Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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· Score: 1
Steve's genius was in predicting the things nobody thought they wanted until he showed it to them.
Star Wars, for example.
(Darn, can't find a link -- but it was in one of the Star Wars documentaries. Jobs attended a screening of a rough cut of Star Wars, along with other friends of Lucas, many of whom went on to become big-name directors. Most of them were somewhat puzzled by what they saw; Jobs was the only one who went up to Lucas and told him, "You're going to make a TON of money with this!!")
Honda is working on a home hydrogen fuel station that connects to your water main and somehow generates hydrogen from the water mains. Not sure how that is accomplished.
The "how" is electrolysis.
Now as to what is accomplished: it lets you consume four times the amount of electricity to move your H2-powered car a given distance, as compared to an EV or plug-in hybrid.
On top of that, H2 is difficult to store on board the car in much better energy densities than you can get with the latest batteries. So you get a similar range, only with the added excitement of possible leaks and explosions. Neat!
... I've recently changed my opinion to favoring solar heavily. Specifically, solar to various hydrocarbons.
What you're talking about is storage of energy, to smooth out unevenness in demand vs. supply. Sounds like you're focusing on storing in the form of gasoline, for powering cars at a later time.
But using solar energy directly as electricity has a lot of growth remaining before storage even starts to even become an issue. And when it does, you need to look at the full picture:
- Demand shifting can further defer the need for storage. For example, a relatively new trend in air conditioning for large buildings is to manufacture ice at night, which is then used to help cool the air during the day. This takes advantage of lower electric rates at night due to the excess supply from fossil sources, as well as improved efficiency in the ice making itself, due to cooler air temps. But when the installed base of solar becomes large enough that the cheapest rates are in the daytime on sunny days, you could easily switch the ice-making to those times. Of course, excess supply from wind sources at night could often keep the cheapest rates where they are now.
- By the time the installed solar base is large enough to need to worry about storage, the electric car fleet will be substantial. Most of these cars will be commuter cars, so that means that workplaces will need to have charging available. But that seems a relatively minor infrastructure improvement. And again, wind energy will usually be providing cheap rates at night as well.
- Battery technology is is getting a lot of investment attention these days, and in the next decade we're probably going to see the installation of very large flow-type batteries or similar on the grid. These are already very useful for smoothing out demand/supply fluctuations, and protecting against cascading failures. They will be one of the most efficient means of storing excess renewable energy of all kinds.
Only after all these options are at capacity would we start talking about storage by way of driving chemical reactions. And there, yes, making gasoline might make sense, because long-haul trucking and airplanes really need that energy density. But then again, by the time we get there, battery storage may be very competitive -- especially when you take the inefficiency of manufacturing gasoline from scratch into account.
And if you're talking about making gasoline or some such from solar in the near term, for use in the current fleet of cars, there are still problems. True, you'll be supplanting fossil-carbon use from oil, but you'd most likely be able to supplant many times the amount of fossil carbon from coal and natural gas if you put that solar energy into the grid. Even generating hydrogen loses 75% of the energy, if you're converting that H2 back into electricity. The other options above give you far more bang for your solar-investment buck.
Also, generating gasoline from solar only serves to boost the lifetime of the gas-based transportation industry, and all the ill health effects that go with it. It would soak up a lot of the innovative energy/investment that could otherwise go to building a clean infrastructure.
The articles changed in tone -- to me they are trying to adopt Wired's pop-geek approach, compromising the technical depth...
There have been formatting changes numerous times since the 90's (in both SciAm and Science News). Certainly, SciAm in 1990 looked much more like a dry technical journal than it does now. But having gotten used to each new change, I'm not convinced that it's really being dumbed down. There's more (or different) decoration around the articles, but the content of the articles is still quite rich, generally. In fact, I can't even think of what the change was 2 years ago that you're talking about...
Scientific American is amongst the least accessible of this type imo.
Not sure what you mean by "accessible", because I find it very readable in every subject area -- physics, biology, geology, what have you -- even though I have little or no training in any of those beyond some basic high school or college classes. (my degree is in C.S.)
And I still find new ideas and concepts in there that just knock my socks off -- the small-molecule theory of the origin of life, for example. This even though I've been reading it and Science News for nearly 30 years now.
Mind listing some of that unconscionable behavior here? I'm an employee at the former Sun, but I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to the wider business world since the takeover (I'm also just getting back into reading Slashdot...). The main effect of the takeover on me personally has been improved job security in the near term, so I'm curious what else is going on. Thanks.
But Atlantis and her sisters' record of achievement is magnificent, and will probably never be matched. They launched space probes, they... [long list of different kinds of tasks]...</blockquote>
That was actually the most fundamental problem: we tried to have a single piece of equipment do too many different things.
In software, this is called "incoherence". Basically, if you have one object that you rely on to do too many different things, then you're asking for bugs. Such a module needs to be broken up into multiple ones, each one with a clear purpose.
The shuttle was intended to be:
- A launcher/lander for human passengers
- A cargo launcher/lander
- A space station (it could support 7+ astronauts in orbit for multiple weeks)
- A service vehicle
- An experiment bay
And on top of that, it was intended to be reusable, despite the fact that this most-complex machine had to be put through extreme vibration and other duress every time it was used.
A proper space program would break everything into more manageable pieces:
- Human launcher/lander for max 4 persons, which has a single in-orbit task: docking with a space station
- Separate cargo launcher/lander (can be much cheaper, and doesn't need as high a reliability factor)
- A minimal human-habitation module for orbit: supports 1 astronaut for some week or months, or 1 year or more with a supply module attached. A space station would include 2 of these modules for every crew member
- Interconnect module
- Science-bay module(s)
- rec room or other "common room" modules for space station crews to gather
- in-orbit propulsion modules -- probalbly ion engines -- to maintain or adjust a station's orbit
Each module would have its own 2- or 3-year design cycle, with new & improved designs going into production on each cycle. One or more space stations would be assembled from various assortments of the standard modules. A station's old and/or obsolete versions of modules would be periodically jettisoned, and replaced with modules of the newest designs. The engine module would be steadily improved in power, to the point where a "station" could become an earth-moon shuttle, or eventually earth-NEO or earth-mars transporters.
And how efficient is transferring the electricity across the grid to your house so you can charge your batteries?
It's well over 90%. And it will improve as the new HVDC trunk lines are built out.
Furthermore, you obviously wouldn't generate the hydrogen yourself at home, but rather get it at some filling station like today (unlike with batteries which would be difficult to refill within a minute at a "recharging station").
So what? Hydrogen will still use 4x the resource of a straight battery charge, for essentially no benefit over a hybrid setup. An incredible waste.
Again, as a source of range-extending energy within a hybrid setup, hydrogen may eventually prove viable, but only as a means to displace biofuels for that purpose. I did some calcs, showing the mileage yield from a solar installation creating hydrogen to be about 10x that of the best-case cellulosic ethanol, for the same land area. But batteries easily beat it as the primary mover of autos and light trucks (and eventually heavy trucks too, I expect).
Correct so far. In fact, because oil tends to dominate the economy of countries that are major producers of it, those countries are in fact damaged as well, causing the bad stuff to happen in the first place. For example, their currency value goes up too high for any of their industries other than oil to be competitive internationally -- and it's easier for them to import those items anyways -- so the bulk of their non-oil economy stagnates and withers. This makes for a lot of unemployment, unrest, etc. Also, the government holds near-monopoly power on the economy, and so tends strongly towards the dictatorial.
It's not a coincidence that most of the world's oil comes from the most volatile regions on Earth.
we need electric cars supported by a new wave of modern nuclear power plants. of course there are better sources of electricity than nuclear, but most of these are boutique and cannot scale like nuclear can. this includes wind and solar.
What in the world makes you think that solar and wind are not scalable like nuclear? In fact, I would argue it's the opposite:
Since solar and wind come in smaller increments, it's easier to add capacity, even in locations where none exists yet. This means lower barriers to entry, and thus faster and more-widespread scalability.
The environmental hurdles are much easier to overcome, even ignoring the toxic-waste and protesting-hippies concerns.
The aforementioned waste- and hippie-related problems.
Even just general NIMBY. Nuclear plants are quite frightening for people to have nearby -- even for non-hippies. Solar and wind installations, on the other hand, literally are being installed even in people's back yards.
A larger number of smaller installations is far friendlier to the grid, because their output will be more consistent on average. A nuclear plant needs to go offline periodically each year for maintenance, causing Gigawatt-scale dips in available supply.
Uranium supply is limited, and causes environmental damage to mine and process. We've barely even begun to tap into our available solar and wind resources.
Nuclear is a mature technology, and its costs are only going up. Wind and solar still have a great deal of innovation remaining, and their costs are only going down.
If your utility is adding a nuclear plant, your rates are going to go up substantially. If it's adding wind and/or solar, they're probably going to go down, or at least remain even.
There isn't a single nuclear plant in development on the planet that is not receiving a massive amount of help from a government entity. Even many huge subsidies available in the U.S. are going unclaimed. The market has rejected Nuclear already. Contrast that with the amount being invested in wind and solar research and buildouts -- despite the uncertainty of continued government subsidies. Also, wind/solar promise to become economical without subsidies very soon, as they scale up and develop. Nuclear hasn't reached that point even after half a century of development and buildout.
Every dollar put into building a nuclear plant today is a dollar that could have been invested in a solar or wind plant. Since nuclear takes so much more time to come online, and costs so much more, that means that the current coal and natural gas plants will be operating that much longer. So, in essence, investment in new nuclear energy will contribute further to global warming.
Actually -- the cash goes to Canada first, then Saudi Arabia, then Mexico. After that, it's Venezuela at #4...
Since oil is fungible, that's completely irrelevant. If we stopped buying so much oil from the Canadians, and didn't replace it with purchases from elsewhere, the price of oil would go down, and Saudi Arabia and Russia would be getting less money.
And of course, if we were able to stop buying any oil from Canada, and not replace it, that would mean we've engineered non-oil-dependent technologies to a high degree. Since the rest of the world would also use these technologies, there would be even less oil money going to Russia etc.
Well that's great but what do you do with all the spent batteries?...
Either recycle them or throw them in a landfill. For Li-ion batteries, the latter is perfectly safe, and the former quite lucrative.
... Then there's the range problem. What are they getting now...40 miles to a charge? Is that really enough? Even if they triple it?
That's why hybrids are the answer: they eliminate the range issue, and are also able to use pure-electric for the 90% or so of the average driving needs that are within that range-per-day.
The range will be even less of an issue once plugin points are common at workplace parking spaces, city streets, etc. By the time the auto fleet is mostly electric, there will have been enough solar buildout such that daytime will be when most of the excess power is available -- and therefore at its cheapest -- giving people a direct financial incentive to charge during the day.
...projections for the percentage increase in ones monthly electric bill have ranged from 28% to 64% once the caps are removed.
Actually, this could be beneficial, as it will encourage more homeowners to install solar panels (yes, useful even in PA), and/or to cut their electricity use overall. Especially if it's possible to request the utility to provide time-of-use pricing.
EVs will still be cheaper than gasoline by a wide margin, and it will take a good deal of time before enough EVs are charging at night to actually soak up the excess baseload power; only then will EVs contribute pricing pressure on electricity -- and by then, the amount of solar and wind installed should be pretty significant.
So higher electric rates right now will help push down carbon emissions that much faster.
... all viable H2 systems store it in a chemical bond, not 'just' compressed gas.
I assume you're talking about the metal hydrides or some such, not, say, gasoline, which stores more hydrogen per unit volume in its chemical bonds than even liquid hydrogen.
Please point to one such storage system that is (a) proven, and (b) gets anywhere near the energy density that would be viable for use in an automobile. Hell, give me one that even approaches the performance of Li-ion batteries.
All of the hydrogen prototype cars I've ever heard of use compressed-gas tanks for storage. There was a Honda, I think, that claimed some 600mi of range with such a setup.
In terms of safety: with a compressed-gas setup, there is one important safety issue that I can think of: the fact that a leak could be ignited, and yet totally invisible. So if your car's H2 tank has some kind of small puncture, enough to send out a jet for a few feet, and that somehow gets lit, you may not notice it until your foot catches on fire when you walk past your car.
With gasoline, at least you know when it's on fire!
You lose a lot of power in the hydrogen generation, that's true, but batteries and power lines aren't especially efficient either. I'm not sure which one would best/most practical though.
The conversion of electricity to hydrogen, then back to electricity, is about 25% efficient, and I'm not even counting the penalty for compressing or otherwise storing the hydrogen gas. For batteries, it's something like 85%. Basically, you need around 4x the electricity (from your solar panels or the grid or whatever) to run your car on hydrogen than you will with batteries. The prospects for hydrogen improving significantly on that seem slim.
True, hydrogen can get better energy density, so for applications that really need it, such as airplanes, ocean liners, or big trucks, it may ultimately be the way to go -- but in that realm, it's chief competitor is biodiesel and/or ethanol, not batteries.
For regular cars, 90% of the fleet's needs will be met with even modest batteries such as what the Chevy Volt will have. Arranging that in a hybrid setup eliminates the range issue completely -- and leverages the current refueling structure, as well. Ultimately that will translate into biofuels serving as the range-extender, but by then battery capacities may rise to the point where hybrids are no longer needed anyways. If not, then hydrogen may start to become a player -- but again, this is as a competitor to biofuels, not to batteries.
4. The benefits of space development are not 100% crystal clear to the general public.
Yes, and trying to say it's about "science" only muddies the waters
further. Leave the pure-science missions to the robots.
To me, it's clear:
The only reason to put people into space... is to put people into space.
That may sound self-referential, but it's really the correct goal --
and one worthy of sustained national and international attention.
Basically, we all want to go to space. We want it to eventually
become as easy for any one of us to go to the Moon, Mars, or a
near-earth asteroid as it currently is to fly between San Francisco
and London, or some such (i.e. affordable for a large enough
fraction of the population, in terms of both time and money). We
want to be a multi-planetary species, which is actually essential
for our long-term survival (as Carl Sagan pointed out).
So the only real point of any nation's manned space
program is to learn how to put people into space safely and,
ultimately, cheaply. Such a program should not only concentrate
on developing the appropriate technology and techniques; it should
also pave the way to allow private enterprise to begin to work in
that realm.
Part of the way to do that is to achieve sufficient modularization of the
technology. You don't go building some giant, $100 billion
spacecraft to take a crew of 5 to Mars and back once. You build
lots of little pices which work together, and can be developed,
tested hard against reality, and improved continuously, allowing
the system as a whole to tackle larger and larger tasks over time.
It may take 3 decades instead of 1 to get people to Mars, but 3
decades after that, there will still be people there, instead
of the whole thing fizzling out because "it's been done."
In designing this system, the key term to remember is the same as
the one for good software design: "coherence." You don't build any
one machine that focuses on more than one major task. And if you
find yourself wanting to build such a thing, you need to figure out
how to split it into better-focused submodules.
Here's how it should work:
Build a launcher/lander module -- a space capsule -- which
will be set atop a rocket that is only strong enough to lift to
low-earth orbit (obeying the appropriate G-force limits).
Probably should keep it small, carrying maybe 2 persons max. The
capsule should only be designed to support those 2 astronauts in
orbit for 1 or 2 days. With every launch, the capsule must
dock with a space station. It can remain docked with the station
for a long time, but its only other task will be to return
astronauts safely to the ground.
(One of the Space Shuttle's main problems is that it was both a
launch/lander and a short-term space station, able to keep
7 astronauts up there for weeks. That incoherence was a big
factor in the Shuttle's complexity, and therefore its expense and
delicateness.)
Launch all support hardware (space station modules, etc) via unmanned rockets. These tasks have far
less restrction on G-forces, or on safety for that matter.
A given space station will be a collection of a number of types of
standardized modules:
A habitation module, able to support 1 person for mabye a week by
itself. It has its own solar panel, air/water recirc, etc., and a
dock on one side to connect with the rest of the station. For
every astronaut you plan to inhabit a station, you would include 2
of these in the station (for safety).
A supply module, which lets the habitation module run for at least
several months (and can be switched out, to allow the habitation
modules to last an arbitrarily long time).
A connector module, which not only joins and lets people move
between different modules, but also ferries supplies: water, fuel,
electr
I have heard that a "couple of weeks" trip time to Mars is quite possible if you use an ion drive of sufficient size. A low acceleration applied continuously over a long period can work surprisingly well. This would also handle the deceleration issue, as you'd spend half the trip with the engine pointed behind you, and the other half with it in front.
Also, any such mission really shouldn't have the same vehicle serving as both interplanetary transport and lander/launcher (or even just together). All three tasks should be handled by separate vehicles with well-focused designs. And you definitely should be sending all such extra hardware as the landers, launchers, and surface habitat ahead of any manned mission.
Of course, this is certainly still more difficult than going to the moon, in terms of the size of the problem. But if we take the same approach as above to going to the moon, rather than another throwaway 1-shot method like the Apollo program was, then Mars will really just be another increment, and thus "easier" than getting to the Moon was in the first place.
given a mathematically perfect carbon nanotube structure, the highest building we could build before it would collapse on itself is something like 90 miles.....the height required for a space elevator/cable is several orders of magnitude greater
Carbon nanotubes have their strength in tension, not compression.
A self-supporting building based on nanotubes would have to be a tensegrity structure of some kind, where you'd have nanotubes pulling against something else that's relatively incompressible; maybe a diamond lattice. The tensions involved at the base of such a structure would be immense to keep the thing rigid enough to remain standing.
A space elevator, on the other hand, would rely purely on tension; the centrifugal effects of following the Earth's rotation are what keep it aloft -- that's the beauty of it. The tension forces -- greatest just below the geostationary orbit height -- would be large, but perhaps not as large as
in the tensegrity structure.
That doesn't matter. If you find someone with a non-watermarked copy, you send them a nastygram.
That's the point of the whole thing: you're not using technology
by itself. The feedback loop of accountabiliy occurs only through human
(at least, lawyer) intervention.
Since that feedback loop is expensive, you need to have the system set up
so that you're generating the right combination of good will among those
willing to play by the rules, and fear in those who are not. Just like
the rest of the legal system.
Which means that the system you're using must be viewed as fair and
reasonable by most people (this would include the prices charged for the
digital content in the first place). To that end, you need to be
generous on the "trust" side of the equation. You have to trust that
people will behave well when given a chance.
The #1 failing of all DRM schemes today is that they absolutely refuse to
do that. They try to implement the accountability loop cheaply with
a blind technological solution, and in so doing create a system that's
inherently unfair and unreasonable, dooming it to failure.
As for the idea the people aren't deterred by small fines, you need to remember a few factors here:
This is not just a parking ticket. It's a letter from a lawyer that
could lead to a big-time lawsuit if you ignore it or treat it too casually.
It's not just the money; there's a fear factor here. No one wants to
get a nasty letter from a lawyer, potentially threatening your
financial well-being. Imagine you're a father and you see one of
these come for your teenage son. You're going to be pretty concerned
about where this would lead, would you not?
You mention both speeding and the RIAA etc. lawsuits for comparison.
The reason these have proven not to be deterrents is because they are
viewed, rightly in most cases, as unreasonable. The RIAA suits in
particular are clearly abuses of the law on the part of the powerful
to attack the powerless.
As for speeding: using a simplistic measurement of speed as a proxy to
actually evaluating the safety of someone's driving style is not
really reasonable, in most people's minds. So, certainly, getting
hit with a $300 ticket for going 85mph in a 65 zone -- which you felt
was safe in that circumstance -- is only going to make you feel like
you're being treated unfairly, and isn't going to convince you to go
slower unless cops are actually present.
That's a pretty unnecessary statement. Your credibility takes a hit right away.
1. For it to have no restrictions, encoding it into a different format would lose the "watermark" data.
I said no restrictions on copying and related. Try reading more carefully.
But it's true, re-encoding it would require that the software preserve
the wartermark. The formatting for the watermark would need to be
an open standard (which means open-source software would be able to handle it).
That's why the actual info stored in the watermark would be encrypted.
And the upgrades would indeed happen, because it would be in people's interest to do so, and most people would consider it fair.
That's really the key: everyone agreeing that the system is fair. No scheme could survive without that.
2. It can't be determined from just "looking" what all that person's information is to tell if the data was correct.
Yes, this is probably the most problematic part of my proposal. Though it seems that some agreement can be reached with ISPs etc. for that info to be available to the bots. It would be in individuals' interests to make that info available for that purpose.
I'd like to hear if anyone has a clear argument against this.
3. "other than to keep it from interfering with quality of music playback, etc." doesn't sound like "no restrictions" to me.
Again, I said no restrictions on copying etc., not "no inconvenience
of any degree." Music player software would need an upgrade to handle
it. So an open standard is essential.
4. $25 once or twice isn't going to scare people.
I think you overestimate the callousness of the average person.
Certainly, some percentage will just pay the fines as they come, and not
change their behavior, but my assertion is that that percentage will be
low enough for the music business to be quite profitable.
Also, it would be very easy to escalate things for repeat offenders.
Say, for the 3rd offence, sue for several hundred dollars; for the
fourth, several thousand; etc. Make the escalation plan clear in the
first nasty-gram. When people are afraid that they might be on the hook
for a big chunk of money somewhere down the line if they don't change
their behavior, they'll usually start playing nice. Especially if they
can't justifiably argue that they're being treated unfairly.
Alternatively, if you don't escalate for repeat offenders, you could just
be sure to keep dinging them often enough such that they're effectively paying a nice, hefty subscription fee.
And again, the percentage of the population that will bother go to extra lengths
to get around these obstacles will be small enough that the artists can
make their money.
who's to stop people from copying things for free? only two things: people's sense of morality ("I don't want to steal from artists") and people's fear of the law ("I don't want to be caught with illegal copies on my hard disk"). That's hardly the basis of a healthy business model.
Actually, I think there is a scheme which can leverage basic human psychology to get a workable system. It would go as follows:
Watermark the digital content, with information specific to the person
who purchased it. i.e. brand it "owned by John Smith, 123 Fake Street,... ". This info would be encrypted, and the seller (music label or
artist) would hold the decryption keys exclusively (though it wouldn't
really matter if one got out).
There would be no restrictions whatsoever on where the watermarked
copy could be copied, how many times, etc. No hardware or software
will have any special recognition of the watermark, other than to
keep it from interfering with quality of music playback, etc.
Also the prices would have to be reasonable.
The labels or artists' associations will have bots scanning the
file-sharing networks, looking for items known to be produced by the
given artist/label, but which either (a) have no watermarking, or (b)
each have a watermark bearing ID info that doesn't match the info of the
person sharing the file.
Bring in the lawyers -- but don't pick a few people to sue for their
life savings ("going nuclear" like that only serves to discredit the
lablel/artist); rather, pick thousands to send nasty-grams to.
In each, describe the copyright violation for just one or a few songs, and
demand remittance of $25 or $50 or whatever.
Most people will likely just fork over the cash, change their behavior,
and tell their friends how they got "dinged." That's where the human
psychology comes in -- (a) most people will feel that those getting
dinged did deserve it in some way, and (b) will take steps to play
fair, as they would agree that the system is fair, and after all they want to support the artists.
It's when someone ignores repeated demands for payment that the real lawsuit starts.
It will be relatively few who casually take on the risks of getting
the nasty-grams sent to them, or who try to play games by ignoring them.
Enough will get hit with real lawsuits that most people will say "I
don't want to take that risk," keeping the number of scofflaws low
enough (say, 20% of the population or less) that this system should be
plenty profitable for the artists.
Slashdot Mirror
Steve's genius was in predicting the things nobody thought they wanted until he showed it to them.
Star Wars, for example.
(Darn, can't find a link -- but it was in one of the Star Wars documentaries. Jobs attended a screening of a rough cut of Star Wars, along with other friends of Lucas, many of whom went on to become big-name directors. Most of them were somewhat puzzled by what they saw; Jobs was the only one who went up to Lucas and told him, "You're going to make a TON of money with this!!")
Honda is working on a home hydrogen fuel station that connects to your water main and somehow generates hydrogen from the water mains. Not sure how that is accomplished.
The "how" is electrolysis.
Now as to what is accomplished: it lets you consume four times the amount of electricity to move your H2-powered car a given distance, as compared to an EV or plug-in hybrid.
On top of that, H2 is difficult to store on board the car in much better energy densities than you can get with the latest batteries. So you get a similar range, only with the added excitement of possible leaks and explosions. Neat!
... I've recently changed my opinion to favoring solar heavily. Specifically, solar to various hydrocarbons.
What you're talking about is storage of energy, to smooth out unevenness in demand vs. supply. Sounds like you're focusing on storing in the form of gasoline, for powering cars at a later time.
But using solar energy directly as electricity has a lot of growth remaining before storage even starts to even become an issue. And when it does, you need to look at the full picture:
- Demand shifting can further defer the need for storage. For example, a relatively new trend in air conditioning for large buildings is to manufacture ice at night, which is then used to help cool the air during the day. This takes advantage of lower electric rates at night due to the excess supply from fossil sources, as well as improved efficiency in the ice making itself, due to cooler air temps. But when the installed base of solar becomes large enough that the cheapest rates are in the daytime on sunny days, you could easily switch the ice-making to those times. Of course, excess supply from wind sources at night could often keep the cheapest rates where they are now.
- By the time the installed solar base is large enough to need to worry about storage, the electric car fleet will be substantial. Most of these cars will be commuter cars, so that means that workplaces will need to have charging available. But that seems a relatively minor infrastructure improvement. And again, wind energy will usually be providing cheap rates at night as well.
- Battery technology is is getting a lot of investment attention these days, and in the next decade we're probably going to see the installation of very large flow-type batteries or similar on the grid. These are already very useful for smoothing out demand/supply fluctuations, and protecting against cascading failures. They will be one of the most efficient means of storing excess renewable energy of all kinds.
Only after all these options are at capacity would we start talking about storage by way of driving chemical reactions. And there, yes, making gasoline might make sense, because long-haul trucking and airplanes really need that energy density. But then again, by the time we get there, battery storage may be very competitive -- especially when you take the inefficiency of manufacturing gasoline from scratch into account.
And if you're talking about making gasoline or some such from solar in the near term, for use in the current fleet of cars, there are still problems. True, you'll be supplanting fossil-carbon use from oil, but you'd most likely be able to supplant many times the amount of fossil carbon from coal and natural gas if you put that solar energy into the grid. Even generating hydrogen loses 75% of the energy, if you're converting that H2 back into electricity. The other options above give you far more bang for your solar-investment buck.
Also, generating gasoline from solar only serves to boost the lifetime of the gas-based transportation industry, and all the ill health effects that go with it. It would soak up a lot of the innovative energy/investment that could otherwise go to building a clean infrastructure.
The articles changed in tone -- to me they are trying to adopt Wired's pop-geek approach, compromising the technical depth...
There have been formatting changes numerous times since the 90's (in both SciAm and Science News). Certainly, SciAm in 1990 looked much more like a dry technical journal than it does now. But having gotten used to each new change, I'm not convinced that it's really being dumbed down. There's more (or different) decoration around the articles, but the content of the articles is still quite rich, generally. In fact, I can't even think of what the change was 2 years ago that you're talking about...
Scientific American is amongst the least accessible of this type imo.
Not sure what you mean by "accessible", because I find it very readable in every subject area -- physics, biology, geology, what have you -- even though I have little or no training in any of those beyond some basic high school or college classes. (my degree is in C.S.)
And I still find new ideas and concepts in there that just knock my socks off -- the small-molecule theory of the origin of life, for example. This even though I've been reading it and Science News for nearly 30 years now.
Mind listing some of that unconscionable behavior here? I'm an employee at the former Sun, but I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to the wider business world since the takeover (I'm also just getting back into reading Slashdot...). The main effect of the takeover on me personally has been improved job security in the near term, so I'm curious what else is going on. Thanks.
It's even worse when it's a TV series that you've just gotten hooked on, then suddenly it's gone when you're halfway through...
And in the end, Russia is the only nation to have manned space flight capability.
And China.
And how efficient is transferring the electricity across the grid to your house so you can charge your batteries?
It's well over 90%. And it will improve as the new HVDC trunk lines are built out.
Furthermore, you obviously wouldn't generate the hydrogen yourself at home, but rather get it at some filling station like today (unlike with batteries which would be difficult to refill within a minute at a "recharging station").
So what? Hydrogen will still use 4x the resource of a straight battery charge, for essentially no benefit over a hybrid setup. An incredible waste.
Again, as a source of range-extending energy within a hybrid setup, hydrogen may eventually prove viable, but only as a means to displace biofuels for that purpose. I did some calcs, showing the mileage yield from a solar installation creating hydrogen to be about 10x that of the best-case cellulosic ethanol, for the same land area. But batteries easily beat it as the primary mover of autos and light trucks (and eventually heavy trucks too, I expect).
your cash goes to:
Correct so far. In fact, because oil tends to dominate the economy of countries that are major producers of it, those countries are in fact damaged as well, causing the bad stuff to happen in the first place. For example, their currency value goes up too high for any of their industries other than oil to be competitive internationally -- and it's easier for them to import those items anyways -- so the bulk of their non-oil economy stagnates and withers. This makes for a lot of unemployment, unrest, etc. Also, the government holds near-monopoly power on the economy, and so tends strongly towards the dictatorial.
It's not a coincidence that most of the world's oil comes from the most volatile regions on Earth.
we need electric cars supported by a new wave of modern nuclear power plants. of course there are better sources of electricity than nuclear, but most of these are boutique and cannot scale like nuclear can. this includes wind and solar.
What in the world makes you think that solar and wind are not scalable like nuclear? In fact, I would argue it's the opposite:
Since solar and wind come in smaller increments, it's easier to add capacity, even in locations where none exists yet. This means lower barriers to entry, and thus faster and more-widespread scalability.
The environmental hurdles are much easier to overcome, even ignoring the toxic-waste and protesting-hippies concerns.
The aforementioned waste- and hippie-related problems.
Even just general NIMBY. Nuclear plants are quite frightening for people to have nearby -- even for non-hippies. Solar and wind installations, on the other hand, literally are being installed even in people's back yards.
A larger number of smaller installations is far friendlier to the grid, because their output will be more consistent on average. A nuclear plant needs to go offline periodically each year for maintenance, causing Gigawatt-scale dips in available supply.
Uranium supply is limited, and causes environmental damage to mine and process. We've barely even begun to tap into our available solar and wind resources.
Nuclear is a mature technology, and its costs are only going up. Wind and solar still have a great deal of innovation remaining, and their costs are only going down.
If your utility is adding a nuclear plant, your rates are going to go up substantially. If it's adding wind and/or solar, they're probably going to go down, or at least remain even.
There isn't a single nuclear plant in development on the planet that is not receiving a massive amount of help from a government entity. Even many huge subsidies available in the U.S. are going unclaimed. The market has rejected Nuclear already. Contrast that with the amount being invested in wind and solar research and buildouts -- despite the uncertainty of continued government subsidies. Also, wind/solar promise to become economical without subsidies very soon, as they scale up and develop. Nuclear hasn't reached that point even after half a century of development and buildout.
Every dollar put into building a nuclear plant today is a dollar that could have been invested in a solar or wind plant. Since nuclear takes so much more time to come online, and costs so much more, that means that the current coal and natural gas plants will be operating that much longer. So, in essence, investment in new nuclear energy will contribute further to global warming.
My main reference for this: RMI summary page
Detailed report
Actually -- the cash goes to Canada first, then Saudi Arabia, then Mexico. After that, it's Venezuela at #4 ...
Since oil is fungible, that's completely irrelevant. If we stopped buying so much oil from the Canadians, and didn't replace it with purchases from elsewhere, the price of oil would go down, and Saudi Arabia and Russia would be getting less money.
And of course, if we were able to stop buying any oil from Canada, and not replace it, that would mean we've engineered non-oil-dependent technologies to a high degree. Since the rest of the world would also use these technologies, there would be even less oil money going to Russia etc.
Well that's great but what do you do with all the spent batteries?...
Either recycle them or throw them in a landfill. For Li-ion batteries, the latter is perfectly safe, and the former quite lucrative.
... Then there's the range problem. What are they getting now...40 miles to a charge? Is that really enough? Even if they triple it?
That's why hybrids are the answer: they eliminate the range issue, and are also able to use pure-electric for the 90% or so of the average driving needs that are within that range-per-day.
The range will be even less of an issue once plugin points are common at workplace parking spaces, city streets, etc. By the time the auto fleet is mostly electric, there will have been enough solar buildout such that daytime will be when most of the excess power is available -- and therefore at its cheapest -- giving people a direct financial incentive to charge during the day.
See the "Are there any toxic chemicals in the battery?" question in the Tesla faq:
http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/faqs.php
...projections for the percentage increase in ones monthly electric bill have ranged from 28% to 64% once the caps are removed.
Actually, this could be beneficial, as it will encourage more homeowners to install solar panels (yes, useful even in PA), and/or to cut their electricity use overall. Especially if it's possible to request the utility to provide time-of-use pricing.
EVs will still be cheaper than gasoline by a wide margin, and it will take a good deal of time before enough EVs are charging at night to actually soak up the excess baseload power; only then will EVs contribute pricing pressure on electricity -- and by then, the amount of solar and wind installed should be pretty significant.
So higher electric rates right now will help push down carbon emissions that much faster.
... all viable H2 systems store it in a chemical bond, not 'just' compressed gas.
I assume you're talking about the metal hydrides or some such, not, say, gasoline, which stores more hydrogen per unit volume in its chemical bonds than even liquid hydrogen.
Please point to one such storage system that is (a) proven, and (b) gets anywhere near the energy density that would be viable for use in an automobile. Hell, give me one that even approaches the performance of Li-ion batteries.
All of the hydrogen prototype cars I've ever heard of use compressed-gas tanks for storage. There was a Honda, I think, that claimed some 600mi of range with such a setup.
In terms of safety: with a compressed-gas setup, there is one important safety issue that I can think of: the fact that a leak could be ignited, and yet totally invisible. So if your car's H2 tank has some kind of small puncture, enough to send out a jet for a few feet, and that somehow gets lit, you may not notice it until your foot catches on fire when you walk past your car.
With gasoline, at least you know when it's on fire!
You lose a lot of power in the hydrogen generation, that's true, but batteries and power lines aren't especially efficient either. I'm not sure which one would best/most practical though.
The conversion of electricity to hydrogen, then back to electricity, is about 25% efficient, and I'm not even counting the penalty for compressing or otherwise storing the hydrogen gas. For batteries, it's something like 85%. Basically, you need around 4x the electricity (from your solar panels or the grid or whatever) to run your car on hydrogen than you will with batteries. The prospects for hydrogen improving significantly on that seem slim.
True, hydrogen can get better energy density, so for applications that really need it, such as airplanes, ocean liners, or big trucks, it may ultimately be the way to go -- but in that realm, it's chief competitor is biodiesel and/or ethanol, not batteries.
For regular cars, 90% of the fleet's needs will be met with even modest batteries such as what the Chevy Volt will have. Arranging that in a hybrid setup eliminates the range issue completely -- and leverages the current refueling structure, as well. Ultimately that will translate into biofuels serving as the range-extender, but by then battery capacities may rise to the point where hybrids are no longer needed anyways. If not, then hydrogen may start to become a player -- but again, this is as a competitor to biofuels, not to batteries.
I think it sounds pretty good, actually.
Nowadays, when I see a noisy, rumbly sportscar on the road, I tend to think: "klunker!!""
Thanks! It's nice to know that there was at least one reader. :)
(I noticed that the discussion was 2 days old only after I posted!)
Yes, and trying to say it's about "science" only muddies the waters further. Leave the pure-science missions to the robots.
To me, it's clear:
The only reason to put people into space ... is to put people into space.
That may sound self-referential, but it's really the correct goal -- and one worthy of sustained national and international attention. Basically, we all want to go to space. We want it to eventually become as easy for any one of us to go to the Moon, Mars, or a near-earth asteroid as it currently is to fly between San Francisco and London, or some such (i.e. affordable for a large enough fraction of the population, in terms of both time and money). We want to be a multi-planetary species, which is actually essential for our long-term survival (as Carl Sagan pointed out).
So the only real point of any nation's manned space program is to learn how to put people into space safely and, ultimately, cheaply. Such a program should not only concentrate on developing the appropriate technology and techniques; it should also pave the way to allow private enterprise to begin to work in that realm.
Part of the way to do that is to achieve sufficient modularization of the technology. You don't go building some giant, $100 billion spacecraft to take a crew of 5 to Mars and back once. You build lots of little pices which work together, and can be developed, tested hard against reality, and improved continuously, allowing the system as a whole to tackle larger and larger tasks over time. It may take 3 decades instead of 1 to get people to Mars, but 3 decades after that, there will still be people there, instead of the whole thing fizzling out because "it's been done."
In designing this system, the key term to remember is the same as the one for good software design: "coherence." You don't build any one machine that focuses on more than one major task. And if you find yourself wanting to build such a thing, you need to figure out how to split it into better-focused submodules.
Here's how it should work:
(One of the Space Shuttle's main problems is that it was both a launch/lander and a short-term space station, able to keep 7 astronauts up there for weeks. That incoherence was a big factor in the Shuttle's complexity, and therefore its expense and delicateness.)
I have heard that a "couple of weeks" trip time to Mars is quite possible if you use an ion drive of sufficient size. A low acceleration applied continuously over a long period can work surprisingly well. This would also handle the deceleration issue, as you'd spend half the trip with the engine pointed behind you, and the other half with it in front.
Also, any such mission really shouldn't have the same vehicle serving as both interplanetary transport and lander/launcher (or even just together). All three tasks should be handled by separate vehicles with well-focused designs. And you definitely should be sending all such extra hardware as the landers, launchers, and surface habitat ahead of any manned mission.
Of course, this is certainly still more difficult than going to the moon, in terms of the size of the problem. But if we take the same approach as above to going to the moon, rather than another throwaway 1-shot method like the Apollo program was, then Mars will really just be another increment, and thus "easier" than getting to the Moon was in the first place.
Carbon nanotubes have their strength in tension, not compression.
A self-supporting building based on nanotubes would have to be a tensegrity structure of some kind, where you'd have nanotubes pulling against something else that's relatively incompressible; maybe a diamond lattice. The tensions involved at the base of such a structure would be immense to keep the thing rigid enough to remain standing.
A space elevator, on the other hand, would rely purely on tension; the centrifugal effects of following the Earth's rotation are what keep it aloft -- that's the beauty of it. The tension forces -- greatest just below the geostationary orbit height -- would be large, but perhaps not as large as in the tensegrity structure.
You call this funding?That doesn't matter. If you find someone with a non-watermarked copy, you send them a nastygram.
That's the point of the whole thing: you're not using technology by itself. The feedback loop of accountabiliy occurs only through human (at least, lawyer) intervention.
Since that feedback loop is expensive, you need to have the system set up so that you're generating the right combination of good will among those willing to play by the rules, and fear in those who are not. Just like the rest of the legal system.
Which means that the system you're using must be viewed as fair and reasonable by most people (this would include the prices charged for the digital content in the first place). To that end, you need to be generous on the "trust" side of the equation. You have to trust that people will behave well when given a chance.
The #1 failing of all DRM schemes today is that they absolutely refuse to do that. They try to implement the accountability loop cheaply with a blind technological solution, and in so doing create a system that's inherently unfair and unreasonable, dooming it to failure.
As for the idea the people aren't deterred by small fines, you need to remember a few factors here:
This is not just a parking ticket. It's a letter from a lawyer that could lead to a big-time lawsuit if you ignore it or treat it too casually.
It's not just the money; there's a fear factor here. No one wants to get a nasty letter from a lawyer, potentially threatening your financial well-being. Imagine you're a father and you see one of these come for your teenage son. You're going to be pretty concerned about where this would lead, would you not?
You mention both speeding and the RIAA etc. lawsuits for comparison. The reason these have proven not to be deterrents is because they are viewed, rightly in most cases, as unreasonable. The RIAA suits in particular are clearly abuses of the law on the part of the powerful to attack the powerless.
As for speeding: using a simplistic measurement of speed as a proxy to actually evaluating the safety of someone's driving style is not really reasonable, in most people's minds. So, certainly, getting hit with a $300 ticket for going 85mph in a 65 zone -- which you felt was safe in that circumstance -- is only going to make you feel like you're being treated unfairly, and isn't going to convince you to go slower unless cops are actually present.
That's a pretty unnecessary statement. Your credibility takes a hit right away.
I said no restrictions on copying and related. Try reading more carefully.
But it's true, re-encoding it would require that the software preserve the wartermark. The formatting for the watermark would need to be an open standard (which means open-source software would be able to handle it). That's why the actual info stored in the watermark would be encrypted.
And the upgrades would indeed happen, because it would be in people's interest to do so, and most people would consider it fair.
That's really the key: everyone agreeing that the system is fair. No scheme could survive without that.
Yes, this is probably the most problematic part of my proposal. Though it seems that some agreement can be reached with ISPs etc. for that info to be available to the bots. It would be in individuals' interests to make that info available for that purpose.
I'd like to hear if anyone has a clear argument against this.
Again, I said no restrictions on copying etc., not "no inconvenience of any degree." Music player software would need an upgrade to handle it. So an open standard is essential.
I think you overestimate the callousness of the average person. Certainly, some percentage will just pay the fines as they come, and not change their behavior, but my assertion is that that percentage will be low enough for the music business to be quite profitable.
Also, it would be very easy to escalate things for repeat offenders. Say, for the 3rd offence, sue for several hundred dollars; for the fourth, several thousand; etc. Make the escalation plan clear in the first nasty-gram. When people are afraid that they might be on the hook for a big chunk of money somewhere down the line if they don't change their behavior, they'll usually start playing nice. Especially if they can't justifiably argue that they're being treated unfairly.
Alternatively, if you don't escalate for repeat offenders, you could just be sure to keep dinging them often enough such that they're effectively paying a nice, hefty subscription fee.
And again, the percentage of the population that will bother go to extra lengths to get around these obstacles will be small enough that the artists can make their money.
Actually, I think there is a scheme which can leverage basic human psychology to get a workable system. It would go as follows:
Watermark the digital content, with information specific to the person who purchased it. i.e. brand it "owned by John Smith, 123 Fake Street, ... ". This info would be encrypted, and the seller (music label or
artist) would hold the decryption keys exclusively (though it wouldn't
really matter if one got out).
There would be no restrictions whatsoever on where the watermarked copy could be copied, how many times, etc. No hardware or software will have any special recognition of the watermark, other than to keep it from interfering with quality of music playback, etc.
Also the prices would have to be reasonable.
The labels or artists' associations will have bots scanning the file-sharing networks, looking for items known to be produced by the given artist/label, but which either (a) have no watermarking, or (b) each have a watermark bearing ID info that doesn't match the info of the person sharing the file.
Bring in the lawyers -- but don't pick a few people to sue for their life savings ("going nuclear" like that only serves to discredit the lablel/artist); rather, pick thousands to send nasty-grams to. In each, describe the copyright violation for just one or a few songs, and demand remittance of $25 or $50 or whatever.
Most people will likely just fork over the cash, change their behavior, and tell their friends how they got "dinged." That's where the human psychology comes in -- (a) most people will feel that those getting dinged did deserve it in some way, and (b) will take steps to play fair, as they would agree that the system is fair, and after all they want to support the artists.
It's when someone ignores repeated demands for payment that the real lawsuit starts.
It will be relatively few who casually take on the risks of getting the nasty-grams sent to them, or who try to play games by ignoring them. Enough will get hit with real lawsuits that most people will say "I don't want to take that risk," keeping the number of scofflaws low enough (say, 20% of the population or less) that this system should be plenty profitable for the artists.