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Comment Re:Typical company approach to accounting (Score 1) 53

So in essence this boosts their stock price by making them look more profitable than they are.

Sure it does. Any serious investor is going to look at their basic financial statement, not to mention the numerous articles written on the subject, and make an informed decision.

The rest aren't going to give a shit what their profits are. Most of them think revenue is profit anyway.

Comment Re:What's wrong with an accounting trick or two? (Score 1) 53

It's a bit like a jar of jam. You can keep scraping it for a little more for quite a while, but eventually there isn't going to be any useful jam. Then you'll have to buy new jam. This is how depreciation works, you figure out when it's time to buy new jam and write off the "loss" of your asset over that predicted schedule.

Because of the accounting and the second hand market, sending those graphics cards to the dump is going to likely be a bigger net benefit than trying to sell used compute cards with no display output. Most of them aren't ordinary videocards even if the chips in them are basically the same.

Comment Break Out the Champagne at under $100/MWh (Score 1) 37

$100/MWh isn't remotely competitive any more, mostly, but because of the "base-load" need, you might get that much. If it can't produce power cheaper than that, though, it won't fly.

Nuclear dreams are now in a race with batteries, basically - if batteries get down to $20/kWh as the CAPEX, keeping around enough batteries for a dunkelflaute every few years, starts to compete with $100/MWh of baseload.

And then there's geothermal, just a big question mark right now, but the chancers doing pilot plants are definitely aiming for less than $100/MWh - and for power that may not just be base-load, but have some storage capability so it can flex up more power at night, hold it back during the day. If they make that happen, nuclear has to beat them or die.

Comment Re:claims (Score 2) 47

Efficiency is based on differences in energy that are economically accessible, not on some rambling theories in a newline-free paragraph.

You can access room temperature. You can' economically access the blackness of outer space from the earth's surface. Likewise, you can access the negative terminal on your battery, but not some static charge in the upper atmosphere.

You pump X amount of energy into a heat engine, it expels that energy to an accessible exhaust, and typically 70 to 95 percent of that energy is *not* converted to work. You pump X amount of energy into a battery, it dumps that energy through a motor to its negative terminal, and only 5 to 10 percent of that energy is not converted to work. That's the only way to practically analyze the situation.

We could also all have infinite free energy if we could access the levels below the zero point energy in the quantum fields. One little problem: that's not accessible either.

Comment Re: Trump will solve this problem (Score 1) 93

Time for the US to nationalise all things vehicle. Registration and taxes. Emissions and smog checks. Safety inspections. Dealership laws and regulations. Driver licensing (including for trucks, busses etc). Road rules. The lot.

Fuck that.

I want the govt more OUT of my life, I dont want to give them more pathways into my life....

Comment Re:3D printing wasn't the problem (Score 1) 98

I'll find out in mid January, lol - it's en route on the Ever Acme, with a transfer at Rotterdam. ;) But given our high local prices, it's the same cost to me of like 60kg of local filament, so so long as the odds of it being good are better than 1 in 8, I come out ahead, and I like those odds ;)

That said, I have no reason to think that it won't be. Yasin isn't a well known brand, but a lot of other brands (for example Hatchbox) often use white-label Yasin as their own. And everything I've seen about their op looks quite professional.

Comment Re: Why was the older version better? (Score 5, Insightful) 70

They don't really know what caused the glitch.

The cosmic ray hypothesis is just a conjecture.

So, they're rolling back to the previous version until they can figure it out.

If they're doing memory scrubbing, they might want to bump up the frequency.

If they aren't using semiconductors made with depleted boron, they should be.

Comment Re:claims (Score 4, Insightful) 47

For the example in TFS of 200F water and assuming room temperature exhaust, Mr. Carnot says that the max possible efficiency is less than 20%. Any real world engine, including this one, probably ends up at a low-to-mid single digit percent efficiency. IOW, the vast majority of the heat would still be wasted.

The operator of the facility generating the waste heat might get more energy savings at lower cost by tweaking their processes to be a few percent more efficient in the first place, instead of trying to recover this low-grade energy source with an elaborate engine and plumbing.

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