For many people, the limit on the size of their solar array is the size of their roof. If you want to offset your full usage, you may need higher-capacity panels than the standard 250W base panels. There are a number of higher-efficiency panels available, but the cost per Watt is higher. They probably don't cost much more to manufacture, so the more efficient panels have a higher profit margin.
Also, you have to keep improving your technology or you're out of the business when the cheap panels get to be as efficient than what you're producing.
So the solution is that the professional reviewers at places like C|Net or ArsTechnica need to have a policy of redoing their testing on older models when newer models are released. If they find that the older model no longer performs as they originally reviewed it, then they need to loudly warn that the manufacturer is known for reducing the quality of the product without announcing a change.
These reviews are nice, but they always focus on gaming. There's very little information for media playback.
How well do each of these drivers do with accelerated playback of MPEG2, MPEG4, and other formats? If given a 1080i source, can they produce a real 1080i stream to the display, or will the alternating fields get reversed? (I have an older CRT HDTV that is 1080i native. With newer displays, it's good to have the option of letting the display handle deinterlacing.)
If I want to build a low-power media player, what are my options for video hardware and drivers?
Tesla has a pretty good system. If they were interested in marketing it for other cars, they could probably have another solid business. Of course, they probably want to keep it for themselves to keep their cars more exclusive.
One economic test would be to compare the price of installing the solar roadway with the cost of building a cover over the roadway with solar panels on it.
They claim that the glass cover panels can hold up to traffic and provide sufficient traction. Why not mount just the glass covers over a stretch of road and see how it behaves? Until they get the covers right, the rest is irrelevant.
Once they have the ability to make a glass roadway, then they can deal with the question of what to put under it. How about just LEDs for traffic marking? Will they work in the day time? Will they put out too much light pollution?
Once they have the traffic markings working, they can get the heating elements needed for installing where it might snow. I'm under the impression that they have to melt the snow because the panels won't stand up to snow plows. Maybe it will make more sense to run pipes with heated antifreeze solution instead of direct electric heat. Maybe it will make more sense to redesign the glass covers to stand up to snow plows.
Once those are solved, putting in solar panels is a no-brainer that helps the economics of the project work.
In the end, once all the technical issues are solved, it's a matter of economics. What is the cost of a road made with the panels over 50 years as opposed to a traditional asphalt or concrete road when all the maintenance is factored in for each road type?
Considering all the above, I'm convinced that it makes much more sense to put solar on rooftops.
It's simple. You use signed source code instead of signed binaries.
Then you use a compiler and linker that does some simple things like randomly ordering variables and functions in the executable and on the stack. That makes it impossible for an attacker to know where some key variable is and exploit it though an overflow (whether on the stack or elsewhere). The attacker is far more likely to crash your program than to exploit a bug, which is much easier to recover from.
Also, as pointed out elsewhere, while this may make debugging more complicated in some cases, it also makes it more likely that bugs where the compiler's choices matter will be found earlier in development, so you may not encounter them in the first place.
And in the case of a corporate IT department, you use the randomizing compiler to build the binary that you push out to your clients. It may be the same throughout your company, but it will be different from anything anyone outside would have access to, which is probably good enough.
Gentoo isn't about speed. It's about control and configurability.
All those packages with optional Gnome support? Turned on in every other distribution, but turned off for me.
Want to add patches to a package? Just put the patch file under/etc/portage/patches// and it gets included. I currently have 9 patches applied. I can upgrade the packages, and keep my patches as long as they continue to merge cleanly.
The whole concept assumes that there is no soul. An individual is simply what you get from a functioning brain. If you can create a duplicate of a functioning brain inside a functioning body with the nerves wired up correctly, then you have a person. You duplicated the individual (personality, emotions, memories, etc.) with a duplicate brain structure. If the body doesn't match the original body, you've essentially done a full-body transplant.
Yes, it's all science fiction for now, but there's no reason to assume that it always will be.
We're probably a lot closer to replacing our bodies with mechanical equivalents than we are to printing a complete person. The biggest challenge is the brain. If you replace everything surrounding the brain with prosthetics, then it may be much more practical to suspend the function of the brain for a long voyage than it would be for a whole body.
Or combine the ideas. Freeze a brain in a cyborg body. When you get a colony set up, print a uterus, implant frozen embryos, and then let the cyborg parent the first off-world generation.
You don't need to describe a human on the molecular level. For the most part, go with the organ level, and you're all set. Once we can print replacement organs, it's just a small step to putting it all together for a complete person. You'll need compatible DNA to match the cells that you're printing.
The only big deal is the brain, as you probably want to print a person with memory and skills, so you have to be able to scan a live person and then print a duplicate.
You don't really need to match the DNA to the brain structure. You also don't need to match the DNA to the body shape, though that's probably a good idea.
Yes. I made a point of writing my original post without including a value judgement on that point.
There's a big difference between a cop deciding that someone looks suspicious because he's driving in a neighborhood where the residents don't match his skin color and a police officer deciding someone is suspicious because it looked like they were doing a drug deal in a parking lot but he didn't see exactly what was exchanged. I expect if you were doing a civilian ride-along at the time, there's a wide range of possibilities, some of which you would agree with, and some of which you wouldn't.
My point is that a traffic stop is a tool that is widely used in law enforcement. Tools can be used for good or bad, but aren't necessarily good or bad themselves. Driverless cars remove that tool. In some cases this is good. In others, police will need to find new ways of dealing with old problems.
It's not just about the money. Traffic stops are a major tool that police use in law enforcement. If they think someone is suspicious, they look for a traffic violation as an excuse to pull them over and investigate. Likewise, normal traffic stops give officers a chance to notice suspicious activity.
Someone should dig up the numbers for the percentage of arrests that begin with a traffic stop.
I think the big surprise here is that this doesn't happen more often.
Consider how many corporations, universities, and such have huge PC deployments with automated updates. I've seen updates that drop all the PCs off the network, but I've never seen one where everything is wiped.
I'm also surprised that I haven't heard of malware that accidentally wiped a network of 100K or more machines when someone sent the wrong command.
Or maybe the news here is that it was in a more open environment where people hear about it. If a publicly traded company wiped a thousand PCs at its headquarters, you bet they would try to keep it quiet.
That doesn't quite do it. FLAC is great for the individual tracks, but there is also information about inter-track gaps. If you lose that, playing the album won't sound right if any of the tracks are supposed to flow into the next one. This isn't an issue for probably 90% of the CDs out there, but for the remaining ones, it's important to get them to play correctly.
I've noticed the same problem when ripping old vinyl albums and playing them on an MP3 player. When the tracks used to flow, there's now a gap, and it can be really annoying.
If you look around, there has been a fantastic fan effort to create the Despecialized Editions that are as close to the original theatrical runs as possible for the original trilogy. They've mixed in the HD sources for the current releases with older footage to undo all the changes. It's pretty amazing.
How about a browser plug-in that will stop me from using https if the site is vulnerable? The last thing I want to do is expose my information by passing it through a vulnerable web server. It should be rather easy for a plugin to send a mal-formed heartbeat ping before sending any data to find out if the server is vulnerable, and then block the connection if it is.
Thanks for OpenRC. I *love* how it works on my Gentoo system. The ability to load custom variables for any script with/etc/conf.d files is wonderful.
I've gone a bit crazy with my/etc/conf.d/net, automatically setting up a ssh tunnel home if it sees that it's on an outside network (and trying several methods to get the tunnel working). If it's on ethernet, it switches the WiFi to being an access point. Lots of fun. I just wish the preup()/postup() functions were part of all the init scripts, not just the net script.
I also make use of/lib/dhcpcd-hooks to clean things up if the local network is unfriendly. If the provided DNS server mangles entries for non-existent domains, and if it doesn't block Google, it switches over transparently in my local script.
The paradigm of letting the user modify the behavior through regular shell scripts is extremely powerful. Thanks for keeping it alive.
If you're really interested in urban planning and parking regulations, watch the whole thing, but otherwise the link should go right to where he talks about San Francisco's parking program.
I thought San Francisco already had dynamic parking prices to try to use market forces to keep parking available. They have devices to monitor parking utilization. The goal is to typically have one on-street parking spot open per block; somewhere around 85% utilization. If the block is consistently above that, the price increases. If it's below, the price lowers. They adjust the prices by $.25 every month.
From the talk on this that I saw, they generally improved the availability of parking though the dynamic pricing. Employees who park every day would find the cheaper blocks to park on, leaving the busier blocks open for customers.
Maybe the program isn't working as well as they claimed. Maybe the program isn't covering enough of the city, and the approach in the article is of more use in other parts.
This monitors the behavior of web sites, not the function. So if there's a non-advertising site that just puts out tracking bugs, it will get blocked. If there's an advertising site that doesn't send tracking cookies, it won't be blocked. There's no blacklist--it's all based on observed behavior.
My Atari 800 died a few years back. Something died in the power system. I thought it was a bad power supply (all the peripherals used the same supplies), so I swapped some around. It turns out it blew some internal fuse in each supply that I attached to it. I ended up buying a replacement on eBay, but I've since given up on it (too many other things taking up my time for the old games). I'll use an emulator the next time I want to use it.
For my state taxes in Massachusetts, it's trivial to do web file through the state's web site. Once my federal taxes are done, it takes just a few minutes to enter all the numbers and I'm all set. At least my state allows me to file electronically for free.
Slashdot Mirror
For many people, the limit on the size of their solar array is the size of their roof. If you want to offset your full usage, you may need higher-capacity panels than the standard 250W base panels. There are a number of higher-efficiency panels available, but the cost per Watt is higher. They probably don't cost much more to manufacture, so the more efficient panels have a higher profit margin.
Also, you have to keep improving your technology or you're out of the business when the cheap panels get to be as efficient than what you're producing.
So the solution is that the professional reviewers at places like C|Net or ArsTechnica need to have a policy of redoing their testing on older models when newer models are released. If they find that the older model no longer performs as they originally reviewed it, then they need to loudly warn that the manufacturer is known for reducing the quality of the product without announcing a change.
These reviews are nice, but they always focus on gaming. There's very little information for media playback.
How well do each of these drivers do with accelerated playback of MPEG2, MPEG4, and other formats? If given a 1080i source, can they produce a real 1080i stream to the display, or will the alternating fields get reversed? (I have an older CRT HDTV that is 1080i native. With newer displays, it's good to have the option of letting the display handle deinterlacing.)
If I want to build a low-power media player, what are my options for video hardware and drivers?
What, a car story with no reference to Tesla?
Tesla has a pretty good system. If they were interested in marketing it for other cars, they could probably have another solid business. Of course, they probably want to keep it for themselves to keep their cars more exclusive.
Or worse--they could sell advertising on the road to help fund it.
One economic test would be to compare the price of installing the solar roadway with the cost of building a cover over the roadway with solar panels on it.
The should do the simple tests first.
They claim that the glass cover panels can hold up to traffic and provide sufficient traction. Why not mount just the glass covers over a stretch of road and see how it behaves? Until they get the covers right, the rest is irrelevant.
Once they have the ability to make a glass roadway, then they can deal with the question of what to put under it. How about just LEDs for traffic marking? Will they work in the day time? Will they put out too much light pollution?
Once they have the traffic markings working, they can get the heating elements needed for installing where it might snow. I'm under the impression that they have to melt the snow because the panels won't stand up to snow plows. Maybe it will make more sense to run pipes with heated antifreeze solution instead of direct electric heat. Maybe it will make more sense to redesign the glass covers to stand up to snow plows.
Once those are solved, putting in solar panels is a no-brainer that helps the economics of the project work.
In the end, once all the technical issues are solved, it's a matter of economics. What is the cost of a road made with the panels over 50 years as opposed to a traditional asphalt or concrete road when all the maintenance is factored in for each road type?
Considering all the above, I'm convinced that it makes much more sense to put solar on rooftops.
It's simple. You use signed source code instead of signed binaries.
Then you use a compiler and linker that does some simple things like randomly ordering variables and functions in the executable and on the stack. That makes it impossible for an attacker to know where some key variable is and exploit it though an overflow (whether on the stack or elsewhere). The attacker is far more likely to crash your program than to exploit a bug, which is much easier to recover from.
Also, as pointed out elsewhere, while this may make debugging more complicated in some cases, it also makes it more likely that bugs where the compiler's choices matter will be found earlier in development, so you may not encounter them in the first place.
And in the case of a corporate IT department, you use the randomizing compiler to build the binary that you push out to your clients. It may be the same throughout your company, but it will be different from anything anyone outside would have access to, which is probably good enough.
Gentoo isn't about speed. It's about control and configurability.
All those packages with optional Gnome support? Turned on in every other distribution, but turned off for me.
Want to add patches to a package? Just put the patch file under /etc/portage/patches// and it gets included. I currently have 9 patches applied. I can upgrade the packages, and keep my patches as long as they continue to merge cleanly.
The whole concept assumes that there is no soul. An individual is simply what you get from a functioning brain. If you can create a duplicate of a functioning brain inside a functioning body with the nerves wired up correctly, then you have a person. You duplicated the individual (personality, emotions, memories, etc.) with a duplicate brain structure. If the body doesn't match the original body, you've essentially done a full-body transplant.
Yes, it's all science fiction for now, but there's no reason to assume that it always will be.
We're probably a lot closer to replacing our bodies with mechanical equivalents than we are to printing a complete person. The biggest challenge is the brain. If you replace everything surrounding the brain with prosthetics, then it may be much more practical to suspend the function of the brain for a long voyage than it would be for a whole body.
Or combine the ideas. Freeze a brain in a cyborg body. When you get a colony set up, print a uterus, implant frozen embryos, and then let the cyborg parent the first off-world generation.
You don't need to describe a human on the molecular level. For the most part, go with the organ level, and you're all set. Once we can print replacement organs, it's just a small step to putting it all together for a complete person. You'll need compatible DNA to match the cells that you're printing.
The only big deal is the brain, as you probably want to print a person with memory and skills, so you have to be able to scan a live person and then print a duplicate.
You don't really need to match the DNA to the brain structure. You also don't need to match the DNA to the body shape, though that's probably a good idea.
Yes. I made a point of writing my original post without including a value judgement on that point.
There's a big difference between a cop deciding that someone looks suspicious because he's driving in a neighborhood where the residents don't match his skin color and a police officer deciding someone is suspicious because it looked like they were doing a drug deal in a parking lot but he didn't see exactly what was exchanged. I expect if you were doing a civilian ride-along at the time, there's a wide range of possibilities, some of which you would agree with, and some of which you wouldn't.
My point is that a traffic stop is a tool that is widely used in law enforcement. Tools can be used for good or bad, but aren't necessarily good or bad themselves. Driverless cars remove that tool. In some cases this is good. In others, police will need to find new ways of dealing with old problems.
It's not just about the money. Traffic stops are a major tool that police use in law enforcement. If they think someone is suspicious, they look for a traffic violation as an excuse to pull them over and investigate. Likewise, normal traffic stops give officers a chance to notice suspicious activity.
Someone should dig up the numbers for the percentage of arrests that begin with a traffic stop.
I'll Google that for me:
http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHT...
While there may not be solid data nationally, at least in this one area, traffic stops account for about a third of all arrests.
I think the big surprise here is that this doesn't happen more often.
Consider how many corporations, universities, and such have huge PC deployments with automated updates. I've seen updates that drop all the PCs off the network, but I've never seen one where everything is wiped.
I'm also surprised that I haven't heard of malware that accidentally wiped a network of 100K or more machines when someone sent the wrong command.
Or maybe the news here is that it was in a more open environment where people hear about it. If a publicly traded company wiped a thousand PCs at its headquarters, you bet they would try to keep it quiet.
That doesn't quite do it. FLAC is great for the individual tracks, but there is also information about inter-track gaps. If you lose that, playing the album won't sound right if any of the tracks are supposed to flow into the next one. This isn't an issue for probably 90% of the CDs out there, but for the remaining ones, it's important to get them to play correctly.
I've noticed the same problem when ripping old vinyl albums and playing them on an MP3 player. When the tracks used to flow, there's now a gap, and it can be really annoying.
If you look around, there has been a fantastic fan effort to create the Despecialized Editions that are as close to the original theatrical runs as possible for the original trilogy. They've mixed in the HD sources for the current releases with older footage to undo all the changes. It's pretty amazing.
Thanks! I see there's also one for Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/webs...
I just hope these plugins are trustworthy.
How about a browser plug-in that will stop me from using https if the site is vulnerable? The last thing I want to do is expose my information by passing it through a vulnerable web server. It should be rather easy for a plugin to send a mal-formed heartbeat ping before sending any data to find out if the server is vulnerable, and then block the connection if it is.
Thanks for OpenRC. I *love* how it works on my Gentoo system. The ability to load custom variables for any script with /etc/conf.d files is wonderful.
I've gone a bit crazy with my /etc/conf.d/net, automatically setting up a ssh tunnel home if it sees that it's on an outside network (and trying several methods to get the tunnel working). If it's on ethernet, it switches the WiFi to being an access point. Lots of fun. I just wish the preup()/postup() functions were part of all the init scripts, not just the net script.
I also make use of /lib/dhcpcd-hooks to clean things up if the local network is unfriendly. If the provided DNS server mangles entries for non-existent domains, and if it doesn't block Google, it switches over transparently in my local script.
The paradigm of letting the user modify the behavior through regular shell scripts is extremely powerful. Thanks for keeping it alive.
I looked up the talk in question, and here's the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you're really interested in urban planning and parking regulations, watch the whole thing, but otherwise the link should go right to where he talks about San Francisco's parking program.
I thought San Francisco already had dynamic parking prices to try to use market forces to keep parking available. They have devices to monitor parking utilization. The goal is to typically have one on-street parking spot open per block; somewhere around 85% utilization. If the block is consistently above that, the price increases. If it's below, the price lowers. They adjust the prices by $.25 every month.
From the talk on this that I saw, they generally improved the availability of parking though the dynamic pricing. Employees who park every day would find the cheaper blocks to park on, leaving the busier blocks open for customers.
Maybe the program isn't working as well as they claimed. Maybe the program isn't covering enough of the city, and the approach in the article is of more use in other parts.
This monitors the behavior of web sites, not the function. So if there's a non-advertising site that just puts out tracking bugs, it will get blocked. If there's an advertising site that doesn't send tracking cookies, it won't be blocked. There's no blacklist--it's all based on observed behavior.
My Atari 800 died a few years back. Something died in the power system. I thought it was a bad power supply (all the peripherals used the same supplies), so I swapped some around. It turns out it blew some internal fuse in each supply that I attached to it. I ended up buying a replacement on eBay, but I've since given up on it (too many other things taking up my time for the old games). I'll use an emulator the next time I want to use it.
For my state taxes in Massachusetts, it's trivial to do web file through the state's web site. Once my federal taxes are done, it takes just a few minutes to enter all the numbers and I'm all set. At least my state allows me to file electronically for free.