Corporations are, simply, organizations chartered by governments to act according to government policy. Vis. the East India Company. Their use was expanded in the 1800s to accommodate the need for organizations that rose from new technology - railroads, telegraph, etc. - to be able to attract capital from non-governmental sources (public investment) at a new large scale, and to build the administrative structure required to run national-scale business operations. Single individuals could no longer collect enough money to build such large enterprises, and could no longer manage them either. (Similar problems with administration were arising in government as well.) Thus the rise of the bureaucracy simultaneously in both commerce and government.
Without the imprimature and legislative support provided by government, corporations could literally not exist. Whether that would be a good or bad thing is an interesting question. However, corporations as presently structured are far more responsive to public opinion and government policy than their individually-owned predecessors. For example, read up on Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller (both of whom were really participants in the transition from proprietorship to corporate structures) - or the feudal lords of the Middle Ages. the feudal lords were really the prototypes of the pre-corporate industrial company.
Frankly, we don't dare even allow Space-X or any single government to get a controlling foothold off-planet until we've evolved the necessary collective awareness and wisdom to prevent the result from reading like the plot from any one of dozens of dystopian science fiction novels. WE NEED TO OWN THAT INFRASTRUCTURE, all of us; it needs to be a co-op enterprise. The human push into space must be a SOCIAL endeavor, and by social I mean the entire human tribe, not just one splinter group of it.
No. Or at least, only in the broadest abstract sense, in which we truly already do collectively 'own' it. Imagine if the integrated circuit technology invented in the early-mid 1960s had been owned and developed collectively. We would still be running 128 K bit memory and 100 KHz processors, and disk drive capacity would be still approaching 10 Mibibytes. If (as so many of us believe) NASA in its post-Apollo structure has held back space exploration rather than advanced it, how can you propose that this, a particular expression of a collective approach, makes any sense?
No, progress has always and will always depend on individual creativity, risk taking and initiative. In fact I'm rooting for the first trillionaires, who will achieve trillionaire status by collecting $100 billion in investment and using it to exploiting the literally unlimited resources available to a space-faring civilization. They are the ones who will pull this off, risking their own and their investors' futures and their participants (employees etc.)) lives. Excellent examples - Elon Musk, Mark Shuttleworth, Jeff Bezos, Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow.
Do not forget for one minute that there is no technical difference (other than the pre-existing legal basis for shooting the opposition without repercussion) between a government and a corporation. The plain fact is that space is big - really big, and communications and transport are relatively slow compared to the distances. So it is inevitable that any future spacefaring civilization will be segmented and diversified, analogously to the world in the era of sailing ships when it could take months or years to get from Europe to China.
Whether the management of the various elements of a spacefaring civilization - planetary, asteroidal or orbital communities - are governments or companies is a rather unimportant distinction - in the end, both will act similarly to protect their interests. (A 'company' was, originally, a group of people who establish a contractual agreement to work in common - in some cases under a government or military regime, in others under a profit-making regime. But all 'companies' must make a 'profit' - acquire more resources than are spent - else they die.) Let the legal structure be developed and firmly established on the basis of a common understanding of the rights and responsibilities of humans, to prevent and minimize the impact of internal and inter-agency conflict and preserve human and other rights, and work very hard to establish a permanent philosophy and practice of ethical interactions, and there is a chance that most (not all) conflicts between groups will be restricted to activities within that broad legal basis. For example, there have been almost no significant deadly conflicts between the various states of the United States. California has not sent their militia to attack Oregon over water rights on the Klamath River. That is the best that you can hope for.
Think of the atmosphere as analogous to a very diffuse moon.
The real moon is also gradually slowing the rotation of the earth down, and the orbit of the earth is gradually shrinking. IANA astrophysicist but that's how I recall the whole orbital thing works. The Wikipedia article on the Moon does mention that the orbiting Moon is gradually lengthening the Earth's day - note the energy that is required to drive the tides has to come from somewhere, and loss of rotational speed is where it comes from. That's essentially the same type of drag that the atmosphere has on the Earth.
The windmills are ever so slightly increasing the amount that the atmosphere interacts with the body of the Earth, thereby increasing the absolute rotational speed of the air and reducing the relative speed compared to the surface of the Earth. Thus the rotational drag increases. So the lengthening day is where the conservation of energy comes together.
I suppose there is also a slight alteration in the thermal equation, since mechanical energy is being converted to electrical energy, so the waste heat is radiated at a different frequency spectrum than the air by itself - but this is way past my ability to determine effect. Does this radiated energy escape the Earth more, or less than from the undisturbed air? Is the air temperature raised or lowered? The mind starts to boggle. But this has to be tiny even in relation to the above in any case.
Just to throw another thought on the pile - when we build thousands of 'clean' Thorium or Fusion power plants to power our all-electric civilization, at what point will the waste heat being released (on the order of 1/2 or more of the total energy produced in a thermal power plant is waste heat, and all of the electrical energy being used is eventually released as heat) become itself a factor in climate change? In 500 years or less, I can assume that will be a major enviro-political topic - maybe sooner. There's no free lunch.
I just saw one more bit at the end of today (Friday)'s WSJ - AT&T have also "agreed to give T-Mobile a roaming agreement that would allow the smaller carrier to use its network" (quote from the paper edition, don't know if it's online). The paper goes on to say that this was not mentioned in the AT&T statement.
I think that may be a huge boon for T-Mobile. That could help TM with its biggest problem, lack of coverage. It appears to me that TM gets everything they wanted/needed without having to actually merge. Deutsche Telecom cut a very good deal!
I'm thinking more like 500 or 1000, or 10,000 years.:) Who knows? In 1000 years we may have bred our sentient canine and dolphin successors - not necessarily my preference, but who am I to dictate the future? I don't even know what I'm having for lunch.
When I worked at CMU in the early 1990s their marketing department wanted to drop the word 'University' from their logo. That was vetoed. But 1/2 of the faculty did not teach and only did research, and most of the research was applied research. So yes, in many ways it was more analogous to a diversified corporate research lab company than a classical university (IMHO).
I tend to be a long-term optimist. Humans don't always (or even often) make the right decision right off. But IMHO societies are bottom-up decision systems, just like ecosystems, evolutionary systems, and neural networks - living systems in general (AKA 'complex adaptive systems'). The secret of all such systems is basically 'muddling through', always slowly converging toward the optimal energy/minimum error given the environment of the system. One of the characteristics of such systems is that no individual component is likely to make the 'right' decision at any given moment. In fact no individual component (at any scale) is even likely to be able to see more than a very limited subset of the system. For example, how much does a mosquito know about the swamp? But the mosquito transports nitrogen from big animals down to the micro level, and helps to fertilize the swamp that grows the fish that the bear lives on.
So, humans will continue to screw up, and destroy, and build, and die, and live. And something that none of us will recognize will come out of this and eventually reach the stars. Humans may transform this planet into something that no grizzly bear would appreciate, but in the process will take life to other planets, where grizzly bears may yet live again in freedom that lasts beyond the life of this planet.
I remember CompUSA - I bought a laptop for a company I was involved wit, on a company account. They were incompetent at the time, but then so was the company. AFAIK the company never did pay CompUSA for the laptop.
I'd have to do some actual work to figure it out, but i wouldn't be surprised if it was close to that - per customer, not per line. The easiest way would be to take whatever number you can find for their gross sales for the cellular business, divide by the number of customers, and then take 20% or whatever they publish as their gross profits times the amount per customer.
I'm sure the average customer has more than one line, business customers have many lines and often pay prices at the high end. In my case I have three - two data lines, one smartphone (partly for historical reasons and pure laziness on my part), and I don't even have a family. I don't have cable at this time so all my data is going via cellular. I'm sending this from my laptop on a 4G modem - not my phone). But I did make the $500 up. The $250 cost of a new customer is from real data I've seen on the web. A company that is paying that much for each new customer is going to want to make that back in under a year (10 months is a pretty typical target), so that's $25 per month. So maybe $250 per year would be better.
It's fairly common in big mergers that take a long time for the preliminary contract to include an opt-out fee, so if either one backs out they pay the other some fee. It does take a lot of money, concentration and time to execute big mergers, and as noted above it also affects customers and employees - oftentimes the best employees bail out.
Those customers are worth between $250 (the costs cell companies are now paying to acquire each new customer) and $500 (a reasonable one-year follow-on profit per customer) each to another provider - but none of the Big Three can now touch T-Mobile. So it's going to be a new entrant. T-Mobile is an excellent way to buy into the US market for someone with the balls and the resources to do it.
If they had another few $billion they could build out their network as the best nationwide 4G, and expand their customer base with ridiculous incentives. (Just for instance, imagine a network so good that they could support their entire customer base with full-time streaming, 24 hours, no limits. Overkill? I don't know. It's just an example.) If they can manage to do all that, and grow fast but not so fast that they lose the great customer service that they used to have (and I hope they still have - I had to leave T-Mobile several years ago for work reasons), they could be a major player.
I'm guessing Carlos Slim, or that guy that owns most of the cell providers in Africa. Or the one in Brazil... Someone with both cash AND an entrepreneurial spirit that can recognize and take advantage of the potential. 4G does provide an opening as everyone has to build out. Realize that T-Mobile started out as a mundane customer-owned power utility in Idaho, had a short and unfortunate stint as a national fiber optics long-haul provider, then morphed again into the cell business. It has come a long way through many perils to get where it is. And AFAIK they still have the nicest customer service folks of any US provider.
I just heard that solar has recently passed below the magic $1 per peak watt that has long been considered the point where it was really cost effective on a large scale.
I just commented on the parent, but just so you know, there are at least two such systems in operation in the US. I forget where... They use excess power (night time?) to pump water up to a lake, then use that water to generate power during peak demand.
It's been done. I forget where, but here in the US there are at least two such systems used by power companies. They use excess power to pump the water to higher elevation lakes (such as the middle of the night), and use that water to generate electricity during peak periods (3PM on a hot day). It does require everything to be in the right places.
I neglected to mention that the greenhouse roofs could also be constructed as solar stills, also synergistically generating one resource (irrigation water) while reducing the total heat influx on the greenhouse interiors.
About 10 years ago I did an analysis of the economics and related topics on a hypothetical large-scale solar project in the northern Sahara. It wasn't specific to Libya but today Libya is a good potential platform. If you build a 100- or 200-square mile solar farm, putting the solar panels about 20 feet or more above the ground (higher is better due to better breeze), two of the beneficial side effects are cooling the space underneath, and (closely related) shade. If you think about it, in that area shade is a significant resource!
This solar installation then provides a large area where greenhouses can be built, shaded (between 70% and 95%) by the solar panels, and partly roofed so it's relatively cheaper to complete the enclosure. this not only provides power but also creates a huge plant-growing area. The result - Libya could become the produce capital of the Mediterranean. Some of the power could be used to provide desalinization, and the greenhouses would minimize water loss so the impact on the Mediterranean could be minimized. So Libya can export power AND food, and hire thousands of farm workers to work in long term, skilled jobs, without any need for migration so they will have a stake in improving where they live. This is a very synergistic approach so the total cost of the system does not have to be amortized purely with power sales. And it could be expanded across hundreds or thousands of square miles of rock and sand.
The analysis also showed that such a large installation would have a significant effect on the weather patterns, increasing local rainfall similarly to how a forest tends to increase rainfall, thereby to some extent ameliorating the present tendency of the Sahara to expand itself. It's a very complicated system, and I did not do the detailed computer analysis necessary to really prove this hypothesis out, but it's certainly one worth exploring.
When I worked in a research lab, another methodology used was to use this year's funding to pay for the research for which funding had not been requested yet, to assure that the results of THAT were likely to be confirmed. Then, once they were pretty confident that the research would pan out, they could apply for the grant to do the research. This way they always had successful research, and a continuous stream of grants. The continuously successful labs all worked this way to my knowledge. If they applied for a grant to do 'X', you could be 90% sure that they had already proved that 'X' would work, and probably had already been done. This might have been less true for 'pure' research as opposed to applied research.
Of course at the big Uni's the Uni took 50% to 60% off the top to cover operational expenses, so every grant application had to include a justification for double the amount of money actually needed (since the grants rarely paid for operational expenses), hidden in the cost structure.
And you thought corporations and government agencies were the only ones doing shenanigans. Ask anyone who is likely to know at Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc.
Hmm. I think that wind energy is in part derived as drag on the rotation of the Earth - the atmosphere is being dragged around the Earth along with the hard part of the planet, but since it is farther from the center or rotation it wants to move a bit slower (just as artificial satellites have slower rotation rates as their elevation increases). That explains why the net wind is from east to west. Of course a bunch of related effects related to sherical shape, coriolis force, thermal gradients in both elevation and latitude, etc. cause winds at different latitudes and elevations to go in different directions. So windmills are ever so slightly making the day longer.
Well, in all fairness, that's a binary order of magnitude.:)
- I know, that's weak. But this is slashdot.
Other orders of magnitude may be calculated using bases other than 10. The ancient Greeks ranked the nighttime brightness of celestial bodies by 6 levels in which each level was the fifth root of one hundred (about 2.512) as bright as the nearest weaker level of brightness, so that the brightest level is 5 orders of magnitude brighter than the weakest, which can also be stated as a factor of 100 times brighter.
Interestingly, where I used to live out in farm country most of the farms have the big circular irrigation systems. Each of those has a cell phone built in, so the farmer can call into the sprinkler system to find out what's going on and change instructions. It saves a LOT of water.
One comment I haven't seen in this discussion so far is that if you have solar or wind power and want to sell power back to the power company, you need a smart meter. As more and more people start doing that (with the encouragement of the government and the power companies), if these meters are already in place it saves everyone a bit of hassle and expense. For the power companies, conservation and cogeneration are by far the cheapest forms of 'new' electricity per KWH - as I recall from several years ago, power made available by conservation costs about 1/2 of what a new power plant costs. This is why the companies have been providing subsidies for higher efficiency appliances and in some cases no interest loans and outright grants for customers who install solar. And now some solar panels are below $1 per peak watt. Smart meters can (theoretically, anyway) help balance out all these tiny local point generating sources. Of course, solid state inverters that latch onto the local line frequency make this all possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations are, simply, organizations chartered by governments to act according to government policy. Vis. the East India Company. Their use was expanded in the 1800s to accommodate the need for organizations that rose from new technology - railroads, telegraph, etc. - to be able to attract capital from non-governmental sources (public investment) at a new large scale, and to build the administrative structure required to run national-scale business operations. Single individuals could no longer collect enough money to build such large enterprises, and could no longer manage them either. (Similar problems with administration were arising in government as well.) Thus the rise of the bureaucracy simultaneously in both commerce and government.
Without the imprimature and legislative support provided by government, corporations could literally not exist. Whether that would be a good or bad thing is an interesting question. However, corporations as presently structured are far more responsive to public opinion and government policy than their individually-owned predecessors. For example, read up on Jay Gould, John D. Rockefeller (both of whom were really participants in the transition from proprietorship to corporate structures) - or the feudal lords of the Middle Ages. the feudal lords were really the prototypes of the pre-corporate industrial company.
Frankly, we don't dare even allow Space-X or any single government to get a controlling foothold off-planet until we've evolved the necessary collective awareness and wisdom to prevent the result from reading like the plot from any one of dozens of dystopian science fiction novels. WE NEED TO OWN THAT INFRASTRUCTURE, all of us; it needs to be a co-op enterprise. The human push into space must be a SOCIAL endeavor, and by social I mean the entire human tribe, not just one splinter group of it.
No. Or at least, only in the broadest abstract sense, in which we truly already do collectively 'own' it. Imagine if the integrated circuit technology invented in the early-mid 1960s had been owned and developed collectively. We would still be running 128 K bit memory and 100 KHz processors, and disk drive capacity would be still approaching 10 Mibibytes. If (as so many of us believe) NASA in its post-Apollo structure has held back space exploration rather than advanced it, how can you propose that this, a particular expression of a collective approach, makes any sense?
No, progress has always and will always depend on individual creativity, risk taking and initiative. In fact I'm rooting for the first trillionaires, who will achieve trillionaire status by collecting $100 billion in investment and using it to exploiting the literally unlimited resources available to a space-faring civilization. They are the ones who will pull this off, risking their own and their investors' futures and their participants (employees etc.)) lives. Excellent examples - Elon Musk, Mark Shuttleworth, Jeff Bezos, Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow.
Do not forget for one minute that there is no technical difference (other than the pre-existing legal basis for shooting the opposition without repercussion) between a government and a corporation. The plain fact is that space is big - really big, and communications and transport are relatively slow compared to the distances. So it is inevitable that any future spacefaring civilization will be segmented and diversified, analogously to the world in the era of sailing ships when it could take months or years to get from Europe to China.
Whether the management of the various elements of a spacefaring civilization - planetary, asteroidal or orbital communities - are governments or companies is a rather unimportant distinction - in the end, both will act similarly to protect their interests. (A 'company' was, originally, a group of people who establish a contractual agreement to work in common - in some cases under a government or military regime, in others under a profit-making regime. But all 'companies' must make a 'profit' - acquire more resources than are spent - else they die.) Let the legal structure be developed and firmly established on the basis of a common understanding of the rights and responsibilities of humans, to prevent and minimize the impact of internal and inter-agency conflict and preserve human and other rights, and work very hard to establish a permanent philosophy and practice of ethical interactions, and there is a chance that most (not all) conflicts between groups will be restricted to activities within that broad legal basis. For example, there have been almost no significant deadly conflicts between the various states of the United States. California has not sent their militia to attack Oregon over water rights on the Klamath River. That is the best that you can hope for.
- sorry, "conservation of *momentum"
Think of the atmosphere as analogous to a very diffuse moon.
The real moon is also gradually slowing the rotation of the earth down, and the orbit of the earth is gradually shrinking. IANA astrophysicist but that's how I recall the whole orbital thing works. The Wikipedia article on the Moon does mention that the orbiting Moon is gradually lengthening the Earth's day - note the energy that is required to drive the tides has to come from somewhere, and loss of rotational speed is where it comes from. That's essentially the same type of drag that the atmosphere has on the Earth.
The windmills are ever so slightly increasing the amount that the atmosphere interacts with the body of the Earth, thereby increasing the absolute rotational speed of the air and reducing the relative speed compared to the surface of the Earth. Thus the rotational drag increases. So the lengthening day is where the conservation of energy comes together.
I suppose there is also a slight alteration in the thermal equation, since mechanical energy is being converted to electrical energy, so the waste heat is radiated at a different frequency spectrum than the air by itself - but this is way past my ability to determine effect. Does this radiated energy escape the Earth more, or less than from the undisturbed air? Is the air temperature raised or lowered? The mind starts to boggle. But this has to be tiny even in relation to the above in any case.
Just to throw another thought on the pile - when we build thousands of 'clean' Thorium or Fusion power plants to power our all-electric civilization, at what point will the waste heat being released (on the order of 1/2 or more of the total energy produced in a thermal power plant is waste heat, and all of the electrical energy being used is eventually released as heat) become itself a factor in climate change? In 500 years or less, I can assume that will be a major enviro-political topic - maybe sooner. There's no free lunch.
I just saw one more bit at the end of today (Friday)'s WSJ - AT&T have also "agreed to give T-Mobile a roaming agreement that would allow the smaller carrier to use its network" (quote from the paper edition, don't know if it's online). The paper goes on to say that this was not mentioned in the AT&T statement.
I think that may be a huge boon for T-Mobile. That could help TM with its biggest problem, lack of coverage. It appears to me that TM gets everything they wanted/needed without having to actually merge. Deutsche Telecom cut a very good deal!
I'm thinking more like 500 or 1000, or 10,000 years. :) Who knows? In 1000 years we may have bred our sentient canine and dolphin successors - not necessarily my preference, but who am I to dictate the future? I don't even know what I'm having for lunch.
When I worked at CMU in the early 1990s their marketing department wanted to drop the word 'University' from their logo. That was vetoed. But 1/2 of the faculty did not teach and only did research, and most of the research was applied research. So yes, in many ways it was more analogous to a diversified corporate research lab company than a classical university (IMHO).
I tend to be a long-term optimist. Humans don't always (or even often) make the right decision right off. But IMHO societies are bottom-up decision systems, just like ecosystems, evolutionary systems, and neural networks - living systems in general (AKA 'complex adaptive systems'). The secret of all such systems is basically 'muddling through', always slowly converging toward the optimal energy /minimum error given the environment of the system. One of the characteristics of such systems is that no individual component is likely to make the 'right' decision at any given moment. In fact no individual component (at any scale) is even likely to be able to see more than a very limited subset of the system. For example, how much does a mosquito know about the swamp? But the mosquito transports nitrogen from big animals down to the micro level, and helps to fertilize the swamp that grows the fish that the bear lives on.
So, humans will continue to screw up, and destroy, and build, and die, and live. And something that none of us will recognize will come out of this and eventually reach the stars. Humans may transform this planet into something that no grizzly bear would appreciate, but in the process will take life to other planets, where grizzly bears may yet live again in freedom that lasts beyond the life of this planet.
I remember CompUSA - I bought a laptop for a company I was involved wit, on a company account. They were incompetent at the time, but then so was the company. AFAIK the company never did pay CompUSA for the laptop.
I'd have to do some actual work to figure it out, but i wouldn't be surprised if it was close to that - per customer, not per line. The easiest way would be to take whatever number you can find for their gross sales for the cellular business, divide by the number of customers, and then take 20% or whatever they publish as their gross profits times the amount per customer.
I'm sure the average customer has more than one line, business customers have many lines and often pay prices at the high end. In my case I have three - two data lines, one smartphone (partly for historical reasons and pure laziness on my part), and I don't even have a family. I don't have cable at this time so all my data is going via cellular. I'm sending this from my laptop on a 4G modem - not my phone). But I did make the $500 up. The $250 cost of a new customer is from real data I've seen on the web. A company that is paying that much for each new customer is going to want to make that back in under a year (10 months is a pretty typical target), so that's $25 per month. So maybe $250 per year would be better.
:D
It's fairly common in big mergers that take a long time for the preliminary contract to include an opt-out fee, so if either one backs out they pay the other some fee. It does take a lot of money, concentration and time to execute big mergers, and as noted above it also affects customers and employees - oftentimes the best employees bail out.
Those customers are worth between $250 (the costs cell companies are now paying to acquire each new customer) and $500 (a reasonable one-year follow-on profit per customer) each to another provider - but none of the Big Three can now touch T-Mobile. So it's going to be a new entrant. T-Mobile is an excellent way to buy into the US market for someone with the balls and the resources to do it.
If they had another few $billion they could build out their network as the best nationwide 4G, and expand their customer base with ridiculous incentives. (Just for instance, imagine a network so good that they could support their entire customer base with full-time streaming, 24 hours, no limits. Overkill? I don't know. It's just an example.) If they can manage to do all that, and grow fast but not so fast that they lose the great customer service that they used to have (and I hope they still have - I had to leave T-Mobile several years ago for work reasons), they could be a major player.
I'm guessing Carlos Slim, or that guy that owns most of the cell providers in Africa. Or the one in Brazil... Someone with both cash AND an entrepreneurial spirit that can recognize and take advantage of the potential. 4G does provide an opening as everyone has to build out. Realize that T-Mobile started out as a mundane customer-owned power utility in Idaho, had a short and unfortunate stint as a national fiber optics long-haul provider, then morphed again into the cell business. It has come a long way through many perils to get where it is. And AFAIK they still have the nicest customer service folks of any US provider.
Great. Now can you please send my the sandpaper to get that image off my eyes... :P
I just heard that solar has recently passed below the magic $1 per peak watt that has long been considered the point where it was really cost effective on a large scale.
I just commented on the parent, but just so you know, there are at least two such systems in operation in the US. I forget where ... They use excess power (night time?) to pump water up to a lake, then use that water to generate power during peak demand.
It's been done. I forget where, but here in the US there are at least two such systems used by power companies. They use excess power to pump the water to higher elevation lakes (such as the middle of the night), and use that water to generate electricity during peak periods (3PM on a hot day). It does require everything to be in the right places.
I neglected to mention that the greenhouse roofs could also be constructed as solar stills, also synergistically generating one resource (irrigation water) while reducing the total heat influx on the greenhouse interiors.
About 10 years ago I did an analysis of the economics and related topics on a hypothetical large-scale solar project in the northern Sahara. It wasn't specific to Libya but today Libya is a good potential platform. If you build a 100- or 200-square mile solar farm, putting the solar panels about 20 feet or more above the ground (higher is better due to better breeze), two of the beneficial side effects are cooling the space underneath, and (closely related) shade. If you think about it, in that area shade is a significant resource!
This solar installation then provides a large area where greenhouses can be built, shaded (between 70% and 95%) by the solar panels, and partly roofed so it's relatively cheaper to complete the enclosure. this not only provides power but also creates a huge plant-growing area. The result - Libya could become the produce capital of the Mediterranean. Some of the power could be used to provide desalinization, and the greenhouses would minimize water loss so the impact on the Mediterranean could be minimized. So Libya can export power AND food, and hire thousands of farm workers to work in long term, skilled jobs, without any need for migration so they will have a stake in improving where they live. This is a very synergistic approach so the total cost of the system does not have to be amortized purely with power sales. And it could be expanded across hundreds or thousands of square miles of rock and sand.
The analysis also showed that such a large installation would have a significant effect on the weather patterns, increasing local rainfall similarly to how a forest tends to increase rainfall, thereby to some extent ameliorating the present tendency of the Sahara to expand itself. It's a very complicated system, and I did not do the detailed computer analysis necessary to really prove this hypothesis out, but it's certainly one worth exploring.
When I worked in a research lab, another methodology used was to use this year's funding to pay for the research for which funding had not been requested yet, to assure that the results of THAT were likely to be confirmed. Then, once they were pretty confident that the research would pan out, they could apply for the grant to do the research. This way they always had successful research, and a continuous stream of grants. The continuously successful labs all worked this way to my knowledge. If they applied for a grant to do 'X', you could be 90% sure that they had already proved that 'X' would work, and probably had already been done. This might have been less true for 'pure' research as opposed to applied research.
Of course at the big Uni's the Uni took 50% to 60% off the top to cover operational expenses, so every grant application had to include a justification for double the amount of money actually needed (since the grants rarely paid for operational expenses), hidden in the cost structure.
And you thought corporations and government agencies were the only ones doing shenanigans. Ask anyone who is likely to know at Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc.
Hmm. I think that wind energy is in part derived as drag on the rotation of the Earth - the atmosphere is being dragged around the Earth along with the hard part of the planet, but since it is farther from the center or rotation it wants to move a bit slower (just as artificial satellites have slower rotation rates as their elevation increases). That explains why the net wind is from east to west. Of course a bunch of related effects related to sherical shape, coriolis force, thermal gradients in both elevation and latitude, etc. cause winds at different latitudes and elevations to go in different directions. So windmills are ever so slightly making the day longer.
Well, in all fairness, that's a binary order of magnitude. :)
- I know, that's weak. But this is slashdot.
Other orders of magnitude may be calculated using bases other than 10. The ancient Greeks ranked the nighttime brightness of celestial bodies by 6 levels in which each level was the fifth root of one hundred (about 2.512) as bright as the nearest weaker level of brightness, so that the brightest level is 5 orders of magnitude brighter than the weakest, which can also be stated as a factor of 100 times brighter.
- Order of Magnitude
And see, now you know how star magnitude is computed! :D
Interestingly, where I used to live out in farm country most of the farms have the big circular irrigation systems. Each of those has a cell phone built in, so the farmer can call into the sprinkler system to find out what's going on and change instructions. It saves a LOT of water.
One comment I haven't seen in this discussion so far is that if you have solar or wind power and want to sell power back to the power company, you need a smart meter. As more and more people start doing that (with the encouragement of the government and the power companies), if these meters are already in place it saves everyone a bit of hassle and expense. For the power companies, conservation and cogeneration are by far the cheapest forms of 'new' electricity per KWH - as I recall from several years ago, power made available by conservation costs about 1/2 of what a new power plant costs. This is why the companies have been providing subsidies for higher efficiency appliances and in some cases no interest loans and outright grants for customers who install solar. And now some solar panels are below $1 per peak watt. Smart meters can (theoretically, anyway) help balance out all these tiny local point generating sources. Of course, solid state inverters that latch onto the local line frequency make this all possible.