Calculation for the force of drag is ugly... We'll ignore the air resistance
Wind loading is especially going to be a pain on top of that water drag since the thing has to go through the roaring 40s, furious 50s and screaming 60s. I don't even know where to start on working that out since it's going to be very shape dependent and assuming a sphere is around the same as ignoring the wind loading entirely. However, if the wind is behind it to propel it through the southern ocean there's some huge savings there.
And that is why you don't cut corners and rely on your supplier to do all testing. It's not just the Chinese who get up to those games. It's worth at least getting a small amount of one batch tested done to see what you are really getting. While the above sounds complicated (impact tested, low temperature performing) all that really means is cutting out a little bar, putting a notch in it, soaking it for a while in something like alcohol cooled with carbon dioxide (or leave it to soak in liquid nitrogen if it's for a use that gets incredibly cold) and breaking it with an instrument that is really just a great big hammer on a pivot. If it's brittle it will barely slow the hammer down and it will swing up almost as far as it swung down. Parts of weld test plates get tested that way all the time.
He hasn't just been bullying, he's been sweetening people in power up as well. It's an odd kind of feeling seeing these guys come in and treat places in the west as if it's a banana republic with easily bought officials - not just insulting but depressing when it works.
Good point. There's a few other "special" places out there that are too big for failure to wipe them out so they sustain a state of failure indefinitely.
However when the boss demands the highest possible security clearances for all staff and then invites a Hollywood set designer to just wander in and look at everything to do a Star Trek themed "command center" it's part of an especially special kind of failure. There's a very long, very public list but that's the one that really stood out.
Yes I heard someone do an interview by phone on a bus - I think that kind of sucked for both parties and the large audience was also visibly disgusted that there was a bit of nepotism in the mix. Sometimes setting up a time works better than just trying to do it on the fly.
I'm at the part where Facebook internal data connects with external data to attach personal information on to every piece of data that Facebook had collected from the web. Scary stuff.
It's like the NSA, only full of functional people who can work for a living instead of being in a sheltered workshop for people with James Bond fantasies - of course it's scary.
This is highlighting a bit of a problem with putting employees at arms length to provide a legal fiction to dodge tax and other obligations - you have to be able to trust everyone else in the chain you are using to attempt to fool others. These middlemen exist really due to the deliberate complications of pretending an employee is not an employee where it's far more efficient to handle such deception in bulk. It's far less complicated with real contractors and it's far more effective to contract them directly instead of via a middleman, but once the contract extends beyond a certain length if they are not contracted to anyone else it starts to get very complicated since they are now de-facto employees. So real contractors (instead of employees under a legal fiction) and the company they contact to on a job are better off dealing with each other directly since they gain nothing by a middleman.
In this case it looks like the middleman decided to screw over everyone and not just the sham contractors and the tax office. It was bound to happen sometime due to the level of trust required in an enterprise that is really about hiding the truth.
When considering the solution on a national and global scale
So who is doing that AC? The trend has been to shift to private enterprise and nobody is large enough in that sector to even think about things on a national scale.
The hassle is that thermal projects, solar included, are best at large scale and that comes with a large capital cost. Getting funding in the west for large projects based on emerging technologies is difficult as the nuke crowd can also tell you (hence a very small number of AP1000 reactors getting built today when something almost identical could have been built in the late 1970s while next-gen nukes (that could have been built in the 1990s) are seen as too radical to get finance for).
There have been some very effective small baseload solar thermal pilot plants, salt heat storage, steam heat storage and various co-generation ideas, but despite success the modern investment market doesn't want to touch anything other than short term returns.
Oh really? In a place with so much hydro that they make aluminium and export a lot of power when the link is up? It sounds incredibly unlikely. Extraordinary claims typically require a little more than the word of an AC - have you got a link to something better?
Indeed, but for extra irony for those pushing nukes for purely political purposes they use photovoltaics to produce electricity from the photons given off by the nuclear material. As well as probes they were one of the best choices for powering spy satelllites that needed to encounter a fair bit of atmosphere at one end of a very elliptical orbit (and may still be used in those for all we know).
I've worked in one - face mask required due to the nasty stuff growing in the warm water. I'm commenting on the very odd "You can't guarantee a useful site for cooling will remain viable long enough to pay back the sunk costs"
While it is a constraint there's no shortage of sites - it's not as if the water used for cooling has to be drinkable. You do need a LOT of water, but it's not as if much gets used up.
Still waiting for solar to pass its commercial viability test
Thanks to price gouging from energy utilities it passed that point long ago for residential solar users in a lot of places. It doesn't have to be the cheapest energy to produce, just cheaper than what you have to pay for. For energy utilities themselves it's not quite so obvious since the cheapest power station is usually the one built and paid for long ago.
Now that is just weird - is the above poster assuming all cooling water is destroyed on contact with a heat exchanger from the boiler water and that no more will flow in? All you have to do is leave the hot water somewhere to cool down, like a lake, or if you have to, seawater, and you can use it over and over again. Thermal pollution is worked around by just having a lot of outlets to dilute the heated cooling water. I really don't get how someone can make such an obvious mistake unless it's pretended stupidity to push an argument.
In the world of tomorrow - or maybe the week after next. The cutting edge stuff you can get today is that good but we've only seen it as consumers in small devices (or aircraft batteries on fire!). It's a matter of a little bit more product development and process line design to get economies of scale instead of outright invention.
That's a side effect. It was things like attempting to protect the US steel industry by putting in barriers to imports that resulted in the manufacturing moving to where steel was cheaper.
I meant to write that both should be taken seriously. India should be taken seriously despite problems just as the USA should be taken seriously despite the "rust belt" being abandoned etc.
They have a manned space program in development instead of asking the Russians for a lift and they are working on the next generation of civilian nuclear reactors instead of something like the AP1000 which is 1970s tech painted green. So who is it that shouldn't be taken seriously?
Personally I think both, but people in glass houses shouldn't really post while stoned should they above poster?
That long - wow. I've only noticed it (and been annoyed with it on sight for some reason) this year when it seemed to turn up on Slashdot so I must not have been paying attention. Was it in sitcoms, talk radio or something?
I think you were referring to 3D acceleration, though, which is also a necessity for nice visual effects
When it is a requirement instead of icing on the cake of something that can degrade gracefully when such hardware is not present it is only for the lazy. Such lazy programming and very poor performance even with far more hardware than should be required has been used as the example of why X is broken when it really isn't - the badly written window managers and related software are broken.
With the proprietary NVidia cards, several of those core effects behave badly
Yes. Those effects do not default to different behaviour when the hardware they are looking for is not supported in the way the are looking for. Two points of failure. IMHO both should be fixed but the poorly written window managers are the easiest things to replace or fix. The same problem manifests itself when you attempt to get remote access to those applications and they expect the same sort of hardware at both ends instead of doing something sensible with OpenGL like everyone else has been doing for many years.
Enlightenment, by the way, requires hardware acceleration for its shiny effects.
Enlightenment, which I've been using since before this site existed, degrades gracefully when it finds that hardware is not available for its shiny effects - you just get less shiny instead of the machine performing poorly. That is why I used it as an example. The current version will run on ten year old netbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder why the water shortage is expected to last 25 years? What is going to happen in 25 years to ameliorate this problem?
The local oil is going to run out so the place turns into a ghost town?
Wind loading is especially going to be a pain on top of that water drag since the thing has to go through the roaring 40s, furious 50s and screaming 60s. I don't even know where to start on working that out since it's going to be very shape dependent and assuming a sphere is around the same as ignoring the wind loading entirely.
However, if the wind is behind it to propel it through the southern ocean there's some huge savings there.
Yes, and the epic fail with that NSA incident was the guy was not cleared in any way and was free to roam around.
And that is why you don't cut corners and rely on your supplier to do all testing.
It's not just the Chinese who get up to those games. It's worth at least getting a small amount of one batch tested done to see what you are really getting.
While the above sounds complicated (impact tested, low temperature performing) all that really means is cutting out a little bar, putting a notch in it, soaking it for a while in something like alcohol cooled with carbon dioxide (or leave it to soak in liquid nitrogen if it's for a use that gets incredibly cold) and breaking it with an instrument that is really just a great big hammer on a pivot. If it's brittle it will barely slow the hammer down and it will swing up almost as far as it swung down. Parts of weld test plates get tested that way all the time.
He hasn't just been bullying, he's been sweetening people in power up as well.
It's an odd kind of feeling seeing these guys come in and treat places in the west as if it's a banana republic with easily bought officials - not just insulting but depressing when it works.
Good point.
There's a few other "special" places out there that are too big for failure to wipe them out so they sustain a state of failure indefinitely.
However when the boss demands the highest possible security clearances for all staff and then invites a Hollywood set designer to just wander in and look at everything to do a Star Trek themed "command center" it's part of an especially special kind of failure. There's a very long, very public list but that's the one that really stood out.
Yes I heard someone do an interview by phone on a bus - I think that kind of sucked for both parties and the large audience was also visibly disgusted that there was a bit of nepotism in the mix.
Sometimes setting up a time works better than just trying to do it on the fly.
It's like the NSA, only full of functional people who can work for a living instead of being in a sheltered workshop for people with James Bond fantasies - of course it's scary.
This is highlighting a bit of a problem with putting employees at arms length to provide a legal fiction to dodge tax and other obligations - you have to be able to trust everyone else in the chain you are using to attempt to fool others.
These middlemen exist really due to the deliberate complications of pretending an employee is not an employee where it's far more efficient to handle such deception in bulk.
It's far less complicated with real contractors and it's far more effective to contract them directly instead of via a middleman, but once the contract extends beyond a certain length if they are not contracted to anyone else it starts to get very complicated since they are now de-facto employees. So real contractors (instead of employees under a legal fiction) and the company they contact to on a job are better off dealing with each other directly since they gain nothing by a middleman.
In this case it looks like the middleman decided to screw over everyone and not just the sham contractors and the tax office. It was bound to happen sometime due to the level of trust required in an enterprise that is really about hiding the truth.
So who is doing that AC? The trend has been to shift to private enterprise and nobody is large enough in that sector to even think about things on a national scale.
So the answer to anyone who looks like a "hater" is irrational hate? Fair enough but I thought you were better than that.
The hassle is that thermal projects, solar included, are best at large scale and that comes with a large capital cost. Getting funding in the west for large projects based on emerging technologies is difficult as the nuke crowd can also tell you (hence a very small number of AP1000 reactors getting built today when something almost identical could have been built in the late 1970s while next-gen nukes (that could have been built in the 1990s) are seen as too radical to get finance for).
There have been some very effective small baseload solar thermal pilot plants, salt heat storage, steam heat storage and various co-generation ideas, but despite success the modern investment market doesn't want to touch anything other than short term returns.
Oh really? In a place with so much hydro that they make aluminium and export a lot of power when the link is up?
It sounds incredibly unlikely.
Extraordinary claims typically require a little more than the word of an AC - have you got a link to something better?
Indeed, but for extra irony for those pushing nukes for purely political purposes they use photovoltaics to produce electricity from the photons given off by the nuclear material.
As well as probes they were one of the best choices for powering spy satelllites that needed to encounter a fair bit of atmosphere at one end of a very elliptical orbit (and may still be used in those for all we know).
Ocean? WTF is wrong with you guys? Seas, lakes and rivers that never run dry also exist.
I've worked in one - face mask required due to the nasty stuff growing in the warm water.
I'm commenting on the very odd "You can't guarantee a useful site for cooling will remain viable long enough to pay back the sunk costs"
While it is a constraint there's no shortage of sites - it's not as if the water used for cooling has to be drinkable. You do need a LOT of water, but it's not as if much gets used up.
No, it's called guzzaline in that mythology.
Maybe you should learn about the world via something other than movies?
Thanks to price gouging from energy utilities it passed that point long ago for residential solar users in a lot of places. It doesn't have to be the cheapest energy to produce, just cheaper than what you have to pay for.
For energy utilities themselves it's not quite so obvious since the cheapest power station is usually the one built and paid for long ago.
Now that is just weird - is the above poster assuming all cooling water is destroyed on contact with a heat exchanger from the boiler water and that no more will flow in?
All you have to do is leave the hot water somewhere to cool down, like a lake, or if you have to, seawater, and you can use it over and over again. Thermal pollution is worked around by just having a lot of outlets to dilute the heated cooling water.
I really don't get how someone can make such an obvious mistake unless it's pretended stupidity to push an argument.
In the world of tomorrow - or maybe the week after next. The cutting edge stuff you can get today is that good but we've only seen it as consumers in small devices (or aircraft batteries on fire!). It's a matter of a little bit more product development and process line design to get economies of scale instead of outright invention.
That's a side effect. It was things like attempting to protect the US steel industry by putting in barriers to imports that resulted in the manufacturing moving to where steel was cheaper.
I meant to write that both should be taken seriously.
India should be taken seriously despite problems just as the USA should be taken seriously despite the "rust belt" being abandoned etc.
They have a manned space program in development instead of asking the Russians for a lift and they are working on the next generation of civilian nuclear reactors instead of something like the AP1000 which is 1970s tech painted green.
So who is it that shouldn't be taken seriously?
Personally I think both, but people in glass houses shouldn't really post while stoned should they above poster?
That long - wow. I've only noticed it (and been annoyed with it on sight for some reason) this year when it seemed to turn up on Slashdot so I must not have been paying attention. Was it in sitcoms, talk radio or something?
When it is a requirement instead of icing on the cake of something that can degrade gracefully when such hardware is not present it is only for the lazy. Such lazy programming and very poor performance even with far more hardware than should be required has been used as the example of why X is broken when it really isn't - the badly written window managers and related software are broken.
Yes. Those effects do not default to different behaviour when the hardware they are looking for is not supported in the way the are looking for. Two points of failure. IMHO both should be fixed but the poorly written window managers are the easiest things to replace or fix. The same problem manifests itself when you attempt to get remote access to those applications and they expect the same sort of hardware at both ends instead of doing something sensible with OpenGL like everyone else has been doing for many years.
Enlightenment, which I've been using since before this site existed, degrades gracefully when it finds that hardware is not available for its shiny effects - you just get less shiny instead of the machine performing poorly. That is why I used it as an example. The current version will run on ten year old netbooks.