I like how the President promised to put Science back in it's rightful place, then cut the space program more than any previous President, then talked up the space program to get re-elected... Pity his supporters have such short attention spans/poor memories.
It obviously wasn't cost-effective to do the replacement. You can buy anything in NYC, but remember, much of NYC is heated by steam thrown off as a by-product of other industries. Did your "really fancy" hotel have steam heat?
What, exactly, is the zero carbon source of electricity that could power NYC?
As I read the criteria "creature comforts" I take that to mean there would still be buses and taxis, presumably running on electricity (ignoring for the moment that cabs run 24x7 and have no real window for battery charging), heating and air conditioning would keep everyone warm or cool, and that Times Square would not go dark, the stock market will still be run out of NYC, etc.
New York is located close to the Atlantic ocean and that's one decent heatsink, so by pumping out excess heat in the summer into the ocean would be more efficient in two steps - less heat put out in the city, and the temperature difference when doing heat pumping will be lower which can result in lower costs. The disadvantage here is that a lot of pipes needs to be laid down for central cooling in addition to central heating.
Of course, pumping all that heat into the Atlantic ocean won't have any climatic or ecological implications, right?
...people are downloading it for free so they're not by definition paying customers...
There, I fixed it for you.
Download doesn't equal use, and use doesn't equal a willingness/ability to pay, and a willingness/ability to pay doesn't mean they would pay the same price as MS Office charges (the estimated $150/user).
I'm all for solar energy. But I'm not for throwing our money away. My thought: who is being held accountable for the money, and overseeing that it goes into productive use? [emphasis added]
No, but in private enterprise investments are made with private funds by investors willing to take the risk in hopes of great reward.
The government took taxpayer money (much of it borrowed from future genreations) and went to the green energy "craps table" and threw the dice on companies the private investors wouldn't touch. The government's own analysts predicted (almost to the day) when Solyndra would go bankrupt before we invested in them - why didn't the government/politicians heed the warnings of their own analysts?
We invested billions in bringing unproven technologies with almost no market demand into the market.
We did NOT invest billions in research.
In the case of Solyndra, they spent the vast majority of the money we GAVE them to build a factory full of whistling robots.
I contend we would hav ebeen better off if we instead simply took those lost taxpayer dollars and bought cheap chinese solar panels and installed them on the roofs of gov't buildings, schools, etc. At least the money would be going for something useful and have a meaningful impact on the environment.
What was the logic behind our many (failed) investments in green energy? We wanted to "beat the Chinese" in the manufacturing of what are decidedly low-tech commodity products because, somehow, we believe that we can make solar panels more cost-effectively here than the Chinese can.
Uh-huh. Brilliant.
The reason we gave three-quarters of a billion dollars to Solyndra was so they could create a few hundred mfg. jobs in Silicon Valley and make the most expensive solar panels using the most expensive technology in a phenominally expensive factory with robots that "whistle while they work".
More money would have simply delayed the failure of Solyndra - they still would have failed as soon as the constant supply of money stopped.
The real lesson is that we should be investing in research and development, and leave the commercialization of the developed technologies to the private sector. The private sector had the good sense to avoid investing in Solyndra, BTW.
Yes, I noticed they compared numbers genreated in two significantly different way as if they were equvalent.
They differ in the span of time the measurements were taken and they differ in the way the measurements were taken/calculated.
The US map is "from a model developed at SUNY/Albany using geostationary weather satellite data for the period 1998 - 2005."
The German map is "the yearly sum of global irradiation on an optimally inclined surface for the period 1981 - 1990."
While the German data was observed, the US data was calculated using a software model.
It would have been nice if EITHER they had both been for the same time period (rather thanusing data points with at least 8 years of seperation) OR had used the same method to arrive at the data for both countries.
For all of you laughing at the Fox News reporter's statement that "Germany gets more sun than the US does" I'd like you to support the equally mockable argument that "Germany gets less sun than the US" - all the graphic used supports is that when you measure two differnet countries at two different decades using two wildly different methods to arrive at your numbers, you get different numbers. Put simply, why should either country have more or less sun?
Please explain to me how they fitted a GPS receiver chip and antenna array in a 16 gram drone, along with a video camera, transmitter, and power source for all the above.
Let's remember, these "smoking gun" emails are the result of exhaustive, comprehensive searches of EVERY ingoing and outgoing email from the respective organizations. In a large enough company I can guarantee you I can find emails that "prove" almost anything relating to thier business, their customers, etc.
That some employees expressed doubts or questioned the value of the products or services their company offers means very little if they are not the decision-makers.
Anyone surprised that a salesman at an investment house might be selling something they either don't understand or personally see the value in shouldn't be investing in the stock market. Would you be surprised to find out the guy selling you a Chevy Volt doesn't believe it is the best car in the world? What a salesman says to a customer is not neccessarily what he believes in his heart or in his mind.
Those "bag-of-shit" securities were, in very large part, guaranteed by the US Gov't. That Wall Street Banks offered crap investment opportunities that no one understood is nearly as bad as the so-called investors who bought them with an equal lack of understanding, and don't get me started on people who "bought" homes they could never, ever make the payments on that formed the basis for the "bag-of-shit" investments no one understood.
That they were "highly-rated" by the security analyst firms means very little - I'll leave you with this sage advice from that classic film "Tommy Boy"
MS does not pay me (lower computer cost) to buy machines with Windows. Installing OEM Windows on a PC enables the other software companies to install their bloatware/crapware on the machine and pay the mfg. to do so.
MS makes money on each PC sold with Windows - period. PC mfg. collects more in bloatware subsidies than it pays in OEM license fees to Microsoft, and THAT makes PCs with WIndows cheaper.
1) They are little. You can screw them to the back of your monitor or TV.
Uhm, OK - is that really a problem for anyone?
2) They have an external, sealed laptop-style power supply. If you live in the tropics or near the sea the moist air constantly sucked through a standard ATX PSU can kill it quite quickly.
The vast majority of people do not live in the tropics or near the sea...
And if you don't want to play the latest offerings from Steam they are plenty powerful enough.
Go back and look at the title of the "review"/slashdot article - the article says the machine can handle Steam games, you hold out their inability to run "the latest offerings from Steam"...
Slashdot Mirror
I alwayt thought the point of vi was to train users to use the 'hjkl' cursor keys for when they were playing robots.
All we need is a few $1 Trillion coins to solve the problem...
I like how the President promised to put Science back in it's rightful place, then cut the space program more than any previous President, then talked up the space program to get re-elected... Pity his supporters have such short attention spans/poor memories.
It obviously wasn't cost-effective to do the replacement. You can buy anything in NYC, but remember, much of NYC is heated by steam thrown off as a by-product of other industries. Did your "really fancy" hotel have steam heat?
There are massive steam pipes that warm much of Manhattan.
Why would banks slash their profits on mortgages to facilitate your vision of better insulation for buildings?
Why aren't lowered operating costs motivation enough?
What, exactly, is the zero carbon source of electricity that could power NYC?
As I read the criteria "creature comforts" I take that to mean there would still be buses and taxis, presumably running on electricity (ignoring for the moment that cabs run 24x7 and have no real window for battery charging), heating and air conditioning would keep everyone warm or cool, and that Times Square would not go dark, the stock market will still be run out of NYC, etc.
Of course, pumping all that heat into the Atlantic ocean won't have any climatic or ecological implications, right?
There, I fixed it for you.
Download doesn't equal use, and use doesn't equal a willingness/ability to pay, and a willingness/ability to pay doesn't mean they would pay the same price as MS Office charges (the estimated $150/user).
Thankfully we don't use corn as feed for any other foods, or any corn by-products in any other foods.
Don't forget the Government requirement to include Ethanol in gasoline - that skews the market as well...
Market Share - MS operating systems run on over 90%+ of personal computers, OS X on about 5% and Linux on about 1%.
Joe Biden
No, but in private enterprise investments are made with private funds by investors willing to take the risk in hopes of great reward.
The government took taxpayer money (much of it borrowed from future genreations) and went to the green energy "craps table" and threw the dice on companies the private investors wouldn't touch. The government's own analysts predicted (almost to the day) when Solyndra would go bankrupt before we invested in them - why didn't the government/politicians heed the warnings of their own analysts?
We invested billions in bringing unproven technologies with almost no market demand into the market.
We did NOT invest billions in research.
In the case of Solyndra, they spent the vast majority of the money we GAVE them to build a factory full of whistling robots.
I contend we would hav ebeen better off if we instead simply took those lost taxpayer dollars and bought cheap chinese solar panels and installed them on the roofs of gov't buildings, schools, etc. At least the money would be going for something useful and have a meaningful impact on the environment.
What was the logic behind our many (failed) investments in green energy? We wanted to "beat the Chinese" in the manufacturing of what are decidedly low-tech commodity products because, somehow, we believe that we can make solar panels more cost-effectively here than the Chinese can.
Uh-huh. Brilliant.
The reason we gave three-quarters of a billion dollars to Solyndra was so they could create a few hundred mfg. jobs in Silicon Valley and make the most expensive solar panels using the most expensive technology in a phenominally expensive factory with robots that "whistle while they work".
More money would have simply delayed the failure of Solyndra - they still would have failed as soon as the constant supply of money stopped.
The real lesson is that we should be investing in research and development, and leave the commercialization of the developed technologies to the private sector. The private sector had the good sense to avoid investing in Solyndra, BTW.
Yes, I noticed they compared numbers genreated in two significantly different way as if they were equvalent.
They differ in the span of time the measurements were taken and they differ in the way the measurements were taken/calculated.
The US map is "from a model developed at SUNY/Albany using geostationary weather satellite data for the period 1998 - 2005."
The German map is "the yearly sum of global irradiation on an optimally inclined surface for the period 1981 - 1990."
While the German data was observed, the US data was calculated using a software model.
It would have been nice if EITHER they had both been for the same time period (rather thanusing data points with at least 8 years of seperation) OR had used the same method to arrive at the data for both countries.
For all of you laughing at the Fox News reporter's statement that "Germany gets more sun than the US does" I'd like you to support the equally mockable argument that "Germany gets less sun than the US" - all the graphic used supports is that when you measure two differnet countries at two different decades using two wildly different methods to arrive at your numbers, you get different numbers. Put simply, why should either country have more or less sun?
Please explain to me how they fitted a GPS receiver chip and antenna array in a 16 gram drone, along with a video camera, transmitter, and power source for all the above.
Sure, the UAV "drone" only weighs 16 grams, but what about the weight of:
a) The protective box that carries it
b) The recharging/refueling mechanisim
c) The receiver
d) The display
What does it weigh in hand grenades? Ammo clips? etc.
Let's remember, these "smoking gun" emails are the result of exhaustive, comprehensive searches of EVERY ingoing and outgoing email from the respective organizations. In a large enough company I can guarantee you I can find emails that "prove" almost anything relating to thier business, their customers, etc.
That some employees expressed doubts or questioned the value of the products or services their company offers means very little if they are not the decision-makers.
Anyone surprised that a salesman at an investment house might be selling something they either don't understand or personally see the value in shouldn't be investing in the stock market. Would you be surprised to find out the guy selling you a Chevy Volt doesn't believe it is the best car in the world? What a salesman says to a customer is not neccessarily what he believes in his heart or in his mind.
Those "bag-of-shit" securities were, in very large part, guaranteed by the US Gov't. That Wall Street Banks offered crap investment opportunities that no one understood is nearly as bad as the so-called investors who bought them with an equal lack of understanding, and don't get me started on people who "bought" homes they could never, ever make the payments on that formed the basis for the "bag-of-shit" investments no one understood.
That they were "highly-rated" by the security analyst firms means very little - I'll leave you with this sage advice from that classic film "Tommy Boy"
MS does not pay me (lower computer cost) to buy machines with Windows. Installing OEM Windows on a PC enables the other software companies to install their bloatware/crapware on the machine and pay the mfg. to do so.
MS makes money on each PC sold with Windows - period. PC mfg. collects more in bloatware subsidies than it pays in OEM license fees to Microsoft, and THAT makes PCs with WIndows cheaper.
So what? I'm concerned with the money that flows from my pocket to the Mfg. What goes on in the background doesn't concern me.
Uhm, OK - is that really a problem for anyone?
The vast majority of people do not live in the tropics or near the sea...
Go back and look at the title of the "review"/slashdot article - the article says the machine can handle Steam games, you hold out their inability to run "the latest offerings from Steam"...
This is really a $300-400 problem? You could do much better with a Foxconn barebones ($130), 4 Gig of DDR3 RAM ($25) and a $30 add-in gigabit card and a hard drive ($50) - all in for about $235.
Of course, this is an atom-based system, but you won't be paying a premium for a discrete graphics feature you won't use.
You mean I can actually buy a PC for jur just $279 + RAM + notebook HD = $399 that is capable of running Linux?
That's amazing!
Prices certainly are dropping through the floor...
Oh look, Dell has a system on sale for $299 WITH the so-called Microsoft Tax (Windows 8) and an actual DVD drive.
What was it that made this system special? The novelty of shipping with no operating system? Seriously?