I absolutely do not understand why anyone would consider embedding solar panels underneath clear concrete[1] for a road.
I'm not an engineer but wouldn't the weight and/or vibrations from cars and trucks, over time, possibly mess up the electrical connections or the panels themselves?
I don't know but It sure is nice that somebody is ready to build something like this and find out. This is not the first project like this, there is 1km stretch of solar road in Tourouvre-au-Perche that powers the village's entire grid of street lights. Meanwhile Trump is working hard to take America back to good'ole patriotic coal, oil and gas (cue patriotic music and warm fuzzy patriotic feelings). Renewable energy companies in N-Europe, Germany and China are celebrating Trump as a bonus period of 4-8 years in which to leave the United States behind in renewables research and development. The best part is that US conservatives are still harping on about how gas is way cheaper than solar repeating the old mantra about how China is not taking responsibility and that the US won't do so until China does and yet the Chinese and the Germans/Britons/Dutch/Scandinavians combined are plowing well over a trillion dollars into renewables over the next two decades.
+1 for mentioning HEMA. It's a great sport and my brother is very good at it. Is it European only?
I haven't been doing HEMA long but there is a lively community in the US, Canada and down to S-America judging by the people I ran into at the last newbie course I attended. Japanese fencing does not really come under HEMA since it is European only but many people who go to these events come there from Kendo or from Olympic saber fencing like I did but it is still fun to mix things up and see what happens, like Rapier vs. Katana or Walpurgis sword and buckler vs. Katana (or even arming sword and full sized shield vs Katana or Katana and Wakizashi) which is another thing I'd like to seen in Star Wars, force-field shields and bucklers there is no reason for not having hand held shield generators if you can fit enough energy to contain a plasma stream in a sword hilt.
Just like the rest of these children's movies for stupid kids who don't know shit, especially not physics.
Advertisement for action figures for children, it should be forbidden or at least called what it is.
Hell they didn't even get the name for the stupid light_sabers_ right?
Sabers are _curved_, that's what differentiates them from a sword.
Firstly, sabers are swords just like a Ferrari is a car. Secondly, while the saber started out as a curved bladed adopted by Europeans through contact with the Ottomans, by the 19th and early 20th century sabers became progressively more straight bladed. The US Model 1913 Cavalry saber for example, had a completely straight blade as did many other contemporary sabers. but you are right in that the 'light saber' has nothing in common with any kind of saber. If the lightsaber is anything it's a kind of 'laser shikomizue' or something (one of the few straight bladed Japanese swords I can think of other than a Shinobigatana). Kylo Ren's weapon is more of a 'laser longsword' and he uses it a bit like one too. That was kind of interesting to watch because the 'light sabers' in Star Wars are used in a somewhat 'katana-esque' manner and it is always fun to see Talhoffer and Liechtenauer's ideas clash with the Japanese mindset. Mind you it's way more fun to watch at a HEMA event where the Longswordsman and the Katanna fanboy are both purists and both of them actually know precisely what they are doing.
"Subsidies for renewables, which far exceed those of fossil fuels, are used to make them appear cost effective."
No, they are used so that people will have an incentive to adopt renewables, thus creating an economy of scale whereas renewables become commonplace. It's not just "for looks"
That statement should be in the past tense. Fossil fuel extraction costs are an upward trending proposition because of increasing extraction costs. Once in a while you get dips like you got with the shale bubble but on the whole the trend is upward. The price of renewable energy technology is on on a downward trend due to economy of scale, you don't have do drill through the earth's crust or dig away mountains to get sun and wind. We are now at a place where renewables are getting cheaper than coal and gas without subsidies. With battery technology undergoing an economy of scale and engineering revolution things do not look good for fossil fuels. Anybody buying a coal or gas fired power plant these days is being sold a pup.
Why do you hate freedom of choice? Instead of being condemned to have health care, you can freely choose between having health insurance and eating.
I don't hate freedom, it is you wing-nuts who get off on demonising the concept of insurance. Another thing is that even though I live in a country that has implemented many of the blasphemous ideas of social democracy I can afford to BOTH pay for health insurance AND eat. Now ask yourself: why do people in your country have to choose between health insurance and eating?... and this even though you have such a wonderful for maximum possible profit healthcare system and I have a single payer healthcare system conceived of in the socialist bowes of hell by lucifer himself. And why do such systems all over Europe costs significantly less to run per patient than your for maximum possible profit system does?
Yet the products, should they reach patients, are likely to cost as much as $1 million for both eyes.
Ah, the wonders and joys of a privatised helthcare systems run by Wall Street hyenas out to make the biggest possible profit off of your misery with the help of your elected repesentatives in Congress. You pay as you go and it is much cheaper for the individual citizen than the socialist horrors of a universal single payer healthcare system and it is so much more humane.
I make very few attempts to print hardcopies of documents these days and when I do the printer usually develops some problem. I am now pondering the hypothesis that printers are malevolent sentient robots who don't like me and pretend to break down every time I try to print a hardcopy of anything at all
To be fair "these days" was referring to 2011, when that article by Sanders was written. A time when the Venezuelan economy was rebounding. Two years before Maduro was even sworn in.
To be really fair, when someone predicts something and their prediction turns out accurate, then their hypothesis is *probably* correct.
Like if, for example, someone in 2011 said "Socialist policies don't really work, mostly", and Sanders points to Venezuela as an argument that they do indeed work, the future collapse of Venezuela provides support for the statement "Socialist policies don't really work, mostly", not for whatever counter-argument Sanders was attempting to make.
Another example to clarify: if I were to say, right now, that BTC is not really a currency and you point to its use by $fraction of retailers as proof that it is a currency, any future decline in BTC acceptance by retailers adds support for my assertion, not for your counter-argument. A future rise in % BTC acceptance by retailers may provide the support for your counter-argument, but current cherry-picked examples do not.
Predictive power beats single-data-point examples when proving or disproving a hypothesis. Pointing to a single example only works when the assertion is an existentialist one ("All $FOO are unworkable" needs only a single counter-example to disprove, while "$FOO is not long-term viable" cannot be disproved with a single counter-example).
The FUBAR otherwise known as the Venezuelan economy is what happens when you over-leverage your economy and bet on oil prices permanently remaining at an all time high. Conflating Bernie's brand of social democracy with Chavista style socialism and then pointing at Vesezuela as an example that Bernie's ideas don't work is simplistic to say the least.
If the leaders of a democracy are going to treat its citizens as mere background noise...
The US is not a democracy, full stop.
The US is a representative republic. And they *did* listen to the people, the people who elected their party and president to represent them with this internet deregulation as one of the campaign promises prior to the election. Elections have consequences, particularly for contentious executive-branch Agency/Dept./Bureau/etc administrative unilateral fiats. Same thing as with Executive Orders. What one administration can do, another can undo.
Strat
Bollocks, republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive things. The USA is a democratic republic, or more specifically a federal republic with features of a representative democracy where where elected individuals represent the citizen body in government. If you require further proof read the writings of the founding fathers, the federalist papers and a whole mountain of other literature on the subject although most of us don't need to do more than note the fact that every two years you guys go out and directly elect congress critters and senators that are supposed to represent you in the US congress. Furthermore every four years you also directly elect a bunch of people that in turn elect a president on your behalf. That last bit is a quite strange arrangement to be sure but most of the rest of your process of choosing your leaders makes the US a republic with a form of representative democracy even if it has some esoteric features. What the US isn't is a pure direct democracy but then very few countries practice pure direct democracy except maybe certain parts of Switzerland where all the oath brothers and oath sisters (aka. the citizenry) assemble in public places all over each canton (since even the Appenzellers have finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age and now allow women to vote) and the entire citizenry then votes on legislation without any representatives acting as intermediaries. Obviously such a system would have been rather hard to coordinate in the US of the 18th century so, unsurprisingly, the founding fathers of your country went the representative way. The problem the USA has, like many other countries with representative democratic systems, is that not only have your democratically elected representatives come to believe that they are elected by you, the people, to serve the interests of the oligarchs who stuff their pockets full of money, they have convinced large portions of the electorate of this as well. In my estimation and that of many Americans this is a process that is in dire need of begin reversed and Ajit Pai is just one living breathing and smugly grinning example of why.
Call your representatives and tell them what you want. Congress can pass a law to ensure net neutrality but they have to know it matters to voters. Also, if they won't support it then you need to get involved politically. If your preferred political party does not support net neutrality then you may want to reexamine why you are aligning yourself with them.
Call your representative? Get a million angry voters together, head down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and shout with one voice, "Give us a net neutrality law you corrupt skunk!", then head over to the senate building and repeat the exercise except the last word should be in the plural. Democracy works best when the politicians are scared stiff of the electorate.
Now THAT would be an event I'd gladly pay to see. Ajit? You available?
I'm not so sure, if Ajit fell down a reactor shaft there would probably just be a loud farting noise followed by the overwhelming stink of skunk perfume instead of the awesome flash of plasma they got out of Palpatine.
Mark Hamill seems to forget that, in the Star Wars universe, the light sabre lost to the politicians scheming... Palpatines manoeuvres in the senate got him far further than wielding a light sabre ever did.
Pity then that he could not maneuver his way out of getting thrown down a reactor shaft.
. . . the major problem with the FCC’s move: It forced ISPs into an 80-year-old framework designed for the telephone monopolies of a much different era. Those regulations were more concerned about things like controlling market power than, say, promoting innovation.
Except this is exactly the issue we are worried about. How is it a much different era? Did companies stop being greedy? Did they stop consolidating to control massive swaths of customers? How is this era any different?
I don't think companies stopped being greedy. What is different is that the idea the internet should be a level playing field has breathed it's last breath because Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of the big players who used to fight for net neutrality realised they can afford to pay the extortionists their pound of flesh, that given the utterly corrupt nature of the Trump administration they have to and finally that the real threat is not the extortionists, it is scrappy startups with a better business model and product than them. These startups will from now on be competing at an even greater disadvantage because people have now accepted that is both normal and desirable for the extortionists to ensure that the bandwidth of smaller players is limited and their customer's connections are regularly interrupted by 'technical problems' unless they pay a ransom. The death of net neutrality will work to the advantage of both the extortionists who will now get their regular infusion of mafia style protection payments and the established big players. So in future expect any upcoming competitor who threatens somebody like Google for example and starts to chew up their dominant market share to die a death of a million connection error messages because Google felt threatened and and crapppified their service by pulling the protection money strings so that Google can eventually buy up the corpse and its patents and technology with it. Just ask Eric Schmidt, he'll be the first to tell you how proud he is to call this: "capitalism working as intended" (... and to hell with Adam Smith).
Let's not give the Tzar of Russia any more credit than he deserves, he propped up the Assad regime but that was about all he did. It was Iranian, American and even European backed forces that did just as much if not more to destroy ISIS in Iraq and the same goes for large parts of Syria. It was US/German/French training and delivery of Milan missiles along with US and Iranian small arms and ammo deliveries that stopped ISIS from overrunning the entire north of Iraq while the Iraqi national army that Nouri al-Maliki purged of any soldiers who knew what they were doing was still trying to figure out which end of their rifles was the one the bullets come out of, and lets not forget the importance of US/NATO and even Iranian air support either. Giving the Russians sole credit for destroying ISIS is a joke.
I don't know the relationship (if any) between the two, but is it just coincidence this is happening less than a month after this:
https://uawire.org/russia-offe...
Also, is this something that can be attributed to the 'handing over' of certain services from the US to the UN?
It is. The first thing the UN decided to do when they got control of those services was to redirect all the "Herbal Viagra" and "Penis Enlargement" junk mails to Russia, specifically the address: vladimir.putin@kremlin.ru.
There are certain locations where solar and / or wind energy will not suffice due to the climate. 'Green' houses were tried in Michigan a while back, didn't last a single winter.
Everyone talks about a smaller foot print. But you have to have far more turbines and panels to replace a single coal/gas plant. So what is the footprint of a 1000 turbines? Doesn't it take nearly 1000 turbines to replace a single coal/gas plant?
A wind farm with 100 turbines would produce about 2-4 GW of power depending on the type of turbine. Larger wind farms are usually smaller than that. They consists of turbines in the 1.-4 Mw range but I have seen bigger ones. A wind farm of 2 MW producing 200 MW occupies an area of about 12 x 12 km. But building nothing but big wind farms is not what normally happens. What they are doing in Germany and Denmark for example is mixing together large wind farms with small clusters of them, dotted over the landscape and supplementing that with rooftop solar installations and batteries. Many farms in Northern Germany for example have wind turbines in the fields and every roof of every building and rain shelter on the farm is completely covered with solar panels. Same for the surrounding towns and villages. Apartment blocks in cities often also have their roof covered in solar panels and you are now seeing wind turbines even inside cities.
As for carbon footprint. A wind turbine represents a fairly large carbon footprint during manufacture and after that a minimal carbon footprint during decades of maintenance and operation. A coal plant represents not only a large carbon footprint during construction but also a large and steady carbon footprint during decades of operational use and it also generated other forms of pollution like for example sulphur dioxide. Gas plants also represent an enormous carbon footprint in construction and especially over their lifespan. The idea that a wind farm over 30 years of operation is going to match the carbon footprint of an equivalent (in power output) coal plant or even a gas power plant is quite frankly laughable. All studies I have seen show an order of magnitude lower carbon footprint (kg of CO2 per KWh) for solar and wind compared to coal, gas and biomass and it is usually wind that has the lowest footprint at about 1/4th the footprint of solar which itself has about 1/20th the footprint of coal/gas.
I'd like to see laws on the books that would require new commercial developments to include solar+battery for each housing unit.
This is one of the dumbest things we could do. In order to make a real change, alternative energy HAS TO ACTUALLY MAKE ECONOMIC SENSE. Requiring companies to buy their products regardless of the efficiency will take away incentives to improve and impede progress.
"Feel good" subsidies and mandates only work in the 1st World, and nearly all growth in energy use is coming in the 3rd World, where they can't afford such foolishness. India isn't going to switch from coal to solar until solar is cheaper.
Define ECONOMIC SENSE. Is economic sense calculating the total cost of using renewable energy sources AND their minimal carbon footprint?... Or is economic sense to use coal/oil/gas count only the price of extraction/transport/energy-generation? Because that is how things usually work with people arguing that fossil fuels make more economic sense than renewables. The fossil fuel pundits never count the cost of the enormous carbon footprint of coal/oil/gas and the cost of the damage that carbon footprint does. Once you factor that in, the picture of the argument that coal/oil/gas make superior economic sense looks a lot weaker. The basic truth is that coal/oil/gas are wreaking havoc in the life support system of this planet (hint: the part of your environment that produces oxygen for you to breathe) that makes them a liability, economically, environmentally and even in the USA they will eventually become a liability politically. Coal/oil/gas is already a political liability in much of the rest of the world. But do continue to argue in favour of coal/oil/gas and ignore the fact that wind/solar/battery are already cheaper than coal and according to the summary they are now getting cheaper than gas. You seem like to type who'll enjoy being like one of those guys 20 years ago who kept arguing long after the writing was on the wall that digital cameras will never replace film cameras because of the superior quality of film.
Look, if we're serious about addressing climate change then we'll need to ramp solar and wind to the point where they are widespread enough that politicians will stop turning a blind eye to the serious damage being done. This of course means either campaign finance reform or clean energy companies bribing politicians better. I'd like to see laws on the books that would require new commercial developments to include solar+battery for each housing unit.
The good news is that solar+battery installations are recursive self-improvement as each installation reduces the amount of emissions while decreasing the market price of solar installations. Elon really needs to get his battery factory building in gear!
There is one way and one way only to phase out fossil fuels. You have to roll up your sleeves and make solar and wind so totally ridiculously cheaper than coal or natural gas that the bottom will fall out of the natural gas market because you can bet your bottom dollar that there is a delegation from the natural-gas/fracking industries in the White House now pounding a table yelling: "Something must be done Mr. President!!!". Next thing you know a delegation is on it's way to WTO headquarters to lobby for import tariffs on wind/solar tech to protect fossil fuels (if they haven't done all these things already) and the only way to beat that is make the alternatives so much cheaper they cannot be ignored even with protective tariffs in place. When the fossil fuel barons run to the politicians for protection, like the coal lobby has already done, you know you are winning.
Russia today has an economy the size of Australia...bunch of geldings reminiscing about their balls. The biggest threat they present is their technicians or engineers getting jobs in nations that are actual threats.
A less American centric NATO isn't a benefit to Russia. Rather the opposite. Russia's direct neighbors are LESS likely to tolerate their bullshit than America is.
And here I was thinking that he biggest threat Russia poses consists of ~7000 nuclear warheads.
I can't help but wonder whether these Russian fake news accounts were online and active trying to get Roy Moore elected in the special senate race. Trump would have likely requested Putin to try to tip this one too in his favor.
No, Putin has re-allocated all his election rigging assets to the nor important task of rigging the upcoming Russian presidential elections.
And basically this is entirely invalidated by designing the phone such that the battery is not user-replaceable.
Apple designed a device that will intentionally run slower without the end user paying someone else to disassemble the phone to replace parts. Given the cost to service an older device weighed against the cost of a new device, a lot of users are going to opt for the new device, especially if they don't realize that the reason the phone is operating poorly is because of the battery.
This throttling theory has been bench-marked and debunked:
https://www.futuremark.com/pre...
MacRumours even featured a discussion of the above benchmark report: https://www.macrumors.com/2017...
What he is describing there is a declining benchmark rating as the battery charge is diminished. That could just as easily be a bug in the power managment system as some grand conspiracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I absolutely do not understand why anyone would consider embedding solar panels underneath clear concrete[1] for a road.
I'm not an engineer but wouldn't the weight and/or vibrations from cars and trucks, over time, possibly mess up the electrical connections or the panels themselves?
I don't know but It sure is nice that somebody is ready to build something like this and find out. This is not the first project like this, there is 1km stretch of solar road in Tourouvre-au-Perche that powers the village's entire grid of street lights. Meanwhile Trump is working hard to take America back to good'ole patriotic coal, oil and gas (cue patriotic music and warm fuzzy patriotic feelings). Renewable energy companies in N-Europe, Germany and China are celebrating Trump as a bonus period of 4-8 years in which to leave the United States behind in renewables research and development. The best part is that US conservatives are still harping on about how gas is way cheaper than solar repeating the old mantra about how China is not taking responsibility and that the US won't do so until China does and yet the Chinese and the Germans/Britons/Dutch/Scandinavians combined are plowing well over a trillion dollars into renewables over the next two decades.
+1 for mentioning HEMA. It's a great sport and my brother is very good at it. Is it European only?
I haven't been doing HEMA long but there is a lively community in the US, Canada and down to S-America judging by the people I ran into at the last newbie course I attended. Japanese fencing does not really come under HEMA since it is European only but many people who go to these events come there from Kendo or from Olympic saber fencing like I did but it is still fun to mix things up and see what happens, like Rapier vs. Katana or Walpurgis sword and buckler vs. Katana (or even arming sword and full sized shield vs Katana or Katana and Wakizashi) which is another thing I'd like to seen in Star Wars, force-field shields and bucklers there is no reason for not having hand held shield generators if you can fit enough energy to contain a plasma stream in a sword hilt.
Just like the rest of these children's movies for stupid kids who don't know shit, especially not physics. Advertisement for action figures for children, it should be forbidden or at least called what it is.
Hell they didn't even get the name for the stupid light_sabers_ right? Sabers are _curved_, that's what differentiates them from a sword.
Firstly, sabers are swords just like a Ferrari is a car. Secondly, while the saber started out as a curved bladed adopted by Europeans through contact with the Ottomans, by the 19th and early 20th century sabers became progressively more straight bladed. The US Model 1913 Cavalry saber for example, had a completely straight blade as did many other contemporary sabers. but you are right in that the 'light saber' has nothing in common with any kind of saber. If the lightsaber is anything it's a kind of 'laser shikomizue' or something (one of the few straight bladed Japanese swords I can think of other than a Shinobigatana). Kylo Ren's weapon is more of a 'laser longsword' and he uses it a bit like one too. That was kind of interesting to watch because the 'light sabers' in Star Wars are used in a somewhat 'katana-esque' manner and it is always fun to see Talhoffer and Liechtenauer's ideas clash with the Japanese mindset. Mind you it's way more fun to watch at a HEMA event where the Longswordsman and the Katanna fanboy are both purists and both of them actually know precisely what they are doing.
"Subsidies for renewables, which far exceed those of fossil fuels, are used to make them appear cost effective."
No, they are used so that people will have an incentive to adopt renewables, thus creating an economy of scale whereas renewables become commonplace. It's not just "for looks"
That statement should be in the past tense. Fossil fuel extraction costs are an upward trending proposition because of increasing extraction costs. Once in a while you get dips like you got with the shale bubble but on the whole the trend is upward. The price of renewable energy technology is on on a downward trend due to economy of scale, you don't have do drill through the earth's crust or dig away mountains to get sun and wind. We are now at a place where renewables are getting cheaper than coal and gas without subsidies. With battery technology undergoing an economy of scale and engineering revolution things do not look good for fossil fuels. Anybody buying a coal or gas fired power plant these days is being sold a pup.
Why do you hate freedom of choice? Instead of being condemned to have health care, you can freely choose between having health insurance and eating.
I don't hate freedom, it is you wing-nuts who get off on demonising the concept of insurance. Another thing is that even though I live in a country that has implemented many of the blasphemous ideas of social democracy I can afford to BOTH pay for health insurance AND eat. Now ask yourself: why do people in your country have to choose between health insurance and eating? ... and this even though you have such a wonderful for maximum possible profit healthcare system and I have a single payer healthcare system conceived of in the socialist bowes of hell by lucifer himself. And why do such systems all over Europe costs significantly less to run per patient than your for maximum possible profit system does?
Yet the products, should they reach patients, are likely to cost as much as $1 million for both eyes.
Ah, the wonders and joys of a privatised helthcare systems run by Wall Street hyenas out to make the biggest possible profit off of your misery with the help of your elected repesentatives in Congress. You pay as you go and it is much cheaper for the individual citizen than the socialist horrors of a universal single payer healthcare system and it is so much more humane.
I make very few attempts to print hardcopies of documents these days and when I do the printer usually develops some problem. I am now pondering the hypothesis that printers are malevolent sentient robots who don't like me and pretend to break down every time I try to print a hardcopy of anything at all
To be fair "these days" was referring to 2011, when that article by Sanders was written. A time when the Venezuelan economy was rebounding. Two years before Maduro was even sworn in.
To be really fair, when someone predicts something and their prediction turns out accurate, then their hypothesis is *probably* correct.
Like if, for example, someone in 2011 said "Socialist policies don't really work, mostly", and Sanders points to Venezuela as an argument that they do indeed work, the future collapse of Venezuela provides support for the statement "Socialist policies don't really work, mostly", not for whatever counter-argument Sanders was attempting to make.
Another example to clarify: if I were to say, right now, that BTC is not really a currency and you point to its use by $fraction of retailers as proof that it is a currency, any future decline in BTC acceptance by retailers adds support for my assertion, not for your counter-argument. A future rise in % BTC acceptance by retailers may provide the support for your counter-argument, but current cherry-picked examples do not.
Predictive power beats single-data-point examples when proving or disproving a hypothesis. Pointing to a single example only works when the assertion is an existentialist one ("All $FOO are unworkable" needs only a single counter-example to disprove, while "$FOO is not long-term viable" cannot be disproved with a single counter-example).
The FUBAR otherwise known as the Venezuelan economy is what happens when you over-leverage your economy and bet on oil prices permanently remaining at an all time high. Conflating Bernie's brand of social democracy with Chavista style socialism and then pointing at Vesezuela as an example that Bernie's ideas don't work is simplistic to say the least.
If the leaders of a democracy are going to treat its citizens as mere background noise...
The US is not a democracy, full stop.
The US is a representative republic. And they *did* listen to the people, the people who elected their party and president to represent them with this internet deregulation as one of the campaign promises prior to the election. Elections have consequences, particularly for contentious executive-branch Agency/Dept./Bureau/etc administrative unilateral fiats. Same thing as with Executive Orders. What one administration can do, another can undo.
Strat
Bollocks, republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive things. The USA is a democratic republic, or more specifically a federal republic with features of a representative democracy where where elected individuals represent the citizen body in government. If you require further proof read the writings of the founding fathers, the federalist papers and a whole mountain of other literature on the subject although most of us don't need to do more than note the fact that every two years you guys go out and directly elect congress critters and senators that are supposed to represent you in the US congress. Furthermore every four years you also directly elect a bunch of people that in turn elect a president on your behalf. That last bit is a quite strange arrangement to be sure but most of the rest of your process of choosing your leaders makes the US a republic with a form of representative democracy even if it has some esoteric features. What the US isn't is a pure direct democracy but then very few countries practice pure direct democracy except maybe certain parts of Switzerland where all the oath brothers and oath sisters (aka. the citizenry) assemble in public places all over each canton (since even the Appenzellers have finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age and now allow women to vote) and the entire citizenry then votes on legislation without any representatives acting as intermediaries. Obviously such a system would have been rather hard to coordinate in the US of the 18th century so, unsurprisingly, the founding fathers of your country went the representative way. The problem the USA has, like many other countries with representative democratic systems, is that not only have your democratically elected representatives come to believe that they are elected by you, the people, to serve the interests of the oligarchs who stuff their pockets full of money, they have convinced large portions of the electorate of this as well. In my estimation and that of many Americans this is a process that is in dire need of begin reversed and Ajit Pai is just one living breathing and smugly grinning example of why.
Call your representatives and tell them what you want. Congress can pass a law to ensure net neutrality but they have to know it matters to voters. Also, if they won't support it then you need to get involved politically. If your preferred political party does not support net neutrality then you may want to reexamine why you are aligning yourself with them.
Call your representative? Get a million angry voters together, head down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and shout with one voice, "Give us a net neutrality law you corrupt skunk!", then head over to the senate building and repeat the exercise except the last word should be in the plural. Democracy works best when the politicians are scared stiff of the electorate.
As long as we're rid of him, who cares?
Good point, I could get used to the stink.
Now THAT would be an event I'd gladly pay to see. Ajit? You available?
I'm not so sure, if Ajit fell down a reactor shaft there would probably just be a loud farting noise followed by the overwhelming stink of skunk perfume instead of the awesome flash of plasma they got out of Palpatine.
Mark Hamill seems to forget that, in the Star Wars universe, the light sabre lost to the politicians scheming... Palpatines manoeuvres in the senate got him far further than wielding a light sabre ever did.
Pity then that he could not maneuver his way out of getting thrown down a reactor shaft.
What's The Worst IT-Related Joke You've Ever Heard?
Pretty much anything Ajit Pai says to justify the eradication of net neutrality.
So, internet regulation is now back to what it was from circa 1980 - 2015? The horror .... the horror ....
Yeah, they have been doing some really shady shit.
. . . the major problem with the FCC’s move: It forced ISPs into an 80-year-old framework designed for the telephone monopolies of a much different era. Those regulations were more concerned about things like controlling market power than, say, promoting innovation.
Except this is exactly the issue we are worried about. How is it a much different era? Did companies stop being greedy? Did they stop consolidating to control massive swaths of customers? How is this era any different?
I don't think companies stopped being greedy. What is different is that the idea the internet should be a level playing field has breathed it's last breath because Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of the big players who used to fight for net neutrality realised they can afford to pay the extortionists their pound of flesh, that given the utterly corrupt nature of the Trump administration they have to and finally that the real threat is not the extortionists, it is scrappy startups with a better business model and product than them. These startups will from now on be competing at an even greater disadvantage because people have now accepted that is both normal and desirable for the extortionists to ensure that the bandwidth of smaller players is limited and their customer's connections are regularly interrupted by 'technical problems' unless they pay a ransom. The death of net neutrality will work to the advantage of both the extortionists who will now get their regular infusion of mafia style protection payments and the established big players. So in future expect any upcoming competitor who threatens somebody like Google for example and starts to chew up their dominant market share to die a death of a million connection error messages because Google felt threatened and and crapppified their service by pulling the protection money strings so that Google can eventually buy up the corpse and its patents and technology with it. Just ask Eric Schmidt, he'll be the first to tell you how proud he is to call this: "capitalism working as intended" (... and to hell with Adam Smith).
Putin did that, not Trump.
Let's not give the Tzar of Russia any more credit than he deserves, he propped up the Assad regime but that was about all he did. It was Iranian, American and even European backed forces that did just as much if not more to destroy ISIS in Iraq and the same goes for large parts of Syria. It was US/German/French training and delivery of Milan missiles along with US and Iranian small arms and ammo deliveries that stopped ISIS from overrunning the entire north of Iraq while the Iraqi national army that Nouri al-Maliki purged of any soldiers who knew what they were doing was still trying to figure out which end of their rifles was the one the bullets come out of, and lets not forget the importance of US/NATO and even Iranian air support either. Giving the Russians sole credit for destroying ISIS is a joke.
I don't know the relationship (if any) between the two, but is it just coincidence this is happening less than a month after this: https://uawire.org/russia-offe...
Also, is this something that can be attributed to the 'handing over' of certain services from the US to the UN?
It is. The first thing the UN decided to do when they got control of those services was to redirect all the "Herbal Viagra" and "Penis Enlargement" junk mails to Russia, specifically the address: vladimir.putin@kremlin.ru.
A wind farm with 100 turbines ...
That should have been 1000 turbines.
Economic non-sense!
There are certain locations where solar and / or wind energy will not suffice due to the climate. 'Green' houses were tried in Michigan a while back, didn't last a single winter.
Everyone talks about a smaller foot print. But you have to have far more turbines and panels to replace a single coal/gas plant. So what is the footprint of a 1000 turbines? Doesn't it take nearly 1000 turbines to replace a single coal/gas plant?
A wind farm with 100 turbines would produce about 2-4 GW of power depending on the type of turbine. Larger wind farms are usually smaller than that. They consists of turbines in the 1.-4 Mw range but I have seen bigger ones. A wind farm of 2 MW producing 200 MW occupies an area of about 12 x 12 km. But building nothing but big wind farms is not what normally happens. What they are doing in Germany and Denmark for example is mixing together large wind farms with small clusters of them, dotted over the landscape and supplementing that with rooftop solar installations and batteries. Many farms in Northern Germany for example have wind turbines in the fields and every roof of every building and rain shelter on the farm is completely covered with solar panels. Same for the surrounding towns and villages. Apartment blocks in cities often also have their roof covered in solar panels and you are now seeing wind turbines even inside cities.
As for carbon footprint. A wind turbine represents a fairly large carbon footprint during manufacture and after that a minimal carbon footprint during decades of maintenance and operation. A coal plant represents not only a large carbon footprint during construction but also a large and steady carbon footprint during decades of operational use and it also generated other forms of pollution like for example sulphur dioxide. Gas plants also represent an enormous carbon footprint in construction and especially over their lifespan. The idea that a wind farm over 30 years of operation is going to match the carbon footprint of an equivalent (in power output) coal plant or even a gas power plant is quite frankly laughable. All studies I have seen show an order of magnitude lower carbon footprint (kg of CO2 per KWh) for solar and wind compared to coal, gas and biomass and it is usually wind that has the lowest footprint at about 1/4th the footprint of solar which itself has about 1/20th the footprint of coal/gas.
I'd like to see laws on the books that would require new commercial developments to include solar+battery for each housing unit.
This is one of the dumbest things we could do. In order to make a real change, alternative energy HAS TO ACTUALLY MAKE ECONOMIC SENSE. Requiring companies to buy their products regardless of the efficiency will take away incentives to improve and impede progress.
"Feel good" subsidies and mandates only work in the 1st World, and nearly all growth in energy use is coming in the 3rd World, where they can't afford such foolishness. India isn't going to switch from coal to solar until solar is cheaper.
Define ECONOMIC SENSE. Is economic sense calculating the total cost of using renewable energy sources AND their minimal carbon footprint? ... Or is economic sense to use coal/oil/gas count only the price of extraction/transport/energy-generation? Because that is how things usually work with people arguing that fossil fuels make more economic sense than renewables. The fossil fuel pundits never count the cost of the enormous carbon footprint of coal/oil/gas and the cost of the damage that carbon footprint does. Once you factor that in, the picture of the argument that coal/oil/gas make superior economic sense looks a lot weaker. The basic truth is that coal/oil/gas are wreaking havoc in the life support system of this planet (hint: the part of your environment that produces oxygen for you to breathe) that makes them a liability, economically, environmentally and even in the USA they will eventually become a liability politically. Coal/oil/gas is already a political liability in much of the rest of the world. But do continue to argue in favour of coal/oil/gas and ignore the fact that wind/solar/battery are already cheaper than coal and according to the summary they are now getting cheaper than gas. You seem like to type who'll enjoy being like one of those guys 20 years ago who kept arguing long after the writing was on the wall that digital cameras will never replace film cameras because of the superior quality of film.
Look, if we're serious about addressing climate change then we'll need to ramp solar and wind to the point where they are widespread enough that politicians will stop turning a blind eye to the serious damage being done. This of course means either campaign finance reform or clean energy companies bribing politicians better. I'd like to see laws on the books that would require new commercial developments to include solar+battery for each housing unit.
The good news is that solar+battery installations are recursive self-improvement as each installation reduces the amount of emissions while decreasing the market price of solar installations. Elon really needs to get his battery factory building in gear!
There is one way and one way only to phase out fossil fuels. You have to roll up your sleeves and make solar and wind so totally ridiculously cheaper than coal or natural gas that the bottom will fall out of the natural gas market because you can bet your bottom dollar that there is a delegation from the natural-gas /fracking industries in the White House now pounding a table yelling: "Something must be done Mr. President!!!". Next thing you know a delegation is on it's way to WTO headquarters to lobby for import tariffs on wind/solar tech to protect fossil fuels (if they haven't done all these things already) and the only way to beat that is make the alternatives so much cheaper they cannot be ignored even with protective tariffs in place. When the fossil fuel barons run to the politicians for protection, like the coal lobby has already done, you know you are winning.
Russia today has an economy the size of Australia...bunch of geldings reminiscing about their balls. The biggest threat they present is their technicians or engineers getting jobs in nations that are actual threats.
A less American centric NATO isn't a benefit to Russia. Rather the opposite. Russia's direct neighbors are LESS likely to tolerate their bullshit than America is.
And here I was thinking that he biggest threat Russia poses consists of ~7000 nuclear warheads.
I can't help but wonder whether these Russian fake news accounts were online and active trying to get Roy Moore elected in the special senate race. Trump would have likely requested Putin to try to tip this one too in his favor.
No, Putin has re-allocated all his election rigging assets to the nor important task of rigging the upcoming Russian presidential elections.
I love reducing government restrictions by creating new ones.
They're not restrictions if they only affect people you don't like, if you were a Republican you'd know that.
And basically this is entirely invalidated by designing the phone such that the battery is not user-replaceable.
Apple designed a device that will intentionally run slower without the end user paying someone else to disassemble the phone to replace parts. Given the cost to service an older device weighed against the cost of a new device, a lot of users are going to opt for the new device, especially if they don't realize that the reason the phone is operating poorly is because of the battery.
This throttling theory has been bench-marked and debunked: https://www.futuremark.com/pre...
MacRumours even featured a discussion of the above benchmark report: https://www.macrumors.com/2017...
What he is describing there is a declining benchmark rating as the battery charge is diminished. That could just as easily be a bug in the power managment system as some grand conspiracy.
Oh, and iFixit also rates the iPhone on par with many Android phones in terms of repairability: https://www.ifixit.com/smartph...