Intel sunk billions into the development of Itanium on the premise that if they make a VLIW architecture, compiler developers will find a way to automatically extract the parallelism necessary to make good use of it. A company with the size, resources, and engineering knowledge of Intel made the mistake of assuming that a fundamental shift in thinking could be driven by money and sheer desire, but it turns out that the problem is not just hard - that would make it solvable given sufficient effort and money - it's actually impossible. Those compiler advances never materialized; you can't draw blood from a stone.
The quest for parallelism in ordinary software might just be similar. Developing tools to make this automated and easy with low overhead is akin to putting a dozen smart people in a room and saying "think up the next big idea that will make me millions." Innovation doesn't work that way; it can't be forced... and money isn't going to make the impossible into the possible.
I think we'll see a move to eight and then maybe even sixteen cores on a consumer-level chip before we see things start going back in the other direction. This will necessary mean a slowdown in the development of processors as CPU manufacturers go back to wringing every last bit of single-threaded performance out of their designs.
Everything else: -It's not like the fingerprint reader gets in the way. You don't have to use it if you don't want to. -You may like the nipple, but many people, myself included, don't. I won't buy a laptop without a touchpad; I'm not alone. -More than 4GB of RAM would require more than two memory slots (impractical) or 4GB SODIMMs (not yet available). -You can't hotswap your boot drive. I mean, there's nothing at the hard disk level that prevents it, but how are an OS and its applications supposed to keep functioning when the drive on which they reside disappears? That said, secondary drives should indeed be hot-swappable, like the optical drives already are. -14.1" XGA? You mean 1024x768? That's not even a usable resolution these days. If you mean that Lenovo should keep a 14.1" 4:3 aspect ratio display, I'm with you here. Lenovo is at the mercy of its component suppliers: widescreen is in (sadly), and there's just not enough demand for 4:3 panels, much less in an uncommon size and at a high resolution. -I wouldn't give up dual core, and intel's power management is good enough that the marginal power draw of the second CPU is quite minimal.
What they do need to fix: the battery management for secondary LiPo batteries. A new battery lasts about 30 discharge cycles before becoming useless - the idiots that designed the firmware made it so that the battery is fully discharged every single time.
On a Pentium 66 with 8MB of memory, building a full index file took quite a while. The three options control a tradeoff between the granularity of your search and the amount of time you have to spend waiting. As for the necessity of the index, it's a way to make win16-style help files (long since officially deprecated, but still used to this day) easily searchable.
I completely agree, however, that a user looking for help probably shouldn't be hit with a decision they don't understand.
In a conversation about personal responsibility and internet use, you've managed to find a way to express your derision for Microsoft Windows. Sure, you have a point, but is it really a point worth making? Is it related to the topic at hand in anything but the most tangential manner?
You can't just throw a graphics chip into a laptop as an afterthought: the entire machine has to be designed around the thermal profile of both the CPU and the GPU. Given how marginal laptop cooling systems are, an increase of 5W in GPU power output might be enough to overheat the system.
A laptop really isn't designed to be upgradeable - the good ones, especially so. They're integrated systems, carefully engineered for structural strength and heat dissipation. The only laptops that could accomodate a modular graphics interface are the cheap 17" ABS monsters.
It amuses me when people throw around the idea of mining Helium 3 from the moon. You might as well write a diatribe on the evils of using kittens as hydrocarbon fuel: nobody is seriously proposing that either.
According to wikipedia, the concentration of He-3 in lunar soil is estimated at 1ppm. 1ppm is an order of magnitude below an economically viable grade for mining gold or platinum on earth. For the sake of argument, lets assume that strip mining the moon would cost at least one hundred times more than strip mining an equivalent tonnage on earth - He3 now needs to be worth 1000 times more than gold to make the operation viable.
Since the mechanism of He3 deposition in lunar soil is by solar wind, it's highly unlikely that you'll find areas of increased concentration. Pick a spot on the moon, land there, and start mining several tons per day. Nevermind that the largest thing we've ever sent to the moon was a package of a lander barely big enough for three people and a dune buggy, and that it took a significant fraction of a nation's GDP to accomplish that.
You need to send up earth moving equipment, a Helium / Lunar Soil separator (not yet invented), an isotope separation plant, and a means to return the product to earth for use. Did I mention that we don't actually have the fusion technology to make use of it?
I don't know what's worse: that this guy took the time to write about the evils of lunar mining, or that if, against all odds, we made it a viable enterprise, people like him would fret over the altered aesthetics of a tiny patch of a completely lifeless rock.
So you don't trust a private company to handle anything nuclear, but you trust them to handle tanks of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, volatile organic compounds and petrochemical byproducts? There are chemical compounds far more dangerous than any nuclear material being manufactured, processed, and used near/within major population centres all over the world. But they're not OMG NUCLEAR, so nobody seems to care too much.
A potentially serious accident involving nuclear material occurred, but the workers on the site got lucky and the consequences were relatively benign. These kinds of near misses are serious, and should absolutely be avoided, but they happen every day in smelters, chemical plants, and refineries around the world. The messes are cleaned up, reported if necessary, and dealt with. Policies are put in place, processes are changed, etc.
But when a problem like this somehow involves the word "nuclear," it's suddenly subject to incredible scrutiny. We're talking about reporting a small and isolated industrial accident to the United States Congress. Is there any other industry in which such a thing would even be considered? If congress had to get involved every time a leaky seal dumps a few gallons of a carcinogenic compound on a refinery floor, they'd be overwhelmed.
Accidents happen in every industry. How many construction workers die on the job every year? I don't have the numbers, but it's a pretty safe bet that the number is not zero. Yet we'd make a national emergency out of it if a single person died as a result of a nuclear incident - something that hasn't happened in my lifetime, as far as I know.
My point is just that we're being far too severe in our treatment over what amounts to a simple materials handling incident, due solely to an irrational fear of anything nuclear.
Why should we assume that Griffin is "antiglobal warming," as Hansen so eloquently put it? That is, why assume that Griffin's comments are just insincere justification for toeing the Bush party line? I think his comments are a very reasonable position for an informed person to take.
Can you answer his rhetorical questions: is today's climate really the best possible one, and is human action making it worse? All we know it's making it different. Is letting nature take its course, as free as possible from human intervention, the "right thing to do?" Is anthropogenic climate change automatically bad just because it's anthropogenic? What if it has positive consequences for some?
I'm not advocating a position on this: I'm just saying that Griffin's comments should be evaluated on their own merits rather than being lumped into "pro" or "anti" categories and accepted/rejected on that basis. The guy has a point; don't dismiss him just because his argument leads to a conclusion that you don't agree with.
Something I've always wondered... how do the R&D costs compare to construction, testing, and launch of a satellite, or in this case, a space telescope? Wouldn't R&D be the hard part here, making the marginal cost of each additional spacecraft relatively small in comparison to the upfront cost?
It's my understanding that there's a substantial waiting list to use Hubble, and that a lot of very good research can't get done because telescope time is so limited. Time on JWST will probably be similarly limited... if we've spent $3.5B on this thing so far, why not put an extra $250M into it and get twice the benefit?
Photovoltaic is an appropriate technology for the private rooftops of wealthy environmentally-minded people. They don't mind a 20 year ROI, because they're installing the panels to feel good about making a difference. I, as a consumer of electricity, do not want to pay $0.42/kWh: that's probably one of the most expensive electricity sources in north america.
I especially don't want to pay those rates for a dead-end technology. It's one thing to build a pilot plant at subsidized rates if it can realistically be expected to scale... but we know enough about conventional PV cells that we can state, with some confidence, that only a major research breakthrough is ever going to make them a viable large-scale power source.
I'm guessing you're on the western end of the country. From what I've heard, service in Ontario, under the iron fist of Rogers, is comparable to the worst of what you see in the US.
Saying "there's no debate" doesn't magically make it so. There is debate, and you fall on one particular side of it; it's incredibly arrogant to dismiss the other side as if it didn't legitimately exist.
Actually, even if it were emitting light, that would still count as heat. Visible light is no different from infrared: when the photons are finally absorbed by something, the temperature of the absorbing material increases.
An incandescent lightbulb, for example, emits about 95% of its energy in the infrared part of the spectrum and 5% in the visible part. Both infrared and visible light, after bouncing around for a while, eventually get absorbed by the walls of your house, and those walls will heat up slightly.
The United States has a similar history of grossly violating citizens' rights in the past century: the McCarthy era, COINTELPRO, Japanese internment, MKULTRA, the Tuskegee experiment, etc.
It seems to me that a lot of the stuff they pulled off in past generations wouldn't be accepted today; it's hard to believe, but maybe we've actually made advances in civil liberties over a relatively short period of time. We're much better at watching the government; but then, the government has become much better at ignoring us when we try to protest its excesses. So I guess what we've really accomplished is that the abuses are more subtle and less likely to directly impact the life of the average person... a rather hollow victory.
I recycle aluminum because (unlike most recycling) it actually makes a difference for very little effort. I don't take public transit unless it's some deisireable combination of faster and/or cheaper and/or less likely to get me arrested for driving drunk. If I owned one, I'd insulate my house to the degree that the economics made it worthwhile. I don't like the spectrum of CFLs; I gladly pay a premium to use tungsten halogen.
My point? I don't believe in conservation for its own sake. Asking us, or worse yet, forcing us, to reduce our activity to a level below the economic equilibrium is futility.
I think CO2 has technical solutions: changes in personal transport and power generation are completely sufficient to solve this problem. What's not necessary is conservation: that's just a way to solve the CO2 problem faster while compromising our quality of life. Of course it's frustrating to see change happen so slowly, but it is indeed happening, and I don't think it's appropriate to make huge sacrifices and start regulating everything just so we can tackle such a large-scale problem before an artificially imposed deadline.
I'm perfectly content to wait for solar/wind/nuclear power to replace coal and for lithium ion or hydrogen to replace ICEs. Of course you're welcome to conserve energy and such: it just keeps it cheaper for longer for the rest of us.
So, per passenger-mile, cars and planes are about even. By the way, I'd argue that most car rides are single-occupancy commuter trips, and airplanes fly closer to 90% capacity. That said, the exact numbers are insignificant: orders of magnitude are sufficient for this discussion.
Planes are significant, you'd argue, because they accumulate passenger-miles at such a high rate. True, perhaps, but the sheer number of cars versus the comparatively small number of airplanes again serves to put things back into perspective.
But at this point I'd take a step back and reiterate an earlier point: none of this matters. There's no substitute for kerosene-fuelled air travel and there's probably not going to be one within our lifetimes; further, air travel is not something that we should make do without, or even curtail slightly, for the sake of the environment. We don't have to live in a carbon-neutral society, and we shouldn't. First attack power generation, then cars, then ocean-going freighters... only if that's not enough should we even think about regulating air travel in terms of carbon.
As a final point, the A380 itself is no worse, and is in fact better, than most comparable airliners which are based on older technology. Assuming it flies full most of the time - and why would airlines buy these monsters unless they have a reasonable expectation of operating them near capacity - it will actually be better on a per-passenger-mile basis.
So let's take a look again: six cars worth of energy is required per passenger. Except those passengers are going 860km/h instead of an average cross-town speed of, say, 30. Why doesn't the economist look at it in terms of fuel per passenger-mile, which would make the airplane look pretty damn good? And why is it even comparing cars to airplanes? It's like complaining that tractors put out more CO2 than ox-drawn plows while ignoring the fact that you couldn't have a modern agricultural industry without them.
The article then goes on to say that contrails in the upper atmosphere might be somewhat more damaging than CO2 at ground level, and there may in fact be evidence to support that... but again, look at the benefits (and the lack of available substitutes) of/for air travel.
Finally, "aviation is increasingly attracting the attention of environmentalists and politicians," which just tells us that ignorant cause-heads and sycophantic politicians have found yet another cause to rally around.
No, you posted an irrelevant fact, a two line quote, a link to an article behind a subscription wall, and a pithy comment. You're moderated about where you should be.
I know The Economist is highly regarded, but I have to seriously wonder about them, if the quote you've given me is any indication. I'll reproduce it here for convenience:
[F]lying a fully laden A380 is, in terms of energy, like a 14km (nine-mile) queue of traffic on the road below. And that is just one aircraft. In 20 years, Airbus reckons, 1,500 such planes will be in the air. By then, the total number of airliners is expected to have doubled, to 22,000. The super-jumbos alone would be pumping out carbon dioxide (CO2) at the same rate as 5m cars.
Let's think about this: what is that quote trying to tell us? That the power output, or perhaps the CO2 emissions, of an airplane is equal to that of a large number of idling cars. But is that even a reasonable comparison? What about CO2 per passenger per mile? And why don't we put airplane CO2 into perspective versus power generation or personal transport? Instead what we have is the equivalent of quoting the speed of a fiber optic link in terms of libraries of congress, and then marvelling that a tiny strand of glass can carry TWO WHOLE LIBRARIES OF CONGRESS PER DAY.
Really, I expect better from The Economist: I don't want or need a dumbed down analogy instead of a reasonable unit of measure, and I most definitely don't need this analogy carefully framed so as to make a mountain out of a molehill.
It's a good thing flying doesn't have a minimum intelligence requirement, or they probably wouldn't *let* you on the plane.
With the increased awareness of global warming, people like you are falling all over themselves trying to be extra-conscious of their CO2 emissions... but this is ridiculous.
There's no good reason to burn coal for power generation, there's no good reason to drive ten times the car you really need, there are large efficiency gains to be had in personal transport, and we should indeed address all of these issues.
But we're talking about airplanes here. Fuel efficiency matters inasmuch as airlines want to pay as little as possible per passenger, but CO2 isn't, and shouldn't be, a consideration at all. What percentage of the global carbon-based fuel usage goes to the aerospace industry? 1%? 3%? Is this where we should be focusing our efforts? There is no substitute for airplanes in long-distance travel, and there is no substitute for kerosene in airplanes. No other fuel has the required energy density, nuclear excepted of course. Even when oil costs $200/barrel, we'll still be using kerosene to move airplanes around because it's the *only* option.
Fossil fuel use is not an all-or-nothing deal: there is, and always will be, room for airplanes. If you don't want to fly because you really think that air travel is a luxury we can do without for the sake of the precious environment, just do us all a favor and try not to impose your craziness on the rest of us.
Note that this doesn't mean that you should only use channels 1, 6, and 11. If you use channels 3 or 8, then instead of competing with a half-dozen strong signals directly overlapping yours, you'll be competing with much weaker sidebands from, say, a dozen devices.
That said, the real solution to this problem is 802.11a. But good luck finding a router that isn't three years old - the standard is pretty much dead in the water.
We also farmed using ox-driven plows for centuries, so why do we need combines and synthetic fertilizer? Mining has developed to take advantage of the same economies of scale as agriculture, which is what allows you to buy metals and coal at the lowest cost in human history. MTR is necessary because economies of scale demand it.
Of course it's "short term greed." Every single company on earth operates that way - it's the nature of the corporation. But they're not racing against some sort of anti-mining sentiment, they're racing to get the maximum return on investment.
You can't have it both ways: coal mining can't be both cheap and pretty. Notice I didn't say that it has to have an adverse environmental impact... just that the landscape isn't going to look like something you'd want to put on a postcard. Again, a concern for aesthetics is not environmentalism.
Now what does wind power have to do with this? Was anyone proposing that these mountain tops be made into wind farms? Did anyone say that, even if it were a good idea, that it couldn't be done now because of coal mining? What does this have to do with the issue at hand? Essentially nothing, as far as I can tell...
Genocide? Do you even know what the word means? That's a rhetorical question; you obviously don't. For future reference, it's "the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group." It's not just a generic word that means "something really bad that I don't like."
Looking at the same thing in Google Earth, you and I see two very different things. I see a few small grey mines in a sea of thousands of untouched mountain peaks. Yes, entire mountains are being leveled and the nearby valleys are being filled. This is the way mining works. But the important thing to remember is that this is not environmental damage - it's a rock moving exercise on a large scale. The material that's being moved is clean overburden that doesn't produce acid, and there are no harmful chemicals used in the processing of the coal. Streams are sometimes diverted, and sometimes they're actually routed underneath fill through engineered structures known as rock drains.
The simple truth is that your concerns are *aesthetic* and not environmental. You're screaming genocide (remember, that's the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic group) over the *scenery* in and around a few mining operations that, compared to the scale of the mountain range, are tiny.
We need coal. It would be nice if we didn't, but we do... just like we need copper, nickel, zinc, and all the other elements that form everything you touch and use on a daily basis. This stuff doesn't magically appear at Costco as a finished product, but the good news is that an incredibly tiny percentage of the earth's land area gives us all the metal we need. If you want to live in a society with things like plumbing and computers, you need to level a few mountains... even if they're really, really pretty.
It's especially telling of your ignorance that you suggest underground mining as an alternative. First, because the viability of a mining method depends on the thickness, orientation, and geology of a deposit, and second, because you suggest using an inefficient and expensive technique under which these mines could never compete - and then suggest to us that an ancillary benefit would be job creation. The reality is that it's not a choice between mountaintop removal and underground mining - it's mountaintop removal or nothing at all. Let's see you sell that to the local residents.
Sorry if coal mining offends your sense of aesthetics. If you must be a crusader for something, at least find a legitimate environmental cause.
That's an interesting anecdote, but it doesn't have much relevance to today's reality.
Where I live, cable modems were first made available in 1999, and there hasn't been any increase in line speed since day one. DSL and cable providers compete on price, not speed: 80% of their customer base wants a low-cost always-on internet connection with which to browse the web quickly and use iTunes. As for the other 20%: the broadband ISPs would actually love to get rid of them; they're not profitable.
Broadband speeds aren't increasing any time soon, and even if last-mile technology were to make a huge leap, we'd still have to deal with transfer quotas, throttling, and non-neutral pipes.
I call bullshit. Either you're misunderstanding how the system worked or you're just lying: there's no way you could pick a car up by clamping a giant electromagnet to the roof without causing severe damage to the vehicle. The roof is not designed to support the weight of the car, especially not in tension.
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...is a mentality that probably won't work here.
Intel sunk billions into the development of Itanium on the premise that if they make a VLIW architecture, compiler developers will find a way to automatically extract the parallelism necessary to make good use of it. A company with the size, resources, and engineering knowledge of Intel made the mistake of assuming that a fundamental shift in thinking could be driven by money and sheer desire, but it turns out that the problem is not just hard - that would make it solvable given sufficient effort and money - it's actually impossible. Those compiler advances never materialized; you can't draw blood from a stone.
The quest for parallelism in ordinary software might just be similar. Developing tools to make this automated and easy with low overhead is akin to putting a dozen smart people in a room and saying "think up the next big idea that will make me millions." Innovation doesn't work that way; it can't be forced... and money isn't going to make the impossible into the possible.
I think we'll see a move to eight and then maybe even sixteen cores on a consumer-level chip before we see things start going back in the other direction. This will necessary mean a slowdown in the development of processors as CPU manufacturers go back to wringing every last bit of single-threaded performance out of their designs.
Thoughts?
Winkey, agreed.
Everything else:
-It's not like the fingerprint reader gets in the way. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.
-You may like the nipple, but many people, myself included, don't. I won't buy a laptop without a touchpad; I'm not alone.
-More than 4GB of RAM would require more than two memory slots (impractical) or 4GB SODIMMs (not yet available).
-You can't hotswap your boot drive. I mean, there's nothing at the hard disk level that prevents it, but how are an OS and its applications supposed to keep functioning when the drive on which they reside disappears? That said, secondary drives should indeed be hot-swappable, like the optical drives already are.
-14.1" XGA? You mean 1024x768? That's not even a usable resolution these days. If you mean that Lenovo should keep a 14.1" 4:3 aspect ratio display, I'm with you here. Lenovo is at the mercy of its component suppliers: widescreen is in (sadly), and there's just not enough demand for 4:3 panels, much less in an uncommon size and at a high resolution.
-I wouldn't give up dual core, and intel's power management is good enough that the marginal power draw of the second CPU is quite minimal.
What they do need to fix: the battery management for secondary LiPo batteries. A new battery lasts about 30 discharge cycles before becoming useless - the idiots that designed the firmware made it so that the battery is fully discharged every single time.
On a Pentium 66 with 8MB of memory, building a full index file took quite a while. The three options control a tradeoff between the granularity of your search and the amount of time you have to spend waiting. As for the necessity of the index, it's a way to make win16-style help files (long since officially deprecated, but still used to this day) easily searchable.
I completely agree, however, that a user looking for help probably shouldn't be hit with a decision they don't understand.
In a conversation about personal responsibility and internet use, you've managed to find a way to express your derision for Microsoft Windows. Sure, you have a point, but is it really a point worth making? Is it related to the topic at hand in anything but the most tangential manner?
You can't just throw a graphics chip into a laptop as an afterthought: the entire machine has to be designed around the thermal profile of both the CPU and the GPU. Given how marginal laptop cooling systems are, an increase of 5W in GPU power output might be enough to overheat the system.
A laptop really isn't designed to be upgradeable - the good ones, especially so. They're integrated systems, carefully engineered for structural strength and heat dissipation. The only laptops that could accomodate a modular graphics interface are the cheap 17" ABS monsters.
It amuses me when people throw around the idea of mining Helium 3 from the moon. You might as well write a diatribe on the evils of using kittens as hydrocarbon fuel: nobody is seriously proposing that either.
According to wikipedia, the concentration of He-3 in lunar soil is estimated at 1ppm. 1ppm is an order of magnitude below an economically viable grade for mining gold or platinum on earth. For the sake of argument, lets assume that strip mining the moon would cost at least one hundred times more than strip mining an equivalent tonnage on earth - He3 now needs to be worth 1000 times more than gold to make the operation viable.
Since the mechanism of He3 deposition in lunar soil is by solar wind, it's highly unlikely that you'll find areas of increased concentration. Pick a spot on the moon, land there, and start mining several tons per day. Nevermind that the largest thing we've ever sent to the moon was a package of a lander barely big enough for three people and a dune buggy, and that it took a significant fraction of a nation's GDP to accomplish that.
You need to send up earth moving equipment, a Helium / Lunar Soil separator (not yet invented), an isotope separation plant, and a means to return the product to earth for use. Did I mention that we don't actually have the fusion technology to make use of it?
I don't know what's worse: that this guy took the time to write about the evils of lunar mining, or that if, against all odds, we made it a viable enterprise, people like him would fret over the altered aesthetics of a tiny patch of a completely lifeless rock.
So you don't trust a private company to handle anything nuclear, but you trust them to handle tanks of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, volatile organic compounds and petrochemical byproducts? There are chemical compounds far more dangerous than any nuclear material being manufactured, processed, and used near/within major population centres all over the world. But they're not OMG NUCLEAR, so nobody seems to care too much.
A potentially serious accident involving nuclear material occurred, but the workers on the site got lucky and the consequences were relatively benign. These kinds of near misses are serious, and should absolutely be avoided, but they happen every day in smelters, chemical plants, and refineries around the world. The messes are cleaned up, reported if necessary, and dealt with. Policies are put in place, processes are changed, etc.
But when a problem like this somehow involves the word "nuclear," it's suddenly subject to incredible scrutiny. We're talking about reporting a small and isolated industrial accident to the United States Congress. Is there any other industry in which such a thing would even be considered? If congress had to get involved every time a leaky seal dumps a few gallons of a carcinogenic compound on a refinery floor, they'd be overwhelmed.
Accidents happen in every industry. How many construction workers die on the job every year? I don't have the numbers, but it's a pretty safe bet that the number is not zero. Yet we'd make a national emergency out of it if a single person died as a result of a nuclear incident - something that hasn't happened in my lifetime, as far as I know.
My point is just that we're being far too severe in our treatment over what amounts to a simple materials handling incident, due solely to an irrational fear of anything nuclear.
So it's more dangerous than one of the safest energy sources in the world? You fail at hyperbole.
Why should we assume that Griffin is "antiglobal warming," as Hansen so eloquently put it? That is, why assume that Griffin's comments are just insincere justification for toeing the Bush party line? I think his comments are a very reasonable position for an informed person to take.
Can you answer his rhetorical questions: is today's climate really the best possible one, and is human action making it worse? All we know it's making it different. Is letting nature take its course, as free as possible from human intervention, the "right thing to do?" Is anthropogenic climate change automatically bad just because it's anthropogenic? What if it has positive consequences for some?
I'm not advocating a position on this: I'm just saying that Griffin's comments should be evaluated on their own merits rather than being lumped into "pro" or "anti" categories and accepted/rejected on that basis. The guy has a point; don't dismiss him just because his argument leads to a conclusion that you don't agree with.
Something I've always wondered... how do the R&D costs compare to construction, testing, and launch of a satellite, or in this case, a space telescope? Wouldn't R&D be the hard part here, making the marginal cost of each additional spacecraft relatively small in comparison to the upfront cost?
It's my understanding that there's a substantial waiting list to use Hubble, and that a lot of very good research can't get done because telescope time is so limited. Time on JWST will probably be similarly limited... if we've spent $3.5B on this thing so far, why not put an extra $250M into it and get twice the benefit?
Any experts care to weigh in?
Photovoltaic is an appropriate technology for the private rooftops of wealthy environmentally-minded people. They don't mind a 20 year ROI, because they're installing the panels to feel good about making a difference. I, as a consumer of electricity, do not want to pay $0.42/kWh: that's probably one of the most expensive electricity sources in north america.
I especially don't want to pay those rates for a dead-end technology. It's one thing to build a pilot plant at subsidized rates if it can realistically be expected to scale... but we know enough about conventional PV cells that we can state, with some confidence, that only a major research breakthrough is ever going to make them a viable large-scale power source.
I'm guessing you're on the western end of the country. From what I've heard, service in Ontario, under the iron fist of Rogers, is comparable to the worst of what you see in the US.
Saying "there's no debate" doesn't magically make it so. There is debate, and you fall on one particular side of it; it's incredibly arrogant to dismiss the other side as if it didn't legitimately exist.
Actually, even if it were emitting light, that would still count as heat. Visible light is no different from infrared: when the photons are finally absorbed by something, the temperature of the absorbing material increases.
An incandescent lightbulb, for example, emits about 95% of its energy in the infrared part of the spectrum and 5% in the visible part. Both infrared and visible light, after bouncing around for a while, eventually get absorbed by the walls of your house, and those walls will heat up slightly.
The United States has a similar history of grossly violating citizens' rights in the past century: the McCarthy era, COINTELPRO, Japanese internment, MKULTRA, the Tuskegee experiment, etc.
It seems to me that a lot of the stuff they pulled off in past generations wouldn't be accepted today; it's hard to believe, but maybe we've actually made advances in civil liberties over a relatively short period of time. We're much better at watching the government; but then, the government has become much better at ignoring us when we try to protest its excesses. So I guess what we've really accomplished is that the abuses are more subtle and less likely to directly impact the life of the average person... a rather hollow victory.
I recycle aluminum because (unlike most recycling) it actually makes a difference for very little effort. I don't take public transit unless it's some deisireable combination of faster and/or cheaper and/or less likely to get me arrested for driving drunk. If I owned one, I'd insulate my house to the degree that the economics made it worthwhile. I don't like the spectrum of CFLs; I gladly pay a premium to use tungsten halogen.
My point? I don't believe in conservation for its own sake. Asking us, or worse yet, forcing us, to reduce our activity to a level below the economic equilibrium is futility.
I think CO2 has technical solutions: changes in personal transport and power generation are completely sufficient to solve this problem. What's not necessary is conservation: that's just a way to solve the CO2 problem faster while compromising our quality of life. Of course it's frustrating to see change happen so slowly, but it is indeed happening, and I don't think it's appropriate to make huge sacrifices and start regulating everything just so we can tackle such a large-scale problem before an artificially imposed deadline.
I'm perfectly content to wait for solar/wind/nuclear power to replace coal and for lithium ion or hydrogen to replace ICEs. Of course you're welcome to conserve energy and such: it just keeps it cheaper for longer for the rest of us.
So, per passenger-mile, cars and planes are about even. By the way, I'd argue that most car rides are single-occupancy commuter trips, and airplanes fly closer to 90% capacity. That said, the exact numbers are insignificant: orders of magnitude are sufficient for this discussion.
Planes are significant, you'd argue, because they accumulate passenger-miles at such a high rate. True, perhaps, but the sheer number of cars versus the comparatively small number of airplanes again serves to put things back into perspective.
But at this point I'd take a step back and reiterate an earlier point: none of this matters. There's no substitute for kerosene-fuelled air travel and there's probably not going to be one within our lifetimes; further, air travel is not something that we should make do without, or even curtail slightly, for the sake of the environment. We don't have to live in a carbon-neutral society, and we shouldn't. First attack power generation, then cars, then ocean-going freighters... only if that's not enough should we even think about regulating air travel in terms of carbon.
As a final point, the A380 itself is no worse, and is in fact better, than most comparable airliners which are based on older technology. Assuming it flies full most of the time - and why would airlines buy these monsters unless they have a reasonable expectation of operating them near capacity - it will actually be better on a per-passenger-mile basis.
So let's take a look again: six cars worth of energy is required per passenger. Except those passengers are going 860km/h instead of an average cross-town speed of, say, 30. Why doesn't the economist look at it in terms of fuel per passenger-mile, which would make the airplane look pretty damn good? And why is it even comparing cars to airplanes? It's like complaining that tractors put out more CO2 than ox-drawn plows while ignoring the fact that you couldn't have a modern agricultural industry without them.
The article then goes on to say that contrails in the upper atmosphere might be somewhat more damaging than CO2 at ground level, and there may in fact be evidence to support that... but again, look at the benefits (and the lack of available substitutes) of/for air travel.
Finally, "aviation is increasingly attracting the attention of environmentalists and politicians," which just tells us that ignorant cause-heads and sycophantic politicians have found yet another cause to rally around.
No, you posted an irrelevant fact, a two line quote, a link to an article behind a subscription wall, and a pithy comment. You're moderated about where you should be.
I know The Economist is highly regarded, but I have to seriously wonder about them, if the quote you've given me is any indication. I'll reproduce it here for convenience:
Let's think about this: what is that quote trying to tell us? That the power output, or perhaps the CO2 emissions, of an airplane is equal to that of a large number of idling cars. But is that even a reasonable comparison? What about CO2 per passenger per mile? And why don't we put airplane CO2 into perspective versus power generation or personal transport? Instead what we have is the equivalent of quoting the speed of a fiber optic link in terms of libraries of congress, and then marvelling that a tiny strand of glass can carry TWO WHOLE LIBRARIES OF CONGRESS PER DAY.
Really, I expect better from The Economist: I don't want or need a dumbed down analogy instead of a reasonable unit of measure, and I most definitely don't need this analogy carefully framed so as to make a mountain out of a molehill.
It's a good thing flying doesn't have a minimum intelligence requirement, or they probably wouldn't *let* you on the plane.
With the increased awareness of global warming, people like you are falling all over themselves trying to be extra-conscious of their CO2 emissions... but this is ridiculous.
There's no good reason to burn coal for power generation, there's no good reason to drive ten times the car you really need, there are large efficiency gains to be had in personal transport, and we should indeed address all of these issues.
But we're talking about airplanes here. Fuel efficiency matters inasmuch as airlines want to pay as little as possible per passenger, but CO2 isn't, and shouldn't be, a consideration at all. What percentage of the global carbon-based fuel usage goes to the aerospace industry? 1%? 3%? Is this where we should be focusing our efforts? There is no substitute for airplanes in long-distance travel, and there is no substitute for kerosene in airplanes. No other fuel has the required energy density, nuclear excepted of course. Even when oil costs $200/barrel, we'll still be using kerosene to move airplanes around because it's the *only* option.
Fossil fuel use is not an all-or-nothing deal: there is, and always will be, room for airplanes. If you don't want to fly because you really think that air travel is a luxury we can do without for the sake of the precious environment, just do us all a favor and try not to impose your craziness on the rest of us.
Note that this doesn't mean that you should only use channels 1, 6, and 11. If you use channels 3 or 8, then instead of competing with a half-dozen strong signals directly overlapping yours, you'll be competing with much weaker sidebands from, say, a dozen devices.
That said, the real solution to this problem is 802.11a. But good luck finding a router that isn't three years old - the standard is pretty much dead in the water.
We also farmed using ox-driven plows for centuries, so why do we need combines and synthetic fertilizer? Mining has developed to take advantage of the same economies of scale as agriculture, which is what allows you to buy metals and coal at the lowest cost in human history. MTR is necessary because economies of scale demand it.
Of course it's "short term greed." Every single company on earth operates that way - it's the nature of the corporation. But they're not racing against some sort of anti-mining sentiment, they're racing to get the maximum return on investment.
You can't have it both ways: coal mining can't be both cheap and pretty. Notice I didn't say that it has to have an adverse environmental impact... just that the landscape isn't going to look like something you'd want to put on a postcard. Again, a concern for aesthetics is not environmentalism.
Now what does wind power have to do with this? Was anyone proposing that these mountain tops be made into wind farms? Did anyone say that, even if it were a good idea, that it couldn't be done now because of coal mining? What does this have to do with the issue at hand? Essentially nothing, as far as I can tell...
Genocide? Do you even know what the word means? That's a rhetorical question; you obviously don't. For future reference, it's "the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group." It's not just a generic word that means "something really bad that I don't like."
Looking at the same thing in Google Earth, you and I see two very different things. I see a few small grey mines in a sea of thousands of untouched mountain peaks. Yes, entire mountains are being leveled and the nearby valleys are being filled. This is the way mining works. But the important thing to remember is that this is not environmental damage - it's a rock moving exercise on a large scale. The material that's being moved is clean overburden that doesn't produce acid, and there are no harmful chemicals used in the processing of the coal. Streams are sometimes diverted, and sometimes they're actually routed underneath fill through engineered structures known as rock drains.
The simple truth is that your concerns are *aesthetic* and not environmental. You're screaming genocide (remember, that's the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic group) over the *scenery* in and around a few mining operations that, compared to the scale of the mountain range, are tiny.
We need coal. It would be nice if we didn't, but we do... just like we need copper, nickel, zinc, and all the other elements that form everything you touch and use on a daily basis. This stuff doesn't magically appear at Costco as a finished product, but the good news is that an incredibly tiny percentage of the earth's land area gives us all the metal we need. If you want to live in a society with things like plumbing and computers, you need to level a few mountains... even if they're really, really pretty.
It's especially telling of your ignorance that you suggest underground mining as an alternative. First, because the viability of a mining method depends on the thickness, orientation, and geology of a deposit, and second, because you suggest using an inefficient and expensive technique under which these mines could never compete - and then suggest to us that an ancillary benefit would be job creation. The reality is that it's not a choice between mountaintop removal and underground mining - it's mountaintop removal or nothing at all. Let's see you sell that to the local residents.
Sorry if coal mining offends your sense of aesthetics. If you must be a crusader for something, at least find a legitimate environmental cause.
That's an interesting anecdote, but it doesn't have much relevance to today's reality.
Where I live, cable modems were first made available in 1999, and there hasn't been any increase in line speed since day one. DSL and cable providers compete on price, not speed: 80% of their customer base wants a low-cost always-on internet connection with which to browse the web quickly and use iTunes. As for the other 20%: the broadband ISPs would actually love to get rid of them; they're not profitable.
Broadband speeds aren't increasing any time soon, and even if last-mile technology were to make a huge leap, we'd still have to deal with transfer quotas, throttling, and non-neutral pipes.
Transfer rates aren't going anywhere.
I call bullshit. Either you're misunderstanding how the system worked or you're just lying: there's no way you could pick a car up by clamping a giant electromagnet to the roof without causing severe damage to the vehicle. The roof is not designed to support the weight of the car, especially not in tension.