Agreed, the Constitution gives Congress the power to make law, not Ajit Pai.
You fail to understand how laws are actually made. There are in broad strokes three kinds of law. Statutes, regulations, and case law. Regulations ARE laws. Congress passes statutes which then delegates the authority to the administration (the FCC in this case) to make regulations which are the details about how the law is to be implemented and they have substantial discretion in doing this in most cases. Congress doesn't have the expertise to fill in all the details so they leave much of the heavy lifting up to the executive branch. Regulations ARE laws so the FCC has (within their mandate from Congress) the power to make law. Since Ajit Pai is in charge of that particular agency he has been delegated law making power from Congress.
Now a judge or Congress can constrain his actions through further statutes or case law, but otherwise the FCC absolutely can make laws and does so routinely every time they make a regulation.
Can you explain why they fractured the Control Panel / Settings? Why it takes 15 clicks between two/three different panels now to adjust a network connection?
Since I don't work for Microsoft you'll have to ask them for their reasoning. But it's just different routing to the same stuff for the most part. I think they were trying to make it easier to use for the things that happen most often. You can debate whether they succeeded or not but it certainly does not take "15 clicks" or anything close in most cases. It's not like the old Control Panel was a paragon of ease of use even if you were accustomed to it.
If you like the old Control Panel it's still there and pretty much identical to the one in Windows 7 for all practical purposes. I'm familiar with it so I sometimes pull it up sometimes and it works fine.
I think there are lots of things in Windows 10 to get bent out of shape over. This isn't really anywhere near the top of the list.
Windows 10 is a 100% phone/tablet interface. You can easily verify that yourself: they did away with the right mouse button.
That's strange. I'm typing on a Windows 10 machine to make this comment and my right mouse button works just fine. If you want to criticize Windows there is plenty to choose from without making up a bunch of bullshit that is obviously wrong.
Correction: not a 100% phone interface. They are apparently incapable of actually fully replacing the old control panel what the "settings" crap is supposed to do.
The old control panel is available if you prefer it. Just hit the Windows key on your keyboard and start typing "control panel" and it comes up just fine. Make a shortcut to it if you prefer it. I do this all the time. But the newer settings functions work just fine too if you can be bothered to actually take 5 minutes to figure them out.
So yes, I have "tested" Windows 10 and running it. I'm not sure if you are however.
Pretty clear you haven't since you think it has a phone interface as the primary user interface.
After months of usage, I've come to the same conclusion as when it was first announced -- Windows 10 sucks. I don't need a tablet/phone interface on my desktop.
If you believe this then you haven't actually used Windows 10. It's desktop interface is pretty much exactly what Windows has been since Windows 7 and not much different from XP in practical terms. It does not have a tablet/phone interface unless you explicitly tell it to behave that way. There are plenty of things you can criticize about Windows without making up shit that doesn't actually exist in the product.
Their attempt at giving us a "regular" desktop really doesn't cut it either.
I use it daily at work and it's fine. It's exactly what one would expect from Windows, good and bad. The interface on Windows 10 is decidedly NOT the problem with it unlike with Windows 8.
I do not need the internals obfuscated so that "normal" users find it difficult to affect them as that makes it difficult for IT staff to reach them as well unless I learn a whole bunch of new shortcuts.
So your argument is they shouldn't try to make anything better because you might have to learn something new? If you don't like Windows that's fine but please stick to critiques that aren't your failings. Microsoft fails plenty on their own without being responsible for your deficiencies too.
I'm one of those people with Surface 2 RT. To be honest, the support has been a lot better than I've seen with any Android device I've ever owned.
If that isn't damning with faint praise I'm not sure what is.
Microsoft may have made some mistakes with the Windows RT line...
"May have"? You don't need the qualifier. It was a huge and expensive fuck up on their part. It was an intentionally and needlessly crippled product with no obvious benefit to customers that was outperformed by better devices running uncrippled Windows and it was an object lesson in terrible branding. (you don't call something Windows when people have an existing expectation for what that means) Microsoft tried to create a device in between their smartphones and PCs when they didn't need to and they fucked it up.
I still use my Surface 2 to this day, and find it hard to justify getting something new, because it still works quite well as a tablet/media consumption device, which was my primary purpose for it.
That's fine but there were/are better devices available to do that which are less limited and more useful to most of us.
My attention and peripheral vision was more than sufficient that I never stepped over a curb or walked in front of traffic, but I still had people shout at me out of cars.
What about the people around you who had to needlessly maneuver around you? I don't buy the argument that you were able to adequately pay attention to what was going on around you at all times.
I think a lot of people are that way with people on cell phones. He's on a cell phone, is he going to walk in front of me? And they project their anxiety onto the other party where it does not belong. I'm responsible for my behavior. If I actually behave unsafely that's on me. Otherwise stop trying to regulate me.
Your argument might have merit if people were actually good at paying attention to multiple things at once. It's called task saturation though I like the term pilots use which is "helmet fire". It is a FACT that people cannot talk on a phone and give their full attention to other tasks. It sounds simple enough but it actually task saturates most people and they start making mistakes unintentionally. The reason it is dangerous to talk on a cell phone and drive is that your brain physically cannot cope with doing both at the same time. Same thing applies to pedestrians. They literally cannot task switch between talking and navigating fast enough.
I think we have the technologies to make water proof underground dwellings and the means to move the water to a different location.
If it is fully water proof then it also is air proof which presents certain problems. Water doesn't just come from below. Yes we can make dwellings that can route the water appropriate from underneath (for $$$) but you can't make it sealed from above unless you start making things really complicated and expensive. And then when it rains (or worse floods) you had better be able to remove the water faster than it comes in. And rains and floods are a real problem when tornadoes and hurricanes are a blowin'.
Or have a significant portion of our dwellings underground.
Not really an option in a lot of places and a LOT more expensive to build than above ground dwellings. Plus you have to deal with removing groundwater in most places so you'd better have some pretty reliable power for the pumps and well designed drainage.
Not only would the damage from a tornado be much less, heating/cooling would require much less energy.
Then you drown when the rain and floods that routinely accompanies the tornado floods your underground bunker. Or you get trapped inside from debris that lands on top of your hobbit hole. No this isn't hypothetical either. Plus you have to live underground with limited natural light which isn't as much fun as you might imagine. Yes there are some advantages to being underground but there are a lot more disadvantages for most of us.
in the USA especially in tornado alley, because wood frame houses almost always gets torn to pieces, it would be nice to have my whole house completely tornado-proof,
You can already do that. It's just going to cost a bloody fortune. 3D printing will not solve that problem. Buildings robust enough to withstand a tornado are inherently going to be more expensive than those which aren't, typically by a lot. It's almost certainly cheaper to rebuild than it is to build a what amounts to a bunker.
, i think a monolithic concrete house made with a 3D printer would be able to build a house capable of withstanding a tornado
Depends on the design. Just being concrete isn't enough. It has to be reinforced concrete of an adequate thickness with appropriate sealing and ventilation. Remember that tornados do things like throw cars through the air. It's going to be rather expensive to build a building strong enough to withstand impact from a car that has been flung through the air.
Shortage of bricklayers? How about training sim bricklayers. And not pay them refugee wages.
Where are you hiring bricklayers? They certainly aren't being paid "refugee wages". You can make a fine living in the skilled trades and there is a shortage in labor. The problem isn't that it doesn't pay well. The problem is that it's hard work and not glamorous. Nobody dreams of being a bricklayer when they are a child and our education system certainly doesn't promote it as a respectable profession.
3D printed home have got to be the most expensive way possible.
Pretty much. Unless this is some sort of marketing stunt or proof of concept for something I don't really see the point. Looking at what they made, these "houses" are remarkably ugly and appear highly impractical. I know "3D printing" along with "AI" are the hot buzzwords these days but let's not pretend this is anything we need to really worry about just yet.
It requires orders of magnitude decreases in cost, but that's theoretically possible with sufficient research investment.
There are lots of things that are theoretically possible in the sense that they haven't been conclusively determined to be impossible. That is not the same thing as saying they are plausible or likely.
Rectenna arrays take up less space than solar panels.
That's only an issue if space is somehow a constraint.
The panels will be in the sunlight all the time.
Again, that's only an issue if there is a constraint in play. If a solar panel + battery system gets the job done and is cheaper then the argument is over before it begins. To be honest I have a hard time imagining any sort of space based power generation transmitted to Earth being cheaper than terrestrial generation. It also seems improbable that such vast amounts of energy could be transmitted through the atmosphere without any dangerous side effects. It's a cool idea but it has a strong whiff of science fiction about it unfortunately.
I'd rather live near a nuke plant and far, far away from any large grid scale solar installations. I don't want to deal with any of the heavy metals that would leach off of the panels, no matter how slowly they leach.
Got any other imaginary scary things about solar you'd like to make up? The computer you are using to type this drivel has the same dangerous stuff in it that your strawman argument has.
As for the waste problem with nuclear, it's a solved problem.
No it isn't. Your own arguments admit as much. Nuclear waste is a manageable problem but definitely not a solved one. If it was a solved problem we wouldn't have so bloody much of the stuff.
We have reactor designs that could burn the "spent fuel" for power generation, but since they will produce fissionable "weapons grade" isotopes that can be extracted we can't build them.
QED it isn't a solved problem.
We have reactor designs that can burn the fuel down a such a low radiation risk that a guy could literally shovel accidental fuel spills up into a wheelbarrow with little risk of radiation related health issue... providing he isn't exposed for long times / too often.
We have no proven designs that do anything of the sort. There are a few proposed and unproven reactor designs that are probably worth considering that may help with the problem if they prove practical and can get funded but they are little more than proposals at this point. I'm not aware of any reactor design that does not produce some amount of high level radioactive waste and/or undesirable byproducts.
More people die falling off roofs installing solar than die from anything nuclear on an annual basis.
And no solar installation has rendered a 1000 square mile area permanently uninhabitable. What is your point?
The "fallout risk" is higher in running 1960s-era reactors past their designed lifetime instead of building replacements.
There is no such thing as an industrial scale fission reactor without the risk of contamination. No new reactor designs have eliminated this failure mode. In fact no theoretical fission reactor designs have eliminated the risk either. It's the fatal flaw in the technology and its what scares people. Yes people overreact about it but that should surprise no one since people aren't rational animals. Until we solve that problem (along with the waste problem) nuclear fission is probably not going to become a bigger percentage of our energy portfolio than it already is.
So why don't we make it easier to build replacements that have vastly improved safety systems?
Because we still haven't eliminated the risk of large scale radiation contamination nor have we solved the waste disposal problem. Yes there are better designs out there. No they haven't solved the problem and it's obvious that people are not comfortable with that fact.
For small countries, especially those with widespread and frequent cloud cover, solar is not an ideal investment.
If you are a small country you are going to import your power one way or another anyway unless you happen to be sitting on top of some massive reserves of oil. Your argument is a strawman. Heck even "big" countries like much of Europe import power from elsewhere (gas from Russia, oil from the middle east, etc) so why would it be any different for solar? You put the panels where they make sense and transmit the power where you need it. Plus even places with frequent cloud cover can find utility in solar panels. They don't have to be operating at peak efficiency to be useful.
Globally, nuclear power currently generates roughly three times as much power as wind and solar combined,
A percentage which is falling daily. Nuclear has a waste problem and a fallout risk. Solar and wind have no such issues. People recognize this and are acting accordingly with their interests. Most would rather live near some solar panels than a fission plant no matter how safe people claim it to be.
Now, it would be disingenuous of me not to point out that I'm comparing subsidies for a single nuclear plant with subsidies for an entire class of generation source,
So let's point out that private insurance will not as a general proposition insure nuclear plants without government guarantees. That is a form of subsidy.
My daughter's school had a water main break & flooding. They canceled school in the middle of the day. Her ability to call me was a godsend!
Do you suffer from the delusion that that sort of thing never happened prior to mobile phones being widely available? Here is a hint. The SCHOOL called you instead. I know, right? You might actually have to talk to an adult!
Schools now can very easily send a blast message out to all parents via text or email. They also maintain call lists and other people have phones too. Your child would have survived just fine and worst case would have been bored for a few hours. Schools are well equipped to deal with this sort of thing.
But when we need to coordinate after-school activities, having a phone available for texting or calls is a godsend!
No it has become a crutch. It is not necessary. When I was school age I had no problem coordinating after school activities with my parents and I didn't get a mobile phone until I was 26. Your argument is specious.
That may all be true but one aspect of the idea is that simulations will improve (as they have) and a lot of hardware can be designed and tested virtually (e.g. Besiege or Kerbal Space Program).
Kerbal Space Program is not a simulation. It is a game. Do not confuse the two. It has about as much to do with how real space travel is designed as Mario Kart does with driving your car to work. Any similarities are superficial.
My first job out of college for a number of years was doing simulations of both hardware and production systems. My company had a large department for finite element analysis, vehicle dynamics simulations, etc. We also did a lot of monte-carlo analysis and robot modeling. These were useful for optimizing designs or for doing early evaluation of design ideas. But they were only supplemental in all cases. We also had a large materials testing lab, a rapid prototyping lab, and a large department for product testing because ALL models have limits to what they can tell you. A simulation model that hasn't been validated to a real world system is nothing more than a theory. It's no different than doing physics on a blackboard while never actually doing any experiments. That's not to say simulation is useless (far from it) but do not be tempted into thinking it is something more than it actually is.
Is only simulated testing ideal? No. But it is next-to-free and so can move us forward.
"Next to free"? Not even remotely. Not even if someone donates their time. Simulations can help reduce opportunity costs in some cases but they do not eliminate the costs of actually building, prototyping, and testing for hardware. Simulation is actually quite expensive to perform because you have to be able to validate the model against a real world system. That means you have to actually build a physical object or system to check against and that is never free or even close to free.
Simulation models of any meaningful complexity are actually quite expensive to develop and deploy. For the stuff I was working on I wouldn't roll out of bed for a problem that cost less than a few million dollars because the savings wouldn't justify the cost of the analysis otherwise. It would be cheaper to just build whatever we planned to model and iterate. And at the end of the day, we still had to go and build whatever we designed and we still had to go test it in the real world. Simulation can reduce costs but when you are talking about hardware design it is NEVER free or even close to free.
Eventually, sure, we need to build and test real hardware. But that can come later after we have a lot of social momentum going from the simulations.
Building hardware is not an "eventually" thing. If you want to design hardware that you know works, you have to actually build it. There is no way around this. You can simulate all day long but simulations are models and models NEVER give you the whole picture. Models are a theory and you have to actually test the theory. Nobody sane is going to step onto a rocket that has never been tested in the real world. There is an old saying in the simulation community All models are wrong. Some models are useful.. Simulation is ALWAYS a model of reality and all simulations incorporate numerous assumptions and parameter limitations which the real world is under no obligation to respect. Your simulation is going to be wrong, the only question is by how much. The only way to know that answer is to build what you are simulating.
The only motivation for moon colonization that I can see is the same motivation for colonizing Antarctica.
There are several potential motivations I can think of. The first and most alarming and most likely is as a military base. Kind of the ultimate high ground if you will. The second is that if we are going to mine something is space, the moon seems to be a far more practical candidate than asteroids. It's composition isn't wildly different from Earth and we already have/had technology that can reach it even with humans if necessary. I still think space mining is something of a fools errand until we get substantially more robust space travel capabilities than we have now. The third is as you mention scientific research. Obvious potential utility there. The fourth is as a sort of waystation for deep space travel. It seems like the resources exist to make rocket fuel on the moon and there is(oxygen in reasonable abundance and the gravity well is considerably shallower than the one on Earth.
Are any of these sufficient to justify a moon colony? Honestly I have no idea though I admit I'm dubious. I think the military base is by far the most likely. Mining and manufacturing requires substantial advances in technology that will take a long time to develop unless we have a crash government program. I'm sure there will be efforts at scientific research but a manned outpost seems unlikely unless it is developed for other reasons. And a deep space support station seems pointless unless part of a bigger project.
Ok, devil's advocate here. Where is the economic benefit over terrestrial generation that would justify the immense expense of developing the technology (presuming it's possible) and deploying it to space? Terrestrial solar in principle can already cleanly provide more power than the global need multifold without even taking up arable land nor requiring any new technology to be developed. It's also not clear how you plan to transmit this energy safely to Earth... For space based energy generation to become a thing it needs to provide an economic advantage over the existing options. (and it needs to be technologically feasible)
It should come as no huge shock that China is the technology leader in this space.
??? Nobody is a leader in this space because it doesn't exist outside of a few academic research projects with no immediate chance of application. There is precisely zero power being transmitted from space based solar generation to Earth nor any reasonable prospect of it happening any time soon.
To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act.
Basically you are arguing that some version of open source style licensing will get us there. I think you're going to run into the same problems as we do with open source style licenses on hardware. It works well in software because there are limited capital expenditures required to build production ready software. You're basically just asking people to donate their time and knowledge and you can get working products of high quality. But hardware is different because you have to spend hard cash to make it. Even prototypes and proof of concepts of anything non-trivial can be wildly expensive. It's not enough to design something - you have to build it and test it in the real world. Furthermore software is protected by copyright by default without even having to take any actions. This prevents free riders without extra expense. Hardware has no such protection in our legal system. You have to apply for a very expensive patent which limits how easy it is to protect inventions and keep the available. Anything useful that isn't patent protected will be patented by a more motivated party with deeper pockets effectively taking it out of the public domain for a substantial number of years.
I'm certainly all in favor of what you propose in principle but I think the economic realities of it are that it won't really get us there. I think you are thinking about it like a software guy who doesn't fully appreciate the economic realities of building physical objects under our current legal framework.
Eliminating poverty within your borders is a far more noble pursuit than exploring space.
First off you cannot eliminate poverty completely. To pretend otherwise is a delusion. Second, I reject your attempt to frame the argument that somehow exploring space is a less noble endeavor. Third, exploring space has proven economic benefits that are hugely useful towards fighting poverty. Every penny we've invested in NASA has been repaid in economic benefits from technology spinoffs alone somewhere between 3X and 8X ROI even under the most conservative analysis. You want to reduce poverty? Spend MORE on a well executed space program. That will do more to reduce poverty than almost anything else you could possibly imagine.
Let's cure problems down here first and then worry about up there.
That meme is tired and false. It isn't either/or. Exploring space can do far more to solve terrestrial economic problems than keeping our feet on the ground.
Most great achievements of civilization are not "profitable".
That's just not true in the long run. The biggest exploration expenditures are generally made for one of two reasons. 1) Defense of nation states and 2) Economic benefit. If something doesn't have a profit eventually then it won't be done or won't be done for long. The payoff doesn't have to be immediate but there does have to be a payoff eventually.
Accountants are notoriously myopic.
Yeah it's annoying having someone point out reality all the time. Much better to live in an echo chamber where the laws of economics are suspended for your benefit.
Moon colonization shout be the goal along with asteroid mining.
Asteroid mining is a ludicrous proposition. Either it requires returning a dangerously large amount of material back to earth (dropping a large rock on Earth from space tends to make a rather large boom - de facto a WMD) or it requires processing in space for which we have not the technology, the infrastructure, nor any demand. To make asteroid mining and processing in space we would have to build a huge amount of space based infrastructure, supply chains, and economy for which there is no obvious ROI. People who suggest processing in space tend to rather glibly gloss over the details about how manufacturing supply chains actually work in the real world because they don't understand manufacturing. We take for granted a lot of things that are FAR more difficult to achieve in space. You have to replicate not just processing equipment but entire supply chains and then automate them which we cannot even do here on Earth.
Moon colonization? Fun idea but what's the motivation for doing it? What's the economic or defense reason that would justify and pay for such an enormous outlay of cash? Just because it's cool (and it is) isn't sufficient. Scientific research isn't enough either though that's closer. I'm all for colonizing the moon but I just can't see a roadmap to making doing it possible on a time scale shorter than hundreds of years. We would need a LOT of massive advances in technology to really make it practical and economic to do and even then we still would need an economic reason to be there for any length of time.
That is the best way to build a sustaining space travel infrastructure.
That's debatable and there are plenty of people more informed on the subject than either of us that have different opinions.
What people are talking about is building a self-sustaining (as far as possible) moon base as a demonstration humans can survive long-term without deliveries from earth.
Quite so. The real challenge in doing so is finding an economic reason to build such a moon base in the first place. It won't get done without a darn good reason. Either we need to discover something really valuable that can only be exploited on the moon or there would need to be some national/global defense reason to do it. Literally every really large expenditure (talking MUCH bigger than stuff like the ISS or LHC) made for exploration is made for one of those two reasons.
My personal guess is this will take at least 100 years to accomplish.
Unless it was declared to be a massive national/global priority I think your time estimate is short by several hundred years. Such an endeavor would be massively expensive and requires large amounts of technology we are in no danger of developing in the near future. I could see it happening at some point but a real moon based like you are proposing is going to take a really long time to come to fruition if it ever does. The biggest obstacle to it is economics. There just is no obvious direct economic benefit to building such a thing.
The very fact that you can only mention a few specific accidents, despite thousands of nuclear power plants in active use around the world, should tell you something about how safe it actually is.
Sigh... you are missing the point. MOST of the time it is safe. But when it isn't safe it is REALLY not safe. Low frequency high consequence. It's like a volcanic eruption. Doesn't happen often but when it does it is a huge problem and makes a gigantic and expensive mess. And because the possibility of failure is not zero eventually there WILL be a large disaster. There is absolutely no reason to believe another Chernobyl size or worse disaster will not happen again. It should be expected as inevitable. Probably not the same failure mode but there is no lack of potential failure modes to choose from with fission plants.
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Agreed, the Constitution gives Congress the power to make law, not Ajit Pai.
You fail to understand how laws are actually made. There are in broad strokes three kinds of law. Statutes, regulations, and case law. Regulations ARE laws. Congress passes statutes which then delegates the authority to the administration (the FCC in this case) to make regulations which are the details about how the law is to be implemented and they have substantial discretion in doing this in most cases. Congress doesn't have the expertise to fill in all the details so they leave much of the heavy lifting up to the executive branch. Regulations ARE laws so the FCC has (within their mandate from Congress) the power to make law. Since Ajit Pai is in charge of that particular agency he has been delegated law making power from Congress.
Now a judge or Congress can constrain his actions through further statutes or case law, but otherwise the FCC absolutely can make laws and does so routinely every time they make a regulation.
Can you explain why they fractured the Control Panel / Settings? Why it takes 15 clicks between two/three different panels now to adjust a network connection?
Since I don't work for Microsoft you'll have to ask them for their reasoning. But it's just different routing to the same stuff for the most part. I think they were trying to make it easier to use for the things that happen most often. You can debate whether they succeeded or not but it certainly does not take "15 clicks" or anything close in most cases. It's not like the old Control Panel was a paragon of ease of use even if you were accustomed to it.
If you like the old Control Panel it's still there and pretty much identical to the one in Windows 7 for all practical purposes. I'm familiar with it so I sometimes pull it up sometimes and it works fine.
I think there are lots of things in Windows 10 to get bent out of shape over. This isn't really anywhere near the top of the list.
Windows 10 is a 100% phone/tablet interface. You can easily verify that yourself: they did away with the right mouse button.
That's strange. I'm typing on a Windows 10 machine to make this comment and my right mouse button works just fine. If you want to criticize Windows there is plenty to choose from without making up a bunch of bullshit that is obviously wrong.
Correction: not a 100% phone interface. They are apparently incapable of actually fully replacing the old control panel what the "settings" crap is supposed to do.
The old control panel is available if you prefer it. Just hit the Windows key on your keyboard and start typing "control panel" and it comes up just fine. Make a shortcut to it if you prefer it. I do this all the time. But the newer settings functions work just fine too if you can be bothered to actually take 5 minutes to figure them out.
So yes, I have "tested" Windows 10 and running it. I'm not sure if you are however.
Pretty clear you haven't since you think it has a phone interface as the primary user interface.
After months of usage, I've come to the same conclusion as when it was first announced -- Windows 10 sucks. I don't need a tablet/phone interface on my desktop.
If you believe this then you haven't actually used Windows 10. It's desktop interface is pretty much exactly what Windows has been since Windows 7 and not much different from XP in practical terms. It does not have a tablet/phone interface unless you explicitly tell it to behave that way. There are plenty of things you can criticize about Windows without making up shit that doesn't actually exist in the product.
Their attempt at giving us a "regular" desktop really doesn't cut it either.
I use it daily at work and it's fine. It's exactly what one would expect from Windows, good and bad. The interface on Windows 10 is decidedly NOT the problem with it unlike with Windows 8.
I do not need the internals obfuscated so that "normal" users find it difficult to affect them as that makes it difficult for IT staff to reach them as well unless I learn a whole bunch of new shortcuts.
So your argument is they shouldn't try to make anything better because you might have to learn something new? If you don't like Windows that's fine but please stick to critiques that aren't your failings. Microsoft fails plenty on their own without being responsible for your deficiencies too.
I'm one of those people with Surface 2 RT. To be honest, the support has been a lot better than I've seen with any Android device I've ever owned.
If that isn't damning with faint praise I'm not sure what is.
Microsoft may have made some mistakes with the Windows RT line...
"May have"? You don't need the qualifier. It was a huge and expensive fuck up on their part. It was an intentionally and needlessly crippled product with no obvious benefit to customers that was outperformed by better devices running uncrippled Windows and it was an object lesson in terrible branding. (you don't call something Windows when people have an existing expectation for what that means) Microsoft tried to create a device in between their smartphones and PCs when they didn't need to and they fucked it up.
I still use my Surface 2 to this day, and find it hard to justify getting something new, because it still works quite well as a tablet/media consumption device, which was my primary purpose for it.
That's fine but there were/are better devices available to do that which are less limited and more useful to most of us.
My attention and peripheral vision was more than sufficient that I never stepped over a curb or walked in front of traffic, but I still had people shout at me out of cars.
What about the people around you who had to needlessly maneuver around you? I don't buy the argument that you were able to adequately pay attention to what was going on around you at all times.
I think a lot of people are that way with people on cell phones. He's on a cell phone, is he going to walk in front of me? And they project their anxiety onto the other party where it does not belong. I'm responsible for my behavior. If I actually behave unsafely that's on me. Otherwise stop trying to regulate me.
Your argument might have merit if people were actually good at paying attention to multiple things at once. It's called task saturation though I like the term pilots use which is "helmet fire". It is a FACT that people cannot talk on a phone and give their full attention to other tasks. It sounds simple enough but it actually task saturates most people and they start making mistakes unintentionally. The reason it is dangerous to talk on a cell phone and drive is that your brain physically cannot cope with doing both at the same time. Same thing applies to pedestrians. They literally cannot task switch between talking and navigating fast enough.
I think we have the technologies to make water proof underground dwellings and the means to move the water to a different location.
If it is fully water proof then it also is air proof which presents certain problems. Water doesn't just come from below. Yes we can make dwellings that can route the water appropriate from underneath (for $$$) but you can't make it sealed from above unless you start making things really complicated and expensive. And then when it rains (or worse floods) you had better be able to remove the water faster than it comes in. And rains and floods are a real problem when tornadoes and hurricanes are a blowin'.
Or have a significant portion of our dwellings underground.
Not really an option in a lot of places and a LOT more expensive to build than above ground dwellings. Plus you have to deal with removing groundwater in most places so you'd better have some pretty reliable power for the pumps and well designed drainage.
Not only would the damage from a tornado be much less, heating/cooling would require much less energy.
Then you drown when the rain and floods that routinely accompanies the tornado floods your underground bunker. Or you get trapped inside from debris that lands on top of your hobbit hole. No this isn't hypothetical either. Plus you have to live underground with limited natural light which isn't as much fun as you might imagine. Yes there are some advantages to being underground but there are a lot more disadvantages for most of us.
in the USA especially in tornado alley, because wood frame houses almost always gets torn to pieces, it would be nice to have my whole house completely tornado-proof,
You can already do that. It's just going to cost a bloody fortune. 3D printing will not solve that problem. Buildings robust enough to withstand a tornado are inherently going to be more expensive than those which aren't, typically by a lot. It's almost certainly cheaper to rebuild than it is to build a what amounts to a bunker.
, i think a monolithic concrete house made with a 3D printer would be able to build a house capable of withstanding a tornado
Depends on the design. Just being concrete isn't enough. It has to be reinforced concrete of an adequate thickness with appropriate sealing and ventilation. Remember that tornados do things like throw cars through the air. It's going to be rather expensive to build a building strong enough to withstand impact from a car that has been flung through the air.
In the immortal words of Ron White, It's not THAT the wind's a blowin'. It's WHAT the wind's a blowin.
Shortage of bricklayers? How about training sim bricklayers. And not pay them refugee wages.
Where are you hiring bricklayers? They certainly aren't being paid "refugee wages". You can make a fine living in the skilled trades and there is a shortage in labor. The problem isn't that it doesn't pay well. The problem is that it's hard work and not glamorous. Nobody dreams of being a bricklayer when they are a child and our education system certainly doesn't promote it as a respectable profession.
3D printed home have got to be the most expensive way possible.
Pretty much. Unless this is some sort of marketing stunt or proof of concept for something I don't really see the point. Looking at what they made, these "houses" are remarkably ugly and appear highly impractical. I know "3D printing" along with "AI" are the hot buzzwords these days but let's not pretend this is anything we need to really worry about just yet.
It requires orders of magnitude decreases in cost, but that's theoretically possible with sufficient research investment.
There are lots of things that are theoretically possible in the sense that they haven't been conclusively determined to be impossible. That is not the same thing as saying they are plausible or likely.
Rectenna arrays take up less space than solar panels.
That's only an issue if space is somehow a constraint.
The panels will be in the sunlight all the time.
Again, that's only an issue if there is a constraint in play. If a solar panel + battery system gets the job done and is cheaper then the argument is over before it begins. To be honest I have a hard time imagining any sort of space based power generation transmitted to Earth being cheaper than terrestrial generation. It also seems improbable that such vast amounts of energy could be transmitted through the atmosphere without any dangerous side effects. It's a cool idea but it has a strong whiff of science fiction about it unfortunately.
I'd rather live near a nuke plant and far, far away from any large grid scale solar installations. I don't want to deal with any of the heavy metals that would leach off of the panels, no matter how slowly they leach.
Got any other imaginary scary things about solar you'd like to make up? The computer you are using to type this drivel has the same dangerous stuff in it that your strawman argument has.
As for the waste problem with nuclear, it's a solved problem.
No it isn't. Your own arguments admit as much. Nuclear waste is a manageable problem but definitely not a solved one. If it was a solved problem we wouldn't have so bloody much of the stuff.
We have reactor designs that could burn the "spent fuel" for power generation, but since they will produce fissionable "weapons grade" isotopes that can be extracted we can't build them.
QED it isn't a solved problem.
We have reactor designs that can burn the fuel down a such a low radiation risk that a guy could literally shovel accidental fuel spills up into a wheelbarrow with little risk of radiation related health issue... providing he isn't exposed for long times / too often.
We have no proven designs that do anything of the sort. There are a few proposed and unproven reactor designs that are probably worth considering that may help with the problem if they prove practical and can get funded but they are little more than proposals at this point. I'm not aware of any reactor design that does not produce some amount of high level radioactive waste and/or undesirable byproducts.
More people die falling off roofs installing solar than die from anything nuclear on an annual basis.
And no solar installation has rendered a 1000 square mile area permanently uninhabitable. What is your point?
The "fallout risk" is higher in running 1960s-era reactors past their designed lifetime instead of building replacements.
There is no such thing as an industrial scale fission reactor without the risk of contamination. No new reactor designs have eliminated this failure mode. In fact no theoretical fission reactor designs have eliminated the risk either. It's the fatal flaw in the technology and its what scares people. Yes people overreact about it but that should surprise no one since people aren't rational animals. Until we solve that problem (along with the waste problem) nuclear fission is probably not going to become a bigger percentage of our energy portfolio than it already is.
So why don't we make it easier to build replacements that have vastly improved safety systems?
Because we still haven't eliminated the risk of large scale radiation contamination nor have we solved the waste disposal problem. Yes there are better designs out there. No they haven't solved the problem and it's obvious that people are not comfortable with that fact.
For small countries, especially those with widespread and frequent cloud cover, solar is not an ideal investment.
If you are a small country you are going to import your power one way or another anyway unless you happen to be sitting on top of some massive reserves of oil. Your argument is a strawman. Heck even "big" countries like much of Europe import power from elsewhere (gas from Russia, oil from the middle east, etc) so why would it be any different for solar? You put the panels where they make sense and transmit the power where you need it. Plus even places with frequent cloud cover can find utility in solar panels. They don't have to be operating at peak efficiency to be useful.
Globally, nuclear power currently generates roughly three times as much power as wind and solar combined,
A percentage which is falling daily. Nuclear has a waste problem and a fallout risk. Solar and wind have no such issues. People recognize this and are acting accordingly with their interests. Most would rather live near some solar panels than a fission plant no matter how safe people claim it to be.
Now, it would be disingenuous of me not to point out that I'm comparing subsidies for a single nuclear plant with subsidies for an entire class of generation source,
So let's point out that private insurance will not as a general proposition insure nuclear plants without government guarantees. That is a form of subsidy.
My daughter's school had a water main break & flooding. They canceled school in the middle of the day. Her ability to call me was a godsend!
Do you suffer from the delusion that that sort of thing never happened prior to mobile phones being widely available? Here is a hint. The SCHOOL called you instead. I know, right? You might actually have to talk to an adult!
Schools now can very easily send a blast message out to all parents via text or email. They also maintain call lists and other people have phones too. Your child would have survived just fine and worst case would have been bored for a few hours. Schools are well equipped to deal with this sort of thing.
But when we need to coordinate after-school activities, having a phone available for texting or calls is a godsend!
No it has become a crutch. It is not necessary. When I was school age I had no problem coordinating after school activities with my parents and I didn't get a mobile phone until I was 26. Your argument is specious.
That may all be true but one aspect of the idea is that simulations will improve (as they have) and a lot of hardware can be designed and tested virtually (e.g. Besiege or Kerbal Space Program).
Kerbal Space Program is not a simulation. It is a game. Do not confuse the two. It has about as much to do with how real space travel is designed as Mario Kart does with driving your car to work. Any similarities are superficial.
My first job out of college for a number of years was doing simulations of both hardware and production systems. My company had a large department for finite element analysis, vehicle dynamics simulations, etc. We also did a lot of monte-carlo analysis and robot modeling. These were useful for optimizing designs or for doing early evaluation of design ideas. But they were only supplemental in all cases. We also had a large materials testing lab, a rapid prototyping lab, and a large department for product testing because ALL models have limits to what they can tell you. A simulation model that hasn't been validated to a real world system is nothing more than a theory. It's no different than doing physics on a blackboard while never actually doing any experiments. That's not to say simulation is useless (far from it) but do not be tempted into thinking it is something more than it actually is.
Is only simulated testing ideal? No. But it is next-to-free and so can move us forward.
"Next to free"? Not even remotely. Not even if someone donates their time. Simulations can help reduce opportunity costs in some cases but they do not eliminate the costs of actually building, prototyping, and testing for hardware. Simulation is actually quite expensive to perform because you have to be able to validate the model against a real world system. That means you have to actually build a physical object or system to check against and that is never free or even close to free.
Simulation models of any meaningful complexity are actually quite expensive to develop and deploy. For the stuff I was working on I wouldn't roll out of bed for a problem that cost less than a few million dollars because the savings wouldn't justify the cost of the analysis otherwise. It would be cheaper to just build whatever we planned to model and iterate. And at the end of the day, we still had to go and build whatever we designed and we still had to go test it in the real world. Simulation can reduce costs but when you are talking about hardware design it is NEVER free or even close to free.
Eventually, sure, we need to build and test real hardware. But that can come later after we have a lot of social momentum going from the simulations.
Building hardware is not an "eventually" thing. If you want to design hardware that you know works, you have to actually build it. There is no way around this. You can simulate all day long but simulations are models and models NEVER give you the whole picture. Models are a theory and you have to actually test the theory. Nobody sane is going to step onto a rocket that has never been tested in the real world. There is an old saying in the simulation community All models are wrong. Some models are useful.. Simulation is ALWAYS a model of reality and all simulations incorporate numerous assumptions and parameter limitations which the real world is under no obligation to respect. Your simulation is going to be wrong, the only question is by how much. The only way to know that answer is to build what you are simulating.
The only motivation for moon colonization that I can see is the same motivation for colonizing Antarctica.
There are several potential motivations I can think of. The first and most alarming and most likely is as a military base. Kind of the ultimate high ground if you will. The second is that if we are going to mine something is space, the moon seems to be a far more practical candidate than asteroids. It's composition isn't wildly different from Earth and we already have/had technology that can reach it even with humans if necessary. I still think space mining is something of a fools errand until we get substantially more robust space travel capabilities than we have now. The third is as you mention scientific research. Obvious potential utility there. The fourth is as a sort of waystation for deep space travel. It seems like the resources exist to make rocket fuel on the moon and there is(oxygen in reasonable abundance and the gravity well is considerably shallower than the one on Earth.
Are any of these sufficient to justify a moon colony? Honestly I have no idea though I admit I'm dubious. I think the military base is by far the most likely. Mining and manufacturing requires substantial advances in technology that will take a long time to develop unless we have a crash government program. I'm sure there will be efforts at scientific research but a manned outpost seems unlikely unless it is developed for other reasons. And a deep space support station seems pointless unless part of a bigger project.
I've got one:space based solar power.
Ok, devil's advocate here. Where is the economic benefit over terrestrial generation that would justify the immense expense of developing the technology (presuming it's possible) and deploying it to space? Terrestrial solar in principle can already cleanly provide more power than the global need multifold without even taking up arable land nor requiring any new technology to be developed. It's also not clear how you plan to transmit this energy safely to Earth... For space based energy generation to become a thing it needs to provide an economic advantage over the existing options. (and it needs to be technologically feasible)
It should come as no huge shock that China is the technology leader in this space.
??? Nobody is a leader in this space because it doesn't exist outside of a few academic research projects with no immediate chance of application. There is precisely zero power being transmitted from space based solar generation to Earth nor any reasonable prospect of it happening any time soon.
To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act.
Basically you are arguing that some version of open source style licensing will get us there. I think you're going to run into the same problems as we do with open source style licenses on hardware. It works well in software because there are limited capital expenditures required to build production ready software. You're basically just asking people to donate their time and knowledge and you can get working products of high quality. But hardware is different because you have to spend hard cash to make it. Even prototypes and proof of concepts of anything non-trivial can be wildly expensive. It's not enough to design something - you have to build it and test it in the real world. Furthermore software is protected by copyright by default without even having to take any actions. This prevents free riders without extra expense. Hardware has no such protection in our legal system. You have to apply for a very expensive patent which limits how easy it is to protect inventions and keep the available. Anything useful that isn't patent protected will be patented by a more motivated party with deeper pockets effectively taking it out of the public domain for a substantial number of years.
I'm certainly all in favor of what you propose in principle but I think the economic realities of it are that it won't really get us there. I think you are thinking about it like a software guy who doesn't fully appreciate the economic realities of building physical objects under our current legal framework.
Eliminating poverty within your borders is a far more noble pursuit than exploring space.
First off you cannot eliminate poverty completely. To pretend otherwise is a delusion. Second, I reject your attempt to frame the argument that somehow exploring space is a less noble endeavor. Third, exploring space has proven economic benefits that are hugely useful towards fighting poverty. Every penny we've invested in NASA has been repaid in economic benefits from technology spinoffs alone somewhere between 3X and 8X ROI even under the most conservative analysis. You want to reduce poverty? Spend MORE on a well executed space program. That will do more to reduce poverty than almost anything else you could possibly imagine.
Let's cure problems down here first and then worry about up there.
That meme is tired and false. It isn't either/or. Exploring space can do far more to solve terrestrial economic problems than keeping our feet on the ground.
Trump as president is just a symptom. Removing him will do nothing about the actual problem.
Quite so but it would definitely be a good start to solving the actual problem.
Most great achievements of civilization are not "profitable".
That's just not true in the long run. The biggest exploration expenditures are generally made for one of two reasons. 1) Defense of nation states and 2) Economic benefit. If something doesn't have a profit eventually then it won't be done or won't be done for long. The payoff doesn't have to be immediate but there does have to be a payoff eventually.
Accountants are notoriously myopic.
Yeah it's annoying having someone point out reality all the time. Much better to live in an echo chamber where the laws of economics are suspended for your benefit.
Moon colonization shout be the goal along with asteroid mining.
Asteroid mining is a ludicrous proposition. Either it requires returning a dangerously large amount of material back to earth (dropping a large rock on Earth from space tends to make a rather large boom - de facto a WMD) or it requires processing in space for which we have not the technology, the infrastructure, nor any demand. To make asteroid mining and processing in space we would have to build a huge amount of space based infrastructure, supply chains, and economy for which there is no obvious ROI. People who suggest processing in space tend to rather glibly gloss over the details about how manufacturing supply chains actually work in the real world because they don't understand manufacturing. We take for granted a lot of things that are FAR more difficult to achieve in space. You have to replicate not just processing equipment but entire supply chains and then automate them which we cannot even do here on Earth.
Moon colonization? Fun idea but what's the motivation for doing it? What's the economic or defense reason that would justify and pay for such an enormous outlay of cash? Just because it's cool (and it is) isn't sufficient. Scientific research isn't enough either though that's closer. I'm all for colonizing the moon but I just can't see a roadmap to making doing it possible on a time scale shorter than hundreds of years. We would need a LOT of massive advances in technology to really make it practical and economic to do and even then we still would need an economic reason to be there for any length of time.
That is the best way to build a sustaining space travel infrastructure.
That's debatable and there are plenty of people more informed on the subject than either of us that have different opinions.
What people are talking about is building a self-sustaining (as far as possible) moon base as a demonstration humans can survive long-term without deliveries from earth.
Quite so. The real challenge in doing so is finding an economic reason to build such a moon base in the first place. It won't get done without a darn good reason. Either we need to discover something really valuable that can only be exploited on the moon or there would need to be some national/global defense reason to do it. Literally every really large expenditure (talking MUCH bigger than stuff like the ISS or LHC) made for exploration is made for one of those two reasons.
My personal guess is this will take at least 100 years to accomplish.
Unless it was declared to be a massive national/global priority I think your time estimate is short by several hundred years. Such an endeavor would be massively expensive and requires large amounts of technology we are in no danger of developing in the near future. I could see it happening at some point but a real moon based like you are proposing is going to take a really long time to come to fruition if it ever does. The biggest obstacle to it is economics. There just is no obvious direct economic benefit to building such a thing.
The very fact that you can only mention a few specific accidents, despite thousands of nuclear power plants in active use around the world, should tell you something about how safe it actually is.
Sigh... you are missing the point. MOST of the time it is safe. But when it isn't safe it is REALLY not safe. Low frequency high consequence. It's like a volcanic eruption. Doesn't happen often but when it does it is a huge problem and makes a gigantic and expensive mess. And because the possibility of failure is not zero eventually there WILL be a large disaster. There is absolutely no reason to believe another Chernobyl size or worse disaster will not happen again. It should be expected as inevitable. Probably not the same failure mode but there is no lack of potential failure modes to choose from with fission plants.