>Treachery is behaving in the same way towards one's allies.
Ruthless would be a good word to use as well - probably better - but treachery does not automatically mean behaving in the same way towards one's allies. As Dictionary.com points out, it can also mean: Marked by unforeseen hazards; dangerous or deceptive: treacherous waters. And that's what I consider IBM's actions - deceptive. They look like an act of generosity toward the OSS community, but that isn't the case.
>Robbing is an act of taking someones possessions away >with the help of weapons.
Wrong. There are multiple definitions of the word, and in this context rob meant (as defined at Dictionary.com) "To deprive of something injuriously: a parasite that robs a tree of its sap."
convincing people to work on an open source projec which benifits you is certainly not treacherous
It's treacherous because it's dangerous and deceptive. The danger is not to the OSS community though, but to IBM's rivals. It's deceptive because at first glance it looks like a gesture of goodwill, like IBM is "giving" something away for free. But this is no act of generosity.
It's more like a state "giving" away some of its weapons to its allies. Seems very magnanimous, but in reality it's saving that state the effort of having to fight its enemies directly. Even better, it's forcing their rivals to deal with a host of smaller combatants instead of giving those rivals the luxury of focusing all of their attentions on that "generous" state.
>Best of luck to IBM in this clearly magnanimous move >but they're simply giving away a potential competitive >edge.
Wrong. Totally wrong. This isn't "magnanimous" - it's treacherous. IBM knows it could never exploit all of those patents as successfully on its own as the vast OSS development community can. They're "giving" these patents away to the OSS community in the hope a million code writing geeks will turn at least some of them into digital gold that corporations and governments around the world will adopt in droves.
That in turn would help IBM in two very important ways:
1) IBM's primary business these days is service - helping large organizations run their computer hardware and complicated software systems. They make billions a year doing this - more than they make selling software they've written themselves. As more and more OSS code is adopted in the field, demand for IBM's services will only increase.
2) Organizations that purchase closed source or commercial OSS products typically end up spending a LOT of money on license fees and vendor support. But if IBM can help make OSS software more attractive - by encouraging the development of packages that depend upon technology developed by IBM - those organizations might adopt a free OSS solution and take the money they would have otherwise spent on license fees and give it over to IBM for help with customizing the software for their needs and for providing support on a longterm basis. This not only makes money for IBM directly, it also robs money (and market share) from competitors like Microsoft, Sun and Oracle.
It's almost a variant on the strategy the clone manufacturers and Microsoft used to dethrone IBM 20 years ago. Promote an open alternative that doesn't have huge firm (then IBM, now Microsoft) standing behind it, but instead a loose affiliation of developers offering a solution with an overall lower TCO.
I've been waiting for these sets to come online for over 5 years now. It looks like they may finally be close to market. If these sets work out as well as we've been made to believe over the years - CRT image quality, LCD power consumption at rear projection prices per square inch - they're going to blow plasma and LCD direct view screens right out of the marketplace.
Here's hoping all of those LCD plants the Koreans have built can be converted to SED or FED factories . ..
I think OLED is dead for anything apart from small portable screens in disposable devices - PDA's, cell phones and such. If SED and FED sets turn out to be as cheap as some are indicating, there's no way OLED will ever compete with them. Not if manufacturers are expecting to get any kind of return on their OLED R&D investment.
I'm not convinced 2" tape has a 100 year shelf life. There is some entropy in those magnetized ferrite particles. They want to realign with the planetary field.
Worse, you can't clone analog signals stored on tape the way you can clone a digital signal. Worried that ProTools and IDE hard drives won't be around in 50 years? Fine. Output the separate channels of your mix to 24/96.wav audio files, and have them pressed onto DVD. Not burned - pressed. I guarantee you software and players will be available in 50 years that will be able to read that data and retrieve your mix, barring some global catastrophe or total economic collapse (in which case nobody will give a flip about Boston's shitty music). Make a hundred clones of that data and scatter them around the world. A clone of your work is guaranteed to survive.
Scholz's 2 inch analog multitrack tape on the other hand can never be cloned exactly - any copy will be just that, a copy that's inferior to the original. Worse, those crummy copies are far more expensive to produce than a digital clone is, and both the analog copy and the analog original are far more expensive to store properly. If they aren't stored properly, they'll degrade and may become unplayable after 40 years, let alone 100.
Beyond that, who knows how many 2" analog decks will still be in working order in 100 years. Not to mention you'll need to configure them just right in order to playback the original tape as accurately as possible. Then you'll need to make sure whatever analog noise reduction scheme you were using is being decoded properly . . . assuming compatible equipment has even survived 100 years in perfect working order. Given how electronic components can decay over time, that's not a safe bet. Will there be anyone around in 100 years who understands Dolby-whatever analog noise reduction circuits well enough to troubleshoot potential problems with a 100-year-old decoder circuit?
Ask the guys at Atlantic Records about the archival storage of analog master tapes. They lost a slew of priceless masters to a giant fire, back in the early '70s if memory serves. Wiped out the original multitracks of legendary works like Dusty in Memphis and some of Aretha Franklin's Atlantic recordings. They're all just ashes now - we only have the final mixdowns (and those may be copies too - I'm not certain).
Going digital allows you to produce and store multiple clones of your work for pennies, avoiding the kind of archival nightmares Atlantic experienced. And it's not just music that's in danger when stored in the analog realm. A similar wipeout occurred due to the 9/11 attack, when thousands of photographic negatives from the Kennedy administration that had been stored at the WTC were destroyed. Over a 100-year span, the odds of a war, natural disaster, or media decay destroying a single analog copy of some piece of information are far greater than the odds of digital data cloned and stored in multiple locales being destroyed or rendered unusable. If people 100 years from now want that digital information badly enough, and if you've produced a reasonable number of clones scattered across the globe, they'll be able to dig up a clone of that data and figure out how to go about decoding it - particularly if you've taken the time to store it in a reasonably popular digital format.
And then they can make clones of it in the popular formats of the day, and scatter those across the globe (or solar system, or galaxy), preserving the information for as long as anybody is interested in accessing it. And probably longer than that.
JADP, but I pitched all of my high school and college papers several years ago. However, a paper I wrote for a high school history class still exists on a 5.25" floppy at a friend's house, in Atariwriter format. If I wanted that data badly enough, it would be trivial to get it off an old Atari and onto a modern PC, and that's after 20 years. And we're talking a fairly obscure brand of
I wonder: can ice chunks stick as easily to a painted fuel tank?
I've been wondering the same thing for several months. The Shuttles were originally designed to be flown with painted tanks. Sometime early in the history of the program, the decision was made to stop painting the tanks in order to reduce their weight a little bit. Paint has to be slicker than that foam, and would in theory cut down on the amount of water that sticks to the side of the tank and forms dangerous ice.
Maybe that decision to stop painting the tanks 20 years ago finally caught up with NASA. Talk about a false economy!
Maybe they should investigate painting the tanks with teflon.
Just try to imagine a Soyuz-based mission to fix the Hubble.
It's being estimated that Shuttle launches are going to cost in excess of $500 million a pop going forward. At that kind of money, it would probably be cheaper to skip servicing missions entirely and simply launch new-and-improved versions of the Hubble once a decade, including some kind of engine to allow for a properly-controlled deorbit or the ability to boost the scope into a stable parking orbit.
That having been said, I'm sure you could service the Hubble from a Soyuz, though it might be a more risky mission. Then again, given the track record of the Shuttles, it probably wouldn't be that much more of a risk - and you'd be risking fewer lives and spending $400 million less.
but have the relevant people taken peak oil into consideration when making such plans?
Of course not. The "relevant people" are the Enron crowd, or crooks just like them. This is yet another scam they're running for short term profit - they'll be happy to pocket the low-interest, taxpayer-backed loans they'll doubtless be receiving, rake in billions off of the construction contracts they'll get to build this boondoggle on all of that government-seized property, and if the whole thing turns out to be as useless as a buggywhip factory in 20 years, oh well! They'll just default on the debt and walk away with billions, leaving the taxpayers with the check. It's the Neil Bush playbook.
How do you think people would feel if there was a nuke parked beside any volcano, fault line, etc? And also one that had to be detonated instantly, without human oversight and control?
Exactly. AMD is doing more USEFUL development on the x86 processors than Intel has done in years. The stuff AMD is adding to that platform is the kind of stuff Intel *used* to provide its hundreds of millions of users until they decided to sink billions into the money pit that was the Itanium.
Even an imperfect shield is likely to be a deterrent to nuclear blackmail from Korea or Iran.
I think an even better "shield" to nuclear blackmail is the fact we could turn North Korea into a glow-in-the-dark parking lot should they attempt to lob a missile in our direction.
If someone really wants to nuke us in a terror operation, they won't use a missile - they'll slip it into the country aboard a container ship, an oil tanker or a jetliner. The origin of a missile could easily be traced. It might be virtually impossible to tell where a nuke delivered by more conventional means came from originally, given the few fragments that might remain after it detonated.
"Star Wars" makes even less sense now than it did 20 years ago. The *only* way you're going to make a missile defense scheme work is with directed energy weapons. And we're probably still decades away from having a system capable of shooting down shielded warheads and all of the dummy warheads a sophisticated power (like China) would deploy to counteract an anti-missile missile.
Theoretically you could build solar panels that are even more efficient - perhaps up to 70%. Which is great, but that doesn't include the costs of transmitting that electricity.
Except if you slap solar arrays on the tops of houses and businesses, you don't need to transmit the power anywhere, especially during periods of peak local demand (which, conveniently enough, are typically hot sunny summer days). Since something like 20% of the electricity we generate at our huge centralized power plants is lost via transmission over long distances, right there the solar cells on your roof get a 20% efficiency boost over some nuclear plant in the next state.
Currently electricity isn't stored, it's made as needed. You can't do that with solar. If you have a day with a high need for electricity but your production stations are getting rained on, you're screwed.
That's when you fallback on alternate sources, like gas, coal, wind and hydro. Since rainy weather typically correlates with extremely low energy use, you should have plenty of generating capacity available elsewhere to satisfy demand.
And of course, it can be (and frequently is) pouring down rain in Portland or San Francisco while the sun shines brightly in Idaho or Los Angeles. Rain would typically only reduce solar generation in a single part of the grid. Rain is also frequently associated with wind, which of course means that wind power generation would rise to compensate for the decline in solar generation.
Best of all, a large deployment of solar power would allow you to decrease the amount of electricity you need to generate during peak use periods from hydroelectric. That means you can keep your dams fuller, and use them to generate electricity to satisfy peak demands whenever solar and wind can't keep up with the load. Dams can ramp up to full capacity within minutes, unlike coal and nuclear plants which are typically designed to run most efficiently at full capacity all the time - i.e. they're either on or off.
Solar has its uses, but not for widescale replacement of existing electrical infrastructure. It's not efficient enough, you can't ramp up production when needed, and it's limited to those places where you have a decent and predictable amount of sunlight.
Who said anything about replacing the infrastructure? That would be outrageously expensive, and it's not necessary. Solar could be used in concert with other sources though, helping to not only lessen our dependence on those sources but also reduce the load on our long distance transmission grids, since here in the US peak energy demand typically occurs during hot, sunny weather. Solar is at its most efficient when electrical energy demands are their greatest, and it can be generated locally where demand is located, unlike hydro, coal or nuclear, giving it the added advantage of reducing the strain on the grid. You don't need a predictable source - you need one that peaks when energy use peaks. In most of the country, solar fits that need perfectly.
Solar isn't "the" solution, but it's certainly a more efficient solution than spending zillions constructing new nuclear plants destined to generate dangerous waste. Unlike solar (and to a lesser extent wind), those plants will do nothing to solve the problems we're experiencing with our transmission grids. Build those nuclear plants and you're also going to have to fork over billions to completely rebuild our transmission network to support them, not to mention the cost of dealing effectively with the waste.
>It's the same idiocy with people saying Bush is >stupid. Clearly, he's smart enough to get through >grad school (even with a C average), be the >governor of a large state, and become the >president of the US.
Yeah. God knows the billions of dollars his family is worth or their connections to leaders of the Republican Party like Charles Schultz had absolutely nothing to do with it . ..
W's sole skill in life involves having plopped out of a well-financed cunt.
Tape backup sucks for all but heavy users - i.e. companies with more than a couple dozen employees or unusually heavy data storage requirements. As you noted, the cost of entry is just way too high now. The $10,000 it would cost to buy a good tape drive would buy you something like 40 250GB hard drives - way more storage than the original post required (500GB). Halve that to 20 250GB drives and you'd still have 10 times the storage requested, 5,000 GB.
If you were really paranoid about backup security, you could then spend the remaining $5,000 setting up some kind of offsite storage array - maybe at a friend's or relative's home halfway across country - and buying yourself a T1 line you could use to shift the data around.
/i Remember the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" missions that NASA tried a few years ago? They became famous for failing spectacularly./.
IIRC the Mars Pathfinder mission was a "Faster, Better, Cheaper" project, and it was a huge success.
I'd rather have a couple of cheap failures than an outrageously expensive "success". We need to learn how to succeed in space on a reasonable budget, and we're never gonna do that without having a few failures along the way.
>the color quality is pretty awful in the restored DVDs. >The saturation is way too high; for example, sometimes >it looks like ObiWan is wearing lipstick, the desert >sand often looks bright orange, and C3P0 looks like >he was painted with a flourescent marker or something.
I noticed that, too. Even the flares of light that come off of CP3O's reflective surface are brightly colored on the DVDs (instead of nearly white, as they should be and were in the original films).
But it's more than just chroma oversaturation, because white objects seem to remain truly, blindingly white. I'm assuming it's some kind of fancy digital processing trick, probably done intentionally, to make the colors look as vibrant as they do in the digitally-filmed Attack Of The Clones (and as bright as they will in the upcoming Revenge Of The Sith). Now that the color has been pumped-up in Episodes 4 -6 I guess all of the films will have a fairly consistent look between them, although Episode IV in particular will be a bit marred by the occasional odd color artifact.
>ONE: We're STILL in Afghanistan. They have a government now.
We're in Kabul, the capital. They have a weak, US-backed central government that has control over Kabul and not much else. The rest of the country remains in various states of chaos, with warlords either openly at war with the central government, or scheming to take control of it.
Oh, and the Taliban are back in parts of the country too. We can't even stamp out the guys who sheltered Osama bin Forgotten. Well, we probably could, if we didn't have so many of our forces deployed in Iraq, where the weak US-backed central government also doesn't have control over much outside of the capital.
>These things don't happen overnight.
These things don't happen ever. You aren't going to impose a Democracy on a tribal culture where most of the population hates your guts and distrusts your dominant religion. You sure aren't going to impose Democracy when you can't even maintain order.
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>Treachery is behaving in the same way towards one's allies.
Ruthless would be a good word to use as well - probably better - but treachery does not automatically mean behaving in the same way towards one's allies. As Dictionary.com points out, it can also mean: Marked by unforeseen hazards; dangerous or deceptive: treacherous waters. And that's what I consider IBM's actions - deceptive. They look like an act of generosity toward the OSS community, but that isn't the case.
>Robbing is an act of taking someones possessions away
>with the help of weapons.
Wrong. There are multiple definitions of the word, and in this context rob meant (as defined at Dictionary.com) "To deprive of something injuriously: a parasite that robs a tree of its sap."
convincing people to work on an open source projec which benifits you is certainly not treacherous
It's treacherous because it's dangerous and deceptive. The danger is not to the OSS community though, but to IBM's rivals. It's deceptive because at first glance it looks like a gesture of goodwill, like IBM is "giving" something away for free. But this is no act of generosity.
It's more like a state "giving" away some of its weapons to its allies. Seems very magnanimous, but in reality it's saving that state the effort of having to fight its enemies directly. Even better, it's forcing their rivals to deal with a host of smaller combatants instead of giving those rivals the luxury of focusing all of their attentions on that "generous" state.
>Best of luck to IBM in this clearly magnanimous move
>but they're simply giving away a potential competitive
>edge.
Wrong. Totally wrong. This isn't "magnanimous" - it's treacherous. IBM knows it could never exploit all of those patents as successfully on its own as the vast OSS development community can. They're "giving" these patents away to the OSS community in the hope a million code writing geeks will turn at least some of them into digital gold that corporations and governments around the world will adopt in droves.
That in turn would help IBM in two very important ways:
1) IBM's primary business these days is service - helping large organizations run their computer hardware and complicated software systems. They make billions a year doing this - more than they make selling software they've written themselves. As more and more OSS code is adopted in the field, demand for IBM's services will only increase.
2) Organizations that purchase closed source or commercial OSS products typically end up spending a LOT of money on license fees and vendor support. But if IBM can help make OSS software more attractive - by encouraging the development of packages that depend upon technology developed by IBM - those organizations might adopt a free OSS solution and take the money they would have otherwise spent on license fees and give it over to IBM for help with customizing the software for their needs and for providing support on a longterm basis. This not only makes money for IBM directly, it also robs money (and market share) from competitors like Microsoft, Sun and Oracle.
It's almost a variant on the strategy the clone manufacturers and Microsoft used to dethrone IBM 20 years ago. Promote an open alternative that doesn't have huge firm (then IBM, now Microsoft) standing behind it, but instead a loose affiliation of developers offering a solution with an overall lower TCO.
Wow! Great link! Someone needs to mod your original post up to +5 - Informative.
He sure has a purddy mouth . . .
Just don't let it happen again.
I've been waiting for these sets to come online for over 5 years now. It looks like they may finally be close to market. If these sets work out as well as we've been made to believe over the years - CRT image quality, LCD power consumption at rear projection prices per square inch - they're going to blow plasma and LCD direct view screens right out of the marketplace.
.
Here's hoping all of those LCD plants the Koreans have built can be converted to SED or FED factories . .
I think OLED is dead for anything apart from small portable screens in disposable devices - PDA's, cell phones and such. If SED and FED sets turn out to be as cheap as some are indicating, there's no way OLED will ever compete with them. Not if manufacturers are expecting to get any kind of return on their OLED R&D investment.
Is this a Monitor that Mork and Mindy would like? Nano Nano
That does it. We need a "Not Funny -1" mod option.
I'm not convinced 2" tape has a 100 year shelf life. There is some entropy in those magnetized ferrite particles. They want to realign with the planetary field.
.wav audio files, and have them pressed onto DVD. Not burned - pressed. I guarantee you software and players will be available in 50 years that will be able to read that data and retrieve your mix, barring some global catastrophe or total economic collapse (in which case nobody will give a flip about Boston's shitty music). Make a hundred clones of that data and scatter them around the world. A clone of your work is guaranteed to survive.
Worse, you can't clone analog signals stored on tape the way you can clone a digital signal. Worried that ProTools and IDE hard drives won't be around in 50 years? Fine. Output the separate channels of your mix to 24/96
Scholz's 2 inch analog multitrack tape on the other hand can never be cloned exactly - any copy will be just that, a copy that's inferior to the original. Worse, those crummy copies are far more expensive to produce than a digital clone is, and both the analog copy and the analog original are far more expensive to store properly. If they aren't stored properly, they'll degrade and may become unplayable after 40 years, let alone 100.
Beyond that, who knows how many 2" analog decks will still be in working order in 100 years. Not to mention you'll need to configure them just right in order to playback the original tape as accurately as possible. Then you'll need to make sure whatever analog noise reduction scheme you were using is being decoded properly . . . assuming compatible equipment has even survived 100 years in perfect working order. Given how electronic components can decay over time, that's not a safe bet. Will there be anyone around in 100 years who understands Dolby-whatever analog noise reduction circuits well enough to troubleshoot potential problems with a 100-year-old decoder circuit?
Ask the guys at Atlantic Records about the archival storage of analog master tapes. They lost a slew of priceless masters to a giant fire, back in the early '70s if memory serves. Wiped out the original multitracks of legendary works like Dusty in Memphis and some of Aretha Franklin's Atlantic recordings. They're all just ashes now - we only have the final mixdowns (and those may be copies too - I'm not certain).
Going digital allows you to produce and store multiple clones of your work for pennies, avoiding the kind of archival nightmares Atlantic experienced. And it's not just music that's in danger when stored in the analog realm. A similar wipeout occurred due to the 9/11 attack, when thousands of photographic negatives from the Kennedy administration that had been stored at the WTC were destroyed. Over a 100-year span, the odds of a war, natural disaster, or media decay destroying a single analog copy of some piece of information are far greater than the odds of digital data cloned and stored in multiple locales being destroyed or rendered unusable. If people 100 years from now want that digital information badly enough, and if you've produced a reasonable number of clones scattered across the globe, they'll be able to dig up a clone of that data and figure out how to go about decoding it - particularly if you've taken the time to store it in a reasonably popular digital format.
And then they can make clones of it in the popular formats of the day, and scatter those across the globe (or solar system, or galaxy), preserving the information for as long as anybody is interested in accessing it. And probably longer than that.
JADP, but I pitched all of my high school and college papers several years ago. However, a paper I wrote for a high school history class still exists on a 5.25" floppy at a friend's house, in Atariwriter format. If I wanted that data badly enough, it would be trivial to get it off an old Atari and onto a modern PC, and that's after 20 years. And we're talking a fairly obscure brand of
I wonder: can ice chunks stick as easily to a painted fuel tank?
I've been wondering the same thing for several months. The Shuttles were originally designed to be flown with painted tanks. Sometime early in the history of the program, the decision was made to stop painting the tanks in order to reduce their weight a little bit. Paint has to be slicker than that foam, and would in theory cut down on the amount of water that sticks to the side of the tank and forms dangerous ice.
Maybe that decision to stop painting the tanks 20 years ago finally caught up with NASA. Talk about a false economy!
Maybe they should investigate painting the tanks with teflon.
Just try to imagine a Soyuz-based mission to fix the Hubble.
It's being estimated that Shuttle launches are going to cost in excess of $500 million a pop going forward. At that kind of money, it would probably be cheaper to skip servicing missions entirely and simply launch new-and-improved versions of the Hubble once a decade, including some kind of engine to allow for a properly-controlled deorbit or the ability to boost the scope into a stable parking orbit.
That having been said, I'm sure you could service the Hubble from a Soyuz, though it might be a more risky mission. Then again, given the track record of the Shuttles, it probably wouldn't be that much more of a risk - and you'd be risking fewer lives and spending $400 million less.
but have the relevant people taken peak oil into consideration when making such plans?
Of course not. The "relevant people" are the Enron crowd, or crooks just like them. This is yet another scam they're running for short term profit - they'll be happy to pocket the low-interest, taxpayer-backed loans they'll doubtless be receiving, rake in billions off of the construction contracts they'll get to build this boondoggle on all of that government-seized property, and if the whole thing turns out to be as useless as a buggywhip factory in 20 years, oh well! They'll just default on the debt and walk away with billions, leaving the taxpayers with the check. It's the Neil Bush playbook.
How do you think people would feel if there was a nuke parked beside any volcano, fault line, etc? And also one that had to be detonated instantly, without human oversight and control?
Clearly, this is a job for Skynet!
Exactly. AMD is doing more USEFUL development on the x86 processors than Intel has done in years. The stuff AMD is adding to that platform is the kind of stuff Intel *used* to provide its hundreds of millions of users until they decided to sink billions into the money pit that was the Itanium.
Even an imperfect shield is likely to be a deterrent to nuclear blackmail from Korea or Iran.
I think an even better "shield" to nuclear blackmail is the fact we could turn North Korea into a glow-in-the-dark parking lot should they attempt to lob a missile in our direction.
If someone really wants to nuke us in a terror operation, they won't use a missile - they'll slip it into the country aboard a container ship, an oil tanker or a jetliner. The origin of a missile could easily be traced. It might be virtually impossible to tell where a nuke delivered by more conventional means came from originally, given the few fragments that might remain after it detonated.
"Star Wars" makes even less sense now than it did 20 years ago. The *only* way you're going to make a missile defense scheme work is with directed energy weapons. And we're probably still decades away from having a system capable of shooting down shielded warheads and all of the dummy warheads a sophisticated power (like China) would deploy to counteract an anti-missile missile.
A lot of what you posted doesn't make any sense.
Theoretically you could build solar panels that are even more efficient - perhaps up to 70%. Which is great, but that doesn't include the costs of transmitting that electricity.
Except if you slap solar arrays on the tops of houses and businesses, you don't need to transmit the power anywhere, especially during periods of peak local demand (which, conveniently enough, are typically hot sunny summer days). Since something like 20% of the electricity we generate at our huge centralized power plants is lost via transmission over long distances, right there the solar cells on your roof get a 20% efficiency boost over some nuclear plant in the next state.
Currently electricity isn't stored, it's made as needed. You can't do that with solar. If you have a day with a high need for electricity but your production stations are getting rained on, you're screwed.
That's when you fallback on alternate sources, like gas, coal, wind and hydro. Since rainy weather typically correlates with extremely low energy use, you should have plenty of generating capacity available elsewhere to satisfy demand.
And of course, it can be (and frequently is) pouring down rain in Portland or San Francisco while the sun shines brightly in Idaho or Los Angeles. Rain would typically only reduce solar generation in a single part of the grid. Rain is also frequently associated with wind, which of course means that wind power generation would rise to compensate for the decline in solar generation.
Best of all, a large deployment of solar power would allow you to decrease the amount of electricity you need to generate during peak use periods from hydroelectric. That means you can keep your dams fuller, and use them to generate electricity to satisfy peak demands whenever solar and wind can't keep up with the load. Dams can ramp up to full capacity within minutes, unlike coal and nuclear plants which are typically designed to run most efficiently at full capacity all the time - i.e. they're either on or off.
Solar has its uses, but not for widescale replacement of existing electrical infrastructure. It's not efficient enough, you can't ramp up production when needed, and it's limited to those places where you have a decent and predictable amount of sunlight.
Who said anything about replacing the infrastructure? That would be outrageously expensive, and it's not necessary. Solar could be used in concert with other sources though, helping to not only lessen our dependence on those sources but also reduce the load on our long distance transmission grids, since here in the US peak energy demand typically occurs during hot, sunny weather. Solar is at its most efficient when electrical energy demands are their greatest, and it can be generated locally where demand is located, unlike hydro, coal or nuclear, giving it the added advantage of reducing the strain on the grid. You don't need a predictable source - you need one that peaks when energy use peaks. In most of the country, solar fits that need perfectly.
Solar isn't "the" solution, but it's certainly a more efficient solution than spending zillions constructing new nuclear plants destined to generate dangerous waste. Unlike solar (and to a lesser extent wind), those plants will do nothing to solve the problems we're experiencing with our transmission grids. Build those nuclear plants and you're also going to have to fork over billions to completely rebuild our transmission network to support them, not to mention the cost of dealing effectively with the waste.
>It's the same idiocy with people saying Bush is
.
>stupid. Clearly, he's smart enough to get through
>grad school (even with a C average), be the
>governor of a large state, and become the
>president of the US.
Yeah. God knows the billions of dollars his family is worth or their connections to leaders of the Republican Party like Charles Schultz had absolutely nothing to do with it . .
W's sole skill in life involves having plopped out of a well-financed cunt.
Tape backup sucks for all but heavy users - i.e. companies with more than a couple dozen employees or unusually heavy data storage requirements. As you noted, the cost of entry is just way too high now. The $10,000 it would cost to buy a good tape drive would buy you something like 40 250GB hard drives - way more storage than the original post required (500GB). Halve that to 20 250GB drives and you'd still have 10 times the storage requested, 5,000 GB.
If you were really paranoid about backup security, you could then spend the remaining $5,000 setting up some kind of offsite storage array - maybe at a friend's or relative's home halfway across country - and buying yourself a T1 line you could use to shift the data around.
Yeah, they must be real limber.
/i Remember the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" missions that NASA tried a few years ago? They became famous for failing spectacularly./.
IIRC the Mars Pathfinder mission was a "Faster, Better, Cheaper" project, and it was a huge success.
I'd rather have a couple of cheap failures than an outrageously expensive "success". We need to learn how to succeed in space on a reasonable budget, and we're never gonna do that without having a few failures along the way.
>the color quality is pretty awful in the restored DVDs.
>The saturation is way too high; for example, sometimes
>it looks like ObiWan is wearing lipstick, the desert
>sand often looks bright orange, and C3P0 looks like
>he was painted with a flourescent marker or something.
I noticed that, too. Even the flares of light that come off of CP3O's reflective surface are brightly colored on the DVDs (instead of nearly white, as they should be and were in the original films).
But it's more than just chroma oversaturation, because white objects seem to remain truly, blindingly white. I'm assuming it's some kind of fancy digital processing trick, probably done intentionally, to make the colors look as vibrant as they do in the digitally-filmed Attack Of The Clones (and as bright as they will in the upcoming Revenge Of The Sith). Now that the color has been pumped-up in Episodes 4 -6 I guess all of the films will have a fairly consistent look between them, although Episode IV in particular will be a bit marred by the occasional odd color artifact.
Ditto. I'm so fed up with Microsoft I'm also considering upgrading to a Mac.
> The U.S. official said the cloud could be the result of
> a forest fire.
>
>Damn, we must look stupid to gov't officials.
Well, they're used to dealing with their supporters . . .
>ONE: We're STILL in Afghanistan. They have a government now.
We're in Kabul, the capital. They have a weak, US-backed central government that has control over Kabul and not much else. The rest of the country remains in various states of chaos, with warlords either openly at war with the central government, or scheming to take control of it.
Oh, and the Taliban are back in parts of the country too. We can't even stamp out the guys who sheltered Osama bin Forgotten. Well, we probably could, if we didn't have so many of our forces deployed in Iraq, where the weak US-backed central government also doesn't have control over much outside of the capital.
>These things don't happen overnight.
These things don't happen ever. You aren't going to impose a Democracy on a tribal culture where most of the population hates your guts and distrusts your dominant religion. You sure aren't going to impose Democracy when you can't even maintain order.