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User: amorsen

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  1. Re:Brand? on 17-Year-Old Radio Astronomy Mystery Traced Back To Kitchen Microwave · · Score: 1

    The washer and dryer primarily spend their energy on heating, not on running the motor. Using less water means savings on electricity because there is less water to heat. Dryers jump dramatically in efficiency when you switch to a condensing dryer, since you save most of the heat that went into turning water into steam.

  2. Re:Brand? on 17-Year-Old Radio Astronomy Mystery Traced Back To Kitchen Microwave · · Score: 1

    Clothes dryers made an enormous jump when they switched to condensing operation. After that, the improvements have been smaller. It is quite likely that a 10 year old dryer is non-condensing, and so the gains are huge.

  3. Re:Elude observation? on 17-Year-Old Radio Astronomy Mystery Traced Back To Kitchen Microwave · · Score: 1

    They did not spend millions of dollars looking for the microwave oven, and they knew all along that the signal was man-made. Figuring out precisely which item made it is the kind of thing that gets you in the newspapers, so they did a little PR stunt.

    Their usual work changes our understanding of the universe but does not have a chance to make it into the mainstream news. Can you begrudge them their 15 minutes of fame?

  4. Re:Brand? on 17-Year-Old Radio Astronomy Mystery Traced Back To Kitchen Microwave · · Score: 2

    If you have a 10 year old washing machine, the likelihood is that a new one will pay itself back in energy + water savings in a few years. The efficiency improvements in white goods over the last decade have been astounding.

  5. Re:Gamechanger on Tesla Announces Home Battery System · · Score: 1

    Plus those installations can provide a shedload of REACTIVE power, very, very useful for grid stabilization.

    They can, but are they? I have only seen residential solar which reacted to grid overload/underload situations (i.e. situations which should never occur in an ideal world), not any which reacted to constant requirements for reactive power. Do you know of any which take part in the standard grid stabilization in normal use, outside of grid emergencies?

  6. A better DOS than DOS on Android and iOS App Porting Will Not Be Available At Windows 10 Launch · · Score: 1

    Will Windows Phone thrive by being a better iOS than iOS and a better Android than Android? It did not work for OS/2 20 years ago.

  7. Re:She has a point. on My High School CS Homework Is the Centerfold · · Score: 1

    With the same reasoning, schools in Europe are taking the holocaust out of the history lessons, to avoid nasty remarks from muslim kids in the classroom.

    No, they are not. You may be thinking of this: http://www.snopes.com/politics...

  8. Re:Gamechanger on Tesla Announces Home Battery System · · Score: 1

    When electricity is cheap, it is because the marginal cost of producing it is low. The marginal cost is low because it does not take very much extra fuel to produce it. In other words, when electricity is cheap, its production is also less environmentally harmful. (This only holds as long as the power stations are unchanged of course.)

    The Economist regularly gets this wrong by saying that electric cars are polluting more if they charge at night rather than during the day. They base this on the average pollution per kWh being higher at night. However, the average pollution does not matter. It is the marginal pollution which matters, and that is very low at night. This is really the kind of thing that economists should be specializing in getting right; I do not understand how you can be an economist and get it wrong.

  9. Re:Excellent. on Mozilla Begins To Move Towards HTTPS-Only Web · · Score: 1

    Another problem is that if they do accept your CA certificate, you can issue a certificate for irs.gov and they will believe that.

    The trust system in TLS is really lousy.

  10. Re:Why? on Messenger's Mercury Trip Ends With a Bang, and Silence · · Score: 1

    Deorbit is what happened... If you mean actually escape from Mercury gravity, that would have shortened the mission due to the need to save fuel for a last burn. What would be the point?

  11. Re:Show me the math on the Tesla. on New Study Suggests Flying Is Greener Than Driving · · Score: 1

    Coal plants are certainly capable of throttling their output and using less coal. But if what you say was true, my point would only be reinforced: Marginal CO2 emissions by using an extra kWh at night would be zero, because the grid would otherwise have to stabilize by dumping electricity in resistors.

  12. Re:Masstransit is more energy efficient than perso on New Study Suggests Flying Is Greener Than Driving · · Score: 1

    DSB (Danish Railways) has a table on http://www.dsb.dk/om-dsb/dsbs-... saying that their long-distance trains do 33g CO2 per person km. Regional trains are considerably worse. Modern cars should hopefully do better than 133g per km.

    Urban trains do better because people are standing up, which significantly lowers the train weight per person.

    Now, Denmark is admittedly a bit of a developing country when it comes to trains. Obviously a pure electrified system running on hydro power would do a lot better. DSB's long distance trains use 0.12kWh per person km. A Tesla uses about 0.35kWh per km, which comes to 0.09kWh per person km with 4 people.

  13. Re:Show me the math on the Tesla. on New Study Suggests Flying Is Greener Than Driving · · Score: 2

    That would be pointless because practically no one uses oil to produce electricity. Electric cars tend to charge at night where the coal plants are running at very low power and low efficiency. An idling coal plant has a very high average pollution per kWh produced but a very low marginal pollution per extra kWh.

    Of course if it is a windy night the coal plants might just give up and shut down overnight, and then you really get your zero emissions.

  14. Re:Masstransit is more energy efficient than perso on New Study Suggests Flying Is Greener Than Driving · · Score: 1

    Most other forms of transport have no chance against a decent modern passenger car with 4+ passengers. Most passenger cars are comparatively light, well below 500kg per passenger, which is very hard to beat. They do that because there is hardly any wasted space. A bus needs a walkway and it has to be tall enough to stand in, and trains are just horrendously heavy. While rubber-on-tarmac is a bit wasteful compared to metal-on-metal, it is not that bad, and the lower weight helps a lot.

    Electric trains can sometimes play in that efficiency range, but it is tempting to make them faster and then the savings mostly evaporate. Cars are useful despite their lower speeds because of the time saved by almost going door-to-door.

  15. Re:Solar rarely enough for the whole house on Tesla To Announce Battery-Based Energy Storage For Homes · · Score: 1

    24kWh/day = 24kWh/24h = 1kW. Which is a completely ridiculous amount of electricity.

  16. Re: Solar rarely enough for the whole house on Tesla To Announce Battery-Based Energy Storage For Homes · · Score: 2

    If you are using 48kWh a day on heating, a heat pump is going to pay itself back in months or even weeks.

  17. Re:Solar rarely enough for the whole house on Tesla To Announce Battery-Based Energy Storage For Homes · · Score: 1

    A home server can easily get by on 20W instead of 200W. My house uses around 4kWh a day on everything, and that includes among other things a server running 24x7.

  18. Re:SSDs on New PCIe SSDs Load Games, Apps As Fast As Old SATA Drives · · Score: 1

    Infinitely fast SSD's would be almost useless for RAM. You would need to make your cache lines 8kiB or more (they are rarely larger than 128 bytes today), and a spinlock would burn out a flash cell in less than a second -- probably less than a millisecond.

  19. Re:So.. Why? on NVIDIA's New GPUs Are Very Open-Source Unfriendly · · Score: 1

    How exactly does handing a binary blob to the Nouveau developers reveal any trade secrets? The binary blob is handed out in the driver anyway, it is just a pain to extract now.

    This is just an attempt at killing Nouveau. It will most likely succeed.

  20. Re:Anything unique? on Mono 4 Released, First Version To Adopt Microsoft Code · · Score: 1

    The patent indemnification only covers you if you are using the code for a .NET runtime or a .NET application. Too bad if you find some of the code useful in an unrelated project and fall for the MIT license.

  21. Re:Ada on Rust 1.0 Enters Beta · · Score: 1

    It would be unusual if Rust was marketed as a functional language, because AFAIK no functional language exists without garbage collection today.

  22. Re:other stuff matters also? I claim it does on Inexpensive Electric Cars May Arrive Sooner Than You Think · · Score: 1

    When it is merely cold, like -20C, electric cars are great. You arrive to a preheated and defrosted car and there are no problems starting the engine. 3kW of heating is quite sufficient when it includes heated seats and heated steering wheel, and that takes 3 hours to use 10% of the capacity of a Tesla 85kWh car. At slightly higher temperatures you can get a lot of benefit from the heat pump instead.

    Now, lots of electric cars do not have suitably designed heating systems or batteries to handle -20C reliably. This is true of some petrol cars as well.

  23. Re:Missing the point. on Inexpensive Electric Cars May Arrive Sooner Than You Think · · Score: 1

    Series hybrids are a terrible idea. See the BMW i3. It has worse mileage than most comparable cars. Its speed on petrol is limited, and the fuel tank is too small to be useful.

    An electric drivetrain costs in the region of 30% of the energy that the engine puts in. Stuff an 8-speed modern automatic in there instead, and you keep the engine at almost the ideal RPM at all times. That drive train will have close to zero loss. Or put an extra electric motor in (two in total) and you get a variable ratio gearbox almost for free -- the Prius solution. Again, close to zero loss when running purely on petrol. Once you have a decent drivetrain, you can afford to put a slightly larger engine in and actually reach highway speeds.

  24. Re:What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article on Focusing On Tech Alone, You Miss How Autonomous Driving Will Change Society · · Score: 1

    You are seriously implying that living in a house sharing walls with another house is equivalent to serfdom?

    This subthread has outlived its usefulness.

  25. Re:What an Embarrassingly Vapid Article on Focusing On Tech Alone, You Miss How Autonomous Driving Will Change Society · · Score: 1

    Which part of human nature is incompatible with having someone sitting in a separate cabin nearby?

    In England, detached houses are comparatively rare. Human nature seems to cope.