In Aussie lay speak what does this mean? Is it likely Microsoft might take a hit? Does i4i — whoever they are — do open source? Is this a FOSS story, or not?
It's not like we have to store it for long, but instead get it back into the fuel cycle when we start rolling out the Gen4 reactors that feed on nuclear waste. We've already mined enough nuclear fuel in 'waste' rods to power the whole world for at least 500 years, and Greenpeace have the gall to call it 'waste'! Nuclear waste isn't the problem, it's the SOLUTION!
As you'll see from my sig, I se peak oil as a clear and present danger. If only we had a peer-reviewed energy body that actually had the top 100 questions that should be asked of any energy claims by a start up. Here's my first 7 expressed in the mnemonic SERVICE.
1. Sustainability
2. Energy Return on Energy Invested
3. Rare materials
4. Volumes
5. Infrastructure — time to implement?
6. Constant supply of energy
7. Expense http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/alternatives/
We don't have long to get ready, so why oh why are we still mucking around with toys like wind and solar? It's time to get some baseload grunt out there. We need to electrify as many forms of transport as we can, conserve the fuels we absolutely need in sectors like agriculture and long-haul flights, convert shorter flights to fast rail, etc. And only baseload NUKES can supply the energy cheap enough. If I were Obama I'd be handing out $10 billion to the Argonne labs guys and get them to build their prototype GenIV reactor. Then I'd get them to set up the modularised FACTORY and start pumping these nukes off the production line! The reason individual nukes are so expensive is they are... individual. Like a hand crafted Rolls Royce instead of a mass produced Hyundai. GE have the S-PRISM almost ready to go: so I'd call the big boys in from Argonne, GE, and Westinghouse and have a peer-reviewed 'chat' about which way to go nuclear. FAST. Only then will we solve both peak oil and climate change (and with a whole lot of rolling suburbia back into New Urbanism, but that's my other shtick).
Does that include $20 thousand dollars per household for batteries to charge up for this mysterious no-sun event we call the 'night'? Sorry folks, nothing to see here, move along, move along. Gen3 and Gen4 nukes are the only way to go until TRUE 'super-batteries' that are 'super-cheap' can actually deal with renewable's main problem, intermittency.
I like the big picture. And with GenIV reactors that breed up nuclear waste as fuel, it wouldn't take too big a payload to fuel up the place and have multiple reactors to keep the station fully powered. On a moonbase a blackout means death.
I agree! It really is creepy — and limited. It looks like the toys I had as a kid, wire-framed bendy action figures that were meant to be the Greys from "Close encounters". My mum hated them and thought they looked like mutated embryo's.
Not only that, they're too limited. I hate them. They should be focussing on the iPad & tablet market and creating super-cool avatars that beat the pants off anything Xbox has created. Isn't that far more William Gibson than having an ACTION FIGURE for crying out loud? Why bring it down to the level of the meat — especially if we can't customise it with the click of a button? Ooooh, shiny idea... dress up accessories made in China! Shsssshhhhhhh, nothing to see here, move along! Move along! (Jumps on phone to make a squillion in a new dress-up-dolls market).
"Cut the military budget in half and we could have a colony on mars." I'm with you all the way *after* America switches over to non-oil transport. Then you'll be far less likely to get into REAL wars over the remaining black stuff after we hit peak oil! So, roll out the fast-rail, electric cars, and GenIV nukes. Start eating up some of that nuclear 'waste' (which is actually fuel that could run the world for 500 years).
Once you are off the oil you'll save yourselves $600 billion a year in imported oil. If you think that's expensive, once production peaks and the terminal decline sets in it could double in cost. We're talking a ballpark figure of over a trillion dollars a year! Yes, a million million dollars a year. If America can wean off the oil FAST you may just save yourselves from entering a REAL oil war (with China?) and you will not NEED half your armed forces anyway.
I'm all for a war-time economy to get us off the oil and prevent some of the darker peak oil scenarios.
I take your point, but what is the ERoEI of Shale oil? There are limits to the speed of extracting the non-conventional oils, and they take SERIOUS investment and lots of time. I don't think the non-conventional oil will have a remote chance of replacing conventional oil at the speed at which we need it to come online — not even the most optimistic stuff I've read the tar-sands boosters in Canada raving about has a chance of replacing the accumulative depletion rate of oil post-peak. And this depletion rate gets larger each and ever year, with 56 out of the top 65 oil producing nations having peaked. There's going to be rationing, one way or another. Shame it will have to smack us into a Great Depression, but that's probably what it will take to WAKE US UP to the limits of geology and DO something about it. There's plenty we can do, when the political willpower arrives. I'm not a Malthusian doomer. But peak oil denial just isn't funny any more.
You sound sympathetic to Open Source, so what would it take to swing Australian government and business around, especially when Russia have already mandated that everything on public desktops has to be open source by 2015?
Even though I'm not in I.T. and am not a computer developer or programmer, I just have to have a good old-fashioned rant about this one! Microsoft recently commissioned a study into just how much money adopting Open Source can really cost an organisation. It seems that when a company adopts new software, it takes a bunch of time and money to build all the systems from scratch, get them all working together smoothly, and then retrain all the workers. Surprise surprise!
But this superficial study ignores the fact that every time Microsoft callously upgrades their Operating System without due diligence into compatibility problems with a trillion other bits of software and hardware out there, there are a gazillion compatibility issues to sort out. All the IT professionals run off to classes and seminars and have to retrain anyway, and then begin the mammoth task of ironing out all their unique business software routines, banging it all into shape and forcing it to work. It takes time. Microsoft upgrades are a major pain in the butt to the IT staff on any decent sized firm! Of course, they want this. It guarantees job security. But must the job itself be so painful?
To top it all off, Microsoft are being hypocritical here. They are warning against the change to Open Source software because of the costs in changing, yet ignore just how enormously they had just changed Microsoft Office 2007 when they introduced the Ribbon bar across all the old drop down menu's we used to know! Their rather experimental Ribbon was not just a view option leaving all the old commands and drop down menu's intact, but instead killed many of the old commands and routines users knew. It was an autocratic rewrite of the entire Office suite forcing everyone to go back to basics and learn how to suck eggs. The sheer human capital lost in this arrogant decision was astonishing! Workers with years of Office experience, who could format Word with ease and design beautiful Excel spreadsheets in their sleep, all suddenly found themselves powerless. As the old joke goes,
12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
I admit to being an idealist and dreamer, and maybe even a tiny bit lazy. Or is that sane? At a deep, gut level, I just feel that once I learn a piece of basic software like Word I should not have to re-learn the basics all over again. Call me lazy, but I don't want progress and new functionality to force me to have to relearn the basics. The modern world is complex enough, thank you very much!
So even though we are graphic designers and forced to use Mac, the one thing that keeps me wishing a Mac-ish Open Source revolution would sweep away all competitors is the fact that the Open Source model is more grassroots driven, and less likely to waste so much human capital on pointless 'renovations' to the software.
Not only that, but it is Open source! The code is open, and available to all. Programmers can design stuff compatible with their Open standards. Microsoft isn't Open. They keep the latest editions of Word locked so that I can't open a.docx file in Open Office. We're talking about a monopoly here! So why on earth did the Australian government mandate support for a monopoly!?
I want the world's governments to accelerate their support of Open Source, not retard it. I like the fact that the
Thing I don't get is where does the Co2 come from? If the reactor some how captures it from ambient airflow over the device, then that's *amazing*. But if they actually have to *assume* a good flow of concentrated Co2 from somewhere, isn't that adding to the cost? Sucking Co2 out of the air would become a whole new industry, expensive enough in its own right! And if they are talking about using Co2 captured from some fossil fuel plant, then, ummm, isn't that defeating the whole point? It's still addicted to fossil fuels.
When Russia and China appear to be moving away from paying for a ridiculously overpriced OS and Office software, our government is locking it in! Aaaargh! Don't they realise that if Western governments finally wean off the evil giant by growing their own Open Source versions of Linux, and creating beautiful efficient User-Interfaces in Open Office software, the whole economy can eventually wean off America's software and we all win? The Australian government should have mandated exactly the opposite! Today is a sad day to be an Australian. Geeks across the land will be tearing their shirts and throwing ashes over their heads, crying "Alas! Alas, we are undone!"
Gasoline engines are only 10% efficient, so the scheme is less efficient than electric cars + solar panels.
This is a good point! Imagine we build a fleet of GenIV nuclear reactors which could power the world for 500 years just on the nuclear waste we already have sitting around. That's reliable, baseload power despite the weather or season or that other great problem solar advocates don't like to mention, 'the night'. Now imagine most cars are Electric, and just charge at home or work or the shops. There could even be fast-charge stations on highways.
Now imagine that we save the precious gasoline for heavy vehicles, trains, and jets. This is doable! I wish the developers in this field the best of luck.
One of the lines had the "mad scientist's" mum asking why on earth he'd want to make bacteria smart? The hero asked his mother, "Why are you so worried?" She answered, "Ask anyone that's ever cleaned a toilet bowl."
Ok, so while we're all discussing electric cars, please please please get all your online mates to click "LIKE" on the Facebook page of this documentary so that they'll release the trailer! I'm getting desperate! (You couldn't tell?)
It's not like this one group are suddenly going to discover some magic new way of manufacturing solar PV cheap JUST BECAUSE they've decided to make it in the desert (horrible place) in Africa (sad place with sad history) because they have lots of sand. What am I missing? Rightly or wrongly, there's an exponentially growing solar PV world of industry out there trying lazer sliced 'sliver cells', dye-based photovoltaics that mimic nature's photosynthesis, and a bunch of other ideas.
But really, what we should be doing is pumping research into modularising Gen3 nuclear reactors and pulling them off the assembly line with standardised, routine safety inspections. Rather than reinventing the wheel each time we need to get Henry Ford about nukes. Build them fast, in an established routine, and it will make them cheap. Then when Gen4 arrives, Gen4 will just eat all that waste. Even just TODAY's nuclear waste could run the world for 500 years! And who knows what they'll have by then? A moon-base shooting solar PV into orbit for 24/7 space based solar power? Now THAT's solar I could live with! (But, with the tiny little detail of requiring the moon-base first. And hey, maybe we'll even crack fusion before then!)
The moment I read Solar PV I knew these guys had lost the plot. Why on earth do we need it to even have a pump, let alone moving parts and a costly Solar PV array to power it? If it's a big enough emergency, dump thousands of "Life Straws" into the field and let the wonder of the human mouth suck the water through the straw directly from the river, which filters it by the time it hits the lips. Solar PV? Are they trying to kill people by making this more expensive than it has to be? The Life Straw is also more flexible. People sometimes need to be on the move in emergencies. They can take their own Life Straw with them, and drink water from whatever river they find on the way.
There are also various bottle-filter versions that also use no power. They don't need it, as the hand cranks the water through the cleaning membranes.
There is also the Watercone, which again is portable, and can desalinate seawater with solar heat (but no Solar PV needed!) http://www.watercone.com/product.html But I guess when you work for MIT's space division and you have to reinvent something as basic as the wheel, one has to spend a million dollars to make a high tech space pen that will work in zero g rather than just use a pencil! The problem here, is we are talking about saving thousands of the world's poor. They can't afford the 'space-pen' version. (Or, more accurately, they can't afford the emergency relief agencies to have cost limit supply). Instead, lets dump thousands of Life Straws and Watercones, and let *people power* and sunlight provide the energy to save their own lives.
Dude, I totally agree with the recycling philosophy you're discussing. There are even new plasma burner technologies that will recycle municipal waste at an atomic level for us, ripping plastics and diapers and food waste back to constituent atoms and the resulting gases and slag are all used.
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/recycle/
However, my main reason for posting was to ask: where did you get your awesome sig? It is hilarious.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Agreed! These suckers are going to be networked as well. You know what they say, "Complex systems collapse". Just imagine the software asking if you wanted to install the latest upgrades while you are trying to drive... imagine spam attacks... imagine porn attacks, on your windscreen, while driving around in public! Not good!
OK, so shooting power in from space is a recurring theme in the quest for reliable baseload power. For me the dreamer aspect of this has always been launch costs, which the more serious slashdotters here have demonstrated just...don't...add...up. However, does the 'Hydrogen gun' make Space PV power, or even this solar wind power concept, economical? What do you all make of the Hydrogen gun? Indeed, does it warrant its own slashdot thread? (I've never known how to generate a thread here).
Personally with peak oil & global warming bearing down on us, I'm hoping we get serious about Gen3 and Gen4 nuclear power. (Gen4 promises to run the world for 500 years just on the nuclear 'waste' we have already produced). But I'd love to see the more technical slashdotters amongst us analysing conventional solar PV power beaming stations with the Hydrogen Gun economic models.
Slashdot Mirror
In Aussie lay speak what does this mean? Is it likely Microsoft might take a hit? Does i4i — whoever they are — do open source? Is this a FOSS story, or not?
It's not like we have to store it for long, but instead get it back into the fuel cycle when we start rolling out the Gen4 reactors that feed on nuclear waste. We've already mined enough nuclear fuel in 'waste' rods to power the whole world for at least 500 years, and Greenpeace have the gall to call it 'waste'! Nuclear waste isn't the problem, it's the SOLUTION!
As you'll see from my sig, I se peak oil as a clear and present danger. If only we had a peer-reviewed energy body that actually had the top 100 questions that should be asked of any energy claims by a start up. Here's my first 7 expressed in the mnemonic SERVICE.
1. Sustainability
2. Energy Return on Energy Invested
3. Rare materials
4. Volumes
5. Infrastructure — time to implement?
6. Constant supply of energy
7. Expense
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/alternatives/
We don't have long to get ready, so why oh why are we still mucking around with toys like wind and solar? It's time to get some baseload grunt out there. We need to electrify as many forms of transport as we can, conserve the fuels we absolutely need in sectors like agriculture and long-haul flights, convert shorter flights to fast rail, etc. And only baseload NUKES can supply the energy cheap enough. If I were Obama I'd be handing out $10 billion to the Argonne labs guys and get them to build their prototype GenIV reactor. Then I'd get them to set up the modularised FACTORY and start pumping these nukes off the production line! The reason individual nukes are so expensive is they are... individual. Like a hand crafted Rolls Royce instead of a mass produced Hyundai. GE have the S-PRISM almost ready to go: so I'd call the big boys in from Argonne, GE, and Westinghouse and have a peer-reviewed 'chat' about which way to go nuclear. FAST. Only then will we solve both peak oil and climate change (and with a whole lot of rolling suburbia back into New Urbanism, but that's my other shtick).
Does that include $20 thousand dollars per household for batteries to charge up for this mysterious no-sun event we call the 'night'? Sorry folks, nothing to see here, move along, move along. Gen3 and Gen4 nukes are the only way to go until TRUE 'super-batteries' that are 'super-cheap' can actually deal with renewable's main problem, intermittency.
I like the big picture. And with GenIV reactors that breed up nuclear waste as fuel, it wouldn't take too big a payload to fuel up the place and have multiple reactors to keep the station fully powered. On a moonbase a blackout means death.
I agree! It really is creepy — and limited. It looks like the toys I had as a kid, wire-framed bendy action figures that were meant to be the Greys from "Close encounters". My mum hated them and thought they looked like mutated embryo's.
... dress up accessories made in China! Shsssshhhhhhh, nothing to see here, move along! Move along! (Jumps on phone to make a squillion in a new dress-up-dolls market).
Not only that, they're too limited. I hate them. They should be focussing on the iPad & tablet market and creating super-cool avatars that beat the pants off anything Xbox has created. Isn't that far more William Gibson than having an ACTION FIGURE for crying out loud? Why bring it down to the level of the meat — especially if we can't customise it with the click of a button? Ooooh, shiny idea
"Cut the military budget in half and we could have a colony on mars." I'm with you all the way *after* America switches over to non-oil transport. Then you'll be far less likely to get into REAL wars over the remaining black stuff after we hit peak oil! So, roll out the fast-rail, electric cars, and GenIV nukes. Start eating up some of that nuclear 'waste' (which is actually fuel that could run the world for 500 years).
Once you are off the oil you'll save yourselves $600 billion a year in imported oil. If you think that's expensive, once production peaks and the terminal decline sets in it could double in cost. We're talking a ballpark figure of over a trillion dollars a year! Yes, a million million dollars a year. If America can wean off the oil FAST you may just save yourselves from entering a REAL oil war (with China?) and you will not NEED half your armed forces anyway.
I'm all for a war-time economy to get us off the oil and prevent some of the darker peak oil scenarios.
Then it's time for Mars!
If it slows down too much, we'll be forced to fix it with that old Sci-Fi catch-all procedure; "NUKE IT!"
I take your point, but what is the ERoEI of Shale oil? There are limits to the speed of extracting the non-conventional oils, and they take SERIOUS investment and lots of time. I don't think the non-conventional oil will have a remote chance of replacing conventional oil at the speed at which we need it to come online — not even the most optimistic stuff I've read the tar-sands boosters in Canada raving about has a chance of replacing the accumulative depletion rate of oil post-peak. And this depletion rate gets larger each and ever year, with 56 out of the top 65 oil producing nations having peaked. There's going to be rationing, one way or another. Shame it will have to smack us into a Great Depression, but that's probably what it will take to WAKE US UP to the limits of geology and DO something about it. There's plenty we can do, when the political willpower arrives. I'm not a Malthusian doomer. But peak oil denial just isn't funny any more.
You sound sympathetic to Open Source, so what would it take to swing Australian government and business around, especially when Russia have already mandated that everything on public desktops has to be open source by 2015?
I forgot to say, this was a rant I just put up on my blog. http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/how-the-marketplace-of-software-squanders-human-capital/
But this superficial study ignores the fact that every time Microsoft callously upgrades their Operating System without due diligence into compatibility problems with a trillion other bits of software and hardware out there, there are a gazillion compatibility issues to sort out. All the IT professionals run off to classes and seminars and have to retrain anyway, and then begin the mammoth task of ironing out all their unique business software routines, banging it all into shape and forcing it to work. It takes time. Microsoft upgrades are a major pain in the butt to the IT staff on any decent sized firm! Of course, they want this. It guarantees job security. But must the job itself be so painful?
To top it all off, Microsoft are being hypocritical here. They are warning against the change to Open Source software because of the costs in changing, yet ignore just how enormously they had just changed Microsoft Office 2007 when they introduced the Ribbon bar across all the old drop down menu's we used to know! Their rather experimental Ribbon was not just a view option leaving all the old commands and drop down menu's intact, but instead killed many of the old commands and routines users knew. It was an autocratic rewrite of the entire Office suite forcing everyone to go back to basics and learn how to suck eggs. The sheer human capital lost in this arrogant decision was astonishing! Workers with years of Office experience, who could format Word with ease and design beautiful Excel spreadsheets in their sleep, all suddenly found themselves powerless. As the old joke goes,
I admit to being an idealist and dreamer, and maybe even a tiny bit lazy. Or is that sane? At a deep, gut level, I just feel that once I learn a piece of basic software like Word I should not have to re-learn the basics all over again. Call me lazy, but I don't want progress and new functionality to force me to have to relearn the basics. The modern world is complex enough, thank you very much!
So even though we are graphic designers and forced to use Mac, the one thing that keeps me wishing a Mac-ish Open Source revolution would sweep away all competitors is the fact that the Open Source model is more grassroots driven, and less likely to waste so much human capital on pointless 'renovations' to the software. Not only that, but it is Open source! The code is open, and available to all. Programmers can design stuff compatible with their Open standards. Microsoft isn't Open. They keep the latest editions of Word locked so that I can't open a .docx file in Open Office. We're talking about a monopoly here! So why on earth did the Australian government mandate support for a monopoly!?
I want the world's governments to accelerate their support of Open Source, not retard it. I like the fact that the
Thing I don't get is where does the Co2 come from? If the reactor some how captures it from ambient airflow over the device, then that's *amazing*. But if they actually have to *assume* a good flow of concentrated Co2 from somewhere, isn't that adding to the cost? Sucking Co2 out of the air would become a whole new industry, expensive enough in its own right! And if they are talking about using Co2 captured from some fossil fuel plant, then, ummm, isn't that defeating the whole point? It's still addicted to fossil fuels.
When Russia and China appear to be moving away from paying for a ridiculously overpriced OS and Office software, our government is locking it in! Aaaargh! Don't they realise that if Western governments finally wean off the evil giant by growing their own Open Source versions of Linux, and creating beautiful efficient User-Interfaces in Open Office software, the whole economy can eventually wean off America's software and we all win? The Australian government should have mandated exactly the opposite! Today is a sad day to be an Australian. Geeks across the land will be tearing their shirts and throwing ashes over their heads, crying "Alas! Alas, we are undone!"
This is a good point! Imagine we build a fleet of GenIV nuclear reactors which could power the world for 500 years just on the nuclear waste we already have sitting around. That's reliable, baseload power despite the weather or season or that other great problem solar advocates don't like to mention, 'the night'. Now imagine most cars are Electric, and just charge at home or work or the shops. There could even be fast-charge stations on highways.
Now imagine that we save the precious gasoline for heavy vehicles, trains, and jets. This is doable! I wish the developers in this field the best of luck.
"I see stupid people. They're walking around like regular people, but they're stupid, and they don't even know they're stupid!"
One of the lines had the "mad scientist's" mum asking why on earth he'd want to make bacteria smart? The hero asked his mother, "Why are you so worried?" She answered, "Ask anyone that's ever cleaned a toilet bowl."
Mandate EV's instead? Hello? Peak oil?
http://www.facebook.com/revengeoftheelectriccar
But really, what we should be doing is pumping research into modularising Gen3 nuclear reactors and pulling them off the assembly line with standardised, routine safety inspections. Rather than reinventing the wheel each time we need to get Henry Ford about nukes. Build them fast, in an established routine, and it will make them cheap. Then when Gen4 arrives, Gen4 will just eat all that waste. Even just TODAY's nuclear waste could run the world for 500 years! And who knows what they'll have by then? A moon-base shooting solar PV into orbit for 24/7 space based solar power? Now THAT's solar I could live with! (But, with the tiny little detail of requiring the moon-base first. And hey, maybe we'll even crack fusion before then!)
The moment I read Solar PV I knew these guys had lost the plot. Why on earth do we need it to even have a pump, let alone moving parts and a costly Solar PV array to power it? If it's a big enough emergency, dump thousands of "Life Straws" into the field and let the wonder of the human mouth suck the water through the straw directly from the river, which filters it by the time it hits the lips. Solar PV? Are they trying to kill people by making this more expensive than it has to be? The Life Straw is also more flexible. People sometimes need to be on the move in emergencies. They can take their own Life Straw with them, and drink water from whatever river they find on the way.
There are also various bottle-filter versions that also use no power. They don't need it, as the hand cranks the water through the cleaning membranes.
There is also the Watercone, which again is portable, and can desalinate seawater with solar heat (but no Solar PV needed!) http://www.watercone.com/product.html But I guess when you work for MIT's space division and you have to reinvent something as basic as the wheel, one has to spend a million dollars to make a high tech space pen that will work in zero g rather than just use a pencil! The problem here, is we are talking about saving thousands of the world's poor. They can't afford the 'space-pen' version. (Or, more accurately, they can't afford the emergency relief agencies to have cost limit supply). Instead, lets dump thousands of Life Straws and Watercones, and let *people power* and sunlight provide the energy to save their own lives.
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/recycle/
However, my main reason for posting was to ask: where did you get your awesome sig? It is hilarious.
Great question. Please sign me up for updates to this question!
Agreed! These suckers are going to be networked as well. You know what they say, "Complex systems collapse". Just imagine the software asking if you wanted to install the latest upgrades while you are trying to drive... imagine spam attacks... imagine porn attacks, on your windscreen, while driving around in public! Not good!
OK, so shooting power in from space is a recurring theme in the quest for reliable baseload power. For me the dreamer aspect of this has always been launch costs, which the more serious slashdotters here have demonstrated just...don't...add...up. However, does the 'Hydrogen gun' make Space PV power, or even this solar wind power concept, economical? What do you all make of the Hydrogen gun? Indeed, does it warrant its own slashdot thread? (I've never known how to generate a thread here).
Personally with peak oil & global warming bearing down on us, I'm hoping we get serious about Gen3 and Gen4 nuclear power. (Gen4 promises to run the world for 500 years just on the nuclear 'waste' we have already produced). But I'd love to see the more technical slashdotters amongst us analysing conventional solar PV power beaming stations with the Hydrogen Gun economic models.