Posts by dkjd 84 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Feb 2012
I thought the problem with liquid-salt thorium reactors was that the reactor vessel rots due to the corrosive properties of the liquified salt.
So the test reactor IIRC was shut down after a few years as it was starting to fall apart.
Not sure if metallurgy has solver the issue yet
I was going to make a comment about how TVs only used to work in small parts of the world, allegedly to protect various manufacturers. Then I saw the spelling mistake in the title and started having visions of wiping spittle off of my new electronic goods....
"Scotland will continue to use the pound. They currencies will be fixed", and George Soros never really existed.
There is no way a Scottish issued pound fixed to the English/Welsh/NI pound will survive the currency speculators. It would be cheaper if the Scottish parliament just burned a couple of billion pounds in a big bonfire and then introduced a new currency
The main problem is that GPS satellites don't do leap seconds, so GPS time is already 16 seconds out from UTC. Also you cannot predict when you will need leap seconds as it depends upon the weather on top of the mountains, which affects the amount of ice that accumulates in winter which affects how fast the earth rotates.
Probably no-one, better place only have 500 customers and that is less than clever which already has a nationwide network of fast-recharging stations in Denmark, and more customers too. And there will be no other cars using the battery shift technology apart from the renault fluence, so there will never be enough customers to make the station profitable.
Forgetting the technology, I find it hard to understand why anyone would want to go down the buy-the-car lease-the-battery route. When I get a car its either buy or lease, not buy a bit and lease a bit. I mean you wouldn't buy a petrol car and lease the engine. The "better place" way was that you buy a bloody expensive car, then you have to rent a bloody expensive battery. So you have all the disadvantages of buying (high up front costs) and all the disadvantages of leasing (e.g. maybe the administrators will take the batteries back from the customers and sell them in France). Similarly when you sell the car on, you have to sell the car, and sort out battery rental with the new owner.
So even if the technology worked really well, I think most people would avoid the complex ownership/lease model, because when you spend the amount of money that a car costs, you want to understand what you are buying.
No drm on those suckers, can't watch them anyhow as the player is bust, but at least there is no DRM. (to be truthful most all of the tapes got f*cked when my basement flooded so it wouldn't matter at all). The books survived, kinda, but as they smelled of sh*t they got thrown out too. To be honest the tapes were more of a fire-hazard at the end than a useful library of data.
So its swings and roundabouts, and to be honest most movies/books only get watched or read once by me so I don't really care about DRM, just about how convenient it is to get the content. What I would like would be if I could access books or movies for about £2 for a 6-months or so, then I would be happy to rent them, but that seems unlikely to happen.
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