At that price I'd be better off buying a couple USB to Ethernet adapters and an Ethernet cable. That would be faster, possibly cheaper, not require any drivers (or at least none not easily obtained), and still offer the ability to breakup this "home brew Laplink" to connect a couple computers to an Ethernet network.
By looking hard enough I was able to find someone selling a passive, and USB 3.0 compliant, USB-A to USB-A cable for about $15. https://www.datapro.net/produc...
The warning on the DataPro webpage indicates that this cable will not support networking or file transfer with Windows, macOS, or Linux. Well, why not? Clearly this is supported in the USB spec and Microsoft provides debugging on this cable with some registry editing. Apple seemed to figure out how to write the software needed for networking on a passive cable for Thunderbolt, Firewire, Ethernet, and going all the way back to serial ports with LocalTalk. Seems to me that they are more than halfway there with the hardware and software, they need only to take those last few steps to take this from the realm of superusers to the everyday.
I can understand why Apple doesn't support direct USB to USB networking. First, they support higher speeds on other ports. Second, there's a lot of non-compliant USB cables floating about and they likely don't want to be held responsible for someone burning up their laptop over this. Third, without support from other manufacturers and OS publishers there's no real market for it.
Let's ignore the USB-A to USB-A aspect of this for a moment. I should be able to connect a couple computers together with a USB-A to USB-C cable, or USB-C to USB-C cable, and do more than charge up a laptop battery. There is a data connection there, all we need is the software to transfer some data. Given that Ethernet ports are disappearing from computers, and USB-C is taking their place, one would think that a computer manufacturer would want to assure that the ability to make a fast and direct connection to another computer was maintained. Well, I mean, besides just Apple.
Saudi Arabia gets 90%+ of their electricity from oil and natural gas. To make a profit on oil they have to export it, not burn it locally. To stop burning it for electricity they need something to replace it. They may be building lots of solar but they are also building nuclear. It seems they plan to build far more nuclear than solar. If solar power cannot support Saudi Arabia then it's not likely to work anywhere else either. Their lack of faith in solar power should concern us all.
I agree. What bothers me is the increasing lack of Ethernet ports and no support for an inexpensive alternative. All it would take is the small step of support for USB to USB networking with a passive cable. This was written in the USB spec 10 years ago, but it seems few people bothered to implement it. It's in section 5.5.2 of the USB 3.0 whitepaper.
Apple doesn't have this problem because they have USB-C ports on all new computers and support networking over a passive cable by use of the Thunderbolt protocol. An inexpensive passive cable will connect two Apple computers at 10 Gbps. A wired network does not necessarily mean Ethernet.
I guess if Apple supported this kind of connection with USB 3.0 it might go just as fast, and be able to connect to any computer with a USB-A port with a widely available an inexpensive USB-A to USB-C cable, but then the other computer would have to support this as well. There's little incentive by Apple to support this if Windows and Linux can't be bothered to support a direct PC to PC connection by USB.
Oh, and if you really needed to have Ethernet to connect by a wire to another computer then there's all kinds of adapters out there for this. Given the increasing scarcity of Ethernet ports on new Windows computers, especially laptops and tablets, the need for such an adapter is shared with Apples. But, again, I can connect two new Apple computers together at 10 Gbps with a $10 cable I can get at most any Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or whatever. I can't do this with Windows or Linux, or at least I haven't seen it yet.
I'd like to be able to do the same with Windows and Linux. Why after 10 years has no one bothered to read the USB spec and implement a very useful wired connection between PCs? Seems to me that there would be no hardware limitation for this, all we need is the software. Has no third party read this either and seen the possibilities?
Socialism: We all pay for this and enjoy the benefits of a healthy society.
When in history have we ever seen socialism produce a healthier society than a free one? I'm sure a lot of socialist nations are healthy on the surface, such as the supposed "cure" for Down Syndrome. All they did was kill any infant that had the condition before they were born. Same for the "cure" for homosexuality that supposedly exists, the government kills every homosexual they find and the one's they don't are "scared straight".
People with mental illness are often left untreated, because in a socialist nation the treatment is worse than the disease. Many other diseases are covered up as poor life choices that lead to an early death. Things like maybe smoking, alcoholism, bad diet, or speaking out against the government. Those kinds of life choices.
If you want socialism then go someplace else. There's plenty already in the world. Let's keep our freedom in the USA.
Medical research should be entirely funded by the public, and all patents and treatments that result made available to the public for free.
So, you'd ban any privately funded medical research then? That doesn't sound like a society I'd want to live in. In that case the government has a monopoly on medical research and if you had some disease that the government didn't feel like researching then you won't get treated. If you had piles of money that you'd be willing to spend on a cure for your own disease, or donate to someone with a similar goal of finding a cure, then the government would bar you from doing so.
I'm pretty sure that the best path is a combination of both. We can have our publicly funded research without barring private research. And private research does not need to come at the expense of public research. Each has their merits.
We saw a lot of research in prosthetic limbs come from public research as wars lead to soldiers coming back as amputees. The government has a high motivation on taking care of those that defended the nation after they've fought. This research can become available publicly for use to treat birth defects and industrial accidents, both of which are quite rare in modern society and not very profitable for private investment. Once the research is done though the actual manufacturing of these devices may in fact be very profitable.
Private research on profitable cosmetic surgery tends to also help out on less profitable treatments for birth defects, war injuries, and accidents. What has made elective vision correction surgery so inexpensive has been the government largely staying out of it. Competition between different kinds of such surgeries, and inexpensive corrective lenses, means the surgery had to become very inexpensive or no body would bother.
No, medical research should not be exclusively publicly funded. Doing this requires the belief that the government knows best always, and they don't. It also requires a government so large that it is capable of barring any private research. As I recall there seems to be a lot of people that exclaim "my body, my choice" when it comes to government intervention in medicine. Well, what happens when people truly get choice? They can fund any medical research they like.
I know "my body, my choice" is a politically loaded phrase. If the people that shout this from the rooftops actually believed this then they'd keep government funding from medicine as much as they could. When the government pays then they choose. If you want choice then you must pay for it yourself.
India apparently used a reactor very similar to CANDU to turn natural uranium into weapon grade plutonium for their first nuclear bomb test. This goes to show that there is no need to have enriched uranium for producing weapon grade nuclear material.
Why would you launch a military strike from the Moon? Wouldn't it be easier to launch a strike....from Earth?
Maybe you'd launch a military strike from the moon because it's a Heinlein story that was written 50+ years ago.
Did you miss the part where I hadn't read the book yet? I assume that the why is explained in the book. I also assume that the books diverge a bit from reality. The challenge was to explain the strategic value of going to the moon while not repeating something in science fiction. I use that as an example of how science fiction, given the large numbers of stories in the genre, likely covered them all and then some.
Can you think of a reason for going to the moon that wasn't already envisioned in some science fiction story somewhere? Maybe we will find a strange monolithic device buried in the moon's surface and want to send a bunch of people to investigate. Or maybe we'll take harpoons to go hunt whales and tell tall tales. Oh, wait, those were already mentioned in science fiction too.
Maybe we just feel a need to climb mountains on the moon, because they are there.
What is the strategic use of the moon and planets? Please explain without using scifi or references to any Heinlein novel.
Hmmm. That seems quite difficult since any strategic use of the moon would have likely been covered in some sci-fi somewhere.
I have some Heinlein novels in my possession but I have not read them yet. I do recall mention by Heinlein as a high ground position from which a military strike could be launched to most anywhere on Earth's surface. I'm sure some sc-fi covered the possibility of mining something of relative rarity on Earth but abundance on the moon. There's certainly been mention in numerous sci-fi stories that I can recall of the moon being a base of operations for exploration to other planets in the solar system and beyond. The moon can also be a place from which observations of the universe, or of Earth, that might be difficult on Earth's surface or near Earth orbit.
Seems to me what you are asking is for an explanation of the strategic value of the moon that nobody else thought up first. Seems like a lot of people thought of good strategic value for a moon colony, is there any real need to think of another? Just having one good reason to go there seems like enough to me. Sometimes the challenge alone is a good enough reason. As in "we choose to go to the moon because it is hard" or something like that, I heard that before somewhere. Not in science fiction either.
My guess is China or possibly India will have a better chance of accomplishing that than the US
My guess is it will be a privately funded endeavor.
There's international laws against any nation claiming dominion over any portion of outer space. If a nation cannot legally defend their colony then it's going to be difficult to establish said colony. This is a legal hurdle that does not exist for someone that goes out on their own to declare a nation of their own on the moon or other rock in space.
I'm guessing that there will be a group of people that want to free themselves from the politics of Earth and the moon becomes a place for people all over the planet to gather. People from all over the world flying to the moon to establish a new nation that has no connection to any one nation on Earth.
If there is a nation on Earth that can establish a colony then it's going to be the USA. I find it difficult to imagine that any nation will be able to amass the wealth and know how needed to do it any time soon. That can certainly change, and quite quickly, but that would be something on the scale of World War 2 to shift things about like that.
As I recall from something I read a long time ago the minimum size of a breeding population to avoid inbreeding problems is about 10,000. To assure this is truly self perpetuating then the population would have to be far larger, and likely selected against many inheritable diseases.
There are, and have been, populations like this on Earth. As one might imagine this turned out well in some cases and not so well in others. Part of this is social pressures on who is an acceptable breeding partner. If cousin marriage is considered accepted, even though far better mates exist, this can result in a drop of IQ, physical deformities, and all kinds of bad things for the future of the population.
There's cases where a choice for traits that turned out to be a bad idea for the future of the population. I can't recall any examples in human population but in animals there was a deer population that went extinct because a large rack of horns was seen as attractive. This lead to the males growing horns so large that they'd break their own necks. They'd also be encumbered by tree branches and too weighed down to outrun or fight off predators. There's a cattle mutation that doubles muscle size, which might seem like an advantage, but this makes the tongue so large that it can make breathing difficult. Would humans in a small lunar colony be smart enough to avoid this? Not if they end up marrying their cousins for a few generations, I'm guessing.
Of course it could all turn out well, and everyone lives happily ever after. The colony grows to potentially millions of happy and healthy humans, then they move on to repopulate Earth (assuming time heals all wounds even on a planet killing scale) and go on to colonize the other planets in the solar system.
If they actually meant it, they'd set a 20-30 year time horizon, which would cut the cost of the project by more than half, since it can replace infrastructure as it nears maximum lifespan.
If they actually meant it then they'd set a two year goal to go with the 20 to 30 year grander plan.
Without that goal in the time frame of an election then there is no accountability. Maybe they could make a 4 year plan, to fit in a term of POTUS. Maybe a 6 year plan to fit that of a US senator. Maybe an 8 year plan like JFK did in 1962 to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely. That would fit in the two terms that a POTUS could serve.
Any plan beyond the term in office of the person making the plan is worthless. Maybe I can believe a 20 year plan if it's got milestones at every 2 years or so. That way we can know they are serious. If they miss the 2 year goal then they must explain why it was missed and how they plan to meet the next goal in another 2 years.
You want to get to 0% carbon in 30 years? Okay, then tell me you will get a 3% reduction in the next year. Then another 3% the year after. And so on. If you can't do even as little as 3% this year then why should I expect 100% in 30 years?
When the energy from renewable sources and nuclear reactors go into the same grid, how do you identify which energy was pulled out?
That's easy, the renewable energy costs twice as much.
I keep hearing on how renewable energy will dominate the world because it is cheaper than coal. Well, then why do I keep getting these letters in the mail from the local utilities that want to charge me more for "green" energy? If it's cheaper than coal then they should be sending letters on how if I switch to "green" energy that my electric rates will be reduced.
Wind and solar are not cheaper than coal. If it was then they wouldn't need government subsidies, and higher rates from consumers, to sell it.
I saw an announcement from a local nuclear power plant that they intend to shutdown years before the originally planned retirement date because they could no longer compete with wind subsidies. That might be fine for the electricity consumers on the short term, they get cheaper electricity because the costs they bear are spread out among the taxpayers in coal country. What happens if everyone does this? Or, the subsidies end? That means a spike in electricity rates and a rush for more cheap energy. This means more nuclear and/or coal.
We can't keep driving nuclear power out of the market artificially and not expect rates to climb, energy shortages, or both. I prefer more nuclear sooner than later. The sooner we get more nuclear the less risk we run of another energy crisis.
Can't have a big bang just because some suicidal terrorists fight their way into the reactor hall.
A safety feature I've seen proposed in some fourth generation designs is a big fat "fuck you" button for such a scenario. If there is a threat of release of anything even potentially weapons grade, or of sabotage, there is a mechanism that will dump a big load of fission poisoning isotopes to spoil the batch and render the core effectively inert. They might still be able to walk away with some radioactive material but it will be no more valuable in a weapon than natural uranium dug up from the ground. Mashing the "fuck you" button would render the power plant unable to be restarted for a very long time but it also makes it worthless to anyone that wants to use it to make weapons.
Any nation that wants to make a nuclear weapon can do so by digging up some uranium and enriching it like the USA did in the 1940s. All the anti-proliferation laws do is keep the bar at that level rather than lower it with access to some new technology.
Chernobyl was also a "dual use" reactor, useful for power and plutonium production. No western country builds these any more. This creates the common complaint of nuclear power plants having to shut down for months every 2 or 3 years for refuel and inspection. The alternative to this is a more complex reactor that allows refueling while in operation, which also allows for the production of weapon grade plutonium.
So, make your choice. We either get dual use reactors that can stay online for decades at a time or we get proliferation resistant reactors that need to shutdown for refueling. If you want both then we need more research on new designs, and that means testing those designs in the real world. To test them means building them. We can't approve a design for mass production until tested. So, we are stuck in the catch-22 of not being able to build until tested while not being able to test until allowed to build.
Chernobyl was a disaster before it even went critical. It was unsafe from the start and it's quite amazing more people were not killed.
And to add to that, the only reason why Chernobyl was as hard to shut down properly as it was, was because that reactor type used graphite as a moderator.
That and the SCRAM rods where tipped with graphite as a lubricant. When they hit the SCRAM too late the graphite tipped rods was the last straw that broke the camel's back. It induced another "pulse" of neutrons that sent the reactor pile into an overload from which the rate of the falling SCRAM rods could not stop. The water flash boiled into steam, blew the roof off the building, and the rest is history.
Oh, and the lack of a containment dome didn't help. Most every other reactor built at the time had a heavy concrete dome built to contain a flash boil event like this. Without the dome the radiation was spread all over. Had it been built with a dome then it would have been another TMI or Fukushima, still an expensive mess but deaths would have been in the single digits instead of in the dozens.
Modern reactors used heavy water as moderator for a very long time. If reaction runs away, water evaporates, and therefore ceases moderating the reaction, which means reaction no longer has slow neutrons to continue the chain reaction.
That's how some modern reactors manage it. There's still plenty that use light water. I like heavy water reactors for this very simple safety feature but heavy water is very expensive and had not caught on in many nations. What is likely to replace light water reactors in the next generation are those that use molten fuels, as salts or metals. This means that if the reaction gets away from them then the fuel can be quickly dumped into a containment tank away from the moderator. This is kind of the reverse of the heavy water moderation where the moderator is dumped to stop the reaction.
Maybe heavy water reactors will catch on again. The price of heavy water will have to come down. Heavy water is considered a nuclear weapon proliferation risk though, because of the use of heavy hydrogen to make fusion boosted bombs.
Geographic distribution and high levels of predictability, combined with a distributed nature that means a single failure only takes out tens of megawatts instead of a gigawatt or two all make renewables more reliable, not less.
Geographic distribution works great for nations that span multiple time zones like Canada, USA, Russia, China, and India. What are island nations supposed to do? Shiver in the dark? Places like Japan and Hawaii cannot rely on wind and solar for their power. Nations with unfriendly neighbors will not be willing to hand over their economy to an adversary by sharing their electric grid with them. We see this in Europe with concern on the increasing reliance on foreign produced electricity and natural gas. South Korea would never consider a shared electric grid with North Korea and/or China. Do you think that Cuba would want to run an underwater power line to Florida? That would be political suicide for any socialist dictator. If their own people didn't string him up for selling out to the "capitalist pigs" then surely some American politician will use it as leverage against them.
I can agree that in a large nation, or group of friendly nations, could potentially build a "super grid" capable of supporting their economy on a mix of wind, hydro, and solar. Few such nations or federations exist in the real world. The rest of the world will have to find another solution. That solution must include nuclear power, and then also some wind, hydro, and natural gas. It's that or they shiver in the dark.
Then we will just have to wait for these people to "age out" as Bill Nye put it euphemistically.
It wasn't that long ago when the "atomic age" was supposed to bring the end of poverty and open the door to exploring the solar system and beyond. Then we got a generation that grew up in the age of "The China Syndrome" and "The Day After". These people grew up fearing nuclear power, and they've been teaching the next generation to fear it. This is starting to fade. I saw it happen before my very eyes.
In a modern history class in college, I was taking summer classes as a "non-traditional student" (meaning I was older than the rest of the class, but younger than the professor) I had a professor instruct the class on how China is investing heavily in solar power. I raised my hand and pointed out that China is also leading in nuclear power investment. He pointed out that nuclear power is hazardous, it can blow up in our faces. I pointed out that new nuclear is not built like old nuclear. He mentioned Fukushima. I countered that Fukushima was built before Chernobyl. He was a bit at a loss for words and now the students started to raise their hands and ask about nuclear power. The professor felt a sudden need to move on to the next topic.
It's very easy to flip people on nuclear power if they hadn't spent decades steeped in a culture that feared nuclear power for decades. This one small history class in a Midwestern university now has a seed in their minds that maybe nuclear is not as dangerous as it used to be. This professor will soon find it difficult to continue the same lecture he's done for the last decade in modern history and have students take it in as gospel. There will be more "non-traditional students" to dispute his "facts". Some of them might in fact be on the GI Bill like me, and perhaps (unlike myself) a "bubble head" that worked on modern nuclear power in a Navy submarine.
Nuclear power is exceedingly safe, and the more people exposed to this will prove it to the rest. One such example is the veterans of the US Navy that served aboard nuclear powered vessels. Nothing is as convincing as first hand knowledge. We can't have a modern Navy without nuclear power. We won't keep our modern economy without nuclear power either. As the existing nuclear power plants reach their end of life we will be forced to build more. Once we start building more it will be difficult to stop it again.
The guy can promise rainbows and unicorns and get the same result.
Chicago is called the Windy City not because of the climate, it's called that because of all the hot air from politicians that inhabit the place. They simply cannot build enough windmills to run the entire city and keep it affordable. There will not be any city in the USA that can run on 100% renewable energy except with the same funny bookkeeping that many businesses use to make the same claim. If they reach this goal it will be because they buy more expensive electricity from wind and solar projects around the USA and ignore that they are able to do this because of the ample production of cheaper (and far more reliable) energy from coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
There's also the matter of the time frame. He can make no promise that extends beyond his term. If he made a promise that was within his term in office, such as a 3 or 5 year plan, then I might believe him. A plan that's 10 to 20 years in the future starts to get to the point where any politician is unlikely to be in office, and perhaps beyond their own expected lifespan. No, this will not happen. Just more hot air from a windy politician.
Again, if he made some goal for the next 2 or 3 years, maybe as far as 8 years, then I might believe him. That way he could be held responsible. When JFK made his "going to the moon" speech people may have thought him crazy but at least it was within the potential frame of his time in office. We need more politicians like that. I'm thinking the nation is just craving for them. Give me a goal in the next 8 years, and even the slightest idea of how to get there, and I'll vote for that.
In sports we recognize that different genetics correlate to performance. We also recognize that while someone is generally athletic different genetics leads to different physical attributes which correlate to performance in different sports, or different positions within a team sport.
Take building a football team as an example. A coach would want the guys doing the defending to be big and strong, but not necessarily fast. The people doing the catching would have to be fast, but not necessarily strong. The guy that throws the ball would need a different build than the guy that kicks the ball. What does this mean for the genetic makeup on a team? Different tasks mean different genetics, at the higher levels of performance this genetic difference becomes difficult to ignore.
The brain is just as much influenced by our genetics as our physical attributes. There is a gradient of intelligence as there is a gradient of athleticism. Within that gradient there is a difference on which tasks this intelligence is optimized. In a university, especially at the graduate level, this genetic difference becomes difficult to ignore.
Where politics is ruining our universities is that people equate this genetic difference with racism. Time and time again we see different "families" that we call "races" score differently. That doesn't mean people from these different families cannot excel in any field of choice, only that statistically there may be more or fewer individuals from these families that excel.
People of Asian ancestry always did excel in STEM. That does not mean someone from a different "family" cannot excel. The bell curve still applies, there's always going to be someone from some different family that will do far better than someone from an Asian family.
In other words, if people are serious about ending racism then stop looking at races. Treat people as individuals and we'd all be far better off. Inflating grades of minorities doesn't help them, it only sets them up for failure in the future. This also applies to racial quotas on university admissions. This sets up two people on a path of a less successful future, first is the person that got admitted in spite of a lower score, second is the person that scored higher and was denied entry because of race.
STOP THE RACISM! Having a racial quota is still racism. Claiming this is penance for some past sin does not mean it's not racism. The European or Asian student that was denied admittance didn't own any slaves, and this is likely true going back many generations. The African student that was admitted this year wasn't a slave, and did not likely have even a grandparent that was a slave.
Different genetics means different attributes. These tend to run along family lines. Denying this and forcing people into roles that they are not best suited is bad for society. STOP IT!
As a senior in college I lived in an apartment off campus with a graduate roommate. He told me of how he applied for a job at the university and part of the application was an English aptitude test. I guess the school got tired of complaints on teaching assistants being unable to speak proper English and tested everyone that applied. He said he scored a bit lower than average because of his dyslexia but still got a job as a teaching assistant. He was from Michigan and the majority of the students would also have been from Midwest USA. The school wanted someone that could speak English to the students.
The people that scored higher on the English test, but had thick accents, would be doing research instead of teach. In a lab they would have to interact with other international students and the tenured professors that had to grade their work. I was pleased that the school understood the need to have native speakers teach rather than simply take the highest scoring people on a written test to teach classes.
I guess there's a couple another possibilities. One being the "stupid" kid in class was stuck teaching the undergrads while the "smart" ones (with the higher English scores) got to do the more interesting (and profitable for the school) graduate research. He did get accepted into graduate school, in an electrical engineering program, at a well known state university, so he can't be all that "stupid".
If you wanted to show the ordering then you would, or should, have shown the entire quote. I also made no claim that any attribute was any more important than the other, I can't type them out on top of each other and so I had to put them in a list in some order. Maybe the order is random. Maybe I saved the best for last.
The cost is probably more important than the rest since it's pretty easy to ignore some minor inconvenience to save money, people do that all the time. Same for safety, people do less safe things because it saves money. Energy density is also easy to ignore so long as it's not too far out of the norm. People might not care if they need a 30 gallon tank to hold the same energy they used to get in a 10 gallon tank of gasoline.
I'm pretty sure that the cost is more important than the energy density. When it comes to electric cars the cost is mostly in the vehicle, there's just a lot of cheap gas cars out there. Used cars are real cheap and there aren't that many used BEVs just yet to bring that cost down. If you want to argue total cost of ownership being lower then, while quite likely true, it requires someone willing and able to do that math. If this is proven true and it gets out to many buyers then that drives up prices on used BEVs, quite likely negating any savings.
It *is* leaking 400 tons of radionuclide contaminated water into the Pacific ocean everyday.
That's the mass of the water, tell me how much mass of actual radioisotopes are leaking into the ocean.
Now, tell me what are the actual isotopes. This is important because different isotopes pose different hazards, and some isotopes pose no hazard at all. Is it uranium? There's naturally uranium in the seawater already, Japan has been experimenting for a very long time on how to "mine" the sea for their uranium needs. Adding a bit more won't hurt anything. It is tritium? Also naturally occurring. Iodine? All the iodine-131 would have decayed into stable xenon by now. Any other radioactive isotope of iodine that would be left by now has a half life of millions of years, is also naturally occurring, and poses no hazard to plant or animal life.
There are very few isotopes that are created in a fission reactor, just because we can detect them does not mean they are a hazard to anyone. Also, it's the dose that makes the poison. Dumping 400 tons of just about anything into the ocean means nothing since the ocean is so large. This is especially true since we know that a vast majority of the 400 tons is just plain old H2O. Would I drink this water? No, no more than I'd want to drink seawater. Is this water a hazard to the life at sea? Well, I can find out if it is if we know how much of this 400 tons is not H2O and how much is an actually hazardous material.
Why didn't you give the whole quote? To lie by omission, I assume.
There is nothing as energy dense, convenient, safe, and inexpensive as hydrocarbons.
It's this entire list of attributes that makes hydrocarbons difficult to displace in the energy market. Find something with a significantly similar balance of those benefits, and something more, then we can replace hydrocarbons.
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I know Laplink still sells transfer cables, they have a USB 3.0 version for $50. https://web.laplink.com/cables...
At that price I'd be better off buying a couple USB to Ethernet adapters and an Ethernet cable. That would be faster, possibly cheaper, not require any drivers (or at least none not easily obtained), and still offer the ability to breakup this "home brew Laplink" to connect a couple computers to an Ethernet network.
By looking hard enough I was able to find someone selling a passive, and USB 3.0 compliant, USB-A to USB-A cable for about $15. https://www.datapro.net/produc...
The warning on the DataPro webpage indicates that this cable will not support networking or file transfer with Windows, macOS, or Linux. Well, why not? Clearly this is supported in the USB spec and Microsoft provides debugging on this cable with some registry editing. Apple seemed to figure out how to write the software needed for networking on a passive cable for Thunderbolt, Firewire, Ethernet, and going all the way back to serial ports with LocalTalk. Seems to me that they are more than halfway there with the hardware and software, they need only to take those last few steps to take this from the realm of superusers to the everyday.
I can understand why Apple doesn't support direct USB to USB networking. First, they support higher speeds on other ports. Second, there's a lot of non-compliant USB cables floating about and they likely don't want to be held responsible for someone burning up their laptop over this. Third, without support from other manufacturers and OS publishers there's no real market for it.
Let's ignore the USB-A to USB-A aspect of this for a moment. I should be able to connect a couple computers together with a USB-A to USB-C cable, or USB-C to USB-C cable, and do more than charge up a laptop battery. There is a data connection there, all we need is the software to transfer some data. Given that Ethernet ports are disappearing from computers, and USB-C is taking their place, one would think that a computer manufacturer would want to assure that the ability to make a fast and direct connection to another computer was maintained. Well, I mean, besides just Apple.
Saudi Arabia gets 90%+ of their electricity from oil and natural gas. To make a profit on oil they have to export it, not burn it locally. To stop burning it for electricity they need something to replace it. They may be building lots of solar but they are also building nuclear. It seems they plan to build far more nuclear than solar. If solar power cannot support Saudi Arabia then it's not likely to work anywhere else either. Their lack of faith in solar power should concern us all.
A citation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No wired network is a killer in some settings.
I agree. What bothers me is the increasing lack of Ethernet ports and no support for an inexpensive alternative. All it would take is the small step of support for USB to USB networking with a passive cable. This was written in the USB spec 10 years ago, but it seems few people bothered to implement it. It's in section 5.5.2 of the USB 3.0 whitepaper.
https://www.usb3.com/whitepape...
Apple doesn't have this problem because they have USB-C ports on all new computers and support networking over a passive cable by use of the Thunderbolt protocol. An inexpensive passive cable will connect two Apple computers at 10 Gbps. A wired network does not necessarily mean Ethernet.
I guess if Apple supported this kind of connection with USB 3.0 it might go just as fast, and be able to connect to any computer with a USB-A port with a widely available an inexpensive USB-A to USB-C cable, but then the other computer would have to support this as well. There's little incentive by Apple to support this if Windows and Linux can't be bothered to support a direct PC to PC connection by USB.
Oh, and if you really needed to have Ethernet to connect by a wire to another computer then there's all kinds of adapters out there for this. Given the increasing scarcity of Ethernet ports on new Windows computers, especially laptops and tablets, the need for such an adapter is shared with Apples. But, again, I can connect two new Apple computers together at 10 Gbps with a $10 cable I can get at most any Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or whatever. I can't do this with Windows or Linux, or at least I haven't seen it yet.
I'd like to be able to do the same with Windows and Linux. Why after 10 years has no one bothered to read the USB spec and implement a very useful wired connection between PCs? Seems to me that there would be no hardware limitation for this, all we need is the software. Has no third party read this either and seen the possibilities?
Socialism: We all pay for this and enjoy the benefits of a healthy society.
When in history have we ever seen socialism produce a healthier society than a free one? I'm sure a lot of socialist nations are healthy on the surface, such as the supposed "cure" for Down Syndrome. All they did was kill any infant that had the condition before they were born. Same for the "cure" for homosexuality that supposedly exists, the government kills every homosexual they find and the one's they don't are "scared straight".
People with mental illness are often left untreated, because in a socialist nation the treatment is worse than the disease. Many other diseases are covered up as poor life choices that lead to an early death. Things like maybe smoking, alcoholism, bad diet, or speaking out against the government. Those kinds of life choices.
If you want socialism then go someplace else. There's plenty already in the world. Let's keep our freedom in the USA.
Medical research should be entirely funded by the public, and all patents and treatments that result made available to the public for free.
So, you'd ban any privately funded medical research then? That doesn't sound like a society I'd want to live in. In that case the government has a monopoly on medical research and if you had some disease that the government didn't feel like researching then you won't get treated. If you had piles of money that you'd be willing to spend on a cure for your own disease, or donate to someone with a similar goal of finding a cure, then the government would bar you from doing so.
I'm pretty sure that the best path is a combination of both. We can have our publicly funded research without barring private research. And private research does not need to come at the expense of public research. Each has their merits.
We saw a lot of research in prosthetic limbs come from public research as wars lead to soldiers coming back as amputees. The government has a high motivation on taking care of those that defended the nation after they've fought. This research can become available publicly for use to treat birth defects and industrial accidents, both of which are quite rare in modern society and not very profitable for private investment. Once the research is done though the actual manufacturing of these devices may in fact be very profitable.
Private research on profitable cosmetic surgery tends to also help out on less profitable treatments for birth defects, war injuries, and accidents. What has made elective vision correction surgery so inexpensive has been the government largely staying out of it. Competition between different kinds of such surgeries, and inexpensive corrective lenses, means the surgery had to become very inexpensive or no body would bother.
No, medical research should not be exclusively publicly funded. Doing this requires the belief that the government knows best always, and they don't. It also requires a government so large that it is capable of barring any private research. As I recall there seems to be a lot of people that exclaim "my body, my choice" when it comes to government intervention in medicine. Well, what happens when people truly get choice? They can fund any medical research they like.
I know "my body, my choice" is a politically loaded phrase. If the people that shout this from the rooftops actually believed this then they'd keep government funding from medicine as much as they could. When the government pays then they choose. If you want choice then you must pay for it yourself.
India apparently used a reactor very similar to CANDU to turn natural uranium into weapon grade plutonium for their first nuclear bomb test. This goes to show that there is no need to have enriched uranium for producing weapon grade nuclear material.
Why would you launch a military strike from the Moon? Wouldn't it be easier to launch a strike....from Earth?
Maybe you'd launch a military strike from the moon because it's a Heinlein story that was written 50+ years ago.
Did you miss the part where I hadn't read the book yet? I assume that the why is explained in the book. I also assume that the books diverge a bit from reality. The challenge was to explain the strategic value of going to the moon while not repeating something in science fiction. I use that as an example of how science fiction, given the large numbers of stories in the genre, likely covered them all and then some.
Can you think of a reason for going to the moon that wasn't already envisioned in some science fiction story somewhere? Maybe we will find a strange monolithic device buried in the moon's surface and want to send a bunch of people to investigate. Or maybe we'll take harpoons to go hunt whales and tell tall tales. Oh, wait, those were already mentioned in science fiction too.
Maybe we just feel a need to climb mountains on the moon, because they are there.
What is the strategic use of the moon and planets? Please explain without using scifi or references to any Heinlein novel.
Hmmm. That seems quite difficult since any strategic use of the moon would have likely been covered in some sci-fi somewhere.
I have some Heinlein novels in my possession but I have not read them yet. I do recall mention by Heinlein as a high ground position from which a military strike could be launched to most anywhere on Earth's surface. I'm sure some sc-fi covered the possibility of mining something of relative rarity on Earth but abundance on the moon. There's certainly been mention in numerous sci-fi stories that I can recall of the moon being a base of operations for exploration to other planets in the solar system and beyond. The moon can also be a place from which observations of the universe, or of Earth, that might be difficult on Earth's surface or near Earth orbit.
Seems to me what you are asking is for an explanation of the strategic value of the moon that nobody else thought up first. Seems like a lot of people thought of good strategic value for a moon colony, is there any real need to think of another? Just having one good reason to go there seems like enough to me. Sometimes the challenge alone is a good enough reason. As in "we choose to go to the moon because it is hard" or something like that, I heard that before somewhere. Not in science fiction either.
My guess is China or possibly India will have a better chance of accomplishing that than the US
My guess is it will be a privately funded endeavor.
There's international laws against any nation claiming dominion over any portion of outer space. If a nation cannot legally defend their colony then it's going to be difficult to establish said colony. This is a legal hurdle that does not exist for someone that goes out on their own to declare a nation of their own on the moon or other rock in space.
I'm guessing that there will be a group of people that want to free themselves from the politics of Earth and the moon becomes a place for people all over the planet to gather. People from all over the world flying to the moon to establish a new nation that has no connection to any one nation on Earth.
If there is a nation on Earth that can establish a colony then it's going to be the USA. I find it difficult to imagine that any nation will be able to amass the wealth and know how needed to do it any time soon. That can certainly change, and quite quickly, but that would be something on the scale of World War 2 to shift things about like that.
As I recall from something I read a long time ago the minimum size of a breeding population to avoid inbreeding problems is about 10,000. To assure this is truly self perpetuating then the population would have to be far larger, and likely selected against many inheritable diseases.
There are, and have been, populations like this on Earth. As one might imagine this turned out well in some cases and not so well in others. Part of this is social pressures on who is an acceptable breeding partner. If cousin marriage is considered accepted, even though far better mates exist, this can result in a drop of IQ, physical deformities, and all kinds of bad things for the future of the population.
There's cases where a choice for traits that turned out to be a bad idea for the future of the population. I can't recall any examples in human population but in animals there was a deer population that went extinct because a large rack of horns was seen as attractive. This lead to the males growing horns so large that they'd break their own necks. They'd also be encumbered by tree branches and too weighed down to outrun or fight off predators. There's a cattle mutation that doubles muscle size, which might seem like an advantage, but this makes the tongue so large that it can make breathing difficult. Would humans in a small lunar colony be smart enough to avoid this? Not if they end up marrying their cousins for a few generations, I'm guessing.
Of course it could all turn out well, and everyone lives happily ever after. The colony grows to potentially millions of happy and healthy humans, then they move on to repopulate Earth (assuming time heals all wounds even on a planet killing scale) and go on to colonize the other planets in the solar system.
If they actually meant it, they'd set a 20-30 year time horizon, which would cut the cost of the project by more than half, since it can replace infrastructure as it nears maximum lifespan.
If they actually meant it then they'd set a two year goal to go with the 20 to 30 year grander plan.
Without that goal in the time frame of an election then there is no accountability. Maybe they could make a 4 year plan, to fit in a term of POTUS. Maybe a 6 year plan to fit that of a US senator. Maybe an 8 year plan like JFK did in 1962 to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely. That would fit in the two terms that a POTUS could serve.
Any plan beyond the term in office of the person making the plan is worthless. Maybe I can believe a 20 year plan if it's got milestones at every 2 years or so. That way we can know they are serious. If they miss the 2 year goal then they must explain why it was missed and how they plan to meet the next goal in another 2 years.
You want to get to 0% carbon in 30 years? Okay, then tell me you will get a 3% reduction in the next year. Then another 3% the year after. And so on. If you can't do even as little as 3% this year then why should I expect 100% in 30 years?
When the energy from renewable sources and nuclear reactors go into the same grid, how do you identify which energy was pulled out?
That's easy, the renewable energy costs twice as much.
I keep hearing on how renewable energy will dominate the world because it is cheaper than coal. Well, then why do I keep getting these letters in the mail from the local utilities that want to charge me more for "green" energy? If it's cheaper than coal then they should be sending letters on how if I switch to "green" energy that my electric rates will be reduced.
Wind and solar are not cheaper than coal. If it was then they wouldn't need government subsidies, and higher rates from consumers, to sell it.
I saw an announcement from a local nuclear power plant that they intend to shutdown years before the originally planned retirement date because they could no longer compete with wind subsidies. That might be fine for the electricity consumers on the short term, they get cheaper electricity because the costs they bear are spread out among the taxpayers in coal country. What happens if everyone does this? Or, the subsidies end? That means a spike in electricity rates and a rush for more cheap energy. This means more nuclear and/or coal.
We can't keep driving nuclear power out of the market artificially and not expect rates to climb, energy shortages, or both. I prefer more nuclear sooner than later. The sooner we get more nuclear the less risk we run of another energy crisis.
Can't have a big bang just because some suicidal terrorists fight their way into the reactor hall.
A safety feature I've seen proposed in some fourth generation designs is a big fat "fuck you" button for such a scenario. If there is a threat of release of anything even potentially weapons grade, or of sabotage, there is a mechanism that will dump a big load of fission poisoning isotopes to spoil the batch and render the core effectively inert. They might still be able to walk away with some radioactive material but it will be no more valuable in a weapon than natural uranium dug up from the ground. Mashing the "fuck you" button would render the power plant unable to be restarted for a very long time but it also makes it worthless to anyone that wants to use it to make weapons.
Any nation that wants to make a nuclear weapon can do so by digging up some uranium and enriching it like the USA did in the 1940s. All the anti-proliferation laws do is keep the bar at that level rather than lower it with access to some new technology.
Chernobyl was also a "dual use" reactor, useful for power and plutonium production. No western country builds these any more. This creates the common complaint of nuclear power plants having to shut down for months every 2 or 3 years for refuel and inspection. The alternative to this is a more complex reactor that allows refueling while in operation, which also allows for the production of weapon grade plutonium.
So, make your choice. We either get dual use reactors that can stay online for decades at a time or we get proliferation resistant reactors that need to shutdown for refueling. If you want both then we need more research on new designs, and that means testing those designs in the real world. To test them means building them. We can't approve a design for mass production until tested. So, we are stuck in the catch-22 of not being able to build until tested while not being able to test until allowed to build.
Chernobyl was a disaster before it even went critical. It was unsafe from the start and it's quite amazing more people were not killed.
And to add to that, the only reason why Chernobyl was as hard to shut down properly as it was, was because that reactor type used graphite as a moderator.
That and the SCRAM rods where tipped with graphite as a lubricant. When they hit the SCRAM too late the graphite tipped rods was the last straw that broke the camel's back. It induced another "pulse" of neutrons that sent the reactor pile into an overload from which the rate of the falling SCRAM rods could not stop. The water flash boiled into steam, blew the roof off the building, and the rest is history.
Oh, and the lack of a containment dome didn't help. Most every other reactor built at the time had a heavy concrete dome built to contain a flash boil event like this. Without the dome the radiation was spread all over. Had it been built with a dome then it would have been another TMI or Fukushima, still an expensive mess but deaths would have been in the single digits instead of in the dozens.
Modern reactors used heavy water as moderator for a very long time. If reaction runs away, water evaporates, and therefore ceases moderating the reaction, which means reaction no longer has slow neutrons to continue the chain reaction.
That's how some modern reactors manage it. There's still plenty that use light water. I like heavy water reactors for this very simple safety feature but heavy water is very expensive and had not caught on in many nations. What is likely to replace light water reactors in the next generation are those that use molten fuels, as salts or metals. This means that if the reaction gets away from them then the fuel can be quickly dumped into a containment tank away from the moderator. This is kind of the reverse of the heavy water moderation where the moderator is dumped to stop the reaction.
Maybe heavy water reactors will catch on again. The price of heavy water will have to come down. Heavy water is considered a nuclear weapon proliferation risk though, because of the use of heavy hydrogen to make fusion boosted bombs.
and geothermal (which is derived from nuclear fission, at the core)
No, it's not from fission. Well, there is some minute fraction that is fission but the bulk of the heat is from radioactive decay.
Geographic distribution and high levels of predictability, combined with a distributed nature that means a single failure only takes out tens of megawatts instead of a gigawatt or two all make renewables more reliable, not less.
Geographic distribution works great for nations that span multiple time zones like Canada, USA, Russia, China, and India. What are island nations supposed to do? Shiver in the dark? Places like Japan and Hawaii cannot rely on wind and solar for their power. Nations with unfriendly neighbors will not be willing to hand over their economy to an adversary by sharing their electric grid with them. We see this in Europe with concern on the increasing reliance on foreign produced electricity and natural gas. South Korea would never consider a shared electric grid with North Korea and/or China. Do you think that Cuba would want to run an underwater power line to Florida? That would be political suicide for any socialist dictator. If their own people didn't string him up for selling out to the "capitalist pigs" then surely some American politician will use it as leverage against them.
I can agree that in a large nation, or group of friendly nations, could potentially build a "super grid" capable of supporting their economy on a mix of wind, hydro, and solar. Few such nations or federations exist in the real world. The rest of the world will have to find another solution. That solution must include nuclear power, and then also some wind, hydro, and natural gas. It's that or they shiver in the dark.
Then we will just have to wait for these people to "age out" as Bill Nye put it euphemistically.
It wasn't that long ago when the "atomic age" was supposed to bring the end of poverty and open the door to exploring the solar system and beyond. Then we got a generation that grew up in the age of "The China Syndrome" and "The Day After". These people grew up fearing nuclear power, and they've been teaching the next generation to fear it. This is starting to fade. I saw it happen before my very eyes.
In a modern history class in college, I was taking summer classes as a "non-traditional student" (meaning I was older than the rest of the class, but younger than the professor) I had a professor instruct the class on how China is investing heavily in solar power. I raised my hand and pointed out that China is also leading in nuclear power investment. He pointed out that nuclear power is hazardous, it can blow up in our faces. I pointed out that new nuclear is not built like old nuclear. He mentioned Fukushima. I countered that Fukushima was built before Chernobyl. He was a bit at a loss for words and now the students started to raise their hands and ask about nuclear power. The professor felt a sudden need to move on to the next topic.
It's very easy to flip people on nuclear power if they hadn't spent decades steeped in a culture that feared nuclear power for decades. This one small history class in a Midwestern university now has a seed in their minds that maybe nuclear is not as dangerous as it used to be. This professor will soon find it difficult to continue the same lecture he's done for the last decade in modern history and have students take it in as gospel. There will be more "non-traditional students" to dispute his "facts". Some of them might in fact be on the GI Bill like me, and perhaps (unlike myself) a "bubble head" that worked on modern nuclear power in a Navy submarine.
Nuclear power is exceedingly safe, and the more people exposed to this will prove it to the rest. One such example is the veterans of the US Navy that served aboard nuclear powered vessels. Nothing is as convincing as first hand knowledge. We can't have a modern Navy without nuclear power. We won't keep our modern economy without nuclear power either. As the existing nuclear power plants reach their end of life we will be forced to build more. Once we start building more it will be difficult to stop it again.
The guy can promise rainbows and unicorns and get the same result.
Chicago is called the Windy City not because of the climate, it's called that because of all the hot air from politicians that inhabit the place. They simply cannot build enough windmills to run the entire city and keep it affordable. There will not be any city in the USA that can run on 100% renewable energy except with the same funny bookkeeping that many businesses use to make the same claim. If they reach this goal it will be because they buy more expensive electricity from wind and solar projects around the USA and ignore that they are able to do this because of the ample production of cheaper (and far more reliable) energy from coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
There's also the matter of the time frame. He can make no promise that extends beyond his term. If he made a promise that was within his term in office, such as a 3 or 5 year plan, then I might believe him. A plan that's 10 to 20 years in the future starts to get to the point where any politician is unlikely to be in office, and perhaps beyond their own expected lifespan. No, this will not happen. Just more hot air from a windy politician.
Again, if he made some goal for the next 2 or 3 years, maybe as far as 8 years, then I might believe him. That way he could be held responsible. When JFK made his "going to the moon" speech people may have thought him crazy but at least it was within the potential frame of his time in office. We need more politicians like that. I'm thinking the nation is just craving for them. Give me a goal in the next 8 years, and even the slightest idea of how to get there, and I'll vote for that.
In sports we recognize that different genetics correlate to performance. We also recognize that while someone is generally athletic different genetics leads to different physical attributes which correlate to performance in different sports, or different positions within a team sport.
Take building a football team as an example. A coach would want the guys doing the defending to be big and strong, but not necessarily fast. The people doing the catching would have to be fast, but not necessarily strong. The guy that throws the ball would need a different build than the guy that kicks the ball. What does this mean for the genetic makeup on a team? Different tasks mean different genetics, at the higher levels of performance this genetic difference becomes difficult to ignore.
The brain is just as much influenced by our genetics as our physical attributes. There is a gradient of intelligence as there is a gradient of athleticism. Within that gradient there is a difference on which tasks this intelligence is optimized. In a university, especially at the graduate level, this genetic difference becomes difficult to ignore.
Where politics is ruining our universities is that people equate this genetic difference with racism. Time and time again we see different "families" that we call "races" score differently. That doesn't mean people from these different families cannot excel in any field of choice, only that statistically there may be more or fewer individuals from these families that excel.
People of Asian ancestry always did excel in STEM. That does not mean someone from a different "family" cannot excel. The bell curve still applies, there's always going to be someone from some different family that will do far better than someone from an Asian family.
In other words, if people are serious about ending racism then stop looking at races. Treat people as individuals and we'd all be far better off. Inflating grades of minorities doesn't help them, it only sets them up for failure in the future. This also applies to racial quotas on university admissions. This sets up two people on a path of a less successful future, first is the person that got admitted in spite of a lower score, second is the person that scored higher and was denied entry because of race.
STOP THE RACISM! Having a racial quota is still racism. Claiming this is penance for some past sin does not mean it's not racism. The European or Asian student that was denied admittance didn't own any slaves, and this is likely true going back many generations. The African student that was admitted this year wasn't a slave, and did not likely have even a grandparent that was a slave.
Different genetics means different attributes. These tend to run along family lines. Denying this and forcing people into roles that they are not best suited is bad for society. STOP IT!
As a senior in college I lived in an apartment off campus with a graduate roommate. He told me of how he applied for a job at the university and part of the application was an English aptitude test. I guess the school got tired of complaints on teaching assistants being unable to speak proper English and tested everyone that applied. He said he scored a bit lower than average because of his dyslexia but still got a job as a teaching assistant. He was from Michigan and the majority of the students would also have been from Midwest USA. The school wanted someone that could speak English to the students.
The people that scored higher on the English test, but had thick accents, would be doing research instead of teach. In a lab they would have to interact with other international students and the tenured professors that had to grade their work. I was pleased that the school understood the need to have native speakers teach rather than simply take the highest scoring people on a written test to teach classes.
I guess there's a couple another possibilities. One being the "stupid" kid in class was stuck teaching the undergrads while the "smart" ones (with the higher English scores) got to do the more interesting (and profitable for the school) graduate research. He did get accepted into graduate school, in an electrical engineering program, at a well known state university, so he can't be all that "stupid".
If you wanted to show the ordering then you would, or should, have shown the entire quote. I also made no claim that any attribute was any more important than the other, I can't type them out on top of each other and so I had to put them in a list in some order. Maybe the order is random. Maybe I saved the best for last.
The cost is probably more important than the rest since it's pretty easy to ignore some minor inconvenience to save money, people do that all the time. Same for safety, people do less safe things because it saves money. Energy density is also easy to ignore so long as it's not too far out of the norm. People might not care if they need a 30 gallon tank to hold the same energy they used to get in a 10 gallon tank of gasoline.
I'm pretty sure that the cost is more important than the energy density. When it comes to electric cars the cost is mostly in the vehicle, there's just a lot of cheap gas cars out there. Used cars are real cheap and there aren't that many used BEVs just yet to bring that cost down. If you want to argue total cost of ownership being lower then, while quite likely true, it requires someone willing and able to do that math. If this is proven true and it gets out to many buyers then that drives up prices on used BEVs, quite likely negating any savings.
It *is* leaking 400 tons of radionuclide contaminated water into the Pacific ocean everyday.
That's the mass of the water, tell me how much mass of actual radioisotopes are leaking into the ocean.
Now, tell me what are the actual isotopes. This is important because different isotopes pose different hazards, and some isotopes pose no hazard at all. Is it uranium? There's naturally uranium in the seawater already, Japan has been experimenting for a very long time on how to "mine" the sea for their uranium needs. Adding a bit more won't hurt anything. It is tritium? Also naturally occurring. Iodine? All the iodine-131 would have decayed into stable xenon by now. Any other radioactive isotope of iodine that would be left by now has a half life of millions of years, is also naturally occurring, and poses no hazard to plant or animal life.
There are very few isotopes that are created in a fission reactor, just because we can detect them does not mean they are a hazard to anyone. Also, it's the dose that makes the poison. Dumping 400 tons of just about anything into the ocean means nothing since the ocean is so large. This is especially true since we know that a vast majority of the 400 tons is just plain old H2O. Would I drink this water? No, no more than I'd want to drink seawater. Is this water a hazard to the life at sea? Well, I can find out if it is if we know how much of this 400 tons is not H2O and how much is an actually hazardous material.
The dextrous robot was dangled into the Unit 2 reactor
Maybe if they didn't make their robots out of sugar they would last longer under the heat.
Why didn't you give the whole quote? To lie by omission, I assume.
There is nothing as energy dense, convenient, safe, and inexpensive as hydrocarbons.
It's this entire list of attributes that makes hydrocarbons difficult to displace in the energy market. Find something with a significantly similar balance of those benefits, and something more, then we can replace hydrocarbons.