Unless you're the boss, I fundamentally disagree with the idea that you should have personal standards, that you force onto your colleagues to meet them like that.

In a business situation, the organization should have standards, and that's what they should meet. only if they've done something that is not fit for purpose, then yes, you can and should fail the review. But that's not you just not liking the way they've done it, you have to actually have a good reason to think it won't work.

The purpose of economic activity is to make money, not dot i;s and cross ts.

They've tested it at the test rig and it works fine.

The engine has a far easier time than scramjet engines, they should be able to keep the running for hours; good luck with getting a scramjet engine to do that!

SABRE idea has also got a huge advantage that the cycle works with excellent thrust and efficiency from zero speed all the way up to Mach 5.5. Scramjets ONLY work above Mach 4 or so.

The air starts to burn the nitrogen with the oxygen giving nitrates; this takes energy and tends to be rather inefficient and changes the aerodynamics.

Yeah, this makes sense because America is the most ethical country on the planet.

Nuclear doesn't kill people, but fallout causes large areas of land to have to be evacuated, and causes MASSIVE economic damage. The nuclear pushers will claim that modern reactors don't melt down, but there's no good reason to think that that's 100% so. And if it's not, then they will sometimes and the more reactors there are, the more chance of it happening.

Note also that hydro- just ordinary hydro, not pumped- is virtually 100% efficient at storing wind energy; in many cases you just hold back the water and release it when the wind drops. Many hydro systems are now being fitted with bigger generators to make that work better.

I bet that the turbines can be built better to last much longer.

Environmentalism is always a tradeoff- trading off riverbeds against global warming for example. And the thing about hydro is that it doesn't matter if the hydro is already deployed, wind generally allows you to make better use of it, because when the wind blows you can hold back the water, and the evaporation losses are very small, and so it's very efficient. Pumped storage is OK too, but it's a rather less efficient.

Actually the solar panel thing isn't as good as you'd hope. Solar energy is still much more expensive than nuclear or wind, although it's getting there.

The gas thing, $10 billion sounds like a lot, but it's over 7 years or more, it's not as bad as it sounds, and wind is otherwise cheaper than nuclear anyway. Also, although you probably can get that high pressure front effect sometimes, wind speeds are generally higher in winter. That quote "In winter, when the most intense cold period coincides with a high pressure front, most wind turbines do not work." is only a partial truth.

Not necessarily.

Wind power energy cost is at grid parity right now, and is virtually CO2 neutral.

I mean, yeah sure, wind is intermittent; but it doesn't melt down, and storage can be done with hydro, pumped hydro or electric cars, or you can fill in with a bit of fossil or biofuel when the wind doesn't blow.

Wind power is growing at ~25% per annum. It's only about 3% at the moment, but with that growth rate, it's going to be huge.

Some countries like Denmark are already at 30%, and are aiming for 50%, and Denmark isn't even very good for wind resources (although they're surrounded by hydro, which certainly is good.)

Nuclear is more expensive than wind, and is also poor at load following; you normally find nuclear needs hydro as well; because it's so expensive to build it runs flat out and then the hydro does the load following- nuclear is better for baseload.

Actually, not that much energy; the cost of drinkable water is measured in pennies per cubic metre (1000 litres).

Basically, you can use heat exchangers to boil and distil the water using hardly any energy, the water comes out lukewarm and virtually all the heat used is recycled within the process. You can even use solar energy for this.

There's also processes using membranes that are about as good where you just pump the water through the membrane.

You can't usually make a patent critically hinge on just using a different material, the patent office won't usually give you a patent on that; they normally want a bit more than that.

The plural of trite phrases is not 'rebuttal'.

You say it's 'purely statistical' as if this makes it completely insufficiient, but the whole of science is at root, purely statistical, and none the worse for that!

They also had a line in SDH and SONET equipment. That's been or is being replaced with IP/Ethernet protocol equipment. Basically, all their old core markets evaporated, and they weren't able to adapt in time.

> The problem is inefficiency. Power drops with the square of distance.

Wrong!

That's how radio works.

Actually the resonant schemes DON'T use radio, they use inductance; which is just magnetic fields; and they work at much lower frequencies.

By contrast, radio is a particular mixture of magnetic and electric fields that propagate to infinity, and you tend to lose them. That was the genius of Marconi, to get the mix right.

But magnetic fields on their own don't propagate, that's partly why magnets don't go flat. The energy hangs around the transmitter and can be absorbed by a suitable receiver.

Except that now the device can have chips in to measure the amount of power being supplied, and if somebody hasn't paid, can cut it off.

And actually the original problem about how you can be billed was solved by television broadcasters; mostly it relied on people being honest, and occasionally driving around with a truck with equipment to sniff out people that were stealing.

...but it helps!