Yep. I did both myself, as I was using old cameras that I had hanging around and if I sent them for conversion it would be more expensive than the cost of the camera.
Conversions done in places like Kolari or Spencer run about $300-500 depending on the camera model.
If I were to buy a brand new A7 IV or something like that, I would of course ask one of those shops to do it for me.
The kind of people who automate away their job won't care if papers accidentally make it through the review process and they won't care enough to stop this. For them, the process is working.
Lazy fraudsters don't pose much of a challenge. If the scientific process works even a little bit, this is just a stupid gimmick, like hiding a Monty Python quote in the metadata.
Turns out China buys Iranian oil, China makes cheap products out of this oil. China builds lots of new cheap coal plants, west fades theirs out but moves part of their production to China.. etc.
Use of coal in Chinese energy production is not growing, peaked in 2013 according to their stats. They are also building massive solar and nuclear capacity.
But anyway, half of all global coal production is consumed in China. I hope they will manage to get rid of coal in the next 20 years.
In Switzerland there is some neat established method for finding out the needed heating power. Consumption/year x Efficiency / 2000h/year = Max heating power. This should work for most moderate climates, although you should consult your local climate table. https://pubdb.bfe.admin.ch/de/publication/download/2781
Further even if you undersize your heat pump to only 70% of the max heating power, then you still will get out 99% from your heating from the heat pump on average.
Had they said "the array will be so large it'll have its own gravity." then you'd be making a valid point.
But they didn't say just "gravity", they said "gravity well".
> "First, let us simply define what a gravity well is. A gravity well is a term used metaphorically to describe the gravitational pull that a large body exerts in space."
So they weren't suggesting that it will be big enough to get past some boundary below which things don't have gravity, just that smaller things don't have enough gravity to matter.
Given all mass has gravity, and gravity can be metaphorically described by a well, all mass has a gravity well. It is not necessary for mass to capture other mass in its gravity. A well is a pleasant and relative metaphor humans can visualize - not a threshold reached after certain mass.
"Large" is almost meaningless in this context. Douglas Adams put it best
> Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
From an education site:
> Everything with mass is able to bend space and the more massive an object is, the more it bends
They start with an explanation of a marble compared to a bowling ball. Both have a gravity well, but one exerts far more influence
As mentioned in the article the Starcloud design requires solar arrays that are ~2x more efficient than those deployed on the ISS. Simply scaling them up introduces more drag and weight problems as do the batteries needed to suffice for the 45 minutes of darkness the satellite will receive.
Also, if your mine is done, you can load up your trains and bring them to the next up to the mountain mine! Lifetime of the catenaries might be a lot longer than the mine.
I wonder that in certain parts of the world, the train network could become net positive electrical contributor by mining stones in quarries up the mountain?
Depends on what you measure, I guess? Ie I don't think you have enough excess energy to pay for the actual quarrying itself. (Though you might be able to become energy positive if you take water as a ballast, not stone. Water is easier to pump into some tanks.)
Well inner mine transport can be net positive as well with electrical mining trucks. Then you need the energy for explosives and stone cutting, which needs further investigation, whether this can be offset by the energy gained of the stones travelling downhill. Water should be better used for hydroelectrical production.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html.en