Sounds like a direct rip-off of a 1970s novel by a British sci-fi author who's name escapes me.
Mission sent to a distant planet while the Earth teeters towards war and is increasingly uninterested in the mission. Resupply eventually ends and no further messages are heard - assumed global war, end of civilization. Mission crew attempts to populate planet, only to find a microorganism clogs the lungs of children. Everyone dies, the end.
"ex-NASA press secretary came forward and said that an unnamed MIT grad student came up with the idea to slingshot the spacecraft around the moon"
Free-return trajectory was the basis for the moon missions since the era when they were still seriously considering direct ascent (ie, the 1950s). Every iteration of the mission design included it as the default trajectory in order to dela with any of the myriad events which could preclude proper lunar orbit insertion. You can find this in any detailed book on the Apollo development.
> I've looked at putting solar panels on my house, and it will cost $30K after tax breaks and credits.
I doubt it. Parts costs are around $1.50 right now, and I suspect your house cannot support 20 kW of panels. Interconnect and other soft costs shouldn't run more than $5,000, and should be considerably less than that if your jurisdiction uses net metering (which eliminates a second meter and all sorts of wiring).
I suspect you looked about two years ago? Want me to re-run the numbers using today's prices?
> The life span of a solar panel is 15-20 years with a denigration of efficiency of about 25% over that period.
No it's not. As I noted earlier, panels generally degrade by about 1 to 2% during their burn-in period in the first couple of months, and then basically don't degrade after that. There have been some suggestions that the expected lifetime is as high as 100 years (although I won't go that far). Panels will *fail*, due to mechanical events like water leakage and back sheet separation, and that has a measured rate of 0.23% a year.
> The $30K investment in the house doesn't raise it's value that amount
*That* is absolutely *not* the case. Study after study has shown that the house value will go up about $1 for every $1 of panels you install. Sheesh, use Google!
> As for the environmental impactI read recently that each panel made results in 4x
>it's weight in toxic waste and greenhouse gasses produced as a side effect
You read BS put out by a PR company. These claims are quite common, and their refutation just as common. Someone with your technical background should have spent a little time in Google before repeating falsehoods so cavalierly.
If anyone's wondering, the energy payback claim is simply false, and has been since about the 1970s. Panels will produce somewhere between 10 and 20 times as much energy as was used along the entire manufacturing and installation chain (including driving them to you, etc.)
The "toxic waste" argument generally refers to the use of trichlorosilane during the construction of polysilicon. This decomposes in silicon and dichlorosilane, the later is then re-processed back into trichlorosilane. This is a heavy-chemical process, and like any such process, inputs costs money. Over the last decade the industry as made *enormous* advances in material handling techniques. Today there is practically zero waste, and no chemicals embedded in the panel itself.
Even the most trivial search would demonstrate that the greenhouse gasses claim is just as bogus as it appears to be at first glance. I won't even bother LMGTFY'ing it.
> I've looked at installing solar panels. Of course I live far enough north that the front > of my house has a better angle than the roof(I'd need an very steep roof to get to a good angle).
I doubt it. PVWatts likes to set the angle to that of your latitude, but if you try different angles you'll find that the farther north you go, the more summer light you get, so the more you want to optimize the system for summer production - at lower angles.
The end result is that the magic number is about 30 degrees for enormous swaths of the planet.
> You repeated essentially exactly the same statement
Essentially exactly the same?!
The original statement implied that the panels *would* degrade to 25%, Mike pointed out that that's simply their warrantee. As I said earlier, my car had a 80,000 km power train warrantee, but I'm far beyond that and it's still working fine.
> go bankrupt at the end of 25 years
In 25 years the inflation adjusted price of PV will likely be very close to zero.
> See here [wikipedia.org] - not an industry shill.
I helped write that article (and wrote most of the related ones, like LCOE and $/watt), so I can same with some authority that you're missing the point. The point was about the *energy payback*, the ratio between the energy used to make the panel to the energy it produces over its lifetime.
> TOTAL system levelized cost
I find it more than a little amusing that you complain that Mike is an industry shill, then quote numbers from an industry shill to show him why.
The EIA numbers you quote were compiled before the price of PV imploded. If you'd like to run the calculations again with modern numbers, you can try the math I put in this article:
> * even top-end panels last about 25 years max before peak output drops below 80% of rated Wp.
Nope. That's when their warrantee expires, but that don't actually "do that" in the field. My car didn't magically stop moving when it hit its 80,000 km power train warrantee either.
Arco started serial production of panels in the early 1970. Those that can be found (most were scrapped, some sank in the ocean) are producing an amount not easily distinguishable from 100% of their post-burn-in power rating. That's after 40 years. This is not atypical. Study after study after study has shown that there is no real degradation after burn-in, and the warrantee is really covering mechanical failures.
The same is not true of inverters. Most of them have a 10 year warrantee and last 12 to 15. That is something everyone expects to improve as operational frequencies increase. Microinverters almost all come with 25 year warrantees now.
> you have to burn an unholy amount of electricity just to feed the CZ furnaces
The panels "pay off" their energy in 2 to 3 years. Thin-film versions in 1 or less.
And before you say it, do you know where concrete comes from?
> I expect throwing largish rocks down from space will do some significant damage. > Same with just dropping iron rods onto a larger target (with nods to Larry Niven).
Larry writes fun stories, but doesn't know much about orbital dynamics.
Calculate the amount of energy needed to deorbit, say, a "crow bar". Compare this with the energy need to top-attack a tank. See a problem?
The very idea of attacking moving targets from orbit has been done to death, it doesn't work. Lots of Navy studies to show you why.
"... showing that the proportion of people who believe in hell negatively predicts national crime rates whereas belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates."
I don't believe this for an instant.
By *every* measure, religiosity is lower in Canada than the US. Moreover, Canada is generally more pluralistic in terms of faith. Both would contribute to significantly lower "belief in heaven" *and* "hell".
Yet the crime rate in Canada is much lower than the US. There are a few categories where it is higher, like car theft, but their relative increase is dramatically less than the relative decrease of all violent crime (30% more vs. 3x less).
I realize this is a single counterexample, but I suspect this is true for most countries in the western world, and would not be surprised if this were true for much of the planet.
> I absolutely love C# syntax and the easy readability of the code.
I agree. I found the experience of programming in C# generally enjoyable, and the IDE was one of the better ones I've used.
>.NET libraries are also wonderful
I disagree. They are certainly no match for Cocoa.
Consider one example, the lowly combo box. For decades (literally) people have been asking for MS to support the multi-column format found in Access. Over and over and over and over. Nothing in GDI, so it's not surprising it wasn't in MFC or WTL. And it's not entirely surprising it wasn't in WinForms, right? But why not in WPF? And if that's not enough TLA, it's not in.NET Micro either. Seriously? And I *still* have to buy a 3rd party lib just to get real work done?
Or consider data access ODBC comes out and, IMHO, it remains one of the few good data access APIs ever made. But the early drivers sucked, and it didn't handle the results in a programmer-friendly way. Ok, so RDO. Geez, slow on top of slow, ok lets try DAO. Oh, that's not very good, so OLEDB, wait I mean ADO. Oh geez, ok how about ADO.NET? Oh, darn, ok fine, let's throw out ACE and see if that sticks. Oh, and none of this is working on 64 bit? Ok, port-o-rama!
Funny part to all of this? When you look at the results all of these system produce, you find they're bug compatible with the original ODBC drivers. It's new code, don't get me wrong, but *they copied the bad code*. Meanwhile, ODBC continued to improve, and iODBC absolutely kicks ass. If they just stuck it out with ODBC and waited until they really understood how to wrap it, we'd all be using it today. Like we do under Cocoa.
When MS builds new stuff, like C#, it tends to be pretty damb good. They look at what's out there, select the good, fix the bad, and there it is. But when they're trying to fix something that already exists it seems they invariably just re-apply the lipstick to the chicken. Then they give you both, and when we note it has the same problems they throw up their hands and cry "well what do you want already?!"
"Unfortunately there are a lot of Objective-C old-timers, both at Apple and abroad, who think that Objective-C is a great language and don't see how it needs much refinement"
Hmmm. I'm one of those old-timers (well, semi-old) and I can assure you we complain just as loud, or more loudly, than most. Your experience is very much not of the norm, and I suspect you are conflating the negative with the common.
"Even Apple's own old Dylan was a more interesting and innovative as a language than Objective-C."
Agreed. I loved the multi-interface stuff. Why doesn't anyone else pick that up? It would be particularly easy to implement in Bundles. But...
"the availability of libraries is often more important than the language itself"
Bingo. Lets be honest, is any native library set even *remotely* as good as Cocoa out of the box? With the exception of Delphi I've fiddled with them all, and the answer is a resounding "no!". All you have to do is compare the basic text editing widget across libraries and you can draw your own conclusions.
> None of those can deviate far from any of the others
If the ABM problem were so "trivial", do you think the US and USSR would be so quick to abandon them during SALT?
The Spartan's 5 Mt M71 had an effective range of about 50 km - by FAR the largest of any ABM. A polar-launched ICBM has a re-entry footprint that is typically 500 by 150 km. That means 300 Spartan's are needed to cover the footprint of a single ICBM, and twice that number if you want to actually stop them. Every missile that the Soviets build required the US to build hundreds.
And footprint is easy, it's far easier than accuracy. So if you're only interested in city busters, avoiding a nuclear armed re-entry-phase ABM is "trivial" even for a hypothetical (which they are) NK missile system. Trivial as in "already done" as opposed to "my ill-informed pondering".
Slashdot Mirror
"Also they are attempting to introduce a more "small start-up culture" to Motorola"
Every failing company makes this claim. I have yet to see a single successful example.
Sounds like a direct rip-off of a 1970s novel by a British sci-fi author who's name escapes me.
Mission sent to a distant planet while the Earth teeters towards war and is increasingly uninterested in the mission. Resupply eventually ends and no further messages are heard - assumed global war, end of civilization. Mission crew attempts to populate planet, only to find a microorganism clogs the lungs of children. Everyone dies, the end.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
We blew ourselves up, we'll do it again, forever and ever.
"ex-NASA press secretary came forward and said that an unnamed MIT grad student came up with the idea to slingshot the spacecraft around the moon"
Free-return trajectory was the basis for the moon missions since the era when they were still seriously considering direct ascent (ie, the 1950s). Every iteration of the mission design included it as the default trajectory in order to dela with any of the myriad events which could preclude proper lunar orbit insertion. You can find this in any detailed book on the Apollo development.
This story is complete BS.
> I've looked at putting solar panels on my house, and it will cost $30K after tax breaks and credits.
I doubt it. Parts costs are around $1.50 right now, and I suspect your house cannot support 20 kW of panels. Interconnect and other soft costs shouldn't run more than $5,000, and should be considerably less than that if your jurisdiction uses net metering (which eliminates a second meter and all sorts of wiring).
I suspect you looked about two years ago? Want me to re-run the numbers using today's prices?
> The life span of a solar panel is 15-20 years with a denigration of efficiency of about 25% over that period.
No it's not. As I noted earlier, panels generally degrade by about 1 to 2% during their burn-in period in the first couple of months, and then basically don't degrade after that. There have been some suggestions that the expected lifetime is as high as 100 years (although I won't go that far). Panels will *fail*, due to mechanical events like water leakage and back sheet separation, and that has a measured rate of 0.23% a year.
> The $30K investment in the house doesn't raise it's value that amount
*That* is absolutely *not* the case. Study after study has shown that the house value will go up about $1 for every $1 of panels you install. Sheesh, use Google!
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/study-finds-solar-panels-increase-home-values/
> Nothing you mentioned will be substantially mitigated within my lifetime.
The price of PV fell 70% in the last two years. I suspect your statement is false.
> As for the environmental impactI read recently that each panel made results in 4x
>it's weight in toxic waste and greenhouse gasses produced as a side effect
You read BS put out by a PR company. These claims are quite common, and their refutation just as common. Someone with your technical background should have spent a little time in Google before repeating falsehoods so cavalierly.
If anyone's wondering, the energy payback claim is simply false, and has been since about the 1970s. Panels will produce somewhere between 10 and 20 times as much energy as was used along the entire manufacturing and installation chain (including driving them to you, etc.)
The "toxic waste" argument generally refers to the use of trichlorosilane during the construction of polysilicon. This decomposes in silicon and dichlorosilane, the later is then re-processed back into trichlorosilane. This is a heavy-chemical process, and like any such process, inputs costs money. Over the last decade the industry as made *enormous* advances in material handling techniques. Today there is practically zero waste, and no chemicals embedded in the panel itself.
Even the most trivial search would demonstrate that the greenhouse gasses claim is just as bogus as it appears to be at first glance. I won't even bother LMGTFY'ing it.
> I've looked at installing solar panels. Of course I live far enough north that the front
> of my house has a better angle than the roof(I'd need an very steep roof to get to a good angle).
I doubt it. PVWatts likes to set the angle to that of your latitude, but if you try different angles you'll find that the farther north you go, the more summer light you get, so the more you want to optimize the system for summer production - at lower angles.
The end result is that the magic number is about 30 degrees for enormous swaths of the planet.
> Unlikely. If there was an easy and cheap way to use solar power, why wouldn't they?
Oh geez, maybe because of all the government regulations, perchance?
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/30/hawaii-sails-past-solar-grid-parity-surprised-by-additional-roadblocks/
Oh, missed this
> Solar panels are warrantied for maybe 1-3 years against manufacturing defects if you're lucky, and that's about
Most are 5, lots are more. For instance:
http://www.solarworld-usa.com/solar-for-home/products-and-services/~/media/Global/PDFs/solarworld-usa-limited-warranty.ashx
> You repeated essentially exactly the same statement
Essentially exactly the same?!
The original statement implied that the panels *would* degrade to 25%, Mike pointed out that that's simply their warrantee. As I said earlier, my car had a 80,000 km power train warrantee, but I'm far beyond that and it's still working fine.
> go bankrupt at the end of 25 years
In 25 years the inflation adjusted price of PV will likely be very close to zero.
> See here [wikipedia.org] - not an industry shill.
I helped write that article (and wrote most of the related ones, like LCOE and $/watt), so I can same with some authority that you're missing the point. The point was about the *energy payback*, the ratio between the energy used to make the panel to the energy it produces over its lifetime.
> TOTAL system levelized cost
I find it more than a little amusing that you complain that Mike is an industry shill, then quote numbers from an industry shill to show him why.
The EIA numbers you quote were compiled before the price of PV imploded. If you'd like to run the calculations again with modern numbers, you can try the math I put in this article:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/your-own-grid-parity-pv-system/
And before you start, contract tenders for mid-scale commercial systems are currently going out at $3.50, all in.
> * even top-end panels last about 25 years max before peak output drops below 80% of rated Wp.
Nope. That's when their warrantee expires, but that don't actually "do that" in the field. My car didn't magically stop moving when it hit its 80,000 km power train warrantee either.
Arco started serial production of panels in the early 1970. Those that can be found (most were scrapped, some sank in the ocean) are producing an amount not easily distinguishable from 100% of their post-burn-in power rating. That's after 40 years. This is not atypical. Study after study after study has shown that there is no real degradation after burn-in, and the warrantee is really covering mechanical failures.
The same is not true of inverters. Most of them have a 10 year warrantee and last 12 to 15. That is something everyone expects to improve as operational frequencies increase. Microinverters almost all come with 25 year warrantees now.
> you have to burn an unholy amount of electricity just to feed the CZ furnaces
The panels "pay off" their energy in 2 to 3 years. Thin-film versions in 1 or less.
And before you say it, do you know where concrete comes from?
> I expect throwing largish rocks down from space will do some significant damage.
> Same with just dropping iron rods onto a larger target (with nods to Larry Niven).
Larry writes fun stories, but doesn't know much about orbital dynamics.
Calculate the amount of energy needed to deorbit, say, a "crow bar". Compare this with the energy need to top-attack a tank. See a problem?
The very idea of attacking moving targets from orbit has been done to death, it doesn't work. Lots of Navy studies to show you why.
"claimed its Mac computers were completely immune to viruses"
No, that's not what it said. It said, and I quote, "A Mac isn't susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers."
That is still true today.
"... showing that the proportion of people who believe in hell negatively predicts national crime rates whereas belief in heaven predicts higher crime rates."
I don't believe this for an instant.
By *every* measure, religiosity is lower in Canada than the US. Moreover, Canada is generally more pluralistic in terms of faith. Both would contribute to significantly lower "belief in heaven" *and* "hell".
Yet the crime rate in Canada is much lower than the US. There are a few categories where it is higher, like car theft, but their relative increase is dramatically less than the relative decrease of all violent crime (30% more vs. 3x less).
I realize this is a single counterexample, but I suspect this is true for most countries in the western world, and would not be surprised if this were true for much of the planet.
Yeah, like the Zune.
> I absolutely love C# syntax and the easy readability of the code.
I agree. I found the experience of programming in C# generally enjoyable, and the IDE was one of the better ones I've used.
> .NET libraries are also wonderful
I disagree. They are certainly no match for Cocoa.
Consider one example, the lowly combo box. For decades (literally) people have been asking for MS to support the multi-column format found in Access. Over and over and over and over. Nothing in GDI, so it's not surprising it wasn't in MFC or WTL. And it's not entirely surprising it wasn't in WinForms, right? But why not in WPF? And if that's not enough TLA, it's not in .NET Micro either. Seriously? And I *still* have to buy a 3rd party lib just to get real work done?
Or consider data access ODBC comes out and, IMHO, it remains one of the few good data access APIs ever made. But the early drivers sucked, and it didn't handle the results in a programmer-friendly way. Ok, so RDO. Geez, slow on top of slow, ok lets try DAO. Oh, that's not very good, so OLEDB, wait I mean ADO. Oh geez, ok how about ADO.NET? Oh, darn, ok fine, let's throw out ACE and see if that sticks. Oh, and none of this is working on 64 bit? Ok, port-o-rama!
Funny part to all of this? When you look at the results all of these system produce, you find they're bug compatible with the original ODBC drivers. It's new code, don't get me wrong, but *they copied the bad code*. Meanwhile, ODBC continued to improve, and iODBC absolutely kicks ass. If they just stuck it out with ODBC and waited until they really understood how to wrap it, we'd all be using it today. Like we do under Cocoa.
When MS builds new stuff, like C#, it tends to be pretty damb good. They look at what's out there, select the good, fix the bad, and there it is. But when they're trying to fix something that already exists it seems they invariably just re-apply the lipstick to the chicken. Then they give you both, and when we note it has the same problems they throw up their hands and cry "well what do you want already?!"
"Unfortunately there are a lot of Objective-C old-timers, both at Apple and abroad, who think that Objective-C is a great language and don't see how it needs much refinement"
Hmmm. I'm one of those old-timers (well, semi-old) and I can assure you we complain just as loud, or more loudly, than most. Your experience is very much not of the norm, and I suspect you are conflating the negative with the common.
"Even Apple's own old Dylan was a more interesting and innovative as a language than Objective-C."
Agreed. I loved the multi-interface stuff. Why doesn't anyone else pick that up? It would be particularly easy to implement in Bundles. But...
"the availability of libraries is often more important than the language itself"
Bingo. Lets be honest, is any native library set even *remotely* as good as Cocoa out of the box? With the exception of Delphi I've fiddled with them all, and the answer is a resounding "no!". All you have to do is compare the basic text editing widget across libraries and you can draw your own conclusions.
"Clang recently added literal syntax for collections and boxed numbers"
Oh thank your deity. Long overdue IMHO.
That's "30", not "300", of course.
> None of those can deviate far from any of the others
If the ABM problem were so "trivial", do you think the US and USSR would be so quick to abandon them during SALT?
The Spartan's 5 Mt M71 had an effective range of about 50 km - by FAR the largest of any ABM. A polar-launched ICBM has a re-entry footprint that is typically 500 by 150 km. That means 300 Spartan's are needed to cover the footprint of a single ICBM, and twice that number if you want to actually stop them. Every missile that the Soviets build required the US to build hundreds.
And footprint is easy, it's far easier than accuracy. So if you're only interested in city busters, avoiding a nuclear armed re-entry-phase ABM is "trivial" even for a hypothetical (which they are) NK missile system. Trivial as in "already done" as opposed to "my ill-informed pondering".
> 600 km would allow intercept for most of the country from South Korea
And South Korea is only 0 km from North Korean artillery, which they would use en-masse if this were to occur.
> Plus, any launch vectors that would have a hope of hitting the USA
Which are, specifically, none at all.
A real threat to the US is Type II Diabetes. North Korean missile attacks are science fiction. So why are they spending money on the wrong one?
"Bishop says that USAID needs to find ways to assist developing regions without compromising the jobs of U.S. call center workers"
*sigh* Insert your image of plantation owners and whips as you see fit.
> Sadly a Leaf cant make my 40 mile commute and back
I thought the real range was about 100 miles?
> weather is below 70 degrees F
That sounds too big. Li-ion is generally less susceptible to temperature effects until you get down around 45 degrees.