Europeans use more coal, hydro, wind and nuclear, and less oil for electricity production. In terms of energy efficiency generally electricity requires 3J input for every Joule of electricity, but efficiency isn't relevant to this discussion, only oil consumption. In new zealand an electric resistance heater is more oil efficient than a heat pump in the US - new zealand is warmer and most electricity there is derived from hydro and water.
PV makes a lot of sense in remote power applications. Lighthouses, traffic monitoring systems, communication satelites, lamp posts in forests - that sort of thing. It is not yet cost effective when the grid is closer than say 1km, and may never be.
I agree about the hybrids, we have a cheap little toyota hatchback which gets about the same L/100km as a prius and it only cost us $14k, compared to $44k for a prius. However, the prius is more likely going to be the car of the future, as separating the energy source from the power train means that many other technologies can be tried (such as high efficiency diesel, fuel cells, stirling engines etc).
You are suggesting writing ultra-reliable code in python?! Python is fine for whipping up a quick toy, but for large scale applications it easily becomes unmanagable. I'd agree if you'd suggested a high level language like haskell first, but python's lack of static checking (of anything) makes it a very dangerous language for serious work.
pride. i'm a developer of software, and I don't allow myself to test my own code beyond a certain point because i'll be too proud of my accomplishments to accept mistakes or failures.
This is only half the story. Our research group tries to get our bleeding edge algorithms into existing software (e.g. text algorithms in scribus, connector routing and graph layout in inkscape). One thing we've found is that when you are developing some code it's easy to get trained into only trying certain pathways through the code. In each case we've found that once you let fools play with your foolproof algorithm, they find things you hadn't tried. If these stats are standard tests used by wine devels they will only contain well tested pathways, and if you leave those pathways things misbehave or run slowly.
However by using the suit you might find out what parts of the suit fail first, making newer suits safer. I imagine there could be a lot of useful information gathered for real space exploration with a simple experiment like this!
In low power applications such as fridges on RAPS people use latching relays instead, which have a set of magnets to hold the current position (or sometimes, an over centre spring).
One thing I'd love is for someone to make a standard looking light or powerpoint switch with an electomagnetic actuator so I could turn all the lights off in the house from a single switch.
Now what will really bake your noodle is whether the diverted energy will result in an improvement in total wellbeing. See also The broken window fallacy.
(Put another way, do you think that the steam engine was a good thing or a bad thing?)
They also have a nifty levitating mouse like thing that is propelled using compressed air. It floats down the ducts and dislodges dust (and in our case, rat poo).
even in places like central australia the water used is less valuable than the electricity required to run a normal air conditioner. Anywhere that people live will need far more potable water than such an airconditioner will use. (Having said that, most commercial designs dump lots of excess water down the drain rather than using it for irrigation or toilet flushing)
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Shame. Oh well, I can wait :)
So there's going to be a glut of good machines on the market when it comes out.
C is used to write operating systems, does that mean all C programs are operating systems? That seems a rather confused line of reasoning...
I'm sorry, I don't understand your point? Haskell is a programming language, like C++.
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell
Europeans use more coal, hydro, wind and nuclear, and less oil for electricity production. In terms of energy efficiency generally electricity requires 3J input for every Joule of electricity, but efficiency isn't relevant to this discussion, only oil consumption. In new zealand an electric resistance heater is more oil efficient than a heat pump in the US - new zealand is warmer and most electricity there is derived from hydro and water.
And to be pedantic, heat pumps in the US have about the same CO2 and oil efficiency as burning oil :)
AFAICT, everywhere but the US diesel fuel is cheaper than petrol.
PV makes a lot of sense in remote power applications. Lighthouses, traffic monitoring systems, communication satelites, lamp posts in forests - that sort of thing. It is not yet cost effective when the grid is closer than say 1km, and may never be.
I agree about the hybrids, we have a cheap little toyota hatchback which gets about the same L/100km as a prius and it only cost us $14k, compared to $44k for a prius. However, the prius is more likely going to be the car of the future, as separating the energy source from the power train means that many other technologies can be tried (such as high efficiency diesel, fuel cells, stirling engines etc).
You are suggesting writing ultra-reliable code in python?! Python is fine for whipping up a quick toy, but for large scale applications it easily becomes unmanagable. I'd agree if you'd suggested a high level language like haskell first, but python's lack of static checking (of anything) makes it a very dangerous language for serious work.
pride. i'm a developer of software, and I don't allow myself to test my own code beyond a certain point because i'll be too proud of my accomplishments to accept mistakes or failures.
This is only half the story. Our research group tries to get our bleeding edge algorithms into existing software (e.g. text algorithms in scribus, connector routing and graph layout in inkscape). One thing we've found is that when you are developing some code it's easy to get trained into only trying certain pathways through the code. In each case we've found that once you let fools play with your foolproof algorithm, they find things you hadn't tried. If these stats are standard tests used by wine devels they will only contain well tested pathways, and if you leave those pathways things misbehave or run slowly.
The fact that the drivers are better is certainly interesting by itself.
:-)
Actually, I think if you ate fat people you would absorb a large chunk of their fat. So eating fat people probably will make you fat.
Was it: "The employee that comes to work in a suit and leaves for job interviews on company time gets the unfair dismissal case."?
However by using the suit you might find out what parts of the suit fail first, making newer suits safer. I imagine there could be a lot of useful information gathered for real space exploration with a simple experiment like this!
I used to use copper foil to stop slugs getting into my veggie patch.
Or put another way, imagine a square of land 32miles on each side. That's all you need.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
Even more basic, 2^32 is only 4 billion.
Soon they'll be finding the bugs before they leave the factory!
Inconcievable!
I don't think that word is spelt the way you think it's spelled.
In low power applications such as fridges on RAPS people use latching relays instead, which have a set of magnets to hold the current position (or sometimes, an over centre spring).
One thing I'd love is for someone to make a standard looking light or powerpoint switch with an electomagnetic actuator so I could turn all the lights off in the house from a single switch.
FYI, petrol is $5/gallon here and people are still quite happy driving SUVs.
Now what will really bake your noodle is whether the diverted energy will result in an improvement in total wellbeing. See also The broken window fallacy.
(Put another way, do you think that the steam engine was a good thing or a bad thing?)
They also have a nifty levitating mouse like thing that is propelled using compressed air. It floats down the ducts and dislodges dust (and in our case, rat poo).
even in places like central australia the water used is less valuable than the electricity required to run a normal air conditioner. Anywhere that people live will need far more potable water than such an airconditioner will use. (Having said that, most commercial designs dump lots of excess water down the drain rather than using it for irrigation or toilet flushing)