I agree, but currently the alternative sources are so far away from feasibility that we need artificial market forces to drive them into widespread use. Increased competition lured by market demand will drive down costs more quickly. The obvious political gain of course is to free us from the clutches of the oil and gas industry.
Sorry, the payback needs to be under 3 years to have any chance at wide spread acceptance. Here's the cold hard reality: until we tax the living shit out of fossil fuel consumption, alternative energy sources will never gain traction.
Perhaps the rating of my post is an indicator of why this hasn't happened and why solar and other alternate forms of energy continue to be fringe technology. Remember when gas was over $4 per gallon? All of a sudden you could see all kinds of "green tech" projects cropping up because the dollars made sense. Then guess what? Oil came down when they realized their franchise was threatened and all the projects stopped or significantly slowed down.
Until this tax happens we are all living in denial and continue to be controlled by the fossil fuel industry.
You have to tax conventional energy to skew the demand curve. There should be a multi-dollar a gallon gas tax and a steep tax on grid-based electric. Solar would come into vogue right quick.
Gartner has published a great curve that largely explains this phenomenon. We start with a new technology (trigger), and it's promise is almost limitless. It rises rapidly until it peaks at the height of inflated expectations. Then people realize the hype and we slip into the trough of disillusionment and many times this kills the technology, but if it's viable, it then settles into a steadily rising slope of enlightenment that, over time, becomes the broad productive deployment of the technology. Classic case: the internet, that went through this cycle through the 90s, hit the trough in 2000/2001, and is now broadly accepted as a part of life. Every new technology experiences this cycle to some extent. Wiki has a piece on this.
I know of several failed SAP implementations, each spending millions. It is big and bloated and requires tons of consulting - a vendor's dream. Yet, they dominate the market.
If this really proves to be useful, do they really think they will have this speed to themselves for any substantial period of time? DARPA-sponsored universities and firms, Cisco, AT&T, and many other U.S. entities are probably working on the same thing.
The real concern is that people, cars, etc. are still in the images. Google needs to perfect a post-processing cleansing of the image to remove all evidence of cars, people, and other movable objects. The final result should look like an abandoned city.
Heading south on 101 from San Jose Thursday morning, I was on my cell as I usually am. It cut out about 4 miles north of my Morgan Hill exit. I thought it was a dead spot. I got to work and realized we had no phones, no internet, no cell if you were a Verizon or AT&T customer. The only link we had was AM radio (KGO), who told us of the outage.
We needed an ETA for restoration of service. How? We drove north until we had cell coverage, and called our respective providers. Neither had a clue. We called our spouses outside the DOS area and they said that cables were cut, but still no ETA. Finally we heard on the AM radio they expected to restore service by end of day.
We ended up sending our customer service and order entry people home, and the rest of us worked the internal network or paperwork for the day. The phone came back around 4 PM, but the internet and cells never did until the next day.
No 911, all the stores and restaurants were pretty much cash only. It was truly eerie. It was front page news for a couple days but has faded from view since.
We think it was almost certainly the union, since the first thing the union did was vehemently deny they had anything to do with it.
Having done a fair bit of interviews and TV, this is absolutely correct in my experience. I don't trust any news story - you know it's wrong, you just don't know how.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, but currently the alternative sources are so far away from feasibility that we need artificial market forces to drive them into widespread use. Increased competition lured by market demand will drive down costs more quickly. The obvious political gain of course is to free us from the clutches of the oil and gas industry.
Sorry, the payback needs to be under 3 years to have any chance at wide spread acceptance. Here's the cold hard reality: until we tax the living shit out of fossil fuel consumption, alternative energy sources will never gain traction.
Me suggest you long time
Perhaps the rating of my post is an indicator of why this hasn't happened and why solar and other alternate forms of energy continue to be fringe technology. Remember when gas was over $4 per gallon? All of a sudden you could see all kinds of "green tech" projects cropping up because the dollars made sense. Then guess what? Oil came down when they realized their franchise was threatened and all the projects stopped or significantly slowed down. Until this tax happens we are all living in denial and continue to be controlled by the fossil fuel industry.
You have to tax conventional energy to skew the demand curve. There should be a multi-dollar a gallon gas tax and a steep tax on grid-based electric. Solar would come into vogue right quick.
http://www.ratemypoo.com/
I hope they understand that the first instinct in zero Gs is to hurl!
Gartner has published a great curve that largely explains this phenomenon. We start with a new technology (trigger), and it's promise is almost limitless. It rises rapidly until it peaks at the height of inflated expectations. Then people realize the hype and we slip into the trough of disillusionment and many times this kills the technology, but if it's viable, it then settles into a steadily rising slope of enlightenment that, over time, becomes the broad productive deployment of the technology. Classic case: the internet, that went through this cycle through the 90s, hit the trough in 2000/2001, and is now broadly accepted as a part of life. Every new technology experiences this cycle to some extent. Wiki has a piece on this.
...hilarious and scarily on the money...
Talk about irony!
I know of several failed SAP implementations, each spending millions. It is big and bloated and requires tons of consulting - a vendor's dream. Yet, they dominate the market.
Why are they doing this? What burning ghost-related questions remain unanswered? Will they at least cross the streams for real?
If this really proves to be useful, do they really think they will have this speed to themselves for any substantial period of time? DARPA-sponsored universities and firms, Cisco, AT&T, and many other U.S. entities are probably working on the same thing.
and thus unpatentable.
and a .9 probability that he underperforms, if you know what I mean!
The real concern is that people, cars, etc. are still in the images. Google needs to perfect a post-processing cleansing of the image to remove all evidence of cars, people, and other movable objects. The final result should look like an abandoned city.
...followed by "Stroke"...
Climbing walls, spinning webs, that sort of thing?
They're actually Funky Apple Gurus...
Not a story but a goof...
...and I welcome them to our planet.
Heading south on 101 from San Jose Thursday morning, I was on my cell as I usually am. It cut out about 4 miles north of my Morgan Hill exit. I thought it was a dead spot. I got to work and realized we had no phones, no internet, no cell if you were a Verizon or AT&T customer. The only link we had was AM radio (KGO), who told us of the outage. We needed an ETA for restoration of service. How? We drove north until we had cell coverage, and called our respective providers. Neither had a clue. We called our spouses outside the DOS area and they said that cables were cut, but still no ETA. Finally we heard on the AM radio they expected to restore service by end of day. We ended up sending our customer service and order entry people home, and the rest of us worked the internal network or paperwork for the day. The phone came back around 4 PM, but the internet and cells never did until the next day. No 911, all the stores and restaurants were pretty much cash only. It was truly eerie. It was front page news for a couple days but has faded from view since. We think it was almost certainly the union, since the first thing the union did was vehemently deny they had anything to do with it.
The reward went quickly up to $250K where it is now.
Having done a fair bit of interviews and TV, this is absolutely correct in my experience. I don't trust any news story - you know it's wrong, you just don't know how.
N. Korea is a pimple on the ass of world politics, but they do nicely for us to be scared enough to support funding massive defense assets.