Two key differences, it is not "beyond the influence of government regulation" since it is explicitly part of Frencb Polynesia which is in turn actually part of France. Some interesting points in the Wikipedia article about French Polynesia:
"Political life in French Polynesia has been marked by great instability since the mid-2000s"
Always a good sign... and
"Despite a local assembly and government, French Polynesia is not in a free association with France... As a French overseas collectivity, the local government has no competence in justice, university education, security and defense. Services in these areas are directly provided and administered by the Government of France, including the National Gendarmerie (which also polices rural and border areas in European France), and French military forces. The collectivity government retains control over primary and secondary education, health, town planning, and the environment. The highest representative of the State in the territory is the High Commissioner of the Republic in French Polynesia"
Overseas Collectivities are integral parts of France and the supreme local power is the French High Commissioner, and its ultimate head of state is President of France Emmanuel Macron.
So the notion that this little project will be "beyond the influence of government regulation" is delusional (or else pure hype).
But hey! It is being funded with an ICO! What could go wrong with that?
My projection: the only thing floating here will be the money people invest in the cryptocurrency which will float away.
In other news you can still send money to Mars One to see a colony be not built on Mars. Mars One really missed the boat (err... spaceship) in not creating the chance to invest in the new Martian cryptocurrency. But that may be coming if, their gullible (err... optimistic) contributors have dried up.
Here's a news story from the end of last year - Comcast: Loss of cable television subscribers accelerates. I am sure that this has absolutely nothing to do with the billing practices described in TFA. Nope, unh-uh, not at all, not one bit, nothing to see here folks, these things are totally unrelated.
Converting a high quality form of energy - electricity - into a low grade form (heat) to store it is a terrible idea. The conversion rate for solar thermal is only about 40%. Some form if kinetic or potential energy are much better - several can do 80% or better.
As I note in another post here the battery is in South Australia, which is essentially a single metropolitan area - Adelaide, population 1.3 million - in a territory 50% larger than Texas (total population 1.7 million), located 750 km from the nearest major urban area, with almost nothing in between (and lots more nothing for a couple of thousand kilometers in every other direction). It is for practical purposes an isolated grid serving a single city. The situation on Oahu (population 0.95 million) would be similar, and could use a system like this as it expands its solar and and wind capacity.
In 2017 South Australia gets 27% of its electricity from renewable sources, increasing by 2% (of total capacity) every year at present, to be 33% by 2020, and the battery is actually an excellent 21st Century infrastructure improvement. So South Australia is the exact opposite of a "lack" - it has a very modern infrastructure.
As nospam007 says, this is not intended to be a UPS system, and so this calculation is of limited value - even if it were well thought out. But really it's not.
South Australia is essentially an independent energy grid. It consists of the city of Adelaide and suburbs centered in a territory half again as large as Texas, and beyond those borders are hundreds of kilometers of nearly empty desert. It is effectively a single isolated power grid serving Adelaide (they are connections to other grids but are very limited). That is the reason this battery exists, the isolated nature of the power grid.
So this battery is just serving South Australia - which consumes a total of 13,000 GWh a year, and so it could provide (as it most definitely will never be called on to do) power for the grid for 1/100,000 of a year, which is 315 seconds. For a single power conditioning system, being able to power an entire grid (in theory) for over five minutes is pretty impressive.
The whole reason for "demoting" Pluto had nothing to do with Pluto itself. It had to do with Eris....
Everything you say is true, but it gets much, much worse.
They concocted this contrived definition of "planet" not long before we started finding lots more planets, thousands of them.
The IAU needs to sit down with all the exo-planet astronomers, and planetologists (like geologists, but not restricted to Earth), and think this through from the beginning, and come up with consistent, science-based classifications, and let the chips fall where they may - not use a pre-determined "correct" number of planets for the Solar System.
Of course the very term "planet" is of ancient origin and referred to those permanent naked eye lights in the sky that weren't stars. There were only the original set until William Herschel discovered Uranus (well, Earth too - after Copernicus). When asteroids were first discovered, they were planets too until astronomers realized they were dozens of them, make that hundreds of them, make that thousands of them. So the term never had a firm scientific definition.
I think a more complex classification system is called for myself. It is true that Pluto and Eris are a new class of body - Kuiper Belt Objects, just as asteroids were and are, but that doesn't mean they can't also be planets. Now that we know of some 4,500 confirmed or candidate planets (which will expand to tens of thousands in a decade or so) it is ridiculous to use those ancient six plus two planets as the standard to define what the term means.
30 year treasury note are paying about 3% currently, while you are quoting non-existent investment opportunities why not go with the 6% someone else used here? Heck it sounds even better if you go with 10%!
The California Public Utility Commission has for many years been a classic case of regulatory capture by industry -- rubber-stamping virtually every power plant proposal brought before it. Rate payers are required to pay for these plants, and the builders make a profit even if they never produce a single joule of electricity, so California has some of the highest electricity rates in the country (though not the highest - yet).
The perennial excuse for forcing rate payers to fork over cash to private builders who provide no electricity is that this grossly excessive capacity is "insurance" against a shortage that has never happened.
Often the Enron brown and black out crisis of around 2000 is cited as "evidence" of needing these plants -- but at no point in Enron's artificially created crisis was there ever a shortage of power production, in fact there was ample capacity the whole time. Enron did cr@p like buying up power, pulling it off the market (by routing it out of state) then selling it back at an enormous mark up. This was possible because a Libertarian lawmaker named Steve Peace pushed for, and got, a power trading system set up (because private markets are just so totally awesome) which was promptly abused.
Non-unionized IT departments are equally guilty of this due to territory issues of IT management.
At my last employer, an Internet business with 100 or so people, about 20 of them tech, I had a desktop workstation that I needed to max out the memory on for an important project (a "big data" proof-of-concept). Rather than put in a request to the IT department, which for a small department was amazingly bureaucratic and unresponsive, I simply bought the memory for the best price on-line, and installed it, and filed an expense reimbursement -- for less than half the price "regular channels" would have cost and with next-day availability, keeping important project on schedule.
There was a huge stink from the IT manager. Since my immediate boss was pleased with what I had done, I (and he) just shrugged it off.
Anyone who has worked in a large defense company has observed people who had no identifiable skills or duties, yet were hanging around on the payroll. A common characteristic is that they were buddies with lots of other people and had been there a long time. Some of them were managers who were known to have "retired on the job" - which did not appear to interfere with their continued employment.
The main advantage is that JSON is that it is consistent. XML has attributes, embedded optional stuff within tags. That was derived from the original SGML ancestor where is was thought to be a convenience for the human authors who were supposed to be making the mark-up manually. Programmatically it is a PITA.
This is a DNA structure never before seen in any living cell. Knowing something is "possible" and finding it in a real living system is enormously different.
The article says: "a "twisted knot" of DNA in living cells confirms our complex genetic code is crafted with more intricate symmetry". Knots are never symmetric. They are either right-handed or left-handed.
Right - they should have said "more intricate geometry".
Well, the latest version of Confluent Platform community edition - a Kafka/ Zookeeper offering - only runs on Java 8. That would be the major reason, using code - either commercial or open source - that does not run on Java 9 or 10.
Then there is the puzzling short maintenance periods being offered for all post Java 8 releases. See for example the comments here. Moving to a new Java version that will be supported apparently for six months is very questionable for any enterprise. It appears that Oracle has some sort of scheme to make everyone (businesses, anyway) to pay for using Java going forward.
For the first 10-15 sec. Then it has to go into cool-down mode. Teslas are undeniably quick. But in a world where even trucks can approach 150mph if the tires are replaced with something appropriate to that speed, they're not particularly fast
But given that the highest posted highway speeds in the U.S. are 85 MPH in rural stretches in Texas, Nebraska and Wyoming, there is no advantage to approaching 150 MPH, unless you do racing on a private track as a hobby.
My current Pruis (a 2017 model) has an overall actual mileage from the moment it drove off the dealer's log of 51.5 MPH over 30,000 miles of driving.
And it is a very nice car - I drove in a friend's Lexus (2017) recently, and it was remarkable how similar the experience was. The new electronics consoles were similar, and the seating was equally nice (though the Lexus had harder to maintain leather, inside of durable, easy to clean synthetic fabric). And it had worse mileage. It was twice as expensive, but only very slightly nicer.
Congress no longer represents the people on the West Coast and the Northeast. It's heavily weighted towards the interests of less-populated central states. Remember, they get two Senators even if they have 1/10th the population of a Texas, New York, New Jersey, or California. This isn't representative government as much as a tyranny of a landed minority.
In 2017, the United States imported approximately 10.1 million barrels per day (MMb/d) of petroleum from about 84 countries. Petroleum includes crude oil, natural gas plant liquids, liquefied refinery gases, refined petroleum products such as gasoline and diesel fuel, and biofuels including ethanol and biodiesel. About 79% of gross petroleum imports were crude oil.
For comparison total U.S. crude oil production averaged 9.3 million barrels per day in 2017. So a bit more than half of U.S. oil consumption was imported.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's not the only one. The is also the "Republic of Minerva".
Two key differences, it is not "beyond the influence of government regulation" since it is explicitly part of Frencb Polynesia which is in turn actually part of France. Some interesting points in the Wikipedia article about French Polynesia:
"Political life in French Polynesia has been marked by great instability since the mid-2000s"
Always a good sign... and
"Despite a local assembly and government, French Polynesia is not in a free association with France... As a French overseas collectivity, the local government has no competence in justice, university education, security and defense. Services in these areas are directly provided and administered by the Government of France, including the National Gendarmerie (which also polices rural and border areas in European France), and French military forces. The collectivity government retains control over primary and secondary education, health, town planning, and the environment. The highest representative of the State in the territory is the High Commissioner of the Republic in French Polynesia"
Overseas Collectivities are integral parts of France and the supreme local power is the French High Commissioner, and its ultimate head of state is President of France Emmanuel Macron.
So the notion that this little project will be "beyond the influence of government regulation" is delusional (or else pure hype).
But hey! It is being funded with an ICO! What could go wrong with that?
My projection: the only thing floating here will be the money people invest in the cryptocurrency which will float away.
In other news you can still send money to Mars One to see a colony be not built on Mars. Mars One really missed the boat (err... spaceship) in not creating the chance to invest in the new Martian cryptocurrency. But that may be coming if, their gullible (err... optimistic) contributors have dried up.
Here's a news story from the end of last year - Comcast: Loss of cable television subscribers accelerates. I am sure that this has absolutely nothing to do with the billing practices described in TFA. Nope, unh-uh, not at all, not one bit, nothing to see here folks, these things are totally unrelated.
Converting a high quality form of energy - electricity - into a low grade form (heat) to store it is a terrible idea. The conversion rate for solar thermal is only about 40%. Some form if kinetic or potential energy are much better - several can do 80% or better.
This story is really about Australia's screwed up energy market and lack of infrastructure.
No, it is about Australia's geography.
As I note in another post here the battery is in South Australia, which is essentially a single metropolitan area - Adelaide, population 1.3 million - in a territory 50% larger than Texas (total population 1.7 million), located 750 km from the nearest major urban area, with almost nothing in between (and lots more nothing for a couple of thousand kilometers in every other direction). It is for practical purposes an isolated grid serving a single city. The situation on Oahu (population 0.95 million) would be similar, and could use a system like this as it expands its solar and and wind capacity.
In 2017 South Australia gets 27% of its electricity from renewable sources, increasing by 2% (of total capacity) every year at present, to be 33% by 2020, and the battery is actually an excellent 21st Century infrastructure improvement. So South Australia is the exact opposite of a "lack" - it has a very modern infrastructure.
As nospam007 says, this is not intended to be a UPS system, and so this calculation is of limited value - even if it were well thought out. But really it's not.
South Australia is essentially an independent energy grid. It consists of the city of Adelaide and suburbs centered in a territory half again as large as Texas, and beyond those borders are hundreds of kilometers of nearly empty desert. It is effectively a single isolated power grid serving Adelaide (they are connections to other grids but are very limited). That is the reason this battery exists, the isolated nature of the power grid.
So this battery is just serving South Australia - which consumes a total of 13,000 GWh a year, and so it could provide (as it most definitely will never be called on to do) power for the grid for 1/100,000 of a year, which is 315 seconds. For a single power conditioning system, being able to power an entire grid (in theory) for over five minutes is pretty impressive.
The whole reason for "demoting" Pluto had nothing to do with Pluto itself. It had to do with Eris....
Everything you say is true, but it gets much, much worse.
They concocted this contrived definition of "planet" not long before we started finding lots more planets, thousands of them.
The IAU needs to sit down with all the exo-planet astronomers, and planetologists (like geologists, but not restricted to Earth), and think this through from the beginning, and come up with consistent, science-based classifications, and let the chips fall where they may - not use a pre-determined "correct" number of planets for the Solar System.
Of course the very term "planet" is of ancient origin and referred to those permanent naked eye lights in the sky that weren't stars. There were only the original set until William Herschel discovered Uranus (well, Earth too - after Copernicus). When asteroids were first discovered, they were planets too until astronomers realized they were dozens of them, make that hundreds of them, make that thousands of them. So the term never had a firm scientific definition.
I think a more complex classification system is called for myself. It is true that Pluto and Eris are a new class of body - Kuiper Belt Objects, just as asteroids were and are, but that doesn't mean they can't also be planets. Now that we know of some 4,500 confirmed or candidate planets (which will expand to tens of thousands in a decade or so) it is ridiculous to use those ancient six plus two planets as the standard to define what the term means.
C'mon guys and gals, this is funny!
$10k, on a 30-year note at 5%...
30 year treasury note are paying about 3% currently, while you are quoting non-existent investment opportunities why not go with the 6% someone else used here? Heck it sounds even better if you go with 10%!
The California Public Utility Commission has for many years been a classic case of regulatory capture by industry -- rubber-stamping virtually every power plant proposal brought before it. Rate payers are required to pay for these plants, and the builders make a profit even if they never produce a single joule of electricity, so California has some of the highest electricity rates in the country (though not the highest - yet).
The perennial excuse for forcing rate payers to fork over cash to private builders who provide no electricity is that this grossly excessive capacity is "insurance" against a shortage that has never happened.
Often the Enron brown and black out crisis of around 2000 is cited as "evidence" of needing these plants -- but at no point in Enron's artificially created crisis was there ever a shortage of power production, in fact there was ample capacity the whole time. Enron did cr@p like buying up power, pulling it off the market (by routing it out of state) then selling it back at an enormous mark up. This was possible because a Libertarian lawmaker named Steve Peace pushed for, and got, a power trading system set up (because private markets are just so totally awesome) which was promptly abused.
Non-unionized IT departments are equally guilty of this due to territory issues of IT management.
At my last employer, an Internet business with 100 or so people, about 20 of them tech, I had a desktop workstation that I needed to max out the memory on for an important project (a "big data" proof-of-concept). Rather than put in a request to the IT department, which for a small department was amazingly bureaucratic and unresponsive, I simply bought the memory for the best price on-line, and installed it, and filed an expense reimbursement -- for less than half the price "regular channels" would have cost and with next-day availability, keeping important project on schedule.
There was a huge stink from the IT manager. Since my immediate boss was pleased with what I had done, I (and he) just shrugged it off.
Anyone who has worked in a large defense company has observed people who had no identifiable skills or duties, yet were hanging around on the payroll. A common characteristic is that they were buddies with lots of other people and had been there a long time. Some of them were managers who were known to have "retired on the job" - which did not appear to interfere with their continued employment.
But going "solo" doesn't count. The clubs only admit those who participated with partners.
Maybe Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic can offer special "couples" accommodations.
True, but no different than being in microgravity during orbit. This is also due to being in free-fall.
The microgravity (aka free fall) time is 4 minutes, so about two minutes to the peak above the Kármán line.
And what do you call COAL?
A type of rock.
You were saying?
The main advantage is that JSON is that it is consistent. XML has attributes, embedded optional stuff within tags. That was derived from the original SGML ancestor where is was thought to be a convenience for the human authors who were supposed to be making the mark-up manually. Programmatically it is a PITA.
This is a DNA structure never before seen in any living cell. Knowing something is "possible" and finding it in a real living system is enormously different.
The article says: "a "twisted knot" of DNA in living cells confirms our complex genetic code is crafted with more intricate symmetry". Knots are never symmetric. They are either right-handed or left-handed.
Right - they should have said "more intricate geometry".
Well, the latest version of Confluent Platform community edition - a Kafka/ Zookeeper offering - only runs on Java 8. That would be the major reason, using code - either commercial or open source - that does not run on Java 9 or 10.
Then there is the puzzling short maintenance periods being offered for all post Java 8 releases. See for example the comments here. Moving to a new Java version that will be supported apparently for six months is very questionable for any enterprise. It appears that Oracle has some sort of scheme to make everyone (businesses, anyway) to pay for using Java going forward.
For the first 10-15 sec. Then it has to go into cool-down mode. Teslas are undeniably quick. But in a world where even trucks can approach 150mph if the tires are replaced with something appropriate to that speed, they're not particularly fast
But given that the highest posted highway speeds in the U.S. are 85 MPH in rural stretches in Texas, Nebraska and Wyoming, there is no advantage to approaching 150 MPH, unless you do racing on a private track as a hobby.
51.5 MPG of course.
My current Pruis (a 2017 model) has an overall actual mileage from the moment it drove off the dealer's log of 51.5 MPH over 30,000 miles of driving.
And it is a very nice car - I drove in a friend's Lexus (2017) recently, and it was remarkable how similar the experience was. The new electronics consoles were similar, and the seating was equally nice (though the Lexus had harder to maintain leather, inside of durable, easy to clean synthetic fabric). And it had worse mileage. It was twice as expensive, but only very slightly nicer.
Congress no longer represents the people on the West Coast and the Northeast. It's heavily weighted towards the interests of less-populated central states. Remember, they get two Senators even if they have 1/10th the population of a Texas, New York, New Jersey, or California. This isn't representative government as much as a tyranny of a landed minority.
States get two senators even if they have 1.5% of the population of California.
Fortunately there aren't enough aggressively anti-social pro-pollution "coal rollers" such as yourself to affect over all pollution levels.
Any effective system must be robust enough not to be adversely affected by a few bad actors.
Due to the shale revolution, the US is now self-sufficient in oil.
I guess you watched some American Petroleum Institute advertising a few years ago and you believed the attractive pitch-woman's predictions, and assumed they came true.
But in actual reality (not "reality TV" reality):
In 2017, the United States imported approximately 10.1 million barrels per day (MMb/d) of petroleum from about 84 countries. Petroleum includes crude oil, natural gas plant liquids, liquefied refinery gases, refined petroleum products such as gasoline and diesel fuel, and biofuels including ethanol and biodiesel. About 79% of gross petroleum imports were crude oil.
For comparison total U.S. crude oil production averaged 9.3 million barrels per day in 2017. So a bit more than half of U.S. oil consumption was imported.