Key phrase: "the mountain passes", as in "where wind is concentrated and accelerated."
That would be where the winds are worst, yes.
I live in Nebraska, and I've heard meteorologists state with a straight face that "today will be calm, with a 25 mile per hour west wind". That is, there are constant 25mph straight-line winds blowing across the prairies.
Sounds like a nice calm day in the Southern California deserts as well. Summer, winter, it doesn't matter. Calm and barely breeze days are the very rare exceptions here.
What about nighttime on a not-very-windy day? Oh right, we don't have massive electrical storage stations built around the US.
In fact we do. There are numerous dams located around the country. You merely need to install a pump, and pump water from the bottom to the top of the dam during the day or when it's windy. Then the dam can extract most of that stored water to generate extra power when needed. The big downside is evaporation, but that's still only up to 20% loss, which is pretty good. And that can be eliminated by building such uphill/downhill water storage/generation facilities that are completely enclosed, rather than re-using dams.
Additional, solar-thermal has a built-in ability to store thermal energy and continue generating electricity through the night, and through several days of overcast skies. Look up liquid sodium solar-thermal power plant designs for more info.
not really seeing what benefit that will bring, the operator gets to hear the password so they'll get to know it anyhow
Yes, and the website you type your password into gets it in plain text as well when you log-in.
The advantage is the same as with all hashed passwords... Someone gaining access to the password file, through whatever means, can't up and use that information to access everyone's accounts. They would have to brute force the hash to find the plain text password. It doesn't protect you from a man-in-the-middle, just some scenarios of unauthorized access.
Personally I found the original change funny, like the customer did.
The change would be funny from a small company that you do some business with, but NOT FROM A BANK. Any sign of employee impropriety with sensitive information that your life savings depends on, is downright scary. And losing money might be the best outcome... A couple suspicious transactions is all it would take to raise a red-flag, and automatically trigger a police investigation for possible (drug/weapons/terrorist) money laundering.
I want nothing but monotonous, joyless, boring bastards handling all aspects of my bank account. In fact, computers would fit the bill perfectly.
Not really. The staff is looking at this info in front of a computer, no doubt, so hashing the password, and then requiring the staff to type it in to verify a match would be quite easily possible.
OTOH, there could be innumerable problems with poor spelling, having to spell out your password over the phone, issues with whitespace, punctuation, etc. Of course, those could be pretty easily managed as well.
The picture to which you link doesn't even support that (Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are shown as windier).
Actually, it does. I was not claiming California had more wind capacity, but that it has lots of areas with extremely powerful winds, making for extremely good spots for wind farms.
note that the only coastal state among the top thirteen in capacity is Texas.
"Top X" is utterly irrelevant. There is a LOT of untapped capacity available near population centers, long before we'd possibly need such ridiculously expensive and wasteful infrastructure, as proposed here.
The problem with solar is that we still don't have a good way to gather it.
That's utterly idiotic. Several solar-thermal power plants have been in operation around the world for years, if not decades, and thoroughly proven themselves in every way. Several of the world's largest (and most efficient) solar power plants are in the works right now in CA, in contract with So Cal Edison and PG&E.
Solar currently provides less than.1% of the nation's electricity; by contrast, wind is already at 1.1% and growing quickly.
It's true that there hasn't been a lot of solar capacity, but over the past few years, numerous huge solar power facilities have been in the works, mostly in CA, and will be online in just a few years. Any one of which boasts that it will have more capacity than all other existing facilities combined. It won't be long before solar surpasses wind, and the potential for solar is VASTLY larger than wind, easily being able to supply ALL the power needed in the entire country.
Huge wind farms in the Midwest will only benefit the Midwest. A massive solar array in the Mojave dessert will only benefit states that are near it.
Sounds good to me... Many many megawatts of capacity can come from solar and wind, and it's generated closest to where it's used, minimizing line losses. What's the problem?
The example they use is that midwest wind-farms can't send power to the coasts... WTF?
California is quite likely the windiest place in the US. Excluding tornadoes, the midwest can't hope to compete with the daily hurricane-force winds across all the mountain passes and deserts in CA.
And it's not just CA. How about the Cape Wind Project? Just about any coastal community is going to have substantial and steady wind at their disposal. Honestly, just check out the map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_wind_power_map.png
And why the fixation on maxing out wind power? Because T.B. Pickens wants to get the most out of his investment, and get the Fed to pick up as much of the check as possible? What happened to solar?
Nearly every place in the US that isn't great for wind, is very favorable to solar. The entire southern half of the US could get by on solar, and skip wind turbines all together. That's just doubly true for the south-west. Again, see the map for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Us_pv_annual_may2004.jpg
Between the two options, where is it, exactly, that we can't locally generate all the energy needed? Seems to be pretty solid coverage, without the need for a national grid roll-out to get the Fed to subsidize the midwestern states. Of all the issues the grid has, the limited ultra-long-haul capacity (and correspondingly high losses) would be the last on my list.
It is Apple's right and responsibility as a business to protect its brand by making sure its products are high quality and by making sure that others, for any reason, don't tarnish that brand.
By the same logic, any company should be able to set any terms it wants to, on anything it sells.
What if someone buys a car from Ford, gets maintenance done by somebody that doesn't know what they are doing, then sells it to someone else? The guy that bought it is going to be complaining that Ford sells crappy cars. Clearly, Ford has a right and responsibility to stop anyone but their own service centers from working on their cars.
The politicians win on every front here, they can hide the true cost of the tax load on the American worker and vilify any corporation that makes big numbers as being against the poor, downtrodden, hungry, or my favorite "children".
That's pure and total nonsense.
Go look up ANY (real/credible) economist's explanation for why the "gas- tax holiday" idea (being spouted by McCain) won't lower prices at all.
A windfall profits tax is the polar opposite. It will do little or nothing to increase the price at the pump, and what small increase there is, will be more than made up for in the taxes they pay, presumably allowing individual income taxes on the public to be lowered.
Reaganomics has been adopted world wide and as such has produced the largest wave of economic expansion, on the planet, in human history.
Indeed it has. The rich are far richer than their have ever been before. The middle and lower classes, however, are not only seeing NONE of that "economic expansion", their economic situation continues to worsen, on both an absolute basis, and comparatively to the richest 2%.
Actually, in this country, tax cuts for everyone has lead to an increase in the manufacturing capacity of the United States. Right now, USA exports are -higher- than they have ever been.
You can always spot a moron ("I Got Mine") Libertarian by the obvious blatant lies.
I mean, you're not entirely wrong... Bush's tax cuts DID help greatly to send the US economy into it's current tail-spin, which vastly devalued the US dollar, thereby making US products slightly cheaper to the rest of the world.
They haven't, in any way, contributed to the manufacturing capacity of the US. The US' manufacturing capacity is still growing, of course, and is the largest in the world, but it's shrinking, relative to the population, and the overall economy.
But of course you already knew that, since you criticized Bush earlier for the economy, but you certainly can't let that get in the way of your bullshit justifications for your current agenda, so just hand-wave away the real reasons, and substitute your own.
It's easy to bullshit like this on any subject. If you just don't account for inflation, everything is more expensive today than it was yesterday! Alternatively, you can complain about the government spending so much more money for X Y Z, and just ignore the fact that spending has increased lower than inflation. Similarly, you can say that the poor and middle class are better off, because their pay has increased (eg.) X% over the past Y years, never minding that X is less than inflation, so they're actually earning less money now than before, for more work.
Unless I'm completely mistaken, this plane being constructed with so much carbon fiber, wouldn't it have a very small (perhaps non-existent) radar signature?
It may be structurally carbon-fiber, but those solar panels covering the entire body, and all the batteries and motors certainly aren't.
But both are besides the point. Once you've scaled a plane down to smaller than common types of birds, it's effectively invisible anyhow, with the enemy recon plane being indistinguishable from wild-life.
I heard Schwarzenegger commenting how he 'saw the steel melted by fire' when that San Francisco bridge collapse happened a couple years ago.
I have no doubt the Governator saw mangled steel, that was damaged by the fire (either directly or indirectly). The fact that he, an actor and politician, attempted to convey the point with incorrect technical terminology does not surprise me in the slightest. Neither do I think either an expert or an average person would take the word of a politician on technical issues, so I can't see how his comment would further a conspiracy to convince anyone of anything.
Sorry. I was there and I heard the explosions.
*sigh*
I've head from several people who were there, and reported seeing "a small plane" (presumably propeller driven--ie. a Cesna) crash into the first tower.
I also heard from former pilot who was there, and, 5 minutes after witnessing it, recognized the errant plane in question as a jumbo jet, and even went as far as making an (correct) educated guess that it was likely a Boeing 767.
So... you heard explosions. Are you an explosives expert? Would an explosives expert, who witnessed the destruction of the towers, report hearing explosions? Or would he, instead, identify hearing loud noises, that did not sound anything like explosions to him?
and the need for maintenance and cooling precludes burying them.
Actually, they would have lower cooling needs underground, and what cooling they did need could be done much more efficiently with a small ground loop (versus a radiator and fan blowing air).
As for maintenance, things like water lines and sewers have similar needs... We all know what a "man hole cover" is. It would be rather simple to have them below ground, with a ground-level panel for extremely easy access.
That is "Not In My BackYard" has become "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody".
Nobody is complaining about the upgrading communications, just the gigantic boxes being suddenly installed, rather than, say, burried as Verizon is happily doing.
I'd say the only thing that has really changed in the past decade or so, is that the public actually has some rights now, when a company comes in and decides to put up a gigantic eyesore in front of their windows, or dangerously close to the road or their driveway.
This is the polar opposite of what generally happens, as companies would go out of their way to put up a giant billboard, or a new apartment building that completely obstructs the view of other buildings, and often hanging a banner on the side saying "If you don't like looking at this brick wall, call to rent a new apartment from us."
The Russians also want to discourage further development of missile defense, because if America ever does manage to get it reliable enough to count on, that leaves them in the same losing position that unilateral disarmament would.
Russia is a big enough country, with an advanced enough military, that launching ICBMs isn't their only option.
With dozens of submarines, I'm sure they don't need to worry about being able to get several shots through the "shield".
If we covered the world with newclear fallout, nature would flourish and global warming would go away.
All true, at least in the long-term. I mean, we'd lose numerous species in the process, but something would spring-up, and history has shown quite well that "nature" does flourish when there are as few humans around as possible.
If there is no coal plant, you have perfect air, but you freeze to death in winter, can't see at night...
Only if coal is the only possible source of energy.
If it is not, and has to compete with a higher price alternative that does not pollute the air at all, it's a prisoner's dilemma...
Everyone would save money if we payed the higher price for a clean alternative, in the cost of medical bills, and the like. But if most people pay the higher price, and you pay the lower price, you still get pretty clean air, and save money. But if everyone takes the second route, we all get dirty air, and none of us save money, nor the air.
Including the cost of medical bills into the cost of coal, forces it to fairly compete on cost with the cleaner option that doesn't pollute.
All this talk about trying to adequately "capture the costs" of the environment is really more along the lines of trying to compel people to pay them.
No. To be accurate, the idea of adjusting for externalities is an attempt to compel those who directly get the benefits, to pay for them, rather than spreading the burden onto governments, the populace at large, etc., etc.
I have a better idea. Give up the "web app" mentality all together.
When you need to access your e-mail, load up an MTA. It works an order of magnitude faster, without maxing out your CPU to display a message. It requires an infinitesimal amount of bandwidth, and allows you to read and respond to e-mails even when you're nowhere near an internet connection.
When I'm looking at several items, and want them sorted by popularity, I REALLY DON'T NEED to see an animated status bar show up to tell me that the page is being loaded. Come to think of it, I don't need that fancy menu, made up of hundreds of images. A plain old HTML listbox works better, and IMHO even looks better.
If you have a break-through network application that's going to change the world... GREAT! Write an actual program that will merely communicate over the net. Not some hacked together Javascript that just barely works on a good day, on the right version of the right browser, with all the settings done by your CTO.
Tell me... how would you feel if "whois" was implemented entirely as a web-app? Only way to get whois information was to load-up netsol.com, input an IP/URL and parse the output? It would sure suck, wouldn't it? Yet the trend of the week is to lock-up as many of our programs as possible just like that. And usability suffers dramatically. For all the complaints about Microsoft, I bet most people would be extremely happy with a slow computer if it wasn't for browsing with multiple tabs of unresponsive web-apps that max-out your CPU and RAM. Of course Mozilla and kin are partly to blame as well, but that's rather high hanging fruit when the root of the problem is glorified Visual Basic apps redone over again, even clunkier, in HTML.
Nuclear is so much better than solar because it works in the dark and even when it rains.
True. There are many areas where solar isn't a good option, and solar probably won't be used for base load for several decades in the future.
So what if it blows up from time to time, nuclear accidents are overrated anyway, and are probably good for the environment because it scares people away so the forest can re-grow.
True. More people die from pollution than have ever died from radiation poisoning, and both plants and animals are flourishing in the Chernobyl fall-out area.
There is no reason why we all can't have safe little nuclear power plants in our backyard, today.
Almost true. I'd love to see Stirling Radioisotope Generators (SRG) installed every few city blocks large enough to handle base load. Alpha emitters aren't the "dangerous" type of radiation like the Gamma emitters everyone is familiar with, and doesn't even require any special radiation shielding. They're maintenance-free for decades at a time, so you install them in an ultra-massive concrete casing if you like, or perhaps just bury them a hundred feet down, and let them do their thing.
In fact, what I'd really like is an SRG in my electric motor home, so that I never need any gasoline or grid electricity for my lifetime, and could drive endlessly, and just decide to park and live absolutely anywhere I feel like. Honestly, how expensive is food? If you didn't have to pay for rent, electricity, gasoline, etc., how many years would you have to work to save up enough money to feed yourself for the rest of your life?
If we all could tolerate soot filled cities, like London in 1880, we could have dirt cheap heat and light and electricity just by burning coal and sometimes making steam with it for power.
You forgot about the expensive part... stringing-up power lines across all of sub-Saharan Africa to distribute the power. With distributed generation, like solar panels, you don't have to build that kind of terribly expensive infrastructure. There might be a place for such central power plants in the larger cities, but it likely won't help the really poor.
And coal really isn't cheap, as you're making it out to be. To build a large power plant, you need lots of up-front investment to construct a plant large enough that you aren't wasting 75% of the coal (your biggest operating cost), and then you also need the infrastructure to distribute coal on an extremely regular basis, which isn't going to be so easy with a land-locked country surrounded by politically unstable, potentially unfriendly, and possibly anarchic nations.
But hey, you've obviously know what you're talking about, as evidenced by all the facts and figures you've included in your proposal...
After you factor out the spread of disease from Europe in the Americas, which was tragic, but not malicious for the most part(Germ theory hadn't been invented yet, though apparently Cortez figured out something was killing the Aztecs and gave them smallpox infected blankets)
Germ theory wasn't invented, but that doesn't mean people didn't have at least a good idea how to spread diseases.
Theories like "miasma" were close enough to accuracy that people were able to effectively utilize, or prevent, the spread of germs.
Back to at least the Middle Ages, armies were widely utilizing germ warfare in a somewhat vain and ignorant manner, by throwing decomposing animal carcases over castle walls. Long before then there were less widespread examples of the same.
Saying you can't utilize disease because you don't fully understand the theory behind it is extremely ignorant.
I'm sure blacksmiths didn't know much about human biology, but were still able to craft pointy objects that were effective at killing people.
It doesn't take an electrical engineer to figure out how to let out the "magic smoke" from most devices.
Why is it that when women start developing (gasp!), they are hugely disadvantaged in the world of competitive gymnastics?
Because when they grow up, they aren't as strong, relative to their own weight.
But while we cannot control the woman's figure, of course we can control the sport and its events. Why not choose or create events that aren't hindered by a woman's curves or emphasize artistic moves that prefer a adult's center of mass, rather than a child's, etc.?
We do NOT create sports to fit a particular body type. We create sports that are difficult, and those who are best suited for it become the best competitors.
Many sports favor people who are tall. Some sports favor those who are short. Most sports favor those who are extremely strong. None are normal or average individuals by any stretch of the imagination.
If you're going to start changing sports to give every average person a fair shot at any of them, you're going to take away anything and everything that is special about the sports (that makes people want to watch them) and the competitors.
You might as well suggest that we change weightlifting so that 7' (2m+) tall people can be just as competitive as those who are 5' (1.5m).
It's all an idiotic idea, bourne out of the same ocean of bullshit as "political correctness" and "gender equality".
Up next, no doubt, you're going to suggest that sports should be created, where women can compete equally with men... the very weak should be able to compete with the strong, etc. etc. It very quickly becomes a non-sport.
Any changes you make to gymnastics that cease to favor the better competitors will quickly make it a pointless and mindless dance routine.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be where the winds are worst, yes.
Sounds like a nice calm day in the Southern California deserts as well. Summer, winter, it doesn't matter. Calm and barely breeze days are the very rare exceptions here.
In fact we do. There are numerous dams located around the country. You merely need to install a pump, and pump water from the bottom to the top of the dam during the day or when it's windy. Then the dam can extract most of that stored water to generate extra power when needed. The big downside is evaporation, but that's still only up to 20% loss, which is pretty good. And that can be eliminated by building such uphill/downhill water storage/generation facilities that are completely enclosed, rather than re-using dams.
Additional, solar-thermal has a built-in ability to store thermal energy and continue generating electricity through the night, and through several days of overcast skies. Look up liquid sodium solar-thermal power plant designs for more info.
Yes, and the website you type your password into gets it in plain text as well when you log-in.
The advantage is the same as with all hashed passwords... Someone gaining access to the password file, through whatever means, can't up and use that information to access everyone's accounts. They would have to brute force the hash to find the plain text password. It doesn't protect you from a man-in-the-middle, just some scenarios of unauthorized access.
The change would be funny from a small company that you do some business with, but NOT FROM A BANK. Any sign of employee impropriety with sensitive information that your life savings depends on, is downright scary. And losing money might be the best outcome... A couple suspicious transactions is all it would take to raise a red-flag, and automatically trigger a police investigation for possible (drug/weapons/terrorist) money laundering.
I want nothing but monotonous, joyless, boring bastards handling all aspects of my bank account. In fact, computers would fit the bill perfectly.
Not really. The staff is looking at this info in front of a computer, no doubt, so hashing the password, and then requiring the staff to type it in to verify a match would be quite easily possible.
OTOH, there could be innumerable problems with poor spelling, having to spell out your password over the phone, issues with whitespace, punctuation, etc. Of course, those could be pretty easily managed as well.
Actually, it does. I was not claiming California had more wind capacity, but that it has lots of areas with extremely powerful winds, making for extremely good spots for wind farms.
"Top X" is utterly irrelevant. There is a LOT of untapped capacity available near population centers, long before we'd possibly need such ridiculously expensive and wasteful infrastructure, as proposed here.
That's utterly idiotic. Several solar-thermal power plants have been in operation around the world for years, if not decades, and thoroughly proven themselves in every way. Several of the world's largest (and most efficient) solar power plants are in the works right now in CA, in contract with So Cal Edison and PG&E.
It's true that there hasn't been a lot of solar capacity, but over the past few years, numerous huge solar power facilities have been in the works, mostly in CA, and will be online in just a few years. Any one of which boasts that it will have more capacity than all other existing facilities combined. It won't be long before solar surpasses wind, and the potential for solar is VASTLY larger than wind, easily being able to supply ALL the power needed in the entire country.
Sounds good to me... Many many megawatts of capacity can come from solar and wind, and it's generated closest to where it's used, minimizing line losses. What's the problem?
The example they use is that midwest wind-farms can't send power to the coasts... WTF?
California is quite likely the windiest place in the US. Excluding tornadoes, the midwest can't hope to compete with the daily hurricane-force winds across all the mountain passes and deserts in CA.
And it's not just CA. How about the Cape Wind Project? Just about any coastal community is going to have substantial and steady wind at their disposal. Honestly, just check out the map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_wind_power_map.png
And why the fixation on maxing out wind power? Because T.B. Pickens wants to get the most out of his investment, and get the Fed to pick up as much of the check as possible? What happened to solar?
Nearly every place in the US that isn't great for wind, is very favorable to solar. The entire southern half of the US could get by on solar, and skip wind turbines all together. That's just doubly true for the south-west. Again, see the map for yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Us_pv_annual_may2004.jpg
Between the two options, where is it, exactly, that we can't locally generate all the energy needed? Seems to be pretty solid coverage, without the need for a national grid roll-out to get the Fed to subsidize the midwestern states. Of all the issues the grid has, the limited ultra-long-haul capacity (and correspondingly high losses) would be the last on my list.
Corona discharge
Capacitance / Reactance
Skin Effect
Phase synchronization
Dielectric losses
Peak Voltage
By the same logic, any company should be able to set any terms it wants to, on anything it sells.
What if someone buys a car from Ford, gets maintenance done by somebody that doesn't know what they are doing, then sells it to someone else? The guy that bought it is going to be complaining that Ford sells crappy cars. Clearly, Ford has a right and responsibility to stop anyone but their own service centers from working on their cars.
That's pure and total nonsense.
Go look up ANY (real/credible) economist's explanation for why the "gas- tax holiday" idea (being spouted by McCain) won't lower prices at all.
A windfall profits tax is the polar opposite. It will do little or nothing to increase the price at the pump, and what small increase there is, will be more than made up for in the taxes they pay, presumably allowing individual income taxes on the public to be lowered.
Indeed it has. The rich are far richer than their have ever been before. The middle and lower classes, however, are not only seeing NONE of that "economic expansion", their economic situation continues to worsen, on both an absolute basis, and comparatively to the richest 2%.
You can always spot a moron ("I Got Mine") Libertarian by the obvious blatant lies.
I mean, you're not entirely wrong... Bush's tax cuts DID help greatly to send the US economy into it's current tail-spin, which vastly devalued the US dollar, thereby making US products slightly cheaper to the rest of the world.
They haven't, in any way, contributed to the manufacturing capacity of the US. The US' manufacturing capacity is still growing, of course, and is the largest in the world, but it's shrinking, relative to the population, and the overall economy.
But of course you already knew that, since you criticized Bush earlier for the economy, but you certainly can't let that get in the way of your bullshit justifications for your current agenda, so just hand-wave away the real reasons, and substitute your own.
It's easy to bullshit like this on any subject. If you just don't account for inflation, everything is more expensive today than it was yesterday! Alternatively, you can complain about the government spending so much more money for X Y Z, and just ignore the fact that spending has increased lower than inflation. Similarly, you can say that the poor and middle class are better off, because their pay has increased (eg.) X% over the past Y years, never minding that X is less than inflation, so they're actually earning less money now than before, for more work.
Great strategy! This year, vote for the GREATER of two evils...
Cthulhu For President!
It may be structurally carbon-fiber, but those solar panels covering the entire body, and all the batteries and motors certainly aren't.
But both are besides the point. Once you've scaled a plane down to smaller than common types of birds, it's effectively invisible anyhow, with the enemy recon plane being indistinguishable from wild-life.
I have no doubt the Governator saw mangled steel, that was damaged by the fire (either directly or indirectly). The fact that he, an actor and politician, attempted to convey the point with incorrect technical terminology does not surprise me in the slightest. Neither do I think either an expert or an average person would take the word of a politician on technical issues, so I can't see how his comment would further a conspiracy to convince anyone of anything.
*sigh*
I've head from several people who were there, and reported seeing "a small plane" (presumably propeller driven--ie. a Cesna) crash into the first tower.
I also heard from former pilot who was there, and, 5 minutes after witnessing it, recognized the errant plane in question as a jumbo jet, and even went as far as making an (correct) educated guess that it was likely a Boeing 767.
So... you heard explosions. Are you an explosives expert? Would an explosives expert, who witnessed the destruction of the towers, report hearing explosions? Or would he, instead, identify hearing loud noises, that did not sound anything like explosions to him?
Actually, they would have lower cooling needs underground, and what cooling they did need could be done much more efficiently with a small ground loop (versus a radiator and fan blowing air).
As for maintenance, things like water lines and sewers have similar needs... We all know what a "man hole cover" is. It would be rather simple to have them below ground, with a ground-level panel for extremely easy access.
Nobody is complaining about the upgrading communications, just the gigantic boxes being suddenly installed, rather than, say, burried as Verizon is happily doing.
I'd say the only thing that has really changed in the past decade or so, is that the public actually has some rights now, when a company comes in and decides to put up a gigantic eyesore in front of their windows, or dangerously close to the road or their driveway.
This is the polar opposite of what generally happens, as companies would go out of their way to put up a giant billboard, or a new apartment building that completely obstructs the view of other buildings, and often hanging a banner on the side saying "If you don't like looking at this brick wall, call to rent a new apartment from us."
Russia is a big enough country, with an advanced enough military, that launching ICBMs isn't their only option.
With dozens of submarines, I'm sure they don't need to worry about being able to get several shots through the "shield".
Residents of Japan, circa 1945, would disagree.
All true, at least in the long-term. I mean, we'd lose numerous species in the process, but something would spring-up, and history has shown quite well that "nature" does flourish when there are as few humans around as possible.
Only if coal is the only possible source of energy.
If it is not, and has to compete with a higher price alternative that does not pollute the air at all, it's a prisoner's dilemma...
Everyone would save money if we payed the higher price for a clean alternative, in the cost of medical bills, and the like. But if most people pay the higher price, and you pay the lower price, you still get pretty clean air, and save money. But if everyone takes the second route, we all get dirty air, and none of us save money, nor the air.
Including the cost of medical bills into the cost of coal, forces it to fairly compete on cost with the cleaner option that doesn't pollute.
No. To be accurate, the idea of adjusting for externalities is an attempt to compel those who directly get the benefits, to pay for them, rather than spreading the burden onto governments, the populace at large, etc., etc.
I have a better idea. Give up the "web app" mentality all together.
When you need to access your e-mail, load up an MTA. It works an order of magnitude faster, without maxing out your CPU to display a message. It requires an infinitesimal amount of bandwidth, and allows you to read and respond to e-mails even when you're nowhere near an internet connection.
When I'm looking at several items, and want them sorted by popularity, I REALLY DON'T NEED to see an animated status bar show up to tell me that the page is being loaded. Come to think of it, I don't need that fancy menu, made up of hundreds of images. A plain old HTML listbox works better, and IMHO even looks better.
If you have a break-through network application that's going to change the world... GREAT! Write an actual program that will merely communicate over the net. Not some hacked together Javascript that just barely works on a good day, on the right version of the right browser, with all the settings done by your CTO.
Tell me... how would you feel if "whois" was implemented entirely as a web-app? Only way to get whois information was to load-up netsol.com, input an IP/URL and parse the output? It would sure suck, wouldn't it? Yet the trend of the week is to lock-up as many of our programs as possible just like that. And usability suffers dramatically. For all the complaints about Microsoft, I bet most people would be extremely happy with a slow computer if it wasn't for browsing with multiple tabs of unresponsive web-apps that max-out your CPU and RAM. Of course Mozilla and kin are partly to blame as well, but that's rather high hanging fruit when the root of the problem is glorified Visual Basic apps redone over again, even clunkier, in HTML.
True. There are many areas where solar isn't a good option, and solar probably won't be used for base load for several decades in the future.
True. More people die from pollution than have ever died from radiation poisoning, and both plants and animals are flourishing in the Chernobyl fall-out area.
Almost true. I'd love to see Stirling Radioisotope Generators (SRG) installed every few city blocks large enough to handle base load. Alpha emitters aren't the "dangerous" type of radiation like the Gamma emitters everyone is familiar with, and doesn't even require any special radiation shielding. They're maintenance-free for decades at a time, so you install them in an ultra-massive concrete casing if you like, or perhaps just bury them a hundred feet down, and let them do their thing.
In fact, what I'd really like is an SRG in my electric motor home, so that I never need any gasoline or grid electricity for my lifetime, and could drive endlessly, and just decide to park and live absolutely anywhere I feel like. Honestly, how expensive is food? If you didn't have to pay for rent, electricity, gasoline, etc., how many years would you have to work to save up enough money to feed yourself for the rest of your life?
You forgot about the expensive part... stringing-up power lines across all of sub-Saharan Africa to distribute the power. With distributed generation, like solar panels, you don't have to build that kind of terribly expensive infrastructure. There might be a place for such central power plants in the larger cities, but it likely won't help the really poor.
And coal really isn't cheap, as you're making it out to be. To build a large power plant, you need lots of up-front investment to construct a plant large enough that you aren't wasting 75% of the coal (your biggest operating cost), and then you also need the infrastructure to distribute coal on an extremely regular basis, which isn't going to be so easy with a land-locked country surrounded by politically unstable, potentially unfriendly, and possibly anarchic nations.
But hey, you've obviously know what you're talking about, as evidenced by all the facts and figures you've included in your proposal...
Germ theory wasn't invented, but that doesn't mean people didn't have at least a good idea how to spread diseases.
Theories like "miasma" were close enough to accuracy that people were able to effectively utilize, or prevent, the spread of germs.
Back to at least the Middle Ages, armies were widely utilizing germ warfare in a somewhat vain and ignorant manner, by throwing decomposing animal carcases over castle walls. Long before then there were less widespread examples of the same.
Saying you can't utilize disease because you don't fully understand the theory behind it is extremely ignorant.
I'm sure blacksmiths didn't know much about human biology, but were still able to craft pointy objects that were effective at killing people.
It doesn't take an electrical engineer to figure out how to let out the "magic smoke" from most devices.
Because when they grow up, they aren't as strong, relative to their own weight.
We do NOT create sports to fit a particular body type. We create sports that are difficult, and those who are best suited for it become the best competitors.
Many sports favor people who are tall. Some sports favor those who are short. Most sports favor those who are extremely strong. None are normal or average individuals by any stretch of the imagination.
If you're going to start changing sports to give every average person a fair shot at any of them, you're going to take away anything and everything that is special about the sports (that makes people want to watch them) and the competitors.
You might as well suggest that we change weightlifting so that 7' (2m+) tall people can be just as competitive as those who are 5' (1.5m).
It's all an idiotic idea, bourne out of the same ocean of bullshit as "political correctness" and "gender equality".
Up next, no doubt, you're going to suggest that sports should be created, where women can compete equally with men... the very weak should be able to compete with the strong, etc. etc. It very quickly becomes a non-sport.
Any changes you make to gymnastics that cease to favor the better competitors will quickly make it a pointless and mindless dance routine.