Many of those articles and hate-blogs written on computers powered by the plant itself, filled with dreams of paving Nevada (or just Somewhere Else) with windmills and unspecified solar miracle-widgets to generate 2 gigawatts to replace San Onofre.
According to what I just googled, California currently has just over a gigawatt of installed solar production, and just over half a gigawatt of installed wind power.
Therefore, to replace the 2 gigawatts that used to come from San Onofre with renewable energy (and ignoring the possibility of increases in renewable efficiency), we'd have to roughly double our current amount of installed renewable infrastructure.
That won't be cheap, but its certainly doable -- and given the steadily decreasing cost of renewables, it will almost certainly happen.
As dear as it may be to some peoples' hearts, nuclear technology is not our only option. If society rejects nuclear, we can solve our energy and climate problems using other methods.
It was known prior to the election by the higher ups, but was covered up. It might have been enough to tip the election in a 50-50 country.
If the "suppression" of these groups (i.e. the delay and/or denial of their request for tax-exempt status as non-political organizations) might have tipped the election, is that not pretty good evidence that they should not qualify for that tax-exempt status? An apolitical organization by definition would not try to effect the outcome of an election.
That may explain the lukewarm response -- the sense that these groups were trying to have their cake and eat it too.
That's funny... you believe there was any difference between the two? Exactly how could Romney have been any worse?
Romney wasn't an running in the 2008 general election, perhaps you meant McCain/Palin?
That aside, I suspect you're right, that the Republican wouldn't have been much worse (or much better) on the national-security-vs-privacy issue. There really does seem to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington that mass monitoring of phone/email records is acceptable.
However, that's not the only issue that people care about. For example, a Republican president would have been significantly worse in terms of clean energy policy (which is important to me), and would have taken very different approaches on other things like health care, gay rights, taxation, social spending, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Regardless of your position on those issues, they matter, perhaps more than this one, and people rightly take them into account when voting.
there was Ron Paul, who while he has problems, would at least have shut down this surveillance nonsense, plus a lot of other stuff, if he had been elected
I wonder, would he have? Or would he have instead changed his mind after viewing the NSA/CIA/TLA's uber-secret Power Point presentation detailing how many terrorist plots they (allegedly) have thwarted via their mass snooping?
A new nuclear plant costs billions of dollars, and the only way they ever get built at all is if the government guarantees to backstop disaster liability with taxpayer dollars. Otherwise private investors would never touch them.
That doesn't sound particularly cheap to me. And in fact it isn't.
[An ICE car] can go about 350 miles between refueling stops.
All true, but it should be pointed out that driving 350 miles (in any car) sucks. It means you are sitting in a chair, unable to do anything but watch the road in front of you, for 5+ tedious hours.
Most people who need to go that far would prefer to take an airplane; and certainly anyone who can afford a Tesla can afford plane tickets.
So I see the 300 mile range limit as largely a non-issue (outside of perception/marketing, anyway).
... so much as a reflection of the fact the risk of development failure increases proportionally with the size/scope of the system being developed, and this is/was a very large system.
Or, to paraphrase a quote I heard (Google can't find it for me, alas):
"There are two types of complex system; the type that started out as a simple system and grew more complex over time; and the type that doesn't work."
They're going to want reports and stats not just on the current living animals. I didn't RTFA ('natch) but if they missed that requirement, what else have they overlooked?
I think what you overlooked was that the "database" in the article was just a colorful contrivance to illustrate common usages of an in-memory data structure (e.g. a page-table in the Linux kernel) and not a True Database in the SQL/web-server/generate-me-a-report sense.
A colleague suggested during a meeting that we were building something that would make it far too easy for the customer to perform a certain task; a task that my colleague felt was deleterious.
If electric cars take over the market, the demand for car maintenance will collapse. Thats a big chunk of the job market in some areas and there will have to be some adjustment.
We should all have such problems. Also if they find the cure for cancer, a lot of oncologists will be out of a job. It's still a big net win for society in either case.
IMO, Tesla needs to produce an EV that costs under $20K new. A $15K would be even better. It should have range... as good as it gets. Beggars can't be choosers. But probably 100 miles per charge would be OK for many. A $15K car that costs little to run would be an excellent reason to buy - and that would appeal to the mass market, to the people who have to count each dollar when they fuel up their current vehicles.
I'd like to see that happen too, but I feel the need to point out that any number of electric car companies have tried exactly that approach and promptly gone out of business. At least in the past, a $15K electric car ended up being a glorified golf cart that didn't sell. Maybe in the future, battery technology will advance to the point where that is no longer the case; we can only hope. In the meantime, Tesla has approached the market from the other direction and appears to be doing quite well.
When you consider that USD and most other currencies are backed by nothing more than the governments that print/mint the stuff
Nothing less than those governments as well... the same governments that have control over stuff like the world's largest military, one of the world's largest economies, many of the world's largest banks, one of the world's largest nuclear weapons arsenals...
As a result, I have a latency too short to be noticed, and also the process eats almost no processor time when idle.
100,000 microseconds (aka 0.1 seconds) is too short to be noticed? Maybe for some very lightweight tasks, but for many (most?) computer tasks, 0.1 seconds is a huge amount of latency. If, for example, your hard disk controller was programmed using this logic, your computer would take several hours to boot. Even writing a mouse driver this way would provide a poor user experience (10Hz mouse pointer updates)
This would have close to zero latency, and would eat precisely zero processor time when idle. Of course the trick is implementing wait_until_next_event_is_ready() to do what its name implies, but it's really not that hard to do in most cases.
The fact that drones are an issue only underlines how desperate the republican media is to pin anything on the current president.
Also along those lines -- if anyone thinks that a contemporary Republican administration would be avoiding the use of drones for moral reasons, I've got a bridge to sell them.
There are lots of valid points against the use of drones, but given their recent foreign policy history, Republicans are not people with any credibility to make them. Hell, they still can't decide whether they're for or against torture.
The only value any of it has, is the value given to it by feeble Human minds.
Well yeah, but that's the value that matters. The whole point of currency is that you can trade it for goods and services from... humans (including their feeble minds).
Slashdot Mirror
Many of those articles and hate-blogs written on computers powered by the plant itself, filled with dreams of paving Nevada (or just Somewhere Else) with windmills and unspecified solar miracle-widgets to generate 2 gigawatts to replace San Onofre.
According to what I just googled, California currently has just over a gigawatt of installed solar production, and just over half a gigawatt of installed wind power.
Therefore, to replace the 2 gigawatts that used to come from San Onofre with renewable energy (and ignoring the possibility of increases in renewable efficiency), we'd have to roughly double our current amount of installed renewable infrastructure.
That won't be cheap, but its certainly doable -- and given the steadily decreasing cost of renewables, it will almost certainly happen.
As dear as it may be to some peoples' hearts, nuclear technology is not our only option. If society rejects nuclear, we can solve our energy and climate problems using other methods.
It was known prior to the election by the higher ups, but was covered up. It might have been enough to tip the election in a 50-50 country.
If the "suppression" of these groups (i.e. the delay and/or denial of their request for tax-exempt status as non-political organizations) might have tipped the election, is that not pretty good evidence that they should not qualify for that tax-exempt status? An apolitical organization by definition would not try to effect the outcome of an election.
That may explain the lukewarm response -- the sense that these groups were trying to have their cake and eat it too.
That's funny... you believe there was any difference between the two? Exactly how could Romney have been any worse?
Romney wasn't an running in the 2008 general election, perhaps you meant McCain/Palin?
That aside, I suspect you're right, that the Republican wouldn't have been much worse (or much better) on the national-security-vs-privacy issue. There really does seem to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington that mass monitoring of phone/email records is acceptable.
However, that's not the only issue that people care about. For example, a Republican president would have been significantly worse in terms of clean energy policy (which is important to me), and would have taken very different approaches on other things like health care, gay rights, taxation, social spending, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. Regardless of your position on those issues, they matter, perhaps more than this one, and people rightly take them into account when voting.
there was Ron Paul, who while he has problems, would at least have shut down this surveillance nonsense, plus a lot of other stuff, if he had been elected
I wonder, would he have? Or would he have instead changed his mind after viewing the NSA/CIA/TLA's uber-secret Power Point presentation detailing how many terrorist plots they (allegedly) have thwarted via their mass snooping?
When are you going to stop being delusional that some magical pseudo-authority figure is the answer to everyone's perceived problems?
I don't have an opinion on the matter, but DogDude specifically said "best", not "only". So you're arguing against a claim he never made.
But there are still wingnuts who claim they can detect the radiation as far as California, that all tuna in the oceans are radioactive, etc.
That's the beauty of the Internet; it turns the million-monkeys-on-typewriters idea from a thought experiment into an actual everyday experience.
For any idiotic idea you can think of, there's someone on the Internet proclaiming it as true.
I wouldn't use that as a method for judging the intelligence of the entire human race, though.
A new nuclear plant costs billions of dollars, and the only way they ever get built at all is if the government guarantees to backstop disaster liability with taxpayer dollars. Otherwise private investors would never touch them.
That doesn't sound particularly cheap to me. And in fact it isn't.
[An ICE car] can go about 350 miles between refueling stops.
All true, but it should be pointed out that driving 350 miles (in any car) sucks. It means you are sitting in a chair, unable to do anything but watch the road in front of you, for 5+ tedious hours.
Most people who need to go that far would prefer to take an airplane; and certainly anyone who can afford a Tesla can afford plane tickets.
So I see the 300 mile range limit as largely a non-issue (outside of perception/marketing, anyway).
... so much as a reflection of the fact the risk of development failure increases proportionally with the size/scope of the system being developed, and this is/was a very large system.
Or, to paraphrase a quote I heard (Google can't find it for me, alas):
"There are two types of complex system; the type that started out as a simple system and grew more complex over time; and the type that doesn't work."
They're going to want reports and stats not just on the current living animals. I didn't RTFA ('natch) but if they missed that requirement, what else have they overlooked?
I think what you overlooked was that the "database" in the article was just a colorful contrivance to illustrate common usages of an in-memory data structure (e.g. a page-table in the Linux kernel) and not a True Database in the SQL/web-server/generate-me-a-report sense.
Water wings!
A colleague suggested during a meeting that we were building something that would make it far too easy for the customer to perform a certain task; a task that my colleague felt was deleterious.
Ah, building a porn site, are you?
If electric cars take over the market, the demand for car maintenance will collapse. Thats a big chunk of the job market in some areas and there will have to be some adjustment.
We should all have such problems. Also if they find the cure for cancer, a lot of oncologists will be out of a job. It's still a big net win for society in either case.
IMO, Tesla needs to produce an EV that costs under $20K new. A $15K would be even better. It should have range ... as good as it gets. Beggars can't be choosers. But probably 100 miles per charge would be OK for many. A $15K car that costs little to run would be an excellent reason to buy - and that would appeal to the mass market, to the people who have to count each dollar when they fuel up their current vehicles.
I'd like to see that happen too, but I feel the need to point out that any number of electric car companies have tried exactly that approach and promptly gone out of business. At least in the past, a $15K electric car ended up being a glorified golf cart that didn't sell. Maybe in the future, battery technology will advance to the point where that is no longer the case; we can only hope. In the meantime, Tesla has approached the market from the other direction and appears to be doing quite well.
Has a D-Wave quantum-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own quantum-nature.
When you consider that USD and most other currencies are backed by nothing more than the governments that print/mint the stuff
Nothing less than those governments as well... the same governments that have control over stuff like the world's largest military, one of the world's largest economies, many of the world's largest banks, one of the world's largest nuclear weapons arsenals...
Point being, it's not chopped liver.
Actually add human recognition software to this and it could reduce accidental (and deliberate) deaths drastically.
Accidental deaths, sure. Deliberate deaths? I'm thinking deliberate deaths could become much easier (and thus perhaps more common).
"Okay gun, I'm going to place you here in this tree. Next time my ex walks by, shoot him."
somelabel: if(something_happened() process_it(); usleep(100000); goto somelabel;
As a result, I have a latency too short to be noticed, and also the process eats almost no processor time when idle.
100,000 microseconds (aka 0.1 seconds) is too short to be noticed? Maybe for some very lightweight tasks, but for many (most?) computer tasks, 0.1 seconds is a huge amount of latency. If, for example, your hard disk controller was programmed using this logic, your computer would take several hours to boot. Even writing a mouse driver this way would provide a poor user experience (10Hz mouse pointer updates)
A much better event loop would be:
somelabel: if(something_happened() process_it(); wait_until_next_event_is_ready(); goto somelabel;
This would have close to zero latency, and would eat precisely zero processor time when idle. Of course the trick is implementing wait_until_next_event_is_ready() to do what its name implies, but it's really not that hard to do in most cases.
The fact that drones are an issue only underlines how desperate the republican media is to pin anything on the current president.
Also along those lines -- if anyone thinks that a contemporary Republican administration would be avoiding the use of drones for moral reasons, I've got a bridge to sell them.
There are lots of valid points against the use of drones, but given their recent foreign policy history, Republicans are not people with any credibility to make them. Hell, they still can't decide whether they're for or against torture.
The only value any of it has, is the value given to it by feeble Human minds.
Well yeah, but that's the value that matters. The whole point of currency is that you can trade it for goods and services from... humans (including their feeble minds).
Why would you propose fewer?
Because many (I suspect most) people will not want a flying car, nor would they be able to afford one if they did want it.
I just don't believe we're going to be able to build the infrastructure to have millions of autonomous flying vehicles soaring around the world.
Millions, no. Tens or even hundreds of thousands, perhaps.
but so damned far from something which can be made into reality as to be a waste of time.
An self-flying airplane is a much easier problem to solve than a self-driving car, and they've largely solved the self-driving car problem already.
We can't solve basic problems like feeding people and not trying to kill each other constantly
Wow, what a complete non-sequiter. There is nothing that requires thorny political problems to be resolved before technical problems can be addressed.
9/11 like attack would become common
Mini 9/11 attacks, maybe. Jumbo jets these are not.
Yet you propose 240 million flying cars?
Did anyone actually propose 240 million flying cars?
put it on death row and people may not want to end up there.
As opposed to now, where people are clamoring to get in?