You do realize that he was a fighter pilot protecting the highly contested air space of Texas, right?
You do realize that GW Bush was flying a supersonic capable interceptor, right? No one flies one of those with a below average IQ, even if daddy is the governor.
The AFQT scores are highly correlated with IQ. An IQ score of 90 would mean getting a score of about 25 on the AFQT, no one gets in the Air National Guard with a score that low. Daddy might be able to pull some strings on that since the minimum AFQT is about 35, depending on recruit demands, but that still won't get you into flight school. Minimum AFQT for pilots vary between 50 and 70, which correlates to an IQ score of about 100 to 110. The F-102 is a single seat aircraft, so Daddy isn't going to fly the plane for Junior.
I'm not going to argue that Dubya's IQ was quite likely below 120, but claiming it to be in the 90's is a bit too far. That kind of score would put him in the bottom 40% to 50% range, that's not someone that gets to be a fighter pilot or governor. Unless this brain damaging drinking was done while governor of Texas then I would think he'd score above 115 or so, certainly above 110.
I've seen claims that Obama has an IQ above 130 or 140 but that is hard to believe for me. Someone with an IQ like that should have been able to author a few publishable law reviews, find work beyond "community organizer", not be so ashamed of his grades to have them sealed from public view, and be able to make a proper argument in a debate without a teleprompter. I'm not saying he's stupid, he did get his JD from Harvard, but that does not make him a genius either. He is quite likely the stupidest POTUS elected so far, which likely puts the low end of his IQ at about 110 and high end at about Dubya's low end score.
To get to someone that was elected POTUS and did not hold a political office before we'd have to go back to Eisenhower. As I recall, anyone appointed as a general/flag officer must be confirmed by the US Senate and therefore could be considered a political position. Looking back at others that have been elected POTUS we find a lot of governors, senators, ambassadors, cabinet members, generals, a handful of US representatives, and a quite a few VPOTUSs.
We are in new territory here and I wish our new POTUS success.
Something that was pointed out to me and tends to have some merit is that B talent tends to hire C talent and A talent tends to hire A talent. If Obama found a "clown" as a VP then working that premise backward implies that Obama is B class talent. If you consider Gore and elder Bush as "non-buffoons" then Reagan and Clinton were perhaps A class talent. Both Reagan and Clinton were considered quite successful while in office and so this theory seems to hold. Rumor has it that both men were quite intelligent.
Obama on the other hand had his school records sealed, which would have required great effort and expense. He was the only president of Harvard Law Review that didn't have a review published. Did he not write any law reviews? That's unlikely. What is more likely is that he wrote law reviews but none of them were worth publishing. Rumor is that Obama has an IQ in the 115 to 120 range, which would put him in about the top 20% of the population. Clinton and Trump likely have IQ score above 145, which puts them in the top 1% or so. Reagan and the elder Bush likely had IQ score above 130, putting them in the top 5% of the population. "Dubya" Bush has an IQ score of about 120, about on par with Obama in the top 20%. Obama likely ranks in the bottom four of POTUSs in intelligence, along with younger Bush, Grant, and Ford with the exact order in some dispute.
Trying to find VPOTUS IQ scores on the internet has proven difficult. Gore seems to be considered quite intelligent, other recent VPOTUSs not so much unless they ascended to POTUS later.
While a switch to wind would reduce carbon output, by a large margin, but the taxing of carbon will only slow it's adoption.
I may be proven wrong in my assessment in the long run but in the short run a tax on carbon is such an economy killer that it hasn't lasted long enough to matter when and where it's been tried. Reducing the ability for people to invest in new business ventures by increasing taxes arbitrarily is always a bad idea. People need money to spare to invest in any business this includes wind power. If taxes remove this economic freedom then wind investment will take a hit.
You need to update your facts. Wind and solar are affordable now. The price of solar has come down quite a bit in the last decade. Lazard's levelized cost report shows solar and wind as cheaper than nuclear.
I read that report and a couple things stuck out to me. First is that the reductions in costs seen in wind and solar have been made in large part from government subsidies. This is not a real reduction, only taking money from energy users from one pocket (taxes) instead of another (energy rates). The real cost reductions, as in from reduced material costs, have flattened in recent years. This means that the big cost reductions seen in the past is not likely to be seen again. The second thing that stuck out to me is the admission that these subsidies go to people that can afford to buy solar panels, the wealthy, while being taken from those paying taxes, the working poor. This is not acceptable on so many levels.
Perhaps most important is that solar is still more expensive than natural gas, only marginally better than coal, and (as pointed out above) much of this cost advantage is from subsidies. Wind does compete well, and I don't have near the problem with wind as I do with solar because of that, but wind cannot be relied upon for energy. If wind is deployed widely then there must be an infrastructure to address this unreliability which I'll get to next.
"Base load" is still an argument, but it isn't relevant until solar and wind become a vast majority of the energy in a locale. You only need a small percentage of "base load" to cover some emergency situations. We have enough existing conventional energy that we don't need to build more.
I've seen people in the industry talk about this and the "limit" for wind and solar on the grid is about 20% before real stability issues start to come up. Real weird things start to happen with so many different sources on a grid trying to balance voltage and such. To account for this means expensive changes to the electric grid. Making the grid larger to account for things like poor weather in certain areas only makes the problem more complex. Smaller grids where solar power is popular, like those in Hawaii and Texas, have already seen this.
Many people think that solar power matches load well but it does not. Peak solar output is at noon, when demand actually takes a small dip, and is gone at dusk, when demand peaks. This makes load management more difficult and therefore more expensive. More peak power, and therefore expensive power, is needed when solar exceeds about 15% of capacity. Wind is less of an issue since wind power tends to peak at dusk but this is still problematic in many ways when near 15% to 25% capacity.
This makes no sense. There isn't a shortage of steel or concrete. In fact, if anything there is too much steel at the moment and its driving down prices as it gets dumped.
There will be a shortage if we try to replace coal, nuclear, and natural gas with wind and solar. I have on my desk a report from Morgan Stanley claiming that it would take 10 billion tons of steel and concrete annually to replace coal power. Current world production of steel and concrete is 1.5 billion tons/year. This report was given at the 2016 Platts nuclear conference. I don't recall where I downloaded this report otherwise I'd link to it for you.
You don't really seem to understand the needs of the grid at all, in terms of reliability. Wind and solar are actually more reliable than nuclear in one critical way - they tend not to fail in a way that knocks out a gigawatt instantly with zero warning. If you lose a turbine or two, it's tens of megawatts at most, and both wind and sunshine are very easy to predict on the timescales required to spin up alternatives (15+ minutes).
Imagine that I have a dozen nuclear power plants all humming along at about 80% capacity. Now imagine I have one of those once in a century events that knocks out one of those power plants. In the short term, the first few minutes and hours, the emergency and peaker power makes up for this loss because that is why they are there. Once it is determined that this failed plant will not come back online any time soon the remaining 11 plants crank up their output to 85% capacity. In the exceedingly unlikely event that another plant is lost before another plant comes online then these remaining 10 plants have to go up to 95% capacity.
With wind and solar the output is what I get depending on the weather. If I lose one of those PV panels or a windmill then I can't just crank up the rest to make up for it. With a nuclear power plant it might take a decade to replace a failed power plant while a wind or solar component is likely replaced within a week. Given that nuclear power plants have scheduled downtime, reserve capacity, and (assuming you have a nation/state/utility/whatever that has a long term energy plan) the building of new plants will be planned for the obsolescence of older ones. This schedule should mean that with a dozen plants and an expected lifespan of 50 years I can expect a new plant to come online about every four years. If a plant is lost in that time I can opt to delay decommissioning an aging plant for a while to make up for lost capacity if I must.
Batteries further improve this situation, and have been in use for over a decade to smooth wind farm output. With geographic distribution and enough turbines, other sources are relegated to making up supply at peak times and nuclear is less suited to that than hydro, pumped storage and biofuels.
Do you think that batteries care what kind of power they are charged from? What makes you think that someone won't come up with the idea of using nuclear power to charge those batteries? I believe that if we do see this battery technology come about then I think that it will be just as popular with the nuclear people as with the solar. The difference is that nuclear can charge those batteries all night while the solar panels can only do so for a few hours every day.
People keep talking about how batteries will change how we view wind and solar. I agree, only I disagree on the polarity of how it changes that view.
If you had read my entire comment I did consider a grid. Infrastructure costs money, for wind and solar to compete with coal, nuclear, and natural gas the infrastructure costs need to be included in that price. Many people will ignore this cost because it is inconvenient for their argument.
You have that backwards, for whether you like nukes or not the current economic reality there is that replacing the old nukes with new news is unrealistic due to the huge capital outlays and long lead times.
This problem of the high cost of nuclear power lies mostly in satisfying the regulations put upon the nuclear power industry. Making the price of nuclear power cheaper than coal can be solved with a change in policy, a relatively trivial problem. Making wind and solar cheaper than coal is a technological problem, which is not trivial. Some of the problems with wind and solar are matters of physics, which cannot be "solved" in any real sense.
In reading the news lately I do see that there are likely big changes in energy policy coming soon to us in the USA. I expect nuclear power to get much cheaper real quick.
The large capital outlay for nuclear power right now is a result of the regulations placed upon nuclear power right now. The regulatory costs to get a reactor licensed only makes sense when spread out over many years with many megawatts. If the regulatory costs get reduced then those costs are more easily absorbed with a smaller reactor. If the reactors are small enough then they can be mass produced like jetliners. Even if they can be "mass produced" like aircraft carriers, which a new one in a series is cranked out at a rate of one every three years, then the costs can be spread out that way too. The reactors in these aircraft carriers are likewise "mass produced" but they fall under military rules which makes their regulatory cost structure very different from a civilian reactor.
A CO2 tax makes pollution more expensive. The tax won't make anything "greener" on its own. But set the tax sufficiently high, and suddenly windmills (or whatever) saves money on the now expensive energy.
I have a few questions for you. What do you think windmills are made of? This isn't a trick question either. The answer is that a large portion of the costs in windmills is in the steel, aluminum, and concrete. What do you think happens to the price of these materials if CO2 output is taxed? The way concrete is produced now includes the reduction of limestone to lime by heating it. This heat is often from natural gas or coal. The reduction of the limestone releases CO2.
Aluminum also produces a lot of CO2. The aluminum ore is dissolved in a hot vat where a carbon rod is inserted, current passed through it, and the carbon rod is "burned" away, releasing CO2. The heat for this is also derived from natural gas or coal. Steel is produced by various means, depending on the properties desired, also involving a lot of coal burned and CO2 produced.
While it may be possible to produce this steel, aluminum, and concrete in ways that do not produce CO2 such processes would require more energy which means more cost. Taxing carbon output like you describe is likely to hurt the transition to wind more than it helps. Solar power has similar issues since it involves a lot of aluminum, steel, and quite likely a lot of concrete too. Hydroelectric sources needs these same resources too. Basically anything you want to replace coal with is going to take resources that must be mined, refined, transported, molded, shaped, etc., etc., all of which require energy that now largely comes from carbon sources. Raising the price of carbon raises the price of energy, which raises the price of materials, which raises the price of labor, which can easily price out the competition to carbon energy.
People don't burn carbon to be dicks to the environment. People burn carbon because it is the cheapest means to get the energy we need to live. So long as people have a vote the taxes on carbon will not last long, just look at Australia and Canada for proof of that.
Economic stagnation due to high energy cost is a problem; but though luck!
This is tough for the legislators that impose policies that arbitrarily raise the price of energy too. People will not put up with such taxes for long. If imposed on a society that do not have a vote then expect a real environmental disaster. With expensive fuel for cooking and heating those trees in the nearby forest look real tempting for firewood. You can look to any of a number of tyrannical hell holes on Earth for examples of deforestation out of desperation. This also goes way back in history too, the "cedars of Lebanon" are an example of that.
I saw a talk from a Dr. Stephen Boyd where he described this exact problem. He ran a lab doing research on battery technologies and electricity costs were a big problem for him. The equipment he needed to do his research inherently required a lot of energy. Raising his costs more will only make his job more difficult. (I tried to look him up quick to give a reference but it appears that there are a lot of people called Dr. Stephen Boyd on the internet.) Raising the cost of energy to the point it impacts the economy also makes this research more difficult, since there is just less money flowing about for the luxury of technology research.
Not only is a carbon tax a bad idea I would argue it would be counter productive.
Superheated liquid metal is very reactive with water or moisture and creates hydrogen gas.
Which is why they take great care in keeping water from it. Seriously though, there are concerns about water getting to the liquified metal and it could be quite a problem if it got out of hand. I do recall that in an experimental reactor in Japan they had pools of liquid metal that were open to the air without much concern, the metal would form a "crust" that prevented further oxidation. This is much like a tarnish on a solid metal forming. This worked well in that Japanese reactor until a crane fell into one of the liquid metal pools. That was pretty much the end of that reactor.
Liquid salt is corrosive.
Largely a myth. Tests show that use of fairly common alloys will hold up to the salts used in these planned reactors for decades. Of course we won't know for sure if it will hold up for decades until it is actually tested for decades but this is a largely solved problem.
Graphite moderator burns in atmosphere and made Chernobyl accident worse.
Also largely a myth. Graphite is pure carbon, much like coal. Unlike coal the graphite used as a moderator is in a metallic state. As a metal is it highly conductive, making it difficult to get hot enough to ignite. As a metal it's not "rough" like coal and does not give much surface area to oxidize. If hot enough, long enough, with enough air, it will start on fire. However, at that point the reactor will already have been destroyed from whatever made it that hot to begin with. Also, there just isn't a lot of graphite in these reactors. The heat from burning graphite is a rounding error if there is ever a problem of something burning.
No matter what clever materials you use, no fission reactor is inherently safe, unless it is some sort of subcritical reactor, so that you don't act upon it to keep its chain reaction stable, but instead continuously supply energy to it to produce more energy.
When it comes to molten salt reactors a common safety element is the "freeze plug". This is a section of pipe at the bottom of the reactor vessel that is kept cool to plug the pipe. This pipe drains to a tank which is in a shape that prevents fission, removed from the moderator, and kept cool with passive systems. If power is lost the plug thaws, the reactor drains, and fission stops. If the reactor gets too hot the cooling system that freezes the plug is overwhelmed, the plug thaws, the reactor drains, and fission stops.
Some designs go an extra mile and allow for the unlikely event the freeze plug fails. This is done by having the moderator rods getting inserted from the bottom of the reactor and held up by electric motors. If power is lost then gravity lowers the moderator from the reactor and fission stops. Another fail safe which is rarely mentioned is that the alloy that the reactor vessel is made of has a melting point lower than the boiling point of the salt it holds. If for some reason the reactor got really hot the vessel would melt away and release the salt into the drain pan below it, which drains to the same drain tank that the freeze plug would open into.
I've seen a few sub-critical reactor designs and a common feature on them are scram rods. Why would a sub-critical reactor need to have scram rods? At least I asked myself this question. The reason is that these reactors are held so close to critical that it is possible for it to go super-critical in a split second. If this is not accounted for with a means to scram beyond just shutting down the accelerator then it would never get licensed. If built so that it was further from critical mass so scram rods are not needed then the accelerators need to be so large as to become impractical. Which means, in short, sub-critical reactors are impractical.
Molten salt reactors are much like accelerator driven reactors in that if power is lost the reaction stops. The difference is in the power required to keep the reactor going. In an accelerator driven system it takes a large fraction of the power produced, in a molten salt reactor the power required is in the noise.
You really think it's unrealistic to replace 60 year old nuclear technology with something as simple an elegant as a windmill or a sheet of semiconductor with no moving parts?
Yes, I do believe it unrealistic to replace 60 year old nuclear technology with wind and solar power. There's two big reasons I believe this.
First, it's a matter of resources. Wind power takes ten times as much steel and concrete to produce the same power as coal or nuclear. I don't have the numbers for solar in front of me but I do recall it being similar. Those windmills sit atop large steel poles anchored to large concrete pads. We can choose to put those resources into wind power or we can use those same resources, put it into nuclear power, and get ten times more energy in return.
Second, it's a matter of reliability. Wind power only works when the wind blows. Solar power only works when the sun shines. Nuclear power doesn't care what the weather is or the time of day. Wind and solar have a capacity factor of about 30%, nuclear power has a capacity factor of about 90%. I don't know if that 10 times number from Morgan Stanley I gave above includes the capacity factor issue or not but this still makes nuclear look real good.
This is using numbers from "60 year old" nuclear technology. We got better stuff in development now. There's nothing inherently wrong with how we've been doing nuclear considering how safe it has been but we do know how to make it safer and therefore cheaper. By doing away with the large pools of water for moderator and cooling, and therefore the threat of a flash boil in a loss of cooling event, the large containment domes are unnecessary. By using liquid metal or liquid salt for cooling, and graphite moderator, the containment can be much smaller. That alone saves a lot on material costs.
What I foresee as replacing these 60 year old nuclear reactors are new nuclear reactors. With a four decade span where the USA has not built a new nuclear power plant we are going to see a lot of nuclear reactors being in operation for twice their intended lifespan. When those reactors were designed they were intended to run for 30 to 50 years before being replaced, many of them are now expected to run for 80 years. While this is impressive engineering it is also pushing the limits of safety. If you don't want to see another Fukushima style disaster then you are going to want to see many more new nuclear power plants built.
Without nuclear power we have the option of smog or the lights going out. Wind and solar are not a solution. "Smart grids" and utility scale batteries will not make wind and solar viable and they certainly will not make them affordable.
I didn't say that nuclear power requires "special" mention, only that by leaving it out of the discussion the authors of the article show an anti-nuclear bias. Forbes claims that China's wind and solar growth cannot continue at this rate for long, the economics don't add up. Forbes also claims that if China is going to reduce its coal use by any meaningful amount it will be from growth in nuclear and hydro energy.
Reuters claims that this shift to zero carbon energy will come from wind and solar. The implication is that the rest of the world should follow China's lead in this. I agree, only if the whole story is told. China, or any other nation, can only truly reduce fossil fuel use if nuclear power is part of the solution.
Interesting that the article makes no mention of China's plans to build more nuclear power plants. Found this with a quick Google search: http://dailycaller.com/2016/09...
China intends to bring 58 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity into operation by 2020, up from the current capacity of roughly 27 gigawatts, according to World Nuclear News. China plans to follow this by getting about 10 percent of its electricity from 150 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2030, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?
There is a bias in all news. The bias is in not only what they choose to report but what they choose to leave out. I've begun to seek out news from places that wear their bias on their sleeve, that way at least I know what they likely chose to report and leave out.
Prove it. Farmers today are college educated and they are taught how to manage illness in herds. Overuse of antibiotics is a known problem. Meat inspectors will look for sick animals and not allow them into the food supply. Too many sick animals, antibiotics in meat or milk, and a farmer risks losing their license to sell product.
Did you even know you need a license to sell milk? There are inspectors that know about the problem of "superbugs" and they look for bad practices that can breed them. One thing inspectors look for is how antibiotics are used.
Again, show me how antibiotics are abused. I admit that my knowledge of how a farm is run could be out of date. Dad was one of the last of his kind, he ran a farm without even a high school education. Today farmers are college educated, they tend to study animal science like Gov. Rick Perry did. Among those classes they'll take is "meat safety" which Perry famously got a "D" grade in. People laugh at how Perry got a poor grade in a class on "meat" but this is serious stuff. It's these college educated farmers that make the tasty tasty bacon I love. I'm not going to second guess their use of antibiotics, just like they aren't likely to second guess my choice of compilers. We each have our specializations, I'm staying in mine and perhaps you need to stay in yours.
I think you may have misunderstood the argument. The concern isn't that humans are getting antibiotics into their system from meat or dairy, the concern is that the animals themselves provide an environment in which antibiotic-resistant bacteria can grow.
Do you have any evidence of this? If the pigs didn't get their shot on coming into the confinement building then a lot of them would get sick, we know this. Sick pigs cost money. Dead pigs cost even more money.
Farmers get it from all sides, if they give the pigs antibiotics then they are breeding "superbugs", if they don't then they are abusing the animals by not keeping them healthy. Which is it? Antibiotics or a bunch of dead pigs from a common lung infection?
Raw meat with resistant bacteria can spread it around a kitchen (using antibacterial soap will only make the problem worse--killing off the competition), and then accidentally cutting yourself while preparing food can lead to life threatening illness.
Cook your meat, be careful with a knife, and generally take care with your food.
You think that modern farmers don't know about the risks of a "superbug"? Of course they do. They also know that without this stuff we'd see a lot more sick people. There is a lot of care in making sure our food it safe to eat. This is often taken to extremes, costing farmers a lot of money for a minor risk.
The need to keep the antibiotics out of the meat and milk is precisely the kind of precautions taken to keep "superbugs" out of the food supply.
I have to wonder what people think happens on a farm. I grew up on a farm where we had pigs and dairy cattle. We gave the animals antibiotics, but it was rare.
For the pigs we'd give them a shot of antibiotics when we'd get a batch of new pigs in. A pig's life is short, less than a year, and they'd typically get one shot of antibiotics in their life. Pigs cost money, so do antibiotics, so the job of a pig farmer is to balance those costs. Penicillin is cheap but not free. If a pig got sick then it might get another shot. If it got real sick then it got a different kind of shot, as in from a rifle. The carcass of a pig like that could not be sold for meat but the leather was valuable, for a while at least. At some point the rendering truck stopped picking up the dead pigs for free and started to charge for the service, that's when Dad started to just bury them. Any pigs sold for meat are tested for antibiotics. I'm not sure what happened if they tested positive but Dad would make sure that any pig given a shot would not go to market until enough time has passed for the antibiotics to get out of their system.
The dairy cattle would also typically get one shot of antibiotics in their life, when they'd get dehorned. This was because they were at risk of infection at this point until the wound healed over. Any cattle given antibiotics recently were not able to be sold for meat, and they are also tested like the pigs. Any cow given antibiotics while milking had the milk discarded until the antibiotics were out of their system. Milk was also regularly tested for antibiotics. If antibiotics were found in the milk this would mean the milk was discarded. Since the milk of an entire herd was put in the same tank a single cow testing positive would contaminate thousands of gallons of milk. I remember having to do this before, Dad was pissed since that meant not getting money for that milk.
Here's the thing, antibiotics are necessary. I thought it funny too on how much farmers rely on antibiotics if it upset so many people. I saw the value in the Army. When going through in processing I got an antibiotic shot, as did everyone else in the company. It turns out that when you put a lot of living and breathing beings in an enclosed space, be they recruits in a barracks or pigs in a shed, they tend to get sick. I still ended up getting a pretty nasty lung infection while in the Army, they gave me a potent antibiotic that made me sensitive to the sun. I got the worst sunburn in my life then.
Just say no to antibiotic treated animals.
If you don't like it then go ahead and buy your "organic" meat or go vegan. I know what farmers do to get animals to market and if these animals weren't treated for infections then meat gets real expensive due to losses. Quality would go down too because healthy animals make tasty meat. Since so many people in this world seem able to eat this meat and live well I'm trying to figure out what the problem is exactly.
People find a way to make stuff useful despite manufacturers trying to cripple it.
You think that perhaps Apple, et al., anticipated this?
I've heard all kinds of conspiracy theories about removing the headphone jack all with nefarious intent. What if a phone manufacturer wanted to make a cheap(er) and small(er) phone for the masses while those that didn't mind a larger phone with a headphone jack could just buy the case with them in it? It saves them engineering, marketing, logistics, etc. on making another phone model and every market is still served.
Perhaps the phone makers want to keep people happy as best they can so they keep coming back for more. Isn't that how a free society works?
I know of several places that offer battery replacement services for phones. If a phone is old enough it needs this then it can be done, the phone would have to be worth it though. This service costs money and phones are cheap, so it would have to be a really nice phone to bother.
For those not wanting to go to the expense of a battery replacement there are battery extender cases for most popular phones. Again the phone must be valuable enough to bother.
What I find to be the best reason for not offering replaceable batteries is that the batteries are much better now. I've had several phones and similar portable devices and never did I feel a desire to get a new battery even in devices where it could be replaced easily. By the time the battery no longer held enough of a charge for me I felt the device was old enough to toss to recyclers and buy a new replacement.
Laptops though have been different for me. I replaced batteries in three laptops now and for one of them I feel I may need to replace the replacement. With charging ports on laptops getting standardized like they have been on cell phones the need to replace the internal battery may be unnecessary as well, I can likely get a "piggyback" battery to get an old laptop to limp along for long enough that I would not feel bad to replace it.
I fully expect someone to introduce "end to end" DRM within a year or two which will require an authenticated and encrypted connection from the source (file or stream) through the mobile processor, to the headphones.
I'm not sure how this helps, it's not like people can't or won't strip the wires from a pair of headphones and wire them to the wires stripped from a microphone. A simpler solution that doesn't destroy the headphones and with only a minimal loss in quality is putting microphones in the ears of a foam head to wear the headphones.
They can't plug the analog hole.
Don't be surprised when Apple shows more "courage" and removes the analog audio connectors from their next lineup of desktops and laptops (if they haven't already). The desktop / laptop market will swiftly follow once people accept it on mobile.
If Apple does get rid of the analog audio ports I expect them to be replaced with the Lightning port or whatever they come up to replace it. This gets back to the stripped wires and/or foam head solutions I mentioned before for copying music. This also addresses some of the complaints of the loss of the headphone port on iDevices, now the same accessories work on all Apple devices again.
I've been looking off and on for years for a headset that has stereo, microphone, and plugs into the headphone/mic port common on Apple devices (desktop, laptop, and iOS) for years. People would sell mono devices and obviously I can get stereo headphones without a mic. There are USB headsets like this which supposedly work on iDevices with the "camera" adapter, but this is an unsupported feature that might stop working at any time with an iOS update. I can also find a number of other adapters to make a number of headsets work. I guess I'm not part of a big enough market for someone to bother making a product to fit. I don't know if this shift to digital ports will make finding a headset to fit all my requirements easier or not but I doubt it will hurt.
I have a lot of broken and worn headphone jacks that say different.
Having USB-C ports on portable devices is relatively new so time will tell. Given that the USB-C port is an evolution of the mini and micro USB port I suspect that the people behind this have it figured out. If not then expect USB-D ports or something else to replace them. Sure it sucks having to buy all new accessories when getting a new phone but I'm old enough to remember the days before USB became the charging standard. There were a lot of sucky, proprietary, expensive, and fragile connectors then.
It's not like headphone jacks were always the norm. I remember all kinds of crazy ports on portable devices to get people to buy accessories from the device maker. At least now we have people following standards like USB-C, Bluetooth, and WiFi. Even the Lighting port is a blessing since we can be reasonably assured it's going to stick around for a while and third parties are making cables, adapters, and accessories with that connector.
Because the engineering mantra of designing something that's the minimum needed to do the job properly has been supplanted with a long-term strategic goal to attempt to sell more things to consumers by selling them devices that don't do everything they need out of the box.
Is this feature reduction or future proofing? I have a laptop with a SD slot and HDMI port that I've never used, except to only prove to myself that they worked, and not likely to use in the future. It also has USB-3 and DisplayPort outputs which with inexpensive adapters I can use to attach an SD card reader or HDMI cable. If given the option now I'd much rather buy a replacement that lacks a SD reader and HDMI port so that I can have a laptop that is just that much smaller, lighter, and cheaper.
I've had an iPod Touch for years that has seen daily use, and is now going into semi-retirement with my acquisition of an iPhone. That iPod had it's headphone jack damaged about a year ago but after an initial transition period I didn't miss it. I could still dock it with my truck stereo for music. When at home I could stream my music to an AirPort Expess, put in in a dock by my stereo, or just listen to it through the internal speaker. This is how I intend to use my iPhone now. What allowed me to keep that iPod working for me for so long was the ability to get audio and video from the dock port. I didn't need all kinds of ports and plugs on the iPod itself, I just bought the cables as I needed them. These cables and adapters included a composite A/V cable, component A/V cable, USB "card reader" adapter, and the car stereo adapter I mentioned earlier. An iPod with all of those ports on the device itself would have been huge.
This is a bit different with a laptop due to the inherent proportions of the format. I do remember many many people essentially laughing at Apple for not putting an optical drive in their laptop. Now we have people laughing at them for not having a SD slot. In the past I hated having to need adapters because they were exceedingly large and expensive, or so I perceived them to be, and it seemed I could never find the one I needed when I needed it. What has changed is the technology, adapters are smaller and cheaper now, and with the growth in the internet I have access to many competing suppliers trying to get me what I want when I want it.
Another change, perhaps just as important, is my perception. I have come to realize that no matter what two devices I have before me that I wish to connect I will need an adapter. We might not perceive this as an adapter but as a cable but every cable is effectively an adapter. Instead of thinking of this as having to buy another damned adapter I think of it as having to get a cable I would have had to get anyway but now I don't have to have a dozen ports on a computer where I'll only use half of them.
A joke among my friends was that USB stood for "useless serial bus" since when it was introduced there was nothing to plug into it. Now it's replaced nearly everything and I'm liking it. I don't need a laptop with a serial port, Ethernet port, flash card reader, modem port, Firewire port, parallel port, and DVI port like my old one did. When I pack my laptop I also pack the cables I need with the USB adapters attached. I treat the USB adapter and cable as a single unit, if it isn't a single physical unit already. While USB isn't quite "universal" it's close enough that I only need a couple other kinds of ports to plug into everything I need to get my work done.
Another thing that has changed with time is the weight bearing ability of my knees. Having all those ports on the laptop means weight that I must carry even if I just want to have a laptop with me to do a bit of work at a deli while eating. I'll still pack my bag with my laptop but all those adapters can be left behind.
So, yes, they do intend for people to come back for the cable they need. Any more I find complaints that a device doesn't have the p
This sounds a lot like a bunch of talks I attended while in college. When in college I was taking a power class required of all electrical engineering students and some company sponsored a handful of students to go to some big energy conference. What was big news then was the then new federal regulation that utilities had to charge other utilities the sames fees they charge themselves to carry power. What the government wanted to see was utilities stopping to abuse their monopoly on wires to prop up unprofitable electricity generation. Or, at least that is how it was explained to me.
This seemed to be viewed as generally favorable. No one at this conference seemed to consider this a bad thing. Effectively the government enforced a separation between energy generation and energy transmission. Where this equates to this AT&T deal, at least IMHO, is that this is enforcing a separation between content ownership and delivery. The "monopoly" isn't as obvious since most areas of the USA are serviced by more than one cell phone company but it's not like people can switch cell phone providers on a whim, or get the same great deal on data from more than one content owner at the same time.
I generally oppose the government getting in the way of business because it is so easy for rules intended to protect the average consumer to evolve into rules that protect a business. I'm not a DirectTV subscriber but I do get AT&T cell service. One thing I considered in choosing my cell service provider was that AT&T did not charge data usage for DirectTV and I thought that in the near future I may want that service. I could have stayed with Verizon as the price and data limit differences were small. I will say that it is nice that I get cell service while at work but that could be the new phone and not the new provider.
I was taking an information security certification course from an interesting character. He was a USMC sniper, police officer on a narc team, then a lecturer offering courses in Microsoft and security certifications, and running a part time data forensics job with one of his old friends. He says he gets a call from the local PD about data recovery on a computer that they say has child porn on it. My instructor tells his partner not to touch the computer. Then tells him that as mere possession of child porn is a felony the only way they could legally touch this is with some kind of immunity or being deputized. The partner seemed to really want the job since it could mean good money and putting a bad guy away. My instructor, a retired police officer, knew that being in possession of child porn regardless of the source is going to be problematic.
He talked a bit more on this and he seemed to imply that child porn cases can fetch good money for the technicians because so few people are willing to do it. There is an obvious "ick" factor that so many healthy people have. There are legal problems to deal with, as in all your ducks in a row or by doing exactly as the PD requests can still end up with getting charged with a crime.
So, you have a presumably high dollar and experienced technician with considerable knowledge on how files can be hidden as well as a beat cop level of legal knowledge on this, and he won't touch it for what I can assume is much more than the $500 that these "geeks" could get. Do these Geek Squad people even know what they are doing? Can they be trusted? Would they be willing to be a witness in court? Would the prosecutor even want the typical Geek Squad member testifying in court?
I can see no good coming from these Geek Squad types looking for incriminating evidence.
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You do realize that he was a fighter pilot protecting the highly contested air space of Texas, right?
You do realize that GW Bush was flying a supersonic capable interceptor, right? No one flies one of those with a below average IQ, even if daddy is the governor.
The AFQT scores are highly correlated with IQ. An IQ score of 90 would mean getting a score of about 25 on the AFQT, no one gets in the Air National Guard with a score that low. Daddy might be able to pull some strings on that since the minimum AFQT is about 35, depending on recruit demands, but that still won't get you into flight school. Minimum AFQT for pilots vary between 50 and 70, which correlates to an IQ score of about 100 to 110. The F-102 is a single seat aircraft, so Daddy isn't going to fly the plane for Junior.
I'm not going to argue that Dubya's IQ was quite likely below 120, but claiming it to be in the 90's is a bit too far. That kind of score would put him in the bottom 40% to 50% range, that's not someone that gets to be a fighter pilot or governor. Unless this brain damaging drinking was done while governor of Texas then I would think he'd score above 115 or so, certainly above 110.
I've seen claims that Obama has an IQ above 130 or 140 but that is hard to believe for me. Someone with an IQ like that should have been able to author a few publishable law reviews, find work beyond "community organizer", not be so ashamed of his grades to have them sealed from public view, and be able to make a proper argument in a debate without a teleprompter. I'm not saying he's stupid, he did get his JD from Harvard, but that does not make him a genius either. He is quite likely the stupidest POTUS elected so far, which likely puts the low end of his IQ at about 110 and high end at about Dubya's low end score.
To get to someone that was elected POTUS and did not hold a political office before we'd have to go back to Eisenhower. As I recall, anyone appointed as a general/flag officer must be confirmed by the US Senate and therefore could be considered a political position. Looking back at others that have been elected POTUS we find a lot of governors, senators, ambassadors, cabinet members, generals, a handful of US representatives, and a quite a few VPOTUSs.
We are in new territory here and I wish our new POTUS success.
Something that was pointed out to me and tends to have some merit is that B talent tends to hire C talent and A talent tends to hire A talent. If Obama found a "clown" as a VP then working that premise backward implies that Obama is B class talent. If you consider Gore and elder Bush as "non-buffoons" then Reagan and Clinton were perhaps A class talent. Both Reagan and Clinton were considered quite successful while in office and so this theory seems to hold. Rumor has it that both men were quite intelligent.
Obama on the other hand had his school records sealed, which would have required great effort and expense. He was the only president of Harvard Law Review that didn't have a review published. Did he not write any law reviews? That's unlikely. What is more likely is that he wrote law reviews but none of them were worth publishing. Rumor is that Obama has an IQ in the 115 to 120 range, which would put him in about the top 20% of the population. Clinton and Trump likely have IQ score above 145, which puts them in the top 1% or so. Reagan and the elder Bush likely had IQ score above 130, putting them in the top 5% of the population. "Dubya" Bush has an IQ score of about 120, about on par with Obama in the top 20%. Obama likely ranks in the bottom four of POTUSs in intelligence, along with younger Bush, Grant, and Ford with the exact order in some dispute.
Trying to find VPOTUS IQ scores on the internet has proven difficult. Gore seems to be considered quite intelligent, other recent VPOTUSs not so much unless they ascended to POTUS later.
While a switch to wind would reduce carbon output, by a large margin, but the taxing of carbon will only slow it's adoption.
I may be proven wrong in my assessment in the long run but in the short run a tax on carbon is such an economy killer that it hasn't lasted long enough to matter when and where it's been tried. Reducing the ability for people to invest in new business ventures by increasing taxes arbitrarily is always a bad idea. People need money to spare to invest in any business this includes wind power. If taxes remove this economic freedom then wind investment will take a hit.
You need to update your facts. Wind and solar are affordable now. The price of solar has come down quite a bit in the last decade. Lazard's levelized cost report shows solar and wind as cheaper than nuclear.
I read that report and a couple things stuck out to me. First is that the reductions in costs seen in wind and solar have been made in large part from government subsidies. This is not a real reduction, only taking money from energy users from one pocket (taxes) instead of another (energy rates). The real cost reductions, as in from reduced material costs, have flattened in recent years. This means that the big cost reductions seen in the past is not likely to be seen again. The second thing that stuck out to me is the admission that these subsidies go to people that can afford to buy solar panels, the wealthy, while being taken from those paying taxes, the working poor. This is not acceptable on so many levels.
Perhaps most important is that solar is still more expensive than natural gas, only marginally better than coal, and (as pointed out above) much of this cost advantage is from subsidies. Wind does compete well, and I don't have near the problem with wind as I do with solar because of that, but wind cannot be relied upon for energy. If wind is deployed widely then there must be an infrastructure to address this unreliability which I'll get to next.
"Base load" is still an argument, but it isn't relevant until solar and wind become a vast majority of the energy in a locale. You only need a small percentage of "base load" to cover some emergency situations. We have enough existing conventional energy that we don't need to build more.
I've seen people in the industry talk about this and the "limit" for wind and solar on the grid is about 20% before real stability issues start to come up. Real weird things start to happen with so many different sources on a grid trying to balance voltage and such. To account for this means expensive changes to the electric grid. Making the grid larger to account for things like poor weather in certain areas only makes the problem more complex. Smaller grids where solar power is popular, like those in Hawaii and Texas, have already seen this.
Many people think that solar power matches load well but it does not. Peak solar output is at noon, when demand actually takes a small dip, and is gone at dusk, when demand peaks. This makes load management more difficult and therefore more expensive. More peak power, and therefore expensive power, is needed when solar exceeds about 15% of capacity. Wind is less of an issue since wind power tends to peak at dusk but this is still problematic in many ways when near 15% to 25% capacity.
This makes no sense. There isn't a shortage of steel or concrete. In fact, if anything there is too much steel at the moment and its driving down prices as it gets dumped.
There will be a shortage if we try to replace coal, nuclear, and natural gas with wind and solar. I have on my desk a report from Morgan Stanley claiming that it would take 10 billion tons of steel and concrete annually to replace coal power. Current world production of steel and concrete is 1.5 billion tons/year. This report was given at the 2016 Platts nuclear conference. I don't recall where I downloaded this report otherwise I'd link to it for you.
You don't really seem to understand the needs of the grid at all, in terms of reliability. Wind and solar are actually more reliable than nuclear in one critical way - they tend not to fail in a way that knocks out a gigawatt instantly with zero warning. If you lose a turbine or two, it's tens of megawatts at most, and both wind and sunshine are very easy to predict on the timescales required to spin up alternatives (15+ minutes).
Imagine that I have a dozen nuclear power plants all humming along at about 80% capacity. Now imagine I have one of those once in a century events that knocks out one of those power plants. In the short term, the first few minutes and hours, the emergency and peaker power makes up for this loss because that is why they are there. Once it is determined that this failed plant will not come back online any time soon the remaining 11 plants crank up their output to 85% capacity. In the exceedingly unlikely event that another plant is lost before another plant comes online then these remaining 10 plants have to go up to 95% capacity.
With wind and solar the output is what I get depending on the weather. If I lose one of those PV panels or a windmill then I can't just crank up the rest to make up for it. With a nuclear power plant it might take a decade to replace a failed power plant while a wind or solar component is likely replaced within a week. Given that nuclear power plants have scheduled downtime, reserve capacity, and (assuming you have a nation/state/utility/whatever that has a long term energy plan) the building of new plants will be planned for the obsolescence of older ones. This schedule should mean that with a dozen plants and an expected lifespan of 50 years I can expect a new plant to come online about every four years. If a plant is lost in that time I can opt to delay decommissioning an aging plant for a while to make up for lost capacity if I must.
Batteries further improve this situation, and have been in use for over a decade to smooth wind farm output. With geographic distribution and enough turbines, other sources are relegated to making up supply at peak times and nuclear is less suited to that than hydro, pumped storage and biofuels.
Do you think that batteries care what kind of power they are charged from? What makes you think that someone won't come up with the idea of using nuclear power to charge those batteries? I believe that if we do see this battery technology come about then I think that it will be just as popular with the nuclear people as with the solar. The difference is that nuclear can charge those batteries all night while the solar panels can only do so for a few hours every day.
People keep talking about how batteries will change how we view wind and solar. I agree, only I disagree on the polarity of how it changes that view.
If you had read my entire comment I did consider a grid. Infrastructure costs money, for wind and solar to compete with coal, nuclear, and natural gas the infrastructure costs need to be included in that price. Many people will ignore this cost because it is inconvenient for their argument.
You have that backwards, for whether you like nukes or not the current economic reality there is that replacing the old nukes with new news is unrealistic due to the huge capital outlays and long lead times.
This problem of the high cost of nuclear power lies mostly in satisfying the regulations put upon the nuclear power industry. Making the price of nuclear power cheaper than coal can be solved with a change in policy, a relatively trivial problem. Making wind and solar cheaper than coal is a technological problem, which is not trivial. Some of the problems with wind and solar are matters of physics, which cannot be "solved" in any real sense.
In reading the news lately I do see that there are likely big changes in energy policy coming soon to us in the USA. I expect nuclear power to get much cheaper real quick.
The large capital outlay for nuclear power right now is a result of the regulations placed upon nuclear power right now. The regulatory costs to get a reactor licensed only makes sense when spread out over many years with many megawatts. If the regulatory costs get reduced then those costs are more easily absorbed with a smaller reactor. If the reactors are small enough then they can be mass produced like jetliners. Even if they can be "mass produced" like aircraft carriers, which a new one in a series is cranked out at a rate of one every three years, then the costs can be spread out that way too. The reactors in these aircraft carriers are likewise "mass produced" but they fall under military rules which makes their regulatory cost structure very different from a civilian reactor.
A CO2 tax makes pollution more expensive. The tax won't make anything "greener" on its own. But set the tax sufficiently high, and suddenly windmills (or whatever) saves money on the now expensive energy.
I have a few questions for you. What do you think windmills are made of? This isn't a trick question either. The answer is that a large portion of the costs in windmills is in the steel, aluminum, and concrete. What do you think happens to the price of these materials if CO2 output is taxed? The way concrete is produced now includes the reduction of limestone to lime by heating it. This heat is often from natural gas or coal. The reduction of the limestone releases CO2.
Aluminum also produces a lot of CO2. The aluminum ore is dissolved in a hot vat where a carbon rod is inserted, current passed through it, and the carbon rod is "burned" away, releasing CO2. The heat for this is also derived from natural gas or coal. Steel is produced by various means, depending on the properties desired, also involving a lot of coal burned and CO2 produced.
While it may be possible to produce this steel, aluminum, and concrete in ways that do not produce CO2 such processes would require more energy which means more cost. Taxing carbon output like you describe is likely to hurt the transition to wind more than it helps. Solar power has similar issues since it involves a lot of aluminum, steel, and quite likely a lot of concrete too. Hydroelectric sources needs these same resources too. Basically anything you want to replace coal with is going to take resources that must be mined, refined, transported, molded, shaped, etc., etc., all of which require energy that now largely comes from carbon sources. Raising the price of carbon raises the price of energy, which raises the price of materials, which raises the price of labor, which can easily price out the competition to carbon energy.
People don't burn carbon to be dicks to the environment. People burn carbon because it is the cheapest means to get the energy we need to live. So long as people have a vote the taxes on carbon will not last long, just look at Australia and Canada for proof of that.
Economic stagnation due to high energy cost is a problem; but though luck!
This is tough for the legislators that impose policies that arbitrarily raise the price of energy too. People will not put up with such taxes for long. If imposed on a society that do not have a vote then expect a real environmental disaster. With expensive fuel for cooking and heating those trees in the nearby forest look real tempting for firewood. You can look to any of a number of tyrannical hell holes on Earth for examples of deforestation out of desperation. This also goes way back in history too, the "cedars of Lebanon" are an example of that.
I saw a talk from a Dr. Stephen Boyd where he described this exact problem. He ran a lab doing research on battery technologies and electricity costs were a big problem for him. The equipment he needed to do his research inherently required a lot of energy. Raising his costs more will only make his job more difficult. (I tried to look him up quick to give a reference but it appears that there are a lot of people called Dr. Stephen Boyd on the internet.) Raising the cost of energy to the point it impacts the economy also makes this research more difficult, since there is just less money flowing about for the luxury of technology research.
Not only is a carbon tax a bad idea I would argue it would be counter productive.
Superheated liquid metal is very reactive with water or moisture and creates hydrogen gas.
Which is why they take great care in keeping water from it. Seriously though, there are concerns about water getting to the liquified metal and it could be quite a problem if it got out of hand. I do recall that in an experimental reactor in Japan they had pools of liquid metal that were open to the air without much concern, the metal would form a "crust" that prevented further oxidation. This is much like a tarnish on a solid metal forming. This worked well in that Japanese reactor until a crane fell into one of the liquid metal pools. That was pretty much the end of that reactor.
Liquid salt is corrosive.
Largely a myth. Tests show that use of fairly common alloys will hold up to the salts used in these planned reactors for decades. Of course we won't know for sure if it will hold up for decades until it is actually tested for decades but this is a largely solved problem.
Graphite moderator burns in atmosphere and made Chernobyl accident worse.
Also largely a myth. Graphite is pure carbon, much like coal. Unlike coal the graphite used as a moderator is in a metallic state. As a metal is it highly conductive, making it difficult to get hot enough to ignite. As a metal it's not "rough" like coal and does not give much surface area to oxidize. If hot enough, long enough, with enough air, it will start on fire. However, at that point the reactor will already have been destroyed from whatever made it that hot to begin with. Also, there just isn't a lot of graphite in these reactors. The heat from burning graphite is a rounding error if there is ever a problem of something burning.
No matter what clever materials you use, no fission reactor is inherently safe, unless it is some sort of subcritical reactor, so that you don't act upon it to keep its chain reaction stable, but instead continuously supply energy to it to produce more energy.
When it comes to molten salt reactors a common safety element is the "freeze plug". This is a section of pipe at the bottom of the reactor vessel that is kept cool to plug the pipe. This pipe drains to a tank which is in a shape that prevents fission, removed from the moderator, and kept cool with passive systems. If power is lost the plug thaws, the reactor drains, and fission stops. If the reactor gets too hot the cooling system that freezes the plug is overwhelmed, the plug thaws, the reactor drains, and fission stops.
Some designs go an extra mile and allow for the unlikely event the freeze plug fails. This is done by having the moderator rods getting inserted from the bottom of the reactor and held up by electric motors. If power is lost then gravity lowers the moderator from the reactor and fission stops. Another fail safe which is rarely mentioned is that the alloy that the reactor vessel is made of has a melting point lower than the boiling point of the salt it holds. If for some reason the reactor got really hot the vessel would melt away and release the salt into the drain pan below it, which drains to the same drain tank that the freeze plug would open into.
I've seen a few sub-critical reactor designs and a common feature on them are scram rods. Why would a sub-critical reactor need to have scram rods? At least I asked myself this question. The reason is that these reactors are held so close to critical that it is possible for it to go super-critical in a split second. If this is not accounted for with a means to scram beyond just shutting down the accelerator then it would never get licensed. If built so that it was further from critical mass so scram rods are not needed then the accelerators need to be so large as to become impractical. Which means, in short, sub-critical reactors are impractical.
Molten salt reactors are much like accelerator driven reactors in that if power is lost the reaction stops. The difference is in the power required to keep the reactor going. In an accelerator driven system it takes a large fraction of the power produced, in a molten salt reactor the power required is in the noise.
You really think it's unrealistic to replace 60 year old nuclear technology with something as simple an elegant as a windmill or a sheet of semiconductor with no moving parts?
Yes, I do believe it unrealistic to replace 60 year old nuclear technology with wind and solar power. There's two big reasons I believe this.
First, it's a matter of resources. Wind power takes ten times as much steel and concrete to produce the same power as coal or nuclear. I don't have the numbers for solar in front of me but I do recall it being similar. Those windmills sit atop large steel poles anchored to large concrete pads. We can choose to put those resources into wind power or we can use those same resources, put it into nuclear power, and get ten times more energy in return.
Second, it's a matter of reliability. Wind power only works when the wind blows. Solar power only works when the sun shines. Nuclear power doesn't care what the weather is or the time of day. Wind and solar have a capacity factor of about 30%, nuclear power has a capacity factor of about 90%. I don't know if that 10 times number from Morgan Stanley I gave above includes the capacity factor issue or not but this still makes nuclear look real good.
This is using numbers from "60 year old" nuclear technology. We got better stuff in development now. There's nothing inherently wrong with how we've been doing nuclear considering how safe it has been but we do know how to make it safer and therefore cheaper. By doing away with the large pools of water for moderator and cooling, and therefore the threat of a flash boil in a loss of cooling event, the large containment domes are unnecessary. By using liquid metal or liquid salt for cooling, and graphite moderator, the containment can be much smaller. That alone saves a lot on material costs.
What I foresee as replacing these 60 year old nuclear reactors are new nuclear reactors. With a four decade span where the USA has not built a new nuclear power plant we are going to see a lot of nuclear reactors being in operation for twice their intended lifespan. When those reactors were designed they were intended to run for 30 to 50 years before being replaced, many of them are now expected to run for 80 years. While this is impressive engineering it is also pushing the limits of safety. If you don't want to see another Fukushima style disaster then you are going to want to see many more new nuclear power plants built.
Without nuclear power we have the option of smog or the lights going out. Wind and solar are not a solution. "Smart grids" and utility scale batteries will not make wind and solar viable and they certainly will not make them affordable.
Here's a news article from a few weeks ago:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ja...
Happier now?
I didn't say that nuclear power requires "special" mention, only that by leaving it out of the discussion the authors of the article show an anti-nuclear bias. Forbes claims that China's wind and solar growth cannot continue at this rate for long, the economics don't add up. Forbes also claims that if China is going to reduce its coal use by any meaningful amount it will be from growth in nuclear and hydro energy.
Reuters claims that this shift to zero carbon energy will come from wind and solar. The implication is that the rest of the world should follow China's lead in this. I agree, only if the whole story is told. China, or any other nation, can only truly reduce fossil fuel use if nuclear power is part of the solution.
Interesting that the article makes no mention of China's plans to build more nuclear power plants.
Found this with a quick Google search:
http://dailycaller.com/2016/09...
China intends to bring 58 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity into operation by 2020, up from the current capacity of roughly 27 gigawatts, according to World Nuclear News. China plans to follow this by getting about 10 percent of its electricity from 150 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2030, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Why mention plans to reduce coal use, increase wind and solar use but not mention the plans to also increase the use of nuclear power?
There is a bias in all news. The bias is in not only what they choose to report but what they choose to leave out. I've begun to seek out news from places that wear their bias on their sleeve, that way at least I know what they likely chose to report and leave out.
Prove it. Farmers today are college educated and they are taught how to manage illness in herds. Overuse of antibiotics is a known problem. Meat inspectors will look for sick animals and not allow them into the food supply. Too many sick animals, antibiotics in meat or milk, and a farmer risks losing their license to sell product.
Did you even know you need a license to sell milk? There are inspectors that know about the problem of "superbugs" and they look for bad practices that can breed them. One thing inspectors look for is how antibiotics are used.
Again, show me how antibiotics are abused. I admit that my knowledge of how a farm is run could be out of date. Dad was one of the last of his kind, he ran a farm without even a high school education. Today farmers are college educated, they tend to study animal science like Gov. Rick Perry did. Among those classes they'll take is "meat safety" which Perry famously got a "D" grade in. People laugh at how Perry got a poor grade in a class on "meat" but this is serious stuff. It's these college educated farmers that make the tasty tasty bacon I love. I'm not going to second guess their use of antibiotics, just like they aren't likely to second guess my choice of compilers. We each have our specializations, I'm staying in mine and perhaps you need to stay in yours.
I think you may have misunderstood the argument. The concern isn't that humans are getting antibiotics into their system from meat or dairy, the concern is that the animals themselves provide an environment in which antibiotic-resistant bacteria can grow.
Do you have any evidence of this? If the pigs didn't get their shot on coming into the confinement building then a lot of them would get sick, we know this. Sick pigs cost money. Dead pigs cost even more money.
Farmers get it from all sides, if they give the pigs antibiotics then they are breeding "superbugs", if they don't then they are abusing the animals by not keeping them healthy. Which is it? Antibiotics or a bunch of dead pigs from a common lung infection?
Raw meat with resistant bacteria can spread it around a kitchen (using antibacterial soap will only make the problem worse--killing off the competition), and then accidentally cutting yourself while preparing food can lead to life threatening illness.
Cook your meat, be careful with a knife, and generally take care with your food.
You think that modern farmers don't know about the risks of a "superbug"? Of course they do. They also know that without this stuff we'd see a lot more sick people. There is a lot of care in making sure our food it safe to eat. This is often taken to extremes, costing farmers a lot of money for a minor risk.
The need to keep the antibiotics out of the meat and milk is precisely the kind of precautions taken to keep "superbugs" out of the food supply.
I have to wonder what people think happens on a farm. I grew up on a farm where we had pigs and dairy cattle. We gave the animals antibiotics, but it was rare.
For the pigs we'd give them a shot of antibiotics when we'd get a batch of new pigs in. A pig's life is short, less than a year, and they'd typically get one shot of antibiotics in their life. Pigs cost money, so do antibiotics, so the job of a pig farmer is to balance those costs. Penicillin is cheap but not free. If a pig got sick then it might get another shot. If it got real sick then it got a different kind of shot, as in from a rifle. The carcass of a pig like that could not be sold for meat but the leather was valuable, for a while at least. At some point the rendering truck stopped picking up the dead pigs for free and started to charge for the service, that's when Dad started to just bury them. Any pigs sold for meat are tested for antibiotics. I'm not sure what happened if they tested positive but Dad would make sure that any pig given a shot would not go to market until enough time has passed for the antibiotics to get out of their system.
The dairy cattle would also typically get one shot of antibiotics in their life, when they'd get dehorned. This was because they were at risk of infection at this point until the wound healed over. Any cattle given antibiotics recently were not able to be sold for meat, and they are also tested like the pigs. Any cow given antibiotics while milking had the milk discarded until the antibiotics were out of their system. Milk was also regularly tested for antibiotics. If antibiotics were found in the milk this would mean the milk was discarded. Since the milk of an entire herd was put in the same tank a single cow testing positive would contaminate thousands of gallons of milk. I remember having to do this before, Dad was pissed since that meant not getting money for that milk.
Here's the thing, antibiotics are necessary. I thought it funny too on how much farmers rely on antibiotics if it upset so many people. I saw the value in the Army. When going through in processing I got an antibiotic shot, as did everyone else in the company. It turns out that when you put a lot of living and breathing beings in an enclosed space, be they recruits in a barracks or pigs in a shed, they tend to get sick. I still ended up getting a pretty nasty lung infection while in the Army, they gave me a potent antibiotic that made me sensitive to the sun. I got the worst sunburn in my life then.
Just say no to antibiotic treated animals.
If you don't like it then go ahead and buy your "organic" meat or go vegan. I know what farmers do to get animals to market and if these animals weren't treated for infections then meat gets real expensive due to losses. Quality would go down too because healthy animals make tasty meat. Since so many people in this world seem able to eat this meat and live well I'm trying to figure out what the problem is exactly.
People find a way to make stuff useful despite manufacturers trying to cripple it.
You think that perhaps Apple, et al., anticipated this?
I've heard all kinds of conspiracy theories about removing the headphone jack all with nefarious intent. What if a phone manufacturer wanted to make a cheap(er) and small(er) phone for the masses while those that didn't mind a larger phone with a headphone jack could just buy the case with them in it? It saves them engineering, marketing, logistics, etc. on making another phone model and every market is still served.
Perhaps the phone makers want to keep people happy as best they can so they keep coming back for more. Isn't that how a free society works?
Aluminum foil doesn't work for this?
I know of several places that offer battery replacement services for phones. If a phone is old enough it needs this then it can be done, the phone would have to be worth it though. This service costs money and phones are cheap, so it would have to be a really nice phone to bother.
For those not wanting to go to the expense of a battery replacement there are battery extender cases for most popular phones. Again the phone must be valuable enough to bother.
What I find to be the best reason for not offering replaceable batteries is that the batteries are much better now. I've had several phones and similar portable devices and never did I feel a desire to get a new battery even in devices where it could be replaced easily. By the time the battery no longer held enough of a charge for me I felt the device was old enough to toss to recyclers and buy a new replacement.
Laptops though have been different for me. I replaced batteries in three laptops now and for one of them I feel I may need to replace the replacement. With charging ports on laptops getting standardized like they have been on cell phones the need to replace the internal battery may be unnecessary as well, I can likely get a "piggyback" battery to get an old laptop to limp along for long enough that I would not feel bad to replace it.
I fully expect someone to introduce "end to end" DRM within a year or two which will require an authenticated and encrypted connection from the source (file or stream) through the mobile processor, to the headphones.
I'm not sure how this helps, it's not like people can't or won't strip the wires from a pair of headphones and wire them to the wires stripped from a microphone. A simpler solution that doesn't destroy the headphones and with only a minimal loss in quality is putting microphones in the ears of a foam head to wear the headphones.
They can't plug the analog hole.
Don't be surprised when Apple shows more "courage" and removes the analog audio connectors from their next lineup of desktops and laptops (if they haven't already). The desktop / laptop market will swiftly follow once people accept it on mobile.
If Apple does get rid of the analog audio ports I expect them to be replaced with the Lightning port or whatever they come up to replace it. This gets back to the stripped wires and/or foam head solutions I mentioned before for copying music. This also addresses some of the complaints of the loss of the headphone port on iDevices, now the same accessories work on all Apple devices again.
I've been looking off and on for years for a headset that has stereo, microphone, and plugs into the headphone/mic port common on Apple devices (desktop, laptop, and iOS) for years. People would sell mono devices and obviously I can get stereo headphones without a mic. There are USB headsets like this which supposedly work on iDevices with the "camera" adapter, but this is an unsupported feature that might stop working at any time with an iOS update. I can also find a number of other adapters to make a number of headsets work. I guess I'm not part of a big enough market for someone to bother making a product to fit. I don't know if this shift to digital ports will make finding a headset to fit all my requirements easier or not but I doubt it will hurt.
I have a lot of broken and worn headphone jacks that say different.
Having USB-C ports on portable devices is relatively new so time will tell. Given that the USB-C port is an evolution of the mini and micro USB port I suspect that the people behind this have it figured out. If not then expect USB-D ports or something else to replace them. Sure it sucks having to buy all new accessories when getting a new phone but I'm old enough to remember the days before USB became the charging standard. There were a lot of sucky, proprietary, expensive, and fragile connectors then.
It's not like headphone jacks were always the norm. I remember all kinds of crazy ports on portable devices to get people to buy accessories from the device maker. At least now we have people following standards like USB-C, Bluetooth, and WiFi. Even the Lighting port is a blessing since we can be reasonably assured it's going to stick around for a while and third parties are making cables, adapters, and accessories with that connector.
Because the engineering mantra of designing something that's the minimum needed to do the job properly has been supplanted with a long-term strategic goal to attempt to sell more things to consumers by selling them devices that don't do everything they need out of the box.
Is this feature reduction or future proofing? I have a laptop with a SD slot and HDMI port that I've never used, except to only prove to myself that they worked, and not likely to use in the future. It also has USB-3 and DisplayPort outputs which with inexpensive adapters I can use to attach an SD card reader or HDMI cable. If given the option now I'd much rather buy a replacement that lacks a SD reader and HDMI port so that I can have a laptop that is just that much smaller, lighter, and cheaper.
I've had an iPod Touch for years that has seen daily use, and is now going into semi-retirement with my acquisition of an iPhone. That iPod had it's headphone jack damaged about a year ago but after an initial transition period I didn't miss it. I could still dock it with my truck stereo for music. When at home I could stream my music to an AirPort Expess, put in in a dock by my stereo, or just listen to it through the internal speaker. This is how I intend to use my iPhone now. What allowed me to keep that iPod working for me for so long was the ability to get audio and video from the dock port. I didn't need all kinds of ports and plugs on the iPod itself, I just bought the cables as I needed them. These cables and adapters included a composite A/V cable, component A/V cable, USB "card reader" adapter, and the car stereo adapter I mentioned earlier. An iPod with all of those ports on the device itself would have been huge.
This is a bit different with a laptop due to the inherent proportions of the format. I do remember many many people essentially laughing at Apple for not putting an optical drive in their laptop. Now we have people laughing at them for not having a SD slot. In the past I hated having to need adapters because they were exceedingly large and expensive, or so I perceived them to be, and it seemed I could never find the one I needed when I needed it. What has changed is the technology, adapters are smaller and cheaper now, and with the growth in the internet I have access to many competing suppliers trying to get me what I want when I want it.
Another change, perhaps just as important, is my perception. I have come to realize that no matter what two devices I have before me that I wish to connect I will need an adapter. We might not perceive this as an adapter but as a cable but every cable is effectively an adapter. Instead of thinking of this as having to buy another damned adapter I think of it as having to get a cable I would have had to get anyway but now I don't have to have a dozen ports on a computer where I'll only use half of them.
A joke among my friends was that USB stood for "useless serial bus" since when it was introduced there was nothing to plug into it. Now it's replaced nearly everything and I'm liking it. I don't need a laptop with a serial port, Ethernet port, flash card reader, modem port, Firewire port, parallel port, and DVI port like my old one did. When I pack my laptop I also pack the cables I need with the USB adapters attached. I treat the USB adapter and cable as a single unit, if it isn't a single physical unit already. While USB isn't quite "universal" it's close enough that I only need a couple other kinds of ports to plug into everything I need to get my work done.
Another thing that has changed with time is the weight bearing ability of my knees. Having all those ports on the laptop means weight that I must carry even if I just want to have a laptop with me to do a bit of work at a deli while eating. I'll still pack my bag with my laptop but all those adapters can be left behind.
So, yes, they do intend for people to come back for the cable they need. Any more I find complaints that a device doesn't have the p
This sounds a lot like a bunch of talks I attended while in college. When in college I was taking a power class required of all electrical engineering students and some company sponsored a handful of students to go to some big energy conference. What was big news then was the then new federal regulation that utilities had to charge other utilities the sames fees they charge themselves to carry power. What the government wanted to see was utilities stopping to abuse their monopoly on wires to prop up unprofitable electricity generation. Or, at least that is how it was explained to me.
This seemed to be viewed as generally favorable. No one at this conference seemed to consider this a bad thing. Effectively the government enforced a separation between energy generation and energy transmission. Where this equates to this AT&T deal, at least IMHO, is that this is enforcing a separation between content ownership and delivery. The "monopoly" isn't as obvious since most areas of the USA are serviced by more than one cell phone company but it's not like people can switch cell phone providers on a whim, or get the same great deal on data from more than one content owner at the same time.
I generally oppose the government getting in the way of business because it is so easy for rules intended to protect the average consumer to evolve into rules that protect a business. I'm not a DirectTV subscriber but I do get AT&T cell service. One thing I considered in choosing my cell service provider was that AT&T did not charge data usage for DirectTV and I thought that in the near future I may want that service. I could have stayed with Verizon as the price and data limit differences were small. I will say that it is nice that I get cell service while at work but that could be the new phone and not the new provider.
I was taking an information security certification course from an interesting character. He was a USMC sniper, police officer on a narc team, then a lecturer offering courses in Microsoft and security certifications, and running a part time data forensics job with one of his old friends. He says he gets a call from the local PD about data recovery on a computer that they say has child porn on it. My instructor tells his partner not to touch the computer. Then tells him that as mere possession of child porn is a felony the only way they could legally touch this is with some kind of immunity or being deputized. The partner seemed to really want the job since it could mean good money and putting a bad guy away. My instructor, a retired police officer, knew that being in possession of child porn regardless of the source is going to be problematic.
He talked a bit more on this and he seemed to imply that child porn cases can fetch good money for the technicians because so few people are willing to do it. There is an obvious "ick" factor that so many healthy people have. There are legal problems to deal with, as in all your ducks in a row or by doing exactly as the PD requests can still end up with getting charged with a crime.
So, you have a presumably high dollar and experienced technician with considerable knowledge on how files can be hidden as well as a beat cop level of legal knowledge on this, and he won't touch it for what I can assume is much more than the $500 that these "geeks" could get. Do these Geek Squad people even know what they are doing? Can they be trusted? Would they be willing to be a witness in court? Would the prosecutor even want the typical Geek Squad member testifying in court?
I can see no good coming from these Geek Squad types looking for incriminating evidence.