If you're wondering why you've never heard of the NRO before, it's because the government does everything it can to keep the agency under wraps, mostly because it doesn't want the taxpayers to realize how many billions of dollars are flushed down this worthless toilet of a spy agency yearly.
I rather suspect that not knowing about the NRO is a result of a lack of education or sheer ignorance. I've known about them for twenty plus years, without having an intelligence background.
Anyone remember the pioneering days when real men (and women) weren't afraid to light a giant roman candle under their posteriors? Back in those days, we would have retasked a spaceflight, go and check the sat out, and get it running again.
How can someone remember something that never happened? The Shuttle missions that rescued satellites were exceptions - not the rule.
Well, it is not only the former vietcong that regards 'vietnam' as a major defeat for the US, and thus a bloody victory for Vietnam, the whole world (minus the US-minority) does so. As for understanding for attacks on civilians: none is ever justified. Not then in Vietnam, not now in Iraq. Killing people is always wrong, but killing innocents is even worse. What part of 'thou shalt not kill' do you not understand?
What part of 'double standard' do you not understand? Why is the US, which avoids killing civilians during military operations [1], the target of your fury - but terrorists *which deliberately kills civilians* seem to get off scott free?
I suspect your only connection with the biblical adage you quote is that it allows you to express hatred of the US.
[1] Which is not to say it doesn't happen. It does. But, unlike terrorists, the Army does attempt to avoid doing so.
Third, the massacre was not done in a an attack on the village, it was done AFTER an initial attack on the village, where the US soldiers had full control of it.
Which is precisely the OP's point - the soldiers had become desensitized to killing 'civilians' and made paranoid about the presence of 'civilians' by the tactics to the North Vietnamese. (Made worse by the steadily declining discipline and pride of the Vietnam era Army.)
The three factors combined to produce the massacre.
I would rate *your* post +5 pandering to stereotypes as well, to assume that "cultural differences" (which usually is just the politically correct way to say "uncivilized slant-eyed brutes" whenever I've ever heard it) even matters in this case.
Anyone who think cultural differences don't matter is, to put it bluntly, ignorant in the extreme. The differences exist - and they do matter. (Hint: If cultural differences *didn't* matter - why must Western businessmen play to cultural sensitivities in Asia in order to do business there?)
Honestly, unless you are also an Asian immigrant, I would contend that I have a far better sense of "cultural differences" between East and West. I was born and raised in a bilingual environment, lived in both the east and west, speak both English and Mandarin fluently, and I consider myself a pretty even mix of Chinese and American/Canadian cultural traditions.
Your anecdotal evidence proves this contention laughably false. You keep accusing *me* of bias - while indulging in the same habit yourself. You whitewash *known* differences between the cultures to 'prove' that I have bias.
And how does that matter? Don't be quick to assume that there have been no major effort to stamp out kidnapping for ransom in Taiwan. Massive undertakings have been taken, with some limited success.
It matters because it highlights the differences between the two cultures. Somehow never occurs to you to ask *why* the sucess in Taiwan has been 'limited', while in the West the sucess is virtually complete? (Hint: I gave the answers in my original post.)
Oh, and the tales of children being sold into chattel bondage, often sexual, are really not prevalent. They are equally absent in Asia as they are in the West.
Which explains why pedophiles from around the world go to Asia. It explains the utter *lack* of coverage of such things in the West. (Somehow child molestors and child pornographers in the West get a great deal of coverage - yet operators of child brothels in the West go unremarked and unreported? I don't think so.)
Note: I consider myself Canadian. I love this country so much that I've become a proud citizen of it. I wear the flag proudly and sing the anthem at hockey games, but I will not subscribe to the disturbing Western tendency to portray Asia as a cesspool of underage prostitution, oppression, and all the ills of the world.
Had I portrayed it as such - you'd have a point. I pointed out known cultural difference - it's not my problem that you are either a) ignorant of them (probably as a result of your tender age and privileged upbringing, or b) your own biases prevent you seeing them.
If what they claim is true, i.e. that they aren't doing anything illegal now, why do they need to escape to anywhere ?
Because the operators of TPB are much like your [stereo] typical Slashdotter. They encrypt their drives and their email, use cash rather than cards, go out of the way to hide or obscure their identity, IP, etc... etc... Because it makes them Feel Important and it Makes A Statement about How Important they are. (I.E. it's essentially a dick measuring contest.)
I've lived in Canada for many years now, but before then I came from Taiwan, which as a country is really not as poor as it gets in southeast Asia. I can tell you that the wealth gap certainly does matter.
However - the (anecdotal) evidence you provide fails to support your contention. You don't take into account (among many other things) the cultural differences between Asia and the West.
Then I came to Canada and that turned upside down. I can't remember the last time a kidnapping happened in Canada that was driven by the ransom - usually it's some sick f--- getting his jones on molesting little girls, not an organized group out to steal from the rich.
The difference? Canada has well-established social security.
Here's where those cultural differences come into play. First, in the West there has been a concerted (and almost completely sucessful) effort to stamp out kidnapping for ransom. The penalties are steep, and typically the top echelons of the police get involved. Secondly, in the West - families don't typically cooperate with the kidnappers. They go to and cooperate with law enforcement authorities. Thirdly, when the crime of kidnapping for ransom involves children - it invokes the 'protect the children' meme that appears much stronger in the West than in Asia. (For example, you hear tales of children in Asia being sold into chattel bondage, often sexual. Such tales are noticeable by their near complete absence in the West.)
America isn't quite at that point, but I get the distinct impression that the gap is widening. If it continues, we will reach a point where the majority of the country is unable to afford the necessities of life. Then the violence will start.
Again, we see the same failure of logic - as the two items [increased costs of staples] and [increasing wage disparity] are only weakly connected, if at all.
I'd rate your post +5, pandering to stereotypes, +5 pandering to the Slashdot biases, -5 for logic, -5 for excess rhetoric.
Well I suppose if the less talented people among our species find their own means to survive, most people here on slashdot shouldn't have a really big problem even if they started to focus on earning "real money" a bit late
I suspect most people here on Slashdot would be in for a rude awakening if they tried.
The Gulf Coast is quite a bit different from the rest of the South - it's considerably warmer. Florida varies wildly - Miami is much hotter and sunnier than Jacksonville, while Orlando (being located inland) is much drier than both.
Seriously the weather here is not as bad as legend would have you believe - it does get cold and wet, but that considerably balanced by the days that are glorious and the views you can get. Driving around where I live (near Seattle) it's impossible to avoid views of the Olympics and the Cascades - and I look straight at Mt Rainer just driving to the grocery store. That's not to mention views of all the local water that you can get just driving around.
So far as keeping people here you also have to factor in the fact that Seattle is a major metroplex with all the shopping, museums, professional sports, indoor and outdoor activities that implies.
if you live in the south(as i do) and are used to roughly 300+ days of sunshine a year with 9 months of that being labeled as summertime then that can be quite a turnoff.
I grew up in the South - FL, GA, NC, and spent 4 years stationed in Charleston, SC. I probably far more aware than you of what constitutes 'summertime' in the South - and it sure as heck isn't 9 months of the year with 300+ days of sun.
In Seattle's case i dont know how in the world all these tech companies keep people in that area. Traffic is still heavy but most of all for me i just cant bear the thought of at most 3 months of sunshine and cold rainy winters.
Mostly because Seattle weather isn't actually quite as bad as the mythology about Seattle weather would have you think. (And the summers, while short, are truly glorious.)
If you are young, healthy, single, and debt-free, you dont need to be a millionaire to pursue your dream. Ramen noodles, a backpack, and a good attitude is all you need. I don't understand why people think they need to "pay their dues" before doing what they really want to do in life.
Because if you don't, you can easily find yourself with your dream fulfilled - but years behind where you need to be in able to get a job, let alone fund your retirement. Fulfilled dreams don't put a roof over your head or food on the table. (Unless you hit the jackpot and write a bestseller about your experiences and spend a couple of years on the talkshow and lecture circuit.)
wouldn't call it a failure of Computer Science; it's a QA failure without a doubt.
Mistakes happen when you code. Sure, you try to minimize them but even the most carefully designed code can't be guaranteed to be 100% error free. That's why you employ, presumably, a top-notch QA team to check and recheck, testing your "perfect" code in ways that perhaps you never even considered.
And even then - there exists the non-trivial possibility that something might slip through. No QA is ever going to reach absolute 1.00 perfection.
This is what you would expect in a terrestrial application. When the platform that your code is going to run on isn't bound to the same gravitational source that you are, you would think...you would *hope*...that the QA team might do an even more thorough job.
They do as thorough a job as can be expected in the real world - where issues like budget and manpower arise, as well as the inevitable (howsoever small) chance that a bug will slip through. On top of this, MGS is over a decade old - which adds in the chance of a tiny 'gotcha' that the original programmers knew about, but the current ones don't.
If this event is at all indicative of the QA efforts that NASA will be making for our return to the moon, perhaps we'd be better off staying at home.
Baseless fearmongering based on a strawman of your own creation. The reality is that NASA (flight) software record is orders of magnitude better than any other organiztion.
If PayPal wants to continue pretending to be a bank, they should be regulated like one.
Which won't change as much you might think - banks can, and do, freeze funds, refuse transations, etc... etc... on a regular basis.
A few years back we had a virtually identical case locally. A local families house was burnt out - and a helpful neighbor collected cash and checks (made out to the neighbor) to help them out. Said neighbor took a sackful of checks and cash down to the bank and deposited it - two days later when the family showed up with a large check from from the helpful neighbor, the bank refused to honor it and froze the account. (As several posters have pointed out this behavior often points to fraud, or scams, or money laundering - all of which a bank is required by law to make notice of, and take steps to prevent.) In the end the only difference between the two cases is that the local one was sorted out in a matter of a few days.
Vertical Take off and landing. Notice the lack of heat, that is simple escaping gas, notice the lake of "smoke" or product of a oxygen reaction, the liquid and frost?...Some compressed gas propellent in the form of pressurized liquid was used to propel this "pod". Probably a test of the computer controls required to do a vertical landing.
The pod will probably be deployed atop a conventional rocket to shoot tourists into low earth orbit, take some snaps, puke in zero G then fall to earth, chute deploys then the last 5000 feet or so the landing "spray" take over with non-explosive propellent...for a safe, soft touch down.
I could be way off base
You are so far off base that your post contains essentially no relation to reality.
Turns out it's never actually been used (except when testing.) I did get caught up in a surprise arrest not too long ago, but since my girlfriend was going to be at home and able to take care of any problems I didn't turn on the system.
In other words - you have the system because it makes you Feel Good and telling people about it makes you Feel Important. You don't really care if works or what it accomplishes.
Well..... considering that whatever is encrypted behind those keys might conceivably be enough to send you to jail anyway (and possibly for a longer term), it might be worth swallowing the lighter sentence for not handing over your keys.
I imagine that many here on Slashdot encrypt their drives not because there is something that will send them to jail [1], but because it's a cool geek thing to do and it Makes A Statement. Slashdotters are big on Making Statements that don't actually require a commitment or lead to personal discomfort.
[1] Except in their tinfoil hat mindset where they believe The Man is dilegently hunting them. (But they are always vague on why The Man might want them - usually its the result of a kneejerk over reaction.)
The official report mentions this - but glosses over its importance.
Sounds to me like you have a problem with the official report, not Wikipedia.
Sounds to me like you haven't even bothered to read the official report - but then, why would you bother? You didn't even bother to actually read and think about what I wrote. Cheerleading Wikipedia is so much easier than actually thinking.
Wikipedia places a high level of importance on citations.
ROTFLMAO. Wikipedia places a high level of importance on looking like you have reliable citations. The reality is that Wikipedia is utterly unable to differentiate between a citation to a random web page, Popular Mechanics, or an actual standard reference work.
Citation mania is merely Wikipedia's latest attempt to look like what it claims not to be - an actual encyclopedic reference. What it ends up looking like is a high school research paper where the teacher required 'x' number of citations - so all manner of crap gets cited without any actual usefulness in the citations. Real reference works come with lengthy bibliographies and many fewer citations per text page than the equivalent amount of text on a Wikipedia page.
Were you able to come up with credible citations to backup your alternate conclusions?
It's not an alternate conclusion - it's one directly from the official report.
The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter was blamed on an error converting between English units and metric units.
Exhibit #1 for why Wikipedia is not to be trusted - they continue to tell half the story. (On this and many other topics, they prefer the simple and popular explanation over completeness and accuracy. [1])
MCO was lost not because of a metric conversion error - but because an increasing divergence between the planned and actual performance was ignored. The official report mentions this - but glosses over its importance. MCO was lost because NASA attempted to fly the mission on the cheap, because of this testing and analysis during the cruise phase was cut from the budget. Some analysis was done on the side by a few engineers - and their calls for a formal analysis went unheeded until too late.
[1] And before the Wikipedia cheerleaders chime in, yes - I have tried to fix many articles to correct this problem. Without exception the corrections were either reverted out or edited into meaninglessness. On Wikipedia the win goes to the editor with time on his hands or who can cite a lightweight popular article as the source of his 'facts'.
You can't just open source software, there is work to do to open source it. First, you have to inspect the licenses of any module/code that you include to make sure that it is open sourceable. You also have to have a build system in place that works with open source. Is it truly open source, if you have to buy Microsoft's Visual Studio to build it?
Short answer: Yes.
The compiler/interpreter/whatever used to compile/interpret/whatever the source code is utterly irrelevant.
I guess in his world structures and machinery aren't subject to wear and tear - but here in the real world they are.
The miracle of modern technology is that consumer grade stuff just works, with very little extra input required.
The reality of modern consumer grade technology is that, yes, it just works - until the day it doesn't. (Kinda like my washing machine which recently required repairs.)
Other than a car, I can't really think of many consumer grade pieces of 'equipment' (which people regularly interact with) that require regular maintenance.
There problem is, you are responding to a strawman of your own creation - because I didn't mention (regular) maintenance. I adressed the (false) claim that the machinery will not wear out - and that capital investment is thus preserved. In the real world, machinery of any grade eventually requires either corrective maintenance or outright replacement.
Even newer cars don't require the same level of maintenance that they used to. Modern diffs, transmissions, bearings and spark plugs can all (supposedly) go for ~100k miles... Radiators don't really need to be flushed anymore. Heck, you don't even need to change your oil every 3,000 miles (RTFM, YMMV).
After reading over their description, how likely do you think it is to work?
Not very likely at all - because the creator doesn't really have any idea how steam engines, or refrigerators work. Also, like most armchair engineers he's really, really light on the math.
I find this part particularly amusing;
2. The principles and project management of Linus Torvolds with Linux and the many other contributors to Open Source and Free Software has shown such success with large projects.
3. There are many people with good ideas and a willingness to help, but Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and Physics are not their field. The project is based on bringing people together to work on something that has benefit for everyone.
I think the creator quite misundertands how F/OSS works - he somehow thinks that people who aren't programmers get together and somehow create the programs, and that the same magic wand will work for making this kludge a reality.
Then he makes laughable statements like this:
In the capital investment for energy sources that are renewable, the capital investment is not important. Once the system is built and producing electrical power, it doesn't run out.
I guess in his world structures and machinery aren't subject to wear and tear - but here in the real world they are.
Nothing quite like a million cars recharging to push the California power grid six feet under during the summer. This will guarantee year-round brownouts, blackouts, and other power problems.
99.99% of California's electric problems could be cured if people learned to live without, or at least minimize, the use of air conditioners. I was in LA back in Sept, and I swear every place was cooled to 72 degrees - needlessly.
That being said; I think the OP has it right - nightly recharging of large numbers of electric cars is a load the national power grid is unlikely to be able to handle.
When I was in the Navy, most of our critical systems, especially combat system computers, consoles, and the like, were water cooled.
Yep. But the water in the cooling loops was purified and the various chemical levels in it very carefully controlled. It wasn't just any ol' water.
What the heck, we were generally surrounded by the stuff.
Sea water is very rarely used as a coolant - and that generally only in the engineering spaces. The cooling water loops (containing fresh water as mentioned above) were themselves are generally cooled via a chiller, not a (water-to-water) heat exchanger. Sea water temperature is very undependable - from the Artic in the winter to the tropical seas in the summer, the temperature varies considerably.
I see no need for what is effectively a triple-boot machine - OS X (with Classic, quadruple-boot), Linux/and/ Windows - when you could easily have made a simpler system by removing a whole OS from the equation.
That's the problem - the OP doesn't give a fig a simple, and only gives functionality as passing nod. What he cares about is imposing *his* political and religious beliefs on others. (And has the unmitigated gall to call the forced behavior a 'bonus'.)
Ending up being modded +5 only shows the bigotry and dual standards inherent on Slashdot - if he bragged about making his daughter take a bible to college and forcing her to read ten verses every night to do her homework, he'd be modded and flamed into oblivion.
Slashdot Mirror
I rather suspect that not knowing about the NRO is a result of a lack of education or sheer ignorance. I've known about them for twenty plus years, without having an intelligence background.
How can someone remember something that never happened? The Shuttle missions that rescued satellites were exceptions - not the rule.
What part of 'double standard' do you not understand? Why is the US, which avoids killing civilians during military operations [1], the target of your fury - but terrorists *which deliberately kills civilians* seem to get off scott free?
I suspect your only connection with the biblical adage you quote is that it allows you to express hatred of the US.
[1] Which is not to say it doesn't happen. It does. But, unlike terrorists, the Army does attempt to avoid doing so.
Which is precisely the OP's point - the soldiers had become desensitized to killing 'civilians' and made paranoid about the presence of 'civilians' by the tactics to the North Vietnamese. (Made worse by the steadily declining discipline and pride of the Vietnam era Army.)
The three factors combined to produce the massacre.
Anyone who think cultural differences don't matter is, to put it bluntly, ignorant in the extreme. The differences exist - and they do matter. (Hint: If cultural differences *didn't* matter - why must Western businessmen play to cultural sensitivities in Asia in order to do business there?)
Your anecdotal evidence proves this contention laughably false. You keep accusing *me* of bias - while indulging in the same habit yourself. You whitewash *known* differences between the cultures to 'prove' that I have bias.
It matters because it highlights the differences between the two cultures. Somehow never occurs to you to ask *why* the sucess in Taiwan has been 'limited', while in the West the sucess is virtually complete? (Hint: I gave the answers in my original post.)
Which explains why pedophiles from around the world go to Asia. It explains the utter *lack* of coverage of such things in the West. (Somehow child molestors and child pornographers in the West get a great deal of coverage - yet operators of child brothels in the West go unremarked and unreported? I don't think so.)
Had I portrayed it as such - you'd have a point. I pointed out known cultural difference - it's not my problem that you are either a) ignorant of them (probably as a result of your tender age and privileged upbringing, or b) your own biases prevent you seeing them.
Because the operators of TPB are much like your [stereo] typical Slashdotter. They encrypt their drives and their email, use cash rather than cards, go out of the way to hide or obscure their identity, IP, etc... etc... Because it makes them Feel Important and it Makes A Statement about How Important they are. (I.E. it's essentially a dick measuring contest.)
However - the (anecdotal) evidence you provide fails to support your contention. You don't take into account (among many other things) the cultural differences between Asia and the West.
Here's where those cultural differences come into play. First, in the West there has been a concerted (and almost completely sucessful) effort to stamp out kidnapping for ransom. The penalties are steep, and typically the top echelons of the police get involved. Secondly, in the West - families don't typically cooperate with the kidnappers. They go to and cooperate with law enforcement authorities. Thirdly, when the crime of kidnapping for ransom involves children - it invokes the 'protect the children' meme that appears much stronger in the West than in Asia. (For example, you hear tales of children in Asia being sold into chattel bondage, often sexual. Such tales are noticeable by their near complete absence in the West.)
Again, we see the same failure of logic - as the two items [increased costs of staples] and [increasing wage disparity] are only weakly connected, if at all.
I'd rate your post +5, pandering to stereotypes, +5 pandering to the Slashdot biases, -5 for logic, -5 for excess rhetoric.
A statement which is known as a false choice, or more commonly as a strawman.
I suspect most people here on Slashdot would be in for a rude awakening if they tried.
The Gulf Coast is quite a bit different from the rest of the South - it's considerably warmer. Florida varies wildly - Miami is much hotter and sunnier than Jacksonville, while Orlando (being located inland) is much drier than both.
Seriously the weather here is not as bad as legend would have you believe - it does get cold and wet, but that considerably balanced by the days that are glorious and the views you can get. Driving around where I live (near Seattle) it's impossible to avoid views of the Olympics and the Cascades - and I look straight at Mt Rainer just driving to the grocery store. That's not to mention views of all the local water that you can get just driving around.
So far as keeping people here you also have to factor in the fact that Seattle is a major metroplex with all the shopping, museums, professional sports, indoor and outdoor activities that implies.
I grew up in the South - FL, GA, NC, and spent 4 years stationed in Charleston, SC. I probably far more aware than you of what constitutes 'summertime' in the South - and it sure as heck isn't 9 months of the year with 300+ days of sun.
Mostly because Seattle weather isn't actually quite as bad as the mythology about Seattle weather would have you think. (And the summers, while short, are truly glorious.)
Because if you don't, you can easily find yourself with your dream fulfilled - but years behind where you need to be in able to get a job, let alone fund your retirement. Fulfilled dreams don't put a roof over your head or food on the table. (Unless you hit the jackpot and write a bestseller about your experiences and spend a couple of years on the talkshow and lecture circuit.)
And even then - there exists the non-trivial possibility that something might slip through. No QA is ever going to reach absolute 1.00 perfection.
They do as thorough a job as can be expected in the real world - where issues like budget and manpower arise, as well as the inevitable (howsoever small) chance that a bug will slip through. On top of this, MGS is over a decade old - which adds in the chance of a tiny 'gotcha' that the original programmers knew about, but the current ones don't.
Baseless fearmongering based on a strawman of your own creation. The reality is that NASA (flight) software record is orders of magnitude better than any other organiztion.
Which won't change as much you might think - banks can, and do, freeze funds, refuse transations, etc... etc... on a regular basis.
A few years back we had a virtually identical case locally. A local families house was burnt out - and a helpful neighbor collected cash and checks (made out to the neighbor) to help them out. Said neighbor took a sackful of checks and cash down to the bank and deposited it - two days later when the family showed up with a large check from from the helpful neighbor, the bank refused to honor it and froze the account. (As several posters have pointed out this behavior often points to fraud, or scams, or money laundering - all of which a bank is required by law to make notice of, and take steps to prevent.) In the end the only difference between the two cases is that the local one was sorted out in a matter of a few days.
You are so far off base that your post contains essentially no relation to reality.
In other words - you have the system because it makes you Feel Good and telling people about it makes you Feel Important. You don't really care if works or what it accomplishes.
I imagine that many here on Slashdot encrypt their drives not because there is something that will send them to jail [1], but because it's a cool geek thing to do and it Makes A Statement. Slashdotters are big on Making Statements that don't actually require a commitment or lead to personal discomfort.
[1] Except in their tinfoil hat mindset where they believe The Man is dilegently hunting them. (But they are always vague on why The Man might want them - usually its the result of a kneejerk over reaction.)
Sounds to me like you haven't even bothered to read the official report - but then, why would you bother? You didn't even bother to actually read and think about what I wrote. Cheerleading Wikipedia is so much easier than actually thinking.
ROTFLMAO. Wikipedia places a high level of importance on looking like you have reliable citations. The reality is that Wikipedia is utterly unable to differentiate between a citation to a random web page, Popular Mechanics, or an actual standard reference work.
Citation mania is merely Wikipedia's latest attempt to look like what it claims not to be - an actual encyclopedic reference. What it ends up looking like is a high school research paper where the teacher required 'x' number of citations - so all manner of crap gets cited without any actual usefulness in the citations. Real reference works come with lengthy bibliographies and many fewer citations per text page than the equivalent amount of text on a Wikipedia page.
It's not an alternate conclusion - it's one directly from the official report.
Exhibit #1 for why Wikipedia is not to be trusted - they continue to tell half the story. (On this and many other topics, they prefer the simple and popular explanation over completeness and accuracy. [1])
MCO was lost not because of a metric conversion error - but because an increasing divergence between the planned and actual performance was ignored. The official report mentions this - but glosses over its importance. MCO was lost because NASA attempted to fly the mission on the cheap, because of this testing and analysis during the cruise phase was cut from the budget. Some analysis was done on the side by a few engineers - and their calls for a formal analysis went unheeded until too late.
[1] And before the Wikipedia cheerleaders chime in, yes - I have tried to fix many articles to correct this problem. Without exception the corrections were either reverted out or edited into meaninglessness. On Wikipedia the win goes to the editor with time on his hands or who can cite a lightweight popular article as the source of his 'facts'.
Short answer: Yes.
The compiler/interpreter/whatever used to compile/interpret/whatever the source code is utterly irrelevant.
The reality of modern consumer grade technology is that, yes, it just works - until the day it doesn't. (Kinda like my washing machine which recently required repairs.)
There problem is, you are responding to a strawman of your own creation - because I didn't mention (regular) maintenance. I adressed the (false) claim that the machinery will not wear out - and that capital investment is thus preserved. In the real world, machinery of any grade eventually requires either corrective maintenance or outright replacement.
That's news to me - got a cite? (IOW, bullshit.)
Not very likely at all - because the creator doesn't really have any idea how steam engines, or refrigerators work. Also, like most armchair engineers he's really, really light on the math.
I find this part particularly amusing;
I think the creator quite misundertands how F/OSS works - he somehow thinks that people who aren't programmers get together and somehow create the programs, and that the same magic wand will work for making this kludge a reality.
Then he makes laughable statements like this:
I guess in his world structures and machinery aren't subject to wear and tear - but here in the real world they are.
99.99% of California's electric problems could be cured if people learned to live without, or at least minimize, the use of air conditioners. I was in LA back in Sept, and I swear every place was cooled to 72 degrees - needlessly.
That being said; I think the OP has it right - nightly recharging of large numbers of electric cars is a load the national power grid is unlikely to be able to handle.
Yep. But the water in the cooling loops was purified and the various chemical levels in it very carefully controlled. It wasn't just any ol' water.
Sea water is very rarely used as a coolant - and that generally only in the engineering spaces. The cooling water loops (containing fresh water as mentioned above) were themselves are generally cooled via a chiller, not a (water-to-water) heat exchanger. Sea water temperature is very undependable - from the Artic in the winter to the tropical seas in the summer, the temperature varies considerably.
That's the problem - the OP doesn't give a fig a simple, and only gives functionality as passing nod. What he cares about is imposing *his* political and religious beliefs on others. (And has the unmitigated gall to call the forced behavior a 'bonus'.)
Ending up being modded +5 only shows the bigotry and dual standards inherent on Slashdot - if he bragged about making his daughter take a bible to college and forcing her to read ten verses every night to do her homework, he'd be modded and flamed into oblivion.