By selecting different seeds you can create millions or billions of sequences with a tiny piece of code, even if you include the random number generator.
...and none of those sequences are actually random.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
Yeah, those are effectively the same. But a $500K salary with a potential $5M bonus for exceptional success, or a potential $5M penalty for failure is different. A major screw-up means you owe $4.5M.
...by about 1.3% due to the recession. Over the last 3 years, they increased on average 2.2% per year, which is a bit less than both the average in recent times and the IPCC prediction. So all this really says is that in terms of how much stuff we burn, the world has mostly "recovered" from the recession. 6% is a big increase for one year, but it's an increase from a point below the trend. And climate trends are meant to be measured over decades, not years.
Of course any increase is large compared to what should be happening...
You're right though, fossil fuels (for example) are an actual energy source when compared to typical current photovoltaic solar panels which use more energy to produce than they'll generate over their lifetime (and that's before the conversion losses). The typical solar panel you see on a rooftop is really more a coal burning panel.
Now you're making things up. According to NREL, back in 2004, the time needed to generate the amount of energy used to produce solar panels was about 3-5 years or less, depending on the type of panels ( http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf ). The financial payback time (time to recover the dollar cost through savings on your bill) without subsidies is longer because you're paying for more than manufacturing energy, and because the competing technologies are both subsidized and are also larger, more established industries.
According to Murphy & Hall ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1749-6632.2009.05282.x ), the EROI for PV is 6.8. That means it takes one unit of energy from somewhere else to result in 6.8 units of electricity from the panels. Compare that to natural gas, which has an EROI of 10, which means it takes 1 unit of energy from other sources to get enough gas out of the ground to burn for 10 units of energy. This comparison doesn't take into account that the "energy returned" is in the form of a finite resource you have to burn in the case of gas. In other words, with 1 unit of natural gas, you can generate 6.8 units of electricity by using it to build PV, or you can get around 0.4 units of electricity by burning it in a turbine, after deducting the amount needed to get another unit of gas out of the ground. For comparison, the same source says that nuclear power has an EROI of 5-15, and coal is higher at 80. Again, this doesn't take into account that you're using the fuel itself.
Nothing against research into solar energy, just when you find people deploying with current technology onto their rooftops (or window panes) and announcing their "helping the environment" or that they have a "carbon neutral" energy source or that what they're doing makes economic sense is laughable.
In terms of environmental impact, grid-tied solar power makes sense with today's technology (or 10-year old technology for that matter). In terms of dollar cost for putting it on residential roofs, maybe you don't save money without the subsidies. For the window film, who knows.
Solar panels are not carbon-neutral, but they generate about 90% less greenhouse gas emissions than the conventional plants they displace, which are primarily coal- and gas-fired.
Assuming no subsidies anywhere along the production/sales/installation process making the solar panels feel artificially cheap.
And what about the subsidies that make conventional electricity feel artificially cheap?
Nor counting losses converting power to storage and back again to match energy demand that doesn't coincide with peak production.
Solar production tends to match up pretty well with peak demand. Better than, say, regular power plants.
...or just use the usual tactic, ratchet up the subsidies a little more to further hide the underlying inefficiencies.
You're right, it's only fair to subsidize energy from fossil fuel sources. You know, real energy.
It's different because you can still change your password thus restricting access again, and also everyone else's passwords to the same system are still effective. You have a problem if everything shares the same password and it can't be changed- that is security by obscurity. Or if you have a system where everyone's password is their birthday, and then it leaks that this is your obscurity system.
If a password is used directly to grant access to you system, then yes, that is security by obscurity and is bad security. In a more sufficient security system, you might use a password as a shared secret to authenticate someone's identity, and use that identity to grant access. This is a completely different security architecture, and is better. It's different because authentication and authorization are treated as separate issues.
Certainly obscurity can add to security, but you really want a security system that is sufficient without it.
This is completely different from grid-connected solar.
Most likely this will not be deployed until the utility implements real-time pricing (or at least hourly pricing, rather than the monthly pricing we have now), where electricity prices vary during the day based on the exact system conditions. They will have to pay you at the price when they draw power from your battery (or more likely, you will just use the power in your house, and pay that much less), and you will pay a lower rate to charge at night (or whenever it is cheapest if the electricity supply changes drastically). This is a net savings for you, even if there is a small loss of electricity in the process. In this case, the utility wouldn't even have to ask- your charging system would probably do it automatically just to save you money through arbitrage in the electricity market.
If there is no instantaneous pricing, they will have to pay you a fee just for being available, plus pay you back for whatever power they draw. This fee would exceed any loss. In this case, the utility would have to control your battery because you would have no incentive to discharge otherwise. This is similar to load-shedding agreements utilities have now with large customers.
How do you maintain availability of power for the car owner?
Yes, sure, you might be able to harness some from, say, a haulage company at the end of the day when they shut up shop but in general you can't just steal charge from people's electric cars (because the first new-father in the middle of the night that can't drive his wife to hospital is going to create a ton of bad press for you).
There are two obvious ways you can maintain availability of power for the car owner.
1) Let the owner say the next time they need to have a full or partial charge- when they leave for work, when they finish work, when they get back from vacation in 2 weeks, etc. You want to do this anyway so the system can decide the best time to charge the battery. And a "don't discharge" option would be very simple if you expect emergency trips. Most people don't.
2) Make sure they have enough power to get to the nearest battery swapping station if they happen to need to drive somewhere right after the battery is discharged.
Nope. Either they will be paying you far more than your net loss in charge for the availability, or they will be paying you at far higher retail prices when they buy the power from you than when you are charging the battery. Either way, you're going to make money on it. And the utility will save money by keeping less reserves available, and avoiding use of more expensive generators.
That makes sense for dividends, which are the shareholders' portion of the corporation's profits, but not for capital gains. The corporation did not pay a tax on the increase of its share price, and property owners did not already pay a tax on the increase in their property value prior to selling that property and paying capital gains tax.
If a sole proprietor is making over $1M in profit per year, and not re-investing it into growing the business, then that business can afford to pay a higher tax rate on the amount of profits over $1M.
If a partnership or multi-member LLC is making more than $1M per year in profit, then those profits are divided between the partners/members before the tax rate is applied, so we're talking about profits over $N million where N is the number of partners/members (assuming equal ownership).
If they used some of that profit to hire employees, then that would be a business expense and they wouldn't pay the taxes on it. So this really isn't a burden on small businesses.
However, as heat can be converted to other forms of energy, there are ways to dissipate and/or use the surplus heat. Also, higher efficiency methods of converting heat into electricity or other useful forms of energy will delay the saturation point. So, he's correct in theory, and his details are probably not an accurate prediction.
Nope, pretty much anything reasonable you do with energy turns into heat, and eventually gets radiated to space at an equilibrium temperature, which rises according to the heat flux. He already assumed 100% conversion efficiency (which is not possibly thermodynamically), but when you use that electricity to do something, you get heat as a byproduct. Some waste energy is light that can be radiated to space directly, but if you can use light with 100% efficiency for other purposes, you'd do that and it would eventually become heat at the surface.
So we're stuck without exponential growth in energy use, or making that energy use take place somewhere outside of the Earth (which is probably what will happen), or finding some way to dissipate unusable energy (currently waste heat from conversion AND from end-use) to space much faster than longwave radiation, or finding ways to increase value without exponential increases in energy use.
boy... you are going to sprain something reaching so hard.
Not reaching at all. Just trying to illustrate that the low gas light and tank full nozzle switch are not accurate measurement devices. My main point, though, is that the fuels being compared are not sufficient to isolate the effect of ethanol on mileage.
a) My car said "full". My gallons in were roughly the same (about 12.25 gallons) as every other time they low gasoline light came in.
I have never had refills that consistent. I guess I don't always refill exactly when the light comes on. Of course, I don't drive often these days, and haven't for 10 years. I find that level of consistency, refilling to +/- 0.05 gallons quite surprising. Anyway, you never specified that you recorded the fill amount at the E0 pump, only the next refill after. Actually, you never specified whether you took the measurement before or after using a given fuel. Unless you did both and calculated the exact mileage for both adjacent tanks (rather than just some random E10 tank), it's hard to say. The error in "around" 12.25 and "around" 265 or 300 miles can be significant. 261 miles / 12.4 gallons is 21 mpg, 270 miles / 12.1 gallons is 22.5 mpg, and 295 miles / 12.5 gallons is 23.6 mpg. It is even more so if around 265 miles means between 250 and 275, and around 12.25 gallons means between 12 and 12.5.
Not 35 miles difference. You get to the point in mileage where your mileage light "always" comes on and you notice it's not coming on...
IT'S NOT A 35 MILE DIFFERENCE. There is less energy density in ethanol than gas. It's like a 20 mile difference. That's about 7%. Your methods are not nearly good enough to measure a 7% change. Not even close. Especially in 3 trials.
Or using your expectation of up to a 10% reduction, it's a 5 mile difference, which is hardly significant. 10% less than 300 miles is 270 miles.
Yes, my expectation from Keith Knoll's report is that I'd lose 3.5% mileage per tank using 10% ethanol. Reality is not matching that expectation. Hell, my worst case expectation would be that I would lose 10% with ethanol but my observed loss is over 10%. Having ethanol in the tank provides worse gas mileage for my honda element than the mystery substance I'm going to presume was 100% gasoline (since super and premium do not raise my mileage).
100% gasoline doesn't really mean something specific. It just means it's some mix of liquid hydrocarbons with some limits of how much of certain ones are in it. It is only different from other "non-100%" gasoline in that it presumably wouldn't contain additives beyond what comes out of the refining process. However, they might just mean ethanol-free, and who knows what it would contain. Or maybe the E10 has other components such that it is not 90% regular gasoline. Maybe it has less alkenes because ethanol makes them evaporate; alkenes have higher energy content than the rest of the fuel. Who knows. Since they don't advertise the chemical makeup of the fuels, it is impossible to know unless you mix and chemically test the fuels yourself.
You can only expect the 3.5% reduction if the E10 mix is actually 90% the-same-gasoline-as-E0 and 10% ethanol. All we know is that it is at most 10% ethanol, and 90% other stuff. Hell, it could be 85% gasoline, and 5% stuff to keep the ethanol mixed. And that 3.5% is specific to the fuels they were using; the actual amount depends on the energy density of the particular batch of gasoline, and could be higher or lower.
You should not expect super or premium to raise your mileage, unless your car requires them. It generally just means higher octane, which means less energy than regular. They generally contain more additives (like ethanol or MTBE) to raise the octane rating, and those additives are probably not actually octane.
And I calculated the mileage at fillup after each those 300 mile tanks. I knew exactly how far I had driven-- and i knew exactly how many gallons I had just put in the car.
But you still didn't know the relationship between the fill level that time and the previous time. All you know is that the pump clicked off, but they were different pumps. Maybe the shutoff mechanism is higher on the nozzle on the E0 pumps, and you actually had an extra gallon or so those times.
The mileage was about 24.5 mpg for a mixture of city and highway driving for each 300 mile tank. That's close to the theoretical top of the mileage range for pure highway driving.
I have not calculated after fillup for every 265 mile tank but the ones I did come in just below 22 mpg.
So, one would expect that if you mix 10% ethanol with the fuel in the 300-mile tank, if all else is equal, you'd get about 23.5 mpg. So your mileage is 1.5 mpg lower than expectation, only a 6% difference, which is in the range of the effect of getting a car wash.
If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.
