It's a device for accepting something and dealing with it from a distance, obviously.
I've spent many hours with a telecope looking for comets, and again, they lied.
Clearly, this poster has been so badly affected by astronomers' lies that he has now turned to calling his therapist whenever he feels the need to look at the sky. It's a coping mechanism, executed remotely: a telecope.
The properties of a single object (in this case, the position of any single atom) can be described with only two variables. Thus it's two-dimensional.
Under this definition, I'm even okay with having several distinct layers, as long as they're all one atom thick. Effectively the material type then becomes the third dimension, but I'm willing to overlook that.
Take a single steel girder falling off the back of a semi into the head of a train
The head car notices the girder coming toward it as soon as it's moving off of the truck, and announces the hazard to the other cars. The whole train is keeping a long following distance from the truck (which either isn't part of the network, or has announced that it's carrying loose cargo), so it triggers the brakes or lane changes on the cars behind it.
The cost is simply that if *anything* goes wrong up front, pretty much everyone in the train is screwed.
You're assuming a lot of incompetence. Unlike rail trains, the cars in this network aren't physically linked. There's no requirement that they remain a train. If a car wants to do something different from the rest of the train, it leaves the group. The cars behind it will adjust to either form a new train, or just allow the dissenting car to leave.
And of course for cars it depends on a automated vehicle network
Yes, network benefits require a network. This is why the whole thread started with a comment about "50 years from now".
separate from (though dependent on) self-driving cars
Hardly. There are vehicular networks now, that simply inform the driver of emergent traffic conditions. They're mostly confined to university projects, but even so have already shown great potential.
which requires widespread adoption before it has any serious benefit
Not really. Road conditions can be monitored with as few as two cars per hour. Closures and detours can be pulled from government data sources , which are already becoming more accessible because travelers want to check for such things on websites. Much like high-speed cellular data service, whenever it's available, it brings a benefit, and absence doesn't diminish operation beyond the current standard.
and which has some rather serious privacy concerns
Only among the folks with shiny hats. Besides current observation, vehicular networks really just need to know vehicle specs (as measured through closed feedback loops) and an intended direction of travel. Network identifiers can be regenerated on the fly, and authenticated cryptographically. Pretty much, someone in your train can know which road you'll be taking next, and they can probably figure out what kind of car you're driving. As soon as you leave their train, you can change your identification (and if you're paranoid, fudge your vehicle characteristics), and appear to be someone completely different for the next train you join. The only practical privacy invasion is to follow someone, just as you can now.
what happens when one malicious car at the front reports a catastrophic failure?
It gets ejected from the train, and the other cars go around it, just like would happen now if the car in front of you suddenly started spewing smoke. The biggest malicious threat is still exactly the same as it is now: A few trucks can throw out caltrops on major highways. The network will detect the risk and route around it, but local streets will be overloaded.
"Safe following distance" for automated vehicles is somewhere in the area of three to six inches. Yes, this has been tested pretty thoroughly, in a wide variety of (simulated) situations.
Safe following distance for humans is based mostly on reaction speed and attention span. If someone's driving at highway speeds and looking down at the speedometer or changing radio stations, they'll cover a lot of distance before noticing what happens in front of them. Once they notice that the car in front of them has brake lights on, it's up to their brakes to to stop them quickly enough before a collision, and the driver has to guess how much force to apply to slow or stop correctly.
Automated cars with vehicle networks can share information so that there is no guesswork. The train can self-arrange to put the slowest-stopping cars in the front, and when one car needs to slow down or stop, all of the cars will know within milliseconds why and how the brakes are applied. The train may split at that point for an exit, slow down together or spread apart as the cars all brake at their differing speeds.
You're almost right that such a hivemind would be impossible until automated cars are common. There's been some research into integration techniques, but I haven't been a part of that research, so my expertise is minimal. From what I recall, some promising techniques involve adjusting the train-forming algorithms. A train may be only two cars, so the system would work if there's only a few automated cars on the roads. As their popularity rises, trains can get longer, but then they'll be annoying to non-automated drivers. I do recall some work into limiting the train length based on the number of non-networked vehicles in the area, but I don't recall much about how it worked.
Once such networking becomes commonplace, highway carrying capacity can increase by a few hundred percent, as the only large gaps will be between separate trains and around non-networked vehicles.
50 years from now, the answer's the same, and it's exactly what's taught in driving classes now: Anticipate what's coming before it's "unavoidable", and you won't ever have to decide what to hit. If you're making that choice, then you've already failed as a driver (even if you're a computer program).
If autonomous cars are successful, then we'll also be improving vehicle networking, so the autonomous cars will be able to work together to avoid crashes. With a bit of sarcasm, one answer is that the autonomous car should hit the other autonomous car, knowing that it will move out of the way first.
Further out, our road systems can also change to fit the new driving patterns. Thanks to cooperation, autonomous cars can travel on main routes in denser trains, reducing the traffic on many side streets. They'd also be able to park in unified parking structures, further clearing streets and reducing the chances of ever having to decide what to hit.
And as you argue about costs, you are only confirming my point as to what drives the availability of water...
You seem to think that some noble goal is enough in itself to overcome the natural scarcity of resources. A few millenia of history stand against you, but don't let that thwart your optimism. Maybe someday, a few thousand miners, steelworkers, and shipwrights, and a few million support personnel, will all decide that drastically changing the Sahara's ecosystem is a good idea, and they'll all volunteer their time and effort to build your giant rain collector.
I won't hold my breath waiting, though, especially since there are far easier ways to get clean water. If there's going to be a mass movement to reclaim the Sahara, it'll probably start with a few local villages planting trees and clearing sand. In fact, that's already happening, and it's fairly successful. In a few areas of West Africa, the edge of the desert has been pushed back several hundred meters, and further away there are noticeable increases in precipitation.
Even that project takes money, though. Coming across free bulldozers is a rare thing. Food is still scarce and people still need to trade with others. You can close your eyes and pretend that we live in a communist world where cost doesn't matter, but that won't change the fact that people usually care for themselves and their families before they'll donate time and energy to an idealist's inefficient construction project
That QE money can just as easily go towards building the plants
No, it can't. The QE money cannot exist without a sufficiently-debt-laden vehicle to support it. The existence of debt is what stabilizes the money supply, preventing the inflation that would result if the Federal Reserve did indeed just start printing money to build things.
The water to irrigate the Sahara to Iowa's levels falls (assuming typical tropical rates of 10 inches per year) on 6.48 billion acres, which would require a tarp costing $47 trillion (based on the best bulk price I found easily). That's about two thirds the net worth of all US households.
The price for the tarp works out to be $0.02 per gallon gathered, roughly ten times the average price of water in the US. Then we'll have to add on the cost of the pumps, too, and the management and environmental costs associated with putting something that large into the ocean.
Except that QE is the purchase of investment vehicles (bonds) that return their cost. You're right, though: You're back to your original point where you don't understand economics.
That does bring up a good question, however: What is the price of the water produced with these rain barrels?
If we want to pay back the production cost of one barge in a single productive year, each gallon of water must be sold for only $0.023. The US average price per gallon of water is $0.002, so to compete with the current US market, you'll need to spread the cost over a decade, at least, and we're still assuming minimal production costs and free labor.
Now would be a good time to account for not having that world-record rainfall. The average in a good southern tropical location is only about 100 inches annually, so your barge probably wouldn't break even for 100 years, if it even survives that long. 100 years is a very long time in salt water, even with corrosion resistance. In comparison, the desalination plant would break even in only 7 years.
I'm left with the same conclusion as I had in my earlier comment: No sane politician or corporate investor will want anything to do with a project this absurd. It's not a matter of how you scale up or where you get the water. A giant rain barrel left open to the sky simply isn't a cost-effective means of water production. Small ones only work because they have a relatively large surface gathering water for them.
American rainfall ranges from about 5 inches to 30 inches per year, which (at 10 inches per year) gives us about 12500 gallons per year for a 2000 square foot collection area. Conveniently and coincidentally, that much water costs about the same ($25) as a cheap plastic rain barrel on Amazon. To equal the production of the one desalination plant (7500 acre feet per year), we'd have to gather rainfall from an area of 9000 acres, or half the size of Manhattan. The easiest way to accomplish that scale of collection would be to dam up a valley, possibly diverting existing rivers and tributaries. In short, build a reservoir, like politicians and corporations already have in many places that can fill them.
I've been mimicking Randall Munroe's style all day, so it's fitting that I'm reminded of a basic test for whether an idea makes sense. Building a reservoir on land where there is already ample rainfall makes sense, and people are already doing it. Building a completely man-made structure to gather rainwater for transport elsewhere doesn't make sense, so people don't do it. You can blame conspiracies all you want, but that won't change the basic fact that such a project is a ridiculously expensive way to get water.
That's a lot of little barges. If we make each barge the size of a Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, each would collect 580 acre feet of water per year. To water the Sahara, we'll need just over 9 million of these "little" barges. Producing one per day, we'll be "scaling up" over the next 25,000 years.
Each of these little barges, if it were simply a topless box of 1" steel, will require 12 million pounds of steel, currently coming in at a base price of around $4.3 million, plus labor, and assuming that the price of steel doesn't rise due to demand.
You'd need 13 of those little supercarrier-sized barges to equal the production of the one desalination facility described in TFA, for a production cost of $56 million (again, for just the steel to build a very-poorly-designed hull), whereas this plant cost only $34 million to build. Desalination also delivers water directly to land and does not assume world-record rainfall.
I'm not trolling. I just don't think you understand the scale of the problem.
To give the entire Sahara 28 inches of rainfall (which is the low end of what Iowa gets annually), you need 5.4 billion acre feet of water. By mass, that's 67 times the total amount of oil produced since 1850*. If you think the water business is the problem now, just wait until you see the management for that size of operation.
So where exactly do we get these 15,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of water? We could drain half of Lake Superior, but you specified rain barrels. That makes the math easy. Cherrapunji is often regarded as the wettest place on Earth, recording 1,041.75 inches of rainfall in a calendar year, which is 37 times what Iowa gets. That means we'd only need to cover an area 1/37th the size of the Sahara to get enough water, assuming it all has the same rainfall as Cherrapunji. Our total rain-barrel area is then only about 95,000 square miles, which would cover about half the area of France.
I guess you're right: The problem is politics and business. No government or corporation wants to try to build a rain-barrel raft half the size of France (or larger, since it won't all receive 1000 inches of rainfall per year).
The system is inefficient for how much work is put into it versus the water output.
Ok, so that's for a hand-built survival system... perhaps not a good reference for a purpose-built system.
In 1952 the United States military developed a portable solar still...a large inflatable 24-inch plastic ball that floats on the ocean... on a good day 2.5 US quarts (2.4 l) of fresh water could be produced. On an overcast day, 1.5 US quarts (1.4 l) was produced.
The plant in question produces 7500 acre-feet (2,400,000,000 US gallons) per year. That's the equivalent of 18 million of the spheres. If we assume that the barge would have similar efficiency (which it probably wouldn't, as there would be significant thermal loss to the ocean below, as opposed to the military's encapsulation design), we would require a sunlit area of approximately 8.1 billion square inches, or 2.0 square miles. That's about 360 times the area of a giant cruise ship.
"Inefficient" still seems like the right word, and we still don't have any answers regarding how to propel or maneuver that large a mass.
The Sahara, which has existed for a few thousand years, is a result of the commodities market, and the solution is to just pump water in from the Mediterranean, using the minute amount of usable energy extracted from wave action, with a machine that's big enough to supply water to the whole desert, yet cheap enough that there won't be a "disagreement over the price"?
How do you deal with everything else that gets on the ceiling, like the salt spray from the air? How do you guide this raft to efficiently use its time, while still keeping management costs below the sale price of the water (including government funding)? How do you build the ceiling in the first place, which must be cooled to support condensation, mechanically conducive to collection, large enough to make the raft practical, and small enough to keep the raft manageable? Once you've filled the raft with several tons of fresh water, will it still be buoyant enough to hold the several tons of engine needed to push that mass?
Problem: User interface is unclear as to whether document can't scroll more, or has just stopped responding.
Solution: Use an interface that changes behavior at the edge of the document.
Patented implementation: Document is allowed to move past its edge, then returns to a usable position
Alternate implementation: Document stretches to show that it can go no further
The "implementation" is the embodiment of the solution to the problem. It is not inherently a particular written work (as a single software program would be), nor is it an algorithm. It is the means by which the problem is mitigated.
...which can be avoided by not requiring continuous contact with the screen, such as having a slowly-resetting (but "catchable") slider. All of the patent's claims note that the contact is continuous.
"bounce back when you reach the end of a list"
...which can be avoided by not showing the background behind the document (for example, by stretching the visible portion of the document so it remains filling the screen).
"rounded corner"
Which is a design patent, covering the entire visual appearance of the device. Avoidable by having a rounded rectangle with multiple colors, texture, or other readily-apparent differences. Interpretation of a design patent is more vague by its aesthetic nature, but the simple test is to see if someone with only passing familiarity with a patented design would be able to immediately distinguish between it an a competitor.
That's why patents cover implementations, not ideas.
Implement any given patent in a different way so as not to hit the patent's claims, and you have a whole new (and probably separately patentable) thing.
Subtly insightful: All fast-food fries must be timed so enough is available when rushes come in, but there's only a few minutes' window before it cools too much. Resource management and a keen sense of timing are very desirable qualities for a fry cook. Of course, that same skill set is necessary for managing a supply chain. You have to get parts ordered with sufficient lead time so they'll arrive before the production facility runs out, but you also don't want to be wasting storage space (and the associated facilities budget) holding more stock than you need.
My point is that the same skills Starcraft competitions rely on are very close to what certain business sectors need. Perhaps you successfully built your own fan base as a gamer, and now can turn that into a marketing career. Maybe you were able to perfectly balance defenses, and now have a well-trained sense of how to build and evaluate defense-in-depth security. There could be a good career in government work for you. Even if the only thing you were good at was predicting your opponents' strategies, that could be spun into a successful career as an industry analyst.
Don't discount skills just because they were used for something fun.
"I played Starcraft tournaments for 5 years" isn't exactly great resume material
Sure it is, but like any other skill it has to be written so it shows what's useful about you. A resume is an account of your abilities, not a biography.
Playing Starcraft competitively for five years could easily be described by saying you "competed professionally in strategy tournaments", and when accompanied by a short description of the primary skills you excelled in (resource management, risk mitigation, public relations), it becomes a very positive credential.
Is it particularly different from professional physical sports?
A career in any sport is viable as long as there are people willing to pay for someone else to play. Physical sports have a clear lead here, as the fan base is much larger.
Similarly, with so many fans, there's also a greater number of professional players. Percentage-wise, though, there's still only a very small number who make it to the big leagues.
I used to work in a financial company, that had several professional athletes as clients. Most were facing retirement in their early 30's, with huge medical expenses expected later on. Several had second careers lined up before retiring from the sport itself, usually in some tangential field like sports commentary or coaching. After expenses and various kinds of insurance, many of those athletes were looking at modest retirements, having spent much of their high income on preserving what's left of their bodies.
I'll save you the time - I've done the research already. My state is one of the majority that don't have a statewide ban for of-age drivers. About two thirds of municipalities in my county have secondary-enforcement bans, and about 10% have primary-enforcement bans. See, that's a meaningful fact, rather than just cherry-picking the scope where federal grant money has influenced policy.
Whether you were lying, or simply ignorant, it doesn't change the fact you were a trolling flamebait.
Gee, and here I thought that "trolling" meant having an intent to cause an argument. I simply hold an unpopular opinion, that laws shouldn't be a knee-jerk reaction to the latest technology scare story or statistically-insignificant fluctuation. If I were intending to start flaming, I'd probably turn to terms like "mentally ill" or "idiot jackass". I guess I'm just not humble enough to fling insults at people with whom I disagree.
Slashdot Mirror
what's a "telecope?"
It's a device for accepting something and dealing with it from a distance, obviously.
I've spent many hours with a telecope looking for comets, and again, they lied.
Clearly, this poster has been so badly affected by astronomers' lies that he has now turned to calling his therapist whenever he feels the need to look at the sky. It's a coping mechanism, executed remotely: a telecope.
As a computer programmer, this sounds fine to me.
The properties of a single object (in this case, the position of any single atom) can be described with only two variables. Thus it's two-dimensional.
Under this definition, I'm even okay with having several distinct layers, as long as they're all one atom thick. Effectively the material type then becomes the third dimension, but I'm willing to overlook that.
Take a single steel girder falling off the back of a semi into the head of a train
The head car notices the girder coming toward it as soon as it's moving off of the truck, and announces the hazard to the other cars. The whole train is keeping a long following distance from the truck (which either isn't part of the network, or has announced that it's carrying loose cargo), so it triggers the brakes or lane changes on the cars behind it.
The cost is simply that if *anything* goes wrong up front, pretty much everyone in the train is screwed.
You're assuming a lot of incompetence. Unlike rail trains, the cars in this network aren't physically linked. There's no requirement that they remain a train. If a car wants to do something different from the rest of the train, it leaves the group. The cars behind it will adjust to either form a new train, or just allow the dissenting car to leave.
And of course for cars it depends on a automated vehicle network
Yes, network benefits require a network. This is why the whole thread started with a comment about "50 years from now".
separate from (though dependent on) self-driving cars
Hardly. There are vehicular networks now, that simply inform the driver of emergent traffic conditions. They're mostly confined to university projects, but even so have already shown great potential.
which requires widespread adoption before it has any serious benefit
Not really. Road conditions can be monitored with as few as two cars per hour. Closures and detours can be pulled from government data sources , which are already becoming more accessible because travelers want to check for such things on websites. Much like high-speed cellular data service, whenever it's available, it brings a benefit, and absence doesn't diminish operation beyond the current standard.
and which has some rather serious privacy concerns
Only among the folks with shiny hats. Besides current observation, vehicular networks really just need to know vehicle specs (as measured through closed feedback loops) and an intended direction of travel. Network identifiers can be regenerated on the fly, and authenticated cryptographically. Pretty much, someone in your train can know which road you'll be taking next, and they can probably figure out what kind of car you're driving. As soon as you leave their train, you can change your identification (and if you're paranoid, fudge your vehicle characteristics), and appear to be someone completely different for the next train you join. The only practical privacy invasion is to follow someone, just as you can now.
what happens when one malicious car at the front reports a catastrophic failure?
It gets ejected from the train, and the other cars go around it, just like would happen now if the car in front of you suddenly started spewing smoke. The biggest malicious threat is still exactly the same as it is now: A few trucks can throw out caltrops on major highways. The network will detect the risk and route around it, but local streets will be overloaded.
I suspect you have a broken sarcasm detector.
"Safe following distance" for automated vehicles is somewhere in the area of three to six inches. Yes, this has been tested pretty thoroughly, in a wide variety of (simulated) situations.
Safe following distance for humans is based mostly on reaction speed and attention span. If someone's driving at highway speeds and looking down at the speedometer or changing radio stations, they'll cover a lot of distance before noticing what happens in front of them. Once they notice that the car in front of them has brake lights on, it's up to their brakes to to stop them quickly enough before a collision, and the driver has to guess how much force to apply to slow or stop correctly.
Automated cars with vehicle networks can share information so that there is no guesswork. The train can self-arrange to put the slowest-stopping cars in the front, and when one car needs to slow down or stop, all of the cars will know within milliseconds why and how the brakes are applied. The train may split at that point for an exit, slow down together or spread apart as the cars all brake at their differing speeds.
You're almost right that such a hivemind would be impossible until automated cars are common. There's been some research into integration techniques, but I haven't been a part of that research, so my expertise is minimal. From what I recall, some promising techniques involve adjusting the train-forming algorithms. A train may be only two cars, so the system would work if there's only a few automated cars on the roads. As their popularity rises, trains can get longer, but then they'll be annoying to non-automated drivers. I do recall some work into limiting the train length based on the number of non-networked vehicles in the area, but I don't recall much about how it worked.
Once such networking becomes commonplace, highway carrying capacity can increase by a few hundred percent, as the only large gaps will be between separate trains and around non-networked vehicles.
50 years from now, the answer's the same, and it's exactly what's taught in driving classes now: Anticipate what's coming before it's "unavoidable", and you won't ever have to decide what to hit. If you're making that choice, then you've already failed as a driver (even if you're a computer program).
If autonomous cars are successful, then we'll also be improving vehicle networking, so the autonomous cars will be able to work together to avoid crashes. With a bit of sarcasm, one answer is that the autonomous car should hit the other autonomous car, knowing that it will move out of the way first.
Further out, our road systems can also change to fit the new driving patterns. Thanks to cooperation, autonomous cars can travel on main routes in denser trains, reducing the traffic on many side streets. They'd also be able to park in unified parking structures, further clearing streets and reducing the chances of ever having to decide what to hit.
Natural resources are NOT scarce in any way.
Really? Name any resource that is naturally available in absolute abundance everywhere in the world.
And as you argue about costs, you are only confirming my point as to what drives the availability of water...
You seem to think that some noble goal is enough in itself to overcome the natural scarcity of resources. A few millenia of history stand against you, but don't let that thwart your optimism. Maybe someday, a few thousand miners, steelworkers, and shipwrights, and a few million support personnel, will all decide that drastically changing the Sahara's ecosystem is a good idea, and they'll all volunteer their time and effort to build your giant rain collector.
I won't hold my breath waiting, though, especially since there are far easier ways to get clean water. If there's going to be a mass movement to reclaim the Sahara, it'll probably start with a few local villages planting trees and clearing sand. In fact, that's already happening, and it's fairly successful. In a few areas of West Africa, the edge of the desert has been pushed back several hundred meters, and further away there are noticeable increases in precipitation.
Even that project takes money, though. Coming across free bulldozers is a rare thing. Food is still scarce and people still need to trade with others. You can close your eyes and pretend that we live in a communist world where cost doesn't matter, but that won't change the fact that people usually care for themselves and their families before they'll donate time and energy to an idealist's inefficient construction project
That QE money can just as easily go towards building the plants
No, it can't. The QE money cannot exist without a sufficiently-debt-laden vehicle to support it. The existence of debt is what stabilizes the money supply, preventing the inflation that would result if the Federal Reserve did indeed just start printing money to build things.
The water to irrigate the Sahara to Iowa's levels falls (assuming typical tropical rates of 10 inches per year) on 6.48 billion acres, which would require a tarp costing $47 trillion (based on the best bulk price I found easily). That's about two thirds the net worth of all US households.
The price for the tarp works out to be $0.02 per gallon gathered, roughly ten times the average price of water in the US. Then we'll have to add on the cost of the pumps, too, and the management and environmental costs associated with putting something that large into the ocean.
Except that QE is the purchase of investment vehicles (bonds) that return their cost. You're right, though: You're back to your original point where you don't understand economics.
That does bring up a good question, however: What is the price of the water produced with these rain barrels?
If we want to pay back the production cost of one barge in a single productive year, each gallon of water must be sold for only $0.023. The US average price per gallon of water is $0.002, so to compete with the current US market, you'll need to spread the cost over a decade, at least, and we're still assuming minimal production costs and free labor.
Now would be a good time to account for not having that world-record rainfall. The average in a good southern tropical location is only about 100 inches annually, so your barge probably wouldn't break even for 100 years, if it even survives that long. 100 years is a very long time in salt water, even with corrosion resistance. In comparison, the desalination plant would break even in only 7 years.
I'm left with the same conclusion as I had in my earlier comment: No sane politician or corporate investor will want anything to do with a project this absurd. It's not a matter of how you scale up or where you get the water. A giant rain barrel left open to the sky simply isn't a cost-effective means of water production. Small ones only work because they have a relatively large surface gathering water for them.
American rainfall ranges from about 5 inches to 30 inches per year, which (at 10 inches per year) gives us about 12500 gallons per year for a 2000 square foot collection area. Conveniently and coincidentally, that much water costs about the same ($25) as a cheap plastic rain barrel on Amazon. To equal the production of the one desalination plant (7500 acre feet per year), we'd have to gather rainfall from an area of 9000 acres, or half the size of Manhattan. The easiest way to accomplish that scale of collection would be to dam up a valley, possibly diverting existing rivers and tributaries. In short, build a reservoir, like politicians and corporations already have in many places that can fill them.
I've been mimicking Randall Munroe's style all day, so it's fitting that I'm reminded of a basic test for whether an idea makes sense. Building a reservoir on land where there is already ample rainfall makes sense, and people are already doing it. Building a completely man-made structure to gather rainwater for transport elsewhere doesn't make sense, so people don't do it. You can blame conspiracies all you want, but that won't change the basic fact that such a project is a ridiculously expensive way to get water.
That's a lot of little barges. If we make each barge the size of a Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, each would collect 580 acre feet of water per year. To water the Sahara, we'll need just over 9 million of these "little" barges. Producing one per day, we'll be "scaling up" over the next 25,000 years.
Each of these little barges, if it were simply a topless box of 1" steel, will require 12 million pounds of steel, currently coming in at a base price of around $4.3 million, plus labor, and assuming that the price of steel doesn't rise due to demand.
You'd need 13 of those little supercarrier-sized barges to equal the production of the one desalination facility described in TFA, for a production cost of $56 million (again, for just the steel to build a very-poorly-designed hull), whereas this plant cost only $34 million to build. Desalination also delivers water directly to land and does not assume world-record rainfall.
I'm not trolling. I just don't think you understand the scale of the problem.
To give the entire Sahara 28 inches of rainfall (which is the low end of what Iowa gets annually), you need 5.4 billion acre feet of water. By mass, that's 67 times the total amount of oil produced since 1850*. If you think the water business is the problem now, just wait until you see the management for that size of operation.
So where exactly do we get these 15,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of water? We could drain half of Lake Superior, but you specified rain barrels. That makes the math easy. Cherrapunji is often regarded as the wettest place on Earth, recording 1,041.75 inches of rainfall in a calendar year, which is 37 times what Iowa gets. That means we'd only need to cover an area 1/37th the size of the Sahara to get enough water, assuming it all has the same rainfall as Cherrapunji. Our total rain-barrel area is then only about 95,000 square miles, which would cover about half the area of France.
I guess you're right: The problem is politics and business. No government or corporation wants to try to build a rain-barrel raft half the size of France (or larger, since it won't all receive 1000 inches of rainfall per year).
* Wolfram Alpha is great for perspective.
The system is inefficient for how much work is put into it versus the water output.
Ok, so that's for a hand-built survival system... perhaps not a good reference for a purpose-built system.
In 1952 the United States military developed a portable solar still ...a large inflatable 24-inch plastic ball that floats on the ocean... on a good day 2.5 US quarts (2.4 l) of fresh water could be produced. On an overcast day, 1.5 US quarts (1.4 l) was produced.
The plant in question produces 7500 acre-feet (2,400,000,000 US gallons) per year. That's the equivalent of 18 million of the spheres. If we assume that the barge would have similar efficiency (which it probably wouldn't, as there would be significant thermal loss to the ocean below, as opposed to the military's encapsulation design), we would require a sunlit area of approximately 8.1 billion square inches, or 2.0 square miles. That's about 360 times the area of a giant cruise ship.
"Inefficient" still seems like the right word, and we still don't have any answers regarding how to propel or maneuver that large a mass.
So let me get this straight...
The Sahara, which has existed for a few thousand years, is a result of the commodities market, and the solution is to just pump water in from the Mediterranean, using the minute amount of usable energy extracted from wave action, with a machine that's big enough to supply water to the whole desert, yet cheap enough that there won't be a "disagreement over the price"?
Sounds simple enough.
How do you deal with everything else that gets on the ceiling, like the salt spray from the air? How do you guide this raft to efficiently use its time, while still keeping management costs below the sale price of the water (including government funding)? How do you build the ceiling in the first place, which must be cooled to support condensation, mechanically conducive to collection, large enough to make the raft practical, and small enough to keep the raft manageable? Once you've filled the raft with several tons of fresh water, will it still be buoyant enough to hold the several tons of engine needed to push that mass?
Problem: User interface is unclear as to whether document can't scroll more, or has just stopped responding.
Solution: Use an interface that changes behavior at the edge of the document.
Patented implementation: Document is allowed to move past its edge, then returns to a usable position
Alternate implementation: Document stretches to show that it can go no further
The "implementation" is the embodiment of the solution to the problem. It is not inherently a particular written work (as a single software program would be), nor is it an algorithm. It is the means by which the problem is mitigated.
See "slide to unlock"
...which can be avoided by not requiring continuous contact with the screen, such as having a slowly-resetting (but "catchable") slider. All of the patent's claims note that the contact is continuous.
"bounce back when you reach the end of a list"
...which can be avoided by not showing the background behind the document (for example, by stretching the visible portion of the document so it remains filling the screen).
"rounded corner"
Which is a design patent, covering the entire visual appearance of the device. Avoidable by having a rounded rectangle with multiple colors, texture, or other readily-apparent differences. Interpretation of a design patent is more vague by its aesthetic nature, but the simple test is to see if someone with only passing familiarity with a patented design would be able to immediately distinguish between it an a competitor.
Prior art matters in patent disputes. This is not a patent dispute.
That's why patents cover implementations, not ideas.
Implement any given patent in a different way so as not to hit the patent's claims, and you have a whole new (and probably separately patentable) thing.
That's rather completely irrelevant. This program doesn't seem to replace physical education at all.
Subtly insightful: All fast-food fries must be timed so enough is available when rushes come in, but there's only a few minutes' window before it cools too much. Resource management and a keen sense of timing are very desirable qualities for a fry cook. Of course, that same skill set is necessary for managing a supply chain. You have to get parts ordered with sufficient lead time so they'll arrive before the production facility runs out, but you also don't want to be wasting storage space (and the associated facilities budget) holding more stock than you need.
My point is that the same skills Starcraft competitions rely on are very close to what certain business sectors need. Perhaps you successfully built your own fan base as a gamer, and now can turn that into a marketing career. Maybe you were able to perfectly balance defenses, and now have a well-trained sense of how to build and evaluate defense-in-depth security. There could be a good career in government work for you. Even if the only thing you were good at was predicting your opponents' strategies, that could be spun into a successful career as an industry analyst.
Don't discount skills just because they were used for something fun.
"I played Starcraft tournaments for 5 years" isn't exactly great resume material
Sure it is, but like any other skill it has to be written so it shows what's useful about you. A resume is an account of your abilities, not a biography.
Playing Starcraft competitively for five years could easily be described by saying you "competed professionally in strategy tournaments", and when accompanied by a short description of the primary skills you excelled in (resource management, risk mitigation, public relations), it becomes a very positive credential.
Is it particularly different from professional physical sports?
A career in any sport is viable as long as there are people willing to pay for someone else to play. Physical sports have a clear lead here, as the fan base is much larger.
Similarly, with so many fans, there's also a greater number of professional players. Percentage-wise, though, there's still only a very small number who make it to the big leagues.
I used to work in a financial company, that had several professional athletes as clients. Most were facing retirement in their early 30's, with huge medical expenses expected later on. Several had second careers lined up before retiring from the sport itself, usually in some tangential field like sports commentary or coaching. After expenses and various kinds of insurance, many of those athletes were looking at modest retirements, having spent much of their high income on preserving what's left of their bodies.
I'll try to look up your state laws...
I'll save you the time - I've done the research already. My state is one of the majority that don't have a statewide ban for of-age drivers. About two thirds of municipalities in my county have secondary-enforcement bans, and about 10% have primary-enforcement bans. See, that's a meaningful fact, rather than just cherry-picking the scope where federal grant money has influenced policy.
Whether you were lying, or simply ignorant, it doesn't change the fact you were a trolling flamebait.
Gee, and here I thought that "trolling" meant having an intent to cause an argument. I simply hold an unpopular opinion, that laws shouldn't be a knee-jerk reaction to the latest technology scare story or statistically-insignificant fluctuation. If I were intending to start flaming, I'd probably turn to terms like "mentally ill" or "idiot jackass". I guess I'm just not humble enough to fling insults at people with whom I disagree.
If it takes that much thought to consider the implications of an action, the answer should be "indirectly yes", and the idea should be abandoned.