Out the door (and temporarily off line).

Posts may be a bit short and few and far between for the next couple of weeks. I recently bought a house and now have about a week and a half to move everything from my apartment to the new homestead. The two are about 45 minutes apart and there is a lot of stuff to move, most of it in my Ford Focus, so this process might take a while. I'm not sure when I'll be able to get an internet hook-up at the new place, I haven't gotten things nearly that organized yet.

Power (away from the people).

I suspected that one day it would come to this. In the post - 9/11 climate of trading away freedom for security, there would come a point when there would be nothing more to trade. I just didn't think the end would come earliest in Sweden. The Swedish parliament passed one of the most sweeping surveillance bills every seen in a democratic state yesterday, by a vote of 143 to 138 as protesters shouted outside. The bill allows the Swedish military to monitor essentially every data transmission made within, or passing through, the country's borders to monitor for what the bill calls "external threats." Somewhere, George Orwell is spinning in his grave.

Everything is Nuclear Powered!

Today the Ontario provincial government announced plans to build two additional reactors at the Darlington generating station, 80 km east of Toronto. Currently, there are four units on site, CANDU 9s with a combined 3800 MW capacity. The Globe and Mail reports that bids will be considered from AECL, the Canadian company behind the CANDU reactor design, Westinghouse, one of the original developers of the PWR design, and Areva Group of France. The announcement was predictably met with moaning from finance critics about the projected $26 billion price tag, and with the environmentalists with their tired old statement that nuclear is unnecessary because you can do it all with wind, solar, and tidal power.

The later argument particularly irks me because wind, solar, and tidal are part of the solution, but not the panacea some would have you believe. Let's take solar for an example. The energy of the Sun at the Earth's surface has an average intensity of 1366 W/m2. Consider that solar panels are, at best, 6% efficient. So we get 82 W per square meter of solar panels deployed. To replace Ontario's existing 11 400 MW of nuclear power capacity, you would require:

11 400 000 000 W / 82 W/m2 = 139 024 390 m2 or a little over 139 000 square km, 15% of Ontario's total land mass, and it only works during the day. Just to come up with the the equivalent of the proposed plant, around 1000 MW, that's over 12 000 square km. Wind is inconsistent but is great for peaking load. The record holder for power production by a wind turbine is 6 MW, and 1900 of those (to replace installed nuclear capacity) makes for one big wind farm. Tidal power is at such an early stage of development that I cannot even speculate.

In short, nuclear power is a key part of the energy mix we'll need as fossil fuels become increasingly scarce and unattractive, weather you like it or not. We should also remember that solar and wind energy both result from a nuclear reaction taking place within the sun, and fossil fuels are simply the condensed results of ancient plant and animal growth which likewise used the Sun's energy. So at a basic level, tidal power is unique in being the only source of energy I know of that is completely non-nuclear.

The future will be a long time coming.

Bob LeDrew over at CBC seems to have shared one of my brainwaves... Rogers horridly poor announcement of the iPhone 3G, coming July 11 to its network. I had noticed that for the first few days (4 to be exact)after the announcement, the Rogers website had only a teaser ad saying "something big is coming July 11th" and a link that went to nowhere. It just looped back to the homepage. Then it linked to a short press release saying that it was, *gasp* the iPhone, and it will cost $199 for 8GB and $299 for 16GB. Frustratingly, no information on pricing of the data plan(s) was forthcoming. ACH! I want one, just tell me what it will cost me! I will pay it! But what is the point of dribbling out half a press release once a week? To generate Apple-esque buzz? I've had all the iPhone rumors I can stomach, thank you. Another fine demonstration of Rogers great product offerings but stunning marketing ineptitude.

While on the subject of products that are long overdue, Mozilla has declared that Firefox 3 will be released tomorrow, June 17. Those of you who have been using one of the perfectly stable beta releases for two or three months now can move right along now. Incidentally, 3.1 is in the works for as early as July to fix the things that we just couldn't shove into 3.0 despite a very long lead time.

And finally, Ars Technica gives us bloggers reasons to lock our doors and keep our heads down, pointing out that several bloggers have recently been arrested around the world. Now, most of this comes to you from the usual suspects like Iran and China, but Egypt is also right up there, along with Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Steve Jobs shows us the new math.

For those of you who have been sleeping under a rock this week, you should know that the new model of the iPhone was officially announced. There was much speculation about what the new version would be called. iPhone 2.0 was out because that was already used to refer to the firmware, which will also be rolling out onto first-gen iPhones. iPhone 3G is what Apple finally settled on, which does a nice job of highlighting the new support for faster third-generation cell data networks, but now what do we call the inevitable third generation of the iPhone itself? We might need some new math to avoid a Windows-style confusion of names refering to version numbers (1.0 to 3.1), years (95, 98, 2000), and nonsensical gibberish (95SE, ME, XP, Vista).

But before we worry about that, perhaps we should take a moment to appreciate the iPhone 3G's new features. In addition to high-speed data, the iPhone got GPS, Exchange e-mail support, and a spiffy new apps store for the long-awaited Apple-approved 3rd party apps. Apple rebranded .Mac online storage under the name "MobileMe" to push more data to the device, although MobileMe sounds like Mini-Me's cousin rather than a form of cloud computing. The device stayed about the same size and mass but got a few slight cosmetic touches such as beveled edges to make it appear thinner and a black (or white) plastic back shell.

What's really awesome about this is that it finally is an iPhone for the rest of us. Whereas the original iPhone only made it to four countries, the iPhone 3G will debut in 22 countries on day 1 (July 11th) and expand to 70 countries by the end of the year. Canada is on the list, with Rogers offering the iPhone 3G on a 3-year plan (long, but pretty standard for Canada) or as a pay-as-you-go service through its subsidiary FIDO.

Now on to cost. Steve Jobs got a loud round of applause while announcing that the 8GB version will go for $199 US, while the 16GB version will set you back $299, compared to $499 and $599. The bad news came when it was revealed that AT&T's all-you-can-eat data plan would go from $20/month to $30/month, which largely makes up the difference in initial cost. Pricing for service has not been announced in Canada, but the device will cost the same, $199 CAD and $299 CAD, since our dollar is about par with the US.

Of course the device is not perfect, copy and paste is still not in there, also missing are video capture and picture messaging. However, I have yet to hear of a gripe that cannot be fixed with a future firmware update.

It might not fit my crazy-ass schedule to run out and get one on July 11th, but I am certainly going to try and get my hands on one before the month is out.

You smell like drinking!

Oops, again with the infrequent blog posts. I recently bought a house and while I'm ecstatic about that, the downside is I have to clean out and pack up my apartment. I had actually forgotten how much stuff we own.

And now to the news...

A company in Japan (where else) has come out with a teddy bear with a built-in breathalyzer. And it talks! The title is my vote for what it should say. It's also a Futurama reference (collect the whole set!). This device could be a punishment for drivers with previous DUI convictions.

The American Astronomical Society has produced the most detailed map of our home galaxy ever, National Geographic reports. Producing a map of the galaxy when you're in it is a surprisingly difficult task. This map shows that there are fewer major spiral arms than previously believed, with two rather than four.

For those of you longing for a simpler time, before the age of the talking teddy bear, a small British company might have just the thing. The home stereo has an iPod dock, CD player, and yes, a working radio, and the unit itself is made to look like a Second World War - era field radio set. It'll set you back about $600 Canadian plus shipping, but that would look awesome in pretty much any house (mostly in mine).

Now here is some bad news. A recent filing by a group of small Canadian ISPs shows that Bell Canada's bandwidth throttling is so severe that it sometimes reduces the speed of a 5 mbps connection to half the speed of dial-up (remember the days of 28 kbps modems?). That's money well wasted.