Even if the fuel was free (delivered by aliens or God) and just sitting in tanks on the moon ready to use, it would make no sense to land there to pick it up.
It might also be an opportunity to make a break with the overly risk averse attitude towards space exploration/colonization we have currently. If expectations of death are managed appropriately (e.g. conditioning the public up front that a given percentage of people WILL die in this, sometimes in transit - but the goal is worth it, and the people who do it are fine with that), we'd probably get more bang for the buck. It's a bit ridiculous to think that 33000 people willingly throw their lives away in the US each year (suicide), but it's somehow the wrong approach to allow a handful of people to place a similar value on their lives for the far greater good of humanity.
Of course, is is pretty darn funny. Turns out after all this genetic algorithm stuff. A very simple structure is close enough to optimal to make other more complex structures pointless.
While I can't get to your actual link, I suspect that the picture marked (b) in the slashdot linked article is the simple but still very efficient configuration.
In all, it is a cool approach. Even cooler if he can start putting some of the other assumptions (ease of cleaning, cost of manufacturing different shapes of panels, cost of panels, whatever else is relevant) in the fitness function, so that it is actually commercially practical. Ultimately, the best panel that wins for most applications is going to be the lowest in terms of $/Watt. I'm not sure if this has been done yet, I'm guessing not yet as it's harder. However, it's a fait accompli that if you can come up with an accurate fitness function for what you truly want, and use a computer to brute force the search space, the answer, no matter how strange, is the truth. It's a great approach because it throws out all our preconceived ideas about how the solution should look, to let us find the best, and probably counterintuitive, solution. I find that often people dismiss this approach because it seems hard, but once you sit down and actually try it, it can be done. And once done, the computer can examine different configurations far quicker than we can by trial and error.
I would also not be surprised if we see something similar to the final thing in nature. If you've ever seen time lapse photography of plants, they turn their leaves to face the sun. I wouldn't be surprised to find the solution in plants too rigid to be able to track the sun, as they'd need to be pre-configured in the most efficient way. Something like a cactus perhaps.
That was cool. It's not an accident that this was invented in tropical Brazil. If insulation is a requirement for your roof (heating where required will dwarf light usage, especially with fluorescents), using sunlight for lighting will require different technology. But this is awesome for those areas, or non-insulated buildings in temperate or colder regions. It should be fairly frost resistant, having a relatively large thermal mass. In climates with snow it may explode unless you put a hole in the lid.
Lighter and much less sturdy cars will lead to perhaps 10,000 more deaths per year.
Until those who are driving around overweight behemoths are made to pay for their huge negative externalities. E.g. with mandatory sentences for manslaughter every time they bump into a smaller car and kill someone, increased taxes, etc. It's hardly fair that those who do the responsible thing are penalized.
Tremulous is one of those games that should be cool by all aspects: setting, look, features, etc. They're all awesome. But the game just lacks a fun factor for some reason.
I find it fun, and very addictive. Have you played it long enough to start getting good at it? There's something satisfying about sneaking up sneaking up on some poor human from behind and dretching the back of their head. Or successfully pouncing a human with a goon. Sniping their armory or telenodes as an ad goon. Absorbing a full luci hit as a rant and then taking the human out, along with the thousand odd credits it took to get to that stage. Leveling to stage 2 as a human and pulsing dretches. Finding the alien base empty, sawing every egg in the alien base, and finally their overmind. Taking the time to position each build point in either race so that you maximize the time the base can survive before being overwhelmed by the enemy. Spamming eggs on transit so as to avoid a human win. I love the teamwork aspect to the game.
There is a steep learning curve to the game though, some things require a lot of practice (e.g. goon pounce), require a bit of setup (e.g. assigning keys), or maybe even a knack (e.g. basilisk skills). Keeping your kill/death ratio low is also key, but hard, since most everyone but noobs avoids death like the plague.
You could program perfectly well just knowing how to add, subtract, multiply and divide if you worked on (yawn) accounting systems.
Basic arithmetic is still math. And despite accounting being "just basic arithmetic", somehow a lot of people who can do basic arithmetic still struggle with accounting, or everyone would get an A in it. They don't. Accounting is a mathematical system with its own laws, and to do anything interesting with it (e.g. answer various flavors of the question "how do I make more money?") as the OP was getting at, requires ability to pose questions to that system and answer them correctly. Depending on the exact question, the answers may require anything up to graduate level mathematics, or at least, a brain capable of such thinking.
It actually is, just one you don't want to consider. The first step is to realize that most of what high energy use society deems as "needs" are actually "wants". Humans made do without profligate energy spending for thousands of years. We can do it again. Once high EROEI energy runs out, we will certainly learn to make do again. With the engineering knowledge we have now, a future society living with a frugal energy budget would look much more similar to our own than say, life in the 1700s, or even life in the early 1900s. We have the internet to transmit that information, and the engineering knowledge exists now to make that a reality.
Yes, there are compromises. Some are functional, most are fashion/style/status/cultural. The main compromise is switch to investing up front to achieve a long-term payoff (which is how most wealthy people become that way, and they end up having a greater quality of life for longer). To use your examples, energy use in sanitation as far as I am aware is not even noise when compared to transport or heating. We will still have sanitation as long as our society has the engineering expertize to implement and maintain it.
Energy use in refrigeration is more significant. However, it is very doable to increase the insulation. Double the insulation and halve the energy consumption. My fridge has 35mm walls and the freezer compartment has 60mm walls. If the walls were quadrupled in thickness (e.g. 240mm freezer walls, 140mm fridge walls), the fridge would use 1/4 of the energy. Will the housewife complain about the ugliness or lack of convenience? Yes. Will the kitchen need to be redesigned to accommodate it? Maybe. Will it require more up front investment? Yes. Will the investment pay off? Yes. For example, my fridge/freezer uses 500kWh per year, so at $0.15/kWh, that's $75/year. Considering that there is no reason the fridge/freezer can't last 20 years, there is $1200 or so of energy savings to be had (which will be less given time value of money calculations), this will offset the cost of manufacture, which is certainly not all in insulation costs.
However, the fact that this is possible indicates that powering your house with "fluffy bunny" wind generators and "happy" solar panels is more than possible if the house is designed properly from the ground up to be energy efficient. If a society has made the decision that powering your house that way is the only option, then unless a miracle occurs with solar panel efficiency, designing your house to use less power is much more viable than spending more on energy. But the important thing is that in order for society to use less energy, fundamental changes in design of everyday items, houses, transport, cities etc. must occur. It's the same principle in designing a computer to be silent - buy the right parts and design it right from the beginning.
The reason this solution is not on the table really is that it requires will - doing hard things now for a future payoff. The average person is lazy. Will for things that are good but the average population is incapable of understanding or lacks the drive to do are not achievable in a democracy, at least not without a good scare campaign.
and heck, even 8 cores become "wasteful" on a home desktop, no?
It's not wasteful if each core can be power gated (e.g. Nehalem and newer processors) to use near-zero power when not in use, other than the one-time manufacturing cost which is insignificant compared to the energy consumed by the CPU in processing.
Actually, usually for database designers it's a one to zero relationship.
Initiate enough union queries and eventually you'll start seeing results. The first results will likely not be what you had hoped for but over time you may manage to debug your querying process and even optimize it. As soon as you think you've got a handle on it, child processes start spawning uncontrollably, your performance will drop through the floor and the rest of your life becomes one long death march.
Well, don't you have something better to do with your life than play games?
Even then, linux is not a panacea for a game free existence. There are plenty of highly addictive games in FOSS operating systems, including Ubuntu. Even FreeBSD has the power to serve... you up games. The more addictive the game is, the higher the likelihood of there being a port for it. To find the most addictive ones, just sort by rating using the PC-BSD game repository - http://www.pbidir.com/bt/category/games/rating/. Wesnoth, Tremulous, Assault Cube. And if you give it a chance, the roguelikes (Angband, Nethack) will happily eat as much time as you can throw at them.
Voting for the BNP is not a "protest vote" - this is not a warm and cuddly hippy protest option like voting for the Monster Raving Loony Party.
The alternatives aren't very warm and cuddly either. Having no say in your immigration policy for half a century - that's real warm and cuddly. Having said immigration policy be irreversible once demographic change tips the balance past 50%, and no guaranteed say in anything else for that matter, that's real warm and cuddly too. Discriminatory ethnic quotas for good jobs and university degrees that will secure said jobs, gotta love those too.
The BNP is no less warm and cuddly than the Indian National Congress or the African National Congress. It would be a world first that a people allow themselves to be willingly herded into a reservation. It is always resisted.
Right... If someone was standing at the door of your house for a year, trying to pick the lock, you'd just let them keep trying until they opened it?
Bad analogy. Picking most locks is fairly easy - there are video tutorials on the net to show you how to do it. If you let them there for an hour, they will probably get in if it's a typical lock. If you have at least a random 8 digit lowercase password, it will take 200,000 years for them to "pick" the lock.
The other thing, comparing your front door to an internet facing ssh server - where do you live, Johannesburg?
Quoted for truth. For applications where GB are not needed but IOPS is, IOPS is the only thing that matters. Booting and applications usually need less than 40GB. We are already at that point where the total cost is more than worth it from a total system cost perspective. Games are there, or nearly there. I highly doubt that someone is going to have more than 160GB of games they play regularly, in which case, SSD are a logical choice for games. Low minimum FPS is what destroys a gaming experience, not so much the average. And SSD shine there. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=14
For terabyte sized applications, there is only media (not talking enterprise here), and HDD does an excellent job there. And really, there are two use cases - putting the files on there/copying them off in the first case, and reading them off slowly. It seems like HDD would benefit from having two spin speeds - a fast speed for copying data to and from the drive, and a very slow speed for streaming that would lower the power use and probably increase longevity of the drive. One benefits from 5000rpm plus, the other really only needs 500rpm. It could possibly be adaptive too - surely you can algorithmically sense when the HDD is only getting small chunks of data every so often, and arrange for the drive to slow down - perhaps pre-fetching it even. HDD makers need to accept the fact that their drives really only make sense as media drives (or will very shortly), but are not yet optimum for that purpose.
Get a real high-performance file system. One that's also mature and can actually be recovered if it ever does fail catastrophically. (Yes, ZFS can fail catastrophically. Just Google "ZFS data loss"...)
I just did. On the first page, I got just one result on the first page relating to an event from January 2008 - Joyent. And they managed to recover their data. I did another search - "ZFS lost my data". One example running on FreeBSD 7.2, in which ZFS was not yet production ready. Other examples existed in which people were eventually able to get their data.
The following is an interesting message - http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-8A - that seems pretty scary but someone was able to get back their data anyway. All in all, the lack of datapoints for ZFS losing data is actually encouraging. If this were really a problem, I would expect to see a lot more forum posts about this, and people piling on as well. The others are singing ZFS's praises.
The question is, as people don't buy google directly, what is going to trip them up?
Widespread bypassing of internet advertising. e.g. Strong AI that can be run from some future desktop computer, that searches through all the major search engines, picks the most relevant results from all of them, and arranges the links for you to visit. (Maybe only weak AI is needed?) But this would still require the visiting of search engines, so that would only really hurt Google if a superior competitor existed. Well not necessarily. If intelligent, local meta-searching was easy, then search would become competitive. So long as a search engine was good enough to want to be searched by this AI, that search engine could undercut Google's advertising rates because companies would find that advertising with them would be as effective as using Google. A race to the bottom would then ensue.
Of course, this superior local meta-searching technology would also need to be noticeably superior to Google enough that people would feel compelled to switch. The familiar look, the syntax, google maps... it's a softer lock-in than backroom deals made to preinstall operating systems, but it's still effective. Google does a very good job now, and they have an income stream that is plowed back into research to keep them competent at search. I don't see them going away. Could they be better? Maybe. I find that I often need to constrain my searches with a "site:whatever.com" where the whatever.com is the largest internet forum devoted to the particular subject. It would be nice if google were to somehow be able to figure out that when I type "$error_message $subject", that I want to search the best $subject forums about $error_message. But this is not essential, and I have to wonder how many people are this anal about getting good search results.
Google sure seems to be unstoppable now. But so did Microsoft and IBM back in their respective days.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Slim
Yeah, I know. If you read the fine print he's 100% Lebanese. There are 7 others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexican_billionaires
If NASA selects pioneers rather than tourists, that's no longer a problem. No one lives forever, not everyone wants to either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay
It might also be an opportunity to make a break with the overly risk averse attitude towards space exploration/colonization we have currently. If expectations of death are managed appropriately (e.g. conditioning the public up front that a given percentage of people WILL die in this, sometimes in transit - but the goal is worth it, and the people who do it are fine with that), we'd probably get more bang for the buck. It's a bit ridiculous to think that 33000 people willingly throw their lives away in the US each year (suicide), but it's somehow the wrong approach to allow a handful of people to place a similar value on their lives for the far greater good of humanity.
While I can't get to your actual link, I suspect that the picture marked (b) in the slashdot linked article is the simple but still very efficient configuration.
In all, it is a cool approach. Even cooler if he can start putting some of the other assumptions (ease of cleaning, cost of manufacturing different shapes of panels, cost of panels, whatever else is relevant) in the fitness function, so that it is actually commercially practical. Ultimately, the best panel that wins for most applications is going to be the lowest in terms of $/Watt. I'm not sure if this has been done yet, I'm guessing not yet as it's harder. However, it's a fait accompli that if you can come up with an accurate fitness function for what you truly want, and use a computer to brute force the search space, the answer, no matter how strange, is the truth. It's a great approach because it throws out all our preconceived ideas about how the solution should look, to let us find the best, and probably counterintuitive, solution. I find that often people dismiss this approach because it seems hard, but once you sit down and actually try it, it can be done. And once done, the computer can examine different configurations far quicker than we can by trial and error.
I would also not be surprised if we see something similar to the final thing in nature. If you've ever seen time lapse photography of plants, they turn their leaves to face the sun. I wouldn't be surprised to find the solution in plants too rigid to be able to track the sun, as they'd need to be pre-configured in the most efficient way. Something like a cactus perhaps.
That was cool. It's not an accident that this was invented in tropical Brazil. If insulation is a requirement for your roof (heating where required will dwarf light usage, especially with fluorescents), using sunlight for lighting will require different technology. But this is awesome for those areas, or non-insulated buildings in temperate or colder regions. It should be fairly frost resistant, having a relatively large thermal mass. In climates with snow it may explode unless you put a hole in the lid.
Until those who are driving around overweight behemoths are made to pay for their huge negative externalities. E.g. with mandatory sentences for manslaughter every time they bump into a smaller car and kill someone, increased taxes, etc. It's hardly fair that those who do the responsible thing are penalized.
~
I find it fun, and very addictive. Have you played it long enough to start getting good at it? There's something satisfying about sneaking up sneaking up on some poor human from behind and dretching the back of their head. Or successfully pouncing a human with a goon. Sniping their armory or telenodes as an ad goon. Absorbing a full luci hit as a rant and then taking the human out, along with the thousand odd credits it took to get to that stage. Leveling to stage 2 as a human and pulsing dretches. Finding the alien base empty, sawing every egg in the alien base, and finally their overmind. Taking the time to position each build point in either race so that you maximize the time the base can survive before being overwhelmed by the enemy. Spamming eggs on transit so as to avoid a human win. I love the teamwork aspect to the game.
There is a steep learning curve to the game though, some things require a lot of practice (e.g. goon pounce), require a bit of setup (e.g. assigning keys), or maybe even a knack (e.g. basilisk skills). Keeping your kill/death ratio low is also key, but hard, since most everyone but noobs avoids death like the plague.
You'll need 5 evos for a rant.
****ing botter! I'm surprised you didn't ask for X-ray vision as well! (But be careful what you wish for.)
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/03/23/amazing-x-ray-picture-boy-gets-stabbed-in-the-head-with-10-inch-knife-after-row-over-counter-strike-computer-game-115875-22132969/
Basic arithmetic is still math. And despite accounting being "just basic arithmetic", somehow a lot of people who can do basic arithmetic still struggle with accounting, or everyone would get an A in it. They don't. Accounting is a mathematical system with its own laws, and to do anything interesting with it (e.g. answer various flavors of the question "how do I make more money?") as the OP was getting at, requires ability to pose questions to that system and answer them correctly. Depending on the exact question, the answers may require anything up to graduate level mathematics, or at least, a brain capable of such thinking.
Maybe those same people are a subset of those who like to reference the Jamie Zawinksi quote:
It actually is, just one you don't want to consider. The first step is to realize that most of what high energy use society deems as "needs" are actually "wants". Humans made do without profligate energy spending for thousands of years. We can do it again. Once high EROEI energy runs out, we will certainly learn to make do again. With the engineering knowledge we have now, a future society living with a frugal energy budget would look much more similar to our own than say, life in the 1700s, or even life in the early 1900s. We have the internet to transmit that information, and the engineering knowledge exists now to make that a reality.
Yes, there are compromises. Some are functional, most are fashion/style/status/cultural. The main compromise is switch to investing up front to achieve a long-term payoff (which is how most wealthy people become that way, and they end up having a greater quality of life for longer). To use your examples, energy use in sanitation as far as I am aware is not even noise when compared to transport or heating. We will still have sanitation as long as our society has the engineering expertize to implement and maintain it.
Energy use in refrigeration is more significant. However, it is very doable to increase the insulation. Double the insulation and halve the energy consumption. My fridge has 35mm walls and the freezer compartment has 60mm walls. If the walls were quadrupled in thickness (e.g. 240mm freezer walls, 140mm fridge walls), the fridge would use 1/4 of the energy. Will the housewife complain about the ugliness or lack of convenience? Yes. Will the kitchen need to be redesigned to accommodate it? Maybe. Will it require more up front investment? Yes. Will the investment pay off? Yes. For example, my fridge/freezer uses 500kWh per year, so at $0.15/kWh, that's $75/year. Considering that there is no reason the fridge/freezer can't last 20 years, there is $1200 or so of energy savings to be had (which will be less given time value of money calculations), this will offset the cost of manufacture, which is certainly not all in insulation costs.
However, the fact that this is possible indicates that powering your house with "fluffy bunny" wind generators and "happy" solar panels is more than possible if the house is designed properly from the ground up to be energy efficient. If a society has made the decision that powering your house that way is the only option, then unless a miracle occurs with solar panel efficiency, designing your house to use less power is much more viable than spending more on energy. But the important thing is that in order for society to use less energy, fundamental changes in design of everyday items, houses, transport, cities etc. must occur. It's the same principle in designing a computer to be silent - buy the right parts and design it right from the beginning.
The reason this solution is not on the table really is that it requires will - doing hard things now for a future payoff. The average person is lazy. Will for things that are good but the average population is incapable of understanding or lacks the drive to do are not achievable in a democracy, at least not without a good scare campaign.
I could go on, but will instead leave you to read the same links that I have over time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society (ignore the maglev trains, rolling resistance is not the problem). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivhaus http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec2.pdf
It's not wasteful if each core can be power gated (e.g. Nehalem and newer processors) to use near-zero power when not in use, other than the one-time manufacturing cost which is insignificant compared to the energy consumed by the CPU in processing.
AND when beetles from a bottle have a fizzle with their jizzle it's called a bottled beetle jizzle fizzle. AND...
when beetles from these bottles with the fizzle in their jizzle eat a brekkie that is specky and battle beetles for a jottle...
they call this a fizzled jizzled specky brekkied bottled beetle jottle battle.
Initiate enough union queries and eventually you'll start seeing results. The first results will likely not be what you had hoped for but over time you may manage to debug your querying process and even optimize it. As soon as you think you've got a handle on it, child processes start spawning uncontrollably, your performance will drop through the floor and the rest of your life becomes one long death march.
Even then, linux is not a panacea for a game free existence. There are plenty of highly addictive games in FOSS operating systems, including Ubuntu. Even FreeBSD has the power to serve... you up games. The more addictive the game is, the higher the likelihood of there being a port for it. To find the most addictive ones, just sort by rating using the PC-BSD game repository - http://www.pbidir.com/bt/category/games/rating/. Wesnoth, Tremulous, Assault Cube. And if you give it a chance, the roguelikes (Angband, Nethack) will happily eat as much time as you can throw at them.
The alternatives aren't very warm and cuddly either. Having no say in your immigration policy for half a century - that's real warm and cuddly. Having said immigration policy be irreversible once demographic change tips the balance past 50%, and no guaranteed say in anything else for that matter, that's real warm and cuddly too. Discriminatory ethnic quotas for good jobs and university degrees that will secure said jobs, gotta love those too.
The BNP is no less warm and cuddly than the Indian National Congress or the African National Congress. It would be a world first that a people allow themselves to be willingly herded into a reservation. It is always resisted.
Bad analogy. Picking most locks is fairly easy - there are video tutorials on the net to show you how to do it. If you let them there for an hour, they will probably get in if it's a typical lock. If you have at least a random 8 digit lowercase password, it will take 200,000 years for them to "pick" the lock.
The other thing, comparing your front door to an internet facing ssh server - where do you live, Johannesburg?
Quoted for truth. For applications where GB are not needed but IOPS is, IOPS is the only thing that matters. Booting and applications usually need less than 40GB. We are already at that point where the total cost is more than worth it from a total system cost perspective. Games are there, or nearly there. I highly doubt that someone is going to have more than 160GB of games they play regularly, in which case, SSD are a logical choice for games. Low minimum FPS is what destroys a gaming experience, not so much the average. And SSD shine there. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=14
For terabyte sized applications, there is only media (not talking enterprise here), and HDD does an excellent job there. And really, there are two use cases - putting the files on there/copying them off in the first case, and reading them off slowly. It seems like HDD would benefit from having two spin speeds - a fast speed for copying data to and from the drive, and a very slow speed for streaming that would lower the power use and probably increase longevity of the drive. One benefits from 5000rpm plus, the other really only needs 500rpm. It could possibly be adaptive too - surely you can algorithmically sense when the HDD is only getting small chunks of data every so often, and arrange for the drive to slow down - perhaps pre-fetching it even. HDD makers need to accept the fact that their drives really only make sense as media drives (or will very shortly), but are not yet optimum for that purpose.
I just did. On the first page, I got just one result on the first page relating to an event from January 2008 - Joyent. And they managed to recover their data. I did another search - "ZFS lost my data". One example running on FreeBSD 7.2, in which ZFS was not yet production ready. Other examples existed in which people were eventually able to get their data.
The following is an interesting message - http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-8A - that seems pretty scary but someone was able to get back their data anyway. All in all, the lack of datapoints for ZFS losing data is actually encouraging. If this were really a problem, I would expect to see a lot more forum posts about this, and people piling on as well. The others are singing ZFS's praises.
gubhtu gur qvfpbirel vf n perngvir cebprff. Lbh pna\'g fgrny gung juvpu orybatf gb ab bar.
ht ekil ton , oN
Widespread bypassing of internet advertising. e.g. Strong AI that can be run from some future desktop computer, that searches through all the major search engines, picks the most relevant results from all of them, and arranges the links for you to visit. (Maybe only weak AI is needed?) But this would still require the visiting of search engines, so that would only really hurt Google if a superior competitor existed. Well not necessarily. If intelligent, local meta-searching was easy, then search would become competitive. So long as a search engine was good enough to want to be searched by this AI, that search engine could undercut Google's advertising rates because companies would find that advertising with them would be as effective as using Google. A race to the bottom would then ensue.
Of course, this superior local meta-searching technology would also need to be noticeably superior to Google enough that people would feel compelled to switch. The familiar look, the syntax, google maps... it's a softer lock-in than backroom deals made to preinstall operating systems, but it's still effective. Google does a very good job now, and they have an income stream that is plowed back into research to keep them competent at search. I don't see them going away. Could they be better? Maybe. I find that I often need to constrain my searches with a "site:whatever.com" where the whatever.com is the largest internet forum devoted to the particular subject. It would be nice if google were to somehow be able to figure out that when I type "$error_message $subject", that I want to search the best $subject forums about $error_message. But this is not essential, and I have to wonder how many people are this anal about getting good search results.
Google sure seems to be unstoppable now. But so did Microsoft and IBM back in their respective days.
I think you can guess what happened to the last person who suggested Chuck Norris do anything. Hello?