What else is new? Human interest takes a back seat to Apple's interests. I'd suggest they have no respect for the dead, but in this case, they are respecting the will of Jobs by carrying on as he would.
(yeah yeah, troll modding here I come. He was pretty famous for being a major ass.)
So, when they were the subject of severe criticism for having lax security (justified in my opinion) after someone used social engineering to reset a reporter's Apple ID you hated them then, and now that they responded to that criticism and improved their security to be less convenient they're still to be hated?
Got it.
You're a very angry person when it comes to Apple. How much of your time would you say you spend raging on the internet because people buy products from a company you don't like?
You don't need a credit card to have an Apple ID. You don't even need to put in a real address (or the one you live at, certainly - Apple doesn't verify that).
Who knows what information Apple has on that iPad and subsequent account? Of course they know what it is, but they need a court of law to say "the people asking for access to it are legit, you can reset the Apple ID".
Perhaps Grandma was too busy dying to be concerned about what bullshit some company was going to pull with her possession. As was the family. Apple asked for proof of ownership. Fair enough. They provided *three* forms of it. That should be the end of it.
All that bibble about "what if" is bollocks. It was her iPad, she died, it now belongs to the family who have proven that they are the family. Unlock the fucking thing.
No, they provided a death certificate, that proves a woman died. They provided a will that said all her possessions go to the kids, and a fancy letter from a lawyer that says the same thing.
None of those things prove that the iPad they want unlocked belonged to the dead person, hence the court order.
This is all pretty standard stuff. It's just big news because someone wants ad impressions via click bait and slashdot just loves to hate Apple. Someone is making a mortgage payment off this story.
Say I inherit a locked safe made by SafeCo from my dead father. I have a certificate proving he is dead, and a will that says I inherit his possessions.
Is SafeCo obligated to open the safe with their master key. Do you think they might ask for a court order, as is standard in probate law?
Now assume that I inherit my father's estate and I add a stolen safe into the possessions, also made by SafeCo. What happens if they unlock that for me without a court order?
Is it a safe manufacturer's problem if a locked safe is inherited by the children and they don't know the combination?
I'm pretty sure they'd ask for something like, I I don't know, a court order perhaps, if they were asked to enter their master code to unlock the safe if the original owner had died and their kids wanted access to it.
They're asking for a standard court order based on English law that the documents presented are genuine and that the iPad actually belonged to that dead person.
This is really, really, really standard stuff. The only reason it's turned into a big deal is because it's Apple. After the big kefuffle last year or so when that reporter lost his data because someone social engineered their way into his Apple ID and Apple took (deserved) serious heat for it, they seriously tightened up their security procedures.
Again, you are hilarious. The iTunes store wasn't introduced until April 2003, and by that time the iPod was already well established as the top media player (the launch of the store coincided with the release of the redesigned third gen iPod, and long after Windows compatibility and the subsequent huge uptick in sales happened).
You seem to cling to the belief that the iPod failed because it was expensive when in reality it was wildly popular in virtually all incarnations until its feature set was taken over by the smartphone.
Yes, cheap chinese players with terrible interfaces still exist and did exist before the iPod - the market for those hasn't changed, but the majority of people wanted something other than that, hence the enormous success of the iPod. The popularity dropped off because of iPhone and Android, not because the cheap players that have always been there suddenly became a threat.
Apple's "innovation" with the iPod was a user interface that was actually pleasant to use. I know Apple haters like to suppress that and anything that they have actually done in product innovation and refining because they weren't literally the first mp3 player to market, but Apple rarely are with any product. What they are very good at is refining an existing concept and making it accessible to a large demographic. Of course, you can continue to fail to see that due to hate of the company, but it's all there in the history of the products.
The level of hilarious "not getting it" displayed by your comment is staggering.
I too also had a cellphone "that wasn't called a smartphone back then" too back in the late 90's/early 2000's because the smartphone is a different class of device.
Your definition of "plays mp3s just fine" is clearly different to the vast majority of consumers, as evidenced by the way the portable digital music player market changed once the iPod was launched. The iPod still exists, but its market was steadily consumed by the rise of the smartphone - which rolled in the features that the iPod provided (easy to use interface, lots of storage, portable, convenient) alongside the other device that people were carrying around more and more; a mobile telephone. It's no surprise that the iPod and the portable phone became essentially the same item since people carry a smartphone around all the time anyway and it's more than capable of providing that function (and by that I am talking about all smartphones, not just iPhone). People who used to carry mobile phones and iPods now carry around iPhones or Android phones, or very occasionally, Windows Phones.
To state that the iPod was killed off by cheap Chinese devices hilariously misunderstands the nature of the market. This is not "defensive of Apple" it's simply a statement of the buying habits of modern consumers and the rise of the smartphone as the multifunction device of choice, whether that be an iPhone or an Android.
The iPod sales went down because Apple replaced it with the iPhone - they still have the iPod Touch, but the bulk of consumers who want the functionality of the iPod get it because it's included in the iPhone. Using the drop in iPod sales as some sort of indicator for what will happen to the iPad in the future is laughable.
If Apple were to replace it with something else then perhaps, but as it stands at the moment, the tablet is a relatively unchanging target (it has survived the "netbooks will kill tablets" rhetoric, for example) and seem to happily coexist with ultrabooks.
Ahh, WebKit, you mean KHTML that Apple STOLE from Konqueror and that Google and Opera had to fix with Blink.
How do you "steal" a GPL project by adopting it and working on it? Isn't that the point of open source? Code that is available for anyone to use and improve (Apple did give give back their changes, as fully stipulated in the licence).
Is it only "stealing" if a company you don't like uses open source code?
It's stealing credit.
Apple didn't invent Webkit, the forked it from KHTML.
And stealing credit is expressly verboten by the GPL.
Ah, so it is what I said - that it's only stealing when a company you don't like does it.
Where exactly did Apple claim to have taken the credit for Webkit? They forked KHTML and explicitly said so, in their public announcement about it and in subsequent official material, including the open letter from Jobs on why Apple din't support Flash on iOS. Nowhere have they ever claimed that it was all their work, and I'm struggling to see what else they could do when forking an OSS project to meet your criteria.
They did not try to pass off the work of the KHTML devs as their own, they did not "steal credit", they abided by the licence terms of the GPL....
But because they're Apple they are "stealing code". The double standards and hypocrisy demonstrated by slashdot readers when it comes to Apple is simply staggering. Closed source code? Evil and proprietary/ Open source code? Stealing from community. Hilarious.
Ahh, WebKit, you mean KHTML that Apple STOLE from Konqueror and that Google and Opera had to fix with Blink.
How do you "steal" a GPL project by adopting it and working on it? Isn't that the point of open source? Code that is available for anyone to use and improve (Apple did give give back their changes, as fully stipulated in the licence).
Is it only "stealing" if a company you don't like uses open source code?
Because it shows how lame Apple is. They are totally comfortable taking open source code to use for themselves, but damned if they'll give anything of value back.
Right, that's why Clang and LLVM are not being developed, or Webkit, or... oh never mind. Sorry kid, I didn't mean to let reality intrude on your blissful state of hate and ignorance.
Even worse is the assertion by the click bait summary that it "gutted Apple's security for years" when it only affected Mavericks and iOS versions 6 and 7.
Mavericks was released as a GM in September 2013, iOS 7 around the same time. iOS 6 was released in September 2013, which is hardly "years" ago - it is 16 months ago. "Over a year" might be a more accurate, if less click bait worthy, phrase to use there.
It was a programming error, though, through a simple lack of QA on the code. If you;re trying to claim it was deliberate then I have a tinfoil hat to sell you. I'll throw in the bridge for free.
Perhaps the security updates are on the back burner because it's 7 years old (and because the vast majority of Macs that ever ran 10.6 can upgrade to 10.7 and beyond for free except in a few niche cases involving Core Solo machines)? We have no idea.
So you're glossing over the fact that you don;t understand the science yet are still happy to make sweeping statements about what is and isn't possible.
No wonder we're struggling as a species if this is how economists operate.
I am an actual scientist, and I'm still waiting on your solution to an earth based system that will provide 24/7 power, even if you do cover the deserts of the world with solar panels, I'm still not seeing how you do that. You're apparently the expert on this though. Have you abandoned your "in orbit" array system now, too? Ground-based it is then?
You're all over the place here trying to sound smart and keep moving the goalposts. Your grasp of science is tenuous at best, to the point where you're making elementary errors about the things we already understand in great detail and throwing them up as insurmountable obstacles and guesswork, then handwaving the "common sense, moon is far away, we can't get things to it" argument as if you understand the technical challenges involved.
You didn't even realise the atmosphere absorbs radiation differently at different ranges of the EM spectrum, yet you claim to be an expert on what is possible regarding solar power.
I realize that earth based collection even an attenuated flood of energy from the sun is VASTLY cheaper than building collection in space and hoping (without any real demonstrated capability) to then somehow avoid that same attenuation when transmitting it to earth.
Yes, and it's clear you're no scientist. The absorbance characteristics of the atmosphere to different portions of the EM spectrum are well understood. Where are you getting that there's no demonstrated capability? Because the system hasn't been built? It wasn't until the previous comment that you understood that the system was designed to reduce the footprint of the earth based structures, now you're claiming authority on the the science of "somehow avoid[ing] the same attenuation" without actually understanding that the frequency of the radiation matters and that we're actually quite good at this.
So, if there's no shortage of land to build these systems, where exactly do you suggest we put them? The outcome of the earth-built systems must provide 24/7 power to the Earth, at the same capacity as the Lunar system.
I guess you could put some in the Sahara. That takes care of a little bit of capacity while that side of the Earth faces the sun. Of course, you need to constantly clean the panels and maintenance will be much higher due to the weather. Where else?
You're clearly (either wilfully or just via plain ignorance) not understanding the reason this system has been proposed.
The Earth's atmosphere attenuates a great deal of the radiation that we receive from the sun. Nowhere near all of it, obviously - we still get vast amounts of it every day. However, collecting it is the challenge - 2/3 of the surface of the earth is water. It's hard to build there (you can't build on water easily). We also lose a large portion of the useful high-energy spectrum due to the atmosphere.
The Moon has none of these problems - it is a tidally locked body with no atmosphere and a vast amount of land to build the large solar arrays that you need (large as in, they circle the equator of the moon and and extremely wide). You then beam this power back to earth as (and here's the clever bit) microwave radiation at a specific frequency (or more likely, a range of frequencies, but let's keep it simple for you) such that you can collect it at ground stations that are also large, but not "circle the moon's equator" large. Large like the "VLA large", such that you're not beaming a tight microwave death ray at the Earth but merely a parallel beam of lower intensity that will not damage anything that moves through it by burning it up.
The beauty of using microwaves is that you can tune them to minimise losses through the atmosphere, and you can effectively turn a collection surface that circles the moon (where land pressure is low) into several small (but moon collector size standards) ground stations on the Earth (where land pressure is high).
Man, it;s almost as if you haven;t even researched this and just fired off some nonsense from the hip and tried to wing it to sound smart.
Power is not the problem. If you have an ion thruster you still need propellant - the electricity is abundant, but you'd still have to fuel up the array with whatever you are running the ion thruster on, like xenon, argon or something else heavy and with a reasonable IE.
Even in earth orbit you need to keep on top of station keeping, as you do at lagrangian points too - a spacecraft exactly one of the stable L points (4 or 5) is going to also face debris issues as those places face higher concentrations of dust and rock.
Beaming the power back is not dangerous - you design the system to collect over a large area so that any one point in the beam is of very low intensity. This is very easy to do with the Moon because it's tidally locked to the Earth. Why give up that obvious advantage by having an orbital array that not only has to beam power between the individual satellites (no single one is going to beam back to earth - you'd need to collate it all first) but then you also need a central orbiting hub unit with the transmitter, which you need to keep facing the ground stations at all times. The Moon does that already - just build a beaming station on the near side with the ability to make slight adjustments as necessary.
With the solar panels also built on the moon, servicing them is much simpler - either for a robotic system or in person by astronauts. You also have lots of land area to build servicing sheds and storage buildings to maintain/build panels.
Plus the amount of power this system would beam to earth is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the amount that is beamed to the earth every day by the sun, and even then, the power you are beaming is being used - if you didn't beam the power down then you'd have to generate it on Earth by other means and then that power would be similarly used. 1 watt of power generated on earth and used by an electrical device is no different to 1 watt of power collected and transmitted to the earth from the moon and used up, except in the case of solar panels on the earth. Even then, we barely make a dent in the amount of energy the sun is blasting us with. Solar power is like putting a bucket into a wave and making a note that we slightly reduced the volume of water breaking onto the shore.
But then you have a ton of arrays in solar orbit that you have to monitor and require fuel for station keeping. You also don't have access to a handy moon to use as a heat sink to cool the panels (although they could be designed to radiatively cool since they are going to be in shadow for half the time, although vacuum is a poor heat transfer medium).
Slashdot Mirror
What else is new? Human interest takes a back seat to Apple's interests. I'd suggest they have no respect for the dead, but in this case, they are respecting the will of Jobs by carrying on as he would.
(yeah yeah, troll modding here I come. He was pretty famous for being a major ass.)
So, when they were the subject of severe criticism for having lax security (justified in my opinion) after someone used social engineering to reset a reporter's Apple ID you hated them then, and now that they responded to that criticism and improved their security to be less convenient they're still to be hated?
Got it.
You're a very angry person when it comes to Apple. How much of your time would you say you spend raging on the internet because people buy products from a company you don't like?
You don't need a credit card to have an Apple ID. You don't even need to put in a real address (or the one you live at, certainly - Apple doesn't verify that).
Who knows what information Apple has on that iPad and subsequent account? Of course they know what it is, but they need a court of law to say "the people asking for access to it are legit, you can reset the Apple ID".
Perhaps Grandma was too busy dying to be concerned about what bullshit some company was going to pull with her possession. As was the family. Apple asked for proof of ownership. Fair enough. They provided *three* forms of it. That should be the end of it.
All that bibble about "what if" is bollocks. It was her iPad, she died, it now belongs to the family who have proven that they are the family. Unlock the fucking thing.
No, they provided a death certificate, that proves a woman died. They provided a will that said all her possessions go to the kids, and a fancy letter from a lawyer that says the same thing.
None of those things prove that the iPad they want unlocked belonged to the dead person, hence the court order.
This is all pretty standard stuff. It's just big news because someone wants ad impressions via click bait and slashdot just loves to hate Apple. Someone is making a mortgage payment off this story.
Say I inherit a locked safe made by SafeCo from my dead father. I have a certificate proving he is dead, and a will that says I inherit his possessions.
Is SafeCo obligated to open the safe with their master key. Do you think they might ask for a court order, as is standard in probate law?
Now assume that I inherit my father's estate and I add a stolen safe into the possessions, also made by SafeCo. What happens if they unlock that for me without a court order?
Why is it Apple's problem?
Is it a safe manufacturer's problem if a locked safe is inherited by the children and they don't know the combination?
I'm pretty sure they'd ask for something like, I I don't know, a court order perhaps, if they were asked to enter their master code to unlock the safe if the original owner had died and their kids wanted access to it.
Does it take effort to be that stupid?
They're asking for a standard court order based on English law that the documents presented are genuine and that the iPad actually belonged to that dead person.
This is really, really, really standard stuff. The only reason it's turned into a big deal is because it's Apple. After the big kefuffle last year or so when that reporter lost his data because someone social engineered their way into his Apple ID and Apple took (deserved) serious heat for it, they seriously tightened up their security procedures.
Christ have you read any of this thread or even TFA? It's in England there is no probate!
You're really going with that?!
Ok!
Maybe you should have posted AC.
Again, you are hilarious. The iTunes store wasn't introduced until April 2003, and by that time the iPod was already well established as the top media player (the launch of the store coincided with the release of the redesigned third gen iPod, and long after Windows compatibility and the subsequent huge uptick in sales happened).
You seem to cling to the belief that the iPod failed because it was expensive when in reality it was wildly popular in virtually all incarnations until its feature set was taken over by the smartphone.
Yes, cheap chinese players with terrible interfaces still exist and did exist before the iPod - the market for those hasn't changed, but the majority of people wanted something other than that, hence the enormous success of the iPod. The popularity dropped off because of iPhone and Android, not because the cheap players that have always been there suddenly became a threat.
Apple's "innovation" with the iPod was a user interface that was actually pleasant to use. I know Apple haters like to suppress that and anything that they have actually done in product innovation and refining because they weren't literally the first mp3 player to market, but Apple rarely are with any product. What they are very good at is refining an existing concept and making it accessible to a large demographic. Of course, you can continue to fail to see that due to hate of the company, but it's all there in the history of the products.
The level of hilarious "not getting it" displayed by your comment is staggering.
I too also had a cellphone "that wasn't called a smartphone back then" too back in the late 90's/early 2000's because the smartphone is a different class of device.
Your definition of "plays mp3s just fine" is clearly different to the vast majority of consumers, as evidenced by the way the portable digital music player market changed once the iPod was launched. The iPod still exists, but its market was steadily consumed by the rise of the smartphone - which rolled in the features that the iPod provided (easy to use interface, lots of storage, portable, convenient) alongside the other device that people were carrying around more and more; a mobile telephone. It's no surprise that the iPod and the portable phone became essentially the same item since people carry a smartphone around all the time anyway and it's more than capable of providing that function (and by that I am talking about all smartphones, not just iPhone). People who used to carry mobile phones and iPods now carry around iPhones or Android phones, or very occasionally, Windows Phones.
To state that the iPod was killed off by cheap Chinese devices hilariously misunderstands the nature of the market. This is not "defensive of Apple" it's simply a statement of the buying habits of modern consumers and the rise of the smartphone as the multifunction device of choice, whether that be an iPhone or an Android.
The iPod sales went down because Apple replaced it with the iPhone - they still have the iPod Touch, but the bulk of consumers who want the functionality of the iPod get it because it's included in the iPhone. Using the drop in iPod sales as some sort of indicator for what will happen to the iPad in the future is laughable.
If Apple were to replace it with something else then perhaps, but as it stands at the moment, the tablet is a relatively unchanging target (it has survived the "netbooks will kill tablets" rhetoric, for example) and seem to happily coexist with ultrabooks.
Ahh, WebKit, you mean KHTML that Apple STOLE from Konqueror and that Google and Opera had to fix with Blink.
How do you "steal" a GPL project by adopting it and working on it? Isn't that the point of open source? Code that is available for anyone to use and improve (Apple did give give back their changes, as fully stipulated in the licence).
Is it only "stealing" if a company you don't like uses open source code?
It's stealing credit.
Apple didn't invent Webkit, the forked it from KHTML.
And stealing credit is expressly verboten by the GPL.
Ah, so it is what I said - that it's only stealing when a company you don't like does it.
Where exactly did Apple claim to have taken the credit for Webkit? They forked KHTML and explicitly said so, in their public announcement about it and in subsequent official material, including the open letter from Jobs on why Apple din't support Flash on iOS. Nowhere have they ever claimed that it was all their work, and I'm struggling to see what else they could do when forking an OSS project to meet your criteria.
They did not try to pass off the work of the KHTML devs as their own, they did not "steal credit", they abided by the licence terms of the GPL....
But because they're Apple they are "stealing code". The double standards and hypocrisy demonstrated by slashdot readers when it comes to Apple is simply staggering. Closed source code? Evil and proprietary/ Open source code? Stealing from community. Hilarious.
Ahh, WebKit, you mean KHTML that Apple STOLE from Konqueror and that Google and Opera had to fix with Blink.
How do you "steal" a GPL project by adopting it and working on it? Isn't that the point of open source? Code that is available for anyone to use and improve (Apple did give give back their changes, as fully stipulated in the licence).
Is it only "stealing" if a company you don't like uses open source code?
Because it shows how lame Apple is. They are totally comfortable taking open source code to use for themselves, but damned if they'll give anything of value back.
Right, that's why Clang and LLVM are not being developed, or Webkit, or... oh never mind. Sorry kid, I didn't mean to let reality intrude on your blissful state of hate and ignorance.
Even worse is the assertion by the click bait summary that it "gutted Apple's security for years" when it only affected Mavericks and iOS versions 6 and 7.
Mavericks was released as a GM in September 2013, iOS 7 around the same time. iOS 6 was released in September 2013, which is hardly "years" ago - it is 16 months ago. "Over a year" might be a more accurate, if less click bait worthy, phrase to use there.
It was a programming error, though, through a simple lack of QA on the code. If you;re trying to claim it was deliberate then I have a tinfoil hat to sell you. I'll throw in the bridge for free.
How do we know it has ended?
Perhaps the security updates are on the back burner because it's 7 years old (and because the vast majority of Macs that ever ran 10.6 can upgrade to 10.7 and beyond for free except in a few niche cases involving Core Solo machines)? We have no idea.
How do we know that this "patch" don't open up a new "NSA backdoor" somewhere else?
Because the piece that was patched is open source.
Go have a look through the code if you like.
So you're glossing over the fact that you don;t understand the science yet are still happy to make sweeping statements about what is and isn't possible.
No wonder we're struggling as a species if this is how economists operate.
I am an actual scientist, and I'm still waiting on your solution to an earth based system that will provide 24/7 power, even if you do cover the deserts of the world with solar panels, I'm still not seeing how you do that. You're apparently the expert on this though. Have you abandoned your "in orbit" array system now, too? Ground-based it is then?
You're all over the place here trying to sound smart and keep moving the goalposts. Your grasp of science is tenuous at best, to the point where you're making elementary errors about the things we already understand in great detail and throwing them up as insurmountable obstacles and guesswork, then handwaving the "common sense, moon is far away, we can't get things to it" argument as if you understand the technical challenges involved.
You didn't even realise the atmosphere absorbs radiation differently at different ranges of the EM spectrum, yet you claim to be an expert on what is possible regarding solar power.
Remarkable.
I'm an economist by trade.
I realize that earth based collection even an attenuated flood of energy from the sun is VASTLY cheaper than building collection in space and hoping (without any real demonstrated capability) to then somehow avoid that same attenuation when transmitting it to earth.
Yes, and it's clear you're no scientist. The absorbance characteristics of the atmosphere to different portions of the EM spectrum are well understood. Where are you getting that there's no demonstrated capability? Because the system hasn't been built? It wasn't until the previous comment that you understood that the system was designed to reduce the footprint of the earth based structures, now you're claiming authority on the the science of "somehow avoid[ing] the same attenuation" without actually understanding that the frequency of the radiation matters and that we're actually quite good at this.
So, if there's no shortage of land to build these systems, where exactly do you suggest we put them? The outcome of the earth-built systems must provide 24/7 power to the Earth, at the same capacity as the Lunar system.
I guess you could put some in the Sahara. That takes care of a little bit of capacity while that side of the Earth faces the sun. Of course, you need to constantly clean the panels and maintenance will be much higher due to the weather. Where else?
You're clearly (either wilfully or just via plain ignorance) not understanding the reason this system has been proposed.
The Earth's atmosphere attenuates a great deal of the radiation that we receive from the sun. Nowhere near all of it, obviously - we still get vast amounts of it every day. However, collecting it is the challenge - 2/3 of the surface of the earth is water. It's hard to build there (you can't build on water easily). We also lose a large portion of the useful high-energy spectrum due to the atmosphere.
The Moon has none of these problems - it is a tidally locked body with no atmosphere and a vast amount of land to build the large solar arrays that you need (large as in, they circle the equator of the moon and and extremely wide). You then beam this power back to earth as (and here's the clever bit) microwave radiation at a specific frequency (or more likely, a range of frequencies, but let's keep it simple for you) such that you can collect it at ground stations that are also large, but not "circle the moon's equator" large. Large like the "VLA large", such that you're not beaming a tight microwave death ray at the Earth but merely a parallel beam of lower intensity that will not damage anything that moves through it by burning it up.
The beauty of using microwaves is that you can tune them to minimise losses through the atmosphere, and you can effectively turn a collection surface that circles the moon (where land pressure is low) into several small (but moon collector size standards) ground stations on the Earth (where land pressure is high).
Man, it;s almost as if you haven;t even researched this and just fired off some nonsense from the hip and tried to wing it to sound smart.
Power is not the problem. If you have an ion thruster you still need propellant - the electricity is abundant, but you'd still have to fuel up the array with whatever you are running the ion thruster on, like xenon, argon or something else heavy and with a reasonable IE.
Even in earth orbit you need to keep on top of station keeping, as you do at lagrangian points too - a spacecraft exactly one of the stable L points (4 or 5) is going to also face debris issues as those places face higher concentrations of dust and rock.
Beaming the power back is not dangerous - you design the system to collect over a large area so that any one point in the beam is of very low intensity. This is very easy to do with the Moon because it's tidally locked to the Earth. Why give up that obvious advantage by having an orbital array that not only has to beam power between the individual satellites (no single one is going to beam back to earth - you'd need to collate it all first) but then you also need a central orbiting hub unit with the transmitter, which you need to keep facing the ground stations at all times. The Moon does that already - just build a beaming station on the near side with the ability to make slight adjustments as necessary.
With the solar panels also built on the moon, servicing them is much simpler - either for a robotic system or in person by astronauts. You also have lots of land area to build servicing sheds and storage buildings to maintain/build panels.
Plus the amount of power this system would beam to earth is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the amount that is beamed to the earth every day by the sun, and even then, the power you are beaming is being used - if you didn't beam the power down then you'd have to generate it on Earth by other means and then that power would be similarly used. 1 watt of power generated on earth and used by an electrical device is no different to 1 watt of power collected and transmitted to the earth from the moon and used up, except in the case of solar panels on the earth. Even then, we barely make a dent in the amount of energy the sun is blasting us with. Solar power is like putting a bucket into a wave and making a note that we slightly reduced the volume of water breaking onto the shore.
But then you have a ton of arrays in solar orbit that you have to monitor and require fuel for station keeping. You also don't have access to a handy moon to use as a heat sink to cool the panels (although they could be designed to radiatively cool since they are going to be in shadow for half the time, although vacuum is a poor heat transfer medium).
Equally pedantic: The K in km should also be upper case, so:
On ISS, they get about 0.1 MW from an acre, that is 24.7 mw from Km2.
No it shouldn't. The SI prefix for 10^3 is a lower case k.
You also forgot to log in.
How is a factual reply to the OP comment with a link to the source (which provides technical details) to support my argument , "overrated"?
Slashdot, words simply fail me. This place really has turned into reddit.
Ah, so in that case I assume it's fair to add on all the figures from the iPad to the iOS numbers, then?
I mean, the software platforms are the same.
Directly from the Ford Focus brochure, 2013, from here: http://www.ford.co.uk/Cars/Foc...
Ford Focus 5 door (the hatch):
Fuel tank capacity (litres)
Petrol: 55 (62 for 2.0 litre)
Diesel: 53