Public transport is only as efficient as cars of the same type.
Public transport can certainly be efficient. Especially rail. It takes a lot less energy to move something on rails than in a road. It is all about friction. You can also use much heavier vehicles without damaging the track. This makes it easier to make a robust vehicle which can still handle high speeds. In addition since the vehicle moves by a fixed route, it is often profitable to electrify the railway. Electric rail does not use oil to move and it can use regenerative breaking. You can inject the power generated during braking periods into the grid. You also do not need any batteries, which are the bane of electric cars.
The Japanese economy has not collapsed. It has stagnated. The Japanese have come with many consumer products since the 90s stagnation like the games consoles, blue leds, hybrid cars, electric cars, etc. In fact the major issue the Japanese have is that they have lost much of the so called low end of electronics and manufacturing, to other Asian countries which emulated the Japanese model and did quite successfully on their own. Examples include South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Although even these countries are suffering from outsourcing to China as well right now. I am more hard pressed to find examples of successful US products than Japanese.
No. The problem is the government keeps trying to use one model of airplane, or whatever, to do everything. This often results in long and protracted design cycles producing something which does work well at doing anything (e.g. Space Shuttle). It also starves the other companies in the sector and helps create self perpetuating defense monopolies.
Take the F-35. Had they separated the air force model from the naval and marine versions I bet it would be in service already and cost a lot less per unit. It would also feed an actual market of design companies, which would compete for contracts in the future, instead of spoon feeding it all on Lockheed Martin. For the same cost. All that would be necessary is for the aircraft to use the same engines and simplified electronics. Those are most of the design cost to begin with.
That website does not disprove anything I said. There has been persistent underinvestment in nuclear fuel processing in the US since the 1970s. The US has also persistently undermined the handling of the nuclear fuel cycle by other countries, for understandable strategic reasons, since these countries could use uranium and plutonium separation to manufacture a nuclear weapon.
Uranium separation is one example of the sad display of the state of decay in the US nuclear fuel cycle. Pakistan, Iran and Brazil manage to use the substantially cheaper gas centrifuge uranium separation process while USEC still uses old gas diffusion plants.
USEC killed AVLIS research in the US. The US government actively shut down research on AVLIS separation in Japan and South Korea several years ago. When even a non-nuclear state such as Australia manages to develop the technology behind the SYLEX separation process on a shoestring budget, you have to wonder what the US has been doing. Eventually someone, somewhere, will get these plutonium separation processes working right as well, decreasing cost significantly, and it seems it will not be the US. The present state of doing nothing will work fine and dandy while there are old nuclear warheads to discard and cheap coal to burn, but not forever. The nuclear warheads in the inventory can only go so low. The price of coal has also increased significantly. This will make nuclear power generation more interesting regardless.
The French do reprocessing at COGEMA La Hague. Since the wikipedia page says they treated 1100 tons in 2005, I will have to assume they still pretty much do it.
The Japanese still send their spent fuel to France for separation to create MOX fuel. The Japanese are in the process of ramping up their own separation facility at Rokkasho. I even remember an accident report a couple of years back in Japan, of some worker handling MOX fuel. So I know someone is actively doing reprocessing to some degree even inside Japan...
The Japanese are highly interested in such projects because of their lack of strategic material deposits, including uranium.
In the long term these technologies will be developed. The advantages of cheaper uranium and plutonium separation are too large to ignore. These techniques are useful for both electric power generation and weapons manufacturing. Nuclear power could replace coal, and even natural gas for electricity generation.
You could use high temperature nuclear reactors to get the temperatures necessary to generate cheap hydrogen using the sulfur-iodine process, displacing another use of natural gas, the manufacture of ammonia.
Then you could use the natural gas to generate synthetic diesel fuel using gas to liquid plants, such as the one build by Sasol at Qatar.
IIRC Ballmer used to work as product manager at Procter & Gamble (you know, the Tide detergent and Gillette razor blade folks). P&G are pretty much used to selling crap products with massive amounts of marketing. They are also known to have high employee churn. So it is little surprising Ballmer acts like he does. He has bachelor degrees in mathematics and economics. That makes him CFO, or at best head of marketing, rather than CEO material of a technological company.
Gates, for all his many faults, actually had a better grasp of the technological issues.
Running Windows 7 won't cut it in a tablet form factor. Not until either they port it to ARM (the NT kernel was ported to Alpha and PowerPC, so it should be possible), or Intel gets more integrated, lower consumption chips out. Otherwise forget about battery life, or light weight. Then there is the issue of the graphical interface. They need to replace it, rather than tack things on top.
Japan rebuilt its economy after WWII using fiat paper, after they were forced to give back all the gold they had confiscated during their invasions in Asia. It worked pretty well for a reasonable amount of time. Gold is useful as an exchange medium because it represents something of actual value. It takes a supernova explosion to create it. However our wealth does not come from something like gold, but actual human effort multiplied by available tools. If you take that into consideration the US has considerable human capital. It just needs to put it to good use.
Clinton reduced expenses alright. He closed down many military bases. Several programs were either shut down or reduced in scope (remember the Strategic Defense Initiative, NASP, one thousand ship Navy).
During his time some things were closed though they shouldn't have like the IFR, or AVLIS. His predecessors showed a similar myopic view by shutting down Synthetic fuel research. It would have been nice to have any of these technologies available right now!
The issue is that there is basically no way companies focused solely on stock market performance will do massive investments. Especially not on long term projects which may show limited returns compared to, you know, hedge funds, buying gold, or building houses no one wants to buy. Check out the major US auto manufacturers. The only one which has managed to stay reasonably in shape is still family controlled to a large degree.
As for the military contractors, it has been painfully obvious that the main issue was the governments insistence on reducing the number of units ordered, as well as the amount of contracts per project, thereby decreasing the number of existing military contractors. This has usually resulted in a duopoly, and sometimes monopoly, on military hardware. While in the past the state actually bothered to try to keep more contractors around, so costs per unit came down due to competition.
You can have a disaster happen with any other form of energy. Imagine a wind turbine blade snapping off and hitting someone. Or the pond wastes from silicon processing (it is cheap to wash them off with sulfuric acid) which are polluting large parts of China as we speak. The reason for getting alternative energy is not the environment. If it was about the environment we would all be using nuclear power by now, which has been the safest in terms of kWh produced. Or we would have already upgraded uranium separation (if you need less energy to separate uranium, you get more energy out in the process), as well as fuel reprocessing facilities. Nope. It is a matter of energy security. Simple as that. With hydroelectric power from Canada, plus newly found natural gas reserves, tar sands, and perhaps oil shale in the future, we will be using fossil fuels for a long, long time.
Solar and wind power are fine. Wind is a worthwhile investment, even without subsidies. It was used, together with hydroelectric, to power the European economy from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. It was cheap enough then and is now. The problem with wind (or solar) is that these sources are intermittent, which was the main reason for them falling out of favor in the first place. Oh and BP does have substantial renewable energy investments, including in both solar and wind power. It is the universe's way to follow the path of least resistance, the path of lower energy cost. So it is that naturally the most energetically efficient forms of energy will be explored first and foremost if you examine things on the long range, even if there are localized bubbles here and there in the short term. One of them being corn ethanol.
If you remember earlier movies, such as Terminator 2, the computer generated characters were only used sparingly for a few scenes. These scenes would have been too expensive or night impossible to do without computer generated characters (e.g. the T1000 liquid morphing effects). As time progressed and CPU cycles became cheaper, you got wholly computer generated characters for longer periods of time. Here we were talking about Toy Story, with less realistic graphics, or Gollum in Lord of the Rings. The issue with more realistic computer generated characters afterwards was how to make them move in a life like fashion. Weta added realistic crowd movements to their Lord of the Rings special effects which made possible the animation of the massive battle scenes. Something that would have taken hundreds of doubles and careful coordination in the past.
Still to get realistic individual movements you needed to do expensive motion capture, using markers, of a real person actually moving. In Avatar the character movements were done in an automated fashion. Many of the actors were shown only briefly, and spent a lot of time doing voiceovers. Now imagine if we had perfect speech synthesis and a couple more generations of hardware development making the computing power for doing Avatar much cheaper. You could get wholly computer generated movies. This would reduce the role (hah!) of actors in the movie business.
As for robots in a live theatrical show, it is not very far fetched, considering what some Japanese companies presently are using as greeters...
In Europe the weight measures most commonly used are either the "g", or the "kg". Those work surprisingly well for most applications. For volume you often see the decimal fractions of the liter being used. e.g. a soda can is usually marked as 33 cl (1cl is 1/100th of a liter), like 1/3 of a liter. Drinks usually come in 33 cl, 0.5l, 1l, 1.5l, or 2l containers.
Once electricity is cheap you can start replacing many devices, which use gas, to use electricity instead. One example is a cooking stove. If you have plentiful cheap electric power you are better off installing an induction cooker, or a microwave. This increases electricity consumption per capita further.
Also, the nuclear power plants the French use are more sophisticated than a lot of people give them credit for. You often hear people call nuclear power plants "baseload" i.e. you cannot turn the reactor off, or reduce the power generation, without taking a long time to spool up/spool down the reactor. Presumably this would mean a lot of nighttime nuclear electricity would go wasted. The truth matter is that you can power down a nuclear power plant during the night. The French do this.
Most French nuclear power plants can use load following. They have special control rods which enable then to run their reactor between 30% and 100% of reactor capacity with a slope of 5% of rate power per minute. However the French nuclear power plants run at 77% capacity factor. The French do not "need" to export the power. It is just that this way they can run their nuclear power plants for a longer time and maximize return on investment.
The Germans, in contrast, have a tax on nuclear power plants while simultaneously having generation subsidies on wind and solar power. They also used to forbid the construction of new nuclear power plants last time I heard about it. The result is they have to buy more natural gas from Russia to cover power generation shortfalls from these highly variable wind and solar resources, and use burn coal, or import nuclear electricity from France for a lot of their usual needs.
You do not need all that electric generation capacity to have a nuclear weapons program to provide a small deterrent. Just ask the Israelis about it. Or Pakistan.
The French ramped up their nuclear construction effort after the 1970s oil crisis. Most countries used to burn oil back then to generate peak power during the day, or even as baseload generation, because it is cheaper to transport oil than coal with the same amount of energy in it. Oil got so expensive in the 1970s that most countries switched to burning natural gas instead. This construction effort (from oil to natural gas) took some 20 years. The French decided they did not want their energy production be held hostage to a foreign power again so they switched to nuclear. This was IMO a wise policy.
The French do reprocessing. So do the Japanese. It helps keep the waste volume from the LWRs and BWRs low.
There are other proposed techniques for reprocessing, other than the most commonly used chemical separation method. They haven't been pursued further for economical (cheaper to extract new uranium from the ground) or political (if you have separation technology you can make weapons grade plutonium easily) reasons. Some of the other proposed separation techniques, like laser separation, would be much cleaner and more efficient than chemical separation.
Other companies than Samsung tried to manufacture RDRAM and failed even more, because of poor quality control. The fact is the design was complex, and hard to manufacture, leading to all sorts of issues, including localized heat zones. If you remember, RDRAM was when we started seeing heat spreaders in memory modules.
Sending a signal on both edges of the clock has been done since like forever. I learned it in class before Rambus was even founded. If DDR infringes on a patent because of that, the patent office needs to review its standards for accepting patent applications.
Selling your own hardware is not necessary in this segment. The issue with Windows Mobile has never really been the hardware. The HTC HD2 has great hardware, it is the software that sucks. Microsoft needs to fix the software. The problem with Windows Mobile is the typical Microsoft issue. They make a first software version lavishing many resources to enter a market, then when it gets successful they dump the developers overboard (happened to Internet Explorer as well). The Windows Mobile software platform has stagnated for way too long.
Making Windows Mobile a.NET platform is essential, because it is an easy platform to develop for. Many people know how to develop for it, and those who don't learn quickly. C# is an easier to use language than Objective-C. Making the applications run in a sandbox means you are less open to security vulnerabilities and can afford not to waste as much resources reviewing third party apps before adding them to the online store.
Lastly the Windows Mobile UI is pathetically backwards. It was good back in the day, but now it is too clunky.
The Afghanistan offensive into Taliban territory was won by local forces with US air support. They did not need US army on the ground in any significant quantity to win. So why do all of the sudden people think adding more infantry will make it better?
If the secretary cannot write a word document with the lost and found poster, what kind of use does she have anyway? Better off employing a 5 year old from Afghanistan instead.
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Denmark has oil. Portugal does not. Big difference.
The mines stopped being profitable after the Cold War. That was when the world started melting nuclear warheads into fuel.
Public transport can certainly be efficient. Especially rail. It takes a lot less energy to move something on rails than in a road. It is all about friction. You can also use much heavier vehicles without damaging the track. This makes it easier to make a robust vehicle which can still handle high speeds. In addition since the vehicle moves by a fixed route, it is often profitable to electrify the railway. Electric rail does not use oil to move and it can use regenerative breaking. You can inject the power generated during braking periods into the grid. You also do not need any batteries, which are the bane of electric cars.
The Japanese economy has not collapsed. It has stagnated. The Japanese have come with many consumer products since the 90s stagnation like the games consoles, blue leds, hybrid cars, electric cars, etc. In fact the major issue the Japanese have is that they have lost much of the so called low end of electronics and manufacturing, to other Asian countries which emulated the Japanese model and did quite successfully on their own. Examples include South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Although even these countries are suffering from outsourcing to China as well right now. I am more hard pressed to find examples of successful US products than Japanese.
BP also finances many projects on wind and solar. Actual generating installations, rather than producing the components. Like wind farms.
Take the F-35. Had they separated the air force model from the naval and marine versions I bet it would be in service already and cost a lot less per unit. It would also feed an actual market of design companies, which would compete for contracts in the future, instead of spoon feeding it all on Lockheed Martin. For the same cost. All that would be necessary is for the aircraft to use the same engines and simplified electronics. Those are most of the design cost to begin with.
Uranium separation is one example of the sad display of the state of decay in the US nuclear fuel cycle. Pakistan, Iran and Brazil manage to use the substantially cheaper gas centrifuge uranium separation process while USEC still uses old gas diffusion plants.
USEC killed AVLIS research in the US. The US government actively shut down research on AVLIS separation in Japan and South Korea several years ago. When even a non-nuclear state such as Australia manages to develop the technology behind the SYLEX separation process on a shoestring budget, you have to wonder what the US has been doing. Eventually someone, somewhere, will get these plutonium separation processes working right as well, decreasing cost significantly, and it seems it will not be the US. The present state of doing nothing will work fine and dandy while there are old nuclear warheads to discard and cheap coal to burn, but not forever. The nuclear warheads in the inventory can only go so low. The price of coal has also increased significantly. This will make nuclear power generation more interesting regardless.
The French do reprocessing at COGEMA La Hague. Since the wikipedia page says they treated 1100 tons in 2005, I will have to assume they still pretty much do it.
The Japanese still send their spent fuel to France for separation to create MOX fuel. The Japanese are in the process of ramping up their own separation facility at Rokkasho. I even remember an accident report a couple of years back in Japan, of some worker handling MOX fuel. So I know someone is actively doing reprocessing to some degree even inside Japan...
The Japanese are highly interested in such projects because of their lack of strategic material deposits, including uranium.
In the long term these technologies will be developed. The advantages of cheaper uranium and plutonium separation are too large to ignore. These techniques are useful for both electric power generation and weapons manufacturing. Nuclear power could replace coal, and even natural gas for electricity generation.
You could use high temperature nuclear reactors to get the temperatures necessary to generate cheap hydrogen using the sulfur-iodine process, displacing another use of natural gas, the manufacture of ammonia.
Then you could use the natural gas to generate synthetic diesel fuel using gas to liquid plants, such as the one build by Sasol at Qatar.
IIRC Ballmer used to work as product manager at Procter & Gamble (you know, the Tide detergent and Gillette razor blade folks). P&G are pretty much used to selling crap products with massive amounts of marketing. They are also known to have high employee churn. So it is little surprising Ballmer acts like he does. He has bachelor degrees in mathematics and economics. That makes him CFO, or at best head of marketing, rather than CEO material of a technological company.
Gates, for all his many faults, actually had a better grasp of the technological issues.
Running Windows 7 won't cut it in a tablet form factor. Not until either they port it to ARM (the NT kernel was ported to Alpha and PowerPC, so it should be possible), or Intel gets more integrated, lower consumption chips out. Otherwise forget about battery life, or light weight. Then there is the issue of the graphical interface. They need to replace it, rather than tack things on top.
Interesting bit about Avatar. About the music style, I assume you are talking about something like a Jazz band instead of a symphonic orchestra.
Japan rebuilt its economy after WWII using fiat paper, after they were forced to give back all the gold they had confiscated during their invasions in Asia. It worked pretty well for a reasonable amount of time. Gold is useful as an exchange medium because it represents something of actual value. It takes a supernova explosion to create it. However our wealth does not come from something like gold, but actual human effort multiplied by available tools. If you take that into consideration the US has considerable human capital. It just needs to put it to good use.
Clinton reduced expenses alright. He closed down many military bases. Several programs were either shut down or reduced in scope (remember the Strategic Defense Initiative, NASP, one thousand ship Navy).
During his time some things were closed though they shouldn't have like the IFR, or AVLIS. His predecessors showed a similar myopic view by shutting down Synthetic fuel research. It would have been nice to have any of these technologies available right now!
The issue is that there is basically no way companies focused solely on stock market performance will do massive investments. Especially not on long term projects which may show limited returns compared to, you know, hedge funds, buying gold, or building houses no one wants to buy. Check out the major US auto manufacturers. The only one which has managed to stay reasonably in shape is still family controlled to a large degree.
As for the military contractors, it has been painfully obvious that the main issue was the governments insistence on reducing the number of units ordered, as well as the amount of contracts per project, thereby decreasing the number of existing military contractors. This has usually resulted in a duopoly, and sometimes monopoly, on military hardware. While in the past the state actually bothered to try to keep more contractors around, so costs per unit came down due to competition.
You can have a disaster happen with any other form of energy. Imagine a wind turbine blade snapping off and hitting someone. Or the pond wastes from silicon processing (it is cheap to wash them off with sulfuric acid) which are polluting large parts of China as we speak. The reason for getting alternative energy is not the environment. If it was about the environment we would all be using nuclear power by now, which has been the safest in terms of kWh produced. Or we would have already upgraded uranium separation (if you need less energy to separate uranium, you get more energy out in the process), as well as fuel reprocessing facilities. Nope. It is a matter of energy security. Simple as that. With hydroelectric power from Canada, plus newly found natural gas reserves, tar sands, and perhaps oil shale in the future, we will be using fossil fuels for a long, long time.
Solar and wind power are fine. Wind is a worthwhile investment, even without subsidies. It was used, together with hydroelectric, to power the European economy from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. It was cheap enough then and is now. The problem with wind (or solar) is that these sources are intermittent, which was the main reason for them falling out of favor in the first place. Oh and BP does have substantial renewable energy investments, including in both solar and wind power. It is the universe's way to follow the path of least resistance, the path of lower energy cost. So it is that naturally the most energetically efficient forms of energy will be explored first and foremost if you examine things on the long range, even if there are localized bubbles here and there in the short term. One of them being corn ethanol.
What's next replaces the Actors with robots?
Avatar actually comes pretty close to that.
If you remember earlier movies, such as Terminator 2, the computer generated characters were only used sparingly for a few scenes. These scenes would have been too expensive or night impossible to do without computer generated characters (e.g. the T1000 liquid morphing effects). As time progressed and CPU cycles became cheaper, you got wholly computer generated characters for longer periods of time. Here we were talking about Toy Story, with less realistic graphics, or Gollum in Lord of the Rings. The issue with more realistic computer generated characters afterwards was how to make them move in a life like fashion. Weta added realistic crowd movements to their Lord of the Rings special effects which made possible the animation of the massive battle scenes. Something that would have taken hundreds of doubles and careful coordination in the past.
Still to get realistic individual movements you needed to do expensive motion capture, using markers, of a real person actually moving. In Avatar the character movements were done in an automated fashion. Many of the actors were shown only briefly, and spent a lot of time doing voiceovers. Now imagine if we had perfect speech synthesis and a couple more generations of hardware development making the computing power for doing Avatar much cheaper. You could get wholly computer generated movies. This would reduce the role (hah!) of actors in the movie business.
As for robots in a live theatrical show, it is not very far fetched, considering what some Japanese companies presently are using as greeters...
In Europe the weight measures most commonly used are either the "g", or the "kg". Those work surprisingly well for most applications. For volume you often see the decimal fractions of the liter being used. e.g. a soda can is usually marked as 33 cl (1cl is 1/100th of a liter), like 1/3 of a liter. Drinks usually come in 33 cl, 0.5l, 1l, 1.5l, or 2l containers.
Once electricity is cheap you can start replacing many devices, which use gas, to use electricity instead. One example is a cooking stove. If you have plentiful cheap electric power you are better off installing an induction cooker, or a microwave. This increases electricity consumption per capita further.
Also, the nuclear power plants the French use are more sophisticated than a lot of people give them credit for. You often hear people call nuclear power plants "baseload" i.e. you cannot turn the reactor off, or reduce the power generation, without taking a long time to spool up/spool down the reactor. Presumably this would mean a lot of nighttime nuclear electricity would go wasted. The truth matter is that you can power down a nuclear power plant during the night. The French do this.
Most French nuclear power plants can use load following. They have special control rods which enable then to run their reactor between 30% and 100% of reactor capacity with a slope of 5% of rate power per minute. However the French nuclear power plants run at 77% capacity factor. The French do not "need" to export the power. It is just that this way they can run their nuclear power plants for a longer time and maximize return on investment.
The Germans, in contrast, have a tax on nuclear power plants while simultaneously having generation subsidies on wind and solar power. They also used to forbid the construction of new nuclear power plants last time I heard about it. The result is they have to buy more natural gas from Russia to cover power generation shortfalls from these highly variable wind and solar resources, and use burn coal, or import nuclear electricity from France for a lot of their usual needs.
You do not need all that electric generation capacity to have a nuclear weapons program to provide a small deterrent. Just ask the Israelis about it. Or Pakistan.
The French ramped up their nuclear construction effort after the 1970s oil crisis. Most countries used to burn oil back then to generate peak power during the day, or even as baseload generation, because it is cheaper to transport oil than coal with the same amount of energy in it. Oil got so expensive in the 1970s that most countries switched to burning natural gas instead. This construction effort (from oil to natural gas) took some 20 years. The French decided they did not want their energy production be held hostage to a foreign power again so they switched to nuclear. This was IMO a wise policy.
The French do reprocessing. So do the Japanese. It helps keep the waste volume from the LWRs and BWRs low.
There are other proposed techniques for reprocessing, other than the most commonly used chemical separation method. They haven't been pursued further for economical (cheaper to extract new uranium from the ground) or political (if you have separation technology you can make weapons grade plutonium easily) reasons. Some of the other proposed separation techniques, like laser separation, would be much cleaner and more efficient than chemical separation.
Heaven forbid the greenies allow you to flood an area with a lake in order to build a pumped storage facility.
Other companies than Samsung tried to manufacture RDRAM and failed even more, because of poor quality control. The fact is the design was complex, and hard to manufacture, leading to all sorts of issues, including localized heat zones. If you remember, RDRAM was when we started seeing heat spreaders in memory modules.
Sending a signal on both edges of the clock has been done since like forever. I learned it in class before Rambus was even founded. If DDR infringes on a patent because of that, the patent office needs to review its standards for accepting patent applications.
Selling your own hardware is not necessary in this segment. The issue with Windows Mobile has never really been the hardware. The HTC HD2 has great hardware, it is the software that sucks. Microsoft needs to fix the software. The problem with Windows Mobile is the typical Microsoft issue. They make a first software version lavishing many resources to enter a market, then when it gets successful they dump the developers overboard (happened to Internet Explorer as well). The Windows Mobile software platform has stagnated for way too long.
Making Windows Mobile a .NET platform is essential, because it is an easy platform to develop for. Many people know how to develop for it, and those who don't learn quickly. C# is an easier to use language than Objective-C. Making the applications run in a sandbox means you are less open to security vulnerabilities and can afford not to waste as much resources reviewing third party apps before adding them to the online store.
Lastly the Windows Mobile UI is pathetically backwards. It was good back in the day, but now it is too clunky.
The Afghanistan offensive into Taliban territory was won by local forces with US air support. They did not need US army on the ground in any significant quantity to win. So why do all of the sudden people think adding more infantry will make it better?
If the secretary cannot write a word document with the lost and found poster, what kind of use does she have anyway? Better off employing a 5 year old from Afghanistan instead.