You *do* know that Chernobyl was a nuclear weapons production reactor, right? It was specifically designed to generate the maximal amount of weapons-grade plutonium possible.
How is that *better* than MOX fuel?
You do know that *all* reactors generate a reasonably large amount of plutonium, and that MOX fuel, while it starts with more Pu, actually tends to burn up more of the plutonium than LEU (low enriched uranium), right?
The whole situation at Fukushima is bad, but I don't see how a few MOX rods (most of the fuel rods were *not* MOX - even in the one reactor that was using MOX, it was only a small number of the total rods loaded in) has made the situation any worse?
Can you please tell me how, right now, in real terms of what has been released from the reactors, this would be any better if MOX had not been used? So far as I know, no significant amounts of PU have been found outside the reactor, so how has MOX made this worse?
But, there's one important difference - if used appropriately, every ton of Uranium has the energy equivalent of something on the order of a million tons of coal or oil. Also, don't forget about Thorium. Uranium is not the only nuclear fuel. Thorium is estimated to be at least 5 times more abundant than Uranium.
I've seen some analyses which estimate that, if we used fast breeder reactors (like the Integral Fast Reactor - search for that sometime, interesting reading) and Liquid Thorium Reactors, we have enough fuel supplies to last us at least 100,000 years. Also, both technologies solve the 'nuclear waste problem' by burning off the nuclear waste.
If we can extract Uranium cost-effectively from the ocean, we have enough Uranium to perhaps get us through a few billion years (and, over the course of a Billion years, more uranium will leach out of the earth's crust [there's all kind of uranium in the crust, but not concentrated enough for effective mining, but if it dissolves out, it might be recoverable] and into the oceans, making it an effectively renewable resource).
Nuclear power has it's challenges in terms of safety and economics. Fuel supply is not a real problem though. If you are *really* worried about a fuel supply which might run low in 100,000 years, I don't know what to tell you. I don't worry much about problems that far down the road.
Most of the atoms in your body came from dead stars. Without stars, the vast majority of the universe would be hydrogen (and I think, maybe, trace amounts of a few other 'light' elements were formed during the big bang) If you want to go down that ridiculous rhetorical route, we should kill you and bury you deep under ground so your 'dirty "fossil" fuel (albeit from dead suns)' body constituents can't pollute our environment. Except. . . oh wait, most of our environment is elements which are 'fossil fuel' from dead stars.
These types of problems seem, as far as I know, to be typical of "reports" and "studies" from Greenpeace. They translated and edited a 'study' a year or two ago, which they somehow got the New York Academy of Sciences to publish, about the long-term Effects of Chernobyl.
There's been lots of research done on the long term health effects caused by Chernobyl, most of them finding relatively few deaths and cancers after 25 years. The U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation reviewed and summarized all the best science they could find, coming to the conclusion that there were and continue to be very few deaths and additional cancers as a result of the Chernobyl accident.
Since that doesn't give the results that Greenpeace wanted, they *commissioned* this report which comes to the conclusion that Chernobyl is responsible for 1,000,000 deaths and counting. While I've not read it (it's pretty expensive - like $250 or something ridiculous, to get access to it, and I refuse to give Greenpeace that kind of funding), a number of scientists have reviewed it, and found that the report itself *specifically* repudiates standard scientific procedures because they don't give the results that the authors wanted to find.
For examples, see this article, in particular, the section "Ignoring Science", which details some of the ways in which the "NYAS Study" (which Greenpeace folks cite all over the place in online discussions - I've seen no less than 10 citations in all sort of online discussions at well known News sites, etc, and, which, by the way, the NYAS has said they have not reviewed and make no endorsement of the "study", but they just publish it for reasons that nobody seems to be clear about - I haven't been able to find an explanation/justification for how the decision was made).
So, I think it should be standard policy to ignore 'studies' and 'reports' from Greenpeace, because they try to make scientific claims, while simultaneously ignoring standard scientific process in coming to conclusions, so their results are therefore unscientific snake oil.
I'll get this started by pointing out one seeming flaw or inconsistency in the article itself.
On page one, the author states,
Other than using a Webmail client, a PlayBook without a BlackBerry is unable to communicate. You can't connect to POP, IMAP, or Exchange servers directly from the tablet, as you can from an iOS or Android device -- you must have a BlackBerry tethered via Bluetooth using the BlackBerry Bridge application.
On page 3, in the security section, he then contradicts himself:
If you're tethered to a BlackBerry, you can rest assured that your communications are secured. But if you don't use BlackBerry tethering, then you have no security, as you must use standard IMAP and POP connections to your email.
Those two statements cannot both be true. I think what the author was trying to say probably, is that you can't use the normal BlackBerry "secure" email, contacts, and calendars, unless tethered (which is still a reasonable flaw to point out), which would be required for any business servers you want to connect to. But, that still makes his original statement poorly worded at best, deceptive at worst.
So, which part is he wrong or lieing about? The article seemed to present facts, such as the PlayBook requires a BlackBerry to be tethered to it for basic email functionality.
Is he wrong? Is he lieing?
He said AT&T won't allow you to install the Bridge tethering software, so then if you're an AT&T customer, you can't get the tethering functionality without violating the terms of your contract.
Is he wrong? Is he lieing?
I get so tired of people making ad hominem attacks against article authors, instead of just answering the article itself. What criticism's that he made do you think are unfair or dishonest?
I figure the first step in getting people to convert to metric is simply to get everyone using metric units for simple things at home like kitchen measuring cups and measuring spoons, rulers, measuring tapes, saw blades, wrenches, etc.
The problem with that is, "Grandma's recipe" for whatever is in the old units. Dad's books of plans for building cabinets or furniture or whatever are in the old units. Just because you decide to start using metric doesn't mean that hundreds of years of old resources magically get updated to the new units. Sure, they can be converted, but that's work people would rather not do if they don't have to, and prone to errors which can end up being costly or, in some cases, even fatal (think of a second or third story deck which, perhaps collapses, because someone made a conversion mistake and used supporting beams which were of too small a width, and so could not bear the weight which they were thought to be able to bear).
It's kind of funny. When I first started playing video and computer games as a kid in the 80's, arguably a lot of the content for Nintendo and PC was not worth the 40-60 that they were charging. The games were, overall, smaller, less technologically advanced, there were less art assets, and simpler art assets, smaller levels, etc.
For many years, the 'value' you get for your $40-60 increased every year as the technology improved - prices stayed about the same, but the games got bigger, with more content, etc.
But now we do somewhat seem to be on a downswing, where some developers are delivering *less* value per dollar.
There are a few counter-examples where players are still getting a lot of value for their money, but it does seem to be a trend to give gamers less for their dollar.
My understanding is that even quantum entanglement is still limited by the speed of light. I think the main advantage of quantum entanglement vs. radio communication is greater privacy. Also, I'm not completley positive on this, but I think that, whereas a limited number of users can 'share' a bit of the RF spectrum, as long as you have more entangled particle pairs, you have essentially unlimited bandwidth.
I could maybe see a doctor doing something in coordination with IT, but what's alarming to me is this guy went ahead and did all this, then connected it to the hospital network, and only THEN decided to contact IT. WTH. If you get *permission*, fine (although I doubt in most hospitals, or businesses generally, you could get permission, because a box on the network that they don't administer could be an unintentional back door into a secure network).
Dilution is a well known phenomenon, and has dramatic effect on the toxicity of the material, chemical or radioactive. If there's too much to contain, dumping in the ocean is probably the next best thing to do. I mean, nuclear weapons were set off underwater in the oceans, and probably put a lot more radioactive material into the ocean than the dumping from Fukushima.
Can you show any actual harm will be caused to the environment by dumping the cooling water?
By the way, the amount of radioactive material in the water is fairly small and already highly diluted - Most the material that started in the reactors is STILL in the reactors. There were only a few tons of material in each reactor, so we're talking about a few percent of a few tons of material, to start with.
Then, the amount of cooling water which was contaminated was like millions of gallons, which is several orders of magnitude above the amount of material which was contaminating that water. Then, you dump it into the ocean which has what, trillions of gallons of water? More? It starts out dilluted already, and will get much, much more dilluted quickly in the ocean.
I suspect they probably are looking at the total energy costs to, e.g. extract raw materials from the ground, transport them, refine them, transport them again, manufacture them into finished product (potentially with additional shipping as individual chips and components get shipped from suppliers to the final OEM), manufacture and testing at the final oem, then transport the laptop and packaging to the final customer.
If you look at that entire 'lifecycle', I would absolutely NOT be surprised to find that $120 of a $500 laptop is energy costs.
However, the rule of thumb you give is a very good one - if you won't pay for the costs of the upgrade in energy savings (or productivity increases for the same energy spent, which is basically energy savings), then you probably aren't saving enough energy to offset the energy costs of the piece of equipment.
Because, in a very real sense, if you are buying a competitively priced item (that is, doesn't have very high margins) cost is pretty representative of the energy that went into making something. That rule of thumb doesn't apply to luxury goods like Mac's, Sports Cars, etc. which have high margins, but does for anything with tight margins.
He lists several very abstract complaints, without giving an example of at least one way in which he thinks it could be differently, and done better?
I'm not in complete disagreement with him that the web could be improved. For one thing, we've given website creators so much control over presentation, that there's no standard 'look' to hyperlinks anymore - ever been to a website and not even *realized* that one of the elements in the page was a link to something else?
Also, there's too much problem of link obfuscation - the problem of the user having absolutely no idea where a link will take them, because when they hover the mouse over the link, it just shows some useless javascript, or the site designer used some javascript to make something which is not a link behave like a link, but not actually give the user any feedback about where it goes to, or the link is rendered by Flash, and Flash never tells you where a link goes. I just hate that.
But, I'm not really sure that's what this guy was talking about. In fact, his complaints were *so* abstract, I have no idea what he was complaining about?
See, that was a decision of their marketting dept. There's nothing that says you have to give people unlimited minutes for UMA calls. I would have been happy to just get my normal plan benefits (e.g. free on nights/weekends, use my normal plan minutes during peak hours), just to get better reception, for free.
I was just talking about the tech, not their plan (although that was cool too - and might have got them some customers if more phones supported it; but when almost none of their phones support that feature, it's not going to get them any new customers).
I do agree that UMA will be killed off completely by ATT, but it's a shame. It was already killed of defacto by T-Mobile, to the extent that they stopped supporting the feature in new phones.
There's a tech called UMA, which allows cell phones to connect cell calls over a WiFi network. Only T-Mobile implemented it though, and almost none of their phones support it anymore (there was a brief period they tried to push it).
Personally, I love the idea, because almost everyone has WiFi *anyhow*, so why not leverage that? Why have a second, special-purpose device like a femtocell?
I don't know why, but when 3G phones came out, not a single 3G phone for a long time came with UMA support, and then I think the only one that did was one or two models of Blackberry.
Those cities are in deserts. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, etc are all basically in the middle of a desert.
But, I got to thinking about this, and really the main reason to not build them in cities is that, putting refelectors on houses would most likely never give you the correct geometry that you want - they need to have a very high percentage of the land area covered with reflectors. I can't see any possible way of accomplishing the correct geometry with houses and streets everywhere.
Further, why *would* you put a large, industrial facility of *any type* on top of a housing development? You wouldn't build a steel mill right in the middle of a housing development, why would you build a solar tower there? It just makes no sense to me.
Main reason to put it in a desert is few cloudy days - put something like this in Ohio or Washington, state, or most of the states, really, and you'll never get your money back, because it'll be cloudy 1/3 of the year or more.
These power plants make some sense in parts of California, maybe Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, etc. where it's sunny maybe 320 days a year or something along those lines.
As for putting these in a housing development, that just sounds like an accident waiting to happen, but I dunno. I remember hearing about a fire at one of these concentrated solar power plants. I dunno if this new plant uses the same design, but the plant that had the fire, was using the Sun to heat up some type of oil to like 500 or 600 degrees. Some of the hot oil got out of the system, and once it reached air, ignited and burned.
There've been online "chat" site forever, where you go chat with some girl or guy who says what you want to hear and pretends to be your fantasy lover, and you're never going to meet them in real life.
The only thing new here is that they'll setup a facebook page so you can eventually be humiliated when all your friends and relatives realize the 'girl' you've been 'seeing' online is completely fake and you made her up.
24 fps is really just, warmer, you know. You can really see the difference, and the 24fps just looks better, to my eyes anyhow. BTW, I am so glad I bought the Monster Video cables - my DVD bits have so much less signal degradation with them.
I suspect that $50/GB is really not that terrible, comparatively, with month-to-month plans, if it doesn't expire and you can actually use the entire GB you payed for.
I say that, because I'm pretty sure that most folks on month-to-month plants don't really use as much bandwidth as they're paying for every month, and in the end, most of the contract folks are paying at least $50/GB too.
For any company or even non-profit organization, unless they are already substantially developed, part of the goal is some level of growth. Break-even means there's not really a possibility for growth, and the organization will have a hard time getting better.
For the folks behind the HIB's, that might mean that with a bit more money, perhaps they can provide more technical support people (though they've done, from what I can tell, an awesome job with what they had, I also think they ended up all working 80+ hour weeks during the big events). It also might mean that, if they can make a bit of money, perhaps they can get developers of better titles to participate in the future, maybe a little more publicity to get even more people to hear about and particpate in the bundles, better servers, better website design, etc.
Now, there's a difference between a 'healthy' profit and a glutonous one, of course, but a little bit of profit really is necessary for any organization to thrive in the future, not just 'break-even'.
Using a chemical launch rocket to get into outer earth orbit will likely always remain more practical than a space elevator. Like you say, from their you can use other means.
Would ion drives be unsafe for terrestrial launch, so that you have to get into orbit before you can fire them up? I've wondered about that - I suppose that a high energy Ion stream would probably be a pretty hazardous thing to organic life - it would basically be ionizing radiation, right?
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You *do* know that Chernobyl was a nuclear weapons production reactor, right? It was specifically designed to generate the maximal amount of weapons-grade plutonium possible.
How is that *better* than MOX fuel?
You do know that *all* reactors generate a reasonably large amount of plutonium, and that MOX fuel, while it starts with more Pu, actually tends to burn up more of the plutonium than LEU (low enriched uranium), right?
The whole situation at Fukushima is bad, but I don't see how a few MOX rods (most of the fuel rods were *not* MOX - even in the one reactor that was using MOX, it was only a small number of the total rods loaded in) has made the situation any worse?
Can you please tell me how, right now, in real terms of what has been released from the reactors, this would be any better if MOX had not been used? So far as I know, no significant amounts of PU have been found outside the reactor, so how has MOX made this worse?
But, there's one important difference - if used appropriately, every ton of Uranium has the energy equivalent of something on the order of a million tons of coal or oil. Also, don't forget about Thorium. Uranium is not the only nuclear fuel. Thorium is estimated to be at least 5 times more abundant than Uranium.
I've seen some analyses which estimate that, if we used fast breeder reactors (like the Integral Fast Reactor - search for that sometime, interesting reading) and Liquid Thorium Reactors, we have enough fuel supplies to last us at least 100,000 years. Also, both technologies solve the 'nuclear waste problem' by burning off the nuclear waste.
If we can extract Uranium cost-effectively from the ocean, we have enough Uranium to perhaps get us through a few billion years (and, over the course of a Billion years, more uranium will leach out of the earth's crust [there's all kind of uranium in the crust, but not concentrated enough for effective mining, but if it dissolves out, it might be recoverable] and into the oceans, making it an effectively renewable resource).
Nuclear power has it's challenges in terms of safety and economics. Fuel supply is not a real problem though. If you are *really* worried about a fuel supply which might run low in 100,000 years, I don't know what to tell you. I don't worry much about problems that far down the road.
""fossil" fuels (albeit one from dead suns)."
Most of the atoms in your body came from dead stars. Without stars, the vast majority of the universe would be hydrogen (and I think, maybe, trace amounts of a few other 'light' elements were formed during the big bang) If you want to go down that ridiculous rhetorical route, we should kill you and bury you deep under ground so your 'dirty "fossil" fuel (albeit from dead suns)' body constituents can't pollute our environment. Except. . . oh wait, most of our environment is elements which are 'fossil fuel' from dead stars.
These types of problems seem, as far as I know, to be typical of "reports" and "studies" from Greenpeace. They translated and edited a 'study' a year or two ago, which they somehow got the New York Academy of Sciences to publish, about the long-term Effects of Chernobyl.
There's been lots of research done on the long term health effects caused by Chernobyl, most of them finding relatively few deaths and cancers after 25 years. The U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation reviewed and summarized all the best science they could find, coming to the conclusion that there were and continue to be very few deaths and additional cancers as a result of the Chernobyl accident.
Since that doesn't give the results that Greenpeace wanted, they *commissioned* this report which comes to the conclusion that Chernobyl is responsible for 1,000,000 deaths and counting. While I've not read it (it's pretty expensive - like $250 or something ridiculous, to get access to it, and I refuse to give Greenpeace that kind of funding), a number of scientists have reviewed it, and found that the report itself *specifically* repudiates standard scientific procedures because they don't give the results that the authors wanted to find.
For examples, see this article, in particular, the section "Ignoring Science", which details some of the ways in which the "NYAS Study" (which Greenpeace folks cite all over the place in online discussions - I've seen no less than 10 citations in all sort of online discussions at well known News sites, etc, and, which, by the way, the NYAS has said they have not reviewed and make no endorsement of the "study", but they just publish it for reasons that nobody seems to be clear about - I haven't been able to find an explanation/justification for how the decision was made).
So, I think it should be standard policy to ignore 'studies' and 'reports' from Greenpeace, because they try to make scientific claims, while simultaneously ignoring standard scientific process in coming to conclusions, so their results are therefore unscientific snake oil.
I'll get this started by pointing out one seeming flaw or inconsistency in the article itself.
On page one, the author states,
Other than using a Webmail client, a PlayBook without a BlackBerry is unable to communicate. You can't connect to POP, IMAP, or Exchange servers directly from the tablet, as you can from an iOS or Android device -- you must have a BlackBerry tethered via Bluetooth using the BlackBerry Bridge application.
On page 3, in the security section, he then contradicts himself:
If you're tethered to a BlackBerry, you can rest assured that your communications are secured. But if you don't use BlackBerry tethering, then you have no security, as you must use standard IMAP and POP connections to your email.
Those two statements cannot both be true. I think what the author was trying to say probably, is that you can't use the normal BlackBerry "secure" email, contacts, and calendars, unless tethered (which is still a reasonable flaw to point out), which would be required for any business servers you want to connect to. But, that still makes his original statement poorly worded at best, deceptive at worst.
So, which part is he wrong or lieing about? The article seemed to present facts, such as the PlayBook requires a BlackBerry to be tethered to it for basic email functionality.
Is he wrong? Is he lieing?
He said AT&T won't allow you to install the Bridge tethering software, so then if you're an AT&T customer, you can't get the tethering functionality without violating the terms of your contract.
Is he wrong? Is he lieing?
I get so tired of people making ad hominem attacks against article authors, instead of just answering the article itself. What criticism's that he made do you think are unfair or dishonest?
I figure the first step in getting people to convert to metric is simply to get everyone using metric units for simple things at home like kitchen measuring cups and measuring spoons, rulers, measuring tapes, saw blades, wrenches, etc.
The problem with that is, "Grandma's recipe" for whatever is in the old units. Dad's books of plans for building cabinets or furniture or whatever are in the old units. Just because you decide to start using metric doesn't mean that hundreds of years of old resources magically get updated to the new units. Sure, they can be converted, but that's work people would rather not do if they don't have to, and prone to errors which can end up being costly or, in some cases, even fatal (think of a second or third story deck which, perhaps collapses, because someone made a conversion mistake and used supporting beams which were of too small a width, and so could not bear the weight which they were thought to be able to bear).
It's kind of funny. When I first started playing video and computer games as a kid in the 80's, arguably a lot of the content for Nintendo and PC was not worth the 40-60 that they were charging. The games were, overall, smaller, less technologically advanced, there were less art assets, and simpler art assets, smaller levels, etc.
For many years, the 'value' you get for your $40-60 increased every year as the technology improved - prices stayed about the same, but the games got bigger, with more content, etc.
But now we do somewhat seem to be on a downswing, where some developers are delivering *less* value per dollar.
There are a few counter-examples where players are still getting a lot of value for their money, but it does seem to be a trend to give gamers less for their dollar.
My understanding is that even quantum entanglement is still limited by the speed of light. I think the main advantage of quantum entanglement vs. radio communication is greater privacy. Also, I'm not completley positive on this, but I think that, whereas a limited number of users can 'share' a bit of the RF spectrum, as long as you have more entangled particle pairs, you have essentially unlimited bandwidth.
I could maybe see a doctor doing something in coordination with IT, but what's alarming to me is this guy went ahead and did all this, then connected it to the hospital network, and only THEN decided to contact IT. WTH. If you get *permission*, fine (although I doubt in most hospitals, or businesses generally, you could get permission, because a box on the network that they don't administer could be an unintentional back door into a secure network).
I get your point, but there is one important difference - it's not illegale to 'practice IT' without a license - there's no licensing regime for IT.
Are they wrong?
Dilution is a well known phenomenon, and has dramatic effect on the toxicity of the material, chemical or radioactive. If there's too much to contain, dumping in the ocean is probably the next best thing to do. I mean, nuclear weapons were set off underwater in the oceans, and probably put a lot more radioactive material into the ocean than the dumping from Fukushima.
Can you show any actual harm will be caused to the environment by dumping the cooling water?
By the way, the amount of radioactive material in the water is fairly small and already highly diluted - Most the material that started in the reactors is STILL in the reactors. There were only a few tons of material in each reactor, so we're talking about a few percent of a few tons of material, to start with.
Then, the amount of cooling water which was contaminated was like millions of gallons, which is several orders of magnitude above the amount of material which was contaminating that water. Then, you dump it into the ocean which has what, trillions of gallons of water? More? It starts out dilluted already, and will get much, much more dilluted quickly in the ocean.
Isn't a static electric charge an example of E without M?
I know you can't have a magentic field without an electric field, but is that really a two-way relationship?
I suspect they probably are looking at the total energy costs to, e.g. extract raw materials from the ground, transport them, refine them, transport them again, manufacture them into finished product (potentially with additional shipping as individual chips and components get shipped from suppliers to the final OEM), manufacture and testing at the final oem, then transport the laptop and packaging to the final customer.
If you look at that entire 'lifecycle', I would absolutely NOT be surprised to find that $120 of a $500 laptop is energy costs.
However, the rule of thumb you give is a very good one - if you won't pay for the costs of the upgrade in energy savings (or productivity increases for the same energy spent, which is basically energy savings), then you probably aren't saving enough energy to offset the energy costs of the piece of equipment.
Because, in a very real sense, if you are buying a competitively priced item (that is, doesn't have very high margins) cost is pretty representative of the energy that went into making something. That rule of thumb doesn't apply to luxury goods like Mac's, Sports Cars, etc. which have high margins, but does for anything with tight margins.
He lists several very abstract complaints, without giving an example of at least one way in which he thinks it could be differently, and done better?
I'm not in complete disagreement with him that the web could be improved. For one thing, we've given website creators so much control over presentation, that there's no standard 'look' to hyperlinks anymore - ever been to a website and not even *realized* that one of the elements in the page was a link to something else?
Also, there's too much problem of link obfuscation - the problem of the user having absolutely no idea where a link will take them, because when they hover the mouse over the link, it just shows some useless javascript, or the site designer used some javascript to make something which is not a link behave like a link, but not actually give the user any feedback about where it goes to, or the link is rendered by Flash, and Flash never tells you where a link goes. I just hate that.
But, I'm not really sure that's what this guy was talking about. In fact, his complaints were *so* abstract, I have no idea what he was complaining about?
See, that was a decision of their marketting dept. There's nothing that says you have to give people unlimited minutes for UMA calls. I would have been happy to just get my normal plan benefits (e.g. free on nights/weekends, use my normal plan minutes during peak hours), just to get better reception, for free.
I was just talking about the tech, not their plan (although that was cool too - and might have got them some customers if more phones supported it; but when almost none of their phones support that feature, it's not going to get them any new customers).
I do agree that UMA will be killed off completely by ATT, but it's a shame. It was already killed of defacto by T-Mobile, to the extent that they stopped supporting the feature in new phones.
There's a tech called UMA, which allows cell phones to connect cell calls over a WiFi network. Only T-Mobile implemented it though, and almost none of their phones support it anymore (there was a brief period they tried to push it).
Personally, I love the idea, because almost everyone has WiFi *anyhow*, so why not leverage that? Why have a second, special-purpose device like a femtocell?
I don't know why, but when 3G phones came out, not a single 3G phone for a long time came with UMA support, and then I think the only one that did was one or two models of Blackberry.
It's a shame - UMA is just a great idea.
Those cities are in deserts. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, etc are all basically in the middle of a desert.
But, I got to thinking about this, and really the main reason to not build them in cities is that, putting refelectors on houses would most likely never give you the correct geometry that you want - they need to have a very high percentage of the land area covered with reflectors. I can't see any possible way of accomplishing the correct geometry with houses and streets everywhere.
Further, why *would* you put a large, industrial facility of *any type* on top of a housing development? You wouldn't build a steel mill right in the middle of a housing development, why would you build a solar tower there? It just makes no sense to me.
Putting it in the desert makes 100% sense.
Main reason to put it in a desert is few cloudy days - put something like this in Ohio or Washington, state, or most of the states, really, and you'll never get your money back, because it'll be cloudy 1/3 of the year or more.
These power plants make some sense in parts of California, maybe Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, etc. where it's sunny maybe 320 days a year or something along those lines.
As for putting these in a housing development, that just sounds like an accident waiting to happen, but I dunno. I remember hearing about a fire at one of these concentrated solar power plants. I dunno if this new plant uses the same design, but the plant that had the fire, was using the Sun to heat up some type of oil to like 500 or 600 degrees. Some of the hot oil got out of the system, and once it reached air, ignited and burned.
There've been online "chat" site forever, where you go chat with some girl or guy who says what you want to hear and pretends to be your fantasy lover, and you're never going to meet them in real life.
The only thing new here is that they'll setup a facebook page so you can eventually be humiliated when all your friends and relatives realize the 'girl' you've been 'seeing' online is completely fake and you made her up.
That'll really boost the old self-esteem.
24 fps is really just, warmer, you know. You can really see the difference, and the 24fps just looks better, to my eyes anyhow. BTW, I am so glad I bought the Monster Video cables - my DVD bits have so much less signal degradation with them.
I suspect that $50/GB is really not that terrible, comparatively, with month-to-month plans, if it doesn't expire and you can actually use the entire GB you payed for.
I say that, because I'm pretty sure that most folks on month-to-month plants don't really use as much bandwidth as they're paying for every month, and in the end, most of the contract folks are paying at least $50/GB too.
For any company or even non-profit organization, unless they are already substantially developed, part of the goal is some level of growth. Break-even means there's not really a possibility for growth, and the organization will have a hard time getting better.
For the folks behind the HIB's, that might mean that with a bit more money, perhaps they can provide more technical support people (though they've done, from what I can tell, an awesome job with what they had, I also think they ended up all working 80+ hour weeks during the big events). It also might mean that, if they can make a bit of money, perhaps they can get developers of better titles to participate in the future, maybe a little more publicity to get even more people to hear about and particpate in the bundles, better servers, better website design, etc.
Now, there's a difference between a 'healthy' profit and a glutonous one, of course, but a little bit of profit really is necessary for any organization to thrive in the future, not just 'break-even'.
By the time it reaches US, I believe it's become like a million or billion times more diluted, no? Dilution does matter.
Using a chemical launch rocket to get into outer earth orbit will likely always remain more practical than a space elevator. Like you say, from their you can use other means.
Would ion drives be unsafe for terrestrial launch, so that you have to get into orbit before you can fire them up? I've wondered about that - I suppose that a high energy Ion stream would probably be a pretty hazardous thing to organic life - it would basically be ionizing radiation, right?