Mainly because I'm out of sorts...

Weird outliers exist in every industry, and in every time. It's just that now get mroe examples of it worldwide, in realtime.

Five bits of anecdotal weirdness do not a trend make.

M and above are capitalized and everything else is in lower case.

oH, I THInK I GET IT now.

I agree with you. There would likely be a boost over land-based mw estimates. 10% seems reasonable, but I'm not sure how much exactly. I saw 144% on Wikipedia, but that number also took into account the fact that space-based uptime is better than land-based uptime in rainy and snowier places. This system uses stable weather areas as stations though, which would lower that 144% by some amount.

Good article on space-based solar here: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/.

Yes, I don't however see any data on their website about how wide they are planning to build the ring out. If their graphical renderings are accurate, they display a 195 pixel moon with a 22 pixel ring. Given that google tells me the moon's radius is 1737 km, that means the ring should be about 200 km wide.

So considering that we have a 11,000 km ring that is 200 km width, the power generation for the light-facing half should be what you'd expect from 5500km x 200km or 1,100,000 square kilometers. I've seen estimates of 1.2 mw per square km for solar. Using that as a basis we'd expect 1,320,000 mw of constant power generation. Wikipedia says to take off 10% due to conversion inefficiencies of microwave transmission of electricity and we probably should take off another 5% or so for weather and atmospheric disruptions or inefficiencies. That leaves us with 1,122,000 mw of constant power.

As a point of comparison, all the wind power in the entire world added up to 238,351 megawatts in 2011, so it is roughly five times the capacity of that. However, in 2008 the world had an average power consumption rate of 15 terawatts . 1,122,000 mw is 1.12 terawatts, so this project could supply roughly 7% of the worlds electricity if it was operational today.

The moon has an area of 37,932,000 square km though, so if we coated the entire moon and got energy from the sunny side and do the same math we get 19.34 terrawats. So, at our current state of energy usage it could power the world if we coated the moon in solar panels.

I'm not sure about the aesthetics of it though, a racing stripe on the moon.

...you mean hundreds of thousands, as numerous pictures from Newspapers and Twitter have shown.

The rest of your post is of similar accuracy.

Now why don't you tell us how Euromaidan in Ukraine is "just a handful of extremists"?

Fukushima is a serious nuclear disaster. It's a very situation that we should all be concerned about. But this should not lead to any pause in our appetite for nuclear energy.

What people often fail to appreciate is that even coal fired powerstations release quite large amounts of radioactive material in to atmosphere. Coal fired powerstations burn about a million times as much material as a nuclear powerstation per joule of energy produced. Some of that material is radioactive. That stuff isn't been sealed in a container in burrried in a mountain, it's being blown up chimney stacks along with the rest of the rather unpleasant stuff.

Don't believe me? Reflect on this passage taken from this (PDF) document:

The EPA found slightly higher average coal concentrations than used by McBride et al. of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively. Gabbard (A. Gabbard, “Coal combustion: nuclear resource or danger?,” ORNL Review 26, http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview... 34/text/colmain.html.) finds that American releases from each typical 1 GWe coal plant in 1982 were 4.7 tonnes of uranium and 11.6 tonnes of thorium, for a total national release of 727 tonnes of uranium and 1788 tonnes of thorium. The total release of radioactivity from coal-fired fossil fuel was 97.3 TBq (9.73 x 1013 Bq) that year. This compares to the total release of 0.63 TBq (6.3 x 1011 Bq) from the notorious TMI accident, 155 times smaller.

So far, there has not been a single confirmed death due to Fukushima accident. In comparison, there were 20 deaths in the US just mining for coal in 2013. This is not to mention all the deaths being caused by cancers and other health problems being caused by breathing polluted air.

If we're ever going to get on top of this climate change challenge, nuclear must be leading the charge. Nuclear is a safe, non-polluting technology. Modern designs are fail-safe in every sense of the word. The newer designs can even cope with a loss of external power (like Fukushima experienced) yet still stay safe.

This is the 21st century. The technology is mature, sensible and safe. Really, we should be looking to retire every coal fired plant as a matter of urgency, if only to reduce the amount of radioactive contamination of the atmosphere!!

A few problems:

- What about circular reactions?
- Is SQL really that right language for encoding business logic?
- Triggers are kind of an anti-pattern.
- What about atomicity? What if I need the whole reaction chain to work or none of it.

I'm afraid there more questions than answers with this proposed pattern.

It always seems that when companies start trying to branch out into wildly dissimilar industries, it's a sign of trouble within the organization. Do what you do well, figure out how to do it better if things aren't going how you'd like them. Don't try making sushi if you've always sold donuts.

Yeah, Steve Jobs, don't try making phones or music players if you've always sold computers. Actually, don't even starting making computers if you've always made Atari games. Actually, maybe you've got the whole thing backwards...

Given the furious pace of technological change, there's no reason to assume any current distribution model will last 50 years. Maybe not even 20.

The following used to be important distribution channels or outlets:

• American News Company
• Blockbuster
• Borders
• B. Dalton
• Walden Books
• Drive-in movie theaters
• Hastings
• Newsweek
• The American Mercury
• The Houston Post
• The Chicago Daily News
• Tower Records
• Newstands
• AM Radio
• FM Radio

Where are they now? Dead or dying.

Push the timescale out long enough, and the future of Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Time Warner/Comcast, NPR, The New York Times, and broadcast TV are no more assured.

Will they be replaced by Kickstarter? They'll probably be replaced by the thing that replaces the things that replaces Kickstarter...

>If food, shelter, and energy were in virtually unlimited supply no one would need to work, yes, but more importantly, no one would *want* to.

This is incorrect. If food, shelter and energy were plentiful, people would still work. They would just work on things they wanted to work on. Some people enjoy their work or enjoy aspects of their work. (They do.)

> Where would the goodies come from then? Automation? Okay then, the Machines rule the Federation.

In Star Trek they come from essentially a microwave that spits them out. Using your logic, I have determined that the United States is ruled by microwaves. (It isn't.)

> And no one would ever emerge out of their self-created kingdoms inside holodecks. Just everyone plugged into their fantasies in their holo-simulators, a civilization of lotus-eaters.

And no one would ever emerge out of their self-created kingdoms inside books. So, I say, Mr. Gutenberg, we should burn the infernal press! (We shouldn't.)

Seriously. You can get some coverage OTA. No worries. If that's not compelling, it's not our job to pay NBC more. It's theirs to make the best of the material they signed a deal on.

Seems to me, writing an exclusive means they can deliver. What they are doing is trying to make the most money, not actually delivering the games.

And that's fair, but not my or your problem. And it's up to them to present value to the Olympics. If we don't watch, the games get less relevant, and at the end of the day, NBC didn't deliver.

Besides, the Russian stand on homophobia really doesn't add a lot of value there either. Tons of people aren't going to pay up, but they would watch and support athletes who worked hard to participate.

I'll gladly watch the games and view the ADS they deliver OTA. If they can't do that, they don't have me as a product to sell and I recommend you do the same.

I pretty much left slashdot once, when Dice took over, because the quality of the content went downhill... now the quality of the site has gone downhill too. So long slashdot. BTW, for those who remember CmdrTaco, he's working on a pretty interesting new project called Trove - check it out!

"Smith!" screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. "6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! THAT’S better, comrade."