Funnily enough, I actually learned at little Hebrew at University. Enough to be able to read parts of Bereshit, anyway. (Why call an English translation Genesis, which is not an English word? Either call it by its translated name "In the Beginning", or its actual name which is Bereshit.) Enough to know that there is no such word as "Jehovah" in the Bible (it's an interesting story how the error arose, but rest assured it is an error.) Bereshit actually begins, in a fairly accurate translation, "In the beginning the Gods created the Heavens and the Earth" - the word "Elohim" is in the form of a Hebrew plural. YHWH turns up later in the book. If you actually read it in anything like a literal translation, you will find that there are at least 3 different gods wandering around the first book of the Bible, along with some angels who intermarry with human beings.
So either we have to believe that the Jehovah's Witnesses and other "fundamentalists" have been supplied with a heavily corrected version of the Hebrew Bible by a God who keeps supplying different versions in different versions of English (King James, Revised etc.) or that they have been misled by a series of incompetent scholars who never bothered to learn Hebrew.
It's strange, is it not, that Roman Catholic and Episcopalian priests (most of whom do know Hebrew) are quite comfortable with the age of the Universe and the Theory of Evolution, and it is the unlettered fundamentalists, who don't know their k'thibh from their qu're, who aren't?
This is yet more evidence, if it was needed, that there is something about carbon chemistry that facilitates the emergence of life. Once you have a DNA or RNA molecule, organisation and replication of small molecules seems to emerge almost from nowhere. This evidence that even a concept as significant as photon collecting and channelling could emerge out of a largely self-organising process is quite extraordinary, because it starts to answer the objections of Creationists to, for instance, the evolution of light sensitivity. Given the sheer vastness of geological time, the range of environments on even a minor planet going around a mid-rank star, the opportunities for something to get started are enormous. It's a kind of corollary to Murphy's law: in a sufficiently large system, given long enough, practically anything possible is going to happen at some point.
This of course is not evidence for or against any kind of theology in general, because theology is a much more diverse (and interesting) subject than the Creationists and IDers would have you believe. But it does look as though the question "how did life get started", which is vague and ill defined, is gradually resolving down to the question "under what circumstances can ribose nucleic acids form spontaneously, and how many other small molecules can we find which can spontaneously arrange themselves in the presence of ribose nucleic acids?" which is testable.
Erm...alpha particles (helium nuclei) are stopped by paper or air. Beta particles are stopped by quite thin metal foil. I think you mean gammas, and I suspect that these will be much lower than the background radiation (read, cosmic rays.)
I recall that back in the old days when expensive ICs were packaged in ceramic and cheap ones in plastic, cheap memory was less prone to bit errors because some of the ceramics contained, as it turned out, significant amounts of radioactivity. Potassium, for instance, is noticeably radioactive in its natural state (one of its isotopes is unstable).
Given that the concrete won't be made from raw materials collected on site, nor will the aluminum and steel in the server racks, and that the only really common beta emitter (tritium) produces electrons with less energy than those in an old style CRT, your fears are groundless.
I used to visit Hanau on business. I don't know whether it's changed, but it used to be full of nuclear engineers, metallurgists, and scientists working on some interesting technologies. In the (spotlessly clean) town centre (rebuilt completely after WW2) is a memorial to the Brothers Grimm, the philologists who collected the fairy tales. Hansel und Gretel are famous for stuffing the witch into her own oven, and one company in Hanau used to make extremely high temperature furnaces, but that's about the only connection I can make.
Where do I get a job where I get paid for sleeping through pages? Some of my code may look as if I was asleep on the job, but that excuse doesn't really work.
Page is a noun referring either to printed material or to a human being paid to take messages, pager is a noun meaning a paging device.
The catch with the Stirling is that it is always playing catch up to small Diesels. All over the world, small generators are powered by Diesel engines of one or two cylinders which can be very thermally efficient (35-45% is readily achievable at constant speed), and the sheer production volume and cumulative R&D makes them very cheap and reliable. The problem is in the US, where the environmental regulations favour gasoline over Diesel and claims of deaths from Diesel particulates are regularly used to maintain the status quo. That these claims are unproven (and difficult to separate out from the vast number of annual deaths due to smoking) doesn't matter.
Stirling engines used in military system have the advantage that cost is almost irrelevant, but Stirling for road vehicles has the chicken and egg problem - to prove the viability of the concept, you need to get up to big manufacturing volumes to get the reliability data and drive costs down. The takeover by Diesels for cars in Europe was made possible because the technologies for advanced Diesels were already in wide use in marine engnies and just had to be engineered down the size scale. This situation does not exist for Stirlings.
On the pollution front, it is true that Stirling engines will burn most fuels, but the downside is that it is very hard to produce a multi-fuel engine that does not produce a lot of soot from some of those fuels. You can drive a small Sitrling by burning wood - if you don't mind dismantling the heat exchanger periodically to get the gunk out.
Kamen's idea is, I feel, less about viable technology than pressing buttons with the US Government's priorities. It would be more economical, and more reliable, to fit a small off the shelf packaged generator of the sort that is already available to fit into boat lockers. Compare the price of one of these with a Whispergen and you will see the point very quickly.
If you don't know the difference between the CIO and the CTO, here it is.
You don't need computers to be a CIO or a CTO. The guy in charge of the Sumerian temple record collecting system was a CIO and he had baked clay tablets to deal with. Doubtless he had people who worked out how many tablets a day a scribe could produce, how much storage for new tablets were needed each year, how old tablets needed to be before they were scrapped, how many scribes they needed, and when a scribe took an ox-cart of confidential tablets home with him and then accidentally left them at an inn, he had the offending scribe impaled on a spike. That's the CIO job.
The CTO meanwhile was investigating this new material called "papyrus", found out that the range of things you could put on it was much greater for a given weight and volume, and started to produce plans for a completely new server farm - sorry, records store - based on papyrus. He would have to consider a new training system for scribes, a new encoding for data, and probably a method of illumination of the scriptorium that didn't use oil lamps, since the new material was flammable. There would be many technical problems to solve before all the production and warehouse records could be moved to the new system.
I can also give you a Gutenberg analogy - the monastic CIO was organising the scriptorium and ensuring that the Biblical copying was as accurate and speedy as possible despite human factors while the CTO was talking to Herr Gutenberg about this "Press" thing he was copying from the Chinese, and how it would semi-automate the production of Bibles.
They are supported by MPs because they have houses in London and are surrounded by frightened middle class and upper class people. I live in a small town and in the last 20 years petty crime has dropped, especially since PCSOs (a kind of return to the old village policeman) were introduced and started talking to the local kids instead of trying to recognise them on CCTV pictures.) The UK is actually run on the basis that it is all like London. It is not.
Even the last two directors of our security service say the Government is way over the top. But (see posts below) the paranoia is of huge benefit to the large,foreign IT firms who want to put this stuff in and are worried about their gravy train of huge, over-budget projects coming to a stop in the recession. The opportunity to create huge server farms, cable backbones and data mining operations out of taxpayer money must look like take-candy-off-a-rich-baby time, and with no risk its effectiveness will be called into question. If as we susopect the terrorist threat is minute and under control, they will not have to worry too much about the effectiveness of the system. Allow me to sell you my tiger repellent spray for use in Iceland.
(You may want to discount some of my opinion because I work for a consultancy that aims to do - guess what? -reduce IT costs.)
I have mod points but would like to add to this. I can assure you that there are civil servants at the Home Office who know that this is stupid, though obviously to name them would be to put their jobs at risk. You are exactly right. Let's name the guilty parties. EDS. Cap Gemini. Fujitsu Siemens. A US company, a French company, and a Japanese/German company. We in the UK invented the digital computer (I'm not arguing about whether we beat the US or the Germans to it, but we invented it independently) and yet our infrastructure is entirely foreign owned. Yes of course these leeches want to repatriate our taxes.
Boris Johnson has stopped the wastage of cash on extending the London car tax zone westwards. The NHS project is being scaled back. People are beginning to believe that PCSOs on the beat are far more effective at crime prevention than CCTV systems or policemen in cars. These people are desperate to keep their revenue streams intact. They need to sell a vast scheme to the UK Government, and what better than to prey on the control freakery and insecurity of Labour, a government so incompetent that it has illegal immigrants working in the department that is supposed to prevent illegal immigration.
Meanwhile we have massive infrastructural problems in IT because of a lack of people to carry out necessary on-the-ground projects. Dismantling these vast Government willy-waggling programmes and reallocating skilled staff to fixing the IT problems in local and national government all over the country would be a huge benefit - but it would mean dismantling departments, and it would mean overpaid business development managers getting the push and real IT implementers getting more visibility. And we don't want that, do we?
Personally, I think ALL responsibility for Government IT should be taken away from people like Smith, who should revert to her proper job as an inner city nightclub bouncer, and be handed over to a department staffed by people who would not merely be forbidden to accept any gifts or trips from large IT companies, but would have to agree never to work for an IT company with a turnover in excess of, say, 500 million Euros after leaving Government. There is simply no other way to prevent corruption.
Stevens has done well by Alaska. It reminds me of when the Mayor of Nice had taken an emergency flight to Paraguay ahead of the fraud police, and I was talking about it to a taxi driver on my way in from the airport. He said "C'est un vieil escroc, mais c'est notre vieil escroc a nous" ("He's an old crook, but he's our old crook." Same with Stevens. If you keep supplying people with pork, people won't worry if some of it falls into your barrel as well.
But as the great-grandson of a blacksmith, I can tell you that Wayland is the archetypal smith of English mythology. In our town, which was established during the Dark Ages, and where metalworking is still a significant industry, the little road that led to the smithy is still named Waylands.
Solar cells are a lot less than 30% efficient, nearer 10%. Not all the incident power is in the band that can operate a solar cell. The actual solar flux is nearer 680W/m^2, and you then have to allow for clouds and the drop off in collection power as the surface ceases to be normal to the incident solar radiation (there is additional input from scattered light from the sky, but this drops off with lower solar angle, i.e. early morning and evening).
You are going to need around a square meter for your laptop, and it will be quite heavy as it will need to be supported at a suitable angle, meaning it will need to be able to withstand wind pressure. Then there is the charge control gear. It's portable if you have a truck, which rather defeats the object of the exercise.
To generate enough power to run a laptop, even a netbook, you will need solar cells with a peak output of hundreds of watts, unless you live in Arizona or a similar place. Cloud cover reduces output dramatically. Cells only produce maximum power when the line from the sun is normal to the surface, and for fixed cells this can only be true for a short time every day. To get maximum utilisation, cells really need to be on a tracking system that rotates in two axes throughout the day, but this is likely to be expensive to build and maintain. In addition, they need to be working (i.e. producing) all the time the sun is shining, or you are wasting them. Any calculation of payback needs to take into account the ACTUAL output, not the peak. Many companies who sell solar cells are economical with the truth about this, in fact on a scale of power generation ethics I would put them at the bottom.
Here in the UK, the gradual conversion of our biggest coal power plant (Drax) to be able to produce about 7-10% of its output from biomass is going to save more carbon than solar PV is likely to achieve for many years, far more cheaply.
So after all the negatives, what are the positives? One option is to put up a serious PV rig - say a peak of about 3-600W - and use it to charge cheap lead acid batteries, then use these to run chargers for your gear. This is in effect what many boat and RV owners do, but with a static installation you can get much better efficiency. Bear in mind that, because solar chargers can charge lead acid cells to around 14.5 volts, sulfation is minimal and the batteries can have a very long life; keep them topped up and buy proper open cells, not car starters, and you might easily get 10 years of useful life on shore. I won't promise you a net carbon dioxide saving over life, but you will get the best available performance. This system has other advantages; the cost of putting lighting in my garden shed would have been around $1000, whereas the 12V solar powered system I installed cost a third of that.
Sorry to disappoint UK bashers, but it was a French/Belgian company, and not the British Government, that lost the data. The scandal, of course, is that so much of our IT and utilities have been hived off to non-UK companies, but for that we have to blame the City, not the Government. The people who are saying "corporates wouldn't allow it" - this mess of data loss is almost entirely caused by American, French, and German/Japanese corporates. I would love to blame Civil Servants, but I can't.
I'm afraid the solution is roughly as follows, in a simple step by step guide
1. Bear down on French IT company from windward.
2. Lie down between guns for protection.
3. Let them fire first broadside, most of which will miss
4. Taking your time, deliver devastating broadsides at close range.
The smaller screen really has no advantages at all - any cost saving is more than outweighed by those missing 224 pixels across - so why have more skus than you need? And the XP thing is obvious. My phone software will not run on Linux. My Palm desktop won't run under Linux. I could probably get my mobile internet modem to work under Linux - but why bother, especially as any problems won't be supported. Why do I want my netbook? Because it works when I travel.
Sadly, the truth is that when it comes to an appliance like a netbook, I fundamentally do not care what OS it runs so long as the performance is adequate and all the applications I actually need run on it. Thunderbird? Check. Firefox? Check. OOo 3? Check. Java 6? Check. The fact is, FOSS has in a real sense shot Linux in the foot by running so well on XP/Server 2003. While XP is available, this will continue. Vista, now...that would be a different matter. If I was limited to Vista, I wouldn't want to try to run on a single Atom CPU.
Hard drives are designed for air cooling, not conduction. That's why those little circuit boards are exposed on the outside of the drive. (Conduction cooled circuit boards do exist, especially in military systems, where expensive machined conduction plates are bonded to the upper surface, but you won't find those in commercial electronics.) Putting a gel pack on the circuit board may cool some components adequately while leaving others uncooled.
There is a reason why Apple uses (used to use) FEA programs to design the cooling systems of their computers, and it is not marketing. In the good old days, you often found bad engineering practices in cheap PCs - such as the hard drive being screwed wrong side down to the chassis - and it was then not unusual for them to work OK as a desktop but fail quickly if used as a server, because the HDD was now actually doing some work.
In Europe, these have traditionally been where the most intelligent graduates went. They wrote the book on security. They are bright enough to realise that if they open a branch office in Obscuristan it is going to be easier to get a version of OO customised for the Obscuristani dialect than persuade MS to do it, and know their successors in 100 years time will still be able to read the files. And perhaps they have the smallest concern that the CIA might be able to get information via Windows backdoors.
The real story would be if they got the Interior Ministry to convert. In Europe, that (and the Agriculture Ministry) is usually where the deadbeats end up.
The British political cartoonist Steve Bell has always used the Superman reference (if Superman is so smart why does he wear his pants(i.e. US underpants) outside his trousers) - he represented the Prime Minister John Major as wearing his underpants outside his trousers so as to try to be like Superman. When Blair become PM, Bell drew him as wearing "the pants of power". So, here in the UK, it is indeed a pair of pants that convey (political) power.
Why don't you actually investigate what goes on in the countries that have national health systems? You would quickly find that your analysis is simplistic and just plain wrong. There are boards such as (in the UK), NICE which evaluate the effectiveness of medicines and and have the job of doing cost/benefit analyses. While these seem a little ruthless, ask yourself who you would trust to do it - an organisation responsible to elected politicians, or an insurance company responsible only to its shareholders? In the US, you have outsourced the ethical decisions on who lives and dies to corporations. In the UK, we have a system which is continually monitored by the media and by politicians.
The goal of a health system is NOT to prevent death. It is to reduce avoidable deaths, and to cure, or improve the quality of life of people with chronic or serious illnesses. By doing this it benefits everybody because it reduces social cost. For some reason many people in the US think this is "socialism", but it is more about pragmatism and what works. Or why does our system cost us a quarter per head of what yours does, and yet our life expectancy is longer?
The city-state of Athens that had a form of democracy did not comply with the definition given by the GP, since women and slaves did not have the vote (just like the USA when it was founded...) and in any case only lasted for a few decades. I think you may possibly find that New Zealand beat the Finns to it, though.
This is actually a real technical breakthrough. The point is that the nanotubes are highly conductive and highly transparent so the display can be made much larger (and thinner)than hitherto. LCDs have quite a thick electrode layer on the front to provide enough conductivity and this is one of the limiting factors. The holy grail of e-paper, the thing to drive widespread usage, is the ability to deliver a full A4 or USL size page, at which point it has a big future in business. For anybody who hasn't noticed, business discussions (as distinct from people sitting around chewing fat on zero-information-content PP slides) usually require participants to wade through long reports, which still need to be printed, and which are then discarded (and have to be shredded...).
A workable e-reader would have a market here which is initially niche but would then provide the revenue to get to the fully commercialised A4 e-reader - which makes electronic delivery of newspapers and magazines fully practical. The decline in value of internet content is driven by the advertiser-funded model. Paid-for services offering real value would love a locked down e-reader. (and I personally don't mind paying for worthwhile services. By buying a subscription to e.g. Scientific American, I help guarantee its editorial independence and ability to fund articles that would lose certain advertisers.)
Proof of concept of a workable full page e-reader, during a recession when people are looking for disruptive technologies that may offer a good return? This could easily be the most important thing on Slashdot this week.
I am afraid you have failed the humorous irony detection test. As you leave Slashdot by the back entrance, please hand in your geek cred card and your Futurama and Simpsons DVDs.
And the Indians are very good economists. Trickle down doesn't work, but what does work is moving the economy upwards in the tech chain. First you mine resources. Then you process what you mine. Then you make widgets. Then you put widgets together. Then you write the software to control the widget assemblies. Then you invent new things that need widget assemblies and software.
A country like Australia works because the population is tiny and the extraction of resources is large, but even so they have developed a high tech industry. Germany has most of its industrial base far up the food chain, Switzerland even more so. Mexico makes cars, cars are made in the UK regions, but the UK industrial heartland is more interested in the R&D around Formula 1 racing because the value added is better. The US has tried to take the process a stage further with banking and intellectual property, which requires few reources but has a high value added; unfortunately as we are seeing this value added, because it has so little real asset behind it, is extremely vulnerable to fashion and obsolescence.
The Indians know all of this. The faster they can move their industry up the chain, the more they can spend on getting the peasants past a 500BCE living standard.
We old guys remember the Aero Morgan - a three wheeler with a V-twin light aircraft engine at the front and a single rear wheel. In those days there was no front wheel drive, so it was far less advanced than the Aptera. They used to race these things, in Germany no less, and seeing a whole lot of them going through bends at over 100mph was a slightly worrying sight, but fun. Nowadays you may see one in the UK out on a rare sunny day. The point is, although very niche, they were a well proven design which attracted a devoted following. The Aptera might well do the same.
I have worked in vehicle R&D. I know what some people do to their cars. I know that if I buy new and keep for a long time, I am buying something that hasn't been maltreated. The wheels haven't been taken up kerbs, the tires haven't been bashed, the engine hasn't been over-revved or labored, the gearbox hasn't been abused and the battery hasn't been allowed to discharge repeatedly. I amortise this comfort factor over at least 6 years and it doesn't cost nearly so much.
Mind you, I also buy within my budget, pay cash from savings to get a discount, and do other things that the car industry hates.
Slashdot Mirror
So either we have to believe that the Jehovah's Witnesses and other "fundamentalists" have been supplied with a heavily corrected version of the Hebrew Bible by a God who keeps supplying different versions in different versions of English (King James, Revised etc.) or that they have been misled by a series of incompetent scholars who never bothered to learn Hebrew.
It's strange, is it not, that Roman Catholic and Episcopalian priests (most of whom do know Hebrew) are quite comfortable with the age of the Universe and the Theory of Evolution, and it is the unlettered fundamentalists, who don't know their k'thibh from their qu're, who aren't?
This of course is not evidence for or against any kind of theology in general, because theology is a much more diverse (and interesting) subject than the Creationists and IDers would have you believe. But it does look as though the question "how did life get started", which is vague and ill defined, is gradually resolving down to the question "under what circumstances can ribose nucleic acids form spontaneously, and how many other small molecules can we find which can spontaneously arrange themselves in the presence of ribose nucleic acids?" which is testable.
I recall that back in the old days when expensive ICs were packaged in ceramic and cheap ones in plastic, cheap memory was less prone to bit errors because some of the ceramics contained, as it turned out, significant amounts of radioactivity. Potassium, for instance, is noticeably radioactive in its natural state (one of its isotopes is unstable).
Given that the concrete won't be made from raw materials collected on site, nor will the aluminum and steel in the server racks, and that the only really common beta emitter (tritium) produces electrons with less energy than those in an old style CRT, your fears are groundless.
I used to visit Hanau on business. I don't know whether it's changed, but it used to be full of nuclear engineers, metallurgists, and scientists working on some interesting technologies. In the (spotlessly clean) town centre (rebuilt completely after WW2) is a memorial to the Brothers Grimm, the philologists who collected the fairy tales. Hansel und Gretel are famous for stuffing the witch into her own oven, and one company in Hanau used to make extremely high temperature furnaces, but that's about the only connection I can make.
Where do I get a job where I get paid for sleeping through pages? Some of my code may look as if I was asleep on the job, but that excuse doesn't really work.
Page is a noun referring either to printed material or to a human being paid to take messages, pager is a noun meaning a paging device.
Stirling engines used in military system have the advantage that cost is almost irrelevant, but Stirling for road vehicles has the chicken and egg problem - to prove the viability of the concept, you need to get up to big manufacturing volumes to get the reliability data and drive costs down. The takeover by Diesels for cars in Europe was made possible because the technologies for advanced Diesels were already in wide use in marine engnies and just had to be engineered down the size scale. This situation does not exist for Stirlings.
On the pollution front, it is true that Stirling engines will burn most fuels, but the downside is that it is very hard to produce a multi-fuel engine that does not produce a lot of soot from some of those fuels. You can drive a small Sitrling by burning wood - if you don't mind dismantling the heat exchanger periodically to get the gunk out.
Kamen's idea is, I feel, less about viable technology than pressing buttons with the US Government's priorities. It would be more economical, and more reliable, to fit a small off the shelf packaged generator of the sort that is already available to fit into boat lockers. Compare the price of one of these with a Whispergen and you will see the point very quickly.
You don't need computers to be a CIO or a CTO. The guy in charge of the Sumerian temple record collecting system was a CIO and he had baked clay tablets to deal with. Doubtless he had people who worked out how many tablets a day a scribe could produce, how much storage for new tablets were needed each year, how old tablets needed to be before they were scrapped, how many scribes they needed, and when a scribe took an ox-cart of confidential tablets home with him and then accidentally left them at an inn, he had the offending scribe impaled on a spike. That's the CIO job.
The CTO meanwhile was investigating this new material called "papyrus", found out that the range of things you could put on it was much greater for a given weight and volume, and started to produce plans for a completely new server farm - sorry, records store - based on papyrus. He would have to consider a new training system for scribes, a new encoding for data, and probably a method of illumination of the scriptorium that didn't use oil lamps, since the new material was flammable. There would be many technical problems to solve before all the production and warehouse records could be moved to the new system.
I can also give you a Gutenberg analogy - the monastic CIO was organising the scriptorium and ensuring that the Biblical copying was as accurate and speedy as possible despite human factors while the CTO was talking to Herr Gutenberg about this "Press" thing he was copying from the Chinese, and how it would semi-automate the production of Bibles.
Even the last two directors of our security service say the Government is way over the top. But (see posts below) the paranoia is of huge benefit to the large,foreign IT firms who want to put this stuff in and are worried about their gravy train of huge, over-budget projects coming to a stop in the recession. The opportunity to create huge server farms, cable backbones and data mining operations out of taxpayer money must look like take-candy-off-a-rich-baby time, and with no risk its effectiveness will be called into question. If as we susopect the terrorist threat is minute and under control, they will not have to worry too much about the effectiveness of the system. Allow me to sell you my tiger repellent spray for use in Iceland.
(You may want to discount some of my opinion because I work for a consultancy that aims to do - guess what? -reduce IT costs.)
Boris Johnson has stopped the wastage of cash on extending the London car tax zone westwards. The NHS project is being scaled back. People are beginning to believe that PCSOs on the beat are far more effective at crime prevention than CCTV systems or policemen in cars. These people are desperate to keep their revenue streams intact. They need to sell a vast scheme to the UK Government, and what better than to prey on the control freakery and insecurity of Labour, a government so incompetent that it has illegal immigrants working in the department that is supposed to prevent illegal immigration.
Meanwhile we have massive infrastructural problems in IT because of a lack of people to carry out necessary on-the-ground projects. Dismantling these vast Government willy-waggling programmes and reallocating skilled staff to fixing the IT problems in local and national government all over the country would be a huge benefit - but it would mean dismantling departments, and it would mean overpaid business development managers getting the push and real IT implementers getting more visibility. And we don't want that, do we?
Personally, I think ALL responsibility for Government IT should be taken away from people like Smith, who should revert to her proper job as an inner city nightclub bouncer, and be handed over to a department staffed by people who would not merely be forbidden to accept any gifts or trips from large IT companies, but would have to agree never to work for an IT company with a turnover in excess of, say, 500 million Euros after leaving Government. There is simply no other way to prevent corruption.
Stevens has done well by Alaska. It reminds me of when the Mayor of Nice had taken an emergency flight to Paraguay ahead of the fraud police, and I was talking about it to a taxi driver on my way in from the airport. He said "C'est un vieil escroc, mais c'est notre vieil escroc a nous" ("He's an old crook, but he's our old crook." Same with Stevens. If you keep supplying people with pork, people won't worry if some of it falls into your barrel as well.
But as the great-grandson of a blacksmith, I can tell you that Wayland is the archetypal smith of English mythology. In our town, which was established during the Dark Ages, and where metalworking is still a significant industry, the little road that led to the smithy is still named Waylands.
You are going to need around a square meter for your laptop, and it will be quite heavy as it will need to be supported at a suitable angle, meaning it will need to be able to withstand wind pressure. Then there is the charge control gear. It's portable if you have a truck, which rather defeats the object of the exercise.
Here in the UK, the gradual conversion of our biggest coal power plant (Drax) to be able to produce about 7-10% of its output from biomass is going to save more carbon than solar PV is likely to achieve for many years, far more cheaply.
So after all the negatives, what are the positives? One option is to put up a serious PV rig - say a peak of about 3-600W - and use it to charge cheap lead acid batteries, then use these to run chargers for your gear. This is in effect what many boat and RV owners do, but with a static installation you can get much better efficiency. Bear in mind that, because solar chargers can charge lead acid cells to around 14.5 volts, sulfation is minimal and the batteries can have a very long life; keep them topped up and buy proper open cells, not car starters, and you might easily get 10 years of useful life on shore. I won't promise you a net carbon dioxide saving over life, but you will get the best available performance. This system has other advantages; the cost of putting lighting in my garden shed would have been around $1000, whereas the 12V solar powered system I installed cost a third of that.
I'm afraid the solution is roughly as follows, in a simple step by step guide
Worked for Nelson, anyway.
Sadly, the truth is that when it comes to an appliance like a netbook, I fundamentally do not care what OS it runs so long as the performance is adequate and all the applications I actually need run on it. Thunderbird? Check. Firefox? Check. OOo 3? Check. Java 6? Check. The fact is, FOSS has in a real sense shot Linux in the foot by running so well on XP/Server 2003. While XP is available, this will continue. Vista, now...that would be a different matter. If I was limited to Vista, I wouldn't want to try to run on a single Atom CPU.
There is a reason why Apple uses (used to use) FEA programs to design the cooling systems of their computers, and it is not marketing. In the good old days, you often found bad engineering practices in cheap PCs - such as the hard drive being screwed wrong side down to the chassis - and it was then not unusual for them to work OK as a desktop but fail quickly if used as a server, because the HDD was now actually doing some work.
The real story would be if they got the Interior Ministry to convert. In Europe, that (and the Agriculture Ministry) is usually where the deadbeats end up.
The British political cartoonist Steve Bell has always used the Superman reference (if Superman is so smart why does he wear his pants(i.e. US underpants) outside his trousers) - he represented the Prime Minister John Major as wearing his underpants outside his trousers so as to try to be like Superman. When Blair become PM, Bell drew him as wearing "the pants of power". So, here in the UK, it is indeed a pair of pants that convey (political) power.
Why don't you actually investigate what goes on in the countries that have national health systems? You would quickly find that your analysis is simplistic and just plain wrong. There are boards such as (in the UK), NICE which evaluate the effectiveness of medicines and and have the job of doing cost/benefit analyses. While these seem a little ruthless, ask yourself who you would trust to do it - an organisation responsible to elected politicians, or an insurance company responsible only to its shareholders? In the US, you have outsourced the ethical decisions on who lives and dies to corporations. In the UK, we have a system which is continually monitored by the media and by politicians.
The goal of a health system is NOT to prevent death. It is to reduce avoidable deaths, and to cure, or improve the quality of life of people with chronic or serious illnesses. By doing this it benefits everybody because it reduces social cost. For some reason many people in the US think this is "socialism", but it is more about pragmatism and what works. Or why does our system cost us a quarter per head of what yours does, and yet our life expectancy is longer?
The city-state of Athens that had a form of democracy did not comply with the definition given by the GP, since women and slaves did not have the vote (just like the USA when it was founded...) and in any case only lasted for a few decades. I think you may possibly find that New Zealand beat the Finns to it, though.
A workable e-reader would have a market here which is initially niche but would then provide the revenue to get to the fully commercialised A4 e-reader - which makes electronic delivery of newspapers and magazines fully practical. The decline in value of internet content is driven by the advertiser-funded model. Paid-for services offering real value would love a locked down e-reader. (and I personally don't mind paying for worthwhile services. By buying a subscription to e.g. Scientific American, I help guarantee its editorial independence and ability to fund articles that would lose certain advertisers.)
Proof of concept of a workable full page e-reader, during a recession when people are looking for disruptive technologies that may offer a good return? This could easily be the most important thing on Slashdot this week.
I am afraid you have failed the humorous irony detection test. As you leave Slashdot by the back entrance, please hand in your geek cred card and your Futurama and Simpsons DVDs.
A country like Australia works because the population is tiny and the extraction of resources is large, but even so they have developed a high tech industry. Germany has most of its industrial base far up the food chain, Switzerland even more so. Mexico makes cars, cars are made in the UK regions, but the UK industrial heartland is more interested in the R&D around Formula 1 racing because the value added is better. The US has tried to take the process a stage further with banking and intellectual property, which requires few reources but has a high value added; unfortunately as we are seeing this value added, because it has so little real asset behind it, is extremely vulnerable to fashion and obsolescence.
The Indians know all of this. The faster they can move their industry up the chain, the more they can spend on getting the peasants past a 500BCE living standard.
We old guys remember the Aero Morgan - a three wheeler with a V-twin light aircraft engine at the front and a single rear wheel. In those days there was no front wheel drive, so it was far less advanced than the Aptera. They used to race these things, in Germany no less, and seeing a whole lot of them going through bends at over 100mph was a slightly worrying sight, but fun. Nowadays you may see one in the UK out on a rare sunny day. The point is, although very niche, they were a well proven design which attracted a devoted following. The Aptera might well do the same.
Mind you, I also buy within my budget, pay cash from savings to get a discount, and do other things that the car industry hates.