More to the point, the 1890 census wasn't expected to be completed with pencil and paper before it was time to start the 1900 census. So what hope do they have this time around?
People stick with what they're used to, even if it doesn't always make the most sense.
Legacy mainframes do make sense, though. Even if they're old and the people who know how to program them are retiring/dieing off, they do have 20+ years of debugging behind the code. Many of these systems run highly mission critical banking systems. If some of them fail, worldwide economic collapse is a real possibility. It's worth being very conservative in this case. Even if the going rate for COBOL programmers ends up being five times the amount paid to Ruby/Java/whatever coders (just so that somebody would be willing to work with such an archaic language), it'd still be worth it.
If the procedure is correct, the data is correct, and the logic is correct, then the conclusions will also be correct. It doesn't matter who paid for it.
Yes, there are many developers who write code for no money, but at the same time, I don't know anyone who does it entirely for selfless, charitable reasons.
Vim is explicitly produced as a way to promote a charity for Uganda.
LEDs are very sensitive to heat. Current fixtures for incandescent bulbs are designed to limit heat conduction, because all the heat coming off a bulb would damage the wires and probably cause a short. Although LEDs are far less heat-generating than incandescents, they still give off some and it needs to be taken away.
Hardly an insurmountable problem, but one that keeps LEDs from being an immediate solution.
There's also an intriguing possibility of using laser diodes for general lighting. These are even more efficient than LEDs. A lens can diffuse the beam, and they currently exist in red, green, and blue forms that could be combined into the proper color temperature. The one problem as yet is that green and blue laser diodes are still very expensive, though they're coming down.
And cheaper, too. Sometime last year, I calced out the price of configuring a 64GB server (with most of that intended as a RAM disk). IIRC, it came out that the complete price of the system was less than the cost of the high-end solid state drives out there (like a RAMSAN). I was looking for some software exactly like the one in TFA so you could still have a hard drive backup automatically in place, but didn't find much at the time.
The one thing you could try back then is a software RAID 1 setup, with one device being the RAM disk and the other on a hard drive. The only thing with this is that the Linux software RAID drivers remember where the hard disk head is at and read from the drive with its head closest to the needed data. That's a lot of wasted effort for a RAM disk. IIRC, most RDBMS have a similar problem.
Cut out the worst 25-50% drivers and improve public transportation (which you'd have to do anyway under this plan), and energy consumption is far less of a problem.
Much of the rest can be taken care of by good engine tuning (particularly the camshaft timing). American and Japanese cars are usually tuned to get optimal gas millage when they're driven at a constant speed of 60-70mph. German cars are usually around 100mph.
By far, the two largest source of carbon output are oil/coal burning for electricity and driving 5 days a week during rush hour. Those are the first two places to start optimizing, not highway or recreational use. Even if all the cars on the road were Priusen (you try coming up with the plural of Prius) driven by hypermillers, the carbon footprint of rush hour traffic would still be large. This X-Prize won't change that, as 100mpg isn't that high of a target, and I doubt any new interesting techniques will come out of it. Double or triple that, and you might get somewhere.
The cars allowed to drive that fast have regular maintenance inspections
People who are allowed to drive that fast have stringent license requirements
The hiway is designed without tight bends
The road is made of a material that can take the wear
No automated controls are necessary. As long as the cars are in good operating condition and everyone is moving the same direction, speeds well in excess of 150mph are well within human abilities.
The problem in the US is that nobody wants to be forced to do good maintenance or to increase licensing restrictions, the hiway bends are too tight, and the roads aren't thick enough to take the abuse. None of which has been a problem for Germany.
Exactly. You could probably get in with a small diesel-powered car and make some drastic weight reductions. Getting 100mpg isn't that hard if you're willing to rip off the doors/interior carpet/dashboard plastics/etc.
If it hadn't done there's no doubt they would have taken out Tokyo.
Except that the US only had two working bombs at that point, and both were already used. Also, IIRC, Tokyo was already firebombed at that point. Firebombing takes a lot more planes and bombs to do the job, but its effects are comparable to the nukes around at the time.
First off, what did Comedy Central have to do with fighting robots? ESPN I sort of get (they call Poker a "sport", so I guess battlebots can be one, too), but why Comedy Central.
More to the point, I miss Battle Bots being televised, but I don't miss Comedy Central. The announcers were annoying, Carmen Electra was pointless, and they spent too much airtime dithering about nothing. The worst of it was that the camera angles and microphone pickup made the bots look like toys. Many of these machines took a team of guys to lift them out of the travel van and get them into the arena. Every year, they thickened the lexan around the arena, and every year, something managed to pierce it. These are nasty machines, but they never looked more powerful than an unmodded nerf gun.
Yes, they can be shown to lose money, but this is because someone was dumb enough to sign a contract for a cut of the profits rather than the gross. Then the accountants divert some funds through some "production" companies (that are actually owned by the all the same people) to pretend that the movie was actually a big loss, and the people who signed those contracts get squat.
If Forest Gump was produced with the budget management skills of a yappy wiener dog, it made a profit.
Incidentally, the author for the original book of Forest Gump had a contract for a cut of the profits, and he therefore got nothing. And then the studio had the audacity to ask for rights to the second book.
I'm waiting for a smarty-pants (but wrong) astrophysicist to flame you for not recognizing that unless an event's light cone hits you, it hasn't actually happened yet.
That's a very limiting definition. Mathematics is really about the manipulation of symbols. That particular revelation led to the thought behind the Universal Turing Machine.
Regenerative braking plays a big role there. Right now, a lot of energy from the brakes on electrics/hybrids is lost to heat because the battery can't absorb the charge fast enough. Adding a supercap (even if it's just a few) would greatly increase overall efficiency.
But in general, supercaps are dumb if they're used alone. Caps are good for storing and releasing a lot of charge very quickly, not letting it bleed out slowly.
Everyone in the US already does it. Pounds are technically a unit of force, but we normalize away the gravitational pull of the earth in the equation so we can pretend pounds are equivalent to kilograms.
In principle, not evil at all. The idea is that the government will grant you a limited time monopoly on your invention, provided you document everything so that once your time is up, anyone can create and improve on the idea. This is in contrast to trade secrets, where you get to keep your invention for as long as you can keep it a secret.
(As a side note, the NSA has cheated this system, where some of their algorithms are currently a trade secret, and will suddenly become a patent if they're ever revealed).
The system today has severe implementation flaws, but the idea behind it is brilliant.
A hydrogen fuel cell is electric. It takes the place of a battery. The previous problem was that without an easily available source of pure H2, the whole process is too energy intensive to be feasible. This catalyst changes that. Lithium-based batteries are still more efficient, but there's not enough Lithium in the Earth's crust to make all the batteries we need for cars. Hydrogen fuel cells don't contain anything we can't easily get (except platinum, and the catalyzer mentioned in the article replaces that, too), so they're the next best battery technology after Lithium.
Also, one of the nice benefits of a purely electric car is that it should be (relatively) easy to rip out one type of battery and replace it with another.
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More to the point, the 1890 census wasn't expected to be completed with pencil and paper before it was time to start the 1900 census. So what hope do they have this time around?
People stick with what they're used to, even if it doesn't always make the most sense.
Legacy mainframes do make sense, though. Even if they're old and the people who know how to program them are retiring/dieing off, they do have 20+ years of debugging behind the code. Many of these systems run highly mission critical banking systems. If some of them fail, worldwide economic collapse is a real possibility. It's worth being very conservative in this case. Even if the going rate for COBOL programmers ends up being five times the amount paid to Ruby/Java/whatever coders (just so that somebody would be willing to work with such an archaic language), it'd still be worth it.
If the procedure is correct, the data is correct, and the logic is correct, then the conclusions will also be correct. It doesn't matter who paid for it.
Yes, there are many developers who write code for no money, but at the same time, I don't know anyone who does it entirely for selfless, charitable reasons.
Vim is explicitly produced as a way to promote a charity for Uganda.
I hope you were being sarcastic, because otherwise, I think you learned the wrong lesson . . .
LEDs are very sensitive to heat. Current fixtures for incandescent bulbs are designed to limit heat conduction, because all the heat coming off a bulb would damage the wires and probably cause a short. Although LEDs are far less heat-generating than incandescents, they still give off some and it needs to be taken away.
Hardly an insurmountable problem, but one that keeps LEDs from being an immediate solution.
There's also an intriguing possibility of using laser diodes for general lighting. These are even more efficient than LEDs. A lens can diffuse the beam, and they currently exist in red, green, and blue forms that could be combined into the proper color temperature. The one problem as yet is that green and blue laser diodes are still very expensive, though they're coming down.
And cheaper, too. Sometime last year, I calced out the price of configuring a 64GB server (with most of that intended as a RAM disk). IIRC, it came out that the complete price of the system was less than the cost of the high-end solid state drives out there (like a RAMSAN). I was looking for some software exactly like the one in TFA so you could still have a hard drive backup automatically in place, but didn't find much at the time.
The one thing you could try back then is a software RAID 1 setup, with one device being the RAM disk and the other on a hard drive. The only thing with this is that the Linux software RAID drivers remember where the hard disk head is at and read from the drive with its head closest to the needed data. That's a lot of wasted effort for a RAM disk. IIRC, most RDBMS have a similar problem.
Cut out the worst 25-50% drivers and improve public transportation (which you'd have to do anyway under this plan), and energy consumption is far less of a problem.
Much of the rest can be taken care of by good engine tuning (particularly the camshaft timing). American and Japanese cars are usually tuned to get optimal gas millage when they're driven at a constant speed of 60-70mph. German cars are usually around 100mph.
By far, the two largest source of carbon output are oil/coal burning for electricity and driving 5 days a week during rush hour. Those are the first two places to start optimizing, not highway or recreational use. Even if all the cars on the road were Priusen (you try coming up with the plural of Prius) driven by hypermillers, the carbon footprint of rush hour traffic would still be large. This X-Prize won't change that, as 100mpg isn't that high of a target, and I doubt any new interesting techniques will come out of it. Double or triple that, and you might get somewhere.
100mph (and well beyond) is reasonable if:
No automated controls are necessary. As long as the cars are in good operating condition and everyone is moving the same direction, speeds well in excess of 150mph are well within human abilities.
The problem in the US is that nobody wants to be forced to do good maintenance or to increase licensing restrictions, the hiway bends are too tight, and the roads aren't thick enough to take the abuse. None of which has been a problem for Germany.
Exactly. You could probably get in with a small diesel-powered car and make some drastic weight reductions. Getting 100mpg isn't that hard if you're willing to rip off the doors/interior carpet/dashboard plastics/etc.
If it hadn't done there's no doubt they would have taken out Tokyo.
Except that the US only had two working bombs at that point, and both were already used. Also, IIRC, Tokyo was already firebombed at that point. Firebombing takes a lot more planes and bombs to do the job, but its effects are comparable to the nukes around at the time.
First off, what did Comedy Central have to do with fighting robots? ESPN I sort of get (they call Poker a "sport", so I guess battlebots can be one, too), but why Comedy Central.
More to the point, I miss Battle Bots being televised, but I don't miss Comedy Central. The announcers were annoying, Carmen Electra was pointless, and they spent too much airtime dithering about nothing. The worst of it was that the camera angles and microphone pickup made the bots look like toys. Many of these machines took a team of guys to lift them out of the travel van and get them into the arena. Every year, they thickened the lexan around the arena, and every year, something managed to pierce it. These are nasty machines, but they never looked more powerful than an unmodded nerf gun.
Yes, they can be shown to lose money, but this is because someone was dumb enough to sign a contract for a cut of the profits rather than the gross. Then the accountants divert some funds through some "production" companies (that are actually owned by the all the same people) to pretend that the movie was actually a big loss, and the people who signed those contracts get squat.
If Forest Gump was produced with the budget management skills of a yappy wiener dog, it made a profit.
Incidentally, the author for the original book of Forest Gump had a contract for a cut of the profits, and he therefore got nothing. And then the studio had the audacity to ask for rights to the second book.
I'm waiting for a smarty-pants (but wrong) astrophysicist to flame you for not recognizing that unless an event's light cone hits you, it hasn't actually happened yet.
In fact, I think it was that exact set of episodes where the professor gets killed and the show officially jumped the shark.
People also have the right to be able to walk down any dark alley in the world and not get mugged. However, we can't reasonably expect this.
If you want a reasonable expectation of privacy, shut your blinds.
Then you're not using a big enough hammer.
That's a very limiting definition. Mathematics is really about the manipulation of symbols. That particular revelation led to the thought behind the Universal Turing Machine.
Regenerative braking plays a big role there. Right now, a lot of energy from the brakes on electrics/hybrids is lost to heat because the battery can't absorb the charge fast enough. Adding a supercap (even if it's just a few) would greatly increase overall efficiency.
But in general, supercaps are dumb if they're used alone. Caps are good for storing and releasing a lot of charge very quickly, not letting it bleed out slowly.
Why? What has Florida done for the other 49 states lately?
Correction: Gets almost 70mpg combined (was looking at the "extraurban" number). So the added complication of a hybrid system isn't buying you much.
Not really. The Fiat Panda diesel (non hybrid) gets almost 80mpg.
Everyone in the US already does it. Pounds are technically a unit of force, but we normalize away the gravitational pull of the earth in the equation so we can pretend pounds are equivalent to kilograms.
In principle, not evil at all. The idea is that the government will grant you a limited time monopoly on your invention, provided you document everything so that once your time is up, anyone can create and improve on the idea. This is in contrast to trade secrets, where you get to keep your invention for as long as you can keep it a secret.
(As a side note, the NSA has cheated this system, where some of their algorithms are currently a trade secret, and will suddenly become a patent if they're ever revealed).
The system today has severe implementation flaws, but the idea behind it is brilliant.
A hydrogen fuel cell is electric. It takes the place of a battery. The previous problem was that without an easily available source of pure H2, the whole process is too energy intensive to be feasible. This catalyst changes that. Lithium-based batteries are still more efficient, but there's not enough Lithium in the Earth's crust to make all the batteries we need for cars. Hydrogen fuel cells don't contain anything we can't easily get (except platinum, and the catalyzer mentioned in the article replaces that, too), so they're the next best battery technology after Lithium.
Also, one of the nice benefits of a purely electric car is that it should be (relatively) easy to rip out one type of battery and replace it with another.