like to mention, firstly people in the most heavily earthquake and tsunami directly affected areas aren't too worried about the radiation - there's sufficient struggle to survive and frankly not enough time to worry much about something you can't really see.
Secondly most people who are incredibly concerned about the radiation (I'm really ignoring the people in the US as that is just hysteria - it's too far away to worry that much) aren't directly affected by the tsunami and weren't too badly affected by the earthquake, they have time and a media that is using the fear of the un-understood to sell panic.
The reactor situation is serious, it's a problem but it's being dealt with, there's some radiation leaks and some lovely headlines of 10,000 times allowable levels. The number of times I've read an article that states 'officials say' and then some prognosis of doom it's just hilarious. I mean seriously, how much do you trust a news organisation that sticks in a article 'officials say' without mentioning which officials? I mean arguably a binman working for the government is an official. About the only reason I can see that they wouldn't mention who says it is that it's not a credible source. I don't really have time today to pick 10 articles from 'credible' sources and pull them apart but this should be an exercise that you do, don't let them blind you with FUD.
Oh, and also look at minimum allowable levels - and note the difference between those and the maximum safe levels.
Everything you read (including this post) should be taken with a grain of salt, you should look at what the person writing it is trying to say, and what they stand to gain. Don't just believe everything you read, good or bad about something and please please challenge your assumptions!
No problem, pretty much I agree with you which is why I wrote what I did but I'm glad you approved:)
I did like finding out how much radiation you got from eating a banana, or even just sleeping next to someone - it's entertaining. Told someone at work and they freaked no matter what they were told, or how small the radiation is....
Dang! You have a very good point, that would be a pretty good solution..
Any encryption except one time pads can be broken (well assuming you use the one time pad only once), but you're quite right, the likelihood of someone breaking into the server and then happening to have either the ability to crack the public/private encryption through algorithm vulnerability or computing power is low.. Arguably there are still many ways to break into it, from social engineering to physical breakins etc but really low order probability if it's done correctly.
I'd probably accept that as a viable solution myself (and I wish I'd come up with it so as not to look too stupid there:) ) - I'm still not 100% confident of a company that can retrieve your password however it is done as it's just not as secure but if the law does remain in force it's not too bad a solution.
I still think the law's rubbish tho, there's no requirement to grab records of all the passwords someone's had over the last year unless you're fishing somewhere you can't legally force to comply.
Why on earth do you think that if someone doesn't relocated half way around the globe into completely different country with a different language and culture that they are a 'blowhard' and a hypocrite? (I actually had to look up blowhard, never heard that before... odd phrase). Especially when they were talking about a spacecraft launch? I mean this isn't even suggesting building a nuclear reactor, it's about a radioisotope thermal generator. Talk about projecting.
Aren't you really exaggerating it a little? If you were being honest, and seriously looking at what you think and what you're afraid of wouldn't you admit to exaggerating a little there?
So you're in a panic about Fukushima, awesome, but I fail to understand what this has to do with Cassini's RTG?
Obviously radiation is radiation, so that's scary, I mean it's not like there are different types like alpha, beta etc? Or things like alpha sources, like say the Plutonium 238 on Cassini's RTG can be stopped by a few cm of air, and in fact about the only way to be harmed by it is to ingest or breath it (I suppose if one of the RTGs from it hit you in the head if the launch failed it'd harm you but that's not really radiation). Or that it's insoluble unlike the iodine you're petrified of in local produce and fish so wouldn't really get out of the soil and so there's only a tiny window in which you could possibly get a tiny amount of it into you. But obviously that's really scary and will destroy everything.
The reason he wants to slap people who say things like
"OH GOD IT'S GOING TO SPLODE AND KILL EVERYONE!!!111ONE"
is because it's moronic and they don't have a clue, they're afraid it will destroy the world and when it comes down to it they're petrified of cancer and death and radiation == cancer.
People fear what they don't understand, people don't understand statistics, radiation and frankly technology and people do stupid things like try and compare a spacecraft launch like Cassini with an RTG on it with swimming inside of a nuclear reactor. Your exact response is stupid, sensationalist and not based in reality, just your fears of it. (Yeah I know, the swimming in the nuclear reactor was sensationalist, but seriously, it's a fecking tsunami hit area and you think they're on the beach swimming? Riiight, good to know your priorities)
Also, seriously you're suggesting drinking from streams in tsunami hit areas in Japan? If you do that I'm pretty sure radiation that might cause cancer 40 years down the road is the least of your problems, ignoring the possibility of things decomposing into the water and all the bugs you'd get that way I'm also pretty sure there's a pot load of toxicity from all the rest of the stuff washed on the land, like say oil, gas, and who knows what other industrial run-off.
As for increasing the chances of dying, yes it would, living in a tsunami hit area you're always going to have a higher chance of dying, I mean it's not the most healthy place in the world - I mean gas is carcinogenic, so any of that being around is bad and I'm pretty sure that cars didn't magically survive the wave intact, nor were their tanks empty. They don't have all the bodies removed yet, so they're going to decompose and potentially have a bunch of nasties in, things like rats are going to multiply it's just an unpleasant place to live.
And yes, there is an increase in radiation, pretty much all of it short lived - half lives of 8 days isn't too worrying if you're careful for a month, but to be frank the highest risk to anyone there isn't from the reactor, it's from everything else. There is a small, and unmeasurable risk due to the radiation from the reactor, whilst in the individual this may translate to death it's impossible to attribute that to the radiation from the reactor - you may have just had sucky genetics, or for some reason you used an antique tritium dial watch, or you spent too long flying around, or you had gas splashed on you at some po
The law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers.
This includes users' full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded.
Which means that they would have to store the password, and be able to give it out to authorities.
So, to take your points:
It is still completely possible for Google to use hashed passwords to authenticate users and only "save" the plain password in a "write only" file (text or separate database) with the unhashed passwords...
Yes, but this is stupid and really gets rid of the point of having the hashed password in the first place. Now you have two copies, and even better if you hack the french data you start potentially having information necessary to recover passwords from other more secure countries. As for the 'write only' file, seriously? the only write only file is/dev/null, if you can read it at all there's the possibility that it can be read by bad people - that's what a security breach is... I suppose you could use a printer and print them all, if there's no digital way to read it then it would have to be a physical security breach, but the cost of compliance?
Shit, if they were required to provide a plain password, they could use any of the cracking tools to obtain exactly that one...
Kinda plausible, if only hashes were guaranteed to be one to one, only they aren't as it is possible to have hash collisions where two passwords can point to the same hash. This doesn't usually matter but it does mean you wouldn't be able to guarantee that there was no hash-collision and you were giving the authorities the wrong password, which would be illegal under this law. Granted the authorities may not know this and many not do anything about it, but if they wanted to be evil it wouldn't be hard to prove non-compliance.
or just "reset" the password of the account and give it to the French police.
Yeah, as above this would be giving them the incorrect password and would be violating the law. You really think they want the password to log into the site? Seriously? When they can just demand access? Most likely they're taking advantage of the fact that people tend to use the same passwords, so getting a historical record (and note this information has to be held for at least a year) of passwords for that user means there is a high likelihood that they'll be able to access data outside of their country. The law isn't asking them for their current password, or should I say not JUST their current password, it's asking for ALL of this data for the last year.
It's a data retention law, not a you must provide this to authorities when asked. You have to gather the information all the time and keep it for a minimum of a year and provide all that historical information on request (this is not just the current information). Which means you cannot just provide the current information, or reverse a hash etc.
The law is broad reaching, really intrusive and will cause far more problems for anyone than the french might hope it will solve, but for some reason you (after apparently reading the article) missed entirely the point of it.
Damnit forgot one more thing... Peak flipping demand!.
All this maths is based around averaged demand, but grid usage is anything but average.
Peak demand in 2003 for electricity generation comes up to over 140MW - don't forget that average power generation !=power usage. Of course you can ignore it and just go for the average - which is fine but you'll have daily brown and blackouts..
So we would need sufficient generator capacity to cover that.
Gas 150MW generator = $150million Solar 30x5MW generators = $750 million
In kansas, use the molten salt. If i recall, a 5 megawatt generation station requires 25 acres. That's a pretty small piece of land compared to the size of land that is occupied by electricity users. My father actually owns slightly more than 25 acres, so I have a very good idea how big that is. It's not big. Using extremely fuzzy estimates, its like 1/8th mile by 1/4 mile.
The total energy consumption for humboldt county (which I might add is artificially high due to indoor cannabis cultivtion) averages about 100MWH.
Theoretically, my very large county could be powered by 20 of these plants
Sorry matey, your math wasn't correct.
Power consumption of Humboldt county isn't 100MWH, or even if your mistake was typing that extra H and you meant 100MW that is also false, although not as badly.
But if Humboldt County did only consume 100MWH then it would only need 1 plant (you know 5MW = 120MWH, right?) - which would be awesome but not what you said....
So if we assume 1% annual growth in electricity consumption then by 2011 you should be using about 2786MWH daily, or if you want to know what level of power generation is required 116MW - which ironically is different from 100MW and especially different from 100MWH.
even the 2500MWH figure doesn't support 100MW, that comes out to 104.2MW, which ironcially is almost exactly one of your solar plants more than you suggested.
Whilst I did make a mistake - you shouldn't really be running around thinking that your maths was any better... tsk.
I had typed out a huge reply including the stats and links and I stupidly clicked on the ricesolar link above hence losing it all...
Ok, 2 things.
Firstly you're correct I forgot to convert between MW and MWH when I was taking the rated output of the power plants, so assuming the solar plant can provide power 24x7 it would produce 120MWH and yes the number required would be many times less. Ironically this doesn't really help with the costs as much as you'd think because I did the same with the gas power plant, and rather than needing 8 of them you'd actually need a third of that one plant. (Interestingly renewable plants are often rated on their maximum output which they rarely ever reach - wind is particularly guilty of this but so is solar - obviously solar input changes over the day and isn't present at all at night)
Secondly, don't be an idiot, not all my calculations were incorrect, in fact as far as I can tell and as far as anyone has pointed out I made one mistake, and it was a noticeable one as (and I hope they told you this when you were at school) I showed my workings, including sources. I still have no idea where your 100MWH daily energy usage came from. Your calculations were also wrong, but you were lucky that your incorrect energy usage matched... Interestingly I go back to your first post and I notice that you said that 20x5MW generating stations would generate 100MWH - er, doesn't just one of your stations generate 120MWH if you multiply up properly? Why would you need 20? Ahh I know, you forgot to convert between MW and MWH - weird it's the same mistake I made, and also weird if I'm bad at math then you must be.....what?
As for the 7 acres thing, well I had gone so far as to calculate the solar insolation, area of mirrors, separation of them before I screwed up and lost it. I'll leave the maths to you but yes, average solar insolation for Humbolt County does support a plant with an average 7 acres of mirrors for a 5MW plant, of course those mirrors are over a much larger area (has to be to avoid mirror shadowing and killing the land below it) and in order to account for losses, seasonal variations and cloudy days etc it seems that the rice solar plant at 50 acres for 5MW continuous output is actually fairly doable.
The rice solar plant which appears to be a molten salt continuous generation plant appears to come down to $25million for 5MW (at the low estimate), so your 5MW plants of which you'd require 21 (2500/120=20.8) would cost the state $525million to build, and would require about 1050acres of land. The same amount of gas generation would cost about $50million, still an order of magnitude more for the solar.
Cost dispersed over the 2008 estimate of 130k people comes to a much more acceptable $4038 for everyone in the county, but this is still around 24% of the total income of everyone. Compare that to the gas plant which is the equivalent of just $385 or just over 2% of the total income of everyone in Humboldt County.
This is assuming your 21x 5MW plants can have the efficiencies of an 150MW plant (which it can't) and you have increased thermal loss from greater numbers of smaller storage (thermal loss being heavily affected by surface area to volume - which means the larger the store the greater the insulation efficiency one climbs with the square, the other the cube) although that could probably be offset with reduced transmission losses through distributed generation.
Maintenance costs look to be about $5-7million annually for the ricesolar plant, so lets take $5million as the annual maintenance cost for a 150MW plant, you'll have to assume greater maintenance costs for distributed plants as there are more components, but that looks at being say $200k per plant annually x21 for the plants gives about $4.2 million for annual maintenance costs, which is the equivalent of the fuel.
Hmm, looking at gas fuel costs (http://www.cres-energy.org/blogs/blogs_roedern06Jan.html) an efficent gas turbine appears to get about $0.08 in
The idea's been around for a long time, it'll work, but it's expensive.
SJBE: FTL on the other hand doesn't really have any basis atm other than the possibility of wormholes afaik. We can build a space elevator (not tethered) now if we make the economic case for it, or just have enough money and the drive to do it.
There's usually more than one way to skin a cat as the saying goes.
Ok, so I found 3 Humboldt Countys in California, Iowa and Nevada, but based on size it appears you mean the CA one, of course it only really has 2.2million acres of land, the rest is water.
According to this report (http://postcarboncities.net/humboldt-county-ca-energy-element-background-technical-report) Humboldt county (apologies if I got the wrong one or anything) used 940 GWh of electricity alone in 2003, which comes out to around 2500MWH averaged daily - that is a heck of a jump from your 100MWH, 25 times as much. And that doesn't count usage growth over the last 8 years, nor the natural gas heating, cooking and hot water (about 45million therms) nor transportation energy costs.
I'm pretty concerned by your numbers now, but even taking your 25 acre 5MW station at face value, and even allowing that it's a molten salt plant and stores enough energy to provide that 5MW continuously day and night with backup storage to last several weeks and to provide that 5MW during the local solar minimum you would need 12500 acres to provide just the electrical energy. 10 cubic meters of molten salt can provide 1MWH of storage, since you'd need 2500MWH of storage for a single day, and several weeks of storage you're talking about 350k cubic meters of molten salt, a heck of a lot.
Sure all of this is relatively minor compared to the actual size of Humboldt county but I'd guess the cost of manufacture of a 5MW plant to be around the $20million mark (unaccurately based on http://www.power-technology.com/projects/Seville-Solar-Tower/ and scaling down), so if you have to build 500 of them just to handle the electrical load you're talking about $10billion to manufacture (and remember this is for purely the electrical generation of 2003, not transport or natural gas). The population of 2008 is estimated at about 130k (http://mapzones.org/Humboldt_County_California.html) meaning that would cost about $77k per resident. The same report shows that the average per-capita income of Humboldt county residents is $17k annually - or 4.5 times the cost.
I don't know about you but I'm a little puzzled as to how you're going to pay for all of this? Not to mention over doubling it for powering hydrogen/electrical vehicles and replacing natural gas completely - something you'll have to do to have this green revolution of yours.
What you, and everyone who thinks that "popular pundit b.s." is just "b.s." seem to fail to understand is that this is a huge engineering, financial and technological issue to overcome. There are many reasons why it hasn't happened already, and aside from energy density and reliability the biggest reason is cost, are you really willing to have an additional 50% tax on all income in your state for the next 10 years to pay for constructing the plants necessary? Think of what that would mean, can you cope with 50% less money every payday?
Just as a comparison a 320MW natural gas power station costs about $150million dollars (http://www.power-technology.com/projects/laverton/), so you're looking at about the equivalent of 8 of them, or $1.2billion dollars - your solar plan is an order of magnitude more expensive. If you're saying that they should be built with loans and then amortised over the lifetime of the plant with the cost being the energy, you're still looking at about 5 times more expensive electricity (yes I know the fuel costs are minimal - mirror maintenance is a pain but you don't have to buy gas) unless you subsidise it somehow (in which case it's still 5 times as expensive but you're pretending it's not).
If you're going to have statements like "Now you see where the science behind green makes sense, and the popular pundit b.s. that is constantly echoed is just exaggerated doubt and nonsense claims." then you had really better match that with actual verifiable numbers and facts. Rather than just repeating what you've heard without really understanding it - it is completely possible, but then again so
I hadn't actually looked up the temps the molten salt plants work at, but that effectively gives them about a max of 1200 DegC thermal difference, giving a maximum theoretical efficiency of 81% at maximum temperature (assuming 0 degrees outside) down to 28% right before it stops boiling. Obviously the outside is not likely to be at zero, so the max efficiency drops even further, but that's actually not too bad you could probably get an average of 30% - possibly more with supercritical steam turbines . It also depends on how the energy is extracted - there's a big difference between a coal fired plant at a (fairly) constant source temperature to a solar plant that has to extract as much power as possible from the heat store, it has to run across all the temperature differentials.
The boiling point of the water was when you stopped being able to extract heat energy in a regular steam turbine - I checked the melting point of an existing molten-salt solar reactor (sodium nitrate/potassium-nitrate in 60/40) and it melts at about 232C the 'cold' temp is about 287C and the 'hot' temp is 565C (http://www.sandia.gov/Renewable_Energy/solarthermal/NSTTF/salt.htm). I'm sure different mixes of salt can have different temperature ranges, and the design there simplified the thermal issue with a separate hot and cold tank. A quick calculation shows that you need storage of about 10 cubic metres for 1MW for an hour. The US uses about 10,034 MWH/day so a single days storage would be around 100k cubic metres - which actually doesn't sound like too much.. Hmm maybe it is doable to store that much, you'd need several times it as there could be fairly bad days / weeks (although the more you store in a single place the better the insulation is - volume vs surface area) and I have no idea how much space it would take up to gather that much heat... but...
You've got a very good point though, many more people will be happy with a molten salt plant than a nuclear plant, and yeah there's much less to go wrong - but I wouldn't say nobody would complain. People complain about wind turbines enough and for no real reason - I think they tend to look pretty decent but a lot of people really get up in arms when new ones are sited.
I still suspect it'll be much harder than most proponents suggest, but mebbe it's not the complete nightmare I'd thought it would be. I wonder if you could shrink the technology for rooftop / backyard operation, the necessary storage space isn't very much, and I quite like the independence of localised power.
As for the nukes, yeah I think they'll be around, they are much denser than solar power (and not everywhere has the same amount of land per person as the US does), although I'd personally prefer the molten salt thorium reactors to current pressurised reactors.
I'm not exactly a convert;) but I suspect you're not as insane as you first sounded.
So you're talking about solar-thermal plants that store heat.
It certainly does reduce the need for direct electrical storage, but it's still not a good numbers game.
Firstly, there is a maximum amount of energy you can store, then there's the issue of diminishing returns on thermal storage (both leakage and pushing more energy into the store is a function of the difference in temperature).
80% efficiency of conversion of thermal to electrical energy is impressive but I have to admit I really doubt it would be attainable in real life, the maximum theoretical efficiency of a a heat engine is the difference in temperature between hot and cold divided by the absolute temperature of the hot side. This means that as you extract more and more heat out of the molten salt you're constantly reducing efficiency (not to mention that as the molten salt heats up it absorbs less and less of the heat from the sun) - also I'm under the impression that these are steam plants too, which gives a point below which they cannot extract any more heat (boiling point of water) to turn to electricity.
Weather is relatively predictable over the long term (approximately) but you're falling into the trap of the generic versus the specific, averaging all of the plants over the US for example, and over years you can work out what is necessary to keep power running. However what you can't do is keep any specific plant generating 24x7, then of course come the transmission losses, the storage losses, meaning that the size of the plants and their storage have to be increased again and again. The more you store, the more you lose to thermal leakage, the more you transmit from one side of the country to another the more you lose, each requires more storage and generation capacity to offset. Anyway, back to my point, saying that X amount of generation and Y amount of storage will cover the US (or any country) for their power requirements over the next 5 years will actually give you localised brown and blackouts (there are always events outside of the bell-curve that the system cannot adapt to) - it will mean a change in lifestyle from that of certain power to that of uncertain power.
Since the solar plants can't ramp up (or they run out during the night, or the next cloudy day), and the wind can't be certain to blow when you need more than the baseload (which is all the time, the baseload is just the average lowest usage) this isn't a replacement technology, sure you can replace some plants with this, but personally I'd replace the fossil fuel plants before I replaced the nuclear plants with these.
As to the US being under 80% cloud cover for a month or two? It's possible, likely, no, possible yes. If you're happy being without power for a week or so then all is good, but most people don't have the capability to cope for a week or two without power, I mean no heating, light, refrigeration or cooking (obviously everyone will have gone electric for everything as fossil fuels shouldn't be used) is quite difficult to do without.
To be honest, I really wish I could believe, or that the numbers supported a fully renewable future - but unfortunately they don't. It's personally possible to be completely on renewable energy (with enough land) but much harder for millions of people to do the same.
Wind can generate power yes, so can solar - but it is very important to know that wind and solar CANNOT generate power ALL the time, not only that they also sometimes do not generate power at the same time - and inconveniently at the time of peak requirement.
Nuclear power can generate all the time (as can gas and coal and oil etc).
People use power ALL THE TIME, this means that you cannot rely on solar and wind power without massive storage systems, and of course many times more generating capacity than you actually need - as significant energy is lost in each conversion.
Take the UK, mid winter records show that the entire country has been becalmed for up to 2 weeks at a time (no wind power - and of course minimal solar power) - what this means is that if the UK converted to pure wind and solar we would require 2 weeks of peak energy storage (you use more energy in the winter with lighting and heating), and the ability to keep it charged (or of course accept that there may be no power during the coldest time of the year). The problem with this is that the battery technology does not exist, pumped hydro storage is pitiful compared to the UK load. If you want to have power during these times then you need to store the energy from the bright and windy times. This applies to absolutely every country world-wide, but I know that limit of the UK wind.
If you want to live off grid it's completely possible, I mean firstly don't worry about a fridge / freezer etc as they use a lot of power, so use dried foodstuffs that don't need to be chilled. Then don't worry about cooking with electricity - you don't have enough for that. Then also don't worry about heating your house with electricity, you don't have enough for that. Don't worry about using a TV, computer, you don't have the electricity for that - you have enough for light, and a couple of small devices. Granted you could use a laptop as a TV / computer some of the time, but it's unlikely you'd be able to keep it charged for continuous use.
If you live off grid you heat your house with oil, coal, gas or wood, same with cooking etc, the energy you gather from your wind and solar isn't enough to run these devices.
Is this a world you want? To not have the power to run anything? To drop back into victorian times? To have a massive change in lifestyle enforced on you? Oh and forget actually having an electric car - if you can't power all your home devices how can you power an order of magnitude higher electricity use car?
Some people will say that the technology is there, that magical X will solve all the storage problems, and to them I'd ask a simple question - what is the range of an electrical car compared to a fossil fuel powered one? And that's cutting edge, incredibly expensive and polluting battery tech.
The ideal of completely renewable energy is great - the reality isn't workable, and for all you think wind and solar are cheap, you're actually paying higher bills because of them - the subsidies for wind and solar to make them competitive basically get added to the cost of electricity generated through other mechanisms. The belief that if you only just try and put it all in place it'll work ignores reality, if you can come up with a plan on paper that matches the requirements and keeps our quality of life I'll leap on it (heck, just get it in the rough same ball-park of quality of life and I'll be happy), until then saying it'll just work is pointless.
The point about nuclear is that it works, all the time, day, night, windy or not it means you have heat, light and even possibly electric cars - wind and solar cannot do this. It's not an obsession, it's reality and reality doesn't care if you have the 'will to commit to them' it only has what will happen if you do.
That was purely the cost of the oil - which is only about 40% of the US energy usage, so assuming costs are roughly on par for the rest of the energy usage then it's over twice as much, so you could say that the energy costs we're spending over the next 40 years adds up to $240trillion, but then again you've ignore that 85 million barrels a day is crude oil consumption - for lots of different types of fuel, for plastics, for fertilisers etc. This might make the figures much more acceptable except that they're incorrect:
Giving a rough total of $236trillion... Of course not even close to counting the hydrogen infrastructure the electrolysis plants needed to make the hydrogen, nor the new global transmission infrastructure or the necessary energy storage.
And this was to handle the projected consumption of 2030, not 2050, so what it really works out to is something like $59trillion in oil costs up until 2030 - and this isn't just fuel at the pump, it's all oil, from fuel to plastic to fertiliser.
Which means it's not double, it's not triple it's 4 times as much as you're paying now - for all oil. And even of the oil that is burnt 72% of that is used for cars... Cars that won't magically convert to running on electricity and hydrogen, that's a lot of cars you need to replace, and filling stations, and human behaviour.
To be frank I think the cost will be an order of magnitude higher than it is now - 10 times as much as you're paying, not your double.
Finally, don't forget you'll have to pay it at the same time as everything is built, meaning it's oil AND these costs (in fact this will drive oil prices up massively as all the materials have to come from somewhere, there's transport, manufacture, installation etc - all using oil) which are really optimistic.
Oh yes, and the report mentions a new improved electricity grid, mainly because the power is never where (or when) you need it - no idea of the cost of that. It
And this ignores the fact that the world would be a very different place after this big change occurred, I mean who actually needs constant uninterrupted power? That's a luxury we can all do without. Not one of these studies has ever dealt with the variability of the energy source, the need to ship it half way around the world and the fact that roughly 20% of it (the solar) doesn't work at least 50% of the time, and that 73% of the energy generation comes from wind, wind known to have long periods when it's useless; from too windy to no wind, for weeks at a time.
Storage is hugely inefficient, transmission is very inefficient and I must have missed the part of the report that mentions it all. With costings..
My conclusion? Wow, they just don't bother looking at it seriously, after all who wants t
There's no such thing like "x activations per day", unless you define the time period. It's just not reasonable to think such a number can actually be that predictable.
Huh? So when it was said to be 350k activations per day, you missed the time period of a day? So about 350k activations every 24 hours, or to be more specific 14.6k activations per hour, 243 activations per minute or a bit over 4 activations per second.
I can only assume that you actually meant something like between the 00:00 Jan 1st 2011 and 23:59.59 Jan 31st 2011 there were 10.8million activations (not a real stat, I just multiplied up 350kx31) - but this isn't actually that helpful as it boils down to 350k per day..
It would help provide additional information about trending activations but I have no issue with knowing approximate average levels - I mean if you were looking at the stock market it might be helpful to know the level at which a stock is growing (yeah it's not an exact match as constantly climbing stocks don't exist but it's a similar statistical analysis).
But, to actually refute your statement: Of course there is such a thing as "x activations per day", especially as when these are published or the statements are made they contain the words 'about', or 'over' etc - these bound the data provided. Granted the language could be more specific but it's pretty much intrinsic that this is an average and obviously will fluctuate - I wouldn't be surprised by 400k activations on some days and 300k on others, after all shopping levels change on a daily basis, but you can average them out.
The one thing I'd like google to define most absolutely is what an Activation is, they've said that this is new devices being activated but there are still some questions (how do they count people leaving devices behind - they do break and get replaced after all).
But did you really want to know that on day x we have exactly this many activations - I mean you have no idea if that was an up or a down day - rolling averages are your friend when you're looking at overall trends.
On smartphones iOS will be in second place, right were apple wants it. They want to be the up market trendy choice, they are all about image and high price. They want to be BMW, which means you will not see Toyota levels of sales.
Apple doesn't want "second place". They want whatever the most they can get is. Comparing Apple to BMW vs Toyota is not apt, as Android phones and iPhones are similarly priced, with the exception of sometimes highly discounted Android phones, and a few discount models. It's more like comparing Toyota (Apple) to Ford (Android) and sometimes Yugo (low end Android).
I happen to somewhat agree with you - Apple, like RIM or Google, or Nokia or anyone in the Smartphone business would love to be the top dog, having 100% of sales. Since none of them can do that then they different approaches to it, and I'd have to say Apple (currently) isn't aiming to get the world + dog using their devices - hence the aiming for 'second place' remark. This is obvious by the profit margin on the iOS devices (iPhone 4 has 61% apparently http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/apple-earns-61-gross-profit-margin-on-each-iphone-4-sale/) which means that they could probably half the price of the device and stay afloat, it certainly means that a 10% price cut wouldn't hurt them in the slightest and their earnings reports do show that they are making a lot of money. There is no doubt that dropping the price of the iPhone would increase sales, it is an expensive device so it's obvious that they don't want to do this, hence they really are aiming for second place, or at least not panicking about first place.
Personally I don't think this is necessarily a good thing for them, there's
Firstly Android development is not open, the code is developed in private and then published when done. Not open!
This isn't any different from any other open source project - other than scale. Patches to the linux kernel are developer on individual people's machines, tested etc before anyone gets to see them - I see few arguments about Linux not being open source. Yes google take longer and put more into their 'patches' so to speak but it's only a difference of scale, not a difference of process. You can still take the source code and create your own version of Android.
Secondly, you can't choose what language to develop in when creating Android, you have to use the Dalvik VM and use libraries for any native code. Not open!
Feel free to fork Android at any point and write in any language (which is of course the point of open source), or write an interpreter in Java to convert to any language and go from there (sure it's slightly painful the interpreter way but JIT gets there eventually). An open source project is not obliged to ensure that absolutely anything can be done with it, it's obliged to provide the source code so that YOU can add the features you want - it's not obliged to change in order to make it fit with the way you want it. Open source projects means just that, open source. Has it occurred to you that if you detest using Java so much you could write a patch to Android to provide for whatever language you desire and even persuade google to ship it with their code? It won't be easy, but it's possible - that's the point of open.
Thirdly, if open source was so desirable we would all be using Linux now, OSX and Windows would be dead. The opposite is true.
OSX is based on BSD, it's a wrapper built on open source - poor choice of example there, in fact without the BSD core OSX wouldn't be very good. Windows is also riddled with open source software. But here, and it appears to be your only point that is valid in your entire tirade, you actually have a point - most people (90+%) use windows. Of course there's a minor issue with that - Linux isn't as functional as windows unless you don't want to use very much. If you want to game it's just not as capable as windows because fewer games developers use it. If you want to browse the web it's fine, but then again 90+% of computers sold have windows pre-installed, and if you want to use the computer why would you change the OS? It's not what you purchased the computer to do.
I think the argument about Apple and iOS being closed and Android being open isn't really about open vs closed source (certainly I don't really care about that particular difference), I believe that the point that should be made with 'open' vs iOS is that you are heavily restricted in what you can do with the device. On Android if you don't like the current UI you can replace it - you can have an iPhone UI clone, you can have a Windows Phone 7 UI, you can have the interesting slidescreen http://slidescreenhome.com/ UI, you can have a world of innovation available *now* - because, literally, there's an app for that.
This is something that you literally cannot get with an Apple device. Frankly the ideology difference between closed and open source, I couldn't care less - I (personally) care about being able to customise and streamline *my* device. You can't even have applications that look like a homescreen because, well that would confuse users / or Apple doesn't like it.
My biggest issue with iOS? It is flexibility. The possibility of having applications multi-task for whatever reason not just a few restricted cut down options. I can change my UI, I have much more information available at my fingertips than you get on the iPhone. Widgets are much better than icons for some things and having the option is better than not.
I was never into the phone case stuff, or downloadable ringtones that happe
It's certainly cheaper than building a fully fledged power station in orbit and gets rid of any complaints about microwave beaming of power.
There's a minor issue of increasing global warming by throwing extra energy down onto the planet but if you can offset most of the rest of the generation of electricity it'll probably balance out.
It certainly bears thinking on and would help with the overnight storage issue.
As you say, you could have the same mirrors just on the night terminator (I'm not sure that the orbits supports it - but possibly you could balance on the sunlight you're beaming) so that for that latitude the night is shortened.
I think the biggest stupidity with this (aside from the awful transmission losses - you'd need *many* times the usage value to transmit it) is the fact that 50% of the time your solar panels aren't producing energy.
You honestly think it's a good plan to have to store about 6.5 x10^17 Joules of energy? (World consumption in 2008 - 474*10^18Joules) There's about 11000J in a Lithium Ion AA battery, which means you need 5.9 x 10^13 AA batteries to store this - or about 59trillion AA batteries just to try and store the energy needed for the night-time - assuming 100% charge discharge and transmission efficiency, you'd actually need many times that in reality - and that assumes of course that there's no annual solar variation, clouds or other bad weather to do it.
Capacitors are better for this but they store even less - about 277J for a 2.5volt 350 farad capacitor.. so about 2300trillion of those capacitors. (multiplied by about 10 for transmission losses)
It's great to say, yeah enough energy falls on the Sahara to power the world, but it's completely idiotic to contemplate actually doing it. The scale of the problem is so much more than you've even bothered to look at.
In the real world, then yes, obviously relying on terrestrial passive collection energy gathering will leave you with a deficit (no matter what you do - wind stops blowing, the day turns to night etc) the only thing you can do is have many many times what you need and try and store the rest or use active generation mechanisms.
Also btw, did you know that solar panels efficiency drops the hotter they are? Last I checked the Sahara was a little toasty - especially when the sun is shining. Also, materials don't tend to like massive repeated thermal shifts like say about 50C summer days to -5 winter nights, best case is still something like a 20C shift at least twice a day. There are sand-storms, continuous abrasion and about a billion other problems.
Of course if you had solar satellites that always had the sun shining on them, well that's a different matter, but the sahara? Gah - I hate it when people bring up that armchair numbers exercise without actually thinking about it.
Er, ignoring the fact that your cousin wouldn't be protected by patents anyway (as that's copyright), and ignoring the difference in perceived value this isn't the best idea.
Patents aren't copyright, they aren't protecting you (or your cousin) they are harming you, they cost a lot to create and even more to enforce. Example US costs here http://ipwatchdog.com/patent/patent-cost/ but it ranges from $5k to $15k+.
The fun thing about patents is that they harm you, even if you never apply for one. Take your cousin for an example, there's nothing hugely different in what he does compared to a computer programmer, he uses tools to achieve an end, be that programming techniques / product features or the type of hill to put in a painting. The difference between the two is that (currently) you can't patent a type of hill to put in your painting, however you can patent (in certain countries) features in your product.
It doesn't matter if you created those types of hills yourself, or if you looked through a list of hill types people have created before (although in the software patents example - it can triple the damages) if someone else has patented them, then you're not allowed to use it - at least without paying them. Imagine the world your cousin would live in if he had 20 patent infringement suits for a single picture he'd created, that he "put an enormous amount of effort, talent and training into his work" but it turns out people had done it before. His worry wouldn't be some chinese printer ripping him off, no, it would be the american company who has sued him for willful infringement.
But lets say you've spent $15k on your complex patent, and a large company infringes it, how much money do you have to enforce the patent? I mean you've got to take them to court, they probably won't just admit fault and give you the money, that can take years, years of lawyers, costs etc, you could spend millions trying to enforce a patent, and even if you win there's no guarantee of breaking even.
Your fear of anarchy is blinding you to the reality, you're afraid of big companies just stealing ideas - which is what they're already doing! It costs too much to try and take them down, about your only hope is to go to one of their competitors and licence it to them and make them pay to defend it. Which is basically trying to play school yard bullies off against each other - it's stupid, immature and frankly most clearly highlights the issues with the current system. But what is the definition of anarchy? "A state of lawlessness and disorder" - I mean if large company X takes your idea, that's contrary to law, and yet they get away with it because you don't have the financial resources to fight, ergo we're in anarchy and you're blindly defending it.
There are around 7 billion people on this planet, a lot of them have brains, and use them. A lot of them have problems similar to you (and if you look through history you'll see my point - numerous discoveries and inventions happened nigh on simultaneously around the world) and a lot of them find similar solutions. I'm sorry, you're not unique, your thought? You're not the first to have that idea and you definitely won't be the last. Why do you think that you should have ownership of something you came up with if someone else comes up with it without your help?
The most I could agree with is that if you come up with an idea and tell the world immediately, and clearly that you might deserve some recompense, after all you just saved someone time. But patents? Have you ever read a patent? They aren't designed to be clear, they're designed to be vague (yes I have several - and I was disappointed with how an idea could be mutilated) because vague covers more related inventions. Patents are legal tools to bludgeon people/companies, not to protect.
Pay attention, think - you believe it's a valid use of time, so do it! But don't blind yourself to thinking that the status quo is a perfect solution, and
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what your point is, mainly because your example doesn't make any sense.
Your comparison appears to be that telling the truth ("The ads that you're all hating are the things that are paying for the content you want to view.") vs lying to incite a (presumably negative) response ("calling the Pope a gynophobic Nazi paedophile-protector") is somehow the same?
If I'd gone to the Vatican website and called the Pope that, then obviously I would be trolling and attempting to start a flame-war. Whereas all I did was tell the truth (granted as I see it, but I've seen no evidence to the contrary) in discussion about flash (and specifically how bad flash is because of the uses of it).
However saying it on slashdot? I don't know about you but I prefer the intelligent (yes I know bits of slashdot aren't, but significant bits are) conversation on here, where I might actually learn something and I have to say I really don't know what you'll learn from deluding yourself. Granted I tend to define learning as learning new beneficial skills, or information etc. I don't really consider it 'learning' if what you've learnt isn't correct, or at least approximately correct.
Denying that ads do pay for content on a site that is partially funded by advertising revenue is a little odd. It may be unpleasant but it's still true, and you can only change things for the better (other than blind chance) if you start from what's true not just what you want to be true.
Z.
P.S. Quite like the sig :)
Two words for you: wilful infringement
Once you have had the education about copyright and how what you are doing is bad you can no longer claim that you didn't realise, or didn't understand. You are educated, and there is a record of your education.
And as I understand it, wilful infringement hits you with triple damages... Hmm, well it appears to be that way for patent infringement but a quick scan doesn't seem to have the triple damages rule for wilful copyright infringement but does impact your damages.
There is a point to it, quite a nasty one.
1. Google gets to look good, educating the copyright infringers. Helps get the *IAAs off their back, probably because of point 2.
2. The *IAAs get to get higher damages and lower burden of proof for repeating offenders. After all if you've violated copyright many times before and been educated it's going to have a bearing on the trial judge and jury.
Z.
I agree, it's the use to which it is put that's a problem.
The thing is, I can understand why there are flashing, bouncing annoying ads. Simply put they catch your attention and advertising is about catching your attention (well for a generic 'your').
The second issue is that the ads work, it's depressing and makes me weep for the species (well exaggerated there) but flashy ads work (or at least I assume they would, otherwise they'd soon disappear). I don't actually know about any click-through / conversion rates as I've never posted any ads (nor directly hosted any - I presume wordpress have slapped some on my blogs) but I suspect that they do generate more for the advertiser, hence they exist. Ads don't have to be socially acceptable, they aren't going for acceptance they're going for clicks and potentially sales.
Maybe I'm just not visiting any of the most annoying sites, but I don't find the flash ads that intrusive anymore, few flashy, bells whistles and running around the screen ads - they used to be appalling so I wonder what's changed? Is it just me not bothering to return to sites with sucky ads or have they actually improved?
You have to remember who is seeing these ads, annoying as it is to acknowledge, we're in the minority. Tech savy users are few and far between compared to the average person on the web, which means those ads aren't interested in you, they're interested in your neighbour because your neighbour might click on the flashy ad, or respond to the 411 scam, or click 'scan my machine for viruses'. It's all social engineering and it's not targeted at you, you're just an unfortunate bystander.
As for the numbers? Who knows, I've seen some decent flash ones, and I've seen some appalling ones. You're probably right that the majority are sucky, but that doesn't make it flash's fault, it's the use that's a problem. Assuming flash dies then something else will take up the slack as unfortunately sucky ads work for some people.
Z.
You don't have to install flash - problem solved.
Oh yes, if you don't have flash you can't access flash, if you don't have javascript you can't use javascript - meaning that if you turn off the ads or whatever then you run the risk of not seeing what you want to see.
Frankly if the website is that annoying, then go to a different one, or create your own content to rival it.
What might be nice actually is a plugin control that allowed you to load individual objects on the page, so load this JS script (not that it really has a visual element tho) or load this flash object (which does have a visual element), but then again a fair few of them may interlink and break if they are partially loaded.. Sigh.
But I suspect that Adobe might bring out the lawyers to take care of that if there was one.
Z.
I remember back when I used to run Windows on my laptop, if the battery suddenly dropped 50% in ten minutes I'd go to the task manager and find some minimized Firefox window maxing out a core running some Flash crap. Firefox seems to handle that better these days, or maybe Linux Flash does.
It really is an evil monstrosity.
This statement has always bugged me about flash and why some people seem to detest it.
Hasn't it occurred to you that it's to do with what you use flash for rather than flash itself?
Animation, sounds all that junk in those ads takes CPU time, it's pretty much the same as playing lots of little movies on your system. Why shoot the messenger when it's to do with the ads developer, or the site developer?
Flash may not be efficient (I have no idea as to the relative efficiency compared to other ways to achieve the same thing) but I'm pretty sure it's the content that causes the issue. I suspect that a text only flash ad wouldn't be as draining. Once HTML 5 is present sufficiently and has the same capabilities then there's a real likelihood that this conversation will be about how HTML 5 feature X drains battery massively, not once realising that it's what you do with it thats the problem.
I'm a little puzzled as to why you left any pop-under windows up on your system - they really annoyed me when they launched so I'd just kill them. And since firefox has had tabs for a long time there never really was a major reason to have loads of windows open (that I could see) making pop-unders even more obvious.
I've got a couple of points to make:
1. On Android you can (and it appeared to be default for me) have it set to load plugins only when requested.. So no flash unless there's something particular I want to see (in fact no plugins at all unless there's something particular I want to see).
2. The ads that you're all hating are the things that are paying for the content you want to view. You have visited these websites, sat there long enough for them to max out your cores in order to view the content. That's the exchange you're making. No ads, eventually no content - and people don't seem all that willing to pay for everything.
About the only other solution is a paywall, or getting rid of the web and going for pay-for apps only..
Z.
Frankly why not let them create an account for you?
I mean does it matter? They're creating false profiles about you in their banking system - in a lot of places that's actionable. Just like if someone else opened an account in your name in Bank of America, or Barclays, it doesn't make you liable. And should their demonstrably false information materially harm you then you can recover that cost, and pretty much recover the cost of recovering the costs, etc. It's hassle, but you add that to the costs that facebook would have to host. Not to mention the legal minefield of libel when your 'friends' say unpleasant things about you on their (or your) walls and it suddenly increases the cost of your mortgage as you're now a higher risk. Would facebook assume that liability? Because some has to, giving random people the ability to materially detriment your life is going to be a lawyers wet dream I'd expect.
The article mentions 680million facebook users, the facebook stats themselves http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics say 500+million users, and then goes on to say that only 50% of them log on per day. Then a quick look at the number of farmville users http://www.facebook.com/FarmVille gives us about 48million users active in the last month. Now maybe this is just me, (and yes I'm aware that facebook games are more than just farmville) but I would suggest that the vast majority of the 'active' facebook users don't play games, and probably don't spend money to do it - so few of them would be using facebook credits, the underpinning of this idea in the first place.
It sounds like the stats have been inflated to say that everyone using facebook plays games, and everyone playing games gushes money into facebook, this really isn't the case.
Why would companies suddenly try and use facebook (and on Mark's terms, not theirs) to data mine and find out which people are good or bad credit risks? For that matter how truthful is facebook? Is all the stuff you put up there real? Or as I've seen so many times exaggerated to make the poster seem a much 'cooler' person.
It's good for headlines, but I'm pretty suspicious that it has any real world possibilities.
Z.
Sorry but the responses didn't miss the point.
What did you think you were going to achieve with a troll post, other than a troll response.
If you want a reasoned debate about something you have to start with being reasonable, blowing everything out of proportion and attacking like you did doesn't achieve anything.
You can be as sarcastic as you like, but remember again you're using a medium that does not convey emotional content easily, and different people from different backgrounds will interpret the same words in a different manner, especially when they are removed from the context of tone.
If you believe as you do that the phase 'Nuklear hysteria' is terrible and denigrates people to that extent I'd suggest saying that, disagree with what the person is saying and say that specifically, do not jump on the hysteria bandwagon to attempt to disprove it. Hysteria only begets hysteria.
I have a friend in Japan, a moderate distance from from the affected area and he's not too worried about it - at least he's certainly not obviously in a panic - but as this is second hand unsubstanciated information and of course incredibly subjective I wouldn't expect you to take that as a calming influence.
Two things I would like to mention, firstly people in the most heavily earthquake and tsunami directly affected areas aren't too worried about the radiation - there's sufficient struggle to survive and frankly not enough time to worry much about something you can't really see.
Secondly most people who are incredibly concerned about the radiation (I'm really ignoring the people in the US as that is just hysteria - it's too far away to worry that much) aren't directly affected by the tsunami and weren't too badly affected by the earthquake, they have time and a media that is using the fear of the un-understood to sell panic.
The reactor situation is serious, it's a problem but it's being dealt with, there's some radiation leaks and some lovely headlines of 10,000 times allowable levels. The number of times I've read an article that states 'officials say' and then some prognosis of doom it's just hilarious. I mean seriously, how much do you trust a news organisation that sticks in a article 'officials say' without mentioning which officials? I mean arguably a binman working for the government is an official. About the only reason I can see that they wouldn't mention who says it is that it's not a credible source. I don't really have time today to pick 10 articles from 'credible' sources and pull them apart but this should be an exercise that you do, don't let them blind you with FUD.
Oh, and also look at minimum allowable levels - and note the difference between those and the maximum safe levels.
Everything you read (including this post) should be taken with a grain of salt, you should look at what the person writing it is trying to say, and what they stand to gain. Don't just believe everything you read, good or bad about something and please please challenge your assumptions!
Z.
No problem, pretty much I agree with you which is why I wrote what I did but I'm glad you approved :)
I did like finding out how much radiation you got from eating a banana, or even just sleeping next to someone - it's entertaining. Told someone at work and they freaked no matter what they were told, or how small the radiation is....
Z.
Dang! You have a very good point, that would be a pretty good solution..
Any encryption except one time pads can be broken (well assuming you use the one time pad only once), but you're quite right, the likelihood of someone breaking into the server and then happening to have either the ability to crack the public/private encryption through algorithm vulnerability or computing power is low.. Arguably there are still many ways to break into it, from social engineering to physical breakins etc but really low order probability if it's done correctly.
I'd probably accept that as a viable solution myself (and I wish I'd come up with it so as not to look too stupid there :) ) - I'm still not 100% confident of a company that can retrieve your password however it is done as it's just not as secure but if the law does remain in force it's not too bad a solution.
I still think the law's rubbish tho, there's no requirement to grab records of all the passwords someone's had over the last year unless you're fishing somewhere you can't legally force to comply.
Z.
But good catch :)
Just a question.
Why on earth do you think that if someone doesn't relocated half way around the globe into completely different country with a different language and culture that they are a 'blowhard' and a hypocrite? (I actually had to look up blowhard, never heard that before... odd phrase). Especially when they were talking about a spacecraft launch? I mean this isn't even suggesting building a nuclear reactor, it's about a radioisotope thermal generator. Talk about projecting.
Aren't you really exaggerating it a little? If you were being honest, and seriously looking at what you think and what you're afraid of wouldn't you admit to exaggerating a little there?
So you're in a panic about Fukushima, awesome, but I fail to understand what this has to do with Cassini's RTG?
Obviously radiation is radiation, so that's scary, I mean it's not like there are different types like alpha, beta etc? Or things like alpha sources, like say the Plutonium 238 on Cassini's RTG can be stopped by a few cm of air, and in fact about the only way to be harmed by it is to ingest or breath it (I suppose if one of the RTGs from it hit you in the head if the launch failed it'd harm you but that's not really radiation). Or that it's insoluble unlike the iodine you're petrified of in local produce and fish so wouldn't really get out of the soil and so there's only a tiny window in which you could possibly get a tiny amount of it into you. But obviously that's really scary and will destroy everything.
The reason he wants to slap people who say things like
"OH GOD IT'S GOING TO SPLODE AND KILL EVERYONE!!!111ONE"
is because it's moronic and they don't have a clue, they're afraid it will destroy the world and when it comes down to it they're petrified of cancer and death and radiation == cancer.
People fear what they don't understand, people don't understand statistics, radiation and frankly technology and people do stupid things like try and compare a spacecraft launch like Cassini with an RTG on it with swimming inside of a nuclear reactor. Your exact response is stupid, sensationalist and not based in reality, just your fears of it. (Yeah I know, the swimming in the nuclear reactor was sensationalist, but seriously, it's a fecking tsunami hit area and you think they're on the beach swimming? Riiight, good to know your priorities)
Also, seriously you're suggesting drinking from streams in tsunami hit areas in Japan? If you do that I'm pretty sure radiation that might cause cancer 40 years down the road is the least of your problems, ignoring the possibility of things decomposing into the water and all the bugs you'd get that way I'm also pretty sure there's a pot load of toxicity from all the rest of the stuff washed on the land, like say oil, gas, and who knows what other industrial run-off.
As for increasing the chances of dying, yes it would, living in a tsunami hit area you're always going to have a higher chance of dying, I mean it's not the most healthy place in the world - I mean gas is carcinogenic, so any of that being around is bad and I'm pretty sure that cars didn't magically survive the wave intact, nor were their tanks empty. They don't have all the bodies removed yet, so they're going to decompose and potentially have a bunch of nasties in, things like rats are going to multiply it's just an unpleasant place to live.
And yes, there is an increase in radiation, pretty much all of it short lived - half lives of 8 days isn't too worrying if you're careful for a month, but to be frank the highest risk to anyone there isn't from the reactor, it's from everything else. There is a small, and unmeasurable risk due to the radiation from the reactor, whilst in the individual this may translate to death it's impossible to attribute that to the radiation from the reactor - you may have just had sucky genetics, or for some reason you used an antique tritium dial watch, or you spent too long flying around, or you had gas splashed on you at some po
Summary isn't completely wrong, you're actually wrong.
The article specifically states that
The law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers.
This includes users' full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded.
Which means that they would have to store the password, and be able to give it out to authorities.
So, to take your points:
It is still completely possible for Google to use hashed passwords to authenticate users and only "save" the plain password in a "write only" file (text or separate database) with the unhashed passwords...
Yes, but this is stupid and really gets rid of the point of having the hashed password in the first place. Now you have two copies, and even better if you hack the french data you start potentially having information necessary to recover passwords from other more secure countries. As for the 'write only' file, seriously? the only write only file is /dev/null, if you can read it at all there's the possibility that it can be read by bad people - that's what a security breach is... I suppose you could use a printer and print them all, if there's no digital way to read it then it would have to be a physical security breach, but the cost of compliance?
Shit, if they were required to provide a plain password, they could use any of the cracking tools to obtain exactly that one...
Kinda plausible, if only hashes were guaranteed to be one to one, only they aren't as it is possible to have hash collisions where two passwords can point to the same hash. This doesn't usually matter but it does mean you wouldn't be able to guarantee that there was no hash-collision and you were giving the authorities the wrong password, which would be illegal under this law. Granted the authorities may not know this and many not do anything about it, but if they wanted to be evil it wouldn't be hard to prove non-compliance.
or just "reset" the password of the account and give it to the French police.
Yeah, as above this would be giving them the incorrect password and would be violating the law. You really think they want the password to log into the site? Seriously? When they can just demand access? Most likely they're taking advantage of the fact that people tend to use the same passwords, so getting a historical record (and note this information has to be held for at least a year) of passwords for that user means there is a high likelihood that they'll be able to access data outside of their country. The law isn't asking them for their current password, or should I say not JUST their current password, it's asking for ALL of this data for the last year.
It's a data retention law, not a you must provide this to authorities when asked. You have to gather the information all the time and keep it for a minimum of a year and provide all that historical information on request (this is not just the current information). Which means you cannot just provide the current information, or reverse a hash etc.
The law is broad reaching, really intrusive and will cause far more problems for anyone than the french might hope it will solve, but for some reason you (after apparently reading the article) missed entirely the point of it.
Z.
Damnit forgot one more thing... Peak flipping demand!.
All this maths is based around averaged demand, but grid usage is anything but average.
Peak demand in 2003 for electricity generation comes up to over 140MW - don't forget that average power generation !=power usage. Of course you can ignore it and just go for the average - which is fine but you'll have daily brown and blackouts..
So we would need sufficient generator capacity to cover that.
Gas 150MW generator = $150million
Solar 30x5MW generators = $750 million
Which makes it more expensive of course.
Z.
In kansas, use the molten salt. If i recall, a 5 megawatt generation station requires 25 acres. That's a pretty small piece of land compared to the size of land that is occupied by electricity users. My father actually owns slightly more than 25 acres, so I have a very good idea how big that is. It's not big. Using extremely fuzzy estimates, its like 1/8th mile by 1/4 mile.
The total energy consumption for humboldt county (which I might add is artificially high due to indoor cannabis cultivtion) averages about 100MWH.
Theoretically, my very large county could be powered by 20 of these plants
Sorry matey, your math wasn't correct.
Power consumption of Humboldt county isn't 100MWH, or even if your mistake was typing that extra H and you meant 100MW that is also false, although not as badly.
But if Humboldt County did only consume 100MWH then it would only need 1 plant (you know 5MW = 120MWH, right?) - which would be awesome but not what you said....
Humboldt County used 940GWH in 2003 as per this report: http://postcarboncities.net/humboldt-county-ca-energy-element-background-technical-report
From that same report: "Based on past behavior it is expected that growth in electricity demand over the next 20 years will range from about 0.5% per year to 1.5% per year."
So if we assume 1% annual growth in electricity consumption then by 2011 you should be using about 2786MWH daily, or if you want to know what level of power generation is required 116MW - which ironically is different from 100MW and especially different from 100MWH.
even the 2500MWH figure doesn't support 100MW, that comes out to 104.2MW, which ironcially is almost exactly one of your solar plants more than you suggested.
Whilst I did make a mistake - you shouldn't really be running around thinking that your maths was any better... tsk.
Z.
Ahh bollox.
I had typed out a huge reply including the stats and links and I stupidly clicked on the ricesolar link above hence losing it all...
Ok, 2 things.
Firstly you're correct I forgot to convert between MW and MWH when I was taking the rated output of the power plants, so assuming the solar plant can provide power 24x7 it would produce 120MWH and yes the number required would be many times less. Ironically this doesn't really help with the costs as much as you'd think because I did the same with the gas power plant, and rather than needing 8 of them you'd actually need a third of that one plant. (Interestingly renewable plants are often rated on their maximum output which they rarely ever reach - wind is particularly guilty of this but so is solar - obviously solar input changes over the day and isn't present at all at night)
Secondly, don't be an idiot, not all my calculations were incorrect, in fact as far as I can tell and as far as anyone has pointed out I made one mistake, and it was a noticeable one as (and I hope they told you this when you were at school) I showed my workings, including sources. I still have no idea where your 100MWH daily energy usage came from. Your calculations were also wrong, but you were lucky that your incorrect energy usage matched... Interestingly I go back to your first post and I notice that you said that 20x5MW generating stations would generate 100MWH - er, doesn't just one of your stations generate 120MWH if you multiply up properly? Why would you need 20? Ahh I know, you forgot to convert between MW and MWH - weird it's the same mistake I made, and also weird if I'm bad at math then you must be.....what?
As for the 7 acres thing, well I had gone so far as to calculate the solar insolation, area of mirrors, separation of them before I screwed up and lost it. I'll leave the maths to you but yes, average solar insolation for Humbolt County does support a plant with an average 7 acres of mirrors for a 5MW plant, of course those mirrors are over a much larger area (has to be to avoid mirror shadowing and killing the land below it) and in order to account for losses, seasonal variations and cloudy days etc it seems that the rice solar plant at 50 acres for 5MW continuous output is actually fairly doable.
The rice solar plant which appears to be a molten salt continuous generation plant appears to come down to $25million for 5MW (at the low estimate), so your 5MW plants of which you'd require 21 (2500/120=20.8) would cost the state $525million to build, and would require about 1050acres of land. The same amount of gas generation would cost about $50million, still an order of magnitude more for the solar.
Cost dispersed over the 2008 estimate of 130k people comes to a much more acceptable $4038 for everyone in the county, but this is still around 24% of the total income of everyone. Compare that to the gas plant which is the equivalent of just $385 or just over 2% of the total income of everyone in Humboldt County.
This is assuming your 21x 5MW plants can have the efficiencies of an 150MW plant (which it can't) and you have increased thermal loss from greater numbers of smaller storage (thermal loss being heavily affected by surface area to volume - which means the larger the store the greater the insulation efficiency one climbs with the square, the other the cube) although that could probably be offset with reduced transmission losses through distributed generation.
Maintenance costs look to be about $5-7million annually for the ricesolar plant, so lets take $5million as the annual maintenance cost for a 150MW plant, you'll have to assume greater maintenance costs for distributed plants as there are more components, but that looks at being say $200k per plant annually x21 for the plants gives about $4.2 million for annual maintenance costs, which is the equivalent of the fuel.
Hmm, looking at gas fuel costs (http://www.cres-energy.org/blogs/blogs_roedern06Jan.html) an efficent gas turbine appears to get about $0.08 in
Actually we have all the technology we need now - we don't need to use a ribbon, you can use kinetic exchange to balance gravity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain
The idea's been around for a long time, it'll work, but it's expensive.
SJBE: FTL on the other hand doesn't really have any basis atm other than the possibility of wormholes afaik. We can build a space elevator (not tethered) now if we make the economic case for it, or just have enough money and the drive to do it.
There's usually more than one way to skin a cat as the saying goes.
Z.
Ok, so I found 3 Humboldt Countys in California, Iowa and Nevada, but based on size it appears you mean the CA one, of course it only really has 2.2million acres of land, the rest is water.
According to this report (http://postcarboncities.net/humboldt-county-ca-energy-element-background-technical-report) Humboldt county (apologies if I got the wrong one or anything) used 940 GWh of electricity alone in 2003, which comes out to around 2500MWH averaged daily - that is a heck of a jump from your 100MWH, 25 times as much. And that doesn't count usage growth over the last 8 years, nor the natural gas heating, cooking and hot water (about 45million therms) nor transportation energy costs.
I'm pretty concerned by your numbers now, but even taking your 25 acre 5MW station at face value, and even allowing that it's a molten salt plant and stores enough energy to provide that 5MW continuously day and night with backup storage to last several weeks and to provide that 5MW during the local solar minimum you would need 12500 acres to provide just the electrical energy. 10 cubic meters of molten salt can provide 1MWH of storage, since you'd need 2500MWH of storage for a single day, and several weeks of storage you're talking about 350k cubic meters of molten salt, a heck of a lot.
Sure all of this is relatively minor compared to the actual size of Humboldt county but I'd guess the cost of manufacture of a 5MW plant to be around the $20million mark (unaccurately based on http://www.power-technology.com/projects/Seville-Solar-Tower/ and scaling down), so if you have to build 500 of them just to handle the electrical load you're talking about $10billion to manufacture (and remember this is for purely the electrical generation of 2003, not transport or natural gas). The population of 2008 is estimated at about 130k (http://mapzones.org/Humboldt_County_California.html) meaning that would cost about $77k per resident. The same report shows that the average per-capita income of Humboldt county residents is $17k annually - or 4.5 times the cost.
I don't know about you but I'm a little puzzled as to how you're going to pay for all of this? Not to mention over doubling it for powering hydrogen/electrical vehicles and replacing natural gas completely - something you'll have to do to have this green revolution of yours.
What you, and everyone who thinks that "popular pundit b.s." is just "b.s." seem to fail to understand is that this is a huge engineering, financial and technological issue to overcome. There are many reasons why it hasn't happened already, and aside from energy density and reliability the biggest reason is cost, are you really willing to have an additional 50% tax on all income in your state for the next 10 years to pay for constructing the plants necessary? Think of what that would mean, can you cope with 50% less money every payday?
Just as a comparison a 320MW natural gas power station costs about $150million dollars (http://www.power-technology.com/projects/laverton/), so you're looking at about the equivalent of 8 of them, or $1.2billion dollars - your solar plan is an order of magnitude more expensive. If you're saying that they should be built with loans and then amortised over the lifetime of the plant with the cost being the energy, you're still looking at about 5 times more expensive electricity (yes I know the fuel costs are minimal - mirror maintenance is a pain but you don't have to buy gas) unless you subsidise it somehow (in which case it's still 5 times as expensive but you're pretending it's not).
If you're going to have statements like "Now you see where the science behind green makes sense, and the popular pundit b.s. that is constantly echoed is just exaggerated doubt and nonsense claims." then you had really better match that with actual verifiable numbers and facts. Rather than just repeating what you've heard without really understanding it - it is completely possible, but then again so
Ahh ok..
I hadn't actually looked up the temps the molten salt plants work at, but that effectively gives them about a max of 1200 DegC thermal difference, giving a maximum theoretical efficiency of 81% at maximum temperature (assuming 0 degrees outside) down to 28% right before it stops boiling. Obviously the outside is not likely to be at zero, so the max efficiency drops even further, but that's actually not too bad you could probably get an average of 30% - possibly more with supercritical steam turbines . It also depends on how the energy is extracted - there's a big difference between a coal fired plant at a (fairly) constant source temperature to a solar plant that has to extract as much power as possible from the heat store, it has to run across all the temperature differentials.
The boiling point of the water was when you stopped being able to extract heat energy in a regular steam turbine - I checked the melting point of an existing molten-salt solar reactor (sodium nitrate/potassium-nitrate in 60/40) and it melts at about 232C the 'cold' temp is about 287C and the 'hot' temp is 565C (http://www.sandia.gov/Renewable_Energy/solarthermal/NSTTF/salt.htm). I'm sure different mixes of salt can have different temperature ranges, and the design there simplified the thermal issue with a separate hot and cold tank. A quick calculation shows that you need storage of about 10 cubic metres for 1MW for an hour. The US uses about 10,034 MWH/day so a single days storage would be around 100k cubic metres - which actually doesn't sound like too much.. Hmm maybe it is doable to store that much, you'd need several times it as there could be fairly bad days / weeks (although the more you store in a single place the better the insulation is - volume vs surface area) and I have no idea how much space it would take up to gather that much heat... but...
You've got a very good point though, many more people will be happy with a molten salt plant than a nuclear plant, and yeah there's much less to go wrong - but I wouldn't say nobody would complain. People complain about wind turbines enough and for no real reason - I think they tend to look pretty decent but a lot of people really get up in arms when new ones are sited.
I still suspect it'll be much harder than most proponents suggest, but mebbe it's not the complete nightmare I'd thought it would be. I wonder if you could shrink the technology for rooftop / backyard operation, the necessary storage space isn't very much, and I quite like the independence of localised power.
As for the nukes, yeah I think they'll be around, they are much denser than solar power (and not everywhere has the same amount of land per person as the US does), although I'd personally prefer the molten salt thorium reactors to current pressurised reactors.
I'm not exactly a convert ;) but I suspect you're not as insane as you first sounded.
Z.
So you're talking about solar-thermal plants that store heat.
It certainly does reduce the need for direct electrical storage, but it's still not a good numbers game.
Firstly, there is a maximum amount of energy you can store, then there's the issue of diminishing returns on thermal storage (both leakage and pushing more energy into the store is a function of the difference in temperature).
80% efficiency of conversion of thermal to electrical energy is impressive but I have to admit I really doubt it would be attainable in real life, the maximum theoretical efficiency of a a heat engine is the difference in temperature between hot and cold divided by the absolute temperature of the hot side. This means that as you extract more and more heat out of the molten salt you're constantly reducing efficiency (not to mention that as the molten salt heats up it absorbs less and less of the heat from the sun) - also I'm under the impression that these are steam plants too, which gives a point below which they cannot extract any more heat (boiling point of water) to turn to electricity.
Weather is relatively predictable over the long term (approximately) but you're falling into the trap of the generic versus the specific, averaging all of the plants over the US for example, and over years you can work out what is necessary to keep power running. However what you can't do is keep any specific plant generating 24x7, then of course come the transmission losses, the storage losses, meaning that the size of the plants and their storage have to be increased again and again. The more you store, the more you lose to thermal leakage, the more you transmit from one side of the country to another the more you lose, each requires more storage and generation capacity to offset. Anyway, back to my point, saying that X amount of generation and Y amount of storage will cover the US (or any country) for their power requirements over the next 5 years will actually give you localised brown and blackouts (there are always events outside of the bell-curve that the system cannot adapt to) - it will mean a change in lifestyle from that of certain power to that of uncertain power.
Since the solar plants can't ramp up (or they run out during the night, or the next cloudy day), and the wind can't be certain to blow when you need more than the baseload (which is all the time, the baseload is just the average lowest usage) this isn't a replacement technology, sure you can replace some plants with this, but personally I'd replace the fossil fuel plants before I replaced the nuclear plants with these.
As to the US being under 80% cloud cover for a month or two? It's possible, likely, no, possible yes. If you're happy being without power for a week or so then all is good, but most people don't have the capability to cope for a week or two without power, I mean no heating, light, refrigeration or cooking (obviously everyone will have gone electric for everything as fossil fuels shouldn't be used) is quite difficult to do without.
To be honest, I really wish I could believe, or that the numbers supported a fully renewable future - but unfortunately they don't. It's personally possible to be completely on renewable energy (with enough land) but much harder for millions of people to do the same.
Z.
Wind can generate power yes, so can solar - but it is very important to know that wind and solar CANNOT generate power ALL the time, not only that they also sometimes do not generate power at the same time - and inconveniently at the time of peak requirement.
Nuclear power can generate all the time (as can gas and coal and oil etc).
People use power ALL THE TIME, this means that you cannot rely on solar and wind power without massive storage systems, and of course many times more generating capacity than you actually need - as significant energy is lost in each conversion.
Take the UK, mid winter records show that the entire country has been becalmed for up to 2 weeks at a time (no wind power - and of course minimal solar power) - what this means is that if the UK converted to pure wind and solar we would require 2 weeks of peak energy storage (you use more energy in the winter with lighting and heating), and the ability to keep it charged (or of course accept that there may be no power during the coldest time of the year). The problem with this is that the battery technology does not exist, pumped hydro storage is pitiful compared to the UK load. If you want to have power during these times then you need to store the energy from the bright and windy times. This applies to absolutely every country world-wide, but I know that limit of the UK wind.
If you want to live off grid it's completely possible, I mean firstly don't worry about a fridge / freezer etc as they use a lot of power, so use dried foodstuffs that don't need to be chilled. Then don't worry about cooking with electricity - you don't have enough for that. Then also don't worry about heating your house with electricity, you don't have enough for that. Don't worry about using a TV, computer, you don't have the electricity for that - you have enough for light, and a couple of small devices. Granted you could use a laptop as a TV / computer some of the time, but it's unlikely you'd be able to keep it charged for continuous use.
If you live off grid you heat your house with oil, coal, gas or wood, same with cooking etc, the energy you gather from your wind and solar isn't enough to run these devices.
Is this a world you want? To not have the power to run anything? To drop back into victorian times? To have a massive change in lifestyle enforced on you? Oh and forget actually having an electric car - if you can't power all your home devices how can you power an order of magnitude higher electricity use car?
Some people will say that the technology is there, that magical X will solve all the storage problems, and to them I'd ask a simple question - what is the range of an electrical car compared to a fossil fuel powered one? And that's cutting edge, incredibly expensive and polluting battery tech.
The ideal of completely renewable energy is great - the reality isn't workable, and for all you think wind and solar are cheap, you're actually paying higher bills because of them - the subsidies for wind and solar to make them competitive basically get added to the cost of electricity generated through other mechanisms. The belief that if you only just try and put it all in place it'll work ignores reality, if you can come up with a plan on paper that matches the requirements and keeps our quality of life I'll leap on it (heck, just get it in the rough same ball-park of quality of life and I'll be happy), until then saying it'll just work is pointless.
The point about nuclear is that it works, all the time, day, night, windy or not it means you have heat, light and even possibly electric cars - wind and solar cannot do this. It's not an obsession, it's reality and reality doesn't care if you have the 'will to commit to them' it only has what will happen if you do.
Z.
I'm pretty sure you've not thought that through.
That was purely the cost of the oil - which is only about 40% of the US energy usage, so assuming costs are roughly on par for the rest of the energy usage then it's over twice as much, so you could say that the energy costs we're spending over the next 40 years adds up to $240trillion, but then again you've ignore that 85 million barrels a day is crude oil consumption - for lots of different types of fuel, for plastics, for fertilisers etc. This might make the figures much more acceptable except that they're incorrect:
3,800,000 5 MW wind turbines ($19 trillion @ $5m each)
49,000 300 MW concentrated solar plants ($59trillion @ $1.2billion each - http://www.power-technology.com/projects/Seville-Solar-Tower/)
40,000 300 MW solar PV power plants ($44trillion @ $1.1billion each - http://www.thebioenergysite.com/news/3845/300-mw-solar-plant-planned-in-ningxia)
1.7 billion 3 kWrooftop PV systems ($102trillion @ $60k each)
5350 100 MWgeothermal power plants, ($1.6trillion @$300million each - http://www.globalenergymagazine.com/?p=2438)
270 new 1300 MWhydroelectric power plants, ($135billion @ $500m each)
720,000 0.75 MWwave devices ($6.48trillion @$9million each - http://cleantech.com/news/4276/pelamis-sinks-portugal-wave-power-p)
490,000 1 MWtidal turbines ($3.92trillion @$8million each - http://www.energyefficiencynews.com/policy/i/3710/)
Giving a rough total of $236trillion... Of course not even close to counting the hydrogen infrastructure the electrolysis plants needed to make the hydrogen, nor the new global transmission infrastructure or the necessary energy storage.
And this was to handle the projected consumption of 2030, not 2050, so what it really works out to is something like $59trillion in oil costs up until 2030 - and this isn't just fuel at the pump, it's all oil, from fuel to plastic to fertiliser.
Which means it's not double, it's not triple it's 4 times as much as you're paying now - for all oil. And even of the oil that is burnt 72% of that is used for cars... Cars that won't magically convert to running on electricity and hydrogen, that's a lot of cars you need to replace, and filling stations, and human behaviour.
To be frank I think the cost will be an order of magnitude higher than it is now - 10 times as much as you're paying, not your double.
Finally, don't forget you'll have to pay it at the same time as everything is built, meaning it's oil AND these costs (in fact this will drive oil prices up massively as all the materials have to come from somewhere, there's transport, manufacture, installation etc - all using oil) which are really optimistic.
Oh yes, and the report mentions a new improved electricity grid, mainly because the power is never where (or when) you need it - no idea of the cost of that. It
And this ignores the fact that the world would be a very different place after this big change occurred, I mean who actually needs constant uninterrupted power? That's a luxury we can all do without. Not one of these studies has ever dealt with the variability of the energy source, the need to ship it half way around the world and the fact that roughly 20% of it (the solar) doesn't work at least 50% of the time, and that 73% of the energy generation comes from wind, wind known to have long periods when it's useless; from too windy to no wind, for weeks at a time.
Storage is hugely inefficient, transmission is very inefficient and I must have missed the part of the report that mentions it all. With costings..
My conclusion? Wow, they just don't bother looking at it seriously, after all who wants t
Android has 350k+ activations a day.
There's no such thing like "x activations per day", unless you define the time period. It's just not reasonable to think such a number can actually be that predictable.
Huh? So when it was said to be 350k activations per day, you missed the time period of a day? So about 350k activations every 24 hours, or to be more specific 14.6k activations per hour, 243 activations per minute or a bit over 4 activations per second.
I can only assume that you actually meant something like between the 00:00 Jan 1st 2011 and 23:59.59 Jan 31st 2011 there were 10.8million activations (not a real stat, I just multiplied up 350kx31) - but this isn't actually that helpful as it boils down to 350k per day..
It would help provide additional information about trending activations but I have no issue with knowing approximate average levels - I mean if you were looking at the stock market it might be helpful to know the level at which a stock is growing (yeah it's not an exact match as constantly climbing stocks don't exist but it's a similar statistical analysis).
But, to actually refute your statement: Of course there is such a thing as "x activations per day", especially as when these are published or the statements are made they contain the words 'about', or 'over' etc - these bound the data provided. Granted the language could be more specific but it's pretty much intrinsic that this is an average and obviously will fluctuate - I wouldn't be surprised by 400k activations on some days and 300k on others, after all shopping levels change on a daily basis, but you can average them out.
The one thing I'd like google to define most absolutely is what an Activation is, they've said that this is new devices being activated but there are still some questions (how do they count people leaving devices behind - they do break and get replaced after all).
But did you really want to know that on day x we have exactly this many activations - I mean you have no idea if that was an up or a down day - rolling averages are your friend when you're looking at overall trends.
On smartphones iOS will be in second place, right were apple wants it. They want to be the up market trendy choice, they are all about image and high price. They want to be BMW, which means you will not see Toyota levels of sales.
Apple doesn't want "second place". They want whatever the most they can get is. Comparing Apple to BMW vs Toyota is not apt, as Android phones and iPhones are similarly priced, with the exception of sometimes highly discounted Android phones, and a few discount models. It's more like comparing Toyota (Apple) to Ford (Android) and sometimes Yugo (low end Android).
I happen to somewhat agree with you - Apple, like RIM or Google, or Nokia or anyone in the Smartphone business would love to be the top dog, having 100% of sales. Since none of them can do that then they different approaches to it, and I'd have to say Apple (currently) isn't aiming to get the world + dog using their devices - hence the aiming for 'second place' remark. This is obvious by the profit margin on the iOS devices (iPhone 4 has 61% apparently http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/apple-earns-61-gross-profit-margin-on-each-iphone-4-sale/) which means that they could probably half the price of the device and stay afloat, it certainly means that a 10% price cut wouldn't hurt them in the slightest and their earnings reports do show that they are making a lot of money. There is no doubt that dropping the price of the iPhone would increase sales, it is an expensive device so it's obvious that they don't want to do this, hence they really are aiming for second place, or at least not panicking about first place.
Personally I don't think this is necessarily a good thing for them, there's
Firstly Android development is not open, the code is developed in private and then published when done. Not open!
This isn't any different from any other open source project - other than scale. Patches to the linux kernel are developer on individual people's machines, tested etc before anyone gets to see them - I see few arguments about Linux not being open source.
Yes google take longer and put more into their 'patches' so to speak but it's only a difference of scale, not a difference of process.
You can still take the source code and create your own version of Android.
Secondly, you can't choose what language to develop in when creating Android, you have to use the Dalvik VM and use libraries for any native code. Not open!
Feel free to fork Android at any point and write in any language (which is of course the point of open source), or write an interpreter in Java to convert to any language and go from there (sure it's slightly painful the interpreter way but JIT gets there eventually).
An open source project is not obliged to ensure that absolutely anything can be done with it, it's obliged to provide the source code so that YOU can add the features you want - it's not obliged to change in order to make it fit with the way you want it. Open source projects means just that, open source.
Has it occurred to you that if you detest using Java so much you could write a patch to Android to provide for whatever language you desire and even persuade google to ship it with their code? It won't be easy, but it's possible - that's the point of open.
Thirdly, if open source was so desirable we would all be using Linux now, OSX and Windows would be dead. The opposite is true.
OSX is based on BSD, it's a wrapper built on open source - poor choice of example there, in fact without the BSD core OSX wouldn't be very good. Windows is also riddled with open source software.
But here, and it appears to be your only point that is valid in your entire tirade, you actually have a point - most people (90+%) use windows.
Of course there's a minor issue with that - Linux isn't as functional as windows unless you don't want to use very much. If you want to game it's just not as capable as windows because fewer games developers use it. If you want to browse the web it's fine, but then again 90+% of computers sold have windows pre-installed, and if you want to use the computer why would you change the OS? It's not what you purchased the computer to do.
I think the argument about Apple and iOS being closed and Android being open isn't really about open vs closed source (certainly I don't really care about that particular difference), I believe that the point that should be made with 'open' vs iOS is that you are heavily restricted in what you can do with the device. On Android if you don't like the current UI you can replace it - you can have an iPhone UI clone, you can have a Windows Phone 7 UI, you can have the interesting slidescreen http://slidescreenhome.com/ UI, you can have a world of innovation available *now* - because, literally, there's an app for that.
This is something that you literally cannot get with an Apple device. Frankly the ideology difference between closed and open source, I couldn't care less - I (personally) care about being able to customise and streamline *my* device. You can't even have applications that look like a homescreen because, well that would confuse users / or Apple doesn't like it.
My biggest issue with iOS? It is flexibility. The possibility of having applications multi-task for whatever reason not just a few restricted cut down options. I can change my UI, I have much more information available at my fingertips than you get on the iPhone. Widgets are much better than icons for some things and having the option is better than not.
I was never into the phone case stuff, or downloadable ringtones that happe
That.... is a really interesting idea!
It's certainly cheaper than building a fully fledged power station in orbit and gets rid of any complaints about microwave beaming of power.
There's a minor issue of increasing global warming by throwing extra energy down onto the planet but if you can offset most of the rest of the generation of electricity it'll probably balance out.
It certainly bears thinking on and would help with the overnight storage issue.
As you say, you could have the same mirrors just on the night terminator (I'm not sure that the orbits supports it - but possibly you could balance on the sunlight you're beaming) so that for that latitude the night is shortened.
Thanks!
Z.
I think the biggest stupidity with this (aside from the awful transmission losses - you'd need *many* times the usage value to transmit it) is the fact that 50% of the time your solar panels aren't producing energy.
You honestly think it's a good plan to have to store about 6.5 x10^17 Joules of energy? (World consumption in 2008 - 474*10^18Joules)
There's about 11000J in a Lithium Ion AA battery, which means you need 5.9 x 10^13 AA batteries to store this - or about 59trillion AA batteries just to try and store the energy needed for the night-time - assuming 100% charge discharge and transmission efficiency, you'd actually need many times that in reality - and that assumes of course that there's no annual solar variation, clouds or other bad weather to do it.
Capacitors are better for this but they store even less - about 277J for a 2.5volt 350 farad capacitor.. so about 2300trillion of those capacitors. (multiplied by about 10 for transmission losses)
It's great to say, yeah enough energy falls on the Sahara to power the world, but it's completely idiotic to contemplate actually doing it. The scale of the problem is so much more than you've even bothered to look at.
In the real world, then yes, obviously relying on terrestrial passive collection energy gathering will leave you with a deficit (no matter what you do - wind stops blowing, the day turns to night etc) the only thing you can do is have many many times what you need and try and store the rest or use active generation mechanisms.
Also btw, did you know that solar panels efficiency drops the hotter they are? Last I checked the Sahara was a little toasty - especially when the sun is shining. Also, materials don't tend to like massive repeated thermal shifts like say about 50C summer days to -5 winter nights, best case is still something like a 20C shift at least twice a day. There are sand-storms, continuous abrasion and about a billion other problems.
Of course if you had solar satellites that always had the sun shining on them, well that's a different matter, but the sahara? Gah - I hate it when people bring up that armchair numbers exercise without actually thinking about it.
Z.
Er, ignoring the fact that your cousin wouldn't be protected by patents anyway (as that's copyright), and ignoring the difference in perceived value this isn't the best idea.
Patents aren't copyright, they aren't protecting you (or your cousin) they are harming you, they cost a lot to create and even more to enforce. Example US costs here http://ipwatchdog.com/patent/patent-cost/ but it ranges from $5k to $15k+.
The fun thing about patents is that they harm you, even if you never apply for one. Take your cousin for an example, there's nothing hugely different in what he does compared to a computer programmer, he uses tools to achieve an end, be that programming techniques / product features or the type of hill to put in a painting. The difference between the two is that (currently) you can't patent a type of hill to put in your painting, however you can patent (in certain countries) features in your product.
It doesn't matter if you created those types of hills yourself, or if you looked through a list of hill types people have created before (although in the software patents example - it can triple the damages) if someone else has patented them, then you're not allowed to use it - at least without paying them. Imagine the world your cousin would live in if he had 20 patent infringement suits for a single picture he'd created, that he "put an enormous amount of effort, talent and training into his work" but it turns out people had done it before. His worry wouldn't be some chinese printer ripping him off, no, it would be the american company who has sued him for willful infringement.
But lets say you've spent $15k on your complex patent, and a large company infringes it, how much money do you have to enforce the patent? I mean you've got to take them to court, they probably won't just admit fault and give you the money, that can take years, years of lawyers, costs etc, you could spend millions trying to enforce a patent, and even if you win there's no guarantee of breaking even.
Your fear of anarchy is blinding you to the reality, you're afraid of big companies just stealing ideas - which is what they're already doing! It costs too much to try and take them down, about your only hope is to go to one of their competitors and licence it to them and make them pay to defend it. Which is basically trying to play school yard bullies off against each other - it's stupid, immature and frankly most clearly highlights the issues with the current system. But what is the definition of anarchy? "A state of lawlessness and disorder" - I mean if large company X takes your idea, that's contrary to law, and yet they get away with it because you don't have the financial resources to fight, ergo we're in anarchy and you're blindly defending it.
There are around 7 billion people on this planet, a lot of them have brains, and use them. A lot of them have problems similar to you (and if you look through history you'll see my point - numerous discoveries and inventions happened nigh on simultaneously around the world) and a lot of them find similar solutions. I'm sorry, you're not unique, your thought? You're not the first to have that idea and you definitely won't be the last. Why do you think that you should have ownership of something you came up with if someone else comes up with it without your help?
The most I could agree with is that if you come up with an idea and tell the world immediately, and clearly that you might deserve some recompense, after all you just saved someone time. But patents? Have you ever read a patent? They aren't designed to be clear, they're designed to be vague (yes I have several - and I was disappointed with how an idea could be mutilated) because vague covers more related inventions. Patents are legal tools to bludgeon people/companies, not to protect.
Pay attention, think - you believe it's a valid use of time, so do it! But don't blind yourself to thinking that the status quo is a perfect solution, and