Debatable. It is possible to make very energy efficient homes that use almost no power to cool them.
This is basically to take your average Norwegian house, plop it down somewhere hot, slightly uprate the cooling system, and get some sort of shading over the windows.
The same applies in hot weather as cold. Very good sealing, heat recovery ventilation. Vapour barriers and heating controls do get more annoying when the habitable volume goes well above and below the environment.
The major difference is solar gain is now your enemy, not your friend, so you need to do things like put up shade (natural or otherwise) to stop the sun shining into the windows - overhanging construction, comparatively small windows (in both cases)...
The one good thing the home in 117F has is an abundance of potential energy from solar.
Admittedly, these require actually mounting on the roof, and grid-tie inverters. But let's ballpark these at $3/W. In sunny Scotland, I pay $.25/kWh of power.
At current prices, this 1kW panel would produce $225/year, or payback (neglecting interest!!!) in 6 years. And I've just got notice that bills are going up 10%.
For 'solar laminates' - these are the bare glass panels with solar cells on which need a frame made, the cost is around $1/W, so payback can be lots sooner in some cases.
(this assumes that I can simply backfeed the meter. In the UK as it stands, you cannot do this) For places with lower electricity prices, payback is questionable.
'647 "A system and method causes a computer to detect and perform actions on structures identified in computer data. The system provides an analyzer server, an application program interface, a user interface and an action processor. " Or in other words - a browser and X. Analyser server = netscape API = X structures in data = html UI = X
"The analyzer server receives from an application running concurrently data having recognizable structures, uses a pattern analysis unit, such as a parser or fast string search function, to detect structures in the data, and links relevant actions to the detected structures. The application program interface communicates with the application running concurrently, and transmits relevant information to the user interface. Thus, the user interface can present and enable selection of the detected structures, and upon selection of a detected structure, present the linked candidate actions. Upon selection of an action, the action processor performs the action on the detected structure. "
Well - yes. You can avoid dust in that manner. But only if you wind up the fan speed to several tens of thousands of RPM, and make them sound like your case is about to explode.
And also - read the article - the heat is transferred by the conductive fan rotating over a thermal plate with a.001" clearance. This actively massively stirred air has fairly low thermal resistance.
I note the pressure guage next to the device. This is presumably connected to a large compressor, providing reasonable rates of high pressure air, as you need for air bearings. The average PC however doesn't actually have this.
Perhaps not, but the result is freeze dried food. 'conventional' freeze drying has been around since 1930. Nescafe commercialised freeze-dried coffee before WWII.
Sure - which is why I wasn't qualifying how large. The fixed costs of the shuttle program are somewhat a factor of launch rate - though design is a big elephant in the budget too.
If you have to completely tear down the main engines every flight, it doesn't help, nor does stuff like the toxic propellants used for the reaction control system.
NASAs attempts at cheaper launch have largely been comedic. For example - DCX was promising. But it was canned in favour of X33 - which was going to reduce access to space. (well, the evolved form was). It was to do this by trying out three completely untried technologies on the same vehicle.
This list seems at best dubious in many aspects. MRI, for example, was an outgrowth of magnetic resonance studies on chemicals that had been going on for a long time, which was invented in england in the university of Nottingham.
I'd like to know how NASA influenced velcro - which was patented in 1948 in switzerland. Thermal gloves and boots - what? I think you'll find the Eskimo (inuit) got there first.
The incas did freeze drying naturally hundreds of years ago, and freeze dried coffee was available around WWII. Disposable diapers have a long history, and were around well before the 60s.
Kidney dialysis was done in WWII.
These are just some examples that jumped out at me as unlikely.
The precedent - yes. However in times of war you don't want to overfly as for one that'll give them a really accurate position on where the satellite is.
The shuttle was not a shining example of the US doing well. It was a shining example of how much pork you can pack into one project and have it stumble along and achieve a bare fraction of the aims at huge cost.
For example. Do you know why the shuttle has large wings? It's largely so that it can take off, launch a military satellite into a polar orbit, and land back in the continental united states, without overflying russian territory.
Needless to say, it's never actually needed to do this. But the requirement to do so meant the need for SRBs, and the complex thermal protection system. This was so that the DOD would kick in some funding into the project early on.
A shuttle launch costs a really, really large slice of a billion dollars.
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is currently selling twice the amount of payload to low earth orbit, for well under a quarter of the price.
Yes, it's not quite as nice, as you need a few percent of that to be able to push it around a bit to match orbits you can reach with the shuttle.
And you need a bit more payload sacrificed if you actually want anything of significant weight recovered. But the shuttle has only done that task perhaps half a dozen times, for payloads where in many cases it was debatable as to the value of doing so.
The shuttle has basically been the shining light akin to the caver that finds his way by periodically lighting his hair on fire.
Because often you can't. The models of laptops you can buy without MSFT OS are really very, very restricted. Especially as some countries don't let you reclaim the microsoft tax.
An especially amusing complaint was from a dev who had their sandboxed app nuked. Another fun problem is they often nuke the accounts of paid facebook developers. You're not allowed to create two accounts.
Because if they can kill spammy apps faster than users check their accounts, then they reduce the apparant spam by the actions the app did simply dissapearing.
2 gig isn't a hell of a lot when tethering. Especially if you're using it for your primary internet. That's a whole 60MB/day.
I am having trouble sticking to 30M/day - and that's using opera with 'turbo' mode on to compress text, and turning off images for most websites. Not to mention that one several minute video eats your days quota, and a movie eats the whole thing.
At some point, it's not going to be economic. To do it right, you need to do it BIG. Start off at the end of the delivery - at least 10 minutes per customer is going to be spent dropping off the groceries, finding the address,...
Let's say the ideal situation is where you've got enough customers that the average drive is 5 minutes, and you can fit 30 customers deliveries in your van. (from the size of the vans they use here) That works out to about an 8 hour shift - which seems logical. Cost per customer is of the order of 30 minutes of labour (half driving and delivering, half picking.) This is about 4 pounds. Vehicle leasing will be around 600/month - a pound a customer. (Mercedes Sprinter LWB). Fuel around 2 pounds. (this will be a third of the cost in the US)
This is a bit high - it's the top end of what they charge, but it's ballpark. The vehicle leasing cost may be high - you can trim a lot on Huuuuuge fleets.
This works OK as a buisness model. The nasty part hits - very fast - as you increase the miles between customers.
As most of this increase is driving cost - the amount of scope you have to reduce this is small. Your buisness can very easily go from a loss-leader, to a profitable enterprise - if you can reduce the time between deliveries. This could mean - for example - pinging you if there is going to be a delivery in your area in the next few days, and it's been about that since your last order. It could mean massive advertising, or even good word of mouth.
It really needs high customer density. With low density the number of customers you can service in a day drops, as the cost per customer of the van and fuel rise. Going from 8 miles or so between customers, to 16 makes the deliveries expensive. Going from 16-32 means you need more customers in your service area, or you're going to fail.
Yup. I've unfortunately at the moment not got access to a car, as well as health problems, and there isn't a local shop in this village.
To get my weekly shopping done, otherwise I'd have to get on a bus, and spend $5 or so getting into town and back.
I can shop online at Tesco, pay the same price as in-store, and order anything, for a delivery of $5 or so. In addition, it lets me get bulk buys of staples, when they are on special offer, which would be totally impossible on the bus. For example - last order was 8*2Kg packs of spaghetti, as they were half price. Combined with a large freezer, this works well. I've ended up shopping around monthly. Admittedly at the end of the month, I'm more reliant on the frozen stuff, as the tomatoes and bananas have mostly been eaten. A breadmaker means I've got fresh bread whenever I want it, and I'm more able to plan tasty healthy meals on a budget. (Asda do seem to offer slightly lower base prices - but much of my orders come from buying a years of good offers at once)
You could make a breadmaker functionally identical to todays with 1700s tech. It would be fairly trivial with 1850.
It's just that you need quite a lot of power to run it. The timers and clocks are easy, as is the baking - but turning the paddle round and round isn't at all simple. A breadmaker with a mule tied to it, or that had a steam engine to do the kneading would be somewhat less convenient.
I was responding to the question posed in the title of the thread - 'Have we reached maximum population size.'
Clearly not - for example - if we all went vegetarian and stopped (in the west) buying and using energy efficient products - we would be close to the 'carrying capacity' - assuming that the report quoted is accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed - hence fall arrest stuff.
I was largely neglecting that, as climbing on my roof doesn't scare me.
Debatable.
It is possible to make very energy efficient homes that use almost no power to cool them.
This is basically to take your average Norwegian house, plop it down somewhere hot, slightly uprate the cooling system, and get some sort of shading over the windows.
The same applies in hot weather as cold.
Very good sealing, heat recovery ventilation.
Vapour barriers and heating controls do get more annoying when the habitable volume goes well above and below the environment.
The major difference is solar gain is now your enemy, not your friend, so you need to do things like put up shade (natural or otherwise) to stop the sun shining into the windows - overhanging construction, comparatively small windows (in both cases) ...
The one good thing the home in 117F has is an abundance of potential energy from solar.
Well...
A fairly small bit of googling will get you readily assembled panels for $1.50/W. http://www.sunelec.com/solar-panels-c-5.html
Admittedly, these require actually mounting on the roof, and grid-tie inverters.
But let's ballpark these at $3/W.
In sunny Scotland, I pay $.25/kWh of power.
A 1kW panel produces around 900kWh/year of electricity.
( http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/apps4/pvest.php)
At current prices, this 1kW panel would produce $225/year, or payback (neglecting interest!!!) in 6 years.
And I've just got notice that bills are going up 10%.
For 'solar laminates' - these are the bare glass panels with solar cells on which need a frame made, the cost is around $1/W, so payback can be lots sooner in some cases.
(this assumes that I can simply backfeed the meter. In the UK as it stands, you cannot do this)
For places with lower electricity prices, payback is questionable.
Sportsmen and women, almost universally.
'647
"A system and method causes a computer to detect and perform actions on structures identified in computer data.
The system provides an analyzer server, an application program interface, a user interface and an action processor.
"
Or in other words - a browser and X.
Analyser server = netscape
API = X
structures in data = html
UI = X
"The analyzer server receives from an application running concurrently data having recognizable structures, uses a pattern analysis unit, such as a parser or fast string search function, to detect structures in the data, and links relevant actions to the detected structures. The application program interface communicates with the application running concurrently, and transmits relevant information to the user interface. Thus, the user interface can present and enable selection of the detected structures, and upon selection of a detected structure, present the linked candidate actions. Upon selection of an action, the action processor performs the action on the detected structure. "
Well - yes.
You can avoid dust in that manner.
But only if you wind up the fan speed to several tens of thousands of RPM, and make them sound like your case is about to explode.
And also - read the article - the heat is transferred by the conductive fan rotating over a thermal plate with a .001" clearance.
This actively massively stirred air has fairly low thermal resistance.
I note the pressure guage next to the device.
This is presumably connected to a large compressor, providing reasonable rates of high pressure air, as you need for air bearings.
The average PC however doesn't actually have this.
Perhaps not, but the result is freeze dried food.
'conventional' freeze drying has been around since 1930.
Nescafe commercialised freeze-dried coffee before WWII.
Sure - which is why I wasn't qualifying how large.
The fixed costs of the shuttle program are somewhat a factor of launch rate - though design is a big elephant in the budget too.
If you have to completely tear down the main engines every flight, it doesn't help, nor does stuff like the toxic propellants used for the reaction control system.
NASAs attempts at cheaper launch have largely been comedic.
For example - DCX was promising.
But it was canned in favour of X33 - which was going to reduce access to space. (well, the evolved form was).
It was to do this by trying out three completely untried technologies on the same vehicle.
Needless to say, it diddn't get far.
By living in a very, very high cold place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_civilization#Agriculture_and_farming
The space telescope was not actually recovered, it was serviced in orbit.
Was the shuttle a good platform for those servicing missions - possibly.
Did it make sense to spend well over the cost of the telescope servicing it, rather than launching a new telescope - questionable.
This list seems at best dubious in many aspects.
MRI, for example, was an outgrowth of magnetic resonance studies on chemicals that had been going on for a long time, which was invented in england in the university of Nottingham.
I'd like to know how NASA influenced velcro - which was patented in 1948 in switzerland.
Thermal gloves and boots - what? I think you'll find the Eskimo (inuit) got there first.
The incas did freeze drying naturally hundreds of years ago, and freeze dried coffee was available around WWII.
Disposable diapers have a long history, and were around well before the 60s.
Kidney dialysis was done in WWII.
These are just some examples that jumped out at me as unlikely.
The precedent - yes.
However in times of war you don't want to overfly as for one that'll give them a really accurate position on where the satellite is.
The shuttle was not a shining example of the US doing well.
It was a shining example of how much pork you can pack into one project and have it stumble along and achieve a bare fraction of the aims at huge cost.
For example.
Do you know why the shuttle has large wings?
It's largely so that it can take off, launch a military satellite into a polar orbit, and land back in the continental united states, without overflying russian territory.
Needless to say, it's never actually needed to do this.
But the requirement to do so meant the need for SRBs, and the complex thermal protection system. This was so that the DOD would kick in some funding into the project early on.
A shuttle launch costs a really, really large slice of a billion dollars.
SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is currently selling twice the amount of payload to low earth orbit, for well under a quarter of the price.
Yes, it's not quite as nice, as you need a few percent of that to be able to push it around a bit to match orbits you can reach with the shuttle.
And you need a bit more payload sacrificed if you actually want anything of significant weight recovered.
But the shuttle has only done that task perhaps half a dozen times, for payloads where in many cases it was debatable as to the value of doing so.
The shuttle has basically been the shining light akin to the caver that finds his way by periodically lighting his hair on fire.
Linux.
I can't buy a laptop from nearly all vendors in the UK if I don't pay the microsoft tax.
Because often you can't.
The models of laptops you can buy without MSFT OS are really very, very restricted.
Especially as some countries don't let you reclaim the microsoft tax.
An especially amusing complaint was from a dev who had their sandboxed app nuked.
Another fun problem is they often nuke the accounts of paid facebook developers.
You're not allowed to create two accounts.
The app can do things that the user is not very aware of with their permission.
Because if they can kill spammy apps faster than users check their accounts, then they reduce the apparant spam by the actions the app did simply dissapearing.
2 gig isn't a hell of a lot when tethering.
Especially if you're using it for your primary internet.
That's a whole 60MB/day.
I am having trouble sticking to 30M/day - and that's using opera with 'turbo' mode on to compress text, and turning off images for most websites.
Not to mention that one several minute video eats your days quota, and a movie eats the whole thing.
At some point, it's not going to be economic. ...
To do it right, you need to do it BIG.
Start off at the end of the delivery - at least 10 minutes per customer is going to be spent dropping off the groceries, finding the address,
Let's say the ideal situation is where you've got enough customers that the average drive is 5 minutes, and you can fit 30 customers deliveries in your van.
(from the size of the vans they use here)
That works out to about an 8 hour shift - which seems logical.
Cost per customer is of the order of 30 minutes of labour (half driving and delivering, half picking.)
This is about 4 pounds.
Vehicle leasing will be around 600/month - a pound a customer. (Mercedes Sprinter LWB).
Fuel around 2 pounds. (this will be a third of the cost in the US)
This is a bit high - it's the top end of what they charge, but it's ballpark.
The vehicle leasing cost may be high - you can trim a lot on Huuuuuge fleets.
This works OK as a buisness model.
The nasty part hits - very fast - as you increase the miles between customers.
As most of this increase is driving cost - the amount of scope you have to reduce this is small.
Your buisness can very easily go from a loss-leader, to a profitable enterprise - if you can reduce the
time between deliveries.
This could mean - for example - pinging you if there is going to be a delivery in your area in the next few
days, and it's been about that since your last order.
It could mean massive advertising, or even good word of mouth.
It really needs high customer density. With low density the number of customers you can service in a day drops, as the cost per customer of the van and fuel rise.
Going from 8 miles or so between customers, to 16 makes the deliveries expensive.
Going from 16-32 means you need more customers in your service area, or you're going to fail.
Yup. I've unfortunately at the moment not got access to a car, as well as health problems, and there isn't a local shop in this village.
To get my weekly shopping done, otherwise I'd have to get on a bus, and spend $5 or so getting into town and back.
I can shop online at Tesco, pay the same price as in-store, and order anything, for a delivery of $5 or so.
In addition, it lets me get bulk buys of staples, when they are on special offer, which would be totally impossible on the bus.
For example - last order was 8*2Kg packs of spaghetti, as they were half price.
Combined with a large freezer, this works well.
I've ended up shopping around monthly.
Admittedly at the end of the month, I'm more reliant on the frozen stuff, as the tomatoes and bananas have mostly been eaten.
A breadmaker means I've got fresh bread whenever I want it, and I'm more able to plan tasty healthy meals on a budget.
(Asda do seem to offer slightly lower base prices - but much of my orders come from buying a years of good offers at once)
Are the drones in fact flown by serving members of the armed services?
You could make a breadmaker functionally identical to todays with 1700s tech.
It would be fairly trivial with 1850.
It's just that you need quite a lot of power to run it.
The timers and clocks are easy, as is the baking - but turning the paddle round and round isn't at all simple.
A breadmaker with a mule tied to it, or that had a steam engine to do the kneading would be somewhat less convenient.
I was responding to the question posed in the title of the thread - 'Have we reached maximum population size.'
Clearly not - for example - if we all went vegetarian and stopped (in the west) buying and using energy efficient products - we would be close to the 'carrying capacity' - assuming that the report quoted is accurate.