Look at the Valle solar power plant that is currently under construction. It has two 50MW towers and each tower has a reflecting field of 460 hectares. If we could really do 1GW in 575 hectares I don't think we would be talking about it... but we can't.

The area that these plants are installed is great for solar power, they receive about 2.2kwH/m^2 of total solar power per day. So even if it was possible to convert 100% of the solar power falling in that space with 100% efficiency you wouldn't be able to generate 1GW(base load for 24 hours). The 50MW per 460 hectares sounds about right given what I know about this technology.

But just looking at the pictures of the existing plants, they do seem to be more compact than pictures of Invanpah. That being said, it's likely due to the very high solar Insolation of the site where these plants are located. This part of Spain(heck most of Spain) is better for Solar power solutions than the locations in California. This would result in a smaller plant.

There is one little problem with that... How do you get the power to where you need it? If you generating electricity in North Africa you are going to lose %20-30 just getting it into Western Europe. And you would have to build a new massive power grid just to be able to deliver this power. I am not say it can't be done, you would have to expect to build more capacity to cover the loses. And that is going to increase prices dramatically(see below).

The most efficient plan I have see to use North Africa as a Solar power system involved using the S-I cycle(about 40-50% of the heat energy would be converted) to generate Hydrogen and then pipe the Hydrogen to Europe. But even that has major issues. Hydrogen has storage issues and transportation issues.

Actually... looks like you got "ass-raped" also! The official price for the Andasol 1 plant(50MW) was $380 Million $US to build. If you scaled that up to the size of Invanpah you would be looking at 2.8 Billion $US which is $600Million more than the projected cost.

50MW at $380Million = $7,600 per Kw. So looking at the "Cost" it seems to be slightly higher than the actual cost of the Invanpah plant. Note, I don't have good numbers for the true baseline any of the these plants. My gut feeling that Invanpah is going to be in the 100-130MW baseline range which would make it about 2X more costly than what i think most of the Spanish plants can do. But I was unable to find good numbers for the Spanish plants also... so, I could be wrong.

IV Generation Nuclear power plants will dramatically reduce the waste issue. We can make much of the current waste much less dangerous if we run it through these reactors. Which in my mind is enough of a reason to build them now. I am not going to say Nuclear power is perfect. It's not, but we know that we could build power plants today that would scale as we need them to... And with an IFR reactor(which is what GE is pushing) much of the fueling issues go away. We have more than enough fuel already mined to fuel reactors for the next 500 years.

If your going to talk about private companies willing to build new plants... you better look at what has happened since Spain started pulling back on planned subsidies. In 2008 Spain provided a $589 per mwH subsidy on solar power. Since then they have placed caps on how many mwH they will actually subsidize. That alone has almost stopped plans for new plants that weren't already going ahead before the subsidies were scaled back...

There is really only one reason why Spain is at the forefront of solar thermal power systems; the massive Gov subsidy! It didn't hurt that Spain also has great weather/location for it... but now that those subsidies are drying up, I expect you will only see limited large scale growth.

I would hate to see a scaled up Solar Thermal power plant. The largest one that I know of is the SEGS plant in California. As I remember it has a peak power output of ~350MW. But if your talking about 24/7 operation that drops to a small 75MW of output.

To get that 75MW of base load capacity, they have to use 6.5KM^2(I had to look that up ^^) of land. If this technology was scaled up to the size of a nuclear plant that has a base load capacity of 1GW you would be talking about using(some people would say destroying) 90KM^2 land.

Actually, looking at the Invanpah plant which is currently under construction, it's a 392MW(Peak Power) plant that is going to be using ~16KM^2 of land. So the newer plant is even worse on land usage... While it's technically possible to build large solar thermal plants, I don't think your going to find the land to do it. Invanpah was scaled down from initial plans because of land use issues...

I am not so sure about the cost difference either. Invanpah is a 2.2 billion dollar project. When you compute $ per KW of capacity, your looking at about $5,600 per KW. It's hard to find accurate Nuclear plant numbers since so none have been built in the US in 30 years. Looking online I found two numbers on $per/KW a pro nuclear site quoted ~$2000-2500/KW and a anti-nuclear site said ~5000-6000/KW. I am not sure which to believe but even if it's the high number, it lines up with Invanpah cost almost exactly. But the problem is that this is comparing the Peak Power $/KW price of Invanpah vs Nuclear. I looked all over the place and I couldn't the planned capacity factor... but if Invanpah can only generate a base load of ~100-130MW then the cost of Invanpah would be 3-4 times that of the "High" figure vs Nuclear.

Honestly after looking at these numbers I am shocked at just how bad Solar Thermal power really is for baseload generation costs. I didn't think it was good but I never would have thought it was this bad.

Well, this device already costs about $350... and some quick and dirty math shows that an HDMI video stream is about 1.78 TB an hour. It's a lot of data, but the bigger problem is not the storage but the rate at which the data is coming out of the capture device. it's about 500MB/sec and to actually write at that data rate, your going to need quite a few hard drives to keep up. You are really going to need at least 6 drives at a minimum to be able to record at this data rate(without problems). So the amount of data is likely to fit on what ever array your recording the HDMI stream onto.

My 8-disk array could handle this right now... granted it wasn't a low cost array(machine + disks for ~$1000) and it would be even more costly with current HDD prices. But people do have access to the disk space and speed needed to do this currently. I think you would find that a lot of the people the would think about ripping video directly from HDMI already have the data storage requirements taken care of.

I agree that foreign aid is just a small part of the total budget. But your point about the military budget is in my mind the major problem we have when we talk about making cuts. The "discretionary" part of the budget is about 20% of the total budget and Defense is about 20%. But we don't even think about cutting Social Security(20%), Medicare/Medicade(23%) or other Mandatory spending(12%).

So the idea that we should cut big items first, I agree with. But if we take almost 60% of budget off of the cutting table I don't see how it's really that much different than saying that we shouldn't cut defense. Ultimately we are going to have to look at the whole budget. It's my fear that we are going to wait until Interest and entitlements make up the bulk of the budget before anyone even thinks about making the cuts we really need.

Even if we could go back in time and get ALL of the foreign aid that we have ever spent it wouldn't pay for Social Security for even one year. Cutting going forward really requires looking at EVERYTHING not just one part of the budget. In the end an across the board 5-10% cut in EVERY department/program would have a real effect and we wouldn't have to totally give-up every program. But ALL politicians don't want to touch that 60% of the budget. And it's going to be an ever increasing slice of the total budget going forward that we don't look at...

Last I had heard the estimated cost per shuttle flight was over $1 Billion. Due to the way NASA does accounting they don't put out an official cost per flight. When the program started they wanted to be flying the shuttle every 2 weeks. The program was always going to be costly year over year but the idea was that with many flights we would be getting a great value. As the program has flown less flights per year the costs have gone WAY up.

So when I heard that they wanted to do this for $1.5 billion per year I was wondering how they do it... looking at NASA's budgets they spent $3.1 billion on the shuttle last year and another $724 on Space and Flight support. I don't see how a private company is going to strip that much cost from the program.

The FY2011 Budget which includes past years.
  http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/428837main_NASA_FY_2011_Congressional_Justificaton_Budget_Book_Rev-01_BOOKMARKED.pdf

You have to remember that an internal combustion engine is not very efficient at turning that 34kWh gas into forward motion. Numbers I have seen put them at about 15-25% efficient in the best case. An electric motors on the other hand in the 50-100hp range have efficiencies of ~85-90%.

So from a fuel vs electricity cost stand point EV's win hands down. It's the massive extra costs that keep EV's off of the road today. You can buy a lot of gas for the $10,000-15,000 extra that your paying for your small electric car. Add limited range to that equation and it's no wonder that they aren't widely deployed.

The big problem with using the ISS to do this type of mission is that the ISS is in the wrong orbital plane to easily launch flights to the moon. While it's not impossible to fly from the ISS it will be far more costly(in terms of fuel) to do so. Basically as long assembling the mission at the ISS is less costly than a single launch into the correct orbital plane this might be feasible.

I remember seeing an interview with a cold-war military scientist that was working on a automated nuclear powered bomber. And even though it never got out of concept phase, they had already figured that after it had dropped the bombs that they would have it fly race track patterns over the USSR. Because it had a rather radioactive exhaust and it was a feature that they had planned on using. So DARPA thought of radioactive military vehicles in the 60's.
         

If you haven't seen most Japanese Phones, they tend to be larger on average than American cell phones. The iPhone is about the same size as most phones here in Japan. It is a little wider but thinner than most phones but it is very normal in terms of bulk(volume).

In fact one of my Japanese friends just brought home a 32gb iPhone two days ago. So I asked him why he bought the 32gb version vs the 16gb. For him at least it came down to comparing features of the iPhone vs other Japanese cell phones. He felt that the extra space allowed the iPhone to be a computer replacement. Why having having 32gb vs 16gb suddenly makes it into small computer vs a big cell phone, I don't know. He also said that softbank(a cell phone company here in Japan) is pricing the iPhone very competitively.

He feels he bought a small computer that can make calls and not really a cell phone. Maybe that is why... 16gb of storage for a computer would be nothing... but 32gb would be far better at least if you think of the iPhone as a small computer and not as a cell phone. That might be why the 32gb version is selling far more than the 16gb version.

Mainly because you wouldn't need any source code to do any of the localization. Not to say they wouldn't have access to development tools built for WoW or that they wouldn't have a very good idea how the game was put together internally.

They might even be able to take the WoW engine and mod it heavily into a new game... but the core would still but the same under all of those changes. I doubt they could even change game mechanics. But maybe they don't want to... It would look like a new game but have the feel of WoW. Which might be just what they are looking to do.

The problem with metered service is the downward cost of bandwidth over time. Ten years ago I remember paying about $1000 month for 3mbit of connectivity(At a data center). Today I could get 60-100Mbit of connectivity for the same cost. Bandwidth isn't like electricity, if it was it would have cost 10cents per kw/h in 1999 but today it would only cost 0.1cents per kw/h...

Any comparisons between Electricity and Bandwidth will always fail due to the massive downward cost of bandwidth. I would be fine with bandwidth metering or caps if they were tied to the real cost of providing the bandwidth. But I don't see how any system to measure this cost would be free of corruption or provide encouragement for infrastructure upgrades.

The real issue isn't that the government can't price a service correctly. If anything is unfair about the government providing services it's how they can cut through government policies and basically get stuff done if they want too. Granted, that isn't always the case... but at the very least the government tends not to have to worry about intervention at the same level(city/state/federal). In this case it's city gov vs TWC(backed by state gov) but at the city level once they wanted to deploy their own network they were able to do so.

The real question is why couldn't TWC compete? I think the answer to that is basically lack of focus and they are searching for short term profits. Any large Isp could kill a local network... really it wouldn't be hard. They could bring in so much bandwidth and price it cheaper than the local network. But they don't do so... they aren't willing to take the hit on the bottom line in the short term to lock up the area over the long term. If TWC was a local company that had the powers to do the same things as the Government and the outlook to give up short-term profits for a customer base over the long-term they wouldn't have any problems competing.

As much as you can complain about how Verizon FIOS service is a total lock-in. I think they have the winning move long term. They give you access to massive amounts of bandwidth today, they remove any current POTS service(the lock-in) and they have the headroom to grow in the future. This makes it possible for them to ALWAYS have the bandwidth advantage if they chose to pay for the upgrades. They have been willing to pay for a costly roll-out that should give them long-term benefits.

This really is a something that has been around for a long time. One of the most interesting uses I have found for it is; simulating the effects of satellite Wan connections. Most of these links have about 600ms of end-to-end latency and without something like this simple tc command it is difficult to simulate this without actually hooking up to a real satellite connection.

Other uses; I once bandwidth limited one of my old roommates. Every week I would shave a little bit more bandwidth off of his connection. I think I started at about 500kbit and by the end of the semester I had him down to about 16kbit. We were waiting to hear him say something about the slow Internet connection. The whole time he didn't say a word and he just assumed that his computer was slowly dieing on him. ^^