Gaining an advantage over your competitors is *not* grounds for anti-trust.
Apple buying ARM Holdings wouldn't in an of itself be grounds for antitrust. But, the potential to then abuse that ownership to block out competitors that use ARM components in the smartphone/etc. markets would be. Rather than allow such a situation to come about, regulators would block the sale in the first place.
Being able to control who gets to use the processors (and, more importantly, who doesn't) would give Apple a huge advantage over it's competitors.
And it is for this very simple reason that it would be blocked on antitrust grounds. Even if the slightly more lax regulators in the US would permit it, you can bet the Europeans wouldn't (ARM Holdings is based in the UK).
I would say if it is a requirement that it be dead simple for the end user, your only recourse is to despair. No CMS system on the planet is dead simple to use. Easy doesn't exist, either. Moderately difficult can be found if you look around. The problem is that, while most reasonably competent people understand a hierarchical file structure (files, folders, drives, etc.), adding the extra dimension of time/versioning/check-in/check-out makes the average user crawl into a ball in the corner and weep. The publishers of such software, while they obviously understand this extra dimension, seem to have gone out of their way to obfuscate it. Most of these programs have some centralized database structure for storing the information, then present that as a hierarchical folder structure to the end user. The paradigm just doesn't quite work.
And don't get me started on what to do if you have inter-file dependencies, such as you have in CAD or software development! I have used several such systems as a necessary evil of being a practicing engineer, and every one of them is a kludge that should never have made it out of beta testing.
The math is so complex though - you have to take relativity into account because time literally slows down the closer to a massive body you get. I've been reading a Brief History of Time lately and this shit is insane.
By and large, unless you need super-precise calculations, you can rely solely on Newtonian physics to do orbital calculations. This makes the problem much easier to tackle computationally. The equations of motion cannot be solved analytically, but discrete simulations can be done to arbitrary accuracy extending out for years and years. Relativistic effects will appear as a small cumulative error, but it's small enough that it would probably require only a little more fuel to correct for.
While Saturn is heavy compared to the Earth, the curvature it produces in spacetime is tiny in the grand scheme of things. Even for calculations where the Sun dominates, relativistic effects can safely be ignored in all but the most exacting situations.
Put it this way: if relativistic effects mattered, then Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others wouldn't have been able to work out the mathematics of non-relativistic orbital mechanics in the first place. Newtonian orbital mechanics is plenty accurate to predict the motions of the planets and other bodies to many decimal places over long stretches of time.
About the only noticeable orbital relativistic effect that I know of in the solar system is a slight perturbation in the orbit of mercury that only became apparent after we'd been observing it for a few centuries. Relativity also comes into play in GPS, but that has a lot more to do with the precise timing of their radio signals than with their orbits.
More than anything, Microsoft's birthday wish should be for fearless leadership," says Ayers. "Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come
There's another component you need if you want to use fearless leadership and disruptive innovation to be the bedrock of your success: you need to also be right. Apple's taken some big product risks. None of them were exactly bet-the-company-big risks, but pretty risky. The fact that we're still talking about Apple is that they've taken chances and been right. There are plenty of companies out there that had a scary-cool product or technology, something transformational, but missed something along the way: misjudged the market, misjudged their capital needs, rushed a buggy product to market, etc. Don't hear much from those companies anymore.
While there's something to be said for bluffing in poker and going all in, it's much better to go all in when you've got the cards. You can bluff and buy the pot only so many times before someone calls you on it and you're out of the game.
That may be. However, if you'd bothered to actually look at the WSJ article, you'd see that it wasn't written by Mossberg. This was a business news story, not a product review. And, if you'd bothered to read it, you'd have seen that it was a rather dispassionate report about the likelihood of the new model and who might carry it, not a gushing screed about how awesome Apple is by finally delivering its gorgeous Jesus-phone from the evil clutches of AT&T.
Good Grief. I have a first-gen iPhone, and will consider upgrading when the next version comes out. So you can expect that I'm excited about the possible specs on. But, really, the linked article is a ridiculous i-gasm. If you are going to report this stuff, stick to the original sources, rather than linking to second-hand articles that lace their copy with unabashed fanboy-ism. If you want color commentary along with your tech news, check out the relevant post on Engadget.
What actually kicked off this latest wave of speculation was an an article from the Wall Street Journal, stating that Apple is developing a CDMA version of the iphone for Verizon. The WSJ is a fairly reputable source that wouldn't print unless they had some solid evidence, so this should be interpreted as a bit more than a typical rumor.
So if another probe lands in the vicinity, or roves its away across the supposed territory, would Lord British then have grounds to sue for ruining the property values? "Good Lord, man, look at what you've done! All those tracks ruin the pristine scenery!"
The key fob displays a number, sort of like a one-time password. The keychain refreshes and supplies a new number every few minutes according to some cryptographic sequence. I believe it is something like a pseudo-random number generator. The bank has a companion system that knows what the algorithm is and what the PNRG seed is for each device out there. Both the key fob and companion system have accurate clocks, so that they can stay synchronized.
There are still some flaws in the system, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, but it's more secure than a typical password.
I disagree. If your doctor is telling you to make sure the stddev of blood sugar readings should be within a certain range, the doctor should know what the meaning of standard deviation is. If the doctor doesn't know, then how can that doctor make any sensible statement, diagnosis, or recommendation when the patient comes back with blood sugar levels that have a large standard deviation. How would that doctor know if it's a problem? How much of a problem is it? Are there physiological reasons to expect a standard deviation that large? Are there reasons, other than patient compliance, why it can't be smaller? If a patient has one particularly high reading, how might that effect the standard deviation and, more importantly, is that one reading clinically significant?
It may not be the doctor's job to know how to write a program to calculate the standard deviation of a dataset - that would just be reinventing the wheel - or even to express it in a compact mathematical form. But you'd better believe that the doctor should know what it is, where it comes from, and what it means.
To use an analogy, when Han Solo says that Millenium Falcon made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs, the only way you'd know if he's genuinely boasting or just bullshitting you is if he can explain why measuring the Kessel run in a unit of distance is better than a unit of time.
Another analogy: overclockers and computing enthusiasts put much stock in benchmark tests. But if you don't know what the test is actually testing, and what factors influence it, then all you are doing in the end is quoting some number from the magic box. You may not be expected to code your own benchmark test, but if you don't know its background, how can you expected to know how to improve the numbers? Do you need more RAM, a faster CPU, or a different motherboard?
Cutting the spine off a book you already own may or may not be sacrilege. But doing that to your friend's book might strain your relationship.
The employees at Borders were not amused when I wheeled my band saw in. They demanded that I pay for the book I'd just sawed up and scanned. I told them "I'm certainly not paying money for that book now, look how ruined it is! Besides, I already have a copy," as I waved my thumb drive in their face.
Yes, it can be abused, but so can just about any crowdsourced technology. Wikipedia is prone to abuse, but on the whole is a tremendously valuable and accurate tool.
This is not meant to be used in the same way that a 911 system gets used, where one person reports something at a location and expects a directed response to that incident. In cases of natural or civil disasters, it is very difficult and not particularly equitable to distribute resources to combat individual problems. Instead, this would be a tool to help determine where to direct broad aid: what section of the city is facing the worst problems, where should the next food depot be established, where should you direct a police brigade to quell violence? As the tools get better and the availability of resources improves, you can start targeting the smaller targets.
Google holds the weight of milk at '4.5 lbs/gallon'.
For what it is worth, milk is more than 90% water, which weighs in at about 9 pounds per gallon. The rest of milk is mostly fats and proteins, which are not drastically different in density than water.
A littlesearchingaround yields the density of milk to be around 1.02-1.06 g/cc (or kg/L). This translates to, you guessed it, about 9 pounds per gallon.
Also, any farmer could tell you that a hundredweight of milk (a touch over 100 pounds - go figure) is about 12 gallons.
So there's a factor of two (or one half) to muddle into your calculations.
Conversion of photons to electron-hole pairs (quantum efficiency) is not the same as the creation of useful electricity, nor is the product of absorption and quantum efficiency the same as overall electrical conversion efficiency.
Conversion of photons to electron-hole pairs (quantum efficiency) is not the same as the creation of useful electricity, nor is the product of absorption and quantum efficiency the same as overall electrical conversion efficiency.
However, getting the money together to buy and install the solar panels is all on me, the homeowner
It may be on you to front the money, but a signficant portion of the upfront cost will be subsidized by some combination of:
Your local utility,
Your local municipality,
Your state government,
Your national government,
unless you have some philosophical aversion to accepting such subsidies. If you get into a net metering contract with the local utility, you could also say that your neighbors subsidize the cost by paying for your surplus power.
In reality, this situation of large upfront cost that gets subsidized by other players and paying customers is the same as for a nuclear or hydro plant. The only difference is the scale, and getting your head around being a producer or energy, not merely a consumer.
That 90-100% conversion efficiency isn't the whole story, either. That term is what's referred to as quantum efficiency. A shorthand way to think of Q.E. is to consider the probability that an absorbed photon will create an electron-hole pair. But that isn't the same as the electricity harnessed; it is only a pre-requisite.
The quantum efficiency of existing solar cells is also very high - approaching 100%. But a large fraction of those electron-hole pairs quickly recombine within the semiconductor. In order to create usable electricity, the electron-hole pairs must be separated and collected before they recombine. In a conventional solar cell, the separation is done by the internal semiconductor junction, and the collection is done by the metal electrodes on one or both faces. This team, as far as I can tell from the press release, hasn't published numbers for this step of the process.
One can make a sort of Drake Equation concerning the conversion of incident photons to usable electricity:
Number of incident photons above a minimum energy,
times the percentage of photons that are absorbed by the active area of the solar cell,
times the percentage that create electron-hole pairs (the quantum efficiency),
times the percentage of electron-hole pairs that separate and make it to the electrodes before recombining.
Even then, this product isn't the same as the overall efficiency of the solar cell. That just tells you the conversion of photons to electricity. That's not the same as conversion of sunlight to electrical power. This is because the energy contained within an electron-hole pair is a fixed quantity for a given solar cell construction. Consider three photons: a red photon, a green photon, and a blue photon. The red has the least energy; the blue has the most. Let's say the solar cell's threshold energy is greater than the red photon's. In this case, the red photon will generate no usable electrical energy. The green photon and the blue photon will both create an electron-hole pair. Here is the key point, however: although the blue photon is more energetic, it will create no more useful electrical energy than the green one. The extra energy of the blue photon above and beyond the solar cell's threshold energy is, essentially, wasted. This is a key limiting factor in photovoltaics today. Some folks have gotten around this with multi-junction solar cells, which can tune their (multiple) threshold energies to better utilize the solar spectrum. But these are more exotic than silicon solar cells and find use almost exclusively in space applications (or solar racing vehicles) because of their cost.
So figuring out the "incident solar power in to useful electrical power out" efficiency of a solar cell is much, much more complicated than just absorbing photons.
This is not to say that the innovation in the article is worthless. Far from it - it's a pretty neat and new development that will likely have good application. But it isn't the "85% efficient solar power!1!!" that some posters are jumping at.
Even more interesting is that, while it is the heaviest in the periodic table, uranium is not the "heaviest" material you can hold. That would go to the densest material, which does not exactly correspond to atomic number. Behold:
Al: 2.7 g/cc
Fe: 7.8
Pb: 11.3
U : 19.1
W : 19.3
Pu: 19.8
Pt: 21.4
So while uranium is indeed really "heavy" (which is why depleted uranium is great for artillery projectiles), it's not quite the heaviest around.
But here's the real head scratcher: if you had a 1-kg ingot of each of the above metals, then which would be heaviest?
You don't get "curies" of radiation during a test; curies are a measure of emission *rate*. That's like saying that your meter reader recorded that you used 80kW of electricity this month. Radiation doses are properly measured in gray or sievert (formerly rad and rem).
It's off-topic, I know, but it irks me to know end when the media (name your format and producer of choice - they're pretty much all guilty) confuse kilowatts with kilowatt-hours. For instance:
"The school's new solar panels are predicted to generate 20 kilowatts per month"
I can understand that, to the layman, these are somewhat unintuitive ways of measuring energy rate (i.e., power) and total energy, respectively. But for goodness sake - you're supposed to research your topic before reporting on it! How stupid would I look it I started going on about how my car gets 200 horsepower per week, and cranks out over 30 m.p.g.?
Fund one damned vehicle for 2 trips a year until private industry catches up. Is that so hard?
Yes, it is damned hard. Well, perhaps not hard, but really, really expensive. In order to have just one or two flights per years you basically need to have the same infrastructure that you would have for a dozen flights per year. that infrastructure isn't just the facilities, it's also the thousands of people that build, maintain, and operate the shuttles and their components, the launch facility in Florida, mission control in Houston, alternate or emergency landing sites in California and Africa, and a global communications network. These are not trivial or cheap things, and you need it all to do even a single shuttle launch. Since Columbia, they need to have a flight-ready backup shuttle that can be launched in short order.
And what would you do with this infrastructure the rest of the time? It's pretty specialized, and can't be used for much else except launching shuttles. In order for it to be ready, it needs to be funded and running all the time. This totals a couple billion dollars per year in operating expenses, plus hundreds of millions or billions of dollars per launch. You either have a full shuttle program or none at all. Because NASA's budget is finite and has been mostly stagnant for a long time, having a full shuttle program constrained the ability to do anything else in the realm of manned spaceflight.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple buying ARM Holdings wouldn't in an of itself be grounds for antitrust. But, the potential to then abuse that ownership to block out competitors that use ARM components in the smartphone/etc. markets would be. Rather than allow such a situation to come about, regulators would block the sale in the first place.
And it is for this very simple reason that it would be blocked on antitrust grounds. Even if the slightly more lax regulators in the US would permit it, you can bet the Europeans wouldn't (ARM Holdings is based in the UK).
I would say if it is a requirement that it be dead simple for the end user, your only recourse is to despair. No CMS system on the planet is dead simple to use. Easy doesn't exist, either. Moderately difficult can be found if you look around. The problem is that, while most reasonably competent people understand a hierarchical file structure (files, folders, drives, etc.), adding the extra dimension of time/versioning/check-in/check-out makes the average user crawl into a ball in the corner and weep. The publishers of such software, while they obviously understand this extra dimension, seem to have gone out of their way to obfuscate it. Most of these programs have some centralized database structure for storing the information, then present that as a hierarchical folder structure to the end user. The paradigm just doesn't quite work.
And don't get me started on what to do if you have inter-file dependencies, such as you have in CAD or software development! I have used several such systems as a necessary evil of being a practicing engineer, and every one of them is a kludge that should never have made it out of beta testing.
By and large, unless you need super-precise calculations, you can rely solely on Newtonian physics to do orbital calculations. This makes the problem much easier to tackle computationally. The equations of motion cannot be solved analytically, but discrete simulations can be done to arbitrary accuracy extending out for years and years. Relativistic effects will appear as a small cumulative error, but it's small enough that it would probably require only a little more fuel to correct for.
While Saturn is heavy compared to the Earth, the curvature it produces in spacetime is tiny in the grand scheme of things. Even for calculations where the Sun dominates, relativistic effects can safely be ignored in all but the most exacting situations.
Put it this way: if relativistic effects mattered, then Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others wouldn't have been able to work out the mathematics of non-relativistic orbital mechanics in the first place. Newtonian orbital mechanics is plenty accurate to predict the motions of the planets and other bodies to many decimal places over long stretches of time.
About the only noticeable orbital relativistic effect that I know of in the solar system is a slight perturbation in the orbit of mercury that only became apparent after we'd been observing it for a few centuries. Relativity also comes into play in GPS, but that has a lot more to do with the precise timing of their radio signals than with their orbits.
There's another component you need if you want to use fearless leadership and disruptive innovation to be the bedrock of your success: you need to also be right. Apple's taken some big product risks. None of them were exactly bet-the-company-big risks, but pretty risky. The fact that we're still talking about Apple is that they've taken chances and been right. There are plenty of companies out there that had a scary-cool product or technology, something transformational, but missed something along the way: misjudged the market, misjudged their capital needs, rushed a buggy product to market, etc. Don't hear much from those companies anymore.
While there's something to be said for bluffing in poker and going all in, it's much better to go all in when you've got the cards. You can bluff and buy the pot only so many times before someone calls you on it and you're out of the game.
That may be. However, if you'd bothered to actually look at the WSJ article, you'd see that it wasn't written by Mossberg. This was a business news story, not a product review. And, if you'd bothered to read it, you'd have seen that it was a rather dispassionate report about the likelihood of the new model and who might carry it, not a gushing screed about how awesome Apple is by finally delivering its gorgeous Jesus-phone from the evil clutches of AT&T.
Good Grief. I have a first-gen iPhone, and will consider upgrading when the next version comes out. So you can expect that I'm excited about the possible specs on. But, really, the linked article is a ridiculous i-gasm. If you are going to report this stuff, stick to the original sources, rather than linking to second-hand articles that lace their copy with unabashed fanboy-ism. If you want color commentary along with your tech news, check out the relevant post on Engadget.
What actually kicked off this latest wave of speculation was an an article from the Wall Street Journal, stating that Apple is developing a CDMA version of the iphone for Verizon. The WSJ is a fairly reputable source that wouldn't print unless they had some solid evidence, so this should be interpreted as a bit more than a typical rumor.
So if another probe lands in the vicinity, or roves its away across the supposed territory, would Lord British then have grounds to sue for ruining the property values? "Good Lord, man, look at what you've done! All those tracks ruin the pristine scenery!"
Not exactly. I think he means something like this
The key fob displays a number, sort of like a one-time password. The keychain refreshes and supplies a new number every few minutes according to some cryptographic sequence. I believe it is something like a pseudo-random number generator. The bank has a companion system that knows what the algorithm is and what the PNRG seed is for each device out there. Both the key fob and companion system have accurate clocks, so that they can stay synchronized.
There are still some flaws in the system, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, but it's more secure than a typical password.
I disagree. If your doctor is telling you to make sure the stddev of blood sugar readings should be within a certain range, the doctor should know what the meaning of standard deviation is. If the doctor doesn't know, then how can that doctor make any sensible statement, diagnosis, or recommendation when the patient comes back with blood sugar levels that have a large standard deviation. How would that doctor know if it's a problem? How much of a problem is it? Are there physiological reasons to expect a standard deviation that large? Are there reasons, other than patient compliance, why it can't be smaller? If a patient has one particularly high reading, how might that effect the standard deviation and, more importantly, is that one reading clinically significant?
It may not be the doctor's job to know how to write a program to calculate the standard deviation of a dataset - that would just be reinventing the wheel - or even to express it in a compact mathematical form. But you'd better believe that the doctor should know what it is, where it comes from, and what it means.
To use an analogy, when Han Solo says that Millenium Falcon made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs, the only way you'd know if he's genuinely boasting or just bullshitting you is if he can explain why measuring the Kessel run in a unit of distance is better than a unit of time.
Another analogy: overclockers and computing enthusiasts put much stock in benchmark tests. But if you don't know what the test is actually testing, and what factors influence it, then all you are doing in the end is quoting some number from the magic box. You may not be expected to code your own benchmark test, but if you don't know its background, how can you expected to know how to improve the numbers? Do you need more RAM, a faster CPU, or a different motherboard?
Cutting the spine off a book you already own may or may not be sacrilege. But doing that to your friend's book might strain your relationship.
The employees at Borders were not amused when I wheeled my band saw in. They demanded that I pay for the book I'd just sawed up and scanned. I told them "I'm certainly not paying money for that book now, look how ruined it is! Besides, I already have a copy," as I waved my thumb drive in their face.
Damn! I had mod points this morning.
Brilliant!
Yes, it can be abused, but so can just about any crowdsourced technology. Wikipedia is prone to abuse, but on the whole is a tremendously valuable and accurate tool.
This is not meant to be used in the same way that a 911 system gets used, where one person reports something at a location and expects a directed response to that incident. In cases of natural or civil disasters, it is very difficult and not particularly equitable to distribute resources to combat individual problems. Instead, this would be a tool to help determine where to direct broad aid: what section of the city is facing the worst problems, where should the next food depot be established, where should you direct a police brigade to quell violence? As the tools get better and the availability of resources improves, you can start targeting the smaller targets.
For what it is worth, milk is more than 90% water, which weighs in at about 9 pounds per gallon. The rest of milk is mostly fats and proteins, which are not drastically different in density than water.
A little searching around yields the density of milk to be around 1.02-1.06 g/cc (or kg/L). This translates to, you guessed it, about 9 pounds per gallon.
Also, any farmer could tell you that a hundredweight of milk (a touch over 100 pounds - go figure) is about 12 gallons.
So there's a factor of two (or one half) to muddle into your calculations.
Archimedes, for whom the screw-lift is named, would be so proud to know what use his invention is being put to.
Conversion of photons to electron-hole pairs (quantum efficiency) is not the same as the creation of useful electricity, nor is the product of absorption and quantum efficiency the same as overall electrical conversion efficiency.
A further explanation can be found here.
Conversion of photons to electron-hole pairs (quantum efficiency) is not the same as the creation of useful electricity, nor is the product of absorption and quantum efficiency the same as overall electrical conversion efficiency.
A further explanation can be found here.
It may be on you to front the money, but a signficant portion of the upfront cost will be subsidized by some combination of:
Your local utility,
Your local municipality,
Your state government,
Your national government,
unless you have some philosophical aversion to accepting such subsidies. If you get into a net metering contract with the local utility, you could also say that your neighbors subsidize the cost by paying for your surplus power.
In reality, this situation of large upfront cost that gets subsidized by other players and paying customers is the same as for a nuclear or hydro plant. The only difference is the scale, and getting your head around being a producer or energy, not merely a consumer.
That 90-100% conversion efficiency isn't the whole story, either. That term is what's referred to as quantum efficiency. A shorthand way to think of Q.E. is to consider the probability that an absorbed photon will create an electron-hole pair. But that isn't the same as the electricity harnessed; it is only a pre-requisite.
The quantum efficiency of existing solar cells is also very high - approaching 100%. But a large fraction of those electron-hole pairs quickly recombine within the semiconductor. In order to create usable electricity, the electron-hole pairs must be separated and collected before they recombine. In a conventional solar cell, the separation is done by the internal semiconductor junction, and the collection is done by the metal electrodes on one or both faces. This team, as far as I can tell from the press release, hasn't published numbers for this step of the process.
One can make a sort of Drake Equation concerning the conversion of incident photons to usable electricity:
Number of incident photons above a minimum energy,
times the percentage of photons that are absorbed by the active area of the solar cell,
times the percentage that create electron-hole pairs (the quantum efficiency),
times the percentage of electron-hole pairs that separate and make it to the electrodes before recombining.
Even then, this product isn't the same as the overall efficiency of the solar cell. That just tells you the conversion of photons to electricity. That's not the same as conversion of sunlight to electrical power. This is because the energy contained within an electron-hole pair is a fixed quantity for a given solar cell construction. Consider three photons: a red photon, a green photon, and a blue photon. The red has the least energy; the blue has the most. Let's say the solar cell's threshold energy is greater than the red photon's. In this case, the red photon will generate no usable electrical energy. The green photon and the blue photon will both create an electron-hole pair. Here is the key point, however: although the blue photon is more energetic, it will create no more useful electrical energy than the green one. The extra energy of the blue photon above and beyond the solar cell's threshold energy is, essentially, wasted. This is a key limiting factor in photovoltaics today. Some folks have gotten around this with multi-junction solar cells, which can tune their (multiple) threshold energies to better utilize the solar spectrum. But these are more exotic than silicon solar cells and find use almost exclusively in space applications (or solar racing vehicles) because of their cost.
So figuring out the "incident solar power in to useful electrical power out" efficiency of a solar cell is much, much more complicated than just absorbing photons.
This is not to say that the innovation in the article is worthless. Far from it - it's a pretty neat and new development that will likely have good application. But it isn't the "85% efficient solar power!1!!" that some posters are jumping at.
that's why I immediately looked for the tag "potkettleblack", or, "hypocrisy", or something similar, attached to this story.
Even more interesting is that, while it is the heaviest in the periodic table, uranium is not the "heaviest" material you can hold. That would go to the densest material, which does not exactly correspond to atomic number. Behold:
Al: 2.7 g/cc
Fe: 7.8
Pb: 11.3
U : 19.1
W : 19.3
Pu: 19.8
Pt: 21.4
So while uranium is indeed really "heavy" (which is why depleted uranium is great for artillery projectiles), it's not quite the heaviest around.
But here's the real head scratcher: if you had a 1-kg ingot of each of the above metals, then which would be heaviest?
That is to say - I agree with the GP's fourth point. He, at least, got the units right.
It's off-topic, I know, but it irks me to know end when the media (name your format and producer of choice - they're pretty much all guilty) confuse kilowatts with kilowatt-hours. For instance:
"The school's new solar panels are predicted to generate 20 kilowatts per month"
I can understand that, to the layman, these are somewhat unintuitive ways of measuring energy rate (i.e., power) and total energy, respectively. But for goodness sake - you're supposed to research your topic before reporting on it! How stupid would I look it I started going on about how my car gets 200 horsepower per week, and cranks out over 30 m.p.g.?
Yes, it is damned hard. Well, perhaps not hard, but really, really expensive. In order to have just one or two flights per years you basically need to have the same infrastructure that you would have for a dozen flights per year. that infrastructure isn't just the facilities, it's also the thousands of people that build, maintain, and operate the shuttles and their components, the launch facility in Florida, mission control in Houston, alternate or emergency landing sites in California and Africa, and a global communications network. These are not trivial or cheap things, and you need it all to do even a single shuttle launch. Since Columbia, they need to have a flight-ready backup shuttle that can be launched in short order.
And what would you do with this infrastructure the rest of the time? It's pretty specialized, and can't be used for much else except launching shuttles. In order for it to be ready, it needs to be funded and running all the time. This totals a couple billion dollars per year in operating expenses, plus hundreds of millions or billions of dollars per launch. You either have a full shuttle program or none at all. Because NASA's budget is finite and has been mostly stagnant for a long time, having a full shuttle program constrained the ability to do anything else in the realm of manned spaceflight.