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Comment Re:Yikes (Score 2) 96

The problem is getting people to build it exactly as the computer models it :-)

I would think that welds are quite chaotic in nature. The heat changes the crystal structure of the steel, the welds are not uniform, etc.

Steel is really complicated stuff. It's a matrix of iron alloy and hard nonmetallic crystals like carbides. The iron alloy can have five different crystal structures, and can transition between them through heating - which welding does. There is also thermal stress from welding, which you can relax by annealing, but annealing the entire vehicle is not practical.

Comment Re:Cryogenic temperatures required!! (Score 2) 96

The cryogenic nitrogen used in the test is very cold, as you can see by the frost on the vehicle. Atmospheric pressure is only 14 pounds, so if you pressurize to 14 pounds greater than you intend in space, you get equivalent stress on the vehicle. The final test is to actually send it to space.

Comment Re: Not everyone (Score 1) 131

Let's not kid ourselves that fossil fuel exploration and production doesn't also have tremendous tax credits and subsidies, and that nuclear did not also have this when the plants were being constructed. If you want to take away one, you have to take away the other too. I'm also not at all clear that California municipalities are forced to contract with a specific indeprndent solar provider like Alta power.

And backups are not an issue for desalinization. You only need to desalinate when there is power

Comment Re: Not everyone (Score 1) 131

We can't really pretend that nuclear plants for economically effective any longer. Pretty much all of the oil-fired plants constructed in the 1950s and 60s in California, and about half of the natural-gas-fired ones are no longer economically feasible for operation, and despite the fact that nuclear plants theoretically should be cheaper to operate than the fossil-fuel ones, they haven't been. Cross your fingers and hope for effective fusion, but we're not seeing that so far either.

So it happens that solar and wind crossed the line of being less expensive to sell to California municipalities than fossil-fuel-based power over the past several years. And the perovskite-based cells are looking very promising, and approaching 30% efficiency for tandem perovskite and silicon cells.

Of course desalinization does not have the storage problem that home power does. If you've got more solar power in the daytime, only desalinate in the daytime. And we have lots of desert in which to make that power.

So yes, there is desalinization in the future. I think the real problem, though, is that California has both more people, and more acres farmed, than it can support.

Submission + - Gopher's rise and fall shows how much we lost when monopolists stole the net (eff.org)

mouthbeef writes: EFF just published the latest instalment in my case histories of "adversarial interoperability" once the main force that kept tech competitive. Today, I tell the story of Gopher, the web’s immediate predecessor, which burrowed under the mainframe systems’ guardians and created a menu-driven interface to campus resources, then the whole internet.

Gopher ruled until browser vendors swallowed gopherspace whole, incorporating it by turning gopher:// into a way to access anything on any Gopher server. Gopher served as the booster rocket that helped the web attain a stable orbit. But the tools that Gopher used to crack open the silos, and the moves that the web pulled to crack open Gopher, are radioactively illegal today.

If you wanted do to Facebook what Gopher did to the mainframes, you would be pulverized by the relentless grinding of software patents, terms of service, anticircumvention law, bullshit theories about APIs being copyrightable. Big Tech blames “network effects” for its monopolies — but that's a counsel of despair. If impersonal forces (and not anticompetitive bullying) are what keeps tech big then there’s no point in trying to make it small. Big Tech’s critics swallow this line, demanding that Big Tech be given state-like duties to police user conduct — duties that require billions and total control to perform, guaranteeing tech monopolists perpetual dominance. But the lesson of Gopher is that adversarial interop is judo for network effects.

Comment Student work, not an effective strategy (Score 1) 129

This assumes that the device with the microphone is sensitive to frequencies above the hearing range. Most devices have a low-pass filter for the purpose of avoiding any input above 1/2 the sample rate of the DAC, since these will create artifacts, aliasing, and distortion. Even in the case that current devices have left out the low-pass filter, it costs pennies to add.

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