You are correct that solar isn't very efficient (usually no more than 20% efficient). But let's be clear that the steam turbines from coal-burning powerplants are usually on the order of 30% efficient. That's not great either.

A natural gas turbine, especially if you have a secondary, steam-based "bottoming cycle," can get north of 50% combined efficiency. In that regard, I'm all in favor of replacing coal with natural gas.

But those 20% efficient solar panels don't lose much transferring the power from my roof or back yard into my house. The 30% efficient coal-burning powerplant, located much further away, is going to lose some power in transmission over distance. Ditto for the natural gas power plant but it's starting from a level of higher efficiency. And solar panels don't impact my local air quality.

Also, if I install enough solar panels and some batteries, I can get to the point where I no longer give a s**t about the costs of coal vs natural gas. Because I'm not paying for either.

I'm all in favor of nuclear fusion. I just prefer to stay 93k miles from the reactor.

Oh, and I don't want to have to pay to refuel it.

One could argue that our current president largely WAS chosen by lottery. That's probably the best counter-example anyone could wish for.

Gonna have to disagree with you there.

Make no mistake, my Overdrive account with our local library system gets a workout. I've read dozens of books on my old, Sony e-reader without needing to set foot in the library to get them or "return" them. Have read a few using my newer tablet (with full-color, backlit LCD) as well.

So long as many of the titles I'm looking for simply don't exist as e-books, I will be investing in Dead Tree Format. There is no (legal) ePub of "The Odyssey File," by Arthur C Clarke. Can't find one for "Low Level Hell," by Robert A Anderson, either. Both of them are excellent reads. I had to buy the first, used, from Amazon (getting hard to find; not even MOBIUS, the local InterLibrary Loan system, had it) and the latter I managed to get from MOBIUS. Some of the libraries in my local system have drive-up windows; those have re-opened. My wife and I routinely go through over a dozen books / month, through the drive-up window.

Also, it's been my experience that image-heavy books don't translate well to e-book format, even if I'm reading them on my tablet instead of my e-ink Sony. Don't get me started on programming books, which switch between prose with the usual typefaces and program code with monospaced type. It never fails to amaze me just how many companies seem to screw those up. "Javascript: The Good Parts" and "Eloquent Javascript" were both pains to read as e-books. Neither of those are as old as the titles mentioned above so they, at least, had e-book editions.

When more titles are available as ebooks, maybe. When they can sort out the issues with the ePub standard, including getting SVG and related properly implemented, both for content creation and contest display, definitely. Today is not that day.

Going to the beach isn't the problem per se. Indeed, getting vitamin D from sunlight is helpful.

It's the complete and utter lack of social distancing which tends to happen at a crowded beach. Yes, the UV and the open air reduces the chance of transmission. It REDUCES it; it doesn't eliminate it. All the screaming and yelling from people running around at the crowded beach increases the chance of transmission. Remember, there was choir practice at a church which turned into a superspreader event. They weren't screaming and yelling but they were making plenty of noise and projecting their voices (higher volume).

Going for a walk in nature, preferably with plenty of sunlight, with appropriate social distancing, is probably one of the BEST things you can do. But if you're going to be indoors around other people, or if you will have difficulty maintaining social distance outdoors ... wear the mask. The vast majority of people who have COVID-19 never knew they had it, yet they were infectious as all hell to everyone around them.

His first one was typical for the strain found in Asia. His second one was typical for the strain found in Europe. He'd just returned home (in Asia) from Europe.

There are already at least two significantly different strains out there. His first infection appears to be one, the second another. No need to worry about it mutating on him; it was already mutated, elsewhere, and he caught it.

I'm agreeing with you on rail. Having electrified rail lines for the long-haul stuff with quick intermodal movement to trucks for "last mile" would likely be the cleanest way forward. And you wouldn't need to worry about having hundreds of miles range on the trucks.

The usual gripe about wind farms is that the wind doesn't always blow. There's truth to that. But if it's NOT blowing here, it's usually blowing somewhere else. Most wind farms have about a 30 - 36% duty cycle; they produce roughly 1/3 of their rated power because "the wind doesn't always blow." But if you connect multiple wind farms, across 1,000 miles or so with high-voltage DC infrastructure, the combination of them will be producing significant power 100% of the time. In which case, putting in the wired infrastructure for the trains is also putting in the wired infrastructure to connect the wind farms.

I'd really like to see that. We had a partially-electric-powered railroad for a while (Milwaukee Road), with the majority of the electricity used coming from hydroelectric in the Rocky Mountains. It was basically looted by later owners and, eventually, all the electric infrastructure was removed, converting it to plain old diesel.

If you could source your motive power from wind farms, that would mean that your energy cost would, no longer, be tied to the price of petroleum fuels. As those prices continue to climb, your rates wouldn't need to. Which would likely make you VERY competitive with trucking or other rail systems.

It's not just flywheel-based.

Hydraulic Launch Assist provides regenerative braking without needing to go electric. UPS and FedEx have been looking into using vehicles with this. Use a small, ICE to propel the vehicle for cruising purposes and use this to handle stopping / starting. The engine shuts off when not needed and runs closer to peak efficiency when it's in use.

Trash trucks are also using this, seeing as how they have lots of low-speed movement and lots of stop / start, along with heavy use of hydraulics. Combine that with the fact that many trash trucks running on natural gas are actually running on landfill gas (mostly methane, produced at the landfill where the trucks dump) and you get something which is efficient and very little net CO2 emissions.

And yet you might be surprised (or maybe not) how many people are hacking together something in Google Sheets and sharing it with a larger group, using that as a database app of sorts. There was an article a week or so ago about how some, small organizations are creating a sheet on Google Docs to coordinate stuff and then sharing it, widely, and Docs just isn't able to handle that many people trying to edit the same sheet / doc at a time.

As much as we don't like to admit it, creating a spreadsheet is a form of programming. It's an interpreter, so it tends to be slow. But you're creating instructions for a computer, with the grid and the formula dependencies providing the sequence instead of sequential lines of code. People who know nothing about relational theory have little difficulty grasping the "Autofilter" stuff. As people learn more, Google Sheet's query() function is a "gateway drug" to wanting a "real" SQL-based database. In all cases, though, you are programming, just not what we tend to think of as "real" programming.

Yes, I'm one of the stereotypical "real programmers" writing code in HTML, CSS, Javascript, Java, SQL, etc. And yet, I use Google Sheets to manage my 401(k) portfolio because, quite frankly, coding something up like that is more time than I want to spend on that. It's not the prettiest thing you've ever seen, nor is it the fastest (it's a spreadsheet running on Javascript in a web browser, for cryin' out loud). But it works. It evolved organically. It continues to evolve. Do I have the skills to write a "real" application? Sure. Do I have the time / mental cycles left, after doing my full-time gig? Nope.

A lot of people need a basic database. Those solutions fit the bill. Most homeowners don't need a chainsaw, whereas professional lumberjacks do. Most casual users don't need Oracle or DB/2. If their needs get large enough, it's worth their while to invest in a "real programmer" and solutions like those. But a great many operations will never get large enough to need it.

The current head of the FCC used to be the chief legal counsel for Verizon.

And when his turn is up, I expect he'll either "return to the mother ship" or get a cushy job as a lobbyist, trying to tell the next round of FCC commissioners how to do their job. Because, hey, he did that job; he would know.

I'm with you. My beloved and I went to PR on our honeymoon. We're both geeks so we HAD TO go see it. It was awesome. Sad to see it going downhill like this.

A partial-spherical dish (not parabolic) so you can suspend the receiving antenna (from the three aforementioned "mountains") and "look at" different parts of the sky without needing to move the dish. Just wait until the Earth faces in that general direction and look at the part of the sky in which you're interested. Move the receiving antenna to keep looking at one spot in the sky, while the Earth turns. Absolutely ground-breaking design (IMHO), back when the USA still did big things like this.

The museum even had, on display, the medal from one of the Nobel prizes won by researchers using the facility.

I've seen "Contact" and "Goldeneye." I saw a lot more of it in the latter. That's probably why the reference in the title. The SFX of it rising out the water was just plain cheesy. Looking back at the movie, I can't help but laugh at the scene where the "lair" is blowing up and a lot of the computers appear to have the OS/2 logo on the screen.

Good luck with that. It was built in karst territory, over very unstable ground. Lots of sinkholes out there. You may sink the putt and never get your ball back.

DCC used PASC. That said, MPEG copied / extended on what was done with PASC, calling it MPEG Layer 1, later evolving that into MP3.

I remember DCC. I remember how good they sounded, compared to analog cassettes. Could never afford them at that time, though. I recall they had a sliding metal shutter, to protect the tape, kinda like the sliding shutter on a 3.5" floppy.

I'm with ya there.

My employer provides a laptop with a fairly standardized set of apps. I have a much nicer, personally-owned PC sitting here at home. I have Linux running on the laptop and X-Windows using my PC as a thin client. The company's apps and data are sitting on, and running on, the laptop. I can pack up the laptop, go somewhere and use it stand-alone. Nothing to sync, nothing to move, all of the company's stuff is on the company's machine. But I can use my noisy Model M keyboard and my 36" screen to drive all that when I'm at home.

I tend to think the employer should provide you with either a) hardware and software with which to do your work OR b) the ability to use RDP / VNC, etc. to hit a company-provided virtual machine. I have the former, my wife has the latter. So long as the bandwidth is decent and reliable, either one works reasonably well.

While my office is not far (about 45 minutes during rush hour) the cognitive load that I'm NOT spending fighting with bovines in traffic means I have lot more mental "cycles" I can devote to my job. True, I'm not spending as much on gas, I won't need an oil change or new tires as soon, I'm not wearing (and needing to replace parts of) my office attire; there are $$$ savings. But, mostly, the ability to avoid putting up with bovines in traffic ... that's a huge win. I'm not arriving at the office, starting my workday, stressed and pissed. And I'm not that way when the day is done and I'm home.

Or anyone using an IBM 3270- or 5250-class terminal. Return took you took the first field on the next line. Enter actually submitted your inputs. You could type just about anything you wanted but the mainframe didn't see it until you hit Enter.

Enter was roughly the same spot as the right-control key is on my 1980s-vintage IBM Model M.