What new technologies are needed? Thermal insulation has proved highly effective, and many people report up to 90% reductions in energy use & emissions.
Buildings as a whole consume 72% of total US electricity (42% of total energy). There's plenty of scope for impact.
Obviously we don't need to reduce energy consumption to zero, just emissions. And it's inevitable that we'll switch to 100% renewable energy eventually, by definition - non-renewable energy isn't renewed, and will run out (or just get too expensive to use).
That's what they achieved when they retrofitted the Empire State Building. Paid for itself in only 3 years, and now delivers $4.4M savings annually.
Insulation, smart energy controls etc do cost money, but the energy savings can more than pay for it over the life of the building. Better designs can save up to 69% of energy costs. And there's a lot of ripple-effect savings too, by reducing emissions and freeing up capital.
Of course, getting completely off coal, oil & gas will eventually cut emissions to zero, but there's a more immediate & guaranteed payoff simply by improving efficiencies.
Seems to me, if they had systems capable of shooting down crowbars falling from space, they could probably shoot down landing ships too, which would be a lot larger and slower.
Dropping a kinetic weapon from orbit is a lot faster than landing a ship. It would take only 2.5 minutes to fall 100km at 1G (regardless of mass and assuming an efficient aerodynamic profile of course). That's probably too fast to evacuate, and a tonne travelling at 1.4km/s contains significant energy. From 1000km, it'd still only take around 7.5 minutes, but would now be travelling 3x faster, with 5x the kinetic energy...
So... if I buy a harmonica every break, I'll be a musician, and chicks'll dig me? Guess they'll certainly be impressed at the size of my harmonica collection.
If the Rebel shields couldn't stop matter entering (and the Imperials didn't even have a crowbar) - then how does it prevent the Rebel ships from leaving? A shield that won't stop a kinetic bombardment or even an invasion, but still blocks your own retreat, is worse than useless.
XBMC will actually support the OUYA specifically, including full hardware acceleration. Also, it has an ethernet port, for more reliable video streaming. Oh, and it has better games too.
Inflated with water? Are you sure about that? I can't see any mention of any Bigelow design being inflated with anything except air.
Current designs like the BA-330 use multiple Whipple-style layers of shielding fabric, including layers of Kevlar and Vectran, akin to the TransHab design they're based on.
I would imagine an inflatable module could be perfectly adequate as a construction support, especially in lunar gravity.
You don't need structural strength in microgravity, and Bigelow claim their inflatable modules offer more radiation and ballistic protection than rigid cans. No idea about the "more points of failure" part - I'd have thought an inflatable structure would be simpler though. Do you have citations?
There's many other forms of energy storage: thermal (molten salt), kinetic (flywheels), chemical (batteries, hydrogen) and so on. There are other methods of gravitational storage too, like sand. Some may only be half as efficient as gravitational, but if you wait 3-5 years, solar prices per watt will halve again, and we're back to price-competitive.
Also, many of these methods (like pumped hydro) are particularly feasible and efficient at sufficient scale. We have a grid; there's no necessity for most houses to manage their own baseload.
Finally, coal only looks cheap if you ignore all the waste products and related health & climate issues. Factor those in, and renewables have already won.
The vast majority of "fossil fuels" on Earth are biotic in origin. Abiotic hydrocarbons do of course exist, and are plentiful on Titan, but are relatively rare on Earth.
Don't expect to be able to just top up your car with water and drive a few thousand miles on a single silicon cartridge. Water stores too little energy to ever be useful as a fuel, nor can it be "converted" in any conventional sense. The best we can do is pump in a lot of energy and create a fuel from it, as with electrolysis, but the energy has to come from elsewhere.
In this case, all the energy comes from the silicon nanoparticles, and the water just releases that energy as unbound hydrogen. Since nothing indicates that the silicon nanoparticles are unusually energy-dense, you'll be replacing them at least as often as as your water.
So, you have no specific critiques of their methods? I see only a vague assumption that a larger set of data in one aspect of the study "would seem to mean" the whole study is worthless. You've clearly decided to ignore their conclusions without even bothering to read the paper, let alone understanding their methods.
I find even SciTechnol's peer review to be more credible than yours.
The streaming video is of course compressed, by the required GeForce 650+ GPU which has dedicated low-latency h.264 encoding hardware. The Shield unit supports 2x2 MIMO 802.11n, which should be more than capable.
nVidia haven't given any latency figures, but hands-on reports all indicate "no detectable lag" over local connections. Some mention visible encoding artefacts, so the bitrate used may not be very high.
As Kurzweil himself points out, there's two main approaches to simulating a brain. The one you mention is by simulating every neuron with sufficient detail, which requires a massive amount of hardware. Exactly how much depends on the detail required, which we're still not sure of - we could be at that level today, or we could be decades off. At that point, we hope that intelligence emerges - a reasonable hope, given what we know, but still somewhat uncertain.
The other approach is by building sufficiently detailed and accurate functional models of the human brain. At the time of writing of The Singularity Is Near, he estimated possibly 5% of the brain's function had been well-modelled (one example he gives is auditory function, which is fairly well understood). This is obviously the harder path in terms of effort and invention, but also more useful, as functional models can be adapted, and generally require significantly less underlying hardware (e.g. we don't have to fully model a bird's entire biology to make something that can fly).
The recent articles on models like Spaun suggest that, while we're obviously still a long way off human-level intelligence, we're making good progress. You'll also note that Spaun's model runs on a single workstation, not a super-computer (albeit well below real-time).
So, the long-term tidal gauge data is apparently not accurate enough for you, and the accurate altimetry & GPS data is not long-term enough. All the climate scientists deem it useful, but not you.
As I see it, you simply won't accept any data that doesn't support your own opinions, nor can you present any data that does. Anything I say (which obviously isn't science; merely pointing out others' science) is clearly falling into that rejected category too. And you accuse me of confirmation bias:-)
Enjoy your misconceptions. Hopefully you won't suffer from them too directly, or be in a position to cause others to suffer.
Slashdot Mirror
They already refitted the Empire State Building, and achieved payoff in only 3 years. Now it's saving $4.4M/year of pure gravy.
It can certainly cost millions, but the returns can be much more, over the life of the building.
What new technologies are needed? Thermal insulation has proved highly effective, and many people report up to 90% reductions in energy use & emissions.
Hah, "bankrupted"? Citation needed if ever I saw one..
Buildings as a whole consume 72% of total US electricity (42% of total energy). There's plenty of scope for impact.
Obviously we don't need to reduce energy consumption to zero, just emissions. And it's inevitable that we'll switch to 100% renewable energy eventually, by definition - non-renewable energy isn't renewed, and will run out (or just get too expensive to use).
That's what they achieved when they retrofitted the Empire State Building. Paid for itself in only 3 years, and now delivers $4.4M savings annually.
Insulation, smart energy controls etc do cost money, but the energy savings can more than pay for it over the life of the building. Better designs can save up to 69% of energy costs. And there's a lot of ripple-effect savings too, by reducing emissions and freeing up capital.
Of course, getting completely off coal, oil & gas will eventually cut emissions to zero, but there's a more immediate & guaranteed payoff simply by improving efficiencies.
Seems to me, if they had systems capable of shooting down crowbars falling from space, they could probably shoot down landing ships too, which would be a lot larger and slower.
Dropping a kinetic weapon from orbit is a lot faster than landing a ship. It would take only 2.5 minutes to fall 100km at 1G (regardless of mass and assuming an efficient aerodynamic profile of course). That's probably too fast to evacuate, and a tonne travelling at 1.4km/s contains significant energy. From 1000km, it'd still only take around 7.5 minutes, but would now be travelling 3x faster, with 5x the kinetic energy...
TFA indicated the energy shield covered the whole planet, but perhaps that was wrong.
That explains the wings on those invading AT-ATs...
So... if I buy a harmonica every break, I'll be a musician, and chicks'll dig me? Guess they'll certainly be impressed at the size of my harmonica collection.
If the Rebel shields couldn't stop matter entering (and the Imperials didn't even have a crowbar) - then how does it prevent the Rebel ships from leaving? A shield that won't stop a kinetic bombardment or even an invasion, but still blocks your own retreat, is worse than useless.
If you'd traded those aapl shares for goog six months ago, they'd be worth 1570.
Wasn't that long ago, and certainly cut into his spare cash. Also, Planetary Resources, Inc probably needs cash soon.
XBMC will actually support the OUYA specifically, including full hardware acceleration. Also, it has an ethernet port, for more reliable video streaming. Oh, and it has better games too.
Inflated with water? Are you sure about that? I can't see any mention of any Bigelow design being inflated with anything except air.
Current designs like the BA-330 use multiple Whipple-style layers of shielding fabric, including layers of Kevlar and Vectran, akin to the TransHab design they're based on.
I would imagine an inflatable module could be perfectly adequate as a construction support, especially in lunar gravity.
NASA isn't so convinced; that's why they're testing an inflatable module for the ISS.
You don't need structural strength in microgravity, and Bigelow claim their inflatable modules offer more radiation and ballistic protection than rigid cans. No idea about the "more points of failure" part - I'd have thought an inflatable structure would be simpler though. Do you have citations?
There's many other forms of energy storage: thermal (molten salt), kinetic (flywheels), chemical (batteries, hydrogen) and so on. There are other methods of gravitational storage too, like sand. Some may only be half as efficient as gravitational, but if you wait 3-5 years, solar prices per watt will halve again, and we're back to price-competitive.
Also, many of these methods (like pumped hydro) are particularly feasible and efficient at sufficient scale. We have a grid; there's no necessity for most houses to manage their own baseload.
Finally, coal only looks cheap if you ignore all the waste products and related health & climate issues. Factor those in, and renewables have already won.
The vast majority of "fossil fuels" on Earth are biotic in origin. Abiotic hydrocarbons do of course exist, and are plentiful on Titan, but are relatively rare on Earth.
Don't expect to be able to just top up your car with water and drive a few thousand miles on a single silicon cartridge. Water stores too little energy to ever be useful as a fuel, nor can it be "converted" in any conventional sense. The best we can do is pump in a lot of energy and create a fuel from it, as with electrolysis, but the energy has to come from elsewhere.
In this case, all the energy comes from the silicon nanoparticles, and the water just releases that energy as unbound hydrogen. Since nothing indicates that the silicon nanoparticles are unusually energy-dense, you'll be replacing them at least as often as as your water.
So they're getting better at saying "yes", too.
So, you have no specific critiques of their methods? I see only a vague assumption that a larger set of data in one aspect of the study "would seem to mean" the whole study is worthless. You've clearly decided to ignore their conclusions without even bothering to read the paper, let alone understanding their methods.
I find even SciTechnol's peer review to be more credible than yours.
The streaming video is of course compressed, by the required GeForce 650+ GPU which has dedicated low-latency h.264 encoding hardware. The Shield unit supports 2x2 MIMO 802.11n, which should be more than capable.
nVidia haven't given any latency figures, but hands-on reports all indicate "no detectable lag" over local connections. Some mention visible encoding artefacts, so the bitrate used may not be very high.
And the car drives itself to a cleaning service. Is that really your best objection?
In the US, as of 2011, 3 in 10 people believe the Bible is the literal word of God. 49% believe it is inspired by God.
As Kurzweil himself points out, there's two main approaches to simulating a brain. The one you mention is by simulating every neuron with sufficient detail, which requires a massive amount of hardware. Exactly how much depends on the detail required, which we're still not sure of - we could be at that level today, or we could be decades off. At that point, we hope that intelligence emerges - a reasonable hope, given what we know, but still somewhat uncertain.
The other approach is by building sufficiently detailed and accurate functional models of the human brain. At the time of writing of The Singularity Is Near, he estimated possibly 5% of the brain's function had been well-modelled (one example he gives is auditory function, which is fairly well understood). This is obviously the harder path in terms of effort and invention, but also more useful, as functional models can be adapted, and generally require significantly less underlying hardware (e.g. we don't have to fully model a bird's entire biology to make something that can fly).
The recent articles on models like Spaun suggest that, while we're obviously still a long way off human-level intelligence, we're making good progress. You'll also note that Spaun's model runs on a single workstation, not a super-computer (albeit well below real-time).
So, the long-term tidal gauge data is apparently not accurate enough for you, and the accurate altimetry & GPS data is not long-term enough. All the climate scientists deem it useful, but not you.
As I see it, you simply won't accept any data that doesn't support your own opinions, nor can you present any data that does. Anything I say (which obviously isn't science; merely pointing out others' science) is clearly falling into that rejected category too. And you accuse me of confirmation bias :-)
Enjoy your misconceptions. Hopefully you won't suffer from them too directly, or be in a position to cause others to suffer.