Cdma is being phased out anyway for LTE. It just means that Verizon will accelerate plans to phase out and shut down the cdma towers iin favor of the faster 4g LTE ones. (Which they are doing anyways)
Voice on CDMA networks still operates over CDMA. Just like voice on GSM still operates over TDMA (which GSM had to abandon for wideband CDMA for 3G data - that's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. Your GSM phone is jam packed with CDMA technology. That's why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM handsets - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for 3G data. CDMA phones used a single radio for both, so couldn't do both at the same time.)
This would be a moot point if everyone switched to VoLTE (voice over LTE). But the carriers have been reluctant to completely switch since their 2G and 3G networks still have better coverage than their LTE networks. It also makes their towers compatible with all devices allowing phone owners to use their handset with any carrier, which would increase competition and lower prices. And you can't be having that.
Qualcomm is so far in the wrong here it isn't even funny. They are trying to charge Apple two to three times for the same patent just because Apple has deep pockets. If no one else has to pay twice for the same patent. Not HTC not Nexus and Google.
I agree completely. (They're not charging 2-3x per se, they're trying to get Apple to re-pay to license patents that the supplier Apple bought the Qualcomm chips from has already paid to license. i.e. Qualcomm believes if a patent licensee sells a product using the patent, the buyer also needs to license the patent too. Kind of a value-added tax approach to patent licensing. If they succeed in court against Apple, the Android handset manufacturers are next.)
But there's a good deal of karmaic justice here. Apple was the one who tried to argue in court that patent damage awards should be based on the entire price of the infringing product, rather than the value of the component which infringed. e.g. If a car offered GPS navigation as a factory option, and a GPS patent holder successfully sued for infringement, they should be awarded damages based on the value of the entire car, rather than the value of the GPS navigation unit.
I have no idea how, but wish we had a multiparty system to stop this "us vs them" tribal cultural war. We got Democrats voting Republican for financial issues, and Republicans voting democrat for social issues. Libertarians, Socialist, Communists, etc, its a clusterfuck.
The problem actually stems from our system of government electing representatives for a specific district (or state). It results in a bunch of winner-take-all elections. The founding fathers chose this method because they wanted elected representatives to have a direct connection to the people they were representing. The downside is that a vote for someone who has no chance of winning (a third party candidate) is a wasted vote.
In countries which use parliamentary elections, everyone casts their votes, and the members of parliament are allocated in proportion to the vote. So a vote for a third party is not "wasted" (as long as that party gets enough votes to obtain one seat). The downside of course is that no single member of parliament feels bound to a particular group of people or represents any particular region.
If you wish to retain the representative model while having fairer outcomes, you first have to realize that there is no such thing as a perfectly fair election system. All of them can result in counter-intuitive results where the "winner" doesn't really enjoy as much support among the voters as the loser(s). People are upset about the Electoral College "stealing" the election from Clinton. But if you add up the votes for all the parties and independent candidates, the liberal parties (Democrat, Green, Independent, Socialism and Liberalism, Bernie Sanders) add up to 49.38% of the votes. Adding up the conservative parties (Republican, Libertarian, Constitution, Evan McMullin) gives 50.06%. So the correct winner of the 2016 election was in fact a conservative candidate even if you ignored the Electoral College and did a straight vote tally.
But different systems result in a different frequency of counter-intuitive results. Unfortunately the plurality wins system the U.S. uses is one of the worst. The frequency of "bad" results can be minimized by use of an instant-runoff voting system. Where each voter ranks all the candidates in order of preference. You then successively eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of #1 votes. Voters who voted for that candidate have their vote reallocated to their next highest choice of the remaining candidates. And so on. Until just two candidates are left, and the more popular of them among all the voters is the winner.
Drift analysis relies on the average value of year's worth of estimated currents and winds. The satellite data analysis relied on precisely known satellite positions and the speed of light (which is also precisely known). My money is on the satellite analysis being more accurate.
But until the plane is actually found, there's no point arguing which is correct. We can't draw any conclusions until the plane is found. And it probably will never be found. Even if the search area indicated by the satellite signals is accurate, finding it there was always going to be a long shot (after the pingers stopped after 30 days). Given the relative sizes of the plane and the search area, finding a needle in a haystack is child's play by comparison. This is like trying to find a needle in field of haystacks.
If they wanted to test the accuracy of their satellite analysis, they should be running it on planes on regular flights. They can calculate a plane's position at certain times based on similar satellite ping times, then check it against the plane's actual flight path. Do it enough times and you can figure out just how accurate the methodology is.
Before the Internet, this sort of "news" was called gossip. And we've been trying to stamp it out for thousands of years, without success.
At some point you accept that it's an innate part of human nature. And rather than trying to stamp it out, work instead towards reducing and mitigating the damage it causes. But any policies attempting to stop cold fundamental human behavior is destined to fail.
That's city debt. That's in addition to state and national debt (and personal debt) owed by every SF citizen. In terms of city debt, SF ranks near the bottom.
Estimating from the picture, they're laying out about 40 meters x 25 meters of panels (1000 m^2). At a nominal capacity of 160 W/m^2, that's 160 kW peak capacity.
Plugging in Puerto Rico's zip code (00901) into the PWatts calculator yields a 17.4% capacity factor (this factors in night, weather, movement of the sun across the sky, etc). Add in 14% system losses and 96% inverter efficiency, and you get an average actual power production of (160 kW) * (17.4%) * (100-14%) * (96%) = 23 kW. (Judging from the picture, actual production will be worse since the panels aren't tilted at Puerto Rico's latitude and pointed South to maximize exposure area. They're simply laid flat, tilted at a slight angle to shed rain.)
At a 25% ICE efficiency, you need a (23 kW) / (25%) = 92 kW generator to produce the same amount of power as this parking lot full of solar panels. 92 kW is about 120 horsepower. Basically an engine like the one under the hood of the small black car in the picture.
"But fuel!" you say. Diesel has an energy density of 35.8 MJ/liter. While generating 23 kW of power, the 92 kW generator is going to burn (92 kilojoules/sec) / (35.8 MJ / liter) * (3600 sec/hour) = 9.25 liters of diesel per hour (2.44 gallons/hr).
Assume these panels and batteries fit into a standard cargo container (2.43x2.59 meters x 12.2 meters long). If you fit a cylindrical tank into said container - 1.1m interior radius x 11 meters long (need some space for the generator), that could transport (pi) * (1.1 meters)^2 * (11 meters) = 41.815 m^3 = 41815 liters of diesel. That would be enough to operate the generator continuously for (41815 liters) / (9.25 liters/hour) = 4521 hours, or 188 days. A little over half a year.
It's been my experience that people vastly underestimate the amount of energy contained in petrochemical fuels, and vastly overestimate the amount of energy you can collect via solar. I'm not saying what Musk is doing is bad - if he lets them keep the panels to continue to power the hospital afterwards for decades, then it's most likely very good. But for emergency response, a generator is much more compact, requires less labor and space, and is logistically simpler to set up and operate.
I'm just happy that after years of eating downvotes for pointing out that EVs are not zero emissions, someone finally gets it. "Ranking" cars by how much pollution comes out their tailpipe is stupid. What matters is the total emissions of the entire system which allows you to propel your car (be it gas, electric, horse-drawn, whatever). For ICE vehicles it's mostly in the fuel that's burned. Which means for biodiesel it's close to zero because it's a closed cycle (fuel -> CO2 -> plants -> fuel). For EVs, it's the process used to generate electricity (including transmission and charging losses).
until you Prius from my cold dead hans
Incidentally, the Prius is a waste of a hybrid engine. The problem is the U.S. measures fuel economy in MPG. Fuel economy is actually GPM - how much fuel you burn to travel a fixed distance. Because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy, the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel is saved per mile driven. This is why the CAFE standards use a harmonic mean. That corrects for MPG being the inverse of fuel economy. e.g. Suppose you're going to travel 100 miles.
Notice how every time you double MPG, the fuel saved is only half the previous step? The 12.5 MPG jump from a Suburban to a sedan saves you 4 gallons, while the what many people assume-to-be-bigger 25 MPG jump from a sedan to a Prius only saves you 2 gallons.
In other words, if the true goal here is to reduce fuel consumption, we should be concentrating on improving the efficiency of trucks. That's where we should be trying to add hybrid powertrains. Converting an economy car into a hybrid is barely worth the trouble. The MPG increase may seem big, but it's an almost insignificant amount. If you can improve a tractor trailer's economy from 6 MPG to 7 MPG (just a 1 MPG improvement or 17%), you've saved more fuel per mile driven than switching from a sedan to a Prius (a 25 MPG improvement or 100%). 100/6 - 100/7 = 2.38 gal saved per 100 miles. Vs 100/25 - 100/50 = 2 gal saved per 100 miles. You know how environmentalists scoffed at hybrid SUVs? That was actually one of the best types of vehicles to convert into a hybrid.
To avoid this problem of inverse fuel economy, the rest of the world uses liters per 100 km, which is analogous to GPM and a correct measure of fuel economy. This is the problem I have with the current push for clean energy - so much of it is about appearance and bragging rights (including calling EVs zero emissions when they clearly aren't), instead of actual results.
That's the problem with you conspiracy kooks. Occams razor tells us otherwise.
I see people making this mistake a lot. Occam's razor isn't a law. It doesn't "tell us" anything. It doesn't say "The simplest explanation is the correct one."
It actually goes: "The simplest explanation tends to be the correct one." Occam's razor merely suggests what is the most probable answer. It doesn't prove or tell us anything, it simply lets you organize hypotheses into, lacking any other evidence, the most likely order of plausibility. You still have to prove the most-likely hypothesis is correct. And a less-likely (more complicated) hypothesis can still turn out to be the correct one.
This is not about the right to repair our electronics. We already have the right to do whatever we want with stuff we own, including trashing it, burning it, running over it with a car, and - yes if you want to - fixing it or modifying it.
This is about the hypothetical "right" of manufacturers to mess around with and disable stuff they made after they've sold it to you. Because you're not using your equipment the way they want you to. Saying this is about our right to repair implies that manufacturers have this right to meddle with stuff they don't own, when they clearly don't.
At the time, Apple didn't have the broad-market appeal you speak of. I remember it distinctly because I heard on the radio while driving to work that Apple stock had fallen to $22. Some long-forgotten memory cell in my brain fired up and asked "wasn't that the price it IPO'ed at?" (it was, before stock splits). So I did a bunch of research into Apple with the idea of buying some of its stock. They were a has-been computer company whose most popular product was a computer built into a CRT monitor which you could get in your choice of brightly-colored side panels. Their regular Mac desktop line was languishing. They'd just replaced their Powerbooks with newer impossible-to-afford models. And the iPod lacked in features compared to the competition. No I didn't buy any stock (hindsight is 20/20). The iPod was successful because it was a mediocre product which solved the biggest impediment to widescale adoption in its market.
MP3 players had been around for a few years, and everyone knew they wanted one (we were still using Walkman-type cassette players back then). The problem was the ridiculously convoluted process of transferring your music collection over to the MP3 player. Many of us already had an MP3 collection on our computer. In theory you should be able to just drag and drop it. But most MP3 players used some proprietary ordering scheme so dragging and dropping destroyed your playlist info (e.g. your music would show up in alphabetical order, or worse yet ordered by file creation date). In order to preserve your playlists, you had to go through some proprietary software which had a terrible UI, didn't work all the time (or even most of the time), and frequently didn't do what you wanted. There was no real standard for organizing music into playlists, and the MP3 manufacturers were having trouble grappling with the multitude of different ways it was being done.
iTunes is what made the iPod. The iPod with iTunes nailed how synchronization of your music collection between devices should work. You organize it in one place (iTunes, before it became the horrible monstrosity it is today), and it reflected that organization onto all your devices. That's why it went on to tremendous success despite having "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame." People (the technically illiterate people who make up 95% of the population) bought it because it just works. I complain about Apple's hardware and their policies. But their software and their approach to UIs is top-notch - make it so an idiot could use it (the complete opposite of most open source).
I think that's what Spiegel was going for with his iPod analogy. He felt there was some impediment to widescale adoption of the technology, and he thought his company had solved it.
I'm the target market for damn near every stupid doodad, but I didn't hear ANYTHING about it because it was marketed within snapchat as if it were a limited upsell only to dedicated snapchat users..
I'd heard about it (and I don't use Snapchat), but every online discussion was derailed by a few people vociferously ranting about glassholes. It was impossible to find any real user feedback amongst all their noise.
It's worth noting that Samsung won the same case regarding tablets - they convinced the jury that the elements in the Apple design patent for the iPad already existed in other products and popular culture (2001, Star Trek, etc) long before the iPad. In fact if you look at Samsung's digital picture frame from 2006, it's pretty clear their Galaxy Tab simply re-used that face design, rather than copying the iPad. And if anything, it was Apple who copied Samsung. (Except of course Samsung never got a design patent on a black rectangle with rounded corners - because that'd be silly and the USPTO would never grant it, right?)
The only reason Samsung lost to the design patent on phones was because they missed a filing deadline. They'd put together a document showing pre-production models and design concepts of Samsung phones prior to the iPhone's release. Demonstrating that their phone designs already incorporated all the elements in Apple's design patent before the patent was granted. Unfortunately, Judge Koh prohibited Samsung from showing that evidence to the jury because they missed the filing deadline.
Back in the 1970s when DES was being standardized, The NSA told the standards body to remove certain sets of keys from possible use in DES. There was widespread speculation that the NSA had weakened DES, but in the 1990s differential cryptanalysis was discovered (outside classified circles). And it turned out the keys the NSA said to remove were vulnerable to differential cryptanalysis.
When the govenrment is working for the people to strengthen the products they use, the people are more willing to go along with its recommendations. And to trust it when it says it needs a backdoor and will only use it with a warrant in cases of criminal or national security importance.
But the last two decades has seen multiple revelations that the government is working against the people - violating the 4th Amendment under the veil of secrecy. When the public gets a whiff of that, they start to distrust the government. Not only do they refuse to put in backdoors, they start implementing security measures that even they cannot bypass if they lose the key. "Just to be on the safe side."
The U.S. government has nobody to blame but themselves for letting things to get to this point. Once you lose the people's trust, the people stop going out of their way to make things easier for the government, and in fact will start doing things to make things harder for the government.
If we recall, the FBI desperately wanted to backdoor the cell phone of the San Bernadino terrorists
Incidentally, that was a PR snowjob by Apple. The cell phone in that case didn't belong to the terrorists. It actually belonged to the San Bernardino County government. It was assigned to one of the terrorists as a work phone. Apple was basically arguing that they should not be compelled to give the owner of a phone access to information on the phone in the case of a (potential) dire emergency. If you follow through on their argument, employers would not have access to company phones they provided to employees, parents would not have access to phones they bought for their kids, you could not authorize police to pull GPS data from a phone you lent to a friend when they went hiking and got lost. It's an argument which weakens the concept of ownership (right of the owner to know what their property is being used for, vs the user's right to privacy).
As an employer who tried not to hire illegal aliens, but got a lot of illegals as job applicants, it's nothing like you characterize. It is already a crime to hire an illegal alien. The penalty ranges from a few thousand dollars for the first offense, up to tens of thousands of dollars and jail time for multiple offenses.
The problem is the government requires some sort of government ID and a social security number before you can hire someone. But it doesn't give employers any way to authenticate that the documents they receive are legit. I spoke to multiple employment attorneys about this, and the best you can do is make copies of the ID presented to you and keep them on file. This is your due diligence - proof that you attempted to comply with the law to the best of your ability should the employee's legal status come into question.
In other words, the government doesn't make any effort to block illegal immigrants from working. If it wanted to, it's be trivial to implement an electronic system which could verify an applicant's ID as legit. Social security cards are trivial to fake, and they don't even need a real SSN if they don't plan to work past the end of the year (at year's end, employment taxes are submitted and SSNs which don't match the person's name and address on file get flagged by the IRS). Just a simple system which allows you to submit a name and SSN, and it spits back valid/invalid would block about 75% of the illegal applicants we got (based on flagging by the IRS). Likewise, government ID could be confirmed the same way, possibly adding a unique code onto each ID to make forging impossible without access to the original source documents.
But the government doesn't do it. They're not serious about stopping illegal immigrants from working. My hunch is conservative politicians want to keep cheap illegal labor readily available. And liberal politicians want to encourage people to enter the country illegally to skew Congressional reapportionment (House representatives are allocated based on total population - legal and illegal - so every 743,000 illegal immigrants is approximately an extra House seat), and on the outside chance they'll be legalized and become voters (they're disproportionately low income with liberal politics).
They're unique, but stay the same between uses. So if someone manages to copy it when you use it, they can use the copy in the future to pose as you.
Fortunately, that means they have the same solution as credit cards. Chip and pin works by you remembering a PIN (like how you remember a password). You enter the PIN into an authorized device, and that allows the device to query the chip. The chip then establishes a secure link to the processing site. Intercepting that session's communications doesn't make it any easier to forge a future communication.
Likewise, passwords can be replaced by a authenticator. Your password unlocks the authenticator. The authenticator then takes the site you're trying to login to and the time of day to generate a unique code you need to login. That way your password never has to leave your control. In theory this could be used in lieu of a password, but so far it's mostly being used to augment your password. That is, you still use a password (which can be stolen) to login to the site, but you also need the authentication code as a second factor to let you in.
This is mainly because Google's implementation is half-assed and lets you use it if you have access to the device (which is always for phones without security enabled. Authy is better implemented, requiring a passcode or password to use every time, backs up your authentication keys on the cloud so you can share them between multiple devices (they're still useless without a passcode/password), and is compatible with Google Authenticator. It's still vulnerable to some sort of keylogger. So ideally, this authenticator would be a separate physical device which did only authentication so there's no opportunity for rogue software to be installed onto it.
Federal tax subsidies for renewables exploded starting in 2006. Of course any projections made in 2006 based on extrapolating 2000-2005 subsidy levels would be inaccurate.
CR typically doesn't get a big enough sample size (from its subscribers during their annual survey) for a single product within a single year to generate a reliability score within a statistically significant confidence interval. Consequently, they use a multi-year sliding window average of reliability to build up sample size. This has the unfortunate effect of conflating different year models, but the operating premise is that a brand's attitudes towards quality and reliability stays more or less consistent.
By pre-announcing that they're not going to recommend Microsoft Surface this year, they're basically saying the product's reliability in previous years was so low that even if the new model turns out to be 100% reliable in their survey, its multi-year sliding window average will still be so low that they can't recommend the product.
You can see this in action in their auto reports. In deference to their subscriber base (who is typically clueless about statistics) they won't throw around terms like confidence interval and standard deviation. But some of the less-popular cars will have an asterisk saying they have an insufficient sample size. Even if they do have a big enough sample size, I actually prefer the sliding window method (with decreasing weighting the older the data is). It avoids the situation where with the new year, everyone's slate is wiped clean. If you have a history of making crappy products, it makes it harder for you to pull yourself out of the pit you've dug yourself into.
Personally, I really like the specs of the Surface of Surface Books. But I won't touch them for the simple reason that they're impossible to repair. If you're gonna buy one, make sure you get a multi-year extended warranty with it.
By requiring a signature, they make the merchant liable for fraud. In case of a fraudulent transaction, they can claim the merchant didn't verify the signature matched the signature on the card, and thus it's the merchant's fault. They do a chargeback. The merchant is out the money and the item(s), and thus the merchant has paid for the fraud. Online sales work the same way - the website asks for your billing address and phone number not because they want to sell it to marketers (though they probably do that too), but because that's the only way credit card companies have set it up so merchants can "confirm" you're authorized to use the card. If the merchant fails to confirm all these facts and the transaction is fraudulent, the credit card company can just do a chargeback and make the merchant pay for the fraud.
Once you move to a real secure card system like Chip and PIN, the merchant is out of the picture. If the transaction went through when it wasn't supposed to, then it's the credit card company's fault and they have to pay for the fraud. If the transaction went through because the cardholder shared their PIN with someone else, then it's the card holder's fault and they have to pay for the fraud. The merchant is no longer liable. And the credit card companies have to make a choice between pissing off their customer (cardholder) or paying for the fraud themselves.. By keeping the merchant liable for as long as possible, they've been able to avoid this hard choice simply by shifting blame and the cost of fraud onto the merchant.
Considering people's mouths are more or less the same size, no one should be allowed to contribute more money than anyone else.
Unfortunately that runs afoul of that pesky concept of "no taxation without representation." If you believe in that (as most red-blooded Americans do), then the fact that we tax corporations means they should have some form of representation in government. Since they can't vote, all that's left for them is to spend money on elections. And it also leads to the idea that someone who pays 10,000x more in taxes than you, might be entitled to a little more say in government.
IMHO the solution is pretty simply. Eliminate corporate taxes - they just get passed on to people anyway (reduced income for employees, reduced distributions for stockholders, higher prices for customers). Then the link between taxation and representation vanishes, and you're free to prohibit any corporate spending on elections. If a corporation thinks an issue is important to it in an election, it should impress that upon its employees, stockholders, and customers so that they'll vote to help the corporation.
This also has the side-benefit of encouraging corporations to be nice to their employees, stockholders, and customers. Because those are the folks it will have to convince to vote a certain way on issues which affect it. Landing on the most hated list will mean you have almost zero influence on government policies over your business.
Actually, this is a common cycle. Post-WWII, Japanese stuff was considered crap. The country was war-torn and rebuilding its industrial base. Most emphasis was put on volume of production and expansion, little on quality.
As Japan modernized and "got" how to produce quality consistently, it earned a reputation for making the best stuff in the world. Korea and Taiwan followed the same pattern, about two decades behind Japan. (Most of the world's computer components are currently produced by Korean and Taiwanese companies. Even the stuff that goes into Apple's products.) China is currently in the first stage. The U.S. probably went through the same thing after it broke off from colonial Europe.
I suspect however that there's a third stage - complacency and mediocrity. The U.S. went into this in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped Japanese products to gain a fairly sizeable foothold here. Japan seems to be going through this third stage the last couple decades, allowing Korean and Taiwanese products to eclipse Japanese as considered "best" in the world.
There's a substantial safety factor built into things to compensate for things like this. In most industries, not every component is tested (aerospace tends to be an exception). It's cost-prohibitive to do so. Instead, you build the structure stronger than it needs to be, to compensate for a substandard part failing at a lower load than expected. You calculate the strongest forces you expect the structure to experience, figure out how strong your structure needs to be to withstand those forces, then you change the design to make it x times stronger. For buildings the safety factor is typically 10x. Cars 3x. Boats about 2x. (These are average; individual components may have different safety factors depending on how crucial they are.)
Aerospace unfortunately is extremely weight-sensitive. The normal safety factor there is 1.5x for manned aircraft. Unmanned craft (missiles, drones) can be as low as 1.25x or even 1.1x. This is a large part of the reason aerospace is ungodly expensive. They need to be much more rigorous in their design calculations, and have to do a lot more testing of components and materials to be sure they all fall within design specs.
Because of this safety factor, it's usually difficult to directly tie an individual substandard component to an accident. To borrow an analogy someone came up with for global warming, think about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. The PEDs definitely increased the number of overall home runs hit in a season. But you cannot pin down whether a specific home run was or was not "caused by" PEDs (i.e. wouldn't have happened without PEDs).
I also keep Windows Task Manager's CPU graph in the notifications bar so I can see if my computer isn't dropping to idle. That's what originally led me to start using The Great Suspender. Although in my case it wasn't crytocurrency mining scripts, it was poor coding on Google's Photos and Drive websites which kept chewing up CPU cycles in the background.
the REAL issue is that it makes negotiating a one-way street, with the company having all the power and you have nearly none.
How does that make it a one-way street? All you have to do is ask "how much does this position pay?" And demand an answer to that question before you'll reveal your current pay. Then you both know where the other stands and can negotiate from there. Heck, most job listings already tell you that before you even apply for the job, so if anything the employer has already showed you their cards and is just asking for you to do the same.
Until you've been on both sides (employee, employer - I have), you don't truly understand what's at play during salary negotiations. As a job applicant, you're paranoid that if you ask for too much the company can just hire someone else, so you're tempted to lowball your salary requirements. But as an employer, when you finally find the hiree you want to offer the job to, you're paranoid that s/he'll accept a job elsewhere if you don't offer enough, so you're tempted to offer a higher salary than you really want to give up. The pressure to give up more than you want goes both ways.
its all about keeping you in your place. the god damned 'job creators' that we have been worshipping really don't have our needs in mind; they could not care less if we all starved and died on the streets
That's how it's supposed to work. During the negotiation phase, you're not supposed to care if the company you're interviewing with goes bankrupt either. People (both employees and employers) signaling to each other what they want and what they're willing to give up to get what they want, irrespective of how "expensive" it will be to the other party, is how a market economy determines the "proper" pricing for labor.
Once you agree to work with each other, that's when you're supposed to start watching out for each other. Not before.
Wind has been competitive or on the cusp of being competitive for about 5 years now. Especially off of Scotland, which has the highest capacity factor for wind in the world (capacity factor = ratio of actual electricity produced to peak production capability). In most of the world, onshore wind has a capacity factor of about 0.2-0.25, offshore wind about 0.3-0.4. Off Scotland it's closer to 0.6, with some locations going over 0.7. So if there's one place where wind will be viable and competitive, it's Scotland. (Not true for solar, which still relies heavily on subsidies to be cost-competitive.)
The 1 MWh battery they have is laughably tiny. For a typical power plant churning out 500 MW, that's 7.2 seconds worth of electricity. Even for a 30 MW wind farm with 0.6 capacity factor, it's only 3.3 minutes worth of electricity. What's going to save them is that the winds off Scotland are very consistent so they're not going to need that battery much.
Also, as stated in summary, these floating wind turbines borrow a lot of technology from oil platforms - anchorage, stability in heavy seas, survivability against ice floes, and underwater pipe/cable for pumping the oil/electricity back to shore. Some people like to think nothing good comes from oil, but that's simply not true. If it weren't for the R&D done by the oil industry, it probably would've taken 20 more years to get this floating wind farm working. This isn't an Us vs Them situation. This is simply All of Us finding the most cost-effective and least damaging forms of energy generation. Most oil companies are also heavily invested in renewable energy technology. Because they're not really oil companies; they're energy companies.
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Voice on CDMA networks still operates over CDMA. Just like voice on GSM still operates over TDMA (which GSM had to abandon for wideband CDMA for 3G data - that's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. Your GSM phone is jam packed with CDMA technology. That's why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM handsets - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a CDMA radio for 3G data. CDMA phones used a single radio for both, so couldn't do both at the same time.)
This would be a moot point if everyone switched to VoLTE (voice over LTE). But the carriers have been reluctant to completely switch since their 2G and 3G networks still have better coverage than their LTE networks. It also makes their towers compatible with all devices allowing phone owners to use their handset with any carrier, which would increase competition and lower prices. And you can't be having that.
I agree completely. (They're not charging 2-3x per se, they're trying to get Apple to re-pay to license patents that the supplier Apple bought the Qualcomm chips from has already paid to license. i.e. Qualcomm believes if a patent licensee sells a product using the patent, the buyer also needs to license the patent too. Kind of a value-added tax approach to patent licensing. If they succeed in court against Apple, the Android handset manufacturers are next.)
But there's a good deal of karmaic justice here. Apple was the one who tried to argue in court that patent damage awards should be based on the entire price of the infringing product, rather than the value of the component which infringed. e.g. If a car offered GPS navigation as a factory option, and a GPS patent holder successfully sued for infringement, they should be awarded damages based on the value of the entire car, rather than the value of the GPS navigation unit.
The problem actually stems from our system of government electing representatives for a specific district (or state). It results in a bunch of winner-take-all elections. The founding fathers chose this method because they wanted elected representatives to have a direct connection to the people they were representing. The downside is that a vote for someone who has no chance of winning (a third party candidate) is a wasted vote.
In countries which use parliamentary elections, everyone casts their votes, and the members of parliament are allocated in proportion to the vote. So a vote for a third party is not "wasted" (as long as that party gets enough votes to obtain one seat). The downside of course is that no single member of parliament feels bound to a particular group of people or represents any particular region.
If you wish to retain the representative model while having fairer outcomes, you first have to realize that there is no such thing as a perfectly fair election system. All of them can result in counter-intuitive results where the "winner" doesn't really enjoy as much support among the voters as the loser(s). People are upset about the Electoral College "stealing" the election from Clinton. But if you add up the votes for all the parties and independent candidates, the liberal parties (Democrat, Green, Independent, Socialism and Liberalism, Bernie Sanders) add up to 49.38% of the votes. Adding up the conservative parties (Republican, Libertarian, Constitution, Evan McMullin) gives 50.06%. So the correct winner of the 2016 election was in fact a conservative candidate even if you ignored the Electoral College and did a straight vote tally.
But different systems result in a different frequency of counter-intuitive results. Unfortunately the plurality wins system the U.S. uses is one of the worst. The frequency of "bad" results can be minimized by use of an instant-runoff voting system. Where each voter ranks all the candidates in order of preference. You then successively eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of #1 votes. Voters who voted for that candidate have their vote reallocated to their next highest choice of the remaining candidates. And so on. Until just two candidates are left, and the more popular of them among all the voters is the winner.
Drift analysis relies on the average value of year's worth of estimated currents and winds. The satellite data analysis relied on precisely known satellite positions and the speed of light (which is also precisely known). My money is on the satellite analysis being more accurate.
But until the plane is actually found, there's no point arguing which is correct. We can't draw any conclusions until the plane is found. And it probably will never be found. Even if the search area indicated by the satellite signals is accurate, finding it there was always going to be a long shot (after the pingers stopped after 30 days). Given the relative sizes of the plane and the search area, finding a needle in a haystack is child's play by comparison. This is like trying to find a needle in field of haystacks.
If they wanted to test the accuracy of their satellite analysis, they should be running it on planes on regular flights. They can calculate a plane's position at certain times based on similar satellite ping times, then check it against the plane's actual flight path. Do it enough times and you can figure out just how accurate the methodology is.
Before the Internet, this sort of "news" was called gossip. And we've been trying to stamp it out for thousands of years, without success.
At some point you accept that it's an innate part of human nature. And rather than trying to stamp it out, work instead towards reducing and mitigating the damage it causes. But any policies attempting to stop cold fundamental human behavior is destined to fail.
That's city debt. That's in addition to state and national debt (and personal debt) owed by every SF citizen. In terms of city debt, SF ranks near the bottom.
Estimating from the picture, they're laying out about 40 meters x 25 meters of panels (1000 m^2). At a nominal capacity of 160 W/m^2, that's 160 kW peak capacity.
Plugging in Puerto Rico's zip code (00901) into the PWatts calculator yields a 17.4% capacity factor (this factors in night, weather, movement of the sun across the sky, etc). Add in 14% system losses and 96% inverter efficiency, and you get an average actual power production of (160 kW) * (17.4%) * (100-14%) * (96%) = 23 kW. (Judging from the picture, actual production will be worse since the panels aren't tilted at Puerto Rico's latitude and pointed South to maximize exposure area. They're simply laid flat, tilted at a slight angle to shed rain.)
At a 25% ICE efficiency, you need a (23 kW) / (25%) = 92 kW generator to produce the same amount of power as this parking lot full of solar panels. 92 kW is about 120 horsepower. Basically an engine like the one under the hood of the small black car in the picture.
"But fuel!" you say. Diesel has an energy density of 35.8 MJ/liter. While generating 23 kW of power, the 92 kW generator is going to burn (92 kilojoules/sec) / (35.8 MJ / liter) * (3600 sec/hour) = 9.25 liters of diesel per hour (2.44 gallons/hr).
Assume these panels and batteries fit into a standard cargo container (2.43x2.59 meters x 12.2 meters long). If you fit a cylindrical tank into said container - 1.1m interior radius x 11 meters long (need some space for the generator), that could transport (pi) * (1.1 meters)^2 * (11 meters) = 41.815 m^3 = 41815 liters of diesel. That would be enough to operate the generator continuously for (41815 liters) / (9.25 liters/hour) = 4521 hours, or 188 days. A little over half a year.
It's been my experience that people vastly underestimate the amount of energy contained in petrochemical fuels, and vastly overestimate the amount of energy you can collect via solar. I'm not saying what Musk is doing is bad - if he lets them keep the panels to continue to power the hospital afterwards for decades, then it's most likely very good. But for emergency response, a generator is much more compact, requires less labor and space, and is logistically simpler to set up and operate.
Incidentally, the Prius is a waste of a hybrid engine. The problem is the U.S. measures fuel economy in MPG. Fuel economy is actually GPM - how much fuel you burn to travel a fixed distance. Because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy, the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel is saved per mile driven. This is why the CAFE standards use a harmonic mean. That corrects for MPG being the inverse of fuel economy. e.g. Suppose you're going to travel 100 miles.
6.25 MPG tractor trailer = 16 gallons consumed
12.5 MPG SUV = 8 gallons consumed
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons
50 MPG Prius = 2 gallons
100 MPG supercar = 1 gallon
Notice how every time you double MPG, the fuel saved is only half the previous step? The 12.5 MPG jump from a Suburban to a sedan saves you 4 gallons, while the what many people assume-to-be-bigger 25 MPG jump from a sedan to a Prius only saves you 2 gallons.
In other words, if the true goal here is to reduce fuel consumption, we should be concentrating on improving the efficiency of trucks. That's where we should be trying to add hybrid powertrains. Converting an economy car into a hybrid is barely worth the trouble. The MPG increase may seem big, but it's an almost insignificant amount. If you can improve a tractor trailer's economy from 6 MPG to 7 MPG (just a 1 MPG improvement or 17%), you've saved more fuel per mile driven than switching from a sedan to a Prius (a 25 MPG improvement or 100%). 100/6 - 100/7 = 2.38 gal saved per 100 miles. Vs 100/25 - 100/50 = 2 gal saved per 100 miles. You know how environmentalists scoffed at hybrid SUVs? That was actually one of the best types of vehicles to convert into a hybrid.
To avoid this problem of inverse fuel economy, the rest of the world uses liters per 100 km, which is analogous to GPM and a correct measure of fuel economy. This is the problem I have with the current push for clean energy - so much of it is about appearance and bragging rights (including calling EVs zero emissions when they clearly aren't), instead of actual results.
I see people making this mistake a lot. Occam's razor isn't a law. It doesn't "tell us" anything. It doesn't say "The simplest explanation is the correct one."
It actually goes: "The simplest explanation tends to be the correct one." Occam's razor merely suggests what is the most probable answer. It doesn't prove or tell us anything, it simply lets you organize hypotheses into, lacking any other evidence, the most likely order of plausibility. You still have to prove the most-likely hypothesis is correct. And a less-likely (more complicated) hypothesis can still turn out to be the correct one.
This is not about the right to repair our electronics. We already have the right to do whatever we want with stuff we own, including trashing it, burning it, running over it with a car, and - yes if you want to - fixing it or modifying it.
This is about the hypothetical "right" of manufacturers to mess around with and disable stuff they made after they've sold it to you. Because you're not using your equipment the way they want you to. Saying this is about our right to repair implies that manufacturers have this right to meddle with stuff they don't own, when they clearly don't.
MP3 players had been around for a few years, and everyone knew they wanted one (we were still using Walkman-type cassette players back then). The problem was the ridiculously convoluted process of transferring your music collection over to the MP3 player. Many of us already had an MP3 collection on our computer. In theory you should be able to just drag and drop it. But most MP3 players used some proprietary ordering scheme so dragging and dropping destroyed your playlist info (e.g. your music would show up in alphabetical order, or worse yet ordered by file creation date). In order to preserve your playlists, you had to go through some proprietary software which had a terrible UI, didn't work all the time (or even most of the time), and frequently didn't do what you wanted. There was no real standard for organizing music into playlists, and the MP3 manufacturers were having trouble grappling with the multitude of different ways it was being done.
iTunes is what made the iPod. The iPod with iTunes nailed how synchronization of your music collection between devices should work. You organize it in one place (iTunes, before it became the horrible monstrosity it is today), and it reflected that organization onto all your devices. That's why it went on to tremendous success despite having "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame." People (the technically illiterate people who make up 95% of the population) bought it because it just works. I complain about Apple's hardware and their policies. But their software and their approach to UIs is top-notch - make it so an idiot could use it (the complete opposite of most open source).
I think that's what Spiegel was going for with his iPod analogy. He felt there was some impediment to widescale adoption of the technology, and he thought his company had solved it.
I'd heard about it (and I don't use Snapchat), but every online discussion was derailed by a few people vociferously ranting about glassholes. It was impossible to find any real user feedback amongst all their noise.
It's worth noting that Samsung won the same case regarding tablets - they convinced the jury that the elements in the Apple design patent for the iPad already existed in other products and popular culture (2001, Star Trek, etc) long before the iPad. In fact if you look at Samsung's digital picture frame from 2006, it's pretty clear their Galaxy Tab simply re-used that face design, rather than copying the iPad. And if anything, it was Apple who copied Samsung. (Except of course Samsung never got a design patent on a black rectangle with rounded corners - because that'd be silly and the USPTO would never grant it, right?)
The only reason Samsung lost to the design patent on phones was because they missed a filing deadline. They'd put together a document showing pre-production models and design concepts of Samsung phones prior to the iPhone's release. Demonstrating that their phone designs already incorporated all the elements in Apple's design patent before the patent was granted. Unfortunately, Judge Koh prohibited Samsung from showing that evidence to the jury because they missed the filing deadline.
BTW, a lot of other Apple patents should never have been granted. Here's pinch-to-zoom in 1988. And the "bounce" animation is just the transient response of an underdamped second order system that every freshman engineering student learns.
When the govenrment is working for the people to strengthen the products they use, the people are more willing to go along with its recommendations. And to trust it when it says it needs a backdoor and will only use it with a warrant in cases of criminal or national security importance.
But the last two decades has seen multiple revelations that the government is working against the people - violating the 4th Amendment under the veil of secrecy. When the public gets a whiff of that, they start to distrust the government. Not only do they refuse to put in backdoors, they start implementing security measures that even they cannot bypass if they lose the key. "Just to be on the safe side."
The U.S. government has nobody to blame but themselves for letting things to get to this point. Once you lose the people's trust, the people stop going out of their way to make things easier for the government, and in fact will start doing things to make things harder for the government.
Incidentally, that was a PR snowjob by Apple. The cell phone in that case didn't belong to the terrorists. It actually belonged to the San Bernardino County government. It was assigned to one of the terrorists as a work phone. Apple was basically arguing that they should not be compelled to give the owner of a phone access to information on the phone in the case of a (potential) dire emergency. If you follow through on their argument, employers would not have access to company phones they provided to employees, parents would not have access to phones they bought for their kids, you could not authorize police to pull GPS data from a phone you lent to a friend when they went hiking and got lost. It's an argument which weakens the concept of ownership (right of the owner to know what their property is being used for, vs the user's right to privacy).
As an employer who tried not to hire illegal aliens, but got a lot of illegals as job applicants, it's nothing like you characterize. It is already a crime to hire an illegal alien. The penalty ranges from a few thousand dollars for the first offense, up to tens of thousands of dollars and jail time for multiple offenses.
The problem is the government requires some sort of government ID and a social security number before you can hire someone. But it doesn't give employers any way to authenticate that the documents they receive are legit. I spoke to multiple employment attorneys about this, and the best you can do is make copies of the ID presented to you and keep them on file. This is your due diligence - proof that you attempted to comply with the law to the best of your ability should the employee's legal status come into question.
In other words, the government doesn't make any effort to block illegal immigrants from working. If it wanted to, it's be trivial to implement an electronic system which could verify an applicant's ID as legit. Social security cards are trivial to fake, and they don't even need a real SSN if they don't plan to work past the end of the year (at year's end, employment taxes are submitted and SSNs which don't match the person's name and address on file get flagged by the IRS). Just a simple system which allows you to submit a name and SSN, and it spits back valid/invalid would block about 75% of the illegal applicants we got (based on flagging by the IRS). Likewise, government ID could be confirmed the same way, possibly adding a unique code onto each ID to make forging impossible without access to the original source documents.
But the government doesn't do it. They're not serious about stopping illegal immigrants from working. My hunch is conservative politicians want to keep cheap illegal labor readily available. And liberal politicians want to encourage people to enter the country illegally to skew Congressional reapportionment (House representatives are allocated based on total population - legal and illegal - so every 743,000 illegal immigrants is approximately an extra House seat), and on the outside chance they'll be legalized and become voters (they're disproportionately low income with liberal politics).
They're unique, but stay the same between uses. So if someone manages to copy it when you use it, they can use the copy in the future to pose as you.
Fortunately, that means they have the same solution as credit cards. Chip and pin works by you remembering a PIN (like how you remember a password). You enter the PIN into an authorized device, and that allows the device to query the chip. The chip then establishes a secure link to the processing site. Intercepting that session's communications doesn't make it any easier to forge a future communication.
Likewise, passwords can be replaced by a authenticator. Your password unlocks the authenticator. The authenticator then takes the site you're trying to login to and the time of day to generate a unique code you need to login. That way your password never has to leave your control. In theory this could be used in lieu of a password, but so far it's mostly being used to augment your password. That is, you still use a password (which can be stolen) to login to the site, but you also need the authentication code as a second factor to let you in.
This is mainly because Google's implementation is half-assed and lets you use it if you have access to the device (which is always for phones without security enabled. Authy is better implemented, requiring a passcode or password to use every time, backs up your authentication keys on the cloud so you can share them between multiple devices (they're still useless without a passcode/password), and is compatible with Google Authenticator. It's still vulnerable to some sort of keylogger. So ideally, this authenticator would be a separate physical device which did only authentication so there's no opportunity for rogue software to be installed onto it.
Federal tax subsidies for renewables exploded starting in 2006. Of course any projections made in 2006 based on extrapolating 2000-2005 subsidy levels would be inaccurate.
For solar in particular, it got just $174 million in subsidies in 2007. By 2010 it got $1.1 billion. And in 2013 it received $5.3 billion. Or to put it as TFA does, it received 3046% more in subsidies in 2013 than it did in 2007.
You increase subsidies by 30x over 7 years, the story would've been if growth hadn't increase by more than 40x over 10 years.
CR typically doesn't get a big enough sample size (from its subscribers during their annual survey) for a single product within a single year to generate a reliability score within a statistically significant confidence interval. Consequently, they use a multi-year sliding window average of reliability to build up sample size. This has the unfortunate effect of conflating different year models, but the operating premise is that a brand's attitudes towards quality and reliability stays more or less consistent.
By pre-announcing that they're not going to recommend Microsoft Surface this year, they're basically saying the product's reliability in previous years was so low that even if the new model turns out to be 100% reliable in their survey, its multi-year sliding window average will still be so low that they can't recommend the product.
You can see this in action in their auto reports. In deference to their subscriber base (who is typically clueless about statistics) they won't throw around terms like confidence interval and standard deviation. But some of the less-popular cars will have an asterisk saying they have an insufficient sample size. Even if they do have a big enough sample size, I actually prefer the sliding window method (with decreasing weighting the older the data is). It avoids the situation where with the new year, everyone's slate is wiped clean. If you have a history of making crappy products, it makes it harder for you to pull yourself out of the pit you've dug yourself into.
Personally, I really like the specs of the Surface of Surface Books. But I won't touch them for the simple reason that they're impossible to repair. If you're gonna buy one, make sure you get a multi-year extended warranty with it.
By requiring a signature, they make the merchant liable for fraud. In case of a fraudulent transaction, they can claim the merchant didn't verify the signature matched the signature on the card, and thus it's the merchant's fault. They do a chargeback. The merchant is out the money and the item(s), and thus the merchant has paid for the fraud. Online sales work the same way - the website asks for your billing address and phone number not because they want to sell it to marketers (though they probably do that too), but because that's the only way credit card companies have set it up so merchants can "confirm" you're authorized to use the card. If the merchant fails to confirm all these facts and the transaction is fraudulent, the credit card company can just do a chargeback and make the merchant pay for the fraud.
Once you move to a real secure card system like Chip and PIN, the merchant is out of the picture. If the transaction went through when it wasn't supposed to, then it's the credit card company's fault and they have to pay for the fraud. If the transaction went through because the cardholder shared their PIN with someone else, then it's the card holder's fault and they have to pay for the fraud. The merchant is no longer liable. And the credit card companies have to make a choice between pissing off their customer (cardholder) or paying for the fraud themselves.. By keeping the merchant liable for as long as possible, they've been able to avoid this hard choice simply by shifting blame and the cost of fraud onto the merchant.
then it can replace real field trips. In its current state, it's just a slightly better version of a 3D movie.
Unfortunately that runs afoul of that pesky concept of "no taxation without representation." If you believe in that (as most red-blooded Americans do), then the fact that we tax corporations means they should have some form of representation in government. Since they can't vote, all that's left for them is to spend money on elections. And it also leads to the idea that someone who pays 10,000x more in taxes than you, might be entitled to a little more say in government.
IMHO the solution is pretty simply. Eliminate corporate taxes - they just get passed on to people anyway (reduced income for employees, reduced distributions for stockholders, higher prices for customers). Then the link between taxation and representation vanishes, and you're free to prohibit any corporate spending on elections. If a corporation thinks an issue is important to it in an election, it should impress that upon its employees, stockholders, and customers so that they'll vote to help the corporation.
This also has the side-benefit of encouraging corporations to be nice to their employees, stockholders, and customers. Because those are the folks it will have to convince to vote a certain way on issues which affect it. Landing on the most hated list will mean you have almost zero influence on government policies over your business.
Actually, this is a common cycle. Post-WWII, Japanese stuff was considered crap. The country was war-torn and rebuilding its industrial base. Most emphasis was put on volume of production and expansion, little on quality.
As Japan modernized and "got" how to produce quality consistently, it earned a reputation for making the best stuff in the world. Korea and Taiwan followed the same pattern, about two decades behind Japan. (Most of the world's computer components are currently produced by Korean and Taiwanese companies. Even the stuff that goes into Apple's products.) China is currently in the first stage. The U.S. probably went through the same thing after it broke off from colonial Europe.
I suspect however that there's a third stage - complacency and mediocrity. The U.S. went into this in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped Japanese products to gain a fairly sizeable foothold here. Japan seems to be going through this third stage the last couple decades, allowing Korean and Taiwanese products to eclipse Japanese as considered "best" in the world.
There's a substantial safety factor built into things to compensate for things like this. In most industries, not every component is tested (aerospace tends to be an exception). It's cost-prohibitive to do so. Instead, you build the structure stronger than it needs to be, to compensate for a substandard part failing at a lower load than expected. You calculate the strongest forces you expect the structure to experience, figure out how strong your structure needs to be to withstand those forces, then you change the design to make it x times stronger. For buildings the safety factor is typically 10x. Cars 3x. Boats about 2x. (These are average; individual components may have different safety factors depending on how crucial they are.)
Aerospace unfortunately is extremely weight-sensitive. The normal safety factor there is 1.5x for manned aircraft. Unmanned craft (missiles, drones) can be as low as 1.25x or even 1.1x. This is a large part of the reason aerospace is ungodly expensive. They need to be much more rigorous in their design calculations, and have to do a lot more testing of components and materials to be sure they all fall within design specs.
Because of this safety factor, it's usually difficult to directly tie an individual substandard component to an accident. To borrow an analogy someone came up with for global warming, think about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. The PEDs definitely increased the number of overall home runs hit in a season. But you cannot pin down whether a specific home run was or was not "caused by" PEDs (i.e. wouldn't have happened without PEDs).
I've been manually accomplishing the same thing with Quick Javascript Switcher to turn off JS on sites which abuse it, and The Great Suspender to freeze background tabs.
I also keep Windows Task Manager's CPU graph in the notifications bar so I can see if my computer isn't dropping to idle. That's what originally led me to start using The Great Suspender. Although in my case it wasn't crytocurrency mining scripts, it was poor coding on Google's Photos and Drive websites which kept chewing up CPU cycles in the background.
How does that make it a one-way street? All you have to do is ask "how much does this position pay?" And demand an answer to that question before you'll reveal your current pay. Then you both know where the other stands and can negotiate from there. Heck, most job listings already tell you that before you even apply for the job, so if anything the employer has already showed you their cards and is just asking for you to do the same.
Until you've been on both sides (employee, employer - I have), you don't truly understand what's at play during salary negotiations. As a job applicant, you're paranoid that if you ask for too much the company can just hire someone else, so you're tempted to lowball your salary requirements. But as an employer, when you finally find the hiree you want to offer the job to, you're paranoid that s/he'll accept a job elsewhere if you don't offer enough, so you're tempted to offer a higher salary than you really want to give up. The pressure to give up more than you want goes both ways.
That's how it's supposed to work. During the negotiation phase, you're not supposed to care if the company you're interviewing with goes bankrupt either. People (both employees and employers) signaling to each other what they want and what they're willing to give up to get what they want, irrespective of how "expensive" it will be to the other party, is how a market economy determines the "proper" pricing for labor.
Once you agree to work with each other, that's when you're supposed to start watching out for each other. Not before.
Oh they're expensive enough. It's just that Apple pockets most of that excess money, instead of investing it into service.
Wind has been competitive or on the cusp of being competitive for about 5 years now. Especially off of Scotland, which has the highest capacity factor for wind in the world (capacity factor = ratio of actual electricity produced to peak production capability). In most of the world, onshore wind has a capacity factor of about 0.2-0.25, offshore wind about 0.3-0.4. Off Scotland it's closer to 0.6, with some locations going over 0.7. So if there's one place where wind will be viable and competitive, it's Scotland. (Not true for solar, which still relies heavily on subsidies to be cost-competitive.)
The 1 MWh battery they have is laughably tiny. For a typical power plant churning out 500 MW, that's 7.2 seconds worth of electricity. Even for a 30 MW wind farm with 0.6 capacity factor, it's only 3.3 minutes worth of electricity. What's going to save them is that the winds off Scotland are very consistent so they're not going to need that battery much.
Also, as stated in summary, these floating wind turbines borrow a lot of technology from oil platforms - anchorage, stability in heavy seas, survivability against ice floes, and underwater pipe/cable for pumping the oil/electricity back to shore. Some people like to think nothing good comes from oil, but that's simply not true. If it weren't for the R&D done by the oil industry, it probably would've taken 20 more years to get this floating wind farm working. This isn't an Us vs Them situation. This is simply All of Us finding the most cost-effective and least damaging forms of energy generation. Most oil companies are also heavily invested in renewable energy technology. Because they're not really oil companies; they're energy companies.