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Comment Re: Out of control demand for power (Score 1) 106

Depends on what you classify as traditional plants. Solar and wind, you'd have a point. However, coal and natural gas plants emit orders of magnitude more radioactivity directly into the environment in the form of naturally occurring radioactive materials (uranium, thorium, radon, traces of other elements) as a consequence of their normal operations. Fission plants basically only do that during catastrophic failure modes.

Comment Re: Possibly the only good thing... (Score 1) 144

500 panels per 1000 m^2 is pretty achievable, accounting for whatever roof penetrations and facilities that need to be there. Some of those buildings are outright colossal. Plus, nobody is saying the data centers needs to be completely powered by solar.
Here's the thing: the lions share of power consumption on the grid traditionally comes from cooling. Most cooling needs, outside of the context of data centers, coincides with the sunniest, highest production times for solar panels. There is a great synergy to take advantage of here. It might be that a such a data center / solar farm farm actually produces net power for a portion of the day, covering for residential use or car charging etc. but is a net consumer off peak hours, when it's more efficient to use other means to supply power when most other consumers aren't using as much. Net effect is better grid utilization and reduced costs all around.

Comment And that's why (Score 4, Interesting) 42

I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Comment Truly ignorant author lives in cities too much (Score 2) 108

"The use of wood as an energy source is a relic of the past, one that should not be relived if given a choice.

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

Comment Re: Procrastination kills (Score 2) 7

Absolutely correct. But the silver lining is that the procrastination led NASA to approve a quick, cheap, and risky attempt to save it.

* If it works, it's a model that might get applied to others in the future.

* If it fails, well it was just $30 million, and the telescope was basically considered lost anyway.

Submission + - BFS: What the Textbook Says and What It Looks Like Running (rebraining.org)

fishbowl writes: A working lecture on breadth-first search, anchored to a real implementation — 22 lines of JavaScript from a single-file browser hex game. Walks through why every line is there and how you might have arrived at it yourself. Python and Java equivalents included. Cormen is waiting when you want it.

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One can search the brain with a microscope and not find the mind, and can search the stars with a telescope and not find God. -- J. Gustav White

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