That'll be great _until_ we suddenly lose diplomatic relations with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates over this mess. And at the rate things are going, it might just happen and the diplomatic fallout will be _enormous_.
However, now that Microsoft has said they're pulling support for Windows XP in 2014, that has forced corporations and government agencies to upgrade to Windows 7, which in many ways is a VASTLY superior operating system. Indeed, at where I work, it was this change that forced the IT department to upgrade their computers to run Windows 7 Professional, which will be the "de facto" default operating system for many years to come.
I think there was two reasons why Apple did not adopt a native Micro USB connection for the iPhone 5:
1. Micro USB connectors are fragile and prone to break rather easily, as many cellphone users have found out the hard way. As such, Apple designed the "Lightning" connection to NOT be a keyed connection and also designed it to be durable in the first place.
2. The "Lightning" connector may allow far higher bandwidth of audio and video out than the Micro USB connection. I wouldn't be surprised that "Lightning" is ready to be fully compliant with USB 3.0 connections at full USB 3.0 speed.
Actually, nuclear reactors need to go away from uranium-fuel reactors (which require pressurized reactor vessels, big cooling systems, and a way to dispose of spent uranium fuel rods) and go to thorium-fueled molten salt reactors (which don't require pressurized reactor vessels, can even dispense with cooling systems by using closed loop Brayton turbines, and generates very little radioactive waste). Commercializing the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology should be the next big priority for the US Energy Department.
There are a number of considerations with solar power:
1. You want to makes sure the solar power panels are located in a area with a lot of sunny days per year. That's why the US Southwest is among the best places for solar power on Earth, especially given the relative closeness to large population centers to reduce power transmission losses.
2. High power solar power installations can require HUGE swaths of land. That could be a problem given the fragility of some desert environments.
3. You need a way to store the power generated during the day so you can still provide power during the night. One idea being discussed is to store the power generated in molten-salt batteries during the day, and the batteries provide power at night.
I'm not exactly a supporter of wind power given the size of wind turbines used in large power installations, the noise generated by these turbines and the fact they can be major hazards to birds flying nearby. And it could be even worse if the wind turbines are on "kites" flying at 8,000 to 12,000 meters altitude, given that some migratory birds and of course commercial airliners fly at this altitude.
You are absolutely correct. If the installation starts shedding parts, they will becoming back to the ground at pretty high velocity, as we all know from the "blue ice" dropping from airplanes and punching holes through the roofs of houses below.
By the way, the #2 and #3 issues I mentioned are related, because if the tether breaks, we could have an uncontrolled "fly away" situation that could become a major hazard to aviation, especially since the plans for these high-flying wind turbine installations involve putting them near or just above the same flight level as modern airliners (9,000 to 11,000 meters altitude).
....No one has actually _built_ a wind power turbine setup that operates at well above the ground. I mean, consider the issues involved:
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude? 2. What are the costs of tethering these high-flying wind turbine installations? 3. Will these installations become hazards to migratory birds flying at high altitude, let alone passing airplanes of all sizes?
I'd rather build hundreds of nuclear reactors based on the safe liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology instead in the short to medium term, and in the longer term build space-based solar power arrays parked in geosynchronous or near-geosynchronous orvbit.
The big problem was that Soviet authorities forced the collectivized farms in the Ukraine to WAY overproduce. The result was disastrous: Ukrainians literally starved to death as all the food was exported, and the death toll has been estimated _at minimum_ 2.4 million dead (some estimates put it as high as 14 million dead!).
And it happened again between 1958 and 1961, when the Great Leap Forward--which used the same ill-advised policies of forced collectivization of farms. A recent scholarly report by historian Frank Dikötter, who had access to Communist Party archives in China, revealed the death toll from the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward to be around _45 million_. It's small wonder why there were a huge swell of refugees into Hong Kong between 1958 and 1962 from China to escape the effects of the Great Leap Forward.
In fact, every major famine in the 20th Century was caused NOT by major crop failures, but by deliberate political policy or the effects of war.
Famous examples of this include the forced collectivization of farms in the Ukraine between 1928 and 1933, the time of the warlords in China during the 1920's and 1930's when fighting disrupted food supply, the effects of the the invasion of China by Japan (which also disrupted food supply), the "Great Leap Forward" in China that seriously affected food production, and the political policies of dictators in Africa during the second half of the 20th Century.
Many states are how using mark-sense paper ballots filled out in _permanent_ ink, either by pen or a special stamp. As such, the ballots are both readable by machine and hand counts. Mind you, you do get a problem of ballots that look like reading a long newspaper article, especially in California with a lot of propositions on the ballot!
Only one thing though: chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides are starting to change in formula.
Thanks to better understanding of the biological process, we need less of the "overkill" agrichemicals that can cause a lot of environmental damage from the agricultural runoff. Indeed, the introduction of GPS into agriculture makes it possible for a major cut in agrichemical usage because of much more precise application of said chemicals. Also, I see agrichemicals being made less from petroleum and more from plants such as corn, peanuts, and so on, which may reduce the agricultural runoff issue even further.
And if the plans for large-scale urban greenhouses become reality, the amount of agrichemical usage could drop quite a lot, too.
Actually, a potentially better solution is to grow food in multistory greenhouses located in urban areas.
Since you can precisely control the growing environment in a greenhouse, that makes it possible to grow a huge variety of food year-round, and being located in an urban area, it also means way lower transportation costs since there is less need to ship in food hundreds to thousands of kilometers/miles away. Don't be surprised that within 50 years, much of our vegetable supply will be grown this way.
Given that Windows 7 running on any machine that support x86-64 instructions very well, no wonder why it's been widely adopted.
I myself really like Windows 7: surprisingly fast boot, very stable, and the implementation of the "Aero Glass" look and feel is far better than what was done in Windows Vista. It's probably the best version of Windows (client version) since Windows 2000 Professional.
That would be true in the past, but today with most hard drives running Serial ATA-II interfaces, the performance hit is not as bad as it used to be. And with SSD drives, the performance penalty is negligible.
I think you need to look up the history of Android itself.
Before the iPhone was unveiled, Google had developed Android to be essentially an "improved" version of what was accomplished with the Danger Hiptop (aka. T-Mobile Sidekick) platform, complete with real physical keyboard. But once the iPhone came out, Google completely redesigned the interface for Android, and incorporated touchscreen functionality that was not originally part of Android itself. And from Android 1.6 on, the similarities to iOS became more and more obvious.
Drive cellphone manufacturers into building Windows Phone 8.0 devices, especially now that Windows Phone 8.0 supports all the latest cellphone hardware features (multicore SoC's like the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 and Samsung Exynos, 3GPP LTE, NFC mobile payments and high-resolution touchscreens up to 1280x768 resolution) and the fact cellphone manufacturers don't want to get in the crossfire in the Apple versus Google legal fight over Android itself.
Legally, Windows Phone 8.0 has two major advantages over Android:
1. The overall interface itself does not violate critical Apple patents on iOS. 2. MIcrosoft and Apple have cross-license agreements so a small number of iOS features can be run under Windows Phone 7.x and 8.0.
Indeed, why do you think Samsung surprised everyone by unveiling the Ativ S cellphone (essentially a Galaxy SIII modified to run Windows Phone 8.0)? And Nokia will unveil in a few days the Lumia 820 and Lumia 920 PureView? I expect both HTC and LG to unveil their Windows Phone 8.0 devices before the end of this year.
Yes, the Galaxy SIII is a great cellphone, but the legal cloud over this model is why I have yet to get one, because the last thing I want is a few months from now I can't legally use this model in the USA....
....If you want to make biofuels on a truly huge scale, there's only one source that actually makes sense: oil-laden algae.
Since some forms of oil-laden algae can grow in seawater, that right there means anywhere near an ocean the algae can be grown on a very large scale without the enormous expense of finding a source of fresh water. And the waste from processing oil-laden algae into biodiesel fuel can be processed further into either ethanol or turned into agricultural fertilizer.
In Europe, they got the better fuel economy by switching en masse to turbodiesel engines. Only one problem: diesel engine exhaust has higher NOx gas output and you have diesel particulates, which are bad for your lungs.
Small wonder why the likes of the Volkswagen Group and BMW are funding efforts to develop better electric car battery technology. New battery types such as dry-electrode lithium-ion batteries (which have way higher storage density than current lithium-ion battery designs) and the carbon nanotube ultracapacitor battery could make it possible to tremendously extend the range of electric cars and reduce the size of the battery pack itself. We may see by 2020 a vehicle about the size of today's Volkswagen Golf with a battery pack the same volume as the current Golf's fuel tank capable to going as far as 800 km (497 miles) on a single full charge; if that happens, that will be the start of the end of using gasoline and diesel fuel for personal vehicles.
Actually, thanks to new battery technologies such as dry-electrode lithium-ion batteries and carbon nanotube ultracapacitors, we may see by 2020 electric automobiles about the size of a Volkswagen Golf--with the battery pack the same volume size as the current Golf's gas tank!--go possibly 800 km (497 miles) on a single full charge cycle. If that becomes reality, the age of the gasoline and diesel fueled automobile will come to an end--and everyone in urban areas can breathe a lot easier since we will start seeing lower and lower air pollution as long-range electric cars take over.
I think it was Armstrong's ability to "stay calm" in times of crisis in the two instances you mentioned was the reason why he was chosen as mission commander on Apollo 11. During his days as X-15 test pilot, some test pilots at Edwards AFB thought he didn't have enough "stick and rudder" skills to handle sophisticated test vehicles, but Armstrong proved them all wrong....
I think now that Apple has pretty much prevailed over Samsung, Apple may be emboldened to do the unthinkable: directly sue Google over Android itself. (After all, anyone who's run a Samsung Galaxy Nexus notices that much of the "look and feel" of Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich") and 4.1 ("Jelly Bean") is still very much like iOS in many ways.)
If Apple does this, we could see a gigantic migration of cellphone manufacturers to the only really viable alternative: Microsoft, especially the Windows Phone 8.0 being officially unveiled in September 2012. Why Windows Phone 8.0? I cite two reasons:
1. Thanks to cross-licensing agreements with Apple and its very unique tile-based interface, Windows Phone 8.0 will NOT infringe on critical Apple iOS patents and copyrights.
2. Windows Phone 8.0 supports all the latest cellphone hardware--multicore CPU/GPU's, 3GPP LTE, NFC mobile payments and higher resolution touchscreen displays up to 1280x768.
I would NOT be surprised that a Samsung cellphone that looks almost identical to the Galaxy SIII but running Windows Phone 8.0 comes out before the end of 2012.
I'll list the advantages of a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, to sum it up:
1. It uses thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts, very cheap to make compared to making uranium-235 pellets assembled into fuel rods. 2. You can even use spent uranium fuel rods or even plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel. 3. The reactor vessel does not need to be pressurized, which saves a lot on engineering and construction costs. 4. Stopping the reaction is essentially dumping the molten fuel mixture from the reactor, which only happens in a few minutes. 5. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines, we eliminate the need for expensive large cooling towers or locating the reactor near a large source of cooling water such as a river, lake or ocean shoreline. 6. The radioactive waste from an LFTR has a very short half life (under 300 years), which means very cheap waste disposal---dump it into a disused salt mine or salt dome. However, the "waste" also has considerable use in the nuclear medicine industry, so some of it could be processed for such a purpose.
How about implementing safer forms of nuclear power?
Such a technology does exist: the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), a prototype of which was tested in the 1960's and early 1970's at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with very promising results for power generation but was discontinued because it couldn't generate uranium-235 and plutonium-239 needed for nuclear weapons production.
There are numerous advantages to LFTR nuclear power plants, as I've mentioned in other posts in the recent past. And it uses thorium-232, which is quite abundant in nature, so finding it is not an issue. (Indeed, China wants this technology because they can't figure out what to do with all that thorium ore dug out as part of China's extensive rare Earth mining program.)
Wind and solar power may be nice, but large installations of wind turbines could pose a major hazard to birds and most large-scale solar power array installations take up huge swaths of land. Meanwhile, a modern LFTR using Brayton turbines to generate power takes up a very small amount of land just to generate 500 to 1,000 MW, which means very cheap construction costs.
My only concern is that if Apple wins, Apple could pursue the ultimate sanction against Samsung: a ban on selling in the USA any Samsung device that runs Android, whether it's the Galaxy Nexus cellphone, Galaxy SIII cellphone, other Samsung cellphones that use Android, or the Galaxy Tab series tablet computers. We may be talking a HUGE hit in the number of Android cellphones available for the US market.
And it may embolden Apple to do what was once unthinkable: directly sue Google over Android itself. It this doesn't put a gigantic chill into future Android development, I don't know what will.
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That'll be great _until_ we suddenly lose diplomatic relations with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates over this mess. And at the rate things are going, it might just happen and the diplomatic fallout will be _enormous_.
However, now that Microsoft has said they're pulling support for Windows XP in 2014, that has forced corporations and government agencies to upgrade to Windows 7, which in many ways is a VASTLY superior operating system. Indeed, at where I work, it was this change that forced the IT department to upgrade their computers to run Windows 7 Professional, which will be the "de facto" default operating system for many years to come.
I think there was two reasons why Apple did not adopt a native Micro USB connection for the iPhone 5:
1. Micro USB connectors are fragile and prone to break rather easily, as many cellphone users have found out the hard way. As such, Apple designed the "Lightning" connection to NOT be a keyed connection and also designed it to be durable in the first place.
2. The "Lightning" connector may allow far higher bandwidth of audio and video out than the Micro USB connection. I wouldn't be surprised that "Lightning" is ready to be fully compliant with USB 3.0 connections at full USB 3.0 speed.
Actually, nuclear reactors need to go away from uranium-fuel reactors (which require pressurized reactor vessels, big cooling systems, and a way to dispose of spent uranium fuel rods) and go to thorium-fueled molten salt reactors (which don't require pressurized reactor vessels, can even dispense with cooling systems by using closed loop Brayton turbines, and generates very little radioactive waste). Commercializing the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology should be the next big priority for the US Energy Department.
There are a number of considerations with solar power:
1. You want to makes sure the solar power panels are located in a area with a lot of sunny days per year. That's why the US Southwest is among the best places for solar power on Earth, especially given the relative closeness to large population centers to reduce power transmission losses.
2. High power solar power installations can require HUGE swaths of land. That could be a problem given the fragility of some desert environments.
3. You need a way to store the power generated during the day so you can still provide power during the night. One idea being discussed is to store the power generated in molten-salt batteries during the day, and the batteries provide power at night.
I'm not exactly a supporter of wind power given the size of wind turbines used in large power installations, the noise generated by these turbines and the fact they can be major hazards to birds flying nearby. And it could be even worse if the wind turbines are on "kites" flying at 8,000 to 12,000 meters altitude, given that some migratory birds and of course commercial airliners fly at this altitude.
You are absolutely correct. If the installation starts shedding parts, they will becoming back to the ground at pretty high velocity, as we all know from the "blue ice" dropping from airplanes and punching holes through the roofs of houses below.
By the way, the #2 and #3 issues I mentioned are related, because if the tether breaks, we could have an uncontrolled "fly away" situation that could become a major hazard to aviation, especially since the plans for these high-flying wind turbine installations involve putting them near or just above the same flight level as modern airliners (9,000 to 11,000 meters altitude).
....No one has actually _built_ a wind power turbine setup that operates at well above the ground. I mean, consider the issues involved:
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude?
2. What are the costs of tethering these high-flying wind turbine installations?
3. Will these installations become hazards to migratory birds flying at high altitude, let alone passing airplanes of all sizes?
I'd rather build hundreds of nuclear reactors based on the safe liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology instead in the short to medium term, and in the longer term build space-based solar power arrays parked in geosynchronous or near-geosynchronous orvbit.
The big problem was that Soviet authorities forced the collectivized farms in the Ukraine to WAY overproduce. The result was disastrous: Ukrainians literally starved to death as all the food was exported, and the death toll has been estimated _at minimum_ 2.4 million dead (some estimates put it as high as 14 million dead!).
And it happened again between 1958 and 1961, when the Great Leap Forward--which used the same ill-advised policies of forced collectivization of farms. A recent scholarly report by historian Frank Dikötter, who had access to Communist Party archives in China, revealed the death toll from the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward to be around _45 million_. It's small wonder why there were a huge swell of refugees into Hong Kong between 1958 and 1962 from China to escape the effects of the Great Leap Forward.
In fact, every major famine in the 20th Century was caused NOT by major crop failures, but by deliberate political policy or the effects of war.
Famous examples of this include the forced collectivization of farms in the Ukraine between 1928 and 1933, the time of the warlords in China during the 1920's and 1930's when fighting disrupted food supply, the effects of the the invasion of China by Japan (which also disrupted food supply), the "Great Leap Forward" in China that seriously affected food production, and the political policies of dictators in Africa during the second half of the 20th Century.
Many states are how using mark-sense paper ballots filled out in _permanent_ ink, either by pen or a special stamp. As such, the ballots are both readable by machine and hand counts. Mind you, you do get a problem of ballots that look like reading a long newspaper article, especially in California with a lot of propositions on the ballot!
Only one thing though: chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides are starting to change in formula.
Thanks to better understanding of the biological process, we need less of the "overkill" agrichemicals that can cause a lot of environmental damage from the agricultural runoff. Indeed, the introduction of GPS into agriculture makes it possible for a major cut in agrichemical usage because of much more precise application of said chemicals. Also, I see agrichemicals being made less from petroleum and more from plants such as corn, peanuts, and so on, which may reduce the agricultural runoff issue even further.
And if the plans for large-scale urban greenhouses become reality, the amount of agrichemical usage could drop quite a lot, too.
Actually, a potentially better solution is to grow food in multistory greenhouses located in urban areas.
Since you can precisely control the growing environment in a greenhouse, that makes it possible to grow a huge variety of food year-round, and being located in an urban area, it also means way lower transportation costs since there is less need to ship in food hundreds to thousands of kilometers/miles away. Don't be surprised that within 50 years, much of our vegetable supply will be grown this way.
Given that Windows 7 running on any machine that support x86-64 instructions very well, no wonder why it's been widely adopted.
I myself really like Windows 7: surprisingly fast boot, very stable, and the implementation of the "Aero Glass" look and feel is far better than what was done in Windows Vista. It's probably the best version of Windows (client version) since Windows 2000 Professional.
That would be true in the past, but today with most hard drives running Serial ATA-II interfaces, the performance hit is not as bad as it used to be. And with SSD drives, the performance penalty is negligible.
I think you need to look up the history of Android itself.
Before the iPhone was unveiled, Google had developed Android to be essentially an "improved" version of what was accomplished with the Danger Hiptop (aka. T-Mobile Sidekick) platform, complete with real physical keyboard. But once the iPhone came out, Google completely redesigned the interface for Android, and incorporated touchscreen functionality that was not originally part of Android itself. And from Android 1.6 on, the similarities to iOS became more and more obvious.
Drive cellphone manufacturers into building Windows Phone 8.0 devices, especially now that Windows Phone 8.0 supports all the latest cellphone hardware features (multicore SoC's like the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 and Samsung Exynos, 3GPP LTE, NFC mobile payments and high-resolution touchscreens up to 1280x768 resolution) and the fact cellphone manufacturers don't want to get in the crossfire in the Apple versus Google legal fight over Android itself.
Legally, Windows Phone 8.0 has two major advantages over Android:
1. The overall interface itself does not violate critical Apple patents on iOS.
2. MIcrosoft and Apple have cross-license agreements so a small number of iOS features can be run under Windows Phone 7.x and 8.0.
Indeed, why do you think Samsung surprised everyone by unveiling the Ativ S cellphone (essentially a Galaxy SIII modified to run Windows Phone 8.0)? And Nokia will unveil in a few days the Lumia 820 and Lumia 920 PureView? I expect both HTC and LG to unveil their Windows Phone 8.0 devices before the end of this year.
Yes, the Galaxy SIII is a great cellphone, but the legal cloud over this model is why I have yet to get one, because the last thing I want is a few months from now I can't legally use this model in the USA....
....If you want to make biofuels on a truly huge scale, there's only one source that actually makes sense: oil-laden algae.
Since some forms of oil-laden algae can grow in seawater, that right there means anywhere near an ocean the algae can be grown on a very large scale without the enormous expense of finding a source of fresh water. And the waste from processing oil-laden algae into biodiesel fuel can be processed further into either ethanol or turned into agricultural fertilizer.
In Europe, they got the better fuel economy by switching en masse to turbodiesel engines. Only one problem: diesel engine exhaust has higher NOx gas output and you have diesel particulates, which are bad for your lungs.
Small wonder why the likes of the Volkswagen Group and BMW are funding efforts to develop better electric car battery technology. New battery types such as dry-electrode lithium-ion batteries (which have way higher storage density than current lithium-ion battery designs) and the carbon nanotube ultracapacitor battery could make it possible to tremendously extend the range of electric cars and reduce the size of the battery pack itself. We may see by 2020 a vehicle about the size of today's Volkswagen Golf with a battery pack the same volume as the current Golf's fuel tank capable to going as far as 800 km (497 miles) on a single full charge; if that happens, that will be the start of the end of using gasoline and diesel fuel for personal vehicles.
Actually, thanks to new battery technologies such as dry-electrode lithium-ion batteries and carbon nanotube ultracapacitors, we may see by 2020 electric automobiles about the size of a Volkswagen Golf--with the battery pack the same volume size as the current Golf's gas tank!--go possibly 800 km (497 miles) on a single full charge cycle. If that becomes reality, the age of the gasoline and diesel fueled automobile will come to an end--and everyone in urban areas can breathe a lot easier since we will start seeing lower and lower air pollution as long-range electric cars take over.
I think it was Armstrong's ability to "stay calm" in times of crisis in the two instances you mentioned was the reason why he was chosen as mission commander on Apollo 11. During his days as X-15 test pilot, some test pilots at Edwards AFB thought he didn't have enough "stick and rudder" skills to handle sophisticated test vehicles, but Armstrong proved them all wrong....
Godspeed, Neil Armstrong.
I think now that Apple has pretty much prevailed over Samsung, Apple may be emboldened to do the unthinkable: directly sue Google over Android itself. (After all, anyone who's run a Samsung Galaxy Nexus notices that much of the "look and feel" of Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich") and 4.1 ("Jelly Bean") is still very much like iOS in many ways.)
If Apple does this, we could see a gigantic migration of cellphone manufacturers to the only really viable alternative: Microsoft, especially the Windows Phone 8.0 being officially unveiled in September 2012. Why Windows Phone 8.0? I cite two reasons:
1. Thanks to cross-licensing agreements with Apple and its very unique tile-based interface, Windows Phone 8.0 will NOT infringe on critical Apple iOS patents and copyrights.
2. Windows Phone 8.0 supports all the latest cellphone hardware--multicore CPU/GPU's, 3GPP LTE, NFC mobile payments and higher resolution touchscreen displays up to 1280x768.
I would NOT be surprised that a Samsung cellphone that looks almost identical to the Galaxy SIII but running Windows Phone 8.0 comes out before the end of 2012.
I'll list the advantages of a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, to sum it up:
1. It uses thorium-232 dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts, very cheap to make compared to making uranium-235 pellets assembled into fuel rods.
2. You can even use spent uranium fuel rods or even plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons dissolved in molten sodium fluoride salts as fuel.
3. The reactor vessel does not need to be pressurized, which saves a lot on engineering and construction costs.
4. Stopping the reaction is essentially dumping the molten fuel mixture from the reactor, which only happens in a few minutes.
5. By using closed-loop Brayton turbines, we eliminate the need for expensive large cooling towers or locating the reactor near a large source of cooling water such as a river, lake or ocean shoreline.
6. The radioactive waste from an LFTR has a very short half life (under 300 years), which means very cheap waste disposal---dump it into a disused salt mine or salt dome. However, the "waste" also has considerable use in the nuclear medicine industry, so some of it could be processed for such a purpose.
How about implementing safer forms of nuclear power?
Such a technology does exist: the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), a prototype of which was tested in the 1960's and early 1970's at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with very promising results for power generation but was discontinued because it couldn't generate uranium-235 and plutonium-239 needed for nuclear weapons production.
There are numerous advantages to LFTR nuclear power plants, as I've mentioned in other posts in the recent past. And it uses thorium-232, which is quite abundant in nature, so finding it is not an issue. (Indeed, China wants this technology because they can't figure out what to do with all that thorium ore dug out as part of China's extensive rare Earth mining program.)
Wind and solar power may be nice, but large installations of wind turbines could pose a major hazard to birds and most large-scale solar power array installations take up huge swaths of land. Meanwhile, a modern LFTR using Brayton turbines to generate power takes up a very small amount of land just to generate 500 to 1,000 MW, which means very cheap construction costs.
My only concern is that if Apple wins, Apple could pursue the ultimate sanction against Samsung: a ban on selling in the USA any Samsung device that runs Android, whether it's the Galaxy Nexus cellphone, Galaxy SIII cellphone, other Samsung cellphones that use Android, or the Galaxy Tab series tablet computers. We may be talking a HUGE hit in the number of Android cellphones available for the US market.
And it may embolden Apple to do what was once unthinkable: directly sue Google over Android itself. It this doesn't put a gigantic chill into future Android development, I don't know what will.