I actually preferred the unfinished movie better than I think I will like the finished one. With no musical cues, you have to pay attention to the story. Without the orgy of special effects, the acting becomes more important. I thought it was well written and the acting was generally good. Watching this unfinished movie made me realize what a waste of money millions of dollars of special effects really is, even in a high-budget action movie like this. It's an enjoyable movie without all that fluff.
This one is much more interesting. Its only for the state of Maine, but they measured the wind OFFSHORE as well. Look at the difference! Putting wind farms offshore makes much more financial sense than on land. As for those who say you need backup power equivalent to the whole wind grid, that isn't true. Offshore wind is fairly constant and you can play statistics with different regions. No wind across the entire atlantic seaboard is probably a 1 in 1 billion years event. Much more likely that someone will steal copper from a major transmission line and trigger an unforseen cascade failure.
If we're really interested in an open and free (libre) society, the Internet gives everyone the best chance to be heard and be seen--and the side of that open coin is hearing and seeing things that you don't necessarily agree with or condone.
I remember when TLC was "The Learning Channel". They had all sorts of great stuff on there, including Junkyard Wars and fistfuls of great documentaries. Then they drove Junkyard wars into the ground, brought in a bunch of "Pimp my X" and "Flip this House" shows. Now the channel is dead to me.
A similar thing happened recently to the Discovery Channel. Anyone who thinks that Mythbusters has science content is kidding themselves.
Looks like the Scifi channel is next. Stargate has no new episodes, the "good ol' shows" like Farscape and the Outer Limits are banished to 1AM in the morning, and now the name change.
I see lots of great channels being run into the ground. Does anyone know any that are rising to the top?
Oh please. I bet you're the sort of person who believes that we can replace all our coal plants with Wind and Hydro by 2015 if we spent enough money.
First you have to get the liscensing for all these power plants. For Hydro, this is mostly impossible since someone will stand up and say that the turbines chew up fish at a ridiculous rate and destroy the river. For wind, people will complain about the birds. These drawbacks were true in 1960 but they aren't anymore. You'll be tied down for at least 3 years trying to get the permits and approval to build. And that's being optomistic.
Then you need to build the things. But the lead time for many components is pretty long and still getting longer, even in this economy. We're buying forgings and bearings 3-4 years in advance. And then you have to machine it. These are big forgings and bearings, so not a lot of companies make them.
Finally, you need to install and run the plants. As I said, the manpower is getting a little short. Startup engineers make a minimum of 60k base salary a year and it goes up from there. That's not incuding overtime, which is excessive. So its not at all about the money. Most companies that are installing wind turbines are running flat out too along with everyone else.
Coal is mostly clean now, and it's a huge resource that the US has Right Now. I just spent a week in New Cumberland PA, right next door to Three Mile Island and several huge coal plants. And you know what? The air quality was excellent. There are tons of trees in that area and the scrubbers on all the plants are excellent. The ash is recycled into various useful products and the stuff that comes out of the scrubbers (mostly gypsum) is turned into Gypsum board.
As for natural Gas, its completely clean. I went to one plant in Wallingford Connecticut that was in a heavy residential area. The turbines were abour 400 feet away from a bunch of houses, but nobody who lived there knew they were even running because of the sound wall and the clear exhaust. It's even burning a renewable resource. Most people don't realize that Natural Gas is 99% Methane with a hint of Hydrogen. Sure its not coming from renewable sources *now* but there's no reason it couldn't.
I *want* one of these plants in my backyard. The taxes on 250 million dollars of equipment makes my taxes less. The highly paid employees have to eat, sleep, and socialize somewhere. The electrical costs are less because less energy is wasted in transmission.
If you want to turn this country into Vermont, maybe you should just move to Vermont.
I work for a company that is retrofitting 30-40 year old steam turbines at coal power plants. Its such a difficult and expensive process to get a new power station built (of any fuel) that the power companies want to keep these coal plants running for another 40 years. You can blame the NIMBY folks, or the environmentalists that require environmental study after study before ground is broken.
I'm in the business, and the cost of electricity is going to continue to rise pretty spectacularly. Most of the plants built in the past 15 years or so are natural gas, which is now expensive and continuing to rise in cost. Many of plants built in the 60's running on cheap fuel are getting near their end of life. Some are being retrofitted but many aren't worth it. Nobody can build a nuke plant these days and coal is equally taboo. Few people are studying engineering so the manpower is also getting scarce. Its not a crisis yet but most of the power industry is aged in thier 50s and 60s.
We aren't in a crisis yet, but in another 10 years its going to start getting ugly.
You've got your stimulus spending in my pork package! No, you've got your pork package in my stimulus bill!
It's almost as if a bunch of senators got together and hired a marketing department to rebrand their pork. And for everyone defending it, enormous spending packages are always full of pork- unless it's YOUR pork. Then suddenly its not pork, its economic development and stimulus.
Glue traps are the BEST. Put them along walls and other high traffic areas and you'll catch all the mice in fairly short order. If it's your house or some place you work, you will hear the mice flopping around with the trap. You can't miss it, and its a beautiful sound. The best part is you can kill them anyway you want. Put them in a garbage bag and pipe your car's exhaust into the bag to kill them humanely. Place them outside and let nature run its course. Throw them off a bridge. Campfires. The possibilities are endless!
I've never had any luck with the snap traps. The sticky traps are a godsend.
Women over 30 impart increased risks to their children as far as other ailments and diseases go. Has Autism been investigated as having anything to do with the mother's age when the baby is delivered?
Dual Citizenship is a pretty great thing to have, but it shouldn't be listed as a grand life achievement. Its one of the greatest gifts that a parent can give a child. There are many ways, but the easiest is for the mother (a citizen of one country) to deliver the baby in another country. Presto! Dual citizenship. Its not something I would trumpet about, but its nice to have.
Judge Gertner's observation that the arguments raised by the RIAA in the appeals court, relating to the manner of administering the broadcast, had never been raised in the lower court."
That sounds bad. Anyone know what this actually means for the case?
I'm not so sure I agree. When you build a bridge or a dam, you get something tangible that will be with you for 30+ years. Its there, and you can use it until it is demolished or replaced. The Brooklyn bridge, the Hoover Dam, etc have been with us for a very long time.
When you write some software, the benefit is not so obvious over the long term. Things have a habit of being rewritten completely in relatively short intervals. How much of the code from Linux of even 15 years ago is in the current kernel? How much of AutoCAD 1.0 is in the current version? The code gets rewritten and forgotten. The programmers learn experience and gain skill, but that isn't something that we need stimulus packages for. If we're going to spend unfathomable amounts of MY money, lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.
When you start handing out subsidies, people start chasing the subsidies rather than the goals that the subsidies are trying to jump-start.
See Ethanol, various agricultural subsidies, tax breaks for wealthy and profitable corporations, subsidies to erect cable lines and the monopolies that has created, etc.
I can think of very few subsidies that have worked out well. A much better idea is to incorporate the cost of "dirty" industry into the services and goods produced. Then consumers can compare on cost alone (which is what most people do anyway).
As the cost of energy rises in the medium future, I think this will sort itself out. Towns will question why they are spending so much on lighting and cut back. Generally, households use all they electricity they can afford so rising prices will make people cut back. People don't (usually) run the AC in the summer with the front door wide open. People don't like heating/cooling the outside. It's too expensive and wasteful. Similarly, I think people will curb their habits of trying to light entire cities at night.
What continues to amaze me about the SpaceX folk is not really the technology and engineering anymore, although that is impressive. What is great about their organization is the project management. They continually deliver on their claims on time (or ahead of schedule) and mostly stick to the budget. They are making steady steps toward being a massive player like Lockheed. Very few companies run this smoothly.
As for shipping, CFLs are quite a bit heavier than a twisted tungsten wire, so shipping a container of CFLs the same distance as a container of incandescent bulbs could well cost more too.
Except that commercial shipping is usually done by volume not weight. Only if the weight is extremely excessive does it matter for pricing. Shipping containers are usually charged by the container, not by the weight. They have a weight *limit*, but that is not the same thing. I can't imagine hitting the weight limit of a container with any kind of light bulb.
This is not at all feasible. For the 1100MW plant, lets say they use common car batteries to save costs. An average car battery is capable of somewhere around 400A at 12V. Keep in mind that at this discharge level the battery isn't going to last very long. Lets say 5000W for a short period of time. You would need 220,000 batteries to make 1100MW. This ignores all losses, which makes this even more optomistic.
I am aware of one facility that uses batteries to power Fairbanks, as reported some time ago here. But even that facility is not really useful, and Fairbanks is not a huge city- perhaps only 100MW or so.
There are many ideas for storing wind power, but I don't think batteries should be considered an option unless some radical advancements are made. Water electrolysis, pumping water uphill, etc are all much better ideas. But ultimately, storing the amount of power that even a small city uses is a problem which has yet to be solved.
The biggest reason SD "looks so awful about seeing HD" is because the built in upscalers of most HDTV is completly horrible, and make SD sources look faaaaaar worse than they should.
I don't agree with this. I think the biggest reason is because HD is usually in 16x9, so it is not stretched on a new widescreen TV. If there are bars (usually for commercials) they are usually encoded in the signal. SD, in contrast, is always 4:3 so you either have black bars (which is the correct way), stretching (most people do this) or cropping.
I think stretching is the worst possible solution, but it also seems to be the most common, especially in TV store displays and other public places. I have changed some TVs to black bars, and the immediate response is "change it back! We hate black bars". The fact that the screen is horribly stretched usually goes unnoticed.
I think multiplayer avatar interactions are much more interesting. In most MMOs, players will not stand directly in each other. I think this is a violation of a player's personal space. Nearby players who are messaging will stand at "speaking distance", even though it makes no difference to the game's chat mechanism how far apart they are. There are many other examples as well.
"Then again, all planetary missions so far have turned up amazing images and surprising scientific discoveries, and I doubt this expedition will be any different."
Not all planetary missions have turned up amazing images. Roughly half of the Mars missions failed to reach the planet and become operational. So those didn't complete anything at all amazing. Even of the ones that did, I doubt you could say that ALL of them resulted in amazing images and surprising discoveries. Unless, of course, you count "This didn't work lets try something else" as an amazing image and discovery.
I remember Fallout 1 (or maybe 2) had a certain edible item called a "cookie". It restored a very small amount of hitpoints if you ate it. However, if you ate the cookie, your hard drive light blinked twice. This was back in the day where hard drive writes were quite loud and noticable. Since no other edible items wrote to the hard drive, most people realized that this was an easter egg left by the developers. With hard drives so quiet today (and SSD starting to take over) would anyone even notice if this was in a present-day game?
This is a fairly obvious example where the software needs the the hardware (loud hard drives). But I am sure there are other examples where the hardware of today cannot give the same game experience of yesterday.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually preferred the unfinished movie better than I think I will like the finished one. With no musical cues, you have to pay attention to the story. Without the orgy of special effects, the acting becomes more important. I thought it was well written and the acting was generally good. Watching this unfinished movie made me realize what a waste of money millions of dollars of special effects really is, even in a high-budget action movie like this. It's an enjoyable movie without all that fluff.
This one is much more interesting. Its only for the state of Maine, but they measured the wind OFFSHORE as well. Look at the difference! Putting wind farms offshore makes much more financial sense than on land. As for those who say you need backup power equivalent to the whole wind grid, that isn't true. Offshore wind is fairly constant and you can play statistics with different regions. No wind across the entire atlantic seaboard is probably a 1 in 1 billion years event. Much more likely that someone will steal copper from a major transmission line and trigger an unforseen cascade failure.
If we're really interested in an open and free (libre) society, the Internet gives everyone the best chance to be heard and be seen--and the side of that open coin is hearing and seeing things that you don't necessarily agree with or condone.
Like Goatse.
I remember when TLC was "The Learning Channel". They had all sorts of great stuff on there, including Junkyard Wars and fistfuls of great documentaries. Then they drove Junkyard wars into the ground, brought in a bunch of "Pimp my X" and "Flip this House" shows. Now the channel is dead to me.
A similar thing happened recently to the Discovery Channel. Anyone who thinks that Mythbusters has science content is kidding themselves.
Looks like the Scifi channel is next. Stargate has no new episodes, the "good ol' shows" like Farscape and the Outer Limits are banished to 1AM in the morning, and now the name change.
I see lots of great channels being run into the ground. Does anyone know any that are rising to the top?
Oh please. I bet you're the sort of person who believes that we can replace all our coal plants with Wind and Hydro by 2015 if we spent enough money.
First you have to get the liscensing for all these power plants. For Hydro, this is mostly impossible since someone will stand up and say that the turbines chew up fish at a ridiculous rate and destroy the river. For wind, people will complain about the birds. These drawbacks were true in 1960 but they aren't anymore. You'll be tied down for at least 3 years trying to get the permits and approval to build. And that's being optomistic.
Then you need to build the things. But the lead time for many components is pretty long and still getting longer, even in this economy. We're buying forgings and bearings 3-4 years in advance. And then you have to machine it. These are big forgings and bearings, so not a lot of companies make them.
Finally, you need to install and run the plants. As I said, the manpower is getting a little short. Startup engineers make a minimum of 60k base salary a year and it goes up from there. That's not incuding overtime, which is excessive. So its not at all about the money. Most companies that are installing wind turbines are running flat out too along with everyone else.
Coal is mostly clean now, and it's a huge resource that the US has Right Now. I just spent a week in New Cumberland PA, right next door to Three Mile Island and several huge coal plants. And you know what? The air quality was excellent. There are tons of trees in that area and the scrubbers on all the plants are excellent. The ash is recycled into various useful products and the stuff that comes out of the scrubbers (mostly gypsum) is turned into Gypsum board.
As for natural Gas, its completely clean. I went to one plant in Wallingford Connecticut that was in a heavy residential area. The turbines were abour 400 feet away from a bunch of houses, but nobody who lived there knew they were even running because of the sound wall and the clear exhaust. It's even burning a renewable resource. Most people don't realize that Natural Gas is 99% Methane with a hint of Hydrogen. Sure its not coming from renewable sources *now* but there's no reason it couldn't.
I *want* one of these plants in my backyard. The taxes on 250 million dollars of equipment makes my taxes less. The highly paid employees have to eat, sleep, and socialize somewhere. The electrical costs are less because less energy is wasted in transmission.
If you want to turn this country into Vermont, maybe you should just move to Vermont.
I work for a company that is retrofitting 30-40 year old steam turbines at coal power plants. Its such a difficult and expensive process to get a new power station built (of any fuel) that the power companies want to keep these coal plants running for another 40 years. You can blame the NIMBY folks, or the environmentalists that require environmental study after study before ground is broken.
I'm in the business, and the cost of electricity is going to continue to rise pretty spectacularly. Most of the plants built in the past 15 years or so are natural gas, which is now expensive and continuing to rise in cost. Many of plants built in the 60's running on cheap fuel are getting near their end of life. Some are being retrofitted but many aren't worth it. Nobody can build a nuke plant these days and coal is equally taboo. Few people are studying engineering so the manpower is also getting scarce. Its not a crisis yet but most of the power industry is aged in thier 50s and 60s.
We aren't in a crisis yet, but in another 10 years its going to start getting ugly.
I wonder what would happen if the Kindle suddenly got a couple thousand 1-star reviews complaining about this. It worked for Spore.
You've got your stimulus spending in my pork package! No, you've got your pork package in my stimulus bill!
It's almost as if a bunch of senators got together and hired a marketing department to rebrand their pork. And for everyone defending it, enormous spending packages are always full of pork- unless it's YOUR pork. Then suddenly its not pork, its economic development and stimulus.
Glue traps are the BEST. Put them along walls and other high traffic areas and you'll catch all the mice in fairly short order. If it's your house or some place you work, you will hear the mice flopping around with the trap. You can't miss it, and its a beautiful sound. The best part is you can kill them anyway you want. Put them in a garbage bag and pipe your car's exhaust into the bag to kill them humanely. Place them outside and let nature run its course. Throw them off a bridge. Campfires. The possibilities are endless!
I've never had any luck with the snap traps. The sticky traps are a godsend.
Women over 30 impart increased risks to their children as far as other ailments and diseases go. Has Autism been investigated as having anything to do with the mother's age when the baby is delivered?
Dual Citizenship is a pretty great thing to have, but it shouldn't be listed as a grand life achievement. Its one of the greatest gifts that a parent can give a child. There are many ways, but the easiest is for the mother (a citizen of one country) to deliver the baby in another country. Presto! Dual citizenship. Its not something I would trumpet about, but its nice to have.
Judge Gertner's observation that the arguments raised by the RIAA in the appeals court, relating to the manner of administering the broadcast, had never been raised in the lower court."
That sounds bad. Anyone know what this actually means for the case?
I'm not so sure I agree. When you build a bridge or a dam, you get something tangible that will be with you for 30+ years. Its there, and you can use it until it is demolished or replaced. The Brooklyn bridge, the Hoover Dam, etc have been with us for a very long time.
When you write some software, the benefit is not so obvious over the long term. Things have a habit of being rewritten completely in relatively short intervals. How much of the code from Linux of even 15 years ago is in the current kernel? How much of AutoCAD 1.0 is in the current version? The code gets rewritten and forgotten. The programmers learn experience and gain skill, but that isn't something that we need stimulus packages for. If we're going to spend unfathomable amounts of MY money, lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.
When you start handing out subsidies, people start chasing the subsidies rather than the goals that the subsidies are trying to jump-start.
See Ethanol, various agricultural subsidies, tax breaks for wealthy and profitable corporations, subsidies to erect cable lines and the monopolies that has created, etc.
I can think of very few subsidies that have worked out well. A much better idea is to incorporate the cost of "dirty" industry into the services and goods produced. Then consumers can compare on cost alone (which is what most people do anyway).
As the cost of energy rises in the medium future, I think this will sort itself out. Towns will question why they are spending so much on lighting and cut back. Generally, households use all they electricity they can afford so rising prices will make people cut back. People don't (usually) run the AC in the summer with the front door wide open. People don't like heating/cooling the outside. It's too expensive and wasteful. Similarly, I think people will curb their habits of trying to light entire cities at night.
What continues to amaze me about the SpaceX folk is not really the technology and engineering anymore, although that is impressive. What is great about their organization is the project management. They continually deliver on their claims on time (or ahead of schedule) and mostly stick to the budget. They are making steady steps toward being a massive player like Lockheed. Very few companies run this smoothly.
If it burned a lot more fuel to ship heavy containers, heavy containers would cost more.
As for shipping, CFLs are quite a bit heavier than a twisted tungsten wire, so shipping a container of CFLs the same distance as a container of incandescent bulbs could well cost more too.
Except that commercial shipping is usually done by volume not weight. Only if the weight is extremely excessive does it matter for pricing. Shipping containers are usually charged by the container, not by the weight. They have a weight *limit*, but that is not the same thing. I can't imagine hitting the weight limit of a container with any kind of light bulb.
Trucks are the same way for large quantities.
Patent Troll hits you for 3 damage.
This is not at all feasible. For the 1100MW plant, lets say they use common car batteries to save costs. An average car battery is capable of somewhere around 400A at 12V. Keep in mind that at this discharge level the battery isn't going to last very long. Lets say 5000W for a short period of time. You would need 220,000 batteries to make 1100MW. This ignores all losses, which makes this even more optomistic.
I am aware of one facility that uses batteries to power Fairbanks, as reported some time ago here. But even that facility is not really useful, and Fairbanks is not a huge city- perhaps only 100MW or so.
There are many ideas for storing wind power, but I don't think batteries should be considered an option unless some radical advancements are made. Water electrolysis, pumping water uphill, etc are all much better ideas. But ultimately, storing the amount of power that even a small city uses is a problem which has yet to be solved.
The biggest reason SD "looks so awful about seeing HD" is because the built in upscalers of most HDTV is completly horrible, and make SD sources look faaaaaar worse than they should.
I don't agree with this. I think the biggest reason is because HD is usually in 16x9, so it is not stretched on a new widescreen TV. If there are bars (usually for commercials) they are usually encoded in the signal. SD, in contrast, is always 4:3 so you either have black bars (which is the correct way), stretching (most people do this) or cropping.
I think stretching is the worst possible solution, but it also seems to be the most common, especially in TV store displays and other public places. I have changed some TVs to black bars, and the immediate response is "change it back! We hate black bars". The fact that the screen is horribly stretched usually goes unnoticed.
I think multiplayer avatar interactions are much more interesting. In most MMOs, players will not stand directly in each other. I think this is a violation of a player's personal space. Nearby players who are messaging will stand at "speaking distance", even though it makes no difference to the game's chat mechanism how far apart they are. There are many other examples as well.
"Then again, all planetary missions so far have turned up amazing images and surprising scientific discoveries, and I doubt this expedition will be any different."
Not all planetary missions have turned up amazing images. Roughly half of the Mars missions failed to reach the planet and become operational. So those didn't complete anything at all amazing. Even of the ones that did, I doubt you could say that ALL of them resulted in amazing images and surprising discoveries. Unless, of course, you count "This didn't work lets try something else" as an amazing image and discovery.
I remember Fallout 1 (or maybe 2) had a certain edible item called a "cookie". It restored a very small amount of hitpoints if you ate it. However, if you ate the cookie, your hard drive light blinked twice. This was back in the day where hard drive writes were quite loud and noticable. Since no other edible items wrote to the hard drive, most people realized that this was an easter egg left by the developers. With hard drives so quiet today (and SSD starting to take over) would anyone even notice if this was in a present-day game?
This is a fairly obvious example where the software needs the the hardware (loud hard drives). But I am sure there are other examples where the hardware of today cannot give the same game experience of yesterday.
Tell that to the guy in this movie. The only time I watched it I was thinking that couldn't possibly work.