Helium balloons are a minor part of the overall picture. The overwhelming majority of uses are industrial, such as cryogenics. The problem is that they don't recover it. If you want to make a big impact on the helium consumption rate, hard drives is pretty much one of the least effective places you could focus - focus on industrial recovery.

Note that humans will never "run out" of helium. Even if we assume that space-based resource extraction becomes realistic, one can always refrigerate it out of the atmosphere. Or more accurately, refrigerate everything else out and leave the helium behind. There's only a tiny bit in the atmosphere, but for important uses it'll remain a possibility. I saw page that says that neon is $2 per liter. If you're refrigerating neon out of the atmosphere, pretty much all that's left is helium, so you're co-producing it, at a ratio of 3.5 to 1. If we assume that helium demand vastly outpaces neon demand, then the helium cost would be $7 per liter. And maybe less in mass production.

That's not really an absurd price for many uses - such as hard drives. On the other hand, it's dramatically more than today's prices at about $0.005 per liter! You're not going to be making helium blimps at $7 per liter. But if industry learns how to recapture and reuse, they should manage.

(Of course, humans probably wouldn't have to resort to helium extraction from the atmosphere for centuries, pretty much any gas coming out of the ground will be richer in helium than the air)

I'm not lying, that's the actual size, something like 420k. It may have been a bit shorter playtime, perhaps 20 seconds (I didn't time it), but still, it was quite small.

Nobody said videos on Facebook are Blu-Ray quality. But you seem to have weird concepts about how big videos need to be to be good enough quality for a web page. Just as a test, I took an original high quality full-motion video of a concert, reencoded it with ffmpeg, audio codec aac, vbr audio quality 0.5, video codec x264, preset veryslow, cf 33, resolution 512x288 (half original size), 20 seconds. File size? 420k. Of course the video from facebook was darker and quieter, so one would expect it to compress better. If we give my sample concert clip an allowable size of, say, 550k, then I can up audio quality to 0.7 and cf down to 30. Either way, the resultant clip was fine, the sort of thing you'd expect to see on a Facebook wall.

Anyway, the key point is, Facebook feeds aren't loading you down with 50 meg videos, they're little couple-hundred-k clips, the same size as animated gifs. And while I haven't measured it, they don't appear to start streaming until you scroll down to them, and look to stop after you scroll away.

1) I just went and pulled the first anim-gif I saw off 9-gag, a fairly simple thing of Ralph Wiggum with little motion, so it should compress quite well for an animated gif. Size: just over 400k. I then pulled the first video that showed up on my Facebook feed, a 30 second full motion clip, and downloaded the entire thing (including the audio stream, full quality). Size: just over 400k.

So....?

2) Are you actually sure that it is downloading the audio stream when it does muted autoplay? Not saying that it oes or doesn't, but do you actually have evidence either way?

3) See the reply below.

There's really no argument. If you're going to allow animated gifs, you should allow autoplay videos. So that we can finally put the nail in the coffin of the awfulness that is gif by removing the last common use of it.

And FYI, 400k is not that much. Slashdot is a pretty simplistic website compared to most, and I just measured how much data is downloaded just to read the front page: 1.4M.

Why is it any more evil than animated GIFs? Both play automatically, neither happen with sound, and compression on x264 is *way* better than with animated gifs.

I was initially opposed to autoplay on FB, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. We already see tons of animated stuff on web pages, and the videos from people who show up on my page about are usually things I'd find interesting (if the user posting them didn't usually post interesting things, I'd have stopped following them). There's no unexpected sounds to bug me, and the quality to size ratio versus animated gifs is, what, two orders of magnitude better?

Or a live badger. That would just be awesome. Franklinator 2.0.

It both scares me and pisses me of that the government can do whatever it wants with nuclear weapons, while my ability to use them is very, very restricted.

Who do they think they are, claiming the right to use things that the general public can't? Let me use my nuclear weapons!

Until I can be sure things are as safe as they reasonably can get I'd rather not have drones delivering packages yet

But that's exactly what drone proponents are asking for - a permitting standard that gives them the right to fly in these conditions and for these purposes in exchange for meeting a set of safety standards. Passive or automatically-engaged active safety features that ensure that "death by falling drone" is effectively an impossibility, whether that things like be cowled propellors, parachutes, an inherently low terminal velocity, fully independent backup propulsion, or whatever the case may be.

And in case you didn't notice, massive objects weighing hundreds of tons loaded with massive amounts of fuel and capable of taking out whole city blocks and/or skyscapers already fly extensively over your head. But you're worried about little plastic helicopters?

Do NOT come to Indianapolis for IT!

Pay rates are low even adjusted for the cost of living (which is dirt cheap for a northern city) and IT workers get ZERO respect unless you are working for a profit center (you are doing IT staffing, contracting or are a programmer writing product to be sold).

Between H1Bs and large contracting pushing down rates and squeezing out locals at the big operations (Lilly, Sallie Mae, Allison, Caterpillar, etc.) about the only good place for IT long term is working for state or the federal government (which is even lower pay but you might actually get a career out of it)... although many of those jobs are being handed over to contractors, too.

About the only place I have heard pays well for IT is Angie's List and it's only for programmers... that company is a ticking time bomb, though. How they stay in business while loosing money every year they have existed is a miracle of a pyramid scheme.

I am the last of my friends that came out of college in the early nineties still in IT. The rest have moved on to various other careers (several became attorneys, two are doctors, and one crazy bastard is a deep water welder... he makes more than all of us).

*Happy spices!* We *happy bubbles* second Star Control II; only *silly cows* do not enjoy *smelling* *pretty colors*!

+++OUT OF CHEESE ERROR+++

Frogs, mud, slingshots, wrong words and awkward times, etc.

All part of being a kid.

Now I'm older I realize more fully the grief I gave my parents.

It's not a "non-need", but it's not the end of the world, for several reasons.

First off, everything comes down to time. If one had, say a decade, they could build a full, brand new gas production infrastructure from scratch, designed to produce in different parts of the world and export straight to the EU.

Great, except EU gas reserves aren't that big. They have a max capacity of about 6 months, usually filled to about half that at this time of year, though higher than average now. Russia makes up 30% of EU imports. Basically, reserves provides something like 9-12 months of Russian cutoff.

Next we have instant displacement. Much of the EU has been working to shut down coal power plants, and ones that are in operation are often run at lower and lower capacity factors. In the event of a full Russian gas cutoff, these would be all fired up and used heavily, while NG plants would instead be mostly shut down.

Then we have slower displacement, which can take anywhere from a month or so to a couple years. NG power plants can be converted to other thermal sources. Industrial consumers of NG for heat can switch to other heat sources. Etc.

On the home and commercial perspective, the higher cost of gas will lead to more investment in efficiency on its own. Government efficiency programs can improve this even further.

On the production side, the spike in gas prices will instantly make higher-cost, formerly unecomomical European fields economical. Some of these will be available right away, some will require weeks, some months, some years to bring online. But it does put a lot of new gas into the picture.

On the non-European side, there's LNG. The US is really a read herring on this front, at least for the time being, as Sabine Pass won't come online until the winter after next, and others even later. The Middle East is the primary LNG exporter here, particularly Qatar, whose LNG capacity alone is more than all the gas Russia sells Europe. Thankully, the EU is loaded with largely idle LNG import terminals (nearly enough to replace all of Russian gas as-is), and LNG tanker rates are very low right now, there's a glut. Now, Europe would have to pay a very high price for it. LNG is expensive to begin with, and they'll be competing with the gas's current customers, primarily Asia. Europe, of course, would pay more, leading to all of the aforementioned things - increased production, increased displacement, etc - to occur in Asia to offset their reduced LNG imports. Interestingly, the US actually *can* help there - the US does have a Pacific LNG export terminal that was recently brought back into operation at Kenai, Alaska.

The net combination of these factors is that, no, Europe will not just "run out of gas and freeze to death" or any of those other doomsday scenarios that people throw around. But there's no question that Europe will have to pay more for gas, probably at least 50% more. And nobody's going to like the resumed usage of coal power - but in the short term, they're not going to have a choice.

On the other hand... for the EU, the extra energy costs for gas and oil may represent something like a 5-10% GDP hit. But for Russia, losing all of their oil and gas exports would be like dropping a nuclear bomb onto their economy.