February is a good month for dropping console prices, because both January and February are slow retail months. Since some retailers have 'price' matching if you have the receipt and it's been less than 30 days, that makes it a good time to drop the price.
if this news had come around Christmas shopping time, I'd say they wouldn't budge on the price til the next year, but with the popularity of the wii, they just might drop the price soon. It would be nice if similar news were to hit for the xbox 360, but most likely the reason ibm did this with the ps3 first is because of the volume that sony does, vs the volume of chips Microsoft buys. after all the ps3 has been a 'cheap' Blueray player 'with hd video gaming capabilities.' of course, with PC Blue-Ray drives costing about $200 then if your pc works with your HD set, then a $200 upgrade to your PC is way cheaper than a PS3.
the PS3 is not a big savings over other Blue-ray players anymore, but it does play games as well.
if they do decide to drop the price, it will be in the next 3 months, the summer picks up a little as teenagers with jobs have more disposable income.
Re:I thought those things were already broken
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bandwidth is only part of the cost, servers, co-location fees, DNS fees, advertisment, server administration costs (which may be part of the hosting fee.) it all costs money, how much it costs for you to lease the fiber-optic lines isn't the sum of all costs.
location capabilities of cell phones (done via triangulation, not gps) is by default set to 'e 911 only' if you turn the feature on, and the police start using the cell phone company records to prove your speed it's your own fault for turning it on. Still, i doubt that the cell companies even want to collect, and send all that data to the police. if you're not in a call, it uses a lot of network bandwidth to triangulate 'every' phone, every '3' seconds, even if it's only 'the phones on the highway'
it's one thing for a bunch of college students to use the feature to test highway travel times, and a completely different matter to figure out who's speeding.
well, anyone who goes to a church with a 'projection hdtv' or large screen hdtv is in my opinion in too rich a church to begin with.
I know, because I've been dragged along to just such a church, where the pastors make a living being pastors, and even have a paid secretary to handle calls and paper work.... but frankly, that kind of 'religion' scares me, wouldn't they be better off helping the poor? why do they need a tv production studio so the pastors can sit at home on sunday, while a tape is played for the people donating their money each week to this church?
makes me sick when a pastor is a millionaire, and people mindlessly keep giving...
Basically, the reason we have 'adult stem cell research' is because 'embryonic cell research' discovered embryonic stem cells, in 1998 at the UW Madison. And yes, the 'tissue' came from local abortion clinics, so they died long before they became medical research material.
true, now we don't need to harvest stem cells from embryos, and for certain practices it's better to harvest from the patient's own fatty tissue. but if laws banning research on aborted fetus had existed pre-1998 there would be no stem cell research at all.
so god only knows what technology we're missing out on now that researchers in most of the us and Europe can't research on discarded embryonic tissues. The discard of said materials was again not for the sake of research, so these laws haven't changed the source of embryos in the least. but now science may be hindered, because some things are easier to observe in unborn tissues than in a living organism that has matured.
that's why 'electronic' voting has paper trails. if you make a print out, even if it's in a bar code format, you can still perform 'manual' recounts with a hand-held bar-code scanner. using perhaps a desktop computer with a database of the 'recently dead' and as the bar-code recognized the names of 'dead' people it rejects their votes. putting that kind of functionality in the 'election time' 'electronic voting machine' might be too hard, especially if it all has to be 'open' source or if the software has to be audited by government officials etc.
so really all you need on an 'electronic voting machine' is a printer, preferably with some sort of design to prevent 'weak' printouts that' can't be rescanned. (eg: a large capacity printer, and requirements that new cartridges are used each voting season, or some other technical solution) and a barcode scanner, (for automated recounts, and verification of printout) and I'm assuming it would use rolls of paper, again preferably with one 'large enough' to handle all the votes that machine tallies. it's not paperless, but the barcode would be almost meaningless to people, and use less paper than 'voting cards' since 'chad' based ballots are large, and meant for analog computation... while the barcode is meant for digital computation...
oh well, the more features you require the more costly it becomes. still recounts would go much faster with a system well though out. it would be 'nice' if people could vote at 'home' over the internet, but that opens a whole can of worms about identity verification, and security of data, and worries about the system getting hacked, and the whole db becoming 'corrupted' to the tune of the highest paid hacker, who 'won' the election for their 'official.'
the place in Arlington heights is most likely the residence of a 'close' family member of one of those 'prosperous' lawyers, it's not uncommon for 'relatives' of a fairly wealthy family member to be in a situation, where they can't make ends meet with current rental prices, and seek the aid of a family member, because they don't come close to qualifying for any sort of public assistance. although it's somewhat rare for the wealthy relative to buy a house, and let them 'rent' it at cost.
the second thing is a mistress may well be living there 'free' and that's where Mr. big rich lawyer gets the kicks his wife won't give him while he's 'staying late at the office.'
if it's the latter, i suggest leaving messages about it at all the listed numbers. (i won't too lazy)
His wife may need a divorce lawyer, so qualified/.ers in the area may wish to ring them with messages too. I'm brave, and below the poverty line, so I'll post this with my uid. After all, you can sue the poor, but you can't touch their money.
Re:I thought those things were already broken
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that's why it costs 1 cent per 1 captcha, the overall cost of webhosting the porn for exchange boils down to 1 cent per solved captcha. obviously, if you're hosting on root-kited windows boxes in the us (the highest rate of infection is in the us) the cost is still about 1 cent per one captcha because the cost of paying hackers to keep a bot net sizable enough comes to about the same cost.
especially with sp3 coming out now, the cost of bot nets is higher, since sp3 offers a 'easy' bot net removal path, since staying off-line long enough to get all sp2's flaws patched is crucial in preventing reinfection. believe me, having a root-kit installed is easy even for a veteran computer guy to miss.
i have dvd's i burned almost 3 years ago that reinfect any windows machine with a root-kit, and are un-readable in linux, apparently the root-kit was using some hooks in nero burning rom to 'randomly' pick a burn project and put the root-kit installer on there so when windows tried to auto run it would install the root-kit, then show the 'window' that normally shows up on auto-run would show up. the rootkit took an 'extra' session, that was transparent, eg: it would only show using burning software to read the track data, for the burned cd or dvd. no additional files showed up in windows, but the extra session made it unreadable to linux.
also, the root-kit only runs in a 'blank' screen saver, which it protects and makes sure loads when the system is idle, so it never sends data when the user might be there to notice. and i think it sends the data as like, internet explorer, to bypass firewall rules. since none of the firewalls i tried could block it. i actually only found the original root kit when a second root-kit moved the first root-kit's files to the recycle bin. other than that none of the root kit scanners that were recommended to me could even detect this thing. only the 'symptoms' and the fact i could 'remove them' by staying off-line and not using my old discs were proof that i had a root kit.
symptoms included, auto-run becoming disabled, screen saver always resetting to 15 minutes (only when both root-kits were on there), and the 'desktop' showing up 2-3 times a day when in full-screen games (also only with both root kits), and finding root-kit files in recycle bin(only found on networked systems with the root kit, and didn't return on reinstall of both root-kit, likely was a 1 time 'bug' that was fixed later on)
so yeah, I didn't notice it for 3 years. Not that i usually have to deal with virus, but in the past I had only ever had to deal with 3 virus and in my 15 years online. and the third one was really a root-kit. I've also been using open-source software for 11 years, so that probably helped, of course, one of the virus was one that affected my open source software, the other 2 were windows based.
it's still easy to miss windows root-kit's nowadays, especially when hackers have root-kits that aren't published, and they use scripts to make the exe's have unique signatures (using compiler tricks) for known root-kits.
the packaging is a little more spendy with rhino, but it still doesn't go up to $2 after all, on froogle i can find a 10 pack of 'dvd cases' (basic black ones) for $8.90 that's 89 cents per individual unit at full retail-price. even if they add $0.20 cents in 'costs' i would be shocked. but yeah, the 'rights' to content do add up. still, wal-mart sells $5 DVDs for instance Robocop 2 and robocop 3 were available at $5, while robocop 1 was a $10 disc. apparently the 'original' is more highly valued than the sequels, but you can still get 3 full length movies for $20 at wal-mart.
of course, the companies that pressed those discs Did have wal-mart to deal with, and with 2% of the us gross domestic product going through wal-mart's doors (only the second company in history to breach the 2% US GDP, the first company was General Motors) there certainly is a different economic model when you know wal-mart will buy a few million of a specific disc, at a specific price.
still, in music and video it's often more 'politics' of what they think people will pay, rather than 'actual cost' that winds up as the deciding factor, for both volume and pricing of discs. After all what makes the 'Simpson's movie' worth $20 retail when you can buy robocop 2 for $5? because wal-mart expects millions of simpsons fans to pay $20, most likely based on both research they did, and the evidence of how it fared at the box-office. meanwhile they only expect to sell 10 copies of robocop 1 at $10 per store.
i hade more stuff that was off-topic here, i'm going to write a je about it instead.
Have you ever wondered why there are $1 DVD-videos at wal-mart, target, or your favorite dollar store?
because the material on the disc fell into the public domain.
so cost of authoring/distribution is Less than.50 cents per pressed DVD.
after all to make a profit on $1 they need to have a overhead below 50% of the cost, as your 'basic' business model pointed out.
so to the fixed $100k add anywhere from $0.10-$0.50 the price is lowest at 50k run volumes, since each master ($1,000 to make a master) can press 50,000 retail discs, and assume a small percentage of about 1-3% 'fail' and need to be sifted out. (although some companies allow the 'retailer' to sort this out and hold on to a small set of discs for replacement use)
I hate people who can't even use common sense to get an idea of the 'overhead' in producing a dvd.
although he was on the side of 'legal copyright' expiring.
even people who like to make a living in television production can be against the 'Disney protection act' known as the the Sonny Bono Term Extension Act.
you never know, if the early 20th century version of mickey mouse were to ever become public domain people might not pay $30 for a mickey mouse t-shirt.
I recently switched my parents to linux from microsoft. they had a nasty rootkit that was a variation of known rootkits, that exploited a SP2 vulnerability. the only solution, was to install sp3 which is still in a pre-release state, or to switch to linux. since their ip was known to the hackers who got the rootkit on there in the first place it was impossible to rely on 'automatic updates.' and manually downloading a list of 90 some 'patches' was unreasonable. since the nearest bigbox store is over 200 miles away, and the local computer techs never even heard of a rootkit there was no way to have someone else take care of the problem.
while linux does have it's security flaws too, in general distros release 'new' cd-roms every 3 months or less, allowing someone to DL a 'secure' install media even if a previous system had a rootkit. microsoft can't possibly math this level of online security, just go to a friend's place and dl a new 'secure' install media, after backing up your important documents.
the motley fool may be ahead of the curve, but as Africa, China, and the 'poor' in developed countries start to rely on desktop Linux, it's getting better and easier to use than ever. As well as more secure. Eventually, companies like microsoft will be forced to resort to patent law to 'take out' open source competitors, but with millions of open source programmers around the world, they will be too little to late, to stop Linux with lawyers alone.
well your bs detector was good to be at high alert.
Currently he has a working prototype that operates at 200 degrees centigrade. the theory implies that at 600 degrees it would achieve 60% efficiencies, existing solar (parabolic mirror based solar electric plants) operate at 800 degrees. since he has a system that works at 200 centigrade, it is not a massive power plant sized unit, that would need to be stable and still work in the 600-800 degree range. if his invention only works at 200 degrees centigrade, then it will never replace convention solar power models. but there are still many potential uses for a 200 degree centigrade model, such as using 'waste heat' from existing power plants to create 'more electricity' with less fuel.
so yeah, i wouldn't hold my breath on this 'still working' at 600 degrees when the guy who invented it hasn't gotten to those temperatures yet.
i lost my password to my lowest uid account... a shameful 138667, i mean i was busy surfing pr0n on the net for 2-3 years before i went to college and learned about slashdot. or course the password e-mail is my college e-mail which i have not had access too since 1997.
the only story i posted to on that account was posted in july... but i know i registered from the computer labs in my college...
i got tired of slashdot quickly the first account i used here. which is kinda obvious as i only posted once with that account. then i registered this account with a password i could remember... if i could remember my old accounts password i doubt i would use it.. it doesnt have enough karma and i read slashdot infrequently nowadays.
i remember when 256 colors were good enough for anyone.. including pr0n sites.
the only realistic way to collect enough energy to steer a hurricane would require building a massive solar reflector that would send energy into space 90% of the time, and focus solar energy into the hurricanes they were trying to move the other 10% of the time, even using micro-thin reflectors with solar powered aiming mehcanisms would cost billions if not trillions of dollars including putting the materials into space.
and any such device would cause global warming on a massive scale... creating more severe hurricanes requiring more use of said steering system.. a vicious cycle.
the other options are to take the water vapor out of the system (which would cause massive droughts, as tropical storms provide most of the fresh water for most of the world) and would leave higher speed winds (which do less damage than wind driven water)
or to try to take energy out of the system by blocking the sun. said system would be almost as expensive as the solar reflector, and the consequences on global weather patterns are almost impossible to compute.
hurricanes are a reality, building hurricane resistant structures is far more economically viable than any effort to control the weather. the other extreme is to build such easilly fasioned buildings that rebuilding after a hurricane is cheap. of course for that one needs enough secure shelters, and plentiful cheap consturction materials... i doubt they will be using paper to rebuild louisiana anytime soon, but maybe after the fall of western civilization the populous living in hurricane regions will find building a community shelter and rebuilding with paper and poles more practical than any other form of construction.
contrary to common misperception a hazmat suit is primarially to protect the weared from Radioactive dust. not from the irradiated materials. radiaoctive dust can stay in the lungs potentially for decades, causing lung cancers, some ultra fine dusts can work into the blood stream and cause other forms of cancers, but most irradiated sites put out less radiation than a CRT. there are special lead lined suits that will protect workers trying to contain reactor breaches where radioactive energies can be high enough to require lead, but most sites its the dust that will kill you, not the high radiation levels. so basically im guessing theyre going in with lead boxes to aquire plutonim contining sands, to raise cockroaches in. obviously theyre doing controlls too, to see if in fact radiation is deadly to roaches.. but the main concern is not spreading radioactive dust around, not wearing intensly heavy suits that could block an x-ray machine.
they make firewalls for a reason. rather than needing to wipe and reformat every infected machibne at once, you just kill all packet traffic to every infected machine at once and restore them without fancy network based reformat tools. you know with like a bootable dvd.
i know the technology isnt as fancy as restoring every client from a master server with images of every machine on a multi terrabyte array.. but even a trained monkey can handle a bootable dvd with restoration tools akin to what gateway etc ship with all their systems.
from what i understand about storm is that the network traffic is very easy to detect, especially in a corporate environment. so automatic firewalling to protect the rest of the network is easy to setup. which is probablly the main reason why storm has fallen so dramatically. corporations are using firewalls to stop infections before they loose the whole network. thus the main size of the botnet are non technical users with fast internet and fast pcs, who never realize theyre part of a botnet because they check email once or twice a week, maybe google a recipie once in a blue moon... nothing fancy.
where it really comes in as important is this. I happen to have 4 old PCI (not express) graphic cards with anywhere from 32mb - 128 mb of video ram. if pci graphic cards can read/write as fast as an ide pci card can then it would be very beneficial to install one or more pci graphic cards, and hijack their ram for use as a swapfile. (especially the card with 128 mb of video ram) although the system i was considering doing this on has 384 mb of ram, giving the system an extra 128 mb to use as swap space that potentially could read write much faster than agp cards. (since agp has chronically slow back to the cpu channels, as that is how they got the speed so fast TO the gpu on agp designs)
Im sure im no the only guy with unused pci graphic cards lying around, and using them as a swap partition could really help people, especially when trying to run linux on older machines with low ram limits. (my system with 384mb maxes out at 512mb, if i used all 4 slots with 128 mb sticks, and its old ram hard to find, especially in the 128 mb size) and it only has a 1.1 ghz processor, which is no problem for linux.
name one anti virus maker with a VMM detctor. every AV software i have used simply ignores virtual machines, hidden or otherwise.
right. a whitepaper about how easy it is to detect virual machine malware is not grandpas av dector popping up a warning about a virtual machine running on his system.
this type of exploit has been known about for many months virus writers take a lot less time than that to come up with working attack vectors. so it would not suprize me in the least to find that hackers are using little known small vmm malware to run undetected on suitable machines that they have control over.
and fwiw i have personally seen hackers edit registrys and system files without leaving a single detectable trace for security software to detect, (other than the modified registry settings) if security software has to be installed to catch these types of actions, and there are numerous people who simply think they are fine just being carful and keeping patched and decline to pay for software to detect and protect against remote vulnerabilities... and hacker have a field day exploiting those machines. even without needing a new vector of attack.
for the majority of the time ive run computers ive run without any type of anti virus software at all. and the few times i do run with av software from all that time they can only find 2 viruses in all my archives of data. (a zip file virus and a irc worm) and the system where hackers modded my registry and changed certain image files the av software i run cant even find a exploit that would have allowed the hackers to do that stuff. (i deleted all the non essential files in case it was a custom writen exploit, not in major vendor dbs.)
so, basically security software is basically using algorythm based zero day dectors that can only detect IF they are running UNCOMPROMIZED av tools on a system WHILE its being infected, and cant detect 0-day files from archives... and then there are blacklists of published exploits viruses etc.. that can be detected from archives.. and the detection of vmm based malware assumes a Man In the Middle attack hasnt already disabled the protection software by pretending to be a legitimate update of the protection software (ive seen this happen with zone alarm software, where the firewall becomes disabled but still runs pretending to be a firewall, they can actually use automatic update features to upload their malware ick)
so basically no security software out there has vmm detection yet, but detection is trivial if security software supports vmm detection and hasnt been disabled with malware pretending to be the protection software.. and if you ve got enough control over a system to install a vmm well, frankly you could have disabled the security software. so grandpa and grandma will never notice it when their software keeps updating and they are running loads of malware allowing professional hackers to make use of systems to perform various crimes.
nice. they will probabbly notice it when the software loads a keylogger and steals their bank accounts though. at which point they will bring their computer to a professional who will find out quickly that they have a ton of 0-day software loaded on their system. since most professional hackers use 0-day and mitm attacks exclusively.
not so, the asus Eee PC is in the $200 range, but they are unable to make more than about 750,000 units globally... the XO-1 will be able to ship 5 million units this year (if there is demand for that many) although currently only about 1 million units have been ordered... thus the buy 2 get 1 sale. countries that cant afford the XO-1 will now be able to get them with this new deal.
since there is a pull string power option they could be bringing real educational tools to remote parts of the world. 1 minute of pulling iirc powers the laptop for an hour or more depending on display mode.
yeah the 3v and 5v rails are used in the latest atx specs... and they are on a 49a 12v rail usually in the 30-40 amp range, and those psus are not sufficient to run dual 4core cpus and dual gpus... there are psus with quad 12v rails at 20 amps a pop for those kinda setups... and theyre usually 600-800 watt psus although you do run acroos 1000-1200 watt psus meant for watercooling. dont ask me how may amps those bad boys provide, as theyre meant to run a watercooled pump that uses way more electricity than any fan cooling system would (and gets the system much cooler, if its got a sufficient radiator/tank which with the intel article kinda setup you would need to air cool an automobile radiator to keep the water from rising above room temp in the system) or use an ocean as your reserve tank...
ive seen normal watercooled servers using a 25 gallon fish tank as reservoir so with all those cores to cool plus the graphic cards, and some even water cool the PSU and ram as well... using the pc to heat a waterbed might make more sence than paying for the electricity to run a waterbed heater;)
i can see someone now posting pics of their waterbed cooling reservoir. only problem would be laying down on the water bed, but if you make the pipe into that tall enough gravity will keep the water in...
actually about this technology trickling down to the mid and low end im going to have to take point with... with ati releasing 2 pixel pipeline cards as the low end market things arent getting better on the low end.. and the mid range cards are still as expensive as they were 18 months ago. they have been really careful not to bump up the mid range very much, you still pay over $120 for a 12 pixel pipeline card, and those are using reject 16 pix pipe chips. card vendors really arent trying to go for economy of scale. but theyre trying to maximize their bottom lines.. and as long as they keep charging mucho dinero for any chip with more than 4 pixel pipes its just going to be more of the same in the mid range... not that long back i remember their being $40 graphic cards in best buy, but last time i was in their they sold nothing under $80.
by the time 100 pixel pipeline cards become affordable ill probabbly be an old man... at least the way the vendors are dragging their toes at lowering the cost of performance cards. before the latest generation of ati card the lowest number of pixel pipes they had in a card was 8, this generation they sell defect 4 pipe cards as 2 pipeline cards, and nvidia isnt any better at lowering the cost of decent graphic cards.
we thought 640k was enough to run games in and 16 colors was good enough for anyone! now we have to have 2-4 graphic cards, and 8 processing cores??? and probabbly 8 gigs of ram!!! dosent anyone think of how many watts these gaming rigs use anymore? i mean wow... pulling 49 amps over the 12 v rail... you might as well sell them with a dc generator and solid copper power rails.
seriously add in liquid cooling and cold cathodes and a 52" HDTV and youre talking over 3 killowatts of power draw... Im glad i play blizzard games, not only to people play them for a decade after theyre made, the initial launches try to have a configuration setting that will lower the bar and let less impressive systems play too.
sure their engines might not be so impressive that youd need quad 100 pixel pipeline cards... that themselves have 2 GB of ram on them.. or a system with 4x processors with 8 gb or ram... but i think the gaming industry has gone too far ever since they realized there was a market for $600 gaming cards..
Because water cooled reactors also etch away uranium from the fuel rods, causing them to be replaced every 2-3 years. and uranium supplies are tight. so tight the cost per ounce has more than tripled in the past year.
Sodium cooled reactors would last for at least 10 years, and while the japanese are doing reaserch into sodium cooled reactors the US is so bass ackwards that because of a single accident in the 70s due to an unforeen flaw in the reactor desing they were using.. that reasearchers here havent been able to go near the sodium cooled design...
if every reactor made from now on used a sodium or liquid metal cooled design and every retrofit for existing reactors too, wed have enough uranium to put out 5x as much electricity from nuclear sources, but if we stick to the water cooled designs were heading towards a global shortage of uranium.
thats why we cant just say nuclear energy for eveyone. were barely getting by with the russians converting all their weapons grade uranium to fuel rods. if the first sodium cooled designs had been safe we probabbly would all be using 10cent/kwh nuclear energy. but weve lost most of our reserves of uranium to water etching.. and theyre not finding more uranium deposits out there... so were really screwed if reasearch and academia cant get us production ready liquid metal/sodium cooled reactors.
with conventional solar pannels the cost per watt is around $3-$5. so the $1 per watt price isnt that impressive, what is impressive is the scale at which they can produce these new panels... they could sell self install kits at wal-mart and still have no problem with inventory..
conventional panels have always been restricted by the amount of pure silicon that can be produced, and with microprocessors using the same pure silicon its been tough for solar panel makers to have enough supply to meet demand. in fact the major tech companies have multi year contracts on 99% of the pure silicon being produced world wide.
btw this technology does not cheapen solar power to utility electric rates.. according to a website about solar energy Around 59% of world solar product sales installed the last five years were in applications that are tied to the electricity grid. Solar Energy prices in these applications are 5-20 times more expensive than the cheapest source of conventional electricity generation, although they may only be 3-5 times the electricity tariff that utility customers pay. By contrast, PV can be fully cost competitive on economic grounds in remote (off-grid) industrial and habitational applications.http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm
so cutting the solar panel cost to 1/2 of what it was before makes solar a preffered method of off-grid electrical applications, and brings the total consumer cost down to levels (15cents/kwh) that they would actually pay for electricity. still not ideal, if they can bring the cost down further with economies of scale, then this will start a revolution for earth-friendly consumers who will be able to take out a loan to buy a $10k system that cuts their electric bill by 25% (to fully power a house with typical energy usage would run about $40k with these pannels, or $80k with normal solar pannels) which means the pannels would have to last at least 34 years to recoup the cost invested in installing a solar system. (theyd have to last for 68 years with normal solar panels) now if youre using a grid+solar setup you can probablly keep using those solar panels as long as theyll crank out energy, but of course they do degrade over the years, producing less energy... and widespead solar power adoption will cause winter energy spikes, but if they have to have coal fired plants that they only run 3 months a year, because of widespread solar adoption... well itll be an improvement.
$1 per watt is frankly about 10 times more expensive than we need to get solar energy for solar electric companies to adopt the technology without government subsudies/regulation.
this is why companies like excell energy are turing to wind turbines to meet the 20% renewable energy production mandate minnesota has put them under by 2020.. wind turbines are ALREADY produced around the COST per kwh of coal fired plants. (theyre sold for more obviously though)
wind energy is a natural byproduct of solar energy, and with the new tidal stream generators it is possible that the uk and scottland could see more than 10% of their total electrical consumption produced entirely from rapidly moving undersea currents.
tidal projects obviously have less problems with home owners that wind farms, and since areas with high tidal streams tend to be far from good scuba diving sites there should be little complaint about installing tidal stream generators.. in the handful of places where they are genuinely viable.
its nice to know that more californians will be able to afford a basic solar install, but this isnt something so revolutionary that were going to stop building coal fired plants because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
February is a good month for dropping console prices, because both January and February are slow retail months. Since some retailers have 'price' matching if you have the receipt and it's been less than 30 days, that makes it a good time to drop the price.
if this news had come around Christmas shopping time, I'd say they wouldn't budge on the price til the next year, but with the popularity of the wii, they just might drop the price soon. It would be nice if similar news were to hit for the xbox 360, but most likely the reason ibm did this with the ps3 first is because of the volume that sony does, vs the volume of chips Microsoft buys. after all the ps3 has been a 'cheap' Blueray player 'with hd video gaming capabilities.' of course, with PC Blue-Ray drives costing about $200 then if your pc works with your HD set, then a $200 upgrade to your PC is way cheaper than a PS3.
the PS3 is not a big savings over other Blue-ray players anymore, but it does play games as well.
if they do decide to drop the price, it will be in the next 3 months, the summer picks up a little as teenagers with jobs have more disposable income.
bandwidth is only part of the cost, servers, co-location fees, DNS fees, advertisment, server administration costs (which may be part of the hosting fee.) it all costs money, how much it costs for you to lease the fiber-optic lines isn't the sum of all costs.
location capabilities of cell phones (done via triangulation, not gps) is by default set to 'e 911 only' if you turn the feature on, and the police start using the cell phone company records to prove your speed it's your own fault for turning it on. Still, i doubt that the cell companies even want to collect, and send all that data to the police. if you're not in a call, it uses a lot of network bandwidth to triangulate 'every' phone, every '3' seconds, even if it's only 'the phones on the highway'
it's one thing for a bunch of college students to use the feature to test highway travel times, and a completely different matter to figure out who's speeding.
well, anyone who goes to a church with a 'projection hdtv' or large screen hdtv is in my opinion in too rich a church to begin with.
I know, because I've been dragged along to just such a church, where the pastors make a living being pastors, and even have a paid secretary to handle calls and paper work.... but frankly, that kind of 'religion' scares me, wouldn't they be better off helping the poor? why do they need a tv production studio so the pastors can sit at home on sunday, while a tape is played for the people donating their money each week to this church?
makes me sick when a pastor is a millionaire, and people mindlessly keep giving...
Basically, the reason we have 'adult stem cell research' is because 'embryonic cell research' discovered embryonic stem cells, in 1998 at the UW Madison. And yes, the 'tissue' came from local abortion clinics, so they died long before they became medical research material.
true, now we don't need to harvest stem cells from embryos, and for certain practices it's better to harvest from the patient's own fatty tissue. but if laws banning research on aborted fetus had existed pre-1998 there would be no stem cell research at all.
so god only knows what technology we're missing out on now that researchers in most of the us and Europe can't research on discarded embryonic tissues. The discard of said materials was again not for the sake of research, so these laws haven't changed the source of embryos in the least. but now science may be hindered, because some things are easier to observe in unborn tissues than in a living organism that has matured.
that's why 'electronic' voting has paper trails. if you make a print out, even if it's in a bar code format, you can still perform 'manual' recounts with a hand-held bar-code scanner. using perhaps a desktop computer with a database of the 'recently dead' and as the bar-code recognized the names of 'dead' people it rejects their votes. putting that kind of functionality in the 'election time' 'electronic voting machine' might be too hard, especially if it all has to be 'open' source or if the software has to be audited by government officials etc.
so really all you need on an 'electronic voting machine' is a printer, preferably with some sort of design to prevent 'weak' printouts that' can't be rescanned. (eg: a large capacity printer, and requirements that new cartridges are used each voting season, or some other technical solution) and a barcode scanner, (for automated recounts, and verification of printout) and I'm assuming it would use rolls of paper, again preferably with one 'large enough' to handle all the votes that machine tallies.
it's not paperless, but the barcode would be almost meaningless to people, and use less paper than 'voting cards' since 'chad' based ballots are large, and meant for analog computation... while the barcode is meant for digital computation...
oh well, the more features you require the more costly it becomes. still recounts would go much faster with a system well though out. it would be 'nice' if people could vote at 'home' over the internet, but that opens a whole can of worms about identity verification, and security of data, and worries about the system getting hacked, and the whole db becoming 'corrupted' to the tune of the highest paid hacker, who 'won' the election for their 'official.'
the place in Arlington heights is most likely the residence of a 'close' family member of one of those 'prosperous' lawyers, it's not uncommon for 'relatives' of a fairly wealthy family member to be in a situation, where they can't make ends meet with current rental prices, and seek the aid of a family member, because they don't come close to qualifying for any sort of public assistance. although it's somewhat rare for the wealthy relative to buy a house, and let them 'rent' it at cost.
/.ers in the area may wish to ring them with messages too. I'm brave, and below the poverty line, so I'll post this with my uid. After all, you can sue the poor, but you can't touch their money.
the second thing is a mistress may well be living there 'free' and that's where Mr. big rich lawyer gets the kicks his wife won't give him while he's 'staying late at the office.'
if it's the latter, i suggest leaving messages about it at all the listed numbers. (i won't too lazy)
His wife may need a divorce lawyer, so qualified
that's why it costs 1 cent per 1 captcha, the overall cost of webhosting the porn for exchange boils down to 1 cent per solved captcha. obviously, if you're hosting on root-kited windows boxes in the us (the highest rate of infection is in the us) the cost is still about 1 cent per one captcha because the cost of paying hackers to keep a bot net sizable enough comes to about the same cost.
especially with sp3 coming out now, the cost of bot nets is higher, since sp3 offers a 'easy' bot net removal path, since staying off-line long enough to get all sp2's flaws patched is crucial in preventing reinfection. believe me, having a root-kit installed is easy even for a veteran computer guy to miss.
i have dvd's i burned almost 3 years ago that reinfect any windows machine with a root-kit, and are un-readable in linux, apparently the root-kit was using some hooks in nero burning rom to 'randomly' pick a burn project and put the root-kit installer on there so when windows tried to auto run it would install the root-kit, then show the 'window' that normally shows up on auto-run would show up. the rootkit took an 'extra' session, that was transparent, eg: it would only show using burning software to read the track data, for the burned cd or dvd. no additional files showed up in windows, but the extra session made it unreadable to linux.
also, the root-kit only runs in a 'blank' screen saver, which it protects and makes sure loads when the system is idle, so it never sends data when the user might be there to notice. and i think it sends the data as like, internet explorer, to bypass firewall rules. since none of the firewalls i tried could block it. i actually only found the original root kit when a second root-kit moved the first root-kit's files to the recycle bin. other than that none of the root kit scanners that were recommended to me could even detect this thing. only the 'symptoms' and the fact i could 'remove them' by staying off-line and not using my old discs were proof that i had a root kit.
symptoms included, auto-run becoming disabled, screen saver always resetting to 15 minutes (only when both root-kits were on there), and the 'desktop' showing up 2-3 times a day when in full-screen games (also only with both root kits), and finding root-kit files in recycle bin(only found on networked systems with the root kit, and didn't return on reinstall of both root-kit, likely was a 1 time 'bug' that was fixed later on)
so yeah, I didn't notice it for 3 years. Not that i usually have to deal with virus, but in the past I had only ever had to deal with 3 virus and in my 15 years online. and the third one was really a root-kit. I've also been using open-source software for 11 years, so that probably helped, of course, one of the virus was one that affected my open source software, the other 2 were windows based.
it's still easy to miss windows root-kit's nowadays, especially when hackers have root-kits that aren't published, and they use scripts to make the exe's have unique signatures (using compiler tricks) for known root-kits.
the packaging is a little more spendy with rhino, but it still doesn't go up to $2 after all, on froogle i can find a 10 pack of 'dvd cases' (basic black ones) for $8.90 that's 89 cents per individual unit at full retail-price. even if they add $0.20 cents in 'costs' i would be shocked. but yeah, the 'rights' to content do add up. still, wal-mart sells $5 DVDs for instance Robocop 2 and robocop 3 were available at $5, while robocop 1 was a $10 disc. apparently the 'original' is more highly valued than the sequels, but you can still get 3 full length movies for $20 at wal-mart.
of course, the companies that pressed those discs Did have wal-mart to deal with, and with 2% of the us gross domestic product going through wal-mart's doors (only the second company in history to breach the 2% US GDP, the first company was General Motors) there certainly is a different economic model when you know wal-mart will buy a few million of a specific disc, at a specific price.
still, in music and video it's often more 'politics' of what they think people will pay, rather than 'actual cost' that winds up as the deciding factor, for both volume and pricing of discs. After all what makes the 'Simpson's movie' worth $20 retail when you can buy robocop 2 for $5? because wal-mart expects millions of simpsons fans to pay $20, most likely based on both research they did, and the evidence of how it fared at the box-office. meanwhile they only expect to sell 10 copies of robocop 1 at $10 per store.
i hade more stuff that was off-topic here, i'm going to write a je about it instead.
well, your made up numbers are wrong, dead wrong.
.50 cents per pressed DVD.
Have you ever wondered why there are $1 DVD-videos at wal-mart, target, or your favorite dollar store?
because the material on the disc fell into the public domain.
so cost of authoring/distribution is Less than
after all to make a profit on $1 they need to have a overhead below 50% of the cost, as your 'basic' business model pointed out.
so to the fixed $100k add anywhere from $0.10-$0.50 the price is lowest at 50k run volumes, since each master ($1,000 to make a master) can press 50,000 retail discs, and assume a small percentage of about 1-3% 'fail' and need to be sifted out. (although some companies allow the 'retailer' to sort this out and hold on to a small set of discs for replacement use)
I hate people who can't even use common sense to get an idea of the 'overhead' in producing a dvd.
although he was on the side of 'legal copyright' expiring.
even people who like to make a living in television production can be against the 'Disney protection act' known as the the Sonny Bono Term Extension Act.
you never know, if the early 20th century version of mickey mouse were to ever become public domain people might not pay $30 for a mickey mouse t-shirt.
I recently switched my parents to linux from microsoft. they had a nasty rootkit that was a variation of known rootkits, that exploited a SP2 vulnerability. the only solution, was to install sp3 which is still in a pre-release state, or to switch to linux. since their ip was known to the hackers who got the rootkit on there in the first place it was impossible to rely on 'automatic updates.' and manually downloading a list of 90 some 'patches' was unreasonable. since the nearest bigbox store is over 200 miles away, and the local computer techs never even heard of a rootkit there was no way to have someone else take care of the problem.
while linux does have it's security flaws too, in general distros release 'new' cd-roms every 3 months or less, allowing someone to DL a 'secure' install media even if a previous system had a rootkit. microsoft can't possibly math this level of online security, just go to a friend's place and dl a new 'secure' install media, after backing up your important documents.
the motley fool may be ahead of the curve, but as Africa, China, and the 'poor' in developed countries start to rely on desktop Linux, it's getting better and easier to use than ever. As well as more secure. Eventually, companies like microsoft will be forced to resort to patent law to 'take out' open source competitors, but with millions of open source programmers around the world, they will be too little to late, to stop Linux with lawyers alone.
well your bs detector was good to be at high alert.
Currently he has a working prototype that operates at 200 degrees centigrade. the theory implies that at 600 degrees it would achieve 60% efficiencies, existing solar (parabolic mirror based solar electric plants) operate at 800 degrees. since he has a system that works at 200 centigrade, it is not a massive power plant sized unit, that would need to be stable and still work in the 600-800 degree range. if his invention only works at 200 degrees centigrade, then it will never replace convention solar power models. but there are still many potential uses for a 200 degree centigrade model, such as using 'waste heat' from existing power plants to create 'more electricity' with less fuel.
so yeah, i wouldn't hold my breath on this 'still working' at 600 degrees when the guy who invented it hasn't gotten to those temperatures yet.
i lost my password to my lowest uid account... a shameful 138667, i mean i was busy surfing pr0n on the net for 2-3 years before i went to college and learned about slashdot. or course the password e-mail is my college e-mail which i have not had access too since 1997.
the only story i posted to on that account was posted in july... but i know i registered from the computer labs in my college...
i got tired of slashdot quickly the first account i used here. which is kinda obvious as i only posted once with that account. then i registered this account with a password i could remember... if i could remember my old accounts password i doubt i would use it.. it doesnt have enough karma and i read slashdot infrequently nowadays.
i remember when 256 colors were good enough for anyone.. including pr0n sites.
the only realistic way to collect enough energy to steer a hurricane would require building a massive solar reflector that would send energy into space 90% of the time, and focus solar energy into the hurricanes they were trying to move the other 10% of the time, even using micro-thin reflectors with solar powered aiming mehcanisms would cost billions if not trillions of dollars including putting the materials into space.
and any such device would cause global warming on a massive scale... creating more severe hurricanes requiring more use of said steering system.. a vicious cycle.
the other options are to take the water vapor out of the system (which would cause massive droughts, as tropical storms provide most of the fresh water for most of the world) and would leave higher speed winds (which do less damage than wind driven water)
or to try to take energy out of the system by blocking the sun. said system would be almost as expensive as the solar reflector, and the consequences on global weather patterns are almost impossible to compute.
hurricanes are a reality, building hurricane resistant structures is far more economically viable than any effort to control the weather. the other extreme is to build such easilly fasioned buildings that rebuilding after a hurricane is cheap. of course for that one needs enough secure shelters, and plentiful cheap consturction materials... i doubt they will be using paper to rebuild louisiana anytime soon, but maybe after the fall of western civilization the populous living in hurricane regions will find building a community shelter and rebuilding with paper and poles more practical than any other form of construction.
contrary to common misperception a hazmat suit is primarially to protect the weared from Radioactive dust. not from the irradiated materials. radiaoctive dust can stay in the lungs potentially for decades, causing lung cancers, some ultra fine dusts can work into the blood stream and cause other forms of cancers, but most irradiated sites put out less radiation than a CRT.
there are special lead lined suits that will protect workers trying to contain reactor breaches where radioactive energies can be high enough to require lead, but most sites its the dust that will kill you, not the high radiation levels. so basically im guessing theyre going in with lead boxes to aquire plutonim contining sands, to raise cockroaches in. obviously theyre doing controlls too, to see if in fact radiation is deadly to roaches.. but the main concern is not spreading radioactive dust around, not wearing intensly heavy suits that could block an x-ray machine.
they make firewalls for a reason. rather than needing to wipe and reformat every infected machibne at once, you just kill all packet traffic to every infected machine at once and restore them without fancy network based reformat tools. you know with like a bootable dvd.
i know the technology isnt as fancy as restoring every client from a master server with images of every machine on a multi terrabyte array.. but even a trained monkey can handle a bootable dvd with restoration tools akin to what gateway etc ship with all their systems.
from what i understand about storm is that the network traffic is very easy to detect, especially in a corporate environment. so automatic firewalling to protect the rest of the network is easy to setup. which is probablly the main reason why storm has fallen so dramatically. corporations are using firewalls to stop infections before they loose the whole network. thus the main size of the botnet are non technical users with fast internet and fast pcs, who never realize theyre part of a botnet because they check email once or twice a week, maybe google a recipie once in a blue moon... nothing fancy.
where it really comes in as important is this. I happen to have 4 old PCI (not express) graphic cards with anywhere from 32mb - 128 mb of video ram. if pci graphic cards can read/write as fast as an ide pci card can then it would be very beneficial to install one or more pci graphic cards, and hijack their ram for use as a swapfile. (especially the card with 128 mb of video ram) although the system i was considering doing this on has 384 mb of ram, giving the system an extra 128 mb to use as swap space that potentially could read write much faster than agp cards. (since agp has chronically slow back to the cpu channels, as that is how they got the speed so fast TO the gpu on agp designs)
Im sure im no the only guy with unused pci graphic cards lying around, and using them as a swap partition could really help people, especially when trying to run linux on older machines with low ram limits. (my system with 384mb maxes out at 512mb, if i used all 4 slots with 128 mb sticks, and its old ram hard to find, especially in the 128 mb size) and it only has a 1.1 ghz processor, which is no problem for linux.
name one anti virus maker with a VMM detctor. every AV software i have used simply ignores virtual machines, hidden or otherwise.
right. a whitepaper about how easy it is to detect virual machine malware is not grandpas av dector popping up a warning about a virtual machine running on his system.
this type of exploit has been known about for many months virus writers take a lot less time than that to come up with working attack vectors. so it would not suprize me in the least to find that hackers are using little known small vmm malware to run undetected on suitable machines that they have control over.
and fwiw i have personally seen hackers edit registrys and system files without leaving a single detectable trace for security software to detect, (other than the modified registry settings) if security software has to be installed to catch these types of actions, and there are numerous people who simply think they are fine just being carful and keeping patched and decline to pay for software to detect and protect against remote vulnerabilities... and hacker have a field day exploiting those machines. even without needing a new vector of attack.
for the majority of the time ive run computers ive run without any type of anti virus software at all. and the few times i do run with av software from all that time they can only find 2 viruses in all my archives of data. (a zip file virus and a irc worm) and the system where hackers modded my registry and changed certain image files the av software i run cant even find a exploit that would have allowed the hackers to do that stuff. (i deleted all the non essential files in case it was a custom writen exploit, not in major vendor dbs.)
so, basically security software is basically using algorythm based zero day dectors that can only detect IF they are running UNCOMPROMIZED av tools on a system WHILE its being infected, and cant detect 0-day files from archives... and then there are blacklists of published exploits viruses etc.. that can be detected from archives.. and the detection of vmm based malware assumes a Man In the Middle attack hasnt already disabled the protection software by pretending to be a legitimate update of the protection software (ive seen this happen with zone alarm software, where the firewall becomes disabled but still runs pretending to be a firewall, they can actually use automatic update features to upload their malware ick)
so basically no security software out there has vmm detection yet, but detection is trivial if security software supports vmm detection and hasnt been disabled with malware pretending to be the protection software.. and if you ve got enough control over a system to install a vmm well, frankly you could have disabled the security software. so grandpa and grandma will never notice it when their software keeps updating and they are running loads of malware allowing professional hackers to make use of systems to perform various crimes.
nice. they will probabbly notice it when the software loads a keylogger and steals their bank accounts though. at which point they will bring their computer to a professional who will find out quickly that they have a ton of 0-day software loaded on their system. since most professional hackers use 0-day and mitm attacks exclusively.
There's nothing in the $200 price range.
not so, the asus Eee PC is in the $200 range, but they are unable to make more than about 750,000 units globally... the XO-1 will be able to ship 5 million units this year (if there is demand for that many) although currently only about 1 million units have been ordered... thus the buy 2 get 1 sale. countries that cant afford the XO-1 will now be able to get them with this new deal.
since there is a pull string power option they could be bringing real educational tools to remote parts of the world. 1 minute of pulling iirc powers the laptop for an hour or more depending on display mode.
yeah the 3v and 5v rails are used in the latest atx specs... and they are on a 49a 12v rail usually in the 30-40 amp range, and those psus are not sufficient to run dual 4core cpus and dual gpus... there are psus with quad 12v rails at 20 amps a pop for those kinda setups... and theyre usually 600-800 watt psus although you do run acroos 1000-1200 watt psus meant for watercooling. dont ask me how may amps those bad boys provide, as theyre meant to run a watercooled pump that uses way more electricity than any fan cooling system would (and gets the system much cooler, if its got a sufficient radiator/tank which with the intel article kinda setup you would need to air cool an automobile radiator to keep the water from rising above room temp in the system) or use an ocean as your reserve tank...
;)
ive seen normal watercooled servers using a 25 gallon fish tank as reservoir so with all those cores to cool plus the graphic cards, and some even water cool the PSU and ram as well... using the pc to heat a waterbed might make more sence than paying for the electricity to run a waterbed heater
i can see someone now posting pics of their waterbed cooling reservoir.
only problem would be laying down on the water bed, but if you make the pipe into that tall enough gravity will keep the water in...
actually about this technology trickling down to the mid and low end im going to have to take point with... with ati releasing 2 pixel pipeline cards as the low end market things arent getting better on the low end.. and the mid range cards are still as expensive as they were 18 months ago. they have been really careful not to bump up the mid range very much, you still pay over $120 for a 12 pixel pipeline card, and those are using reject 16 pix pipe chips. card vendors really arent trying to go for economy of scale. but theyre trying to maximize their bottom lines.. and as long as they keep charging mucho dinero for any chip with more than 4 pixel pipes its just going to be more of the same in the mid range... not that long back i remember their being $40 graphic cards in best buy, but last time i was in their they sold nothing under $80.
by the time 100 pixel pipeline cards become affordable ill probabbly be an old man... at least the way the vendors are dragging their toes at lowering the cost of performance cards. before the latest generation of ati card the lowest number of pixel pipes they had in a card was 8, this generation they sell defect 4 pipe cards as 2 pipeline cards, and nvidia isnt any better at lowering the cost of decent graphic cards.
we thought 640k was enough to run games in and 16 colors was good enough for anyone! now we have to have 2-4 graphic cards, and 8 processing cores??? and probabbly 8 gigs of ram!!! dosent anyone think of how many watts these gaming rigs use anymore? i mean wow... pulling 49 amps over the 12 v rail... you might as well sell them with a dc generator and solid copper power rails.
seriously add in liquid cooling and cold cathodes and a 52" HDTV and youre talking over 3 killowatts of power draw... Im glad i play blizzard games, not only to people play them for a decade after theyre made, the initial launches try to have a configuration setting that will lower the bar and let less impressive systems play too.
sure their engines might not be so impressive that youd need quad 100 pixel pipeline cards... that themselves have 2 GB of ram on them.. or a system with 4x processors with 8 gb or ram... but i think the gaming industry has gone too far ever since they realized there was a market for $600 gaming cards..
Because water cooled reactors also etch away uranium from the fuel rods, causing them to be replaced every 2-3 years. and uranium supplies are tight. so tight the cost per ounce has more than tripled in the past year.
Sodium cooled reactors would last for at least 10 years, and while the japanese are doing reaserch into sodium cooled reactors the US is so bass ackwards that because of a single accident in the 70s due to an unforeen flaw in the reactor desing they were using.. that reasearchers here havent been able to go near the sodium cooled design...
if every reactor made from now on used a sodium or liquid metal cooled design and every retrofit for existing reactors too, wed have enough uranium to put out 5x as much electricity from nuclear sources, but if we stick to the water cooled designs were heading towards a global shortage of uranium.
thats why we cant just say nuclear energy for eveyone. were barely getting by with the russians converting all their weapons grade uranium to fuel rods. if the first sodium cooled designs had been safe we probabbly would all be using 10cent/kwh nuclear energy. but weve lost most of our reserves of uranium to water etching.. and theyre not finding more uranium deposits out there... so were really screwed if reasearch and academia cant get us production ready liquid metal/sodium cooled reactors.
with conventional solar pannels the cost per watt is around $3-$5. so the $1 per watt price isnt that impressive, what is impressive is the scale at which they can produce these new panels... they could sell self install kits at wal-mart and still have no problem with inventory..
conventional panels have always been restricted by the amount of pure silicon that can be produced, and with microprocessors using the same pure silicon its been tough for solar panel makers to have enough supply to meet demand. in fact the major tech companies have multi year contracts on 99% of the pure silicon being produced world wide.
btw this technology does not cheapen solar power to utility electric rates.. according to a website about solar energy Around 59% of world solar product sales installed the last five years were in applications that are tied to the electricity grid. Solar Energy prices in these applications are 5-20 times more expensive than the cheapest source of conventional electricity generation, although they may only be 3-5 times the electricity tariff that utility customers pay. By contrast, PV can be fully cost competitive on economic grounds in remote (off-grid) industrial and habitational applications.http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm
so cutting the solar panel cost to 1/2 of what it was before makes solar a preffered method of off-grid electrical applications, and brings the total consumer cost down to levels (15cents/kwh) that they would actually pay for electricity. still not ideal, if they can bring the cost down further with economies of scale, then this will start a revolution for earth-friendly consumers who will be able to take out a loan to buy a $10k system that cuts their electric bill by 25% (to fully power a house with typical energy usage would run about $40k with these pannels, or $80k with normal solar pannels) which means the pannels would have to last at least 34 years to recoup the cost invested in installing a solar system. (theyd have to last for 68 years with normal solar panels) now if youre using a grid+solar setup you can probablly keep using those solar panels as long as theyll crank out energy, but of course they do degrade over the years, producing less energy... and widespead solar power adoption will cause winter energy spikes, but if they have to have coal fired plants that they only run 3 months a year, because of widespread solar adoption... well itll be an improvement.
$1 per watt is frankly about 10 times more expensive than we need to get solar energy for solar electric companies to adopt the technology without government subsudies/regulation.
this is why companies like excell energy are turing to wind turbines to meet the 20% renewable energy production mandate minnesota has put them under by 2020.. wind turbines are ALREADY produced around the COST per kwh of coal fired plants. (theyre sold for more obviously though)
wind energy is a natural byproduct of solar energy, and with the new tidal stream generators it is possible that the uk and scottland could see more than 10% of their total electrical consumption produced entirely from rapidly moving undersea currents.
tidal projects obviously have less problems with home owners that wind farms, and since areas with high tidal streams tend to be far from good scuba diving sites there should be little complaint about installing tidal stream generators.. in the handful of places where they are genuinely viable.
its nice to know that more californians will be able to afford a basic solar install, but this isnt something so revolutionary that were going to stop building coal fired plants because of it.