So you're just a little rock drifting in space, perhaps you have a bit of slow elliptical gig with the Sun or some heavy vector from rude encounters with other Astrobumps and potato-lumps. But these vectors have mostly cancelled each other and you're copa-centric with the solar system, just chillin'.

Every now and then you wiggle-woggle as a giant vacuum cleaner that is Jupiter or Mars passes, which leaves you a bit perturbed but its song is so enticing. You do a little dusting now and then to spruce up the neighborhood and your day/night sides fill you with just enough electrostatic tickle and a tug of graviton tockle to gather little bits. Just a big lovable clump, like a giant iron-filled molar enjoying the solitude of space grooving on the universe.

But the groove is changing. You are humming with beacons and bitcoms and bacon commercials, ringing with SATCOM beams and HF RTTY streams, and music and bouncy over-the-horizon PAVE PAWS and wave claws of a modern age. And music, voices! Millions of voices. Single sideband gwobbles and gwerps, AM throbby-bumps and gurgle-beats, quavering FM and chaotic barking bursty bits channelized and encrypted for your protection. Lissen up party people, meat is in the house. And it's talking.

And IT is the source, that THING, a rolling blue ball with puffy white squiggles tumbling towards you. Clearly this is a bad place to be because it is headed in your direction and its inhabitants are too stupid or inconsiderate to move it aside.

Its mass tugs at you as a thin layer of atmosphere sears blazing heat through your little rocky self. It becomes thicker and you dissolve in an explosion of heat and light. Your elementary particles will add mass to this malevolent menace as a few creatures point their stubby fingers at your death and say, "Ooooooooooooooo!".

Then they will get on their cell phones and blabble over the radio accusing YOU of attacking THEM.

Stoopid PEOPLE on their BIG BLUE DEATH MARBLE.

Glad to hear it! If we love our children, there really is nothing quite as important.

For every 1000kg of U-233 bred with thorium in a LFTR, ~15kg of Pu-238 is produced. Here is Kirk Sorensen discussing the waste stream of a two-fluid LFTR and a series of slides.

So every 1 gigawatt LFTR reactor would produce the necessary amount of Pu-238 to fuel ~3 Voyager-class (4.5kg) space probes, every year. Beyond Voyager's simple purpose and its 400 watt electronics package, think of what our space probes could do with more energy. Locomotion, drilling, small maneuvering adjustments or a steady acceleration using ion thrusters.

For more, see my letters on energy:
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
and the the collected rants of the Trix Rabbit of Thorium.

[FIXED LINK]
Which is one reason we need LFTR to produce Pu238, among countless other reasons.

This is not really about the use of Lion batteries. So Facebook is going to change out lead-acid systems that give ~20-30 minutes (MY guess, TFA does not say) to one that gives only 90 seconds for generator start.

That 'dragster' remark is cute but it falls flat with me. There is a whole class of real-world fail opened up here. 90 seconds is scarcely enough time for humans to respond, let alone diagnose and solve a problem. As a critical infrastructure IT admin I'd never want to commit to this. It is an example of one of those 'Faustian bargain' compromises over time that are making modern technology fragile (in a sneaky way that is no one's fault) , where the UPS maintainers are 'absolved' of responsibility for the Big Fail when it happens. Blame is shifted onto the generator maintainers --- who might have been able to solve the problem had they had more than 90 seconds in which to do so.

If you design a commercial class server farm without a physical fire/vapor room/wall between batteries and servers and a real DC bus you have already lost the battle, abandoned Bell Standard Practice. I remember when telling someone they were violating BSP was the worst thing you could say. Now it's like, "Bell Standard Practice? What's that? Look it's cool, we just unpack this stuff from the box, snap it together and it works!" Until it doesn't. Or a single battery catches fire and you have to clear the room and don moon suits.

There are other issues too. It's an environmental loser. If you're championing Lion over lead acid for vehicles you're a winner because there is no other way. But this move to install Lion over lead-acid in places where the additional sqft is available is silly. Lead acid maintenance and recycling is a no-brainer. But Lion? Taks a look at this article on state-of-the-art battery hazards and recycling. "it takes 6 to 10 times more energy to reclaim metals from some recycled batteries than it does to produce it through other means, including mining" and thus only a few companies are doing it, probably living on subsidy. The Lion boom is driven by China's rare earth industry, and you can be sure they'll turn the screws when assimilation is complete. There are even some who claim that due to economic reality, many Lion batteries, even the heavy duty ones, are dangerously destined for the landfill, a place lead-acid batteries do not go because their recycle process is mature and chemically simple.

So from here it really looks like Facebook is trying to eliminate a few blue-collar battery maintainer positions in their Data Center, at great cost, to their ultimate peril. Never mind that extra time to keep servers running while you fix faults, just chuck the old stuff, install these things, and... relax. The Big Fail will be no one's fault because the accountants have signed off on it.

Story of the modern world.

This dialogue is straight from the United States' temperance movement that led up to a Constitutional amendment and a decade of peril, a black market economy comparable in size to the real one, and the Federally-subsidized ascension of organized crime. Some people think they are being proactive, easing their view of a world 'sin tax' as a way to stay global catastrophe. They are being hoodwinked into believing that unless they act soon by accepting some prepared package of countermeasures, some point of no return would be reached. This is being done in the traditional way, fronting claims that the (terrorists, evil corporations, fossil fuel interests) have "almost won".

But the real tripe, such as Perl spouts, misrepresents and marginalizes the personal motives among the poor and middle class folks who've managed to (just) stay afloat, and use their resources to acquire certain contested 'things'. Complicated and realistic motives, the whole spectrum of survival through pursuit of happiness (aka sanity) are reduced to some simple addict-reward-temperance model that suits the purpose. Then add a dash of global imperative and we have things like

Abolish slavery, then alcohol? This lady says this in 1897, a time when neither women nor former slaves in the US were permitted to vote. Priorities problem, much? Now cheap gas and pure-CO2 is the alcohol of the 21st century, and the same style of temperance movement is forming. It is hip and trendy. No one will confront you if you publicly picket for temperance in these matters.

Perhaps they should. Because where the rubber hits the road, such temperance movements are ultimately damaging to society. Phelps may have believed that the abolition of alcohol would magically 'elevate the human condition' to such a degree that other pressing issues of her day would be somehow solved, that it was drunkenness that was denying women the vote, or any other issue of the day to which she could have refocused her effort.

I'll say it flat out. Real people tend to have rational and understandable reasons for doing what they do. They will choose a vehicle that can hold a family and haul a load with a measure of real metal to stabilize it and protect them. They will choose a $30k truck or minivan over a $50k Tesla because... they have a choice.

Real innovation arises by pursuing real solutions to problems that result in the right choice being the cheapest one, not the one least encumbered by taxation. The future does not depend on the 'price of gas'. Temperance movements are ultimately about removing choice from the equation.

Science is finding new ways to tell us apart from one another.

Well Lordy be, they chose a Climate Change issue to do a psychological study of people-perceptions, again. What a surprise. Perhaps a disproportionately large number of Republicans have encountered various other analyses that plot observed reality against model projection and said, "well maybe that 3.2degC is not so scientific after all." How did/could they control for the participants' private assessment of the "scientific" statement they were given?

I'd be more curious about the pollution portion, there is far less scientific dispute about the effects particulates and aerosols on people and planet. Too bad the press release didn't cover that. At $11.95 for the PDF its TE;DR.

The hidden component to these studies is not necessarily political people-prejudices or even brain wiring, it is how people perceive and apply risk. Without a pivot of risk you're not going to get a straight answer on anything. None of these issues (climate, pollution, guns) are simple.

For pure-CO2 global average temperature causation my risk-O-meter is barely twitching, just enough that I'll glance out of the corner of my eye for the huge juggernaut of extraordinary evidence that would be required to prove it at this point. It would be large enough to see from a distance and would be a great deal slower than a speeding train .

My other risk-O-meter is PEGGED, the one that attempts to assess my personal risk from politically motivated shoddy conclusions, emerging secular belief systems, 'new' government regulation (by a government that seems to have forgotten how to repeal anything, preferring to tune legislation to greater heights of obfuscation and uselessness) ... some of the dumb-ass solutions being proposed out there are TERRIFYING.

So if someone drew me into a study where I'm expected to weigh a stated 'problem' with and proposed 'solution' empirically, expecting me to decouple one from the other so they can draw some sort of conclusion from it, forget that.

If I had grown up in a place where solutions did not often create their own set of problems, that need to be weighed and factored --- such as inside a comic book --- maybe.

And I'm not even a Democrat or a Republican or liberal or conservative. That's just me looking at the world.

Hm... could this be the result of clouds blocking the sun? See if the owner's manual has an appendix, that is often where you find a list of troubleshooting procedures --- since the appendices are often written by the engineers themselves, you often find useful tidbits of info there that didn't fit into the how-to narrative and are not part of the sales pitch.

I sympathize with your problem but I am also relieved that it is obviously a local phenomenon, since there are so many here on Slashdot who haven't experienced this, as they continue to advocate the use of solar energy for base load power generation for an industrial society.

Good luck to you friend and I hope you find the problem and get those panels back up to 4kW all day, every day since that is what you paid for... you might try mounting a large Fresnel lens over your kettle to help it come to a boil on those cloudy days.

Pure CO2 causation, the forced feedback in climate models and the machinations on the data that attempt to leverage a 400% CO2 rise into an extremely-slight-yet-lost-in-noise rise or flatline (depending on how you rearrange the noise) average global temperature... it has been like a bad dream that does not end.

Will the world end in ***FIRE*** or ***ICE***? Or will the world fail to end at all, that would be really embarrassing. It's time to put the steep rise in people-generated pure-CO2 and the observed not steep at all global temperature curve in proper perspective. As in, pure-CO2 causation is a non-starter yet worthy of study --- but it's time to focus on other aspects for awhile. Without all that 'climate denier' noise too.

Let's just talk about actual particulates and albedo. Stratospheric sulfur aerosols reflect more sunlight. In the Arctic, nearby soot may be a larger forcing than CO2. One effect would cause net cooling at the surface and the other a net warming as near-perfect blackbody particles settle on ice crystals. The photograph of a melt water canal with concentrated black carbon particles lining the bottom of the pool begs the question, does this melt channel owe its very existence to the presence of the carbon, or was it caused by other factors? I guestimate that the area of black is about 1/10 the size of the surrounding melt pit... so we are definitely seeing 'grey snow' in the Arctic here.

It has taken five years for the failed 'Glory' satellite mission to be re-launched as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. It is my hope that OCO2 will help to answer these questions by showing where pollution plumes originate and how they move, so that we know where to take samples and what to look for.

Politics demands simplified models and pure-CO2 causation so they can tax everybody without pissing off the coal industry. F*ck politics. It is my view that pure-science demands a balanced approach that will reveal the true impact of coal, among other manmade and natural causes.

And the folks in California would really appreciate a green-tax refund for the 29% of their pollution that is actually from Asia.

When growing up at 15 degrees North in the Caribbean where we do not do DST, it was awkward at times to arrange business calls with the States... but no big deal, I couldn't understand why folks would want too go through all that twice a year.

Now I live 34 degrees North and see what the big deal is. I am on the road to work at 6:30am and come Monday I will not be seeing children walking around, crossing streets and standing around in the dark.

Anything that makes kids easier to avoid while driving in large portions of the continent is fine with me. All those other reasons like saving energy (NOT) can go stuff themselves.

"Welcome to the testing room of the Parallax Corporation's Division of Human Engineering. You will now please go up to the chair, and you will sit down, make yourself comfortable, be sure to place each one of your hands on the box on either side of the chair, making sure that each one of your fingers is on one of the white rectangles. Just sit back, nothing is required of you, except to observed the visual materials that are presented to you. Be sure to keep your fingers on the box at all times. All right, I hope you find the test a pleasant experience."

Take the test: Montage from the film, The Parallax View [1974]

More info about the 'test'

On the subject of stocking up information and entertainment for a future apocalypse,

EXTRA CREDIT. In the 1997 film The Postman, the the Holnists army training camp is set in a large quarry, and in the evening films are shown on a large screen projected from a boat in the quarry lake. The projectionist starts one film, and the crowd becomes irate, throwing rocks at the boat. The projectionist shuts down that film and picks up another reel yelling, "So that's what you want??" and quickly threads it. As it begins the crowd smiles and sits in rapt attention.

What were the two movies?

(perhaps UK folk can use this alternate torcache link)
too bad you posted AC so you probably won't see this...

Thank you all for participating, even those without a clue.
This is a long recap of the story and its comments.

When I said "Think of the Survivor Library as a trove of survival skills, a '100-year civilization checkpoint backup' that fits on a hard drive." Some didn't get it, thinking it meant burying the Library and a computer for 100 years for someone to dig up. That is not what I meant.

A collapse event could happen never, next year or tomorrow. It could be a impact of a Near Earth Object we have not catalogued, Yellowstone, a pandemic. A political Orwellian slate-wiper followed by a Chairman Mao-style 'revolution', famine and dark age. Or over time, even some ridiculous consumer movement to phase out paper books and do away with autonomous storage altogether in favor of some 'cloud' that a future despot ruler could centrally edit, revoke or just turn off. Yes, we are that stupid.

Your modern civilization has failed you. It provides for you collectively but, because it was never a real priority, as it stands it cannot provide for itself in a time of disaster. It cannot repair itself. Many steps have been taken over the last hundred years, little things, that enabled life to become a bit easier and better. And in key areas (food, energy, communication, transportation) 'best' paths were chosen exclusively over other paths that were not as desirable, maintainable or as economically feasible (though not impossible). Some of these roads not taken were not merely abandoned. Details of the technology that ours was built upon live on only in old books for which few copies exist, that never made it to the Internet age.

When I say '100 year backup' I mean a knowledge backup you could use tomorrow if you need it, to help ensure that normal people like yourself could, with practice and patience, re-create civilization as it was 100 years ago, as an alternative to sliding completely into a medieval existence --- or worse, a Mad Max scavenger based existence where everyone waits for some 'miracle' reboot that never arrives.

Your modern civilization has failed you. You cannot hope to even gather a scope of knowledge such as contained in this Library, for our modern world. That is because it is bound by non-disclosure, proprietary processes, and to catch a glimpse of it you'd need access to a volume of copyrighted textbooks and industry publications that you, oh best beloved, could particularly never afford. There are few lay introductions to how modern technology is actually made put together, and even if you could find them you will never have access to the 'experts' who understand it.

That is because in a real disaster the relatively few experts of any particular field of modern technology will be just like you, disconnected and fighting for survival. Some will not make it. They have specialized because civilization has permitted them to do so, and together we have built something that is foolishly fragile.

Your communications will be down. You will be walking, bicycling or riding horses again. You will be fighting to obtain food, heat (for most, wood) and supplies. And if you weather all of these challenges you and your kids will be asking, what now?

You are conditioned to think of each of everything that surrounds you as the best that has yet been developed, the finest and ultimate of it kind and most advanced. And in many aspects this is true. You may be conditioned to ignore and dismiss older folks who point out exceptions or sound warnings of vulnerability.

For example, the warning I sounded recently here at Slashdot, The Dismantling of POTS: Bold Move Or Grave Error?. Modern civilization has failed you, young people. Your grandparents (I speak of my own United States) grew up with a wired Plain Old Telephone Service that was engineered so that in small communities or even cities people could communicate with one another, practically forever, so long as you could provide power to a few buildings. Forty years of little compromises later, what you have now are cell towers and unmanned subscriber remotes that are too stupid to connect calls, all of this controlled by a few central points of failure in distant cities. It's all good and cheap until disaster strikes and everyone pays the price. If you think those cell towers and 'cable phones' in your town will keep everyone in touch after a real disaster, you've got a lot to learn. I hope when you've learned what they replaced and how resilient it was, you'll be at least a little angry.

But to learn how vulnerable we are don't listen to 'old geezers' like me. I'm not really old, just seen a lot happen in my time. Research it for yourself. If you can imagine even one potential disaster (I could cite several) you owe it to your own children to do so. Perhaps a hundred gigabytes of FREE books that were considered to be vital reference 100 years ago would at least help. The "for dummies" books will not help at all.

THANKS TO THE PEOPLE OF THE SLASHDOT COMMUNITY for supporting the torrent of 12,929 files in 126 folders, 109GB (perhaps UK folk can use this alternate torcache link). When the story was posted three days ago there were 6 seeders. Now there are ~300 seeders and at times there have been ~700 peers acquiring the Library.

Silly posts I noted but had no time to properly respond to,
Making fun of Henley's Formulas [fine, I'll sell you soap and fireworks, keep the gunpowder]
Demand for printed 'acid free paper' version of ~7,00 PDFs [someone else's job?]
Demand for modern X,Y,Z in the Library [okay, get started, good luck with copyright]
Concerns about practices in 'old' medicine books [but not all, it's not end-all]
Complaints about how 'old' this free library is [missed point entirely. What is the value of NOT having it?]
Musings that Wikipedia would fit on DVDs [maybe the stuff on Cricket] or be 'how-to-do-it' useable [how much of it have you read?]
Musings that collapse would [magically] create a renaissance of 'renewable energy sources' [in China maybe because that's where they're made, for many of us auto alternators will be high-tech]
Musing that 'mass shipping uses [abundant] heavy fuel' [interesting point, but how about economy down too?]
Someone recommending no old X-ray machines [as opposed to... NO X-ray machines? We know more about radiation now]
Argument that even 100 years ago civilization relied on mass transport from distant points [true, but the Library details a ~1900 era civilization rather than the medieval survival level of hunting, fishing and garden that most 'survival' tomes cover]

Notable contributions to the thread,
Thanks for the detail on electrolytic capacitors, stocking spares does seem to be necessary for true survivalists.
This AC who really gets it.
kbahey also get it and thanks for link to this story link in your blog entry!
Many other people also get it, especially the lurkers those who are getting the torrent now. Your action speaks louder than words.

Recommendations to read books,
Heinlein, Farnham's Freehold; Stephen King, The Stand; Niven and Pournelle, Lucifer's Hammer; Lewis Dartnell, The Knowedge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch; George R. Stewart, Earth Abides; Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz;

Other sites and Libraries to check out,
Global Village Construction Set
The Long Now Foundation, they 'get it'.
The Rosetta Project [great idea though its value for survival is nil in any language...]
Project Foxfire
Pointer to the cd3wd library which has many modern technology, education (including Khan Academy) and classic literature packages.
United States Navy Electricity & Electronics Training Series - NEETS
http://www.rarefile.net/1g1jay...
  http://www.rarefile.net/1rqsbc...
  http://www.rarefile.net/vk0a8p...
  http://www.rarefile.net/ecqwwr...

Thanks again.