Nah. The summary got it wrong. What he said is that he is building things (atom nuclei) that are 100 000 times smaller than the creations of nanotech-scientists.
No, you don't get it. The summary says that drivers can make hydrogen from water while driving. That hydrogen can then presumably be used to drive the car and make more hydrogen. What's up with that "law" you guys were talking about earlier?:)
I think it would work like with rental cars. If you find the seat torn you dial a number and report it. Then take the next car. The amoeba who tore the seat on his own rental car will naturally get a bill in the mail for the replacement seat. The car would probably also have a simple camera that takes a picture of the interior when a customer checks out. Few amoebas are stupid enough to take such a case to court.
My thought exactly. And the reason behind it is that computers are no longer getting twice as fast every 1.5 years. When new computers are not always amazingly fast, consumers look for other things. Like better operating systems or better programs. Things like smaller hardware or stylish design and products that are durable (or give the impression of being durable). Or they wait a couple of years extra until something amazing comes out or until something in their computer breaks down. The industry predicted years ago that this would happen approximately now...
For example, I have an old Radeon X800XL video card. I have been looking for a replacement that doubles my frame rates in games at the same price I paid for that Radeon. It actually took 2.5 years for that to come true with the Geforce 8800GT, that will hit stores in a week or two. How long will people keep their 8800GT cards? Probably three years the least if development continues to slow down.
My Gnome setup looks like MacOS X at the moment, but I doubt that I will use that look forever. A texture slightly inspired by wood could actually look good. You also have to imagine windows and bars as polygon models that stand out slightly (which will almost certainly be the standard in a few years).
Back in 2005 the contribution to radiative forcing from contrails was still considered to be positive (contributing to warming). The net radiative forcing of an aircraft was estimated to be 1.9 times the RF of CO2 alone. But this does not take cloud formation into account. The error bars are huge, but unfortunately they don't allow for any negative RF. Unless the theory is wrong and has been replaced by something completely new lately.
Kerosene? You mean like JET-A?? Contrary to common belief, jet engines are extremely "fuel-agnostic". Pretty much anything that burns and expands will do for fuel. You could even use an alcohol like ethanol to drive a jet (but the fumes would be poisonous). The airline industry probably chose kerosene because it's cheap and has a high flash point.
That's fascinating! I would love to skim through some of those studies. I suspect that they are either very new and ground-breaking, or very old and already proven wrong by newer studies. Care to post any references?
I love flying by the way - so don't take this sarcastically. I would truly love to hear that flying is good for the environment.
He has done well to inform people and to raise the issue among politicians. But the role of politicians is to actually create policies and new laws to counter the problems. Has Al Gore helped create new policies to counter global warning? Has the U.S. begun to use a proper carbon-limiting/carbon-trading system while I was asleep? Has any country begun to put a firm limit on CO2-emissions? The EU has created some ambitious goals, but they are not set in stone. That is about everything I think.
This prize was simply handed out too early. Hopefully, time will prove the Norwegian prize judges right.
It's most likely an RC-toy from Taiwan or Hong Kong. Sure, maybe the military moded a few of them with tiny cameras and microphones. But it seems far more likely that some civilian just thought it would be cool to play with it in front of a huge crowd.
Well, the way I understand it Greenland was the main problem. Norse leaders tried to promote it as a "nice and green" place, while in fact is icy and cold and lacks a good supply of firewood and wood for construction material (for housing and ships). Part of the reason the Norse Greenlanders built the colony in America was probably to bring back wood to Greenland. In the end they gave up on the Greenland and America colonies and went back to Iceland, where they had all the resources they needed.
Anyway, in the case of the Moon there isn't a nice warm place full of natural resources at the end of the road. The Moon isn't a new America - it's a new Greenland! And analogous to the fact that we don't land in Greenland when traveling across the Atlantic, we will probably not stop at the Moon when flying to Mars and beyond.
Let me be the first to inform you that the number of countries where food is expensive and scarce has declined to a point where you can almost count them on the fingers of your two hands. Over-eating is a major problem in the poor world. Poor people are more likely to have serious problems, which means that they are more likely to eat for comfort. Also, poor people are more likely to have less knowledge about good nutrition.
Diabetes is on its way to becoming a poor man's disease. A cheap medicine against diabetes might do miracles for people in the developing countries a couple of decades from now.
Wind and solar are not replacements for coal and nuclear. They are wonderful, clean complements in their own right. But they are not replacements. Nevertheless there is still a huge demand for coal or nuclear all over the world (especially in poorer countries). Build all the wind and solar you can (the US is way behind countries like Germany on wind) but don't expect it to replace the "always on" coal and nuclear plants.
Wind power only comes when the wind is blowing (duh). To add to that the power obtained has a cubic relation to the wind speed. That means a doubling of wind speed (for example from 4 m/s to 8 m/s - a small, rather unpredictable increase) creates an eightfold increase in power! Now, unless the people at the power company had anticipated that particular wind increase and planned extra usage in the network (or planned to use less hydro power that day), 7/8 of the wind power will be wasted. Denmark has about 20% wind power - and that is close to the maximum with today's technology. It's great that you can get 20% of a country's power from wind. But it's not a replacement for coal or nuclear.
Solar power is wonderful in places with a lot of sun (duh). It produces power when it is most needed, to run machinery at workplaces, to run air conditioning at maximum power, etc. But solar power cannot provide more than a certain percentage of power either. We should not expect that solar and wind are perfectly complementary. Denmark for example might have trouble implementing a very large percentage of solar in their supply. We need stationary power sources too. Bio power is part of the answer to that, but it can't provide all the power we need. Even with massive rationalization and energy saving, all the green power sources put together won't give us enough juice! We need something else.
Now, no-one even knows how much coal there is left. The official figure was that we had over 400 years at usage rate in the nineties. It was around 250 years in 2000. According to the latest figures we have about 150 years of coal left... Some scientists are already talking about "peak coal"! And coal puts out CO2, which our children will pay for in floods and extreme weather. I would be very doubtful to join the anti-nuclear rally.
I think it means content that can be changed by users, like Slashdot or Wikipedia. Naturally, that concept has existed since before Web browsers themselves, with usergroups e.t.c.
I wonder if Penn and Teller are geeky enough to do an episode on 'Web 2.0'.
Ha ha. Are you by any chance the guy writing the script for Idiocracy 2?
Phil: Hi mom, it's Phil!
Phil's Mom: Hi!
Phil: I'm calling about your birthday. I'll be there around three.
Mom: It will be so nice to have you here.
Phil: Still not sure what kind of birthday present to buy.
Mom: Don't worry. For example, some neat ideas just popped up on my computer, you see that?
Phil: Yeah, that's nice. I like this free phone service! What kind of cake and what kind of food do you want?
Mom: Nothing fancy. You know what I like. For food, just bring something Asian. Something from that Thai place maybe? For cake, I like those cream pies...
Imagine a system where there is no GSM or UMTS or WiMax or WiFi. Just one single radio network that automatically optimizes the communication for each terminal in the network, whether it's in the middle of a city or out at sea. A network where a user with a particular sim-card is free to choose which company or companies it want to use with that sim-card (no more roaming abroad or tie-in with a certain carrier).
That part about the sim-cards will come true approximately when hell freezes over, pigs fly and Windows becomes a Linux distro. But it would be pretty sweet.
Perhaps Apple realized that the current iPhone is more of an entertainment gadget than a professional device. If it's not considered to be a "professional phone", it will probably not sell enough units at $599.
Photoshop filters and video transcoding are predictable interruptions that come in big chunks. You can then use your other core(s) to do other tasks, for example to load some files from HDD to RAM...
Opening photos for editing in Photoshop and opening video files for transcoding are tasks that are limited by HDD-performance. This HDD lag comes in tiny bits all the time. You can't avoid it. It's also ANNOYING and pisses you off (some call it "micro stress"). Let's say you lose 10 seconds every two minutes that you are working on the computer. That's 5 minutes every hour that you are just waiting. It adds up if you spend a lot of time working on the computer. Maybe, 20 minutes per day? Would your boss be happy if you suddenly started taking an extra 20 minute coffee break every day?
Once someone figures out a cheap way to get around this problem (cheaper flash memory drives, cheaper RAM-drives, cheaper fast HDDs,or something else) our productivity will increase by several percent.
Yes, solar power is clean and it is starting to reach a price range within one order of magnitude from being competitive.
But capacitators using "barium titanate coated with aluminum oxide and glass" (according to Wikipedia) does not sound like it's going to help make solar power cheaper. Those caps are good as a short term power booster for cars and in other applications where the value of the product justifies the price.
Green electricity generation needs to be cheap as hell if we want to replace coal. If green power is not cheap as hell, then coal will be replaced by uranium and nuclear reactors once the coal mines starts to peak.
Well, I'd say she looks about average. And of course it's self-evident that only extremely ugly girls could ever learn how to do anything remotely technical. Like putting some cards into slots and pulling a few screws. After all, the X-chromosome does not have screwdriving hard-coded into it, that's in the Y-chromosome! Yeah it's fake for sure.
Well TV-signals are hardly strong enough to be detected by ET? Or I don't know. But what about (military) radar? It is stronger by several magnitudes and it is transmitted in one direction at a time. Or what about atmospheric nuclear tests? (Let's hope that ET assumes that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tests, too.) In that case we are constantly transmitting the following message over and over: "Bip! We like to kill each other."
If I was ET I would probably call the extermination entrepreneur for this sector of the galaxy.
Well, it seems to me that MMORPG-playing and "socializing" on slashdot are purely animalistic and primal desires with little to no logic to them...;-) Because you say that you enjoy playing a game I suspect that you will enjoy playing with girls too, if you can catch one who cares a bit about you.
Sex in itself is nice and warm and reasonably enjoyable like you say. However good sex (which probably happens after you and your partner has practiced a bit together) is something different. Not to mention good sex with someone that you love. I think you might have given up too soon. Some research has found that around 99% of humans need a good f**k every now and then. The remaining 1% are truly asexual. (But many of them still like to hold hands and raise babies together!)
Slashdot Mirror
Nah. The summary got it wrong. What he said is that he is building things (atom nuclei) that are 100 000 times smaller than the creations of nanotech-scientists.
No, you don't get it. The summary says that drivers can make hydrogen from water while driving. That hydrogen can then presumably be used to drive the car and make more hydrogen. What's up with that "law" you guys were talking about earlier? :)
The appropriate movie terminology for what China is doing about the history of the Mao era would be "director's cut".
I think it would work like with rental cars. If you find the seat torn you dial a number and report it. Then take the next car. The amoeba who tore the seat on his own rental car will naturally get a bill in the mail for the replacement seat. The car would probably also have a simple camera that takes a picture of the interior when a customer checks out. Few amoebas are stupid enough to take such a case to court.
My thought exactly. And the reason behind it is that computers are no longer getting twice as fast every 1.5 years. When new computers are not always amazingly fast, consumers look for other things. Like better operating systems or better programs. Things like smaller hardware or stylish design and products that are durable (or give the impression of being durable). Or they wait a couple of years extra until something amazing comes out or until something in their computer breaks down. The industry predicted years ago that this would happen approximately now...
For example, I have an old Radeon X800XL video card. I have been looking for a replacement that doubles my frame rates in games at the same price I paid for that Radeon. It actually took 2.5 years for that to come true with the Geforce 8800GT, that will hit stores in a week or two. How long will people keep their 8800GT cards? Probably three years the least if development continues to slow down.
My Gnome setup looks like MacOS X at the moment, but I doubt that I will use that look forever. A texture slightly inspired by wood could actually look good. You also have to imagine windows and bars as polygon models that stand out slightly (which will almost certainly be the standard in a few years).
Well, the "signal to noise ratio" of moderation down here is low (replies of replies of replies a while after the article was posted).
On topic (in case anyone is still reading this). My best source for information on this issue is this report from 2005: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/schweiz/mz/2005/00000014/00000004/art00013
Back in 2005 the contribution to radiative forcing from contrails was still considered to be positive (contributing to warming). The net radiative forcing of an aircraft was estimated to be 1.9 times the RF of CO2 alone. But this does not take cloud formation into account. The error bars are huge, but unfortunately they don't allow for any negative RF. Unless the theory is wrong and has been replaced by something completely new lately.
Kerosene? You mean like JET-A?? Contrary to common belief, jet engines are extremely "fuel-agnostic". Pretty much anything that burns and expands will do for fuel. You could even use an alcohol like ethanol to drive a jet (but the fumes would be poisonous). The airline industry probably chose kerosene because it's cheap and has a high flash point.
That's fascinating! I would love to skim through some of those studies. I suspect that they are either very new and ground-breaking, or very old and already proven wrong by newer studies. Care to post any references?
I love flying by the way - so don't take this sarcastically. I would truly love to hear that flying is good for the environment.
He has done well to inform people and to raise the issue among politicians. But the role of politicians is to actually create policies and new laws to counter the problems. Has Al Gore helped create new policies to counter global warning? Has the U.S. begun to use a proper carbon-limiting/carbon-trading system while I was asleep? Has any country begun to put a firm limit on CO2-emissions? The EU has created some ambitious goals, but they are not set in stone. That is about everything I think.
This prize was simply handed out too early. Hopefully, time will prove the Norwegian prize judges right.
It's most likely an RC-toy from Taiwan or Hong Kong. Sure, maybe the military moded a few of them with tiny cameras and microphones. But it seems far more likely that some civilian just thought it would be cool to play with it in front of a huge crowd.
Well, the way I understand it Greenland was the main problem. Norse leaders tried to promote it as a "nice and green" place, while in fact is icy and cold and lacks a good supply of firewood and wood for construction material (for housing and ships). Part of the reason the Norse Greenlanders built the colony in America was probably to bring back wood to Greenland. In the end they gave up on the Greenland and America colonies and went back to Iceland, where they had all the resources they needed.
Anyway, in the case of the Moon there isn't a nice warm place full of natural resources at the end of the road. The Moon isn't a new America - it's a new Greenland! And analogous to the fact that we don't land in Greenland when traveling across the Atlantic, we will probably not stop at the Moon when flying to Mars and beyond.
Let me be the first to inform you that the number of countries where food is expensive and scarce has declined to a point where you can almost count them on the fingers of your two hands. Over-eating is a major problem in the poor world. Poor people are more likely to have serious problems, which means that they are more likely to eat for comfort. Also, poor people are more likely to have less knowledge about good nutrition.
Diabetes is on its way to becoming a poor man's disease. A cheap medicine against diabetes might do miracles for people in the developing countries a couple of decades from now.
Wind and solar are not replacements for coal and nuclear. They are wonderful, clean complements in their own right. But they are not replacements. Nevertheless there is still a huge demand for coal or nuclear all over the world (especially in poorer countries). Build all the wind and solar you can (the US is way behind countries like Germany on wind) but don't expect it to replace the "always on" coal and nuclear plants.
Wind power only comes when the wind is blowing (duh). To add to that the power obtained has a cubic relation to the wind speed. That means a doubling of wind speed (for example from 4 m/s to 8 m/s - a small, rather unpredictable increase) creates an eightfold increase in power! Now, unless the people at the power company had anticipated that particular wind increase and planned extra usage in the network (or planned to use less hydro power that day), 7/8 of the wind power will be wasted. Denmark has about 20% wind power - and that is close to the maximum with today's technology. It's great that you can get 20% of a country's power from wind. But it's not a replacement for coal or nuclear.
Solar power is wonderful in places with a lot of sun (duh). It produces power when it is most needed, to run machinery at workplaces, to run air conditioning at maximum power, etc. But solar power cannot provide more than a certain percentage of power either. We should not expect that solar and wind are perfectly complementary. Denmark for example might have trouble implementing a very large percentage of solar in their supply. We need stationary power sources too. Bio power is part of the answer to that, but it can't provide all the power we need. Even with massive rationalization and energy saving, all the green power sources put together won't give us enough juice! We need something else.
Now, no-one even knows how much coal there is left. The official figure was that we had over 400 years at usage rate in the nineties. It was around 250 years in 2000. According to the latest figures we have about 150 years of coal left... Some scientists are already talking about "peak coal"! And coal puts out CO2, which our children will pay for in floods and extreme weather. I would be very doubtful to join the anti-nuclear rally.
I think it means content that can be changed by users, like Slashdot or Wikipedia. Naturally, that concept has existed since before Web browsers themselves, with usergroups e.t.c. I wonder if Penn and Teller are geeky enough to do an episode on 'Web 2.0'.
Ha ha. Are you by any chance the guy writing the script for Idiocracy 2?
Phil: Hi mom, it's Phil!
Phil's Mom: Hi!
Phil: I'm calling about your birthday. I'll be there around three.
Mom: It will be so nice to have you here.
Phil: Still not sure what kind of birthday present to buy.
Mom: Don't worry. For example, some neat ideas just popped up on my computer, you see that?
Phil: Yeah, that's nice. I like this free phone service! What kind of cake and what kind of food do you want?
Mom: Nothing fancy. You know what I like. For food, just bring something Asian. Something from that Thai place maybe? For cake, I like those cream pies...
Imagine a system where there is no GSM or UMTS or WiMax or WiFi. Just one single radio network that automatically optimizes the communication for each terminal in the network, whether it's in the middle of a city or out at sea. A network where a user with a particular sim-card is free to choose which company or companies it want to use with that sim-card (no more roaming abroad or tie-in with a certain carrier).
That part about the sim-cards will come true approximately when hell freezes over, pigs fly and Windows becomes a Linux distro. But it would be pretty sweet.
Perhaps Apple realized that the current iPhone is more of an entertainment gadget than a professional device. If it's not considered to be a "professional phone", it will probably not sell enough units at $599.
Photoshop filters and video transcoding are predictable interruptions that come in big chunks. You can then use your other core(s) to do other tasks, for example to load some files from HDD to RAM...
,or something else) our productivity will increase by several percent.
Opening photos for editing in Photoshop and opening video files for transcoding are tasks that are limited by HDD-performance. This HDD lag comes in tiny bits all the time. You can't avoid it. It's also ANNOYING and pisses you off (some call it "micro stress"). Let's say you lose 10 seconds every two minutes that you are working on the computer. That's 5 minutes every hour that you are just waiting. It adds up if you spend a lot of time working on the computer. Maybe, 20 minutes per day? Would your boss be happy if you suddenly started taking an extra 20 minute coffee break every day?
Once someone figures out a cheap way to get around this problem (cheaper flash memory drives, cheaper RAM-drives, cheaper fast HDDs
Yes, solar power is clean and it is starting to reach a price range within one order of magnitude from being competitive.
But capacitators using "barium titanate coated with aluminum oxide and glass" (according to Wikipedia) does not sound like it's going to help make solar power cheaper. Those caps are good as a short term power booster for cars and in other applications where the value of the product justifies the price.
Green electricity generation needs to be cheap as hell if we want to replace coal. If green power is not cheap as hell, then coal will be replaced by uranium and nuclear reactors once the coal mines starts to peak.
Now we're talking! You could make a whole website around that idea, honestly.
Well, I'd say she looks about average. And of course it's self-evident that only extremely ugly girls could ever learn how to do anything remotely technical. Like putting some cards into slots and pulling a few screws. After all, the X-chromosome does not have screwdriving hard-coded into it, that's in the Y-chromosome! Yeah it's fake for sure.
Well TV-signals are hardly strong enough to be detected by ET? Or I don't know. But what about (military) radar? It is stronger by several magnitudes and it is transmitted in one direction at a time. Or what about atmospheric nuclear tests? (Let's hope that ET assumes that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tests, too.) In that case we are constantly transmitting the following message over and over: "Bip! We like to kill each other."
If I was ET I would probably call the extermination entrepreneur for this sector of the galaxy.
Well, it seems to me that MMORPG-playing and "socializing" on slashdot are purely animalistic and primal desires with little to no logic to them... ;-) Because you say that you enjoy playing a game I suspect that you will enjoy playing with girls too, if you can catch one who cares a bit about you.
Sex in itself is nice and warm and reasonably enjoyable like you say. However good sex (which probably happens after you and your partner has practiced a bit together) is something different. Not to mention good sex with someone that you love. I think you might have given up too soon. Some research has found that around 99% of humans need a good f**k every now and then. The remaining 1% are truly asexual. (But many of them still like to hold hands and raise babies together!)