ok, firstly, that "80% efficiency when it provides both heat and power" is a copout. any engine can be 100% efficient when you classify usable energy output as both heat and electricity. i wanna know the efficiency of the electricity production.
It's not a "copout" because the heat generated isn't waste heat (since it is useable by the house it is connected to). This is unlike an ICE or central powerplant where it IS waste heat.
The typical fuel cell has an efficiency of between 40-60% for electrical generation only. Their website indicates that it is at the higher end of that scale.
secondly, how long is the lifetime of the unit? how much fuel can it process before the catalyst or membrane or whatever wears out? and how expensive is the catalyst? is it still made out of freaking platinum?
It's amazing what you can learn when you RTFA. The membrane they use is based on ceramics (solid oxide). They're durable and less expensive than platinum.
thirdly, can this thing be used in vehicles? planes? cause thats the real application of something like this.
They're planning on making a smaller version for cars. Again, TFA has more information.
Game development sounds fun because games are fun. Like how being a prostitute sounds fun because having sex is fun.
Yep. The "game industry glow" wears off pretty damn quick when you're working non-stop 80 hour work weeks. I don't really miss having a sleeping bag by my desk, the perpetual deadlines, low pay, crap benefits, vacations you were never allowed to take, and all the other crap from the game industry. Yeah, it's cool to see your game on the shelf and if you're lucky, good game reviews but that is a small consolation for basically being a sweatshop slave.
The first job I got after leaving the games industry doubled my salary, gave me real benefits, and had me working standard 40 hour work weeks.
China has modified the weather publicly. Russia has modified the weather publicly.
Cloud seeding is not weather modification. It's more like weather "coercion". The energy is already there. The moisture is already there. All cloud seeding does is add a nucleation agent. And even then there's a relatively high probability of failure.
True weather modification, such as creating or dissipating tornadoes or hurricanes is so far beyond our technology that it may as well be magic.
To claim that it's impossible is pretty damn idiotic! If you are not suspicious as to why the most allegedly advanced society in the world claims it can't do it you really should get off the medication.
No it claims it can' do it because it can't. To truly be able to modify weather requires enormous amounts of energy and the ability to control atmospheric conditions across a large volume of the troposphere. It also means having the ability to precisely control the atmospheric conditions at different levels of the atmosphere, as well as keeping out other influences that could interfere.
Even if you could orbit a full nuclear power station you wouldn't even come close to the require power that would be needed to pull something like this off, let alone have the technology to actually do something like this.
The fact that the plans for chemtrails and weather modification are not given does not make science study disappear. We know things are happening and we can measure them. Aluminum and Barium in the atmosphere has been shown to be true by numerous scientific studies. Those metals are measurable in plants and soil which has also been measured.
O RLY? You provide no citations for this nonsense, and the only sites that come up on a cursory google search are all links to nutter sites. Not to mention aluminium is one of the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust, with aluminium oxide being the most common form (which is biologically inert).
Basically, you make big claims but have no evidence.
The underlying "why" is not seen because it's all "top-secret" but that does not make the metals disappear.
It apparently also doesn't make the metals appear either.
This idiot thinks that their "why" is better than someone else' "why". While everything is buried in "top-secret" files nobody knows.
The government can't even keep a surveillance program from leaking. What makes you think it is competent enough to keep something like a weather modification program from being leaked?
How about petitioning the Government to open up instead of claiming it's all for the greater good without any evidence? If we don't open things up, that speculation that it's all for the greater good has identical credibility to the guy who believes it's for nefarious purposes.
The article didn't say anything about being for the greater good. It said that believing such garbage either means you're an idiot or you're crazy (or maybe both).
Then we get to the outright lies in this article. "HAARP does not and cannot control the weather. " Wait a minute there non-scientist! If the stated goals of exciting and heating particles and atoms in the ionosphere, and we know that they can do that, how does that not give someone the ability to control weather?
Because exciting a few atoms in the near vacuum of the ionosphere is completely different and unrelated to altering weather in the troposphere. To influence even a small region of weather would require an enormous amount of energy, orders of magnitude more than any power source we can orbit. That's basic physics. For example, take the amount of water in a typical thunderstorm and calculate the
...The doomsayers have been doomsaying for thousands of years, and we've always figured out ways to avoid the doom they're saying...
No we haven't. Entire civilizations have vanished due to "not being able to figure it out" or "being too stupid to listen" or "just plain stupid" or "being unlucky" or some combination. This coming century will be the first time we will experience serious global shortages in critical resources. While human extinction is an unlikely outcome, you'd have to be naive to think it won't seriously impact us.
That's actually exactly what the world needs the more our society becomes knowledge-oriented. If you could double the active lifespan of a (sane, healthy) individual, you'd get twice the amount of wotk for the same amount of high-school and college man-years. It's simple economy of scale.
And slow down evolution by the same factor.
Death isn't a disease. It's nature's way of cleaning out the old to make room for the new. That's how species evolve. Having a bunch of "old fogeys" hanging around and consuming resources would act as an impediment to the process.
Medical billing and insurance software is probably some of the worst hacked together spaghetti disaster-ware there is, at least in the US. Anyone who's had a serious medical procedure done and received a couple redwood forests worth of bills and other crap has had a taste of this.
I think the real reason insurance companies didn't want Obamacare to go through is because they're scared shitless of having to go in and make modifications to their code.
Remember when creating high quality open source software didn't require a Kickstarter campaign?
I remember when software developers subsisted on nothing but air and close proximity to an electric line, and required only their imagination to create software and distribute it via their magical mind rainbows to all the computers in the world.
Sometimes people actually want to get paid for what they do. And usually, if someone can get paid while doing something they like then that's all the better.
I remember when people wrote free software because it scratched an itch. Kickstarter seems to be setting a trend where people won't write free software unless they get paid. (Or they will write it and refuse to release it unless they get paid). That's not FREE software, it's hostage software.
No, it's not hostage software. Software developers need to eat. Writing free software and kindly asking for donations very rarely generates enough to put food on the table. Using Kickstarter is actually a good idea. If there is enough demand, then people will contribute to it. And afterwards, the project gets released for free to the community.
Software developers get paid. Community gets free software.
The beauty of (natural) science is that you can replicate the results.
Spoken from a true armchair POV. Trying to replicate results can be very expensive and time consuming. Furthermore, failure to replicate results does not immediately invalidate the original work, as there can be all kinds of legitimate explanations. Either party may have simply made a mistake, or there may be some critical variable that isn't yet recognized. Fraud in science is a very serious matter, a major impediment and expense, and unfortunately can be very difficult to prove. Therefore when it is found it should be punished severely.
Well, the beauty of science is that it is self-correcting. Even if the results are too expensive/time-consuming to reproduce, eventually someone will attempt to use the results as a basis for their own research. And when they do, they will quickly find out that it was a load of crap.
Unlike the corporate world where you can hide malice and incompetence by burying it in BS, you can't do that for long in the science world. Every time you publish you put your reputation on the line, and if it is found that your research is deliberately fraudulent your reputation is pretty much destroyed. Even if your research just demonstrates incompetence rather than malice, your reputation can be irreparably damaged. Once that happens, the only science you'll be doing is figuring out how long to keep those french fries in the fryer.
You want "Someone Else" to manage your data that is classified under ITAR? Uhmmm... Why don't you build your backup solution - put links in to remote data centers and handle the problem correctly and professionally. The last thing we need is some external entity getting a hold of this stuff because you don't want to have the budget to do things right instead of at a consumer level. Gah - I can't believe this is even a question
I agree. Putting information like this in the cloud? This guy either has no clue what he's doing or not all his dogs are barking.
No credible scientist is predicting a 20m sea level rise by 2100. If it did happen, then sea level rise would be the very least of our worries (for those that were left).
That was a long time before the bronze age.. Nobody was burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the air. SO.... How does something like this happen?
Look up paleoclimate. Plenty of information there. Continental shifts, massive volcanic outgassings, orbital and axial variations, altered ocean currents, and various other factors come into play.
Can you believe there is some kind of natural process that we don't yet understand going on?
You should seriously stop and think about that question. A natural process capable of raising a planet's temperature by as much as we've seen over the past century isn't a subtle thing.
It's very simple. The Earth's temperature rises and falls in relation to it's energy balance; how much energy it receives from the sun and how much energy it radiates off into space. So we are either receiving more energy, radiating less energy, or some combination of both.
The sun's average output has not increased. And the Earth certainly hasn't been generating it's own heat either (no continuous major global volcanic activity). That seems to imply the Earth is retaining more heat. So what's changed over the past 100 years that could cause the Earth to retain more heat? Well, due to human activity there has been a rather large increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. And sure enough, when scientists run the numbers we get an increase in global temperature that that matches well with the additional forcing coming from increased greenhouse gas concentrations. How do we know it's our emissions? Because the isotope ratios show the carbon coming from fossil fuel sources (C12 and C13) vs. natural sources (C14).
This is very well studied, an greenhouse theory itself is nearly 200 years old (postulated by Fourier in the 1820's).
Problem with all of this is that if the process cycles are in the millions of years, it's going to be impossible to really know if your models are accurate because you only have a few thousand years of recorded history to validate your models with.
This is why you need to look up paleoclimatology. There's more than a few thousands years of data available.
Also, the models used by climate scientists are physical models. They're based on mathematical and physical theories from various different branches of science. And they work well, even at simulating climates from the distant past.
Plus, you don't know if the system has been disturbed by some outside forces, say a meteor strike (think meteor crater) or volcanic eruption. Interesting evidence guys, please keep looking into this..
Meteor strikes or volcanic eruptions large enough to affect planetary climate over a significant period of time leave a pretty telling signature behind. That's one of the things paleoclimatologists and geologists look for in things like sedimentary cores.
- developed sound physical theories that any theoretical theorist could verify from first principles and a few key experiments
So have climate scientists. The original greenhouse gas theory was first proposed by Fourier in the 1820's. Since then, advances in the sciences from thermodynamics to fluid dynamics have been incorporated to better model and explore Earth's climate system.
- proved that their theories worked in a series of repeatable experiments
So have climate scientists. Whether it's in a lab doing fundamental analysis of gases and aerosols or running physical models on thousands of CPUs, climate scientists have produced petabytes worth of data and research, including thousands of peer-reviewed papers.
- implemented their technologies as practical devices
The scientists developed the theories and models. (Mechanical and electrical engineers actually created the devices.
Climate engineering (very new) is based upon the theories and models developed by climate scientists. Of course, technologically speaking we're pretty far away from being able to alter planetary climate on anything less than a multi-decadal scale, as demonstrated by our 100+ years of CO2 addition.
- worried that the technology they themselves developed might be used for bad
Climate scientists are very worried that the technology we have developed is causing bad things to happen.
climate scientists:
- make extrapolations involving tons of assumptions and unknowns
Bullshit. Climate science is built upon well proven physical theories from multiple different branches of science. In fact, greenhouse theory itself is almost 200 years old (developed by Fourier in the 1820's). Climate models are not statistical, they are physical; similar to the fluid dynamics models used for airfoil development.
From this one statement alone it's clear you have no idea what you're talking about.
- their experiments and data collections cannot be reproduced
Bullshit. Climate scientists wouldn't be able to publish in major research journals without reproducible results. The journals' reputation take a serious blow by doing so, and any scientist publishing falsified research destroy their careers. Even if you don't get caught immediately, you will as soon as someone tries to cite your work.
Or are you implying by that statement that all the science journals are in on some crackpot conspiracy?
- haven't created any new technologies
And what technology, pray tell, would you have a climate scientist create? They aren't mechanical or electrical engineers. Do you think particle physicists build their accelerators?
- try to stop people from using other people's technologies
In what way? Climate scientists are simply stating the results of their research. The policies based on that research come from lawmakers, not scientists. Just take a look at smoking. It's bad for you. We know it's bad for you. We have a lot research that shows it's bad for you. Yet you can still go in any store and get a pack.
All climate scientists are saying is that our activities are causing the planet to warm up, and this is causing the climate to change. What, if anything, is done about it remains entirely up to us.
This is quite similar to those who created the nuclear bomb. It is a destructive weapon. If used indiscriminately it could fundamentally change the planet. What, if anything, is done about them remains entirely up to us.
The Earth's climate has always been changing and will be changing while the planet is alive.
And you won't find a single climate scientist who would disagree with you. However, that in no way should imply that climate change NOW is a good thing. In fact, sudden climate changes often were a BAD thing to the existing life forms of the time.
It is uncertain whether humans have measurable influence on those changes at all;
No, it's pretty certain at this point. Fourier himself proposed greenhouse theory back in the 1820's, so it's been around for quite some time. Since then, mountains of research and data have been collected on the subject.
the fact that people with clear financial interests claim so does not make it certainty.
Oh stop with this tired bullshit, ok? Exxon by itself makes twice as much money in a quarter as the entire yearly NSF budget, of which only a small portion goes to climate related grants. The difference in money between climate science research and fossil fuel industry profits is orders of magnitude. Why the hell would "money grubbing" climate scientists bother fighting over scraps when they could be making bank shilling for an oil company?
Even if we suppose there is a measurable influence it is still uncertain whether the human influence is setting the current trends -- there have been warm ages in the past, too.
Because scientists aren't fucking stupid, despite what you and others like you think. We have proxies. We have satellite measurements. We have mathematical models built upon fundamental physical theories like thermodynamics and fluid dynamics. Climate science isn't some magical creation. It's built upon solid, provable, physics that have been used, in some cases, for centuries.
For instance, the Medieval Warm Period.
Which, if you'd bother reading any real peer-reviewed research on, was a REGIONAL PHENOMENA. You'd also see that the conditions that induced it were completely different from what we are seeing now, and what we're seeing is GLOBAL.
When I was growing up, i.e. the 70ies and the 80ies, the climate scare was The Big Bad Global Cooling.
The theory of global warming is older than Einstein's theory of relativity.
Then the scare mongers got smarter and now the scare is The Big Bad Climate Change Whatever It Is.
Global warming refers to rising average global temperatures. Climate change refers to the impacts caused by global warming. Of course, you could have just looked that up but you don't strike me as the type of person to do that.
Since the climate is always changing it is a perfectly safe bet it is going to change, somehow.
And that means it shouldn't be a concern? Exactly how the hell does that logic work? The last time the planet underwent a climate shift our species almost went extinct. Before that, every major climate shift has been catastrophic for the life that existed at the time. It shear idiocy to think that global climate change, anthropogenic otherwise, should not be a MAJOR FUCKING CONCERN to everyone on the planet.
To prevent the climate from changing is about as possible as to prevent the Earth fro
In the sixties and seventies, the climate hucksters were selling us on a man-made ice age.
Bullshit. The media sensationalized a couple of crackpots claiming a new ice age was coming. Check the peer-reviewed scientific literature during that time period. Just about every paper discussing the subject was in regards to warming. http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=11
In the eighties, they told us California would be underwater by 2000. It's still there.
Bullshit. No credible peer-reviewed research ever stated anything REMOTELY close to that possibility either during the 80's or anytime before or after. I'm pretty sure this is a crock that you just made up as there is no physically possible way for California to go "underwater" short of a massive asteroid impact. Even if all of Greenland and Antarctica melted, most of California would still be above sea level
Maybe alot of people twist and exaggerate the evidence for their own reasons when $ billions are on the line. A $100k grant ? Just in the Obama years alone, he's handed hundreds of millions of your money to fake greenies. By fake , I mean ones that took the money and ran, never living up to any of their promises.
Oh, you're one of the conspiracy nutters. Ok, you want to play the money game? The National Science Foundation (NSF) has a yearly budget at the moment of $5 billion, and that covers all the sciences. Exxon has a QUARTERLY profit of $9.5 billion. So in a given year just Exxon by itself is making nearly 8 TIMES the entire budget for the NSF. And that is just one fossil fuel company.
The fossil fuel industry profits dwarfs climate research budgets by orders of magnitude. If climate scientists wanted money, they would drop this "conspiracy" in a heartbeat and go work for Exxon and the like saying how everything is just peachy.
If they were honest, why are they calling it "Climate Change" now, rather than Global Warming? Seems to me they're trying to have it both ways.(Note: This is just an observation, nothing more. If you try to argue with me about issues I haven't raised here today, I'm going to ignore you.)
Climate change more accurately describes the effects. Global warming, to the lay person, implied that everything would warm up. So when a record breaking cold snap occurred, invariably we would here "See? It ain't warmin' up!".
Warmer average global temperatures means one thing; there's more energy in the system. More energy in the system means that the system will destabilize until it reaches a new norm. That is, the climate will change.
Now how that change actually effects different regions depends on a number of factors. Warmer average global temperatures does NOT mean that every place on the globe will warm up. Hence climate change is a more intuitive description of what is happening for the general populace.
You're either naive or are trying to be deliberately misleading. That "median income" figure is median HOUSEHOLD income, where a household is approximately 2 parents and 2.3 kids. Being single and making $50K is a world apart and isn't even remotely comparable. You're not even taking location and cost of living differences.
The "1% shit" exists for a reason. We ARE fighting for scraps. The vast majority of the wealth in this country is controlled by the elite few, and every year they control more while the middle and low classes have either been stagnating or dropping. This shows that there is something fundamentally broken here.
Wars are won one battle at a time. You must choose how to win each battle if you ever hope to prevail in the war.
No they aren't. Wars are won by being smart enough to avoid them in the first place.
The ends do not justify the means. Buying those in power ensure they stay in power. By the time you eventually get enough money and power to actually undo all the damage they have done, you have either become them or so much damage has been done that it is nigh impossible to fix it.
I'd like to ride a bike to and from work, and even for some light-weight errands. But where I live, you'd be safer trying to make it through the demilitarized zone in the Koreas.:P
Lol. Nope. Charging / discharging the battery, you will take a hit. Transmission over power lines? Taking a hit.
Now, it may, in the long run, be superior to petroleum tech, but let's not start lying.
Charging is 80-90% efficient, transmission losses are on average 6%, and electric engines are 85-90% efficient. No long term needed. Even if you use coal power you still beat out an ICE by a noticeable margin. And that's not even including the considerable energy it takes to transport and refine oil into gasoline.
The typical ICE is about 18-20% efficient on average (peak for best case is around 37%). The typical coal fired plant is about 33-40% efficient. Electric engines are 80-90% efficient. Line losses are estimated to be around 6%. Charging is around 80-90% efficient.
Assuming you have a "good" coal plant, for an electric car if you include everything from power station to driving you get:.4 -.4*.06 =.376 -.2*.376 =.3008 -.3008*.2 =.24064.
But the important thing to note is that this isn't even an apples to apples comparison. If we really wanted this to be an even comparison, then we'd also have to include all the inefficiencies in transporting fuel (the oil and the coal), and in gasoline's case all the inefficiencies in refining the fuel (which according to the DoE, takes about 6 kWh per gallon of gasoline, enough to drive an electric car 24 miles). This makes electric cars even more efficient by comparison. And this is assuming the person is even getting their power from coal.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh you want to play that game?
http://www.evilbible.com/
ok, firstly, that "80% efficiency when it provides both heat and power" is a copout. any engine can be 100% efficient when you classify usable energy output as both heat and electricity. i wanna know the efficiency of the electricity production.
It's not a "copout" because the heat generated isn't waste heat (since it is useable by the house it is connected to). This is unlike an ICE or central powerplant where it IS waste heat.
The typical fuel cell has an efficiency of between 40-60% for electrical generation only. Their website indicates that it is at the higher end of that scale.
secondly, how long is the lifetime of the unit? how much fuel can it process before the catalyst or membrane or whatever wears out? and how expensive is the catalyst? is it still made out of freaking platinum?
It's amazing what you can learn when you RTFA. The membrane they use is based on ceramics (solid oxide). They're durable and less expensive than platinum.
thirdly, can this thing be used in vehicles? planes? cause thats the real application of something like this.
They're planning on making a smaller version for cars. Again, TFA has more information.
Game development sounds fun because games are fun.
Like how being a prostitute sounds fun because having sex is fun.
Yep. The "game industry glow" wears off pretty damn quick when you're working non-stop 80 hour work weeks. I don't really miss having a sleeping bag by my desk, the perpetual deadlines, low pay, crap benefits, vacations you were never allowed to take, and all the other crap from the game industry. Yeah, it's cool to see your game on the shelf and if you're lucky, good game reviews but that is a small consolation for basically being a sweatshop slave.
The first job I got after leaving the games industry doubled my salary, gave me real benefits, and had me working standard 40 hour work weeks.
This article reeks of poisoning the well.
Only if sanity is considered "poisoning the well.
China has modified the weather publicly. Russia has modified the weather publicly.
Cloud seeding is not weather modification. It's more like weather "coercion". The energy is already there. The moisture is already there. All cloud seeding does is add a nucleation agent. And even then there's a relatively high probability of failure.
True weather modification, such as creating or dissipating tornadoes or hurricanes is so far beyond our technology that it may as well be magic.
To claim that it's impossible is pretty damn idiotic! If you are not suspicious as to why the most allegedly advanced society in the world claims it can't do it you really should get off the medication.
No it claims it can' do it because it can't. To truly be able to modify weather requires enormous amounts of energy and the ability to control atmospheric conditions across a large volume of the troposphere. It also means having the ability to precisely control the atmospheric conditions at different levels of the atmosphere, as well as keeping out other influences that could interfere.
Even if you could orbit a full nuclear power station you wouldn't even come close to the require power that would be needed to pull something like this off, let alone have the technology to actually do something like this.
The fact that the plans for chemtrails and weather modification are not given does not make science study disappear. We know things are happening and we can measure them. Aluminum and Barium in the atmosphere has been shown to be true by numerous scientific studies. Those metals are measurable in plants and soil which has also been measured.
O RLY? You provide no citations for this nonsense, and the only sites that come up on a cursory google search are all links to nutter sites. Not to mention aluminium is one of the most abundant elements in the Earth's crust, with aluminium oxide being the most common form (which is biologically inert).
Basically, you make big claims but have no evidence.
The underlying "why" is not seen because it's all "top-secret" but that does not make the metals disappear.
It apparently also doesn't make the metals appear either.
This idiot thinks that their "why" is better than someone else' "why". While everything is buried in "top-secret" files nobody knows.
The government can't even keep a surveillance program from leaking. What makes you think it is competent enough to keep something like a weather modification program from being leaked?
How about petitioning the Government to open up instead of claiming it's all for the greater good without any evidence? If we don't open things up, that speculation that it's all for the greater good has identical credibility to the guy who believes it's for nefarious purposes.
The article didn't say anything about being for the greater good. It said that believing such garbage either means you're an idiot or you're crazy (or maybe both).
Then we get to the outright lies in this article. "HAARP does not and cannot control the weather. " Wait a minute there non-scientist! If the stated goals of exciting and heating particles and atoms in the ionosphere, and we know that they can do that, how does that not give someone the ability to control weather?
Because exciting a few atoms in the near vacuum of the ionosphere is completely different and unrelated to altering weather in the troposphere. To influence even a small region of weather would require an enormous amount of energy, orders of magnitude more than any power source we can orbit. That's basic physics. For example, take the amount of water in a typical thunderstorm and calculate the
...The doomsayers have been doomsaying for thousands of years, and we've always figured out ways to avoid the doom they're saying...
No we haven't. Entire civilizations have vanished due to "not being able to figure it out" or "being too stupid to listen" or "just plain stupid" or "being unlucky" or some combination. This coming century will be the first time we will experience serious global shortages in critical resources. While human extinction is an unlikely outcome, you'd have to be naive to think it won't seriously impact us.
That's actually exactly what the world needs the more our society becomes knowledge-oriented. If you could double the active lifespan of a (sane, healthy) individual, you'd get twice the amount of wotk for the same amount of high-school and college man-years. It's simple economy of scale.
And slow down evolution by the same factor.
Death isn't a disease. It's nature's way of cleaning out the old to make room for the new. That's how species evolve. Having a bunch of "old fogeys" hanging around and consuming resources would act as an impediment to the process.
Medical billing and insurance software is probably some of the worst hacked together spaghetti disaster-ware there is, at least in the US. Anyone who's had a serious medical procedure done and received a couple redwood forests worth of bills and other crap has had a taste of this.
I think the real reason insurance companies didn't want Obamacare to go through is because they're scared shitless of having to go in and make modifications to their code.
Remember when creating high quality open source software didn't require a Kickstarter campaign?
I remember when software developers subsisted on nothing but air and close proximity to an electric line, and required only their imagination to create software and distribute it via their magical mind rainbows to all the computers in the world.
Sometimes people actually want to get paid for what they do. And usually, if someone can get paid while doing something they like then that's all the better.
I remember when people wrote free software because it scratched an itch. Kickstarter seems to be setting a trend where people won't write free software unless they get paid. (Or they will write it and refuse to release it unless they get paid). That's not FREE software, it's hostage software.
No, it's not hostage software. Software developers need to eat. Writing free software and kindly asking for donations very rarely generates enough to put food on the table. Using Kickstarter is actually a good idea. If there is enough demand, then people will contribute to it. And afterwards, the project gets released for free to the community.
Software developers get paid. Community gets free software.
The beauty of (natural) science is that you can replicate the results.
Spoken from a true armchair POV. Trying to replicate results can be very expensive and time consuming. Furthermore, failure to replicate results does not immediately invalidate the original work, as there can be all kinds of legitimate explanations. Either party may have simply made a mistake, or there may be some critical variable that isn't yet recognized. Fraud in science is a very serious matter, a major impediment and expense, and unfortunately can be very difficult to prove. Therefore when it is found it should be punished severely.
Well, the beauty of science is that it is self-correcting. Even if the results are too expensive/time-consuming to reproduce, eventually someone will attempt to use the results as a basis for their own research. And when they do, they will quickly find out that it was a load of crap.
Unlike the corporate world where you can hide malice and incompetence by burying it in BS, you can't do that for long in the science world. Every time you publish you put your reputation on the line, and if it is found that your research is deliberately fraudulent your reputation is pretty much destroyed. Even if your research just demonstrates incompetence rather than malice, your reputation can be irreparably damaged. Once that happens, the only science you'll be doing is figuring out how long to keep those french fries in the fryer.
You want "Someone Else" to manage your data that is classified under ITAR? Uhmmm... Why don't you build your backup solution - put links in to remote data centers and handle the problem correctly and professionally. The last thing we need is some external entity getting a hold of this stuff because you don't want to have the budget to do things right instead of at a consumer level. Gah - I can't believe this is even a question
I agree. Putting information like this in the cloud? This guy either has no clue what he's doing or not all his dogs are barking.
No credible scientist is predicting a 20m sea level rise by 2100. If it did happen, then sea level rise would be the very least of our worries (for those that were left).
That was a long time before the bronze age.. Nobody was burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the air. SO.... How does something like this happen?
Look up paleoclimate. Plenty of information there. Continental shifts, massive volcanic outgassings, orbital and axial variations, altered ocean currents, and various other factors come into play.
Can you believe there is some kind of natural process that we don't yet understand going on?
You should seriously stop and think about that question. A natural process capable of raising a planet's temperature by as much as we've seen over the past century isn't a subtle thing.
It's very simple. The Earth's temperature rises and falls in relation to it's energy balance; how much energy it receives from the sun and how much energy it radiates off into space. So we are either receiving more energy, radiating less energy, or some combination of both.
The sun's average output has not increased. And the Earth certainly hasn't been generating it's own heat either (no continuous major global volcanic activity). That seems to imply the Earth is retaining more heat. So what's changed over the past 100 years that could cause the Earth to retain more heat? Well, due to human activity there has been a rather large increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. And sure enough, when scientists run the numbers we get an increase in global temperature that that matches well with the additional forcing coming from increased greenhouse gas concentrations. How do we know it's our emissions? Because the isotope ratios show the carbon coming from fossil fuel sources (C12 and C13) vs. natural sources (C14).
This is very well studied, an greenhouse theory itself is nearly 200 years old (postulated by Fourier in the 1820's).
Problem with all of this is that if the process cycles are in the millions of years, it's going to be impossible to really know if your models are accurate because you only have a few thousand years of recorded history to validate your models with.
This is why you need to look up paleoclimatology. There's more than a few thousands years of data available.
Also, the models used by climate scientists are physical models. They're based on mathematical and physical theories from various different branches of science. And they work well, even at simulating climates from the distant past.
Plus, you don't know if the system has been disturbed by some outside forces, say a meteor strike (think meteor crater) or volcanic eruption. Interesting evidence guys, please keep looking into this..
Meteor strikes or volcanic eruptions large enough to affect planetary climate over a significant period of time leave a pretty telling signature behind. That's one of the things paleoclimatologists and geologists look for in things like sedimentary cores.
early atomic scientists:
- developed sound physical theories that any theoretical theorist could verify from first principles and a few key experiments
So have climate scientists. The original greenhouse gas theory was first proposed by Fourier in the 1820's. Since then, advances in the sciences from thermodynamics to fluid dynamics have been incorporated to better model and explore Earth's climate system.
- proved that their theories worked in a series of repeatable experiments
So have climate scientists. Whether it's in a lab doing fundamental analysis of gases and aerosols or running physical models on thousands of CPUs, climate scientists have produced petabytes worth of data and research, including thousands of peer-reviewed papers.
- implemented their technologies as practical devices
The scientists developed the theories and models. (Mechanical and electrical engineers actually created the devices.
Climate engineering (very new) is based upon the theories and models developed by climate scientists. Of course, technologically speaking we're pretty far away from being able to alter planetary climate on anything less than a multi-decadal scale, as demonstrated by our 100+ years of CO2 addition.
- worried that the technology they themselves developed might be used for bad
Climate scientists are very worried that the technology we have developed is causing bad things to happen.
climate scientists:
- make extrapolations involving tons of assumptions and unknowns
Bullshit. Climate science is built upon well proven physical theories from multiple different branches of science. In fact, greenhouse theory itself is almost 200 years old (developed by Fourier in the 1820's). Climate models are not statistical, they are physical; similar to the fluid dynamics models used for airfoil development.
From this one statement alone it's clear you have no idea what you're talking about.
- their experiments and data collections cannot be reproduced
Bullshit. Climate scientists wouldn't be able to publish in major research journals without reproducible results. The journals' reputation take a serious blow by doing so, and any scientist publishing falsified research destroy their careers. Even if you don't get caught immediately, you will as soon as someone tries to cite your work.
Or are you implying by that statement that all the science journals are in on some crackpot conspiracy?
- haven't created any new technologies
And what technology, pray tell, would you have a climate scientist create? They aren't mechanical or electrical engineers. Do you think particle physicists build their accelerators?
- try to stop people from using other people's technologies
In what way? Climate scientists are simply stating the results of their research. The policies based on that research come from lawmakers, not scientists. Just take a look at smoking. It's bad for you. We know it's bad for you. We have a lot research that shows it's bad for you. Yet you can still go in any store and get a pack.
All climate scientists are saying is that our activities are causing the planet to warm up, and this is causing the climate to change. What, if anything, is done about it remains entirely up to us.
This is quite similar to those who created the nuclear bomb. It is a destructive weapon. If used indiscriminately it could fundamentally change the planet. What, if anything, is done about them remains entirely up to us.
The Earth's climate has always been changing and will be changing while the planet is alive.
And you won't find a single climate scientist who would disagree with you. However, that in no way should imply that climate change NOW is a good thing. In fact, sudden climate changes often were a BAD thing to the existing life forms of the time.
It is uncertain whether humans have measurable influence on those changes at all;
No, it's pretty certain at this point. Fourier himself proposed greenhouse theory back in the 1820's, so it's been around for quite some time. Since then, mountains of research and data have been collected on the subject.
the fact that people with clear financial interests claim so does not make it certainty.
Oh stop with this tired bullshit, ok? Exxon by itself makes twice as much money in a quarter as the entire yearly NSF budget, of which only a small portion goes to climate related grants. The difference in money between climate science research and fossil fuel industry profits is orders of magnitude. Why the hell would "money grubbing" climate scientists bother fighting over scraps when they could be making bank shilling for an oil company?
Even if we suppose there is a measurable influence it is still uncertain whether the human influence is setting the current trends -- there have been warm ages in the past, too.
Because scientists aren't fucking stupid, despite what you and others like you think. We have proxies. We have satellite measurements. We have mathematical models built upon fundamental physical theories like thermodynamics and fluid dynamics. Climate science isn't some magical creation. It's built upon solid, provable, physics that have been used, in some cases, for centuries.
For instance, the Medieval Warm Period.
Which, if you'd bother reading any real peer-reviewed research on, was a REGIONAL PHENOMENA. You'd also see that the conditions that induced it were completely different from what we are seeing now, and what we're seeing is GLOBAL.
When I was growing up, i.e. the 70ies and the 80ies, the climate scare was The Big Bad Global Cooling.
It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
At the end of the 90ies and until recently, the climate scare was The Big Bad Global Warming.
If by 90's you mean 1890's, then yes you're approximately correct. http://www.skepticalscience.com/history-climate-science.html
The theory of global warming is older than Einstein's theory of relativity.
Then the scare mongers got smarter and now the scare is The Big Bad Climate Change Whatever It Is.
Global warming refers to rising average global temperatures. Climate change refers to the impacts caused by global warming. Of course, you could have just looked that up but you don't strike me as the type of person to do that.
Since the climate is always changing it is a perfectly safe bet it is going to change, somehow.
And that means it shouldn't be a concern? Exactly how the hell does that logic work? The last time the planet underwent a climate shift our species almost went extinct. Before that, every major climate shift has been catastrophic for the life that existed at the time. It shear idiocy to think that global climate change, anthropogenic otherwise, should not be a MAJOR FUCKING CONCERN to everyone on the planet.
To prevent the climate from changing is about as possible as to prevent the Earth fro
In the sixties and seventies, the climate hucksters were selling us on a man-made ice age.
Bullshit. The media sensationalized a couple of crackpots claiming a new ice age was coming. Check the peer-reviewed scientific literature during that time period. Just about every paper discussing the subject was in regards to warming. http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=11
In the eighties, they told us California would be underwater by 2000. It's still there.
Bullshit. No credible peer-reviewed research ever stated anything REMOTELY close to that possibility either during the 80's or anytime before or after. I'm pretty sure this is a crock that you just made up as there is no physically possible way for California to go "underwater" short of a massive asteroid impact. Even if all of Greenland and Antarctica melted, most of California would still be above sea level
Maybe alot of people twist and exaggerate the evidence for their own reasons when $ billions are on the line. A $100k grant ? Just in the Obama years alone, he's handed hundreds of millions of your money to fake greenies. By fake , I mean ones that took the money and ran, never living up to any of their promises.
Oh, you're one of the conspiracy nutters. Ok, you want to play the money game? The National Science Foundation (NSF) has a yearly budget at the moment of $5 billion, and that covers all the sciences. Exxon has a QUARTERLY profit of $9.5 billion. So in a given year just Exxon by itself is making nearly 8 TIMES the entire budget for the NSF. And that is just one fossil fuel company.
The fossil fuel industry profits dwarfs climate research budgets by orders of magnitude. If climate scientists wanted money, they would drop this "conspiracy" in a heartbeat and go work for Exxon and the like saying how everything is just peachy.
If they were honest, why are they calling it "Climate Change" now, rather than Global Warming? Seems to me they're trying to have it both ways.(Note: This is just an observation, nothing more. If you try to argue with me about issues I haven't raised here today, I'm going to ignore you.)
Climate change more accurately describes the effects. Global warming, to the lay person, implied that everything would warm up. So when a record breaking cold snap occurred, invariably we would here "See? It ain't warmin' up!".
Warmer average global temperatures means one thing; there's more energy in the system. More energy in the system means that the system will destabilize until it reaches a new norm. That is, the climate will change.
Now how that change actually effects different regions depends on a number of factors. Warmer average global temperatures does NOT mean that every place on the globe will warm up. Hence climate change is a more intuitive description of what is happening for the general populace.
You're either naive or are trying to be deliberately misleading. That "median income" figure is median HOUSEHOLD income, where a household is approximately 2 parents and 2.3 kids. Being single and making $50K is a world apart and isn't even remotely comparable. You're not even taking location and cost of living differences.
The "1% shit" exists for a reason. We ARE fighting for scraps. The vast majority of the wealth in this country is controlled by the elite few, and every year they control more while the middle and low classes have either been stagnating or dropping. This shows that there is something fundamentally broken here.
Wars are won one battle at a time. You must choose how to win each battle if you ever hope to prevail in the war.
No they aren't. Wars are won by being smart enough to avoid them in the first place.
The ends do not justify the means. Buying those in power ensure they stay in power. By the time you eventually get enough money and power to actually undo all the damage they have done, you have either become them or so much damage has been done that it is nigh impossible to fix it.
Fucking A! (or is that illegal these days)
Fuck a B. It has more holes.
Asking who they consider adversaries is excellent journalism. I'd actually like to hear an answer to that question.
The answer to that questions is: Everyone.
Your welcome.
It's nothing to worry about. It's just the alien equivalent of toilet papering a galaxy.
I'd like to ride a bike to and from work, and even for some light-weight errands. But where I live, you'd be safer trying to make it through the demilitarized zone in the Koreas. :P
Lol. Nope. Charging / discharging the battery, you will take a hit. Transmission over power lines? Taking a hit.
Now, it may, in the long run, be superior to petroleum tech, but let's not start lying.
Charging is 80-90% efficient, transmission losses are on average 6%, and electric engines are 85-90% efficient. No long term needed. Even if you use coal power you still beat out an ICE by a noticeable margin. And that's not even including the considerable energy it takes to transport and refine oil into gasoline.
The typical ICE is about 18-20% efficient on average (peak for best case is around 37%). The typical coal fired plant is about 33-40% efficient. Electric engines are 80-90% efficient. Line losses are estimated to be around 6%. Charging is around 80-90% efficient.
Assuming you have a "good" coal plant, for an electric car if you include everything from power station to driving you get: .4 - .4*.06 = .376 - .2*.376 = .3008 - .3008*.2 = .24064.
But the important thing to note is that this isn't even an apples to apples comparison. If we really wanted this to be an even comparison, then we'd also have to include all the inefficiencies in transporting fuel (the oil and the coal), and in gasoline's case all the inefficiencies in refining the fuel (which according to the DoE, takes about 6 kWh per gallon of gasoline, enough to drive an electric car 24 miles). This makes electric cars even more efficient by comparison. And this is assuming the person is even getting their power from coal.