I notice that all on the companies mentioned are ex-state-owned companies. Basically they're the old monopoly telecoms who got to lay the telephone lines in the past using taxpayer's money and later got privatised, keeping ownership of all that infrastructure.
Even though in most (maybe all) of the countries where those companies are based laws were passed forcing them to provide access through their lines to any company wanting to work as an ISP (a boon to competition and why Internet access is faster an cheaper in most of Europe than in the US) they are still meaningful because they own the last-mile infrastructure and get paid by ISPs that use those lines to provide Internet access.
They still retain many of the bad habits from their days as a state own monopoly (big, fat and uncompetitive) and have only remained in their positions because of the huge barriers to entry in the landline telecoms infrastructure business.
Given that I would say that these big, fat behmots are worried about high-bandwith Internet services because they have in fact not updated the infrastructure: - Until now they were relying in advances in xDSL technology to provide ever increasing speeds on top of the existing POTS copper lines. This improving of xDSL technologies is now slowing down while at the same time government have suddenly discoverd it's fashionable to rant about the need for universal high-speed Internet access to "liberate Europe's creative energies" and "Create the jobs of the future". This means that a critical mass is building that would lower the barriers to entry (or make it a better investment) to lay fiber-to-the-home.
Once other companies have replaced enough of the installed base of last-mile POTS copper wires with fiber these guys (who never had to face any real competition in the landline telecoms business) will likelly shrink to nothingness.
...because people keep blowing through red lights like there's no tomorrow.
And for some of those people, there indeed will be no tomorrow.
And some will just walk out of the accident having hit somebody else head on. The person in the other car who got hit on the driver's side might not be so lucky...
His job was to influence lawmakers - a cross between a Saleman and a Power Broker.
The skill set necessary to manage anything or evaluate any kind of technology barelly if at all overlaps with the skillset required in his previous job.
Reminds me of the shock joke we used to have when I was a teenager: "Have you ever rubbed your ears in your mother's vagina?"
The answers is yes, unless you were born by cesarian.
Now, this was considered bad taste but was hardly "OMG call the cops" material. (In fact, calling the cops for hearing it would have you ridiculed, potentially by the cops themselfs)
Obviously I'm not from the US, and yet my home country (Portugal) was and still is strongly Catolic.
Here's another one: naked tits on the beach are really only shocking for 80 year old women from the deep countriside (nowadays, probably not even that). In fact, the only shocking things about seeing naked female breasts on the beach is [warning, nausea inducing imagery] some 60+ years old women that go topless.
I find it shocking that while in the last 30 years (since Portugal threw out a fascist dictatorship) the country has become culturally much more open minded and worldy, the US (which 20 years ago was seen in Portugal with awe and respect) or at least some part of it, has gone backwards.
In November 2008 there were 28.8 million credit cards in Mexico and 10.7 million debit cards (source).
The population of the country is about 110 million.
The US has the highest usage of "plastic" money in the world, so data linking between service purchases and card registered addresses work very well there. It doesn't necessarilly work in other nations.
In my experience (all of it outside the US, but including Canada which is some regions has a similar commercial-culture), anywhere in the world one can easilly get a pre-paid mobile phone account and top it up with cash only.
Even more interesting is that EULAs and any such after-purchase "user agreements" are not valid in Europe since they are consider an after the fact one sided attempt at changing the implicit contract which is the actual purchase.
They might be valid if people got to see them (and sign) BEFORE purchasing the product (subjected to some rules with regards to the language of them as a contract being clear and understandeable to the leigh man, which many EULAs would not pass).
At it is, if people didn't saw it before purchasing the product then it has no validity in the eyes of the law.
Factionalisation is only a problem in the UK electoral system because it's not truly democratic (read: not using proportional representation).
In any real Democracy with a proportional system where all votes count the same, many smallish parties together can be as powerful as one big party as long as the total of votes they recieved is more than the votes that the big party got.
In the UK, a party can get a parlimentary absolute majority (more than half the seats) with only 35% of the vote: How Democratic is it when the voice of a third of the people is more important than that of the other 2 thirds...
So the issue is not one of liberal/idealistic ideologies being prone to defeat due to their own nature but one of uneveness of the playing field.
That said, at the moment the Liberal Democrat leadership dresses, talks and moves in the same circles as the Tory and Labour ones - they copied the style of the top parties, cultivate the same circle of influnces and do not represent a "break with the past", more of a "same shit, new flies".
Isn't it better the a boy understands how a womens body works? Personal, I prefer knowledge of a mysterious black box
Somehow I suspect that if 20 or 30 years ago more Americans had learned about the clitoris and how to use it there would be a lot fewer of them having issues with human sexuality now than there actually are - and this both amongst males and females.
Dollar cost is the easiest path to determine the energy cost of a project because it already takes in account all the inputs directly and indirectly (for example, the manpower costs include not only the transportation costs for that worker but also all the side-costs such as entertainment costs, housing costs and more of using that specific kind of worker - after all, if the pay was lower that the money the worker spends then he would - usually - not take that job).
Don't forget that indirect energy costs are extremelly difficult to calculate: for example, if a worker in the construction of that battery uses his/her bycicle to get to work instead of a car, then energy costs are lower, but if the money thus saved is spend in ways that consume more energy than that amount of gas has, then the energy costs are actually higher.
If you want to translate dollar costs to energy costs, the easiest way is probably to use the dollar-per-joule ration of money spent in direct energy sources in that area (mostly dollars spent in gas and electricity purchases per joule).
Two:
Question: how much energy did it take to make it
is actually the wrong question.
A closer to right question is: "How much energy did it take to make it versus the energy that is saved by having it?"
Even that is not the best possible question. Here's a better one: "How much non-renewable energy did it take to make it and will take to maintain and decomission it versus the amount of non-renewable energy that is saved by having it during it's lifetime?"
If this battery allows this city to use renewable sources of energy (for example solar) instead of non-renewable ones, then this project might be worth it. In fact, it doesn't mater how much non-renewable energy it costs to make it (and maintain it and decomission it) as long as more non-renewable energy is saved by having it.
[Side note 1: This is why, for example, termal isolation in a house is almost always the most efficient way of improving one's energy profile: not because it does not consume lots of energy to make and deploy but because it saves a lot more energy than that over the course of it's lifetime. In fact, in sunny places usually the single most energy-efficient change to do is to have the outer walls of one's house painted white]
[Side note 2: This is also why in the long term nuclear might not be quite as great a source of energy as some people make it to be - it has very high decomissioning costs and current renewable energy capture technologies are still less mature by comparisson and will thus improve faster than nuclear over time (meaning that, later in the life-time of a nuclear reactor it will be saving less non-renewable energy than earlier). That said, at the moment it is one of the best options we have.]
The pilot studies in South Africa show that pebble bed reactors acn abe built for $800 to $1000 per kilowatt. A 4mW reactor could be built for around $4 million and they could completely disconnect themselves from the grid.
Somehow I suspect that the costs of Pebble Bed nuclear reactors don't scale up linearly per-kilowatt.
If that was the case, then one could get a "personal" 1kW pebble bed reactor for $1000.
So there must be a "minimum" power value above which the price per kilowatt is close enough to the one you quoted for your argument to make some sense.
Until you can show that 4mW is at or above that "minimum" power value your argument makes no sense.
Funilly enough, with both DRM and constant cycles of "here's the same thing again but now in a new and improved format" the Movies (and Games) industries are causing more and more people to get burned by going with DRM-restricted/new-format media and thus teaching even the less technology-savy people to be weary of both.
Just like the GP, more people are thinking-through their buying decisions due to painfull memories of "what happened last time".
Me, I'm sitting on the sidelines and aplauding every time I see the industry going a little bit farther and doing it a lit bit more (hi Ubisoft) all the while more and more people get bit by it - eventually only the really dumb people will be asking "How high?" every time the entertainment industry says "Jump!".
[PS: The latest and greatest fad is 3D movies. Here in the UK they're pushing it really hard, even with 3D TV channels. I expect all the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hearly adopters that just 3 years ago went for new HD TVs (at the time replacing their "HD Ready" TV sets that turned out not to have HDMI connections) to rush to get the new 3D TV sets. Hopefull some people learned a lesson or two in the meanwhile and will wait in the sidelines]
The way certain Churches deal with sex outside the marriage and preach abstinence is a bit like the war on drugs: - You make it illegal/socially-shamefull - You tell teenagers they can't do it. - Teenagers dully proceed to do what you told them they can't do. - Some teenagers get problems because of it. - Because it's illegal/socially-shamefull the teenagers with with problems do not seek help. - The problems develop into life-ruining outcomes (uncontrolled addictions/children born to single mothers).
Telling teenagers to go against their strongest impulses and then denying them help when they "fall to temptation" even if just once just creates more single-mothers and children of single-mothers: both belonging to social groups with the lowest likellyhood of future success.
Saying that Capitalism and Democracy should always go together because you can find simplified descriptions for both that include the word "free" is like saying that you should cook steak and chocolate together because they both taste good.
A Democracy is based on the principle that people are sufficiently informed and knowledgeable to make a decision. It's also based on the principle that rules are created by agreement of at least a majority of people (through their representatives).
Capitalism is a regulated form of market Anarchy. It's basically as close as you get to a free-for-all but with some rules, where due to each participant trying to maximize his/her own outcomes, the overall outcomes for the whole are also maximized. The rules in a capitalist system exist to avoid the natural final state of an Anarchist system: a tyrany.
In a capitalist system, amongst other things, two of the most powerfull mechanisms for one participant to maximize his/her outcomes are:
Controling information (think the car mechanic that charges you a fortune for a simple fixe because you don't know best)
Get the rules of the game changed (for example by lobbying) in ones benefit
Both are pretty much the antithesis of Democracy. In fact, most of the current problems of democratic systems can be easilly traced back to these two mechanisms: current winners in the Capitalistic game buying the rule-setters and them (and the rule-setters) controlling information to influence the decisions of the voters.
I think the dawn of the UAV era may well herald the end of the independent Air Force, and I think the current crop of pilots know it too. And it begs the question, did a seperate Air Force ever really make that much sense? It was a branch based on a particular technology.... akin to the Army splitting Tanks off into their own separate service, or the Navy doing the same with submarines. Airpower really isn't a doctrine so much as it's just one more weapon in your arsenal.
One word "Jamming".
Remote controlled drones work against low-technology enemies that cannot blanket the radio spectrum with high-power white noise or shoot down your high-altitude relays (if you use line-of-sight comms technologies such as lasers). The drones can only go autonomous for simple tasks and are (not yet) capable of wining a dogfight with a human-controlled fighter.
Going fully dependent on remote controlled drones is a form of "Preparing for the last war".
Slashdot Mirror
I notice that all on the companies mentioned are ex-state-owned companies. Basically they're the old monopoly telecoms who got to lay the telephone lines in the past using taxpayer's money and later got privatised, keeping ownership of all that infrastructure.
Even though in most (maybe all) of the countries where those companies are based laws were passed forcing them to provide access through their lines to any company wanting to work as an ISP (a boon to competition and why Internet access is faster an cheaper in most of Europe than in the US) they are still meaningful because they own the last-mile infrastructure and get paid by ISPs that use those lines to provide Internet access.
They still retain many of the bad habits from their days as a state own monopoly (big, fat and uncompetitive) and have only remained in their positions because of the huge barriers to entry in the landline telecoms infrastructure business.
Given that I would say that these big, fat behmots are worried about high-bandwith Internet services because they have in fact not updated the infrastructure:
- Until now they were relying in advances in xDSL technology to provide ever increasing speeds on top of the existing POTS copper lines. This improving of xDSL technologies is now slowing down while at the same time government have suddenly discoverd it's fashionable to rant about the need for universal high-speed Internet access to "liberate Europe's creative energies" and "Create the jobs of the future". This means that a critical mass is building that would lower the barriers to entry (or make it a better investment) to lay fiber-to-the-home.
Once other companies have replaced enough of the installed base of last-mile POTS copper wires with fiber these guys (who never had to face any real competition in the landline telecoms business) will likelly shrink to nothingness.
This is why they're trying to hold the tide.
And some will just walk out of the accident having hit somebody else head on. The person in the other car who got hit on the driver's side might not be so lucky ...
His job was to influence lawmakers - a cross between a Saleman and a Power Broker.
The skill set necessary to manage anything or evaluate any kind of technology barelly if at all overlaps with the skillset required in his previous job.
Reminds me of the shock joke we used to have when I was a teenager:
"Have you ever rubbed your ears in your mother's vagina?"
The answers is yes, unless you were born by cesarian.
Now, this was considered bad taste but was hardly "OMG call the cops" material. (In fact, calling the cops for hearing it would have you ridiculed, potentially by the cops themselfs)
Obviously I'm not from the US, and yet my home country (Portugal) was and still is strongly Catolic.
Here's another one: naked tits on the beach are really only shocking for 80 year old women from the deep countriside (nowadays, probably not even that). In fact, the only shocking things about seeing naked female breasts on the beach is [warning, nausea inducing imagery] some 60+ years old women that go topless.
I find it shocking that while in the last 30 years (since Portugal threw out a fascist dictatorship) the country has become culturally much more open minded and worldy, the US (which 20 years ago was seen in Portugal with awe and respect) or at least some part of it, has gone backwards.
In November 2008 there were 28.8 million credit cards in Mexico and 10.7 million debit cards (source).
The population of the country is about 110 million.
The US has the highest usage of "plastic" money in the world, so data linking between service purchases and card registered addresses work very well there. It doesn't necessarilly work in other nations.
In my experience (all of it outside the US, but including Canada which is some regions has a similar commercial-culture), anywhere in the world one can easilly get a pre-paid mobile phone account and top it up with cash only.
Even more interesting is that EULAs and any such after-purchase "user agreements" are not valid in Europe since they are consider an after the fact one sided attempt at changing the implicit contract which is the actual purchase.
They might be valid if people got to see them (and sign) BEFORE purchasing the product (subjected to some rules with regards to the language of them as a contract being clear and understandeable to the leigh man, which many EULAs would not pass).
At it is, if people didn't saw it before purchasing the product then it has no validity in the eyes of the law.
or "To send a robot where no robot has gone before" doesn't exactly sound quite as exciting as the original phrase.
... NASA announced their new criteria for selection of Astronauts.
"We're looking for really short and really thin persons, with proven ability to hold their breath for long periods of time" - said a NASA spokesman.
Khagendra Thapa Magar, the latest candidate to shortest man in the world, was unavailable for comments.
Factionalisation is only a problem in the UK electoral system because it's not truly democratic (read: not using proportional representation).
In any real Democracy with a proportional system where all votes count the same, many smallish parties together can be as powerful as one big party as long as the total of votes they recieved is more than the votes that the big party got.
In the UK, a party can get a parlimentary absolute majority (more than half the seats) with only 35% of the vote: How Democratic is it when the voice of a third of the people is more important than that of the other 2 thirds ...
So the issue is not one of liberal/idealistic ideologies being prone to defeat due to their own nature but one of uneveness of the playing field.
That said, at the moment the Liberal Democrat leadership dresses, talks and moves in the same circles as the Tory and Labour ones - they copied the style of the top parties, cultivate the same circle of influnces and do not represent a "break with the past", more of a "same shit, new flies".
Somehow I suspect that if 20 or 30 years ago more Americans had learned about the clitoris and how to use it there would be a lot fewer of them having issues with human sexuality now than there actually are - and this both amongst males and females.
Nah, the true hacker way would be to byte-change the binary of the game so that it plays itself.
Two things:
One:
Dollar cost is the easiest path to determine the energy cost of a project because it already takes in account all the inputs directly and indirectly (for example, the manpower costs include not only the transportation costs for that worker but also all the side-costs such as entertainment costs, housing costs and more of using that specific kind of worker - after all, if the pay was lower that the money the worker spends then he would - usually - not take that job).
Don't forget that indirect energy costs are extremelly difficult to calculate: for example, if a worker in the construction of that battery uses his/her bycicle to get to work instead of a car, then energy costs are lower, but if the money thus saved is spend in ways that consume more energy than that amount of gas has, then the energy costs are actually higher.
If you want to translate dollar costs to energy costs, the easiest way is probably to use the dollar-per-joule ration of money spent in direct energy sources in that area (mostly dollars spent in gas and electricity purchases per joule).
Two:
is actually the wrong question.
A closer to right question is: "How much energy did it take to make it versus the energy that is saved by having it?"
Even that is not the best possible question. Here's a better one:
"How much non-renewable energy did it take to make it and will take to maintain and decomission it versus the amount of non-renewable energy that is saved by having it during it's lifetime?"
If this battery allows this city to use renewable sources of energy (for example solar) instead of non-renewable ones, then this project might be worth it. In fact, it doesn't mater how much non-renewable energy it costs to make it (and maintain it and decomission it) as long as more non-renewable energy is saved by having it.
[Side note 1: This is why, for example, termal isolation in a house is almost always the most efficient way of improving one's energy profile: not because it does not consume lots of energy to make and deploy but because it saves a lot more energy than that over the course of it's lifetime. In fact, in sunny places usually the single most energy-efficient change to do is to have the outer walls of one's house painted white]
[Side note 2: This is also why in the long term nuclear might not be quite as great a source of energy as some people make it to be - it has very high decomissioning costs and current renewable energy capture technologies are still less mature by comparisson and will thus improve faster than nuclear over time (meaning that, later in the life-time of a nuclear reactor it will be saving less non-renewable energy than earlier). That said, at the moment it is one of the best options we have.]
Somehow I suspect that the costs of Pebble Bed nuclear reactors don't scale up linearly per-kilowatt.
If that was the case, then one could get a "personal" 1kW pebble bed reactor for $1000.
So there must be a "minimum" power value above which the price per kilowatt is close enough to the one you quoted for your argument to make some sense.
Until you can show that 4mW is at or above that "minimum" power value your argument makes no sense.
Funilly enough, with both DRM and constant cycles of "here's the same thing again but now in a new and improved format" the Movies (and Games) industries are causing more and more people to get burned by going with DRM-restricted/new-format media and thus teaching even the less technology-savy people to be weary of both.
Just like the GP, more people are thinking-through their buying decisions due to painfull memories of "what happened last time".
Me, I'm sitting on the sidelines and aplauding every time I see the industry going a little bit farther and doing it a lit bit more (hi Ubisoft) all the while more and more people get bit by it - eventually only the really dumb people will be asking "How high?" every time the entertainment industry says "Jump!".
[PS: The latest and greatest fad is 3D movies. Here in the UK they're pushing it really hard, even with 3D TV channels. I expect all the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hearly adopters that just 3 years ago went for new HD TVs (at the time replacing their "HD Ready" TV sets that turned out not to have HDMI connections) to rush to get the new 3D TV sets. Hopefull some people learned a lesson or two in the meanwhile and will wait in the sidelines]
"Positive Discrimination" is just plain old discrimination only against everybody else.
Most people seem to have little situation awareness while driving even when fully concentrating on driving.
Antennas are cheap. You can setup new antennas faster than the drones can resupply.
The way certain Churches deal with sex outside the marriage and preach abstinence is a bit like the war on drugs:
- You make it illegal/socially-shamefull
- You tell teenagers they can't do it.
- Teenagers dully proceed to do what you told them they can't do.
- Some teenagers get problems because of it.
- Because it's illegal/socially-shamefull the teenagers with with problems do not seek help.
- The problems develop into life-ruining outcomes (uncontrolled addictions/children born to single mothers).
Telling teenagers to go against their strongest impulses and then denying them help when they "fall to temptation" even if just once just creates more single-mothers and children of single-mothers: both belonging to social groups with the lowest likellyhood of future success.
That would be Goatse
Saying that Capitalism and Democracy should always go together because you can find simplified descriptions for both that include the word "free" is like saying that you should cook steak and chocolate together because they both taste good.
A Democracy is based on the principle that people are sufficiently informed and knowledgeable to make a decision. It's also based on the principle that rules are created by agreement of at least a majority of people (through their representatives).
Capitalism is a regulated form of market Anarchy. It's basically as close as you get to a free-for-all but with some rules, where due to each participant trying to maximize his/her own outcomes, the overall outcomes for the whole are also maximized. The rules in a capitalist system exist to avoid the natural final state of an Anarchist system: a tyrany.
In a capitalist system, amongst other things, two of the most powerfull mechanisms for one participant to maximize his/her outcomes are:
Both are pretty much the antithesis of Democracy. In fact, most of the current problems of democratic systems can be easilly traced back to these two mechanisms: current winners in the Capitalistic game buying the rule-setters and them (and the rule-setters) controlling information to influence the decisions of the voters.
Warming up loose bits of meat is on of the things microwaves excel at.
One word "Jamming".
Remote controlled drones work against low-technology enemies that cannot blanket the radio spectrum with high-power white noise or shoot down your high-altitude relays (if you use line-of-sight comms technologies such as lasers). The drones can only go autonomous for simple tasks and are (not yet) capable of wining a dogfight with a human-controlled fighter.
Going fully dependent on remote controlled drones is a form of "Preparing for the last war".
Bingo!
The good old "speak with a whinny voice" trick never fails ...