I like the efficiency numbers of such heat pumps, but am concerned about diminishing returns over time in areas with unbalanced heating and cooling seasons.
You seem to be blithely unaware of the fact that heat flows naturally, and that deep underground is much warmer than shallow. The 'unbalance over time' is a creation of your own mind.
There is lot of confusion, since the term "geothermal" is used for two different technologies. The first is digging deep to hot rocks and using water to extract the heat and doing something with it. This has been used for over a century, but has a lot of problems with it.
The other is going a few feet down to use the ground as a heat source or sink for a heat pump/air conditioner. The latter is what is used now.
Um, no. Geothermal heat means extracting heat from the ground, which may be done with *either* a deep well *or* a (relatively) shallow horizontal array. The transfer is usually accomplished via a heat pump, so the same system can also provide cooling.
Thirty five years ago, it was mostly conjecture with little evidence to support it and widely accepted because it "made sense". It's in the news today, because there's increasing amounts of evidence that it is in fact correct.
Realistically what applications are there for a high-precision GPS outside of geological/territorial surveys and military intelligence?
Ooh, ooh, teacher, teacher! I know this one! It's knowing which freaking road you're on when there are several close together.
Depending on how close they are, un-augmented civilian grade GPS may or may not be up to the task. Pretty much all GPS navigators (handheld or dash mounted) are either augmented (with WAAS or it's EU equivalent, or with Assisted GPS) or they 'cheat' by making certain assumptions (I.E. you came in on this road, therefore you must still be on this road), or both. This has lead many people to mis-estimate the true accuracy of civilian grade GPS. (And it goes without saying that such augmentation is unavailable in China - because it depends on high grade surveys.)
That being said, even civilian grade GPS is good enough to create a control point to update satellite based maps. There's not a doubt in my mind that the CIA has been doing so globally, using small (possibly military grade) handhelds to mark important points and then using that information to update more conventional maps. (Maps aren't just pretty pictures... there's a lot of data stored on them, but you need an accurate reference point to build the map around.)
Even as I was a TSA screener for a while, the whole "papers please!" measures that have been coming down have simply reminded me of "Nazi Germany" from old movies and the like.
Which just goes to show that what everyone says is true - the TSA hires clueless idiots. As bad as it's gotten, we're nowhere even *close* to a totalitarian state. Hint: In such a state, not only would the lawsuit that's under discussion here never be filed... we wouldn't even be having this discussion. (In the literal sense - there would no public forum for such discussions.) Grow the ef up, learn some history, and quit exaggerating.
Certainly it has revenue potential - but that doesn't mean it has sufficient ROI compared to other uses of their capital to justify committing the resources. For example, I can spend today on a project that will make me $100 bucks or on one that will make me $120 bucks - and absent compelling reasons to choose the former, I'm going with the latter.
On Earth where ever life can survive it does and generally thrives. It just proves how tenacious and adaptable life is in the Universe. There are only really two options, life is an unlikely fluke or it's everywhere it can possibly exist.
It's not impossible for life to be both - an unlikely fluke *and* everywhere it can possibly exist. It's the adaptability of life that's the key, currently extremophiles on Earth are believed to have arisen someplace benign (I.E. where it's easy for life-the-fluke to take root) and then migrated and evolved into the extreme niches.
The only way to stop the second problem is making the wall more difficult to wiggle - or increasing it's mass.
Or by adding soundproof foam... because changing the density of the medium the sound is traveling through can lower transmission drastically. (And the foam, being elastic, can also absorb some of the vibration.) That's why submarines all wear rubber tiles nowadays - not only do they not reflect sound well (defeating active sonar), they also reduce the transfer of vibrations and noise from the hull to the water (reducing the passive signature).
Congratulations on (re)inventing noise cancellation!
Yes, the concept is extraordinarily simple - but like so many things, the engineering and execution is anything but. That's why it took so long for noise cancelling headphones to come to market, and why they're still relatively uncommon.
Then, experienced sysadmins, which you clearly are not, know that like the most dangerous time for an airplane is during takeoff and landing, the most dangerous time for a server is during shutdown and start. Stiction on old drives, minor internal power surges during boot that doesn't affect a running system, and much else can cause problems.
On the other hand, I worked on a system for the US Navy that controlled Trident-I missiles... we rebooted both of our main computers every six hours to ensure that we could reboot them when needed - and the first one after midnight included an extensive hard drive self test to make sure it was working to spec. The gentleman down thread has it right, the answer to 100% uptime is redundancy and failover or switchover, not relying on nothing ever going wrong.
In addition, you seem to be unclear on the difference between a reboot and power cycling... In the latter case, if you're worried about stiction and power surges, that's an indication that you should have been thinking about replacing the machine for quite a while rather than hoping nothing ever goes wrong. Because eventually, something will - and when that happens, now you've potentially got two problems... the one that brought the machine to it's knees, *and* the undiscovered ones because you've never rebooted or cycled power.
Am I wrong in thinking the UK has a plutonium stockpile it really doesn't know what to do with? Simply not juicy enough?
It's the wrong isotope - bombs and reactors use Pu-239, while RTGs use Pu-238. The key difference is half-life and thus the heat generated, as the heat drives the thermocouples in the RTG to produce power. Pu-239 has a half life of 24 kyears, which means it decays slowly and thus doesn't produce much heat (relatively speaking). Pu-238 has a half life of 87 years, which means it emits considerable heat.
That short half life is also why NASA has been trying to figure out how to re-start production for some years now, since production was halted in 1988 a considerable quantity of the stockpiled fuel has essentially 'evaporated'. (And the stockpile wasn't that large to begin with.) Since the 'evaporated' fuel doesn't actually physically go anywhere, this means that you either have to use a bigger and heavier RTG or redesign the mission to use less power. (The first is obviously bad, and the second can paint you into a bit of a corner if the launch is delayed.) Processing the fuel to remove the decay products and restore energy density is... Very Expensive, so it's not an option (especially since it doesn't solve the problem of 'evaporation').
Given NASA's constant funding problems for the last few decades, by this point all the talented engineers and researchers would of left.
Yet, we have two rovers on Mars and two orbiters at Mars, an orbiter at Saturn, an orbiter at Mercury, a fly-by probe on the way to Pluto, multiple astronomical observatories, lunar orbiters, and more earth sciences orbiters than you can shake a stick at... In fact, NASA has more going on currently than at almost any other time in it's history. I'd suggest you calibrate your biases against reality, because the former is way out of touch with the latter.
At this rate, is there any meaningful hope left for NASA, JPL or indeed any government-funded space-related agencies?
I've been hearing that question since the mid-70's - NASA watchers seem to be mostly nothing but a bunch of Chicken Little's for whom the sky is perpetually falling.
From years of watching NASA, their problems aren't so much budgetary and managerial... and not just at HQ, but all the way out to the line troops at the Centers. NASA has a long standing problem with properly estimating and managing their budgets. To be fair, some of that isn't their fault - Congress is rarely inclined to fund the engineering development missions that would give them the experience to do so... as a result, practically every program and mission is a one-off that absolutely must succeed because failure isn't an option. And because Congress and the general public treat every failure as an earth shattering disaster, something of a positive feedback loop has been established which just makes the problem worse.
Unless you bitched about the articles on which actors were coming back in the new Star Wars, or the random bloviations of some rich guy or pundit at SXSW... you really don't have much of a leg to stand on. Roman Catholics represent about a sixth of the worlds population, and one of the largest (if not the largest) organized religions in the world. The selection of a new Pope is indeed something that matters.
And costs are more than "equipment to handle fluids"... There's the capital costs of the land, structure, equipment, and infrastructure.
Which is part of the equipment costs
Not in ordinary English usage, no. Nor are the ongoing costs I mentioned and which you snipped.
I am not in the slightest "blithely unaware" of these costs because they are irrelevant to the argument about efficiency vs equipment costs
When you say things like "costs are irrelevant", then perhaps "blithely" is too weak a word to describe your ignorance. Doubly so since even after I explained the economics of the plant, you reply with more handwaving and hogwash that does nothing but demonstrate that such ignorance is seemingly willful.
Efficiency is not a serious concern when your energy source is cost free.
Since there is no such thing as a 'cost free' energy source... then, by definition efficiency is always a concern.
The costs of this problem are all in your equipment to handle the fluids, there is no fuel as such so efficiency doesn't directly matter. What is important is how much your plant costs you to generate X watts.
Yes, efficiency matters - because along with efficiency, costs determine your price per kwH. And costs are more than "equipment to handle fluids"... There's the capital costs of the land, structure, equipment, and infrastructure. There's maintenance, which is a (very) significant ongoing cost for anything that touches seawater. There's insurance, and taxes, and wages, and... well, quite a laundry list that you seem blithely unaware of.
But I don't understand why Japan doesn't perfect Deep water cooling technology
Because deep water cooling is an air conditioning system - not a power generation system. Anyhow, the problem with thermocouples (other than not being particularly efficient) is generally getting the hot leg hot enough, not cooling the cold leg.
I didn't say they were did I? Nor does the existence of other ways to waste money change the fact that there crimes that the OP claims are victimless - aren't.
Yes, but you are using today's drug math. If cocaine wasn't illegal, it wouldn't be so expensive. And if it was well regulated, the dosage could be monitored.
Yes, because after all.. alcohol, which is well regulated, hasn't caused any collateral damage. No, I'm not using "today's drug math", I'm pointing out reality - there is rarely any such thing as a 'victimless' crime. (Otherwise, what you're proposing is a system of legalization that is so regulated that it won't work like you think it will. If the state prevents an addict from getting his fix one way, he's going to get it another way.)
But what if he blew his money on the stock market or a crazy investment? There are a million stupid ways people lose their retirement savings.
The topic here isn't "ways to blow retirement savings", the topic is "the effects of so called victimless crimes". That you feel the need to change the topic tells me all I need to know.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be blithely unaware of the fact that heat flows naturally, and that deep underground is much warmer than shallow. The 'unbalance over time' is a creation of your own mind.
Um, no. Geothermal heat means extracting heat from the ground, which may be done with *either* a deep well *or* a (relatively) shallow horizontal array. The transfer is usually accomplished via a heat pump, so the same system can also provide cooling.
See the articles on Geothermal heat and Geothermal heat pumps on Wikipedia.
Thirty five years ago, it was mostly conjecture with little evidence to support it and widely accepted because it "made sense". It's in the news today, because there's increasing amounts of evidence that it is in fact correct.
If satellites could create control points, yes, that would be a very good plan. It isn't that easy.
Depending on how close they are, un-augmented civilian grade GPS may or may not be up to the task. Pretty much all GPS navigators (handheld or dash mounted) are either augmented (with WAAS or it's EU equivalent, or with Assisted GPS) or they 'cheat' by making certain assumptions (I.E. you came in on this road, therefore you must still be on this road), or both. This has lead many people to mis-estimate the true accuracy of civilian grade GPS. (And it goes without saying that such augmentation is unavailable in China - because it depends on high grade surveys.)
That being said, even civilian grade GPS is good enough to create a control point to update satellite based maps. There's not a doubt in my mind that the CIA has been doing so globally, using small (possibly military grade) handhelds to mark important points and then using that information to update more conventional maps. (Maps aren't just pretty pictures... there's a lot of data stored on them, but you need an accurate reference point to build the map around.)
Which just goes to show that what everyone says is true - the TSA hires clueless idiots. As bad as it's gotten, we're nowhere even *close* to a totalitarian state. Hint: In such a state, not only would the lawsuit that's under discussion here never be filed... we wouldn't even be having this discussion. (In the literal sense - there would no public forum for such discussions.) Grow the ef up, learn some history, and quit exaggerating.
Time to come visit us in the 21st century, the Church dropped the tithing requirement a long time ago.
Certainly it has revenue potential - but that doesn't mean it has sufficient ROI compared to other uses of their capital to justify committing the resources. For example, I can spend today on a project that will make me $100 bucks or on one that will make me $120 bucks - and absent compelling reasons to choose the former, I'm going with the latter.
It's not impossible for life to be both - an unlikely fluke *and* everywhere it can possibly exist. It's the adaptability of life that's the key, currently extremophiles on Earth are believed to have arisen someplace benign (I.E. where it's easy for life-the-fluke to take root) and then migrated and evolved into the extreme niches.
Or by adding soundproof foam... because changing the density of the medium the sound is traveling through can lower transmission drastically. (And the foam, being elastic, can also absorb some of the vibration.) That's why submarines all wear rubber tiles nowadays - not only do they not reflect sound well (defeating active sonar), they also reduce the transfer of vibrations and noise from the hull to the water (reducing the passive signature).
Congratulations on (re)inventing noise cancellation!
Yes, the concept is extraordinarily simple - but like so many things, the engineering and execution is anything but. That's why it took so long for noise cancelling headphones to come to market, and why they're still relatively uncommon.
Self diagnosed or professionally diagnosed?
Nope. I went here. Much classier.
What statistical analysis did you use to ensure your key was cryptographically strong?
On the other hand, I worked on a system for the US Navy that controlled Trident-I missiles... we rebooted both of our main computers every six hours to ensure that we could reboot them when needed - and the first one after midnight included an extensive hard drive self test to make sure it was working to spec. The gentleman down thread has it right, the answer to 100% uptime is redundancy and failover or switchover, not relying on nothing ever going wrong.
In addition, you seem to be unclear on the difference between a reboot and power cycling... In the latter case, if you're worried about stiction and power surges, that's an indication that you should have been thinking about replacing the machine for quite a while rather than hoping nothing ever goes wrong. Because eventually, something will - and when that happens, now you've potentially got two problems... the one that brought the machine to it's knees, *and* the undiscovered ones because you've never rebooted or cycled power.
It's the wrong isotope - bombs and reactors use Pu-239, while RTGs use Pu-238. The key difference is half-life and thus the heat generated, as the heat drives the thermocouples in the RTG to produce power. Pu-239 has a half life of 24 kyears, which means it decays slowly and thus doesn't produce much heat (relatively speaking). Pu-238 has a half life of 87 years, which means it emits considerable heat.
That short half life is also why NASA has been trying to figure out how to re-start production for some years now, since production was halted in 1988 a considerable quantity of the stockpiled fuel has essentially 'evaporated'. (And the stockpile wasn't that large to begin with.) Since the 'evaporated' fuel doesn't actually physically go anywhere, this means that you either have to use a bigger and heavier RTG or redesign the mission to use less power. (The first is obviously bad, and the second can paint you into a bit of a corner if the launch is delayed.) Processing the fuel to remove the decay products and restore energy density is... Very Expensive, so it's not an option (especially since it doesn't solve the problem of 'evaporation').
Yet, we have two rovers on Mars and two orbiters at Mars, an orbiter at Saturn, an orbiter at Mercury, a fly-by probe on the way to Pluto, multiple astronomical observatories, lunar orbiters, and more earth sciences orbiters than you can shake a stick at... In fact, NASA has more going on currently than at almost any other time in it's history. I'd suggest you calibrate your biases against reality, because the former is way out of touch with the latter.
I've been hearing that question since the mid-70's - NASA watchers seem to be mostly nothing but a bunch of Chicken Little's for whom the sky is perpetually falling.
From years of watching NASA, their problems aren't so much budgetary and managerial... and not just at HQ, but all the way out to the line troops at the Centers. NASA has a long standing problem with properly estimating and managing their budgets. To be fair, some of that isn't their fault - Congress is rarely inclined to fund the engineering development missions that would give them the experience to do so... as a result, practically every program and mission is a one-off that absolutely must succeed because failure isn't an option. And because Congress and the general public treat every failure as an earth shattering disaster, something of a positive feedback loop has been established which just makes the problem worse.
That may be part of it - but RSS in general is also facing stiff competition in the form of Facebook based blogs and feeds.
Unless you bitched about the articles on which actors were coming back in the new Star Wars, or the random bloviations of some rich guy or pundit at SXSW... you really don't have much of a leg to stand on. Roman Catholics represent about a sixth of the worlds population, and one of the largest (if not the largest) organized religions in the world. The selection of a new Pope is indeed something that matters.
Not in ordinary English usage, no. Nor are the ongoing costs I mentioned and which you snipped.
When you say things like "costs are irrelevant", then perhaps "blithely" is too weak a word to describe your ignorance. Doubly so since even after I explained the economics of the plant, you reply with more handwaving and hogwash that does nothing but demonstrate that such ignorance is seemingly willful.
Since there is no such thing as a 'cost free' energy source... then, by definition efficiency is always a concern.
Yes, efficiency matters - because along with efficiency, costs determine your price per kwH. And costs are more than "equipment to handle fluids"... There's the capital costs of the land, structure, equipment, and infrastructure. There's maintenance, which is a (very) significant ongoing cost for anything that touches seawater. There's insurance, and taxes, and wages, and... well, quite a laundry list that you seem blithely unaware of.
Because deep water cooling is an air conditioning system - not a power generation system. Anyhow, the problem with thermocouples (other than not being particularly efficient) is generally getting the hot leg hot enough, not cooling the cold leg.
When someone makes a reply that is heavily biased *and* (seemingly deliberately) fails to respond to the poster he's quoting - that's bigotry. Period.
Your reply is just more of the same - sophomoric bullshit that marks you as the willfully ignorant bigot you are.
I didn't say they were did I? Nor does the existence of other ways to waste money change the fact that there crimes that the OP claims are victimless - aren't.
Yes, because after all.. alcohol, which is well regulated, hasn't caused any collateral damage. No, I'm not using "today's drug math", I'm pointing out reality - there is rarely any such thing as a 'victimless' crime. (Otherwise, what you're proposing is a system of legalization that is so regulated that it won't work like you think it will. If the state prevents an addict from getting his fix one way, he's going to get it another way.)
The topic here isn't "ways to blow retirement savings", the topic is "the effects of so called victimless crimes". That you feel the need to change the topic tells me all I need to know.