Shit like this does not deserve attention. Correlation is not causation. Looking for correlations and suggesting causation is tantamount to scientific perjury. I have never been more ashamed to be human than I am right now, but I can say that every day: the world gives an unending stream of reasons to be ashamed of it.
Enh, don't feel ashamed to be a human. If you're a researcher at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, feel free to feel ashamed, otherwise no. With several billion people on the planet, researchers trying for fame or money instead of science, and a news system that gravitates to crap sensationalist news to sell ad space, you're going to get stuff like this.
Now that I write all that, I'm starting to feel ashamed to be a human also.
"Dish said AT&T is demanding it pay for a guaranteed number of subscribers, regardless of how many people actually want to subscribe to HBO."
In other words, AT&T is still clinging to the old cable tv all-or-nothing business model, where you were a subscriber whether you liked it or not. Whatever Dish has to pay for HBO will have to be passed onto their customers, (as Dish is a business, not a charity) no matter how many actual subscribers there are to the channel.
That said, years ago I went to internet only (currently 100/100) and wife and daughter seem quite content with their roku and firestick.
Reminds me of 1970's and 80's pagers. Two rechargeable, removable batteries, which had to be charged daily.
But rechargeable batteries sucked back then. Which is why anyone serious about on-call coverage carried one of those pagers that would last three weeks on a single disposable AA battery.
> Battery life is already a limiting factor though, there has been no real improvement in batteries in more then 30 years.
Well, there has, but manufacturers have chosen to leverage new battery technology to produce thinner and thinner batteries, not to improve battery life past not-quite-one-day.
I'd buy a phone as thick as my old Palm Treo, if it lasted a week of heavy usage on one charge. And this in theory should be possible. But that's not what's being sold.
Any new technology goes through a ramp-up period where the next iteration is substantially better than the previous one. At some point, a new technology with a fixed set of purposes asymptotically produces fewer and fewer returns at each iteration, until the manufacturer struggles to provide enough newness to convince people to upgrade. And sometimes, in the process, even goes backwards in some areas. (going from 3d icons to flat icons, removing transparency from frames, etc.)
PCs went through this several years ago. Currently available hardware is way more capable than most people need, and operating systems have gotten as good as they're going to get for present use cases. As users, we're still looking for that Minority Report touch interface, but it doesn't look like we're ever going to get it. So PC and tablet markets stagnate.
Phones have reached the same stage. They're "good enough", and there's no longer any compelling reason to pay hundreds of bucks on the next tiny iteration.
What can move things forward is a "killer app", a new purpose for a particular class of device, that requires new hardware and software to support. (For tablets, this would be an interface that allows competent content creation -- again, see "minority report" -- but tablet manufacturers are only selling to content consumers, apparently.). Virtual gaming allowed phones to limp forward another cycle or two, but currently there's really no compelling feature that needs to be added or improved.
At least, no feature that the manufacturers *want* to add or improve. Battery life still sucks, and batteries tend to wear out and are getting harder and harder to replace. And manufacturers still want us to pay a high boutique premium for storage, at a time when flash is dirt cheap. Instead of providing phones that last a week on a charge, which would actually be useful, manufacturers seem to be convinced that we want credit card thinness as a feature. (I do not. Thin phones are hard to hold and more prone to breakage.)
And so, the industry stagnates, while manufacturers continue trying to whip the horse forward, not realizing it died some time ago.
I would hope fusion byproducts would be mostly helium, not hydrogen.:) Unless you are talking about deuterium and tritium extracted from hydrogen from seawater, with a waste stream of hydrogen? If so you would probably be best off burning it in situ with extracted oxygen rather than trying to compress and transport it, I would have thought as it would be lower NOx and also a source of fresh water, as well as some extra energy production to offset the potentially considerable energy needed to get the hydrogen in the first place.
Ok, we're descending into drunk college student territory, but what I had envisioned long ago before I was more conversant with the details, was a rather all-in-one solution: Extract deuterium from sea water to fuse, use the resultant reaction to fuel the deuterium separation process, desalination (yielding fresh water) and splitting some of the resulting fresh water into oxygen and hydrogen. Pipe the hydrogen to end points or compress it and ship it in containers. Internal combustion engines and electric generators will burn hydrogen with minor modification. So you get fresh water, electricity, and fuel for personal use out of the same plant. Bonus, the point pollution is water vapor -- burning hydrogen combines with oxygen to return it to its previous state.
Where this doesn't pencil out is that hydrogen is not very energy dense. For instance, I saw a report some time ago (which may be obsolete but bear with me) that the cost of transporting liquified hydrogen to fueling stations would burn up almost as much hydrogen as was being transported. So fusing deuterium for heat to generate electricity, and perhaps use some of that energy for desalination, would make sense, presuming fusion ever stops being "40 years away", but using hydrogen for fuel on location isn't very practical.
The point being, compressed air is *much* less dense than hydrogen.
The advantage of petroleum is that the energy density is relatively high. Batteries aren't nearly as high. Liquified natural gas is not as high. Compressed natural gas is much lower. Hydrogen is much lower in energy per volume vs petroleum. (Which is a shame, as hydrogen byproducts from fusion plants on the coast might be a really cool solution.)
But the lowest energy per storage volume of any of these is compressed air. Ok I guess in situations when you either have HUGE, cheap, airtight storage spaces, or very modest energy requirements, you might find a situation where such a solution would be viable. But the whole thing sounds like a late night conversation between drunk college students.
From the wiki on the Tata, the compressed air automobile:
Compressed air has relatively low energy density. Air at 30 MPa (4,500 psi) contains about 50 Wh of energy per liter (and normally weighs 372g per liter). For comparison, a lead–acid battery contains 60-75 Wh/l. A lithium-ion battery contains about 250-620 Wh/l. The EPA estimates the energy density of gasoline at 8,890 Wh/l; however, a typical gasoline engine with 18% efficiency can only recover the equivalent of 1694 Wh/l. [...]
In order to increase energy density, some systems may use gases that can be liquified or solidified. "CO2 offers far greater compressibility than air when it transitions from gaseous to supercritical form."
So one possibility is to use compressed CO2. Generate CO2, compress it, then release it to generate electricity.
No, wait... What problem were we trying to solve again?
I suppose nowadays a big f*ck you to family/friends quality time is the norm.
...or maybe your kids have their own lives, and your wife is glued to the TV. And maybe your friends are the people you meet doing your second business.
I have a day job in IT and have a photography business primarily for evenings and weekends. (Weekends for shoots and evenings to retouch photos and manage the business.) I typically burn up about half my vacation each year covering events for which I sell the photos. I love my photography work; I tolerate my IT work.
The photography business pays for itself, barely. I make enough money to pay for equipment, maintenance and repair, and the website where I sell my photos. I have a fantasy of supporting myself on photography when I retire from IT. But I don't know how realistic that really is.
I don't sleep much. Watching TV is a special treat, not a nightly occurrence.
I often ask myself why do I do it? Working two jobs is definitely not making me rich. Things would be so much easier if I could work a regular job, go home and watch TV for a couple hours, and then get a good night's sleep. Spend my vacation at some resort ogling the beach bunnies instead of out in a field trying not to step in horse poo.
But then I look at photos of breathtaking scenes and heartbreakingly beautiful women (I don't call them "breathtaking photos" because that seems arrogant) and it all seems worth it.
So I think the answer is, there's things you have to make the effort to do, or learn to live with the regret. I've chosen to make the effort.
...can only run applications from the Windows Store — specifically Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps and Win32 apps that Microsoft has explicitly approved
Well, that was a complete waste of time and development capital.
I can predict accurately how many of these things they're going to sell: 0
They'll sell a few to people who don't understand what they're buying.
Automatic fail. I'm not looking forward to members of my extended family buying these things. They're going to want support, and I'm not going to want to touch them. But I'll have to, won't I?
Screen Printer here! Laser doesn't work on transparent 13x19 sheets, and I need to print those daily:) Whats even more annoying is that even though I have everything set to black and white, and I literally only print black - my color ink cartridges run out a little faster than the black ones on my canon printer. Sneaky bastards.
If you're using it every day, a dye printer is a better fit. It's selling the damned things to consumers who print photos maybe once a week that's the root of the problem. It's not a good use case.
re: color ink cartridges -- right, for two reasons (1) even if you say "black only", the printer will still create "black" by combining the other three colors. (Thanks, Canon.). (2) Inevitable head cleanings use up a significant amount of ink, regardless of your actual usage.
I was making a joke about the title here, as it says
some electric car drivers might spew more CO2 than diesel cars
(emphasis mine), as it can be read to suggest that the CO2 is coming directly from the drivers themselves rather than from their vehicles or the processes that make and run them.
Ah. Right. Zoom. That was that feeling of my hair flapping about as that went over my head. Sorry for ruining the joke.
I took the time to look this up (man, that's geeky...) and moonlight contains considerably less UV vs visible light, than direct sunlight. So maybe vampires are allergic to UV?
TFA covered that. The emissions created by manufacturing the battery exceed emissions spewed by some hyper-efficient internal combustion engines over the same timeframe as the expected life of the battery. (To paraphrase.) As I said in a different thread, this is the difference between "zero emissions" (which no vehicle truly achieves) and "zero point emissions", which means that the vehicle itself doesn't expel significant amounts of carbon while in use.
Personally, I'd like to get a second opinion on quantities, but the basic framework of the argument is sound. Making the battery causes pollution, and how much pollution depends in part on where it's made and by whom, and in what quantities. Total end-to-end pollution of a given mode of transport needs to take this into account.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. You can always tell when it's an election year.
Shit like this does not deserve attention. Correlation is not causation. Looking for correlations and suggesting causation is tantamount to scientific perjury. I have never been more ashamed to be human than I am right now, but I can say that every day: the world gives an unending stream of reasons to be ashamed of it.
Enh, don't feel ashamed to be a human. If you're a researcher at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, feel free to feel ashamed, otherwise no. With several billion people on the planet, researchers trying for fame or money instead of science, and a news system that gravitates to crap sensationalist news to sell ad space, you're going to get stuff like this.
Now that I write all that, I'm starting to feel ashamed to be a human also.
"Dish said AT&T is demanding it pay for a guaranteed number of subscribers, regardless of how many people actually want to subscribe to HBO."
In other words, AT&T is still clinging to the old cable tv all-or-nothing business model, where you were a subscriber whether you liked it or not. Whatever Dish has to pay for HBO will have to be passed onto their customers, (as Dish is a business, not a charity) no matter how many actual subscribers there are to the channel.
That said, years ago I went to internet only (currently 100/100) and wife and daughter seem quite content with their roku and firestick.
Reminds me of 1970's and 80's pagers. Two rechargeable, removable batteries, which had to be charged daily.
But rechargeable batteries sucked back then. Which is why anyone serious about on-call coverage carried one of those pagers that would last three weeks on a single disposable AA battery.
What I *really* want is a phone that lasts as long on one charge as my 1990's era pager did on one AA battery.
> Battery life is already a limiting factor though, there has been no real improvement in batteries in more then 30 years.
Well, there has, but manufacturers have chosen to leverage new battery technology to produce thinner and thinner batteries, not to improve battery life past not-quite-one-day.
I'd buy a phone as thick as my old Palm Treo, if it lasted a week of heavy usage on one charge. And this in theory should be possible. But that's not what's being sold.
Any new technology goes through a ramp-up period where the next iteration is substantially better than the previous one. At some point, a new technology with a fixed set of purposes asymptotically produces fewer and fewer returns at each iteration, until the manufacturer struggles to provide enough newness to convince people to upgrade. And sometimes, in the process, even goes backwards in some areas. (going from 3d icons to flat icons, removing transparency from frames, etc.)
PCs went through this several years ago. Currently available hardware is way more capable than most people need, and operating systems have gotten as good as they're going to get for present use cases. As users, we're still looking for that Minority Report touch interface, but it doesn't look like we're ever going to get it. So PC and tablet markets stagnate.
Phones have reached the same stage. They're "good enough", and there's no longer any compelling reason to pay hundreds of bucks on the next tiny iteration.
What can move things forward is a "killer app", a new purpose for a particular class of device, that requires new hardware and software to support. (For tablets, this would be an interface that allows competent content creation -- again, see "minority report" -- but tablet manufacturers are only selling to content consumers, apparently.). Virtual gaming allowed phones to limp forward another cycle or two, but currently there's really no compelling feature that needs to be added or improved.
At least, no feature that the manufacturers *want* to add or improve. Battery life still sucks, and batteries tend to wear out and are getting harder and harder to replace. And manufacturers still want us to pay a high boutique premium for storage, at a time when flash is dirt cheap. Instead of providing phones that last a week on a charge, which would actually be useful, manufacturers seem to be convinced that we want credit card thinness as a feature. (I do not. Thin phones are hard to hold and more prone to breakage.)
And so, the industry stagnates, while manufacturers continue trying to whip the horse forward, not realizing it died some time ago.
I would hope fusion byproducts would be mostly helium, not hydrogen. :) Unless you are talking about deuterium and tritium extracted from hydrogen from seawater, with a waste stream of hydrogen? If so you would probably be best off burning it in situ with extracted oxygen rather than trying to compress and transport it, I would have thought as it would be lower NOx and also a source of fresh water, as well as some extra energy production to offset the potentially considerable energy needed to get the hydrogen in the first place.
Ok, we're descending into drunk college student territory, but what I had envisioned long ago before I was more conversant with the details, was a rather all-in-one solution: Extract deuterium from sea water to fuse, use the resultant reaction to fuel the deuterium separation process, desalination (yielding fresh water) and splitting some of the resulting fresh water into oxygen and hydrogen. Pipe the hydrogen to end points or compress it and ship it in containers. Internal combustion engines and electric generators will burn hydrogen with minor modification. So you get fresh water, electricity, and fuel for personal use out of the same plant. Bonus, the point pollution is water vapor -- burning hydrogen combines with oxygen to return it to its previous state.
Where this doesn't pencil out is that hydrogen is not very energy dense. For instance, I saw a report some time ago (which may be obsolete but bear with me) that the cost of transporting liquified hydrogen to fueling stations would burn up almost as much hydrogen as was being transported. So fusing deuterium for heat to generate electricity, and perhaps use some of that energy for desalination, would make sense, presuming fusion ever stops being "40 years away", but using hydrogen for fuel on location isn't very practical.
The point being, compressed air is *much* less dense than hydrogen.
Every human comes with its own compressed gas mechanism. We just need to hook a hose from our butts to our cellphones!
Have you been on twitter lately? Apparently this is already standard practice.
The advantage of petroleum is that the energy density is relatively high. Batteries aren't nearly as high. Liquified natural gas is not as high. Compressed natural gas is much lower. Hydrogen is much lower in energy per volume vs petroleum. (Which is a shame, as hydrogen byproducts from fusion plants on the coast might be a really cool solution.)
But the lowest energy per storage volume of any of these is compressed air. Ok I guess in situations when you either have HUGE, cheap, airtight storage spaces, or very modest energy requirements, you might find a situation where such a solution would be viable. But the whole thing sounds like a late night conversation between drunk college students.
From the wiki on the Tata, the compressed air automobile:
Compressed air has relatively low energy density. Air at 30 MPa (4,500 psi) contains about 50 Wh of energy per liter (and normally weighs 372g per liter). For comparison, a lead–acid battery contains 60-75 Wh/l. A lithium-ion battery contains about 250-620 Wh/l. The EPA estimates the energy density of gasoline at 8,890 Wh/l; however, a typical gasoline engine with 18% efficiency can only recover the equivalent of 1694 Wh/l. [...]
In order to increase energy density, some systems may use gases that can be liquified or solidified. "CO2 offers far greater compressibility than air when it transitions from gaseous to supercritical form."
So one possibility is to use compressed CO2. Generate CO2, compress it, then release it to generate electricity.
No, wait... What problem were we trying to solve again?
Don't keep me in suspense...what's your photography company's website?
Can I post that here? I thought Slashdot frowned on commercial promotion?
I do operate it as a business. I pay income tax on sales and take equipment off as capital expenses.
I suppose nowadays a big f*ck you to family/friends quality time is the norm.
"Ridiculous expensive necessities" seems like a contradiction.
I have a day job in IT and have a photography business primarily for evenings and weekends. (Weekends for shoots and evenings to retouch photos and manage the business.) I typically burn up about half my vacation each year covering events for which I sell the photos. I love my photography work; I tolerate my IT work.
The photography business pays for itself, barely. I make enough money to pay for equipment, maintenance and repair, and the website where I sell my photos. I have a fantasy of supporting myself on photography when I retire from IT. But I don't know how realistic that really is.
I don't sleep much. Watching TV is a special treat, not a nightly occurrence.
I often ask myself why do I do it? Working two jobs is definitely not making me rich. Things would be so much easier if I could work a regular job, go home and watch TV for a couple hours, and then get a good night's sleep. Spend my vacation at some resort ogling the beach bunnies instead of out in a field trying not to step in horse poo.
But then I look at photos of breathtaking scenes and heartbreakingly beautiful women (I don't call them "breathtaking photos" because that seems arrogant) and it all seems worth it.
So I think the answer is, there's things you have to make the effort to do, or learn to live with the regret. I've chosen to make the effort.
Life imitates art.
...can run any x86 apps.
The world has been x64 for the last decade.
That's why "can run any x86 apps" is important to understand before one buys one of these things.
...can only run applications from the Windows Store — specifically Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps and Win32 apps that Microsoft has explicitly approved
Well, that was a complete waste of time and development capital.
I can predict accurately how many of these things they're going to sell: 0
They'll sell a few to people who don't understand what they're buying.
run Linux?
If it ran mint/cinnamon, I'd buy one. Not with windows 10 s.
Automatic fail. I'm not looking forward to members of my extended family buying these things. They're going to want support, and I'm not going to want to touch them. But I'll have to, won't I?
Screen Printer here! Laser doesn't work on transparent 13x19 sheets, and I need to print those daily:)
Whats even more annoying is that even though I have everything set to black and white, and I literally only print black - my color ink cartridges run out a little faster than the black ones on my canon printer. Sneaky bastards.
If you're using it every day, a dye printer is a better fit. It's selling the damned things to consumers who print photos maybe once a week that's the root of the problem. It's not a good use case.
re: color ink cartridges -- right, for two reasons (1) even if you say "black only", the printer will still create "black" by combining the other three colors. (Thanks, Canon.). (2) Inevitable head cleanings use up a significant amount of ink, regardless of your actual usage.
I was making a joke about the title here, as it says
some electric car drivers might spew more CO2 than diesel cars
(emphasis mine), as it can be read to suggest that the CO2 is coming directly from the drivers themselves rather than from their vehicles or the processes that make and run them.
Ah. Right. Zoom. That was that feeling of my hair flapping about as that went over my head. Sorry for ruining the joke.
I took the time to look this up (man, that's geeky...) and moonlight contains considerably less UV vs visible light, than direct sunlight. So maybe vampires are allergic to UV?
TFA covered that. The emissions created by manufacturing the battery exceed emissions spewed by some hyper-efficient internal combustion engines over the same timeframe as the expected life of the battery. (To paraphrase.) As I said in a different thread, this is the difference between "zero emissions" (which no vehicle truly achieves) and "zero point emissions", which means that the vehicle itself doesn't expel significant amounts of carbon while in use.
Personally, I'd like to get a second opinion on quantities, but the basic framework of the argument is sound. Making the battery causes pollution, and how much pollution depends in part on where it's made and by whom, and in what quantities. Total end-to-end pollution of a given mode of transport needs to take this into account.