If the North invades, then the US, China, Australia, Japan (though banned from having a military, actually has one), and probably a pile of others will lay waste to North Korea and be done with it.
Last I checked, North Korea has the #4 military in the world. China is the only one on your list that could take them on. Austrailia isn't a nuclear power, and Japan trains their army not to shoot people, and not to shoot to kill even if being attacked, even in a war zone like Afghanistan.
And China would be more likely to encourage an invasion than stop it. They're the PROK's only major trading partner and ally. It would be a cheap way for China to get anything they want out of the south.
And you assume that we should be able to project our military might globally. When you start with such assumptions, your conclusions are required. However, when you don't start with those assumptions, you find that we can greatly reduce our military.
I start with the OBSERVATION that the US' projection of military power across the world since WWII has had tremendous positive effect in economic, political, and humanitarian. I continue on with the observation that all other western nations have shown themselves completely unwilling to commit to such efforts, no matter what, unless the US is doing the overwhelming bulk of the fighting.
Saying we can save money by eliminating our military is a lot like saying someone should sell their (only) car to avoid paying the car insurance bill... you'll find not having it soon costs you so much more than the cost of maintaining it would have.
In the event of conflict in the region, the Chinese will have greater mobility and reduced troop movement times, which basically means that they'll be able to dominate the region in a way America is no longer capable of within the Americas.
Umm, what? The US military has huge air capacity, and routinely uses it to great effect. If an obvious and severe need arose, I fully expect the US could move hundreds of thousands of military personnel, and a substantial amount of heavy equipment, into any given major metropolitan area in well under 24 hours.
And hundreds of jets are much harder to sabotage than a couple train lines.
It pains me to read where China is doing this and that, while everyone in USA talks about how great we once were.
That's your own misperception. The grass is always greener elsewhere, right?
High-speed rail is a great gadget, which is why you want one. People like gadgets because they sound cool, but then after the shine wears off and you find they're not very useful, they get thrown out.
In this case, rail has an impossible task competing with jet travel. For longer distances, the speed difference is monumental, and there's no hope of rail being a faster or cheaper alternative. For shorter distances, it has no hope of competing with cars, because you just can't get more efficient than being able to go directly in a straight line where you want, when you want. Highways are actually very efficient, which is why trucking is so often competitive with freight trains.
So where does that leave trains competitive? Just the small commuter trips... Connecting major cities that are only 30 minutes or so from each other. Connecting the suburbs to cities might work, but it usually doesn't, as the added hassle of getting to/from the train often doesn't turn out to be practically better than driving the entire route.
In short, often what will really contribute the most benefit simply isn't flashy, drool-worthy and new... Often those un-sexy incremental improvements are a collective revolution. And while you may not get a warm fuzzy feeling, the fact that the US doesn't throw money after projects destined to fail and become a money pit is actually a plus.
$20k/home could install small-scale solar on all of these houses
Try that without the subsidies the state and federal governments are already providing. And while you could of course get PV panels for a home for $20k, it wouldn't provide for 100% of the power they need, so it's not a remotely fair comparison.
And did I mention life-time? Operating costs on a solar thermal plant are infinitesimal, indefinitely. PV panels need to be thrown away and replaced after a few years.
With solar however, at low penetrations, you're offsetting the increased demand that bright, sunny days impart to the grid.
That's only true in lower, hotter latitudes. Try that trick further north and you'll get lots of power when nobody is using it, and none when everyone is consuming massive amounts of electricity for heating.
having just one plant is vulnerable to the "a cloud just showed up" phenomenon
Nope. We're talking about a liquid sodium solar plant, here. It'll keep producing a large fraction of it's normal, steady power output levels for DAYS after the sun explodes.
Really? How can you argue FOR the huge defense budget?
You can't possibly argue for anything so abstract. Break it down into it's constituent parts, though, and the utility of each is clear.
We have somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 nuclear warheads deployed or in stockpile
And what? Push a magic button and they turn into money? Decommissioning them is quite expensive,and as you've said, we've been systematically lowering the numbers in the stockpile for decades.
We still have 174,000 troops deployed world wide, with 60,000+ in Germany, 50,000+ in Japan, and 30,000+ in South Korea. Why? Your guess is as good as mine, because those wars ended long ago.
The Korean War never ended. Soldiers along the DMZ are routinely shot and killed. With North Korea's dire economic situation, it's practically undisputed that the US' military commitment to South Korea is the only thing stopping invasion from the heavily militarized North... That's as current as it gets.
Many of the troops in Germany are supporting the active wars in the middle east. Basically everyone who gets seriously injured in Iraq or Afghanistan is evac'd to US military medical facilities in Germany. What's more, if the US is going to continue to be the police force to the world, large bases outside of the US are simply needed. They happen to be often located in countries we've been at war with, but it's not always the case, and simply works out that way. If we didn't have foreign bases standing, how long do you think it would have taken the US to coordinate their initial attacks on Libya? Sure, a few jets could do the mid-air refueling thing and fly around the planet, but it would become untenable quickly. And we wouldn't just suddenly be converting a parking lot into a military base over night.
How is that smart spending in a time of economic hardship?
Failing to spend a small amount of money to maintain something that has been highly valuable in the past, is not "smart spending". It's short-sighted idiocy. Think of it like not paying your flood insurance bill on your beach house, when times are tough. Penny-wise, pound foolish.
The tanks and missiles and ships aren't going anywhere.
Umm, actually, they are. Failing to do the maintenance on that equipment will quickly render it unreliable, dangerous, and militarily useless.
I guarantee calling back all troops deployed worldwide not currently engaged in Afghanistan would net a huge amount of $ that could be spent in a MUCH better place,
Well you'd immediately break the supply chain for Afghanistan, so that would require a huge amount more money spent to replace it. And casualties would vastly increase as well.
Let's not forget that South Korea is dead as soon as the US' commitment to them shows any signs of wavering, which, while that would save us some money momentarily, would quickly drive the world into depression, as one of the biggest economies in the world is militarily overwhelmed, all of Asia is severely affected, investors panic, and stock markets around the world crash and burn, with no sign of improvement for many years.
And besides all this, what's the point? Sure, we'd have a bit less debt, but spending it on other stimulus programs isn't going to improve the economy notably. Every respectable economist out there says we need private sector job growth, not more government stimulus, for a lasting recovery. Stimulus helps, but it's not a solution to the problem.
Show that any of the defense budget is wasted, and it can be cut right away. If you can't point out waste, then you're saying we should make some serious trade-offs. SO what are you going to cut? Fewer armored humvees? Less body armor. It's not being thrown in a hole in the ground, it's doing something. Just because it's a big number doesn't mean cutting BILLIONS from it won't be missed. It also doesn't mean there's a lot of waste in there. That's very ignorant and childish thinking.
If you want to debate what should and should not be part of defense spending, fine. But acknowledge that you're making trade-offs, and sit back and wait for the flood of people that disagree with you about what is necessary to come rolling in.
And even if a smartphone is necessary to live (ha!), Boost mobile (for example) has non-contract Android service, IIRC.
Problem with that logic is that, if this was a free market, there would be no Boost or Virgin. Both are Sprint, and Sprint reps testified in front of congress that, if AT&T is allowed to buy T-mobile, Sprint will be next. Then you'll have a true duopoly, and prepaid cell service might go away all together...
Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich, peak oil, etc, etc. Now Friedman.
Peak oil happened, and you were staring right at it, yet you say it's fake... The peak oil predictions proved to be a few years premature, but still, it happened. Oil shot up from $2/gallon to over $4/gallon in record time. It drove food prices way up, as well as other energy prices. It was only with a worldwide economic collapse that we got a brief reprieve, and then flew back up again... Looks like for good this time.
No, this is simply what the aftermath of a gold rush looks like... Back during the bubble, everyone that knew the difference between hardware and software could get a job without trying, and make a mint with no talent. Now, there's so many useless folks out there that a job listing is an invitation for idiots to spam you
Companies see you as replaceable because there's so many coming along that will work for far less, never mind skill level.
But those who are halfway decent have always done just fine (once you get a foot in the door). Of course, doing well may require switching jobs every couple years, until you find one offering a decent salary for your resume, and good stock options...
Think about it: how many routine flyers, do you think, have forgotten to turn off their phone when they sit down, or just didn't bother? How many incidents have occurred as a result? It's zero, in case you are wondering....
"Think about it" all you want, that won't make your gut feeling a fact. Let's try some actual facts:
Microsoft's R&D on Office pretty much amounts to making the UI ever more pretty for the ads, yet cryptic, unfamiliar, and painfully difficult to use. If open office was just an office 97 clone, and remained forever that way, only adding new file formats when Microsoft gets the urge to break compatibility and make it difficult to keep using the old versions, it could remain massively successful by doing so... After all, office suites are an awfully mature product at this point. No mater how much money microsoft spends on it, it's not going to improve much, without a revolutionary input device, or complete change of the document processing techniques we've all learned (like switching to something like latex) but that seems unlikely.
Okay, I wanted to like this. I've worked for dysfunctional companies, and would love to have a guide I could just hand to them to get things in order, and get security as an added benefit. But all I've read shows this is just doublespeak, corporate buzzword hell that doesn't do a thing.
I'm looking for suggestions, and will offer my own up front. If you want a reasonably safe infrastructure, start with PCI-DSS. It's free, fairly short, generalized, and widely accepted (because you have to, to accept credit cards). The key points being keep up to date, disable any extra features, use encryption, require two factor, force password changes, use tripwire, control and monitor physical access, don't give developers access to production, always code audit before deployment, and require management sign-off on every update.
It's not rocket science, and won't solve all problems, but it covers a hell of a lot of ground that companies often skip for expediency, and false economy. It also helps that it's a major industry standard, and in writing, and not just a whiney IT guy nobody likes, telling them what to do...
But there's certainly room for something better, and I'd like to see what others recomend.
Flywheels have very different power profiles depending on their design and usage. They can be extremely efficient, and at low speeds and high mass, they are. The longer you store energy, the more power lose is incurred due to friction (they're in a vacuum, but ride on bearings, which aren't perfect.). So, traditional (large, slow) flywheels which you quickly charge and discharge have losses basically equal to the loses of your electric motor, doubled. And in the real world, also the loses from AC-DC-AC conversion. You really can get 85% efficiency in the idealized cases, but in more realistic energy storage situations, loses can be massive, think 20% efficiency. Still, batteries are pretty poor at energy storage to, so high efficiency in the best case, and long service life, make it worthwhile.
For the high speed, portable flywheels, things are not so good. Traditional bearings can't be used, and electromagnetic bearings have never worked very well... They sound perfect, but those magnetic edies just annihilate all the benefits over time, and decades of r&d hasn't shown anything promising. Sorry to be a buzz kill, but these really don't work, and efficiency hasn't rivaled batteries, and won't until somebody finds the magic formula for magnetic bearings.
. But TNT releases most of its energy in the form of heat, which is imperfectly converted to kinetic energy, while the flywheels will release pure kinetic energy.
Hell, have you even HEARD of flywheels before? Your statement smacks of so much ignorance I can't believe you have the slightest comprehension of the subject...
Portable flywheels are spinning at very high speed in a vacuum, and made of carbon fiber. The instant the vacuum is broken, the friction from the air super heats the flywheel. It burns up almost instantly. There is NO SHRAPNEL. NO SHOCK WAVE. ETC. In fact it's basically a small volcano, and convection is very good at removing extremely high temperature gradients immediately. In short, if you aren't directly over it, you'll survive. Anything under it (eg steel) will be fine, too, if a bit cooked (yeah, plan on a new paint job), and thanks to convection, being a good distance above it is safe too, if uncomfortably warm, so no bridge collapse fear mongering, thanks... Chances are you'll need a clean pair of underwear, but will be untouched.
Now, for the large stationary flywheels, lower speeds and higher mass is used. Those you don't want to be near, but that's why they bury them underground, where they'll only destroy themselves, and make some glass.
Your microwave should not leak any signals/radiation...
This is not at all true. There shouldn't be substantial RF leakage, but it would be an impressive accomplishment to not leak ANY RF energy, especially given the high power involved. Even tempest-hardened environments leak plenty. There as here, the main culprit tends to be the power lines... They make good antennas, carrying RF signals from inside the metal box, to the outside world.
And as for danger, sure, it could be dangerous, but we're talking about "touching an electric hot plate" kind of danger, here, and that only in an extreme case, and only if you're very close by... nothing too exotic.
The whole notion that your degree should directly influence your earnings is reflective of how today many people go to college to get vocational training
No, actually, it's reflective of how huge of an economic burden student loans are, and hence requiring tremendous rewards to justify the burden and risk.
Of course, I've never seen a study that attacks the issue head-on. Even this study makes no attempt at cause and effect, and merely states those who go to college happen to make more money, never mind pre-existing skills and talent, nor economic background.
I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't think you do, either. I've never heard of any GMO research to make crops resistant to any "targeted" herbicides. However, "Roundup resistant" crops is a common goal of GMO research, and Roundup is a decidedly non targeted herbicide. In fact combining targeted herbicide and crop resistance to said herbicide is rather a redundant exercise.
And on that note, no new audio, video, or still image codes are ever developed... It all stops with h.264 and he-aac. The End.
And don't bother mentioning Theora or Web M, On2 was only profitable as a lower licensing cost alternative to MPEG, and wouldn't exist if not for patents.
The same goes for digital modulation methods (hope you're happy with 802.11n wireless and 40 gigabit ethernet speeds), and just about anything else you can name that's "open" yet requires money to develop...
Yes, in general it seems that the higher-end and more expensive your laser printer, the lower (sometimes dramatically) your consumables cost is. The $200 color laser is good if you rarely print anything at all, as a set of replacement carts is probably > $100 and run out after 1-2000 pages, but if you're doing much printing at all, it's worth it to spend more
Don't expect even an expensive business printer to be any cheaper than that...
What you get from a high end business class printer isn't cheaper consumables, it's hassle free operation. They'll crank out thousands of pages before there is a jam, and then, they might still auto recover from it. Meanwhile, for the home user, an occasional mis feed isn't a big deal.
Business class printers also blow past home printers in speed and duty cycle, but that's almost incidental. And these days, a low end laser is probably faster than you could want, unless you're literally keeping multiple laser printers fully utilized around the clock.
Amazon.com shipped it to my front door for $190, total.
You can get a color laser printer for $130... They don't clot, ink won't ever dry up, don't need head cleaning, print better looking text than any inkjet could hope for, consumables are dirt cheap, and toner is vastly more durable than any ink.
I got a samsung clp-300 for $150 about 4 years ago now, and it's doing just fine. But look up the price of generic consumables and be amazed... A fraction of a cent per page.
11x17" (aka Tabloid or Ledger, the ISO equivalent being A3). You won't find any laser printers that can do that for less than a couple thousand dollars.
That's true. However, when facing that dilemma for my employer, I figured out that practically any laser printer can handle US Legal, at 8.5x14, which means simply scaling printouts down by a few percent allow us to use any $50 laser printer while still being perfectly readable, instead of requiring a $3,000 large format laser. The rest should be obvious...
Mpeg2 is as healthy as ever. Hdtv, dvd, etc. h.264 is catching on for the web, but mpeg2 never even had afoot hold there, anyhow.
Your AAC comment needs a lot of qualifiers just to sound important, when it's a tiny number. MP3 was popular when there were no digital sales, and remains so.
And did you know that Mpeg1 layer2 audio has better sound quality than AAC can possibly manage? The mpeg1 articles on wikipedia or citizendium explain why.
Web P was weird from the start. Somebody said "hey, we can just rip that part out and call it a still image format". It's some google programmers hello world that crossed some PR guys desk...
Still, it's further proof of my motto... The earliest codes were based on decades of amazing research and development, and frankly, did everything right. They were designed for transparent reproduction at high bit rates, not low quality junk, so there's room for alternatives there. But across a wide range of scenarios, the early lossy formats get impressively close to the maximum possibly compression, per perceptual entropy, and do so at a tiny fraction the resource requirements of the shiny new trendy junk that is often technically inferiori.
In short, MP3 will be around forever, layer2 at 192k is frankly perfect, Mpeg 2 (dvd, hdtv, etc) will be the high quality video standard effectively forever, jpeg will always be awesome, and perceptual encoding simply doesn't evolve at internet speeds, no mater how much we'd like it to, or how much you spend marketing it.
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Last I checked, North Korea has the #4 military in the world. China is the only one on your list that could take them on. Austrailia isn't a nuclear power, and Japan trains their army not to shoot people, and not to shoot to kill even if being attacked, even in a war zone like Afghanistan.
And China would be more likely to encourage an invasion than stop it. They're the PROK's only major trading partner and ally. It would be a cheap way for China to get anything they want out of the south.
I start with the OBSERVATION that the US' projection of military power across the world since WWII has had tremendous positive effect in economic, political, and humanitarian. I continue on with the observation that all other western nations have shown themselves completely unwilling to commit to such efforts, no matter what, unless the US is doing the overwhelming bulk of the fighting.
Saying we can save money by eliminating our military is a lot like saying someone should sell their (only) car to avoid paying the car insurance bill... you'll find not having it soon costs you so much more than the cost of maintaining it would have.
Umm, what? The US military has huge air capacity, and routinely uses it to great effect. If an obvious and severe need arose, I fully expect the US could move hundreds of thousands of military personnel, and a substantial amount of heavy equipment, into any given major metropolitan area in well under 24 hours.
And hundreds of jets are much harder to sabotage than a couple train lines.
That's your own misperception. The grass is always greener elsewhere, right?
High-speed rail is a great gadget, which is why you want one. People like gadgets because they sound cool, but then after the shine wears off and you find they're not very useful, they get thrown out.
In this case, rail has an impossible task competing with jet travel. For longer distances, the speed difference is monumental, and there's no hope of rail being a faster or cheaper alternative. For shorter distances, it has no hope of competing with cars, because you just can't get more efficient than being able to go directly in a straight line where you want, when you want. Highways are actually very efficient, which is why trucking is so often competitive with freight trains.
So where does that leave trains competitive? Just the small commuter trips... Connecting major cities that are only 30 minutes or so from each other. Connecting the suburbs to cities might work, but it usually doesn't, as the added hassle of getting to/from the train often doesn't turn out to be practically better than driving the entire route.
In short, often what will really contribute the most benefit simply isn't flashy, drool-worthy and new... Often those un-sexy incremental improvements are a collective revolution. And while you may not get a warm fuzzy feeling, the fact that the US doesn't throw money after projects destined to fail and become a money pit is actually a plus.
Try that without the subsidies the state and federal governments are already providing. And while you could of course get PV panels for a home for $20k, it wouldn't provide for 100% of the power they need, so it's not a remotely fair comparison.
And did I mention life-time? Operating costs on a solar thermal plant are infinitesimal, indefinitely. PV panels need to be thrown away and replaced after a few years.
That's only true in lower, hotter latitudes. Try that trick further north and you'll get lots of power when nobody is using it, and none when everyone is consuming massive amounts of electricity for heating.
Nope. We're talking about a liquid sodium solar plant, here. It'll keep producing a large fraction of it's normal, steady power output levels for DAYS after the sun explodes.
You can't possibly argue for anything so abstract. Break it down into it's constituent parts, though, and the utility of each is clear.
And what? Push a magic button and they turn into money? Decommissioning them is quite expensive,and as you've said, we've been systematically lowering the numbers in the stockpile for decades.
The Korean War never ended. Soldiers along the DMZ are routinely shot and killed. With North Korea's dire economic situation, it's practically undisputed that the US' military commitment to South Korea is the only thing stopping invasion from the heavily militarized North... That's as current as it gets.
Many of the troops in Germany are supporting the active wars in the middle east. Basically everyone who gets seriously injured in Iraq or Afghanistan is evac'd to US military medical facilities in Germany. What's more, if the US is going to continue to be the police force to the world, large bases outside of the US are simply needed. They happen to be often located in countries we've been at war with, but it's not always the case, and simply works out that way. If we didn't have foreign bases standing, how long do you think it would have taken the US to coordinate their initial attacks on Libya? Sure, a few jets could do the mid-air refueling thing and fly around the planet, but it would become untenable quickly. And we wouldn't just suddenly be converting a parking lot into a military base over night.
Failing to spend a small amount of money to maintain something that has been highly valuable in the past, is not "smart spending". It's short-sighted idiocy. Think of it like not paying your flood insurance bill on your beach house, when times are tough. Penny-wise, pound foolish.
Umm, actually, they are. Failing to do the maintenance on that equipment will quickly render it unreliable, dangerous, and militarily useless.
Well you'd immediately break the supply chain for Afghanistan, so that would require a huge amount more money spent to replace it. And casualties would vastly increase as well.
Let's not forget that South Korea is dead as soon as the US' commitment to them shows any signs of wavering, which, while that would save us some money momentarily, would quickly drive the world into depression, as one of the biggest economies in the world is militarily overwhelmed, all of Asia is severely affected, investors panic, and stock markets around the world crash and burn, with no sign of improvement for many years.
And besides all this, what's the point? Sure, we'd have a bit less debt, but spending it on other stimulus programs isn't going to improve the economy notably. Every respectable economist out there says we need private sector job growth, not more government stimulus, for a lasting recovery. Stimulus helps, but it's not a solution to the problem.
Show that any of the defense budget is wasted, and it can be cut right away. If you can't point out waste, then you're saying we should make some serious trade-offs. SO what are you going to cut? Fewer armored humvees? Less body armor. It's not being thrown in a hole in the ground, it's doing something. Just because it's a big number doesn't mean cutting BILLIONS from it won't be missed. It also doesn't mean there's a lot of waste in there. That's very ignorant and childish thinking.
If you want to debate what should and should not be part of defense spending, fine. But acknowledge that you're making trade-offs, and sit back and wait for the flood of people that disagree with you about what is necessary to come rolling in.
Problem with that logic is that, if this was a free market, there would be no Boost or Virgin. Both are Sprint, and Sprint reps testified in front of congress that, if AT&T is allowed to buy T-mobile, Sprint will be next. Then you'll have a true duopoly, and prepaid cell service might go away all together...
Peak oil happened, and you were staring right at it, yet you say it's fake... The peak oil predictions proved to be a few years premature, but still, it happened. Oil shot up from $2/gallon to over $4/gallon in record time. It drove food prices way up, as well as other energy prices. It was only with a worldwide economic collapse that we got a brief reprieve, and then flew back up again... Looks like for good this time.
I bet there's high demand for fast food employees, too. It's just not on this list because that's not "IT".
No, this is simply what the aftermath of a gold rush looks like... Back during the bubble, everyone that knew the difference between hardware and software could get a job without trying, and make a mint with no talent. Now, there's so many useless folks out there that a job listing is an invitation for idiots to spam you
Companies see you as replaceable because there's so many coming along that will work for far less, never mind skill level.
But those who are halfway decent have always done just fine (once you get a foot in the door). Of course, doing well may require switching jobs every couple years, until you find one offering a decent salary for your resume, and good stock options...
"Think about it" all you want, that won't make your gut feeling a fact. Let's try some actual facts:
http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.php?c_id=1&objectid=10701029
Microsoft's R&D on Office pretty much amounts to making the UI ever more pretty for the ads, yet cryptic, unfamiliar, and painfully difficult to use. If open office was just an office 97 clone, and remained forever that way, only adding new file formats when Microsoft gets the urge to break compatibility and make it difficult to keep using the old versions, it could remain massively successful by doing so... After all, office suites are an awfully mature product at this point. No mater how much money microsoft spends on it, it's not going to improve much, without a revolutionary input device, or complete change of the document processing techniques we've all learned (like switching to something like latex) but that seems unlikely.
Okay, I wanted to like this. I've worked for dysfunctional companies, and would love to have a guide I could just hand to them to get things in order, and get security as an added benefit. But all I've read shows this is just doublespeak, corporate buzzword hell that doesn't do a thing.
I'm looking for suggestions, and will offer my own up front. If you want a reasonably safe infrastructure, start with PCI-DSS. It's free, fairly short, generalized, and widely accepted (because you have to, to accept credit cards). The key points being keep up to date, disable any extra features, use encryption, require two factor, force password changes, use tripwire, control and monitor physical access, don't give developers access to production, always code audit before deployment, and require management sign-off on every update.
It's not rocket science, and won't solve all problems, but it covers a hell of a lot of ground that companies often skip for expediency, and false economy. It also helps that it's a major industry standard, and in writing, and not just a whiney IT guy nobody likes, telling them what to do...
But there's certainly room for something better, and I'd like to see what others recomend.
Flywheels have very different power profiles depending on their design and usage. They can be extremely efficient, and at low speeds and high mass, they are. The longer you store energy, the more power lose is incurred due to friction (they're in a vacuum, but ride on bearings, which aren't perfect.). So, traditional (large, slow) flywheels which you quickly charge and discharge have losses basically equal to the loses of your electric motor, doubled. And in the real world, also the loses from AC-DC-AC conversion. You really can get 85% efficiency in the idealized cases, but in more realistic energy storage situations, loses can be massive, think 20% efficiency. Still, batteries are pretty poor at energy storage to, so high efficiency in the best case, and long service life, make it worthwhile.
For the high speed, portable flywheels, things are not so good. Traditional bearings can't be used, and electromagnetic bearings have never worked very well... They sound perfect, but those magnetic edies just annihilate all the benefits over time, and decades of r&d hasn't shown anything promising. Sorry to be a buzz kill, but these really don't work, and efficiency hasn't rivaled batteries, and won't until somebody finds the magic formula for magnetic bearings.
Hell, have you even HEARD of flywheels before? Your statement smacks of so much ignorance I can't believe you have the slightest comprehension of the subject...
Portable flywheels are spinning at very high speed in a vacuum, and made of carbon fiber. The instant the vacuum is broken, the friction from the air super heats the flywheel. It burns up almost instantly. There is NO SHRAPNEL. NO SHOCK WAVE. ETC. In fact it's basically a small volcano, and convection is very good at removing extremely high temperature gradients immediately. In short, if you aren't directly over it, you'll survive. Anything under it (eg steel) will be fine, too, if a bit cooked (yeah, plan on a new paint job), and thanks to convection, being a good distance above it is safe too, if uncomfortably warm, so no bridge collapse fear mongering, thanks... Chances are you'll need a clean pair of underwear, but will be untouched.
Now, for the large stationary flywheels, lower speeds and higher mass is used. Those you don't want to be near, but that's why they bury them underground, where they'll only destroy themselves, and make some glass.
Sounds fine to me, since they make up 75% of electrical demand.
This is not at all true. There shouldn't be substantial RF leakage, but it would be an impressive accomplishment to not leak ANY RF energy, especially given the high power involved. Even tempest-hardened environments leak plenty. There as here, the main culprit tends to be the power lines... They make good antennas, carrying RF signals from inside the metal box, to the outside world.
And as for danger, sure, it could be dangerous, but we're talking about "touching an electric hot plate" kind of danger, here, and that only in an extreme case, and only if you're very close by... nothing too exotic.
No, actually, it's reflective of how huge of an economic burden student loans are, and hence requiring tremendous rewards to justify the burden and risk.
Of course, I've never seen a study that attacks the issue head-on. Even this study makes no attempt at cause and effect, and merely states those who go to college happen to make more money, never mind pre-existing skills and talent, nor economic background.
I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't think you do, either. I've never heard of any GMO research to make crops resistant to any "targeted" herbicides. However, "Roundup resistant" crops is a common goal of GMO research, and Roundup is a decidedly non targeted herbicide. In fact combining targeted herbicide and crop resistance to said herbicide is rather a redundant exercise.
And on that note, no new audio, video, or still image codes are ever developed... It all stops with h.264 and he-aac. The End.
And don't bother mentioning Theora or Web M, On2 was only profitable as a lower licensing cost alternative to MPEG, and wouldn't exist if not for patents.
The same goes for digital modulation methods (hope you're happy with 802.11n wireless and 40 gigabit ethernet speeds), and just about anything else you can name that's "open" yet requires money to develop...
Maybe that is generally true, but there are plenty of exceptions. My old Samsung CLP-300 for example works out to less than a cent per page. The black toner is about half a cent per page.
http://www.123inkjets.com/Samsung/Compatible/Laser-Toner/Black/CLP-K300A/1230-Product.html
Don't expect even an expensive business printer to be any cheaper than that...
What you get from a high end business class printer isn't cheaper consumables, it's hassle free operation. They'll crank out thousands of pages before there is a jam, and then, they might still auto recover from it. Meanwhile, for the home user, an occasional mis feed isn't a big deal.
Business class printers also blow past home printers in speed and duty cycle, but that's almost incidental. And these days, a low end laser is probably faster than you could want, unless you're literally keeping multiple laser printers fully utilized around the clock.
You can get a color laser printer for $130... They don't clot, ink won't ever dry up, don't need head cleaning, print better looking text than any inkjet could hope for, consumables are dirt cheap, and toner is vastly more durable than any ink.
I got a samsung clp-300 for $150 about 4 years ago now, and it's doing just fine. But look up the price of generic consumables and be amazed... A fraction of a cent per page.
That's true. However, when facing that dilemma for my employer, I figured out that practically any laser printer can handle US Legal, at 8.5x14, which means simply scaling printouts down by a few percent allow us to use any $50 laser printer while still being perfectly readable, instead of requiring a $3,000 large format laser. The rest should be obvious...
Mpeg2 is as healthy as ever. Hdtv, dvd, etc. h.264 is catching on for the web, but mpeg2 never even had afoot hold there, anyhow.
Your AAC comment needs a lot of qualifiers just to sound important, when it's a tiny number. MP3 was popular when there were no digital sales, and remains so.
And did you know that Mpeg1 layer2 audio has better sound quality than AAC can possibly manage? The mpeg1 articles on wikipedia or citizendium explain why.
Web P was weird from the start. Somebody said "hey, we can just rip that part out and call it a still image format". It's some google programmers hello world that crossed some PR guys desk...
Still, it's further proof of my motto... The earliest codes were based on decades of amazing research and development, and frankly, did everything right. They were designed for transparent reproduction at high bit rates, not low quality junk, so there's room for alternatives there. But across a wide range of scenarios, the early lossy formats get impressively close to the maximum possibly compression, per perceptual entropy, and do so at a tiny fraction the resource requirements of the shiny new trendy junk that is often technically inferiori.
In short, MP3 will be around forever, layer2 at 192k is frankly perfect, Mpeg 2 (dvd, hdtv, etc) will be the high quality video standard effectively forever, jpeg will always be awesome, and perceptual encoding simply doesn't evolve at internet speeds, no mater how much we'd like it to, or how much you spend marketing it.
A can we please get a better name for it?