Pick a "brininess" and energy consumption you want to run at. By definition, the brine produced will be more concentrated than the ocean water flowing into your plant. Run the more-concentrated brine and less-concentrated ocean water through this power system and produce whatever energy you can get from it. It will always be less than the energy that you used to produce the freshwater+brine, but it will always be more than 0 which is what you get if you dump the brine back into the ocean. How you want to slide the bars in terms of brininess and energy consumption is up to you. But either way, you're ahead with this system. Get it?
Yes, desalination obviously requires more energy than you get out of this method. But the point of the desalination is not energy production, it's freshwater production. You get freshwater out of your desalination plant. That requires using some amount of energy X. Instead of dumping the waste product of the desalination plant (highly-concentrated brine) somewhere, you use it with one of these devices to produce some amount of energy Y where Y is less than X.
The net result is that you end up with freshwater, and instead of spending X energy to get it, you had to spend only (X - Y) energy.
Because meth is illegal, a person who's using it doesn't advertize the fact. So how would you recognize anyone who used it in moderation?
I wouldn't, of course. As I've acknowledge three times now, I'm no expert on meth usage. But we have all sorts of data on usage for all sorts of illegal drugs. Where is the data on casual meth usage? This is now the third time I've asked for it.
And please don't wikipedia-link me stupid crap. That's a Slashdot addiction that has got to stop.
Do you realize said opium dens were run by the British with the specific goal of selling as much opium as possible, and as such didn't have any of the safeguards I proposed?
So in your meth dens, the dens would not be run with the intent to sell as much meth as possible? Is that how a licensed liquor establishment (a bar) operates?
Start here [wikipedia.org].
That link has a chart that lists heroin and cocaine (two drugs I called out as bad candidates for legalization) as very harmful. It lists meth as more harmful than alcohol. It has no information on addiction rate. It does have information on how dependent an addict is on the drug.
Higher latency between the memory and the GPU which is KEY to a GPU performance.
Latency doesn't matter very much for GPU. A little, but not much. Bandwidth is what matters for GPU. (Latency matters for CPU tasks.) As long as the GPU has enough buffer depth to cover the latency to and from memory (which it certainly does), the memory bandwidth is what will keep the GPU pipelines completely full.
Just out of curiosity: have you ever actually seen a drunk person?
Yes, of course. But did you read the next couple sentences of my post? I've seen alcohol users drunk, but I've also seen many, many alcohol users NOT drunk, and as I stated, the vast majority of alcohol users I've seen have not been drunk. What I haven't heard much about is moderation in meth users. Every time I hear about meth (which, like I acknowledged in my post, is not much), I hear about meth heads being super high and totally messed up.
In any case, you could always restrict the sale of some substance to a licensed establishment, and have them require an agreement to stay on the premises while under influence as a condition of sale. Licensed opium dens, in other words. This would also allow monitoring of usage, and medical intervention in case of addiction.
Sure. You realize though that China figured out that even with legal opium dens, it was still bad to have a good fraction of the population addicated to it?
What I'm asking for is non-anecdotal studies on the addiction and abuse rates of the drugs everyone is proposing to legalize. If the addiction and/or abuse rates are too high, then I'm contending that legalizing them is still bad for society. You've trade one set of problems (black market drug trade, drug crime, etc.) for a different set (a good chunk of your population is whacked out on whatever drugs are now legal) and it's not an obvious call to me that the problems you introduce with legalization are actually superior.
Quad core doesn't help you on single-threaded, lightly-threaded, or GPU benchmarks, which is most of the benchmarks that I saw in the article. That means you can't say that Krait sucks because it has four cores and barely beats a dual core, since the four cores aren't being utilized. The conclusion you can draw is that a quad core CPU isn't necessary for a good user experience on a phone.
And needing a faster clock to reach the same performance levels isn't a meaningful metric either, at least not in a phone. In a phone that is power-constrained, the metric is performance per watt. If both CPUs burn the same power and give the same performance, they're basically equivalent. How each chooses to provide that performance is immaterial in a phone which is a power-constrained environment. Maybe the Apple CPU has some performance headroom at higher power budgets if it could run at a faster frequency (thus providing higher perf at the same freq as the Krait core), but that doesn't help you if it has to run throttled at all times so as to not blow through the phone's battery life and/or burn your pants.
Most things being reported by mainstream newsmedia fit the description "stuff that matters". The question is, why does this matter to STEM nerds, which ostensibly is the intent of this website? (I say STEM nerds because just about anyone interested in a particular thing can be called a " nerd" nowadays; however this website started when nerd had a more specific meaning.)
The answer is, Slashdot cherry-picks clickbait, polarizing-to-STEM-nerds stories out of mainstream newsmedia. Rather than having any real STEM connection, they are merely topics about which STEM nerds tend to have strong opinions about. Common topics are almost always political: political debates climate change, political debates about alternative energy, political debates about privacy, American politics, and American foreign policy. (Note I did not say scientific or technical discussions of those topics. This website doens't really have those.) Even the Microsoft stories, which are at least about a tech company instead of about politics or mainstream news, tend to be non-tech pieces about how terrible Microsoft's business practices are, or yet another article about how Win8 Metro sucks.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
