If you dont need a lot of CPU power, you can get a MSI AM1I motherboard with the Athlon 5350 cpu and crucial ecc memory part CT51272BD160B (B, not the 'BJ' model). It isn't written on the box that this motherboard and CPU support ECC memory but there are forum threads full of people who built file servers using this combination. Only 6 SATA ports but that is plenty for most people.

They have never put it in a production machine. And as a steam turbine engineer, I can say they probably never will. The engineering problems are too difficult to solve in a cost-effective and worthwhile manner for small vehicles. Trains, large trucks, and busses? Maybe. But not in passenger vehicles.

There are practical reasons why we don't use this energy. In large power stations the exhaust isn't allowed to drop below about 300-350F. There is a very small percentage of sulfur in all fuels. It passes through combustion without being chemically changed, but if it is allowed to cool, the sulfur vapor combines with water vapor, condenses, and forms sulfuric acid. It is only a small amount, but over time it causes huge problems. It is cost prohibitive to try to make an exhaust system that can handle one of the strongest and most corrosive acids known to man.

Difficult and abusive negotiations are not the path to repeat business.

Well, at least it is exciting since maybe we will get a good Valve game out of it. Valve games tend to be defined by their physics puzzles and/or new gameplay innovations. When the technology for having portals in the engine was invented/developed (by others), BAM, we got 2 portal games. A new engine may just bring enough new possibilities that they make some interesting games themselves.

Only on slashdot does someone split hairs between economic obsolescence and functional obsolescence. I suppose the military does too since they have lost all perspective on $ per outcome and only focus on the outcome.

To be fair, I have worked with some of these Westinghouse guys and they are fairly universally not up to the task of playing in this industry. I'm not surprised they have tripped over their own dicks.

Most large utility contracts do have such clauses. They are called liquidated damages or "LDs". In new gas turbine , steam turbine, and wind turbine contracts, there are late fees for drawing and documentation, usually around $500-2,000 per day per document. Then there are late delivery LDs, which vary depending on the equipment but $50,000-100,000 per day for a gas or steam turbine isn't uncommon. Lastly, there are startup LDs, which are late fees for if the equipment isn't functionally complete and operating by a certain date. Startup LDs are a lot more of a headache because one vendor's delay often causes a delay with other vendors. Proving what is a "delay" and who caused it can be a major hassle. I'm glad I am not involved in this particular project because it sounds like a disaster.

The US government collects about $750 million in fees each year for nuclear waste disposal. Utilities have paid these fees for decades. The fund has 25 billion dollars in it. "Actions by both Congress and the Executive Branch have made the money in the fund effectively inaccessible to serving its original purpose." When it comes time to retire plants, utilities are forced to store the waste on their sites at their cost.

And consumers do have a choice in the matter. They are welcome to go off the grid. Electricity in the US is among the cheapest in the world, while also being one of the safest for workers and the environment. There is always room for improvement but electricity in Japan and Europe costs 2-4 times as much, and electricity production in poorer countries is often very unsafe for workers and the environment. The US does a fairly decent job at providing safe, reliable electricity at a low cost.

And all the other ways of making electricity are prohibitively expensive too. In 2003, Calpine had a multi billion dollar lawsuit against Siemens and GE for a large number of gas turbines. GE and Siemens' F-series gas turbines were laughably defective at launch and the Siemens units, in particular, had a tendency to completely self-destruct under rather easy to achieve conditions.

Heavy industrial equipment is expensive. Fuel for power plants is expensive too. It just happens that the machines are so large and powerful that the cost is divided hundreds of thousands, or even millions of ways among all the customers.

I wish that were an exaggeration. A couple days ago, South Korea legalized adultery. While the rest of the world discussed the history and the merits of the law, the US media asked only if someone had made a buck off it

From my limited understanding, it appears the photo is showing the particle while showing the effects of the wave on the wire. If light particles were rocks, we are seeing a photo of the rock sinking to the bottom of a pond at the same time we are seeing the water being disturbed by waves. In other words, we aren't seeing the light as a wave, only the wavelike effects on another object.

As an traditional power plant engineer, offshore wind costs seem staggeringly high to me. A 90m (300ft) tall tower in the middle of the ocean supporting a nacelle that weighs about 520 metric tons (1.15 million pounds) doesn't come cheap. Have you seen rate sheets for the cranes that are needed to assemble these turbines? On land, they average in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.

At sea, with the need for a large vessel and all the crew that a large vessel requires to keep it operating, the cost is staggering. I spent a couple weeks aboard the Tolteca, a Mexican heavy-lift ship with a 2000 ton crane and a crew of about 250. Even using labor from the developing world, the costs are astronomical. We invoiced them millions of dollars of work and they didn't even blink. An offshore supply boat rents out (in good oil-boom times, maybe not right now) for hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. A heavy crane ship is probably in the millions per day. That's just for erecting the wind turbine, which is probably at least a 24 hour lift. You also need specialized vessels to lay high voltage cable across the sea floor. Adding "marine" or "offshore" to the name of anything is an excellent way to multiply the cost by at least 3.

There are a very limited number of places on earth where tidal dam power works. Power output scales linearly with height difference. This map shows the tidal range all over the world. Combine that with a need for a bay or inlet that can be dammed without impacting commerce or the environment, and the list of places tidal power can be used shrinks dramatically. Remember, you need a bay or cove that is large enough to be worthwhile for making power, but not so large that it is economically important. And also not in an environmentally sensitive area.

Nothing wrong with a little tidal power but just looking at the geography it will never be a significant source of power.