While we have been sending radio transmissions for 80 years, the modularion has changed dramatically, which has negative imolications for finding ET, even if they are using our same frequency bands.
Early on we used FM and AM. Both end up with a strong easy to identify carrier tone. As time has gone one and DSP has become a cheap commodity we moved to more efficient modulations (relative to Shannons's limit). Digital modulations look more noise like and have no carrier as such. GPS is below the noise floor as received due to the energy being so smeared out, and that is from medium earth orbit. Your voice calls are recieved below noise as well in a CDMA system.
So if ET is similarly good at math, they will have moved on to signals that are similarly noise like and may simply be undetectable. There may only be a 100 year or so window to detect Earth, and similar may be true for ET.
If your English class requires a computer, you have likely missed the point.
Bear in mind that once Johny has an El Cheapo computer, he likely will be far behind on computer skills. His house will likely not have an internet connection as well. He may fall far behind after wasting more time on computer skill rather than reading and writing. Sending students to a bunch of online videos and texts may be trendy, but it is likely not actually helping your students.
Far more helpful would be to add awnings over windows like the Petronas towers have. The view is not obstructed, but high angle sun is largely never hitting the windows.
Yep. It would be better for all involved to make a high efficiency building (often with smaller and fewer windows), and then pay for a remote solar farm. Moving power around is relatively efficient, especially compared to the losses from city shadows and design trade offs.
Solar windows for self sufficiency makes about as much sense as trying to put in hydroelectric power systems on the sewer lines leaving the buildings. Technically there is power to be had, but you efforts and money are almost certainly better spent elsewhere.
Bloated price tag, or baked in bloatware/malware. Which is worse?
I mostly loathe my Samsung POS Android phone due to the small internal memory that is larded up with crap I can't delete, but can't stomach an iphone price tag. My wife loves her 5s, and it is a much better widget that works far better and has held up better as well. She upgraded from a different Android POS that auto-updated itself until it ran out of memory and there was no easy way to clear it out and make it a usable phone again.
So in looking for a new phone for me it is either a minefield of Android crap phones, or a pretty solid overpriced iphone. At least with a $60 phone you can readily toss it if it turns out to suck too badly.
The current ISS is pretty pointless. Contrived "science" missions really have not produced any headline worthy results. It is basically a summer camp for astronauts. Is there station going to be just as pointless?
I had a decent layoff package about 10 years ago, and it was great. I spent almost a year living out of my truck going from rock climbing spot to rock climbing spot. I was happier and healthier than during any other similar stretch of time in my life. Right now I don't want more money, I want more time. I would love to be able to go do the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and spend a lot more more nights hanging in a portaledge on side of El Cap. I'd love to spend more time with my wife and kid too. Heck, just being able to hang out by a fire ring in Joshua Tree National Park without a vacation countdown clock in the back of my head would be a huge life improvement.
I honestly enjoy my work, but I have shown myself that I can be even happier not working just fine for a pretty long stretch. If I could have 3 months off a year I could stop bumping into burnout so often. My real fear is that by time I can retire, or at least slow down the hamster wheel I am stuck on, I will not be able to physically do the things I really enjoy anymore. Maybe I should start buying lottery tickets?
While it is egregious, it is what everything has moved to, and the seeds of this are quite old. Games are released in Beta form, with furious patching for the first month or two, followed by ongoing significant tweaks and bug fixes stretching out for more than a year at times.
Wolfenstein Enemy Territory was the first game I recall that was not playable after the disc install, and that was about 10 years ago.
Games like Battlefield 4 have changed quite a bit from when they first shipped (actually playable now...). The updates can be many GB at times, often with almost no apparent changes beyond more tracers and tweaks to reload times.
Probably a better discussion point is what games have gotten so HUGE? 50-80 GB games seem to be the new normal, and for folks stuck on DSL or who live in rural areas that just sucks. Even with my 25 Mbps I find these monsters to be really annoying to download. Perhaps the high resolution textures need to be optional free downloads for poor souls with small drives or slow connections (crap, those might get turned in to extra DLC to charge for...).
Yep, this. My 2002 truck is more pleasant to drive in a lot of ways than my 2011 commuter car.
- No "I Agree" button on the touchscreen sever single time I start it up. - AC controls that are a couple simple knobs, not monstrous buttons that get reset to outside air and AC every time I cycle through the defrost setting to get back to front vents. - No XM selection I have to cycle through to get from my iPod back to FM. - No downloaded messages about how my carbon footprint is doing for the last month that start playing 30s into my drive (very distracting to turn off via the stupid touchscreen).
Why manufacturers (and consumers) think we need all this touchscreen, and now internet connected crap is beyond me. I just want to get from home to work and back.
Where the model broke down is that we let them fail. We are supposed to keep sending them orders for stuff and park the products in the Mojave desert. It works for the defense industry, but the government screwed up and actually let Solyndra die rather than converting it into a perpetual contractor like so many defense companies.
OK, so other than some flower vases, as well has hard to clean (but cool looking) beer glasses, what is the real utility?
Sorry for being a naysayer, but the whole 3D printed "revolution" has been underwhelming thus far. It has a really high cool factor, but I am still waiting to see a whole lot of useful stuff come from it.
Even 8 GB is good enough for >95% of the days. Still, I run big nasty electromagnetic simulations a few times a quarter that run into the 20-50 GB usage ballpark. So I have 64 GB of RAM. Probably cost the company about a grand, but being unable to run those sims would cost them much more.
Engineer time is the most expensive budget item. License costs are next. Workstation hardware is the lowest cost by a pretty big margin.
Obviously that order varies a lot depending on the type of work you do, but I am often amazed by companies who have 6 figure employees who are required to use ancient laptops and small monitors to save a few bucks, when lost productivity often outweighs those costs at least ten to one.
"The good news is that autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride."
They will only give another person a ride during peak hours, say morning rush hours and evening hours. Mid-day traffic will be lighter, and middle of the night traffic will be downright dead. At those time these Johny Cabs still have to go somewhere. The Schisters trying make a buck will want them programmed to waste the least gas possible. So unlike human cabs that often troll around looking for a fare, these Johny Cabs are likely to park immediately at the closest free spot and wait for someone to call for a ride with their smart phone.
Without enough regulation, these cabs may make parking matters worse, as they won't necessarily go back to home base every night if a few pennies can be saved on gas by parking near where they will be needed in the morning.
Riddle me this, what voltage does your widget run off of? 1.5V? 3.3V? 5V? 12V? 48V?
AC to the house is 120V single phase of 240V 2-phase which covers all appliances from a few watts to many kW. There is also 3-phase 208V which is a lot less common to residential.
DC is the latest hipster fantasy plan pushed by those who mostly have no clue. It sounds all sexy to be anti-establishment, but in general DC is an awful choice for power distribution. It still need to be run at a pretty hefty voltage to keep the wire gauge reasonable, and you end up having to make a bunch of DC-DC converters (really DC-AC-DC) for each required supply voltage anyway.
120V 60Hz may be an old tired standard, but usually that is better than no standard at all.
Almost everything from Google is Beta. It is subject to spurious cancellation, hard tacks in direction it is going in, and rarely is "finished" as such.
I avoid most Google things for this reason alone, there is a better chance they will lose interest and kill it than not. It is not clear to me what, if anything, is subject to long term support.
Compounding this is their invite only launches. They build huge buzz, then turn away people who want in. By time they open it up to more people I have forgotten why I was excited in the first place (Google Glass, their phone service with funky data plan, etc). If they want to sell a product, sell it. If you want to provide a service, provide it. Betas should be done quietly under an NDA, not with trumpeting press releases.
Cars have about a 12 year half life. The composition of the cars on the road will be subject to that. So even if 100% of the cars being made suddenly were autonomous it would be a long time before most of the cars on the road were autonomous. The insurance industry will have a lot longer to see the changes coming than implied here.
The long life of cars is such that I can't imagine the security mess that will come with owning a 10-20 year old autonomous car. People gripe now about XP not getting security updated, but imagine still having Win95 based vehicles still on the roads that are 10 years past EOL support. People will be irate when their Chevy HAL gets an over the air update that disables the autonomous function after the company lawyers freakout over a hard to patch vulnerability.
Somehow people think autonomous cars will only leak pixie dust, and that people will happily throw away their drivers license and just take Johny Cabs everywhere.
Or you could just rent a gasser for the few times a year you take a road trip.
Seriously, we drive our crappy little Leaf more than our other two cars combined, and by a large margin. We take the crappy Ford Escape for longer local trips, and the Tundra truck for hauling our camping kit, or a load of crap from Home Despot. It is not a stretch to expect that we could readily get to 20-25% electric market share even without road trip capability, but the range does need to be more like 150 real EPA miles minimum for folks stop feeling like they are taking a big risk.
"Driverless cars are the revolution. Electric makes existing car use patterns better. Driverless makes an entirely new paradigm. It may eliminate mass car ownership. It might eliminate parking lots. It might eliminate light rail in suburban areas. Taxis. Deliveries. Shipping. Police reponses."
Huh?
Autonomous cars won't need to park? Do they warp to a distant land when you don't need them? Even Taxis have parking lots, though usually private ones, for when they are not operating. Similarly you see a lot of taxis sitting on the side of the road waiting to be assigned, the same would be necessary for a Johny Cab fleet. The fleet has to be big enough to handle peak usage, which is likely >10x what you need on the road at 3 AM.
Why would light rail go away in suburban areas? Often these are people taking the train because it is less of a headache than driving into the city center during rush hour (right, your idea is that autonomous cars somehow vanish when not in use...).
Deliveries and shipping will disappear?! How would that work? I buy my widget and it never comes? Thanks a lot for nothing.
Police responses go away? Anarchy here I come, HAL has eliminated the police! Do you expect machine gun turrets on top of autonomous cars, maybe automated stop and frisk bots too?
We need a Godwin's law for people who use "paradigm" in a sentence in place of "Effing miracle happens here".
GaAs and GaN have some real advantages over silicon, but price and density has not been their strong suit. Silicon is cheap per unit of area, and is compatible with copper metallization. GaAs in particular has always been sensitive to copper contamination, hence the use of gold for most of the interconnects. GaN has very fast switching speeds while handling an order of magnitude more voltage than GaAs (~10x the breakdown for the same Ft). So for a ~100 GHz Ft silicon can handle just a volt or so (think 65 nm nodes and smaller to get those speeds), GaAs can handle about ~5V, and GaN is more like 40V.
The real story here is the ability to run GaN with existing silicon equipment with silicon type costs, rather than the relatively low density fab equipment GaAs and GaN are usually processed on (usually the repurposed cast-offs from old silicon fabs).
GaN by its nature operates at high voltages, like 15V minimum, so don't expect a GaN based processor any time in the near future. Instead it sounds like they are claiming a 100x improvement in the Ron*Coff figure of merit for power switching devices. The payoff would be smaller and more efficient power electronics, such as the mentioned laptop supply brick, electric car power electronics, etc. Don't expect this has any bearing on the plateau of Moore's Law.
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While we have been sending radio transmissions for 80 years, the modularion has changed dramatically, which has negative imolications for finding ET, even if they are using our same frequency bands.
Early on we used FM and AM. Both end up with a strong easy to identify carrier tone. As time has gone one and DSP has become a cheap commodity we moved to more efficient modulations (relative to Shannons's limit). Digital modulations look more noise like and have no carrier as such. GPS is below the noise floor as received due to the energy being so smeared out, and that is from medium earth orbit. Your voice calls are recieved below noise as well in a CDMA system.
So if ET is similarly good at math, they will have moved on to signals that are similarly noise like and may simply be undetectable. There may only be a 100 year or so window to detect Earth, and similar may be true for ET.
Please explain how Australia's experience does not refute your argument.
Momentum is conserved, but a bunch of the kinetic energy is lost to heat and deformation of the bullet as it is captured.
This.
If your English class requires a computer, you have likely missed the point.
Bear in mind that once Johny has an El Cheapo computer, he likely will be far behind on computer skills. His house will likely not have an internet connection as well. He may fall far behind after wasting more time on computer skill rather than reading and writing. Sending students to a bunch of online videos and texts may be trendy, but it is likely not actually helping your students.
Far more helpful would be to add awnings over windows like the Petronas towers have. The view is not obstructed, but high angle sun is largely never hitting the windows.
Yep. It would be better for all involved to make a high efficiency building (often with smaller and fewer windows), and then pay for a remote solar farm. Moving power around is relatively efficient, especially compared to the losses from city shadows and design trade offs.
Solar windows for self sufficiency makes about as much sense as trying to put in hydroelectric power systems on the sewer lines leaving the buildings. Technically there is power to be had, but you efforts and money are almost certainly better spent elsewhere.
Funny, it was my Bogo-meter that pegged. The bogon flux emanating from the article was simply off the charts.
Bloated price tag, or baked in bloatware/malware. Which is worse?
I mostly loathe my Samsung POS Android phone due to the small internal memory that is larded up with crap I can't delete, but can't stomach an iphone price tag. My wife loves her 5s, and it is a much better widget that works far better and has held up better as well. She upgraded from a different Android POS that auto-updated itself until it ran out of memory and there was no easy way to clear it out and make it a usable phone again.
So in looking for a new phone for me it is either a minefield of Android crap phones, or a pretty solid overpriced iphone. At least with a $60 phone you can readily toss it if it turns out to suck too badly.
The current ISS is pretty pointless. Contrived "science" missions really have not produced any headline worthy results. It is basically a summer camp for astronauts. Is there station going to be just as pointless?
I had a decent layoff package about 10 years ago, and it was great. I spent almost a year living out of my truck going from rock climbing spot to rock climbing spot. I was happier and healthier than during any other similar stretch of time in my life. Right now I don't want more money, I want more time. I would love to be able to go do the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and spend a lot more more nights hanging in a portaledge on side of El Cap. I'd love to spend more time with my wife and kid too. Heck, just being able to hang out by a fire ring in Joshua Tree National Park without a vacation countdown clock in the back of my head would be a huge life improvement.
I honestly enjoy my work, but I have shown myself that I can be even happier not working just fine for a pretty long stretch. If I could have 3 months off a year I could stop bumping into burnout so often. My real fear is that by time I can retire, or at least slow down the hamster wheel I am stuck on, I will not be able to physically do the things I really enjoy anymore. Maybe I should start buying lottery tickets?
While it is egregious, it is what everything has moved to, and the seeds of this are quite old. Games are released in Beta form, with furious patching for the first month or two, followed by ongoing significant tweaks and bug fixes stretching out for more than a year at times.
Wolfenstein Enemy Territory was the first game I recall that was not playable after the disc install, and that was about 10 years ago.
Games like Battlefield 4 have changed quite a bit from when they first shipped (actually playable now...). The updates can be many GB at times, often with almost no apparent changes beyond more tracers and tweaks to reload times.
Probably a better discussion point is what games have gotten so HUGE? 50-80 GB games seem to be the new normal, and for folks stuck on DSL or who live in rural areas that just sucks. Even with my 25 Mbps I find these monsters to be really annoying to download. Perhaps the high resolution textures need to be optional free downloads for poor souls with small drives or slow connections (crap, those might get turned in to extra DLC to charge for...).
Rule 34.
Yep, this. My 2002 truck is more pleasant to drive in a lot of ways than my 2011 commuter car.
- No "I Agree" button on the touchscreen sever single time I start it up.
- AC controls that are a couple simple knobs, not monstrous buttons that get reset to outside air and AC every time I cycle through the defrost setting to get back to front vents.
- No XM selection I have to cycle through to get from my iPod back to FM.
- No downloaded messages about how my carbon footprint is doing for the last month that start playing 30s into my drive (very distracting to turn off via the stupid touchscreen).
Why manufacturers (and consumers) think we need all this touchscreen, and now internet connected crap is beyond me. I just want to get from home to work and back.
Where the model broke down is that we let them fail. We are supposed to keep sending them orders for stuff and park the products in the Mojave desert. It works for the defense industry, but the government screwed up and actually let Solyndra die rather than converting it into a perpetual contractor like so many defense companies.
OK, so other than some flower vases, as well has hard to clean (but cool looking) beer glasses, what is the real utility?
Sorry for being a naysayer, but the whole 3D printed "revolution" has been underwhelming thus far. It has a really high cool factor, but I am still waiting to see a whole lot of useful stuff come from it.
Even 8 GB is good enough for >95% of the days. Still, I run big nasty electromagnetic simulations a few times a quarter that run into the 20-50 GB usage ballpark. So I have 64 GB of RAM. Probably cost the company about a grand, but being unable to run those sims would cost them much more.
Engineer time is the most expensive budget item.
License costs are next.
Workstation hardware is the lowest cost by a pretty big margin.
Obviously that order varies a lot depending on the type of work you do, but I am often amazed by companies who have 6 figure employees who are required to use ancient laptops and small monitors to save a few bucks, when lost productivity often outweighs those costs at least ten to one.
"The good news is that autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride."
They will only give another person a ride during peak hours, say morning rush hours and evening hours. Mid-day traffic will be lighter, and middle of the night traffic will be downright dead. At those time these Johny Cabs still have to go somewhere. The Schisters trying make a buck will want them programmed to waste the least gas possible. So unlike human cabs that often troll around looking for a fare, these Johny Cabs are likely to park immediately at the closest free spot and wait for someone to call for a ride with their smart phone.
Without enough regulation, these cabs may make parking matters worse, as they won't necessarily go back to home base every night if a few pennies can be saved on gas by parking near where they will be needed in the morning.
Riddle me this, what voltage does your widget run off of? 1.5V? 3.3V? 5V? 12V? 48V?
AC to the house is 120V single phase of 240V 2-phase which covers all appliances from a few watts to many kW. There is also 3-phase 208V which is a lot less common to residential.
DC is the latest hipster fantasy plan pushed by those who mostly have no clue. It sounds all sexy to be anti-establishment, but in general DC is an awful choice for power distribution. It still need to be run at a pretty hefty voltage to keep the wire gauge reasonable, and you end up having to make a bunch of DC-DC converters (really DC-AC-DC) for each required supply voltage anyway.
120V 60Hz may be an old tired standard, but usually that is better than no standard at all.
Almost everything from Google is Beta. It is subject to spurious cancellation, hard tacks in direction it is going in, and rarely is "finished" as such.
I avoid most Google things for this reason alone, there is a better chance they will lose interest and kill it than not. It is not clear to me what, if anything, is subject to long term support.
Compounding this is their invite only launches. They build huge buzz, then turn away people who want in. By time they open it up to more people I have forgotten why I was excited in the first place (Google Glass, their phone service with funky data plan, etc). If they want to sell a product, sell it. If you want to provide a service, provide it. Betas should be done quietly under an NDA, not with trumpeting press releases.
Cars have about a 12 year half life. The composition of the cars on the road will be subject to that. So even if 100% of the cars being made suddenly were autonomous it would be a long time before most of the cars on the road were autonomous. The insurance industry will have a lot longer to see the changes coming than implied here.
The long life of cars is such that I can't imagine the security mess that will come with owning a 10-20 year old autonomous car. People gripe now about XP not getting security updated, but imagine still having Win95 based vehicles still on the roads that are 10 years past EOL support. People will be irate when their Chevy HAL gets an over the air update that disables the autonomous function after the company lawyers freakout over a hard to patch vulnerability.
Somehow people think autonomous cars will only leak pixie dust, and that people will happily throw away their drivers license and just take Johny Cabs everywhere.
Or you could just rent a gasser for the few times a year you take a road trip.
Seriously, we drive our crappy little Leaf more than our other two cars combined, and by a large margin. We take the crappy Ford Escape for longer local trips, and the Tundra truck for hauling our camping kit, or a load of crap from Home Despot. It is not a stretch to expect that we could readily get to 20-25% electric market share even without road trip capability, but the range does need to be more like 150 real EPA miles minimum for folks stop feeling like they are taking a big risk.
"Driverless cars are the revolution. Electric makes existing car use patterns better. Driverless makes an entirely new paradigm. It may eliminate mass car ownership. It might eliminate parking lots. It might eliminate light rail in suburban areas. Taxis. Deliveries. Shipping. Police reponses."
Huh?
Autonomous cars won't need to park? Do they warp to a distant land when you don't need them? Even Taxis have parking lots, though usually private ones, for when they are not operating. Similarly you see a lot of taxis sitting on the side of the road waiting to be assigned, the same would be necessary for a Johny Cab fleet. The fleet has to be big enough to handle peak usage, which is likely >10x what you need on the road at 3 AM.
Why would light rail go away in suburban areas? Often these are people taking the train because it is less of a headache than driving into the city center during rush hour (right, your idea is that autonomous cars somehow vanish when not in use...).
Deliveries and shipping will disappear?! How would that work? I buy my widget and it never comes? Thanks a lot for nothing.
Police responses go away? Anarchy here I come, HAL has eliminated the police! Do you expect machine gun turrets on top of autonomous cars, maybe automated stop and frisk bots too?
We need a Godwin's law for people who use "paradigm" in a sentence in place of "Effing miracle happens here".
Take my money and give me my receipt. If you put gimmicks around that process to up sell me, you are pretty far down a slippery slope.
GaAs and GaN have some real advantages over silicon, but price and density has not been their strong suit. Silicon is cheap per unit of area, and is compatible with copper metallization. GaAs in particular has always been sensitive to copper contamination, hence the use of gold for most of the interconnects. GaN has very fast switching speeds while handling an order of magnitude more voltage than GaAs (~10x the breakdown for the same Ft). So for a ~100 GHz Ft silicon can handle just a volt or so (think 65 nm nodes and smaller to get those speeds), GaAs can handle about ~5V, and GaN is more like 40V.
The real story here is the ability to run GaN with existing silicon equipment with silicon type costs, rather than the relatively low density fab equipment GaAs and GaN are usually processed on (usually the repurposed cast-offs from old silicon fabs).
GaN by its nature operates at high voltages, like 15V minimum, so don't expect a GaN based processor any time in the near future. Instead it sounds like they are claiming a 100x improvement in the Ron*Coff figure of merit for power switching devices. The payoff would be smaller and more efficient power electronics, such as the mentioned laptop supply brick, electric car power electronics, etc. Don't expect this has any bearing on the plateau of Moore's Law.