Heck, it's not that rare for companies to go back to perfectly functional older turbines and upgrade their generator and add longer blades, to get more power out of a given tower. There's a project like that going on in Iowa right now.
Also, just looking at it, these panels seem to be very low slung and at shallow angles. If you were to concrete those frames to the ground, and they had sufficient wall thickness, I could easily picture those withstanding huge winds.
Please, by all means, show me the solar power generation and storage facility that you built in a country whose transportation infrastructure was devastated, completed just 2 1/2 weeks after speaking with the local government for the very first time.
I love thinking about the long term, and I wish more people did. I'm in the middle of a house construction project, trying to design it for a many-hundred to couple-thousand year lifespan (just the basic structure, not everything in it).... and it touches on everything that you do. And I know the exact same things would apply to repository design.
Example: first off, let's assume that like me they're building out of concrete. Well, unless your wall thickness is dam-thick, what's going to happen is CO2 will slowly dissolve into the concrete, converting the cement to limestone and lowering its pH. When the lowered pH zone reaches the rebar, it'll suddenly begin to rust and increase in size (as it's no longer protected by a highly basic environment); within a few years, the concrete is spalling out, and if not repaired, the structure will soon be unsafe.
What do you do? Well, one answer is, like dams, extreme thickness. This keeps the CO2 from ever reaching the rebar, although it also means a very expensive build. The answer of "no rebar", like the Romans did, may seem tempting, but beyond how that means that you can no longer have any shear or tensile stress (shear = loads that aren't in perfectly balanced arches; tensile = loads for example in the foundation, meaning you have to have a crazy-overbuilt foundation), it also means no safety factor against shifting loads. What's the balance?
Stainless steel has excellent (although somewhat uncertain in the long-term) lifespan. It's a bit unpredictable... you may find not the slightest bit of corrosion on 99% of the stainless but then heavy pitting on 1%, with no obvious rhyme or reason as to why. In general, though, it's quite good, but very expensive - 5x more than mild steel.
Loose plastic fibres again appear to have extremely long lifespans in concrete, and play a role akin to the horsehair that Romans added to concrete - helping resist the formation of microcracks. But while they can add some limited tensile strength to concrete, the structural benefits are limited.
Fibre-reinforced plastic rebar has superb tensile strength and can can resist shear loads. Carbon fibre is best, but very expensive; basalt fibre looks best for my needs. Unfortunately, FRP has inelastic stress-strain behavior which means that it can't directly substitute for steel in all roles. Also, tensile strength of FRP rebar does drop with time, but mainly early on; the rate of decline slows and slows with time (unlike basalt and glass, degradation in carbon fibre rebar is minimal with time... it shrugs off almost anything. But again, crazy expensive).
In my case, the house is being shaped to try to - as much as is realistic - avoid shear stress. Which is challenging when it comes to price because, for example, have you ever gone out and shopped for curved windows?;) So we're doing the windows as big arches, setting a frame inside them (not matching the wall's bend, just flat), and deviating slightly from a perfect arch so that most of the panes inside can be rectangular, with only a couple requiring a curved cut. Where reinforcement in the concrete is required it'll be a mix of FRP and stainless rebar, with a pozzolanic / loose fibre concrete. I'm also pushing for the use of very thick pumice crete walls, acting as their own insulation. "Thick" and "pore space" are two factors in concrete that have demonstrable very long term survivability - stress from a shear force is inversely proportional to the thickness squared, and pore space tends to mean that it "crushes into itself" over time rather than shearing / spalling off. But in addition to that not being traditional in modern construction, it can cause problems, say, when you're concreting a wall to a foundation and the wall shrinks as it hardens, putting stress (and thus cracking) at the connection point. A pozzolanic mix should reduce but not eliminate this (it also produces a stronger concrete in the end, and the CSH gel tends to self-seal cracks - although pozzolanic concrete
Did you just call a conversion to electric heat "wasteful"? I thought electric heat was the goal of every "green" energy plan?
If you think the goal of "100% renewable electricity cheaper than fossil fuels" is realistic. I don't, at least in the short to mid term. There's nothing wrong with natural gas heating. Natural gas is low carbon, clean burning, cheap, abundant, and can (by varying means and to varying degrees) be a renewable resource.
Heating with coal, oil, or natural gas are presumably out, as those contribute to CO2 output. . Are people supposed to burn wood for heat? That's going to go over real well once people find out how many trees would have to be cut down every winter.
You should be a story writer, because you've composed an elaborate story in your mind about who I am and what I believe.
Wood is a terrible fuel source. As polluting as coal, and that's assuming you have equivalent scrubbers.
Yes, that does mean largely starting over with the nuclear power learning curve. If we figure this out then we've solved the energy problem for all time.
History tells us that, in addition to being saddled with massive costs, we'll end up having to switch to yet another "new generation" a couple decades down the road.
The fact that nuclear has been this way isnt due to "bad luck". It's the very nature of what you're doing. You're creating immensely toxic materials, from literally all across the periodic table, meaning literally every possibility for corrosion, side reactions, etc. You're doing this in the middle of an intense neutron flux which embrittles materials at the best, and at the worst makes them store Wigner energy which can be suddenly released. Neutron transparency / absorption requirements mean you have to work with exotic materials. Etc, etc, etc. When was the last time you welded a half-meter diameter zirconium pipe with x-ray-perfect precision? How many people do you think there are in the world who know how to do something like that? Because that's the sort of stuff you have to do to build nuclear power plants. That's the sort of thing that causes cost overruns. Check out some of the latest generation of overbudget plants and look at the various reasons why they went over budget. Hint: "NIMBY" has nothing to do with any of them.
Assuming wind and solar is cheaper than nuclear and coal, the growth in demand as more people in the world want to get to a standard of living that those in Europe enjoy will soon overwhelm the supply and prices will go up.
That's not how it works. Production goes up when demand goes up. And the larger the scale of production, the lower the unit cost, not higher.
The "France did it and their rates aren't excessive, so why can't others?" line keeps coming up.
The Messmer Plan, which converted France to a nuclear grid, came at a huge cost. Between 1973 and 1984, EDF's debt rose by 650%. As EDF is largely owned by the state, this has a direct influence on France's total debt standings. By the mid 1980s, EDF's debt standing was 15,4% of France's total foreign debt - a debt which shot up during the Messmer Plan's implementation (not solely due to it, but it certainly didn't help). The fact that ratepayers weren't directly forced to pay this on their power bills is irrelevant; everyone pays indirectly when you fund things through a debt burden borne by the state.
Furthermore, because France didn't account for improvements in efficiency in their power forecasts, so they overbuilt. This led to France desperately seeking ways to use and sell more power, which led to wasteful consumption (such as the conversion of heating to electric, reduced focus on efficiency, insulation, etc). So they took on a debt burden in order to create power generation to use inefficiently.
And the Messmer Plan was really a best case scenario: a unified deployment of identical plants back in the 1970s. Unfortunately, nuclear power has experienced a negative learning curve since then; things have been getting more expensive, not less, as we've learned of problems in previous designs that need to be overcome with future designs. Fixing these means starting over with a new generation of plants, but this restarts the learning curve. The most recent attempt to do this - the so-called "nuclear renaissance" - was a colossal failure, leaving a mess of hugely overbudget / behind schedule plants, debt-saddled / bankrupt utilities, the bankruptcy of Westinghouse and the bailout of Areva in its wake.
France is now putting a new focus on renewables. But they're behind the curve on this front. France has had little incentive to work on renewables compared to other major powers because they were overbuilt on generation capacity. Now it's catch-up time.
Of course, it's easier to switch over a smaller infrastructure used by fewer people.
This is wrong on many levels.
1) The basic premise itself is wrong. If you have fewer people, yes that means less demand, but it also means correspondingly less resources to make the change.
2) Iceland is a much more challenging case than Italy. Both Italy and Iceland are mountainous, but Iceland - in addition to having a worse climate - also has a far lower population density.
3) Infrastructure in Iceland isn't better than in Italy. Take Tesla, for example. Italy has five Tesla stores, 2 Tesla service centres, and 23 supercharging stations (soon to be 35) covering the whole of the country. Iceland? 0, 0 and 0. Iceland doesn't even have any kind of charging stations at all - even slow chargers - covering large chunks of the Ring Road, the main road around the country. Just a couple months ago chargers only went a third of the way around.
I'll repeat: Italy has no excuse. They're not a role model when it comes to EVs; they're being lapped at the track by everyone else and making up excuses for why it's not their fault.
Everyone else can and is doing it. Italy has no excuse. When Iceland is nearly outpacing Italy in total (not per capita) numbers, that doesn't reflect well on Italy.
Furthermore, there is not "unknown battery lifespan". Ignoring that accelerated aging tests have been done, the Roadster was delivered nearly a decade ago and there are Model Ss with with hundreds of thousands of miles / many hundreds of thousands of kilometers on their packs. The "it's unknown" excuse just doesn't fly anymore. It's known, and degradation is minimal. The typical curve is about 4% in the first year, then it greatly slows with time; year five total degradation is about 6-7%.
All other losses after the Carnot losses are minor. In the US, for example, grid transmission efficiency is around 98%, and there's another 4% losses for distribution, then a couple percent from the transformer to the socket. Charging is usually in the 90%s from the socket/charger connector (slow charging = more efficient, fast = less efficient), relative to achievable energy output from the battery. Motor + inverter efficiency (including wiring losses) depends on the type - induction averaging in the upper 80%s in real-world driving, PM averaging low to mid 90%s.
And since they want to switch to electric vehicles, they'll effectively be "vehicles powered by natural gas burned at very high efficiencies". Which is not in any way a bad thing. Combined cycle NG plants can reach 60% efficiency or so; a typical ICE peaks at 35-40% and averages 20-25%, and releases much more pollution per unit energy - and emits it right where people are breathing it in rather than "at altitude, generally outside of cities".
That said, let me be the first to question Italy's seriousness on the electric vehicle front. While Europe is up to 1,6% market penetration on average, with Norway in first place at around 1/3rd market penetration, Italy has a measly 0,1% market penetration - the worst in the developed world. Even Iceland buys nearly as many electric cars per month now as Italy (the latter having 12% of the population of the entire EU, the former having a third of a million people). Italy is an embarrassment when it comes to electric vehicles, not a role model. We'll see if they actually do anything to change this.
And this is all the more reason not to be. Yes, they display "more vibrant colours", in that they have trouble displaying white properly; I always find the feel of OLED phones akin to that I get from looking at coloured LED christmas lights. The colours degrade at different rates, too, so the longer you own your phone, the more off balance they get. They're also harder to read outside even if really bright inside.
I know that there will be others who prefer OLED phones who disagree. But this is just my experience with the two.
Often it's not a case of "there are no backups", but "the ransomware gets the backups too because they're read-write accessible".
IMHO, the best solution is a versioning filesystem, where deleting old versioning data requires administrator access. So ransomware "wrote over" all of your files? Big deal - rollback. So long as it can't delete old versions, the worst it can do is temporarily run you out of disk space.
Some are actually unintentionally insightful. I love "Security Hole For Security Hole" - I've seen that one way too many times in real life.;) "Black Hole Proposed" - Yep, been at meetings like that at work as well;) "Building a Top 100 Company For Mars" - I think Musk wrote that one;) "Computer Computer Computer Computer Software" sounds like a Balmer speech. "Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store In the US" sounds like The Onion. "Microsoft Slashdot: How To Build a Bad Privacy For Windows 10" - Done and done. "IBM Moves to The Matrix" - Also happened long ago. "Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?" - Yes. Yes we do.
I thought the AI-based Magic The Gathering card generator was pretty neat; by the end it was reasonably consistent at generating proper cards. I once wrote a program that would automatically select images to go with them (googling keywords of relevance from the generated text, with optional colour filters and trying to find artwork rather than photos, and progressively decreasing how stringent its search terms were until it found a match), so it would be possible to print out no-human-involved decks from scratch;) Doesn't work anymore because Google changed the image search API, however :
The Chinese gigafactory is for the Chinese market (the largest EV market in the world). The US gigafactory is for the US and European markets (although the EU will likely get its own gigafactory eventually).
The original Hyperloop Alpha plan budgeted standard rates for tunneling for the sections that required it. Musk however began looking into tunneling after Hyperloop came out and found (the same thing I found when I looked into it) that today's tunneling market and contract structures disincentivise radical innovations to reduce costs, and that there's many things that people in the industry already suspect could radically increase tunneling speeds (and thus reduce costs) but have not yet been attempted. Hence he decided to try it himself (and also came up with the concept of the "intermediary" system of car sleds but ambient pressure). The big thing about tunnels is that they give you much better possibilities of getting into town (rather than the periphery like airports, as Hyperloop Alpha did) and maintain straightness in rough terrain. In the northeast corridor that they're working on now, an elevated Hyperloop would be passing through far too much built up land to maintain straightness, speed, and low right-of-way costs.
Okay, let's try to add something to the conversation. Here's what we know about the ideas behind Boring Company so far. First, the tangential aspect: the non-Hyperloop car sleds. Tunnel costs are almost linearly proportional to cross section. By having cars on sleds you don't need any lane margin around the vehicles and can use a much smaller (and thus cheaper) tunnel. Also by moving them at very high speeds you have a much higher throughput, and by computer control, you can space them closely (getting even higher throughput).
However, as for the boring itself: the rate at which a TBM bores is proportional to how fast the head is rotated. In hard rock boring they generally also spend a large portion of the time stopped; a new casing segment is set up to both support the walls and for the TBM to push off of. During downtime, maintenance tasks such as replacing cutting disks are conducted.
When you read through literature on the topic, you find that the answer to "how fast can you X?" or "Is it possible to Y" are frequently "We don't know - contractors are payed to complete a given task and generally have little incentive to experiment with new approaches." Boring company seeks to focus on all of them at once. First off, the cutting disks: if the TBM rotates too quickly, the disks heat too much and their (already short) lifetime is greatly reduced. Boring Company is looking to do three things: one, use more advanced alloys (cost more to replace, but nothing compared to the cost savings of faster boring); two, use active cooling on the cutting disks; and three, have them hot swappable so the TBM doesn't have to be stopped. All of these things together in theory should allow the TBM to be run many times faster (so long as everything else associated with the excavation is also correspondingly sped up). It's also being modified to not need to stop for casing; downtimes are only to be for when something is physically broken or there are issues with the geology that need to be dealt with.
Many of the complicating issues with boring, such as unpredictable geology, unmapped buried hardware in urban areas, etc, Boring Company's approach will not eliminate. But the goal (whether they can reach it or not) is to ensure that when they are boring, they're doing so very quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
What, are you saying that it doesn't actually cost $300 an hour to employ a lineman?
Solar survives what it's designed to.
Heck, it's not that rare for companies to go back to perfectly functional older turbines and upgrade their generator and add longer blades, to get more power out of a given tower. There's a project like that going on in Iowa right now.
What "deadline"?
Do you mean the target, an S-curve which was described in advance as something fully expected to be "production hell"?
Also, just looking at it, these panels seem to be very low slung and at shallow angles. If you were to concrete those frames to the ground, and they had sufficient wall thickness, I could easily picture those withstanding huge winds.
Please, by all means, show me the solar power generation and storage facility that you built in a country whose transportation infrastructure was devastated, completed just 2 1/2 weeks after speaking with the local government for the very first time.
I love thinking about the long term, and I wish more people did. I'm in the middle of a house construction project, trying to design it for a many-hundred to couple-thousand year lifespan (just the basic structure, not everything in it).... and it touches on everything that you do. And I know the exact same things would apply to repository design.
Example: first off, let's assume that like me they're building out of concrete. Well, unless your wall thickness is dam-thick, what's going to happen is CO2 will slowly dissolve into the concrete, converting the cement to limestone and lowering its pH. When the lowered pH zone reaches the rebar, it'll suddenly begin to rust and increase in size (as it's no longer protected by a highly basic environment); within a few years, the concrete is spalling out, and if not repaired, the structure will soon be unsafe.
What do you do? Well, one answer is, like dams, extreme thickness. This keeps the CO2 from ever reaching the rebar, although it also means a very expensive build. The answer of "no rebar", like the Romans did, may seem tempting, but beyond how that means that you can no longer have any shear or tensile stress (shear = loads that aren't in perfectly balanced arches; tensile = loads for example in the foundation, meaning you have to have a crazy-overbuilt foundation), it also means no safety factor against shifting loads. What's the balance?
Stainless steel has excellent (although somewhat uncertain in the long-term) lifespan. It's a bit unpredictable... you may find not the slightest bit of corrosion on 99% of the stainless but then heavy pitting on 1%, with no obvious rhyme or reason as to why. In general, though, it's quite good, but very expensive - 5x more than mild steel.
Loose plastic fibres again appear to have extremely long lifespans in concrete, and play a role akin to the horsehair that Romans added to concrete - helping resist the formation of microcracks. But while they can add some limited tensile strength to concrete, the structural benefits are limited.
Fibre-reinforced plastic rebar has superb tensile strength and can can resist shear loads. Carbon fibre is best, but very expensive; basalt fibre looks best for my needs. Unfortunately, FRP has inelastic stress-strain behavior which means that it can't directly substitute for steel in all roles. Also, tensile strength of FRP rebar does drop with time, but mainly early on; the rate of decline slows and slows with time (unlike basalt and glass, degradation in carbon fibre rebar is minimal with time... it shrugs off almost anything. But again, crazy expensive).
In my case, the house is being shaped to try to - as much as is realistic - avoid shear stress. Which is challenging when it comes to price because, for example, have you ever gone out and shopped for curved windows? ;) So we're doing the windows as big arches, setting a frame inside them (not matching the wall's bend, just flat), and deviating slightly from a perfect arch so that most of the panes inside can be rectangular, with only a couple requiring a curved cut. Where reinforcement in the concrete is required it'll be a mix of FRP and stainless rebar, with a pozzolanic / loose fibre concrete. I'm also pushing for the use of very thick pumice crete walls, acting as their own insulation. "Thick" and "pore space" are two factors in concrete that have demonstrable very long term survivability - stress from a shear force is inversely proportional to the thickness squared, and pore space tends to mean that it "crushes into itself" over time rather than shearing / spalling off. But in addition to that not being traditional in modern construction, it can cause problems, say, when you're concreting a wall to a foundation and the wall shrinks as it hardens, putting stress (and thus cracking) at the connection point. A pozzolanic mix should reduce but not eliminate this (it also produces a stronger concrete in the end, and the CSH gel tends to self-seal cracks - although pozzolanic concrete
If you think the goal of "100% renewable electricity cheaper than fossil fuels" is realistic. I don't, at least in the short to mid term. There's nothing wrong with natural gas heating. Natural gas is low carbon, clean burning, cheap, abundant, and can (by varying means and to varying degrees) be a renewable resource.
You should be a story writer, because you've composed an elaborate story in your mind about who I am and what I believe.
Wood is a terrible fuel source. As polluting as coal, and that's assuming you have equivalent scrubbers.
History tells us that, in addition to being saddled with massive costs, we'll end up having to switch to yet another "new generation" a couple decades down the road.
The fact that nuclear has been this way isnt due to "bad luck". It's the very nature of what you're doing. You're creating immensely toxic materials, from literally all across the periodic table, meaning literally every possibility for corrosion, side reactions, etc. You're doing this in the middle of an intense neutron flux which embrittles materials at the best, and at the worst makes them store Wigner energy which can be suddenly released. Neutron transparency / absorption requirements mean you have to work with exotic materials. Etc, etc, etc. When was the last time you welded a half-meter diameter zirconium pipe with x-ray-perfect precision? How many people do you think there are in the world who know how to do something like that? Because that's the sort of stuff you have to do to build nuclear power plants. That's the sort of thing that causes cost overruns. Check out some of the latest generation of overbudget plants and look at the various reasons why they went over budget. Hint: "NIMBY" has nothing to do with any of them.
That's not how it works. Production goes up when demand goes up. And the larger the scale of production, the lower the unit cost, not higher.
Yes, I'm assuming a proper EV (aka, not a Leaf) ;) More specifically, I'm referring to data collected from Tesla Model Ss.
The "France did it and their rates aren't excessive, so why can't others?" line keeps coming up.
The Messmer Plan, which converted France to a nuclear grid, came at a huge cost. Between 1973 and 1984, EDF's debt rose by 650%. As EDF is largely owned by the state, this has a direct influence on France's total debt standings. By the mid 1980s, EDF's debt standing was 15,4% of France's total foreign debt - a debt which shot up during the Messmer Plan's implementation (not solely due to it, but it certainly didn't help). The fact that ratepayers weren't directly forced to pay this on their power bills is irrelevant; everyone pays indirectly when you fund things through a debt burden borne by the state.
Furthermore, because France didn't account for improvements in efficiency in their power forecasts, so they overbuilt. This led to France desperately seeking ways to use and sell more power, which led to wasteful consumption (such as the conversion of heating to electric, reduced focus on efficiency, insulation, etc). So they took on a debt burden in order to create power generation to use inefficiently.
And the Messmer Plan was really a best case scenario: a unified deployment of identical plants back in the 1970s. Unfortunately, nuclear power has experienced a negative learning curve since then; things have been getting more expensive, not less, as we've learned of problems in previous designs that need to be overcome with future designs. Fixing these means starting over with a new generation of plants, but this restarts the learning curve. The most recent attempt to do this - the so-called "nuclear renaissance" - was a colossal failure, leaving a mess of hugely overbudget / behind schedule plants, debt-saddled / bankrupt utilities, the bankruptcy of Westinghouse and the bailout of Areva in its wake.
France is now putting a new focus on renewables. But they're behind the curve on this front. France has had little incentive to work on renewables compared to other major powers because they were overbuilt on generation capacity. Now it's catch-up time.
Oh, and as for your first claim:
This is wrong on many levels.
1) The basic premise itself is wrong. If you have fewer people, yes that means less demand, but it also means correspondingly less resources to make the change.
2) Iceland is a much more challenging case than Italy. Both Italy and Iceland are mountainous, but Iceland - in addition to having a worse climate - also has a far lower population density.
3) Infrastructure in Iceland isn't better than in Italy. Take Tesla, for example. Italy has five Tesla stores, 2 Tesla service centres, and 23 supercharging stations (soon to be 35) covering the whole of the country. Iceland? 0, 0 and 0. Iceland doesn't even have any kind of charging stations at all - even slow chargers - covering large chunks of the Ring Road, the main road around the country. Just a couple months ago chargers only went a third of the way around.
I'll repeat: Italy has no excuse. They're not a role model when it comes to EVs; they're being lapped at the track by everyone else and making up excuses for why it's not their fault.
Everyone else can and is doing it. Italy has no excuse. When Iceland is nearly outpacing Italy in total (not per capita) numbers, that doesn't reflect well on Italy.
Furthermore, there is not "unknown battery lifespan". Ignoring that accelerated aging tests have been done, the Roadster was delivered nearly a decade ago and there are Model Ss with with hundreds of thousands of miles / many hundreds of thousands of kilometers on their packs. The "it's unknown" excuse just doesn't fly anymore. It's known, and degradation is minimal. The typical curve is about 4% in the first year, then it greatly slows with time; year five total degradation is about 6-7%.
All other losses after the Carnot losses are minor. In the US, for example, grid transmission efficiency is around 98%, and there's another 4% losses for distribution, then a couple percent from the transformer to the socket. Charging is usually in the 90%s from the socket/charger connector (slow charging = more efficient, fast = less efficient), relative to achievable energy output from the battery. Motor + inverter efficiency (including wiring losses) depends on the type - induction averaging in the upper 80%s in real-world driving, PM averaging low to mid 90%s.
And since they want to switch to electric vehicles, they'll effectively be "vehicles powered by natural gas burned at very high efficiencies". Which is not in any way a bad thing. Combined cycle NG plants can reach 60% efficiency or so; a typical ICE peaks at 35-40% and averages 20-25%, and releases much more pollution per unit energy - and emits it right where people are breathing it in rather than "at altitude, generally outside of cities".
That said, let me be the first to question Italy's seriousness on the electric vehicle front. While Europe is up to 1,6% market penetration on average, with Norway in first place at around 1/3rd market penetration, Italy has a measly 0,1% market penetration - the worst in the developed world. Even Iceland buys nearly as many electric cars per month now as Italy (the latter having 12% of the population of the entire EU, the former having a third of a million people). Italy is an embarrassment when it comes to electric vehicles, not a role model. We'll see if they actually do anything to change this.
And this is all the more reason not to be. Yes, they display "more vibrant colours", in that they have trouble displaying white properly; I always find the feel of OLED phones akin to that I get from looking at coloured LED christmas lights. The colours degrade at different rates, too, so the longer you own your phone, the more off balance they get. They're also harder to read outside even if really bright inside.
I know that there will be others who prefer OLED phones who disagree. But this is just my experience with the two.
Often it's not a case of "there are no backups", but "the ransomware gets the backups too because they're read-write accessible".
IMHO, the best solution is a versioning filesystem, where deleting old versioning data requires administrator access. So ransomware "wrote over" all of your files? Big deal - rollback. So long as it can't delete old versions, the worst it can do is temporarily run you out of disk space.
Mentioned it earlier :)
Some are actually unintentionally insightful. I love "Security Hole For Security Hole" - I've seen that one way too many times in real life. ;) ;) ;)
"Black Hole Proposed" - Yep, been at meetings like that at work as well
"Building a Top 100 Company For Mars" - I think Musk wrote that one
"Computer Computer Computer Computer Software" sounds like a Balmer speech.
"Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store In the US" sounds like The Onion.
"Microsoft Slashdot: How To Build a Bad Privacy For Windows 10" - Done and done.
"IBM Moves to The Matrix" - Also happened long ago.
"Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?" - Yes. Yes we do.
I thought the AI-based Magic The Gathering card generator was pretty neat; by the end it was reasonably consistent at generating proper cards. I once wrote a program that would automatically select images to go with them (googling keywords of relevance from the generated text, with optional colour filters and trying to find artwork rather than photos, and progressively decreasing how stringent its search terms were until it found a match), so it would be possible to print out no-human-involved decks from scratch ;) Doesn't work anymore because Google changed the image search API, however :
TTAC called, they want you for their Tesla Deathwatch column nearly a decade ago.
Meh, you've never experienced quality until you've driven a Temla. Their new Optopilot system is amazing!
The Chinese gigafactory is for the Chinese market (the largest EV market in the world). The US gigafactory is for the US and European markets (although the EU will likely get its own gigafactory eventually).
The original Hyperloop plan was to not go into town at all, so it didn't apply.
It also, however, meant that it wasn't as convenient.
The original Hyperloop Alpha plan budgeted standard rates for tunneling for the sections that required it. Musk however began looking into tunneling after Hyperloop came out and found (the same thing I found when I looked into it) that today's tunneling market and contract structures disincentivise radical innovations to reduce costs, and that there's many things that people in the industry already suspect could radically increase tunneling speeds (and thus reduce costs) but have not yet been attempted. Hence he decided to try it himself (and also came up with the concept of the "intermediary" system of car sleds but ambient pressure). The big thing about tunnels is that they give you much better possibilities of getting into town (rather than the periphery like airports, as Hyperloop Alpha did) and maintain straightness in rough terrain. In the northeast corridor that they're working on now, an elevated Hyperloop would be passing through far too much built up land to maintain straightness, speed, and low right-of-way costs.
So many people making the same joke.
Okay, let's try to add something to the conversation. Here's what we know about the ideas behind Boring Company so far. First, the tangential aspect: the non-Hyperloop car sleds. Tunnel costs are almost linearly proportional to cross section. By having cars on sleds you don't need any lane margin around the vehicles and can use a much smaller (and thus cheaper) tunnel. Also by moving them at very high speeds you have a much higher throughput, and by computer control, you can space them closely (getting even higher throughput).
However, as for the boring itself: the rate at which a TBM bores is proportional to how fast the head is rotated. In hard rock boring they generally also spend a large portion of the time stopped; a new casing segment is set up to both support the walls and for the TBM to push off of. During downtime, maintenance tasks such as replacing cutting disks are conducted.
When you read through literature on the topic, you find that the answer to "how fast can you X?" or "Is it possible to Y" are frequently "We don't know - contractors are payed to complete a given task and generally have little incentive to experiment with new approaches." Boring company seeks to focus on all of them at once. First off, the cutting disks: if the TBM rotates too quickly, the disks heat too much and their (already short) lifetime is greatly reduced. Boring Company is looking to do three things: one, use more advanced alloys (cost more to replace, but nothing compared to the cost savings of faster boring); two, use active cooling on the cutting disks; and three, have them hot swappable so the TBM doesn't have to be stopped. All of these things together in theory should allow the TBM to be run many times faster (so long as everything else associated with the excavation is also correspondingly sped up). It's also being modified to not need to stop for casing; downtimes are only to be for when something is physically broken or there are issues with the geology that need to be dealt with.
Many of the complicating issues with boring, such as unpredictable geology, unmapped buried hardware in urban areas, etc, Boring Company's approach will not eliminate. But the goal (whether they can reach it or not) is to ensure that when they are boring, they're doing so very quickly.