Politicked Off

From The New York Times:

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Nanosolar, a heavily financed Silicon Valley start-up whose backers include Google’s co-founders, plans to announce Tuesday that it has begun selling its innovative solar panels, which are made using a technique that is being held out as the future of solar power manufacturing.

The company, which has raised $150 million and built a 200,000-square-foot factory here, is developing a new manufacturing process that “prints” photovoltaic material on aluminum backing, a process the company says will reduce the manufacturing cost of the basic photovoltaic module by more than 80 percent.

Nanosolar, which recently hired a top manufacturing executive from I.B.M., said that it had orders for its first 18 months of manufacturing capacity. The photovoltaic panels will be made in Silicon Valley and in a second plant in Germany.

While many photovoltaic start-up companies are concentrating on increasing the efficiency with which their systems convert sunlight, Nanosolar has focused on lowering the manufacturing cost. Its process is akin to a large printing press, rather than the usual semiconductor manufacturing techniques that deposit thin films on silicon wafers.

Nanosolar’s founder and chief executive, Martin Roscheisen, claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. That is the price at which solar energy becomes less expensive than coal.

“With a $1-per-watt panel,” he said, “it is possible to build $2-per-watt systems.”

According to the Energy Department, building a new coal plant costs about $2.1 a watt, plus the cost of fuel and emissions, he said.

From Stanford News Service:

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices.

The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers.

“It’s not a small improvement,” Cui said. “It’s a revolutionary development.”

The breakthrough is described in a paper, “High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires,” published online Dec. 16 in Nature Nanotechnology, written by Cui, his graduate chemistry student Candace Chan and five others.

The greatly expanded storage capacity could make Li-ion batteries attractive to electric car manufacturers. Cui suggested that they could also be used in homes or offices to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels.

“Given the mature infrastructure behind silicon, this new technology can be pushed to real life quickly,” Cui said.

  From Popular Science:

The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum and gas hidden inside everyday objects—or at least anything made with hydrocarbons, which, it turns out, is most of what’s around you. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste—tires, plastic, vinyl—into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running).

Terry Hancock writes:

Somebody recently noted that, what with all the bombing and killing and tyrannical madness going on in the world, how can we waste all this time talking about free software? Surely there’s more important stuff to worry about?

Well, they’re absolutely right that there are bigger problems in the world. When I get a chance to do something more direct about it, I plan to. So far, it looks like voting is about it, though.

On the other hand, you can’t trivialize peacetime matters. Peace is more important than stopping war. It’s the thing we need to protect when we deal with the evils in the world.

Regrettably, peace usually works the soft and slow way, while war is swift and always seems like the simpler solution. Hence our constant error in trying to make wars to stop wars. It is always a mistake to try to stop the processes of peace just because war seems more urgent. Because peace is what actually stops wars.

Free software does, in my opinion, make significant strides forward in creating long-term peace for humanity. A web, constructed of free software now connects us all, enemies and friends alike—and people who used to be enemies are becoming friends. Or perhaps only their children are.

This is the real thing that those “evil internet chat rooms” are doing to our children: they are connecting them. They’re allowing people who wouldn’t talk to each other before the chance to do so in relative safety, unencumbered by distance. They’re allowing them to come to terms with each other on a personal, down-to-Earth level like nothing else can. It makes a difference when you know that the “foreigner” with the odd skin color and the funny-looking clothes has a name and a pet hamster named “Rodrigo”.

The thing breeding in those internet chat rooms is surely the power-mongerers of the world’s worst nightmare: it’s a new generation of people who are beginning to think of their race as “Human” and their nation as “Earth”. I’m not saying we’re there yet, but there is something happening. Something that happens through shared experiences and exchanged knowledge. Something personal that treaties and laws and propaganda ministers can’t get to. People are talking to each other.

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What did people say in 1498? Well, they said only, “How wonderful it is to have all these new books.” Those same people were engaged in turning the known world inside out, but they didn’t for a minute see what they were doing.

And what are people saying in 1998? Well, we’ve watched technology turning us inside out for about 200 years now. So we expect the computer to change us. But technology has never been predictable. We always miss the point. Visionaries looked at transportation in 1948 and predicted we’d have a helicopter in every garage by 1960. They looked at the new computers in 1960 and predicted that one big mother computer would organize the world by 1980. We never get the future right.

Today, visionaries fall oddly quiet while the rest us of run about saying Gee Whiz, look at how much information our children can access. The real changes that the computer is bringing about are changes in the way we see reality. And we do not yet have an adult generation that’s known the computer from the cradle. All of us see the computer against the background of the not-computer. All of us typed before we word-processed. All of us learned the algorithms of arithmetic before we used hand calculators. All of us see the PC against the backdrop of a world without it. What we cannot see at all is how a mind will work when it’s never known anything but the PC.

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Want to catch a senator napping during a congressional hearing? Or letting a possible racial slur slip out at a campaign rally?

Then log on to Internet video-sharing Web sites like YouTube.com — the latest weapon in U.S. politics where a candidate’s missteps can be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

Political campaigns for the November 7 congressional elections have sent out mass e-mails with links to videos of opponents in unscripted, often embarrassing, situations.

Some campaigns have even dispatched young staffers known as “trackers” armed with video cameras. Their sole job is to track a rival candidate’s every move and make sure their cameras are rolling in case the politician makes a gaffe.

Politicians caught on Internet candid camera

Conrad Burns’ Naptime

Platewire is a public repository and electronic forum of drivers by drivers. Using a drivers license plate, commuters can communicate their thoughts and feelings in regards to driving on todays’ roadways. Report and flag bad drivers, award good drivers, and even flirt with cute drivers. PlateWire was born out of frustration from years of driving along side drivers who seem to have no concern with anyone’s safety, including their own.

While this site is currently just a nice place to vent, this could easily be adapted in the next few years to tie in with a consumer version of the IR cameras currently in police cars. With the emerging long distance wireless network technologies, your car could constantly update you on your GPS screen with warnings about the drivers around you, gathered from databases on the internet.

You can already call their toll free number to report drivers on the road - 1(866)689-2155. You will have to retrieve it later on the website to post the plate number. Once speech recognition technology reaches open-source status, one can imagine dictating into the phone and having it entered automatically on the website.

Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.

Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.

He predicted that “truth predictor” software would, within five years, “hold politicians to account.” People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.

“One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false.’ We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability,” he told the newspaper.

Full story at Reuters

Web powered widget-enabled TV, anyone?  Who’s going to hack a slingbox?