I know this is a really radical idea, but perhaps instead of a bunch of government regulatory czars making technology decrees that they are hopelessly unable to comprehend, maybe, just maybe, we should let the market sort out the winners and losers rather than mandate them up front as a fait accompli. Just sayin'...
(Oh, and although I firmly hope to never have to drive an electric car, I think the mere existence of the new "Frankenplug" EV connector proves my point...)
You put it in, and it doesn't fit, so you turn it over. You put it in again, it doesn't fit, so you turn it back over. Now it fits.
And if it's like the one on my daughter's Kindle, that's because one of those insertions bent the shield enough that the connector can be inserted the wrong way, so that very soon, you'll break the little plastic piece inside the connector, essentially rendering your Kindle trash.
Ironically, this boneheaded government mandate will lead to far *more* e-waste than actually letting companies and their customers decide what works without the divine wisdom of a bunch of socialist lawyer potentates in Brussels....
No thanks, EUroweenies, I'd rather be free to choose a connector that actually works. I certainly would love to never see another microUSB connector again, as it's probably the worst power connector on the planet. (And it took some doing to beat the monstrously clunky UK power plug...) The *only* decent application for micro USB is for devices that are never unplugged, like some small consumer electronics equipment/appliances - it's *completely* unsuitable for anything that needs to be plugged or unplugged frequently.
Turns out UPS (but not FedEx) will deliver anywhere with an address - even a vacant lot. A buddy of mine had his card used to buy thousands of dollars worth of TVs and other home entertainment electronics that were delivered to a vacant lot in Round Rock. The bad guys just waited for the truck to leave, then swooped in and loaded up. Far as I know, they were never caught. (To be fair, this was a few years ago, one would hope UPS has changed their policy on this....)
You're assuming people even *can* look at their statements in something like an real-time fashion.
A great many of us (even here at/.) deliberately disable any and all "online banking" features, simply because we *know* they're not secure. If someone compromises my card (it would have to be someone else, since I don't allow *any* online account access) , then unless the bank or card bureau calls me, I have no way to know until I get my next statement in the mail. (No, I don't allow electronic statements, either.)
BTW, I was comparing notes with a good friend of mine the other day - he's one of the world's leading experts on software engineering (his seminal paper is cited more than any other), and he's even tostricter on this stuff than I am - and for *all* the right reasons.
I thought it was interesting that the article mentioned that Dyson has never released a robot vacuum, but then failed to note that the company did *announce* a robot vacuum back around 2001, and finally (quietly) decided to cancel it in 2005. That vacuum was called the DC06 - a summary of the letter "announcing" its cancellation can be found here: http://www.robotreviews.com/ch...
Those who say this is an easy problem have clearly never really looked at what it takes to solve it. I have - my original background is robotics, and I worked on (and we abandoned as infeasible) a robotic floor cleaner design back in the late 1980s. Time and tech advances haven't helped much - Like most problems in robotics and AI, the real issues are stubbornly immune to increases in compute power or software technology. In addition, "simply" designing and building reliable robotics hardware is insanely difficult to do well. The very best (and thus very expensive) robots we can build are still finicky, fiddly, and incredibly fragile things that require staggering amounts of maintenance (both preventive and corrective). My friend Dewayne Perry, one of the world's leading experts on software engineering, is right when he says that Artificial Intelligence needs quantum improvements to reach even the level of natural stupidity...
FWIW, I've never seen a robot that doesn't suck, except for the robot "vacuum cleaners" out there.... Nothing makes you appreciate the Intelligent Design of living systems like trying to build a robot that actually really works and is truly adaptive to real world environments!
I remember reading that is all benefits were removed from oil than the price of gas would be between 12-15 dollars a gallon!
And that, children, is why you don't believe everything you read, especially from those on the Internet that don't bother to sanity check their figures.
Let's do some grade school math: The US EIA says we used 134 Billion gallons of gasoline in 2011. Assuming a $3/gal current cost of gas and subtracting that from your ridiculous $12-15/gal figure, that means the federal government was subsidizing the oil industry by between 1.2 and 1.6 TRILLION DOLLARS, or roughly HALF of all federal receipts.
Oh really? Then why aren't American companies over there owning, running, and profiting from all that oil? I'd bet there's not enough oil under the whole place for the next 100 years to break even on the Iraq war. Sorry, but the US oil industry really didn't gain much, if anything from the Iraq war. It may shake your world, but there may have been other considerations...
I remember reading that is all benefits were removed from oil than the price of gas would be between 12-15 dollars a gallon!
And that, children, is why you shouldn't believe everything you read, especially if it's hearsay from an uninformed source on the Internet...
That figure's complete BS - it has to be. Even if you counted all of the oil industry's tax deductions that are analogous to those in other industries as subsidies, (they're not), there's not nearly enough subsidy there to raise the price of gas anywhere near that much - that doesn't even pass a first-order common-sense test...
Do the grade school math: 134,000,000,000 (1.34e9) gallons of gasoline were used in the US in 2011, according to the EIA. Assuming current prices of $3/gal to make the math easier, that means you're claiming the "subsidies" amount to between $9 and $12/gal, for a total of $1.2-1.6 TRILLION. I find that very difficult to believe, since that's roughly HALF of the entire revenue of the federal government...
Lots of people tried to do thin-film/amorphous solar panels. All the others had the sense to make them flat to maximize the sun exposure rather than coat the entire inside surface of a tube, only half (at best) of which was going to catch sunlight anyway. Solyndra's engineering and design wasn't flat - but it was just flat awful.
Seriously, it's hard to imagine a stupider idea to throw over half a billion dollars at than Solyndra (maybe feeding plants Brawndo?) - this was corruption and unsavory dealing at its worst. Solyndra was doomed by a stupid concept, as anyone with any technical ability at all knew from the beginning.
Every rooftop that doesn't have solar panels is a target for panels
No, that's just wrong - your roof has to face within about 20 degrees of due south if those panels are ever to produce enough power to recover their cost. (Actually, about 15-20 degrees West of South is ideal from an economic point of view, since power is worth more in the late afternoon.)
Also, if your roof has any shade (trees, chimneys, etc.) then you can lose a large portion of your generating capacity. Microinverters help, since they keep the losses to only the shaded panels, but they are really only cost effective for homes and fairly small commercial rooftops, today.
Germany is hardly what anyone would call a bastion of sunshine, but they seem to be making quite a go of solar.
And a large part of that is their ability to lavishly fund subsidies because we provide a fair portion of their defense - and pay them for our bases there to do it...
Not that I'm advocating subsidies, I'm not, but it's fair to point out that European socialist welfare/subsidy states could not exist if it were not for the US subsidizing the costs of their defense. Not that I advocate that, either...
Whether or not SolarCity is getting direct subsidies (and I find it difficult to believe that they're not), they are most certainly getting the indirect benefits of those subsidies (tradeable renewable energy credits (RECs), etc.), since that's what's driving almost all solar projects today (which is why most are in New Jersey (nice, sunny place, that) and California - that's where the subsidies are biggest and still flowing. (Look at all the solar activity in Colorado that dried up overnight when the state killed the subsidy program...)
and how in about '66 or '67 Texaco payed less in Federal Income Tax than just one of the cleaning ladies at its New York headquarters
Corporations NEVER, EVER pay taxes. Sure, they may write a check to the government (although they owe it to their investors and customers to make sure that check is as small as possible) , but that cost is then necessarily passed on to their customers in the form of higher prices, and thus eventually to consumers. One of the biggest lies anywhere is the notion that you can tax corporations (evil, noble, or otherwise) at all. In reality, every corporate tax is paid for by all of us. There really is no such thing as a tax on corporations, just indirect and wildly inefficient tax collection mechanisms.
Those are not subsidies, they are ordinary tax deductions. The cost of drilling wells is part of the COGS - Cost of Goods Sold - this is and always has been deductible in all modern tax codes, in all industries, for at least he last 100 years...
Subsidies are *payments* made, usually to encourage behavior that is otherwise economically harmful. Solar does get subsidies - governments write checks or grant fungible tax credits such as RECs and give them to solar developers. Fossil fuels (with a few niggling corner-case exceptions) do not get subsidies...
Solyndra's product was *always* stupid, and was inherently even less efficient than the already abysmal efficiency we get from conventional solar panels. The *only* advantage of Solydra's technology was that snow could (maybe, if you were lucky) fall between the tubes and you could generate power in the winter, while flat panels were blanketed in snow, if you're unfortunate enough to live someplace where it snows.
All kidding aside, this is a big benefit, since PV produces far more power cold weather, but it's not nearly enough to offset all the other really big drawbacks to Solyndra's approach. At the time of Solyndra's bankruptcy, their technology cost nearly twice as much - but it would be 4-5X today, since Si panels bacame so cheap...)
No, not really. I personally believe that there is no compelling evidence that AGW exists, or that CO2 is in any way a pollutant - but that has absolutely *nothing* to do with why I'm against solar subsidies, whether backed by the GOP, the Democrat party, or anyone else. (Not solar itself, note the difference...)
(Disclosure - I've spent the last five years in the solar industry, dragging it kicking and screaming into the modern world...)
Solar still has a great many problems, and is very, very far from the panacea that most people in the industry (and green fanboys) delude themselves into believing.
First, solar is not economically feasible without huge government subsidies unless you live on an island or similarly remote area and have to ship in your fuel. This is not easy to change - panels are cheap (and getting a little cheaper), but most of the money in a solar install is not the panels, but rather the BOS (balance of system) cost. BOS costs are NOT falling, and may be going up with increased regulation. Let solar grow into the places where it makes sense - subsidies only distort the market and create huge incentive for graft, corruption, and cronyism. (Solyndra really is a great example here - it was clear from the very beginning that there was no way a company could spend $7/Watt to build goofy tubular PV and sell into a market where top-grade German panels could be had for $4/W. This was just the worst sort of corrupt cronyism on an unprecedented scale.) Recent studies in Spain have shown that any ground-mount array not only produces marked ecological damage, but that you will *never* recover the site prep energy required by a large-scale ground-mount array. And we're just starting to wake up to the risk that rooftop solar arrays present in a fire - there are downsides to materials that MUST (according to quantum physics) produce voltage when exposed to sunlight - many fire departments are instituting "watch it burn" policies for building with rooftop solar arrays, since there is no other reasonable way to protect firefighters on a solar roof. Bottom line, Solar is still *really* expensive, and not reliable enough to benefit the grid on a large scale. (Germany's grid is facing instability issues related to their relatively high usage of solar.) The US EIA reports that the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, taking into account lifecycle costs) of solar PV is at best about 3X that of combined cycle natural gas, with a capacity factor (availability) of only around 25%, compared to 85-90% for coal, gas, or nuclear. "Grid parity" is still a pipe dream.)
Second, solar panels don't last *nearly* as long or work nearly as well as people (including the manufacturers) say. I know - my team built and collected the largest database of per-panel performance data the world has ever seen. Very minor soiling (say, a business-card-sized drop of bird crap) eliminates 1/3 of the power output of most panels. Add another one or two in that string, and you've now removed that entire string's power production from your array. Even a little shade, as you might expect, can cripple the performance of entire arrays. The harsh economic reality is that you need at least 20-25 years of production to breakeven - even *with* most subsidies. (With current technology, the power output of even quality panels degrades very rapidly after about 20 years. Yes, that's right, you get to re-buy your solar power generation every couple of decades, and deal with difficult-to-get-to toxic heavy metal waste in the old ones...) There are good quality panels out there that last, but we're starting to see way too many arrays with third-tier Chinese panels beginning to fail in the field after only 5-8 years (delamination and backing failures being the most common). Arrays being built with most of the crap that's on the market now will *never* breakeven. (And even the Chinese cannot afford to continue selling panels at current prices - a shakeout is virtually inevitable, and will traumatize the industry even further
WebRTC is a moderately interesting technology (not app, an important distinction), that I have *never* seen used outside of a demo. You might as well argue for inline NAPLPS graphics, Betamax, or GPG/PGP mail, or 100baseVG AnyLAN...
Yes, you have to sell your soul (and all your personal info) to Google+ in order to use hangouts.
That said, I use whatever my clients and customers use - until recently, that was G+ and Hangouts, but I've switched back to Skype again in the past couple of months, and it's been a real relief.
There is no contest as far as reliability of connections and acceptable video and (more importantly) audio quality. Skype isn't as good as we all wish it was, but it really is light-years ahead of Hangouts, which is so bug-ridden that you can pretty much count on wasting 5 minutes every time you use it tying to get everyone connected before finally giving up in disgust and just accepting that some part of it isn't going to work. (We had one developer who was routinely reduced to writing signs on paper and holding them up to the camera as the most effective way to participate in a Hangouts call...)
Skype isn't perfect, for sure, but at least it's usable...
From what I've seen, this says quite a bit more about the stability and proper functioning of Android devices and apps in general than it does about Skype...
Seriously, I bought an Android tablet a few months back, and the hardware is quite good, but Android is just a bloody disaster. (This is a very clean Android implementation, about the closest to a Nexus 7, which shares most of the same problems.)
One thing is very clear: NO ONE at Google seems to have worried much about making the various bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam that comprise Android hang together in any kind of meaningful or coordinated fashion.
There's a lot to dislike about Apple (especially with the horrid iOS7), but they did at least think (a little) about how users would actually use the thing.
FWIW, I now trust Microsoft more than I trust either Google or Apple. Never thought I'd be saying that... If I could find an alternative for ActiveInbox, I'd leave the Google plantation for good...
One of many innovative aspects of Burt Rutan's Spaceship One design was the design of the landing gear. Rutan's designs have a Bauhaus-like spareness to them - especially when pushing the envelope as in Spaceship One, his practice was to eliminate cost and weight by eliminating the complexity that drove them.
SSOne's landing gear is a perfect example - ordinary landing gear (such as used on the Shuttle) is heavy and complex, with lots of hydraulics to be able to deploy and retract, and even more large, heavy oleo strut stuff to absorb the impact of landing.
Rutan's insight here was typically brilliant: In flight, the landing gear never needed to retract, only deploy, and even that only once, reliably. The model became that of a switchblade knife: A powerful spring reliably forces the landing gear down to engage a locking catch. The comparatively spindly landing gear struts themselves are designed to be springy enough to absorb the expected landing impacts.
Of course, NASA can't bring itself to admire or declare acceptable what a "private cowboy" like Rutan has done, so they need to spend more money to figure out some other way, rather than adopt what's been shown to work quite well (at least for space vehicles that aren't obese, which is admittedly a foreign concept to NASA - the Shuttle was 20% overweight (!!), making it too heavy to launch Air Force satellites into polar orbit, one of the things that justified it in the first place!)
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I know this is a really radical idea, but perhaps instead of a bunch of government regulatory czars making technology decrees that they are hopelessly unable to comprehend, maybe, just maybe, we should let the market sort out the winners and losers rather than mandate them up front as a fait accompli. Just sayin'...
(Oh, and although I firmly hope to never have to drive an electric car, I think the mere existence of the new "Frankenplug" EV connector proves my point...)
You put it in, and it doesn't fit, so you turn it over.
You put it in again, it doesn't fit, so you turn it back over.
Now it fits.
And if it's like the one on my daughter's Kindle, that's because one of those insertions bent the shield enough that the connector can be inserted the wrong way, so that very soon, you'll break the little plastic piece inside the connector, essentially rendering your Kindle trash.
Ironically, this boneheaded government mandate will lead to far *more* e-waste than actually letting companies and their customers decide what works without the divine wisdom of a bunch of socialist lawyer potentates in Brussels....
No thanks, EUroweenies, I'd rather be free to choose a connector that actually works. I certainly would love to never see another microUSB connector again, as it's probably the worst power connector on the planet. (And it took some doing to beat the monstrously clunky UK power plug...) The *only* decent application for micro USB is for devices that are never unplugged, like some small consumer electronics equipment/appliances - it's *completely* unsuitable for anything that needs to be plugged or unplugged frequently.
Actually, we prefer to pay with little pieces of green paper. It's much more secure than the plastic stuff, chip, pin, or whatnot...
We used to use money that had actual value, but that perfectly logical practice was deemed barbaric by our betters in the last century.
As Scott McNealy famously said (and was pilloried for here on Slashdot, IIRC), "You've got no privacy anyway - get over it."
Turns out UPS (but not FedEx) will deliver anywhere with an address - even a vacant lot. A buddy of mine had his card used to buy thousands of dollars worth of TVs and other home entertainment electronics that were delivered to a vacant lot in Round Rock. The bad guys just waited for the truck to leave, then swooped in and loaded up. Far as I know, they were never caught. (To be fair, this was a few years ago, one would hope UPS has changed their policy on this....)
That's just another one of those old canards... /geese
Oh, that sounds really f-ing convenient...
That's because electronic evidence *isn't*.
You're assuming people even *can* look at their statements in something like an real-time fashion.
A great many of us (even here at /.) deliberately disable any and all "online banking" features, simply because we *know* they're not secure. If someone compromises my card (it would have to be someone else, since I don't allow *any* online account access) , then unless the bank or card bureau calls me, I have no way to know until I get my next statement in the mail. (No, I don't allow electronic statements, either.)
BTW, I was comparing notes with a good friend of mine the other day - he's one of the world's leading experts on software engineering (his seminal paper is cited more than any other), and he's even tostricter on this stuff than I am - and for *all* the right reasons.
I thought it was interesting that the article mentioned that Dyson has never released a robot vacuum, but then failed to note that the company did *announce* a robot vacuum back around 2001, and finally (quietly) decided to cancel it in 2005. That vacuum was called the DC06 - a summary of the letter "announcing" its cancellation can be found here: http://www.robotreviews.com/ch...
Those who say this is an easy problem have clearly never really looked at what it takes to solve it. I have - my original background is robotics, and I worked on (and we abandoned as infeasible) a robotic floor cleaner design back in the late 1980s. Time and tech advances haven't helped much - Like most problems in robotics and AI, the real issues are stubbornly immune to increases in compute power or software technology. In addition, "simply" designing and building reliable robotics hardware is insanely difficult to do well. The very best (and thus very expensive) robots we can build are still finicky, fiddly, and incredibly fragile things that require staggering amounts of maintenance (both preventive and corrective). My friend Dewayne Perry, one of the world's leading experts on software engineering, is right when he says that Artificial Intelligence needs quantum improvements to reach even the level of natural stupidity...
FWIW, I've never seen a robot that doesn't suck, except for the robot "vacuum cleaners" out there.... Nothing makes you appreciate the Intelligent Design of living systems like trying to build a robot that actually really works and is truly adaptive to real world environments!
I remember reading that is all benefits were removed from oil than the price of gas would be between 12-15 dollars a gallon!
And that, children, is why you don't believe everything you read, especially from those on the Internet that don't bother to sanity check their figures.
Let's do some grade school math: The US EIA says we used 134 Billion gallons of gasoline in 2011. Assuming a $3/gal current cost of gas and subtracting that from your ridiculous $12-15/gal figure, that means the federal government was subsidizing the oil industry by between 1.2 and 1.6 TRILLION DOLLARS, or roughly HALF of all federal receipts.
I find that very difficult to believe!
Oh really? Then why aren't American companies over there owning, running, and profiting from all that oil? I'd bet there's not enough oil under the whole place for the next 100 years to break even on the Iraq war. Sorry, but the US oil industry really didn't gain much, if anything from the Iraq war. It may shake your world, but there may have been other considerations...
I remember reading that is all benefits were removed from oil than the price of gas would be between 12-15 dollars a gallon!
And that, children, is why you shouldn't believe everything you read, especially if it's hearsay from an uninformed source on the Internet...
That figure's complete BS - it has to be. Even if you counted all of the oil industry's tax deductions that are analogous to those in other industries as subsidies, (they're not), there's not nearly enough subsidy there to raise the price of gas anywhere near that much - that doesn't even pass a first-order common-sense test...
Do the grade school math: 134,000,000,000 (1.34e9) gallons of gasoline were used in the US in 2011, according to the EIA. Assuming current prices of $3/gal to make the math easier, that means you're claiming the "subsidies" amount to between $9 and $12/gal, for a total of $1.2-1.6 TRILLION. I find that very difficult to believe, since that's roughly HALF of the entire revenue of the federal government...
Lots of people tried to do thin-film/amorphous solar panels. All the others had the sense to make them flat to maximize the sun exposure rather than coat the entire inside surface of a tube, only half (at best) of which was going to catch sunlight anyway. Solyndra's engineering and design wasn't flat - but it was just flat awful.
Seriously, it's hard to imagine a stupider idea to throw over half a billion dollars at than Solyndra (maybe feeding plants Brawndo?) - this was corruption and unsavory dealing at its worst. Solyndra was doomed by a stupid concept, as anyone with any technical ability at all knew from the beginning.
Every rooftop that doesn't have solar panels is a target for panels
No, that's just wrong - your roof has to face within about 20 degrees of due south if those panels are ever to produce enough power to recover their cost. (Actually, about 15-20 degrees West of South is ideal from an economic point of view, since power is worth more in the late afternoon.)
Also, if your roof has any shade (trees, chimneys, etc.) then you can lose a large portion of your generating capacity. Microinverters help, since they keep the losses to only the shaded panels, but they are really only cost effective for homes and fairly small commercial rooftops, today.
Germany is hardly what anyone would call a bastion of sunshine, but they seem to be making quite a go of solar.
And a large part of that is their ability to lavishly fund subsidies because we provide a fair portion of their defense - and pay them for our bases there to do it...
Not that I'm advocating subsidies, I'm not, but it's fair to point out that European socialist welfare/subsidy states could not exist if it were not for the US subsidizing the costs of their defense. Not that I advocate that, either...
Whether or not SolarCity is getting direct subsidies (and I find it difficult to believe that they're not), they are most certainly getting the indirect benefits of those subsidies (tradeable renewable energy credits (RECs), etc.), since that's what's driving almost all solar projects today (which is why most are in New Jersey (nice, sunny place, that) and California - that's where the subsidies are biggest and still flowing. (Look at all the solar activity in Colorado that dried up overnight when the state killed the subsidy program...)
and how in about '66 or '67 Texaco payed less in Federal Income Tax than just one of the cleaning ladies at its New York headquarters
Corporations NEVER, EVER pay taxes. Sure, they may write a check to the government (although they owe it to their investors and customers to make sure that check is as small as possible) , but that cost is then necessarily passed on to their customers in the form of higher prices, and thus eventually to consumers. One of the biggest lies anywhere is the notion that you can tax corporations (evil, noble, or otherwise) at all. In reality, every corporate tax is paid for by all of us. There really is no such thing as a tax on corporations, just indirect and wildly inefficient tax collection mechanisms.
Those are not subsidies, they are ordinary tax deductions. The cost of drilling wells is part of the COGS - Cost of Goods Sold - this is and always has been deductible in all modern tax codes, in all industries, for at least he last 100 years...
Subsidies are *payments* made, usually to encourage behavior that is otherwise economically harmful. Solar does get subsidies - governments write checks or grant fungible tax credits such as RECs and give them to solar developers. Fossil fuels (with a few niggling corner-case exceptions) do not get subsidies...
Solyndra's product was *always* stupid, and was inherently even less efficient than the already abysmal efficiency we get from conventional solar panels. The *only* advantage of Solydra's technology was that snow could (maybe, if you were lucky) fall between the tubes and you could generate power in the winter, while flat panels were blanketed in snow, if you're unfortunate enough to live someplace where it snows.
All kidding aside, this is a big benefit, since PV produces far more power cold weather, but it's not nearly enough to offset all the other really big drawbacks to Solyndra's approach. At the time of Solyndra's bankruptcy, their technology cost nearly twice as much - but it would be 4-5X today, since Si panels bacame so cheap...)
$10b goes a long way towards making something 'cheaper'.
No, based on what we've seen the last few years, it just fuels corrupt cronyism...
No, not really. I personally believe that there is no compelling evidence that AGW exists, or that CO2 is in any way a pollutant - but that has absolutely *nothing* to do with why I'm against solar subsidies, whether backed by the GOP, the Democrat party, or anyone else. (Not solar itself, note the difference...)
(Disclosure - I've spent the last five years in the solar industry, dragging it kicking and screaming into the modern world...)
Solar still has a great many problems, and is very, very far from the panacea that most people in the industry (and green fanboys) delude themselves into believing.
First, solar is not economically feasible without huge government subsidies unless you live on an island or similarly remote area and have to ship in your fuel. This is not easy to change - panels are cheap (and getting a little cheaper), but most of the money in a solar install is not the panels, but rather the BOS (balance of system) cost. BOS costs are NOT falling, and may be going up with increased regulation. Let solar grow into the places where it makes sense - subsidies only distort the market and create huge incentive for graft, corruption, and cronyism. (Solyndra really is a great example here - it was clear from the very beginning that there was no way a company could spend $7/Watt to build goofy tubular PV and sell into a market where top-grade German panels could be had for $4/W. This was just the worst sort of corrupt cronyism on an unprecedented scale.) Recent studies in Spain have shown that any ground-mount array not only produces marked ecological damage, but that you will *never* recover the site prep energy required by a large-scale ground-mount array. And we're just starting to wake up to the risk that rooftop solar arrays present in a fire - there are downsides to materials that MUST (according to quantum physics) produce voltage when exposed to sunlight - many fire departments are instituting "watch it burn" policies for building with rooftop solar arrays, since there is no other reasonable way to protect firefighters on a solar roof. Bottom line, Solar is still *really* expensive, and not reliable enough to benefit the grid on a large scale. (Germany's grid is facing instability issues related to their relatively high usage of solar.) The US EIA reports that the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, taking into account lifecycle costs) of solar PV is at best about 3X that of combined cycle natural gas, with a capacity factor (availability) of only around 25%, compared to 85-90% for coal, gas, or nuclear. "Grid parity" is still a pipe dream.)
Second, solar panels don't last *nearly* as long or work nearly as well as people (including the manufacturers) say. I know - my team built and collected the largest database of per-panel performance data the world has ever seen. Very minor soiling (say, a business-card-sized drop of bird crap) eliminates 1/3 of the power output of most panels. Add another one or two in that string, and you've now removed that entire string's power production from your array. Even a little shade, as you might expect, can cripple the performance of entire arrays. The harsh economic reality is that you need at least 20-25 years of production to breakeven - even *with* most subsidies. (With current technology, the power output of even quality panels degrades very rapidly after about 20 years. Yes, that's right, you get to re-buy your solar power generation every couple of decades, and deal with difficult-to-get-to toxic heavy metal waste in the old ones...) There are good quality panels out there that last, but we're starting to see way too many arrays with third-tier Chinese panels beginning to fail in the field after only 5-8 years (delamination and backing failures being the most common). Arrays being built with most of the crap that's on the market now will *never* breakeven. (And even the Chinese cannot afford to continue selling panels at current prices - a shakeout is virtually inevitable, and will traumatize the industry even further
WebRTC is a moderately interesting technology (not app, an important distinction), that I have *never* seen used outside of a demo. You might as well argue for inline NAPLPS graphics, Betamax, or GPG/PGP mail, or 100baseVG AnyLAN...
Yes, you have to sell your soul (and all your personal info) to Google+ in order to use hangouts.
That said, I use whatever my clients and customers use - until recently, that was G+ and Hangouts, but I've switched back to Skype again in the past couple of months, and it's been a real relief.
There is no contest as far as reliability of connections and acceptable video and (more importantly) audio quality. Skype isn't as good as we all wish it was, but it really is light-years ahead of Hangouts, which is so bug-ridden that you can pretty much count on wasting 5 minutes every time you use it tying to get everyone connected before finally giving up in disgust and just accepting that some part of it isn't going to work. (We had one developer who was routinely reduced to writing signs on paper and holding them up to the camera as the most effective way to participate in a Hangouts call...)
Skype isn't perfect, for sure, but at least it's usable...
From what I've seen, this says quite a bit more about the stability and proper functioning of Android devices and apps in general than it does about Skype...
Seriously, I bought an Android tablet a few months back, and the hardware is quite good, but Android is just a bloody disaster. (This is a very clean Android implementation, about the closest to a Nexus 7, which shares most of the same problems.)
One thing is very clear: NO ONE at Google seems to have worried much about making the various bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam that comprise Android hang together in any kind of meaningful or coordinated fashion.
There's a lot to dislike about Apple (especially with the horrid iOS7), but they did at least think (a little) about how users would actually use the thing.
FWIW, I now trust Microsoft more than I trust either Google or Apple. Never thought I'd be saying that... If I could find an alternative for ActiveInbox, I'd leave the Google plantation for good...
One of many innovative aspects of Burt Rutan's Spaceship One design was the design of the landing gear. Rutan's designs have a Bauhaus-like spareness to them - especially when pushing the envelope as in Spaceship One, his practice was to eliminate cost and weight by eliminating the complexity that drove them.
SSOne's landing gear is a perfect example - ordinary landing gear (such as used on the Shuttle) is heavy and complex, with lots of hydraulics to be able to deploy and retract, and even more large, heavy oleo strut stuff to absorb the impact of landing.
Rutan's insight here was typically brilliant: In flight, the landing gear never needed to retract, only deploy, and even that only once, reliably. The model became that of a switchblade knife: A powerful spring reliably forces the landing gear down to engage a locking catch. The comparatively spindly landing gear struts themselves are designed to be springy enough to absorb the expected landing impacts.
Of course, NASA can't bring itself to admire or declare acceptable what a "private cowboy" like Rutan has done, so they need to spend more money to figure out some other way, rather than adopt what's been shown to work quite well (at least for space vehicles that aren't obese, which is admittedly a foreign concept to NASA - the Shuttle was 20% overweight (!!), making it too heavy to launch Air Force satellites into polar orbit, one of the things that justified it in the first place!)