It sounds to me like the research is really carried out for the purposes of producing better batteries, and the application of "capturing CO2 to stave off climate change" was tagged on as an attention-grabber, either by the researcher or (more likely) the journalist.
When it comes to capturing CO2 from the air to reduce the impact on climate, I think most people aren't aware of the sheer scale of the amount of gas that needs to be captured to have any significant effect. If you burn a ton of coal, oil or your favorite fossil fuel, practically all the carbon is released as CO2. In the fuel, the carbon atoms are bound to each other and to hydrogen, whereas when released, they are bound to oxygen atoms, which are much heavier than hydrogen. Without actually doing a numerical estimate (which shouldn't be that hard, btw), it is fairly clear that the weight of the released CO2 would be in the same order of magnitude (and likely exceed) the weight of the fossil fuel burned. That is, to counterbalance the effect of burning a ton of oil, you would have to capture something similar to a ton of CO2. The volume of CO2 when compressed to a liquid would also be comparable to the volume of the oil burned.
In other words, in order to counterbalance the consumption of the oil carried by a single supertanker, you basically need another supertanker to carry away and sequestrate the corresponding amount of captured CO2 (assuming we have established a workable sink for sequestrating the CO2, which is a huge assumption in itself). For a society to base itself on carbon capture to counterbalance its burning of fossil fuel, it would need a whole parallel infrastructure of CO2 transport that would rival the infrastructure already in place for distributing the fuels in the first place.
So the logistics challenge of carbon capture in itself is enormous. Add to this the engineering challenge of actually capturing vast amounts of CO2, the challenge of finding proper sinks that are both large enough and long-term enough, and the huge amount of energy that would have to be consumed just to run the whole capture-transport-sequestration process, and the scale of the problem becomes apparent.
Stories such as these are in my eyes detrimental to agreeing on realistic solutions to the problems raised by climate change, as they generate some sense among the public that given enough time and money engineers will eventually come up with some technical device to "fix the problem" (if you even acknowledge it) .
In the end, the best we can do is probably the boring old solutions of restricting fossil fuel consumption (through regulation or taxation), reforestation, saving energy wherever possible and gradually moving towards a primary energy mix consisting of renewable and nuclear energy sources. Of course, we are always allowed to keep our fingers crossed that there will be a major technical breakthrough that will render energy and climate problems obsolete, but we shouldn't bet on it.
If your main concern is maxing out your storage on your laptop, then yes, HDD will probably make perfect sense to you. As I said, people have different needs.
My post was addressing the rhetoric (and rather sarcatic) comments of the OP, by pointing out that yes, there is real competition for what is most likely the majority of users out there. And if you define "year of the flash drive" as the year where flash drives have a larger than 50 percent market share, then yes, we will almost certainly see that year, and very soon too.
By the way, laptops aren't great for "accumulating stuff" anyway, unless you really don't worry about losing the stuff you have accumulated. I treat my family videos more precious than that.
I realize that people may have different needs. Although I also play games (downloaded over Steam) from time to time, I rarely need more than one or two of them installed at the same time on my laptop, and at home I have backup drives for stuff I don't actively use.
My point is that for a large group of users, myself included, huge storage capacities are no longer the biggest selling point when it comes to hard drives on portable machines.
Unless you plan to carry around a huge music or movie collection, I never understood the point of maxing out on hard disk capacity when buying a laptop anyway.
My heavily used, 3 year old laptop has a 200 GB hard drive which is shared between one Linux and one Windows 7 partition. I have installed all software I need as well as a significant quantity of music and photos and I have yet to worry about running out of hard disk space.
For users like me, the question when buying a new laptop would rather be: for the amount of cash you are ready to spend on the hard drive, what would likely be most useful to you? A lighter, less power-consuming and overall quicker SSD drive that provides twice your actual storage needs, or a slower, heavier, more power consuming and fragile magnetic drive that provides ten times your storage needs?
SSD made sense to me a long time ago, well before prices dropped to their current levels.
The Catholic Church had to change its position with respect to the priesthood: homosexuals would no longer be allowed. They simply couldn't risk the scandal of child abuse.
So rather than dealing with the problem by punishing those individuals actually responsible for the crime, it made more sense to exclude an entire group of people (which happened to be, conveniently, the homosexuals)?
This sounds like a trolling comment to me here on Slashdot, but I have actually heard this line of argument by Catholic apologists who are being dead serious about it, so one can never be too sure...
I use OpenOffice and MS Office extensively and often interchangeably. For Writer/Word and Calc/Excel, this rarely means trouble, unless you are relying on special macros.
However, Impress has still a way to go to be used as a PowerPoint replacement. Animations are jerky, and when viewing PowerPoint files colors and drawings are often rendered incorrectly, and it has a bad tendency to insert weird characters into the text, especially around line breaks. Although it is usable to review presentations for your own sake, the quirks renders it unusable for presenting all but the simplest PowerPoint slides to an audience.
Users of Access should not expect an easy time using Base. I guess one could argue that Base doesn't even try to be compatible with Access, so some might find this criticism unfair. On the other hand, if the goal is to convince users of MS Office to make a switch, it's a hard sell if you have to tell them that they must re-learn much of what they know.
Not sure what is most annoying with the Ron Paul fanatics; that they agree to virtually everything coming out of his mouth, or that they believe that those of us not supporting him have no idea about his politics.
Having not been able to read too many books this year, it's not easy to make a well-founded proposal for the "best book" of the year. That said, I still think "Oryx and Crake" by Margareth Atwood was a real enjoyment to read! The dystopia presented in this book is described credibly, funny and though-provokingly, and in many ways it doesn't look as far away as one might think. The imagined consequences of ever-more-powerful international corporation, increasing public indifference and disillusionment, genetic engineering gone astray, terrorism and much-too-visionary nerd-geniuses are keywords in describing the world in which "Snowman" grows up - eventually to find himself the last human being on earth. Not often you see the author of a science fiction novel being a favourite for receiving the Nobel Price.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds to me like the research is really carried out for the purposes of producing better batteries, and the application of "capturing CO2 to stave off climate change" was tagged on as an attention-grabber, either by the researcher or (more likely) the journalist.
When it comes to capturing CO2 from the air to reduce the impact on climate, I think most people aren't aware of the sheer scale of the amount of gas that needs to be captured to have any significant effect. If you burn a ton of coal, oil or your favorite fossil fuel, practically all the carbon is released as CO2. In the fuel, the carbon atoms are bound to each other and to hydrogen, whereas when released, they are bound to oxygen atoms, which are much heavier than hydrogen. Without actually doing a numerical estimate (which shouldn't be that hard, btw), it is fairly clear that the weight of the released CO2 would be in the same order of magnitude (and likely exceed) the weight of the fossil fuel burned. That is, to counterbalance the effect of burning a ton of oil, you would have to capture something similar to a ton of CO2. The volume of CO2 when compressed to a liquid would also be comparable to the volume of the oil burned.
In other words, in order to counterbalance the consumption of the oil carried by a single supertanker, you basically need another supertanker to carry away and sequestrate the corresponding amount of captured CO2 (assuming we have established a workable sink for sequestrating the CO2, which is a huge assumption in itself). For a society to base itself on carbon capture to counterbalance its burning of fossil fuel, it would need a whole parallel infrastructure of CO2 transport that would rival the infrastructure already in place for distributing the fuels in the first place.
So the logistics challenge of carbon capture in itself is enormous. Add to this the engineering challenge of actually capturing vast amounts of CO2, the challenge of finding proper sinks that are both large enough and long-term enough, and the huge amount of energy that would have to be consumed just to run the whole capture-transport-sequestration process, and the scale of the problem becomes apparent.
Stories such as these are in my eyes detrimental to agreeing on realistic solutions to the problems raised by climate change, as they generate some sense among the public that given enough time and money engineers will eventually come up with some technical device to "fix the problem" (if you even acknowledge it) .
In the end, the best we can do is probably the boring old solutions of restricting fossil fuel consumption (through regulation or taxation), reforestation, saving energy wherever possible and gradually moving towards a primary energy mix consisting of renewable and nuclear energy sources. Of course, we are always allowed to keep our fingers crossed that there will be a major technical breakthrough that will render energy and climate problems obsolete, but we shouldn't bet on it.
If your main concern is maxing out your storage on your laptop, then yes, HDD will probably make perfect sense to you. As I said, people have different needs.
My post was addressing the rhetoric (and rather sarcatic) comments of the OP, by pointing out that yes, there is real competition for what is most likely the majority of users out there. And if you define "year of the flash drive" as the year where flash drives have a larger than 50 percent market share, then yes, we will almost certainly see that year, and very soon too.
By the way, laptops aren't great for "accumulating stuff" anyway, unless you really don't worry about losing the stuff you have accumulated. I treat my family videos more precious than that.
I realize that people may have different needs. Although I also play games (downloaded over Steam) from time to time, I rarely need more than one or two of them installed at the same time on my laptop, and at home I have backup drives for stuff I don't actively use.
My point is that for a large group of users, myself included, huge storage capacities are no longer the biggest selling point when it comes to hard drives on portable machines.
Unless you plan to carry around a huge music or movie collection, I never understood the point of maxing out on hard disk capacity when buying a laptop anyway. My heavily used, 3 year old laptop has a 200 GB hard drive which is shared between one Linux and one Windows 7 partition. I have installed all software I need as well as a significant quantity of music and photos and I have yet to worry about running out of hard disk space. For users like me, the question when buying a new laptop would rather be: for the amount of cash you are ready to spend on the hard drive, what would likely be most useful to you? A lighter, less power-consuming and overall quicker SSD drive that provides twice your actual storage needs, or a slower, heavier, more power consuming and fragile magnetic drive that provides ten times your storage needs? SSD made sense to me a long time ago, well before prices dropped to their current levels.
The Catholic Church had to change its position with respect to the priesthood: homosexuals would no longer be allowed. They simply couldn't risk the scandal of child abuse.
So rather than dealing with the problem by punishing those individuals actually responsible for the crime, it made more sense to exclude an entire group of people (which happened to be, conveniently, the homosexuals)? This sounds like a trolling comment to me here on Slashdot, but I have actually heard this line of argument by Catholic apologists who are being dead serious about it, so one can never be too sure...
It isn't too hard for you to protect your material from being linked to, even if you post it on the web...
I use OpenOffice and MS Office extensively and often interchangeably. For Writer/Word and Calc/Excel, this rarely means trouble, unless you are relying on special macros.
However, Impress has still a way to go to be used as a PowerPoint replacement. Animations are jerky, and when viewing PowerPoint files colors and drawings are often rendered incorrectly, and it has a bad tendency to insert weird characters into the text, especially around line breaks. Although it is usable to review presentations for your own sake, the quirks renders it unusable for presenting all but the simplest PowerPoint slides to an audience.
Users of Access should not expect an easy time using Base. I guess one could argue that Base doesn't even try to be compatible with Access, so some might find this criticism unfair. On the other hand, if the goal is to convince users of MS Office to make a switch, it's a hard sell if you have to tell them that they must re-learn much of what they know.
Hell, even read/write 10% of the time is too much for normal usage.
You obviously aren't using Windows Vista.
Not sure what is most annoying with the Ron Paul fanatics; that they agree to virtually everything coming out of his mouth, or that they believe that those of us not supporting him have no idea about his politics.
Having not been able to read too many books this year, it's not easy to make a well-founded proposal for the "best book" of the year. That said, I still think "Oryx and Crake" by Margareth Atwood was a real enjoyment to read! The dystopia presented in this book is described credibly, funny and though-provokingly, and in many ways it doesn't look as far away as one might think. The imagined consequences of ever-more-powerful international corporation, increasing public indifference and disillusionment, genetic engineering gone astray, terrorism and much-too-visionary nerd-geniuses are keywords in describing the world in which "Snowman" grows up - eventually to find himself the last human being on earth. Not often you see the author of a science fiction novel being a favourite for receiving the Nobel Price.