I have no illusions about this. There is nothing wrong with Youtube getting monetary reimbursment with advertisments on videos that dont have a legal mandate to not be for profit to exist. Kittens? Put all the ads you want.

Drones? Now you are getting into sticky waters.

Youtube can fingerprint if there is a tiny blurp of copyrighted music in the background. Surely they can find a way to fingerprint drone footage, and black list their ad injector appropriately.

simply posting the video to youtube does not in and of itself, generate income.

Allowing youtube to monetize the video, and their subsequent royalty payment, DOES generate income.

The legal grey territory, would be with Youtube making money from videos (used to bring in users, who then view youtube only ads) of people's drone use. Youtube would then be generating income from private drine use, making it commercial, but not to the drone operators.

The proper remedy here, is to make youtube and other video sites not be able to collect income from uploaded videos of drone flight.

Not to penalize the drone operators, who simply want to share videos of drone flight with other enthusiasts, without a profit motive.

Uhm-- YES. I know this. The energy comes from sunlight. I never suggested otherwise. That's why I stated that the power plant is at the equator, where insolation is greatest, and thus, harvestable energy is greatest.

Because there is significantly less energy at the poles, the atmosphere freezes into ice. The amount of energy needed to reconstitute this gas from the ice is significantly less than the energy needed to boil water, meaning you dont need the same intense energy sources.

Most of the energy in a steam powered plant goes right out the flu. This is because water has a very high specific heat. CO2 has a substantially lower specific heat. In addition, water has a very strong hydrogen bond that keeps the molecules close toghether that must be overcome to cause evaporation. This is not the case with CO2 ice. Significantly less of the energy would go out the flu in a well designed dry ice powered plant.

The ACTUAL QUESTION I asked, was if one could harvest enough thermal energy at the equator, to supply the power plant with more raw material to react with that thermal energy, to get useful mechanical energy.

Instead, you gave me a lesson in 101 physics that I already knew.

I am more intetested in leveraging the "Free" compression you get from the dry ice snow; Add just a little heat, and it expands voluminously. While still in ice form, significantly large quantities of CO2 can be harvested for very little energy, and then transported without much more than a pressure-friendly cargo container. The killer in gas compression based power systems is that you have to use energy to compress the gas. Not so in this case. The phase change does the compression for you. You just need to expend energy to pick it up and ship it. The energy used to convert it into gas, and thus get useful mechanical energy out of useless thermal energy, comes from sunlight.

The combined costs of harvesting and transporting the reactant are what need to be considered when evaluaiting efficiency curves for energy production.

Here, let me make this more appealing to you:

You can use a solar concentrator to heat up a tube filled with salt, which is attached to the hot side of a stirling engine. Mars' atmosphere is too thin to efficiently radiate heat away, so this alone is not going to be very efficient as a power generator. However, if you put the radiator side of the stirling engine into the dry ice sublimation chamber, and embed it into the dry ice (say, by dumping it on top), then there will be enough medium on the radiator side to have efficient thermal elimination. Suddenly the stirling engine works VERY efficiently.

At the same time, the dry ice is now getting the energy it needs to evaporate, and expand. You pipe it out through a turbine system, and get the resulting mechanical energy from the phase change. That mechanical energy can drive even more electical generators.

At no place in this process is energy magically appearing. It comes from sunlight, which is concentrated with mirrors.

The ACTUAL question-- was can you harvest ENOUGH energy, to overcome the logistical costs of harvesting the dry ice needed for the process to work, with sufficient excess to power a colony.

Mirrors are made out of aluminum metal, deposited onto glass, usually.

Silver mirror is made of silver metal deposited onto glass.

Both require exotic materials, as far as martian soil mineral is concerned. Polished steel plates have sufficient reflectivity, and could be manufactured cheaply on mars. They are also more resistant to being broken or blown around by martian wind/dust/sand storms.

Still have the costs of producing the solar panels, VS the costs of building turbines. Turbines are made of metal (Or even plastic, at these temps!), VS solar panels, which are made of refined, heavily processed rare earth metals and silicon.

Solar panels are very expensive, energy wise, to produce. They are also more fragile, and prone to breaking. The mirrors here could just be polished metal plates, and be very durable against sand/dust storms.

At worst, it would thicken the martian atmosphere.

In practice, it wouldnt do anything at all. Mars is already at thermal equalibrium, and the only energy source is sunlight. The ice is frozen atmospheric gas! The lower sunlight delivered to the poles causes it to freeze out there. This is a renewable energy resource.

A miror is easier to produce than a solar pannel.

For purposes of thermal expansion based turbines, a mirror is quite sufficient as an energy source improvement.

For purposes of solar energy to electricity, a mirror is not what you need-- you need much more energy expensive materials and processing.

The former is more sustainable in place than the latter.

Indeed, but as a "mature" energy infrastructure, it has many benefits that straight solar or nuclear simply dont have.

1) It's pretty damned low tech, meaning you need need the same amount of energy hungry industrial infrastructure to maintain or build it out.

2) Approx 40% of polar ice on mars is actually water ice, according to spectroscopic analysis from orbit. This means that the turbine generation process would leave behind pretty damned pure water ice in the turbine pressure generators. Useful for a colony.

3) The temperature difference between the polar region and the equitorial region is astounding. In the summer months, mars equator can reach up to 70F in the daytime. Conversely, the pole is -200F. There is also powerful day/night temperature variation at the equator that a heat-engine could capitalize on. Even in the summer, when the daylight surface temp can possibly reach 70F, the night time temperature drops to -150F rapidly. This means that simple mirror concentrators and molten salt tech could be used to drive INSANELY efficient stirling power generators at night.

less practical. Insolation is a tiny fraction of that of the earth. Conversely, the amount of expansion (and pressure) that heated dry ice turning into gas produces is very high, enabling high efficiency power generation.

The question is if the costs of harvesting and transporting the dry ice are sufficiently low to enable this as a viable solution.

"High Temperature" superconductors exist now that would be superconductive at the polar latitudes.

"High temperature superconductor" research has yeilded superconductive materials that would operate in those ranges as well.

Mars being bitching cold might actually be BENEFICIAL.

I suggested using the different ambient temperature at the middle latitudes, where dry ice is naturally unstable (which is why there isnt lots of dry ice there) to drive the turbines, which produce electricity.

The electricity is sent to the polar region to drive electric motors to extract dry ice, and to ship it via electric rail to the power plants.

I was wondering what the econmy of that kind of arrangement would be.

I wonder over the costs of energy transport..

Let's say we have an industry on Mars, that is powered by dry ice evaporation turbines.

In the middle latitudes, dry ice is unstable on the marian surface. It sublimes, and turns into gas. This means that ambient temperatures there are able to turn the ice into useful energy.

Now, if these power plants shipped energy, in the form of electricity on power lines (burried, probably) to the polar region where dry ice can be efficiently mined, what is the feasibility in terms of energy cost for extraction and transport?

depending on his locality, that might be illegal speech.

(and yes, there IS such a thing in the US too.)

Better story:

dont tell them that you are onto them. Instead, monitor the honeypot and see what they install later, what they use the compromised VM for, and build an actual case against them.

It's one thing to say "these people are taking over computers". it's entirely another to clearly show what they do with the computer afterwards, and build a profile that can be used to detect compromised systems based on activity patterns, then publish.

a friend of mine and his folks have been recently plagued by this.

He actually did say he ran linux (he doesnt, but that's beside the point) and just hung up. They called again later though.

He lives next door to his folks (not the basement. next door) so the next time his folks answered. His folks dont know anything about computers but can recognize a scam when they hear one. His mom just blurted into the phone "I dont even use a computer!" and hung up.

they got quite a few more calls in the week after.

some part of me wants to see what these guys do when their remote access software trick gets pulled on a throwaway linux VM.

"Yeah, I have windows. I have one open right now! Go to your remote access client site? OK!"

"what OS is this? Hold on, i'll check with the console (uname -a) It says it is GNU Linux 3.10.11, but I can totally run windows software (fires up wine regedit) see?"

LOL, it would be so fun to troll.

This is both NOT the first time, and as stated, NOT purely microprocessor tech.

For the real McCoy, look back to the 70s, with the Altair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...