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Comment Energy in Hawaii is more complex than that (Score 2, Interesting) 255

by VirtualSquid (#26007963) Attached to: Hawaii Planning State-Wide Electric Car Network
I live on Hawaii island and study the energy issue so i can give some perspective.

First, to dispense with the false choice in the summary: It's not "car charging network" vs. "solar and wind". Of course we need both. Renewables are held back for both political reasons (no carbon penalty, 'avoided cost', slow bureaucracy) and physical reasons (no storage, no renewable baseload except geothermal on this island). There are a _lot_ of important-but-unpopular things the State could do to really make a difference - like tax gasoline and the importation of food - which they will never do because they don't have the guts.

However, we could do every possible thing - give away electric cars, tax the hell out of fossil fuels, put solar and wind and geothermal in every possible place, grow biodiesel crops for liquid fuel, burn biomass for carbon-neutral baseload electricity, wave power, condemn car-dependent suburbs - all of which we should do - and Hawaii would _still_ be a totally unsustainable place. Oil permeates every single bit of our culture, such as our 95% imported food.

Anything short of a mass exodus (not exactly a popular idea) and a return to a semi-agrarian lifestyle (not particular popular either) is not sustainable. Very few people in Hawaii realize it, and of the few educated people, many are in denial or hold out unrealistic optimist for a silver bullet ("fuel from algae will save us!")

For more info, see my biofuel notes
Transportation

FAA Greenlights Satellite-Based Air Traffic Control System 138

Posted by samzenpus from the no-clouds-in-the-sky dept.
coondoggie writes "As one of the massive flying seasons gets underway the government today took a step further in radically changing the way aircraft are tracked and moved around the country. Specifically the FAA gave the green light to deploy satellite tracking systems nationwide, replacing the current radar-based approach. The new, sometimes controversial system would let air traffic controllers track aircraft using a satellite network using a system known as Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B), which is ten times more accurate than today's radar technology. ADS-B is part of the FAA's wide-reaching plan known as NextGen to revamp every component of the flight control system to meet future demands and avoid gridlock in the sky."
The Courts

RIAA Litigation May Be Unconstitutional 281

Posted by timothy from the what-about-ritchie-chaz-and-margot? dept.
dtjohnson writes "A Harvard law school professor has submitted arguments on behalf of Joel Tenenbaum in RIAA v. Tenenbaum in which Professor Charles Nesson claims that the underlying law that the RIAA uses is actually a criminal, rather than civil, statute and is therefore unconstitutional. According to this article, 'Nesson charges that the federal law is essentially a criminal statute in that it seeks to punish violators with minimum statutory penalties far in excess of actual damages. The market value of a song is 99 cents on iTunes; of seven songs, $6.93. Yet the statutory damages are a minimum of $750 per song, escalating to as much as $150,000 per song for infringement "committed willfully."' If the law is a criminal statute, Neeson then claims that it violates the 5th and 8th amendments and is therefore unconstitutional. Litigation will take a while but this may be the end for RIAA litigation, at least until they can persuade Congress to pass a new law."
Software

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Is Officially Here 284

Posted by CmdrTaco from the who-needs-office-anyway dept.
SNate writes "After a grinding three-year development cycle, the OpenOffice.org team has finally squeezed out a new release. New features include support for the controversial Microsoft OOXML file format, multi-page views in Writer, and PDF import via an extension. Linux Format has an overview of the new release, asking the question: is it really worth the 3.0 label?"
Software

Submission + - iPhone Goes Adult With iSteamy (isteamy.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The iPhone went adult today with the launch of the first native adult application for the iPhone and iPod Touch; iSteamy. http://www.isteamy.net/ iSteamy brings the adult media world to your pocket with an ever growing and user contributable collection of audio, video, and zoomable pictures, as well as off-line storage for when you are away from the internet.
Role Playing (Games)

Submission + - Dead game designer updates her blog (10zenmonkeys.com)

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "As Vanity Fair ran a cover story about the death by suicide of Theresa Duncan (creator of Zero Zero), she was updating her blog. Theresa left behind a posthumous post, raising questions about how the process of death itself will be impacted by technology. "It isn't hard to imagine a future scenario when people will be able to generate AI-controlled virtual selves who will stroll around digital worlds like Second Life, having conversations with grief-stricken friends and family after their living counterparts are dead.""

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