Government ownership didn't work out too well in the Ukraine.
Like socialism, nuclear is a great idea on paper. But once you get greedy and/or incompetent people involved, and it is pretty inevitable you will, you don't want to be living down wind of one.
If the companies building and profiting from nuclear had to pay the full costs of insurance and decommissioning they would never be built. Come to that, if open cast coal miners or oil shale producers had to pay the full costs of restoring the land solar would probably be cheaper than all alternatives.
Most people I know think he is a force for good. Maybe you should stop hanging out with rednecks.
A couple of percent will get you a senator. Hell, I would put Julian first because if he got in, it might shake things up a bit, and if he didn't my vote goes to my second preference anyway.
The paper used for Student Transcripts (the record of achievement) at universities is closely guarded. Even access to live student data is less restricted than access to the paper.
"Hi Mom and Dad, look, I got straight A's. Can I have that new car now?"
And the dude on the dorm that offers the unprinting service will be rolling in money. Well, relative to other students anyway.
That is a lot of free power IF you get those eight hours of sunlight, and IF you get them when you want them and IF you can use the power at the output voltage of the panel. Sadly not one of those is correct for home installation:o(
You actually get an average 4 hours peak output for a fixed panel, the power arrives while you are at work, and you don't have too many devices that run off of 24v DC.
It is the batteries, inverters, trackers and installation that make PV expensive.
Of course most of this doesn't apply if you are an energy company that can chuck it out as base load for office workers. But you will still have to spin up alternatives once the sun goes down, and most fossil fuel power stations are so slow and expensive to start it is better to keep them running (hence the cut price overnight electricity to heat up household water).
You will only get 8 hours of usable sunlight per year if you have a solar tracker and live in a particularly sunny spot. Here in Sydney, (which is on the same latitude sun wise as LA for you North Americans) PV installers base calculations on on 4 hours at the rated value for fixed PV.
So a 200w panel costing $600 would give you 300 KW per year. At our electricity prices that is $68 a year, so paid off in 9 years and a ROI of 280% over the 25 years of installation. Sounds okay. Sounds even better when you take into account that buying grid energy from renewables in Australia commands a 40% premium on the price, and that there is a connection fee of $160 per year, and that energy prices will continue to rise.
The problem is that the cost of the panel is only about a third of the cost of the installation for home solar, even if you do it yourself. To make matters worse the batteries have a much shorter life than the panels.
The biggest problem for new projects is that the ROI is over the life of the panels, leading to big up front capital costs. A return based on 25 years is way too long for many investors.
The nice thing about solar is that cost per watt continues to improve, and regular stories like this indicate that it has a way to fall yet. Once it gets cheap enough everyone will have them, even if only to power air conditioning on hot sunny days.
"Do people really need the always-on connectivity and eye candy that smartphones provide?"
This is/. The question is unnecessary.
For the record, I bought mine myself and don't use it for work except the very occasional phone call. I do find it an excellent sports & fitness computer and navigation aid when in cities I am unfamiliar with. It also makes bank queues and doctors waiting rooms a lot less dull. Can your phone do that?
My phone doesn't have any "titty", Mexican or otherwise. And I am fine with that.
Ditto. I left my phone on the roof of my car at a rest area. Came back looking for it an hour later and it had gone. No answer on the phone. Got a call from a mobile phone shop the next day to say that someone had handed it in to them - due to the carrier splash screen. They couriered it to me because I had only been in the city for the day, and had returned home.The best part about it was that I was no longer with that carrier, which they would have known when they looked up my address.
Nice things do happen, and as houstonbofh said, it is the rule rather than the exception in most places.
The law of England and Wales (which often applies to other commonwealth countries as well), a person commits theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.
My guess is that a lost (or in this case deliberately discarded) phone still legally belongs to the owner, and that someone picking it up is appropriating it, given this definition of the word (Take for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission).
Oh, and BTW given that definition, copying something outside against the wishes or knowledge of the owner is not theft, which is why they need other laws to cover this.
I love the way you try to fix a broken system by restricting the people who can participate.
You seem to be harking back to the 'good old days' of gentlemen, presumably on the assumption of being one of them. Well in the UK those gentlemen enacted the Laws of Enclosure, privatising common land and forcing peasants into appalling conditions in the industrial cities. Or invested in the Congo, where the natives were driven to death extracting rubber and copper by the likes of King Leopold II (Rockefeller made quite a bit of dough this way, although in his case I think it was the French Congo).
The problem is that representative democracy doesn't work. You vote for someone for a fixed term, and then they get to do what they want. Why not vote on a weekly basis. Allow anyone to put up proposals (so there you would get the people that wanted to spend the time and effort doing research etc). That would be true democracy. Whether it would work I don't know, but I doubt it would be worse that what we have now.
At the very least we should have a system where people could elect where their taxes went to when they did their tax returns. And have that influence public spending. You would need to apply some smoothing to it, but it would allow people to decide whether they wanted more money spent on homeland security, or social security, regardless of the clowns running the circus.
All currency has been imaginary ever since the gold standard was dropped. In theory there is nothing to stop the central bank from printing massive amounts of new currency (actually nowadays it doesn't even need to print it, it just magics it out of thin digital air).
In fact this is happening right now, with a number of central banks creating money, and then loaning it to banks for 1% to prop up the banks.
When you consider that increasing the money supply by 10% effectively makes the ones you have (and earn) worth 10% less (actually not quite, but let's not quibble), this is effectively a redistribution of the wealth of a nation everyone, to those that own shares in the bank. Which will have the inevitable consequence of moving said wealth into the hands of the already wealthy, since everyone has SOME money but in general only the wealthy have shares in banks.
Why this doesn't get people out on the streets rioting I have no idea. Oh, wait...
I have worked in government circles for years now, and by far the majority of people in public service are time servers whose focus is not their jobs, but rather their lives. The focus is far more on complying with policy than with outcomes, and delivering "something", whether or not that something ends up being of any use to anyone.
Those is public service who are ambitious tend not to focus on the particular job at hand, but instead charting a path up the greasy pole.
All in all the resemblance to a feudal court is uncanny. The peasants do the work under sufferance, the lords fight amongst each other, and any progress that is made is down to a few people with drive, or not at all.
Actually come to think about it the private sector isn't THAT different, it is just that times have moved on and the Landed Gentry are quite happy to enact Acts of Enclosure and evict the peasants if sheep farming turns out more profitable with less headcount.
The problem is that the ones that screw people over are often the ones that succeed because they burn up the goodwill of the people in the company, get results, and then move on before it all turns pear-shaped.
Totally agree with this. To make matters worse even if it IS up to date and 100% accurate, there is no way of the reader knowing this, especially several years down the track.
My experience with wikis at two different jobs was that they are dreadful. Start of with good intentions but end up being so inaccurate and incomplete that they are dangerous to rely on. Not only that in both cases they didn't support cut'n'paste of pictures, which wasted huge amounts of time if you could be bothered to save to a png, resize them, upload and then link them, but often it was easier not to bother.
But you are not buying a Ferrari - you are buying a road usage package with with the Ferrari thrown in for free (or for a modest additional payment).
I think it is entirely reasonable to expect to be able to drive said Ferrari at the speeds advertised on the roads. If the person selling you the roads package sells more than the road can hold, that sounds awfully like fraud to me (no different from selling 110 tickets for a 100 seater sit-anywhere plane).
Last year I got out of a contract for two phones with Vodafone. The service they were providing was woeful - hardly able to get data access at times. They made the mistake of sending out a letter from their CEO apologising for the bade service and saying it was because they were too successful (i.e. had sold more capacity than they had). I used it as a trigger to get out of the remaining 8 months of both contracts. It did take a few emails and a complaint to the Australian Telco ombudsman though.
If we all act less like sheeple there would be a whole lot less of this shit about.
My maths and physics are a bit wonky, but I doubt whether you could build a steel cable 300 km long that could support move it's own mass even in zero G. I think they need another order of magnitude or two for that.
So what you are saying is, then, is probably best not to be first in the queue.
Imagine if it did snap, say just inside the mid point. That is a lot of cable coming down on someones head. So you would want to have the base station somewhere out of the way of air traffic, cities, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Government ownership didn't work out too well in the Ukraine.
Like socialism, nuclear is a great idea on paper. But once you get greedy and/or incompetent people involved, and it is pretty inevitable you will, you don't want to be living down wind of one.
If the companies building and profiting from nuclear had to pay the full costs of insurance and decommissioning they would never be built. Come to that, if open cast coal miners or oil shale producers had to pay the full costs of restoring the land solar would probably be cheaper than all alternatives.
Is this not reasonable?
Not to me. The owner of a photograph is the picture taker, not the subject. Why should the same not be true for a screen grab?
If you are going to be picky about counting you might like to consider that mathematics is a plural noun, so it should be maths not math.
Most people I know think he is a force for good. Maybe you should stop hanging out with rednecks.
A couple of percent will get you a senator. Hell, I would put Julian first because if he got in, it might shake things up a bit, and if he didn't my vote goes to my second preference anyway.
Dontcha just love preferential voting?
The paper used for Student Transcripts (the record of achievement) at universities is closely guarded. Even access to live student data is less restricted than access to the paper.
"Hi Mom and Dad, look, I got straight A's. Can I have that new car now?"
And the dude on the dorm that offers the unprinting service will be rolling in money. Well, relative to other students anyway.
Or the self sufficiency handbook. Tells you everything from brewing and carpentry to how to grown your own food and slaughter your own animals.
That is a lot of free power IF you get those eight hours of sunlight, and IF you get them when you want them and IF you can use the power at the output voltage of the panel. Sadly not one of those is correct for home installation :o(
You actually get an average 4 hours peak output for a fixed panel, the power arrives while you are at work, and you don't have too many devices that run off of 24v DC.
It is the batteries, inverters, trackers and installation that make PV expensive.
Of course most of this doesn't apply if you are an energy company that can chuck it out as base load for office workers. But you will still have to spin up alternatives once the sun goes down, and most fossil fuel power stations are so slow and expensive to start it is better to keep them running (hence the cut price overnight electricity to heat up household water).
You will only get 8 hours of usable sunlight per year if you have a solar tracker and live in a particularly sunny spot. Here in Sydney, (which is on the same latitude sun wise as LA for you North Americans) PV installers base calculations on on 4 hours at the rated value for fixed PV.
So a 200w panel costing $600 would give you 300 KW per year. At our electricity prices that is $68 a year, so paid off in 9 years and a ROI of 280% over the 25 years of installation. Sounds okay. Sounds even better when you take into account that buying grid energy from renewables in Australia commands a 40% premium on the price, and that there is a connection fee of $160 per year, and that energy prices will continue to rise.
The problem is that the cost of the panel is only about a third of the cost of the installation for home solar, even if you do it yourself. To make matters worse the batteries have a much shorter life than the panels.
The price is coming down significantly year on year, as others have responded. According to this report http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/New-Study-Solar-Grid-Parity-Is-Here-Today/ it has already reached grid parity.
The biggest problem for new projects is that the ROI is over the life of the panels, leading to big up front capital costs. A return based on 25 years is way too long for many investors.
The nice thing about solar is that cost per watt continues to improve, and regular stories like this indicate that it has a way to fall yet. Once it gets cheap enough everyone will have them, even if only to power air conditioning on hot sunny days.
He had his own mobile phone number in his mobile? Is that just in case he lent the phone to someone he could still call them?
"Do people really need the always-on connectivity and eye candy that smartphones provide?"
This is /. The question is unnecessary.
For the record, I bought mine myself and don't use it for work except the very occasional phone call. I do find it an excellent sports & fitness computer and navigation aid when in cities I am unfamiliar with. It also makes bank queues and doctors waiting rooms a lot less dull. Can your phone do that?
My phone doesn't have any "titty", Mexican or otherwise. And I am fine with that.
Isn't it great to live in a world with choices?
Ditto. I left my phone on the roof of my car at a rest area. Came back looking for it an hour later and it had gone. No answer on the phone. Got a call from a mobile phone shop the next day to say that someone had handed it in to them - due to the carrier splash screen. They couriered it to me because I had only been in the city for the day, and had returned home.The best part about it was that I was no longer with that carrier, which they would have known when they looked up my address.
Nice things do happen, and as houstonbofh said, it is the rule rather than the exception in most places.
The law of England and Wales (which often applies to other commonwealth countries as well), a person commits theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.
My guess is that a lost (or in this case deliberately discarded) phone still legally belongs to the owner, and that someone picking it up is appropriating it, given this definition of the word (Take for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission).
Oh, and BTW given that definition, copying something outside against the wishes or knowledge of the owner is not theft, which is why they need other laws to cover this.
I love the way you try to fix a broken system by restricting the people who can participate.
You seem to be harking back to the 'good old days' of gentlemen, presumably on the assumption of being one of them. Well in the UK those gentlemen enacted the Laws of Enclosure, privatising common land and forcing peasants into appalling conditions in the industrial cities. Or invested in the Congo, where the natives were driven to death extracting rubber and copper by the likes of King Leopold II (Rockefeller made quite a bit of dough this way, although in his case I think it was the French Congo).
The problem is that representative democracy doesn't work. You vote for someone for a fixed term, and then they get to do what they want. Why not vote on a weekly basis. Allow anyone to put up proposals (so there you would get the people that wanted to spend the time and effort doing research etc). That would be true democracy. Whether it would work I don't know, but I doubt it would be worse that what we have now.
At the very least we should have a system where people could elect where their taxes went to when they did their tax returns. And have that influence public spending. You would need to apply some smoothing to it, but it would allow people to decide whether they wanted more money spent on homeland security, or social security, regardless of the clowns running the circus.
All currency has been imaginary ever since the gold standard was dropped. In theory there is nothing to stop the central bank from printing massive amounts of new currency (actually nowadays it doesn't even need to print it, it just magics it out of thin digital air).
In fact this is happening right now, with a number of central banks creating money, and then loaning it to banks for 1% to prop up the banks.
When you consider that increasing the money supply by 10% effectively makes the ones you have (and earn) worth 10% less (actually not quite, but let's not quibble), this is effectively a redistribution of the wealth of a nation everyone, to those that own shares in the bank. Which will have the inevitable consequence of moving said wealth into the hands of the already wealthy, since everyone has SOME money but in general only the wealthy have shares in banks.
Why this doesn't get people out on the streets rioting I have no idea. Oh, wait...
Just for the record IANAE
I have worked in government circles for years now, and by far the majority of people in public service are time servers whose focus is not their jobs, but rather their lives. The focus is far more on complying with policy than with outcomes, and delivering "something", whether or not that something ends up being of any use to anyone.
Those is public service who are ambitious tend not to focus on the particular job at hand, but instead charting a path up the greasy pole.
All in all the resemblance to a feudal court is uncanny. The peasants do the work under sufferance, the lords fight amongst each other, and any progress that is made is down to a few people with drive, or not at all.
Actually come to think about it the private sector isn't THAT different, it is just that times have moved on and the Landed Gentry are quite happy to enact Acts of Enclosure and evict the peasants if sheep farming turns out more profitable with less headcount.
The problem is that the ones that screw people over are often the ones that succeed because they burn up the goodwill of the people in the company, get results, and then move on before it all turns pear-shaped.
Also if you don't help out, and it all goes to shit, it is often your reputation that gets tarnished.
Totally agree with this. To make matters worse even if it IS up to date and 100% accurate, there is no way of the reader knowing this, especially several years down the track.
My experience with wikis at two different jobs was that they are dreadful. Start of with good intentions but end up being so inaccurate and incomplete that they are dangerous to rely on. Not only that in both cases they didn't support cut'n'paste of pictures, which wasted huge amounts of time if you could be bothered to save to a png, resize them, upload and then link them, but often it was easier not to bother.
But you are not buying a Ferrari - you are buying a road usage package with with the Ferrari thrown in for free (or for a modest additional payment).
I think it is entirely reasonable to expect to be able to drive said Ferrari at the speeds advertised on the roads. If the person selling you the roads package sells more than the road can hold, that sounds awfully like fraud to me (no different from selling 110 tickets for a 100 seater sit-anywhere plane).
Are you saying that you don't have portable mobile phone numbers in the States?
If it is legal in your state you should start by saying that you are recording the conversation. Just like they are.
Good to you standing up to telcos GrumpySteen.
Last year I got out of a contract for two phones with Vodafone. The service they were providing was woeful - hardly able to get data access at times. They made the mistake of sending out a letter from their CEO apologising for the bade service and saying it was because they were too successful (i.e. had sold more capacity than they had). I used it as a trigger to get out of the remaining 8 months of both contracts. It did take a few emails and a complaint to the Australian Telco ombudsman though.
If we all act less like sheeple there would be a whole lot less of this shit about.
They are 117 times stronger than steel according to this:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100915140334.htm
My maths and physics are a bit wonky, but I doubt whether you could build a steel cable 300 km long that could support move it's own mass even in zero G. I think they need another order of magnitude or two for that.
So what you are saying is, then, is probably best not to be first in the queue.
Imagine if it did snap, say just inside the mid point. That is a lot of cable coming down on someones head. So you would want to have the base station somewhere out of the way of air traffic, cities, etc.