"Economics" is the study of how to use limited resources most effectively. This is a broader and more interesting field of study than most people tend to think. "Money" doesn't necessarily play a part.
Climatologists have already reached a very solid consensus that CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost.
That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists. The consensus is that CO2 is increasing, that CO2 is highly correlated with historical temperature changes, and that the last century of climate change is caused primarily by humans. There is far less consensus over the exact changes that will occur, that they will all necessarily all be bad, or that we must reduce them at all costs.
There's a huge difference in marginal cost between health, education, and the military. Doubling healthcare costs probably won't double life expectancy. Doubling education costs probably won't double the number of geniuses. But doubling military costs may do better than double the size and effectiveness of your units.
High dosages generally do need a prescription, so TFA is technically correct. I don't find that a particularly compelling reason for a strip search, though, and certainly not by a school administrator because of an allegation from another student. Call the girl's parents' or the cops if you must.
If the solar panels are 80% efficient in space, you can make them 80% efficient on Earth.
It's not the efficiency percentage that matters. It's total output per area, which can be quite a bit more in orbit than on the surface.
Even NASA's best-case estimates (if I read them correctly) put the price of space solar at about $3 per Watt, which is a significant premium over ground-based solar.
Yup. For SBSP to work, one of three things has to happen:
Launch costs come down
Weight of solar panels comes down
Cost of energy goes up
Most likely, all three will converge in the middle. However, I doubt they're going to converge by 2016; PG&E is probably walking into a scam.
The first deployment of SBSP will probably be the military, who have reasons for wanting power in remote areas that aren't strictly economic.
If you're talking about getting a little warm, this stuff still won't affect you. The frequencies need to be specifically choosen to cut through water vapor in the atmosphere and anything else that might get in the way that isn't a metal receiving antenna.
Goesynchronous is high enough that the Earth's shadow passes in front of the Sun only very briefly. For all practical purposes, you have 24 hours of daylight.
Tricky. The atmosphere will spread the beam out a lot. As the other reply said, you'd probably be better off dropping bricks from orbit. Better still, use a good cruise missile.
It's not just the lack of night, but not having the atmosphere block out a lot of light before it hits your solar cells.
Sim City was fiction. The microwave beams here aren't concentrated enough to be useful as any sort of weapon, either purposely or accidental. The frequencies choosen need to be transparent to water (since it'll have to cut through a lot of it to get to the surface), and the "beam" is spread over a wide area to make simple rectenna receivers possible.
Anandtech tested the Zotac Ion with a dual core Atom with Win XP. Full screen Hulu videos were unwatchable at 1920 x 1200, even though the Flash code seems to be threaded pretty well. This same machine can handle 1080p Blu ray playback just fine. That's partially due to handling some of the DRM decryption on the GPU, but even if you strip the DRM, playback still has about 10% CPU utilization.
The protection against bias is already built into the system. It's why there are nine Supreme Court Justices instead of one, and why they are appointed positions for as long as they care to have the job (barring gross misconduct). As others have mentioned, this will be true and necessary for as long as humans are appointed to this position.
The report I linked earlier considers lithium processing from seawater. It concluded that if the flow rate of sea water were equivilient to the amount of world wide oil production and extract 100% of the lithium in the water, you could build the batteries for 45,000 GM Volts per year. That's not even an within an order of magnitude of GM's total sales. If we're going to see EVs take over, we're either going to need a lot better battery capacity or a much larger source of lithium.
In short, the upper limit on most mineral resources is, for all practical purposes, unbounded, and more importantly, the scaling factor on such resources is toward geometric growth of reserves . . . This is the great lie of reserves figures; reserves figures for a resource reflect only upon the amount of that resource that can be produced at current prices with current technology.
At some point, the amount of useful reserves in the Earth's crust is so low that it makes economic sense to go to an asteroid to get it instead. This can theoretically happen without any further development in robotics or launch costs.
It's probably irrelevent, anyway. Developed nations are having trouble keeping their birthrates above the replacement rate. This is probably a good thing in the long run, but there are problems with this in the short run, such as caring for an ageing population.
The harsh reality of undeveloped nations is that if they can't keep their birthrates under control, then they'll see a population explosion, followed by a crash due to starvation, disease, and wars over limited resources.
There are metals that are very rare in the Earth's crust, but are extremely useful, like Platinum and Palladium. Any realistic plan for a hydrogen economy is going to need a lot of at least one of those metals, and those two are useful as catalysts in a lot of other chemical reactions, too.
Say the hydrogen economy is a pipe dream and we should be making better Lithium batteries instead? Well, you've only just moved the problem around. Lithium production is unlikely to meet future demands for electric vehicles, even though it has an atomic number of 3 and is therefore fairly abundant in the universe at large.
Further, mining of any kind has a lot of hidden costs in terms of human lives and environmental damage.
But you can strip mine an asteroid without damaging a fragile ecosystem, and with sufficient advances in automation, you can eliminate nearly all costs in human lives. Further, strip mining is relatively easy to automate (pick up chunk of rock, move it to processing station).
If you want to limit economic feasibility to what only shows up on a corporate balance sheet, then asteroid mining makes a lot more sense in terms of building out other space infrastructure, e.g. O'Neill Cylinders, nuclear pulse rockets built in space, Martian colonies, etc.
The take home is that space is, and always will be, very $ relative to ground; therefore there has to be some compelling reason to go to space.
Sadly, there are few compelling reasons.
Next time you want to get a weather report, try doing it without relying on a source that bases it on satellite imagery. Next time you watch TV, do it on a channel that doesn't link to a satellite somewhere along the way. At least as far as unmanned space projects go, the economic debate was over a long time ago.
Manned space flight is a different matter. Manned space flight is about the advancement of the species rather than any strictly economic viewpoint.
The 2D Canvas tag already works pretty well in Chrome, and mostly works in Firefox with some notable features missing. The w3c plans on adding a 3D standard at some point, but my guess is that the 2D API isn't going to change much from here.
You and I both know it doesn't cost them even remotely close to 95$ a month for your service - their profit margins are obscene
The per-connection margins are pretty good, yes, but it gets eaten up by operating expenses pretty fast. Take a look at AT&T's financials. In 2008, they had $124,028 million in revenue, but only $12,867 million in net income, or about 10%. That's pretty good, but it's not fantastic, either. Google was at 29% in 2006, though that dipped to only 19% in 2008.
Slashdot Mirror
"Economics" is the study of how to use limited resources most effectively. This is a broader and more interesting field of study than most people tend to think. "Money" doesn't necessarily play a part.
Climatologists have already reached a very solid consensus that CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost.
That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists. The consensus is that CO2 is increasing, that CO2 is highly correlated with historical temperature changes, and that the last century of climate change is caused primarily by humans. There is far less consensus over the exact changes that will occur, that they will all necessarily all be bad, or that we must reduce them at all costs.
There's a huge difference in marginal cost between health, education, and the military. Doubling healthcare costs probably won't double life expectancy. Doubling education costs probably won't double the number of geniuses. But doubling military costs may do better than double the size and effectiveness of your units.
This wouldn't have happened if they had my poorly-defined buzzword idea!
High dosages generally do need a prescription, so TFA is technically correct. I don't find that a particularly compelling reason for a strip search, though, and certainly not by a school administrator because of an allegation from another student. Call the girl's parents' or the cops if you must.
If the solar panels are 80% efficient in space, you can make them 80% efficient on Earth.
It's not the efficiency percentage that matters. It's total output per area, which can be quite a bit more in orbit than on the surface.
Even NASA's best-case estimates (if I read them correctly) put the price of space solar at about $3 per Watt, which is a significant premium over ground-based solar.
Yup. For SBSP to work, one of three things has to happen:
Most likely, all three will converge in the middle. However, I doubt they're going to converge by 2016; PG&E is probably walking into a scam.
The first deployment of SBSP will probably be the military, who have reasons for wanting power in remote areas that aren't strictly economic.
If you're talking about cancer, yes, it is.
If you're talking about getting a little warm, this stuff still won't affect you. The frequencies need to be specifically choosen to cut through water vapor in the atmosphere and anything else that might get in the way that isn't a metal receiving antenna.
Goesynchronous is high enough that the Earth's shadow passes in front of the Sun only very briefly. For all practical purposes, you have 24 hours of daylight.
Tricky. The atmosphere will spread the beam out a lot. As the other reply said, you'd probably be better off dropping bricks from orbit. Better still, use a good cruise missile.
how do you collimate the beam tightly enough that it doesn't spread out and you lose most of the power?
You don't. You use a rectenna (basically just a grid of metal) spread over farm fields, with plenty of light getting through to grow crops underneath.
. . . if you're upping the dosage of ANY frequency, you're upping your risk.
Risk of what? Non-ionizing radiation like microwaves don't cause genetic damage.
It's not just the lack of night, but not having the atmosphere block out a lot of light before it hits your solar cells.
Sim City was fiction. The microwave beams here aren't concentrated enough to be useful as any sort of weapon, either purposely or accidental. The frequencies choosen need to be transparent to water (since it'll have to cut through a lot of it to get to the surface), and the "beam" is spread over a wide area to make simple rectenna receivers possible.
Compared to ground-based photovoltaic cells, lots of things are efficient.
Javascript did a pretty good job at this
No, it didn't. Google isn't doing anything the spammers couldn't have done themselves with a little bit of Perl.
Anandtech tested the Zotac Ion with a dual core Atom with Win XP. Full screen Hulu videos were unwatchable at 1920 x 1200, even though the Flash code seems to be threaded pretty well. This same machine can handle 1080p Blu ray playback just fine. That's partially due to handling some of the DRM decryption on the GPU, but even if you strip the DRM, playback still has about 10% CPU utilization.
The protection against bias is already built into the system. It's why there are nine Supreme Court Justices instead of one, and why they are appointed positions for as long as they care to have the job (barring gross misconduct). As others have mentioned, this will be true and necessary for as long as humans are appointed to this position.
A) Methane is fairly reactive, and doesn't last long in the atmosphere. CO2 is compartively stable.
B) The Greenhouse Effect isn't bad in itself. Without it, the Earth would be too cold, like Mars. Having too much of it, like Venus, is the bad thing.
The report I linked earlier considers lithium processing from seawater. It concluded that if the flow rate of sea water were equivilient to the amount of world wide oil production and extract 100% of the lithium in the water, you could build the batteries for 45,000 GM Volts per year. That's not even an within an order of magnitude of GM's total sales. If we're going to see EVs take over, we're either going to need a lot better battery capacity or a much larger source of lithium.
Can you go through that supply without killing the rest of the planet? There are externalities to consider here.
In short, the upper limit on most mineral resources is, for all practical purposes, unbounded, and more importantly, the scaling factor on such resources is toward geometric growth of reserves . . . This is the great lie of reserves figures; reserves figures for a resource reflect only upon the amount of that resource that can be produced at current prices with current technology.
At some point, the amount of useful reserves in the Earth's crust is so low that it makes economic sense to go to an asteroid to get it instead. This can theoretically happen without any further development in robotics or launch costs.
It's probably irrelevent, anyway. Developed nations are having trouble keeping their birthrates above the replacement rate. This is probably a good thing in the long run, but there are problems with this in the short run, such as caring for an ageing population.
The harsh reality of undeveloped nations is that if they can't keep their birthrates under control, then they'll see a population explosion, followed by a crash due to starvation, disease, and wars over limited resources.
There are metals that are very rare in the Earth's crust, but are extremely useful, like Platinum and Palladium. Any realistic plan for a hydrogen economy is going to need a lot of at least one of those metals, and those two are useful as catalysts in a lot of other chemical reactions, too.
Say the hydrogen economy is a pipe dream and we should be making better Lithium batteries instead? Well, you've only just moved the problem around. Lithium production is unlikely to meet future demands for electric vehicles, even though it has an atomic number of 3 and is therefore fairly abundant in the universe at large.
Further, mining of any kind has a lot of hidden costs in terms of human lives and environmental damage.
But you can strip mine an asteroid without damaging a fragile ecosystem, and with sufficient advances in automation, you can eliminate nearly all costs in human lives. Further, strip mining is relatively easy to automate (pick up chunk of rock, move it to processing station).
If you want to limit economic feasibility to what only shows up on a corporate balance sheet, then asteroid mining makes a lot more sense in terms of building out other space infrastructure, e.g. O'Neill Cylinders, nuclear pulse rockets built in space, Martian colonies, etc.
The take home is that space is, and always will be, very $ relative to ground; therefore there has to be some compelling reason to go to space. Sadly, there are few compelling reasons.
Next time you want to get a weather report, try doing it without relying on a source that bases it on satellite imagery. Next time you watch TV, do it on a channel that doesn't link to a satellite somewhere along the way. At least as far as unmanned space projects go, the economic debate was over a long time ago.
Manned space flight is a different matter. Manned space flight is about the advancement of the species rather than any strictly economic viewpoint.
The 2D Canvas tag already works pretty well in Chrome, and mostly works in Firefox with some notable features missing. The w3c plans on adding a 3D standard at some point, but my guess is that the 2D API isn't going to change much from here.
You and I both know it doesn't cost them even remotely close to 95$ a month for your service - their profit margins are obscene
The per-connection margins are pretty good, yes, but it gets eaten up by operating expenses pretty fast. Take a look at AT&T's financials. In 2008, they had $124,028 million in revenue, but only $12,867 million in net income, or about 10%. That's pretty good, but it's not fantastic, either. Google was at 29% in 2006, though that dipped to only 19% in 2008.