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  1. Re:Carbon free power on Last Operating Magnox Nuclear Reactor Closes · · Score: 1

    The Hanford "N" reactor was somewhat similar to the RMBK-1000 in that it was graphite moderated, light water cooled and produced about 600MWe. It was decommissioned shortly after the Chernobyl incident.

  2. Re:Sand Storms on Should We Fill the Sahara With Solar Panels? (bbc.com) · · Score: 2, Informative

    With a DC line the loss can be figured to be due to conductor resistance. A back of the envelope calculation shows that to get 3.5% loss per 1000km would require each pole to have ~5,000mcm of aluminum conductor. At 600kV, it would be a good idea to use a bundle of 4 conductors to reduce corona loss, so each conductor would need to be ~1,250mcm of aluminum, which is a common size for ACSR conductors.

    1.1% loss per 100km sounds more like a 230kV AC line.

  3. Re:Carbon free power on Last Operating Magnox Nuclear Reactor Closes · · Score: 1

    Um, 131I has a half life of 8 days, you may have been thinking of 129I with a half life of 16 million years. 90Sr has a half life of 28.8 years, so it will be pretty much gone in a few hundred years. 137Cs has a half life of 30 years and as with 90Sr, will be pretty much one in a few hundred years - figure the radioactivity declining by a factor of 10 for every century.

    Considering that King Tut's tomb lay undisturbed for ~3,000 years, it doesn't seem to be too much of an effort to keep spent fuel isolated for a few thousand years.

  4. Washing Machine hacks? on Ask Slashdot: Any Dishwasher Hackers Out There? · · Score: 2

    One hack I'd really like to do is a warm rinse cycle on a washing machine. A 15C increase in water temperature can make a big difference in rinsing effectiveness. My first washing machine did have a warm rinse cycle, but the US Govt, in their infinite wisdom, decided to require washing machines to only use cold water for rinse.

  5. Electric propulsion is a century old on Largest Destroyer Built For Navy Headed To Sea For Testing (ap.org) · · Score: 1

    The USN built a bunch of surface ships with electric propulsion after WW1. These included the New Mexico class battleships along with the Lexington and Saratoga (originally intended as battle cruisers, but completed as aircraft carriers).

  6. Re: Typical of those poorly trained... on Air Asia Pilot Response Leads To Plane Crashing (wsj.com) · · Score: 1

    Which is why I think sidestick control on an airliner is an incredibly dumb idea. With control yokes mechanically linked together, both pilots know what the other is doing. This is the second Airbus lost because of pilots not knowing what the other guy in the cockpit was doing.

  7. How about LIS as in the original pilot? on Netflix Remaking Lost In Space (ew.com) · · Score: 1

    The pilot for LIS, which lacked both the robot and Dr Smith, was very promising. Guy Williams stood out very well in the pilot and was grossly underutilized in the series. I would go so far as to say the pilot for LIS was better than the original pilot for Star Trek (the one with Christopher Pike).

    I could go either with respect to Dr Smith in a new series - the pilot had a hokey run-in with "asteroids" causing the Jupiter II to go off course, which was part of the plot for an episode in the third season - the one where Dr Smith does time travel and DOESN'T board the Jupiter II, which leads to the J2 being destroed when hitting uncharted asteroids.

  8. Re:Despite the summary, this is somewhat new... on Immersion Cooling Drives Server Power Densities To Insane New Heights (datacenterfrontier.com) · · Score: 1

    The Leidenfrost effect is a form of film boiling. The bad news is that film boiling will take place on vertical surfaces about as easily as it will on horizontal surfaces. The one sure way to stop film boiling is to keep the heat transfer rate well below the departure from nucleate boiling limit (nuclear reactors are design to have the peak heat transfer rate at least 3X below the departure from nucleate boiling limit) and never let the circuitry become dry when powered.

  9. Re:Humans remain better sometimes on Software Update Adds Autonomous Driving To Tesla's Bag of Tricks (nytimes.com) · · Score: 2

    Such as when the center engine of a DC-10 goes "bang", cutting off the hydraulics and the only control is from adjusting the throttles of the remaining two good engines?

    And for atrophied skills, consider Air France 330 (IIRC) from 2009, which was flown in a controlled stall into the Atlantic Ocean because the co-pilot forgot that recovery from a stall requires the nose to be pushed down. Original cause was autopilot decoupling when the pitot tube got iced up.

    Main problem with computer control is trusting that the people writing the software properly anticipated all of the situations that could be encountered. The quality of most code leaves me with a bad feeling about this. An example, an Airbus on a demonstration flight crashed because the software countermanded the pilot's attempt to pull out of a dive, the software was trying to prevent excessive g-loads but the programmer didn't consider that hitting the ground would be worse than bending the airframe.

  10. Re:WWII? on Yale Makes Available Online 170,000 Photographs From WWII Period · · Score: 2

    Try September 18, 1931 for the start of the hostilities that began WW2 - this is when Japan invaded Manchuria. First US casualties from that fracas were in 1937.

    I'm partial to Jerry Pournelle's calling WW1, the ETO of WW2 and the ETO of the Cold War as the 70 year war.

  11. Re:Vitality is defined by users, not developers. on OpenIndiana Hipster 2015.10: Keeping an Open-Source Solaris Going · · Score: 1

    FWW, Motif was an HP development where a fair amount of effort was put into making a more or less intuitive Window manager that was a bit better looking than what M$-Windows looked like at the time (ca 1990). Visual User Environment was built on top of Motif, and that morphed into CDE in the mid 1990's.

    There have been a few open source apps built on motif, Nedit and Xephem come to mind. Tcl/Tk was first built on Motif.

  12. Re:Why all the desktop stuff? on OpenIndiana Hipster 2015.10: Keeping an Open-Source Solaris Going · · Score: 1

    Solaris had been running on x86 since about 1990. One motivation for running on two different processors is that the porting process uncovered a fair number of bugs, I would go so far as to say the reputation of the open source UNIX software from the late 1980's and early 1990's was due to the process of porting to the various flavors of UNIX.

    Sun was in the process of migrating away from CDE when Oracle bought them, so implementing a desktop was more a matter of porting GNOME and KDE to run on Solaris. The Firefox ports to Solaris were done by a Sun's software group in China and Sun was paying Adobe to support Acroread and Flash on Solaris.

  13. Re:No additional hardware was likely needed on Volkswagen Diesel Scandal Logistics Imply Sizable Conspiracy · · Score: 1

    I disagree, as the author didn't seem to understand the reason why gasolene and diesel engines run on different fuels. Gasoline is composed of lighter hydrocarbons to give a higher resistance to compression ignition to reduce knocking, diesel is composed of longer hydrocarbons to enhance ignition by the hot air generated by compression.

  14. Re:The Nazis Could Have Won on Chemical Evidence Shows the Nazis Weren't At All Close To Having the Bomb · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure you're both wrong, the Ukrainian peasants were the ones that hated Stalin - several million died in the early thirties. Had the Germans treated them well, they might have been very willing to join the Germans in attacking Russia.

  15. Nimitz on MacArthur on Chemical Evidence Shows the Nazis Weren't At All Close To Having the Bomb · · Score: 2

    The quote according to Eddie Layton was, "To remind myself not to be a horse's ass." It's unfortunate that Nimitz isn't as well known as some of the other WW2 principals, as he did a very good job as CinCPAC.

  16. Re:Related to gamma ray bursts? on Enormous Red Sprites Seen From Space · · Score: 1

    I suspect the sprites might be related to the gamma rays. Don't see electrons having a long enough free path in the lower atmosphere to build up enough energy to cause pair production.

    I am very convinced that the sprites are related to sporadic E skip, where ionization of the E layer of the ionosphere becomes intense to reflect VHF signals.

  17. Re:It's badly written ad scripts on Study: Ad Blocker Use Jumps 41 Percent · · Score: 2

    That was my motivation to use Flash Blocker - got really tired of my computer coming to a halt and occasionally having Firefox crash due to badly written ad scripts. The companies buying the as need to pay more attention to the quality of the scripts.

  18. Re:Mickey Mouse copyirght extenstions... on "Happy Birthday" Public Domain After All? · · Score: 2

    I'd modify the proposal for copyright to be free for 14 years, 5% gross royalties from 15 to 28 years, 10% gross royalties from 29 to 56 years, then 25% gross royalties after that.

  19. Incandescant lights? on Scientists Identify Possible New Substance With Highest Melting Point · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm guessing the material should be quite happy to sit at 4000K, which would make for a much higher luminous efficiency than tungsten. Kind of like a 21st century version of the Nernst lamp (which was twice as efficient as a carbon filament, but half of tungsten's efficiency).

  20. Re:I don't get the point of this thing... on Watch the US Navy Test Its Electromagnetic Jet Fighter Catapult · · Score: 1

    A few reasons why the electric catapult is better than steam. It's a royal PITA keeping the steam seal in good shape on the catapult. The steam reservoirs take up a fair amount of space. The steam piping is a PITA. Gas turbines for non-nuclear ships don't necessarily produce steam.

  21. Z-800? on When Exxon Wanted To Be a Personal Computing Revolutionary · · Score: 3, Informative

    ISTR Z-800 as being the designation for the Z-80 extended to 16 bits. My recollection was that it didn't start shipping until sometime past 1980. If Zilog got the Z-800 out late 1978, and sweet talked DRI to porting CP/M to it, and with that port capable of running Z-80 executables...

    Reality was that Intel had announced the 8086 in 1978, had silicon shipping early 1979 and Tim Paterson got an 8086 board up and running in May 1979.

  22. Reverse Osmosis is energy efficient on California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water · · Score: 2

    Getting a gallon of fresh water to San Diego County from the Carlsbad plant will use less energy than a gallon from the Sacramento River delta. The Edmonston pumping plant of the California water project is the largest single consumer of electric power in the state.

    I'm looking forward to the Poseidon plant coming on line as my water should get noticeably softer.

  23. Re:Follow the herd or vanish on Google Wants To Rank Websites Based On Facts Not Links · · Score: 1

    If Google starts showing preference to one se of candidates over another, could they be prosecuted for effectively making illegal campaign contributions??

  24. Re:Fuck it - everyone for themselves. on The Groups Behind Making Distributed Solar Power Harder To Adopt · · Score: 1

    I'm with you on waiting for panel prices to drop some more, but I'm also waiting for a good battery pack to keep my house "off grid" until around 10 to 11PM. The problem with solar is that the peak generation occurs hours before peak load and even worse the generation will be close to zero at the time of peak load - search for "solar duck" for more info. The mismatch between solar generation and utility customer demand was pointed out to a group of us EE's at UCB by a PG&E official 40 years ago!

    FWIW, I've seen your postings on at least one site and tend to agree with you more than I disagree.

  25. Re:Fuck it - everyone for themselves. on The Groups Behind Making Distributed Solar Power Harder To Adopt · · Score: 1

    In an ideal world, you would be credited for the incremental cost of generation, transmission and distribution when your panels provided power, but e charged for the incremental cost of generation, transmission and distribution when your house was drawing power. Keep in mind that the peak load on the Calif grid occurs about 7PM PDT so your solar panels are unlikely to offset capital costs for transmission and distribution.

    I suspect that one of the prime incentives for Elon Musk to develop the homepower battery pack is to keep his Solar City investments from becoming worthless in a few years. By storing enough power for the house to stay off grid till maybe 10PM, he would be able to say that the Solar City installations are a benefit as opposed to a liability. Without the batteries, those installations will become a liability in a very few years - google for "solar duck".