"whilst the costs of renewables are at the same time plummeting"
Except they're not.
If they were, consumers wouldn't be seeing their power costs steadily climbing to cover the costs of providing subsidies to renewables providers.
Windmills aren't changing in price(*) and whilst the raw manufacturing costs of solarPV may be low, the environmental costs are at least as high as those of coal plants.(**)
(*) Bigger ones are less per turbine MW but the civil engineering costs are higher and EU ones are catching fire/eating gearboxes at high enough rates that without subsidies they're a money loser. Even with subsidies(***) the only way they are usually profitable is when they're not generating and powercos are paying the operators to _not_ connect to the grids. The other problem with the things is that broken blades have been known to go more than a mile, so there's a large exclusion zone necessary around them.
(**)The mess around chinese manufacturing plants is going to take decades to clean up. Factory effluent ponds are essentially dead zones and they're leaking into watersheds. If you thought gold mining effluent was bad you haven't seen the downstream of these places.
(***) Subsidies are direct (grants and cheap loans) and indirect (preferential feed-in tarriffs mean artificially high feed in prices no matter what demand is like, powercos are obliged to take electricity even if it means idling other plant, and renewables operators do not have to carry any cost of backing plant). Those subsidies are paid by end-user, who have already seen their power costs more than double as a direct result of "green initiatives" - which aren't - and if renewables end up with more than 5-10% penetration those prices will increase by another factor of 5 at least.
"renewables farms" are actually "subsidy farms" and the day those subsidies are removed is the day many of them will simply be abandoned.
Solar thermal is even worse: The big californian Solar Thermal plant uses so much gas to keep things hot overnight that it would use only 25% more to directly run gas generators, etc.
"Gold, platinum, iridium, rhodium, osmium, indium and palladium hover in the rough ballpark of $10000-60000 USD per kilogram; gem-quality peridot about the same"
You face a double-barrelled problem.
1: Space is currently expensive enough that recovering any of these materials is uneconomic even if there were ingots stacked on an asteroid (or the moon) awaiting collection.
2: Supply and demand. As soon as you start landing significant quantities of these materials the price will tumble.
The logical target market for space mining is space manufacturing and consumption. It's obscenely expensive to haul stuff out of a gravity well using chemical rockets. Space elevators are some time off (if ever), ditto Lofstrom loops or similar technology and Orion-class launchers contravene nuclear limitation treaties.
The two single largest resources available are iron/water and they're not something that's exactly in short supply on earth. Concentrations of other minerals may be a lot higher than on earth but the problems of zero-g extraction and smelting are hundreds of times more complicated in the short term. Even if you can match ground-based production costs, the moment you bring large quantities of supply online is the moment those precious metals/minerals are no longer precious ones unless cartel tactics are used (Like de Beers have used for over a century to hold gem diamond prices at least 10 times above what they should be)
One of the most efficient propulsion systems in space is a nuclear bomb. If you want to run that far you wouldn't use chemical or ion reactions, they're far too inefficient.
With regard to shielding (which is the big bugbear people keep ignoring) - water is one of the best shielding materials that exists and there's a lot of it on Ceres. Once in the right shape it can be left to freeze. Water is at _least_ as important as mining metals for this reason.
> One of the big parts of the "spectacle" in Biosphere 2 was "no tweaking allowed, sealed environment".
Except it wasn't. _tonnes_ of oxygen was pumped in to account for concrete curing and it's rumoured that more than a few pizza deliveries were made to the "isolated" crew.
"Then there is the reality that the Earth is going to be literally cooked by the Sun eventually"
Eventually being about 500 million years, not the oft-quoted 4 billion.
The sun is gradually increasing in output (it's significantly brighter than when life first crawled out of the oceans). Long before it goes red giant, surface temperatures will be too high for liquid water to exist and once that happens Venus isn't far off.
"This is hardly a Muslim-only problem, in fact this is an argument I hear all the time from Christians, but its the first time I've heard it acknowledged by a Muslim."
Pretty much all religious people will say the same thing (including jews), EXCEPT the hardline fundamentalists or whatever faith it happens to be.
The core message of almost every major religion has been "Be nice, don't be an asshole" This has been twisted around at some point by someone to be "Kill anyone who isn't like 'us'"
Politicians have always been around and a lot of them dress up as religious leaders because that way their motives don't get questioned.
"Two different people made two different errors while calculating the weight using two different methods"
That's highly unlikely and probably an ass-covering excuse.
The more likely scenario is that one crewmember made an incorrect calculation and the other said "looks about right". Humans are humans, etc.
What I can guarantee is that both pilots will always crosscheck in future, no matter who they fly with. That degree of error would make the feel on takeoff "wrong" enough to be a brown-trouser moment.
"Is there any reason you don't just slam the throttles open on a modern jetliner until you are off the ground?"
Firstly: In most parts of the world: Noise laws
Secondly: Going to 120% power dramatically shortens engine life so you only do it in an emergency (yes, you turn it up to 11, but there are tradeoffs). Engine overhauls are extremely expensive. Management frown on pilots who cost the company too much.
This was an aircraft that was 10 tons heavier than calculated - on a 737 that's easily a 15-20% variation on nominal MTOW. That makes a large difference to the rotate and liftoff velocities. These are precalculated based on the aircraft's assumed weight to give optimum climbout rate.
If you rotate early or overrotate, the aircraft takes longer to get to liftoff velocity. If you rotate late the ride is bumpy and that is bad for both the nerves of the passengers and the fatigue life of the airframe (late rotation is used in hot'n'high conditions or where you need to "spring" off the runway, but generally strongly discouraged). Taking longer to get to liftoff velocity may mean running out of runway.
The surprise is that they only kissed the tarmac. It must have been a long runway with an easy climbout. If they'd done that at Queenstown (where 737s have to fly out with the front 4 rows empty in order to be able to climb over terrain) this would have resulted in a messy smear mark over a nearby mountainside.
Ok, so a big-ass weighstation platform. Let's ignore the logistics of something that size that for a moment
Weighing accurately from under 1 ton to over 700?
Compensating for rain? Compensating for wind? (This will make apparent weight change. A parked 747 in even a mild breeze moved and heaves like a beast wanting to leap into the air)
Calculating the centre of mass too? (This is at least as important as overall TOW)
Bandwidth is almost never an issue. _Latency_ is another matter.
There are a lot of tricks and bits to optimise things regarding locality (mainly around row based and lookahead accessing. CPUs aren't the only devices trying to predict what will be read next) and controller optimisation, but the underlaying dynamic ram itself hasn't actually improved much over the last 20 years in terms of time between addressing a random cell and getting an answer back from it. The big improvements have been around the number of requests you can make while waiting for that answer instead of being in request-answer lockstep and there is only so far that can be taken.
_true_ 1GHz ram would have 1ns latency, not 12-30ns - and the reason that L1/L2/L3 is so important is because of that poor response time.
"it could potentially trail behind the Core i7-6700K, a quad-core Skylake processor clocked at 3.4GHz (base) to 4GHz (Turbo)."
Not by much.
If you want to see the true speed of any CPU, look at the memory speed. Internal multipliers make some steps run faster but the overall effect isn't high enough to justify the cost deltas on the higher-clockrate CPUs. In general the sweetspot is 2-4 steps below the top step.
If you have a proper multitasking operating system it will take as much advantage of extra processors even if individual programs don't. For that reason I always bias toward more CPUs than higher clockrate when specifying servers for the datacentre, whilst aiming for maximum possible memory speed (That used to mean trying to keep to one bank on DDR3, but it's a bit easier with LRDIMMS and DDR4)
We don't run much virtualisation, as the kind of loads being run invariably max out the raw systems so there's no point, however in a virtualised environment "More CPUs" always beats "faster ones" as long as hyperthreading is disabled (if a virtualised box gets assigned a HT "CPU" then it will crawl).
Higher CPU clocking is mainly good for willy-waving, other than in quite specific tasks where you can keep everything important in L1/L2.
One of the single biggest problem with traction applications has been deliberate patent encumberances which are still echoing through the manufacturing arena.
"There was a bus pulled off to the right, and of course we had no way of seeing through the bus"
Defensive driving 101 - ALWAYS assume that a pedestrian will leap out from behind the object you can't see through.
Your wife was arguably driving too fast for the conditions and she was also likely to be concentrating on the green light (and speeding up, green lights have a tendency to cause that in humans) than on the possibility that someone might step out in front of her.
If you're driving at 30mph and are at the rear of a bus you're passing when someone steps out in front of it, _you_ as a human will run them over before you even get close to touching the brake pedal. An AI will react a lot faster and any defensive driver knows to be slowing down/foot already hovering on the brake pedal in such a situation because sooner or later it happens (in my home country, 100 children a year used to be killed in exactly such circumstances. It became a specific part of drivers' education and that figure is now a lot lower)
In other words: You're bringing up a situation caused by your wife's poor driving skills and claiming an autonomous vehicle wouldn't cope - it doesn't have to cope if it's avoided the situation by slowing down to a safe speed already.
"Sea ice, which is ice that has formed at sea and not calved off a land based ice sheet, is by definition sea (salt) water."
Not necessarily true in the Antarctic.
There is so much freshwater (as in actual water, not glacial ice) flowing off the continent that in many areas it's forming a freshwater layer over the top of denser seawater and freezing at much higher temperatures than the underlaying saltwater does.
So in that case, it's sea ice, but it's not necessary saline.
It also means that antarctic winter sea ice cover can _simultaneously_ be warmer AND icier than it was - and don't forget that 1km^3 of land-based ice can be 1000km^2 of sea-ice @1m thickness.
This freshwater layer is showing up around western greenland too - too far south to form pack ice, but in such a location that it can seriously bugger up the labradour current plus the gulf stream. This could easily lead to a situation where northern europe ends cooling by 3-5C ("mini ice age") whilst global averages contnue to climb.
5 years ago the UK had a _lot_ of snow(*) because of various wind patterns(**). The usual suspects started raving on about how this is proof that global warming is a myth. The fact that at the same time England was 2-3C cooler than usual, Siberia and Northern Canada were experiencing temperatures 20-30C warmer than usual (over an area 100 times the size of the UK) was quite conveniently ignored.
(*) Relatively speaking. I had 14 inches which lasted for 12 days when the usual for the area is 1-2 inches gone within 48 hours once a year (twice if you're lucky).
(**) England normally only gets snow if the wind is coming from the northeast and "not too hot, not too cold", which means that the ideal temp for lots of snow is -4C up to 2C. Above/below that you get rain or simple frozen conditions respectively.
Actually the more efficient nuclear methods are much harder to make weapons-grade materials from.
In particular, the plutonium from LFTRs is so badly polluted with the fiercely hot isotopes that it would be cheaper to build a windscale-style reactor (the one that caught fire) to make bomb-suitable stuff than to try and refine what you can get from the LFTR. Likewise, the U233 is so badly mixed up with other fiercely hot uranium isotopes that it's hard to extract for bombs.
Current uranium enrichment processes produce around 2 pounds of "useless" U238 for every pound of reactor fuel they output. Except it's not useless - it makes a great H-bomb casing (enhances yield) and there are all those bullets you can make from it - bear in mind that environmental uranium is a worse chemical pollutant than lead, so you don't really want people making bullets out of the stuff.
That existing enrichment system can also produce highly enriched uranium for weapons and the reprocessing systems for fuel rods can pull out the plutonium (uranium reactors generally produce bomb-grade isotopes) for weapons making. It's so energy intensive that the actual costs of operating such facilities for civil reactors are regarded by the USA as a military state secret.
And of course, conventional nuclear plants can burn (hydrogen gas), leak radioactive steam, explode (steam) or leak radioactive water. Molten Salt plants won't do any of these and if they leak any radioactives won't go more than a couple of feet before the salt freezes and can be dropped back into the pool. Addtionally, MSRs run so hot that you don't need to cool your output with river/sea water (air cooling is sufficient), so you don't have siting constraints and you don't have to turn them down during heatwaves, plus there's the small matter of massively reduced waste output, most of which can be kept onsite for a dozen years and then onsold as useful gasses such as helium/xenon
The comparison which could be drawn is that conventional water-based plants (and all other plants using encapsulated fuel) are like a Neucomen Steam engine and Molten salt systems are Mr Watt's improved version.
Why? It's only waste in the sense that it can't be used in the heath-robinson (rube-goldberg) contraption that comprises a current civil nuclear plant.
Nuclear plants currently boil water to make steam to turn turbines.
They don't run very hot, because the fuel rods are poor heat conductors and melt if it gets too warm. This means they're thermally inefficient. More than 2/3 of their heat is vented to atmosphere.
That water is also a problem because water dissolves everything eventually, even faster when it's under high pressure and at high temperature and slightly acidic to start with. You really _don't_ want it near your radioactives because some amount always ends up in solution and if there's a leak you now have large quantities of radioactive steam to dispose of, or radioactive water entering the biosphere, or (if the cooling fails entirely and the rods melt), hydrogen/oxygen being cracked out by the heat, carrying various radioactive gases along too.
Short term we have to keep using conventional water reactors.
Long term, Molten salt systems are intrinsically safe and a no-brainer to move on to - no pressurisation, no boiling, freeze sold at 400C (so they don't go far if they leak) and gassing is relatively easy to handle as extracting gases is part of the design and that extraction means they can throttle up/down quickly to follow loads, which reduces the need for nasty peaking plants. They've already been tested but not at civil nuke scale.
Using molten sodium coolant is a pretty dumb idea, as several operators have discovered. Molten lead is better but you still have fuel rods to deal with and if the lead freezes they're hard to extract. With a Molten salt system the fuel is in the liquid and that also means you can SCRAM the thing very quickly (the test system was shut down every friday night and restarted every monday morning - because noone wanted to watch over it during weekends. Try that with a "normal" nuclear reactor and see how short a period it takes to break it.)
Hinkeley Point power station is currently guaranteed to sell its electrricty at double the current rate (it was the only way the investors could be persuaded to build and under normal circumstances it would double by the time it was built anyway)
Thanks to subsidies, Renewables generators are selling into the grid at 6 to 12 times the going rate _NOW_ and thanks to much higher than advertised maintenance costs(*) they're only barely making money.
(*) Windmills keep eating gearboxes (or having them catch fire). This is expensive. Solar PV installations are not putting out anywhere near as much electricity as claimed (the absolute peak power output has been sold as "the output", whilst long-term real world figures were claimed to be about 30% of this - they're actually 15-20% of average, less still if nights are taken into account.
Even if they could replace all the CO2 generating sources (they can't, see below), having electricity prices climb that much is not feasible.
Why can't windmills replace coal plants?
1: Density: Even if safety regulations were ignored, carpeting the UK in windmills would only produce enough power on average to replace 3-5 power stations. The UK has in excess of 60 conventional stations.
Carpeting the country in windmills won't happen, because:
2: Safety regulations. Windmills need a 2 _mile_ safety clearance between them and any inhabited buildings or areas. This is due to the slightly pesky fact that the blades have been observed to go almost that far when they break - and they've been breaking more frequently than planned, thanks to gearbox fires weakening them.
Solar PV has a similar density problem. Tidal simply doesn't work economically - all the schemes which have been started up worldwide have quietly closed down.
Solar Thermal is also of dubious economics and density plays into the picture.
Importing power from elsewhere is hard. Underwater interconnectors are extremely expensive and the UK only has 3GW connectiivty to the rest of Europe. That's already peaking out at times.
Generating power in the Sahara and importing it to Europe would require the largest engineering projects ever undertaken, merely to transport the electricity. The fact that African Generated electricty being sent out of the continent when there is more than enough demand south of the Sahara to absorb every bit of that power would be seen as yet more exploitative colonial theft should also be taken into account.
Which brings up the other factor: Reduction of 1st world electricity demands won't mean much when developing world demands would completely swamp that reduction simply to bring people up to a reasonably low standard of living.
If you want to produce that much electricity, that soon, the only way forward is nuclear and lots of it. Conventional technology now and MSRs when they're ready. Fusion won't be ready for another century.
"Nuclear waste" is a solved problem. The amount produced by a conventional station over 60 years will sit in an olympic-sized pool and be safe to approach unshielded after 300 years - NOT 300,000 as the extremists claim.
That "waste" is unlikely to sit in a pool for 300 years though - it's highly likely to be useful fuel for kickstarting MSRs - which produce 1% of the waste level of conventional nukes - less still when you realise they can take the "useless" U238 depleted uranium from enrichment processes that current makes up 60-65% of mined uranium (yup, less than 40% of uranium taken out of the ground and fed into the refining process comes out the other end as useful) and "just so happens" to be highly useful as H-bomb enhancers - in other words getting rid of that "non-radioactive" waste is a really good idea.
Even if no use for kickstarting a MSR, the MSR can quickly break down conventional "nuclear waste" to much safer elements.
GCC may be more disruptive than you think, sooner than you think - and not because of temperature rises.
Rapidly increasing oceanic CO2 levels are likely to kick off a global Anoxic Oeanic Event. This would wipe out a large chunk of the planet's megafauna (including us) if past ones are anything to go by.
There are indications it may have already started.
The biggest contributors to cleaning up California's air (in no particular order) were:
1: Getting smokers off the road 2: Banning 2 stroke lawnmowers (in the mid 1980s these were estimated to produce half of LA county's smog count) 3: Cleaning up the fuel - both gasoline and diesel by mandating lower impurity levels (sulfur and others) and banning lead additives (a pity that several of the lead replacements turned out to be nastier than what went before....)
No matter what they do, the air in that area will still never been pristine because it never really was. Early explorers reported smog from native american cooking fires, for instance.
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"whilst the costs of renewables are at the same time plummeting"
Except they're not.
If they were, consumers wouldn't be seeing their power costs steadily climbing to cover the costs of providing subsidies to renewables providers.
Windmills aren't changing in price(*) and whilst the raw manufacturing costs of solarPV may be low, the environmental costs are at least as high as those of coal plants.(**)
(*) Bigger ones are less per turbine MW but the civil engineering costs are higher and EU ones are catching fire/eating gearboxes at high enough rates that without subsidies they're a money loser. Even with subsidies(***) the only way they are usually profitable is when they're not generating and powercos are paying the operators to _not_ connect to the grids. The other problem with the things is that broken blades have been known to go more than a mile, so there's a large exclusion zone necessary around them.
(**)The mess around chinese manufacturing plants is going to take decades to clean up. Factory effluent ponds are essentially dead zones and they're leaking into watersheds. If you thought gold mining effluent was bad you haven't seen the downstream of these places.
(***) Subsidies are direct (grants and cheap loans) and indirect (preferential feed-in tarriffs mean artificially high feed in prices no matter what demand is like, powercos are obliged to take electricity even if it means idling other plant, and renewables operators do not have to carry any cost of backing plant). Those subsidies are paid by end-user, who have already seen their power costs more than double as a direct result of "green initiatives" - which aren't - and if renewables end up with more than 5-10% penetration those prices will increase by another factor of 5 at least.
"renewables farms" are actually "subsidy farms" and the day those subsidies are removed is the day many of them will simply be abandoned.
Solar thermal is even worse: The big californian Solar Thermal plant uses so much gas to keep things hot overnight that it would use only 25% more to directly run gas generators, etc.
The original 3 were homages to 1930s space and horse operas, played as straight as possible in order to be true to form.
There's no big message in them, not intentionally anyway. Enjoy them at face value because that's all that was intended.
The earth's day has always been 24 hours, however the defined period of the 86400 seconds within it may have changed over the millenia.... :-)
"As seen from the moon, the Earth is only about two degrees across"
Now.
At the time of the late heavy bombardment, the moon was a _lot_ closer than it is now. Close enough that the earth was a fairly effective shield.
It also means that tidal forces and heating effects would have been a lot stronger too.
"Gold, platinum, iridium, rhodium, osmium, indium and palladium hover in the rough ballpark of $10000-60000 USD per kilogram; gem-quality peridot about the same"
You face a double-barrelled problem.
1: Space is currently expensive enough that recovering any of these materials is uneconomic even if there were ingots stacked on an asteroid (or the moon) awaiting collection.
2: Supply and demand. As soon as you start landing significant quantities of these materials the price will tumble.
The logical target market for space mining is space manufacturing and consumption. It's obscenely expensive to haul stuff out of a gravity well using chemical rockets. Space elevators are some time off (if ever), ditto Lofstrom loops or similar technology and Orion-class launchers contravene nuclear limitation treaties.
The two single largest resources available are iron/water and they're not something that's exactly in short supply on earth. Concentrations of other minerals may be a lot higher than on earth but the problems of zero-g extraction and smelting are hundreds of times more complicated in the short term. Even if you can match ground-based production costs, the moment you bring large quantities of supply online is the moment those precious metals/minerals are no longer precious ones unless cartel tactics are used (Like de Beers have used for over a century to hold gem diamond prices at least 10 times above what they should be)
One of the most efficient propulsion systems in space is a nuclear bomb. If you want to run that far you wouldn't use chemical or ion reactions, they're far too inefficient.
With regard to shielding (which is the big bugbear people keep ignoring) - water is one of the best shielding materials that exists and there's a lot of it on Ceres. Once in the right shape it can be left to freeze. Water is at _least_ as important as mining metals for this reason.
> One of the big parts of the "spectacle" in Biosphere 2 was "no tweaking allowed, sealed environment".
Except it wasn't. _tonnes_ of oxygen was pumped in to account for concrete curing and it's rumoured that more than a few pizza deliveries were made to the "isolated" crew.
"Then there is the reality that the Earth is going to be literally cooked by the Sun eventually"
Eventually being about 500 million years, not the oft-quoted 4 billion.
The sun is gradually increasing in output (it's significantly brighter than when life first crawled out of the oceans). Long before it goes red giant, surface temperatures will be too high for liquid water to exist and once that happens Venus isn't far off.
not all. Many were used as staging posts - OK to visit but not enough resources to stay long-term.
"This is hardly a Muslim-only problem, in fact this is an argument I hear all the time from Christians, but its the first time I've heard it acknowledged by a Muslim."
Pretty much all religious people will say the same thing (including jews), EXCEPT the hardline fundamentalists or whatever faith it happens to be.
The core message of almost every major religion has been "Be nice, don't be an asshole"
This has been twisted around at some point by someone to be "Kill anyone who isn't like 'us'"
Politicians have always been around and a lot of them dress up as religious leaders because that way their motives don't get questioned.
"Two different people made two different errors while calculating the weight using two different methods"
That's highly unlikely and probably an ass-covering excuse.
The more likely scenario is that one crewmember made an incorrect calculation and the other said "looks about right". Humans are humans, etc.
What I can guarantee is that both pilots will always crosscheck in future, no matter who they fly with. That degree of error would make the feel on takeoff "wrong" enough to be a brown-trouser moment.
"Is there any reason you don't just slam the throttles open on a modern jetliner until you are off the ground?"
Firstly: In most parts of the world: Noise laws
Secondly: Going to 120% power dramatically shortens engine life so you only do it in an emergency (yes, you turn it up to 11, but there are tradeoffs). Engine overhauls are extremely expensive. Management frown on pilots who cost the company too much.
This was an aircraft that was 10 tons heavier than calculated - on a 737 that's easily a 15-20% variation on nominal MTOW. That makes a large difference to the rotate and liftoff velocities. These are precalculated based on the aircraft's assumed weight to give optimum climbout rate.
If you rotate early or overrotate, the aircraft takes longer to get to liftoff velocity. If you rotate late the ride is bumpy and that is bad for both the nerves of the passengers and the fatigue life of the airframe (late rotation is used in hot'n'high conditions or where you need to "spring" off the runway, but generally strongly discouraged). Taking longer to get to liftoff velocity may mean running out of runway.
The surprise is that they only kissed the tarmac. It must have been a long runway with an easy climbout. If they'd done that at Queenstown (where 737s have to fly out with the front 4 rows empty in order to be able to climb over terrain) this would have resulted in a messy smear mark over a nearby mountainside.
Three words: Centre of Mass.
can a static weighstation calculate this?
Ok, so a big-ass weighstation platform. Let's ignore the logistics of something that size that for a moment
Weighing accurately from under 1 ton to over 700?
Compensating for rain? Compensating for wind? (This will make apparent weight change. A parked 747 in even a mild breeze moved and heaves like a beast wanting to leap into the air)
Calculating the centre of mass too? (This is at least as important as overall TOW)
"Memory bandwidth can become an issue"
Bandwidth is almost never an issue. _Latency_ is another matter.
There are a lot of tricks and bits to optimise things regarding locality (mainly around row based and lookahead accessing. CPUs aren't the only devices trying to predict what will be read next) and controller optimisation, but the underlaying dynamic ram itself hasn't actually improved much over the last 20 years in terms of time between addressing a random cell and getting an answer back from it. The big improvements have been around the number of requests you can make while waiting for that answer instead of being in request-answer lockstep and there is only so far that can be taken.
_true_ 1GHz ram would have 1ns latency, not 12-30ns - and the reason that L1/L2/L3 is so important is because of that poor response time.
"it could potentially trail behind the Core i7-6700K, a quad-core Skylake processor clocked at 3.4GHz (base) to 4GHz (Turbo)."
Not by much.
If you want to see the true speed of any CPU, look at the memory speed. Internal multipliers make some steps run faster but the overall effect isn't high enough to justify the cost deltas on the higher-clockrate CPUs. In general the sweetspot is 2-4 steps below the top step.
If you have a proper multitasking operating system it will take as much advantage of extra processors even if individual programs don't. For that reason I always bias toward more CPUs than higher clockrate when specifying servers for the datacentre, whilst aiming for maximum possible memory speed (That used to mean trying to keep to one bank on DDR3, but it's a bit easier with LRDIMMS and DDR4)
We don't run much virtualisation, as the kind of loads being run invariably max out the raw systems so there's no point, however in a virtualised environment "More CPUs" always beats "faster ones" as long as hyperthreading is disabled (if a virtualised box gets assigned a HT "CPU" then it will crawl).
Higher CPU clocking is mainly good for willy-waving, other than in quite specific tasks where you can keep everything important in L1/L2.
One of the single biggest problem with traction applications has been deliberate patent encumberances which are still echoing through the manufacturing arena.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"There was a bus pulled off to the right, and of course we had no way of seeing through the bus"
Defensive driving 101 - ALWAYS assume that a pedestrian will leap out from behind the object you can't see through.
Your wife was arguably driving too fast for the conditions and she was also likely to be concentrating on the green light (and speeding up, green lights have a tendency to cause that in humans) than on the possibility that someone might step out in front of her.
If you're driving at 30mph and are at the rear of a bus you're passing when someone steps out in front of it, _you_ as a human will run them over before you even get close to touching the brake pedal. An AI will react a lot faster and any defensive driver knows to be slowing down/foot already hovering on the brake pedal in such a situation because sooner or later it happens (in my home country, 100 children a year used to be killed in exactly such circumstances. It became a specific part of drivers' education and that figure is now a lot lower)
In other words: You're bringing up a situation caused by your wife's poor driving skills and claiming an autonomous vehicle wouldn't cope - it doesn't have to cope if it's avoided the situation by slowing down to a safe speed already.
In areas where there is no competition, telcos can charge what they like and will invent ways of getting away with it.
Compare and contrast with what's happening across Europe.
"Sea ice, which is ice that has formed at sea and not calved off a land based ice sheet, is by definition sea (salt) water."
Not necessarily true in the Antarctic.
There is so much freshwater (as in actual water, not glacial ice) flowing off the continent that in many areas it's forming a freshwater layer over the top of denser seawater and freezing at much higher temperatures than the underlaying saltwater does.
So in that case, it's sea ice, but it's not necessary saline.
It also means that antarctic winter sea ice cover can _simultaneously_ be warmer AND icier than it was - and don't forget that 1km^3 of land-based ice can be 1000km^2 of sea-ice @1m thickness.
This freshwater layer is showing up around western greenland too - too far south to form pack ice, but in such a location that it can seriously bugger up the labradour current plus the gulf stream. This could easily lead to a situation where northern europe ends cooling by 3-5C ("mini ice age") whilst global averages contnue to climb.
5 years ago the UK had a _lot_ of snow(*) because of various wind patterns(**). The usual suspects started raving on about how this is proof that global warming is a myth. The fact that at the same time England was 2-3C cooler than usual, Siberia and Northern Canada were experiencing temperatures 20-30C warmer than usual (over an area 100 times the size of the UK) was quite conveniently ignored.
(*) Relatively speaking. I had 14 inches which lasted for 12 days when the usual for the area is 1-2 inches gone within 48 hours once a year (twice if you're lucky).
(**) England normally only gets snow if the wind is coming from the northeast and "not too hot, not too cold", which means that the ideal temp for lots of snow is -4C up to 2C. Above/below that you get rain or simple frozen conditions respectively.
Actually the more efficient nuclear methods are much harder to make weapons-grade materials from.
In particular, the plutonium from LFTRs is so badly polluted with the fiercely hot isotopes that it would be cheaper to build a windscale-style reactor (the one that caught fire) to make bomb-suitable stuff than to try and refine what you can get from the LFTR. Likewise, the U233 is so badly mixed up with other fiercely hot uranium isotopes that it's hard to extract for bombs.
Current uranium enrichment processes produce around 2 pounds of "useless" U238 for every pound of reactor fuel they output. Except it's not useless - it makes a great H-bomb casing (enhances yield) and there are all those bullets you can make from it - bear in mind that environmental uranium is a worse chemical pollutant than lead, so you don't really want people making bullets out of the stuff.
That existing enrichment system can also produce highly enriched uranium for weapons and the reprocessing systems for fuel rods can pull out the plutonium (uranium reactors generally produce bomb-grade isotopes) for weapons making. It's so energy intensive that the actual costs of operating such facilities for civil reactors are regarded by the USA as a military state secret.
And of course, conventional nuclear plants can burn (hydrogen gas), leak radioactive steam, explode (steam) or leak radioactive water. Molten Salt plants won't do any of these and if they leak any radioactives won't go more than a couple of feet before the salt freezes and can be dropped back into the pool. Addtionally, MSRs run so hot that you don't need to cool your output with river/sea water (air cooling is sufficient), so you don't have siting constraints and you don't have to turn them down during heatwaves, plus there's the small matter of massively reduced waste output, most of which can be kept onsite for a dozen years and then onsold as useful gasses such as helium/xenon
The comparison which could be drawn is that conventional water-based plants (and all other plants using encapsulated fuel) are like a Neucomen Steam engine and Molten salt systems are Mr Watt's improved version.
Why? It's only waste in the sense that it can't be used in the heath-robinson (rube-goldberg) contraption that comprises a current civil nuclear plant.
Nuclear plants currently boil water to make steam to turn turbines.
They don't run very hot, because the fuel rods are poor heat conductors and melt if it gets too warm. This means they're thermally inefficient. More than 2/3 of their heat is vented to atmosphere.
That water is also a problem because water dissolves everything eventually, even faster when it's under high pressure and at high temperature and slightly acidic to start with. You really _don't_ want it near your radioactives because some amount always ends up in solution and if there's a leak you now have large quantities of radioactive steam to dispose of, or radioactive water entering the biosphere, or (if the cooling fails entirely and the rods melt), hydrogen/oxygen being cracked out by the heat, carrying various radioactive gases along too.
Short term we have to keep using conventional water reactors.
Long term, Molten salt systems are intrinsically safe and a no-brainer to move on to - no pressurisation, no boiling, freeze sold at 400C (so they don't go far if they leak) and gassing is relatively easy to handle as extracting gases is part of the design and that extraction means they can throttle up/down quickly to follow loads, which reduces the need for nasty peaking plants. They've already been tested but not at civil nuke scale.
Using molten sodium coolant is a pretty dumb idea, as several operators have discovered. Molten lead is better but you still have fuel rods to deal with and if the lead freezes they're hard to extract. With a Molten salt system the fuel is in the liquid and that also means you can SCRAM the thing very quickly (the test system was shut down every friday night and restarted every monday morning - because noone wanted to watch over it during weekends. Try that with a "normal" nuclear reactor and see how short a period it takes to break it.)
UK:
Hinkeley Point power station is currently guaranteed to sell its electrricty at double the current rate (it was the only way the investors could be persuaded to build and under normal circumstances it would double by the time it was built anyway)
Thanks to subsidies, Renewables generators are selling into the grid at 6 to 12 times the going rate _NOW_ and thanks to much higher than advertised maintenance costs(*) they're only barely making money.
(*) Windmills keep eating gearboxes (or having them catch fire). This is expensive. Solar PV installations are not putting out anywhere near as much electricity as claimed (the absolute peak power output has been sold as "the output", whilst long-term real world figures were claimed to be about 30% of this - they're actually 15-20% of average, less still if nights are taken into account.
Even if they could replace all the CO2 generating sources (they can't, see below), having electricity prices climb that much is not feasible.
Why can't windmills replace coal plants?
1: Density: Even if safety regulations were ignored, carpeting the UK in windmills would only produce enough power on average to replace 3-5 power stations. The UK has in excess of 60 conventional stations.
Carpeting the country in windmills won't happen, because:
2: Safety regulations. Windmills need a 2 _mile_ safety clearance between them and any inhabited buildings or areas. This is due to the slightly pesky fact that the blades have been observed to go almost that far when they break - and they've been breaking more frequently than planned, thanks to gearbox fires weakening them.
Solar PV has a similar density problem. Tidal simply doesn't work economically - all the schemes which have been started up worldwide have quietly closed down.
Solar Thermal is also of dubious economics and density plays into the picture.
Importing power from elsewhere is hard. Underwater interconnectors are extremely expensive and the UK only has 3GW connectiivty to the rest of Europe. That's already peaking out at times.
Generating power in the Sahara and importing it to Europe would require the largest engineering projects ever undertaken, merely to transport the electricity. The fact that African Generated electricty being sent out of the continent when there is more than enough demand south of the Sahara to absorb every bit of that power would be seen as yet more exploitative colonial theft should also be taken into account.
Which brings up the other factor: Reduction of 1st world electricity demands won't mean much when developing world demands would completely swamp that reduction simply to bring people up to a reasonably low standard of living.
If you want to produce that much electricity, that soon, the only way forward is nuclear and lots of it. Conventional technology now and MSRs when they're ready. Fusion won't be ready for another century.
"Nuclear waste" is a solved problem. The amount produced by a conventional station over 60 years will sit in an olympic-sized pool and be safe to approach unshielded after 300 years - NOT 300,000 as the extremists claim.
That "waste" is unlikely to sit in a pool for 300 years though - it's highly likely to be useful fuel for kickstarting MSRs - which produce 1% of the waste level of conventional nukes - less still when you realise they can take the "useless" U238 depleted uranium from enrichment processes that current makes up 60-65% of mined uranium (yup, less than 40% of uranium taken out of the ground and fed into the refining process comes out the other end as useful) and "just so happens" to be highly useful as H-bomb enhancers - in other words getting rid of that "non-radioactive" waste is a really good idea.
Even if no use for kickstarting a MSR, the MSR can quickly break down conventional "nuclear waste" to much safer elements.
GCC may be more disruptive than you think, sooner than you think - and not because of temperature rises.
Rapidly increasing oceanic CO2 levels are likely to kick off a global Anoxic Oeanic Event. This would wipe out a large chunk of the planet's megafauna (including us) if past ones are anything to go by.
There are indications it may have already started.
The biggest contributors to cleaning up California's air (in no particular order) were:
1: Getting smokers off the road
2: Banning 2 stroke lawnmowers (in the mid 1980s these were estimated to produce half of LA county's smog count)
3: Cleaning up the fuel - both gasoline and diesel by mandating lower impurity levels (sulfur and others) and banning lead additives (a pity that several of the lead replacements turned out to be nastier than what went before....)
No matter what they do, the air in that area will still never been pristine because it never really was. Early explorers reported smog from native american cooking fires, for instance.