There is plenty of easy science still yet to be done in taboo subjects. The possibilities for illegal drugs alone are huge. Can't get funding? Crowdfund it. There are plenty of people who will contribute to good science in these areas, like this one which essentially is just putting people on LSD in a fMRI machine and looking at the results. I donated some money and it looks like 1279 other people did too. They are currently at 177% of their funding goal with 34 days remaining.

Right now, there are obviously a lot of donors and too few studies using crowd funding. That will surely change in the near future but I still think that is a far easier task to find 1280 people willing to give you $50 instead of finding 1 person willing to write a check for $66,000 (44,500 British Pounds). There are plenty of people like me who want to see research into these areas and are willing to pay for it.

The USA has high AC use because we have cities in very warm climates. Cities where the temperature can stay above 90F (32C) for weeks at a time- day AND night. Plus keeping a livable temperature in an office building improves productivity. I have worked in Tokyo in August and Baden, Switzerland in June. The high office temperature meant I could not maintain concentration nearly as well as in a US office building. If the $$ spent on air conditioning didn't deliver better productivity, we wouldn't spend the money. As for clothes driers, my wife is from Japan where line drying is normal and she quickly converted to drier-only. It is a huge labor and time saver, and clothes are a lot softer. If you put them on the hanger while still hot, ironing is only rarely required.

As someone who recently picked up an instrument for the first time in a decade, you have convinced me. Maybe you should have represented the defense in court.

As you approach a 1:1 ratio of tangential velocity and gas velocity, the efficiency falls off dramatically. At a 1:1 velocity ratio, that turbine stage is 0% efficient and not helping at all- the gas is no longer pushing it. For the most efficient design the tangential rotor velocity should be limited to 50-75% of the gas velocity.

It isn't a low hanging fruit. It is part of a multipronged approach, tackling all of the ways people die needlessly.

Automakers spend billions of dollars making their cars more safe, going to great lengths to add features that increase survivability. The government sets standards that must be met if the car is allowed to be sold.

Local governments and state/national governments spend millions of dollars making lakes, rivers and beaches more safe, by adding signage, marking hazards and swimming areas, hiring lifeguards, building lighthouses, etc.

Just about every plastic bag is marked with warnings not to allow children to play with them. Lampcords and blinds have standards now that are supposed to make them safer and more difficult for young children to hang themselves.

"408 being murdered by a parent/family member" How many of those were by gun?

"58 dying from exposure (cold)" Governments all over the world, including the USA, have programs subsidizing fuel for the poor. Lots of effort and money is spent predicting the weather and issuing cold weather / winter storm warnings.

"228 from burning to death" - The government spends a huge amount of money on fire education and local municipalities subsidize smoke detectors, CO detectors, and other fire safety items. Etc.

So we do take action to try to prevent those causes of deaths. We spend billions of dollars a year on reducing them, and try to educate those in society about the dangers. The argument "accidental gun shootings are just another, of many common ways to die" only works if you are willing to treat it the same way as we treat other deaths. By education, regulation, and by using every other tool available. Gun advocates complaining about regulation and education is as absurd as a match or lighter manufacturer complaining about Smokey the Bear. The goal is to make the product more safe, and the public more educated, so it isn't as vilified.

If a company has to pay $2 billion for a slice of spectrum, they have to pass that cost on to their customers. The government gets $2 billion from the company and immediately spends it on something foolish. Everyone who uses that spectrum has to pay the tax since the company who bought the spectrum has to make back the $2 billion somehow. Plus interest. Plus a profit.

High-dollar spectrum sales are almost the same thing as the government taking out a loan. Quick cash for the government but the citizens will be paying it off for decades.

The "find a qualified user and charge them nothing" model is also a poor way to allocate radio spectrum. But that doesn't mean that the current system is a good system. Maybe we should be looking at a system where only Public Benefit corporations or B corporations are allowed to hold radio spectrum.

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.