One of the biggest benefits of HFR (48FPS) is specifically for 3D. 3D project is actually "triple flashed" at 144FPS (72FPS/eye). This accentuates the (camera and subject) motion issues w/ 24FPS, so HFR is a way of trying to get around that - and having just seen the Hobbit in 3D HFR today, it seems to do a pretty good job at it. Fast motion is crystal clear - it's really astounding.
That being said, I agree about the aesthetic adjustment. The intro scene in the Shire/Bag End in particular... just looks bad. Similarly the way the set/makeup/lighting looks. IMO, the most CG parts of the movie looked best because at least it didn't have that "live theatre" look. I think most films won't adopt HFR because it may just be too hard/expensive to make things look good.
Another part of it seems to be the DOF choice - it's just incredibly deep/clear which IMO is *not* realistic at all - when you look at something in real life, that's just not how your foveal/peripheral vision works, at least for me. Sure the clarity is nice for spectacle, but not so much for immersion.
And lastly, of course people (especially people that watch lots of films) have an expectation of what a film should look like and HFR totally breaks that.
Still, I'm sure that people had this sort of discussion w/ the switch from B&W to Color or w/ Talkies, soI guess time will tell.
Actually, the "standard" shutter speed for 24fps film is typically 1/48s (180 degree shutter angle in film-speak). Cinematographers choose different shutter speeds based on a number of considerations, mostly related to how motion (camera (pan judder) and subject (strobing)) will look w/ specific lenses and lighting. Depth of Field also plays into that choice of course. Common shutter angles range anywhere from 270 degrees (1/24s) all the way down to 45 degrees (1/192s). FYI: 360 degrees is now possible w/ digital cameras, but was *not* possible with mechanical cameras! (practically every feature length film shot until the last decade or so).
You can easily find samples online, as you can imagine, they give extremely different looks for motion.
Yeah, they're currently Knight Foundation funded (a Knight News Challenge winner) and a big part of CfA Brigade's current Race for Reuse project encouraging community deployments - there's are bunch of communities adopting LocalWiki, which is awesome. Also, I met Philip, the lead dev recently and he's very sharp.
That being said, for a volunteer project for a small town without any support or resources, a Google Site w/ Google Docs links that an AC suggested probably is the best way to go - it's not sexy, but I bet that realistically, it'd be the lowest maintenance and longest lasting/most effective way to get the basic info up there (and kept up to date).
For the type of things you're looking for, I'd recommend LocalWiki. While so far it's been used mostly by communities vs municipalities, it includes robust permissions, is under active development, and is built w/ some nice geo-extensions for where that's applicable. It's very easy to get up and running and you could run a micro EC2 instance to test out for (practically) free.
I'd also suggest that you try to connect w/ others that are doing similar things. There's a large community of civic hackers. For those working directly w/ municipal govt, check out the Code for America Brigade, a community that's all about that and can provide help/support for exactly this sort of thing. You may want to check out their deployable app list, and maybe also check out CfA's github repository which has a lot of projects that may be useful, and their Civic Commons project which gathers the sw/infrastructure that cities are using.
Slashdot definitely isn't what it used to be. For programming questions you may want to look at Stack Overflow or Quora. For general nerdly news, I find Hacker News, Techmeme, and The Verge tends to cover my bases better these days.
DOTT or Sam n' Max would both be great for kids. That being said, I wouldn't rule out MI2 (my alltime fav as well). With the Special Edition (for PC and iOS), there's a built in hint system for when the going gets too tough (or weird, really). Also, being able to switch instantly between the classic and updated art is just super sweet.
For wind power, we can turn to the US government reports a quick search turned up the DoE's NREL annual report on wind power (May, 2008) show an installed cost of "$1,240/kW to $2,600/kW, with an average cost of $1,710/kW." Even accounting for the capacity factor difference, Wind is looking pretty competitive vs nuclear. (Also, from the NREL report, you can see the average turbine size is 1.65MW - using a 3KW turbine to calculate costs is just mind-boggingly silly.)
The other salient point is that while thousands of megawatts of new wind generation is being added annually (according to NREL, 35% of new generation capacity was wind), 0% is nuclear (the last plant that went online in the US was in 1996. The $8.3B loan backed by the Obama administration for the $14B A.W. Votgle plants aren't scheduled to come online until 2016 and 2017).
All this is a long way of saying that I'm quite surprised that your comment could possibly be rated informative. It's a rant based on a hare-brained back of the envelope calculation (although I do admit there's some humor in the fact that the $14B price tag that you're aghast about is the actual cost of a new 2200MW nuclear plant) that seems to have managed to make many claims and conclusions without having done some pretty basic research.
To answer the poster's question, I have a Thecus N5200 Pro that performs pretty well - RAID0 should break 40MB/s - not amazing, but better than any other SOHO NAS's around, barring the new N7700, which looks like it'll hit Gig-E limits (finally a cheapish NAS that approaches 100MB/s for reads/writes). That said, you're gonna pay for the performance - the N5200 is about $700 and the N7700 is $1100 (enclosure's only). eAegis sells them w/ burned in drives as well - that's where I got my N5200. The hot-swap and automatic RAID rebuilding works as well and it has built in FTP, SMB, AFP, and NFS and is pretty good for a plug and play system.
That being said, you're definitely paying a premium, and you could easily throw together a multi-terabyte system that would max out your GigE for about the same price as what you'd pay for the N5200 enclosure. My only big recommendation there is that you get a hotswap rack w/ that - makes things much more pleasant when replacing drives.
One other thing to consider is power consumption. My N5200 Pro idles at 80W - if you built a low-power mini-ITX system you could probably get something pretty close to that, but a regular PC would probably be closer to 150-200W. Depending on your electric billing, you could be talking about a $100-200/yr difference there.
That being said, I think that most of your problems with CFL's probably have to do with low color rendering index - older/cheaper CFL's have pretty miserable CRIs (50-60s). (why colors look like crap)
You can commonly get good CFLs in the 80s, and like someone mentions later on in the thread, you can even get one with a CRI of 96 (the cheapest I've seen that bulb is $16/bulb), but over the lifetime of the bulb you should still save money (w/ at my current kWH rate you would save about $100/bulb in electricity over the bulb lifetime).
Those Lumiram Ecolumes, besides having a 96 CRI are at 5000K ("daylight") and put out a pretty impressive 1300 Lumens and might be worth giving a try. (they also claim to be "full spectrum," but from the charts of the studies, it looks like nothing, not your GE Reveals or Flourescent FSI puts out anything close to resembling D65).
WM5 devices have an incredibly small marketshare... That being said, the high end GMM works great on my PPC6700 w/ the IBM J2ME runtime installed (J9VM 2.3; MIDP 2.0).
Marge: Well... Then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.
Homer: Exactly! Just a bunch of stuff that happened.
Re:DivX 6 is Out...for Windows 2000/XP.
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1
It's sometimes referred to as AVC (Advanced Video Coding), but mostly people seem to bite the bullet and say H.264 (hey, beats MPEG-4 part 10, I guess)
Definitely give Fink a try for handling most of the packages that OS X is missing. I haven't tried Gentoo for Mac OS X yet - it writes directly into your / instead of/sw so I might wait until it stabilizes a bit before giving that a try.
ServerLogistics' Complete * packages are also great.
Thanks for posting the direct links, didn't realize until after I posted that the blog admin had removed the comment. Now that's rather unsporting. (the rest of the convsersation is still interesting. Also, there's a mention of "Diane's" real name, Lindsey, in the comments still)
If you read this comment, you'll see that someone already found one of the people in the photo a while ago. The conclusion of the discussion at the time was that the participants should be allowed to 'discover for themselves.'
Hopefully the meta-drama will half as fun as the blog so far:)
I've seen it firsthand (some alpha builds sitting right here) and have to say it's damn impressive. He's recruited some really smart people, and I'm quite excited about what they're working on (self-modifying code, smart objects (object veiling/advanced capability models), P2P sync/mesh networking, natural interfaces [mirrors, portals], etc. etc.)
In other words, 6% of the contiguous US land area would have to be covered with windmill farms.
I'm don't claim to be an expert, but that's what it sounds like. Here's a reference within the paper itself that references the 6% figure again:
The amount of windy land available for power class 4 and above is approximately 460,000 square kilometers, or about 6% of the total land area in the contiguous United States. The potential average power from areas with class 4 and higher, which are suitable for development with advanced wind turbine technology, is estimated at 500,000 MW.
(The sizing assumptions fromt he study: 50-m hub height, 10 D x 5 D spacing, 25% efficiency, and 25% power losses.)
Another interesting figure:
Figure 4 shows the contribution that the wind energy of each state could make to meet the total electrical needs of the nation, assuming a moderate land exclusion scenario. North Dakota alone has enough potential energy from windy areas of class 4 and higher to supply 36% of the total 1990 electricity consumption of the 48 contiguous states.
How much does each windmill cost? (I don't know.) How much would a million of them cost?
The AWEA document includes basic information on cost. One of the charts tables shows a 1.65mW rated 71m diameter turbine to cost $1.3M in 2000. They give a capital cost estimate of building a class 4 50MW wind farm at about $1M/MW, with an annual power production (assuming 35% capacity factor) of 150M kWh.
Here's a 2001 study of Comparative Cost Of Wind And Other Energy Sources [PDF]. Citing a table from the California Energy Commission's 1996 Energy Technology Status Report (CEC calculations do not include subsidies or environmental costs), Wind is about even w/ coal (4.0-6.0c/kWh) and *much* cheaper than nuclear (not sure why the CEC's number differs so much from those floated by the Uranium Information Centre). Once externalities [PDF] are figured in of course, wind power is much cheaper than coal.
What would be the effect of taking that much energy out of wind patterns? Would rainfall in the region be affected? Regional temperatures? Flowering plant pollination rates?
I agree, the most common environmental problems seem to those affecting birds and aesthetic, etc. While I don't think that larger climactic changes are a significant concern at the scales we're talking about, it would be nice to see some numbers/empirical research. I haven't, however seen any such portential issues cited it anywhere, from the ANL's Wind EIS's concerns, the UCS, or any of the various reports I've read (I've done searching on Google and Citeseer), which you might expect to see if there were problems. What I have seen shows local net-positive effects in wildlife from reduced emissions in states implementing large-scale wind power. It might be worth doing more research on how Denmark is doing (they're at over 10%+ of their power being generated vy windmills, and aiming for 40-50% by 2030).
I haven't done enough research to actually nail down the numbers of whether it would be able to completely replace coal, but from the research I've done, wind power is actually something that is pretty close to viable in the US (unlike solar) and certainly very viable in other countries.
Of course getting rid of burning coal is great, but our oil consumption problem is really a totally different can of worms (w/ about 45% of the 20.0MMBD last year being gasoline).
An interesting analysis, and while I agree w/ that nuclear power would be far preferable to coal, (and without discussing further viability issues), I would just like to point out that wind power in the US should not be ruled out offhand. From the abstract of the 1993 Wind Energy Potential in the United States study by D.L. Elliott and M.N. Schwartz (which supercedes the 1991 study cited):
Good wind areas, which cover 6% of the contiguous U.S. land area, have the potential to supply more than one and a half times the current electricity consumption of the United States. Technology under development today will be capable of producing electricity economically from good wind sites in many regions of the country.
So yes, in theory, wind power could meet our power needs (but not w/o being coupled with advanced battery technologies.
Even cost per kWh, Wind does ok. From a March 2004 briefing published by the World Nuclear Association on The Economics of Nuclear Power, shows a present day cost of about 3.7c/kWh. A recent AWEA analysis of the The Economics of Wind Energy [PDF] places the cost/kWh for a 51MW wind farm at between 2.6-4.8c/kWh depending on wind speed. Even if we account for backup power and double the cost, we're not doing too badly either way.
Coal is at about 3.3c/kWh, but when calculating in the external costs "to put plausible financial figures against damage resulting from different forms of electricity production for the entire EU" as done in the decade long EC ExternE studies. Total cost of both nuclear (avg'ing 0.4 euro cents/kWh) and wind (0.1-0.2 ec/kWh) end up beating the snot over coal (4.1-7.3 ec/kWh).
Regardless, I agree with Lovelock. We really need to dump fossil fuels now.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the biggest benefits of HFR (48FPS) is specifically for 3D. 3D project is actually "triple flashed" at 144FPS (72FPS/eye). This accentuates the (camera and subject) motion issues w/ 24FPS, so HFR is a way of trying to get around that - and having just seen the Hobbit in 3D HFR today, it seems to do a pretty good job at it. Fast motion is crystal clear - it's really astounding.
That being said, I agree about the aesthetic adjustment. The intro scene in the Shire/Bag End in particular... just looks bad. Similarly the way the set/makeup/lighting looks. IMO, the most CG parts of the movie looked best because at least it didn't have that "live theatre" look. I think most films won't adopt HFR because it may just be too hard/expensive to make things look good.
Another part of it seems to be the DOF choice - it's just incredibly deep/clear which IMO is *not* realistic at all - when you look at something in real life, that's just not how your foveal/peripheral vision works, at least for me. Sure the clarity is nice for spectacle, but not so much for immersion.
And lastly, of course people (especially people that watch lots of films) have an expectation of what a film should look like and HFR totally breaks that.
Still, I'm sure that people had this sort of discussion w/ the switch from B&W to Color or w/ Talkies, soI guess time will tell.
Actually, the "standard" shutter speed for 24fps film is typically 1/48s (180 degree shutter angle in film-speak). Cinematographers choose different shutter speeds based on a number of considerations, mostly related to how motion (camera (pan judder) and subject (strobing)) will look w/ specific lenses and lighting. Depth of Field also plays into that choice of course. Common shutter angles range anywhere from 270 degrees (1/24s) all the way down to 45 degrees (1/192s). FYI: 360 degrees is now possible w/ digital cameras, but was *not* possible with mechanical cameras! (practically every feature length film shot until the last decade or so).
You can easily find samples online, as you can imagine, they give extremely different looks for motion.
Yeah, they're currently Knight Foundation funded (a Knight News Challenge winner) and a big part of CfA Brigade's current Race for Reuse project encouraging community deployments - there's are bunch of communities adopting LocalWiki, which is awesome. Also, I met Philip, the lead dev recently and he's very sharp.
That being said, for a volunteer project for a small town without any support or resources, a Google Site w/ Google Docs links that an AC suggested probably is the best way to go - it's not sexy, but I bet that realistically, it'd be the lowest maintenance and longest lasting/most effective way to get the basic info up there (and kept up to date).
Actually, this is probably much better than my suggestion. +1
For the type of things you're looking for, I'd recommend LocalWiki. While so far it's been used mostly by communities vs municipalities, it includes robust permissions, is under active development, and is built w/ some nice geo-extensions for where that's applicable. It's very easy to get up and running and you could run a micro EC2 instance to test out for (practically) free.
I'd also suggest that you try to connect w/ others that are doing similar things. There's a large community of civic hackers. For those working directly w/ municipal govt, check out the Code for America Brigade, a community that's all about that and can provide help/support for exactly this sort of thing. You may want to check out their deployable app list, and maybe also check out CfA's github repository which has a lot of projects that may be useful, and their Civic Commons project which gathers the sw/infrastructure that cities are using.
If you're looking to learn something new and general purpose, Python has a combination of decent docs (you can start with http://www.python.org/doc/ , http://pleac.sourceforge.net/pleac_python/ , and http://www.lightbird.net/py-by-example/ ), good libraries (see http://pypi.python.org/pypi and https://github.com/languages/Python/most_watched ) and all-around flexibility (all the regular system stuff, lots of microframeworks for web, scientific computing tools, 2d+3d graphics).
You may want to take a look at IPython ( http://ipython.org/ ), Reinteract ( http://fishsoup.net/software/reinteract/ ), and DreamPie ( http://dreampie.sourceforge.net/ ) for some interactive shells/interpreters to play around with. I use vim for programming, but there are a number of IDEs. Of the ones I've tried, I thought IEP offered the most interesting tools: http://code.google.com/p/iep/
Probably the fastest/easiest way to learn (and learn if you like) Python is to go through Zed Shaw's book/exercises: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/
There's a lot of other stuff on the Python wiki: http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/Programmers
Slashdot definitely isn't what it used to be. For programming questions you may want to look at Stack Overflow or Quora. For general nerdly news, I find Hacker News, Techmeme, and The Verge tends to cover my bases better these days.
FYI in case anyone is following along, yesterday's update announced support for Mac, Linux, iOS, and some Android devices. Also, it will be available DRM free. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TFKwplDBmgg
As of the current posting, the project is at over $1.9M w/ >56K supporters.
DOTT or Sam n' Max would both be great for kids. That being said, I wouldn't rule out MI2 (my alltime fav as well). With the Special Edition (for PC and iOS), there's a built in hint system for when the going gets too tough (or weird, really). Also, being able to switch instantly between the classic and updated art is just super sweet.
Why not use real numbers? Another post pointed to the a Wikipedia article on the economics for new nuclear power plants.. This includes a section that includes capital cost estimates of $3,000-5,000/kW. These projects new projects are all in the $10B ballpark. These numbers are sourced from a January 2010 report by the World Nuclear Association, a nuclear power trade group, so this is probably as optimistic as you'll get.
For wind power, we can turn to the US government reports a quick search turned up the DoE's NREL annual report on wind power (May, 2008) show an installed cost of "$1,240/kW to $2,600/kW, with an average cost of $1,710/kW." Even accounting for the capacity factor difference, Wind is looking pretty competitive vs nuclear. (Also, from the NREL report, you can see the average turbine size is 1.65MW - using a 3KW turbine to calculate costs is just mind-boggingly silly.)
The other salient point is that while thousands of megawatts of new wind generation is being added annually (according to NREL, 35% of new generation capacity was wind), 0% is nuclear (the last plant that went online in the US was in 1996. The $8.3B loan backed by the Obama administration for the $14B A.W. Votgle plants aren't scheduled to come online until 2016 and 2017).
All this is a long way of saying that I'm quite surprised that your comment could possibly be rated informative. It's a rant based on a hare-brained back of the envelope calculation (although I do admit there's some humor in the fact that the $14B price tag that you're aghast about is the actual cost of a new 2200MW nuclear plant) that seems to have managed to make many claims and conclusions without having done some pretty basic research.
Actually, it's not just Fawkes, but you could also have Charon, who's also completely immune to radiation (and who'll also refuse to go in).
To answer the poster's question, I have a Thecus N5200 Pro that performs pretty well - RAID0 should break 40MB/s - not amazing, but better than any other SOHO NAS's around, barring the new N7700, which looks like it'll hit Gig-E limits (finally a cheapish NAS that approaches 100MB/s for reads/writes). That said, you're gonna pay for the performance - the N5200 is about $700 and the N7700 is $1100 (enclosure's only). eAegis sells them w/ burned in drives as well - that's where I got my N5200. The hot-swap and automatic RAID rebuilding works as well and it has built in FTP, SMB, AFP, and NFS and is pretty good for a plug and play system.
That being said, you're definitely paying a premium, and you could easily throw together a multi-terabyte system that would max out your GigE for about the same price as what you'd pay for the N5200 enclosure. My only big recommendation there is that you get a hotswap rack w/ that - makes things much more pleasant when replacing drives.
One other thing to consider is power consumption. My N5200 Pro idles at 80W - if you built a low-power mini-ITX system you could probably get something pretty close to that, but a regular PC would probably be closer to 150-200W. Depending on your electric billing, you could be talking about a $100-200/yr difference there.
You might be interested in reading the results of the RPI Lighting Research Center's study on "Full Spectrum" lighting, it's pretty interesting.
That being said, I think that most of your problems with CFL's probably have to do with low color rendering index - older/cheaper CFL's have pretty miserable CRIs (50-60s). (why colors look like crap)
You can commonly get good CFLs in the 80s, and like someone mentions later on in the thread, you can even get one with a CRI of 96 (the cheapest I've seen that bulb is $16/bulb), but over the lifetime of the bulb you should still save money (w/ at my current kWH rate you would save about $100/bulb in electricity over the bulb lifetime).
Those Lumiram Ecolumes, besides having a 96 CRI are at 5000K ("daylight") and put out a pretty impressive 1300 Lumens and might be worth giving a try. (they also claim to be "full spectrum," but from the charts of the studies, it looks like nothing, not your GE Reveals or Flourescent FSI puts out anything close to resembling D65).
WM5 devices have an incredibly small marketshare... That being said, the high end GMM works great on my PPC6700 w/ the IBM J2ME runtime installed (J9VM 2.3; MIDP 2.0).
Marge: Well... Then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.
Homer: Exactly! Just a bunch of stuff that happened.
It's sometimes referred to as AVC (Advanced Video Coding), but mostly people seem to bite the bullet and say H.264 (hey, beats MPEG-4 part 10, I guess)
An application I've used which does what you want is called scponly.
Features include chrooting to home directory, and full sftp, unison, and optional rsync compatibility.
One of the benefits of having a fully open API: FlickrUploadr written in PyGtk by Michele Campeotto.
Personally, I've gone the cmdline route. Here's a perl-script I use that I run in my cron to automatically u/l what's in a dropbox folder: flickrer
Be sure to check out the Flickr API group. There's also a mailing list
Definitely give Fink a try for handling most of the packages that OS X is missing. I haven't tried Gentoo for Mac OS X yet - it writes directly into your / instead of /sw so I might wait until it stabilizes a bit before giving that a try.
ServerLogistics' Complete * packages are also great.
See, this meta-drama *is* getting interesting. :)
Thanks for posting the direct links, didn't realize until after I posted that the blog admin had removed the comment. Now that's rather unsporting. (the rest of the convsersation is still interesting. Also, there's a mention of "Diane's" real name, Lindsey, in the comments still)
If you read this comment, you'll see that someone already found one of the people in the photo a while ago. The conclusion of the discussion at the time was that the participants should be allowed to 'discover for themselves.'
Hopefully the meta-drama will half as fun as the blog so far :)
(Yeah, it's pretty wrong. But hilarious.)
Here's the Address scraper I wrote in Perl last year when I switched to a Treo 600: http://randomfoo.net/code/Sidekick/hiptop.pl
It's ugly and I'm not really supporting it (only needed it once, right?), but it works so I've GPL'd it and thrown it out there.
If you're interested in more about what Alan's been working on recently, check out Alan Kay and David Smith's Keynote at ETECH 2003.
I've seen it firsthand (some alpha builds sitting right here) and have to say it's damn impressive. He's recruited some really smart people, and I'm quite excited about what they're working on (self-modifying code, smart objects (object veiling/advanced capability models), P2P sync/mesh networking, natural interfaces [mirrors, portals], etc. etc.)
I'm don't claim to be an expert, but that's what it sounds like. Here's a reference within the paper itself that references the 6% figure again:
(The sizing assumptions fromt he study: 50-m hub height, 10 D x 5 D spacing, 25% efficiency, and 25% power losses.)
Another interesting figure:
The AWEA document includes basic information on cost. One of the charts tables shows a 1.65mW rated 71m diameter turbine to cost $1.3M in 2000. They give a capital cost estimate of building a class 4 50MW wind farm at about $1M/MW, with an annual power production (assuming 35% capacity factor) of 150M kWh.
Here's a 2001 study of Comparative Cost Of Wind And Other Energy Sources [PDF]. Citing a table from the California Energy Commission's 1996 Energy Technology Status Report (CEC calculations do not include subsidies or environmental costs), Wind is about even w/ coal (4.0-6.0c/kWh) and *much* cheaper than nuclear (not sure why the CEC's number differs so much from those floated by the Uranium Information Centre). Once externalities [PDF] are figured in of course, wind power is much cheaper than coal.
I agree, the most common environmental problems seem to those affecting birds and aesthetic, etc. While I don't think that larger climactic changes are a significant concern at the scales we're talking about, it would be nice to see some numbers/empirical research. I haven't, however seen any such portential issues cited it anywhere, from the ANL's Wind EIS's concerns, the UCS, or any of the various reports I've read (I've done searching on Google and Citeseer), which you might expect to see if there were problems. What I have seen shows local net-positive effects in wildlife from reduced emissions in states implementing large-scale wind power. It might be worth doing more research on how Denmark is doing (they're at over 10%+ of their power being generated vy windmills, and aiming for 40-50% by 2030).
I haven't done enough research to actually nail down the numbers of whether it would be able to completely replace coal, but from the research I've done, wind power is actually something that is pretty close to viable in the US (unlike solar) and certainly very viable in other countries.
Of course getting rid of burning coal is great, but our oil consumption problem is really a totally different can of worms (w/ about 45% of the 20.0MMBD last year being gasoline).
An interesting analysis, and while I agree w/ that nuclear power would be far preferable to coal, (and without discussing further viability issues), I would just like to point out that wind power in the US should not be ruled out offhand. From the abstract of the 1993 Wind Energy Potential in the United States study by D.L. Elliott and M.N. Schwartz (which supercedes the 1991 study cited):
So yes, in theory, wind power could meet our power needs (but not w/o being coupled with advanced battery technologies.
Even cost per kWh, Wind does ok. From a March 2004 briefing published by the World Nuclear Association on The Economics of Nuclear Power, shows a present day cost of about 3.7c/kWh. A recent AWEA analysis of the The Economics of Wind Energy [PDF] places the cost/kWh for a 51MW wind farm at between 2.6-4.8c/kWh depending on wind speed. Even if we account for backup power and double the cost, we're not doing too badly either way.
Coal is at about 3.3c/kWh, but when calculating in the external costs "to put plausible financial figures against damage resulting from different forms of electricity production for the entire EU" as done in the decade long EC ExternE studies. Total cost of both nuclear (avg'ing 0.4 euro cents/kWh) and wind (0.1-0.2 ec/kWh) end up beating the snot over coal (4.1-7.3 ec/kWh).
Regardless, I agree with Lovelock. We really need to dump fossil fuels now.