and provides a nice answer to "what do I do with my stack of crappy decade-old laptops"
You can trade it in for cash. They'll take more than laptops too. Some manufacturers even run their own promos with this company. Sony and HP do so almost continuously. Dell has done it in the past. Buy one of their new laptops, trade in your old one for a $100-$300 cash rebate. Those programs used to be for any functioning laptop, but the last one I sent in had to meet certain CPU specs to qualify for the $300 rebate. Since their rebate for my old laptop as-is was just $100, I bought a CPU which qualified off eBay for $20, installed it, sent it in, and got my $300 check a month later. (I gave them the old CPU and some ancient SO-DIMMs as well since I had no further use for them.)
During the nuclear crisis in Japan, watching NHK coverage was a treat. I had expected the Japanese to be well ahead of the U.S. in fancy computer graphics during news broadcasts. Instead, they had a hand-made 3D model of the nuclear plant, giant posters for various charts, and the weather reports used cardboard cutouts drawings of clouds, sun, rain, etc. which the weather lady stuck to a cloth map with velcro. Very quaint, and for the most part just as effective as the CGI stuff.
It's a 1920x1080 HDTV with touchscreen capability. That resolution is fine for viewing from 10-15 feet away, or if you're broadcasting it on TV. But if you're right in front of the screen touching it, it works out to an underwhelming 27 DPI. The pixels are nearly 1 mm square. I'm not sure this will work as the whiteboard replacement they're envisioning.
I would personally keep the Galaxy Tab 10.1 on shelves because it's different enough, but there's no question that the model you see now wouldn't look the way it does if it weren't for Apple.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 also has a higher res screen than the iPad 2. If the iPad3 or iPad4 comes out with a higher-res screen, are you going to use the same reasoning you just did and claim "there's no question" that Apple wouldn't have increased the resolution "if it weren't for Samsung"?
Just look at what Android phones looked like before and after the iPhone was released in 2007.
Well yeah, if you limit your sample to phones which didn't look like an iPhone before the iPhone was released, of course it's going to look like they copied the iPhone. As it turns out LG announced this phone to the public with pics 3 weeks before the iPhone. Black, touchscreen covering nearly the entire front surface, rectangular, rounded corners, and icons arranged in a grid. So if we were to take your argument at face value, LG deserves credit for the current form factor of smartphones, Apple just happened to make the most successful copy, and Apple fans are deliberately ignoring history to spread misguided claims that Apple invented it all and others are copying from Apple.
The reality is that the current form factor is just the natural evolution of the smartphone due to a variety of factors, none of which has to do with a distinctive design that others are copying from LG (or Apple). You need to maximize screen size to comfortably browse the web on something the size of a phone, so the screen will cover almost the entire front surface. The screen needs to be black to maximize the contrast ratio - if you use a white screen you have to turn off the lights to maximize contrast. Capacitive touchscreens (which had just reached commercial critical mass, and the LG had before the iPhone) were responsive enough that they could replace trackballs or directional navigation keys. Rounded corners prevent it from poking you while in your pocket. And icons in a grid have been around since the Xerox Star IS in 1981; even earlier if you look outside computers. All of this is stuff which would be obvious to someone working in the field, and thus not worthy of patent protection.
So if we ever invented teleporters or Star Trek-like matter transporters, their only use would be as a weapons delivery system? That's rather short-sighted, don't you think?
Either you get rid of unlimited accounts and charge by the GB, in which case it shouldn't matter to you whether those GBs are from the phone or tethered. Or you restrict tethering because people on unlimited accounts are using too much bandwidth while tethered. Charging for tethering while at the same time charging per GB is trying to have your cake and eat it too.
The FTC should step in and make it illegal to advertise bandwidth as "x GB" if the carrier puts restrictions on exactly what is and isn't allowed in those GB. At the very least it should come with an asterisk and a disclosure of limitations at the bottom of the ad. That way people know not to compare GB* to GB.
Most of you are too young to remember, but once upon a time there were no pseudonyms on the Internet. All schools, companies, and organizations on the Internet voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity was easily linked to their real world identity. It was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would fall apart into a morass of misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.
There were a few people running their own servers who bucked the trend, but it wasn't until AOL joined USENET that pseudonyms became a fact of life. AOL allowed each account to have up to 5 usernames, to facilitate families sharing a single AOL account. Obviously these extra usernames were quickly taken up by people wishing to post things anonymously online, which was good for free speech. But not surprisingly, spam was invented shortly thereafter.
So it's actually anonymity which is the "recent artifact". All that's happening now is that the pendulum is starting to swing the other way as netizens struggle to figure out the best balance between real names and pseudonyms.
Keep a distance between cars of at least 2 seconds.
This is a great idea in theory. But in practice, most of time I open up a space larger than 2 sec between me and the car in front, someone pulls into it. Driving is a collaborative effort between you and the people around you. Unfortunately, this means that actual following distance is dictated by the person who believes in a shorter "safe following distance", not longer. In fact it's sometimes dictated by idiots who think a space barely big enough to parallel park into is big enough for a lane change.
"The iPad is the best product, hands down, but if you don't mind dealing with a bunch of issues, the Android tablet is a strong contender."
There's a simple reason for that. When Apple released the iPad, they cut a lot of deals with major publishing companies to release electronic publications for the iPad. The iPad was going to be the messiah which led the paper-bound publishing industry to the promised land of DRM-locked electronic content distribution. The publishing companies have every reason to want the iPad to succeed and open, easily hackable platforms like Android tablets to fail.
Put them near the backyard of the CEO/Owners of the Power Station.
That's where it's currently stored. Because there's no permanent disposal site, each reactor keeps its waste in cooling pools at the power station. The only reason they're able to keep 30, 40, or 50+ years worth of waste on-site is because so little of it is generated. The total amount of high-level nuclear waste generated by the 104 reactors in the U.S. is about 2000 tons annually. By volume, that would just about fit into a single tractor trailer.
Per household it's about 0.5 cc per year. An equivalent amount of electricity generated by coal would generate about 2 tons of coal ash and other pollutants. That's about 2.5 cubic meters worth, or 5 million times more than nuclear. IMHO it's crazy to continue using coal when nuclear is available. Yeah it has its problems, but those problems are nowhere near 5 million times worse than the problems that come with coal (global warming, acid rain, mercury in fish, estimated 1 million deaths/yr worldwide from air pollution, smog, etc). And unlike renewables, nuclear could be expanded to replace coal inside 10 years.
Divide the amount of high level nuclear waste by about 10 if you reprocess.
And now manufacturers in these nations are talking about increased mechanization in order to circumvent the desire of workers for better conditions of employment. In a lot of respects, it sounds like we (in the western world) just shot ourselves in the head: we shipped out the low skill jobs and we don't have the infrastructure for the high skill jobs needed in highly mechanized factories.
You need to look a bit further back in history to see when we shot ourselves in the head. Back in the 70s and 80s when robotics first began to be introduced into manufacturing, there was considerable resistance to it in the West because it displaced blue collar workers. We prioritized their jobs over market efficiency. Consequently in the 90s and 00s when a certain country stepped forward who was willing to play hardball in the labor market, a lot of those jobs ended up moving over there.
If we'd opted for efficiency over jobs in the 70s and 80s and pressed full speed ahead with automated assembly lines, the cost of robotic labor in the West might have been low enough to compete with human labor in China. Those manufacturing industries might have been able to stay here, along with jobs operating and maintaining those automated manufacturing facilities. This is the risk you take when you prioritize anything over efficiency - that someone else will swoop in with a less costly and/or more efficient process and steal all your business from you.
Foxconn is now shielding themselves so another developing country cannot do to them what they did to the West. If they stuck with human labor as we did, as their wages rose another developing country could undercut their labor prices and steal business from them. To prevent this, they're getting the robots in place now. That'll make it difficult or impossible for another developing country to undercut their manufacturing costs, thus guaranteeing those manufacturing industries stay put in China.
They see the writing on the wall when it comes to mundane, repetitive tasks performed by humans. The inexorable march of progress in AI and robotics means that long-term, blue collar manufacturing jobs worldwide are a dead end. It may take 30 years, it may take 100+ years, but the inevitable outcome is that all manufacturing labor will be done by machines, not people. It's simply a waste of our time to be doing such mundane tasks. This should have been obvious in the 70s. We should have embraced automation back then and set up re-education programs to teach assembly line workers how to operate and maintain the robots. Then maybe those manufacturing industries might never have moved over to China in the first place.
many have signed into this thing as unlimited, not unlimted as long as it doesnt effect ATT
To be fair, the contracts they signed were unlimited until either party decides otherwise, not unlimited forever. There will be a few years of grandfathering as multi-year contracts expire, then unlimited will either be gone or relegated to expensive business plans.
OP is right though - this is the better, more honest way to do it. The bandwidth industry lives on overselling capacity to lower prices. From the google searches I've done, it looks like about 20:1 overselling is the norm. Selling that as "unlimited" is simply the marketing department's fantasy, designed to entice customers away from other more honest providers who clearly state their bandwidth and usage caps up-front. Like all fantasies, it's unsustainable. So it's better in that the industry is heading towards honest disclosure of the actual extent of your service.
I'd agree with you that they should be held to the letter of their contract if they sold you "unlimited" service. But once that contract expires, I don't see anything wrong with your only choices being one of their more realistically labeled plans.
And the 2.5" form factor once again pulls into approximately equal volumetric parity with the 3.5" (when you count the actual space consumed by the drive and mounting arrangement for 2-3 2.5" drives compared to 1 3.5" drive)
Actually, two 2.5" drives (70x100x9.5 mm) will fit perfectly on top of a single 3.5" drive (102x146x25.4 mm) (wikipedia entry on dimensions. By volume, one 3.5" HDD = 5.3 2.5" HDDs. So 2.5" drives surpassed 3.5" drives in volumetric data density long ago.
I suspect the main constraint on 3.5" HDDs right now is heat from putting too many platters inside. The 2.5" drives demonstrate that they can squeeze in a lot more platters and heads within the same height. They could probably cut the 3.5" HDDs to half height if there were a market for it. But it looks like the market is heading towards 2.5" HDDs and SSDs.
Recently, Western Digital stepped out and announced their new
1TB 9.5mm Scorpio Blue 2.5-inch notebook drive. The announcement was significant in that it's the first drive of this capacity to squeeze that many bits into an industry standard 9.5mm, 2.5" SATA form-factor.
Samsung announced theirs back in early June. It's been coming in and out of stock since then. I last saw it on Newegg a couple weeks ago, though curiously it's now marked as deactivated.
except that the change is not quick. If suddenly the price of gas jumps it may be months or years before a person can afford to buy a better car. Not to mention the time it takes for the car companies to tool up to meet demand for fuel efficient cars. Buying a car is not like buying laundry detergent. You just can't switch over to a new car rapidly enough to adapt to rapid changes in the price of fuel.
This works both ways though. What if tomorrow someone invents some fantastically cheap and effective way to create cellulose-based biofuels. Price of gas drops to 1/10th what it is now, and people in theory would be able to better utilize the cheaper energy. Except they can't immediately switch over to a new car, and car companies have been forced by decades of government regulation to tool for and research fuel efficient car designs, rather than designs which can best exploit abundant cheap fuel.
Yet another situation where the failures of market economics is laid bare. This is a situation where only government has the ability to do the correct thing for the public good.
The whole point of a market economy is to keep all your bases covered so your economy can react quickly to changes like this. Companies which believe gas prices will go up will research fuel-efficient vehicles. Companies which believe gas prices will go down will research designs exploiting low energy costs. If gas prices go up, the companies which bet on prices going up experience a business boom while those which bet the other way die off. If gas prices go down, the same thing happens except with the companies reversed. Either way, you have someone who has already researched and worked on the best solution to the current situation before the situation ever happens.
Pre-ordaining a specific outcome, then pointing out how a government policy is superior at achieving that outcome than the market is begging the question, since in real life you can't pre-ordain the outcome. If things don't turn out the way you've pre-ordained, then the government policy has been detrimental to the public good. It's an all your eggs in one basket approach which frequently doesn't turn out well.
They still screwed it up. You want fewer jobs per MW, not more. Say there are two generators which both put out 100 MW; one takes 5 people to operate properly, while the other can be operated with just 2 people. Which generator do you think any business, city, military service, etc. would rather have?
I don't see the public clamoring for this data so they can check it with their own models at home. I see a few people who have vested interests in trying to prove this data wrong, and I see some people who don't want to believe hard times are ahead trying to shoot the messenger. Most of us see no reason to question the conclusions of the experts.
That's hardly scientific. Science doesn't care if someone is doing something because they have a vested interest. It only cares if the results are reproducible and independently verifiable. If the people who are skeptical of global warming (no matter their rationale) aren't allowed to try to prove the data wrong, who else is going to do it? People who already believe in global warming?
Let them make what they can of the data. If they can't come up with any substantial, then it validates the data and your theory. If they come up with something you can't counter, then they've found a serious problem with your theory or your methodology which needs to be addressed.
If the problem is that the public doesn't understand what scientists are saying and why some arguments are bunk, then that's an independent problem which needs to be dealt with separately. If you're afraid that "vested interests" will wage an unscientific PR war to overturn the recommendation of scientists, the solution has to be within the PR domain. It cannot involve compromising the free exchange of scientific information and ideas. Destroying science is not a valid way to save science.
Yeah, it sounds like Sony's policy with Zurich was General Liability Insurance. That type of insurance only pays for injury, property damage, and litigation arising from those two. Sony is really pushing it trying to claim the data breach caused injury or property damage to its customers.
OTOH, if the courts buy Sony's argument and classifies identity theft as injury or property damage, then the world gets a lot more interesting. Paypal loses your credit card and bank account info to hackers? Your bank loses a laptop with all your personal info on it? Sue them for injury or property damage.
As for the cost, the average US nuclear power plant puts out very close to one gigawatt, and costs on the order of 6-9 billion dollars to build and another 30 billion in expenses over its lifetime. This tower has an estimated construction cost of 750 million dollars, and although I can't find any estimates of the maintenance cost, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "a hell of a lot less than completely rebuilding it every 3 years of its spec'd lifetime".
Average nuclear reactor output in the U.S. is around 950 MW. Nuclear plants have a capacity factor of a bit more than 90%. So your 950 MW reactor will put out an average 855 MW.
As I calculated in a post above, capacity factor for this tower should be about 28%, for an average 56 MW generation. You'd need a bit more than 15 of these towers to equal the power output of one 950 MW nuclear reactor. If this tower costs $750 million, and you need to build 15.3 of them to equal a nuclear plant, you're at $11.5 billion construction costs vs the $6-$9 billion you cited for nuclear.
Actually a 1 GW nuclear reactor should only cost $1-$5 billion. The $6-$9 billion cost figure is after you include financing - that is, interest on the loans. If you included financing on $11.5 billion for your 15.3 solar towers, you'd be up around $15-$21 billion. So MWh for MWh, these towers are considerably more expensive to construct than a nuclear reactor.
Also, your $30 billion operating costs is wildly off. A nuclear reactor generating 855 MW puts out about 7.5 million MWh in a year. Wholesale electricity prices are around $40-$100 per MWh. So the reactor generates about $300-$750 million worth of electricity in a year. If its expenses over 40 years are $30 billion, that's $750 million per year in expenses. The power companies would be losing money operating the reactors, and they would be falling over themselves trying to shut them down.
Cost to generate nuclear power in the U.S is about $48-$73 per MWh depending on whether you use a 5% or 10% discount rate. So the nuclear plant's operational costs are about $360-$550 million per year. Amortized over the 15.3 towers, that would be equivalent to each tower having an operational budget of $24-$36 million per year.
The tower is rated for 200 MW, with an estimated utilization of 60%. So the average power output is about 120 MW.
It should be obvious that this is wrong, since half the hours during the year are night. For any solar-based system, capacity factor is by definition capped at 50% because of night. Then you have to factor in weather, angle of the sun (you lose some around dawn and dusk even with tracking), fouling of the reflectors with dust between maintenance, planned downtime during maintenance, etc.
For non-tracking solar systems in the desert Southwest U.S., capacity factor is about 18%. Tracking should multiply that by pi/2 if you integrate angle of the sun as it traces a circle (integral of sin(theta) as theta ranges from 0 to pi), giving a capacity factor of 28%. 200 MW * 28% = 56 MW average generation throughout the entire year. I'm guessing the 60% figure is just for daytime (2*28% = 56%) rounded up and ignoring weather and downtime due to maintenance.
. Regarding nuclear, you should look at the power output for one of those plants. They are 2000MW or greater.
The U.S. has nuclear 104 commercial reactors at 64 plants. The average per-plant capacity is about 1550 MW, while the average per-reactor capacity is about 1000 MW. So you and the OP are both correct, he's just talking about reactors while you're talking about plants.
Money might be a good start. Even in schools where this $5 Billion reaches, they still expect to pay teachers poverty wages.
No, money is not a good start. We're already drowning the education system in money. The U.S. spends over $10,000 per student per year on public education. It's just among the highest of the OECD countries. So a single teacher teaching a class of 25 kids (which is low these days) represents more than a quarter million dollars per year.
The problem isn't that we aren't spending enough money on education. The problem is that only a tiny amount of what we do spend is trickling down to the teachers and the classroom. The vast majority is being absorbed by bureaucracy and administration. That's what needs to be reformed. But they're the ones who control where education money gets spent, making it very difficult to reform them. They absorb increases in education funding, while passing down cuts to the teachers.
I see this all the time - "I think something is stupid, therefore it's worth nothing." As it happens, I do think bitcoins are stupid. But I recognize that the value of something is not what I think, not even what the average person thinks. Its value is what the person who most wants them at that moment thinks.
Back when Pokemon cards came out, I talked with a friend about them and he agreed they were the dumbest things ever. Stupid concept, stupid game, and at its root just cardboard with a bit of ink printed on them. But he also recognized that there was a lot of demand for them, mostly driven by little kids pestering their parents into buying them. Could parents really resist that? He didn't think so. He made himself a small fortune importing them for resale to stores.
So as long as there are people out there willing to offer goods, services, or money in exchange for bitcoins, bitcoins have real-world value. Even if they are a dumb idea.
Unless Calculator has failed me, a 1 million part machine (with each part having a 1 in a million fail rate) has around a 63.2% chance of failing.
No need for a calculator. This type of problem (1 in n chance of an event occurring, what are the odds of it occurring in m trials, when n=m?) converges to 1 - 1/e. The total number of failures adds up to 100% (it has to be to maintain the original odds), but some of those outcomes are multiple failures (i.e. 2+ parts failing on your million part machine). If you have 100 letters which you randomly put into 100 mailboxes, some of those mailboxes will get 2+ letters, meaning obviously that some mailboxes will not get any letters. As it turns out, it's 1/e mailboxes which get no letters, and 1 - 1/e mailboxes which get at least 1 letter.
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You can trade it in for cash. They'll take more than laptops too. Some manufacturers even run their own promos with this company. Sony and HP do so almost continuously. Dell has done it in the past. Buy one of their new laptops, trade in your old one for a $100-$300 cash rebate. Those programs used to be for any functioning laptop, but the last one I sent in had to meet certain CPU specs to qualify for the $300 rebate. Since their rebate for my old laptop as-is was just $100, I bought a CPU which qualified off eBay for $20, installed it, sent it in, and got my $300 check a month later. (I gave them the old CPU and some ancient SO-DIMMs as well since I had no further use for them.)
During the nuclear crisis in Japan, watching NHK coverage was a treat. I had expected the Japanese to be well ahead of the U.S. in fancy computer graphics during news broadcasts. Instead, they had a hand-made 3D model of the nuclear plant, giant posters for various charts, and the weather reports used cardboard cutouts drawings of clouds, sun, rain, etc. which the weather lady stuck to a cloth map with velcro. Very quaint, and for the most part just as effective as the CGI stuff.
It's a 1920x1080 HDTV with touchscreen capability. That resolution is fine for viewing from 10-15 feet away, or if you're broadcasting it on TV. But if you're right in front of the screen touching it, it works out to an underwhelming 27 DPI. The pixels are nearly 1 mm square. I'm not sure this will work as the whiteboard replacement they're envisioning.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 also has a higher res screen than the iPad 2. If the iPad3 or iPad4 comes out with a higher-res screen, are you going to use the same reasoning you just did and claim "there's no question" that Apple wouldn't have increased the resolution "if it weren't for Samsung"?
Well yeah, if you limit your sample to phones which didn't look like an iPhone before the iPhone was released, of course it's going to look like they copied the iPhone. As it turns out LG announced this phone to the public with pics 3 weeks before the iPhone. Black, touchscreen covering nearly the entire front surface, rectangular, rounded corners, and icons arranged in a grid. So if we were to take your argument at face value, LG deserves credit for the current form factor of smartphones, Apple just happened to make the most successful copy, and Apple fans are deliberately ignoring history to spread misguided claims that Apple invented it all and others are copying from Apple.
The reality is that the current form factor is just the natural evolution of the smartphone due to a variety of factors, none of which has to do with a distinctive design that others are copying from LG (or Apple). You need to maximize screen size to comfortably browse the web on something the size of a phone, so the screen will cover almost the entire front surface. The screen needs to be black to maximize the contrast ratio - if you use a white screen you have to turn off the lights to maximize contrast. Capacitive touchscreens (which had just reached commercial critical mass, and the LG had before the iPhone) were responsive enough that they could replace trackballs or directional navigation keys. Rounded corners prevent it from poking you while in your pocket. And icons in a grid have been around since the Xerox Star IS in 1981; even earlier if you look outside computers. All of this is stuff which would be obvious to someone working in the field, and thus not worthy of patent protection.
So if we ever invented teleporters or Star Trek-like matter transporters, their only use would be as a weapons delivery system? That's rather short-sighted, don't you think?
Either you get rid of unlimited accounts and charge by the GB, in which case it shouldn't matter to you whether those GBs are from the phone or tethered. Or you restrict tethering because people on unlimited accounts are using too much bandwidth while tethered. Charging for tethering while at the same time charging per GB is trying to have your cake and eat it too.
The FTC should step in and make it illegal to advertise bandwidth as "x GB" if the carrier puts restrictions on exactly what is and isn't allowed in those GB. At the very least it should come with an asterisk and a disclosure of limitations at the bottom of the ad. That way people know not to compare GB* to GB.
Most of you are too young to remember, but once upon a time there were no pseudonyms on the Internet. All schools, companies, and organizations on the Internet voluntarily adhered to a policy where each user's online identity was easily linked to their real world identity. It was staunchly enforced by admins who believed the net would fall apart into a morass of misbehavior if people were allowed to post anonymously.
There were a few people running their own servers who bucked the trend, but it wasn't until AOL joined USENET that pseudonyms became a fact of life. AOL allowed each account to have up to 5 usernames, to facilitate families sharing a single AOL account. Obviously these extra usernames were quickly taken up by people wishing to post things anonymously online, which was good for free speech. But not surprisingly, spam was invented shortly thereafter.
So it's actually anonymity which is the "recent artifact". All that's happening now is that the pendulum is starting to swing the other way as netizens struggle to figure out the best balance between real names and pseudonyms.
This is a great idea in theory. But in practice, most of time I open up a space larger than 2 sec between me and the car in front, someone pulls into it. Driving is a collaborative effort between you and the people around you. Unfortunately, this means that actual following distance is dictated by the person who believes in a shorter "safe following distance", not longer. In fact it's sometimes dictated by idiots who think a space barely big enough to parallel park into is big enough for a lane change.
There's a simple reason for that. When Apple released the iPad, they cut a lot of deals with major publishing companies to release electronic publications for the iPad. The iPad was going to be the messiah which led the paper-bound publishing industry to the promised land of DRM-locked electronic content distribution. The publishing companies have every reason to want the iPad to succeed and open, easily hackable platforms like Android tablets to fail.
That's where it's currently stored. Because there's no permanent disposal site, each reactor keeps its waste in cooling pools at the power station. The only reason they're able to keep 30, 40, or 50+ years worth of waste on-site is because so little of it is generated. The total amount of high-level nuclear waste generated by the 104 reactors in the U.S. is about 2000 tons annually. By volume, that would just about fit into a single tractor trailer.
Per household it's about 0.5 cc per year. An equivalent amount of electricity generated by coal would generate about 2 tons of coal ash and other pollutants. That's about 2.5 cubic meters worth, or 5 million times more than nuclear. IMHO it's crazy to continue using coal when nuclear is available. Yeah it has its problems, but those problems are nowhere near 5 million times worse than the problems that come with coal (global warming, acid rain, mercury in fish, estimated 1 million deaths/yr worldwide from air pollution, smog, etc). And unlike renewables, nuclear could be expanded to replace coal inside 10 years.
Divide the amount of high level nuclear waste by about 10 if you reprocess.
You need to look a bit further back in history to see when we shot ourselves in the head. Back in the 70s and 80s when robotics first began to be introduced into manufacturing, there was considerable resistance to it in the West because it displaced blue collar workers. We prioritized their jobs over market efficiency. Consequently in the 90s and 00s when a certain country stepped forward who was willing to play hardball in the labor market, a lot of those jobs ended up moving over there.
If we'd opted for efficiency over jobs in the 70s and 80s and pressed full speed ahead with automated assembly lines, the cost of robotic labor in the West might have been low enough to compete with human labor in China. Those manufacturing industries might have been able to stay here, along with jobs operating and maintaining those automated manufacturing facilities. This is the risk you take when you prioritize anything over efficiency - that someone else will swoop in with a less costly and/or more efficient process and steal all your business from you.
Foxconn is now shielding themselves so another developing country cannot do to them what they did to the West. If they stuck with human labor as we did, as their wages rose another developing country could undercut their labor prices and steal business from them. To prevent this, they're getting the robots in place now. That'll make it difficult or impossible for another developing country to undercut their manufacturing costs, thus guaranteeing those manufacturing industries stay put in China.
They see the writing on the wall when it comes to mundane, repetitive tasks performed by humans. The inexorable march of progress in AI and robotics means that long-term, blue collar manufacturing jobs worldwide are a dead end. It may take 30 years, it may take 100+ years, but the inevitable outcome is that all manufacturing labor will be done by machines, not people. It's simply a waste of our time to be doing such mundane tasks. This should have been obvious in the 70s. We should have embraced automation back then and set up re-education programs to teach assembly line workers how to operate and maintain the robots. Then maybe those manufacturing industries might never have moved over to China in the first place.
To be fair, the contracts they signed were unlimited until either party decides otherwise, not unlimited forever. There will be a few years of grandfathering as multi-year contracts expire, then unlimited will either be gone or relegated to expensive business plans.
OP is right though - this is the better, more honest way to do it. The bandwidth industry lives on overselling capacity to lower prices. From the google searches I've done, it looks like about 20:1 overselling is the norm. Selling that as "unlimited" is simply the marketing department's fantasy, designed to entice customers away from other more honest providers who clearly state their bandwidth and usage caps up-front. Like all fantasies, it's unsustainable. So it's better in that the industry is heading towards honest disclosure of the actual extent of your service.
I'd agree with you that they should be held to the letter of their contract if they sold you "unlimited" service. But once that contract expires, I don't see anything wrong with your only choices being one of their more realistically labeled plans.
Actually, two 2.5" drives (70x100x9.5 mm) will fit perfectly on top of a single 3.5" drive (102x146x25.4 mm) (wikipedia entry on dimensions. By volume, one 3.5" HDD = 5.3 2.5" HDDs. So 2.5" drives surpassed 3.5" drives in volumetric data density long ago.
I suspect the main constraint on 3.5" HDDs right now is heat from putting too many platters inside. The 2.5" drives demonstrate that they can squeeze in a lot more platters and heads within the same height. They could probably cut the 3.5" HDDs to half height if there were a market for it. But it looks like the market is heading towards 2.5" HDDs and SSDs.
Samsung announced theirs back in early June. It's been coming in and out of stock since then. I last saw it on Newegg a couple weeks ago, though curiously it's now marked as deactivated.
This works both ways though. What if tomorrow someone invents some fantastically cheap and effective way to create cellulose-based biofuels. Price of gas drops to 1/10th what it is now, and people in theory would be able to better utilize the cheaper energy. Except they can't immediately switch over to a new car, and car companies have been forced by decades of government regulation to tool for and research fuel efficient car designs, rather than designs which can best exploit abundant cheap fuel.
The whole point of a market economy is to keep all your bases covered so your economy can react quickly to changes like this. Companies which believe gas prices will go up will research fuel-efficient vehicles. Companies which believe gas prices will go down will research designs exploiting low energy costs. If gas prices go up, the companies which bet on prices going up experience a business boom while those which bet the other way die off. If gas prices go down, the same thing happens except with the companies reversed. Either way, you have someone who has already researched and worked on the best solution to the current situation before the situation ever happens.
Pre-ordaining a specific outcome, then pointing out how a government policy is superior at achieving that outcome than the market is begging the question, since in real life you can't pre-ordain the outcome. If things don't turn out the way you've pre-ordained, then the government policy has been detrimental to the public good. It's an all your eggs in one basket approach which frequently doesn't turn out well.
They still screwed it up. You want fewer jobs per MW, not more. Say there are two generators which both put out 100 MW; one takes 5 people to operate properly, while the other can be operated with just 2 people. Which generator do you think any business, city, military service, etc. would rather have?
That's hardly scientific. Science doesn't care if someone is doing something because they have a vested interest. It only cares if the results are reproducible and independently verifiable. If the people who are skeptical of global warming (no matter their rationale) aren't allowed to try to prove the data wrong, who else is going to do it? People who already believe in global warming?
Let them make what they can of the data. If they can't come up with any substantial, then it validates the data and your theory. If they come up with something you can't counter, then they've found a serious problem with your theory or your methodology which needs to be addressed.
If the problem is that the public doesn't understand what scientists are saying and why some arguments are bunk, then that's an independent problem which needs to be dealt with separately. If you're afraid that "vested interests" will wage an unscientific PR war to overturn the recommendation of scientists, the solution has to be within the PR domain. It cannot involve compromising the free exchange of scientific information and ideas. Destroying science is not a valid way to save science.
Yeah, it sounds like Sony's policy with Zurich was General Liability Insurance. That type of insurance only pays for injury, property damage, and litigation arising from those two. Sony is really pushing it trying to claim the data breach caused injury or property damage to its customers.
OTOH, if the courts buy Sony's argument and classifies identity theft as injury or property damage, then the world gets a lot more interesting. Paypal loses your credit card and bank account info to hackers? Your bank loses a laptop with all your personal info on it? Sue them for injury or property damage.
Average nuclear reactor output in the U.S. is around 950 MW. Nuclear plants have a capacity factor of a bit more than 90%. So your 950 MW reactor will put out an average 855 MW.
As I calculated in a post above, capacity factor for this tower should be about 28%, for an average 56 MW generation. You'd need a bit more than 15 of these towers to equal the power output of one 950 MW nuclear reactor. If this tower costs $750 million, and you need to build 15.3 of them to equal a nuclear plant, you're at $11.5 billion construction costs vs the $6-$9 billion you cited for nuclear.
Actually a 1 GW nuclear reactor should only cost $1-$5 billion. The $6-$9 billion cost figure is after you include financing - that is, interest on the loans. If you included financing on $11.5 billion for your 15.3 solar towers, you'd be up around $15-$21 billion. So MWh for MWh, these towers are considerably more expensive to construct than a nuclear reactor.
Also, your $30 billion operating costs is wildly off. A nuclear reactor generating 855 MW puts out about 7.5 million MWh in a year. Wholesale electricity prices are around $40-$100 per MWh. So the reactor generates about $300-$750 million worth of electricity in a year. If its expenses over 40 years are $30 billion, that's $750 million per year in expenses. The power companies would be losing money operating the reactors, and they would be falling over themselves trying to shut them down.
Cost to generate nuclear power in the U.S is about $48-$73 per MWh depending on whether you use a 5% or 10% discount rate. So the nuclear plant's operational costs are about $360-$550 million per year. Amortized over the 15.3 towers, that would be equivalent to each tower having an operational budget of $24-$36 million per year.
It should be obvious that this is wrong, since half the hours during the year are night. For any solar-based system, capacity factor is by definition capped at 50% because of night. Then you have to factor in weather, angle of the sun (you lose some around dawn and dusk even with tracking), fouling of the reflectors with dust between maintenance, planned downtime during maintenance, etc.
For non-tracking solar systems in the desert Southwest U.S., capacity factor is about 18%. Tracking should multiply that by pi/2 if you integrate angle of the sun as it traces a circle (integral of sin(theta) as theta ranges from 0 to pi), giving a capacity factor of 28%. 200 MW * 28% = 56 MW average generation throughout the entire year. I'm guessing the 60% figure is just for daytime (2*28% = 56%) rounded up and ignoring weather and downtime due to maintenance.
The U.S. has nuclear 104 commercial reactors at 64 plants. The average per-plant capacity is about 1550 MW, while the average per-reactor capacity is about 1000 MW. So you and the OP are both correct, he's just talking about reactors while you're talking about plants.
No, money is not a good start. We're already drowning the education system in money. The U.S. spends over $10,000 per student per year on public education. It's just among the highest of the OECD countries. So a single teacher teaching a class of 25 kids (which is low these days) represents more than a quarter million dollars per year.
The problem isn't that we aren't spending enough money on education. The problem is that only a tiny amount of what we do spend is trickling down to the teachers and the classroom. The vast majority is being absorbed by bureaucracy and administration. That's what needs to be reformed. But they're the ones who control where education money gets spent, making it very difficult to reform them. They absorb increases in education funding, while passing down cuts to the teachers.
I see this all the time - "I think something is stupid, therefore it's worth nothing." As it happens, I do think bitcoins are stupid. But I recognize that the value of something is not what I think, not even what the average person thinks. Its value is what the person who most wants them at that moment thinks.
Back when Pokemon cards came out, I talked with a friend about them and he agreed they were the dumbest things ever. Stupid concept, stupid game, and at its root just cardboard with a bit of ink printed on them. But he also recognized that there was a lot of demand for them, mostly driven by little kids pestering their parents into buying them. Could parents really resist that? He didn't think so. He made himself a small fortune importing them for resale to stores.
So as long as there are people out there willing to offer goods, services, or money in exchange for bitcoins, bitcoins have real-world value. Even if they are a dumb idea.
No need for a calculator. This type of problem (1 in n chance of an event occurring, what are the odds of it occurring in m trials, when n=m?) converges to 1 - 1/e. The total number of failures adds up to 100% (it has to be to maintain the original odds), but some of those outcomes are multiple failures (i.e. 2+ parts failing on your million part machine). If you have 100 letters which you randomly put into 100 mailboxes, some of those mailboxes will get 2+ letters, meaning obviously that some mailboxes will not get any letters. As it turns out, it's 1/e mailboxes which get no letters, and 1 - 1/e mailboxes which get at least 1 letter.