His argument was not "grounded" in the First Amendment. It was pathetically, desperately, incorrectly dragging in the First Amendment, then proceeding to misinterpret it to suit his own agenda.
This is the paramount problem with 'Net Neutrality'. They used the word Neutrality but its total bullshit. The net result is they forced carriers to absorb the cost of companies like Netflix.
Nobody "forced" the carriers to do anything. It's called "meeting customer demand", also called "running a successful business." Customers wanted more bandwidth. They were willing to pay for more bandwidth. The carriers offered more bandwidth. Customers paid the carriers for more bandwidth. This happened repeatedly, until there was enough bandwidth being paid for by customers that Netflix became a viable business.
And now, suddenly, ISPs think that isn't enough. That they should have the right to fuck with everybody, including you, to demand fees on top of fees on top of fees for a service they're already being paid for, because quarterly profits must continue to rise, no matter what, and not because the service will be better or, in fact, meet customer needs.
If you want real neutrality then everyone gets a bandwidth meter and they pay by the byte, just like electricity.
Bullshit. And no. Bandwidth is not "just like electricity." Bandwidth is nothing like electricity. Bandwidth is nothing like water. Bandwidth is the availability of some maximum data rate, and it costs the same to provide it empty as it does to provide it full. The number of bytes transmitted is totally irrelevant to the cost of providing the service. Therefore metering by the byte is nothing but a money-grab, and an incredibly greedy one at that.
If you want Neutrality then you best be ready to fuck over the content providers equally as much as you fuck over those just delivering said content.
Being neutral is not "fucking over" ISPs you asshole. It's forcing them to continue to behave the way they used to behave since the inception of the public Internet, before they decided they somehow deserved more money for doing the same fucking thing they've been doing this entire time, which is and always has been fabulously profitable. Forcing them, by the way, because if they get to do whatever the fuck they, want, they break the Internet. And fuck that, fuck them, and fuck you. The Internet is the most powerful, most useful, most effective communication mechanism ever devised, but only if it continues to be neutral.
And those pieces of shit at AT&T owe me and every other American $200 billion in back taxes for failing to meet their build-out commitments, which were and are enshrined in LAW.
A lot of the disadvantages of these go away if there is no air in the way. Could this be a reaction to the "Space Force" announcements?
Unlikely. Standard cartridge weapons work just fine in space. The propellant chemical includes its own oxidizer. If anything, conventional weapons work better, as they have an ever so slightly higher muzzle velocity and a much longer range due to a lack of air resistance.
Gas operated autoloading weapons might be somewhat prone to jamming, unless they're manufactured to fairly fine tolerances, since combustion gases can escape somewhat more quickly than normal due to a lack of external air pressure.
Depending on the alloys of which the gun is made, it might freeze up due to vacuum welding of the components. It would be necessary to use a vacuum-friendly grease to prevent accelerated wear during operation, too.
The fact is that a vehicle with a license plate was in a public place during specific times. You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy is such a public place.
Until this decade, I damn well did. Until the latter half of this decade, I damn well did. While it was possible to track me and everyone else in that public place sooner, it cost too much, so no one did. Now it's so cheap, any asshole can do it, and every asshole is doing it and that's not ok. I expect to be able to move around in a public place in relative anonymity, without being tracked by tens or hundreds or thousands of random jackoffs like you. And this is completely reasonable.
Brought to you by We Don't Want Them To Own Cars, part of the We Don't Want Them To Own Property project, in partnership with We Don't Want Them To Move Freely and We Want To Track Everything They Do as part of the Citizen Slavery Coalition.
By the time you hit the fifth bold faced word, it became evident that your tin foil hat is on too tight today.
From that point of view, Facebook isn't a newspaper, it's a tabloid.
These days I think that's overly generous. They're neither a newspaper nor a tabloid. They're a straight up publisher of fiction, like Penguin or HarperCollins. I don't think even the AIs are trying anymore.
Just invite one of your helicopter parents to join you on your next employee performance review.
Trust me, your manager will consider you to be a defacto millennial.
The guy is 60. His parents likely aren't alive anymore, or if they are, suffering dementia.
Beyond that, keeping current with technology, including fads, also helps.
The guy was in cloud sales. A "technology" so current, the hipsters haven't moved on yet. A "technology" so hypey and buzzwordy you could win a game of Bullshit Bingo by listening to this guy for 10 minutes. Being current was not the problem.
In this particular case, it was just the world coming full circle, to IBM. They've been selling people on other people's servers (theirs) since their inception. Cloud is tailor made for IBM. And this guy knew it, exploited it, and made the company millions in sales. They fired him because IBM has a policy of not rewarding successful employees. Nobody is ever supposed to hit that bonus level and make the company actually pay out. It's supposed to be aspirational, like winning the lottery, to make the proles slave away just a little bit harder. It's supposed to be the carrot dangling in front of the donkey. The donkey is not ever supposed to get the carrot. He might stop moving forward if he does.
IBM could actually weasel out of the age discrimination suit, if they were wiling to admit in writing their real company policy, which is to fire all high achievers regardless of age, because they don't want to pay those bonuses. IBM is just stupid enough to do it, but their lawyers will prevent it.
This guy was a "cloud sales star", not necessarily technologically adept, just good at talking.
Which should make this an open and shut case, and slap IBM with a huge fine. There is no question about whether or not he was good at some obscure, difficult technical job. He was a sales droid, selling suckers IBM shit they didn't want, and he was very very good at it. His bonuses were tied to how good he was at it, and he pulled in a whopping $20,000 bonus. He got that money as a direct result of the sales he closed. He probably booked tens of millions of dollars of business for IBM to get it.
This story is a posterchild for why Libertarians are living in a dream world. In a rational world, you don't fire your fucking star sales guy! He was making the company millions, and since the cloud is the sale that keeps on billing, it could snowball into billions over the course of the next decade or two. But IBM did, because rewarding a high performing employee is against company policy. Literally. That's how fucked up this world is, and that's why government regulations are both necessary and proper.
Do the math for, say, Germany. Each German uses about 7000 KWh per year. There are 83 million Germans. The Gigafactory can make 35 GWh of batteries per year. Do the math for say, 1 day backup (19 kWh per German).
Foolishness. You don't ever need 24 continuous hours of backup, and the more distributed, a.k.a. the more renewable your power harvesting is, the less you need. If you have 9 kW of solar panels on your roof (nameplate capacity), you need just 2 Tesla Powerwall 2s to have continuous backup power for a week of American power consumption, which is 40% higher than German consumption (33 kWh per day). For $13,500 installed, available now. That's a week with zero grid input, average. It could be months, depending on weather.
In any case, we (a global we) have years. We have decades to install more and more batteries, solar panels, and windmills, and there's every reason to believe it will happen. The current multibillion dollar investments in existing power generation is not going to go away overnight. Only Germany and Japan are foolish enough to shut down perfectly good nuclear reactors with a decade of operational life left, nevermind all the existing installed coal plants. The grid mix is going to change and is changing, but it will not be rapid, globally, no matter how dire IPCC predictions get.
2AU lol, that's still pretty close kiddo. Try Pluto, or deep space.
Why bother? Mars is 21,344 km in circumference. At an average walking pace of 5 km/h, if you walk 12 hours per day, it would require nearly a year to walk all the way around Mars. 355 days, to be exact. With no oceans in the way, this is physically possible. And that's without stopping to look at the rocks on the way. There's plenty to do at 2AU.
There are just five human artifacts beyond Pluto's orbit right now, and that number is unlikely to change appreciably in decades, if it even changes this century. (Lovely visualization, somewhat outdated, from NASA here.) Reactor design for deep space isn't relevant.
Yes it is extremely hard, as there is very little direct matter contact in space, so you cannot use convection or conduction as your means of temperature regulation.
Sure, but spaceborne reactors are mostly pointless. All of the interesting places in the solar system are balls of rock of various sizes, so conduction can be quite useful. Maybe somebody would like to build a super-high-power deep space probe, but probably only once. It's easier to build a smaller one and just keep building bigger antennas to pick up its signal the farther it gets. A deep space antenna array at, say, Mars-Sun L2 will probably be able to hear Voyager I long after its signal is indetectable on Earth, until Voyager's transmitter fails entirely.
Math is good. Engineering is good too. Radiative cooling is only necessary if you can't do conductive cooling with a large body of rock, which is available anywhere in the solar system that's actually interesting. Rerun the numbers for buried coolant loops.
How would you get something so big into space, and more importantly, how would you get whatever uses all the electricity into space?
Anybody building a reactor that large somewhere in space will be bootstrapping from something smaller and building it on the spot out of local resources, probably in order to drive more of what you need to make the parts for the big reactor (and other such large things).
There's been many papers about the smallest viable seed package required to bootstrap a space industry capable of in situ resource utilization. The seed can be almost arbitrarily small if you're willing to wait inordinately long amounts of time. If you want a functioning industry in, say, 20 years, you're going to need quite a few BFR launches worth of stuff.
If SpaceX's Starlink is as overengineered as it appears to be, it might be able to support subscription numbers high enough so that SpaceX will have enough income to pay for the development of quite a lot of those BFR payloads. If not, Elon Musk will have to hope that if he builds it, they will come, which may or may not happen.
You will need to somehow dump 2x the "net power" worth of heat into the surrounding environment. I'm sure it could be done but it would require a massive amount of radiators.
If you have any significant chunk of rock nearby, such as Earth's Moon, you run your coolant loops underground. Maintenance will be tricky, but there's far less piping to keep track of vs surface radiators. Likewise for Mars. The Moon can likely get away with solar panels for some time, but if there's ever to be any significant industry there, a nuclear reactor will be required (barring self-replicating robots, which are more heard of than seen).
You're lumping in nuclear with all the rest to mask it's actual availability factor, which is more like 98%. Far better than wind.
Unsourced numbers are unsourced.
Try the real numbers. Availability of reactors in the US has ranged from 91.8% to 92.4% for the last three years, and that's extraordinarily high. Of the 441 reactors in the world, besides the United States, only Romania managed a greater than 90% availability for all three years, and Romania has just 2 reactors. Finland and Hungary managed greater than 90% for two of the last three years, by the slimmest of margins. The vast majority of reactors in the world are less than 90% available, and dozens of reactors around the world average less than 80% per year. One country in the entire world managed an average availability of over 98% in 2017, and that was Slovenia, which has exactly 1 reactor.
Nuclear availability factor for 1 year can be 98%, but for a 3 year period, it is basically never that high. The world's fleet of reactors is designed for refueling intervals of 12, 18, or 24 months. It takes an average of 35 days to refuel a current reactor in the United States. 91.8% availability is best case for annual refueling. 96% availability is best case for biannual refueling. Basically no single reactor can operate three years without refueling, so for any individual commercial reactor, 98% availability over a 3 year period is impossible.
2 12 year old characters going at it is not adult content. It's illegal.
Two 12 year old fictional characters going at it is illegal in the United States only if it's obscene, where obscenity in this case must meet the Miller test. See Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002), which is considered at the appellate level to be the controlling case in litigation involving the PROTECT Act. However, the Supreme Court has ruled that such images are legal if viewable only over the Internet. Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court unanimously ruled that anti-indecency provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. The court's decision was nuanced in that it specifically distinguished between the Internet being a fundamentally "pull" technology (you have to request any content to receive it) vs. a "push" technology like radio or television (any content may appear on the channel to which you are tuned without your request). The conviction of Dwight Whorley was not appealed to the Supreme Court, so the decision of the Fourth Circuit has not been tested.
That is why where teen get sex ed, they have consistently LESS unwanted pregnancy, and abstinence policy lead to MORE pregnancy. This is simply plain statistic and whether you are religious or not cannot deny, you can refuse them, pretend they do not exists, but we can all see them for what thy are.
It is plain truth, but "we" are not seeing them for what they are. We fail to realize that this outcome is intentional.
Whole swaths of religious sects in the United States take the phrase "be fruitful and multiply" as literally as possible. Some politicians in the deep South pay lip service to the idea that teen pregnancy is bad, but most just ignore it. Their constituents don't believe it's some terrible thing to be prevented at all costs. Quite the opposite. I have seen the argument made against porn that it reduces the amount of sex young people are having, and this is bad and should be prevented by banning porn. Abstinence only "education" is so perfectly designed to exploit the teen tendency to try the forbidden that if my tin foil hat was just a little tighter, I'd call it a conspiracy.
Why can't we get rid of all plastic bottles and make beverage makers use aluminum or glass exclusively?
We can't force a switch to glass. It's breakable, which would increase loss rates, but most importantly, it's heavy. Glass containers safe enough to be used in the home have a minimum thickness which results in containers considerably heavier than any other container. Yes it's possible to make a very thin glass container (a la Christmas ornaments), but any little thing breaks them, and then you have splinters of glass in your food. Bad news.
Aluminum, on the other hand, could be the way to go. It's nonreactive, since the aluminum oxide skin it develops is quite tough, it's not breakable, it can be made very thin while retaining integrity, and it's very easily recyclable. The only utility disadvantage it has over plastic is it's not squeezable. If I was in the aluminum business, I'd be coming up with new package designs and trying to sell them to food companies of all kinds, not just beverage companies.
Actually, I'd say reconditioning consumers to accept water in an aluminum can would be harder than getting them to accept, say, olives or yogurt or mayonnaise in an aluminum can.
Most areas do not make financial sense to put up solar panels, there are only 12 states where panels out perform the S&P500, half the states can't out perform US treasury bonds over 30 years.
Did you perform that calculation when you bought your refrigerator? Because that's what you're advocating. You're not going to not use electricity, any more than you're not going to use some of that electricity to preserve food. Solar panels are a quality of life investment, not a financial investment.
Solar panels make sense now for rural areas, where the power company makes the slimmest investment they possibly can, and weather happens. They make sense in a great many suburban areas too, after 100 years of tree growth and total lack of investment by power companies in burying their lines. Remember the Great Northeast Blackout? Solar panels. Solar panels and batteries, especially now that the Tesla Powerwall 2 is available. No more finicky fiddling about with lead acid battery banks that require so much coddling they're practically a hobby in their own right. Unless my house actually gets run right over by the tornado, my power should stay on. Is this 1918 or is it 2018? And since power companies have done the bare minimum, rather than get rid of all those unsightly poles, it's on us to solve the problem ourselves.
It's an investment all right. Just not the kind you're thinking of.
’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable."
That forever unreachable poetic nonsense always bothers me. Given even an optimistic lifespan for our species, there are trillions and trillions of stars we can actually see that are forever unreachable. A good many of them aren't actually there anymore. Even stars have finite lifespans. A billion novas have already happened that we haven't even seen yet. It doesn't require any cosmological horizon for most of the universe to be forever inaccessible to humans.
A generation ship is perhaps a theoretical exception, but it will take a big chunk of Earth's resources and is unlikely to reach its destination given all the things that could go wrong with the equipment or crew on the way which could doom the ship.
It's fairly obvious that no one would be building a generation ship until they're exploiting a big chunk of the solar system's resources, making the chunk of Earth's resources comparatively small. And that also solves the equipment and crew problems by default. Any civilization successfully exploiting a solar system's resources has encountered and solved those problems pretty much by definition. If they hadn't, they wouldn't be successful.
A civilization spanning a solar system can build a generation ship. A planet-bound civilization can not. There are no shortcuts. If the Earth's space programs have taught us anything, they've taught us that you don't understand it until you build it, it fails catastrophically, and you build it again differently. That's how architecture happened too.
I'll go so far as to say that a civilization spanning a solar system will inevitably build a generation ship (assuming no clever physics happen). It's The Next Thing. A civilization successfully exploiting the resources of its solar system is gigantic in terms of sheer numbers and fantastically wealthy compared to a planet-bound civilization. A generation ship becomes the next Antarctic Outpost project. Doesn't really make sense (ignoring the military reasons for the seismometers in Antarctica), but it's something to do. The story of human history can frequently be summed up as: doesn't really make sense, but it's something to do.
An interesting architectural note: "GPUs, not CPUs, now power most of supercomputers' speed."
Who is this beeftopia guy who is so monumentally ignorant of the history of supercomputing? That's not an "interesting architectural note". That's supercomputing since the very beginning of supercomputing. Supercomputers are supercomputers specifically because they had vector processors, before "GPU" was even a recognizable acronym. When PCs had nothing but framebuffers, supercomputers had vector processors. That was the point of building them. Once the GPU was invented, utilizing them to build a supercomputer was an inevitability.
History tends to reward the Musks and Jobs of this world who are very smart in their own right but also very adept at self promotion.
Very adept at self promotion? Have you seen Elon Musk speak? He's a nerd. The quintessential nerd, with a head full of facts and figures and very poor command of his tongue. People lionize him and promote him, then blame him for self promoting, when in fact he's absolutely terrible at actually promoting himself. He talks about ideas and business activities and people call that self promotion. There's very little mention of himself, except when the interviewer inevitably asks, "Why are you doing this?" Then he answers with his, "I think humanity should be a multiplanetary species." That's about the only time he says "I think". The rest of the time, he's busy telling you what his companies are doing, and people somehow interpret that as self promotion.
As opposed to what a Kardashian is saying, which is somehow.... fine? Humans baffle me.
On its surface you can see how an amazing story could be told but it would have needed to be told from Anakin's perspective. Instead we see the story from Obi Wan's perspective and isn't at all charitable to the person whose arc we really needed to sympathize with: Anakin.
And this right here is why copyright as it exists today is such a travesty. Those movies could be excellent, but they can't be made because they're obviously derivative works. They'd also overshadow Disney's version of the franchise so severely that Disney's massive expense in buying Lucas Film would probably end up an unrecoverable loss. (If it isn't already.)
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His argument was grounded in the First Amendment.
His argument was not "grounded" in the First Amendment. It was pathetically, desperately, incorrectly dragging in the First Amendment, then proceeding to misinterpret it to suit his own agenda.
This is the paramount problem with 'Net Neutrality'. They used the word Neutrality but its total bullshit. The net result is they forced carriers to absorb the cost of companies like Netflix.
Nobody "forced" the carriers to do anything. It's called "meeting customer demand", also called "running a successful business." Customers wanted more bandwidth. They were willing to pay for more bandwidth. The carriers offered more bandwidth. Customers paid the carriers for more bandwidth. This happened repeatedly, until there was enough bandwidth being paid for by customers that Netflix became a viable business.
And now, suddenly, ISPs think that isn't enough. That they should have the right to fuck with everybody, including you, to demand fees on top of fees on top of fees for a service they're already being paid for, because quarterly profits must continue to rise, no matter what, and not because the service will be better or, in fact, meet customer needs.
If you want real neutrality then everyone gets a bandwidth meter and they pay by the byte, just like electricity.
Bullshit. And no. Bandwidth is not "just like electricity." Bandwidth is nothing like electricity. Bandwidth is nothing like water. Bandwidth is the availability of some maximum data rate, and it costs the same to provide it empty as it does to provide it full. The number of bytes transmitted is totally irrelevant to the cost of providing the service. Therefore metering by the byte is nothing but a money-grab, and an incredibly greedy one at that.
If you want Neutrality then you best be ready to fuck over the content providers equally as much as you fuck over those just delivering said content.
Being neutral is not "fucking over" ISPs you asshole. It's forcing them to continue to behave the way they used to behave since the inception of the public Internet, before they decided they somehow deserved more money for doing the same fucking thing they've been doing this entire time, which is and always has been fabulously profitable. Forcing them, by the way, because if they get to do whatever the fuck they, want, they break the Internet. And fuck that, fuck them, and fuck you. The Internet is the most powerful, most useful, most effective communication mechanism ever devised, but only if it continues to be neutral.
And those pieces of shit at AT&T owe me and every other American $200 billion in back taxes for failing to meet their build-out commitments, which were and are enshrined in LAW.
A lot of the disadvantages of these go away if there is no air in the way. Could this be a reaction to the "Space Force" announcements?
Unlikely. Standard cartridge weapons work just fine in space. The propellant chemical includes its own oxidizer. If anything, conventional weapons work better, as they have an ever so slightly higher muzzle velocity and a much longer range due to a lack of air resistance.
Gas operated autoloading weapons might be somewhat prone to jamming, unless they're manufactured to fairly fine tolerances, since combustion gases can escape somewhat more quickly than normal due to a lack of external air pressure.
Depending on the alloys of which the gun is made, it might freeze up due to vacuum welding of the components. It would be necessary to use a vacuum-friendly grease to prevent accelerated wear during operation, too.
Other than that, guns work fine in space.
The fact is that a vehicle with a license plate was in a public place during specific times. You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy is such a public place.
Until this decade, I damn well did. Until the latter half of this decade, I damn well did. While it was possible to track me and everyone else in that public place sooner, it cost too much, so no one did. Now it's so cheap, any asshole can do it, and every asshole is doing it and that's not ok. I expect to be able to move around in a public place in relative anonymity, without being tracked by tens or hundreds or thousands of random jackoffs like you. And this is completely reasonable.
Brought to you by We Don't Want Them To Own Cars, part of the We Don't Want Them To Own Property project, in partnership with We Don't Want Them To Move Freely and We Want To Track Everything They Do as part of the Citizen Slavery Coalition.
By the time you hit the fifth bold faced word, it became evident that your tin foil hat is on too tight today.
They already track everything you do.
From that point of view, Facebook isn't a newspaper, it's a tabloid.
These days I think that's overly generous. They're neither a newspaper nor a tabloid. They're a straight up publisher of fiction, like Penguin or HarperCollins. I don't think even the AIs are trying anymore.
Just invite one of your helicopter parents to join you on your next employee performance review.
Trust me, your manager will consider you to be a defacto millennial.
The guy is 60. His parents likely aren't alive anymore, or if they are, suffering dementia.
Beyond that, keeping current with technology, including fads, also helps.
The guy was in cloud sales. A "technology" so current, the hipsters haven't moved on yet. A "technology" so hypey and buzzwordy you could win a game of Bullshit Bingo by listening to this guy for 10 minutes. Being current was not the problem.
In this particular case, it was just the world coming full circle, to IBM. They've been selling people on other people's servers (theirs) since their inception. Cloud is tailor made for IBM. And this guy knew it, exploited it, and made the company millions in sales. They fired him because IBM has a policy of not rewarding successful employees. Nobody is ever supposed to hit that bonus level and make the company actually pay out. It's supposed to be aspirational, like winning the lottery, to make the proles slave away just a little bit harder. It's supposed to be the carrot dangling in front of the donkey. The donkey is not ever supposed to get the carrot. He might stop moving forward if he does.
IBM could actually weasel out of the age discrimination suit, if they were wiling to admit in writing their real company policy, which is to fire all high achievers regardless of age, because they don't want to pay those bonuses. IBM is just stupid enough to do it, but their lawyers will prevent it.
This guy was a "cloud sales star", not necessarily technologically adept, just good at talking.
Which should make this an open and shut case, and slap IBM with a huge fine. There is no question about whether or not he was good at some obscure, difficult technical job. He was a sales droid, selling suckers IBM shit they didn't want, and he was very very good at it. His bonuses were tied to how good he was at it, and he pulled in a whopping $20,000 bonus. He got that money as a direct result of the sales he closed. He probably booked tens of millions of dollars of business for IBM to get it.
This story is a posterchild for why Libertarians are living in a dream world. In a rational world, you don't fire your fucking star sales guy! He was making the company millions, and since the cloud is the sale that keeps on billing, it could snowball into billions over the course of the next decade or two. But IBM did, because rewarding a high performing employee is against company policy. Literally. That's how fucked up this world is, and that's why government regulations are both necessary and proper.
Do the math for, say, Germany. Each German uses about 7000 KWh per year. There are 83 million Germans. The Gigafactory can make 35 GWh of batteries per year. Do the math for say, 1 day backup (19 kWh per German).
Foolishness. You don't ever need 24 continuous hours of backup, and the more distributed, a.k.a. the more renewable your power harvesting is, the less you need. If you have 9 kW of solar panels on your roof (nameplate capacity), you need just 2 Tesla Powerwall 2s to have continuous backup power for a week of American power consumption, which is 40% higher than German consumption (33 kWh per day). For $13,500 installed, available now. That's a week with zero grid input, average. It could be months, depending on weather.
In any case, we (a global we) have years. We have decades to install more and more batteries, solar panels, and windmills, and there's every reason to believe it will happen. The current multibillion dollar investments in existing power generation is not going to go away overnight. Only Germany and Japan are foolish enough to shut down perfectly good nuclear reactors with a decade of operational life left, nevermind all the existing installed coal plants. The grid mix is going to change and is changing, but it will not be rapid, globally, no matter how dire IPCC predictions get.
2AU lol, that's still pretty close kiddo. Try Pluto, or deep space.
Why bother? Mars is 21,344 km in circumference. At an average walking pace of 5 km/h, if you walk 12 hours per day, it would require nearly a year to walk all the way around Mars. 355 days, to be exact. With no oceans in the way, this is physically possible. And that's without stopping to look at the rocks on the way. There's plenty to do at 2AU.
There are just five human artifacts beyond Pluto's orbit right now, and that number is unlikely to change appreciably in decades, if it even changes this century. (Lovely visualization, somewhat outdated, from NASA here.) Reactor design for deep space isn't relevant.
Yes it is extremely hard, as there is very little direct matter contact in space, so you cannot use convection or conduction as your means of temperature regulation.
Sure, but spaceborne reactors are mostly pointless. All of the interesting places in the solar system are balls of rock of various sizes, so conduction can be quite useful. Maybe somebody would like to build a super-high-power deep space probe, but probably only once. It's easier to build a smaller one and just keep building bigger antennas to pick up its signal the farther it gets. A deep space antenna array at, say, Mars-Sun L2 will probably be able to hear Voyager I long after its signal is indetectable on Earth, until Voyager's transmitter fails entirely.
Math is good. Engineering is good too. Radiative cooling is only necessary if you can't do conductive cooling with a large body of rock, which is available anywhere in the solar system that's actually interesting. Rerun the numbers for buried coolant loops.
How would you get something so big into space, and more importantly, how would you get whatever uses all the electricity into space?
Anybody building a reactor that large somewhere in space will be bootstrapping from something smaller and building it on the spot out of local resources, probably in order to drive more of what you need to make the parts for the big reactor (and other such large things).
There's been many papers about the smallest viable seed package required to bootstrap a space industry capable of in situ resource utilization. The seed can be almost arbitrarily small if you're willing to wait inordinately long amounts of time. If you want a functioning industry in, say, 20 years, you're going to need quite a few BFR launches worth of stuff.
If SpaceX's Starlink is as overengineered as it appears to be, it might be able to support subscription numbers high enough so that SpaceX will have enough income to pay for the development of quite a lot of those BFR payloads. If not, Elon Musk will have to hope that if he builds it, they will come, which may or may not happen.
You will need to somehow dump 2x the "net power" worth of heat into the surrounding environment. I'm sure it could be done but it would require a massive amount of radiators.
If you have any significant chunk of rock nearby, such as Earth's Moon, you run your coolant loops underground. Maintenance will be tricky, but there's far less piping to keep track of vs surface radiators. Likewise for Mars. The Moon can likely get away with solar panels for some time, but if there's ever to be any significant industry there, a nuclear reactor will be required (barring self-replicating robots, which are more heard of than seen).
You're lumping in nuclear with all the rest to mask it's actual availability factor, which is more like 98%. Far better than wind.
Unsourced numbers are unsourced.
Try the real numbers. Availability of reactors in the US has ranged from 91.8% to 92.4% for the last three years, and that's extraordinarily high. Of the 441 reactors in the world, besides the United States, only Romania managed a greater than 90% availability for all three years, and Romania has just 2 reactors. Finland and Hungary managed greater than 90% for two of the last three years, by the slimmest of margins. The vast majority of reactors in the world are less than 90% available, and dozens of reactors around the world average less than 80% per year. One country in the entire world managed an average availability of over 98% in 2017, and that was Slovenia, which has exactly 1 reactor.
Nuclear availability factor for 1 year can be 98%, but for a 3 year period, it is basically never that high. The world's fleet of reactors is designed for refueling intervals of 12, 18, or 24 months. It takes an average of 35 days to refuel a current reactor in the United States. 91.8% availability is best case for annual refueling. 96% availability is best case for biannual refueling. Basically no single reactor can operate three years without refueling, so for any individual commercial reactor, 98% availability over a 3 year period is impossible.
2 12 year old characters going at it is not adult content. It's illegal.
Two 12 year old fictional characters going at it is illegal in the United States only if it's obscene, where obscenity in this case must meet the Miller test. See Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002), which is considered at the appellate level to be the controlling case in litigation involving the PROTECT Act. However, the Supreme Court has ruled that such images are legal if viewable only over the Internet. Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court unanimously ruled that anti-indecency provisions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. The court's decision was nuanced in that it specifically distinguished between the Internet being a fundamentally "pull" technology (you have to request any content to receive it) vs. a "push" technology like radio or television (any content may appear on the channel to which you are tuned without your request). The conviction of Dwight Whorley was not appealed to the Supreme Court, so the decision of the Fourth Circuit has not been tested.
That is why where teen get sex ed, they have consistently LESS unwanted pregnancy, and abstinence policy lead to MORE pregnancy. This is simply plain statistic and whether you are religious or not cannot deny, you can refuse them, pretend they do not exists, but we can all see them for what thy are.
It is plain truth, but "we" are not seeing them for what they are. We fail to realize that this outcome is intentional.
Whole swaths of religious sects in the United States take the phrase "be fruitful and multiply" as literally as possible. Some politicians in the deep South pay lip service to the idea that teen pregnancy is bad, but most just ignore it. Their constituents don't believe it's some terrible thing to be prevented at all costs. Quite the opposite. I have seen the argument made against porn that it reduces the amount of sex young people are having, and this is bad and should be prevented by banning porn. Abstinence only "education" is so perfectly designed to exploit the teen tendency to try the forbidden that if my tin foil hat was just a little tighter, I'd call it a conspiracy.
Where can I get 277.8KWh for $3? Can I see that study? Please?
One of these sitting in the sun for several hundred years should do the trick.
I did blow the budget by 20%, but you know how it goes for these big energy projects.
Why can't we get rid of all plastic bottles and make beverage makers use aluminum or glass exclusively?
We can't force a switch to glass. It's breakable, which would increase loss rates, but most importantly, it's heavy. Glass containers safe enough to be used in the home have a minimum thickness which results in containers considerably heavier than any other container. Yes it's possible to make a very thin glass container (a la Christmas ornaments), but any little thing breaks them, and then you have splinters of glass in your food. Bad news.
Aluminum, on the other hand, could be the way to go. It's nonreactive, since the aluminum oxide skin it develops is quite tough, it's not breakable, it can be made very thin while retaining integrity, and it's very easily recyclable. The only utility disadvantage it has over plastic is it's not squeezable. If I was in the aluminum business, I'd be coming up with new package designs and trying to sell them to food companies of all kinds, not just beverage companies.
Actually, I'd say reconditioning consumers to accept water in an aluminum can would be harder than getting them to accept, say, olives or yogurt or mayonnaise in an aluminum can.
Most areas do not make financial sense to put up solar panels, there are only 12 states where panels out perform the S&P500, half the states can't out perform US treasury bonds over 30 years.
Did you perform that calculation when you bought your refrigerator? Because that's what you're advocating. You're not going to not use electricity, any more than you're not going to use some of that electricity to preserve food. Solar panels are a quality of life investment, not a financial investment.
Solar panels make sense now for rural areas, where the power company makes the slimmest investment they possibly can, and weather happens. They make sense in a great many suburban areas too, after 100 years of tree growth and total lack of investment by power companies in burying their lines. Remember the Great Northeast Blackout? Solar panels. Solar panels and batteries, especially now that the Tesla Powerwall 2 is available. No more finicky fiddling about with lead acid battery banks that require so much coddling they're practically a hobby in their own right. Unless my house actually gets run right over by the tornado, my power should stay on. Is this 1918 or is it 2018? And since power companies have done the bare minimum, rather than get rid of all those unsightly poles, it's on us to solve the problem ourselves.
It's an investment all right. Just not the kind you're thinking of.
’Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable."
That forever unreachable poetic nonsense always bothers me. Given even an optimistic lifespan for our species, there are trillions and trillions of stars we can actually see that are forever unreachable. A good many of them aren't actually there anymore. Even stars have finite lifespans. A billion novas have already happened that we haven't even seen yet. It doesn't require any cosmological horizon for most of the universe to be forever inaccessible to humans.
A generation ship is perhaps a theoretical exception, but it will take a big chunk of Earth's resources and is unlikely to reach its destination given all the things that could go wrong with the equipment or crew on the way which could doom the ship.
It's fairly obvious that no one would be building a generation ship until they're exploiting a big chunk of the solar system's resources, making the chunk of Earth's resources comparatively small. And that also solves the equipment and crew problems by default. Any civilization successfully exploiting a solar system's resources has encountered and solved those problems pretty much by definition. If they hadn't, they wouldn't be successful.
A civilization spanning a solar system can build a generation ship. A planet-bound civilization can not. There are no shortcuts. If the Earth's space programs have taught us anything, they've taught us that you don't understand it until you build it, it fails catastrophically, and you build it again differently. That's how architecture happened too.
I'll go so far as to say that a civilization spanning a solar system will inevitably build a generation ship (assuming no clever physics happen). It's The Next Thing. A civilization successfully exploiting the resources of its solar system is gigantic in terms of sheer numbers and fantastically wealthy compared to a planet-bound civilization. A generation ship becomes the next Antarctic Outpost project. Doesn't really make sense (ignoring the military reasons for the seismometers in Antarctica), but it's something to do. The story of human history can frequently be summed up as: doesn't really make sense, but it's something to do.
If an Asteroid decides to come this way then we can't do much about it.
If an asteroid decides to come this way, we're not alone in the universe.
Never anthropomorphize asteroids. They hate that.
An interesting architectural note: "GPUs, not CPUs, now power most of supercomputers' speed."
Who is this beeftopia guy who is so monumentally ignorant of the history of supercomputing? That's not an "interesting architectural note". That's supercomputing since the very beginning of supercomputing. Supercomputers are supercomputers specifically because they had vector processors, before "GPU" was even a recognizable acronym. When PCs had nothing but framebuffers, supercomputers had vector processors. That was the point of building them. Once the GPU was invented, utilizing them to build a supercomputer was an inevitability.
And get off my lawn!
History tends to reward the Musks and Jobs of this world who are very smart in their own right but also very adept at self promotion.
Very adept at self promotion? Have you seen Elon Musk speak? He's a nerd. The quintessential nerd, with a head full of facts and figures and very poor command of his tongue. People lionize him and promote him, then blame him for self promoting, when in fact he's absolutely terrible at actually promoting himself. He talks about ideas and business activities and people call that self promotion. There's very little mention of himself, except when the interviewer inevitably asks, "Why are you doing this?" Then he answers with his, "I think humanity should be a multiplanetary species." That's about the only time he says "I think". The rest of the time, he's busy telling you what his companies are doing, and people somehow interpret that as self promotion.
As opposed to what a Kardashian is saying, which is somehow.... fine? Humans baffle me.
On its surface you can see how an amazing story could be told but it would have needed to be told from Anakin's perspective. Instead we see the story from Obi Wan's perspective and isn't at all charitable to the person whose arc we really needed to sympathize with: Anakin.
And this right here is why copyright as it exists today is such a travesty. Those movies could be excellent, but they can't be made because they're obviously derivative works. They'd also overshadow Disney's version of the franchise so severely that Disney's massive expense in buying Lucas Film would probably end up an unrecoverable loss. (If it isn't already.)