The problem with that graph is that the time scale used is far too small. The line of best fit would have shown a downward trend in 3-4 times before present, it is only later values that pull it up. If not for the huge peak between 1995 and 2000, the trend line would still be going up!
If you expand the graph you see a much different picture. Clearly the temperature is rising quickly right? Well who is to say that this graph is any better at predicting the future than yours?
I would also point out the IPCC predictions are based on decade averages. So saying that it doesn't work because they estimated too high this year, is like saying they were wrong because they estimated too low 1998.
Seriously problem is not high gas prices, the problem is urban sprawl. I don't own a car and I hope I never do (I can rent if I must). I live downtown Toronto and I promise you the best thing in this city is the PATH, 28km (17miles) of underground walking paths. Almost the whole thing is lined with stores and cafeterias. Things connected to the PATH include Union Station (rail & subway links), all the sports stadiums, several downtown malls (esp. Eaton Centre), Opera, Symphony, Live Theatre, and about a dozen subway stations. Very few things in the downtown core are more than a 5min walk from a PATH entry point.
Many people in Toronto take either GO Transit (regional rail), or TTC (subway/bus) to the downtown core, then walk underground to where ever they need to go. And from what I have heard, places like Hong Kong and Tokyo do it even better.
Also the population density thing is nonsense. The Golden Horseshoe has a higher population density than most European counties, and at 8 million people it is also bigger than a few. The BosWash area of the USA even more so at 58 million 360pp/km2! The only reason these areas don't have European style public transit is due to a lack of foresight.
As someone who voted for the Conservatives in the last election I have to say I find this every disturbing. Everyone expects politicians to play hardball with each other: name-calling, negative campaigning, scare-mongering, over promising. No one likes it but it is what it is.
But playing hardball with voters is crossing the line. Every Canadian citizen has a right to vote, and someone in the conservative caucus was interfering with that right then they should be put in jail.
The funny thing is while I don't agree with many of the polices of this government I can at least understand why they are doing it. But between Toews, MacKay, and now this, I think the problem with the Tories is not policy but personality. Some of them are just assholes.
IANA web admin, but from what I have learned from playing around with both Apache and Nginx is that they serve different markets.
Nginx is a small, fast, reliable web server that is great for virtual machines, home users, newbies (like me), etc. It is simple and "just works" because it make sense. Nginx is the Ubuntu/Mint of the web server world.
Apache is a massive, feature rich, highly tunable, beast that can inter-operate with everything. This is an enterprise class (or at least very serious workload) web server. Designed by people who know what they are doing for people who know what they are doing. Apache is the Slackware/Gentoo of the web server world.
If you need a web server to get a job done, use Nginx. If the web server is your job then Apache. The key is how much time you have to spend figuring out how to customize Apache just right vs. how much those customizations are worth.
Or 1)Open terminal. 2) for i in quiz*.doc;do lp -n 15 $i;done. Now not many people would know how to do that and need to have the GUI to guide them. But for those of us who do know, not having the option of using a command line (especially for remote connections!) is dreadful.
That sounds like a real time saver. Except that for most people who don't understand loops, variables, and programming in general, the time required to learn what all that actually means is orders of magnitude longer than it takes to press print 4 times.
See how if you had just read the two sentences after what you quoted it all makes sense. Common buddy.
Right, because there's absolutely nothing arcane or overly complex about having to open a terminal window, read a bunch of man pages, and then issue two commands with various flags just to mount a disk image.
While yes it can be arcane to go through man pages to find out how to using things, I doubt many people do that anymore. If I need to know the command I go to google and type "Linux ${thing I want to do}" and get exactly what I need 90% of the time.
However what I find stupid is having to run a gui to do the stupidest little thing. For example:
Yesterday I had to print out quizzes for my students, I had 4.doc versions of the quiz and needed 15 of each. On a gui I would have to this 4 times: 1) LibreOffice 2) Press Ctrl+P 3) Type in the number of copies. Opening LibreOffice/MS Office can be brutally slow on older machines.
Or 1)Open terminal. 2) for i in quiz*.doc;do lp -n 15 $i;done. Now not many people would know how to do that and need to have the GUI to guide them. But for those of us who do know, not having the option of using a command line (especially for remote connections!) is dreadful. Why do I have to have so many GUIs, wizards, pop-ups, tips of the day, and other nonsense between me and the code that will send my stuff to the printer?
And that is really the crux of the problem for me. It's not that the command line is better or the GUI is better. They each have their pros and cons. The problem is MS has crap command-line support, so when something is better done via command-line the option isn't there.
MS is just adding insult to injury with their command line trickery comment. They claim the Win8 is better because you can mount ISOs from the GUI while on Linux you have to use the command line. Okay that is fair, but what about all of the windows versions currently available? You know, the ones where you just can't do it at all, command line or not?
There seems to be a fair bit of skepticism about reaching this place because at 22ly it is way to far. But what about a probe? Probes can be much less massive, can be designed to operate for long periods of time, don't need to maintain contact. Also I don't see the need to stop in the system to collected data. Just whizzing through with some high powered instruments should be sufficient.
Quite right. I do research on AI for embedded systems, specifically Integer Neural Networks (is it a shameless plug if I don't profit from it? creative commons book chapter.). By cutting out FP you can make all those low cost (sub $1) microcontrollers pretty powerful. Neural Networks cut out a lot of the processing by just making good guesses, then cutting out FP makes an implementation very light on resources.
I was trying to quote Patton but got the wording wrong it should have read:
“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.”
But you are right in that it is often better to wound than kill. According the Clausewitz the purpose of war is to remove your opponents will to resist you (I cannot find the quote so those may not be the exact words). The actual killing or wounding is just a means to an end. Ideally you can win without fighting through intimidation, diplomacy, etc.
This is a large reason why the fighting of Islamic radicals is so difficult. They feel whatever happens in this world will be justified in the next (eg. suicide bombers). It is incredibly difficult to defeat people when in their view nothing in this world matters.
Although I don't for a second believe that the war in Afghanistan for example cannot be won. Saying that the US is losing to the Taliban, is like saying Germany was losing to the French Resistance, or that Britain was losing to the IRA. Eventually the Afghan police and military will be able to take over in some fashion. Resistance movements like the Taliban are common throughout the Islamic world (ie. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia) they will never go away for the same reason crime never goes away. It sounds really bizarre to people in the western world to think of Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, or al-Shabaab, as something you just live with. But that has been the reality for many people in the Islamic world for decades.
Well your little spiel would make sense if bean counters didn't actually care about money.
Have you seen how much money was spent on the Iraq war? Money is not an issue
Why waste 50 mil on a blown up drone when you can level the whole village with the push of a button? You don't even have to see their dead bodies if you don't want to.
You mean like how right now we don't waste 100s of billions in Iraq when we could just level the whole thing with bombers? Wait a second.....
No actually it is quite a difficult task. How difficult depends on how how much time you have and how accurate you need the system to be.
Humans can be very accurate. Unfortunately in combat they have almost no time, if you wait too long to make a decision it could cost you your life. This means they get it wrong an awful lot of the time. Robots are not really that accurate (for now at least), but they have lots of time because they are expendable.
The reason robots can work is not because the task is easy, but because the bar has been set so low. The robot can have lot and lots of false negatives (ie. doesn't shoot enemies) because no one cares if the robots dies. On the flip side if its positive ids are wrong half the time (ie. 50% of the people it kills are innocent), that is still 5 times better than a human.
Robots, making war easier for the public to swallow. It's less icky to wage war when you can send robots instead of people.
It's also less likely to make mistakes and kill innocent people. For those of you who don't know most casualties in war are civilians. The civilian casualty ratio for recent wars has averaged 10 civilians for every combatant. The reasons are many but is basically boils down to who takes what risks.
When a soldier is in a combat zone he has to make a shoot/no-shoot choice for every person he sees. Now of course in a combat zone people are running on adrenaline, they are often exhausted, the situation is chaos, and the stakes are life and death. So if you are a soldier and you see someone, how sure are you going to be that they are not a civilian before you shoot? And remember if you are wrong, you die.
A good example is this story. It is easy to lay blame after the fact. But imagine you are in that chopper, you have had RPGs shot at you all day, and then you see someone in a van pointing a black tube like thing at you. What are you going to do?
But probably the biggest cause is long range weapons like artillery and air strikes. Sometimes sending in people on the ground would be suicide, so you have to use less accurate weapons like artillery and air strikes even though they cause more civilian casualties. This need to minimize your own casualties it just part of how war works, and it always has. The point of war is not to die for your side, but to make the other guy die for his.
With drones however the game changes because you can send a drone on a suicide mission instead of firing artillery. You can have a drone wait and verify that it is a camera and not an RPG. Yes drones will make mistakes, probably a lot of mistakes, but humans only get it right 10% of the time anyway. So please don't pretend that the bar is so high that it will never work.
The argument against drones is like an argument against smart bombs. They get the job done faster, cheaper, and with less casualties for all sides. But then some people will argue against it anyway because its popular to be anti-anything-military.
While yes using a SATA 3.0 would take forever, there is no reason to think that when these drives a produced that will be the standard used for them. I think it is more likely that they will connect to something like PCIe 16x slot (or whatever dongle they are using to connect to that bus). A v3.0 PCIe 16x will do 16GB/s so it would take 34 hours with technology in most people's computer right now. By the time 2EB drives get on the market I don't think it will be an issue.
I'm more concerned about when all the programs I use are going to get properly threaded so my 32 core computer of the future won't be wasting most of it's clock cycles. Threading is not trivial and there are a lot of legacy programs out there.
How the hell can the manage 500MB/s? That is an insane amount. We can stream 720p with 5.1 audio over a 5mb/s connection. So what the hell are they using all that bandwidth for?
Clearly the military needs to invest some money in compression and/or greater automation in these things. 500MB/s should be enough for a wing of UAVs.
Here in the US they let the entrenched media conglomerates control the flow of information by abusing civil law to maintain a de facto cartel.
The situations are not equivalent. In the USA the media makes people pay a fee to access information they have collected, they are trying to make money providing a service. But they cannot stop others from publishing their own information, most importantly information from outside of the USA. The goal is more profits.
In Iran, it is the government who is trying to censor information from both domestic and foreign source. The goal is control of public opinion.
The US situation is about money. The Iran situation is about censorship.
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Every nation has the right to develop nuclear weapons, but most (including Iran) promised not to, so they could have access to already developed peaceful nuclear technology.
The world falls into three groups on this treaty:
Nuclear Powers: USA, Russia, UK, France, China
Non-Signatories: India, Pakistan, Israel (recently joined by North Korea)
Signatories: Everyone else (that includes Iran).
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty works like this:
Nuclear Powers: Give Signatories nuclear technology for medical and industrial purposes.
NPT-Signatories: Promise not to use that technology for weapons or share it outside the NPT.
Non-Signatories: No access to technology, no promise not to build weapons.
Iran is not being sanctioned for developing nuclear weapons. They are being sanctioned because they promised they would not use the technology Russia gave them to develop weapons, are promise they a breaking.
Israel and Pakistan and India are not being sanctioned because they did not make that promise.
The problem is not that they allow remote access. That is obviously useful. The problem is that they rig the thing up on the internet, sans firewall, where anyone can hammer away at it.
I don't see any reason why a company cannot run all of these systems through a a VPN where only the only people allowed on the VPN is the engineers who need to be. I suspect they they don't do this simply because they are lazy or incompetent.
Those whole issue of subsidies and trade with China are moot. Chinese currency policy already has a far greater impact on trade than any tariff or subsidy. China likes to claim that they don't manipulate their currency to gain an advantage but that is bold faced lie. European empires played currency games with each other for centuries and Japan/South Korea did the same in the 70s and 80s, we know exactly what it looks like.
Countries suppress the value of their currency to aid exports. The result is a massive trade imbalance, huge currency reserves, and lots of inflation. Now these things can happen without currency manipulation for a short while. But when the effect is massive and long lasting its a pretty good indication of government intervention.
How NASA projects should work:
President gives a mission to NASA
NASA estimates method and budget
Congress approves budget
NASA completes mission
Here is how it actually works:
President gives a mission to NASA
Congress chooses the method (maximum jobs) and budget (way too small)
NASA tries and fails to make congresses' stupid ideas work
New President cancels old mission in favour of a new mission that is "better" because he can take credit for it
The exclusion zone around Fukushima is now unfarmable.
That is the problem with the media right there. You clearly have good understanding of the risks, but most people thanks to the media do not. I remember immediate after Fukushima hit the new people that people were claiming that a huge part of Japan, all they way down to Tokyo would become uninhabitable for 100's of years. Just purely spreading panic.
The truth is that an area less then 20km in radius will be unsuitable for farming. Bad yes, but totally different than what the media was going on about. Compare that with the damage/reporting on the Tsunami that killed 10,000+ people.
Nuclear is dangerous no doubt, but not to the extent that most people believe. And the saddest part is that because of this exaggerated fear we are not replace old nuclear plants with newer safer ones, which is actually putting us at greater risk.
The problem is not so much with the technologies' themselves as it is people's understanding of the scale of them.
My point was not that this or that particular method will not work, in fact I support solar and wind technology. My point is that most people don't have a good grasp of the scale of these projects.
Nuclear most people understand, partly because of the huge upfront costs and partly because Greenpeace has scared the shit out of them. But if you ask people what it would cost to replace a nuclear or coal plant they have no idea.
assumed that nothing else can use the land assigned for it.
I calculated the raw area needed to be occupied by solar panels based on the energy per m^2 so that land cannot be used by anything else. I'm not talking about wind farms, try reading my post again.
The problem is not so much with the technologies' themselves as it is people's understanding of the scale of them. For example Tom Murphy explains that dropping the great lakes by 1m would produce 54 billion kWh. Compare that to the 2,000 billion kWh produced every year by coal plants. My napkin math says we would drain the great lakes of their current supply of water in the order of years, not decades just to replace coal.
Since the people on Slashdot are mathematically inclined, try to calculate the physical area needed for solar panels to replace a nuclear power station near you. To replace the Pickering Nuclear Planet (3.1GW) the oldest planet here in Ontario with solar assuming Ontario get the global average amount of sun light (which is pretty generous for Ontario) and gets an average of 20% efficiency you get 250W x 0.2 = 50W/m^2. So, (3.1E9W) / (50W/m^2) = 62E6 m^2 or 62,000 square km, a box 8km by 8km of solid solar panels or a circle with a radius of 4.4km. That is approx 2% the size of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. We are talking about building something 2% the size of the area we fenced off during the worst nuclear accident in history per nuclear station.
Most renewable source of energy are not very concentrated, so anything dealing with them has to be huge, it's inescapable.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that graph is that the time scale used is far too small. The line of best fit would have shown a downward trend in 3-4 times before present, it is only later values that pull it up. If not for the huge peak between 1995 and 2000, the trend line would still be going up!
If you expand the graph you see a much different picture. Clearly the temperature is rising quickly right? Well who is to say that this graph is any better at predicting the future than yours?
I would also point out the IPCC predictions are based on decade averages. So saying that it doesn't work because they estimated too high this year, is like saying they were wrong because they estimated too low 1998.
Seriously problem is not high gas prices, the problem is urban sprawl. I don't own a car and I hope I never do (I can rent if I must). I live downtown Toronto and I promise you the best thing in this city is the PATH, 28km (17miles) of underground walking paths. Almost the whole thing is lined with stores and cafeterias. Things connected to the PATH include Union Station (rail & subway links), all the sports stadiums, several downtown malls (esp. Eaton Centre), Opera, Symphony, Live Theatre, and about a dozen subway stations. Very few things in the downtown core are more than a 5min walk from a PATH entry point.
Many people in Toronto take either GO Transit (regional rail), or TTC (subway/bus) to the downtown core, then walk underground to where ever they need to go. And from what I have heard, places like Hong Kong and Tokyo do it even better.
Also the population density thing is nonsense. The Golden Horseshoe has a higher population density than most European counties, and at 8 million people it is also bigger than a few. The BosWash area of the USA even more so at 58 million 360pp/km2! The only reason these areas don't have European style public transit is due to a lack of foresight.
As someone who voted for the Conservatives in the last election I have to say I find this every disturbing. Everyone expects politicians to play hardball with each other: name-calling, negative campaigning, scare-mongering, over promising. No one likes it but it is what it is.
But playing hardball with voters is crossing the line. Every Canadian citizen has a right to vote, and someone in the conservative caucus was interfering with that right then they should be put in jail.
The funny thing is while I don't agree with many of the polices of this government I can at least understand why they are doing it. But between Toews, MacKay, and now this, I think the problem with the Tories is not policy but personality. Some of them are just assholes.
IANA web admin, but from what I have learned from playing around with both Apache and Nginx is that they serve different markets.
Nginx is a small, fast, reliable web server that is great for virtual machines, home users, newbies (like me), etc. It is simple and "just works" because it make sense. Nginx is the Ubuntu/Mint of the web server world.
Apache is a massive, feature rich, highly tunable, beast that can inter-operate with everything. This is an enterprise class (or at least very serious workload) web server. Designed by people who know what they are doing for people who know what they are doing. Apache is the Slackware/Gentoo of the web server world.
If you need a web server to get a job done, use Nginx. If the web server is your job then Apache. The key is how much time you have to spend figuring out how to customize Apache just right vs. how much those customizations are worth.
Michael Bay is that you?
Or 1)Open terminal. 2) for i in quiz*.doc;do lp -n 15 $i;done. Now not many people would know how to do that and need to have the GUI to guide them. But for those of us who do know, not having the option of using a command line (especially for remote connections!) is dreadful.
That sounds like a real time saver. Except that for most people who don't understand loops, variables, and programming in general, the time required to learn what all that actually means is orders of magnitude longer than it takes to press print 4 times.
See how if you had just read the two sentences after what you quoted it all makes sense. Common buddy.
Right, because there's absolutely nothing arcane or overly complex about having to open a terminal window, read a bunch of man pages, and then issue two commands with various flags just to mount a disk image.
While yes it can be arcane to go through man pages to find out how to using things, I doubt many people do that anymore. If I need to know the command I go to google and type "Linux ${thing I want to do}" and get exactly what I need 90% of the time.
However what I find stupid is having to run a gui to do the stupidest little thing. For example:
Yesterday I had to print out quizzes for my students, I had 4 .doc versions of the quiz and needed 15 of each. On a gui I would have to this 4 times: 1) LibreOffice 2) Press Ctrl+P 3) Type in the number of copies. Opening LibreOffice/MS Office can be brutally slow on older machines.
Or 1)Open terminal. 2) for i in quiz*.doc;do lp -n 15 $i;done. Now not many people would know how to do that and need to have the GUI to guide them. But for those of us who do know, not having the option of using a command line (especially for remote connections!) is dreadful. Why do I have to have so many GUIs, wizards, pop-ups, tips of the day, and other nonsense between me and the code that will send my stuff to the printer?
And that is really the crux of the problem for me. It's not that the command line is better or the GUI is better. They each have their pros and cons. The problem is MS has crap command-line support, so when something is better done via command-line the option isn't there.
MS is just adding insult to injury with their command line trickery comment. They claim the Win8 is better because you can mount ISOs from the GUI while on Linux you have to use the command line. Okay that is fair, but what about all of the windows versions currently available? You know, the ones where you just can't do it at all, command line or not?
There seems to be a fair bit of skepticism about reaching this place because at 22ly it is way to far. But what about a probe? Probes can be much less massive, can be designed to operate for long periods of time, don't need to maintain contact. Also I don't see the need to stop in the system to collected data. Just whizzing through with some high powered instruments should be sufficient.
Sounds like a good idea. Hopefully they can actually do something with this instead of endlessly talking about it, and sinking money into studys.
Quite right. I do research on AI for embedded systems, specifically Integer Neural Networks (is it a shameless plug if I don't profit from it? creative commons book chapter.). By cutting out FP you can make all those low cost (sub $1) microcontrollers pretty powerful. Neural Networks cut out a lot of the processing by just making good guesses, then cutting out FP makes an implementation very light on resources.
I was trying to quote Patton but got the wording wrong it should have read:
“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other guy die for his.”
But you are right in that it is often better to wound than kill. According the Clausewitz the purpose of war is to remove your opponents will to resist you (I cannot find the quote so those may not be the exact words). The actual killing or wounding is just a means to an end. Ideally you can win without fighting through intimidation, diplomacy, etc.
This is a large reason why the fighting of Islamic radicals is so difficult. They feel whatever happens in this world will be justified in the next (eg. suicide bombers). It is incredibly difficult to defeat people when in their view nothing in this world matters.
Although I don't for a second believe that the war in Afghanistan for example cannot be won. Saying that the US is losing to the Taliban, is like saying Germany was losing to the French Resistance, or that Britain was losing to the IRA. Eventually the Afghan police and military will be able to take over in some fashion. Resistance movements like the Taliban are common throughout the Islamic world (ie. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia) they will never go away for the same reason crime never goes away. It sounds really bizarre to people in the western world to think of Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, or al-Shabaab, as something you just live with. But that has been the reality for many people in the Islamic world for decades.
Well your little spiel would make sense if bean counters didn't actually care about money.
Have you seen how much money was spent on the Iraq war? Money is not an issue
Why waste 50 mil on a blown up drone when you can level the whole village with the push of a button? You don't even have to see their dead bodies if you don't want to.
You mean like how right now we don't waste 100s of billions in Iraq when we could just level the whole thing with bombers? Wait a second.....
So if you are a soldier and you see someone, how sure are you going to be that they are not a civilian before you shoot?
Yes, because it's so trivial to program such a quick response into a robot?
if (object == enemy) { kill(); } else { candy(); }
No actually it is quite a difficult task. How difficult depends on how how much time you have and how accurate you need the system to be.
Humans can be very accurate. Unfortunately in combat they have almost no time, if you wait too long to make a decision it could cost you your life. This means they get it wrong an awful lot of the time. Robots are not really that accurate (for now at least), but they have lots of time because they are expendable.
The reason robots can work is not because the task is easy, but because the bar has been set so low. The robot can have lot and lots of false negatives (ie. doesn't shoot enemies) because no one cares if the robots dies. On the flip side if its positive ids are wrong half the time (ie. 50% of the people it kills are innocent), that is still 5 times better than a human.
Robots, making war easier for the public to swallow. It's less icky to wage war when you can send robots instead of people.
It's also less likely to make mistakes and kill innocent people. For those of you who don't know most casualties in war are civilians. The civilian casualty ratio for recent wars has averaged 10 civilians for every combatant. The reasons are many but is basically boils down to who takes what risks.
When a soldier is in a combat zone he has to make a shoot/no-shoot choice for every person he sees. Now of course in a combat zone people are running on adrenaline, they are often exhausted, the situation is chaos, and the stakes are life and death. So if you are a soldier and you see someone, how sure are you going to be that they are not a civilian before you shoot? And remember if you are wrong, you die.
A good example is this story. It is easy to lay blame after the fact. But imagine you are in that chopper, you have had RPGs shot at you all day, and then you see someone in a van pointing a black tube like thing at you. What are you going to do?
But probably the biggest cause is long range weapons like artillery and air strikes. Sometimes sending in people on the ground would be suicide, so you have to use less accurate weapons like artillery and air strikes even though they cause more civilian casualties. This need to minimize your own casualties it just part of how war works, and it always has. The point of war is not to die for your side, but to make the other guy die for his.
With drones however the game changes because you can send a drone on a suicide mission instead of firing artillery. You can have a drone wait and verify that it is a camera and not an RPG. Yes drones will make mistakes, probably a lot of mistakes, but humans only get it right 10% of the time anyway. So please don't pretend that the bar is so high that it will never work.
The argument against drones is like an argument against smart bombs. They get the job done faster, cheaper, and with less casualties for all sides. But then some people will argue against it anyway because its popular to be anti-anything-military.
While yes using a SATA 3.0 would take forever, there is no reason to think that when these drives a produced that will be the standard used for them. I think it is more likely that they will connect to something like PCIe 16x slot (or whatever dongle they are using to connect to that bus). A v3.0 PCIe 16x will do 16GB/s so it would take 34 hours with technology in most people's computer right now. By the time 2EB drives get on the market I don't think it will be an issue.
I'm more concerned about when all the programs I use are going to get properly threaded so my 32 core computer of the future won't be wasting most of it's clock cycles. Threading is not trivial and there are a lot of legacy programs out there.
How the hell can the manage 500MB/s? That is an insane amount. We can stream 720p with 5.1 audio over a 5mb/s connection. So what the hell are they using all that bandwidth for?
Clearly the military needs to invest some money in compression and/or greater automation in these things. 500MB/s should be enough for a wing of UAVs.
Here in the US they let the entrenched media conglomerates control the flow of information by abusing civil law to maintain a de facto cartel.
The situations are not equivalent. In the USA the media makes people pay a fee to access information they have collected, they are trying to make money providing a service. But they cannot stop others from publishing their own information, most importantly information from outside of the USA. The goal is more profits.
In Iran, it is the government who is trying to censor information from both domestic and foreign source. The goal is control of public opinion.
The US situation is about money. The Iran situation is about censorship.
Why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons?
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Every nation has the right to develop nuclear weapons, but most (including Iran) promised not to, so they could have access to already developed peaceful nuclear technology.
The world falls into three groups on this treaty:
Nuclear Powers: USA, Russia, UK, France, China
Non-Signatories: India, Pakistan, Israel (recently joined by North Korea)
Signatories: Everyone else (that includes Iran).
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty works like this:
Nuclear Powers: Give Signatories nuclear technology for medical and industrial purposes.
NPT-Signatories: Promise not to use that technology for weapons or share it outside the NPT.
Non-Signatories: No access to technology, no promise not to build weapons.
Iran is not being sanctioned for developing nuclear weapons. They are being sanctioned because they promised they would not use the technology Russia gave them to develop weapons, are promise they a breaking.
Israel and Pakistan and India are not being sanctioned because they did not make that promise.
The problem is not that they allow remote access. That is obviously useful. The problem is that they rig the thing up on the internet, sans firewall, where anyone can hammer away at it.
I don't see any reason why a company cannot run all of these systems through a a VPN where only the only people allowed on the VPN is the engineers who need to be. I suspect they they don't do this simply because they are lazy or incompetent.
Very Interesting Mod Parent UP!
Those whole issue of subsidies and trade with China are moot. Chinese currency policy already has a far greater impact on trade than any tariff or subsidy. China likes to claim that they don't manipulate their currency to gain an advantage but that is bold faced lie. European empires played currency games with each other for centuries and Japan/South Korea did the same in the 70s and 80s, we know exactly what it looks like.
Countries suppress the value of their currency to aid exports. The result is a massive trade imbalance, huge currency reserves, and lots of inflation. Now these things can happen without currency manipulation for a short while. But when the effect is massive and long lasting its a pretty good indication of government intervention.
How NASA projects should work:
President gives a mission to NASA
NASA estimates method and budget
Congress approves budget
NASA completes mission
Here is how it actually works:
President gives a mission to NASA
Congress chooses the method (maximum jobs) and budget (way too small)
NASA tries and fails to make congresses' stupid ideas work
New President cancels old mission in favour of a new mission that is "better" because he can take credit for it
The exclusion zone around Fukushima is now unfarmable.
That is the problem with the media right there. You clearly have good understanding of the risks, but most people thanks to the media do not. I remember immediate after Fukushima hit the new people that people were claiming that a huge part of Japan, all they way down to Tokyo would become uninhabitable for 100's of years. Just purely spreading panic.
The truth is that an area less then 20km in radius will be unsuitable for farming. Bad yes, but totally different than what the media was going on about. Compare that with the damage/reporting on the Tsunami that killed 10,000+ people.
Nuclear is dangerous no doubt, but not to the extent that most people believe. And the saddest part is that because of this exaggerated fear we are not replace old nuclear plants with newer safer ones, which is actually putting us at greater risk.
The problem is not so much with the technologies' themselves as it is people's understanding of the scale of them.
My point was not that this or that particular method will not work, in fact I support solar and wind technology. My point is that most people don't have a good grasp of the scale of these projects.
Nuclear most people understand, partly because of the huge upfront costs and partly because Greenpeace has scared the shit out of them. But if you ask people what it would cost to replace a nuclear or coal plant they have no idea.
assumed that nothing else can use the land assigned for it.
I calculated the raw area needed to be occupied by solar panels based on the energy per m^2 so that land cannot be used by anything else. I'm not talking about wind farms, try reading my post again.
The problem is not so much with the technologies' themselves as it is people's understanding of the scale of them. For example Tom Murphy explains that dropping the great lakes by 1m would produce 54 billion kWh. Compare that to the 2,000 billion kWh produced every year by coal plants. My napkin math says we would drain the great lakes of their current supply of water in the order of years, not decades just to replace coal.
Since the people on Slashdot are mathematically inclined, try to calculate the physical area needed for solar panels to replace a nuclear power station near you. To replace the Pickering Nuclear Planet (3.1GW) the oldest planet here in Ontario with solar assuming Ontario get the global average amount of sun light (which is pretty generous for Ontario) and gets an average of 20% efficiency you get 250W x 0.2 = 50W/m^2. So, (3.1E9W) / (50W/m^2) = 62E6 m^2 or 62,000 square km, a box 8km by 8km of solid solar panels or a circle with a radius of 4.4km. That is approx 2% the size of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. We are talking about building something 2% the size of the area we fenced off during the worst nuclear accident in history per nuclear station.
Most renewable source of energy are not very concentrated, so anything dealing with them has to be huge, it's inescapable.