If you believe that solar is free, you're obviously a moron.
I didn’t say solar was free. I said that if you build a coal plant you then have to pay market prices at regular intervals to buy coal to burn in your plant. If, however, you build a solar power plant you do not have to pay for the sunlight. If you still do not understand this it is YOU who are the moron here.
Extraction costs is getting the coal out of the ground, processing costs is getting the raw coal into a usable state, [...] Contrast this with solar, where the is no digging up the sunlight, no processing the sunlight into a usable state, no shipping the sunlight [...]
A reminder that solar and wind plants are made of tangible stuff, almost entirely manufactured and constructed with fossil energy, and will use more fossil energy at the end of their life.
A reminder that as renewables displace fossil fuels that problem diminishes and then goes away as fossil fuels are phased out. Fossil fuels are a transient thing, a dying legacy technology, not a universal constant without which the universe will be sucked into a singularly and cease to exist.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration the US currently generates 1.4 percent of it's energy from solar, Egypt is about to cover 4% of it's energy needs from solar in one fell swoop.
No, they're not. The capacity factor of solar electric is pretty shit. If we assume that the CF of this plant will equal the best place in the USA (Arizona) then the annual output will be about 19% of the rated output. This means a total of 2,995 gWh per year. Since Egypt currently produces about 170,000 gWh per year of electricity, this new plant will only equal about 1.7% of their total electrical production.
It will of course be an even lower fraction of total energy production.
No extraction costs? What do you call the $2.8 billion to build the thing?
I'm not a geologist or anything, but I call that a construction cost. Which applies to any power generation station.
Really, this isn't hard. Most of the same costs like construction and transmission will apply to any power generation station. But with things like solar, wind, and hydro, you only need to build them in the right location, you do not need to pay to get the fuel.
Extraction costs is getting the coal out of the ground, processing costs is getting the raw coal into a usable state, shipping costs is loading it onto a barge and shipping it down to Florida, energy production costs is building a coal fired power-plant in Florida and buying coal at market prices so you can burn it and generate energy for Floridians to use to air condition their houses. Contrast this with solar, where the is no digging up the sunlight, no processing the sunlight into a usable state, no shipping the sunlight down the Mississippi on barges to Florida, you get to go straight to the power plant building part and there your costs are basically fixed since there are no fluctuations in the price of sunlight the price of sunlight is pretty much always $0.00. The real beauty of this idea is to use the sunlight you are trying to escape to cool down your house.
No extraction costs? What do you call the $2.8 billion to build the thing? That doesn't even count transmission.
What do you call $X billion to extract the oil and then $Y billion to build a refinery to process it into a usable state and/or ship it to the consumer?... which is the process with oil, natural gas and coal. You don't have to dig up the sunlight, you don't have to refine it, you don't have to ship it to the power-plant, it just shines down on you from the sky, onto your solar panels allowing you to go straight to the convert-it-into-electric-enery step.
Yep, 100% change overnight or it doesn't matter...
Nah...but 10% might mean something. And 4000 people employed there??? For less than 2GW peak? Seems more like a public works project than a serious attempt to go Green....
So. they're going to get 1.8GW of the ~25GW they produce in total? For 12 hours per day, or less, of course.
That seems to translate to maybe 4% of their electricity production.
Color me unimpressed....
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration the US currently generates 1.4 percent of it's energy from solar, Egypt is about to cover 4% of it's energy needs from solar in one fell swoop. I'd say that's rather impressive, especially since the Egyptians have by now probably caught on to the fact that (A) sunlight, unlike oil and gas, carries no extraction costs with it, (B) it comes with no geopolitical baggage and (C) Egypt has a fantastic abundance of both sunlight and cheap desert land to put solar plants on. Meanwhile in the US, the nation's president thinks the future of the nation's energy generation lies in coal and natural gas of which one is being out competed price wise by Wind and Solar and the other soon will be.
I find the lack of a thumb pad / home button already fairly offensive but the headphone jack on a device like that? Which people use on planes? Hell, god damned no.
Nope.
Every airline I've flown with allow Bluetooth these days except at takeoff and landing. The FAA has also rated "short range Bluetooth devices" as safe. Every single serious test I have every seen indicates that interference from electronic devices has zero effects on an aircraft's avionics except maybe (very remote possibility) at takeoff and landing.
Google has 85,000 employees. For a phishing attack to work, it has to work on the dumbest employee.
Since this implies that there were successful phishing attacks more than a year ago, congratulations on being better at security than the person in Google who gives the least shits.
You really are quite full of yourself. Just because somebody falls for a phishing attack that does not mean they are dumb. It just means that they don't know as much about computers and malware as you do.
Low-information democrats have poorly formed thoughts and opinions.
Yes, but Low-information democrats, by definition of the term 'Low-information democrats', have at least some data to back up what they are saying. While sub-optomal, 'low-information', still compares positively with non-information Republican Trumpkins who operate on 'truthiness', i.e. emotionally generated facts that are not backed up by a shred of empirical data.
However.... just like the time Microsoft was forced to stop dictating what software is pre-installed on PC's, government regulation here is just going to make things worse for consumers. For all it's faults and obscene privacy invasion, Google is a relatively benign overlord. If they loose the ability to dictate how phones are pre-configured, the end result will not be a utopia of phone carefully pre-configured to protect end-user privacy. It will be phone makers selling out and pre-configuring phones with malicious advertisement hijacking search engines, and app repositories stuffed with even more malware than Google's Play store.
Well, for one thing this is only an issue for Google in the EU and in that neck of the woods there will not be a bonanza of “pre-configuring phones with malicious advertisement hijacking search engines, and app repositories stuffed with even more malware than Google's Play store. Anybody selling phone a like that in the EU will be having a rather serious discussion with the EU comission about some very large fines. But, fret not, Google will be free to continue its anti-competitive practices outside of EU jurisdiction, that much is clear from president Trump’s recent tweets.
I wish that pricey service include the films and shows I want to watch,
That is a wonderfully non-specific demand. Do you mean all the old classics from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s? Those are owned by various entities that sell access to them to the highest bidder in an insanely complicated web of licensing deals that result in you not even getting a consistent catalogue of content on Netflix as you move from country to country. Or maybe you mean that you want all the latest Hollywood blockbusters to be available on Netflix? Same problem basically. Making it sound like Netflix does not want you to have access to this stuff is kind of unfair. There is never going to be a situation where you can sign up for a single streaming service and get access to all movies ever made, entertainment industry politics make that impossible.
Nothing will be different other than more local manufacturing.Modern automation is bringing in a lot of local manufacturing already. I don't see this as a problem. Even Chinese companies can't compete against local companies doing stupid injection molds of iPhone cases. Costs will drop overall over time.
I find all this anti-automation talk politically motivated as it's a win for local industry. The Chinese buying up commercial and industrial property making it impossibly expensive to do business and not having a care in the world if it's vacant for decades as proof of this.
I second that, with the caveat that any society that invests in education is going to come out of the automation transition stronger than the ones who systematically demolished their public education system because they figured for-profit corporations would do it better, so that they could finance tax breaks for the wealthy, because they simply regarded education as a 'useless breeding ground for intellectual elitism' or whatever other reason they did it for.
It would not do you much good. Up until now even foreigners could buy campaign ads in the US with impunity. People who have tried to trace money flowing into PACs have basically hit a wall of shell companies and obscure financial service companies with unclear ownership. Now Google, Facebook, Twitter et-al are checking only that ads are paid for by a US entity. I'm willing to bet that all that will change is that from now on the last entity the money is routed through before it ends up in Google, Facebook and Twitter's coffers will be a US based shell company in order to pass Google, Facebook and Twitter's pathetic attempts at vetting. The situation in Europe is even worse. The Russians are actually openly financing Fascist parties like FN for example, neither the FN nor the Russians are even bothering to hide it.
Employers "ghost" people all the time. Sometimes it's for legal reasons, like not hiring a candidate because of their race/religion/etc so you don't want to give them a reason to sue, but honestly it's mostly because they don't care and there's 3 more applicants waiting for your spot.
I have absolutely no reservations about ghosting employers. Not only do they ghost applicants on a regular basis or turn them down without any explanation with some boilerplate rejection letter, I've been asked to so many interviews where I was confronted by some corporate dingleberry who had obviously been too lazy to read even the front page of my CV (which describes the career of a veteran Unix/C/C++ developer and takes about 60 seconds to read) ask me how good I am at C# and various types of Windows programming. I don't like having my time wasted by lazy HR staff, especially when I paid for a long-ish distance train ticket or something to get to the interview and I don't think it is in any way discourteous or unacceptable to treat employers like they treat everybody else.
For people who put down a $1,000 deposit for a Tesla Model 3 as long as two years ago, the big day has arrived.
Not to dump on Tesla's, they are nice cars, but waiting two years for a car? You have to be a major fanboy to do that... and people around here call Apple users all kinds of ugly names for queueing in front of a shop for a mobile phone 24hrs before release day.
"This occurred after the [family] connected the duplicate camera to their network and ignored the warning prompt that notified: 'Camera is already paired to an account' and left the camera running," she added.
And there's a big part of the problem: the phrase 'Camera is already paired to an account' is just so much word salad to the average user. They will look at it for a moment, briefly wonder what those words might mean, then click through and forget about them.
If you want people to take such warnings seriously, you need to make it much more explicit, as in: "WARNING: The camera is already paired to another user's account. If you continue to use this camera, that user will be able to view the images from it without your knowledge. Please contact Swann technical support at xxx-xxx-xxxx immediately."
I think the problem here is that they put a networked camera inside their own house in the first place. I set up and configured equipment from Swann for my sister. They retailers sell it to people as being user-installable and user-configurable. The first is generally true but the latter is not. Their systems aren't that bad (apart from this issue apparently) and not hard to configure if you bother reading the instructions. But if you want to get the remote access via their app to work it requires you to have a static IP address. Now try to get a hold of somebody at Sky internet customer service who even knows what that is. I got passed on from Pontius to Pilate and thence to 2nd level support before I finally go a hold of somebody with a clue what a static IP address is. Having said that, I'm fine with filming what's happening outside of the house. I could possibly get used to an air-gapped camera system inside the house that feeds video to a computer which stores it on an encrypted disk but even that I'd be hesitant about. I'd feel much safer with outside cameras only, an alarm system and two big, suspicious minded and, very, very ill tempered guard dogs roaming the house at all times.
So apple copied HP. I hope HP goes thermonuclear and sues apple. apple were thieves back then and they are thieves now.
HP and Sony Ericsson who also came out with a no keyboard and no keypad phone around the same time. Not that it matters much, both these devices were essentially tablets with a mobile networking chip built in and it does not take an Einstein level intellect to figure out the advantages of putting a networking capability into a tablet. As for tablets in general, they have been around since the 1980s. Fun fact, Apple released one of the very first ones in 1987. It was called the Apple Newton. It had no keyboard, just a big touch screen.
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If you believe that solar is free, you're obviously a moron.
I didn’t say solar was free. I said that if you build a coal plant you then have to pay market prices at regular intervals to buy coal to burn in your plant. If, however, you build a solar power plant you do not have to pay for the sunlight. If you still do not understand this it is YOU who are the moron here.
Extraction costs is getting the coal out of the ground, processing costs is getting the raw coal into a usable state, [...] Contrast this with solar, where the is no digging up the sunlight, no processing the sunlight into a usable state, no shipping the sunlight [...]
A reminder that solar and wind plants are made of tangible stuff, almost entirely manufactured and constructed with fossil energy, and will use more fossil energy at the end of their life.
A reminder that as renewables displace fossil fuels that problem diminishes and then goes away as fossil fuels are phased out. Fossil fuels are a transient thing, a dying legacy technology, not a universal constant without which the universe will be sucked into a singularly and cease to exist.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration the US currently generates 1.4 percent of it's energy from solar, Egypt is about to cover 4% of it's energy needs from solar in one fell swoop.
No, they're not. The capacity factor of solar electric is pretty shit. If we assume that the CF of this plant will equal the best place in the USA (Arizona) then the annual output will be about 19% of the rated output. This means a total of 2,995 gWh per year. Since Egypt currently produces about 170,000 gWh per year of electricity, this new plant will only equal about 1.7% of their total electrical production.
It will of course be an even lower fraction of total energy production.
And yet 1,7% is still more than the US.
No extraction costs? What do you call the $2.8 billion to build the thing?
I'm not a geologist or anything, but I call that a construction cost. Which applies to any power generation station.
Really, this isn't hard. Most of the same costs like construction and transmission will apply to any power generation station. But with things like solar, wind, and hydro, you only need to build them in the right location, you do not need to pay to get the fuel.
Extraction costs is getting the coal out of the ground, processing costs is getting the raw coal into a usable state, shipping costs is loading it onto a barge and shipping it down to Florida, energy production costs is building a coal fired power-plant in Florida and buying coal at market prices so you can burn it and generate energy for Floridians to use to air condition their houses. Contrast this with solar, where the is no digging up the sunlight, no processing the sunlight into a usable state, no shipping the sunlight down the Mississippi on barges to Florida, you get to go straight to the power plant building part and there your costs are basically fixed since there are no fluctuations in the price of sunlight the price of sunlight is pretty much always $0.00. The real beauty of this idea is to use the sunlight you are trying to escape to cool down your house.
No extraction costs? What do you call the $2.8 billion to build the thing? That doesn't even count transmission.
What do you call $X billion to extract the oil and then $Y billion to build a refinery to process it into a usable state and/or ship it to the consumer? ... which is the process with oil, natural gas and coal. You don't have to dig up the sunlight, you don't have to refine it, you don't have to ship it to the power-plant, it just shines down on you from the sky, onto your solar panels allowing you to go straight to the convert-it-into-electric-enery step.
Nah...but 10% might mean something. And 4000 people employed there??? For less than 2GW peak? Seems more like a public works project than a serious attempt to go Green....
One more time ... it's an iterative process.
So. they're going to get 1.8GW of the ~25GW they produce in total? For 12 hours per day, or less, of course.
That seems to translate to maybe 4% of their electricity production.
Color me unimpressed....
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration the US currently generates 1.4 percent of it's energy from solar, Egypt is about to cover 4% of it's energy needs from solar in one fell swoop. I'd say that's rather impressive, especially since the Egyptians have by now probably caught on to the fact that (A) sunlight, unlike oil and gas, carries no extraction costs with it, (B) it comes with no geopolitical baggage and (C) Egypt has a fantastic abundance of both sunlight and cheap desert land to put solar plants on. Meanwhile in the US, the nation's president thinks the future of the nation's energy generation lies in coal and natural gas of which one is being out competed price wise by Wind and Solar and the other soon will be.
I find the lack of a thumb pad / home button already fairly offensive but the headphone jack on a device like that? Which people use on planes? Hell, god damned no.
Nope.
Every airline I've flown with allow Bluetooth these days except at takeoff and landing. The FAA has also rated "short range Bluetooth devices" as safe. Every single serious test I have every seen indicates that interference from electronic devices has zero effects on an aircraft's avionics except maybe (very remote possibility) at takeoff and landing.
try plugging in your headset while charging the phone, then you will understand why you need dongles.
1) Plug the charger lead into the phone.
2) Put on your Bluetooth headphones.
3) Listen to music while the phone charges, no dongle.
I don't see the problem.
Google has 85,000 employees. For a phishing attack to work, it has to work on the dumbest employee.
Since this implies that there were successful phishing attacks more than a year ago, congratulations on being better at security than the person in Google who gives the least shits.
You really are quite full of yourself. Just because somebody falls for a phishing attack that does not mean they are dumb. It just means that they don't know as much about computers and malware as you do.
Low-information democrats have poorly formed thoughts and opinions.
Yes, but Low-information democrats, by definition of the term 'Low-information democrats', have at least some data to back up what they are saying. While sub-optomal, 'low-information', still compares positively with non-information Republican Trumpkins who operate on 'truthiness', i.e. emotionally generated facts that are not backed up by a shred of empirical data.
However.... just like the time Microsoft was forced to stop dictating what software is pre-installed on PC's, government regulation here is just going to make things worse for consumers. For all it's faults and obscene privacy invasion, Google is a relatively benign overlord. If they loose the ability to dictate how phones are pre-configured, the end result will not be a utopia of phone carefully pre-configured to protect end-user privacy. It will be phone makers selling out and pre-configuring phones with malicious advertisement hijacking search engines, and app repositories stuffed with even more malware than Google's Play store.
Well, for one thing this is only an issue for Google in the EU and in that neck of the woods there will not be a bonanza of “pre-configuring phones with malicious advertisement hijacking search engines, and app repositories stuffed with even more malware than Google's Play store. Anybody selling phone a like that in the EU will be having a rather serious discussion with the EU comission about some very large fines. But, fret not, Google will be free to continue its anti-competitive practices outside of EU jurisdiction, that much is clear from president Trump’s recent tweets.
Fill it so high that America gags, then drain it the tiniest bit and try to get everyone to ignore the stink of dried out shit around their necks.
Trump's version of swamp draining was simple, he drained the swamp into his administration.
I wish that pricey service include the films and shows I want to watch,
That is a wonderfully non-specific demand. Do you mean all the old classics from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s? Those are owned by various entities that sell access to them to the highest bidder in an insanely complicated web of licensing deals that result in you not even getting a consistent catalogue of content on Netflix as you move from country to country. Or maybe you mean that you want all the latest Hollywood blockbusters to be available on Netflix? Same problem basically. Making it sound like Netflix does not want you to have access to this stuff is kind of unfair. There is never going to be a situation where you can sign up for a single streaming service and get access to all movies ever made, entertainment industry politics make that impossible.
Cool guys don't look at [market] explosions.
So, you guys have invented a new word for 'bubble' ...
Nothing will be different other than more local manufacturing. Modern automation is bringing in a lot of local manufacturing already. I don't see this as a problem. Even Chinese companies can't compete against local companies doing stupid injection molds of iPhone cases. Costs will drop overall over time.
I find all this anti-automation talk politically motivated as it's a win for local industry. The Chinese buying up commercial and industrial property making it impossibly expensive to do business and not having a care in the world if it's vacant for decades as proof of this.
I second that, with the caveat that any society that invests in education is going to come out of the automation transition stronger than the ones who systematically demolished their public education system because they figured for-profit corporations would do it better, so that they could finance tax breaks for the wealthy, because they simply regarded education as a 'useless breeding ground for intellectual elitism' or whatever other reason they did it for.
As Cryptocurrency Values Plummet, Graphics Card Pricing Improves Dramatically ....
Tulip bulb market crashes, flowerpot pricing improves dramatically ....
Cool. Now show who has already PAID for ads.
It would not do you much good. Up until now even foreigners could buy campaign ads in the US with impunity. People who have tried to trace money flowing into PACs have basically hit a wall of shell companies and obscure financial service companies with unclear ownership. Now Google, Facebook, Twitter et-al are checking only that ads are paid for by a US entity. I'm willing to bet that all that will change is that from now on the last entity the money is routed through before it ends up in Google, Facebook and Twitter's coffers will be a US based shell company in order to pass Google, Facebook and Twitter's pathetic attempts at vetting. The situation in Europe is even worse. The Russians are actually openly financing Fascist parties like FN for example, neither the FN nor the Russians are even bothering to hide it.
Employers "ghost" people all the time. Sometimes it's for legal reasons, like not hiring a candidate because of their race/religion/etc so you don't want to give them a reason to sue, but honestly it's mostly because they don't care and there's 3 more applicants waiting for your spot.
I have absolutely no reservations about ghosting employers. Not only do they ghost applicants on a regular basis or turn them down without any explanation with some boilerplate rejection letter, I've been asked to so many interviews where I was confronted by some corporate dingleberry who had obviously been too lazy to read even the front page of my CV (which describes the career of a veteran Unix/C/C++ developer and takes about 60 seconds to read) ask me how good I am at C# and various types of Windows programming. I don't like having my time wasted by lazy HR staff, especially when I paid for a long-ish distance train ticket or something to get to the interview and I don't think it is in any way discourteous or unacceptable to treat employers like they treat everybody else.
1984 is here and large parts of the population are volunteering to be a part of it.
Yup, and Senator Amidala was right, liberty actually seems to be dying to the sound of thunderous applause.
For people who put down a $1,000 deposit for a Tesla Model 3 as long as two years ago, the big day has arrived.
Not to dump on Tesla's, they are nice cars, but waiting two years for a car? You have to be a major fanboy to do that ... and people around here call Apple users all kinds of ugly names for queueing in front of a shop for a mobile phone 24hrs before release day.
That! is! your!!!! interpretation! of! the! verbal! language! Trump! is! speaking! which! says! more! about! you!!!!!! than! the! President's! language!
All I did was 'accuse' the man of being enthusiastic and you have a snowflake meltdown. Why?
Well, Donald Trump regularly uses between 10 and 20. I'd say that indicates a pretty high degree of enthusiasm.
And there's a big part of the problem: the phrase 'Camera is already paired to an account' is just so much word salad to the average user. They will look at it for a moment, briefly wonder what those words might mean, then click through and forget about them.
If you want people to take such warnings seriously, you need to make it much more explicit, as in: "WARNING: The camera is already paired to another user's account. If you continue to use this camera, that user will be able to view the images from it without your knowledge. Please contact Swann technical support at xxx-xxx-xxxx immediately."
I think the problem here is that they put a networked camera inside their own house in the first place. I set up and configured equipment from Swann for my sister. They retailers sell it to people as being user-installable and user-configurable. The first is generally true but the latter is not. Their systems aren't that bad (apart from this issue apparently) and not hard to configure if you bother reading the instructions. But if you want to get the remote access via their app to work it requires you to have a static IP address. Now try to get a hold of somebody at Sky internet customer service who even knows what that is. I got passed on from Pontius to Pilate and thence to 2nd level support before I finally go a hold of somebody with a clue what a static IP address is. Having said that, I'm fine with filming what's happening outside of the house. I could possibly get used to an air-gapped camera system inside the house that feeds video to a computer which stores it on an encrypted disk but even that I'd be hesitant about. I'd feel much safer with outside cameras only, an alarm system and two big, suspicious minded and, very, very ill tempered guard dogs roaming the house at all times.
So apple copied HP. I hope HP goes thermonuclear and sues apple. apple were thieves back then and they are thieves now.
HP and Sony Ericsson who also came out with a no keyboard and no keypad phone around the same time. Not that it matters much, both these devices were essentially tablets with a mobile networking chip built in and it does not take an Einstein level intellect to figure out the advantages of putting a networking capability into a tablet. As for tablets in general, they have been around since the 1980s. Fun fact, Apple released one of the very first ones in 1987. It was called the Apple Newton. It had no keyboard, just a big touch screen.