Nonsense, Dawkins is exceedingly smart. What he doesn't have is extensive training in the philosophy of religion, which causes him to make statements that sometimes woefully misrepresent the religious perspective.
That hits the nail on the head precisely! Just as people who lack training in science have difficulty understanding the scientific perspective, those who lack training in religious philosophy have difficulty understanding the religious perspective. As a result, scientists who aren't steeped in religion don't have much common ground for conversation with religious people who aren't steeped in science. Without that common ground it shouldn't be surprising that philosophical wires get crossed and people on each side of the evolutionary debate are seen by the other as simply building up and knocking down strawmen. Scientists and religious people generally don't talk to each other, they talk past, around, over, under, beneath, above, and at each other.
Scientific illiteracy isn't due exclusively (or even mostly) to religious beliefs, of course, but the religious ones at least have guiding principles behind their illiteracy and that makes it easier to identify the common ground needed for clear communication. But what about when you're up against apathy and disinterest? What's the language for that? "Dude, that totally violates the second law, but whatevs"?
Technologies are things, and as such they cannot have an opinion on politics.
Reminds me of a professor I once had whose research was aimed at saving lives. It wasn't necessarily military research, but since it could potentially save military lives the Army was interested in it. Trouble was, it could also be used to kill, so when the Army showed interest a student group tried to put a stop to his research (which was unclassified, since the university prohibited classified research). The professor pointed out in the campus newspaper that any technology, once developed, can be used for good or evil regardless of the inventor's intent -- I think the wheel was the specific example he used. I don't know whether his argument proved convincing to the student group, but the protest they promised never materialized and, as far as I know, the issue went away.
I don't see the point in your arguement. Microsoft didn't post a $38B loss. Why did you drag GM into it?
The point is that revenues have nothing to do with whether a company is treading water. The post I responded to said Microsoft was doing much better than treading water by virtue of its high revenues. I used GM as an existence proof that high revenues do not equal financial health.
Microsoft's year over year growth for the fourth quarter of 2007 was 26%.
Whether or not that's "treading water" depends a bit on how you define "treading water." It's been awhile since I checked, but as I recall that's a pretty average growth rate for Microsoft's industry. From an investor's point of view, that could certainly be seen as treading water (depending, of course, on the company's other financial indicators).
Their quarterly revenues were nearly equal to Google's entire financial year. Such growth can hardly be termed as "treading water", despite their lack of innovation.
Now that just doesn't make sense. By that criterion, GM is doing really well -- after all, it posted quarterly revenues nearly equal to Microsoft's entire annual earnings last year. GM also posted a net loss of $38 billion, though, which can hardly be called healthy. Revenues alone tell you virtually nothing about whether a company is "treading water."
How about just calling it "sexual entertainment", I don't think porn is by definition adult only.
Heh, reminds me of a comedian who did a routine on growing up with the term "adult" as a euphemism to refer to X-rated material. Boy was he horrified when his grandma moved to the "adult living center"....
On the plus side, the studios will have resurrected the Oscars before their entire awards season is a bust.
Sure, if you call that a plus. All it means to me is that the TV Guide channel will be useless as an actual TV guide channel for yet another night while they show has-been and would-be celebrities prowl the red carpet.
But why isn't there any real record available online of his birth?
Probably for the same reason there isn't a record of your birth available online -- birth certificates generally aren't public records.
With so many inconsistencies,
What, the press might have done shoddy research, made mistakes, or printed articles with an agenda?! The horror! Who else knows about this?!
I would want to ensure we have accurate records that couldn't have been altered or fabricated.
Have you checked with the Federal Election Commission, or are you just spreading FUD because you're too cheap to spend $25 on public records and/or a FOIA request?
Awhile back I was leaning toward Clinton, but she said a few things that lost me pretty quickly. First, at one of the debates the candidates were asked why people should vote for them. Each candidate responded in turn, talking about the things they would do for the country and why they were the ones for the job. Then they got to Clinton, who said "because I'm the one with the experience to win." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but there was really not much more to her response than that (in either content or word count). Voting for the candidate who can win for the sole reason that he or she can win is monumentally stupid, and when I heard Clinton urging voters to do just that I had to put my hands over my ears to keep IQ points from falling out of my head.
That made me wary, but I chalked it up to the inevitable campaign trail gaffe. But then she started picking fights with Obama over nothing in an effort to get him off-message. Not only did he stay on-message, for the most part, but he did it with poise. When Clinton not only wasn't wise enough to stop, but got her husband involved, her whole campaign began to look like a group of playground bullies picking on the smart kid. Had Obama gone negative along with her then I might still be a Clinton supporter, but as it was he came off looking like a guy who genuinely cares about the country and wants to do the right thing while Clinton and her camp now look to me like a pack of trolls who see the White House as their birthright.
So in a pretty short span I've gone from leaning toward Clinton and hoping for a Clinton/Obama ticket to being a strong Obama supporter hoping for an Obama/Anybody But Clinton ticket. I know a handful of other voters that Clinton lost over the course of the last month, so I'm hopeful and cautiously optimistic that Obama will wrap it up tomorrow. Then maybe Clinton will stop shredding the few tatters that remain of Democratic party unity.
BTW, you totally missed/ignored the original point - a sports broadcast is functional, not creative.
No, I didn't. You argue that a game is not creative (and I disagree), so I point out that the broadcast of that game is creative, regardless of the status of the game itself. The commentary, the camera angles, the graphics, the production are all creative inputs. Just because it's functional doesn't mean it's not creative.
I'm with you on that -- the simple act of creating a broadcast feed or videotape is enough for it to be deemed "creative" under the law. This reminds me very much of a dispute between a compiler of sports statistics and one of the major sports leagues. The league, whichever it was, argued that its statistics were subject to copyright and couldn't be republished without permission, but the court held that statistics are facts, and therefore not subject to copyright. What is subject to copyright is the manner in which the statistics are presented. So you can't go to nfl.com, copy their statistics page, and post it on your own web site, but you can scrape the statistics from their page, tabulate them in a manner of your own design, and post them on your own web site.
In this case, the game itself is "functional" or "factual" or whatever you want to call it and the NFL cannot prevent anybody from describing it, but the manner in which those descriptions are presented -- be they a blog entry, a newspaper column, or the broadcast of the game itself -- is protected by copyright. It doesn't matter that it can be as simple as setting up a camera and hitting the record button, it's still a creative work in the sense that the broadcast won't exist unless somebody goes to the trouble to set up a camera and create it. It doesn't matter that the broadcast documents a factual event -- the footage you see on the news everynight is copyrighted -- the broadcast itself is not a fact and cannot exist without at least a modicum of creative effort.
Now consumers are getting their wish, and the music industry will continue to crumble.
If the music industry crumbles it won't be because it did or did not have DRM, it will be because it failed to offer a product consumers wanted at a price they were willing to pay. No amount of DRM or hand-wringing will change the fact that for some consumers, that means competing with free. Nor will it change the fact that if they produce music that nobody wants, nobody will buy it (even for free). In short, the music industry must either change with the times or go to its grave. That's no different than for any other industry, notwithstanding the industry big-shots who seem to think that consumers owe it to them to keep them afloat.
If they don't defend their trademark everytime they see it being used outside of a licensing deal, they can lose it.
That's a myth. There are all sorts of cases in which the use of somebody else's trademark without their consent is non-infringing. Non-commercial uses are generally non-infringing, and any use -- commercial or otherwise -- that does not cause confusion about who owns the trademark is also non-infringing. Remember the old Pepsi Challenge advertisements? They used Coca-Cola's trademarks all over the place, but since they made it quite clear that Coke is not Pepsi there's no way Coke could possibly have won an infringement case. Now if you ask a trademark attorney to do everything he possibly can to protect your trademark he's going to send cease-and-desist letters to anybody that uses your trademark without explicit permission, but that doesn't mean he has to do that to protect your trademark. He will tell you that he has to, but that's only to cover his own ass and has nothing to do with whether infringement has actually occurred.
If I read the article right, this guy has no clue what he's talking about, or is completely misinformed.
Based on the summary, I tend to agree (couldn't get to the article for some reason). However, it does occur to me that if a supplier can provide easier-to-schedule wind output, which the kind of "smoothing" the article discusses might be able to provide, then perhaps there's some economic incentive for this. I agree there's no incentive from an engineering standpoint, but we all know that that isn't the only thing that counts in the end. FWIW, I'm also in the energy industry, though not specifically in wind. And I'm only speculating -- I suspect you're much more knowledgeable in this particular area than I am.
There is not a valid business model when you say, "Pay whatever you want".
Nonsense. When you get right down to it, virtually every business transaction follows this model -- it's just that we typically look at it from the seller's point of view rather than the buyer's point of view. Think about it. If you need a widget, do you obiently pay whatever the widget seller demands? No, of course not. You decide what you're willing to pay for the widget, and if the seller won't give it to you for that price or less you look for another seller or simply live without the widget. The bottom line is that you're not going to pay more than you're willing to. The reason we look at it from the seller's point of view is that the supply of widgets is limited, which means the seller doesn't necessarily need to sell to you, only to enough people that he can sell all of his widgets. But when you're talking about a digital product in the modern world, the supply can be unlimited. Once an unlimited supply is available, the seller has no choice but to accept whatever people will pay, even if that's nothing. You don't want to give it to me free? Fine, I'll go to someone who will. The software industry has, to some extent, figured out how to deal with this -- just look at the number of people making a living off free software -- but the entertainment industry is still trying to control the price of what has become essentially an infinite resource. I can't imagine they're going to succeed any more than they would if they tried to put a price on sunlight, but regardless they're in exactly the same position they would have been in 50 years ago if they priced records too high -- if they demand more than people are willing to pay, sales will suffer.
Of course, with the current legal campaign it's difficult to tell just how much a "free" movie or song will really cost. But then, between DRM, rootkits, and the claims by some in the *AAs that ripping/copying for personal use is not fair use, it's also difficult to tell just how much a CD or DVD will ultimately cost. I, for one, am not willing to take on this cost uncertainty, so I don't download and I have pared my 100 CD/year habit down to almost zero.
Actually, these guys seem to have genuinely invented the work they hold the patents for, though they were working for the University of Calgary at the time - does the University allow its employees to hold the IP for inventions made in the course of their University funded research through private holding companies? If I was a Canadian taxpayer, I'm not sure I'd be happy about that.
Universities normally have some sort of arcane policy about it. You invent X with grant money university skims Y and Z goes back to the inventors. It's fairly standard. Your tax dollars may fund it, but it's the inventors blood; sweat; tears; time; effort; intellect; experience; grad students; and ingenuity that makes it work.
And not only that, but just because the work was done at a public university does not necessarily mean that it was funded with public money (just as not all the work done at private universities is funded with private money). And if it was funded with private money, it doesn't necessarily mean the company that funded it gets the patent rights, though they'll generally get a royalty-free license at a minimum.
The next segment was on the production of solar panels, and the contrast was not only striking, it was shocking. The entire process is done by hand.
No it's not. That's the way they did it on that show, but that was done at an exceedingly small shop. I think they said that shop did something like six panels a day, which would work out to a manufacturing capacity of something like 100 kW/year. By contrast, even a relatively small PV production line is fairly automated, handles as many wafers in a day as a high-volume IC fab does in a month, and produces about 25 MW/year.
let's say conservatively labor is roughly half the retail cost.
In reality, labor is 10-15% of the manufacturing cost and roughly a sixteenth of the retail cost.
Even the cheapest solar cell should be expected to cost more than plain glass since it includes at a minimum plain glass.
PV companies don't buy their glass at Rona, they buy it in large quantities direct from the manufacturer. You don't say how thick the piece of glass you saw in the store is, or what its composition is (and both of these things are major factors in the price), but I have it on good authority that it is not unusual for a PV company to pay about $12/square meter.
Also, there is a lot of speculation within the PV industry that as individual plants approach 1 GW/year manufacturing capacity, they will begin manufacturing their own glass. In those quantities they can make it cheaper than they can buy it, and since glass is the first or second most expensive single material cost (depending on the semiconductor material used) it would make economic sense for them to do that.
Thing is $100 per square meter is only 2x the cost of a plain glass windowpane so its actually unreasonable to expect they will be able to sell these panels at anywhere near 2x the cost of plain glass.
But they're talking about selling the modules for $2/W -- it's the manufacturing cost that is $1.00/W. Nevertheless, as I said your estimate of the glass cost is far too high. At $12/m^2 on a module with 13% efficiency, glass cost works out to less than $0.10/W. That means the ultimate sales price to the customer is about 20X the cost of the glass.
Hence one should expect the thing to capture at most say 300 watt hours per day.
You're a bit on the low side there, unless you put the panel in Seattle. An average location in the United States receives about 5.0 kWh/m^2/day. Between thermal losses, dust, wiring, inverter, and other losses, a typical PV system will have a total efficiency about 20-25% lower than the module efficiency -- in this case, let's call it 10%. That's about 500 Wh/m^2/day, or about 70% higher than your estimate. Again, that's an average location -- it will be more like 650 in a place like Phoenix or 300 in a place like Seattle.
Invest say $200 in a panel when it retails and get $10 per year from it in electricity. This is a 20 year pay back not counting installation, maintenance, and so forth. At a 5% interest rate (cost of capital) it has a ZERO Return on Investment (ROI).
There's nothing wrong with a 20-year payback time if the panel lasts longer than 20 years.
I'm with the others who think your death will be nearly instantaneous if you're caught up in one of these things. It's still pretty gruesome, though.
That said, the primary purpose of these weapons is generally not to kill people, but to crush things that are ordinarily difficult to penetrate: buildings, heavily armored vehicles, caves and bunkers, land mines, and the like. Yes, these things often have people in them, but the intent is to use them only when those people are trying to kill you and you can't get to them in any other way. Now, I'm not naive and I realize that they are not always used in this manner, but those are the sorts of purposes the weapons were developed for.
The land mine use is particularly interesting: Many modern land mines are not easily detected or removed, but thermobaric weapons can be used to safely crush or detonate them. So they can save lives as well as take them. Like any other technology, the good or evil is in what you do with it.
Oh, and Israel has developed thermobaric weapons too.
Interesting. Seems that a few of the other things I'd been informed were matters of policy and procedure are also codified.
While not all-encompassing (e.g. it only applies where the posted limit is 35MPH and above, state police are not subject to it, etc.) it is absolutely 100% codified in state law. I'm not sure how hard you looked, but it took me about 5 minutes with Google to come up with this.
I looked pretty exhaustively, but it's been quite awhile (more than five years, now that I think about it) and either my memory is failing or some of these things are new. Or perhaps I ignored it because it wouldn't help me. And like I said, I saw quite a few people in court who paid fines for doing less than 5 over, but they must have been in residential or school zones.
I could have sworn I saw the "don't go after people unless they're going more than 10 mph over" provision when I got a speeding ticket and checked a year or so ago. However, when I checked again, I couldn't find it. That doesn't mean it wasn't there, though, because I remember it being in the same code section as the "downhill grade" and "distance within change" exceptions you mention, and I couldn't find them either.
Ah, but those aren't laws, merely a set of recommended practices and procedures published by a state police organization. My understanding is that the Georgia State Police and most other police departments in Georgia follow them, but not all. I also understand that if you're ticketed by an agency that officially follows those procedures you can use that information in pleading your case, but it's more of a "he failed to follow his department's procedures" sort of thing rather than "he ticketed me in violation of the law." Obviously, that's not going to go over well if the cop did, in fact, follow his department's procedures.
In fact its downright prohibited by law in CT,MA,NH for a cop to ticket you, if you travel just 5-10 MHPH above speed limit.
Add GA (10 MPH) to that list.
No, don't add Georgia to that list. Not only does not such thing appear in state statutes (I've looked), but I have personally witnessed at least a half-dozen people ordered by a judge in Atlanta to pay fines for traveling less than 5 mph over the speed limit. The judge was very clear that the posted speed limit is *the* speed limit. As I recall, two of them were caught in a construction zone and their fines were massive. Not only that, but a number of communities in Georgia are notorious for ticketing people doing as little as 1 mph over the speed limit, and their practices have been largely supported by the courts. Pine Lake, near Atlanta, is one of them, though I understand that once people started having their cases moved to state court (so the state got the money instead of the city) they eased up a bit.
That said, the procedures used by the state police and most local police in Georgia do contain a number of fairly lax provisions designed to keep people from being ticketed "unfairly" (presumably to keep state troopers out of court on tickets they're likely to lose). These include things like not clocking people on a downhill grade of greater than 4% (or something like that) or within a certain distance of a change in the posted speed limit. That might be where your 10 mph buffer comes from, but that's a matter of policy, not law.
That's a pretty standard design feature in modern solar cells, though typically they use pyramids rather than honeycombs.
I know about it, the V-groove, like in VMOSFETS, but I thought it was done that way to make light-exposed area of P-N junction larger, not to lower its albedo?
Actually, it's not a groove (though that has been done) but four-sided pyramids that are etched into the surface of the silicon. They're made by a simple dip into sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, which etches the silicon faster in certain crystallographic directions than in others -- a V-groove would be more expensive. The pyramids are used purely to reduce reflection. There would be little or no benefit to increasing the p-n junction area exposed to light, and in fact the increase in surface area that comes with the pyramids is detrimental (it increases surface recombination). Modern antireflection coatings do a good job of passivating the surface and preventing surface recombination, though, so this isn't really a big deal anymore.
Records being broken for efficiency gains etc. are fine. But why are no new hone systems available today getting more efficient and better priced?
Umm, they are. It's happening slowly, in part because global supply for solar modules can't keep up with the global demand, so supply/demand economics are keeping retail prices high even as manufacturing costs fall. Another factor is that the solar industry's demand for silicon has surpassed the world's ability to refine silicon, so silicon prices have skyrocketed. Once the supply/demand situations are fixed there should be a bit of a market correction, but in the meantime prices are slowly declining.
Slashdot Mirror
That hits the nail on the head precisely! Just as people who lack training in science have difficulty understanding the scientific perspective, those who lack training in religious philosophy have difficulty understanding the religious perspective. As a result, scientists who aren't steeped in religion don't have much common ground for conversation with religious people who aren't steeped in science. Without that common ground it shouldn't be surprising that philosophical wires get crossed and people on each side of the evolutionary debate are seen by the other as simply building up and knocking down strawmen. Scientists and religious people generally don't talk to each other, they talk past, around, over, under, beneath, above, and at each other.
Scientific illiteracy isn't due exclusively (or even mostly) to religious beliefs, of course, but the religious ones at least have guiding principles behind their illiteracy and that makes it easier to identify the common ground needed for clear communication. But what about when you're up against apathy and disinterest? What's the language for that? "Dude, that totally violates the second law, but whatevs"?
Reminds me of a professor I once had whose research was aimed at saving lives. It wasn't necessarily military research, but since it could potentially save military lives the Army was interested in it. Trouble was, it could also be used to kill, so when the Army showed interest a student group tried to put a stop to his research (which was unclassified, since the university prohibited classified research). The professor pointed out in the campus newspaper that any technology, once developed, can be used for good or evil regardless of the inventor's intent -- I think the wheel was the specific example he used. I don't know whether his argument proved convincing to the student group, but the protest they promised never materialized and, as far as I know, the issue went away.
The point is that revenues have nothing to do with whether a company is treading water. The post I responded to said Microsoft was doing much better than treading water by virtue of its high revenues. I used GM as an existence proof that high revenues do not equal financial health.
Whether or not that's "treading water" depends a bit on how you define "treading water." It's been awhile since I checked, but as I recall that's a pretty average growth rate for Microsoft's industry. From an investor's point of view, that could certainly be seen as treading water (depending, of course, on the company's other financial indicators).
Now that just doesn't make sense. By that criterion, GM is doing really well -- after all, it posted quarterly revenues nearly equal to Microsoft's entire annual earnings last year. GM also posted a net loss of $38 billion, though, which can hardly be called healthy. Revenues alone tell you virtually nothing about whether a company is "treading water."
Heh, reminds me of a comedian who did a routine on growing up with the term "adult" as a euphemism to refer to X-rated material. Boy was he horrified when his grandma moved to the "adult living center"....
Sure, if you call that a plus. All it means to me is that the TV Guide channel will be useless as an actual TV guide channel for yet another night while they show has-been and would-be celebrities prowl the red carpet.
Probably for the same reason there isn't a record of your birth available online -- birth certificates generally aren't public records.
What, the press might have done shoddy research, made mistakes, or printed articles with an agenda?! The horror! Who else knows about this?!
Have you checked with the Federal Election Commission, or are you just spreading FUD because you're too cheap to spend $25 on public records and/or a FOIA request?
Awhile back I was leaning toward Clinton, but she said a few things that lost me pretty quickly. First, at one of the debates the candidates were asked why people should vote for them. Each candidate responded in turn, talking about the things they would do for the country and why they were the ones for the job. Then they got to Clinton, who said "because I'm the one with the experience to win." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but there was really not much more to her response than that (in either content or word count). Voting for the candidate who can win for the sole reason that he or she can win is monumentally stupid, and when I heard Clinton urging voters to do just that I had to put my hands over my ears to keep IQ points from falling out of my head.
That made me wary, but I chalked it up to the inevitable campaign trail gaffe. But then she started picking fights with Obama over nothing in an effort to get him off-message. Not only did he stay on-message, for the most part, but he did it with poise. When Clinton not only wasn't wise enough to stop, but got her husband involved, her whole campaign began to look like a group of playground bullies picking on the smart kid. Had Obama gone negative along with her then I might still be a Clinton supporter, but as it was he came off looking like a guy who genuinely cares about the country and wants to do the right thing while Clinton and her camp now look to me like a pack of trolls who see the White House as their birthright.
So in a pretty short span I've gone from leaning toward Clinton and hoping for a Clinton/Obama ticket to being a strong Obama supporter hoping for an Obama/Anybody But Clinton ticket. I know a handful of other voters that Clinton lost over the course of the last month, so I'm hopeful and cautiously optimistic that Obama will wrap it up tomorrow. Then maybe Clinton will stop shredding the few tatters that remain of Democratic party unity.
I'm with you on that -- the simple act of creating a broadcast feed or videotape is enough for it to be deemed "creative" under the law. This reminds me very much of a dispute between a compiler of sports statistics and one of the major sports leagues. The league, whichever it was, argued that its statistics were subject to copyright and couldn't be republished without permission, but the court held that statistics are facts, and therefore not subject to copyright. What is subject to copyright is the manner in which the statistics are presented. So you can't go to nfl.com, copy their statistics page, and post it on your own web site, but you can scrape the statistics from their page, tabulate them in a manner of your own design, and post them on your own web site.
In this case, the game itself is "functional" or "factual" or whatever you want to call it and the NFL cannot prevent anybody from describing it, but the manner in which those descriptions are presented -- be they a blog entry, a newspaper column, or the broadcast of the game itself -- is protected by copyright. It doesn't matter that it can be as simple as setting up a camera and hitting the record button, it's still a creative work in the sense that the broadcast won't exist unless somebody goes to the trouble to set up a camera and create it. It doesn't matter that the broadcast documents a factual event -- the footage you see on the news everynight is copyrighted -- the broadcast itself is not a fact and cannot exist without at least a modicum of creative effort.
If the music industry crumbles it won't be because it did or did not have DRM, it will be because it failed to offer a product consumers wanted at a price they were willing to pay. No amount of DRM or hand-wringing will change the fact that for some consumers, that means competing with free. Nor will it change the fact that if they produce music that nobody wants, nobody will buy it (even for free). In short, the music industry must either change with the times or go to its grave. That's no different than for any other industry, notwithstanding the industry big-shots who seem to think that consumers owe it to them to keep them afloat.
Guess I shouldn't be too surprised -- I heard India got jealous after Madagascar did that Disney movie. Which one gets the kids?
That's a myth. There are all sorts of cases in which the use of somebody else's trademark without their consent is non-infringing. Non-commercial uses are generally non-infringing, and any use -- commercial or otherwise -- that does not cause confusion about who owns the trademark is also non-infringing. Remember the old Pepsi Challenge advertisements? They used Coca-Cola's trademarks all over the place, but since they made it quite clear that Coke is not Pepsi there's no way Coke could possibly have won an infringement case. Now if you ask a trademark attorney to do everything he possibly can to protect your trademark he's going to send cease-and-desist letters to anybody that uses your trademark without explicit permission, but that doesn't mean he has to do that to protect your trademark. He will tell you that he has to, but that's only to cover his own ass and has nothing to do with whether infringement has actually occurred.
Based on the summary, I tend to agree (couldn't get to the article for some reason). However, it does occur to me that if a supplier can provide easier-to-schedule wind output, which the kind of "smoothing" the article discusses might be able to provide, then perhaps there's some economic incentive for this. I agree there's no incentive from an engineering standpoint, but we all know that that isn't the only thing that counts in the end. FWIW, I'm also in the energy industry, though not specifically in wind. And I'm only speculating -- I suspect you're much more knowledgeable in this particular area than I am.
Nonsense. When you get right down to it, virtually every business transaction follows this model -- it's just that we typically look at it from the seller's point of view rather than the buyer's point of view. Think about it. If you need a widget, do you obiently pay whatever the widget seller demands? No, of course not. You decide what you're willing to pay for the widget, and if the seller won't give it to you for that price or less you look for another seller or simply live without the widget. The bottom line is that you're not going to pay more than you're willing to. The reason we look at it from the seller's point of view is that the supply of widgets is limited, which means the seller doesn't necessarily need to sell to you, only to enough people that he can sell all of his widgets. But when you're talking about a digital product in the modern world, the supply can be unlimited. Once an unlimited supply is available, the seller has no choice but to accept whatever people will pay, even if that's nothing. You don't want to give it to me free? Fine, I'll go to someone who will. The software industry has, to some extent, figured out how to deal with this -- just look at the number of people making a living off free software -- but the entertainment industry is still trying to control the price of what has become essentially an infinite resource. I can't imagine they're going to succeed any more than they would if they tried to put a price on sunlight, but regardless they're in exactly the same position they would have been in 50 years ago if they priced records too high -- if they demand more than people are willing to pay, sales will suffer.
Of course, with the current legal campaign it's difficult to tell just how much a "free" movie or song will really cost. But then, between DRM, rootkits, and the claims by some in the *AAs that ripping/copying for personal use is not fair use, it's also difficult to tell just how much a CD or DVD will ultimately cost. I, for one, am not willing to take on this cost uncertainty, so I don't download and I have pared my 100 CD/year habit down to almost zero.
And not only that, but just because the work was done at a public university does not necessarily mean that it was funded with public money (just as not all the work done at private universities is funded with private money). And if it was funded with private money, it doesn't necessarily mean the company that funded it gets the patent rights, though they'll generally get a royalty-free license at a minimum.
No it's not. That's the way they did it on that show, but that was done at an exceedingly small shop. I think they said that shop did something like six panels a day, which would work out to a manufacturing capacity of something like 100 kW/year. By contrast, even a relatively small PV production line is fairly automated, handles as many wafers in a day as a high-volume IC fab does in a month, and produces about 25 MW/year.
In reality, labor is 10-15% of the manufacturing cost and roughly a sixteenth of the retail cost.
PV companies don't buy their glass at Rona, they buy it in large quantities direct from the manufacturer. You don't say how thick the piece of glass you saw in the store is, or what its composition is (and both of these things are major factors in the price), but I have it on good authority that it is not unusual for a PV company to pay about $12/square meter.
Also, there is a lot of speculation within the PV industry that as individual plants approach 1 GW/year manufacturing capacity, they will begin manufacturing their own glass. In those quantities they can make it cheaper than they can buy it, and since glass is the first or second most expensive single material cost (depending on the semiconductor material used) it would make economic sense for them to do that.
But they're talking about selling the modules for $2/W -- it's the manufacturing cost that is $1.00/W. Nevertheless, as I said your estimate of the glass cost is far too high. At $12/m^2 on a module with 13% efficiency, glass cost works out to less than $0.10/W. That means the ultimate sales price to the customer is about 20X the cost of the glass.
You're a bit on the low side there, unless you put the panel in Seattle. An average location in the United States receives about 5.0 kWh/m^2/day. Between thermal losses, dust, wiring, inverter, and other losses, a typical PV system will have a total efficiency about 20-25% lower than the module efficiency -- in this case, let's call it 10%. That's about 500 Wh/m^2/day, or about 70% higher than your estimate. Again, that's an average location -- it will be more like 650 in a place like Phoenix or 300 in a place like Seattle.
There's nothing wrong with a 20-year payback time if the panel lasts longer than 20 years.
I'm with the others who think your death will be nearly instantaneous if you're caught up in one of these things. It's still pretty gruesome, though.
That said, the primary purpose of these weapons is generally not to kill people, but to crush things that are ordinarily difficult to penetrate: buildings, heavily armored vehicles, caves and bunkers, land mines, and the like. Yes, these things often have people in them, but the intent is to use them only when those people are trying to kill you and you can't get to them in any other way. Now, I'm not naive and I realize that they are not always used in this manner, but those are the sorts of purposes the weapons were developed for.
The land mine use is particularly interesting: Many modern land mines are not easily detected or removed, but thermobaric weapons can be used to safely crush or detonate them. So they can save lives as well as take them. Like any other technology, the good or evil is in what you do with it.
Oh, and Israel has developed thermobaric weapons too.
Isn't that exactly what the *AAs and the Copyright Alliance are trying to do?
Apparently I'm wrong about that, at least partly -- see the reply to my previous message from Anonymous Coward.
Interesting. Seems that a few of the other things I'd been informed were matters of policy and procedure are also codified.
I looked pretty exhaustively, but it's been quite awhile (more than five years, now that I think about it) and either my memory is failing or some of these things are new. Or perhaps I ignored it because it wouldn't help me. And like I said, I saw quite a few people in court who paid fines for doing less than 5 over, but they must have been in residential or school zones.
Ah, but those aren't laws, merely a set of recommended practices and procedures published by a state police organization. My understanding is that the Georgia State Police and most other police departments in Georgia follow them, but not all. I also understand that if you're ticketed by an agency that officially follows those procedures you can use that information in pleading your case, but it's more of a "he failed to follow his department's procedures" sort of thing rather than "he ticketed me in violation of the law." Obviously, that's not going to go over well if the cop did, in fact, follow his department's procedures.
No, don't add Georgia to that list. Not only does not such thing appear in state statutes (I've looked), but I have personally witnessed at least a half-dozen people ordered by a judge in Atlanta to pay fines for traveling less than 5 mph over the speed limit. The judge was very clear that the posted speed limit is *the* speed limit. As I recall, two of them were caught in a construction zone and their fines were massive. Not only that, but a number of communities in Georgia are notorious for ticketing people doing as little as 1 mph over the speed limit, and their practices have been largely supported by the courts. Pine Lake, near Atlanta, is one of them, though I understand that once people started having their cases moved to state court (so the state got the money instead of the city) they eased up a bit.
That said, the procedures used by the state police and most local police in Georgia do contain a number of fairly lax provisions designed to keep people from being ticketed "unfairly" (presumably to keep state troopers out of court on tickets they're likely to lose). These include things like not clocking people on a downhill grade of greater than 4% (or something like that) or within a certain distance of a change in the posted speed limit. That might be where your 10 mph buffer comes from, but that's a matter of policy, not law.
Actually, it's not a groove (though that has been done) but four-sided pyramids that are etched into the surface of the silicon. They're made by a simple dip into sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide, which etches the silicon faster in certain crystallographic directions than in others -- a V-groove would be more expensive. The pyramids are used purely to reduce reflection. There would be little or no benefit to increasing the p-n junction area exposed to light, and in fact the increase in surface area that comes with the pyramids is detrimental (it increases surface recombination). Modern antireflection coatings do a good job of passivating the surface and preventing surface recombination, though, so this isn't really a big deal anymore.
Records being broken for efficiency gains etc. are fine. But why are no new hone systems available today getting more efficient and better priced?
Umm, they are. It's happening slowly, in part because global supply for solar modules can't keep up with the global demand, so supply/demand economics are keeping retail prices high even as manufacturing costs fall. Another factor is that the solar industry's demand for silicon has surpassed the world's ability to refine silicon, so silicon prices have skyrocketed. Once the supply/demand situations are fixed there should be a bit of a market correction, but in the meantime prices are slowly declining.