Efficiency is based on differences in energy that are economically accessible, not on some rambling theories in a newline-free paragraph.

You can access room temperature. You can' economically access the blackness of outer space from the earth's surface. Likewise, you can access the negative terminal on your battery, but not some static charge in the upper atmosphere.

You pump X amount of energy into a heat engine, it expels that energy to an accessible exhaust, and typically 70 to 95 percent of that energy is *not* converted to work. You pump X amount of energy into a battery, it dumps that energy through a motor to its negative terminal, and only 5 to 10 percent of that energy is not converted to work. That's the only way to practically analyze the situation.

We could also all have infinite free energy if we could access the levels below the zero point energy in the quantum fields. One little problem: that's not accessible either.

For the example in TFS of 200F water and assuming room temperature exhaust, Mr. Carnot says that the max possible efficiency is less than 20%. Any real world engine, including this one, probably ends up at a low-to-mid single digit percent efficiency. IOW, the vast majority of the heat would still be wasted.

The operator of the facility generating the waste heat might get more energy savings at lower cost by tweaking their processes to be a few percent more efficient in the first place, instead of trying to recover this low-grade energy source with an elaborate engine and plumbing.

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

Once you import numpy, Python has arrays.

For a long time slashdot was blocking them for me, as some sort of legacy reward. That stopped, but the ads have been unobtrusive so I left it unblocked. Last week I started seeing an ad that stayed on the screen when scrolling. I was about to start blocking, but that ad has disappeared. So for now this is one of the few sites I don't block.

That would never fly. You just know that some dufus at the gym would bring a 10kg steel dumbbell into the MRI room and ruin things for everyone.

They tried, but quarreling parent groups couldn't agree on whether to teach the kids that they were coding with 3 registers or 259 registers.

I think that many of those people were also recent DOS users. Given that DOS systems would often simply freeze up several times per day and require a reboot (easy to do since any bug in the user's application could do this), once they added a protected mode pseudo-kernel to Windows (maybe starting with Windows/386 2.1), it was actually a slight improvement over what they were used to since DOS crashes could sometimes be isolated to one virtual terminal.

Considering that for the one-time investment of $150 and a half hour of your time you could not have to do that any more? Hell yes, you're crazy.

Samsung is collection of several companies and if you've ever spent any time working with them you quickly realize that they all prioritize other Samsung companies below other customers. I don't know whether it's because of anti-trust concerns, or market strategy, or just rivalry, but I've never seen any Samsung company that operated any differently. I worked quite a bit with Samsung Mobile and S.LSI, who are even quite interdependent (though S.LSI depends more on Samsung Mobile than the reverse), and they constantly ignored and even dissed one another.

There's no way your driver's ed class failed to mention that traffic is required to stop for school buses with their red lights flashing, and I think it's unlikely that your written test failed to include a question about school zone and school bus rules. Mine (Utah) certainly did.

In rural areas, like where I live, there aren't any marked crossings, and there really isn't any reasonable place to put them. If you mark a crossing it would only ever be used by the one or two houses near it, and only by school children, because there's really no need for anyone to walk across the street otherwise. The school buses stop directly in front of each child's house. There aren't any locations where a bus could pick up multiple children without making them have to walk an unreasonable distance, so each kid's house is a stop.

Also, the speed limit on my road is 45 mph, and cars routinely drive 55 mph... so having the "huge yellow beast" with flashing red lights and a flipped-out, flashing red stop sign is definitely necessary.

Fun fact, Weller trained with world-class mimes to do a very fluid, fast, bird-like robotic physical language for RoboCop.

Then he put on the suit for the first time, and couldn't move.

So they carved huge chunks of the suit out, and he could barely move.

So he had to work to come up with a new physical language that was more heavy, slow, deliberate, and tank-like.

I can actually believe this is something LLM is good at, especially with the numbers they describe. Door to door numbers cite 4 to 8 changes in their efforts, compared to the 2.3 and 3.9 points from this study. And, in this era of fake news, we are apparently content with untrue political rhetoric, so hallucinating facts probably doesn't do as much to hurt effect. The hard part was natural language processing, which is basically already a solved problem. And what does it mean to move someone's opinion 4 points anyways? It possibly says more about how we pick political candidates.

Yep. CAFE-style regulation is the wrong way to attempt to reduce carbon emissions. The right way is to impose a carbon tax, then let consumers vote with their wallets and engineers work to make the right tradeoffs to meet customer demand. My guess is that consumers would choose to buy the more fuel-efficient vehicles and engineers might make the same tradeoffs... but now it would be clear that those tradeoffs are worthwhile.