I'm not going to look through 428 comments to see if this is already addressed, so I'll just put it in simple numbers for you all:
A very streamlined car going about 60 mph uses about 50 kilowatts. Thus, the 2 kW charge rate mentioned above would move such a car only about 2.4 minutes for each hour of charging. If you could change all the cars in the US to electric propulsion, you'd need 200 to 250 additional nuclear reactors to provide the energy for them. Wind or solar power won't get you there since it would require about 5,000 one-MW wind turbines or about 20 million square meters of solar collectors to equal the daily energy production of just one reactor. And that's not even the hard part of the problem with wind or solar, which is storage and transmission.
The grid is already stressed to the breaking point with brownouts and breakdowns a daily occurence in summer. How could adding a few million electric cars not make a difference? Next time check with an engineer. And if you are an engineer, go back to school.
The ONLY way to avoid serious shortages in the future is to go nuclear for our primary energy needs, and electric for our cars. And I do mean the ONLY way.
Wrong. There was a guy in our office a few years ago from Kowloon, China. He pronounced the name of his home as Cow-Roon. Kowloon is an urban area of Hong Kong. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon
Lucky you. I live in Tennessee, where only about 20% of the area (10% in my county) has availability of broadband. Now this doesn't cover satellite access, which everybody already has, but then that isn't really broadband, and it certainly isn't "affordable." With satellite I can get only 1.5 Mbps download and 50 kbps upload on a good day. And a FAP that limits upload to 5 GB per month and download to 17 GB per month. So forget about online backup. No cable, no DSL, and no EvDO - right here in the middle of the USA.
Windows System Restore does not always restore to the point prior to the last change. (This happened to me when M/S Outlook functionality was severely compromised as a result of a M/S 11/13/2009 update, and would not return to normal after a System Restore to delete the update. I had to switch to Windows Mail as my e-mail client - not nearly as good as Outlook was.)
Second, you can delete all prior restore points anytime you want.
I've been unable to use Microsoft Outlook since the 11/13 update. System Restore didn't help. This is for Vista. I've had to switch to Windows Mail, which is much less user friendly.
You guys chatting about this are only touching on some of the problems with laser weapons, especially airborne ones. All the problems discussed have engineering solutions, but are difficult to implement. This is the reason development of such weapons has taken decades. There are lots of parameters with respect to how much energy is delivered to a target, but one would, for example, result in about 1 megawatt on a target for a few seconds. One megawatt in one second is about the same energy as in a hand grenade. If all this power is focused on a few square centimeters of a target, it gets REAL hot!
In general, the high amounts of money top CEO's sometimes make doesn't just drop from heaven. They earned it through risk-taking, long travel away from family, good business sense, and incredibly hard work (how does 90-100 hours per week sound?). Occasionally, but rarely, the money comes from fraud and other criminal activity. If illegal activities were properly investigated and prosecuted, we'd all be better off. Capitalism is simply a realization that no one does anything (except simple charity) without expecting to make a profit. Why would anyone start a company if they knew it was going to lose money? Nobody would -- they start companies hoping to make money -- HOW EVIL!!
Yes, it was true and possibly still is. When I lived in CA, I actually saw a cop pull over an Asian chap who was driving much slower than the speed limit, and had about 20 cars lined up behind him. Here in Tennessee the same law applies. You are required to pull over if you are traveling 10 or more miles slower than the posted limit and have 5 or more vehicles lined up behind you. Of course, tailgating is also a violation, but they don't pay any attention to that one either.
By a school? Good idea, but there are not that many schools around. I live in the sticks and have satellite access max download of 1.5 Mbps for $80/mo. The only way to pay a higher rate (that I am aware of) is to use HughesNet's higher speeds, which are available, but cost more than that per bps, much more.
I only read about halfway through the thread before realizing that apparently no one has actually read Ellison's short story upon which he is basing the lawsuit. Other than mention of the word "time," his story and the Star Trek episode have virtually no resemblance. He will loose his case big time!
Most of rural America has to live with 1.5 Mbps, assuming you can afford the $80/month. So Europe is close to being 12 THOUSANDS times faster. How nice;)
Oh, and for good measure, most of rural America also has no cable, cell phone, or DSL access either.
I don't blame the providers, who obviously have a profit objective. In fact, I don't blame anybody. But I would appreciate a national push to get cable everywhere, or at least put up satellites that can provide 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload for a reasonable fee. That would enable much of America, which would like to telecommute, to actually do it from rural America. Having millions of Americans move out of cities and into rural America would relieve pressures on all population-density caused problems like traffic and crime.
As one who worked in the missile defense community for 30 years, let me just say most of you have your heads in the sand when it comes to simple logic or the real world. The threat of retaliation is not worth much against North Korea or Iran. First, they know we wouldn't retaliate with nukes; why would we obliterate millions of innocent peasants when it is the radical leaders of these countries who would have been responsible? Wouldn't it be better to defend against an incoming warhead rather than take the hit, which could kill millions of our citizens and cause many $trillion in damage? Preventing even one nuke from hitting the U.S. saves many times more money than the defensive program could ever cost. And just having a defensive system deters an enemy from launching it because of doubt it would succeed. Second, if smuggling a nuke into the US in a suitcase were so easy, why hasn't it been done already? You can watch the Discovery Channel and see we have extensive ways of checking incoming cargo, despite only a few percent being hand-checked. And there are sure to be classified ways they can't show on the Discovery Channel. And just why would North Korea and Iran be spending so much money on their missile programs if they could just cheaply smuggle a nuke into any location they want? There is a good reason: a missile is the most reliable way to deliver a nuclear or any other kind of payload to its target. But if the US has a missile defense system, then that way becomes much less reliable. That brings up the third point. The reliability of the missile defense system isn't expected to be 10% as some have posted. A single interceptor is expected to be more like 90% effective, and the hit probability has very little to do with the intercept angles as one person suggested. The defended "footprints" of interceptors are typically as large as the entire United States. And if two or more interceptors are launched at the enemy warhead, the reliability goes way up. There are many other arguments against missile defense, such as the one that the enemy who can launch a missile all the way to the United States could also easily develop effective countermeasures. Says who? All CM do is increase the probability of success, but it isn't raised much. Our interceptor technology is designed to be way out front of the ability of anyone (including ourselves) to develop truly effective countermeasures. In fact, the MKV program, about which this whole thread is supposed to be, is one of those counter-counter measures. Namely, if the interceptor can't identify every single target in the threat cloud, that is, can't positively tell which is a decoy and which is a real target, then it directs a mini interceptor at each one it suspects could be the RV (re-entry vehicle). It goes on and on; millions of person-hours have been spent in this pursuit analyzing what might countermeasure missile defenses and what can win over such countermeasures. Actual space experiments have been going on for decades to prove these countermeasures and counter-countermeasures out. I'll stop now. I had a few other comments, but they looked too much like flame bait.
Hey guys -- Where does all the money go we pay for PMI? Isn't the purpose of that to pick up the mortgage for those who default? And the so-called bail-out money....who gets that? The banks or the people who defaulted on their loans? If it is the banks, then they got the homes AND the money. If it is the homeowner, then it is an income redistribution, rewarding irresponsible borrowing.
I have read much of this dialog and agree that wind power can be a near-term partial solution. For hardly any cost noticible at the Federal level, the government could build, say, 100,000 windmills (1 MW ea) over the next five years. They could be put in the windiest spots (eminent domain if necessary), and "sold" at a low cost to local utilities which would then operate and maintain them. This would equate to about 100 nuclear power stations (one generator = about 1 GW), and provide thousands of jobs for the five or so years to construct them. Even if each windmill cost $1 million (I think they are much less than that), the cost per year to build them would only be $20 billion, roughly 1/3 of the amount Americans spend on cigarettes annually.
If we all then go for hybrid vehicles, driving down the cost of oil, our energy problems would be solved. Of course, some group would create a new problem, but that's another story....
$3 Trillion disappeared w/o a trace from the DOD budget? Prior to 9/11 that would represent about 10 years of DOD's budget. Did you not notice the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or Coast Guard during those ten years? Deployed to and keeping the peace in about 30 countries world-wide. Developing new systems so that when other countries have the capability to wage war on us (like China or Russia) we will be able to win handily, or better yet, we can intimidate them by such overwhelming superiority they will choose NOT to pursue activities contrary to the United States. I would rather the United States be superior militarily than some other country. BTW, every dollar spent by the DOD is traceable via Program Element. That's EVERY DOLLAR. Don't believe what you see in the liberal media about funds disappearing.
Oil has dropped in price a little lately, but at $100 per barrell is $2.38 per gallon, and this is the price before it is shipped to the US, refined, distributed, and sold, never mind some minor profit at each end. After you add taxes, you are at $3.00+ per gallon. The large profits made by oil companies are only large in absolute terms; as a percentage of sales they are about 5%, WAY less than, say, Wal-Mart. People pay more for gasoline because they HAVE to, not because they are WILLING to. Willingness implies other than coersion. Even when gasoline tops $4.00 per gallon, like it already does in CA, consumption will not decrease significantly because people still have to get to work. If we opened ANWR and our off-shore proven reserves to drilling, we'd be swiming in oil, and the foreign price-controllers would have to reduce their prices. We could then keep these savings in this country, and invest in wind farms and nuclear power plants. With plenty of electricity, and the already existing advances in lithium batteries, we could have all-electric cars, or at least hybrid cars, saving even more oil. It all goes back to environmental extremism, and the American Trial Lawyers Assn as being the root causes of our energy problems in the US today. That we can't build nuclear power plants requires us to build coal-fired plants; hence, CO2 emmisions and global warming. The environmentalists have done it to us in so many ways.
Federal Tax is 43 cents per gallon. State and local taxes add another 8 to 35 percent, so in the U.S. the taxes you already pay on a gallon of gasoline vary from a minimum of about $0.70 per gallon to over $2.00 per gallon. Lighter cars mean more deaths in auto accidents. We should spend the money for building more nuclear plants, drilling for oil we already know about, and building massive wind farms. There is no energy shortage, just a common sense shortage.
At least two more financial reasons to use credit cards: Pay off your card each month and get the benefit of drawing interest on your money for an additional month after you spend it! AND get free airline miles. Over the last twenty years I have spent an average of about $50K per year with my Visa card; so that is a LOT of free interest and a LOT of free travel. So that benefits me about $200 per year in interest plus two free airline tickets per year. All I have do is make sure I'm not charging more than I can afford to pay off. And I'm not "rich" by any means. If you can't afford to pay off your credit card balance every month, then transfer the balance to a credit card with zero interest. I have a $15K balance on one card that I just move around to a different card each year. I'm in no hurry to pay it off since I'm making interest on that money. This is all pretty easy, and I'm no rocket scientist.
Just for those theorists following this thread, I remember that "long line" in my college transmission line class was one longer than a wavelength of the transmitted signal. At 1 GHz (125 Mbps) a wavelength is about a foot long.
Nuclear has a competitive advantage of lower cost and cleaner. the fuel is nearly inexhaustible. The industry is just prevented from building new plants because of the environmental movement, which is still apparently of the belief that nuclear energy is the work of the devil. Nuclear energy is produced (even using the technology of the older plants) for about $0.01 per kilowatt hour. The rate you pay on your utility bill is so high because of the other forms of producing electricity. Solar and Wind are not yet competitive, but are getting closer to being so. One of the few things Jimmy Carter ever did as President that was worth anything was to push this technology by providing real fiscal incentives to the consumer. If it weren't for that, we'd still be in the "dark ages" LOL. If everyone were REQUIRED to have their hot water provided by solar collectors, we wouldn't have an energy problem in the US, period (well, at least not a problem with lack of electricity). AND we wouldn't need any more energy generating plants, renewable or not.
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I'm not going to look through 428 comments to see if this is already addressed, so I'll just put it in simple numbers for you all: A very streamlined car going about 60 mph uses about 50 kilowatts. Thus, the 2 kW charge rate mentioned above would move such a car only about 2.4 minutes for each hour of charging. If you could change all the cars in the US to electric propulsion, you'd need 200 to 250 additional nuclear reactors to provide the energy for them. Wind or solar power won't get you there since it would require about 5,000 one-MW wind turbines or about 20 million square meters of solar collectors to equal the daily energy production of just one reactor. And that's not even the hard part of the problem with wind or solar, which is storage and transmission. The grid is already stressed to the breaking point with brownouts and breakdowns a daily occurence in summer. How could adding a few million electric cars not make a difference? Next time check with an engineer. And if you are an engineer, go back to school. The ONLY way to avoid serious shortages in the future is to go nuclear for our primary energy needs, and electric for our cars. And I do mean the ONLY way.
Wrong. There was a guy in our office a few years ago from Kowloon, China. He pronounced the name of his home as Cow-Roon. Kowloon is an urban area of Hong Kong. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon
Lucky you. I live in Tennessee, where only about 20% of the area (10% in my county) has availability of broadband. Now this doesn't cover satellite access, which everybody already has, but then that isn't really broadband, and it certainly isn't "affordable." With satellite I can get only 1.5 Mbps download and 50 kbps upload on a good day. And a FAP that limits upload to 5 GB per month and download to 17 GB per month. So forget about online backup. No cable, no DSL, and no EvDO - right here in the middle of the USA.
Windows System Restore does not always restore to the point prior to the last change. (This happened to me when M/S Outlook functionality was severely compromised as a result of a M/S 11/13/2009 update, and would not return to normal after a System Restore to delete the update. I had to switch to Windows Mail as my e-mail client - not nearly as good as Outlook was.) Second, you can delete all prior restore points anytime you want.
I've been unable to use Microsoft Outlook since the 11/13 update. System Restore didn't help. This is for Vista. I've had to switch to Windows Mail, which is much less user friendly.
You guys chatting about this are only touching on some of the problems with laser weapons, especially airborne ones. All the problems discussed have engineering solutions, but are difficult to implement. This is the reason development of such weapons has taken decades. There are lots of parameters with respect to how much energy is delivered to a target, but one would, for example, result in about 1 megawatt on a target for a few seconds. One megawatt in one second is about the same energy as in a hand grenade. If all this power is focused on a few square centimeters of a target, it gets REAL hot!
In general, the high amounts of money top CEO's sometimes make doesn't just drop from heaven. They earned it through risk-taking, long travel away from family, good business sense, and incredibly hard work (how does 90-100 hours per week sound?). Occasionally, but rarely, the money comes from fraud and other criminal activity. If illegal activities were properly investigated and prosecuted, we'd all be better off. Capitalism is simply a realization that no one does anything (except simple charity) without expecting to make a profit. Why would anyone start a company if they knew it was going to lose money? Nobody would -- they start companies hoping to make money -- HOW EVIL!!
Yes, it was true and possibly still is. When I lived in CA, I actually saw a cop pull over an Asian chap who was driving much slower than the speed limit, and had about 20 cars lined up behind him. Here in Tennessee the same law applies. You are required to pull over if you are traveling 10 or more miles slower than the posted limit and have 5 or more vehicles lined up behind you. Of course, tailgating is also a violation, but they don't pay any attention to that one either.
By a school? Good idea, but there are not that many schools around. I live in the sticks and have satellite access max download of 1.5 Mbps for $80/mo. The only way to pay a higher rate (that I am aware of) is to use HughesNet's higher speeds, which are available, but cost more than that per bps, much more.
Oops! I'm getting old and typos are getting more frequent. Dang it!
I only read about halfway through the thread before realizing that apparently no one has actually read Ellison's short story upon which he is basing the lawsuit. Other than mention of the word "time," his story and the Star Trek episode have virtually no resemblance. He will loose his case big time!
Most of rural America has to live with 1.5 Mbps, assuming you can afford the $80/month. So Europe is close to being 12 THOUSANDS times faster. How nice ;)
Oh, and for good measure, most of rural America also has no cable, cell phone, or DSL access either.
I don't blame the providers, who obviously have a profit objective. In fact, I don't blame anybody. But I would appreciate a national push to get cable everywhere, or at least put up satellites that can provide 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload for a reasonable fee. That would enable much of America, which would like to telecommute, to actually do it from rural America. Having millions of Americans move out of cities and into rural America would relieve pressures on all population-density caused problems like traffic and crime.
As one who worked in the missile defense community for 30 years, let me just say most of you have your heads in the sand when it comes to simple logic or the real world. The threat of retaliation is not worth much against North Korea or Iran. First, they know we wouldn't retaliate with nukes; why would we obliterate millions of innocent peasants when it is the radical leaders of these countries who would have been responsible? Wouldn't it be better to defend against an incoming warhead rather than take the hit, which could kill millions of our citizens and cause many $trillion in damage? Preventing even one nuke from hitting the U.S. saves many times more money than the defensive program could ever cost. And just having a defensive system deters an enemy from launching it because of doubt it would succeed. Second, if smuggling a nuke into the US in a suitcase were so easy, why hasn't it been done already? You can watch the Discovery Channel and see we have extensive ways of checking incoming cargo, despite only a few percent being hand-checked. And there are sure to be classified ways they can't show on the Discovery Channel. And just why would North Korea and Iran be spending so much money on their missile programs if they could just cheaply smuggle a nuke into any location they want? There is a good reason: a missile is the most reliable way to deliver a nuclear or any other kind of payload to its target. But if the US has a missile defense system, then that way becomes much less reliable. That brings up the third point. The reliability of the missile defense system isn't expected to be 10% as some have posted. A single interceptor is expected to be more like 90% effective, and the hit probability has very little to do with the intercept angles as one person suggested. The defended "footprints" of interceptors are typically as large as the entire United States. And if two or more interceptors are launched at the enemy warhead, the reliability goes way up. There are many other arguments against missile defense, such as the one that the enemy who can launch a missile all the way to the United States could also easily develop effective countermeasures. Says who? All CM do is increase the probability of success, but it isn't raised much. Our interceptor technology is designed to be way out front of the ability of anyone (including ourselves) to develop truly effective countermeasures. In fact, the MKV program, about which this whole thread is supposed to be, is one of those counter-counter measures. Namely, if the interceptor can't identify every single target in the threat cloud, that is, can't positively tell which is a decoy and which is a real target, then it directs a mini interceptor at each one it suspects could be the RV (re-entry vehicle). It goes on and on; millions of person-hours have been spent in this pursuit analyzing what might countermeasure missile defenses and what can win over such countermeasures. Actual space experiments have been going on for decades to prove these countermeasures and counter-countermeasures out. I'll stop now. I had a few other comments, but they looked too much like flame bait.
Hey guys -- Where does all the money go we pay for PMI? Isn't the purpose of that to pick up the mortgage for those who default? And the so-called bail-out money....who gets that? The banks or the people who defaulted on their loans? If it is the banks, then they got the homes AND the money. If it is the homeowner, then it is an income redistribution, rewarding irresponsible borrowing.
"The only downside to idealism is reality." I LOVE THAT!!!!!
The particular fuel used had a very low vapor pressure.
I had to read two thirds of the way through the comments before I found one with any imagination. Yours.
I have read much of this dialog and agree that wind power can be a near-term partial solution. For hardly any cost noticible at the Federal level, the government could build, say, 100,000 windmills (1 MW ea) over the next five years. They could be put in the windiest spots (eminent domain if necessary), and "sold" at a low cost to local utilities which would then operate and maintain them. This would equate to about 100 nuclear power stations (one generator = about 1 GW), and provide thousands of jobs for the five or so years to construct them. Even if each windmill cost $1 million (I think they are much less than that), the cost per year to build them would only be $20 billion, roughly 1/3 of the amount Americans spend on cigarettes annually. If we all then go for hybrid vehicles, driving down the cost of oil, our energy problems would be solved. Of course, some group would create a new problem, but that's another story....
Here is a fact sheet among all this hyperbole. www.gunowners.org/fs0404.htm
$3 Trillion disappeared w/o a trace from the DOD budget? Prior to 9/11 that would represent about 10 years of DOD's budget. Did you not notice the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or Coast Guard during those ten years? Deployed to and keeping the peace in about 30 countries world-wide. Developing new systems so that when other countries have the capability to wage war on us (like China or Russia) we will be able to win handily, or better yet, we can intimidate them by such overwhelming superiority they will choose NOT to pursue activities contrary to the United States. I would rather the United States be superior militarily than some other country. BTW, every dollar spent by the DOD is traceable via Program Element. That's EVERY DOLLAR. Don't believe what you see in the liberal media about funds disappearing.
Oil has dropped in price a little lately, but at $100 per barrell is $2.38 per gallon, and this is the price before it is shipped to the US, refined, distributed, and sold, never mind some minor profit at each end. After you add taxes, you are at $3.00+ per gallon. The large profits made by oil companies are only large in absolute terms; as a percentage of sales they are about 5%, WAY less than, say, Wal-Mart. People pay more for gasoline because they HAVE to, not because they are WILLING to. Willingness implies other than coersion. Even when gasoline tops $4.00 per gallon, like it already does in CA, consumption will not decrease significantly because people still have to get to work. If we opened ANWR and our off-shore proven reserves to drilling, we'd be swiming in oil, and the foreign price-controllers would have to reduce their prices. We could then keep these savings in this country, and invest in wind farms and nuclear power plants. With plenty of electricity, and the already existing advances in lithium batteries, we could have all-electric cars, or at least hybrid cars, saving even more oil. It all goes back to environmental extremism, and the American Trial Lawyers Assn as being the root causes of our energy problems in the US today. That we can't build nuclear power plants requires us to build coal-fired plants; hence, CO2 emmisions and global warming. The environmentalists have done it to us in so many ways.
Federal Tax is 43 cents per gallon. State and local taxes add another 8 to 35 percent, so in the U.S. the taxes you already pay on a gallon of gasoline vary from a minimum of about $0.70 per gallon to over $2.00 per gallon. Lighter cars mean more deaths in auto accidents. We should spend the money for building more nuclear plants, drilling for oil we already know about, and building massive wind farms. There is no energy shortage, just a common sense shortage.
At least two more financial reasons to use credit cards: Pay off your card each month and get the benefit of drawing interest on your money for an additional month after you spend it! AND get free airline miles. Over the last twenty years I have spent an average of about $50K per year with my Visa card; so that is a LOT of free interest and a LOT of free travel. So that benefits me about $200 per year in interest plus two free airline tickets per year. All I have do is make sure I'm not charging more than I can afford to pay off. And I'm not "rich" by any means. If you can't afford to pay off your credit card balance every month, then transfer the balance to a credit card with zero interest. I have a $15K balance on one card that I just move around to a different card each year. I'm in no hurry to pay it off since I'm making interest on that money. This is all pretty easy, and I'm no rocket scientist.
Just for those theorists following this thread, I remember that "long line" in my college transmission line class was one longer than a wavelength of the transmitted signal. At 1 GHz (125 Mbps) a wavelength is about a foot long.
Nuclear has a competitive advantage of lower cost and cleaner. the fuel is nearly inexhaustible. The industry is just prevented from building new plants because of the environmental movement, which is still apparently of the belief that nuclear energy is the work of the devil. Nuclear energy is produced (even using the technology of the older plants) for about $0.01 per kilowatt hour. The rate you pay on your utility bill is so high because of the other forms of producing electricity. Solar and Wind are not yet competitive, but are getting closer to being so. One of the few things Jimmy Carter ever did as President that was worth anything was to push this technology by providing real fiscal incentives to the consumer. If it weren't for that, we'd still be in the "dark ages" LOL. If everyone were REQUIRED to have their hot water provided by solar collectors, we wouldn't have an energy problem in the US, period (well, at least not a problem with lack of electricity). AND we wouldn't need any more energy generating plants, renewable or not.