Look up the cost per kilowatt of your alternatives. Wind and wave are around 70 per kilowatt hour, Nuclear is at around 20-something. I don't consider paying over triple the cost for power a "viable alternative".
Yes, they do sometimes. But birds fly into skyscrapers quite often too, and for some reason that doesn't seem to stop anybody from building them.
The windmills here in San Francisco kill something like 4,000 birds a year. I doubt that many run into skyscrapers.
By your own graph, 9/11ths of power used in the home is NOT wasted.
You're confused, I think, by the power line losses in transmission. Unless you're a physicist working on building superconducting power lines, I highly doubt you will be able to improve the efficiency of our power distribution system.
Sorry, I should have made myself more clear. It's very difficult to cut power in such a way that doesn't send us back to the stone ages. People in the 1600s didn't have fridges, but they also died of food poisoning a lot more often. We could turn off street lights, but then more people will die in traffic accidents. Anyone who suggests making cuts that would result in the loss of life should themselves be shot, or, more appropriately, forced to live in the wilderness for a couple years without their Gore-Tex (tm) jacket or First Need (tm) water filter.
You can't compare energy expenditure between Germany and the US if you're counting oil costs. Germans live in much denser cities. Americans are more dispersed. The expectation that Americans could go without cars if they had to is laughable. I live in San Francisco, which has one of the largest public transportation systems in the US, and I still don't use it. Not because I have a car fetish, but because it's impractical. Getting to the BART station from my house (and it's about 3 or 4 miles away) takes over an hour, with two bus connections, from where I live. When I lived in the suburbs of San Diego, it was a half hour walk to get to the nearest restaurant or grocery store from where I lived. Impractical without a car.
Light bulbs are not the single biggest user of energy. As the other guy posted, they're a small fraction. That's why I laughed when Al Gore said he'd be upgrading to CFDs -- his house uses in a day what the average household uses in a month. What, the CFDs will cut it down to a 29-day cost?
Nuclear power is cheap and safe. Any environmentalist who is serious about reducing carbon emissions and lowering their country's dependence on oil, but is unwilling to switch to nuclear power, is a hypocrite.
Besides incredibly trivial things like replacing our light bulbs with CFDs and turning off our power when we go outside, which is a *trivial* amount of savings, there's not much humans can do to save power.
No alternative energy source is capable of cheaply producing mass amount of energy, and even most of these run into problems with environmentalists as well (damns stop fish from migrating, windmills chop up endangered birds, etc.)
In all honestly, nuclear power is the correct solution to our energy needs.
However, I agree that in the absence of contrary evidence, that correlation may be very weak in this study. According to the accelerometer, for instance, the kids who rode the bus home got more exercise than those who rode their bikes.
Right, it just doesn't make any sense to me that this could be at all accurate.
My own experience as a child athlete was that my exercise program raised my daily caloric requirment over 5,000. I am skeptical that I was merely "moving around" exercise to which I was already genetically committed.
Yeah. When I was in 4th grade, I ran 44 laps (11 miles) in a Jog a Thon, and was pretty damn hungry afterwards. =)
I read the fine article, and still claim bullshit on it.
There's no genetic difference between the Hopi Indians today and of the Hopi Indians hundreds of years ago. And yet now they have a massive epidemic of diabetes and obesity, whereas it was almost unheard of before. Changes: diet, and exercise.
Since when do accelerometers measure the amount of calories you burn? I could quite easily sit on a weight machine all day pumping iron, with an accelerometer sitting on my waist saying I'm doing no exercise.
Unless these kids have found some sort of way to violate the conservation of energy, the kids that run around, instead of, say, sitting in one place, will have burned more calories than the other.
I've worked with programs that do athletics with kids in afterschool settings, and believe me, they make a big difference in terms of childhood obesity. They aren't just exercise programs, but teach nutrition, healthy lifestyle choices, etc.
It's more a back of the napkin calculation than anything. People with high poverty in America only have a 30% internet usage rate, vs 70% nationwide. Most of the world is poorer than our people living in poverty, so it is doubtful they'd ever reach our rates of internet usage without a massive increase in economic performance. Even in China, home internet is still somewhat uncommon, with most people I know there using internet cafes, which share a small pool of IP addresses.
I know that 100% usage of the IP space is an impossibility, but I think that with more efficient allocations of the IP space we should be able to get by indefinitely.
The same thing was said about phone numbers. When everyone started buying faxes, pagers, and cell phones, people looked at the rate of growth and panicked, saying we'd be out of phone numbers by 2000.
I think the same sort of thing is going on with IP addresses. You have entire countries coming online at unprecedented rates. But when the market saturates, well, there's only so many billion people on the planet.
256^4 = 4,294,967,296
Even in America, which is a mature market, has 70% of its population online.
Even if the whole world comes online (6,525,170,264 people to date), and an average of one IP per person (very rough estimate considering NAT and dynamic ip reduce the numbers, but waste and multiple computers inflate the number), that's 6,525,170,264 * 70% = 4,567,619,184. With the entire world online.
Or, in other words, it could feasibly be possible to never upgrade to IPV6.
It's not like I don't like IPV6 overall, but I do think there is a fair bit of fear mongering going on. I still hear techie friends talking about how inefficient the allocation of classed networks are, as if CIDR wasn't invented 15 years ago.
Actually, I think evolution presents a very strong argument against a (purely) genetic basis for religion.
Namely that no other animal exhibits religious tendencies. I'm not talking about superstitions -- these are actually logical for most animals. My grandmother had a cat that thought that whenever it went into the supply closet and banged around, food would appear in its plate (she'd hear it, and then pop open a can of cat food). It's simply false causation (or true causation as the case may be, since it did cause my grandma to open the cat food). I mean honest-to-G-D religious behavior. Where are the monkeys worshiping shamanistic totems? Where are the dogs praying late at night? Where are the animals crossing themselves before they engage in mortal combat? Animals turning down sex because it is "morally wrong"? Answer: there aren't any. Humans are unique among all animals in this regard. Which should be a red flag for people trying to make this claim.
If you're going to hypothesize evolution as the source for religion, you have to actually consider evolution. If all you have to work with is the (modern) man, you're ignoring the fact that all genes have to come from somewhere. Royal Jester Richard Dawkin's claim that religion is the result of a wanting-to-follow authority gene is ridiculous, as if such a gene existed, it'd be more present in the orderly Germans and less present in the iconoclastic Americans. But half of Germany is Atheistic, and only 8% of Americans are.
In fact, the differences by culture, alone, discredit this theory. If there was a gene, that was presumably more prevalent in some populations than others, that gave people an inclination to believe in God, then you should see correlation between genotype and Atheism rates, whereas the opposite is true. The same descendants from Europeans in America still have high theism rates, whereas their cousins in Europe have very high atheism rates.
Nurture, not nature.
And, honestly, I think the article is insulting to the rational theists out there. It removes personal decision from the equation. (If you are an atheist, consider someone telling you that you're only an atheist because you have this one gene, and through no personal decision of your own.) It really is insulting.
Again, I was talking about gas production, which has been steadily increasing for the last 20 years. You said the following: "I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak."
The point is that North America peaked in Natural Gas production in about Jan 2001. I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak. We do have coal available and we do have nuclear. But most houses don't have a coal furnace anymore.
Nope, not at all. Peakers keep claiming we're at peak, and showing "projections" which take the current trend of ever increasing production after 1980 and drop it off sharply after the current date. It's amusing to watch them keep making new projections as years go by and the production collapse doesn't happen.
Essentially, there was a fall off around 1980, but since then oil production has been increasing pretty regularly.
I don't disagree that nuclear power is the way to go. Shame on any environmentalists that protested nuclear power and is complaining about oil.
Except MTBF is just pulled out of their asses. Look at the development cycle of a hard drive. Look at the MTBF. I used to work for an engineering company, and have worked doing test suites to determine MTBF. Sure, there's numbers involved, but it's probably 60% wishful thinking and 40% science.
Believe me, they aren't determining an 11 year MTBF empirically.
This reminds me of the central premise of Unbreakable... that for every degenerative disease, there can be a (much rarer) mutation which is the opposite.
Slashdot Mirror
Look up the cost per kilowatt of your alternatives. Wind and wave are around 70 per kilowatt hour, Nuclear is at around 20-something. I don't consider paying over triple the cost for power a "viable alternative".
Yes, they do sometimes. But birds fly into skyscrapers quite often too, and for some reason that doesn't seem to stop anybody from building them.
The windmills here in San Francisco kill something like 4,000 birds a year. I doubt that many run into skyscrapers.
By your own graph, 9/11ths of power used in the home is NOT wasted.
You're confused, I think, by the power line losses in transmission. Unless you're a physicist working on building superconducting power lines, I highly doubt you will be able to improve the efficiency of our power distribution system.
Incorrect. Nuclear power is actually quite cheap, and produces no CO2.
2 pe_technology01.gif
v ersy#Economics
http://images.pennnet.com/articles/pe/cap/cap_070
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_contro
The technology is a solved problem, and building safe reactors is no longer a technological challenge.
Sorry, I should have made myself more clear. It's very difficult to cut power in such a way that doesn't send us back to the stone ages. People in the 1600s didn't have fridges, but they also died of food poisoning a lot more often. We could turn off street lights, but then more people will die in traffic accidents. Anyone who suggests making cuts that would result in the loss of life should themselves be shot, or, more appropriately, forced to live in the wilderness for a couple years without their Gore-Tex (tm) jacket or First Need (tm) water filter.
You can't compare energy expenditure between Germany and the US if you're counting oil costs. Germans live in much denser cities. Americans are more dispersed. The expectation that Americans could go without cars if they had to is laughable. I live in San Francisco, which has one of the largest public transportation systems in the US, and I still don't use it. Not because I have a car fetish, but because it's impractical. Getting to the BART station from my house (and it's about 3 or 4 miles away) takes over an hour, with two bus connections, from where I live. When I lived in the suburbs of San Diego, it was a half hour walk to get to the nearest restaurant or grocery store from where I lived. Impractical without a car.
Light bulbs are not the single biggest user of energy. As the other guy posted, they're a small fraction. That's why I laughed when Al Gore said he'd be upgrading to CFDs -- his house uses in a day what the average household uses in a month. What, the CFDs will cut it down to a 29-day cost?
Nuclear power is cheap and safe. Any environmentalist who is serious about reducing carbon emissions and lowering their country's dependence on oil, but is unwilling to switch to nuclear power, is a hypocrite.
Actually, environmental groups are suing wind generator operators.
n dmills-usat_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-04-wi
There's a similar story down in Arkansas.
It's a myth that we waste energy.
Besides incredibly trivial things like replacing our light bulbs with CFDs and turning off our power when we go outside, which is a *trivial* amount of savings, there's not much humans can do to save power.
No alternative energy source is capable of cheaply producing mass amount of energy, and even most of these run into problems with environmentalists as well (damns stop fish from migrating, windmills chop up endangered birds, etc.)
In all honestly, nuclear power is the correct solution to our energy needs.
However, I agree that in the absence of contrary evidence, that correlation may be very weak in this study. According to the accelerometer, for instance, the kids who rode the bus home got more exercise than those who rode their bikes.
Right, it just doesn't make any sense to me that this could be at all accurate.
My own experience as a child athlete was that my exercise program raised my daily caloric requirment over 5,000. I am skeptical that I was merely "moving around" exercise to which I was already genetically committed.
Yeah. When I was in 4th grade, I ran 44 laps (11 miles) in a Jog a Thon, and was pretty damn hungry afterwards. =)
I read the fine article, and still claim bullshit on it.
There's no genetic difference between the Hopi Indians today and of the Hopi Indians hundreds of years ago. And yet now they have a massive epidemic of diabetes and obesity, whereas it was almost unheard of before. Changes: diet, and exercise.
Active kids will be less fat.
That will be all.
I suggest everyone tag this with a "BS" tag.
Since when do accelerometers measure the amount of calories you burn? I could quite easily sit on a weight machine all day pumping iron, with an accelerometer sitting on my waist saying I'm doing no exercise.
Unless these kids have found some sort of way to violate the conservation of energy, the kids that run around, instead of, say, sitting in one place, will have burned more calories than the other.
I've worked with programs that do athletics with kids in afterschool settings, and believe me, they make a big difference in terms of childhood obesity. They aren't just exercise programs, but teach nutrition, healthy lifestyle choices, etc.
It's more a back of the napkin calculation than anything. People with high poverty in America only have a 30% internet usage rate, vs 70% nationwide. Most of the world is poorer than our people living in poverty, so it is doubtful they'd ever reach our rates of internet usage without a massive increase in economic performance. Even in China, home internet is still somewhat uncommon, with most people I know there using internet cafes, which share a small pool of IP addresses.
I know that 100% usage of the IP space is an impossibility, but I think that with more efficient allocations of the IP space we should be able to get by indefinitely.
The same thing was said about phone numbers. When everyone started buying faxes, pagers, and cell phones, people looked at the rate of growth and panicked, saying we'd be out of phone numbers by 2000.
I think the same sort of thing is going on with IP addresses. You have entire countries coming online at unprecedented rates. But when the market saturates, well, there's only so many billion people on the planet.
256^4 = 4,294,967,296
Even in America, which is a mature market, has 70% of its population online.
Even if the whole world comes online (6,525,170,264 people to date), and an average of one IP per person (very rough estimate considering NAT and dynamic ip reduce the numbers, but waste and multiple computers inflate the number), that's 6,525,170,264 * 70% = 4,567,619,184. With the entire world online.
Or, in other words, it could feasibly be possible to never upgrade to IPV6.
It's not like I don't like IPV6 overall, but I do think there is a fair bit of fear mongering going on. I still hear techie friends talking about how inefficient the allocation of classed networks are, as if CIDR wasn't invented 15 years ago.
Reviews let me know if a game totally sucks. Then I avoid it.
But positive reviews are no guarantee of a good game, as the glowing ratings for such moribund stinkers as FFVII and FFX can attest to.
Actually, I think evolution presents a very strong argument against a (purely) genetic basis for religion.
Namely that no other animal exhibits religious tendencies. I'm not talking about superstitions -- these are actually logical for most animals. My grandmother had a cat that thought that whenever it went into the supply closet and banged around, food would appear in its plate (she'd hear it, and then pop open a can of cat food). It's simply false causation (or true causation as the case may be, since it did cause my grandma to open the cat food). I mean honest-to-G-D religious behavior. Where are the monkeys worshiping shamanistic totems? Where are the dogs praying late at night? Where are the animals crossing themselves before they engage in mortal combat? Animals turning down sex because it is "morally wrong"? Answer: there aren't any. Humans are unique among all animals in this regard. Which should be a red flag for people trying to make this claim.
If you're going to hypothesize evolution as the source for religion, you have to actually consider evolution. If all you have to work with is the (modern) man, you're ignoring the fact that all genes have to come from somewhere. Royal Jester Richard Dawkin's claim that religion is the result of a wanting-to-follow authority gene is ridiculous, as if such a gene existed, it'd be more present in the orderly Germans and less present in the iconoclastic Americans. But half of Germany is Atheistic, and only 8% of Americans are.
In fact, the differences by culture, alone, discredit this theory. If there was a gene, that was presumably more prevalent in some populations than others, that gave people an inclination to believe in God, then you should see correlation between genotype and Atheism rates, whereas the opposite is true. The same descendants from Europeans in America still have high theism rates, whereas their cousins in Europe have very high atheism rates.
Nurture, not nature.
And, honestly, I think the article is insulting to the rational theists out there. It removes personal decision from the equation. (If you are an atheist, consider someone telling you that you're only an atheist because you have this one gene, and through no personal decision of your own.) It really is insulting.
Again, I was talking about gas production, which has been steadily increasing for the last 20 years. You said the following:
"I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak."
There's no data to support that claim.
I was talking about oil. And the NGPL is Natural Gas I believe.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Crud e_NGPL_IEAtotal_1960-2004.png
Pretty much what I said
The point is that North America peaked in Natural Gas production in about Jan 2001. I suspect the world may be peaking in oil production and may already be past peak. We do have coal available and we do have nuclear. But most houses don't have a coal furnace anymore.
Nope, not at all. Peakers keep claiming we're at peak, and showing "projections" which take the current trend of ever increasing production after 1980 and drop it off sharply after the current date. It's amusing to watch them keep making new projections as years go by and the production collapse doesn't happen.
Essentially, there was a fall off around 1980, but since then oil production has been increasing pretty regularly.
I don't disagree that nuclear power is the way to go. Shame on any environmentalists that protested nuclear power and is complaining about oil.
Except MTBF is just pulled out of their asses. Look at the development cycle of a hard drive. Look at the MTBF. I used to work for an engineering company, and have worked doing test suites to determine MTBF. Sure, there's numbers involved, but it's probably 60% wishful thinking and 40% science.
Believe me, they aren't determining an 11 year MTBF empirically.
There's no particular reason why a Megabyte should be 1024 bytes, instead of 1000 bytes, which is the SI standard.
Ditto. Built my machine in 2005. 3800+, Nforce4 with RAID, Nvidia 7800, no issues.
Right. At the local science center, I found you have to pedal pretty damn hard just to power one light bulb.
There's no way that he's getting megawatts out of a gym, in any reasonable scope of time.
Most stationary bikes use human power to turn themselves on, which is nice, I guess, but the physics of the situation make his pipe dream unrealistic.
Wait, are we for or against the DMCA? I keep getting confused.
How much authority does a school have to monitor, regulate and punish activities occurring inside a student's home?
None. In loco parentis only applies while the child is at school. Schools are not allowed to act as parents when the kid is at home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis
Any attempts for the schools to regulate the kids' home behavior should be met with a stern warning.
This reminds me of the central premise of Unbreakable... that for every degenerative disease, there can be a (much rarer) mutation which is the opposite.
Not really. A buddy of mine works for Hotmail (Microsoft) and they get nice machines with Vista, nice graphics cards, etc.
Long story short, quote: "Vista is not ready for gaming."