No, I do not wish to conserve energy. Progress, quality of life, advancement of civilization is driven by energy consumption.
None of those goals is served by wasting power, however. Conserving energy is the art/science of minimizing the amount of power that is wasted.
Since the earth's population will soon peak at 8.5 billion in about 2075 and then decline, some of the "unsustainable growth" nonsense needs to be given the heave-ho too.
Also, since the Second Coming of Jesus will occur in 2012, there's little point in worrying about "unsustainable growth" that might otherwise have occurred after that. Whew, that sure takes a load off of my mind!:^)
If we had any sense at all, we would shut down every nuclear power plant until we had evidence that we had developed human beings who are smart enough to run them properly without ever screwing up.
Or, slightly more realistically, until someone comes up with a design for a fission power plant that can be completely mismanaged, neglected, even bombed, and still not cause a significant radiation problem.
Dunno if that's feasible (short of developing nuclear fusion and using that instead), but it would be one way to go.
Why should We The Taxpayers have to prop up an industry that can't support itself?
Because We The Taxpayers have an interest in weaning ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels, and (barring a miracle) that won't happen unless the new-technology companies can sell product and not go bankrupt. Your argument would make sense if solar and e.g. coal competed on a fair playing field, but there clearly isn't one -- the traditional energy sources have huge externalized costs (air pollution, war, global warming, the world's largest standing military to defend oil fields, propping up nasty dictators because they have oil) that all We Taxpayers are forced to pay for (one way or another) whether we care to or not. Those costs are not factored into the price of traditional energy. Furthermore, the traditional energy sources have mostly already paid their R&D costs, so they only have to pay for production; whereas new technologies have to pay for both research and production. Because of this, without some sort of intervention, there would simply be no significant incentive to do anything but burn coal -- its' a straightforward case of the tragedy of the commons. (If you don't like subsidies, I'm open to slapping a fat Carbon Tax on coal/gas/etc to make the prices of those products reflect their actual costs instead, but you and I both know that's not going to happen anytime soon, so subsidies it is)
Therefore, we either do something to make development of new technologies viable, or we go without their benefits until the problems with traditional energy sources become so acute that there is no alternative. But if we do the latter, we've given up the opportunity to develop the better technology until it's perhaps too late.
we lessen the incentive for private funding of development of cheaper, more efficient technologies
Err... such as? Exactly what cheaper, more efficient technologies are being held back by subsidized solar power? And what makes you think that (in a subsidy-free world) these (hypothetical) superior technologies wouldn't also be stymied by the very same problems that made subsidies necessary for solar?
( Making green-friendly people happy = increase in sales ) + ridiculous government subsidies for installing solar = profit increase.
"Ridiculous" is just you editorializing. AFAICT the subsidies are working exactly as intended: by encouraging the adoption of solar power, they grow the solar power market, increase the economies of scale for panel production, and bring the prices down quicker so that soon we'll have solar power that's cheap enough that subsidies are no longer necessary.
Well, there's always hydrogen as a plentiful alternative... it's not quite clear whether these craft are intended to be manned or unmanned, but if it's the latter, then the safety issues inherent with hydrogen might be less of a problem.
(and I, for one, welcome our new solar-powered FedEx Air robot deliverymen!)
Even if we don't find life on mars, it will be important as a second establishment of civilization
I disagree -- Mars will never support a civilization, as a civilization would require an ecosystem to support it, and (short of terraforming) Earth-based life cannot grow on Mars. Mars might support a research outpost or two, but that outpost will be forever dependent on supplies from Earth for its long-term survival, and therefore not viable as a redundant backup location for humanity that could help if Earth was lost.
For an example of what would happen to a Mars outpost that doesn't get resupplied regularly from Earth, check out the results of the BioSphere 2 prototype outpost... and note that Biosphere 2's environmental conditions were much more forgiving than they would be on Mars.
Said person seeks health insurance, but can't get any, because the insurance companies will have access to that person's surfing habit, and will flag this person as undesirable customer. So no coverage, right?
Not right... because starting in 2014 health insurance companies will be forced to offer coverage to everyone. That's the flip side of forcing everyone to have health insurance (the individual mandate).
I imagine the "real" intended use of this is for oppressive police/military units to toss into an area to map the room and identify potential threats easily.
It's also usable by non-oppressive police/military units.
In fact, this technology will likely cut down on accidental shootings of civilians, because the police/military will be better able to determine what sort of threat they face before exposing themselves. Fewer split-second shoot/don't-shoot decisions means fewer wrong shoot/don't-shoot decisions. (the oppressive police/military, OTOH, won't use this because they don't care who's in the room; they'll just blow up the room immediately and sort out the corpses later)
You don't have to press the home button and talk into it like a walkie-talkie you know. The proximity sensor will switch Siri on if you put the iPhone to the side of your head,
True, but from the video it appears that a good part Siri's user feedback is on-screen displays, which you won't be able to read with the phone pressed against your ear.
Would be the ability to melt down previously-created toys back into feedstock material, so that they can be re-used to create new toys.
Otherwise, either the parents get tired of buying more toy-making plastic (at which point the toymaker machine is no longer usable), or the house fills up with endless piles of old toy-printouts as the kids experiment and refine their designs.
What I'm annoyed with is that Apple really hasn't gone the extra distance to make the thing *really* bullet proof. The system should be able to restore itself to some useful state without dropping into terminal or resetting the drive.
Heh, be careful what you wish for. Usually when software tries to rectify a situation it doesn't fully understand, it ends up trashing things beyond any hope of recovery. Often it is better for the software to simply give up and wait for help from a trained operator (read: Genius Bar guy), than try real hard and outsmart itself.
Our system is set up in a way to ensure only real parties are included.
True, but besides the point. Did you see what happened in 2000? A significant number of people who (in a two-candidate race) would have voted for Gore voted instead for Nader, reducing Gore's tallies by enough that Bush was able to squeak out a victory. The end result was many policy changes directly opposite to those that Nader advocated.... the Nader voters' votes were not just ineffective but demonstrably counterproductive to their policy goals. This despite the fact that Nader's party had 5% of the votes and was on the ballot and so on.
Voting 3rd party will change everything
Not in a winner-take-all election system.... not unless the 3rd party has enough support to actually become one of the first two parties (as when the Republicans replaced the Whigs in the 1850s). Of course if that happens, then you again have a two-party system.
. At current rates, it's going to take decades to send that "team" of 20 robots.
Well, if you can design and build one robot (and we have shown that we can), then stamping out the next 19 copies of the same design is straightforward. Once created, they can be sent to Mars together or separately.
At current rates, it's going to take decades to send that "team" of 20 robots.
That same issue also applies to sending humans. The main obstacle is the cost of lifting mass into orbit, and each human you send to Mars will require much more mass than each robot, since for the human you also have to send along several years' worth of food, water, medical supplies, life support equipment, and so on. The robot only needs a power supply.
How about we send them to Mars on a different kind of mission that isn't near-suicidal? I think that would be better.
It would be better, but is it practical? The only manned Mars missions I can foresee right now are (a) on-the-cheap ones where the chances of anyone returning alive are small or zero... or (b) really really expensive ones, which our nation probably isn't willing to underwrite.
Sure, I think there will be some point when robots surpass current humans in agility and cognitive ability. But that hasn't happened yet
Accepted -- but note that the send-robots-instead-of-humans side of the argument doesn't require that robots be as effective as humans.... it only requires that robots be "effective enough" that their remaining performance disadvantages (relative to sending humans) are outweighed by their advantages (lower cost, longer service lifetime, relaxed ethical concerns, no need to return them to Earth, etc).
Or to put it another way.... say sending a robot to Mars is only 5% as scientifically useful as sending a human, but sending a robot also only costs 5% as much. In that case, NASA might well opt to send a team of 20 robots to Mars, rather than sending a single human on a near-suicide mission. That way the eggs aren't all in one basket; a catastrophe still leaves 19 functioning robots, rather than a dead human and a failed mission.
(Btw one thing those 19 remaining robots could do is set up habitation and life-support systems on Mars (or the moon, or wherever) and start producing rocket fuel for future manned missions to use. Once most of the necessary materials for human life (and a return trip) are known to be in place already at the destination, a manned mission becomes much less risky and less expensive)
The outcome of the Apollo program demonstrate that humans still do better than robots for this sort of task.
The Apollo program ended in 1972. I don't think you can use 1960's-era technology to draw useful conclusions about the robots of today. Keep in mind that the primary challenge for robots is cognition, and that the $300 smart phone sitting in your pocket has more computing capability than all the computers in the Apollo program combined.
Of course humans are expendable. You just can't shove it in the public's faces like the Challenger incident (I dunno that 'disaster' is the appropriate word) did.
The problem is that if you are going to use the drama of human spaceflight as a selling point (as what was advocated in the article) then you pretty much have to "shove it in the public's face". You can't spend weeks and weeks building up the public's interest, and then when something goes wrong simply cut to a commercial and never come back. Doing that would only make the situation worse, since then the TV networks would spend all their time talking about "the coverup" instead.;^)
For better or worse, NASA uses the human element of its manned missions to boost political support. But doing that is a double-edged sword. Could NASA get enough funding if it became "just another government agency" that was rarely or never in the news? I doubt it.
If they want to be this way, vote 'em out. Bastards.
All well and good in theory, but in practice it only helps if the alternative isn't even worse. And in the contemporary US, the alternative to a lousy Democrat is usually a much lousier Republican.
(Yes, I know about third party candidates. Unfortunately, our elections are set up in such a way that the only real effect third party candidates can have is to siphon support away from the mainstream candidate they most resemble... which means that voting third party makes it less likely that the third party's policy goals will be realized. Sad, but true.)
Then how is it that not even 2000 iterations of "watch your beloved GI Joe die a horrible death" did manage to convince your American public to expend their dimes anywhere but Iraq/Afghanistan?
That's a good question... the difference is that the government can sell war to the American public by convincing them that it's necessary to keep them safe... the old "better over there than here" argument.
NASA, OTOH, can't play the fear card. The public (rightly) views space exploration as a non-necessity.
As long as the device you want to remove is at the end of the chain, you're golden. However, as the chain gets longer, the chances of the device you want to remove being the device at the end of the chain diminish.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I do not wish to conserve energy. Progress, quality of life, advancement of civilization is driven by energy consumption.
None of those goals is served by wasting power, however. Conserving energy is the art/science of minimizing the amount of power that is wasted.
Since the earth's population will soon peak at 8.5 billion in about 2075 and then decline, some of the "unsustainable growth" nonsense needs to be given the heave-ho too.
Also, since the Second Coming of Jesus will occur in 2012, there's little point in worrying about "unsustainable growth" that might otherwise have occurred after that. Whew, that sure takes a load off of my mind! :^)
If we had any sense at all, we would shut down every nuclear power plant until we had evidence that we had developed human beings who are smart enough to run them properly without ever screwing up.
Or, slightly more realistically, until someone comes up with a design for a fission power plant that can be completely mismanaged, neglected, even bombed, and still not cause a significant radiation problem.
Dunno if that's feasible (short of developing nuclear fusion and using that instead), but it would be one way to go.
Hitler did less than this
What history books have you been reading? Hitler did much, much more than the Zetas could ever do.
Where is PronFS when we desperately need one?
It's widely available... these days it goes by the name "the Internet".
Why should We The Taxpayers have to prop up an industry that can't support itself?
Because We The Taxpayers have an interest in weaning ourselves from our dependence on fossil fuels, and (barring a miracle) that won't happen unless the new-technology companies can sell product and not go bankrupt. Your argument would make sense if solar and e.g. coal competed on a fair playing field, but there clearly isn't one -- the traditional energy sources have huge externalized costs (air pollution, war, global warming, the world's largest standing military to defend oil fields, propping up nasty dictators because they have oil) that all We Taxpayers are forced to pay for (one way or another) whether we care to or not. Those costs are not factored into the price of traditional energy. Furthermore, the traditional energy sources have mostly already paid their R&D costs, so they only have to pay for production; whereas new technologies have to pay for both research and production. Because of this, without some sort of intervention, there would simply be no significant incentive to do anything but burn coal -- its' a straightforward case of the tragedy of the commons. (If you don't like subsidies, I'm open to slapping a fat Carbon Tax on coal/gas/etc to make the prices of those products reflect their actual costs instead, but you and I both know that's not going to happen anytime soon, so subsidies it is)
Therefore, we either do something to make development of new technologies viable, or we go without their benefits until the problems with traditional energy sources become so acute that there is no alternative. But if we do the latter, we've given up the opportunity to develop the better technology until it's perhaps too late.
we lessen the incentive for private funding of development of cheaper, more efficient technologies
Err... such as? Exactly what cheaper, more efficient technologies are being held back by subsidized solar power? And what makes you think that (in a subsidy-free world) these (hypothetical) superior technologies wouldn't also be stymied by the very same problems that made subsidies necessary for solar?
( Making green-friendly people happy = increase in sales ) + ridiculous government subsidies for installing solar = profit increase.
"Ridiculous" is just you editorializing. AFAICT the subsidies are working exactly as intended: by encouraging the adoption of solar power, they grow the solar power market, increase the economies of scale for panel production, and bring the prices down quicker so that soon we'll have solar power that's cheap enough that subsidies are no longer necessary.
You may or may not have noticed that solar panel prices decreased by 50% last year, and the market grew by 70%. Coincidence? Perhaps, but I don't think so.
If it's regulated like other energy companies, your looking at a decade for a permit to start building...
Is cold fusion regulated? Probably not, although that would like change if it was found to actually work.
AmigaOS is still somewhat of a toy operating system though, considering that at is core is Disk Operating System (not unlike the various x86 DOSes)
Oy! AmigaOS is completely unrelated to MS-DOS/PC-DOS/etc. The only thing they have in common is that they were both used in the 80's and 90's.
albeit one that supports preemptive multitasking, but only cooperative memory protection.
"cooperative memory protection"? You mean "no memory protection".
Well, there's always hydrogen as a plentiful alternative... it's not quite clear whether these craft are intended to be manned or unmanned, but if it's the latter, then the safety issues inherent with hydrogen might be less of a problem.
(and I, for one, welcome our new solar-powered FedEx Air robot deliverymen!)
All these worlds are yours, except Europa.
Meddling crotchety old aliens can bite me. We'll go where we damn well please.
Even if we don't find life on mars, it will be important as a second establishment of civilization
I disagree -- Mars will never support a civilization, as a civilization would require an ecosystem to support it, and (short of terraforming) Earth-based life cannot grow on Mars. Mars might support a research outpost or two, but that outpost will be forever dependent on supplies from Earth for its long-term survival, and therefore not viable as a redundant backup location for humanity that could help if Earth was lost.
For an example of what would happen to a Mars outpost that doesn't get resupplied regularly from Earth, check out the results of the BioSphere 2 prototype outpost... and note that Biosphere 2's environmental conditions were much more forgiving than they would be on Mars.
Said person seeks health insurance, but can't get any, because the insurance companies will have access to that person's surfing habit, and will flag this person as undesirable customer. So no coverage, right?
Not right... because starting in 2014 health insurance companies will be forced to offer coverage to everyone. That's the flip side of forcing everyone to have health insurance (the individual mandate).
I imagine the "real" intended use of this is for oppressive police/military units to toss into an area to map the room and identify potential threats easily.
It's also usable by non-oppressive police/military units.
In fact, this technology will likely cut down on accidental shootings of civilians, because the police/military will be better able to determine what sort of threat they face before exposing themselves. Fewer split-second shoot/don't-shoot decisions means fewer wrong shoot/don't-shoot decisions. (the oppressive police/military, OTOH, won't use this because they don't care who's in the room; they'll just blow up the room immediately and sort out the corpses later)
Put all of them up on some old shelving, and serve cake.
You don't have to press the home button and talk into it like a walkie-talkie you know. The proximity sensor will switch Siri on if you put the iPhone to the side of your head,
True, but from the video it appears that a good part Siri's user feedback is on-screen displays, which you won't be able to read with the phone pressed against your ear.
Would be the ability to melt down previously-created toys back into feedstock material, so that they can be re-used to create new toys.
Otherwise, either the parents get tired of buying more toy-making plastic (at which point the toymaker machine is no longer usable), or the house fills up with endless piles of old toy-printouts as the kids experiment and refine their designs.
What I'm annoyed with is that Apple really hasn't gone the extra distance to make the thing *really* bullet proof. The system should be able to restore itself to some useful state without dropping into terminal or resetting the drive.
Heh, be careful what you wish for. Usually when software tries to rectify a situation it doesn't fully understand, it ends up trashing things beyond any hope of recovery. Often it is better for the software to simply give up and wait for help from a trained operator (read: Genius Bar guy), than try real hard and outsmart itself.
Our system is set up in a way to ensure only real parties are included.
True, but besides the point. Did you see what happened in 2000? A significant number of people who (in a two-candidate race) would have voted for Gore voted instead for Nader, reducing Gore's tallies by enough that Bush was able to squeak out a victory. The end result was many policy changes directly opposite to those that Nader advocated.... the Nader voters' votes were not just ineffective but demonstrably counterproductive to their policy goals. This despite the fact that Nader's party had 5% of the votes and was on the ballot and so on.
Voting 3rd party will change everything
Not in a winner-take-all election system.... not unless the 3rd party has enough support to actually become one of the first two parties (as when the Republicans replaced the Whigs in the 1850s). Of course if that happens, then you again have a two-party system.
. At current rates, it's going to take decades to send that "team" of 20 robots.
Well, if you can design and build one robot (and we have shown that we can), then stamping out the next 19 copies of the same design is straightforward. Once created, they can be sent to Mars together or separately.
At current rates, it's going to take decades to send that "team" of 20 robots.
That same issue also applies to sending humans. The main obstacle is the cost of lifting mass into orbit, and each human you send to Mars will require much more mass than each robot, since for the human you also have to send along several years' worth of food, water, medical supplies, life support equipment, and so on. The robot only needs a power supply.
How about we send them to Mars on a different kind of mission that isn't near-suicidal? I think that would be better.
It would be better, but is it practical? The only manned Mars missions I can foresee right now are (a) on-the-cheap ones where the chances of anyone returning alive are small or zero ... or (b) really really expensive ones, which our nation probably isn't willing to underwrite.
Sure, I think there will be some point when robots surpass current humans in agility and cognitive ability. But that hasn't happened yet
Accepted -- but note that the send-robots-instead-of-humans side of the argument doesn't require that robots be as effective as humans.... it only requires that robots be "effective enough" that their remaining performance disadvantages (relative to sending humans) are outweighed by their advantages (lower cost, longer service lifetime, relaxed ethical concerns, no need to return them to Earth, etc).
Or to put it another way.... say sending a robot to Mars is only 5% as scientifically useful as sending a human, but sending a robot also only costs 5% as much. In that case, NASA might well opt to send a team of 20 robots to Mars, rather than sending a single human on a near-suicide mission. That way the eggs aren't all in one basket; a catastrophe still leaves 19 functioning robots, rather than a dead human and a failed mission.
(Btw one thing those 19 remaining robots could do is set up habitation and life-support systems on Mars (or the moon, or wherever) and start producing rocket fuel for future manned missions to use. Once most of the necessary materials for human life (and a return trip) are known to be in place already at the destination, a manned mission becomes much less risky and less expensive)
The outcome of the Apollo program demonstrate that humans still do better than robots for this sort of task.
The Apollo program ended in 1972. I don't think you can use 1960's-era technology to draw useful conclusions about the robots of today. Keep in mind that the primary challenge for robots is cognition, and that the $300 smart phone sitting in your pocket has more computing capability than all the computers in the Apollo program combined.
Of course humans are expendable. You just can't shove it in the public's faces like the Challenger incident (I dunno that 'disaster' is the appropriate word) did.
The problem is that if you are going to use the drama of human spaceflight as a selling point (as what was advocated in the article) then you pretty much have to "shove it in the public's face". You can't spend weeks and weeks building up the public's interest, and then when something goes wrong simply cut to a commercial and never come back. Doing that would only make the situation worse, since then the TV networks would spend all their time talking about "the coverup" instead. ;^)
For better or worse, NASA uses the human element of its manned missions to boost political support. But doing that is a double-edged sword. Could NASA get enough funding if it became "just another government agency" that was rarely or never in the news? I doubt it.
If they want to be this way, vote 'em out. Bastards.
All well and good in theory, but in practice it only helps if the alternative isn't even worse. And in the contemporary US, the alternative to a lousy Democrat is usually a much lousier Republican.
(Yes, I know about third party candidates. Unfortunately, our elections are set up in such a way that the only real effect third party candidates can have is to siphon support away from the mainstream candidate they most resemble... which means that voting third party makes it less likely that the third party's policy goals will be realized. Sad, but true.)
Then how is it that not even 2000 iterations of "watch your beloved GI Joe die a horrible death" did manage to convince your American public to expend their dimes anywhere but Iraq/Afghanistan?
That's a good question... the difference is that the government can sell war to the American public by convincing them that it's necessary to keep them safe... the old "better over there than here" argument.
NASA, OTOH, can't play the fear card. The public (rightly) views space exploration as a non-necessity.
Why not chain the HDD off the display instead?
As long as the device you want to remove is at the end of the chain, you're golden. However, as the chain gets longer, the chances of the device you want to remove being the device at the end of the chain diminish.