It has been known for decades that there is a tremendous amount of oil shale and tar sands in this area. The challenge, and it is a significant challenge, is to extract the oil from these deposits in a way that isn't an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions. As is often the case, the wikipedia article is a great introduction to the topic.
Extracting oil from oil shale in the most obvious way involves heating it (probably with oil, but you do get more out than you put in, usually). So, you scoop it out of the massive open-pit mine, heat it, get the oil out, and then dispose of the remaining rock. Paradoxically, you end up changing the nature of the rock, so that it takes up more space than it originally did -- so even if you put all the tailings back into where it was mined, you'd end up with a new set of mountains. The net energy you end up with after processing the oil shale isn't a lot, and ridiculous amounts of water are necessary in the process (water the mountain west just doesn't have.)
It should be noted that the Canadians are talking about building nuclear plants in their tar sands regions to supply the energy necessary to liberate the oil from the tar sands, in sort of a nuclear->oil scheme.
According to the Wikipedia article, there have been oil shale processing programs in the past, some on a fairly large scale. They have fallen by the wayside as conventional oil has been so inexpensive.
I believe that the environmental impact of extracting oil from oil shale on the scale required to keep the world running on oil as it is today would have a devastating environmental impact. Probably not as bad as a nuclear war fought over the remaining conventional oil resources...probably.
The reason that this took so long to approve is that it is illegal on its face. The agreement that opened up the satellite spectrum for XM and Sirius specified unambiguously that no merger would be tolerated.
I agree that a year is a long time for the Bush so-called administration to make a ruling that contradicts a law. Usually that's done before morning tea.
I thought the most thought provoking movie of last year was Children of Men, about the collapse of society when there are no more children. It was one of those movies where a simple premise is carried to the logical extreme, and it's more than a little depressing.
But, coincidentally, the next day I saw a demonstration of ASIMO, Honda's self-contained little robot -- and it resonated so well with the movie that it's hard to believe in coincidence anymore.
The Japanese are already living in that Children of Men world, their birthrate is shockingly low, and they have almost no immigration, so the population is shrinking quickly, especially of young people.
So, what do the Japanese do? Rather than despair (as they did in England, in the movie) they just build a generation of robots...
At some point, I do expect that very large organizations will break the DRM on Blu-Ray, and they'll probably present it to DVD-Jon, much like they did with DVD's. Probably be a while, though.
I'm curious what the resolution of your display is -- you know, the one you're looking at right now. If it's more than 720x480, (and it is) then you can hardly say that resolution doesn't matter to people.
We were watching my Academy screener of Charlie Wilson's War on my wife's new iMac (just because it was a new toy) and I was amazed how bad image looked. There were compression artifacts all over the place, and the resolution of the image was such that everything looked blurry all the time [well, when it wasn't blocky]. Now, I am sure that a screener doesn't have the level of compression sweetening/optimization that a commercial DVD release has, but if we had been watching this on bluRay, it would have looked far, far better even with hamfisted compression.
Playing DVDs in their native format on a Mac shows a tiny little window in the middle of the screen. That's just not a realistic choice in 2008, certainly it won't be in 2010.
I am a huge fan of the show "Sunrise Earth" on HDNet. Every frame of any one of their "episodes" looks better than any frame of any DVD.
To make a competitive movie today, it just costs a lot of money, mostly because the standards of the movie-going population are higher than they have been.
Maybe not $100M, but at least $10M, which is not money that you are going to find under the seat cushions. Where is that money going to come from, if not from sales of movie tickets, DVDs, or paid-for downloads?
My prediction is that if the trajectory of movie copying/stealing/downloading/piracy/whatever follows that of the music business over the next few years (and it probably will), you will find that movies will be funded primarily through product placement -- and that product sponsorship will inevitably affect the content of the movie.
[disclaimer -- I am in the movie business, but just on the technical/creative side, not the financial side]
Lockheed, the Orion prime contractor, has expressed significant reservations about carrying the heavy airbags to the moon and back -- those 1500 lbs can better be used in other ways. On the other hand, there shouldn't be a problem with the weight on the more common missions to the space station and low-earth orbit, and the ability to reuse the capsule will be far greater if they put it down on land.
The speculation in this week's Aviation Week was that they would have bolt-on airbags for the earth-orbit flights, and would recover those missions on the land, and would recover at sea for the moon-return missions.
The reentry profile for the moon missions is really quite amazing. Recently Aviation Week had an article about it, describing how to get all the capsules to recover to the same spot on Earth. Do you recall way back in the Apollo days, they always described the narrow re-entry corridor? Too steep and you'd burn up, to shallow and you'd skip back into space forever? Well...
For Orion, they plan to use a skip back into space to bleed off some of the speed coming back from the moon, and to align the craft to re-enter at the correct place to land where they want, off the coast of California. It's an incredibly audacious plan, with tolerances that have to be measured in tenths of a degree of entry angle. Very cool.
the best L/D they are getting seems to be about 3:1, which is pretty amazing, really.
So, if they weigh 180 lbs, and the engine weights 30 lbs, then you'd need 70 lbs of thrust to maintain altitude. Not as much as a jetpack, but not a heck of a lot less, either. It would also make landing a heck of a lot harder.
Yes, you are completely correct, that I should have mentioned in my first reply that the HD DVD assn is more than just Microsoft. I believe that it's impossible at this point to know how much influence or money Microsoft has put up to pay these fairly extreme exclusivity fees. I guess the only evidence that I have is that Microsoft hasn't sued Michael Bay for libel yet.
Now, I have no idea whether similar deals are in place for Blu-ray. Sony, of course, is a major studio on its own, so it clearly has a vested interest in releasing exclusively on Blu-ray.
[disclaimer: I'm a bit of a Blu-ray fan, I like the higher capacities]
It is likely that the days of physical objects for movies (whether they be DVD, HD-DVD, or dilithium crystals) are numbered. Even the writers noted this in their negotiations for a new contract with the studios -- at the last minute they gave up their demand for 8 cents on each DVD sale (as opposed to the 4 cents they are getting now,) almost certainly because they see that fighting over 4 cents on a DVD is fighting the last war -- not putting them in place for the next one.
What kind of tools would the FBI, or any TLA, need to go after botnets?
Assuming that the 'nets were employed to do something blatant (and this is surely not universally the case) you would watch the DDOS or spam attack and see what IP addresses were doing that, then you'd want to go back and see what machines communicated with those machines in the past, and the machines that communicated with those machines. Mining that information should, at some point, lead you to the systems that originated and controlled the attack.
Of course, nobody has that information, right? Nobody can possibly save all the connections between all machines on the internet, certainly not for any length of time...[now is the time to get out your envelopes to do calculations -- I don't think it's by any means impossible to do this.]
If you can't save the whole net, then perhaps you can set probes -- watch internet nexi for IP addresses to go by, once you've identified a few hundred thousand bot-infested machines. Assuming that a bot herder uses machines more than once [another perhaps unsupportable assumption] you could do the same analysis, more slowly, by tracking with these probed addresses as they come across the wire.
I hate botnets, they will destroy the 'net, but I'm not sure that the solution is any better than the problem.
I agree that the Tesla is a particularly solid and opaque form of vapor, but it -- at this point -- is vapor nonetheless. The Volt even more so. These are not products you can actually get, they are in development and may be actual products some day.
I've ridden a Vectrix, they had a bunch of them for sale in Santa Monica, they have a showroom in San Francisco, they've made hundreds of them so far.
I don't think the Vectrix is perfect by any means, I'd far rather have a car, or a real motorcycle, but having an actual product for sale is an achievement worth celebrating.
Well, I'm actually comparing a real vehicle to vaporware.
Poland makes some of the finest sailplanes in the world, and from everything I've seen and read, the Vectrix appears to be a well-designed and built machine. If there was anybody else building actual street-legal reasonable-performance machines, I'd compare them too.
I mean, the article includes the Aptera -- which while it is beautiful, innovative, and extremely high-performance, that's because pure pipe-dreams can get at least 200 mpg. If you read the flash-benighted website, you can see that the people behind Aptera don't intend to actually build a car, they want to design it and have some unknown group build it.
AC Propulsion built exactly that kind of thing for the Toyota RAV4 electric car. They used a motorcycle engine and drove a generator. They had to mess with the computer a little bit to charge while driving.
My friend with an electric RAV4 wanted to buy it, but the AC Propulsion lawyers eventually decided that the liability was potentially infinite, so they withdrew their offer. Still, it would give you the benefit of a hybrid car for the long trips, while not making you carry the gas engine around when you didn't need it around town.
Check it out at their site. They were showing these vehicles, and giving rides, at the recent AltCar fair here in Santa Monica. The machines are built in Poland and assembled in Rhode Island, and give every appearance of being extremely high quality, rugged machines. They are so-called maxi-scooters, and are very substantial machines, about the size of a Harley and not a Vespa.
And, at $11,000 or so, are not ridiculously expensive. I am seriously considering buying one when they open their LA showroom, supposedly within the next month or so.
Yeah, not only would the charge at night, but one could also sell power back to the utility during the day if necessary, at higher prices than the buy it at night. Then the fleet of electric vehicles could really make a huge impact in leveling the load on the electic power system.
Fighter planes design is very compromised by the requirement that the pilot be able to see out the canopy. Typically, you find the cockpit cantaleivered way out in front of the center of gravity. In more recent planes, the requirements of stealth require dramatic measures to enable vision from the cockpit while still maintaining a low radar profile. I feel, too, that in any serious war you're going to find that the easiest way to bring down an airplane is to blind the pilot with lasers.
So, put the pilot right in the middle of the airplane in an opaque cockpit. Put a large number of wide-bandwidth sensors on the plane that would enable the pilot to see better than he could with his own eyes, certainly over a wider frequency and contrast range. You could armor this cockpit much more easily, it could be far more stealthy, and it could be far more structurally sound. You could have redundant sensors that could be deployed if the primary sensors are blinded.
Now, some might say that we should go all the way and put the pilots on the ground -- and they have a point. But, I think that the amount of bandwidth available inside the plane would be far greater than you could ever hope to transmit securely over the air.
Forkazoo said > I'm not in the process of working on a compositing demo reel so I can try to jump from straight IT to visual effects in the near future. I blame this career change in part on all your interesting and informative posts getting stuck in my head.
Sorry about that whole visual effects problem... Hope it works out.
I thought your description of the difference between the server chips and desktop chips was right on.
I'm going to be building a 8-core AMD machine in a few days, and I'll use the "server" barcelona chips if they don't actually release the "workstation" phenom chips on time, as I can't for the life of me see any disadvantage in the server chips. They're not even expensive!
There are cyclogyro like propellors used on a number of ships. The VSP is used most prominently these days on a couple of tugboats in Prince William Sound up in Alaska.
The Flash animation at the bottom of the page linked as "Open iVSP - Interactive VSP Program" is truly amazing, and gives you a great intuitive understanding of how these machines work.
For stealth, you'd never want to have edges perpendicular to the line of flight, there's just no way that they wouldn't have a strong radar return right back where you don't want it. This so-called mockup, while it may have some features that are stealth, is clearly not the final deal.
Given the specifications, it should be possible to do something that more "jumps" than "roves", but certainly gets around on the moon, and transmits data back to earth, for maybe a few dozen grams. The rocket that takes it from LEO to the moon might have to weigh 10 to 20 times that, but still we're talking about something on the order of a pound or two.
And something that light should be able to piggyback on almost any launch.
Three weeks ago, Skype was down for quite a while. Was it possible that it was not the benign "updating software" that they had previously reported? Perhaps it really was some kind of malicious attack.
An aquaintance of mine was hit by this today, he only ran Skype ever with his wife and daughter -- it seems hard to imagine how bad guys got ahold of his address, unless perhaps somebody downloaded the whole database.
Slashdot Mirror
It has been known for decades that there is a tremendous amount of oil shale and tar sands in this area. The challenge, and it is a significant challenge, is to extract the oil from these deposits in a way that isn't an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions. As is often the case, the wikipedia article is a great introduction to the topic.
Extracting oil from oil shale in the most obvious way involves heating it (probably with oil, but you do get more out than you put in, usually). So, you scoop it out of the massive open-pit mine, heat it, get the oil out, and then dispose of the remaining rock. Paradoxically, you end up changing the nature of the rock, so that it takes up more space than it originally did -- so even if you put all the tailings back into where it was mined, you'd end up with a new set of mountains. The net energy you end up with after processing the oil shale isn't a lot, and ridiculous amounts of water are necessary in the process (water the mountain west just doesn't have.)
It should be noted that the Canadians are talking about building nuclear plants in their tar sands regions to supply the energy necessary to liberate the oil from the tar sands, in sort of a nuclear->oil scheme.
According to the Wikipedia article, there have been oil shale processing programs in the past, some on a fairly large scale. They have fallen by the wayside as conventional oil has been so inexpensive.
I believe that the environmental impact of extracting oil from oil shale on the scale required to keep the world running on oil as it is today would have a devastating environmental impact. Probably not as bad as a nuclear war fought over the remaining conventional oil resources...probably.
The reason that this took so long to approve is that it is illegal on its face. The agreement that opened up the satellite spectrum for XM and Sirius specified unambiguously that no merger would be tolerated.
I agree that a year is a long time for the Bush so-called administration to make a ruling that contradicts a law. Usually that's done before morning tea.
I thought the most thought provoking movie of last year was Children of Men, about the collapse of society when there are no more children. It was one of those movies where a simple premise is carried to the logical extreme, and it's more than a little depressing.
But, coincidentally, the next day I saw a demonstration of ASIMO, Honda's self-contained little robot -- and it resonated so well with the movie that it's hard to believe in coincidence anymore.
The Japanese are already living in that Children of Men world, their birthrate is shockingly low, and they have almost no immigration, so the population is shrinking quickly, especially of young people.
So, what do the Japanese do? Rather than despair (as they did in England, in the movie) they just build a generation of robots...
Simplistic, I know.
At some point, I do expect that very large organizations will break the DRM on Blu-Ray, and they'll probably present it to DVD-Jon, much like they did with DVD's. Probably be a while, though.
I'm curious what the resolution of your display is -- you know, the one you're looking at right now. If it's more than 720x480, (and it is) then you can hardly say that resolution doesn't matter to people.
We were watching my Academy screener of Charlie Wilson's War on my wife's new iMac (just because it was a new toy) and I was amazed how bad image looked. There were compression artifacts all over the place, and the resolution of the image was such that everything looked blurry all the time [well, when it wasn't blocky]. Now, I am sure that a screener doesn't have the level of compression sweetening/optimization that a commercial DVD release has, but if we had been watching this on bluRay, it would have looked far, far better even with hamfisted compression.
Playing DVDs in their native format on a Mac shows a tiny little window in the middle of the screen. That's just not a realistic choice in 2008, certainly it won't be in 2010.
I am a huge fan of the show "Sunrise Earth" on HDNet. Every frame of any one of their "episodes" looks better than any frame of any DVD.
Thad Beier
Music...maybe. Movies, no.
To make a competitive movie today, it just costs a lot of money, mostly because the standards of the movie-going population are higher than they have been.
Maybe not $100M, but at least $10M, which is not money that you are going to find under the seat cushions. Where is that money going to come from, if not from sales of movie tickets, DVDs, or paid-for downloads?
My prediction is that if the trajectory of movie copying/stealing/downloading/piracy/whatever follows that of the music business over the next few years (and it probably will), you will find that movies will be funded primarily through product placement -- and that product sponsorship will inevitably affect the content of the movie.
[disclaimer -- I am in the movie business, but just on the technical/creative side, not the financial side]
Lockheed, the Orion prime contractor, has expressed significant reservations about carrying the heavy airbags to the moon and back -- those 1500 lbs can better be used in other ways. On the other hand, there shouldn't be a problem with the weight on the more common missions to the space station and low-earth orbit, and the ability to reuse the capsule will be far greater if they put it down on land.
The speculation in this week's Aviation Week was that they would have bolt-on airbags for the earth-orbit flights, and would recover those missions on the land, and would recover at sea for the moon-return missions.
The reentry profile for the moon missions is really quite amazing. Recently Aviation Week had an article about it, describing how to get all the capsules to recover to the same spot on Earth. Do you recall way back in the Apollo days, they always described the narrow re-entry corridor? Too steep and you'd burn up, to shallow and you'd skip back into space forever? Well...
For Orion, they plan to use a skip back into space to bleed off some of the speed coming back from the moon, and to align the craft to re-enter at the correct place to land where they want, off the coast of California. It's an incredibly audacious plan, with tolerances that have to be measured in tenths of a degree of entry angle. Very cool.
Thad
the best L/D they are getting seems to be about 3:1, which is pretty amazing, really.
So, if they weigh 180 lbs, and the engine weights 30 lbs, then you'd need 70 lbs of thrust to maintain altitude. Not as much as a jetpack, but not a heck of a lot less, either. It would also make landing a heck of a lot harder.
Yes, you are completely correct, that I should have mentioned in my first reply that the HD DVD assn is more than just Microsoft. I believe that it's impossible at this point to know how much influence or money Microsoft has put up to pay these fairly extreme exclusivity fees. I guess the only evidence that I have is that Microsoft hasn't sued Michael Bay for libel yet.
Thad
It is well-known that the HD-DVD association gave some $150 million to the studios to release movies exclusively on HD-DVD as opposed to Blu-ray. Several studios have taken them up on this generous offer, as the linked article indicates.
Now, I have no idea whether similar deals are in place for Blu-ray. Sony, of course, is a major studio on its own, so it clearly has a vested interest in releasing exclusively on Blu-ray.
[disclaimer: I'm a bit of a Blu-ray fan, I like the higher capacities]
It is likely that the days of physical objects for movies (whether they be DVD, HD-DVD, or dilithium crystals) are numbered. Even the writers noted this in their negotiations for a new contract with the studios -- at the last minute they gave up their demand for 8 cents on each DVD sale (as opposed to the 4 cents they are getting now,) almost certainly because they see that fighting over 4 cents on a DVD is fighting the last war -- not putting them in place for the next one.
Thad Beier
What kind of tools would the FBI, or any TLA, need to go after botnets?
Assuming that the 'nets were employed to do something blatant (and this is surely not universally the case) you would watch the DDOS or spam attack and see what IP addresses were doing that, then you'd want to go back and see what machines communicated with those machines in the past, and the machines that communicated with those machines. Mining that information should, at some point, lead you to the systems that originated and controlled the attack.
Of course, nobody has that information, right? Nobody can possibly save all the connections between all machines on the internet, certainly not for any length of time...[now is the time to get out your envelopes to do calculations -- I don't think it's by any means impossible to do this.]
If you can't save the whole net, then perhaps you can set probes -- watch internet nexi for IP addresses to go by, once you've identified a few hundred thousand bot-infested machines. Assuming that a bot herder uses machines more than once [another perhaps unsupportable assumption] you could do the same analysis, more slowly, by tracking with these probed addresses as they come across the wire.
I hate botnets, they will destroy the 'net, but I'm not sure that the solution is any better than the problem.
I agree that the Tesla is a particularly solid and opaque form of vapor, but it -- at this point -- is vapor nonetheless. The Volt even more so. These are not products you can actually get, they are in development and may be actual products some day.
I've ridden a Vectrix, they had a bunch of them for sale in Santa Monica, they have a showroom in San Francisco, they've made hundreds of them so far.
I don't think the Vectrix is perfect by any means, I'd far rather have a car, or a real motorcycle, but having an actual product for sale is an achievement worth celebrating.
Thad
Well, I'm actually comparing a real vehicle to vaporware.
Poland makes some of the finest sailplanes in the world, and from everything I've seen and read, the Vectrix appears to be a well-designed and built machine. If there was anybody else building actual street-legal reasonable-performance machines, I'd compare them too.
I mean, the article includes the Aptera -- which while it is beautiful, innovative, and extremely high-performance, that's because pure pipe-dreams can get at least 200 mpg. If you read the flash-benighted website, you can see that the people behind Aptera don't intend to actually build a car, they want to design it and have some unknown group build it.
AC Propulsion built exactly that kind of thing for the Toyota RAV4 electric car. They used a motorcycle engine and drove a generator. They had to mess with the computer a little bit to charge while driving.
My friend with an electric RAV4 wanted to buy it, but the AC Propulsion lawyers eventually decided that the liability was potentially infinite, so they withdrew their offer. Still, it would give you the benefit of a hybrid car for the long trips, while not making you carry the gas engine around when you didn't need it around town.
Thad
so sorry! the link was wrong. Its here. I'll check the links in the preview page next time!
Check it out at their site. They were showing these vehicles, and giving rides, at the recent AltCar fair here in Santa Monica. The machines are built in Poland and assembled in Rhode Island, and give every appearance of being extremely high quality, rugged machines. They are so-called maxi-scooters, and are very substantial machines, about the size of a Harley and not a Vespa.
And, at $11,000 or so, are not ridiculously expensive. I am seriously considering buying one when they open their LA showroom, supposedly within the next month or so.
Yeah, not only would the charge at night, but one could also sell power back to the utility during the day if necessary, at higher prices than the buy it at night. Then the fleet of electric vehicles could really make a huge impact in leveling the load on the electic power system.
Or maybe a quarter-measure.
Fighter planes design is very compromised by the requirement that the pilot be able to see out the canopy. Typically, you find the cockpit cantaleivered way out in front of the center of gravity. In more recent planes, the requirements of stealth require dramatic measures to enable vision from the cockpit while still maintaining a low radar profile. I feel, too, that in any serious war you're going to find that the easiest way to bring down an airplane is to blind the pilot with lasers.
So, put the pilot right in the middle of the airplane in an opaque cockpit. Put a large number of wide-bandwidth sensors on the plane that would enable the pilot to see better than he could with his own eyes, certainly over a wider frequency and contrast range. You could armor this cockpit much more easily, it could be far more stealthy, and it could be far more structurally sound. You could have redundant sensors that could be deployed if the primary sensors are blinded.
Now, some might say that we should go all the way and put the pilots on the ground -- and they have a point. But, I think that the amount of bandwidth available inside the plane would be far greater than you could ever hope to transmit securely over the air.
Thad Beier
Forkazoo said > I'm not in the process of working on a compositing demo reel so I can try to jump from straight IT to visual effects in the near future. I blame this career change in part on all your interesting and informative posts getting stuck in my head.
Sorry about that whole visual effects problem... Hope it works out.
I thought your description of the difference between the server chips and desktop chips was right on.
I'm going to be building a 8-core AMD machine in a few days, and I'll use the "server" barcelona chips if they don't actually release the "workstation" phenom chips on time, as I can't for the life of me see any disadvantage in the server chips. They're not even expensive!
Thad
I've seen this before, I've never understood it. What does it mean?
Thad
There are cyclogyro like propellors used on a number of ships. The VSP is used most prominently these days on a couple of tugboats in Prince William Sound up in Alaska.
The Flash animation at the bottom of the page linked as "Open iVSP - Interactive VSP Program" is truly amazing, and gives you a great intuitive understanding of how these machines work.
Thad Beier
For stealth, you'd never want to have edges perpendicular to the line of flight, there's just no way that they wouldn't have a strong radar return right back where you don't want it. This so-called mockup, while it may have some features that are stealth, is clearly not the final deal.
Thad
Given the specifications, it should be possible to do something that more "jumps" than "roves", but certainly gets around on the moon, and transmits data back to earth, for maybe a few dozen grams. The rocket that takes it from LEO to the moon might have to weigh 10 to 20 times that, but still we're talking about something on the order of a pound or two.
And something that light should be able to piggyback on almost any launch.
Thad
Three weeks ago, Skype was down for quite a while. Was it possible that it was not the benign "updating software" that they had previously reported? Perhaps it really was some kind of malicious attack.
An aquaintance of mine was hit by this today, he only ran Skype ever with his wife and daughter -- it seems hard to imagine how bad guys got ahold of his address, unless perhaps somebody downloaded the whole database.
Thad Beier
I hadn't read the article -- I remember it when it was done, but I had thought it was just recently.
This was done by AC Propulsion two years ago.
Thad