The Financial Times editor is unfortunately either misinformed or is deliberately trying to frame this into a particular agenda (or more likely just trying to make up a story to make headlines).
Those costs only appear if you include taxes. E.g. in Denmark there's a really hefty tax on energy in general, partly to induce people to save energy, partly as just a means of taxing - instead of taxing income which according to prevailing economic theory reduces the incentive to work. It's not the renewables that are the cause of the high price.
You're the third guy on the Internet I've had to explain this to. That Financial Time writer really needs a kick in his/her butt.
No, he's not. I read his blog post and it was not terribly convincing - because he's using numbers derived from rail road, and he's ignoring the fact that the dude he's bad-mouthing (and he is bad-mouthing him, it's by no means an objective blog post) actually has a history of delivering on hard technical problems.
It's a logical fallacy to compare the unit cost of (not a lot of) viaducts that need to carry heavy trains and more than 500 km of pylons + steel tubes.
It's a logical fallacy to compare acceleration forces and regulatives for a train and a capsule floating in a steel tube where the latter have people are fastened to the seats.
Note: I'm not saying Elon Musk is right (and I don't think he's himself either, it's an alpha plan afterall) - I'm saying that Alan Levy is definitely not right.:)
Most people are unaware that the "fresh" apples they get in store are actually a few years old.
I don't think that's true. As far as I know, depending on the sort of apple, you can store them on a commercial scale for maybe up to 9-12 months. Many sorts can't be stored more than a couple of months before the quality loss makes them distasteful.
No, I'm not an apple producer myself, but I do own a (somewhat old) book on commercial apple production.
Also, regarding the gas - the trick is to remove most of the oxygen. The easiest way to do that is simply letting the apples use up the available oxygen through normal respiration by closing the storage room off. But there can't be too much CO2 either, so I imagine commercial facilities these days have some more active means of controlling the atmosphere.
Anyway, there's no special gas - you just control the levels of oxygen, CO2 and nitrogen. And water vapor, of course, to prevent fungus.
Or perhaps the dude is just old enough to remember what he's been promised before:
Mark Cooper
Cooper is a senior research fellow for economic analysis at the Center for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School. He has almost 30 years experience as a public policy analyst and expert witness for public interest clients. As such, he has appeared more than 300 times before public utility commissions, federal agencies, and state and federal legislatures in more than 40 jurisdictions in the United States and Canada. He first analyzed nuclear power economics in 1984 for the Mississippi Public Service Commission in regard to the construction of the second unit at the Grand Gulf nuclear power station.
Furthermore, he's not saying it can't be done. He's saying one shouldn't eat the corporate BS raw. It sounds like you disagree. You're postulating that smaller flexible designs would be cost-effective, but maybe they're just more expensive - things always look better on the drawing board, we all know that.
Energy labels have been mandatory for some years now with a big label that must be shown to the consumer. The result are actually pretty stunning. A couple of years ago C or B would be considered fine, and you'd have to shell out a lot of extra cash to get an A-rated fridge. These days, A is the standard, really low-end ones are B and the best are A+++:
I agree, but actually my sister had a cat, and it did in fact sometimes run by walking really, really fast. If you see a not too scared cat run away from you on the street, it's often doing the fast walk rather than the galloping. It looks pretty funny at top speed because the legs are moving so fast. Here's an example on Youtube.
Wind turbines slow the wind, consume territory, look hideous, require huge maintenance, and make noise.
You, sir, are bonkers. Of course they slow the wind locally! What's the problem? They are actually relatively cheap in maintenance (you can look up the financials of a modern wind turbine park if you don't believe me, we're talking maybe 1-2 US cent per kWh), as for the rest of your points, that's generally why you put them away somewhere far.
Solar panels take up a huge about of territory, polute to manufacture, and require total replacement to upgrade.
So you put them in a desert. "Polute to manufacture" - maybe but they're still a net win. "Require toal replacement to upgrade" - so what?
Maybe because he doesn't really represent the project? Miguel hasn't really been involved in GNOME for many years. Been around in some form for a long time, yes, developing for it, no. Basically, he gradually left for Mono (which was started in 2001). As a side note, the original GNOME vision he had with CORBA and the networked object model turned out to be fundamentally useless and a big distraction.
Regarding base load: you don't need base load. That's a myth. You need a large grid, multiple power sources, an abundance of plants and some amount of storage, e.g. hydro (pumped isn't necessary, you just need to be able to have a buffer) or natural gas, could be biogas. I've seen three independent studies come to this conclusion.
The primary problem with nuclear power is cost. It's really expensive. There was an article in Bulletins of Atomic Scientists that covered this in depth, "How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing":
I think you missed something here. It's not the bandwidth that's the problem, it's the latency. X is waiting for far too many requests. You could put it on a 10 Gbit high-latency network and it would still suck.
X is not really network transparent. It only works over a limited set of networks because the stack isn't geared for high-latency networks.
Meanwhile, Wayland developers have actually worked on network support. The main developer demoed it a couple of months ago.
I too would like to be able to SSH into a box, start a GUI program and get a window up. And I think that's going to happen at some point natively. In the meantime, X on Wayland allows you to continue to use X's network support. I'm looking forward to a day where I can SSH over ADSL and still get a usable window back. This sort of works with NX, but NX is just too buggy for me.
By the way, "network transparent" is in itself a stupid notion, and X is the perfect example of how stupid it is. Other similar flawed systems include CORBA and.NET Remoting. Going over a network is so fundamentally different that trying to gloss over it is guarenteed to fail.
Actually, where I live, it has been discussed to put up surveillance cameras to catch burglars. But the police isn't really interested, because nobody's going to watch those cameras realtime and usually they can't use the footage for identification after the fact (low light, masks, too long distance). So the problem is less tractable than you'd think.
Agreed. And if you take a look at the top subscribed channels, it's not all complete crap or copyrighted-by-someone-else material.
Of course, most of the stuff on that list is not something I'd like to watch, but take any list of commercial TV channels, and I'd feel the same way.:)
The difficulty in synthesizing sound is getting the models right. You can't simulate each atom so you need a simplifying model that allows you to reduce the work. And that model has to be accurate in the areas where it matters.
While moving stuff to a GPU gives more computing power (but in a more constrained fashion than a CPU) and certainly helps, the models aren't there yet.
The people researching physical modelling continue to make progress, but I think that if you put state of the art in a game, you'd perhaps have more lively sounds, but they'd probably sound worse than sampled sounds.
Agreed. Do read at least some of it. It puts an interesting perspective of Julian Assange. That dude has some deep thoughts and he's seen some really scary stuff.
I disagree. Python 3 uptake has been really slow. The result is that a lot of the good stuff in the Python 3.x series isn't in wide-spread use yet, and if you're writing reusable library code, you can't really assume the majority of your users will have access to it yet.
Guido should have said: we'll break these things we have to break, and for the rest add shim layers with deprecation warnings instead of just opening the gates. That would probably have seen much faster adoption rates.
The gradual approach has worked pretty well for the 2.x series - if you use something deprecated, you get a bunch of really visible warnings you can then fix as you go along. I see no upsides in turning these warnings into hard errors, especially not when some of them happen in library code out of your immediate control.
Prompted by your observation, I read the interview and have to agree it was very interesting. Alan Kay is obviously thinking completely different from the crowd.
Actually, you laugh, but Vestas, the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world, bought a supercomputer two years ago.
They use it to run simulations of wind conditions back in time. In some sense terrain-aware interpolations of existing measurements.
The thing is that when you're trying to figure out the economics of putting up a wind turbine, it doesn't really help you terribly much that you know the wind conditions 20 miles away in the nearest town. They've built a tool on top querying the simulated data so they can instantly tell their customers what the ROI would be for a specific location. Beats raising a long pole and waiting a year or two for the results.
Slashdot Mirror
The Financial Times editor is unfortunately either misinformed or is deliberately trying to frame this into a particular agenda (or more likely just trying to make up a story to make headlines).
Those costs only appear if you include taxes. E.g. in Denmark there's a really hefty tax on energy in general, partly to induce people to save energy, partly as just a means of taxing - instead of taxing income which according to prevailing economic theory reduces the incentive to work. It's not the renewables that are the cause of the high price.
You're the third guy on the Internet I've had to explain this to. That Financial Time writer really needs a kick in his/her butt.
You sound like a guy who doesn't eat many potatoes, and doesn't know the metric system. :)
If you are ordering potatoes in 5 kg bags (~10 lbs), 4 small potatoes aren't helpful.
No, he's not. I read his blog post and it was not terribly convincing - because he's using numbers derived from rail road, and he's ignoring the fact that the dude he's bad-mouthing (and he is bad-mouthing him, it's by no means an objective blog post) actually has a history of delivering on hard technical problems.
It's a logical fallacy to compare the unit cost of (not a lot of) viaducts that need to carry heavy trains and more than 500 km of pylons + steel tubes.
It's a logical fallacy to compare acceleration forces and regulatives for a train and a capsule floating in a steel tube where the latter have people are fastened to the seats.
Note: I'm not saying Elon Musk is right (and I don't think he's himself either, it's an alpha plan afterall) - I'm saying that Alan Levy is definitely not right. :)
Most people are unaware that the "fresh" apples they get in store are actually a few years old.
I don't think that's true. As far as I know, depending on the sort of apple, you can store them on a commercial scale for maybe up to 9-12 months. Many sorts can't be stored more than a couple of months before the quality loss makes them distasteful.
No, I'm not an apple producer myself, but I do own a (somewhat old) book on commercial apple production.
Also, regarding the gas - the trick is to remove most of the oxygen. The easiest way to do that is simply letting the apples use up the available oxygen through normal respiration by closing the storage room off. But there can't be too much CO2 either, so I imagine commercial facilities these days have some more active means of controlling the atmosphere.
Anyway, there's no special gas - you just control the levels of oxygen, CO2 and nitrogen. And water vapor, of course, to prevent fungus.
You mean, like, morse code? What would do the morsing with? Oh, wait.
Even creationists say he's off by a thousand years...
He's not a 1000 years off, he's living in the middle ages.
Many Metals have Anti-Bacterial properties to them.
Is that before or after receiving a coating of gunk from a human hand?
Or perhaps the dude is just old enough to remember what he's been promised before:
Mark Cooper
Cooper is a senior research fellow for economic analysis at the Center for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School. He has almost 30 years experience as a public policy analyst and expert witness for public interest clients. As such, he has appeared more than 300 times before public utility commissions, federal agencies, and state and federal legislatures in more than 40 jurisdictions in the United States and Canada. He first analyzed nuclear power economics in 1984 for the Mississippi Public Service Commission in regard to the construction of the second unit at the Grand Gulf nuclear power station.
Furthermore, he's not saying it can't be done. He's saying one shouldn't eat the corporate BS raw. It sounds like you disagree. You're postulating that smaller flexible designs would be cost-effective, but maybe they're just more expensive - things always look better on the drawing board, we all know that.
In the EU it is using less power.
Energy labels have been mandatory for some years now with a big label that must be shown to the consumer. The result are actually pretty stunning. A couple of years ago C or B would be considered fine, and you'd have to shell out a lot of extra cash to get an A-rated fridge. These days, A is the standard, really low-end ones are B and the best are A+++:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label
Without comprehensive, cooperative, enforceable international standards and practices, it's all just political showmanship.
No, it's not. Changing the world often starts with yourself.
If you don't get this - fair enough. But don't ridicule people who do.
I agree, but actually my sister had a cat, and it did in fact sometimes run by walking really, really fast. If you see a not too scared cat run away from you on the street, it's often doing the fast walk rather than the galloping. It looks pretty funny at top speed because the legs are moving so fast. Here's an example on Youtube.
These will in turn be eaten by sharks.
Wind turbines slow the wind, consume territory, look hideous, require huge maintenance, and make noise.
You, sir, are bonkers. Of course they slow the wind locally! What's the problem? They are actually relatively cheap in maintenance (you can look up the financials of a modern wind turbine park if you don't believe me, we're talking maybe 1-2 US cent per kWh), as for the rest of your points, that's generally why you put them away somewhere far.
Solar panels take up a huge about of territory, polute to manufacture, and require total replacement to upgrade.
So you put them in a desert. "Polute to manufacture" - maybe but they're still a net win. "Require toal replacement to upgrade" - so what?
Maybe because he doesn't really represent the project? Miguel hasn't really been involved in GNOME for many years. Been around in some form for a long time, yes, developing for it, no. Basically, he gradually left for Mono (which was started in 2001). As a side note, the original GNOME vision he had with CORBA and the networked object model turned out to be fundamentally useless and a big distraction.
Regarding base load: you don't need base load. That's a myth. You need a large grid, multiple power sources, an abundance of plants and some amount of storage, e.g. hydro (pumped isn't necessary, you just need to be able to have a buffer) or natural gas, could be biogas. I've seen three independent studies come to this conclusion.
The primary problem with nuclear power is cost. It's really expensive. There was an article in Bulletins of Atomic Scientists that covered this in depth, "How to close the US nuclear industry: Do nothing":
http://bos.sagepub.com/content/69/2/12.full
Since it's so expensive, it has to be operating 24/7 which makes it hard to integrate in a power grid with intermittent power sources.
I think you missed something here. It's not the bandwidth that's the problem, it's the latency. X is waiting for far too many requests. You could put it on a 10 Gbit high-latency network and it would still suck.
X is not really network transparent. It only works over a limited set of networks because the stack isn't geared for high-latency networks.
Meanwhile, Wayland developers have actually worked on network support. The main developer demoed it a couple of months ago.
I too would like to be able to SSH into a box, start a GUI program and get a window up. And I think that's going to happen at some point natively. In the meantime, X on Wayland allows you to continue to use X's network support. I'm looking forward to a day where I can SSH over ADSL and still get a usable window back. This sort of works with NX, but NX is just too buggy for me.
By the way, "network transparent" is in itself a stupid notion, and X is the perfect example of how stupid it is. Other similar flawed systems include CORBA and .NET Remoting. Going over a network is so fundamentally different that trying to gloss over it is guarenteed to fail.
Actually, where I live, it has been discussed to put up surveillance cameras to catch burglars. But the police isn't really interested, because nobody's going to watch those cameras realtime and usually they can't use the footage for identification after the fact (low light, masks, too long distance). So the problem is less tractable than you'd think.
Did you actually read the article? The article in which an X developer points out that this is really hard to with X?
Agreed. And if you take a look at the top subscribed channels, it's not all complete crap or copyrighted-by-someone-else material.
Of course, most of the stuff on that list is not something I'd like to watch, but take any list of commercial TV channels, and I'd feel the same way. :)
The difficulty in synthesizing sound is getting the models right. You can't simulate each atom so you need a simplifying model that allows you to reduce the work. And that model has to be accurate in the areas where it matters.
While moving stuff to a GPU gives more computing power (but in a more constrained fashion than a CPU) and certainly helps, the models aren't there yet.
The people researching physical modelling continue to make progress, but I think that if you put state of the art in a game, you'd perhaps have more lively sounds, but they'd probably sound worse than sampled sounds.
Agreed. Do read at least some of it. It puts an interesting perspective of Julian Assange. That dude has some deep thoughts and he's seen some really scary stuff.
I disagree. Python 3 uptake has been really slow. The result is that a lot of the good stuff in the Python 3.x series isn't in wide-spread use yet, and if you're writing reusable library code, you can't really assume the majority of your users will have access to it yet.
Guido should have said: we'll break these things we have to break, and for the rest add shim layers with deprecation warnings instead of just opening the gates. That would probably have seen much faster adoption rates.
The gradual approach has worked pretty well for the 2.x series - if you use something deprecated, you get a bunch of really visible warnings you can then fix as you go along. I see no upsides in turning these warnings into hard errors, especially not when some of them happen in library code out of your immediate control.
Valve Corporation has an interesting setup.
Prompted by your observation, I read the interview and have to agree it was very interesting. Alan Kay is obviously thinking completely different from the crowd.
Actually, you laugh, but Vestas, the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world, bought a supercomputer two years ago.
They use it to run simulations of wind conditions back in time. In some sense terrain-aware interpolations of existing measurements.
The thing is that when you're trying to figure out the economics of putting up a wind turbine, it doesn't really help you terribly much that you know the wind conditions 20 miles away in the nearest town. They've built a tool on top querying the simulated data so they can instantly tell their customers what the ROI would be for a specific location. Beats raising a long pole and waiting a year or two for the results.