I looked at the slideshow on the LISI house site, and I don't see anything that looks like a kitchen, anything that looks like a bedroom, or anything that looks like a bathroom.

Yes, they made a pretty space, but I do not see how it is a space for people to live, and I thought that was the purpose of a house, to be a space for people to live.

VERY old news.

When "Star Trek" first came on the air, in the 1960s, the US Navy sent a team to visit the set. They were building a new communications center, and they REALLY liked the bridge set layout, as it did an OUTSTANDING job of facilitating communications among the bridge crew.

Yup.

NOBODY wants to talk about this one.

Extract all the energy from the wave, and you have no more wave. There is a HUGE amount of shoreline and shallow-water marine ecology that is critically dependent on wave action. Remove the waves, and you wreck that ecology.

The Environmental Impact Statements for those wave energy plants are gonna be INTERESTING.

Not really.

It was proven decades ago that you didn't need a motion base under a flight simulator if your visual scene generator was good enough.

What is interesting is that the visual scene doesn't have to be all that good.

There's no such thing as an "Airbus 757". Boeing builds the 7x7 airplanes. Airbus builds the A3xx birds.

I'm scheduled to take my first-ever Airbus ride in November (maybe sooner). I almost took one back in March, but Cathay Pacific put me on the earlier flight, which was on a 767.

I'm not really looking forward to it.

It was a Boeing 777.

VERY good airplane. (Direct quote from an American Airlines 777 First Officer: "Sweetest-flying airplane I ever flew!" Direct quote from a very senior American Airlines 777 Captain: "10 years in 757/767. First time I got in the 777, I realized they'd fixed things I hadn't realized had been bugging me.")

With all due respect, natural gas is generally far too valuable as a chemical process feedstock to burn for electricity or heat.

Wind power, no matter where it is located, suffers from Carnot efficiency limits: the amount of power per unit "size" you can extract from a machine is limited by the temperature differential across the machine. This is fundamental physics, and will always mean that wind machines have to be physically HUGE for the amount of power they generate.

Compare a wind machine with a nuclear submarine powerplant.

For offshore wind, you also have the transmission line problem: you have to get the power from where it is generated (harvested) to where it is needed.

Geothermal: there aren't that many geothermal sites available, last I heard.

Let me see if I understand this.

You're saying that, as we shift from reliable power sources (coal, nuclear) to unreliable ones (wind, solar), we should shift that unreliability penalty to the end user, who just has to live with the fact that his power is unreliable?

Where I come from, the system designer's first job is to ensure reliability: when the user throws that switch, the machine is supposed to work. Every time.

Seriously: In the name of energy efficiency, would you consider incorporating a random "Walk to work today" module into your car, such that, every so often, it would refuse to start? With no recourse whatsoever for emergencies? That is what you are proposing for unreliable energy.

I invite you to observe that the quantity of nuclear waste per kilowatt-hour generated is very very small, compared to the quantity of carbon dioxide and other pollutants, including radioactives, emitted per kilowatt-hour by a coal-burning plant.

You COULD figure this out by noticing that a coal-fired plant takes many, many freight trains of coal per year to haul the fuel in, while a nuclear plant takes on semi-trailer I think every two years or so.

It is also worth noticing that the United States is the only country doing nuclear power generation that does not recycle (reprocess) the spent fuel rods, so that more energy may be extracted, leaving less total waste.

With all due respect, you appear to fail to understand the distinction between base load plants and topping plants.

Base load plants supply the huge amount of power that MUST BE THERE 24x7. Topping plants supply the variable amount that is or is not needed depending on seasons, weather, uncharacteristic heat waves, sudden cold snaps, Pink Floyd concert light shows...

MOST of the power demand is base load demand. Heating and cooling don't stop. Water pumping doesn't stop. Hospitals run 24x7. Ditto traffic lights.

For topping plants, there are lots of choices, natural gas being a popular one. For base load plants, there are at the moment exactly three viable choices: hydroelectric, coal, and nuclear (to be precise, negative void coefficient pressurized water reactors). We are maxed out on hydroelectric power: every dammable river in the country has already been dammed. Coal is about the dirtiest power generation technology known to man, as well as one of the most dangerous (Google "black lung disease" someday). That leaves nuclear as Hobson's Choice, if you actually care about environmental and safety issues. (Hint: Of the three, only one emits significant quantities of carbon dioxide.) (For that matter, if coal plants were held to the radiation release limits applied to nuclear plants, it would be impossible to light up a coal plant, because of the radioisotopes in the coal (carbon-14 being the big one) that go straight up the smokestack and into the atmosphere.)

*ANY* base load plant costs a lot of money and takes a long time to build, because, by their very nature, they are BIG.

Finally, observe that wind and solar are utterly unsuitable for base load, because the wind doesn't always blow, and the sun effectively "goes out" for several hours every day.

I wish it was that good an answer.

I RTFA. It wasn't.

This was a hearing on a motion objecting to a procedural point. The previous proceeding, in front of a Federal magistrate (not a judge: key point, although obscure) at which the order to decrypt the drives was issued, was attended only by the prosecutors and the magistrate. Defense counsel was not present and was not able to argue against the order. According to TFA, the judge agreed with this part of the motion, set the order aside, and ordered both parties to submit additional briefs on the matter.

It isn't over.

At this point, as I read the tea leaves, even if he wins the 5th Amendment case, Feldman is toast. They found kiddie porn on the one piece they were able to crack. They also found financial data on the drive that ties it to Feldman. Even if the prosecutors are forced to go to trial with just what they have today, they almost certainly have enough to convict him for possession of kiddie porn and put him in prison.

I worked for Texas Instruments Defense Systems and Electronics Group from early 1988 through about mid-1999.

TI DSEG had LOTS of R&D money available, and MANY different internal programs for handing it out. The most important one was called IDEA (I don't know if it was an acronym or not, or what it may have stood for). IDEA was designed to hand out small chunks of first-round funding, enough to keep one engineer with a crazy idea that just might work fed and working for a couple of months, while he threw together a detailed study proposal, saying how to do a pilot project to see if there might be something to the idea. IDEA money was EASY to get, and there were multiple paths to it. If you for whatever reason didn't want to go through your management, that was no problem at all: *ANY* IDEA coordinator ANYWHERE IN THE COMPANY could listen to an IDEA pitch from ANYONE, and, if it sounded AT ALL plausible, throw some funding at him.

The whole idea behind IDEA was that most IDEA projects were EXPECTED to fail, but they'd generally fail quickly and cheaply. The ones that didn't fail got more funding, and more detailed investigation. Wash, rinse, and repeat, and every so often something REALLY good would pop up, that would make TI a huge chunk of money, enough to justify all those little failed efforts, and some not-so-little failures as well.

Sorry, that should be Doug Casey. The URL for his piece is http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/lessons-argentine, the table is near the end.

I got it from http://howardleeharkness.com/2013/01/how-did-we-get-in-this-mess/. He's an old friend. Note that he corrected one of Casey's numbers, where Casey slipped a decimal point.

From a David Casey online newsletter, courtesy of a friend's blog:

Lesson #1

US Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $1,650,000,000,000
National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
Recent budget cuts: $38,500,000,000

Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
* Total budget cuts so far: $385