Are you sure? The article doesn't say how hot the preheated fuel gets, other than it is supercritical. I can't find properties tables to see where this lies.

It is right to be skeptical, but the theoretical efficiency of a typical Diesel is in the 50% range.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/thermo/diesel.html

This thing is not a Diesel engine, but it looks like it might be similar to one.

Actually, I have the definition of supercritical wrong. I had confounded it with superheated. Supercritical is a substance that is above its critical point, where the liquid and gas phases combine.

I always thought the definition of a Diesel engine was that it used the heat of compressing the chamber to ignite the spark. In this engine it sounds like they are heating the fuel before it goes into the chamber.

Supercritical is when a substance is above its critical point where the liquid and gas phase lose their distinction. This requires both high pressure and high temperature. So fuel at 180 MPa may not be supercritical. It depends on its temperature.

People keep saying this is a diesel engine, but it is not. In a diesel engine, the air in the chamber is heated by compresssion up to something hot enough to ignite the fuel. In this design they are heating the fuel and pressurizing it before they inject it into the chamber, so that it turns to vapor as soon as it is injected into the chamber. Someone seemed to be making fun of the term 'supercritical' but that is the word for vapor that has completely transformed from a liquid and has excess internal energy. This is very different from spraying the gas with an atomizer.

This guy is the CIO. He is management.

This is really a nonsequitur to my original point. The fact is the mandate has been given. It doesnt matter if it came from the Government or the CEO. The CIO here is still responsible for making it happen. His claim that it won't be ready may be true, but why not? what fall-back functionality CAN be provided?

Maybe the CIO should just accept that he's not going to get the MAXIMUM incentive payment the Government is willing to hand out in order to get this done.

You know what, Gregg? Suck it up. Man up and get your system production ready. I am so tired of excuses from the IT department.

Maybe I'm being unfair here, but my experience with IT managers is that their development plans look something like this:

1. Promise the impossible
2. Get buy-in to develop an expensive system based on (1)
3. Essentially let people play with themselves until the time is up.
4. Realize what you have is not even close to (1)
5. Try to rebaseline the schedule, and GOTO 1.

Instead of telling us what you can't do, how about telling us what you can do. Meaning what functionality you can deliver (production-ready) by the deadline. Otherwise, you are just whining.

Maybe Google will buy the Firefox guys an H.264 license. I wonder if they would accept it.

That is some good folksy wisdom for your intrepid yound developer. Also:

"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched!"
"A little too late is much too late!"
"A small leak will sink a great ship!"
"Lost time is never found!"
"A chain is as strong as its weakest link!"
"A bad broom leaves a dirty room!"

Anyway, my point is not that your advice is bad. But are you seriously suggesting that Brin, when he had this idea, should have gone straight for the library until he found this 1941 Economics paper? I wonder how long that would take? How about this advice:

"Go ahead and reinvent the wheel. If its useful enough, no one will care."

You make decent arguments that I've heard before, many times. And I actually agree with them to a point. At least in theory, given somewhat unrealistic assumptions about the system. But there are two major flaws in this idea. First, in practice, where real developers are making complex decisions about how they structure their programs and the resources they use, I think this sentiment results in wasteful and excessive programming practices.

In other words, the resources programs demand may be managed very well, but programmers end up demanding more than they need, forgetting that there are other users of those resources. And a scheduler isn't psychic; it has no real way to know if a program is demanding "too much."

Second, a multiqueue system with a nonzero variance of demand (e.g., a computer's resources) has high latency if its resource utilization is also high. This is due to bottlenecks being created when there is a surge in demand, and resulting system instability as those backups are cleared. If you want to have a system with consistent and predictable latency, you need some extra resource hanging around to handle spikes in demand. Otherwise the system tends to go berserk in a way that strongly resembles "thrashing" seen on computers that are being maximally utilized. People forget (or don't know) this.

I guess this is true, although considering the amount of malware coming out of China, and China's human rights record as compared to north american countries, I think there is reason not to equivocate about this.

Just make it a configuration option, default NO.

Yeah, its not the most elegant solution, but welcome to the real world guys.

I didn't read the bill, but why should/are ISPs responsible for this? Granted I guess you could argue that there are tiers of ISPs, but if I am trying to provide internet to a condo, or something, the cost of dedicated bandwidth is what it costs. And most places, the loop is a significant (about half) of the monthly cost as well. So how am I, down at Tier 2 or 3, going to control the cost and availability of bandwidth?

Also.

What does it mean to have 100Mbps internet? Is that 100Mbps internet during peak hours when everyone is downloading, or a maximum rate of 100Mbps theoretical, if no one else is on the line? Things like this matter quite a lot. And just to be clear, where I live the cost of a 45Mbps DS3 is right around $1500/mo., and the loop is about the same. So right now, under the strictest definition, a recurring cost of $6000/mo. would be needed to provide this level of connectivity. Not to mention the hardware costs associated with providing this to more than, say ten people at a time.