As usual with Oracle, the patch will be a 4GB download. Considering how much they charge for that junk, it's amazing those morons haven't figured out how to just simply use rpm/yum or apt.

Here in France direct transfer is actually safer in that respect than CC, because chargebacks are even easier to obtain (IIRC a mere phone call as opposed to written complaint, and a longer grace period). This is mostly because creditor-issued transfers have stringent specs, it's open only to established businesses (utilities mainly), and if they don't respect the charter (i.e. delay in chargebacks, abnormally large amounts ...) their authorization can be pulled in a matter of days.

etc.

I used to work in the payment card industry, McD was one of our clients, and I was told that they paid on the order of a few cents or maybe a dozen at most per trx. Might be higher for card not present, not sure.

gfy

You use fresh water in a closed circuit for steam, and you cool _that_ with seawater.

But you're making me change my mind.

From memory, typical internal combustion engines are on the order of 20% efficiency; advanced combined cycle fossil fuel power plants, taking into account transportation losses, conversion, charging, battery losses, driver and motor translate into something like 40% efficiency.

For a given power generation capacity, there is no intrinsic reason why the energy cost for building windmills / solar cells should not be a fixed ratio of that of building coal plants. Maintenance costs for wind/solar are very low, but even if you don't believe me on this one, ask yourself, again, whether coal plants require no maintenance -- they do.

After that, solar/wind cost nothing in energy, while coal plants need to be fed coal, that also has to be transported.

Coals plants also need to be built, they also need generators that require rare earth elements, they also need plenty of steel and concrete. And not only do they obviously spew shitloads of CO2, you also need to build the roads, railways or ships and ports to carry the coal around, as well as mine the damn thing.

So what is the argument? That since it's just merely much better, and not simply perfect, we should just give up on them?

They might be secretive (or not, I've never heard that claim before) because purer sources should require less work. In any case microelectronics grade silicon needs to be extremely pure, and the industrial processes involved are very advanced; finding a good source of raw materials is likely to be a trivial problem in comparison.

But that is rather moot because the total amount of Si used is rather small compared to its economic value. Chips and solar cells are etched on extremely thin discs. Considering that there are enormous amounts of the element in the crust (it's the 2nd most common element there after oxygen, 28% in mass), there's bound to be plenty of places where you can find it in the right configuration.

... all extract wind energy. They interrupt the flow of wind and generate turbulence, and eventually turn wind energy into heat, except that unlike wind turbines they don't make electricity as well. It's a rather silly question when you know the first thing about thermodynamics.

They're not practical for mobile steam engines, but they certainly are used in most nuclear plants. Those that don't are located near the sea. Not gonna run out of sea water any time soon.

Is this a joke?

Are you seriously suggesting that it's reasonable that we could one day run out of fucking sand?

But the reaction you describe reeks of closed mindedness.

Anyway, we really have no idea what's out there. The Drake equation has been criticized for being of little use; what it does very well though is point out how much we don't know. The great thing though is that we're progressing very rapidly; if life (not necessarily intelligent) is rather common, we will find out in less than 3 decades, possibly earlier. The upcoming 30m and up telescopes are getting close to the point where we could do spectral analysis on some extrasolar planets.