Sci-fi is decidedly not prior art in patents. I can imagine a device for instantaneous teleportation, but that wouldn't invalidate a patent for such a device, since patents (are supposed to) cover actual inventions, not just an idea for something, which is all sci-fi is. So unless your science fiction comes with detailed drawings and working descriptions detailed enough to actually build the device in question (in which case it isn't fiction), it cannot serve as prior art.
"Although Microsoft's stipulations require also that x86/x64 systems provide an option to disable Secure Boot"
MS has to allow people to install other OSes in the x86 market. If you thought anti-trust over IE was bad, you'd love to see what happens if MS tried to lock down all computer systems with Windows installed.
They can get away with it in the ARM market because MS is ~1% or less of the market in that space, so they have absolutely zero monopoly power there.
"Tens of metres" is not exactly very precise, and it makes rather a large difference in precision if this is 20 metres or 99 metres: the first is annoying, the second might severely impair your ability to navigate, although I'd question that a bit. I mean, line of sight usually works, and in storms when it doesn't you really shouldn't be navigating close enough to the ground or a potential collision that even 100 metres off would be a dangerous problem, so am I missing something or is not that big an issue? Annoying, yes, and I can see the issue in S&R (gets a lot colder than the -20 mentioned in TFA that close to the poles, hell it gets colder than that here sometimes), but is there any highly important usage case where it would be an extremely detrimental problem?
I'm also a bit curious why they don't just use DGPS anyways, since that exists and it seems like it would solve the problem quite nicely. Added bonus that it helps even when there isn't a solar storm, and it's even more accurate than regular GPS.
I'll be playing Logical Fallacy Bingo against my friends. I personally expect it to be a fast bingo game.
I just feel I should point out that simply because someone is using a fallacy, doesn't make them wrong (the fact they are politicians does that... but I digress). Fallacies are commonly used rhetorical methods to convince... lets say, more emotional audiences... and practically nothing gets people more emotional than politics (religion can be more heated, but not nearly as commonly). Which is not to say it is acceptable to use them, just, well, using them shouldn't be taken as proof against the position espoused by the person who uses them (doing that is, in itself, a fallacy, though I don't care to look up the name... guilt by association? Close enough).
Given the distance involved (200 feet or so) I doubt that effect will be present in aircraft "vortex surfing". I think the physics involved are quite a bit different from drafting in a car, but that is really just a guess.
If it leads to vendor GPU drivers being developed in the open then I'm in!
Why were you upset again?
...because it won't, and never will, and because this is the Linux community attempting to force Nvidia to develop open-source drivers, which is just about the exact opposite of freedom. Or at least, that is what it looks like to me (hard to say, since IANAL nor do I work on the Linux kernel), and therefore is what it will look like to a lot of people. And it's why graphics on Linux sucks, forcing people to use Windows instead.
Linux's greatest enemy is quite often itself. Which is fine, if you only ever want to use it on a server... but if you want it to be a serious competitor to Windows, it won't be. Ever. There will never be a "year of Linux on the desktop", not so long as these kinds of restrictions exist.
go fuck yourself, seriously, there is no typical obama supporter you twit, just like there is no typical romney support. But your a typical douchebag, so there is that.
Well, at least he's behaving better than you (or are you the same person trying to be funny?), not that that is saying much.
Simply because the word "library" doesn't appear doesn't mean it isn't about them. Hathicourt (i.e. the defendant) is an online digital library which is the result of a collaborative of dozens of research libraries, such as the Universities of Michigan, California, Washington, et. alia., universities often having the biggest and best libraries in existence (and the most interested in preserving and accessing them).
Some things are KNOWN to have no dependence either observed or possible, and people like you should shut the fuck up instead of talking about them.
So... genetics is known to have no influence on behavior? I'd definitely like to see that research. Or by "known" do you mean "not actually known but held by people so they appear not to be racist"? On the contrary, I can say that it very much is known that genetics will have an influence on behavior. People born with more testosterone will be more aggressive, people with dopamine dysfunctions tend to have certain psychoses, etc., and such things can be cause by genetic traits. Now, whether those traits can be abstract to an entire race or even large group of people, I don't know, and I rather doubt (even a "pure" race has enough genetic diversity that such traits are unlikely to be observable over the noise of normal human behavioral variation). But genetics itself will very much (and provably) have an influence on behavior.
That's impossible. Immigration is the only cause of genetic diversity in humans.
No, it isn't. War, for example, is traditionally a huge cause of genetic diversity (after conquering a place, soldiers would often... well, rape the local women, to be frank, and even in a less-extreme scenario often slept with the more willing local women as they traveled). There is a reason there were often massive population booms after an invading army swept through a country. Any traveler has a possibility of spreading diversity, even if they aren't immigrating, and genes will spread across borders slowly over time even if the population remains relatively stationary.
They need one rendering unit for every player. They need to pay for bandwidth and energy to run all these units, plus people to maintain them. They need to stay upgraded, generously, every year or two, to play the latest stuff. That's quite a bit of money to support a single user paying $120/year.
They only need on renderer per player at any given time. So if most of their players play for, say, 2 hours a day, they can theoretically get ($120/year)*12, or $1,440 a year/render unit, which is... possibly economical. The problem, obviously, is that they need extra capacity for peak hours, plus bandwidth costs, plus tons of data centers to minimize latency, all of which results in massive overhead. Plus it only works if users have moderately beefy connections, and anyone who does is likely to have their own gaming machine of some kind. Maybe if they had partnered with a game studio to produce some smash-hit exclusive, they could have pulled it off, but the Internet and computers aren't quite fast enough for what they wanted to do, not yet anyways.
They never will, it'd cause way to much embarrassment. Oh, that company page you put up has 2 million dislikes? Oops, looks like a Facebook page was a bad idea. Yeah no, Facebook wouldn't do that to their bottom line. Interesting as it would be to see if you could "Dislike" Facebook itself...
That 800 is just 6.5% of the Internet radio streaming. That means the total Internet streaming business is over 15 times larger than that, which (assuming there is no overlap, which is of course quite false, but for the sake of argument) means there are 12,000 people making more than $50k.... which is actually a thriving industry. Now I have no way of knowing what the actual numbers are, but that represents a single source of income. Any musician will tell you that the vast majority of their income is made by live shows (except for the very very very top percentages of musicians who have 10+ million albums sold, perhaps, and even they probably make more money off shows). CD sales earn most musicians pennies on the dollar, sometimes even putting them into debt if the album doesn't sell very well. That isn't a joke, BTW, depending on the deal the record studio may actually charge the musicians for the cost of recording and advertising the album, which is very often more than the album makes. They basically make the album as an ad for the live shows.
Take a close look at the 2 images. The CGI doesn't match the finger position.
And it doesn't have to, either. It's actually probably better that it doesn't: you want the matches to be close enough to the correct gesture, rather than the exact gesture itself, as exact matching would create endless frustration for the user. Rough matching, OTOH, if done decently well, is vastly easier to use. That's why speech recognition is so hard for computers: because humans don't pronounce the same word the exact same way every time (well, that and some words sound identical).
And also dead, because most of them would end up ripped to shreds by predators, who would flourish if cows and other herd animals were allowed to roam free.
The "Westboro Baptist Church" style of marketing? You're actually probably a lot more right than you know. Groups like this stay relevant by generating ever more insane news clips. Oh sure, they probably believe (most of them, anyways) their basic message, but they do and say the really stupid stuff like this because it gets them noticed. And they thrive on attention. They're like children throwing temper tantrums (probably with the same level of maturity). The absolute worst thing you can do to them, and the best thing you can do for society, is to studiously ignore them. It might get worse for a while, but it will be vastly better once they learn that saying things like this won't get them noticed.
Of course, I live in a country where the Kardashians are popular, so that'll never happen.
No, but it is an important one, if you want to get on-target quickly. The point of the SR-71 was it could get much higher detail than a satellite more reliably and very quickly. Turns out that wasn't as important as the cost (and new missile system made it a bit less practical). There are still plenty of reasons to develop high-speed aircraft, from surveillance to first strike ability, which is why they are doing so, right now, with the X-51.
Also, it's need a tail like a helicopter and for exactly the same reason.
Or two counter-rotating discs, like a multi-rotor helicopter. Double advantage is you can rotate extremely quickly simply by slowing one of the discs a bit (assuming the humans inside don't mind).
Helicopters are usually extremely loud and, most importantly, simply unable to fly faster than 300mph or so: any faster and the supersonic shockwaves from the rotors tips (keep in mind those are traveling at helicopter speed + rotational velocity) destroys it's ability to fly. This could go much, much faster, as fast as you want, and probably be a fair bit more maneuverable.
They thought the same about flying wing designs in the 1950s. Indeed, they never did get the design to work right at the time. Turns out, the US Air Force did, eventually.
While the saucer design is a challenge to make work, I'm sure if the Air Force saw some great advantage in it, they would have built it. I'm not sure what the advantage of such a craft would be, though, besides VTOL capability being standard.
Right, I was wrong about that (knew I should have looked it up). Still, when the weight is spread out over a 3-4 feet, that isn't nearly as light as it sounds. And of course you also have to carry armor and packs of food/water, which is quite heavy as well (although relying more on leg strength, which has less of a male/female disparity).
At the risk of sounding like a misogynist... is the lack of women really a bad thing in and of itself? It's certainly quite "realistic" (as much as a fantasy setting can be): in medieval cultures, women weren't adventurers or warriors, and LOTR is focused almost exclusively on adventure and fighting. And for good reason: it's a simple biological fact (source, warning that the picture at the top is full frontal male/female nudity, so probably NSFW) that men have a greater upper body strength than women, on average, and when wielding 50+ pound swords and 100+ pound draw weights on bows, upper body strength is kinda important (which is not to say women could not be fighters and archers, but the average woman would be worse at it than the average man: obviously, some women are far stronger than most men).
There is also the fact that LOTR isn't concerned with gender inequality: it's simply not one of the themes of the book, so if you expect it to deal with it, you will obviously be disappointed. I'd say that isn't even the point of the genre, as a whole. It's like expecting sci-fi to explore what it's like to be a single person living in New York city: it's kind of missing the point. Gender equality is an issue in our day-to-day world. Writing fantasy to explore the issue, while possible, is a bit underwhelming. The point of fantasy is it can explore grand themes of the struggle between good and evil and power/corruption in a way no book set in everday life ever could. OTOH, a book set in everday life can explore the issues of gender inequality in a way that fantasy can't, because fantasy is by definition disconnected from the real world, so exploring real-world issues using fantasy will create some issues in the translation.
Mind you, I'm not saying you should write a book to specifically exclude women or paint them in a bad light, that would be misogynistic. But simply ignoring the issue isn't a problem, IMO, if you don't mean to be dealing with it.
So his network started taking 5 steps to get out of country instead of 2, and that means he was being spied upon? I mean, sure, it's possible, but it doesn't even make sense. If they can re-direct his traffic, why not just copy it, either at one of the jumps or send a second copy to someone else? Unless you need to be able to cut off the communication (which you can't really do in 180ms anyways, unless it is automated, in which case you can do it without the jumps anyways), there isn't any reason to send it through a longer path.
Much much more likely is that it was a routing problem. You know, the kind of thing that happens all the time. But since it involves Dotcom, of course it must have been spying. Right.
Man up. What do you think coal, oil, natural gas etc power plants do now? Do you even remember the massive power outage that affected a large portion of the United States a few years ago? Enough solar energy hits the earth in an hour to fill all our electrical requirements for a year. The only problem would be getting that energy to where people need it. Stop your whining about how hard things are. People could setup individual panels at their homes to reduce load on the grid, and plants can be setup in various locations as well. If one location is cloudy, guess what? Another one probably isn't!
Guess what? That means you need to build twice as many panels/wind generators as you nominally need (at least). That increases the cost 2x, plus of course the cost of a robust power grid to transmit the power. Again, not quite so easy in a part of the world near tornado alley, where power loss is already moderately common... and where loosing power in the winter means people can start dying.
If everyone starts using electric cars, that represents a massive increase in demand. According to this [PDF WARNING] report, ~28% of US energy demand is in transportation, which means our demand for electrical power will go up significantly (30-40% is probably a decent estimation). If you double production costs and increase demand, combined with the vastly increased cost of electric cars (themselves hardly environmentally friendly to make. Side note: the Prius is supposedly worse for the environment than a normal gas-powered car because of the costs of building the batteries and motors) and suddenly you are looking at transport costs 2-3 times greater than they are now. Good luck getting that to happen, considering people already complain about the high costs of gas (which already has significant economical impact).
My point with hydroelectrical was it doesn't scale. If you try to make it scale, you run out of land for people to live and farm, and your entire cost of living goes up considerably. My entire point is that while green energy sounds nice, it is nowhere near practical yet, and won't be for years yet. Electric generation and storage is simply not good enough yet, and that is ignoring the fact that green power sources rarely are as green as they seem (like the Prius mentioned earlier: they always have environmental costs people don't like to talk about). Such as, for example, the fact that magnets used in electric motors requires rare earths, which have massive pollution by-products. I'm speaking realistically here when I say the only green technology we have, right now, that could fill our electric needs not only practically but cost-efficiently is nuclear.
Doesn't matter how much energy is hitting the planet from the sun, we simply cannot collect it effectively. Even an efficient solar panel is only 15% or so efficient. And expensive. And unreliable.
Slashdot Mirror
Sci-fi is decidedly not prior art in patents. I can imagine a device for instantaneous teleportation, but that wouldn't invalidate a patent for such a device, since patents (are supposed to) cover actual inventions, not just an idea for something, which is all sci-fi is. So unless your science fiction comes with detailed drawings and working descriptions detailed enough to actually build the device in question (in which case it isn't fiction), it cannot serve as prior art.
"Although Microsoft's stipulations require also that x86/x64 systems provide an option to disable Secure Boot"
MS has to allow people to install other OSes in the x86 market. If you thought anti-trust over IE was bad, you'd love to see what happens if MS tried to lock down all computer systems with Windows installed.
They can get away with it in the ARM market because MS is ~1% or less of the market in that space, so they have absolutely zero monopoly power there.
"Tens of metres" is not exactly very precise, and it makes rather a large difference in precision if this is 20 metres or 99 metres: the first is annoying, the second might severely impair your ability to navigate, although I'd question that a bit. I mean, line of sight usually works, and in storms when it doesn't you really shouldn't be navigating close enough to the ground or a potential collision that even 100 metres off would be a dangerous problem, so am I missing something or is not that big an issue? Annoying, yes, and I can see the issue in S&R (gets a lot colder than the -20 mentioned in TFA that close to the poles, hell it gets colder than that here sometimes), but is there any highly important usage case where it would be an extremely detrimental problem?
I'm also a bit curious why they don't just use DGPS anyways, since that exists and it seems like it would solve the problem quite nicely. Added bonus that it helps even when there isn't a solar storm, and it's even more accurate than regular GPS.
I'll be playing Logical Fallacy Bingo against my friends. I personally expect it to be a fast bingo game.
I just feel I should point out that simply because someone is using a fallacy, doesn't make them wrong (the fact they are politicians does that... but I digress). Fallacies are commonly used rhetorical methods to convince... lets say, more emotional audiences... and practically nothing gets people more emotional than politics (religion can be more heated, but not nearly as commonly). Which is not to say it is acceptable to use them, just, well, using them shouldn't be taken as proof against the position espoused by the person who uses them (doing that is, in itself, a fallacy, though I don't care to look up the name... guilt by association? Close enough).
Given the distance involved (200 feet or so) I doubt that effect will be present in aircraft "vortex surfing". I think the physics involved are quite a bit different from drafting in a car, but that is really just a guess.
If it leads to vendor GPU drivers being developed in the open then I'm in!
Why were you upset again?
...because it won't, and never will, and because this is the Linux community attempting to force Nvidia to develop open-source drivers, which is just about the exact opposite of freedom. Or at least, that is what it looks like to me (hard to say, since IANAL nor do I work on the Linux kernel), and therefore is what it will look like to a lot of people. And it's why graphics on Linux sucks, forcing people to use Windows instead.
Linux's greatest enemy is quite often itself. Which is fine, if you only ever want to use it on a server... but if you want it to be a serious competitor to Windows, it won't be. Ever. There will never be a "year of Linux on the desktop", not so long as these kinds of restrictions exist.
go fuck yourself, seriously, there is no typical obama supporter you twit, just like there is no typical romney support. But your a typical douchebag, so there is that.
Well, at least he's behaving better than you (or are you the same person trying to be funny?), not that that is saying much.
Simply because the word "library" doesn't appear doesn't mean it isn't about them. Hathicourt (i.e. the defendant) is an online digital library which is the result of a collaborative of dozens of research libraries, such as the Universities of Michigan, California, Washington, et. alia., universities often having the biggest and best libraries in existence (and the most interested in preserving and accessing them).
Some things are KNOWN to have no dependence either observed or possible, and people like you should shut the fuck up instead of talking about them.
So... genetics is known to have no influence on behavior? I'd definitely like to see that research. Or by "known" do you mean "not actually known but held by people so they appear not to be racist"? On the contrary, I can say that it very much is known that genetics will have an influence on behavior. People born with more testosterone will be more aggressive, people with dopamine dysfunctions tend to have certain psychoses, etc., and such things can be cause by genetic traits. Now, whether those traits can be abstract to an entire race or even large group of people, I don't know, and I rather doubt (even a "pure" race has enough genetic diversity that such traits are unlikely to be observable over the noise of normal human behavioral variation). But genetics itself will very much (and provably) have an influence on behavior.
That's impossible. Immigration is the only cause of genetic diversity in humans.
No, it isn't. War, for example, is traditionally a huge cause of genetic diversity (after conquering a place, soldiers would often... well, rape the local women, to be frank, and even in a less-extreme scenario often slept with the more willing local women as they traveled). There is a reason there were often massive population booms after an invading army swept through a country. Any traveler has a possibility of spreading diversity, even if they aren't immigrating, and genes will spread across borders slowly over time even if the population remains relatively stationary.
They need one rendering unit for every player. They need to pay for bandwidth and energy to run all these units, plus people to maintain them. They need to stay upgraded, generously, every year or two, to play the latest stuff. That's quite a bit of money to support a single user paying $120/year.
They only need on renderer per player at any given time. So if most of their players play for, say, 2 hours a day, they can theoretically get ($120/year)*12, or $1,440 a year/render unit, which is... possibly economical. The problem, obviously, is that they need extra capacity for peak hours, plus bandwidth costs, plus tons of data centers to minimize latency, all of which results in massive overhead. Plus it only works if users have moderately beefy connections, and anyone who does is likely to have their own gaming machine of some kind. Maybe if they had partnered with a game studio to produce some smash-hit exclusive, they could have pulled it off, but the Internet and computers aren't quite fast enough for what they wanted to do, not yet anyways.
They never will, it'd cause way to much embarrassment. Oh, that company page you put up has 2 million dislikes? Oops, looks like a Facebook page was a bad idea. Yeah no, Facebook wouldn't do that to their bottom line. Interesting as it would be to see if you could "Dislike" Facebook itself...
That 800 is just 6.5% of the Internet radio streaming. That means the total Internet streaming business is over 15 times larger than that, which (assuming there is no overlap, which is of course quite false, but for the sake of argument) means there are 12,000 people making more than $50k.... which is actually a thriving industry. Now I have no way of knowing what the actual numbers are, but that represents a single source of income. Any musician will tell you that the vast majority of their income is made by live shows (except for the very very very top percentages of musicians who have 10+ million albums sold, perhaps, and even they probably make more money off shows). CD sales earn most musicians pennies on the dollar, sometimes even putting them into debt if the album doesn't sell very well. That isn't a joke, BTW, depending on the deal the record studio may actually charge the musicians for the cost of recording and advertising the album, which is very often more than the album makes. They basically make the album as an ad for the live shows.
Take a close look at the 2 images. The CGI doesn't match the finger position.
And it doesn't have to, either. It's actually probably better that it doesn't: you want the matches to be close enough to the correct gesture, rather than the exact gesture itself, as exact matching would create endless frustration for the user. Rough matching, OTOH, if done decently well, is vastly easier to use. That's why speech recognition is so hard for computers: because humans don't pronounce the same word the exact same way every time (well, that and some words sound identical).
And also dead, because most of them would end up ripped to shreds by predators, who would flourish if cows and other herd animals were allowed to roam free.
The "Westboro Baptist Church" style of marketing? You're actually probably a lot more right than you know. Groups like this stay relevant by generating ever more insane news clips. Oh sure, they probably believe (most of them, anyways) their basic message, but they do and say the really stupid stuff like this because it gets them noticed. And they thrive on attention. They're like children throwing temper tantrums (probably with the same level of maturity). The absolute worst thing you can do to them, and the best thing you can do for society, is to studiously ignore them. It might get worse for a while, but it will be vastly better once they learn that saying things like this won't get them noticed.
Of course, I live in a country where the Kardashians are popular, so that'll never happen.
That is another issue, although that problem can largely be solved by using a co-axial rotor system, so it isn't an insurmountable problem.
No, but it is an important one, if you want to get on-target quickly. The point of the SR-71 was it could get much higher detail than a satellite more reliably and very quickly. Turns out that wasn't as important as the cost (and new missile system made it a bit less practical). There are still plenty of reasons to develop high-speed aircraft, from surveillance to first strike ability, which is why they are doing so, right now, with the X-51.
Also, it's need a tail like a helicopter and for exactly the same reason.
Or two counter-rotating discs, like a multi-rotor helicopter. Double advantage is you can rotate extremely quickly simply by slowing one of the discs a bit (assuming the humans inside don't mind).
Helicopters are usually extremely loud and, most importantly, simply unable to fly faster than 300mph or so: any faster and the supersonic shockwaves from the rotors tips (keep in mind those are traveling at helicopter speed + rotational velocity) destroys it's ability to fly. This could go much, much faster, as fast as you want, and probably be a fair bit more maneuverable.
.
They thought the same about flying wing designs in the 1950s. Indeed, they never did get the design to work right at the time. Turns out, the US Air Force did, eventually.
While the saucer design is a challenge to make work, I'm sure if the Air Force saw some great advantage in it, they would have built it. I'm not sure what the advantage of such a craft would be, though, besides VTOL capability being standard.
Right, I was wrong about that (knew I should have looked it up). Still, when the weight is spread out over a 3-4 feet, that isn't nearly as light as it sounds. And of course you also have to carry armor and packs of food/water, which is quite heavy as well (although relying more on leg strength, which has less of a male/female disparity).
At the risk of sounding like a misogynist... is the lack of women really a bad thing in and of itself? It's certainly quite "realistic" (as much as a fantasy setting can be): in medieval cultures, women weren't adventurers or warriors, and LOTR is focused almost exclusively on adventure and fighting. And for good reason: it's a simple biological fact (source, warning that the picture at the top is full frontal male/female nudity, so probably NSFW) that men have a greater upper body strength than women, on average, and when wielding 50+ pound swords and 100+ pound draw weights on bows, upper body strength is kinda important (which is not to say women could not be fighters and archers, but the average woman would be worse at it than the average man: obviously, some women are far stronger than most men).
There is also the fact that LOTR isn't concerned with gender inequality: it's simply not one of the themes of the book, so if you expect it to deal with it, you will obviously be disappointed. I'd say that isn't even the point of the genre, as a whole. It's like expecting sci-fi to explore what it's like to be a single person living in New York city: it's kind of missing the point. Gender equality is an issue in our day-to-day world. Writing fantasy to explore the issue, while possible, is a bit underwhelming. The point of fantasy is it can explore grand themes of the struggle between good and evil and power/corruption in a way no book set in everday life ever could. OTOH, a book set in everday life can explore the issues of gender inequality in a way that fantasy can't, because fantasy is by definition disconnected from the real world, so exploring real-world issues using fantasy will create some issues in the translation.
Mind you, I'm not saying you should write a book to specifically exclude women or paint them in a bad light, that would be misogynistic. But simply ignoring the issue isn't a problem, IMO, if you don't mean to be dealing with it.
So his network started taking 5 steps to get out of country instead of 2, and that means he was being spied upon? I mean, sure, it's possible, but it doesn't even make sense. If they can re-direct his traffic, why not just copy it, either at one of the jumps or send a second copy to someone else? Unless you need to be able to cut off the communication (which you can't really do in 180ms anyways, unless it is automated, in which case you can do it without the jumps anyways), there isn't any reason to send it through a longer path.
Much much more likely is that it was a routing problem. You know, the kind of thing that happens all the time. But since it involves Dotcom, of course it must have been spying. Right.
Man up. What do you think coal, oil, natural gas etc power plants do now? Do you even remember the massive power outage that affected a large portion of the United States a few years ago? Enough solar energy hits the earth in an hour to fill all our electrical requirements for a year. The only problem would be getting that energy to where people need it. Stop your whining about how hard things are. People could setup individual panels at their homes to reduce load on the grid, and plants can be setup in various locations as well. If one location is cloudy, guess what? Another one probably isn't!
Guess what? That means you need to build twice as many panels/wind generators as you nominally need (at least). That increases the cost 2x, plus of course the cost of a robust power grid to transmit the power. Again, not quite so easy in a part of the world near tornado alley, where power loss is already moderately common... and where loosing power in the winter means people can start dying.
If everyone starts using electric cars, that represents a massive increase in demand. According to this [PDF WARNING] report, ~28% of US energy demand is in transportation, which means our demand for electrical power will go up significantly (30-40% is probably a decent estimation). If you double production costs and increase demand, combined with the vastly increased cost of electric cars (themselves hardly environmentally friendly to make. Side note: the Prius is supposedly worse for the environment than a normal gas-powered car because of the costs of building the batteries and motors) and suddenly you are looking at transport costs 2-3 times greater than they are now. Good luck getting that to happen, considering people already complain about the high costs of gas (which already has significant economical impact).
My point with hydroelectrical was it doesn't scale. If you try to make it scale, you run out of land for people to live and farm, and your entire cost of living goes up considerably. My entire point is that while green energy sounds nice, it is nowhere near practical yet, and won't be for years yet. Electric generation and storage is simply not good enough yet, and that is ignoring the fact that green power sources rarely are as green as they seem (like the Prius mentioned earlier: they always have environmental costs people don't like to talk about). Such as, for example, the fact that magnets used in electric motors requires rare earths, which have massive pollution by-products. I'm speaking realistically here when I say the only green technology we have, right now, that could fill our electric needs not only practically but cost-efficiently is nuclear.
Doesn't matter how much energy is hitting the planet from the sun, we simply cannot collect it effectively. Even an efficient solar panel is only 15% or so efficient. And expensive. And unreliable.