I'm sorry . . . we must have missed YOUR links. You know, the ones YOU didn't post to back up the assertions YOU made in YOUR original post.
It's a little disingenuous to demand links when you yourself didn't bother to provide any in the original post.
It's also more than a little ridiculous to compare Chile to Cuba. Chile is an enormous country compared to Cuba (756,950 sq km vs. 110,860 sq km), and has tremendous mineral wealth (copper, timber, iron ore, nitrates, precious metals, molybdenum, hydropower). Copper is Chile's biggest export, and copper prices have reached levels not seen since the 1960's. Cuba has some mineral wealth, mainly nickel, but its economy is far more dependent on agricultural exports. It's hardly surprising Chile's economy is biggger.
You can check all of this at the CIA Factbook for yourself, or at Wikipedia's article on copper, if you're remotely interested in the facts. Which I suspect you aren't.
Chile also hasn't been the subjected to a ridiculous, politically-motivated economic embargo by the US.
Source, please. According to Consumer Reports, in US Government testing the Prius did better in all regards than most cars in its class, with excellent driver side impact performance. In no way, shape or form is the Civic a "lot" safer than a Prius.
has significantly more performance
Source, please. The Civic automatic sedan does 0-30 in 3.6 seconds and 0-60 in 10.1 seconds. It does 45-65mph in 6.0 seconds. The Prius does 0-30 in 3.7 seconds, and 0-60 in 10.5. The Prius goes 45-65 in 6.4 seconds. Virtually identical performance, and the Prius is a larger car with more interior volume and a much quieter ride than the Civic.
and your Civic isn't a bomb on wheels waiting to go off should the battery compartment be intruded upon by another vehicle
Source, please. I haven't seen any reports regarding a Prius going up in smoke. Frankly, I'd be a lot more worried about the gas tank in either car than the batteries. Gasoline vapors are far more likely to explode than any battery.
The RIAA is doomed. Why are they wasting any money on these idiotic lawsuits? Kids are now trading 60, 120, 160 and even 500GB drives full of mp3 or aac files, or even FLAC or Apple Lossless files. They don't even trade the files online anymore. They just pass whole drives around their circle of friends. They buy CDs used, rip 'em and then sell 'em back.
Within a year or so 500GB drives will be selling for around $100. Even at 256kbps, that'll hold an immense music library. The RIAA's biggest customers - high school and college kids - will have easy access to terabytes of free music.
It's over. Stick a fork in the record companies. They're done.
But hey, if you think grandma's going to switch out a hundred or two hundred pounds of batteries every time she fills up, well then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
So, you're worried about the ability of people to swap out 25 pound batteries, even given some kind of mechanical assist, but you're not worried about people pumping ten gallons a minute of a flammable liquid that produces explosive vapors? Because that's what we've been doing for the past 75 years or so, and nobody seems too freaked out about it, even though it's about a zillion times more dangerous than changing batteries.
What if someone doesn't secure the crane to the battery pack properly and drops a battery pack on their foot?
Don't release the battery from its holster until it's securely engaged in the mechanical assist. Again, not rocket science.
if you think grandma's going to switch out a hundred or two hundred pounds of batteries every time she fills up, well then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Well, grandma currently toodles around town in a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds, thanks to the miracle of the machine. She can hurtle up a shaft in a hundred story building thanks to the miracle of the machine. I think she could probably lift 4 25 pound batteries with the help of a machine, too. After all, she can already pump 10 gallons a minute of a flammable liquid with explosive vapors into her car . . .
Well, you'd need a crane to lift out a couple hundred pounds of batteries, and the batteries would have to be easily accessable for a rapid switch, which would put constraints on the designs of cars. The danger of swinging a couple hunderd pounds of batteries on a crane would lead to huge insurance costs if you let granny and junior and Joe 6 pack do it. So you'd have to bring back gas station attendants to handle the switch, which would also increase cost of a fillup.
Huh? We let Granny and Joe Sixpack play with a hose that spews out an explosive liquid. I can't see how this could possibly be any MORE dangerous than today's gas stations (unless Sony supplies the batteries - that could be an explosive combination!).
According to Wikipedia, the batteries in the Prius weigh 45kg (about 100 pounds). Assuming you could divide those into 4 standard battery packs, each roughly the size of a common fire extinguisher, they'd weigh 25 pounds each.
Granny probably lifts bags of cat litter that weigh as much, without any mechanical aid. Joe Sixpack is carrying twice that weight in excess fat around his waistline.
This means that to replace gas with electricity we need on the order of 5.4 billion kWHr per day. This comes to at least 225,000 MW of new generating capacity or about 450 more of those 500 MW chunks. It would require about a 36% increase in total U.S. generating capacity.
Well, that's one way to meet increased demand. Another way might be to decrease demand by increasing efficiency. Replacing inefficient appliances - such as old refrigerators and hot water heaters - with newer, more efficient models could lead to a substantial decrease in power use per-capita. So could replacing inefficient incandescent lights with compact fluorescent or LED-based lighting. Improving insulation, increasing the efficiency of electronic devices like computers and televisions, installing low-flow showerheads and deploying newer, more efficient air conditioning technologies could also contribute to increased efficiency. California has enacted legislation over the past 30 years or so to encourage all of these things, and the state is now substantially more energy efficient than most other states in the nation. There's no reason why the rest of the country can't follow that lead.
I don't know if it would cover the entire 36% increase in generation capacity a switch to electric vehicles might require, but it could certainly cover much of it.
A lot of it might happen anyhow, as technology advances and as increased demand drives up the price of electricity nationwide.
The problem is that eventually there won't be many consumers left who can afford a ticket, because a few kleptocrats will pocket the lion's share of the cost savings and leave their slave labor with crumbs. Then the whole corrupt enterprise will collapse, just as it has in the past when wealth has become too concentrated to support a robust consumer economy.
Carl Sagan had a great story related to this very subject, in his book The Demon Haunted World. I found a copy of the story at this website. Here's the story Sagan relates:
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the midst of World War II with U.S. flag officers.
So-and-so is a great general, he was told.
"What is the definition of a great general?" Fermi characteristically asked.
I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles.
"How many?"
After some back and forth, they settled on five.
"What fraction of American generals are great?"
After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent.
"But imagine," Fermi rejoined, "that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning a battle is purely a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle is one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32 - which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles - purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles... ?"
The problem with the business world - especially in America these days - is that it's absolutely filled with climbers, idiots with loads of ambition and not a lot else. A few of these baboons get promoted to the executive ranks based largely upon politicking and thanks to random chance - as Fermi correctly observed 60 years ago - and then promptly go about looting the entire organization they run.
HP, having been hijacked by Carly Fiorina and her ilk, is a prime example. They've surrendered HP's position as an industry and technology leader and are now simply cashing in on decades worth of work by engineers and more competent managers. They're eating the seed corn. Look to Detroit if you want to know where this folly will leave America's technology industry.
One of the reasons why HP is cleaning up in the home computer and small business market vs. Dell is because of their physical presence in the local retail channel. Dell is a pure Internet mail order play, with no local retail presence. That was great 5 years ago, when Dell's rivals were bloated, smaller operations who had to maintain a retail marketing and distribution structure that handled dozens of major retailers, in addition to their corporate sales and Internet sales structures. Dell could shave a substantial percentage off the price of each PC as a result, which at the time added up to a couple hundred dollars per-PC, back when the average PC cost around $2000. Dell had no real R&D to speak of either, unlike its competitors - they were free to focus solely on lowering component and assembly costs, using stock standard designs provided by Intel.
Fast forward to 2006 though and the picture isn't so rosy for Dell. The average inflation-adjusted price of a new PC is probably closer to $1000 today. The shipping costs alone can add 5% or more to the cost of a PC, not to mention the added hassle if there's a problem and you need to return it. So Dell's mail order model has become something of a disadvantage. Everybody has implemented the kind of component and assembly optimization Dell pioneered, and they're all just putting together kits of standardized equipment supplied by the same handful of vendors - Intel, nVidia, ATI, etc., so Dell gains no traction there. The standard $1000 PC comes with so many built-in features there's little demand for the kind of customization that once set Dell apart.
On the cost side, Carly butchered HP's workforce, so a lot of the old R&D overhead is gone, and HP has the combined retail channel of both the old HP and Compaq, plus all of their old corporate accounts. There are fewer retail players to deal with as well, lowering HP's costs even more, and HP's size gives them more leverage to push retailers around with. In this new environment, HP is poised to beat Dell at their own game.
The only problem is, this has turned into an extremely low-margin game for all of the players. HP makes a lot of revenue off the PC market, but their margins are all in corporate hardware and services and of course in printer ink that costs more per-ounce than gold. Beyond that, they're now a hollowed-out shell, living off of support for legacy products designed and frequently sold a decade ago. Corporate hardware is slowly marching down the commoditization path as well, though it's probably 5-10 years behind the kind of margin erosion we've seen in the PC space.
IBM saw what was coming and bailed on the PC market a couple of years ago, retreating entirely to the corporate space. HP bet the company on beating Dell, and while it looks like they may in fact pull that feat off, my guess it's going to be a pyrrhic victory. I think the PC market isn't going to be worth diddlysquat in a couple of years. Apple is rapidly carving out a big niche for itself in the only remaining retail segment that's profitable - the high end. That leaves everybody else - Lenovo, HP, Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Gateway - to squabble over the low margin to no margin mid and low end of the market. I think it's only a matter of time before most of them are squeezed out, leaving probably just Lenovo and either Dell or HP standing.
Which of those two ultimately wins out probably depends upon when the Chinese enter the printer market and begin to consume market share from HP. If it happens within the next 3 years, Dell will probably be victorious, as HP will have its legs shot out from beneath it due to the drop in sales of their highest-margin retail product, printer ink. If cheap printer rivals don't enter the market in the next 3 years, HP will probably survive as the other big player in the PC market, leaving Dell to implode as their revenues continue to decline.
In the end, IBM will probably buy out the loser in that battle, take the corporate hardware and service for its
I refuse to reward Apple with yet another sale after dealing with their shoddy engineering twice now. If I do end up replacing the MacBook, it most assuredly will not be with another Apple.
Apple's no worse than the rest, and at least their customer service is usually pretty good. I have a coworker who has been thru 4 laptops over the past six months, from Dell, Toshiba and Sony. All junk.
Dell was the worst of the bunch, though - not only were two machines defective, they were impossible to deal with. They tried to screw him on the purchase price (he only bought the machine because he had a coupon, which they then tried not to honor), then they screwed him on the return when he sent the defective lump back to them. I'm not surprised HP is eating their lunch.
Switch to electric cars in any sort of accelerated timeframe, and watch electricity prices go up just as quick as oil is now.
I wouldn't bet on that. It would take years for any switchover to complete - at least a decade I'd imagine before even half of the cars in common use on the road were electric. That's plenty of time to add additional capacity.
Beyond that, the price of electrical power is driven largely by peak daily demand. Since electric cars would mostly be charging overnight, when demand is typically low and prices per kwh drop anyhow, I doubt electric cars would have a dramatic impact on the cost of electrical power. By the time they represented a significant fraction of overall electrical power use in the United States, there would have been time for plenty of additional capacity to be added to the grid, and for other users of electricity to increase their own energy efficiency.
Exactly. American corporations have no problem with outsourcing jobs to 3rd world sweatshops, taking advantage of people who have few of the freedoms the executives of those companies enjoy. But heaven forbid the American consumer outsources their shopping to countries with copyright laws more favorable to consumers. Oh no, can't have that. They'll squeal like stuck pigs all the way to the G8 (which is exactly what these clowns are - pigs).
It's the same reason why we aren't allowed to import pharmaceuticals from Canada into the US - might erode big pharma's profit margins. Can't have that. Corporations can outsource jobs, but you can't outsource your shopping.
Why? The ISS is going to cost US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before. Since we don't currently have a reliable manned booster to rotate crew on and off the station (having trashed the working, reliable, relatively inexpensive and more powerful Apollo launcher for the unreliable, outrageously expensive Shuttles), or a reliable means of emergency escape, the ISS is limited to 3 crewmembers on a longterm basis. That's barely enough staff to keep the station running, which means there's virtually no science taking place aboard the station.
I say abandon the ISS now, along with the Shuttles, and divert those tens of billions of dollars into designing and building a state-of-the-art launcher utilizing the lessons learned from the successful Apollo program and those parts of the Shuttle program (such as the engines) which have proven worthwhile. Or spend that money on researching and developing tech which could dramatically lower the cost of access to space, such as carbon nanotube structures or new propulsion technologies. Either would be a far better use of taxpayer money than the useless ISS or the expensive, unreliable Shuttle, which I believe are now up to a billion dollars a launch, making them the most expensive launcher ever by a wide margin. We could launch fleets of astronauts into space aboard Russia's safer Soyuz booster for the price of a single Shuttle launch. Like the ISS, the Shuttle is a crippled dog and needs to be put out of its (and our) misery.
Gay Cowboys and Pimps == Movies about topics that most people don't really give a shit about. Don't believe me, look at the ticket sales. BBM may have had great writing, and even been a great movie (i don't know, haven't seen it) but very few people cared about the topic.
Um, Brokeback Mountain has already made about $140 million at the box office, worldwide. That's ten times its $14 million production budget. In the US alone it's about to pass $80 million at the box office and has already become the 9th highest-grossing romance pic of all time. Not bad for an R-Rated romance. Clearly, an awful lot of people cared about the topic.
Since films tend to make at least as much money off of cable, pay per view and DVD as they do in the theaters, you're looking at a probable total haul of $300 million for Brokeback Mountain. Not bad for maybe a $30 million investment, including production, distribution & marketing costs.
Compare and contrast to Spielberg's mainstream political thriller Munich, which cost $75 million to produce, at least another $30 million to promote and distribute, but which has only returned a paltry $50 million of domestic box office. Or worse, Michael Bay's sci-fi thriller The Island, which cost an estimated $122 million just to produce, yet grossed a pathetic $35 million in its domestic run.
I'm sure Hollywood wishes it had sunk less money into supposedly-mainstream duds like Munich and The Island and produced a few more films like Brokeback Mountain this past year that, according to you, "very few people cared about".
Pedophilia is commonly utilized to denote sexual relations between an adult and minors under the age of consent - as the Wikipedia article you linked to points out. Technically it's Ephebophilia, being sexually attracted primarily or exclusively to adolescents. Whatever.
The Catholic Church had more than "some pedos". It had a slew, and it went to great lengths to cover up their abuses, harass or discredit their accusers and in the process enable the predator Priests to assault still more children. For every one abuser, there were dozens of enablers within the Church, including a full compliment of the most loathsome lawyers on the planet.
This kind of spin - nitpicking at definitions of pedophilia, blaming it all on "the gays" or "the liberals" - is commonly utilized by apologists for the morally bankrupt leadership of the Catholic Church, in an attempt to deflect responsibility for the abuse away from the Church hierarchy. The only problem is, the Church in which much of this abuse took place was increasingly conservative over the past 25 years, dominated by a conservative Pope and with conservative Priests and Bishops in favor and in power. Many of the diocese being slammed the hardest by lawsuits following the 2002 media frenzy in Boston involving abuse allegations are conservative, were run by some of the Church's most conservative members, and were located in conservative parts of the country.
The Covington diocese in Kentucky announced in June it'll be shelling out an incredible $120 million to settle the suits against it. More than 100 victims had come forward by the time the diocese settled. Heaven knows how many more were too ashamed to speak up. This is on top of a $100 million settlement in Orange County, and the $90 million settlement in Boston. More are probably in the pipeline. The OC Weekly just ran a story about what happened there from the '60s thru the '90s that read like the Nazi abuse of the Jews during the holocaust - it's still online at http://www.ocweekly.com/the-news/news/king-of-the- county-pedophiles_2005-12-14.html if anyone's still interested in reality.
The Priests and Bishops who conducted and condoned this abuse weren't gay or straight - they were child predators, first and foremost. Policies and procedures could have been put into place decades ago to prevent this kind of widescale, horrific abuse. They weren't. That's the fault of the conservative (and liberal, for that matter) leadership of the Church and not anybody else. A leadership which apparently considered itself above the law and more important that the children of its faithful flock. If the buck passing and ideologically motivated attempts to spin the blame elsewhere don't stop now, it's only gonna lead to some other sex scandal in the not-too-distant future, with more innocent victims.
Pedo's are an eternal favorite and you can't really defend the rights of pedo's unless you wanna be lynched.
Unless you're the Catholic Church, in which case you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars - raised from the families of the victims, no less - to defend (and even enable) your pedos.
I'm starting to wonder in Comcast isn't the one that's doomed, along with all of the other cable operators. Apple's iTunes video thing has been astoundingly successful. They have very little product, but have managed to shift millions of copies of low-resolution video files in spite of that fact. Clearly, there's plenty of demand for video on demand and on the go.
If their library continues to expand, and begins to include more first-run network series in addition to older syndicated material and perhaps films, they could begin to make a serious dent in the number of cable subscribers. iTunes works well over DSL, which most homes can get for $15 or so a month more than they're already paying for phone service. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than basic cable and a DVR in most markets, and iTunes may soon offer access to premium channel content from the likes of HBO for the same $1.99 an episode.
Granted, iTunes content will still cost $2 a pop, but if you aren't a complete couch potato you could download a couple dozen shows a month and still spend less than it costs for cable - let alone cable with premium content - in many markets. And if the networks get smart and offer season packages for $24 or something, they could cut out the cable middleman entirely. Apple gets a very small piece of the iTunes revenue cut compared to the amount of ad time cable operators consume for themselves. And by going around the cable companies, the networks and other content producers would have a much better chance of marketing their shows to customers who might actually be interested in them. Customers will very quickly grow accustomed to watching their shows where and when they want to. Broadcast will die a rapid death.
If Apple is able to sign deals with ESPN and CBS (which now controls the old libraries of ABC, NBC and CBS, thanks to the various acquisitions Viacom made over the years), the cable companies should get very nervous. Some kind of gadget that makes it easy to get iTunes video from a PC or Mac to a TV is also bound hit the market in the next few months, putting additional pressure on broadcast cable and even their PPV model. If the phone companies wake up and realize iTunes offers them a golden opportunity to kick their largest competitors in the nuts, they may also begin offering customers $20 a month in free iTunes downloads.
iRobot is the same company that brought you the popular Roomba robotic vacuum.
Great. This is how it starts, people. First they make household robots. Then they make sniper-spotters for the military. Pretty soon you've got a Cylon rebellion on your hands. Then the Cylons go away for 50 years, return as human cyborgs, and begin having wild sex with your brilliant computer science guys.
Hey, maybe those Roomba guys are just/. readers looking to get laid in their old age. Way to plan ahead, fellas!
it's more feasible and practical than "build all the cable on earth and lift it into space, so we can lift heavy things into space".
What makes you think a carbon nanotube ribbon would weigh too much to be launched into space by conventional booster technology? You could launch a single hairlike ribbon into orbit aboard a conventional booster like the Shuttle or a Russian Proton rocket, a seed cable weighing about 20 short tons. Climbers with ribbon cable could then be sent up the seed, to adhere additional ribbon to that seed cable, building it up into a fully capable space elevator.
Slashdot Mirror
Link? Oops...
I'm sorry . . . we must have missed YOUR links. You know, the ones YOU didn't post to back up the assertions YOU made in YOUR original post.
It's a little disingenuous to demand links when you yourself didn't bother to provide any in the original post.
It's also more than a little ridiculous to compare Chile to Cuba. Chile is an enormous country compared to Cuba (756,950 sq km vs. 110,860 sq km), and has tremendous mineral wealth (copper, timber, iron ore, nitrates, precious metals, molybdenum, hydropower). Copper is Chile's biggest export, and copper prices have reached levels not seen since the 1960's. Cuba has some mineral wealth, mainly nickel, but its economy is far more dependent on agricultural exports. It's hardly surprising Chile's economy is biggger.
You can check all of this at the CIA Factbook for yourself, or at Wikipedia's article on copper, if you're remotely interested in the facts. Which I suspect you aren't.
Chile also hasn't been the subjected to a ridiculous, politically-motivated economic embargo by the US.
Hmm, those are the facts for the 2006 Civic EX sedan, 1.8-liter Four, 5-speed automatic, according to Consumer Reports (http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/models/ho nda/civic/model-overview-4748-5732.htm).
If they're wrong you may want to contact them to let them know.
Your Civic is a LOT safer than the Prius
Source, please. According to Consumer Reports, in US Government testing the Prius did better in all regards than most cars in its class, with excellent driver side impact performance. In no way, shape or form is the Civic a "lot" safer than a Prius.
has significantly more performance
Source, please. The Civic automatic sedan does 0-30 in 3.6 seconds and 0-60 in 10.1 seconds. It does 45-65mph in 6.0 seconds. The Prius does 0-30 in 3.7 seconds, and 0-60 in 10.5. The Prius goes 45-65 in 6.4 seconds. Virtually identical performance, and the Prius is a larger car with more interior volume and a much quieter ride than the Civic.
and your Civic isn't a bomb on wheels waiting to go off should the battery compartment be intruded upon by another vehicle
Source, please. I haven't seen any reports regarding a Prius going up in smoke. Frankly, I'd be a lot more worried about the gas tank in either car than the batteries. Gasoline vapors are far more likely to explode than any battery.
Well here is a newsweek article from 1975 which states that global cooling is(was) coming:http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/cooling1.pdf
Oh well, that's it, then. Because everyone knows Newsweek is the world's definitive science journal . . .
I was thinking external drives, not internal. It takes a little bit of tech savvy to swap internal drives, but anyone can plug in a USB drive.
The RIAA is doomed. Why are they wasting any money on these idiotic lawsuits? Kids are now trading 60, 120, 160 and even 500GB drives full of mp3 or aac files, or even FLAC or Apple Lossless files. They don't even trade the files online anymore. They just pass whole drives around their circle of friends. They buy CDs used, rip 'em and then sell 'em back.
Within a year or so 500GB drives will be selling for around $100. Even at 256kbps, that'll hold an immense music library. The RIAA's biggest customers - high school and college kids - will have easy access to terabytes of free music.
It's over. Stick a fork in the record companies. They're done.
The MPAA is next.
But hey, if you think grandma's going to switch out a hundred or two hundred pounds of batteries every time she fills up, well then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
So, you're worried about the ability of people to swap out 25 pound batteries, even given some kind of mechanical assist, but you're not worried about people pumping ten gallons a minute of a flammable liquid that produces explosive vapors? Because that's what we've been doing for the past 75 years or so, and nobody seems too freaked out about it, even though it's about a zillion times more dangerous than changing batteries.
What if someone doesn't secure the crane to the battery pack properly and drops a battery pack on their foot?
Don't release the battery from its holster until it's securely engaged in the mechanical assist. Again, not rocket science.
if you think grandma's going to switch out a hundred or two hundred pounds of batteries every time she fills up, well then I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Well, grandma currently toodles around town in a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds, thanks to the miracle of the machine. She can hurtle up a shaft in a hundred story building thanks to the miracle of the machine. I think she could probably lift 4 25 pound batteries with the help of a machine, too. After all, she can already pump 10 gallons a minute of a flammable liquid with explosive vapors into her car . . .
Well, you'd need a crane to lift out a couple hundred pounds of batteries, and the batteries would have to be easily accessable for a rapid switch, which would put constraints on the designs of cars. The danger of swinging a couple hunderd pounds of batteries on a crane would lead to huge insurance costs if you let granny and junior and Joe 6 pack do it. So you'd have to bring back gas station attendants to handle the switch, which would also increase cost of a fillup.
Huh? We let Granny and Joe Sixpack play with a hose that spews out an explosive liquid. I can't see how this could possibly be any MORE dangerous than today's gas stations (unless Sony supplies the batteries - that could be an explosive combination!).
According to Wikipedia, the batteries in the Prius weigh 45kg (about 100 pounds). Assuming you could divide those into 4 standard battery packs, each roughly the size of a common fire extinguisher, they'd weigh 25 pounds each.
Granny probably lifts bags of cat litter that weigh as much, without any mechanical aid. Joe Sixpack is carrying twice that weight in excess fat around his waistline.
This means that to replace gas with electricity we need on the order of 5.4 billion kWHr per day. This comes to at least 225,000 MW of new generating capacity or about 450 more of those 500 MW chunks. It would require about a 36% increase in total U.S. generating capacity.
Well, that's one way to meet increased demand. Another way might be to decrease demand by increasing efficiency. Replacing inefficient appliances - such as old refrigerators and hot water heaters - with newer, more efficient models could lead to a substantial decrease in power use per-capita. So could replacing inefficient incandescent lights with compact fluorescent or LED-based lighting. Improving insulation, increasing the efficiency of electronic devices like computers and televisions, installing low-flow showerheads and deploying newer, more efficient air conditioning technologies could also contribute to increased efficiency. California has enacted legislation over the past 30 years or so to encourage all of these things, and the state is now substantially more energy efficient than most other states in the nation. There's no reason why the rest of the country can't follow that lead.
I don't know if it would cover the entire 36% increase in generation capacity a switch to electric vehicles might require, but it could certainly cover much of it.
A lot of it might happen anyhow, as technology advances and as increased demand drives up the price of electricity nationwide.
The problem is that eventually there won't be many consumers left who can afford a ticket, because a few kleptocrats will pocket the lion's share of the cost savings and leave their slave labor with crumbs. Then the whole corrupt enterprise will collapse, just as it has in the past when wealth has become too concentrated to support a robust consumer economy.
Carl Sagan had a great story related to this very subject, in his book The Demon Haunted World. I found a copy of the story at this website. Here's the story Sagan relates:
Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, newly arrived on American shores, enlisted in the Manhattan nuclear weapons Project, and brought face-to-face in the midst of World War II with U.S. flag officers.
So-and-so is a great general, he was told.
"What is the definition of a great general?" Fermi characteristically asked.
I guess it's a general who's won many consecutive battles.
"How many?"
After some back and forth, they settled on five.
"What fraction of American generals are great?"
After some more back and forth, they settled on a few percent.
"But imagine," Fermi rejoined, "that there is no such thing as a great general, that all armies are equally matched, and that winning a battle is purely a matter of chance. Then the chance of winning one battle is one out of two, or 1/2; two battles 1/4, three 1/8, four 1/16, and five consecutive battles 1/32 - which is about 3 percent. You would expect a few percent of American generals to win five consecutive battles - purely by chance. Now, has any of them won ten consecutive battles... ?"
The problem with the business world - especially in America these days - is that it's absolutely filled with climbers, idiots with loads of ambition and not a lot else. A few of these baboons get promoted to the executive ranks based largely upon politicking and thanks to random chance - as Fermi correctly observed 60 years ago - and then promptly go about looting the entire organization they run.
HP, having been hijacked by Carly Fiorina and her ilk, is a prime example. They've surrendered HP's position as an industry and technology leader and are now simply cashing in on decades worth of work by engineers and more competent managers. They're eating the seed corn. Look to Detroit if you want to know where this folly will leave America's technology industry.
One of the reasons why HP is cleaning up in the home computer and small business market vs. Dell is because of their physical presence in the local retail channel. Dell is a pure Internet mail order play, with no local retail presence. That was great 5 years ago, when Dell's rivals were bloated, smaller operations who had to maintain a retail marketing and distribution structure that handled dozens of major retailers, in addition to their corporate sales and Internet sales structures. Dell could shave a substantial percentage off the price of each PC as a result, which at the time added up to a couple hundred dollars per-PC, back when the average PC cost around $2000. Dell had no real R&D to speak of either, unlike its competitors - they were free to focus solely on lowering component and assembly costs, using stock standard designs provided by Intel.
Fast forward to 2006 though and the picture isn't so rosy for Dell. The average inflation-adjusted price of a new PC is probably closer to $1000 today. The shipping costs alone can add 5% or more to the cost of a PC, not to mention the added hassle if there's a problem and you need to return it. So Dell's mail order model has become something of a disadvantage. Everybody has implemented the kind of component and assembly optimization Dell pioneered, and they're all just putting together kits of standardized equipment supplied by the same handful of vendors - Intel, nVidia, ATI, etc., so Dell gains no traction there. The standard $1000 PC comes with so many built-in features there's little demand for the kind of customization that once set Dell apart.
On the cost side, Carly butchered HP's workforce, so a lot of the old R&D overhead is gone, and HP has the combined retail channel of both the old HP and Compaq, plus all of their old corporate accounts. There are fewer retail players to deal with as well, lowering HP's costs even more, and HP's size gives them more leverage to push retailers around with. In this new environment, HP is poised to beat Dell at their own game.
The only problem is, this has turned into an extremely low-margin game for all of the players. HP makes a lot of revenue off the PC market, but their margins are all in corporate hardware and services and of course in printer ink that costs more per-ounce than gold. Beyond that, they're now a hollowed-out shell, living off of support for legacy products designed and frequently sold a decade ago. Corporate hardware is slowly marching down the commoditization path as well, though it's probably 5-10 years behind the kind of margin erosion we've seen in the PC space.
IBM saw what was coming and bailed on the PC market a couple of years ago, retreating entirely to the corporate space. HP bet the company on beating Dell, and while it looks like they may in fact pull that feat off, my guess it's going to be a pyrrhic victory. I think the PC market isn't going to be worth diddlysquat in a couple of years. Apple is rapidly carving out a big niche for itself in the only remaining retail segment that's profitable - the high end. That leaves everybody else - Lenovo, HP, Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Gateway - to squabble over the low margin to no margin mid and low end of the market. I think it's only a matter of time before most of them are squeezed out, leaving probably just Lenovo and either Dell or HP standing.
Which of those two ultimately wins out probably depends upon when the Chinese enter the printer market and begin to consume market share from HP. If it happens within the next 3 years, Dell will probably be victorious, as HP will have its legs shot out from beneath it due to the drop in sales of their highest-margin retail product, printer ink. If cheap printer rivals don't enter the market in the next 3 years, HP will probably survive as the other big player in the PC market, leaving Dell to implode as their revenues continue to decline.
In the end, IBM will probably buy out the loser in that battle, take the corporate hardware and service for its
I refuse to reward Apple with yet another sale after dealing with their shoddy engineering twice now. If I do end up replacing the MacBook, it most assuredly will not be with another Apple.
Apple's no worse than the rest, and at least their customer service is usually pretty good. I have a coworker who has been thru 4 laptops over the past six months, from Dell, Toshiba and Sony. All junk.
Dell was the worst of the bunch, though - not only were two machines defective, they were impossible to deal with. They tried to screw him on the purchase price (he only bought the machine because he had a coupon, which they then tried not to honor), then they screwed him on the return when he sent the defective lump back to them. I'm not surprised HP is eating their lunch.
Switch to electric cars in any sort of accelerated timeframe, and watch electricity prices go up just as quick as oil is now.
I wouldn't bet on that. It would take years for any switchover to complete - at least a decade I'd imagine before even half of the cars in common use on the road were electric. That's plenty of time to add additional capacity.
Beyond that, the price of electrical power is driven largely by peak daily demand. Since electric cars would mostly be charging overnight, when demand is typically low and prices per kwh drop anyhow, I doubt electric cars would have a dramatic impact on the cost of electrical power. By the time they represented a significant fraction of overall electrical power use in the United States, there would have been time for plenty of additional capacity to be added to the grid, and for other users of electricity to increase their own energy efficiency.
Exactly. American corporations have no problem with outsourcing jobs to 3rd world sweatshops, taking advantage of people who have few of the freedoms the executives of those companies enjoy. But heaven forbid the American consumer outsources their shopping to countries with copyright laws more favorable to consumers. Oh no, can't have that. They'll squeal like stuck pigs all the way to the G8 (which is exactly what these clowns are - pigs).
It's the same reason why we aren't allowed to import pharmaceuticals from Canada into the US - might erode big pharma's profit margins. Can't have that. Corporations can outsource jobs, but you can't outsource your shopping.
It's a crock.
Spending money on the ISS is a good thing.
Why? The ISS is going to cost US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before. Since we don't currently have a reliable manned booster to rotate crew on and off the station (having trashed the working, reliable, relatively inexpensive and more powerful Apollo launcher for the unreliable, outrageously expensive Shuttles), or a reliable means of emergency escape, the ISS is limited to 3 crewmembers on a longterm basis. That's barely enough staff to keep the station running, which means there's virtually no science taking place aboard the station.
I say abandon the ISS now, along with the Shuttles, and divert those tens of billions of dollars into designing and building a state-of-the-art launcher utilizing the lessons learned from the successful Apollo program and those parts of the Shuttle program (such as the engines) which have proven worthwhile. Or spend that money on researching and developing tech which could dramatically lower the cost of access to space, such as carbon nanotube structures or new propulsion technologies. Either would be a far better use of taxpayer money than the useless ISS or the expensive, unreliable Shuttle, which I believe are now up to a billion dollars a launch, making them the most expensive launcher ever by a wide margin. We could launch fleets of astronauts into space aboard Russia's safer Soyuz booster for the price of a single Shuttle launch. Like the ISS, the Shuttle is a crippled dog and needs to be put out of its (and our) misery.
Gay Cowboys and Pimps == Movies about topics that most people don't really give a shit about. Don't believe me, look at the ticket sales. BBM may have had great writing, and even been a great movie (i don't know, haven't seen it) but very few people cared about the topic.
Um, Brokeback Mountain has already made about $140 million at the box office, worldwide. That's ten times its $14 million production budget. In the US alone it's about to pass $80 million at the box office and has already become the 9th highest-grossing romance pic of all time. Not bad for an R-Rated romance. Clearly, an awful lot of people cared about the topic.
Since films tend to make at least as much money off of cable, pay per view and DVD as they do in the theaters, you're looking at a probable total haul of $300 million for Brokeback Mountain. Not bad for maybe a $30 million investment, including production, distribution & marketing costs.
Compare and contrast to Spielberg's mainstream political thriller Munich, which cost $75 million to produce, at least another $30 million to promote and distribute, but which has only returned a paltry $50 million of domestic box office. Or worse, Michael Bay's sci-fi thriller The Island, which cost an estimated $122 million just to produce, yet grossed a pathetic $35 million in its domestic run.
I'm sure Hollywood wishes it had sunk less money into supposedly-mainstream duds like Munich and The Island and produced a few more films like Brokeback Mountain this past year that, according to you, "very few people cared about".
Pedophilia is commonly utilized to denote sexual relations between an adult and minors under the age of consent - as the Wikipedia article you linked to points out. Technically it's Ephebophilia, being sexually attracted primarily or exclusively to adolescents. Whatever.
- county-pedophiles_2005-12-14.html if anyone's still interested in reality.
The Catholic Church had more than "some pedos". It had a slew, and it went to great lengths to cover up their abuses, harass or discredit their accusers and in the process enable the predator Priests to assault still more children. For every one abuser, there were dozens of enablers within the Church, including a full compliment of the most loathsome lawyers on the planet.
This kind of spin - nitpicking at definitions of pedophilia, blaming it all on "the gays" or "the liberals" - is commonly utilized by apologists for the morally bankrupt leadership of the Catholic Church, in an attempt to deflect responsibility for the abuse away from the Church hierarchy. The only problem is, the Church in which much of this abuse took place was increasingly conservative over the past 25 years, dominated by a conservative Pope and with conservative Priests and Bishops in favor and in power. Many of the diocese being slammed the hardest by lawsuits following the 2002 media frenzy in Boston involving abuse allegations are conservative, were run by some of the Church's most conservative members, and were located in conservative parts of the country.
The Covington diocese in Kentucky announced in June it'll be shelling out an incredible $120 million to settle the suits against it. More than 100 victims had come forward by the time the diocese settled. Heaven knows how many more were too ashamed to speak up. This is on top of a $100 million settlement in Orange County, and the $90 million settlement in Boston. More are probably in the pipeline. The OC Weekly just ran a story about what happened there from the '60s thru the '90s that read like the Nazi abuse of the Jews during the holocaust - it's still online at http://www.ocweekly.com/the-news/news/king-of-the
The Priests and Bishops who conducted and condoned this abuse weren't gay or straight - they were child predators, first and foremost. Policies and procedures could have been put into place decades ago to prevent this kind of widescale, horrific abuse. They weren't. That's the fault of the conservative (and liberal, for that matter) leadership of the Church and not anybody else. A leadership which apparently considered itself above the law and more important that the children of its faithful flock. If the buck passing and ideologically motivated attempts to spin the blame elsewhere don't stop now, it's only gonna lead to some other sex scandal in the not-too-distant future, with more innocent victims.
Pedo's are an eternal favorite and you can't really defend the rights of pedo's unless you wanna be lynched.
Unless you're the Catholic Church, in which case you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars - raised from the families of the victims, no less - to defend (and even enable) your pedos.
What's the first thing a sorority girl does in the morning?
Walk home.
Taylor is one of Mitchell's ex lovers.
I'm starting to wonder in Comcast isn't the one that's doomed, along with all of the other cable operators. Apple's iTunes video thing has been astoundingly successful. They have very little product, but have managed to shift millions of copies of low-resolution video files in spite of that fact. Clearly, there's plenty of demand for video on demand and on the go.
If their library continues to expand, and begins to include more first-run network series in addition to older syndicated material and perhaps films, they could begin to make a serious dent in the number of cable subscribers. iTunes works well over DSL, which most homes can get for $15 or so a month more than they're already paying for phone service. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than basic cable and a DVR in most markets, and iTunes may soon offer access to premium channel content from the likes of HBO for the same $1.99 an episode.
Granted, iTunes content will still cost $2 a pop, but if you aren't a complete couch potato you could download a couple dozen shows a month and still spend less than it costs for cable - let alone cable with premium content - in many markets. And if the networks get smart and offer season packages for $24 or something, they could cut out the cable middleman entirely. Apple gets a very small piece of the iTunes revenue cut compared to the amount of ad time cable operators consume for themselves. And by going around the cable companies, the networks and other content producers would have a much better chance of marketing their shows to customers who might actually be interested in them. Customers will very quickly grow accustomed to watching their shows where and when they want to. Broadcast will die a rapid death.
If Apple is able to sign deals with ESPN and CBS (which now controls the old libraries of ABC, NBC and CBS, thanks to the various acquisitions Viacom made over the years), the cable companies should get very nervous. Some kind of gadget that makes it easy to get iTunes video from a PC or Mac to a TV is also bound hit the market in the next few months, putting additional pressure on broadcast cable and even their PPV model. If the phone companies wake up and realize iTunes offers them a golden opportunity to kick their largest competitors in the nuts, they may also begin offering customers $20 a month in free iTunes downloads.
Comcast may outlast Blockbuster, but by how long?
I believe that is a James Taylor song.
Close. Try Joni Mitchell. CSNY recorded it first, before Mitchell recorded it for her album Ladies of the Canyon.
iRobot is the same company that brought you the popular Roomba robotic vacuum.
Great. This is how it starts, people. First they make household robots. Then they make sniper-spotters for the military. Pretty soon you've got a Cylon rebellion on your hands. Then the Cylons go away for 50 years, return as human cyborgs, and begin having wild sex with your brilliant computer science guys.
Hey, maybe those Roomba guys are just
it's more feasible and practical than "build all the cable on earth and lift it into space, so we can lift heavy things into space".
What makes you think a carbon nanotube ribbon would weigh too much to be launched into space by conventional booster technology? You could launch a single hairlike ribbon into orbit aboard a conventional booster like the Shuttle or a Russian Proton rocket, a seed cable weighing about 20 short tons. Climbers with ribbon cable could then be sent up the seed, to adhere additional ribbon to that seed cable, building it up into a fully capable space elevator.