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Submission + - 'Peak Oil' Movement Prepares for the Worst (nytimes.com)

Submitted by chrnb
chrnb writes: Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and likeminded others, have a new focus: peak oil. They argue that oil supplies peaked as early as 2008 and will decline rapidly, taking the economy with them.

Located somewhere between the environmental movement and the bunkered survivalists, the peak oil crowd is small but growing, reaching from health food stores to Congress, where a Democrat and a Republican formed a Congressional Peak Oil Caucus.

And they have been resourceful, sharing the concerns of other âÅ"collapsitarians,âï½ including global debt and climate change ââ both caused by overuse of diminishing oil supplies, they maintain.

Submission + - "Peak oil" theorists: World running out (denverpost.com)

Submitted by
chrnb
chrnb writes: "The group, meeting in Denver this week, wants immediate steps to avert economic ruin.
The world is running out of oil faster than society suspects, and last year's $4.11 gasoline spike was just a bitter hint of the future, according to a "peak oil" theory whose key proponents will gather in Denver this week.

Though peak-oil theorists prompt scorn from many in the petroleum industry, they've attracted an audience in some political and financial circles with their warnings to avert disaster by conserving, diversifying and exploring at an urgent pace.

"Up until now, technology has delivered dazzling results to America and the world economy, in delivering oil from all around the world despite increasingly challenging environments," said Dave Bowden, executive director of the Denver-based Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas-USA, or ASPO. "The harsh reality is, despite the best efforts of amazing technology, they're not finding as many of these big fields anymore.""

Submission + - Carbon Capture Works at Wisconsin Coal Plant

Submitted by pickens
pickens writes: Hugh Pickens writes:

Thomas Content writes in the Milwauke Journal Sentinel that a coal-fired power plant in southeastern Wisconsin has been successful in grabbing 90% of greenhouse gas using chilled ammonia to capture carbon dioxide from the smokestack. The technology is one of several being tested by utilities that are seeking to ways to continue burning coal from their existing fleet of coal plants even if the United States embarks on a national plan to slash emissions of greenhouse gases. "One of the biggest challenges facing our industry is the development of cost effective technology that will allow us to capture carbon from the operation of power plants around the world," says Gale Klappa, chairman and chief executive of We Energies. The next phase of testing at the Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia will go one step further by testing not only the capture but the sequestration of the carbon dioxide where the gas will be compressed, pipelined, and injected into two different saline reservoirs located approximately 8,000 feet beneath the plant site. The experiment, which the company says could begin in the next few days, is riveting the world's coal-fired electricity sector, which is under growing pressure to develop technology to capture and store carbon dioxide. The technology is certain to devour a substantial amount of the plant's energy output — optimists say 15 percent, and skeptics, 30 percent leaving less electricity available to send out to the power grid and utility customers. "Key questions around energy consumption — a key driver of cost — and other important technical issues will be addressed as larger-scale demonstrations work to fully optimize the technology."

Comment non-story (Score 1) 2

by chrnb (#29706289) Attached to: Rupert Murdoch says Google is Stealing His Content
Why the fuck are we actually listening to a guy, who has proven time and time again he is a major douchebag? Before there is any action, legal or otherwise, this is a non-story (although I guess a lot of slashdotters would really like a chance discuss this issue yet again). This is the same old story about the carriage makers whining about cars, record labels whining about sharing etc. etc.
Technology

Submission + - Commercial green fuel from algae still years away (reuters.com)

Submitted by
chrnb
chrnb writes: "SAN DIEGO (Reuters) — Filling your vehicle's tank with fuel made from algae is still as much as a decade away, as the emerging industry faces a series of hurdles to find an economical way to make the biofuel commercially.
Estimates on a timeline for a commercial product, and profits, vary from two to 10 years or more."
Media

Submission + - What's replacing P2P, BitTorrent for warez? (computerworld.com)

Submitted by ericatcw
ericatcw writes: Driven by increased crackdowns on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, software pirates are fast-moving their warez to file-hosting Web sites like RapidShare, reports Computerworld. According to anti-piracy vendor, V.I. Labs, 100% of the wares in its survey were available on Rapidshare, which according to Alexa, is already one of the 20 largest sites in the world. V.I. Labs' CEO predicts file-hosting sites such as Rapidshare to supplant BitTorrent, as the former appear better protected legally.

Submission + - Fossils Suggest an Ancient CO2-Climate Link (time.com)

Submitted by chrnb
chrnb writes: By looking at the chemistry of fossilized foraminifera — tiny sea creatures no bigger than a grain of sand — a team led by Aradhna Tripati, of University of the California, Los Angeles, has detected a significant CO2 bump during both warming episodes.
If they're right, it could be pretty bad news, even for those who already worry about rising CO2. It's generally agreed that during the earlier warm period, known as the Miocene Climatic Optimum, which occurred 15 million years ago, the global temperature was high enough to make sea levels between 80 ft. and 130 ft. higher than they are today. According to the new study, CO2 levels in the atmosphere at that time hovered at from 390 to 430 parts per million (p.p.m.). Today's CO2 level: 387 p.p.m. and rising.

Submission + - Peak Oil Could Hit Soon, Report Says (guardian.co.uk) 1

Submitted by
chrnb
chrnb writes: "There is a "significant risk" that global oil production could begin to decline in the next decade, researchers said today.
A report by the UK Energy Research Council (UKERC) said worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could "peak" and go into terminal decline before 2020 – but that the government was not facing up to the risk.

Falls in production will lead to higher and more volatile prices, and could encourage investment in even more polluting fossil fuels, such as tar sands, which "need to stay in the ground" to avoid dangerous climate change as a result of carbon emissions, the researchers said.

The new report said there was too much geological, political and economic uncertainty to predict an exact date for peak oil, which would not lead to a sudden decline but a "bumpy plateau" with a downward trend in extraction.

But Steve Sorrell, chief author of the report, said while those who forecasted an imminent decline had underestimated oil reserves, more positive forecasts suggesting oil production will not peak before 2030 were "at best optimistic and at worst implausible"."
Power

Submission + - From Turbines and Straw, Danish Self-Sufficiency (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
chrnb
chrnb writes: "Last year, Samso (pronounced SOME-suh) completed a 10-year experiment to see whether it could become energy self-sufficient. The islanders, with generous amounts of aid from mainland Denmark, busily set themselves about erecting wind turbines, installing nonpolluting straw-burning furnaces to heat their sturdy brick houses and placing panels here and there to create electricity from the island’s sparse sunshine.
By their own accounts, the islanders have met the goal. For energy experts, the crucial measurement is called energy density, or the amount of energy produced per unit of area, and it should be at least 2 watts for every square meter, or 11 square feet. “We just met it,” said Soren Hermansen, the director of the local Energy Academy, a former farmer who is a consultant to the islanders."

Submission + - 'Whatever' America's Most Annoying Word, Poll Says

Submitted by nandemoari
nandemoari writes: In a poll conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, the word "whatever" received 47 per cent, almost half, of the total votes when subjects were asked to choose from a list of the most annoying popular phrases. It beat out equally ambiguous phrases "you know" and "it is what it is," which placed second and third, respectively.

Submission + - Yahoo provided Iran with names of 200,000

Submitted by rcamans
rcamans writes: October 8th, 2009
"ZDnet's Richard Koman accuses Yahoo of having collaborated with the Iranian regime during the recent post-election protests. Koman says the online giant provided names and emails for some 200,000 Iranian Yahoo users to authorities so that those same authorities would "unban" Yahoo on the state-controlled internet. The blog post does not include a response by Yahoo to the allegations, but promises "to provide further proof as the story unfolds." Snip:
This is according to a post on the Iranian Students Solidarity (Farsi) blog. My sources indicate the information comes from a group of resisters who have infiltrated the administration and are leaking out important information. These sources say that Yahoo representatives met with Iranian Internet authorities after Google and Yahoo were shut down during the protests and agreed to provide the names of Yahoo subscribers who also have blogs in exchange for the government lifting the blocks on Yahoo." This quote from ZDNET @ http://government.zdnet.com/?p=5547.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/09/yahoo-accused-of-hav.html#more

Yahoo has not yet responded to these claims, and they are not substantiated. Can anyone out there help substantiate these?

Submission + - SPAM: A.I. Researcher Offers Singularity Survival Tips

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: A.I. researcher Ben Goertzel reports back from the 2009 Singularity Summit in New York. Stephen Wolfram discussed Wolfram|Alpha, an IBM researcher described brain emulation, and Intel CTO Justin Rattner spoke "on his firm's potential role in the Singularity." But in this follow-up article, Ben Goertzel describes what he learned in a day-long workshop/discussion group on averting catastrophic outcomes: his list of "11 ways to avoid a bad Singularity." For example, tip #5 suggests that humanity should simply refrain from building any artificial intelligences that are autonomous...
Link to Original Source
Google

Submission + - SPAM: Bahama Botnet Stealing Traffic From Google

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: 'As part of its design, the Bahama botnet not only turns ordinary, legitimate PCs into click-fraud perpetrators that dilute the effectiveness of ad campaigns. It also modifies the way these PCs locate certain Web sites through DNS poisoning,' explains Juan Carlos Perez in an ITworld article. 'In the case of Google.com, compromised machines take their users to a fake page hosted in Canada that looks just like the real Google page and even returns results for queries entered into its search box. It's not clear where the Canadian server gets these results. What is evident is that the results aren't "organic" direct links to their destinations but are instead masked cost-per-click (CPC) ads that get routed through other ad networks or parked domains, some of which are in on the scam and some of which aren't.' 'Regardless, CPC fees are generated, advertisers pay, and click fraud has occurred,' Click Forensics reported on Thursday in a blog posting.
Link to Original Source
Hardware

Submission + - QualcommFull-Color Passive Display that Does Video (wordpress.com)

Submitted by sixwings
sixwings writes: Passive display technologies rock. You're probably familiar with the Kindle's e-Ink passive display, but that's already ancient technology. The future of low-power displays is color video, something the Kindle can only dream of doing. Qualcomm, however, isn't just dreaming it, they're living it. The company's mirasol division was proudly showing off their latest mirasol display with nothing less than full-motion color video at 30 fps. Impressed? We were.

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