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"Can I interest you in the feature driven model methodology?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There is at least one other option that could scale up to take over not only the electrical load, but the whole fossil energy use of the human race.

It's power satellites. In the last couple of years we got the cost down to where they can undercut coal. This is a little out of date

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The updated version of it put the beamed power plants in space.

I've always thought Japan got it right with their aluminum 1 Yen coin. Japan's 1 Yen coin (current face value of 0.85 US cents) has a much lower metal cost than our copper or copper clad zinc penny. Copper is currently $2/lb vs $0.66/lb for aluminum. Aluminum has a density of 1/3.32 that of copper so at today's metal prices an aluminum penny would cost 1/10th that of a solid copper penny and a few years ago it cost 1/40 that of a solid copper penny. Considering today's copper clad zinc penny aluminum density is roughly 1/3 that of zinc which at the moment has roughly the same cost/lb as aluminum so an aluminum penny would cost about 1/3 that of today's copper/zinc penny. Besides the much lower metal cost the light mass means that the 1 Yen coin floats on water.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I am not sure why we still have pennies. They are annoying and useless, and costing the tax payers money just keeping it in circulation. Keeping pennies make about as much sense as bringing back the half cent. tbh, I think John Oliver subbed it up pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

On the other hand... Copper prices is shrinking... http://www.thestreet.com/story...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Well, he is arguably the nerdiest pop singer/artist that could ever be.

I'd argue that point. Compared to the likes Weird Al, They Might Be Giants, OK Go, Frank Zappa, Talking Heads, Beck, Thomas Dolby, Weezer, GWAR, The Mountain Goats, Ben Folds, Elvis Costello... Bowie probably isn't even in the top 20 nerdiest pop artists. I didn't even bother with indie acts like Jonathan Coulton, niche acts like The Aquabats, or nerds who were only incidentally pop artists like Brian Cox.

My vote for the nerdiest pop superstar would be Brian May. He built his own guitar and helped build his own amplifier, he has a PhD in astrophysics, and wrote a song about the effect of space travel at relativistic speeds.

and even I think this stuff is bad ju-ju. The Extra Creditz youtube blog did a good piece on the Chinese version of this called Sesame Credit.

For those of you wondering how I can stay pro central gov't, I don't see how you can have a world without one. We're going to have a big military to protect us from other countries with big militaries. If you're going to have a big military then you better have a big, strong civilian gov't to counter balance it or you're just asking for a coup de eta. Besides, what else besides a strong central gov't can possibly stand up to a large multi-national corporation?

Think of it this way: It's like there's a box of loader firearms out in the open and somebody picked up a bunch of them and starts waving them around demanding things. Are you gonna sit there and do what they say because you might shoot your eye out or are you gonna pick up a gun and defend yourself? Yeah, you might shoot yourself (heck, it's statistically likely) but it's either that or spend the rest of eternity doing what they guy with the gun says. Gov't is that gun. It's a dangerous tool we're all stuck with...

LED bulb nerds should checkout bigclivedotcom's channel on YouTube. Where he does teardowns of LED light bulbs purchased on eBay and from his local "pound shop" and other assorted cheap Chinese crap.

Here he does a teardown on what sounds like your "chip-on-glass" LED bulb. He approves of it.

LED bulb nerds should checkout bigclivedotcom's channel on YouTube. Where he does teardowns of LED light bulbs purchased on eBay and from his local "pound shop" and other assorted cheap Chinese crap.

Here he does a teardown on what sounds like your "chip-on-glass" LED bulb. He approves of it.

Actually, Thomas Edison was the first recording artist ever. "Merry had a little lamb" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Holy shit!?! Seriously? You know the album? I found it on YouTube once and it had a half dozen views. (Listens, really.) I think the rest of them, since then, have been from me turning people on to it.

Now, I didn't upload the album on YouTube. I have it on LP and on 8 track and, somewhere, I have a copy that I dubbed to cassette. But, you're the very first person that I've ever met, online, that already knew what I was referencing. Obviously, someone else does - 'cause they uploaded it. I intentionally slip it into posts just to see if anyone mentions it - I literally look for reasons to mention it.

I'll be damned... You, sir or ma'am, are my hero for the day! If you've never listened to it on a real quadraphonic stereo system then you absolutely should consider it. Hell, if you get to Maine (after I get back this spring) you can come over and listen to it in my Dart! I'll even bring the weed!

You take a trip to the left and take a trip to the right, when you get done tripping gonna trip all night...

Oh, man... I've probably dropped the title into two dozen different threads over the Slashdot years - not one nibble. I've even *linked* to the YouTube, nary a nibble.

Here, again, for those who are unfamiliar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Hah, I had listened to a bit of it back during the holidays with my son. It started me off at the meditation segment.

Alright, I have to ask... How the hell do you even know about this album? I seriously didn't think it was rare or anything - all my friends knew about it back in the day. Today? Crickets... I've tossed it out there and you're the absolute first to know what I speak of. Man, listening to that stoned, in quadraphonic stereo, was absolutely mind blowing back in the day. I think there was even a four channel LP version but I'm not positive. There probably was - that might even be where my dub is from with proper channel separation? I suspect one of my kids has absconded with the cassette.

You are my hero!

Help!!! I'm lost in the refrigerator!

Oh my... Heh... The missus didn't listen with my son and I. I shall restart it from the beginning... Hmm... I should wait until we're back in Maine and can safely smoke again. Florida really frowns on weed so I don't have any. It just smells enough and the penalty is too high. So, I go without weed. Err, Florida has *other* options. I've, umm, I might have skied more since I got to Florida than I ever do in Maine. *chuckles* Don't laugh - I actually had several Slashdotters over for NYE festivities (we made things go boom) and they may (or may not have - I'll let them decide to tell their story or not) gone skiing with me. A big ol' pile of powder and you face plant your way to the bottom. That might explain the verbosity of my posts. Or not...

Oh yes, hah... Back to the question - I was hanging out with an older hippie chick, stoned obviously, when she turned me on to the album. She was a friend's mother and I was nearing the age where I graduated from high school. She caught us getting stoned and we thought we were in so much trouble. She made us share with her and she played the album for us. I think I have the timing right? I might be conflating it with something else. I seem to recall that the album was fairly new at the time, or at least not that old, so I'm thinking it was around 1973.

And if your friends are stoned too, they won't know what you're talking about either.

Oh man... I could go on but this is already long enough. ;-) If you get the chance to listen to it in quadraphonic stereo (some record players had four discrete channels and some just had two left and two right channels) then then do so. It's actually best (in my opinion) in a car with a good sound system that is properly balanced. Oh man... Heh, I've got like 1,000 stories about this album and the times we had on it but I'll spare you the boring details. I hope you've got your own special set of stories

Interestingly enough, Slate leans a bit to the left... and most anti-vaxxers lean very much to the left, so why was the bile necessary?

You are obviously unfamiliar with how the left <air_quotes>functions </air_quotes>.

No matter where you are no the political spectrum, if you are completely honest with yourself you have to admit there are some people on your side who are an embarrassment. The kind of people who take an important and valuable idea and find a way to make a complete hash of it. The left wing anti-vaxxers have absorbed the lessons about distrusting the self-serving narratives of corporations and the powerful, but in their place they accept uncritically a different set of self-serving narratives peddled by anti-vaxx grifters. The anti-vaxxers cop the Emersonian self-reliance attitude, but they miss the really important part about thinking for themselves.

Quoting The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (discussed here):

Achieving deep cuts [in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions] will require more intensive use of low-GHG technologies such as renewable energy, nuclear energy, and CCS.

So, someone who is completely anti-nuclear is in conflict with the IPCC, which is supposed to be the standard for technical consensus, right? It's only those crazy global warming denialists who think they know better than the IPCC.

In this piece by Joe Romm (linked to here by timothy) I think the first step is to note that he's critiquing something over at the Guardian UK site written by James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley, Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change (it's distantly possible that you're better off reading something by James Hansen rather than by some guy who actually quotes Mark Jacobson approvingly).

Please note the sub-title on that Hansen piece: "Alongside renewables, Nuclear will make the difference". Joe Romm insists it's likely nuclear power will be just a "bit player", but conceeds we should keep working on it, e.g. he likes research into small, modular reactors. Hansen and company don't dispute that renewables have a role to play, they just insist we can't solve the problem without nuclear. Arguably, the great fight here is over whether we need renewables plus nukes, or nukes plus renewables.

Hansen and company say:

For example, a build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario. We know that this is technically achievable because France and Sweden were able to ramp up nuclear power to high levels in just 15-20 years."

Joe Romm argues:

According to the online database of the International Atomic Energy Agency, France has 58 operational reactors, which took the country more than two decades to connect to the grid! That would be a rate of under three per year.

Actually, 58 reactors over two decades is in fact nearly 3 per year, and that's built by a single country.

Why, that would mean that to build 115 reactors per year we might need the efforts of nearly 40 countries! Oh my god where are we going to find that many?

Seriously: you need to grasp the sheer scale of the problem of decarbonizing the world economy. If you look at what we need to do to ramp up any clean energy source, it's absolutely huge. Take a look at some of the numbers Saul Griffith crunched back in 2009:

Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (Thatâ(TM)s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) [ ... and so on ... ]

Another version of that talk is here. Anything we do is going to involve incredible magnitudes of rapid construction, and we really need to get started on it.

By the way, Hansen and company did an extended presentation at COP21.

....free thinking citizens of the world pulled together to put an end to this nonsense.

Microsoft is nothing more than a money gathering machine, so the best way to attack it would be to cut off the money supply. The only legal way I can think of to attempt this is to spread knowledge of free solutions as widely as possible.

My suggestion would be to approach some media production company, preferably one that depends upon open source because they might do it for free, and persuade them to work with a well known personality, perhaps somebody like Steven Fry (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) who might also do it for free. Produce a short public information type film demonstrating how to use Windows to download a good Linux desktop OS and burn the ISO file to a DVD, then use that DVD to install Linux onto a computer.

It might take a kick-starter campaign to raise funds to put it onto TV.

Could it work?

I think this is what you meant to say.

You can see Audio Spectrum Analyzer running on a screen behind Lewis and Gilbert in Revenge of the Nerds!

This is the reference he was joking about.

> David Bowie and Bing Crosby

Dave Foley did a quite hilarious impression of David Bowie and pretty decent singing with Joe Flaherty's "Bing." I'm not bowled over by Dave Thomas's Bob Hope though.

Gosh. On /. I would have figured that some people would have chimed in that he played Nikola Tesla in the film "The Prestige." Bonus: his lab assistant was played by Andy Serkis, in one of his few live-action roles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

One thing I would like to see with autonomous cars is a new set of required lights when they are in operation. This way you can easily identify the cars that are driving themselves. Also at some point autonomous cars will network together on highways and form a virtual train. I think another beacon should be required when they are in this mode.

We really need to work on infrastructure in the US and making it easier for automated vehicles to be the norm would go a long way to reducing deaths and accidents and will pave the way to flying cars. I'm not kidding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The biggest issue with flying cars has been having people pilot the damn things. We're at the point now that we can automate the piloting of all vehicles. Imagine the reduction of congestion on roads if a huge number of people took to the sky. It's not that big of a deal to me since I work from home but I remember the suffering of a long commute. Autonomous vehicles both automobile and drone would help a lot of people tremendously. It would also generate a lot of economic activity.

A true genius. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The guy was razor sharp, and at times almost prescient.

From around 6 minutes in this interview, he talks re. the music industry's rot, and predicts much of the internet's climb over the last decade and a half. All to Paxman's skepticism...

We have an emptier world today

Better put enough explosives in, or you'll get something like this (sans the driver):

you can't fix everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This is what people don't seem to get. They compare Fukushima to a single wind turbine failure and proclaim wind is safer. Um no, Fukushima's generation capacity was equivalent to about 7,000-10,000 wind turbines.

So much of the story is left untold, thank you for telling. No one ever seems to ask: What is good about Fukushima Daiichi?

Fukushima's first reactor went on-line in March 1971 [cite] and 5 others followed up to 1979. Without accounting for cumulative downtime (hard to find), let's keep it simple, cut everything here by a third if you like, I come up with a combined total of ~159.12 Gigawatt-years of electricity. That's ~636.5 million tons of coal [cite] that did not have to be expensively imported and burned to help resource-poor Japan become the industrial giant it is today. Think of it as ~1.8 trillion tons of CO2 [cite] that did not enter the atmosphere, if you like. That's just one nuclear power plant with reactors that are not big by today's standards. More stats, and the interesting observation on how the hysterical press of Japan does not necessarily reflect public opinion,

"A poll taken in February 2015 by the Mizuho Information & Research Institute of Japan asked whether or not the respondent would use nuclear-generated electricity if the costs were the same or less than they were that month, and 67% said âoeyesâ. Only 32% replied in the negative. This contrasts with a number of media polls with voluntary and hence non-representative participation, and the distortion is compounded by a 2012 news media survey finding that 47 of the 50 most popular press outlets in Japan said they were antinuclear."

Japans few nuclear plants have provided as much as ~30% of Japan's electricity and I am confident they will pass that figure once more. Nuclear has contributed greatly to the country's wealth in ways that no other energy source could have, or ever could. There is a great deal of hidden peril facing the entire human species that is a direct result of stalling the Industrial Revolution --- by sweeping nuclear energy under the rug. As Kirk Sorensen says so eloquently,

"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common."

You people are fucking idiots.

Look through the YouTube comments posted for this video of Marguerite Perrin. Not a lot of sympathy being shown there. You morons read 'ugly woman' and you immediately think Hollywood homely, or something equally stupid.

Any, enjoy your bullshit self absorbed little complex.

we never eat jelly
they make it with wine
and one little bite turns a man to a swine
think -just imagine- how sinful the day:
THE CHIDREN all wasted on PB and J

****

"If I'll be alive tomorrow
-really I don't know
BUT if I'm alive tomorrow
I am sure Ill drink tomorrow
-THIS I promise you"

***

Boozin, Boozin
-Just You and I
Boozin Boo - oozin
-When we are Dry!

Some do it openly
Some on the sly
But We All are bloody well BOOZIN

****
http://www.metrolyrics.com/alcohol-lyrics-brad-paisley.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXxomeId_dw

  Brad Paisley - Alcohol Lyrics

I can make anybody pretty
I can make you believe any lie
I can make you pick a fight
With somebody twice
Your size

Well I've been known to cause a few breakups
And I've been known to cause a few births
I can make you new friends
Or get you fired from work.

And since the day I left Milwaukee
Lyncheburg Bordeaux, France
Been making the bars
With lots of big money
And helping white people dance

I am medicine and I am poison
I can help you up or make you fall
You had some of the best times
You'll never remember with me
Alcohol, alcohol

Yes since the day I left Milwaukee
Lynchburg, Bordeaux, France
Been makin' the bars lots of big money
And helpin' white people dance

Yea I got you in trouble in high school
And college now that was a ball
You had some of the best times
You'll never remember with me
Alcohol, alcohol
-

"Either you drink or you don't. If you do, then you are incapable of living without being intoxicated. Ask yourself why you get drunk."

Unless this coment was posted by an omnicient G*d, I find it presumptuous and rude. Some people really need to abstain... totaly. I respect them for recognizing that fact. Other people are able to use psychoactives without losing control. I respect THEIR right to do so (legality of any particular substance is another issue).

-

You can't even get Federal approval for such a thing in 5 years

Tesla Autopilot, which automates most highway driving, is already approved and available to consumers. A driver is required to be in the seat, but the car mostly drives itself. Here is a video of some idiot riding in the backseat while his Tesla drives down a busy highway.

And the technology isn't even close to being done.

You might want to get a better grip on reality. Tesla Autopilot is already 80% of the way there, and the other 20% may not be available to consumers yet, but it has had millions of miles of testing

You can't defend the indefensible. Consumer SSD manufacturers purvey millions of devices with known catastrophic failure modes that could be remedied with a few cents in extra parts.

Sort of like if the engineers of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge put it into mass production. It only fails during wind storms you see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

... it was aired long before this suicide, but provides lots of insight on why the situation is as it is: Episode on Youtube.

I'm not sure, but every time someone says duct tape these days this comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Additionally I can say duct/duck tape is heavily overrated, for most applications I found Kapton tape to be the prime choice. Fire proof, good insulator, usually comes with an adhesive that doesn't leave too much residue, and extremely strong. Only thing speaking against Kapton tape is that once it starts tearing it'll go through completely. Additionally the entire electronics industry runs off this stuff; it's one of those consumables you have in every manufacturing plant that you can't quite explain. But the day it's no longer there everything will stop working most likely.

Clinton had a push to get females in as well. Let's hope it doesn't get under qualified people killed. Kara Hultgren: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

You mean that there are qualifications to getting killed??? Does having black skin make you more qualified to get killed, like in Vietnam and today's urban US centers?

In this and so many other things people conflate "being black" with "being poor". Its poverty, not race.

Antonio Banderas and Columbia Pictures might has something to say about this also...

They have a good evolutionary reason for this.

Shachar

Clinton had a push to get females in as well. Let's hope it doesn't get under qualified people killed. Kara Hultgren: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

You mean that there are qualifications to getting killed??? Does having black skin make you more qualified to get killed, like in Vietnam and today's urban US centers?

People keep thinking they can outsmart reality with mathematical masturbation. The only one that gets fooled by that sort of thing is ourselves. Reality is never fooled because it doesn't calculate things in terms of our philosophies and theories and spreadsheets... it rather calculates things in terms of "is" and "is not". You can't trick that.

Print all the money you want. Its just zeros in a computer at this point. When push comes to shove... the question will be "how much of X do you have NOW". The numbers in our model rarely describe that. They talk about how much we "should" have or how much we "might" have or how much we "will" have... assuming everything goes one way or another.

If our models were so f'ing perfect we wouldn't have these collapses. We wouldn't go from bull to bear and then back to bull and then back to bear.

The truth of the economy lies somewhere between bull and bear. It is the empirical reality. Denial in that case is just self delusion. Accept that and grow wiser.

You can pretend Keynes is the end all be all... but were that the case more of his theories would not be a shit show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The baby boom started increasing the supply of entry level labor about 1970.

Women's liberation started increasing the supply of entry level labor about 1970.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 started increasing the supply of labor (not just entry level) about 1970.

The Donor Party liked this because it lowered labor costs. Oh, did I say "Donor"? I meant "Republican".

The Elect A New People Party liked this because 2 of the 3 sources of new labor would vote to Elect A New People. Oh, did I say "Elect A New People"? I meant "Democratic".

So you have a huge influx of labor and this is interpreted as a "labor shortage" by both parties.

Combined with the fact that FDR's "New Deal", in effect, nationalized many of the functions previously performed by the labor unions -- turning the national border into a de facto picket line that, for example, that neoNazi Eisenhower enforced with "Operation Wetback" (deporting most of the illegal immigrants) -- and the labor movement effectively collapsed.

Elizabeth Warren, before she got conned into becoming a politician, was the only mainstream academic to come close to documenting even part of this. See her Jefferson Lecture titled "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class.

Since 1992, I've been advocating replacing taxes on economic activity with what amounts to an insurance premium for the protection of property rights, and distributing the revenue in a citizen's dividend. In that white paper I predicted a lot of what has now come to pass as a result of centralization of wealth and burgeoning welfare state rent seeking.

Here is a link to a recent synopsis of that proposal.

These Numbers lol.

Yeah, he's probably arone.

You can make one out of a Raspberry Pi!

Is there anything it can't do?? :)

This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.

That means no more illegal wire-tapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. Our Constitution works. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary.

This Administration acts like violating civil liberties is the way to enhance our security. It is not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This is why I voted for him in 2008. His economic promises and predictions have turned out to be equally hollow.

Clinton had a push to get females in as well. Let's hope it doesn't get under qualified people killed. Kara Hultgren: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Meanwhile in a country full of criminals one of our prime ministers held the world record for sculling a yard of ale.

Even our more recent prime ministers has put some effort in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Considering consuming healthy stuff as boring and unhealthy stuff as fun, and defending this viewpoint, is a symptom of dependency (addiction).
You are not born with such dependencies, they are created by your upbringing, by what you are taught, not only by parents but society as a whole.
It leads to a deep feeling of some things about life/reality/yourself/the world being not right, so you try to avoid those. For that you cultivate those dependencies as an avoidance mechanism.

The solution lies in looking underneath those dependencies towards those "wrong" things, and learning what is real (by meditation for example). You might discover those negative feelings are not based on reality but on a learnt image, and can adjust your perception accordingly. Then you don't need unhealthy dependencies anymore to avoid (what you perceive as) reality.
There are many books written about this problem, I'm no expert but you can look at John Bradshaw or Brenee Brown or something as an intro.
I'm sure many slashdotters will oppose this "spiritual bullshit", that's fine, you are free to enjoy your dependencies if you like them.

And yes, you are right in that they basically say to people: "you shouldn't depend on this", without even hinting at how to be not dependent. Of course, people are dependent for a reason, and _if_ they did follow that advice, the root cause is unaddressed so they create a different escape mechanism.