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Comment your washer has a cycle time? (Score 4, Interesting) 602

This is crazy. Just because the service tech told you something doesn't make it true.

I have an HE washer/dryer that predates yours. I got it them 10 years ago and they're still going strong. It was the Maytag Neptune, which was the first HE washer on the US market. There was a flaw in the door latch on the first year or two model but I was lucky to avoid that, mine is from just after that.

The washer works fine, although it is nice if you leave the door open for a day once in a while to dry it out in there otherwise, since the door is sealed, any moisture left in the drum after a cycle just sits there until next time you use it. It doesn't have anything to do with hot water, hot water only stays hot for a short time and hot water doesn't kill mildew anyway, if it did you wouldn't need to scrub or bleach the grout in your shower! Later models from Samsung and LG don't have this problem.

The dryer doesn't even have cycle times. It just runs until the clothes are dry. It does this using a dryness sensor, the same type which has been around since 1980 or so. If you do run it on a timed cycle, you can adjust the time it runs in one minute increments. So I have no idea what your tech was telling you about mandating short cycle times or burners that aren't hot enough.

Comment it's simple math, similar triangles (Score 4, Insightful) 425

On the smaller phone (iPhone 6) the lens is 50mm from the far (button) edge of the phone and protrudes 0.8mm. The phone is 7mm thick.

Thus there is a triangle formed on the top of the phone which is 0.8mm tall and 50mm base. Now, if you make the triangle 7.8mm tall you form a triangle with the front plane of the phone, a triangle with a base (7.8/0.8)*50 of 487mm.

So if you take the picture from less than 487mm away (half a meter) you can take a picture which doesn't show the camera and doesn't show the face of the phone (thus is "edge on") without using any photoshop trickery. The phone body will simply block the camera from view.

And that's surely what Apple did. It's not hard to do.

Also note: you don't have one, troll. It doesn't come out for a couple more days.

Comment same junk as last time (Score 5, Insightful) 444

You cannot base any real analysis on figures take by looking at an artists rendering of the site.

The article says that they will have 85 windmills because there are 85 windmills in the picture. This is garbage. It is an artists rendering!

If you want to have a serious discussion, you have to wait until there is some actual real info to discuss.

Note that net metering is not running your plant completely off renewables. It's running it off renewables some of the time.

Comment Re:batteries cost money (Score 1) 260

I forgot to do the 30% part.

2900MWh times 61 * 0.3 or 53GWh, 53M kWh. 530,000 packs or $2.66B worth of packs (apparently I misplaced a decimal point before). 1 year of entire plant output.

A lot closer to workable, but still unworkable.

This is why grid-scale electricity storage is considered a nascent technology instead of a solved one.

Comment batteries cost money (Score 2) 260

And those batteries cannot hold a charge for 6 months anyway.

Even if they could, you're talking about a deficit of about 1/3rd at the peak of winter and a corresponding surplus in the summer. So let's assume you have a 1/3rd total energy surplus for 2 months in the summer and have to hold it 6 months until winter where you use it up.

That'd be 2900MWh times 61 or 177GWh. that's 177M kWh. A Tesla pack holds 85kWh, let's assume it's about to become 100kWh. And the pack costs over $10K, we'll assume it costs $5K.

That would mean they need 1,770,000 packs, at $5K a piece or $89B worth of packs. It's also the entire output of the plant for 3.5 years.

Does this seem workable to you?

I think you're not getting a good grip on the actual size of the problem.

Comment Re:Musk worship (Score 1) 260

> Is it getting major tax breaks?

Yes. It's getting huge tax breaks here. It got a nearly free auto plant from California.

It gets $7500/car in subsidy from the feds. Many states give $1500 to $5000 on top of that. Some countries they sell into give tens of thousands equivalent.

And this is beyond the emissions trading money it gets, which is a subsidy, but not directly from governments, just enforced by the government.

>becasue they are high end luxury vehicles. Do you send letter to Mercedes telling them their care a rudely expensive?

If they charged $90K for a car which is luxury equivalent to a Hyundai Sonata I would. It's a nice car, but it doesn't measure up to other $90K cars on luxury.

Comment "some storage" (Score 2) 260

From the article:

"Reno gets an average of five peak sun hours per day."

Remember, as soon as you say the word "average" you are counting on a huge amount of storage so that you get the average amount of energy every day, even if that day is below average. And even if every day for the last two weeks has been below average.

In in fact, if you are using solar, you have to understand that nearly every day between the autumn equinox and the spring equinox is below average. That means you need enough storage to store up electricity all summer so you can use it in the winter! This is not at all realistic. More realistic is to make sure you produce more than you need in the summer and enough in the winter.

This does use more than solar though. However, I can't believe this guy counted the windmills in a PR picture.

Anyway, buying and erecting a 3MW windmill costs about $10M. That would mean Tesla would spend $850M on windmills. You cannot seriously think that Tesla is going to spend $850M on windmills before the plant even opens.

Comment Re:customer-centric (Score 1) 419

This isn't seizing. This is ordering an entity to produce evidence. Yes, the US could order a US company to produce the contents of a safe deposit box in Europe. If the company doesn't comply, the US arm would be fined until it does comply. That is if the US couldn't get cooperation from local authorities to get it seized.

The US government isn't saying anything about other countries' laws not applying. The US government is saying its own do. Where there is a conflict, it really isn't the US government's problem, it's MS' problem.

And this whole thing works in reverse too. US companies in the EU are required to comply with EU laws, including producing evidence that is outside of the EU.

Just to wonder, if you really believe that out of the US is out of the US' reach, you must be really shocked to hear of the IRS now finding out about money in offshore accounts and taxing people on it, eh?

Comment NIMBYs? Crackpots? (Score 5, Informative) 521

California has had 2-3 of these running for decades. Yes, newer ones are bigger, but even the smaller ones like the one in Coalinga can fry a bird if it flies near the focal point.

Maybe just stop building these. They are quite expensive. They are the most expensive source of electricity, bar none.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... (sort by levelised cost).

Comment it's not not an effort (Score 2) 125

"that may result in an unauthorized effort to adversely impact the security, availability, confidentiality, or integrity of an information system or information that is stored on, processed by, or transiting an information system."

It's not an effort (authorized or unauthorized) to adversely impact any of those things. It is an effort to deliver video.

You changed "effort" to "impact". You're changing the meaning of the sentence.

If someone were to hijack Netflix' traffic to create an effort to deny service, then that would be a denial of service attack and ISPs could counter that, as ISPs already counter DoS attacks.

Comment no, it's not true (Score 5, Informative) 125

According to the bill a threat is anything which is anything which is part of an unauthorized effort to deny access. Netflix streaming which inadvertently leads to a denial of access would not be part of an effort to deny access.

Here is the bill.

http://www.feinstein.senate.go...

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