You can't even power cars with only solar. You need an energy storage device. You won't with fusion.
Eh? How do we avoid the need for an energy storage device with fusion?
If you're predicting that we are going to be able to scale fusion reactors down from ITER-sized to something that can operate inside a moving car, I have to say I don't believe you.
First, it's extraordinarily wasteful to burn electricity for "proof-of-work".
It certainly seems that way. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see a comparative study of the energy resources consumed (per user) to create and maintain the paper money supply. I wouldn't be too surprised if the per-capita efficiency advantage was actually on the BitCoin side, once all the paper production costs, transport costs, guard costs, legal overhead, etc is tallied up.
I hate to break it to you, but running an SSH server on the target is *not* lighter weight than running vim on the target
Bah, you kids with your fancy "encryption" and "privacy". In my day, we ran our vi sessions over telnetd with a default root password, and we liked it!
Also, QoS is a total dog if you are trying to employ it on consumer grade equipment. At least, that's been my experience with numerous linksys, d-link, and netgear devices. I'm kind of down on QoS as a result.
Automobile manufacturers are considering using AVB as the mechanism by which they get their quality-of-service guarantees -- basically re-using the audio/video bandwidth-reservation protocols as a way to reserve bandwidth for their command signaling data.
Whether or not this is a good idea I will leave as an exercise to the reader; but at least it is not relying on your father's broken QoS system.
Oh, yes, what awful passengers those people are. It's not as if it's the government thugs that are awful for harassing people and violating their rights and the constitution, no; it's the passengers.
It's not an either/or thing. Anybody can be awful if they put their mind to it; many people succeed brilliantly at being awful, regardless of their chosen profession.
Thousands of volunteering and self-organizing detectives have been meticulously laying a puzzle that reveals the Gox billion-dollar heist as an inside job.
Running something at the speed it was designed and verified to run at by the maker isn't over clocking.
If Intel designs a component to run at speed X, then later finds out that it can run some of those components at speed 1.5X, and verifies and sells them at that higher-than-rated speed, I think it's fair to say Intel is over clocking. The only difference is that in this situation, the warranty will be honored if it stops working.
Apparently the swapping station keeps track of which battery is yours. When you come back it will give you back the same battery.
Of course, that raises some interesting logistical issues. Such as, is the station allowed to loan out your battery to anyone else while you are out using the loaner they gave you? If so, what happens when you come back to retrieve your battery and it's no longer there? Or if not, what happens when you pull up to the swap-station and find that despite the presence of dozens of batteries there, all charged and ready to use, you can't have one because they are all someone else's personal battery and need to be there when that someone returns?
(There's probably an obvious solution to this, but it's late and I can't think what it is)
Use, you say, fractions of coins! The fractions would be so tiny as to be impractical.
What exactly makes tiny fractions impractical? All the transactions are done on computers, and computers are quite good at multiplying and dividing to reformat those tiny fractions into whatever units you want to use.
For example, if you think it's impractical to spend 42/100,000,000'th of a BitCoin, just tell your BitCoin app to spend 42 Satoshis instead.
BitCoin has its problems, but the use of fractions isn't one of them.
And another huge reason why bitcoins won't become popular: computers. Bitcoins require them, and most people don't have them.
Most people have cell phones. Cell phones are computers.
Government should force people to bake wedding cakes against their will because... else someone of some special race will be sad? Why don't they just buy a wedding cake from someone who wants to sell them one?
1950's Kohath: Government should force people to make sandwiches for black people? Why don't the black people just go find another lunch counter that's willing to serve them?
They said Bitcoin was just like currency, only better.
And so it is! It turns out that when people send large amounts of cash to be held for them by an unregulated/uninsured web site in a foreign country, the inevitable result is identical whether the currency is USD or BitCoin.
(As for the "only better" part, that refers to the entertainment value. Enjoy your schaeudenfreude!)
Presumably you'd advertise your prices in a more-stable currency, and then do an automatic/fast conversion to BitCoins at the moment of the sale.
Whether or not it would be worth the hassle to do that, I don't know. Life would certainly be simpler if/when BitCoin matures and its valuation becomes less erratic.
Easy to insure a worthless product, the government just hands out paper.
It may just be paper, but I've been successfully using it to purchase goods and services since I was five. It's hard to see how something that has been so reliably useful can be worthless, unless you've redefined the word "worthless" in some irrelevant way.
And since the government makes the rules up as it goes, there is actually no real guarantee of that
And yet its actual record for reliability is still much higher than that of BitCoin's (or just about any national fiat currency for that matter).
Qt Creator and Eclipse both support multiplatform projects very well, being multiplatform themselves.
I believe multi platform ubiquity is in fact vi's One True selling point. vi sucks, but it sucks in exactly the same way everywhere, so there's no need to re-train your muscle memory every time you switch from one platform to another. Qt Creator and Eclipse are heading in that direction, but neither helps you much when you need to do your work over an ssh connection to a mainframe...
Visual Studio doesn't, but it doesn't shoehorn you into Microsoft-specific extensions either.
In principle, I think this is true, but in practice it seems like projects end up having to support two different build systems: One Makefile-based system for Unix/Linux/MacOSX, and a separate,.vcproj-file based system for Windows. And of course the two sets of build files are constantly getting out of sync with each other as the code develops... bleah.
(Qt gets around that problem by using their own.pro format and qmake to auto-generate the appropriate "native" project file as necessary, and this works well, but even then there was about a five-year period where our Windows guy was hand-maintaining his own parallel Windows project files for his Qt software, simply because he could modify their settings from within the IDE GUI rather and therefore didn't have to learn how to use the.pro file format. And if that meant his changes regularly broke the build on all platforms besides Windows, well, that wasn't his problem....:P )
In the small embedded processor market, the best you can hope for is a hardware stack (like some Microchip products use.) If the hardware stack overfills, then a hard reset occurs.
It seems to me that a better approach would be to have the linker (or some post-link build tool) use static analysis to determine the program's worst-case stack usage, and abort with an error if that usage is greater than the amount of stack space that will be available.
Some programs (e.g. those that use recursion or alloca()) may have potentially infinite stack usage, but that's fine -- in this application, those programs are considered unacceptable and should not be allowed to generate an executable.
Or better yet, why can't the manufacturer just email everybody a flash drive containing the update which they can then stick in the car's USB port at their leisure?
I'm all for it -- I can't wait to laser-print an Acura return address onto a nice-looking envelope and mail a custom 'auto-brick' USB key to my engine-revving neighbors.
It will never happen. That would raise the BOM for each vehicle by at least $0.20, possibly as much as $0.40 for redundant memory which would only ever be used for a few minutes out of the car's lifetime. Do you think that car manufacturers are made of money?
If only there was just one car manufacturer that was willing to spend that extra cash to make a superior product, and then people lined up to buy that superior product even though it cost more. That could then serve as proof-by-example to the other auto companies that there is profit to be made by improving quality as well as by reducing cost.
Well, assuming I'm an auto manufacturer, I'd respond, "that depends - which is cheaper, doing a recall and fixing the issue, or paying out settlements to X number of people who will be hurt if we don't issue a recall?"
Fight Club notwithstanding, there are other costs that auto manufacturers have to consider as well. One is the cost of lost sales if their brand gains a reputation for being unsafe. The long-term cost of your products being thought of deathtraps can far exceed the cost of settling some lawsuits. Just ask Toyota -- or ask Elon Musk what keeps him up at night.
Because a bad update on the phone won't cause a high speed fiery wreck.
Assuming they do proper key-signing and checksumming to verify that the files are genuine and uncorrupted, and they don't trigger the actual install until after the car is parked, I don't see how an over-the-air update is any less safe than one delivered through a USB cable (or whatever it is they use at the dealer).
I suppose at the dealer they would be better prepared to manually recover if something went wrong during the install and bricked the computer, but that would be a customer-satisfaction issue, not a safety issue, as a non-functional car isn't going to crash into anything.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't even power cars with only solar. You need an energy storage device. You won't with fusion.
Eh? How do we avoid the need for an energy storage device with fusion?
If you're predicting that we are going to be able to scale fusion reactors down from ITER-sized to something that can operate inside a moving car, I have to say I don't believe you.
Exactly how would a consumer figure out whether to trust a coin exchange?
If it's not regulated and insured like a bank, don't trust it to act like a bank. Easy enough. :)
First, it's extraordinarily wasteful to burn electricity for "proof-of-work".
It certainly seems that way. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see a comparative study of the energy resources consumed (per user) to create and maintain the paper money supply. I wouldn't be too surprised if the per-capita efficiency advantage was actually on the BitCoin side, once all the paper production costs, transport costs, guard costs, legal overhead, etc is tallied up.
I hate to break it to you, but running an SSH server on the target is *not* lighter weight than running vim on the target
Bah, you kids with your fancy "encryption" and "privacy". In my day, we ran our vi sessions over telnetd with a default root password, and we liked it!
Also, QoS is a total dog if you are trying to employ it on consumer grade equipment. At least, that's been my experience with numerous linksys, d-link, and netgear devices. I'm kind of down on QoS as a result.
Automobile manufacturers are considering using AVB as the mechanism by which they get their quality-of-service guarantees -- basically re-using the audio/video bandwidth-reservation protocols as a way to reserve bandwidth for their command signaling data.
Whether or not this is a good idea I will leave as an exercise to the reader; but at least it is not relying on your father's broken QoS system.
Oh, yes, what awful passengers those people are. It's not as if it's the government thugs that are awful for harassing people and violating their rights and the constitution, no; it's the passengers.
It's not an either/or thing. Anybody can be awful if they put their mind to it; many people succeed brilliantly at being awful, regardless of their chosen profession.
Thereby making the Zimbabwean dollar look stable in comparison.
I think you overestimate the stability of the Zimbabwean dollar...
Thousands of volunteering and self-organizing detectives have been meticulously laying a puzzle that reveals the Gox billion-dollar heist as an inside job.
Oh great, the armchair Internet detectives are back. Remember the crack job those guys did tracking down the Boston Bombers?
So we don't count the lines of code behind the "FindShortestTour" function?
Not unless you had to write them yourself. Do you count the lines of code behind printf() when you write Hello World?
Running something at the speed it was designed and verified to run at by the maker isn't over clocking.
If Intel designs a component to run at speed X, then later finds out that it can run some of those components at speed 1.5X, and verifies and sells them at that higher-than-rated speed, I think it's fair to say Intel is over clocking. The only difference is that in this situation, the warranty will be honored if it stops working.
Apparently the swapping station keeps track of which battery is yours. When you come back it will give you back the same battery.
Of course, that raises some interesting logistical issues. Such as, is the station allowed to loan out your battery to anyone else while you are out using the loaner they gave you? If so, what happens when you come back to retrieve your battery and it's no longer there? Or if not, what happens when you pull up to the swap-station and find that despite the presence of dozens of batteries there, all charged and ready to use, you can't have one because they are all someone else's personal battery and need to be there when that someone returns?
(There's probably an obvious solution to this, but it's late and I can't think what it is)
All situations are exactly like stuff that happened to black folks in 1950?
Not all situations, no. But this situation? Certainly.
Use, you say, fractions of coins! The fractions would be so tiny as to be impractical.
What exactly makes tiny fractions impractical? All the transactions are done on computers, and computers are quite good at multiplying and dividing to reformat those tiny fractions into whatever units you want to use.
For example, if you think it's impractical to spend 42/100,000,000'th of a BitCoin, just tell your BitCoin app to spend 42 Satoshis instead.
BitCoin has its problems, but the use of fractions isn't one of them.
And another huge reason why bitcoins won't become popular: computers. Bitcoins require them, and most people don't have them.
Most people have cell phones. Cell phones are computers.
Government should force people to bake wedding cakes against their will because ... else someone of some special race will be sad? Why don't they just buy a wedding cake from someone who wants to sell them one?
1950's Kohath: Government should force people to make sandwiches for black people? Why don't the black people just go find another lunch counter that's willing to serve them?
Can the state tell someone they must not refuse to do business with brunettes? Or people with freckles?
Yes.
They said Bitcoin was just like currency, only better.
And so it is! It turns out that when people send large amounts of cash to be held for them by an unregulated/uninsured web site in a foreign country, the inevitable result is identical whether the currency is USD or BitCoin.
(As for the "only better" part, that refers to the entertainment value. Enjoy your schaeudenfreude!)
Presumably you'd advertise your prices in a more-stable currency, and then do an automatic/fast conversion to BitCoins at the moment of the sale.
Whether or not it would be worth the hassle to do that, I don't know. Life would certainly be simpler if/when BitCoin matures and its valuation becomes less erratic.
Easy to insure a worthless product, the government just hands out paper.
It may just be paper, but I've been successfully using it to purchase goods and services since I was five. It's hard to see how something that has been so reliably useful can be worthless, unless you've redefined the word "worthless" in some irrelevant way.
And since the government makes the rules up as it goes, there is actually no real guarantee of that
And yet its actual record for reliability is still much higher than that of BitCoin's (or just about any national fiat currency for that matter).
If you can get the job done and get a paycheck what difference does it make?
Better tools let you work more efficiently. Working more efficiently means you can either get more done, or spend fewer hours at the office.
Qt Creator and Eclipse both support multiplatform projects very well, being multiplatform themselves.
I believe multi platform ubiquity is in fact vi's One True selling point. vi sucks, but it sucks in exactly the same way everywhere, so there's no need to re-train your muscle memory every time you switch from one platform to another. Qt Creator and Eclipse are heading in that direction, but neither helps you much when you need to do your work over an ssh connection to a mainframe...
Visual Studio doesn't, but it doesn't shoehorn you into Microsoft-specific extensions either.
In principle, I think this is true, but in practice it seems like projects end up having to support two different build systems: One Makefile-based system for Unix/Linux/MacOSX, and a separate, .vcproj-file based system for Windows. And of course the two sets of build files are constantly getting out of sync with each other as the code develops... bleah.
(Qt gets around that problem by using their own .pro format and qmake to auto-generate the appropriate "native" project file as necessary, and this works well, but even then there was about a five-year period where our Windows guy was hand-maintaining his own parallel Windows project files for his Qt software, simply because he could modify their settings from within the IDE GUI rather and therefore didn't have to learn how to use the .pro file format. And if that meant his changes regularly broke the build on all platforms besides Windows, well, that wasn't his problem.... :P )
In the small embedded processor market, the best you can hope for is a hardware stack (like some Microchip products use.) If the hardware stack overfills, then a hard reset occurs.
It seems to me that a better approach would be to have the linker (or some post-link build tool) use static analysis to determine the program's worst-case stack usage, and abort with an error if that usage is greater than the amount of stack space that will be available.
Some programs (e.g. those that use recursion or alloca()) may have potentially infinite stack usage, but that's fine -- in this application, those programs are considered unacceptable and should not be allowed to generate an executable.
Or better yet, why can't the manufacturer just email everybody a flash drive containing the update which they can then stick in the car's USB port at their leisure?
I'm all for it -- I can't wait to laser-print an Acura return address onto a nice-looking envelope and mail a custom 'auto-brick' USB key to my engine-revving neighbors.
It will never happen. That would raise the BOM for each vehicle by at least $0.20, possibly as much as $0.40 for redundant memory which would only ever be used for a few minutes out of the car's lifetime. Do you think that car manufacturers are made of money?
If only there was just one car manufacturer that was willing to spend that extra cash to make a superior product, and then people lined up to buy that superior product even though it cost more. That could then serve as proof-by-example to the other auto companies that there is profit to be made by improving quality as well as by reducing cost.
Well, assuming I'm an auto manufacturer, I'd respond, "that depends - which is cheaper, doing a recall and fixing the issue, or paying out settlements to X number of people who will be hurt if we don't issue a recall?"
Fight Club notwithstanding, there are other costs that auto manufacturers have to consider as well. One is the cost of lost sales if their brand gains a reputation for being unsafe. The long-term cost of your products being thought of deathtraps can far exceed the cost of settling some lawsuits. Just ask Toyota -- or ask Elon Musk what keeps him up at night.
Because a bad update on the phone won't cause a high speed fiery wreck.
Assuming they do proper key-signing and checksumming to verify that the files are genuine and uncorrupted, and they don't trigger the actual install until after the car is parked, I don't see how an over-the-air update is any less safe than one delivered through a USB cable (or whatever it is they use at the dealer).
I suppose at the dealer they would be better prepared to manually recover if something went wrong during the install and bricked the computer, but that would be a customer-satisfaction issue, not a safety issue, as a non-functional car isn't going to crash into anything.