I'd argue OSX is worse than Win10 from a privacy perspective (barring the heinous trick upgrades). It isn't the perfect privacy we'd like, but MS is more upfront about their policies and actions, and although they could make it easier, at least they do give you a choice. They are, sadly, best in class among modern commercial OSes.
This is a problem with all commercial OS environments, and Win10 is arguably way better than iOS and ChromeOS/Android in this respect as well, although they could all stand to be much better...
Win 10 really is way better in a lot of ways, but it's also very much a work in progress: there are still horrible Frankenstein-like seams between the old desktop OS (basically, Win7-ish) and the newer "Metro/Modern/UWP" programs. (The fact that "Settings" and "Control Panel" both even exist at all (and overlap only awkwardly) makes the point....)
Generally, I'd recommend *trying* the upgrade to Win10, but it doesn't always go smoothly - my wife's computer lost the ability to single-finger scroll from the touchpad, and if you run a bunch of older apps (Corel apps are particularly prone), you may find they don't fully work as expected. If you have a touch-enabled PC, Win10 is better in nearly all respects except that Modern IE was a far better touch browser than Edge, but that will presumably get somewhat better with the Redstone release this summer. Generally, 10 is a bit faster and less of a resource hog (!)
Remember that if you decide NOT to upgrade before the clock runs out this summer, you'll have to pay to upgrade later.
Personally, I've upgraded all of my PCs except two to Win10, and I'm generally happy with the results - one is an old Win 7 laptop that I'm freezing to remain compatible and fully working with its existing software complement, the other is a "home theater" PC I may yet upgrade from 8.1.
Also, for the predictable "just run Linux" crowd, keep in mind that if you have a 64-bit PC, you'll be able to run the new Ubuntu on Windows and avoid VMs or that steaming pile of crap called Cygwin. This is a high-quality joint effort between MS and Canonical, and although it's not finished yet, it's already quite handy and usable if you can deal with Linux from the command line. It's going to be *really* nice having a full Linux/Posix environment with the ability to run nearly anything you can apt-get. This will make Windows a *much* nicer dev platform, as it avoids having to dope out all the Win-specific stuff, or use Chocolatey/NuGet or the like to get a (hopefully not too outdated) Win version of dev tools, languages, libraries, etc... It's now possible to have a first-class dev environment on Windows without climbing the learning curve of Visual Studio.
While there are a number of tax treatments specific to the oil and gas industry (they are not subsidies, or really, even tax "breaks"), they exist almost exclusively to address things like reservoir depletion and exploration and drilling costs that are unique to that industry and not at all relevant to general manufacturing. These are important to all of us, since reliable, predictable, affordable energy drives and makes possible all aspects of modern technological society.
Like conventional capital depreciation, these tax treatments "smooth out the lumps" for both companies in the industry as well as the government taxing authorities, making cash flows far more predictable over time.
As I mention above, if anything, electric cars are avoiding paying for the roads they drive on...
Plus, electric cars already get a free ride tax-wise simply because they aren't paying the gasoline taxes that pay for the very roads they drive on.
If anything we need to close the electric car loophole and make electric car owners pay an additional electric car license charge of, say, $325/yr (15Kmiles at 23 MPG w/ ~$0.50/gal gas tax.)
Even this falls far short of capturing their real cost - Since a single Tesla high-speed home charger pulls as much as 3-4 homes, every Tesla that gets sold winds up costing neighboring ratepayers $10-30,000 for a new, upgraded transformer to handle the increased load.
Figure further that Tesla owners are also likely to have solar and pay less to the power company in the first place due to insane net-metering policies, and the power company will NEVER recoup the grid improvements. The rest of us just get to eat that cost to subsidize the Tesla owners' choking cloud of smug, which is certainly worse than any smog my supercharged gas-burners could belch...
A carbon tax is not some big plot by rich people. It's a way to put an economic value on the cost of dealing with the pollution created by fossil fuels.
While fossil fuels do produce pollution to varying degrees (natural gas is the cleanest fuel on the planet, probably cleaner than solar on a unit energy basis), it's important to remember that despite the B.S. you may hear, CARBON DIOXIDE IS ***NOT*** A POLLUTANT! (BTW, for those saying hydrogen is a cleaner fuel than NG, realize that the only commercially viable source of that much hydrogen is NG(CH4) in the first place, and that you're way better off just burning the NG than taking the additional pollution and energy loss hit from reforming the NG to H2...)
Believing that CO2 is a pollutant is tantamount to believing that ignorance is strength, war is peace, and freedom is slavery. It really is that irrational and nonsensical.
If CO2 is a pollutant, then we must eliminate water vapor at once, since it's far, far worse... Sadly, that would destroy our beautiful blue planet.
Vacuuming homes and replacing filters sounds like the fallout (literally) from coal-fired power plants.
Since every Tesla and other electric car in America is in reality not a zero-emissions, but rather remote-emissions vehicle, and roughly half of US electricity comes from coal, I fail to see how more electric cars are going to help.
(I've got friend who laughably says that the electricity that charges his car from the grid is provided by solar. Since there's only one (completely corrupt) government regime-controlled power company here in Austin, and only a tiny fraction of Austin's power comes from solar, this is flat B.S. Other parts of Texas are far more enlightened (pun fully intended) and have the ability to choose to buy their power from providers based on cost, reliability, or energy source, whether coal, nuclear, solar, or dung...)
Sorry, but most of what Musk and other fossil fuel bashers call "subsidies" for the oil & gas industry are really not subsidies at all, but rather just application-specific ways of accounting for things that are done in ALL manufacturing industries (including the ones Musk owns).
For instance, the (admittedly somewhat arcane) ways that wells are valued for tax and accounting purposes is really no different than depreciating any other kind of investment (such as capital equipment, and the diminishing value of the mineral content of real estate over time) required to produce something of value. Both companies and the government benefit from being able to predictably spread those cash flows out over time rather than having to deal with them in huge lumps, which would be traumatic for all involved.
Proportionally, renewables receive quite a bit more subsidy than other forms of energy production. In fact, if you're not on an island where you have to ship in your fuel, solar *still* barely makes any sense without the subsidies to make up the difference. I've been in the business of monitoring large utility-scale PV and wind plants, and I can tell you for sure that most of them are seriously upside-down without the subsidies. In fact, the ONLY people that make much money in renewables are the people that build NEW plants and harvest the subsidies. Anyone else in the ecosystem, especially subsequent owners, gets completely hosed.
Of course, if you are a rational human being and realize that CO2 cannot possibly be a pollutant (especially when compared to water vapor!!), then you realize that there's no real urgency - we'll eventually migrate off of fossil fuels for most things other than transportation anyway (solar airplanes are pretty much impossible with even mid-term future technologies).
And at least with solar, you only have to dig it up once and make the panel once, and then it produces power for decades. And you can then recycle it afterwards.
I call BS on this one. I worked for a number of years in the Solar PV industry, and this is one of the pervasive myths. We built systems that collected more and better solar PV performance data (much of it at the individual panel level) than anyone in history, so we really had better data on which to assess the viability of solar.
It's not a panacea. "Decades" is only barely true - the economic life of good, high-quality solar panels is only around 20-25 years at best (for economically viable, mass-producible panels, not one-off science projects). Payback for most utility scale power plants is about 20-22 years, so there's not much margin for error there. Most plants figure their economics by pushing that life out to 30 years, but you've already fallen off the cliff of quantum junction degradation and onto the sharp rocks below by that time. (Keep in mind that the high-energy components of the same energy you're trying to harvest is also slowly destroying the panel over its life...)
Most panel mfrs claim something along the lines of 80% of rated power output at 20-25 years, but the curve literally looks like a cliff, so you're headed for trivial power production very soon by the time you're at that point.
Did you notice I qualified my figures with "good, high-quality solar panels" above? The sad truth his that such a thing doesn't really exist anymore. Even the so-called "Tier 1" Chinese vendors are cranking out panels that are absolute crap compared to what true quality mfrs like Schott in Germany were making a few years back. They and others were chased out of that business by Chinese panels selling for less than their cost to make. (Employment, not profit, is the primary success metric for Chinese companies - communism still warps things badly...)
In reality, most PV plant developers are using cheap panels, since the only way you really make money in solar is to soak the government for the subsidies. We were seeing cheap Chinese panels begin to degrade and fall apart after as little as 7-8 years. Usually, these were due to failure of the polymer backing sheet. When the backing sheet fails, the panel is no longer sealed, and when water leaks in, heavy metals, including cadmium and lead, leach out. In short order, corrosion and rot have the cells hanging in an ineffective shredded plastic hammock from the edges of the frame. Solar panels are not nearly so environmentally friendly as people suppose, especially at the end of their life.
Recycling is just lip service - there's really no good way to do that now, and little economic incentive to do so. The tens of thousands of abandoned wind turbines (worldwide) is a preview of the toxic fields of solar panels that we'll see in the coming decades.
I'd love to see solar be successful, but without a nearly two-order-of-magnitude improvement in DC storage price/performance, it just isn't going to be good for much other than intermittent-load gap-filling. (And a great analysis by Eleanor Denny in Ireland showed that at over about 33% generation share, the net value of renewable energy actually becomes negative due to the instability it induces into the grid and the hoops you have to jump through to accommodate that.)
Legally, the fact that they apparently *are* automatically creating faceprints (even for people like me who don't have facebook accounts) seems to be the thing that could get them in trouble. There can be no consent from innocent bystanders who choose not to participate in Facebook's internet hegemony (often very deliberately, since not having a Facebook ID is a real PITA these days)...
There are reports of people signing up for Facebook, and then as soon as they have an "official" profile, that gets connected to warehouse of things they have been tagged to prior to their signup, whether they were tagged by other Facebook users or by the faceprinting engine...
And so, logically, the way to fix the structural problem is simple, and there's really only one way to do it: Slash the size of government down to where these subsidies for large corporations simply can't exist. The easiest way to do that is to repeal the 16th amendment and force equal apportionment of the states as the Founders intended.
This self-limits the size of government to what the smallest/weakest state has the capability and will to support. (Legislation to undo Wickard v. Philburn and a few other egregious big-government-favoring court decisions would help, too...)
(I say large corporations, because mostly, they are the only ones that benefit from this kind of big government/big business corruption and cronyism - the taxes and endless regulations substantially raise costs for both individuals and small businesses, usually with no corresponding benefit.)
Would someone please tell me what's wrong with a minimum wage of $99.00/hour, then? That would certainly solve our poverty problems, wouldn't it?
Do these people have ANY idea how economics works? (If they don't, perhaps they can start with the "Sixth Century Political Economics" chapter in Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"...)
Remember: The true minimum wage is ALWAYS ZERO! (i.e., the job goes away or is never created)
Because, obviously, blind people have learned just to hold it and never poop. Really, sometimes the asininity of the questions and assertions on/. is mind-boggling...
Actually, even fighters from 1950's can fly at mach 2, BUT:
Actually, the fastest jet aircraft ever built were (at least designed) in the 1950s - all current planes (that we know about for sure) are sluggards by comparison: YF-12A/SR-71, B-70 Valkyrie, B-58 Hustler, the entire Century series of fighters, especially the F-104 Starfighter. That's not even counting the amazing stuff that was on the drawing board but never produced due to the advent of high-altitude missiles - the B-70 is arguably right on that cusp, but I'm talking about Mach 3+ planes like the XF-108 Rapier (intended to intercept a Soviet analog of the B-70), which did influence the later A-5 Vigilante.)
Even as a *bomber* the B-58 was a fair fraction as fast as the SR-71 - my Dad and a buddy were in marginally supersonic jet fighters when they snuck up on one near FortWorth (home of the Convair plant that built the B-58) and pulled up alongside, giving him a "bang-bang, you're dead" hand signal. The B-58 pilot turned first to one of them, then the other, waving "bye-bye", and all three planes went to full throttle. Dad said the fireballs from the B-58's four afterburning engines collapsed into one and then disappeared from sight nearly as fast as the image collapsed to a dot on an old CRT television, and he and his wingman were left looking at each other across the empty space where the aptly named Hustler had been only moments before.
BTW, some of these planes suffered from the runaway systems complexity and cost that will doom the F-35, but at least they were good at their one job, unlike the F-35 which excels at nothing...
Google in particular has been getting increasingly bad about this in the past year or two. AFAICT, they blithely ignore all the things that *used* to make it possible to actually give Google value - the Google-fu expressions, including most importantly +term and -term.
Just recently, our dev team was searching for results and Google simply refused to let us filter out the crap or require the only phrase that would guarantee relevant results.
Even the dash in between words (making looking-glass match looking.glass, looking glass, and lookinggglass) seems to be mostly (but not entirely ignored).
It was exactly Google's support for this sort of precise search specification that put them on top, especially after the vastly superior InfoSeek (IMO, the best search engine ever) died a horrible, emasculated death after being acquired by Disney/ABC/Go.
There is good news, though - we finally got what we needed - the answer, which has become a larger and larger part of our bag o' tricks in the past several weeks? Bing! Surprisingly, Microsoft has been really working on it - it's actually *better* than Google now at an increasing number of searches. I now use it about half the time - it's the default in Firefox, my primary browser, vs. Google in Chrome, which is used mostly for dev and testing....
It's about biology. Our eyes are by nature more accustomed to view wide scenes instead of tall ones. If you feel like flipping your monitor to a vertical format, you probably have a too small monitor. With a properly sized widescreen monitor, two webpages fit nicely side-by-side. Who maximizes browser windows nowdays anyway?
Uh, me, right now, and pretty much always...
Viewing the world through the letter slot of widescreen displays is simply horrid - HDTV set the computer graphics world back by well over a decade, and we're only just now beginning to release ourselves from its slimy clutches...
The inspector would write up faults, they would fix them, he would write up new faults...eventually he lost patience and let it be known that the real problem was that he hadn't yet found a blank envelope filled with cash.
This is Texas after all - a call to the Texas Rangers might well have ended that kind of corruption for good - most inspectors are state-licensed, and it's hard to make a living if you've lost your license. I'm not saying we're corruption-free here, but in my experience, the level of common ethical business standards is still much higher in Texas than in some other states I've done business in. (Cough, *California*, cough *Illinois*, cough, *New Jersey*...)
Really, if Tesla gets their way, then GM (or Toyota, VW, etc) can force you to get your GM car serviced only through "authorized" GM service centers, under pain of voiding your warranty. Especially in today's world of telematics, they will control your car more than you do. Is that what consumers want? I damn sure don't...
Tesla's model is hideously proprietary and abusive of its customers. The silly thing is that Tesla's customers are such fanboys that they cheer Tesla on in their subjugation of their rights as customers.
I'm no fan of dealers, but at least at a dealer there's a *chance* someone cares about me, if they're locally owned and not part of one of the increasing number of megachain dealerships. That chance is near-zero if my only choice is to deal directly with the manufacturer.
I said it before, Tesla is evil, and no amount of greenwashing can change that...
Remember that the dealership layer was inserted by the states to PROTECT consumers from the crushing power of the auto manufacturers, and add some local accountability through choice. (Choice that has vanished lately as we've allowed huge dealer networks to replace that local ownership, more or less defeating the original purpose.)
There are certainly significant problems with the current model, but remember that the current dealership model was created to address problems that resulted from exactly what Tesla is asking for - direct control of the customer relationship by the manufacturer, especially during the rapid consolidation of brands in the first three decades of the 20th century. That means we should at least THINK about what we're doing here before we make reactionary policy changes either for or against what Tesla's asking for. I'm no big fan of the dealership model, but I am skeptical that if Tesla gets what they want, that it won't be a huge win for the big manufacturers at the expense of local power and control, and ultimately, at the expense of buyers. (Dealers who regard customer service as a possibly necessary evil aren't exactly helping themselves here, of course...)
State government policy should first serve both the people and the corporations (which are just legally "embodied/corporeal" groups of people empowered to act as a single person) of the state. The best ironclad principle of true libertarian conservatism is that government power and control must be kept as local (at as low a level) as possible, as the higher it rises, the more corrupt and evil it will eventually become. Neither big government nor big business is a good thing, but the two of them "working together" is pretty much always a very bad thing...
This is just errant bigotry against Texas. If you actually knew anything about he state that's creating 75% of the new jobs in the entire US, you'd realize that there is a *very* competitive labor market here.
I definitely have to pay more for talented or skilled software people here (especially in Austin) than in other parts of the country. Hell, if you've got a CDL and can pass a drug test, you can make $100K+ driving an oilfield truck - all due to the economic miracle called fracking - no thanks to the US Government, which has tried its best to kill the strongest economic engine still running in the US... That said, there are a LOT of programmers who aren't worth what they're getting paid, and when the next bubble burst in the mobile/social software space, there are going to be many people out of work and with suddenly unmarketable skills.
BTW, it's not like the laws here are hurting Tesla any - Here in Austin, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one of the things. I know one thing - I'd sure hate to own a Mercedes or BMW dealership, since that demographic has made the Tesla the currently trendy car for show-off poseurs.
This is wishcraft. Hell, solar has a very hard time ever reaching break-even *without* the cost of trackers. (Many plants will NEVER reach breakeven, but then they're not supposed to -they're really just there as a means of acquiring government subsidy money.)
In my experience in building the world's top utility-scale PV array management system, trackers haven't got a prayer of paying off. They break often, and when they do (unless they happen to break pointing straight up), they keep the panels they're attached to from making much power at all until they're fixed. If you have even a little bit of extra space, you're way better off just throwing more fixed panels out there and avoiding the maintenance and power loss headaches.
The capacity factor for solar is abysmal anyway - trying to optimize it much is a fool's errand. Unless you live someplace exceptionally sunny or cloudy, or at extreme latitudes, You'll be within a percent or two by figuring the nominal power output of your array for an average of FIVE (yep, only 5) hours a day.
Since I've seen and analyzed the actual measured data from literally hundreds to thousands of solar installations, I can tell you this number holds up pretty darn well as a rule of thumb. (That's assuming you're using quality PV panels from a Western or 1st tier Chinese supplier. Panels from the cheaper (and thus pretty popular) Chinese panel suppliers never even approach their spec sheet outputs, and many are delaminating after only seven or eight years, leaching toxic heavy metals into the environment. (Disposal/recycling of panels is rarely factored into solar lifecycle cost analyses, though it should be...))
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I've not yet seen a Win 7 or 8 print driver that doesn't work on Win 10. I use them every day with no problem at all...
I'd argue OSX is worse than Win10 from a privacy perspective (barring the heinous trick upgrades). It isn't the perfect privacy we'd like, but MS is more upfront about their policies and actions, and although they could make it easier, at least they do give you a choice. They are, sadly, best in class among modern commercial OSes.
This is a problem with all commercial OS environments, and Win10 is arguably way better than iOS and ChromeOS/Android in this respect as well, although they could all stand to be much better...
Win 10 really is way better in a lot of ways, but it's also very much a work in progress: there are still horrible Frankenstein-like seams between the old desktop OS (basically, Win7-ish) and the newer "Metro/Modern/UWP" programs. (The fact that "Settings" and "Control Panel" both even exist at all (and overlap only awkwardly) makes the point....)
Generally, I'd recommend *trying* the upgrade to Win10, but it doesn't always go smoothly - my wife's computer lost the ability to single-finger scroll from the touchpad, and if you run a bunch of older apps (Corel apps are particularly prone), you may find they don't fully work as expected. If you have a touch-enabled PC, Win10 is better in nearly all respects except that Modern IE was a far better touch browser than Edge, but that will presumably get somewhat better with the Redstone release this summer. Generally, 10 is a bit faster and less of a resource hog (!)
Remember that if you decide NOT to upgrade before the clock runs out this summer, you'll have to pay to upgrade later.
Personally, I've upgraded all of my PCs except two to Win10, and I'm generally happy with the results - one is an old Win 7 laptop that I'm freezing to remain compatible and fully working with its existing software complement, the other is a "home theater" PC I may yet upgrade from 8.1.
Also, for the predictable "just run Linux" crowd, keep in mind that if you have a 64-bit PC, you'll be able to run the new Ubuntu on Windows and avoid VMs or that steaming pile of crap called Cygwin. This is a high-quality joint effort between MS and Canonical, and although it's not finished yet, it's already quite handy and usable if you can deal with Linux from the command line. It's going to be *really* nice having a full Linux/Posix environment with the ability to run nearly anything you can apt-get. This will make Windows a *much* nicer dev platform, as it avoids having to dope out all the Win-specific stuff, or use Chocolatey/NuGet or the like to get a (hopefully not too outdated) Win version of dev tools, languages, libraries, etc... It's now possible to have a first-class dev environment on Windows without climbing the learning curve of Visual Studio.
While there are a number of tax treatments specific to the oil and gas industry (they are not subsidies, or really, even tax "breaks"), they exist almost exclusively to address things like reservoir depletion and exploration and drilling costs that are unique to that industry and not at all relevant to general manufacturing. These are important to all of us, since reliable, predictable, affordable energy drives and makes possible all aspects of modern technological society.
Like conventional capital depreciation, these tax treatments "smooth out the lumps" for both companies in the industry as well as the government taxing authorities, making cash flows far more predictable over time.
As I mention above, if anything, electric cars are avoiding paying for the roads they drive on...
Plus, electric cars already get a free ride tax-wise simply because they aren't paying the gasoline taxes that pay for the very roads they drive on.
If anything we need to close the electric car loophole and make electric car owners pay an additional electric car license charge of, say, $325/yr (15Kmiles at 23 MPG w/ ~$0.50/gal gas tax.)
Even this falls far short of capturing their real cost - Since a single Tesla high-speed home charger pulls as much as 3-4 homes, every Tesla that gets sold winds up costing neighboring ratepayers $10-30,000 for a new, upgraded transformer to handle the increased load.
Figure further that Tesla owners are also likely to have solar and pay less to the power company in the first place due to insane net-metering policies, and the power company will NEVER recoup the grid improvements. The rest of us just get to eat that cost to subsidize the Tesla owners' choking cloud of smug, which is certainly worse than any smog my supercharged gas-burners could belch...
A carbon tax is not some big plot by rich people. It's a way to put an economic value on the cost of dealing with the pollution created by fossil fuels.
While fossil fuels do produce pollution to varying degrees (natural gas is the cleanest fuel on the planet, probably cleaner than solar on a unit energy basis), it's important to remember that despite the B.S. you may hear, CARBON DIOXIDE IS ***NOT*** A POLLUTANT! (BTW, for those saying hydrogen is a cleaner fuel than NG, realize that the only commercially viable source of that much hydrogen is NG(CH4) in the first place, and that you're way better off just burning the NG than taking the additional pollution and energy loss hit from reforming the NG to H2...)
Believing that CO2 is a pollutant is tantamount to believing that ignorance is strength, war is peace, and freedom is slavery. It really is that irrational and nonsensical.
If CO2 is a pollutant, then we must eliminate water vapor at once, since it's far, far worse... Sadly, that would destroy our beautiful blue planet.
Vacuuming homes and replacing filters sounds like the fallout (literally) from coal-fired power plants.
Since every Tesla and other electric car in America is in reality not a zero-emissions, but rather remote-emissions vehicle, and roughly half of US electricity comes from coal, I fail to see how more electric cars are going to help.
(I've got friend who laughably says that the electricity that charges his car from the grid is provided by solar. Since there's only one (completely corrupt) government regime-controlled power company here in Austin, and only a tiny fraction of Austin's power comes from solar, this is flat B.S. Other parts of Texas are far more enlightened (pun fully intended) and have the ability to choose to buy their power from providers based on cost, reliability, or energy source, whether coal, nuclear, solar, or dung...)
Sorry, but most of what Musk and other fossil fuel bashers call "subsidies" for the oil & gas industry are really not subsidies at all, but rather just application-specific ways of accounting for things that are done in ALL manufacturing industries (including the ones Musk owns).
For instance, the (admittedly somewhat arcane) ways that wells are valued for tax and accounting purposes is really no different than depreciating any other kind of investment (such as capital equipment, and the diminishing value of the mineral content of real estate over time) required to produce something of value. Both companies and the government benefit from being able to predictably spread those cash flows out over time rather than having to deal with them in huge lumps, which would be traumatic for all involved.
Proportionally, renewables receive quite a bit more subsidy than other forms of energy production. In fact, if you're not on an island where you have to ship in your fuel, solar *still* barely makes any sense without the subsidies to make up the difference. I've been in the business of monitoring large utility-scale PV and wind plants, and I can tell you for sure that most of them are seriously upside-down without the subsidies. In fact, the ONLY people that make much money in renewables are the people that build NEW plants and harvest the subsidies. Anyone else in the ecosystem, especially subsequent owners, gets completely hosed.
Of course, if you are a rational human being and realize that CO2 cannot possibly be a pollutant (especially when compared to water vapor!!), then you realize that there's no real urgency - we'll eventually migrate off of fossil fuels for most things other than transportation anyway (solar airplanes are pretty much impossible with even mid-term future technologies).
And at least with solar, you only have to dig it up once and make the panel once, and then it produces power for decades. And you can then recycle it afterwards.
I call BS on this one. I worked for a number of years in the Solar PV industry, and this is one of the pervasive myths. We built systems that collected more and better solar PV performance data (much of it at the individual panel level) than anyone in history, so we really had better data on which to assess the viability of solar.
It's not a panacea. "Decades" is only barely true - the economic life of good, high-quality solar panels is only around 20-25 years at best (for economically viable, mass-producible panels, not one-off science projects). Payback for most utility scale power plants is about 20-22 years, so there's not much margin for error there. Most plants figure their economics by pushing that life out to 30 years, but you've already fallen off the cliff of quantum junction degradation and onto the sharp rocks below by that time. (Keep in mind that the high-energy components of the same energy you're trying to harvest is also slowly destroying the panel over its life...)
Most panel mfrs claim something along the lines of 80% of rated power output at 20-25 years, but the curve literally looks like a cliff, so you're headed for trivial power production very soon by the time you're at that point.
Did you notice I qualified my figures with "good, high-quality solar panels" above? The sad truth his that such a thing doesn't really exist anymore. Even the so-called "Tier 1" Chinese vendors are cranking out panels that are absolute crap compared to what true quality mfrs like Schott in Germany were making a few years back. They and others were chased out of that business by Chinese panels selling for less than their cost to make. (Employment, not profit, is the primary success metric for Chinese companies - communism still warps things badly...)
In reality, most PV plant developers are using cheap panels, since the only way you really make money in solar is to soak the government for the subsidies. We were seeing cheap Chinese panels begin to degrade and fall apart after as little as 7-8 years. Usually, these were due to failure of the polymer backing sheet. When the backing sheet fails, the panel is no longer sealed, and when water leaks in, heavy metals, including cadmium and lead, leach out. In short order, corrosion and rot have the cells hanging in an ineffective shredded plastic hammock from the edges of the frame. Solar panels are not nearly so environmentally friendly as people suppose, especially at the end of their life.
Recycling is just lip service - there's really no good way to do that now, and little economic incentive to do so. The tens of thousands of abandoned wind turbines (worldwide) is a preview of the toxic fields of solar panels that we'll see in the coming decades.
I'd love to see solar be successful, but without a nearly two-order-of-magnitude improvement in DC storage price/performance, it just isn't going to be good for much other than intermittent-load gap-filling. (And a great analysis by Eleanor Denny in Ireland showed that at over about 33% generation share, the net value of renewable energy actually becomes negative due to the instability it induces into the grid and the hoops you have to jump through to accommodate that.)
Legally, the fact that they apparently *are* automatically creating faceprints (even for people like me who don't have facebook accounts) seems to be the thing that could get them in trouble. There can be no consent from innocent bystanders who choose not to participate in Facebook's internet hegemony (often very deliberately, since not having a Facebook ID is a real PITA these days) ...
There are reports of people signing up for Facebook, and then as soon as they have an "official" profile, that gets connected to warehouse of things they have been tagged to prior to their signup, whether they were tagged by other Facebook users or by the faceprinting engine...
And so, logically, the way to fix the structural problem is simple, and there's really only one way to do it: Slash the size of government down to where these subsidies for large corporations simply can't exist. The easiest way to do that is to repeal the 16th amendment and force equal apportionment of the states as the Founders intended.
This self-limits the size of government to what the smallest/weakest state has the capability and will to support. (Legislation to undo Wickard v. Philburn and a few other egregious big-government-favoring court decisions would help, too...)
(I say large corporations, because mostly, they are the only ones that benefit from this kind of big government/big business corruption and cronyism - the taxes and endless regulations substantially raise costs for both individuals and small businesses, usually with no corresponding benefit.)
Would someone please tell me what's wrong with a minimum wage of $99.00/hour, then? That would certainly solve our poverty problems, wouldn't it?
Do these people have ANY idea how economics works? (If they don't, perhaps they can start with the "Sixth Century Political Economics" chapter in Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"...)
Remember: The true minimum wage is ALWAYS ZERO! (i.e., the job goes away or is never created)
Pretty much everything the FSF claims has never been tested in court. That's half the problem...
Because, obviously, blind people have learned just to hold it and never poop. Really, sometimes the asininity of the questions and assertions on /. is mind-boggling...
Kinda like I've started to use the term "Cadillac ugly" to describe either repulsively abysmal systems architecture or aesthetics...
Thanks for posting this - I was somehow not aware of this - stunning...
Actually, even fighters from 1950's can fly at mach 2, BUT:
Actually, the fastest jet aircraft ever built were (at least designed) in the 1950s - all current planes (that we know about for sure) are sluggards by comparison: YF-12A/SR-71, B-70 Valkyrie, B-58 Hustler, the entire Century series of fighters, especially the F-104 Starfighter. That's not even counting the amazing stuff that was on the drawing board but never produced due to the advent of high-altitude missiles - the B-70 is arguably right on that cusp, but I'm talking about Mach 3+ planes like the XF-108 Rapier (intended to intercept a Soviet analog of the B-70), which did influence the later A-5 Vigilante.)
Even as a *bomber* the B-58 was a fair fraction as fast as the SR-71 - my Dad and a buddy were in marginally supersonic jet fighters when they snuck up on one near FortWorth (home of the Convair plant that built the B-58) and pulled up alongside, giving him a "bang-bang, you're dead" hand signal. The B-58 pilot turned first to one of them, then the other, waving "bye-bye", and all three planes went to full throttle. Dad said the fireballs from the B-58's four afterburning engines collapsed into one and then disappeared from sight nearly as fast as the image collapsed to a dot on an old CRT television, and he and his wingman were left looking at each other across the empty space where the aptly named Hustler had been only moments before.
BTW, some of these planes suffered from the runaway systems complexity and cost that will doom the F-35, but at least they were good at their one job, unlike the F-35 which excels at nothing...
Google in particular has been getting increasingly bad about this in the past year or two. AFAICT, they blithely ignore all the things that *used* to make it possible to actually give Google value - the Google-fu expressions, including most importantly +term and -term.
Just recently, our dev team was searching for results and Google simply refused to let us filter out the crap or require the only phrase that would guarantee relevant results.
Even the dash in between words (making looking-glass match looking.glass, looking glass, and lookinggglass) seems to be mostly (but not entirely ignored).
It was exactly Google's support for this sort of precise search specification that put them on top, especially after the vastly superior InfoSeek (IMO, the best search engine ever) died a horrible, emasculated death after being acquired by Disney/ABC/Go.
There is good news, though - we finally got what we needed - the answer, which has become a larger and larger part of our bag o' tricks in the past several weeks? Bing! Surprisingly, Microsoft has been really working on it - it's actually *better* than Google now at an increasing number of searches. I now use it about half the time - it's the default in Firefox, my primary browser, vs. Google in Chrome, which is used mostly for dev and testing....
All monitors are made to be viewed landscape.
No they're not.
It's about biology. Our eyes are by nature more accustomed to view wide scenes instead of tall ones. If you feel like flipping your monitor to a vertical format, you probably have a too small monitor. With a properly sized widescreen monitor, two webpages fit nicely side-by-side. Who maximizes browser windows nowdays anyway?
Uh, me, right now, and pretty much always...
Viewing the world through the letter slot of widescreen displays is simply horrid - HDTV set the computer graphics world back by well over a decade, and we're only just now beginning to release ourselves from its slimy clutches...
The inspector would write up faults, they would fix them, he would write up new faults...eventually he lost patience and let it be known that the real problem was that he hadn't yet found a blank envelope filled with cash.
This is Texas after all - a call to the Texas Rangers might well have ended that kind of corruption for good - most inspectors are state-licensed, and it's hard to make a living if you've lost your license. I'm not saying we're corruption-free here, but in my experience, the level of common ethical business standards is still much higher in Texas than in some other states I've done business in. (Cough, *California*, cough *Illinois*, cough, *New Jersey*...)
Really, if Tesla gets their way, then GM (or Toyota, VW, etc) can force you to get your GM car serviced only through "authorized" GM service centers, under pain of voiding your warranty. Especially in today's world of telematics, they will control your car more than you do. Is that what consumers want? I damn sure don't...
Tesla's model is hideously proprietary and abusive of its customers. The silly thing is that Tesla's customers are such fanboys that they cheer Tesla on in their subjugation of their rights as customers.
I'm no fan of dealers, but at least at a dealer there's a *chance* someone cares about me, if they're locally owned and not part of one of the increasing number of megachain dealerships. That chance is near-zero if my only choice is to deal directly with the manufacturer.
I said it before, Tesla is evil, and no amount of greenwashing can change that...
Remember that the dealership layer was inserted by the states to PROTECT consumers from the crushing power of the auto manufacturers, and add some local accountability through choice. (Choice that has vanished lately as we've allowed huge dealer networks to replace that local ownership, more or less defeating the original purpose.)
There are certainly significant problems with the current model, but remember that the current dealership model was created to address problems that resulted from exactly what Tesla is asking for - direct control of the customer relationship by the manufacturer, especially during the rapid consolidation of brands in the first three decades of the 20th century. That means we should at least THINK about what we're doing here before we make reactionary policy changes either for or against what Tesla's asking for. I'm no big fan of the dealership model, but I am skeptical that if Tesla gets what they want, that it won't be a huge win for the big manufacturers at the expense of local power and control, and ultimately, at the expense of buyers. (Dealers who regard customer service as a possibly necessary evil aren't exactly helping themselves here, of course...)
State government policy should first serve both the people and the corporations (which are just legally "embodied/corporeal" groups of people empowered to act as a single person) of the state. The best ironclad principle of true libertarian conservatism is that government power and control must be kept as local (at as low a level) as possible, as the higher it rises, the more corrupt and evil it will eventually become. Neither big government nor big business is a good thing, but the two of them "working together" is pretty much always a very bad thing...
Namely paying the workers less.
This is just errant bigotry against Texas. If you actually knew anything about he state that's creating 75% of the new jobs in the entire US, you'd realize that there is a *very* competitive labor market here.
I definitely have to pay more for talented or skilled software people here (especially in Austin) than in other parts of the country. Hell, if you've got a CDL and can pass a drug test, you can make $100K+ driving an oilfield truck - all due to the economic miracle called fracking - no thanks to the US Government, which has tried its best to kill the strongest economic engine still running in the US... That said, there are a LOT of programmers who aren't worth what they're getting paid, and when the next bubble burst in the mobile/social software space, there are going to be many people out of work and with suddenly unmarketable skills.
BTW, it's not like the laws here are hurting Tesla any - Here in Austin, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one of the things. I know one thing - I'd sure hate to own a Mercedes or BMW dealership, since that demographic has made the Tesla the currently trendy car for show-off poseurs.
This is wishcraft. Hell, solar has a very hard time ever reaching break-even *without* the cost of trackers. (Many plants will NEVER reach breakeven, but then they're not supposed to -they're really just there as a means of acquiring government subsidy money.)
In my experience in building the world's top utility-scale PV array management system, trackers haven't got a prayer of paying off. They break often, and when they do (unless they happen to break pointing straight up), they keep the panels they're attached to from making much power at all until they're fixed. If you have even a little bit of extra space, you're way better off just throwing more fixed panels out there and avoiding the maintenance and power loss headaches.
The capacity factor for solar is abysmal anyway - trying to optimize it much is a fool's errand. Unless you live someplace exceptionally sunny or cloudy, or at extreme latitudes, You'll be within a percent or two by figuring the nominal power output of your array for an average of FIVE (yep, only 5) hours a day.
Since I've seen and analyzed the actual measured data from literally hundreds to thousands of solar installations, I can tell you this number holds up pretty darn well as a rule of thumb. (That's assuming you're using quality PV panels from a Western or 1st tier Chinese supplier. Panels from the cheaper (and thus pretty popular) Chinese panel suppliers never even approach their spec sheet outputs, and many are delaminating after only seven or eight years, leaching toxic heavy metals into the environment. (Disposal/recycling of panels is rarely factored into solar lifecycle cost analyses, though it should be...))