Maybe its your area but in my city there are pretty active rec leagues for all sports.
"All sports"? I very much doubt it is true for all sports. Maybe there are for the sports you care about but I very much doubt you have leagues for quite a few sports. The options for adults tend to be rather limited even in the best of circumstances. I don't even need to know where you live to know that there isn't an adult rec league in your area for my sport (wrestling) because such a league simply doesn't exist anywhere. The best I could do would be to do something like train at an MMA gym or judo dojo but it's not the same sport.
Even if you live near a major city with lots of rec league options not every sport has such options or is compatible with the life of a busy adult. Most places in the US do not have much in the way of rec leagues for adults available. That's certainly true near me unless I want to drive a considerable distance and play a sport I don't have any interest or skill in.
Why don't more people go out and play sports, instead of sitting on a couch and watching somebody else have fun?
Because the options to play sports for people who aren't children or professionals are rather limited. In my sport of choice (wrestling) it's rather difficult to compete in any meaningful way after college if you aren't an elite athlete. Even if you have the time (which can be challenging if you have a career and/or family) there is basically nobody to practice with and few events to enter. Some sports are easier to participate in as an adult (running, cycling, etc) but most aren't. I coach my sport but I haven't wrestled a competitive match since the early 1990s when I was in college.
There also is the fact that actually playing sports is a lot of work. Sitting on the couch and watching requires zero effort and carries no chance of injury and still can be pretty fun. You don't have to block out hours of time which can be nigh impossible if you have any family responsibilities or a spouse that doesn't share your specific interest. You don't need anyone else to watch with you to be a spectator either which is not true for a lot of sports. Unless you are lucky enough to live in an area that happens to have adult rec leagues in your sport of choice then you are kind of out of luck. A lot of the fun of sports is the camaraderie with the people you do it with. Most sports are social activities at some level.
The best way to opt out of these fees is not to pay Comcast ANY money and switch to just watching content from streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and YouTube!
Since Comcast is my internet provider and is the only realistic option for internet in my area, exactly how do you propose I cease paying Comcast any money? Streaming doesn't solve that problem. It allows me to pay them less but I spend more on my internet connection than on cable. You have to have internet service to stream and there are no other service providers in my area worth mentioning.
I recently returned a rented cable modem because I bought my own. I can log into Comcast's account page and look at "Devices" and the rented modem is no longer there. Yet they still billed me for the rented modem. How can their systems know that I don't have the modem, yet continue to charge me for it?
I can top that. I am a Comcast customer and I own my own cable modem. I've never rented a modem from them at any time. But last month what do I see on my bill but a rental fee for a modem. I also got a notice from them telling me that my modem is obsolete and that I need a new one from them. My modem is a DOCSIS 3.0 modem and always has been and no service that would require DOCSIS 3.1 is in my area. Comcast knows what equipment I have (or they should since they set it up) and it hasn't changed in 5 years. But that didn't stop them from trying to slip in some charges for renting equipment I never rented from them. Douchebags...
I'd consider going to another vendor but Comcast is the only realistic option where I live. My only other "high speed" internet provider is Frontier Communications which offers substantially slower DSL connections.
First is a massive 20-10-5 billion dollar X-prize to the first three groups to successfully colonize.
$20 billion won't even be close to enough money. It certainly won't cover the cost of such a venture. $20 Billion is roughly NASA's annual budget today in 2016. It's certainly not enough to cover the cost of a colonization. Colonizing Mars will cost TRILLIONS of dollars. Probably tens or even hundreds of trillions. $20 billion wouldn't even buy you the Apollo program on an inflation adjusted basis.
Second is homesteading. There's no value in Martian real-estate right now, but in 200 years? 500? How much would companies pay to have governments recognize their property rights over a decent sized chunk of Mars? I'm not sure how markets would treat it, but property rights are very stable, I'm betting the value would be substantial.
I think you don't understand how capital markets work. The value of Mars real estate is zero and will remain so for the lifetime of anyone reading this. The possibility of it being worth substantial sums in 500 years is WAY beyond any realistic projections for a business plan. Property rights are only as stable as governments and governments are demonstrable very unstable over century long time spans. And even if they were, until we have some actual functioning colonies on Mars with a self sustaining economy and infrastructure the value of an real estate on Mars is very literally less than zero. It is a cost with no offsetting revenue.
As for funding the companies could create a consortium to spread out costs and risk.
You don't get it. No they cannot. You can't spread out risks that you cannot even quantify. Nobody is going to take on costs unless you can show them some means by which those costs can be recouped in a reasonable time frame. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson is right that private enterprise will not and indeed cannot lead us to Mars. The risks are unknown and unquantified, the ROI is non-existent, the costs are enormous and unquantified, the technology to go there doesn't yet exist and nobody knows when it will exist, and the likelihood of failure is high. No private company can take a risk like that. If one did they would be in bankruptcy faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit".
Why do people always say "we don't have the technology" when we clearly have it?
We clearly do NOT have the technology to send a successful manned mission to Mars today and we are in no danger of having such technology mission ready in the next 10-15 years minimum. For a non-suicide mission we currently lack radiation shielding, life support systems, a functional ship, a landing system, a return system, and a host of other mission ready systems necessary to make such a journey viable. If we had such technology ready today the discussion surrounding a manned Mars mission would be quite different.
Mars missions are not a technology problem, particular radiation and life support are solved problems.
They most certainly are not solved problems. At least not in any economically viable sense of the word. If you don't have a solution that is mission ready and can be funded for available amounts of money then you don't have a solution. Right now we don't have a radiation shielding solution that is mission ready and economically realistic. What solutions we could implement today are economically non-starters.
I agree that manned Mars missions, especially by mini companies, are unrealistic... but it is a mere monetary and time frame problem, not a technology one.
It's a technology problem too. Don't kid yourself that there aren't any technology hurdles. I think the technology portion of the problem is the most tractable of the problems compared with the economic and political issues but it is a problem nonetheless. We don't have solutions to a lot of the technology problems with a manned mission to Mars today but we do have a pretty good idea what the solutions would look like and we've done similar things in the past. Even if we had a crash program to get boots on Mars ASAP, it would still take one or two decades minimum to work out all the technology issues and get them adequately tested and built.
Well, less people driving means fewer jobs... again.
No it means fewer people in jobs that involve driving. Nothing more. It does not follow that eliminating drivers will mean fewer jobs overall. It just means those jobs won't be driving vehicles around which frankly is something of a waste human capital. Jobs get obsoleted all the time by new technology but that doesn't mean there are fewer jobs in total. Those people now can be employed doing something else and they will be. Your argument is like complaining that we have fewer jobs washing clothes now that we have automatic washing machines in the home. That labor buden went away but it didn't result in fewer jobs. It freed up people to do more productive and economically beneficial work.
MI can't really afford to rest all it's eggs in the Automotive basket...
Michigan doesn't really have much of a choice for the near future. Michigan is and remains the epicenter of the auto industry even to this day. That comes with some benefits and some drawbacks. Michigan's economy does not depend solely on the auto industry but it's definitely the most important industry in the state.
Not if you actually understand finance and risk it isn't. Bitcoin is an interesting experiment in some ways but as a practical matter for real world use it's rather clumsy, risky and impractical. It's flawed in so many ways I barely know where to begin. The only thing about it that I really think might eventually prove valuable is the block chain technology which has applications far beyond bitcoin.
But in reality it's still trading more like a commodity than a currency.
Currencies ARE commodities. The term commodity is specifically used for an economic good or service when the demand for it has no qualitative differentiation across a market. A dollar is a dollar no matter where you trade it. Don't feel bad, a lot of people fail to understand this. Currencies in forex markets are traded very much like other commodities. They're just an abstract/intangible sort of commodity rather than bars of gold or barrels of oil. There is some nuance to the market just like every other commodity but they really are commodities all the same.
So real money is only 1% tangible while bitcoin is 0% tangible. Not a huge difference for me.
That's because you're not trying to actually buy anything with bitcoins. Go try to pay for your Big Mac at McDonald's with bitcoin and see if you can tell the difference.
Verizon will not be taking part in this update because of the added risk this could pose to Galaxy Note 7 users that do not have another device to switch to
Translation: "This will result in a lot of pissed off customer calling us about the problem and we don't want the expense".
And MI is a great state for automated driving systems to test again bad weather road conditions and construction re-routing....
Which is fine but does little for the economy of Michigan by itself. Employs a few engineers and support personnel but what else is the benefit to Michigan? Hope a few businesses take root as a result but I'm not holding my breath.
No, actually hitchhiking is perfectly legal in most places. A few states ban it but in most places it's just illegal to actually stand on the road when soliciting a ride. Stand to the side of the road and you are not breaking any laws. And even in places where it is illegal the police mostly don't care all that much.
"It makes Michigan a place where particularly for the auto industry it's a good place to do work,"
Yeah except for the shitty roads, expensive labor, unsupportive government, hostile unions, etc. Other than that it's awesome. I find it hilarious that the state most closely associated with the auto industry has some of the worst roads in the country. Good place to test handling and suspensions I guess. Anyway this doesn't really matter much unless they can keep the companies that own the technology doing it in Michigan. Who cares if Google develops self driving tech in Michigan if Michigan doesn't see any of the financial benefit from that.
The thing that Michigan (particularly SE Michigan) has going for it is that the auto industry has a lot of residual talent left in the area. There is a ton of engineering and production capability. Michigan can be a great place to work on some really interesting technology. Seriously, it's hugely underrated as a tech hub but Michigan is one of the best places to be for high tech jobs. Too bad the state has dropped the ball in so many other areas. It's a beautiful place to live and work (outside of Detroit City proper anyway) and it's kind of a shame what has happened to the state in the last several decades.
That's not really accurate. We DO know how to send humans to Mars.
Not live ones. If you are looking to sent a dead human to Mars then your statement is accurate.
The problem is we don't know how to do it on a budget that is remotely achievable
No, right now we don't know how to do it period. Not for any amount of money. We probably could invest several tens (hundreds maybe?) of billions of dollars to figure it out but today as I type this we do not know for certain how to pull off a manned mission to Mars. And in matter of fact until we actually do such a mission successfully we cannot say that we know how to do it because until then we don't. We didn't know how to land on the Moon until we actually landed on the moon. You have to prove you can do something to say you know how to do it. Right now we THINK we know how to get it done but that's a far cry from actually doing it.
I would love to see us standing on Mars someday but let's be realistic about where we are and what it will take to get there.
Not entirely true, I think a private organization could go to Mars, but it would have to be a big established organization (like a Boeing, or maybe SpaceX in 10 years) who has a lot of credibility, expertise, and resources to throw behind the project.
No profit making public company can possibly go to Mars. There is no profit to be had in doing so or if there is, nobody has found it yet. If you were CEO of Boeing and you went into a board meeting and proposed going to Mars, you would be out of job 5 minutes later. It would be the shortest board meeting ever. A Mars mission is HUGELY expensive, there is no discernible profit to be had in doing so, and the risks of failure are enormous. Businesses can't do things with huge costs, minimal if any revenue, and high probability of failure.
SpaceX can only talk about Mars because they are privately held and Elon Musk effectively controls the company so the board has to indulge him. It's a vanity project for him but even they aren't seriously doing the things that would be necessary to make a Mars mission actually happen within my remaining lifespan. They have a business sending rockets into low earth orbit and still working the kinks out for that. Explain to me how they make enough money to finance even a vanity project to Mars much less do it as a profit making enterprise. Talk is cheap. Rockets to Mars aren't.
That is completely untrue. We've been sending heavy things to Mars reasonably reliably since the late 1970s.
There is a huge difference between sending a robot the size of a car and sending a human landing party with the VAST amount of equipment they would need to survive the trip to Mars. It's like the difference between sending up a sounding rocket versus the Apollo program. You're talking orders of magnitude difference in complexity and cost.
We do NOT have the technology to send humans to Mars at this time. We don't have the life support systems, we don't have the landing craft, we don't have the radiation shielding, we don't have a return system, etc. All that could (probably) be developed with enough time and money but we're not even close to having it ready. Without a crash government program we aren't going to have it ready in the next 10-15 years either. The only thing we have the technology to do today is to send a dead human body to Mars which is a pretty useless exercise.
The reality is that the tech industry has reached a dead end with the death of Moore's Law.
It's absolutely adorable that you think all progress in the tech industry is rooted in Moore's Law and that nothing more can be accomplished if we see a slowing in the rate at which we pack transistors into a given area on a chip.
You will see incremental progress from here on out, but no more large leaps like we have had for the previous 40 years.
All progress is incremental and Moore's Law is nothing if not incremental. If you didn't know that then you didn't understand what was going on. Moore's Law was just a observation of the fast but incremental development of semiconductor manufacturing. However it isn't the end-all-be-all of tech. It's not some fundamental law of nature, just an empirical observation of incremental change.
I know they have concepts and maybe some engineering drawings but have they actually contracted out for the development of anything?
No. It's a scam and an obvious one. Do not take any of it seriously. It's annoying that they keep getting headlines in spite of their lies.
I could see this going somewhere with the right mix of companies, but right now I just don't see one organization pulling it all together.
Unless one or more of the bigger nation states gets involved there simply won't be adequate funding to make it happen. We're talking tens to hundreds of billions to actually pull off a mission to Mars. For profit companies aren't going to get involved because shockingly enough there is no profit in such a venture even if it were a serious endeavor, which it is not. Private funding wouldn't remotely be sufficient and governments aren't involved. The only organizations that are capable of developing the technology to make a Mars mission happen are not involved with Mars One.
Why does this obvious scam continue to get headlines from slashdot? Or anyone else for that matter. This is nothing more than some crooked and/or delusional people preying on the credulous. Without the resources of a nation state backing the project there is absolutely no way this could possibly happen. The technology to make it happen does not (yet) exist and the organizations who are capable of developing it (read NASA and peers) aren't involved with any of this. Furthermore any credible mission to Mars will cost tens and more likely hundreds of billions of US$ to even have a prayer of working at all much less in such a ludicrously short time span.
Seriously, why does this drivel keep getting the time of day?
You need to take it into the shop to have it fixed. It's clearly malfunctioning.
Wind, at about 2% of the total energy market is tiny.
Even 2% of US generating capacity (not the actual number) is an enormous amount of power and the amount of wind power generating capacity is growing fast. Wind accounted for about 4.4% of US energy production in 2014. Some countries generate double digit percentages of their electricity from wind with Denmark topping the list at 39%! The US accounts for a (disproportionate) 18% of world energy consumption despite being just 5% of the population. If other countries (particularly India and China) follow our lead that is not sustainable without huge increases in the use of renewable energy.
This hostility from the government towards nuclear power is one big reason why I have trouble believing in the global warming hysteria.
The hostility towards nuclear power does not come from the government. It comes from citizens who are nervous about nuclear power and the consequences of what can happen when things go wrong. (see Chernobyl and Fukishima) There also is the as yet unsolved problem of nuclear waste disposal. Granted some (not all) of their concerns are more perception than reality but perception is what drives policy regardless of whether it is true. It also comes from financiers who look at a LONG track record of cost overruns and cost uncertainty in building nuclear plants.
This hostility towards nuclear power on costs is also something that bothers me. The reason it costs so much is because we've forgotten how to build them.
No we haven't. Nuclear power plants are being built routinely and have advanced significantly. Just not in the USA. I'm an accountant. The reason nuclear power plants cost so much is twofold. 1) They are very complicated and have to be engineered to very high standards with careful attention to safety culture to avoid disasters. This level of engineering and safety is very expensive and prone to cost overruns. Nuclear plants are (comparatively) cheap to operate but very expensive to build. Worse, there is considerable cost uncertainty surrounding their construction. When this happens financing costs for construction rise considerably. Private financing is very difficult to come by as a result. Public financing is substantially more expensive and harder to get. 2) Nuclear power plants are considered so risky by insurance and financing companies that they cannot be built without government guarantees. The risk profile is one where the odds of a disaster are (generally) low but the consequences are very high and challenging to quantify. That makes insuring and indemnifying them very expensive.
I'm not impressed with wind power. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is a much better solution.
You can waste your time being "not impressed" with wind power but it's an important and fast growing and affordable and clean source of energy. It's not going to solve all our energy needs. No one form of energy (not even nuclear) is going to do that. Stop thinking in terms of either/or and start thinking in terms of balanced portfolio. Nuclear fission will be an important part of the energy portfolio for the foreseeable future and it has almost none of the climate change issues we get from fossil fuels. The goal is to reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to a level lower than what the Earth's ecosystem can handle. This number isn't zero but it's far lower than where we are now. To do this with existing technology will require some combination of wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and hydro. Battery and energy storage technology will matter greatly. I think distributed power (solar panels on roofs) are going to matter a lot as well.
The fact that you can just buy your power from a so called renewable resource power company doesn't mean that you're not still pulling power from the same coal fire power plants that are the BACK BONE of the US power infrastructure. They're not 'bottling up' that electrics and shipping it to the Google.
Calm down. We all know that. You don't seem to grasp that it doesn't matter on a net basis whether Google consumes the power themselves or not. Google needs X joules of power and they pay for X joules to be generated from renewable sources. Whether they use it themselves or not has EXACTLY the same effect on the ecosystem overall.
You're just buying more expensive power so you can feel like you're doing something.
They are doing something. They are subsidizing the development of renewable energy. Early adopters always pay more. It's a good thing that they are doing and with the amount of power they use it makes a measurable difference.
Domestic cats don't kill eagles and other typical endangered species of bird.
Domestic cats most certainly do kill endangered species of birds. They may not kill eagles but the certainly kill other threatened species in substantial numbers. Cats are an invasive species and a poorly controlled one at that.
Let us not also forget about bats,
Same deal as with birds. Windmills are simply not a significant threat to their populations.
and the fact that renewable provide a tiny amount of energy today.
You think 10% of US energy consumption is a tiny number? I think you don't understand the definition of the word "tiny".
So much for "green" power. I'm all for it, really, but let us not be deceived that "green" means at no cost. There is a real cost to everything. Tens of millions of birds (and bats) are killed the world over annually the world over.
The number of birds killed by windmills is several orders of magnitude smaller than the number killed by domestic cats. Heck FAR more birds are killed in collisions with cell phone towers than by windmills - roughly an order of magnitude more.. Bird deaths are a very minor issue especially compared with the number of deaths that will occur if we don't do anything about climate change. You're focusing on the little problem when it is the big one you should be worrying about.
Which tells you that no government incentives or actions are needed: if this is a reasonable accounting of costs, companies will switch to renewables all by themselves.
I'm afraid not. First off the competing fossil fuels receive substantial subsidies from the government. Worse, fossil fuels do not have to pay for a large portion of the pollution (including carbon) that they create so their prices are artificially low. Second, while renewables are becoming cheaper they aren't the lowest cost option just yet outside of some corner cases. Getting them to be the lowest cost option likely will require some amount of financial and/or regulatory support for a while longer. Not forever but just until cost parity is approximately reached.
Once the economic incentives are in place the switch will take place like osmosis but I don't think we are quite there yet. Only rich companies like Google can do it today and they do it as a marketing expense more than anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe its your area but in my city there are pretty active rec leagues for all sports.
"All sports"? I very much doubt it is true for all sports. Maybe there are for the sports you care about but I very much doubt you have leagues for quite a few sports. The options for adults tend to be rather limited even in the best of circumstances. I don't even need to know where you live to know that there isn't an adult rec league in your area for my sport (wrestling) because such a league simply doesn't exist anywhere. The best I could do would be to do something like train at an MMA gym or judo dojo but it's not the same sport.
Even if you live near a major city with lots of rec league options not every sport has such options or is compatible with the life of a busy adult. Most places in the US do not have much in the way of rec leagues for adults available. That's certainly true near me unless I want to drive a considerable distance and play a sport I don't have any interest or skill in.
Why don't more people go out and play sports, instead of sitting on a couch and watching somebody else have fun?
Because the options to play sports for people who aren't children or professionals are rather limited. In my sport of choice (wrestling) it's rather difficult to compete in any meaningful way after college if you aren't an elite athlete. Even if you have the time (which can be challenging if you have a career and/or family) there is basically nobody to practice with and few events to enter. Some sports are easier to participate in as an adult (running, cycling, etc) but most aren't. I coach my sport but I haven't wrestled a competitive match since the early 1990s when I was in college.
There also is the fact that actually playing sports is a lot of work. Sitting on the couch and watching requires zero effort and carries no chance of injury and still can be pretty fun. You don't have to block out hours of time which can be nigh impossible if you have any family responsibilities or a spouse that doesn't share your specific interest. You don't need anyone else to watch with you to be a spectator either which is not true for a lot of sports. Unless you are lucky enough to live in an area that happens to have adult rec leagues in your sport of choice then you are kind of out of luck. A lot of the fun of sports is the camaraderie with the people you do it with. Most sports are social activities at some level.
The best way to opt out of these fees is not to pay Comcast ANY money and switch to just watching content from streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and YouTube!
Since Comcast is my internet provider and is the only realistic option for internet in my area, exactly how do you propose I cease paying Comcast any money? Streaming doesn't solve that problem. It allows me to pay them less but I spend more on my internet connection than on cable. You have to have internet service to stream and there are no other service providers in my area worth mentioning.
I recently returned a rented cable modem because I bought my own. I can log into Comcast's account page and look at "Devices" and the rented modem is no longer there. Yet they still billed me for the rented modem. How can their systems know that I don't have the modem, yet continue to charge me for it?
I can top that. I am a Comcast customer and I own my own cable modem. I've never rented a modem from them at any time. But last month what do I see on my bill but a rental fee for a modem. I also got a notice from them telling me that my modem is obsolete and that I need a new one from them. My modem is a DOCSIS 3.0 modem and always has been and no service that would require DOCSIS 3.1 is in my area. Comcast knows what equipment I have (or they should since they set it up) and it hasn't changed in 5 years. But that didn't stop them from trying to slip in some charges for renting equipment I never rented from them. Douchebags...
I'd consider going to another vendor but Comcast is the only realistic option where I live. My only other "high speed" internet provider is Frontier Communications which offers substantially slower DSL connections.
First is a massive 20-10-5 billion dollar X-prize to the first three groups to successfully colonize.
$20 billion won't even be close to enough money. It certainly won't cover the cost of such a venture. $20 Billion is roughly NASA's annual budget today in 2016. It's certainly not enough to cover the cost of a colonization. Colonizing Mars will cost TRILLIONS of dollars. Probably tens or even hundreds of trillions. $20 billion wouldn't even buy you the Apollo program on an inflation adjusted basis.
Second is homesteading. There's no value in Martian real-estate right now, but in 200 years? 500? How much would companies pay to have governments recognize their property rights over a decent sized chunk of Mars? I'm not sure how markets would treat it, but property rights are very stable, I'm betting the value would be substantial.
I think you don't understand how capital markets work. The value of Mars real estate is zero and will remain so for the lifetime of anyone reading this. The possibility of it being worth substantial sums in 500 years is WAY beyond any realistic projections for a business plan. Property rights are only as stable as governments and governments are demonstrable very unstable over century long time spans. And even if they were, until we have some actual functioning colonies on Mars with a self sustaining economy and infrastructure the value of an real estate on Mars is very literally less than zero. It is a cost with no offsetting revenue.
As for funding the companies could create a consortium to spread out costs and risk.
You don't get it. No they cannot. You can't spread out risks that you cannot even quantify. Nobody is going to take on costs unless you can show them some means by which those costs can be recouped in a reasonable time frame. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson is right that private enterprise will not and indeed cannot lead us to Mars. The risks are unknown and unquantified, the ROI is non-existent, the costs are enormous and unquantified, the technology to go there doesn't yet exist and nobody knows when it will exist, and the likelihood of failure is high. No private company can take a risk like that. If one did they would be in bankruptcy faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit".
Why do people always say "we don't have the technology" when we clearly have it?
We clearly do NOT have the technology to send a successful manned mission to Mars today and we are in no danger of having such technology mission ready in the next 10-15 years minimum. For a non-suicide mission we currently lack radiation shielding, life support systems, a functional ship, a landing system, a return system, and a host of other mission ready systems necessary to make such a journey viable. If we had such technology ready today the discussion surrounding a manned Mars mission would be quite different.
Mars missions are not a technology problem, particular radiation and life support are solved problems.
They most certainly are not solved problems. At least not in any economically viable sense of the word. If you don't have a solution that is mission ready and can be funded for available amounts of money then you don't have a solution. Right now we don't have a radiation shielding solution that is mission ready and economically realistic. What solutions we could implement today are economically non-starters.
I agree that manned Mars missions, especially by mini companies, are unrealistic ... but it is a mere monetary and time frame problem, not a technology one.
It's a technology problem too. Don't kid yourself that there aren't any technology hurdles. I think the technology portion of the problem is the most tractable of the problems compared with the economic and political issues but it is a problem nonetheless. We don't have solutions to a lot of the technology problems with a manned mission to Mars today but we do have a pretty good idea what the solutions would look like and we've done similar things in the past. Even if we had a crash program to get boots on Mars ASAP, it would still take one or two decades minimum to work out all the technology issues and get them adequately tested and built.
Well, less people driving means fewer jobs... again.
No it means fewer people in jobs that involve driving. Nothing more. It does not follow that eliminating drivers will mean fewer jobs overall. It just means those jobs won't be driving vehicles around which frankly is something of a waste human capital. Jobs get obsoleted all the time by new technology but that doesn't mean there are fewer jobs in total. Those people now can be employed doing something else and they will be. Your argument is like complaining that we have fewer jobs washing clothes now that we have automatic washing machines in the home. That labor buden went away but it didn't result in fewer jobs. It freed up people to do more productive and economically beneficial work.
MI can't really afford to rest all it's eggs in the Automotive basket...
Michigan doesn't really have much of a choice for the near future. Michigan is and remains the epicenter of the auto industry even to this day. That comes with some benefits and some drawbacks. Michigan's economy does not depend solely on the auto industry but it's definitely the most important industry in the state.
I like the idea of Bitcoin. It's fantastic.
Not if you actually understand finance and risk it isn't. Bitcoin is an interesting experiment in some ways but as a practical matter for real world use it's rather clumsy, risky and impractical. It's flawed in so many ways I barely know where to begin. The only thing about it that I really think might eventually prove valuable is the block chain technology which has applications far beyond bitcoin.
But in reality it's still trading more like a commodity than a currency.
Currencies ARE commodities. The term commodity is specifically used for an economic good or service when the demand for it has no qualitative differentiation across a market. A dollar is a dollar no matter where you trade it. Don't feel bad, a lot of people fail to understand this. Currencies in forex markets are traded very much like other commodities. They're just an abstract/intangible sort of commodity rather than bars of gold or barrels of oil. There is some nuance to the market just like every other commodity but they really are commodities all the same.
So real money is only 1% tangible while bitcoin is 0% tangible. Not a huge difference for me.
That's because you're not trying to actually buy anything with bitcoins. Go try to pay for your Big Mac at McDonald's with bitcoin and see if you can tell the difference.
Verizon will not be taking part in this update because of the added risk this could pose to Galaxy Note 7 users that do not have another device to switch to
Translation: "This will result in a lot of pissed off customer calling us about the problem and we don't want the expense".
And MI is a great state for automated driving systems to test again bad weather road conditions and construction re-routing....
Which is fine but does little for the economy of Michigan by itself. Employs a few engineers and support personnel but what else is the benefit to Michigan? Hope a few businesses take root as a result but I'm not holding my breath.
Isn't hitchhiking illegal in most states?
No, actually hitchhiking is perfectly legal in most places. A few states ban it but in most places it's just illegal to actually stand on the road when soliciting a ride. Stand to the side of the road and you are not breaking any laws. And even in places where it is illegal the police mostly don't care all that much.
"It makes Michigan a place where particularly for the auto industry it's a good place to do work,"
Yeah except for the shitty roads, expensive labor, unsupportive government, hostile unions, etc. Other than that it's awesome. I find it hilarious that the state most closely associated with the auto industry has some of the worst roads in the country. Good place to test handling and suspensions I guess. Anyway this doesn't really matter much unless they can keep the companies that own the technology doing it in Michigan. Who cares if Google develops self driving tech in Michigan if Michigan doesn't see any of the financial benefit from that.
The thing that Michigan (particularly SE Michigan) has going for it is that the auto industry has a lot of residual talent left in the area. There is a ton of engineering and production capability. Michigan can be a great place to work on some really interesting technology. Seriously, it's hugely underrated as a tech hub but Michigan is one of the best places to be for high tech jobs. Too bad the state has dropped the ball in so many other areas. It's a beautiful place to live and work (outside of Detroit City proper anyway) and it's kind of a shame what has happened to the state in the last several decades.
That's not really accurate. We DO know how to send humans to Mars.
Not live ones. If you are looking to sent a dead human to Mars then your statement is accurate.
The problem is we don't know how to do it on a budget that is remotely achievable
No, right now we don't know how to do it period. Not for any amount of money. We probably could invest several tens (hundreds maybe?) of billions of dollars to figure it out but today as I type this we do not know for certain how to pull off a manned mission to Mars. And in matter of fact until we actually do such a mission successfully we cannot say that we know how to do it because until then we don't. We didn't know how to land on the Moon until we actually landed on the moon. You have to prove you can do something to say you know how to do it. Right now we THINK we know how to get it done but that's a far cry from actually doing it.
I would love to see us standing on Mars someday but let's be realistic about where we are and what it will take to get there.
Not entirely true, I think a private organization could go to Mars, but it would have to be a big established organization (like a Boeing, or maybe SpaceX in 10 years) who has a lot of credibility, expertise, and resources to throw behind the project.
No profit making public company can possibly go to Mars. There is no profit to be had in doing so or if there is, nobody has found it yet. If you were CEO of Boeing and you went into a board meeting and proposed going to Mars, you would be out of job 5 minutes later. It would be the shortest board meeting ever. A Mars mission is HUGELY expensive, there is no discernible profit to be had in doing so, and the risks of failure are enormous. Businesses can't do things with huge costs, minimal if any revenue, and high probability of failure.
SpaceX can only talk about Mars because they are privately held and Elon Musk effectively controls the company so the board has to indulge him. It's a vanity project for him but even they aren't seriously doing the things that would be necessary to make a Mars mission actually happen within my remaining lifespan. They have a business sending rockets into low earth orbit and still working the kinks out for that. Explain to me how they make enough money to finance even a vanity project to Mars much less do it as a profit making enterprise. Talk is cheap. Rockets to Mars aren't.
That is completely untrue. We've been sending heavy things to Mars reasonably reliably since the late 1970s.
There is a huge difference between sending a robot the size of a car and sending a human landing party with the VAST amount of equipment they would need to survive the trip to Mars. It's like the difference between sending up a sounding rocket versus the Apollo program. You're talking orders of magnitude difference in complexity and cost.
We do NOT have the technology to send humans to Mars at this time. We don't have the life support systems, we don't have the landing craft, we don't have the radiation shielding, we don't have a return system, etc. All that could (probably) be developed with enough time and money but we're not even close to having it ready. Without a crash government program we aren't going to have it ready in the next 10-15 years either. The only thing we have the technology to do today is to send a dead human body to Mars which is a pretty useless exercise.
The reality is that the tech industry has reached a dead end with the death of Moore's Law.
It's absolutely adorable that you think all progress in the tech industry is rooted in Moore's Law and that nothing more can be accomplished if we see a slowing in the rate at which we pack transistors into a given area on a chip.
You will see incremental progress from here on out, but no more large leaps like we have had for the previous 40 years.
All progress is incremental and Moore's Law is nothing if not incremental. If you didn't know that then you didn't understand what was going on. Moore's Law was just a observation of the fast but incremental development of semiconductor manufacturing. However it isn't the end-all-be-all of tech. It's not some fundamental law of nature, just an empirical observation of incremental change.
I know they have concepts and maybe some engineering drawings but have they actually contracted out for the development of anything?
No. It's a scam and an obvious one. Do not take any of it seriously. It's annoying that they keep getting headlines in spite of their lies.
I could see this going somewhere with the right mix of companies, but right now I just don't see one organization pulling it all together.
Unless one or more of the bigger nation states gets involved there simply won't be adequate funding to make it happen. We're talking tens to hundreds of billions to actually pull off a mission to Mars. For profit companies aren't going to get involved because shockingly enough there is no profit in such a venture even if it were a serious endeavor, which it is not. Private funding wouldn't remotely be sufficient and governments aren't involved. The only organizations that are capable of developing the technology to make a Mars mission happen are not involved with Mars One.
Why does this obvious scam continue to get headlines from slashdot? Or anyone else for that matter. This is nothing more than some crooked and/or delusional people preying on the credulous. Without the resources of a nation state backing the project there is absolutely no way this could possibly happen. The technology to make it happen does not (yet) exist and the organizations who are capable of developing it (read NASA and peers) aren't involved with any of this. Furthermore any credible mission to Mars will cost tens and more likely hundreds of billions of US$ to even have a prayer of working at all much less in such a ludicrously short time span.
Seriously, why does this drivel keep getting the time of day?
My BS meter just twitched.
You need to take it into the shop to have it fixed. It's clearly malfunctioning.
Wind, at about 2% of the total energy market is tiny.
Even 2% of US generating capacity (not the actual number) is an enormous amount of power and the amount of wind power generating capacity is growing fast. Wind accounted for about 4.4% of US energy production in 2014. Some countries generate double digit percentages of their electricity from wind with Denmark topping the list at 39%! The US accounts for a (disproportionate) 18% of world energy consumption despite being just 5% of the population. If other countries (particularly India and China) follow our lead that is not sustainable without huge increases in the use of renewable energy.
This hostility from the government towards nuclear power is one big reason why I have trouble believing in the global warming hysteria.
The hostility towards nuclear power does not come from the government. It comes from citizens who are nervous about nuclear power and the consequences of what can happen when things go wrong. (see Chernobyl and Fukishima) There also is the as yet unsolved problem of nuclear waste disposal. Granted some (not all) of their concerns are more perception than reality but perception is what drives policy regardless of whether it is true. It also comes from financiers who look at a LONG track record of cost overruns and cost uncertainty in building nuclear plants.
This hostility towards nuclear power on costs is also something that bothers me. The reason it costs so much is because we've forgotten how to build them.
No we haven't. Nuclear power plants are being built routinely and have advanced significantly. Just not in the USA. I'm an accountant. The reason nuclear power plants cost so much is twofold. 1) They are very complicated and have to be engineered to very high standards with careful attention to safety culture to avoid disasters. This level of engineering and safety is very expensive and prone to cost overruns. Nuclear plants are (comparatively) cheap to operate but very expensive to build. Worse, there is considerable cost uncertainty surrounding their construction. When this happens financing costs for construction rise considerably. Private financing is very difficult to come by as a result. Public financing is substantially more expensive and harder to get. 2) Nuclear power plants are considered so risky by insurance and financing companies that they cannot be built without government guarantees. The risk profile is one where the odds of a disaster are (generally) low but the consequences are very high and challenging to quantify. That makes insuring and indemnifying them very expensive.
I'm not impressed with wind power. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is a much better solution.
You can waste your time being "not impressed" with wind power but it's an important and fast growing and affordable and clean source of energy. It's not going to solve all our energy needs. No one form of energy (not even nuclear) is going to do that. Stop thinking in terms of either/or and start thinking in terms of balanced portfolio. Nuclear fission will be an important part of the energy portfolio for the foreseeable future and it has almost none of the climate change issues we get from fossil fuels. The goal is to reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to a level lower than what the Earth's ecosystem can handle. This number isn't zero but it's far lower than where we are now. To do this with existing technology will require some combination of wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and hydro. Battery and energy storage technology will matter greatly. I think distributed power (solar panels on roofs) are going to matter a lot as well.
The fact that you can just buy your power from a so called renewable resource power company doesn't mean that you're not still pulling power from the same coal fire power plants that are the BACK BONE of the US power infrastructure. They're not 'bottling up' that electrics and shipping it to the Google.
Calm down. We all know that. You don't seem to grasp that it doesn't matter on a net basis whether Google consumes the power themselves or not. Google needs X joules of power and they pay for X joules to be generated from renewable sources. Whether they use it themselves or not has EXACTLY the same effect on the ecosystem overall.
You're just buying more expensive power so you can feel like you're doing something.
They are doing something. They are subsidizing the development of renewable energy. Early adopters always pay more. It's a good thing that they are doing and with the amount of power they use it makes a measurable difference.
Domestic cats don't kill eagles and other typical endangered species of bird.
Domestic cats most certainly do kill endangered species of birds. They may not kill eagles but the certainly kill other threatened species in substantial numbers. Cats are an invasive species and a poorly controlled one at that.
Let us not also forget about bats,
Same deal as with birds. Windmills are simply not a significant threat to their populations.
and the fact that renewable provide a tiny amount of energy today.
You think 10% of US energy consumption is a tiny number? I think you don't understand the definition of the word "tiny".
Stealing people personal data and providing it to advertisers to better target Ads.
It's not stealing when people give it up willingly. You can argue that isn't a good deal for users of Google products but it isn't theft.
So much for "green" power. I'm all for it, really, but let us not be deceived that "green" means at no cost. There is a real cost to everything. Tens of millions of birds (and bats) are killed the world over annually the world over.
The number of birds killed by windmills is several orders of magnitude smaller than the number killed by domestic cats. Heck FAR more birds are killed in collisions with cell phone towers than by windmills - roughly an order of magnitude more.. Bird deaths are a very minor issue especially compared with the number of deaths that will occur if we don't do anything about climate change. You're focusing on the little problem when it is the big one you should be worrying about.
Which tells you that no government incentives or actions are needed: if this is a reasonable accounting of costs, companies will switch to renewables all by themselves.
I'm afraid not. First off the competing fossil fuels receive substantial subsidies from the government. Worse, fossil fuels do not have to pay for a large portion of the pollution (including carbon) that they create so their prices are artificially low. Second, while renewables are becoming cheaper they aren't the lowest cost option just yet outside of some corner cases. Getting them to be the lowest cost option likely will require some amount of financial and/or regulatory support for a while longer. Not forever but just until cost parity is approximately reached.
Once the economic incentives are in place the switch will take place like osmosis but I don't think we are quite there yet. Only rich companies like Google can do it today and they do it as a marketing expense more than anything else.