Your assertion that autonomous vehicles will take over fails to take into account one of the major reasons we have such a large automotive industry - people like to drive. They like to buy new cars, repair old cars, and do stupid things in fast cars. At most, a car with auto-pilot would be a convenience feature for the daily commute, but so long as people get an adrenaline rush when they put the pedal to the floor, this will not change.
Indeed, and I wouldn't dream of preventing them from doing so -- as long as they aren't threatening my life while they do it.
I know there are lots of drivers who are far more skillful than me. (At least, I hope so; I have slow reflexes, I'm a bit more distractible than average, and I'm just really not that interested in high-performance driving.) But I also know there are lots of drivers who overestimate their own competence, not to mention the competence of others on the road. That's a recipe for disaster.
If so many people like to drive for recreation, I'd expect an increase in private tracks and roads where people can do just that, in the company of other competent and attentive drivers. I'd hope as a result that they'd stop doing fast stupid stuff on roads full of innocent bystanders.
Even if they don't stop that, though, a critical mass of autonomous and networked vehicles will drastically reduce the mayhem. If a maniac is blasting through at twice the speed limit, the network will be able to move everybody cooperatively out of the way. It'll even eliminate onlooker delays passing the wreckage after the maniac makes a mistake.
We'll soon reach a point where autonomous vehicles are orders of magnitude less likely than human-driven vehicles to have an accident. It won't matter, though; people would rather face a daily one-in-a-million chance of dying due to their own mistake than a daily one-in-a-billion chance of dying due to a machine failure.
Autonomous vehicles will still take over in the end. It's just that this particular rational motive to make it happen won't be contributing very much. So, it'll take longer than it should, and more people will die.
Incandescent bulbs don't thrive in constant-switching environments because there's an inrush of current when the filament is cold. That's why most incandescent bulb failures happen right when you turn the light on. It's less of a problem if you run the bulb below its design voltage, but that drastically reduces efficiency.
LEDs have no corresponding issue. If you're very stupid about the way you build your power supply, that might fail (or even take out the LED), but I don't think that's an issue for traffic lights -- judging from the high-frequency flicker, most of them just run off rectified (and unfiltered) AC. That means they're turning on and off 60 or 120 times a second (50 or 100 in the UK), with no ill effects.
I was going to make a snarky comment about LEDs not using ballasts, but I see that some manufacturers are using that term for LED power-conditioning components. Seems confusing to me, but it's not my field.
Musk's criticisms depends on the particular type of "fuel cell" under discussion, I would think. There are many architectures & designs, some which only create small amounts of hydrogen & oxygen from electrolyzing H2O which is burned almost immediately internally which have a very low likelihood of causing/starting an explosion or fire.
Sweet! Does it then use the electricity from the fuel cell to electrolyze more water? Or does it perhaps use it to run a fan, which in turn drives a windmill?
My UID? Did... did you just fall for what amounts to an injection attack?
I appreciate the horror of Alzheimer's as much as anyone who has higher-than-normal empathy, a good imagination, and no direct experience. So, no, I probably don't get it as viscerally as you do. But sixty years is a very long time. If I thought it likely I had sixty more years, and if the post below yours had not been made AC, I'd definitely take that bet on a cure -- or, more accurately, effective treatment and prevention of the syndrome's ill effects.
Amen. I landed a position on a research project developing a graphical programming language almost exactly thirty years ago. It was newer then, but still not really new. People were probably wanting executable flowcharts since at least the 1960s, if not earlier.
A lot has changed over the last thirty years, but nothing that addresses the fundamental issues with graphical flow-based programming. Sure, some products have enjoyed some success, but it's still a niche approach, destined to remain a niche approach.
Because there's clearly no chance of significant progress on Alzheimer's treatment, prevention, or reversal over the next SIXTY YEARS.
If I'd received a diagnosis like that in my teens, it might well have lent me some much-needed career focus. As it is, I sort of happened into a position where I was contributing to Alzheimer's research (in a very small way), and eventually drifted back out of it. With this kind of motivation, I might have pushed a lot harder, and stayed engaged.
Seriously, if I had to pick a terrible disease to contract sixty years down the road, Alzheimer's would be high on my list. It's high-profile, there's a huge amount of research being done, and there are lots of promising avenues for progress.
I'm sure the NSA is happy to see lots of people adopting popular systems that include NSA backdoors (explicit or implicit), and would rather not see lots of new systems that don't natively support NSA access.
However, I'm also sure that building a system that effectively blocks the NSA is a pretty tall order. You need algorithms that the NSA can't crack, and you need personnel that the NSA (and affiliated agencies) can't suborn.
I'm sure it'll be quite straightforward to develop a system that seems secure from NSA snooping. Something that provides actual security, rather than empty reassurance? That's a taller order.
The reasoning and facts behind this are a bit subtle, and certainly counterintuitive to those of us who've grown up in a world of classical behavior, but that makes them no less iron-clad. Believe me, if communication faster than light (or, equivalently, into the past) were possible through this avenue, we'd be using it already -- subject, of course, to Niven's law of time travel.
One terawatt-HOUR of energy per YEAR equals 11.4 megawatts of power. 11.4 megawatts per nothing, because hours and years are the same dimension, and they cancel.
If you generate 11.4 megawatts of power steadily for a year, you produce one terawatt-hour of energy.
If you divide 11.4 megawatts of power among 85,000 homes, each home gets 1342 watts of power. Over the course of a year, each home gets 11.8 megawatt-hours of energy.
Yes, terawatt-hours per year is a valid way to state average power. It's obfuscatory, though, because most people can't do a quick mental conversion based on the number of hours in a year. If the article had stated that one TWh is enough to supply 85,000 homes for a year, it would have been a coherent and perhaps useful statement -- but why not just carry out the rest of the calculation (1400 * 85000), and say that this has the potential to power almost 12 million homes?
Some quick Googling turns up US average household energy consumption of 6000 kWh, or 8900 kWh, or 14000 kWh, corresponding to average power consumption of 685 W, 1 kW, and 1.6 kW. If the semantics I'm trying to salvage from the summary are correct, it's claiming a figure of 1340 W.
(I don't claim to be a unit-analysis wizard, but I was stating fuel efficiency in inverse acres years before XKCD covered it...)
Is it really asking so much for a three-sentence summary to address "power" and "energy" correctly and consistently?
Any time someone talks about a power facility in terms of "terawatt-hours per year", they're either confused themselves, or they're trying to confuse you. (Or both.) If they're talking about "terawatt-hours of power", they're the ones who are confused.
Except that increasing tidal drag would actually cause the Moon to move away more quickly. Remember, the Earth rotates faster than the Moon orbits around it.
But yeah, other than being exactly wrong, you're exactly right.
No, in other words, they're being responsible and cautious in their claims.
Are you really clamoring for more press releases that trumpet a "breakthrough" or a "cure"? It seems to me that we get plenty of those already, and I, for one, am pretty sick of them.
One becquerel is one decay per second -- or, to put it another way, the activity of a quantity of radioactive material sufficient to produce one decay per second. While it may not be perfectly proper from a unit-analysis perspective, reporting quantities of radioactive material in becquerels is widely accepted, and quite unambiguous.
So, the original article, and my list of comparisons, are using Bq as a measure of activity -- from the potassium in one human body or all human bodies, from one kg of Ra, from all the radioactive gas released from TMI, and from all the devil's cocktail spewed from Chernobyl. And, of course, from the current Fukushima leak.
Although it is kind of an interesting idea to consider a computer where there is no distinction between mass storage and RAM, where RAM is rewritable but permanent.
That is an interesting idea. Maybe you could call it Multiple-Capability Storage, or Multics for short.
I'd like to shake the hand of whoever is behind this. I have to respect anyone who's willing to put serious effort and bucks into this kind of culture-jamming.
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Your assertion that autonomous vehicles will take over fails to take into account one of the major reasons we have such a large automotive industry - people like to drive. They like to buy new cars, repair old cars, and do stupid things in fast cars. At most, a car with auto-pilot would be a convenience feature for the daily commute, but so long as people get an adrenaline rush when they put the pedal to the floor, this will not change.
Indeed, and I wouldn't dream of preventing them from doing so -- as long as they aren't threatening my life while they do it.
I know there are lots of drivers who are far more skillful than me. (At least, I hope so; I have slow reflexes, I'm a bit more distractible than average, and I'm just really not that interested in high-performance driving.) But I also know there are lots of drivers who overestimate their own competence, not to mention the competence of others on the road. That's a recipe for disaster.
If so many people like to drive for recreation, I'd expect an increase in private tracks and roads where people can do just that, in the company of other competent and attentive drivers. I'd hope as a result that they'd stop doing fast stupid stuff on roads full of innocent bystanders.
Even if they don't stop that, though, a critical mass of autonomous and networked vehicles will drastically reduce the mayhem. If a maniac is blasting through at twice the speed limit, the network will be able to move everybody cooperatively out of the way. It'll even eliminate onlooker delays passing the wreckage after the maniac makes a mistake.
We'll soon reach a point where autonomous vehicles are orders of magnitude less likely than human-driven vehicles to have an accident. It won't matter, though; people would rather face a daily one-in-a-million chance of dying due to their own mistake than a daily one-in-a-billion chance of dying due to a machine failure.
Autonomous vehicles will still take over in the end. It's just that this particular rational motive to make it happen won't be contributing very much. So, it'll take longer than it should, and more people will die.
I think you've got this backwards.
Incandescent bulbs don't thrive in constant-switching environments because there's an inrush of current when the filament is cold. That's why most incandescent bulb failures happen right when you turn the light on. It's less of a problem if you run the bulb below its design voltage, but that drastically reduces efficiency.
LEDs have no corresponding issue. If you're very stupid about the way you build your power supply, that might fail (or even take out the LED), but I don't think that's an issue for traffic lights -- judging from the high-frequency flicker, most of them just run off rectified (and unfiltered) AC. That means they're turning on and off 60 or 120 times a second (50 or 100 in the UK), with no ill effects.
I was going to make a snarky comment about LEDs not using ballasts, but I see that some manufacturers are using that term for LED power-conditioning components. Seems confusing to me, but it's not my field.
Musk's criticisms depends on the particular type of "fuel cell" under discussion, I would think. There are many architectures & designs, some which only create small amounts of hydrogen & oxygen from electrolyzing H2O which is burned almost immediately internally which have a very low likelihood of causing/starting an explosion or fire.
Sweet! Does it then use the electricity from the fuel cell to electrolyze more water? Or does it perhaps use it to run a fan, which in turn drives a windmill?
You seem to have tunneled across from a neighboring thread.
My UID? Did... did you just fall for what amounts to an injection attack?
I appreciate the horror of Alzheimer's as much as anyone who has higher-than-normal empathy, a good imagination, and no direct experience. So, no, I probably don't get it as viscerally as you do. But sixty years is a very long time. If I thought it likely I had sixty more years, and if the post below yours had not been made AC, I'd definitely take that bet on a cure -- or, more accurately, effective treatment and prevention of the syndrome's ill effects.
Amen. I landed a position on a research project developing a graphical programming language almost exactly thirty years ago. It was newer then, but still not really new. People were probably wanting executable flowcharts since at least the 1960s, if not earlier.
A lot has changed over the last thirty years, but nothing that addresses the fundamental issues with graphical flow-based programming. Sure, some products have enjoyed some success, but it's still a niche approach, destined to remain a niche approach.
Because there's clearly no chance of significant progress on Alzheimer's treatment, prevention, or reversal over the next SIXTY YEARS.
If I'd received a diagnosis like that in my teens, it might well have lent me some much-needed career focus. As it is, I sort of happened into a position where I was contributing to Alzheimer's research (in a very small way), and eventually drifted back out of it. With this kind of motivation, I might have pushed a lot harder, and stayed engaged.
Seriously, if I had to pick a terrible disease to contract sixty years down the road, Alzheimer's would be high on my list. It's high-profile, there's a huge amount of research being done, and there are lots of promising avenues for progress.
Mightn't a primary of 5x Jovian mass radiate a significant amount of IR on its own? Reminds me of Trygve from A Deepness In The Sky...
I'm sure the NSA is happy to see lots of people adopting popular systems that include NSA backdoors (explicit or implicit), and would rather not see lots of new systems that don't natively support NSA access.
However, I'm also sure that building a system that effectively blocks the NSA is a pretty tall order. You need algorithms that the NSA can't crack, and you need personnel that the NSA (and affiliated agencies) can't suborn.
I'm sure it'll be quite straightforward to develop a system that seems secure from NSA snooping. Something that provides actual security, rather than empty reassurance? That's a taller order.
Not yours.
The reasoning and facts behind this are a bit subtle, and certainly counterintuitive to those of us who've grown up in a world of classical behavior, but that makes them no less iron-clad. Believe me, if communication faster than light (or, equivalently, into the past) were possible through this avenue, we'd be using it already -- subject, of course, to Niven's law of time travel.
Assembly is a crutch for people who are too weak-minded to remember opcode values and numeric addresses.
And I'll bet you've never implemented a single instruction in microcode.
It's called "dissipation as heat".
Gaah.
One terawatt-HOUR of energy per YEAR equals 11.4 megawatts of power. 11.4 megawatts per nothing, because hours and years are the same dimension, and they cancel.
If you generate 11.4 megawatts of power steadily for a year, you produce one terawatt-hour of energy.
If you divide 11.4 megawatts of power among 85,000 homes, each home gets 1342 watts of power. Over the course of a year, each home gets 11.8 megawatt-hours of energy.
Yes, terawatt-hours per year is a valid way to state average power. It's obfuscatory, though, because most people can't do a quick mental conversion based on the number of hours in a year. If the article had stated that one TWh is enough to supply 85,000 homes for a year, it would have been a coherent and perhaps useful statement -- but why not just carry out the rest of the calculation (1400 * 85000), and say that this has the potential to power almost 12 million homes?
Some quick Googling turns up US average household energy consumption of 6000 kWh, or 8900 kWh, or 14000 kWh, corresponding to average power consumption of 685 W, 1 kW, and 1.6 kW. If the semantics I'm trying to salvage from the summary are correct, it's claiming a figure of 1340 W.
(I don't claim to be a unit-analysis wizard, but I was stating fuel efficiency in inverse acres years before XKCD covered it...)
Is it really asking so much for a three-sentence summary to address "power" and "energy" correctly and consistently?
Any time someone talks about a power facility in terms of "terawatt-hours per year", they're either confused themselves, or they're trying to confuse you. (Or both.) If they're talking about "terawatt-hours of power", they're the ones who are confused.
Except that increasing tidal drag would actually cause the Moon to move away more quickly. Remember, the Earth rotates faster than the Moon orbits around it.
But yeah, other than being exactly wrong, you're exactly right.
That's like saying someone can get around faster in a wheelchair because they've broken their legs.
You might want to look up the record time for completing the Boston Marathon in a wheelchair vs. on foot.
No, in other words, they're being responsible and cautious in their claims.
Are you really clamoring for more press releases that trumpet a "breakthrough" or a "cure"? It seems to me that we get plenty of those already, and I, for one, am pretty sick of them.
No, I'm pretty sure it's the right measurement.
One becquerel is one decay per second -- or, to put it another way, the activity of a quantity of radioactive material sufficient to produce one decay per second. While it may not be perfectly proper from a unit-analysis perspective, reporting quantities of radioactive material in becquerels is widely accepted, and quite unambiguous.
So, the original article, and my list of comparisons, are using Bq as a measure of activity -- from the potassium in one human body or all human bodies, from one kg of Ra, from all the radioactive gas released from TMI, and from all the devil's cocktail spewed from Chernobyl. And, of course, from the current Fukushima leak.
So, have you got some pictures from all the times you helped clean up coal slurry spills?
...actually means nothing to most readers not in the field. So, some comparisons:
Radioactivity from potassium in an average human body: 4000 Bq.
Radioactivity from potassium in entire human population of Earth: ~30 trillion Bq.
Radioactivity from one kilogram of radium: 37 trillion Bq.
Radioactivity released during Three Mile Island event: 481 thousand trillion Bq.
Radioactivity released during Chernobyl event: 5.2 million trillion Bq.
I'm thinking not to panic just yet.
Although it is kind of an interesting idea to consider a computer where there is no distinction between mass storage and RAM, where RAM is rewritable but permanent.
That is an interesting idea. Maybe you could call it Multiple-Capability Storage, or Multics for short.
I'd like to shake the hand of whoever is behind this. I have to respect anyone who's willing to put serious effort and bucks into this kind of culture-jamming.
To be honest, I did check EntrezGene first to see whether there really is a SRSLY gene. Apparently not; all I got was SRSY, a little-boy-mouse gene.