So the only people who are qualified to be journalists are extreme left wing hacks with huge axes to grind?

A monoculture in journalism is even more dangerous than a monoculture in operating systems.

You're correct that a lot of long haul trucking can be replaced by electrified railroads, but LWATCDR is correct in stating that it would cost billions of dollars and take a number of years. The Southern California Regional Rail Authority held a series of meetings in 1990-92 on a proposal to electrify the freight railroads in Southern California and the estimated cost at that time was 4 billion $. FWIW, I attended several of these meetings.

The high fixed cost problem has been the stumbling block for RR electrification in the US even though the pioneering long distance electrifications were in the US - 1907 for the New Haven and 1916 for the Milwaukee. Since 1940, it has been generally cheaper in the US to generate electricity on board the locomotive than with central power stations. This may change if the current price differential between oil and natural gas holds up.

Electric Railroads require a reliable source of base load power. Neither wind or solar qualifies as reliable base load generation.

Simply put, LightSquared should have known that use of high power terrestial base stations could adversely affect GPS receivers and they should have made an effort to see if a work-around was possible before acquiring rights to the frequency bands. Since they didn't, LightSquared management have probably opened themselves up to shareholder lawsuits.

The original allocation for the LightSquared frequencies was for satellite based transmitters and it is up to LightSquared to prove that shifting to terrestial transmitters will not cause harmful interference.

It's the customary unit of measure in the US for water/irrigation districts as the most common unit for describing land area in the US is the acre. Converting to metric would require updating millions of legal titles and the benefit from doing so is not considered to be worth the cost.

Large central station generators (actually alternators...) have been achieving 98 to 99% efficiency for several decades now using copper and electrical steel (no Neodymium). A larger rotor allows for more copper, which reduces the percentage of the alternators output power needed for generating the field. With a wind turbine sized alternator, the power required to maintain the field can approach 5% of the rated output, hence the use of permanent magnets (especially since the turbine is rarely producing rated output). Also note that making concrete for the foundations for the wind turbines does involve a lot of CO2 emissions - look up cement kilns.

FWIW, the NdFeB magnet material was originally developed at General Motors.

Really poor analogies. What you are referring to is energy concentrated in a small part of the body as opposed to the whole body. The scanners distribute the energy over the whole body and any breakdown with the scanning mechanism will be immediately evident in the image. Also remember when dealing with total doses on the milli-rem level, it doesn't make much of difference whether the dose occurred during a microsecond or over a day. Starting around 25 rem or so, there is a substantial difference in getting the dose in much less than a day as opposed to a couple of years.

Considering that the dose from a scan is equivalent to a few minutes of flying on a geomagnetically quiet day, more people are getting killed from cancer induced by flying than by getting scanned. If you're that concerned about additional radiation, you should be checking for any unusual geomagnetic activity before flying, especially at high geomagnetic latitudes or maybe just give up flying altogether.

Infrequent flyers will often have more to worry about the radiation dose from their own homes from radon and normally occurring radioactive materials in many building materials.

The application calls for a storage system that can provide up to 6MW for about 20 to 30 seconds. My gut reaction is that ultracaps would be a better choice than flywheels, the discharge rate is close to optimal for ultracaps and the cycle life would probably be much higher for ultracaps (especially since the caps would rarely be fully discharged). In addition, the control scheme would be much simpler, the caps would be floating on the third rail supply, not needing the power conversion electronics and motor/alternator on flywheels.

While not caused by the aircrew, the plane was essentially brought down by a former PSA employee using his badge to get by security. This happened while PSA was in the process of being folded into UseLess Air (USAir).

My recollection was that the XT came out in early 1983. Hell, the 8086/88 weren't announced till sometime in 1978 and SCP built their first 8086 board set in 1979. Anyway, the period from about 1990 to 2002 was when the big speedups took place - i.e. from when the 25MHz 486 was the hot machine to the netburst architecture.

Sounds like you are in what used to be Northern Ohio Telephone Co territory. NOTC was bought by GTE in 1968, the phone portion of GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon in 1999, then Verizon spinning off a bunch of their business the last few years.

That's been true only since the last DC residential service got converted to AC. Prior to WW2, there were pockets of 50 Hz (Southern Cal Edison converted to 60 Hz in '47-'48), 25Hz, 133Hz and a few other odd frequencies.

The links convert AC to DC and then back to AC in order to eliminate the synchronous connection. My recollection is that the conversions process was close to 99% efficient. A more recent alternative to DC links is GE's phase shifting transformer which allows transfer of reactive as well as real power.

I take you're not familiar with The Registers system of units. Volume can be measured in Bulgarian airbags, Bulgarian funbags, Olympic swimming pools, etc.

The original topic was the power grid, not residential wiring standards. As far as I know, the US grid has far more high voltage AC lines (i.e. 765kV and above) and HVDC lines than Europe.