IMHO concentrated solar power is absolutely the way forward for the Southwest and other desert regions of the US that have 250-300 sunny days per year. There's plenty of land available, no scary chemicals are needed anywhere in the process, and the power output will naturally match the air conditioning power demand.

However, it won't work so well in more moderate climates - you can't concentrate sunlight on cloudy days at all, and a few straight cloudy days are all it will take to use up all of that latent heat in a molten salt tower. It might still be worth installing but you'll have to have standby capacity (perhaps in the form of natural gas generators) to match it and that unfortunately drives up the price.

Also, apparently a number of these plants are being built to use fresh water to help reject turbine waste heat, and that's unsustainable in the sort of desert environments where these plants make sense.

Take the lens off the front and bolt the sensor to a used SLR camera lens. With the 10x or 15x crop factor, that old 50mm SLR lens will turn into a 500-750mm equivalent, and if you use a prime lens, it'll have even better low-light performance than the original wide angle lens. If you put it on a telescope, you can easily get into 5000mm+ territory, although it'll be very difficult to use without an expensive tripod and tracking system.

Is it possible that you meant to reply to a child of this comment instead of to my comment?

While I agree that all captains (whether you're on a teeny little sailboat or a SuezMax container ship) should know how to use their fallbacks, I think that disabling GPS during military exercises is going to increase the probability that innocent civilians are going to accidentally encroach on those military ships during those same exercises. Seems like a bad idea.

For the most part, the cell phone networks don't need GPS to operate. Just knowing the location wouldn't be good enough for signal beamforming anyway because of all the multipath in urban environments. It's often the other way around - GPS location information is often provided by the towers to the phones. The phones use that info (whether acquired via real GPS or cell phone network assisted GPS) for E911 and for whatever smartphone apps want it. However, CDMA *does* need *very* precise time synchronization to work - and this is usually implemented via GPS receivers on each tower.

Not quite that simple to get around. It has to be something about you that you find offensive.

It's possible something was lost in the Wikipedia translation, but their wording was "any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image", not "about the applicant". The sky is the limit.

If someone who is offended can require a correction be made without comment, then surely anyone else can be offended by the correction and have it reverted - without comment.

People seem to want symbolic icons that represent the programs they want to run; they don't want to look through a long menu and read a bunch of text.

A lot of people want that - for themselves. However, most mere mortals eventually need some help with their computer and it's damn near impossible to walk someone through finding something just based on its icon over the phone.

It also makes it harder to unit test all code paths.

I'd wager that for every 1000 programmers out there that aren't validating external data and the results of their function calls, testing all code paths is the last thing on about 999 of their minds.

You can overbuild a house, it generally makes it stronger. You over code a piece of software it just adds to the number of possible points of failure.

In this context, "over coding" software refers to, for starters, defensive programming techniques (i.e. checking the return values of all the functions you call, fully validating external inputs, etc). It does not reduce the number of points of failure, but it does require the programmer to consider them and the gracefully handle them or transparently report the problems it can't handle. It does bloat the code somewhat, making it less concise, and it usually increases the amount of time required to make changes, but the transparent reporting of issues to the user significantly reduces the amount of time needed to debug flaws. Fewer bugs escape testing and the bugs that do escape can be accurately reported, are more likely to be reproducible, and are more easily fixed.

Healthcare is first case of being forced to buy a product just for being alive.

Except that's not true. You're forced to pay income tax if you make income, which Congress was given carte blanche to do via the 16th amendment. You pay *less* income tax if you buy health insurance. But if you didn't make enough to get taxed that much, then you're not paying for this anyway (you are, however, still getting it).