The company claims they could sell $1/watt panels, but with 100% of their production for 2008 already purchased, what are the odds they're selling their stuff 4X below market value? In the article I read:
Roscheisen said the manufacturing process the company has developed will enable it to eventually deliver solar electricity for less than a dollar per watt Which I take to mean,, Slashdot's usual headline buffoonery aside, their process could not deliver it today for $1/watt regardless of demand. There is an unquantified less than in there, but if I'd guess if they were delivering it to their current customers at $1.01 per watt they'd call it $1 and we'd all forgive them.
I intend to buy one solely for the high res B&W screen. If they still sport that....I stopped paying attention because I thought they weren't planning to sell these to the public.
And I'm someone who spends a lot of time in the countries where these will be distributed. I expect to be able to trade into one relatively cheap, but I'm also happy to support the cause.
We in America have a cultural bend toward using a car and reducing the reluctance to ride a bike or walk to a couple of bullet points is bound to leave out a lot of important factors.
I once contracted for a company that had an office building and a manufacturing plant about 1/2 mile apart on the same road. They gave me an office but a lot of the work I did was on the machines in their plant. Three or four times a weeks I'd walk down there, carrying a laptop, to do some kind of update.
Other people in the office thought I was insane for walking. They questioned whether my car was broken. They offered me use of a company vehicle. They offered to give me a ride. They told me it might rain. They didn't think it was safe. An litany of reasons why I should drive it. And carrying a laptop the whole way? The message was clear: These people would dismiss the idea of walking a half mile across the well manicured lawns of our corporate neighbors without a second thought.
Most of the people warning me away from the walk were physically capable of making it themselves. Maybe 1/4 of them were too fat or too enfeebled (surprisingly, few of those made the connection between a lack of walking and the condition they were in). The rest of them just flat out did not want to do it. In an office of 300 people I found one or two who were willing to walk there instead of drive.
There seems to be hope, if you mean for our collective survival and such. If you mean relief from consumerist binging that I (and you, it seems) find grotesque, probably not.
For a long time humans have been burning down one another's cities and eradicating entire cultures from the planet over control of shiny objects that have had, until very recently, no practical use apart from adornment. And we still are but in a more civilized manner. Right now as I type this an otherwise intelligent man is signing over 3 months of his salary in trade for a chip of colorless rock half the size of a pencil eraser. He does this because he and other humans are fascinated by this rock, a trait we as a species share with raccoons and crows exclusively.
But now we just get Slashvertisements to stoke the fires of brand envy. A scant 500 years ago the Europeans would have slit your throat to get hold of your 'iPhone'.
That's why you always aim for the head; their feathers are too tough for shotgun pellets.
Not really, pellets will penerate their feather just fine. The problem is that their vital organs are both well padded by non-vital tissue and they are fairly small. Their head and neck offer much more direct routes to inflict fatal damage. A gut shot wild turkey can run for miles before expiring and bleed very little in the process, rendering it untrackable.
As for their ability to fly it is limited. In the sig joke you reply to the turkeys were a) domestic, and b) dropped from a helicopter. I'm not sure that even widl turkey would have been able to maintain flight long enough keep from hitting the ground with terminal (for them) velocity.
If you read any photography related web forums, something I strongly advise against, you'll see that lolcats photos are pretty popular.
Some guy buys a $3000 lens for his $3000 DSLR, shoots a photo of his cat, then posts a modified JPG version so everyone can validate his pointless consumerism. "Here I am shooting cat photos in my living room with $10,000 in camera gear. Please tell me how excellent my purchasing acumen is."
I took the parent as taking issue with the 'loving' part than with the anthropomorphic tone of the OP.
My favorite 'mother earth' quote, from someone who was out in it quite a bit:
"...nature is a stern, hard, immovable and terrible in her unrelenting cruelty. When wintry winds are out and the mercury far below zero she will allow her most ardent lover to freeze to her snowy breast without waving a single leaf in pity, or offering him a match; and scores of her devotees may starve to death in as many languages before she will offer a loaf of bread."
That from Nessmuk.
I'm from the Aldo Leopold school of conservation, I don't want to poison the air and water and cut down all the trees. But I also know, from various somewhat narrow escapes, that regardless of the cartoon face stuck on nature, it wants to crunch up my bones and return them to the soil and only by my wits or by erecting technological barriers do I keep that from happening.
Entropy and all that. Nature is a big promoter of entropy.
I don't see why a person who's never read the Constitution...should have an equal voice in running the nation So do you find, in the Constitution or its supporting documentation, something that leads you to believe the authors wanted to dole out the right to vote that way?
Like most problems of society, drug use is not likely the cause of the above errant moderation.
I get mod points quite often and I've fucked up applying them a few times. Each time it was related to the fact that the current UI for moderating is drop down menu (which is just fine) that applies whatever moderation is selected immediately upon being clicked (no fine). This would be halfway fine if there were some means to un-mod a post, or at least re-mod it, but there is not.If my mouse pointer is off slightly when I click an item in the list I'll have applied the wrong moderation and can do nothing about it.
This is obviously dumb. I don't want to be bothered like I'm using Windows, but some things involving user selections on a computer need either a confirmation step that is distinct from the selection or have a Back button.
Some of the things on the list wouldn't likely be popular enough to be viable imports. The cell phones, for now, are good examples.
But other things are kept out due to patent issues, and other sorts of regulatory absurdity. The few Cuban cigars brought into the country change hands for astronomical sums compared with what they sell for everywhere else, so the market obviously wants them.
Older generation industrial AGVs (essentially robot forklifts) usually followed magnets embedded in the floor. Some of the more sophisticated ones could load pallets into vertical racks by reading magnets as their masts rose.
While that type of navigation is still the most common, there are some interesting systems out there that rely on machine vision to locate things in 3D. Cameras spaced known distances apart and a lot of precessing.
I've seen lifts that could accurately find randomly placed pallets in a warehouse, accurately enough to slide their forks under them without any damage. There is a lot of work being done to perfect this sort of technology and to combine it with others ways of sensing what is going on around a AGV, so that it will work in a mixed environment with human forklift operators whos movements are not predictable.
Obviously a long way off from use in generic transportation but it is promising.
You don't read a lot of serious science here because this isn't the place for it.
Every so often a fairly specialized technical discussion will crop up and even to people like me, who are casually interested, it is obvious that people who are serious about the subject are posting. They don't write full blown journal quality posts because a) see above, and b) as you correctly point out, Slashdot's demographic on the whole doesn't have the higher level knowledge necessary to understand them.
But that doesn't mean there isn't an interesting discussion going on. On the contrary, there are good opportunities to interact with serious people you would otherwise never be able to access. If you can effectively ignore the "I got wireless working under Linux so I know everything" mentality anyway.
Along the lines of the RIAA submissions from NewYorkCountryLawyer. How many attorneys who actively defend against RIAA lawsuits as their primary practice do you meet in a day?
The OP wrote that as a result of the photos US soldiers could expect to be tortured.
This is not the case. There were no photos prior to Mogadishu, where bodies of helicopter crew and the snipers who tried to rescue them were dragged through the streets. There were none when various acts of torture were committed against the Vietnam vets who spoke to us during our SERE training.
Then, as now, whether or not a captured soldier is killed or tortured or beaten or fed lobster tails depends largely on who their captors are and what strategic advantage they think they can get out of them. Photos might get kids to show up at a protest rally, or people to blame Bush on Slashdot, but the people out there making war on both sides have more serious shit to attend to.
For instance, just before I capture you, you shooting at my head might cause a more immediate emotional reaction than the photos I saw on the news last year.
And as a result US servicemen who are captured by Jihadis can expect to be treated as brutally as the Abu Graihb photographs. No.
Long before those photographs were published many US soldiers expected to be tortured if they were captured. During some of the higher level Marine SERE training that was pretty well drilled into our heads. And if it wasn't, those of us on the ground in Somalia, watching video of our captured brothers, figured it out.
So no, I don't think the photos were any kind of deciding factor for anyone.
He probably asked for $10 million and they probably agreed. After deduxcting various ancilliary expenses, office rental, studio time, roadies, electrical power factor multiplier, candy bars, in office Jolt delivery, the deposit on his office key, and various other miscellaneous Usual & Customary Fees, and taxes, his check was about $15k.
The OP stated "openly kleptocrats", which leaves open the possibility that they all are, everywhere.
Here in the US we seldom get to see objective evidence that we've elected one, so that when we do we can still pretend that he is just one bad apple and his 430 some odd peers are just as clean as their press releases lead us to believe.
One would think the occupying military would just ban private ownership of firearms, like the dictatorship before them did, and that problem would be solved.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this one is trying to get you to vote for him as President.
If he wins, he'll go back to being that other one again.
Probably forever, since Congress can't amend the Constitution.
I intend to buy one solely for the high res B&W screen. If they still sport that....I stopped paying attention because I thought they weren't planning to sell these to the public.
And I'm someone who spends a lot of time in the countries where these will be distributed. I expect to be able to trade into one relatively cheap, but I'm also happy to support the cause.
We in America have a cultural bend toward using a car and reducing the reluctance to ride a bike or walk to a couple of bullet points is bound to leave out a lot of important factors.
I once contracted for a company that had an office building and a manufacturing plant about 1/2 mile apart on the same road. They gave me an office but a lot of the work I did was on the machines in their plant. Three or four times a weeks I'd walk down there, carrying a laptop, to do some kind of update.
Other people in the office thought I was insane for walking. They questioned whether my car was broken. They offered me use of a company vehicle. They offered to give me a ride. They told me it might rain. They didn't think it was safe. An litany of reasons why I should drive it. And carrying a laptop the whole way? The message was clear: These people would dismiss the idea of walking a half mile across the well manicured lawns of our corporate neighbors without a second thought.
Most of the people warning me away from the walk were physically capable of making it themselves. Maybe 1/4 of them were too fat or too enfeebled (surprisingly, few of those made the connection between a lack of walking and the condition they were in). The rest of them just flat out did not want to do it. In an office of 300 people I found one or two who were willing to walk there instead of drive.
There seems to be hope, if you mean for our collective survival and such. If you mean relief from consumerist binging that I (and you, it seems) find grotesque, probably not.
For a long time humans have been burning down one another's cities and eradicating entire cultures from the planet over control of shiny objects that have had, until very recently, no practical use apart from adornment. And we still are but in a more civilized manner. Right now as I type this an otherwise intelligent man is signing over 3 months of his salary in trade for a chip of colorless rock half the size of a pencil eraser. He does this because he and other humans are fascinated by this rock, a trait we as a species share with raccoons and crows exclusively.
But now we just get Slashvertisements to stoke the fires of brand envy. A scant 500 years ago the Europeans would have slit your throat to get hold of your 'iPhone'.
That's why you always aim for the head; their feathers are too tough for shotgun pellets.
Not really, pellets will penerate their feather just fine. The problem is that their vital organs are both well padded by non-vital tissue and they are fairly small. Their head and neck offer much more direct routes to inflict fatal damage. A gut shot wild turkey can run for miles before expiring and bleed very little in the process, rendering it untrackable.
As for their ability to fly it is limited. In the sig joke you reply to the turkeys were a) domestic, and b) dropped from a helicopter. I'm not sure that even widl turkey would have been able to maintain flight long enough keep from hitting the ground with terminal (for them) velocity.
Colonel Jeff Cooper, a guy who didn't shrink from a fight, felt exactly the same way.
Eliminating people who want to kill you, or who do evil things, is a fine idea but this has been morphed into an exercise for chickenhawks.
Yes to the first, no to the second.
Essentially the crimes are not authorized unless you fill out the authorization forms first.
And by authorization forms I mean the documents needed to start a corporation.
Or win an election.
Thats how you get authorized.
If you read any photography related web forums, something I strongly advise against, you'll see that lolcats photos are pretty popular.
Some guy buys a $3000 lens for his $3000 DSLR, shoots a photo of his cat, then posts a modified JPG version so everyone can validate his pointless consumerism. "Here I am shooting cat photos in my living room with $10,000 in camera gear. Please tell me how excellent my purchasing acumen is."
I took the parent as taking issue with the 'loving' part than with the anthropomorphic tone of the OP.
My favorite 'mother earth' quote, from someone who was out in it quite a bit:
"...nature is a stern, hard, immovable and terrible in her unrelenting cruelty. When wintry winds are out and the mercury far below zero she will allow her most ardent lover to freeze to her snowy breast without waving a single leaf in pity, or offering him a match; and scores of her devotees may starve to death in as many languages before she will offer a loaf of bread."
That from Nessmuk.
I'm from the Aldo Leopold school of conservation, I don't want to poison the air and water and cut down all the trees. But I also know, from various somewhat narrow escapes, that regardless of the cartoon face stuck on nature, it wants to crunch up my bones and return them to the soil and only by my wits or by erecting technological barriers do I keep that from happening.
Entropy and all that. Nature is a big promoter of entropy.
Like most problems of society, drug use is not likely the cause of the above errant moderation.
I get mod points quite often and I've fucked up applying them a few times. Each time it was related to the fact that the current UI for moderating is drop down menu (which is just fine) that applies whatever moderation is selected immediately upon being clicked (no fine). This would be halfway fine if there were some means to un-mod a post, or at least re-mod it, but there is not.If my mouse pointer is off slightly when I click an item in the list I'll have applied the wrong moderation and can do nothing about it.
This is obviously dumb. I don't want to be bothered like I'm using Windows, but some things involving user selections on a computer need either a confirmation step that is distinct from the selection or have a Back button.
No, he wrote roll models......as in 16 sided dice.
I have a half dozen or so live shows by The Black Keys on perpetual seed and I haven't noticed much of a difference.
Some of the things on the list wouldn't likely be popular enough to be viable imports. The cell phones, for now, are good examples.
But other things are kept out due to patent issues, and other sorts of regulatory absurdity. The few Cuban cigars brought into the country change hands for astronomical sums compared with what they sell for everywhere else, so the market obviously wants them.
Older generation industrial AGVs (essentially robot forklifts) usually followed magnets embedded in the floor. Some of the more sophisticated ones could load pallets into vertical racks by reading magnets as their masts rose.
While that type of navigation is still the most common, there are some interesting systems out there that rely on machine vision to locate things in 3D. Cameras spaced known distances apart and a lot of precessing.
I've seen lifts that could accurately find randomly placed pallets in a warehouse, accurately enough to slide their forks under them without any damage. There is a lot of work being done to perfect this sort of technology and to combine it with others ways of sensing what is going on around a AGV, so that it will work in a mixed environment with human forklift operators whos movements are not predictable.
Obviously a long way off from use in generic transportation but it is promising.
You don't read a lot of serious science here because this isn't the place for it.
Every so often a fairly specialized technical discussion will crop up and even to people like me, who are casually interested, it is obvious that people who are serious about the subject are posting. They don't write full blown journal quality posts because a) see above, and b) as you correctly point out, Slashdot's demographic on the whole doesn't have the higher level knowledge necessary to understand them.
But that doesn't mean there isn't an interesting discussion going on. On the contrary, there are good opportunities to interact with serious people you would otherwise never be able to access. If you can effectively ignore the "I got wireless working under Linux so I know everything" mentality anyway.
Along the lines of the RIAA submissions from NewYorkCountryLawyer. How many attorneys who actively defend against RIAA lawsuits as their primary practice do you meet in a day?
The OP wrote that as a result of the photos US soldiers could expect to be tortured.
This is not the case. There were no photos prior to Mogadishu, where bodies of helicopter crew and the snipers who tried to rescue them were dragged through the streets. There were none when various acts of torture were committed against the Vietnam vets who spoke to us during our SERE training.
Then, as now, whether or not a captured soldier is killed or tortured or beaten or fed lobster tails depends largely on who their captors are and what strategic advantage they think they can get out of them. Photos might get kids to show up at a protest rally, or people to blame Bush on Slashdot, but the people out there making war on both sides have more serious shit to attend to.
For instance, just before I capture you, you shooting at my head might cause a more immediate emotional reaction than the photos I saw on the news last year.
Long before those photographs were published many US soldiers expected to be tortured if they were captured. During some of the higher level Marine SERE training that was pretty well drilled into our heads. And if it wasn't, those of us on the ground in Somalia, watching video of our captured brothers, figured it out.
So no, I don't think the photos were any kind of deciding factor for anyone.
I read that as they promised him anything.
He probably asked for $10 million and they probably agreed. After deduxcting various ancilliary expenses, office rental, studio time, roadies, electrical power factor multiplier, candy bars, in office Jolt delivery, the deposit on his office key, and various other miscellaneous Usual & Customary Fees, and taxes, his check was about $15k.
The OP stated "openly kleptocrats", which leaves open the possibility that they all are, everywhere.
Here in the US we seldom get to see objective evidence that we've elected one, so that when we do we can still pretend that he is just one bad apple and his 430 some odd peers are just as clean as their press releases lead us to believe.
One would think the occupying military would just ban private ownership of firearms, like the dictatorship before them did, and that problem would be solved.
Like in Washington, DC.
If Leo Strauss taught us anything, and I think he has, it is that the Russians are to be blamed whether they deserve it or not.
Also buy a rifle.