Not to mention, unless I'm much mistaken a NAT can support 65536 connections at maximum
This is not true, at least for TCP connections. While many implementations might have this limit for simplicity sake, there is no actual reason why you can't use the same local port for different destinations, e.g. TCP port 1000 could have active connections to www.slashdot.org on port 80 and to www.microsft.com on port 80 and there is sufficient information in each packet to work out which of those two connections each packet belongs to. You see this type of multiplexing in reverse on servers where port 80 might have thousands of connections to it active at once.
Intel is already doing this to some extent with their Turbo Boost technology. You can run one core at the fastest clock rate allowed by the heat envelope of the CPU, two cores slightly slower or four even slower cores. It certainly isn't taking it to the extent that you suggest, but it is heading in that direction.
With their next generation Sandy Bridge architecture they are taking it a bit further and if the cores are cooler because they have been running idle for a while then it lets them run even faster for a short period of time until they head up again.
It is all about heat these days and in order for all those slow cores to be helpful, they need to have significantly better computation per watt ratio than the big fast cores AND we need OSs and/or hypervisors that understand how to use a mix of fast and slow cores.
However, the effect is debatable, with no consensus on what it will be and whether it would be negative. If we were getting to 50% wind power then I'd want to see more research on the possible effects, but I can't see it having any noticeable impact one way or the other any time soon.
For example, a single terrorist nuclear incident would probably result in marshal law within the US, an escalation of our military, and a massive retrenchment of the world economy. Even if this as a 1% chance, the cost is so great that one must account for it. One percent of 100 trillion dollars in cumulative loss over the ensuing 50 years (not even accounting for loss of life) is $1T.
I think that you overstate the effect and the chance, but yes, this is indeed a cost that needs to be taken into account. However, what we are comparing to is coal-fired power plants. These also do massive damage - it is just less obvious. I won't try to put a number on it, but greenhouse effects could easily cause a loss of well over 1% of GDP even in a moderately bad scenario. I don't want to think about worst cast. Then there's the mining, particle pollution and mercury that coal has to deal with.
Further, nuclear energy economic models assume centralized power generation. That is a poor approach, an industrial age approach. We need to get away from that and move power generation closer to where power is used.
Yes, decentralized generation can be good when it works, but why do we need it? You say yourself that high-voltage transmission is very efficient, so why?
I don't feel that nuclear is a choice. It is too dangerous. In my opinion, it needs to be off the table as an option. If it did not exist, we would find a way and we would be fine.
I don't feel that coal is a choice. It is too dangerous. In my opinion, it needs to be off the table as an option. If it did not exist, we would find a way and we would be fine.
It would be great if solar and wind could produce all our power requirements and maybe one day they will, but I feel that that's a long time away and if that leaves us with a choice between coal and nuclear then I'd definitely support the nuclear option.
That's because the point of technology is not to enforce the levelness on the grid. The idea would be to anticipate the time of peak demand, cool all of the fridges down before this time starts, so that they can all stay off during peak load. Alternatively, if the peak load spikes unexpectedly or power production drops unexpectedly then the fridges could switch off to allow the available power to be used for other purposes.
This would mean two things. Firstly, less peak capacity would be required which reduces infrastructure costs. Secondly, it allows renuable energy sources to be used to a greater extent in the grid. Generally with renuable energy you have no control over production, so being able to control consumption instead means that a greater percentage of renuable sources can be used instead.
I'd put an induction clamp onto the line in my box and get the data from that point.
Hard to do that with Gas, though.
Plus, you'd have to measure the main (not impossible, but it might be harder to find a clamp-on inductive ammeter that's easy to interface with a computer), and you'd have to monitor it *continuously* in order to integrate over time. Whereas the webcam can even sit powered off for most of the day, and just be activated long enough to grab an image of the dials.
Even worse that that, you won't even get the correct result because of power factor effects.
Not to ask the blatantly obvious, but if it's the right mass for one theory of dark matter, I can't help but wonder where they are all being produced. Given a life of 20 picoseconds, I can't imagine that there would be monstrous factories of these things all over the universe to account for the stupidly large amount of mass they are supposed to account for. How come we haven't found them before?
I thought the same thing at first, but the article states that they are theorizing that the particle produced is not a dark matter particle itself, but rather the particle that carries forces between dark matter particles. It is entirely possible that there are stable dark-matter particles, but for the force-carrying particles to be unstable when produced in isolation.
The power usage during standby is only about 1-2 watts on a decent PC these days. The power usage during hibernation is also about 1-2 watts and the power usage while OFF is about 1-2 watts as well.
So unless you are actually prepared to turn your PC off at the wall then they are right, standby mode is generally the best way of saving power because the speed to resume from standby means that you can put the PC into standyby mode much more often than you would turn it off and the PC can put itself into standyby mode automatically.
Current costs of uranium are well below the cost for coal in terms of dollars per MWh, and far below the cost for other hydrocarbons. Given the small rate of usage it's unlikely to undergo an oil-like cost explosion anytime in the foreseeable future.
Uranium did undergo a massive oil-like cost explosion recently, going up from about $10/lb in around 2002 to $140/lb in 2008 and has since dropped back to around $50/lb.
The difference is that uranium is such a small cost the overall cost of producing nuclear power that even such a big price rise makes little difference and if you start reprocessing the waste into more useful fuel then it makes even less difference.
The 6 months clause in this agreement is ridiculous. If enforced, it means that you couldn't work in any other job where you produce IP of any sort for the 6 months after you leave because otherwise anything you create for the new company is at risk of being claimed by the old company. The same goes for working for yourself, anything involving the creation of IP will be put at risk. The contract may well not be enforceable, but even so it is better to be on the safe side and not have to ever go through the process of getting a court to decide that it isn't enforceable.
If the company really does desire this restriction for some reason then that's fair enough, but to compensate for it, the company should agree to maintain your pay at the level it was when you left for a period of 6 months. Now, if you do go and do a job that doesn't involve creating any IP for those 6 months, e.g. flipping burgers, then they could just top up your pay to the level it was rather than continuing to pay the whole lot. You can point out that because you are getting fair compensation for signing the agreement that there is a much greater chance of it being enforceable as well, so if the company really does need this for some reason then the modified agreement benefits both of you.
I've briefly played with Gnumeric a while ago and actually added a couple of minor features to it. Despite being an OO application written in C (Yes, this is possible, but the language doesn't help you at all), it was the most easy code that I've ever worked with. It was extremely easy to understand and find your way around.
I'm not too sure on the details of the US economy and inflation in the US might well be related to a depreciating US dollar and a depreciating US dollar would have some effect on metal prices. However these effects are very minor compared to metal price rises which are actually a result of increasing demand, mostly notably from a booming Chinese economy, outstripping supply.
On your question of costs, according to lme.co.uk, Aluminium is currently $2,185 per tonne and Zinc is $3,850 per tonne, so I wouldn't be worried about the raw metal cost since Aluminium is cheaper. Anyway, neither of these costs is likely to be at all significant when making a battery.
In the last 2 years the Zinc price has gone up about 300%. By comparison, Aluminium has only gone up abut 60% in the same time period. The price of Aluminium is probably less affected because its cost comes more from the highly energy-intensive manufacturing process rather than the discovery and mining costs which would more heavily affect Zinc.
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Not to mention, unless I'm much mistaken a NAT can support 65536 connections at maximum
This is not true, at least for TCP connections. While many implementations might have this limit for simplicity sake, there is no actual reason why you can't use the same local port for different destinations, e.g. TCP port 1000 could have active connections to www.slashdot.org on port 80 and to www.microsft.com on port 80 and there is sufficient information in each packet to work out which of those two connections each packet belongs to. You see this type of multiplexing in reverse on servers where port 80 might have thousands of connections to it active at once.
With their next generation Sandy Bridge architecture they are taking it a bit further and if the cores are cooler because they have been running idle for a while then it lets them run even faster for a short period of time until they head up again.
It is all about heat these days and in order for all those slow cores to be helpful, they need to have significantly better computation per watt ratio than the big fast cores AND we need OSs and/or hypervisors that understand how to use a mix of fast and slow cores.
However, the effect is debatable, with no consensus on what it will be and whether it would be negative. If we were getting to 50% wind power then I'd want to see more research on the possible effects, but I can't see it having any noticeable impact one way or the other any time soon.
For example, a single terrorist nuclear incident would probably result in marshal law within the US, an escalation of our military, and a massive retrenchment of the world economy. Even if this as a 1% chance, the cost is so great that one must account for it. One percent of 100 trillion dollars in cumulative loss over the ensuing 50 years (not even accounting for loss of life) is $1T.
I think that you overstate the effect and the chance, but yes, this is indeed a cost that needs to be taken into account. However, what we are comparing to is coal-fired power plants. These also do massive damage - it is just less obvious. I won't try to put a number on it, but greenhouse effects could easily cause a loss of well over 1% of GDP even in a moderately bad scenario. I don't want to think about worst cast. Then there's the mining, particle pollution and mercury that coal has to deal with.
Further, nuclear energy economic models assume centralized power generation. That is a poor approach, an industrial age approach. We need to get away from that and move power generation closer to where power is used.
Yes, decentralized generation can be good when it works, but why do we need it? You say yourself that high-voltage transmission is very efficient, so why?
I don't feel that nuclear is a choice. It is too dangerous. In my opinion, it needs to be off the table as an option. If it did not exist, we would find a way and we would be fine.
I don't feel that coal is a choice. It is too dangerous. In my opinion, it needs to be off the table as an option. If it did not exist, we would find a way and we would be fine.
It would be great if solar and wind could produce all our power requirements and maybe one day they will, but I feel that that's a long time away and if that leaves us with a choice between coal and nuclear then I'd definitely support the nuclear option.
That's because the point of technology is not to enforce the levelness on the grid. The idea would be to anticipate the time of peak demand, cool all of the fridges down before this time starts, so that they can all stay off during peak load. Alternatively, if the peak load spikes unexpectedly or power production drops unexpectedly then the fridges could switch off to allow the available power to be used for other purposes. This would mean two things. Firstly, less peak capacity would be required which reduces infrastructure costs. Secondly, it allows renuable energy sources to be used to a greater extent in the grid. Generally with renuable energy you have no control over production, so being able to control consumption instead means that a greater percentage of renuable sources can be used instead.
I'd put an induction clamp onto the line in my box and get the data from that point.
Hard to do that with Gas, though.
Plus, you'd have to measure the main (not impossible, but it might be harder to find a clamp-on inductive ammeter that's easy to interface with a computer), and you'd have to monitor it *continuously* in order to integrate over time. Whereas the webcam can even sit powered off for most of the day, and just be activated long enough to grab an image of the dials.
Even worse that that, you won't even get the correct result because of power factor effects.
Not to ask the blatantly obvious, but if it's the right mass for one theory of dark matter, I can't help but wonder where they are all being produced. Given a life of 20 picoseconds, I can't imagine that there would be monstrous factories of these things all over the universe to account for the stupidly large amount of mass they are supposed to account for. How come we haven't found them before?
I thought the same thing at first, but the article states that they are theorizing that the particle produced is not a dark matter particle itself, but rather the particle that carries forces between dark matter particles. It is entirely possible that there are stable dark-matter particles, but for the force-carrying particles to be unstable when produced in isolation.
The power usage during standby is only about 1-2 watts on a decent PC these days. The power usage during hibernation is also about 1-2 watts and the power usage while OFF is about 1-2 watts as well. So unless you are actually prepared to turn your PC off at the wall then they are right, standby mode is generally the best way of saving power because the speed to resume from standby means that you can put the PC into standyby mode much more often than you would turn it off and the PC can put itself into standyby mode automatically.
Current costs of uranium are well below the cost for coal in terms of dollars per MWh, and far below the cost for other hydrocarbons. Given the small rate of usage it's unlikely to undergo an oil-like cost explosion anytime in the foreseeable future.
Uranium did undergo a massive oil-like cost explosion recently, going up from about $10/lb in around 2002 to $140/lb in 2008 and has since dropped back to around $50/lb. The difference is that uranium is such a small cost the overall cost of producing nuclear power that even such a big price rise makes little difference and if you start reprocessing the waste into more useful fuel then it makes even less difference.
The 6 months clause in this agreement is ridiculous. If enforced, it means that you couldn't work in any other job where you produce IP of any sort for the 6 months after you leave because otherwise anything you create for the new company is at risk of being claimed by the old company. The same goes for working for yourself, anything involving the creation of IP will be put at risk. The contract may well not be enforceable, but even so it is better to be on the safe side and not have to ever go through the process of getting a court to decide that it isn't enforceable. If the company really does desire this restriction for some reason then that's fair enough, but to compensate for it, the company should agree to maintain your pay at the level it was when you left for a period of 6 months. Now, if you do go and do a job that doesn't involve creating any IP for those 6 months, e.g. flipping burgers, then they could just top up your pay to the level it was rather than continuing to pay the whole lot. You can point out that because you are getting fair compensation for signing the agreement that there is a much greater chance of it being enforceable as well, so if the company really does need this for some reason then the modified agreement benefits both of you.
I've briefly played with Gnumeric a while ago and actually added a couple of minor features to it. Despite being an OO application written in C (Yes, this is possible, but the language doesn't help you at all), it was the most easy code that I've ever worked with. It was extremely easy to understand and find your way around.
I'm not too sure on the details of the US economy and inflation in the US might well be related to a depreciating US dollar and a depreciating US dollar would have some effect on metal prices. However these effects are very minor compared to metal price rises which are actually a result of increasing demand, mostly notably from a booming Chinese economy, outstripping supply.
On your question of costs, according to lme.co.uk, Aluminium is currently $2,185 per tonne and Zinc is $3,850 per tonne, so I wouldn't be worried about the raw metal cost since Aluminium is cheaper. Anyway, neither of these costs is likely to be at all significant when making a battery.
In the last 2 years the Zinc price has gone up about 300%. By comparison, Aluminium has only gone up abut 60% in the same time period. The price of Aluminium is probably less affected because its cost comes more from the highly energy-intensive manufacturing process rather than the discovery and mining costs which would more heavily affect Zinc.