And Amtrak, at least in the NorthEast, has AC power in its cars.

Your problem is that the only value for a and b is 0. Dividing by 0 in the last step is undefined, so you can't make the equality. In essence, in step 7, the only value for b that makes the equality valid is 0.

Why off-shore wind facilities are appealing is that a large portion of the country lives along the coasts and around the Great Lakes. Moving power from the middle of the country to the coasts is daunting. It's the big reason T Boone Pickens gave up on his idea for setting up wind turbines in TX, could produce the juice, couldn't get it to the market without investing beacoup bucks in distribution and transport. Not to say that the transport and distribution infrastructure doesn't need to be upgraded, it really does. But, utilities have never really been about distribution, just generation. Having the off-shore wind turbine farms would provide some renewable energy resources closer to where a lot of people live, and it MAY be cheaper/easier to distribute. That's one of the big researchy things this effort will need to address.

The question was "how do I write something in Xcode, and compile on Android?" What I said was how you do it. The "view" and "controller" components of your application are going to be either fully system dependent or partially system dependent. Much of the application's code can be made system-independent (mostly the model, but, some of the controller stuff). I've got million line simulations that run on Mac OSX, Windows, Linux/Unix/Solaris, etc.. Now, most of these are mostly mathematics and physics, and all of that code runs unmodified for the most part on all these systems. The animation and UI components all have to be tailored to Windows, Mac OS X, X-Windows, but, doing a good design assuming multiple platforms can make that manageable. Single Flash app that runs on all platforms is exactly what Apple does not want for their mobile customers. I have Click2Flash to manage my exposure to Flash on the Web, try to avoid Flash sites, and all the Flash games and applications I've seen always look and act lame on my Mac.

I only have a handful of 3rd party apps (Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) on my iPhone that even NEED the Internet. Of the remaining 70+ applications (I'm not a big app collector), all of them run locally on my iPhone, and provide useful information and calculation capabilities locally on the phone. I don't need the Internet for a calculator, as a place to keep my expenses, notes, and all the other uses I have for a hand-held computer.

Xcode is not a language, it's a development environment. You can use the gcc/g++ compilers directly from the command line to compile the source code. The source code lives whereever you want, and you can compile and link to build the executables using whatever compiler you want. So, on your Mac, you can install the Xcode environment (to get the Mac g++/gcc tools, code signing tools you need for signing and certification for the App Store, etc.), install Eclipse and the Android development environment (to get the java runtime environment, c/c++ support tools, JNI support tools you need to run c/c++ code under the Android java VM), and both environments can build executables using the shared source code base (some pieces, views especially, will need to be tailored to each environment, Cocoa Touch for iPhone, iPad, Touch, whatever is used on Android, etc.).

I would submit that IBM did not fail, but actually succeeded, and continues to succeed, in the mainframe market. They absolutely punted in the PC market, but, in the supercomputer and mainframe worlds, IBM is clearly dominant, and, for mainframes, is pretty much the sole vendor these days. And, IBM is still a Fortune 50 company, and it still gets a lot of that cash from mainframe sales and service.

Windows has certain level POSIX compliance (it is not 100% because it doesn't provide a POSIX-compliant shell, as far as I know, as well as other POSIX requirements). Mac OS X has Unix certification, including 100% compliance with the mandatory components of ALL the POSIX specifications. That puts in the league of Solaris, HP/UX, IRIX, AIX, and other Unix systems. Linux is NOT Unix-certified (and can't be because it exhibits certain kernel behaviors and interfaces different from what is expected from a Unix system, and those are design choices made by Linus Torvalds and the others in the Linux kernel system). It handles everything (signaling, POSIX threads, etc.) by the book (the BSD book, at least, with some System V support thrown in)! That's why Mac OS X is certified to be Unix-compliant and Linux is not. Linux often introduces behaviors and/or interface changes that the kernel team (Linus Torvalds and company) have deemed to be better (which it may or may not), but it's not Unix. Biggest significant difference I've seen in porting Linux software to Mac OS X is the lack of implementation of some of the optional features of the POSIX Real-Time extensions that many (though not all) Linux distributions support. They can usually be gotten around, however, you often have to venture into the worlds of Mach programming to achieve the same behaviors. All the KDE/Gnome/Other X-Window applications and stuff is not required for Unix certification. X-Windows itself is not even required for Unix certification. However, Mac OS X 10.5 provides a modern X-Windows environment in which the majority of the X-Windows based applications can (and have been) ported to Mac OS X. Mac OS X at the command line has the same GNU command line tools that Linux provides, most of them from the same code base (depending on version).