If you decline to participate, they can boost your insurance premiums by 30%-50%.
Workplace wellness programs make some sense - but there's absolutely no need to involve genetic testing. Has Breitbart been telling them you can catch congenital ugliness from your co-workers or something?
I've judged her as having broken the law based on evidence that the FBI director provided to the public.
Actually, you've pre-judged her as guilty based on media reports, almost certainly with some bias added by the outlets of your choice, and which further selectively filtered the already-limited information the FBI director provided. Is that not third-hand, at least?
I'm not saying all prosecutors are too corrupt to take the case, but that the FBI believes that is the case (again, the FBI director's words, not mine).
I must have missed where the FBI director said anything about their supposed belief of all prosecutors being corrupt.
The information I do have clearly indicates the law was not followed.
Yet you agree your information is far from complete. A body and a suspect do not a murder case make - that's why we have courts, and not trials by media.
I would argue it is far more likely that she is guilty of much more
That prejudice right there, based on little more than pure speculation, would disqualify you from any jury.
So you've pre-judged her as guilty, based on your incomplete third-hand hearsay, and you're further alleging that all prosecutors are too corrupt to take the case.
Have you considered perhaps that you simply don't have all the information, and what you don't know maybe indicates that she's not nearly as obviously guilty as you think, and possibly that's a much simpler explanation for why she's not being charged, rather than massive and widespread corruption throughout our entire legal system?
They got an answer, from the feds. It's not definitive, but it's indicative at least, and far more informed than public speculation.
I am saying major crimes were committed
This is exactly my point. Major crimes are alleged. The difference is crucial. Someone could indeed be charged and get their day in court, but whether major crimes were actually committed is still not proved, let alone who by.
I am not disagreeing with the feds judgement
It does kinda sound like you are (which is fine). And I'm right with you on the whole "too powerful for the law to apply" thing - politicians more than anyone must be subject to the law.
Except all the US generals have the exact same secret, and are equally vulnerable to blackmail. As do their politicians, corporations, citizens, and allies.
So by not notifying anyone, they're leaving their own country wide open to the Russians, Chinese, Mossad, other nations, organised crime etc, who they are hoping desperately haven't and won't ever notice the same secret themselves. They can't even tell if it's already happened. It's pure security through obscurity, and we've just seen that it didn't work.
Again, you are presuming, based on your limited information, that she's guilty.
The reason we have trials, rather than relying on the snap judgement of people like you, is that *all* the evidence is brought out, explored, and argued over. Until that is done, you cannot rightly presume anything other than innocence.
The Feds did their investigation, came up with more evidence and counter-evidence than you will ever know about, and judged that in total, it wasn't enough to even make a reasonable case. You can claim to disagree with the Feds' judgement all you like, if you think someone will listen; you can demand the investigation be re-opened, or insist that she go straight to trial, but you *still* need a trial and court decision, because you don't have all the facts.
Of course, requiring political opponents to be re-investigated until something turns up is a practice normally associated with oppressive regimes, and opens your own preferred politicians to the same treatment, so maybe be careful what you wish for.
The improved algorithms are being driven by machine learning. They trained it to recognise when a scene needs a higher bitrate to look good, so that humans don't have to guide the encoder.
I don't necessarily agree that all machine learning or neural networks merit the term "AI", but nor do I class software that must be trained on a dataset to function as an "algorithm", except in the broadest sense.
Don't forget the tracking differences. PSVR has only a single front camera, and cannot see your controllers if you turn around. It can lose sight of your head in some cases too, so it falls somewhat short of true room-scale experiences.
Oculus + Touch has two cameras that cover a much wider field of view, with uninterrupted tracking in most cases. The Vive's lighthouse emitters cover a very wide angle for complete 360 degree tracking, as does the Oculus with an optional third camera.
Oculus is still overpriced by about 20% with its new $600 list price.
FTFY.
Rift offers better resolution, better frame rate, better tracking, and better controllers for the extra money, though the PSVR is a little more comfortable. But a $100 price disparity is likely small enough that the user's preferred games & gaming platform (PC or PS4) matters more. Certainly the cheaper prices of Steam games will quickly make up the difference.
Had a good one myself. Forced a reboot, spent 90 mins s..l..o..w..l..y installing the update, got to 94% then failed something and spent another 90 mins unrolling everything again - unusable for 3 hours. Repeat the next day, and the next. Clearing update caches, scouring logs for error codes, googling all the things, tearing hair - nothing helped, until I eventually found something that hinted at the actual cause: my EFI partition apparently wasn't quite big enough.
Shifting the goal posts, are we? I'm pretty sure there's no falsified predictions about hurricanes in the Atlantic specifically before 2020, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. As we get further into the red zone, there's some evidence to suggest that hurricane intensity might increase, though frequency is less certain.
Maybe you should skim through the IPCC AR5 WGII impacts summary, to see what we're actually expecting. There's much more to be concerned about than just hurricanes, and the risks and damages far outweigh any small plant growth benefit we might expect from boosted CO2 (which is discussed in Chapter 7 - studies suggest that food production will see a net negative effect).
Consider that the global average land+sea temperature for this month (February), averaged over the entire 20th century, was 12.1 C. In a chaotic system, one would expect a roughly equal probability of seeing a cooler temperature as a hotter one, individually or averaged, though the average of large numbers of readings are less likely to show outliers. Seasonal and other cyclical factors would skew temperatures one way for a while, then the other way, balancing out over time.
For 2015, the globally-averaged temperature for February was 0.86 C higher than that 20th century average. If that was a single reading, or a local average, that wouldn't be at all noteworthy. Even averaged across the entire globe for the month, it was merely the second-highest February recorded, next to 1998. Similarly for land-only average temperatures, though with larger variations.
But when you consider that 2015 was the 30th hotter-than-average February in a row, the odds shift dramatically. If there's a 50/50 chance that we would see a hotter-than-average February any given year, then there's 1 chance in 2^30 that we would get 30 hotter "heads" in a row - ridiculously improbable. There hasn't been a cooler-than-average February since 1985 - and February 2016 was even hotter, setting a new record at 1.21 C above the average. Clearly the global average temperature isn't stable, but is showing a long-term underlying rising trend, which makes the new highest-temperature-ever records not only more likely, but bound to happen eventually. (Incidentally, if you use yearly averages instead of just February, it's now been 38 years of above-average temperatures.)
So the existence of a rising temperature trend is virtually certain. Whether it's anthropic or caused by a hitherto-undiscovered long-term natural cycle is a separate discussion, but the probability of the former is very high indeed.
You'd expect *occasional* records - and increasingly infrequently, as each new record would require an ever-more-unlikely combination of random variables, like flipping coins and getting a new record number of heads in a row.
What we're actually seeing today is a steady progression of new records, each slightly exceeding the record set only a few years earlier - so commonly that people like yourself are starting to dismiss this situation as "expected". It is absolutely *not* expected from a normal Gaussian distribution of chaotic variables - unless you add a rising trend underneath. Then a whole stream new records is no longer ridiculously improbable, but inevitable.
AR may be the culmination - so long as it's also capable of replacing all your reality, instead of only some of it. While AR is a much broader category, and useful in a vast variety of fields, there's still some very large niches for completely virtual reality, such as games, education, tourism, semi-interactive entertainment, many categories of desk work; nearly anything that benefits from a focus on information, rather than nearby people or surroundings. And there's a lot of jobs, hobbies, and entertainment like that.
While you're not wrong, it's hardly unexpected that such an expensive, small-userbase piece of hardware hasn't brought in megabux for developers yet, and AAA publishers will likely keep waiting.
However, I think the more important gaben quote is this:
“Developers are super excited. There’s nobody who works in VR saying, ‘oh I’m bored with this.’ Everybody comes back. For every idea they had in their first generation product, they have ten ideas now.”
So it's clear that developers at least are still absolutely willing to experiment, and we can expect numerous interesting and innovative VR indie games to keep people interested while hardware gets better and cheaper. So long as developers remain keen, hardware vendors will keep working on improvements, and the userbase will eventually grow enough for larger publishers to experiment on
Not so much. For one, willow bark contains salicin, and though it has been used since Egyptian times, is less potent and causes side effects like gastric distress and potentially heart issues. Salicylic acid is a more potent extract, but still causes side effects. Aspirin is a derivation of this - acetylsalicylic acid, which eliminated most of the side effects but wasn't medically tested until nearly 1900.
ASA was ineligible for patenting in its country of discovery (Germany), but was patented in the UK and US. I'm unaware of any FUD or other efforts to discourage the use of willow bark though, and it's unlikely that anyone would bother, due to aspirin's much greater effectiveness, lower side effects, and the intense bitterness of willow.
First, solar panels are under $0.80/watt, so let's call it 5 kW for $5k, and average 4.92 solar hours per day in New Orleans (1795 productive hrs/year), typical 80% inverter efficiency, so 215.6 MWh over 30 years.
Second, a short ton of coal costs on average $45.66 delivered, and generates 1,927 kWh per ton, so $5k will get you 109.5 tons and 211 MWh.
Third, your whole premise of comparison is bogus, because it doesn't include any supporting costs: installation + inverter for the solar, and the entire cost of the power plant for coal, not to mention all the mining and transport infrastructure investment, which makes a pretty dramatic difference to final costs. A more reasonable comparison would be the Lifetime Levelised Cost of Energy of solar PV vs coal - and coal does pretty poorly there.
Yes, and of course captured solar energy would be a lot lower, not unlike how the Carnot limit stops us capturing anything like all the energy from the coal reserves. Both require corresponding investments in infrastructure, equipment, distribution etc to make use of it too.
My point was more about how the sheer difference in magnitude makes arguments about abundance largely irrelevant.
Levelised cost, before any tax credits, is $84.70 / MWh for solar PV, vs $139.50 / MWh for coal - which makes it very clear that new solar is much cheaper than new coal. That is, nobody would ever want to build a new coal plant, at least not in the US, when there are so many alternatives that are so much cheaper.
Obviously, existing solar plants are far cheaper than existing coal plants, per MWh, since solar has near-zero generation cost.
The only way coal could win any comparison is by comparing only the fuel & running costs of an existing coal plant to the full amortised cost of building & running a new solar plant - and only if you ignore all those massive external costs too. And even then, solar still wins that comparison in some regions (onshore wind wins in quite a lot of regions).
So please be more specific about what you're claiming?
Which part of that link are you referring to? Is it Table 1b, where it quotes a fully levelised, unsubsidised cost of $84.70 / MWh for solar PV, vs $139.50 / MWh for coal? And that's without even counting the pollution, health, and climate costs of burning the coal.
It's not even the most abundant. There are roughly 2.4x10^19 BTUs of known coal reserves. We get that much energy from the sun every 8.25 days - just on the land surface alone, not even counting oceans.
Given that approximately zero people are required to actually generate that 0.6% of solar power, I'd say coal is the one looking inefficient - look at all the manpower required simply to keep a coal power plant maintained and running, let alone constantly fed with coal that's been surveyed, mined, processed, and transported to the plant.
Maybe try comparing manpower needed by each to actually add a MW of capacity, instead of to generate a MWh - then you might have a comparison that doesn't look so appalling for coal. Oh, and be sure to stick to utility-scale installations too, since residential coal power isn't popular.
Look at the full lifetime levelised costs per MWh - you'll find that solar thermal is nearly twice the price of solar PV, despite its greater efficiency. Thermal has its place, but since PV panels got so ridiculously cheap, PV makes more sense in a lot of cases, not least due to flexibility, wide scale, and ease of installation.
The only unsubstantiated handwaving bullshit is in your comment. The $330-500 billion annual health costs of coal are backed by this Harvard study, among others.
Slashdot Mirror
If you decline to participate, they can boost your insurance premiums by 30%-50%.
Workplace wellness programs make some sense - but there's absolutely no need to involve genetic testing. Has Breitbart been telling them you can catch congenital ugliness from your co-workers or something?
I've judged her as having broken the law based on evidence that the FBI director provided to the public.
Actually, you've pre-judged her as guilty based on media reports, almost certainly with some bias added by the outlets of your choice, and which further selectively filtered the already-limited information the FBI director provided. Is that not third-hand, at least?
I'm not saying all prosecutors are too corrupt to take the case, but that the FBI believes that is the case (again, the FBI director's words, not mine).
I must have missed where the FBI director said anything about their supposed belief of all prosecutors being corrupt.
The information I do have clearly indicates the law was not followed.
Yet you agree your information is far from complete. A body and a suspect do not a murder case make - that's why we have courts, and not trials by media.
I would argue it is far more likely that she is guilty of much more
That prejudice right there, based on little more than pure speculation, would disqualify you from any jury.
So you've pre-judged her as guilty, based on your incomplete third-hand hearsay, and you're further alleging that all prosecutors are too corrupt to take the case.
Have you considered perhaps that you simply don't have all the information, and what you don't know maybe indicates that she's not nearly as obviously guilty as you think, and possibly that's a much simpler explanation for why she's not being charged, rather than massive and widespread corruption throughout our entire legal system?
I am saying the public needs answers
They got an answer, from the feds. It's not definitive, but it's indicative at least, and far more informed than public speculation.
I am saying major crimes were committed
This is exactly my point. Major crimes are alleged. The difference is crucial. Someone could indeed be charged and get their day in court, but whether major crimes were actually committed is still not proved, let alone who by.
I am not disagreeing with the feds judgement
It does kinda sound like you are (which is fine). And I'm right with you on the whole "too powerful for the law to apply" thing - politicians more than anyone must be subject to the law.
Except all the US generals have the exact same secret, and are equally vulnerable to blackmail. As do their politicians, corporations, citizens, and allies.
So by not notifying anyone, they're leaving their own country wide open to the Russians, Chinese, Mossad, other nations, organised crime etc, who they are hoping desperately haven't and won't ever notice the same secret themselves. They can't even tell if it's already happened. It's pure security through obscurity, and we've just seen that it didn't work.
Apparently they're supposed to disclose them, but clearly they're not.
Again, you are presuming, based on your limited information, that she's guilty.
The reason we have trials, rather than relying on the snap judgement of people like you, is that *all* the evidence is brought out, explored, and argued over. Until that is done, you cannot rightly presume anything other than innocence.
The Feds did their investigation, came up with more evidence and counter-evidence than you will ever know about, and judged that in total, it wasn't enough to even make a reasonable case. You can claim to disagree with the Feds' judgement all you like, if you think someone will listen; you can demand the investigation be re-opened, or insist that she go straight to trial, but you *still* need a trial and court decision, because you don't have all the facts.
Of course, requiring political opponents to be re-investigated until something turns up is a practice normally associated with oppressive regimes, and opens your own preferred politicians to the same treatment, so maybe be careful what you wish for.
The improved algorithms are being driven by machine learning. They trained it to recognise when a scene needs a higher bitrate to look good, so that humans don't have to guide the encoder.
I don't necessarily agree that all machine learning or neural networks merit the term "AI", but nor do I class software that must be trained on a dataset to function as an "algorithm", except in the broadest sense.
Don't forget the tracking differences. PSVR has only a single front camera, and cannot see your controllers if you turn around. It can lose sight of your head in some cases too, so it falls somewhat short of true room-scale experiences.
Oculus + Touch has two cameras that cover a much wider field of view, with uninterrupted tracking in most cases. The Vive's lighthouse emitters cover a very wide angle for complete 360 degree tracking, as does the Oculus with an optional third camera.
Oculus is still overpriced by about 20% with its new $600 list price.
FTFY.
Rift offers better resolution, better frame rate, better tracking, and better controllers for the extra money, though the PSVR is a little more comfortable. But a $100 price disparity is likely small enough that the user's preferred games & gaming platform (PC or PS4) matters more. Certainly the cheaper prices of Steam games will quickly make up the difference.
Had a good one myself. Forced a reboot, spent 90 mins s..l..o..w..l..y installing the update, got to 94% then failed something and spent another 90 mins unrolling everything again - unusable for 3 hours. Repeat the next day, and the next. Clearing update caches, scouring logs for error codes, googling all the things, tearing hair - nothing helped, until I eventually found something that hinted at the actual cause: my EFI partition apparently wasn't quite big enough.
Shifting the goal posts, are we? I'm pretty sure there's no falsified predictions about hurricanes in the Atlantic specifically before 2020, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. As we get further into the red zone, there's some evidence to suggest that hurricane intensity might increase, though frequency is less certain.
Maybe you should skim through the IPCC AR5 WGII impacts summary, to see what we're actually expecting. There's much more to be concerned about than just hurricanes, and the risks and damages far outweigh any small plant growth benefit we might expect from boosted CO2 (which is discussed in Chapter 7 - studies suggest that food production will see a net negative effect).
Consider that the global average land+sea temperature for this month (February), averaged over the entire 20th century, was 12.1 C. In a chaotic system, one would expect a roughly equal probability of seeing a cooler temperature as a hotter one, individually or averaged, though the average of large numbers of readings are less likely to show outliers. Seasonal and other cyclical factors would skew temperatures one way for a while, then the other way, balancing out over time.
For 2015, the globally-averaged temperature for February was 0.86 C higher than that 20th century average. If that was a single reading, or a local average, that wouldn't be at all noteworthy. Even averaged across the entire globe for the month, it was merely the second-highest February recorded, next to 1998. Similarly for land-only average temperatures, though with larger variations.
But when you consider that 2015 was the 30th hotter-than-average February in a row, the odds shift dramatically. If there's a 50/50 chance that we would see a hotter-than-average February any given year, then there's 1 chance in 2^30 that we would get 30 hotter "heads" in a row - ridiculously improbable. There hasn't been a cooler-than-average February since 1985 - and February 2016 was even hotter, setting a new record at 1.21 C above the average. Clearly the global average temperature isn't stable, but is showing a long-term underlying rising trend, which makes the new highest-temperature-ever records not only more likely, but bound to happen eventually. (Incidentally, if you use yearly averages instead of just February, it's now been 38 years of above-average temperatures.)
So the existence of a rising temperature trend is virtually certain. Whether it's anthropic or caused by a hitherto-undiscovered long-term natural cycle is a separate discussion, but the probability of the former is very high indeed.
You'd expect *occasional* records - and increasingly infrequently, as each new record would require an ever-more-unlikely combination of random variables, like flipping coins and getting a new record number of heads in a row.
What we're actually seeing today is a steady progression of new records, each slightly exceeding the record set only a few years earlier - so commonly that people like yourself are starting to dismiss this situation as "expected". It is absolutely *not* expected from a normal Gaussian distribution of chaotic variables - unless you add a rising trend underneath. Then a whole stream new records is no longer ridiculously improbable, but inevitable.
AR may be the culmination - so long as it's also capable of replacing all your reality, instead of only some of it. While AR is a much broader category, and useful in a vast variety of fields, there's still some very large niches for completely virtual reality, such as games, education, tourism, semi-interactive entertainment, many categories of desk work; nearly anything that benefits from a focus on information, rather than nearby people or surroundings. And there's a lot of jobs, hobbies, and entertainment like that.
While you're not wrong, it's hardly unexpected that such an expensive, small-userbase piece of hardware hasn't brought in megabux for developers yet, and AAA publishers will likely keep waiting.
However, I think the more important gaben quote is this:
“Developers are super excited. There’s nobody who works in VR saying, ‘oh I’m bored with this.’ Everybody comes back. For every idea they had in their first generation product, they have ten ideas now.”
So it's clear that developers at least are still absolutely willing to experiment, and we can expect numerous interesting and innovative VR indie games to keep people interested while hardware gets better and cheaper. So long as developers remain keen, hardware vendors will keep working on improvements, and the userbase will eventually grow enough for larger publishers to experiment on
Not so much. For one, willow bark contains salicin, and though it has been used since Egyptian times, is less potent and causes side effects like gastric distress and potentially heart issues. Salicylic acid is a more potent extract, but still causes side effects. Aspirin is a derivation of this - acetylsalicylic acid, which eliminated most of the side effects but wasn't medically tested until nearly 1900.
ASA was ineligible for patenting in its country of discovery (Germany), but was patented in the UK and US. I'm unaware of any FUD or other efforts to discourage the use of willow bark though, and it's unlikely that anyone would bother, due to aspirin's much greater effectiveness, lower side effects, and the intense bitterness of willow.
No sources for your costs?
First, solar panels are under $0.80/watt, so let's call it 5 kW for $5k, and average 4.92 solar hours per day in New Orleans (1795 productive hrs/year), typical 80% inverter efficiency, so 215.6 MWh over 30 years.
Second, a short ton of coal costs on average $45.66 delivered, and generates 1,927 kWh per ton, so $5k will get you 109.5 tons and 211 MWh.
Third, your whole premise of comparison is bogus, because it doesn't include any supporting costs: installation + inverter for the solar, and the entire cost of the power plant for coal, not to mention all the mining and transport infrastructure investment, which makes a pretty dramatic difference to final costs. A more reasonable comparison would be the Lifetime Levelised Cost of Energy of solar PV vs coal - and coal does pretty poorly there.
Yes, and of course captured solar energy would be a lot lower, not unlike how the Carnot limit stops us capturing anything like all the energy from the coal reserves. Both require corresponding investments in infrastructure, equipment, distribution etc to make use of it too.
My point was more about how the sheer difference in magnitude makes arguments about abundance largely irrelevant.
Levelised cost, before any tax credits, is $84.70 / MWh for solar PV, vs $139.50 / MWh for coal - which makes it very clear that new solar is much cheaper than new coal. That is, nobody would ever want to build a new coal plant, at least not in the US, when there are so many alternatives that are so much cheaper.
Obviously, existing solar plants are far cheaper than existing coal plants, per MWh, since solar has near-zero generation cost.
The only way coal could win any comparison is by comparing only the fuel & running costs of an existing coal plant to the full amortised cost of building & running a new solar plant - and only if you ignore all those massive external costs too. And even then, solar still wins that comparison in some regions (onshore wind wins in quite a lot of regions).
So please be more specific about what you're claiming?
Which part of that link are you referring to? Is it Table 1b, where it quotes a fully levelised, unsubsidised cost of $84.70 / MWh for solar PV, vs $139.50 / MWh for coal? And that's without even counting the pollution, health, and climate costs of burning the coal.
it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source
Sorry. Not even if you ignore coal's hundreds of billions annually in externalised costs.
It's not even the most abundant. There are roughly 2.4x10^19 BTUs of known coal reserves. We get that much energy from the sun every 8.25 days - just on the land surface alone, not even counting oceans.
Given that approximately zero people are required to actually generate that 0.6% of solar power, I'd say coal is the one looking inefficient - look at all the manpower required simply to keep a coal power plant maintained and running, let alone constantly fed with coal that's been surveyed, mined, processed, and transported to the plant.
Maybe try comparing manpower needed by each to actually add a MW of capacity, instead of to generate a MWh - then you might have a comparison that doesn't look so appalling for coal. Oh, and be sure to stick to utility-scale installations too, since residential coal power isn't popular.
Is that the one from Baghdad? When Spicer can't take it any longer, I bet Sahaf is still available.
Look at the full lifetime levelised costs per MWh - you'll find that solar thermal is nearly twice the price of solar PV, despite its greater efficiency. Thermal has its place, but since PV panels got so ridiculously cheap, PV makes more sense in a lot of cases, not least due to flexibility, wide scale, and ease of installation.
The only unsubstantiated handwaving bullshit is in your comment. The $330-500 billion annual health costs of coal are backed by this Harvard study, among others.