OK, Internet super-engineer. You clearly do not know anything about aircraft or spacecraft structures.
Materials used for small drones have a very difficult time scaling up to very large lightweight structures. Care to expound on the loads and stresses experienced by a 144 foot wingspan wing, that weighs only 900 lbs? This drone was built to be light and barely strong enough. That was its design point. Have you shown the world that you can do better and can credibly criticize their design?
Extremely high aspect ratio wings, like this one, just don't want to quit flying. It is a real challenge to bring it down onto the ground. The pilots possibly exceeded design Vne trying to get it down. This exponentially increases drag forces on the airframe. Ground-effect makes landing even more difficult, and with a 144 foot wingspan, ground-effect starts at ~72 feet above ground.
Add to this the non-homogeneous nature of gusting winds in proximity to the ground, and it is not inconceivable that design limits were exceeded by a fluke of nature. There is not enough public information of what weather conditions existed during landing, but sudden adverse conditions during landing are not unprecedented. Did Lockheed's engineers under-design the structure on the L-1011?
Disclaimer - I work for an aerospace prototyping firm (not related to Facebook), and have worked on things that cover the conceivable gamut of Reynolds numbers that can be "flown". Although I have not worked on Facebook's drone, I have an intimate knowledge of the modern materials used in this air vehicle. My opinions expressed here are my own.
Where I was going with my original comment was that the CEO I was talking to was an "all of the above" alternative supporter. Algae, switchgrass, wind, nuclear, biomass conversion, butanol, solar, etc. Most environmentalist I know, pick and choose. Pro-wind, but not nuclear. Pro-nuclear, but not wind, because the windmills kill birds. Here where I live, we have about 40 eagles (brown and bald) killed a year in the wind farm, and there is a big worry about the California Condor, as this is part of their range.
To my knowledge, these energy companies don't try to discredit anybody, as it is not personal. They may fund attempts to verify or discredit faulty experiments, because bad policy built on faulty science is prone to damage their business. The scientific process includes aspects of independent verification. If an experiment cannot be reliably repeated, then there was an error in the process. Honest scientists welcome verification by adverse critics, as it proves their experiment as valid. If your published work cannot be repeated, or if it does not stand up to independent verification, then it isn't valid.
The energy companies want honest results from all of the research they do. If a promising technology doesn't add up now, they keep working on it until it does. Many of the environmentalists I know, keep pushing very sub-optimal technology as a solution, ignoring the total burden. It's great that you can make it work off grid, but if that requires 20 lead-acid cell batteries, a wind turbine, six solar panels, a diesel generator and a propane tank to power your minimal electrical consumption, then there is a problem. Especially if the twenty year cost of maintenance is over twenty times the cost of conventional grid and gas service.
I advocate for intellectual honesty. I'm not a member of any cult, and I think that cults have no place in scientific debate. Most people I know of who do not subscribe to man-made global warming theories and who have actively examined the plausibility of theories with real-world data, have zero connection to energy companies. They don't want to be treated like mushrooms, and when they attempt to verify analyses and inquire about raw data, rather than "filtered" data, they are met with stone walls. This how the pursuit of intellectual honesty is met by charlatans.
Conversely, I have sat in a few lectures by academics, who were funded explicitly because their research was in search of more "evidence" of man-made global warming. In one case a very sincere academic lectured about his hair-brained scheme to re-sequester CO2 by building giant artificial waterfalls with a particular mineral (don't pay attention to the energy required to quarry the rock or pump the water). I believe many were very good people, who were faced with the problem of finding continued funding for their research. Just like mediaeval artists, the funds keep flowing, if you paint what your patron wants. This is the current problem where dogma has largely been substituted for intellectual and scientific honesty in this field, because funds are tied to the outcome. The few climate scientist who have changed their position from pro-man-made to semi-skeptical, have been ostracized and treated as apostate from the cult.
Greenhouse gasses are to the anti-oil crowd, what bullets are to the anti-gun crowd. It is a means to a political end. The political/religious attacks on energy companies do not make poor alternatives work any better. There is no big oil conspiracy to thwart alternatives. In their labs, they are well-ahead of any of these rink-dink companies that waste our taxpayer dollars.
You cite industries that are built off of intangibles. Energy is a commodity, and the companies in that field are very concerned with cost and profit. They have defined costs, and a huge market that is inelastic. Most of their products are amazingly cheap, given the processing and logistics of delivery.
Music and newspaper are not necessities. Demand of their product is fickle, and the purveyors of this entertainment product are not bright enough to hedge for their demise, as their product is not based on a finite and diminishing resource. I assure that there is always another version of Lady GaGa, ready to be "discovered". That these companies were caught flat-footed by the internet says nothing about the forward vision of the energy sector.
The DoE program is not the right path. It is an attempt to pick winners, regardless of technical merit. Others have gone into Solydra and others, so I won't go there, except to say that these wasteful failures were inevitable. The winners were picked more by political contribution than likelihood of success.
I don't have a clue where you are going about NASA and SpaceX.
I don't post all of my conversations with windmill technicians on the internet, or I would cite it for you. Not knowing where you are, I'll post a link to picture of the windmills.
Here's is a picture of the farm. I couldn't find a close-up of the turbines, but each one has dark grease streaks down the support pylons. Each turbine has a complex gearbox and transmission that varies the blade angles, to keep the turbines turning at a constant speed. This is tough to seal, and in practice, there is no seal replacement. The turbines are operated to destruction, and replaced only if economically viable. The only thing staving off the destruction is constant refilling of the gearbox lubricant. These fields are just about as polluted as the the grounds of any oil refinery in the U.S.
I prefer to dig into topics until I have a solid factual basis to form my opinions. It is called being intellectually honest. You may want to try it sometime, at least to give some backing to your righteousness.
I'm not dismissive of you because of any "news" outlet you may or may not use, so I'd expect the same courtesy.
I appreciate that an AC thinks I am an astroturfer, but I assure you I am not. I don't work for any energy company, and I don't actually know anything about the Koch Brothers, although I gather they are somehow like a George Soros of the right.
Don't assume that because someone doesn't agree with your point of view, they are bought and paid for by some monied entity. Blind adhesion to an ideology is an expensive sort of ignorance. Get better educated by venturing outside of whatever echo chamber you occupy. Ask just as many questions about that which you believe, as you would about that with which you disagree.
Without questioning everything, you never will know how weak or solid your position is. It is my opinion that many politicians, the President not the least of whom, rely on the ignorance of the general populace to repeatedly build straw men. Most of these are flimsy facades held together with sneering rhetoric, and little factual basis. There are villains in the corporate world, but the vast majority of public companies are not the malevolent actors that they are painted as. Most are afraid of the regulatory clubs that the government wields.
With all due respect that an AC deserves, you need to get out of your bubble more.
Wind energy is probably the biggest boondoggle in the last 50 years. From my kitchen table, I can currently see ~350 windmills, and there are nearly 6,000 in a 20 mile radius of my house. Wind energy remains ludicrously expensive, and only makes a profit by using a lot of other people's money. When the tax credits run out, all of the windmills surrounding me are idled.
When oil hit $140 a barrel, about half of the windmills around me were idled. Why is that? Well, each one required a 55 gallon barrel of lubricant, a week. When oil spiked, they were not economically viable, even with the hefty tax credits they earned by just existing. I won't touch the low wind or high wind conditions that also idle the fields. The demand for these wind farms are primarily politically sourced, rather than any reality based economic decision.
Solar may be improving, but they are very far from being cost competitive. The manufacture of hybrid cars share much of the same environmental problems that plague the manufacture of windmills. Rare earths and nickel mines are very problematic, and energy intensive.
Good intentions do not make these things good. Continued research and development may one day make them truly viable, but that day is not on the immediate horizon.
The profit motive of the energy companies is all that they need to invest in new alternatives. They are constantly working against brain-dead regulations dreamed up by science-illiterate politicians, and are always looking at how to best cope with them. If and when any of them come up with an alternative, you can be sure it will be viable, or on course to be economically viable in less than a decade.
Far more is currently gained with energy conservation technologies, rather than alternative energy production. LED lights and Energy Star certifications are great, the former not getting any government money until the L-Prize. The winner of this contest was developed in advance, because Philips saw the path to profits. Prices will drop soon enough, with scaling of manufacture.
The money is not given away. It is a tax credit for R&D. What you seem to be suggesting is that some types of R&D are more worthy for receiving a tax break. In the larger picture of a national economy, R&D spending prepares for economic growth through either finding ways to lower cost, or produce a better product. It is incentivized in the tax code, to promote economic growth.
Carving out specific areas for different rates, is just meddling. The law of unintended consequences will guarantee that the recipients of these proposed grants will have very little to do with the professed goal. A few years ago, I saw many academic papers tack on the words "with nanotechnology" in an attempt to gain funding. Most of the projects had nothing to do with nano anything. In a similar way, these grants will go to alternative energy shams that have nothing viable in the way of technology, but loads of good intentions.
Why give money to the government to have a small portion given back? This is a policy that is anti-growth, except for governmental growth.
One of the former CEO's I talked to helmed BP in the late 1990's. He was the most earnest, and the exact opposite of the cartoonish cigar chomping oil-man that environmentalists imagine these CEO's to be. He talked much about preparing for the impending end of the hydrocarbon economy.
The plan to collect $2 billion from oil and gas revenues is a tax. These companies don't get subsidies for being oil companies. They get tax credits for R&D investment, like any other company in the US. Politicians call these subsidies, like some call tax cuts spending, when a lowering of a tax rate is not an expenditure.
When a politician states that they want to eliminate the subsidies to oil companies, they are talking about not giving them tax credits for R&D, like any other company. As I mentioned in my first post, this R&D is largely in alternative and clean energy research. Removing the tax credits for these energy companies is counter to the professed intention of supporting alternative energy.
It is unfortunate that government is apt to pursue political solutions rather than viable practical solutions. That's the world we live in.
The premise here is that gas and oil companies should be punished, and their gains should be confiscated and given to other companies with better intentions. The real world truth is that there are no oil or gas companies anymore, and there hasn't been for the last fifteen years, at least.
No, what used to be oil companies have all become energy companies. They all invest heavily in alternative energy technologies, because they have the most to lose if anything does become viable and threatens their current revenue generators. I've spoken with several former CEO's of these former oil companies, and they were, to a person, fixated on the end of oil and the emergence of alternative energy sources. I left these conversations wondering why these CEO's were more pro-alternative than any environmentalist I had ever met.
The government confiscation of funds from these companies, and the eventual redistribution to campaign donors fronting "new" energy companies will only slow down the discovery of practical and sustainable alternative energy sources.
The problem is that Samsung et. al are throwing inferior, more expensive knock-offs into the marketplace, hoping to capitalize on Apple's ground-breaking success. If Samsung didn't try to ape almost every detail of the iPad, then these suits wouldn't have happened.
To many people, if it looks like an iPad, it is one.
Think about it this way. What does a ThinkPad look like? Whether it was made by IBM or Lenovo, it has a distinct style (industrial design) that sets it apart from every other Wintel laptop out there. Same question for Samsung mobile devices? Today, they look near identical to Apple's stuff, which was original in concept and imlementation when released. Galaxies Tabs look like IPads. Most Android phones look like iPhones, instead of the Blackberry/Treo/Sidekicks that they looked like in development, prior to the iPhone.
I'm curious to get the input from you or someone else that has done the necessary research on Android tablets as to which the "best one" is supposed to be.
The best one is the one that does the most things you would like to do, in a stable manner.
Right now, for most people, that would be the iPad. Apple has their shit together, and that just cannot be said of ANY Android tablet maker or even Google, at this point in time. They just passed something like 100,000 iPad-specific Apps in their store. I have friends who are anti-establishment types (big Android fans), who have published an iPad app, and won't even consider producing an Android version. As new developers, they want to be paid, and pragmatism is a very good idea.
Sorry, but until Google steps up and blesses a reference standard like a Nexus Tab or something, the Android tablet market won't have any "best" tablet. Until Google steps up with a real tablet SDK and a good emulator, the hurried and shoddy Android tablets will always take a back seat to the iPad.
On a side note, the history of Android and iOS devices should be considered when looking at this market disparity. Apple started with the tablet first, and shrunk it down into a phone. Sure, the iPhone preceded the iPad to market by three years, but the tablet touch interface was being developed for the better part of a decade before it was shrunk down for the phone. In both iPad and iPhone/iPod renditions, the devices were clean-sheet from the ground up. Apple got it right on the tablet, and then worked to get it right on the phone. The delay in releasing the iPad was most-likely due to needing the silicon to catch-up, so that the user experience wouldn't suck. Apple has fast emulators for both the iPad and the iPhone, and targeting either device with a common codebase is very easy.
Android, on the other hand, started out using the Microsoft Windows Mobile reference platform for hardware. The initial designs (pre-iPhone) looked much closer to Blackberries, than the now-omnipresent iPhone/Touch form factor. The first Androids were hobbled by their MS-designed roots with goofy memory management, and all Android manufacturers are still paying Microsoft for the privilege of using their crappy design. Android tablets grew out of this, with the added technical problem that any manufacturer could do whatever the hell they wanted to do. Until Honeycomb, all Android tablets used ugly (fragile) hacks to scale up phone interfaces. From Google's own admission, they did the same for Honeycomb, and won't be releasing the source because of it. Hopefully, they will eventually get it right.
I know you are trolling, as the article did not say any such comment, but I know we did use use Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime as an informal pilot input design case. If this plane is easy enough for a grandmother, let alone a C programmer to fly, then I did my job too well. All joking aside, Pete Siebold, who piloted the craft today, did almost all of the C/C++ programming for the SS1 program and its simulator, and he flew this craft very well today.
The article did mention Burt Rutan as the designer, which is unfortunate. Burt has corrected this misconception many times, but all of Scaled's work will always be tied to him and his legendary career achievements.
I believe the founder's group (the first 100 passengers) have paid the full price for the priveidge to be in that group. I've met a few of them, and many are more ordinary middle class people than one would think.
The desire to be among the first private people in space is strong with many, and not limited to the super-rich.
I've never been hired by anyone who was poor. Both I and my wife have worked private companies that were owned in whole or in part by people affected by the tax cuts that you appear to detest. Less taxes for the owners == more job security, and more probability of more workers being hired to help me out.
The reality is that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts == a 50% increase in federal tax rate for anyone making less than $34,550. The reality of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts == an infinite tax rate increase for capital gains for low-income poor people, as their current rate goes from 0% to 20%. The reality of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts means a 33% increase of tax rate for small business owners that pay themselves with dividends, rather than wages. All of these are bad for the poor.
Doing nothing about extending the tax cuts will hurt the working poor, while the entitlement class of non-productive parasites is not affected either way.
This is why Microsoft is becoming the stuff you use at work and Apple is slowly becoming the stuff you use everywhere else.
Just like IBM! Does anybody remember them? Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and now, entire IT careers are based on buying whatever has Microsoft branding, because now nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft. The IT department where I work now are trying to shoehorn MS SharePoint into whatever need we have. Usually where it will never solve anything, and only makes things worse. Alternatives be damned! We only buy Microsoft branded crap!
Originally, I was going to use Wang as an example, but IBM just fits better.
From my checks, Chrome. both 4.0.xxx and 5.0.xxx are running newer versions of WebKit than Apple's shipping version of Safari, on both Windows and Macs. As such, Chrome has a few more check marks in some compliance areas than Safari.
Quite a few of these compliance counting tests are bogus, as they rely on the browser reporting their support. As one example, I note that Chrome 5 reports that it supports the 'date' type of input, where Safari doesn't. In my testing, neither support it, so Chrome is lying. The nightly WebKit makes an attempt at doing 'date' type of input, but it is horribly broken. IE8 and Mozilla also fail for 'date'. Opera (which I only use for testing) correctly handles the 'date' type of input, displaying a usable date-picker, but it can't handle border radiuses or drop shadows which WebKit browsers handle just fine (excepting Micorosoft's testing).
For me, IE9 is useless, as where I work will be stuck on XP for a really long time, and IE9 will not arrive there. All of the other browsers are what matter for me, as I am putting as much HTML5 and CSS 3 as I can into a project now because those portions will progressively improve as browsers improve. The fall-backs are safe and usable on current browsers, but the enhanced functionality will be delivered without rewriting my code. All other browsers will continue to do more-modern things on XP.
I'm just pointing out that this is the liberal/progressive cash cow from government, and though this Cuccinelli guy is most likely overstepping, there is a great deal of fraud within today's climate science where bad models are being used to justify draconian and asphyxiating economic policy.
The conservative cash cow tends to be defense contracts and federal land leases. Their bogeymen are terrorists and whoever may have a nuke with plans to hit us. This thing with Mann and Cuccinelli has nothing to do with defense or drilling, so I didn't include conservatives. If Dr. Mann was taking the opposite side and had inverted his hockey stick, screaming that we weren't doing enough to boost greenhouse gas emissions or nuclear detonations, I'd want him to be investigated, too.
Dr. Mann cherry picked his proxy datasets to flatten out well-documented prior high temperature periods, wed those to recent instrument data when the proxies diverged, and groomed them with bogus filters to make the recent half century look like a run-away freight train of increasing temperatures. He hid his data and process from any and all that sought to recreate his research and verify his results. That in itself is scientific fraud, paid for by the taxpayers of the US and the commonwealth of Virginia. After this, he had this graph planted prominently in the IPCC summary for policy makers, where it became the banner and clarion call for all of the environmentalist left, since the beginning of this last decade.
I love how moderation tends to run far amok on political threads. I guess I didn't contribute in the appropriate way by heaping scorn on the republican AG of VA, therefore getting an overrated and off-topic scoring. How exactly are you supposed to check misguided vitriol, itself off-topic, that paints with a large brush, but gets moderated as insightful?
I hate to bring this up, but all of your points are easily refuted by simple fact. Both parties have billionaires as their financial base, but the Democrats are much more successful in their financial cultivation of their billionaires. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Ron Burkel, George Soros, the whole Google gang and Warren Buffet are all huge recent backers of the Democrats. I can't name a single billionaire that I could associate with the republicans today. Bill Gates is mostly apolitical and donates very small amounts to both sides of the aisle.
As far as climate change costing billionaires income, I would wager that some very wealthy democrats and like-minded wealthy individuals have been pinning their fortunes to the climate change scare. Witness former Vice President Al Gore, who is predicted to be the first carbon-trading billionaire. He left office with a net worth of around $4 million, and now is worth upwards of half a billion. In the last election, T. Boone Pickens was trying to get out ahead of a green energy wave, making wind power an issue in the election. Then in the end, he scrapped his plan because the subsidies that the democrats were promising (to this billionaire) didn't materialize in time.
It is not absurd that the global warming scare (now called "climate change" for less refutation) is a liberal conspiracy, as those on the left have been promoting and profiting from it over the last decade and a half. The climate is always in a state of flux, and there is no good reason to think that we have done anything to affect it substantially, or that we could if we wanted to. People are getting rich from creating a perceived problem and supplying perceived solutions from mechanical gizmos to absurd financial instruments based on trading air and cow farts. Modern snake oil, all of it, supported by cooked fuzzy pseudo-science.
Worse yet, instead of warning you that a PDF is about to execute JavaScript code, Adobe Reader actively and repeatedly harasses you if you turn off JavaScript, telling you that it won't work properly. This, even if the PDF you are viewing contains no JavaScript whatsoever.
Instead of bothering you when you do something dangerous, it bothers and encourages you to let it behave insecurely. Adobe has become the new Microsoft, with respect to hindering user security.
Not only that, but the use of carbon fiber for the plates brings other hazards with galvanic corrosion and much difficulty in preventing shorts. CF is really good at destroying metal fasteners. Throw it in a wet environment like a wheel well, roof or hood, and the problems erupt in very little time.
This is a funding trial balloon. You can imagine lots of uses for something when you make a small swatch hooked up to alligator clips in the lab, but the practicalities of implementing this "technology" in the real world will never be solved. At least without more funding. This university is not interested in making body panels out of this material. They want someone with money to come by and fund their research for access, so they can make body panel capacitors.
WK2 is not fly-by-wire. In fact there is no hydraulic boost, even. Its control surfaces are all human powered by long composite cables.
The WK2 is also fully aerobatic, so it will see high loadings. It was designed for them.
Disclaimer - I work at Scaled Composites, and I am not at liberty to discuss any proprietary information. The information provided above is publicly acknowledged and available from other sources.
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Materials used for small drones have a very difficult time scaling up to very large lightweight structures. Care to expound on the loads and stresses experienced by a 144 foot wingspan wing, that weighs only 900 lbs? This drone was built to be light and barely strong enough. That was its design point. Have you shown the world that you can do better and can credibly criticize their design?
Extremely high aspect ratio wings, like this one, just don't want to quit flying. It is a real challenge to bring it down onto the ground. The pilots possibly exceeded design Vne trying to get it down. This exponentially increases drag forces on the airframe. Ground-effect makes landing even more difficult, and with a 144 foot wingspan, ground-effect starts at ~72 feet above ground.
Add to this the non-homogeneous nature of gusting winds in proximity to the ground, and it is not inconceivable that design limits were exceeded by a fluke of nature. There is not enough public information of what weather conditions existed during landing, but sudden adverse conditions during landing are not unprecedented. Did Lockheed's engineers under-design the structure on the L-1011?
Disclaimer - I work for an aerospace prototyping firm (not related to Facebook), and have worked on things that cover the conceivable gamut of Reynolds numbers that can be "flown". Although I have not worked on Facebook's drone, I have an intimate knowledge of the modern materials used in this air vehicle. My opinions expressed here are my own.
Bill Nye is not a scientist. He only played "The Science Guy" on TV. That was a TV character that he invented.
By training and his early career, he is an engineer.
By fame-driven ego and immersion into an oxygen deprived echo chamber, he is an insufferable leftist.
Where I was going with my original comment was that the CEO I was talking to was an "all of the above" alternative supporter. Algae, switchgrass, wind, nuclear, biomass conversion, butanol, solar, etc. Most environmentalist I know, pick and choose. Pro-wind, but not nuclear. Pro-nuclear, but not wind, because the windmills kill birds. Here where I live, we have about 40 eagles (brown and bald) killed a year in the wind farm, and there is a big worry about the California Condor, as this is part of their range.
To my knowledge, these energy companies don't try to discredit anybody, as it is not personal. They may fund attempts to verify or discredit faulty experiments, because bad policy built on faulty science is prone to damage their business. The scientific process includes aspects of independent verification. If an experiment cannot be reliably repeated, then there was an error in the process. Honest scientists welcome verification by adverse critics, as it proves their experiment as valid. If your published work cannot be repeated, or if it does not stand up to independent verification, then it isn't valid.
The energy companies want honest results from all of the research they do. If a promising technology doesn't add up now, they keep working on it until it does. Many of the environmentalists I know, keep pushing very sub-optimal technology as a solution, ignoring the total burden. It's great that you can make it work off grid, but if that requires 20 lead-acid cell batteries, a wind turbine, six solar panels, a diesel generator and a propane tank to power your minimal electrical consumption, then there is a problem. Especially if the twenty year cost of maintenance is over twenty times the cost of conventional grid and gas service.
I advocate for intellectual honesty. I'm not a member of any cult, and I think that cults have no place in scientific debate. Most people I know of who do not subscribe to man-made global warming theories and who have actively examined the plausibility of theories with real-world data, have zero connection to energy companies. They don't want to be treated like mushrooms, and when they attempt to verify analyses and inquire about raw data, rather than "filtered" data, they are met with stone walls. This how the pursuit of intellectual honesty is met by charlatans.
Conversely, I have sat in a few lectures by academics, who were funded explicitly because their research was in search of more "evidence" of man-made global warming. In one case a very sincere academic lectured about his hair-brained scheme to re-sequester CO2 by building giant artificial waterfalls with a particular mineral (don't pay attention to the energy required to quarry the rock or pump the water). I believe many were very good people, who were faced with the problem of finding continued funding for their research. Just like mediaeval artists, the funds keep flowing, if you paint what your patron wants. This is the current problem where dogma has largely been substituted for intellectual and scientific honesty in this field, because funds are tied to the outcome. The few climate scientist who have changed their position from pro-man-made to semi-skeptical, have been ostracized and treated as apostate from the cult.
Greenhouse gasses are to the anti-oil crowd, what bullets are to the anti-gun crowd. It is a means to a political end. The political/religious attacks on energy companies do not make poor alternatives work any better. There is no big oil conspiracy to thwart alternatives. In their labs, they are well-ahead of any of these rink-dink companies that waste our taxpayer dollars.
-- Len
You cite industries that are built off of intangibles. Energy is a commodity, and the companies in that field are very concerned with cost and profit. They have defined costs, and a huge market that is inelastic. Most of their products are amazingly cheap, given the processing and logistics of delivery.
Music and newspaper are not necessities. Demand of their product is fickle, and the purveyors of this entertainment product are not bright enough to hedge for their demise, as their product is not based on a finite and diminishing resource. I assure that there is always another version of Lady GaGa, ready to be "discovered". That these companies were caught flat-footed by the internet says nothing about the forward vision of the energy sector.
The DoE program is not the right path. It is an attempt to pick winners, regardless of technical merit. Others have gone into Solydra and others, so I won't go there, except to say that these wasteful failures were inevitable. The winners were picked more by political contribution than likelihood of success.
I don't have a clue where you are going about NASA and SpaceX.
-- Len
I don't post all of my conversations with windmill technicians on the internet, or I would cite it for you. Not knowing where you are, I'll post a link to picture of the windmills.
Here's is a picture of the farm. I couldn't find a close-up of the turbines, but each one has dark grease streaks down the support pylons. Each turbine has a complex gearbox and transmission that varies the blade angles, to keep the turbines turning at a constant speed. This is tough to seal, and in practice, there is no seal replacement. The turbines are operated to destruction, and replaced only if economically viable. The only thing staving off the destruction is constant refilling of the gearbox lubricant. These fields are just about as polluted as the the grounds of any oil refinery in the U.S.
-- Len
Perhaps if I had cable...
I prefer to dig into topics until I have a solid factual basis to form my opinions. It is called being intellectually honest. You may want to try it sometime, at least to give some backing to your righteousness.
I'm not dismissive of you because of any "news" outlet you may or may not use, so I'd expect the same courtesy.
-- Len
I appreciate that an AC thinks I am an astroturfer, but I assure you I am not. I don't work for any energy company, and I don't actually know anything about the Koch Brothers, although I gather they are somehow like a George Soros of the right.
Don't assume that because someone doesn't agree with your point of view, they are bought and paid for by some monied entity. Blind adhesion to an ideology is an expensive sort of ignorance. Get better educated by venturing outside of whatever echo chamber you occupy. Ask just as many questions about that which you believe, as you would about that with which you disagree.
Without questioning everything, you never will know how weak or solid your position is. It is my opinion that many politicians, the President not the least of whom, rely on the ignorance of the general populace to repeatedly build straw men. Most of these are flimsy facades held together with sneering rhetoric, and little factual basis. There are villains in the corporate world, but the vast majority of public companies are not the malevolent actors that they are painted as. Most are afraid of the regulatory clubs that the government wields.
-- Len
With all due respect that an AC deserves, you need to get out of your bubble more.
Wind energy is probably the biggest boondoggle in the last 50 years. From my kitchen table, I can currently see ~350 windmills, and there are nearly 6,000 in a 20 mile radius of my house. Wind energy remains ludicrously expensive, and only makes a profit by using a lot of other people's money. When the tax credits run out, all of the windmills surrounding me are idled.
When oil hit $140 a barrel, about half of the windmills around me were idled. Why is that? Well, each one required a 55 gallon barrel of lubricant, a week. When oil spiked, they were not economically viable, even with the hefty tax credits they earned by just existing. I won't touch the low wind or high wind conditions that also idle the fields. The demand for these wind farms are primarily politically sourced, rather than any reality based economic decision.
Solar may be improving, but they are very far from being cost competitive. The manufacture of hybrid cars share much of the same environmental problems that plague the manufacture of windmills. Rare earths and nickel mines are very problematic, and energy intensive.
Good intentions do not make these things good. Continued research and development may one day make them truly viable, but that day is not on the immediate horizon.
The profit motive of the energy companies is all that they need to invest in new alternatives. They are constantly working against brain-dead regulations dreamed up by science-illiterate politicians, and are always looking at how to best cope with them. If and when any of them come up with an alternative, you can be sure it will be viable, or on course to be economically viable in less than a decade.
Far more is currently gained with energy conservation technologies, rather than alternative energy production. LED lights and Energy Star certifications are great, the former not getting any government money until the L-Prize. The winner of this contest was developed in advance, because Philips saw the path to profits. Prices will drop soon enough, with scaling of manufacture.
-- Len
The money is not given away. It is a tax credit for R&D. What you seem to be suggesting is that some types of R&D are more worthy for receiving a tax break. In the larger picture of a national economy, R&D spending prepares for economic growth through either finding ways to lower cost, or produce a better product. It is incentivized in the tax code, to promote economic growth.
Carving out specific areas for different rates, is just meddling. The law of unintended consequences will guarantee that the recipients of these proposed grants will have very little to do with the professed goal. A few years ago, I saw many academic papers tack on the words "with nanotechnology" in an attempt to gain funding. Most of the projects had nothing to do with nano anything. In a similar way, these grants will go to alternative energy shams that have nothing viable in the way of technology, but loads of good intentions.
Why give money to the government to have a small portion given back? This is a policy that is anti-growth, except for governmental growth.
Not sure what free money you are talking about.
-- Len
One of the former CEO's I talked to helmed BP in the late 1990's. He was the most earnest, and the exact opposite of the cartoonish cigar chomping oil-man that environmentalists imagine these CEO's to be. He talked much about preparing for the impending end of the hydrocarbon economy.
-- Len
The plan to collect $2 billion from oil and gas revenues is a tax. These companies don't get subsidies for being oil companies. They get tax credits for R&D investment, like any other company in the US. Politicians call these subsidies, like some call tax cuts spending, when a lowering of a tax rate is not an expenditure.
When a politician states that they want to eliminate the subsidies to oil companies, they are talking about not giving them tax credits for R&D, like any other company. As I mentioned in my first post, this R&D is largely in alternative and clean energy research. Removing the tax credits for these energy companies is counter to the professed intention of supporting alternative energy.
-- Len
It is unfortunate that government is apt to pursue political solutions rather than viable practical solutions. That's the world we live in.
The premise here is that gas and oil companies should be punished, and their gains should be confiscated and given to other companies with better intentions. The real world truth is that there are no oil or gas companies anymore, and there hasn't been for the last fifteen years, at least.
No, what used to be oil companies have all become energy companies. They all invest heavily in alternative energy technologies, because they have the most to lose if anything does become viable and threatens their current revenue generators. I've spoken with several former CEO's of these former oil companies, and they were, to a person, fixated on the end of oil and the emergence of alternative energy sources. I left these conversations wondering why these CEO's were more pro-alternative than any environmentalist I had ever met.
The government confiscation of funds from these companies, and the eventual redistribution to campaign donors fronting "new" energy companies will only slow down the discovery of practical and sustainable alternative energy sources.
-- Len
The problem is that Samsung et. al are throwing inferior, more expensive knock-offs into the marketplace, hoping to capitalize on Apple's ground-breaking success. If Samsung didn't try to ape almost every detail of the iPad, then these suits wouldn't have happened.
To many people, if it looks like an iPad, it is one.
Think about it this way. What does a ThinkPad look like? Whether it was made by IBM or Lenovo, it has a distinct style (industrial design) that sets it apart from every other Wintel laptop out there. Same question for Samsung mobile devices? Today, they look near identical to Apple's stuff, which was original in concept and imlementation when released. Galaxies Tabs look like IPads. Most Android phones look like iPhones, instead of the Blackberry/Treo/Sidekicks that they looked like in development, prior to the iPhone.
-- Len
I'm curious to get the input from you or someone else that has done the necessary research on Android tablets as to which the "best one" is supposed to be.
The best one is the one that does the most things you would like to do, in a stable manner.
Right now, for most people, that would be the iPad. Apple has their shit together, and that just cannot be said of ANY Android tablet maker or even Google, at this point in time. They just passed something like 100,000 iPad-specific Apps in their store. I have friends who are anti-establishment types (big Android fans), who have published an iPad app, and won't even consider producing an Android version. As new developers, they want to be paid, and pragmatism is a very good idea.
Sorry, but until Google steps up and blesses a reference standard like a Nexus Tab or something, the Android tablet market won't have any "best" tablet. Until Google steps up with a real tablet SDK and a good emulator, the hurried and shoddy Android tablets will always take a back seat to the iPad.
On a side note, the history of Android and iOS devices should be considered when looking at this market disparity. Apple started with the tablet first, and shrunk it down into a phone. Sure, the iPhone preceded the iPad to market by three years, but the tablet touch interface was being developed for the better part of a decade before it was shrunk down for the phone. In both iPad and iPhone/iPod renditions, the devices were clean-sheet from the ground up. Apple got it right on the tablet, and then worked to get it right on the phone. The delay in releasing the iPad was most-likely due to needing the silicon to catch-up, so that the user experience wouldn't suck. Apple has fast emulators for both the iPad and the iPhone, and targeting either device with a common codebase is very easy.
Android, on the other hand, started out using the Microsoft Windows Mobile reference platform for hardware. The initial designs (pre-iPhone) looked much closer to Blackberries, than the now-omnipresent iPhone/Touch form factor. The first Androids were hobbled by their MS-designed roots with goofy memory management, and all Android manufacturers are still paying Microsoft for the privilege of using their crappy design. Android tablets grew out of this, with the added technical problem that any manufacturer could do whatever the hell they wanted to do. Until Honeycomb, all Android tablets used ugly (fragile) hacks to scale up phone interfaces. From Google's own admission, they did the same for Honeycomb, and won't be releasing the source because of it. Hopefully, they will eventually get it right.
-- Len
I know you are trolling, as the article did not say any such comment, but I know we did use use Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime as an informal pilot input design case. If this plane is easy enough for a grandmother, let alone a C programmer to fly, then I did my job too well. All joking aside, Pete Siebold, who piloted the craft today, did almost all of the C/C++ programming for the SS1 program and its simulator, and he flew this craft very well today.
The article did mention Burt Rutan as the designer, which is unfortunate. Burt has corrected this misconception many times, but all of Scaled's work will always be tied to him and his legendary career achievements.
--Len
I believe the founder's group (the first 100 passengers) have paid the full price for the priveidge to be in that group. I've met a few of them, and many are more ordinary middle class people than one would think.
The desire to be among the first private people in space is strong with many, and not limited to the super-rich.
--Len
It is pretty obvious that you've never spent time with senior citizens with limited income, and capital gains.
You sound like you are trying to appeal to the non-productive parasites, rather than the working poor.
--Len
I've never been hired by anyone who was poor. Both I and my wife have worked private companies that were owned in whole or in part by people affected by the tax cuts that you appear to detest. Less taxes for the owners == more job security, and more probability of more workers being hired to help me out.
The reality is that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts == a 50% increase in federal tax rate for anyone making less than $34,550. The reality of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts == an infinite tax rate increase for capital gains for low-income poor people, as their current rate goes from 0% to 20%. The reality of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts means a 33% increase of tax rate for small business owners that pay themselves with dividends, rather than wages. All of these are bad for the poor.
Doing nothing about extending the tax cuts will hurt the working poor, while the entitlement class of non-productive parasites is not affected either way.
-- Len
This is why Microsoft is becoming the stuff you use at work and Apple is slowly becoming the stuff you use everywhere else.
Just like IBM! Does anybody remember them? Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and now, entire IT careers are based on buying whatever has Microsoft branding, because now nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft. The IT department where I work now are trying to shoehorn MS SharePoint into whatever need we have. Usually where it will never solve anything, and only makes things worse. Alternatives be damned! We only buy Microsoft branded crap!
Originally, I was going to use Wang as an example, but IBM just fits better.
-- Len
From my checks, Chrome. both 4.0.xxx and 5.0.xxx are running newer versions of WebKit than Apple's shipping version of Safari, on both Windows and Macs. As such, Chrome has a few more check marks in some compliance areas than Safari.
Quite a few of these compliance counting tests are bogus, as they rely on the browser reporting their support. As one example, I note that Chrome 5 reports that it supports the 'date' type of input, where Safari doesn't. In my testing, neither support it, so Chrome is lying. The nightly WebKit makes an attempt at doing 'date' type of input, but it is horribly broken. IE8 and Mozilla also fail for 'date'. Opera (which I only use for testing) correctly handles the 'date' type of input, displaying a usable date-picker, but it can't handle border radiuses or drop shadows which WebKit browsers handle just fine (excepting Micorosoft's testing).
For me, IE9 is useless, as where I work will be stuck on XP for a really long time, and IE9 will not arrive there. All of the other browsers are what matter for me, as I am putting as much HTML5 and CSS 3 as I can into a project now because those portions will progressively improve as browsers improve. The fall-backs are safe and usable on current browsers, but the enhanced functionality will be delivered without rewriting my code. All other browsers will continue to do more-modern things on XP.
-- Len
I'm just pointing out that this is the liberal/progressive cash cow from government, and though this Cuccinelli guy is most likely overstepping, there is a great deal of fraud within today's climate science where bad models are being used to justify draconian and asphyxiating economic policy.
The conservative cash cow tends to be defense contracts and federal land leases. Their bogeymen are terrorists and whoever may have a nuke with plans to hit us. This thing with Mann and Cuccinelli has nothing to do with defense or drilling, so I didn't include conservatives. If Dr. Mann was taking the opposite side and had inverted his hockey stick, screaming that we weren't doing enough to boost greenhouse gas emissions or nuclear detonations, I'd want him to be investigated, too.
Dr. Mann cherry picked his proxy datasets to flatten out well-documented prior high temperature periods, wed those to recent instrument data when the proxies diverged, and groomed them with bogus filters to make the recent half century look like a run-away freight train of increasing temperatures. He hid his data and process from any and all that sought to recreate his research and verify his results. That in itself is scientific fraud, paid for by the taxpayers of the US and the commonwealth of Virginia. After this, he had this graph planted prominently in the IPCC summary for policy makers, where it became the banner and clarion call for all of the environmentalist left, since the beginning of this last decade.
I love how moderation tends to run far amok on political threads. I guess I didn't contribute in the appropriate way by heaping scorn on the republican AG of VA, therefore getting an overrated and off-topic scoring. How exactly are you supposed to check misguided vitriol, itself off-topic, that paints with a large brush, but gets moderated as insightful?
-- Len
I hate to bring this up, but all of your points are easily refuted by simple fact. Both parties have billionaires as their financial base, but the Democrats are much more successful in their financial cultivation of their billionaires. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Ron Burkel, George Soros, the whole Google gang and Warren Buffet are all huge recent backers of the Democrats. I can't name a single billionaire that I could associate with the republicans today. Bill Gates is mostly apolitical and donates very small amounts to both sides of the aisle.
As far as climate change costing billionaires income, I would wager that some very wealthy democrats and like-minded wealthy individuals have been pinning their fortunes to the climate change scare. Witness former Vice President Al Gore, who is predicted to be the first carbon-trading billionaire. He left office with a net worth of around $4 million, and now is worth upwards of half a billion. In the last election, T. Boone Pickens was trying to get out ahead of a green energy wave, making wind power an issue in the election. Then in the end, he scrapped his plan because the subsidies that the democrats were promising (to this billionaire) didn't materialize in time.
It is not absurd that the global warming scare (now called "climate change" for less refutation) is a liberal conspiracy, as those on the left have been promoting and profiting from it over the last decade and a half. The climate is always in a state of flux, and there is no good reason to think that we have done anything to affect it substantially, or that we could if we wanted to. People are getting rich from creating a perceived problem and supplying perceived solutions from mechanical gizmos to absurd financial instruments based on trading air and cow farts. Modern snake oil, all of it, supported by cooked fuzzy pseudo-science.
-- Len
Worse yet, instead of warning you that a PDF is about to execute JavaScript code, Adobe Reader actively and repeatedly harasses you if you turn off JavaScript, telling you that it won't work properly. This, even if the PDF you are viewing contains no JavaScript whatsoever.
Instead of bothering you when you do something dangerous, it bothers and encourages you to let it behave insecurely. Adobe has become the new Microsoft, with respect to hindering user security.
-- Len
Not only that, but the use of carbon fiber for the plates brings other hazards with galvanic corrosion and much difficulty in preventing shorts. CF is really good at destroying metal fasteners. Throw it in a wet environment like a wheel well, roof or hood, and the problems erupt in very little time.
This is a funding trial balloon. You can imagine lots of uses for something when you make a small swatch hooked up to alligator clips in the lab, but the practicalities of implementing this "technology" in the real world will never be solved. At least without more funding. This university is not interested in making body panels out of this material. They want someone with money to come by and fund their research for access, so they can make body panel capacitors.
-- Len
WK2 is not fly-by-wire. In fact there is no hydraulic boost, even. Its control surfaces are all human powered by long composite cables.
The WK2 is also fully aerobatic, so it will see high loadings. It was designed for them.
Disclaimer - I work at Scaled Composites, and I am not at liberty to discuss any proprietary information. The information provided above is publicly acknowledged and available from other sources.
-- Len