Yes. Because changing the albedo for the total surface area of all the roofs in all the world would have any significant effect on a global scale... (hint: it wouldn't)
You'll end up with lower cooling bills in the summer, and higher heating bills in the winter. City temperatures will drop by a couple degrees, and in turn that will cause some localized changes in weather patterns, but that's about it.
Except if such a positive feedback loop worked as you suggest, we would be running our ACs a lot harder than we are currently. Many global warming models had predicted changes over the last ten years several times what they actually were, misjudging the effect this feedback loop would have.
The only real difference between clusters and shared memory "supercomputers" is that shared memory systems get a hardware assist to access remote data, while clusters have to do it all in software in the network stack and communications framework. When your infiniband backbone is running 5GB/s and latencies in the hundreds of nanoseconds between each node, where is the real cut off? It seems more like a gradual sliding scale to me.
Who cares if it's good for me. I would rather have cheese-its made from real tasty moldy cheddar in whatever industrial process you want and then covered in salt, than some tasteless homogenized oil-based crap.
It was actually easier to do with it muted because the noise wasn't drowning out the basely audible whine. You didn't really hear it, you just "knew" the TV was on. My personal favorite was the connection warble from one of the old cell generations. When the connection between phone and tower were initially established, they had a couple low frequency, high power pulses, that could be heard in any electronic noisemaker. Like the TVs, it was just barely in the audible range, and you didn't really hear it, you just "knew" someone's phone was about to ring.
We could do it with a form of gun! We could even use a form of electric steering of the gun through magnets! Now how do you suggest we get people to subject themselves to this electron gun for several hours a day?
Most LCDs use CFLs for backlighting, and a cheap ballast can produce a flicker. Wait until it's dark, turn your monitor brightness up, and bring up a blank white page. Move your hand quickly across the screen. My two Samsung monitors produce a noticeable strobe effect. My older Sony doesn't, presumably due to a better power supply that buffers out the 60Hz powerline signal.
All kidding aside, what I think is really going on with this, is it's part of a trend I've been seeing more and more over the last, say, 20 years. People are more and more rejecting technology and technological progress altogether. Not sure why.
I'm a part of that movement. Ubiquitous technology makes me feel vulnerable, because everything is so complex and interdependent now. When the power grid fails, we city-dwellers will quickly be in serious trouble.
Then you should be doing the exact opposite. Embrace it. Improve it. Make each part independently robust so you don't end up with cascading failures. Make the system more decentralized, so in the event of catastrophe, individual self-sufficient islands can break off and operate on their own, until connectivity is re-established. When something isn't quite good enough yet, abandoning it entirely is the worst possible option.
The game X3 is set up like that. It's a space trading/fighting sim, set up across a hundred or so sectors, encompassing some 3500sq.km. each. Every NPC in the game is a persistent entity, lasting from the point it is spawned until it is killed. If you attack one of these ships and don't kill them, they will mark you as an enemy and attack any of your property on sight from then on. If they belong to a station, that station may mark you as an enemy, disallowing trade, and attacking you and your property with owned defensive turrets or fighters, until you destroy them, or get someone to hack their IFF. You can wipe out entire sectors, making regions of space dead; hours before it becomes populated again by NPC traders travelling through the area, and days before the game spawns new stations and replacement NPCs.
This system, as the game is shipped, is relatively basic. However, the game is extremely modable, with a large community base around it. People modify the NPC trader AI to have a chance of learning of combat in nearby sectors, and routing around it. People modify the police response to call in external assistance, with fast frigates, followed by military capitol ships, jumping in on top of you, forcing you to flee the sector. People have replaced the entire combat AI, making it much more efficient in its use of ships.
As other people have mentioned, this all comes at a price. The CPU requirements later in the game can become very high. Only your current sector is computed with high precision. The AI decision tree outside your sector is performed at much more coarse intervals. The combat system is entirely disabled, instead relying on a turn based statistical model to compute outcomes. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Graphics cards get better every year, but all that gets you is the same gameplay with better graphics. On the other hand, more computational power and more memory actually opens up a a lot of avenues for AI to provide new forms of gameplay. It just takes a good programmer with a creative mind to make it happen, and those people can't be hired in bulk to meet a bottom line.
Sure, you could tank everyone down with level 3 chests, miniguns, and just destroy everything in the level as a single pack. There were some balance issues that allowed that to function, in all but missions where you had to protect an asset as they walked across town. Some of us actually took some creativity and freedom in completing the missions.
Because in some cases, it doesn't make sense for the streets to be vacant. If you are just walking around a city, you will expect people to be about doing their own thing. If battle erupts, they will be running all over the place for cover, or holed up in some corner somewhere. Two armies don't face off in a sterile environment. There needs to be external life around. Adding such things opens up the possibility for more in depth gameplay. Killing civilians gets you a reprimand, or a failed mission, or perhaps results in civilians reacting to you differently, closing off some options and opening others. Preventing civilian deaths earns you things, like better weapons. Perhaps enemy combatants are hiding among the civilians.
If your reasoning for not adding additional NPCs is due to triangle count, then you need to broaden your horizons, and realize that games can be about more than just high quality graphics.
I am being discriminated against by caviar producers. I can't afford to subsist on caviar alone, but that doesn't matter, because there are alternative food sources.
Now compare that to something like broadcast TV. There is only one form of broadcast TV, as mandated by the FCC. That form requires the use of MPEG2 video and AC3 audio, both of which include patented technology. If I want to produce a piece of software or hardware that can play back broadcast TV, I have no option but to license those technologies. They have achieved a government enforced monopoly. I can't afford to write free software to use those broadcasts, because I would have to pay the licensing fees out of pocket, and thus they are discriminating against free software.
In cases where this is to be an enforced standard, the standard should either use technologies that are guaranteed to be licensed freely, or the government should seize the patents using eminent domain, compulsory purchase, expropriation, or whatever you want to call it, and release the technology into the public domain.
No. The scientific majority modded your post down to -1, because you sound like a reactionary nutjob who sounds like they have no idea what they're talking about.
First off, you're talking about a couple kilograms of material, at the largest. Second, it's an alpha emitter, meaning unless you ingest it, it is largely harmless. Assuming there was a worst case scenario, containment was breached, and ALL of the material was aerosolized, it would still not be as bad as reactor breaches such as Chernobyl or Fukashima.
Over the entire 50yr use of RTGs, there have been five losses of space-borne units. The US lost one in the early 60s, resulting in some contamination in the southern Indian ocean. The US lost two more, one recovered before any breach, and the other is several miles down in trench, expected to maintain containment until the fuel has decayed to an inert state. The Russians have lost two more, with minor containment breaches. None of these events have resulted in any serious environmental or health issues.
It's not like these are fragile, critical reactors we are putting up into space, although the US and Russians have tried those in the past. These are very rugged, solid state devices, encased in several layers of protective shielding, designed to withstand detonation of the rocket on the stand, orbital re-entry, high speed impact with the ground, crushing ocean pressures, and a whole slew of other eventualities. These people have done their homework. If you start throwing out fears of doom and gloom, with no evidence as to WHY they are unsafe, of course no one will take you seriously.
It can be fair and reasonable, but it is absolutely discriminatory. As you state, free software cannot afford the licensing, because they are not making any money to offset the license fees. They restricts the field only to commercial players.
By charging, they are ensuring that larger commercial groups can afford the licenses, while shutting smaller or open source groups out of the market. Anything that is not free is by very definition discriminatory. They're not discriminating based off race or religion, they're discriminating based off wealth.
Why don't they? If people have a use for "the cloud", they have just as much use for their own private server.
In any case, that "small file server" back in 2006 probably ran on a single processor, maybe single core system, using the same hardware you would have seen in desktops at the time. A modern home computer is likely much more powerful, and certainly has access to more memory and IO bandwidth. The problem is the application. I've got a file server in my basement, running off a low end Athlon64 X2 that served as my desktop in 2005. My current desktop is a low end Core2Duo from 2008. Firefox runs like a dog, downloading off the Apache server at a meager 25MB/s. Meanwhile wget pulls some 90MB/s off that same server. Even Windows file sharing managing transfers around 70-75MB/s. Today's hardware is plenty fast, the bottleneck is elsewhere.
Shame on the RIO for not being able to distinguish between a dirty, non-directional S-band emitter, and a C or X band sweeping search radar. The only constant signal would be targeting radar, which would be a much higher effective power, and much higher frequency, than that microwave.
Liquid nitrogen temperatures? Rare earth magnets operate at room temperature just fine. The problem is that they are not statically stable. Any pitching beyond perfectly aligned will cause the device to quickly and violently flip over, requiring excessive force to subsequently remove it from the ground.
I've been buying hard drives for about the past decade, and off the top of my head, I've owned somewhere around 40 drives, from 32GB up to 2TB. The failure rate I've experienced has been consistent enough that I haven't noticed any different between the different generations. Maybe 2-3 died in the first couple months. Another 6-8 died within the first year. The rest are either still in use, or were retired before they died, and sitting in a drawer, presumably still functional.
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Yes. Because changing the albedo for the total surface area of all the roofs in all the world would have any significant effect on a global scale... (hint: it wouldn't)
You'll end up with lower cooling bills in the summer, and higher heating bills in the winter. City temperatures will drop by a couple degrees, and in turn that will cause some localized changes in weather patterns, but that's about it.
Except if such a positive feedback loop worked as you suggest, we would be running our ACs a lot harder than we are currently. Many global warming models had predicted changes over the last ten years several times what they actually were, misjudging the effect this feedback loop would have.
The only real difference between clusters and shared memory "supercomputers" is that shared memory systems get a hardware assist to access remote data, while clusters have to do it all in software in the network stack and communications framework. When your infiniband backbone is running 5GB/s and latencies in the hundreds of nanoseconds between each node, where is the real cut off? It seems more like a gradual sliding scale to me.
Who cares if it's good for me. I would rather have cheese-its made from real tasty moldy cheddar in whatever industrial process you want and then covered in salt, than some tasteless homogenized oil-based crap.
It was actually easier to do with it muted because the noise wasn't drowning out the basely audible whine. You didn't really hear it, you just "knew" the TV was on. My personal favorite was the connection warble from one of the old cell generations. When the connection between phone and tower were initially established, they had a couple low frequency, high power pulses, that could be heard in any electronic noisemaker. Like the TVs, it was just barely in the audible range, and you didn't really hear it, you just "knew" someone's phone was about to ring.
We could do it with a form of gun! We could even use a form of electric steering of the gun through magnets! Now how do you suggest we get people to subject themselves to this electron gun for several hours a day?
That's why such studies are supposed to have a statistical basis, to allow near certainty of the results.
Most LCDs use CFLs for backlighting, and a cheap ballast can produce a flicker. Wait until it's dark, turn your monitor brightness up, and bring up a blank white page. Move your hand quickly across the screen. My two Samsung monitors produce a noticeable strobe effect. My older Sony doesn't, presumably due to a better power supply that buffers out the 60Hz powerline signal.
I'm a part of that movement. Ubiquitous technology makes me feel vulnerable, because everything is so complex and interdependent now. When the power grid fails, we city-dwellers will quickly be in serious trouble.
Then you should be doing the exact opposite. Embrace it. Improve it. Make each part independently robust so you don't end up with cascading failures. Make the system more decentralized, so in the event of catastrophe, individual self-sufficient islands can break off and operate on their own, until connectivity is re-established. When something isn't quite good enough yet, abandoning it entirely is the worst possible option.
The game X3 is set up like that. It's a space trading/fighting sim, set up across a hundred or so sectors, encompassing some 3500sq.km. each. Every NPC in the game is a persistent entity, lasting from the point it is spawned until it is killed. If you attack one of these ships and don't kill them, they will mark you as an enemy and attack any of your property on sight from then on. If they belong to a station, that station may mark you as an enemy, disallowing trade, and attacking you and your property with owned defensive turrets or fighters, until you destroy them, or get someone to hack their IFF. You can wipe out entire sectors, making regions of space dead; hours before it becomes populated again by NPC traders travelling through the area, and days before the game spawns new stations and replacement NPCs.
This system, as the game is shipped, is relatively basic. However, the game is extremely modable, with a large community base around it. People modify the NPC trader AI to have a chance of learning of combat in nearby sectors, and routing around it. People modify the police response to call in external assistance, with fast frigates, followed by military capitol ships, jumping in on top of you, forcing you to flee the sector. People have replaced the entire combat AI, making it much more efficient in its use of ships.
As other people have mentioned, this all comes at a price. The CPU requirements later in the game can become very high. Only your current sector is computed with high precision. The AI decision tree outside your sector is performed at much more coarse intervals. The combat system is entirely disabled, instead relying on a turn based statistical model to compute outcomes. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Graphics cards get better every year, but all that gets you is the same gameplay with better graphics. On the other hand, more computational power and more memory actually opens up a a lot of avenues for AI to provide new forms of gameplay. It just takes a good programmer with a creative mind to make it happen, and those people can't be hired in bulk to meet a bottom line.
Sure, you could tank everyone down with level 3 chests, miniguns, and just destroy everything in the level as a single pack. There were some balance issues that allowed that to function, in all but missions where you had to protect an asset as they walked across town. Some of us actually took some creativity and freedom in completing the missions.
Because in some cases, it doesn't make sense for the streets to be vacant. If you are just walking around a city, you will expect people to be about doing their own thing. If battle erupts, they will be running all over the place for cover, or holed up in some corner somewhere. Two armies don't face off in a sterile environment. There needs to be external life around. Adding such things opens up the possibility for more in depth gameplay. Killing civilians gets you a reprimand, or a failed mission, or perhaps results in civilians reacting to you differently, closing off some options and opening others. Preventing civilian deaths earns you things, like better weapons. Perhaps enemy combatants are hiding among the civilians.
If your reasoning for not adding additional NPCs is due to triangle count, then you need to broaden your horizons, and realize that games can be about more than just high quality graphics.
I am being discriminated against by caviar producers. I can't afford to subsist on caviar alone, but that doesn't matter, because there are alternative food sources.
Now compare that to something like broadcast TV. There is only one form of broadcast TV, as mandated by the FCC. That form requires the use of MPEG2 video and AC3 audio, both of which include patented technology. If I want to produce a piece of software or hardware that can play back broadcast TV, I have no option but to license those technologies. They have achieved a government enforced monopoly. I can't afford to write free software to use those broadcasts, because I would have to pay the licensing fees out of pocket, and thus they are discriminating against free software.
In cases where this is to be an enforced standard, the standard should either use technologies that are guaranteed to be licensed freely, or the government should seize the patents using eminent domain, compulsory purchase, expropriation, or whatever you want to call it, and release the technology into the public domain.
No. The scientific majority modded your post down to -1, because you sound like a reactionary nutjob who sounds like they have no idea what they're talking about.
First off, you're talking about a couple kilograms of material, at the largest. Second, it's an alpha emitter, meaning unless you ingest it, it is largely harmless. Assuming there was a worst case scenario, containment was breached, and ALL of the material was aerosolized, it would still not be as bad as reactor breaches such as Chernobyl or Fukashima.
Over the entire 50yr use of RTGs, there have been five losses of space-borne units. The US lost one in the early 60s, resulting in some contamination in the southern Indian ocean. The US lost two more, one recovered before any breach, and the other is several miles down in trench, expected to maintain containment until the fuel has decayed to an inert state. The Russians have lost two more, with minor containment breaches. None of these events have resulted in any serious environmental or health issues.
It's not like these are fragile, critical reactors we are putting up into space, although the US and Russians have tried those in the past. These are very rugged, solid state devices, encased in several layers of protective shielding, designed to withstand detonation of the rocket on the stand, orbital re-entry, high speed impact with the ground, crushing ocean pressures, and a whole slew of other eventualities. These people have done their homework. If you start throwing out fears of doom and gloom, with no evidence as to WHY they are unsafe, of course no one will take you seriously.
It can be fair and reasonable, but it is absolutely discriminatory. As you state, free software cannot afford the licensing, because they are not making any money to offset the license fees. They restricts the field only to commercial players.
By charging, they are ensuring that larger commercial groups can afford the licenses, while shutting smaller or open source groups out of the market. Anything that is not free is by very definition discriminatory. They're not discriminating based off race or religion, they're discriminating based off wealth.
Who said anything about copyrights? These are patents, and patents run out in a much shorter time frame.
Why don't they? If people have a use for "the cloud", they have just as much use for their own private server.
In any case, that "small file server" back in 2006 probably ran on a single processor, maybe single core system, using the same hardware you would have seen in desktops at the time. A modern home computer is likely much more powerful, and certainly has access to more memory and IO bandwidth. The problem is the application. I've got a file server in my basement, running off a low end Athlon64 X2 that served as my desktop in 2005. My current desktop is a low end Core2Duo from 2008. Firefox runs like a dog, downloading off the Apache server at a meager 25MB/s. Meanwhile wget pulls some 90MB/s off that same server. Even Windows file sharing managing transfers around 70-75MB/s. Today's hardware is plenty fast, the bottleneck is elsewhere.
Does any part of North Korean foreign policy makes any sense to you?
Shame on the RIO for not being able to distinguish between a dirty, non-directional S-band emitter, and a C or X band sweeping search radar. The only constant signal would be targeting radar, which would be a much higher effective power, and much higher frequency, than that microwave.
An RF jamming device isn't trying to not be intercepted.
Liquid nitrogen temperatures? Rare earth magnets operate at room temperature just fine. The problem is that they are not statically stable. Any pitching beyond perfectly aligned will cause the device to quickly and violently flip over, requiring excessive force to subsequently remove it from the ground.
I've been buying hard drives for about the past decade, and off the top of my head, I've owned somewhere around 40 drives, from 32GB up to 2TB. The failure rate I've experienced has been consistent enough that I haven't noticed any different between the different generations. Maybe 2-3 died in the first couple months. Another 6-8 died within the first year. The rest are either still in use, or were retired before they died, and sitting in a drawer, presumably still functional.
You're forgetting about Hanlon's Razor.
You're forgetting about Grey's Law.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
If they're vocal and annoying enough, does it matter if the cause is through ignorance or intent?
Isn't that Kibibits?