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Comment Learn the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (Score 1) 222

You know there is a really simply reason renewable energy is more expensive (except hydro and geothermal in favourable locations).

It's the second Law of Thermodynamics. Solar and Wind power is diffuse. Hydrocarbons and particularly nuclear are far more concentrated, thus much easier and cheaper to draw power from. If Google had invested in a array of advanced Nuclear Power technologies, one or more of them may have come off and we'd have cheap CO2 free power for millions of years. If may still happen but it is very difficult and the sophisticated simulations of advanced nuclear IS something where Google could really contribute.

Oh well,

Comment Busard's Polywell is more interesting (Score 3, Interesting) 151

My submission of a couple of days ago.

"The EM2 corportation has submitted a paper to axiv.org http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133 describing their $10 million US Navy project to investigate Bussards Polywell fusion device. NBC has a report on the development http://www.nbcnews.com/science... . Quoting Nicholas Krall, a plasma physicist who has been working in the fusion field for more than a half-century and has been an adviser to EMC2 Fusion, "I think this is the most exciting experimental advance that I've been involved in," he told NBC News. 'I'm stoked.""

Plus there are 2-3 other concepts that gave got Venture Capital funding. Fusion is looking more interesting.

Submission + - Nuclear Fusion in 10 years?

msevior writes: The EM2 corportation has submitted a paper to axiv.org describing their $10 million US Navy project to investigate Bussards Polywell fusion device. NBC has a report on the development . Quoting Nicholas Krall, a plasma physicist who has been working in the fusion field for more than a half-century and has been an adviser to EMC2 Fusion, "I think this is the most exciting experimental advance that I've been involved in," he told NBC News. 'I'm stoked."

Comment Lite Salt? (Score 1) 212

The 700 Bg/ Kg seems awefully low.

Here in Australia you can wander into any local supermarket and buy "Lite Salt" wich is 50% Potassium Chloride. These typically have a mass of 170 gm and consequently an activity of 4000 Bg. So by German standards that is 23529 Bg/Kg and hence way above the legal limit.

Comment Re:Wouldn't electric cars have the opposite effect (Score 1) 502

I totally agree. Now the big difference is the cost differential between selling excess power back to the grid (feed-in price 8 cents) compared to purchasing from the grid at 25 cents per KWHr. The Tesla batteries are projected to cost $200 per KWHr of storage so for $2000 your average punter can get 10 KWHr of storage and likely never need to purchase electricty from the grid. So a $5000 5KW system plus $2000 for 10 KWHr of storage means no more $2500 bills per year. The system pays for itself in less than 4 years.

There is a truely massive market if Tesla can hit their production targets at the advertised price point. Which seems possible given the extreme amount of vertical integration in the plant. Even the energy costs are provided via renewable energy buffered by their own batteries. Feed in raw lithium, aluminum, human labor, out comes batteries.

Comment Only just become usuable (Score 1) 99

The thing about OpenStack is that it has been under really heavy development for the past two years. Two years ago the product was buggy as hell. But they've made a series of 6-monthly releases since then. Each one of which offered substantial improvements. Its now pretty good and stable. There is really a incredible support for it. I heard of numbers of around 2000 developers so each release really is substantially better than the previous.

Now that it is basically stable, it will likely get real traction with users and there are big private deployments already. The Australian NeCTAR project will roll-out 30,000 cores by the end of 2014. CERN is looking at a huge deployment of over 100,000 CPUs.

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Comment Re:I think this is bullshit (Score 1) 1746

This world is not wanting for more human beings. By not adding to the human burden on the planet we are actually being responsible. But you'll happily treat us as lesser people because we don't have the same biological imperative that you do. Did I mention bad person? Personally I can't see how a hetero couple that doesn't/can't have kids is somehow lesser than someone who knocks up his wife so she can birth a kid they can raise as yet another bigot.

Hmm interesting logic, do you think of it as evolution in action? Once homosexuals are no longer living double lives, in a few generations the number of homosexuals will decrease by an order of magnitude.

Comment Re:Tried playing this game (Score 2) 218

We were all Physics nerds so I guess that is close enough :-) Not that it was hard to play AD&D in the 1980's. There were tables for everything and the DM had them all on easy to read screens. As a DM I invented my own monsters and dungeons as did my friends when they were DM in their turn. I also bent some of the rules... A good dungeon is one where the players barely survive and sometimes you have to adjust probability to get that :-)

The rules give the game structure. The human element knows when to adjust them. All in all far more fun than a computer :-)

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