Take this analogy:

What if, as a condition of financially supporting your decision to get married / begin a family (with a boatload of money you couldn't pass up), your parents required that you post an ad to Craigslist and evaluate all reasonable potential spouses who replied? Despite you already having met the person you already want to marry?

I imagine you'd be pretty specific about what you were looking for too.

Not trying to trivialize the situation, just trying to illustrate that it's almost as complicated as dating. There's a lot of things about a candidate that can't be captured in simple qualifications or experience. And staying with a known quantity is way easier than searching for something that may even be better, but highly uncertain.

It's good that the Japanese are funding this, because at the rate European and US basic research funds are going, I doubt we'll be able to detect much of anything by 2016...

More than doors between cars, what NYC needs to bring itself into the modern age is automatic train control and platform doors. It would allow a whole host of benefits, such as less reliance on human drivers (controversial, I know), air conditioned platforms, increased reliability, increased frequency, etc.

When you come back from Asia or Europe and see the subway systems they have, and see what we have in New York, you actually get embarrassed, and wonder how we're still #1...

ps. oh, please do all that, plus grind the rails properly so that I don't have to go deaf when the cars go around any type of curve...

There have been lots of these gasification setups in the past. Two problems are always:

1) Aside from a colocation with an agriculture / waste facility, you will have to scour a large radius to get the amount of biomass to burn reliably. There is significant transport cost to that.

2) For low grade biomass that you're talking about, you're incurring additional fuel and $ to gasify the biomass, to then burn it. This doesn't really make sense. If you're just generating power, you would probably just burn the biomass material itself. Maybe a stirling engine.

Very few applications using gasification have gone anywhere.

"Both sides won't compromise so it's both their fault?" What a moronic statement. I hope that if you ever get mugged on the street, the police will sit back and declare that it's your fault you got shot because you refused to compromise.

Unfortunately, places that have wine tend not be short on electric power either.

But I get the good intention of the demonstration.

Who wants 41 megapixels taken by a shitty sensor? There's little point in pumping the pixel density up that high when the read noise and lens aren't good enough to distinguish it.

Sigh, these policymakers always want the answer to come from some technology that they don't have to do any work for, on a problem that doesn't affect many people

How about we first start with the things that are bigger problems for every day drivers? Highway design and traffic control? Road works and maintenance? How about the condition of public transit? Then after that, get to things like policing of carpool lanes, or people who drive around with license plates obscured. Maybe after all that we can get to your fancy electronic license plates.

These Sacramento politicians love to do anything that doesn't require their own state agencies to improve. Or anything except examine the way that they spend our money.

Yeah, but the thing with storage is that memory density increased by orders of magnitude, and the same previously sized 10GB disk could now store 10TB. Battery storage density doesn't increase very much, aside from changing the chemistry...

Unfortunately, as a former physics-related PhD, I can tell you that there was a time when pure scientists with no finance background were hired and thrown at new quant trading problems. Those were the early days. Now, there are entire grad programs in quantitative finance -- I'm sure any quant fund would be interested in those first.

And just to follow on -- at a certain point where the technology has gone as far as it can, and still costs this much, you are better off putting those research dollars into other technologies or removing barriers to the ones that are at least affordable in the commercialization stage.

It's a good thing that we fund more alternative energy development projects, especially given the absolute crap kinds of things that we as a country are throwing our tax dollars into recently. However, it is important to be upfront that wave power has among the worst cost effectiveness of any of the alternative energy technologies, i.e. solar, wind, geothermal, etc.

If you look at the LCOE (levelized cost of energy, basically the evened-out cost per energy taking into account installation, operation, transportation, etc), wave energy is an order of magnitude bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Analysis_from_different_sources

That being said, of course any technology needs research to help to bring it down in cost and become a reasonable option. But the current cost also just reflects that there is a portion of cost that cannot be easily reduced, because of the inevitable difficulty of the marine environment, generating power there (maintaining these contraptions), and getting the power to land.

Just as a side thought, amidst all this talk of how $900 is an obscene price for a 6-core processor --

It always amazes me how much we have grown to expect the price of amazing things to approach mundane everyday objects. Just think about how little you get for $900 in some of the other things you buy. For $900, you could probably buy a leather couch, a piece of hardware that you yourself could probably build if given a few months, no experience, a hammer and some wood.

Yet we still gripe about we can't believe how a 6-core processor is selling for the extortionate price of $900, a piece of hardware that took trillions of dollars in investment, many hundreds of thousands of people to develop, the great minds of our generations.

By some measures, then, $900 is cheap. But of course, it's all relative to what you come to expect...

sigh. I know it's a bit of an advertising ploy, but still --

It happens so predictably that we try to cut processes to the bare minimum, even when our lives are filled with examples of the rare outlier being not so rare. We assume that because everything is going fine, we can design our control systems/thinking/regulation around the median, and then when the unthinkable happens (more frequently than expected), we're surprised that it turned out so bad.

Let's have one pilot because one pilot only ever lands the plane anyway!

Let's lend to high credit risk borrowers, because ours never default more than one at a time anyway!

etc.

What a great solution, and as always, fixing the wrong problem just because we have a technology to do it. We penalize people for having more than a certain fraction of recyclables in the trash, but do nothing about how much absolute amount of trash there is.

Every kind of recycling incentive program we have is a bandaid to what is really needed -- the prices of things that reflect their true cost to society.