A new organization called "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition" ( leap.cc ) was organized to give a way for (sometimes former) law enforcement and justice personnel to voice their opposition to the "drug war".
Anybody can join, you get a newsletter and you get asked to contribute so that they can afford to send volunteer speakers around to various conferences or on speaking tours to talk about the pointlessness and active harm they saw the "drug war" causing when they were part of it.
Well and good, but they were clearly amateurs at first with the Internet side; the first newsletters were plain text and HTML expertise came slowly. And on November 15, 2006, they sent an E-mail to 5000 addresses with all of them in the TO: line, blowing out the capacity of my webmail service at least to even process it properly; about 3000 of the addresses wound up in the text of the E-mail itself.
Just for grins, I spent about half an hour cutting and pasting the list into a file, and using simple Unix text tools to organize them into a nice sorted text database, revealing how many of them were outright duplicates, how many were obviously for the same guy at two addresses, did a few simple stats on locations and agencies.
I thought of sending them the benefits of my work, so they could clean out the dupes, but decided they'd probably (a) not be pleased and (b) weren't smart enough to use the help anyway.
A good number of people gave addresses that didn't reveal their name outright, others were fully named, along with the government service they worked for, after the "@". I'm sure a number of them were uncomfortable with the thought of their boss or chief knowing they were not solidly behind department policy. Many would not have been law enforcement types, just rank & file citizens like myself - but also not comfortable with the idea of it getting out they were part of an organization that many bosses would tend to assume was joined by stoners. (As opposed to civil libertarians, certainly MY only reason for joining!)
"Only Nixon could go to China", and only 50-something narcotics cops can speak out against the drug war without automatically falling under suspicion of being on drugs.
I haven't donated LEAP any money yet, though I've received a few letters; I'm only slowly coming to the belief that they are bright enough to pound sand.
I know, it does seem hopeless. But politicians can be moved to better attitudes simply from a perception that they'll be facing real opposition, demonstrations, etc. Jerry Pournelle once wrote about his time working in a Congressman's office that five letters per day trickling in on the same issue was regarded with real alarm and excitement.
In theory, that means an organization of (500 congressmen X 10 letters/day X 10 days)= 50,000 letter-writers, could, for 10 days, have all Congress talking of nothing else in the hallways but the new "hot button" issue that they simply must address.
I'm another goddamn foreigner sticking my nose into American business to comment here, but I think you have to go beyond expressing outrage and dismiss civil servants that aren't serving vital interests.
Canada finally got fed up with the corruptions and lawbreaking of a long-term Liberal government recently and didn't vote enough of them back in last election to form a government; it seems to have been an instructive experience.
My recommendation, for what it's worth? Since "FISA" didn't protect your constitutional concerns, start a "FESO" movement, maybe on the web like that "MoveOn" bunch. FESO as in "Fire Every Single One" of the representatives that vote for this law. Gather funds, donate them to anybody who opposes them in primaries for their own party, or to their opponent across party lines -- assuming the opponent will make a campaign promise to work to repeal the law and never vote for any one like it. Make it your sole vote and sole concern, ignoring all their other service, ignoring all the pork they bring to your district. Vote, and donate, and volunteer strictly on this issue. Make it a single-issue election for every member of "FESO.ORG".
Obsessive? Maybe, I don't know American politics enough to say; but the commentary here (and by Glenn Greenwald) seems to be saying this is very, very important at a deep constitutional level.
Clearly, this issue has little traction in the American Congress for its own sake, so they will only make it a priority if they believe their jobs depend on it. I heard that 98% of Congress are re-elected in a given election; offhand, that sounds to me like your main problem right there, you aren't firing enough people to make the rest responsive.
The way to read TFA is to use the search function to look for "$". Then you can skip all the "it would work this way" stuff (this is R&D - just give it to them that they have something that MIGHT work) and get to the real feasibility.
It's not about the watts per square meter, or the transmission feasibility or losses, skip to the final number: how many kilograms do you have to put into HIGH orbit to deliver a 1kW to the ground?
I didn't find that number, but by searching on "$", 56 pages in to a 75 page document (but only 1 minute into my search, see the time-saving?) we come to the important points:
- even the cheapest launch costs won't let them deliver power at even military-cost scenarios of $1/kWh (10X the best commercial
rate)... the military needs megawatts in the middle of nowhere sometimes, and must truck in diesel at $1/kWh.
- to get down to the big market of baseload commercial power, delivered at 8-10 cents/kWh, they need launch costs to drop
to $200/lb.
Good luck to anybody who can drop high-orbit launch costs by two orders of magnitude. A LOT of good things depend on dropping costs that much, including large manned space stations, moon bases, 100m diameter space telescopes, and space tourism for the middle class.
So while it's certainly worth some hundreds of millions per year (if it's worth billions to research fusion) to research the engineering of power transmission, and the making of lightweight cells or zero-gee solar thermal designs...lets take the discussion up again when those launch costs drop even ONE order of magnitude, shall we?
When you feel you have to correct people about this one, don't just focus on the *sacrifices* the Soviets made, focus on the *results*.
And here's the factoid I'm talking about, it's from an Atlantic article on the Battle of Kursk, one of WW2's biggest, but almost unknown to other Allies because they weren't there:
88 out of 100 German soldiers killed by the Allies in WW2 were killed by Soviets.
Or in other words, USA, Britain, Canada Australia/NZ, the French Resistance, etc, etc... were a sideshow compared to the real battles that defeated Germany.
> But it's simply not practical to say, for example, test everyone and give them a license just to buy alcohol (or cigarettes).
Wow, are you ever not open to new ideas.
States do this with cars, for example, when it would be far cheaper and "more practical" to just limit car usage to people over 21 and figure that beyond that age, normal prudence of the mature will cause people to learn how to use them properly before risking their lives and others with such a powerful machine.
Which is exactly our logic with alcohol and cigarettes. And over-21s on alcohol go right out and hurt other people - often with cars - as a result. Or ignore the giant bold-face warnings on the pack and smoke when pregnant or around the kids in an enclosed space. (I'm a skeptic about much "second-hand smoke" damage, but there no denying the kids getting more colds and bronchitis, reason enough to not do it right there.)
It's funny how the achievements of the last generation (or even decade) are the Things That Need Fixing of the new.
I remember the night sky in Calgary as a child (say 40 years back) had a lot more stars, just because the city was so much smaller (1M now; maybe 250,000 then - we're one of the fastest-growing in N. America) and there were so fewer streetlights shining up on the clouds.
But we were indeed extra "bad" for light emissions intensity as measured in kwH/km^2 too, not just sheer size - as this sat. photo on our own website shows:
It made me remember that the "Chief Commissioner" (we now say "CEO") of the municipality when I started working there about 20 years back was a former electrical engineer named George Cornish; and that his bio included him winning an award for championing Calgary getting one of the best street-lighting systems in the world during his time at the (then City-owned) electric light department. Likely our formerly huge 32,100 kWh/km^2 emissions were a byproduct - not seen as a bad thing at the time.
When we brought in the change to the streetlighting, the ad campaign emphasized the savings - money and carbon both - not the improvement to the free astronomy show.
I can't find anything on the web about how much we improved the kwH/km^2, or a new satellite photo for before/after comparison; and no figures on what our "Bortle" number was before/after, either; the available info is all about the money. (5 year payback!)
I'm afraid I can't call the difference dramatic - if it wasn't as bad as "only six stars visible" as one/. poster above said, it was pretty bad; now it's just somewhat less so - you sure as heck can't do serious stargazing even now, though it's probably doubled the number of nights you can see the Milky Way. Not that most people notice, since our clearest skies are in the winter and few brave the cold to watch for more than a few minutes.
The astronomy benefit probably goes to the National Parks like Banff that are over 120km away - we were probably reaching the size where we were affecting the "seeing" even there!
The difference to the streets is probably more dramatic, literally - residential streets have gone from roughly even lighting almost anywhere you stood (which is what I guess got Mr. Cornish his award) to the "look" that cities older than Calgary mostly have, at least in older neighbourhoods - pools of light under the streetlights, soft chiaroscuro pools of darkness between. (I remember seeing this in New York on a visit in the 70's, even in Manhattan itself, and thinking with surprise "I thought that look was just in old film noir with Bogart under the streetlight with a cigarette". I had to visit several older cities before I realized it was common, and that Calgary was the unusual one.)
Now, there's a corner near my house where it's dark enough at night to not be able to see an icy spot on the sidewalk if there is one, so now you tend to memorize these during the day (since night starts at 5PM in late December). That's about the only real bitching though, on the whole I wouldn't go back - it's also nice to have a lot less of the glare and blinding than there used to be...and it's not just me; there have been few to no complaints about the change, it's certainly not an issue ever mentioned in the news.
When you think about it, the vaunted $2M/year is $2/citizen; and most people would pay $2/year for the convenience of "good lighting" if it really made a big difference in their day, so the "savings" only work if the change in comfort/convenience is almost imperceptible. Partly, the change isn't that big, and partly - I'm the guy complaining about the invisible icy spot because I WALK EVERYWHERE,
I'm another Canadian CD shopper that's pretty tight-fisted when the price gets much above $15.
I don't download music; I have ripped CDs I borrowed from the library, which by my reading of our copyright act is legal as church on Sunday - but the bulk of that was out-of-print Jazz albums you can't find in stores anyway.
The real piracy battleground is over the "most popular" pop music that sells a lot of units for a year or so, mostly to people under 30.
Part of the reason I started getting more interested in non-pop genres like Jazz, World, Reggae, electronic was that it was cheaper - even in stores like HMV. I can go in there and get one Avril Lavigne CD for $25 - or pick up Django Reinhart's Jazz, hits by Dean Martin, a Peter Tosh, and an "AfroBeat Collection" for a total of $30. All from the 2/$15 shelf two paces from Avril.
Sorry, Avril...
There's just a LOT of great music out there, and once you stop treating music as a status symbol that proves how up-to-the-minute you are, buying anything new & popular becomes an irrational decision. Wait a few years, and it'll not only be down to the 2/$30 shelf at least, the consensus will be in about how good the artist *really* was under the hype.
However, if HMV drops prices enough, I believe I'll find out what the heck Amy Winehouse is all about this year instead of 2010. One really should encourage moves like this.
Old news - five hundred years old. Find some 500-year-old people if you want to see GOOD memories.
James Burke's great work, "The Day the Universe Changed" (book and TV series) relates how important memory was before paper and writing materials became cheap and printing made standard information cheaper still.
pp 99-102 of the hardback relates such techniques as: rhyme - French merchants used a poem of 137 rhyming couplets to teach and remember all rules of commercial arithmetic; "Memory theatres" - a giant mnemonic device in which rooms and objects in a large building were a metaphor for hundreds of memorized facts;
checksums - there are Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven corporal and seven spiritual works of mercy, etc so that you know you still have two to go when you've remembered five;
Those who could read silently were regarded with awe, since most business was oral, and reading was with moving lips. "Auditing" meant HEARING your financiers describe your accounts, as even Kings were illiterate.
In short, we've been losing our memories since writing was invented 5000-ish years ago, and losing them way faster since it got cheap 500 years ago. The additional speedups ~50 years ago with recorded moving pictures and ~5 years ago with popular PDAs & cellphones are minor by comparison.
Memory is also involved in learning how to use a spreadsheet, or how to line-dance or repair a bicycle. *Insane* amounts of memory are involved in learning a language. There's no evidence this kind of 'memory work' is getting less prevalent or people less able to do it.
One guy who'd argue that it's a mix of marketing and engineering is Warren Woodford of the MEPIS distro. Certainly he's said so a few times.
MEPIS runs #5 at distrowatch, just behind Fedora and ahead of Debian; it's been noted for years now to "just work", with an install that doesn't find and use all your hardware a rare thing.
It, too, has a debian base but is less conservative about moving to new packages and kernels. Indeed, in recent years, its switched to using the Ubuntu libraries rather than Debian originals because in that respect, it shares Ubuntu's philosophy.
But more than Ubuntu, it comes with codecs - MP3s play out of the box, so does almost all video; Flash is pre-installed, for instance. It's had a great installer since long before Ubuntu and some very nice management apps.
So it mystifies me why Ubuntu is 3X as popular; MEPIS has everything U has and then has more. I can only think U has better marketing.
Actually, the one about the SSC was not Twistor, it was "Einstein's Bridge". The latter was a particularly good book, as books by scientists go. It's better Cramer regards it as a hobby, because he's not going to be a Great Novelist as far as character and dialogue and so forth go. But at his weakest, he's a "pretty good" writer, the somewhat thin characters didn't put me off the fine plot and very, very good "Hard SF" ideas expressed. (Put it this way, they were better as stories and characters than 75% of the "action movie" SF novels on the shelves most years.)
Einstein's Bridge was a particular favourite though, for a couple of reasons. It was his "Revenge of the Nerds" against the politicians that killed the SSC with a lot of political chicanery. He had intended to write a novel that took place at the SSC and the early drafts went into a drawer and Cramer into a funk when it was killed, and a whole lot of budding physics career paths dying with it. Then he thought of a plotline that had the SSC being built, contacting other universes entirely, and....well, complications ensue resulting in the destruction of the universe save for two physicists that were able to go back to the late 80's with the desperate mission...to kill the SSC and save the world.
How they killed the SSC (and created "our" timeline) is very funny. It includes wildly distorting politics to get a scientific moron named Quayle picked to be VP of the US, for instance.
It also includes a quick description of what I can only call a great "superpower" that most of the characters on "Heroes" could only pray for, and yet violates no physical laws...it could really be made possible one day if the fondest dreams of genetic engineers and nanontechnologists can be developed.
And "Twistor" was a fine adventure that would interest any young person in studying physics, as well. One comment I haven't seen in this thread is that Cramer may have the side agenda with this wild experiment of just interesting people in physics careers, an ongoing goal of his. Which he has already done!
Remember how the movie "Bull Durham" emphasized what a dramatic jump it is from the bush leagues to what they called "The Show", the majors?
Xandros and a dozen other of what Mr. Perens posted above as "struggling" Linux distributions are struggling because people like myself (MEPIS man, 3 years) consider their $50 or $100 OS price a Grave Decision and hopscotch through various distros (Mandrake, Lycoris and Linspire for me) and probably settle on a totally free one. Like me.
So Xandros and many others have gone over a decade unable to ever meet payroll for more people that can gather around one conference table, with growth flattening after they reach a base of a few thousand home users, a couple of dozen minor corporate installs and perhaps a couple of larger ones.
Then MS comes along, and it's not the direct cash so much as the mere prospect of a CHANCE of being seen as a Serious Corporate Solution that might, just might now get picked up by a couple or six dozen larger installs in the hundreds of desktops each. Slashdot readers might not be scared of the patent boogeyman but the larger a company is, the more averse it is to the prospect of such risks, however small. To them, a volume purchase price of $25 per desktop is very, very cheap insurance against even spending one legal-staff-week on a lawsuit threat.
So a company like Xandros can "offend" a free software community that has been collectively sending it a few hundred thousand a year at most to grab a shot at the brass ring of joining "The Show" and selling thousands of installs to big corporations. Like a baseball player taking a longshot at "The Show" even if it burns all bridges back to the bush leagues.
You can blame them but you should also see their point of view.
Sigh. From the rest of the post, you might have imagined I was joking. Or maybe criticisms of a show that's been off the air for over a decade are very serious posts to some people. I am sure that many dedicated Trek fans applaud your spirited defence. I apologize unreservedly for the criticism. Please don't hurt me.
Somebody has to caution these guys to sound as little as possible like Star Trek lines from Geordie. I think the deflector dish was reconfigured (in minutes) to emit polaritons at least once. Also, my spell checker just flagged "polaritons" as not even being a word.
...it IS a troll. NOBODY who works for C-Net can possibly be ignorant of the rest of this story, or of the tempest in a teapot that a biased editorial is sure to stir up. Therefore, it is purposeful, intended to drive up traffic and replies.
If that's his goal, don't give him the satisfaction. Don't read it, don't comment, don't reply.
Which is not about "winning" some argument, it's just about not letting media people get paid for the almost mindlessly easy job of drumming up fake controversy. Same as ignoring all the cable TV and radio "shock jocks". Let them all work for a living, do some investigative reporting, find out some new facts (you know, "news"?) to fill up their sites with.
Not just, as Jon Stewart said about 'Crossfire', "theatre".
In "The Right Stuff", Tom Wolfe noted that Shirra was the one who almost laughed himself out of the space program.
Much of the book was about the transition of the image of test pilot from "fighter jock", basically a blue-collar, manually-skilled guy who was a "natural stick & rudder man" to the white-collar scientist/robot who lived by the checklist.
Neither was true of anybody, certainly, but at least one story in the book of a flight shared by pioneer Chuck Yeager and new kid Neil Armstrong underscored the difference between the generations.
The Mercury Seven all had to kind of be both to make the cut; command respect from their fellows and the Old Guard in general as natural flyers, and also be respected by the German scientists and Washington bureaucrats running the new space program.
Wally had an irreverent and irrepressable sense of humour that was loved by the old gang and very, very nearly got him shut out by the new, who basically wanted another computer in the capsule, an utterly reliable component with as few "human" characteristics as possible.
Wally helped make sure it was humanity with all its strengths that became "Man in Space".
This is just a pilot plant, really, in the larger scheme of things. 40MW? 400MW is a "medium-size" plant these days.
Solar has to compete not just with coal that sequesters the carbon (more expensive than allowing CO2 into the atmosphere, but may prove still cheaper than anything else clean), with Nuclear (which is probably still cheaper than clean-coal, even budgeting realistic sums for its own waste disposal issues and plant decommissioning), and with Wind, which is just as green.
Wind is getting quite realistic for commercial use, Alberta (home of the tar sands and a lot of gas & oil) also has a lot of windpower building up. My Calgary household verges on carbon-free because I do all my commuting either by bike or by our "C-Train" that is notionally powered by wind turbines, paying a surplus for its power to subsidize the wind farm. Our own electric bill is only about 15% higher for our whole household electric bill to be also "green". ($12.50/mo to join the "GreenMax" program, when average bill is still under $100/mo)
But wind shares a problem with solar: it's not reliable. The sun don't shine every day and the wind don't blow every day. Coal & Nukes are beloved for producing "base load"... the minimum point on the yearly usage graph that is what you always need in the grid, 365x24.
One spot Solar is perfectly matched to is the insanely-growing US Southwest, where new residents are pouring into sunny Arizona and Nevada at bewildering rates. And using air conditioners, MOSTLY WHEN THE SUN IS BEATING DOWN. Unlike, say, Toronto, or Georgia, or even most of Texas, which can be "muggy" and require air conditioning even at midnight, the temperature goes right down again quickly even before sunset in the desert. There, 9AM to 6PM are when you get a power-consumption spike above that base load, and the one time you can count on a solar plant to be at maximum output.
If these guys are not just doing some kind of stock-pumping scam, and really, truly do have a way to make solar cells cheaper, say under 20 cents/kWh on even optimal days, then they could go straight to building a GW plant on the very cheap desert land outside Las Vegas, and start up some kind of "GreenMax" plan that charges them 20 cents for every kWh during the hours of 9AM-6PM that is above their winter-evening consumption level, they could proudly put a "carbon free" sticker on their giant air conditioners and not have to choose between comfort and virtue.
Credit here goes to a cluster of open-source projects - LAMP, basically, plus of course Java.
It also looked, around the time of the Netscape-killing, that Microsoft would inexorably make the Web an MS gated community. That internal corporate web apps would all surely be ASP (and then,.NET) to get along with the desktop/IE monopoly and that open-Internet web sites would have to go along.
But between MySQL, PHP, Python, et al, and of course Java, an alternative held together that relegated Microsoft web solutions to merely another competitor - a strong one, maybe, but not a monopoly that can dictate the whole game. It was some years where it all seemed to hang in the balance, maybe MS would eventually grind them all down. Around the time most people felt that LAMP was here to stay and Java had a well-entrenched community of its own, Firefox came up out of Netscape's grave and started nibbling down IE's market share even on Windows.
That's when I realized that MS was in a box. A big, big box full of money, sure, but still, it had met its limits.
Graham credits Google and Apple, but surely Linux deserves a tip of the hat.
In the mid-90's, when NT stabilized and swiftly sank the whole Unix workstation market, and started putting out real server products that slowly shut down Novell and Banyan, it began to look like Microsoft would soon own all levels of computing. From their secure base of total desktop ownership, they could leverage control of workstation, small server and soon, no doubt, large server markets. And on the other side, Windows CE was going to take over all the TV set boxes and music players and microwave ovens. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of a company that, like IBM, was not another fish but rather the Sea itself.
There was nothing that the minicomputer and Unix workstation companies like DEC and Sun could do to hold back the tide - Microsoft was cheaper software, had the unstoppable advantage of running on cheaper commodity hardware, and again, the desktop that could be tweaked to only work right with one server.
Then Linux came along, operating more efficiently on the same cheap commodity hardware and with even cheaper software. It shut them out of monopoly in the server market. Sure, they have a presence, but only as another competitor, not as a monopolist. And Linux is where everybody went for entertainment appliances, CE is a *minor* competitor there.
That left Microsoft with a monopoly ONLY on the desktop and no way to take over anything larger or smaller.
I couldn't handle reading 300 posts, but I did search the whole topic for the word "peak" and nobody at 2+ used it. So here it is: we had a local news article in Calgary about the lack of change in TOTAL consumption,( just as many lights on in the AM as off in PM) but that it was good because it shaved the PEAK CONSUMPTION.
People use the most energy right after they get home from work, basically; TV, computers (like me right now), cooking and other household operations.
Removing added lighting needs AT THAT TIME reduces the maximum generating capacity you need available to meet the peak demand. Which means they build a new power plant for your area in 2014 instead of 2012, or whatever. The time-cost of money means real savings on your power bill - even at constant total kWh consumed.
Actually, you get a fair bit of "rolling resistance" with friction of the wheels on the tracks, internal resistance inside the engine, etc.
The airtight tunnel, though...I'm sorry, but dream on. Really large diameter for a water pipe, the kind that feeds entire cities, is 10m in diameter and might be large enough for a train - well, that costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per kilometer. And can tolerate some leaks - you just survey every few months and patch where the ground is getting wet. A leak of air going IN would create vast energy costs to run lots of pumps to keep the air pressure inside very low - forget about a real vacuum for anything that big. Since there are always leaks, you'd always have those energy costs - and be back where you started. Sorry.
There's still something fishy about $0.21/GJ. 1E9/3600 = 277777, i.e. 278 kWh.
Or... 0.075 CENTS per kWh.
Yet Nuke plants charge a couple or three cents per kWh, even cheaper than all but the cheapest coal plants, maybe, but about thirty times as much as your estimate.
Either that's wrong, or fuel costs are only 3% of the cost of producing the nuclear power, the other 97% is paying off the $2B mortgage on the capital cost of building the plant, paying salaries and other operating costs, etc.
If so, then it JUST DOESN'T MATTER what Uranium costs... it could go up ten-fold and total Nuke power costs would only go up 30% to four cents per kWh, or something of that order.
Frequently an "SF Setting" (generally, "The Future", usually far enough to have space travel) is simply the chosen backdrop to another movie - generally an action movie, but maybe a romance or comedy. But in all cases you can imagine changing that backdrop and a few dozen words of dialogue and plot details - and turn it into a western, or a Roman costume drama.
Star Trek was described as "Wagon Train to the Stars" and Kirk as "Horatio Hornblower in Space". And a lot of the crapping on the show by SF purists is really over the issue that some episodes really were SF - asking the question "what if" and exploring the consequences of a radical change to some societal underpinning - but most were simple romances or action stories set against the SF backdrop. I'm prejudiced by a love of "true SF", but I think most of the best-loved episodes were the SF ones. "City on the Edge of Forever" explored the emotional problem of "could you kill somebody today if it would save millions in a decade", a problem that just didn't come up for cowboys or Romans.
Many of these movies (or series episodes) aren't merely "not SF" but also "BAD SF" that infuriate SF lovers. The reason being that the SF backdrop gives a bad-SF writer license to utterly contrive the physical & time settings to be anything convenient to their action or comedy plot:
- sometimes it takes months for the Enterprise to get back to Earth, or a week to even phone it. Next episode, it's two days away...BY SHUTTLECRAFT.
- space battles that don't incinerate the losing ship in a millisecond, but slowly degrade it, just like, oddly enough, wooden sailing ships Hornblower used. Niven & Pournelle wrote about contriving the "Mote In God's Eye" ships with their Langston Fields so that they would be staffed & operated like old wet-navy ships, with 3X the needed staff to keep running after losses in battle. That's the social environment they wanted, an existing, familiar one; just like Star Trek (and BG) ships. (My bet: real spaceships will be a bunch of professor types, and no dramatic control room; just "computer, go to Sirius". Dan Simmon's Hyperion had a great scene of a spaceship owner laughing at people who looked for the bridge; and Iain Banks giant ships certainly had none.)
- The Salon review of "Starship Troopers" picked on a great true-SF point that most reviews missed while they debated whether Heinlein was a fascist and such rot. Troopers proposed that the nature of warfare would change. Those ignorant cannon-fodder doughboys became more like modern aviators, working 30 minutes every 30 days while operating complex equipment and working in tight formations. Verhoeven explicitly WANTED a familiar WW2 movie, so he ditched the fancy suits and the army actually acted more like a Civil War rabble, a charging mob with little direction, blazing away with machine guns containing 10,000 bullets. They took away the true-SF "what if" proposition and just restaged Iwo Jima on Klendathau.
- You cannot, of course, get more contrived than Star Wars inventing a reason for swords to still be in use; that's the ultimate gold standard of technology contrived for the desired dramatics.
People listing movie names seem to have forgotten the Philip K. Dick material beyond "Blade Runner" - with "Total Recall" both a classic shoot 'em up actioner that also explored the question of identity and reality itself. (I still think Arnie was dreaming in a hospital bed after scene five.) Minority Report about arresting people for things they "would have" done.
"The Abyss" is mostly just an action movie in a bizarre location; until you get to the aliens at the end, and What If First Contact Was Right Here On Earth...that part was real SF.
I think the article's problem is that the steady appearance of fine SF movies is *diluted* by cowboys in space "not really SF" movies that embarrass & taint the whole genre...but there's lots of real SF out there; a year doesn't go b
Needless to say, of course, that's in a context where a lot of sporting facilities were built for it not at the expense of the Olympic committee but at local government expense. That's fair as long as the facilities, which go on to be locally owned and used -- are actually used. A majority of ours were, the most visible exception being the huge ski-jump tower I can see from my window as I type. Ski-jumping just isn't a big sport except for a few Olympians. We were able to turn the observation deck at the top into a small conference centre with a hell of a view, mind you. You salvage what you can.
And quite a lot of the money we spent sprucing up the town and it's infrastructure in general was well-spent, IMHO. Sorry if that's not true in Vancouver.
Bottom line - we'd do it again. A small profit for the Olympics themselves, most of the government infrastructure and sporting money well-spent, gigantic pots of money laid on the tourism industry, not just during but for years after, when a billion viewers got to see that Calgary is not a cowtown any more, is next door to better skiing than Colorado, and you can drink beer on an outside deck in February if a Chinook blows into town. I'd put the net gain in the millions, not billions, but hey, a win's a win. The gain in civic pride and morale was huge.
So there's a lot of people trying to get us another one. This time, we already have the stupid ski-jump tower.
Slashdot Mirror
A new organization called "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition" ( leap.cc ) was organized to give a way for (sometimes former) law enforcement and justice personnel to voice their opposition to the "drug war".
Anybody can join, you get a newsletter and you get asked to contribute so that they can afford to send volunteer speakers around to various conferences or on speaking tours to talk about the pointlessness and active harm they saw the "drug war" causing when they were part of it.
Well and good, but they were clearly amateurs at first with the Internet side; the first newsletters were plain text and HTML expertise came slowly. And on November 15, 2006, they sent an E-mail to 5000 addresses with all of them in the TO: line, blowing out the capacity of my webmail service at least to even process it properly; about 3000 of the addresses wound up in the text of the E-mail itself.
Just for grins, I spent about half an hour cutting and pasting the list into a file, and using simple Unix text tools to organize them into a nice sorted text database, revealing how many of them were outright duplicates, how many were obviously for the same guy at two addresses, did a few simple stats on locations and agencies.
I thought of sending them the benefits of my work, so they could clean out the dupes, but decided they'd probably (a) not be pleased and (b) weren't smart enough to use the help anyway.
A good number of people gave addresses that didn't reveal their name outright, others were fully named, along with the government service they worked for, after the "@". I'm sure a number of them were uncomfortable with the thought of their boss or chief knowing they were not solidly behind department policy. Many would not have been law enforcement types, just rank & file citizens like myself - but also not comfortable with the idea of it getting out they were part of an organization that many bosses would tend to assume was joined by stoners. (As opposed to civil libertarians, certainly MY only reason for joining!)
"Only Nixon could go to China", and only 50-something narcotics cops can speak out against the drug war without automatically falling under suspicion of being on drugs.
I haven't donated LEAP any money yet, though I've received a few letters; I'm only slowly coming to the belief that they are bright enough to pound sand.
I know, it does seem hopeless. But politicians can be moved to better attitudes simply from a perception that they'll be facing real opposition, demonstrations, etc. Jerry Pournelle once wrote about his time working in a Congressman's office that five letters per day trickling in on the same issue was regarded with real alarm and excitement.
In theory, that means an organization of (500 congressmen X 10 letters/day X 10 days)= 50,000 letter-writers, could, for 10 days, have all Congress talking of nothing else in the hallways but the new "hot button" issue that they simply must address.
I'm another goddamn foreigner sticking my nose into American business to comment here, but I think you have to go beyond expressing outrage and dismiss civil servants that aren't serving vital interests.
Canada finally got fed up with the corruptions and lawbreaking of a long-term Liberal government recently and didn't vote enough of them back in last election to form a government; it seems to have been an instructive experience.
My recommendation, for what it's worth? Since "FISA" didn't protect your constitutional concerns, start a "FESO" movement, maybe on the web like that "MoveOn" bunch. FESO as in "Fire Every Single One" of the representatives that vote for this law. Gather funds, donate them to anybody who opposes them in primaries for their own party, or to their opponent across party lines -- assuming the opponent will make a campaign promise to work to repeal the law and never vote for any one like it. Make it your sole vote and sole concern, ignoring all their other service, ignoring all the pork they bring to your district. Vote, and donate, and volunteer strictly on this issue. Make it a single-issue election for every member of "FESO.ORG".
Obsessive? Maybe, I don't know American politics enough to say; but the commentary here (and by Glenn Greenwald) seems to be saying this is very, very important at a deep constitutional level.
Clearly, this issue has little traction in the American Congress for its own sake, so they will only make it a priority if they believe their jobs depend on it. I heard that 98% of Congress are re-elected in a given election; offhand, that sounds to me like your main problem right there, you aren't firing enough people to make the rest responsive.
The way to read TFA is to use the search function to look for "$". Then you can skip all the "it would work this way" stuff (this is R&D - just give it to them that they have something that MIGHT work) and get to the real feasibility.
... the military needs megawatts in the middle of nowhere sometimes, and must truck in diesel at $1/kWh.
/lb. :
It's not about the watts per square meter, or the transmission feasibility or losses, skip to the final number: how many kilograms do you have to put into HIGH orbit to deliver a 1kW to the ground?
I didn't find that number, but by searching on "$", 56 pages in to a 75 page document (but only 1 minute into my search, see the time-saving?) we come to the important points:
- even the cheapest launch costs won't let them deliver power at even military-cost scenarios of $1/kWh (10X the best commercial
rate)
- to get down to the big market of baseload commercial power, delivered at 8-10 cents/kWh, they need launch costs to drop
to $200/lb.
Current launch costs to geosynchronous orbit are $15,000 - $20,000
( http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=431680 )
Obviously, this amount can drop radically with a new launch system. An earlier post from "Dr. Manhattan" ( http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=287435&cid=20463673 ) mentions nuclear rockets. Good luck to them.
Good luck to anybody who can drop high-orbit launch costs by two orders of magnitude. A LOT of good things depend on dropping costs that much, including large manned space stations, moon bases, 100m diameter space telescopes, and space tourism for the middle class.
So while it's certainly worth some hundreds of millions per year (if it's worth billions to research fusion) to research the engineering of power transmission, and the making of lightweight cells or zero-gee solar thermal designs...lets take the discussion up again when those launch costs drop even ONE order of magnitude, shall we?
Until then, it's not even close to a pilot plant.
1) Well of COURSE it "bears watching". They're ASTRONOMERS, they think EVERYTHING in space "bears watching".
2) I really love the metaphor Bill Bryson made (in "A Short History of Everything", hugely recommended) -
"An asteroid passing between us and the moon is like a bullet passing through your shirt sleeve without quite touching the skin".
When you feel you have to correct people about this one, don't just focus on the *sacrifices* the Soviets made, focus on the *results*.
And here's the factoid I'm talking about, it's from an Atlantic article on the Battle of Kursk, one of WW2's biggest, but almost unknown to other Allies because they weren't there:
88 out of 100 German soldiers killed by the Allies in WW2 were killed by Soviets.
Or in other words, USA, Britain, Canada Australia/NZ, the French Resistance, etc, etc... were a sideshow compared to the real battles that defeated Germany.
> But it's simply not practical to say, for example, test everyone and give them a license just to buy alcohol (or cigarettes).
Wow, are you ever not open to new ideas.
States do this with cars, for example, when it would be far cheaper and "more practical" to just limit car usage to people over 21 and figure that beyond that age, normal prudence of the mature will cause people to learn how to use them properly before risking their lives and others with such a powerful machine.
Which is exactly our logic with alcohol and cigarettes. And over-21s on alcohol go right out and hurt other people - often with cars - as a result. Or ignore the giant bold-face warnings on the pack and smoke when pregnant or around the kids in an enclosed space. (I'm a skeptic about much "second-hand smoke" damage, but there no denying the kids getting more colds and bronchitis, reason enough to not do it right there.)
It's funny how the achievements of the last generation (or even decade) are the Things That Need Fixing of the new.
/. poster above said, it was pretty bad; now it's just somewhat less so - you sure as heck can't do serious stargazing even now, though it's probably doubled the number of nights you can see the Milky Way. Not that most people notice, since our clearest skies are in the winter and few brave the cold to watch for more than a few minutes.
I remember the night sky in Calgary as a child (say 40 years back) had a lot more stars, just because the city was so much smaller (1M now; maybe 250,000 then - we're one of the fastest-growing in N. America) and there were so fewer streetlights shining up on the clouds.
But we were indeed extra "bad" for light emissions intensity as measured in kwH/km^2 too, not just sheer size - as this sat. photo on our own website shows:
http://content.calgary.ca/CCA/City+Hall/Business+U nits/Roads/Street+Lights/Satellite+Photograph+-+Fu ll+Size.htm
It made me remember that the "Chief Commissioner" (we now say "CEO") of the municipality when I started working there about 20 years back was a former electrical engineer named George Cornish; and that his bio included him winning an award for championing Calgary getting one of the best street-lighting systems in the world during his time at the (then City-owned) electric light department. Likely our formerly huge 32,100 kWh/km^2 emissions were a byproduct - not seen as a bad thing at the time.
When we brought in the change to the streetlighting, the ad campaign emphasized the savings - money and carbon both - not the improvement to the free astronomy show.
I can't find anything on the web about how much we improved the kwH/km^2, or a new satellite photo for before/after comparison; and no figures on what our "Bortle" number was before/after, either; the available info is all about the money. (5 year payback!)
I'm afraid I can't call the difference dramatic - if it wasn't as bad as "only six stars visible" as one
The astronomy benefit probably goes to the National Parks like Banff that are over 120km away - we were probably reaching the size where we were affecting the "seeing" even there!
The difference to the streets is probably more dramatic, literally - residential streets have gone from roughly even lighting almost anywhere you stood (which is what I guess got Mr. Cornish his award) to the "look" that cities older than Calgary mostly have, at least in older neighbourhoods - pools of light under the streetlights, soft chiaroscuro pools of darkness between. (I remember seeing this in New York on a visit in the 70's, even in Manhattan itself, and thinking with surprise "I thought that look was just in old film noir with Bogart under the streetlight with a cigarette". I had to visit several older cities before I realized it was common, and that Calgary was the unusual one.)
Now, there's a corner near my house where it's dark enough at night to not be able to see an icy spot on the sidewalk if there is one, so now you tend to memorize these during the day (since night starts at 5PM in late December). That's about the only real bitching though, on the whole I wouldn't go back - it's also nice to have a lot less of the glare and blinding than there used to be...and it's not just me; there have been few to no complaints about the change, it's certainly not an issue ever mentioned in the news.
When you think about it, the vaunted $2M/year is $2/citizen; and most people would pay $2/year for the convenience of "good lighting" if it really made a big difference in their day, so the "savings" only work if the change in comfort/convenience is almost imperceptible. Partly, the change isn't that big, and partly - I'm the guy complaining about the invisible icy spot because I WALK EVERYWHERE,
I'm another Canadian CD shopper that's pretty tight-fisted when the price gets much above $15.
I don't download music; I have ripped CDs I borrowed from the library, which by my reading of our copyright act is legal as church on Sunday - but the bulk of that was out-of-print Jazz albums you can't find in stores anyway.
The real piracy battleground is over the "most popular" pop music that sells a lot of units for a year or so, mostly to people under 30.
Part of the reason I started getting more interested in non-pop genres like Jazz, World, Reggae, electronic was that it was cheaper - even in stores like HMV. I can go in there and get one Avril Lavigne CD for $25 - or pick up Django Reinhart's Jazz, hits by Dean Martin, a Peter Tosh, and an "AfroBeat Collection" for a total of $30. All from the 2/$15 shelf two paces from Avril.
Sorry, Avril...
There's just a LOT of great music out there, and once you stop treating music as a status symbol that proves how up-to-the-minute you are, buying anything new & popular becomes an irrational decision. Wait a few years, and it'll not only be down to the 2/$30 shelf at least, the consensus will be in about how good the artist *really* was under the hype.
However, if HMV drops prices enough, I believe I'll find out what the heck Amy Winehouse is all about this year instead of 2010. One really should encourage moves like this.
Old news - five hundred years old. Find some 500-year-old people if you want to see GOOD memories.
James Burke's great work, "The Day the Universe Changed" (book and TV series) relates how important memory was before paper and writing materials became cheap and printing made standard information cheaper still.
pp 99-102 of the hardback relates such techniques as:
rhyme - French merchants used a poem of 137 rhyming couplets to teach and remember all rules of commercial arithmetic;
"Memory theatres" - a giant mnemonic device in which rooms and objects in a large building were a metaphor for hundreds of memorized facts;
checksums - there are Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven corporal and seven spiritual works of mercy, etc so that you know you still have two to go when you've remembered five;
Those who could read silently were regarded with awe, since most business was oral, and reading was with moving lips. "Auditing" meant HEARING your financiers describe your accounts, as even Kings were illiterate.
In short, we've been losing our memories since writing was invented 5000-ish years ago, and losing them way faster since it got cheap 500 years ago. The additional speedups ~50 years ago with recorded moving pictures and ~5 years ago with popular PDAs & cellphones are minor by comparison.
Memory is also involved in learning how to use a spreadsheet, or how to line-dance or repair a bicycle. *Insane* amounts of memory are involved in learning a language. There's no evidence this kind of 'memory work' is getting less prevalent or people less able to do it.
One guy who'd argue that it's a mix of marketing and engineering is Warren Woodford of the MEPIS distro. Certainly he's said so a few times.
MEPIS runs #5 at distrowatch, just behind Fedora and ahead of Debian; it's been noted for years now to "just work", with an install that doesn't find and use all your hardware a rare thing.
It, too, has a debian base but is less conservative about moving to new packages and kernels. Indeed, in recent years, its switched to using the Ubuntu libraries rather than Debian originals because in that respect, it shares Ubuntu's philosophy.
But more than Ubuntu, it comes with codecs - MP3s play out of the box, so does almost all video; Flash is pre-installed, for instance. It's had a great installer since long before Ubuntu and some very nice management apps.
So it mystifies me why Ubuntu is 3X as popular; MEPIS has everything U has and then has more. I can only think U has better marketing.
Actually, the one about the SSC was not Twistor, it was "Einstein's Bridge". The latter was a particularly good book, as books by scientists go. It's better Cramer regards it as a hobby, because he's not going to be a Great Novelist as far as character and dialogue and so forth go. But at his weakest, he's a "pretty good" writer, the somewhat thin characters didn't put me off the fine plot and very, very good "Hard SF" ideas expressed. (Put it this way, they were better as stories and characters than 75% of the "action movie" SF novels on the shelves most years.)
Einstein's Bridge was a particular favourite though, for a couple of reasons. It was his "Revenge of the Nerds" against the politicians that killed the SSC with a lot of political chicanery. He had intended to write a novel that took place at the SSC and the early drafts went into a drawer and Cramer into a funk when it was killed, and a whole lot of budding physics career paths dying with it. Then he thought of a plotline that had the SSC being built, contacting other universes entirely, and....well, complications ensue resulting in the destruction of the universe save for two physicists that were able to go back to the late 80's with the desperate mission...to kill the SSC and save the world.
How they killed the SSC (and created "our" timeline) is very funny. It includes wildly distorting politics to get a scientific moron named Quayle picked to be VP of the US, for instance.
It also includes a quick description of what I can only call a great "superpower" that most of the characters on "Heroes" could only pray for, and yet violates no physical laws...it could really be made possible one day if the fondest dreams of genetic engineers and nanontechnologists can be developed.
And "Twistor" was a fine adventure that would interest any young person in studying physics, as well. One comment I haven't seen in this thread is that Cramer may have the side agenda with this wild experiment of just interesting people in physics careers, an ongoing goal of his. Which he has already done!
Recommended!
Remember how the movie "Bull Durham" emphasized what a dramatic jump it is from the bush leagues to what they called "The Show", the majors?
Xandros and a dozen other of what Mr. Perens posted above as "struggling" Linux distributions are struggling because people like myself (MEPIS man, 3 years) consider their $50 or $100 OS price a Grave Decision and hopscotch through various distros (Mandrake, Lycoris and Linspire for me) and probably settle on a totally free one. Like me.
So Xandros and many others have gone over a decade unable to ever meet payroll for more people that can gather around one conference table, with growth flattening after they reach a base of a few thousand home users, a couple of dozen minor corporate installs and perhaps a couple of larger ones.
Then MS comes along, and it's not the direct cash so much as the mere prospect of a CHANCE of being seen as a Serious Corporate Solution that might, just might now get picked up by a couple or six dozen larger installs in the hundreds of desktops each. Slashdot readers might not be scared of the patent boogeyman but the larger a company is, the more averse it is to the prospect of such risks, however small. To them, a volume purchase price of $25 per desktop is very, very cheap insurance against even spending one legal-staff-week on a lawsuit threat.
So a company like Xandros can "offend" a free software community that has been collectively sending it a few hundred thousand a year at most to grab a shot at the brass ring of joining "The Show" and selling thousands of installs to big corporations. Like a baseball player taking a longshot at "The Show" even if it burns all bridges back to the bush leagues.
You can blame them but you should also see their point of view.
Sigh. From the rest of the post, you might have imagined I was joking. Or maybe criticisms of a show that's been off the air for over a decade are very serious posts to some people. I am sure that many dedicated Trek fans applaud your spirited defence. I apologize unreservedly for the criticism. Please don't hurt me.
Somebody has to caution these guys to sound as little as possible like Star Trek lines from Geordie. I think the deflector dish was reconfigured (in minutes) to emit polaritons at least once. Also, my spell checker just flagged "polaritons" as not even being a word.
...it IS a troll. NOBODY who works for C-Net can possibly be ignorant of the rest of this story, or of the tempest in a teapot that a biased editorial is sure to stir up. Therefore, it is purposeful, intended to drive up traffic and replies.
If that's his goal, don't give him the satisfaction. Don't read it, don't comment, don't reply.
Which is not about "winning" some argument, it's just about not letting media people get paid for the almost mindlessly easy job of drumming up fake controversy. Same as ignoring all the cable TV and radio "shock jocks". Let them all work for a living, do some investigative reporting, find out some new facts (you know, "news"?) to fill up their sites with.
Not just, as Jon Stewart said about 'Crossfire', "theatre".
In "The Right Stuff", Tom Wolfe noted that Shirra was the one who almost laughed himself out of the space program.
Much of the book was about the transition of the image of test pilot from "fighter jock", basically a blue-collar, manually-skilled guy who was a "natural stick & rudder man" to the white-collar scientist/robot who lived by the checklist.
Neither was true of anybody, certainly, but at least one story in the book of a flight shared by pioneer Chuck Yeager and new kid Neil Armstrong underscored the difference between the generations.
The Mercury Seven all had to kind of be both to make the cut; command respect from their fellows and the Old Guard in general as natural flyers, and also be respected by the German scientists and Washington bureaucrats running the new space program.
Wally had an irreverent and irrepressable sense of humour that was loved by the old gang and very, very nearly got him shut out by the new, who basically wanted another computer in the capsule, an utterly reliable component with as few "human" characteristics as possible.
Wally helped make sure it was humanity with all its strengths that became "Man in Space".
This is just a pilot plant, really, in the larger scheme of things. 40MW? 400MW is a "medium-size" plant these days.
A bout+Greenmax.htm
... the minimum point on the yearly usage graph that is what you always need in the grid, 365x24.
Solar has to compete not just with coal that sequesters the carbon (more expensive than allowing CO2 into the atmosphere, but may prove still cheaper than anything else clean), with Nuclear (which is probably still cheaper than clean-coal, even budgeting realistic sums for its own waste disposal issues and plant decommissioning), and with Wind, which is just as green.
Wind is getting quite realistic for commercial use, Alberta (home of the tar sands and a lot of gas & oil) also has a lot of windpower building up. My Calgary household verges on carbon-free because I do all my commuting either by bike or by our "C-Train" that is notionally powered by wind turbines, paying a surplus for its power to subsidize the wind farm. Our own electric bill is only about 15% higher for our whole household electric bill to be also "green". ($12.50/mo to join the "GreenMax" program, when average bill is still under $100/mo)
http://www.enmax.com/Energy/Residential/Greenmax/
But wind shares a problem with solar: it's not reliable. The sun don't shine every day and the wind don't blow every day.
Coal & Nukes are beloved for producing "base load"
One spot Solar is perfectly matched to is the insanely-growing US Southwest, where new residents are pouring into sunny Arizona and Nevada at bewildering rates. And using air conditioners, MOSTLY WHEN THE SUN IS BEATING DOWN. Unlike, say, Toronto, or Georgia, or even most of Texas, which can be "muggy" and require air conditioning even at midnight, the temperature goes right down again quickly even before sunset in the desert. There, 9AM to 6PM are when you get a power-consumption spike above that base load, and the one time you can count on a solar plant to be at maximum output.
If these guys are not just doing some kind of stock-pumping scam, and really, truly do have a way to make solar cells cheaper, say under 20 cents/kWh on even optimal days, then they could go straight to building a GW plant on the very cheap desert land outside Las Vegas, and start up some kind of "GreenMax" plan that charges them 20 cents for every kWh during the hours of 9AM-6PM that is above their winter-evening consumption level, they could proudly put a "carbon free" sticker on their giant air conditioners and not have to choose between comfort and virtue.
Credit here goes to a cluster of open-source projects - LAMP, basically, plus of course Java.
.NET) to get along with the desktop/IE monopoly and that open-Internet web sites would have to go along.
It also looked, around the time of the Netscape-killing, that Microsoft would inexorably make the Web an MS gated community. That internal corporate web apps would all surely be ASP (and then,
But between MySQL, PHP, Python, et al, and of course Java, an alternative held together that relegated Microsoft web solutions to merely another competitor - a strong one, maybe, but not a monopoly that can dictate the whole game. It was some years where it all seemed to hang in the balance, maybe MS would eventually grind them all down. Around the time most people felt that LAMP was here to stay and Java had a well-entrenched community of its own, Firefox came up out of Netscape's grave and started nibbling down IE's market share even on Windows.
That's when I realized that MS was in a box. A big, big box full of money, sure, but still, it had met its limits.
Graham credits Google and Apple, but surely Linux deserves a tip of the hat.
In the mid-90's, when NT stabilized and swiftly sank the whole Unix workstation market, and started putting out real server products that slowly shut down Novell and Banyan, it began to look like Microsoft would soon own all levels of computing. From their secure base of total desktop ownership, they could leverage control of workstation, small server and soon, no doubt, large server markets. And on the other side, Windows CE was going to take over all the TV set boxes and music players and microwave ovens. Nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of a company that, like IBM, was not another fish but rather the Sea itself.
There was nothing that the minicomputer and Unix workstation companies like DEC and Sun could do to hold back the tide - Microsoft was cheaper software, had the unstoppable advantage of running on cheaper commodity hardware, and again, the desktop that could be tweaked to only work right with one server.
Then Linux came along, operating more efficiently on the same cheap commodity hardware and with even cheaper software. It shut them out of monopoly in the server market. Sure, they have a presence, but only as another competitor, not as a monopolist. And Linux is where everybody went for entertainment appliances, CE is a *minor* competitor there.
That left Microsoft with a monopoly ONLY on the desktop and no way to take over anything larger or smaller.
I couldn't handle reading 300 posts, but I did search the whole topic for the word "peak" and nobody at 2+ used it. So here it is: we had a local news article in Calgary about the lack of change in TOTAL consumption,( just as many lights on in the AM as off in PM) but that it was good because it shaved the PEAK CONSUMPTION.
People use the most energy right after they get home from work, basically; TV, computers (like me right now), cooking and other household operations.
Removing added lighting needs AT THAT TIME reduces the maximum generating capacity you need available to meet the peak demand. Which means they build a new power plant for your area in 2014 instead of 2012, or whatever. The time-cost of money means real savings on your power bill - even at constant total kWh consumed.
Actually, you get a fair bit of "rolling resistance" with friction of the wheels on the tracks, internal resistance inside the engine, etc.
The airtight tunnel, though...I'm sorry, but dream on. Really large diameter for a water pipe, the kind that feeds entire cities, is 10m in diameter and might be large enough for a train - well, that costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per kilometer. And can tolerate some leaks - you just survey every few months and patch where the ground is getting wet. A leak of air going IN would create vast energy costs to run lots of pumps to keep the air pressure inside very low - forget about a real vacuum for anything that big. Since there are always leaks, you'd always have those energy costs - and be back where you started. Sorry.
There's still something fishy about $0.21/GJ. 1E9/3600 = 277777, i.e. 278 kWh.
Or... 0.075 CENTS per kWh.
Yet Nuke plants charge a couple or three cents per kWh, even cheaper than all but the cheapest coal plants, maybe, but about thirty times as much as your estimate.
Either that's wrong, or fuel costs are only 3% of the cost of producing the nuclear power, the other 97% is paying off the $2B mortgage on the capital cost of building the plant, paying salaries and other operating costs, etc.
If so, then it JUST DOESN'T MATTER what Uranium costs... it could go up ten-fold and total Nuke power costs would only go up 30% to four cents per kWh, or something of that order.
And TFA really is crazy alarmism...
Frequently an "SF Setting" (generally, "The Future", usually far enough to have space travel) is simply the chosen backdrop to another movie - generally an action movie, but maybe a romance or comedy. But in all cases you can imagine changing that backdrop and a few dozen words of dialogue and plot details - and turn it into a western, or a Roman costume drama.
Star Trek was described as "Wagon Train to the Stars" and Kirk as "Horatio Hornblower in Space". And a lot of the crapping on the show by SF purists is really over the issue that some episodes really were SF - asking the question "what if" and exploring the consequences of a radical change to some societal underpinning - but most were simple romances or action stories set against the SF backdrop. I'm prejudiced by a love of "true SF", but I think most of the best-loved episodes were the SF ones. "City on the Edge of Forever" explored the emotional problem of "could you kill somebody today if it would save millions in a decade", a problem that just didn't come up for cowboys or Romans.
Many of these movies (or series episodes) aren't merely "not SF" but also "BAD SF" that infuriate SF lovers. The reason being that the SF backdrop gives a bad-SF writer license to utterly contrive the physical & time settings to be anything convenient to their action or comedy plot:
- sometimes it takes months for the Enterprise to get back to Earth, or a week to even phone it. Next episode, it's two days away...BY SHUTTLECRAFT.
- space battles that don't incinerate the losing ship in a millisecond, but slowly degrade it, just like, oddly enough, wooden sailing ships Hornblower used. Niven & Pournelle wrote about contriving the "Mote In God's Eye" ships with their Langston Fields so that they would be staffed & operated like old wet-navy ships, with 3X the needed staff to keep running after losses in battle. That's the social environment they wanted, an existing, familiar one; just like Star Trek (and BG) ships. (My bet: real spaceships will be a bunch of professor types, and no dramatic control room; just "computer, go to Sirius". Dan Simmon's Hyperion had a great scene of a spaceship owner laughing at people who looked for the bridge; and Iain Banks giant ships certainly had none.)
- The Salon review of "Starship Troopers" picked on a great true-SF point that most reviews missed while they debated whether Heinlein was a fascist and such rot. Troopers proposed that the nature of warfare would change. Those ignorant cannon-fodder doughboys became more like modern aviators, working 30 minutes every 30 days while operating complex equipment and working in tight formations. Verhoeven explicitly WANTED a familiar WW2 movie, so he ditched the fancy suits and the army actually acted more like a Civil War rabble, a charging mob with little direction, blazing away with machine guns containing 10,000 bullets. They took away the true-SF "what if" proposition and just restaged Iwo Jima on Klendathau.
- You cannot, of course, get more contrived than Star Wars inventing a reason for swords to still be in use; that's the ultimate gold standard of technology contrived for the desired dramatics.
People listing movie names seem to have forgotten the Philip K. Dick material beyond "Blade Runner" - with "Total Recall" both a classic shoot 'em up actioner that also explored the question of identity and reality itself. (I still think Arnie was dreaming in a hospital bed after scene five.) Minority Report about arresting people for things they "would have" done.
"The Abyss" is mostly just an action movie in a bizarre location; until you get to the aliens at the end, and What If First Contact Was Right Here On Earth...that part was real SF.
I think the article's problem is that the steady appearance of fine SF movies is *diluted* by cowboys in space "not really SF" movies that embarrass & taint the whole genre...but there's lots of real SF out there; a year doesn't go b
Calgary's 1988 Winter Olympics made money.
Needless to say, of course, that's in a context where a lot of sporting facilities were built for it not at the expense of the Olympic committee but at local government expense. That's fair as long as the facilities, which go on to be locally owned and used -- are actually used. A majority of ours were, the most visible exception being the huge ski-jump tower I can see from my window as I type. Ski-jumping just isn't a big sport except for a few Olympians. We were able to turn the observation deck at the top into a small conference centre with a hell of a view, mind you. You salvage what you can.
And quite a lot of the money we spent sprucing up the town and it's infrastructure in general was well-spent, IMHO. Sorry if that's not true in Vancouver.
Bottom line - we'd do it again. A small profit for the Olympics themselves, most of the government infrastructure and sporting money well-spent, gigantic pots of money laid on the tourism industry, not just during but for years after, when a billion viewers got to see that Calgary is not a cowtown any more, is next door to better skiing than Colorado, and you can drink beer on an outside deck in February if a Chinook blows into town. I'd put the net gain in the millions, not billions, but hey, a win's a win. The gain in civic pride and morale was huge.
So there's a lot of people trying to get us another one. This time, we already have the stupid ski-jump tower.