There are huge areas of the deep tropical oceans that are practically lifeless because the surface waters have had all their nutrients exhausted. Pumping up nutrient-rich cold water and putting it on the surface could feed a lot of algea busily sucking down CO2. Then shut 'er down, wait for the stuff to die and sink into the abyss, and repeat as necessary:)
What they *need* to do is kind of like what was described in "The Millennial Project" and build an ocean colony using accretion powered by OTECs. A big floating breakwater around a couple hundred square kilometers of artificial lagoon, in a nice quiet part of the ocean where the surface water is depleted of nutrients so there's no biosphere to speak of. Instead of using it for floating fish farms, cover it with floating solar collectors heating water to run steam turbines, with plenty of conveniently located cooling water. Located in international waters to minimize dealings with pointy headed bureaucrats.:)
How to get the energy to where it's needed is left as an exercise for the reader.
Or, far more likely, the moon will get far enough away it will escape Earth's orbit. Since it'd probably stay in the general neighborhood, things would get hairy.
3800 billion kwh per year is about 433 million kilowatts continuous. One of these ships produces 100 MW. Megawatts. 100,000 kilowatts. You'll need 4330 of them. And their efficiency is nowhere near 100%. Try 3% on a good day. Now you need 130,000 of them. Within 20 degrees of the equator (good for the developing world, not for the USA or Europe). Each ship takes 5000 cfs of cold water; 6 billion cfs total. The Mississippi river at New Orleans has a flow rate of 600,000 cfs. So you're talking 10,000 Mississippi rivers. Or 6000 Amazons.
The 1/300th comment could be them being disingenious. An OTEC power plant, with a delta-T of only 40 degrees, is going to be inefficient as hell, probably getting just a few percent of the available energy. It's going to go through water like a mofo. What would be more important is that the warm water exhaust is discharged near the surface (not really a problem) and the cold water exhaust is discharged at depth (probably a big problem).
There's a linked article that expresses concern about possible depletion of the cold water in the ocean depths.
Which is why, in about a week, they're going to be moving "My Name Is Earl" and "The Office" to Thursday night.
Thursday night's important for broadcast TV; a lot of movies push their ads that night to get people to see them Friday or Saturday night. There's a reason the cast of "Friends" could demand the money they got.
Another factor is that people tend to not hire people smarter than them, so a company's ultimate success is pretty much determined by the intelligence of their founders:)
Of course, if the majority shareholders force the company to move in a given direction for ethical instead of financial reasons, and this causes the stock price to fall, they can expect to have their ass sued to hell and back by the minority stockholders.
It'd be a lot cheaper to put in higher bids for congressmen/women. Once you have controlling interest in them, you make software patents illegal:)
Well, they could always test a morning sickness drug on a male volunteer. Or a non-pregnant female. Or a pregnant rabbit that knows how to talk so she'll answer you when you ask "are you feeling queasy?".
Coders that are in their forties/fifties bought tech stock when it was cheap and sold before the crash. They're on a beach going "Excuse me? Excuse me, senor? May I speak to you please? I asked for a mai tai, and they brought me a pina colada, and I said no salt, NO salt on the margarita, but it had salt on it, big grains of salt, floating in the glass..."
You may believe that living a life without Christ is a living hell, but, sorry to say this, some of us are quite happy living like that. Religion is Pavlovian conditioning. Haven't you noticed that the vast majority of people believe in the religion their parents indoctrinated them into? Religions are memes that evolve and compete; the ones that help create successful societies flourish. But just because a religion/meme creates a successful society, doesn't make it the "Truth".
So. Explain again why your religion is the one true religion instead of Islam. Or Mormonism. Or Pastafarianism. I mean, if my immortal soul is at stake, I'd like to be sure. Tell me why, if you'd have been born in Iran, you believe you'd still have found Christ instead of being a devout Muslim like pretty much every one else there. Why did a loving, just, and *fair* God just happen to let you be born in a family, a society, that encouraged you to believe in the one true faith, while the poor fscks born in the middle of Indonesia are surrounded by nothing but Muslims and are going to be led down the wrong path their whole life?
Sorry it took so long to respond; I don't use this email for many things and I've been busy.
I'm 43 years old, and when I was a kid I'd spend all morning on Saturday sitting in the living room watching a box that would occasionally tell me I'd really like to have this. My parents knew how to say "no", though, and if I made a scene I'd get spanked.
Madison Avenue isn't the problem. It's the idiots who think *every* child can grow up to be a functional adult without some of them occasionally getting their asses whipped by their parents. Or even, god forbid, by their teachers.
Also, the US wouldn't have to scrounge around looking for ways to cover the debt. "You want to redeem $200 billion in T-Bills? Wait here while we go fire up the printing presses."
There's almost $600 billion in paper US dollars in circulation, and that's not counting equities, bonds, money on deposit, etc. Increasing the money supply by a couple hundred billion or so would piss people off and knock the dollar down a bit, but if China tries to fsck with us on the world stage like that, it'd happen and people would have to just deal. And the Federal debt goes down too.
Contrary to what the movie "Pearl Harbor" would have you believe, American pilots didn't fight in the Battle of Britain before America entered the war. The Flying Tigers were helping the Chinese fight the Japanese, though.
Hate to burst your bubble, but when you have a billion people, most living in rural areas raising chickens, ducks, and pigs, you're going to have a lot of bugs moving back and forth. Most flus have originated in China, even way back before we knew what DNA was. The major exception seems to be the flu of 1918, which they think came from Kansas (strangely enough, in 1918 it was a very rural area with people raising chickens, ducks, and pigs).
Animal domestication is the major source of disease. American Indians were mostly hunter/gatherers and didn't have domesticated animals like Europeans did and were subsequently wiped out by diseases like smallpox (which, I believe, originally came from cattle, probably a mutated strain of cowpox).
China will gain power the way the US did for the first 170 years of its existance. Industrial and commercial might. They won't need to fight for access to Mideast oil; they'll just outbid us.
Yes, because it looks just like a CD, which has been around for, oh, 15 years, it's bloody obvious they should be able to *record* on it. And, uh, how many people buy a VHS movie in the store, take it home, and record over it (intentionally)? And when they ask "What's 5.1 sound?", it's immediately obvious from the answer that they will have to have five speakers and a subwoofer to do 5.1 sound, and their old stereo isn't going to cut it.
There really wasn't anything surprising about DVDs. What made them so popular was you could buy a 2-hour movie for less than a 45 minute album. Now, something that installs a rootkit, that's surprising.
You know that Playboy makes plenty of DVDs, right? They are a lot better looking than almost any pr0n star. And, yes, HDTV will accentuate flaws. It's already making mainstream actresses stress out and is driving major improvements in the entertainment industry makeup field (and probably lighting, too).
So, when you got a speeding ticket, did your parents send you to hell to writhe in agony for all of eternity? Cause that's kind of the problem I have with your all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful god.
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Cancun? I think you mispelled "Havana". :>
There are huge areas of the deep tropical oceans that are practically lifeless because the surface waters have had all their nutrients exhausted. Pumping up nutrient-rich cold water and putting it on the surface could feed a lot of algea busily sucking down CO2. Then shut 'er down, wait for the stuff to die and sink into the abyss, and repeat as necessary :)
What they *need* to do is kind of like what was described in "The Millennial Project" and build an ocean colony using accretion powered by OTECs. A big floating breakwater around a couple hundred square kilometers of artificial lagoon, in a nice quiet part of the ocean where the surface water is depleted of nutrients so there's no biosphere to speak of. Instead of using it for floating fish farms, cover it with floating solar collectors heating water to run steam turbines, with plenty of conveniently located cooling water. Located in international waters to minimize dealings with pointy headed bureaucrats. :)
How to get the energy to where it's needed is left as an exercise for the reader.
Or, far more likely, the moon will get far enough away it will escape Earth's orbit. Since it'd probably stay in the general neighborhood, things would get hairy.
3800 billion kwh per year is about 433 million kilowatts continuous. One of these ships produces 100 MW. Megawatts. 100,000 kilowatts. You'll need 4330 of them. And their efficiency is nowhere near 100%. Try 3% on a good day. Now you need 130,000 of them. Within 20 degrees of the equator (good for the developing world, not for the USA or Europe). Each ship takes 5000 cfs of cold water; 6 billion cfs total. The Mississippi river at New Orleans has a flow rate of 600,000 cfs. So you're talking 10,000 Mississippi rivers. Or 6000 Amazons.
The 1/300th comment could be them being disingenious. An OTEC power plant, with a delta-T of only 40 degrees, is going to be inefficient as hell, probably getting just a few percent of the available energy. It's going to go through water like a mofo. What would be more important is that the warm water exhaust is discharged near the surface (not really a problem) and the cold water exhaust is discharged at depth (probably a big problem).
There's a linked article that expresses concern about possible depletion of the cold water in the ocean depths.
If I were omniscient and omnipotent, yeh. I should get the chair.
Which is why, in about a week, they're going to be moving "My Name Is Earl" and "The Office" to Thursday night.
Thursday night's important for broadcast TV; a lot of movies push their ads that night to get people to see them Friday or Saturday night. There's a reason the cast of "Friends" could demand the money they got.
Another factor is that people tend to not hire people smarter than them, so a company's ultimate success is pretty much determined by the intelligence of their founders :)
And not *just* robots. GIRL robots.
Of course, if the majority shareholders force the company to move in a given direction for ethical instead of financial reasons, and this causes the stock price to fall, they can expect to have their ass sued to hell and back by the minority stockholders.
:)
It'd be a lot cheaper to put in higher bids for congressmen/women. Once you have controlling interest in them, you make software patents illegal
It's in one of the deleted scenes on the DVD. God I'm a nerd.
Well, they could always test a morning sickness drug on a male volunteer. Or a non-pregnant female. Or a pregnant rabbit that knows how to talk so she'll answer you when you ask "are you feeling queasy?".
But somehow I don't think it'd work that well.
Wrong cheesy sci-fi movie :) But at least it had Farrah Fawcett.
In the movie, the lifeclock turned black at 30; in the book it was when you turned 21. Yes. I read the book.
Coders that are in their forties/fifties bought tech stock when it was cheap and sold before the crash. They're on a beach going "Excuse me? Excuse me, senor? May I speak to you please? I asked for a mai tai, and they brought me a pina colada, and I said no salt, NO salt on the margarita, but it had salt on it, big grains of salt, floating in the glass..."
You may believe that living a life without Christ is a living hell, but, sorry to say this, some of us are quite happy living like that. Religion is Pavlovian conditioning. Haven't you noticed that the vast majority of people believe in the religion their parents indoctrinated them into? Religions are memes that evolve and compete; the ones that help create successful societies flourish. But just because a religion/meme creates a successful society, doesn't make it the "Truth".
So. Explain again why your religion is the one true religion instead of Islam. Or Mormonism. Or Pastafarianism. I mean, if my immortal soul is at stake, I'd like to be sure. Tell me why, if you'd have been born in Iran, you believe you'd still have found Christ instead of being a devout Muslim like pretty much every one else there. Why did a loving, just, and *fair* God just happen to let you be born in a family, a society, that encouraged you to believe in the one true faith, while the poor fscks born in the middle of Indonesia are surrounded by nothing but Muslims and are going to be led down the wrong path their whole life?
Sorry it took so long to respond; I don't use this email for many things and I've been busy.
Cory Doctorow. He's got a web page. The body hacking story is called ownzored.
I'm 43 years old, and when I was a kid I'd spend all morning on Saturday sitting in the living room watching a box that would occasionally tell me I'd really like to have this. My parents knew how to say "no", though, and if I made a scene I'd get spanked.
Madison Avenue isn't the problem. It's the idiots who think *every* child can grow up to be a functional adult without some of them occasionally getting their asses whipped by their parents. Or even, god forbid, by their teachers.
There's properly sold (licensed) software in China? :)
Also, the US wouldn't have to scrounge around looking for ways to cover the debt. "You want to redeem $200 billion in T-Bills? Wait here while we go fire up the printing presses."
There's almost $600 billion in paper US dollars in circulation, and that's not counting equities, bonds, money on deposit, etc. Increasing the money supply by a couple hundred billion or so would piss people off and knock the dollar down a bit, but if China tries to fsck with us on the world stage like that, it'd happen and people would have to just deal. And the Federal debt goes down too.
Contrary to what the movie "Pearl Harbor" would have you believe, American pilots didn't fight in the Battle of Britain before America entered the war. The Flying Tigers were helping the Chinese fight the Japanese, though.
Hate to burst your bubble, but when you have a billion people, most living in rural areas raising chickens, ducks, and pigs, you're going to have a lot of bugs moving back and forth. Most flus have originated in China, even way back before we knew what DNA was. The major exception seems to be the flu of 1918, which they think came from Kansas (strangely enough, in 1918 it was a very rural area with people raising chickens, ducks, and pigs).
Animal domestication is the major source of disease. American Indians were mostly hunter/gatherers and didn't have domesticated animals like Europeans did and were subsequently wiped out by diseases like smallpox (which, I believe, originally came from cattle, probably a mutated strain of cowpox).
China will gain power the way the US did for the first 170 years of its existance. Industrial and commercial might. They won't need to fight for access to Mideast oil; they'll just outbid us.
Yes, because it looks just like a CD, which has been around for, oh, 15 years, it's bloody obvious they should be able to *record* on it. And, uh, how many people buy a VHS movie in the store, take it home, and record over it (intentionally)? And when they ask "What's 5.1 sound?", it's immediately obvious from the answer that they will have to have five speakers and a subwoofer to do 5.1 sound, and their old stereo isn't going to cut it.
There really wasn't anything surprising about DVDs. What made them so popular was you could buy a 2-hour movie for less than a 45 minute album. Now, something that installs a rootkit, that's surprising.
You know that Playboy makes plenty of DVDs, right? They are a lot better looking than almost any pr0n star. And, yes, HDTV will accentuate flaws. It's already making mainstream actresses stress out and is driving major improvements in the entertainment industry makeup field (and probably lighting, too).
So, when you got a speeding ticket, did your parents send you to hell to writhe in agony for all of eternity? Cause that's kind of the problem I have with your all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful god.