Re: Bio-manufacturing (Score: 1)
by hyper@pipedot.org in 3D-printing for live blood vessels on 2015-12-10 09:11 (#X7YJ)
The amount of profit a corporation claims in tax benefits?
Building cities outwards necessarily either requires removing farmland or destroying ecosystems, which is far and wide the largest contributor to extinctions. Since a significant goal of lower emissions is to save the environment and all its inhabitants, urban sprawl goes directly against this.The US population keeps moving south and west... The Southwestern US is not farms or forests (except in small spots), but mostly-empty desert. While there are some endangered species there, it's a very small number. Maybe it's just me, but I can't get myself worked-up that development of thousands of square miles of desert land might eventually endanger a couple bird sub-species. Particularly in the light of so much more damage being caused if that land development was done outside the sparsely populated desert. Several (certainly not all) desert animals do much better in suburbs, anyhow.
Building out fiber to remote areas doesn't help either as jobs continue to demand the worker be there during work hours. Look at what Yahoo did for an example.The fact that Yahoo discontinued telecommuting, is not evidence that telecommuting doesn't work... Your link turns up opinion pieces on both sides, some saying it was a good idea, others saying it was a mistake, and most saying the number of companies who allow telecommuting keeps increasing. For Yahoo, I think it was just a tool to cut employees without as much downside as firings or layoffs.
If you exclude visible light, you are left with the sides of this, which are awful.Your graph shows a tremendous amount of power available in the infrared. I don't see a problem.
Why would you use solar panels at high latitude? That's another intentional handicap. Put them where the sun actually shines, maybe?Because billions of people live at high latitudes. They need energy, too. Power lines over running thousands of kilometers have huge losses. We haven't gotten superconductors to work quite yet, and even if we did, the up-front construction costs would be huge.
there's casing and transformers and grid connections and mechanical mounts, all of which break and need maintenance. If you are on a roof, that's fine. If you are on the side of a skyscraper, it's more expensive.The "transformers and grid connections" wouldn't be located on the sides of the skyscraper (perhaps in the dropped-ceilings), so no additional maintenance burden there. The "mounts" already exist to hold windows in place, and window washers are already routine, so no additional expenses there. There will be just a little more expense in routing electrical lines from the panels, which wouldn't be required with plain windows.
There are plenty of southern population centers to supply with cheap, dumb, efficient, boring solar panels.Nothing wrong with that, but it's not as if these efforts will somehow slow or stop the production of traditional PV panels. People in less-than-ideal conditions for existing solar panels would like to get some of the benefits, too, and there's no reason to stop them.
Common solar panels are only 20% efficient, anyhow.I remember, around 1990, one of my high school science teachers telling the class that once we reached 15% efficiency we would need no other power generation systems. Mind you, this was a long time ago. I imagine that - as a species - our power requirements have increased dramatically since then.
Not using SD is hardly a fault.It is if you want more than those 4GB of storage... or to easily exchange files.
HDMI on something like this would be just brain dead. You debug something like this over a serial wire.These are high-end devices, which are quite capable of decoding HD video, and that's been a very common use of RPi hardware. You may not be interested in that use, but clearly many people are. If everything but a serial port is unnecessary, why does CHIP include composite video output?
Putting them on the wall! You no longer need to purposely cripple your panel by making it transparent to 70% of the energy in solar spectrum!Common solar panels are only 20% efficient, anyhow. If these will work, and can be made at reasonable prices, they're not crippled at all. Things like skyscrapers, which need as much electricity as they can get, don't have any "wall" space that isn't transparent.
You know what's even better than putting solar panels on the wall? Putting them on the roof! That way you can lay them flat to catch the sun better.Only at near the equator do solar panels laying flat "catch the sun better." The further away from the equator you go, the steeper the angle you need and the more efficient vertical mounting will be.
Putting them on the ground! That way you can put them on sun-tracking mounts, and easily walk around and make repairs/replacements as needed.Rooftop is far better, as you're utilizing otherwise wasted and nearly-free real-estate. They should last for 30+ years before needing "repairs/replacements" and going up to a roof doesn't add much expense.
You know what's even better than putting them on the ground? Putting them on the ground in the desert! That way you don't need to pay for expensive city real-estate.Except the city real-estate was provided free by the property owner, while the desert real estate had to be purchased, environmental studies done, endangered animal habitat relocated/mitigated, etc.