xkcd

roflwaffle

http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/64740079543/how-to-lose-172-222-a-second-for-45-minutes So much cringe. Not that it should be surprising. Financial IT is so rife with bad practices and general cowboy development, it's surprising it hasn't happened before. It's hard to believe they're that ca...

roflwaffle

Thanks!

roflwaffle

Hi, I'm looking for tape for my friend's cell phone. The existing tape isn't sticking, and an internal connector that needs to be taped down periodically comes loose. The tape itself looks like some sort of foil/cloth tape, but isn't just foil tape or cloth tape, at least anything that I've seen. D...

roflwaffle

Hi, I'm looking for tape for my friend's cell phone. The existing tape isn't sticking, and an internal connector that needs to be taped down periodically comes loose. The tape itself looks like some sort of foil/cloth tape, but isn't just foil tape or cloth tape, at least anything that I've seen. Do...

roflwaffle

I found the grand jury indictment somewhat troubling in terms of the leap of logic between all the previous steps and the last one alleging that Swartz was going to publicly share all of the documents, but since that's up to the prosecutor to prove, I guess a judge will allow something like that. Ha...

roflwaffle

False! :P No one's saying there's some weird dichotomy between using the power plant to generate power or somehow build another one. That's a strawman. What I'm saying is that if there are outstanding loans associated with the generator's capital costs, or even loans associated with operating costs,...

roflwaffle

That is the sunk cost fallicy -- if we already built it, the cost of the already built thing shouldn't factor into our decisions. But that isn't what I am arguing. If renewables cannot supply a baseload capacity -- if they cannot produce GWatts on demand -- then they are not replacing baseload. Eve...

roflwaffle

Competing with existing generators only translates to competing with only fuel costs if and only if they somehow manage to get free labor, supplies, insurance, and so on. What I think you're trying to get at is they're competing against existing plants with amortized capital costs, but even then the...

roflwaffle

You don't understand the cost of unflexability. The more varied sources of power you have to use in an increasingly varying way, the more extra capacity you need both in terms of other resources and in terms of the capacity of the power lines and other infrastructure. Of course nothing is perfectly...

roflwaffle

http://i.imgur.com/P621O.png first you mix up MW and GW. CA ISO's peak demand last year was not ~45MW because that's in thousands of megawatts. you missed 3 zeros. and the link you give shows demand peaking at 6, exactly as mine does. solar peaks at noon (unsurprisingly) and is almost gone by that ...

roflwaffle

The national smart grid is a fairy tale told to make wind power seem like a practical idea. In reality, a national smart grid would massively increase the amount of power transmission infrastructure needed, incur significant inefficiencies and transmission losses, and most such plans create unneces...

roflwaffle

Have you looked at vgetty?

roflwaffle

Portraying energy generation as something from one source is something of a straw man. It's not nuclear versus solar, it's what percentage of renewables, nuclear, and FFs minimize GHG emissions and costs. That's probably about the same amount of nukes we have now, a dash of solar to compete against ...

roflwaffle

mosc wrote:I assume you didn't live in southern California in the late 90s...

True that. Blackouts are a function of three things... Generation, transmission, or asshole power companies like Enron manipulating the market.

roflwaffle

I think that generally nuclear and coal are poor for load following. Nat gas is generally the most flexible for dispatchables, and even with nuclear power you need to have a backup when a plant goes down unexpectedly. The better question is, does N amount of nuclear with N/M amount of load following...

roflwaffle

So, it could have been worse but only if the containment structure was blown up by Dr. Evil, or something else improbable (perhaps still worth considering when assessing risk)? Yeah, something like an earthquake with a high PGA is potentially more damaging . Earthquakes as small as 6.X can have PGA...

roflwaffle

Regarding wind power, it depends on the specifics. The NREL seems to think that 20% by 2030 is feasible . As a general rule, the larger the geographical area and the greater the load following the capacity, the greater the wind penetration. Existing producers tend to dislike wind because it competes...

roflwaffle

No, Free Riders are people that get the benefits without paying. The people with 50-120k income don't get any benefit. They just don't see the point in paying $10-20k in health insurance when they only have half that in expected costs. They tend to benefit w/o paying as much, just not at that time....

roflwaffle

I buried a long length of the grey pvc for a few runs of cat6 out to my shop. It has a few curves and bends in it, so I used a pipe size that a ping-pong ball fits into. After the pipe was assembled and glued up, (glue to keep water out!) We tied a ping pong ball to a long spool of string. Put the ...

roflwaffle

I'm mostly on BFBC2/XBL/weekends, so if anyone plays PM for my username. I can hop on COD/XBL too, but I like the Dice engine more than activision's stuff. I used to be on MAG too, so if anyone plays LMK!

roflwaffle

That depends on what you want to do with it. For me a cheap PC and a dedicated game system is less than a PC capable of running everything my game system can because all the stuff I would use a powerful PC for I can also do with a cheap PC. Everyone's situation is different so as usual YMMV.

roflwaffle

Historically, populism has adopted Keynesian policy during the bust - it gives them a theoretical basis for continuing to spend. (It is corrupted, however, much like the stimulus and bailouts in 2008-09, to be spent based on ideology towards companies that are clearly failing, thus continuing to pr...

roflwaffle

If you build your own systems I think an SSD would be a solid investment. Swap it out of your old system and drop it in your new one. Your processor is fine, so IMO you should just upgrade GPUs periodically. That's where the biggest gaming bottleneck will be, even if it isn't there now.

roflwaffle

@roflwaffle, it's not very useful to think about those kinds of externalized negatives as %GDP. GDP consists by definition of observed transaction prices, so translating something without a transaction price to GDP is troublesome. Best example: fresh drinking water is counted in GDP by the money sp...

roflwaffle

Lets see, how about pollution? Lets say that pollution costs roughly 2% of GDP and this could be averted at a cost of .5% of GDP and result in a Pareto improvement given appropriate legislature where some of the reduction in externalized costs is used to cover the cost of the equipment to minimize e...

roflwaffle

To elaborate on my original post, if no one loses anything, but the gains are also relatively small as a whole, should the government proceed with a program that will result in a net gain to the economy? What if pollution were eliminated along with ~$.25 trillion dollars in externalized costs, and t...

roflwaffle

Ignoring the relatively simple/low cost stuff like creating laws for really obvious actions that cause a lot of social/economic harm, do you think that government should pursue programs that result in an increase in social/economic well being for a country independent of what it's citizens want? Let...

roflwaffle

It seems to be fairly basic structural engineering, so I don't see why it would be left out. I don't know if it would significantly change the maximum acceleration at which the plant could safely shut down, but fission reactors aren't the kind of things we want to cut corners with.

roflwaffle

It looks like the biggest problems with fission reactors are still the people designing them . The chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, said that computations submitted by Westinghouse, the manufacturer of the new AP1000 reactor, about the building’s design appeared to be wrong and “had led to more question...

roflwaffle

Maybe for the time period where someone is learning to drive stick or how to balance on a bike they wouldn't be as inclined to drift off while driving, but once someone gets the hang of things everything becomes automatic and it's as easy to drift off driving stick or auto, at least IME. The best tw...

roflwaffle

The long run government spending multiplier tends to zero during economic expansion, but the short run multiplier may not be zero, and even a zero LR multiplier assumes that there aren't types of economic activity that manifest positive or negative economic activity as a whole. For example, lets ass...

roflwaffle

It depends on the signal. I can fiddle with my antenna and get more than two states (no pixelization, varying degrees of pixelization, and different no signal conditions with a digital signal, but it's not continuous like an analog either.

roflwaffle

I've been bouncing between using lentils and refried beans in my burritos and I'd like to add some different flavors with tofu. So far it seems that caldo de pollo and cayenne work well, but I was wondering if anyone had any other ideas.

roflwaffle

Yup, just some very hard water evaporating. I didn't know that trace salts could all crystallize together like that, kinda neat.

roflwaffle

They're square, green, and the few that are larger still have a square pattern, like a cube bottom with a square on the top. It seemed to dissolve quickly in water (would fluorite do this?), but unfortunately I'm not part of everyone who has a UV light, well a working UV light anyway.

roflwaffle

IMO the all or nothing has been a great improvement in signal reception even w/ the signal dropping out completely due to weather every now and then, and the increase in bandwidth is a happy bonus. That said I also use a GH antenna w/o a reflector instead of the usual rabbit ears now, so that's prob...

roflwaffle

I have some cool looking crystals that formed from sediment, does anyone have any idea what they probably are? I'm guessing that they're fluorite but I don't have a whole lot of practical experience with chemistry.

roflwaffle

Plants can take a lot in terms of a single impact, but if a plant experienced an earthquake w/ PGAs in excess of one gravity there's no guarantee it would survive that. For instance the AP1000 can supposedly withstand an airliner hitting it (technically a Phantom at 500mph, but the KE is equivalent ...

roflwaffle

FWIW I still see a noticeable difference screwing with TV antenna direction.

roflwaffle

I finally dug up some interesting information on the ground motion of the quake . It looks like the plant was in an area that experienced peak ground acceleration of ~2.5-40 m/s^2 which was within or a smidge above it's rated design. The problem in the context of plants operating near fault lines is...

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