These are 7MWh sodium-suplhur units, with a 1MW output capacity. You'd only need 135 EESU units to match it. A vaguely half-remembered stat puts it's production cost per piece at around $4000, which puts a 7MWh unit at a mere $540,000 ; a snip compared to the $1M dollars for these sodium-sulphur things, without the tribulations of operating at 700 degrees C.
Yup, definitely durians. Big and stinky. Even those evil bastards who used to mute your modem and dial a premium rate number if you made the mistake of surfing their porn site never charged that much per MB.
My wife often asks me for help with Office, on the general principle that I'm the computer geek, and she isn't. But I probably know less about the features of office suites than she does ; I certainly use them less.
I sometimes use spreadsheets to make a few calculations. I use Word when I have to fill in some piece of red tape that's a Word form.
I've donated many hours of my time to tools that make my life easier - almost entirely selfishly, because if I donate my patches and features, I don't have to maintain a separate version for myself.
I don't use an office suite enough to care though, and I suspect the same is true of the majority of programmers, which means that it's likely that to get someone to write code for OOo, you have to pay them, and also that they are not in a position to pick and choose their projects, which likely means that they are probably not as good as say, kernel developers, who almost certainly enjoy the geek thrill of getting cool new hardware working smoothly.
Of course they want to sell you new media. Old media has the unfortunate quality of being old. Should copyright extension insanity ever end, old content is closer to becoming free content.
If they can induce you to fill your time with new, "premium" content by splashing adverts at you and skewing selection algorithms on Amazon and the like, they will prefer to every time. New stuff commands a higher price. New stuff has higher margins. New stuff keeps the media industry running, and they have clout.
Old stuff is, like, yesterdays stuff. Even if it's better.
The typical argument here is that you'd install a second one of these cells in your house, trickle charge it, and fast-charge the car from it when you get home.
Domestic use for a cell like this intrigues me just as much as automotive use. 52kWh is enough for at least a few days domestic use, more than enough to compensate for natural variations in the output of your windmill, solar, etc. As long as you have an average generation output high enough, the arguments against local micro-generation based on variability of insolation and wind go away.
As someone who's been watching this particular tech for a while, I still really hope that it works ; it could really help us all.
In fact, if it does really work, Mr Obama could do worse than making the inventors bona-fide American Heroes, giving them a cool billion dollars apiece for their trouble, and then... freeing the technology.
Let's face it - if they work, the Chinese will be knocking them out by the tonne with no qualms within a year or two. Better to start everyone on a level playing field.
Although, somewhat spookily, you really have to mess around with kernel options and whatnot to get Ubuntu to even boot on MS Virtual PC, whereas it just runs as-is on VirtualBox (and I presume on VMWare too).
I've heard that other distros run fine ; what a shame that the most threatening^W popular distro doesn't.
Ah well. VirtualBox is really rather nice, especially for something that is so generously licensed - their no-fee "personal" license runs along the lines of "use it for anything you like, even running your business, as long as you download and install it personally and don't distribute it".
I completely agree - I have a pair of mutually-incompatible versions of the same application that won't co-exist on the same Windows machine, so I set up a VBox machine to put them on. I had to clone the base install, about 2GB, rather than just making a snapshot and installing either version on top of that snapshot and snapshotting them. If you want both versions, you have to sacrifice another 2GB of disk space or install one version natively (which isn't exactly convenient - one of the major reasons for having the VMs is that it's a complete pig to install correctly).
It's not like the virtual disk model is unprepared for it - it does support immutable and delta disks, and uses them when taking snapshots. You are allowed multiple nested snapshot levels. For reasons I don't grok this has not been translated into branching snapshot support.
This has been a feature in printer drivers for donkeys ages ; I remember an "eco" mode that only printed the outlines of the font. Much more flexible than having to use a particular font, and not all that noticable at smaller print sizes.
Basically violence has nothing to do with religion. People will use ANY religion as an excuse to justify their view they they are right and everyone else is wrong.
Imagine if you could present a complete mathematical proof with no wiggle room at all that a particular cultural viewpoint was just plain wrong.
Your average secular Joe might think about it and concede that they were wrong, and something might actually change for the better. Or they might just say "that sounds very nice, but I like my old opinion better".
A theist can stick their fingers in their ears and chant litanies, and is indeed, far more likely to, because their doctrine includes inbuilt mechanisms that tell them to resist all questions and doubts. They might even obey the instructions in their doctrine that tell them to destroy those with world views that conflict with theirs.
A scientist would examine and attempt to verify the other fellows position - and if he was right, may actually thank him for the enlightenment.
Yes, people will do violence for other reasons. But religion is inherently inflexible in a world where the one constant is change, produces a sense of entitlement to use any means - because the end is "Gods Will", and religious texts often contain actual explicit instructions to do violence to individuals and cultures that do not comply.
I do not concur that religion and violence are unassociated.
Medicine bored me to tears ; I liked the first two years of the curriculum, where all the science was, I hated the rest, which was largely drudge-work - memorization, memorization, memorization.
In the same way that a London cabbie has to have the "Knowledge" ; a doctor needs to perform a similar feat of memorization to become basically competant in medicine. It's very, very dull.
At medical school I concluded that being willing to work very hard was required to pass the course, but being very clever was not. If a London cabbie can win Mastermind, he could probably become a doctor.
I now program computers, for the UK National Health Service, so I suppose SOME use came out of my medical degree.
You can't really blame them for whining though. The biotech firms are still trying to commercialize things like Terminator Technology seeds. No, they don't grow miniature governators, they grow crops that produce sterile seeds - breaking the fundamental rule of agriculture (never eat your seedcorn), and placing control firmly in the hands of the company that controls the technology, Monsanto.
As the GPP points out, western agriculture is essentially addicted to Roundup. Monsanto already directly forbids reserving Roundup Ready® seed for the next crop, but this technology would give that real teeth.
Golden Rice is a great example of how technology should be used - seeing a problem, and trying to fix it. The technology has been donated in full to a charity overseeing it's development for the target niche. But the only problems that some people see is that their profit margins are too low, which is sad.
Raising meat in the quanities that western society eats it in is very inefficient.
The majority of agricultural land in the US is given over to beef production, either for the cows or the crops they eat. A 1/4 pounder requires enough land for 36 pounds of potatoes. For each acre of land growing vegetable matter for people, there are 14 acres growing hay for cows.
When people used to raise meat, it was because the meat animal could convert plant matter that would otherwise be inedible into something useful ; in addition, the animal is doing a lot of the work - roaming the pasture harvesting plant matter - all of which the farmer no longer has to do. It's like having a pool of cheap farm labour that you eat at the end of the season. So while meat production was still not efficient it was a way of raising output without needing extra arable land and farm labour.
Cut to today ; no-one has to starve, vegetable crop yields are enormous because of modern agricultural technologies. The output of vegetable agriculture is far greater than required to support the human population because most of it is specifically being grown for the cows.
From a Darwinian viewpoint, the cows are incredibly successful, as long as they continue to be heavy, meaty, and delicious. You could consider them a parasite on human society.
Now, I like beef. But I could stand to eat less of it. And I already eat far less than the average American. (UK, 17.3 Kg/y vs USA 30.4 Kg/y, 1995 figures). That statistic right there is very revealing. The UK, an affluent western nation, eats approximately half the beef.
Imagine if the USA ate half the beef, which seems reasonable, since the UK can do it. Suddenly all those statistics above become shocking - you free up six times the current area of arable land being used for human-consumed crops (we'll assume that we had to claw one of the seven multiples back to grow soy or something to replace the beef). So you could feed a population about five times the size of the USA population in grand (vegetarian) style, that's around the population of China, about 1.3 billion people.
Or....
Grow trees and offset the carbon deficit.
Give it back to the wilderness and have some big-ass national parks (to walk off your big national ass in).
Grow biodiesel crops and gain energy independance*
* (well, maybe not ; some figures would be helpful. If you can do it with 4% of the Arizona desert and some pond scum though...)
So if in the future we hooked up newly born cows to a Virtual Reality system ala. the matrix, where there was no suffering
I raise a similar point with many vegetarians ; if you could have vatgrown cloned meat that was identical to the "real" stuff, would you eat it? Most of those I speak to say yes.
I draw the line at carnivores ; for reasons of both health and efficiency.
It takes 10 kilos (or more) of vegetable matter to make a single kilo of herbivourous meat. The same ratio applies to carnivorous meat, only they are eating meat ; so carnivorous meat animals are incredibly inefficient to farm.
In addition, because carnviores are at the top of the food chain, they are far more likely to carry diseases that would infect us (caught from their prey or feed), and they also bioconcentrate all non-eliminable toxins from the food chain below ; for an example you only have to consider Minamata Bay ; mercury compounds discharged into fishing waters at "safe" concentrations were concentrated by the food chain until it reached toxic concentrations in the human population.
OSS licenses function by copyright, not patents. Some licenses explicitly forbid you from exercising patents on software so licensed.
If others produce functionally equivalent software, this is not a violation of the license on the first piece (unless it's written into the EULA - and such terms are of untested legality, and certainly don't apply to anyone who isn't a customer). From my understanding, people are producing OSS versions of commercially licensed extensions anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
54 kWh.
But not such a silly idea.
These are 7MWh sodium-suplhur units, with a 1MW output capacity. You'd only need 135 EESU units to match it. A vaguely half-remembered stat puts it's production cost per piece at around $4000, which puts a 7MWh unit at a mere $540,000 ; a snip compared to the $1M dollars for these sodium-sulphur things, without the tribulations of operating at 700 degrees C.
At 10 seconds a text, those dudes are also spending 275 hours out of 720 each month texting each other.
This is how the human race will go extinct ... the last generation will have atrophied genitals and thumbs with an extra joint.
More like comparing apples to durians.
At $0.10 for 160 bytes, thats
1600 bytes for a dollar,
or $640 / MB
Yup, definitely durians. Big and stinky. Even those evil bastards who used to mute your modem and dial a premium rate number if you made the mistake of surfing their porn site never charged that much per MB.
In the EU it's still sucrose.
My wife loves Coke ; when she went to the states she thought the HFCS version was vile.
She doesn't drink it any more though after discovering the practices of their bottling plants in water-poor areas.
Exactly.
My wife often asks me for help with Office, on the general principle that I'm the computer geek, and she isn't. But I probably know less about the features of office suites than she does ; I certainly use them less.
I sometimes use spreadsheets to make a few calculations. I use Word when I have to fill in some piece of red tape that's a Word form.
I've donated many hours of my time to tools that make my life easier - almost entirely selfishly, because if I donate my patches and features, I don't have to maintain a separate version for myself.
I don't use an office suite enough to care though, and I suspect the same is true of the majority of programmers, which means that it's likely that to get someone to write code for OOo, you have to pay them, and also that they are not in a position to pick and choose their projects, which likely means that they are probably not as good as say, kernel developers, who almost certainly enjoy the geek thrill of getting cool new hardware working smoothly.
That would be a collective noun, not a plural.
I'll get my coat....
Of course they want to sell you new media. Old media has the unfortunate quality of being old. Should copyright extension insanity ever end, old content is closer to becoming free content.
If they can induce you to fill your time with new, "premium" content by splashing adverts at you and skewing selection algorithms on Amazon and the like, they will prefer to every time. New stuff commands a higher price. New stuff has higher margins. New stuff keeps the media industry running, and they have clout.
Old stuff is, like, yesterdays stuff. Even if it's better.
The typical argument here is that you'd install a second one of these cells in your house, trickle charge it, and fast-charge the car from it when you get home.
Domestic use for a cell like this intrigues me just as much as automotive use. 52kWh is enough for at least a few days domestic use, more than enough to compensate for natural variations in the output of your windmill, solar, etc. As long as you have an average generation output high enough, the arguments against local micro-generation based on variability of insolation and wind go away.
As someone who's been watching this particular tech for a while, I still really hope that it works ; it could really help us all.
In fact, if it does really work, Mr Obama could do worse than making the inventors bona-fide American Heroes, giving them a cool billion dollars apiece for their trouble, and then ... freeing the technology.
Let's face it - if they work, the Chinese will be knocking them out by the tonne with no qualms within a year or two. Better to start everyone on a level playing field.
even Microsoft
Although, somewhat spookily, you really have to mess around with kernel options and whatnot to get Ubuntu to even boot on MS Virtual PC, whereas it just runs as-is on VirtualBox (and I presume on VMWare too).
I've heard that other distros run fine ; what a shame that the most threatening^W popular distro doesn't.
Ah well. VirtualBox is really rather nice, especially for something that is so generously licensed - their no-fee "personal" license runs along the lines of "use it for anything you like, even running your business, as long as you download and install it personally and don't distribute it".
This feature is allegedly in progress.
I completely agree - I have a pair of mutually-incompatible versions of the same application that won't co-exist on the same Windows machine, so I set up a VBox machine to put them on. I had to clone the base install, about 2GB, rather than just making a snapshot and installing either version on top of that snapshot and snapshotting them. If you want both versions, you have to sacrifice another 2GB of disk space or install one version natively (which isn't exactly convenient - one of the major reasons for having the VMs is that it's a complete pig to install correctly).
It's not like the virtual disk model is unprepared for it - it does support immutable and delta disks, and uses them when taking snapshots. You are allowed multiple nested snapshot levels. For reasons I don't grok this has not been translated into branching snapshot support.
They could throw a few million the way of Eric Lerner as well.
I mean, after all, if we're going to have all these super-batteries we'll need some cheap 'leccy to fill them up with.
.. since the USA uses Imperial measures and definitely has the biggest asses.
Gnu's Not Underwater
This has been a feature in printer drivers for donkeys ages ; I remember an "eco" mode that only printed the outlines of the font. Much more flexible than having to use a particular font, and not all that noticable at smaller print sizes.
Basically violence has nothing to do with religion. People will use ANY religion as an excuse to justify their view they they are right and everyone else is wrong.
Imagine if you could present a complete mathematical proof with no wiggle room at all that a particular cultural viewpoint was just plain wrong.
Your average secular Joe might think about it and concede that they were wrong, and something might actually change for the better. Or they might just say "that sounds very nice, but I like my old opinion better".
A theist can stick their fingers in their ears and chant litanies, and is indeed, far more likely to, because their doctrine includes inbuilt mechanisms that tell them to resist all questions and doubts. They might even obey the instructions in their doctrine that tell them to destroy those with world views that conflict with theirs.
A scientist would examine and attempt to verify the other fellows position - and if he was right, may actually thank him for the enlightenment.
Yes, people will do violence for other reasons. But religion is inherently inflexible in a world where the one constant is change, produces a sense of entitlement to use any means - because the end is "Gods Will", and religious texts often contain actual explicit instructions to do violence to individuals and cultures that do not comply.
I do not concur that religion and violence are unassociated.
Or how about...
Scorched 3D
Free in both ways, networked and local play, installers for most platforms (including Windows and Ubuntu). And a whole extra DIMENSION, baby.
It also counts for pictures of individuals of legal age who look as if they are underage, according to recent legislation.
I could probably be done for child pornography if I took nudie pictures of my wife, and she's 34, just because she's so flat chested and petite.
Hey! The British love breasts enough to put as many as possible in several of their national newspapers. This man is clearly Belgian.
Medicine bored me to tears ; I liked the first two years of the curriculum, where all the science was, I hated the rest, which was largely drudge-work - memorization, memorization, memorization.
In the same way that a London cabbie has to have the "Knowledge" ; a doctor needs to perform a similar feat of memorization to become basically competant in medicine. It's very, very dull.
At medical school I concluded that being willing to work very hard was required to pass the course, but being very clever was not. If a London cabbie can win Mastermind, he could probably become a doctor.
I now program computers, for the UK National Health Service, so I suppose SOME use came out of my medical degree.
You can't really blame them for whining though. The biotech firms are still trying to commercialize things like Terminator Technology seeds. No, they don't grow miniature governators, they grow crops that produce sterile seeds - breaking the fundamental rule of agriculture (never eat your seedcorn), and placing control firmly in the hands of the company that controls the technology, Monsanto.
As the GPP points out, western agriculture is essentially addicted to Roundup. Monsanto already directly forbids reserving Roundup Ready® seed for the next crop, but this technology would give that real teeth.
Golden Rice is a great example of how technology should be used - seeing a problem, and trying to fix it. The technology has been donated in full to a charity overseeing it's development for the target niche. But the only problems that some people see is that their profit margins are too low, which is sad.
Raising meat in the quanities that western society eats it in is very inefficient.
The majority of agricultural land in the US is given over to beef production, either for the cows or the crops they eat. A 1/4 pounder requires enough land for 36 pounds of potatoes. For each acre of land growing vegetable matter for people, there are 14 acres growing hay for cows.
When people used to raise meat, it was because the meat animal could convert plant matter that would otherwise be inedible into something useful ; in addition, the animal is doing a lot of the work - roaming the pasture harvesting plant matter - all of which the farmer no longer has to do. It's like having a pool of cheap farm labour that you eat at the end of the season. So while meat production was still not efficient it was a way of raising output without needing extra arable land and farm labour.
Cut to today ; no-one has to starve, vegetable crop yields are enormous because of modern agricultural technologies. The output of vegetable agriculture is far greater than required to support the human population because most of it is specifically being grown for the cows.
From a Darwinian viewpoint, the cows are incredibly successful, as long as they continue to be heavy, meaty, and delicious. You could consider them a parasite on human society.
Now, I like beef. But I could stand to eat less of it. And I already eat far less than the average American. (UK, 17.3 Kg/y vs USA 30.4 Kg/y, 1995 figures). That statistic right there is very revealing. The UK, an affluent western nation, eats approximately half the beef.
Imagine if the USA ate half the beef, which seems reasonable, since the UK can do it. Suddenly all those statistics above become shocking - you free up six times the current area of arable land being used for human-consumed crops (we'll assume that we had to claw one of the seven multiples back to grow soy or something to replace the beef). So you could feed a population about five times the size of the USA population in grand (vegetarian) style, that's around the population of China, about 1.3 billion people.
Or ....
* (well, maybe not ; some figures would be helpful. If you can do it with 4% of the Arizona desert and some pond scum though...)
So if in the future we hooked up newly born cows to a Virtual Reality system ala. the matrix, where there was no suffering
I raise a similar point with many vegetarians ; if you could have vatgrown cloned meat that was identical to the "real" stuff, would you eat it? Most of those I speak to say yes.
I draw the line at carnivores ; for reasons of both health and efficiency.
It takes 10 kilos (or more) of vegetable matter to make a single kilo of herbivourous meat. The same ratio applies to carnivorous meat, only they are eating meat ; so carnivorous meat animals are incredibly inefficient to farm.
In addition, because carnviores are at the top of the food chain, they are far more likely to carry diseases that would infect us (caught from their prey or feed), and they also bioconcentrate all non-eliminable toxins from the food chain below ; for an example you only have to consider Minamata Bay ; mercury compounds discharged into fishing waters at "safe" concentrations were concentrated by the food chain until it reached toxic concentrations in the human population.
#> make house
shouldn't you report them to the FSF?
OSS licenses function by copyright, not patents. Some licenses explicitly forbid you from exercising patents on software so licensed.
If others produce functionally equivalent software, this is not a violation of the license on the first piece (unless it's written into the EULA - and such terms are of untested legality, and certainly don't apply to anyone who isn't a customer). From my understanding, people are producing OSS versions of commercially licensed extensions anyway.