NASA did destroy a large amount of imagery in the 1980s, despite a public outcry I certainly contributed to. The official line was that no one knew how to read the warehouses full of 7 track tapes to for conversion to CD (the 2400 foot tape could store 5 to 140 MB depending on density). The obvious reason was no one wanted to spend the money to replace all the classified pixels with innocuous ones. And so mankind lost a large amount of wealth.

Can't be bothered to read TFA, and got a life-threatening yawn scanning the overly complicated rebuttal.

Dollars of carbon offsets vs. megawatts of installed capacity is mostly a measure of the average capacity factor during operation, possibly adjusted by the fossil fuels needed for maintenance but that is way beyond this level of analysis.

Capacity factor is something like 20% for solar (5 full sun hours most days), 40% for wind in a favorable location, 95% for nuclear until something bad happens In the end if they all have the same cost per installed MW then nuclear wins. If solar had 5x less installed cost then it wins, similarly for wind at 2.5 less.

where the state legislature is not afraid to make suh environmental dangers illegal.

Such a bomb could well house a small battery for detonation, big enough to also power the device for a short time for the trigger swipe. Rejecting devices that don't work is absolute insanity.

But no net energy that way, just pointless multiplication of PV panels. If you want a energy return equal to the energy that went into making the first panel, the first 5 years is a loss - all it does is produce a panel. If you produce no more panels after that it takes another 5 years to recover the energy you could have used 10 years earlier to do something useful. Only after that is net energy. Some of the net energy can be used as a new source of useful energy, the rest to produce more panels and ultimately as the energy source to develop a Dyson sphere. When you stop building panels, it's all net energy.

Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) of PV can be 3-4 in favorable cases but the rate of return is also important if you want to multiply the resource. If energy parity for the first panel takes 5 years then its output could produce a second panel in another 5 years. So for 10 years you get no net energy, after which you can tap some of the output for other uses while still continuing to add panels at an accelerating rate. Doesn't matter if you start with 10 or 10 billion, there is still no net energy for 10 years. Starting with a large number could cause energy shortages and social unrest which could end the sustainable growth entirely.

Yes, we should have started 20 years ago.

As always, there is plenty of free and superior course material. The real graft is at whatever level can issue the mandate that the latest and priciest must be used. Nothing but the best for our children, etc.

"The Penultimate Truth" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

I have script and ad blocks and bogus host file entries to speed up browsing but can honestly say I don't pay attention to ads when they get through, When looking for something to buy I do the search and find it hard to believe unsolicited ads bring in any customers.

Are there really people who click through and buy something because an ad says they need it?

That's the infinite plane wave approximation for lattices of infinite extent. Scattered spherical waves from finite objects will result in some energy passing through the aperture for every spatial frequency. Although it could be difficult to sort out which frequencies are contributing (aliasing). Analysis of the through focal series can do that, also changing the convergence of incident illumination.

But if the source is known to be two points, accurate measurement of the spacing between the resulting PSFs is limited only by signal to noise.

Yes, and what's more diffraction causes no fundamental limit to resolution, it just happens to be the distance between the first zeroes of an interference function. For two point sources of equal intensity that leads to an easily seen contrast difference of around 25% but trained observers can detect 5%. On electronic displays the contrast can be cranked up arbitrarily.

The fundamental limit to resolution is signal-to-nose.

http://www.technocracy.org/stu...

Written mostly during the 1930s by M. King Hubbert of peak oil infamy. Describes a sustainable society directed by science instead of wishful thinking.

Isn't the history of a bitcoin included in the block chain? And the stolen bitcoins identifiable?

If so whoever tries to use one risks being traced, moreover the recipient could be considered as knowingly accepting stolen goods..

Sort of like the haul from a bank robbery having an indelible "This money stolen from Bank X" printed on every bill.

Presumably the wayback redirect would tell you the page does not exist, but the he last time it could be loaded, this was the content. What's wrong with that?