You don't need anything more than the demonstrated capabilities and the ability to display color patterns in specific directions. (That second part's going to be a significant challenge, though.) Even though the cloth can't sense *exactly* what's behind you in a certain direction, that's not needed. All you need to do is approximate what's behind you. This would work for a large variety of backgrounds: tree Leaves, savannah grass, concrete, gravel, sand, asphalt, etc...
If you have a computer attached to the cloth programmed for specific sets of environments, then you can have a set of camouflage patterns tailored for the specific situation you are in. You don't have to be able to process the exact pattern behind you, just recognize what it is so you can project a close match from your database. (With some tailoring for ambient lighting, etc.) This way, you can project "leaves in sunlight" to your enemy to the north, but "tall meadow with wildflowers" to the guy to the west. Your two enemies radio each other, and they both can't spot you from two different directions, so they're *really* confident you're not there -- right up to when you shoot them.
It's just a step away from Ghost in the Shell Optocam!
No smartphone is waterproof and can be easily read in direct sun while mounted to a motorcycle handlebar.
No smartphone can do what my field guide GPS can do. (Give me elevation maps... oh the iphone cant do that? sowwwy.)
No smartphone can work well on a boat at 55mph across the water and it does not interface to my autohelm.
Thanks for the feature list! A waterproof case like they have for cameras with a capacitative touch-though membrane would do it for the iPhone, though it would have some trouble with sunlight. However, there is an exotic device called a *shade* that solves this. Also, with the new hardware interface features of iPhone OS 3, you can interface with the autohelm. Elevation maps -- that's just a software feature.
Only a utterly complete fool would think the standalone GPS is going the way of the DoDo bird.
Hmm, and you thought your feature list was some sort of insurmountable barrier? Extrapolate much?
Only if they relax the drunk-driving laws. I don't see any other way the economics can work.
Simple. Have one designated driver and three people on "fuel detail." This would make long distance road-trips more economical for college students. It's going to put a dent in Mickey's Big Mouth sales, though.
I've been thinking along these lines quite a bit. Here's what I've come up with:
Let your players design their own ships. (For the Space games. Armor/Mounts/Minions for the others.) The appearance of the items will determine the stats according to some simple geometric rules. (Examples: A part of the hull which is angled back will have more armor resistance from certain directions. The larger your ship is in any direction, the slower it can turn, etc.) There will also be "design points" players can spend. The player will then submit the design by spending the in-game money for a "research project." During this time, the item will be submitted to a user-driven forum much like/. or reddit, and the top vote-getters during their "research period" will succeed in their research projects and actually get prototyped. Players are rewarded for designing cool ships by being given the opportunity to license their designs for a royalty.
Now here's the kicker -- the stats of ships of a certain design will shrink over time. So players who want the best ships will constantly have to seek out new designs. (All items would be temporary in this scheme. Nothing would ever be permanently bound to any player.)
I'd also like to see opportunities for players to legitimately program their own bots/minions. The code could run on a specialized VM only on the servers, so you could sandbox them and enforce DRM. Then the scripts could again be licensed. Balance this out by having genetic algorithms constantly evolving the monsters. Also, this would co-opt farming and macros, and make them a part of the game. (And subject to game balance by he devs.)
Don't try to fight the forces of evolution and economics and the scheming of crowds. CO-OPT them!
The last...well, hydrogen can trivially be made by running a current through water.
Basic electrolysis is pretty lossy up-front. It makes batteries look *good*. (41% efficient for systems running at 100 celsius. 64% for 850 celsuis. Not sure that's suitable for consumer equipment!)
If you've got a photovoltaic array on your roof, you can analyze water and get essentially free hydrogen.
It's electrolyze, not analyze. Also, widely manufactured photovoltaics are still expensive.
While we'll never see cars powered in "real time" by the sun, it's quite easy make in a couple days as much hydrogen as you'll need to power your car for a week of normal driving.
I think the photovoltaics you'd need to recharge a car in a couple of days are going to be expensive. Let's say your family drives one half hour a day. This is pretty reasonable. A 15 minute commute during the weekdays and some chores on the weekend. To get yourself a reasonable stack of Thundersky Lithium Ion Phosphate batteries, you'd need to buy something like 30 of them, which is the size of the stack for Kearon's electric Ford Capri. This gets the stack up to 96 volts and can supposedly push the Capri 90 km or about 55 miles. It's also 8640 watt-hours. But remember, your elecrolysis is only 41% efficient, which means you have to produce 21073 watt-hours. There's going to be about 5 hours of peak sunlight per day, so let's just say the two days recharging is equivalent to 15 peak hours. This works out to about 1400 watts of solar panels. That's about $10,000 of new solar panels for one 55 mile charge completed in two days. We need about 210 miles range for the 30 minutes of driving a day. For that, you'd need something like $35,000 of solar panels.
So our back of the envelope calcs, with an optimistically small car and very modest driving distances with an unreasonable assumption of EV like efficiency, still gives us a pretty hurtful dollar figure. And this is just the solar panels. The electrolyzer is going to cost money as well. However, if you take the solar cells out of the equation, this starts to look good for us. Why? Because much of the cost of an electric vehicle is in the batteries. If we can electrolyze and burn our own hydrogen from a tank that actually fits in a car, we can still come out ahead, assuming the storage systems don't wear out.
This is already being done. Many of the most successful FOSS projects have corporate contributors, so this "design conundrum" doesn't really exist.
That's not how I read it. FOSS projects have corporate contributors as a weapon used to commoditize their rival's products. (IBM versus Sun, to make it impossible to monetize Java) FOSS projects are also funded in order to create commodity complements to company's products. Sell servers? Commoditize software that runs on servers!
There's a problem with this. It reduces FOSS to ammunition. A tactical move. If FOSS can't produce really slick interfaces, then FOSS will always be a lackey of the corporations in order to achieve first-rate success. If the corporations don't like you or can't use you, then you're left out in the bush leagues, the farm teams. Just look at the software out there. Almost every piece of software that gets widespread corporate or consumer traction is being used as a weapon or market driver.
In fact Apple, like it or not, is a pretty good example of how to monetize FOSS. Can't say I'm thrilled with the methods they employ to achieve that, but it's still a fact that they do achieve it.
The problem is that it makes FOSS critically dependent on the corporate masters if a particular project wants to be "first-rate." It's as if FOSS is like indy music/film, and the corporations are the music industry, and everyone is trying to get signed. Maybe that's how things should be. But it would be better if we never had to admit, "can't say I'm thrilled," about how our funders are treating our ideals. FOSS needs its equivalent of bittorrent, Pirate Bay, and independent musicians who can give the finger to the big music distributors, yet still turn out first-rate product. Where's our Protools for interfaces? (Actually, the problem is likely cultural and not technological.)
Not those. The first one had a built in constituency. The second one could be practiced by ordinary citizens. I'm thinking about the "back to the land" movement and their ilk.
using Facebook in place of Google sounds like many steps back
The questions you ask your friends are going to be more limited. Feedback to advertisers in the form of data will also be more limited, therefore less valuable to advertisers.
You know what would be of *huge* value to advertisers? Social news techniques used *on* advertising. Hulu is in a great position for this. *Let* the users skip (or better yet, 40X fast-forward) the ads! If not that, then let users mod them up or down! Heck, why not tags, like "irrelevant" "obsolete" or "already own?" Advertisers would get immediate feedback on ad reception. Correlation to buying demographic buying habits would be easier to make. Decisions on where to put ad budget wouldn't have to be done at the huge granularity of a particular show or timeslot, but could be targeted directly at demographic cohorts.
Viewers would benefit, as ads would have to get better. Advertisers would benefit from the better, more watchable ads!
The big problem facing Facebook is difficulty of monetization. There are societal and cultural sensitivities around companies monetizing one's "circle of friends." This has been true since the early 90's with MCI's campaigns.
Cold mathematics (Google's way) doesn't have this problem.
I am reminded of a quote from the PBS documentary about the 60's. A woman was lamenting that so many of the movements had powerful societal traction, but no economic basis. So in the end, they faded away.
He was a film prof, not physics, however. He rigged up a pulley system, so you could film a Point Of View sequence for someone thrown down a stairwell. The friction from the rope and pulley would slow down the acceleration and fall, but the camera could be run at a slower speed to compensate. At the last moment, you could grab onto the rope (with thick gloves) and save the camera. A bit of spin and/or off-center mounting of the camera would give you a more chaotic feel.
Since they have a single choke-point, can the Iranian regime do a Man In The Middle attack on the entire country? They'd have to do something about the certificates that get pre-installed on new computers. (China's powerful enough for that, but not Iran.) I'm not sure they can manage this. However, they can insure that the real certs won't work, and could then distribute "patches" for that. They could also cook up their own "cache" for 3rd party browsers like Firefox and Opera with the bogus certs.
This would let them snoop on all public-key based cryptosystems, like SSL. However, they would need enough processing power to quickly do all of the key negotiation for the entire country in real-time. (I suspect that China can afford resources like that for this purpose, but not Iran.)
Doesn't this sound like a hoax? The CEO is named Redmond. The Car is called the XP. "XP started out with an investment from Microsoft, which offered a majority of its software products and a very large number of its licenses to build some process management." Aren't these some sort of reference to eXtreme Programming and and Windows XP?
Are they going to come out with a Sport Utility model called the eXtreme? Will the next models be called the Vista and the Seven?
Nickel-Iron (NiFe) batteries don't appreciably degrade from discharge. There is some wear, but they can last for 50 years if you change the electrolyte. Power and current densities are low, but they are ideal for photovoltaic installations. Battery wear from deep discharge is one of the biggest economic factors of solar power cost.
You can buy them, but currently only from manufacturers in India and China.
1 - Write a story involving Google 2 - Find a way to include the word EVIL 3 - Blog it, post it, spam it, be sure to put up Google Adwords advertising 4 - Profit!
Folks like the US military are interested. It's expensive to ship fuel for generators to remote outposts. At those prices for power, SPS are competitive. You also get to remove one logistics vulnerability.
But this hare-brained idea will heat the atmosphere
Fail.
Most power generation schemes are *heat engines.* The typical efficiency is less than 40%. Microwave transmission starts at 50% efficiency, and is likely to get better. For the same amount of electric power, you're going to have less waste heat than with coal, nuclear, or natural gas power plants.
For specific kinds of applications, yes, there is demand. DARPA is interested in this, because electronics use, and there fore electricity use, by the military has expanded tremendously, even in remote locations. A diesel generator has to receive a constant supply of fuel. This is very expensive and inconvenient on the top of a mountain in Afghanistan. A solar power receiving station doesn't. The power supply is invulnerable to attack. The receiving station doesn't make constant noise. In such contexts, power delivered at rates an order of magnitude higher than commercial generation is very competitive.
We should build something like the Iraqi Super-cannon. The thing was built out of 70's tech and was slated to deliver stuff to orbit for $600/Kg. We could improve on that with new tech and mass production of the rocket-boosted projectiles. Construction materials for SPS could be packaged to survive the G's of being shot out of a cannon. Even electronic components could be built to survive. The US government has specs for electronic components that can survive 100,000 G. (Yes, one hundred thousand!) That would make SPS much cheaper.
Pick out a particular ethnic group, and oppress the hell out of them for about 3 generations, at least. Caveats: this also results in terrorism and religious extremism.
I think you are doing a disservice to 9 million dead Jews.
Understandable misunderstanding. I'm not claiming he's not evil. Just incompetent in a *lot* of areas besides getting himself into power in the first place.
Hitler wasn't some demonic bad-ass bad-guy. He was a crazed political genius at the right place and right time. His downfall: he wasn't a real geek! He lost because of technical cluelessness! He didn't have the technical knowledge to realize the value of the wonder-weapons until late in the war when the 3rd Reich got desperate, and then it was too late. His right-hand man Goering didn't have a complete grasp of the importance of good intelligence and command and control. (He would have won the Battle of Britain, but he didn't know that he should've continued his campaign against the sector stations.) Even Hitler's understanding of economic warfare was that of an enthusiastic amateur.
We won not because our geeks were better, though they were darn good. We won because we *listened* to them!
The uplink is the difficult and expensive part. Receiving satellite multi-cast is cheap. Wifi is cheap. So it should be dirt cheap to produce lots of local satellite->wifi repeaters pumping out data, so long as you skip on the uplink. Have some sort of simple one-way streaming multi-cast protocol. (You'd only need to do multi-cast on the LAN, and depend on distributing lots of units to get wide area coverage.) You'd have to distribute a new piece of software so that RSS readers and web browsers could view the content. Opera Unite might be able to do this. Any kind of locally installable web browser would do.
Balloons are cute, but you wouldn't even have to do that. All you have to do is get them to locals somehow. Just make these things self contained, disposable, battery powered with lots of longevity. The locals could stash them in random places out in the open and it would be completely deniable.
Of course, FM radio is a *lot* cheaper. So is analog television.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.
Somebody who works for an actual wind power company debunked this for us. If you build more turbines and deliberately run them at less than their maximum, then you can use the reserve capacity plus a limited amount of geographic distribution to get steady-state power output the majority of the time. This stuff about storage technology is bunk -- we haven't built out wind power infrastructure to its potential. Do that and you don't need storage. (And Solar Thermal could make up for a lot as well. It has a cheap and reliable storage technology that would work just fine on 24 hour timescales.)
The savvy ones can use that power to order a guy to do anything. If they can keep you wondering, they can get you to agree to use one. The pretty ones with good self esteem also realize that they have other choices if you don't want to cooperate.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need anything more than the demonstrated capabilities and the ability to display color patterns in specific directions. (That second part's going to be a significant challenge, though.) Even though the cloth can't sense *exactly* what's behind you in a certain direction, that's not needed. All you need to do is approximate what's behind you. This would work for a large variety of backgrounds: tree Leaves, savannah grass, concrete, gravel, sand, asphalt, etc...
If you have a computer attached to the cloth programmed for specific sets of environments, then you can have a set of camouflage patterns tailored for the specific situation you are in. You don't have to be able to process the exact pattern behind you, just recognize what it is so you can project a close match from your database. (With some tailoring for ambient lighting, etc.) This way, you can project "leaves in sunlight" to your enemy to the north, but "tall meadow with wildflowers" to the guy to the west. Your two enemies radio each other, and they both can't spot you from two different directions, so they're *really* confident you're not there -- right up to when you shoot them.
It's just a step away from Ghost in the Shell Optocam!
Thanks for the feature list! A waterproof case like they have for cameras with a capacitative touch-though membrane would do it for the iPhone, though it would have some trouble with sunlight. However, there is an exotic device called a *shade* that solves this. Also, with the new hardware interface features of iPhone OS 3, you can interface with the autohelm. Elevation maps -- that's just a software feature.
Only a utterly complete fool would think the standalone GPS is going the way of the DoDo bird.
Hmm, and you thought your feature list was some sort of insurmountable barrier? Extrapolate much?
Only if they relax the drunk-driving laws. I don't see any other way the economics can work.
Simple. Have one designated driver and three people on "fuel detail." This would make long distance road-trips more economical for college students. It's going to put a dent in Mickey's Big Mouth sales, though.
I've been thinking along these lines quite a bit. Here's what I've come up with:
Let your players design their own ships. (For the Space games. Armor/Mounts/Minions for the others.) The appearance of the items will determine the stats according to some simple geometric rules. (Examples: A part of the hull which is angled back will have more armor resistance from certain directions. The larger your ship is in any direction, the slower it can turn, etc.) There will also be "design points" players can spend. The player will then submit the design by spending the in-game money for a "research project." During this time, the item will be submitted to a user-driven forum much like /. or reddit, and the top vote-getters during their "research period" will succeed in their research projects and actually get prototyped. Players are rewarded for designing cool ships by being given the opportunity to license their designs for a royalty.
Now here's the kicker -- the stats of ships of a certain design will shrink over time. So players who want the best ships will constantly have to seek out new designs. (All items would be temporary in this scheme. Nothing would ever be permanently bound to any player.)
I'd also like to see opportunities for players to legitimately program their own bots/minions. The code could run on a specialized VM only on the servers, so you could sandbox them and enforce DRM. Then the scripts could again be licensed. Balance this out by having genetic algorithms constantly evolving the monsters. Also, this would co-opt farming and macros, and make them a part of the game. (And subject to game balance by he devs.)
Don't try to fight the forces of evolution and economics and the scheming of crowds. CO-OPT them!
The last...well, hydrogen can trivially be made by running a current through water.
Basic electrolysis is pretty lossy up-front. It makes batteries look *good*. (41% efficient for systems running at 100 celsius. 64% for 850 celsuis. Not sure that's suitable for consumer equipment!)
If you've got a photovoltaic array on your roof, you can analyze water and get essentially free hydrogen.
It's electrolyze, not analyze. Also, widely manufactured photovoltaics are still expensive.
While we'll never see cars powered in "real time" by the sun, it's quite easy make in a couple days as much hydrogen as you'll need to power your car for a week of normal driving.
I think the photovoltaics you'd need to recharge a car in a couple of days are going to be expensive. Let's say your family drives one half hour a day. This is pretty reasonable. A 15 minute commute during the weekdays and some chores on the weekend. To get yourself a reasonable stack of Thundersky Lithium Ion Phosphate batteries, you'd need to buy something like 30 of them, which is the size of the stack for Kearon's electric Ford Capri. This gets the stack up to 96 volts and can supposedly push the Capri 90 km or about 55 miles. It's also 8640 watt-hours. But remember, your elecrolysis is only 41% efficient, which means you have to produce 21073 watt-hours. There's going to be about 5 hours of peak sunlight per day, so let's just say the two days recharging is equivalent to 15 peak hours. This works out to about 1400 watts of solar panels. That's about $10,000 of new solar panels for one 55 mile charge completed in two days. We need about 210 miles range for the 30 minutes of driving a day. For that, you'd need something like $35,000 of solar panels.
So our back of the envelope calcs, with an optimistically small car and very modest driving distances with an unreasonable assumption of EV like efficiency, still gives us a pretty hurtful dollar figure. And this is just the solar panels. The electrolyzer is going to cost money as well. However, if you take the solar cells out of the equation, this starts to look good for us. Why? Because much of the cost of an electric vehicle is in the batteries. If we can electrolyze and burn our own hydrogen from a tank that actually fits in a car, we can still come out ahead, assuming the storage systems don't wear out.
http://www.evcapri.com/
Jenny-mae, I tole you not to let Billy-Bob alone with the chickens and the lighter fluid!
But Mary-Sue, Billy-Bob's up and solved the Hydrogen Nanostorage Problem! He saved the world! Solved global warming! Ther gonna give him a NOBEL!
So? I'm still makin myself scarce when Pa starts askin what happened to those Chickens!
This is already being done. Many of the most successful FOSS projects have corporate contributors, so this "design conundrum" doesn't really exist.
That's not how I read it. FOSS projects have corporate contributors as a weapon used to commoditize their rival's products. (IBM versus Sun, to make it impossible to monetize Java) FOSS projects are also funded in order to create commodity complements to company's products. Sell servers? Commoditize software that runs on servers!
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
There's a problem with this. It reduces FOSS to ammunition. A tactical move. If FOSS can't produce really slick interfaces, then FOSS will always be a lackey of the corporations in order to achieve first-rate success. If the corporations don't like you or can't use you, then you're left out in the bush leagues, the farm teams. Just look at the software out there. Almost every piece of software that gets widespread corporate or consumer traction is being used as a weapon or market driver.
In fact Apple, like it or not, is a pretty good example of how to monetize FOSS. Can't say I'm thrilled with the methods they employ to achieve that, but it's still a fact that they do achieve it.
The problem is that it makes FOSS critically dependent on the corporate masters if a particular project wants to be "first-rate." It's as if FOSS is like indy music/film, and the corporations are the music industry, and everyone is trying to get signed. Maybe that's how things should be. But it would be better if we never had to admit, "can't say I'm thrilled," about how our funders are treating our ideals. FOSS needs its equivalent of bittorrent, Pirate Bay, and independent musicians who can give the finger to the big music distributors, yet still turn out first-rate product. Where's our Protools for interfaces? (Actually, the problem is likely cultural and not technological.)
Not those. The first one had a built in constituency. The second one could be practiced by ordinary citizens. I'm thinking about the "back to the land" movement and their ilk.
using Facebook in place of Google sounds like many steps back
The questions you ask your friends are going to be more limited. Feedback to advertisers in the form of data will also be more limited, therefore less valuable to advertisers.
You know what would be of *huge* value to advertisers? Social news techniques used *on* advertising. Hulu is in a great position for this. *Let* the users skip (or better yet, 40X fast-forward) the ads! If not that, then let users mod them up or down! Heck, why not tags, like "irrelevant" "obsolete" or "already own?" Advertisers would get immediate feedback on ad reception. Correlation to buying demographic buying habits would be easier to make. Decisions on where to put ad budget wouldn't have to be done at the huge granularity of a particular show or timeslot, but could be targeted directly at demographic cohorts.
Viewers would benefit, as ads would have to get better. Advertisers would benefit from the better, more watchable ads!
The big problem facing Facebook is difficulty of monetization. There are societal and cultural sensitivities around companies monetizing one's "circle of friends." This has been true since the early 90's with MCI's campaigns.
Cold mathematics (Google's way) doesn't have this problem.
I am reminded of a quote from the PBS documentary about the 60's. A woman was lamenting that so many of the movements had powerful societal traction, but no economic basis. So in the end, they faded away.
He was a film prof, not physics, however. He rigged up a pulley system, so you could film a Point Of View sequence for someone thrown down a stairwell. The friction from the rope and pulley would slow down the acceleration and fall, but the camera could be run at a slower speed to compensate. At the last moment, you could grab onto the rope (with thick gloves) and save the camera. A bit of spin and/or off-center mounting of the camera would give you a more chaotic feel.
Effective and cheap.
Since they have a single choke-point, can the Iranian regime do a Man In The Middle attack on the entire country? They'd have to do something about the certificates that get pre-installed on new computers. (China's powerful enough for that, but not Iran.) I'm not sure they can manage this. However, they can insure that the real certs won't work, and could then distribute "patches" for that. They could also cook up their own "cache" for 3rd party browsers like Firefox and Opera with the bogus certs.
This would let them snoop on all public-key based cryptosystems, like SSL. However, they would need enough processing power to quickly do all of the key negotiation for the entire country in real-time. (I suspect that China can afford resources like that for this purpose, but not Iran.)
Doesn't this sound like a hoax? The CEO is named Redmond. The Car is called the XP. "XP started out with an investment from Microsoft, which offered a majority of its software products and a very large number of its licenses to build some process management." Aren't these some sort of reference to eXtreme Programming and and Windows XP?
Are they going to come out with a Sport Utility model called the eXtreme? Will the next models be called the Vista and the Seven?
Actually, from the very edge of the 1800's. Development didn't complete until 1901.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel-iron_battery
Nickel-Iron (NiFe) batteries don't appreciably degrade from discharge. There is some wear, but they can last for 50 years if you change the electrolyte. Power and current densities are low, but they are ideal for photovoltaic installations. Battery wear from deep discharge is one of the biggest economic factors of solar power cost.
You can buy them, but currently only from manufacturers in India and China.
1 - Write a story involving Google
2 - Find a way to include the word EVIL
3 - Blog it, post it, spam it, be sure to put up Google Adwords advertising
4 - Profit!
Folks like the US military are interested. It's expensive to ship fuel for generators to remote outposts. At those prices for power, SPS are competitive. You also get to remove one logistics vulnerability.
The power densities involved are way too low for anything like this to happen. (Only about 3X the worst noontime sunlight.)
But this hare-brained idea will heat the atmosphere
Fail.
Most power generation schemes are *heat engines.* The typical efficiency is less than 40%. Microwave transmission starts at 50% efficiency, and is likely to get better. For the same amount of electric power, you're going to have less waste heat than with coal, nuclear, or natural gas power plants.
For specific kinds of applications, yes, there is demand. DARPA is interested in this, because electronics use, and there fore electricity use, by the military has expanded tremendously, even in remote locations. A diesel generator has to receive a constant supply of fuel. This is very expensive and inconvenient on the top of a mountain in Afghanistan. A solar power receiving station doesn't. The power supply is invulnerable to attack. The receiving station doesn't make constant noise. In such contexts, power delivered at rates an order of magnitude higher than commercial generation is very competitive.
We should build something like the Iraqi Super-cannon. The thing was built out of 70's tech and was slated to deliver stuff to orbit for $600/Kg. We could improve on that with new tech and mass production of the rocket-boosted projectiles. Construction materials for SPS could be packaged to survive the G's of being shot out of a cannon. Even electronic components could be built to survive. The US government has specs for electronic components that can survive 100,000 G. (Yes, one hundred thousand!) That would make SPS much cheaper.
Pick out a particular ethnic group, and oppress the hell out of them for about 3 generations, at least. Caveats: this also results in terrorism and religious extremism.
--Hitler wasn't some demonic bad-ass bad-guy.--
I think you are doing a disservice to 9 million dead Jews.
Understandable misunderstanding. I'm not claiming he's not evil. Just incompetent in a *lot* of areas besides getting himself into power in the first place.
Hitler wasn't some demonic bad-ass bad-guy. He was a crazed political genius at the right place and right time. His downfall: he wasn't a real geek! He lost because of technical cluelessness! He didn't have the technical knowledge to realize the value of the wonder-weapons until late in the war when the 3rd Reich got desperate, and then it was too late. His right-hand man Goering didn't have a complete grasp of the importance of good intelligence and command and control. (He would have won the Battle of Britain, but he didn't know that he should've continued his campaign against the sector stations.) Even Hitler's understanding of economic warfare was that of an enthusiastic amateur.
We won not because our geeks were better, though they were darn good. We won because we *listened* to them!
The Secret History of Silicon Valley. (How geeks won WWII and the Cold War, and how that led to Silicon Valley.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ
The uplink is the difficult and expensive part. Receiving satellite multi-cast is cheap. Wifi is cheap. So it should be dirt cheap to produce lots of local satellite->wifi repeaters pumping out data, so long as you skip on the uplink. Have some sort of simple one-way streaming multi-cast protocol. (You'd only need to do multi-cast on the LAN, and depend on distributing lots of units to get wide area coverage.) You'd have to distribute a new piece of software so that RSS readers and web browsers could view the content. Opera Unite might be able to do this. Any kind of locally installable web browser would do.
Balloons are cute, but you wouldn't even have to do that. All you have to do is get them to locals somehow. Just make these things self contained, disposable, battery powered with lots of longevity. The locals could stash them in random places out in the open and it would be completely deniable.
Of course, FM radio is a *lot* cheaper. So is analog television.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.
Somebody who works for an actual wind power company debunked this for us. If you build more turbines and deliberately run them at less than their maximum, then you can use the reserve capacity plus a limited amount of geographic distribution to get steady-state power output the majority of the time. This stuff about storage technology is bunk -- we haven't built out wind power infrastructure to its potential. Do that and you don't need storage. (And Solar Thermal could make up for a lot as well. It has a cheap and reliable storage technology that would work just fine on 24 hour timescales.)
Pretty naked girl overrides sanity
The savvy ones can use that power to order a guy to do anything. If they can keep you wondering, they can get you to agree to use one. The pretty ones with good self esteem also realize that they have other choices if you don't want to cooperate.