Targeting specific birds, how many top of the food chain birds do cats kill? I have doubts that cats or glass panes are killing as many eagles as windmills.
67 eagles have been verified as killed by wind turbines in the last 5 years (source).
That's out of a population of about 20,000 bald eagles (source) and 30,000 golden eagles (source).
So, are wind turbines a significant problem for eagles? Well, they do kill an estimated 0.13% of eagles, so they aren't completely harmless. On the other hand, the American Eagle Society's threats to eagle survival page lists the primary threats to eagles as: DDT, Lead shot poisoning, secondary poisoning, electrocution, poaching, habitat destruction, and other predators. Wind turbines are not mentioned at all.
Therefore, we can conclude that "wind turbines kill eagles" is a not a valid criticism of wind power.
Code that has been good for years suddenly has warnings because a later compiler release starts to gripe about it.
I've seen it go the other way too -- code that has been buggy for years (but nobody noticed because the bug's symptoms were too subtle to easily detect, or because that particular code path was seldom exercised) -- suddenly gets warned about, and (if the developer is paying attention) fixed.
If "int* ptr;" returns any value that is inconsistent it is a problem IMHO.
Ah, but in C++ that 'problem' is considered a feature. The reasoning is that if you know you're going to assign a value to that variable later on (without reading its value beforehand), then there is no point in having the program waste CPU cycles writing a never-to-be-used default value to ptr's memory location every time the function runs. So instead the compiler leaves ptr's memory location alone unless/until you explicitly request that it be set to a particular value, and thus its uninitialized value will depend on whatever bits happened to be already present at that location in RAM beforehand.
It's design decisions like that that make C++ so efficient -- and so easy to shoot yourself in the foot with.
In fact, the ones that they fear is not tesla, but China. If Tesla opens the door this way, then the Chinese companies will come to America in exactly the same fashion.
Given the product quality and level of support provided by Chinese manufacturers -- if American dealers can't compete against that, then they really don't have any reason to exist.
I wrote and maintain an open-source library whose primary purpose is to support the software that I write for my employer. Because of that, I need to keep the primary copy of the library's source code in my employer's SVN server.
However, I also like to keep the library's source available for public use (BSD licensed, with my employer's permission). Traditionally I've been doing that by creating a.zip file containing the source code of each new release, uploading that.zip file to my public web server, and posting a release announcement on Freecode.com.
If Freecode.com can no longer play that announcement/indexing role for future releases, where should I post release notices to instead? It seems like github.com and sourceforge.net assume that all source code will be hosted by their own source-code-management servers, which isn't a good option for me. Just posting them to my own little web page seems insufficient.
Well, our electricity expenses (i.e. the sum of the money we send to the power company, plus the money we send to SolarCity) went from $1000/month to $650/month.
You're right, that's not quite "cut in half", but $350/month in savings is nothing to sneeze at either, especially since achieving it cost us nothing but some roof space we weren't using anyway.
They'd be stupid not to consider, "how much will it cost to clean up the mess?" in today's day and age where the EPA can come in and pretty much regulate you out of business for messing things up.
That's true, which is one reason why not many coal plants are being built in the USA today.
However, solar panels aren't competing against new coal plants -- they are competing against the many existing coal plants which have been running for years, and whose construction has already been paid for. Those plants' only ongoing costs are maintenance and fuel, which makes them relatively inexpensive to operate.
The cost of repairing the damage to the climate that those plants cause, OTOH, may be quite large, but the owners of the plants will not be responsible for paying that cost, so they don't care.
There are better options, and cells with better efficiency. Shop around if you want solar
Sure, there are better systems to be had, if you are willing to shell out cash up front. If that's something that you're unwilling or unable to do, however, it's hard to beat cutting your electric bill in half for free.
There's also something to be said for not having to maintain and support the system yourself. Non-technical people feel better knowing that if the system fails or performs poorly, it's SolarCity's problem, not theirs.
Please please please, pretty please with a bow around it, do not build these plants in states voting for legislators who are hostile to climate science, hostile to green technology, hostile to EPA.
Alternatively, please please do build these plants in those states. Most of those legislators are hostile to renewable energy because their constituents (and backers) are from the fossil-fuel industry. If/when their constituents' livelihoods and/or campaign funds start coming from the solar power industry instead, that will likely 'evolve' their thinking more quickly than anything else.
I've never understood why, when you save a file, a checksum isn't computed at the same time and stored among the metadata. [...] It would be easy and useful, no ?
It would be, and applications that just write out a file to disk can and do implement exactly that (although I think many of them save the checksum in the file's data-stream itself, rather than as filesystem-dependent metadata).
Implementing checksumming at the filesystem level is a good deal trickier, because the filesystem has to support more than just one-and-done writing out of new files. It has to allow programs to do things like mmap() files into a region of memory and keep the file-on-disk synchronized with the mapped region of RAM whenever the CPU writes data to that RAM; and it has to allow programs to seek around and overwrite arbitrary subsections of an existing file from multiple threads simultaneously, etc.
I think it is possible for a filesystem to maintain/update checksums even in the face of all of that, and it may even possible to do it efficiently -- but I think it is also sufficiently difficult that most filesystems implementers don't bother to try (especially since even minor errors in the checksumming mechanism will present themselves to the user as messages that his files have been corrupted -- and whether the files actually are corrupted or not, that will make the user very unhappy).
We are not all that interesting, nor special, and in the last 35,000 years when we could comprehend what we're looking at, no-one's bothered to swing by and ask for a cup of sugar.
Or it could be that interstellar travel is just extremely expensive, so that any aliens civilizations that exist either don't bother, or they can only afford to visit a small number of places (and we're way down the list), or they can only send extremely small (read: hard-to-notice) spacecraft.
Until we invent something like a Warp Drive (or at least discover a reason to think such a thing might be possible even in principle), I'm inclined to prefer this explanation, at least over the 'nature preserve' idea:)
[Politicians] use the taxes we give them to spy on us and arm our police forces with tanks rather than give us nationalized healthcare.
If you're hoping that electing Tea Partiers to Congress will result in nationalized healthcare. . . well, good luck with that. I wouldn't hold my breath.
However it's wrong. That comes out of the fact that a standard exists; who owns/defines it is irrelevant.
That would only be true if all the standards performed equally well, which is not the case here.
The relevant comparison: At a SuperCharger you can recharge your Model S in less than an hour -- typically within 20-30 minutes. If you plug your Model S into a standard J1722 charger, OTOH, it will take about five times longer, because J1722 has a much lower maximum charge rate.
So ask yourself: if you were considering buying a Tesla, would you be more likely to buy one if you knew that recharging it would take 30 minutes at most locations, or 3 hours?
Other than charging a fee to anyone who wants to make things complying with it (which the story suggests isn't the case) then where exactly is the profit in setting the standard?
1. Teslas are a lot easier to sell if there are recharging locations everywhere as opposed to just in a few places. To the extent that this promotes more Tesla-friendly charging locations, it helps sell more Teslas.
2. If it's your design becomes the standard, then the standard is going to be a very good fit with your other products. Other companies might have to make compromises to work with the standard, but you (presumably) won't, because you designed the standard to fit your products. That makes it easier to sell better products.
3. If you're seen as the de-facto technology leader, it becomes much easier to get the market to accept your next design (SuperCharger 2.0 or whatever) as a standard as well.
Pro society? Not really. This is a brilliant move in terms of getting his infrastructure built for him.
I don't see anything above that precludes the move from being pro-society, Not everything is a zero-sum game -- this can benefit both Tesla and society at large.
That's a really big assumption - IF we get to that point, we'd have to smack the head of any engineer who suggests, "Hey, let's take human control out of the loop of this killer robot system of systems."
We've already passed that point, if you count things like minefields. (and yes, the engineer who dreamed them up should be smacked)
It's true, I've seen those SMART cars all over Europe - and yet, they still look silly.
As a Smart owner, I won't disagree -- I'll just note that there is something to be said for looking a bit silly. Taking yourself too seriously is a recipe for dissatisfaction.
And would make that buggy software nearly impossible to patch. Every time there's a security vulnerability found, you'd essentially have to reinstall the whole application.
Is there any way to run the patch through the same process (using the same per-install key, of course) so that the result is a locally-transmuted patch that can be applied to the locally-transmuted application?
(Not that updating the entire application is necessarily a deal-breaker anyway; we all have broadband now, right?)
Just figure out what the social cost of the emissions is, charge that much through a tax, and let everyone decide on their own whether that trip, or that vehicle, is still worth it.
Yes, the Carbon tax is a great idea. However it can't be effective until Congress passes it -- and Congress is unlikely to pass anything that includes the word "tax" in the title, because taxes are bad, m'kay.
So until Congress gets off its ass and does something useful, CAFE standards are a whole lot better than nothing.
That way if they complained about a program not compiling because they forgot a '.', you could respond with "Well you wouldn't end a sentence with out a '.', would you?"
I like it, but the benefit would be more than offset by the confusion that would be introduced by the fact that there would now be two flavors of C code floating around, and the people used to the old syntax are confused by the new one and vice-versa.
Perhaps someone will invent a time machine and travel back to 1969 to have a 'frank exchange of views' with Dennis Ritchie.
Slashdot Mirror
Please please please tell me this device alerts swimmers by playing the "Jaws" theme over the water...
Targeting specific birds, how many top of the food chain birds do cats kill? I have doubts that cats or glass panes are killing as many eagles as windmills.
67 eagles have been verified as killed by wind turbines in the last 5 years (source).
That's out of a population of about 20,000 bald eagles (source) and 30,000 golden eagles (source).
So, are wind turbines a significant problem for eagles? Well, they do kill an estimated 0.13% of eagles, so they aren't completely harmless. On the other hand, the American Eagle Society's threats to eagle survival page lists the primary threats to eagles as: DDT, Lead shot poisoning, secondary poisoning, electrocution, poaching, habitat destruction, and other predators. Wind turbines are not mentioned at all.
Therefore, we can conclude that "wind turbines kill eagles" is a not a valid criticism of wind power.
Code that has been good for years suddenly has warnings because a later compiler release starts to gripe about it.
I've seen it go the other way too -- code that has been buggy for years (but nobody noticed because the bug's symptoms were too subtle to easily detect, or because that particular code path was seldom exercised) -- suddenly gets warned about, and (if the developer is paying attention) fixed.
Problem is, that variable is indeed used, only it's inside of an ifdef, so now we have to stick in even more ifdefs to hide the variable declaration.
A potentially less messy approach:
int some_variable; // might generate warning if left unused!
#ifdef DEBUG // avoid compiler warning
some_variable = 5;
#else
(void) some_variable;
#endif
If "int* ptr;" returns any value that is inconsistent it is a problem IMHO.
Ah, but in C++ that 'problem' is considered a feature. The reasoning is that if you know you're going to assign a value to that variable later on (without reading its value beforehand), then there is no point in having the program waste CPU cycles writing a never-to-be-used default value to ptr's memory location every time the function runs. So instead the compiler leaves ptr's memory location alone unless/until you explicitly request that it be set to a particular value, and thus its uninitialized value will depend on whatever bits happened to be already present at that location in RAM beforehand.
It's design decisions like that that make C++ so efficient -- and so easy to shoot yourself in the foot with.
Guaranteed death in a car accident -- what's not to love?
That doesn't stop all the motorcyclists and bicyclists out there; they have even less protection than this offers.
Plus in this you don't have to wear stifling leather clothing, and you can drive in the rain without getting soaked.
I think there is a market for this.
In fact, the ones that they fear is not tesla, but China. If Tesla opens the door this way, then the Chinese companies will come to America in exactly the same fashion.
Given the product quality and level of support provided by Chinese manufacturers -- if American dealers can't compete against that, then they really don't have any reason to exist.
I wrote and maintain an open-source library whose primary purpose is to support the software that I write for my employer. Because of that, I need to keep the primary copy of the library's source code in my employer's SVN server.
However, I also like to keep the library's source available for public use (BSD licensed, with my employer's permission). Traditionally I've been doing that by creating a .zip file containing the source code of each new release, uploading that .zip file to my public web server, and posting a release announcement on Freecode.com.
If Freecode.com can no longer play that announcement/indexing role for future releases, where should I post release notices to instead? It seems like github.com and sourceforge.net assume that all source code will be hosted by their own source-code-management servers, which isn't a good option for me. Just posting them to my own little web page seems insufficient.
It is not cut in half.
Well, our electricity expenses (i.e. the sum of the money we send to the power company, plus the money we send to SolarCity) went from $1000/month to $650/month.
You're right, that's not quite "cut in half", but $350/month in savings is nothing to sneeze at either, especially since achieving it cost us nothing but some roof space we weren't using anyway.
They'd be stupid not to consider, "how much will it cost to clean up the mess?" in today's day and age where the EPA can come in and pretty much regulate you out of business for messing things up.
That's true, which is one reason why not many coal plants are being built in the USA today.
However, solar panels aren't competing against new coal plants -- they are competing against the many existing coal plants which have been running for years, and whose construction has already been paid for. Those plants' only ongoing costs are maintenance and fuel, which makes them relatively inexpensive to operate.
The cost of repairing the damage to the climate that those plants cause, OTOH, may be quite large, but the owners of the plants will not be responsible for paying that cost, so they don't care.
There are better options, and cells with better efficiency. Shop around if you want solar
Sure, there are better systems to be had, if you are willing to shell out cash up front. If that's something that you're unwilling or unable to do, however, it's hard to beat cutting your electric bill in half for free.
There's also something to be said for not having to maintain and support the system yourself. Non-technical people feel better knowing that if the system fails or performs poorly, it's SolarCity's problem, not theirs.
Please please please, pretty please with a bow around it, do not build these plants in states voting for legislators who are hostile to climate science, hostile to green technology, hostile to EPA.
Alternatively, please please do build these plants in those states. Most of those legislators are hostile to renewable energy because their constituents (and backers) are from the fossil-fuel industry. If/when their constituents' livelihoods and/or campaign funds start coming from the solar power industry instead, that will likely 'evolve' their thinking more quickly than anything else.
I've never understood why, when you save a file, a checksum isn't computed at the same time and stored among the metadata. [...] It would be easy and useful, no ?
It would be, and applications that just write out a file to disk can and do implement exactly that (although I think many of them save the checksum in the file's data-stream itself, rather than as filesystem-dependent metadata).
Implementing checksumming at the filesystem level is a good deal trickier, because the filesystem has to support more than just one-and-done writing out of new files. It has to allow programs to do things like mmap() files into a region of memory and keep the file-on-disk synchronized with the mapped region of RAM whenever the CPU writes data to that RAM; and it has to allow programs to seek around and overwrite arbitrary subsections of an existing file from multiple threads simultaneously, etc.
I think it is possible for a filesystem to maintain/update checksums even in the face of all of that, and it may even possible to do it efficiently -- but I think it is also sufficiently difficult that most filesystems implementers don't bother to try (especially since even minor errors in the checksumming mechanism will present themselves to the user as messages that his files have been corrupted -- and whether the files actually are corrupted or not, that will make the user very unhappy).
We are not all that interesting, nor special, and in the last 35,000 years when we could comprehend what we're looking at, no-one's bothered to swing by and ask for a cup of sugar.
Or it could be that interstellar travel is just extremely expensive, so that any aliens civilizations that exist either don't bother, or they can only afford to visit a small number of places (and we're way down the list), or they can only send extremely small (read: hard-to-notice) spacecraft.
Until we invent something like a Warp Drive (or at least discover a reason to think such a thing might be possible even in principle), I'm inclined to prefer this explanation, at least over the 'nature preserve' idea :)
[Politicians] use the taxes we give them to spy on us and arm our police forces with tanks rather than give us nationalized healthcare.
If you're hoping that electing Tea Partiers to Congress will result in nationalized healthcare. . . well, good luck with that. I wouldn't hold my breath.
However it's wrong. That comes out of the fact that a standard exists; who owns/defines it is irrelevant.
That would only be true if all the standards performed equally well, which is not the case here.
The relevant comparison: At a SuperCharger you can recharge your Model S in less than an hour -- typically within 20-30 minutes. If you plug your Model S into a standard J1722 charger, OTOH, it will take about five times longer, because J1722 has a much lower maximum charge rate.
So ask yourself: if you were considering buying a Tesla, would you be more likely to buy one if you knew that recharging it would take 30 minutes at most locations, or 3 hours?
Other than charging a fee to anyone who wants to make things complying with it (which the story suggests isn't the case) then where exactly is the profit in setting the standard?
1. Teslas are a lot easier to sell if there are recharging locations everywhere as opposed to just in a few places. To the extent that this promotes more Tesla-friendly charging locations, it helps sell more Teslas.
2. If it's your design becomes the standard, then the standard is going to be a very good fit with your other products. Other companies might have to make compromises to work with the standard, but you (presumably) won't, because you designed the standard to fit your products. That makes it easier to sell better products.
3. If you're seen as the de-facto technology leader, it becomes much easier to get the market to accept your next design (SuperCharger 2.0 or whatever) as a standard as well.
Pro society? Not really. This is a brilliant move in terms of getting his infrastructure built for him.
I don't see anything above that precludes the move from being pro-society, Not everything is a zero-sum game -- this can benefit both Tesla and society at large.
That's a really big assumption - IF we get to that point, we'd have to smack the head of any engineer who suggests, "Hey, let's take human control out of the loop of this killer robot system of systems."
We've already passed that point, if you count things like minefields. (and yes, the engineer who dreamed them up should be smacked)
It's true, I've seen those SMART cars all over Europe - and yet, they still look silly.
As a Smart owner, I won't disagree -- I'll just note that there is something to be said for looking a bit silly. Taking yourself too seriously is a recipe for dissatisfaction.
are you kidding, California is nearly bankrupt.
No, it isn't.
And would make that buggy software nearly impossible to patch. Every time there's a security vulnerability found, you'd essentially have to reinstall the whole application.
Is there any way to run the patch through the same process (using the same per-install key, of course) so that the result is a locally-transmuted patch that can be applied to the locally-transmuted application?
(Not that updating the entire application is necessarily a deal-breaker anyway; we all have broadband now, right?)
By the time a human realizes there is a problem if the automated system has failed, they'll be lucky to have enough time to scream.
That said, a big red "OMG stop" button wouldn't go amiss, particularly on the Toyota models...
Just figure out what the social cost of the emissions is, charge that much through a tax, and let everyone decide on their own whether that trip, or that vehicle, is still worth it.
Yes, the Carbon tax is a great idea. However it can't be effective until Congress passes it -- and Congress is unlikely to pass anything that includes the word "tax" in the title, because taxes are bad, m'kay.
So until Congress gets off its ass and does something useful, CAFE standards are a whole lot better than nothing.
That way if they complained about a program not compiling because they forgot a '.', you could respond with "Well you wouldn't end a sentence with out a '.', would you?"
I like it, but the benefit would be more than offset by the confusion that would be introduced by the fact that there would now be two flavors of C code floating around, and the people used to the old syntax are confused by the new one and vice-versa.
Perhaps someone will invent a time machine and travel back to 1969 to have a 'frank exchange of views' with Dennis Ritchie.