For what it's worth I'm firmly in the anti-alarmist category and don't make a fuss over silly things that are otherwise labeled a crisis for media consumption.
That said isn't getting weapons grade Pu or U the most difficult part of building a nuclear bomb? I'm not talking about the highly refined Fission-fusion-fission 50Mt or man-portable devices. But given a modest budget and the internets it wouldn't be THAT difficult to build a Manhatten-project era nuclear device...assuming you had sufficient quantity of enriched material.
People seem to automatically assume that obscurity (or ocean depth) equals safety. Then you hear about 4 college kids with a budget of 3 grand who design an automated SAR diving robot. I'm not saying MIT will be a nuclear power next week but for all the insane amounts of money we spend doing cavity searches on grandma at the airport...maybe we should consider that eventually another non-dumb terrorist cell will come along.
Try reading a book in the dark. Apparently billions upon billions of books are defective too.
I've read on an LCD in the dark, it tends to kill my eyes even worse than staring at an LCD 8-10 hours a day in a lit room.
I used to read books on my laptop all the time. Once I got an eInk reader I stopped almost entirely.
Honestly the biggest fault with eInk is the inability to quickly 'flip' through pages. I love reading novels but would not be as happy to use it for textbooks.
I remember reading that UPS was looking into this for their delivery trucks. Personally I think USPS would have even more use - those idiots literally drive from house to house in my area including starting and turning off the car to get out and walk up my lawn. Seriously...it's the dumbest thing i've seen in a very long time.
Anyhow, delivery vehicles where there's plenty of available space, not as much concern about weight, and lots of stop-and-go driving this seems like a great idea.
Ignoring the technical challenges of getting a WiFi transceiver into something the size of a SIM card - how exactly is the SIM card trading data with the cell phone to begin with?
Cell phones have an open back door to their wireless data channel through the SIM interface? One that will, without software on the phone, just allow you to transport data?
Even if you CAN talk through the SIM card interface and for data around how ever you want - how fast is that interface? It's meant to read off SIM cards that hold a tiny amount of data. So little most internet speeds could transmit the entire contents in a single second quite easily. Or is the SIM card supposed to have some kind of BT transceiver in it as well to tie to the cell phone?
There's no detail in the linked article and...given that cell carriers lock down this stuff in the phone I fail to see how it's possible even if the miniaturization is practical.
So let me get this straight. They upgraded from a limited management Mac environment where "power users" were doing administration to a fully managed/secured Windows one and it cost more?
I'm not saying their implementation was ideal or even correct but this is far from apples to apples.
Enterprise pricing? Only if your purchasing dept is really bad at negotiating. You can easily get a good, solid enterprise PC with 3yr warranty for about 750. This is without cutting corners and buying clearance/used stuff.
People like to compare Apple's offering to some other fancy PCs and with a bit of fudging make the numbers about equal. They never take into account that Apple's discount tier is minimal while other major providers (Dell, HP, etc) offer substantial discounts when you start buying in the $100k+ range a year.
On a small scale, sure you can use apple tools. Enterprise solutions are going to need additional tools. Jamf being the most prominent example. It's not just the OS package, but the easy of deployment + configurability + application packaging + app deployment + inventory etc.
You most certainly do not have everything you need out of the box for enterprise level work. Small to perhaps mid-size biz? Sure. Beyond that it's not practical and even Apple will tell you so.
I'll leave the debate over which OS is better for another day but it's funny that you take a position that Apple is *too good* to be bothered with enterprise. There's huge bucks in enterprise.
OWA is the old version... but 10.6 supports EWS which you'll get with the new exchange builds. You'll find many enterprise level companies will enable that even if they only allow it to be accessed internally.
Compared to Entourage in Office 2k8 - this actually works. Entourage has a crashing bug for which MS has no fix other than 'upgrade to the new office version when it comes out'.
They don't even want to force you to report back to them - they want to do the reporting themselves!
I work in an enterprise level environment as well and there's no chance - ZERO - that I'd ever want to allow something that I have no control over sitting out there possibly disabling computers at it's whim. MS can't even guarantee their OS will run correctly, you expect me to believe this enforcement tool will work on top of a bug-prone OS?
Remember Spore? It was released with some of the most restrictive DRM to date. PRIOR to it's release date it was easily found on P2P, cracked, and with literally 10,000+ seeders. This stopped piracy in what way?
Oddly enough the backlash from legal, paid users was so harsh they stepped back from that DRM scheme.
Of all the popular products out there only the PS3 comes to mind as not being fairly quickly cracked (though I read something recently this may have been done). Everything from hardware-interlocks (dongles) of CAD/CAM, device OS restrictions (iphone, droid, etc.), gaming consoles locks (NES to Wii), serial numbers, online registration (windows activation, etc.), DVD/Blu-Ray have all been hacked/cracked.
Funny thing though - Apple is *notorious* about controlling your experience with their hardware and software yet their OS updates have no restrictions, no serial numbers, no registration. It's the honor system that you don't share the DVD with all your friends. Plus there isn't multiple versions of the same OS to worry about *AND* it's cheaper than the least expensive Win7 build. I'm not a applefag but seriously - take a hint MS.
Let's be perfectly honest. With the number of completely stupid, contradictory, and vague laws on the books...you and I both are probably breaking some law or another RIGHT NOW.
I wouldn't hesitate to say that a cop would find some violation or another and then bang you for this law. It's like walking up to a totally peaceful person and arresting him/her. Of COURSE they're going to question it when they legitimately haven't done anything wrong...except now they're resisting and the cop has a valid charge.
I don't doubt this law will be thrown out as unconstitutional but I have great sympathy for the poor schlep that gets dragged through the mud and has his life turned upside-down in the process.
Funny you should mention that...OSX is actually worse at leaving things running unintentionally:)
However with the iPad when she wants to go check that website while she's writing something...oh...wait, your document closed? Your browser isn't on the page you spent 15 minutes drilling down to?
No offense to you or your wife, but if she wants to use a computer she needs to learn how. If she refuses, she perpetuates her frustration when things don't work as she things they should. If she really never *ever* refers back to old windows then tell her to hit the X instead of the _
I think the iPad will be more useful as an output device...a la ST:TNG pads. But it's limited usefulness in other regards makes it a very expensive toy that's too big to carry everywhere. Instead of being a 'just right' middle ground i think it's a 'just wrong' small and large product. Heck, even my 1st gen Sony e-reader has a headphones jack.
Yeah, we are not carbon or water are we? Of course we are conductive. We just need to be grounded. However, I imagine the scientists insulate the area in such a way that the metal is grounded and the floor humans stand on is insulated. I remember one time walking about one hundred yards from huge electrical wiring that was about five stories up. However the ground was usually near saturated in the surrounding fields. You could hear an electrical buzz in the area, and get a little tingly zap from any metal surface that is in contact with the ground. My guess is the height of the tower, the humidity, and ground water nullified the insulating properties for the electrical wires, therefore allowing some leakage through the metal towers to the ground. With the ground water being high and metal objects being a great conductor and us being so conductive (snicker), when we walked near (without rubber soles) and touched metal, and thus being grounded caused a discharge. We aren't conductive or anything though? Right? Carbon and water brah!
I'm sorry but do you have *any* clue what you're talking about?
First off, carbon and water are conductive but not exceptionally so.
Being grounded has NOTHING to do with conductivity.
Your suggestion about insulating the floor is quaint, but unrelated. This device uses an electromagnet to induce a current in a conductive material...which makes that material a magnet...which is repelled from the electromagnet. There's no current flow between the electromagnet and target metal. aka no lightning bolts
As for your example about high voltage wires...to start those wires are NOT insulated and the rest is cute but unrelated to multi-tesla-field electromagnets. But to bring a slightly more related talking point up...you know what a MRI is? Yeah, you lay inside a strong magnetic field. The machine that surrounds you? One big freaking 'uge superconducting electromagnet. Somehow it manages to avoid killing us.
So while humans *can* conduct current our bodies are more akin to a resistor.
And add the cost of "standardization" to all mp3 players? They'll all have to be certified? Just to have everyone who wants loud music immediately turn off the protection?
Or they could... I don't know... let people make their own decisions OR let parents educate their kids OR leave all the retarded "you might hurt your ears" literature that every audio device already includes...
Really, this is just all nanny state crap. Utterly unnecessary and a waste of time and effort that could be better spent on things that actually MATTER.
Really...$100k to remove seti from 5000 machines?...because I *REALLY* want that job. It's an hour of scripting and a few days (at most) to test. Push it out over a weekend, run an inventory...follow up on the few failures.
To say Seti "fucked up the computers" is pure BS. It may have caused problems with their operation but it's a simple, essentially self-contained, program. Remove it and you're back to where you started...no re-image needed.
As for the rest of the cabling "problems" I suggest you walk a mile in a tech's shoes. Who's to say the guy's supposed to work during the 3 months that school is closed too? Get off your high horse.
Actually it has less to do with the land than it does the post-growing processing. Switch grass and other similar crops are far superior in energy in -> energy out ratio.
Corn -> ethanol is actually one of the *worst* net positive biofuels.
I'm a fan of solar power actually. I fully understand that solar insolation greatly exceeds our power needs.
*BUT* collecting it effectively is not a small task. It's not even a daunting task, it's something that exceeds any undertaking mankind has ever attempted.
Let's work some generous numbers. Solar insolation we'll call 1.5kw/m^2, PV efficiency 15% (or concentrated solar thermal), and duty cycle 66% (yearly avg 8 hours of darkness) to pick round numbers. For the record I'm erring in favor of solar power.
1500w/m^2 *.15 *.66 = ~150w/m^2 or 1.5*10^2w / m^2
Global demand averages 15TW or 1.5*10^12w
1.5*10^12 / (1.5*10^2/m^2) = 1*10^10 m^2
Sq Km for convenience (1 / 1*10^6)
1*10^4 Km^2
10,000 sq kilometers or a bit under 4000 square miles of solar cells... that's a LOT of cells
It doesn't look expensive, it IS expensive. At $4/watt so we're talking 60 trillion dollars plus plant costs - this isn't DIY solar and economy-of-scale hasn't applied to government in a long time. That's 4x the 2008 GDP for the USA and about the GDP for the entire world.
Now, environmental pollution has soft and hard costs but I'm pretty sure they're not equal to the worldwide GDP. Going further on pollution costs...nuclear produces FAR less pollution than a coal plant. ~1 pound of surplus military Pu or U produces the same power as about 3,000,000 pounds of coal. To burn coal you need 4x that weight in oxygen (or 20x of actual air) so increase your waste output by that much more. This reply is long enough so suffice it to say that just the particulate matter from a coal plant that's NOT captured exceeds the waste from a modern nuclear plant. Note, I said modern...the 30-40 year old designs we're running today aren't quite as pretty but still better than coal.
How much waste comes from producing a solar cell? Times 4000 sq miles? How about when we run out of trace elements? Then replace them every ~25 years? I wonder if we'd finish the project before we had to start replacing the first cells that were installed.
Wow, you really *DON'T* get it. You don't understand how mutations and transmission and inoculation work in the slightest. You've just seen too many news shows preaching paranoia.
First - Influenza has MANY strains. H1N1 is simply one of the many strains...mutated from another. So guess what? Mutations have happened and continue to happen. Nothing says that H1N1 in particular is going to mutate into something especially deadly...and if it DOES there's a very good chance that existing vaccinations won't work on the mutated strain.
So sure, spend $Billions on a vaccination that is useful to a tiny percentage of the population and will only help a very small percentage of that avoid getting sick and will only save the lives of an even smaller percentage of that number who would actually die and other post-infection medical treatments wouldn't help. And it all fails to protect against your crystal-ball predicted mutation anyhow.
And to be a picky pain in the ass, a FLUE is for a fireplace. Also, what does out 'current economy' have to do with spreading the flu? If anything travel is DOWN, vacation stays are DOWN, public performances/gatherings are DOWN...and the list goes on. Being out of work means more people stay home and DON'T concentrate in offices. Only a fraction of those actually have to go into unemployment offices at a given time.
The 1918 flu pandemic (i assume you're referring to) has very little in common with the current "epidemic". The current swine flu is generally only fatal to very young, very old, or immunocompromised people whereas the 1918 pandemic had a significant mortality rate in the 25-34 age bracket. Oh, and there have been a *FEW* other advances in medicine in the last 91 years.
So your entire FUD-ridden post is based on the assumption that H1N1 will mutate (very likely) into a much more deadly strain (very unlikely, especially to say this particular strain will have a particular mutation), and the current vaccination will still be useful to prevent it (extremely unlikely). About the only thing you got right is that the flu mutates.
Actually, new plants are on the table for the first time in ~20 years. Companies would invest millions in design and 10-100x that in initial purchase contracts if they didn't expect a good chance of finishing the project.
You're right though, initial design to completion is FAR too long and our only current choice is more fossil fueled plants or extending the life of existing nuclear plants. Running plants at 120% isn't much of an issue if 30-40 year newer technology makes that safe.
But, as someone else pointed out, nuclear is only about 10% of the power in the US. France, IIRC, has the highest at about 40%.
You do understand that a coal plants produces billions of tons of waste, and an appreciable amount of that is toxic chemicals, right? Also a fun factoid - Coal plants release more radiation than nuclear plants. Go look it up.
In addition, you're perpetuating more FUD by linking unrelated facts. Chernobyl had *NOTHING* to do with processing nuclear waste. It had everything to do with taking every safety system offline, then having poorly trained staff incorrectly running hugely dangerous tests on a totally unsafe reactor design and not understanding/reacting properly when things went wrong. More homework for you.
Someone else mentioned reprocessing which is very true. More advanced reactors also reduce the amount of waste but can produce additional "dangerous" nuclear fuel so they're looked down upon. Never mind these same reactors actually *make* fuel while producing their energy output, essentially eliminating the possibility of running out of fuel in the next 1000+ years.
Nuclear power was anything BUT a failure. Every other technology since though...
Solar is great, except it's 10x too expensive and producing the solar cells isn't an especially 'green' process. Biofuels are a nifty idea. Let's starve the population to produce ~5% more fuel oil. Never mind that political motivation has left us with horribly inefficient corn-based ethanol instead of several better options and it's driven up the price of staple food by something like 25-50%. Hydrogen was a joke because our president at the time didn't understand the difference between energy generation and energy storage/transport Hydro is great except for the part where building a dam destroys the local ecology and there's simply not enough places where it's effective. Wave power is cute but quirky and will fall victim to people preserving the sea life if it ever gets beyond the conceptual testing phase.
Well i'm with you on most of it...except the greens supporting good things.
All we seem to hear is 1) Stop doing this-and-that because it's bad and B) 'This' magical technology is the panacea... at 10x the cost and in 5-15 years when it goes from laboratory process to initial commercial production... and another 10 for large-scale usage.
I understand that cleaner generation plants, cars, etc. are a good thing but the cost-reward balance is often so far off I can do nothing but shake my head. Remember the father that backed a large SUV over his child? They fought (probably still are) to get a law passed *requiring* every SUV have a back-up camera in it. Never mind that many children aren't visible behind a normal size CAR. So because one person is a complete IDIOT... we should put a ~$1000+ camera system in *every* car? Funny, my parents just made sure they could see each of us before backing out of the driveway when I was a kid.
Kinda OT but related. Swine flu vaccinations - about 10^5 people die from the (regular) flu every year. Swine flu has claimed what, 10^2? Yet how many millions/billions have been spend on this vaccination? For a sickness that's generally NOT deadly to healthy people? Come on people, stop living in fear and look at the big picture.
Yup, and about a million other things that aren't as perfect as a little baby. You realize though that you played into the OP's point perfectly...right?
So let's be realistic for...oh...30 seconds or so. The NIMBYism in the US has left us in a position where energy demand is outstripping production (well, it has but we import). Sure, an oil rig isn't ideal for your romantic sunset on the beach but if it's that have gas up at $10/gallon maybe we should give it some though. Sure the teary case of a child with lead poisoning hits all kinds of sore points but would you rather shut down the smelting plants and stop construction on anything containing steel or aluminium?
Now, I'll give a lot more weight to things that cause actual *problems* like mercury pollution. The cries over preserving the skyline/horizon at the expense of progress/growth are getting a bit much. On long island they want to build a rather tall hotel building. It will be the tallest building on the island...and people are all bent out of shape about it. Ok...except the *current* tallest structure is a smokestack. really people!
So...give us some technology that's available today and is even reasonably cost competitive and "clean". If you don't like the current game, come up with some new ones to play or STFU and don't play at all.
You can buy a *good* laptop for what some of these phones cost "retail"
The pricing for phones is just kept artificially high because there's not a large demand for non-contract phones. Yet.
The new TMO plans will hopefully work to change things. If nothing else, you can directly see the cost of "contract phones" and also STOP paying the surcharge after you're out of contract.
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For what it's worth I'm firmly in the anti-alarmist category and don't make a fuss over silly things that are otherwise labeled a crisis for media consumption.
That said isn't getting weapons grade Pu or U the most difficult part of building a nuclear bomb? I'm not talking about the highly refined Fission-fusion-fission 50Mt or man-portable devices. But given a modest budget and the internets it wouldn't be THAT difficult to build a Manhatten-project era nuclear device...assuming you had sufficient quantity of enriched material.
People seem to automatically assume that obscurity (or ocean depth) equals safety. Then you hear about 4 college kids with a budget of 3 grand who design an automated SAR diving robot. I'm not saying MIT will be a nuclear power next week but for all the insane amounts of money we spend doing cavity searches on grandma at the airport...maybe we should consider that eventually another non-dumb terrorist cell will come along.
Try reading a book in the dark. Apparently billions upon billions of books are defective too.
I've read on an LCD in the dark, it tends to kill my eyes even worse than staring at an LCD 8-10 hours a day in a lit room.
I used to read books on my laptop all the time. Once I got an eInk reader I stopped almost entirely.
Honestly the biggest fault with eInk is the inability to quickly 'flip' through pages. I love reading novels but would not be as happy to use it for textbooks.
I remember reading that UPS was looking into this for their delivery trucks. Personally I think USPS would have even more use - those idiots literally drive from house to house in my area including starting and turning off the car to get out and walk up my lawn. Seriously...it's the dumbest thing i've seen in a very long time.
Anyhow, delivery vehicles where there's plenty of available space, not as much concern about weight, and lots of stop-and-go driving this seems like a great idea.
Ignoring the technical challenges of getting a WiFi transceiver into something the size of a SIM card - how exactly is the SIM card trading data with the cell phone to begin with?
Cell phones have an open back door to their wireless data channel through the SIM interface? One that will, without software on the phone, just allow you to transport data?
Even if you CAN talk through the SIM card interface and for data around how ever you want - how fast is that interface? It's meant to read off SIM cards that hold a tiny amount of data. So little most internet speeds could transmit the entire contents in a single second quite easily. Or is the SIM card supposed to have some kind of BT transceiver in it as well to tie to the cell phone?
There's no detail in the linked article and...given that cell carriers lock down this stuff in the phone I fail to see how it's possible even if the miniaturization is practical.
So let me get this straight. They upgraded from a limited management Mac environment where "power users" were doing administration to a fully managed/secured Windows one and it cost more?
I'm not saying their implementation was ideal or even correct but this is far from apples to apples.
Enterprise pricing? Only if your purchasing dept is really bad at negotiating. You can easily get a good, solid enterprise PC with 3yr warranty for about 750. This is without cutting corners and buying clearance/used stuff.
People like to compare Apple's offering to some other fancy PCs and with a bit of fudging make the numbers about equal. They never take into account that Apple's discount tier is minimal while other major providers (Dell, HP, etc) offer substantial discounts when you start buying in the $100k+ range a year.
On a small scale, sure you can use apple tools. Enterprise solutions are going to need additional tools. Jamf being the most prominent example. It's not just the OS package, but the easy of deployment + configurability + application packaging + app deployment + inventory etc.
You most certainly do not have everything you need out of the box for enterprise level work. Small to perhaps mid-size biz? Sure. Beyond that it's not practical and even Apple will tell you so.
I'll leave the debate over which OS is better for another day but it's funny that you take a position that Apple is *too good* to be bothered with enterprise. There's huge bucks in enterprise.
OWA is the old version ... but 10.6 supports EWS which you'll get with the new exchange builds. You'll find many enterprise level companies will enable that even if they only allow it to be accessed internally.
Compared to Entourage in Office 2k8 - this actually works. Entourage has a crashing bug for which MS has no fix other than 'upgrade to the new office version when it comes out'.
They don't even want to force you to report back to them - they want to do the reporting themselves!
I work in an enterprise level environment as well and there's no chance - ZERO - that I'd ever want to allow something that I have no control over sitting out there possibly disabling computers at it's whim. MS can't even guarantee their OS will run correctly, you expect me to believe this enforcement tool will work on top of a bug-prone OS?
MS licensing is a pain and this won't help.
Dead on.
Remember Spore? It was released with some of the most restrictive DRM to date. PRIOR to it's release date it was easily found on P2P, cracked, and with literally 10,000+ seeders. This stopped piracy in what way?
Oddly enough the backlash from legal, paid users was so harsh they stepped back from that DRM scheme.
Of all the popular products out there only the PS3 comes to mind as not being fairly quickly cracked (though I read something recently this may have been done). Everything from hardware-interlocks (dongles) of CAD/CAM, device OS restrictions (iphone, droid, etc.), gaming consoles locks (NES to Wii), serial numbers, online registration (windows activation, etc.), DVD/Blu-Ray have all been hacked/cracked.
Funny thing though - Apple is *notorious* about controlling your experience with their hardware and software yet their OS updates have no restrictions, no serial numbers, no registration. It's the honor system that you don't share the DVD with all your friends. Plus there isn't multiple versions of the same OS to worry about *AND* it's cheaper than the least expensive Win7 build. I'm not a applefag but seriously - take a hint MS.
I'm no history buff, but doesn't the constitution allow for citizens to modify, change, and or even replace it?
You know, the whole "for the people, BY the people" thing.
Let's be perfectly honest. With the number of completely stupid, contradictory, and vague laws on the books...you and I both are probably breaking some law or another RIGHT NOW.
I wouldn't hesitate to say that a cop would find some violation or another and then bang you for this law. It's like walking up to a totally peaceful person and arresting him/her. Of COURSE they're going to question it when they legitimately haven't done anything wrong...except now they're resisting and the cop has a valid charge.
I don't doubt this law will be thrown out as unconstitutional but I have great sympathy for the poor schlep that gets dragged through the mud and has his life turned upside-down in the process.
Sure, it's a big iPod...with no headphones jack?
Funny you should mention that...OSX is actually worse at leaving things running unintentionally :)
However with the iPad when she wants to go check that website while she's writing something...oh...wait, your document closed? Your browser isn't on the page you spent 15 minutes drilling down to?
No offense to you or your wife, but if she wants to use a computer she needs to learn how. If she refuses, she perpetuates her frustration when things don't work as she things they should. If she really never *ever* refers back to old windows then tell her to hit the X instead of the _
I think the iPad will be more useful as an output device...a la ST:TNG pads. But it's limited usefulness in other regards makes it a very expensive toy that's too big to carry everywhere. Instead of being a 'just right' middle ground i think it's a 'just wrong' small and large product. Heck, even my 1st gen Sony e-reader has a headphones jack.
I'm sorry but do you have *any* clue what you're talking about?
First off, carbon and water are conductive but not exceptionally so.
Being grounded has NOTHING to do with conductivity.
Your suggestion about insulating the floor is quaint, but unrelated. This device uses an electromagnet to induce a current in a conductive material...which makes that material a magnet...which is repelled from the electromagnet. There's no current flow between the electromagnet and target metal. aka no lightning bolts
As for your example about high voltage wires...to start those wires are NOT insulated and the rest is cute but unrelated to multi-tesla-field electromagnets. But to bring a slightly more related talking point up...you know what a MRI is? Yeah, you lay inside a strong magnetic field. The machine that surrounds you? One big freaking 'uge superconducting electromagnet. Somehow it manages to avoid killing us.
So while humans *can* conduct current our bodies are more akin to a resistor.
And add the cost of "standardization" to all mp3 players? They'll all have to be certified? Just to have everyone who wants loud music immediately turn off the protection?
Or they could ... I don't know ... let people make their own decisions OR let parents educate their kids OR leave all the retarded "you might hurt your ears" literature that every audio device already includes...
Really, this is just all nanny state crap. Utterly unnecessary and a waste of time and effort that could be better spent on things that actually MATTER.
Really...$100k to remove seti from 5000 machines? ...because I *REALLY* want that job. It's an hour of scripting and a few days (at most) to test. Push it out over a weekend, run an inventory...follow up on the few failures.
To say Seti "fucked up the computers" is pure BS. It may have caused problems with their operation but it's a simple, essentially self-contained, program. Remove it and you're back to where you started...no re-image needed.
As for the rest of the cabling "problems" I suggest you walk a mile in a tech's shoes. Who's to say the guy's supposed to work during the 3 months that school is closed too? Get off your high horse.
Actually it has less to do with the land than it does the post-growing processing. Switch grass and other similar crops are far superior in energy in -> energy out ratio.
Corn -> ethanol is actually one of the *worst* net positive biofuels.
I'm a fan of solar power actually. I fully understand that solar insolation greatly exceeds our power needs.
*BUT* collecting it effectively is not a small task. It's not even a daunting task, it's something that exceeds any undertaking mankind has ever attempted.
Let's work some generous numbers. Solar insolation we'll call 1.5kw/m^2, PV efficiency 15% (or concentrated solar thermal), and duty cycle 66% (yearly avg 8 hours of darkness) to pick round numbers. For the record I'm erring in favor of solar power.
1500w/m^2 * .15 * .66 = ~150w/m^2 or 1.5*10^2w / m^2
Global demand averages 15TW or 1.5*10^12w
1.5*10^12 / (1.5*10^2/m^2) = 1*10^10 m^2
Sq Km for convenience (1 / 1*10^6)
1*10^4 Km^2
10,000 sq kilometers or a bit under 4000 square miles of solar cells ... that's a LOT of cells
It doesn't look expensive, it IS expensive. At $4/watt so we're talking 60 trillion dollars plus plant costs - this isn't DIY solar and economy-of-scale hasn't applied to government in a long time. That's 4x the 2008 GDP for the USA and about the GDP for the entire world.
Now, environmental pollution has soft and hard costs but I'm pretty sure they're not equal to the worldwide GDP. Going further on pollution costs...nuclear produces FAR less pollution than a coal plant. ~1 pound of surplus military Pu or U produces the same power as about 3,000,000 pounds of coal. To burn coal you need 4x that weight in oxygen (or 20x of actual air) so increase your waste output by that much more. This reply is long enough so suffice it to say that just the particulate matter from a coal plant that's NOT captured exceeds the waste from a modern nuclear plant. Note, I said modern...the 30-40 year old designs we're running today aren't quite as pretty but still better than coal.
How much waste comes from producing a solar cell? Times 4000 sq miles? How about when we run out of trace elements? Then replace them every ~25 years? I wonder if we'd finish the project before we had to start replacing the first cells that were installed.
Wow, you really *DON'T* get it. You don't understand how mutations and transmission and inoculation work in the slightest. You've just seen too many news shows preaching paranoia.
First - Influenza has MANY strains. H1N1 is simply one of the many strains...mutated from another. So guess what? Mutations have happened and continue to happen. Nothing says that H1N1 in particular is going to mutate into something especially deadly...and if it DOES there's a very good chance that existing vaccinations won't work on the mutated strain.
So sure, spend $Billions on a vaccination that is useful to a tiny percentage of the population and will only help a very small percentage of that avoid getting sick and will only save the lives of an even smaller percentage of that number who would actually die and other post-infection medical treatments wouldn't help. And it all fails to protect against your crystal-ball predicted mutation anyhow.
And to be a picky pain in the ass, a FLUE is for a fireplace. Also, what does out 'current economy' have to do with spreading the flu? If anything travel is DOWN, vacation stays are DOWN, public performances/gatherings are DOWN...and the list goes on. Being out of work means more people stay home and DON'T concentrate in offices. Only a fraction of those actually have to go into unemployment offices at a given time.
The 1918 flu pandemic (i assume you're referring to) has very little in common with the current "epidemic". The current swine flu is generally only fatal to very young, very old, or immunocompromised people whereas the 1918 pandemic had a significant mortality rate in the 25-34 age bracket. Oh, and there have been a *FEW* other advances in medicine in the last 91 years.
So your entire FUD-ridden post is based on the assumption that H1N1 will mutate (very likely) into a much more deadly strain (very unlikely, especially to say this particular strain will have a particular mutation), and the current vaccination will still be useful to prevent it (extremely unlikely). About the only thing you got right is that the flu mutates.
Actually, new plants are on the table for the first time in ~20 years. Companies would invest millions in design and 10-100x that in initial purchase contracts if they didn't expect a good chance of finishing the project.
You're right though, initial design to completion is FAR too long and our only current choice is more fossil fueled plants or extending the life of existing nuclear plants. Running plants at 120% isn't much of an issue if 30-40 year newer technology makes that safe.
But, as someone else pointed out, nuclear is only about 10% of the power in the US. France, IIRC, has the highest at about 40%.
You do understand that a coal plants produces billions of tons of waste, and an appreciable amount of that is toxic chemicals, right? Also a fun factoid - Coal plants release more radiation than nuclear plants. Go look it up.
In addition, you're perpetuating more FUD by linking unrelated facts. Chernobyl had *NOTHING* to do with processing nuclear waste. It had everything to do with taking every safety system offline, then having poorly trained staff incorrectly running hugely dangerous tests on a totally unsafe reactor design and not understanding/reacting properly when things went wrong. More homework for you.
Someone else mentioned reprocessing which is very true. More advanced reactors also reduce the amount of waste but can produce additional "dangerous" nuclear fuel so they're looked down upon. Never mind these same reactors actually *make* fuel while producing their energy output, essentially eliminating the possibility of running out of fuel in the next 1000+ years.
Nuclear power was anything BUT a failure. Every other technology since though...
Solar is great, except it's 10x too expensive and producing the solar cells isn't an especially 'green' process.
Biofuels are a nifty idea. Let's starve the population to produce ~5% more fuel oil. Never mind that political motivation has left us with horribly inefficient corn-based ethanol instead of several better options and it's driven up the price of staple food by something like 25-50%.
Hydrogen was a joke because our president at the time didn't understand the difference between energy generation and energy storage/transport
Hydro is great except for the part where building a dam destroys the local ecology and there's simply not enough places where it's effective.
Wave power is cute but quirky and will fall victim to people preserving the sea life if it ever gets beyond the conceptual testing phase.
Well i'm with you on most of it...except the greens supporting good things.
All we seem to hear is 1) Stop doing this-and-that because it's bad and B) 'This' magical technology is the panacea ... at 10x the cost and in 5-15 years when it goes from laboratory process to initial commercial production ... and another 10 for large-scale usage.
I understand that cleaner generation plants, cars, etc. are a good thing but the cost-reward balance is often so far off I can do nothing but shake my head. Remember the father that backed a large SUV over his child? They fought (probably still are) to get a law passed *requiring* every SUV have a back-up camera in it. Never mind that many children aren't visible behind a normal size CAR. So because one person is a complete IDIOT ... we should put a ~$1000+ camera system in *every* car? Funny, my parents just made sure they could see each of us before backing out of the driveway when I was a kid.
Kinda OT but related. Swine flu vaccinations - about 10^5 people die from the (regular) flu every year. Swine flu has claimed what, 10^2? Yet how many millions/billions have been spend on this vaccination? For a sickness that's generally NOT deadly to healthy people? Come on people, stop living in fear and look at the big picture.
Yup, and about a million other things that aren't as perfect as a little baby. You realize though that you played into the OP's point perfectly...right?
So let's be realistic for...oh...30 seconds or so. The NIMBYism in the US has left us in a position where energy demand is outstripping production (well, it has but we import). Sure, an oil rig isn't ideal for your romantic sunset on the beach but if it's that have gas up at $10/gallon maybe we should give it some though. Sure the teary case of a child with lead poisoning hits all kinds of sore points but would you rather shut down the smelting plants and stop construction on anything containing steel or aluminium?
Now, I'll give a lot more weight to things that cause actual *problems* like mercury pollution. The cries over preserving the skyline/horizon at the expense of progress/growth are getting a bit much. On long island they want to build a rather tall hotel building. It will be the tallest building on the island...and people are all bent out of shape about it. Ok...except the *current* tallest structure is a smokestack. really people!
So...give us some technology that's available today and is even reasonably cost competitive and "clean". If you don't like the current game, come up with some new ones to play or STFU and don't play at all.
It's not just VZW but anyhow...
You can buy a *good* laptop for what some of these phones cost "retail"
The pricing for phones is just kept artificially high because there's not a large demand for non-contract phones. Yet.
The new TMO plans will hopefully work to change things. If nothing else, you can directly see the cost of "contract phones" and also STOP paying the surcharge after you're out of contract.