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Comment Re:Gamechanger (Score 4, Interesting) 514

$0.50. That's how much savings one full charge/discharge can save you at current rates. That's $182 per year. Even people that plan ahead balk at a 5 year payoff, so you'd have to have the cost for a 10kWh battery be under $1000 to get people to buy in. Even $2k seems unlikely at technology and market levels.

Obviously those numbers change if the peak/off peak ratio changes, but $0.05 isn't enough of a difference to make it practical for that usage. Of course, it also functions as backup power or quite possibly can be used to increase the effective efficiency of renewables. I'm not trying to say that the system isn't impractical, just not economically sound for the on/off peak power shifting.

Comment Re:Why even have a class ? (Score 4, Insightful) 355

This is actually quite the opposite. I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a single person in the back of class just trying to get their work done and get out. Not everyone swears in their day to day life, let alone at authority figures. Not everyone cheats. Not everyone lies.

Comment Re:Hard to take sides (Score 5, Insightful) 355

He is certainly incompetent. Any idiot could see that the university wouldn't let a blanket fail stick, you can't fail an entire class based on group behavior that's just not the way academics works. If everyone in the class was really that bad, he should have been documenting specific incidents and then failed them individually at the end of the semester.

Comment Re:SpaceShipTwo (Score 1) 447

It wouldn't be 24/7, it would be the last 30 minutes. Or the last hour. You could even rig things so that if weight on wheels is set and the engine is shutdown normally it would be immediately wiped. Whatever. It's not about pilots playing grabass everyday. It's about pilots playing grabass and crashing a 737.

Comment Re: And what good would it do? (Score 1) 447

What percentage of max thrust is it set at? You have to guess with video. The data recorder will tell you exactly.

What happens when the data recorder shows you that alarms X, Y started sounding at 3 minutes before impact and Z at 1 minute, but the crew only reacts to alarms X and Z. Why didn't they verbally acknowledge Y? Did they not just not have time? Did they never see it? What if Z was the real cause of the accident and X and Y were relatively minor faults? There's plenty to be gained in terms of cockpit design and pilot training by seeing how the flight crew handles an impending catastrophic accident.

Comment Re:And what good would it do? (Score 1) 447

This accident isn't the right test case. The right test case is an accident where there are a dozen alarms sounding the cockpit and handling them correctly could have saved lives. Knowing how the crew reacts and responds to those alarms, where their attention is and how they work together could all be key to improving the design of cockpit systems or training programs.

Comment Re:Sure, great, new comms channel (Score 1) 123

Well, by most reports the target computers of Stuxnet were airgapped. There are ways, usually through social engineering.

Drop a particularly neat looking, high capacity (and extremely exploited) flash drive in the parking lot and wait for someone to pick it up. At worst they'll plug it into their open PC looking to see if they can find the owner. At worst they'll put it on their lanyard and start using it day to day, infecting every PC they plug it into. Yeah, airgapped PCs should have their USB disabled, but there are many places that should know better that don't bother. And that's just off the top of my head, a team of 20 brainstorming for a week is going to come up with ideas.

Comment Re:Don't fuck with Mother Nature (Score 2) 421

Don't fuck with Mother Nature

We. Already. Did.

I'd rather have us fuck with Mother Nature after a decade of exhaustive research, debate, and cost benefit analysis than continue fucking with Mother Nature purely based on what's most profitable at the moment (aka, what we do now).

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