What that mass is doesn't necessarily mean a large Neptune sized body. It could have just as easily been the effect of numerous small ort cloud objects or even the interplay between the all or collisions between them.
He's got a solution in look for evidence, personally I prefer evidence that's explained by a solution. All too often people that have answers and are looking for data to back up their answer are wrong.
Shareholders don't get involved in day to day running of the business. They give that responsibility to the board of directors through elections, etc.. The Board of directors generally don't get involved in day to day business. They give that responsibility to the CEO, senior leadership.
30 Years ago that was true. These days the CEO hires the board by finding friends who are CEO's of other companies to sit on the board. The CEO then sits on their board of directors and they give each other raises. It's a great way to screw the owners and suck all the company revenue into the CEO's pocket.
Though I think there is a role for government law making with regard to boards of directors, the easiest and best solution is for the institutional investors (mutual funds and retirement accounts) that hold up to 80% of the shares to stand up and take responsibility and appoint or hire directors who will look after the long term interests of the company.
The problem that's gripping the American public business climate is that the board of directors are often token shareholders if that. These days usually more than half the board of directors are CEO friends of the current CEO. This is why executive salaries are sky rocketing. There is no owner chokehold on the management of the companies anymore as the board of directors votes to raise one CEO's pay and he returns the favor by voting for the same thing on all the board's of directors he sits on.
Shareholders have abrogated their responsibility and are allowing these sham boards and leaders to run companies into the ground to enrich themselves. Most of this is because the majority of shareholders these days are mutual funds and retirement groups (called institutional investors) that take no responsibility for the massive stock holdings they have. It allows these companies to sail along rudderless diverting shareholder resources into the pockets of the executive management.
But these activist investors are NOT the solution. They are sharks that are out to gut the company and sell the assets to make a couple bucks short term profit. The only real answer to this problem is for the investors, in particular the institutional investors (including the mutual funds that hold almost all stock) to hire or appoint board members that actually look after stockholders interests including long term growth and profit. Until that happens the US will continue to decline.
Yahoo was making money during Yang's term. Just not "enough" money. Starboard and the investors that drove Yang out simply want to suck all the money out and walk away.
As another posters said, I haven't met an "activist shareholder" yet that wants to do anything other that gut the company, take the resources and let the whole thing collapse in on itself and lay everyone off, either that or take all the resources, export all the jobs overseas then let the company be purchased by the Chinese who are quite happy with a 1-3% return because they have national pride and want to support the Chinese economy.
The CEO's and major investors on wall street these days are destroying this country. They have no national pride, don't give a crap about this country and are only out for themselves even if it destroys the US in the process. Many many are worse than traitors. Shipping all your jobs overseas so you can make an extra 0.5% return at the expense of thousands of American jobs is the opposite of patriotic. These people hate the US and should be treated as such.
You still need a way to transfer files on air-gaped systems or they aren't real useful. CD writeables are much more difficult to use for normal users than thumb drives so the USB ports are left open. Besides, malware can still get in on the CD, just like it can on the thumb drive.
There are already well known groups of malware that target air gaped systems and try to communicate with networked computers by using microphones and speakers (and probably other techniques as well such as cameras and monitors) in frequencies humans can't hear but the electronics of the speakers and microphones can. This is probably the area of state sponsored hacking so spy agencies can gain access to network restricted defense information and is probably a favorite target of ALL major spy agencies because an air gaped computer is more likely to have something interesting on it, at least to these groups.
Of course it's true, the south was once a Bastion of the Democratic party right up until Johnson signed the Civil Rights act and Regan got the Republican party to embrace it's "Southern Strategy" where they courted Democrats that were unhappy with the party stand on Civil Rights. Almost every racist that was once Democratic switched to the Republican Party include Strom Thurmand (a celebrated Republican legislator) who ran for president on a platform of repealing civil rights and restoring the Jim Crow laws.
So yea, Duke was a Democrat right up until the Democrats told him and his hate to take a hike and the Republican invited him in. Invited.
I'll never understand people like you that point out that Democrats used to be the part of racists. As it conveniently points out that all those racists moved to the Republican party and were embraced and welcomed by the party.
The vast majority of Men I know would be arguably offended if you started referring to them as Boy, and doing so with those of certain ethnic groups would likely get you involved in a fight.
White supremacists have roundly endorsed Trump. So roundly in fact I don't think there is a single White supremacist group that hasn't endorsed him. It wouldn't be that far off base for anyone to assume that neo-nazi = right wing, given that neo-nazi's routinely refer to themselves as right wing conservatives. The Republican party has always had a passive acceptance of white supremacist voters. Hell David Duke ran for congress as a Republican and you don't get much more white supremacist than the leader of the KKK.
The Debian packagers rarely package vanilla on major packages. The Debian package teams often make significant changes and incorporate features and patches all the time that aren't in the vanilla. It's one of the things I really like about Debian, the people packaging the software actually use it and often go for usability above and beyond what the developers did. The disadvantage is that the Debian package often has differences to vanilla but it's never anything that's hurt me.
You best check on what Debian plans for the future isn't to install Ubuntu, but to install Debian Unstable and see what Debian is doing with Gnome 3. Unstable is a pretty good snapshot of what Debian is planning for the future.
You should keep in mind that Gnome3 may be the way it is in Jessie because of Debian and it may be the way it is Xubuntu because of Canonical. The packager can enable or disable all those features. My bet is the Debian team went for usability.
Absolutely. Unicorns with rainbows coming out their butts could also someday be real. Possible, yes, likely, not a chance in hell.
What happens when the cost of solar halves and the cost of nuclear halves?
One is likely, in fact not just likely but happening. The other has as much chance as the universe popping out of existence tonight.
Solar power takes more land area, more labor, and more materials for a comparable power output than just about anything else we have.
That is a complete and total fabrication. With solar power we could produce 6.1 Twh simply by putting panels on every single rooftop. That would require not one single square foot of land. Other than installation labor Solar PV has nearly zero labor involved, the panels require little to no maintenance. But during construction I'd argue Nuclear has far more labor than solar. That would require research to back and I doubt anyone cares, I certainly don't.
Advancements in automation, 3D printing, materials, or whatever that can be applied to solar power can almost always be applied to nuclear power.
Such advancements have little impact on solar. There are two primary drivers in the drop in solar pricing, the first is economics of scale in manufacturing. Solar is manufactured, nuclear is constructed. The relatively small number of nuclear plants would preclude any sort of economics of scale, and being a building it would automatically be precluded by each plant being it's own individual butterfly designed and sited for it's specific situation. Now there are some nuclear technologies that might benefit from mass production, such as the theoretical 1mw or so solid state reactors that have been proposed by Mitsubishi and others. But there is a reason they are only proposals.
The second cost advantage to solar is that installation costs continue to drop as innovation in installation continues to reduce the amount of materials and labor involved in installation, on average 20% yearly decreases in installation costs have been typical for the last 5 years (2010 the average US residential install took 2-4 days, in 2016 most can be done in a few hours). Nuclear plant costs continue to rise, astronomically so it would seem given the recent examples. There has not been a single incidence where the cost of construction of nuclear power has decreased, each and every plant is more expensive than the last. To the point that some of the recent plants have been double or triple the cost of the one they replace or are adjacent to.
I change my mind, I do have a few things against solar. With the exception of pocket calculators, communication satellites, and a few other niche uses, solar is next to worthless. It's a distraction. We could be doing so much better if we left solar alone and started building nuclear power.
That's great, you're wrong but I doubt you care and neither do I. Be wrong all you want! You're also welcome to walk around without pants wearing slippers talking about how much you dislike solar. Your local law enforcement might not agree with me but I think you are welcome to do so.
Like I said in the GPP, just don't even try to tell me that solar is "better". We've dumped all kinds of money into it, my tax money, and I'm tired of seeing good money flushed away like that.
Not a dime of your tax money has went to any solar. 99.99% of all solar incentives are in the form of accelerated depreciation which reduces early taxes and raises later taxes. And all the increased depreciation rates in solar don't add up to the subsidies a single nuclear reactor receives. Hell even the loan guarantees on a single reactor (that allow borrowing at government rates) likely far exceed the accelerated depreciation for every solar panel ever installed. And that doesn'
I like it as well, it was really bad early on but they've slowly been adding the customization back and yea it's dumbed down tremendously. But I like the look and the performance. It's no longer painful and is relatively useful in Jessie and I really like how easy they've made some things even if it costs me other things. I particularly like the modular nature of some of the desktop features and that I can add features I want and remove features I don't. T
hough I don't like how they keep moving things around. When they moved the settings in the Jessie release it took me like 10 minutes to find them again, felt like I was on Windows with the continual movements of settings so you have to relearn how to do things over and over again.
Going by windows, most people don't want that, they want full copies. I like what you want most of the time as well but I have to admit in some instances it's nice to get everything.
According to the court documents, the entire purpose of cracking this phone is to determine if charges need to be brought against other people. In other words the intent IS to use this in a criminal trial if such cooperation is found on the phone.
The FBI and half the world has been arguing both sides of this. The FBI says in court documents they absolutely need this to find out if there are other conspirators. In public they talk about needing the ability to combat terrorism. Both arguments are lies, this is about precedent and always has been.
It will be interesting to see if they do but given the previous sales numbers I don't find it likely. With the x-server you could buy more for less in the PC space and that will likely remain true.
That article is a hit piece with no basis in reality. I read it a couple days ago and came away wondering if the author was paid to write it. The author uses data that is more than a year old, neglecting to mention that recent plant numbers are nearing the initial values projected. He ignores that the plant from day one has said that the time to ramp up of full production was an unknown because this is a new type of plant and all new technology takes time to figure out how to run it. It has taken longer than they projected to figure out how to run the plant and optimize it's systems, that isn't in dispute. The author is completely dishonest about the agreement details by selective use of parts of the agreement. In fact I dare say from the selective quotes he's put in the article he's completely rewritten it to say something completely different than it does.
Ivanpah isn't going to shutdown, it's reaching it's energy targets and it's generating power at rates that are competitive, though it does have a bit to go before it reaches optimal operation. IMO this article is a hit piece paid for by a carbon energy conglomerate or one of carbon energies sock puppets such as the Koch foundation. Anyone with any sense should read the article as such, and if anything it indicates how scared carbon based companies are of solar power. When you start seeing paid hit articles (particularly in things like the fox owned WSJ) like this the fear is real. Pay no attention to solar, it's bad, trust them.
It's not so much the older ones, but the badly designed one. They have a LOT of coal plants that operate at about 30% because of all the coal plants they have. Scrubbers have also been mandatory on coal plants for about 10 years. Though it's mandatory to install scrubbers, it is not mandatory to actually run them and as far as I'm aware this hasn't changed though likely will in the near future.
The 30% number is significant, they've already announced that nearly 1.8million jobs in coal mining and coal power generation are going to go away triggering talks of strikes. If you know the history of the communist party you would understand how significant this is because the Communist party in China started in the coal mines, the parties first major success was organizing a coal miner strike.
Solar, Wind and Nuclear are the Communist party power generation strategy. They are hedging their bets with all three technologies in active over deployment. At some point down the road after all the coal power is shutdown they will make a decision on whether all sources of power are still needed and how the generation mix should be changed. Given that solar is a one time major cost with little in the way of maintenance and a life guaranteed to exceed 25 years (panel warranty) I expect it will ultimately end up with a significant portion of the energy market, you also gain the advantage of a generation infrastructure that can not be brought down in a war because of how widely dispersed it is.
Right now wind and solar are basically proxies for natural gas, since with every watt of capacity from wind or sun there must be a watt of reserve in natural gas.
This is outright lie. No such demand proxy is needed nor is one deployed. What they've found in Texas where wind and solar are exploding is that wind picks up when solar drops off. There are towns in Texas (easily found by Google) where power prices are free at night because of all the excess wind generation happening at night. As a result there are no more gas peaker plants than anywhere else in the country even though as much as 50% of the power in west Texas is now renewable Solar PV and Wind. With the construction of the cross Texas transmission lines even major cities like Dallas are now receiving a significant portion of their power from the west Texas wind and solar.
I have nothing against Nuclear but it's cost make it a dead technology. The only major Nuclear plant under construction in the US (and it's even on an existing Nuclear site and was partially constructed prior to this round of Nuclear) has costs approaching $9 Billion. Over 70 years that's a per kwh price of close to $0.15 kwh. Wind turbines installed are generating 20 year contracts at $0.05 a kwh right now and solar PV is at $0.07 and the price of both is falling at 20% per year. Nuclear is simply not competitive cost wise and I doubt it ever will be again. Properly balanced in both power mix and regional location and with sufficient transmission to move the power a renewable platform is completely functional, in time the market will sort this out (it's already started) and Coal, oil and even gas will fall out of the energy mix, the age of hydrocarbon power is ending and 99% of people aren't even aware of it..
The Rockefeller fund is heavily invested in Hydrocarbons and ALWAYS has been. It is extremely difficult for a fund with that much money not to be invested in hydrocarbons because there are so few companies that have a capital worth such that investments by the fund would see profitable returns.
To attribute this change in investment strategy as a short term maneuver due to market performance is very shortsighted. The divestment of the Rockefeller fund from hydrocarbons is going to affect the stocks of each of the companies the fund is invested in as their holdings are massive. The very act of divesting these assets will be expensive and raise the funds costs because the dollars will need to be spread among far more stocks and monitored more heavily. But what this divestment means is that the people that made all their money on hydrocarbons no longer see it as a long term growth market. That is very significant and should not be ignored.
The writing is on the wall about hydrocarbons particularly in trends in energy production and this is visible in the long term investing market. Divestment is becoming a big deal because when hydrocarbon stocks collapse it will happen far too quickly (look how fast coal stocks collapsed) for these large investors to be able to divest, and divesting early is going to be in their interest even if it results in short term losses. Those investors remaining in hydrocarbons should do so as a much higher risk short term investment with the understanding that the investment will need to be monitored closely and the investment abandoned as quickly as possible when the eventual reckoning comes.
Last announcement is the government is going to force the shutdown of about 30% of coal power plants (most of these are the dirtiest least efficient plants). This isn't a paper announcement either, as the government is under intense public pressure to deal with the air and water pollution. Their long range plan is to basically stop using coal power entirely (IIRC that's about 2050). They have more than 130 nuclear reactors under construction and are building so much solar PV and wind turbines it would make your head spin.
They've got to stop the air and water pollution or they might get overthrown. The new middle class is no longer tolerant of pollution and it's seen some very public demonstrations that the government couldn't stop. This scares the communist party to death.
Up to a certain level of penetration (which we're nowhere close to), solar usually makes it easier on the grid, not harder, by reducing midday peaking requirements, particularly on the hottest days (if it's spread out enough, that is)
Your statement about penetration levels is seriously dated. What they've found in Germany and Hawaii and other places where solar is reaching 30% of power generation is that everything people assumed about maximum amount of solar energy is wrong. It was all theoretical anyway but what they find is that those peak generation periods you allow rates to fall to zero then people will jump in with storage technologies (batteries, fly wheels, pumped hydro, etc) and will use that free peak power to generate stored energy that the grid can use later. Recent research is indicating that rates as high as 80% generation by PV would be sustainable.
The reality is that it will never reach that point because a balanced portfolio of solar, wind and either geothermal or nuclear and you can meet all needs and power rates will probably fall with periods of free power. But this will require total deregulation of the power market. Honestly at some point in the future power generation will be a commodity service with minor profit margin. I expect that grid maintenance and operation will at some point need to be picked up either by a non-profit or government due to the lack or profit from generation and power rates will fall through the floor. This will be good for everyone. One particular thing I like about wind and PV solar is you don't need to waste water generating power, particularly for those of us that live in the desert.
Might sound like a lot of panels but it's not really. If you put panels on every roof in the US we'd be producing more than 10 times the total power we need and the peak production would be far beyond anything anyone could consume. We only need to cover something like half the roofs in the US to generate more power that we'd need for decades.
It's not very far from there to methods to use that power to store it so it can be used outside production hours and there are a LOT of ways to store energy. Power shifting becomes very cheap when the peak power rate is zero.
I shouldn't need to point out the obvious answer that everyone seems to avoid. If the FBI succeeds in this action they have precedent that they can force private companies and people to develop devices/software/whatever under threat of imprisonment for contempt of court (absolutely no appeals and you can be imprisoned until you cooperate up to life in prison). This would make the all writs act a law of incredible power allowing the FBI to impress into service any person or company with the ability to do something it needs for the investigation. Apple in this action is at best a third party, they developed and had manufactured the phone but they are neither the owner nor do they have access or the software to do what the FBI asks. The FBI is asking for them to be compelled to do work for the FBI under threat of imprisonment or divulging their most precious assets (a public release of which could decimate their company revenue).
With the precedent of this case, If you had the skill to do something the FBI needed for an investigation they could simply compel you to do so under the all writs act and if they refuse you could go to jail until you comply. This is ALL kinds of scary and 99% of the articles and comments I read about it focus on the insignificant details of this individual complaint and not the precedent it sets.
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What that mass is doesn't necessarily mean a large Neptune sized body. It could have just as easily been the effect of numerous small ort cloud objects or even the interplay between the all or collisions between them.
He's got a solution in look for evidence, personally I prefer evidence that's explained by a solution. All too often people that have answers and are looking for data to back up their answer are wrong.
30 Years ago that was true. These days the CEO hires the board by finding friends who are CEO's of other companies to sit on the board. The CEO then sits on their board of directors and they give each other raises. It's a great way to screw the owners and suck all the company revenue into the CEO's pocket.
Though I think there is a role for government law making with regard to boards of directors, the easiest and best solution is for the institutional investors (mutual funds and retirement accounts) that hold up to 80% of the shares to stand up and take responsibility and appoint or hire directors who will look after the long term interests of the company.
The problem that's gripping the American public business climate is that the board of directors are often token shareholders if that. These days usually more than half the board of directors are CEO friends of the current CEO. This is why executive salaries are sky rocketing. There is no owner chokehold on the management of the companies anymore as the board of directors votes to raise one CEO's pay and he returns the favor by voting for the same thing on all the board's of directors he sits on.
Shareholders have abrogated their responsibility and are allowing these sham boards and leaders to run companies into the ground to enrich themselves. Most of this is because the majority of shareholders these days are mutual funds and retirement groups (called institutional investors) that take no responsibility for the massive stock holdings they have. It allows these companies to sail along rudderless diverting shareholder resources into the pockets of the executive management.
But these activist investors are NOT the solution. They are sharks that are out to gut the company and sell the assets to make a couple bucks short term profit. The only real answer to this problem is for the investors, in particular the institutional investors (including the mutual funds that hold almost all stock) to hire or appoint board members that actually look after stockholders interests including long term growth and profit. Until that happens the US will continue to decline.
Yahoo was making money during Yang's term. Just not "enough" money. Starboard and the investors that drove Yang out simply want to suck all the money out and walk away.
As another posters said, I haven't met an "activist shareholder" yet that wants to do anything other that gut the company, take the resources and let the whole thing collapse in on itself and lay everyone off, either that or take all the resources, export all the jobs overseas then let the company be purchased by the Chinese who are quite happy with a 1-3% return because they have national pride and want to support the Chinese economy.
The CEO's and major investors on wall street these days are destroying this country. They have no national pride, don't give a crap about this country and are only out for themselves even if it destroys the US in the process. Many many are worse than traitors. Shipping all your jobs overseas so you can make an extra 0.5% return at the expense of thousands of American jobs is the opposite of patriotic. These people hate the US and should be treated as such.
You still need a way to transfer files on air-gaped systems or they aren't real useful. CD writeables are much more difficult to use for normal users than thumb drives so the USB ports are left open. Besides, malware can still get in on the CD, just like it can on the thumb drive.
There are already well known groups of malware that target air gaped systems and try to communicate with networked computers by using microphones and speakers (and probably other techniques as well such as cameras and monitors) in frequencies humans can't hear but the electronics of the speakers and microphones can. This is probably the area of state sponsored hacking so spy agencies can gain access to network restricted defense information and is probably a favorite target of ALL major spy agencies because an air gaped computer is more likely to have something interesting on it, at least to these groups.
Of course it's true, the south was once a Bastion of the Democratic party right up until Johnson signed the Civil Rights act and Regan got the Republican party to embrace it's "Southern Strategy" where they courted Democrats that were unhappy with the party stand on Civil Rights. Almost every racist that was once Democratic switched to the Republican Party include Strom Thurmand (a celebrated Republican legislator) who ran for president on a platform of repealing civil rights and restoring the Jim Crow laws.
So yea, Duke was a Democrat right up until the Democrats told him and his hate to take a hike and the Republican invited him in. Invited.
I'll never understand people like you that point out that Democrats used to be the part of racists. As it conveniently points out that all those racists moved to the Republican party and were embraced and welcomed by the party.
The vast majority of Men I know would be arguably offended if you started referring to them as Boy, and doing so with those of certain ethnic groups would likely get you involved in a fight.
White supremacists have roundly endorsed Trump. So roundly in fact I don't think there is a single White supremacist group that hasn't endorsed him. It wouldn't be that far off base for anyone to assume that neo-nazi = right wing, given that neo-nazi's routinely refer to themselves as right wing conservatives. The Republican party has always had a passive acceptance of white supremacist voters. Hell David Duke ran for congress as a Republican and you don't get much more white supremacist than the leader of the KKK.
Is that F for Francis?
The Debian packagers rarely package vanilla on major packages. The Debian package teams often make significant changes and incorporate features and patches all the time that aren't in the vanilla. It's one of the things I really like about Debian, the people packaging the software actually use it and often go for usability above and beyond what the developers did. The disadvantage is that the Debian package often has differences to vanilla but it's never anything that's hurt me.
You best check on what Debian plans for the future isn't to install Ubuntu, but to install Debian Unstable and see what Debian is doing with Gnome 3. Unstable is a pretty good snapshot of what Debian is planning for the future.
You should keep in mind that Gnome3 may be the way it is in Jessie because of Debian and it may be the way it is Xubuntu because of Canonical. The packager can enable or disable all those features. My bet is the Debian team went for usability.
Absolutely. Unicorns with rainbows coming out their butts could also someday be real. Possible, yes, likely, not a chance in hell.
One is likely, in fact not just likely but happening. The other has as much chance as the universe popping out of existence tonight.
That is a complete and total fabrication. With solar power we could produce 6.1 Twh simply by putting panels on every single rooftop. That would require not one single square foot of land. Other than installation labor Solar PV has nearly zero labor involved, the panels require little to no maintenance. But during construction I'd argue Nuclear has far more labor than solar. That would require research to back and I doubt anyone cares, I certainly don't.
Such advancements have little impact on solar. There are two primary drivers in the drop in solar pricing, the first is economics of scale in manufacturing. Solar is manufactured, nuclear is constructed. The relatively small number of nuclear plants would preclude any sort of economics of scale, and being a building it would automatically be precluded by each plant being it's own individual butterfly designed and sited for it's specific situation. Now there are some nuclear technologies that might benefit from mass production, such as the theoretical 1mw or so solid state reactors that have been proposed by Mitsubishi and others. But there is a reason they are only proposals.
The second cost advantage to solar is that installation costs continue to drop as innovation in installation continues to reduce the amount of materials and labor involved in installation, on average 20% yearly decreases in installation costs have been typical for the last 5 years (2010 the average US residential install took 2-4 days, in 2016 most can be done in a few hours). Nuclear plant costs continue to rise, astronomically so it would seem given the recent examples. There has not been a single incidence where the cost of construction of nuclear power has decreased, each and every plant is more expensive than the last. To the point that some of the recent plants have been double or triple the cost of the one they replace or are adjacent to.
That's great, you're wrong but I doubt you care and neither do I. Be wrong all you want! You're also welcome to walk around without pants wearing slippers talking about how much you dislike solar. Your local law enforcement might not agree with me but I think you are welcome to do so.
Not a dime of your tax money has went to any solar. 99.99% of all solar incentives are in the form of accelerated depreciation which reduces early taxes and raises later taxes. And all the increased depreciation rates in solar don't add up to the subsidies a single nuclear reactor receives. Hell even the loan guarantees on a single reactor (that allow borrowing at government rates) likely far exceed the accelerated depreciation for every solar panel ever installed. And that doesn'
I like it as well, it was really bad early on but they've slowly been adding the customization back and yea it's dumbed down tremendously. But I like the look and the performance. It's no longer painful and is relatively useful in Jessie and I really like how easy they've made some things even if it costs me other things. I particularly like the modular nature of some of the desktop features and that I can add features I want and remove features I don't. T
hough I don't like how they keep moving things around. When they moved the settings in the Jessie release it took me like 10 minutes to find them again, felt like I was on Windows with the continual movements of settings so you have to relearn how to do things over and over again.
Going by windows, most people don't want that, they want full copies. I like what you want most of the time as well but I have to admit in some instances it's nice to get everything.
According to the court documents, the entire purpose of cracking this phone is to determine if charges need to be brought against other people. In other words the intent IS to use this in a criminal trial if such cooperation is found on the phone.
The FBI and half the world has been arguing both sides of this. The FBI says in court documents they absolutely need this to find out if there are other conspirators. In public they talk about needing the ability to combat terrorism. Both arguments are lies, this is about precedent and always has been.
It will be interesting to see if they do but given the previous sales numbers I don't find it likely. With the x-server you could buy more for less in the PC space and that will likely remain true.
That article is a hit piece with no basis in reality. I read it a couple days ago and came away wondering if the author was paid to write it. The author uses data that is more than a year old, neglecting to mention that recent plant numbers are nearing the initial values projected. He ignores that the plant from day one has said that the time to ramp up of full production was an unknown because this is a new type of plant and all new technology takes time to figure out how to run it. It has taken longer than they projected to figure out how to run the plant and optimize it's systems, that isn't in dispute. The author is completely dishonest about the agreement details by selective use of parts of the agreement. In fact I dare say from the selective quotes he's put in the article he's completely rewritten it to say something completely different than it does.
Ivanpah isn't going to shutdown, it's reaching it's energy targets and it's generating power at rates that are competitive, though it does have a bit to go before it reaches optimal operation. IMO this article is a hit piece paid for by a carbon energy conglomerate or one of carbon energies sock puppets such as the Koch foundation. Anyone with any sense should read the article as such, and if anything it indicates how scared carbon based companies are of solar power. When you start seeing paid hit articles (particularly in things like the fox owned WSJ) like this the fear is real. Pay no attention to solar, it's bad, trust them.
It's not so much the older ones, but the badly designed one. They have a LOT of coal plants that operate at about 30% because of all the coal plants they have. Scrubbers have also been mandatory on coal plants for about 10 years. Though it's mandatory to install scrubbers, it is not mandatory to actually run them and as far as I'm aware this hasn't changed though likely will in the near future.
The 30% number is significant, they've already announced that nearly 1.8million jobs in coal mining and coal power generation are going to go away triggering talks of strikes. If you know the history of the communist party you would understand how significant this is because the Communist party in China started in the coal mines, the parties first major success was organizing a coal miner strike.
Solar, Wind and Nuclear are the Communist party power generation strategy. They are hedging their bets with all three technologies in active over deployment. At some point down the road after all the coal power is shutdown they will make a decision on whether all sources of power are still needed and how the generation mix should be changed. Given that solar is a one time major cost with little in the way of maintenance and a life guaranteed to exceed 25 years (panel warranty) I expect it will ultimately end up with a significant portion of the energy market, you also gain the advantage of a generation infrastructure that can not be brought down in a war because of how widely dispersed it is.
This is outright lie. No such demand proxy is needed nor is one deployed. What they've found in Texas where wind and solar are exploding is that wind picks up when solar drops off. There are towns in Texas (easily found by Google) where power prices are free at night because of all the excess wind generation happening at night. As a result there are no more gas peaker plants than anywhere else in the country even though as much as 50% of the power in west Texas is now renewable Solar PV and Wind. With the construction of the cross Texas transmission lines even major cities like Dallas are now receiving a significant portion of their power from the west Texas wind and solar.
I have nothing against Nuclear but it's cost make it a dead technology. The only major Nuclear plant under construction in the US (and it's even on an existing Nuclear site and was partially constructed prior to this round of Nuclear) has costs approaching $9 Billion. Over 70 years that's a per kwh price of close to $0.15 kwh. Wind turbines installed are generating 20 year contracts at $0.05 a kwh right now and solar PV is at $0.07 and the price of both is falling at 20% per year. Nuclear is simply not competitive cost wise and I doubt it ever will be again. Properly balanced in both power mix and regional location and with sufficient transmission to move the power a renewable platform is completely functional, in time the market will sort this out (it's already started) and Coal, oil and even gas will fall out of the energy mix, the age of hydrocarbon power is ending and 99% of people aren't even aware of it..
The Rockefeller fund is heavily invested in Hydrocarbons and ALWAYS has been. It is extremely difficult for a fund with that much money not to be invested in hydrocarbons because there are so few companies that have a capital worth such that investments by the fund would see profitable returns.
To attribute this change in investment strategy as a short term maneuver due to market performance is very shortsighted. The divestment of the Rockefeller fund from hydrocarbons is going to affect the stocks of each of the companies the fund is invested in as their holdings are massive. The very act of divesting these assets will be expensive and raise the funds costs because the dollars will need to be spread among far more stocks and monitored more heavily. But what this divestment means is that the people that made all their money on hydrocarbons no longer see it as a long term growth market. That is very significant and should not be ignored.
The writing is on the wall about hydrocarbons particularly in trends in energy production and this is visible in the long term investing market. Divestment is becoming a big deal because when hydrocarbon stocks collapse it will happen far too quickly (look how fast coal stocks collapsed) for these large investors to be able to divest, and divesting early is going to be in their interest even if it results in short term losses. Those investors remaining in hydrocarbons should do so as a much higher risk short term investment with the understanding that the investment will need to be monitored closely and the investment abandoned as quickly as possible when the eventual reckoning comes.
Last announcement is the government is going to force the shutdown of about 30% of coal power plants (most of these are the dirtiest least efficient plants). This isn't a paper announcement either, as the government is under intense public pressure to deal with the air and water pollution. Their long range plan is to basically stop using coal power entirely (IIRC that's about 2050). They have more than 130 nuclear reactors under construction and are building so much solar PV and wind turbines it would make your head spin.
They've got to stop the air and water pollution or they might get overthrown. The new middle class is no longer tolerant of pollution and it's seen some very public demonstrations that the government couldn't stop. This scares the communist party to death.
Your statement about penetration levels is seriously dated. What they've found in Germany and Hawaii and other places where solar is reaching 30% of power generation is that everything people assumed about maximum amount of solar energy is wrong. It was all theoretical anyway but what they find is that those peak generation periods you allow rates to fall to zero then people will jump in with storage technologies (batteries, fly wheels, pumped hydro, etc) and will use that free peak power to generate stored energy that the grid can use later. Recent research is indicating that rates as high as 80% generation by PV would be sustainable.
The reality is that it will never reach that point because a balanced portfolio of solar, wind and either geothermal or nuclear and you can meet all needs and power rates will probably fall with periods of free power. But this will require total deregulation of the power market. Honestly at some point in the future power generation will be a commodity service with minor profit margin. I expect that grid maintenance and operation will at some point need to be picked up either by a non-profit or government due to the lack or profit from generation and power rates will fall through the floor. This will be good for everyone. One particular thing I like about wind and PV solar is you don't need to waste water generating power, particularly for those of us that live in the desert.
Might sound like a lot of panels but it's not really. If you put panels on every roof in the US we'd be producing more than 10 times the total power we need and the peak production would be far beyond anything anyone could consume. We only need to cover something like half the roofs in the US to generate more power that we'd need for decades.
It's not very far from there to methods to use that power to store it so it can be used outside production hours and there are a LOT of ways to store energy. Power shifting becomes very cheap when the peak power rate is zero.
I shouldn't need to point out the obvious answer that everyone seems to avoid. If the FBI succeeds in this action they have precedent that they can force private companies and people to develop devices/software/whatever under threat of imprisonment for contempt of court (absolutely no appeals and you can be imprisoned until you cooperate up to life in prison). This would make the all writs act a law of incredible power allowing the FBI to impress into service any person or company with the ability to do something it needs for the investigation. Apple in this action is at best a third party, they developed and had manufactured the phone but they are neither the owner nor do they have access or the software to do what the FBI asks. The FBI is asking for them to be compelled to do work for the FBI under threat of imprisonment or divulging their most precious assets (a public release of which could decimate their company revenue).
With the precedent of this case, If you had the skill to do something the FBI needed for an investigation they could simply compel you to do so under the all writs act and if they refuse you could go to jail until you comply. This is ALL kinds of scary and 99% of the articles and comments I read about it focus on the insignificant details of this individual complaint and not the precedent it sets.