Co-generation tends to be cheaper than normal generation because you not only get electricity - you also keep some of the heat. Still, natural gas prices are high at the moment.
As for the plans for US energy... I've read them, and they're utterly insane.
The DOE planners have historically been way off when predicting future energy needs: they simply did not take the potential for energy efficiency seriously.
So, the building of coal plants may start in earnest... but I doubt it will proceed as predicted!
Sometimes I just hate being one of the.001% of the population that understands the power system.
Wind & Solar PV: NONDISPATCHABLE, aka cannot be there on demand.
Power must be delivered at the speed of light from generation source to the load. Therefore you need a reliable generation source. Wind and Solar PV aren't reliable.
Hey, AC: not all sources have to be dispatchable.
As far as balancing demand and supply, we could be doing more work on the demand side. Net-connected appliances that can be shut off during peak periods are typically far less costly than maintaining that extra capacity.
One last thing: your argument would be far more credible if our nuclear plants were actually reliable. It's not a big deal when a couple small generators go berzerk, but when a plant producing a significant chunk of your needs goes off line, you're in trouble.
I challenge you to find a single large-scale power generation plant that can outcompete co-generation.
Small-scale natural gas cogeneration can fit in almost any urban setting, and costs are often much lower than prices offered by the utilities. Keeping the heat results in significantly higher total efficiency, and distribution costs are spared. Mid-sized institutions are finding it cheaper to build and operate their own generators than pay the wholesale prices the utility charges!
Small-scale systems can also be ramped up more smoothly, meaning you can put off capital expenses far longer.
And wind is still falling in prices, already one tenth of what it was 20 years ago, and likely to fall under $0.03/kWh by 2010.
The current system is antiquated, and large power plants are going the way of the mainframe. With economics like these, it's just a matter of time.
It seems a significant percentage of the/. crowd prefers nuclear (fission and fusion) over your idea.
Sure, widely distributed smaller stations would make the whole grid more stable. If you use such things as natural gas cogeneration, it might also be cheaper than current systems and more environmentally friendly to boot.
At the end of the day, this debate will be settled if corporations are allowed to look for the cheapest energy solutions. The fact we're not building many more nuclear plants has less to do with NIMBY movements than hard economics: they cost more than coal and natural gas.
Cost-effective co-generators are getting better, and growing their market share. In my region, a mid-sized university is trying to have one installed, fighting against government regulators that would let the local monopoly simply add a turbine to one of their old plants.
Meanwhile, wind is dropping in price: from $0.38 per Kilowatt-Hour in 1982 to $0.18 in 1990. Prices are now under $0.06, and it is "projected that the average cost per kilowatt hour of wind-generated electricity will drop to 2.6 by 2010 and to 2.1 by 2020."
Additional wind and co-generation capacity can be added much, much faster than new nuclear plants can be built, and in smaller increments.
For all those reasons, a system like the one you describe is not only a good thing, it is the most likely one to happen.
WORM media has been mentionned, and it is one solution to this problem.
But what is the problem here?
Companies are threatening managers with loss of hours or firing if they do not keep costs down. And they know that this causes many managers to actually do illegal things.
And what do they do about it? They claim their policy is to follow the law.
As is mentionned in the article, "shaving time" required collusion between managers and payroll when punchcards were used.
The new system is allowing managers to do what they are naturally tempted to do (or in some cases ordered to do), and we're surprised when they do it?
Policies are lame when a simple technical solution avoids the temptation and the very possibility of wrongdoing. Corporations that are aware of the problem and fail to fix it are complicit, enablers, and should be dealt with appropriately.
3-5 km/h for 30 minutes, all the time in the same lane.
A car that could keep a speed as constant as possible, instead of advancing in fits and jerks, would help all traffic more fluidly.
With the sensors they have, this should be easy enough. And if they can't do that, I don't think we should trust those companies to program cars to move without your intervention when you're going 100km/h.
Unfortunately, it seems that our government is in bed with so many corporations, and they don't want to threaten their corporate benefactors
Applying similar logic to government... if we can't get them to do their job we entrusted them for, perhaps we need to consider revoking their charter:)
Easier said than done, I know. But since so many people are espousing the very same views you put forward, there might be enough political power to actually do something about it, even though it's not likely to make the mainstream news.
So you have this company that views fines as a cost of doing business... why is no one talking about revoking their corporate charter?
When we look at the history of our states, we learn that citizens intentionally defined corporations through charters -- the certificates of incorporation.
In exchange for the charter, a corporation was obligated to obey all laws, to serve the common good, and to cause no harm. Early state legislators wrote charter laws and actual charters to limit corporate authority, and to ensure that when a corporation caused harm, they could revoke its charter.(link)
In a country with a three-strikes and you're out policy, why can corporations continue to view fines as just a cost of doing business? They are legal people when it comes to free expression, but not when it comes to prison or the death penalty.
While I wouldn't advocate shutting down Microsoft (though maybe companies like Philip Morris), we shouldn't feel bad if we have to split up the company into several smaller ones.
If a democracy implements laws that subordinate entities need not bother obeying, it is not much of a democracy!
" I just finished development on a little utility that runs on Mac OS X. Has a nice GUI interface, we think it's easy to use."
[warning: rant] Whaddya mean, you "think" it's easy to use? Of course it is to you: you've been working with it since day one.
Please, go recruit 5 test subjects- people that would likely use your type of application. Follow a simple thinking aloud protocol, and give them tasks you would expect them to complete with your GUI.
Then fix whatever issues, and iterate until you KNOW it's easy to use.
I can guarantee you, when you are done your app will kick ass and no one will want to use anything else.
Re:Cool! But the most important part is...
on
The Power of Persuasion
·
· Score: 2, Informative
wow. a/. reader that doesn't just have a gf, but has a wife and kid. cool:)
You raise an important point, though I believe there is a better way than formula: having mothers share breast-feeding.
I know that sounds strange, but it's been going on for a long, long time and continues to this day. Not too long ago, my own mother fed another woman's child. Just as some produce too little, some produce too much... in some areas, excess milk is saved through a milk bank, and distributed to mothers that need more.
This naturally takes some political will or community organization. In the absence of such, should we need to resort to formula, then by all means we should try to make it as close as possible to human milk.
This is incredible. If babies are getting infections because they are not being breastfed, the solution of the corporations is to engineer rice for processing in some ersatz replacement which will have only a tiny portion of the benefits of breast milk.
Breast feeding is FREE and far superior to the patented alternatives. Yet another company doing PR to convince doctors, nurses and parents that their product is safe will mean fewer breast-fed kids. Dumb security.
Cross-pollination will destroy heirloom and open-pollinated varieties, which offer genetic diversity (resilience), and political freedom from large corporations that would control the food supply. The dream of many such companies? Making seeds that will not germinate unless you have their proprietary chemical (GRM- Genetic Rights Management!).
The farmers that save seeds are food hackers. If this were software, people here would be up in arms. Where's the outrage? Companies like Monsanto are worse than SCO. All of them would destroy the public good to profiteer, including those with such noble sounding motives as keeping children healthy.
Are we all so mesmerized by technology that we can't see the politics?
Ok, so now Billy G. has caught up to what my 80's mentors were saying. Back then they also thought that new computers had entirely too much memory and free disk space. Oops.
On the whole, they were right: hardware prices have fallen dramatically, and software now routinely costs more than the hardware that runs it.
What did they get wrong? Bloatware kept increasing hardware requirements, and a lot of software became free. I like the idea of nearly free computers with all the basic applications available for free: browser, mail, office suite and solitaire.
But what of specialized software? F/OSS is great, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that companies will still need to pay programmers for custom work. And they will pay programmers far more than they spend on hardware, as long as our software helps them make more money.
Even a small business can spend more on a couple web applications than they do on hardware- it is certainly true of all my customers.
As for hardware, there is one factor that will keep me spending more money even though I might have enough with last year's technology. I want screens with high resolution, as easy on the eyes as paper; computers that are light and have very long battery life. Once we achieve a computer that has those features, manufacturers might find something else that will keep us buying expensive boxes/pda/wearables, or prices will go down.
A distro shipping with only one browser sounds like fascism to you? And 4 mods thought it insightful? Aack!!
This is quite disturbing. Please read the wikipedia article on Fascism.
Fascism is not merely a lack of choice in goods and services. Perhaps if you knew its political meaning, you might be concerned at the lack of political choices you have...
Unfortunately, it's most likely the poor bloke whose typo caused the system to go down who will suffer, rather than the morons who designed such a brittle system.
I didn't simply talk about alternative energy. I also mentionned demand-side management and co-generation.
When I mentionned alternative energy, I mainly had wind in mind. I'll get to the other two a bit further down.
Perhaps it has a fringe image in your mind, but in Germany and Denmark wind is anything but. Germany produces 4% of its electricity from wind, Denmark 20%. That's not fringe, especially when you consider this is a relatively new mode of generation.
While wind is still more expensive than coal, it is arguably cheaper than nuclear if you count the levelized life-cycle costs. More than a frightened public, it is the economics of nuclear that have sunk it- building a new plant costs a lot of money, is often over budget and takes a very long time.
Fuel costs for wind won't go up, and they will never be a big terrorist target. They also don't release mercury and radio-active waste like coal plants. Many also believe that if we counted the real costs of fossil fuels ("externalities"), coal and natural gas would not be as cost-effective as wind. If fossil fuels and nuclear are such good deals, why do they have to be subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions a year?
-- Co-generation refers to using natural gas to get both heat and electricity, with a much higher efficiency than if you were producing only electricity.
Being so efficient, they are very cost effective. Being small, they are ideal for decentralized production- great if you want to avoid blackouts or expensive increases in grid capacity.
-- Demand-side management programs are in place by many utilities, including in the US. Helping customers use less energy, or use it during off-peak periods cost less than increasing generating capacity.
-- Taken together, demand-side management, wind and co-generation can provide cheap, reliable, safe energy. They are not zero-impact, nothing is. (Although they might reduce your foreign energy dependency, help clean your air and create jobs.)
So, I submit that what I offered was indeed considering the entire energy production picture. Simply adding nuclear plants will cost too much money and take too long. If you disagree, I would urge you to provide a better alternative.
There are more alternatives to nuclear than just coal, and some of the other costs of coal are usually not counted for nuclear, such as mining.
Demand-side management, renewables and co-generation should be considered. While none are perfect, they are much cheaper and don't have some of the liabilities of nuclear energy.
In my fantasy land, a few politicians brave enough to stand up and isolate the ruling class to prevent a massacre does constitute non-violent action.
Even if tens of thousands are massacred, if they do not respond with violence and still achieve their aims, that is still legitimate non-violent action. Non-violence does not totally eliminate the risk of injury or death.
But then again, modern forms of violence all but guarantees people will die- and usually in bigger numbers, with more precarious results.
For the record, this is not unlike AI: they consistently refuse to see war as a violation of human rights.
If you can't even sway a person like me who is reasonnably well informed and open minded, what the heck do you hope to accomplish with your sig? If you assume people on/. couldn't care less, why bother at all?
Remember the fall of the Berlin wall? Around that time a third of humanity rid themselves of dictators mainly through non-violent action.
Now, non-violence does not always work (Tien an men square...), nor does it always work fast (South Africa, India, Burma, Tibet...) but then neither does violence. With Afghanistan slowly going back to the Taliban, that lesson should be clear.
Also keep in mind that the people that you train to use violence can then use it against you- another lesson that should have come out of Afghanistan.
I'd rather trust in organized, informed non-violent groups than in gun-toting ideologues. I'll choose the internet over guns any day.
It's nice to see some people pointing the finger at others besides just he US government.
To say the French government all but carried out the Rwandan massacre is over-stating it. Boutros Boutros-Ghali knew (got Egypt to start selling them weapons before being SG), the US knew, the Belgians knew, the Vatican knew and the World Bank knew. The French were bastards as usual (this coming from a French citizen), but you can't lay all the blame on them.
In most cases, the French, Russians, UK and US have common foreign policy objectives. Burma and Iran could be democratic if any one of them would be so kind as to stop their support for nasty regimes.
And that brings up a fundamental point the reporter seems to have missed: if we in the west can use the internet (not just the web- he apparently can't tell the difference) to pressure our governments to stop supporting dictatorships, and companies to stop doing business with them... we might actually see a bit more democracy.
This is happenning slowly, and as pressure increases on dictatorships, we might see another wave of democratization.
It is odd to read people think this will reduce the number of casualties, especially "collateral damage".
This is not unlike some of the security discussions we've had here. Force people to have 4 passwords, and they'll write them on sticky-notes besides their screen, reducing security. Passwords are _supposed_ to make systems safer, but abuse them and they are counter-productive.
Drone technologies will completely change the strategy of conflict. One month before 9/11, a colleague and I predicted rc planes would be used against the White House. Ok, so we were off. But think about it: if the Israelis can use this, why couldn't the "terrorist" Palestinians? Imagine for a second what an rc plane/helicopter could do with non-conventional means...
Assymetrical warfare is used because one side has no chance at symmetrical -conventional- warfare. As this reinforces "full-spectrum dominance", it only increases the risk of terrorist attack.
I hope such drones are only used for reconnaissance, and not to carry out direct assassinations, causing another escalation.
In the long-term, we will need to make our conflict resolution systems more robust, so they don't degenerate so fast and with such bloody consequences. Another interesting thing to note is as war becomes more capital intensive, we can expect the rise of Conscientious Objection to Military Taxation
Slashdot Mirror
Co-generation tends to be cheaper than normal generation because you not only get electricity - you also keep some of the heat. Still, natural gas prices are high at the moment.
As for the plans for US energy... I've read them, and they're utterly insane.
The DOE planners have historically been way off when predicting future energy needs: they simply did not take the potential for energy efficiency seriously.
So, the building of coal plants may start in earnest... but I doubt it will proceed as predicted!
Hey, AC: not all sources have to be dispatchable.
As far as balancing demand and supply, we could be doing more work on the demand side. Net-connected appliances that can be shut off during peak periods are typically far less costly than maintaining that extra capacity.
One last thing: your argument would be far more credible if our nuclear plants were actually reliable. It's not a big deal when a couple small generators go berzerk, but when a plant producing a significant chunk of your needs goes off line, you're in trouble.
I challenge you to find a single large-scale power generation plant that can outcompete co-generation.
Small-scale natural gas cogeneration can fit in almost any urban setting, and costs are often much lower than prices offered by the utilities. Keeping the heat results in significantly higher total efficiency, and distribution costs are spared. Mid-sized institutions are finding it cheaper to build and operate their own generators than pay the wholesale prices the utility charges!
Small-scale systems can also be ramped up more smoothly, meaning you can put off capital expenses far longer.
And wind is still falling in prices, already one tenth of what it was 20 years ago, and likely to fall under $0.03/kWh by 2010.
The current system is antiquated, and large power plants are going the way of the mainframe. With economics like these, it's just a matter of time.
It seems a significant percentage of the /. crowd prefers nuclear (fission and fusion) over your idea.
Sure, widely distributed smaller stations would make the whole grid more stable. If you use such things as natural gas cogeneration, it might also be cheaper than current systems and more environmentally friendly to boot.
At the end of the day, this debate will be settled if corporations are allowed to look for the cheapest energy solutions. The fact we're not building many more nuclear plants has less to do with NIMBY movements than hard economics: they cost more than coal and natural gas.
Cost-effective co-generators are getting better, and growing their market share. In my region, a mid-sized university is trying to have one installed, fighting against government regulators that would let the local monopoly simply add a turbine to one of their old plants.
Meanwhile, wind is dropping in price: from $0.38 per Kilowatt-Hour in 1982 to $0.18 in 1990. Prices are now under $0.06, and it is "projected that the average cost per kilowatt hour of wind-generated electricity will drop to 2.6 by 2010 and to 2.1 by 2020."
Additional wind and co-generation capacity can be added much, much faster than new nuclear plants can be built, and in smaller increments.
For all those reasons, a system like the one you describe is not only a good thing, it is the most likely one to happen.
WORM media has been mentionned, and it is one solution to this problem.
But what is the problem here?
Companies are threatening managers with loss of hours or firing if they do not keep costs down. And they know that this causes many managers to actually do illegal things.
And what do they do about it? They claim their policy is to follow the law.
As is mentionned in the article, "shaving time" required collusion between managers and payroll when punchcards were used.
The new system is allowing managers to do what they are naturally tempted to do (or in some cases ordered to do), and we're surprised when they do it?
Policies are lame when a simple technical solution avoids the temptation and the very possibility of wrongdoing. Corporations that are aware of the problem and fail to fix it are complicit, enablers, and should be dealt with appropriately.
3-5 km/h for 30 minutes, all the time in the same lane.
A car that could keep a speed as constant as possible, instead of advancing in fits and jerks, would help all traffic more fluidly.
With the sensors they have, this should be easy enough. And if they can't do that, I don't think we should trust those companies to program cars to move without your intervention when you're going 100km/h.
Applying similar logic to government... if we can't get them to do their job we entrusted them for, perhaps we need to consider revoking their charter
Easier said than done, I know. But since so many people are espousing the very same views you put forward, there might be enough political power to actually do something about it, even though it's not likely to make the mainstream news.
In a country with a three-strikes and you're out policy, why can corporations continue to view fines as just a cost of doing business? They are legal people when it comes to free expression, but not when it comes to prison or the death penalty.
While I wouldn't advocate shutting down Microsoft (though maybe companies like Philip Morris), we shouldn't feel bad if we have to split up the company into several smaller ones.
If a democracy implements laws that subordinate entities need not bother obeying, it is not much of a democracy!
" I just finished development on a little utility that runs on Mac OS X. Has a nice GUI interface, we think it's easy to use."
[warning: rant]
Whaddya mean, you "think" it's easy to use? Of course it is to you: you've been working with it since day one.
Please, go recruit 5 test subjects- people that would likely use your type of application. Follow a simple thinking aloud protocol, and give them tasks you would expect them to complete with your GUI.
Then fix whatever issues, and iterate until you KNOW it's easy to use.
I can guarantee you, when you are done your app will kick ass and no one will want to use anything else.
You are looking for the pickup guide.
:)
"Strip" away all the manipulative embedded suggestion nonsense and the dumb macho ideology, and there's a few gems in there
wow. a /. reader that doesn't just have a gf, but has a wife and kid. cool :)
You raise an important point, though I believe there is a better way than formula: having mothers share breast-feeding.
I know that sounds strange, but it's been going on for a long, long time and continues to this day. Not too long ago, my own mother fed another woman's child. Just as some produce too little, some produce too much... in some areas, excess milk is saved through a milk bank, and distributed to mothers that need more.
This naturally takes some political will or community organization. In the absence of such, should we need to resort to formula, then by all means we should try to make it as close as possible to human milk.
This is incredible. If babies are getting infections because they are not being breastfed, the solution of the corporations is to engineer rice for processing in some ersatz replacement which will have only a tiny portion of the benefits of breast milk.
Breast feeding is FREE and far superior to the patented alternatives. Yet another company doing PR to convince doctors, nurses and parents that their product is safe will mean fewer breast-fed kids. Dumb security.
Cross-pollination will destroy heirloom and open-pollinated varieties, which offer genetic diversity (resilience), and political freedom from large corporations that would control the food supply. The dream of many such companies? Making seeds that will not germinate unless you have their proprietary chemical (GRM- Genetic Rights Management!).
The farmers that save seeds are food hackers. If this were software, people here would be up in arms. Where's the outrage? Companies like Monsanto are worse than SCO. All of them would destroy the public good to profiteer, including those with such noble sounding motives as keeping children healthy.
Are we all so mesmerized by technology that we can't see the politics?
Ok, so now Billy G. has caught up to what my 80's mentors were saying. Back then they also thought that new computers had entirely too much memory and free disk space. Oops.
On the whole, they were right: hardware prices have fallen dramatically, and software now routinely costs more than the hardware that runs it.
What did they get wrong? Bloatware kept increasing hardware requirements, and a lot of software became free. I like the idea of nearly free computers with all the basic applications available for free: browser, mail, office suite and solitaire.
But what of specialized software? F/OSS is great, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that companies will still need to pay programmers for custom work. And they will pay programmers far more than they spend on hardware, as long as our software helps them make more money.
Even a small business can spend more on a couple web applications than they do on hardware- it is certainly true of all my customers.
As for hardware, there is one factor that will keep me spending more money even though I might have enough with last year's technology. I want screens with high resolution, as easy on the eyes as paper; computers that are light and have very long battery life. Once we achieve a computer that has those features, manufacturers might find something else that will keep us buying expensive boxes/pda/wearables, or prices will go down.
...you have one more choice: a distro with less choices.
And you wonder why sticking with XP for now seems like a sensible solution?
A distro shipping with only one browser sounds like fascism to you? And 4 mods thought it insightful? Aack!!
This is quite disturbing. Please read the wikipedia article on Fascism.
Fascism is not merely a lack of choice in goods and services. Perhaps if you knew its political meaning, you might be concerned at the lack of political choices you have...
Unfortunately, it's most likely the poor bloke whose typo caused the system to go down who will suffer, rather than the morons who designed such a brittle system.
I didn't simply talk about alternative energy. I also mentionned demand-side management and co-generation.
When I mentionned alternative energy, I mainly had wind in mind. I'll get to the other two a bit further down.
Perhaps it has a fringe image in your mind, but in Germany and Denmark wind is anything but. Germany produces 4% of its electricity from wind, Denmark 20%. That's not fringe, especially when you consider this is a relatively new mode of generation.
While wind is still more expensive than coal, it is arguably cheaper than nuclear if you count the levelized life-cycle costs. More than a frightened public, it is the economics of nuclear that have sunk it- building a new plant costs a lot of money, is often over budget and takes a very long time.
Fuel costs for wind won't go up, and they will never be a big terrorist target. They also don't release mercury and radio-active waste like coal plants. Many also believe that if we counted the real costs of fossil fuels ("externalities"), coal and natural gas would not be as cost-effective as wind. If fossil fuels and nuclear are such good deals, why do they have to be subsidized to the tune of hundreds of billions a year?
--
Co-generation refers to using natural gas to get both heat and electricity, with a much higher efficiency than if you were producing only electricity.
Being so efficient, they are very cost effective.
Being small, they are ideal for decentralized production- great if you want to avoid blackouts or expensive increases in grid capacity.
--
Demand-side management programs are in place by many utilities, including in the US. Helping customers use less energy, or use it during off-peak periods cost less than increasing generating capacity.
--
Taken together, demand-side management, wind and co-generation can provide cheap, reliable, safe energy. They are not zero-impact, nothing is. (Although they might reduce your foreign energy dependency, help clean your air and create jobs.)
So, I submit that what I offered was indeed considering the entire energy production picture. Simply adding nuclear plants will cost too much money and take too long. If you disagree, I would urge you to provide a better alternative.
There are more alternatives to nuclear than just coal, and some of the other costs of coal are usually not counted for nuclear, such as mining.
Demand-side management, renewables and co-generation should be considered. While none are perfect, they are much cheaper and don't have some of the liabilities of nuclear energy.
In my fantasy land, a few politicians brave enough to stand up and isolate the ruling class to prevent a massacre does constitute non-violent action.
Even if tens of thousands are massacred, if they do not respond with violence and still achieve their aims, that is still legitimate non-violent action. Non-violence does not totally eliminate the risk of injury or death.
But then again, modern forms of violence all but guarantees people will die- and usually in bigger numbers, with more precarious results.
If I didn't care, I would not have asked.
/. couldn't care less, why bother at all?
For the record, this is not unlike AI: they consistently refuse to see war as a violation of human rights.
If you can't even sway a person like me who is reasonnably well informed and open minded, what the heck do you hope to accomplish with your sig? If you assume people on
True. Non-violent action usually does.
Remember the fall of the Berlin wall? Around that time a third of humanity rid themselves of dictators mainly through non-violent action.
Now, non-violence does not always work (Tien an men square...), nor does it always work fast (South Africa, India, Burma, Tibet...) but then neither does violence. With Afghanistan slowly going back to the Taliban, that lesson should be clear.
Also keep in mind that the people that you train to use violence can then use it against you- another lesson that should have come out of Afghanistan.
I'd rather trust in organized, informed non-violent groups than in gun-toting ideologues. I'll choose the internet over guns any day.
Oh, like they would need to understand that the web is not the internet?
If you are going to troll against Amnesty in your sig, the least you could do is link to an article, or even just write a journal entry about it.
It's nice to see some people pointing the finger at others besides just he US government.
To say the French government all but carried out the Rwandan massacre is over-stating it. Boutros Boutros-Ghali knew (got Egypt to start selling them weapons before being SG), the US knew, the Belgians knew, the Vatican knew and the World Bank knew. The French were bastards as usual (this coming from a French citizen), but you can't lay all the blame on them.
In most cases, the French, Russians, UK and US have common foreign policy objectives. Burma and Iran could be democratic if any one of them would be so kind as to stop their support for nasty regimes.
And that brings up a fundamental point the reporter seems to have missed: if we in the west can use the internet (not just the web- he apparently can't tell the difference) to pressure our governments to stop supporting dictatorships, and companies to stop doing business with them... we might actually see a bit more democracy.
This is happenning slowly, and as pressure increases on dictatorships, we might see another wave of democratization.
It is odd to read people think this will reduce the number of casualties, especially "collateral damage".
This is not unlike some of the security discussions we've had here. Force people to have 4 passwords, and they'll write them on sticky-notes besides their screen, reducing security. Passwords are _supposed_ to make systems safer, but abuse them and they are counter-productive.
Drone technologies will completely change the strategy of conflict. One month before 9/11, a colleague and I predicted rc planes would be used against the White House. Ok, so we were off. But think about it: if the Israelis can use this, why couldn't the "terrorist" Palestinians? Imagine for a second what an rc plane/helicopter could do with non-conventional means...
Assymetrical warfare is used because one side has no chance at symmetrical -conventional- warfare. As this reinforces "full-spectrum dominance", it only increases the risk of terrorist attack.
I hope such drones are only used for reconnaissance, and not to carry out direct assassinations, causing another escalation.
In the long-term, we will need to make our conflict resolution systems more robust, so they don't degenerate so fast and with such bloody consequences. Another interesting thing to note is as war becomes more capital intensive, we can expect the rise of Conscientious Objection to Military Taxation