If it really works they could create a business out of it and retire.
But if it really is nuclear something, I doubt they want to try to scale it up until they know what's really going on.
The problem is the nickel metal hydride battery manufacturers have been screwing around with nickel and hydrogen for a long time on a very large scale without vaporizing the planet, so regardless of what is going on, scaling it up will probably be as harmless as a nearby battery plant.
They could have accidentally made a Nickel-Hydrogen battery. A remarkably efficient battery, which itself is pretty useful, but until they provide some concrete evidence that fusion is producing the majority of the power output here (e.g. a high fast-neutron flux), other methods of power production are more likely.
Assuming the device actually works, of course.
A better question, is why does their nickel-metal hydride "reactor" produce excess power that never showed up when the NiMH researchers did their rather extensive battery experiments in the past? News stories about batteries spontaneously combusting are mostly about lithium batteries not NiMH.
Now if it was common knowledge that NiMH battery plants occasionally went nuclear, then maybe their experiment would have some merit, but...
I recall some obscure articles and google ads about CNT products for sale. Unless you're a material engineer doing something very obscure work you're unlikely to have a use for it though.
Note that fullerenes form in natural soot. So its unlikely a typical fullerene is super dangerous.
One huge problem is fullerenes are a class of material, not one individual atom (err, well, they're mostly C) or molecule. You know how pissed off chemists were about that superman movie where he dissolved a computer using "acid" so a generation of the clueless masses grew up thinking there is an element or something called "acid" and all acids including citric will instantly vaporize steel, fiberglass, and silicon? Well the nano guys get that way about fullerenes and cancer. Could you theoretically micromachine a nanotube that is the exact same size and shape as an asbestos fiber and then inhale a bunch of them and die? Well, yeah if you intentionally tried really freaking hard, but why would you do something that stupid?
Kind of like blaming that new-fangled "metal" technology because people get hurt when tiny chemically propelled chunks of "metal" strike them in their heart, or when you make a hundred pound pile of U235 bad stuff happens, so I suggest we all live in fear of this "metal" technology and watch lots of scary TV.
You can always identify people whom have never read Knuth because they get hung up on it not using the hot new language of the month. "Now with Erlang!"
On the other hand, the people that "read" Knuth but didn't understand any of it, get even by complaining about the magnetic tape merge scenarios, and "doesn't everyone just use the qsort routine anyway?"
The folks whom "get it" understand its not training, but education.
But more seriously - it would make far more sense to buy this as an e-book that I can search on my computer wherever I am.
I do enough of my programming from home or from a coffee shop that it'd be rather useless to have these things stuck on my office bookshelf (except, perhaps to look a bit pretentious).
Kindle / etc / generally seems to suffer under the load of large equations and diagrams. OK for the latest Tom Clancy or Gibbons decline and fall of the roman empire, not so hot for this application.
If you're talking about PDFs of Knuths work to read on the laptop, those are, uh, available, from the usual sources.
Personally I was more excited to receive the final (?) eighth collection of Knuths papers that being the "fun and games". Got it in the mail last week, barely cracked open yet. Has his "famous" MAD magazine articles.
Now an off the wall question, do people really program in coffee shops (other than ron ivi) ? I have the impression locally that they are bar / meat market equivalent for non-drinkers, people whom want to re-enact "friends" episodes, and homeless / urban campers ala the recent one zillion "hacker public radio" series. Do you just leave your $$$$$$ laptop and confidential corporate papers on the desk when you go to the can? Does the staff tolerate your presence?
I have worked in parks, at least a couple hours until the battery dies, its not like I'm locked in my office.
Now I wish they would sell 4A + the empty box, so I could upgrade my 1-3. But my guess is that the publishers haven't read the books, and didn't plan for upgrades.
Its a CS computer science book. Something like "apt-get dist-upgrade" is mostly appreciated by IT people not CS people. Bonus if you understand why its apt-get dist-upgrade instead of apt-get upgrade, unless you plan on keeping your old box (for kindling?)
Putting it on a website for free won't remove it from the torrent sites.
Which is why they need to put it on the torrent sites themselves. With commercials. And a farm of paid, well connected, colo-ed seeders. And intelligent filenames.
Good rips drive out bad rips. If their rip happens to be the best, with the single sole exception of having some commercials...
Which would you download:
teh_daley.sho-January-24-2011_handeld_camcordercap_by_the.leet_team_sadlkbgf_320x240.mkv with a whopping 2 seeders
or:
2011-01-24_The_Daily_Show_HiDef_video_5.1_sound_official_release.avi with 200 lightning fast seeders, which happens to have commercials included?
On one condition: The ads don't treat me like I'm an idiot, and they don't try to capitalize on the "captive audience" concept.
By captive audience concept do you mean repeating the same commercial twice during each and every commercial break?
Alternately I'm annoyed by promo commercials for the show itself (next week on !) that make me stop the DVR for a second and maybe accidentally see the end of the preceding commercial.
For some reason, most advertisers in the US seem to instead focus on the lowest common denominator....
Average IQ of "tv watchers" is below 100 and dropping. There is a strong feedback loop where the intelligence level of shows (and advertisements) drops, so the average of viewers whom still watch tend to drop, leading to lower shows succeeding, leading to further drops, etc.
Its an extremely strong feedback loop... regardless of trends in the greater population, with regards to the subpopulation of people whom still watch TV, we are rapidly approaching idiocracy / "ow my balls" level where that is all thats on, because no one watches except people low enough to find that insightful, and the advertisers whom cater to them.
Think about it... the advertisements are not an average cross section of products aimed at the "LCD" but are specifically products of nearly exclusive interest to the LCD subgroup. I see a lot of ads for payday loan stores, dollar stores, criminal defense lawyers, flashy giant SUV wheel rims, walmart, mcdonalds, etc.
So, essentially the bottom line of AOL is bolstered by "inertia"? Is there a compelling reason why someone hasn't told the investors and / or the people getting bilked?
Yeah, right after we get rid of Microsoft, whom has the same business model.
And particularly the person who actually NEEDS AOL?
I was also bit mystified by the 25% actually needing it.
It seems to be insurance.
Can you absolutely 100% guarantee that your hotel or conference center will have a phone line to dial up and check your email etc when business traveling? Yeah, pretty much. Thats right up there with "having sheets" or "has HVAC" or "has electricity".
Can you absolutely 100% guarantee that your hotel or conference center will have WORKING wifi? Well, err,... um... Yeah maybe 90% but can you financially afford to take that chance for only $50/month to AOL?
"Engineer", like "doctor" is a reserved title in many societies.
Exactly, yes, thats the stupid part.
Photographers and writers are not responsible by what they do for the lives of people.
OK how about automobile brake mechanic, natural gas pipeline welder, or taxi driver? None requiring a "4 year degree" and all responsible for more lives that your average EE or CE or frankly, most engineers in general (note, average, not the single most important guy ever to work in the field on the largest project ever)
You're confusing jobs requiring substantial proven past experience and certification such as P.E. licensing, with the noun engineer meaning someone whom engineers, in other words more or less solves problems using the scientific method and usually a lot of math, which is perfectly applicable to, say, a network engineer.
By your definition, my having a four year degree means I didn't cook my breakfast this morning, I engineered it, and I didn't take out the trash bags but performed sanitary engineering upon my domicile, yet a non degree holding ham radio guy designing and building his own equipment is not really doing electrical engineering work.
The only reliable work in America going forward are those that must be physically done here. Like being a bus-boy, stocking grocery shelves, or folding clothes at the GAP.
Interestingly, around here, those jobs are now exclusively done by illegals. May as well put up a sign "citizens need not apply". Every job I had from 15 yrs to 24 yrs is now strictly "citizens need not apply". So you've got a country with 300 million citizens in it, none of whom can be employed either because they're citizens or their jobs are now done in other countries. I wonder how that will turn out?
That stuff is crap, thats why it has no viewers. When I was a kid, I could learn something watching PBS NOVA despite there being no competition such as wikipedia. Suddenly, it was all about the historical re-enactments and computer animations and feel good human interest filler material.
Why is it that they were great when they had no competition, but now they're fighting the internet/wikipedia/google and are failing so badly as to make an hour of watching, less useful than two minutes with google?
Last NOVA I ever watched, admittedly a long time ago, was about Fermats last theorem being proven by Andrew Wiles and I sat thru an hour of where he grew up, what a nice house he lives in, his desk is covered with junk, he works really hard, and if I recall correctly he has a pet cat. They finish all that and I get excited that I'm about to actually learn something, and they roll the credits... WTF? Junk. Never watch NOVA again. Stick to google and wikipedia.
I was just thinking of this the other day. We put so much importance on children to excel in sports, hoping that one dey they will make it into the NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB that we neglect to realize how minuscule that chance is. The problem with trying to excel at sports is that if you aren't good enough to be in the top league, you are basically just a point where you don't make any money at all, or at best have to have a second job even to make ends meet. Even if you are good enough at football to make it to the CFL, you still have to have a second job because you don't make enough doing your sport. On the other hand,
Zing... Up to that point I thought you were going to savage the academic sciences, not sports.
Note the only people whom ever say we have too few PHDs running around and we need to grow or import more, are the ones whom think paying a postdoc $25K/yr is way too high.
Unless he has a 4-year degree in engineering, he is not an engineer. Its very unfortunate that the job title "engineer" is so commonly misused in the US.
Unless he has a 4 year degree in photography, he is not a photographer. Unless he has a 4 year degree in english lit, he is not a writer. Unless he has a 4 year degree in business, he is not a manager. Repetition of a meme is not proof of a meme.
Think back to the TV shows of the '50's and '60's. We had an Astronaut/physics guy as the main character in I dream of Jeanie, A senior marketing executive as the husband of a witch in Bewitched, and many many others. The key factor was, they were all intelligent.
These days we have Homer Simpson and the King of queens, et al.
That has a lot to do with man bashing. Intelligent women are permitted on prime time, just not intelligent while normal men, for purely political reasons.
>In fact, one can argue the opposite: that engineers and scientists focused on engineering and science, rather than politics, is a better way to insure innovation.
Only if they can do their work on a zero budget and don't mind earning the equivalent of hourly minimum wage or less. Pretty good approximation for mathematicians (although the general/. opinion is mathematicians are not "scientists", they are artists or conquerors or circus clowns or some hilarious bs like that). Not so good of an approximation for aerospace engineers or chemical engineers.
His background check was so extensive that it went on for 3 months, while he just sat around and brought home paychecks for doing absolutely NOTHING.
In the US Army in the early 90s, we certainly were not allowed to do our job, but we did not do "nothing". I became quite skilled and the operation of a lawnmower, broom, and lawn rake. Luckily for me if you signed up early, the army began the research early, so I only had about one weeks experience.
Maybe it's less efficient, but so what? The source is free, so even if it is less effiecnt, if the total energy can be maintained, then it's a wash.
Welcome to EROEI energy returned on energy invested. Lets say you can build a plant that makes 10 million barrels of crude oil equivalent over its lifetime. If it takes less than 2 million barrels of crude to dig the materials out of the ground, pay the folks whom maintain the plant, and finally pack it in the landfill when its done, you made a profit of 8 million barrels.
On the other hand, if it takes 20 million barrels of crude to refine the materials, build the plant, maintain the plant, decommission the plant, not so hot of a deal anymore.
Once you get beyond that, you reach financial limitations, like it would be nice to get a rate of return on investment above 0.0000001% or else you won't get the loan to build the plant.
Effectively what they're doing is turning sunlight into chemical energy. The process sounds complex at first glance, so can it be more efficient than other methods of capturing solar energy? From a technical POV the percentage of sunlight captured is interesting. But from a business POV the costs are interesting, and I think overall more important: real estate footprint, amortized capital costs, and operational costs. Where do these fall relative to other methods?
Well, best comparison model is probably farming, where your typical crop runs about 1 or 2 percent efficiency from sunlight to glucose but these guys can almost make methane at 15% efficiency. Also fertilizer and insecticide costs are zero and theoretically you can produce whenever the sun is up regardless of outdoor temperature.
So I'm thinking it would be a bit more capital intensive and much less risky than industrial farming.
I find it truly amazing that we can utilize this gigantic ball of burning energy that shows up every single day to help power things on Earth. Why haven't we thought of taking advantage of this abundant, renewable and FREE resource before????
MTBF, on an annualized basis, is almost exactly 12 hours. On a month to month basis, especially in polar areas, it approaches zero roughly once per year.
Slashdot Mirror
If it really works they could create a business out of it and retire.
But if it really is nuclear something, I doubt they want to try to scale it up until they know what's really going on.
The problem is the nickel metal hydride battery manufacturers have been screwing around with nickel and hydrogen for a long time on a very large scale without vaporizing the planet, so regardless of what is going on, scaling it up will probably be as harmless as a nearby battery plant.
They could have accidentally made a Nickel-Hydrogen battery. A remarkably efficient battery, which itself is pretty useful, but until they provide some concrete evidence that fusion is producing the majority of the power output here (e.g. a high fast-neutron flux), other methods of power production are more likely.
Assuming the device actually works, of course.
A better question, is why does their nickel-metal hydride "reactor" produce excess power that never showed up when the NiMH researchers did their rather extensive battery experiments in the past? News stories about batteries spontaneously combusting are mostly about lithium batteries not NiMH.
Now if it was common knowledge that NiMH battery plants occasionally went nuclear, then maybe their experiment would have some merit, but...
I recall some obscure articles and google ads about CNT products for sale. Unless you're a material engineer doing something very obscure work you're unlikely to have a use for it though.
Off the shelf at
http://www.kleancarbon.com/Single-Wall-Carbon-Nano-tubes.aspx
Kind of expensive.
Note that fullerenes form in natural soot. So its unlikely a typical fullerene is super dangerous.
One huge problem is fullerenes are a class of material, not one individual atom (err, well, they're mostly C) or molecule. You know how pissed off chemists were about that superman movie where he dissolved a computer using "acid" so a generation of the clueless masses grew up thinking there is an element or something called "acid" and all acids including citric will instantly vaporize steel, fiberglass, and silicon? Well the nano guys get that way about fullerenes and cancer. Could you theoretically micromachine a nanotube that is the exact same size and shape as an asbestos fiber and then inhale a bunch of them and die? Well, yeah if you intentionally tried really freaking hard, but why would you do something that stupid?
Kind of like blaming that new-fangled "metal" technology because people get hurt when tiny chemically propelled chunks of "metal" strike them in their heart, or when you make a hundred pound pile of U235 bad stuff happens, so I suggest we all live in fear of this "metal" technology and watch lots of scary TV.
You can always identify people whom have never read Knuth because they get hung up on it not using the hot new language of the month. "Now with Erlang!"
On the other hand, the people that "read" Knuth but didn't understand any of it, get even by complaining about the magnetic tape merge scenarios, and "doesn't everyone just use the qsort routine anyway?"
The folks whom "get it" understand its not training, but education.
But more seriously - it would make far more sense to buy this as an e-book that I can search on my computer wherever I am.
I do enough of my programming from home or from a coffee shop that it'd be rather useless to have these things stuck on my office bookshelf (except, perhaps to look a bit pretentious).
Kindle / etc / generally seems to suffer under the load of large equations and diagrams. OK for the latest Tom Clancy or Gibbons decline and fall of the roman empire, not so hot for this application.
If you're talking about PDFs of Knuths work to read on the laptop, those are, uh, available, from the usual sources.
Personally I was more excited to receive the final (?) eighth collection of Knuths papers that being the "fun and games". Got it in the mail last week, barely cracked open yet. Has his "famous" MAD magazine articles.
Now an off the wall question, do people really program in coffee shops (other than ron ivi) ? I have the impression locally that they are bar / meat market equivalent for non-drinkers, people whom want to re-enact "friends" episodes, and homeless / urban campers ala the recent one zillion "hacker public radio" series. Do you just leave your $$$$$$ laptop and confidential corporate papers on the desk when you go to the can? Does the staff tolerate your presence?
I have worked in parks, at least a couple hours until the battery dies, its not like I'm locked in my office.
Now I wish they would sell 4A + the empty box, so I could upgrade my 1-3. But my guess is that the publishers haven't read the books, and didn't plan for upgrades.
Its a CS computer science book. Something like "apt-get dist-upgrade" is mostly appreciated by IT people not CS people. Bonus if you understand why its apt-get dist-upgrade instead of apt-get upgrade, unless you plan on keeping your old box (for kindling?)
Putting it on a website for free won't remove it from the torrent sites.
Which is why they need to put it on the torrent sites themselves. With commercials. And a farm of paid, well connected, colo-ed seeders. And intelligent filenames.
Good rips drive out bad rips. If their rip happens to be the best, with the single sole exception of having some commercials...
Which would you download:
teh_daley.sho-January-24-2011_handeld_camcordercap_by_the.leet_team_sadlkbgf_320x240.mkv with a whopping 2 seeders
or:
2011-01-24_The_Daily_Show_HiDef_video_5.1_sound_official_release.avi with 200 lightning fast seeders, which happens to have commercials included?
On one condition: The ads don't treat me like I'm an idiot, and they don't try to capitalize on the "captive audience" concept.
By captive audience concept do you mean repeating the same commercial twice during each and every commercial break?
Alternately I'm annoyed by promo commercials for the show itself (next week on !) that make me stop the DVR for a second and maybe accidentally see the end of the preceding commercial.
For some reason, most advertisers in the US seem to instead focus on the lowest common denominator ....
Average IQ of "tv watchers" is below 100 and dropping. There is a strong feedback loop where the intelligence level of shows (and advertisements) drops, so the average of viewers whom still watch tend to drop, leading to lower shows succeeding, leading to further drops, etc.
Its an extremely strong feedback loop... regardless of trends in the greater population, with regards to the subpopulation of people whom still watch TV, we are rapidly approaching idiocracy / "ow my balls" level where that is all thats on, because no one watches except people low enough to find that insightful, and the advertisers whom cater to them.
Think about it... the advertisements are not an average cross section of products aimed at the "LCD" but are specifically products of nearly exclusive interest to the LCD subgroup. I see a lot of ads for payday loan stores, dollar stores, criminal defense lawyers, flashy giant SUV wheel rims, walmart, mcdonalds, etc.
So, essentially the bottom line of AOL is bolstered by "inertia"? Is there a compelling reason why someone hasn't told the investors and / or the people getting bilked?
Yeah, right after we get rid of Microsoft, whom has the same business model.
And particularly the person who actually NEEDS AOL?
I was also bit mystified by the 25% actually needing it.
It seems to be insurance.
Can you absolutely 100% guarantee that your hotel or conference center will have a phone line to dial up and check your email etc when business traveling? Yeah, pretty much. Thats right up there with "having sheets" or "has HVAC" or "has electricity".
Can you absolutely 100% guarantee that your hotel or conference center will have WORKING wifi? Well, err, ... um... Yeah maybe 90% but can you financially afford to take that chance for only $50/month to AOL?
"Engineer", like "doctor" is a reserved title in many societies.
Exactly, yes, thats the stupid part.
Photographers and writers are not responsible by what they do for the lives of people.
OK how about automobile brake mechanic, natural gas pipeline welder, or taxi driver? None requiring a "4 year degree" and all responsible for more lives that your average EE or CE or frankly, most engineers in general (note, average, not the single most important guy ever to work in the field on the largest project ever)
You're confusing jobs requiring substantial proven past experience and certification such as P.E. licensing, with the noun engineer meaning someone whom engineers, in other words more or less solves problems using the scientific method and usually a lot of math, which is perfectly applicable to, say, a network engineer.
By your definition, my having a four year degree means I didn't cook my breakfast this morning, I engineered it, and I didn't take out the trash bags but performed sanitary engineering upon my domicile, yet a non degree holding ham radio guy designing and building his own equipment is not really doing electrical engineering work.
The only reliable work in America going forward are those that must be physically done here. Like being a bus-boy, stocking grocery shelves, or folding clothes at the GAP.
Interestingly, around here, those jobs are now exclusively done by illegals.
May as well put up a sign "citizens need not apply". Every job I had from 15 yrs to 24 yrs is now strictly "citizens need not apply".
So you've got a country with 300 million citizens in it, none of whom can be employed either because they're citizens or their jobs are now done in other countries.
I wonder how that will turn out?
the good science (from PBS) has no viewers.
That stuff is crap, thats why it has no viewers. When I was a kid, I could learn something watching PBS NOVA despite there being no competition such as wikipedia. Suddenly, it was all about the historical re-enactments and computer animations and feel good human interest filler material.
Why is it that they were great when they had no competition, but now they're fighting the internet/wikipedia/google and are failing so badly as to make an hour of watching, less useful than two minutes with google?
Last NOVA I ever watched, admittedly a long time ago, was about Fermats last theorem being proven by Andrew Wiles and I sat thru an hour of where he grew up, what a nice house he lives in, his desk is covered with junk, he works really hard, and if I recall correctly he has a pet cat. They finish all that and I get excited that I'm about to actually learn something, and they roll the credits... WTF? Junk. Never watch NOVA again. Stick to google and wikipedia.
I was just thinking of this the other day. We put so much importance on children to excel in sports, hoping that one dey they will make it into the NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB that we neglect to realize how minuscule that chance is. The problem with trying to excel at sports is that if you aren't good enough to be in the top league, you are basically just a point where you don't make any money at all, or at best have to have a second job even to make ends meet. Even if you are good enough at football to make it to the CFL, you still have to have a second job because you don't make enough doing your sport. On the other hand,
Zing... Up to that point I thought you were going to savage the academic sciences, not sports.
Note the only people whom ever say we have too few PHDs running around and we need to grow or import more, are the ones whom think paying a postdoc $25K/yr is way too high.
The one that doesn't require me to work 80 hours a week under insane stress levels
In other words, why I did not apply to med school. You've got to wonder what they're thinking (or not) when setting up hazing like that.
Unless he has a 4-year degree in engineering, he is not an engineer. Its very unfortunate that the job title "engineer" is so commonly misused in the US.
Unless he has a 4 year degree in photography, he is not a photographer. Unless he has a 4 year degree in english lit, he is not a writer. Unless he has a 4 year degree in business, he is not a manager. Repetition of a meme is not proof of a meme.
Think back to the TV shows of the '50's and '60's. We had an Astronaut/physics guy as the main character in I dream of Jeanie, A senior marketing executive as the husband of a witch in Bewitched, and many many others. The key factor was, they were all intelligent.
These days we have Homer Simpson and the King of queens, et al.
That has a lot to do with man bashing. Intelligent women are permitted on prime time, just not intelligent while normal men, for purely political reasons.
Hey, then there are some in Politics! Social Engineers and Psuedo Scientists!
Is theology a (social) science? We have way the heck too many of that type in charge, here in the usa.
>In fact, one can argue the opposite: that engineers and scientists focused on engineering and science, rather than politics, is a better way to insure innovation.
Only if they can do their work on a zero budget and don't mind earning the equivalent of hourly minimum wage or less. Pretty good approximation for mathematicians (although the general /. opinion is mathematicians are not "scientists", they are artists or conquerors or circus clowns or some hilarious bs like that). Not so good of an approximation for aerospace engineers or chemical engineers.
His background check was so extensive that it went on for 3 months, while he just sat around and brought home paychecks for doing absolutely NOTHING.
In the US Army in the early 90s, we certainly were not allowed to do our job, but we did not do "nothing". I became quite skilled and the operation of a lawnmower, broom, and lawn rake. Luckily for me if you signed up early, the army began the research early, so I only had about one weeks experience.
pfpfpfpfpfpsdpfspdfpasfoawiertkgwerchgcsdhs vdghs ch
sdfghsdf
No, thats Perl. This is a book about "silverlight"
Maybe it's less efficient, but so what? The source is free, so even if it is less effiecnt, if the total energy can be maintained, then it's a wash.
Welcome to EROEI energy returned on energy invested. Lets say you can build a plant that makes 10 million barrels of crude oil equivalent over its lifetime. If it takes less than 2 million barrels of crude to dig the materials out of the ground, pay the folks whom maintain the plant, and finally pack it in the landfill when its done, you made a profit of 8 million barrels.
On the other hand, if it takes 20 million barrels of crude to refine the materials, build the plant, maintain the plant, decommission the plant, not so hot of a deal anymore.
Once you get beyond that, you reach financial limitations, like it would be nice to get a rate of return on investment above 0.0000001% or else you won't get the loan to build the plant.
Effectively what they're doing is turning sunlight into chemical energy. The process sounds complex at first glance, so can it be more efficient than other methods of capturing solar energy? From a technical POV the percentage of sunlight captured is interesting. But from a business POV the costs are interesting, and I think overall more important: real estate footprint, amortized capital costs, and operational costs. Where do these fall relative to other methods?
Well, best comparison model is probably farming, where your typical crop runs about 1 or 2 percent efficiency from sunlight to glucose but these guys can almost make methane at 15% efficiency. Also fertilizer and insecticide costs are zero and theoretically you can produce whenever the sun is up regardless of outdoor temperature.
So I'm thinking it would be a bit more capital intensive and much less risky than industrial farming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
I find it truly amazing that we can utilize this gigantic ball of burning energy that shows up every single day to help power things on Earth. Why haven't we thought of taking advantage of this abundant, renewable and FREE resource before????
MTBF, on an annualized basis, is almost exactly 12 hours. On a month to month basis, especially in polar areas, it approaches zero roughly once per year.