No. They are lower. At least for modern wind farms.

I just have to comment this as I see it repeated often: I am sorry, but that's not really true. It's true they got a (big) foot in the door (about 1/3 of the votes in a background of a crisis), but that's about where democracy stopped and Hitler took over. If you're interested, I suggest you read a history book on the Germany and the Weimar Republic. Here's a couple of quick links with more info:

http://www.lobelog.com/no-hitler-did-not-come-to-power-democratically/
http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/1150/is-the-claim-that-hitler-came-to-power-democratically-justified

Even if you can perhaps argue about the 1933 election, there's no doubt that by 1939 Germany was not a democracy. In 1939 you had to be a fool to think otherwise, the nazis weren't exactly quiet about their authoritarian philosophy. I live in a neighbouring country, and by 1939 a lot of people here were certainly reading the signs, nervously.

Sure, but that's not really what you want. Far from it. You want output that follows the consumption. Many existing hydro plants can do this by virtue of the storage in the dam.

On a related note, cost/kWh figures can be deceptive. For instance, say the cost is 0,20 USD/kWh 24/7. That's great - except at night consumption is low so you may not be able to sell the energy, or will have to sell at a much reduced price; you can still do that if the marginal costs of keeping the plan running are lower than competitors. But in reality, you may only have say 12 hours/day to really turn a profit, not 24 hours.

Or perhaps you could just do what any long section of text does on the web - structure things in a hierarchy so you start off by seeing the hierarchy, then visit the first node, then go back to the hierarchy, then visit the second, etc. (or see part of the hierarchy as you traverse the leaf nodes, or whatever). And color code links to stuff you've already visited.

Really, navigation should be a solved problem by now if you think just a little bit beyond the limitations of paper books.

Watch the QuakeCon talks he gave this year and in 2012. He's been involved in the development of the Rift from the beginning one way or another.

The problem in this instance is that MATE is basically a fork of GNOME which was already in the repository. It's my understanding that a lot of stuff had to be sorted out to prevent clashes and to ensure that Debian doesn't end up with a bunch of garbage packages that will have to be maintained for the next Debian release.

It seems to me there are two schools of thought. One is that people have an inherent right to ideas they invent. That's the American dream - to rise from poverty and get rich.

The other is that patents are there to help society, period. In this case, it seems that without patent protection, society was better off with these Chinese knockoffs you mention - let the most competitive production facility win. If he had spent ten years and lots of development resources researching how to build this, there may be a point that society is better off granting him a patent so others aren't discouraged from investing in R&D. However, this argument only holds water in so far that this R&D wouldn't have happened anyway.

The problem with the first school of thought is that it appears the patent system in practice is actually rigged against individuals and small companies.

I personally know one inventor who was basically had no output for 10 years in order to pay off debt he'd accrued because he went out and patented a really good idea for a household appliance - and then never got anything out of it because the manufacturers found another way to build the appliance. Lawyers seem to me to be the only real winners in this game.

I was waiting for the moment you would suggest to strap the old CRT onto your head for the Only True VR Experience.

Yes, you can. You just can't keep licensing the result as BSD, because that would circumvent the GPL license - someone could take the BSD-licensed result and put it into a proprietary code base, something that people licensing their works under the GPL are not okay with.

But I'll grant that you that these days, it would perhaps be a good idea if you could keep the result licensed under two licenses, so the GPL-part under GPL and the rest under BSD. As long as the rest of the project is under a GPL-compatible free license, I don't really see the problem.

Of course, that could quickly turn into a mess. May not be workable in practice.

From the photos, the platform doesn't look like a WindFloat.

Mitsubishi and Vestas recently announced a joint venture in offshore turbines, though.

It's probably not going to be cheap, not in our lifetime, and it produces radioactive material comparable to a fission plant (although of course with some differences) so I'm not sure how it qualifies as safe either.

The truth is that we already have access to close to limitless energy in renewable sources. And the tech for harvesting it is falling in price year by year.

That's a bit one-sided. The nuclear power plant is going to need repairs and upgrades too, and it also needs backup. The latter should be self-evident given the current situation.

Currently wind turbines are sold with 20-25 years guarantees, but nobody really knows how long they're going to last.

In Denmark it's about 0.45-0.55. You can't really compare the costs of 3 prototype units with a full-scale rollout.

As for the total price, the nuclear plant you're comparing it to would probably be pretty expensive to build today too. In the UK, they're tossing 25 billion USD in Hinkley Point C at 3200 MW nameplate as far as I can tell.

True, but these are prototypes. So of course you don't put 2000 of them up at once, it's not like it's in Denmark where there are currently about 500 offshore non-floating wind turbines.

That's not true. It's more expensive to build them, but they are far cheaper to operate. It's really hard to beat something that runs on sun or air or rain in operating costs.