Fine, but personally I am fed up with having to buy further sets of screwdrivers. The cost is not the issue. Some new head types were introduced purely to discourage owners from "Fiddling", and I have seen slotted screws, hexagon, octagon, square, Allen, Philips, Pozidriv, Torx and now Pentalobular. The makers' attempt to stop people "fiddling" is actually futile because the drivers can all be bought. I have got sets or part-sets of them all (except octagon and Pentalobular) and must own over 100 screwdrivers in one form or another, when about a dozen should have done..
When I am working on something I'd like to be able to have the tools I need use in a single ready-use toolbox and not to waste time having to return to my larger tool store because some wacky "designer" thought it would be a good idea to have a couple of Torx screws among a load of Pozidrivs.
In fact, for light screws, the perfect head is a Pozidriv. All others should be banned.
An automated system is likely to make it safer as it takes away driver error'
Good luck with that. Railway trains are highly automated and the rails even take guidance out of the driver's hands, but trains still crash due to human error.
Which makes me think that all the Swedish system needs now are some rails to do the guidance. Wow, I'll patent that! Oh wait....
>> had bad luck dating people based on what they looked like.
> That's the real point of dating sites, I think. With people you
> meet in person, you're likely to respond first to what they look
> like. Interests come later. For a long relationship, interests
> and personality are more important than looks, I think. Dating
> sites can make a lot of sense.
So why don't looks come into online dating? We are talking about actually meeting them after the on-line exchanges - right?
I don't understand this Looks-versus-Personnality dillemma. I want both. The simple fact is (and you are right) we respond quickest to looks. Even if you have already corresponded blindly there is still going to be a moment when you see them for real the first time. Looks are easier and quicker to assess than personality, and if you don't like their looks when you first see them there is no point in embarking on the long process of understanding their personality - which you cannot do from e-mail exchanges anyway. Would you know from e-mails that they have an evil temper?
Actually there are THREE factors, looks, personality - and sex. Believe or not the first girlfriend I found from a dating club had been a Bunny Girl at the London Playboy club. Voluptuous shape and lovely personality (she had left because the other girls were bitches). We could have married but it turned out she was sexually frigid:-( That was tragic, but I found other good ones including the one I married. But don't tell me that girls in on-line dating clubs are all blue-stockinged prunes.
> Clipper ships were tiny, they couldn't carry more than 200 tons and they were covered in sails.
And it doesn't just scale up, put 50 times the area of sail on a modern cargo ship and you probably aren't going to get 50 times the push.
Why not?
"Clipper ships" were a certain type of sailing ship most associated with the 1800-1870 period. They were slim and fast and meant to carry mail, first class passengers, and premium freight such as tea and spices (as you say, typically only 200 tons of it), with lots of sail for speed.
There were fatter, heavier, lumbering sailing ships for less romantic cargos. By 1900 sailing ships of up to about 3000 tons were common, carying cargos such as grain, coal and ore. The premium cargos had gone to steamships by then.
I *am* an engineer; in fact I have worked in a ship design office. Are you bs-ing me that we could not build much bigger sailing ships today?
Even by the late 19th century large sailing ships were made of iron. By the time large sailing cargo ships ceased to be built around 1900 the default design was a steel hulled bald-headed 4-masted barque or schooner, if you know what those terms mean. The First World War finished the use such ships with a few exceptions. They were too slow to join convoys and many lone ones were sunk early in the war by U-Boats. After that the remainder were scrapped or left to rot^H^H^H rust away.
If train speed were limited by the ability to stop before hitting someone on the line, the limit would be about 30mph. I have driven trains as a test engineer, and at high speeds the brakes feel so feeble compared with a car that for a while it is as if they are not working at all. On descents the stopping distance can be well over a mile, which can include several curves that cannot be seen around. That is why there are "distant" repeater signals long before actual stop signals.
It is also why, in the densely populated UK, all railways have been fenced for at least the last century. The general view is that anyone who climbs the fence and is dumb enough to loiter on the track deserves little sympathy but a Darwin Award. This is not a factor in setting train speeds.
Hiking clubs? Tell us you're having a laugh. I see hiking clubs walking past (in the UK) and I'd say their average age was 65. Males outnumber females 2:1. I am in a photographic club, another non-geek activity (having an art side) and the demograph is similar. Maybe a knitting club would be different (at least the ratio), but I never joined one.
I met my wife in a dating club. I met far more girls in that club than I would ever have done outside, in what you call "real life". In my "real life" I never seemed to meet any although there was nothing wrong with my looks or build.
It's like trying to throw a double-six with dice : the more throws you make the more likely you are to get it.
How you meet someone doesn't matter, it's what develops afterwards. On the first dates with girls through the club, we usually moved on from the club itself as a topic of conversation within the first 10 minutes.
And, contrary to some ideas here, and my initial worry, I met some hot stuff. My first steady GF from the club had recently been a Bunny Girl at the London Playboy Club; disbelieve that if you want (but she wasn't as good as you might be thinking). Another was near ringer for Fairuza Balk (as in The Craft) but with a better complexion and a smaller mouth - the prettiest girl I have ever seen although the personality lagged behind. Two others were nymphos, but I won't go into that.
You say we should meet people "face-to-face". You've lost me there; that is the very point of a dating club.
I got to know all sorts over several years. During that time I saw the most "real life" and had the most face-to-face encounters in my life.
You are whiter than I am then. I've heard of the name Tom Clancy but didn't know he is/was(?) an author, never heard of Van Hallen, and never played a game of mini-golf in my life (I assume that crazy golf doesn't count).
Participants in one experiment interacted with a program that said something like "Most PCs these days have at 2MB of memory. Being an older model I only have 1MB. What do you feel inadequate about?"
I'm using Suse right now. My HD failed on my Kubuntu PC and Ubuntu derivatives have become too dumb to replace it. Suse is recognised as the best KDE distro, and v 11.3 got 9/10 in this month's Linux format mag, so I'm trying it, despite the possible black mark against its sponsor, Novell .
Seems solid so far. I'll keep you posted. It is more a European distro than a US one, so not suprised you don't see it much there.
Because if you pay for a meal you actually get the food. Pay for porn and you don't actually get the sex. It's more like paying to watch other people eating.
There is not a lot of research on the effect of radiation on humans.
There is tons of research. However it is on not a lot of data.
Currently the standard is that all radiation, no matter how small the amount, is harmful.
You put it in a way that sounds bad. Yes that is the standard, but that is a standard to abide by, not to be confused with the harm that you actually get. The harm is assumed proportional so small dose -> little harm, but even that is a deliberately pessimistic assumption.
On a more practical level, in the US the EPA has set a standard of 1 Rem lifetime total dose and 5 Rem lifetime to the thyroid
Geeesh! Is the USA still using Rems? Sievert is the SI unit today.
What does this all mean? There are a lot of numbers to pick from, but there is no real research that says any value is safe.
You have got that the wrong way round. Medical research cannot find evidence of harm at doses below a certain level. You could say that the research does show that low dose values are safe, but really we are into statistical noise. The standard mentioned above takes the harm detected at much higher levels (from early nuclear research workers and Japanese bombing data) and assumes that harm at lower levels of radiation is in proportion. By "harm" is meant chance of getting cancer, not detectable damage at the time of exposure.
"Water vapor is the major green house gas... This is relevant because Nuclear power plants, like coal fired power plants, are big steam engines, many of which release large quantities of steam into the atmosphere.
"
Wow. I can understand someone not knowing much about a subject, but I can't understand why they are inspired to spout off about it when they must surely realise they don't know what they are talking about.
The steam from those "big steam engines" is condensed. Not originally because of environmental concerns, but because it makes the steam engine far more efficient. Heard of James Watt? Gave his name to the Kilowatts and Megawatts
mentioned here? He invented the steam engine condenser.
"Power plants like Diablo Canyon in Southern California get around the issue of needing large quantities of water by being feed by the ocean, but the new power plants on the Mississippi river seem to be causing other power plants to run short of water"
The sea or river water is not boiled away to the sky but goes through the "cold" side of the condensers and returns, slightly warmer, to the sea/river. The water being boiled for the turbines recycles over-and-over again - they would not want to lose it as that water is highly treated stuff.
I don't know Mississippi but it sounds like the river is being warmed enough to cause some loss of efficiency. The river water will not have been "lost".
Some power stations by smaller rivers use cooling towers to supplement the river cooling and these do emit some steam. But that steam is a small fraction of the primary circuit flow through the turbines or the secondary (river water) flow through the condensers.
The only large non-condensing steam engines were steam railway locos, but even some of those used condensers. Of course, oil and gas fired power stations, and internal combustion engines, emit lots of steam in their exhaust, most obvious on cold days, as the hydrogen in their fuel content is burned.
Talk Talk good guys??!! The first time I ever heard of them was several years ago when one of their salesmen phoned me to get me to switch my phone service to Talk Talk from BT.
I told him he was breaking the law by cold-calling me because I was registered with the Telephone Preference Service. He then had the nerve to lie that Talk Talk was a subsiduary of BT, and as I was a BT customer he was therefore entitled to ring me.
I did not know at the time whether his claim was true or not, but I told him to f#%k off anyway.
You need to store the spent fuel somewhere; no one wants to live near a nuclear dump. Even if it is out in the middle of nowhere you still have to transport the fuel there (through citys? on major highways?)
No-one? Let's correct that. My handle isn't Nukenerd for nothing. They can put an underground nuclear waste dump vertically under my house for all I care. What is the issue?
However, I would not want the entrance near me because it is bound to be a traffic nuisance. Not the waste delivery traffic itself (there is not in fact a lot of waste to deal with) but the cars of the zillions of office workers that seem to accompany any operation these days. But that would be the same with any project, nuclear or not. In fact nuclear waste traffic would be insignficant compared with the traffic and activity associated with some of the electricity schemes advocated by the greens.
How do you "hit arable land"? Fold it up and poke it into a black hole? Don't think that you couldn't grow and eat crops around Chernobyl. We are talking about survival, not healthy eating.
I remember reading a comment in memoirs of a British WWI soldier. He said the rats in the trenches survived everything the Germans could throw at them, even poison gas. Come to think of it, most of the soldiers survived too.
Name me one nuclear power station that actually went into operation and stayed within budget while it was constructed, operated and shut down agian.
Sizewell B, a PWR that I was involved in building in the UK, was built within its time and cost budget. Hasn't shut down yet so I can't answer the last part.
I don't think he needs to look up "spinning reserve", he has (almost) described it.
Nuclear and the most efficient other power stations provide the base load. Other stations provide spinning reserve where their alternators are syncronised to the grid, turning at grid frequency but with little or no power input. The boilers of spinning reserve fossil fired stations are kept hot but with little energy flow. There is not much wasted energy - despite some crazy theories here about dumping electricity to resistor banks and even light bulbs, ffs!!!! Spinning reserve stations can be brought on-line in minutes.
Other stations are shut down but at standby, with levels of notice required to join the grid typically hours (but days for a nuclear). Hydro stations however can start and stop generating like at the turn of a tap.
The GP's last paragraph was perfectly logical. Currently electricity is sold cheap at night (to local distributors, factories, railways and some end consumers) because of the otherwise wasted capital and attendance costs of the spinning reserve, not because much fuel is being wasted. However if there were greater demand for night electricity, the price of night electricty (and I believe the GP meant night electricity) would go up with market forces.
Like the grocer might sell stale bread cheaper than fresh. But if there were suddenly a big demand for stale bread, because someone had invented a gadget to restore it, he would put its price up (even if not as much as fresh bread) believe me.
To put that another way, a 100m rise with a reservoir that's 50m by 50m by 10m stores 5 MWh, enough to run 200,000 houses for an entire day
Is this supposed to be problematic?.
Yes, very.
5MWh for 200,000 houses is 25 Watt-hours each, or a continuous load of about 1 Watt for a day. That would be about enough for one torch [flashlight] bulb. Are these hen-houses?
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but the fact that a generation or two of kids have been brought up on Lego is partly responsible for a decline (in the West at least) in people interested in engineering as a career, and in a general lack of public understanding (and even revulsion) at engineering.
Lego was introduced as a constructional toy for model brick buildings. It replaced stuff like Bayko and Betta-Builder. With Betta-Builder (I may have that name wrong) you glued little bricks together with water-soluble glue; Lego was its less-messy replacement.
The dominant mechanical construction toy of the time was Meccano which had an awsome arrray of components (machine-cut brass gears for example), far more than it has had in recent years. Meccano was true miniature mechanical engineering; you construct Meccano on the same principles as a full size project. I am a professional engineer and have seen Meccano used to demonstate real-life mechanical and structural engineering concepts; eg I know that some of the buffers you see at railway termini were first modelled with Meccano. A plotter-printer would be well within its stride.
But somehow Lego went from a masonry toy to ousting Meccano as the leading constructional toy of any kind, with the introduction of rather crude and weak plastic shafts and gears. A Lego mechanism is not however representative of how you would design a mechanism for production.
Lego is however colourful, has no sharp edges, is not made of nasty steel, and above all you cannot see any nuts and bolts - supposedly the greatest design gaffe of the modern age - OMG.
Agreed, until I read "But maybe the states' colonial rebellion sped the fall of the British empire". In the UK I was taught that the loss of the American colonies was the end of the first British Empire (but in fact lots of other colonies remained). The British then built a massive second empire, in particular colonising Australia, South Africa and Canada. It was expanding almost until WW2. The lost land area of the American colonies was actually quite small (but valuable), and the USA today is an empire that those colonies subsequently built themselves.
For the record, Britain has not been terrorised by a king since Henry VIII (or by a Queen since his daughter Mary), although we did get paranoid about Charles I and James II.
I don't know about Austria, but in the UK phone kiosks (booths) are mostly positioned at busy road junctions where they are most visible and accessible. OK in the olden days when they were first placed because there was not much traffic and you could stop a car anywhere.
Now their positioning is a pain. You would not be allowed to park near most of them for yellow lines and standing rules against parking near junctions, and even if you did, or they made a dispensation for car charging, you would start a traffic jam and road rage with the obstruction you caused. And how long will a charge take and so your obstruction last?
And when you do/did use them as phone booths you could hardly hear a thing because there would be heavy traffic outside including boy racers on motorbikes blipping their throttle as they waited at the traffic lights, although that is beside the point now.
Chargers need to be in car parks. If some jerk runs out of juice between home and a car park, let him call the AA to tow him away - he will be got out of the way quicker.
In what way was he (Mollog) not correct? MS did have the rights to at least some OS/2 code. That was part of the "lopsided" partnership. Quite a lot of it was put into NT.
You are incorrect in saying that after the break MS "first release[d] Windows 95". That was later. At the time of the break Windows was still on 3.0 or 3.1.
The story I heard was that during development the OS/2 graphical interface was being tried out by running it on DOS (like a sports car manufacture might try out a new car body on the road by putting a VW engine in it). This was trialled at home by some MS employees' families. They liked it so much that MS wondered if they could sell it like that. They looked at their contract with IBM and realised nothing could stop them. So they set a team to develop the idea and that's how Windows-on-DOS came about. IBM were furious but could do nothing about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, but personally I am fed up with having to buy further sets of screwdrivers. The cost is not the issue. Some new head types were introduced purely to discourage owners from "Fiddling", and I have seen slotted screws, hexagon, octagon, square, Allen, Philips, Pozidriv, Torx and now Pentalobular. The makers' attempt to stop people "fiddling" is actually futile because the drivers can all be bought. I have got sets or part-sets of them all (except octagon and Pentalobular) and must own over 100 screwdrivers in one form or another, when about a dozen should have done..
When I am working on something I'd like to be able to have the tools I need use in a single ready-use toolbox and not to waste time having to return to my larger tool store because some wacky "designer" thought it would be a good idea to have a couple of Torx screws among a load of Pozidrivs.
In fact, for light screws, the perfect head is a Pozidriv. All others should be banned.
An automated system is likely to make it safer as it takes away driver error'
....
Good luck with that. Railway trains are highly automated and the rails even take guidance out of the driver's hands, but trains still crash due to human error.
Which makes me think that all the Swedish system needs now are some rails to do the guidance. Wow, I'll patent that! Oh wait
>> had bad luck dating people based on what they looked like.
:-( That was tragic, but I found other good ones including the one I married. But don't tell me that girls in on-line dating clubs are all blue-stockinged prunes.
> That's the real point of dating sites, I think. With people you
> meet in person, you're likely to respond first to what they look
> like. Interests come later. For a long relationship, interests
> and personality are more important than looks, I think. Dating
> sites can make a lot of sense.
So why don't looks come into online dating? We are talking about actually meeting them after the on-line exchanges - right?
I don't understand this Looks-versus-Personnality dillemma. I want both. The simple fact is (and you are right) we respond quickest to looks. Even if you have already corresponded blindly there is still going to be a moment when you see them for real the first time. Looks are easier and quicker to assess than personality, and if you don't like their looks when you first see them there is no point in embarking on the long process of understanding their personality - which you cannot do from e-mail exchanges anyway. Would you know from e-mails that they have an evil temper?
Actually there are THREE factors, looks, personality - and sex. Believe or not the first girlfriend I found from a dating club had been a Bunny Girl at the London Playboy club. Voluptuous shape and lovely personality (she had left because the other girls were bitches). We could have married but it turned out she was sexually frigid
> Clipper ships were tiny, they couldn't carry more than 200 tons and they were covered in sails. And it doesn't just scale up, put 50 times the area of sail on a modern cargo ship and you probably aren't going to get 50 times the push.
Why not?
"Clipper ships" were a certain type of sailing ship most associated with the 1800-1870 period. They were slim and fast and meant to carry mail, first class passengers, and premium freight such as tea and spices (as you say, typically only 200 tons of it), with lots of sail for speed.
There were fatter, heavier, lumbering sailing ships for less romantic cargos. By 1900 sailing ships of up to about 3000 tons were common, carying cargos such as grain, coal and ore. The premium cargos had gone to steamships by then.
I *am* an engineer; in fact I have worked in a ship design office. Are you bs-ing me that we could not build much bigger sailing ships today?
Even by the late 19th century large sailing ships were made of iron. By the time large sailing cargo ships ceased to be built around 1900 the default design was a steel hulled bald-headed 4-masted barque or schooner, if you know what those terms mean. The First World War finished the use such ships with a few exceptions. They were too slow to join convoys and many lone ones were sunk early in the war by U-Boats. After that the remainder were scrapped or left to rot^H^H^H rust away.
If train speed were limited by the ability to stop before hitting someone on the line, the limit would be about 30mph. I have driven trains as a test engineer, and at high speeds the brakes feel so feeble compared with a car that for a while it is as if they are not working at all. On descents the stopping distance can be well over a mile, which can include several curves that cannot be seen around. That is why there are "distant" repeater signals long before actual stop signals.
It is also why, in the densely populated UK, all railways have been fenced for at least the last century. The general view is that anyone who climbs the fence and is dumb enough to loiter on the track deserves little sympathy but a Darwin Award. This is not a factor in setting train speeds.
Hiking clubs? Tell us you're having a laugh. I see hiking clubs walking past (in the UK) and I'd say their average age was 65. Males outnumber females 2:1. I am in a photographic club, another non-geek activity (having an art side) and the demograph is similar. Maybe a knitting club would be different (at least the ratio), but I never joined one.
I met my wife in a dating club. I met far more girls in that club than I would ever have done outside, in what you call "real life". In my "real life" I never seemed to meet any although there was nothing wrong with my looks or build.
It's like trying to throw a double-six with dice : the more throws you make the more likely you are to get it.
How you meet someone doesn't matter, it's what develops afterwards. On the first dates with girls through the club, we usually moved on from the club itself as a topic of conversation within the first 10 minutes.
And, contrary to some ideas here, and my initial worry, I met some hot stuff. My first steady GF from the club had recently been a Bunny Girl at the London Playboy Club; disbelieve that if you want (but she wasn't as good as you might be thinking). Another was near ringer for Fairuza Balk (as in The Craft) but with a better complexion and a smaller mouth - the prettiest girl I have ever seen although the personality lagged behind. Two others were nymphos, but I won't go into that.
You say we should meet people "face-to-face". You've lost me there; that is the very point of a dating club.
I got to know all sorts over several years. During that time I saw the most "real life" and had the most face-to-face encounters in my life.
You are whiter than I am then. I've heard of the name Tom Clancy but didn't know he is/was(?) an author, never heard of Van Hallen, and never played a game of mini-golf in my life (I assume that crazy golf doesn't count).
From TFA :-
Participants in one experiment interacted with a program that said something like "Most PCs these days have at 2MB of memory. Being an older model I only have 1MB. What do you feel inadequate about?"
My emphasis. How old is this news exactly?
Fine, as long as you are happy with A cup.
You need a reference to show that people with a bullet through the brain generally do not re-offend?
I'm using Suse right now. My HD failed on my Kubuntu PC and Ubuntu derivatives have become too dumb to replace it. Suse is recognised as the best KDE distro, and v 11.3 got 9/10 in this month's Linux format mag, so I'm trying it, despite the possible black mark against its sponsor, Novell .
Seems solid so far. I'll keep you posted. It is more a European distro than a US one, so not suprised you don't see it much there.
Because if you pay for a meal you actually get the food. Pay for porn and you don't actually get the sex. It's more like paying to watch other people eating.
Can't you think of a car analogy instead?
There is not a lot of research on the effect of radiation on humans.
There is tons of research. However it is on not a lot of data.
Currently the standard is that all radiation, no matter how small the amount, is harmful.
You put it in a way that sounds bad. Yes that is the standard, but that is a standard to abide by, not to be confused with the harm that you actually get. The harm is assumed proportional so small dose -> little harm, but even that is a deliberately pessimistic assumption.
On a more practical level, in the US the EPA has set a standard of 1 Rem lifetime total dose and 5 Rem lifetime to the thyroid
Geeesh! Is the USA still using Rems? Sievert is the SI unit today.
What does this all mean? There are a lot of numbers to pick from, but there is no real research that says any value is safe.
You have got that the wrong way round. Medical research cannot find evidence of harm at doses below a certain level. You could say that the research does show that low dose values are safe, but really we are into statistical noise. The standard mentioned above takes the harm detected at much higher levels (from early nuclear research workers and Japanese bombing data) and assumes that harm at lower levels of radiation is in proportion. By "harm" is meant chance of getting cancer, not detectable damage at the time of exposure.
"Water vapor is the major green house gas ... This is relevant because Nuclear power plants, like coal fired power plants, are big steam engines, many of which release large quantities of steam into the atmosphere.
"
Wow. I can understand someone not knowing much about a subject, but I can't understand why they are inspired to spout off about it when they must surely realise they don't know what they are talking about.
The steam from those "big steam engines" is condensed. Not originally because of environmental concerns, but because it makes the steam engine far more efficient. Heard of James Watt? Gave his name to the Kilowatts and Megawatts mentioned here? He invented the steam engine condenser.
"Power plants like Diablo Canyon in Southern California get around the issue of needing large quantities of water by being feed by the ocean, but the new power plants on the Mississippi river seem to be causing other power plants to run short of water"
The sea or river water is not boiled away to the sky but goes through the "cold" side of the condensers and returns, slightly warmer, to the sea/river. The water being boiled for the turbines recycles over-and-over again - they would not want to lose it as that water is highly treated stuff.
I don't know Mississippi but it sounds like the river is being warmed enough to cause some loss of efficiency. The river water will not have been "lost".
Some power stations by smaller rivers use cooling towers to supplement the river cooling and these do emit some steam. But that steam is a small fraction of the primary circuit flow through the turbines or the secondary (river water) flow through the condensers.
The only large non-condensing steam engines were steam railway locos, but even some of those used condensers. Of course, oil and gas fired power stations, and internal combustion engines, emit lots of steam in their exhaust, most obvious on cold days, as the hydrogen in their fuel content is burned.
Talk Talk good guys??!! The first time I ever heard of them was several years ago when one of their salesmen phoned me to get me to switch my phone service to Talk Talk from BT.
I told him he was breaking the law by cold-calling me because I was registered with the Telephone Preference Service. He then had the nerve to lie that Talk Talk was a subsiduary of BT, and as I was a BT customer he was therefore entitled to ring me.
I did not know at the time whether his claim was true or not, but I told him to f#%k off anyway.
You need to store the spent fuel somewhere; no one wants to live near a nuclear dump. Even if it is out in the middle of nowhere you still have to transport the fuel there (through citys? on major highways?)
No-one? Let's correct that. My handle isn't Nukenerd for nothing. They can put an underground nuclear waste dump vertically under my house for all I care. What is the issue?
However, I would not want the entrance near me because it is bound to be a traffic nuisance. Not the waste delivery traffic itself (there is not in fact a lot of waste to deal with) but the cars of the zillions of office workers that seem to accompany any operation these days. But that would be the same with any project, nuclear or not. In fact nuclear waste traffic would be insignficant compared with the traffic and activity associated with some of the electricity schemes advocated by the greens.
How do you "hit arable land"? Fold it up and poke it into a black hole? Don't think that you couldn't grow and eat crops around Chernobyl. We are talking about survival, not healthy eating.
I remember reading a comment in memoirs of a British WWI soldier. He said the rats in the trenches survived everything the Germans could throw at them, even poison gas. Come to think of it, most of the soldiers survived too.
Killing people is hard.
Captainpanic wrote :
Name me one nuclear power station that actually went into operation and stayed within budget while it was constructed, operated and shut down agian.
Sizewell B, a PWR that I was involved in building in the UK, was built within its time and cost budget. Hasn't shut down yet so I can't answer the last part.
I don't think he needs to look up "spinning reserve", he has (almost) described it.
Nuclear and the most efficient other power stations provide the base load. Other stations provide spinning reserve where their alternators are syncronised to the grid, turning at grid frequency but with little or no power input. The boilers of spinning reserve fossil fired stations are kept hot but with little energy flow. There is not much wasted energy - despite some crazy theories here about dumping electricity to resistor banks and even light bulbs, ffs!!!! Spinning reserve stations can be brought on-line in minutes.
Other stations are shut down but at standby, with levels of notice required to join the grid typically hours (but days for a nuclear). Hydro stations however can start and stop generating like at the turn of a tap.
The GP's last paragraph was perfectly logical. Currently electricity is sold cheap at night (to local distributors, factories, railways and some end consumers) because of the otherwise wasted capital and attendance costs of the spinning reserve, not because much fuel is being wasted. However if there were greater demand for night electricity, the price of night electricty (and I believe the GP meant night electricity) would go up with market forces.
Like the grocer might sell stale bread cheaper than fresh. But if there were suddenly a big demand for stale bread, because someone had invented a gadget to restore it, he would put its price up (even if not as much as fresh bread) believe me.
I am a (nuclear) power station engineer btw.
To put that another way, a 100m rise with a reservoir that's 50m by 50m by 10m stores 5 MWh, enough to run 200,000 houses for an entire day
Is this supposed to be problematic?.
Yes, very.
5MWh for 200,000 houses is 25 Watt-hours each, or a continuous load of about 1 Watt for a day. That would be about enough for one torch [flashlight] bulb. Are these hen-houses?
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but the fact that a generation or two of kids have been brought up on Lego is partly responsible for a decline (in the West at least) in people interested in engineering as a career, and in a general lack of public understanding (and even revulsion) at engineering.
Lego was introduced as a constructional toy for model brick buildings. It replaced stuff like Bayko and Betta-Builder. With Betta-Builder (I may have that name wrong) you glued little bricks together with water-soluble glue; Lego was its less-messy replacement.
The dominant mechanical construction toy of the time was Meccano which had an awsome arrray of components (machine-cut brass gears for example), far more than it has had in recent years. Meccano was true miniature mechanical engineering; you construct Meccano on the same principles as a full size project. I am a professional engineer and have seen Meccano used to demonstate real-life mechanical and structural engineering concepts; eg I know that some of the buffers you see at railway termini were first modelled with Meccano. A plotter-printer would be well within its stride.
But somehow Lego went from a masonry toy to ousting Meccano as the leading constructional toy of any kind, with the introduction of rather crude and weak plastic shafts and gears. A Lego mechanism is not however representative of how you would design a mechanism for production.
Lego is however colourful, has no sharp edges, is not made of nasty steel, and above all you cannot see any nuts and bolts - supposedly the greatest design gaffe of the modern age - OMG.
Agreed, until I read "But maybe the states' colonial rebellion sped the fall of the British empire". In the UK I was taught that the loss of the American colonies was the end of the first British Empire (but in fact lots of other colonies remained). The British then built a massive second empire, in particular colonising Australia, South Africa and Canada. It was expanding almost until WW2. The lost land area of the American colonies was actually quite small (but valuable), and the USA today is an empire that those colonies subsequently built themselves.
For the record, Britain has not been terrorised by a king since Henry VIII (or by a Queen since his daughter Mary), although we did get paranoid about Charles I and James II.
I don't know about Austria, but in the UK phone kiosks (booths) are mostly positioned at busy road junctions where they are most visible and accessible. OK in the olden days when they were first placed because there was not much traffic and you could stop a car anywhere.
Now their positioning is a pain. You would not be allowed to park near most of them for yellow lines and standing rules against parking near junctions, and even if you did, or they made a dispensation for car charging, you would start a traffic jam and road rage with the obstruction you caused. And how long will a charge take and so your obstruction last?
And when you do/did use them as phone booths you could hardly hear a thing because there would be heavy traffic outside including boy racers on motorbikes blipping their throttle as they waited at the traffic lights, although that is beside the point now.
Chargers need to be in car parks. If some jerk runs out of juice between home and a car park, let him call the AA to tow him away - he will be got out of the way quicker.
In what way was he (Mollog) not correct? MS did have the rights to at least some OS/2 code. That was part of the "lopsided" partnership. Quite a lot of it was put into NT.
You are incorrect in saying that after the break MS "first release[d] Windows 95". That was later. At the time of the break Windows was still on 3.0 or 3.1.
The story I heard was that during development the OS/2 graphical interface was being tried out by running it on DOS (like a sports car manufacture might try out a new car body on the road by putting a VW engine in it). This was trialled at home by some MS employees' families. They liked it so much that MS wondered if they could sell it like that. They looked at their contract with IBM and realised nothing could stop them. So they set a team to develop the idea and that's how Windows-on-DOS came about. IBM were furious but could do nothing about it.