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Comment Re:It's not energy generation that's the problem.. (Score 1) 626

Perhaps it's not as big a problem as you think.

I live on a man-made lake system with a nuclear reactor, where the upper two lakes are used basically as giant batteries. During the night when the nuclear station is producing excess power, that power is used to pump water from the lower lakes into the upper lakes. During the day when demand is high, water is allowed to flow back downhill through the hydro plants, producing the excess power needed to meet demand.

I see no reason we can't deploy similar technology today, using renewables to pump water uphill during the feast, and then using that stored energy when there is famine.

Comment Fuck Sake (Score 5, Insightful) 189

It's not called being lazy. It's called SURVIVING on LIMITED RESOURCES, which is what Humans had to do for hundreds of thousands of years before developing the technology to increase food availability.

Expending the least amount of energy was called SURVIVAL.

We really have completely lost touch with reality, haven't we? We are living in the idiocracy.

Comment It would if States would quit banning it (Score 1) 626

When I lived in Pennsylvania, I heated my home and my hot water with a furnace that used renewable biofuel. Those furnaces were recently banned in the state because they reduced revenue for gas and oil companies.

Now I live in a State that still allows residential use of renewable biofuel, and it is readily available and quickly replenished. Our energy bills are near zero, and we grow our own fuel on our estate. Fortunately there is not a big natural gas or coal industry here like there is in Pennsylvania, so hopefully we have nothing to fear from political influence from the big-fossil companies.

Comment This is what happens... (Score 1) 200

... when you are a big top secret defense contractor and you attempt to unify your development processes across all of your business units to "save money" through homogenization.

You can design something as an "interconnected series of black boxes" when it's something simple like a missile.

A 787 and other development abortions like the F22 and F35 are infinitely more complex than a simple war munition, and cannot be properly designed as an "interconnected series of black boxes."

Comment Re:McDonald's doesn't (Score 1) 588

A comparable situation would be if you purchased a 12-piece McNuggets lunch, but shat out 5 of them, and complained that you "only got 7."

The explanation is that your body can't use 100% of the nuggets, because you can't digest the stuff that is required to make it take the form of a nugget, and taste approximately like chicken.

Comment Strange implications? (Score 1) 66

"The waves propagating throughout the simulation require a carefully orchestrated balance between computation, memory and communication."

This statement seems to imply the outcome of the simulation depends somehow on the tuning of the system hardware. That has dire implications for whatever method they are using.

If a simulation becomes non-deterministic depending on how the hardware communicates, and gives different solutions to the same problem because of that, then I would say it is not a good approach to computational bogodynamics.

Comment Re:Those are not electronics prototyping (Score 2) 228

I tend to agree. Although, there is _something_ to be said for working with digital systems. There are still many "electronics" concepts to worry about when designing a digital board, or interfacing one digital board with another.

While one of the aforementioned systems alone does not really touch on it, once you start interfacing, or using the commonly-found "scratch area" on one of these systems, you need to know something about how to do it properly.

Strictly speaking, I don't think of an embedded development platform as dealing with "electronics," but it certainly lives in the house next door.

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What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -- Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical Essays", 1928

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