I believe I explained this to you before. I know what I know because I "googled it". I shared what I know with you and where I got it from so we can both know of what we are talking about. If you don't share your sources then I cannot know what you know except what little bit you've shared. If you know of a reputable source on all of this then point it out to me so I can soak it in, not just the tiny bits you put in a few words on a web forum. By not sharing your source I have no idea on if what you know is current, has any backing in reality, or if you just pulled it out of your ass. I did "google it" and what I found out was shown in the sibling post on algae derived fuels being a worthless technology. As that is what I read from Google therefore I concluded that you are full of shit and have been either lying to me or been seriously mislead by your lesser skills with Google.
Energy per gallon: 370kWh... so you need to produce 390e6 * 379kWh in electricity per day and convert it loss free into synthetic fuel. That means 6158750000 kW power capacity. That is 6159 GW. With a capacity of roughly 0.5GW per reactor, you need 12,000 new reactors. Good luck finding places for only a fraction of them in the US. But I guess I made somewhere a mistake, so feel free to divide it by a factor of 10:P
Also shown in the sibling post is that nuclear power takes 1/10th the area of solar power. Solar power including bio-conversion by algae, PV collectors, solar thermal arrays, or whatever. As shown on the Without Hot Air website ( https://www.withouthotair.com/... ) the amount of solar power one can achieve varies greatly by location. Even in an ideal location nuclear power can produce four times the energy by area compared to solar, assuming 100% conversion into something useful. With 250 W/m^2 of average solar power in Hawaii that limited amount of land available on the island would be better used for nuclear power, again assuming 100% conversion of solar power to something useful. The 250 W/m^2 is the power of the sun on the ground, converting that to something useful with the technology we have today means we'd get more like 25 W/m^2. (That math shown in detail here: https://www.withouthotair.com/... ) The 1000 W/m^2 of a nuclear power plant is the electrical output, which assumes the heat left over is just vented to the air. If that heat is instead used in a fuel production process the conversion to useful energy might be improved, or not. We do know that if we use that land for electrical production we will get far more electricity from nuclear power than any solar collectors could. With all else equal, such as that electricity used to drive the same fuel synthesis process, then nuclear power wins by an order of magnitude.
So, where are we going to find places to put all those nuclear power plants? That's easy, push over all those stupid solar collectors and put a nuclear power plant there. Without Hot Air claims a nuclear power plant producing one gigawatt takes less than one square kilometer of area, so 6000 gigawatts would be about the size of the state of Delaware. That's far less area than the size of Arizona as computed in the sibling post for the needed area for solar power to produce the same output.
If you want me to believe algae has any possibility of producing enough fuel to meet any nation's transportation needs, and do so at a price competitive with synthetic fuels from nuclear power, then give me some links on sources which show their math. I "googled it" and found out you are full of shit. If you want me to believe otherwise then you are going to have to be VERY specific on where you got your information.
Everything old is new again. Lamarck had his theory of evolution and Darwin had his, and for the longest time Darwin was thought to have cracked the code. I guess just like how Newton figured out physics on the macro scale there's more to be seen when one looks closely enough to see where the theory doesn't explain it all.
I recall seeing an interesting TED Talk from a man explaining how homosexuality was not genetic but epi-genetic. That is "epi-" meaning "above" or "beyond". Epi-genetics means that environmental factors placed upon the parents produce something very much like genetics on the child, as in inherent to their "code" or "being", that cannot be undone after the child is conceived. In this TED Talk the man used his son as an example of this in that the stress he and his wife had in their life produced a homosexual son because in prior times, and through many iterations of evolution taking place, there is a survival benefit of the clan or species in having homosexual men in times of stress. Things like war and famine might be where a "pause" in further offspring would be beneficial.
This fine article performed the experiment on mice and seemed a bit vague on the behavior they observed. If experiments like this can tell us more on human behaviors then there could be a lot on how we could improve society for the future. Since I already stepped on the landmine that there is a theory, not proven by the way but merely an educated guess by a man that seems convinced of the science, where stressed parents produce homosexual children then I feel like stepping on another will not be any worse.
There's the theory that a stressor that is thought to lower intelligence and raise tendencies to criminal behavior, that is children conceived out of marriage. Women being pregnant without the biological father around (or other male stand in) is stressed in a way that evidence shows might be epi-genetic. There's other possible reasons for this, like such stress in childhood upon the child will bring an adult that is aggressive and poorly educated and therefore likely to exhibit anti-social (or just plain criminal) behaviors. Or that women in such a situation will not have the time for breastfeeding (shown to be far healthier than formula), time for bedtime stories (shown to improve education later), or time for making a proper meal with any regularity. Children raised in a low stress environment tend to become well behaved adults.
Will reduced stress in society mean no more gays and criminals? Well, that would be an interesting theory to test. I don't know how we'd do that without getting into telling parents how to raise their children. Epi-genetics or not there's plenty of evidence on how a downward spiral in society can be broken by one generation of children raised in a healthy family structure. Lamarck may not have got it all right, but he wasn't all wrong either.
What is also maddening is the bias against nuclear power as a "zero carbon" energy source. Nuclear isn't really zero carbon but then neither is wind or solar. If these people were honest with themselves and truly concerned about the environment then they'd embrace nuclear power as much as wind and solar.
I see the future of energy as a mix largely made up of wind, hydro, and nuclear. All these energy sources are very low technology. The machines we build for harnessing this energy has not changed significantly for nearly a century. We have computers to optimize the designs. We have new materials to make them safer and cheaper. We have experience and data to know when and where they will be profitable. If we are going to see undeveloped and underdeveloped nations be brought up to the norms of the developed nations in standards of living then they need energy that they can build on their own, with what little infrastructure they have. That means they start with wind, hydro, and nuclear. The "West" developed this technology in the 1950s, and bringing people up to this level of technology will be far easier than bringing them to the technology of the year 2000. We cannot expect any nation to be willing to base their economy on technology that they cannot own, that only makes them slaves to what other nations would be willing to sell or trade.
Those of us in the wealthy nations of the world have the luxury of ignoring low technology solutions for the high technology and high priced solar panels. The rest of the world do not have that luxury. Barring them from low tech hydro because it might disturb some fish means they never develop the wealth the "West" now enjoys. Those that discourage such development are opening their arms to hug the trees instead of fellow humans. They love "nature" but hate humanity.
It's more than possible to power most needs of a typical house with a solar roof and a large battery pack.
I agree. I did the math on this one time just to amuse myself. In the summer I calculated I'd have plenty of sunshine to run air conditioning and likely have ample left over to charge up an electric vehicle for my commute. In the winter I'd have enough electricity for all my appliances but I'd need natural gas heating and a hydrocarbon fueled vehicle.
The problem was the cost. This was not a trivial matter. The cost of the solar panels and the batteries would have exceeded the cost of the house. My payments on the loans to pay for this equipment would be ten times what I paid for electricity now. When the equipment was paid off then I'd have met or exceeded the expected lifespan of the panels and batteries and I'd have to tear it all out and start all over again.
Solar power for a household is far from practical. It will not likely be practical for a very long time.
Plus if you need a constant carbon free power source nuclear is more than capable.
Yes, it is.
I wouldn't call it clean per-se and it certainly isn't renewable, but it's arguably less dangerous than fossil fuels on grid scale.
Whatever you can say against nuclear power is irrelevant given the pressing need for energy that is cheap, safe, plentiful, and reliable. Nuclear power is all the above and more. It's cleaner than anything else. It's safer than anything else. It's lower carbon than anything else, with a possible exception of hydro power. It's all we got right now and so saying anything against it means nothing. We will deploy more nuclear power, and do so soon, because we will run out of energy without it.
Those idiots in Greenpeace and similar groups are only making things worse for the future. They oppose nuclear power based on lies. They try to make a point on how nuclear power attracts terrorists when the only terrorists nuclear power has attracted so far have been from Greenpeace. If they all went home and shut up about it then the terror problem goes away.
I can point to numerous nuclear power plants that have run without issue for 40 year, and many of them are expected to run safely and profitably for another 40 years. A new nuclear power plant built today, with what we learned from 60 years of building nuclear reactors, would be expected to run for at least a century.
A wind farm running for 25 years is impressive if we ignore that nuclear and hydro power will last for 4 times longer. I have nothing really against wind power, it's cheap, low tech, available most anywhere, and safe. I just don't see lasting 25 years as anything to get excited about. Navy nuclear reactors will last routinely for 50 years before being decommissioned, and that's mostly because the vessel it's in has been worn out and/or seriously outdated and not because of any problems on the reactors.
Wind power is not new, humans have been turning wind into useful work since before written history. With that much time to develop the technology one would think we should have been able to get more out of it than we do. The only thing I can think of holding back wind power today are inherent limitations in wind power. Wind takes a lot of land, material, labor, and for little payback in energy compared to coal, natural gas, and nuclear. As I said earlier, it's nice in many ways but it is not something to get excited about.
The future of "synthetic" fuel if you want to call it that way is Algae. Not nuclear power. You can not produce competitive priced "gasoline" with electricity until the gasoline at your gas station has hit the $5.5 mark.
First, gasoline getting to $5.50 is certainly possible and the technology developed by the Navy, if deployed essentially as-is, would mean fuel costs never get above that. Absent such technology the costs could keep rising as petroleum becomes more difficult to obtain. Second, that price of synthetic fuels is based on no future development in cost reductions for nuclear power or this synthesis process. That $5.50/gallon isn't just the top end for petroleum based fuels then, as synthesized fuels would begin to dominated the market, but also the top end for synthesized fuels because future developments means prices get lower. In the end this is a very promising technology because it's been demonstrated to work, the price structure has been calculated with little room for error, and there's no real limitation on the production capability since we aren't going to run out of uranium and seawater any time soon.
No idea what is so complicated in grasping that. It is in your own links.
I grasp it just fine. While $5.50/gallon is expensive it is far from crushing on the economy.
I don't spread any lies, asshole! A lie means the person is knowingly telling something that is not true. If I say something that is wrong, it is not a lie, asshole!!
So, your defense is your ignorance? That's not a great argument since instead of a liar you are just an ignoramus. If you want to plead ignorance then I will conceded that point, you aren't a liar but you nothing of which you speak. Here's something you could educate us both on, how much would this algae based fuel cost? How much resources would it take? I'm mostly curious on the land it would take as I suspect the sunlight collection would be the limiting factor. As pointed out in the "Without Ho Air" paper/website there is not enough sun for producing both our food and our fuel, assuming the world wishes to live in the same high standard of living as those in Europe or North America.
Sure, there's software solutions for the lack of a phone in tablets. What software cannot fix is the problem of a well supported, standardized, cable for A/V output and charging. I'm guessing if I look hard enough I can likely find a dongle/dock/adapter of some sort that can provide USB-C to HDMI (or MHL, or DisplayPort, or whatever) for audio and video out and that's supported by a large number of devices. What it won't be is as cheap as that passive cable I saw that connected HDMI/MHL displays and TVs to smart phones and tablets.
I'm guessing that this will come again once the different tablet and TV makers decide which A/V out standard to support on USB-C. This only demonstrates that we lost a very useful function on the newer tablets that caused me to be reluctant to buy a new tablet for myself, and I suspect that I am not alone in this.
The people behind USB have some blame on this. They allowed this confusion to develop by enabling four (by my count) different and incompatible means to output audio and video from their port. There's MHL, HDMI, DisplayPort/ThunderBolt, and the old USB A/V standards brought over from USB 2.0 (which appears to be used by the confusingly named DisplayLink series of adapters). Add in ThunderBolt adapters, which are just standard PCIe devices in an external case, and there's another different means to get A/V out from a device with a USB-C port.
Addiction is turning a craving into a behaviour-changing existential need.
So is pseudo-addiction. The behaviors for both are largely indistinguishable, to the point even medical professionals cannot see a difference. The difference is that the person with addictive behaviors but to treat a real medical condition is not considered a true addict. The problem I see is that the government is so concerned of true addiction that it is creating the problem of pseudo-addiction. The laws created this problem, we will need laws changed to resolve the problem.
It would also help if mental health treatments improved but getting people committed for their health was made exceedingly difficult. This has gone on for so long that I have no recollection of how it was before versus now. I just see too many people ending up in prison and not getting treated instead of getting treatment and being productive members of society.
You're confusing yourself with definitions. Addiction doesn't have anything to do with "like". Quite the opposite. It has to do with "need" even if you don't "like". If you have a cigarette once a month then you're not addicted to them. In general withdrawal symptoms to addictive substances don't take more than a couple of days to screw you up.
What addiction looks like: You want to give up smoking, but you can't. You give up coffee and start chewing paracetamol tablets to get the headaches under control for the next week (my own experience). You give up sugar and bite the head off everyone who talks to you for a week in ways that not even a hormonally raged psycho on her period could possibly do (my own experience with someone else). You say "I can stop ${thing} anytime I want!" And yet when you actually need to stop you continue doing ${thing} because the very brain that wants to stop is also dependent on the status quo.
I think you're self justifying the need to define addiction differently. The reality is that most people can understand the difference between an occasional craving and an addiction quite well.
For someone self medicating for a medical condition those behaviors you describe can look a lot like an addiction. Physicians often can't even understand the difference, which is why we have the term "pseudo-addiction".
I've heard of cancer patients craving marijuana, either to treat the pain and other symptoms from the cancer itself or to moderate the side effects of their treatments. Such people can get irritable, bite the head off people for minor matters, crave marijuana to the point of doing something they might not normally do. I will concede that an addict might feel compelled to commit crimes to feed such a need but someone craving relief from their medical conditions might not. This is still an arbitrary and subjective distinction. I can recall having a very bad flu and craving Tylenol. While I was not likely to hold a druggist at gunpoint to get some but if someone was taunting me and holding it out of my reach I might feel a need to punch the person in the ribs to get it. Is resorting to violence in this case an "addiction"? No, it's someone in pain, fevered, and angered for being arbitrarily deprived of something that can provide relief.
The very fact that the concept of "pseudo-addiction" has made it to medical literature is an indication that addiction is poorly defined and difficult to create a distinction from "true" addiction. If a physician, someone that has specialized training in discovering addiction, cannot tell the difference then that means we have a problem. We need better testing for what is addiction as opposed to people craving proper treatment for their mental or physical pain.
It most likely will be bio gas and/or oils made from algae.
No, it won't. I've seen the math and bio-fuels simply cannot provide the energy we need for transportation. Citation: https://www.withouthotair.com/... (You'll have to read through the next few pages to get it all, not just the page I provided a link to.)
Everything in your post is a steaming pile of unsubstantiated bullshit. There is no energy future for the world that does not include nuclear power or widespread poverty. Oil prices will rise as it runs out, at some point this price point will reach to where synthesis of fuel from nuclear power is profitable. Or, more likely, the price of synthesized fuel lowers to the point it be competitive with petroleum drilled from the ground. Whatever the case the lines will meet on that graph and we will slowly transition from petroleum to synthetic fuels. I simply prefer it happen sooner than later. You spreading your lies is not helping.
For someone that constantly tells people to "Google it" for themselves you seem quite ignorant on the subject. Go Google it. If you can't be bothered to watch the videos given to you as links in a post then don't reply as if you have something useful to say.
With wireless charging being the new thing, and just wireless everything in general, there's no one that will build a tablet out of a faraday cage.
I'm guessing that if you looked hard enough you could find a "toughbook" style tablet, or someone that makes a durable metal case for a popular model of tablet. That will kill any wireless function in the tablet. For the security minded person this might be considered a plus. For the rest this will mean needing some kind of dongle hanging out of the thing, which will defeat some of the reasons for the hardened case.
Maybe there's a way to get both, a durable metal case and working wireless function, but this will add complexity and therefore cost. For me I'm quite impressed with the durability of phones and tablets these days. The glass on a phone or tablet used to be quite fragile, to the point of cracked screens being a common sight. Now they rarely break, at least as I've seen so far. Maybe people just learned how to treat their electronics. Or that protective rubber (or plastic, or leather, or whatever) cases are the norm.
I'm guessing that if you want a durable aluminum case for your tablet that you will have to machine one for yourself. With small scale CNC machines getting cheap this might be an option. And they can machine out all kinds of other interesting items as well.
I'll use a USB C to 3.5 jack if I have to, but I'd rather have the native 3.5 jack.
I'd rather have some quality headphones with a USB-C connector.
For years I've had all kinds of problems with the built in audio from computers, except from Apple. The problems are that I can here noise from hard drive access, mouse movement, or some other device in or around the computer. Ever since buying a pair of some very expensive headphones years ago I've been a bit spoiled on the quality of the audio from my electronics. I expect a clean signal because I have headphones that allow for nuance that I could not hear before. The only way I found to address the problems of noise from computers with terrible built-in audio is a USB audio dongle to use with my headphones.
What I'd like is a set of nice headphones with a USB-C connector on the end so I can plug it into the increasingly common USB-C ports on electronics, including those from Apple. This is what I expect though with this new Audio Accessory mode that's been added to the USB-C spec, a return to the crappy internal audio just on a different analog connector. So long as there is still support for an external DAC on that USB-C port then I can still happily replace the crappy internal audio with something of my choice. If devices drop support for this because they provide an analog output on the port then I don't want it. It's bad enough that audio output quality took a dive long ago, we don't need to repeat that history.
I won't miss the 1/8" audio jack. The lack of concern for a quality output on those ports made them useless for me long ago.
I had a similar experience. My brother showed me his Android device some time ago (long enough I forgot many specifics) and I was quite impressed with it. One impressive feature was the HDMI output (or, that's what he called it, I found out it was really MHL) and how he could mirror the display on his TV, direct the sound to his stereo, while powering the device, on a single cable. I thought that looked awesome and thought I'd look for something similar for myself.
Here's what I found out, device manufacturers (or maybe just the ones I looked at) dropped MHL support in the next generation devices. The old devices used mini-USB for power and A/V out which was a standard (or "standard enough") means to make this connection. New devices use USB-C which made such cables obsolete. There's laptops and such that support video out from the USB-C, notably Apple products, but this seems quite rare to the point of near nonexistence.
In their defense these devices often offered some kind of wireless means to output audio and video but that meany buying a new TV or buying an expensive dongle to do what my brother's device did with what seemed to be an off the shelf, and relatively inexpensive, cable. The video was also higher resolution but that seemed like a non-issue since the source material would often be just 720p anyway from some internet stream.
USB-C is nice but it introduced a "reset" on what we had before. There's going to be a lot of mixed up messes on standards until we get back many things lost with older and well established (for the time) connections like mini-USB and the 30-pin Apple connector.
Oh, and this...
Tablets with an LTE modem are essentially cell phones with the "talking" portion of the software disabled.
That really bothers me for some reason. I don't see myself holding a tablet to my face for a phone call but if someone wants to call me on my tablet then they should be able to do so. I can use it like a speaker phone, plug in headphones, use some kind of Bluetooth device (like those built into the dash of many cars these days), or whatever to talk. This would be especially useful for outgoing calls and other cell phone based (as opposed to the general internet protocol based) communications. If I want to make a quick phone call while holding my tablet then in my hands is all the electronics needed to do so, except it's been hobbled for no reason I can really understand.
Maybe if the people making tablets want to sell more of them then they should enable all the features of that cell phone chip it's got, meaning it can make and receive a phone call. Is there some FCC regulation or something preventing this?
It's not just the size that counts. (Insert juvenile joke here.)
I've had an iPod Touch for a very long time but found myself in dire need of a replacement due to a severe crack on the screen. It still works but I can't trust it to keep working in this condition. Upon acquiring an iPhone to replace it (and an equally aged and slightly damaged cell phone) I found that while the screen was not all that much larger the screen resolution has increased considerably. I can simply get far more information on a screen even though it's not all that bigger.
I'm not sure if the expense of the cell phone is much of a factor. I like buying my own cell phone so I'm not locked into a contract but it seems to me that people generally just buy their phone on contract and don't much consider the price too much. I'm guessing that the far greater convenience of a cell phone, with the greater capability of a laptop, don't leave much in the middle.
Tablets for the most part just work. Modern materials, batteries, and manufacturing, have made them very durable. The things people use them for have not changed a lot since they've been introduced. They are the "personal digital assistants" from the 1990s brought to maturity. They give us our e-mail and other communications. They keep us on schedule with clocks and calendars. They give us the information we crave with weather reports, stock prices, news, opinions, and just whatever else we can grab from the internet. They amuse us with music, games, movies, and so on.
With a phone people crave new and shiny more often because they fit a different need. People want more data in a smaller package, which means chasing the latest cellular technology even if the phone is otherwise up to task. A tablet will often be used at home, in an car (where internet access is increasingly a common feature of the vehicle's electronic package), at work, or otherwise in an environment where WiFi exists or brought to the tablet by the latest and greatest cell phone.
This is also a market for which the average user has a computer for the "heavy lifting" of high resolution gaming, office productivity apps, internet access, and computing beyond the mundane of checking the weather or seeing if there was a response to an e-mail.
I've thought of buying a tablet but I find myself instead craving a better phone, laptop, or desktop computer. If I'm just checking for a quick bit of information then my phone comes out of my pocket. If I need more screen space, want to write a longer message, or I'm expecting a longer bit of down time, then I grab my laptop or walk to my office so I have plenty of screen and a real keyboard.
The increasing trend for tablets to have keyboard attachments, and a greater number of ports for accessories, just means they are encroaching on the space already occupied by laptops. And losing on the competition. On the other end is making them smaller, lighter, and simpler, which just means they are getting into the territory of cell phones and other pocket electronics. All I'm seeing with tablets these days is larger and larger versions of my very old iPod Touch. That's not a bad thing, only that I'm only seeing a need to upgrade unless I had my iPod broken, lost, stolen, or considered so old that I can no longer run the latest version of my favorite games.
Perhaps this is just a matter of drawing a distinction where there should not be one. A tablet computer is just an arbitrary distinction along the spectrum of electronic communication devices from pocket sized (generally a cell phone or whatever an iPod is considered these days) to desktop sized. Draw that distinction somewhere else and the market could look very different.
I'm kind of surprised that more effort isn't put into making synthetic fuels.
Since I've thought about it a bit I'm not all that surprised. First is your following point, the technology is relatively well known. People know it's possible but there's a lot of competing means for providing energy for transportation. One main competitor that just won't die is petroleum. Even though there's been scares of running out or the damage burning it might cause to the environment there's plenty of evidence for the policy makers and people in the business that neither have any real reason to be concerned over. Second is the fanaticism among the public and policy makers for electric vehicles. If there is a cheap source of electricity, such as wind power or fusion reactors, then electric cars and trains are supposed to displace a lot of transportation needs almost overnight.
Basically, synthetic fuels are not grabbing people's attention because it's not shiny and new. Even though World War 2 era (if not far older than that) technology would solve the problems we face it's not going to grab attention because it's old and boring.
The technology isn't that immature, the Germans for example studied it quite a bit during the war and today it is being considered for use on Mars.
Not only did they study it, IIRC, they relied upon it heavily to keep their airplanes flying during World War 2. South Africa also used this technology to carry them through their trade sanctions. It's possible, IMHO, that the use of this technology by such hated governments don't help the adoption any.
Seems ideal for solar and wind as you just make the fuel while the Sun is shining, and/or wind blowing. Probably not very efficient, but neither is pumped hydro storage.
Pumped hydro storage is actually quite efficient. Maybe it's only 70% efficient but that's still far better than so many other options to manage grid stability. In the end the efficiency becomes nearly irrelevant. With pumped hydro storage the efficiency is quite apparent as it's electricity in versus electricity out. When it's solar or nuclear (fission or fusion) power driving the process the efficiency is quite academic since that energy in to the process is useless for transportation but the fuel that comes out is highly valued. What matters more than energy in is the dollars put in. If the efficiency of dollars per gallon, or really dollars per mile when comparing electric vehicles, can compete with petroleum then it will win out. The energy efficiency of the entire process is effectively meaningless so long as the dollars to useful work is better than any alternatives.
Be easier to research as well compared to nuclear as you could research in a garage unlike nuclear where the government has an interest for various reasons from weapons to radiation leaks.
There's lots of nuclear power research that can be done without actual radioactive material. Much of the thermal and chemical processes involved can be done with non-radioactive stand-ins. When dealing with uranium chemistry the use of non-fissile U-238 is relatively common and done with relatively little supervision as it's deemed relatively worthless and no more hazardous than many other heavy metals. With plutonium there's often no "safe" alternative available. Every isotope is either considered weapon grade or too "hot" for handling outside of very close supervision.
Nuclear is the right solution in places, if it can be built economically, and should be part of the solution, especially if some of the newer type plants can be brought on line.
"In places"? You mean like nearly every place? We have nuclear power plants on submarines and the people inside work, sleep, and eat, for months at a time, in very close proximity with no ill effects. This should be a demonstration of it's utility and safety far beyond any energ
If it were almost any other drug you'd be in jail, but if it's caffeine, you can brag about your addiction and no one will bat an eye.
I heard someone point out that if we had discovered alcohol today then it would be classified as a schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act. This would be fairly accurate as it is a highly addictive intoxicating substance, with no accepted medicinal value, and having high probability of mental or physical harm. Caffeine in high doses likely meets this standard as well. As would tobacco.
One problem with this is the standard for addiction seems rather subjective. Addiction is just a mental or physical craving for a substance. Are people "addicted" to air? Or food? Well, there are some cases of a food addiction but this is often a sign of an underlying mental or physical condition. I recall a cabbage craving was considered a sign of some physical problem, and people self medicating by eating foam from couch cushions. Of course there are better treatments for diseases than eating gobs of cabbage, and certainly eating foam padding is not all that healthy.
As someone that deals with chronic pain I hear the word "addiction" far too often. There's even a term for seeking medication outside of merely abusing the substance, "pseudo-addiction". Addiction is, again, so subjective that it's lost all meaning to me. There's claims of people being addicted to video games, watching porn, washing their hands, and so many other behaviors. What makes taking a drug, drinking coffee, or smoking a cigarette an addiction over merely a bad habit? I've heard it somewhere that tobacco use is not an addiction if it's not used more than once per month. So, a person is "addicted" if they like to have a cigarette with his smoking friends when they meet on the weekend for poker and pizza? Are they also addicted to poker and pizza then?
I'm thinking we need a better word than addiction for such cravings, or we need to need to better define addiction to something other than merely something that can be mistaken for routine, medical needs, or bad habits. I don't want to be accused of being an addict just because I have not had my pain properly managed by physicians. It seems we've created a health care system so handcuffed by the government's fear of addiction that they can't do their job.
I remember hearing on how there's an "epidemic" among veterans for their opiate use, being prescribed opiates far above the general population. Well, no shit Sherlock! The average population isn't shot at, blown up, dropped from helicopters, marched for miles with 100 pounds on their backs, or put in considerable peril by an LT with a map. I won't doubt that there is an opiate abuse problem, but people need to be treated as individuals and not as some average member of the general population. The average member of the population has one testicle, one ovary, and 1.99 legs, which has little to do with how an individual is treated.
I imagine the ideal time for milking cows would be a fixed number of hours after sunrise.
The ideal time has been long debated but the general practice for most that milked cattle like we did is to milk them 12 hours apart, generally early in the morning and late afternoon. Some people think milking 3 times a day, 8 hours apart, is closer to ideal, but that creates more work for what many see as little gain. We "cheated" on that 12 hour schedule a bit by milking at 5:30 AM and 4:30 PM.
Of course, that would make a bad time standard for everyone else as it varies across latitudes and changes on a daily basis.
I'm guessing the same. I will say that cattle seem to have some real skill at keeping time. I'm guessing this is no different than people experiencing the ability to wake up naturally about the time their alarm clock would wake them. People get used to routine, eating, sleeping, and so on, on a regular daily schedule and I expect cattle are no different in this respect. That means we get tired about the same time, hungry about the same time, etc. Cows living mostly outside where they can see the sun and stars will have further clues in seeing the sun rise and set, even if it changes slightly day by day. In the winter those cows seemed to know that it's time for milking and feeding even if sunrise won't be for another hour. If we're late to get them in the barn then they will let us know by making some noise.
I simply pointed out that the links you provide are for the navy, to cut down their costs and supply problems.
Then you are not clicking on the links I am providing. The US Navy is but one of many groups working on this problem. They get mentioned a lot because they have proven the technology. All that's left is working out the details to ramp it up to commercial scale production. This is very much unlike battery powered airplanes where there's no functioning prototypes. While it's true that the Navy has only tested their fuel (publicly at least) on a model airplane, the fuel works. They tested the fuel in a lab and it meets or exceeds all the specification of military grade jet fuel. What they need now is not funding precisely, only permission to carry the tests further.
They are already flying...
And planes running on synthetic fuels are already flying. Now, tell me something, how many airports have the facilities to recharge an electric airplane and/or swap out their batteries? I know how many airports can accommodate synthetic fuels, all of them. Maybe at first they need to keep the synthetic fuel separate from the traditional fuel but that's no different than airports that already keep different fuels for piston planes, jet planes, and in various grades. With testing by the government and the private companies involved the fuel can be approved as being no different than any other JP5, JP8, JetA, or whatever specification it's mixed to meet.
In Europe, yes. On the rest of the world: no. Making a gallon of synthetic fuel is simply to expensive. In Europe that does not matter as 90% of the price of gasoline are taxes. The governments simply could lower the taxes for synthetic gasoline until it is cheaper than "natural" gasoline.
That's a laugh, no government will be lowering fuel taxes. Assuming that's true then you've proven my point. Synthetic fuels can dominate overnight by ramping up production and lowering the taxes. All we need is an energy source capable of providing the energy needed. As pointed out to you several times now with many links to highly knowledgeable sources this won't happen any time soon without natural gas and/or nuclear power, quite possibly both will be needed. Maybe in the future solar power will dominate but that's not likely to happen for many decades. For solar power to dominate in the next 20 to 30 years it will take synthesized fuels to happen, because airlines can't just toss out their investment in aircraft on a whim.
Here's someone with a doctorate that disagrees with you. Professor Gordon Aubrecht finds synthesized fuel from nuclear power is certainly viable. I don't recall how much detail he goes into it here but he's known to support synthesized fuel from nuclear power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He makes the interesting case that the ultimate solution will be in solar power but we will need nuclear power to get us there.
Here's another idea on a "bridge" to alternative energy. T. Boone Pickens thinks natural gas is the bridge, but hw's not sure where it leads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If we are going to move to electric vehicles then we need an energy source to get it from. Burning natural gas to make electricity to charge up an electric airplane would not generally be considered wise for many reasons. It that case we'd just burn the natural gas in the vehicles. If we want zero carbon energy and still fly our planes then it's likely to be with synthesized fuels. You tell me it will never work? Well, people smarter than you tell me otherwise. Also, if it won't work then we don't fly. So, we'll have to find a way to make it work.
Electric planes won't fly any time soon. The regulations and infrastructure needs alone will keep this from flying for 10 to 30 years. Synthetic fuels can happen very soon if we are truly concerned about a zero carbon future.
Meanwhile the Republicans in America give support to the Iranian military nuclear weapons program. Sure, their propaganda says they oppose it, but actions speak louder than words. Big Giant Orange Head cancelled a successful nuclear agreement.
How was this a "successful nuclear agreement"? Iran was openly developing a civil nuclear power program, something that the Democrats opposed. At least they oppose a civil nuclear power program in the USA, why is it allowed in Iran?
If nuclear power is bad in the USA, as the Democrats keep telling us, then it should be just as bad in Iran. And bad for the same reasons. If nuclear power is good for Iran then it should be good for the USA.
So, which is it? If nuclear power is good then the Democrats should support it hear, there, and everywhere. If nuclear power is bad then we should not be using it anywhere. That is unless someone can explain how a nuclear power accident in Iran is a good thing. That is the primary concern, isn't it? That any nuclear power plant could explode and spread radiation everywhere?
As far as I can tell this nuclear deal was a "success", Iran was building their nuclear reactors far more quickly under the deal. How the Democrats see a deal allowing for the building of a nuclear power plant as a "success" boggles my mind.
I grew up on a dairy farm and the cattle hated the time switch. Not that they'd know why it happened, only that something was up. When milking was an hour late the cows would make all kinds of noise waiting to get into the barn where they knew they could get fed. When it was an hour early it took all kinds of coercion to get them in the barn. We'd open the barn doors and instead of filing in like they normally do they just look at us like we don't belong. It took nearly a week sometimes for the cattle to get used to the change.
I've had people ask why we change times then if the cows don't like it. The answer is that us humans still have to do things like get to school on time. Classes start and end based on the changing clocks, therefore we have to get chores done before then and we can't start chores until we get home.
Maybe we could have done something like ease the cattle into it by shifting the time over a longer period. As in instead of doing the change as one hour over a single night we shifted the time by 10 minutes over 6 days. That would be an interesting experiment to perform, and I'd do that if I still milked cows. God bless those dairy farmers.
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Why don't you google it?
I believe I explained this to you before. I know what I know because I "googled it". I shared what I know with you and where I got it from so we can both know of what we are talking about. If you don't share your sources then I cannot know what you know except what little bit you've shared. If you know of a reputable source on all of this then point it out to me so I can soak it in, not just the tiny bits you put in a few words on a web forum. By not sharing your source I have no idea on if what you know is current, has any backing in reality, or if you just pulled it out of your ass. I did "google it" and what I found out was shown in the sibling post on algae derived fuels being a worthless technology. As that is what I read from Google therefore I concluded that you are full of shit and have been either lying to me or been seriously mislead by your lesser skills with Google.
Energy per gallon: 370kWh ... so you need to produce 390e6 * 379kWh in electricity per day and convert it loss free into synthetic fuel. That means 6158750000 kW power capacity. That is 6159 GW. With a capacity of roughly 0.5GW per reactor, you need 12,000 new reactors. Good luck finding places for only a fraction of them in the US. But I guess I made somewhere a mistake, so feel free to divide it by a factor of 10 :P
Also shown in the sibling post is that nuclear power takes 1/10th the area of solar power. Solar power including bio-conversion by algae, PV collectors, solar thermal arrays, or whatever. As shown on the Without Hot Air website ( https://www.withouthotair.com/... ) the amount of solar power one can achieve varies greatly by location. Even in an ideal location nuclear power can produce four times the energy by area compared to solar, assuming 100% conversion into something useful. With 250 W/m^2 of average solar power in Hawaii that limited amount of land available on the island would be better used for nuclear power, again assuming 100% conversion of solar power to something useful. The 250 W/m^2 is the power of the sun on the ground, converting that to something useful with the technology we have today means we'd get more like 25 W/m^2. (That math shown in detail here: https://www.withouthotair.com/... ) The 1000 W/m^2 of a nuclear power plant is the electrical output, which assumes the heat left over is just vented to the air. If that heat is instead used in a fuel production process the conversion to useful energy might be improved, or not. We do know that if we use that land for electrical production we will get far more electricity from nuclear power than any solar collectors could. With all else equal, such as that electricity used to drive the same fuel synthesis process, then nuclear power wins by an order of magnitude.
So, where are we going to find places to put all those nuclear power plants? That's easy, push over all those stupid solar collectors and put a nuclear power plant there. Without Hot Air claims a nuclear power plant producing one gigawatt takes less than one square kilometer of area, so 6000 gigawatts would be about the size of the state of Delaware. That's far less area than the size of Arizona as computed in the sibling post for the needed area for solar power to produce the same output.
If you want me to believe algae has any possibility of producing enough fuel to meet any nation's transportation needs, and do so at a price competitive with synthetic fuels from nuclear power, then give me some links on sources which show their math. I "googled it" and found out you are full of shit. If you want me to believe otherwise then you are going to have to be VERY specific on where you got your information.
Everything old is new again. Lamarck had his theory of evolution and Darwin had his, and for the longest time Darwin was thought to have cracked the code. I guess just like how Newton figured out physics on the macro scale there's more to be seen when one looks closely enough to see where the theory doesn't explain it all.
I recall seeing an interesting TED Talk from a man explaining how homosexuality was not genetic but epi-genetic. That is "epi-" meaning "above" or "beyond". Epi-genetics means that environmental factors placed upon the parents produce something very much like genetics on the child, as in inherent to their "code" or "being", that cannot be undone after the child is conceived. In this TED Talk the man used his son as an example of this in that the stress he and his wife had in their life produced a homosexual son because in prior times, and through many iterations of evolution taking place, there is a survival benefit of the clan or species in having homosexual men in times of stress. Things like war and famine might be where a "pause" in further offspring would be beneficial.
This fine article performed the experiment on mice and seemed a bit vague on the behavior they observed. If experiments like this can tell us more on human behaviors then there could be a lot on how we could improve society for the future. Since I already stepped on the landmine that there is a theory, not proven by the way but merely an educated guess by a man that seems convinced of the science, where stressed parents produce homosexual children then I feel like stepping on another will not be any worse.
There's the theory that a stressor that is thought to lower intelligence and raise tendencies to criminal behavior, that is children conceived out of marriage. Women being pregnant without the biological father around (or other male stand in) is stressed in a way that evidence shows might be epi-genetic. There's other possible reasons for this, like such stress in childhood upon the child will bring an adult that is aggressive and poorly educated and therefore likely to exhibit anti-social (or just plain criminal) behaviors. Or that women in such a situation will not have the time for breastfeeding (shown to be far healthier than formula), time for bedtime stories (shown to improve education later), or time for making a proper meal with any regularity. Children raised in a low stress environment tend to become well behaved adults.
Will reduced stress in society mean no more gays and criminals? Well, that would be an interesting theory to test. I don't know how we'd do that without getting into telling parents how to raise their children. Epi-genetics or not there's plenty of evidence on how a downward spiral in society can be broken by one generation of children raised in a healthy family structure. Lamarck may not have got it all right, but he wasn't all wrong either.
What is also maddening is the bias against nuclear power as a "zero carbon" energy source. Nuclear isn't really zero carbon but then neither is wind or solar. If these people were honest with themselves and truly concerned about the environment then they'd embrace nuclear power as much as wind and solar.
I see the future of energy as a mix largely made up of wind, hydro, and nuclear. All these energy sources are very low technology. The machines we build for harnessing this energy has not changed significantly for nearly a century. We have computers to optimize the designs. We have new materials to make them safer and cheaper. We have experience and data to know when and where they will be profitable. If we are going to see undeveloped and underdeveloped nations be brought up to the norms of the developed nations in standards of living then they need energy that they can build on their own, with what little infrastructure they have. That means they start with wind, hydro, and nuclear. The "West" developed this technology in the 1950s, and bringing people up to this level of technology will be far easier than bringing them to the technology of the year 2000. We cannot expect any nation to be willing to base their economy on technology that they cannot own, that only makes them slaves to what other nations would be willing to sell or trade.
Those of us in the wealthy nations of the world have the luxury of ignoring low technology solutions for the high technology and high priced solar panels. The rest of the world do not have that luxury. Barring them from low tech hydro because it might disturb some fish means they never develop the wealth the "West" now enjoys. Those that discourage such development are opening their arms to hug the trees instead of fellow humans. They love "nature" but hate humanity.
It's more than possible to power most needs of a typical house with a solar roof and a large battery pack.
I agree. I did the math on this one time just to amuse myself. In the summer I calculated I'd have plenty of sunshine to run air conditioning and likely have ample left over to charge up an electric vehicle for my commute. In the winter I'd have enough electricity for all my appliances but I'd need natural gas heating and a hydrocarbon fueled vehicle.
The problem was the cost. This was not a trivial matter. The cost of the solar panels and the batteries would have exceeded the cost of the house. My payments on the loans to pay for this equipment would be ten times what I paid for electricity now. When the equipment was paid off then I'd have met or exceeded the expected lifespan of the panels and batteries and I'd have to tear it all out and start all over again.
Solar power for a household is far from practical. It will not likely be practical for a very long time.
Plus if you need a constant carbon free power source nuclear is more than capable.
Yes, it is.
I wouldn't call it clean per-se and it certainly isn't renewable, but it's arguably less dangerous than fossil fuels on grid scale.
Whatever you can say against nuclear power is irrelevant given the pressing need for energy that is cheap, safe, plentiful, and reliable. Nuclear power is all the above and more. It's cleaner than anything else. It's safer than anything else. It's lower carbon than anything else, with a possible exception of hydro power. It's all we got right now and so saying anything against it means nothing. We will deploy more nuclear power, and do so soon, because we will run out of energy without it.
Those idiots in Greenpeace and similar groups are only making things worse for the future. They oppose nuclear power based on lies. They try to make a point on how nuclear power attracts terrorists when the only terrorists nuclear power has attracted so far have been from Greenpeace. If they all went home and shut up about it then the terror problem goes away.
I can point to numerous nuclear power plants that have run without issue for 40 year, and many of them are expected to run safely and profitably for another 40 years. A new nuclear power plant built today, with what we learned from 60 years of building nuclear reactors, would be expected to run for at least a century.
A wind farm running for 25 years is impressive if we ignore that nuclear and hydro power will last for 4 times longer. I have nothing really against wind power, it's cheap, low tech, available most anywhere, and safe. I just don't see lasting 25 years as anything to get excited about. Navy nuclear reactors will last routinely for 50 years before being decommissioned, and that's mostly because the vessel it's in has been worn out and/or seriously outdated and not because of any problems on the reactors.
Wind power is not new, humans have been turning wind into useful work since before written history. With that much time to develop the technology one would think we should have been able to get more out of it than we do. The only thing I can think of holding back wind power today are inherent limitations in wind power. Wind takes a lot of land, material, labor, and for little payback in energy compared to coal, natural gas, and nuclear. As I said earlier, it's nice in many ways but it is not something to get excited about.
The future of "synthetic" fuel if you want to call it that way is Algae.
Not nuclear power. You can not produce competitive priced "gasoline" with electricity until the gasoline at your gas station has hit the $5.5 mark.
First, gasoline getting to $5.50 is certainly possible and the technology developed by the Navy, if deployed essentially as-is, would mean fuel costs never get above that. Absent such technology the costs could keep rising as petroleum becomes more difficult to obtain. Second, that price of synthetic fuels is based on no future development in cost reductions for nuclear power or this synthesis process. That $5.50/gallon isn't just the top end for petroleum based fuels then, as synthesized fuels would begin to dominated the market, but also the top end for synthesized fuels because future developments means prices get lower. In the end this is a very promising technology because it's been demonstrated to work, the price structure has been calculated with little room for error, and there's no real limitation on the production capability since we aren't going to run out of uranium and seawater any time soon.
No idea what is so complicated in grasping that. It is in your own links.
I grasp it just fine. While $5.50/gallon is expensive it is far from crushing on the economy.
I don't spread any lies, asshole! A lie means the person is knowingly telling something that is not true. If I say something that is wrong, it is not a lie, asshole!!
So, your defense is your ignorance? That's not a great argument since instead of a liar you are just an ignoramus. If you want to plead ignorance then I will conceded that point, you aren't a liar but you nothing of which you speak. Here's something you could educate us both on, how much would this algae based fuel cost? How much resources would it take? I'm mostly curious on the land it would take as I suspect the sunlight collection would be the limiting factor. As pointed out in the "Without Ho Air" paper/website there is not enough sun for producing both our food and our fuel, assuming the world wishes to live in the same high standard of living as those in Europe or North America.
Sure, there's software solutions for the lack of a phone in tablets. What software cannot fix is the problem of a well supported, standardized, cable for A/V output and charging. I'm guessing if I look hard enough I can likely find a dongle/dock/adapter of some sort that can provide USB-C to HDMI (or MHL, or DisplayPort, or whatever) for audio and video out and that's supported by a large number of devices. What it won't be is as cheap as that passive cable I saw that connected HDMI/MHL displays and TVs to smart phones and tablets.
I'm guessing that this will come again once the different tablet and TV makers decide which A/V out standard to support on USB-C. This only demonstrates that we lost a very useful function on the newer tablets that caused me to be reluctant to buy a new tablet for myself, and I suspect that I am not alone in this.
The people behind USB have some blame on this. They allowed this confusion to develop by enabling four (by my count) different and incompatible means to output audio and video from their port. There's MHL, HDMI, DisplayPort/ThunderBolt, and the old USB A/V standards brought over from USB 2.0 (which appears to be used by the confusingly named DisplayLink series of adapters). Add in ThunderBolt adapters, which are just standard PCIe devices in an external case, and there's another different means to get A/V out from a device with a USB-C port.
Addiction is turning a craving into a behaviour-changing existential need.
So is pseudo-addiction. The behaviors for both are largely indistinguishable, to the point even medical professionals cannot see a difference. The difference is that the person with addictive behaviors but to treat a real medical condition is not considered a true addict. The problem I see is that the government is so concerned of true addiction that it is creating the problem of pseudo-addiction. The laws created this problem, we will need laws changed to resolve the problem.
It would also help if mental health treatments improved but getting people committed for their health was made exceedingly difficult. This has gone on for so long that I have no recollection of how it was before versus now. I just see too many people ending up in prison and not getting treated instead of getting treatment and being productive members of society.
You're confusing yourself with definitions. Addiction doesn't have anything to do with "like". Quite the opposite. It has to do with "need" even if you don't "like". If you have a cigarette once a month then you're not addicted to them. In general withdrawal symptoms to addictive substances don't take more than a couple of days to screw you up.
What addiction looks like:
You want to give up smoking, but you can't.
You give up coffee and start chewing paracetamol tablets to get the headaches under control for the next week (my own experience).
You give up sugar and bite the head off everyone who talks to you for a week in ways that not even a hormonally raged psycho on her period could possibly do (my own experience with someone else).
You say "I can stop ${thing} anytime I want!" And yet when you actually need to stop you continue doing ${thing} because the very brain that wants to stop is also dependent on the status quo.
I think you're self justifying the need to define addiction differently. The reality is that most people can understand the difference between an occasional craving and an addiction quite well.
For someone self medicating for a medical condition those behaviors you describe can look a lot like an addiction. Physicians often can't even understand the difference, which is why we have the term "pseudo-addiction".
I've heard of cancer patients craving marijuana, either to treat the pain and other symptoms from the cancer itself or to moderate the side effects of their treatments. Such people can get irritable, bite the head off people for minor matters, crave marijuana to the point of doing something they might not normally do. I will concede that an addict might feel compelled to commit crimes to feed such a need but someone craving relief from their medical conditions might not. This is still an arbitrary and subjective distinction. I can recall having a very bad flu and craving Tylenol. While I was not likely to hold a druggist at gunpoint to get some but if someone was taunting me and holding it out of my reach I might feel a need to punch the person in the ribs to get it. Is resorting to violence in this case an "addiction"? No, it's someone in pain, fevered, and angered for being arbitrarily deprived of something that can provide relief.
The very fact that the concept of "pseudo-addiction" has made it to medical literature is an indication that addiction is poorly defined and difficult to create a distinction from "true" addiction. If a physician, someone that has specialized training in discovering addiction, cannot tell the difference then that means we have a problem. We need better testing for what is addiction as opposed to people craving proper treatment for their mental or physical pain.
It most likely will be bio gas and/or oils made from algae.
No, it won't. I've seen the math and bio-fuels simply cannot provide the energy we need for transportation. Citation:
https://www.withouthotair.com/... (You'll have to read through the next few pages to get it all, not just the page I provided a link to.)
Everything in your post is a steaming pile of unsubstantiated bullshit. There is no energy future for the world that does not include nuclear power or widespread poverty. Oil prices will rise as it runs out, at some point this price point will reach to where synthesis of fuel from nuclear power is profitable. Or, more likely, the price of synthesized fuel lowers to the point it be competitive with petroleum drilled from the ground. Whatever the case the lines will meet on that graph and we will slowly transition from petroleum to synthetic fuels. I simply prefer it happen sooner than later. You spreading your lies is not helping.
For someone that constantly tells people to "Google it" for themselves you seem quite ignorant on the subject. Go Google it. If you can't be bothered to watch the videos given to you as links in a post then don't reply as if you have something useful to say.
That means an aluminum shell not plastic.
With wireless charging being the new thing, and just wireless everything in general, there's no one that will build a tablet out of a faraday cage.
I'm guessing that if you looked hard enough you could find a "toughbook" style tablet, or someone that makes a durable metal case for a popular model of tablet. That will kill any wireless function in the tablet. For the security minded person this might be considered a plus. For the rest this will mean needing some kind of dongle hanging out of the thing, which will defeat some of the reasons for the hardened case.
Maybe there's a way to get both, a durable metal case and working wireless function, but this will add complexity and therefore cost. For me I'm quite impressed with the durability of phones and tablets these days. The glass on a phone or tablet used to be quite fragile, to the point of cracked screens being a common sight. Now they rarely break, at least as I've seen so far. Maybe people just learned how to treat their electronics. Or that protective rubber (or plastic, or leather, or whatever) cases are the norm.
I'm guessing that if you want a durable aluminum case for your tablet that you will have to machine one for yourself. With small scale CNC machines getting cheap this might be an option. And they can machine out all kinds of other interesting items as well.
I'll use a USB C to 3.5 jack if I have to, but I'd rather have the native 3.5 jack.
I'd rather have some quality headphones with a USB-C connector.
For years I've had all kinds of problems with the built in audio from computers, except from Apple. The problems are that I can here noise from hard drive access, mouse movement, or some other device in or around the computer. Ever since buying a pair of some very expensive headphones years ago I've been a bit spoiled on the quality of the audio from my electronics. I expect a clean signal because I have headphones that allow for nuance that I could not hear before. The only way I found to address the problems of noise from computers with terrible built-in audio is a USB audio dongle to use with my headphones.
What I'd like is a set of nice headphones with a USB-C connector on the end so I can plug it into the increasingly common USB-C ports on electronics, including those from Apple. This is what I expect though with this new Audio Accessory mode that's been added to the USB-C spec, a return to the crappy internal audio just on a different analog connector. So long as there is still support for an external DAC on that USB-C port then I can still happily replace the crappy internal audio with something of my choice. If devices drop support for this because they provide an analog output on the port then I don't want it. It's bad enough that audio output quality took a dive long ago, we don't need to repeat that history.
I won't miss the 1/8" audio jack. The lack of concern for a quality output on those ports made them useless for me long ago.
I see the spider webs all the time, everywhere. I'm not sure if I need to call for pest control or an ambulance.
The spider webs. They are everywhere. Even when I close my eyes.
I had a similar experience. My brother showed me his Android device some time ago (long enough I forgot many specifics) and I was quite impressed with it. One impressive feature was the HDMI output (or, that's what he called it, I found out it was really MHL) and how he could mirror the display on his TV, direct the sound to his stereo, while powering the device, on a single cable. I thought that looked awesome and thought I'd look for something similar for myself.
Here's what I found out, device manufacturers (or maybe just the ones I looked at) dropped MHL support in the next generation devices. The old devices used mini-USB for power and A/V out which was a standard (or "standard enough") means to make this connection. New devices use USB-C which made such cables obsolete. There's laptops and such that support video out from the USB-C, notably Apple products, but this seems quite rare to the point of near nonexistence.
In their defense these devices often offered some kind of wireless means to output audio and video but that meany buying a new TV or buying an expensive dongle to do what my brother's device did with what seemed to be an off the shelf, and relatively inexpensive, cable. The video was also higher resolution but that seemed like a non-issue since the source material would often be just 720p anyway from some internet stream.
USB-C is nice but it introduced a "reset" on what we had before. There's going to be a lot of mixed up messes on standards until we get back many things lost with older and well established (for the time) connections like mini-USB and the 30-pin Apple connector.
Oh, and this...
Tablets with an LTE modem are essentially cell phones with the "talking" portion of the software disabled.
That really bothers me for some reason. I don't see myself holding a tablet to my face for a phone call but if someone wants to call me on my tablet then they should be able to do so. I can use it like a speaker phone, plug in headphones, use some kind of Bluetooth device (like those built into the dash of many cars these days), or whatever to talk. This would be especially useful for outgoing calls and other cell phone based (as opposed to the general internet protocol based) communications. If I want to make a quick phone call while holding my tablet then in my hands is all the electronics needed to do so, except it's been hobbled for no reason I can really understand.
Maybe if the people making tablets want to sell more of them then they should enable all the features of that cell phone chip it's got, meaning it can make and receive a phone call. Is there some FCC regulation or something preventing this?
It's not just the size that counts. (Insert juvenile joke here.)
I've had an iPod Touch for a very long time but found myself in dire need of a replacement due to a severe crack on the screen. It still works but I can't trust it to keep working in this condition. Upon acquiring an iPhone to replace it (and an equally aged and slightly damaged cell phone) I found that while the screen was not all that much larger the screen resolution has increased considerably. I can simply get far more information on a screen even though it's not all that bigger.
I'm not sure if the expense of the cell phone is much of a factor. I like buying my own cell phone so I'm not locked into a contract but it seems to me that people generally just buy their phone on contract and don't much consider the price too much. I'm guessing that the far greater convenience of a cell phone, with the greater capability of a laptop, don't leave much in the middle.
Tablets for the most part just work. Modern materials, batteries, and manufacturing, have made them very durable. The things people use them for have not changed a lot since they've been introduced. They are the "personal digital assistants" from the 1990s brought to maturity. They give us our e-mail and other communications. They keep us on schedule with clocks and calendars. They give us the information we crave with weather reports, stock prices, news, opinions, and just whatever else we can grab from the internet. They amuse us with music, games, movies, and so on.
With a phone people crave new and shiny more often because they fit a different need. People want more data in a smaller package, which means chasing the latest cellular technology even if the phone is otherwise up to task. A tablet will often be used at home, in an car (where internet access is increasingly a common feature of the vehicle's electronic package), at work, or otherwise in an environment where WiFi exists or brought to the tablet by the latest and greatest cell phone.
This is also a market for which the average user has a computer for the "heavy lifting" of high resolution gaming, office productivity apps, internet access, and computing beyond the mundane of checking the weather or seeing if there was a response to an e-mail.
I've thought of buying a tablet but I find myself instead craving a better phone, laptop, or desktop computer. If I'm just checking for a quick bit of information then my phone comes out of my pocket. If I need more screen space, want to write a longer message, or I'm expecting a longer bit of down time, then I grab my laptop or walk to my office so I have plenty of screen and a real keyboard.
The increasing trend for tablets to have keyboard attachments, and a greater number of ports for accessories, just means they are encroaching on the space already occupied by laptops. And losing on the competition. On the other end is making them smaller, lighter, and simpler, which just means they are getting into the territory of cell phones and other pocket electronics. All I'm seeing with tablets these days is larger and larger versions of my very old iPod Touch. That's not a bad thing, only that I'm only seeing a need to upgrade unless I had my iPod broken, lost, stolen, or considered so old that I can no longer run the latest version of my favorite games.
Perhaps this is just a matter of drawing a distinction where there should not be one. A tablet computer is just an arbitrary distinction along the spectrum of electronic communication devices from pocket sized (generally a cell phone or whatever an iPod is considered these days) to desktop sized. Draw that distinction somewhere else and the market could look very different.
I'm kind of surprised that more effort isn't put into making synthetic fuels.
Since I've thought about it a bit I'm not all that surprised. First is your following point, the technology is relatively well known. People know it's possible but there's a lot of competing means for providing energy for transportation. One main competitor that just won't die is petroleum. Even though there's been scares of running out or the damage burning it might cause to the environment there's plenty of evidence for the policy makers and people in the business that neither have any real reason to be concerned over. Second is the fanaticism among the public and policy makers for electric vehicles. If there is a cheap source of electricity, such as wind power or fusion reactors, then electric cars and trains are supposed to displace a lot of transportation needs almost overnight.
Basically, synthetic fuels are not grabbing people's attention because it's not shiny and new. Even though World War 2 era (if not far older than that) technology would solve the problems we face it's not going to grab attention because it's old and boring.
The technology isn't that immature, the Germans for example studied it quite a bit during the war and today it is being considered for use on Mars.
Not only did they study it, IIRC, they relied upon it heavily to keep their airplanes flying during World War 2. South Africa also used this technology to carry them through their trade sanctions. It's possible, IMHO, that the use of this technology by such hated governments don't help the adoption any.
Seems ideal for solar and wind as you just make the fuel while the Sun is shining, and/or wind blowing. Probably not very efficient, but neither is pumped hydro storage.
Pumped hydro storage is actually quite efficient. Maybe it's only 70% efficient but that's still far better than so many other options to manage grid stability. In the end the efficiency becomes nearly irrelevant. With pumped hydro storage the efficiency is quite apparent as it's electricity in versus electricity out. When it's solar or nuclear (fission or fusion) power driving the process the efficiency is quite academic since that energy in to the process is useless for transportation but the fuel that comes out is highly valued. What matters more than energy in is the dollars put in. If the efficiency of dollars per gallon, or really dollars per mile when comparing electric vehicles, can compete with petroleum then it will win out. The energy efficiency of the entire process is effectively meaningless so long as the dollars to useful work is better than any alternatives.
Be easier to research as well compared to nuclear as you could research in a garage unlike nuclear where the government has an interest for various reasons from weapons to radiation leaks.
There's lots of nuclear power research that can be done without actual radioactive material. Much of the thermal and chemical processes involved can be done with non-radioactive stand-ins. When dealing with uranium chemistry the use of non-fissile U-238 is relatively common and done with relatively little supervision as it's deemed relatively worthless and no more hazardous than many other heavy metals. With plutonium there's often no "safe" alternative available. Every isotope is either considered weapon grade or too "hot" for handling outside of very close supervision.
Nuclear is the right solution in places, if it can be built economically, and should be part of the solution, especially if some of the newer type plants can be brought on line.
"In places"? You mean like nearly every place? We have nuclear power plants on submarines and the people inside work, sleep, and eat, for months at a time, in very close proximity with no ill effects. This should be a demonstration of it's utility and safety far beyond any energ
If it were almost any other drug you'd be in jail, but if it's caffeine, you can brag about your addiction and no one will bat an eye.
I heard someone point out that if we had discovered alcohol today then it would be classified as a schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act. This would be fairly accurate as it is a highly addictive intoxicating substance, with no accepted medicinal value, and having high probability of mental or physical harm. Caffeine in high doses likely meets this standard as well. As would tobacco.
One problem with this is the standard for addiction seems rather subjective. Addiction is just a mental or physical craving for a substance. Are people "addicted" to air? Or food? Well, there are some cases of a food addiction but this is often a sign of an underlying mental or physical condition. I recall a cabbage craving was considered a sign of some physical problem, and people self medicating by eating foam from couch cushions. Of course there are better treatments for diseases than eating gobs of cabbage, and certainly eating foam padding is not all that healthy.
As someone that deals with chronic pain I hear the word "addiction" far too often. There's even a term for seeking medication outside of merely abusing the substance, "pseudo-addiction". Addiction is, again, so subjective that it's lost all meaning to me. There's claims of people being addicted to video games, watching porn, washing their hands, and so many other behaviors. What makes taking a drug, drinking coffee, or smoking a cigarette an addiction over merely a bad habit? I've heard it somewhere that tobacco use is not an addiction if it's not used more than once per month. So, a person is "addicted" if they like to have a cigarette with his smoking friends when they meet on the weekend for poker and pizza? Are they also addicted to poker and pizza then?
I'm thinking we need a better word than addiction for such cravings, or we need to need to better define addiction to something other than merely something that can be mistaken for routine, medical needs, or bad habits. I don't want to be accused of being an addict just because I have not had my pain properly managed by physicians. It seems we've created a health care system so handcuffed by the government's fear of addiction that they can't do their job.
I remember hearing on how there's an "epidemic" among veterans for their opiate use, being prescribed opiates far above the general population. Well, no shit Sherlock! The average population isn't shot at, blown up, dropped from helicopters, marched for miles with 100 pounds on their backs, or put in considerable peril by an LT with a map. I won't doubt that there is an opiate abuse problem, but people need to be treated as individuals and not as some average member of the general population. The average member of the population has one testicle, one ovary, and 1.99 legs, which has little to do with how an individual is treated.
I imagine the ideal time for milking cows would be a fixed number of hours after sunrise.
The ideal time has been long debated but the general practice for most that milked cattle like we did is to milk them 12 hours apart, generally early in the morning and late afternoon. Some people think milking 3 times a day, 8 hours apart, is closer to ideal, but that creates more work for what many see as little gain. We "cheated" on that 12 hour schedule a bit by milking at 5:30 AM and 4:30 PM.
Of course, that would make a bad time standard for everyone else as it varies across latitudes and changes on a daily basis.
I'm guessing the same. I will say that cattle seem to have some real skill at keeping time. I'm guessing this is no different than people experiencing the ability to wake up naturally about the time their alarm clock would wake them. People get used to routine, eating, sleeping, and so on, on a regular daily schedule and I expect cattle are no different in this respect. That means we get tired about the same time, hungry about the same time, etc. Cows living mostly outside where they can see the sun and stars will have further clues in seeing the sun rise and set, even if it changes slightly day by day. In the winter those cows seemed to know that it's time for milking and feeding even if sunrise won't be for another hour. If we're late to get them in the barn then they will let us know by making some noise.
I simply pointed out that the links you provide are for the navy, to cut down their costs and supply problems.
Then you are not clicking on the links I am providing. The US Navy is but one of many groups working on this problem. They get mentioned a lot because they have proven the technology. All that's left is working out the details to ramp it up to commercial scale production. This is very much unlike battery powered airplanes where there's no functioning prototypes. While it's true that the Navy has only tested their fuel (publicly at least) on a model airplane, the fuel works. They tested the fuel in a lab and it meets or exceeds all the specification of military grade jet fuel. What they need now is not funding precisely, only permission to carry the tests further.
They are already flying ...
And planes running on synthetic fuels are already flying. Now, tell me something, how many airports have the facilities to recharge an electric airplane and/or swap out their batteries? I know how many airports can accommodate synthetic fuels, all of them. Maybe at first they need to keep the synthetic fuel separate from the traditional fuel but that's no different than airports that already keep different fuels for piston planes, jet planes, and in various grades. With testing by the government and the private companies involved the fuel can be approved as being no different than any other JP5, JP8, JetA, or whatever specification it's mixed to meet.
In Europe, yes. On the rest of the world: no. Making a gallon of synthetic fuel is simply to expensive. In Europe that does not matter as 90% of the price of gasoline are taxes. The governments simply could lower the taxes for synthetic gasoline until it is cheaper than "natural" gasoline.
That's a laugh, no government will be lowering fuel taxes. Assuming that's true then you've proven my point. Synthetic fuels can dominate overnight by ramping up production and lowering the taxes. All we need is an energy source capable of providing the energy needed. As pointed out to you several times now with many links to highly knowledgeable sources this won't happen any time soon without natural gas and/or nuclear power, quite possibly both will be needed. Maybe in the future solar power will dominate but that's not likely to happen for many decades. For solar power to dominate in the next 20 to 30 years it will take synthesized fuels to happen, because airlines can't just toss out their investment in aircraft on a whim.
Brilliant! But...where does the energy come from to make the hydrogen?
In the future? Solar power. Today? Nuclear power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Here's someone with a doctorate that disagrees with you. Professor Gordon Aubrecht finds synthesized fuel from nuclear power is certainly viable. I don't recall how much detail he goes into it here but he's known to support synthesized fuel from nuclear power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He makes the interesting case that the ultimate solution will be in solar power but we will need nuclear power to get us there.
Here's another idea on a "bridge" to alternative energy. T. Boone Pickens thinks natural gas is the bridge, but hw's not sure where it leads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If we are going to move to electric vehicles then we need an energy source to get it from. Burning natural gas to make electricity to charge up an electric airplane would not generally be considered wise for many reasons. It that case we'd just burn the natural gas in the vehicles. If we want zero carbon energy and still fly our planes then it's likely to be with synthesized fuels. You tell me it will never work? Well, people smarter than you tell me otherwise. Also, if it won't work then we don't fly. So, we'll have to find a way to make it work.
Electric planes won't fly any time soon. The regulations and infrastructure needs alone will keep this from flying for 10 to 30 years. Synthetic fuels can happen very soon if we are truly concerned about a zero carbon future.
Meanwhile the Republicans in America give support to the Iranian military nuclear weapons program. Sure, their propaganda says they oppose it, but actions speak louder than words. Big Giant Orange Head cancelled a successful nuclear agreement.
How was this a "successful nuclear agreement"? Iran was openly developing a civil nuclear power program, something that the Democrats opposed. At least they oppose a civil nuclear power program in the USA, why is it allowed in Iran?
If nuclear power is bad in the USA, as the Democrats keep telling us, then it should be just as bad in Iran. And bad for the same reasons. If nuclear power is good for Iran then it should be good for the USA.
So, which is it? If nuclear power is good then the Democrats should support it hear, there, and everywhere. If nuclear power is bad then we should not be using it anywhere. That is unless someone can explain how a nuclear power accident in Iran is a good thing. That is the primary concern, isn't it? That any nuclear power plant could explode and spread radiation everywhere?
As far as I can tell this nuclear deal was a "success", Iran was building their nuclear reactors far more quickly under the deal. How the Democrats see a deal allowing for the building of a nuclear power plant as a "success" boggles my mind.
I grew up on a dairy farm and the cattle hated the time switch. Not that they'd know why it happened, only that something was up. When milking was an hour late the cows would make all kinds of noise waiting to get into the barn where they knew they could get fed. When it was an hour early it took all kinds of coercion to get them in the barn. We'd open the barn doors and instead of filing in like they normally do they just look at us like we don't belong. It took nearly a week sometimes for the cattle to get used to the change.
I've had people ask why we change times then if the cows don't like it. The answer is that us humans still have to do things like get to school on time. Classes start and end based on the changing clocks, therefore we have to get chores done before then and we can't start chores until we get home.
Maybe we could have done something like ease the cattle into it by shifting the time over a longer period. As in instead of doing the change as one hour over a single night we shifted the time by 10 minutes over 6 days. That would be an interesting experiment to perform, and I'd do that if I still milked cows. God bless those dairy farmers.
Why use a fuel cell on an airplane when it is perfectly suited as a fuel for jet engines?
I can understand such use as a means for backup electric power but to provide power to propel the plane sounds quite silly.