Zuckerberg cares about making money and doesn't think twice about selling every piece of info he has on you to anyone who wants it.
And yet people continue to use Facebook and hand over their privacy to Zuckerberg in exchange for trinkets. It's actually quite astonishing that so many people could be so ignorant, careless and naïve. Zuckerberg constantly whores their personal information, relationships and anything else they give him to any and all comers and still they use Facebook. Do they not yet understand that Facebook equals complete privacy fail? To paraphrase Zuckerberg himself, "Why did they give me this information? Because they're dumbasses."
From what I understand, the diesel backup generators powering the cooling loop failed because they were submerged, at least for a time, in the rising waters of the tsunami. My question is this: why of all possible backups was diesel internal combustion selected for this purpose? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but a nuclear plant right near the coast seems like a dead-ringer for a stirling engine instead. A stirling engine could have used the heat from the reactor and the cold waters of the pacific to continue operation of the cooling loop even when the reactor is powered down and the stirling engine submerged. Size and space are not issues in this case, unlike in vehicles, and continuous reliable operation, the best case scenario for stirling power, is highly desirable. It seems to me that a stirling engine would have been vastly superior to a diesel backup, which requires air to operate and has more moving parts and requires separate fuel supply (which creates logistical issues that are amplified during a disaster situation) in every respect at this and other coastal Japanese nuclear plants.
As others have pointed out, the dust on the moon is razor sharp at the microscopic level (having never been subject to erosion by air or water) and thus it tends to sink its hooks into just about everything that isn't harder then the dust. It is likely that a substantial portion of dust would remain even after a high pressure spray down so a water tank immersion would probably remove even less.
One possible solution, or at least mitigation, would be to incorporate a sacrificial outer garment covering the space suits, sort of like the work coveralls worn by mechanics here on earth, that could be discarded (clinging bits of moon dust and all) after each use. This probably wouldn't eliminate all dust problems, but it might go a long way towards making them more manageable.
when was the last time Iran invaded anyone? More than 100 years ago?
How about Lebanon and Hezbollah? Iran has waged its recent wars primarily through proxies, like Hezbollah, in an attempt to deflect attention from themselves. However only Iranian apologists and their fellow travelers fail to make the connection between Hezbollah and Iran; they are one in the same.
Has anyone else noticed that in recent years, extending back at least a decade or so, the Department of "Justice" has become more and more politicized and less and less interested with the administration of real justice? There are examples from both the Bush and the Obama administrations where this is true. For example, Bush acquiring any "justification" that he wished for exercise of wartime powers by the Executive branch while the Obama administration has ordered the department to delay, to the extent possible, the hearing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by the Supreme Court (which is going to hear the case eventually in anyway) or to "not enforce" the defense of marriage act? As a citizen, I no longer have any faith that the Department of Justice is really concerned with justice and doing what is right. Indeed, it seems that political expediency is now the word of the day at the Department of Justice. Now, you may agree or disagree with the ultimate aims of these tactics employed by the Department of Justice, but unless one also subscribes to an "ends justify the means" philosophy it should be troubling that the Department of Justice is so arbitrary and political when it comes to upholding the laws of the land. People should be careful about how their favored ends are achieved; means matter and destroying our system for the sake of a favored political goal is the first step on the road to totalitarianism.
I have also heard reports that the rebels have at least a portion, perhaps substantial, of the Libyan military at their disposal. They also say that Qadafi is fortifying Tripoli against the possibility of an overland assault from the east. If the United States or Europe wanted to help things along then they could blockade Tripoli, enforce no-fly zones and provide the rebel forces with intelligence reports on the locations and dispositions of units loyal to Qadafi. If the rebels could lay siege to Tripoli and the blockade was enforced, Qadafi would be forced to either give up or quit his fortifications and commit to open battle. Some dedicated close air support would make short work of Qadafi's antique Soviet era tanks and vehicles, particularly if they are caught out in the open, and his fighter planes and pilots are no match for either the Europeans or the United States. Qadafi is a sworn enemy of the United States and Europe. We should not pass up an opportunity to give him a push on his way out the door.
Don't be surprised if the next thing you see on FOX News is Glenn Beck extolling the virtues of the SHIELD Act, while on CNN you have a "balanced debate" about "national security" and the "continuing need" for "tighter safeguards against terrorism".
CNN may be balanced, but FOX is fair and balanced...
Assange knew or should have known that the intelligence agencies of this world would use female agents to entrap him. Indeed, the East Germans were famous for this tactic, employing it time and again to recruit spies in Western Europe during the Cold War years (i.e. you will do what we say or else we publish the scandalous evidence of the affair). This is a variation of the classic gambit, social mores about affairs having changed somewhat in the last 40 years, but still effective it seems.
Assange is innocent until proven guilty at least under US law
Juries are overwhelmingly sympathetic to women "victims" who accuse men of rape. It's just one of those unfortunate double standards that men must endure in society these days, along with more mundane indignities such as excessive alimony and continuous child support payments; even after the ex-wife is remarried to a much wealthier man.
Let me give you a hint about space junk: somehow hundreds of satellites, rockets, Hubble and of course the ISS manage to stay up there without being shredded.
Hubble has a high circular orbit, ~353 miles and period of 96-97 minutes, in a much less crowded band. This would not be suitable for your solar arrays. The ISS, which orbits much lower, ~187-197 miles (although the period is similar at ~91 minutes), and makes frequent orbital adjustments to avoid larger pieces of junk. In addition to dodging dangerous bits of junk, the station itself is armored against smaller impacts that are essentially too numerous to avoid. This orbit would also not be suitable for your solar arrays because atmospheric drag would bring them down after only a relatively few orbits (The ISS receives periodic boosts from unmanned supply ships and docking spacecraft).
Space junk is a problem
Some orbits, particularly low orbits, are now so dangerously overcrowded by junk that we are running serious risks of a self-sustaining chain reaction (i.e. the orbit is so junked that anything launched into the orbit of appreciable size also gets junked, which creates more junk and so-on).
Since the solar array would not be geostationary
If it is not geostationary then it will have to have a highly elliptical orbit, like the tundra or molniya, so that there is substantial dwell time over the area to which power is delivered. Satellites in these sorts of orbits have to be tough to withstand the rigors of operation and diving in and out of the atmosphere in lower orbits as they speed around the earth back up to their apogees. Your massive solar arrays aren't going to survive this treatment. If you pick a less crowded circular orbit then you will need hundreds of arrays to provide continuous coverage and nobody is going to want their night skies permanently ruined by your large shiny orbiting arrays. I just don't see the massive orbiting solar array thing working out any time soon (if ever). They are right up there with space elevators, pure science fiction. Expensive doesn't even begin to describe your proposal. You thought extracting those dwindling oil supplies and oil shale are expensive? Not nearly as much as your Dr. Evil-esque orbital power scheme.
but I would love to know what you plan to do once it runs out.
Well have to make do, probably at a lower relative standard of living, until something else can be figured out, if it can be figured out. Even so, "running out", as you said, is a relative term in this instance. The more likely scenario is that in the late 21st century only the very wealthy will be able to continue living a petroleum fueled lifestyle. A large number of people currently living and those yet to be born will probably end up starving to death on a warmer and less habitable future Earth. I don't have any illusions about what is going to happen, but while we still have less expensive oil I will continue to enjoy it; I make no apologies for that.
No-one would have been willing to invest the hundreds of billions needed to develop nuclear if it had not been for the arms race and cold war.
The arms race was inevitable. Indeed, as soon the calculations done by the physicists of the 1930s revealed that an uncontrolled chain reaction of uranium would produce a large and relatively instantaneous burst of energy it was not long before a race was on to build the bomb. The German, British and American scientists in WWII all knew that nuclear weapons would be a game changer, the difference between victory and defeat as it turned out. After the destructive power and first mover advantage was revealed for the world to see, the Soviets wasted no time starting a crash project to get their own bomb. As soon as humankind understand that such weapons were possible, it was inevitable that they would be built. We have been killing each other since one caveman picked
If you ask most people, 2008 was the year when the recession really began putting the hurt on lots of ordinary Americans. It's true that the recession began earlier than that, sometime in late 2006 or early 2007, but by mid 2008 things were really starting to get bad. People were more than six months behind on their mortgages and their savings accounts were depleted. All of this coincidentally coincided with President Obama's inauguration. President Obama wanted the job of President. The second he took office, people started looking to him for answers and many of us are still waiting. If you are unemployed, you care more about who is going to make it better and how and less about who was at fault. Blaming those responsible for pushing us of the edge feels good, but it doesn't put food on your family table. In the United States, the sitting President gets the credit for a good economy and the blame for a bad one. Like it or not, fair or not, that's just the way it is. If things don't turn around by 2012 then Obama is gone. It's that simple. It will be like Jimmy Carter all over again. Americans are looking for answers and they will vote for the person who has them, not the one with the most glibly delivered excuses.
Such as? Take away all subsidies. What powers my car to get me to work in the morning with anything like the ease, efficiency and energy density of gasoline or diesel? Answer: nothing. Internal combustion: accept no substitutes.
The point was never that one or two renewable energy techs would completely and immediately replace oil;
Some of the green boosters, in their desperate enthusiasm for everything green, are doing and saying anything, including playing the "oil replacement" card to win subsidies and trick the gullible. I get annoyed when more responsible promoters of renewable energies don't call these people what they are; quacks.
Surely the nice people living in Africa wouldn't go around smashing your solar panels to bits for salvage, so that wealthy Americans and Europeans can have green feel good energy, and those Arabs would just love to have your massive solar farm right nextdoor. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, right. Have you been to Africa? Do you know what it's like there? Just ask the oil majors about building infrastructure in Africa; even with oil consistently above $75 per barrel it's marginally worthwhile. Complex infrastructure projects built in poor and unstable countries have a miserable history, especially in Africa.
how long do you think it would take to develop space-based solar arrays that work 24/7 if we put the same amount of effort into that?
A lot longer than you might think. Most of the useful orbits around our planet are now chocked full of space junk. Millions of bits of metal, paint, used rocket bodies and defunct satellites all whizzing around like a storm of razor blades and bullets moving at 20+ miles per second. Your space based solar arrays would be turned into swiss cheese in less than a year. Never mind the tremendous technical leaps required to engineer and operate such a system. No, I remain highly skeptical of that suggestion. Indeed, your idea reminds me of all of the "green jobs" boosting going on right now. Where are those green jobs? Millions of unemployed Americans would like to know.
Nuclear only got where it is now because most of the early and very expensive R&D was done for military applications.
Even back in the 1930s when the principles of nuclear energy were still being worked out, every physicist who spent time working through the calculations could see that nuclear was very promising. There were some unknowns to be sure, but It had a much better certainty of large payoff than your orbiting solar arrays. In other words, nuclear was and is a substantially better investment.
the rest we could cut our dependence on oil in 20 years if we wanted to
Never enough to "get rid of" fossil fuels. A future without fossil fuels is the ultimate greenie wet dream but it just ain't gonna happen. It makes sense to invest in nuclear and even some wind and solar, where it makes sense, if only to save the precious petroleum for other things. But completely replacing fossil fuels in general, and oil in particular, as the original poster suggested, is extremely unlikely (ala Star Trek). It's green propaganda bull crap to win more government research subsidies.
The cost would be high but business is starting to realise just how long this gravy train is going to be so the investment is finally ramping up.
The government subsidy gravy train maybe, but that wont be a happy train for us taxpayers.
Yet, life was enjoyed by someone living in the 19th century just the same.
Alright, but suppose that we transported you back to the early 19th century, having already experienced everything up to now and with knowledge that a better life really is possible (you've lived it after all), but never again having the conveniences of late 20th century living. Would you still enjoy it? Maybe you would, but most people, if they are being honest, would not.
For many applications, especially in transportation, there are no good substitutes. Alternatives are only attractive when costs rise if they are viable alternatives and for many of us there simply aren't good enough alternatives to gasoline or diesel powered transportation. When the alternatives come they have to compete on the merits. Making gasoline artificially expensive through taxes and such, in order to make "alternatives" more attractive, doesn't help matters; it just makes people angry and angry people are not good for politicians who want to keep their jobs.
Fine, but to paraphrase: "Whenever the Dems are in I am unemployed, but when the Reps are in I have a job." Unless Obama and the Dems somehow reduce the unemployment rate to 5% or less before 2012, they are likely to receive another shellacking when the grumbling masses get to vote again. They can talk all day about how many new "jobs" they have created, but the guy in the street knows whether or not he has a job and he will be asking the real question, "Am I better off now than I was four years ago?" For most Americans, the answer to that question is still a resounding "No" or, as Clinton was fond of saying, "It's the economy stupid", remember?
It's not bull. The life that you now enjoy would have been practically unimaginable to someone living in the 19th century, before the advent of cheap carbon energy and the invention of internal combustion. I don't know about you, but modern transportation, the green revolution (cheap and abundant food) and antibiotics, to name just a few of the advances enabled by hydrocarbons, are nothing to be sneezed at. Solar and wind energy cannot yet replace our energy needs, not even close. Even if we squeeze every last efficiency gain that we can reasonably get, it still won't be enough. Like it or not, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a while longer and most probably until they are completely used up; they're just aren't good enough substitutes in many applications yet.
With the possible exception of some areas in the arctic, there is no major undiscovered onshore oil remaining. Indeed, the probability of any new large onshore finds is exceedingly remote, because just about every halfway promising geology on land has already been explored, picked over and evaluated. If there were good new onshore finds, the major oil companies wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on deep water drilling projects. It's true that every once in a while some smaller oil companies uncover modest structures missed or overlooked by the majors, but they are not very big relatively speaking. For example, a small US energy company, Wolverine Energy, found some oil bearing sandstone that had been previously missed in Utah back in 2004, but the find was relatively small, on the order of 16 billion barrels or so which is enough to satisfy domestic US demand for about 2 years (assuming it could all be extracted at once which, of course, it cannot be). A boon for the Wolverine investors to be sure, but hardly a solution for our domestic oil demands.
It's a little shocking, given the nature of all the sacrifices the government is forcing on normal people.
It's things like this that make me feel like a schmuck for being an honest guy and paying my taxes. Way to grab the ordinary working guy by the nose and kick him in the ass government, whatever would we do without you?
It's easy to monday morning quarterback this thing but consider the following two points (from TFA):
1. The social engineering portion of the attack originated from Aaron's company gmail account (HBGary used Google Apps for mail), which anonymous had gained access to through the gmail account of the admin who re-used his password from the hacked CMS. So the email to the Finnish sysadmin came from Aaron's gmail account (i.e. Anonymous was effectively impersonating Aaron using his own credentials).
2. The email exchange, which is repeated in TFA, shows that Anonymous used information from Aaron's old emails, including two previous root passwords, to further reinforce the notion that the email did indeed come from Aaron Burr who was in a jam before meeting clients in Europe and needed root SSH access asap.
So while the method itself may not have been sophisticated, the wording of the spear phishing messages, carefully chosen to create just the right combination of credibility and urgency, really was a master stroke. Obviously Anonymous has a few people who have done this before. Besides, have you ever tried to make credible pretext emails or phone calls to social engineer information? It's harder than it looks.
Another benefit of choosing the "generic" CMS solution is that even when a new exploit is discovered, it's highly unlikely that those in possession of such a valuable prize, a zero day vulnerability in a major CMS product, are going to waste in on a small security company like HBGary (high-profile antics of one ridiculously over the top CEO, Aaron Barr, not withstanding) or some random individual user. No, the exploit will be saved for a high value target or sold to the highest bidder. Writing your own CMS from scratch and then exposing it to the public Internet is like writing your own "killer" encryption algorithm, it just shouldn't be done. It's better to leave such concerns to established projects, both open source and proprietary, that have received ample scrutiny over the years by real experts, not the sort like Aaron Barr, and repeatedly probed for weaknesses in the wild.
Slashdot Mirror
Zuckerberg cares about making money and doesn't think twice about selling every piece of info he has on you to anyone who wants it.
And yet people continue to use Facebook and hand over their privacy to Zuckerberg in exchange for trinkets. It's actually quite astonishing that so many people could be so ignorant, careless and naïve. Zuckerberg constantly whores their personal information, relationships and anything else they give him to any and all comers and still they use Facebook. Do they not yet understand that Facebook equals complete privacy fail? To paraphrase Zuckerberg himself, "Why did they give me this information? Because they're dumbasses."
From what I understand, the diesel backup generators powering the cooling loop failed because they were submerged, at least for a time, in the rising waters of the tsunami. My question is this: why of all possible backups was diesel internal combustion selected for this purpose? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but a nuclear plant right near the coast seems like a dead-ringer for a stirling engine instead. A stirling engine could have used the heat from the reactor and the cold waters of the pacific to continue operation of the cooling loop even when the reactor is powered down and the stirling engine submerged. Size and space are not issues in this case, unlike in vehicles, and continuous reliable operation, the best case scenario for stirling power, is highly desirable. It seems to me that a stirling engine would have been vastly superior to a diesel backup, which requires air to operate and has more moving parts and requires separate fuel supply (which creates logistical issues that are amplified during a disaster situation) in every respect at this and other coastal Japanese nuclear plants.
As others have pointed out, the dust on the moon is razor sharp at the microscopic level (having never been subject to erosion by air or water) and thus it tends to sink its hooks into just about everything that isn't harder then the dust. It is likely that a substantial portion of dust would remain even after a high pressure spray down so a water tank immersion would probably remove even less.
One possible solution, or at least mitigation, would be to incorporate a sacrificial outer garment covering the space suits, sort of like the work coveralls worn by mechanics here on earth, that could be discarded (clinging bits of moon dust and all) after each use. This probably wouldn't eliminate all dust problems, but it might go a long way towards making them more manageable.
when was the last time Iran invaded anyone? More than 100 years ago?
How about Lebanon and Hezbollah? Iran has waged its recent wars primarily through proxies, like Hezbollah, in an attempt to deflect attention from themselves. However only Iranian apologists and their fellow travelers fail to make the connection between Hezbollah and Iran; they are one in the same.
Has anyone else noticed that in recent years, extending back at least a decade or so, the Department of "Justice" has become more and more politicized and less and less interested with the administration of real justice? There are examples from both the Bush and the Obama administrations where this is true. For example, Bush acquiring any "justification" that he wished for exercise of wartime powers by the Executive branch while the Obama administration has ordered the department to delay, to the extent possible, the hearing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act by the Supreme Court (which is going to hear the case eventually in anyway) or to "not enforce" the defense of marriage act? As a citizen, I no longer have any faith that the Department of Justice is really concerned with justice and doing what is right. Indeed, it seems that political expediency is now the word of the day at the Department of Justice. Now, you may agree or disagree with the ultimate aims of these tactics employed by the Department of Justice, but unless one also subscribes to an "ends justify the means" philosophy it should be troubling that the Department of Justice is so arbitrary and political when it comes to upholding the laws of the land. People should be careful about how their favored ends are achieved; means matter and destroying our system for the sake of a favored political goal is the first step on the road to totalitarianism.
I have also heard reports that the rebels have at least a portion, perhaps substantial, of the Libyan military at their disposal. They also say that Qadafi is fortifying Tripoli against the possibility of an overland assault from the east. If the United States or Europe wanted to help things along then they could blockade Tripoli, enforce no-fly zones and provide the rebel forces with intelligence reports on the locations and dispositions of units loyal to Qadafi. If the rebels could lay siege to Tripoli and the blockade was enforced, Qadafi would be forced to either give up or quit his fortifications and commit to open battle. Some dedicated close air support would make short work of Qadafi's antique Soviet era tanks and vehicles, particularly if they are caught out in the open, and his fighter planes and pilots are no match for either the Europeans or the United States. Qadafi is a sworn enemy of the United States and Europe. We should not pass up an opportunity to give him a push on his way out the door.
Don't be surprised if the next thing you see on FOX News is Glenn Beck extolling the virtues of the SHIELD Act, while on CNN you have a "balanced debate" about "national security" and the "continuing need" for "tighter safeguards against terrorism".
CNN may be balanced, but FOX is fair and balanced...
So yes, I agree with parent, this is CIA work.
Assange knew or should have known that the intelligence agencies of this world would use female agents to entrap him. Indeed, the East Germans were famous for this tactic, employing it time and again to recruit spies in Western Europe during the Cold War years (i.e. you will do what we say or else we publish the scandalous evidence of the affair). This is a variation of the classic gambit, social mores about affairs having changed somewhat in the last 40 years, but still effective it seems.
Assange is innocent until proven guilty at least under US law
Juries are overwhelmingly sympathetic to women "victims" who accuse men of rape. It's just one of those unfortunate double standards that men must endure in society these days, along with more mundane indignities such as excessive alimony and continuous child support payments; even after the ex-wife is remarried to a much wealthier man.
Let me give you a hint about space junk: somehow hundreds of satellites, rockets, Hubble and of course the ISS manage to stay up there without being shredded.
Hubble has a high circular orbit, ~353 miles and period of 96-97 minutes, in a much less crowded band. This would not be suitable for your solar arrays. The ISS, which orbits much lower, ~187-197 miles (although the period is similar at ~91 minutes), and makes frequent orbital adjustments to avoid larger pieces of junk. In addition to dodging dangerous bits of junk, the station itself is armored against smaller impacts that are essentially too numerous to avoid. This orbit would also not be suitable for your solar arrays because atmospheric drag would bring them down after only a relatively few orbits (The ISS receives periodic boosts from unmanned supply ships and docking spacecraft).
Space junk is a problem
Some orbits, particularly low orbits, are now so dangerously overcrowded by junk that we are running serious risks of a self-sustaining chain reaction (i.e. the orbit is so junked that anything launched into the orbit of appreciable size also gets junked, which creates more junk and so-on).
Since the solar array would not be geostationary
If it is not geostationary then it will have to have a highly elliptical orbit, like the tundra or molniya, so that there is substantial dwell time over the area to which power is delivered. Satellites in these sorts of orbits have to be tough to withstand the rigors of operation and diving in and out of the atmosphere in lower orbits as they speed around the earth back up to their apogees. Your massive solar arrays aren't going to survive this treatment. If you pick a less crowded circular orbit then you will need hundreds of arrays to provide continuous coverage and nobody is going to want their night skies permanently ruined by your large shiny orbiting arrays. I just don't see the massive orbiting solar array thing working out any time soon (if ever). They are right up there with space elevators, pure science fiction. Expensive doesn't even begin to describe your proposal. You thought extracting those dwindling oil supplies and oil shale are expensive? Not nearly as much as your Dr. Evil-esque orbital power scheme.
but I would love to know what you plan to do once it runs out.
Well have to make do, probably at a lower relative standard of living, until something else can be figured out, if it can be figured out. Even so, "running out", as you said, is a relative term in this instance. The more likely scenario is that in the late 21st century only the very wealthy will be able to continue living a petroleum fueled lifestyle. A large number of people currently living and those yet to be born will probably end up starving to death on a warmer and less habitable future Earth. I don't have any illusions about what is going to happen, but while we still have less expensive oil I will continue to enjoy it; I make no apologies for that.
No-one would have been willing to invest the hundreds of billions needed to develop nuclear if it had not been for the arms race and cold war.
The arms race was inevitable. Indeed, as soon the calculations done by the physicists of the 1930s revealed that an uncontrolled chain reaction of uranium would produce a large and relatively instantaneous burst of energy it was not long before a race was on to build the bomb. The German, British and American scientists in WWII all knew that nuclear weapons would be a game changer, the difference between victory and defeat as it turned out. After the destructive power and first mover advantage was revealed for the world to see, the Soviets wasted no time starting a crash project to get their own bomb. As soon as humankind understand that such weapons were possible, it was inevitable that they would be built. We have been killing each other since one caveman picked
If you ask most people, 2008 was the year when the recession really began putting the hurt on lots of ordinary Americans. It's true that the recession began earlier than that, sometime in late 2006 or early 2007, but by mid 2008 things were really starting to get bad. People were more than six months behind on their mortgages and their savings accounts were depleted. All of this coincidentally coincided with President Obama's inauguration. President Obama wanted the job of President. The second he took office, people started looking to him for answers and many of us are still waiting. If you are unemployed, you care more about who is going to make it better and how and less about who was at fault. Blaming those responsible for pushing us of the edge feels good, but it doesn't put food on your family table. In the United States, the sitting President gets the credit for a good economy and the blame for a bad one. Like it or not, fair or not, that's just the way it is. If things don't turn around by 2012 then Obama is gone. It's that simple. It will be like Jimmy Carter all over again. Americans are looking for answers and they will vote for the person who has them, not the one with the most glibly delivered excuses.
Not only are there perfectly good substitutes
Such as? Take away all subsidies. What powers my car to get me to work in the morning with anything like the ease, efficiency and energy density of gasoline or diesel? Answer: nothing. Internal combustion: accept no substitutes.
The point was never that one or two renewable energy techs would completely and immediately replace oil;
Some of the green boosters, in their desperate enthusiasm for everything green, are doing and saying anything, including playing the "oil replacement" card to win subsidies and trick the gullible. I get annoyed when more responsible promoters of renewable energies don't call these people what they are; quacks.
Surely the nice people living in Africa wouldn't go around smashing your solar panels to bits for salvage, so that wealthy Americans and Europeans can have green feel good energy, and those Arabs would just love to have your massive solar farm right nextdoor. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, right. Have you been to Africa? Do you know what it's like there? Just ask the oil majors about building infrastructure in Africa; even with oil consistently above $75 per barrel it's marginally worthwhile. Complex infrastructure projects built in poor and unstable countries have a miserable history, especially in Africa.
how long do you think it would take to develop space-based solar arrays that work 24/7 if we put the same amount of effort into that?
A lot longer than you might think. Most of the useful orbits around our planet are now chocked full of space junk. Millions of bits of metal, paint, used rocket bodies and defunct satellites all whizzing around like a storm of razor blades and bullets moving at 20+ miles per second. Your space based solar arrays would be turned into swiss cheese in less than a year. Never mind the tremendous technical leaps required to engineer and operate such a system. No, I remain highly skeptical of that suggestion. Indeed, your idea reminds me of all of the "green jobs" boosting going on right now. Where are those green jobs? Millions of unemployed Americans would like to know.
Nuclear only got where it is now because most of the early and very expensive R&D was done for military applications.
Even back in the 1930s when the principles of nuclear energy were still being worked out, every physicist who spent time working through the calculations could see that nuclear was very promising. There were some unknowns to be sure, but It had a much better certainty of large payoff than your orbiting solar arrays. In other words, nuclear was and is a substantially better investment.
the rest we could cut our dependence on oil in 20 years if we wanted to
Never enough to "get rid of" fossil fuels. A future without fossil fuels is the ultimate greenie wet dream but it just ain't gonna happen. It makes sense to invest in nuclear and even some wind and solar, where it makes sense, if only to save the precious petroleum for other things. But completely replacing fossil fuels in general, and oil in particular, as the original poster suggested, is extremely unlikely (ala Star Trek). It's green propaganda bull crap to win more government research subsidies.
The cost would be high but business is starting to realise just how long this gravy train is going to be so the investment is finally ramping up.
The government subsidy gravy train maybe, but that wont be a happy train for us taxpayers.
Yet, life was enjoyed by someone living in the 19th century just the same.
Alright, but suppose that we transported you back to the early 19th century, having already experienced everything up to now and with knowledge that a better life really is possible (you've lived it after all), but never again having the conveniences of late 20th century living. Would you still enjoy it? Maybe you would, but most people, if they are being honest, would not.
For many applications, especially in transportation, there are no good substitutes. Alternatives are only attractive when costs rise if they are viable alternatives and for many of us there simply aren't good enough alternatives to gasoline or diesel powered transportation. When the alternatives come they have to compete on the merits. Making gasoline artificially expensive through taxes and such, in order to make "alternatives" more attractive, doesn't help matters; it just makes people angry and angry people are not good for politicians who want to keep their jobs.
If you don't like it, stop voting Republican
Fine, but to paraphrase: "Whenever the Dems are in I am unemployed, but when the Reps are in I have a job." Unless Obama and the Dems somehow reduce the unemployment rate to 5% or less before 2012, they are likely to receive another shellacking when the grumbling masses get to vote again. They can talk all day about how many new "jobs" they have created, but the guy in the street knows whether or not he has a job and he will be asking the real question, "Am I better off now than I was four years ago?" For most Americans, the answer to that question is still a resounding "No" or, as Clinton was fond of saying, "It's the economy stupid", remember?
It's not bull. The life that you now enjoy would have been practically unimaginable to someone living in the 19th century, before the advent of cheap carbon energy and the invention of internal combustion. I don't know about you, but modern transportation, the green revolution (cheap and abundant food) and antibiotics, to name just a few of the advances enabled by hydrocarbons, are nothing to be sneezed at. Solar and wind energy cannot yet replace our energy needs, not even close. Even if we squeeze every last efficiency gain that we can reasonably get, it still won't be enough. Like it or not, fossil fuels are going to be with us for a while longer and most probably until they are completely used up; they're just aren't good enough substitutes in many applications yet.
No reason we could not drill on land
With the possible exception of some areas in the arctic, there is no major undiscovered onshore oil remaining. Indeed, the probability of any new large onshore finds is exceedingly remote, because just about every halfway promising geology on land has already been explored, picked over and evaluated. If there were good new onshore finds, the major oil companies wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on deep water drilling projects. It's true that every once in a while some smaller oil companies uncover modest structures missed or overlooked by the majors, but they are not very big relatively speaking. For example, a small US energy company, Wolverine Energy, found some oil bearing sandstone that had been previously missed in Utah back in 2004, but the find was relatively small, on the order of 16 billion barrels or so which is enough to satisfy domestic US demand for about 2 years (assuming it could all be extracted at once which, of course, it cannot be). A boon for the Wolverine investors to be sure, but hardly a solution for our domestic oil demands.
Sony needs to be taken down a notch or two right about now. Hopefully George, the EFF and his attorneys will give Sony a kick in the derriere.
It's a little shocking, given the nature of all the sacrifices the government is forcing on normal people.
It's things like this that make me feel like a schmuck for being an honest guy and paying my taxes. Way to grab the ordinary working guy by the nose and kick him in the ass government, whatever would we do without you?
It's easy to monday morning quarterback this thing but consider the following two points (from TFA):
1. The social engineering portion of the attack originated from Aaron's company gmail account (HBGary used Google Apps for mail), which anonymous had gained access to through the gmail account of the admin who re-used his password from the hacked CMS. So the email to the Finnish sysadmin came from Aaron's gmail account (i.e. Anonymous was effectively impersonating Aaron using his own credentials).
2. The email exchange, which is repeated in TFA, shows that Anonymous used information from Aaron's old emails, including two previous root passwords, to further reinforce the notion that the email did indeed come from Aaron Burr who was in a jam before meeting clients in Europe and needed root SSH access asap.
So while the method itself may not have been sophisticated, the wording of the spear phishing messages, carefully chosen to create just the right combination of credibility and urgency, really was a master stroke. Obviously Anonymous has a few people who have done this before. Besides, have you ever tried to make credible pretext emails or phone calls to social engineer information? It's harder than it looks.
Another benefit of choosing the "generic" CMS solution is that even when a new exploit is discovered, it's highly unlikely that those in possession of such a valuable prize, a zero day vulnerability in a major CMS product, are going to waste in on a small security company like HBGary (high-profile antics of one ridiculously over the top CEO, Aaron Barr, not withstanding) or some random individual user. No, the exploit will be saved for a high value target or sold to the highest bidder. Writing your own CMS from scratch and then exposing it to the public Internet is like writing your own "killer" encryption algorithm, it just shouldn't be done. It's better to leave such concerns to established projects, both open source and proprietary, that have received ample scrutiny over the years by real experts, not the sort like Aaron Barr, and repeatedly probed for weaknesses in the wild.