Again. That's the difference between journalism and fake news, journalists do make mistakes, but, when it's done right, they correct them. Fake news, on the otehr hand, doesn't even pretend to try to get facts right; fake news simply lies right from the start.
I'm not sure what your anecdotes is intended to demonstrates. If you have to go back to 1932 to cite an example of uncorrected news reported from a major newspaper, I'd say that proves my point.
Interesting link to an article pointing out that until the leaks were about him, Donald Trump loved leaks. Not fake news, since the facts seem to be correct. At best you could say it's a case with some editorializing in the body of the article. But fake news is making up facts, not expressing opinions about facts.
Seems you realize what I'm saying and chose to ignore it.
I'm realizing what you're saying, and pointing out that it is wrong.
I really can't say it more clearly. Fake news means making up facts. You are saying people should be outraged by the leaks out of the Trump administration. Well, fine, you can think that if you want. That's perfectly valid opinion. However, if a news article does not happen to write that opinion in the body of an article, not writing it does not make that news article fake news. Fake news means making up facts.
OK, there may be a huge difference between one type of leak and another. You may even label that "false equivalence" if you like. But it's not fake news unless they are making up facts.
Got it? Fake news is news that is incorrect because it is made up with no regard to facts. Fake news is not "an article that didn't express an opinion that I personally think should have been expressed."
Look, this is important: there is a clear and bright distinction between news that expresses an opinion that you think is wrong, and "news" that simply makes shit up with the intent to outrage without any intent whatsoever to be consistent with reality. Making shit up is fake news.
Again. That's the difference between journalism and fake news, journalists do make mistakes, but, when it's done right, they correct them. Fake news, on the otehr hand, doesn't even pretend to try to get facts right; fake news simply lies right from the start.
I'm not sure what your anecdotes is intended to demonstrates. If you have to go back to 1932 to cite an example of uncorrected news reported from a major newspaper, I'd say that proves my point.
Interesting link to an article pointing out that until the leaks were about him, Donald Trump loved leaks. Not fake news, since the facts seem to be correct. At best you could say it's a case with some editorializing in the body of the article. But fake news is making up facts, not expressing opinions about facts.
"Re:Is there a product these patents protect?" Yes. In (overly broad) summary, Jennifer Doudna and collaborators showed that CRISPR could cut DNA at targeted sites. Zhang and collaborators used that targeting capability to edit DNA. Editing DNA is the product you asked about (in patent terminology, a method of doing something is patentable). That product use uses the cutting that Dudna demonstrated.
A quick (and still overly broad) analysis is that Dudna et al discovered the science, and Zhang et al reduced it to practice. However, reducing it to practice only gets you a patent if it's not obvious.
"The patent ruling suggests that the work done by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and her colleagues on CRISPR wasn't so groundbreaking as to make any other advance obvious. But that legal opinion isn't how the science world views her work, STAT points out: "Doudna and her chief collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences in 2015, the $500,000 Gruber Genetics Prize in 2015, and the $450,000 Ja..."
These are two different things. The patent ruling was only about whether the work by Doudna, Charpentier et al. made the MIT/Harvard work "obvious". The Breakthrough and other prizes didn't care whether the MIT/Harvard work was obvious or not, it was an award for heir work being a breakthrough, whether it led to any applications or not.
look again: his approval rating is roughly the same. his disapproval rating is up (worse) 10% in that time.
Look again, and this time pay attention to the scatter in the measurements. A 10% change in half of the population is way less than the variation from poll to poll. Don't let the nice straight trend lines fool you: that's noise, not signal.
The story that the bust had been removed was posted at 7:31p.m.. By 8:41 p.m. the reporter had sent out e-mails and tweets correcting the information. At 8:46 p.m., Press Secretary Sean Spicer retweeted that message with the words “Apology accepted.”
So: it took an hour to run the correction.
That's the difference between fake news and journalism. Fake news doesn't make corrections.
Go to the next looney left rally and ask the, um, "protestors" about the bust of MLK. You'll find that most of them think it was removed.
This is fake news, since you in fact have not done that experiment. You are making shit up, but stating your speculation as if it were fact.
Do the experiment, and get back to me with the results.
Wrong is not the same as "fake". Fake news is stuff that's made up.
One way you can tell the difference is by whether a correction is made when the error is pointed out. The Time story about the MLK bust you list as fake news, for example, was followed by a correction and an apology. That's journalism. Nobody is perfect; journalism consists of acknowledging and correcting mistakes. Check here: http://time.com/4645541/donald...
To verify, here is the article, dated 20 January. Note that the incorrect information is removed, and the article has a correction also dated 20 January: http://time.com/4642088/trump-...
The correction reads: Correction: An earlier version of the story said that a bust of Martin Luther King had been moved. It is still in the Oval Office.
To verify that the correction wasn't backdated, here's the archived version of the article as of 1AM on Jan 21. Notice the correction: http://web.archive.org/web/201...
Fake news had a very specific meaning, which is propaganda consisting of outright lies masquerading as real news to influence public opinion in a given way.
No, the term "fake news" is looney left propaganda made up in the face of Hillary's loss to explain why she lost.
No, fake news really exists, although it the term has been coopted to mean "stuff I don't agree with." There were web sites that basically completely made stuff up. some of them had small print claiming that they were satire, like this one http://www.thatsfake.com/did-e... but some of them were just clickbait sites, making shit up and trying to go viral with links reposted so that they could score with clicks, like this one: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
You're right to this extent, though, the term is much over-used recently.
Sadly, we don't live in a world where everyone is playing a zero sum game for the most positive outcome for the entire human race...
Those two phrases contradict each other. If it's a zero-sum game, there is no "most positive outcome"; the sum of positive and negative is fixed at zero.
I think what you mean is more like "we live in a world where everyone is playing a zero sum game instead of playing for the most positive outcome for the entire human race.
...And, sorry, Obamacare actually *is* something to oppose. It's amazing how many of my friends lost their insurance and are now paying double or triple for less coverage. And this was all fully predictable to anyone paying attention....
I would think it would be prudent to wait to hear what the politicians who are cancelling it tell us what they are going to implement instead.
So far, it's a pig in a poke-- they're saying "we'll come up with something much much better, trust us, it will be great"-- but they don't seem to have any idea what this "better" system is going to be or how it will work.
Sorry, but I'm skeptical: I want to see some details before I'm convinced.
I think that ability on their part is fading fast. The polls showing Trump's precipitous fall in popularity...
The polls are not showing a "precipitous fall in popularity". So far, three weeks after inauguration, the people who liked Trump before still like him and think he's doing good; the people who didn't like Trump before still don't like him and think he's doing badly.
His approval ratings almost certainly will change as people start to judge him on what he does, not what his campaign said-- but this has not happened yet.
Having a recognizable user name doesn't automatically make someone right. But having the ability to go back and view their comments in prior conversations sure makes it easier to gauge if their opinion is worth a shit or not.
Yep. And after a while you get to notice that some usernames are usually very insightful.
There are only 2 uses I've seen for AC: Trolls, and people who claim they can't comment under their name because their employer would recognize them (or some flavor of that).
Yes on 1, no on two: these people could simply chose a username like "haX0r42" or "Pringleeater" that their boss won't recognize. You're right, though, the worst of the drive-by flaming and pugnacious idiocy is almost always anonymous. Due to the particular nature of/., there's one more reason a person might comment as AC: they have already moderated the thread and don't want to remove their moderations..
The best way to troll Wikipedia is to insert [citation needed] next to all the most obvious parts of the article.
I was going to do this to the Wikipedia article about "the sky", next to the part where it says "the sky is blue", but there are already 4 separate citations for that particular fact. There is a weakness in the following sentence, however - "At night, the sky appears to be a mostly dark surface". There is no citation for this so-called "fact" - until I have read a newpaper article or academic paper confirming that the sky is dark, I will go on believing the opposite. Because that's Wikipedia law.
Here you go. Add these to the article: At night, the sky appears to be a mostly dark surface.[1][2][3][4] [1] Harrison, E. R. "The dark night-sky riddle: a" paradox" that resisted solution." Science 226, (1984): 941-946. [2] Jaki, Stanley L., and H. L. Armstrong. "The paradox of Olbers' paradox." American Journal of Physics, 40.9 (1972): 1354-1355. [3] Harrison, E. R. "Olbers' paradox." Nature 204, (1964): 271-272. [4] Wesson, Paul S., K. Valle, and R. Stabell. "The extragalactic background light and a definitive resolution of Olbers's paradox." The Astrophysical Journal 317, (1987): 601-606.
The entrenched fiefdoms are 100000%+ more harmful than the random drive-by. The drive-by will be deleted while the entrenched (college professors with beards, etc.) will be considered ***absolute truth***.
The entrenched fiefdoms, pages where one user (or a small cabal of users) believe that they own the article and will dispute and revert every change to their perfect prose are indeed a problem in Wikipedia-- their motto should be "the encyclopedia everybody can edit, except don't bother trying with these articles." But in my experience it's rarely college professors-- it's dedicated amateurs who have simply decided that they are the world's expert in this field.
Many of them actually are quite knowledgable-- there are some pretty good articles there. But sometimes these are by people who just don't have a good grasp on writing for clarity and sticking to the topic.
Most of the college professors I know are at best amused by wikipedia, and in general disdain it.
So, some random site decided to grab the URL of "oxford dictionaries", I assume to mislead people into thinking that this is the Oxford English Dictionary
Don't slashdotters know about the Jargon File anymore? (here or here or here.) It's sad how classic hacker history is so quickly forgotten.
1./kluhj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of kluge (US). These two words have been confused in American usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great Britain since the end of World War II.
In English, the soft "g" is pronounced as if it has a "d" in front of it. Kluge rhymes with huge. Kludge, on the other hand, would rhyme with sludge or judge.
Sorry, I was apparently unclear. Microsoft's policy of mis-dating drivers to workaround their self-created problem is a kluge. Or, as some people spell the word, a kludge.
The statement was "the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470C (878F) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water".
It's the atmospheric pressure, not the temperature, that is about 90 times that of Earth
I think there is one good use for geothermal in most areas, namely heating and cooling homes (and possibly larger buildings). In most of the continental US, the temperature ten or twenty feet underground is a somewhat steady ~50 degrees F (ten C). That means that in the summer, when you need to cool the house, the ground is plenty cool, and a heat pump can transfer that heat; and in the winter, the ground is warmer than the air (for places that go around freezing or below), and again a heat pump can transfer that heat.
Yes, that is what I was referring to when I wrote "Good for winter/summer thermal averaging, perhaps, but not much more."
Most of the energy comes from UV light, not the visible spectrum.
Good thinking, but actually silicon cells (the kind used in low-cost panels) are most sensitive to red and near-IR. You don't get much energy out of the UV part of the solar spectrum-- in fact, usually you want to block most of it in the glass, since UV will tend to yellow the adhesive holding the cells to the glass.
However, the previous poster is also way off base-- geothermal is a lousy solution for most of the planet. Maybe he lives in Iceland (which has lots of geothermal). For most of the planet, geothermal is expensive to access, comes in the form of low-grade heat, and is limited by thermal conductivity of rock. Good for winter/summer thermal averaging, perhaps, but not much more.
I expect that the 0.5 to 1.4 year payback numbers are for places photovoltaic panels are actually used, and not for place like Alaska in winter. (Alaska in summer is pretty good, though, as long as you track the sun)
Even if just counting the initial energy costs, I still find it hard to believe a worst case of 1.4 years.
Let's do a back of the envelope calculation.
You can buy solar panels for $0.50/watt. If a significant part of that cost was energy cost, then you'd see panels being made primarily in places with cheap energy. But, actually, you don't-- you see them being made in places with cheap labor.
To make numbers easy, suppose 20% of solar panel cost is energy cost, $0.10 per watt, and the energy cost (at industrial prices, not home prices) is $0.10/kW-hr. So, it takes 1000 hours at 1 kW/m2 (nominal 1 sun-- the solar intensity at which the rated power is rated) to do energy return. Typical insolation maps show a global horizontal insolation of about 1500 kW-hrs annually for the middle of the temperate regions we're talking about, so energy return would be in about 2/3 of a year.
That's a back of the envelope, but I wouldn't expect it to be off by more than a factor of two or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Again. That's the difference between journalism and fake news, journalists do make mistakes, but, when it's done right, they correct them. Fake news, on the otehr hand, doesn't even pretend to try to get facts right; fake news simply lies right from the start.
I'm not sure what your anecdotes is intended to demonstrates. If you have to go back to 1932 to cite an example of uncorrected news reported from a major newspaper, I'd say that proves my point.
Here's one now - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/politics/leaks-donald-trump.html
Interesting link to an article pointing out that until the leaks were about him, Donald Trump loved leaks. Not fake news, since the facts seem to be correct. At best you could say it's a case with some editorializing in the body of the article. But fake news is making up facts, not expressing opinions about facts.
Seems you realize what I'm saying and chose to ignore it.
I'm realizing what you're saying, and pointing out that it is wrong.
I really can't say it more clearly. Fake news means making up facts . You are saying people should be outraged by the leaks out of the Trump administration. Well, fine, you can think that if you want. That's perfectly valid opinion. However, if a news article does not happen to write that opinion in the body of an article, not writing it does not make that news article fake news. Fake news means making up facts .
OK, there may be a huge difference between one type of leak and another. You may even label that "false equivalence" if you like. But it's not fake news unless they are making up facts.
Got it? Fake news is news that is incorrect because it is made up with no regard to facts. Fake news is not "an article that didn't express an opinion that I personally think should have been expressed."
Look, this is important: there is a clear and bright distinction between news that expresses an opinion that you think is wrong, and "news" that simply makes shit up with the intent to outrage without any intent whatsoever to be consistent with reality. Making shit up is fake news.
Again. That's the difference between journalism and fake news, journalists do make mistakes, but, when it's done right, they correct them. Fake news, on the otehr hand, doesn't even pretend to try to get facts right; fake news simply lies right from the start.
I'm not sure what your anecdotes is intended to demonstrates. If you have to go back to 1932 to cite an example of uncorrected news reported from a major newspaper, I'd say that proves my point.
Here's one now - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/politics/leaks-donald-trump.html
Interesting link to an article pointing out that until the leaks were about him, Donald Trump loved leaks. Not fake news, since the facts seem to be correct. At best you could say it's a case with some editorializing in the body of the article. But fake news is making up facts, not expressing opinions about facts.
Here are a few other sources that appear to say the same thing:
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballo...
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/15...
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
http://thehill.com/policy/nati...
"Re:Is there a product these patents protect?"
Yes.
In (overly broad) summary, Jennifer Doudna and collaborators showed that CRISPR could cut DNA at targeted sites. Zhang and collaborators used that targeting capability to edit DNA. Editing DNA is the product you asked about (in patent terminology, a method of doing something is patentable). That product use uses the cutting that Dudna demonstrated.
A quick (and still overly broad) analysis is that Dudna et al discovered the science, and Zhang et al reduced it to practice. However, reducing it to practice only gets you a patent if it's not obvious.
"The patent ruling suggests that the work done by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California and her colleagues on CRISPR wasn't so groundbreaking as to make any other advance obvious. But that legal opinion isn't how the science world views her work, STAT points out: "Doudna and her chief collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in the life sciences in 2015, the $500,000 Gruber Genetics Prize in 2015, and the $450,000 Ja..."
These are two different things. The patent ruling was only about whether the work by Doudna, Charpentier et al. made the MIT/Harvard work "obvious". The Breakthrough and other prizes didn't care whether the MIT/Harvard work was obvious or not, it was an award for heir work being a breakthrough, whether it led to any applications or not.
look again: his approval rating is roughly the same. his disapproval rating is up (worse) 10% in that time.
Look again, and this time pay attention to the scatter in the measurements. A 10% change in half of the population is way less than the variation from poll to poll. Don't let the nice straight trend lines fool you: that's noise, not signal.
... less than a month is a small sample size...
Exactly.
The story that the bust had been removed was posted at 7:31p.m.. By 8:41 p.m. the reporter had sent out e-mails and tweets correcting the information. At 8:46 p.m., Press Secretary Sean Spicer retweeted that message with the words “Apology accepted.”
So: it took an hour to run the correction.
That's the difference between fake news and journalism. Fake news doesn't make corrections.
Go to the next looney left rally and ask the, um, "protestors" about the bust of MLK. You'll find that most of them think it was removed.
This is fake news, since you in fact have not done that experiment. You are making shit up, but stating your speculation as if it were fact.
Do the experiment, and get back to me with the results.
LOL. So the "difference" is that when they're caught they backtrack. Got it.
Exactly.
Fake new sites-- like trolls-- don't acknowledge errors.
Wrong is not the same as "fake". Fake news is stuff that's made up.
One way you can tell the difference is by whether a correction is made when the error is pointed out. The Time story about the MLK bust you list as fake news, for example, was followed by a correction and an apology. That's journalism. Nobody is perfect; journalism consists of acknowledging and correcting mistakes.
Check here:
http://time.com/4645541/donald...
To verify, here is the article, dated 20 January. Note that the incorrect information is removed, and the article has a correction also dated 20 January:
http://time.com/4642088/trump-...
The correction reads: Correction: An earlier version of the story said that a bust of Martin Luther King had been moved. It is still in the Oval Office.
To verify that the correction wasn't backdated, here's the archived version of the article as of 1AM on Jan 21. Notice the correction: http://web.archive.org/web/201...
That's the difference.
Fake news had a very specific meaning, which is propaganda consisting of outright lies masquerading as real news to influence public opinion in a given way.
No, the term "fake news" is looney left propaganda made up in the face of Hillary's loss to explain why she lost.
No, fake news really exists, although it the term has been coopted to mean "stuff I don't agree with." There were web sites that basically completely made stuff up. some of them had small print claiming that they were satire, like this one http://www.thatsfake.com/did-e... but some of them were just clickbait sites, making shit up and trying to go viral with links reposted so that they could score with clicks, like this one: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
You're right to this extent, though, the term is much over-used recently.
Sadly, we don't live in a world where everyone is playing a zero sum game for the most positive outcome for the entire human race...
Those two phrases contradict each other. If it's a zero-sum game, there is no "most positive outcome"; the sum of positive and negative is fixed at zero.
I think what you mean is more like "we live in a world where everyone is playing a zero sum game instead of playing for the most positive outcome for the entire human race.
...And, sorry, Obamacare actually *is* something to oppose. It's amazing how many of my friends lost their insurance and are now paying double or triple for less coverage. And this was all fully predictable to anyone paying attention....
I would think it would be prudent to wait to hear what the politicians who are cancelling it tell us what they are going to implement instead.
So far, it's a pig in a poke-- they're saying "we'll come up with something much much better, trust us, it will be great"-- but they don't seem to have any idea what this "better" system is going to be or how it will work.
Sorry, but I'm skeptical: I want to see some details before I'm convinced.
I think that ability on their part is fading fast. The polls showing Trump's precipitous fall in popularity.. .
The polls are not showing a "precipitous fall in popularity". So far, three weeks after inauguration, the people who liked Trump before still like him and think he's doing good; the people who didn't like Trump before still don't like him and think he's doing badly.
Really. Look at the actual poll numbers, not the misleading headlines: no real change.
http://elections.huffingtonpos...
His approval ratings almost certainly will change as people start to judge him on what he does, not what his campaign said-- but this has not happened yet.
First, Oroville, California, gets 52 inches of rain per year. NOT a desert.
According to US climate data 30.7 inches of precipitation per year
http://www.usclimatedata.com/c...
which is about 20% less than the national average
https://rainfall.weatherdb.com...
Still: not a desert.
Ferroce isn't harmeless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and viologen isn't a nice substance either http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/ca...
How come ferrocene gets a wikipedia page, but viologen has to make do with the Aldrich Chemicals page?
Having a recognizable user name doesn't automatically make someone right. But having the ability to go back and view their comments in prior conversations sure makes it easier to gauge if their opinion is worth a shit or not.
Yep. And after a while you get to notice that some usernames are usually very insightful.
There are only 2 uses I've seen for AC: Trolls, and people who claim they can't comment under their name because their employer would recognize them (or some flavor of that).
Yes on 1, no on two: these people could simply chose a username like "haX0r42" or "Pringleeater" that their boss won't recognize. /., there's one more reason a person might comment as AC: they have already moderated the thread and don't want to remove their moderations..
You're right, though, the worst of the drive-by flaming and pugnacious idiocy is almost always anonymous.
Due to the particular nature of
Why do people think that having a recognizable user name makes them right? You do realize that is just an ad homonym attack, right?
1. It's hominem, as in person.
Did you realize that you just made an ad homonym attack?
You attacked the AC post for using a homonym.
The best way to troll Wikipedia is to insert [citation needed] next to all the most obvious parts of the article.
I was going to do this to the Wikipedia article about "the sky", next to the part where it says "the sky is blue", but there are already 4 separate citations for that particular fact. There is a weakness in the following sentence, however - "At night, the sky appears to be a mostly dark surface". There is no citation for this so-called "fact" - until I have read a newpaper article or academic paper confirming that the sky is dark, I will go on believing the opposite. Because that's Wikipedia law.
Here you go. Add these to the article:
At night, the sky appears to be a mostly dark surface.[1][2][3][4]
[1] Harrison, E. R. "The dark night-sky riddle: a" paradox" that resisted solution." Science 226, (1984): 941-946.
[2] Jaki, Stanley L., and H. L. Armstrong. "The paradox of Olbers' paradox." American Journal of Physics, 40.9 (1972): 1354-1355.
[3] Harrison, E. R. "Olbers' paradox." Nature 204, (1964): 271-272.
[4] Wesson, Paul S., K. Valle, and R. Stabell. "The extragalactic background light and a definitive resolution of Olbers's paradox." The Astrophysical Journal 317, (1987): 601-606.
The entrenched fiefdoms are 100000%+ more harmful than the random drive-by. The drive-by will be deleted while the entrenched (college professors with beards, etc.) will be considered ***absolute truth***.
The entrenched fiefdoms, pages where one user (or a small cabal of users) believe that they own the article and will dispute and revert every change to their perfect prose are indeed a problem in Wikipedia-- their motto should be "the encyclopedia everybody can edit, except don't bother trying with these articles." But in my experience it's rarely college professors-- it's dedicated amateurs who have simply decided that they are the world's expert in this field.
Many of them actually are quite knowledgable-- there are some pretty good articles there. But sometimes these are by people who just don't have a good grasp on writing for clarity and sticking to the topic.
Most of the college professors I know are at best amused by wikipedia, and in general disdain it.
Or, as some people spell the word, a kludge.
Also known as literate people.
So, some random site decided to grab the URL of "oxford dictionaries", I assume to mislead people into thinking that this is the Oxford English Dictionary
Don't slashdotters know about the Jargon File anymore? (here or here or here.) It's sad how classic hacker history is so quickly forgotten.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm... : kludge
1. /kluhj/ n. Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of kluge (US). These two words have been confused in American usage since the early 1960s, and widely confounded in Great Britain since the end of World War II.
In English, the soft "g" is pronounced as if it has a "d" in front of it. Kluge rhymes with huge. Kludge, on the other hand, would rhyme with sludge or judge.
Sorry, I was apparently unclear. Microsoft's policy of mis-dating drivers to workaround their self-created problem is a kluge.
Or, as some people spell the word, a kludge.
There's a word for this method of solving a problem: it's a kluge.
The statement was "the hard bit is not being cremated by the surface temperature of 470C (878F) or crushed by the atmospheric pressure, which is about 90 times that of Earth, the same as swimming 900 metres under water".
It's the atmospheric pressure, not the temperature, that is about 90 times that of Earth
I think there is one good use for geothermal in most areas, namely heating and cooling homes (and possibly larger buildings). In most of the continental US, the temperature ten or twenty feet underground is a somewhat steady ~50 degrees F (ten C). That means that in the summer, when you need to cool the house, the ground is plenty cool, and a heat pump can transfer that heat; and in the winter, the ground is warmer than the air (for places that go around freezing or below), and again a heat pump can transfer that heat.
Yes, that is what I was referring to when I wrote "Good for winter/summer thermal averaging, perhaps, but not much more."
Most of the energy comes from UV light, not the visible spectrum.
Good thinking, but actually silicon cells (the kind used in low-cost panels) are most sensitive to red and near-IR. You don't get much energy out of the UV part of the solar spectrum-- in fact, usually you want to block most of it in the glass, since UV will tend to yellow the adhesive holding the cells to the glass.
However, the previous poster is also way off base-- geothermal is a lousy solution for most of the planet. Maybe he lives in Iceland (which has lots of geothermal). For most of the planet, geothermal is expensive to access, comes in the form of low-grade heat, and is limited by thermal conductivity of rock. Good for winter/summer thermal averaging, perhaps, but not much more.
I expect that the 0.5 to 1.4 year payback numbers are for places photovoltaic panels are actually used, and not for place like Alaska in winter. (Alaska in summer is pretty good, though, as long as you track the sun)
Even if just counting the initial energy costs, I still find it hard to believe a worst case of 1.4 years.
Let's do a back of the envelope calculation.
You can buy solar panels for $0.50/watt. If a significant part of that cost was energy cost, then you'd see panels being made primarily in places with cheap energy. But, actually, you don't-- you see them being made in places with cheap labor.
To make numbers easy, suppose 20% of solar panel cost is energy cost, $0.10 per watt, and the energy cost (at industrial prices, not home prices) is $0.10/kW-hr. So, it takes 1000 hours at 1 kW/m2 (nominal 1 sun-- the solar intensity at which the rated power is rated) to do energy return. Typical insolation maps show a global horizontal insolation of about 1500 kW-hrs annually for the middle of the temperate regions we're talking about, so energy return would be in about 2/3 of a year.
That's a back of the envelope, but I wouldn't expect it to be off by more than a factor of two or so.
Insolation link: http://www.greenrhinoenergy.co...