And then I must write it down, or it will be lost forever. Apparently my mind is keen on discovering that a solution exists. Not so keen on implementing it. So I have had some great ideas and solutions, then my mind goes "OK, solved that one! Whew!" and as soon as possible throws it away. Invariably long before morning.

Totally agree with this - not everyone has the talent or the temperament to be an effective engineer.

Are 5% of the population able to cut it? I think that may be a little high, but a defensible opinion. 36% of any population? No way. Absolutely no way.

I've managed to do code development / updating on a running system, in assembler. Build the fix, and whatever else you need to copy from the original faulty area to a section of code memory unused so far, along with a branch statement back to where the fix needs to hand off back to the original code. Then modify one line in the running system to branch out to the fix, and voila!

Might even be one of the ways they keep the deep space probes running - though their code has been much more thoroughly vetted than anything I've done, there still may be damaged PROM sections and such to patch around [just speculating though].

You are both correct. The poster you are replying to was talking about HOME USE - the power draw of a home is fairly linear through the day and night.

You are talking about OVERALL energy use - for example factories, office buildings, stores, restaurants - that include lots of places that tend to use power primarily during the day.

Not that it's hear nor there, but another headache with EVs for the rental car places is that EVs break their procedures. Some customers rent cars with full tanks and return them empty. They just do. Now what do you do with a bunch of EVs all returned with empty batteries? You can charge the customers money for refueling the cars, but that doesn't get juice back into the EV batteries. Maybe you install a few EV charging stations at the rental place - maybe you have the power available for that - but when you have a couple of dozen cars that are empty? A real headache. And you can't rent them out again without full batteries.

12.5kWh is all you need. You charge them up during the day, spend the charge on them at night. Stay grid tied. The grid takes care of multiple cloudy days in a row. You may have some small amount of reserve for outages, but not much.

Electricity bill is minimal, but still there. Totally off grid is way too expensive today. 95% off-grid? That's the ticket.

95 for $25K, 100 for $120K? No contest.

Thanks Sique - super informative. Makes more sense to me now, but I see a logic error in the naming (which may be why it was confusing before). A Major is called just a Major since he is above the Captains (like the Lt: "without any specification is the deputy of a captain", the Major, without any specification is above the Captains). OK. That's fine.

But the Major General is misnamed in that case - he is above the Colonels, but below the Generals. Should he not be called a Major Colonel then, and not a Major General? Or is the lessor Major misnamed, and should be called the Major Colonel? This seems like a logic flaw.

To carry it further, if we adopt the Major Colonel, then a Major General should be above the Generals, like the lessor Major is above the Captains.

This does not seem so easy.

I would have thought 'Trump dementia' would just return the text from any one of his speeches.

And to be fair, a much bigger percentage of energy expended (by the 22 meter gun) is going into the mach-20 impact than you would get with super high powered lasers that have an efficiency rating of less than 1%.

You have to input a lot of energy to get a fusion reaction going. Making up for the loss of 99%+ of the energy going into lasers makes for a pretty steep hill to climb just to get back to break-even power. Kinetic energy may indeed be a more efficient way to transfer startup energy.

And I'm sure they got it *MOSTLY* right.

So tell us - are you pushing your specs / requirements back on them? As in - OK, you can use 3 million gallons per day, but it must remain potable, to our standards, so when it comes out of your datacenter it is just warmer (so they need a closed loop inside and heat exchangers for instance). As long as they are not "consuming" the water they use, I say let them have what they need.

Then that town of 10,000 still gets the water they need, just a little warmer.

Please tell us the water industry is at least doing that.

I trust him.

Hope it works out buddy!

They are already talking about liquid to liquid volume: "liquid hydrogen has a density of 8 MJ/L whereas gasoline has a density of 32 MJ/L". With hydrogen gas, you are likely in the range of 10-20 times as much volume.

Hint: See subject line.

"I wrote a terrible essay for 3 scholarships to community college and got one of them. I found out it was because I was the only applicant."

I wouldn't feel too bad about that - how do you think Trump "wins" most of his golf tournaments? 8-D

NASA also has been the only one to blow up a female astronaut on launch. Also in the 1980's.