I'm somewhat surprised they go to the trouble to resurrect and upgrade Amigas to do this work. There are plenty of recent ColdFire dev boards that could be used, if they can get someone to donate the board. Coworker tells me the default install for some of those boards is dicey and could stand to benefit from some attention.

naw, it just brought out the few sniveling whiners.

I'll bite. In kelvin, if we add 50% to the mean surface temperature of 287K, that would be.... 430K Which is damn hot. 315 degF for those of us in the U.S. who don't speak metric.

I thought the 22nd was a day of mourning?

They're designing to supplement the grid, not replace it. You're 10kW generator can't handle the peak loads on your house. When someone talks about x kW (it depends on region) powering n homes, they're talking about average demand.

I thought New New York was on New Earth?

As an engineer, I thought I would point out there are two ways we deal with patents:

Method 1: Once you have an idea, do a thorough patent search and verify your idea does not appear to violate any patents. If it does, re-design the widget so it avoids the patent.

Method 2: Ignorance is bliss. Design and build it.

I can tell you, if you use method 1 you will need an enormous staff and risk never getting anything done. Despite it all, you still won't be safe because someone will come along with patent claims anyway, even though you did a most thorough due diligence search. I'm not saying you ignore patents, that would be unethical. Company I work for has a record of the patents related to our products that we have been made aware of. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to go looking for trouble.

Patents won't stop you from building a couple of devices in your garage; but, they'll be as useful as bricks. You have to get the radios FCC certified and then run the gauntlet of certification hoops to convince the cell provider to allow you to connect your garage built device to their network. There are radio modules available that would speed up the process -- basically pre-certified modules that handle the entire cell phone function. You might be able to do it using these... But they're huge, relatively speaking. You won't be building a sexy device like a Galaxy S, iPhone, or Droid with them.

We've done it on equipment we're designing for deployment; but, I have the advantage of being able to call Verizon and say, "I'm Confused, an electrical and software engineer with Big-Company. I am using a cell radio module from A_well_known_manufacturer. I need to activate it on our account for testing..." And, by the way, we won't do that until we're pretty damn sure the thing will work right.

What is this "daylight" thing you speak of?

Motto: I vote early and I vote often.

My name is Chad. Chad Hanging.

And if you look at AMD's strategy, they seem to be suggesting people look at recompiling to run the floating point intensive code on GPUs. The GPUs are better suited to handle the computations than a FPU in a general purpose CPU core or module.

Isn't a geothermal plant, by definition, a nuclear power plant? (Earth's core is heated by nuclear decay)

I'm confused by the naptha reference as well. It's one of the primary components for gasoline... So perhaps it's being used as a fancy word substitution.

Uh, no. First, you'll not affect the upwelling of heat from the lower mantle. Second, you might increase the viscosity in the localized region around the well, which might have the opposite effect by forcing any upwelling magma to seek other directions for expansion, should there be pressure to expand. Third, if the water does ever reach the magma, it will enhance the probability of an eruption.

I'm sorry... This is a bunch of FUD. These plants have all seen impact of large storms before. Other nuclear plants along the Atlantic coast have been impacted by larger storms than Sandy. Despite this, the U.S. Mid Atlantic coast is not a radioactive wasteland.