Solaren is using an innovative space-based solar technology, which, if successful, would represent a break-through in the renewable power industry. While emerging technologies like space solar face considerable hurdles under a traditional viability analysis, PG&E believes that potential, significant benefits to its customers from a successful space solar installation outweigh the challenges associated with a new and unproven technology
Space is expensive (and dangerous) and there are lots of losses in harnessing energy (the second law of thermodynamics is a bitch).
Utility-scale power generation is expensive (and dangerous) and there are lots of losses in harnessing energy (the second law of thermodynamics is a bitch). Starting with 4x the power density really helps, though.
You have to get past your 1970s ideas about launch costs and difficulties. Current, real-world, for sale today launch costs are about 1/10th what they were in the 70s, if you include the cost of government subsidies. And costs look to keep falling - reusable rockets are a real thing now, not a SF dream.
I doubt PG&E abandoned it due to NIMBY unless it was concerns about the giant space death ray that the design calls for. PG&E only builds what the regulators tell them to build (or buy).
You'll note the pdf is a proposal to the regulators by PG&E. Good guess as to the rest of it.
Its hard to see how orbital solar can compete but I haven't crunched the numbers on it yet.
There is a launch cost at which it makes sense. (For most stuff currently done in space, the payload is the dominant cost, but solar thermal is dead simple compared to a communications sat.) And power generation is a trillion dollar industry - if it starts moving into space, we'll get significant economies of scale vs the currently tiny space launch industry.
You linked SerpentZA. He and C-Milk are in Vietnam for the moment, gushing about how it's like China was when they fell in love with it. Yes, his buddy is in it, but what's your point?
Uh...there's a problem with orbital solar. The energy is up there, we're down here. Care to explain to us how it gets transferred, or has your Space Nut Helmet of Science not yet told you.
Really? The atmosphere is more transparent to microwaves than UV and visible light. There's less loss beaming the power down than there is letting the sunlight come through the atmosphere and then hitting the solar panels. Before you ask, you don't build a death ray to send the power down, you use a receiver that's about a square block (and a retroreflector safety mechanism, so the sat will cut the beam off if it drifts).
Of course, the current designs for orbital solar are thermal, not photoeletric, so there's an efficiency hit there, but that's more than made up for by the fast you get about 4x the incoming watts/m^2 in orbit than on the ground, and it's never cloudy, and it's never night (will, maybe for a few minutes a day, depending on the orbit).
With current Falcon 9 launch costs, orbital power is actually cost competitive. But it's new and unknown, so no one's going to take the risk until launch costs fall further or natural gas stops being so very cheap.
If you missed the Slashdot article a couple years back, PG&E actually worked up a serious proposal for orbital power to avoid NIMBY issues, but ultimately abandoned it because of NIMBY issues.
But, if the sun doesn't shine, how will you be able to watch TV?
Florida is a great place for solar, assuming you have a way to hurricane-proof the setup, or eat the cost of rebuilding. It's the energy storage that's the problem.
Ultimately, orbital solar is the way forward for mankind, but in the meantime solar plus storage, or solar plus natural gas works well as long as your latitude isn't too high and you don't have a problem with days-long cloud cover.
SAP or Oracle run the accounting dept. for almost every large company. They're far from dying. There hasn't been a new company entering this domain in several decades. Accounting isn't going away.
Publicly traded corporations die (well, get acquired) when they stop growing. Oracle will actually be shrinking soon enough, as the Oracle DB isn't exactly loved.
I can't speak for the other companies but as long as Madden is the massively successful game franchise that it is, EA isn't going anywhere.
You forget it's a publicly traded corporation Those die not when they go bankrupt, but when they stop growing. Madden/FIFA is a cash cow, to be sure, but EA is already milking that cash cow so hard it's getting legal pushback. There's no growth in revenue coming there.
EA has closed most of the studios they've ever acquired, and tend to lose partners. New sequels to existing games generally produce a bit less revenue each year, relative to the size of the market. To gorw, EA needs new franchises, which means it needs studios capable of creating such.
In 2019 they're down to just 2 with any hope of a breakout hit that spawns a new line of sequels (or a perpetual "live services" game): BioWare and Respawn. Anthem flopped, and I'll be surprised if BioWare survives given EA is EA. If it weren't for Apex Legends, EA would liekly be an acquisition target within a year or so.
And what happens once the battle royale fad passes?
Fun fact: as part of the "propaganda leaflet war" in the Battle of Casino, the allies fired leaflets in claiming the German commander was a womanizer who cheated on his wife (and many other character flaws). and not the sort of man they should follow. The German commander fired back a rebuttal to the US troops, who got seemingly out a nowhere leaflets from the German commander stating that these accusations that he cheated on his wife were unfounded.
Drink! Amimojo pulls from alt-right playbook! This one's where he switches topics and trying to control the conversation.
Dude. C'mon. Even on Slashdot there have to be limits. You can't go around encouraging people to play the Amimojo drinking game - people will die of alcohol poisoning!
Do you know what TERF stands or? The "R" is for "radical", as in not part of the mainstream movement.
You know the term itself is new, and derogatory, right? It's what they got called when they were thrown out. As I said, they are no longer part of the mainstream movement because they were thrown out. Their views were perfectly mainstream 10 years ago.
Of course not all feminists are sex-positive, which is how it should be. It's not a church,
You do know that most churches are sex-positive, right? Just "within marriage". Which is how it should be, it's not like a church is a progressive movement where no disagreement is tolerated.
That doesn't make your statement any less false though.
What statement? That there are sex-negative feminists? Who condemn pornography, sex workers, and all that sort of thing? Of course there are. Or did you mean something else?
How did I know who you were linking to before I clicked? They're out of China, BTW. I think one of them had a kid and didn't want him born in China's medical system.
Blacks account for 31% of police murder, despite being 13% of the population.
But they're a much greater percentage of "police encounters". People tend to have confrontations with the police in crime-ridden areas. That is not racist per se and more than explains your statistic. You can argue that there's some racist reason that black neighborhoods have more crime, of course.
Modern feminism is sex-positive, you are thinking of one radical feminist who didn't actually think men and women should stop having sex, decades ago.
Now that's simply untrue. The fact is there's a great schism in modern feminism between sex-positive and sex-negative. The biggest rift of course is the ejection of the TERFs from progressive circles, but after that is the sex-positive / sex-negative divide.
Feminism has always had its radical lesbians, who think women should stop having sex with men, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about finger-wagging moral scolds who infected feminism around the turn of the millennia, bringing a Victorian ant-sex, anti-porn, anti-everything ethos we used to associate only with the religious right.
The majority of plastic in the ocean is dumped off of garbage haulers. Large cities pay shippers to hauls their trash to someplace lower-rent for disposal, but since it's cheaper for the ship to dump its cargo the second no one is watching, that of course happens a lot. Littering in general is the next biggest cause. Far mor lazy people on beaches (or any place where storm water that falls on streets ends up in the ocean) than ships.
Seriously. Want to fix plastic in the oceans? Simply enforce litter laws, and actually monitor that that garbage hauler the city pays doesn't simply dump the trash as sea.
But those measures would cost the government money. Why do that when you can instead cost your subjects freedom?
Oh, and don't forget the cyber domain also include deception and propaganda on social media, whether to disguise the actions of your troops, to attack the moral strength of the enemy, or to prop up the moral strength of your own side.
Yeah, I don't have a better name either. I suppose it's inevitable that "Cyber Corps" joins "Space Force" one day.
Countries don't attack just because they think they have an edge, presenting strength is usually not necessary and is merely a secondary use of a military.
You know nothing of history.
The point of having a military is, or should be, the capability to defend a country if attacked.
The cost of that happening is massive "in blood and treasure". No. You deter violence, you don't wait for it to happen to you. Strength is the only way to deter a bully, or a psychopath.
Actually, no, the solution to the actual problems being proposed is more spending. The tax increase is simply an implementation detail.
Problem: medical costs are simply too low, especially for the elderly and disabled.
Solution: lets add more taxes! The tax on medicinal devices worked so well, let's tax anyone who employs nurses. That's will surely keep medical costs rising.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you have me confused with the AC you were arguing against. You certainly have me confused.
Citation you can see from space needed.
Give it a read, it's not a joke: https://www.pge.com/nots/rates...
Solaren is using an innovative space-based solar technology, which, if successful, would represent a break-through in the renewable power industry. While emerging technologies like space solar face considerable hurdles under a traditional viability analysis, PG&E believes that potential, significant benefits to its customers from a successful space solar installation outweigh the challenges associated with a new and unproven technology
Space is expensive (and dangerous) and there are lots of losses in harnessing energy (the second law of thermodynamics is a bitch).
Utility-scale power generation is expensive (and dangerous) and there are lots of losses in harnessing energy (the second law of thermodynamics is a bitch). Starting with 4x the power density really helps, though.
You have to get past your 1970s ideas about launch costs and difficulties. Current, real-world, for sale today launch costs are about 1/10th what they were in the 70s, if you include the cost of government subsidies. And costs look to keep falling - reusable rockets are a real thing now, not a SF dream.
I doubt PG&E abandoned it due to NIMBY unless it was concerns about the giant space death ray that the design calls for. PG&E only builds what the regulators tell them to build (or buy).
You'll note the pdf is a proposal to the regulators by PG&E. Good guess as to the rest of it.
Its hard to see how orbital solar can compete but I haven't crunched the numbers on it yet.
There is a launch cost at which it makes sense. (For most stuff currently done in space, the payload is the dominant cost, but solar thermal is dead simple compared to a communications sat.) And power generation is a trillion dollar industry - if it starts moving into space, we'll get significant economies of scale vs the currently tiny space launch industry.
You linked SerpentZA. He and C-Milk are in Vietnam for the moment, gushing about how it's like China was when they fell in love with it. Yes, his buddy is in it, but what's your point?
Uh...there's a problem with orbital solar. The energy is up there, we're down here. Care to explain to us how it gets transferred, or has your Space Nut Helmet of Science not yet told you.
Really? The atmosphere is more transparent to microwaves than UV and visible light. There's less loss beaming the power down than there is letting the sunlight come through the atmosphere and then hitting the solar panels. Before you ask, you don't build a death ray to send the power down, you use a receiver that's about a square block (and a retroreflector safety mechanism, so the sat will cut the beam off if it drifts).
Of course, the current designs for orbital solar are thermal, not photoeletric, so there's an efficiency hit there, but that's more than made up for by the fast you get about 4x the incoming watts/m^2 in orbit than on the ground, and it's never cloudy, and it's never night (will, maybe for a few minutes a day, depending on the orbit).
With current Falcon 9 launch costs, orbital power is actually cost competitive. But it's new and unknown, so no one's going to take the risk until launch costs fall further or natural gas stops being so very cheap.
If you missed the Slashdot article a couple years back, PG&E actually worked up a serious proposal for orbital power to avoid NIMBY issues, but ultimately abandoned it because of NIMBY issues.
But, if the sun doesn't shine, how will you be able to watch TV?
Florida is a great place for solar, assuming you have a way to hurricane-proof the setup, or eat the cost of rebuilding. It's the energy storage that's the problem.
Ultimately, orbital solar is the way forward for mankind, but in the meantime solar plus storage, or solar plus natural gas works well as long as your latitude isn't too high and you don't have a problem with days-long cloud cover.
SAP or Oracle run the accounting dept. for almost every large company. They're far from dying. There hasn't been a new company entering this domain in several decades. Accounting isn't going away.
Publicly traded corporations die (well, get acquired) when they stop growing. Oracle will actually be shrinking soon enough, as the Oracle DB isn't exactly loved.
I can't speak for the other companies but as long as Madden is the massively successful game franchise that it is, EA isn't going anywhere.
You forget it's a publicly traded corporation Those die not when they go bankrupt, but when they stop growing. Madden/FIFA is a cash cow, to be sure, but EA is already milking that cash cow so hard it's getting legal pushback. There's no growth in revenue coming there.
EA has closed most of the studios they've ever acquired, and tend to lose partners. New sequels to existing games generally produce a bit less revenue each year, relative to the size of the market. To gorw, EA needs new franchises, which means it needs studios capable of creating such.
In 2019 they're down to just 2 with any hope of a breakout hit that spawns a new line of sequels (or a perpetual "live services" game): BioWare and Respawn. Anthem flopped, and I'll be surprised if BioWare survives given EA is EA. If it weren't for Apex Legends, EA would liekly be an acquisition target within a year or so.
And what happens once the battle royale fad passes?
Did you reply to the right post?
What extremists are you claiming that I painted as representatives of the whole?
Are you seriously saying that "sex-negative feminists" are extremists? Even amimojo isn't claiming that, and he's nuts.
OK, WTF Slashdot - the politics has gotten nuts. This needs to stop.
The statement "some feminists are sex-negative", true or false, is not trolling.
There is no fucking mod choice on Slashdot for "fact that, if true, makes my political position look bad". OK, I lie, there is: the "Interesting" mod.
If we don't stop this modding-by-politics shit, we will become Digg. And, dammit, we're better than that.
EA is dying. Oracle is dying. SAP is dying.
This isn't some broader problem in this case, these are just companies struggling to stay relevant.
Fun fact: as part of the "propaganda leaflet war" in the Battle of Casino, the allies fired leaflets in claiming the German commander was a womanizer who cheated on his wife (and many other character flaws). and not the sort of man they should follow. The German commander fired back a rebuttal to the US troops, who got seemingly out a nowhere leaflets from the German commander stating that these accusations that he cheated on his wife were unfounded.
Drink! Amimojo pulls from alt-right playbook! This one's where he switches topics and trying to control the conversation.
Dude. C'mon. Even on Slashdot there have to be limits. You can't go around encouraging people to play the Amimojo drinking game - people will die of alcohol poisoning!
Do you know what TERF stands or? The "R" is for "radical", as in not part of the mainstream movement.
You know the term itself is new, and derogatory, right? It's what they got called when they were thrown out. As I said, they are no longer part of the mainstream movement because they were thrown out. Their views were perfectly mainstream 10 years ago.
Of course not all feminists are sex-positive, which is how it should be. It's not a church,
You do know that most churches are sex-positive, right? Just "within marriage". Which is how it should be, it's not like a church is a progressive movement where no disagreement is tolerated.
That doesn't make your statement any less false though.
What statement? That there are sex-negative feminists? Who condemn pornography, sex workers, and all that sort of thing? Of course there are. Or did you mean something else?
How did I know who you were linking to before I clicked? They're out of China, BTW. I think one of them had a kid and didn't want him born in China's medical system.
Blacks account for 31% of police murder, despite being 13% of the population.
But they're a much greater percentage of "police encounters". People tend to have confrontations with the police in crime-ridden areas. That is not racist per se and more than explains your statistic. You can argue that there's some racist reason that black neighborhoods have more crime, of course.
Modern feminism is sex-positive, you are thinking of one radical feminist who didn't actually think men and women should stop having sex, decades ago.
Now that's simply untrue. The fact is there's a great schism in modern feminism between sex-positive and sex-negative. The biggest rift of course is the ejection of the TERFs from progressive circles, but after that is the sex-positive / sex-negative divide.
Feminism has always had its radical lesbians, who think women should stop having sex with men, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about finger-wagging moral scolds who infected feminism around the turn of the millennia, bringing a Victorian ant-sex, anti-porn, anti-everything ethos we used to associate only with the religious right.
You seem to be confusing conservatives with anarchists, or perhaps with DC politicians. Funny how the two overlap.
Well, fair point, I was talking about how western plastic gets into the water. As you point out, that's a tiny part of the problem to begin with.
has a habit of giving you unforeseen consequences in corner cases.
Worried about the real-world consequences of a feel-good measure? if you're not conservative already, you're well on your way.
The majority of plastic in the ocean is dumped off of garbage haulers. Large cities pay shippers to hauls their trash to someplace lower-rent for disposal, but since it's cheaper for the ship to dump its cargo the second no one is watching, that of course happens a lot. Littering in general is the next biggest cause. Far mor lazy people on beaches (or any place where storm water that falls on streets ends up in the ocean) than ships.
The shipping is not the issue. Large ships are astonishingly efficient per ton shipped. The rest of your rant makes sense though.
Seriously. Want to fix plastic in the oceans? Simply enforce litter laws, and actually monitor that that garbage hauler the city pays doesn't simply dump the trash as sea.
But those measures would cost the government money. Why do that when you can instead cost your subjects freedom?
Oh, and don't forget the cyber domain also include deception and propaganda on social media, whether to disguise the actions of your troops, to attack the moral strength of the enemy, or to prop up the moral strength of your own side.
Yeah, I don't have a better name either. I suppose it's inevitable that "Cyber Corps" joins "Space Force" one day.
Countries don't attack just because they think they have an edge, presenting strength is usually not necessary and is merely a secondary use of a military.
You know nothing of history.
The point of having a military is, or should be, the capability to defend a country if attacked.
The cost of that happening is massive "in blood and treasure". No. You deter violence, you don't wait for it to happen to you. Strength is the only way to deter a bully, or a psychopath.
Actually, no, the solution to the actual problems being proposed is more spending. The tax increase is simply an implementation detail.
Problem: medical costs are simply too low, especially for the elderly and disabled.
Solution: lets add more taxes! The tax on medicinal devices worked so well, let's tax anyone who employs nurses. That's will surely keep medical costs rising.
Problem. Solution.