They are way too big to turn themselves around like that. They would Osborne themselves for the third time in three years -- which is admittedly world-class.
Cruise missiles are way too expensive for most of the missions flown over e.g. Libya.
UAV's are an option, but they do not carry enough ordnance yet and they are still dependent on complete air superiority. So far the attempts to fix those problems have increased cost a lot.
It is fine that they are called multirole fighters, but their role is almost exclusively bombing. Feel free to replace "small bomber" with "multirole fighter" in my comment. -i The F-16 is getting quite long in the tooth, F/A-18E/F is non-stealthy and rather expensive, F-22 can't do a credible air-to-ground mission. With F-35 being extremely expensive, it looks like the US airforce will be a lot less scary once F-16 is retired.
Oh, and by the way, the unviable alternative of satellite internet is currently provided by hughesnet.com, wildbluesales.com, gotSky, starband, and dish network, if I'm not mistaken.
The request was "cheap, universal, high speed". The existing providers have trouble delivering on even one of those goals.
As for reversible planetary cooling, I'm also going to guess it'd be cheaper to put that system in place than to pay for the damage caused by changes in weather patterns in places like India and the United States. Just saying.
The price of something which is impossible to do is somewhat uninteresting.
The F-22 hasn't seen combat despite the wide variety of combat situations the US has been in over the last few years. Obviously there hasn't been a real air superiority fight against other aircraft, but if the F-22 had become really useful in an air-to-ground role, surely it would have been used.
The US has enough F-22's to take on every credible air-to-air threat. What it doesn't have is a modern small bomber, which is effectively what F/A-18 and F-16 is being used for. The F/A-18E/F is pretty good in that role but it isn't stealthy, and that can become a problem against modern ground-fired anti-aircraft missiles.
Neither of options 1 through 4 are viable. Well 3) is possible simply because "biggest manufacturer of exotic, zero-g materials" would mean being the largest in a market of a few million dollars. 2) isn't completely ridiculous, but you wouldn't get anywhere on a budget of $80 million.
can they get a meaningful amount of weight out of orbit and en route to mars for that money even?
Not right now, but it is not completely impossible. Right now raw material and fuel cost is below 1% of mission cost (often much much less), so we are nowhere near the physical limits on launch costs.
In fact, fuel is so cheap that if all a space elevator saves is fuel, it isn't worth building.
Virtual machines will work just fine. Untrusted guest operating systems won't be able to get complete hardware access, but you rarely give virtual machines complete hardware access anyway because that compromises the hypervisor.
That is in fact one solution nobody has proposed yet: Get a minimal hypervisor signed and run everything as guest. It would break the binary blob graphics drivers unless you put those in the hypervisor, but Fedora can't run those in Secure Boot mode anyway (since they won't be signed with the right key).
Factor in the cost of the gas turbines that you have to have sitting warm, and how much does wind cost? Remember that you'll be switching them on and off constantly, thermal stressing the hell out of them and costing you more in maintenance and needing backups for the backups.
You know wind production with good certainty the day before. Yes, it can vary 10% on a bad day, but who cares? If it really worries you that much, you can just run your wind turbines at 10% less than maximum power, and only power them up to full production if the estimate was too optimistic. If a turbine fails you lose 3MW, barely noticeable.
Meanwhile, a failure of a power line or a coal or nuclear reactor can easily cost you 400MW instantly. With nuclear, you even risk that a small problem is found and the reactor (sometimes the whole plant, e.g. the horror of Swedish nuclear in 2010) is down for months. Good luck having backup for 2GW missing for a few months.
Would I not be right that capacity factor achieved is entirely a slave to arbitrarily selected design capacity?
Design capacity for a wind turbine is the capacity of the generator. Generators used to be oversized compared to the blades, because generators were cheap in comparison, and if you were lucky you got a bit more power when wind is unusually strong. However, as rotor speed is slowing down and power is going up, generators are becoming more expensive and over-engineering the generator is not as popular anymore.
At the same time, offshore wind tends to be much less variable than onshore. You rarely find that there is no wind at all, and that means you get a good bit of time when offshore wind produces decently while onshore is almost at zero. In a market with a lot of wind generation capacity, that is precisely then time when a lot of money is to be made because prices are high. To catch that, you need long blades, not overly-large generator, and it is ok to shut down production during storms. Older onshore wind farms can produce enormous amounts of power during almost all storms anyway (power produced goes up by the cube of wind speed).
Anyway, all this right now translates to approximately unchanged cost-per-capacity, whereas cost-per-energy is going down.
The calculation for offshore wind is just completely wrong. Capacity factor is set to 27%, which is lower than for onshore wind. Meanwhile, offshore wind is already higher than 40% and the newest wind farm in Denmark should be able to break 50%. That particular wind farm has been criticized for being extremely overpriced, and yet the operator is only paid 173USD/MWh (that price runs for about 12 years, after that there is no guaranteed minimum price).
But its coverage of this Olympics has been stellar, and I can watch any - and all events.
This is not quite true. Lots of events aren't shown on any of the channels. Particularly in sailing. The British bias is also quite apparent in the footage made available for stations around the world. You get lots of pictures and information about the British boat in 15th place, while missing out on the actual action elsewhere.
I can't complain too much because this is pretty much the first time anyone has made a serious attempt at TV coverage of sailing at all.
Gnome has pretty much given up on storing session state, unfortunately. It annoys me a lot too.
You can somewhat work around it with extensions that put specific applications on specific desktops, unless you specific windows from the same application to be on specific desktops.
That's one of the really neat things actually -- it doesn't just search the application name, it searches other things too. I am not sure precisely which ones, but if I search for "photo" I get Eye of Gnome and GIMP. Well the stupid thing is that I don't, I have to search for "foto" because I have chosen my locale to be Danish. It ought to search in English as well as in the local language. Other than that it works really well.
Gnome 3.0 had me trying out various tiling window managers to get rid of the horrible Shell.
Gnome 3.2 came out and I went back to the Shell. I needed a ton of extensions to get a usable desktop.
Now, with 3.4, all I need to add is a direct shortcut to each desktop. Alas, the GUI offers me shortcuts only for the first four desktops, but at least it is possible to set shortcuts for all of them on the command line. I no longer have any extensions installed. Super + typing part of the application name is wonderful.
All in all, 3.4 is IMHO nicer than Gnome 2. The road to get there has been horrendous and it may have cost too many users and developers for Gnome to be viable in the future. I hope Gnome will survive, because it is the best desktop I have tried so far.
Most people don't fall for cons, but some do. In this case a police department and a policeman fell for the con, and a child was shot because of the deception. Obviously we need to educate the potential victims, but we also need to punish the con man.
I could not be bothered to look up more than 2 states, since I don't live in the US. For both of them, California and Texas, bicycles have to ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb.
2. It lets me get into my house easily, while making it much more difficult for anyone else to get in without leaving clear and obvious signs that they have trespassed (i.e. a broken window.)
A small minority of locks fulfill that purpose today. The majority can be opened quickly and easily. If you are lucky, an expert can detect that the lock was forced.
For some, the convenience of being able to call a locksmith and get in easily if you lose your keys outweigh the risk of having to try to prove to an insurance company that you did not leave the door unlocked.
No, not really. As far as I know, the 'funky physical layer' link to the ISP isn't Ethernet at all. Generally speaking some form of PPP is used on top of it, but it's quite common for this to be PPPoA (ATM) rather than PPPoE (Ethernet) because telco ISPs tend to do a lot of internal networking with ATM.
Look up Ethernet First Mile. All that junk is gone.
Solar module prices improve almost 10% a year right now and have for a few years. If we can get perhaps 5 more years out of that trend, solar will get cheap enough that demand skyrockets.
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They are way too big to turn themselves around like that. They would Osborne themselves for the third time in three years -- which is admittedly world-class.
Cruise missiles are way too expensive for most of the missions flown over e.g. Libya.
UAV's are an option, but they do not carry enough ordnance yet and they are still dependent on complete air superiority. So far the attempts to fix those problems have increased cost a lot.
It is fine that they are called multirole fighters, but their role is almost exclusively bombing. Feel free to replace "small bomber" with "multirole fighter" in my comment.
-i
The F-16 is getting quite long in the tooth, F/A-18E/F is non-stealthy and rather expensive, F-22 can't do a credible air-to-ground mission. With F-35 being extremely expensive, it looks like the US airforce will be a lot less scary once F-16 is retired.
Oh, and by the way, the unviable alternative of satellite internet is currently provided by hughesnet.com, wildbluesales.com, gotSky, starband, and dish network, if I'm not mistaken.
The request was "cheap, universal, high speed". The existing providers have trouble delivering on even one of those goals.
As for reversible planetary cooling, I'm also going to guess it'd be cheaper to put that system in place than to pay for the damage caused by changes in weather patterns in places like India and the United States. Just saying.
The price of something which is impossible to do is somewhat uninteresting.
The F-22 hasn't seen combat despite the wide variety of combat situations the US has been in over the last few years. Obviously there hasn't been a real air superiority fight against other aircraft, but if the F-22 had become really useful in an air-to-ground role, surely it would have been used.
The US has enough F-22's to take on every credible air-to-air threat. What it doesn't have is a modern small bomber, which is effectively what F/A-18 and F-16 is being used for. The F/A-18E/F is pretty good in that role but it isn't stealthy, and that can become a problem against modern ground-fired anti-aircraft missiles.
Neither of options 1 through 4 are viable. Well 3) is possible simply because "biggest manufacturer of exotic, zero-g materials" would mean being the largest in a market of a few million dollars. 2) isn't completely ridiculous, but you wouldn't get anywhere on a budget of $80 million.
can they get a meaningful amount of weight out of orbit and en route to mars for that money even?
Not right now, but it is not completely impossible. Right now raw material and fuel cost is below 1% of mission cost (often much much less), so we are nowhere near the physical limits on launch costs.
In fact, fuel is so cheap that if all a space elevator saves is fuel, it isn't worth building.
Virtual machines will work just fine. Untrusted guest operating systems won't be able to get complete hardware access, but you rarely give virtual machines complete hardware access anyway because that compromises the hypervisor.
That is in fact one solution nobody has proposed yet: Get a minimal hypervisor signed and run everything as guest. It would break the binary blob graphics drivers unless you put those in the hypervisor, but Fedora can't run those in Secure Boot mode anyway (since they won't be signed with the right key).
still managed to get hold of an official aeoi.org.ir email address
That is not particularly difficult. Anyone can send mail under any email address they want.
There is of course SPF and DomainKeys, but aeoi.org.ir does not resolve for me at all (not even an NS record) so those do not apply.
Factor in the cost of the gas turbines that you have to have sitting warm, and how much does wind cost? Remember that you'll be switching them on and off constantly, thermal stressing the hell out of them and costing you more in maintenance and needing backups for the backups.
You know wind production with good certainty the day before. Yes, it can vary 10% on a bad day, but who cares? If it really worries you that much, you can just run your wind turbines at 10% less than maximum power, and only power them up to full production if the estimate was too optimistic. If a turbine fails you lose 3MW, barely noticeable.
Meanwhile, a failure of a power line or a coal or nuclear reactor can easily cost you 400MW instantly. With nuclear, you even risk that a small problem is found and the reactor (sometimes the whole plant, e.g. the horror of Swedish nuclear in 2010) is down for months. Good luck having backup for 2GW missing for a few months.
Would I not be right that capacity factor achieved is entirely a slave to arbitrarily selected design capacity?
Design capacity for a wind turbine is the capacity of the generator. Generators used to be oversized compared to the blades, because generators were cheap in comparison, and if you were lucky you got a bit more power when wind is unusually strong. However, as rotor speed is slowing down and power is going up, generators are becoming more expensive and over-engineering the generator is not as popular anymore.
At the same time, offshore wind tends to be much less variable than onshore. You rarely find that there is no wind at all, and that means you get a good bit of time when offshore wind produces decently while onshore is almost at zero. In a market with a lot of wind generation capacity, that is precisely then time when a lot of money is to be made because prices are high. To catch that, you need long blades, not overly-large generator, and it is ok to shut down production during storms. Older onshore wind farms can produce enormous amounts of power during almost all storms anyway (power produced goes up by the cube of wind speed).
Anyway, all this right now translates to approximately unchanged cost-per-capacity, whereas cost-per-energy is going down.
and the boondoggle of offshore wind - 330.6.
The calculation for offshore wind is just completely wrong. Capacity factor is set to 27%, which is lower than for onshore wind. Meanwhile, offshore wind is already higher than 40% and the newest wind farm in Denmark should be able to break 50%. That particular wind farm has been criticized for being extremely overpriced, and yet the operator is only paid 173USD/MWh (that price runs for about 12 years, after that there is no guaranteed minimum price).
But its coverage of this Olympics has been stellar, and I can watch any - and all events.
This is not quite true. Lots of events aren't shown on any of the channels. Particularly in sailing. The British bias is also quite apparent in the footage made available for stations around the world. You get lots of pictures and information about the British boat in 15th place, while missing out on the actual action elsewhere.
I can't complain too much because this is pretty much the first time anyone has made a serious attempt at TV coverage of sailing at all.
No it isn't. Take a look at the iPlayer app for iPhone. You'll notice that it's not possible to view live TV
Are you sure? I can view live TV on the iPlayer app for Android (even if finding it is somewhat unintuitive).
So, to use shortcuts properly in your GUI, you must use a text terminal?
Yes. It is stupid, of course, but compared to other desktop environments it is a trivial annoyance.
Gnome has pretty much given up on storing session state, unfortunately. It annoys me a lot too.
You can somewhat work around it with extensions that put specific applications on specific desktops, unless you specific windows from the same application to be on specific desktops.
That's one of the really neat things actually -- it doesn't just search the application name, it searches other things too. I am not sure precisely which ones, but if I search for "photo" I get Eye of Gnome and GIMP. Well the stupid thing is that I don't, I have to search for "foto" because I have chosen my locale to be Danish. It ought to search in English as well as in the local language. Other than that it works really well.
Gnome 3.0 had me trying out various tiling window managers to get rid of the horrible Shell.
Gnome 3.2 came out and I went back to the Shell. I needed a ton of extensions to get a usable desktop.
Now, with 3.4, all I need to add is a direct shortcut to each desktop. Alas, the GUI offers me shortcuts only for the first four desktops, but at least it is possible to set shortcuts for all of them on the command line. I no longer have any extensions installed. Super + typing part of the application name is wonderful.
All in all, 3.4 is IMHO nicer than Gnome 2. The road to get there has been horrendous and it may have cost too many users and developers for Gnome to be viable in the future. I hope Gnome will survive, because it is the best desktop I have tried so far.
A real gun owner would know this.
Most people don't fall for cons, but some do. In this case a police department and a policeman fell for the con, and a child was shot because of the deception. Obviously we need to educate the potential victims, but we also need to punish the con man.
I could not be bothered to look up more than 2 states, since I don't live in the US. For both of them, California and Texas, bicycles have to ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb.
On a bike you are supposed to follow all the rules of a motor vehicle, and that includes riding in the middle of the lane.
If we are talking a regular pedal-powered bike, that is certainly not universally true.
2. It lets me get into my house easily, while making it much more difficult for anyone else to get in without leaving clear and obvious signs that they have trespassed (i.e. a broken window.)
A small minority of locks fulfill that purpose today. The majority can be opened quickly and easily. If you are lucky, an expert can detect that the lock was forced.
For some, the convenience of being able to call a locksmith and get in easily if you lose your keys outweigh the risk of having to try to prove to an insurance company that you did not leave the door unlocked.
No, not really. As far as I know, the 'funky physical layer' link to the ISP isn't Ethernet at all. Generally speaking some form of PPP is used on top of it, but it's quite common for this to be PPPoA (ATM) rather than PPPoE (Ethernet) because telco ISPs tend to do a lot of internal networking with ATM.
Look up Ethernet First Mile. All that junk is gone.
Your home broadband connection is not ethernet - it's DSL, cable modem, or fiber.
Modern DSL is also known as Ethernet First Mile. Funky physical layer, but otherwise Ethernet. FTTH is almost always ethernet.
Solar module prices improve almost 10% a year right now and have for a few years. If we can get perhaps 5 more years out of that trend, solar will get cheap enough that demand skyrockets.