1) the amount of hydrazine fuel contained was infinitesimal compared to the amount of hydrazine that spills on humans every year. The F-16 uses hydrazine in its EPU, and you can trivially find stories of people practically bathing in it as a result of EPU problems and fuel dumps. The effects are generally less than the horrific outcomes presented in the stories surrounding the shoot-down. The idea that the hydrazine presented any sort of real risk is absolutely bogus, something the articles dance around and just won't address directly.
2) the chance of the debris coming down in a populated area is very close to zero. Although underreported (see http://imca.repetti.net/metinfo/metstruck.html), there are no recorded instances of anyone being killed by anything falling from space. Now of course a 1000 lb fuel tank is much deadlier than a small stone, but 1000 lb objects have fallen from space before, and we didn't bother shooting them down (http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/dangerous_reentries_000602.html).
3) last time I checked, when heat shields fail the aluminum structure generally fails almost immediately thereafter (http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/$A_reentry.htm). I am not aware of any unprotected structure reaching the ground intact (although that could be ignorance) but I am very much aware of many unprotected structures breaking into small parts under the same conditions. This includes tanks with frozen volatiles inside. The only really large pieces of debris to reach the ground were the insulated tanks from Skylab.
4) A nuclear reactor is MUCH more robust than this fuel tank, yet when Cosmos 954 fell to Earth it's 50 by 35 cm reactor shattered and spewed its contents over 600 km (http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/gamma/ml_e.php). Yes, the shaping is critical in terms of shock generation and aerodynamic loading, and it's definitely easier for a sphere to re-enter than a cylinder, but still... bologna.
5) the article Oberg's is based on claims ~8 gee loading. Again, bologna; that's what you get on a carefully controlled re-entry, uncontrolled will cause much greater loadings (again, http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/$A_reentry.htm)
6) The article links to several others that are essentially dismissive of the "publicity" cover-story angle as a conspiracy theory. However, we're talking about an administration who's history shows a well-recorded "shoot first" policy based on extremely inflated data. This case fits the pattern to a T, and I see no reason to believe it differs in any way.
I call BS. Sorry James, but the argument remains specious in my books.
I was reading an interview with Jobs and he started railing on why tech companies fail. His theory is that when you have a product that sells well, the salesmen think they're the ones made that happen. They were selling it, after all. Since these people take all the glory for the success [and although he didn't say it, are typically better at office politics than techs] they end up running the company. When that happens, they just stop listening to the engineers. And then when the product doesn't have any legs, they try to market their way out of the problem. After all, it's all about marketing, right? Cars, hamburgers, operating systems; they're all the same, proper marketing can sell anything, it's got nothing to do with the actual product.
After being asked about MS's recent floundering, he basically stated "Exactly, look who's running it, the sales guy."
The problem with Vista is Vista, not the Vista ad campaign. Does anyone here think sales would have increased if their posters were cooler? If you run ads saying "it's really not so bad", then it pretty much _is_ that bad.
And please, don't compare this with BK. BK's problem wasn't their product, it was visibility. That's something you CAN fix with an ad campaign. Everyone already knows about MS and Vista, so I really don't see how increasing visibility isn't going to help.
Good luck to the new guys! Especially with the Zune.
> actually when you're working as a subsistence farmer, you're at least growing your own food so you don't > have to waste the crap pay you get on buying food from someone else
Then I guess the fact that subsistence farmers all over the world have been flocking to the cities for the last 500 years is because... they're insane? Propaganda? Something in the water?
> Am I the only one who sees a problem with the circular logic
Apparently, yes.
For one thing, it's "extra mass", not "mass". The mass of the electron is fully accounted for by it's self-energy. If you integrate the EM field energy over the electron's field, then apply E=mc^2 to that result, you get the right answer.
Higgs is only needed for particles that do not follow this rule, like quarks. Quarks are heavier than their otherwise obvious self-energy can explain. So we postulate another form of "charge" (sort-of) that these particles interact with. "Charges" are transmitted by mediator particles, so if we postulate a new charge, we postulate a new particle to go with it. And since that guy was Higgs, we have the Higgs particle.
The fact that the Higgs itself would have mass is not at all interesting, any more than saying it's circular to suggest that electrons are effected by electric fields.
> Cosmologists are willing to dismiss observations because they don't fit with theory?
Do cell phones cause cancer? Probably not, in spite of people saying they have data to show it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary data, and the data presented so far is nothing close to extraordinary.
> 1 MJ/kg sounds like a lot of energy [snip]... a loaf of bread has an energy density of 10 MJ/kg
You can't burn a loaf of bread twice, but you can re-use a battery thousands of times. Total storage capacity, and end-to-end energy use, is orders of magnitude larger.
No, it's not. An inexpensive 35% efficient solar cell is important. A working AIDS vaccine is important. A battery with >1 MJ/kg is important. The mass of the Higgs is completely unimportant.
It's a meaningless number in a theory consisting entirely of meaningless numbers. "115? Wow, I'm glad it wasn't 112! I might have had to turn another knob in ST!" The entire theory is nothing more than a collection of measurements tied together by a bunch of unrelated "theorettes".
If someone can show me a real-world use for this waste of talent, I'm all ears (don't say "transistor", that's basic QM. Think really hard and try to find a use for the _standard model_). I've been asking this question for ten years and it's been a big FAIL so far.
And to think that the Sokal affair was considered such a great joke... it seems to me that HEP is just as ridiculously navel-gazing as post-modernist deconstructionist crit-lit, but the latter doesn't cost billions of dollars.
> Ok, so maybe that's not an energy solution, but I think a lot of > our problems stem from urbanization and the lack of trees.
I don't know where you live, but there's more big trees in my city than in the country surrounding it. I'll bet that's true for most people reading this. Furthermore, living in the city allows people to use a variety of low-impact transit methods that are simply not useful living in the country. Unless you grow all your own food, generate all your own power, and telecommute to work (or don't work), every one of these activities will have a far greater ecological footprint living in the country than the city.
75% of people in New York don't have a car (or truck, SUV, whatever), and those that do drive rarely. Do you know anyone that lives in the country without one? 1%, maybe? How often do they drive? What sort of public transit can they use? How many houses does one kilometer of road serve in the country? In the city? How about electrical service? Water? When a single tractor-trailer delivers food to a store, how many pound-miles per person does that feed in the country? In the city?
Cities are extremely efficient. If you want to save the world, get people to move INTO THEM.
> installation is now half the cost of the completed solar system
That's a little inaccurate, but not too bad.
Generally speaking, end-user costs are falling toward the $4-5 a watt range for the panels. The inverter adds another $1 a watt. Installed costs are generally quoted at about $9 a watt. So installation is about 1/3rd of the price, not 1/2. I speak from extensive experience here.
Whether or not costs will fall remains to be seen. It's all about supply and demand, and right now the problem is on the supply side. Solar cells were generally made from the cast-off products of semiconductor fabs, and as demand has grown the supply quickly dried up. Nevertheless, the price has FALLEN (think about that).
A number of companies are looking to address the supply-side of the issue with new plants dedicated to producing huge quantities of polysi specifically for cell production. There's a debate in the investment world about whether or not the increased supply will swamped by increased demand at a new lower price point. I don't see the problem personally, if the cost stays the same it's likely demand will too.
The ~40% cells require an extremely complex process that still includes manual steps, and only works inside an expensive concentrator. In this case AM's number's are too low; CSP using GaAs cells are completely dominated by concentrator cost, and this is unlikely to change (I find it difficult to imagine a 75% cost reduction in "glass plate on a pole" compared to what they have already). By the way, you need concentration on the order of 500 to 1000 times to make these things work, MIT's neon panels won't do squat here.
One exception is aSi, which Uni-Solar seems to have wrapped up. This is based on the same polysi supply, but uses much less of it and has a number of interesting advantages... it's flexible, lightweight (more important than you might thing), extremely robust, and has good off-peak performance. The downside is that it has ~8% peak performance, although they argue this is offset in total production terms by a number of practical factors. Interesting nonetheless.
Another wild-card are the DSSc's. Current generations already offer ~12% (theoretical, still haven't tested one myself) but they also use a liquid electrolyte, which renders them useless in cold-weather situation. They also use rare-earths in the dye. I continue to watch this one with a very sharp eye; if they can get into the aSi performance range with alternate materials this might be interesting in the future.
Most everything else you've read about is just a science experiment, one that uses some extremely expensive and limited material that mean it is unlikely to go into widespread use over the long run.
By the way, to everyone that's complaining about tree-huggers and saying the market should decide, perhaps you should actually check the market? The market has decided, solar is where it's at.
Oh wow! Could you go to the wiki and add to the article there? I did all I could piecing together the fragments of information I was able to found out there (some required photocopying... PHOTOCOPYING!) but that's nothing like first-hand knowledge.
If it can't "feel" the electromagnetic force, which is 36 orders of magnitude greater than gravity, how can it "feel" gravity? [snip] How can it be, that modern, supposedly educated, "mainstream" cosmologists ignore the much powerful force of electricity in the operation of the universe? How can it be that modern cosmology tries to explain the operation of the entire universe by the operation of the weakest force of nature? Yeah, those silly scientists, what a bunch of dummies!
Oh wait, right... since EM is the strongest long-range force, and the universe is ~13 billion years old, all free charges would have already neutralized _because_ the force is so strong. It's so much stronger than gravity, in fact, that it would have neutralized as soon as it cooled off enough for atoms to form, and gravity would be unable to stop it.
I'm glad to see someone put the magnetic field in the donut, and wrap the plasma around it. What, you mean ZETA from 1954 at Harwell? Yes, impressive attempt that. Too bad the self-focussing caused runaway cascades in the plasma that destroyed the stability. But that couldn't possibly happen here, right?
ICF is unlikely to ever deliver excess power after conversion efficiencies. NIF uses ~400 MJ to produce ~40 MJ out. Sign me up!
Fast ignition appears to reduce the required input power by about one order of magnitude. Progress in laser diodes appears to offer another. All of a sudden things look very interesting in the ICF world.
2) Magnetized Target Fusion
ICF has high-density (10 times lead -- consider that it started as hydrogen gas) and super-short confinement times. The problem is getting the density. Magnetic approaches have low density (almost vacuum) and long confinement times. The problem is getting the confinement time.
But what about the middle ground between the two? We already know how to confine for "some" time, and compress things "ok". It turns out there's an extremely interesting area of practical design in that grey area between the two extremes, in the performance area we had 20 years ago. MTF attacks that area in an interesting way.
3) Polywell
Let's give Bussard the props the guy deserves. I don't know if the Polywell is any better positioned for success than focus fusion, and I have funny feelings in my gut about all magnetic approaches, but if this guy says it's going to work I'm willing to cut him a whole lot of slack.
As somebody else pointed out elsewhere an intelligent being would not design something as complicated as a person, complexity is just not the sign of a well designed anything Off topic, but here's my argument:
When you look at a designed object, say a house, one thing that jumps out at you is that there are a large number of special-purpose "things". For instance, you have shingles on the roof, but tiles on the floor. You have copper pipes for water supply, but ABS for waste water. Cinder block for foundation, wood for above-ground framing. And drywall? Whoa. Sure, you have nails all over the place, but in a lot of ways a house is made up of a lot of single-purpose things.
Do you know why your inner ear has those three little bones that are so important to hearing? It has them because those were the jaw bones of reptiles, and they just happened to be in basically the right place that they were a few gamma-rays away from being detached. When I see most people building houses with ABS for wiring and shingles for the foundation, I'll take another look at ID.
If you have a reasonable scanner, would you consider scanning them and uploading to the Wikipedia? It's very difficult to get good scans of these older games in copyright-free forms.
This will have zero effect on the collectibility of the games.
> You mean by asking hardware manufacturers to pay them > money to put their logos on their peripheral products
That's not really fair. MS has their own hardware development, and I think it's been one of their greatest successes. They introduced (widely at least) the scroll wheel, which is one of the few real advances in input in years (well, until the iPhone/Surface anyway). Their keyboards are some of the best to type on since the Apple Extended II. And the multi-input joystick remains the best on the market today, almost a decade after they introduced it.
I'm hardly a MS fanboi -I'm typing this on a Mac- but I give them props for their input devices.
Sigh. To start with, the tribunals are not criminal. In fact, they're not even supposed to be hearing cases like this, they were set up to deal with discrimination for things like renting an apartment.
Look, there IS a point to this case. The point is that Maclean's has been publishing this ongoing series of Styne's rants without any countering view being offered. In one interpretation, that means they are party to publishing hate speech. If this was some random right-wing blog no one would care, but Maclean's is a major Canadian magazine with millions of weekly readers.
I completely disagree with this interpretation. I believe that these cases will simple clarify the real purpose of these tribunals, and lead to their scope being better defined and much more limited. I welcome this. Perhaps you might want a more cut-and-dried case of obvious censorship to test these limits, but that's not how these things work.
The bigger picture is being missed here, IMHO. The question is not what Maclean's is printing, but why. Maclean's is an old-media outlet desperately trying to find a formula that keeps their sales going. In the last century this formula was to be fairly liberal. In this century, as the US discovered much more quickly than Canadian media, the formula is to be a right-wing red-in-the-face shock jock. For whatever reason, THAT is what gets people to read/watch/listen. At least for now.
Maclean's is simply doing what it believes it needs to to survive. If history is any guide, I doubt it will work for long. Another sea-change is coming, but the problem with old-media is that they are slow-moving and often commit suicide while they figure this out.
Maury
p.s. Everyone should go and watch the Steyn episode of The Agenda on TVO. Now THAT is compelling television!
> a merger with Yahoo would have been horrific for both companies
I always thought so too, but let me assure you, the rest of the finance world disagreed. Completely.
There's a certain momentum to mergers that has absolutely nothing to do with the companies involved. It has to do with cash flows and balance sheets. It doesn't make a difference what happens AFTER the deal is closed. That's the distant future, science fiction.
MS had cash, they needed to spend cash, this was a vaguely profitable company to spend it on. Game over.
> which is why Microsoft stock dropped when the offer was first announced...
The target's stock always goes up and the acquirer's always goes down. That's because the former is being made an offer at a premium over their current price, while the later is typically taking on debt or diluting their stock (the later in this case). It had nothing at all to do with the details of the deal.
> Microsoft, but it really looked to me like they wanted Yahoo
Yeah, but why? Really, why does MS believe it's future lies in advertising? They've never made money this way in the past, and the ads I've seen certainly don't instill confidence.
> Today is the last for the Stealth Fighter which is being > replaced by the F-22 Raptor
No it's not. The F-22 is an air-superiority fighter that is replacing the F-15 in that role. The F-117 is being replaced by nothing.
This retirement leaves the USAF with no dedicated long-range tactical interdictors at all. While this gives them an excuse to fly the otherwise ridiculously overpriced B-1 and B-2 on these missions, it also means that in a hot-war they have a very real capability shortfall past the range of the F-16 or F-35.
Absolutely! Wikiality is exactly like newspapers in many ways
And completely different in others. It's the "others" that you don't bother to discuss that are the important question.
Newspapers have a powerful lobby and an agenda behind every news story. One that subtly uses semiotics and wordplay to manipulate emotion and how facts are perceived. Wikipedians do exactly the same things.
And it's right here that the problem becomes obvious. Sure, _wikipedians_ might have an agenda, but it is absolutely not the case that the _wikipedia_ has one. It is precisely through the "collection of minds" that any sort of agenda gets scrubbed out. Through sheer mass, the collection tends toward the neutral.
It is this key difference that you fail to address, or even acknowledge. This thread a perfect example of why it's such an important difference: by simply posting this message the thread as a whole is moving towards the mean. The combination of our two viewpoints represents the "truth" much more than either one alone.
And that is the key difference. Traditional media simply has no correction system. You might have letters to the editor or some such, but they pick and choose what to print even in this case. Your opinion simply doesn't count.
So then the question becomes more obvious: can a collection of different opinions result in an accurate article? The vast majority of the slings and arrows that the Wikipedia takes from the outside is based on this complaint; that a collection of random inputs cannot possibly be as good as one focussed effort. Does this sound familiar to anyone? It should, it's precisely the same argument that pundits used to state, with authority, that Linux could never be a good operating system. Or that evolution cannot possibly work. Or that desktop publishing would destroy the world of print. Or many other things over the years.
But it's always wrong. The Wikipedia is a stochastic process, and the public simply does not understand these. Ask anyone where 100 random steps will get you and they'll always say "right back where you started". So obviously a billion years of random mutations couldn't possibly result in eyeballs, any more than a hundred random edits on the wikipedia could result in a good article. Of course the real answer is "square root of 100", or "the eyeball can evolve" or "the wikipedia does improve".
For all the talk of NPOV on every discussion page, it's little more than talk.
And so is this complaint. Just talk.
And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them.
Much noted, but largely unreal. Many people complain about this "problem", but examples are difficult to come by and in my experience are generally ancient history or outright terrible behavior on the part of the person complaining. If this problem did exist in as widespread a form as detractors claim, it would be noted far more widely than the small number of conspiracy sites that it's limited to.
And then theres the Wikipedia admins... the real problem with the site.
This is the third "real problem" in one message...
Some of them have been proven to be frauds, to have criminal convictions -- and yet they manipulate facts, they have their own little agendas, they block entire countries IP addresses, or the addresses of individuals they dislike (or who are protesting the nature of an article). "Vandalism" isn't necessary vandalism -- they've never actually defined that word. It's like "terrorism" is to a newspaper - a license to do what you like in the name of "truthiness". Would Galileo be a vandal, would Rosa Parks? Is Stephen Colbert?
*sigh* I'm an admin and never done any of these things. Oh, you mean "some" as in "one", or some equally vanishing number? Or do you mean "some"
Slashdot Mirror
> Just how valuable is a human life?
Well there's over 6 billion of them, and they're trivially easy to replace. Supply and demand suggests "zero".
> All the conspiracy theorists come out in situations like this and complain that it's a cover-up
Not a cover-up, there's nothing TO cover up. They said they were going to shoot it, and they shot it.
The question is whether or not the offered reason for shooting it is the real reason for shooting it. Don't try to tell me THAT'S a settled question!
Maury
1) the amount of hydrazine fuel contained was infinitesimal compared to the amount of hydrazine that spills on humans every year. The F-16 uses hydrazine in its EPU, and you can trivially find stories of people practically bathing in it as a result of EPU problems and fuel dumps. The effects are generally less than the horrific outcomes presented in the stories surrounding the shoot-down. The idea that the hydrazine presented any sort of real risk is absolutely bogus, something the articles dance around and just won't address directly.
2) the chance of the debris coming down in a populated area is very close to zero. Although underreported (see http://imca.repetti.net/metinfo/metstruck.html), there are no recorded instances of anyone being killed by anything falling from space. Now of course a 1000 lb fuel tank is much deadlier than a small stone, but 1000 lb objects have fallen from space before, and we didn't bother shooting them down (http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/dangerous_reentries_000602.html).
3) last time I checked, when heat shields fail the aluminum structure generally fails almost immediately thereafter (http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/$A_reentry.htm). I am not aware of any unprotected structure reaching the ground intact (although that could be ignorance) but I am very much aware of many unprotected structures breaking into small parts under the same conditions. This includes tanks with frozen volatiles inside. The only really large pieces of debris to reach the ground were the insulated tanks from Skylab.
4) A nuclear reactor is MUCH more robust than this fuel tank, yet when Cosmos 954 fell to Earth it's 50 by 35 cm reactor shattered and spewed its contents over 600 km (http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/gamma/ml_e.php). Yes, the shaping is critical in terms of shock generation and aerodynamic loading, and it's definitely easier for a sphere to re-enter than a cylinder, but still... bologna.
5) the article Oberg's is based on claims ~8 gee loading. Again, bologna; that's what you get on a carefully controlled re-entry, uncontrolled will cause much greater loadings (again, http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/$A_reentry.htm)
6) The article links to several others that are essentially dismissive of the "publicity" cover-story angle as a conspiracy theory. However, we're talking about an administration who's history shows a well-recorded "shoot first" policy based on extremely inflated data. This case fits the pattern to a T, and I see no reason to believe it differs in any way.
I call BS. Sorry James, but the argument remains specious in my books.
Maury
Very thin 2D objects eh? Nice.
...read the title and start getting excited that they were going to finally replace Congress with WOPR?
I was reading an interview with Jobs and he started railing on why tech companies fail. His theory is that when you have a product that sells well, the salesmen think they're the ones made that happen. They were selling it, after all. Since these people take all the glory for the success [and although he didn't say it, are typically better at office politics than techs] they end up running the company. When that happens, they just stop listening to the engineers. And then when the product doesn't have any legs, they try to market their way out of the problem. After all, it's all about marketing, right? Cars, hamburgers, operating systems; they're all the same, proper marketing can sell anything, it's got nothing to do with the actual product.
After being asked about MS's recent floundering, he basically stated "Exactly, look who's running it, the sales guy."
The problem with Vista is Vista, not the Vista ad campaign. Does anyone here think sales would have increased if their posters were cooler? If you run ads saying "it's really not so bad", then it pretty much _is_ that bad.
And please, don't compare this with BK. BK's problem wasn't their product, it was visibility. That's something you CAN fix with an ad campaign. Everyone already knows about MS and Vista, so I really don't see how increasing visibility isn't going to help.
Good luck to the new guys! Especially with the Zune.
Maury
> actually when you're working as a subsistence farmer, you're at least growing your own food so you don't
> have to waste the crap pay you get on buying food from someone else
Then I guess the fact that subsistence farmers all over the world have been flocking to the cities for the last 500 years is because... they're insane? Propaganda? Something in the water?
Ever been to Africa, perchance? Let me guess, no.
Maury
> Am I the only one who sees a problem with the circular logic
Apparently, yes.
For one thing, it's "extra mass", not "mass". The mass of the electron is fully accounted for by it's self-energy. If you integrate the EM field energy over the electron's field, then apply E=mc^2 to that result, you get the right answer.
Higgs is only needed for particles that do not follow this rule, like quarks. Quarks are heavier than their otherwise obvious self-energy can explain. So we postulate another form of "charge" (sort-of) that these particles interact with. "Charges" are transmitted by mediator particles, so if we postulate a new charge, we postulate a new particle to go with it. And since that guy was Higgs, we have the Higgs particle.
The fact that the Higgs itself would have mass is not at all interesting, any more than saying it's circular to suggest that electrons are effected by electric fields.
Maury
> Cosmologists are willing to dismiss observations because they don't fit with theory?
Do cell phones cause cancer? Probably not, in spite of people saying they have data to show it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary data, and the data presented so far is nothing close to extraordinary.
Explain how this is any different.
Maury
> 1 MJ/kg sounds like a lot of energy [snip] ... a loaf of bread has an energy density of 10 MJ/kg
You can't burn a loaf of bread twice, but you can re-use a battery thousands of times. Total storage capacity, and end-to-end energy use, is orders of magnitude larger.
Maury
> Knowing the mass of the higgs is important
No, it's not. An inexpensive 35% efficient solar cell is important. A working AIDS vaccine is important. A battery with >1 MJ/kg is important. The mass of the Higgs is completely unimportant.
It's a meaningless number in a theory consisting entirely of meaningless numbers. "115? Wow, I'm glad it wasn't 112! I might have had to turn another knob in ST!" The entire theory is nothing more than a collection of measurements tied together by a bunch of unrelated "theorettes".
If someone can show me a real-world use for this waste of talent, I'm all ears (don't say "transistor", that's basic QM. Think really hard and try to find a use for the _standard model_). I've been asking this question for ten years and it's been a big FAIL so far.
And to think that the Sokal affair was considered such a great joke... it seems to me that HEP is just as ridiculously navel-gazing as post-modernist deconstructionist crit-lit, but the latter doesn't cost billions of dollars.
Maury
> Ok, so maybe that's not an energy solution, but I think a lot of
> our problems stem from urbanization and the lack of trees.
I don't know where you live, but there's more big trees in my city than in the country surrounding it. I'll bet that's true for most people reading this. Furthermore, living in the city allows people to use a variety of low-impact transit methods that are simply not useful living in the country. Unless you grow all your own food, generate all your own power, and telecommute to work (or don't work), every one of these activities will have a far greater ecological footprint living in the country than the city.
75% of people in New York don't have a car (or truck, SUV, whatever), and those that do drive rarely. Do you know anyone that lives in the country without one? 1%, maybe? How often do they drive? What sort of public transit can they use? How many houses does one kilometer of road serve in the country? In the city? How about electrical service? Water? When a single tractor-trailer delivers food to a store, how many pound-miles per person does that feed in the country? In the city?
Cities are extremely efficient. If you want to save the world, get people to move INTO THEM.
Maury
> installation is now half the cost of the completed solar system
That's a little inaccurate, but not too bad.
Generally speaking, end-user costs are falling toward the $4-5 a watt range for the panels. The inverter adds another $1 a watt. Installed costs are generally quoted at about $9 a watt. So installation is about 1/3rd of the price, not 1/2. I speak from extensive experience here.
Whether or not costs will fall remains to be seen. It's all about supply and demand, and right now the problem is on the supply side. Solar cells were generally made from the cast-off products of semiconductor fabs, and as demand has grown the supply quickly dried up. Nevertheless, the price has FALLEN (think about that).
A number of companies are looking to address the supply-side of the issue with new plants dedicated to producing huge quantities of polysi specifically for cell production. There's a debate in the investment world about whether or not the increased supply will swamped by increased demand at a new lower price point. I don't see the problem personally, if the cost stays the same it's likely demand will too.
The ~40% cells require an extremely complex process that still includes manual steps, and only works inside an expensive concentrator. In this case AM's number's are too low; CSP using GaAs cells are completely dominated by concentrator cost, and this is unlikely to change (I find it difficult to imagine a 75% cost reduction in "glass plate on a pole" compared to what they have already). By the way, you need concentration on the order of 500 to 1000 times to make these things work, MIT's neon panels won't do squat here.
One exception is aSi, which Uni-Solar seems to have wrapped up. This is based on the same polysi supply, but uses much less of it and has a number of interesting advantages... it's flexible, lightweight (more important than you might thing), extremely robust, and has good off-peak performance. The downside is that it has ~8% peak performance, although they argue this is offset in total production terms by a number of practical factors. Interesting nonetheless.
Another wild-card are the DSSc's. Current generations already offer ~12% (theoretical, still haven't tested one myself) but they also use a liquid electrolyte, which renders them useless in cold-weather situation. They also use rare-earths in the dye. I continue to watch this one with a very sharp eye; if they can get into the aSi performance range with alternate materials this might be interesting in the future.
Most everything else you've read about is just a science experiment, one that uses some extremely expensive and limited material that mean it is unlikely to go into widespread use over the long run.
By the way, to everyone that's complaining about tree-huggers and saying the market should decide, perhaps you should actually check the market? The market has decided, solar is where it's at.
Maury
I thought all of the points brought up in the posts were perfectly valid. The "switching complaints" is simply another set of equally valid problems.
You think this is bad? Try passing FA on the wikipedia some time.
Oh wow! Could you go to the wiki and add to the article there? I did all I could piecing together the fragments of information I was able to found out there (some required photocopying... PHOTOCOPYING!) but that's nothing like first-hand knowledge.
[snip]
How can it be, that modern, supposedly educated, "mainstream" cosmologists ignore the much powerful force of electricity in the operation of the universe? How can it be that modern cosmology tries to explain the operation of the entire universe by the operation of the weakest force of nature? Yeah, those silly scientists, what a bunch of dummies!
Oh wait, right... since EM is the strongest long-range force, and the universe is ~13 billion years old, all free charges would have already neutralized _because_ the force is so strong. It's so much stronger than gravity, in fact, that it would have neutralized as soon as it cooled off enough for atoms to form, and gravity would be unable to stop it.
Maury
Maury
Before you get all up inz:
1) Fast ignition:
ICF is unlikely to ever deliver excess power after conversion efficiencies. NIF uses ~400 MJ to produce ~40 MJ out. Sign me up!
Fast ignition appears to reduce the required input power by about one order of magnitude. Progress in laser diodes appears to offer another. All of a sudden things look very interesting in the ICF world.
2) Magnetized Target Fusion
ICF has high-density (10 times lead -- consider that it started as hydrogen gas) and super-short confinement times. The problem is getting the density. Magnetic approaches have low density (almost vacuum) and long confinement times. The problem is getting the confinement time.
But what about the middle ground between the two? We already know how to confine for "some" time, and compress things "ok". It turns out there's an extremely interesting area of practical design in that grey area between the two extremes, in the performance area we had 20 years ago. MTF attacks that area in an interesting way.
3) Polywell
Let's give Bussard the props the guy deserves. I don't know if the Polywell is any better positioned for success than focus fusion, and I have funny feelings in my gut about all magnetic approaches, but if this guy says it's going to work I'm willing to cut him a whole lot of slack.
Maury
When you look at a designed object, say a house, one thing that jumps out at you is that there are a large number of special-purpose "things". For instance, you have shingles on the roof, but tiles on the floor. You have copper pipes for water supply, but ABS for waste water. Cinder block for foundation, wood for above-ground framing. And drywall? Whoa. Sure, you have nails all over the place, but in a lot of ways a house is made up of a lot of single-purpose things.
Do you know why your inner ear has those three little bones that are so important to hearing? It has them because those were the jaw bones of reptiles, and they just happened to be in basically the right place that they were a few gamma-rays away from being detached. When I see most people building houses with ABS for wiring and shingles for the foundation, I'll take another look at ID.
Maury
If you have a reasonable scanner, would you consider scanning them and uploading to the Wikipedia? It's very difficult to get good scans of these older games in copyright-free forms.
This will have zero effect on the collectibility of the games.
Maury
> You mean by asking hardware manufacturers to pay them
> money to put their logos on their peripheral products
That's not really fair. MS has their own hardware development, and I think it's been one of their greatest successes. They introduced (widely at least) the scroll wheel, which is one of the few real advances in input in years (well, until the iPhone/Surface anyway). Their keyboards are some of the best to type on since the Apple Extended II. And the multi-input joystick remains the best on the market today, almost a decade after they introduced it.
I'm hardly a MS fanboi -I'm typing this on a Mac- but I give them props for their input devices.
Maury
> So, direct quotation is now criminal.
Sigh. To start with, the tribunals are not criminal. In fact, they're not even supposed to be hearing cases like this, they were set up to deal with discrimination for things like renting an apartment.
Look, there IS a point to this case. The point is that Maclean's has been publishing this ongoing series of Styne's rants without any countering view being offered. In one interpretation, that means they are party to publishing hate speech. If this was some random right-wing blog no one would care, but Maclean's is a major Canadian magazine with millions of weekly readers.
I completely disagree with this interpretation. I believe that these cases will simple clarify the real purpose of these tribunals, and lead to their scope being better defined and much more limited. I welcome this. Perhaps you might want a more cut-and-dried case of obvious censorship to test these limits, but that's not how these things work.
The bigger picture is being missed here, IMHO. The question is not what Maclean's is printing, but why. Maclean's is an old-media outlet desperately trying to find a formula that keeps their sales going. In the last century this formula was to be fairly liberal. In this century, as the US discovered much more quickly than Canadian media, the formula is to be a right-wing red-in-the-face shock jock. For whatever reason, THAT is what gets people to read/watch/listen. At least for now.
Maclean's is simply doing what it believes it needs to to survive. If history is any guide, I doubt it will work for long. Another sea-change is coming, but the problem with old-media is that they are slow-moving and often commit suicide while they figure this out.
Maury
p.s. Everyone should go and watch the Steyn episode of The Agenda on TVO. Now THAT is compelling television!
> a merger with Yahoo would have been horrific for both companies
I always thought so too, but let me assure you, the rest of the finance world disagreed. Completely.
There's a certain momentum to mergers that has absolutely nothing to do with the companies involved. It has to do with cash flows and balance sheets. It doesn't make a difference what happens AFTER the deal is closed. That's the distant future, science fiction.
MS had cash, they needed to spend cash, this was a vaguely profitable company to spend it on. Game over.
Maury
> which is why Microsoft stock dropped when the offer was first announced...
The target's stock always goes up and the acquirer's always goes down. That's because the former is being made an offer at a premium over their current price, while the later is typically taking on debt or diluting their stock (the later in this case). It had nothing at all to do with the details of the deal.
> Microsoft, but it really looked to me like they wanted Yahoo
Yeah, but why? Really, why does MS believe it's future lies in advertising? They've never made money this way in the past, and the ads I've seen certainly don't instill confidence.
Maury
> Today is the last for the Stealth Fighter which is being
> replaced by the F-22 Raptor
No it's not. The F-22 is an air-superiority fighter that is replacing the F-15 in that role. The F-117 is being replaced by nothing.
This retirement leaves the USAF with no dedicated long-range tactical interdictors at all. While this gives them an excuse to fly the otherwise ridiculously overpriced B-1 and B-2 on these missions, it also means that in a hot-war they have a very real capability shortfall past the range of the F-16 or F-35.
Maury
Absolutely! Wikiality is exactly like newspapers in many ways
And completely different in others. It's the "others" that you don't bother to discuss that are the important question.
Newspapers have a powerful lobby and an agenda behind every news story. One that subtly uses semiotics and wordplay to manipulate emotion and how facts are perceived.
Wikipedians do exactly the same things.
And it's right here that the problem becomes obvious. Sure, _wikipedians_ might have an agenda, but it is absolutely not the case that the _wikipedia_ has one. It is precisely through the "collection of minds" that any sort of agenda gets scrubbed out. Through sheer mass, the collection tends toward the neutral.
It is this key difference that you fail to address, or even acknowledge. This thread a perfect example of why it's such an important difference: by simply posting this message the thread as a whole is moving towards the mean. The combination of our two viewpoints represents the "truth" much more than either one alone.
And that is the key difference. Traditional media simply has no correction system. You might have letters to the editor or some such, but they pick and choose what to print even in this case. Your opinion simply doesn't count.
So then the question becomes more obvious: can a collection of different opinions result in an accurate article? The vast majority of the slings and arrows that the Wikipedia takes from the outside is based on this complaint; that a collection of random inputs cannot possibly be as good as one focussed effort. Does this sound familiar to anyone? It should, it's precisely the same argument that pundits used to state, with authority, that Linux could never be a good operating system. Or that evolution cannot possibly work. Or that desktop publishing would destroy the world of print. Or many other things over the years.
But it's always wrong. The Wikipedia is a stochastic process, and the public simply does not understand these. Ask anyone where 100 random steps will get you and they'll always say "right back where you started". So obviously a billion years of random mutations couldn't possibly result in eyeballs, any more than a hundred random edits on the wikipedia could result in a good article. Of course the real answer is "square root of 100", or "the eyeball can evolve" or "the wikipedia does improve".
For all the talk of NPOV on every discussion page, it's little more than talk.
And so is this complaint. Just talk.
And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them.
Much noted, but largely unreal. Many people complain about this "problem", but examples are difficult to come by and in my experience are generally ancient history or outright terrible behavior on the part of the person complaining. If this problem did exist in as widespread a form as detractors claim, it would be noted far more widely than the small number of conspiracy sites that it's limited to.
And then theres the Wikipedia admins... the real problem with the site.
This is the third "real problem" in one message...
Some of them have been proven to be frauds, to have criminal convictions -- and yet they manipulate facts, they have their own little agendas, they block entire countries IP addresses, or the addresses of individuals they dislike (or who are protesting the nature of an article). "Vandalism" isn't necessary vandalism -- they've never actually defined that word. It's like "terrorism" is to a newspaper - a license to do what you like in the name of "truthiness". Would Galileo be a vandal, would Rosa Parks? Is Stephen Colbert?
*sigh* I'm an admin and never done any of these things. Oh, you mean "some" as in "one", or some equally vanishing number? Or do you mean "some"