"GNU Image Manipulation Program" might actually sell a few copies if the box made the title look respectable.
Actually, the Lindows/Linspire guy is trying to get in this gameagain. He didn't go with 'gPhotoshop' or with spelling out the GIMP acronym though. I'm not sure how well his 'Compare' tagging will fare as he repackages GIMP and puts it next to a PhotoShop box in Wal-Mart.
Packaging free software up for retail sale didn't fly too well for the major distros in the consumer-space, I don't know what Robertson's expectations are for this ploy. At the very least though you would have to say he knows how to generate buzz (for better or worse)...
Hmm, or wonderful media exposure at least? Lindows --> MS Lawsuit Threats --> Media Exposure --> Changes Name to Linspire but reaps the rewards of all the attention...
Goes to show the old saying that any publicity is good publicity.
I knew I had seen this story before but it wasn't here. This article was up on Digg three days ago--with only three Diggs to it's name (at the time of this writing), but it's front page news here? Interesting to say the least...
I predict that this Digg will become frontpage Slashdot news shortly. It was quite popular (914 diggs so far) and it's hit the three-day mark...
I know, this is all so OT, but it's no worse then whining about duplicate postings here...
Oh the irony here is just too much to take without laughing! My comment gets hammered with the REDUNDANT pummel when I point out that/. is being REDUNDANT in posting old Diggs? Man, it just doesn't get any better then this to make a point.
Moderators: did you catch the not-so-subtle play I made here by quoting ALL of my original message? In case you didn't, I'm beinging REDUNDANTLY sarcastic...
I knew I had seen this story before but it wasn't here. This article was up on Digg three days ago--with only three Diggs to it's name (at the time of this writing), but it's front page news here? Interesting to say the least...
I predict that this Digg will become frontpage Slashdot news shortly. It was quite popular (914 diggs so far) and it's hit the three-day mark...
I know, this is all so OT, but it's no worse then whining about duplicate postings here...
> I never really understood what the big deal was when everyone was downloading 128k MP3's. How could media companies have ever felt threatened by that noise?
Because most people aren't pretentious audiophiles, and are quite happy to listen to 128kbps MP3s through the crappy speakers that came with their Gateway box.
Cool! I've always wanted to be a pretentious audiophile! This is a great day! I just wish I had the gear to go along with such an ostentatious title. [sigh]
The treble washout at 128kbps is often times just too much. Have you ever tried to make an audio CD from 128k MP3s? It will generally turn out to be hideous. That's not always the case. I made one from the Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing album and it rocks! Guess I'm not as picky as you would imply--though others would be, for sure. Still you don't have to have a golden ear to be disturbed with lower bitrate MP3s, even on crappy Gateway speakers...
The reason I use FLAC is not for rebuilding my CDs in pristine state, but to more easily enable transcoding to the format-du-jour. If I had music in MP3 and wanted to move it to Ogg, it would sound ugly, and vice versa. This way I can store my music on my HDD, but still be able to use whatever format I need for my DAP or other device.
Yep very true. It is the best archiving format for sure (since it is lossless compared to MP3, Vorbis, etc.). Unfortunately, I don't think I have the disk space to put all my CDs into FLAC at the moment. Still that would be the ideal as you would only have to manually rip the physical CD once...
Of course this will all be moot once the media companies get it into their heads to stream everything on-demand in lossless format for a monthly subscription, micropayments, whatever. Then no one will have need for a private collection, and it will end all the *IAA attacks against customers...
Why would I need a bazillion CDs or DVDs around if I had the on-demand option? If they offered it at a price the market would bear it would revolutionize & revitalize their industry...
> Moving metadata with the media shift is the real trick though, eh?
Not really. FLAC's metadata is nearly trivial to extract. With the aid of FLAC's format page and Python's "struct" module, I was pulling out the Vorbis comments in about in an hour. From there, it's a simple matter to add those tags to LAME's arguments when piping from FLAC to LAME for the transcoding.
There's always a way, sometimes it just takes a while to find/implement it. The Perl Audio Converter I used not too long ago was very simple to use but getting all the dependicies together to make it play nice was a pain. At any rate, for the purpose of converting and keeping the metadata intact, it worked great.
More to the point of the original story though--I think the majority of/. folks would do their own ripping before sending their CD collections off to have someone else do it for them. I did mention the concept to a friend as a thought to add to his media business services though for the rest of the world who are too busy or lazy to rip their own but still want thier collection on their iPod or whatever. I wouldn't think you'd want to consider this business model for your sole source of income, but as a value-added service why not?
Tape? What's that? I think I have a few hundred of those kicking around somewhere - they haven't been touched since I got my first few CDs twn or fifteen years ago.
LOL, yeah but I'm sure you remember how crappy they would end up sounding after a few runs in the car?
Actually, I have a box full of tapes too--a lot of stuff I don't have on CD audio. I may waste the time and dump them to digital one of these days. Some are in better shape then others. My Dad had a whole collection of stuff on reel-to-reel. Some of that would definitely be cool to media shift into this century. It's that or it will soon be totally lost to the world. Finding a working reel-to-reel deck is the, er, real trick though...
FLAC is overkill unless you want to rebuild your audio CDs in their pristine state. If your are going strictly for archival purposes, FLAC is the way to go.
And format changes. MP3? OGG? WMA? AAC? not-yet-released-format X? FLAC is definately the most future-proof format, and the cost of a 250GB HDD is nothing like the time spent ripping. Even within a format there are many different encoders and qualities. FLAC is a way to be able to always change your mind.
But you are basically saying the same thing I am. If you are going for archival purposes then FLAC is the way to go--whether you are rebuilding CD Audio or new Vorbis or MP3 files. Same difference...
I like buying on-line music in FLAC format, for example when I purchase from places like Magnatune or Live Metallica. I keep those FLAC files and then covert them into whatever I need. Perfect quality files to start with since I am not getting a physical CD with my purchase...
I see your point though, if you dump to FLAC first you can easily batch convert those files into whatever other codec you wish. A really quick way to media shift your entire collection in one easy CLI command. Moving metadata with the media shift is the real trick though, eh? Also, it's going to be a while before portable players have the kind of storage your taking about. There again, FLAC for archiving is great, but you have to consider other formats for more general usages...
Long post short(er), I agree--FLAC is the ideal to use to archive your CD collection as media shifting from that point is a snap. Still, Vorbis at q=6 is pretty good too and not going away either, since it's a patent-free open codec. Not lossless of course, but good enough for my purposes...
I have Alesis M1 Active Mk2 studio monitors, and they really bring out the compression artifacts. On my PDA, home stereo, and car 192kps is perfect, but anything below 320k I swear I hear the difference on my studio monitors (and with 320 it sounds great, but I notice a slight loss of stereo with my studio headphones). Perhaps I'm a freak, or maybe it is just placebo, but either way FLAC cures the problem.
Of that, I have no doubt. For general purposes though I would bet Vorbis at q6 would definitely be sufficient. I'm sure you can hear the washout on studio monitors. I never really understood what the big deal was when everyone was downloading 128k MP3's. How could media companies have ever felt threatened by that noise?
6 sounds better. Since you have everything in FLAC you could try some quick comparisons. Let's just say, it definitely works streaming Vorbis Q6 files from my samba server to PC speaker systems at the very least.:-)
Oh how spoiled we are. Have we forgotten the utter crappiness of tape so soon? LOL
FLAC is overkill unless you want to rebuild your audio CDs in their pristine state. If your are going strictly for archival purposes, FLAC is the way to go. For everything else, ripping to OGG Vorbis at quality 5-6 is quite acceptable, IMO. I started out way too low initially, but 6 is ~192kbps and sounds quite good--that is what I am sticking with these days. Can all but the most discerning ear tell the difference between these files and the originals? I really doubt it...
I'm not going to send my CDs to one of these services, I have been in the process of ripping my entire collection to Vorbis for quite some time. No rush, I have a lot done--enough to entertain me while I am in the process of finishing the rest...
Now there's innovation for you. I wonder if I can patent this as a business technique.
A method of business procedure or policy whereby we watch whatever new direction or new product Google comes out with, then copy it and add our own branding to it.
Excellent. I am myself not a peak-oil optimist or pessimist, believer or doubter. Just interested. The one thing I am certain about in the whole matter is that oil is a non-renewable resource, once it's gone, that's it. On to alternatives. Might as well play it safe and get them in place now...
We tend to gravitate our thinking towards cars when the oil/energy discussions come around. The problem is much bigger than that. We have a trillion dollar infrastructure that is almost exclusive run on oil. Converting that to alternative energy sources is going to be an undertaking greater then any we have known. If the peak oil pessimists are correct, and even the optimists agree that it's likely to occur within the next 50 years. We had better ramp up really fast in phasing in alternatives or it's going to be a mess.
Interested parties really ought to check out the LATOC primer. The guy's sources are not crackpots or psuedo-prophets predicting the end of the world here, they are investors, scientists, politicians, oil analysts, etc. He builds a strong case as to why hitting the peak of world oil production will return incredible economic and social changes if we aren't ready for it. One way or another, we have to do something--a concentrated effort nationally, even globally if we expect life to continue as we know (and enjoy) it.
It probably would not have a huge impact on folks who already live at the subsistance level (the utterly impoverished), but as oil energy drives everything in our modern economy, even a small drop in production over a sustained period would be highly problematic for industrialized economies--for us. I quote from my own write up on this scenario:
The issue is not one of "running out" [of oil] so much as it is not having enough to keep our economy running... A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10-15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.
The effects of even a small drop in production can be devastating. For instance, during the 1970s oil shocks, shortfalls in production as small as 5% caused the price of oil to nearly quadruple. The same thing happened in California a few years ago with natural gas: a production drop of less than 5% caused prices to skyrocket by 400%.
Fortunately, previous price shocks were only temporary.
Did that grab your attention? I know it caught mine when I read it. A 5% drop caused prices to go up 400%?! Incredible! And, that's not just gas prices we're talking about here, oil plays a role in virtually every aspect of our economy. Plastics; transportation; medicine; agriculture (think pesticides); you name it... Our economy isn't based on cash, that is only a convenient medium of exchange--our economy is based on energy. Energy that is almost exclusively derived from oil production. Once the global peak is passed and production starts falling off, there's no going back. Meanwhile, demand for oil here and abroad continues to increase at an amazing rate. Sounds like a bad situation no matter how you look at it.
Even if the odds favor us in that this won't happen in our lifetimes, I feel a concentrated effort now to replace oil should be a national mandate of highest priority. For our kids and grandkids sakes. There are a lot of great ideas floating around for replacing oil with renewables. Let's get them implemented and our infrastucture converted to use them while we have oil energy available for us to do so. It will be extremely difficult to manage such a massive scale transition if we wait until the world oil production starts to decline. It takes energy to make energy after all...
I really don't know where the oil companies are on this. Obviously even an admission of the problem such as Chervon and others have made are at the least an acknowledgement that we're not going to get to continue the course we are on very much longer.
My real frustration in this is, how is it that I have only recently come to a knowledge of this issue when research shows it has been discussed and debated for a loooong time now. Where is the media? They are always so gloomy, you would think this would be something they would love to dwell on...
2.6 gallons of ethanol are produced from 1 bushel of corn. If you figure the average car gets 20mpg with gasoline, and then knock off a bit for the lower energy density of ethanol - figure you need 700 gallons or so of ethanol to get you your 10,000 miles.
That implies you need about 270 bushels of corn to produce the fuel for your vehicle for a year.
On a decent year, corn yields about 250 bushels per acre.
Opps, sorry I didn't get all the quote in there with regards to biodiesel:
Biodiesel is considerably better than ethanol, but with an EROEI of three, it still doesn't compare to oil, which has had an EROEI of about 30.
Regarding ethanol, this April 2005 article claims it takes 6 energy units to produce just 1 unit of ethanol energy. If that is correct you can see why biodiesel would be much preferred over ethanol, but even so it would simply not be an effective replacement for oil.
These guys factor in the energy requirements from planting, fertilizing, harvesting, processing, transporting, etc.
Oil companies will resist biodiesel the way MS resists the GPL. Just watch.:)
Interestingly enough, there is some indication that the oil companies actually share our concerns over energy needs more than we think. It may not entirely be about money to them, they want to stay in business don't they? For instance from Chervon:
Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century. One thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over. What we do next will determine how well we meet the energy needs of the entire world in this century and beyond...
The cynic would probably think that this is just a scam or excuse to raise oil prices and increase profitability. I think that is shortsighted. The ramifications are too great to ignore, even the greediest among us would not like to face the economic and societal ramifications that would follow sustained oil shortages. What good is money if you can't spend it?
On second thought, maybe I should hope that is exactly what they are trying to pull! It beats the bleak outlook sustained shortages would lead to any day...
The problem with nuclear fusion, in my view, is that it's still centralized. Stuff like solar, wind, and biodiesel are (or can be) distributed, giving you no one single point of failure. Distributed energy systems are, I believe, where it's at.
And regarding the batteries,.. Ni-M-Hydride seems to be the as good as it's gonna get for a long while. Lots of money has been spent on research in this area already.
If the Peak Oil (pessimist) guys are right, I would rather have something producing power now (in abundance) even if it's not easily distributed at the moment. Even if that means fission reactors. We know that works and will last. It would give us a breather if the oil supply starts dropping while demand continues increasing. A breather long enough hopefully to develop some of these other "greener" solutions.
Or we could just continue on the same course we've been following for a hundred years and hope it doesn't affect us in our lifetimes. A pretty callous course placing this burden on the next generation or so...
Sorry, no oil for you. Figure something else out, but since you're (low or) out of oil it might be difficult to find energy to power your new ideas until they are mature enough to take over...
bleak, huh?
-- Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work, Frodo, than the will of evil...
The question I would have is how much vegetable oil do we have to process into biodiesel? It's a great idea but if everyone started doing it would we have anywhere near the amount vegetable oil required to power the millions of vehicles on the road?
Biofuels such as biodiesel, ethanol, methanol etc. are great, but only in small doses. Biofuels are all grown with massive fossil fuel inputs (pesticides and fertilizers) and suffer from horribly low, sometimes negative, EROEIs [energy returned on energy invested]. The production of ethanol, for instance, requires six units of energy to produce just one. That means it consumes more energy than it produces and thus will only serve to compound our energy deficit.
In addition, there is the problem of where to grow the stuff, as we are rapidly running out of arable land on which to grow food, let alone fuel. This is no small problem as the amount of land it takes to grow even a small amount of biofuel is quite staggering. As journalist Lee Dye points out in a July 2004 article entitled "Old Policies Make Shift From Foreign Oil Tough:"
. . . relying on corn for our future energy needs would
devastate the nation's food production. It takes 11 acres to
grow enough corn to fuel one automobile with ethanol for
10,000 miles, or about a year's driving, Pimentel says. That's
the amount of land needed to feed seven persons for the
same period of time.
And if we decided to power all of our automobiles with
ethanol, we would need to cover 97 percent of our land with
corn, he adds.
It isn't going to solve the world's dependence on oil overnight, but it's perhaps a step forward.
You are right, it is not and I seriously doubt it ever will. It just takes too much land/vehicle to be practical. Some parties indicate that this issue of oil dependence has already gone beyond critical mass (meaning supplies have peaked and will slowly not be able to meet demand in the near future causing all kinds of economic and social griefs--neither of which possibilites I had ever considered possible in my lifetime). It has even grabbed the attenion of some of the folks in the House of Representatives for whatever good that will do...
The suggestions that I have read repeatedly is that we need to put the energy and effort into renewable energy sources on the scale of the man-to-the-moon effort. Critical. It has been stated that President Bush was very much interested in this situation prior to 9/11 and the events that have transpired. Needless to say, he's been somewhat sidetracked...
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of the /. effect, I can't get to the Allpeers link in the story but the Coral link is definitely working! The Coral FireFox extension rocks!
Actually, the Lindows/Linspire guy is trying to get in this game again. He didn't go with 'gPhotoshop' or with spelling out the GIMP acronym though. I'm not sure how well his 'Compare' tagging will fare as he repackages GIMP and puts it next to a PhotoShop box in Wal-Mart.
Packaging free software up for retail sale didn't fly too well for the major distros in the consumer-space, I don't know what Robertson's expectations are for this ploy. At the very least though you would have to say he knows how to generate buzz (for better or worse)...
Yeah, right, and get sued out of existence...
Hmm, or wonderful media exposure at least? Lindows --> MS Lawsuit Threats --> Media Exposure --> Changes Name to Linspire but reaps the rewards of all the attention...
Goes to show the old saying that any publicity is good publicity.
I knew I had seen this story before but it wasn't here. This article was up on Digg three days ago--with only three Diggs to it's name (at the time of this writing), but it's front page news here? Interesting to say the least...
I predict that this Digg will become frontpage Slashdot news shortly. It was quite popular (914 diggs so far) and it's hit the three-day mark...
I know, this is all so OT, but it's no worse then whining about duplicate postings here...
Oh the irony here is just too much to take without laughing! My comment gets hammered with the REDUNDANT pummel when I point out that /. is being REDUNDANT in posting old Diggs? Man, it just doesn't get any better then this to make a point.
Moderators: did you catch the not-so-subtle play I made here by quoting ALL of my original message? In case you didn't, I'm beinging REDUNDANTLY sarcastic...
Enjoy!
I predict that this Digg will become frontpage Slashdot news shortly. It was quite popular (914 diggs so far) and it's hit the three-day mark...
I know, this is all so OT, but it's no worse then whining about duplicate postings here...
What makes this newsworthy today? The bizarre "run it as a screensaver" factor? What's the point?
"...she turned me into a newt."
"A newt?!"
"A WITCH! GET HER!!!"
Guess what I am doing (over) today? LOL
Because most people aren't pretentious audiophiles, and are quite happy to listen to 128kbps MP3s through the crappy speakers that came with their Gateway box.
Cool! I've always wanted to be a pretentious audiophile! This is a great day! I just wish I had the gear to go along with such an ostentatious title. [sigh]
The treble washout at 128kbps is often times just too much. Have you ever tried to make an audio CD from 128k MP3s? It will generally turn out to be hideous. That's not always the case. I made one from the Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing album and it rocks! Guess I'm not as picky as you would imply--though others would be, for sure. Still you don't have to have a golden ear to be disturbed with lower bitrate MP3s, even on crappy Gateway speakers...
Listening to low quality MP3s can be kind of comparable to the Uncanny Valley effect some people experience when they see photorealistic CG images of humans. They can look really cool but still creep you out at the same time...
Yep very true. It is the best archiving format for sure (since it is lossless compared to MP3, Vorbis, etc.). Unfortunately, I don't think I have the disk space to put all my CDs into FLAC at the moment. Still that would be the ideal as you would only have to manually rip the physical CD once...
Of course this will all be moot once the media companies get it into their heads to stream everything on-demand in lossless format for a monthly subscription, micropayments, whatever. Then no one will have need for a private collection, and it will end all the *IAA attacks against customers...
Why would I need a bazillion CDs or DVDs around if I had the on-demand option? If they offered it at a price the market would bear it would revolutionize & revitalize their industry...
Not really. FLAC's metadata is nearly trivial to extract. With the aid of FLAC's format page and Python's "struct" module, I was pulling out the Vorbis comments in about in an hour. From there, it's a simple matter to add those tags to LAME's arguments when piping from FLAC to LAME for the transcoding.
There's always a way, sometimes it just takes a while to find/implement it. The Perl Audio Converter I used not too long ago was very simple to use but getting all the dependicies together to make it play nice was a pain. At any rate, for the purpose of converting and keeping the metadata intact, it worked great.
More to the point of the original story though--I think the majority of /. folks would do their own ripping before sending their CD collections off to have someone else do it for them. I did mention the concept to a friend as a thought to add to his media business services though for the rest of the world who are too busy or lazy to rip their own but still want thier collection on their iPod or whatever. I wouldn't think you'd want to consider this business model for your sole source of income, but as a value-added service why not?
LOL, yeah but I'm sure you remember how crappy they would end up sounding after a few runs in the car?
Actually, I have a box full of tapes too--a lot of stuff I don't have on CD audio. I may waste the time and dump them to digital one of these days. Some are in better shape then others. My Dad had a whole collection of stuff on reel-to-reel. Some of that would definitely be cool to media shift into this century. It's that or it will soon be totally lost to the world. Finding a working reel-to-reel deck is the, er, real trick though...
And format changes. MP3? OGG? WMA? AAC? not-yet-released-format X? FLAC is definately the most future-proof format, and the cost of a 250GB HDD is nothing like the time spent ripping. Even within a format there are many different encoders and qualities. FLAC is a way to be able to always change your mind.
But you are basically saying the same thing I am. If you are going for archival purposes then FLAC is the way to go--whether you are rebuilding CD Audio or new Vorbis or MP3 files. Same difference...
I like buying on-line music in FLAC format, for example when I purchase from places like Magnatune or Live Metallica. I keep those FLAC files and then covert them into whatever I need. Perfect quality files to start with since I am not getting a physical CD with my purchase...
I see your point though, if you dump to FLAC first you can easily batch convert those files into whatever other codec you wish. A really quick way to media shift your entire collection in one easy CLI command. Moving metadata with the media shift is the real trick though, eh? Also, it's going to be a while before portable players have the kind of storage your taking about. There again, FLAC for archiving is great, but you have to consider other formats for more general usages...
Long post short(er), I agree--FLAC is the ideal to use to archive your CD collection as media shifting from that point is a snap. Still, Vorbis at q=6 is pretty good too and not going away either, since it's a patent-free open codec. Not lossless of course, but good enough for my purposes...
Of that, I have no doubt. For general purposes though I would bet Vorbis at q6 would definitely be sufficient. I'm sure you can hear the washout on studio monitors. I never really understood what the big deal was when everyone was downloading 128k MP3's. How could media companies have ever felt threatened by that noise?
Oh how spoiled we are. Have we forgotten the utter crappiness of tape so soon? LOL
I'm not going to send my CDs to one of these services, I have been in the process of ripping my entire collection to Vorbis for quite some time. No rush, I have a lot done--enough to entertain me while I am in the process of finishing the rest...
Excellent. I am myself not a peak-oil optimist or pessimist, believer or doubter. Just interested. The one thing I am certain about in the whole matter is that oil is a non-renewable resource, once it's gone, that's it. On to alternatives. Might as well play it safe and get them in place now...
Interested parties really ought to check out the LATOC primer. The guy's sources are not crackpots or psuedo-prophets predicting the end of the world here, they are investors, scientists, politicians, oil analysts, etc. He builds a strong case as to why hitting the peak of world oil production will return incredible economic and social changes if we aren't ready for it. One way or another, we have to do something--a concentrated effort nationally, even globally if we expect life to continue as we know (and enjoy) it.
It probably would not have a huge impact on folks who already live at the subsistance level (the utterly impoverished), but as oil energy drives everything in our modern economy, even a small drop in production over a sustained period would be highly problematic for industrialized economies--for us. I quote from my own write up on this scenario:
Even if the odds favor us in that this won't happen in our lifetimes, I feel a concentrated effort now to replace oil should be a national mandate of highest priority. For our kids and grandkids sakes. There are a lot of great ideas floating around for replacing oil with renewables. Let's get them implemented and our infrastucture converted to use them while we have oil energy available for us to do so. It will be extremely difficult to manage such a massive scale transition if we wait until the world oil production starts to decline. It takes energy to make energy after all...I really don't know where the oil companies are on this. Obviously even an admission of the problem such as Chervon and others have made are at the least an acknowledgement that we're not going to get to continue the course we are on very much longer.
My real frustration in this is, how is it that I have only recently come to a knowledge of this issue when research shows it has been discussed and debated for a loooong time now. Where is the media? They are always so gloomy, you would think this would be something they would love to dwell on...
That implies you need about 270 bushels of corn to produce the fuel for your vehicle for a year.
On a decent year, corn yields about 250 bushels per acre.
Opps, sorry I didn't get all the quote in there with regards to biodiesel:
Regarding ethanol, this April 2005 article claims it takes 6 energy units to produce just 1 unit of ethanol energy. If that is correct you can see why biodiesel would be much preferred over ethanol, but even so it would simply not be an effective replacement for oil.
These guys factor in the energy requirements from planting, fertilizing, harvesting, processing, transporting, etc.
Interestingly enough, there is some indication that the oil companies actually share our concerns over energy needs more than we think. It may not entirely be about money to them, they want to stay in business don't they? For instance from Chervon:
The cynic would probably think that this is just a scam or excuse to raise oil prices and increase profitability. I think that is shortsighted. The ramifications are too great to ignore, even the greediest among us would not like to face the economic and societal ramifications that would follow sustained oil shortages. What good is money if you can't spend it?
On second thought, maybe I should hope that is exactly what they are trying to pull! It beats the bleak outlook sustained shortages would lead to any day...
The problem with nuclear fusion, in my view, is that it's still centralized. Stuff like solar, wind, and biodiesel are (or can be) distributed, giving you no one single point of failure. Distributed energy systems are, I believe, where it's at.
And regarding the batteries,.. Ni-M-Hydride seems to be the as good as it's gonna get for a long while. Lots of money has been spent on research in this area already.
If the Peak Oil (pessimist) guys are right, I would rather have something producing power now (in abundance) even if it's not easily distributed at the moment. Even if that means fission reactors. We know that works and will last. It would give us a breather if the oil supply starts dropping while demand continues increasing. A breather long enough hopefully to develop some of these other "greener" solutions.
Or we could just continue on the same course we've been following for a hundred years and hope it doesn't affect us in our lifetimes. A pretty callous course placing this burden on the next generation or so...
Sorry, no oil for you. Figure something else out, but since you're (low or) out of oil it might be difficult to find energy to power your new ideas until they are mature enough to take over...
bleak, huh?
--
Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work, Frodo, than the will of evil...
The answer by all accounts is no. For example:
You are right, it is not and I seriously doubt it ever will. It just takes too much land/vehicle to be practical. Some parties indicate that this issue of oil dependence has already gone beyond critical mass (meaning supplies have peaked and will slowly not be able to meet demand in the near future causing all kinds of economic and social griefs--neither of which possibilites I had ever considered possible in my lifetime). It has even grabbed the attenion of some of the folks in the House of Representatives for whatever good that will do...
The suggestions that I have read repeatedly is that we need to put the energy and effort into renewable energy sources on the scale of the man-to-the-moon effort. Critical. It has been stated that President Bush was very much interested in this situation prior to 9/11 and the events that have transpired. Needless to say, he's been somewhat sidetracked...
Gimme nuclear fusion and better batteries!
Hey! I need that soylent green for my car you insensitive clods!