I agree that patents are good vehicles for protection of your ideas. However, I think the current controversy hinges on this:
1. Are you contributing to a productive world and utilizing your patent to protect a device or product you or a licensee are actually making. 2. Or are you just churning out patents for things your never intend to use, but are gambling that through law suits you can make money.
If it is the second option, that represents a type of "anti-creativity" and "anti-productivity" that just bogs the world down slows down the pace of innovation.
Apple isn't running a patent troll shop by any stretch of the imagination. They patent their creativity embodied in real products to protect them from copy cats.
Apple has driven the whole industry for 30 years for setting the benchmark on how we interact with devices, They have set the standard for computers, music, phones, and tablets. And the industry follows.
The iPhone was introduced 3 years ago. For 20 years there wasn't anything like an iPhone, now every phone out there is an iPhone look alike. It is so pervasive that people can't even remember what phones were like before the iphone.
Most pro monitors don't have matte screens anymore, that is pretty old school. Check out Apples pro monitor or NEC multi-sync etc - clear gloss screens.
LCD TVs are not in the same league.. and have other considerations: view-ability by the largest number of people in bad lighting at the sacrifice of quality is a reasonable approach for a lower price point than a AR coating.
As for maximum contrast and viewability not being what you want, that is not a quality criteria. Laptops didn't have poor viewing angles for security, they had them because they used bad quality TN screens. A good quality, good color rendering IPS screen insure you will have good viewing angles.
In short bright gloss screens don't just sell well, they sell because they render better detail and better contrast and beat sun glare while doing it. Just take a matte screen and a bright gloss screen outdoors in full sun and test for your self.
(All that said, the Air is definitely lighter and would be tempting if there was an option for a matte screen. I don't buy computers in order to stare at my own face.)
I remember when laptops first starting moving to glossy screens. I asked my optics professor "glossy or matte?" He said with a glossy screen at least he has the option of adjusting the angle so he doesn't get glare, whereas a matte screen will have glare no matter what the angle.
His answer is the obvious one once you think about it... and you'll never go back to matte screens. Matte screens produce a lot of diffuse glare as well as diffuse the screen image so that the screen has less contrast and brightness to deal with reflections that are there.
If you want less reflections, matte isn't the way to do it... add a AR coating.
Every energy source gets government support. And nuclear has received more than most.
When to take away that support, the cost for new electricity for nuclear is $0.11-0.17/kWh depending on the estimate source. Cost for new wind is $0.07/kWh, one of the lowest for any energy source, including coal. And that still includes all the back-end government support nuclear gets for things like waste disposal and a free insurance ride - that without nuclear would be completely unviable.
If you check out the below reference, you can see on the graph on page 13, that one of the key problems beyond the electricity end-cost, is the much higher capitol costs of nuclear. This is a major problem for nuclear, the financing doesn't make sense, you have to leverage big and long.
Nuclear is risky, not just technically, but from a business perspective. The Congressional Budget Office study on the loan guarantees for nuclear concluded that the default rate on the nuclear loans would be "very high—well above 50 percent". This why you've only seen nuclear industries flourish under the skirt of a centralized socialist government program - like France and Japan.
Wind power disasters? Where exactly? Look at how Japan winds farms survived, and stepping up operations to fill the gap [google it]
I don't think I ever talked about hydro. Pretty much all large hydro in the world is build out. So there isn't a real comparison here. Its not a future new market competitor. A small hydro, which still has growth, doesn't have that issue.
Solar, Geothermal, Wind, small hydro, combined cycle - all are cheaper than nuclear and more fail-safe. What is the drive to pursue something so issue laden and problematic? I don't think cause its "neato" cuts it.
Again, the idea that nuclear has been held up by legal issues is just not true. The main issue is their hasn't been an economically viable business case. Recent hurdles cleared in the USA have been about federal loan liability giveaways (i.e. it hasn't been economical to kick start these things on the free market).
I think you are uninformed about the scale of renewables. For the last two decades global wind power installations, on a electricity output basis, have vastly outpaced nulcear capacity installs by something on the order of 30-1. In 2009 alone 12 nuclear plants worth of wind electricity generation installed, while only 1 nuclear reactor came on line. Why? not the environment, its because wind is cheaper and faster to deploy - it has a much better business case.
You realize that photovoltaics surpasses most other energy sources EROEI (energy return of energy investment).
It is in the realm of 1:15 for silicon, and 1:30 for thin-film. Only wind beats these numbers. Coal is less, US drilled oil is WAY less. PV is even on par or better than LWR nuclear.
Unfortunately the "environmentalist holding up the progress" of Nuclear power isn't true.
It is disingenuous to reduce the very sophisticated web of VERY serious issues that nuclear power must deal with to be some type of environmentalist conspiracy. There are very REAL technical, political, social, environmental, proliferation and logistical problems that nuclear power has - no other power source comes close to having these issues.
Fundamentally, nuclear is impossible to make safe. It is a reliability problem. How many 9's can you build into trying to make it fail safe, and at what cost? You can't make it to 100% safe, no system can. Yet the risks of failure are enormous. A wind turbine fails, its not a big problem... No other power facility has 100MW-1GW of heat being generated, that when you turn it off, essentially stays-on for weeks still producing heat. It is a huge fail-safe problem. It is easy to think after the fact, that they shouldn't have had generators in a basement - fact is there are millions of interdependent issues that can cause it fail, and they all can't be planned for.
RIght now the statistics are very bad, 500 plants in the world, 4-5 major disasters in 50 years, and dozens of near misses, 100s of serious mishaps. You can come up with better systems, but the inherent problems are fundamental and aren't going away.
Egypt didn't need western help only because the military didn't turn on the people. If you look back at the news reels, Libya two weeks ago looked exactly like the Egyptian during the early part of the protests, with wide popular support.
There is no benefit here for the US other than to protect the civilian population. Indeed, by all accounts Obama, who is generally reluctant to get involved in other countries,was swayed by Clinton and Rice who were pushing to avoid a humanitarian crisis – This in part was driven by Clintons experience with her husbands term as President, where his biggest regret wasn't stepping in on the Rwandan conflict.
Iraq was a unilateral American war, trying to single handedly force democracy on a country whether they want it or not.. Libya actions are air support for a popular democratic uprising.
Just because both countries are Arabs, does not make the military action the same thing.
Either way, nobody is under the illusion that war in Libya results in more oil.
Thermal solutions necessarily scale. There is no such things as "exponential scaling in thermal or nuclear sources" over a smaller device of the same type. Many small thermal systems are equally efficient to larger ones.
Two issues here: economics and physics.
Yes big projects often scale economically, but not with much thermal energy efficiency improvements. In this case the scaling is due to the cubic function of wind speed to power production. The higher you can build the chimney, power output goes up by exponential factors.
Photovoltaics scale just like a nuclear plant, or gas turbine. You put in two, you double the output. Several studies show them to be equal or better land use on a total resource basis to strip mined coal powered plants or mined nuclear... Oh yeah, and they don't have to take land space either as they can be placed on existing buildings.
Uranium from seawater is pure marketing fluff. Sure in theory you can extract from seawater, but not economically nor with a positive return on energy.
Even with current extraction + refinement+ enrichment, the energy return on energy investment for nuclear is only 10:1-20:1 depending on the study. Not all that great (solar is higher).
In fact there was a recent study suggesting we are nearing peak uranium production, given high quality EROEI mineable sources. (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414/)
This vs Photovoltaics: Photovoltaics decay over time, halfing their output in a few decades
Photovoltaic do not degrade much. Industry standard for silicon PV is warranties to have no less than 80% output after 30 years. Making them far more durable than just about any other generation option
Photovoltaics need electronics and moving parts to keep them pointed at the sun to maintain their efficiency, requiring replacement parts and maintenance.
PV does not need moving parts. The vast majority of PV system are stationary.
Interestingly, a couple studies have been done in the last few years, that show when you take away most of the driving laws, stop signs, stoplights, etc - the roads get safer.
There was a danish experiment a few years back that took away bike lanes, side walks and road signs/lights, so you had a big mixed use road without signals. And road safety went up. Anyone who has experienced the awe of third world roads can attest to this - seems like mass chaos, and yet no accidents!
The problem is too many laws/rules, and people turn off their brains and go into automatics mode.
4. Health-care innovation. We are the source of many of the world's new treatments. And we don't have the waiting times of many countries with more socialized systems.
I'm not one to discount the importance of innovation, but its important to note that helping a few people who can afford "heroic" treatments, does not make up for the basic health of a society as a whole. Have more drug companies hawking pills on late night TV, a good health care system does not make.
While there is a spectrum of how well health care works in different countries, few knowledgeable people would put the US anywhere but at the bottom of the heap. The notion that nationalized health care causes "long lines" or "less choice" is just not right. Most other industrialized counties spend half as much, and have a much better outcome. Check out Taiwan's system for an example of how a modern, efficient, free choice, no lines system works.
The free market doesn't always find the most efficient solution. Every doctor in america has 2 or 3 office employees just to submit insurance claims, every insurance company has just as many to try and deny those claims. Not to mention all the time that the customer themselves have to spend to get claims though even with good insurance. A single payer system using a digital claims system like taiwan's, could eliminate all but a handful of people handling claims country -wide.
Your generalizations aren't universal, nor are they telling of the end result. Americans tend to live in a bubble believing their county does it "best", as if its a sports team. The USA is not an island of democracy or success.
Most other industrialized countries consistently rate better on quality of life, longevity, health, and other "how-good-is-my-life" indexes.
Even the one issue people could point to: the economy - has begun eroding its dominance after the EU established a larger unified market and have begun to pull ahead economically in the last few years.
The only thing that really stands out in America, is how little we learn from other nations.
It is perfectly valid to consider Obama's politics liberal. It is an opinion. If Democratic politics more consistently resemble socialism than Republican politics, how else does one describe it? Are Republicans to go around calling Democrats "right-wing" now?
Only an opinion in the relative I-can-make-up-whatever-I-want world of Fox News.
In the spectrum of politics, to invoke Marx, one has to consider a little reality, and there isn't anything close to socialism - let alone Marxism in american politics.
Opinion only comes in when trying to decide if Obama or Clinton are slightly left or right of center relative to each other.
Nope, Nietzsche is a very important figure in philosophy. Whether misunderstood by the average person or not. Any use of his works by the Nazi's, is no different than the misuse of any philosophy or religion by those with ill intent.
This is the dumbist thing I've heard out of the McCain campain - dumber yet is that people are swayed by it.
Obama's politics aren't even very liberal. If you look globally to other modern democratic nations in europe and elsewhere the democratic party looks like other countries conservative party (and the republicans, they are like right wing nationalists).
We have no viable liberal/progressive party in the USA comparable to what has had a large hand in shaping every other modern democracy. Obama's record hardly shows anything other than mainstream Democrat voting. The only person in all of congress that is label-able as a liberal is Denis Kucinish - he is 10 times more liberal than Obama. And he isn't even close to being a Marxist.
Dumb, just plain Dumb
(BTW, Marx is still an important part of the Social Philosophy discussion and syllabus, Being called a Marxist should be about as scary as being called a Nietzschen or Kierkegaardian - quite silly to use as a derogatory term)
Solar 1. For perspective, an average split level house (typical medium sized housing stock) has approx 2000 ft^2 of footprint area. Given an average 5.5 peak hours of sun per day (average insolation in the US) at 15% efficiency (average PV efficiency), an average house roof will produce 153 kWh per day. The average house uses 29 kWh/day (http://www.eia.doe.gov/).
So the average US house roof produces 5.3 times the amount of energy it needs with current technology. With emerging 40% efficiency concentrators, that increases to 14 times the needed power. So solar is relatively dense.
2. So here are the calculations for US roof area. Note that this doesn't take into account other structures and parking lots. For instant my local suburban big box shopping center, if you covered the roof and parking lot, you could power 12,000 homes with current tech.
From the US census: Residential, single family houses: 1.78E11 ft^2 Residential, 2-4 unit houses: 4.47E9 ft^2 Residential, 5 and up: 1.18 E9 ft^2 --------- Total Residential footprint: 1.84 ft^2 (50% 1 story/50% 2 or more) Residential roof With ave 20% slope: 1.95E11 ft^2 Commercial roof sqft 6.7E10 --------- Total US roof area: 2.62E11 sqft
Average US insolation 31.7 kWh/ft^2/year @ 17% efficiency panels Total Solar production: 8.3E12 kWh/year US electrical Consumption: 3.3E12 kWh/year
Total production (17% eff): 246% need Total production (40% eff): 579% need
1. You can't manage the flow of nuclear materials. Uranium is literally (yes, literally) found in your back yard. All that coal we burn in coal-fired plants? Loaded with uranium. Shutting down the world-wide nuclear power industry would do zilch to stop a rouge, industrialized country from developing nuclear weapons technology. point exactly. sophistication is needed to enrich nuclear materials. (P.S. 10 PPM of uranium in coal is hardly "loaded")
2. "Renewables" is a buzz word with no actual meaning. We can generate SOME power off of sources like wind, solar, geothermal, and waves, but there's currently no technology capable of replacing our infrastructure. All those technologies combined still wouldn't manage to meet our current energy demands. With current technologies, they can only manage a few percent of our current power generation needs. You don't know anything about renewables do you? The only thing unique about our current infrastructure, is that it is in place. When you are talking about new capacity there is nothing about renewables that make it any less "capable" than coal, nuclear or any other technology.
Wind already is near coal in cost, large scale solar is on par with nuclear. Solar as of this year will be installing more new capacity world wide than nuclear, wind surpassed nuclear in 2005.
Just take photovoltaics, while expensive compared to other renewables, illustrates "capability" very well. There is 350% more roof top space on buildings alone than is needed to supply all US electricity given current technology. The cost of the Iraq war could have paid for that infrastructure.
Plutonium are the only materials that have been successfully weaponized. And? The point was reactor grade plutonium can be, and has been, successfully used in nuclear weapons. MOX and Pu-240 do nothing to change this, and any claims that the output of breeders, MOX fuels, etc, etc can't be used in weapons in just false. Pre-detonation is an asset for a low budget weapon, it insures it will work, even if considered a "fizzle" by superpower military standards. By reality standards a 1-10kton explosion is a success.
I think you underestimate the degree of industrial capacity required to produce nuclear weapons. No, the whole point is the only thing complicated is making the material, and simple weapon, is VERY easy. But if you have a the right kind of nuclear reactor, or if you can at least pilfer the fuel/waste, you can get the nuclear material.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that patents are good vehicles for protection of your ideas. However, I think the current controversy hinges on this:
1. Are you contributing to a productive world and utilizing your patent to protect a device or product you or a licensee are actually making.
2. Or are you just churning out patents for things your never intend to use, but are gambling that through law suits you can make money.
If it is the second option, that represents a type of "anti-creativity" and "anti-productivity" that just bogs the world down slows down the pace of innovation.
Apple isn't running a patent troll shop by any stretch of the imagination. They patent their creativity embodied in real products to protect them from copy cats.
Apple has driven the whole industry for 30 years for setting the benchmark on how we interact with devices, They have set the standard for computers, music, phones, and tablets. And the industry follows.
The iPhone was introduced 3 years ago. For 20 years there wasn't anything like an iPhone, now every phone out there is an iPhone look alike. It is so pervasive that people can't even remember what phones were like before the iphone.
Most pro monitors don't have matte screens anymore, that is pretty old school. Check out Apples pro monitor or NEC multi-sync etc - clear gloss screens.
LCD TVs are not in the same league.. and have other considerations: view-ability by the largest number of people in bad lighting at the sacrifice of quality is a reasonable approach for a lower price point than a AR coating.
As for maximum contrast and viewability not being what you want, that is not a quality criteria. Laptops didn't have poor viewing angles for security, they had them because they used bad quality TN screens. A good quality, good color rendering IPS screen insure you will have good viewing angles.
In short bright gloss screens don't just sell well, they sell because they render better detail and better contrast and beat sun glare while doing it. Just take a matte screen and a bright gloss screen outdoors in full sun and test for your self.
(All that said, the Air is definitely lighter and would be tempting if there was an option for a matte screen. I don't buy computers in order to stare at my own face.)
I remember when laptops first starting moving to glossy screens. I asked my optics professor "glossy or matte?"
He said with a glossy screen at least he has the option of adjusting the angle so he doesn't get glare, whereas a matte screen will have glare no matter what the angle.
His answer is the obvious one once you think about it... and you'll never go back to matte screens. Matte screens produce a lot of diffuse glare as well as diffuse the screen image so that the screen has less contrast and brightness to deal with reflections that are there.
If you want less reflections, matte isn't the way to do it... add a AR coating.
Every energy source gets government support. And nuclear has received more than most.
When to take away that support, the cost for new electricity for nuclear is $0.11-0.17/kWh depending on the estimate source. Cost for new wind is $0.07/kWh, one of the lowest for any energy source, including coal. And that still includes all the back-end government support nuclear gets for things like waste disposal and a free insurance ride - that without nuclear would be completely unviable.
If you check out the below reference, you can see on the graph on page 13, that one of the key problems beyond the electricity end-cost, is the much higher capitol costs of nuclear. This is a major problem for nuclear, the financing doesn't make sense, you have to leverage big and long.
Nuclear is risky, not just technically, but from a business perspective. The Congressional Budget Office study on the loan guarantees for nuclear concluded that the default rate on the nuclear loans would be "very high—well above 50 percent". This why you've only seen nuclear industries flourish under the skirt of a centralized socialist government program - like France and Japan.
https://old.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E08-01_AmbioNuclIlusion.pdf
Really? Please.
Radioactive waste and nuclear proliferation on the same level as how much steel a windmill manufacture recycles?
Give me a break.
Wind power disasters? Where exactly? Look at how Japan winds farms survived, and stepping up operations to fill the gap [google it]
I don't think I ever talked about hydro. Pretty much all large hydro in the world is build out. So there isn't a real comparison here. Its not a future new market competitor. A small hydro, which still has growth, doesn't have that issue.
Solar, Geothermal, Wind, small hydro, combined cycle - all are cheaper than nuclear and more fail-safe. What is the drive to pursue something so issue laden and problematic? I don't think cause its "neato" cuts it.
Again, the idea that nuclear has been held up by legal issues is just not true. The main issue is their hasn't been an economically viable business case. Recent hurdles cleared in the USA have been about federal loan liability giveaways (i.e. it hasn't been economical to kick start these things on the free market).
I think you are uninformed about the scale of renewables. For the last two decades global wind power installations, on a electricity output basis, have vastly outpaced nulcear capacity installs by something on the order of 30-1. In 2009 alone 12 nuclear plants worth of wind electricity generation installed, while only 1 nuclear reactor came on line. Why? not the environment, its because wind is cheaper and faster to deploy - it has a much better business case.
You realize that photovoltaics surpasses most other energy sources EROEI (energy return of energy investment).
It is in the realm of 1:15 for silicon, and 1:30 for thin-film. Only wind beats these numbers. Coal is less, US drilled oil is WAY less. PV is even on par or better than LWR nuclear.
Unfortunately the "environmentalist holding up the progress" of Nuclear power isn't true.
It is disingenuous to reduce the very sophisticated web of VERY serious issues that nuclear power must deal with to be some type of environmentalist conspiracy. There are very REAL technical, political, social, environmental, proliferation and logistical problems that nuclear power has - no other power source comes close to having these issues.
Fundamentally, nuclear is impossible to make safe. It is a reliability problem. How many 9's can you build into trying to make it fail safe, and at what cost? You can't make it to 100% safe, no system can. Yet the risks of failure are enormous. A wind turbine fails, its not a big problem... No other power facility has 100MW-1GW of heat being generated, that when you turn it off, essentially stays-on for weeks still producing heat. It is a huge fail-safe problem. It is easy to think after the fact, that they shouldn't have had generators in a basement - fact is there are millions of interdependent issues that can cause it fail, and they all can't be planned for.
RIght now the statistics are very bad, 500 plants in the world, 4-5 major disasters in 50 years, and dozens of near misses, 100s of serious mishaps. You can come up with better systems, but the inherent problems are fundamental and aren't going away.
Egypt didn't need western help only because the military didn't turn on the people. If you look back at the news reels, Libya two weeks ago looked exactly like the Egyptian during the early part of the protests, with wide popular support.
There is no benefit here for the US other than to protect the civilian population. Indeed, by all accounts Obama, who is generally reluctant to get involved in other countries,was swayed by Clinton and Rice who were pushing to avoid a humanitarian crisis – This in part was driven by Clintons experience with her husbands term as President, where his biggest regret wasn't stepping in on the Rwandan conflict.
Iraq was a unilateral American war, trying to single handedly force democracy on a country whether they want it or not..
Libya actions are air support for a popular democratic uprising.
Just because both countries are Arabs, does not make the military action the same thing.
Either way, nobody is under the illusion that war in Libya results in more oil.
There is a good meta-analysis on Nuclear EROEI here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3877.
The problem is nuclear is super energy intensive in the fuel production stage. Coal has a better EROEI.
Thermal solutions necessarily scale. There is no such things as "exponential scaling in thermal or nuclear sources" over a smaller device of the same type. Many small thermal systems are equally efficient to larger ones.
Two issues here: economics and physics.
Yes big projects often scale economically, but not with much thermal energy efficiency improvements. In this case the scaling is due to the cubic function of wind speed to power production. The higher you can build the chimney, power output goes up by exponential factors.
Photovoltaics scale just like a nuclear plant, or gas turbine. You put in two, you double the output. Several studies show them to be equal or better land use on a total resource basis to strip mined coal powered plants or mined nuclear... Oh yeah, and they don't have to take land space either as they can be placed on existing buildings.
Uranium from seawater is pure marketing fluff. Sure in theory you can extract from seawater, but not economically nor with a positive return on energy.
Even with current extraction + refinement+ enrichment, the energy return on energy investment for nuclear is only 10:1-20:1 depending on the study. Not all that great (solar is higher).
In fact there was a recent study suggesting we are nearing peak uranium production, given high quality EROEI mineable sources. (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414/)
This vs Photovoltaics:
Photovoltaics decay over time, halfing their output in a few decades
Photovoltaic do not degrade much. Industry standard for silicon PV is warranties to have no less than 80% output after 30 years. Making them far more durable than just about any other generation option
Photovoltaics need electronics and moving parts to keep them pointed at the sun to maintain their efficiency, requiring replacement parts and maintenance.
PV does not need moving parts. The vast majority of PV system are stationary.
Most quality bulbs have a higher quality of light than incandescent bulbs. Here is a double blind test: http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/how_to/4215199.html?page=1
All CFLs tested rated higher than the incandescent.
Warm and cool white are things of the past (and have been for about a decade).
Interestingly, a couple studies have been done in the last few years, that show when you take away most of the driving laws, stop signs, stoplights, etc - the roads get safer.
There was a danish experiment a few years back that took away bike lanes, side walks and road signs/lights, so you had a big mixed use road without signals. And road safety went up. Anyone who has experienced the awe of third world roads can attest to this - seems like mass chaos, and yet no accidents!
The problem is too many laws/rules, and people turn off their brains and go into automatics mode.
4. Health-care innovation. We are the source of many of the world's new treatments. And we don't have the waiting times of many countries with more socialized systems.
I'm not one to discount the importance of innovation, but its important to note that helping a few people who can afford "heroic" treatments, does not make up for the basic health of a society as a whole. Have more drug companies hawking pills on late night TV, a good health care system does not make.
While there is a spectrum of how well health care works in different countries, few knowledgeable people would put the US anywhere but at the bottom of the heap. The notion that nationalized health care causes "long lines" or "less choice" is just not right. Most other industrialized counties spend half as much, and have a much better outcome. Check out Taiwan's system for an example of how a modern, efficient, free choice, no lines system works.
The free market doesn't always find the most efficient solution. Every doctor in america has 2 or 3 office employees just to submit insurance claims, every insurance company has just as many to try and deny those claims. Not to mention all the time that the customer themselves have to spend to get claims though even with good insurance. A single payer system using a digital claims system like taiwan's, could eliminate all but a handful of people handling claims country -wide.
Your generalizations aren't universal, nor are they telling of the end result. Americans tend to live in a bubble believing their county does it "best", as if its a sports team. The USA is not an island of democracy or success.
Most other industrialized countries consistently rate better on quality of life, longevity, health, and other "how-good-is-my-life" indexes.
Even the one issue people could point to: the economy - has begun eroding its dominance after the EU established a larger unified market and have begun to pull ahead economically in the last few years.
The only thing that really stands out in America, is how little we learn from other nations.
It is perfectly valid to consider Obama's politics liberal. It is an opinion. If Democratic politics more consistently resemble socialism than Republican politics, how else does one describe it? Are Republicans to go around calling Democrats "right-wing" now?
Only an opinion in the relative I-can-make-up-whatever-I-want world of Fox News.
In the spectrum of politics, to invoke Marx, one has to consider a little reality, and there isn't anything close to socialism - let alone Marxism in american politics.
Opinion only comes in when trying to decide if Obama or Clinton are slightly left or right of center relative to each other.
Nope, Nietzsche is a very important figure in philosophy. Whether misunderstood by the average person or not. Any use of his works by the Nazi's, is no different than the misuse of any philosophy or religion by those with ill intent.
This is the dumbist thing I've heard out of the McCain campain - dumber yet is that people are swayed by it.
Obama's politics aren't even very liberal. If you look globally to other modern democratic nations in europe and elsewhere the democratic party looks like other countries conservative party (and the republicans, they are like right wing nationalists).
We have no viable liberal/progressive party in the USA comparable to what has had a large hand in shaping every other modern democracy. Obama's record hardly shows anything other than mainstream Democrat voting. The only person in all of congress that is label-able as a liberal is Denis Kucinish - he is 10 times more liberal than Obama. And he isn't even close to being a Marxist.
Dumb, just plain Dumb
(BTW, Marx is still an important part of the Social Philosophy discussion and syllabus, Being called a Marxist should be about as scary as being called a Nietzschen or Kierkegaardian - quite silly to use as a derogatory term)
Solar
1. For perspective, an average split level house (typical medium sized housing stock) has approx 2000 ft^2 of footprint area. Given an average 5.5 peak hours of sun per day (average insolation in the US) at 15% efficiency (average PV efficiency), an average house roof will produce 153 kWh per day. The average house uses 29 kWh/day (http://www.eia.doe.gov/).
So the average US house roof produces 5.3 times the amount of energy it needs with current technology. With emerging 40% efficiency concentrators, that increases to 14 times the needed power. So solar is relatively dense.
2. So here are the calculations for US roof area. Note that this doesn't take into account other structures and parking lots. For instant my local suburban big box shopping center, if you covered the roof and parking lot, you could power 12,000 homes with current tech.
From the US census: /50% 2 or more)
Residential, single family houses: 1.78E11 ft^2
Residential, 2-4 unit houses: 4.47E9 ft^2
Residential, 5 and up: 1.18 E9 ft^2
---------
Total Residential footprint: 1.84 ft^2 (50% 1 story
Residential roof With ave 20% slope: 1.95E11 ft^2
Commercial roof sqft 6.7E10
---------
Total US roof area: 2.62E11 sqft
Average US insolation 31.7 kWh/ft^2/year @ 17% efficiency panels
Total Solar production: 8.3E12 kWh/year
US electrical Consumption: 3.3E12 kWh/year
Total production (17% eff): 246% need
Total production (40% eff): 579% need
(all data from the US census and the doe eia)
Wind already is near coal in cost, large scale solar is on par with nuclear. Solar as of this year will be installing more new capacity world wide than nuclear, wind surpassed nuclear in 2005.
Plutonium are the only materials that have been successfully weaponized. And? The point was reactor grade plutonium can be, and has been, successfully used in nuclear weapons. MOX and Pu-240 do nothing to change this, and any claims that the output of breeders, MOX fuels, etc, etc can't be used in weapons in just false. Pre-detonation is an asset for a low budget weapon, it insures it will work, even if considered a "fizzle" by superpower military standards. By reality standards a 1-10kton explosion is a success. I think you underestimate the degree of industrial capacity required to produce nuclear weapons. No, the whole point is the only thing complicated is making the material, and simple weapon, is VERY easy. But if you have a the right kind of nuclear reactor, or if you can at least pilfer the fuel/waste, you can get the nuclear material.Just take photovoltaics, while expensive compared to other renewables, illustrates "capability" very well. There is 350% more roof top space on buildings alone than is needed to supply all US electricity given current technology. The cost of the Iraq war could have paid for that infrastructure.