I don't post all of my conversations with windmill technicians on the internet, or I would cite it for you. Not knowing where you are, I'll post a link to picture of the windmills.

Here's is a picture of the farm. I couldn't find a close-up of the turbines, but each one has dark grease streaks down the support pylons. Each turbine has a complex gearbox and transmission that varies the blade angles, to keep the turbines turning at a constant speed. This is tough to seal, and in practice, there is no seal replacement. The turbines are operated to destruction, and replaced only if economically viable. The only thing staving off the destruction is constant refilling of the gearbox lubricant. These fields are just about as polluted as the the grounds of any oil refinery in the U.S.

-- Len

Perhaps if I had cable...

I prefer to dig into topics until I have a solid factual basis to form my opinions. It is called being intellectually honest. You may want to try it sometime, at least to give some backing to your righteousness.

I'm not dismissive of you because of any "news" outlet you may or may not use, so I'd expect the same courtesy.

-- Len

I appreciate that an AC thinks I am an astroturfer, but I assure you I am not. I don't work for any energy company, and I don't actually know anything about the Koch Brothers, although I gather they are somehow like a George Soros of the right.

Don't assume that because someone doesn't agree with your point of view, they are bought and paid for by some monied entity. Blind adhesion to an ideology is an expensive sort of ignorance. Get better educated by venturing outside of whatever echo chamber you occupy. Ask just as many questions about that which you believe, as you would about that with which you disagree.

Without questioning everything, you never will know how weak or solid your position is. It is my opinion that many politicians, the President not the least of whom, rely on the ignorance of the general populace to repeatedly build straw men. Most of these are flimsy facades held together with sneering rhetoric, and little factual basis. There are villains in the corporate world, but the vast majority of public companies are not the malevolent actors that they are painted as. Most are afraid of the regulatory clubs that the government wields.

-- Len

With all due respect that an AC deserves, you need to get out of your bubble more.

Wind energy is probably the biggest boondoggle in the last 50 years. From my kitchen table, I can currently see ~350 windmills, and there are nearly 6,000 in a 20 mile radius of my house. Wind energy remains ludicrously expensive, and only makes a profit by using a lot of other people's money. When the tax credits run out, all of the windmills surrounding me are idled.

When oil hit $140 a barrel, about half of the windmills around me were idled. Why is that? Well, each one required a 55 gallon barrel of lubricant, a week. When oil spiked, they were not economically viable, even with the hefty tax credits they earned by just existing. I won't touch the low wind or high wind conditions that also idle the fields. The demand for these wind farms are primarily politically sourced, rather than any reality based economic decision.

Solar may be improving, but they are very far from being cost competitive. The manufacture of hybrid cars share much of the same environmental problems that plague the manufacture of windmills. Rare earths and nickel mines are very problematic, and energy intensive.

Good intentions do not make these things good. Continued research and development may one day make them truly viable, but that day is not on the immediate horizon.

The profit motive of the energy companies is all that they need to invest in new alternatives. They are constantly working against brain-dead regulations dreamed up by science-illiterate politicians, and are always looking at how to best cope with them. If and when any of them come up with an alternative, you can be sure it will be viable, or on course to be economically viable in less than a decade.

Far more is currently gained with energy conservation technologies, rather than alternative energy production. LED lights and Energy Star certifications are great, the former not getting any government money until the L-Prize. The winner of this contest was developed in advance, because Philips saw the path to profits. Prices will drop soon enough, with scaling of manufacture.

-- Len

The money is not given away. It is a tax credit for R&D. What you seem to be suggesting is that some types of R&D are more worthy for receiving a tax break. In the larger picture of a national economy, R&D spending prepares for economic growth through either finding ways to lower cost, or produce a better product. It is incentivized in the tax code, to promote economic growth.

Carving out specific areas for different rates, is just meddling. The law of unintended consequences will guarantee that the recipients of these proposed grants will have very little to do with the professed goal. A few years ago, I saw many academic papers tack on the words "with nanotechnology" in an attempt to gain funding. Most of the projects had nothing to do with nano anything. In a similar way, these grants will go to alternative energy shams that have nothing viable in the way of technology, but loads of good intentions.

Why give money to the government to have a small portion given back? This is a policy that is anti-growth, except for governmental growth.

Not sure what free money you are talking about.

-- Len

One of the former CEO's I talked to helmed BP in the late 1990's. He was the most earnest, and the exact opposite of the cartoonish cigar chomping oil-man that environmentalists imagine these CEO's to be. He talked much about preparing for the impending end of the hydrocarbon economy.

-- Len

The plan to collect $2 billion from oil and gas revenues is a tax. These companies don't get subsidies for being oil companies. They get tax credits for R&D investment, like any other company in the US. Politicians call these subsidies, like some call tax cuts spending, when a lowering of a tax rate is not an expenditure.

When a politician states that they want to eliminate the subsidies to oil companies, they are talking about not giving them tax credits for R&D, like any other company. As I mentioned in my first post, this R&D is largely in alternative and clean energy research. Removing the tax credits for these energy companies is counter to the professed intention of supporting alternative energy.

-- Len

It is unfortunate that government is apt to pursue political solutions rather than viable practical solutions. That's the world we live in.

The premise here is that gas and oil companies should be punished, and their gains should be confiscated and given to other companies with better intentions. The real world truth is that there are no oil or gas companies anymore, and there hasn't been for the last fifteen years, at least.

No, what used to be oil companies have all become energy companies. They all invest heavily in alternative energy technologies, because they have the most to lose if anything does become viable and threatens their current revenue generators. I've spoken with several former CEO's of these former oil companies, and they were, to a person, fixated on the end of oil and the emergence of alternative energy sources. I left these conversations wondering why these CEO's were more pro-alternative than any environmentalist I had ever met.

The government confiscation of funds from these companies, and the eventual redistribution to campaign donors fronting "new" energy companies will only slow down the discovery of practical and sustainable alternative energy sources.

-- Len

Rage has been out for iOS devices for some time. Perhaps this is the first major game release that came over from the Apple touch-based devices first?

--Len

While the headline is accurate, it very optimistically misleads by omission. This was not the newsworthy portion of the judge's ruling. All of Google's other attempts for summary judgement that were submitted at the same time were denied. Google had attempted to reduce the case to a patent-only licensing case, but the judge saw their actions as a much larger copyright issue. The only thing he threw out was the file name copyright claims, which Oracle was silly to include in the first place.

The headline is almost the same as saying that a glass with one sip of water in it is practically overflowing. The implications of the ruling for anyone that ever copied a header file, but wrote their own implementations, are huge!

--Len

The problem is that Samsung et. al are throwing inferior, more expensive knock-offs into the marketplace, hoping to capitalize on Apple's ground-breaking success. If Samsung didn't try to ape almost every detail of the iPad, then these suits wouldn't have happened.

To many people, if it looks like an iPad, it is one.

Think about it this way. What does a ThinkPad look like? Whether it was made by IBM or Lenovo, it has a distinct style (industrial design) that sets it apart from every other Wintel laptop out there. Same question for Samsung mobile devices? Today, they look near identical to Apple's stuff, which was original in concept and imlementation when released. Galaxies Tabs look like IPads. Most Android phones look like iPhones, instead of the Blackberry/Treo/Sidekicks that they looked like in development, prior to the iPhone.

-- Len

The best one is the one that does the most things you would like to do, in a stable manner.

Right now, for most people, that would be the iPad. Apple has their shit together, and that just cannot be said of ANY Android tablet maker or even Google, at this point in time. They just passed something like 100,000 iPad-specific Apps in their store. I have friends who are anti-establishment types (big Android fans), who have published an iPad app, and won't even consider producing an Android version. As new developers, they want to be paid, and pragmatism is a very good idea.

Sorry, but until Google steps up and blesses a reference standard like a Nexus Tab or something, the Android tablet market won't have any "best" tablet. Until Google steps up with a real tablet SDK and a good emulator, the hurried and shoddy Android tablets will always take a back seat to the iPad.

On a side note, the history of Android and iOS devices should be considered when looking at this market disparity. Apple started with the tablet first, and shrunk it down into a phone. Sure, the iPhone preceded the iPad to market by three years, but the tablet touch interface was being developed for the better part of a decade before it was shrunk down for the phone. In both iPad and iPhone/iPod renditions, the devices were clean-sheet from the ground up. Apple got it right on the tablet, and then worked to get it right on the phone. The delay in releasing the iPad was most-likely due to needing the silicon to catch-up, so that the user experience wouldn't suck. Apple has fast emulators for both the iPad and the iPhone, and targeting either device with a common codebase is very easy.

Android, on the other hand, started out using the Microsoft Windows Mobile reference platform for hardware. The initial designs (pre-iPhone) looked much closer to Blackberries, than the now-omnipresent iPhone/Touch form factor. The first Androids were hobbled by their MS-designed roots with goofy memory management, and all Android manufacturers are still paying Microsoft for the privilege of using their crappy design. Android tablets grew out of this, with the added technical problem that any manufacturer could do whatever the hell they wanted to do. Until Honeycomb, all Android tablets used ugly (fragile) hacks to scale up phone interfaces. From Google's own admission, they did the same for Honeycomb, and won't be releasing the source because of it. Hopefully, they will eventually get it right.

-- Len

Apple asked to see physical prototypes with intended packaging of Samsung's announced and shown devices, for trade dress issues that their suit involves. They are not going after all future Samsung devices, just ones that have been shown publicly and bear a very strong resemblance to Apple's products. Their claim appears to have merit, as Samsung performed a crash redesign of the Galaxy Tab 10.1, when the iPad 2 was revealed, arriving at a near identical design being shown month later. This happened as they dumped their stock of their original design that looked like the first iPad, but in black rather than aluminum.

    Samsung's wants to see Apple's unannounced and non-public prototypes, because it just wants to see them (cuts down on copying time). Their new demand is unrelated to their countersuit, and may just be a delay tactic.

--Len