Any new lifeform we find on earth isn't likely to be able to share interesting technological ideas with us.
Any lifeforms on Mars are CERTAINLY going to be unable to share interesting technological ideas with us.
Finding some forms of life on Mars neither increases nor decreases the likelyhood of finding life elsewhere, and even if the chances were high, the possibility that they will CURRENTLY be alive is extremely remote, and the possibility of recognizing and communicating with them, let alone sharing technology is still astronomically remote.
Like I said, the idea of the Deus Ex Machina from space is pure fantasy.
I'm well aware of what isotopes are used. The risks really aren't dramatic. The likelyhood of an RTG breaking apart is very small, and it is furthermore not prone to becoming airborne in the first place. Even in the worst case, with an atmospheric explosion that disperses large quantities of Plutonium 238, the local concentration will be extremely low. Even if significant quantities of the material is made airborne, yet concentrated in a localized area, you're only talking about a minuscule increase in your lifetime odds of developing a fatal form of cancer.
Personally, I think it would be damned cool if they found an indisputable fossil. It would force a whole lot of philosophical re-thinking, and probably give a huge-assed push towards getting humans into space
I don't have any clue what you're getting at. There are probably more people in the world right now that think aliens are out there, than there are that believe we're alone in the universe. Didn't the Vatican just recently do a C.Y.A., and declare that life on other planets is perfectly consistent with Catholicism?
I don't think finding life on Mars would be particularly exciting... You can bet you'd start hearing endless theories about about panspermiation from the Earth to the rest of the solar system... Crazy Scientology nonsense, etc. Finding an utterly alien, highly developed creature would be fascinating, but such a discovery on Earth would be just as exciting, IMHO.
Personally, I think the opposite conclusion would be more compelling... If there was some way to PROVE we are utterly alone in the Universe, it would force humanity to recognize that they we are fully responsible for our own fate, and put an end to all the popular fantasies in literature and movies about the Deus Ex Machina coming down and solving all our hard problems for us.
Of course, either one of those extremely is unbelievably unlikely to happen in any of our lifetimes.
Then it's frozen in time for an hour or two (this time all they could come up with was "we got a signal") while they're all slapping each other five and pouring champagne into their consoles. The $420 million (or whatever it was) came out of our pockets, all I ask is that they get *one* intern to stay sober at the golden moment and clue in those of us who don't get the Science Channel.
I really don't think that keeping their website updated to the last second is a good use of resources. They don't need to dedicate an intern when there's no shortage of news media in this country covering trivial crap, and they certainly don't need to invite a slashdotting.
What is it about X amount of dollars that makes it so you can't wait AN HOUR after after the first few people know, to find out yourself? Just because something is technologically possible, doesn't mean it should be a high priority. If the news media doesn't want to cover it, then NASA can damn well get the word out themselves by candygram if they please.
As much as I like applied fields like math and science, I think history education should get more emphasis... It's the only way to get some context about the world we live in. Welcome to the ancient world, where getting news a year after it happens is fast, and also good enough for military purposes...
Re:Amazing how short sighted ppl are
on
The Phoenix Has Landed
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· Score: 2, Informative
And even as much as fears regarding nuclear power may be overstated, Plutonium is, and will always be pretty scary stuff. We don't want to contaminate our atmosphere, oceans, and land, and also don't want to do the same to the surface of Mars.
This is pure ignorance talking. Having an RTG around isn't going to "contaminate" anything. They are fully sealed, and even in the worst case, can withstand extremely severe impacts without releasing any fissile material.
And in the worst case??? We end up with a boulder somewhere on Mars that just happens to stay warm. "Plutonium" is a good and scary word, but the Plutonium 238 used in RTGs is completely different from the Plutonium 239 used in nuclear weapons. It has a half-life of less than a century, and is merely an alpha emitter. Practically zero gamma emissions, which is the only kind of "radiation" people know about, and what they're so terribly afraid of.
Even if there was a launch failure high in the Earth's atmosphere, who cares? It's not a gamma emitter... It can't possibly do any damage to anyone, unless someone perhaps feels the urge to eat large quantities of it, in which case it's probably more toxic as a heavy metal than as a radioactive substance.
Remember, it's happened before... Apollo 13's RTG is currently keeping the fish warm, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Despite the high speed re-entry, the casing remains in-tact.
Note that for some houses, heat pumps aren't capable of providing enough heat in cold weather conditions.
This is patent nonsense.
This is why some other alternative (traditionally fullfilled by resistive heaters) is still needed.
Resistive heaters are used because they are CHEAPER. This allows the use of a smaller, cheaper heat pump.
Where do you get 5:1 from?
DoE
The efficiency of heat pumps is dependent upon the heat available in the ambient environment as pumps must run for longer periods in order to maintain room temp in colder environments.
In the absolute worse case, heat pumps are still just as efficient as resistive heating. And cold weather performance is highly dependent on the refrigerant and compression ratios used. Heat pumps can be designed for cold weather.
Furthermore, this is all only an issue with air-source heat pumps. With a slightly higher installation cost, a ground-source (geothermal) installation can be performed, and provide an order of magnitude better performance.
Both generation from some natural resource, and transport, incur losses which impact overall efficiency. Solar electricity and solar thermal are generated directly at the home.
PV panels output low voltage DC, which need to stored and converted, incurring more loss than transport over the grid would, even in the best case. Not to mention that solar thermal-electric plants are much more efficient (read, cheaper), but impractical for the home.
Home solar-thermal has even more significant storage problems.
Resistive heaters waste a lot of electricity generating heat from electricity as compared to powering non resistive devices.
This is completely IMPOSSIBLE in theory, and horribly inaccurate in practice. You obviously have no background in electrical engineering, physics, entropy, etc. etc. and I'm not about to try and educate you. I can only suggest you pick up a book on any of the above subjects.
Not only does it require a large amount of current to generate heat,
The amount of current required is directly proportional to the voltage, as well as the amount of heating required. Any heater is going to required "a large amount" of it's form of fuel. More than that, the amount of "current" required doesn't say anything at all about the efficiency of a device.
but not all of the radiation produced in heater coils is in the low energy heat band.
Before now, no-one has ever used the phrase "low energy heat band", as Google can testify. I have no doubt you think you know what you're talking about, but you simply do not.
It is NOT theoretically possible for a resistive heater to be substantially less than 100% efficient, neither in electrical theory, or in pure physics (see: entropy). Any fully resistive device (such as an incandescent lightbulb) makes a 100% efficient heater. Additionally, with DC electricity, ANY and all devices make 100% efficient heaters... A car stereo, an electric motor, a fan, etc., all are 100% efficient heaters. It's not theoretically possible for them to be 100% efficient at their primary jobs, but as heaters, they are nearly perfect. Furthermore, this would be the case with AC devices as well, if not for inherent power factor (PF) issues... there, only fully resistive devices completely qualify.
Plastics take up a huge amount of landfill space worldwide, and this is of use in the future.
Landfill space isn't exactly in short supply, and keeping our trash in-tact is a far better alternative than letting it decompose and pollute the air...
I would say that landfill power is the most promising "green" power technology out there. Decomposing our future "fuel" before we can start to harness it is decidedly non-green.
just "knowing what you're doing" will allow you to avoid damn near 99.999% of malware.
Most people already avoid 99.999% of malware. It's the 0.001% that gets them.
And being an expert helps, but it's not the end-all, and I still wouldn't recommend being without antivirus software (though a full monthly scan is acceptable).
When you need to reinstall or replace a motherboard, and Microsoft refuses to activate your copy of Windows XP, what do you plan to do? Wait a few years as your lawyer fights it out with them in court? Buy a copy of Vista? Hope you can charm or trick a rep into giving you an activation key?
The only place you're going to find a solution are the shadiest websites on the net, where viruses, trojans, and worms run rampant, and being smart won't tell you which exe is legit, and which is infected.
If you convert from solar to electric (which is only %40 at present) to heat, you are not going to get the efficiency you would if you went directly from solar to heat.
40% is going to require ridiculously expensive PV panels, which aren't common at all.
And direct solar heating isn't remotely 100% efficient, either. I'd say you should be happy with 60% in a good installation. It is, however, rather cheap.
conventional resistive heaters which aren't anywhere near %100 efficient at converting elecricity into heat,
A thought experiment for you. In simple resistive electric heating coils... where does the wasted electricity go? I'll wait...
And heat pumps are only about 2-3 times as efficient as conventional resistive heaters
The 4:1 is more common, but the best heat-pumps available today are rated at 5:1... and can be reasonably easily found for installation in your home. That ratio isn't relative to any other device (like an electric heater), but relative to the amount of energy (electricity) put it. ie. a 5:1 heat-pump moves 5 watts of heat for every 1 watt put it.
The end result? It'll be shared and whatnot and the original producer will not make a dime out of it.
The pornography industry has an unwritten agreement not to prosecute non-commercial copyright infringement of their materials. This has not made pornography unprofitable... at all. In fact it continues getting more profitable, as people seek out niche materials, such as interactive or fetish pornographic material.
I see no reason to believe it would have a different effect on child pornography. Further, it would make it safer and profitable to produce, as investors can bring expertise in production and disguising of the origin of the material, while legally selling it on street corners and making ample profits... Lack of copyright just means a change of business model, it won't stop content being produced entirely.
You can't post a video with two people having consentual sex. Yet you can post videos showing violence, inciting hatred and bragging about terrorist attacks.
You can't post a video with explicit violence, yet you can post videos showing sexual activity, inciting sex, and bragging about sex...
Did you know, for example, that the people in our "volunteer military" aren't allowed to leave if they change their minds? Outside of national defense, this would be considered a form of slavery and would not be permitted.
Outside of national defense, this would be considered a "Personal Service Contract" which can have a term of up to 7 years, as commonly used within the music industry.
My only other concern is the amount of land that these wind farms gobble up. With the growth in population especially in energy craving areas like southern california land is at a premium, which makes dedicating hundreds of acres to a wind farm also cost prohibitive.
This is so utterly wrong it's funny. You OBVIOUSLY don't live anywhere near California. Try driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas some time... Note the 3+ hours of driving (at 70MPH) through COMPLETELY VACANT FRICKIN' DESERT.
Land in Los Angeles county is ridiculously expensive. Land in immediately surrounding counties in the basin is fairly expensive also, but low enough that there are lots of farms, and the like, located there. As soon as you get out of the LA Basin, however (cross over the San Bernardino mountains) there are many, many thousands of square miles of utterly empty desert land...
That's why Sterling Systems/Southern California Edison is building a 7 square mile solar power facility north of Victorville. That's why there's a half dozen new state and federal prisons there, that's why there's one of the longest airport runways in the world located there. That's why Chinese airports are actually contracting to have maintenance on their jets done in Southern California. That's why BNSF railroad is building an absolutely gigantic intermodal facility there, adjacent to the airport. That's why the Army's National Training Center is located nearby, with 1000 square miles (2590 km) at Ft Irwin, not to mention NASA/JPL's North American Deep Space Network (DSN) facilities. There is an unimaginably huge amount of empty, dirt-cheap land in Southern California. Not only would dedicating hundreds of acres to wind farms be trivial... Dedicating THOUSANDS of square MILES of Southern California desert land to wind farms would go completely unnoticed by the public (the Bureau of Land Management might have a little something to say about it, though).
What's more, though, wind turbines are NOT like solar power plants. Wind turbines need as much space between them as can be practical done. In other words, you can have a few wind turbines across a farm, and continue to use the area as a farm, minus a small area that the base of the turbine takes up... It's not like the US is lacking in farm-land. In fact, most farmers LOVE wind turbines... Manufacturers just can't make them quickly enough.
Please don't bring up "what about the birds?" in regards to wind turbines.
Was your post meant to be ironic, or what?
There are huge areas of open land in the US where birds are relatively uncommon. Turbines should be avoided in environmentally sensitive areas, but other than that, bird deaths are minimal.
People didn't stop development of automobiles because some birds would get killed... People didn't stop clearing wild land for homes just because some birds (and many other animals) would die.
Such problems could be almost entirely eliminated by putting something like chicken wire over the blades. It was done with early commercial passenger jets.
electricity is extremely inefficient at generating heat.
This is utter nonsense.
First off, it's simply not theoretically possible for electric heating to be "inefficient"... Even the oldest, simplest, resistive heating elements have damn near 100% efficiency.
Secondly, resistive heating isn't the state of the art. Heat pumps are up to 5:1, meaning you get, essentially, 500% efficiency from electricity. The Department of Energy has an ongoing program trying to help further develop, and encourage the use of heat pumps in water heaters, automobiles, etc. etc.
When heat pumps are combined with geothermal, you get the cheapest and most efficient heating/cooling solutions known to humanity.
For instance if you want solar the solar thermal systems are pretty cheap to build and have decent efficiency.
If you're talking about passive solar heating... They're an okay option, but don't provide any cooling (which is needed most when it's sunny out). What's more, as PV panels keep getting more efficient, so too do heat-pumps, which require electricity, not heat (...ignoring inefficient and expensive gas absorption units).
If you're talking about generating electricity via steam or the like, the laws of thermodynamics don't work out well with such small (single-household) installations, and besides that, require maintenance. On an industrial scale, these work well, and are slowly being developed and invested in now that energy prices are so high.
Slashdot is chock full of libertarians until someone talks about jobs going away, and then everyone is a die hard socialist.
It's called competition, and you know what? It's going to take jobs regardless of who you vote for...Fighting supply and demand is like fighting gravity.
I dislike Libertarians as much as anybody, but to be fair, H1B Visas are the furthest thing in the world from free market supply and demand... You are given a piece of paper that allows you to work for 1 company at a fixed price. If they treat you like utter crap, don't live up to half of their contractual obligations, etc., you can chose to put up with it, or go home to your third-world country.
And it is political... Republicans want more H1B visas, and even more, they want an even stricter version of the program that they can apply on a large scale for Mexican agricultural labor...
Free-market supply and demand would be allowing normal immigration and naturalization without such restriction. In such case, it doesn't take long before the foreigners start to expect the same compensation and treatment as their domestic counterparts, and will go with whatever company is offering the better deal.
ARM would have given them cheaper and lower power (that's why your phone isn't x86) and runs Linux very well. No, they wanted to keep Windows capable.
x86 isn't just for Windows. The Geode processor is extremely low power, and I doubt there's an ARM CPU out there that can outperform it while being lower power. Sure, XScale CPUs have ridiculously high MHz numbers, but they still perform like crap.
And x86 isn't just "Windows capable". It's also the most well supported platform for Linux. Have you ever tried to use Linux on any other architecture? It's a huge mess of GCC versions that don't quite generate legal code, and software that won't compile because of all the x86 GCCisms. If you stick strictly to the binary packages provided by some distro, you'll probably get by without anything being too buggy, but as soon as you need to compile anything yourself, expect a mess of weird problems, and terrible performance. It "works" but it's far from user-friendly.
It seems there is alot more details about the F-22 before it was in service. Is that because there is more communication with the taxpayers nowadays, or because they don't want you to ask whats in the left hand?
Keeping a large project in the black is EXTREMELY expensive.
Keeping the Soviets in the dark about our shiny new project that had no other plausible purpose than to silently nuke them back to the stone age, seemed like a good idea at the time, so the money was spent.
Also, the technology was very new, and largely unknown. Having a working craft ready, decades before anyone knew such a thing was even possible, seemed like a good use of the money.
Today, everybody knows stealth exists. We aren't making anything that would antagonize other superpowers. And we aren't in an arms race with anyone. As long as you can keep the specifics secret, the rest doesn't make a hell of a big difference, and you don't need to waste huge amounts of money and effort keeping people from knowing approx. how much it costs.
I don't sync mine. [...] I just come home, open my shared folder over the wireless network, and copy documents back and forth.
I fail to see the distinction.
The vast majority of mobile professionals outside of IT ONLY need to use Word and Excel.
I don't believe that's true at all. Most people don't need a LOT of applications, but they do always need some flexibility.
How about Power Point, and a VGA or TV-out? How about the ability to directly drive a printer, scanner, etc., rather than being tied to installing software on the nearest PC, and going through 10 levels of indirection and bugs/problems? How about some basic image manipulation on the road? etc., etc.
There is very, very, very good reason the endless wave of dot.com computer "appliances" didn't catch on, and WinCE is just a very small improvement over those...
And somewhat besides the point, but I strongly suggest buying an old Psion. Vastly opposite of WinCE, those things were built for the road warrior, to be completely independent of a desktop machine.
The basic office suite built-in to every one is extremely capable. You can insert graphs, drawings, spreadsheet cells, charts, etc., into word documents... You have the full range of layout/formating options. etc. I wrote several entire research papers on my 5mx back in College, often in-class while instructors were boring me. Even better, though, was the ability to write up everything right in the library, with a table full of books in-front of me, and in both cases the ability to stop drop my work in my pocket in a fraction of a second. But more impressively, the ability to walk over to the nearest printer, point my Psion at the IR port, and directly print-out full documents.
People complain that they want color on their handhelds, but in practice, the 1 month of battery life on a pair of AA batteries, and the ability to view the screen in direct sunlight as easily as indoors is a HUGE usability boost (non-backlit screen is FAR easier on the eyes), and dithering colors to shades of grey works extremely well, and looks just fine. Also, the double-width, half-height (640x240) screen is the ideal trade-off, and that was many years before the first 16:9 monitor/notebook came out. The file manager is better than anything I've come across since, too... It's extremely fast and easy to find and open what you want.
I think you can safely assume I'm not a shill for the company, because they don't even make/sell them anymore. Even with the lack of WiFi/Ethernet (well, there is one quite expensive external device), USB, etc., I still keep my 5MX up and working, and occasionally give it some use for reading PDFs on the road, and playing a few games to kill time. I simply haven't needed to do significant writing (or dictation) on the road in a long time... but next time I do, I plan to have my Psion up and ready. Cringe at the 26MHz CPU if you want, but I bet I get twice as much work done as you do, on a 400MHz WinCE device...
I had a ~200MHz WinCE handheld, which I played some music on, watched a couple videos, tried to do real work on for about a month, and summarily trashed.
I know just how terribly unresponsively it performs. I know how terribly limited the selection of available software is I know how crippled all the "pocket" apps are. I know just how completely lacking external hardware drivers (eg. printers) are.
If you need more than something that just barely lets you type basic documents and sync them with your desktop, WinCE is a lame duck.
The HPC form-factor is quite nice, but the realities of using one for any length of time is not so pleasant.
Slashdot Mirror
Any lifeforms on Mars are CERTAINLY going to be unable to share interesting technological ideas with us.
Finding some forms of life on Mars neither increases nor decreases the likelyhood of finding life elsewhere, and even if the chances were high, the possibility that they will CURRENTLY be alive is extremely remote, and the possibility of recognizing and communicating with them, let alone sharing technology is still astronomically remote.
Like I said, the idea of the Deus Ex Machina from space is pure fantasy.
I'm well aware of what isotopes are used. The risks really aren't dramatic. The likelyhood of an RTG breaking apart is very small, and it is furthermore not prone to becoming airborne in the first place. Even in the worst case, with an atmospheric explosion that disperses large quantities of Plutonium 238, the local concentration will be extremely low. Even if significant quantities of the material is made airborne, yet concentrated in a localized area, you're only talking about a minuscule increase in your lifetime odds of developing a fatal form of cancer.
eg. Inhaling 15,000 microns of airborne Plutonium 238 is estimated to increases your cancer odds by just 1% over normal background radiation.
http://consolidationeis.doe.gov/PDFs/PlutoniumANLFactSheetOct2001.pdf
It's dangerous, but a pretty far-fetched and insignificant danger.
I don't have any clue what you're getting at. There are probably more people in the world right now that think aliens are out there, than there are that believe we're alone in the universe. Didn't the Vatican just recently do a C.Y.A., and declare that life on other planets is perfectly consistent with Catholicism?
I don't think finding life on Mars would be particularly exciting... You can bet you'd start hearing endless theories about about panspermiation from the Earth to the rest of the solar system... Crazy Scientology nonsense, etc. Finding an utterly alien, highly developed creature would be fascinating, but such a discovery on Earth would be just as exciting, IMHO.
Personally, I think the opposite conclusion would be more compelling... If there was some way to PROVE we are utterly alone in the Universe, it would force humanity to recognize that they we are fully responsible for our own fate, and put an end to all the popular fantasies in literature and movies about the Deus Ex Machina coming down and solving all our hard problems for us.
Of course, either one of those extremely is unbelievably unlikely to happen in any of our lifetimes.
I really don't think that keeping their website updated to the last second is a good use of resources. They don't need to dedicate an intern when there's no shortage of news media in this country covering trivial crap, and they certainly don't need to invite a slashdotting.
What is it about X amount of dollars that makes it so you can't wait AN HOUR after after the first few people know, to find out yourself? Just because something is technologically possible, doesn't mean it should be a high priority. If the news media doesn't want to cover it, then NASA can damn well get the word out themselves by candygram if they please.
As much as I like applied fields like math and science, I think history education should get more emphasis... It's the only way to get some context about the world we live in. Welcome to the ancient world, where getting news a year after it happens is fast, and also good enough for military purposes...
This is pure ignorance talking. Having an RTG around isn't going to "contaminate" anything. They are fully sealed, and even in the worst case, can withstand extremely severe impacts without releasing any fissile material.
And in the worst case??? We end up with a boulder somewhere on Mars that just happens to stay warm. "Plutonium" is a good and scary word, but the Plutonium 238 used in RTGs is completely different from the Plutonium 239 used in nuclear weapons. It has a half-life of less than a century, and is merely an alpha emitter. Practically zero gamma emissions, which is the only kind of "radiation" people know about, and what they're so terribly afraid of.
Even if there was a launch failure high in the Earth's atmosphere, who cares? It's not a gamma emitter... It can't possibly do any damage to anyone, unless someone perhaps feels the urge to eat large quantities of it, in which case it's probably more toxic as a heavy metal than as a radioactive substance.
Remember, it's happened before... Apollo 13's RTG is currently keeping the fish warm, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Despite the high speed re-entry, the casing remains in-tact.
This is patent nonsense.
Resistive heaters are used because they are CHEAPER. This allows the use of a smaller, cheaper heat pump.
DoE
In the absolute worse case, heat pumps are still just as efficient as resistive heating. And cold weather performance is highly dependent on the refrigerant and compression ratios used. Heat pumps can be designed for cold weather.
Furthermore, this is all only an issue with air-source heat pumps. With a slightly higher installation cost, a ground-source (geothermal) installation can be performed, and provide an order of magnitude better performance.
PV panels output low voltage DC, which need to stored and converted, incurring more loss than transport over the grid would, even in the best case. Not to mention that solar thermal-electric plants are much more efficient (read, cheaper), but impractical for the home.
Home solar-thermal has even more significant storage problems.
This is completely IMPOSSIBLE in theory, and horribly inaccurate in practice. You obviously have no background in electrical engineering, physics, entropy, etc. etc. and I'm not about to try and educate you. I can only suggest you pick up a book on any of the above subjects.
The amount of current required is directly proportional to the voltage, as well as the amount of heating required. Any heater is going to required "a large amount" of it's form of fuel. More than that, the amount of "current" required doesn't say anything at all about the efficiency of a device.
Before now, no-one has ever used the phrase "low energy heat band", as Google can testify. I have no doubt you think you know what you're talking about, but you simply do not.
It is NOT theoretically possible for a resistive heater to be substantially less than 100% efficient, neither in electrical theory, or in pure physics (see: entropy). Any fully resistive device (such as an incandescent lightbulb) makes a 100% efficient heater. Additionally, with DC electricity, ANY and all devices make 100% efficient heaters... A car stereo, an electric motor, a fan, etc., all are 100% efficient heaters. It's not theoretically possible for them to be 100% efficient at their primary jobs, but as heaters, they are nearly perfect. Furthermore, this would be the case with AC devices as well, if not for inherent power factor (PF) issues... there, only fully resistive devices completely qualify.
Landfill space isn't exactly in short supply, and keeping our trash in-tact is a far better alternative than letting it decompose and pollute the air...
I would say that landfill power is the most promising "green" power technology out there. Decomposing our future "fuel" before we can start to harness it is decidedly non-green.
Most people already avoid 99.999% of malware. It's the 0.001% that gets them.
And being an expert helps, but it's not the end-all, and I still wouldn't recommend being without antivirus software (though a full monthly scan is acceptable).
When you need to reinstall or replace a motherboard, and Microsoft refuses to activate your copy of Windows XP, what do you plan to do? Wait a few years as your lawyer fights it out with them in court? Buy a copy of Vista? Hope you can charm or trick a rep into giving you an activation key?
The only place you're going to find a solution are the shadiest websites on the net, where viruses, trojans, and worms run rampant, and being smart won't tell you which exe is legit, and which is infected.
40% is going to require ridiculously expensive PV panels, which aren't common at all.
And direct solar heating isn't remotely 100% efficient, either. I'd say you should be happy with 60% in a good installation. It is, however, rather cheap.
A thought experiment for you. In simple resistive electric heating coils... where does the wasted electricity go? I'll wait...
The 4:1 is more common, but the best heat-pumps available today are rated at 5:1... and can be reasonably easily found for installation in your home. That ratio isn't relative to any other device (like an electric heater), but relative to the amount of energy (electricity) put it. ie. a 5:1 heat-pump moves 5 watts of heat for every 1 watt put it.
That can happen without any contract at all, if your actions (or lack there of) even just indirectly result in harm to others.
The pornography industry has an unwritten agreement not to prosecute non-commercial copyright infringement of their materials. This has not made pornography unprofitable... at all. In fact it continues getting more profitable, as people seek out niche materials, such as interactive or fetish pornographic material.
I see no reason to believe it would have a different effect on child pornography. Further, it would make it safer and profitable to produce, as investors can bring expertise in production and disguising of the origin of the material, while legally selling it on street corners and making ample profits... Lack of copyright just means a change of business model, it won't stop content being produced entirely.
You can't post a video with explicit violence, yet you can post videos showing sexual activity, inciting sex, and bragging about sex...
Outside of national defense, this would be considered a "Personal Service Contract" which can have a term of up to 7 years, as commonly used within the music industry.
This is so utterly wrong it's funny. You OBVIOUSLY don't live anywhere near California. Try driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas some time... Note the 3+ hours of driving (at 70MPH) through COMPLETELY VACANT FRICKIN' DESERT.
Land in Los Angeles county is ridiculously expensive. Land in immediately surrounding counties in the basin is fairly expensive also, but low enough that there are lots of farms, and the like, located there. As soon as you get out of the LA Basin, however (cross over the San Bernardino mountains) there are many, many thousands of square miles of utterly empty desert land...
That's why Sterling Systems/Southern California Edison is building a 7 square mile solar power facility north of Victorville. That's why there's a half dozen new state and federal prisons there, that's why there's one of the longest airport runways in the world located there. That's why Chinese airports are actually contracting to have maintenance on their jets done in Southern California. That's why BNSF railroad is building an absolutely gigantic intermodal facility there, adjacent to the airport. That's why the Army's National Training Center is located nearby, with 1000 square miles (2590 km) at Ft Irwin, not to mention NASA/JPL's North American Deep Space Network (DSN) facilities. There is an unimaginably huge amount of empty, dirt-cheap land in Southern California. Not only would dedicating hundreds of acres to wind farms be trivial... Dedicating THOUSANDS of square MILES of Southern California desert land to wind farms would go completely unnoticed by the public (the Bureau of Land Management might have a little something to say about it, though).
What's more, though, wind turbines are NOT like solar power plants. Wind turbines need as much space between them as can be practical done. In other words, you can have a few wind turbines across a farm, and continue to use the area as a farm, minus a small area that the base of the turbine takes up... It's not like the US is lacking in farm-land. In fact, most farmers LOVE wind turbines... Manufacturers just can't make them quickly enough.
Was your post meant to be ironic, or what?
There are huge areas of open land in the US where birds are relatively uncommon. Turbines should be avoided in environmentally sensitive areas, but other than that, bird deaths are minimal.
People didn't stop development of automobiles because some birds would get killed... People didn't stop clearing wild land for homes just because some birds (and many other animals) would die.
Such problems could be almost entirely eliminated by putting something like chicken wire over the blades. It was done with early commercial passenger jets.
This is utter nonsense.
First off, it's simply not theoretically possible for electric heating to be "inefficient"... Even the oldest, simplest, resistive heating elements have damn near 100% efficiency.
Secondly, resistive heating isn't the state of the art. Heat pumps are up to 5:1, meaning you get, essentially, 500% efficiency from electricity. The Department of Energy has an ongoing program trying to help further develop, and encourage the use of heat pumps in water heaters, automobiles, etc. etc.
When heat pumps are combined with geothermal, you get the cheapest and most efficient heating/cooling solutions known to humanity.
If you're talking about passive solar heating... They're an okay option, but don't provide any cooling (which is needed most when it's sunny out). What's more, as PV panels keep getting more efficient, so too do heat-pumps, which require electricity, not heat (...ignoring inefficient and expensive gas absorption units).
If you're talking about generating electricity via steam or the like, the laws of thermodynamics don't work out well with such small (single-household) installations, and besides that, require maintenance. On an industrial scale, these work well, and are slowly being developed and invested in now that energy prices are so high.
I dislike Libertarians as much as anybody, but to be fair, H1B Visas are the furthest thing in the world from free market supply and demand... You are given a piece of paper that allows you to work for 1 company at a fixed price. If they treat you like utter crap, don't live up to half of their contractual obligations, etc., you can chose to put up with it, or go home to your third-world country.
And it is political... Republicans want more H1B visas, and even more, they want an even stricter version of the program that they can apply on a large scale for Mexican agricultural labor...
Free-market supply and demand would be allowing normal immigration and naturalization without such restriction. In such case, it doesn't take long before the foreigners start to expect the same compensation and treatment as their domestic counterparts, and will go with whatever company is offering the better deal.
And it only takes THOUSANDS of acres of land, with the ample sunlight in the desert, to convert all the CO2 from ONE power plant...
Good plan!
Cover everything in chrome...
Increase sulfur emissions to 19th century levels...
Orbital sun-shade...
I didn't say anything about the number of systems.
x86 isn't just for Windows. The Geode processor is extremely low power, and I doubt there's an ARM CPU out there that can outperform it while being lower power. Sure, XScale CPUs have ridiculously high MHz numbers, but they still perform like crap.
And x86 isn't just "Windows capable". It's also the most well supported platform for Linux. Have you ever tried to use Linux on any other architecture? It's a huge mess of GCC versions that don't quite generate legal code, and software that won't compile because of all the x86 GCCisms. If you stick strictly to the binary packages provided by some distro, you'll probably get by without anything being too buggy, but as soon as you need to compile anything yourself, expect a mess of weird problems, and terrible performance. It "works" but it's far from user-friendly.
Keeping a large project in the black is EXTREMELY expensive.
Keeping the Soviets in the dark about our shiny new project that had no other plausible purpose than to silently nuke them back to the stone age, seemed like a good idea at the time, so the money was spent.
Also, the technology was very new, and largely unknown. Having a working craft ready, decades before anyone knew such a thing was even possible, seemed like a good use of the money.
Today, everybody knows stealth exists. We aren't making anything that would antagonize other superpowers. And we aren't in an arms race with anyone. As long as you can keep the specifics secret, the rest doesn't make a hell of a big difference, and you don't need to waste huge amounts of money and effort keeping people from knowing approx. how much it costs.
I fail to see the distinction.
I don't believe that's true at all. Most people don't need a LOT of applications, but they do always need some flexibility.
How about Power Point, and a VGA or TV-out? How about the ability to directly drive a printer, scanner, etc., rather than being tied to installing software on the nearest PC, and going through 10 levels of indirection and bugs/problems? How about some basic image manipulation on the road? etc., etc.
There is very, very, very good reason the endless wave of dot.com computer "appliances" didn't catch on, and WinCE is just a very small improvement over those...
And somewhat besides the point, but I strongly suggest buying an old Psion. Vastly opposite of WinCE, those things were built for the road warrior, to be completely independent of a desktop machine.
The basic office suite built-in to every one is extremely capable. You can insert graphs, drawings, spreadsheet cells, charts, etc., into word documents... You have the full range of layout/formating options. etc. I wrote several entire research papers on my 5mx back in College, often in-class while instructors were boring me. Even better, though, was the ability to write up everything right in the library, with a table full of books in-front of me, and in both cases the ability to stop drop my work in my pocket in a fraction of a second. But more impressively, the ability to walk over to the nearest printer, point my Psion at the IR port, and directly print-out full documents.
People complain that they want color on their handhelds, but in practice, the 1 month of battery life on a pair of AA batteries, and the ability to view the screen in direct sunlight as easily as indoors is a HUGE usability boost (non-backlit screen is FAR easier on the eyes), and dithering colors to shades of grey works extremely well, and looks just fine. Also, the double-width, half-height (640x240) screen is the ideal trade-off, and that was many years before the first 16:9 monitor/notebook came out. The file manager is better than anything I've come across since, too... It's extremely fast and easy to find and open what you want.
I think you can safely assume I'm not a shill for the company, because they don't even make/sell them anymore. Even with the lack of WiFi/Ethernet (well, there is one quite expensive external device), USB, etc., I still keep my 5MX up and working, and occasionally give it some use for reading PDFs on the road, and playing a few games to kill time. I simply haven't needed to do significant writing (or dictation) on the road in a long time... but next time I do, I plan to have my Psion up and ready. Cringe at the 26MHz CPU if you want, but I bet I get twice as much work done as you do, on a 400MHz WinCE device...
I had a ~200MHz WinCE handheld, which I played some music on, watched a couple videos, tried to do real work on for about a month, and summarily trashed.
Sorry, but I've USED Windows CE before.
I know just how terribly unresponsively it performs.
I know how terribly limited the selection of available software is
I know how crippled all the "pocket" apps are.
I know just how completely lacking external hardware drivers (eg. printers) are.
If you need more than something that just barely lets you type basic documents and sync them with your desktop, WinCE is a lame duck.
The HPC form-factor is quite nice, but the realities of using one for any length of time is not so pleasant.