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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).

Comment Re:The new version is terrible! (Score 1) 222

This sounds like a repeat of the Google News fiasco some years ago. They replaced a good interface with a bad one. The response of a preliminary test group was reportedly negative (I wasn't in that group), and when they made the change for real, there were literally thousands of comments on their forum saying how bad people thought it was, and not a single comment in favor of the change. (Ok, there was one, but it was explicitly tongue-in-cheek.) Did Google listen? No. A couple months after the change they made a few more tweaks, supposedly in response to the negative comments, but didn't really address the issues. I left Google News, and I believe many others did too.

Google is like Microsoft: they know better. (Except Microsoft apparently has repented of Windows 8, and they repented a long time ago over Clippie and Microsoft Bob. I've never seen Google repent of their evil.)

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