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User: afidel

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  1. Re:Bad idea! on Dump World's Nuclear Waste In Australia, Says Ex-PM Hawke · · Score: 3, Funny

    Worse, ninja dropbears, as if the normal ones aren't bad enough.

  2. Re:This could actually be good news on US Officials Cut Estimate of Recoverable Monterey Shale Oil By 96% · · Score: 1

    My numbers are total energy usage according to DoE, that includes electricity, transportation fuels, and industrial usage of non-electric sources of energy (ie how much energy we would need to go all electric)

  3. Re:This could actually be good news on US Officials Cut Estimate of Recoverable Monterey Shale Oil By 96% · · Score: 1

    Hardly, we make around 400m computers per year and a hell of a lot more labor goes into an assembled computer than a simple solar cell. Plus a .1% AFR on something solid state would be horrendously bad, mechanical hdd's (enterprise class) are at only 1.5% AFR and those are mechanical devices spinning at 15k RPM!

  4. Re:This could actually be good news on US Officials Cut Estimate of Recoverable Monterey Shale Oil By 96% · · Score: 2

    Per capita energy use in the US is ~300M BTU, or 90k kWhr, there are ~330M people in the US giving a total energy usage of ~30,000 TWhrs. Average solar insolation without tracking in Albuquerque is ~6.4kWhrs/m^2/day or 2.336 TWhrs per km^2 per year, at 10% efficiency you would need to cover 128,424 km^2 which is a bit more than 1/3rd of the land area of New Mexico.

  5. Re:4th gen reactors consume old waste as fuel ... on Radioactivity Cleanup At Hanford Nuclear Reservation, 25 Years On · · Score: 1

    We clearly have different definitions of "practical". So far no-one has built a working commercial scale breeder reactor

    ahem, there was also the 1,200 MWe unit in France, though it had horrible load availability.

  6. Re:Cloud needs server huggers on Don't Be a Server Hugger! (Video) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I run two diesel generators, they're backups for when the local utility stuffs up their responsibility and fails to provide power, it's exactly the same reason I'm not going to outsource my server farm to someone else.

  7. Re:Proprietary materials? on Autodesk Unveils 3d Printer As It Aims To Become Industry's Android · · Score: 1

    I know one of the 3D resin printer companies had some patents that just recently expired, one of the maker type printers was going to use their tech after the patents expired but they kicked off their crowdfunding campaign before that date which apparently constituted selling an infringing device.

  8. Re:Planned obsolescence on Do Embedded Systems Need a Time To Die? · · Score: 1

    Ford made $35,900 million in sales in Q1 of 2014, they have 34 assembly plants. 34 plants * 90 days * 24 hours = 73,440 hours, so "only" $0.5M per hour, but that assumes that all hours are the same, they are not and like I said when they are selling all they can of a model it easily runs into the several million per hour.

  9. Re:Electric. on Future of Cars: Hydrogen Fuel Cells, Or Electric? · · Score: 1

    No because my employer doesn't have any charging stations at our headquarters location (we do have Tesla stations at many of our shopping centers though) so I can't assume I'll be able to add any charge during the day (plus, even if this employer did there's no way I'd buy a 10 year capital purchase based on current employer amenities)

  10. Re:Economics on Future of Cars: Hydrogen Fuel Cells, Or Electric? · · Score: 1

    The Volt starts at $35k and the next generation (2016 MY) will have a low end offering starting at $30k which compares favorably with the average new car price of almost $31k last year

  11. Re:Electric. on Future of Cars: Hydrogen Fuel Cells, Or Electric? · · Score: 2

    I for one don't need 300 mile range, but I do need ~120 mile rated range because I do 50-54 miles round trip each day and I live in a place that routinely sees temps of -10F so to have enough range to cover my commute after 5+ years of battery degradation plus cold weather I need a pack that starts around 120 miles of rated range.

  12. Re:Planned obsolescence on Do Embedded Systems Need a Time To Die? · · Score: 1

    Hell, $1M per day is nothing, when the major auto companies are selling a certain line of cars as fast as they can make them downtime is in the multiple millions per hour range, and with a steel plant a cold shutdown can result in hundreds of millions in damage.

  13. Re:George Kaiser = Solyndra on Oil Man Proposes Increase In Oklahoma Oil-and-Gas Tax · · Score: 1

    Bilked? He lost his shirt is Solyndra, he owned over 1/3rd of the company and it's now bankrupt.

  14. Interesting on HP Joins OpenDaylight Project · · Score: 1

    Hmm, that's basically everyone that matters with the huge, glaring omission of VMWare. At this point EMC is going to have to decide between being the 'leader' in the field with their early initiative or being standards compliant and interoperating with everyone else. There was a time where Cisco could go it alone in networking and push their own standards, but I don't think they could today and I certainly don't think VMWare has that kind of clout.

  15. Re:The players brought this on themselves on EA Ending Online Support For Dozens of Games · · Score: 1

    NWN predates EA, as do several other titles on that list.

  16. Re:Some are offline already on EA Ending Online Support For Dozens of Games · · Score: 1

    Cool, good to know that NWN still has a way to do matchmaking post Gamespy. Even if I no longer run my own node I definitely have fond memories of NWN and realize that there's STILL not a better engine for rolling your own adventure game.

  17. Re:The only thing is... on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure? · · Score: 1

    Sure, compare the cost of what you host to what it would cost on Amazon/Azure, if you're doing things halfway competently it's not hard to beat those rates by a few hundred percent =)

  18. Re:So... providing electricity is easy, IT is hard on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Tell a Compelling Story About IT Infrastructure? · · Score: 1

    Think about it - in all the time you've worked in IT, how many times have you seen the electricity in a building just go out, without explanation? Now, how many times have you seen major server outages, costing more than a million dollars in lost productivity?

    Uh, my infrastructure has a MUCH higher uptime percentage than the local grid, we've had to send home the entire main campus workforce 3 times in the last 2 years due to power issues, we've had to do that once in the last 8 years due to IT issues (SAN meltdown due to poorly designed switches).

  19. Re:GPL release that Sun did might seem to apply... on Court: Oracle Entitled To Copyright Protection Over Some Parts of Java · · Score: 1

    Nope, as the GPL portion in question would be the Dalvik runtime libraries, not the kernel (which is also GPL but static linking to non-free drivers is a long standing practice that almost nobody thinks is GPLv2 infringing).

  20. Re:Bye-Bye Java on Court: Oracle Entitled To Copyright Protection Over Some Parts of Java · · Score: 1

    JAVA isn't consistent from one EJB server to another, let alone from one version to another. Anyone who has ever dealt with non-trivial sized java projects knows this and isn't going to complain about the slight implementation variances in any other language runtime.

  21. Re:Activist investors on Stanford Getting Rid of $18 Billion Endowment of Coal Stock · · Score: 4, Informative

    Companies only get money from stock when they offer new shares (or sell those already in company reserves), by refusing to buy shares in these types of companies they are reducing the value of future offerings by becoming one less bidder for those shares.

  22. Re:Not the phone on The Feature Phone Is Dead: Long Live the 'Basic Smartphone' · · Score: 1

    Get a Moto X or Moto G on Republic and use the $10/month unlimited voice/text plan and an offline map package (Google maps can easily save an entire metro area for offline use, if you want more than that there are paid apps with full continent maps and POI databases). If you find you want to use data at some point you can switch twice a month so turn on data and get it at a prorated $25/month for just as long as you use it.

  23. Re:Not the phone on The Feature Phone Is Dead: Long Live the 'Basic Smartphone' · · Score: 1

    Yes, the Moto X basically never drops a call, they made the default to be very aggressive towards preferring CDMA if they detect any potential disruption on WiFi (unless you're in an area where you know you have poor Sprint coverage, then you can set that AP to never auto handoff). It's basically been completely invisible to my wife that she's using WiFi for voice calls.

  24. Re:To easy to make new viruses on Anti-Virus Is Dead (But Still Makes Money) Says Symantec · · Score: 3, Informative

    I guess you haven't used a Windows computer since Vista? Users are NOT administrator by default, heck even the domain account Administrator isn't an admin by default, you have to perform an action which requires elevated permissions and then you get a UAC dialog which is required to actually have an Administrator token. This is not at all unlike how SU works *NIX.

  25. Re:Awesome if true. on Did the Ignition Key Just Die? · · Score: 2

    The only reasons to buy a manual are cost and 'fun to drive', and once you reach say 80% of a model being sold with automatics the cost equation actually starts to swing towards the automatic, as far as fun to drive, a properly done DSG is plenty fun to drive =)