Instead of putting solar cells on the roof of a car, why not cover the south side of the garage roof with them, sell it to the electric utility during peak rates, and recharge an electric hybrid at night (when the utility rates are cheaper)? Seems like that would be a better way to power an electric vehicle, and generate a little cash to improve the household budget as well.
In my case, I have at least 400 sq ft of south-facing garage roof (at a 12-12 pitch) and about twice as much on the house. Last month's electric bill showed 1105 kWh of power consumed. Depending on how much a photovoltaic panel installation would cost, it would seem to be a practical thing to do even now, with AC units and furnaces having useful lifetimes of about a decade, the payback time for solar panels would seem to be less than that, depending on the cost.
Maybe in a few years, as the cost declines and experience improves the reliability, I'll open the wallet for a set of solar panels. Don't want to buy the version 1.0 model (or worse yet, the beta product).
All the concerns aside about this being not quite up to carbon nanotube strength, and dissolving when exposed to water, it seems to me that there are still a number of applications for something like this -- e.g., replacing stamped steel car bodies with painted paper. It reduces weight, reduces cost, and is possibly recyclable.
I'm sure there are a number of other applications as well -- stiffeners for notebook computer shells springs to mind, where the "carbon paper" is inside the plastic shell (literally "inside", with the plastic being injection-molded around it).
yeah... 12 microwatt-hrs per day is about 36 kWh per month per billion people. Compare that to your own monthly electric bill.
Either the Matrix has much, MUCH more efficient technologies, or here is yet another fine bit of fiction that has slid down the fantasy side of the fork in the road between science fiction and fantasy.
... one interpretation of "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people" might be an attempt by the Congress to shut down Dubya and Deadeye's Excellent Iraqi Adventure.
I can't see how the form factor of the nano or shuffle can accommodate the hardware necessary to run OS X, so maybe only some of the iPod product line will run on OS X -- but extending and leveraging the iPhone is too profitable an opportunity to pass up. Driving component purchase volumes up decreases unit costs, and allows Apple to wield a bigger club in negotiations with suppliers.
The next video iPod may have a spinning disk drive in place of the iPhone's flash memory, as 30 (or 60) GB of hard drive is a lot cheaper than the same amount of flash memory, but it will likely use most of the rest of the iPhone, sans cellular hardware and camera, to provide a really nice video player with possibly some game content as well.
... where they might reasonably be concerned about ANYBODY's spamware rifling through the files on the user's PC.
There are enough companies that are dragging their heels on "upgrading" to Vista due to hardware requirements that this would seem to only give them another reason to delay, and perhaps question their Windows-only policies.
If that day ever comes, Microsoft's troubles in the video game arena -- where they are losing money hand over fist -- will seem trivial in comparison, and that ginormous war chest of cash will begin to shrink in a major way.
However, for the time being, the sheeple seem to be adhering to the plan, and are continuing to shovel truckloads of cash into the Microsoft money bin each quarter. Although how much of this is due to Vista being bundled with new PCs and how much is due to corporate VPAs is unknown.
Although it would appear that plenty of companies have already signed up for Vista (long ago and sight unseen), even if they are slow in rolling it out, so any thoughts of doing anything other than sticking with the Redmond Empire are nothing more than wishful thinking, that money having been already spent.
The process of switching platforms in any corporation is something that will take years of planning, but the first hint of any possibility of a corporate insurrection will be the appearance of non-Windows systems in isolated pockets of experimentation and innovation within a company, where the costs and benefits are being scrutinized to assess exactly how much the Windows-only policy is costing (or saving) the company.
So if communication via entangled quarks is impossible (ref: the forum comments in TFA), and seems to be impossible because passing information instantaneously (i.e., faster than the speed of light) is thwarted by the quantum states being "a jump ahead" of free will and conscious action, adjusting themselves to compensate for the actions of supposed free will -- does this mean that free will is an illusion?
That we are steered by the manipulations of quantum states, and have no real say in what we do?
Do we live in a Clockwork Reality, something akin to Stephen Wolfram's automaton theories of reality, where a set of rules generate the next state of Reality from the current state?
... both AT&T and Apple (both significant advertisers) will provide some subtle inducements for site owners to provide a view of their pages that works well with the iPhone.
And if a site is well-designed, separating the "view" from the "data" using CSS or javascript or whatever, it should not require a massive overhaul of a site to provide an iPhone-friendly view. And it certainly shouldn't require any non-standard web page syntax to do so.
Anyone know what the user-agent string is for the iPhone?
Bit of a shock when you get to the end and find out who the mouse party was supposed to be, but then I realized that you could take the entire panoply of "party" names, put them in two hats (for majority and minority parties -- the majority hat has only 2 names in it) and select them with no regard to what comes out and it would read the same way.
The problem is not which parties, but rather that we are forced into using parties at all.
OK, we can have party affiliations, let them raise money, advertise, and marshall their troops collectively, but when it comes to voting, there should be no indication whatsoever which parties the candidates belong to, and certainly no "party levers" that automatically vote for only a single party.
That's the only way in which we stand a chance of escaping the domination of parties over individuals, and allow the stance of the individuals to have any relevance when we vote.
Of course, since the Republicrat parties have an effective lock on every aspect of the voting process here in the USofA, there's not the chance of a snowball in Hades that this could ever happen here. It would likely have to be done as an amendment to the constitution, pushed through each state and forced on the federal government over the screams of protest from the lifelong incumbents.
Perhaps you could sell "your own" body parts to cover your losses -- a couple of kidneys, heart, lungs, eyes. One could recover quite a bit from selling off a doppelganger for parts. Hopefully, her substance abuse problems would not have lowered the value of the parts too much.
Of course, a functioning legal system would be a lot more ethical, and would hopefully avoid those messy false positives, but in the absence of a functioning legal system, we've got what? The Rule of Lawless?
I wonder if the Mob would take on this sort of work as contract business, recovering damages by any means necessary.
Population data is in millions, area is in thousands of square kilometers.
Canada would seem to throw a chain saw into the theory that this is driven by population density.
Copy-paste into a text document and import as csv into your favorite spreadsheet, make of it what you will.
Apparently, the way this works is that each session between a client (that would be me and thee) and a server counts as a "channel".
If this actually becomes law, I think the proper thing to do is to sue on behalf of the "not for profit" SoundExchange (a.k.a. a front man for the RIAA) all the radio stations, counting each listener as an individual channel.
Then sue all the record stores, counting each customer as a unique individual channel. At the end of all this, no industry recorded music would be sold, and the recording industry would collapse.
If Microsoft won't improve its software, Microsoft fanboys should help out --
Start by using Visual Studio Express to improve Microsoft Works to be a viable competitor to Office, with full support for all Office formats (this might entail gutting Works and then stuffing it with OpenOffice), then move on to strengthening Outlook Express, fixing all the bug-ridden security holes.
If the patents on these genemods expired after a decade or so, with generics moving in to provide price competition, and offering the inventing corporation a shot at making a decent return on their investment, then this wouldn't be such a Bad Thing.
But as warped as the existing patent laws are, corporations can extend the already ludicrously lengthy patent lives almost indefinitely, giving the company that owns the genemod patent an effective monopoly control over those particular crops, and the ability to suck all the profits out of those crops by pricing the seeds appropriately.
Since both OO and NeoOffice are free, it really makes sense to download each of them and perform your own testing.
In particular, do they each:
1) use the standard OS X print and file navigation dialogs?
2) copy & paste using standard OS X facilities, playing nice with other apps?
3) use the standard OS X fonts?
4) provide Spotlight interfaces/plugins so that the documents are indexed by Spotlight?
5) provide access via the Services menu to things like the OS X system-wide Dictionary, or the Mail app?
6) support international languages in the standard OS X manner?
7) support Applescript -- at least via GUI scripting?
You can add other items to this list, but that's a useful starter set of comparison metrics.
Additionally, one should compare footprints (memory and disk) and overall responsiveness, in addition to launch times.
I think that OpenOffice has an incredibly long way to go before they can catch up to NeoOffice. NeoOffice still has room for improvement (as can be seen from the items in the above list that NeoOffice doesn't do -- I'll let you figure out which ones those are yourself), but it's an awesome program.
Much faster, although since NeoOffice is code on top of OpenOffice, it's never going to be faster than OpenOffice.
And the extensive use of Java as a wrapper around OpenOffice was only the original version 1. The current NeoOffice has much more Cocoa than Java. I suspect that's where most of the speed improvements have come from.
The best thing to hope for is that as OpenOffice itself becomes more OSX-friendly, NeoOffice will be able to leverage their experience in providing OSX-to-OpenOffice integration on top of a better-performing OpenOffice -- unless the approach Sun is taking in making OpenOffice more OSX-friendly is to wrap the C++ core in java, in which case NeoOffice should hang back with the OO 2.0.4 release and blow the doors off the "OSX-friendly" official version of OpenOffice.
The NeoOffice guys have already travelled that road, and speaking as a user, I wouldn't want to revisit it.
Avoid excess complication. With the perpendicular recording drives and SATA II, the data comes off the platters at around a gigabit per second, so that's what your sustained max read is likely to be to begin with. Plenty for a media server. No need to combine multiple data streams via striping and RAID-5 for performance.
For reliability, the current Hitachi terabyte disks offer incremental storage increases at about $0.40 USD per gigabyte. You can mirror them, and that's good enough, the incremental storage cost is still under a buck per gigabyte. If the controller or cpu dies, you still have your data. If one disk dies, you still have your data. If it were irreplaceable stuff, maybe there would be an argument for more stringent methods, but really what you're trying to avoid is the nuisance of having to reload everything. If you want to drive the incremental storage cost lower that $0.80/GB, then you can look into striping via RAID-5 or something like ZFS.
The important thing here is to find an external case that will support an adequate number of drives with acceptable noise levels and reliability for the lowest cost. I recently went with the Sonnettech Fusion 400 (not the triple-interface, but the older eSATA II model, as I was looking to keep the cost down), and an external SATA II controller card for an older Powermac G5 (SATA I is all the onboard controller supports on the original G5 Powermacs). The controller and enclosure were about $600, and the first TB drive $400. So for about $1000, I have a TB media server that I can expand to at least 4 TB over time for at most $0.40/GB (in increments of 1000 GB). For the moment, I have no redundancy, but after a few months, I'll pick up another drive and set up mirroring via software. When I fill up a TB of data, I'll add a third drive (they should be really cheap by then) and employ some form of software-based data striping to drive down the fraction used by the stripe. By the time I need a 4th drive, some newer technology will doubtless have arrived that makes SATA II obsolete, and I'll start the whole process all over again.
So far as I can see, there's no viable alternative to some form of data striping to provide adequate backups. With the amount of data contained in a media server, redundancy via striping is the only rational means that I can see of protecting me from a single-disk failure that loses data and forces me into a lotta work to rebuild the library. Other failures are certainly possible (house burning down trumps all local backup, and offsite backup of the amount of storage in a media library is impractical), but this covers the likely cases (and the only ones I've ever lost data to so far), and is simple enough to work.
The more complicated your data protection scheme is, the more likely it is that some facet of the complexity will end up biting you in the ass.
... with imagery that is publicly obtainable, then it is almost a certainty that with the more detailed imagery at various specific wavelengths available from spy satellites, real-time tracking of submarines -- as well as monitoring of various subterranean activities should have been possible for years. In particular, we should have been able to determine where Saddam's supposed hidden facilities were -- or that they were nonexistent -- and we should also be able to determine with a high degree of accuracy, the exact location of the Iranian nuclear weapons production facilities.
Unless, of course, a British archeologist has outdone the entire technical expertise of the NSA and CIA. But that would make them look pretty much like bumbling civil servants rather than the sleuthing savants that we are led to believe they are.
subcritical coal-fired: approx 37% supercritical coal-fired: approx 40% (supercritical = no phase transition from steam to water) gas turbine combined cycle: approx 60% nuclear: approx 36%
And this is BEFORE the transmission losses in getting the power from the point of generation to the point of consumption. Cost is the ONLY thing holding back massive adoption of photovoltaic technologies -- and nighttime, but the problem of only receiving sunlight for less than half the day is really a problem of how to efficiently store it. Fuel cells make a nice fit technology-wise for an energy storage mechanism, but again, the problem is cost.
In time, technological advances will almost certainly bring down the cost of photovoltaic+fuel cell energy systems, as well as improve the efficiencies of more prosaic (i.e., cheaper) types of photovoltaic cells. And we're probably talking decades rather than centuries.
... is NOT to devise a better policy. They already have a policy that involves a ginormous bureaucracy, a multitude of ineffective measures, and billions of tax dollars being spent. They have no intention whatsoever of changing this.
They're merely looking for ideas they haven't previously considered in order to bang the drum for more money.
If the assembled writers were to advise them to replace scanning shoes and slow checkpoints with random searches and speedier scanning technology, odds are that it would be received and immediately shelved, as it would reduce the number os TSA personnel currently employed to muck up air travel, which would lower personnel budgets and improve air travel. THAT's not the sort of goal our government is seeking.
Remember that the shoe-bomber was stopped by a flight attendant, UA flight 93's attack on Washington was halted by the passengers -- AFTER the terrorists had control of the aircraft, the plot against Fort Dix was foiled by the video store clerk who reported them to the Feds. As others have noted, there is no longer ANY threat of airlines being hijacked, due to cockpit doors being secured on all airlines.
For all the billions upon billions spent by Homeland Defense, they have precious little to show for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of putting solar cells on the roof of a car, why not cover the south side of the garage roof with them, sell it to the electric utility during peak rates, and recharge an electric hybrid at night (when the utility rates are cheaper)? Seems like that would be a better way to power an electric vehicle, and generate a little cash to improve the household budget as well.
In my case, I have at least 400 sq ft of south-facing garage roof (at a 12-12 pitch) and about twice as much on the house. Last month's electric bill showed 1105 kWh of power consumed. Depending on how much a photovoltaic panel installation would cost, it would seem to be a practical thing to do even now, with AC units and furnaces having useful lifetimes of about a decade, the payback time for solar panels would seem to be less than that, depending on the cost.
Maybe in a few years, as the cost declines and experience improves the reliability, I'll open the wallet for a set of solar panels. Don't want to buy the version 1.0 model (or worse yet, the beta product).
All the concerns aside about this being not quite up to carbon nanotube strength, and dissolving when exposed to water, it seems to me that there are still a number of applications for something like this -- e.g., replacing stamped steel car bodies with painted paper. It reduces weight, reduces cost, and is possibly recyclable.
I'm sure there are a number of other applications as well -- stiffeners for notebook computer shells springs to mind, where the "carbon paper" is inside the plastic shell (literally "inside", with the plastic being injection-molded around it).
That was really the point of TFA to begin with.
Pretty neat stuff.
yeah ... 12 microwatt-hrs per day is about 36 kWh per month per billion people. Compare that to your own monthly electric bill.
:-(
Either the Matrix has much, MUCH more efficient technologies, or here is yet another fine bit of fiction that has slid down the fantasy side of the fork in the road between science fiction and fantasy.
"Coppertop", indeed.
A rational person would believe that such an interpretation would never be upheld by the Supreme Court. but then, a rational person would never believe that the Supreme Court would countenance seizure of real estate by the government to be turned over to developers for economic gain.
And if people haven't noticed, there seems to be a complete absence of rational people in the District of Columbia these days.
... but it's not too far away.
I can't see how the form factor of the nano or shuffle can accommodate the hardware necessary to run OS X, so maybe only some of the iPod product line will run on OS X -- but extending and leveraging the iPhone is too profitable an opportunity to pass up. Driving component purchase volumes up decreases unit costs, and allows Apple to wield a bigger club in negotiations with suppliers.
The next video iPod may have a spinning disk drive in place of the iPhone's flash memory, as 30 (or 60) GB of hard drive is a lot cheaper than the same amount of flash memory, but it will likely use most of the rest of the iPhone, sans cellular hardware and camera, to provide a really nice video player with possibly some game content as well.
There are enough companies that are dragging their heels on "upgrading" to Vista due to hardware requirements that this would seem to only give them another reason to delay, and perhaps question their Windows-only policies.
If that day ever comes, Microsoft's troubles in the video game arena -- where they are losing money hand over fist -- will seem trivial in comparison, and that ginormous war chest of cash will begin to shrink in a major way.
However, for the time being, the sheeple seem to be adhering to the plan, and are continuing to shovel truckloads of cash into the Microsoft money bin each quarter. Although how much of this is due to Vista being bundled with new PCs and how much is due to corporate VPAs is unknown.
Although it would appear that plenty of companies have already signed up for Vista (long ago and sight unseen), even if they are slow in rolling it out, so any thoughts of doing anything other than sticking with the Redmond Empire are nothing more than wishful thinking, that money having been already spent.
The process of switching platforms in any corporation is something that will take years of planning, but the first hint of any possibility of a corporate insurrection will be the appearance of non-Windows systems in isolated pockets of experimentation and innovation within a company, where the costs and benefits are being scrutinized to assess exactly how much the Windows-only policy is costing (or saving) the company.
So if communication via entangled quarks is impossible (ref: the forum comments in TFA), and seems to be impossible because passing information instantaneously (i.e., faster than the speed of light) is thwarted by the quantum states being "a jump ahead" of free will and conscious action, adjusting themselves to compensate for the actions of supposed free will -- does this mean that free will is an illusion?
That we are steered by the manipulations of quantum states, and have no real say in what we do?
Do we live in a Clockwork Reality, something akin to Stephen Wolfram's automaton theories of reality, where a set of rules generate the next state of Reality from the current state?
... both AT&T and Apple (both significant advertisers) will provide some subtle inducements for site owners to provide a view of their pages that works well with the iPhone.
And if a site is well-designed, separating the "view" from the "data" using CSS or javascript or whatever, it should not require a massive overhaul of a site to provide an iPhone-friendly view. And it certainly shouldn't require any non-standard web page syntax to do so.
Anyone know what the user-agent string is for the iPhone?
Wouldn't it be reasonable to expect the "car of the future" to come from the people who design cars for a living?
...
After all, we live in a free market society, where superior ideas win out and succeed in the market place, right?
Oh, crap, I forgot -- this is the REAL world.
Bit of a shock when you get to the end and find out who the mouse party was supposed to be, but then I realized that you could take the entire panoply of "party" names, put them in two hats (for majority and minority parties -- the majority hat has only 2 names in it) and select them with no regard to what comes out and it would read the same way.
The problem is not which parties, but rather that we are forced into using parties at all.
OK, we can have party affiliations, let them raise money, advertise, and marshall their troops collectively, but when it comes to voting, there should be no indication whatsoever which parties the candidates belong to, and certainly no "party levers" that automatically vote for only a single party.
That's the only way in which we stand a chance of escaping the domination of parties over individuals, and allow the stance of the individuals to have any relevance when we vote.
Of course, since the Republicrat parties have an effective lock on every aspect of the voting process here in the USofA, there's not the chance of a snowball in Hades that this could ever happen here. It would likely have to be done as an amendment to the constitution, pushed through each state and forced on the federal government over the screams of protest from the lifelong incumbents.
Whatta surprising turn of events!
Whoda thunkit that the US might invade Cuba for their energy!
Perhaps you could sell "your own" body parts to cover your losses -- a couple of kidneys, heart, lungs, eyes. One could recover quite a bit from selling off a doppelganger for parts. Hopefully, her substance abuse problems would not have lowered the value of the parts too much.
Of course, a functioning legal system would be a lot more ethical, and would hopefully avoid those messy false positives, but in the absence of a functioning legal system, we've got what? The Rule of Lawless?
I wonder if the Mob would take on this sort of work as contract business, recovering damages by any means necessary.
Here is the 2006Q4 data and 2003 population data from The Economist:
country, 2006Q4 broadband, 2003 population, 2003 area, median age
South Korea, 89.00%, 47.7, 99, 35.1
Monaco, 82.92%, 0.03, 0.002, 45.5
Hong Kong, 79.78%, 7.0, 1, 38.9
Iceland, 75.71%, 0.3, 103, 34.1
Singapore, 69.59%, 4.3, 1, 37.5
Netherlands, 69.38%, 16.1, 42, 39.3
Denmark, 69.34%, 5.4, 43, 39.5
Israel, 68.97%, 6.4, 21, 28.9
Macau, 68.82%, 0.4, 0.02, 36.6
Switzerland, 66.54%, 7.2, 41, 40.8
Canada, 63.02%, 31.5, 9971, 38.6
Taiwan, 61.40%, 22.6, 36, 31
Norway, 59.70%, 4.5, 324, 38.2
Finland, 59.52%, 5.2, 338, 40.9
Japan, 54.13%, 127.7, 378, 42.9
Germany, 53.23%, 82.5, 358, 42.1
Luxembourg, 52.29%, 0.5, 3, 38.1
UK, 52.25%, 59.3, 243, 39
Sweden, 51.76%, 8.9, 450, 40.1
Belgium, 51.73%, 10.3, 31, 40.6
Estonia, 50.35%, 1.3, 45, 38.9
Australia, 50.18%, 19.7, 7682, 36.6
USA, 50.07%, 294.0, 9373, 36.1
Population data is in millions, area is in thousands of square kilometers.
Canada would seem to throw a chain saw into the theory that this is driven by population density.
Copy-paste into a text document and import as csv into your favorite spreadsheet, make of it what you will.
Apparently, the way this works is that each session between a client (that would be me and thee) and a server counts as a "channel".
If this actually becomes law, I think the proper thing to do is to sue on behalf of the "not for profit" SoundExchange (a.k.a. a front man for the RIAA) all the radio stations, counting each listener as an individual channel.
Then sue all the record stores, counting each customer as a unique individual channel. At the end of all this, no industry recorded music would be sold, and the recording industry would collapse.
It's only fair that they get what they asked for.
... be like, to allow all the various ZFS configuration options to be managed, and yet be simple and (relatively) idiot-proof?
Seems to me that the design and implementation of THAT would take longer than to insert ZFS as the primary filesystem.
... the hype storm is overloading the dilithium crystals --
She's gonna blow!
If Microsoft won't improve its software, Microsoft fanboys should help out --
Start by using Visual Studio Express to improve Microsoft Works to be a viable competitor to Office, with full support for all Office formats (this might entail gutting Works and then stuffing it with OpenOffice), then move on to strengthening Outlook Express, fixing all the bug-ridden security holes.
Yeah, THAT's the ticket!
If the patents on these genemods expired after a decade or so, with generics moving in to provide price competition, and offering the inventing corporation a shot at making a decent return on their investment, then this wouldn't be such a Bad Thing.
But as warped as the existing patent laws are, corporations can extend the already ludicrously lengthy patent lives almost indefinitely, giving the company that owns the genemod patent an effective monopoly control over those particular crops, and the ability to suck all the profits out of those crops by pricing the seeds appropriately.
In particular, do they each:
1) use the standard OS X print and file navigation dialogs?
2) copy & paste using standard OS X facilities, playing nice with other apps?
3) use the standard OS X fonts?
4) provide Spotlight interfaces/plugins so that the documents are indexed by Spotlight?
5) provide access via the Services menu to things like the OS X system-wide Dictionary, or the Mail app?
6) support international languages in the standard OS X manner?
7) support Applescript -- at least via GUI scripting?
You can add other items to this list, but that's a useful starter set of comparison metrics.
Additionally, one should compare footprints (memory and disk) and overall responsiveness, in addition to launch times.
I think that OpenOffice has an incredibly long way to go before they can catch up to NeoOffice. NeoOffice still has room for improvement (as can be seen from the items in the above list that NeoOffice doesn't do -- I'll let you figure out which ones those are yourself), but it's an awesome program.
Try the current 2.1 version.
Much faster, although since NeoOffice is code on top of OpenOffice, it's never going to be faster than OpenOffice.
And the extensive use of Java as a wrapper around OpenOffice was only the original version 1. The current NeoOffice has much more Cocoa than Java. I suspect that's where most of the speed improvements have come from.
The best thing to hope for is that as OpenOffice itself becomes more OSX-friendly, NeoOffice will be able to leverage their experience in providing OSX-to-OpenOffice integration on top of a better-performing OpenOffice -- unless the approach Sun is taking in making OpenOffice more OSX-friendly is to wrap the C++ core in java, in which case NeoOffice should hang back with the OO 2.0.4 release and blow the doors off the "OSX-friendly" official version of OpenOffice.
The NeoOffice guys have already travelled that road, and speaking as a user, I wouldn't want to revisit it.
Uh... try the Window:Freeze menu item. It's been there from Day 1, and has always worked -- at least in my experience.
NeoOffice is is of EXCELLENT release quality.
Avoid excess complication. With the perpendicular recording drives and SATA II, the data comes off the platters at around a gigabit per second, so that's what your sustained max read is likely to be to begin with. Plenty for a media server. No need to combine multiple data streams via striping and RAID-5 for performance.
For reliability, the current Hitachi terabyte disks offer incremental storage increases at about $0.40 USD per gigabyte. You can mirror them, and that's good enough, the incremental storage cost is still under a buck per gigabyte. If the controller or cpu dies, you still have your data. If one disk dies, you still have your data. If it were irreplaceable stuff, maybe there would be an argument for more stringent methods, but really what you're trying to avoid is the nuisance of having to reload everything. If you want to drive the incremental storage cost lower that $0.80/GB, then you can look into striping via RAID-5 or something like ZFS.
The important thing here is to find an external case that will support an adequate number of drives with acceptable noise levels and reliability for the lowest cost. I recently went with the Sonnettech Fusion 400 (not the triple-interface, but the older eSATA II model, as I was looking to keep the cost down), and an external SATA II controller card for an older Powermac G5 (SATA I is all the onboard controller supports on the original G5 Powermacs). The controller and enclosure were about $600, and the first TB drive $400. So for about $1000, I have a TB media server that I can expand to at least 4 TB over time for at most $0.40/GB (in increments of 1000 GB). For the moment, I have no redundancy, but after a few months, I'll pick up another drive and set up mirroring via software. When I fill up a TB of data, I'll add a third drive (they should be really cheap by then) and employ some form of software-based data striping to drive down the fraction used by the stripe. By the time I need a 4th drive, some newer technology will doubtless have arrived that makes SATA II obsolete, and I'll start the whole process all over again.
So far as I can see, there's no viable alternative to some form of data striping to provide adequate backups. With the amount of data contained in a media server, redundancy via striping is the only rational means that I can see of protecting me from a single-disk failure that loses data and forces me into a lotta work to rebuild the library. Other failures are certainly possible (house burning down trumps all local backup, and offsite backup of the amount of storage in a media library is impractical), but this covers the likely cases (and the only ones I've ever lost data to so far), and is simple enough to work.
The more complicated your data protection scheme is, the more likely it is that some facet of the complexity will end up biting you in the ass.
... with imagery that is publicly obtainable, then it is almost a certainty that with the more detailed imagery at various specific wavelengths available from spy satellites, real-time tracking of submarines -- as well as monitoring of various subterranean activities should have been possible for years. In particular, we should have been able to determine where Saddam's supposed hidden facilities were -- or that they were nonexistent -- and we should also be able to determine with a high degree of accuracy, the exact location of the Iranian nuclear weapons production facilities.
Unless, of course, a British archeologist has outdone the entire technical expertise of the NSA and CIA. But that would make them look pretty much like bumbling civil servants rather than the sleuthing savants that we are led to believe they are.
some other powerplant thermodynamic efficiencies:
subcritical coal-fired: approx 37%
supercritical coal-fired: approx 40% (supercritical = no phase transition from steam to water)
gas turbine combined cycle: approx 60%
nuclear: approx 36%
And this is BEFORE the transmission losses in getting the power from the point of generation to the point of consumption. Cost is the ONLY thing holding back massive adoption of photovoltaic technologies -- and nighttime, but the problem of only receiving sunlight for less than half the day is really a problem of how to efficiently store it. Fuel cells make a nice fit technology-wise for an energy storage mechanism, but again, the problem is cost.
In time, technological advances will almost certainly bring down the cost of photovoltaic+fuel cell energy systems, as well as improve the efficiencies of more prosaic (i.e., cheaper) types of photovoltaic cells. And we're probably talking decades rather than centuries.
sources: Wikipedia (Fossil_fuel_power_plant)
... is NOT to devise a better policy. They already have a policy that involves a ginormous bureaucracy, a multitude of ineffective measures, and billions of tax dollars being spent. They have no intention whatsoever of changing this.
They're merely looking for ideas they haven't previously considered in order to bang the drum for more money.
If the assembled writers were to advise them to replace scanning shoes and slow checkpoints with random searches and speedier scanning technology, odds are that it would be received and immediately shelved, as it would reduce the number os TSA personnel currently employed to muck up air travel, which would lower personnel budgets and improve air travel. THAT's not the sort of goal our government is seeking.
Remember that the shoe-bomber was stopped by a flight attendant, UA flight 93's attack on Washington was halted by the passengers -- AFTER the terrorists had control of the aircraft, the plot against Fort Dix was foiled by the video store clerk who reported them to the Feds. As others have noted, there is no longer ANY threat of airlines being hijacked, due to cockpit doors being secured on all airlines.
For all the billions upon billions spent by Homeland Defense, they have precious little to show for it.