I am a physicist (or at least was in a former life). I live just about two miles from one of the biggest producers fuel cells in the country. I go by a house powered by one every day. I know many people who work there. I myself have worked as a designer of electric cars.
Yes. I know how a fuel cell works.
Let me ask my question again and let's see if perhaps you apprehend its meaning this time.
If you have a nonfossil fuel source of electricity sufficient to release hydrogen from water (which takes more electricity than you will generate from the hydrogen), what do you need the hydrogen for?
Let me expand the question into a second part. What nonfossil fuel do you propose to use to begin driving this process, Dear Liza, Dear Liza?
Well then, I assign you the job of laying the cable, real or metaphorical, from that giant nuclear reactor to NYC.
Bear in mind that if you can't figure out how to pull it off there are going to be tens of millions of people really, really pissed at you.
Don't forget to file all your enviromental impact reports and other misc. Federal, State and Local papers.
The sun is free, however, the sun is limited and of limited usefullness. It won't drive your Chevy Impala very far. The population depending on it is expanding, however.
Have you ever made alcohol from the weeds in your yard? I have. You might want to try it sometime. It could prove instructive.
How many acres of weeds do you suppose you will need to make enough ethanol to run your household for a week?
Remember, that includes producing the energy needed to make the ethanol as well. You'll need to rely on solar. That includes your own solar power.
How many ACRES of weeds do you need per week to live like you do now, even if you reduce the energy costs of producing ethanol to its theoretically most efficient?
Where are these acres going to come from and what enviromental impact will turning them to agriculture have?
The biomass we throw away now is oil produced biomass. Where is it going to come from when the oil runs out?
Positing some future technology is one way out, but unless you have some idea of what that technology is it's a copout. The same copout that got us into this mess in the first place. There are real physical limits to how effiecient you can make the extraction of hydrogen from biomass, and even water.
What makes you think this process is ever going to be more effiecient than simply burning the biomass for its energy?
That's only if you take. It also includes a year in county. Look up petty larceny. It's a criminal offense.
If you give away it may be grand larceny. That's where the $150,000 worth of damages comes from. Not the download, the upload. Five years in "Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prison", and up.
No. It isn't. That's why we have oil. It is in large part the stored solar energy (with a dash of geothermal) of millions of years.
That's why it will be the surest and cheapest source of hydrogen for many, many years to come. That's why the so called "hydrogen economy" will be an oil economy.
When the oil runs out it's back to the wood pile and other forms of solar energy. Or nuclear.
Now as it happens I can live on solar energy just fine. I already raise much of my own food. I ride a bicycle. I produce electricity with my bicycle and my food. My family has a 20 acre wood lot. I live this way because I enjoy living this way. Most look on my "lifestyle" with distaste.
NYC is going to be fucked though. Nevermind Las Vegas.
Can you produce enough solar energy to supply downstate NY with enough hydrogen to meet its current energy needs, and without starving them to death? 'Cause we already "sucked Niagra dry."
Doing it without striping the Catskills bare would be a plus. We tried that once. It wasn't pretty.
The world can live on solar power just fine. It did so for billions of years. It did so, however, without electric lights, automobiles, PCes and hydrogen fuel for them.
And without so damned many people.
Hydrogen fuels will not solve our oil crisis. It will only accelerate it. Once the oil is so far gone that it's too expensive the surest source of hydrogen is water, to which you must add energy.
No, it isn't. The advantage to using hydrogen in a fuel cell instead of a battery is the ability to quickly inject more hydrogen and then go on our way. As we do with oil fuels.
It's a convienience issue. Not an energy saving one.
To "produce" millions of gallons of crude oil you have to expend the energy to drill a hole in the ground. To release some portion of that energy you need the energy of a single match. See the burning oil wells in Iraq. The energy from burning oil is the energy source used to crack it.
Read Moby Dick. I call your attention to the chapter entitled The Try-Works, wherein Melville describes how the rendering of whale oil is fueled by burning whale blubber.
In both of these processes you end up with less energy available at some future point then when you started, but still with a surplus over what you had when you began.
You gather a surplus of stored solar and geothermal energy and waste some of that making it into a more usable form.
Let me repeat. For every atom of hydrogen you produce you must add energy to it.
Let me repeat it again. For every atom of hydrogen produced you must add energy to it.
This is why methanol is produced from oil. You can use the above process, wasting some of the energy stored in the oil to refine the particular hydrocarbon you seek from the crude oil which is found energy. That's why we use it. That's why our houses are warm and our lights glow. Because coal and oil are found.
Yes, there is lots and lots of hydrogen in water, but it isn't "found" because it isn't a store of energy, it is an energy sink. You must add energy to the water to release the hydrogen. You cannot burn the water to produce this energy. Typically you use electricity to do this. Electricity generated in a power plant burning coal, oil or nuclear fuel.
Crude oil is noninterest bearing capital. Slush money left under the mattress by an ancestor.
Hydrogen is debt.
Using that capital to finance debt for daily living expenses just uses up your capital faster than living off of the capital itself.
The surest, cheapest source of hydrogen we have is crude oil.
DNA analysis is the breakthrough technology in taxonomic classification, but not as useful as you might think. DNA does, after all, define the macro structure. Having the blueprints of a machine is useful, but doesn't tell you any more about the machine than examining the machine does.
In the case of DNA it often tells us a good deal less.
There is also the problem that much DNA is the same across all species. You really are 50% banana. So yes, minor differences in DNA can have large consequences, but the reverse is true as well. Huge similarities don't imply huge differences, or even small ones, at some levels.
Classicly DNA samples have been taken from every new species found, however. You'll find it in every butterfly pinned to a card or frog floating in a jar.
And also energy intensive. That energy has to come from somewhere. See the second law. The hydrogen derived from the process cannot be used as the energy source for the process.
Catalytic cracking from methanol is another possibility. Energy must be used to refine and manufacture the catalysts( and those catalysts expire, requiring energy to dispose of), as well as to produce the methanol. See above reference to the second law. The quickest dodge around the outside of the second law in this case is to use some naturally occuring process to reduce the energy need. That's why 90% of the "wood alcohol" produced today is produced from. ..are you ready for it?
Oil!
Ah, but what about that bioethanol the article talks about, I hear you cry. That isn't made from petroleum oil.
No. It isn't. Then why is it so expensive? Because of the energy needed to grow the plants ( do you know how much fuel is used in farming?) and the energy needed to produce the ethanol from the plants. See the second law.
Effectively all hydrogen on earth is in a bound molecular compound. Energy must be added to free it. See the second law. Producing hydrogen will always be done at an energy loss.
From whence will we derive the energy to make up that loss?
Ummmmmmmmm, oil?
There's no such thing as a free lunch. You can't win. You can only break even. Oh yeah, and you can't break even.
There are many benefits to be derived from using hydrogen as a fuel. Saving energy from other sources isn't one of them. The big energy companies, even those specializing in oil and nuclear, are going to frikkin' love the "hydrogen economy."
It's going to allow them to sell us more oil for less benefit than ever before.
Saw a congresscritter on the tube the other day (can't remember her name) foaming at the mouth, saying that downloading a song from the internet was stealing, just as if they had stolen a CD from a store, and should be prosecuted as such.
Ummmmmmmmmm, no. One is a civil copyright violation, roughly analogous to skipping out on a one dollar phone bill and basically the same as photocopying a chapter from a library book, and the other is larceny, the same as stealing a library book.
With great legal minds like that writing our laws is it any wonder we are where we are?
I dunno. The regulation basically just puts them under SEC scrutiny as if they were a publicly traded company. It's basically an anti rackteering reg designed to "infiltrate" dummy corporations set up as money laundering operations.
The corporate version of having to file with the feds if you spend $10k cash on something.
This isn't really any more reason to go public than the filing requirement for private citizens is to not buy a car.
I think it's really the pressure of the VC's looking to get in and the spectre of MS looming over their shoulder that's got them going.
I think it's a bad idea though. If there's any one web based business that could suffer real harm to their model from going public I think its Google. They're doing a good job. Let 'em do it in peace.
Guns and ammo are already cheap enough that virutally anyone can supply themselves with a surplus. The materials from which they are made are among the most plentiful and cheap on earth and the base technology is medieval.
In some places this has meant the destruction of a local social system, but the Swiss, with nearly universal aramament, seem to be holding up ok. You can go into any K-Mart and arm yourself with a week's minimum wage pay. We get the odd wingnut shooting up a school, but society hasn't crumbled (well, ok, maybe it has, but not because of the guns).
Hitler didn't take over the world. If the "bad guys" can have all the guns they want so can the "good guys."
If replicators existed the vast majority would just want to have fun with toys and would squash anyone who got in the way of that.
The only reason for a mass revolt would be if replicators existed and everyone didn't get two.
"Let's think of a way to blame this on Microsoft."
Dear sir, I'm afraid I have prior art on that; and can prove it. Your suggestion is in violation of my intellectual property rights. Please cease and desist immediately.
I believe there is a body of prior art for scanning in books and greping them. Is that not one of the oft repeated benefits of ebooks?
Whether or not Amazon can get a patent on a shell script to serve up the results . . . on the web oooooooo, remains to be seen I suppose.
They managed to get one on "Give me one of those, put it on my account and drop it by my house" a "technology" my grocer has been offering over the phone for 40 years that I'm personally aware of.
However, since this sort of "technology" is exactly the sort of thing that the web, and the internet itself for that matter, was invented for I'd have to guess there's a lot of prior art. It's certainly obvious and trivial, but that doesn't seem to count for much these days.
The problem with things that are so obvious and trivial that "everyone" has been doing it for decades is that it's hard to demonstrate in court because no one bothers to document it.
Can you prove your grandfather put his pants on one leg at a time?
Common sense tells you he did, but common sense no longer applies in an age that grants patents to perpetual motion machines and peanut butter sandwiches.
Well, the first thing you have to learn about taxonomy is that stripes and dots don't count. Ever see the stripes and dots on a dinosaur? Neither has anyone else.
Form, not color. A rose by any other color is still a rose.
Taxonomically speaking the only difference between an Atlantic Salmon and a Rainbow Trout ( which has different colored dots and its famous red stripe) is. . . two teeth.
(Yes, for those taking notes, that means that the Rainbow Trout is really the Pacific Salmon and the "Pacific Salmon" aren't. The Brook Trout and the Lake Trout aren't trout or salmon. They're Char. That's what happens when you let the "people" name things before the taxonomists get there).
He really was slow to grasp deep concepts, and he knew it. He always stuggled with it.
Somtimes slow waters are just retarded. Sometimes though, they really do run deep.
Einstein was another one who was slow. Really. You think he was working as a third class clerk because people were vying for him? He couldn't even get a job teaching intro to physics because his reputation was so poor.
I rather suspect it was because he was too busy thinking to study. College isn't about thinking. It's about passing tests. The dull but intelligent do better at passing tests than true thinkers.
Hell, Buckey Fuller got thrown out of Haaahvahd. . . twice.
Maybe if Billy had graduated we'd all be better off.
"I hardly think anyone would require all articles on slashdot to be written such that non-techies will understand..."
And I never suggested anything of the kind.
In this particular instance I think Cringley was a bit slow in his enlightenment. This peculiar dichotomy of society's view of the "professional" versus the "amatuer" is one I've been dealing with, and conversant with, since as long as I can remember.
To me Microsoft's position is patently like that of Starving Artists Inc. claiming they make the best art because they employ thousands of professional artists. Not like those disreputable independants Picasso, Mondrian and Matisse.
Still, it's interesting to see someone go through it, and to do so in this public manner. It can be instructive to both the technical and the nontechnical, even if only as a reminder to the technical that this is where most people's perceptions are hovering around.
While you may be someone who understands your field well enough that you can explain it simply it also has to be remembered that sometimes you have to.
Robert Townsend, author of "Up the Organization" and former President of both Avis Rent-a-Car and American Express, always refused to look at "presentations." He felt that if you couldn't just talk to him and lucidly explain what you were on about in one minute it wasn't going to be worth his time in the first place.
Richard Feynman held that if he couldn't explain a physical phenomenon to someone with no scientific background in plain English in a minute it meant he didn't really understand it himself.
While this may rankle some of the peanut gallery here I'd suggest that if you can't explain the most technically archane subject you deal with to a nontechnical person in plain English (or Russian, or Chinese, or what have you) in a few minutes you don't really understand it either.
Cringley's pieces may contain far more depth than they can appear to have on the surface, even if sometimes he's a little slow to "get it."
So was Feynman, for that matter, but when he got it, he got it.
Something equivilent to I-94. I'm personally only aware of daytime tests though (although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This could be just because it isn't a suitable enviroment to make demo films).
I'm also wondering how it would fair on such as the 1 1/2 lane Vermont roads, many not even paved, let alone reflectorized, that I'm personally prone to go driving on. These roads are often even hard for a human to determine just where the real edges of the road are.
I can think of a few ways that a computer and the proper sensors could do it better than a human though.
As a habitual two wheeler the oil "strip" is an issue I'm also somewhat sensitive to. In a four wheeler, yes, feedback systems can detect this already and adjust torques faster than a human can, but I don't see it bundled onto a two wheeler anytime in the near future. The dynamics of the situation are too complex.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a physicist (or at least was in a former life). I live just about two miles from one of the biggest producers fuel cells in the country. I go by a house powered by one every day. I know many people who work there. I myself have worked as a designer of electric cars.
Yes. I know how a fuel cell works.
Let me ask my question again and let's see if perhaps you apprehend its meaning this time.
If you have a nonfossil fuel source of electricity sufficient to release hydrogen from water (which takes more electricity than you will generate from the hydrogen), what do you need the hydrogen for?
Let me expand the question into a second part. What nonfossil fuel do you propose to use to begin driving this process, Dear Liza, Dear Liza?
KFG
Well then, I assign you the job of laying the cable, real or metaphorical, from that giant nuclear reactor to NYC.
Bear in mind that if you can't figure out how to pull it off there are going to be tens of millions of people really, really pissed at you.
Don't forget to file all your enviromental impact reports and other misc. Federal, State and Local papers.
The sun is free, however, the sun is limited and of limited usefullness. It won't drive your Chevy Impala very far. The population depending on it is expanding, however.
They demand it 24/7.
Good luck.
KFG
Tell me. If you have such a nonfossil fuel electricity generator. . .
what do you need the hydrogen for?
KFG
Have you ever made alcohol from the weeds in your yard? I have. You might want to try it sometime. It could prove instructive.
How many acres of weeds do you suppose you will need to make enough ethanol to run your household for a week?
Remember, that includes producing the energy needed to make the ethanol as well. You'll need to rely on solar. That includes your own solar power.
How many ACRES of weeds do you need per week to live like you do now, even if you reduce the energy costs of producing ethanol to its theoretically most efficient?
Where are these acres going to come from and what enviromental impact will turning them to agriculture have?
The biomass we throw away now is oil produced biomass. Where is it going to come from when the oil runs out?
Positing some future technology is one way out, but unless you have some idea of what that technology is it's a copout. The same copout that got us into this mess in the first place. There are real physical limits to how effiecient you can make the extraction of hydrogen from biomass, and even water.
What makes you think this process is ever going to be more effiecient than simply burning the biomass for its energy?
They call that a wood pile.
Think about it.
KFG
Which we do using oil for a net loss in energy. We could not produce the volume of biomass from agriculture that we do without that oil energy.
We are feeding our population on a prior geological period's solar energy. A point some seem to miss.
Their stomachs will drive the point home if that energy ever suddenly dries up though.
KFG
That's only if you take. It also includes a year in county. Look up petty larceny. It's a criminal offense.
If you give away it may be grand larceny. That's where the $150,000 worth of damages comes from. Not the download, the upload. Five years in "Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prison", and up.
KFG
No. It isn't. That's why we have oil. It is in large part the stored solar energy (with a dash of geothermal) of millions of years.
That's why it will be the surest and cheapest source of hydrogen for many, many years to come. That's why the so called "hydrogen economy" will be an oil economy.
When the oil runs out it's back to the wood pile and other forms of solar energy. Or nuclear.
Now as it happens I can live on solar energy just fine. I already raise much of my own food. I ride a bicycle. I produce electricity with my bicycle and my food. My family has a 20 acre wood lot. I live this way because I enjoy living this way. Most look on my "lifestyle" with distaste.
NYC is going to be fucked though. Nevermind Las Vegas.
Can you produce enough solar energy to supply downstate NY with enough hydrogen to meet its current energy needs, and without starving them to death? 'Cause we already "sucked Niagra dry."
Doing it without striping the Catskills bare would be a plus. We tried that once. It wasn't pretty.
The world can live on solar power just fine. It did so for billions of years. It did so, however, without electric lights, automobiles, PCes and hydrogen fuel for them.
And without so damned many people.
Hydrogen fuels will not solve our oil crisis. It will only accelerate it. Once the oil is so far gone that it's too expensive the surest source of hydrogen is water, to which you must add energy.
Back to the wood pile.
KFG
No, it isn't. The advantage to using hydrogen in a fuel cell instead of a battery is the ability to quickly inject more hydrogen and then go on our way. As we do with oil fuels.
It's a convienience issue. Not an energy saving one.
KFG
To "produce" millions of gallons of crude oil you have to expend the energy to drill a hole in the ground. To release some portion of that energy you need the energy of a single match. See the burning oil wells in Iraq. The energy from burning oil is the energy source used to crack it.
Read Moby Dick. I call your attention to the chapter entitled The Try-Works, wherein Melville describes how the rendering of whale oil is fueled by burning whale blubber.
In both of these processes you end up with less energy available at some future point then when you started, but still with a surplus over what you had when you began.
You gather a surplus of stored solar and geothermal energy and waste some of that making it into a more usable form.
Let me repeat. For every atom of hydrogen you produce you must add energy to it.
Let me repeat it again. For every atom of hydrogen produced you must add energy to it.
This is why methanol is produced from oil. You can use the above process, wasting some of the energy stored in the oil to refine the particular hydrocarbon you seek from the crude oil which is found energy. That's why we use it. That's why our houses are warm and our lights glow. Because coal and oil are found.
Yes, there is lots and lots of hydrogen in water, but it isn't "found" because it isn't a store of energy, it is an energy sink. You must add energy to the water to release the hydrogen. You cannot burn the water to produce this energy. Typically you use electricity to do this. Electricity generated in a power plant burning coal, oil or nuclear fuel.
Crude oil is noninterest bearing capital. Slush money left under the mattress by an ancestor.
Hydrogen is debt.
Using that capital to finance debt for daily living expenses just uses up your capital faster than living off of the capital itself.
The surest, cheapest source of hydrogen we have is crude oil.
There's another term for "hydrogen economy."
Resource bankruptcy.
KFG
DNA analysis is the breakthrough technology in taxonomic classification, but not as useful as you might think. DNA does, after all, define the macro structure. Having the blueprints of a machine is useful, but doesn't tell you any more about the machine than examining the machine does.
In the case of DNA it often tells us a good deal less.
There is also the problem that much DNA is the same across all species. You really are 50% banana. So yes, minor differences in DNA can have large consequences, but the reverse is true as well. Huge similarities don't imply huge differences, or even small ones, at some levels.
Classicly DNA samples have been taken from every new species found, however. You'll find it in every butterfly pinned to a card or frog floating in a jar.
KFG
And also energy intensive. That energy has to come from somewhere. See the second law. The hydrogen derived from the process cannot be used as the energy source for the process.
.are you ready for it?
Catalytic cracking from methanol is another possibility. Energy must be used to refine and manufacture the catalysts( and those catalysts expire, requiring energy to dispose of), as well as to produce the methanol. See above reference to the second law. The quickest dodge around the outside of the second law in this case is to use some naturally occuring process to reduce the energy need. That's why 90% of the "wood alcohol" produced today is produced from. .
Oil!
Ah, but what about that bioethanol the article talks about, I hear you cry. That isn't made from petroleum oil.
No. It isn't. Then why is it so expensive? Because of the energy needed to grow the plants ( do you know how much fuel is used in farming?) and the energy needed to produce the ethanol from the plants. See the second law.
Effectively all hydrogen on earth is in a bound molecular compound. Energy must be added to free it. See the second law. Producing hydrogen will always be done at an energy loss.
From whence will we derive the energy to make up that loss?
Ummmmmmmmm, oil?
There's no such thing as a free lunch. You can't win. You can only break even. Oh yeah, and you can't break even.
There are many benefits to be derived from using hydrogen as a fuel. Saving energy from other sources isn't one of them. The big energy companies, even those specializing in oil and nuclear, are going to frikkin' love the "hydrogen economy."
It's going to allow them to sell us more oil for less benefit than ever before.
KFG
Saw a congresscritter on the tube the other day (can't remember her name) foaming at the mouth, saying that downloading a song from the internet was stealing, just as if they had stolen a CD from a store, and should be prosecuted as such.
Ummmmmmmmmm, no. One is a civil copyright violation, roughly analogous to skipping out on a one dollar phone bill and basically the same as photocopying a chapter from a library book, and the other is larceny, the same as stealing a library book.
With great legal minds like that writing our laws is it any wonder we are where we are?
KFG
I dunno. The regulation basically just puts them under SEC scrutiny as if they were a publicly traded company. It's basically an anti rackteering reg designed to "infiltrate" dummy corporations set up as money laundering operations.
The corporate version of having to file with the feds if you spend $10k cash on something.
This isn't really any more reason to go public than the filing requirement for private citizens is to not buy a car.
I think it's really the pressure of the VC's looking to get in and the spectre of MS looming over their shoulder that's got them going.
I think it's a bad idea though. If there's any one web based business that could suffer real harm to their model from going public I think its Google. They're doing a good job. Let 'em do it in peace.
KFG
What the practical difference between the state owning the corporations and the corporations owning the state is is beyond me.
.
By the way, one of my great grandfathers was Romanian. He crawled across half of Europe on his belly at night to get out and come to America.
Little did he suspect. .
KFG
Guns and ammo are already cheap enough that virutally anyone can supply themselves with a surplus. The materials from which they are made are among the most plentiful and cheap on earth and the base technology is medieval.
In some places this has meant the destruction of a local social system, but the Swiss, with nearly universal aramament, seem to be holding up ok. You can go into any K-Mart and arm yourself with a week's minimum wage pay. We get the odd wingnut shooting up a school, but society hasn't crumbled (well, ok, maybe it has, but not because of the guns).
Hitler didn't take over the world. If the "bad guys" can have all the guns they want so can the "good guys."
If replicators existed the vast majority would just want to have fun with toys and would squash anyone who got in the way of that.
The only reason for a mass revolt would be if replicators existed and everyone didn't get two.
Think about it.
KFG
I might point out that the technical term for a soybean seed is. . . "soybean."
KFG
are right around the corner.
The bad news, using them is illegal.
And so, boys and girls, the problem created by solving the problem of production was solved; and that's why we once again live in the dark and cold.
KFG
"Let's think of a way to blame this on Microsoft."
Dear sir, I'm afraid I have prior art on that; and can prove it. Your suggestion is in violation of my intellectual property rights. Please cease and desist immediately.
KFG
"grep."
I believe there is a body of prior art for scanning in books and greping them. Is that not one of the oft repeated benefits of ebooks?
Whether or not Amazon can get a patent on a shell script to serve up the results . . . on the web oooooooo, remains to be seen I suppose.
They managed to get one on "Give me one of those, put it on my account and drop it by my house" a "technology" my grocer has been offering over the phone for 40 years that I'm personally aware of.
However, since this sort of "technology" is exactly the sort of thing that the web, and the internet itself for that matter, was invented for I'd have to guess there's a lot of prior art. It's certainly obvious and trivial, but that doesn't seem to count for much these days.
The problem with things that are so obvious and trivial that "everyone" has been doing it for decades is that it's hard to demonstrate in court because no one bothers to document it.
Can you prove your grandfather put his pants on one leg at a time?
Common sense tells you he did, but common sense no longer applies in an age that grants patents to perpetual motion machines and peanut butter sandwiches.
KFG
. . ."like sharks are immune to cancer. . ."
l
Weeell, no, not exactly.
http://www.mote.org/~rhueter/sharks/cancer.phtm
KFG
Well, the first thing you have to learn about taxonomy is that stripes and dots don't count. Ever see the stripes and dots on a dinosaur? Neither has anyone else.
Form, not color. A rose by any other color is still a rose.
Taxonomically speaking the only difference between an Atlantic Salmon and a Rainbow Trout ( which has different colored dots and its famous red stripe) is. . . two teeth.
(Yes, for those taking notes, that means that the Rainbow Trout is really the Pacific Salmon and the "Pacific Salmon" aren't. The Brook Trout and the Lake Trout aren't trout or salmon. They're Char. That's what happens when you let the "people" name things before the taxonomists get there).
KFG
Who's "us" Whitey? :)
He really was slow to grasp deep concepts, and he knew it. He always stuggled with it.
Somtimes slow waters are just retarded. Sometimes though, they really do run deep.
Einstein was another one who was slow. Really. You think he was working as a third class clerk because people were vying for him? He couldn't even get a job teaching intro to physics because his reputation was so poor.
I rather suspect it was because he was too busy thinking to study. College isn't about thinking. It's about passing tests. The dull but intelligent do better at passing tests than true thinkers.
Hell, Buckey Fuller got thrown out of Haaahvahd. . . twice.
Maybe if Billy had graduated we'd all be better off.
KFG
"I hardly think anyone would require all articles on slashdot to be written such that non-techies will understand..."
And I never suggested anything of the kind.
In this particular instance I think Cringley was a bit slow in his enlightenment. This peculiar dichotomy of society's view of the "professional" versus the "amatuer" is one I've been dealing with, and conversant with, since as long as I can remember.
To me Microsoft's position is patently like that of Starving Artists Inc. claiming they make the best art because they employ thousands of professional artists. Not like those disreputable independants Picasso, Mondrian and Matisse.
Still, it's interesting to see someone go through it, and to do so in this public manner. It can be instructive to both the technical and the nontechnical, even if only as a reminder to the technical that this is where most people's perceptions are hovering around.
While you may be someone who understands your field well enough that you can explain it simply it also has to be remembered that sometimes you have to.
KFG
Robert Townsend, author of "Up the Organization" and former President of both Avis Rent-a-Car and American Express, always refused to look at "presentations." He felt that if you couldn't just talk to him and lucidly explain what you were on about in one minute it wasn't going to be worth his time in the first place.
Richard Feynman held that if he couldn't explain a physical phenomenon to someone with no scientific background in plain English in a minute it meant he didn't really understand it himself.
While this may rankle some of the peanut gallery here I'd suggest that if you can't explain the most technically archane subject you deal with to a nontechnical person in plain English (or Russian, or Chinese, or what have you) in a few minutes you don't really understand it either.
Cringley's pieces may contain far more depth than they can appear to have on the surface, even if sometimes he's a little slow to "get it."
So was Feynman, for that matter, but when he got it, he got it.
KFG
Something equivilent to I-94. I'm personally only aware of daytime tests though (although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This could be just because it isn't a suitable enviroment to make demo films).
I'm also wondering how it would fair on such as the 1 1/2 lane Vermont roads, many not even paved, let alone reflectorized, that I'm personally prone to go driving on. These roads are often even hard for a human to determine just where the real edges of the road are.
I can think of a few ways that a computer and the proper sensors could do it better than a human though.
As a habitual two wheeler the oil "strip" is an issue I'm also somewhat sensitive to. In a four wheeler, yes, feedback systems can detect this already and adjust torques faster than a human can, but I don't see it bundled onto a two wheeler anytime in the near future. The dynamics of the situation are too complex.
KFG