Does Blu-Ray really meet the definition of a "Sony proprietary format"? Unlike their Memory Stick or MiniDisc, Blu-Ray was developed in conjunction with others, including Philips, who Sony developed the CD with, Pioneer, who were involved with developing the core laser technology utilized by Blu-Ray, and Samsung, among others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_Association
Blu-Ray is more like DVD than like Betamax or MiniDisc. I think it's thought of as a "Sony" format in part because Sony was the first to push it and push it really hard with the PS3.
There are two enormous problems with the ribbon - especially in Excel.
For starters, dingbats whose memory is positional/visual (in other words, folks who have no idea what the word logic means and just wander around till they see a picture they vaguely remember) generally aren't going to be heavy users of programs like Excel, because they're too loopy to be building many spreadsheets. So you've just optimized your menu structure for people who can't use your tool effectively anyhow, because they're incoherent by nature. It makes about as much sense as equipping cars with a steering wheel that makes a clicking noise when its turned so that blind people can get feedback when they drive.
At the same time, Microsoft made Office ridiculously difficult for their core users - people with half a brain, who work with the tool all day long - to utilize. Especially the lack of ribbon customization in Office 2007, which was just insane given that virtually every heavy Office user customized their menus. Extensively.
Only the corporate tools in Redmond could implement such a perfectly misguided strategy, and only their (current) near-monopoly in the Office-apps market has allowed them to get away with it. They'd better pray Apple doesn't decide to enter that space with some cloud-based offering, because I'm guessing the UI guys in Cupertino could cook up something that works pretty well for both groups of users, without charging an arm and a leg for it.
Exactly. Nuclear plants have the unique ability to make a bad natural disaster even worse by creating a man-made catastrophe which impacts a large area and mandates additional evacuations and displacement.
And Japan is lucky, in that it has an incredibly developed (some might say overdeveloped) infrastructure, one which generally held up pretty well to the massive quake and subsequent tsunami.
Add nuclear power plants to the list. All government insured. Sure, the plants pay a nominal tax, but the fund that's current accumulated could be overwhelmed in a day by a nuclear incident near any large city.
We dumb asses on the coasts are already subsidizing your fucking corporate farmers (most of whom now work for massive agribusiness concerns) with tens of billions of dollars a year in subsidies, because they seem to be incapable of competing in the free market we're all supposed to worship. That's on top of all the dams and levees we paid for to keep their farmland from flooding every couple of years.
We'd pay a lot less for food if your farmers would switch to growing healthy crops people (and livestock) should actually eat, instead of growing corn, corn and more corn, which the government then has steal money from the rest of us in order to buy and stockpile.
Callisto has less tidal heating because it's much further out - about 2 million km if memory serves. I think Io is closer to 400,000km from Jupiter. Europa orbits not too much further out, at under 700,000km, then Ganymede at 1 million km. So Io is getting pushed and pulled on by tugs from Europa and Ganymede, not to mention Jupiter itself. Callisto in comparison experiences very weak tugs from Ganymede, and not much at all from Europa or Io. And Callisto experiences those tugs less often, since its orbital period is much longer. I think Calisto takes 17 days to complete an orbit, while Io zips around in well under 2.
I've read about studies which indicate such moons always become tidally locked - planets too, in close orbits about their star, according to simulations.
Based on what we currently know, I think it's safe to assume any terrestrial-mass exomoons orbiting exo gas giants or ice giants will be tidally locked to their primary. They'll likely also occupy resonance orbits with the other moons in their system, as we see with the Jovian moons (and possibly Saturn's moons, though I don't know as much about that system).
The length of any eclipses experienced by these moons would vary greatly depending on how close they orbit to the primary. For moons orbiting far out, I can't imagine the eclipses would have any significant impact on climate. Moons orbiting close in around enormous gas giants would experience longer eclipses, but they'd also have the big primary up in their sky functioning as an enormous heat lamp (it would also bathe the night side in a lot of reflected light). On the whole, worlds closer in would probably be warmer than worlds orbiting further out, in spite of the eclipses. Eclipses would last at most a couple of hours I should think - night could last for days.
I wonder if there are any particularly massive gas giants floating around out there with whole mini-solar systems orbiting them, including smaller gas giants, ice giants and terrestrial planets?
Any moon that's approximately the mass of a terrestrial planet and which orbits a gas giant will eventually become tidally locked. In fact, it'll become tidally locked fairly quickly - within a few million years after formation or capture, based on the studies I've seen cited. That means its "day" will be the amount of time it takes to complete an orbit around the primary.
What about the Day-Night cycle? Isn't going to be much more complex for a body that's orbiting a body that's orbiting a sun?
The day/night cycle would be the duration of the moon's orbit. Half would be day, half would be night, on any given point. It's not more complex, but it's likely to be longer. Life on earth doesn't seem to have an enormous problem with long days and nights - the arctic is quite biologically rich, in spite of the harsh climate (by human standards).
A large moon (Mars sized or larger) would almost certainly be geologically active if it orbited a large gas giant. Indeed, even smaller worlds without a lot of internal decay heat of their own would retain a molten interior far longer than a lone planet the same size would, because of the tidal forces exerted by the large parent planet (and any additional satellites it might have). These geologically active large moons are likely to have their own magnetic fields, the same way earth does, and those would provide their surfaces with protection from the parent world's magnetic field and radiation belts.
A dense atmosphere also provides substantial protection from radiation, so exomoons with dense atmospheres might not be terribly bothered by the primary's radiation belts. Dense atmospheres might be a problem for moons close in to the parent star, but it would be a plus for worlds orbiting at some distance, allowing them to maintain liquid water and comfortable surface temperatures for life as we know it. It would also help them to moderate their climate, perhaps compensating for the long "day" on moons that orbit a great distance from their primary. Really dense atmospheres even refract light, giving you up to a couple of hours of extra daylight, again potentially serving to moderate the climate on some moons.
A really big gas giant (say, 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter) has an enormous gravity well, but we don't know if its magnetic field and radiation belts scale in the same proportion. It's possible you could have moons that orbit well outside of the radiation belts around such a large giant, but which still complete their orbits in a reasonable period of time (days, not months).
One other point - a large gas giant that's fairly close to its moon would put out a lot of heat, like a giant heatlamp in the sky. That would likely expand the habitable zone, the zone in which water could be expected to remain liquid.
Large gas giants could potentially host multiple habitable moons. And smaller ice giants - worlds the mass of Neptune, for example - could also host Mars or even earth-size moons. Neptune-mass worlds appear to be fairly common based on our current observations. If just a small percentage of them host moons that are the mass of terrestrial planets, that could add up to hundreds of millions of potentially-habitable exomoons circling around that class of planet alone.
Oh, and for small red dwarf stars, terrestrial planets in orbits close enough to support liquid water would soon find themselves tidally locked - one hemisphere would always face the parent star. Not pretty. That isn't an issue for exomoons. The primary might end up tidally locked, but the moons orbit the primary and would always have stable day/night cycles. They'd also potentially have the primary functioning as a big heat lamp at night, keeping the dark hemisphere from getting *too* cold during the long night. And the radiation belt around a gas giant orbiting such a small star is likely to be far less intense than the ones sported by the gas giants in this system. The red dwarf also throws off a lot less damaging UV radiation. We may find that the only habitable worlds around small red dwarf stars are exomoons - and there are a LOT of red dwarf stars. They vastly outnumber stars like our sun, by something like 10:1 I believe.
For years the assumption has been if there are large planets buzzing around the inner portion of a given solar system that such a system cannot be host to a habitable, terrestrial world. Clearly, that assumption is no longer valid. There are all kinds of plausible scenarios where moons could be perfectly habitable. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the number of habitable exomoons exceeds - indeed, greatly exceeds - the number of habitable exoplanets.
their vote is causing much worse environmental impact and global warming by the necessary increase in conventional non-nuclear energy production.
Their vote will have absolutely no impact on global warming. Coal and gas aren't going away as energy sources. Assuming the wealthier western nations replaced all of their fossil-fuel plants with thousands of new nuclear plants, the price of coal and gas would decline and developing nations would simply build a slew of new fossil-fuel burning plants. Until a power source comes along that's substantially cheaper than coal and gas and doesn't require enormous startup capital investments (nuclear fails on both accounts), coal and gas aren't going anywhere.
The best bets for replacing fossil fuels are renewable sources like solar thermal, PV and wind power. They don't require billions of dollars and years of construction to deploy - they don't even require a nationwide grid, which is of vital importance across much of the developing world. Cellular power. Western nations should be dumping a ton of R&D money into these technologies, because if they take off the returns will be enormous. Nuclear power belongs to the era of the Edsel, and has proven about as successful.
well I can think of a few reasons. solar PV does not work at night, wind power is variable, geothermal and tidal sites are few.
Power demand crashes at night (and is likely to go even lower in the future as incandescent lighting is replaced by fluorescents and LEDs), so unless you're idiot enough to try to run your entire grid off PV that's a non-issue. (Solar thermal systems can store heat underground in the form of molten salt, so they can actually function well overnight.)
PV power however is perfect in warm sunny climates, since it tends to generate the most energy when demand is at its peak - long, hot, sunny days. That's a feature, not a bug.
Wind power is variable, but tends to pick up when power demand spikes in cooler climates (during cool windy weather). An efficient grid allows you to move any excess to where it's needed. Energy can also be stored, as pumped water for example, or even in enormous batteries. Costly, but likely cheaper than private insurance for nuclear reactors (particularly in the wake of Fukushima).
geothermal and tidal sites are few
Yes, but something like half the planet's population lives within 50 miles of the shore, which makes tidal and wave power excellent choices. Geothermal is perfect for countries like Italy, Japan and parts of the United States. Iceland's experiment with high-pressure geothermal utilizing supercritical water appears to be going really well. It promises to be up to 5 times more efficient than existing geothermal systems, which will both expand the locations where geothermal is practical and dramatically lower the cost per kwh. There's the potential for geothermal to become cost-competitive with coal, allowing it to easily displace nuclear power.
Most importantly there is not renewable technology that will create the base load.
There isn't a single technology. Which is why you deploy multiple technologies. This is not rocket science. While I suppose it's possible for the wind, tides, sun, geothermal heat of the earth and gravity to all fail simultaneously, I suspect in such an event we'd have bigger problems to contend with than the power grid...
Why chose something that looks like a piece of shit when something beautiful costs $50 more? That's barely the cost of a meal out in San Francisco or Manhattan for a device you're going to be stuck using every day.
You can also bet if the manufacturer was too idiotic to make their gadget even look halfway decent, they forgot a bunch of other stuff as well. I mean, if you can't even design a case that's not an eyesore, what about the really difficult engineering and design?
Devices already need (and have) interfaces which allow them to charge and communicate with other devices. Docking isn't going anywhere. It's a really convenient way for new devices - like tablets and smartphones - to connect to and utilize legacy peripherals, everything from monitors to printers to hard drives.
Longterm that may all go wireless, but at the moment things like wireless HDMI are expensive and an enormous power suck. That isn't likely to change in the next decade. Your portable gadget needs to be charged. Might as well get some use out of it while it's charging.
But there's very little reason to have a desktop setup that's completely useless unless you sacrifice your tablet.
There's very little reason to have both devices if one can effectively function as both. You physically can't use a desktop and tablet at the same time. If the tablet - with the help of a keyboard, mouse and monitor - can function as a desktop, why own a desktop? We've seen the same thing happen with laptops largely supplanting desktop PCs over the past decade. Now you can expect to see the tablet and smartphone largely supplant both form factors.
There will always be a teeny tiny market for desktops and traditional laptops, in the same way there's still a small market for workstations. But desktops - and eventually laptops I suspect - are going to become niche products.
Desktop hardware will go the way of the dinosaur. Tablets and smartphones will soon be more than capable of driving multiple monitors when docked (possibly even wirelessly). Their operating systems and UI's will evolve to work with keyboards and mice when available.
For the handful of people who require workstation-class performance - maybe 0.5% of the overall market - those systems may remain, or much of that work may migrate to the cloud, with tablets and other devices simply functioning as clients.
How long before Apple gets back into the printer business? The margins there are still insane, and the products are universally shit. Every HP printer I've ever owned, used or helped a friend try to work has been a festering pile of crap. Don't even get me started on ink that "expires" a week after you've put it in the printer.
If you invest in iApps, you're committed to Apple hardware which comes with a heavy premium.
Huh? Apple's phones at worst are marginally more expensive than Android phones from the same carriers (especially discounting the two-for-one giveaway deals that are now cropping up on Android phones because otherwise the carriers couldn't move the things). We're talking $200-$300 over 2-3 years. For most people who can afford a smartphone at all, that doesn't even approach a "heavy" premium.
And in exchange for the extra couple hundred dollars, you get world-class support - everything from prompt OS updates to a wide range of peripherals to the best in-store experience in the industry. I had an out-of-warranty iPhone die on me, and Apple swapped it out free of charge. That kind of service alone is worth way more than any "premium" they charge.
You also get a phone with a much better user interface, and deeper app support.
The only reason why Android is doing as well as it is: the carriers need something to keep Apple from becoming a monopoly and bossing them around. That's it. Android is still a junky knockoff, but it's a better knockoff than any of the idiots at RIM or Microsoft could come up with. It's serviceable. So, the carriers push it to keep from becoming beholden to Apple.
It'll be interesting to see what'll happen over the next decade as wifi networks become ubiquitous and the carrier's networks won't matter as much for many folks (especially city dwellers). I'm sure the cable companies would love a slice of the mobile telecom pie too, which could accelerate the migration. I think the carriers are going to lose the ability to dictate which devices people use for telecommunications, and at what price. Apple is uniquely positioned to benefit from such a trend. The other makers all seem to depend upon the carriers to plug their junk. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the gatekeepers are no longer directing traffic their way.
Yeah, this story is complete bullshit. Apple is not going to lock down Mac OS X Lion.
I disagree. I think Apple probably will ship a locked-down version of OS X sometime in the next couple of years, and it'll be the default version of the OS. Yeah, you'll still be able to unlock it, but it may not be particularly easy - indeed, the ability to unlock may only be available in a separate "professional" version of the OS.
And I think given the stupidity of the average user (Mac, PC, Android, whatever), this is probably not a bad thing.
I have the distinct impression that many of the atheists who attempt to aggressively debunk religion actually have little understanding of what exactly they are debunking, never having done actual research into what the majority of moderately religious people actually believe and how it affects how they behave.
Oh, please, get off the cross. We need the wood.
There isn't an atheist in America who hasn't been soaked in Christian idiocy their entire lives - moderate, fundamentalist, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, the whole whacked out ball 'o wax. We know exactly what you tools believe in. You NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT. You even have 24/7 television networks spewing the stupidity 365 days a year.
Well, I shouldn't say you NEVER shut up about it, because whenever the fundies attempt to do something pig ignorant, like this latest example of stupidity in Texas, the "moderate" Christians who supposedly represent a "majority" go completely silent. In spite of their alleged "majority" status, they seldom if ever seem to be capable of halting the relentless march back to the Dark Ages.
Funny how that works out.
The fact that half of you believe in shit which directly contradicts what the other half believes makes it even more ludicrous. And all of it is based on, of course, no evidence what-so-ever. Just the idiot ramblings of some ignorant goat fuckers who lived 5,000 years ago.
It's like living in an insane asylum. Only without the access to good drugs.
Local monopolies for Telco and Cable are government imposed
So what's your alternative there, hotshot? How are you going to manage having 50 or 100 companies running fiber all over town, into every home? Logistically, how's THAT gonna work out?
In the case of natural monopolies - like roads, utilities or telecom, where physical limits dictate that only a handful of providers / single provider can practically operate - you have three options. You can either:
1) Tolerate a single monopoly or possibly duopoly, but heavily regulate what it can charge and the level of service it must provide, with an eye toward allowing it a decent return on its investments but no more. This is kinda sorta how AT&T and the utilities operated in the United States from the end of WWII until the deregulation craze in the 1980s.
2) Have the state run the portion of the system where physical limits preclude an efficient market (as we currently do with roads), either directly or via some sort of non-profit quasi-corporate option. This is probably the most efficient proposition from a macroeconomic standpoint, since presumably the money consumers and businesses save here can be directed to other areas of the economy, instead of having some private sector monopoly functioning as a drain on the economy. It's how our interstate highway system was built and operated in the US and one of the reasons why our economy boomed in the postwar period. Making that infrastructure available to consumers and businesses essentially at-cost freed up a lot of capital which in turn was either spent on consumer goods, or invested in education, manufacturing plants, research and development, resource extraction and so forth.
3) Allow unregulated monopolies to form, gouge consumers and businesses, and soak up a huge portion of your overall economic productivity simply because they're squatting on some important resource or access point. You see this a lot in third world shitholes, which the United States is rapidly devolving into. Consumers and businesses end up paying more and more money for less and less in the way of services, the overall economy stagnates, and the country is impoverished and outclassed by more efficient competitors who don't tolerate this kind of kleptocratic stupidity.
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Does Blu-Ray really meet the definition of a "Sony proprietary format"? Unlike their Memory Stick or MiniDisc, Blu-Ray was developed in conjunction with others, including Philips, who Sony developed the CD with, Pioneer, who were involved with developing the core laser technology utilized by Blu-Ray, and Samsung, among others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_Association
Blu-Ray is more like DVD than like Betamax or MiniDisc. I think it's thought of as a "Sony" format in part because Sony was the first to push it and push it really hard with the PS3.
I was just about to say!
"Exterminate!!"
Good news is, if you run up a flight of stairs they're screwed.
There are two enormous problems with the ribbon - especially in Excel.
For starters, dingbats whose memory is positional/visual (in other words, folks who have no idea what the word logic means and just wander around till they see a picture they vaguely remember) generally aren't going to be heavy users of programs like Excel, because they're too loopy to be building many spreadsheets. So you've just optimized your menu structure for people who can't use your tool effectively anyhow, because they're incoherent by nature. It makes about as much sense as equipping cars with a steering wheel that makes a clicking noise when its turned so that blind people can get feedback when they drive.
At the same time, Microsoft made Office ridiculously difficult for their core users - people with half a brain, who work with the tool all day long - to utilize. Especially the lack of ribbon customization in Office 2007, which was just insane given that virtually every heavy Office user customized their menus. Extensively.
Only the corporate tools in Redmond could implement such a perfectly misguided strategy, and only their (current) near-monopoly in the Office-apps market has allowed them to get away with it. They'd better pray Apple doesn't decide to enter that space with some cloud-based offering, because I'm guessing the UI guys in Cupertino could cook up something that works pretty well for both groups of users, without charging an arm and a leg for it.
How about the reactor has been in shutdown since before the flooding happened do you not understand?
The reactor isn't the problem. The spent fuel pools are the real danger. If those lose cooling for a few days, it's Chernobyl on steroids.
Exactly. Nuclear plants have the unique ability to make a bad natural disaster even worse by creating a man-made catastrophe which impacts a large area and mandates additional evacuations and displacement.
And Japan is lucky, in that it has an incredibly developed (some might say overdeveloped) infrastructure, one which generally held up pretty well to the massive quake and subsequent tsunami.
Add nuclear power plants to the list. All government insured. Sure, the plants pay a nominal tax, but the fund that's current accumulated could be overwhelmed in a day by a nuclear incident near any large city.
We dumb asses on the coasts are already subsidizing your fucking corporate farmers (most of whom now work for massive agribusiness concerns) with tens of billions of dollars a year in subsidies, because they seem to be incapable of competing in the free market we're all supposed to worship. That's on top of all the dams and levees we paid for to keep their farmland from flooding every couple of years.
We'd pay a lot less for food if your farmers would switch to growing healthy crops people (and livestock) should actually eat, instead of growing corn, corn and more corn, which the government then has steal money from the rest of us in order to buy and stockpile.
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-09-21-op-ed-corn-subsidies-make-unhealthy-food-choices
Also, food might be a bit cheaper if we stopped paying your precious farmers to not grow any crops at all...
Anyhow, flooding is good for farmland. All that flooding is why the Midwest has so much good farmland to begin with.
Callisto has less tidal heating because it's much further out - about 2 million km if memory serves. I think Io is closer to 400,000km from Jupiter. Europa orbits not too much further out, at under 700,000km, then Ganymede at 1 million km. So Io is getting pushed and pulled on by tugs from Europa and Ganymede, not to mention Jupiter itself. Callisto in comparison experiences very weak tugs from Ganymede, and not much at all from Europa or Io. And Callisto experiences those tugs less often, since its orbital period is much longer. I think Calisto takes 17 days to complete an orbit, while Io zips around in well under 2.
I've read about studies which indicate such moons always become tidally locked - planets too, in close orbits about their star, according to simulations.
Based on what we currently know, I think it's safe to assume any terrestrial-mass exomoons orbiting exo gas giants or ice giants will be tidally locked to their primary. They'll likely also occupy resonance orbits with the other moons in their system, as we see with the Jovian moons (and possibly Saturn's moons, though I don't know as much about that system).
The length of any eclipses experienced by these moons would vary greatly depending on how close they orbit to the primary. For moons orbiting far out, I can't imagine the eclipses would have any significant impact on climate. Moons orbiting close in around enormous gas giants would experience longer eclipses, but they'd also have the big primary up in their sky functioning as an enormous heat lamp (it would also bathe the night side in a lot of reflected light). On the whole, worlds closer in would probably be warmer than worlds orbiting further out, in spite of the eclipses. Eclipses would last at most a couple of hours I should think - night could last for days.
I wonder if there are any particularly massive gas giants floating around out there with whole mini-solar systems orbiting them, including smaller gas giants, ice giants and terrestrial planets?
Any moon that's approximately the mass of a terrestrial planet and which orbits a gas giant will eventually become tidally locked. In fact, it'll become tidally locked fairly quickly - within a few million years after formation or capture, based on the studies I've seen cited. That means its "day" will be the amount of time it takes to complete an orbit around the primary.
What about the Day-Night cycle? Isn't going to be much more complex for a body that's orbiting a body that's orbiting a sun?
The day/night cycle would be the duration of the moon's orbit. Half would be day, half would be night, on any given point. It's not more complex, but it's likely to be longer. Life on earth doesn't seem to have an enormous problem with long days and nights - the arctic is quite biologically rich, in spite of the harsh climate (by human standards).
A large moon (Mars sized or larger) would almost certainly be geologically active if it orbited a large gas giant. Indeed, even smaller worlds without a lot of internal decay heat of their own would retain a molten interior far longer than a lone planet the same size would, because of the tidal forces exerted by the large parent planet (and any additional satellites it might have). These geologically active large moons are likely to have their own magnetic fields, the same way earth does, and those would provide their surfaces with protection from the parent world's magnetic field and radiation belts.
A dense atmosphere also provides substantial protection from radiation, so exomoons with dense atmospheres might not be terribly bothered by the primary's radiation belts. Dense atmospheres might be a problem for moons close in to the parent star, but it would be a plus for worlds orbiting at some distance, allowing them to maintain liquid water and comfortable surface temperatures for life as we know it. It would also help them to moderate their climate, perhaps compensating for the long "day" on moons that orbit a great distance from their primary. Really dense atmospheres even refract light, giving you up to a couple of hours of extra daylight, again potentially serving to moderate the climate on some moons.
A really big gas giant (say, 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter) has an enormous gravity well, but we don't know if its magnetic field and radiation belts scale in the same proportion. It's possible you could have moons that orbit well outside of the radiation belts around such a large giant, but which still complete their orbits in a reasonable period of time (days, not months).
One other point - a large gas giant that's fairly close to its moon would put out a lot of heat, like a giant heatlamp in the sky. That would likely expand the habitable zone, the zone in which water could be expected to remain liquid.
Large gas giants could potentially host multiple habitable moons. And smaller ice giants - worlds the mass of Neptune, for example - could also host Mars or even earth-size moons. Neptune-mass worlds appear to be fairly common based on our current observations. If just a small percentage of them host moons that are the mass of terrestrial planets, that could add up to hundreds of millions of potentially-habitable exomoons circling around that class of planet alone.
Oh, and for small red dwarf stars, terrestrial planets in orbits close enough to support liquid water would soon find themselves tidally locked - one hemisphere would always face the parent star. Not pretty. That isn't an issue for exomoons. The primary might end up tidally locked, but the moons orbit the primary and would always have stable day/night cycles. They'd also potentially have the primary functioning as a big heat lamp at night, keeping the dark hemisphere from getting *too* cold during the long night. And the radiation belt around a gas giant orbiting such a small star is likely to be far less intense than the ones sported by the gas giants in this system. The red dwarf also throws off a lot less damaging UV radiation. We may find that the only habitable worlds around small red dwarf stars are exomoons - and there are a LOT of red dwarf stars. They vastly outnumber stars like our sun, by something like 10:1 I believe.
For years the assumption has been if there are large planets buzzing around the inner portion of a given solar system that such a system cannot be host to a habitable, terrestrial world. Clearly, that assumption is no longer valid. There are all kinds of plausible scenarios where moons could be perfectly habitable. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the number of habitable exomoons exceeds - indeed, greatly exceeds - the number of habitable exoplanets.
their vote is causing much worse environmental impact and global warming by the necessary increase in conventional non-nuclear energy production.
Their vote will have absolutely no impact on global warming. Coal and gas aren't going away as energy sources. Assuming the wealthier western nations replaced all of their fossil-fuel plants with thousands of new nuclear plants, the price of coal and gas would decline and developing nations would simply build a slew of new fossil-fuel burning plants. Until a power source comes along that's substantially cheaper than coal and gas and doesn't require enormous startup capital investments (nuclear fails on both accounts), coal and gas aren't going anywhere.
The best bets for replacing fossil fuels are renewable sources like solar thermal, PV and wind power. They don't require billions of dollars and years of construction to deploy - they don't even require a nationwide grid, which is of vital importance across much of the developing world. Cellular power. Western nations should be dumping a ton of R&D money into these technologies, because if they take off the returns will be enormous. Nuclear power belongs to the era of the Edsel, and has proven about as successful.
well I can think of a few reasons. solar PV does not work at night, wind power is variable, geothermal and tidal sites are few.
Power demand crashes at night (and is likely to go even lower in the future as incandescent lighting is replaced by fluorescents and LEDs), so unless you're idiot enough to try to run your entire grid off PV that's a non-issue. (Solar thermal systems can store heat underground in the form of molten salt, so they can actually function well overnight.)
PV power however is perfect in warm sunny climates, since it tends to generate the most energy when demand is at its peak - long, hot, sunny days. That's a feature, not a bug.
Wind power is variable, but tends to pick up when power demand spikes in cooler climates (during cool windy weather). An efficient grid allows you to move any excess to where it's needed. Energy can also be stored, as pumped water for example, or even in enormous batteries. Costly, but likely cheaper than private insurance for nuclear reactors (particularly in the wake of Fukushima).
geothermal and tidal sites are few
Yes, but something like half the planet's population lives within 50 miles of the shore, which makes tidal and wave power excellent choices. Geothermal is perfect for countries like Italy, Japan and parts of the United States. Iceland's experiment with high-pressure geothermal utilizing supercritical water appears to be going really well. It promises to be up to 5 times more efficient than existing geothermal systems, which will both expand the locations where geothermal is practical and dramatically lower the cost per kwh. There's the potential for geothermal to become cost-competitive with coal, allowing it to easily displace nuclear power.
Most importantly there is not renewable technology that will create the base load.
There isn't a single technology. Which is why you deploy multiple technologies. This is not rocket science. While I suppose it's possible for the wind, tides, sun, geothermal heat of the earth and gravity to all fail simultaneously, I suspect in such an event we'd have bigger problems to contend with than the power grid...
if the government took every last penny from the top 10%, this wouldn't even come close to balancing *this* year's budget alone
Source?
Why chose something that looks like a piece of shit when something beautiful costs $50 more? That's barely the cost of a meal out in San Francisco or Manhattan for a device you're going to be stuck using every day.
You can also bet if the manufacturer was too idiotic to make their gadget even look halfway decent, they forgot a bunch of other stuff as well. I mean, if you can't even design a case that's not an eyesore, what about the really difficult engineering and design?
Devices already need (and have) interfaces which allow them to charge and communicate with other devices. Docking isn't going anywhere. It's a really convenient way for new devices - like tablets and smartphones - to connect to and utilize legacy peripherals, everything from monitors to printers to hard drives.
Longterm that may all go wireless, but at the moment things like wireless HDMI are expensive and an enormous power suck. That isn't likely to change in the next decade. Your portable gadget needs to be charged. Might as well get some use out of it while it's charging.
But there's very little reason to have a desktop setup that's completely useless unless you sacrifice your tablet.
There's very little reason to have both devices if one can effectively function as both. You physically can't use a desktop and tablet at the same time. If the tablet - with the help of a keyboard, mouse and monitor - can function as a desktop, why own a desktop? We've seen the same thing happen with laptops largely supplanting desktop PCs over the past decade. Now you can expect to see the tablet and smartphone largely supplant both form factors.
There will always be a teeny tiny market for desktops and traditional laptops, in the same way there's still a small market for workstations. But desktops - and eventually laptops I suspect - are going to become niche products.
Desktop hardware will go the way of the dinosaur. Tablets and smartphones will soon be more than capable of driving multiple monitors when docked (possibly even wirelessly). Their operating systems and UI's will evolve to work with keyboards and mice when available.
For the handful of people who require workstation-class performance - maybe 0.5% of the overall market - those systems may remain, or much of that work may migrate to the cloud, with tablets and other devices simply functioning as clients.
How long before Apple gets back into the printer business? The margins there are still insane, and the products are universally shit. Every HP printer I've ever owned, used or helped a friend try to work has been a festering pile of crap. Don't even get me started on ink that "expires" a week after you've put it in the printer.
If you invest in iApps, you're committed to Apple hardware which comes with a heavy premium.
Huh? Apple's phones at worst are marginally more expensive than Android phones from the same carriers (especially discounting the two-for-one giveaway deals that are now cropping up on Android phones because otherwise the carriers couldn't move the things). We're talking $200-$300 over 2-3 years. For most people who can afford a smartphone at all, that doesn't even approach a "heavy" premium.
And in exchange for the extra couple hundred dollars, you get world-class support - everything from prompt OS updates to a wide range of peripherals to the best in-store experience in the industry. I had an out-of-warranty iPhone die on me, and Apple swapped it out free of charge. That kind of service alone is worth way more than any "premium" they charge.
You also get a phone with a much better user interface, and deeper app support.
The only reason why Android is doing as well as it is: the carriers need something to keep Apple from becoming a monopoly and bossing them around. That's it. Android is still a junky knockoff, but it's a better knockoff than any of the idiots at RIM or Microsoft could come up with. It's serviceable. So, the carriers push it to keep from becoming beholden to Apple.
It'll be interesting to see what'll happen over the next decade as wifi networks become ubiquitous and the carrier's networks won't matter as much for many folks (especially city dwellers). I'm sure the cable companies would love a slice of the mobile telecom pie too, which could accelerate the migration. I think the carriers are going to lose the ability to dictate which devices people use for telecommunications, and at what price. Apple is uniquely positioned to benefit from such a trend. The other makers all seem to depend upon the carriers to plug their junk. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the gatekeepers are no longer directing traffic their way.
And then Apple will swoop in and buy them up right under Microsoft's nose.
This nails it.
Yeah, this story is complete bullshit. Apple is not going to lock down Mac OS X Lion.
I disagree. I think Apple probably will ship a locked-down version of OS X sometime in the next couple of years, and it'll be the default version of the OS. Yeah, you'll still be able to unlock it, but it may not be particularly easy - indeed, the ability to unlock may only be available in a separate "professional" version of the OS.
And I think given the stupidity of the average user (Mac, PC, Android, whatever), this is probably not a bad thing.
I have the distinct impression that many of the atheists who attempt to aggressively debunk religion actually have little understanding of what exactly they are debunking, never having done actual research into what the majority of moderately religious people actually believe and how it affects how they behave.
Oh, please, get off the cross. We need the wood.
There isn't an atheist in America who hasn't been soaked in Christian idiocy their entire lives - moderate, fundamentalist, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, the whole whacked out ball 'o wax. We know exactly what you tools believe in. You NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT. You even have 24/7 television networks spewing the stupidity 365 days a year.
Well, I shouldn't say you NEVER shut up about it, because whenever the fundies attempt to do something pig ignorant, like this latest example of stupidity in Texas, the "moderate" Christians who supposedly represent a "majority" go completely silent. In spite of their alleged "majority" status, they seldom if ever seem to be capable of halting the relentless march back to the Dark Ages.
Funny how that works out.
The fact that half of you believe in shit which directly contradicts what the other half believes makes it even more ludicrous. And all of it is based on, of course, no evidence what-so-ever. Just the idiot ramblings of some ignorant goat fuckers who lived 5,000 years ago.
It's like living in an insane asylum. Only without the access to good drugs.
Local monopolies for Telco and Cable are government imposed
So what's your alternative there, hotshot? How are you going to manage having 50 or 100 companies running fiber all over town, into every home? Logistically, how's THAT gonna work out?
In the case of natural monopolies - like roads, utilities or telecom, where physical limits dictate that only a handful of providers / single provider can practically operate - you have three options. You can either:
1) Tolerate a single monopoly or possibly duopoly, but heavily regulate what it can charge and the level of service it must provide, with an eye toward allowing it a decent return on its investments but no more. This is kinda sorta how AT&T and the utilities operated in the United States from the end of WWII until the deregulation craze in the 1980s.
2) Have the state run the portion of the system where physical limits preclude an efficient market (as we currently do with roads), either directly or via some sort of non-profit quasi-corporate option. This is probably the most efficient proposition from a macroeconomic standpoint, since presumably the money consumers and businesses save here can be directed to other areas of the economy, instead of having some private sector monopoly functioning as a drain on the economy. It's how our interstate highway system was built and operated in the US and one of the reasons why our economy boomed in the postwar period. Making that infrastructure available to consumers and businesses essentially at-cost freed up a lot of capital which in turn was either spent on consumer goods, or invested in education, manufacturing plants, research and development, resource extraction and so forth.
3) Allow unregulated monopolies to form, gouge consumers and businesses, and soak up a huge portion of your overall economic productivity simply because they're squatting on some important resource or access point. You see this a lot in third world shitholes, which the United States is rapidly devolving into. Consumers and businesses end up paying more and more money for less and less in the way of services, the overall economy stagnates, and the country is impoverished and outclassed by more efficient competitors who don't tolerate this kind of kleptocratic stupidity.