they use concentrators and trackers, and can pipe natural sunlight via fiber optics around to anyplace inside a building. Here is a DOE link on the tech albeit used in conjunction with regular lighting Hybrid solar lighting
The shiny tube guys are in use also, and are cheaper, but require a large diameter pipe to function well.
...mentioned the huge project to reduce demand, which I am convinced can be done to a huge degree with the concept of "superinsulation", applied as new building codes and as requirements for mortgage transfers. Sweeten the deal with 100% tax credits.
I've worked on a few such places, and the diff is *astounding*, beyond astounding. Talk a maine winter without needing supplemental heat all that much (call it around 10% of the previous load roughly), or a 90+ F day in missouri and a house staying cool with the AC not coming on for days. It is *that* good. I am dumbfounded this is not a major part of the national energy strategy-but I understand why, it isn't "sexy", there aren't gobs of money to be made with flash bang gee whizz new tech and R&D, just boring old more insulation, better windows and doors, intelligent building placement, etc.
The press and legislative interest and venture capitalist interest is on new power sources, I say work on dropping demand-just like the chip manufacturers have discovered. the same amount of watts can get you a lot more computing than yesteryear, by more intelligent construction. Same with buildings. Heating and cooling and lighting are the big three, and rather simple solutions exist for them.
I think we could within 10 years probably drop our collective energy demand to at least just a third of what we use now, using off the shelf normal tech pushed along with a little governmental mandating and economic incentive. I don't like taxes, but *credits*-the anti tax-always seem to work well. People dig getting to keep their loot, for any reason.. Taxes are punitive, credits are rewarding. Ideally of course neither should be needed, but we live in the real world and such political tools exist, so I say use them.
yours is called the silver bullet solution, and I agree, there isn't any single alternative energy tech that can "replace" what we have now. It doesn't exist and won't for the foreseable future.
Here's the deal-we don't need to replace, we augment, and keep augmenting, and combined with a huge retrofitting insulation project-government pushed would be idea, total tax credits for it would work,a manhattan project level endeavor, we start to both add to production, and also start to drop demand. For the production, we use "all of the above", individual solar, small building solar, big windchargers, individual windchargers, tidal generators, low head hydro, geothermal and biofuels and etc.. It is the *combination* of all those factors that make for a new energy paradigm. We are trying to eliminate the continual need for more coal plants and for burning pure petroleum products, and whether it is 300 years or 10,000, nukes are inherently overly complex (nukes make heat-we are facing global warming-heat we got by the solar metric ton) and very dangerous, requiring armed guards in *numbers* 24/7/365/x years or decades or centuries or millenia. And they are nasty targets for attacks anyway, using sophisticated weapons. Hit some wind tower, it crashes. Hit a big solar array, oh well, smashed glass. Hit a nuke plant with something "good enough", which judging by reports out of Iraa doesn't seem all that hard to pull off--world of hurt to a lot of folks downwind, for a long time. They are *dangerous*. Yes, they can make a huge amount of cocntrated heat which can then be spun off to electricity-still too dangerous. Keep building more coal plants-still too dirty, too radioactive. Keep burning pure petroleum-geopolitically dangerous and soon to be EGADS expensive. We are one planetary wildcard event away from 100-200 buck a barrel or even more with oil. And it could very well happen this summer. Geopolitical strike over nuclear power leading to a huge impact with petroleum power.
It's just lame when we have alternatives. I work outside all the time, bright sunlight and heat we got a-plenty! It won't do all of it, but it sure as heck could do a big chunk of it!
We have to do this energy transformation in incremental stages. We freeze what we have with the old model dirty and concentrated cash models, and give priority to total diversification for the next century into the identified alternatives we have for deployment, and keep working on more, like with hydrogen from algae or something. We already have the centralized power and concentrated profit grid system, so we start to add "backups" until such a time as the roles are reversed, promoting better tech as it becomes available (actually, this is what is happening now, despite the major industries reluctance for decades, they are being bypassed from sheer economics and the reality of pollution and global climate change awareness). My pet "way" is what is happening, getting rid of the all our eggs in one basket model. Moreso in some european nations and the developing world than in the US, but globally-this is what is happening, the 'whatever works the best in your neighborhood" model. Same with communications, a lot of places are skipping hard wiring and going straight to almost all wireless for telco. Because it's cheaper/better/faster than the old way.
And just from a security standpoint, our centralized distribution model is already highly vulnerable to both natural disasters and physical attack, and just slap overloading. We are only one major heatwave and tech accident away from another regional blackout.
Adding millions of points of production instead of just another hundred, insures a single point of failure will not completely wipeout some huge area for power. It also lets people become owners instead of renters, the "middle class" dream. own your home, own your ride-now own your power! Renting sucks except for very short term or infrequently needed things. Anything important or that you need forev
There is one reason why this ludicrous and destructive charade continues, and that is from a serious flaw in the Constitution. The executive branch controls 99%+ of the "no questions asked" order followers who carry guns.
And that's it. Supposed to be some vague oath for constitution and then commander in chief. That's the theory. In practice, it is completely loyal to commander in chief. Full stop.
The legislative branch has nothing. Zero. Toothless. Even when they allegedly "pass" this or that legislation, it invariably gets "decided" to be something else, by "signing statements", and the orders from the deciders keep being followed. Combine that with that little cute warning to Congress and the mass media with that *mysteriously unsolved* anthrax attack, which let them know in no uncertain terms who was calling the shots now, and you get what you see.
This has been a coup d'état, with hacked elections and some really dodgy and quite *odd* "terror" attacks, and until that is recognized universally and identified as such, by the population en masse and especially by the toady media and by folks inside the government "system", nothing much will change, it will just keep getting worse.
Above is my opinion. I do not like having that opinion, it just sucks.
This is my anecdotal. Going by what I was taught in gradeschool, we are already way past the point where this can be called a police state. That it is not as bad for people right now as worse police states like north korea or wherever is a moot point. The important thing is, it crossed the threshold and is continuing relentlessly in that direction. It's been slow speed but really increased the past few years. I think they really saw they could pull it off cleanly if they took their time and did it piecemeal, instead of an all at once overnight deal like most coups. I also think it has been going on in a loose form since at least when they offed JFK and got away with it. Eisenhower warned the nation. I don't think he was joking.
That is certainly interesting technology, but I am not so sure our materials science is up to the task of keeping all that stuff where it needs to stay to keep on working and remaining safe. In fact, I'd bet against it. Just normal hydraulic fluid at realtively low pressure wipes out steel pipes, see it all the time. Liquid molten metals and neutrons flinging around and stuff...naw, I'm a skeptic it would stay together 300 years. The design is interesting, I just don't think they could build one that would last.
And a second point, and a very important one for me anyway, is I think the centralized power monopolists have had a real good run for over a hundred years now, but it is time to DE-centralize both energy production and where all that cash goes and to help knock back down their political power over the nation. They've made several mountains of loot and have had tremendous political power..but time for a change, a big change. I am not really digging the old central power guys..just a scosh..well, call a spade a spade, greedy is the term. I remember way back in the 70s helping a friend setup what was the first small windcharger in this area. The local power company had a freaking snitfit and tried to block it. They have just been jerks for years over it, because it threatens their business model. That part is obvious anyway.
Joe homeowner can actually purchase and deploy a technologically advanced "fusion reactor" in the form of a solar array, right now and today, and after a few years-that varies-but some amount of years much less than the life expectancy of the system- he owns it and it switches from a debit in the monthly bills to an actual profit. This falls into the "cool beans!" category by any measure. This *never, ever* happens with centralized power and the rent your watts forever model we have now, and certainly not with the current business model of you have not a clue what you'll be paying 5,10,15,20,30 years from now from the central power guys, no matter how they generate that power.
So from the viewpoint of long term safety, convenience, political and economic restructuring and cost, national security and local/regional security, I think nukes lose and solar wins right now.
I've lived extensively with solar, it actually "just works" pretty well, even right through when the centralized grid goes down, and all things considered, if you are really planning to live in your home rather than just look at it as some couple year house flipping investment, it makes economic sense today, let alone in the future when we might have some very sudden and severe price increases for centrally delivered electricity. Combine some solar with some small scale geothermal and a lot better insulation, and it really isn't that hard to have an energy neutral home now. It isn't common yet, but certainly easier to pull off than a lot of these other ideas, because all the tech exists right now, it can all be purchased with a few mouse clicks and a few phone calls really. And with certain lenders now quite willing to roll in the cost of conversion to these techniques, the actual upfront costs and monthly costs are quite competitive with just renting your power.
Plus, it's a whole house UPS system, another really good feature for nerds with a lot of expensive equipment at home, cleaner power than the grid and you have the ability to store if you go battery bank (which I think you should with solar).
Ya, I know, wait 5 years it will be better/cheaper. Meh, same as any other tech, comes a time you either want in or not, same with computers. Remember what you paid for computers years ago? I sure do.. It still was cool though,. and certainly helped the industry along.
Heck, I still have a NIB 4 gig scsi external drive with the sticker on the box, $9,999. Now I didn't pay that, bought a load of assorted "compute" for cheap once, but certainly they sold some of them at that price. 4 gigs! That probably ran some advanced servers someplace. Still
...whatever the particular media company that is offering the swap has on the shelf I guess. If they have porn, they could offer that. Like..hmm...retired geezers doing the transcribing..what might they want.. hmm... MATLOCK AND GOLDEN GIRLS PORN!!1
...when the proponents of nuclear powered everything talk about how easy it is to store waste for 10,000 years or something. Maybe it is or maybe it isn't, but humans track records on this sort of thing are not that good. At a minimum I think it will always be harder than they say, and never be as reliable. And certainly not cheap.
As for records archiving, as long as the net stays up we have a global backup system, because we can keep leapfrogging technologies, there is no start and stop point where we change everything all at once. Static archiving gets into troubles because of entropy, stuff just starts falling apart. If the whole net ever goes down hard globally for some years, we would lose a lot of data. Current paper isn't that good, photos fade fast on most media, plastic disk based isn't that good, harddrives aren't that good, etc. Each has a few good points and some bad points, but none of them are really designed for centuries or millenia AFAIK. A few years or dozens of years anecdotal from someone with their pet favorite media does not equal centuries or millenia. It's a guess and a crapshoot really we just don't know. We've already lost just a ton of old filmed media, TV shows and movies, from the last century, film just didn't cut it long haul, requires a lot of expensive care, and we need something that doesn't require expensive and elaborate care, and digital format requires the media to be matched to the hardware it was designed for, that has to be archived as well, and kept in perfect operating conditions.
We are a society that lost our freaking moon tapes! And even before that it had gotten to the point only a few existing pieces of hardware could even access the stuff, and that was some pretty important records. And that is *short term* historically speaking. Real short term.
We have to keep human nature involved in this discussion as well as just the nuts and bolts of archiving. Stuff gets lost or stolen and artificially lost or just gets wet or forgotten about and starts to just rot away. We have right now a fastfood society, nothing is considered all that important. We pay lip service to archiving, sure, I'll admit that, but really, it's a symptom of our short term profits business world and throw away society.
Then you have to consider, exactly what is really worth saving for that long anyway? All of it, all of everything we do, all the records? It's gonna get pretty expensive eventually if we keep trying to do that.
I guy I know collected winged mopars and parts and just sat on them for years, old superbirds and daytonas. He lived in an apartment over a big garage and that garage and yard and driveway were overflowing eventually. He got em back when they were still more or less affordable to normal enthusiasts. When he got married several years ago now he sold *one* of them and paid cash for a decent house in the Atlanta suburbs (larryville actually). There's stock investing, then *stock* investing. Plus, he got to drive cool cars all the time.
Offer x large numbers of hours of decent content mailed back on disk for every hour of volunteer transcribing? There might be a ton of semi or full retired folks might want to get into that, if the software deal was setup for them and it was easy to use and understand.
...I mean....have all of them connected all the time, even during such a critical upgrade?? I think that might be covered under rookie admin 101 "lame things to never do". And that is just for your home network, let alone being up in freaking space where it is sorta dangerous and you might need to keep your wits about you. Do you really think all of those folks, all of them, just forgot to do that or didn't think it was important? What's the point of having a spare if you subject all of them to the same stresses all the time? It's not like strange errors tied to hardware issues are unknown in the computer world, along with the "stuff happens" universal constant.
If so, I say shut the whole project down, too many tards on board and at ground control. And that's the part I have a hard time believing, just too many engineers and scary smart guys involved with this thing, I just can't believe that all of them wouldn't think to at least temporarily shut down one of the backup boxes during a hot hookup. I mean, I have a couple spare machines kicking around the room here, and no way do I ever have all of them plugged in at the same time, I've lost machines before, but I know a full airgap means if my main machine fails, I *really do* have such a thing as a backup machine, and yep, I lost a machine that was on a surge protector before as well, direct lightning hit to the wire coming in = crispy mobo. And dumbass me never bothered to send in the warranty jazz for the surge so I had to eat it. Learned my lesson on that one..but I still had my older spare machine to get back online with too, because it wasn't plugged in and running at the time, it was airgapped.
We had an el nino last year which tends to reduce the number and severity of hurricanes.
Or so this "they" guy says...read it on the intartubes
The deal with hurricanes isn't so much they are stronger or more of them as hundreds or thousands of years ago as much as we have much better news reporting and data keeping now and even moreso, hoo-mannz have been on a coastal area expensive building spree for the past few decades in the US, so when hurricanes *do* strike, it causes a lot more damage. Example, a little cottage I used to live it on the beach in florida, back when that was still possible at ridiculous cheap joe construction worker wage levels is now a big high rise. Where a few people used to live (and I went through a hurricane there actually) and a structure worth x-dollars might have been damaged, (it wasn't, 'cane that didn't hit directly but was sure *exciting* for yours truly)now a lot more people and x times 500 (whatever, big number) dollars worth of stuff is there that could be damaged. I don't know a technical term for it, but the event impact potential threshold is now way higher than it used to be, given the same exact size hurricane.
I ain't buying this. Supposedly three redundant systems, a previous record of over voltage, and NONE of the three systems was protected with an airgap, ie, pull the plug until the new power situation was tested?
Me smell a ratski here. There is something they still aren't telling us, or there's some dumb clucks running things.
...have no major differences. In the US we have two wings of the Globalist party. It is a 1 party system. Full & Stop. The media pushes those candidates which support that notion, because at the top levels, the "media" is owned by a handful of globalist billionaires, and they give the orders.. If a candidate is pro wall street pirates, open unregulated US borders, offshoring/job jacking, interventionism in the middle east, etc-that's who "wins" for the most part the media popularity contests. The two wings of the Globalist party differ only in which of your pockets they want to pick first-your left or right pocket- and which of your personal freedoms -our supposed inalienable bill of rights- is higher on their list to restrict/eliminate/regulate/tax. "Left wing and right wing" is an obvious ruse to keep the grassroots political activist rabble amused and thinking their input will matter a whole lot. It matters *some* obviously, but not near as much as what gets decided at WTO, CFR, Bohemian Grove, Bilderberger, etc type meetings. That is where official policy is formed and decided on, then they have to sell it to the populace, and media manipulation is a heavily used tool for that purpose.
Historically the most obvious one in the media was the Hearst empire.
If you want some current examples of how this works, look at illegal immigration, a clear cut majority of both "left wing" and "right wing" people (by simply all polls I have seen everyplace) are opposed to amnesty and want the illegals slowed down to a stop and have the "normal" legal, lawful, safer and much more sane immigration continue, yet, the globaist party and their "front runners" keep trying to push amnesty under some other name through the congress. The phones ring off the hook at every congressmans office against it, but they'll keep trying until they get that passed. Look at the war, it hasn't stopped yet, despite a huge overwhelming opposition to it now, we are building permanent bases there, and the largest embassy in the world. Look at energy, the big oil companies keep making record profits, and the amount put towards alternative energy is a pittance compared to that. Mr. Environment, the so called "left" wing gore, a globaist multimillionaire, is just *now* putting solar panels at his house after suffering embarrassing press-yet it wasn't there until some blogs found out about his hypocritical stance. I mean, selling carbon credits from one of your companies to another is not an environmental issue, it's a typical globalist rich guy dodge worth of an enron. The R party grassroots is way against illegal immigration, but their so called "leaders" who are mainstream globalists are all in favor of the scamnesty bill to legalize them. The blue collar dems at the grassroots levels are all against offshoring and job-jacking, yet their leaders are always letting it just keep getting worse and worse and worse with no end in sight.
Any candidate labeled D or R who is against that stuff is invariably labled a "fringe" candidate, by every media empire out there, every newspaper, every major broadcaster does it, because those notions go against the high level globalist party long term goals. Here's another, outside of a few internet sites, where is the main stream media coverage of the north american union that is being forced on us by fiat. It ain't there, zip coverage for the most part and it has *profound*, I mean, large, big, gigantanormous implications for everyone in the US, Canada and Mexico. zip coverage for the most part. This is not a coincidence.
And so on, I could rant awhile on this subject, but following politics and the news closely for around half a century now it is pretty easy for me to see how it has gradually gotten both worse and more sophisticated in how they run this high level propaganda, and I haven't even touched on official governmental employees running the news with fake bloggers, forum posters, news "leaks" (WMD IN IRAQ! OMG! IT'S REAL!). Some of that stuff they have gotten bust
I once did a stretch living as a wild woods hippie for four and a half years, only electronic gadgets I had were a flashlight and a transistor radio. Eventually I almost completely stopped using the flashlight and went to home made candles.
I tell you what civilization has that is way more important and you'll miss the most if modern technology is just absent-clean running water coming out the tap. I think once we achieved that we actually hit "modern" life, some kind of big dividing line. It is something that is still pretty cheap for most of us, and what we take for granted a lot, but lose it, and you'll miss it quickly. In fact, you can see what the top items are when big natural disasters hit and people line up for some care packages stuff. They want water/ice first every time usually.
The mass media controllers hand pick the candidates *they* want you to focus on,and yes I'll even label it a conspiracy and interference of a sort in the political process. Merely by increasing news coverage and declaring such and such candidate a "front runner" it becomes their self fulfilling prophecy. Words have meaning and advertising/brainwashing works to a great extent, notice how they describe candidates other than their version of the top runners.
We always have a lot of candidates, just a very few get the bulk of the press.
The current Republican party disconnect with Ron Paul is a clear example, he has a lot of grassroots support, yet very little national coverage and what he does get is artfully spun negative propaganda, whereas their globalist darlings like giuliani and now fred thompson get the bulk of the positive press. This is on purpose and this controlling the voters mindset is a long running "feature" of having our media controlled by a few people at the top. Their hand picked examples get the bulk of the news, so they turn around and can say "candidates x and y are the front runners, look how much news and interest there is!" Well, duh... These are artificially manufactured "top runner" candidates.
Want to change things, use the net and embarrass the mass media on their own news blogs and follow through no matter what once you actually get to the voting stage. Dump that lesser of the top two evils "vendor lockin" they always push, it's just plain harmful and results in the political situation you see today and what you have seen over the past generations.
Well,that's a drag about the blob. Still though, it is possible albeit complicated. I played with their little interactive connect the dots demo and can see how hard it must be to pull off.
AFAIK, all the olpc stuff is open source or open specced and documented. You can probably find exactly how their mutating mesh works and recreate the hardware and software elsewhere.
Really, the peoples net is a good idea, but it won't fly in any place other than pretty urban settings with the "legal" radio/wireless gear we are so graciously "permitted" by the state. It *could* work there though, especially if a lot of the nodes had decent storage and access to a ton of content.
It's a good idea, just the tech hurdles and economic hurdles are awesome, let alone the political ones, as in, the government and big biz will not like this idea *at all*. But..it is something to contemplate as the internet-as-we-know-it-today gets turned into a series of pay per view walled gardens. . The OLPC machine has built in automagical mesh networking, I'd say look there for tech clues to begin your peoples' net. FON is somewhat what you are looking for that is out there now.
Probably some huge chunk of space stuff smacked into the earth and globbed a large portion out to the other side. Gondawanaland or whatever it was called. I really don't know, but bet if you made a ball of play doh and got some rocks you could experiment further, see what happens. Most likely you would need lighter fluid and goggles, just for effect....hmm, apply for useless government grant..hmmmm
OK, that's my wild assed scientific appearing guess, what's yours why that was so?
I don't see the problem with plate tectonics and the land mass on one side and oceans on the other, earlier earth was still going through a big wobble, plus internal magnetic shifts causing even bigger wobbles, it has lessened somewhat in the past few billion years from inertia. We know the outside of the planet is cooler, so it hardens more. Hard stuff on hot spinning stuff might tend to slide around a little. Plus way back then we were still accumulating masses of water from comet hits, splash, splash, splash, bit smackdowns and more water, tends to make things move around. Eventually gravity starts to pull it out and flat, just like they spin out big sheets of glass on molten metal, or the guy at the pizza joint makes the pie crusts, then internal pressures move stuff up and out making cracks, lather rinse repeat-not seeing any problems with PT yet.
The continental shelf problem I am not aware of, what's the problem with it?
I actually met and got to speak to the guy behind the "philadelphia experiment" legend. Rather fascinating story as he told it but he was obviously starting to suffer from age related problems. I was at a lecture given by someone else and turned out to be sitting right next to the guy. After the lecture we hung around and talked for maybe 1/2 hour or so and I got the cliff notes version of the whole deal. Now I don't give it a ton of credence or anything, just it was a nice story told by an old geezer.
My opinion, time travel might be possible, but only one way, into the future. But who knows. The physics behind our version of reality is *so* complex and they are still learning so much that I think it could be possible eventually. String theory, multiple universes, always getting tangled up in piles of quantums,and etc.
And scientific attitudes can change radically, I am old enough to remember (as pointed out by some others in a previous slashdot conversation from a few weeks ago) when plate tectonics was roundly "debunked" all the time. Much hooting against it.
Anyway, our society *needs* crackpots, one out of a hundred comes up with something really cool. There's a rather thin line sometimes between genius and bonkersville.
I think the biodiesel guys use both a cooker and press with some solvents. I know I'd have to buy another pressure cooker though, NO WAY would ladyZ let me use her expensive cooker for pond scum algae...heh
...glad you saw it or I would have chimed in. The reason for terminator gene seeds is to establish food monopolies/cartels eventually, seeds are the first step and they really want to get this going in the developing world, lock in millions or billions *forever*. They are well on the way there already, this is obvious, along with trying to patent every possible conceivable living thing (and people think software patents are a bad idea), along with the ongoing scam and ripoff of privatization of drinking water supplies for the masses. Control the food and water and that's a *lot* of economic and political power. Add in control of energy, and you got most of the bases covered and can dictate directly or sub rosa from a few steps away from the public facing political puppets how you want society to act.
Remember, this is the same company that tried to corner old traditional Indian wheat with a "patent", never mind THOUSANDS of years of "prior art", and almost got away with it-this is how they think and act, these are their "corporate values". They are the MS, Enron and Haliburton of "food". If they are "for" something, you can bet the farm it isn't good for you, and only goes to insure vendor lockin and maximum profits. I farm and won't give them turkeys a single penny for anything.
Now, I think there's a place for some extremely regulated genetic engineering and I think it can be of some good benefit long term-but not that company, not what they do and with their track record, nope, as far as I am concerned they are just *creepy* weird. I mean bad news weird. Can't put it any better than that.
Do the net install. One small image to boot from, then you point that at another small image, then pick out what you want and it only does that then. That's about as small as it gets for now, AFAIK.. I did that for FC6,relatively painless. Just follow the instructions at the download-get it page. Or just order the disks from one of the online vendors. Looking, they have some single disk "live cd" images as well.
thanks for the replies, and yes, we'll see what we can do. We have a lot of ponds here, most (well, half are clean, half are scummed out) are already saturated with algae and duckweed. I wonder what wild harvested pond scum would yield. I am interested in simple and works as opposed to extremely complex for higher yields. Ethanol is fairly simple, as is methane (built a digester before, it worked great, just test samples though, small scale from a 55 gallon drum). A continuous batch system would be ideal though. My resources are: one (1) large farm full of odd used equipment, stacks of it. A lot of used pvc feeder tubes and watering tubes for poultry. Odd tanks and containers of various sizes from small to whopper. About a normal small hardware store of tools. 15 minutes here and there "spare time". That's probably the worst part of the whole deal right now, this spare time stuff. But it sure is interesting. I already run a little solar PV, that was one of my projects, build some sort of electric farm buggy I can recharge with the panels, just for fun. Haven't found a good enough(cheap/used) DC motor yet though and don't want to go AC because can't afford a big inverter right now. although AC motors we got a plenty.
I thought so too and wanted to start with some home production experiments. I made some ethanol a long time ago (I am an alternate energy geek) and ran two motorcycles and a chainsaw on the stuff, just test runs, but I actually have a need for a lot of diesel, living and working on a farm now. We go through a *lot* of diesel. We also have a big greenhouse, I was thinking of doing the test vats in one end of that thing. Need to do some more research though on the subject, then find a few of those 25-30 hour days....
Slashdot Mirror
they use concentrators and trackers, and can pipe natural sunlight via fiber optics around to anyplace inside a building. Here is a DOE link on the tech albeit used in conjunction with regular lighting Hybrid solar lighting
The shiny tube guys are in use also, and are cheaper, but require a large diameter pipe to function well.
...mentioned the huge project to reduce demand, which I am convinced can be done to a huge degree with the concept of "superinsulation", applied as new building codes and as requirements for mortgage transfers. Sweeten the deal with 100% tax credits.
I've worked on a few such places, and the diff is *astounding*, beyond astounding. Talk a maine winter without needing supplemental heat all that much (call it around 10% of the previous load roughly), or a 90+ F day in missouri and a house staying cool with the AC not coming on for days. It is *that* good. I am dumbfounded this is not a major part of the national energy strategy-but I understand why, it isn't "sexy", there aren't gobs of money to be made with flash bang gee whizz new tech and R&D, just boring old more insulation, better windows and doors, intelligent building placement, etc.
The press and legislative interest and venture capitalist interest is on new power sources, I say work on dropping demand-just like the chip manufacturers have discovered. the same amount of watts can get you a lot more computing than yesteryear, by more intelligent construction. Same with buildings. Heating and cooling and lighting are the big three, and rather simple solutions exist for them.
I think we could within 10 years probably drop our collective energy demand to at least just a third of what we use now, using off the shelf normal tech pushed along with a little governmental mandating and economic incentive. I don't like taxes, but *credits*-the anti tax-always seem to work well. People dig getting to keep their loot, for any reason.. Taxes are punitive, credits are rewarding. Ideally of course neither should be needed, but we live in the real world and such political tools exist, so I say use them.
yours is called the silver bullet solution, and I agree, there isn't any single alternative energy tech that can "replace" what we have now. It doesn't exist and won't for the foreseable future.
Here's the deal-we don't need to replace, we augment, and keep augmenting, and combined with a huge retrofitting insulation project-government pushed would be idea, total tax credits for it would work,a manhattan project level endeavor, we start to both add to production, and also start to drop demand. For the production, we use "all of the above", individual solar, small building solar, big windchargers, individual windchargers, tidal generators, low head hydro, geothermal and biofuels and etc.. It is the *combination* of all those factors that make for a new energy paradigm. We are trying to eliminate the continual need for more coal plants and for burning pure petroleum products, and whether it is 300 years or 10,000, nukes are inherently overly complex (nukes make heat-we are facing global warming-heat we got by the solar metric ton) and very dangerous, requiring armed guards in *numbers* 24/7/365/x years or decades or centuries or millenia. And they are nasty targets for attacks anyway, using sophisticated weapons. Hit some wind tower, it crashes. Hit a big solar array, oh well, smashed glass. Hit a nuke plant with something "good enough", which judging by reports out of Iraa doesn't seem all that hard to pull off--world of hurt to a lot of folks downwind, for a long time. They are *dangerous*. Yes, they can make a huge amount of cocntrated heat which can then be spun off to electricity-still too dangerous. Keep building more coal plants-still too dirty, too radioactive. Keep burning pure petroleum-geopolitically dangerous and soon to be EGADS expensive. We are one planetary wildcard event away from 100-200 buck a barrel or even more with oil. And it could very well happen this summer. Geopolitical strike over nuclear power leading to a huge impact with petroleum power.
It's just lame when we have alternatives. I work outside all the time, bright sunlight and heat we got a-plenty! It won't do all of it, but it sure as heck could do a big chunk of it!
We have to do this energy transformation in incremental stages. We freeze what we have with the old model dirty and concentrated cash models, and give priority to total diversification for the next century into the identified alternatives we have for deployment, and keep working on more, like with hydrogen from algae or something. We already have the centralized power and concentrated profit grid system, so we start to add "backups" until such a time as the roles are reversed, promoting better tech as it becomes available (actually, this is what is happening now, despite the major industries reluctance for decades, they are being bypassed from sheer economics and the reality of pollution and global climate change awareness). My pet "way" is what is happening, getting rid of the all our eggs in one basket model. Moreso in some european nations and the developing world than in the US, but globally-this is what is happening, the 'whatever works the best in your neighborhood" model. Same with communications, a lot of places are skipping hard wiring and going straight to almost all wireless for telco. Because it's cheaper/better/faster than the old way.
And just from a security standpoint, our centralized distribution model is already highly vulnerable to both natural disasters and physical attack, and just slap overloading. We are only one major heatwave and tech accident away from another regional blackout.
Adding millions of points of production instead of just another hundred, insures a single point of failure will not completely wipeout some huge area for power. It also lets people become owners instead of renters, the "middle class" dream. own your home, own your ride-now own your power! Renting sucks except for very short term or infrequently needed things. Anything important or that you need forev
There is one reason why this ludicrous and destructive charade continues, and that is from a serious flaw in the Constitution. The executive branch controls 99%+ of the "no questions asked" order followers who carry guns.
And that's it. Supposed to be some vague oath for constitution and then commander in chief. That's the theory. In practice, it is completely loyal to commander in chief. Full stop.
The legislative branch has nothing. Zero. Toothless. Even when they allegedly "pass" this or that legislation, it invariably gets "decided" to be something else, by "signing statements", and the orders from the deciders keep being followed. Combine that with that little cute warning to Congress and the mass media with that *mysteriously unsolved* anthrax attack, which let them know in no uncertain terms who was calling the shots now, and you get what you see.
This has been a coup d'état, with hacked elections and some really dodgy and quite *odd* "terror" attacks, and until that is recognized universally and identified as such, by the population en masse and especially by the toady media and by folks inside the government "system", nothing much will change, it will just keep getting worse.
Above is my opinion. I do not like having that opinion, it just sucks.
This is my anecdotal. Going by what I was taught in gradeschool, we are already way past the point where this can be called a police state. That it is not as bad for people right now as worse police states like north korea or wherever is a moot point. The important thing is, it crossed the threshold and is continuing relentlessly in that direction. It's been slow speed but really increased the past few years. I think they really saw they could pull it off cleanly if they took their time and did it piecemeal, instead of an all at once overnight deal like most coups. I also think it has been going on in a loose form since at least when they offed JFK and got away with it. Eisenhower warned the nation. I don't think he was joking.
That is certainly interesting technology, but I am not so sure our materials science is up to the task of keeping all that stuff where it needs to stay to keep on working and remaining safe. In fact, I'd bet against it. Just normal hydraulic fluid at realtively low pressure wipes out steel pipes, see it all the time. Liquid molten metals and neutrons flinging around and stuff...naw, I'm a skeptic it would stay together 300 years. The design is interesting, I just don't think they could build one that would last.
And a second point, and a very important one for me anyway, is I think the centralized power monopolists have had a real good run for over a hundred years now, but it is time to DE-centralize both energy production and where all that cash goes and to help knock back down their political power over the nation. They've made several mountains of loot and have had tremendous political power..but time for a change, a big change. I am not really digging the old central power guys..just a scosh..well, call a spade a spade, greedy is the term. I remember way back in the 70s helping a friend setup what was the first small windcharger in this area. The local power company had a freaking snitfit and tried to block it. They have just been jerks for years over it, because it threatens their business model. That part is obvious anyway.
Joe homeowner can actually purchase and deploy a technologically advanced "fusion reactor" in the form of a solar array, right now and today, and after a few years-that varies-but some amount of years much less than the life expectancy of the system- he owns it and it switches from a debit in the monthly bills to an actual profit. This falls into the "cool beans!" category by any measure. This *never, ever* happens with centralized power and the rent your watts forever model we have now, and certainly not with the current business model of you have not a clue what you'll be paying 5,10,15,20,30 years from now from the central power guys, no matter how they generate that power.
So from the viewpoint of long term safety, convenience, political and economic restructuring and cost, national security and local/regional security, I think nukes lose and solar wins right now.
I've lived extensively with solar, it actually "just works" pretty well, even right through when the centralized grid goes down, and all things considered, if you are really planning to live in your home rather than just look at it as some couple year house flipping investment, it makes economic sense today, let alone in the future when we might have some very sudden and severe price increases for centrally delivered electricity. Combine some solar with some small scale geothermal and a lot better insulation, and it really isn't that hard to have an energy neutral home now. It isn't common yet, but certainly easier to pull off than a lot of these other ideas, because all the tech exists right now, it can all be purchased with a few mouse clicks and a few phone calls really. And with certain lenders now quite willing to roll in the cost of conversion to these techniques, the actual upfront costs and monthly costs are quite competitive with just renting your power.
Plus, it's a whole house UPS system, another really good feature for nerds with a lot of expensive equipment at home, cleaner power than the grid and you have the ability to store if you go battery bank (which I think you should with solar).
Ya, I know, wait 5 years it will be better/cheaper. Meh, same as any other tech, comes a time you either want in or not, same with computers. Remember what you paid for computers years ago? I sure do.. It still was cool though,. and certainly helped the industry along.
Heck, I still have a NIB 4 gig scsi external drive with the sticker on the box, $9,999. Now I didn't pay that, bought a load of assorted "compute" for cheap once, but certainly they sold some of them at that price. 4 gigs! That probably ran some advanced servers someplace. Still
...whatever the particular media company that is offering the swap has on the shelf I guess. If they have porn, they could offer that. Like..hmm...retired geezers doing the transcribing..what might they want.. hmm ... MATLOCK AND GOLDEN GIRLS PORN!!1
heh heh heh
As for records archiving, as long as the net stays up we have a global backup system, because we can keep leapfrogging technologies, there is no start and stop point where we change everything all at once. Static archiving gets into troubles because of entropy, stuff just starts falling apart. If the whole net ever goes down hard globally for some years, we would lose a lot of data. Current paper isn't that good, photos fade fast on most media, plastic disk based isn't that good, harddrives aren't that good, etc. Each has a few good points and some bad points, but none of them are really designed for centuries or millenia AFAIK. A few years or dozens of years anecdotal from someone with their pet favorite media does not equal centuries or millenia. It's a guess and a crapshoot really we just don't know. We've already lost just a ton of old filmed media, TV shows and movies, from the last century, film just didn't cut it long haul, requires a lot of expensive care, and we need something that doesn't require expensive and elaborate care, and digital format requires the media to be matched to the hardware it was designed for, that has to be archived as well, and kept in perfect operating conditions.
We are a society that lost our freaking moon tapes! And even before that it had gotten to the point only a few existing pieces of hardware could even access the stuff, and that was some pretty important records. And that is *short term* historically speaking. Real short term.
We have to keep human nature involved in this discussion as well as just the nuts and bolts of archiving. Stuff gets lost or stolen and artificially lost or just gets wet or forgotten about and starts to just rot away. We have right now a fastfood society, nothing is considered all that important. We pay lip service to archiving, sure, I'll admit that, but really, it's a symptom of our short term profits business world and throw away society.
Then you have to consider, exactly what is really worth saving for that long anyway? All of it, all of everything we do, all the records? It's gonna get pretty expensive eventually if we keep trying to do that.
I guy I know collected winged mopars and parts and just sat on them for years, old superbirds and daytonas. He lived in an apartment over a big garage and that garage and yard and driveway were overflowing eventually. He got em back when they were still more or less affordable to normal enthusiasts. When he got married several years ago now he sold *one* of them and paid cash for a decent house in the Atlanta suburbs (larryville actually). There's stock investing, then *stock* investing. Plus, he got to drive cool cars all the time.
Offer x large numbers of hours of decent content mailed back on disk for every hour of volunteer transcribing? There might be a ton of semi or full retired folks might want to get into that, if the software deal was setup for them and it was easy to use and understand.
...I mean....have all of them connected all the time, even during such a critical upgrade?? I think that might be covered under rookie admin 101 "lame things to never do". And that is just for your home network, let alone being up in freaking space where it is sorta dangerous and you might need to keep your wits about you. Do you really think all of those folks, all of them, just forgot to do that or didn't think it was important? What's the point of having a spare if you subject all of them to the same stresses all the time? It's not like strange errors tied to hardware issues are unknown in the computer world, along with the "stuff happens" universal constant.
If so, I say shut the whole project down, too many tards on board and at ground control. And that's the part I have a hard time believing, just too many engineers and scary smart guys involved with this thing, I just can't believe that all of them wouldn't think to at least temporarily shut down one of the backup boxes during a hot hookup. I mean, I have a couple spare machines kicking around the room here, and no way do I ever have all of them plugged in at the same time, I've lost machines before, but I know a full airgap means if my main machine fails, I *really do* have such a thing as a backup machine, and yep, I lost a machine that was on a surge protector before as well, direct lightning hit to the wire coming in = crispy mobo. And dumbass me never bothered to send in the warranty jazz for the surge so I had to eat it. Learned my lesson on that one..but I still had my older spare machine to get back online with too, because it wasn't plugged in and running at the time, it was airgapped.
We had an el nino last year which tends to reduce the number and severity of hurricanes.
Or so this "they" guy says...read it on the intartubes
The deal with hurricanes isn't so much they are stronger or more of them as hundreds or thousands of years ago as much as we have much better news reporting and data keeping now and even moreso, hoo-mannz have been on a coastal area expensive building spree for the past few decades in the US, so when hurricanes *do* strike, it causes a lot more damage. Example, a little cottage I used to live it on the beach in florida, back when that was still possible at ridiculous cheap joe construction worker wage levels is now a big high rise. Where a few people used to live (and I went through a hurricane there actually) and a structure worth x-dollars might have been damaged, (it wasn't, 'cane that didn't hit directly but was sure *exciting* for yours truly)now a lot more people and x times 500 (whatever, big number) dollars worth of stuff is there that could be damaged. I don't know a technical term for it, but the event impact potential threshold is now way higher than it used to be, given the same exact size hurricane.
I ain't buying this. Supposedly three redundant systems, a previous record of over voltage, and NONE of the three systems was protected with an airgap, ie, pull the plug until the new power situation was tested?
Me smell a ratski here. There is something they still aren't telling us, or there's some dumb clucks running things.
...have no major differences. In the US we have two wings of the Globalist party. It is a 1 party system. Full & Stop. The media pushes those candidates which support that notion, because at the top levels, the "media" is owned by a handful of globalist billionaires, and they give the orders.. If a candidate is pro wall street pirates, open unregulated US borders, offshoring/job jacking, interventionism in the middle east, etc-that's who "wins" for the most part the media popularity contests. The two wings of the Globalist party differ only in which of your pockets they want to pick first-your left or right pocket- and which of your personal freedoms -our supposed inalienable bill of rights- is higher on their list to restrict/eliminate/regulate/tax. "Left wing and right wing" is an obvious ruse to keep the grassroots political activist rabble amused and thinking their input will matter a whole lot. It matters *some* obviously, but not near as much as what gets decided at WTO, CFR, Bohemian Grove, Bilderberger, etc type meetings. That is where official policy is formed and decided on, then they have to sell it to the populace, and media manipulation is a heavily used tool for that purpose.
Historically the most obvious one in the media was the Hearst empire.
If you want some current examples of how this works, look at illegal immigration, a clear cut majority of both "left wing" and "right wing" people (by simply all polls I have seen everyplace) are opposed to amnesty and want the illegals slowed down to a stop and have the "normal" legal, lawful, safer and much more sane immigration continue, yet, the globaist party and their "front runners" keep trying to push amnesty under some other name through the congress. The phones ring off the hook at every congressmans office against it, but they'll keep trying until they get that passed. Look at the war, it hasn't stopped yet, despite a huge overwhelming opposition to it now, we are building permanent bases there, and the largest embassy in the world. Look at energy, the big oil companies keep making record profits, and the amount put towards alternative energy is a pittance compared to that. Mr. Environment, the so called "left" wing gore, a globaist multimillionaire, is just *now* putting solar panels at his house after suffering embarrassing press-yet it wasn't there until some blogs found out about his hypocritical stance. I mean, selling carbon credits from one of your companies to another is not an environmental issue, it's a typical globalist rich guy dodge worth of an enron. The R party grassroots is way against illegal immigration, but their so called "leaders" who are mainstream globalists are all in favor of the scamnesty bill to legalize them. The blue collar dems at the grassroots levels are all against offshoring and job-jacking, yet their leaders are always letting it just keep getting worse and worse and worse with no end in sight.
Any candidate labeled D or R who is against that stuff is invariably labled a "fringe" candidate, by every media empire out there, every newspaper, every major broadcaster does it, because those notions go against the high level globalist party long term goals. Here's another, outside of a few internet sites, where is the main stream media coverage of the north american union that is being forced on us by fiat. It ain't there, zip coverage for the most part and it has *profound*, I mean, large, big, gigantanormous implications for everyone in the US, Canada and Mexico. zip coverage for the most part. This is not a coincidence.
And so on, I could rant awhile on this subject, but following politics and the news closely for around half a century now it is pretty easy for me to see how it has gradually gotten both worse and more sophisticated in how they run this high level propaganda, and I haven't even touched on official governmental employees running the news with fake bloggers, forum posters, news "leaks" (WMD IN IRAQ! OMG! IT'S REAL!). Some of that stuff they have gotten bust
I once did a stretch living as a wild woods hippie for four and a half years, only electronic gadgets I had were a flashlight and a transistor radio. Eventually I almost completely stopped using the flashlight and went to home made candles.
I tell you what civilization has that is way more important and you'll miss the most if modern technology is just absent-clean running water coming out the tap. I think once we achieved that we actually hit "modern" life, some kind of big dividing line. It is something that is still pretty cheap for most of us, and what we take for granted a lot, but lose it, and you'll miss it quickly. In fact, you can see what the top items are when big natural disasters hit and people line up for some care packages stuff. They want water/ice first every time usually.
The mass media controllers hand pick the candidates *they* want you to focus on,and yes I'll even label it a conspiracy and interference of a sort in the political process. Merely by increasing news coverage and declaring such and such candidate a "front runner" it becomes their self fulfilling prophecy. Words have meaning and advertising/brainwashing works to a great extent, notice how they describe candidates other than their version of the top runners.
We always have a lot of candidates, just a very few get the bulk of the press.
The current Republican party disconnect with Ron Paul is a clear example, he has a lot of grassroots support, yet very little national coverage and what he does get is artfully spun negative propaganda, whereas their globalist darlings like giuliani and now fred thompson get the bulk of the positive press. This is on purpose and this controlling the voters mindset is a long running "feature" of having our media controlled by a few people at the top. Their hand picked examples get the bulk of the news, so they turn around and can say "candidates x and y are the front runners, look how much news and interest there is!" Well, duh... These are artificially manufactured "top runner" candidates.
Want to change things, use the net and embarrass the mass media on their own news blogs and follow through no matter what once you actually get to the voting stage. Dump that lesser of the top two evils "vendor lockin" they always push, it's just plain harmful and results in the political situation you see today and what you have seen over the past generations.
Well,that's a drag about the blob. Still though, it is possible albeit complicated. I played with their little interactive connect the dots demo and can see how hard it must be to pull off.
AFAIK, all the olpc stuff is open source or open specced and documented. You can probably find exactly how their mutating mesh works and recreate the hardware and software elsewhere.
Really, the peoples net is a good idea, but it won't fly in any place other than pretty urban settings with the "legal" radio/wireless gear we are so graciously "permitted" by the state. It *could* work there though, especially if a lot of the nodes had decent storage and access to a ton of content.
It's a good idea, just the tech hurdles and economic hurdles are awesome, let alone the political ones, as in, the government and big biz will not like this idea *at all*. But..it is something to contemplate as the internet-as-we-know-it-today gets turned into a series of pay per view walled gardens. . The OLPC machine has built in automagical mesh networking, I'd say look there for tech clues to begin your peoples' net. FON is somewhat what you are looking for that is out there now.
Probably some huge chunk of space stuff smacked into the earth and globbed a large portion out to the other side. Gondawanaland or whatever it was called. I really don't know, but bet if you made a ball of play doh and got some rocks you could experiment further, see what happens. Most likely you would need lighter fluid and goggles, just for effect....hmm, apply for useless government grant..hmmmm
OK, that's my wild assed scientific appearing guess, what's yours why that was so?
I don't see the problem with plate tectonics and the land mass on one side and oceans on the other, earlier earth was still going through a big wobble, plus internal magnetic shifts causing even bigger wobbles, it has lessened somewhat in the past few billion years from inertia. We know the outside of the planet is cooler, so it hardens more. Hard stuff on hot spinning stuff might tend to slide around a little. Plus way back then we were still accumulating masses of water from comet hits, splash, splash, splash, bit smackdowns and more water, tends to make things move around. Eventually gravity starts to pull it out and flat, just like they spin out big sheets of glass on molten metal, or the guy at the pizza joint makes the pie crusts, then internal pressures move stuff up and out making cracks, lather rinse repeat-not seeing any problems with PT yet.
The continental shelf problem I am not aware of, what's the problem with it?
I actually met and got to speak to the guy behind the "philadelphia experiment" legend. Rather fascinating story as he told it but he was obviously starting to suffer from age related problems. I was at a lecture given by someone else and turned out to be sitting right next to the guy. After the lecture we hung around and talked for maybe 1/2 hour or so and I got the cliff notes version of the whole deal. Now I don't give it a ton of credence or anything, just it was a nice story told by an old geezer.
My opinion, time travel might be possible, but only one way, into the future. But who knows. The physics behind our version of reality is *so* complex and they are still learning so much that I think it could be possible eventually. String theory, multiple universes, always getting tangled up in piles of quantums,and etc.
And scientific attitudes can change radically, I am old enough to remember (as pointed out by some others in a previous slashdot conversation from a few weeks ago) when plate tectonics was roundly "debunked" all the time. Much hooting against it.
Anyway, our society *needs* crackpots, one out of a hundred comes up with something really cool. There's a rather thin line sometimes between genius and bonkersville.
I think the biodiesel guys use both a cooker and press with some solvents. I know I'd have to buy another pressure cooker though, NO WAY would ladyZ let me use her expensive cooker for pond scum algae...heh
...glad you saw it or I would have chimed in. The reason for terminator gene seeds is to establish food monopolies/cartels eventually, seeds are the first step and they really want to get this going in the developing world, lock in millions or billions *forever*. They are well on the way there already, this is obvious, along with trying to patent every possible conceivable living thing (and people think software patents are a bad idea), along with the ongoing scam and ripoff of privatization of drinking water supplies for the masses. Control the food and water and that's a *lot* of economic and political power. Add in control of energy, and you got most of the bases covered and can dictate directly or sub rosa from a few steps away from the public facing political puppets how you want society to act.
Remember, this is the same company that tried to corner old traditional Indian wheat with a "patent", never mind THOUSANDS of years of "prior art", and almost got away with it-this is how they think and act, these are their "corporate values". They are the MS, Enron and Haliburton of "food". If they are "for" something, you can bet the farm it isn't good for you, and only goes to insure vendor lockin and maximum profits. I farm and won't give them turkeys a single penny for anything.
Now, I think there's a place for some extremely regulated genetic engineering and I think it can be of some good benefit long term-but not that company, not what they do and with their track record, nope, as far as I am concerned they are just *creepy* weird. I mean bad news weird. Can't put it any better than that.
Do the net install. One small image to boot from, then you point that at another small image, then pick out what you want and it only does that then. That's about as small as it gets for now, AFAIK.. I did that for FC6,relatively painless. Just follow the instructions at the download-get it page. Or just order the disks from one of the online vendors. Looking, they have some single disk "live cd" images as well.
a d?action=fullsearch&value=linkto%3A%22Distribution /Download%22&context=180
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Downlo
thanks for the replies, and yes, we'll see what we can do. We have a lot of ponds here, most (well, half are clean, half are scummed out) are already saturated with algae and duckweed. I wonder what wild harvested pond scum would yield. I am interested in simple and works as opposed to extremely complex for higher yields. Ethanol is fairly simple, as is methane (built a digester before, it worked great, just test samples though, small scale from a 55 gallon drum). A continuous batch system would be ideal though. My resources are: one (1) large farm full of odd used equipment, stacks of it. A lot of used pvc feeder tubes and watering tubes for poultry. Odd tanks and containers of various sizes from small to whopper. About a normal small hardware store of tools. 15 minutes here and there "spare time". That's probably the worst part of the whole deal right now, this spare time stuff. But it sure is interesting. I already run a little solar PV, that was one of my projects, build some sort of electric farm buggy I can recharge with the panels, just for fun. Haven't found a good enough(cheap/used) DC motor yet though and don't want to go AC because can't afford a big inverter right now. although AC motors we got a plenty.
anyway,, ya, we'll work something out here.
I thought so too and wanted to start with some home production experiments. I made some ethanol a long time ago (I am an alternate energy geek) and ran two motorcycles and a chainsaw on the stuff, just test runs, but I actually have a need for a lot of diesel, living and working on a farm now. We go through a *lot* of diesel. We also have a big greenhouse, I was thinking of doing the test vats in one end of that thing. Need to do some more research though on the subject, then find a few of those 25-30 hour days....