hatbert's comments

It's not a stupid question. The problem is twofold: Any place that's nearby is already too expensive to make the move worth it; and any place that's cheap enough to be worth it lacks either the coastal climate or proximity to civilization, or both. Or worse (or better, depending on your perspective), it's a place where the Coastal Commission won't let you build anyway.

So, in practice, you're asking "Why doesn't Google just pack up and move to Nevada or Kansas City?" Such a move would probably be highly disruptive to business (probably at least two months of lost productivity (even if you pay relocation consultants to handle everything) for all employees being moved, and you're talking about moving substantially all employees).

I'd believe that, but your MBA also has an SSD, which partially masks the effect of swapping out pages. True, SSD is an option for the new iMac, but it's not included in the base price.

You could start by estimating the time cost correctly. You're assuming that the time required to select the right monitor is zero, that the time required to understand the various connection standards is zero, etc., etc., etc. The only cost you're counting is the act of unboxing and plugging it in.

Maybe you and I keep track of this stuff professionally or as a hobby, but most "grandmothers" don't. Quick: What's the best lock-in amplifier for rejecting mains interference. What? You don't know what dynamic reserve means? Jeez, you're such a dummy.

Think about how you would go about buying a piece of technical equipment outside your domain of expertise. That's what a "grandmother" is doing when he/she is buying a monitor.

The Turbo Boost clock speed is only around 15% lower than the other iMacs, though (2.7 GHz vs 3.2 GHz). It looks like the same processor as the MacBook Air. The bigger problem is probably memory--only 8GB, soldered to the board, and no option for more, even at time of purchase. Could be worse, though. With Mavericks, 8GB is about the minimum configuration for "normal people" tasks.

> FCs don't operate via the carnot cycle so in theory can be 90+% efficient in electricity generation.

Sorry, this is wrong.

FCs are not heat engines, so the thermodynamic limitations of heat engines are not relevant to fuel cells. That said, thermodynamic limitations do set an upper bound on the efficiency of fuel cells. For hydrogen fuel cells, the theoretical upper bound is 83% [1]. That's for just the process of turning hydrogen into electricity, and that does not include the process for producing hydrogen in the first place. "90+%" efficiency is strictly impossible in theory or practice.

> i think the carnot efficiency maxes out somwhere 40-50% so no matter what you do (and we've been doing this for 100 years now)

It must be noted that 50% thermal efficiency is a practical upper bound for a real electrical power plant, not a theoretical one. Some combined-cycle gas turbines do exceed 50% efficiency under some operating conditions.

[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/electrol.h...

I doubt the feedback loop would be very severe, simply because most tuition is not used to pay for faculty. Instead, most goes to the ever-increasing army of administrators whose actual responsibilities are harder and harder to pin down. The more likely scenario is that colleges would be required to trim the fat.

As the density of receiver sites increases, it will likely be possible to use trilateration to identify broadcasts which are obviously bogus.

HNers tend to be technical people who like numbers. It's my experience that such people tend to dislike what might be politely called 'bovine excrement.' The lack of numbers[1] is, I think, triggering some members' "BS meters." In my field (physics), it's common to be challenged to demonstrate how you know something (or why you think something is true). It's a mark of a good scientist/engineer that they can back up their claims (which often involves numbers).

[1] For example, as others have pointed out, the story claims to refute the argument that solar roadways will cost 6e13 dollars... but when you actually read the counter-argument, it basically says "We don't know how much it will cost, it just won't be that particular number."

> His cost argument doesn't make any sense. He is comparing some mythical 12x12' $10k panels to the same size of asphalt and is magically breaking even.

That stuck out at me as well. He's sort of saying "IF we could make these things for $10k per 144 sq ft section, then it would be cost competitive with asphalt." But then he completely punts on the question of how much it's likely to cost. It's not difficult to make some order of magnitude estimates for the cost of raw materials and the omission of such an estimate (even if just to show that the $10k per 144 sq ft goal is plausible) is, well... odd.

> is the "hockey puck" mouse.

I don't disagree that they're terrible, but didn't they end production of those 15 years ago?

I think the part most people are having trouble with is not what is contained in your first paragraph, but how the legislature/executive goes from there to "Every manufacturer, including those that never set up franchise agreements, must sell through a dealership." The especially galling part of the New Jersey kerfuffle is that Tesla was defined to be a "franchisor" despite the fact that they have never entered into a franchise agreement!

> In 2014, this may not be the case. Level3 wants to send much more traffic to Comcast than Comcast would ever send to Level3. This is because Netflix (a Level3 customer) is asymmetric in nature.

Oh, you're so right! That awful, no-good, pesky L3 just keeps sending these packets that nobody wants and nobody ever asked for... oh wait. Oh yes. I just remembered. L3 sends those packets because Comcast's customers requested them. People pay Comcast to transfer packets between themselves and the internet services they wish to use. In a free market, Comcast's inability to do that would result in customers leaving in droves. It really shouldn't matter (within the bounds of legal reason) what's in the packets.

> Demand for faculty positions is pretty stable.

Well, that's certainly one way of putting it. You could also say, "Academia has the potential to absorb about 10% of PhDs produced annually." That's fine for CS, where most people want to go into industry anyway and industry understands the product. Not so much for, say, physics, where more PhDs would rather stay in academia and you have to explain very quickly why someone should hire a PhD physicist before they slam the door in your face.

Actually, the Apple chargers in that link displayed the expected behavior for the USB 2.0 "extended power" (can't think of the actual title) specification. The author has a fancy oscilloscope, but that doesn't mean he/she knows everything.

Well, considering that altitudes above FL1000 have been, for the last 60-odd years, considered to be outside the FAA's jurisdiction... what is the problem exactly?

Isn't that a major functionality regression? I mean, didn't we stop saying "This website best viewed in IE4 with screen resolution set to 800x600" a decade ago?

Honda sold a CNG version of the Civic here in SoCal for a while. It didn't sell very well because the tank took up most of the trunk and the range wasn't much better than most electric cars (around 150 miles, as I recall).

On top of that, the number of refueling stations is very limited--natural gas pipes are ubiquitous in cities, but they deliver the gas at a much lower pressure. You still need a roughly $2k compressor to fill the tank overnight (which uses about as much electricity as you'd put in an electric car). Commercial stations have more expensive compressors that operate continuously to fill a holding tank which cars are filled from.

It's not impossible. But the infrastructure required to put energy in the vehicle costs the same or more as for an electric car. And you use just as much electricity as an electric car (in addition to the natural gas). And the cars aren't that much cheaper than battery EVs. And the cars have similar range and refilling limitations as EVs.

Maybe we'll see it for trucks, though.

Most journals now have a "supplementary content" section where authors upload their results. Anyone can download that without a subscription. Obviously, older results are still locked up in scanned PDFs that you can only download with a subscription, but your database idea doesn't solve that, either. As for making something mandatory... well, that's probably the best way to get scientists not to do something.

Practically speaking, papers probably won't look substantially different under your proposal than they do now, except that there is the extra step of uploading data to the "methods and data" database. Separating the body of the paper from the results and methods would be a pain in the ass to read, which means that you'll need to continue to include those things if you want anyone to cite your papers. As a result, I can't see anyone doing anything more than having an undergrad copy and paste the relevant sections into the database.

Frankly, I think you'd get better results by just declaring that the publishers have to give non-institutional readers free access.

Have you tried looking for motors that aren't designed for 60 Hz operation? I think you might be in for a surprise...

When Musk unveiled Hyperloop, he used sleight of hand to make it look dramatically less expensive than the conventional rail system currently being built. Specifically, Hyperloop, as proposed, only runs within the central valley, from the northern side of the San Gabriel Mountains to the eastern side of the Diablo Range. San Francisco is on the western side of the Diablos and Los Angeles is on the southern side of the San Gabriels. It adds an one to two hours (on each end) to drive from the city center to the proposed hyperloop endpoint.

It should surprise no one that it is less expensive to build a track which avoids crossing two mountain ranges--yet Musk compared the cost of building a hyperloop in the central valley to that of a building a conventional train from LA to San Francisco. When you compare apples to apples (conventional vs. hyperloop in the central valley), conventional rail comes out much cheaper.