Now, what happens if the climate doesn't play ball and your windfarms only manage 0.9x for that day?
Sure you can build them in areas where long term study of the conditions mean that you can pretty much know the normal bounds of the conditions (namely the wind speed in this case - and too high can be as bad as too low). If you build your entire infrastructure on the assuring that you always had x load, then you're in trouble.
Nothing operates in a vacuum of course, except my sample drying on the schlenk line, but if you're adding in other power plants to "cover" that potential loss in base load that your wind is meant to be creating then that's hardly ideal is it?
The only real downsides to wind are the problems of relying on it for base load (you can't really) and the visual impact/area required for large scale farms, and the cost of distribution since you need to collate all the individual turbines and then send the power off into the grid from the farm's hub which tends to be on the edges of your power network, or at the very least unlikely to be central to the system.
It's an excellent piece of the puzzle for our future energy needs, but not the only one.
Personally I favour nuclear for baseload, with combinations of wind, solar (PV and thermal), tidal etc depending on the local conditions. Pumped storage hydro too, if it can be done with minimal impact on the local environment.
Of course you can store surplus in solar plants. It's not all PV you know - you can run the plant using mineral oil (or some other liquid with a high Cv) and pump it round the system, heating it using the sun and storing it for use when there's no sun - like at night. Then just run steam turbines from this stored heat. This has been done in prototype plants, and is subject to economies of scale.
The distribution issue is one that's common to many renewables - the best places to put the plants tend to be far away from where the load is wanted.
I have, and $1200 as a business expense on a $100,000 turnover for a 1 or 2 man business is peanuts.
This is like slashdotters complaining about the "massive" cost of getting into iOS development due to the $99 per year fee and the "enormous" cost of a Mac if you don't already have one.
Interesting. So, privacy is the biggest, most important thing to a slashdotter (witness: any number of stories on here about it), yet your solution is to tell them to totally give theirs up voluntarily?
How does that in any way affect data privacy, unless say, you wanted to sync to some other cloud service and not Apple... but you can already do that.
Seriously, the whole "you can root Android, therefore it is automatically better/faster/slower/quieter/louder/useful" applied to every situation just smacks of people looking for a reason to bash.
It's certainly a useful ability, but the OP wasn't talking about that.
I will second the AC's point - why is Android a "clear winner" while iOS is "more intrusive"?
Not that I necessarily disagree, I am just interested in how you came to that conclusion.
FWIW, you don't have to share your contacts and calendars "in the cloud" in iOS - it's entirely optional, and you can sync solely through your home machine if you like. If you don't want to share personal info with Apple at all then you can set up a throwaway email account for your Apple ID and top it up using iTunes Gift Cards if you want to spend any more on the store (you *do not* need to give them a credit card at any stage).
Then turn off all the location services, and I'm not seeing how iOS is any more or less intrusive than Android is.
YMMV, of course. Pick the best phone for the job - if you're buying new, the Galaxy II S and the iPhone 4S are both excellent if you decide to go Android/iOS.
You're confusing a percentage of your business being signed over to Microsoft to work with them, with a percentage of each sale being paid to Apple/Google (in return for hosting and handling of payments).
Exactly what you said, but reversed. Try reading any selection of random comments on an Apple story sometime, or the sorts of editorially trolling summaries that get posted on Apple stories.
It's not just Apple, of course. Microsoft gets it pretty heavily too.
That was Samsung - they copied the iPhone. Apple sued them.
Nothing stopping Samsung from making a phone that isn't a direct rip off of the iPhone (something HTC, Nokia, Sony etc all managed to do just fine). When the reviewers are all saying "this Galaxy S is great, but it's a little close to an iPhone for comfort...." it was obvious Apple would note the same similarity.
The lawsuit is "you copied the iPhone, design something different".
By contrast, Samsung's countersuit is "you're using one of our 3G patents (that we somehow believe is not covered by the RAND licence terms you've already paid), stop selling all iPhones!"
It's not just "smartphone with rounded corners" - there are plenty of those out there that are not part of a lawsuit from Apple. It's combining "smartphone with rounded corners" with a bunch of other elements that make it very close to a copy of the iPhone that caused the lawsuit.
It wasn't just Apple who noticed - all the initial reviews (or a great many of them) commented that the Galaxy S looked an *awful lot* like the iPhone in terms of physical look as well as software experience. Something they didn't say, for example, with any HTC phone, or any other Android handset. If all Apple had was "it has rounded corners, sue sue!" then it would be nonsense, but they don't.
It's like protection of the President - you can see all the showy stuff with the Secret Service guys in black suits and sunglasses, holding their finger to their ear to listen to an earpiece... those are the guys they want you to see.
So they can sell you a battery. Same reason my car's manual says "only use Citroen-approved parts".
It doesn't mean it's not *ludicrously* easy to do - just take the bottom off and put the new battery in. Essentially the bottom of the laptop is a giant battery door held closed with screws. The 3GS was the same - two screws, pop the thing open, unstick old battery, stick in new one, close it up.
The minor inconvenience of having to open it up with a screwdriver is more than made up for by the design not being compromised by having an externally accessible battery (bigger battery for the size, seamless exterior panels).
The iPod Nano is certainly an issue (the screen is glued on) but replacing batteries in most other Apple devices is easy. Took me about 10 minutes to do the 3GS, including opening the impossible shrink wrap packaging that contained the new battery.
Jobs was about controlling the user experience, but using open standards as part of that.
His mantra was "OS X works well as a closed source top on an open source base, using open standards to get data in and out".
This explains why they went for things like AAC and H.264 (both open standards, albeit patented - but specifically not closed like WMV/WMA etc), and mbox, and so on.
If you can get your data out then it doesn't matter that the OS is partially closed (at least in his view). It's why he went on record about how DRM is a crappy experience for the consumer, and why Apple fought to not have it at all on the iTunes store (to begin with), and having to compromise with weak DRM initially to get it all going and negotiate it away later.
You claim that Steve "would have opposed" things like Webkit, yet he talked a lot about it at keynotes especially around the initial release of Safari as a great addition to the OS X platform, and how they specifically chose KHTML because it was fast, lightweight and in development.
Or his high praise of H.264 - he spent about half an hour talking about it during one keynote, about how it was the next big thing since it was high quality and an open standard.
In the years leading up to this state, market cap was one of the metrics used to bash Apple's "weak position" and one of the many reasons it was "dying".
Now that it's where it is, suddenly it seems market cap is meaningless. Funny that.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so your base load is x.
Your wind farms, on average produce 2x.
All fine.
Now, what happens if the climate doesn't play ball and your windfarms only manage 0.9x for that day?
Sure you can build them in areas where long term study of the conditions mean that you can pretty much know the normal bounds of the conditions (namely the wind speed in this case - and too high can be as bad as too low). If you build your entire infrastructure on the assuring that you always had x load, then you're in trouble.
Nothing operates in a vacuum of course, except my sample drying on the schlenk line, but if you're adding in other power plants to "cover" that potential loss in base load that your wind is meant to be creating then that's hardly ideal is it?
I don't live in the US.
Just try building one near to where people live. The NIMBY factor is almost as bad as for a nuclear power plant.
The only real downsides to wind are the problems of relying on it for base load (you can't really) and the visual impact/area required for large scale farms, and the cost of distribution since you need to collate all the individual turbines and then send the power off into the grid from the farm's hub which tends to be on the edges of your power network, or at the very least unlikely to be central to the system.
It's an excellent piece of the puzzle for our future energy needs, but not the only one.
Personally I favour nuclear for baseload, with combinations of wind, solar (PV and thermal), tidal etc depending on the local conditions. Pumped storage hydro too, if it can be done with minimal impact on the local environment.
Of course you can store surplus in solar plants. It's not all PV you know - you can run the plant using mineral oil (or some other liquid with a high Cv) and pump it round the system, heating it using the sun and storing it for use when there's no sun - like at night. Then just run steam turbines from this stored heat. This has been done in prototype plants, and is subject to economies of scale.
The distribution issue is one that's common to many renewables - the best places to put the plants tend to be far away from where the load is wanted.
I have, and $1200 as a business expense on a $100,000 turnover for a 1 or 2 man business is peanuts.
This is like slashdotters complaining about the "massive" cost of getting into iOS development due to the $99 per year fee and the "enormous" cost of a Mac if you don't already have one.
Interesting. So, privacy is the biggest, most important thing to a slashdotter (witness: any number of stories on here about it), yet your solution is to tell them to totally give theirs up voluntarily?
So, you're unaware of ice core temperature data then?
Figures.
How does that in any way affect data privacy, unless say, you wanted to sync to some other cloud service and not Apple... but you can already do that.
Seriously, the whole "you can root Android, therefore it is automatically better/faster/slower/quieter/louder/useful" applied to every situation just smacks of people looking for a reason to bash.
It's certainly a useful ability, but the OP wasn't talking about that.
I will second the AC's point - why is Android a "clear winner" while iOS is "more intrusive"?
Not that I necessarily disagree, I am just interested in how you came to that conclusion.
FWIW, you don't have to share your contacts and calendars "in the cloud" in iOS - it's entirely optional, and you can sync solely through your home machine if you like. If you don't want to share personal info with Apple at all then you can set up a throwaway email account for your Apple ID and top it up using iTunes Gift Cards if you want to spend any more on the store (you *do not* need to give them a credit card at any stage).
Then turn off all the location services, and I'm not seeing how iOS is any more or less intrusive than Android is.
YMMV, of course. Pick the best phone for the job - if you're buying new, the Galaxy II S and the iPhone 4S are both excellent if you decide to go Android/iOS.
You're confusing a percentage of your business being signed over to Microsoft to work with them, with a percentage of each sale being paid to Apple/Google (in return for hosting and handling of payments).
Exactly what you said, but reversed. Try reading any selection of random comments on an Apple story sometime, or the sorts of editorially trolling summaries that get posted on Apple stories.
It's not just Apple, of course. Microsoft gets it pretty heavily too.
It's actually about both.
Perhaps Samsung shouldn't have copied the iPhone then?
Nothing stopping them selling a phone with a different design.
That was Samsung - they copied the iPhone. Apple sued them.
Nothing stopping Samsung from making a phone that isn't a direct rip off of the iPhone (something HTC, Nokia, Sony etc all managed to do just fine). When the reviewers are all saying "this Galaxy S is great, but it's a little close to an iPhone for comfort...." it was obvious Apple would note the same similarity.
The lawsuit is "you copied the iPhone, design something different".
By contrast, Samsung's countersuit is "you're using one of our 3G patents (that we somehow believe is not covered by the RAND licence terms you've already paid), stop selling all iPhones!"
It's not just "smartphone with rounded corners" - there are plenty of those out there that are not part of a lawsuit from Apple. It's combining "smartphone with rounded corners" with a bunch of other elements that make it very close to a copy of the iPhone that caused the lawsuit.
It wasn't just Apple who noticed - all the initial reviews (or a great many of them) commented that the Galaxy S looked an *awful lot* like the iPhone in terms of physical look as well as software experience. Something they didn't say, for example, with any HTC phone, or any other Android handset. If all Apple had was "it has rounded corners, sue sue!" then it would be nonsense, but they don't.
Yes, seriously.
It's like protection of the President - you can see all the showy stuff with the Secret Service guys in black suits and sunglasses, holding their finger to their ear to listen to an earpiece... those are the guys they want you to see.
So they can sell you a battery. Same reason my car's manual says "only use Citroen-approved parts".
It doesn't mean it's not *ludicrously* easy to do - just take the bottom off and put the new battery in. Essentially the bottom of the laptop is a giant battery door held closed with screws. The 3GS was the same - two screws, pop the thing open, unstick old battery, stick in new one, close it up.
The minor inconvenience of having to open it up with a screwdriver is more than made up for by the design not being compromised by having an externally accessible battery (bigger battery for the size, seamless exterior panels).
You expect anyone commenting on a /. story to have even read the summary?
The iPod Nano is certainly an issue (the screen is glued on) but replacing batteries in most other Apple devices is easy. Took me about 10 minutes to do the 3GS, including opening the impossible shrink wrap packaging that contained the new battery.
Not all of us live in countries where "compact" is classed as a car that can comfortably seat 5 large adults and their luggage.
The Leaf is a pretty average sized car.
Jobs was about controlling the user experience, but using open standards as part of that.
His mantra was "OS X works well as a closed source top on an open source base, using open standards to get data in and out".
This explains why they went for things like AAC and H.264 (both open standards, albeit patented - but specifically not closed like WMV/WMA etc), and mbox, and so on.
If you can get your data out then it doesn't matter that the OS is partially closed (at least in his view). It's why he went on record about how DRM is a crappy experience for the consumer, and why Apple fought to not have it at all on the iTunes store (to begin with), and having to compromise with weak DRM initially to get it all going and negotiate it away later.
You claim that Steve "would have opposed" things like Webkit, yet he talked a lot about it at keynotes especially around the initial release of Safari as a great addition to the OS X platform, and how they specifically chose KHTML because it was fast, lightweight and in development.
Or his high praise of H.264 - he spent about half an hour talking about it during one keynote, about how it was the next big thing since it was high quality and an open standard.
Yes, that kind of cheap service.
It's now been phased out and replaced by a free service.
You missed off "now that Apple is at the top".
In the years leading up to this state, market cap was one of the metrics used to bash Apple's "weak position" and one of the many reasons it was "dying".
Now that it's where it is, suddenly it seems market cap is meaningless. Funny that.