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Comment Re:Moar Cloud (Score 1) 130

Eh, no talk stink! I turn 65 next month. And I've gone through more adaptation than most people our age. I'm now on my fifth favorite programming language (FORTRAN, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, now Python; that doesn't count my unfavorite programming languages, like C, or my more exotic languages, like lexc/xfst and sfst.)

That doesn't mean I have to like changes, when there's no good reason for them. Menus just work fine for me, and they are written with alphabetic words, not hieroglyphics, thank you. (If I could get rid of the useless icons, the ribbon would become a badly organized menu.)

I'm hoping that some day the Ribbon will go the same way as New Coke, Windows 8, tail fins on cars, and the new-and-improved Google Maps. (Ok, the latter is just a hope.)

Comment Briggs-Meyer (Score 1) 425

Briggs-Meyer is another theory that seems to assume U-shaped curves. For that reason (ok, other reasons too...) I'm skeptical of it. Why shouldn't most people score in the middle of the various personality scales B-M uses?

Comment Re:Ok.... Here's the thing, though ..... (Score 1) 533

Thanks.
I used to be on one of those steam turbine ships, a guided missile destroyer built in the early 60s. And yes, we could burn most kinds of oil (fortunately we were burning s.t. a little cleaner than they used to, which meant less cleaning of the boilers). The Navy had a few more steam turbine ships built up through the early 70s, as I recall (mostly destroyer escorts), but afaik they gave up on fossil-fuel steam turbines after that. Nucs are of course still steam turbines.

Comment Re:Ok.... Here's the thing, though ..... (Score 1) 533

The problem is the latency

I don't understand. Not saying you're wrong, I just don't understand.
Power usage already goes up and down, every time my heat pump comes on, say. I wouldn't think the power coming from solar panels would fluctuate that much. Sure, a cloud goes over the sun, or the sun comes out from the cloud. Does it make that much difference? Is the problem that the cloud/sun is more or less synchronized over a large number of houses that have solar, whereas the heat pumps are not?

Comment Re:Just staggering... (Score 1) 193

Nucs have steam turbines, but most modern warships (destroyers and such-like) have gas turbines. I was on one of the oil-fired steam turbine destroyers, the USS Goldsborough, last of the Adams-class to be decommissioned, and afaik (tell me if I'm wrong!) the last steam powered US destroyer (DDG). It had 1200psi steam, 975 degrees of superheat, and the plant was a bear to maintain. We estimated 5000 valves in the engineering spaces (including air lines, oil lines, and so forth, not just steam). From what I hear, the new gas turbine destroyers are much easier to keep in running shape. (Of course my ship was the best one :-).)

Comment Re:Think walls of steel... (Score 1) 193

Why would an aircraft carrier have such a thick hull? They were in general designed for speed, unlike battleships. The Independence was built on a light cruiser hull; later light cruisers had a 3.5 to 5 inch belt, to protect from torpedoes. I don't know what thickness of a belt the Independence might have had, but I doubt it was more than that. And the belt would only have been there around the side, not (I think) on the bottom of the hull. So I doubt these radioactive barrels are all that well protected (and of course the hull has been flooded since the day it sunk).

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