An interesting hypothesis I read about focused on the era of the universe when everything was lukewarm. Literally an entire universe in the “sweet spot” for the building blocks of life to form and propagate.
The idea is that the molecules would form, and then once the universe cooled further would freeze and be spread literally everywhere in similar asteroids. The rare part would be a location sufficiently stable in the goldilocks zone to evolve advanced life, not life itself.
Am I the only one even a little happy to see the head of a major company mentioning upgradability as an appeal for customers?
Please do stick with two unsoldered SODIMM slots for your laptops Asus.
For sure, wind is an especially good complement for hydropower, since the latter can store the surplus when it’s windy and release it when it’s not. Still, wind generation can, like other variable renewables, slip to nigh 0 production from time to time, at which point there must be enough dispatchable capacity to cover the supply/demand gap. Otherwise you get rolling blackouts in the middle of a -20°C winter. Not great.
Here’s a showcase of one such day in my country this winter. Average temps below -20°C (which means demand is very rigid due to heating needs) and the wind died down completely in the morning across all of Scandinavia & northern Germany, which meant there wasn’t room to import either. Winter prices on electricity ranged between 10-60€/MWh back when our nuclear plants were in full operation. Half have been shut down in the past decade due to political pressure from the green party.
Perfect is the worst enemy of progress. Right now the highest priority must be to get rid of the fossil fuel plants, and logistically speaking hydropower is simply the best. Mostly because of the built in function of energy storage and ability to load follow, something that the other variable renewable options entirely lack.
As with everything, politicians are at least 15 years too late in their thinking.
Any country that runs a sizable nuclear industry for power generation does have the capability to develop a nuclear weapons programme in relatively short order.
This is false. Sweden does not have a nuclear programme and does have a sizeable nuclear energy sector.
I disagree. Next to hydropower (which is limited by geography) it has been the champion of non-fossil electricity generation so far. Still, the fossil fuel lobby is a powerful foe.
Simply put, we should invest in all non-fossil options, and where solar is geographically viable, it is great. In other places however, where peak electricity demand coincides with the coldest, darkest parts of the year dispatchable production is strictly necessary, which is where nuclear shines.
Whilst nothing you say here is wrong, humans have a tendency to want more things than machines. A place to live (perhaps a mansion with its own pool), transportation (maybe a private jet or a million dollar supercar) and other general recreation (such as a datacenter full of GPU’s hallucinating cartoons of scantily clad women). So really, a human is pretty energy intensive when you think about it, compared to their rather low number of working hours (eesh, sleep takes so much time).
I do not.
FOSS is the natural conclusion of public code having a negligible cost to supply once it has been produced. Ideally it takes IP out of the equation and allocates compensation towards development rather than rent extraction.
FOSS is a question of centralization & authority vs decentralization & freedom.