I wonder if you could do triple buffering but only render 2 frames and then have the gpu create a 2d composite frame of the 2 in the frame buffer to sandwich inbetween the frames. You would probably be able to double your perceived framerate while not increasing load too much. Would essentially get the benefits of motion blur.

You can merely just retrain the dump truck operators to excavator operators, double your dump trucks, and double your throughput. No jobs lost, double throughput.

I wonder how long it will take the pro cycling communities to start testing for hemerythrin doping. If it doesn't thicken the blood too much, it might actually be a nice performance enhancing treatment for Athletes for training.

Well, the topping off of electrolyte and potash is every 13 years. This might be able to be be automated. But given careful stewardship i wouldn't be surprised if a large lead acid battery using shallow depth of discharge could be cost effective in the short term. However, all things considered, when you're talking about the span of 50+ years I think the NiFE batteries would win out, if anything due to disposal costs, because lead acid batteries would need to be carefully recycled. With NiFE batteries there are no seriously toxic constituent chemicals, so you could probably just leave them buried there if they die, or service them and press them back into another 50+ years of service. But since there are some original Edison cells kicking around now from around 80 years ago, I'd imagine they'd outlast their maintainers.

However, in the long run it may just be more prudent to have one backup diesel generator running the street than a row of expensive batteries. If you've got 500 street lights to power, a 50kw natural gas generator could be deployed for about $10,000. Assuming your battery backup + solar cell system only costs $250 a light, the natural gas generator is still 1/12th the cost. It could run on a separate circuit, to avoid being hazardous to repair crews on the power grid, and run until morning where it could be shut off and attended to. Given that it would only need to run maybe once or twice a year, you'd have a looong service life, and it could be plumbed directly into municipal gas lines to eliminate the issue of stagnating fuel.

That probably depends largely on whether or not you consider the environmental costs of all of the equipment used to decommission the plant that burns it. Decommissioning a plant isn't free, and often times low level and medium level radioactive wastes have to be transported long distances to their final disposal site. The enviornemntal cost of extracting all of the petroleum (and potentially coal) used in the mining, transport, AND disposal of your fuel and contaminated materials has to be considered. The problem with nuclear is you have a long post-retirement supply chain to also consider.

What might be an entertaining alternative to mining uranium from the earth, is mining uranium from fly ash. You could probably get as much energy from the uranium mined from the fly ash, as you did from the coal itself.

Will it drive around to find an empty parking lot? How will it know where a parking lot with a vacancy is? What if it runs out of gas looking for parking? It sounds like specially designed autonomous car parking infrastructure might be required, atleast the cost to you would only be parking + gas and could probably be located in a cheaper area of town farther away, as the time spent commuting to and from the parking is free.

Not a retort to you, but I wonder if self driving vehicles will be able to go get themselves refueled autonomously too. That would be hilarious, when a car with no driver pulls into your gas station and declares over loud speaker "I require Alcohol!" (For comic effect, if ethanol powered)

You could largely eliminate battery maintenence by adding nickle iron batteries which effictevely have infinite endurance. There are some nickle iron batteries which still function 100 years later.

You could always just make the self driving part of the system deactivate itself unless it has received all scheduled checkups and maintenance, putting the liability with the mechanic.

I don't think it'll necessarily put cabbies out of work, because unless i'm mistaken the primary reason people would take a taxi other than drinking, is either they lack a car (by choice, or a family with only one car, where the wife or husband needs to get somewhere while the car is out), or there is no parking at the destination. It would seem that autonomous cars wouldn't benefit people in either of these cases.

The tech to do so is already out there. SASOL which is a south african petroleum products company, has gas to liquids plants that can produce gasoline and diesel products from methane. All you need to do is feed the methane from landfills and sewage plants to these gas to liquids plants, and you have gasoline equivalents from human excrement. The key to this technology is finding a cheap plentiful source of gas and high gasoline and diesel prices.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/business/energy-environment/sasol-plans-first-gas-to-liquids-plant-in-us.html

I believe the intention wasn't that africans wouldnt repair the machine. rather that you wouldnt need to rebuild the computerised combustion control system which is probably environmentally sealed. which seems accurate. Am I wrong on that point?

wood tar can be captured and gasified if the non gasified portion is caoturedb in a filter medium made of fuel and cycled back into the gasifier. part of your fuel then becomes the filter.

you would have to sort your trash into foodscraps and plastics as burning plastics could be harmful without catalytic converts and percipitators. and the cost of the control systems wouldnt scale. what would make more sense is the use of one of these units in a neighborhood where people drop off sorted foodscraps into a solar dryer to bleed off energy robbing moisture and are paid an energy credit. sort of like can deposit machines. this would amoratize the cost of the unit over the neighborhood and allow the economics of scale to still be realized. I'm sure a neighborhood could generate the 2000 pounds of foodscraps a day needed to keep this machine running.

Not quite. the innovations are in the control systems. that is what they have patents for. also standard gasification tech tends to convert the biomass to ash. this machine converts it into charcoal which both creates fertilizer and locks a portion of the carbon away mostly creating hydrogen and co. which are combusted into water and co2. the control over the combustion process that allows charcoal production over ash production is imporant as gasifier ash shakedown to make room for more fuel is the biggest problem keeping gasifiers from being used in diy stationary power generation. This tech they have developed dodges this problem.