Pressure is equivalent to temperature, one begets the other. Since all cases of observable fusion requires high pressure, explain to me how you are going to get the pressure without the temperature? Are you going to crazy glue the atoms together?
PV=nRT only means anything in regards to thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is a statistical description of the behavior of large quantities of matter. All fusion physics is about the individual behavior of the elementary particles involved. Pressure and temperature are ways to achieve the desired proximity of the nuclei, but they are not the only ways.
Only after you've isolated all the contributing factors involved so you can replicate them. So long as there are unknown factors influencing the outcome positive results will appear to happen at random. So long as verifiable transmutation is occasionally occurring *something* is clearly happening, the challenge is to figure out what is different between the experiments that work and the ones that don't. And from what I've heard it seems that certain sub-microscopic imperfections in the host material are likely at least one of the necessary preconditions. And those are damnably hard to replicate intentionally.
The most likely answer is that Rossi is cheating by feeding power into the machine in such a way as to feed more power in than is being reported by the instruments. If you follow some of the links in the attached article, you'll find a wonderful description of how to fool power metering equipment. The researchers could have easily ruled this out using a little subterfuge of their own. Had they built their own custom outlet with a hidden set of power meters placed on the upstream side of the plug, they could have guaranteed an accurate reading, and would have been able to compare that with the "official" reading. A significant mismatch would have proven willful deception on Rossi's part (thus proving the entire thing to be fraud). A match in readings would have verified experimentally that they were not being swindled in this particular respect. It would have been a simple way to gain further insight into Rossis device while allowing him the latitude to believe he is strictly controlling the experiment. (Give him every opportunity to cheat and think he will get away with it, while secretly checking up on his actions).
Sadly, The most likely answer to this riddle is that all of the so called researchers are complicit. They seem to get together regularly and try to figure out ways to make the "experiments" seem more valid while still allowing them to be gamed.
The reason he didn't describe how it works is almost certainly because IT DOESN'T WORK.
Funny but FTFA:
The researchers observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, or âoefar more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.â
That pretty much puts an end to the "doesnt work" crap. As they stated, if it is a hoax, the guy has developed a device that can store and regurgitate energy with a far greater energy density than gasoline. If all it is, is a battery, then by itself it would be worth almost as much as cold fusion, as it can store and produce 600+ horsepower for an hour (1.5MW hours). Thats enough to move a typical passenger vehicle 300+ miles on a power supply the size of a stick of dynamite. If the guy had created a device, of any kind, that can do this, then he has no reason to try to swindle investors in a cold fusion scam, he going to be Elon Musks new best friend for life.
just pick something with steady demand and limited supply.
every advance in technology raises the bar such that a larger percentage of the population is simply incapable of being trained to perform *any* needed labor function. Right now, the bar excludes a very small # (maybe 1% of the population). What happens when trucks drive themselves? Thats 3 million people who will go from earning ~40k / year to earning less than 20k per year. What happens when planes can fly themselves? What happens when being able to program a computer is a "base" skillset, that you cant be employed if you cant at least do that? I know a large number of people who will never be intelligent enough to handle tasks that require the same level of abilities as programming. What do we do with them? Darwin them off?
Sure, eventually we might not need plumbers, or welders, or A/C repairmen, or someone t give a sponge bath, but by then we'll have the luxury to carry 20%, likely 80%, of the population with need of their labor to provide for us all - work will be a matter of psychological health, not productivity eventually. But I won't live to see it; that's not this generation's problem to solve.
We already carry close to 20% of the population, when you count forced early retirement, underemployed and chronic unemployment. The tea party plays on this very "welfare state" concept to draw in working class Americans. How will that play out as the unemployment numbers increase? Capitalism will not / can not tolerate unemployment in large amounts. It causes the value of labor to asymptotically approach zero due to the law of supply and demand.
Only if our economic systems are capable of handling that set of circumstances. What should the roughly 20% of people who are below 85 IQ do to survive? They simply will never be able to handle jobs requiring more than simple manual labor, so when those jobs are gone, how do they earn a living? Welfare? Charity? They starve to death?
I could almost even live with any of those options as long as it was on the table for general public discussion and debate. As it stands now, the politicians treat it like social security: a third rail of politics...
Would you initaite interspecies contact with a species that wonders whether you go with white wine or red? Would you invade a world where the inhabitants are as likely to reach for a jar of brown sauce as a weapon?
It'll be pretty obvious when any other species on this planet becomes advanced enough to be accepted as intelligent enough to warrant the same protections as society affords to humans. That species will be making their own tools. I can teach a cat to open a door. Beyond it being cute, it really doesn't require that much intelligence...
The latter is what provides the ethical argument for treating anything that we can consider "near" human as human for various purposes such as whether to eat them. If we're so considerate of ourselves that cannibalism is usually considered a grievous crime, then maybe we should be a bit more considerate of animals that approach us in intellect.
We don't eat people because of the implied threat from society. Society places value on human life, and works to prevent cannibalism as such. If the animals organized such that there was a threat of meaningful consequences of eating animals, then we would stop eating animals. As long as the animals are not smart enough to organize their own defense, then I'll be damned if I'm going to stop eating them, much less defend them from others.
If you spent half the time perusing the spec than you spent duplicating the STL, you would not find the behaviour "unexpected", you'd save time and other people would find it easier to follow your code.
This.
I had been away from C++ for a little over a decade (got suckered into web design among other things). When I came back to it two years ago, I was pleasantly surprised at the improvements in the language. Specifically, the STL improvements, and the Boost libraries made light work of projects that used to take forever to code and debug. Even the string class I found to be indispensable, even if its interactions with non-c++ code is less than optimal, it still beats C-style string manipulation by leaps and bounds.
Having used Java, PHP and Perl in the mean time, I found C++11 to have incorporated many of the best features of these other languages without loosing much of the performance that was the reason I had gone back to C/C++ for this project.
You forget that this is a democracy. If the laws are wrong, petulance isn't really the answer.
We don't live in a democracy, and never have. Until and unless we have a real democracy, "By the people, for the people and of the people" is just a pretty fiction designed to keep the sheeple in line. The only way this will ever change is through aggressive "petulance"
Plus it's not like C++/ObjC have no runtime. For example, if you don't have the right VC++ redistributable installed, you'll get nowhere trying to run C++ application compiled in VC++. Their runtime just doesn't include a JIT compilation stage (for better or worse)
If your only experience with C / C++ is MS VSxxxx, its no wonder you hate the thing so much. The MS tool chains have never been standards compliant, and they have absolutely zero qualms about breaking their customers legacy code just for random changes. When are developers going to learn their lesson and stop relying on MS for anything they don't have to. You end up locked to MS and they can do whatever they want to you (including large scale cash withdrawal).
That having been said, c++11 is actually a rather more modernized language, but you can bet MS will never fully or properly support it. They prefer to add their own idiot solutions that lock people to MS. A good example of this is the TerminateThread function in VC++. On the surface, this function seems very useful if you have no idea how multithreaded system should work. There is no equivalent in C++11, and in fact, POSIX has no real support for the concept at all. The reason is that the functionality that this provides is a monumentally bad idea, and there are absolutely zero situations where using this would be a better / easier/ faster solution than the traditional multi threading algorithms. In fact, this function is extremely difficult to use in a way that doesn't cause all kind of program stability problems, and if a programmer is even slightly tempted to use it, odds are they simply don't understand the implications, and should seek outside help understanding multi threading.
Microsoft VC++ has thousands of little land mines like that, making it a horrible platform to use as a basis for any project. Never minding vendor lock in, the development environment itself is badly flawed.
wasn't there something a while ago about someone getting hammered for firing a.22 at the white house (think two inch thick laminated glass) while the president was abroad, yet he still got it for attempted assassination?
It was the motivation and intended outcome that mattered in that case. He shot at the White House with every reason to believe that the president was there, and no reason to believe that his bullet wouldn't penetrate the building and hit someone. He was guilty of attempted assassination. Just because he was ignorant doesn't mean he wasn't malicious.
Traffic lights and crosswalks are certainly not mainly for the convenience of drivers, but are still very much necessary to save the lives of the few people that may have to walk into traffic
The same argument was made in favor of the reduction in speed limits. You might be right, you might not be...Show me the numbers...
many studies have shown that when a car hits a pedestrian at 40mph the fatality rate is ten times greater than 30MPH. and in a school zone, there are a lot of kids around...
we should be more vigilant about revoking drivers licenses.
How often do kids end up in a street around a school? Even during student arrivals and departures?
The reality is that it just isn't that often.
The hidden cost of speed limits is monumental: There are more than 100 million people driving to work in the US alone. The average commute is 25 minutes. If we slowed the speed limits by 10 MPH, that would increase the commute by a little less than 20%, so about 4 minutes per driver per day. That works out about 6.6 Million hours per day, or just over 1.4 billion hours per year. At an average US wage of over $20 / hour, The lost productivity is around 28 billion dollars per year.
Back in the 70's, the conservationists claimed we would get 5% or better improvement in fuel economy by switching to 55 MPH instead of 65. Turned out to be less than 1% improvement. That amounts to a saving of about 1.5 Billion Gallons of gas, or $6 Billion USD. So we spent 28 Billion to save 6 Billion.
OK, so we assume the rest is in lives saved. The NTSB has concluded that the reduced speed limits from 65 to 55 saved around 4000 lives annually, with reductions in speed limits from 45 to 35 saving less than 500 lives per year. Even all told, an across the board reduction in speed limits by 10 MPH would only save 5500 lives. That amounts to a cost to the economy of $4 Million USD per year per life saved. To put that in perspective, Mamograms are estimated to cost less than $50,000 per year per life saved.
So what about the school zones? how many Children are killed in these zones? The truth is that no one even keeps statistics that have any meaning because it happens so infrequently. Thats not to say that kids die from it infrequently, thats saying that kids are very rarely even hit in these zones. Its rare enough that we don't even really have a big enough sample size to be statistically useful.
The statistical truth at the end of the day is that our current speed limits cost our economy far more than they save. The Germans did what Germans do: They did the math. They concluded that on open highway speed limits would cost their economy more than they cared to pay, so they did away with them where they were not needed.
People would lost their minds here if electricity prices tripled.
Thats the difference between the US and Germany. People in Germany have *chosen* to pay more for electricity and gas. They did so because they know that their money is buying better living conditions for everyone. Thats is why they have such high taxes. Funny but the typical standard of living in Germany is much better than the US in spite of the high taxes. In the US, its the exact opposite. Everyone wants theirs and Fuck everyone else. In the end everyone in the US suffers except the dwindling few who can hold on to upper middle class or better.
US starts buying more nuclear power from Canada, quickly pulling a Germany. In 5 years, subsidies much like those in Germany will then be gutted, and there will be a mass rush to build new coal and NG power plants until reactors can be refurbished or built anew.
Almost: Germany has been in a mad rush for quite a while to build solar and wind power production. The whole country is dotted with thousands of wind turbines, and a massive percentage of the country have solar panels to reduce their power demands from the grid. In short, Germany has been preparing for a while to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, and was consequently in a position to abandon nuclear power instead. At their current build rate, in 10 years, they will only need 50% of the fossil fuels they use today, even with the nuclear plants shut down
The key to their success is that, for Germans, the overriding goal is environmental protection. Its a national obsession (Probably owing to complete lack of available land, and limited fossil fuels). Like Japan, one bad nuclear accident is guaranteed to affect a massive percentage of the population, fossil fuels leaves them too reliant on foreign powers. It means that Germany's only real option is renewable energy sources, and they have the political will and industrial might to make it happen.
Unlike American politics, the anti-environment sociopaths don't last long in German politics.
The reason you need so much available is so that statistically speaking, you will never have a time when your supply is insufficient to meet demand. If your supply fluctuates between 20% and 100% of supply, then 100% needs to be 5x as much as demand to account for it. With renewables, the fluctuation can be anywhere from 5%-6% to 100%, meaning you would need at least 20x the *peak* demand to match potential minimum supply. In reality, you would need more than that as a margin for error. The more sane solution is to buffer a significant amount of energy and store it somewhere so that you could drop that supply from 20x+ to less than 3x. The larger the energy storage, the lower the average supply you can get away with. With conventional power, the supply ranges from around 80% to 100% available, so the system only needs about 50% excess capacity to meet demand without intermediate storage.
Your fridge can stand to shut down for five minutes to ride out a sudden but brief peak in demand. Those do happen. The 'Corrie Break' is a very well-known example, occuring predictably during the mid-episode break of Coronation Street in the UK - it's caused by millions of people simutainously going to put the kettle on.
These short term peaks are not the problem when it comes to renewable power generation. Those short peaks a (and troughs) are a problem that all power generation must face (and already deals with reasonably well). The problem with renwables is longer term generation across hours and days. You cant simply postpone running the pump for the water tower for two days because the weather forecast calls for cloudy and 0 wind for the next two days. The reality is that there is no amount of jiggering with the demand that will buy you that kind of time, and using only renewables without intermediate storage cannot provide reliable enough power supply across these larger time scales. A very large part of the cost of power generation is the cost of maintaining facilities, whether they are being used or not, so keeping a bunch of backup generation available for no-wind times, will only massively increase the already high cost of renewables. Ultimately the only way most renewables work is with lots of intermediate power storage to maintain the supply during low production periods.
Does that happen every time a coal or gas or nuclear plant has to perform an emergency shut down due to a fault? No? Why is that? Could it be that they keep some capacity in reserve? So why can't you simply build more renewable energy than you need most of the time, to cover those occasions when there is little wind?
Because without intermediate storage, the excess capacity that would have to be kept would be at least an order of magnitude greater than the "normal" fluctuation in the renewable supply. That "normal" fluctuation is already huge, so the excess capacity would have to dwarf the demand. Back of the napkins estimates would be around two orders of magnitude greater power production on average than demand on average. Renewables cant meet current demand, how are you going to achieve 100x that amount? Even if you could get it down to 10x (An amount far lower than I would be willing to bet on), that would still be outside the realm of feasibility, and even if it were feasible would be expensive enough to be impractical compared to large scale intermediate power storage...
I think you missed the point of the article. Demand is far easier to manipulate.
Demand is only easy to manipulate on short time scales. The longer the scale, the harder to manipulate. On scales of anything above an hour or so, it is impossible to regulate any better than we already are without large scale storage. Individuals and organizations are not going to tolerate waiting two days to activate device xyz, just because the northern hemisphere is experiencing a cloudy stagnant week with no wind. that means large scale non-renewable power generation facilities which cost a damn fortune to maintain, whether you're using them or not. The fact of the matter is that renewable sources are not sufficient for baseline power production. There is no amount of jiggering with the power grid, nor incentives that are going to affect that enough to matter, because fluctuations in power demand happen on timescales of hours, and fluctuations in renewable supply happen on timescales of days. The only way to get the two to jibe is to use intermediate storage capable of smoothing the fluctuations across the longest gaps, which means storage capable of meeting demand across days with no power input at all. That is not at all a trivial amount of storage, and again, no amount of playing with the demand can close a gap of days.
No, that's not what he is proposing. He is suggesting that the demand can be controlled to some extent with smart appliances, some assistance from industry and small scale storage.
On that score, he is just plain wrong. The demand side predictability is not the real problem. The problem is that with renewables, there are large periods (hours and days in length) when the supply does not meet the demand. No amount of jiggering with appliances is going to close that gap. Significantly oversizing the supply, or significant storage is the only way to solve the fundamental problem. This guy is assuming that the shortfalls in the supply side are on the order of minutes. The reality is that the shortfall is on the order of days. You cant put off running a refrigerator for two days because there is a two day period of low wind in your offshore wind farms, no matter how far in advance you predict the shortage...
Does he? His only claim here is that both supply and demand can be predicted, and that these can be choreographed to optimize utilization. He mentions that current power generation technologies are not available 100% of the time and proposes that the predictable variability of renewable power would be functionally no different. Nowhere does his proposal require loss-less, instantaneous, unlimited transmission of power.
The problem with this moron is two fold. First, he is not an electrical engineer, but a physicist which gives him absolutely zero qualification as an electrical grid engineer. The second and more direct problem with his hypothesis is that the system he describes is a classical control problem. In a normal control configuration, you have a demand for resources which you use your control of the supply to meet. It is a largely closed loop operation. With this guys setup, you have your usual, largely, uncontrollable demand, but now you are meeting that demand with uncontrollable supply. At best case, you have some limited ability to reduce the supply, but with renewable, there is a fixed upper limit to your supply, which could at any given moment amount to zero, or close to it. With base-load supply (such as coal or nuclear), there is a minimum supply you can count on, which is your fall back, and is 100% (or close to it) reliable. With renewable, you have only half of the controllability (no ability to increase production) which means you have to size the grid so that the odds of not producing enough power at any given moment is many standard deviations below capacity (probably at least 5 for reasonable reliability). That means making a power grid that produces several orders of magnitude more power than needed , on average, just so that the low point in the production scale is still above the high point in the demand scale. Its an idiotic solution from an engineering perspective, and is a perfect example of why scientists should not try to venture opinions outside their expertise.
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Pressure is equivalent to temperature, one begets the other. Since all cases of observable fusion requires high pressure, explain to me how you are going to get the pressure without the temperature? Are you going to crazy glue the atoms together?
PV=nRT only means anything in regards to thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is a statistical description of the behavior of large quantities of matter. All fusion physics is about the individual behavior of the elementary particles involved. Pressure and temperature are ways to achieve the desired proximity of the nuclei, but they are not the only ways.
Only after you've isolated all the contributing factors involved so you can replicate them. So long as there are unknown factors influencing the outcome positive results will appear to happen at random. So long as verifiable transmutation is occasionally occurring *something* is clearly happening, the challenge is to figure out what is different between the experiments that work and the ones that don't. And from what I've heard it seems that certain sub-microscopic imperfections in the host material are likely at least one of the necessary preconditions. And those are damnably hard to replicate intentionally.
The most likely answer is that Rossi is cheating by feeding power into the machine in such a way as to feed more power in than is being reported by the instruments. If you follow some of the links in the attached article, you'll find a wonderful description of how to fool power metering equipment. The researchers could have easily ruled this out using a little subterfuge of their own. Had they built their own custom outlet with a hidden set of power meters placed on the upstream side of the plug, they could have guaranteed an accurate reading, and would have been able to compare that with the "official" reading. A significant mismatch would have proven willful deception on Rossi's part (thus proving the entire thing to be fraud). A match in readings would have verified experimentally that they were not being swindled in this particular respect. It would have been a simple way to gain further insight into Rossis device while allowing him the latitude to believe he is strictly controlling the experiment. (Give him every opportunity to cheat and think he will get away with it, while secretly checking up on his actions).
Sadly, The most likely answer to this riddle is that all of the so called researchers are complicit. They seem to get together regularly and try to figure out ways to make the "experiments" seem more valid while still allowing them to be gamed.
The reason he didn't describe how it works is almost certainly because IT DOESN'T WORK.
Funny but FTFA:
The researchers observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, or âoefar more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.â
That pretty much puts an end to the "doesnt work" crap. As they stated, if it is a hoax, the guy has developed a device that can store and regurgitate energy with a far greater energy density than gasoline. If all it is, is a battery, then by itself it would be worth almost as much as cold fusion, as it can store and produce 600+ horsepower for an hour (1.5MW hours). Thats enough to move a typical passenger vehicle 300+ miles on a power supply the size of a stick of dynamite. If the guy had created a device, of any kind, that can do this, then he has no reason to try to swindle investors in a cold fusion scam, he going to be Elon Musks new best friend for life.
I especially love the part in the MS research video where they use Google to perform a search...
Priceless
just pick something with steady demand and limited supply.
every advance in technology raises the bar such that a larger percentage of the population is simply incapable of being trained to perform *any* needed labor function. Right now, the bar excludes a very small # (maybe 1% of the population). What happens when trucks drive themselves? Thats 3 million people who will go from earning ~40k / year to earning less than 20k per year. What happens when planes can fly themselves? What happens when being able to program a computer is a "base" skillset, that you cant be employed if you cant at least do that? I know a large number of people who will never be intelligent enough to handle tasks that require the same level of abilities as programming. What do we do with them? Darwin them off?
Sure, eventually we might not need plumbers, or welders, or A/C repairmen, or someone t give a sponge bath, but by then we'll have the luxury to carry 20%, likely 80%, of the population with need of their labor to provide for us all - work will be a matter of psychological health, not productivity eventually. But I won't live to see it; that's not this generation's problem to solve.
We already carry close to 20% of the population, when you count forced early retirement, underemployed and chronic unemployment. The tea party plays on this very "welfare state" concept to draw in working class Americans. How will that play out as the unemployment numbers increase? Capitalism will not / can not tolerate unemployment in large amounts. It causes the value of labor to asymptotically approach zero due to the law of supply and demand.
The end of mindless menial labor is a good thing.
Only if our economic systems are capable of handling that set of circumstances. What should the roughly 20% of people who are below 85 IQ do to survive? They simply will never be able to handle jobs requiring more than simple manual labor, so when those jobs are gone, how do they earn a living? Welfare? Charity? They starve to death?
I could almost even live with any of those options as long as it was on the table for general public discussion and debate. As it stands now, the politicians treat it like social security: a third rail of politics...
Would you initaite interspecies contact with a species that wonders whether you go with white wine or red? Would you invade a world where the inhabitants are as likely to reach for a jar of brown sauce as a weapon?
It'll be pretty obvious when any other species on this planet becomes advanced enough to be accepted as intelligent enough to warrant the same protections as society affords to humans. That species will be making their own tools. I can teach a cat to open a door. Beyond it being cute, it really doesn't require that much intelligence...
The latter is what provides the ethical argument for treating anything that we can consider "near" human as human for various purposes such as whether to eat them. If we're so considerate of ourselves that cannibalism is usually considered a grievous crime, then maybe we should be a bit more considerate of animals that approach us in intellect.
We don't eat people because of the implied threat from society. Society places value on human life, and works to prevent cannibalism as such. If the animals organized such that there was a threat of meaningful consequences of eating animals, then we would stop eating animals. As long as the animals are not smart enough to organize their own defense, then I'll be damned if I'm going to stop eating them, much less defend them from others.
If you spent half the time perusing the spec than you spent duplicating the STL, you would not find the behaviour "unexpected", you'd save time and other people would find it easier to follow your code.
This.
I had been away from C++ for a little over a decade (got suckered into web design among other things). When I came back to it two years ago, I was pleasantly surprised at the improvements in the language. Specifically, the STL improvements, and the Boost libraries made light work of projects that used to take forever to code and debug. Even the string class I found to be indispensable, even if its interactions with non-c++ code is less than optimal, it still beats C-style string manipulation by leaps and bounds.
Having used Java, PHP and Perl in the mean time, I found C++11 to have incorporated many of the best features of these other languages without loosing much of the performance that was the reason I had gone back to C/C++ for this project.
The same could be said about pretty much everything. The things you like are incredibly boring and stupid to a lot of people.
Yes, but I'm sure that no one spends huge amounts of their tax dollars supporting his boring recreational activities...
You forget that this is a democracy. If the laws are wrong, petulance isn't really the answer.
We don't live in a democracy, and never have. Until and unless we have a real democracy, "By the people, for the people and of the people" is just a pretty fiction designed to keep the sheeple in line. The only way this will ever change is through aggressive "petulance"
Plus it's not like C++/ObjC have no runtime. For example, if you don't have the right VC++ redistributable installed, you'll get nowhere trying to run C++ application compiled in VC++. Their runtime just doesn't include a JIT compilation stage (for better or worse)
If your only experience with C / C++ is MS VSxxxx, its no wonder you hate the thing so much. The MS tool chains have never been standards compliant, and they have absolutely zero qualms about breaking their customers legacy code just for random changes. When are developers going to learn their lesson and stop relying on MS for anything they don't have to. You end up locked to MS and they can do whatever they want to you (including large scale cash withdrawal).
That having been said, c++11 is actually a rather more modernized language, but you can bet MS will never fully or properly support it. They prefer to add their own idiot solutions that lock people to MS. A good example of this is the TerminateThread function in VC++. On the surface, this function seems very useful if you have no idea how multithreaded system should work. There is no equivalent in C++11, and in fact, POSIX has no real support for the concept at all. The reason is that the functionality that this provides is a monumentally bad idea, and there are absolutely zero situations where using this would be a better / easier/ faster solution than the traditional multi threading algorithms. In fact, this function is extremely difficult to use in a way that doesn't cause all kind of program stability problems, and if a programmer is even slightly tempted to use it, odds are they simply don't understand the implications, and should seek outside help understanding multi threading.
Microsoft VC++ has thousands of little land mines like that, making it a horrible platform to use as a basis for any project. Never minding vendor lock in, the development environment itself is badly flawed.
wasn't there something a while ago about someone getting hammered for firing a .22 at the white house (think two inch thick laminated glass) while the president was abroad, yet he still got it for attempted assassination?
It was the motivation and intended outcome that mattered in that case. He shot at the White House with every reason to believe that the president was there, and no reason to believe that his bullet wouldn't penetrate the building and hit someone. He was guilty of attempted assassination. Just because he was ignorant doesn't mean he wasn't malicious.
Traffic lights and crosswalks are certainly not mainly for the convenience of drivers, but are still very much necessary to save the lives of the few people that may have to walk into traffic
The same argument was made in favor of the reduction in speed limits. You might be right, you might not be...Show me the numbers...
many studies have shown that when a car hits a pedestrian at 40mph the fatality rate is ten times greater than 30MPH. and in a school zone, there are a lot of kids around... we should be more vigilant about revoking drivers licenses.
How often do kids end up in a street around a school? Even during student arrivals and departures?
The reality is that it just isn't that often.
The hidden cost of speed limits is monumental: There are more than 100 million people driving to work in the US alone. The average commute is 25 minutes. If we slowed the speed limits by 10 MPH, that would increase the commute by a little less than 20%, so about 4 minutes per driver per day. That works out about 6.6 Million hours per day, or just over 1.4 billion hours per year. At an average US wage of over $20 / hour, The lost productivity is around 28 billion dollars per year.
Back in the 70's, the conservationists claimed we would get 5% or better improvement in fuel economy by switching to 55 MPH instead of 65. Turned out to be less than 1% improvement. That amounts to a saving of about 1.5 Billion Gallons of gas, or $6 Billion USD. So we spent 28 Billion to save 6 Billion.
OK, so we assume the rest is in lives saved. The NTSB has concluded that the reduced speed limits from 65 to 55 saved around 4000 lives annually, with reductions in speed limits from 45 to 35 saving less than 500 lives per year. Even all told, an across the board reduction in speed limits by 10 MPH would only save 5500 lives. That amounts to a cost to the economy of $4 Million USD per year per life saved. To put that in perspective, Mamograms are estimated to cost less than $50,000 per year per life saved.
So what about the school zones? how many Children are killed in these zones? The truth is that no one even keeps statistics that have any meaning because it happens so infrequently. Thats not to say that kids die from it infrequently, thats saying that kids are very rarely even hit in these zones. Its rare enough that we don't even really have a big enough sample size to be statistically useful.
The statistical truth at the end of the day is that our current speed limits cost our economy far more than they save. The Germans did what Germans do: They did the math. They concluded that on open highway speed limits would cost their economy more than they cared to pay, so they did away with them where they were not needed.
Seriously don't execute the halt and catch fire instruction.
At least he didn't accidentally execute an LNM instruction. This looks like it might also have been an attempt at SRSD with an SSD...
People would lost their minds here if electricity prices tripled.
Thats the difference between the US and Germany. People in Germany have *chosen* to pay more for electricity and gas. They did so because they know that their money is buying better living conditions for everyone. Thats is why they have such high taxes. Funny but the typical standard of living in Germany is much better than the US in spite of the high taxes. In the US, its the exact opposite. Everyone wants theirs and Fuck everyone else. In the end everyone in the US suffers except the dwindling few who can hold on to upper middle class or better.
US starts buying more nuclear power from Canada, quickly pulling a Germany. In 5 years, subsidies much like those in Germany will then be gutted, and there will be a mass rush to build new coal and NG power plants until reactors can be refurbished or built anew.
Almost: Germany has been in a mad rush for quite a while to build solar and wind power production. The whole country is dotted with thousands of wind turbines, and a massive percentage of the country have solar panels to reduce their power demands from the grid. In short, Germany has been preparing for a while to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, and was consequently in a position to abandon nuclear power instead. At their current build rate, in 10 years, they will only need 50% of the fossil fuels they use today, even with the nuclear plants shut down
The key to their success is that, for Germans, the overriding goal is environmental protection. Its a national obsession (Probably owing to complete lack of available land, and limited fossil fuels). Like Japan, one bad nuclear accident is guaranteed to affect a massive percentage of the population, fossil fuels leaves them too reliant on foreign powers. It means that Germany's only real option is renewable energy sources, and they have the political will and industrial might to make it happen.
Unlike American politics, the anti-environment sociopaths don't last long in German politics.
The reason you need so much available is so that statistically speaking, you will never have a time when your supply is insufficient to meet demand. If your supply fluctuates between 20% and 100% of supply, then 100% needs to be 5x as much as demand to account for it. With renewables, the fluctuation can be anywhere from 5%-6% to 100%, meaning you would need at least 20x the *peak* demand to match potential minimum supply. In reality, you would need more than that as a margin for error. The more sane solution is to buffer a significant amount of energy and store it somewhere so that you could drop that supply from 20x+ to less than 3x. The larger the energy storage, the lower the average supply you can get away with. With conventional power, the supply ranges from around 80% to 100% available, so the system only needs about 50% excess capacity to meet demand without intermediate storage.
Your fridge can stand to shut down for five minutes to ride out a sudden but brief peak in demand. Those do happen. The 'Corrie Break' is a very well-known example, occuring predictably during the mid-episode break of Coronation Street in the UK - it's caused by millions of people simutainously going to put the kettle on.
These short term peaks are not the problem when it comes to renewable power generation. Those short peaks a (and troughs) are a problem that all power generation must face (and already deals with reasonably well). The problem with renwables is longer term generation across hours and days. You cant simply postpone running the pump for the water tower for two days because the weather forecast calls for cloudy and 0 wind for the next two days. The reality is that there is no amount of jiggering with the demand that will buy you that kind of time, and using only renewables without intermediate storage cannot provide reliable enough power supply across these larger time scales. A very large part of the cost of power generation is the cost of maintaining facilities, whether they are being used or not, so keeping a bunch of backup generation available for no-wind times, will only massively increase the already high cost of renewables. Ultimately the only way most renewables work is with lots of intermediate power storage to maintain the supply during low production periods.
Does that happen every time a coal or gas or nuclear plant has to perform an emergency shut down due to a fault? No? Why is that? Could it be that they keep some capacity in reserve? So why can't you simply build more renewable energy than you need most of the time, to cover those occasions when there is little wind?
Because without intermediate storage, the excess capacity that would have to be kept would be at least an order of magnitude greater than the "normal" fluctuation in the renewable supply. That "normal" fluctuation is already huge, so the excess capacity would have to dwarf the demand. Back of the napkins estimates would be around two orders of magnitude greater power production on average than demand on average. Renewables cant meet current demand, how are you going to achieve 100x that amount? Even if you could get it down to 10x (An amount far lower than I would be willing to bet on), that would still be outside the realm of feasibility, and even if it were feasible would be expensive enough to be impractical compared to large scale intermediate power storage...
I think you missed the point of the article. Demand is far easier to manipulate.
Demand is only easy to manipulate on short time scales. The longer the scale, the harder to manipulate. On scales of anything above an hour or so, it is impossible to regulate any better than we already are without large scale storage. Individuals and organizations are not going to tolerate waiting two days to activate device xyz, just because the northern hemisphere is experiencing a cloudy stagnant week with no wind. that means large scale non-renewable power generation facilities which cost a damn fortune to maintain, whether you're using them or not. The fact of the matter is that renewable sources are not sufficient for baseline power production. There is no amount of jiggering with the power grid, nor incentives that are going to affect that enough to matter, because fluctuations in power demand happen on timescales of hours, and fluctuations in renewable supply happen on timescales of days. The only way to get the two to jibe is to use intermediate storage capable of smoothing the fluctuations across the longest gaps, which means storage capable of meeting demand across days with no power input at all. That is not at all a trivial amount of storage, and again, no amount of playing with the demand can close a gap of days.
No, that's not what he is proposing. He is suggesting that the demand can be controlled to some extent with smart appliances, some assistance from industry and small scale storage.
On that score, he is just plain wrong. The demand side predictability is not the real problem. The problem is that with renewables, there are large periods (hours and days in length) when the supply does not meet the demand. No amount of jiggering with appliances is going to close that gap. Significantly oversizing the supply, or significant storage is the only way to solve the fundamental problem. This guy is assuming that the shortfalls in the supply side are on the order of minutes. The reality is that the shortfall is on the order of days. You cant put off running a refrigerator for two days because there is a two day period of low wind in your offshore wind farms, no matter how far in advance you predict the shortage...
Does he? His only claim here is that both supply and demand can be predicted, and that these can be choreographed to optimize utilization. He mentions that current power generation technologies are not available 100% of the time and proposes that the predictable variability of renewable power would be functionally no different. Nowhere does his proposal require loss-less, instantaneous, unlimited transmission of power.
The problem with this moron is two fold. First, he is not an electrical engineer, but a physicist which gives him absolutely zero qualification as an electrical grid engineer. The second and more direct problem with his hypothesis is that the system he describes is a classical control problem. In a normal control configuration, you have a demand for resources which you use your control of the supply to meet. It is a largely closed loop operation. With this guys setup, you have your usual, largely, uncontrollable demand, but now you are meeting that demand with uncontrollable supply. At best case, you have some limited ability to reduce the supply, but with renewable, there is a fixed upper limit to your supply, which could at any given moment amount to zero, or close to it. With base-load supply (such as coal or nuclear), there is a minimum supply you can count on, which is your fall back, and is 100% (or close to it) reliable. With renewable, you have only half of the controllability (no ability to increase production) which means you have to size the grid so that the odds of not producing enough power at any given moment is many standard deviations below capacity (probably at least 5 for reasonable reliability). That means making a power grid that produces several orders of magnitude more power than needed , on average, just so that the low point in the production scale is still above the high point in the demand scale. Its an idiotic solution from an engineering perspective, and is a perfect example of why scientists should not try to venture opinions outside their expertise.