I hate to be repetitive, but for any new "energy source", one has to do one's homework.
This means "do the math". Figure out how much energy is captured, at what cost, over what period of time. You also need to figure out the true opportunity costs-- what are you giving up if you go down this path. Not to mention calculating the risks and uncertainties.
With most if not all schemes for capturing energy from small temperature differrences, the efficiency is soooo small, that the schemes can never even pay back the cost of borrowing the capital to build it, much less pay for maintenance, upkeep, degradation, and distributing the energy.
It matters not whether it's "wave power", or "tidal energy", or "tropical seawater", or even "sunlight". If you DO THE MATH, using realistic numbers, and assuming no hidden subsidies, the numbers are usually anywhere from marginal to extremely dismal.
Typical things ignored: reliability, labor costs, energy storage, energy transmission, cleaning, maintenance, zoning, environmental laws, land acquisition, manufacturability, cost of capital, long-term reliability, noise, and probably more..
You're going to send food and oxygen to Mars. Cost, about $200,000 per pound.
To feed and keep alive some astronauts. Efficiency, maybe 30%.
Then you're going to harness their muscles. Efficiency, maybe 20%
To flex little protein generators. Efficiency, maybe 10%
To generate and store electricity. Efficiency, maybe 50%
So in the end, you're generating a teensy amount of electricity, let's estimate it:
Human power available, about.2 HP, that's about 150 watts.
After the protein generators, maybe 30 watts.
Actually makes it into the battery, maybe 15 watts.
Percentage of time 'naut moving in spacesuit, say 30% of time, 3 hrs/day, that's 1/24th, say one watt average.
So you're getting about one teeensy watt on the average, at a huge cost in food, oxygen, and muscle strain.
Meanwhile a little solar panel can put out about 10 watts/ sq meter, no strain, no food, no oxygen needed. And no recurring $200K per pound fuel and onidixzer cost.
And don't suggest "hydroponic gardens and extracting oxygen from the rust".
First of all, if you cool off the fridges, the increased temperature difference between inside and outside the fridge increases the rate of heat loss.
Next the larger the termperature difference, the greater the load on the compressors and the lower the overall efficiency. Although it helps a bit if it's cooler outside at night. But they're already capable of taking advantage of this without any "Night Wind" project babble.
The larger warehouses have more activity at night-- therfore more heat losses. The least best time for having a lower temperature.
A better approch would be to give somewhat lower rates for night electricity usage. Many industries use a *lot* of electricity and could save big bucks by shifting to nighttime work. There's one big steel-mill in town here that uses about 30% of all the electricity-- they'd love to get a few percent off their $13 million per month electric bill by using their electric arc furnaces at night.
>It was one of Bucky Fuller's favorite things to point out that heat management becomes easier with scale since the ratio of surface area (where heat escapes)-to-volume (where heat is stored) goes down in inverse proportion to the increase in linear dimension. This is why he felt that enclosing cities with his domes would be a good idea.
--
Yep, that's another problem with this turbine-- how do you generate hot gas for it? There's a certain minimum size for a flame-- any smaller and the surface area cools off the flame faster than the flame volume can generate heat. And any ducting, with its huge surface-area to volume ratio, is going to carry away heat very quickly, perhaps cooling it off before it can get to the turbine.
The basic laws of scale make very small heat-engines impractical to impossible. Too bad basic physics isnt well known by the grant givers.
If you read the fine print of the article, you see, and Don't see:
How to cut and lift the rotor off the silicon base. ( Difficult, slow, and sloppy)
How to balance the rotor to one part in a million.
How to overcome the bad effects of scale (boundary layer, and friction)
The efficiency of the device, vs larger turbines (is very poor)
How to couple the rotor to a generator.
How to build a generator of the same size.
The cost of the device compared to the competition.
The thing HAS NOT BEEN RUN YET.
So not to put too fine a point on it, but this looks like an unfinished, untested device, of unknown cost, unknown reliability, unknwowm but probably impossible manufacturability, unstated but probably very low efficiency, using unavailable fuels, with uncompetetive features.
Slashdot, please wake up and get some critical thinking skills!
WTF indeed:
>As one comment already explained, the problem only occurs when ungrounded power adapters are used.
I did not say otherwise.
>Three-pronged plug grounded ones remove this problem. So clearly it's not the issue of the EMI filter you described.
No, your logic is faulty. If a 3-wire grounded adapter fixes the problem, then the "problem" had to be with some coupling, likely but not certainly thru the EMI surpression capacitors.
>As another post explained, the issue is capacitive coupling between the primary and secondary windings in the switching transformer.
Speculation, and no numbers, and somewhat unlikely as all UL-approved 2-prong power supplies have a wider neutral prong and specific switcher topology to prevent this kind of thing. If you unwrap the switching transformer you'll find a leyer of copper foil, an electrostatic shield, between the primary and secondary windings.
> I am sorry that your misinforming post got moderated highly.
Well if you read the original laptop posting, you'll see *it* was totally misinformed-- the fella was measuring between a screw on the bottom of the laptop, not guaranteed to be connected to anything, with the other lead going to, get this, an empty computer case sitting on his workbench. Plus they kept blaming the LAPTOP for the problem, not the adapter. They were barking up the wrong tree with the wrong dog.
If you use the wrong measuring device, hooked up between two inappropriate points, you're unlikely to get correct results.
Also the lighting the LED story proves *nothing*. Many homes have high-frequency noise from light dimmers and computers, such noise can ride thru power adaptors and light LED's.
>If you RTFA, it says: "Much of the fuel the system combusts is carbon-neutral...Carbon-neutral fuels like ethanol do not cause an appreciable net increase in atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide."
Don't beleive everything you read. First of all why would you burn pure Ethanol? It's mighty expensive.
Not to mention it's only somewhat close to carbon-neutral IF and only IF you use natural gas to dry the grain and distill the alcohol. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather we saved natural gas for like, heating homes, instead of making Ethanol to burn it to heat up trash.
Every power supply is required to have two capacitors from each side of the power line to ground, and another capacitor from ground to output ground.
Now if you hook a typical $4.99 digital voltmeter from Harbor Freight, the input impedance of the voltmeter, combined with these capacitors, will indicate anything from zero to 377 volts.
And if you rub your cat, the voltage could go much higher!
As you bright folks out there may be guessing, it's not the voltage so much that is the problem, it's the current. And the current is miniscule, microamps.
>The THAAD interceptor uses hit-to-kill technology to destroy targets, and is the only weapon system that engages threat ballistic missiles at both endo- and exo-atmospheric altitudes."
A few quibbles with this "test":
Was there just one incoming target? Why? Even KJI can afford a few dozen missles.
Was the approximate time and direction of the threat known?
Any decoys deployed by the intruder? Why not?
How large an area can it protect before the angle-off becomes unmanageable?
Any jamming from the intruder? Why not?
How does this help against low-trajectory ICBM's, sub-launched IRBM's, or cruise missles, all capable of carrying sizeable WMD's?
IIRC about $60 billion has been spent on ABM since 1950, with negligible results. What a super porkbarrel for the techies!
How is it possible for shill bidding to work out well for the seller? The seller usually has *no idea* what the item will fetch. So a shill bidder has a very good chance of getting stuck with the item. That's no way to make a profit.
If other bidders encourage you to outbid them, that's *your* problem. You usually have several days to form you rbest guess what you think the item is worth. If you have the high bid, you win. If somebody outbids you, you still win, you have the $$ still in hand.
It's trivial for eBay's computers to watch for shill bidding patterns. I don't know if they do, and they are a bit lax in enforcing other rules, so it wuoldnt surprise me if there is a bit of shill bidding going on. Also unsurprised if it ends up not working out well on the average.
Now that this guy is owned by Microsoft we can't depend on anything he writes. Sad.
Please reflect on this article and realize it's not a "fair and balanced" presentation.
Mentioning a few features with no analysis of the possible downsides is not very useful writing.
Some downsides:
Keeping better track of CPU usage-- no mention of whether overall this takes more time than it can ever usefully reschedule. Keeping track of CPU usage per thread/process/interrupt could easily take more extra cycles than it might ever "save".
Having ways of unhanging stuck drivers is good, but should have been in Windows 1.0. No mention of the impact on the existing 78,000 custom drivers.
Adding file links at this late date has HUGE repercussions... What about all the disk scanning, backup, archiving, and browsing utilities that don't know about this feature? Arent they all going to break in unlikely ways, or hang if the file system has a link loop in it? This feature should have been announced *years* in advance so all the third party apps could prepare for this major change.
Anything that heats the skin is also likely to heat the cornea. Microwaves at very low intensity, far lower than can be felt, have been known for 60 years to cause cataracts. It's going to be unlikely that these new waves, which are thousands of times higher than the safe limits for microwaves, will not harm eyeballs.
>The numbers do add up for this individual: he's using more power than he generates, but he's receiving more credit for his generated power than he's paying for his over-usage. That's a rational analysis.
We've gone over this. In a free market his power is worth much less than the retail price, much less than the average wholesale price as it's so undependable-- one cloud and it's all gone.
I suspect one big reason they pay the same is to do otherwise would require a separate power meter, installation, and periodic reckoning. The cost of that ($300-$600) is hard to pay back in less than a considerable number of years.
And I don't consider it a rational analysis to ue retail power prices-- if everybody got paid retail price for unreliable power, the cost of power would have to go up by a factor of 3 (that's about the retail/wholesale difference), times another factor of 3 due to the higher cost of gas-fired peaking plants to make up for cloudy times.
>I believe the CA laws require power companies to pay you the same amount they charge you for power
If so, that's a hidden subsidy, silently paid for by all the other customers. In any rational economic analysis you factor that out.
Realistically they should be paying him MUCH LESS than the wholesale cost of power-- sun power is unpredictable at best, so the utility has to start up more of the very expensive peak power plants (usually gas turbine plants) to compensate for the dips in solar power. That makes solar power worth MUCH LESS than the average wholesale price of reliable power, in any rational analysis.
And notice that his numbers just don't add up-- his consumption is slightly more than can ever be generated by fresh new panels of that size. So there is no energy to get paid back for at unrealistic prices. Zero. Nada.
And in a more typical photovoltaic setup, where you're off the grid, you need batteries. I was extremely generous and did not deduct the losses in storing the power in batteries, or the cost of replacement batteries (they're typically only good for about 300 to 500 charge/discharge cycles).
When I plug your numbers into mine, this is what I see:
You seem to be paying 18 cents a Kw/h Thats very high, nearly twice the average.
You also are using a bit more than twice the average amount of electricity.
So your basic situation is not typical.
Your numbers for watts are misleading-- yes, that many square feet of panel wil generate about that much electricity-- durinbg peak sunlight. But once you divide by the appropriate factors for sun angle, cloudy times, and inverter losses, you're down to about 1,600 watts average, which is slightly less than your consumption. You don't seem to have ANY extra electricity to sell.
And even if you did, utilities will only pay you for their wholesale avoided cost, about 30-35% percent of what they sell it for. So even if you somehow cut back 50% on your usage (very unrealistic), you'd have maybe 800 watts average to pump back, about $458/yrs of income, over 30 years, that's about $13,000. So you've lost $52,000 overall, and had to make do with half the electricity. Not exactly the kind of deal people will be clamoring for.
If you put the $65,000 in the bank at 4% interest, after 30 years you'll have $237,000.
Or looked at another way, the interest on the 65K would just about pay your utility bill.
Or another way, if you had to borrow the $65K, paying it back over 30 years would add another $230K of interest and principal charges.
So first you collect tiny bits of power at tremendous cost.
So now that you have a handful of volts and amps you've gotten at tremendous cost, what do you do with the energy?
Why, of course, you blow 70% of it making Hydrogen. (Electrolysis is very inefficient)
Call us back when the cost of this energy is only ten times as much as utilities charge now.
You'll only have to improve the system by a factor of 100 to 1000 or so.
Nice try guys, but you forgot about the biggest impediment-- your kneecaps.
For decades now inventors have come up with metal, wood, and other kinds of "prefab" or "sitefab" homes.
But you don't see many. Like nearly none.
There's a reason for that.
There are litterally millions of people whose jobs depends on houses being built the slow clumsy old way. Every time a new technology pops up, those folks, thru their lobbyists, briefcase and baseball-bat carrying, "convince" state and local building code boards to disallow that kind of construction. They also get unions to block the construction, movement, and erection of these structures. So far it's worked really well.
About the only loophole is how "double wide" mobile homes got snuck past these folks.
>but is what is being reported what really happened?
You're assuming the NRO is releasing misleading info. Why? What possible difference would it make if they let out this info? And if there is a bad guy who benefits from having the "true" info, how likely are they to be fooled by this released info, when the NRO has never uttered a peep ever before about anything?
An anonymous reader writes to mention a Reuters article about some trouble the U.S. is having communicating with a spy satellite.
>The sensor package was launched last year by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office
Well, I doubt if NRO launches anything-- they probably sign a check to Martin-Marietta,
who coordinates things and rents a pad at Vandenberg.
>and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Well, it probably cost hundreds of millions of $. What it's worth, especially in the light of it being unusable, is debatable. Back when CMOS sensor arrays were custom made for $70,000 each the technology was gee-whizzy. Nowdays your basic disposable camera isnt that far behind what's in the current sats.
>It has apparently hung in a low orbit for months now.
"Hung"? as in hanging from something? Or hung as in "windows hung on me"?
>and efforts to communicate with it have been unsuccessful.
The official said the problems were substantial and involved multiple systems.
So it probably had several radio links and none of them seem to be working. That's bad.
There's usually at least one last-ditch fail-safe really simple telemetry and command link that doesnt depend on the main power source or antenna aiming. If they can't talk to that thingy, things are mighty grim.
>adding that U.S. officials
"Officials"? More likely a bunch of hairy and now sweaty peons.
>Were working to reestablish contact with the satellite because of the importance of the new technology it was meant to test and demonstrate.
So they wouldnt bother if it had old technology but cost $200 million?
>The other source said the satellite had been described to him as 'a comprehensive failure.'
Well, if you can't talk to it, that's pretty comprehensive.
>Additionally, since the computer "flip" happened instantaneously, and the f-16 can roll at much higher G forces than the pilot can take, the flip would have killed the pilot.
Well your whole post is called into question due to quite a few questionable items:
It seems unlikely that the lattitude would enter at all into any calculation of roll attitude. If so, it's more than a "bug", it's a basic design mistake.
The F-16 does have a high roll rate, about 320 degrees per second, but since the pilot is very close to the roll axis, there's very little acceleration at the pilot's position during your basic aileron-roll. Pilots routinely apply maximum roll without dying, or even passing-out.
Nobody dies intantly from excess G-s... Fighter pilots overdo it all the time. Usually they let off the stick as they feel the early effects, such as a narrowing or darkening field of vision. If they keep on commanding too many G's, they'll pass out and that will let pressure off the controls, which quickly reduces the G forces. Good fail-safe system.
Flipping upside down will quickly send blood to the head, which is exacrtly what's needed to recover from too many positive G's.
>"Not only is the interviewer barred from asking the REALLY important questions,..."
>such as? I have always asked tough questions at an interview.
At least in the USA, you can't ask:
Do you have any young children that are going to be sick every other week their first three years?
How high does their fever have to be before you stay home with them? 100? 102? 104!
Is there any chance you WILL be having children during your employ?
If your child kept you up all night, will you still come in the next day to work?
And you'd like to ask, but probably won't:
If you're on a dull project, will your wasted time spent cruising the net go up: 50%, 100%, 1000%?
If your manager is a jerk or an idiot, how much will this depress your efficiency?: 50%, 90%, 99% ?
No consumer has ever bought a light bulb before, and none even hinted at any impulse to buy a "light Bulb".
Every consumer was happy with the light given off by candles, finding it sufficient for the typical nightime activities of plucking chickens, trembling with typhoid fever, and beating servants and children.
We suggest Mr. Edison focus on what consumers did ask for: whale oil lamps that can be hung on buggy whips.
Slashdot Mirror
This means "do the math". Figure out how much energy is captured, at what cost, over what period of time. You also need to figure out the true opportunity costs-- what are you giving up if you go down this path. Not to mention calculating the risks and uncertainties.
With most if not all schemes for capturing energy from small temperature differrences, the efficiency is soooo small, that the schemes can never even pay back the cost of borrowing the capital to build it, much less pay for maintenance, upkeep, degradation, and distributing the energy.
It matters not whether it's "wave power", or "tidal energy", or "tropical seawater", or even "sunlight". If you DO THE MATH, using realistic numbers, and assuming no hidden subsidies, the numbers are usually anywhere from marginal to extremely dismal.
Typical things ignored: reliability, labor costs, energy storage, energy transmission, cleaning, maintenance, zoning, environmental laws, land acquisition, manufacturability, cost of capital, long-term reliability, noise, and probably more..
- You're going to send food and oxygen to Mars. Cost, about $200,000 per pound.
- To feed and keep alive some astronauts. Efficiency, maybe 30%.
- Then you're going to harness their muscles. Efficiency, maybe 20%
- To flex little protein generators. Efficiency, maybe 10%
- To generate and store electricity. Efficiency, maybe 50%
So in the end, you're generating a teensy amount of electricity, let's estimate it:- Human power available, about
.2 HP, that's about 150 watts.
- After the protein generators, maybe 30 watts.
- Actually makes it into the battery, maybe 15 watts.
- Percentage of time 'naut moving in spacesuit, say 30% of time, 3 hrs/day, that's 1/24th, say one watt average.
So you're getting about one teeensy watt on the average, at a huge cost in food, oxygen, and muscle strain.Meanwhile a little solar panel can put out about 10 watts/ sq meter, no strain, no food, no oxygen needed. And no recurring $200K per pound fuel and onidixzer cost.
And don't suggest "hydroponic gardens and extracting oxygen from the rust".
First of all, if you cool off the fridges, the increased temperature difference between inside and outside the fridge increases the rate of heat loss.
Next the larger the termperature difference, the greater the load on the compressors and the lower the overall efficiency. Although it helps a bit if it's cooler outside at night. But they're already capable of taking advantage of this without any "Night Wind" project babble.
The larger warehouses have more activity at night-- therfore more heat losses. The least best time for having a lower temperature.
A better approch would be to give somewhat lower rates for night electricity usage. Many industries use a *lot* of electricity and could save big bucks by shifting to nighttime work. There's one big steel-mill in town here that uses about 30% of all the electricity-- they'd love to get a few percent off their $13 million per month electric bill by using their electric arc furnaces at night.
Yep, that's another problem with this turbine-- how do you generate hot gas for it? There's a certain minimum size for a flame-- any smaller and the surface area cools off the flame faster than the flame volume can generate heat. And any ducting, with its huge surface-area to volume ratio, is going to carry away heat very quickly, perhaps cooling it off before it can get to the turbine.
The basic laws of scale make very small heat-engines impractical to impossible. Too bad basic physics isnt well known by the grant givers.
So not to put too fine a point on it, but this looks like an unfinished, untested device, of unknown cost, unknown reliability, unknwowm but probably impossible manufacturability, unstated but probably very low efficiency, using unavailable fuels, with uncompetetive features.
Slashdot, please wake up and get some critical thinking skills!
Well if you read the original laptop posting, you'll see *it* was totally misinformed-- the fella was measuring between a screw on the bottom of the laptop, not guaranteed to be connected to anything, with the other lead going to, get this, an empty computer case sitting on his workbench. Plus they kept blaming the LAPTOP for the problem, not the adapter. They were barking up the wrong tree with the wrong dog.
If you use the wrong measuring device, hooked up between two inappropriate points, you're unlikely to get correct results.
Also the lighting the LED story proves *nothing*. Many homes have high-frequency noise from light dimmers and computers, such noise can ride thru power adaptors and light LED's.
Don't beleive everything you read. First of all why would you burn pure Ethanol? It's mighty expensive. Not to mention it's only somewhat close to carbon-neutral IF and only IF you use natural gas to dry the grain and distill the alcohol. Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather we saved natural gas for like, heating homes, instead of making Ethanol to burn it to heat up trash.
Now if you hook a typical $4.99 digital voltmeter from Harbor Freight, the input impedance of the voltmeter, combined with these capacitors, will indicate anything from zero to 377 volts.
And if you rub your cat, the voltage could go much higher!
As you bright folks out there may be guessing, it's not the voltage so much that is the problem, it's the current. And the current is miniscule, microamps.
So no conspiracy here, move along, etc....
A few quibbles with this "test":
IIRC about $60 billion has been spent on ABM since 1950, with negligible results. What a super porkbarrel for the techies!
Please reflect on this article and realize it's not a "fair and balanced" presentation.
Mentioning a few features with no analysis of the possible downsides is not very useful writing.
Some downsides:
Anything that heats the skin is also likely to heat the cornea. Microwaves at very low intensity, far lower than can be felt, have been known for 60 years to cause cataracts. It's going to be unlikely that these new waves, which are thousands of times higher than the safe limits for microwaves, will not harm eyeballs.
We've gone over this. In a free market his power is worth much less than the retail price, much less than the average wholesale price as it's so undependable-- one cloud and it's all gone.
I suspect one big reason they pay the same is to do otherwise would require a separate power meter, installation, and periodic reckoning. The cost of that ($300-$600) is hard to pay back in less than a considerable number of years.
And I don't consider it a rational analysis to ue retail power prices-- if everybody got paid retail price for unreliable power, the cost of power would have to go up by a factor of 3 (that's about the retail/wholesale difference), times another factor of 3 due to the higher cost of gas-fired peaking plants to make up for cloudy times.
Any rational utility will only pay for at most, the avoided cost of the power, maybe 30% of the retial price. Anything else is madness.
If so, that's a hidden subsidy, silently paid for by all the other customers. In any rational economic analysis you factor that out.
Realistically they should be paying him MUCH LESS than the wholesale cost of power-- sun power is unpredictable at best, so the utility has to start up more of the very expensive peak power plants (usually gas turbine plants) to compensate for the dips in solar power. That makes solar power worth MUCH LESS than the average wholesale price of reliable power, in any rational analysis.
And notice that his numbers just don't add up-- his consumption is slightly more than can ever be generated by fresh new panels of that size. So there is no energy to get paid back for at unrealistic prices. Zero. Nada.
And in a more typical photovoltaic setup, where you're off the grid, you need batteries. I was extremely generous and did not deduct the losses in storing the power in batteries, or the cost of replacement batteries (they're typically only good for about 300 to 500 charge/discharge cycles).
When I plug your numbers into mine, this is what I see:
You seem to be paying 18 cents a Kw/h Thats very high, nearly twice the average. You also are using a bit more than twice the average amount of electricity. So your basic situation is not typical.
Your numbers for watts are misleading-- yes, that many square feet of panel wil generate about that much electricity-- durinbg peak sunlight. But once you divide by the appropriate factors for sun angle, cloudy times, and inverter losses, you're down to about 1,600 watts average, which is slightly less than your consumption. You don't seem to have ANY extra electricity to sell.
And even if you did, utilities will only pay you for their wholesale avoided cost, about 30-35% percent of what they sell it for. So even if you somehow cut back 50% on your usage (very unrealistic), you'd have maybe 800 watts average to pump back, about $458/yrs of income, over 30 years, that's about $13,000. So you've lost $52,000 overall, and had to make do with half the electricity. Not exactly the kind of deal people will be clamoring for.
If you put the $65,000 in the bank at 4% interest, after 30 years you'll have $237,000. Or looked at another way, the interest on the 65K would just about pay your utility bill. Or another way, if you had to borrow the $65K, paying it back over 30 years would add another $230K of interest and principal charges.
So you see the economics are terribly dreadful!
So first you collect tiny bits of power at tremendous cost.
So now that you have a handful of volts and amps you've gotten at tremendous cost, what do you do with the energy?
Why, of course, you blow 70% of it making Hydrogen. (Electrolysis is very inefficient)
Call us back when the cost of this energy is only ten times as much as utilities charge now. You'll only have to improve the system by a factor of 100 to 1000 or so.
For decades now inventors have come up with metal, wood, and other kinds of "prefab" or "sitefab" homes.
But you don't see many. Like nearly none.
There's a reason for that.
There are litterally millions of people whose jobs depends on houses being built the slow clumsy old way. Every time a new technology pops up, those folks, thru their lobbyists, briefcase and baseball-bat carrying, "convince" state and local building code boards to disallow that kind of construction. They also get unions to block the construction, movement, and erection of these structures. So far it's worked really well.
About the only loophole is how "double wide" mobile homes got snuck past these folks.
You're assuming the NRO is releasing misleading info. Why? What possible difference would it make if they let out this info? And if there is a bad guy who benefits from having the "true" info, how likely are they to be fooled by this released info, when the NRO has never uttered a peep ever before about anything?
Well, I doubt if NRO launches anything-- they probably sign a check to Martin-Marietta, who coordinates things and rents a pad at Vandenberg.
>and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Well, it probably cost hundreds of millions of $. What it's worth, especially in the light of it being unusable, is debatable. Back when CMOS sensor arrays were custom made for $70,000 each the technology was gee-whizzy. Nowdays your basic disposable camera isnt that far behind what's in the current sats.
>It has apparently hung in a low orbit for months now.
"Hung"? as in hanging from something? Or hung as in "windows hung on me"?
>and efforts to communicate with it have been unsuccessful. The official said the problems were substantial and involved multiple systems.
So it probably had several radio links and none of them seem to be working. That's bad. There's usually at least one last-ditch fail-safe really simple telemetry and command link that doesnt depend on the main power source or antenna aiming. If they can't talk to that thingy, things are mighty grim.
>adding that U.S. officials
"Officials"? More likely a bunch of hairy and now sweaty peons.
>Were working to reestablish contact with the satellite because of the importance of the new technology it was meant to test and demonstrate.
So they wouldnt bother if it had old technology but cost $200 million?
>The other source said the satellite had been described to him as 'a comprehensive failure.'
Well, if you can't talk to it, that's pretty comprehensive.
Well your whole post is called into question due to quite a few questionable items:
>such as? I have always asked tough questions at an interview.
At least in the USA, you can't ask:
Do you have any young children that are going to be sick every other week their first three years? How high does their fever have to be before you stay home with them? 100? 102? 104!
Is there any chance you WILL be having children during your employ?
If your child kept you up all night, will you still come in the next day to work?
And you'd like to ask, but probably won't:
If you're on a dull project, will your wasted time spent cruising the net go up: 50%, 100%, 1000%?
If your manager is a jerk or an idiot, how much will this depress your efficiency?: 50%, 90%, 99% ?
Questions like that...