You are lucky to get 10% efficiency from an RTG with a thermoelectric element, and proper Stirling engines or steam turbines are not popular in space for some reason.
Rosetta/Philae came back to Earth several times for gravity boosts. It would not take much to make those flybys into direct hits, probably turning the RTG into radioactive dust.
Agencies who are dependent on public funding are generally wary about spreading radioactive dust.
They compensate for two if they are land turbines. It is a problem for such a few hours a year that it is not worth worrying overly about. Once we get electric cars integrated into the grid, they can tide us over for a couple of hours.
It is interesting that fears of nuclear war have disappeared almost entirely. The arsenals are still in place, almost as powerful as they were at peak. More countries have significant amounts of nuclear weapons and there are doubts about the maintenance procedures in at least some of the countries.
You are absolutely correct. Taco Cowboy was implying that solar power would take up too much land to be feasible. I showed that it is not land use that is stopping solar power in Denmark. Denmark is a lousy place for massive solar power for multiple reasons, but land use is not one of them.
I get annoyed when people talk about trumpeting and blowing smoke, and then proceed to do the same thing,
You lost the superscript 2's in that calculation. Thanks Slashdot.
Yes, the installation price for 100% solar in Denmark is currently ridiculous and it would require even more expensive storage facilities to save the power for winter. Denmark is not a good market for 100% solar penetration even if the panels were free.
Wind power on the other hand is dirt cheap if you can place the turbines on land.
In places with proper winter, average wind speeds tend to be higher in winter. Storms are not large enough to be a problem once we get the European grid strengthened a bit more.
Energy in wind goes up by the cube of the wind speed. High wind turbines would be dirt cheap because the wings would be so short. Not that anyone makes them just to cover the few hours of nation-covering storm conditions per year.
In most storms there will be one wind farm just on the edge of the storm, and that wind farm will be producing at close to 100%, i.e. at least twice its average production (three times if it is a wind farm on land). That covers for a lot of lost capacity.
Danish energy use in total (NOT just electricity, but everything) was 763PJ (212TWh) in 2013. You can expect about 900kWh yearly per 1kW of typical solar panel installed in Denmark. Therefore it takes an installed capacity of 240GW of solar panels to cover Denmark. You need about 8m2 for 1kW of panel (technology dependent), so that comes to around 2000 km2. In comparison, Denmark is currently farming around 26500 km2.
In other words, even for a really lousy location for solar panels like Denmark, area use is not a concern.
As to wind power, did you really bring up the bird strike concern? Denmark is already somewhere around 50% electricity use for wind power, and bird populations are unaffected. In the time since wind turbines started becoming popular in the 80's, populations of falcons and other birds of prey have increased. Denmark even has eagles living in the wild again.
The engine is a hybrid, not a solid. Hybrids very rarely go boom, but some of them have the ability to pretend to be monopropellant (e.g. if they use hydrogen peroxide or nitrogen oxide for the oxidizer) or liquid fuelled (if the fuel is allowed to melt or vaporize without burning or if other combustibles are somehow allowed inside the engine). In both cases, booms are very much possible.
Software producers in Denmark have successfully sued a company that was the victim of a burglary. The company still had the license documents for the software, but the burglars stole the computers where the software was installed. The company was insured, and the insurance had to pay out for new copies of the software.
So in that particular case, the software license was apparently stolen along with the computers. It makes little sense to me, but then that is true of practically everything under the umbrella of "intellectual property".
There has been a lot of dubious research in this area. Studies where only a small minority of the subjects of the experimental procedure had their results published, and a lot of work with patients where the spinal cord was not actually completely severed. At least some of the results are likely to come simply from insufficient retraining prior to the experimental procedures.
Hopefully this one is actually true. We could really do with some good news in this area.
You do not want obstacle penetration, unless you have that 10-story building with less than 10 wifi users. Obstacle penetration is just a nice word for interference these days. 2.5GHz is TOO good at obstacle penetration; in many places you can reach dozens of access points at 2.5GHz and the result is that none of them get decent performance.
Of course it is doable. It is probably even fairly easy with tun/tap. However, it requires programming; I doubt there are any pre-built solutions for doing this.
The requirement was that the code would simultaneously compile with gcc in C mode (through the use of a few macros). That prevents any use of C++ features.
For a short while, the Linux kernel could be compiled as C++. Some developers, I believe Linus included, felt that the stricter type checking offered by C++ would help kernel development. There was no attempt to actually use C++ features though.
This would make sense if HTTP requests were typically bandwidth-limited. Almost none of them are, most are way too short and never actually get TCP going at line-rate. HTTP is most often latency-bound, not bandwidth-bound, and the compression is meant to help with latency (reducing number of request packets), not bandwidth.
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You are lucky to get 10% efficiency from an RTG with a thermoelectric element, and proper Stirling engines or steam turbines are not popular in space for some reason.
However, Philae only needs 32W apparently.
Rosetta/Philae came back to Earth several times for gravity boosts. It would not take much to make those flybys into direct hits, probably turning the RTG into radioactive dust.
Agencies who are dependent on public funding are generally wary about spreading radioactive dust.
True. I was definitely wrong about that.
Still, I think the number of weapons ready for use is cause for concern.
They compensate for two if they are land turbines. It is a problem for such a few hours a year that it is not worth worrying overly about. Once we get electric cars integrated into the grid, they can tide us over for a couple of hours.
It is interesting that fears of nuclear war have disappeared almost entirely. The arsenals are still in place, almost as powerful as they were at peak. More countries have significant amounts of nuclear weapons and there are doubts about the maintenance procedures in at least some of the countries.
You are absolutely correct. Taco Cowboy was implying that solar power would take up too much land to be feasible. I showed that it is not land use that is stopping solar power in Denmark. Denmark is a lousy place for massive solar power for multiple reasons, but land use is not one of them.
I get annoyed when people talk about trumpeting and blowing smoke, and then proceed to do the same thing,
You lost the superscript 2's in that calculation. Thanks Slashdot.
Yes, the installation price for 100% solar in Denmark is currently ridiculous and it would require even more expensive storage facilities to save the power for winter. Denmark is not a good market for 100% solar penetration even if the panels were free.
Wind power on the other hand is dirt cheap if you can place the turbines on land.
In places with proper winter, average wind speeds tend to be higher in winter. Storms are not large enough to be a problem once we get the European grid strengthened a bit more.
Energy in wind goes up by the cube of the wind speed. High wind turbines would be dirt cheap because the wings would be so short. Not that anyone makes them just to cover the few hours of nation-covering storm conditions per year.
In most storms there will be one wind farm just on the edge of the storm, and that wind farm will be producing at close to 100%, i.e. at least twice its average production (three times if it is a wind farm on land). That covers for a lot of lost capacity.
Danish energy use in total (NOT just electricity, but everything) was 763PJ (212TWh) in 2013. You can expect about 900kWh yearly per 1kW of typical solar panel installed in Denmark. Therefore it takes an installed capacity of 240GW of solar panels to cover Denmark. You need about 8m2 for 1kW of panel (technology dependent), so that comes to around 2000 km2. In comparison, Denmark is currently farming around 26500 km2.
In other words, even for a really lousy location for solar panels like Denmark, area use is not a concern.
As to wind power, did you really bring up the bird strike concern? Denmark is already somewhere around 50% electricity use for wind power, and bird populations are unaffected. In the time since wind turbines started becoming popular in the 80's, populations of falcons and other birds of prey have increased. Denmark even has eagles living in the wild again.
Firefox is already multithreaded. It can busy loop on as many cores as you want.
The engine is a hybrid, not a solid. Hybrids very rarely go boom, but some of them have the ability to pretend to be monopropellant (e.g. if they use hydrogen peroxide or nitrogen oxide for the oxidizer) or liquid fuelled (if the fuel is allowed to melt or vaporize without burning or if other combustibles are somehow allowed inside the engine). In both cases, booms are very much possible.
Humans are not in general motivated to snuff out other species. It just sort of happens.
Software producers in Denmark have successfully sued a company that was the victim of a burglary. The company still had the license documents for the software, but the burglars stole the computers where the software was installed. The company was insured, and the insurance had to pay out for new copies of the software.
So in that particular case, the software license was apparently stolen along with the computers. It makes little sense to me, but then that is true of practically everything under the umbrella of "intellectual property".
Would you have preferred that Tom Frieden lied? What would you have liked him to say?
There has been a lot of dubious research in this area. Studies where only a small minority of the subjects of the experimental procedure had their results published, and a lot of work with patients where the spinal cord was not actually completely severed. At least some of the results are likely to come simply from insufficient retraining prior to the experimental procedures.
Hopefully this one is actually true. We could really do with some good news in this area.
You do not want obstacle penetration, unless you have that 10-story building with less than 10 wifi users. Obstacle penetration is just a nice word for interference these days. 2.5GHz is TOO good at obstacle penetration; in many places you can reach dozens of access points at 2.5GHz and the result is that none of them get decent performance.
Do you have lots of 10-story buildings with less than 10 wifi users? That seems like a very small market.
Bluetooth wifi coexistence is an ugly hack. Get your wifi to 5GHz (or 60GHz...) and leave the 2.5GHz mess to crippled protocols like Bluetooth.
Of course it is doable. It is probably even fairly easy with tun/tap. However, it requires programming; I doubt there are any pre-built solutions for doing this.
He is plenty good at dealing out abuse himself. Interacting with him is not a pleasant experience.
Why would you switch trucks to a less efficient system? Would you really put a 200kW+ electric motor in just to get rid of first gear?
The requirement was that the code would simultaneously compile with gcc in C mode (through the use of a few macros). That prevents any use of C++ features.
For a short while, the Linux kernel could be compiled as C++. Some developers, I believe Linus included, felt that the stricter type checking offered by C++ would help kernel development. There was no attempt to actually use C++ features though.
The effort did not last long.
This would make sense if HTTP requests were typically bandwidth-limited. Almost none of them are, most are way too short and never actually get TCP going at line-rate. HTTP is most often latency-bound, not bandwidth-bound, and the compression is meant to help with latency (reducing number of request packets), not bandwidth.