Seret

For checking over the company's books you want an accountant. Some small business owners do their books themselves and may or may not have it all tied up with a bow, but if you're talking about a business with 20-odd employees you're starting to get out of small business territory and they should have been filing proper annual accounts. If you do get an accountant to take a look and they raise any red flags about the business, be prepared to walk away. It's possible there are reasons the previous owner is trying to jump ship that you aren't privy to, although the fact that they want to retain a stake makes that seem unlikely. Either way, don't make a bad financial decision based on not wanting to disturb the status quo. Definitely push your partners to agree to a governance structure for both the transition phase and the new business though. That's really, really important. Make sure everybody knows what their job is, and who is responsible for what. Don't just wing it on that one, it'll come back to bite you at the worst time.

Interesting point. This is probably another reason why they seem to initially be targeting parking rather than roads. The other bit that doesn't seem well explained is their "cable corridor". Would this be taken from the existing road (effectively making the road slightly narrower) or is he suggesting they somehow purchase a strip adjacent to the road? Can't see either option being popular.

What I suggest is that people just ignore that shouty "solar freakin roadways" video and go read the inventor's site. Many of the questions people are raising here are at least partially addressed in the FAQ. In particular you should note that the problem the inventor is trying to solve isn't the easiest, cheapest or best way to generate electricity, it's how to fund road maintenance in the USA. The point of the invention is to try and create a road surface material that is an asset instead of a cost.

Talk to your bank, they might be able to help you draught a business plan.

Depends on the cartoon. Some aren't intended for kids at all, some have references and themes that work on an adult level that went be picked up on by kids. Even amongst cartoons that are for kids some are well enough made that an adult can find them interesting, I've got two kids and some of the shows they watch are alright. Some are pretty bad though. I'd say it's only a problem if you're only watching cartoons. Too much of anything isn't good for you.

That's not quite correct, although you're on the right track in pointing out that wind doesn't entirely remove the need for other plant. Grids need reserves online to cover faults and maintenance anyway. Some of this is sitting dormant, but of a type that can get up and synchronise very quickly (eg: diesel, OCGT). So that kind of reserve uses no fuel until it's needed. Other reserves will be either spinning or hot reserve, where a thermal plant is running, but at less than 100% capacity. It can then increase capacity at short notice as needed. Running at less than full capacity is slightly less efficient, while obviously running hot but not producing is highly inefficient, and is generally avoided. Coal is generally not used for picking up peaking loads anyway, it's cheap and normally used for base load generation. The effect of wind turbines is best seen on consumption of things like gas, and it's not hard to pick out the effect: even a journalist can do it (granted r2 of 0.25 is pretty nasty, but this is large scale real-world data). Bottom line: wind power is effective at reducing fuel use and CO2 production. You can put a cost on that too. In a perfect world those external costs would actually be billed right back to the producers of the impact. That won't happen though, as things like coal would instantly be priced out of the market. Not in any country with effective urban planning rules. This is a non-argument, there are loads of things that shouldn't be sited close to housing. Most industry, for example. Describing these as rendering areas "uninhabitable" is a bit silly. We have no need or desire to build housing everywhere. Wind farms can quite happily be co-located with lots of things, four whacking great new ones recently sprung up near me on some industrial land near me. Sticking them in industrial areas makes a lot of sense in fact, as they're right on top of heavy electricity users. There's also no reliable evidence of wind turbines having any negative health impacts due to noise. It's purely nuisance factor. In fact a recent study found that the main causal factor for reports of health effects from wind turbines was media coverage of the supposed health effects of turbines. It's just hypochondria. See also cell phone masts, etc. There are siting issues for wind turbines (noise nuisance, radar, flicker, etc) but there are issues for every other energy source too. The external impact of wind is laughably low, the NIMBYs are basically just reduced to opposing them on aesthetic grounds.

Not particularly. PV cells are just a giant silicon p-n junction under a glass plate. You can make them from more exotic stuff, but that's rarely done because high quality silicon is available cheaply in large quantities. Their cost is dominated by the energy and hassle of fabrication, not the value of the materials.

Correct, and worse than that it'll actually create fragmentation. Even filesystems that are normally not prone to noticeable fragmentation effects will start to frag up and degrade if you run the drive more than about 80% full. So even us permasmug Linux users can find their drive fragging up if they push it too hard.

IIRC there were two workers killed at the plant during the attempts to manage the incident (although not due to radiation). There would (assuming the linear no threshold model) also be some extra deaths expected whenever you release a significant amount of radioactivity, although at the levels of Fukushima they wouldn't be directly detectable over normal cancer rates. However, in the context of the surrounding tsunami disaster that was occurring and killed many thousands of people, the release of radiation from Fukushima was almost completely inconsequential.

The only OSes that run entirely from RAM are those specifically designed to (normally just Linux live systems). Everything else writes to and reads from the disk a lot normal use. That in fact is a major source of the fragmentation you see on the more frag-prone filesystems. SSDs do indeed speed up boot times, but they also speed up every other task that does any I/O, which in practice is pretty much everything.

Ah good, that's easy fixed then.

F-14 all day long. Hugely aesthetic design, you can see it echoed by artists in things like Macross and Battletech.

Submit a patch? The maintainer might be very grateful to have the benefit of your specific knowledge.

Future energy systems aren't a zero-sum game, there's no one energy source that will "win". Our demands are such that we'll need a diverse energy mix to meet them. We'll need nuclear (whether fission or fusion), and renewables and fossils fuels (particularly in transport) to meet our needs. As for not being able to put wind turbines in farmland, that's just silly. It's done routinely. The whole wind sector in the UK was kickstarted by a farmer getting annoyed with official procrastination and importing some turbines from Denmark to put on his land. Do a Google image search for something like "wind turbine farmland" if you don't believe me. It's probably how most on-shore turbines are built. Lol, he's really trying to hit that "mad inventor in a shed" meme, isn't he?

No, it's not common sense, it's an equation. You're saying that x ≤ y (where x is the lifetime output and y is the embodied energy), but you don't know the values of x or y. Let's do some quick sums and see if we can check your assumptions a bit. PVGIS projects output for a panel of that size (about 0.25m2) in the US right up by the border with Canada lying flat on the ground would generate about 30kWh per year (assuming only 10% efficiency and a whopping 25% system losses). 30kWh is 108MJ, if we assume that they get a hard life and only last 10 years then that's about 1GJ lifetime production. That's about equivalent to the embodied energy of 0.25m2 of polysilicon (the silicon being by far the most energy dense part of the system). So to even reach break-even point you have to assume a very short life and very low efficiency in the worst possible location. I don't think it's at all unreasonable they could achieve better numbers than that, so no I don't think it's common sense that they won't achieve EROEI>1. I was responding to you claim that people might lose faith in renewables. People don't need faith, they need to look at the real numbers. It's not an idealogical question, it's an economic and engineering one. No, they're talking about PV. The cost of PV panels has dropped to the point that over their lifetime they're now around grid parity. In other words, the cost of buying the system is the same as buying the amount of electricity from the grid that would be produced over the panels' lifetime. Raw efficiency of PV cells may be relatively low, but that's immaterial when the "fuel" is free. Operating and maintenance costs are low or zero, so the equation is dominated purely by capital cost. That up-front cost is still dropping. I bought a PV array about 4 years ago, and I could buy the same one for half the price today.

They do develop some aircraft without firm orders if it's a special project. Their all-electric trainer they've got in the pipeline springs to mind.

I agree with helaeon. Coloured lines could well be graphics card. Applications freezing up could also be memory, burn yourself a copy of memtest86 and let it run for a while.

Firefly/Serenity were set in a single multiple star system with dozens of planets and moons.

"Most"? The OP specifically mentions vacuum.

AIUI the prototypes shown are intended for demonstration-scale use in parking lots. They're not intended for use on highways. [source] No, they're not intended to be solar powered. That would be highly illogical; if there was enough sun to heat the road there wouldn't be any ice on it anyway. The heaters run of grid power. Whether or not you think that's a good idea I'll leave up to you. Estimated quite wrongly. This is a claim I've heard repeated a few times, but it doesn't make any sense. Try the numbers yourself, they don't fit. This is wrong, solar panels are actually extremely reliable. Long term users report excellent reliability, and panels are routinely sold with 5-year warranties on quality and 25-years on performance. The weak point of the system is generally the inverter and other "balance of system" components. PV panels themselves are just about bombproof.

[citation needed]

I dunno, looks like it was designed by an artist not an engineer. It's streamlined.

Given that you don't have an accurate bill of materials or any idea of the output, it's impossible for you to make such a claim. It's not inconceivable that a PV array could be sited so badly that it wouldn't work off its embodied energy, but it is highly, highly unlikely. It's not an article of faith. Renewables should be judged on the same criteria as any other energy source. Some of the mature technologies now have enough of a track record that they don't need defending: wind and solar have come down in price as predicted and are now genuine competitors with fossil fuels. Large hydro has been mainstream for decades. The only people who need convincing are the investors, and the big companies keep voting with their wallets again and again. The cost of PV in particular has plummeted in recent years, it's now getting to the point where I think you're a mug if you aren't looking at getting your own. Road and rail reservations are used quite extensively for PV already in some places (Germany, Switzerland). There's a potential issue with glinting, but that's just about avoiding sites where it could be a problem.

Sure, no stealth is foolproof. That's why they call it low-observable technology, not unobservable. Stealthy aircraft become very visible when they open their weapons bays for example, or if they're not very careful about their emissions. In very low orbits an attacker would only pop up above the horizon at quite close range. Engagement ranges could be a lot shorter and times a lot quicker than some people seem to assume. The long range blue sky engagement is only one of several likely scenarios. There's likely to be scope for a wily attacker to get the bounce on the target.

Hardness and toughness aren't the same thing. The problem is that if you increase a material's resistance to scratching (plastic deformation) you tend to lose toughness (resistance to fracture) and vice versa. The surface for this road would have to perform really well at both, and it's not clear if a material with high enough performance is available, or if it would be affordable. This is an R&D project, they're still looking to invest in materials development. The whole project hinges on whether they kind make a good enough glass. I wouldn't like to say they can't, I'm no expert but glass technology has been advancing quite steadily lately. Who knows?