Hydroelectric and nuclear power aren't ever going to be turned down,
Not entirely true, as someone has already noted. Hydro especially can be turned "up and down" as demand dictates. We burn very little oil for electricity - it's too expensive for that. We do burn a lot of coal though, and if solar were capable of supplying just 10-20% of our energy needs, it would certainly put a dent in the cost of coal-generated power.
Nobody needs to go "off the grid" for solar to become viable. It all comes down to $ per kw/h. Even if solar can only meet 10-20% of your needs, if you can recoup your investment in a reasonable timeframe, solar is viable.
If you live in Phoenix and have a $200 a month light bill, a hypothetical $2,500 solar array that saves you just $40 a month but which lasts for 20 years looks like a pretty good deal - it'll pay for itself 3 times over. Unlike, say, a $2,500 3D television. And of course there's the network effect - if everybody installs one of the things, demand for electricity declines by 10-20% - as does the price - meaning you could all be saving a lot more than just $40 a month. That'll also spill over into the cost you pay for locally-produced goods and services.
Combining two years of observations by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, researchers determined that Mars is currently losing only about 20 grams of air per second into space.
Extrapolating this measurement back over 3.5 billion years, they estimate that only a small fraction, 0.2 to 4 millibars, of carbon dioxide and a few centimeters of water could have been lost to solar winds during that timeframe. (A bar is a unit for measuring pressure; Earth's atmospheric pressure is about 1 bar.)
Mars most certainly has an atmosphere, and it is quite active. It just doesn't have a particularly dense atmosphere.
That's understating things just a bit. The Martian "atmosphere" is practically a vacuum, with surface pressure averaging something like seven tenths of a percent the air pressure at sea level on Earth. The challenge with Mars would be heating it up enough to release all of the frozen gasses in its crust, giving it a dense enough atmosphere for life to work with.
Point of fact: Far more energy goes into the processing, refining, and transportation of gasoline than is ever extracted from it in the form of pure heat alone (much less propulsion or "useful work") when it is burned in an internal combustion engine.
Uh, you have a source for that assertion? Because I can tell you right now, everything I've ever read on the subject indicates that a gallon of oil (and gasoline, which is just refined oil) contains a lot more energy than it costs to extract that oil from the ground, refine and transport it. When it becomes uneconomical to continue extracting oil from a given well that well is shut down.
We still had oil-burning power plants in America last time I checked.
I want one that doesn't limit itself to MP3s and Apple's proprietary format
AAC isn't Apple's format. It was largely developed by AT&T, and was declared an international standard in 1997.
The iTunes lockin was necessary to keep the record labels from suing the living crap out of Apple, and it enabled Apple to start selling music online. Something the labels would probably still be sue-happy about if it hadn't been for Apple paving the way.
Um, you do realize it was the record labels that made Apple implement that convoluted synch process involving iTunes, right? They didn't want portable music players being used as sneakernets for piracy.
(Like you're apparently doing, I might add. So, maybe they had a point.)
Apple did more for legitimizing online music and portable mp3 players than any other entity in the industry, hands down. If they hadn't laid the groundwork, the labels would still be suing the crap out of anyone who tried to sell music - let alone DRM-free music - online. And they'd probably still be attacking portable mp3 players as well.
Maybe not all of us want to see every square inch of desert covered in solar panels. Compare the surface area used to generate 1Gigawatt at a Nuke vs Solar
Have you seen how much landscape can be ripped apart by mountaintop removal coal mining, or open pit uranium mines?
Beyond that, hundreds of millions of people already live in areas that receive plenty of sun to make PV solar practical. Instead of carpeting distant deserts with solar panels, simply place the panels atop the existing rooftops of the homes, shops, factories and offices where these people live and work. While the panels might not be quite as efficient as they would be out in the open desert, you eliminate transmission losses by generating the power where it's mostly or entirely consumed.
Of course large corporations don't like this, since they'd lose the ability to control the supply of power as effectively.
Exactly. The plants are cheap. The fuel? Not so much. And we have no idea how costly that fuel could become in the future. Maybe it'll get cheaper. Maybe costs will go thru the roof.
With solar the risks are somewhat lower. We have a good idea how the panels degrade over time, and we know the sun's not going anywhere (if it does, we'll have bigger problems than power generation).
Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts
The Mojave plant already produces over 300 megawatts, the plant in Spain produces 100 megawats, and there are plans for solar plants of half a gigawatt to about a gigawatt. The Topaz Solar Farm in central California is supposed to produce 550 megawatts, and cost around a billion, which is steep but pretty comparable to the skyrocketing price of nuclear power. It's a PV installation. Of course solar only works during the day, but that's when demand is by far at its peak (especially in central and southern California) and customers pay the highest prices.
Why does the plant capacity make a difference, anyhow? Cost seems like a much bigger issue than capacity. If you can build and operate ten 100 megawatt solar plants for the cost of building, operating and decommissioning one 1 gigawatt nuke plant (and insuring it for liability, and dealing with its waste), why not go with solar?
I think real advantage solar offers over nuclear though comes from photovoltaics, which are also just starting to become practical, especially in warm sunny climates where peak summertime power rates spike. I think subsidizing the deployment of rooftop panels atop homes and businesses in places like California and Texas is going to be a more cost effective strategy than sinking tens of billions into nuke plants, and it'll help to advance a technology that could conceivably lead us to near total energy independence.
It also gets a chunk of power generation out of the hands of the enormous energy conglomerates and into the hands of the people, which'll make it much more difficult for the powers that be to play games with the price of electricity on the spot market, a la Enron. And moving power generation much closer to the source of demand could ultimately reduce the overall peak summertime load on our power grids (at least here in America), not to mention the drastic cut in transmission losses.
Maybe you should conduct a reality check on your "data". If you tally up manufacturing based on the reported "value" of the goods being "manufactured", the US manufacturing sector looks like it's doing pretty good.
That is until you realize that a huge chunk of what's left of "manufacturing" in America consists of the final assembly of components manufactured overseas (which is where the bulk of the actual work is performed, involving the highest headcounts), and that companies routinely import the components for a manufactured good and then slap on some enormous arbitrary value once it's assembled here. So GM has the parts for a car that's assembled in Michigan imported from all over the globe for $5,000, then assembles it for a couple grand, slaps a $25,000 pricetag on the finished product and claims that $18,000 of value was miraculously "manufactured" here in the US. As-if.
So our "manufacturing" sector on paper rivals China's, hence your wonky data. The reality is, 95% of the actual work was done overseas for peanuts by an army of peasants with no civil rights. Or clean air. Or clean water.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the numbers cited for domestic manufacturing are total BS, and have been for a couple of decades. In order to truly support those numbers with a robust end to end manufacturing infrastructure and reasonable accounting, you'd need to have massive factories humming away all over the country, a la Germany. Instead virtually all of our manufacturing regions resemble a bombed out postwar landscape, while the few areas that still have marginally robust economies are characterized by office parks and high rises full of service sector employees, not manufacturing.
People who claim that there's nothing wrong with our manufacturing sector because of "the data" remind me of the guys 5 years ago who claimed that there was nothing wrong with the out of control housing market because all of those homes had been appraised at such-and-such a value and all of the borrowers were proven creditworthy. Uh-huh. Anybody who ever thought that a shack in the Oort Cloud of Riverside, CA was truly worth $500,000, or that a part-time janitor was truly qualified for a $500,000 loan stupidly placed their trust in obviously bogus, manipulated data. Their precious data was entirely detached from reality.
That's close to a conventional explanation, but off by 1/4 cycle. The extreme high/low points of the solar system's bobbing orbit are outside the galactic plane, and would be the low-danger points. The rough parts of the (approx. 60 million year) cycle are the two crossings through the central part of the galactic plane, which are the densest portions. During the crossings, the solar system is zipping through the galactic plane at a few hundred km/s, producing lots of collisions with whatever rubble happens to be there.
I've actually seen both mechanisms suggested - that crossing the plane is somewhat more disruptive than average, or that it's the change in motion at the end of each cycle which causes the Oort Cloud to be disrupted. There is I believe still some debate on the exact timing of when we hit the peak on the Z axis and when we cross the galactic plane (maybe not though - been awhile since I did any reading on the subject).
Of course, the density of matter in the region around us during the period of peak disruption, how close neighboring stars are, etc. etc., probably also plays a big role. If we're in the middle of a relatively empty patch there's less chance of hitting something, or of a nearby system or systems causing additional disruption to the Oort cloud on top of galactic tides and such. If we're in a more densely populated region, seems to me that would only increase the disruption to the Oort Cloud.
Check out the Wikipedia article on the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is thought to be well over a light year across. Out on its fringes the influence of the sun's gravity isn't much stronger than the pull of nearby stars, or the galactic core itself. So whenever the oscillation reverses direction and the sun begins moving back toward the galactic plane, a lot of stuff out on the fringes doesn't move neatly with it. Some of it will become gravitationally unbound from the solar system, but some of it will find its orbit perturbed and start heading inward. Whether that's enough stuff to lead to mass extinctions here on Earth is another matter.
This article mentions disk tides, encountered most strongly as the Sol system passes thru the galactic plane, as the possible culprit in disturbing the Oort Cloud on a regular basis:
The sun doesn't just orbit the center of the galaxy, though. It also moves up and down relative to the galactic plane. Some have suggested that whenever the solar system reverses direction in that oscillation, very bad things happen, possibly due to the Oort Cloud experiencing some lag in reversing direction relative to the rest of the system. The sun essentially winds up off-center in the Oort Cloud, and in comparison to normal periods a lot of comets get kicked into the inner solar system as a result of this imbalance.
The cost has only gone up for those who exceed the bandwidth of the current plans. Precious few users do, at least at the moment. Presumably the caps will grow as average use grows (and if carriers like AT&T and O2 don't grow the caps, you can bet hungry competitors will).
Re:How Quickly They Forget
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I quite clearly remember paying $20/month for unlimited dialup in the mid 90s
With inflation, $20 in 1995 would be around $28 today, which is comparable to the $30 a month data charge for a smartphone. And of course, even today's wireless access is generally faster than dialup was in the mid 1990's.
Also, $30 may be your monthly data charge, but AT&T really forces you to pay something like $60/month as a minimum for iPhone service. That's far from a trivial cost for the vast majority of people.
Yes. And in the mid 1990's, you had to have telephone service in order to take advantage of dialup internet providers like AOL. That would have run you at least $20 a month in most markets. Then, if you made a standard amount of long distance calls (including "local" long distance in most large metro areas), you were looking at at least another $20 a month in LD charges. That's $40 for your phone, or about $55 in 2010 money. At $60 a month your cell phone provides you with hundreds of minutes of free long distance calling (unlimited in the late evenings and on weekends) in addition to the convenience of wireless. Not bad for about five extra dollars a month.
How Quickly They Forget
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month
Wait, $30 a month for Internet service on a $300 phone or $600 tablet? Yeah, that's real steep, as opposed to, say, $30 a month for AOL on a $1,500 Windows 95 PC a decade or so ago.
The devices are actually a heck of a lot cheaper now than they were when the Internet took off. They're more capable and easier to use, too. Access is no more expensive, and it's wireless. Look for the cost - of both the devices and bandwidth - to continue to decline over time. This will help users to afford quite a bit of content, in the same way folks who cancel their cable TV can afford a Netflix subscription and a substantial number of downloads from iTunes or Amazon and still end up money ahead (and see exactly what they want to see when they want to see it).
I think you underestimate just how cut off the dynamic range of FM radio is. Have you ever heard a song on the radio and then put in a CD of that same song to hear the difference? Both the high and low end frequencies are just plain chopped off on FM.
What you're talking about is the frequency responses, not the dynamic range. Frequency response details the range of frequencies, low to high, the medium provides. Dynamic range is the range of difference between the loudest and softest signals the medium provides.
Analog FM tends to provide around a 50 - 15kHz frequency response, which while not spectacular, is nothing to sneeze at (especially in the car). That having been said, FM has generally provided craptacular dynamic range for decades now, as broadcasters severely compress the dynamic range of their signals in order to broaden their coverage footprint. By decreasing the dynamic range down to just 10dB or so (as opposed to the 70+ dB afforded by most recording media) they can provide a noise-free signal to listeners over a much broader geographic area. Unfortunately, it sounds like crap.
Digital broadcasts don't have that limitation - regardless of the dynamic range of the content, you either get the signal or you don't. The content doesn't slowly get swamped by noise over distance - you go fairly abruptly from having a signal capable of being decoded to having nothing. There's no incentive to squash the dynamic range of the content, so most broadcasters don't.
You're using the worst-of-all-worlds compromise between hardware and software RAID: software-implemented RAID that is tied to a hardware dongle. Both hardware RAID and software RAID are objectively better than that sort of abomination.
By that standard, ALL software RAID solutions are a "worst-of-all-worlds" compromise between hardware & software. The OS & software RAID solution have to be able to see the drives - and have the correct software to detect, access and possibly rebuild the array - before they work. If yer handy dandy boot disc can't accomplish all that right off the bat, you're either gonna need to build a new box or access an existing box and build a boot disc that can get you back in touch with your drive controller, your drives and that array.
XP has supported software RAID for some time, but it has limits, and Intel's hybrid approach was substantially faster (although, as it turns out, a huge PITA when it failed under those circumstances).
Software RAID is still tied to a particular piece of software, though. I don't see how this necessarily leaves you any better off in the event of some kind of major RAID failure. You'll still need to have the correct software & drivers to boot your system and recover your RAID array.
RAID adds lots of complexity for the home user, and it doesn't seem to offer any substantial benefits in terms of data security. You get enhanced performance with certain RAID schemes, which may be important to a select group of users, but that's about it.
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Who cares? Use solar where it's economical. Use something else in Lansing.
Hydroelectric and nuclear power aren't ever going to be turned down,
Not entirely true, as someone has already noted. Hydro especially can be turned "up and down" as demand dictates. We burn very little oil for electricity - it's too expensive for that. We do burn a lot of coal though, and if solar were capable of supplying just 10-20% of our energy needs, it would certainly put a dent in the cost of coal-generated power.
Nobody needs to go "off the grid" for solar to become viable. It all comes down to $ per kw/h. Even if solar can only meet 10-20% of your needs, if you can recoup your investment in a reasonable timeframe, solar is viable.
If you live in Phoenix and have a $200 a month light bill, a hypothetical $2,500 solar array that saves you just $40 a month but which lasts for 20 years looks like a pretty good deal - it'll pay for itself 3 times over. Unlike, say, a $2,500 3D television. And of course there's the network effect - if everybody installs one of the things, demand for electricity declines by 10-20% - as does the price - meaning you could all be saving a lot more than just $40 a month. That'll also spill over into the cost you pay for locally-produced goods and services.
It's too expensive to mass-produce just about anything here in the US, the wages are way too high (the minimum wages are like what $7/hour)
Doesn't seem to slow the Germans down much. Their industry is booming, and wages in Germany are even higher than they are in America.
I don't think wages are the issue. I think the problem has more to do with piss poor "management".
According to this article from 2007, that might not be the case:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070125_mars_atmosphere.html
Combining two years of observations by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, researchers determined that Mars is currently losing only about 20 grams of air per second into space.
Extrapolating this measurement back over 3.5 billion years, they estimate that only a small fraction, 0.2 to 4 millibars, of carbon dioxide and a few centimeters of water could have been lost to solar winds during that timeframe. (A bar is a unit for measuring pressure; Earth's atmospheric pressure is about 1 bar.)
Mars most certainly has an atmosphere, and it is quite active. It just doesn't have a particularly dense atmosphere.
That's understating things just a bit. The Martian "atmosphere" is practically a vacuum, with surface pressure averaging something like seven tenths of a percent the air pressure at sea level on Earth. The challenge with Mars would be heating it up enough to release all of the frozen gasses in its crust, giving it a dense enough atmosphere for life to work with.
Point of fact: Far more energy goes into the processing, refining, and transportation of gasoline than is ever extracted from it in the form of pure heat alone (much less propulsion or "useful work") when it is burned in an internal combustion engine.
Uh, you have a source for that assertion? Because I can tell you right now, everything I've ever read on the subject indicates that a gallon of oil (and gasoline, which is just refined oil) contains a lot more energy than it costs to extract that oil from the ground, refine and transport it. When it becomes uneconomical to continue extracting oil from a given well that well is shut down.
We still had oil-burning power plants in America last time I checked.
I want one that doesn't limit itself to MP3s and Apple's proprietary format
AAC isn't Apple's format. It was largely developed by AT&T, and was declared an international standard in 1997.
The iTunes lockin was necessary to keep the record labels from suing the living crap out of Apple, and it enabled Apple to start selling music online. Something the labels would probably still be sue-happy about if it hadn't been for Apple paving the way.
Ipad is another short-running, indoor-only battery hog.
Huh? The thing can play video for something like 8 hours straight without a recharge. It's the antithesis of a "battery hog".
Um, you do realize it was the record labels that made Apple implement that convoluted synch process involving iTunes, right? They didn't want portable music players being used as sneakernets for piracy.
(Like you're apparently doing, I might add. So, maybe they had a point.)
Apple did more for legitimizing online music and portable mp3 players than any other entity in the industry, hands down. If they hadn't laid the groundwork, the labels would still be suing the crap out of anyone who tried to sell music - let alone DRM-free music - online. And they'd probably still be attacking portable mp3 players as well.
Maybe not all of us want to see every square inch of desert covered in solar panels. Compare the surface area used to generate 1Gigawatt at a Nuke vs Solar
Have you seen how much landscape can be ripped apart by mountaintop removal coal mining, or open pit uranium mines?
Beyond that, hundreds of millions of people already live in areas that receive plenty of sun to make PV solar practical. Instead of carpeting distant deserts with solar panels, simply place the panels atop the existing rooftops of the homes, shops, factories and offices where these people live and work. While the panels might not be quite as efficient as they would be out in the open desert, you eliminate transmission losses by generating the power where it's mostly or entirely consumed.
Of course large corporations don't like this, since they'd lose the ability to control the supply of power as effectively.
Exactly. The plants are cheap. The fuel? Not so much. And we have no idea how costly that fuel could become in the future. Maybe it'll get cheaper. Maybe costs will go thru the roof.
With solar the risks are somewhat lower. We have a good idea how the panels degrade over time, and we know the sun's not going anywhere (if it does, we'll have bigger problems than power generation).
Now considering that one nuclear power station usually generates 1 to 5 GIGAwatts, and these generate in the order of TENS OF MEGAwatts
The Mojave plant already produces over 300 megawatts, the plant in Spain produces 100 megawats, and there are plans for solar plants of half a gigawatt to about a gigawatt. The Topaz Solar Farm in central California is supposed to produce 550 megawatts, and cost around a billion, which is steep but pretty comparable to the skyrocketing price of nuclear power. It's a PV installation. Of course solar only works during the day, but that's when demand is by far at its peak (especially in central and southern California) and customers pay the highest prices.
Why does the plant capacity make a difference, anyhow? Cost seems like a much bigger issue than capacity. If you can build and operate ten 100 megawatt solar plants for the cost of building, operating and decommissioning one 1 gigawatt nuke plant (and insuring it for liability, and dealing with its waste), why not go with solar?
I think real advantage solar offers over nuclear though comes from photovoltaics, which are also just starting to become practical, especially in warm sunny climates where peak summertime power rates spike. I think subsidizing the deployment of rooftop panels atop homes and businesses in places like California and Texas is going to be a more cost effective strategy than sinking tens of billions into nuke plants, and it'll help to advance a technology that could conceivably lead us to near total energy independence.
It also gets a chunk of power generation out of the hands of the enormous energy conglomerates and into the hands of the people, which'll make it much more difficult for the powers that be to play games with the price of electricity on the spot market, a la Enron. And moving power generation much closer to the source of demand could ultimately reduce the overall peak summertime load on our power grids (at least here in America), not to mention the drastic cut in transmission losses.
I bet the power those things generate will be too cheap to meter, right?
Maybe you should conduct a reality check on your "data". If you tally up manufacturing based on the reported "value" of the goods being "manufactured", the US manufacturing sector looks like it's doing pretty good.
That is until you realize that a huge chunk of what's left of "manufacturing" in America consists of the final assembly of components manufactured overseas (which is where the bulk of the actual work is performed, involving the highest headcounts), and that companies routinely import the components for a manufactured good and then slap on some enormous arbitrary value once it's assembled here. So GM has the parts for a car that's assembled in Michigan imported from all over the globe for $5,000, then assembles it for a couple grand, slaps a $25,000 pricetag on the finished product and claims that $18,000 of value was miraculously "manufactured" here in the US. As-if.
So our "manufacturing" sector on paper rivals China's, hence your wonky data. The reality is, 95% of the actual work was done overseas for peanuts by an army of peasants with no civil rights. Or clean air. Or clean water.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the numbers cited for domestic manufacturing are total BS, and have been for a couple of decades. In order to truly support those numbers with a robust end to end manufacturing infrastructure and reasonable accounting, you'd need to have massive factories humming away all over the country, a la Germany. Instead virtually all of our manufacturing regions resemble a bombed out postwar landscape, while the few areas that still have marginally robust economies are characterized by office parks and high rises full of service sector employees, not manufacturing.
People who claim that there's nothing wrong with our manufacturing sector because of "the data" remind me of the guys 5 years ago who claimed that there was nothing wrong with the out of control housing market because all of those homes had been appraised at such-and-such a value and all of the borrowers were proven creditworthy. Uh-huh. Anybody who ever thought that a shack in the Oort Cloud of Riverside, CA was truly worth $500,000, or that a part-time janitor was truly qualified for a $500,000 loan stupidly placed their trust in obviously bogus, manipulated data. Their precious data was entirely detached from reality.
That's close to a conventional explanation, but off by 1/4 cycle. The extreme high/low points of the solar system's bobbing orbit are outside the galactic plane, and would be the low-danger points. The rough parts of the (approx. 60 million year) cycle are the two crossings through the central part of the galactic plane, which are the densest portions. During the crossings, the solar system is zipping through the galactic plane at a few hundred km/s, producing lots of collisions with whatever rubble happens to be there.
I've actually seen both mechanisms suggested - that crossing the plane is somewhat more disruptive than average, or that it's the change in motion at the end of each cycle which causes the Oort Cloud to be disrupted. There is I believe still some debate on the exact timing of when we hit the peak on the Z axis and when we cross the galactic plane (maybe not though - been awhile since I did any reading on the subject).
Of course, the density of matter in the region around us during the period of peak disruption, how close neighboring stars are, etc. etc., probably also plays a big role. If we're in the middle of a relatively empty patch there's less chance of hitting something, or of a nearby system or systems causing additional disruption to the Oort cloud on top of galactic tides and such. If we're in a more densely populated region, seems to me that would only increase the disruption to the Oort Cloud.
Check out the Wikipedia article on the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is thought to be well over a light year across. Out on its fringes the influence of the sun's gravity isn't much stronger than the pull of nearby stars, or the galactic core itself. So whenever the oscillation reverses direction and the sun begins moving back toward the galactic plane, a lot of stuff out on the fringes doesn't move neatly with it. Some of it will become gravitationally unbound from the solar system, but some of it will find its orbit perturbed and start heading inward. Whether that's enough stuff to lead to mass extinctions here on Earth is another matter.
This article mentions disk tides, encountered most strongly as the Sol system passes thru the galactic plane, as the possible culprit in disturbing the Oort Cloud on a regular basis:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/perturbing-the-oort-cloud
The sun doesn't just orbit the center of the galaxy, though. It also moves up and down relative to the galactic plane. Some have suggested that whenever the solar system reverses direction in that oscillation, very bad things happen, possibly due to the Oort Cloud experiencing some lag in reversing direction relative to the rest of the system. The sun essentially winds up off-center in the Oort Cloud, and in comparison to normal periods a lot of comets get kicked into the inner solar system as a result of this imbalance.
The cost has only gone up for those who exceed the bandwidth of the current plans. Precious few users do, at least at the moment. Presumably the caps will grow as average use grows (and if carriers like AT&T and O2 don't grow the caps, you can bet hungry competitors will).
I quite clearly remember paying $20/month for unlimited dialup in the mid 90s
With inflation, $20 in 1995 would be around $28 today, which is comparable to the $30 a month data charge for a smartphone. And of course, even today's wireless access is generally faster than dialup was in the mid 1990's.
Also, $30 may be your monthly data charge, but AT&T really forces you to pay something like $60/month as a minimum for iPhone service. That's far from a trivial cost for the vast majority of people.
Yes. And in the mid 1990's, you had to have telephone service in order to take advantage of dialup internet providers like AOL. That would have run you at least $20 a month in most markets. Then, if you made a standard amount of long distance calls (including "local" long distance in most large metro areas), you were looking at at least another $20 a month in LD charges. That's $40 for your phone, or about $55 in 2010 money. At $60 a month your cell phone provides you with hundreds of minutes of free long distance calling (unlimited in the late evenings and on weekends) in addition to the convenience of wireless. Not bad for about five extra dollars a month.
expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month
Wait, $30 a month for Internet service on a $300 phone or $600 tablet? Yeah, that's real steep, as opposed to, say, $30 a month for AOL on a $1,500 Windows 95 PC a decade or so ago.
The devices are actually a heck of a lot cheaper now than they were when the Internet took off. They're more capable and easier to use, too. Access is no more expensive, and it's wireless. Look for the cost - of both the devices and bandwidth - to continue to decline over time. This will help users to afford quite a bit of content, in the same way folks who cancel their cable TV can afford a Netflix subscription and a substantial number of downloads from iTunes or Amazon and still end up money ahead (and see exactly what they want to see when they want to see it).
It was never abandoned - it was released quite successfully as Rescue on Fractalus!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_on_Fractalus!
I think you underestimate just how cut off the dynamic range of FM radio is. Have you ever heard a song on the radio and then put in a CD of that same song to hear the difference? Both the high and low end frequencies are just plain chopped off on FM.
What you're talking about is the frequency responses, not the dynamic range. Frequency response details the range of frequencies, low to high, the medium provides. Dynamic range is the range of difference between the loudest and softest signals the medium provides.
Analog FM tends to provide around a 50 - 15kHz frequency response, which while not spectacular, is nothing to sneeze at (especially in the car). That having been said, FM has generally provided craptacular dynamic range for decades now, as broadcasters severely compress the dynamic range of their signals in order to broaden their coverage footprint. By decreasing the dynamic range down to just 10dB or so (as opposed to the 70+ dB afforded by most recording media) they can provide a noise-free signal to listeners over a much broader geographic area. Unfortunately, it sounds like crap.
Digital broadcasts don't have that limitation - regardless of the dynamic range of the content, you either get the signal or you don't. The content doesn't slowly get swamped by noise over distance - you go fairly abruptly from having a signal capable of being decoded to having nothing. There's no incentive to squash the dynamic range of the content, so most broadcasters don't.
You're using the worst-of-all-worlds compromise between hardware and software RAID: software-implemented RAID that is tied to a hardware dongle. Both hardware RAID and software RAID are objectively better than that sort of abomination.
By that standard, ALL software RAID solutions are a "worst-of-all-worlds" compromise between hardware & software. The OS & software RAID solution have to be able to see the drives - and have the correct software to detect, access and possibly rebuild the array - before they work. If yer handy dandy boot disc can't accomplish all that right off the bat, you're either gonna need to build a new box or access an existing box and build a boot disc that can get you back in touch with your drive controller, your drives and that array.
XP has supported software RAID for some time, but it has limits, and Intel's hybrid approach was substantially faster (although, as it turns out, a huge PITA when it failed under those circumstances).
Software RAID is still tied to a particular piece of software, though. I don't see how this necessarily leaves you any better off in the event of some kind of major RAID failure. You'll still need to have the correct software & drivers to boot your system and recover your RAID array.
RAID adds lots of complexity for the home user, and it doesn't seem to offer any substantial benefits in terms of data security. You get enhanced performance with certain RAID schemes, which may be important to a select group of users, but that's about it.