What would make solar energy viable would be panels that didn't cost $30,000 to buy and install. [...] I just don't happen to have $30K laying around.
This game changer has already occurred in many places. There are many locations where you can get a home solar array installed without paying any money for it, because the installing company is willing to pay for the equipment and installation in return for selling you the generated power. This is appealing to consumers because they get a significant reduction in their monthly power bill, they don't have to pay anything, and they don't have to take on the risk of not getting the expected return on their investment.
The fact that solar companies are willing to take the financial risk on the customer's behalf indicates that the risk/reward ratio of home solar installations is already low enough to be economically viable, and it will only improve over time.
Telling people they'll be okay once they know how to drive is the wrong idea.
The difference between driving and VR is that VR is supposed to simulate your being physically present inside a computer-generated environment. People already know how to physically exist in a location. If the VR system requires special training to interact with, then the V isn't doing a very good approximation of the R.
A used car battery won't hold a charge, or deliver current. That's why they are replaced after all.
I think you might have a misconception here -- it sounds like you are thinking of the engine-starter batteries used in a gasoline-engine car. The used batteries the previous poster is referring to are the (much larger) battery packs from an electric car. Those batteries are typically swapped out when their capacity deteriorates to the point where the car's maximum range is no longer acceptable. In that state, the batteries are still perfectly capable of holding a charge and delivering current; just not as much charge as when they were new.
There isn't enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make this work.
That's okay, because they are unlikely to be taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere anyway. It would be much cheaper and easier to capture and reuse the outputs of an existing CO2 source (e.g. a coal plant) than it would be to suck CO2 out of the ambient air.
Google's social networking features remain marginal for the same reason all of the other social networking sites remain marginal: the value of a social networking application is proportional to the number of people who are already using it. And Facebook hit critical mass first, which means that anyone who wants to "socialize" online with all of their buddies is going to want to do that on Facebook, because that's where all of their buddies are to be found online.
Asking people to also sign up for a second social-networking service is a losing proposition, because it inconveniences them (now they have to check two sites every day) without providing any compensating benefit (why talk to their friends on site B when they could already do that on site A?).
That's not what I call "release". That's move from one cage to another. Maybe a bigger cage, but it's still a cage. Not freedom.
They wouldn't survive in the wild, so leaving them in the wild wouldn't be freedom either, it would be a death sentence.
That doesn't mean that putting them in a humane environment isn't the right thing to do. Keeping an animal in a 4x4 wire cage for its entire life is cruel. The distinction you're trying to make (an abstract idea of "complete freedom") isn't relevant and would be meaningless to the chimp; what's relevant is the chimpanzee's quality of life.
Anything a machine call center can handle, a web site could handle more quickly and reliably. An automated call center is like having someone read you a web page's text over the phone, and then ask you to tell them which link to click on.
What we've learned from our history is the stronger power typically enslaves the weaker, why would you think non-terrestrial intelligence wouldn't enslave us?
Historically there has been an economic advantage to enslaving people; if you enslaved someone you could get them to do work for you, so you didn't have to do the work yourself.
A non-terrestrial intelligence, contrariwise, would either not be present on Earth (in which case it wouldn't have the ability to enslave anyone on Earth), or if it did get to Earth, it did so by harnessing enough energy to make the trip across interstellar space. Any species capable of harnessing that much energy on its own is unlikely to need to enslave anyone to get its work done. It would be like you or I 'enslaving' a hamster to generate electrical power for our house -- there's not enough benefit to make it worth the effort of doing.
there has to be a good reason for it, and making it easier for bad programmers to produce more bad code is not a valid one.
If all you've got is bad programmers, and their bad code is nevertheless good enough to accomplish the tasks you need to get done, then a tool that allows bad programmers to produce more bad code may be just the thing you need. (of course some would argue that that niche is already filled by Java, but time will tell)
it actually caused a bug that would crash the system
It would be more accurate to say it revealed a bug. The bug was almost certainly a race condition that had always been present, but it took particular entry conditions (such as an unusually fast I/O device that the transcoder developers never tested against) to provoke the bug into causing a user-detectable failure.
No, they arrested an idiot who is supposed to have a pilot license who does not understand the concept of a 'no-fly-zone'.
He understood the concept perfectly well. He flew into the no-fly zone on purpose, with the full knowledge he would be arrested and prosecuted for doing so.
What's dangerous is 3,000 pounds of metal being controlled by a driver who is impaired by alcohol, drugs or messing around on their phone.
I think there will be a market niche to accommodate the previous poster -- imagine a car that works just like a traditional car, except that it refuses to run into anything. It will be analogous to a (smart) mechanical horse -- you can try to get a horse to run into a brick wall, but most horses are going to turn or stop before they break their neck. There's no reason a car couldn't do the same.
Damn right nobody dresses the gorilla in the room. Gorillas are inveterate nudists, and anyone who tries to force clothing onto a gorilla is going to regret it.
entrapment: cop walks up to suspected thief: "here's the keys to that car, it's yours to take." he takes the car. he's arrest- invalidly. he should not go to jail and he should sue the police for entrapment
entrapment: undercover agent walks up to suspected terrorist: "here's the trigger to that bomb, it's yours to detonate." he (attempts to) detonate the bomb. he's arrested -- invalidly?
I'm sure any company wishing to buy it from the registered owner would need to up that $2500 by at least a zero or two.
The next question to ask is, why should it bother a company so much that a companyname.sucks domain name exists that is not under their control? (i.e. why would they feel the need to spend $2500 or more to obtain it?)
It's pretty apparent that anyone who spontaneously types that domain name into their web browser probably already feels that (companyname) sucks, otherwise they wouldn't have typed in that domain name.
The other way people would find that domain name is by entering "companyname sucks" into a search engine -- in which case they will see all the "companyname sucks" pages, regardless of where they are hosted.
It's doubtful anyone is going to mistake such a domain name for a legitimate company-owned site.
And finally, paying the $2500 is definitely not going to prevent people from saying that "companyname sucks" -- they'll just say it on some other web page, and that web page's URL will be the one that comes up when you google that phrase rather than companyname.sucks. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, AFAICT.
I'd say that if companyname.sucks is getting a lot of traffic, that (company) might want to figure out why people think they suck and take corrective action, rather than simply trying to quash peoples' complaints.
Sorry, I know this is a really basic question, but a quick Google search didn't turn up any satisfying answers.
The question is: why is it useful to have certificates expire after a particular amount of time? Isn't that similar to writing a program that contains a bug that will cause it to automatically stop working in (so many months/years)?
The only reason I can think of is that if the certificate was compromised this would make sure that people eventually stopped using it; OTOH if the certificate is compromised you'd want people to stop using it immediately, not wait (however many) months/years before stopping; so presumably this wouldn't be a sufficient mechanism to handle that use case anyway.
This problem is technically avoidable if every code author is careful to always use tabs only for each line's initial indentation, and never use a tab after a space (or after any other non-tab character on a line), and never use spaces as the initial indent characters.
However, in practice this doesn't happen reliably, presumably because the inevitable mistakes are invisible to the code's author (since it all looks correct in *his* IDE)
As a fairly experienced and slightly wrinkly and grey developer, can anyone tell me why spaces over tabs?
Because in every project that uses tabs, The code is inevitably
littered with
the occasional
line that does not line up with the others
for no apparent reason.
and you will spend part of every day
either changing your editor's tab settings
to match the tab settings of the code's author
or editing the code to "fix" the problem
(which will of course "break" it for the
next person whose tab settings don't match yours)
If you avoid tabs and use only spaces, OTOH, the code formatting will look correct on any editor with any tab setting.
Real Programmers' Easter eggs can undergo code inspections without being noticed by any of the other developers. (Do it well enough and you might get talent-scouted by the NSA!;))
as a general rule, vehicles with low operating costs retain value better than those with high operating costs
In general I think that's true, but I wonder about whether it applies to the special case of EVs in 2015-2020, given the current rapid evolution of battery manufacturing technology. For example, what do you suppose will happen to the resale value of an 80-mile-range Nissan Leaf if/when Chevy comes out with their 200-mile-range Chevy Bolt at a similar price point?
Slashdot Mirror
What would make solar energy viable would be panels that didn't cost $30,000 to buy and install. [...] I just don't happen to have $30K laying around.
This game changer has already occurred in many places. There are many locations where you can get a home solar array installed without paying any money for it, because the installing company is willing to pay for the equipment and installation in return for selling you the generated power. This is appealing to consumers because they get a significant reduction in their monthly power bill, they don't have to pay anything, and they don't have to take on the risk of not getting the expected return on their investment.
The fact that solar companies are willing to take the financial risk on the customer's behalf indicates that the risk/reward ratio of home solar installations is already low enough to be economically viable, and it will only improve over time.
It's not going to happen.
Telling people they'll be okay once they know how to drive is the wrong idea.
The difference between driving and VR is that VR is supposed to simulate your being physically present inside a computer-generated environment. People already know how to physically exist in a location. If the VR system requires special training to interact with, then the V isn't doing a very good approximation of the R.
A used car battery won't hold a charge, or deliver current. That's why they are replaced after all.
I think you might have a misconception here -- it sounds like you are thinking of the engine-starter batteries used in a gasoline-engine car. The used batteries the previous poster is referring to are the (much larger) battery packs from an electric car. Those batteries are typically swapped out when their capacity deteriorates to the point where the car's maximum range is no longer acceptable. In that state, the batteries are still perfectly capable of holding a charge and delivering current; just not as much charge as when they were new.
There isn't enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make this work.
That's okay, because they are unlikely to be taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere anyway. It would be much cheaper and easier to capture and reuse the outputs of an existing CO2 source (e.g. a coal plant) than it would be to suck CO2 out of the ambient air.
Google's social networking features remain marginal for the same reason all of the other social networking sites remain marginal: the value of a social networking application is proportional to the number of people who are already using it. And Facebook hit critical mass first, which means that anyone who wants to "socialize" online with all of their buddies is going to want to do that on Facebook, because that's where all of their buddies are to be found online.
Asking people to also sign up for a second social-networking service is a losing proposition, because it inconveniences them (now they have to check two sites every day) without providing any compensating benefit (why talk to their friends on site B when they could already do that on site A?).
What does knowing this password allow a malicious person to do, that he couldn't do otherwise?
That's not what I call "release". That's move from one cage to another. Maybe a bigger cage, but it's still a cage. Not freedom.
They wouldn't survive in the wild, so leaving them in the wild wouldn't be freedom either, it would be a death sentence.
That doesn't mean that putting them in a humane environment isn't the right thing to do. Keeping an animal in a 4x4 wire cage for its entire life is cruel. The distinction you're trying to make (an abstract idea of "complete freedom") isn't relevant and would be meaningless to the chimp; what's relevant is the chimpanzee's quality of life.
Anything a machine call center can handle, a web site could handle more quickly and reliably. An automated call center is like having someone read you a web page's text over the phone, and then ask you to tell them which link to click on.
What we've learned from our history is the stronger power typically enslaves the weaker, why would you think non-terrestrial intelligence wouldn't enslave us?
Historically there has been an economic advantage to enslaving people; if you enslaved someone you could get them to do work for you, so you didn't have to do the work yourself.
A non-terrestrial intelligence, contrariwise, would either not be present on Earth (in which case it wouldn't have the ability to enslave anyone on Earth), or if it did get to Earth, it did so by harnessing enough energy to make the trip across interstellar space. Any species capable of harnessing that much energy on its own is unlikely to need to enslave anyone to get its work done. It would be like you or I 'enslaving' a hamster to generate electrical power for our house -- there's not enough benefit to make it worth the effort of doing.
Great idea - just tell me: how? Where? [....] they go to some kind of sanctuary or zoo.
There.
there has to be a good reason for it, and making it easier for bad programmers to produce more bad code is not a valid one.
If all you've got is bad programmers, and their bad code is nevertheless good enough to accomplish the tasks you need to get done, then a tool that allows bad programmers to produce more bad code may be just the thing you need. (of course some would argue that that niche is already filled by Java, but time will tell)
it actually caused a bug that would crash the system
It would be more accurate to say it revealed a bug. The bug was almost certainly a race condition that had always been present, but it took particular entry conditions (such as an unusually fast I/O device that the transcoder developers never tested against) to provoke the bug into causing a user-detectable failure.
His message is that he wants the government to limit your ability to engage in free speech.
There's a constant and deliberate conflation of money and speech going on in this country. They are not equivalent to each other.
No, they arrested an idiot who is supposed to have a pilot license who does not understand the concept of a 'no-fly-zone'.
He understood the concept perfectly well. He flew into the no-fly zone on purpose, with the full knowledge he would be arrested and prosecuted for doing so.
What's dangerous is 3,000 pounds of metal being controlled by a driver who is impaired by alcohol, drugs or messing around on their phone.
I think there will be a market niche to accommodate the previous poster -- imagine a car that works just like a traditional car, except that it refuses to run into anything. It will be analogous to a (smart) mechanical horse -- you can try to get a horse to run into a brick wall, but most horses are going to turn or stop before they break their neck. There's no reason a car couldn't do the same.
Damn right nobody dresses the gorilla in the room. Gorillas are inveterate nudists, and anyone who tries to force clothing onto a gorilla is going to regret it.
entrapment: cop walks up to suspected thief: "here's the keys to that car, it's yours to take." he takes the car. he's arrest- invalidly. he should not go to jail and he should sue the police for entrapment
entrapment: undercover agent walks up to suspected terrorist: "here's the trigger to that bomb, it's yours to detonate." he (attempts to) detonate the bomb. he's arrested -- invalidly?
This article needs a soundtrack.
I'm sure any company wishing to buy it from the registered owner would need to up that $2500 by at least a zero or two.
The next question to ask is, why should it bother a company so much that a companyname.sucks domain name exists that is not under their control? (i.e. why would they feel the need to spend $2500 or more to obtain it?)
It's pretty apparent that anyone who spontaneously types that domain name into their web browser probably already feels that (companyname) sucks, otherwise they wouldn't have typed in that domain name.
The other way people would find that domain name is by entering "companyname sucks" into a search engine -- in which case they will see all the "companyname sucks" pages, regardless of where they are hosted.
It's doubtful anyone is going to mistake such a domain name for a legitimate company-owned site.
And finally, paying the $2500 is definitely not going to prevent people from saying that "companyname sucks" -- they'll just say it on some other web page, and that web page's URL will be the one that comes up when you google that phrase rather than companyname.sucks. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, AFAICT.
I'd say that if companyname.sucks is getting a lot of traffic, that (company) might want to figure out why people think they suck and take corrective action, rather than simply trying to quash peoples' complaints.
Sorry, I know this is a really basic question, but a quick Google search didn't turn up any satisfying answers.
The question is: why is it useful to have certificates expire after a particular amount of time? Isn't that similar to writing a program that contains a bug that will cause it to automatically stop working in (so many months/years)?
The only reason I can think of is that if the certificate was compromised this would make sure that people eventually stopped using it; OTOH if the certificate is compromised you'd want people to stop using it immediately, not wait (however many) months/years before stopping; so presumably this wouldn't be a sufficient mechanism to handle that use case anyway.
(Replying to myself before someone else does...)
This problem is technically avoidable if every code author is careful to always use tabs only for each line's initial indentation, and never use a tab after a space (or after any other non-tab character on a line), and never use spaces as the initial indent characters.
However, in practice this doesn't happen reliably, presumably because the inevitable mistakes are invisible to the code's author (since it all looks correct in *his* IDE)
As a fairly experienced and slightly wrinkly and grey developer, can anyone tell me why spaces over tabs?
Because in every project that uses tabs,
The code is inevitably
littered with
the occasional
line that does not line up with the others
for no apparent reason.
and you will spend part of every day
either changing your editor's tab settings
to match the tab settings of the code's author
or editing the code to "fix" the problem
(which will of course "break" it for the
next person whose tab settings don't match yours)
If you avoid tabs and use only spaces, OTOH, the code formatting will look correct on any editor with any tab setting.
... then you haven't hidden it well enough.
Real Programmers' Easter eggs can undergo code inspections without being noticed by any of the other developers. (Do it well enough and you might get talent-scouted by the NSA! ;))
as a general rule, vehicles with low operating costs retain value better than those with high operating costs
In general I think that's true, but I wonder about whether it applies to the special case of EVs in 2015-2020, given the current rapid evolution of battery manufacturing technology. For example, what do you suppose will happen to the resale value of an 80-mile-range Nissan Leaf if/when Chevy comes out with their 200-mile-range Chevy Bolt at a similar price point?