I tend to agree with those who deride Salon for jumping on the angle that the university reacted too slowly to the tragedy. This kind of blatant sensationalism, one day after an event, is no better than the headlines with implicitly screaming fingers pointed at the shooter's status as a foreign (South Korean) student. At times like this, I'm looking for the facts, not conspiracy theories, and it's a shame that salon is trying to harness the same base human emotions, just targeting a different crowd. The details and time for assessing adequacy of response will come later.

With 25,000 students + several thousand staff on campus, we're talking about coordinating an entire community the size of Hyde Park in Chicago, New London, Conn., or Middletown, NY (verified in wikipedia). A) 2 hours response is not unreasonable for a community that size, and B) It's hard to imagine orchestrating a shut-down for a community that size, in the event of a shooting where the gunman is loose.

With the resources of a community of several million in the San Francisco Bay Area, it still took a good hour for news of the hit and run driver who ran down 15 people in 30 minutes, who was still loose.

Wow Salon, you're really alienating your readers... It's good to occasionally present alternative views within the community, but you should do so in a way that doesn't alienate your audience and thus risk destroying your user base.

Just like how the empty party line, no content & thought, poorly investigated journalism that makes up 50% of the reporting in The Nation has driven me away from that respected publication, you're driving your readers away from yours. This is not the first article I've read on salon that I find to be drivel that incites me to anger (which is somewhat unfairly directed at Salon). It's not likely to be the last, but I already finding myself coming to your site less and less, as the frequency has increased for finding things like this blithely ignorant book excerpt. You might not have the manpower to do a full review a la the New York Review of Books, but the very least you could do is have one of your pundits do a quick appraisal of strengths and weaknesses, ya?

While Goldman certainly does it's fair share of nefarious deeds around the globe, I think that the fact that they have historically been leagues ahead of their counterparts in spotting what will be the "wave of the future", and how they often play a catalyzing role for an industry, is only a good thing for finding alternatives to fossil fuels.

Yes, solar power may be more expensive than fossil fuels right now, but CSP (what this new site will use) uses commodity parts that are far cheaper to produce than "solar cells". If you factor in a "carbon emission tax" of $30 / ton, the total cost to build & maintain a CSP plant is competitive with coal-fired power. The mere fact that Goldman is investing in the project will give a significant boost to research in the solar field, as researchers become more confident that there is a future for their technology, with a leader like Goldman investing (& other industry investors to follow).

While the desert tortoise surely deserves protection, I think people need to look at facts & analyses before jumping to conclusions out of sheer knee-jerk moral outrage. A few basic facts:

(1) The mojave desert spans 22,000 square miles, and the 165k acres that this article reports having been staked out is equal to a mere 257 sq miles. The urban sprawl that are Las Vegas in the center and Palmdale to the west pose far more disruption and danger to the desert tortoise. The Las Vegas metro area alone is growing by about 80,000 people a year.

(2) 10 Gigawatts is a *lot* of power -- enough to power 4-10 million homes, depending on who you ask. There are 12 million people in LA metro, and approx 4 million households. Besides powering most of SoCal, if this power plant can actually deliver this amount of power, it will be enough to take up to TEN average sized coal (or gas-fired) power plants offline.

(3) The tortoises are unlikely to live in places that the solar power builders will want to build. According to wikipedia, "They have a strong proclivity in the Mojave desert for alluvial fans, washes and canyons where more suitable soils for den construction might be found." -- all poor building sites for obviously reasons. There will undoubtably be some environmental damage. But covering 1% of the mojave to provide power to almost 1% of the US population, and dealing with the damage associated with building it (including some tortoise habitat inevitably destroyed by transport of materials, laying cable, etc), will in my mind be infinitely preferable to building.

In theory, if this experiment works we could cover the entirety of the mojave (or portions of all the deserts in the southwest) and provide enough power to turn off every fossil-fuel power plant in the country. (Of course, this would require technological advances, building a DC-nationwide power grid, etc, but we're talking "theoretically" here.) Would I kill off 95% of the wildlife in the mojave to make the entire country's electricity nearly carbon free? I can only come to the conclusion of the reader above: sorry turtles, but it's soup time.

Check out

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

I heard an interview with the guy responsible for it on NPR yesterday. I find his methodology to be much more fundamentally sound than any individual poll.

And he has a very well established reputation as someone who is a far more accurate predictor than pollsters & other computer modeling. (he is the creator of the PECOTA baseball analysis)

You can read more about him here:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/140469