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Earth

Nuclear Energy Now More Expensive Than Solar 635

Posted by samzenpus from the sunlight-is-free dept.
js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs. the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."

Comment Re:Missing the forest for the trees (Score 1) 373

by darthyoshiboy (#32986858) Attached to: Death Grip Tested On iPhone Competitors

People, people, people. Its not about the death grip. Its not about general signal loss on all phones.

It is about the magnitude of signal loss. According to Anand's article, the iPhone 4 loses 20 dBm from holding it naturally with the antenna gap covered. That is 30% of the signal range. No other phone can acheive this signal loss, even with the death grip. Most phones 10 dBm or less, or better, even with a death grip. The magnitude of the iPhone 4's signal loss is 100% higher, or more, than all of its competitors when held naturally. This is abysmal, and makes it very hard for the user to predict whether his call is in danger or not. The bar change helps this a bit, but it doesn't take away the fact that a vanilla iPhone 4 has a signal handicap on all of its competitors due to shitty engineering.

As you've noted the iPhone4 loses in the ballpark of 20dB with the deathgrip applied, which is nuts compared to the competition, but it's also worth noting that dB are a logarithmic expression which means that the more dB you've lost, the steeper your actual decline in signal strength is. -10dB is not even close to half as bad as a 20dB loss.

Comment Brought to you by the fine folks in Marketing (Score 2, Informative) 369

by darthyoshiboy (#30063646) Attached to: Firefox Most Vulnerable Browser, Safari Close
The project was both lead and edited by one Mandeep Khera, Chief Marketing Officer, Cenzic, Inc.
Put together more or less entirely by marketing people at a company that is trying to sell you web security.
I don't know about you guys but I've never known people in marketing to be anything less than the most fine and upstanding sort of the disgusting vile unmitigated cock sucking pustules that ever formed on the unwashed asses of pond scum.

Comment Re:But you AREN'T saying that (Score 1) 326

by darthyoshiboy (#28374015) Attached to: Harvard Study Says Weak Copyright Benefits Society
Interestingly, you say that we can't just say that it should be free and have it be that way, and you're right. WE didn't say that, and that is not what is happening.
What is happening is much the same thing as what would happen to Gold if it were suddenly as abundant as Hydrogen, the only value that Gold has is tied to it's scarcity, if the market is flooded with Gold, there is no value.
This is what is happening to Copyright, it used to be that distribution and production made things of a Copyrightable nature scarce (Maybe not scarce per se, but certainly limited.) The internet has made it so that this is not the case, nearly anyone can produce for next to nothing and distribution CAN be had for so ridiculously close to nothing that it's practically indistinguishable. The value has evaporated, the people that are willing to pay for such things will get fewer and fewer as the obstacles become smaller and smaller, and the value gets less and less.
The day may soon be upon us that the hypothetical artist you refer to as only making albums, will have so little general value as to be only capable of generating income from devoted fans that bestow value on the works and know he can only produce if they are willing to pay. To go back to your point about composers working on commission "back in the day", this will once again become the model, only the people commissioning the works will be the patrons themselves through their donations/purchases rather than a rich aristocrat.
Finally a point that you haven't touched on, if we suddenly came upon a replication technology that allowed us to cheaply and easily reproduce anything and everything (Much like the internet has done with media) should we start making laws to control what people can and can't make with their own replicators? In the name of GM making a buck should it be against the law to replicate a '69 Camaro Z28, even when it costs them nothing for me to do so, conversely I had to expend my own energies, time and presumably money making the duplicate? If so, why?

Comment Re:The magic of Blu-Ray! (Score 2, Insightful) 223

by darthyoshiboy (#28316317) Attached to: Game, DVD Sales Hurting Music Industry More Than Downloads
I work for a web hosting company with a host of your typical slashdot reading types for co-workers and I only know of two people among the whole lot that have embraced Blu-Ray.

Meanwhile my circles outside of work are composed equally of techies and Luddites and still only two Blu-Ray owners among them. These people ALL owned DVD players by 1999-2000. That means it took 2-3 years for everyone I know to own a DVD player, whereas here we are almost exactly at year 3 of Blu-Ray and I know 4 people in my since expanded circle that own a Blu-Ray player (and all of those are PS3s.) If you exclude Playstation 3 sales from the figures on Blu-Ray penetration I imagine that it looks a whole lot worse than DVD ever did.

Blu-Ray isn't losing to HD-DVD, (duh) it's losing to the established tech and the internet.

Comment Re:If only (Score 1) 361

by darthyoshiboy (#27430577) Attached to: Google Bans Tethering App From Android Market

That one's easy.

Absolutely free text messages would result in people using them for everything, including massive file transfers. (hey, people use gmail as a storage drive. I can't wait for textmsg2avi to come out. :P )

Text messages save them bandwidth, but also costs them their bread and butter phone calls, so when you pair that with the huge negative that free text messages would create, it's obvious they have to charge for them.

I still think they charge way too much, though. You should be granted something like 100 free text messages per day - plenty for average use, but not enough to abuse them. Or they could have reasonable rates like $0.01 per 25 text-messages. (clumps, reset daily)

Except that SMS costs the provider nothing, thought we covered that here already. If you don't remember, have a quick refresher here: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/text-messages-c.html

An SMS doesn't even take any bandwidth away from the regular channels which carry calls: That's why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

The space is being used one way or another, it's no skin off their backs to have it carry a message or not. The fact that they charge or limit SMS at all is an insult. MMS are another matter.

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