Seems to me that the answer is just to host things yourself, instead of relying on another company's infrastructure.
How do you host anything without relying on another company's infrastructure? Do you purchase right-of-way's between your site and all of your customers and string your own fiber? Do you run your own power plant? Do you build your own UPS, right down to the batteries so you don't need to trust a UPS vendor? Do you build and service your own CRAC's?
It's impossible for any company to *not* rely on another company's infrastructure even if just for internet connectivity, the only question is where to draw the line - do you really want to rack and stack your own servers? Do you trust a vendor to do periodic preventative maintenance on your generators, or do you use your own staff? Do you certify your own staff to service your fire suppression system, or do you contract out to a vendor? Do you want to own your own network equipment and do your own network admin? Do you want to swap out servers and disk drives when they fail? Do you keep staff electricians on-hand to take care of electrical issues? Do you want to run a 24x7 NOC to monitor and maintain your datacenter?
While a large company may be able to keep many of these tasks in-house, many small companies can't afford the staff it would take to control all of their infrastructure.
An honest question, why don't these large, big-name sites utilize the Multi Availability Zone failover that Amazon offers?
It seems these AWS outages make for good headlines, but shouldn't any large site be co-located in multiple physical locations to ensure uptime?
If they WERE using Multi AZ, or there is some other technical reason why it wouldn't help, I'm really curious to know why...
There are rumors floating around that this affects more than one AZ - I'd never host critical infrastructure entirely in a single region even across multiple AZ's - much better to have it spread across multiple regions would eliminate most failure modes that could affect one region (like an East Coast Hurricane).
Your SLA is only as good as your weakest link. Granted, some of these sites may not have SLAs, but if you have an external vendor providing some of this stuff, and their service levels suck, then your service level can't be any better.
For me, I can't see why companies would be willing to do this kind of thing. The risks are just too high.
Because many companies are not willing to spend what it takes to get availability greater than what they can get at Amazon - especially if they take advantage of multi-AZ or multi-region redundancy.
Sure, having a physical server at the office that you know you can fix by buying parts at the local computer store sounds attractive. Until the day you find that your building has burnt to the ground. Or a truck knocked over the utility pole providing network and electricity to your building. Or you discover that when you looked at the flood maps to make sure you weren't in a flood zone, the maps didn't account for a water main breaking and flooding the basement where your telecom equipment is... or the clogged roof drains that let 20,000 gallons of water to build up on the roof during a rainstorm until the roof collapsed and flooded your datacenter. Or the earthquake (or hurricane or tornado or flood or whatever) that takes down your site for days or weeks or even months, and your employees are more concerned with surviving than trying to get your critical systems back online.
Meeting an SLA for your own facility only works when that facility is running, and often the company that rents office space has little control over the facility.
My company has a number critical services running in one Amazon region with replication to a second region for failover. The second region costs very little, just a single instance to hold data replicated from the primary instance, then if we need to spin up the servers in the secondary region, it takes about 10 minutes to push the data from the local copy to the other servers once we start them up.
We could automate the whole process, but Amazon problems are rare enough that it hasn't been worth it.
We do have a couple servers in us-east-1a but so far those servers appear to be fine, although the AWS management interface has not been working for managing servers in that region/AZ. If we ran servers out of our local office instead of Amazon, we would have had at least 2 instances of complete downtime in the past year - one 3 hour internet outage, and a 48 hour power failure on a weekend when a transformer blew and the power company didn't have an available spare and had to truck it in from out of area.
100%, absolutely, positively, this. There is no app out there that will effectively protect you from yourself -- and, make no mistake, it is you creating the problem. If you run around roaming from AP to AP, run unsecured at home (what?!), and leave your BT on even when not in use, you're gonna have a bad time.
What good is Bluetooth if I have to turn it on every time I want to use it and then turn it off again when I'm done? At work my phone pairs to a Bluetooth speaker, when I'm on the train it pairs to my Bluetooth headset, when I'm driving it pairs to my car audio system. If I have to mess with my phone to turn Bluetooth on and off each time I want to use it, I may as well just plug in a cable.
That's a pretty big "if". Do many working professionals spend much time without a mobile phone about their person in this day and age?
If your smartphone works to reach the internet, then your 3G Chromebook will still be working so you can continue working even after your company's internet connection goes down.
Treadmills, virtual or otherwise, wouldn't work. You wouldn't feel the correct motion acting on your body and it would be obvious you were not moving as fast as you appeared to be. The force fields would have to act on every atom in your body and move them all in the opposite direction you were walking/driving, so that things like your inner-ear fluids moved precisely long with you.
Presumably that is how the holodeck works, since it is capable of simulating low gravity and the like which would require affecting every atom in the room simultaneously and equally.
Why wouldn't they just use a 3D array of gravity emitters to simulate acceleration? They already have the ability to manipulate gravity (since they maintain 1G throughout the ship), so it seems like an easier way to simulate the world than to have 10^13 force fields acting on every cell in your body (or 10^27 forcefields acting on each atom)
If they had not drilled the wells, the pressure would have grown greater and when the quake happened it would have been a stronger quake. Silly article headline!
Or maybe not - maybe there would have been a series of smaller quakes that released the energy more gradually. Do you have some evidence that shows that human-induced quakes are of lower intensity than natural quakes?
It only runs a web browser. No ios apps, no android apps, no x86 apps. You won't be able to upgrade its miserable 2GB of ram or attach an ethernet cable and it hardly has any cache. Might as well fuck yourself in the leg with it; it's a DOA POS that will be filling landfills by the end of 2013.
I spent the same amount on an Acer last year and I can read/write DVDs on it, have a moderate HD (250 GB), 15.6" screen and dual-boot Win7 and Linux w/o hacks. I upgraded the mem to 10GB for ~$25 and it has a Radeon 6310. Even before the mem upgrade, I could compile FPGA code, FV-1 code, AVR code, STM32F4 code and develop games with Game Maker on it. Oh yeah, I can also run what the Chromebook "cellphone in a laptop body" does. faster.
Fools and their money.
How much does your $250 15" acer weigh, and how long does it last on batteries? I wouldn't buy a Chromebook as my primary machine, but sounds perfect for travel or catching up on email on the train on the way to work. (the keyboard makes it more convenient than a tablet for replying to emalis)
Increasingly we have a workforce that simply needs to connect to a database, do email.
... and has $250 to waste on a device that is a brick without a net connection, purely because of crippled software. Good luck with that.
Many offices are already dead without a 'net connection - no connection to financial systems, email at the corporate office, etc. If they are lucky they have a local fileserver, but can't do much without the network. Which is why they tend to have redundant connections (i.e. a leased line back to the corporate office and VPN over public internet as a backup).
So it's slightly cheaper than an older iPad, but gets worse battery life. It has a fraction of the software of an iPad, and isn't as easy to whip out and use since you have to fold out the keyboard. It's less features than an netbook (which you could restrict down to be malware free) but at the same cost.
I'm just not sure about the value on these things.
iPad2: $399 ($529 with 3G). 9.2" 1024x768 screen. No keyboard
Samsung Chromebook: $249 ($329 with 3G) 11.6" 1366x768 screen, keyboard, touchpad, USB 3.0/2.0 ports, SD Card slot
I'm not sure I'd say that $150 - $200 is "slightly cheaper".
I don't understand why Paramount do this from time to time, other than to make room for the new stuff. Why don't they just chuck everything in the holodeck?
Because the Holodeck isn't infinite in size - it's an ordinary room (you can see the actual size when people enter it before it's turned on). The unlimited size with the ability to walk endlessly in any direction is an illusion generated by force fields (i.e. virtual treadmills). If they kept throwing junked movie sets in there, it would eventually fill up just like any storage room.
A conventional car can't recapture this energy - but a hybrid can
Actually, petrol-powered Formula 1 racers have recently been made legal with regenerative braking. It was illegal before. And no, they don't have hub motors that turn into generators, nor big-ass batteries to charge up.
Right, I'd forgotten about the flywheel regeneration used in F1 cars, but I'm not aware of the technology having made it to general purpose cars yet. And it may never do so, not all F1 technology ends up in cars due to expense and/or long term reliability issues.
What DOESN'T matter is this "green" or "renewable" bullshit.
There's nothing wrong with preferentially using a finite energy source first because it's cheaper until the prices rise to be on par with solar
That strategy is only reasonable if fossil fuel prices rise linearly. It will take decades to move energy use from fossil fuels to renewables -- cars can last for a decade or more before needing replacing, new power plants (even solar or wind plants) can take a decade to build due to planning and environmental reviews - Nuclear plants can take even longer.
If we wait until the price of fossil fuels rises above alternative sources, the fossil fuel price rise may be on an exponential rise that makes it cost prohibitive to move to any kind of alternative energy source, since until the alternative energy sources are online, we're going to need vast amounts of fossil fuels to build the new infrastructure. Furthermore, we need to be experimenting and building large-scale plants now to find out what works and what doesn't - better to find out now that a $500M solar plant that looked good on paper needs so much mirror maintenance that it's not cost effective before spending $10T building hundreds of them.
The right time to start moving to renewables is now, while fossil fuels are still relatively inexpensive.
(or other "renewables" which are just heat pumps based on solar)
Not all renewables depend on energy from the sun - geothemal generators and tide and wave generators don't rely on the sun at all.
Yes, you made up unrealistic numbers and ignored the most helpfull parts. well don. You where generate by a math program, where you?
Most countries have plenty of room to expand renewable beyond just whats need to power these plants. There are a lot of out of the way area we could use solar or wind to power these plants that aren't piratical to run lines to.
We can use wind power the is in excess of need, probably at night.
We could build a Nuclear plant away from everyone and build an array of these things.
We should think of them as scrubbers with petrol creating as icing on the cake.
Sure, all of that could be done, but it's not. We are far away of generating a significant fraction of global energy use from renewables -- right now it's around 10%. Once we get rid of the 90% of power production from fossil fuels, then it makes sense to use excess "clean" energy to make gasoline. Or even just get rid of the 60% of power generated from oil and coal.
It doesn't make sense to use power from oil to generate electricity to create gasoline to burn in a car.
On a local scale you can plug your solar plant into the gasoline generator and claim that it's a clean fuel, but efficiency-wise you'd be better off plugging your solar plant into the power grid, then decommission an oil burning plant and burn that oil in your car.
Given that nobody (except Iceland) is at 100% renewable energy, yes it does matter.
Ok, I'll bite. Just how are they planning to renew those volcanoes once they use them up?
The earth renews it through conduction and convection from the earth's core (which is still retaining heat from the formation of the earth, plus continues to generate heat through radiation and frictional forces) -- which for all intents and purposes on a human scale, is unlimited energy. You may as well ask how solar plants are going to renew the energy from the sun when the Sun inevitably runs out of hydrogen.
Geothermal wells do eventually extract enough energy from the earth that new wells (deeper or in a new area) need to be drilled periodically to maintain output.
you're point only makes sense with wildly inaccurate numbers and impractical situations.
If I had a 2 MW wind turbine on my property, that would be FAR MORE energy then I need, so that excess would power this CO2 scrubbing plant. However, there are very large areas of land that could be used to get energy to run these via wind, solar and Nuclear energy generation.
But if you joined the electric grid and sold your power back to grid, you'd be adding 2MW of power to the grid, reducing the amount of energy that needs to come from fossil fuel plants.
Average coal plant efficiency is 28% (up to 45% for more modern plants).
If you can generate gasoline from your wind turbine at 30% efficiency, and burn it in your car at 30% efficiency, then around 9% of your power is doing useful work.
However if you put it into the grid and replace power from a coal plant, your 2MW is eliminating the need to burn 6MW of raw coal (since 2/3's of the energy in coal is wasted when generating electricity)
If you're looking only at your own usage, then using your 2MW wind plant to replace all of your power needs makes you seem more "green", but if you look at the nation's energy use as a whole, until all of the power on the grid comes from renewables, you''d be more "green" if you sell your renewable power to the grid.
Because there are already millions of cars out there without the capability to run on electricity. Replacing them all would consume such amounts of energy and vast amounts of material resources that it'd probably be more environmentally friendly just to continue operating them on petrol extracted from the earth. However if you can power them somehow on energy not extracted from the earth we 1: reduce the number of oil wells, which damage ecosystems, and 2: produce no net increase in CO2 because any CO2 released originally extracted from the atmosphere.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that they be replaced overnight, but most cars are retired in less than 15 years, so phase in electric cars over 2 decades, and the old ICE cars will go away by attrition as they wear out.
I seriously doubt that the energy lost in converting air to fuel is going to make it worth using as a pimary fuel source - we are a long way from producing enough electricity from renewable sources to let us shut down all of the fossil fuel plants that generate electricity and we should at least get the coal plants shut down before using electricity to make gasoline, but maybe this could serve some niche market long from now when there's not as much need for gasoline (or it's too expensive to extract from the ground), but gasoline is still needed for a few purposes (like driving "classic" cars like a 2013 Ford Fiesta to a car show)
Actually, if the average weight of you tank of petrol, as it is used up, is significantly less than your stack of batteries would be (which don't get any lighter as you use them up), then the batteries can be worse. It will take more energy to push your heavy, battery laiden car around than it will to push the petrol powered one. As long as the petrol is coming from a renewable source like airborne CO2 captured with solar or wind generated electricity, then you've eliminated it's biggest drawbacks, making it carbon neutral, and no longer a scarce and depletable resource.
Since you can recover much of the energy spent in accelerating that mass of batteries when you decelerate, as well as capture much of the energy spent getting it up the hill when you go downhill, most of the cost of carrying around the extra weight is rolling resistance, which is a small fraction of the extra weight. So carrying extra battery weight isn't as detrimental as it might seem.
A conventional car can't recapture this energy - but a hybrid can, which is why hybrids tend to get better mileage in the city than on the highway - they recapture much of the energy that would be lost in stop-and-go city driving, but they are subject to the same wind resistance at highway speeds as a conventional car.
Except that it's no longer equivalent unless you add the same feature to the iPad which will cost at least $20-$30 for comparable quality?
No, the article ALREADY made it comparable by adding a keyboard to the initial cost, after which the Surface was $20-$30 more expensive (really a bit more since a 32 GB iPad would also have about 10GB more user storage on device which you'd have to buy an SD card for on the Surface to equal).
I don't know if you read the same article as me, but here's the pricing from the article:
That seems to make the iPad $40 more expensive. YOu can probably find a keyboard for less than $69, but if you really wanted a cheap keyboard, then you can probably use a bluetooth keyboard with the MS tablet as well.
They included a $39 screen cover for the iPad, which I omitted, but if you really wanted to make them comparable I guess you'd include that too.
Does the higher resolution of the iPad make any difference in real-life use?
Clearly you have never looked at or used a HiDPI display.
I have, and while it looks better, I didn't find that I could surf the web any faster or type documents any faster, so that's why I asked if it means any difference in real-life use. My eyes aren't good enough to make use of the tiny fonts that would give me more screen real estate on the 9" iPad display, so I may very well find a tablet with lower resolution and larger screen to be more useful.
Tech specs seem less relevant when comparing high-end tablets from different manufacturers running completely different operating systems
Only if you believe in comparing Fariy Dust and Bullshit would it not matter.
I thought the Fairy Dust and Bullshit was in the specs and it's the end-user experience that matters? I don't care if one has an eight core CPU and one has a dual core CPU, I care more about how the apps run.
All I got from this article is that once you add in the cost of the Surface's most notable feature, it costs $20 - $30 more than an equivalent iPad.
Except that it's no longer equivalent unless you add the same feature to the iPad which will cost at least $20-$30 for comparable quality?
But I thought the most notable feature of the tablet was that it runs MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint (it will cost your $30 to get equivalent software on the iPad) -- I don't know why you'd get the MS tablet if you weren't interested in running MS software.
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Seems to me that the answer is just to host things yourself, instead of relying on another company's infrastructure.
How do you host anything without relying on another company's infrastructure? Do you purchase right-of-way's between your site and all of your customers and string your own fiber? Do you run your own power plant? Do you build your own UPS, right down to the batteries so you don't need to trust a UPS vendor? Do you build and service your own CRAC's?
It's impossible for any company to *not* rely on another company's infrastructure even if just for internet connectivity, the only question is where to draw the line - do you really want to rack and stack your own servers? Do you trust a vendor to do periodic preventative maintenance on your generators, or do you use your own staff? Do you certify your own staff to service your fire suppression system, or do you contract out to a vendor? Do you want to own your own network equipment and do your own network admin? Do you want to swap out servers and disk drives when they fail? Do you keep staff electricians on-hand to take care of electrical issues? Do you want to run a 24x7 NOC to monitor and maintain your datacenter?
While a large company may be able to keep many of these tasks in-house, many small companies can't afford the staff it would take to control all of their infrastructure.
An honest question, why don't these large, big-name sites utilize the Multi Availability Zone failover that Amazon offers?
It seems these AWS outages make for good headlines, but shouldn't any large site be co-located in multiple physical locations to ensure uptime?
If they WERE using Multi AZ, or there is some other technical reason why it wouldn't help, I'm really curious to know why...
There are rumors floating around that this affects more than one AZ - I'd never host critical infrastructure entirely in a single region even across multiple AZ's - much better to have it spread across multiple regions would eliminate most failure modes that could affect one region (like an East Coast Hurricane).
Your SLA is only as good as your weakest link. Granted, some of these sites may not have SLAs, but if you have an external vendor providing some of this stuff, and their service levels suck, then your service level can't be any better.
For me, I can't see why companies would be willing to do this kind of thing. The risks are just too high.
Because many companies are not willing to spend what it takes to get availability greater than what they can get at Amazon - especially if they take advantage of multi-AZ or multi-region redundancy.
Sure, having a physical server at the office that you know you can fix by buying parts at the local computer store sounds attractive. Until the day you find that your building has burnt to the ground. Or a truck knocked over the utility pole providing network and electricity to your building. Or you discover that when you looked at the flood maps to make sure you weren't in a flood zone, the maps didn't account for a water main breaking and flooding the basement where your telecom equipment is... or the clogged roof drains that let 20,000 gallons of water to build up on the roof during a rainstorm until the roof collapsed and flooded your datacenter. Or the earthquake (or hurricane or tornado or flood or whatever) that takes down your site for days or weeks or even months, and your employees are more concerned with surviving than trying to get your critical systems back online.
Meeting an SLA for your own facility only works when that facility is running, and often the company that rents office space has little control over the facility.
My company has a number critical services running in one Amazon region with replication to a second region for failover. The second region costs very little, just a single instance to hold data replicated from the primary instance, then if we need to spin up the servers in the secondary region, it takes about 10 minutes to push the data from the local copy to the other servers once we start them up.
We could automate the whole process, but Amazon problems are rare enough that it hasn't been worth it.
We do have a couple servers in us-east-1a but so far those servers appear to be fine, although the AWS management interface has not been working for managing servers in that region/AZ. If we ran servers out of our local office instead of Amazon, we would have had at least 2 instances of complete downtime in the past year - one 3 hour internet outage, and a 48 hour power failure on a weekend when a transformer blew and the power company didn't have an available spare and had to truck it in from out of area.
100%, absolutely, positively, this. There is no app out there that will effectively protect you from yourself -- and, make no mistake, it is you creating the problem. If you run around roaming from AP to AP, run unsecured at home (what?!), and leave your BT on even when not in use, you're gonna have a bad time.
What good is Bluetooth if I have to turn it on every time I want to use it and then turn it off again when I'm done? At work my phone pairs to a Bluetooth speaker, when I'm on the train it pairs to my Bluetooth headset, when I'm driving it pairs to my car audio system. If I have to mess with my phone to turn Bluetooth on and off each time I want to use it, I may as well just plug in a cable.
(and I didn't have my smartphone)
That's a pretty big "if". Do many working professionals spend much time without a mobile phone about their person in this day and age?
If your smartphone works to reach the internet, then your 3G Chromebook will still be working so you can continue working even after your company's internet connection goes down.
Treadmills, virtual or otherwise, wouldn't work. You wouldn't feel the correct motion acting on your body and it would be obvious you were not moving as fast as you appeared to be. The force fields would have to act on every atom in your body and move them all in the opposite direction you were walking/driving, so that things like your inner-ear fluids moved precisely long with you.
Presumably that is how the holodeck works, since it is capable of simulating low gravity and the like which would require affecting every atom in the room simultaneously and equally.
Why wouldn't they just use a 3D array of gravity emitters to simulate acceleration? They already have the ability to manipulate gravity (since they maintain 1G throughout the ship), so it seems like an easier way to simulate the world than to have 10^13 force fields acting on every cell in your body (or 10^27 forcefields acting on each atom)
If they had not drilled the wells, the pressure would have grown greater and when the quake happened it would have been a stronger quake. Silly article headline!
Or maybe not - maybe there would have been a series of smaller quakes that released the energy more gradually. Do you have some evidence that shows that human-induced quakes are of lower intensity than natural quakes?
It only runs a web browser. No ios apps, no android apps, no x86 apps. You won't be able to upgrade its miserable 2GB of ram or attach an ethernet cable and it hardly has any cache. Might as well fuck yourself in the leg with it; it's a DOA POS that will be filling landfills by the end of 2013.
I spent the same amount on an Acer last year and I can read/write DVDs on it, have a moderate HD (250 GB), 15.6" screen and dual-boot Win7 and Linux w/o hacks. I upgraded the mem to 10GB for ~$25 and it has a Radeon 6310. Even before the mem upgrade, I could compile FPGA code, FV-1 code, AVR code, STM32F4 code and develop games with Game Maker on it. Oh yeah, I can also run what the Chromebook "cellphone in a laptop body" does. faster.
Fools and their money.
How much does your $250 15" acer weigh, and how long does it last on batteries? I wouldn't buy a Chromebook as my primary machine, but sounds perfect for travel or catching up on email on the train on the way to work. (the keyboard makes it more convenient than a tablet for replying to emalis)
Increasingly we have a workforce that simply needs to connect to a database, do email.
... and has $250 to waste on a device that is a brick without a net connection, purely because of crippled software. Good luck with that.
Many offices are already dead without a 'net connection - no connection to financial systems, email at the corporate office, etc. If they are lucky they have a local fileserver, but can't do much without the network. Which is why they tend to have redundant connections (i.e. a leased line back to the corporate office and VPN over public internet as a backup).
So it's slightly cheaper than an older iPad, but gets worse battery life. It has a fraction of the software of an iPad, and isn't as easy to whip out and use since you have to fold out the keyboard. It's less features than an netbook (which you could restrict down to be malware free) but at the same cost.
I'm just not sure about the value on these things.
iPad2: $399 ($529 with 3G). 9.2" 1024x768 screen. No keyboard
Samsung Chromebook: $249 ($329 with 3G) 11.6" 1366x768 screen, keyboard, touchpad, USB 3.0/2.0 ports, SD Card slot
I'm not sure I'd say that $150 - $200 is "slightly cheaper".
Look out for the Due in projects that once would have needed something more like a desktop machine
There are a lot of microcontrollers that bridge the gap between a 16MHz Arduino and a desktop machine.
I don't understand why Paramount do this from time to time, other than to make room for the new stuff. Why don't they just chuck everything in the holodeck?
Because the Holodeck isn't infinite in size - it's an ordinary room (you can see the actual size when people enter it before it's turned on). The unlimited size with the ability to walk endlessly in any direction is an illusion generated by force fields (i.e. virtual treadmills). If they kept throwing junked movie sets in there, it would eventually fill up just like any storage room.
A conventional car can't recapture this energy - but a hybrid can
Actually, petrol-powered Formula 1 racers have recently been made legal with regenerative braking. It was illegal before. And no, they don't have hub motors that turn into generators, nor big-ass batteries to charge up.
Right, I'd forgotten about the flywheel regeneration used in F1 cars, but I'm not aware of the technology having made it to general purpose cars yet. And it may never do so, not all F1 technology ends up in cars due to expense and/or long term reliability issues.
Energy is a scarce resource, so yes it matters.
What DOESN'T matter is this "green" or "renewable" bullshit.
There's nothing wrong with preferentially using a finite energy source first because it's cheaper until the prices rise to be on par with solar
That strategy is only reasonable if fossil fuel prices rise linearly. It will take decades to move energy use from fossil fuels to renewables -- cars can last for a decade or more before needing replacing, new power plants (even solar or wind plants) can take a decade to build due to planning and environmental reviews - Nuclear plants can take even longer.
If we wait until the price of fossil fuels rises above alternative sources, the fossil fuel price rise may be on an exponential rise that makes it cost prohibitive to move to any kind of alternative energy source, since until the alternative energy sources are online, we're going to need vast amounts of fossil fuels to build the new infrastructure. Furthermore, we need to be experimenting and building large-scale plants now to find out what works and what doesn't - better to find out now that a $500M solar plant that looked good on paper needs so much mirror maintenance that it's not cost effective before spending $10T building hundreds of them.
The right time to start moving to renewables is now, while fossil fuels are still relatively inexpensive.
(or other "renewables" which are just heat pumps based on solar)
Not all renewables depend on energy from the sun - geothemal generators and tide and wave generators don't rely on the sun at all.
Yes, you made up unrealistic numbers and ignored the most helpfull parts. well don. You where generate by a math program, where you?
Most countries have plenty of room to expand renewable beyond just whats need to power these plants. There are a lot of out of the way area we could use solar or wind to power these plants that aren't piratical to run lines to.
We can use wind power the is in excess of need, probably at night.
We could build a Nuclear plant away from everyone and build an array of these things.
We should think of them as scrubbers with petrol creating as icing on the cake.
Sure, all of that could be done, but it's not. We are far away of generating a significant fraction of global energy use from renewables -- right now it's around 10%. Once we get rid of the 90% of power production from fossil fuels, then it makes sense to use excess "clean" energy to make gasoline. Or even just get rid of the 60% of power generated from oil and coal.
It doesn't make sense to use power from oil to generate electricity to create gasoline to burn in a car.
On a local scale you can plug your solar plant into the gasoline generator and claim that it's a clean fuel, but efficiency-wise you'd be better off plugging your solar plant into the power grid, then decommission an oil burning plant and burn that oil in your car.
Given that nobody (except Iceland) is at 100% renewable energy, yes it does matter.
Ok, I'll bite. Just how are they planning to renew those volcanoes once they use them up?
The earth renews it through conduction and convection from the earth's core (which is still retaining heat from the formation of the earth, plus continues to generate heat through radiation and frictional forces) -- which for all intents and purposes on a human scale, is unlimited energy. You may as well ask how solar plants are going to renew the energy from the sun when the Sun inevitably runs out of hydrogen.
Geothermal wells do eventually extract enough energy from the earth that new wells (deeper or in a new area) need to be drilled periodically to maintain output.
you're point only makes sense with wildly inaccurate numbers and impractical situations.
If I had a 2 MW wind turbine on my property, that would be FAR MORE energy then I need, so that excess would power this CO2 scrubbing plant.
However, there are very large areas of land that could be used to get energy to run these via wind, solar and Nuclear energy generation.
But if you joined the electric grid and sold your power back to grid, you'd be adding 2MW of power to the grid, reducing the amount of energy that needs to come from fossil fuel plants.
Average coal plant efficiency is 28% (up to 45% for more modern plants).
If you can generate gasoline from your wind turbine at 30% efficiency, and burn it in your car at 30% efficiency, then around 9% of your power is doing useful work.
However if you put it into the grid and replace power from a coal plant, your 2MW is eliminating the need to burn 6MW of raw coal (since 2/3's of the energy in coal is wasted when generating electricity)
If you're looking only at your own usage, then using your 2MW wind plant to replace all of your power needs makes you seem more "green", but if you look at the nation's energy use as a whole, until all of the power on the grid comes from renewables, you''d be more "green" if you sell your renewable power to the grid.
Because there are already millions of cars out there without the capability to run on electricity. Replacing them all would consume such amounts of energy and vast amounts of material resources that it'd probably be more environmentally friendly just to continue operating them on petrol extracted from the earth. However if you can power them somehow on energy not extracted from the earth we 1: reduce the number of oil wells, which damage ecosystems, and 2: produce no net increase in CO2 because any CO2 released originally extracted from the atmosphere.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that they be replaced overnight, but most cars are retired in less than 15 years, so phase in electric cars over 2 decades, and the old ICE cars will go away by attrition as they wear out.
I seriously doubt that the energy lost in converting air to fuel is going to make it worth using as a pimary fuel source - we are a long way from producing enough electricity from renewable sources to let us shut down all of the fossil fuel plants that generate electricity and we should at least get the coal plants shut down before using electricity to make gasoline, but maybe this could serve some niche market long from now when there's not as much need for gasoline (or it's too expensive to extract from the ground), but gasoline is still needed for a few purposes (like driving "classic" cars like a 2013 Ford Fiesta to a car show)
Actually, if the average weight of you tank of petrol, as it is used up, is significantly less than your stack of batteries would be (which don't get any lighter as you use them up), then the batteries can be worse. It will take more energy to push your heavy, battery laiden car around than it will to push the petrol powered one. As long as the petrol is coming from a renewable source like airborne CO2 captured with solar or wind generated electricity, then you've eliminated it's biggest drawbacks, making it carbon neutral, and no longer a scarce and depletable resource.
Since you can recover much of the energy spent in accelerating that mass of batteries when you decelerate, as well as capture much of the energy spent getting it up the hill when you go downhill, most of the cost of carrying around the extra weight is rolling resistance, which is a small fraction of the extra weight. So carrying extra battery weight isn't as detrimental as it might seem.
A conventional car can't recapture this energy - but a hybrid can, which is why hybrids tend to get better mileage in the city than on the highway - they recapture much of the energy that would be lost in stop-and-go city driving, but they are subject to the same wind resistance at highway speeds as a conventional car.
and batteries cannot store at sane cost significant enough amount of energy. ...
There is a reason why massive battery arrays really don't exist
I guess it depends on your definition of "massive", but 36 Mega-watt hours is pretty big:
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/01/03/china-byd-launch-largest-battery-energy-storage-station/
Why can't we have a phone number whitelist just like I have for MAC addresses on my wireless router? Everything else dumps to VM.
I believe this will do what you want (if you have an Android phone):
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/a-better-way-to-block-unwanted-calls-on-your-android-phone/
Except that it's no longer equivalent unless you add the same feature to the iPad which will cost at least $20-$30 for comparable quality?
No, the article ALREADY made it comparable by adding a keyboard to the initial cost, after which the Surface was $20-$30 more expensive (really a bit more since a 32 GB iPad would also have about 10GB more user storage on device which you'd have to buy an SD card for on the Surface to equal).
I don't know if you read the same article as me, but here's the pricing from the article:
32GB iPad ($599) + keyboard ($69) = $668
32GB MS tablet ($499) + keyboard ($129) = $628
That seems to make the iPad $40 more expensive. YOu can probably find a keyboard for less than $69, but if you really wanted a cheap keyboard, then you can probably use a bluetooth keyboard with the MS tablet as well.
They included a $39 screen cover for the iPad, which I omitted, but if you really wanted to make them comparable I guess you'd include that too.
Does the higher resolution of the iPad make any difference in real-life use?
Clearly you have never looked at or used a HiDPI display.
I have, and while it looks better, I didn't find that I could surf the web any faster or type documents any faster, so that's why I asked if it means any difference in real-life use. My eyes aren't good enough to make use of the tiny fonts that would give me more screen real estate on the 9" iPad display, so I may very well find a tablet with lower resolution and larger screen to be more useful.
Tech specs seem less relevant when comparing high-end tablets from different manufacturers running completely different operating systems
Only if you believe in comparing Fariy Dust and Bullshit would it not matter.
I thought the Fairy Dust and Bullshit was in the specs and it's the end-user experience that matters? I don't care if one has an eight core CPU and one has a dual core CPU, I care more about how the apps run.
All I got from this article is that once you add in the cost of the Surface's most notable feature, it costs $20 - $30 more than an equivalent iPad.
Except that it's no longer equivalent unless you add the same feature to the iPad which will cost at least $20-$30 for comparable quality?
But I thought the most notable feature of the tablet was that it runs MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint (it will cost your $30 to get equivalent software on the iPad) -- I don't know why you'd get the MS tablet if you weren't interested in running MS software.