10 years is too short. Look at all the aggravation of moving a few TV channels around.
What aggravation? I would imagine most TV channels would bid higher for their existing channel to avoid the cost of switching, while a new channel or service would buy whatever's cheapest: as a result, there wouldn't be any "channel churn": the poorest old station would be replaced by a newcomer, and everyone else would continue as usual.
And while I'm no expert on TV technology, I strongly suspect that most VHF broadcast channels could switch to another VHF channel with the push of a button. (UHF might require a new antenna and equipment.)
And finally, this whole idea of fixed channels at fixed frequencies is a 20th-century legacy. In the 21st, all we care about is bandwidth, the rest is a software problem. Here's what you do: the would FCC broadcast a frequency map on a dedicated band. Yesterday, "Channel 4" was at 66 Mhz, but today it's at 82 Mhz. You don't care, you just hit the "4" on your remote control, and your TV's firmware uses the frequency map to figure out the rest.
I'm one of those pinko liberal democrats. But where electromagnetic spectrum is concerned, I'm as mercenary as they come.
If car makers want spectrum, they can buy it just like everybody else. The FCC should put the entire radio spectrum up for sale to the highest bidder on a rotating 10-year cycle, nothing exempt except for a few bands set aside for emergency services, military, and scientific use.
FM radio, TV, taxicabs, ham radio, I don't care: if you want exclusive use of a slice of spectrum, you form a coalition of like-minded people willing to pay for it. If somebody else wants to pay more, go find a better business model.
4) Producing electricity far away from where it is used is inefficient since transporting electricity is quite inefficient.
If you had to take a guess, how efficient would you say the U.S. power grid is? If you send 100 kilowatt-hours in at the power plant, how much reaches the consumers, hundreds or thousands of miles away?
Would you believe 94%?
The modern power grid is one of the most efficient machines ever invented. You can thank Tesla and Westinghouse for that.
Y'know, I think a lot of American CEOs would be a lot more supportive of "big government" if we had a government agency that provided free industrial espionage services.
Actually, for meteorites this size, there is a pretty good defense. You just surround your planet with a 100-km-thick layer of gas, which will slow down and vaporize the meteorite before it hits the ground. Somebody should get on this ASAP.
You've got it all backwards. You invest in *finding* the threats first; then, if you find a threat, you pay for the defense. Otherwise you've spent a lot of money on a weapon that you have no idea how to aim, that might not have any targets worth shooting at, and which might be misused in the wrong hands.
And yes, we are spending money to search for near-earth asteroids. ( http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/neowise/pia14734.html [nasa.gov] ) And as I said upthread, we've found almost all of the ones which could be species-enders and ruled them out. Now we're hunting down at the level of city-killers. There are still threats out there, but not existential ones that justify a zillion-dollar gun more likely to be abused than used.
Actually there have been quite a few. The largest death reported death toll was "tens of thousands" in Shanxi, China, in 1490. There's a lot of doubt about the accuracy of that number, but it's pretty likely there were mass casualties. Plenty of other more recent cases where a big rock killed handfuls of people at a time.
I don't care what tech level you're at or what you look like: there's still an m in the kinetic energy equation. Whatever your transportation goals are, they get more difficult the heavier your vehicle is.
Well how's a interceptor missile supposed to know the difference?
Velocity. An ICBM arrives at about 5-7 km/s. An asteroid arrives at a *minimum* of 11 km/s.
why should it even care?
Lots of reasons. Among them: asteroids as big as an ICBM enter Earth's atmosphere several times a year. If you tried to shoot them all down, you'd run out of missiles and money pretty quick. Also, if there's a miscommunication between someone's space program and someone's missile defense program, you end up killing a lot of astronauts.
In practice, any radar that can detect an incoming ICBM comes with enough computer power to instantaneously compute an orbital trajectory for it, and see immediately whether it's an asteroid, a spacecraft, or a suborbital missile.
Definitely too small to be noticed or tracked, but it was bigger than a loaf of bread. The 2003 Chicago meteorite was about that size, and while it lit up the night sky like nobody's business, there was no significant shock wave. I'm going to guess this one was about 1-10 meters across based on its effects.
We see posts about twice a year talking about the next "near miss" we're going to have. So what happened with this one? Didn't they catch it? Or did they catch it, realize it was going to hit, and decide not to tell anybody? It
We don't spot 'em all. We've got several active asteroid search programs going, which have discovered thousands of near-earth asteroids, but there are many thousands more. One of the triumphs of 21st-century science is that we now know where almost all of the "end of the world" and "destroy a large country" km-sized near-earth asteroids are. But we think we've only found about half of the "annihilate a city" 300-m sized ones, and most of the mere "hydrogen-bomb" 100-m sized ones remain unknown. This meteor was *much* smaller than that -- I'd guess only a couple meters across. There are probably *millions* of those out there, and they're too small to see at all unless they make a close pass of the EArth.
I don't think there's much danger of most European police forces involved in a "hot pursuit" crossing the border into the UK.
In my experience, most cases of "hot pursuit" involve a big jump-ramp over a body of water, but that's because I've been watching too many old episodes of Dukes of Hazzard.
But if the card is out of range the engine should stop so chuck it out the window.
Nope. My Prius has a similar key. If the key leaves the car while it's on, the car continues to run until you turn it off, and then it won't start up again until the key returns. Yes, I've tested this.
This is a deliberate safety design: you don't want to lose acceleration and power steering on a highway just because your kid decided to chuck the keys out the window. The threat of getting carjacked is minor in comparison.
I have a Prius, one of the most computer-controlled cars on the planet. Accelerator-by-wire, traction control, electric power steering, regenerative braking, if any car was going to crash due to a computer failure it'd be this one.
It has physical hydraulic brakes to back up the regenerative braking. It has a mechanical emergency brake. It has a "neutral" position on its shifting lever. It has a power button, and mechanical steering that continues to work when the car is turned off. That's four different ways to stop the thing.
The "computerized cars will kill us all" thing is just Luddite paranoia. Automotive engineers are not complete idiots.
If you can't disengage the engine by either putting the gearshift into neutral or depressing the clutch pedal, you're not actually driving a manual transmission.
Says you. I say different. But the point is that while you and I could have a long, interesting debate about the future of renewable energy, the author is using misdirection to dodge that debate entirely.
This is a classic case of weighting down an opponent's thesis with extra assumptions, and then using those assumptions to shoot it down.
The basic question is, "is it possible to meet the world's current energy needs using renewables?" The question the author is answering is, "is it possible to to meet the world's energy needs using renewables, assuming continued exponential growth forever?"
The answer to the second question is obviously "no", unless you're an economist. But the author only attacks the "exponential growth forever" idea, and says nothing about the first question, which is far more interesting.
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What aggravation? I would imagine most TV channels would bid higher for their existing channel to avoid the cost of switching, while a new channel or service would buy whatever's cheapest: as a result, there wouldn't be any "channel churn": the poorest old station would be replaced by a newcomer, and everyone else would continue as usual.
And while I'm no expert on TV technology, I strongly suspect that most VHF broadcast channels could switch to another VHF channel with the push of a button. (UHF might require a new antenna and equipment.)
And finally, this whole idea of fixed channels at fixed frequencies is a 20th-century legacy. In the 21st, all we care about is bandwidth, the rest is a software problem. Here's what you do: the would FCC broadcast a frequency map on a dedicated band. Yesterday, "Channel 4" was at 66 Mhz, but today it's at 82 Mhz. You don't care, you just hit the "4" on your remote control, and your TV's firmware uses the frequency map to figure out the rest.
I'm one of those pinko liberal democrats. But where electromagnetic spectrum is concerned, I'm as mercenary as they come.
If car makers want spectrum, they can buy it just like everybody else. The FCC should put the entire radio spectrum up for sale to the highest bidder on a rotating 10-year cycle, nothing exempt except for a few bands set aside for emergency services, military, and scientific use.
FM radio, TV, taxicabs, ham radio, I don't care: if you want exclusive use of a slice of spectrum, you form a coalition of like-minded people willing to pay for it. If somebody else wants to pay more, go find a better business model.
The loss is almost negligible (about 6% for the U.S. electrical distribution system.)
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm
If you had to take a guess, how efficient would you say the U.S. power grid is? If you send 100 kilowatt-hours in at the power plant, how much reaches the consumers, hundreds or thousands of miles away?
Would you believe 94%?
The modern power grid is one of the most efficient machines ever invented. You can thank Tesla and Westinghouse for that.
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm
This thread is one gigantic breeding ground for the No True Scotsman fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
You're confusing "inbound" and "outbound".
Y'know, I think a lot of American CEOs would be a lot more supportive of "big government" if we had a government agency that provided free industrial espionage services.
Actually, for meteorites this size, there is a pretty good defense. You just surround your planet with a 100-km-thick layer of gas, which will slow down and vaporize the meteorite before it hits the ground. Somebody should get on this ASAP.
You've got it all backwards. You invest in *finding* the threats first; then, if you find a threat, you pay for the defense. Otherwise you've spent a lot of money on a weapon that you have no idea how to aim, that might not have any targets worth shooting at, and which might be misused in the wrong hands.
And yes, we are spending money to search for near-earth asteroids. ( http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/neowise/pia14734.html [nasa.gov] ) And as I said upthread, we've found almost all of the ones which could be species-enders and ruled them out. Now we're hunting down at the level of city-killers. There are still threats out there, but not existential ones that justify a zillion-dollar gun more likely to be abused than used.
So cut it with the hyperbole.
You've been playing too many video games. Learn some physics.
Actually there have been quite a few. The largest death reported death toll was "tens of thousands" in Shanxi, China, in 1490. There's a lot of doubt about the accuracy of that number, but it's pretty likely there were mass casualties. Plenty of other more recent cases where a big rock killed handfuls of people at a time.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1997JIMO...25..222G
That's Earth's escape velocity. If you fall into Earth's gravity well from outside, you'll be going at least that fast when you hit the Earth.
I don't care what tech level you're at or what you look like: there's still an m in the kinetic energy equation. Whatever your transportation goals are, they get more difficult the heavier your vehicle is.
Well how's a interceptor missile supposed to know the difference?
Velocity. An ICBM arrives at about 5-7 km/s. An asteroid arrives at a *minimum* of 11 km/s.
why should it even care?
Lots of reasons. Among them: asteroids as big as an ICBM enter Earth's atmosphere several times a year. If you tried to shoot them all down, you'd run out of missiles and money pretty quick. Also, if there's a miscommunication between someone's space program and someone's missile defense program, you end up killing a lot of astronauts.
In practice, any radar that can detect an incoming ICBM comes with enough computer power to instantaneously compute an orbital trajectory for it, and see immediately whether it's an asteroid, a spacecraft, or a suborbital missile.
Definitely too small to be noticed or tracked, but it was bigger than a loaf of bread. The 2003 Chicago meteorite was about that size, and while it lit up the night sky like nobody's business, there was no significant shock wave. I'm going to guess this one was about 1-10 meters across based on its effects.
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php?sea=Park+Forest&sfor=names&ants=&falls=&stype=contains&lrec=50&map=ge&browse=&country=All&srt=name&categ=All&mblist=All&phot=&snew=0&pnt=no&code=18106
http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/
We see posts about twice a year talking about the next "near miss" we're going to have. So what happened with this one? Didn't they catch it? Or did they catch it, realize it was going to hit, and decide not to tell anybody? It
We don't spot 'em all. We've got several active asteroid search programs going, which have discovered thousands of near-earth asteroids, but there are many thousands more. One of the triumphs of 21st-century science is that we now know where almost all of the "end of the world" and "destroy a large country" km-sized near-earth asteroids are. But we think we've only found about half of the "annihilate a city" 300-m sized ones, and most of the mere "hydrogen-bomb" 100-m sized ones remain unknown. This meteor was *much* smaller than that -- I'd guess only a couple meters across. There are probably *millions* of those out there, and they're too small to see at all unless they make a close pass of the EArth.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/neowise/pia14734.html
http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/
I don't think there's much danger of most European police forces involved in a "hot pursuit" crossing the border into the UK.
In my experience, most cases of "hot pursuit" involve a big jump-ramp over a body of water, but that's because I've been watching too many old episodes of Dukes of Hazzard.
But if the card is out of range the engine should stop so chuck it out the window.
Nope. My Prius has a similar key. If the key leaves the car while it's on, the car continues to run until you turn it off, and then it won't start up again until the key returns. Yes, I've tested this.
This is a deliberate safety design: you don't want to lose acceleration and power steering on a highway just because your kid decided to chuck the keys out the window. The threat of getting carjacked is minor in comparison.
I have a Prius, one of the most computer-controlled cars on the planet. Accelerator-by-wire, traction control, electric power steering, regenerative braking, if any car was going to crash due to a computer failure it'd be this one.
It has physical hydraulic brakes to back up the regenerative braking. It has a mechanical emergency brake. It has a "neutral" position on its shifting lever. It has a power button, and mechanical steering that continues to work when the car is turned off. That's four different ways to stop the thing.
The "computerized cars will kill us all" thing is just Luddite paranoia. Automotive engineers are not complete idiots.
If you can't disengage the engine by either putting the gearshift into neutral or depressing the clutch pedal, you're not actually driving a manual transmission.
Oh look, it's another retired general bitching about how much better things were when he led the army. File this one under W for 'Wozniak'.
You're very clever, but you're not contributing anything useful.
Take two of these and call me in the morning.
http://www.amazon.com/Thermodynamics-Dummies-Mike-Pauken/dp/1118002911
Says you. I say different. But the point is that while you and I could have a long, interesting debate about the future of renewable energy, the author is using misdirection to dodge that debate entirely.
This is a classic case of weighting down an opponent's thesis with extra assumptions, and then using those assumptions to shoot it down.
The basic question is, "is it possible to meet the world's current energy needs using renewables?"
The question the author is answering is, "is it possible to to meet the world's energy needs using renewables, assuming continued exponential growth forever?"
The answer to the second question is obviously "no", unless you're an economist. But the author only attacks the "exponential growth forever" idea, and says nothing about the first question, which is far more interesting.