Agreed. The people involved clearly never did an economics calculation in their lives. Or a physics calculation for that matter (see their whole "melting snow") thing. And some of the ideas they had were just dumb, like the whole piezo thing - "Yeah, let's have our road surface deflect to get piezoelectricity, thus making the cars work harder to overcome the deflection, burn more fuel and pollute more - it's brilliant!"
They didn't even start with the low-hanging fruit. I guess "Solar freaking sidewalks!" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. And I get that they live in the north, but they could at least plan on *starting* in a sunny, hot climate where snow isn't an issue.
I don't think the whole concept is inherently a bad idea. There are some things about it that absolutely are correct, such as that one can buy anti-slip / traction glass, that typical roads spend very little of their time shaded, that by combining road laying with solar panel laying you eliminate half of the installation costs (which for solar PV are now the majority of the cost), etc. There are even some potentially workable solutions to the snow problem, such as using periodically-placed fans to pressurize their rain drainage pipes/drainage holes during snowfall to create a mild air cushion over the surface, encouraging snow to drift to the sides (just not enough pressure to levitate cars!), and as a side benefit, facilitating cell cooling/higher efficiencies when run in reverse during the summer. Or one could use vibration in the panels when there's no cars present to move loose snow (and debris) to the side. Or god forbid, one could even make use of regular old snow plows to get rid of snow. But as a whole, the concept that they've made is just so half-baked and their operation so fly-by-night, it's just ridiculous.
Hey, at least they're technologically feasible. Anti-slip glass exists, LEDs exists, resistive heaters exist, solar cells exist, etc. The complaints with that one were always over the economics, in particular, their ridiculous snow-melting idea, which would take about a dollar at average US prices per square foot if you assume 100% efficiency to melt just a couple inches of snow (the crazy thing is, there are better snow-prevention/removal solutions that don't waste that much energy... but the people running the program didn't even take the time to do the simple energy requirements calculation for melting to realize that their particular solution is a non-starter)
This case is even more ridiculous because what they're claiming here isn't even technologically possible.
Or to give you a car analogy, just because internal combustion engines are used to drive cars does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon
Sure you can, if you run it in pulse-and-glide mode or use it as an intermittent generator, in a very light / streamlined vehicle. Even if you want to add on a requirement that it has to be run continuously, you could probably pull it off by going to extremes with your streamlining (going for a Cd of 0,1 or less and a cross section of under 0,5m... basically a little teardrop 1-man reclined capsule going at incredible speeds, thus quickly racking up those "miles" to compensate for the fast fuel consumption) and/or using an electrolysis cell to regenerate hydrogen fuel using whatever power your engine has in surplus (wasteful, but better than throwing away the surplus power from your full-throttle requirement for no purpose). Hmm, that's another thing one could do to game your challenge, one could mess with the fuel mix and the fuel-air ratio; some fuels or fuel progenitors are a lot denser than gasoline (more energy per gallon) - for example, using aluminum powder to generate hydrogen for the V8, a gallon of aluminum powder contains 2 1/2 times more energy than a gallon of gasoline, even with the losses in hydrogen generation it'll still leave you way ahead of the game. And there's all sorts of other possible ways one could tweak the engine, too, to reduce both its consumption (and correspondingly, power output) at full power. Including the easiest one, just tweak the throttle control so that full throttle is actually a very low power output. You could also get some small efficiency gains by sabotaging the pollution controls.
On which ones? (If you say "all", I'm going to hit my head on this desk, these things should all come up on the first hits on Google, as none of them are esoteric; I assume you know how to type words into a search bar?)
Oh, please, get over yourself. I was writing about rape's prevalence here on Slashdot earlier this week, in a thread on women in computing. Is that not often enough for you? Because I can write more about it if you'd like.
lies and debunked talking points
By all means, name a couple of things you think are "lies and debunked talking points"! I'm all ears!
Hope the paychecks are of a decent size.
But of course! You should see the porche I just bought with my dirty, dirty money. It's covered in solid gold! I mean, of course a person couldn't actually give a rat's arse about a famous person getting cheered on for running away from trial for rape and stirring up millions of agitators against the victims. No, you're too clever for me, nobody could give a rat's arse about that! It's all about the benjamins, baby!
The claims won't be processed at all. Artificial islands don't contribute to coastal waters / EEZ claims. Seriously, look it up.
From the sound of it, China is building new islands to place military outposts on in order to not violate a previous agreement that neither side would inhabit presently uninhabited islands.
I'm confused. Are you contesting any of what I wrote? Try out Google, it's your friend. If you still need help, just ask and I'll get you links.
Wikileaks' antics have gotten really ridiculous years. A particular lowpoint, I thought, was when they made a fake news website to post a fake column from a Wikileaks critic, ostensibly supporting Wikileaks, and promoted it with a link from a fake twitter account in the critic's name.
It wouldn't be such a big issue that Wikileaks is run by an overgrown child if they didn't wield such power. Just look to the Belarus situation as to how devastating misuse of their power can get.
It really bothers me because of the potential Wikileaks had, versus what has become of it.
Really? It's the realm of "fat internet neckbeard conspiracy theorists" that the successor to a massively deregulating treaty would be a massively deregulating treaty?
So you think that it's difficult to take crap seriously from an organization that talks about promoting transparency, but is itself highly secretive? Like, oh, let's just say, Wikileaks itself? You know, that famously litigous organization that makes all of its employees sign $20,000,000 NDAs, and which has repeatedly used blackmail, aka threats of information release unless entities pay them protection money (such as blackmailing aid agencies with threats of unredacted information that could get their members killed unless they pay up, even trying to extort $700k from Amnesty International) or give into political demands (usually of the form of get-out-of-jail-free cards, e.g., Assange's "insurance files")?
That's what I'm wondering. Who thought people working on the followup to the massively-deregulating GATS treaty were working to *increase* regulation on financial services?
Next up: a breaking, top secret release about how people in secret meetings at the NRA are discussing strategy about how to keep the US from passing stricter gun laws!
I'd say that the latter deserves the term "drone" more, and the former deserves the term "remote controlled airplane". Drone, to me, invokes "flying craft that does some mindless task repetitively, largely on its own, typically involving both free flight between locations and hover or slow movements at the destination.". "Remote controlled airplane" invokes... well, first, *airplane* (which a quadcopter is not), and beyond that, "with continual operation by an operator, with continuous motion (no hovering)"
Exactly - drone regulations should be for what's the worst case realistic crash scenario. You don't want it breaking a windshield or sending a kid to the hospital, so you can come up with some reasonable impact force / deceleration regulations. And it doesn't even mean that a safety chute is fundamentally required; most people mistakenly believe that helicopters that lose power plummet to the ground, but actually, the rotors autorotate (they're rotary wings, after all), and can (depending on the hardware) even potentially have a safe controlled landing on autorotation. You could also require minimum noise and lighting, at least while the craft is below a certain altitude, and require that they be either passive or on an independent power system.
There's one safety problem, though, that you have to be sure to address... free spinning rotors can be a serious safety hazard. Just from randomly ending up on RC forums I've ran into a number of posts of people who've injured themselves, sometimes rather seriously, on their RC craft's blades. Cowlings could help somewhat, but I don't know if that'd be enough (they're also extra weight and rob some energy). Still, I think it should be totally possible to engineer passively safe, yet still useful, drones.
But you're just looking at one set of scales. Imagine there are hundreds of scales similarly set up. Quite a few are balanced, in many cases too many additional weights have been added. Many many more are still heavily balanced one way to the point where they're touching the floor as well. But there's no one putting weights on the other side to bring balance.
This viewpoint is pretty much a precise definition of the viewpoint of MRAs. Yet if I dare call you an MRA, I'll be called a misandrist. Funny how that works.
Go on, what are these multitude of scales discriminating against men? Yeah, you're so put upon, that's why every president in history has been male, the overwhelming majority of CEOs and top executives, and on and on... clearly you're so put upon and discriminated against. And of course if I bother mentioning the fact that one in ten men admit to having raped and 99% of rapists are men (want to talk about a tipped scale) , why, clearly I'm a "bigoted neofascist mangina" who should be burned, as one Slashdot poster above put it.
MRA is a term with precise definitions - a person who espouses the principle that men are put upon in society and feminists are just trying to get "special rights". A misandrist is someone who hates men. What's your logic in equating anyone who mentions that a person is demonstrating the philosophy in the first part means that they're the second part?
That's a nice straw man. You know very well that my "tiny violin" comment was in regards to his "men have it so hard" stuff, not as justification for women-in-IT programs.
How am I "claiming that men have no legitimate qualms when it comes to gender equality" when in my very first post I wrote, "There are some issues that aren't "womens' issues", but more "equal rights issues" - for example, sex discrimination in hiring practices (just like some companies don't want to hire women for certain positions due to stereotypes or whatnot, the same holds true for hiring men for other positions)"?
[[Citation needed]]. According to DOJ rape statistics, 0,8% of rapes are female-female and 92% male-female. Are you saying that lesbians are only about 1% of the US population and all female-female rapes involve a victim who is a lesbian?
That's a combination of poorly phrasing on the part of Wikipedia and poor reading comprehension on your part. It say that 91% of *victims* are female. Please re-read.
Sorry, I know you wanted to make some "the fact that rape is incredibly common and almost exclusively done by men is some giant conspiracy against men" argument, but you're going to have to try harder than that.
Sorry, but when I hear a MRA whining about how bad men have it, it's just asking for violin.
And really? It's too much to ask for men to not rape? To the point that about one in ten men confesses in anonymous peer-reviewed surveys to having raped at least once, and a third of those to serial rape? It's really too much to ask for it not to be this absurdly common?
But, yes, you're right. Men have had it so good for so long (this is very debatable), that clearly they can never have any grievances about the state of society. Ever.
I'll stop playing my tiny violin when literally 99% of rapists are no longer men.
(Yes, even when men are the victims, the odds are still 40 to 1, according to federal crime statistics, that the rapist was a man... which eliminates the "men underreport out of embarrassment/shame" argument, as if men wouldn't be embarrassed/ashamed to report that they were raped by a man? As if it's somehow shameful for a straight man to be a recipient of unwanted sex with a woman but not shameful for him to be a recipient of unwanted anal/oral sex with another man, in homophobic US society?)
There are some issues that aren't "womens' issues", but more "equal rights issues" - for example, sex discrimination in hiring practices (just like some companies don't want to hire women for certain positions due to stereotypes or whatnot, the same holds true for hiring men for other positions). But there really are issues in society that are grossly imbalanced on which side has been dealt a losing hand, and which party is the dealer.
I know a couple trans women from Canada who use the phrase "tall woman with a laptop" as code for other trans women. Because apparently if you see a tall woman using a laptop in a public place, odds are abnormally high that she's trans.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. The people involved clearly never did an economics calculation in their lives. Or a physics calculation for that matter (see their whole "melting snow") thing. And some of the ideas they had were just dumb, like the whole piezo thing - "Yeah, let's have our road surface deflect to get piezoelectricity, thus making the cars work harder to overcome the deflection, burn more fuel and pollute more - it's brilliant!"
They didn't even start with the low-hanging fruit. I guess "Solar freaking sidewalks!" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. And I get that they live in the north, but they could at least plan on *starting* in a sunny, hot climate where snow isn't an issue.
I don't think the whole concept is inherently a bad idea. There are some things about it that absolutely are correct, such as that one can buy anti-slip / traction glass, that typical roads spend very little of their time shaded, that by combining road laying with solar panel laying you eliminate half of the installation costs (which for solar PV are now the majority of the cost), etc. There are even some potentially workable solutions to the snow problem, such as using periodically-placed fans to pressurize their rain drainage pipes/drainage holes during snowfall to create a mild air cushion over the surface, encouraging snow to drift to the sides (just not enough pressure to levitate cars!), and as a side benefit, facilitating cell cooling/higher efficiencies when run in reverse during the summer. Or one could use vibration in the panels when there's no cars present to move loose snow (and debris) to the side. Or god forbid, one could even make use of regular old snow plows to get rid of snow. But as a whole, the concept that they've made is just so half-baked and their operation so fly-by-night, it's just ridiculous.
Hey, at least they're technologically feasible. Anti-slip glass exists, LEDs exists, resistive heaters exist, solar cells exist, etc. The complaints with that one were always over the economics, in particular, their ridiculous snow-melting idea, which would take about a dollar at average US prices per square foot if you assume 100% efficiency to melt just a couple inches of snow (the crazy thing is, there are better snow-prevention/removal solutions that don't waste that much energy... but the people running the program didn't even take the time to do the simple energy requirements calculation for melting to realize that their particular solution is a non-starter)
This case is even more ridiculous because what they're claiming here isn't even technologically possible.
Sure you can, if you run it in pulse-and-glide mode or use it as an intermittent generator, in a very light / streamlined vehicle. Even if you want to add on a requirement that it has to be run continuously, you could probably pull it off by going to extremes with your streamlining (going for a Cd of 0,1 or less and a cross section of under 0,5m... basically a little teardrop 1-man reclined capsule going at incredible speeds, thus quickly racking up those "miles" to compensate for the fast fuel consumption) and/or using an electrolysis cell to regenerate hydrogen fuel using whatever power your engine has in surplus (wasteful, but better than throwing away the surplus power from your full-throttle requirement for no purpose). Hmm, that's another thing one could do to game your challenge, one could mess with the fuel mix and the fuel-air ratio; some fuels or fuel progenitors are a lot denser than gasoline (more energy per gallon) - for example, using aluminum powder to generate hydrogen for the V8, a gallon of aluminum powder contains 2 1/2 times more energy than a gallon of gasoline, even with the losses in hydrogen generation it'll still leave you way ahead of the game. And there's all sorts of other possible ways one could tweak the engine, too, to reduce both its consumption (and correspondingly, power output) at full power. Including the easiest one, just tweak the throttle control so that full throttle is actually a very low power output. You could also get some small efficiency gains by sabotaging the pollution controls.
On which ones? (If you say "all", I'm going to hit my head on this desk, these things should all come up on the first hits on Google, as none of them are esoteric; I assume you know how to type words into a search bar?)
What I find most notable about SpaceX delays is how short they are. They have an incredible turnaround time on scrubbed launches and fixes.
Now that would be an awesome idea for an egotistical billionaire - hire a choir to follow you around and literally sing your praises.
Oh, please, get over yourself. I was writing about rape's prevalence here on Slashdot earlier this week, in a thread on women in computing. Is that not often enough for you? Because I can write more about it if you'd like.
By all means, name a couple of things you think are "lies and debunked talking points"! I'm all ears!
But of course! You should see the porche I just bought with my dirty, dirty money. It's covered in solid gold! I mean, of course a person couldn't actually give a rat's arse about a famous person getting cheered on for running away from trial for rape and stirring up millions of agitators against the victims. No, you're too clever for me, nobody could give a rat's arse about that! It's all about the benjamins, baby!
The claims won't be processed at all. Artificial islands don't contribute to coastal waters / EEZ claims. Seriously, look it up.
From the sound of it, China is building new islands to place military outposts on in order to not violate a previous agreement that neither side would inhabit presently uninhabited islands.
I'm confused. Are you contesting any of what I wrote? Try out Google, it's your friend. If you still need help, just ask and I'll get you links.
Wikileaks' antics have gotten really ridiculous years. A particular lowpoint, I thought, was when they made a fake news website to post a fake column from a Wikileaks critic, ostensibly supporting Wikileaks, and promoted it with a link from a fake twitter account in the critic's name.
It wouldn't be such a big issue that Wikileaks is run by an overgrown child if they didn't wield such power. Just look to the Belarus situation as to how devastating misuse of their power can get.
It really bothers me because of the potential Wikileaks had, versus what has become of it.
Really? It's the realm of "fat internet neckbeard conspiracy theorists" that the successor to a massively deregulating treaty would be a massively deregulating treaty?
So you think that it's difficult to take crap seriously from an organization that talks about promoting transparency, but is itself highly secretive? Like, oh, let's just say, Wikileaks itself? You know, that famously litigous organization that makes all of its employees sign $20,000,000 NDAs, and which has repeatedly used blackmail, aka threats of information release unless entities pay them protection money (such as blackmailing aid agencies with threats of unredacted information that could get their members killed unless they pay up, even trying to extort $700k from Amnesty International) or give into political demands (usually of the form of get-out-of-jail-free cards, e.g., Assange's "insurance files")?
Come on, stop acting like Assange isn't the awesomeest awesome that ever awesomed; you know it's true.
Assange for Senate in 2016! This time, without allying with the neo-Nazis!
That's what I'm wondering. Who thought people working on the followup to the massively-deregulating GATS treaty were working to *increase* regulation on financial services?
Next up: a breaking, top secret release about how people in secret meetings at the NRA are discussing strategy about how to keep the US from passing stricter gun laws!
I'd say that the latter deserves the term "drone" more, and the former deserves the term "remote controlled airplane". Drone, to me, invokes "flying craft that does some mindless task repetitively, largely on its own, typically involving both free flight between locations and hover or slow movements at the destination.". "Remote controlled airplane" invokes... well, first, *airplane* (which a quadcopter is not), and beyond that, "with continual operation by an operator, with continuous motion (no hovering)"
Exactly - drone regulations should be for what's the worst case realistic crash scenario. You don't want it breaking a windshield or sending a kid to the hospital, so you can come up with some reasonable impact force / deceleration regulations. And it doesn't even mean that a safety chute is fundamentally required; most people mistakenly believe that helicopters that lose power plummet to the ground, but actually, the rotors autorotate (they're rotary wings, after all), and can (depending on the hardware) even potentially have a safe controlled landing on autorotation. You could also require minimum noise and lighting, at least while the craft is below a certain altitude, and require that they be either passive or on an independent power system.
There's one safety problem, though, that you have to be sure to address... free spinning rotors can be a serious safety hazard. Just from randomly ending up on RC forums I've ran into a number of posts of people who've injured themselves, sometimes rather seriously, on their RC craft's blades. Cowlings could help somewhat, but I don't know if that'd be enough (they're also extra weight and rob some energy). Still, I think it should be totally possible to engineer passively safe, yet still useful, drones.
This viewpoint is pretty much a precise definition of the viewpoint of MRAs. Yet if I dare call you an MRA, I'll be called a misandrist. Funny how that works.
Go on, what are these multitude of scales discriminating against men? Yeah, you're so put upon, that's why every president in history has been male, the overwhelming majority of CEOs and top executives, and on and on... clearly you're so put upon and discriminated against. And of course if I bother mentioning the fact that one in ten men admit to having raped and 99% of rapists are men (want to talk about a tipped scale) , why, clearly I'm a "bigoted neofascist mangina" who should be burned, as one Slashdot poster above put it.
MRA is a term with precise definitions - a person who espouses the principle that men are put upon in society and feminists are just trying to get "special rights". A misandrist is someone who hates men. What's your logic in equating anyone who mentions that a person is demonstrating the philosophy in the first part means that they're the second part?
That's a nice straw man. You know very well that my "tiny violin" comment was in regards to his "men have it so hard" stuff, not as justification for women-in-IT programs.
But I hope you had fun knocking it down!
How am I "claiming that men have no legitimate qualms when it comes to gender equality" when in my very first post I wrote, "There are some issues that aren't "womens' issues", but more "equal rights issues" - for example, sex discrimination in hiring practices (just like some companies don't want to hire women for certain positions due to stereotypes or whatnot, the same holds true for hiring men for other positions)"?
[[Citation needed]]. According to DOJ rape statistics, 0,8% of rapes are female-female and 92% male-female. Are you saying that lesbians are only about 1% of the US population and all female-female rapes involve a victim who is a lesbian?
That's a combination of poorly phrasing on the part of Wikipedia and poor reading comprehension on your part. It say that 91% of *victims* are female. Please re-read.
Sorry, I know you wanted to make some "the fact that rape is incredibly common and almost exclusively done by men is some giant conspiracy against men" argument, but you're going to have to try harder than that.
How is pointing out DOJ stats and peer-reviewed perpetration-rate data "sexism"?
Sorry, but when I hear a MRA whining about how bad men have it, it's just asking for violin.
And really? It's too much to ask for men to not rape? To the point that about one in ten men confesses in anonymous peer-reviewed surveys to having raped at least once, and a third of those to serial rape? It's really too much to ask for it not to be this absurdly common?
I'll stop playing my tiny violin when literally 99% of rapists are no longer men.
(Yes, even when men are the victims, the odds are still 40 to 1, according to federal crime statistics, that the rapist was a man... which eliminates the "men underreport out of embarrassment/shame" argument, as if men wouldn't be embarrassed/ashamed to report that they were raped by a man? As if it's somehow shameful for a straight man to be a recipient of unwanted sex with a woman but not shameful for him to be a recipient of unwanted anal/oral sex with another man, in homophobic US society?)
There are some issues that aren't "womens' issues", but more "equal rights issues" - for example, sex discrimination in hiring practices (just like some companies don't want to hire women for certain positions due to stereotypes or whatnot, the same holds true for hiring men for other positions). But there really are issues in society that are grossly imbalanced on which side has been dealt a losing hand, and which party is the dealer.
Some of the leading computer pioneers already have. ;) Willingly or not.
I know a couple trans women from Canada who use the phrase "tall woman with a laptop" as code for other trans women. Because apparently if you see a tall woman using a laptop in a public place, odds are abnormally high that she's trans. ;)