There is an article in Popular Science that describes the pulldown exercise much better than this one. Basically he can pull down that weight indefinitely, without becoming fatigued. The PopSci article says he has done up to 500 reps and even then quit from boredom not because he was tired. It's the same thing with the ammo lift exercise that they show. What it didn't show very well is that there are 3 men pulling the ammo down off the crate while he puts them back up and they still can't keep up with him.
The suit doesn't so much as make him super strong as it makes it so he can lift normal weights with almost no fatigue. Something like this is ideal for carrying heavy loads for extended periods of time, like heavy body armor for instance.
I don't really think that carrying supplies are a good application for a system like this. Things like heavy body armor and the ability to carry higher power weapons would be better uses. In which case you get a soldier that retains most of their mobility and dexterity, but is much more efficient in combat.
this sentence still makes no sense. I can "pull down" double my weight with my little finger. Pulling it UP would be hard. Except when the weight is on a pulley system as it clearly shows in the video. Who the hell modded this as insightful?
I have to disagree. While robotic units are gaining an increasingly important role in combat operations we are a very, very long way from completely eliminating the human element of the battlefield. So long as human beings are involved in warfare, protecting them will have a key role.
Not to mention that while this kind of technology is being developed for the battlefield, it has uses far beyond combat. Suits like this could increase productivity and decrease injuries in any hundred of industries that require workers to lift heavy loads.
There might be thousands of companies looking for and collecting the crude, but only a handful refine it into fuel and fewer yet sell that fuel to us. Fat lot of good having lots of competition in the crude arena is when they all have just a few significant customers (refiners and marketers). The market can be controlled from both the supply and demand side you know. This just isn't true. Like with the producers most people have absolutely no idea how competitive and varied oil refineries are. Here is a list of all US oil refineries and their production. From that list, these are the top 10 and their percentages of the US market.
None of these companies could be considered to be in a market dominating position, and 3, including Valero which has the largest market share, were never even part of Standard Oil. Additionally, there are some 50 other companies that control the remaining 27% of oil refining capacity in the US. People like to think of the oil industry as one unanimous big bad wolf, but that just isn't the reality of the situation.
Ok, let me put it this way for you. The Abiogenic Theory is essentially the geological equivalent of ID theory. Almost all evidence supporting it is specious at best.
Those in the oil industry do not reject these theories because they want to play up market fears of peak oil, but because they don't lead anyone to find oil. There is no vast conspiracy theory to drive up oil prices by subscribing to these theories. Independent oil and gas companies that have absolutely no control over the price of their product use the very same theories in their search for oil as the majors do. Biological origin theories, though, can account for finding just about every drop of oil ever produced. These aren't just a public face. Oil companies actively use these theories in the study of the Earth's geology to find oil reservoirs.
Also, your understanding of the biological origin of hydrocarbons amounts to a caricature, the way you would explain it to a 4th grader. Hydrocarbons do not just come from Dinosaurs, they come from all life forms. The vast majority of hydrocarbons are produced from plant matter, not animal.
I know what Oil Shale is. I actually worked on an undergraduate research project for Shell that involved studying oil shale. I know the name is confusing, but Oil Shale is not the same thing as shale that contains oil.
In an Oil Shale reservoir, the rock is "oil wet" which means that the oil is in contact with the rock. And it is in fact a net energy sink.
However, the Bakken is not an Oil Shale reservoir, and it is water wet, which means that water is in contact with the rock and oil flows through the pore spaces. This type of reservoir is economic to produce.
Perhaps I should have said, private and public companies do not collude. State run companies are a different matter. But I'm pretty sure that the GP wasn't referring to state run companies since he sums up his thought by suggesting that all oil companies should be state run.
At some point we need to address the question of whether it's more important to lower the price of gas at the pump or take measures to develop more sustainable alternatives while we still have some oil to fall back onto. Alternatives to oil are not limited to the fuel pump, but all applications of oil. And plastic is going to be a hard one to replace.
The thing most people don't understand is that oil reservoirs deplete. As you pull oil out of the rock it decreases the pressure and decreases the amount you're able to pull out in the future. It's not just an issue of lowering the price at the pump. You have to work constantly just to keep the price at the pump where it is, and that's if demand is just steady. If we stop developing new reserves before we have a viable alternative to take its place, this $100/bbl we pay now is going to look like a drop in the bucket. And if energy starts getting too expensive there are some pretty dire consequences, like people not being able to afford turning on their heaters in the winter or people not being able to work because they can't afford transportation.
Just read the numbers. Canada and Mexico account for 35% of our oil imports. Is that a lot, sure it is. But is it anywhere near most of our oil? No. What's more, the GP was making this point to support his idea that events in the Middle East do not affect our oil supply. But the #2 provider of US oil imports is Saudi Arabia at 17%.
I'm continually stunned by the abundance of misinformation our there about how oil is produced and distributed.
First of all, most of our oil does not come from Canada and Mexico. And a lot of it does come from the Middle East and our foreign policy does have a big impact on it.
Secondly, yes Exxon made $40 billion in profits last year. They also spend somewhere around $400 billion to make those profits. Big numbers mean nothing unless you put them in perspective. A 10% profit margin is nothing special.
Thirdly, there is no oil monopoly. Oil companies do not calude with each other, they compete. The oil industry is infinitely deeper than Exxon, Chevron, and BP. There are hundreds, if not thousands of independent oil and gas companies in the US alone. The people that have interests in the Bakken in North Dakota are not the majors. They are companies like EOG, Marathon, Kodiak, and Questar. These companies do not have refineries. They sell at the market price, they have no say in what their product goes for. They do not have enough reserves to make any impact on market prices even if they wanted to.
A lot of people question the wisdom of continuing the oil economy, there just aren't a lot of clear cut answers. There are a lot of possibilities, and a lot of people are working hard to make those possibilities a reality, but at the moment nothing is really ready to take oil's (and for that matter coal's) place in our energy production on a large enough scale.
The process described in "There Will be Blood" has long since been outlawed. Oil fields are carefully regulated to ensure that wells are properly spaced and not draining neighboring owner's reserves.
I think you're confusing oil shale with plain old shale. The Bakken is a traditional shale formation, so recovery costs are not that high. Wells are generally economic as long as the price of oil stay above around $70/bbl. And no this won't make the Dakota's like West Virginia. The reason the Bakken is now economic is because of advances in horizontal drilling. When wells are drilled horizontally they are spaced much farther apart. Currently Bakken wells in North Dakota are drilled about 1 to every square mile. A standard oil well will take up about 3-5 acres of surface area in that square mile.
I'm a petroleum engineer who works for an independent oil and gas company that has recently become active in the Bakken formation in North Dakota. So let me try and answer these questions one by one.
This theory is complete and utter bunk. Nobody, and I really mean nobody, seriously invested in the search for petroleum reserves subscribes to it. The Bakken is a traditional petroleum reservoir where the hydrocarbons are created by biological matter subject to intense heat and pressure.
The reason that the Bakken is just now considered a viable reservoir is not because more oil has been generated but because the technology and price of oil have advanced enough to where it's now a viable and economic source of oil. The current buzz about the Bakken is specifically relegated to horizontal wells, a technology that has just recently come into its own.
This reserve may be difficult to tap fully because of the nature of the rocks. I wonder if nuclear weapons would help. I guess it depends on how and where they were deployed.
I'm assuming this is a joke, but nuclear weapons have actually been tested in oil fields to increase production. Traditionally, a well is hydrolicaly fractured with pressure to increase the permiability of the rock and increase the ease in which the hydrocarbons can flow. However, explosives can produce a similar result. Nuclear explosives though are actually poor tools to fracture a well with since the intense heat "glasses" the rock and prevents flow.
How many tons of CO2 would be created with the burning of 500 billion barrels of oil? BTW, 500 billion barrels of oil would be about 1/6th of the world's oil reserves.
Fewer than would be produced generating the same amount of energy with coal, which currently provides about 70% of our energy in the US. Even if we all decide today that we're going to swear off fossil fuels, the process of converting our society to the alternatives will take decades, decades in which we will still rely on millions of barrels of oil every day.
So what happens with the screen when I plop down my bowl of ice cream on it? What will happen when my kids spill their food on it? It will be a while before you even have a chance for any of that to happen. Microsoft has repeatedly stated that this is not currently a device for the consumer market. It is squarely aimed at places like Casinos, Hotels, and retail outlets.
Shouldn't take too long at all. The Surface is basically just a C2D PC with a DLP display and a fancy touch interface. The real question is how long it will take someone to develop a decent Linux interface for the thing.
To reiterate, I doubt your civilization 4 dreams will come true unless its creators decide the demand is big enough for them to drop megabucks developing another interface to the engine hoping that fans will splurge for the 'surface.' Well, the video game industry is something like a $14 billion/year industry these days and developers have dropped megabucks into systems in the past that showed far less promise for gaming applications than the surface.
I do think the GP is being a little bit shortsighted though. The true potential of the Surface for gaming is not ports of old PC games, just like all those PS2 ports on the Wii are not utilizing the system's full potential either.
When I think of gaming on the Surface, I imagine something that takes more advantages of the Surfaces unique features. For instance the Surface is capable of recognizing dozens of different individual objects. Game developers could use this technology to create games that had real world pieces ala traditional board games but used the Surface's computational power to form much deeper and more complex rule sets. Think Eye of the Judgement but much more deeply and seamlessly integrated between the real world and virtual.
I like the idea of Weave. I log into 3 different Firefox browsers each day. None have the same bookmarks or history. My last attempt at synchronizing them over the internet resulted in Google deleting the vast majority of my bookmarks. I wasn't about to try that again. That said, I really don't want my cookies, passwords or favorites ending up on a desktop in Thailand unauthorized, for any reason whatsoever. There are about 50 Del.icio.us extensions for Firefox as it is that do exactly this. No need for an entirely new browser to get this kind of funtionality.
Probably as soon as someone can mass produce an LED lightbulb that is affordable, long lasting, and produces natural looking light in large quantities. As of right now LED's are generally efficient and long lasting, but have an unnatural blue hue to them which turns a lot of people off. A lot of people realize that LED's are the future, the future just isn't here yet.
Honestly, this is my biggest problem with the environmental movement in the US today, it's never satisfied with even the slightest amount of progress. Fossil fuels are unacceptable because they pollute, but so is wind power because it interferes with migration paths. Incandescent bulbs are inefficient but we can't use CFL's because they contain mercury. We want the fuel efficiency that diesel engines already offer but we can't buy them in the US because of sulfur emission regulation. Everything has trade-offs. Sometimes you just have to pick the lesser of the two evils and go with it.
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There is an article in Popular Science that describes the pulldown exercise much better than this one. Basically he can pull down that weight indefinitely, without becoming fatigued. The PopSci article says he has done up to 500 reps and even then quit from boredom not because he was tired. It's the same thing with the ammo lift exercise that they show. What it didn't show very well is that there are 3 men pulling the ammo down off the crate while he puts them back up and they still can't keep up with him.
The suit doesn't so much as make him super strong as it makes it so he can lift normal weights with almost no fatigue. Something like this is ideal for carrying heavy loads for extended periods of time, like heavy body armor for instance.
I don't really think that carrying supplies are a good application for a system like this. Things like heavy body armor and the ability to carry higher power weapons would be better uses. In which case you get a soldier that retains most of their mobility and dexterity, but is much more efficient in combat.
I have to disagree. While robotic units are gaining an increasingly important role in combat operations we are a very, very long way from completely eliminating the human element of the battlefield. So long as human beings are involved in warfare, protecting them will have a key role.
Not to mention that while this kind of technology is being developed for the battlefield, it has uses far beyond combat. Suits like this could increase productivity and decrease injuries in any hundred of industries that require workers to lift heavy loads.
Valero 13.1%
Conoco Phillips 11.7%
ExxonMobil 11.2%
BP 8.3%
Chevron 5.6%
Marathon 5.4%
Citgo 4.5%
Sunoco 4.5%
Shell 4.5%
Motiva 4.5%
None of these companies could be considered to be in a market dominating position, and 3, including Valero which has the largest market share, were never even part of Standard Oil. Additionally, there are some 50 other companies that control the remaining 27% of oil refining capacity in the US. People like to think of the oil industry as one unanimous big bad wolf, but that just isn't the reality of the situation.
Ok, let me put it this way for you. The Abiogenic Theory is essentially the geological equivalent of ID theory. Almost all evidence supporting it is specious at best.
Those in the oil industry do not reject these theories because they want to play up market fears of peak oil, but because they don't lead anyone to find oil. There is no vast conspiracy theory to drive up oil prices by subscribing to these theories. Independent oil and gas companies that have absolutely no control over the price of their product use the very same theories in their search for oil as the majors do. Biological origin theories, though, can account for finding just about every drop of oil ever produced. These aren't just a public face. Oil companies actively use these theories in the study of the Earth's geology to find oil reservoirs.
Also, your understanding of the biological origin of hydrocarbons amounts to a caricature, the way you would explain it to a 4th grader. Hydrocarbons do not just come from Dinosaurs, they come from all life forms. The vast majority of hydrocarbons are produced from plant matter, not animal.
I know what Oil Shale is. I actually worked on an undergraduate research project for Shell that involved studying oil shale. I know the name is confusing, but Oil Shale is not the same thing as shale that contains oil.
In an Oil Shale reservoir, the rock is "oil wet" which means that the oil is in contact with the rock. And it is in fact a net energy sink.
However, the Bakken is not an Oil Shale reservoir, and it is water wet, which means that water is in contact with the rock and oil flows through the pore spaces. This type of reservoir is economic to produce.
Perhaps I should have said, private and public companies do not collude. State run companies are a different matter. But I'm pretty sure that the GP wasn't referring to state run companies since he sums up his thought by suggesting that all oil companies should be state run.
At some point we need to address the question of whether it's more important to lower the price of gas at the pump or take measures to develop more sustainable alternatives while we still have some oil to fall back onto. Alternatives to oil are not limited to the fuel pump, but all applications of oil. And plastic is going to be a hard one to replace.
The thing most people don't understand is that oil reservoirs deplete. As you pull oil out of the rock it decreases the pressure and decreases the amount you're able to pull out in the future. It's not just an issue of lowering the price at the pump. You have to work constantly just to keep the price at the pump where it is, and that's if demand is just steady. If we stop developing new reserves before we have a viable alternative to take its place, this $100/bbl we pay now is going to look like a drop in the bucket. And if energy starts getting too expensive there are some pretty dire consequences, like people not being able to afford turning on their heaters in the winter or people not being able to work because they can't afford transportation.20% is not most. This isn't calculus here.
Just read the numbers. Canada and Mexico account for 35% of our oil imports. Is that a lot, sure it is. But is it anywhere near most of our oil? No. What's more, the GP was making this point to support his idea that events in the Middle East do not affect our oil supply. But the #2 provider of US oil imports is Saudi Arabia at 17%.
I'm continually stunned by the abundance of misinformation our there about how oil is produced and distributed.
First of all, most of our oil does not come from Canada and Mexico. And a lot of it does come from the Middle East and our foreign policy does have a big impact on it.
Secondly, yes Exxon made $40 billion in profits last year. They also spend somewhere around $400 billion to make those profits. Big numbers mean nothing unless you put them in perspective. A 10% profit margin is nothing special.
Thirdly, there is no oil monopoly. Oil companies do not calude with each other, they compete. The oil industry is infinitely deeper than Exxon, Chevron, and BP. There are hundreds, if not thousands of independent oil and gas companies in the US alone. The people that have interests in the Bakken in North Dakota are not the majors. They are companies like EOG, Marathon, Kodiak, and Questar. These companies do not have refineries. They sell at the market price, they have no say in what their product goes for. They do not have enough reserves to make any impact on market prices even if they wanted to.
A lot of people question the wisdom of continuing the oil economy, there just aren't a lot of clear cut answers. There are a lot of possibilities, and a lot of people are working hard to make those possibilities a reality, but at the moment nothing is really ready to take oil's (and for that matter coal's) place in our energy production on a large enough scale.
The current reservoir rock at the North Pole was not actually located at the North Pole when it formed millions of years ago. See plate tectonics.
The process described in "There Will be Blood" has long since been outlawed. Oil fields are carefully regulated to ensure that wells are properly spaced and not draining neighboring owner's reserves.
A horizontal Bakken well costs about $5 million to drill and about $7000/month to operate. Most of these wells are economic at around $70/bbl.
I think you're confusing oil shale with plain old shale. The Bakken is a traditional shale formation, so recovery costs are not that high. Wells are generally economic as long as the price of oil stay above around $70/bbl. And no this won't make the Dakota's like West Virginia. The reason the Bakken is now economic is because of advances in horizontal drilling. When wells are drilled horizontally they are spaced much farther apart. Currently Bakken wells in North Dakota are drilled about 1 to every square mile. A standard oil well will take up about 3-5 acres of surface area in that square mile.
I wonder what this does for theories of for oil. Some people theorize that petroleum is left over from the formation of the earth, rather than created by the fossilization of carbon life forms.
This theory is complete and utter bunk. Nobody, and I really mean nobody, seriously invested in the search for petroleum reserves subscribes to it. The Bakken is a traditional petroleum reservoir where the hydrocarbons are created by biological matter subject to intense heat and pressure.The reason that the Bakken is just now considered a viable reservoir is not because more oil has been generated but because the technology and price of oil have advanced enough to where it's now a viable and economic source of oil. The current buzz about the Bakken is specifically relegated to horizontal wells, a technology that has just recently come into its own.
This reserve may be difficult to tap fully because of the nature of the rocks. I wonder if nuclear weapons would help. I guess it depends on how and where they were deployed.
I'm assuming this is a joke, but nuclear weapons have actually been tested in oil fields to increase production. Traditionally, a well is hydrolicaly fractured with pressure to increase the permiability of the rock and increase the ease in which the hydrocarbons can flow. However, explosives can produce a similar result. Nuclear explosives though are actually poor tools to fracture a well with since the intense heat "glasses" the rock and prevents flow.How many tons of CO2 would be created with the burning of 500 billion barrels of oil? BTW, 500 billion barrels of oil would be about 1/6th of the world's oil reserves.
Fewer than would be produced generating the same amount of energy with coal, which currently provides about 70% of our energy in the US. Even if we all decide today that we're going to swear off fossil fuels, the process of converting our society to the alternatives will take decades, decades in which we will still rely on millions of barrels of oil every day.Shouldn't take too long at all. The Surface is basically just a C2D PC with a DLP display and a fancy touch interface. The real question is how long it will take someone to develop a decent Linux interface for the thing.
I do think the GP is being a little bit shortsighted though. The true potential of the Surface for gaming is not ports of old PC games, just like all those PS2 ports on the Wii are not utilizing the system's full potential either.
When I think of gaming on the Surface, I imagine something that takes more advantages of the Surfaces unique features. For instance the Surface is capable of recognizing dozens of different individual objects. Game developers could use this technology to create games that had real world pieces ala traditional board games but used the Surface's computational power to form much deeper and more complex rule sets. Think Eye of the Judgement but much more deeply and seamlessly integrated between the real world and virtual.
Probably as soon as someone can mass produce an LED lightbulb that is affordable, long lasting, and produces natural looking light in large quantities. As of right now LED's are generally efficient and long lasting, but have an unnatural blue hue to them which turns a lot of people off. A lot of people realize that LED's are the future, the future just isn't here yet.
Honestly, this is my biggest problem with the environmental movement in the US today, it's never satisfied with even the slightest amount of progress. Fossil fuels are unacceptable because they pollute, but so is wind power because it interferes with migration paths. Incandescent bulbs are inefficient but we can't use CFL's because they contain mercury. We want the fuel efficiency that diesel engines already offer but we can't buy them in the US because of sulfur emission regulation. Everything has trade-offs. Sometimes you just have to pick the lesser of the two evils and go with it.