But the regional dean of Northeastern University-Silicon Valley has the glummest prediction of all. "If I were to look at a crystal ball, I don't think the world's going to need as many coders after 2020. Ninety percent of coding is taking some business specs and translating them into computer logic. That's really ripe for machine learning and low-end AI."
Sounds like a fantastic opportunity to get rich—fleecing poor bastards who actually believe this dreck. Ninety percent of coding is indeed figuring out how to wedge some business wonk's hairbrained idea into the machine, but does this clown have any idea how broad a phrase "business specs" is? That's everything. I mean e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
"Make my MRI machine work." Business spec. "Make my combine harvester work." Business spec. "Make my search engine work." Business spec. "Make my toy robot work." Business spec. "Present as many goddamned ad impressions as physically possible." Business spec. He's trying to claim that do-what-I-mean-not-what-I-say computers are just around the corner, readily (and cheaply) available. HA. No. You might, MIGHT be able to train a neural net to do a piece of one of those tasks. All of them? And all parts? Not even close. Not in three years.
I'm sure nVidia's new Titan Xp is a marvelous thing, with its dedicated tensor accelerator hardware, but it's not do-what-I-mean hardware. It was just released last month, which means nVidia's next card is a year away. Does anybody think it's going to be do-what-I-mean hardware? No. How about the generation after that? Maybe another node shrink? Still no. How about three generations from now? If historical Titan benchmarks are anything to go by, it'll be twice as fast as a Titan Xp. It takes nVidia about 36 months to double performance. Is it going to be able to do-what-you-mean? Mmm, no.
The world is going to need just as many coders in three years as it does now. It will probably need more. The coming wave of automation is not going to be self-programming, but it is coming. Somebody is going to have to write all that code. And baby all of those neural nets.
Stocking is a drag for retail. At high-volume stores, it's a difficult job, so turnover is high. Lots of money is wasted on training, and retaining skilled workers is difficult since minimum wage is typical; since worker quality varies so much, and there are usually several who don't show up for work, time taken to stock varies significantly, putting a damper on the effectiveness of JIT warehousing. Stockers at my local Walmart are almost all immigrants who don't speak English, so I don't even bother asking them questions; VPS will make this moot soon, but point is, they don't serve much secondary function and could be safely automated.
A whole list of reasons why retail groceries are going to shrink dramatically, and soon. Nobody is going to pay people to piddle about with shelf grooming and manual stocking when a lights-out warehouse managed by robots can pick you a squeeze bottle of ketchup, chuck it in a box, and have it delivered to your door by a drone an hour later. Free delivery with Amazon Prime! Make no mistake, they are working hard on making exactly that happen.
The end game is a robot forklift unloading a self-driving semi on the dock, which is easy because the same model of robot forklift loaded the truck at the factory. Robot forklift plunks pallets down one by one in a row of specific locations, equipped with robotic arms with machine vision that can cut off the shrink wrap and pull each bulk box from the pallet, easily identifiable by the RFID chip in the label, and plunk it onto the appropriate conveyor belt, where it will get slotted into place in warehouse shelving. When needed, an unpacker robot will break open the bulk package box and put all the retail units where the picker robot can reach them. When a customer orders, the picker robot grabs everything from the retail unit shelving, boxes it, seals it, and loads it onto the delivery drone. The customer has it in an hour. Remember the robot arms suspended overhead, harvesting human babies from the field in The Matrix? Like that, only with slightly less dystopia.
Google's VPS tech is going to be obsolete before it's deployed.
Replace cashiers with self-check outs? We already did that. The max number of lanes I've seen "replaced" has been 8 in a store and even then that was about 25% of the store's capacity. Kroger, the largest grocery store chain in the country, usually has 6 self checkout lanes and 1 or 2 workers keep an eye on them.
Sure, because of lossage. Guess what the solution to lossage is? Lights-out warehouses managed solely by robots, with delivery to your door. This is Amazon's end-game. All pre-packaged grocery items will be included, including refrigerated and frozen items, because it's being delivered from a local warehouse. Grocery retailers in every metro area see this coming and are scrambling to preempt it by providing home delivery themselves. Flyers started showing up in my mail for that last year, and I live in fly-over country, not some trendy coastal megacity.
The only things I see people wanting to choose and collect themselves are fresh meat, fresh fruits, and fresh vegetables. But only in trendy neighborhoods. We're well on the way to eliminating even those, with those prepackaged salads you can buy. When fruit-picking in the orchard is fully automated, fruit grading will be too. To wholesalers, it'll be much like the current grading system, but with machine vision enforcing it. To retail customers, it'll be the price point on the web site. I predict a resurgence in neighborhood butcher shops, kraft paper and all, in trendy neighborhoods, because the big box grocery's days are numbered.
And who designs, builds, programs, sells, maintains, repairs and disposes all those robots? Another 6 million new jobs created, I bet.
Not even close. You're off by three orders of magnitude. Try 6000 jobs. And when they finish designing and building enough robots? They get laid off too.
If you really think about the infrastructure that's going to be needed to cope with peak travel times in our electric-vehicle future, it's really not going to suffice to replace pumps with supercharger stations one-to-one.
Well no. But there will be dramatically more chargers than that, since every single garage and most of the car ports will have one, if not two. It's not like gasoline, where installing your own tank requires either a farm waiver or an EPA approval, and is never legal inside city limits. Odds are, your garage already has an electrical outlet that would suffice for commuter charging (110V 15A) and odds are if you can afford a Tesla, you can afford to have an electrician add a 220V 40A breaker and outlet to your garage.
20-minute bathroom breaks? What do you feed your kids?
It takes longer than you think. Really. Highway rest stops are where you're most likely to hit 20 minutes, since just walking back and forth between the building and the parking spot can take upwards of 5 minutes for a toddler. But even gas station stops require you to walk through the entire depth of the store and back again. (Not like the old days, with an exterior door directly into the bathroom.)
Half an hour to get gas and pick something up from the convenience store? How do you make it take that long?
15 minutes to pump gas, 5 minutes browsing, 10 minutes standing in line while grandpa up front counts out pennies so he can pay in cash and so Bluto next in line can buy lottery tickets and Wheezy next in line can buy cigarettes.... I rarely if ever go inside, since I'm not a convenience store guy, but when the pump can't give me a receipt, I go in, and invariably it takes 10 minutes in line while people dick around.
I don't live in a particularly large metro area, but I've driven north on Friday afternoons in the summer. The freeway gets packed. There's going to be plenty of cars that don't have the range to get to their destination, perhaps because they were used for commuting that day.
You misunderstand how electric cars work. The vast majority of their power usage is motive power. When they're not moving (stuck in traffic), they're expending no power for that at all. When they're in stop and go traffic, they're scavenging power from regenerative braking every time they stop, plus they're suffering basically no wind resistance. Electric cars tolerate traffic jams exceedingly well in terms of mileage. They don't even overheat.
And who leaves on a road trip after commuting home? Not many people. Certainly not many with families. But even if they do, they're plugging their car in when they get home, and the recommended 220v garage chargers can top up the commute consumption in an hour. If the homeowner sprang for some Powerwall2 modules, it acts like a Supercharger, charging at 400 volts. So go home, eat dinner, pack the car, and you're ready. Really, it's not as much of a strain as you think.
It's time to start seriously talking about the Sherman Antitrust Act. It has been illegal since 1890 for monopolies to leverage their monopoly status in one line of business into another line of business. ISPs breaking the Internet by violating Net Neutrality are a posterchild for illegal activity. And this isn't difficult to understand. Let's look at the text of section 1, in its entirety:
15 U.S. Code 1 - Trusts, etc., in restraint of trade illegal; penalty
Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Obviously Comcast doesn't give a damn about a piddling million dollar penalty.[1] But Comcast executives might care a little bit about a federal felony conviction.
There's 38 sections in 15 U.S.C., half a dozen of which have been repealed. Section 15c is an interesting one. That's the one that says State attorneys general are allowed to sue to enforce this law. It does not require a federal prosecutor. There's an aggressive New York state attorney general who might be interested.
Section 15 is also interesting. That's the one that says, "any person who shall be injured in his business or property by reason of anything forbidden in the antitrust laws may sue therefor in any district court", and recover triple damages plus attorney's fees. And since corporations are persons... Netflix needs to grow some balls and sue Comcast in federal court. They qualify. It's black letter law, with zero difficulty proving damages. The dollar amount Comcast extorted from them is the amount of damage they suffered. It's trivial to prove Comcast is an interstate monopoly. Done and done. I just wish Netflix had a lawyer like NewEgg's general counsel.
ISPs might be more interested in Title II protections after a few felony convictions. Eric Schneiderman, are you listening?
---- [1] Obviously the law needs to be inflation-adjusted. That penalty cap should be at least $25,791,700. Still a drop in the bucket. I would argue it needs to be 10 times the inflation adjusted amount.
The FCC regulations to reclassify under Title II were ruled in February 2015, but were not yet in effect. Furthermore, those regulations did not exist before 2015. Thus the internet spent almost its entire existence without the regulation people are convinced is essential. Somehow, it managed.
Yes, Response #2 in the shill playbook.
Prior to 2015, asshats hadn't thought of breaking the fucking Internet for profit. Monopoly ISPs realized they were monopolies and are now trying to break the Internet. Therefore, they must be regulated. Regulations are for reining in asshats. Don't want regulations? Don't be an asshat. But you are, aren't you, shill...
No authority is needed, because there isn't one already. In the centralized index situation, no human validates torrents uploaded to the centralized indices. Instead, the users do.
That was my point. there is some authority.
Well no, there isn't. There is no one who says, "YIFY torrent, approved and available for download! Cell phone cam from random derp guy, disapproved, not available for download!" Everything is made available that parses as a torrent file, regardless of content, or whether or not the label actually matches the contents, and search results return them all. Then it's up to the users to figure out, individually, which torrents are actually valuable. Swarm size is the proxy of that determination. The whole thing is a great deal like the design of the Internet itself: the intelligence is at the edges. The core is as dumb as it can be.
Maybe i should have been more clear. If you get say 50 torrents from a node in 22 hours you only advertise the first 16 to your peers if it's not in your trusted list. I still think there should be some restrictions because the index will become very large very fast.
The nature of the DHT already prevents most floods. When your get_peers message has to bounce from node to node looking for one that's alive and owns the keyspace, it can take a good deal of time just to get a response at all.
In any case, the universe of torrents on the Internet is much smaller than you might think. A random search result I just saw says 1.64 million torrents fits in 90 megs. Back when PirateBay still had the.torrent files available, there was some discussion of mirrors and everything they had at the time was less than 50 gigs. Today that number is bigger, but here's the thing. Now that PirateBay only has magnet links, those torrent files are already in the DHT. Adding search terms adds some number of hashes for each word, which points to the filenames and infohashes that are already in the system. Maybe a factor of 4 increase in bytes? Depending on the definition of a word when splitting the filenames and how efficiently clients implement it. There's something on the order of 25 million nodes in Mainline DHT. Let's say torrents have doubled, then multiply by our factor of 4, so 400 gigs. The burden on clients to store that data is now an average... 16,000 bytes each, up from 4,000 bytes. In other words, even with massive redundancy in the network, it's not even necessary to cull inactive torrents, let alone worry about bogus ones. Each torrent client that joins the DHT keeps a handful of megabytes of DHT data to keep the whole system running and even a concerted attack to pollute individual keywords would have difficulty making a dent in it.
In addition, the way the DHT works, there really is no possibility of making a useful list of trusted nodes anyway. The network is constantly rebalancing itself. It has to. Node churn as people start up and shut down their machines and their clients is on the order of 10 million per day, and ordinarily, what DHT data a given node has is opaque to the user, and there's no point in making it visible because it changes all the time based on the mathematics in the system.
People don't really think about it because it works so well and so silently, but Mainline DHT represents a gigantic amount of distributing computing power, in all categories (bandwidth, memory, CPU). For comparison, Folding@Home is lucky to muster 250,000 active nodes. DHT dwarfs it, at two orders of magnitude larger. It really can tolerate quite a lot of malfuckery and continue to function. After all, it already does.
In reality, there will be bathroom breaks, at least one meal, so add another 2 hours. Now, add two hours for recharge stops...
No. You're doing it wrong. The meal happens while you're charging. Especially since the Supercharger station is going to be literally next door to a restaurant. (It is in my town, right next to the interstate.) If you've got a family, bathroom breaks take 20 minutes easily, so again, stop at a Supercharger and plug in. 20 minutes from a Supercharger is quite a lot of energy. Do that twice in the day, on either side of lunch, and you're good. You're in El Paso, and probably still have a 30% charge. Really, it's not that hard. It's a minor adjustment to your habits, is all. Oh, and subtract the 20 minutes you would have spent stopping for gas at least once along the way. 30 minutes if you're the type who often goes into the convenience store. One of those longish bathroom breaks is a wash.
The only people who lose real time trying to drive cross country in a Tesla are single men hard driving as fast as they can who never go into the convenience store for jerky when they stop for gas. Everybody else is going to spend maybe an extra 20 minutes somewhere, topping up charge before getting into the destination city. People with kids don't even notice the difference in time if they make any effort at all to have stops coincide with Supercharger locations, and that will get easier and easier as the year gets older, since Tesla continues to install them.
But SpaceX has (had) a giant carbon fiber tank which they successfully burst tested to 2/3rds the design pressure back in November, then blew up testing with liquid nitrogen on February 17th 2017.
I do not call that a success. I call that a failure. I mean it doesn't even meet the design pressure.
Judging by your placement of the bold face, I think you misinterpreted my comment. The tank did not fail during the November burst test. I guess the name is deceptive. It was a pressure test, not a burst test. It survived that test just fine. It didn't burst until it was tested with liquid nitrogen, and we don't know what pressure they used. They aren't talking much about either of those tests publicly. We only know about them because of nosy people with cameras and a lone tweet about 2/3rds the design pressure.
Regardless, I brought up that tank testing as an example of how hands on SpaceX is and how rapidly they are moving, especially compared to prior efforts. Lockheed Martin started work on the X-33 in 1994 and had the usual whopping government funding until 2001 ($992 million all told), when NASA was finally forced to pull the plug. The project failed because it was attempting to build a composite tank for liquid hydrogen. They never succeeded at scale. Northrup Grumman actually managed to make a composite tank that could survive multiple loading cycles, demonstrated in 2004, but it was also only 6 feet in diameter and 15 feet long. Far too small to be useful for an orbital class rocket. SpaceX, meanwhile, builds that gigantic prototype, and Elon Musk sounds vaguely disappointed when he comments in interviews that it's slightly smaller than the diameter they finally settled on for ITS. They're a whole different beast.
My entire neighborhood is being invaded by massive swarms of ants. Literally hundreds have gotten into my house. Judging by the number of exterminators ringing my doorbell, my neighbors are just as bad off. As a result, the bird population is gigantic. The sheer racket in the morning when they all start up their pre-dawn calls is enough to wake me up. It's obnoxious.
The amphibian population is also dramatically up. Frogs are in all the drainage ditches. The noise at night from tree frogs is worse than the cicadas once were.
For that matter, the small mammal population in my neighborhood has exploded in the past few years. I can look out my windows at almost any time of day and see a rabbit in my yard. Mice are everywhere. Raccoons have been getting into my house for years (until I poured some concrete to close gaps in my foundation). Last year I started seeing skunks again, after not seeing any for half a dozen prior years. My yard started getting invaded by moles two years ago, after a good eight years without any. The only typical suburban species I haven't been seeing yet is possums. A decade ago, they were getting squished on roads left and right. Haven't seen one, live or dead, in some years.
The burgeoning rabbit population has attracted several predator birds as well. I see a sparrow hawk on a regular basis during the day, and hear a great horned owl at night. And sometimes see him too, through my living room skylights, perched way up at the top of my honeylocust tree.
These things are cyclical. It's not just the cicadas that come and go. I've lived here for 15 years, and some years my entire back yard is alight with lightning bugs. Other years, there's a handful of them. There's a lot of extremely local factors that affect suburban species, and a lot of variance in those factors.
Technically speaking, It's not impossible; The problem is that it's spammable/DoSable and will need an authority to either allow/deny nodes from inserting to index or someone like our good old friend 'hosts guy' to maintain a list of known good source nodes that people can download and only share the indexes from those.
No authority is needed, because there isn't one already. In the centralized index situation, no human validates torrents uploaded to the centralized indices. Instead, the users do. If you go search for any blockbuster movie you care to name on Pirate Bay, you'll get 50 pages worth of hits. The first 10 to 15 hits might be useful, with various bitrate encodings and various subtitles and audio tracks in them, and then it very very quickly tails off into utter trash. It doesn't seem to hurt Pirate Bay. Nobody ever selects the torrents with zero seeds unless they're looking for something so niche that there's no other option, and no one seeds bogus torrents. Even their pathetic originators give up extremely quickly.
And/Or other simple restrictions like limiting the number of torrents any node can add to the index.
In a decentralized index, that limit is only in the local node, where it is easily removed. Not worth bothering to write the code in the first place.
And/Or a voting system that allows all nodes to vote on others to help the client applications with prioritizing/filtering the index.
The seed count effectively serves as a voting system today. It's by far the most useful metric. About the only other useful metric is a user-defined list of strings. Quality video encodings tend to have some release group tag in the torrent name. Easy enough to push priority up a bit if the user's preferred string is present.
What's missing is implementing support for search within Mainline DHT. Kademlia DHT on which it is based has a scheme already designed:
Filename searches are implemented using keywords. The filename is divided into its constituent words. Each of these keywords is hashed and stored in the network, together with the corresponding filename and file hash. A search involves choosing one of the keywords, contacting the node with an ID closest to that keyword hash, and retrieving the list of filenames that contain the keyword. Since every filename in the list has its hash attached, the chosen file can then be obtained in the normal way.
Mainline DHT has omitted that functionality. If it were implemented, index sites would no longer be required.
Obviously Mainline DHT traffic would increase substantially, but it would still be quite small compared to torrent traffic. Also, if it were implemented exactly as described, clients would be responsible for filtering results coming in from the DHT. Most users want the logical AND of their search terms, but Kademlia specifies a logical OR. Performing that processing is simple enough though, and of course the client could present results much like web search engines do, with results that contain as many of the keywords as possible presented first, followed by results with fewer and fewer matches. You don't get the fuzzy matching most of the web search engines employ doing that, but as it happens, you also don't get fuzzy matching from Pirate Bay search anymore, so that's no loss. Client authors then have the option of preemptively fetching.torrent files in order to get tracker lists to be able to rank the results by how active they are, or of waiting to let users do some manual culling first. That whole process is substantially slower than a centralized index site. Mainline DHT is anything but fast, most of the time. It is, however, bulletproof. As long as the DHT exists, files could be found.
BEP 0005 specifies KRPC methods of ping, find_node, get_peers, and announce_peer. What's needed is a new BEP to extend the protocol, adding search_peers.
I ordinarily quote something specific when writing a reply, but that's a serious wall-o-text, which doesn't present many quotable quotes, so I'm forced to reply somewhat generically.
I think what's left after parsing all the fences you've put up is, biometrics (fingerprints) are a good username specifically for unlocking a local-only store of credentials or generator of authentication tokens. Odds are, the handful of people who have access to a local store do have unique enough fingerprints to use as identifiers. Add a password to that and you're golden. What you are and what you know unlock what you have, which can then be used to provide arbitrarily strong credentials to other devices and the network.
And specifically for a smartphone, your fingerprint could be your username, especially since all processing is local, but since nearly all smartphones are single user, there's not much point to that. People who need security on their smartphone need to lock it with a passphrase. Everybody else, sure whatever. Use a fingerprint to unlock. It doesn't matter a whole lot.
In eight years your aren't going to see electric based container ships, 18 wheelers and aircraft.
Tesla released a teaser photo of their all-electric semi tractor April 30th, 2017. They've already built prototypes. Elon Musk reports driving one himself, and commented about how lively it is when not pulling a trailer. The full unveil is expected some time this fall. I expect it to be substantially expensive, but I doubt it will be spectacularly so. Tesla couldn't hope to sell them if it was. And Elon specifically stated that it is designed to compete directly with existing semi tractors in both hauling capacity and range. I, much like other people, don't see how this could be, but they've built something, so apparently they know something we don't. We will know more this fall.
Look outside, right now. What do you see? Odds are, cars. Parked cars, just sitting there, being used by no one. There's no logical way you can look at that and think to yourself "this is cost effective, this is efficient".
Wanna bet? I can, quite easily. Individual private transportation is time efficient. All those resources are being invested in steel and rubber and plastics, and yes, gasoline, in order to claw back time. The current system of roads and automobiles enables the most time efficient transportation humanity has ever known. You can go where you want when you want door to door more rapidly and with more cargo than ever before possible, over both short and long distances. This even applies to cities suffering severe gridlock. All of those drivers are going somewhere. Somewhere probably farther than their great-grandparents would ever travel in their lives.
Electrification is probably inevitable. The demise of private ownership of individual transportation is anything but. It has enormous value, and people tend to cling to enormous value.
As with most things in here, people who hate Apple will hate them getting a patent - or even existing for that matter. If Samsung had filed the same patent, they would be singing praises from the rafters.
You would be completely wrong in that assessment. People who think for a living get really sick and tired of asshole lawyers claiming to own ideas, regardless of which company the assholes work for. And make no mistake, Apple does write their patents with the intent of owning the idea, even though that's explicitly not allowed in patent law.
More to the point, we get really irate about the patent office being 100% incapable of applying the obviousness clause of patent law. Yes, the specific implementation is obvious to anyone skilled in the art. This is nearly always true, because of the nature of how human knowledge spreads and is used. The way the law is written, the vast majority of patents should never be granted.
I blame the Patent Office, but it's fundamentally a bad law that ignores the reality of human nature and the world we live in. The whole system is based on the vision of the lone inventor in their garage coming up with something so radical and so amazing and so revolutionary that it will change the world, and it's important that the details of this invention be known in case the person dies without revealing the secret sauce to their apprentice. That entire vision is at best obsolete, and it was probably always a total fantasy. The world doesn't work that way. This wasn't so noticeable when communications was extremely slow and the population was far sparser than it is today, but I bet it applied as far back as humans have specialized. Certainly those of us who are specialists today all have an extremely common basis of knowledge, because of how our education systems work, and are facing all of the same problems, with all the same physical constraints. It's not just natural but inevitable that we will converge on very similar solutions to those problems, and if financial constraints are similar, the solutions will often be identical. It's the nature of engineering.
Bullshit. You fail second grade arithmetic. 2.9 billion > 0.9 billion. Full stop. Per capita numbers are completely irrelevant when talking about global climate. Only the absolute numbers affect the climate. 2.9 billion tons of burned coal does not magically emit 30% less CO2 because more people benefit from it. It still emits just as much CO2 ton for ton as coal burned anywhere else. China is by FAR the worst polluter in the world. Chinese activity releases more fine particulates, more oxides of nitrogen, more mercury, more of every other nasty substance you can put into the air than any other country on the planet. And they also release far more CO2 than anyone else. Your own numbers said so. And then you suffered a brain fart induced by propaganda and forgot that bigger numbers are bigger than smaller numbers, and this means something.
The only time the per capita number is relevant is when theorizing that Americans could reduce their power consumption per person more easily than other countries without suffering a significant reduction in their standard of living. There is zero support for this theory, and vast amounts of data that contradicts it. Every country that uses less power per person has a lower standard of living.
Personally I am convinced that no country will ever significantly reduce their per capita power consumption voluntarily. Consuming larger amounts of power is directly responsible for higher living standards. It is not merely correlation. It is a causal, provable relationship. This has been true since ancient times, when citizens of Rome enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world. It was built on the output of muscle power, from animals and from slaves. Today, we frown on slavery, and animals are unreliable, so we use other, much denser sources of power, and we in the developed world enjoy the highest standard of living in history. More to the point, our use of power is what distinguishes us from the undeveloped world. Every time someone like you starts yammering about per capita consumption, you're going to get ignored, challenged, or even attacked because the world as it is today and as it has been for all of history proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the higher the power consumption, the better off everyone is. Get used to it.
And people talk about storage. Where is all this storage?
Right here. Also here. Off the shelf products you can buy today, if you're a commercial customer with fairly deep pockets. They're expensive, relatively speaking, but they're not theoretical. Total cost of ownership is no worse than a large scale diesel generator with a large on site tank, and the permitting and construction process is much easier. No EPA crap to deal with, since there's no big tank of flammable fluid with a limited tank life involved.
Those electrical storage systems are being sold and installed all over the world. Walmart is a customer. Dozens of grid providers are customers. They're immediately useful to grid operators today, even those who don't have one iota of intermittent power generation connected. They're used to provide load balancing that's even faster than natural gas turbines to respond to changes in demand.
Governments couldn't advocate for the "elimination of general purpose computers". The split second they did so, you'd have every industry on earth screaming bloody murder, along with various groups like the EFF, FSF, ACLU, etc.
It's already illegal to root your iPhone. It's called the DMCA. EFF, FSF, and ACLU did indeed scream bloody murder. No one cared. You don't even know what it meant. There are 2.1 billion pocket computers in use today, and for the vast majority of them, it is illegal for their owner to assume full control of the software of the device.
So, are there any TECHNICAL reasons why the SLS booster is better than the booster for the Interplanetary Colonial Transport? While, it has been under development for (far) longer and cost much more, as the delays keep piling up it might not get finished before the ICT. Like, is it safer? (though I doubt it with the use of solid rockets in its heavy version).
No. There are no technical reasons. There is a military reason.
SLS, and Constellation and Shuttle before it, exist for the purpose of pretending that military spending isn't military spending. They are there to continue funneling money into ATK, maker of the solid fuel rockets. Why? Because the other name for a solid fuel rocket is 'ICBM', but the Air Force hasn't been allowed to buy new ICBMs since 1978, when the production run of the Minuteman III ended. The START treaties started requiring reductions in the number of missiles allowed by the US and Russia. They've been maintaining their current fleet of Minuteman III missiles, which were first deployed in 1970. Without Shuttle and Constellation and SLS, ATK may have lost the expertise to build solid fuel rockets of the required size, which would have been a strategic loss.
The Air Force is trying to convince Congress to spend many billions to replace all of the Minuteman III missiles. Solid fuels have a long shelf life, but still limited. The Air Force spends billions and does regular test launches to make sure they still work[1], but they're worried that they're reaching the end of their useful lives.
Donald Trump is already convinced that they need replacing, as evidenced by his public speeches and by his administration's budget proposal. Getting Congress to agree is the hard part. If they succeed, watch the solid fueled booster requirement for SLS silently vanish. If they fail, which is far more likely because of the terrible optics of "we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars to build new nuclear warhead delivery systems", SLS will continue to muddle along, absorbing silly amounts of money to build a rocket nobody needs[2] as slowly as possible.
---- [1] They do. America's dick is still bigger than North Korea's dick. Yay. </sarcasm> [2] At that price.
ITS is in very early development stage and probably still couldn't do moon missions, despite having awesome lift mass the second stage relies on atmospheric breaking and onsite refueling, both impossible on the moon.
ITS second stage only requires atmospheric braking to land in deeper gravity wells. Lunar gravity is sufficiently low that ITS can land there just fine. Whether or not it could take off again depends entirely on how much payload it's carrying. If it's maxed out, yes, it probably can't lift off again without refueling, and Lunar refueling would indeed be exceedingly difficult. If it's carrying very little, it could very likely lift off again.
This is typical of everything in space. How much you're carrying and where you're going determines everything about the mission parameters. It took Voyager I decades to get where it is in the solar system today. We could put another probe just as far out of the solar system in 2 years if we wanted to. It would just be very tiny, and launched by a ludicrously large rocket. Nobody is particularly interested in sending a CubeSat to the heliopause, so it won't happen, but it's possible.
Slashdot Mirror
But the regional dean of Northeastern University-Silicon Valley has the glummest prediction of all. "If I were to look at a crystal ball, I don't think the world's going to need as many coders after 2020. Ninety percent of coding is taking some business specs and translating them into computer logic. That's really ripe for machine learning and low-end AI."
Sounds like a fantastic opportunity to get rich—fleecing poor bastards who actually believe this dreck. Ninety percent of coding is indeed figuring out how to wedge some business wonk's hairbrained idea into the machine, but does this clown have any idea how broad a phrase "business specs" is? That's everything. I mean e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.
"Make my MRI machine work." Business spec. "Make my combine harvester work." Business spec. "Make my search engine work." Business spec. "Make my toy robot work." Business spec. "Present as many goddamned ad impressions as physically possible." Business spec. He's trying to claim that do-what-I-mean-not-what-I-say computers are just around the corner, readily (and cheaply) available. HA. No. You might, MIGHT be able to train a neural net to do a piece of one of those tasks. All of them? And all parts? Not even close. Not in three years.
I'm sure nVidia's new Titan Xp is a marvelous thing, with its dedicated tensor accelerator hardware, but it's not do-what-I-mean hardware. It was just released last month, which means nVidia's next card is a year away. Does anybody think it's going to be do-what-I-mean hardware? No. How about the generation after that? Maybe another node shrink? Still no. How about three generations from now? If historical Titan benchmarks are anything to go by, it'll be twice as fast as a Titan Xp. It takes nVidia about 36 months to double performance. Is it going to be able to do-what-you-mean? Mmm, no.
The world is going to need just as many coders in three years as it does now. It will probably need more. The coming wave of automation is not going to be self-programming, but it is coming. Somebody is going to have to write all that code. And baby all of those neural nets.
Stocking is a drag for retail. At high-volume stores, it's a difficult job, so turnover is high. Lots of money is wasted on training, and retaining skilled workers is difficult since minimum wage is typical; since worker quality varies so much, and there are usually several who don't show up for work, time taken to stock varies significantly, putting a damper on the effectiveness of JIT warehousing. Stockers at my local Walmart are almost all immigrants who don't speak English, so I don't even bother asking them questions; VPS will make this moot soon, but point is, they don't serve much secondary function and could be safely automated.
A whole list of reasons why retail groceries are going to shrink dramatically, and soon. Nobody is going to pay people to piddle about with shelf grooming and manual stocking when a lights-out warehouse managed by robots can pick you a squeeze bottle of ketchup, chuck it in a box, and have it delivered to your door by a drone an hour later. Free delivery with Amazon Prime! Make no mistake, they are working hard on making exactly that happen.
The end game is a robot forklift unloading a self-driving semi on the dock, which is easy because the same model of robot forklift loaded the truck at the factory. Robot forklift plunks pallets down one by one in a row of specific locations, equipped with robotic arms with machine vision that can cut off the shrink wrap and pull each bulk box from the pallet, easily identifiable by the RFID chip in the label, and plunk it onto the appropriate conveyor belt, where it will get slotted into place in warehouse shelving. When needed, an unpacker robot will break open the bulk package box and put all the retail units where the picker robot can reach them. When a customer orders, the picker robot grabs everything from the retail unit shelving, boxes it, seals it, and loads it onto the delivery drone. The customer has it in an hour. Remember the robot arms suspended overhead, harvesting human babies from the field in The Matrix? Like that, only with slightly less dystopia.
Google's VPS tech is going to be obsolete before it's deployed.
Replace cashiers with self-check outs? We already did that. The max number of lanes I've seen "replaced" has been 8 in a store and even then that was about 25% of the store's capacity. Kroger, the largest grocery store chain in the country, usually has 6 self checkout lanes and 1 or 2 workers keep an eye on them.
Sure, because of lossage. Guess what the solution to lossage is? Lights-out warehouses managed solely by robots, with delivery to your door. This is Amazon's end-game. All pre-packaged grocery items will be included, including refrigerated and frozen items, because it's being delivered from a local warehouse. Grocery retailers in every metro area see this coming and are scrambling to preempt it by providing home delivery themselves. Flyers started showing up in my mail for that last year, and I live in fly-over country, not some trendy coastal megacity.
The only things I see people wanting to choose and collect themselves are fresh meat, fresh fruits, and fresh vegetables. But only in trendy neighborhoods. We're well on the way to eliminating even those, with those prepackaged salads you can buy. When fruit-picking in the orchard is fully automated, fruit grading will be too. To wholesalers, it'll be much like the current grading system, but with machine vision enforcing it. To retail customers, it'll be the price point on the web site. I predict a resurgence in neighborhood butcher shops, kraft paper and all, in trendy neighborhoods, because the big box grocery's days are numbered.
And who designs, builds, programs, sells, maintains, repairs and disposes all those robots?
Another 6 million new jobs created, I bet.
Not even close. You're off by three orders of magnitude. Try 6000 jobs. And when they finish designing and building enough robots? They get laid off too.
If you really think about the infrastructure that's going to be needed to cope with peak travel times in our electric-vehicle future, it's really not going to suffice to replace pumps with supercharger stations one-to-one.
Well no. But there will be dramatically more chargers than that, since every single garage and most of the car ports will have one, if not two. It's not like gasoline, where installing your own tank requires either a farm waiver or an EPA approval, and is never legal inside city limits. Odds are, your garage already has an electrical outlet that would suffice for commuter charging (110V 15A) and odds are if you can afford a Tesla, you can afford to have an electrician add a 220V 40A breaker and outlet to your garage.
20-minute bathroom breaks? What do you feed your kids?
It takes longer than you think. Really. Highway rest stops are where you're most likely to hit 20 minutes, since just walking back and forth between the building and the parking spot can take upwards of 5 minutes for a toddler. But even gas station stops require you to walk through the entire depth of the store and back again. (Not like the old days, with an exterior door directly into the bathroom.)
Half an hour to get gas and pick something up from the convenience store? How do you make it take that long?
15 minutes to pump gas, 5 minutes browsing, 10 minutes standing in line while grandpa up front counts out pennies so he can pay in cash and so Bluto next in line can buy lottery tickets and Wheezy next in line can buy cigarettes.... I rarely if ever go inside, since I'm not a convenience store guy, but when the pump can't give me a receipt, I go in, and invariably it takes 10 minutes in line while people dick around.
I don't live in a particularly large metro area, but I've driven north on Friday afternoons in the summer. The freeway gets packed. There's going to be plenty of cars that don't have the range to get to their destination, perhaps because they were used for commuting that day.
You misunderstand how electric cars work. The vast majority of their power usage is motive power. When they're not moving (stuck in traffic), they're expending no power for that at all. When they're in stop and go traffic, they're scavenging power from regenerative braking every time they stop, plus they're suffering basically no wind resistance. Electric cars tolerate traffic jams exceedingly well in terms of mileage. They don't even overheat.
And who leaves on a road trip after commuting home? Not many people. Certainly not many with families. But even if they do, they're plugging their car in when they get home, and the recommended 220v garage chargers can top up the commute consumption in an hour. If the homeowner sprang for some Powerwall2 modules, it acts like a Supercharger, charging at 400 volts. So go home, eat dinner, pack the car, and you're ready. Really, it's not as much of a strain as you think.
It's time to start seriously talking about the Sherman Antitrust Act. It has been illegal since 1890 for monopolies to leverage their monopoly status in one line of business into another line of business. ISPs breaking the Internet by violating Net Neutrality are a posterchild for illegal activity. And this isn't difficult to understand. Let's look at the text of section 1, in its entirety:
15 U.S. Code 1 - Trusts, etc., in restraint of trade illegal; penalty
Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Obviously Comcast doesn't give a damn about a piddling million dollar penalty.[1] But Comcast executives might care a little bit about a federal felony conviction.
There's 38 sections in 15 U.S.C., half a dozen of which have been repealed. Section 15c is an interesting one. That's the one that says State attorneys general are allowed to sue to enforce this law. It does not require a federal prosecutor. There's an aggressive New York state attorney general who might be interested.
Section 15 is also interesting. That's the one that says, "any person who shall be injured in his business or property by reason of anything forbidden in the antitrust laws may sue therefor in any district court", and recover triple damages plus attorney's fees. And since corporations are persons... Netflix needs to grow some balls and sue Comcast in federal court. They qualify. It's black letter law, with zero difficulty proving damages. The dollar amount Comcast extorted from them is the amount of damage they suffered. It's trivial to prove Comcast is an interstate monopoly. Done and done. I just wish Netflix had a lawyer like NewEgg's general counsel.
ISPs might be more interested in Title II protections after a few felony convictions. Eric Schneiderman, are you listening?
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[1] Obviously the law needs to be inflation-adjusted. That penalty cap should be at least $25,791,700. Still a drop in the bucket. I would argue it needs to be 10 times the inflation adjusted amount.
The FCC regulations to reclassify under Title II were ruled in February 2015, but were not yet in effect. Furthermore, those regulations did not exist before 2015. Thus the internet spent almost its entire existence without the regulation people are convinced is essential. Somehow, it managed.
Yes, Response #2 in the shill playbook.
Prior to 2015, asshats hadn't thought of breaking the fucking Internet for profit. Monopoly ISPs realized they were monopolies and are now trying to break the Internet. Therefore, they must be regulated. Regulations are for reining in asshats. Don't want regulations? Don't be an asshat. But you are, aren't you, shill...
How does a CEO get a pay package like that if the shareholders are irate about it? Isn't it the shareholders that decide to approve the pay package?
Nope. It's the Board of Directors. Guess what kind of job all the members of the Board have? Yeah, CEO.
No authority is needed, because there isn't one already. In the centralized index situation, no human validates torrents uploaded to the centralized indices. Instead, the users do.
That was my point. there is some authority.
Well no, there isn't. There is no one who says, "YIFY torrent, approved and available for download! Cell phone cam from random derp guy, disapproved, not available for download!" Everything is made available that parses as a torrent file, regardless of content, or whether or not the label actually matches the contents, and search results return them all. Then it's up to the users to figure out, individually, which torrents are actually valuable. Swarm size is the proxy of that determination. The whole thing is a great deal like the design of the Internet itself: the intelligence is at the edges. The core is as dumb as it can be.
Maybe i should have been more clear. If you get say 50 torrents from a node in 22 hours you only advertise the first 16 to your peers if it's not in your trusted list.
I still think there should be some restrictions because the index will become very large very fast.
The nature of the DHT already prevents most floods. When your get_peers message has to bounce from node to node looking for one that's alive and owns the keyspace, it can take a good deal of time just to get a response at all.
In any case, the universe of torrents on the Internet is much smaller than you might think. A random search result I just saw says 1.64 million torrents fits in 90 megs. Back when PirateBay still had the .torrent files available, there was some discussion of mirrors and everything they had at the time was less than 50 gigs. Today that number is bigger, but here's the thing. Now that PirateBay only has magnet links, those torrent files are already in the DHT. Adding search terms adds some number of hashes for each word, which points to the filenames and infohashes that are already in the system. Maybe a factor of 4 increase in bytes? Depending on the definition of a word when splitting the filenames and how efficiently clients implement it. There's something on the order of 25 million nodes in Mainline DHT. Let's say torrents have doubled, then multiply by our factor of 4, so 400 gigs. The burden on clients to store that data is now an average... 16,000 bytes each, up from 4,000 bytes. In other words, even with massive redundancy in the network, it's not even necessary to cull inactive torrents, let alone worry about bogus ones. Each torrent client that joins the DHT keeps a handful of megabytes of DHT data to keep the whole system running and even a concerted attack to pollute individual keywords would have difficulty making a dent in it.
In addition, the way the DHT works, there really is no possibility of making a useful list of trusted nodes anyway. The network is constantly rebalancing itself. It has to. Node churn as people start up and shut down their machines and their clients is on the order of 10 million per day, and ordinarily, what DHT data a given node has is opaque to the user, and there's no point in making it visible because it changes all the time based on the mathematics in the system.
People don't really think about it because it works so well and so silently, but Mainline DHT represents a gigantic amount of distributing computing power, in all categories (bandwidth, memory, CPU). For comparison, Folding@Home is lucky to muster 250,000 active nodes. DHT dwarfs it, at two orders of magnitude larger. It really can tolerate quite a lot of malfuckery and continue to function. After all, it already does.
In reality, there will be bathroom breaks, at least one meal, so add another 2 hours. Now, add two hours for recharge stops...
No. You're doing it wrong. The meal happens while you're charging. Especially since the Supercharger station is going to be literally next door to a restaurant. (It is in my town, right next to the interstate.) If you've got a family, bathroom breaks take 20 minutes easily, so again, stop at a Supercharger and plug in. 20 minutes from a Supercharger is quite a lot of energy. Do that twice in the day, on either side of lunch, and you're good. You're in El Paso, and probably still have a 30% charge. Really, it's not that hard. It's a minor adjustment to your habits, is all. Oh, and subtract the 20 minutes you would have spent stopping for gas at least once along the way. 30 minutes if you're the type who often goes into the convenience store. One of those longish bathroom breaks is a wash.
The only people who lose real time trying to drive cross country in a Tesla are single men hard driving as fast as they can who never go into the convenience store for jerky when they stop for gas. Everybody else is going to spend maybe an extra 20 minutes somewhere, topping up charge before getting into the destination city. People with kids don't even notice the difference in time if they make any effort at all to have stops coincide with Supercharger locations, and that will get easier and easier as the year gets older, since Tesla continues to install them.
But SpaceX has (had) a giant carbon fiber tank which they successfully burst tested to 2/3rds the design pressure back in November, then blew up testing with liquid nitrogen on February 17th 2017.
I do not call that a success. I call that a failure. I mean it doesn't even meet the design pressure.
Judging by your placement of the bold face, I think you misinterpreted my comment. The tank did not fail during the November burst test. I guess the name is deceptive. It was a pressure test, not a burst test. It survived that test just fine. It didn't burst until it was tested with liquid nitrogen, and we don't know what pressure they used. They aren't talking much about either of those tests publicly. We only know about them because of nosy people with cameras and a lone tweet about 2/3rds the design pressure.
Regardless, I brought up that tank testing as an example of how hands on SpaceX is and how rapidly they are moving, especially compared to prior efforts. Lockheed Martin started work on the X-33 in 1994 and had the usual whopping government funding until 2001 ($992 million all told), when NASA was finally forced to pull the plug. The project failed because it was attempting to build a composite tank for liquid hydrogen. They never succeeded at scale. Northrup Grumman actually managed to make a composite tank that could survive multiple loading cycles, demonstrated in 2004, but it was also only 6 feet in diameter and 15 feet long. Far too small to be useful for an orbital class rocket. SpaceX, meanwhile, builds that gigantic prototype, and Elon Musk sounds vaguely disappointed when he comments in interviews that it's slightly smaller than the diameter they finally settled on for ITS. They're a whole different beast.
My entire neighborhood is being invaded by massive swarms of ants. Literally hundreds have gotten into my house. Judging by the number of exterminators ringing my doorbell, my neighbors are just as bad off. As a result, the bird population is gigantic. The sheer racket in the morning when they all start up their pre-dawn calls is enough to wake me up. It's obnoxious.
The amphibian population is also dramatically up. Frogs are in all the drainage ditches. The noise at night from tree frogs is worse than the cicadas once were.
For that matter, the small mammal population in my neighborhood has exploded in the past few years. I can look out my windows at almost any time of day and see a rabbit in my yard. Mice are everywhere. Raccoons have been getting into my house for years (until I poured some concrete to close gaps in my foundation). Last year I started seeing skunks again, after not seeing any for half a dozen prior years. My yard started getting invaded by moles two years ago, after a good eight years without any. The only typical suburban species I haven't been seeing yet is possums. A decade ago, they were getting squished on roads left and right. Haven't seen one, live or dead, in some years.
The burgeoning rabbit population has attracted several predator birds as well. I see a sparrow hawk on a regular basis during the day, and hear a great horned owl at night. And sometimes see him too, through my living room skylights, perched way up at the top of my honeylocust tree.
These things are cyclical. It's not just the cicadas that come and go. I've lived here for 15 years, and some years my entire back yard is alight with lightning bugs. Other years, there's a handful of them. There's a lot of extremely local factors that affect suburban species, and a lot of variance in those factors.
Technically speaking, It's not impossible; The problem is that it's spammable/DoSable and will need an authority to either allow/deny nodes from inserting to index or someone like our good old friend 'hosts guy' to maintain a list of known good source nodes that people can download and only share the indexes from those.
No authority is needed, because there isn't one already. In the centralized index situation, no human validates torrents uploaded to the centralized indices. Instead, the users do. If you go search for any blockbuster movie you care to name on Pirate Bay, you'll get 50 pages worth of hits. The first 10 to 15 hits might be useful, with various bitrate encodings and various subtitles and audio tracks in them, and then it very very quickly tails off into utter trash. It doesn't seem to hurt Pirate Bay. Nobody ever selects the torrents with zero seeds unless they're looking for something so niche that there's no other option, and no one seeds bogus torrents. Even their pathetic originators give up extremely quickly.
And/Or other simple restrictions like limiting the number of torrents any node can add to the index.
In a decentralized index, that limit is only in the local node, where it is easily removed. Not worth bothering to write the code in the first place.
And/Or a voting system that allows all nodes to vote on others to help the client applications with prioritizing/filtering the index.
The seed count effectively serves as a voting system today. It's by far the most useful metric. About the only other useful metric is a user-defined list of strings. Quality video encodings tend to have some release group tag in the torrent name. Easy enough to push priority up a bit if the user's preferred string is present.
What's missing is implementing support for search within Mainline DHT. Kademlia DHT on which it is based has a scheme already designed:
Filename searches are implemented using keywords. The filename is divided into its constituent words. Each of these keywords is hashed and stored in the network, together with the corresponding filename and file hash. A search involves choosing one of the keywords, contacting the node with an ID closest to that keyword hash, and retrieving the list of filenames that contain the keyword. Since every filename in the list has its hash attached, the chosen file can then be obtained in the normal way.
Mainline DHT has omitted that functionality. If it were implemented, index sites would no longer be required.
Obviously Mainline DHT traffic would increase substantially, but it would still be quite small compared to torrent traffic. Also, if it were implemented exactly as described, clients would be responsible for filtering results coming in from the DHT. Most users want the logical AND of their search terms, but Kademlia specifies a logical OR. Performing that processing is simple enough though, and of course the client could present results much like web search engines do, with results that contain as many of the keywords as possible presented first, followed by results with fewer and fewer matches. You don't get the fuzzy matching most of the web search engines employ doing that, but as it happens, you also don't get fuzzy matching from Pirate Bay search anymore, so that's no loss. Client authors then have the option of preemptively fetching .torrent files in order to get tracker lists to be able to rank the results by how active they are, or of waiting to let users do some manual culling first. That whole process is substantially slower than a centralized index site. Mainline DHT is anything but fast, most of the time. It is, however, bulletproof. As long as the DHT exists, files could be found.
BEP 0005 specifies KRPC methods of ping, find_node, get_peers, and announce_peer. What's needed is a new BEP to extend the protocol, adding search_peers.
I ordinarily quote something specific when writing a reply, but that's a serious wall-o-text, which doesn't present many quotable quotes, so I'm forced to reply somewhat generically.
I think what's left after parsing all the fences you've put up is, biometrics (fingerprints) are a good username specifically for unlocking a local-only store of credentials or generator of authentication tokens. Odds are, the handful of people who have access to a local store do have unique enough fingerprints to use as identifiers. Add a password to that and you're golden. What you are and what you know unlock what you have, which can then be used to provide arbitrarily strong credentials to other devices and the network.
And specifically for a smartphone, your fingerprint could be your username, especially since all processing is local, but since nearly all smartphones are single user, there's not much point to that. People who need security on their smartphone need to lock it with a passphrase. Everybody else, sure whatever. Use a fingerprint to unlock. It doesn't matter a whole lot.
In eight years your aren't going to see electric based container ships, 18 wheelers and aircraft.
Tesla released a teaser photo of their all-electric semi tractor April 30th, 2017. They've already built prototypes. Elon Musk reports driving one himself, and commented about how lively it is when not pulling a trailer. The full unveil is expected some time this fall. I expect it to be substantially expensive, but I doubt it will be spectacularly so. Tesla couldn't hope to sell them if it was. And Elon specifically stated that it is designed to compete directly with existing semi tractors in both hauling capacity and range. I, much like other people, don't see how this could be, but they've built something, so apparently they know something we don't. We will know more this fall.
Look outside, right now. What do you see? Odds are, cars. Parked cars, just sitting there, being used by no one. There's no logical way you can look at that and think to yourself "this is cost effective, this is efficient".
Wanna bet? I can, quite easily. Individual private transportation is time efficient. All those resources are being invested in steel and rubber and plastics, and yes, gasoline, in order to claw back time. The current system of roads and automobiles enables the most time efficient transportation humanity has ever known. You can go where you want when you want door to door more rapidly and with more cargo than ever before possible, over both short and long distances. This even applies to cities suffering severe gridlock. All of those drivers are going somewhere. Somewhere probably farther than their great-grandparents would ever travel in their lives.
Electrification is probably inevitable. The demise of private ownership of individual transportation is anything but. It has enormous value, and people tend to cling to enormous value.
As with most things in here, people who hate Apple will hate them getting a patent - or even existing for that matter. If Samsung had filed the same patent, they would be singing praises from the rafters.
You would be completely wrong in that assessment. People who think for a living get really sick and tired of asshole lawyers claiming to own ideas, regardless of which company the assholes work for. And make no mistake, Apple does write their patents with the intent of owning the idea, even though that's explicitly not allowed in patent law.
More to the point, we get really irate about the patent office being 100% incapable of applying the obviousness clause of patent law. Yes, the specific implementation is obvious to anyone skilled in the art. This is nearly always true, because of the nature of how human knowledge spreads and is used. The way the law is written, the vast majority of patents should never be granted.
I blame the Patent Office, but it's fundamentally a bad law that ignores the reality of human nature and the world we live in. The whole system is based on the vision of the lone inventor in their garage coming up with something so radical and so amazing and so revolutionary that it will change the world, and it's important that the details of this invention be known in case the person dies without revealing the secret sauce to their apprentice. That entire vision is at best obsolete, and it was probably always a total fantasy. The world doesn't work that way. This wasn't so noticeable when communications was extremely slow and the population was far sparser than it is today, but I bet it applied as far back as humans have specialized. Certainly those of us who are specialists today all have an extremely common basis of knowledge, because of how our education systems work, and are facing all of the same problems, with all the same physical constraints. It's not just natural but inevitable that we will converge on very similar solutions to those problems, and if financial constraints are similar, the solutions will often be identical. It's the nature of engineering.
tl;dr patents are bad no matter who files them.
America IS the worst polluter of the three...
Bullshit. You fail second grade arithmetic. 2.9 billion > 0.9 billion. Full stop. Per capita numbers are completely irrelevant when talking about global climate. Only the absolute numbers affect the climate. 2.9 billion tons of burned coal does not magically emit 30% less CO2 because more people benefit from it. It still emits just as much CO2 ton for ton as coal burned anywhere else. China is by FAR the worst polluter in the world. Chinese activity releases more fine particulates, more oxides of nitrogen, more mercury, more of every other nasty substance you can put into the air than any other country on the planet. And they also release far more CO2 than anyone else. Your own numbers said so. And then you suffered a brain fart induced by propaganda and forgot that bigger numbers are bigger than smaller numbers, and this means something.
The only time the per capita number is relevant is when theorizing that Americans could reduce their power consumption per person more easily than other countries without suffering a significant reduction in their standard of living. There is zero support for this theory, and vast amounts of data that contradicts it. Every country that uses less power per person has a lower standard of living.
Personally I am convinced that no country will ever significantly reduce their per capita power consumption voluntarily. Consuming larger amounts of power is directly responsible for higher living standards. It is not merely correlation. It is a causal, provable relationship. This has been true since ancient times, when citizens of Rome enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world. It was built on the output of muscle power, from animals and from slaves. Today, we frown on slavery, and animals are unreliable, so we use other, much denser sources of power, and we in the developed world enjoy the highest standard of living in history. More to the point, our use of power is what distinguishes us from the undeveloped world. Every time someone like you starts yammering about per capita consumption, you're going to get ignored, challenged, or even attacked because the world as it is today and as it has been for all of history proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the higher the power consumption, the better off everyone is. Get used to it.
The 140 character mark is here:
I'm wondering if the culprit isn't the short attention span syndrome, immediate gratification and the regular consumption of very short for
Sounds like you have the next great unicorn idea. Twitter with an even lower character limit! Do you have VC funding yet?
And people talk about storage. Where is all this storage?
Right here. Also here. Off the shelf products you can buy today, if you're a commercial customer with fairly deep pockets. They're expensive, relatively speaking, but they're not theoretical. Total cost of ownership is no worse than a large scale diesel generator with a large on site tank, and the permitting and construction process is much easier. No EPA crap to deal with, since there's no big tank of flammable fluid with a limited tank life involved.
Those electrical storage systems are being sold and installed all over the world. Walmart is a customer. Dozens of grid providers are customers. They're immediately useful to grid operators today, even those who don't have one iota of intermittent power generation connected. They're used to provide load balancing that's even faster than natural gas turbines to respond to changes in demand.
Governments couldn't advocate for the "elimination of general purpose computers". The split second they did so, you'd have every industry on earth screaming bloody murder, along with various groups like the EFF, FSF, ACLU, etc.
It's already illegal to root your iPhone. It's called the DMCA. EFF, FSF, and ACLU did indeed scream bloody murder. No one cared. You don't even know what it meant. There are 2.1 billion pocket computers in use today, and for the vast majority of them, it is illegal for their owner to assume full control of the software of the device.
Think about that for a while.
So, are there any TECHNICAL reasons why the SLS booster is better than the booster for the Interplanetary Colonial Transport? While, it has been under development for (far) longer and cost much more, as the delays keep piling up it might not get finished before the ICT. Like, is it safer? (though I doubt it with the use of solid rockets in its heavy version).
No. There are no technical reasons. There is a military reason.
SLS, and Constellation and Shuttle before it, exist for the purpose of pretending that military spending isn't military spending. They are there to continue funneling money into ATK, maker of the solid fuel rockets. Why? Because the other name for a solid fuel rocket is 'ICBM', but the Air Force hasn't been allowed to buy new ICBMs since 1978, when the production run of the Minuteman III ended. The START treaties started requiring reductions in the number of missiles allowed by the US and Russia. They've been maintaining their current fleet of Minuteman III missiles, which were first deployed in 1970. Without Shuttle and Constellation and SLS, ATK may have lost the expertise to build solid fuel rockets of the required size, which would have been a strategic loss.
The Air Force is trying to convince Congress to spend many billions to replace all of the Minuteman III missiles. Solid fuels have a long shelf life, but still limited. The Air Force spends billions and does regular test launches to make sure they still work[1], but they're worried that they're reaching the end of their useful lives.
Donald Trump is already convinced that they need replacing, as evidenced by his public speeches and by his administration's budget proposal. Getting Congress to agree is the hard part. If they succeed, watch the solid fueled booster requirement for SLS silently vanish. If they fail, which is far more likely because of the terrible optics of "we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars to build new nuclear warhead delivery systems", SLS will continue to muddle along, absorbing silly amounts of money to build a rocket nobody needs[2] as slowly as possible.
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[1] They do. America's dick is still bigger than North Korea's dick. Yay. </sarcasm>
[2] At that price.
ITS is in very early development stage and probably still couldn't do moon missions, despite having awesome lift mass the second stage relies on atmospheric breaking and onsite refueling, both impossible on the moon.
ITS second stage only requires atmospheric braking to land in deeper gravity wells. Lunar gravity is sufficiently low that ITS can land there just fine. Whether or not it could take off again depends entirely on how much payload it's carrying. If it's maxed out, yes, it probably can't lift off again without refueling, and Lunar refueling would indeed be exceedingly difficult. If it's carrying very little, it could very likely lift off again.
This is typical of everything in space. How much you're carrying and where you're going determines everything about the mission parameters. It took Voyager I decades to get where it is in the solar system today. We could put another probe just as far out of the solar system in 2 years if we wanted to. It would just be very tiny, and launched by a ludicrously large rocket. Nobody is particularly interested in sending a CubeSat to the heliopause, so it won't happen, but it's possible.
...text, which I heard in a TED talk is totally over as a communication medium. It's all waggling our butts now, like bees.
The other name for that is 'dancing'. As a white male, I am incapable of communicating in that medium.