Come to think of in, in terms of real life, why the hell did we elect a distant relative of Adolf Hitler to be the 41st and 43rd Presidents of the United States?
For the same reason the Brits had a part american indian as their prime minister during WWII. A lot of people were convinced he was a good choice for the job.
This is the United States. No nobles here. Your ancestors' political connections, wealth, and historic behavior don't matter when it comes to what offices YOU get to hold. (Or at least that's the official ideal.)
In particular: The Constitution specifically forbids "Corruption of Blood": Punishment for crimes - even making war on the US and massive genocide - stops with the person who committed those acts. It does NOT get applied to the rest of the family and descendants yet unborn.
the [side away from the earth] is commonly (much to the dismay of pedantic astronomers) call the "dark side",
Right.... despite the fact that it gets just as much light
Well, not quite:
The near side of the Moon always has the Earth above the horizon, and the Earth reflects a lot more sunligt to the moon than the moon does to the earth. (Enough to make the new moon weakly visible just by the doubly-reflected light.) So while days are the same on either side, nights on the "dark side" are only starlit, while those on the "light side" are brightly earthlit for much of their duration - like moonlit, but much more so.
Seriously. Every single decent sci-fi film/show/short that I've ever seen apart from 2001 has ignored the sound propagation issue.
I think that started with Star Trek. They tried doing the credit fly-by with no sound and it felt empty and looked like animated toys. So they added sound and it was more gut-satisfying (despite the inaccuracy).
(This led to the Trekkie joke: "Why does the Enterprise go 'whoosh' when it flies by in vacuum?" "Because somebody left the vacuum cleaner running."
Of course this, and other dramatic elements, led to endless opportunities for reverse-engineering an explanation of why something worked as depicted.
For starters, explosions really WOULD go "bang" in space - because of the gas released. Physics would be different: Speed of the gas expansion in space (mainly a function of its original temperature and pressure divided by molecular weight) rather than speed of sound in a gas (strictly proportional to temperature divided by molecular weight). There'd be prompt echoes from the gas bouncing off debris but no long-term rumble from terrain reflections. However the wavefront would defocus rapidly due to the expansion of the gas, rather than remaining coherent as it does when propagating in a medium. Etc.
Why does a near-miss with a photon torpedo go "bang" and throw people around? I suggest this: Gravity on the ship is generated. It's also multi-directional and under continuous control, to serve as compensation for the impulse engines and keep the crew from being smeared across the rear bulkhead. Photon torpedoes create enough of an electromagnetic pulse to foul the acceleration compensation, causing the gravity to vibrate the walls and maybe throw the crew around in a close one. Star fleet engineers designed enough shielding to keep this effect from damaging the ship and crew when the torpedo alone wasn't close enough to make it a moot point, but stopped there.
So "whoosh" on flyby: Reaction motor exhausts, like explosions, would produce transient gas envelopes that would rattle hulls and produce sound by vibrating the hull (though only once you hit their "wake"). But that's not a typical Star Trek flyby. Two suggestions for that:
1) Warp engines create an electromagnetic or gravitational "wake" that either rattles the hull directly or does the same trick with the artificial gravity as a photon-torpedo near-miss.
2) It's a user-interface feature: Instruments detect whatever signature a passing ship leaves and present it to the crew as a sound. For intuitive ease-of-use it should "sound like it ought to": Bigger ships make a lower pitch, closer passage is louder, fake doppler-shift to indicate relative heading, signals characteristic of the type of ship are encoded as timber, etc. So exactly the same esthetics that drive the dramatic sound-effect also drive the user-interface design, leading to the credit flyby visual and sound matching what would be presented on the bridge of an observing craft.
I wasn't assuming anything, I was TROLLING, maybe you've heard of it?
Of course you were. But it gave me a nice launchpad for MY rant. B-)
Seriously, though. With the largest, fastest growing, most successful (so far), ideological, pro-freedom movement in modern politics trying to kick the bums out using the mechanisms of the REPUBLICAN party, while the Democrats are continuing more of the same old same old, the the knee-jerk "Rs bad, D's good" might need some revision in the next few years. B-)
I wish the Paulies and Minarchists the best of luck kicking those criminals to the curb.
Thanks.
But while you're at it, why don't you join in? The more the merrier. (And the faster and farther we can kick 'em.)
One of the nice things about a pro-freedom agenda is that it doesn't require ideological homogeneity. Sign up for "Don't hit first." and the rest of your idea system can be all over the map. B-)
So what did he actually say? Or are you just ASSUMING he quacks the same duckspeak you believe all Republicans quack?
In case you hadn't noticed, there's a war of dynastic succession going on in the GOP. The Constitutionalists, Libertarian Minarchists, and a plethora of other freedom-loving people (mainly inspired by Ron Paul) are attempting to wrest the party from the death-grip of the neocon faction. It's just getting started, and it's already getting very ugly. (See _The Revolution - a manefesto_ - just out and #1 on Amazon.)
Now I have no idea whether Tony Krvaric himself is a "Ron Paul Republican". But that group is large, largely young, and (so far) mostly internet-connected. And their ideology is a close match to that of many of the denizens of Slashdot.
So don't be surprised to see a LOT of people with reps like Tony's in the Republican party in the near future. Complete with mud-slinging campaigns against them, as the powers-that-be try frantically to keep hold of the political machinery.
The two items - ruling on the motion and imposing sanctions - though fallout from the same act by the plaintiff lawyers, are separate. I'd bet the judge issued the ruling quickly in the interest of justice, to spare the defendant additional delays and lawyer costs. Rule 11 sanctions, if the distinguished jurist decides to impose them, may be along later.
Given that there was a change in one of the counterclaims and an extra pleading by the RIAA, perhaps the judge doesn't think the motion was TOTALLY out-of-line. Or perhaps, now that he's given them some more rope, he's sitting back quietly while the RIAA's lawyers continue to demonstrate a pattern of abuse of process, in case they come up with some clearer examples. Since that's one of the counterclaims, perhaps the judge thinks a better sanction than spanking them early with Rule 11 (and perhaps deter their activities in THIS trial) is to add this (and any future frivolity) to the list of misdeeds when considering the amount to award on that claim.
Wouldn't justice be better served if they have to pay the price of their bullying to the defendant? B-)
Solar panels aren't all that green. They absorb virtually all the solar input that hits them and dump over 80% of it as heat into the air. Not a big deal if they're mounted over something black. But if they're mounted over something light colored they contribute big time to the greenhouse effect - on the albedo-management side of the equation (rather than the trap-the-downconverted-infrared side of "greenhouse gasses").
(On the other hand, the stuff about them not making back the energy needed to build them is a bunch of hooey.)
Wind turbines, on the other hand, turn wind into electricity quite efficiently and have about the same side-effect on the global energy balance as a tree presenting the same cross-section to the wind. And there's a LOT of power in wind (if it's available).
I'd always assumed that it was formed from ions:
- Oxygen atom collects a lose electron or two to form a negatively-charged oxygen ion.
- Oxygen ion collects a lose proton or hydrogen atom to form a hydroxyl ion (or "atom")
- Hydroxyl ion collects a lose proton, or
- Hydroxyl "atom" collects first an electron then a proton.
No surface necessary: The captures can start out very tenuous (say, due to interactions with additional particles or magnetic fields in a gas cloud) and then conserve momentum by radiating photons and recoiling as the captured particles descend through the energy levels toward a neutral molecule.
But I'm not an astrophysicist, so I have no idea how plausible that water-origin story is.
While lithium batteries are very efficient they still lose a small percentage of their power when operating. Electric motors do as well, and their controlling electronics ditto. Designing a cooling system for all of the above was a significant part of designing the car.
Two horsepower is 1491+ watts - about the power of the largest space heater you can run on a 15-amp circuit.
So keeping the batteries warm enough to operate efficiently in cold climates shouldn't be a problem - just restrict the cooling until they're warmed up. And while I don't know how the designers of the Tesla heat it, scavenging this "lost heat" to warm the passenger compartment, just as internal-combustion cars use cooling-system heat for the same purpose, would make sense.
The harder problem would be COOLING the vehicle in hot climates. (But since stealing power to air condition the vehicle tends to cost less in "mileage" than opening windows for ventilation and trashing the air friction, I suspect that the car will be air-conditioned despite the loss of "mileage".)
Where does our electricity for our homes come from? Fossil fuels?
In addition to the points others have made, such as:
- Not all grid power is from fossil fuels.
- Grid fossil fuel plants are more efficient. it should be noted that a car can get a LOT better mileage-equivalent if it doesn't have to burn fuel to carry a heat engine around with it.
Also: Like a hybrid, an electric can recycle a lot of the power that would otherwise be lost to braking or engine-braking - either stop-and-go traffic or downhill driving - rather than burn more fuel to replace it later.
I don't see the point... of a store opening to sell something they have no inventory of, and have no hope of having inventory of for quite some time due to already existing waiting lists.
In addition to providing a site for customers to obtain service...
If they get enough advance orders they can afford to expand production.
Better yet, when was the last time *you* drove 100 miles away from your home?
Last time I went to my vacation/retirement house. It's about 250 miles away from my townhouse. It's also on the other side of the Sierras and about 5,000 feet higher in altitude (with at least one pass over 8,000 feet higher). So the Tesla probably wouldn't get its rated mileage on the way over (though it might do enough better on the way back to make the whole trip).
That's why I've been wanting a plug-in hybrid rather than a pure electric.
I've previously posted the driving cycle such a car would need to serve my needs. It's virtually identical to the cycle that would be needed to handle trips from Silicon Valley to the Tahoe ski areas or to Reno. That would allow it to be a FULL replacement car, rather than the local-only one of two cars, for many of the denizens of the SF Bay Area. (IMHO that's the largest concentration of people with the combination of green consciousness, tech savvy, and disposable income to be early adopters.)
... the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible.
I was under the impression that "the technology" included the source code. And "in the hand" included the ability to make improvements to it and build new things based on it (thus including an appropriate build, execution, and interpretation environment).
If this is not included, it is not "the technology" that has gotten into the children's hands. Instead they hold a product of the technology, while the technology itself remains in the hands of a rich foreign elite.
Just as the price of freedom is letting other people do things you [DON'T] like, the price of free speech is letting other people SAY things you don't like.
I'm not exactly sure how best to implement it; but it seems to me that more of our public social processes need a formal mechanism whereby blatantly factually incorrect statements can be challenged and amended. In situations like courtrooms, political debates, news shows, and whatnot, people can and do just say things that are trivially, demonstrably wrong all the time.
There are already some fine mechanisms in place that have been tested for centuries.
In courts: Cross-examination, witnesses for the other side, contempt-of-court citations, perjury charges (to name just the big four). This is what a court is ABOUT - holding an argument between two opposing sides to get to the truths that have a bearing on the issue in question.
In political debate and public political statements: Rebuttals by opponents, fact-checking and follow-on stories by a free press.
A free press is not intended to promote every press outlet getting all the facts right (even if what is right WASN'T subject to disagreement.) It's about eliminating governmental roadblocks to publication of varying points of view, in the hope that, among these biased outlets, most information and viewpoints of significance will find an outlet somewhere. (Unfortunately the dreadfully-expensive former mainstream media has fallen into a very few hands - and thus shows very few viewpoints and interpretations, and filters out or distorts much of the information of interest. But that's why the internet is replacing it.)
Just as the price of freedom is letting other people do things you like, the price of free speech is letting other people SAY things you don't like. That happens to include spin, euphemisms, and outright lies.
Restricting the debate to some perception of "truth" implies having a group of people who make the call on what is true, with the power to interfere with the publication of information and opinion that does not agree with their call. Oops!
Meanwhile, since people will continue to lie, IMHO it's just as well that they often do so in public, where others can sometimes identify their "errors" and publish them as well. This lets those watching get practice at detecting and rejecting such lies.
A successful truth-squad scheme would be like protecting your kid against contagious diseases - only to have him fall seriously ill when he finally leaves home due to an inadequately trained immune system.
It's true that putting incompetence first produces better rhythm and a very tight resonance with the original.
But the other way around is more insightful into human behavior.
Sufficient incompetence can accidentally mimic malice.
But a large part of malicious scheming is not just to avoid detection until it's too late - but to avoid responsibility when the result of the scheme comes to light. Thus when one is responsible for keeping evidence against oneself, two design goals for a malicious scheme are destroying the evidence beyond recovery and doing so in a way that is a plausible accident.
If the apparent cause of the accident is lack of due diligence when such was required it still doesn't adequately deflect blame. But if the apparent cause is incompetence to perform the requirements, it DOES deflect blame. It's not the actor's fault that he wasn't capable of performing the function. It's not the boss' fault because the actor had adequate credentials. Malice disguised as incompetence is an example of protective mimicry.
This if malice is indistinguishable from incompetence it's sufficiently advanced.
... replacing our entire energy consumption with external sources only increases the energy flux striking the Earth by about 0.01%.
Actually, replacing ground-generated electricity with space solar power REDUCES the heat load.
First: Ground generated electricity is made with big heat engines, limited by the carnot cycle. In addition to the heat released by using the energy, there's the heat released on the cold side of the heat engine. The total is a lot more than you bought and used.
But with space solar power the cold side of the heat engine is in space, radiating toward the sky (with it's black body temperature of 4 degrees absolute). The dumped heat misses the earth. All you heat with is the useful power and a few percent losses. (The sky-to-ground system is estimated to run in the range of 90% efficient and only part of its losses are on the ground.
But far more significant: Fuel-driven ground generators release carbon dioxide, which continuously traps solar power as heat until it's eventually scrubbed from the atmosphere decades or centuries later. That is a big multiple of the useful power actually delivered. No fuel burned on Earth, no CO2 pumping the greenhouse.
The main problem will be keeping us from sliding into an ice age over the next 400 to 1,200 years. (According to one model the current interglacial peaked at about the dawn of agriculture and we've been essentially regulating the earth's temperature as the "furnace" output has been curving down for the last 6,000 years or so, with a slight bump since industrialization. Stop the CO2 and we'd quickly crash back onto the steepening slope of the cooling curve.) But that takes decades to centuries. So we can decide what to do about it in a few generations, when we start to get below the old "regulated" temperature.
One nice thing: If we need to bring in more heat from space we'll have the infrastructure to do it. B-)
Are you serious? You're smarter than a Nasa study?
I don't claim to be (though I did work on NASA projects and have some idea where I stand among the mind power of the rocket science community B-) ).
But I'm not talking from my own work. I'm summarizing what I heard from some of the braniacs who were paying attention to the problem.
Then you can certainly explain how 1300 watts per square meter and putting it...IN FUCKING OUTERSPACE...is better than 1000 watts per m^2 on the ground.
Well for starters:
- No clouds, rain, or snow.
- No atmospheric attenuation.
- No night.
- No seasons. ("It's always noon on midsummer's day.") Those are good for about a factor of seven (depending on the earthbound site you're comparing).
More importantly:
- No gravity (except tides).
- No wind (except solar wind).
- No oxidizing atmosphere.
- No corroding water and waterborne ions. This enormously reduces the structures required.
That would be an enormous reduction in the amount of material needed to make and mount solar panels. Most of their structure is to protect them from the elements and support them against gravity and wind.
But we're not talking photovoltaic solar panels here. We're talking a steam plant, with the steam generated in pipes and mirrors and condensed by pipes with black cooling fins in the mirrors' shade.
With no gravity, wind, and the like, building square miles of parabolic-cylinder solar mirrors is trivial. Making them of aluminized mylar "spaceblanket" material supported by glued-together toothpicks and cobwebs would be a massive overdesign. Virtually all of your mass is the boiler and condenser pipes and the wisp of structure that keeps them straight and properly arranged and oriented as they heat and cool unevenly.
Now it might prove even better to build some film solar panels - especially if you're doing it in space by vacuum deposition of films on some flimsy substrate with an unlimited supply of hard vacuum for free. But sending up bundles of pipe, rolls of wispy plastic, and a flimsy support structure to expand in space. wrap with the mirror film, and aluminize once it's in place is a well understood and (as space stuff goes) inexpensive process.
The power plant is a moderately small lump of machinery suitable for assembling in orbit and charging with a small amount of water.
The transmitter array gets deployed much like the mirrors - but more simply. (It doesn't have to be accurately, or even consistently, spaced. The transmitters are synchronized and the array is focussed by a pilot beam from the ground site, computing the complex-conjugate of the incoming carrier's waveform to focus the beam on the antenna surrounding the pilot transmitter. Lose the pilot and they go incoherent - spreading the energy about equally through the surrounding sky, of which the entire facing side of Earth is a small fraction. (And you can modulate the pilot with an encrypted spectrum-spreader so nobody can steal the power or redirect it to another target.)
Back in the 1960's. Diode grid to rectify the beamed power. Bad idea.
Actually it was a very GOOD idea. But NASA blew it.
The plan was to site solar power satellites in geosync orbit and bring the power back via microwaves.
Unlike microwave ovens (which are tuned to a frequency that is strongly absorbed by water), these would be tuned to a frequency where water - clouds, rain, birds, cows, people - is essentially transparent. This is good both for getting the power through the atmosphere and avoiding rains of roast duck.
I could go into detail on why there's no problem from the millimeter waves, but that would take time. Short form: System failures defocus the beam so much it becomes just radio interference in directional antennas pointed at the satellites. Even when fully focussed it's not an issue for tissue: You can grow crops and graze cattle under the (rather spindly) rectennas, so they don't even use up the chunk of land they're on.
Benefits:
- Enough power to completely replace fossil fuel AND nuclear plants and absorb forseeable energy use expansion for decades.
- 'Way cheaper, too. (Even at '60s fuel prices.)
- Essentially no pollution at ground level.
- Bootstraps a space program that can then move other manufacturing processes, and THEIR pollution, off the planet as well.
NASA blew it by doing a study that purported to show it would be too expensive. But they did that by splitting the design teams for the rockets and the power plant. The power plant designers made a turbine very large to get a couple extra percent of efficiency. Then the rocket designers came up with a heavy lifter sized to take the biggest piece. Result: Enormous rockets with few trips to ammortize the design/construction costs, rather than moderate sized ones with many trips. Cost skyrockets versus a properly integrated design with a small turbine and a fleet of smaller lifters.
Slashdot Mirror
Come to think of in, in terms of real life, why the hell did we elect a distant relative of Adolf Hitler to be the 41st and 43rd Presidents of the United States?
For the same reason the Brits had a part american indian as their prime minister during WWII. A lot of people were convinced he was a good choice for the job.
This is the United States. No nobles here. Your ancestors' political connections, wealth, and historic behavior don't matter when it comes to what offices YOU get to hold. (Or at least that's the official ideal.)
In particular: The Constitution specifically forbids "Corruption of Blood": Punishment for crimes - even making war on the US and massive genocide - stops with the person who committed those acts. It does NOT get applied to the rest of the family and descendants yet unborn.
After growing up on the Moon ... I doubt the master race could take on an 8 year old with a Nerf Bat.
I expect that, if they planned on invading, they'd spend a LOT of time working out in centrifuges.
They might deliberately train at more than one G and end up stronger.
the [side away from the earth] is commonly (much to the dismay of pedantic astronomers) call the "dark side",
... despite the fact that it gets just as much light
Right.
Well, not quite:
The near side of the Moon always has the Earth above the horizon, and the Earth reflects a lot more sunligt to the moon than the moon does to the earth. (Enough to make the new moon weakly visible just by the doubly-reflected light.) So while days are the same on either side, nights on the "dark side" are only starlit, while those on the "light side" are brightly earthlit for much of their duration - like moonlit, but much more so.
Seriously. Every single decent sci-fi film/show/short that I've ever seen apart from 2001 has ignored the sound propagation issue.
I think that started with Star Trek. They tried doing the credit fly-by with no sound and it felt empty and looked like animated toys. So they added sound and it was more gut-satisfying (despite the inaccuracy).
(This led to the Trekkie joke: "Why does the Enterprise go 'whoosh' when it flies by in vacuum?" "Because somebody left the vacuum cleaner running."
Of course this, and other dramatic elements, led to endless opportunities for reverse-engineering an explanation of why something worked as depicted.
For starters, explosions really WOULD go "bang" in space - because of the gas released. Physics would be different: Speed of the gas expansion in space (mainly a function of its original temperature and pressure divided by molecular weight) rather than speed of sound in a gas (strictly proportional to temperature divided by molecular weight). There'd be prompt echoes from the gas bouncing off debris but no long-term rumble from terrain reflections. However the wavefront would defocus rapidly due to the expansion of the gas, rather than remaining coherent as it does when propagating in a medium. Etc.
Why does a near-miss with a photon torpedo go "bang" and throw people around? I suggest this: Gravity on the ship is generated. It's also multi-directional and under continuous control, to serve as compensation for the impulse engines and keep the crew from being smeared across the rear bulkhead. Photon torpedoes create enough of an electromagnetic pulse to foul the acceleration compensation, causing the gravity to vibrate the walls and maybe throw the crew around in a close one. Star fleet engineers designed enough shielding to keep this effect from damaging the ship and crew when the torpedo alone wasn't close enough to make it a moot point, but stopped there.
So "whoosh" on flyby: Reaction motor exhausts, like explosions, would produce transient gas envelopes that would rattle hulls and produce sound by vibrating the hull (though only once you hit their "wake"). But that's not a typical Star Trek flyby. Two suggestions for that:
1) Warp engines create an electromagnetic or gravitational "wake" that either rattles the hull directly or does the same trick with the artificial gravity as a photon-torpedo near-miss.
2) It's a user-interface feature: Instruments detect whatever signature a passing ship leaves and present it to the crew as a sound. For intuitive ease-of-use it should "sound like it ought to": Bigger ships make a lower pitch, closer passage is louder, fake doppler-shift to indicate relative heading, signals characteristic of the type of ship are encoded as timber, etc. So exactly the same esthetics that drive the dramatic sound-effect also drive the user-interface design, leading to the credit flyby visual and sound matching what would be presented on the bridge of an observing craft.
I wasn't assuming anything, I was TROLLING, maybe you've heard of it?
Of course you were. But it gave me a nice launchpad for MY rant. B-)
Seriously, though. With the largest, fastest growing, most successful (so far), ideological, pro-freedom movement in modern politics trying to kick the bums out using the mechanisms of the REPUBLICAN party, while the Democrats are continuing more of the same old same old, the the knee-jerk "Rs bad, D's good" might need some revision in the next few years. B-)
I wish the Paulies and Minarchists the best of luck kicking those criminals to the curb.
Thanks.
But while you're at it, why don't you join in? The more the merrier. (And the faster and farther we can kick 'em.)
One of the nice things about a pro-freedom agenda is that it doesn't require ideological homogeneity. Sign up for "Don't hit first." and the rest of your idea system can be all over the map. B-)
Do as I say, not as I do.
So what did he actually say? Or are you just ASSUMING he quacks the same duckspeak you believe all Republicans quack?
In case you hadn't noticed, there's a war of dynastic succession going on in the GOP. The Constitutionalists, Libertarian Minarchists, and a plethora of other freedom-loving people (mainly inspired by Ron Paul) are attempting to wrest the party from the death-grip of the neocon faction. It's just getting started, and it's already getting very ugly. (See _The Revolution - a manefesto_ - just out and #1 on Amazon.)
Now I have no idea whether Tony Krvaric himself is a "Ron Paul Republican". But that group is large, largely young, and (so far) mostly internet-connected. And their ideology is a close match to that of many of the denizens of Slashdot.
So don't be surprised to see a LOT of people with reps like Tony's in the Republican party in the near future. Complete with mud-slinging campaigns against them, as the powers-that-be try frantically to keep hold of the political machinery.
IANAL but I'll take a guess.
The two items - ruling on the motion and imposing sanctions - though fallout from the same act by the plaintiff lawyers, are separate. I'd bet the judge issued the ruling quickly in the interest of justice, to spare the defendant additional delays and lawyer costs. Rule 11 sanctions, if the distinguished jurist decides to impose them, may be along later.
Given that there was a change in one of the counterclaims and an extra pleading by the RIAA, perhaps the judge doesn't think the motion was TOTALLY out-of-line. Or perhaps, now that he's given them some more rope, he's sitting back quietly while the RIAA's lawyers continue to demonstrate a pattern of abuse of process, in case they come up with some clearer examples. Since that's one of the counterclaims, perhaps the judge thinks a better sanction than spanking them early with Rule 11 (and perhaps deter their activities in THIS trial) is to add this (and any future frivolity) to the list of misdeeds when considering the amount to award on that claim.
Wouldn't justice be better served if they have to pay the price of their bullying to the defendant? B-)
Sorry. Was typing too fast and went phonetic. (Yeah, it bugs me, too, when somebody else does it. B-) )
Solar panels aren't all that green. They absorb virtually all the solar input that hits them and dump over 80% of it as heat into the air. Not a big deal if they're mounted over something black. But if they're mounted over something light colored they contribute big time to the greenhouse effect - on the albedo-management side of the equation (rather than the trap-the-downconverted-infrared side of "greenhouse gasses").
(On the other hand, the stuff about them not making back the energy needed to build them is a bunch of hooey.)
Wind turbines, on the other hand, turn wind into electricity quite efficiently and have about the same side-effect on the global energy balance as a tree presenting the same cross-section to the wind. And there's a LOT of power in wind (if it's available).
I'd always assumed that it was formed from ions:
- Oxygen atom collects a lose electron or two to form a negatively-charged oxygen ion.
- Oxygen ion collects a lose proton or hydrogen atom to form a hydroxyl ion (or "atom")
- Hydroxyl ion collects a lose proton, or
- Hydroxyl "atom" collects first an electron then a proton.
No surface necessary: The captures can start out very tenuous (say, due to interactions with additional particles or magnetic fields in a gas cloud) and then conserve momentum by radiating photons and recoiling as the captured particles descend through the energy levels toward a neutral molecule.
But I'm not an astrophysicist, so I have no idea how plausible that water-origin story is.
While lithium batteries are very efficient they still lose a small percentage of their power when operating. Electric motors do as well, and their controlling electronics ditto. Designing a cooling system for all of the above was a significant part of designing the car.
Two horsepower is 1491+ watts - about the power of the largest space heater you can run on a 15-amp circuit.
So keeping the batteries warm enough to operate efficiently in cold climates shouldn't be a problem - just restrict the cooling until they're warmed up. And while I don't know how the designers of the Tesla heat it, scavenging this "lost heat" to warm the passenger compartment, just as internal-combustion cars use cooling-system heat for the same purpose, would make sense.
The harder problem would be COOLING the vehicle in hot climates. (But since stealing power to air condition the vehicle tends to cost less in "mileage" than opening windows for ventilation and trashing the air friction, I suspect that the car will be air-conditioned despite the loss of "mileage".)
Where does our electricity for our homes come from? Fossil fuels?
In addition to the points others have made, such as:
- Not all grid power is from fossil fuels.
- Grid fossil fuel plants are more efficient.
it should be noted that a car can get a LOT better mileage-equivalent if it doesn't have to burn fuel to carry a heat engine around with it.
Also: Like a hybrid, an electric can recycle a lot of the power that would otherwise be lost to braking or engine-braking - either stop-and-go traffic or downhill driving - rather than burn more fuel to replace it later.
I don't see the point... of a store opening to sell something they have no inventory of, and have no hope of having inventory of for quite some time due to already existing waiting lists.
In addition to providing a site for customers to obtain service...
If they get enough advance orders they can afford to expand production.
Better yet, when was the last time *you* drove 100 miles away from your home?
Last time I went to my vacation/retirement house. It's about 250 miles away from my townhouse. It's also on the other side of the Sierras and about 5,000 feet higher in altitude (with at least one pass over 8,000 feet higher). So the Tesla probably wouldn't get its rated mileage on the way over (though it might do enough better on the way back to make the whole trip).
That's why I've been wanting a plug-in hybrid rather than a pure electric.
I've previously posted the driving cycle such a car would need to serve my needs. It's virtually identical to the cycle that would be needed to handle trips from Silicon Valley to the Tahoe ski areas or to Reno. That would allow it to be a FULL replacement car, rather than the local-only one of two cars, for many of the denizens of the SF Bay Area. (IMHO that's the largest concentration of people with the combination of green consciousness, tech savvy, and disposable income to be early adopters.)
Perhaps their Whitestar model will do the job.
The previous posters are assuming that you can't recharge during the trip and you want to get BACK. B-)
... the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible.
I was under the impression that "the technology" included the source code. And "in the hand" included the ability to make improvements to it and build new things based on it (thus including an appropriate build, execution, and interpretation environment).
If this is not included, it is not "the technology" that has gotten into the children's hands. Instead they hold a product of the technology, while the technology itself remains in the hands of a rich foreign elite.
Just as the price of freedom is letting other people do things you [DON'T] like, the price of free speech is letting other people SAY things you don't like.
(GOTTA hit "preview" more often....)
I'm not exactly sure how best to implement it; but it seems to me that more of our public social processes need a formal mechanism whereby blatantly factually incorrect statements can be challenged and amended. In situations like courtrooms, political debates, news shows, and whatnot, people can and do just say things that are trivially, demonstrably wrong all the time.
There are already some fine mechanisms in place that have been tested for centuries.
In courts: Cross-examination, witnesses for the other side, contempt-of-court citations, perjury charges (to name just the big four). This is what a court is ABOUT - holding an argument between two opposing sides to get to the truths that have a bearing on the issue in question.
In political debate and public political statements: Rebuttals by opponents, fact-checking and follow-on stories by a free press.
A free press is not intended to promote every press outlet getting all the facts right (even if what is right WASN'T subject to disagreement.) It's about eliminating governmental roadblocks to publication of varying points of view, in the hope that, among these biased outlets, most information and viewpoints of significance will find an outlet somewhere. (Unfortunately the dreadfully-expensive former mainstream media has fallen into a very few hands - and thus shows very few viewpoints and interpretations, and filters out or distorts much of the information of interest. But that's why the internet is replacing it.)
Just as the price of freedom is letting other people do things you like, the price of free speech is letting other people SAY things you don't like. That happens to include spin, euphemisms, and outright lies.
Restricting the debate to some perception of "truth" implies having a group of people who make the call on what is true, with the power to interfere with the publication of information and opinion that does not agree with their call. Oops!
Meanwhile, since people will continue to lie, IMHO it's just as well that they often do so in public, where others can sometimes identify their "errors" and publish them as well. This lets those watching get practice at detecting and rejecting such lies.
A successful truth-squad scheme would be like protecting your kid against contagious diseases - only to have him fall seriously ill when he finally leaves home due to an inadequately trained immune system.
It's true that putting incompetence first produces better rhythm and a very tight resonance with the original.
But the other way around is more insightful into human behavior.
Sufficient incompetence can accidentally mimic malice.
But a large part of malicious scheming is not just to avoid detection until it's too late - but to avoid responsibility when the result of the scheme comes to light. Thus when one is responsible for keeping evidence against oneself, two design goals for a malicious scheme are destroying the evidence beyond recovery and doing so in a way that is a plausible accident.
If the apparent cause of the accident is lack of due diligence when such was required it still doesn't adequately deflect blame. But if the apparent cause is incompetence to perform the requirements, it DOES deflect blame. It's not the actor's fault that he wasn't capable of performing the function. It's not the boss' fault because the actor had adequate credentials. Malice disguised as incompetence is an example of protective mimicry.
This if malice is indistinguishable from incompetence it's sufficiently advanced.
So now you want us to be responsible for Universal Warming?
Since the heat would have ended up there anyhow if we hadn't grabbed it on the way past for a while, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Of course we'll be sending it out at a lower frequency than the sun did. So we've done a bit to increase entropy.
But that IS our job, after all. B-)
... replacing our entire energy consumption with external sources only increases the energy flux striking the Earth by about 0.01%.
Actually, replacing ground-generated electricity with space solar power REDUCES the heat load.
First: Ground generated electricity is made with big heat engines, limited by the carnot cycle. In addition to the heat released by using the energy, there's the heat released on the cold side of the heat engine. The total is a lot more than you bought and used.
But with space solar power the cold side of the heat engine is in space, radiating toward the sky (with it's black body temperature of 4 degrees absolute). The dumped heat misses the earth. All you heat with is the useful power and a few percent losses. (The sky-to-ground system is estimated to run in the range of 90% efficient and only part of its losses are on the ground.
But far more significant: Fuel-driven ground generators release carbon dioxide, which continuously traps solar power as heat until it's eventually scrubbed from the atmosphere decades or centuries later. That is a big multiple of the useful power actually delivered. No fuel burned on Earth, no CO2 pumping the greenhouse.
The main problem will be keeping us from sliding into an ice age over the next 400 to 1,200 years. (According to one model the current interglacial peaked at about the dawn of agriculture and we've been essentially regulating the earth's temperature as the "furnace" output has been curving down for the last 6,000 years or so, with a slight bump since industrialization. Stop the CO2 and we'd quickly crash back onto the steepening slope of the cooling curve.) But that takes decades to centuries. So we can decide what to do about it in a few generations, when we start to get below the old "regulated" temperature.
One nice thing: If we need to bring in more heat from space we'll have the infrastructure to do it. B-)
Are you serious? You're smarter than a Nasa study?
I don't claim to be (though I did work on NASA projects and have some idea where I stand among the mind power of the rocket science community B-) ).
But I'm not talking from my own work. I'm summarizing what I heard from some of the braniacs who were paying attention to the problem.
Then you can certainly explain how 1300 watts per square meter and putting it...IN FUCKING OUTERSPACE...is better than 1000 watts per m^2 on the ground.
Well for starters:
- No clouds, rain, or snow.
- No atmospheric attenuation.
- No night.
- No seasons. ("It's always noon on midsummer's day.")
Those are good for about a factor of seven (depending on the earthbound site you're comparing).
More importantly:
- No gravity (except tides).
- No wind (except solar wind).
- No oxidizing atmosphere.
- No corroding water and waterborne ions.
This enormously reduces the structures required.
That would be an enormous reduction in the amount of material needed to make and mount solar panels. Most of their structure is to protect them from the elements and support them against gravity and wind.
But we're not talking photovoltaic solar panels here. We're talking a steam plant, with the steam generated in pipes and mirrors and condensed by pipes with black cooling fins in the mirrors' shade.
With no gravity, wind, and the like, building square miles of parabolic-cylinder solar mirrors is trivial. Making them of aluminized mylar "spaceblanket" material supported by glued-together toothpicks and cobwebs would be a massive overdesign. Virtually all of your mass is the boiler and condenser pipes and the wisp of structure that keeps them straight and properly arranged and oriented as they heat and cool unevenly.
Now it might prove even better to build some film solar panels - especially if you're doing it in space by vacuum deposition of films on some flimsy substrate with an unlimited supply of hard vacuum for free. But sending up bundles of pipe, rolls of wispy plastic, and a flimsy support structure to expand in space. wrap with the mirror film, and aluminize once it's in place is a well understood and (as space stuff goes) inexpensive process.
The power plant is a moderately small lump of machinery suitable for assembling in orbit and charging with a small amount of water.
The transmitter array gets deployed much like the mirrors - but more simply. (It doesn't have to be accurately, or even consistently, spaced. The transmitters are synchronized and the array is focussed by a pilot beam from the ground site, computing the complex-conjugate of the incoming carrier's waveform to focus the beam on the antenna surrounding the pilot transmitter. Lose the pilot and they go incoherent - spreading the energy about equally through the surrounding sky, of which the entire facing side of Earth is a small fraction. (And you can modulate the pilot with an encrypted spectrum-spreader so nobody can steal the power or redirect it to another target.)
While it's nifty that they can focus EM radiation to a smaller point now, I'm not following how this will enable wireless power transfer.
Smaller rectennas. Higher efficiencies. Less land use for the receiving end. Lower cost as a result of all three.
Less power beam soaking into other things, too, which means you can find a receiving site closer to the load and shorten the transmission line.
Back in the 1960's. Diode grid to rectify the beamed power. Bad idea.
Actually it was a very GOOD idea. But NASA blew it.
The plan was to site solar power satellites in geosync orbit and bring the power back via microwaves.
Unlike microwave ovens (which are tuned to a frequency that is strongly absorbed by water), these would be tuned to a frequency where water - clouds, rain, birds, cows, people - is essentially transparent. This is good both for getting the power through the atmosphere and avoiding rains of roast duck.
I could go into detail on why there's no problem from the millimeter waves, but that would take time. Short form: System failures defocus the beam so much it becomes just radio interference in directional antennas pointed at the satellites. Even when fully focussed it's not an issue for tissue: You can grow crops and graze cattle under the (rather spindly) rectennas, so they don't even use up the chunk of land they're on.
Benefits:
- Enough power to completely replace fossil fuel AND nuclear plants and absorb forseeable energy use expansion for decades.
- 'Way cheaper, too. (Even at '60s fuel prices.)
- Essentially no pollution at ground level.
- Bootstraps a space program that can then move other manufacturing processes, and THEIR pollution, off the planet as well.
NASA blew it by doing a study that purported to show it would be too expensive. But they did that by splitting the design teams for the rockets and the power plant. The power plant designers made a turbine very large to get a couple extra percent of efficiency. Then the rocket designers came up with a heavy lifter sized to take the biggest piece. Result: Enormous rockets with few trips to ammortize the design/construction costs, rather than moderate sized ones with many trips. Cost skyrockets versus a properly integrated design with a small turbine and a fleet of smaller lifters.
Good one!
...")
(I'd have said "... places where criminal written communication