A typical nuclear power plant generates a gigawatt of *CONSTANT* power.
At least that, between 1.2 and 1.7 Gw appears to be typical for a gen 3 reactor. A plant can have several reactors.
A 1.5 megawatt turbine (and keep in mind these things are gigantic) typically produces at around 20% of capacity, highly variable, but let's pretend we could store the power somehow or get enough of 'em to magically balance out.
That means you'd need like 3333 turbines to replace a consistent nuclear output with an inconsistent power source. Turbines that would need constant maintenance. And this is for a traditional 1 gig nuclear power plant, not one of the new designs, or larger ones.
You'd also need a lot of materials to build the towers to put all those turbines on as well as all the cable to link them together and probably something to make sure that this huge number of generators were properly in sync. All of this kit is also going to require maintenance. Especially considering that it's going to be outside in all weathers.
How much land would that cover? About 77,000 acres, or 312 square kilometres. That's a square 18 kilometres on a side filled with them. Of course, wind power is not exactly environmentally neutral if you consider constructional, maintenance, and impact on bats, birds and weather patterns.
Assuming that you can pack them that close together. Being in the wake of another turbine may not be good for either turbines or the towers holding them up.
So, this weekend if I go downtown to where all of the bars and nightlife are, and I start snapping pictures of people doing various things. Quietly, and unobtrusively mind you.
Now, say I create a facebook account with false profile information, solely so I can upload pictures of people I don't know doing various (and possibly stupid) things. You're no longer some random, mostly anonymous guy in a picture which could have been anywhere... you're Bob from Detroit. And that guy with the crack pipe is your friend Dave and he's got an outstanding warrant.
You are assuming that whatever facial recognition algorithm Facebook is using is anything near 100% accurate. In practice none are anything like this accurate. Both the false positive and false negative rates of this system are unknown as well as being potentially large.
On the other hand, if you "confidential calls" are so confidential that you are worried about NSA, then I think you have more to worry about than simply someone eavesdropping on your conversation.
On the other hand there are plenty of well proven techniques which you can use to ensure that Eve will learn very little. e.g. using a code. Even some which can be used to discover her existance and/or identity.
The Civilian Assistance to Law Enforcement Act mandates that all telecommunications service providers install and maintain back doors into their systems for the express purpose of enabling Federal law enforcement to intercept private communications.
Assuming that a) they will only ever use such backdoors for the right purposes and b) no other entity will be able to use them.
If a closed source proprietary VOIP provider offers encryption, they are directly obstructing law enforcement agencies in the execution of their lawfully authorized surveillance activities.
Such an obstruction would apply regardless of if the surveillance is "lawfully authorized" or not.
The question I have is whether he was asked to take it down before risking suspension? I am sure many students don't realise that the school technically owns the rights to work done in school.
If this were the case then the school could have sent Google a takedown notice without involving him at all.
The whole terrorism thing isn't viable if people laugh at you - it will be hard to recruit people if the last lot died horribly
Or in other cases didn't even manage to get the "suicide" bit right...
and become a national joke.
It looks an even bigger joke if the authorities appear to putting most of their efforts in to stopping these idiots when there are people operating in the UK. Responsible for the recent death of PC Kerr. Apparently able to place working bombs wherever they feel like.
The article says that each flywheel can "...absorb energy from the grid and discharge 1 megawatt for as much as 15 minutes." Therefore each flywheel is good for up to 0.25 MW*h, and 200 of them should be good for 50 MW*h, not 20 MW*h. I guess there are inefficiencies depending on how fast you extract power, much like batteries.
The generators need to turn at both the right speed (3,000 or 3,600 rpm) and be in sync with every other generator on the grid. Wind turbines have the same issue. But the speed variation with a flywheel is likely to be less and you'd only have to disconnect the generator in case of an under speed rather than both an under and over speed.
In the case of these things, there seem to be many small ones (less risk if one "escapes") and something tells me that carbon fiber disks that are carefully stabilized and levitated in a vacuum while spinning incredibly fast...would break into a thousand pieces the second they left containment rather than rolling down the street and through someone's house.
I suspect your house would stand up better to being hit by one big lump of something than being in the path of what is, in effect, a very large shotgun.
It's a good method, even if a bit old... The flywheel was a mainstay of machine shops in the 1700 and 1800's. It's perfect for use with wind or solar that can change with weather. It lends itself nicely to generating electricity because rotation is something you already need to do.
An 18th century steam engine (or even water wheel) was probably a more reliable source of power than current wind or solar. Wind power has actually been around for more than two thousand years, but still has the basic problem of being intermittent.
Dumber question: if one imagines a vast number of these flywheels buffering intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar at enough scale to power the US, will the flywheels slow the rotation of the Earth significantly?
These things won't affect the Earth in any significent way. What's probably more an issue is how they would behave in an earthquake...
I used to live near the Ben Cruachan pumped storage station. It can generate 440MW for 22 hours and can start up in 30 seconds, which is pretty damned impressive. This flywheel installation can generate 20MW for 15 minutes,
440MW for 22 hours is nearly 35 TJ whereas 20MW for 15 minutes is 18 GJ. The actual mechanical energy stored in such a system would depend on the maximum and minimum speeds of the flywheel.
so it's nowhere near the same league, but is likely to be vastly cheaper and a hell of a lot more portable, not requiring a mountain to install it in.
Does the cost include being able to contain a flywheel failure? Since the units are so close together a single uncontained failure could be the end of the whole plant.
I know there are GM crops resistant to certain herbicides, but in the absence of those herbicides they grow identically to their unmodified siblings.
How does their herbicide resistance actually work. Does the plant only react to the chemical or does produce a counter agent as part of it's normal metabolic process? If the latter then the GM plant isn't growing identically to a non GM plant and you'd have a mechanism for the GM plant producing a poorer yield than the non GM plant.
My only thoughts is that the pilots didn't believe the stick shaker since they were pretty sure the speed sensor had failed.
AFAIK There isn't a stick on a FBW Airbus.
Bottom line, without an indicated air speed, its is extremely difficult to figure out how close you are to death.
There is a specific procedure for pilots to apply in such a situation in an A330. That is to apply plus 5 degrees pitch and move the throttles to the CL position.
Really? Think about that again, please. The astronauts on board the International Space Station are not accelerating... they're in a continous free fall at a constant speed around the Earth (called orbiting).
Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. Velocity a vector quantity consisting of both speed and direction. Even a perfectly circular orbit with a constant speed involves acceleration. Don't they teach this in high school any more?
If there was an acceleration force, anybody on board would feel that force as varying degrees of gravity, however, once a terminal velocity is reached they would become weightless because the aircraft would be falling around them at the same rate they were falling.
You actually have this completely the wrong way around. If you are in a vehicle accelerating downwards at exactly 1G you will appear to be "weightless". Once the vehicle reaches terminal velocity it is no longer accelerating. You will then experience 1G. So far as the physics is concerned it dosn't matter if you are in a Soyuz capsule or an A330.
1. GMOs create monocultures which could severely damage society by allowing for a majority of crop types to be of one kind. If something comes along which the plants have no resistance to and wipes out the majority of crops sold on the planet we're fucked.
Monocultures have been an issue with agriculture since long before anyone even had any idea what a "gene" actually was. Note that many commercially important crops are effectivly "clones"
2. GMOs are patented. When the GMOs seed and spread to fields which do not have GMOs the owner of the patent can sue the farmer for using a crop which they own the patent for even though it's a derivative created by natural processes.
This is an actual problem. But the only people who can fix it are legislators.
3. GMOs require more and more pesticides because they're built to only germinate when the pesticide is used.
Whilst it might be possible to do this it would probably be beyond current abilities to alter a plant's genome in such a way. To influence a plant in such a way requires rather more precision than being able to have some "alien" genes placed randomly in the genome be expressed in the adult plant.
For example, how would you enable huge page files in linux? If you don't know and are looking for how to enable it and set permissions for processes to access it simply using man isn't going to cut it. You would have to rely on google to help you with it. To the same extent in fact that changing the above mentioned setting would require doing a google search. I would instead argue that changing system settings on both platforms are on average about the same as they both require knowledge of how to use the system and quite frankly documentation of one form or another
Altering such settings something a user shouldn't even be thinking about in the first place. It's something for system administrator. To use the overworked car analogy it would be like a driver expecting to have controls on the dashboard to fit oversized pistons...
Good luck getting her to install Windows, if it didn't already come with it. It goes both ways. I know, "but all [*] PCs come with windows". Indeed. So I don't see "but you installed it for her" as a negative on the usability side.
How usable a OEM install of Windows actually is can also be relevent. In plenty of cases it might need an expert to first remove "crapware" and trialware from the machine. As well as installing the likes of working anti-malware software...
You missed one thing:
YOU INSTALLED IT FOR HER.
Good luck getting grandma to take her XP box, back up all her data, install Linux, restore her data, get all the necessary software, and if need be, locate and install the necessary drivers. If she has someone to do that for her, then she'll probably be okay.
Did this person install (and configure) Windows XP themselves? Could they "upgrade" to Vista/7 themselves? IME Windows is by far the most tricky set of operating systems when it comes to needing drivers not bundled with the OS Installer. That includes 2008/7...
"Elevation of starting location is 158.171 meters. A tsunami must start in the ocean."
Then again, I was trying to create a tsunami on Lake Michigan.
Maybe the model they are using dosn't allow for impact generated tsunamis. Is water density also a factor. I suspect the water depth is more relevent than its elevation too.
From what I have read, Righthaven didn't actually aquire any copyrights. They aquired the right to sue for copyright violations. Which means they don't actually own any copyrights.
Sounds like they are in effect a "shell corporation" specifically to allow some other entity/ies to sue without risk of any counter suits.
Those reactors are 45 year old technology, took a direct tsunami hit right after an earthquake that was in the top 3 worst ever recorded, exploded, caught fire, and resulted in a grand total of... zero deaths.
IIRC two people were killed at the plant by the earthquake. Both the earthquake and tsunami were of much greater magnitude than anything considered by the designers.
It's interesting that no attempt has been made to compare damage at this plant with that at other industrial plants in Japan. The press has also been silent on toxic chemical spills resulting from the earthquake and tsunami.
Also, 28 years still sounds way too long for copyright to me.
It was actually 14+14. But that was in the past where it could take literally years to distribute to all possible customers. Yet copyright terms have been going up rather than down as communications improved.
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A typical nuclear power plant generates a gigawatt of *CONSTANT* power.
At least that, between 1.2 and 1.7 Gw appears to be typical for a gen 3 reactor. A plant can have several reactors.
A 1.5 megawatt turbine (and keep in mind these things are gigantic) typically produces at around 20% of capacity, highly variable, but let's pretend we could store the power somehow or get enough of 'em to magically balance out.
That means you'd need like 3333 turbines to replace a consistent nuclear output with an inconsistent power source. Turbines that would need constant maintenance. And this is for a traditional 1 gig nuclear power plant, not one of the new designs, or larger ones.
You'd also need a lot of materials to build the towers to put all those turbines on as well as all the cable to link them together and probably something to make sure that this huge number of generators were properly in sync. All of this kit is also going to require maintenance. Especially considering that it's going to be outside in all weathers.
How much land would that cover? About 77,000 acres, or 312 square kilometres. That's a square 18 kilometres on a side filled with them. Of course, wind power is not exactly environmentally neutral if you consider constructional, maintenance, and impact on bats, birds and weather patterns.
Assuming that you can pack them that close together. Being in the wake of another turbine may not be good for either turbines or the towers holding them up.
So, this weekend if I go downtown to where all of the bars and nightlife are, and I start snapping pictures of people doing various things. Quietly, and unobtrusively mind you. ... you're Bob from Detroit. And that guy with the crack pipe is your friend Dave and he's got an outstanding warrant.
Now, say I create a facebook account with false profile information, solely so I can upload pictures of people I don't know doing various (and possibly stupid) things. You're no longer some random, mostly anonymous guy in a picture which could have been anywhere
You are assuming that whatever facial recognition algorithm Facebook is using is anything near 100% accurate. In practice none are anything like this accurate. Both the false positive and false negative rates of this system are unknown as well as being potentially large.
On the other hand, if you "confidential calls" are so confidential that you are worried about NSA, then I think you have more to worry about than simply someone eavesdropping on your conversation.
On the other hand there are plenty of well proven techniques which you can use to ensure that Eve will learn very little. e.g. using a code.
Even some which can be used to discover her existance and/or identity.
The Civilian Assistance to Law Enforcement Act mandates that all telecommunications service providers install and maintain back doors into their systems for the express purpose of enabling Federal law enforcement to intercept private communications.
Assuming that a) they will only ever use such backdoors for the right purposes and b) no other entity will be able to use them.
If a closed source proprietary VOIP provider offers encryption, they are directly obstructing law enforcement agencies in the execution of their lawfully authorized surveillance activities.
Such an obstruction would apply regardless of if the surveillance is "lawfully authorized" or not.
The question I have is whether he was asked to take it down before risking suspension? I am sure many students don't realise that the school technically owns the rights to work done in school.
If this were the case then the school could have sent Google a takedown notice without involving him at all.
You mean something like pottasium chlorate, the main ingredient in match heads?
You'd need rather a lot of match heads. Before you'd have any chance of combining with sugar to make any sort of explosive.
The whole terrorism thing isn't viable if people laugh at you - it will be hard to recruit people if the last lot died horribly
Or in other cases didn't even manage to get the "suicide" bit right...
and become a national joke.
It looks an even bigger joke if the authorities appear to putting most of their efforts in to stopping these idiots when there are people operating in the UK. Responsible for the recent death of PC Kerr. Apparently able to place working bombs wherever they feel like.
The article says that each flywheel can "...absorb energy from the grid and discharge 1 megawatt for as much as 15 minutes." Therefore each flywheel is good for up to 0.25 MW*h, and 200 of them should be good for 50 MW*h, not 20 MW*h. I guess there are inefficiencies depending on how fast you extract power, much like batteries.
The generators need to turn at both the right speed (3,000 or 3,600 rpm) and be in sync with every other generator on the grid. Wind turbines have the same issue. But the speed variation with a flywheel is likely to be less and you'd only have to disconnect the generator in case of an under speed rather than both an under and over speed.
In the case of these things, there seem to be many small ones (less risk if one "escapes") and something tells me that carbon fiber disks that are carefully stabilized and levitated in a vacuum while spinning incredibly fast...would break into a thousand pieces the second they left containment rather than rolling down the street and through someone's house.
I suspect your house would stand up better to being hit by one big lump of something than being in the path of what is, in effect, a very large shotgun.
It's a good method, even if a bit old... The flywheel was a mainstay of machine shops in the 1700 and 1800's. It's perfect for use with wind or solar that can change with weather. It lends itself nicely to generating electricity because rotation is something you already need to do.
An 18th century steam engine (or even water wheel) was probably a more reliable source of power than current wind or solar. Wind power has actually been around for more than two thousand years, but still has the basic problem of being intermittent.
Dumber question: if one imagines a vast number of these flywheels buffering intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar at enough scale to power the US, will the flywheels slow the rotation of the Earth significantly?
These things won't affect the Earth in any significent way. What's probably more an issue is how they would behave in an earthquake...
I used to live near the Ben Cruachan pumped storage station. It can generate 440MW for 22 hours and can start up in 30 seconds, which is pretty damned impressive. This flywheel installation can generate 20MW for 15 minutes,
440MW for 22 hours is nearly 35 TJ whereas 20MW for 15 minutes is 18 GJ. The actual mechanical energy stored in such a system would depend on the maximum and minimum speeds of the flywheel.
so it's nowhere near the same league, but is likely to be vastly cheaper and a hell of a lot more portable, not requiring a mountain to install it in.
Does the cost include being able to contain a flywheel failure? Since the units are so close together a single uncontained failure could be the end of the whole plant.
I know there are GM crops resistant to certain herbicides, but in the absence of those herbicides they grow identically to their unmodified siblings.
How does their herbicide resistance actually work. Does the plant only react to the chemical or does produce a counter agent as part of it's normal metabolic process? If the latter then the GM plant isn't growing identically to a non GM plant and you'd have a mechanism for the GM plant producing a poorer yield than the non GM plant.
My only thoughts is that the pilots didn't believe the stick shaker since they were pretty sure the speed sensor had failed.
AFAIK There isn't a stick on a FBW Airbus.
Bottom line, without an indicated air speed, its is extremely difficult to figure out how close you are to death.
There is a specific procedure for pilots to apply in such a situation in an A330. That is to apply plus 5 degrees pitch and move the throttles to the CL position.
Really? Think about that again, please. The astronauts on board the International Space Station are not accelerating... they're in a continous free fall at a constant speed around the Earth (called orbiting).
Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. Velocity a vector quantity consisting of both speed and direction. Even a perfectly circular orbit with a constant speed involves acceleration. Don't they teach this in high school any more?
If there was an acceleration force, anybody on board would feel that force as varying degrees of gravity, however, once a terminal velocity is reached they would become weightless because the aircraft would be falling around them at the same rate they were falling.
You actually have this completely the wrong way around. If you are in a vehicle accelerating downwards at exactly 1G you will appear to be "weightless". Once the vehicle reaches terminal velocity it is no longer accelerating. You will then experience 1G. So far as the physics is concerned it dosn't matter if you are in a Soyuz capsule or an A330.
There are GMO crops that produce their own pesticides, and these have actually REDUCE the use of pesticides.
:)
There are plenty of naturally evolved plants which produce their own pesticides some of which are toxic to "pests" rather larger than insects
1. GMOs create monocultures which could severely damage society by allowing for a majority of crop types to be of one kind. If something comes along which the plants have no resistance to and wipes out the majority of crops sold on the planet we're fucked.
Monocultures have been an issue with agriculture since long before anyone even had any idea what a "gene" actually was. Note that many commercially important crops are effectivly "clones"
2. GMOs are patented. When the GMOs seed and spread to fields which do not have GMOs the owner of the patent can sue the farmer for using a crop which they own the patent for even though it's a derivative created by natural processes.
This is an actual problem. But the only people who can fix it are legislators.
3. GMOs require more and more pesticides because they're built to only germinate when the pesticide is used.
Whilst it might be possible to do this it would probably be beyond current abilities to alter a plant's genome in such a way. To influence a plant in such a way requires rather more precision than being able to have some "alien" genes placed randomly in the genome be expressed in the adult plant.
For example, how would you enable huge page files in linux? If you don't know and are looking for how to enable it and set permissions for processes to access it simply using man isn't going to cut it. You would have to rely on google to help you with it. To the same extent in fact that changing the above mentioned setting would require doing a google search. I would instead argue that changing system settings on both platforms are on average about the same as they both require knowledge of how to use the system and quite frankly documentation of one form or another
Altering such settings something a user shouldn't even be thinking about in the first place. It's something for system administrator. To use the overworked car analogy it would be like a driver expecting to have controls on the dashboard to fit oversized pistons...
Good luck getting her to install Windows, if it didn't already come with it. It goes both ways. I know, "but all [*] PCs come with windows". Indeed. So I don't see "but you installed it for her" as a negative on the usability side.
How usable a OEM install of Windows actually is can also be relevent. In plenty of cases it might need an expert to first remove "crapware" and trialware from the machine. As well as installing the likes of working anti-malware software...
You missed one thing:
YOU INSTALLED IT FOR HER.
Good luck getting grandma to take her XP box, back up all her data, install Linux, restore her data, get all the necessary software, and if need be, locate and install the necessary drivers. If she has someone to do that for her, then she'll probably be okay.
Did this person install (and configure) Windows XP themselves? Could they "upgrade" to Vista/7 themselves?
IME Windows is by far the most tricky set of operating systems when it comes to needing drivers not bundled with the OS Installer. That includes 2008/7...
"Elevation of starting location is 158.171 meters. A tsunami must start in the ocean."
Then again, I was trying to create a tsunami on Lake Michigan.
Maybe the model they are using dosn't allow for impact generated tsunamis. Is water density also a factor. I suspect the water depth is more relevent than its elevation too.
From what I have read, Righthaven didn't actually aquire any copyrights. They aquired the right to sue for copyright violations. Which means they don't actually own any copyrights.
Sounds like they are in effect a "shell corporation" specifically to allow some other entity/ies to sue without risk of any counter suits.
Yeah, BP's spill hasn't got the whole world demanding that we review use of oil.
Nor did Piper Alpha have any such effect...
Those reactors are 45 year old technology, took a direct tsunami hit right after an earthquake that was in the top 3 worst ever recorded, exploded, caught fire, and resulted in a grand total of... zero deaths.
IIRC two people were killed at the plant by the earthquake. Both the earthquake and tsunami were of much greater magnitude than anything considered by the designers.
It's interesting that no attempt has been made to compare damage at this plant with that at other industrial plants in Japan. The press has also been silent on toxic chemical spills resulting from the earthquake and tsunami.
Also, 28 years still sounds way too long for copyright to me.
It was actually 14+14. But that was in the past where it could take literally years to distribute to all possible customers. Yet copyright terms have been going up rather than down as communications improved.