Wind turbines that operate well above the ground most emphatically ARE being built, and I'm surprised this fact hasn't more thoroughly penetrated the slashdot consciousness given how "sexy" this tech is. I have biases because I work in this field and have met most of the major players, but IMHO the two companies that are marching most rapidly towards utility scale aerial wind power are Makani power and Ampyx power:

http://www.makanipower.com/
http://www.ampyxpower.com/

In particular, Makani power's 30kW Wing 7b (same as wing 7a but with more aerodynamic turbine cowlings) is hitting their predicted power curve perfectly, and they're already working on their next wing. Ampyx is also using (way more efficient) rigid wings, but they do their power generation on the ground, which has a bunch of advantages and disadvantages. I'm not sure which design will ultimately be more efficient/practical (and this may depend on scale), but at the rate they're going it will certainly be hard to beat Makani to market. Also, for better or worse, national differences in the way airspace is regulated may play an accidental role in preventing the industry from rapidly standardizing on one design. Currently the FAA is (tentatively) regulating Makani's turbines as structures, and the govt. in the Netherlands is (tentatively) regulating Ampyx's turbines as aircraft. Note that there are a bunch of other start-ups working on AWE as well; the above two are just the ones I consider most promising for utility scale power.

I live in Leuven, Belgium, where Group T is based, and they were showing off this car yesterday on the street. I didn't stop to look more closely since I've seen similar cars before, but I did wonder how the hell they made the patterned nose cone. It looked to me like it was injection molded, which seemed odd since a mold that big would be insanely expensive. Now I know better!

The cluster that runs Slashdot ~is CoyboyNeal's oven!

It leans in turns.

yes.

Standardized representations of coordinate frames and tools for manipulating them is indeed one of the features provided in most robotics frameworks.

They have those. One brand is called LabJack. The downside is that you're paying extra for what amounts to an arduino that you can't (as?) easily re-program and/or embed into a gadget.

You win!

I would not be so quick to accuse people of writing poor code when you know very little about the problem they're working on. And remember, ~most code runs faster on CPUs. If you read some of Vasily Volkov's papers (he's the guy who wrote the early versions of CUBLAS), it is very clear that you might as well not bother with the GPU if you're mostly doing blas level 1-2 stuff, since the arithmetic intensity isn't high enough. For our application we had some specific operations we could combine and tricks we could use to reduce bandwidth, but they turned out to not be enough. This was a Ph.D. project that took several years; many parallelization strategies were tried on both CPU and GPU, and I got lots of feedback from colleagues working on gpu compiler tools.

Well, I suppose either my application (face recognition for hundreds of users) is under the threshold for your definition of HPC, or it's a notable exception. Our algorithm consists primarily of repeated BLAS level 1 and 2 operations on chunks of data that fit in CPU cache, but not GPU cache. Essentially, it's low arithmetic intensity operations performed repeatedly (hundreds of times) on gallery image sets that take up a couple megs at a time (and there are a couple hundred of those that can be computed in parallel). Under these conditions, we find that a dual socket quad-core Xeon machine is roughly comparable to a high-end Fermi. There is locality in our memory access pattern that the CPU has enough cache to exploit, but the GPU does not. I'm not a chip designer, so I can't ~really compare the opportunity cost (in $/flop) of adding more cache vs. widening a memory bus of a GPU, but I suspect the cache is cheaper, especially given that it need not be shared (again, for our application).

I'm curious about the memory model too. I'm pretty certain that bit about "cluster on a chip" is just marketing hyperbole, and it's actually still a shared memory system running one instance of the linux kernel. They're not going to make you run 50 linux kernel instances and communicate between them using network sockets.

Depends on how much cache is on the chip, and how big the problem being solved is. GPU's have a lot of FP units, but they have such a tiny amount of cache that they basically have to transfer ~everything they operate on over the memory bus. On a CPU, your dataset can be several MB and still fit on-chip, but of course you have fewer FP units. The algorithm I designed for my Ph.D. operate on the same few megabytes of data many times, and it ended up being about equally fast on both architectures, so I'm hoping KC will bridge the cache size chasm that exists between CPU's and GPU's.

I still don't quite get it. Could you please elaborate?

You're advocating for people beat their children more, and yet ~I'm the one "with little empathy for others"?

I'm not an expert on psychology or child development, but the experts sure seem to disagree with you:
http://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/policy/corporal-punishment.aspx

Not that it has any bearing on whether children deserve to be beaten, but she ~does have ataxic cerebral palsy. It's in the second article you link to.

What's your take on elder abuse? Should we take off our belts and beat the crap out of our grandparents if they buy unauthorized copies of prescription drugs on the black market? Is a judge who beats his elderly parents for such behavior fit to decide cases involving elder abuse? Does the level of senility of a little old man really have any bearing on whether his children should ever beat him with a belt?