It's tempting as hell, I know. All that energy right outside. Also, if I could collect 0.00001% of the money in the world I'd be enormously wealthy.

The problem is, I can't collect even that tiny percentage. For solar electric, the fact that bright sun is only available for a few hours per day is an absolute deal-killer. Let's pretend for a moment that we had magic solar panels that collect a thousand times as much energy as what falls on them , and they're free. All we have to do is store the energy for overnight use. I have an idea, let's use the solar power to pump water uphill, then at 3PM we'll let it start coming back down, through turbines that generate electricity. Let's see where we can put these reservoirs. If we calculate the required amount of water X height, we find that the reservoirs need to cover 80% of the United States. That's right, you can power the country by putting most of it underwater. And that's with magical solar panels that are free.

The amount of energy we're talking about is so far outside most people's experience that we have a hard time reasoning about it. Solar IS good at heating things. Solar energy is good for growing food. It's good for a lot of things. It absolutely sucks balls at making electricity, because we need electricity in the evening, at night, in the morning. Also because solar electric is ten times as expensive than the alternatives. People simply can't afford a $1,500 / month electric bill.

There is ONE way you can turn solar into electricity that's practical on a small scale only. You use the sun to grow plants, then burn the plants to generate electricity, even after 2PM. That does have the minor side effect of releasing a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere. And of course the plants need water, lots of water. Lots of land too.

Preheating water with solar heat: a good way to save energy and money.
Turning light into electricity: a good way to power a small calculator, only. Doesn't provide enough power to run a watch. (But a tiny watch battery does.)

Not according to HR.

We're already hiring for somebody with 5-10 years of Dart programming experience. HR says we have to.

Think of the mold and mildew

Why? Do you think it's better to be worked to death in the heat?

"I actually bought it for my PS3, and the graphic quality seems pretty good to me"

On a GeForce 7900 Modification. I've got the GeForce 7950GT with double the RAM. Why could I not play this thing at minimum 720p with a steady and decent framerate? Why do the minimum GPU specs show nVidia GeForce GTX460 as the minimum GPU when it's running just fine and looks just fine on a freaking piece of hardware FIVE GENERATIONS OLDER?

I have huge parties. Being able to entertain everyone at once is quite handy.

Are you saying that the only reason he works hard is so that he can keep other people poor?

Not at all, that is not an inference that was intended at all.

It is not important that everyone else not have what he has.

But yet it IS important that he get more than an average person? Your original response made it abundantly clear that he should get more than his peers. Regardless of how much everyone else has, your friend should get MORE?

"MORE" is a relative term; that only has meaning when compared to someone else. You didn't argue that your friend should be able to work hard to get the things that he wants -- you argued your friend should be able to work hard to get MORE than other people.

He is motivated to do what he does because more resources grant him more security and more interesting situations.

EXACTLY. This is what I expected.

I asked those leading questions to illustrate what you suggested with your argument, where you implied he need to get MORE. I expanded that to its inevitable conclusion. But he doesn't really need or want MORE at all does he?

So he would not care whether or not everyone had an equal share of wealth, provided he can get what he wants for himself: sufficient security, and the ability to pursue the opportunities that interest him, and so forth. That would satisfy him.

So it seems he'd be perfectly happy if the average were sufficiently higher, such that he was secure and was able to pursue those interesting situations.

Is demanding that others be inappropriately rewarded a positive personality trait? No.

Define "inappropriately rewarded". Because without context you just wrote that sharing and charity are both negative personality traits.

Reality says that there are limited resources.

Finite yes. But is there less then enough? What if there was enough.

There is only so much food

What if mechanization produced more than we all could eat?

only so much energy

What if we advanced and harnessed enough via fusion or solar or whatever to provide all we need, not just what I need, but enough for everyone to have enough?

only so much oxygen

That's a good example, of something that there currently IS enough of. Nobody has to pay for it. Do you think people who work harder should get more? Do you think layabouts should get less? Do you really have any objection to there being enough clean oxygen for everyone to breath as much they like?

I am perfectly fine with people carving resources out for themselves. I am not okay with people taking resources from the people who are gathering those resources because those people feel that they deserve something just for being alive.

Do you go around carving oxygen out for yourself? Imagine food and energy were available like that. Would you begrudge other people food and energy if you had all you wanted?

I can guarantee you that if you and your friends come to take what me and my friends have created, we will kill you. Thieves are weak. Builders are strong. You have no chance.

Wow, that was a left turn into nutjob absurdity just there at the end. Lets just pretend you didn't go there.

The F-35 probably shouldn't have been built. At least, it shouldn't have been built the way it was. "Been built" is the key phrase. Most of the excess cost is already sunk. Nine countries have signed on to buy it. We can't reverse time and get the money back, and starting over from scratch would both a) cost more and b) lose most of the partner countries, meaning the US would pay more of the cost.

Yes, maintaining planes costs money, and the F-35 is no exception. Is someone suggesting that the US should have no planes? Of course not, so maintenance costs will be incurred. There's no choice to be made there. I suppose we could spend nearly as much trying to keep F-15s flying. Would that be better?

You can save a few bucks by pre-heating your hour water in the sun.

You can also power your refrigerator in the middle of the day, when you're not home , by paying $1,500 / month for solar electric. One of these two makes sense.

Every bit of money or time spent taking about solar electric is spent NOT working on something that can actually solve the problem, so it helps guarantee that we remain stuck with coal. If I owned a coal-mining company, I'd promote solar-electric to keep people distracted from nuclear and anything else that might actually be practical.

> just be careful with your numbers.

Absolutely, thanks for pointing that out. I want to post accurate facts, both for the credibility of the argument and I learn something.

Researching solar, I first found out that while solar electric MIGHT be a useful supplement at lunch time, there is zero chance of it ever being viable for primary power. However, in looking for accurate, objective data, I also learned that solar pre-heating by running my hot water pipe across the lawn can save me a lot of money here in sunny Texas.

71 people died from Chernobyl. That same year, more people died from coal.

PREDICTIONS of increased cancer rates around Chernobyl vary. The average prediction is somewhere around 4,000. Compare 170,000 killed when a hydroelectric dam went. Nothing is perfectly safe, but the worst nuclear accident in history isn't as bad as the worst wheat accident.

Your post is based on a slight misunderstanding of radioactivity, a misunderstanding that guys like Patrick Moore of Greenpeace purposely created to trick you. Since founding Greenpeace, Moore has realized he was foolish to BS people and he's changed his tune. Moore now says:

Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.

Moore skipped the fundamental lie / misunderstanding though. There ARE substances that emit radiation very slowly, over a long period of time (trees are an example of this type). There are also substances that emit radiation quickly, quickly enough to harm you. What Moore didn't tell you is that THESE ARE TWO DIFFERENT TYPES OF WASTE. If you think about it for a minute, it makes sense. A candle burns for a long time. Gunpowder burns quickly, releasing its energy all it once. All that energy being released at once is dangerous. Gun powder dangerous BECAUSE it is fast. The energy from the candle isn't dangerous BECAUSE it's being released so slowly. The release of nuclear energy is just the same. There are some materials that take 4,000 years to release their energy. Since it's so slow, you'd need to sit next to it for 800 years to be affected. Then there is the waste that releases enough energy to affect you in only one year. In four years, it's released most of its energy and it is safe to have around the house.

Germany gets 2.3% of it's power from solar electric.

Not even for a moment did they get half their power from solar. The headline was wrong/,misleading times two.
More like 6%, unfortunately. That's nice and all, that when the sun is shining really bright, for five minutes you can get a significant amount of power from solar.

Then, within three hours, it's no longer 10AM-2PM and solar energy drops dramatically. (Our eyes see brightness roughly on a logarithmic scale, so what we perceive to be not quite as bright as bright is actually 90% less energy). For example, the moon looks to be maybe 5% as bright as the sun. Actually, the sun is 400,000 times brighter.

So yeah, solar is a great way to REDUCE the demand on your base sources during lunch time. Kind of like regenerative braking REDUCES the demand on the engine. Neither is, or ever can be, a primary energy source.

Still not enough. As other readers wrote, the quality of existing phone lines varies between questionable and mediocre, and most users will not live in a radius of 70 meters from the distribution point. It is already difficult to operate a 15Mbps ADSL, then imagine 1Gbps.

Note that many of the /. readers do not speak english, and the Google translator is very, very bad. Is even worse in my case as example, because many ideas in my native language (brazilian portuguese) are very difficult to express using english, even when you know how to write in english. So, unless you know that the commenter is from a country where english is the native language, take a break.