8/3 Ars Technica - All Ars Technica Content

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. Ars Technica - All Ars Technica Content Reports: US' best source of carbon-free energy is efficiency August 2, 2009 at 8:30 pm Back in 2001, a prominent politician derided energy efficiency efforts, saying, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." This week saw a pair of reports that can be viewed as a giant "au contraire." The National Academies of Science released a report that looked at the energy market as a whole, and concluded that conservation through efficiency would largely be enough to limit the building of new powerplants to what's needed for the replacement of obsolete facilities. Meanwhile, McKinsey & Company put some hard numbers on things: even if we limit ourselves to efficiency efforts that pay back within a decade, it'll provide the equivalent of 9.1 quadrillion BTUs of carbon-free energy by 2020. The McKinsey report arrived at those figures by performing a fairly simple economic analysis: what measures, if rolled out on a large scale starting in the near future, would have a positive return on investment by 2020. Those are fairly conservative conditions, since many efficiency projects require a substantial up-front investment that's only paid back gradually; time horizons longer than a decade aren't uncommon when it comes to payback. Nevertheless, the numbers were staggering. $520 billion worth of investments would produce a total of $1.2 trillion in savings by 2020. Presumably, the numbers would look even better later into the century. Let them eat cake: Fat Princess is a delight August 2, 2009 at 7:00 pm Fat princess is one of those games that all of us have known about for quite some time and wanted to play simply because it had a great name. Initial previews only made us want to play it more when we found out the premise: it's basically a violent game of Capture the Flag where a princess is the flag, and you make the flag hard to move by feeding it junk food. It sounded like a great premise, and the demo we got to play at GDC this year was a ton of fun. Now, Fat Princess is available to buy on the Playstation Network, and we're happy to say that it's just as much fun to play as we expected. In a nutshell, this is how the game works: players start out in a stronghold, where they hold the enemy princess hostage. Meanwhile, the opposing team holds your princess hostage in their base. Therefore, players' time must be divided between accumulating resources to build siege weapons, defenses for the castle, and class upgrades; running raids against the enemy fortress, while slaughtering your enemies who are trying to invade your castle; and keeping your captive princess as fat as possible by bringing her tons of tasty, tasty cake in order to make her difficult to move should your walls be breached. Hacking a remote-controlled moth with insect venom August 2, 2009 at 5:30 pm There is just so much going on in science that no single person can keep up with it all. So when a friend of mine sent me a copy of an article about the beginnings of a remote-controlled moth, I just had to write about it. One problem though—the research paper is from August of last year, so there may be some bemusement on the part of the researchers that the media has cottoned on to their research so late. What can I say? I don't go looking for remote-controlled moths, I wait for them to come to me. Homegrown CBHD discs outsell Blu-ray by 3-1 margin in China August 2, 2009 at 4:00 pm A Japanese TV station broke a major piece of news on the progress of China Blue High Definition (a China-grown competitor to Blu-ray) in the China market last week, but the English-language technology press, through a translation mistake, misreported the news. It turns out that CBHD penetration in China appears to have hit a staggering 30 percent, in only a few months on the market.   This email was sent to topblogsofthenet@gmail.com.  Manage Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.