The unemployment rates for 20-25 year olds is twice that of the other age groups. Males being the worst off group.
Or maybe gaming is part of the reason for the unemployment.
I don't know about where you live, but where I live employers are desperate for people. My son-in-law, who has no education, not even a high school diploma or GED, just got a $16 per hour job, full-time, with benefits, and that after getting fired from his last three jobs for not bothering to show up. "Help Wanted" signs are everywhere, and all are offering well above minimum wage for unskilled labor. My son has an offer, at a similar pay scale, also full-time, with a company who will also pay for all of the training he needs to do the job (composites tech, making airplane parts) and then give him a pay raise when he completes the course. He's decided not to take it because he wants to finish college instead (I approve heartily).
I have less insight into the white collar job market locally, but every reason to believe it's just as hot. I know that local headhunters are knocking down my door.
And yet, I see lots of unemployed young men. They're unemployed because they don't want to work, not because there is no work available. There is lots and lots of work available.
While the article specifically suggests video games, I'd suggest it's a broader dimension of work-life balance. I think there's been a culture shift that killing yourself for your job isn't worth it
I don't think so. I look at my own kids and their friends, and I see a definite impact of video gaming on their productivity.
Note that in what follows, I'm going to start with an illustrative anecdote, then generalize to some more anecdotes. I'm not claiming this is "data", just that it demonstrates a pattern that may explain how video games could actually reduce work hours and related issues, not because of a focus on work/life balance, but because gaming sucks up available time and energy. Perhaps the best word is "focus". Gaming reduces focus on real life issues.
As my prime example, there's a young man who lives in my house. He's a friend of my sons whose own family life was severely problematic. Not abusive, more inattentive and economically dysfunctional. He ended up abandoning school at age 14 to work full time to support his family because his dad was unable to get a job. At age 18, two years ago, he came to visit us for a month, and stayed. We agreed to let him stay because we had room, felt sorry for the mess he was coming from and wanted to help him. We figured that living with us would give him the time to get his GED, then start getting onto a college career track (he's a bright kid; something of an obnoxious geeky know-it-all, but he has the intelligence to back it up, if only he had the education to use that intelligence).
Two years in, he has a part-time job flipping burgers, no GED and no college plans.
Three months in, he didn't even have the job, though he did have a fancy gaming rig that he brought with him. We had been talking to him regularly about his life trajectory and plans, with no effect. To try to get him to make progress, we helped him find information on getting a GED... and we started charging him rent. Only token rent, actually, $300 per month which includes all of his food (he eats at least $300 per month), utilities, etc., and we weren't too picky about him falling behind. That did motivate him to get a job (at the burger place where he still works)... but he didn't actually pay rent very regularly, instead spending most of his money on gaming.
About a year in, we cracked down on the rent requirement. We gave him a deadline to get caught up on his rent, and said that if he didn't, we'd load his stuff in the truck and take him to his mom's house (500 miles away). Because our three-month deadline was generous, he did nothing until a month before the deadline, then decided it was impossible since what he owed was about 150% of his month's income and he hadn't saved a dime. So, he told his boss that he was giving 30 days' notice, and explained the reason. His boss told him that he didn't want to lose him and would make sure that he had enough hours that month to pay his back rent and get caught up. He did, and has stayed current on his rent.
But... no movement at all on education. The gaming rig, however, has grown to epic proportions.
We sat him down for a formal discussion of his future a few days ago, and the conversation was enlightening. We told him that we were going to set a series of deadlines for taking a GED prep course, taking the GED, taking an ACT prep course, and taking that test. He said okay, and we asked him why he hadn't already made progress on the GED. He said that he just hadn't had time... and after some more discussion it became clear that this wasn't an excuse and it wasn't temporizing, it was really what he thought, that his 28-hour work week left him no time to look up when and where to take the GED.
How could that be? Well, his habit, every day, is to wake up thinking about the games he's going to play, with new ideas about how to approach this boss fight, or optimize that character, or some clever combination of tricks for the other scenario.
I won't hold my breath on that passing the savings down to the customers part.
The whole point of this would be to offer cheaper fares. And if fares weren't cheaper, people wouldn't take the airline that makes them stand. A little bit of caution is good, but cynicism quickly reaches ludicrous levels, as yours has.
I'm not saying I'd be interested in using such an airline, but it seems like it could work if they had standing "rests" that passengers could strap themselves to for safety. I mean, you couldn't have passengers being thrown about the plane in turbulent conditions, so they'd need to be secured in place, the way seat-belted passengers are. Also, to reduce the discomfort of actual standing, the backrests could include small, adjustable "choir seats", just a few inches deep, and adjusted to sit high enough that the passenger's legs are almost straight. The cabin would have to be tall enough to accommodate everyone standing, which might require removal of the overhead luggage compartments.
For short flights, it could be safe enough, and not too uncomfortable, and would allow perhaps 75% more passengers on the plane, which would allow ticket prices to be reduced by about 60% -- a $100 flight for $40, for example. Lots of people would be willing to be less comfortable for an hour to save $60, even in wealthier nations.
What makes you think Google got away with this? The watchdog's assessment that the deal was in violation came today. They haven't yet been charged or assessed a penalty.
It appears to me from the article that the penalty has been assessed... to the Royal Free Trust, the hospital group who had the data and the legal obligation to protect it from disclosure without patient approval. The ICO has asked hospital group to "to sign a new agreement committing it to act in accordance with the law and commission an audit of the 2015 trial."
There doesn't appear to be any allegation that DeepMind did anything other than what it was authorized to do by the hospital group who provided the data, so it doesn't look like DeepMind has any culpability. The agreement between DeepMind and Royal Free Trust didn't meet the requirements of the law, so the ICO has asked Royal Free Trust to commit to being more careful with how it shares patient data in the future.
And the same lesson is learned over and over again: Google got away with it.
To be clear, this was DeepMind, which is owned by Google, not Google. From the article:
The contract was always clear that no private data would ever be shared with DeepMind’s parent company Google, which bought the firm in 2014.
Also, it's really Royal Free Trust which is at fault. The core problem here was that patients weren't made aware that their data would be used for this particular purpose, and it was the hospital group who had contact with the patients and access to their data, not DeepMind. Indeed, the ICO's primary immediate action here is to ask the hospital group "to sign a new agreement committing it to act in accordance with the law and commission an audit of the 2015 trial".
While I think DeepMind should also exercise due diligence and take care that its partners aren't breaking the law, the real responsibility here lies with the organization that has the patient data, the hospitals. If DeepMind had violated the terms of the agreement and used the data for purposes other than it told Royal Free Trust, and gotten away with it, then you'd have had grounds for your complaint. As it is, if you want to sharpen your pitchforks, it's the hospitals you should go after, since DeepMind did nothing other than what the hospitals agreed to let it do. And it's also worth noting that no one here is claiming that there was any harm to patients, just not enough care to follow the disclosure requirements.
If you're getting 19 mpg then your vehicle is not a good test case, because it's already very inefficient in some other ways. Don't take that as a criticism; my non-EV vehicle (a Ford F-350 w/6.8L diesel engine) only gets 17 mpg. But if adding or removing a ton of weight from the bed makes no difference at all in fuel economy, there's no way turning on the AC will make any.
I had an AC problem where the compressor died and it was a few days before I could get it into the shop. That week I ran with the windows down and no AC. My mileage dropped to 17.5. Aerodynamics apparently makes more difference.
How fast do you drive? If you're routinely driving 60+ mph the aerodynamic drag from the windows being down is huge. It's not that the AC is a light load, it's that at high speed those windows are a massive source of drag.
All of this means that EV AC only has to cool the passenger compartment from heat that flows in from outside and is generated by incoming sunlight.... What I do know is that running the AC has negligible effect on range.
My EV (hybrid) uses the air conditioner to cool the battery. It's on all the time whether the vents are set to cool or not.
Your logic is wack. Consider the average not exceptions.
But the standard deviations are quite large, so large as to make averages essentially meaningless when you're considering individuals. Sure, the average man is stronger than the average woman, but if you pick a random man and a random woman, the probability that the woman is the stronger of the two is far from negligible, just to take one example. And that is the example that is perhaps most favorable to your argument. If you look at non-physical traits your argument is even less valid.
About the only major thing I'd add to it is: manually programming memory overlay management; organizing code so chunks of it could be discarded and overlaid with other chunks. And then VROOMM came along and made life so much easier.
Speaking of which, I guess I'd also add Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, and TurboVision for UIs. Great stuff, actually.
For now, hybrids seem to be a better solution. You can take advantage of the immensely higher energy density of gasoline and rapid fueling, while still having the benefits of electric motors.
But the huge disadvantage of having to carry the weight and complexity of two different engines.
I think Tesla's solution is the better one: batteries that are big enough for a segment of a long trip, plus superchargers that can replenish the batteries fast enough that the car's need for recharging roughly coincides with the people's needs for bio breaks.
My area is particularly bad for long EV trips, because the freeway speeds are quite high -- speed limits of 80 mph, so the traffic mostly flows at 85-90 mph -- and high speed significantly reduces range (in your other posts you said traffic would do that, which is completely wrong. Heavy traffic means slower speeds which means greater range). Still, I think the Model 3 would be okay for me. Looking at the long trips I typically make, there are superchargers located at all of the places we typically stop anyway, and they are about 120 miles apart. The only difference is that with a Model 3, those stops would be mandatory, not optional -- we sometimes decide to power through without them, and we couldn't do that.
But unless you're very different from most people, long road trips aren't where you do most of your driving anyway. I own a Nissan LEAF, which has about half the range of a Model 3, and we put 18K miles per year on it, significantly more than the 12K we put on the truck (our long-distance vehicle). Commuting and running errands are what really rack up the miles, and a BEV works great for that application.
It's particularly nice that we never have to stop for gas; just take five seconds to plug the car in at home, and it's always full when we leave. And electricity is much cheaper than gasoline. In addition, electric cars are really nice to drive. Quiet, and with great acceleration.
I haven't ordered a Model 3, but I expect that within a couple of years I'll replace my LEAF with a BEV with much greater range, and it will become the car for road trips as well as around town. The truck will be used only when we need to haul or tow something.
However, turning on the AC in traffic kills the battery...
Actually, it doesn't. I've been driving a Nissan LEAF (a car with a much smaller battery) for five years now, and I don't worry about the range impact of the AC at all. The heater is a different story, but AC has virtually no impact on range.
I think part of the reason that AC seems to impact gasoline efficiency more than EV range is the fact that gasoline engines generate a lot of heat. There's a semi-insulated firewall between the engine compartment and the passenger compartment, but I think a lot of the heat still makes its way through, so an ICEV's AC has to work a lot harder. Electric motors produce very little heat anyway, and none when not moving. Batteries also produce a little heat when discharging, but, again, that is negligible except when at high output... which only happens briefly, during acceleration, and even then isn't that much.
All of this means that EV AC only has to cool the passenger compartment from heat that flows in from outside and is generated by incoming sunlight. It doesn't have to fight heat coming from a 200-degree block of metal sitting two feet in front of the passenger cabin, or the heat from the tailpipe flowing under the passenger cabin.
Anyway, that's only my theory, I don't know if it's remotely related to the truth. What I do know is that running the AC has negligible effect on range. I have a few times opted to turn the cabin heater off in the winter to make sure that I had enough battery to get to my destination (which isn't as bad as it sounds, since the car has heated seats and steering wheel; and those have no impact on range). I have never found it to be of any use to turn off the AC. If I'm getting close to the end of my battery in the summer, the only thing I can do is get off the freeway so I can drive slower.
I think we've finally got to the point where it's worth using C++.
Beat me to it. Well, actually I liked C++ before, but it has become dramatically better of late. Modern C++ feels almost like a completely new language, one that's simpler to read and write, harder to screw up (much less of a footgun) and yet still provides the same run-time performance.
The biggest problem with C++ now is that the size of it makes it a steep learning curve.
I'm not so sure about that. I think it's becoming possible to write the modern dialect of C++ without ever learning most of the old cruft. You probably do need someone around who knows the dusty corners, but largely you can ignore them.
Obama really did screw up healthcare royally by creating a system where insurance will pay for healthcare no matter the cost. Why don't you actually go out look how much the cost of healthcare has gone up since 2008, instead of living in your bubble.
I'm no fan of Obama or the ACA, but this is factually false. The ACA slowed the rate of increase of heathcare costs. Pre-ACA, the total per-capita spend on healthcare in the US was increasing by about 6% annually. The ACA reduced this to about 4%. Still unsustainable, but lower.
(Note that the lowest increase in recent years was in 2013 when healthcare expenditure increased only 2.9%. That would have been 3.5%, but sequestration arbitrarily lopped 2% off of all Medicare and Medicaid payments.)
While it's true that the ACA fundamentally broke the insurance model by requiring that insurers cover pre-existing conditions, enabling people to simply avoid buying coverage while healthy (no, the token tax penalty didn't help; it would have had to be an order of magnitude larger), that's not what made the free market approach to healthcare impossible. That's been impossible for a long time, without both a fundamental restructuring of our approach to healthcare and a willingness to let people who can't pay.
There are lots of problems, but I think the three most significant reasons for-profiit healthcare is infeasible in the US are:
1. Misaligned provider incentives for healthcare providers. Doctors and hospitals are paid for doing procedures, not maintaining health.
2. Customer disincentive and inability to economize. Patients who have health care coverage have little incentive to shop for the best value for their money, and even when coinsurance payments and deductibles give them some incentive, they have little ability to make good decisions regarding what kind of care they should buy. And people can't really even shop for healthcare plans, since they can generally only pick from the two or three offered by their employer.
3. Societal unwillingness to let people who can't pay, die. This arises in all sorts of ways, but probably the best example is the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires hospitals to provide care to anyone who arrives at the emergency room in need. This means that at the end of the day everyone has guaranteed healthcare, but only if they get treatment at the most expensive possible time and in the most expensive possible place.
We could probably fix #1 and #2. Not with the ACA (though its exchanges are an attempt to partially address #2 by allowing more "shopping" of insurance options), but with a complete restructuring along the lines of the old HMO idea, but without the tie to employment. There would still be a big question around how to handle patients with serious chronic conditions, though. The McCarran–Ferguson Act of 1945 made it illegal for insurers to drop patients who have such conditions, which is how the whole hullabaloo about pre-existing conditions arose.
But it's not worth investing too much time or effort into trying to figure out how to make that work in a free market system, because #3 is deadly to free market healthcare. As long as we have legal requirements that providers must take care of people who can't pay, we cannot have a free market healthcare system. And we as a society are unwilling to let people die of acute medical conditions merely because they can't pay. Note that coverage for chronic conditions is just a special case of this more general problem.
Please read *my* whole post before responding. Whether or not the artist intends to convey something, or successfully conveys it, is not really important to the perception of the work as art by the viewers.
No, what art does is generate feelings. An artist may be able to use this mechanism to convey them, but I think in lot of cases -- especially in modern art -- there's very little conveying going on. The artist just creates something that generates reactions in viewers, reactions that may have nothing to do with the artist's intentions, and may vary widely among viewers.
So far, machines have none.
Which doesn't in any way mean they can't generate images which provoke emotional reactions in human viewers, or even that we couldn't apply machine learning algorithms to make them better at doing exactly that... or even generating particular kinds of emotions. It's not necessary to have feelings to create them in others.
That power = money and unless you have money you have no power.
Nonsense. In democratically-run countries, money is only a second-order power. Money can be used to try to convince voters to vote a particular way, and a skillfully-run, well-funded campaign can often succeed. But the true power still lies with the voters.
In this particular case, most of the voters probably do agree, for exactly the reason that it's a way to avoid wiping out the power grids which most of them rely on.
I don't know how people can sleep 20 hours without getting a headache. I know I'm not the only one.
I don't think I've ever gotten a headache from sleeping too much. I just don't know how you could sleep 20 hours, at all. Not without pharmaceutical assistance, anyway. There comes a point where you're just done sleeping, and awake.
Ah, thanks. I saw the Minority Report reference in "predictive law enforcement", but I'd forgotten about the three precogs bit. I don't think I ever paid attention to the meaning of the title, somehow.
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The unemployment rates for 20-25 year olds is twice that of the other age groups. Males being the worst off group.
Or maybe gaming is part of the reason for the unemployment.
I don't know about where you live, but where I live employers are desperate for people. My son-in-law, who has no education, not even a high school diploma or GED, just got a $16 per hour job, full-time, with benefits, and that after getting fired from his last three jobs for not bothering to show up. "Help Wanted" signs are everywhere, and all are offering well above minimum wage for unskilled labor. My son has an offer, at a similar pay scale, also full-time, with a company who will also pay for all of the training he needs to do the job (composites tech, making airplane parts) and then give him a pay raise when he completes the course. He's decided not to take it because he wants to finish college instead (I approve heartily).
I have less insight into the white collar job market locally, but every reason to believe it's just as hot. I know that local headhunters are knocking down my door.
And yet, I see lots of unemployed young men. They're unemployed because they don't want to work, not because there is no work available. There is lots and lots of work available.
While the article specifically suggests video games, I'd suggest it's a broader dimension of work-life balance. I think there's been a culture shift that killing yourself for your job isn't worth it
I don't think so. I look at my own kids and their friends, and I see a definite impact of video gaming on their productivity.
Note that in what follows, I'm going to start with an illustrative anecdote, then generalize to some more anecdotes. I'm not claiming this is "data", just that it demonstrates a pattern that may explain how video games could actually reduce work hours and related issues, not because of a focus on work/life balance, but because gaming sucks up available time and energy. Perhaps the best word is "focus". Gaming reduces focus on real life issues.
As my prime example, there's a young man who lives in my house. He's a friend of my sons whose own family life was severely problematic. Not abusive, more inattentive and economically dysfunctional. He ended up abandoning school at age 14 to work full time to support his family because his dad was unable to get a job. At age 18, two years ago, he came to visit us for a month, and stayed. We agreed to let him stay because we had room, felt sorry for the mess he was coming from and wanted to help him. We figured that living with us would give him the time to get his GED, then start getting onto a college career track (he's a bright kid; something of an obnoxious geeky know-it-all, but he has the intelligence to back it up, if only he had the education to use that intelligence).
Two years in, he has a part-time job flipping burgers, no GED and no college plans.
Three months in, he didn't even have the job, though he did have a fancy gaming rig that he brought with him. We had been talking to him regularly about his life trajectory and plans, with no effect. To try to get him to make progress, we helped him find information on getting a GED... and we started charging him rent. Only token rent, actually, $300 per month which includes all of his food (he eats at least $300 per month), utilities, etc., and we weren't too picky about him falling behind. That did motivate him to get a job (at the burger place where he still works)... but he didn't actually pay rent very regularly, instead spending most of his money on gaming.
About a year in, we cracked down on the rent requirement. We gave him a deadline to get caught up on his rent, and said that if he didn't, we'd load his stuff in the truck and take him to his mom's house (500 miles away). Because our three-month deadline was generous, he did nothing until a month before the deadline, then decided it was impossible since what he owed was about 150% of his month's income and he hadn't saved a dime. So, he told his boss that he was giving 30 days' notice, and explained the reason. His boss told him that he didn't want to lose him and would make sure that he had enough hours that month to pay his back rent and get caught up. He did, and has stayed current on his rent.
But... no movement at all on education. The gaming rig, however, has grown to epic proportions.
We sat him down for a formal discussion of his future a few days ago, and the conversation was enlightening. We told him that we were going to set a series of deadlines for taking a GED prep course, taking the GED, taking an ACT prep course, and taking that test. He said okay, and we asked him why he hadn't already made progress on the GED. He said that he just hadn't had time... and after some more discussion it became clear that this wasn't an excuse and it wasn't temporizing, it was really what he thought, that his 28-hour work week left him no time to look up when and where to take the GED.
How could that be? Well, his habit, every day, is to wake up thinking about the games he's going to play, with new ideas about how to approach this boss fight, or optimize that character, or some clever combination of tricks for the other scenario.
And here's where
The joint popping was the placebo that did it for you.
I won't hold my breath on that passing the savings down to the customers part.
The whole point of this would be to offer cheaper fares. And if fares weren't cheaper, people wouldn't take the airline that makes them stand. A little bit of caution is good, but cynicism quickly reaches ludicrous levels, as yours has.
I'm not saying I'd be interested in using such an airline, but it seems like it could work if they had standing "rests" that passengers could strap themselves to for safety. I mean, you couldn't have passengers being thrown about the plane in turbulent conditions, so they'd need to be secured in place, the way seat-belted passengers are. Also, to reduce the discomfort of actual standing, the backrests could include small, adjustable "choir seats", just a few inches deep, and adjusted to sit high enough that the passenger's legs are almost straight. The cabin would have to be tall enough to accommodate everyone standing, which might require removal of the overhead luggage compartments.
For short flights, it could be safe enough, and not too uncomfortable, and would allow perhaps 75% more passengers on the plane, which would allow ticket prices to be reduced by about 60% -- a $100 flight for $40, for example. Lots of people would be willing to be less comfortable for an hour to save $60, even in wealthier nations.
It could work, I think.
I give it 6 months until those same folks start getting ads for medications of deepmind-guessed ailments.
DeepMind doesn't do advertising, and the contract never allowed any sharing of patient data with Google.
What makes you think Google got away with this? The watchdog's assessment that the deal was in violation came today. They haven't yet been charged or assessed a penalty.
It appears to me from the article that the penalty has been assessed... to the Royal Free Trust, the hospital group who had the data and the legal obligation to protect it from disclosure without patient approval. The ICO has asked hospital group to "to sign a new agreement committing it to act in accordance with the law and commission an audit of the 2015 trial."
There doesn't appear to be any allegation that DeepMind did anything other than what it was authorized to do by the hospital group who provided the data, so it doesn't look like DeepMind has any culpability. The agreement between DeepMind and Royal Free Trust didn't meet the requirements of the law, so the ICO has asked Royal Free Trust to commit to being more careful with how it shares patient data in the future.
And the same lesson is learned over and over again: Google got away with it.
To be clear, this was DeepMind, which is owned by Google, not Google. From the article:
Also, it's really Royal Free Trust which is at fault. The core problem here was that patients weren't made aware that their data would be used for this particular purpose, and it was the hospital group who had contact with the patients and access to their data, not DeepMind. Indeed, the ICO's primary immediate action here is to ask the hospital group "to sign a new agreement committing it to act in accordance with the law and commission an audit of the 2015 trial".
While I think DeepMind should also exercise due diligence and take care that its partners aren't breaking the law, the real responsibility here lies with the organization that has the patient data, the hospitals. If DeepMind had violated the terms of the agreement and used the data for purposes other than it told Royal Free Trust, and gotten away with it, then you'd have had grounds for your complaint. As it is, if you want to sharpen your pitchforks, it's the hospitals you should go after, since DeepMind did nothing other than what the hospitals agreed to let it do. And it's also worth noting that no one here is claiming that there was any harm to patients, just not enough care to follow the disclosure requirements.
If you're getting 19 mpg then your vehicle is not a good test case, because it's already very inefficient in some other ways. Don't take that as a criticism; my non-EV vehicle (a Ford F-350 w/6.8L diesel engine) only gets 17 mpg. But if adding or removing a ton of weight from the bed makes no difference at all in fuel economy, there's no way turning on the AC will make any.
I had an AC problem where the compressor died and it was a few days before I could get it into the shop. That week I ran with the windows down and no AC. My mileage dropped to 17.5. Aerodynamics apparently makes more difference.
How fast do you drive? If you're routinely driving 60+ mph the aerodynamic drag from the windows being down is huge. It's not that the AC is a light load, it's that at high speed those windows are a massive source of drag.
All of this means that EV AC only has to cool the passenger compartment from heat that flows in from outside and is generated by incoming sunlight. ... What I do know is that running the AC has negligible effect on range.
My EV (hybrid) uses the air conditioner to cool the battery. It's on all the time whether the vents are set to cool or not.
My EV (actual EV, not hybrid), doesn't.
Noether's theorem is laughably wrong
Misogynist doesn't know what a theorem is. News at 11.
Your logic is wack. Consider the average not exceptions.
But the standard deviations are quite large, so large as to make averages essentially meaningless when you're considering individuals. Sure, the average man is stronger than the average woman, but if you pick a random man and a random woman, the probability that the woman is the stronger of the two is far from negligible, just to take one example. And that is the example that is perhaps most favorable to your argument. If you look at non-physical traits your argument is even less valid.
I am talking about things that improve the kernel itself.
How about BFQ? I/O scheduling is a core kernel function, and BFQ is a significant improvement.
Good list.
About the only major thing I'd add to it is: manually programming memory overlay management; organizing code so chunks of it could be discarded and overlaid with other chunks. And then VROOMM came along and made life so much easier.
Speaking of which, I guess I'd also add Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, and TurboVision for UIs. Great stuff, actually.
For now, hybrids seem to be a better solution. You can take advantage of the immensely higher energy density of gasoline and rapid fueling, while still having the benefits of electric motors.
But the huge disadvantage of having to carry the weight and complexity of two different engines.
I think Tesla's solution is the better one: batteries that are big enough for a segment of a long trip, plus superchargers that can replenish the batteries fast enough that the car's need for recharging roughly coincides with the people's needs for bio breaks.
My area is particularly bad for long EV trips, because the freeway speeds are quite high -- speed limits of 80 mph, so the traffic mostly flows at 85-90 mph -- and high speed significantly reduces range (in your other posts you said traffic would do that, which is completely wrong. Heavy traffic means slower speeds which means greater range). Still, I think the Model 3 would be okay for me. Looking at the long trips I typically make, there are superchargers located at all of the places we typically stop anyway, and they are about 120 miles apart. The only difference is that with a Model 3, those stops would be mandatory, not optional -- we sometimes decide to power through without them, and we couldn't do that.
But unless you're very different from most people, long road trips aren't where you do most of your driving anyway. I own a Nissan LEAF, which has about half the range of a Model 3, and we put 18K miles per year on it, significantly more than the 12K we put on the truck (our long-distance vehicle). Commuting and running errands are what really rack up the miles, and a BEV works great for that application.
It's particularly nice that we never have to stop for gas; just take five seconds to plug the car in at home, and it's always full when we leave. And electricity is much cheaper than gasoline. In addition, electric cars are really nice to drive. Quiet, and with great acceleration.
I haven't ordered a Model 3, but I expect that within a couple of years I'll replace my LEAF with a BEV with much greater range, and it will become the car for road trips as well as around town. The truck will be used only when we need to haul or tow something.
However, turning on the AC in traffic kills the battery...
Actually, it doesn't. I've been driving a Nissan LEAF (a car with a much smaller battery) for five years now, and I don't worry about the range impact of the AC at all. The heater is a different story, but AC has virtually no impact on range.
I think part of the reason that AC seems to impact gasoline efficiency more than EV range is the fact that gasoline engines generate a lot of heat. There's a semi-insulated firewall between the engine compartment and the passenger compartment, but I think a lot of the heat still makes its way through, so an ICEV's AC has to work a lot harder. Electric motors produce very little heat anyway, and none when not moving. Batteries also produce a little heat when discharging, but, again, that is negligible except when at high output... which only happens briefly, during acceleration, and even then isn't that much.
All of this means that EV AC only has to cool the passenger compartment from heat that flows in from outside and is generated by incoming sunlight. It doesn't have to fight heat coming from a 200-degree block of metal sitting two feet in front of the passenger cabin, or the heat from the tailpipe flowing under the passenger cabin.
Anyway, that's only my theory, I don't know if it's remotely related to the truth. What I do know is that running the AC has negligible effect on range. I have a few times opted to turn the cabin heater off in the winter to make sure that I had enough battery to get to my destination (which isn't as bad as it sounds, since the car has heated seats and steering wheel; and those have no impact on range). I have never found it to be of any use to turn off the AC. If I'm getting close to the end of my battery in the summer, the only thing I can do is get off the freeway so I can drive slower.
I think we've finally got to the point where it's worth using C++.
Beat me to it. Well, actually I liked C++ before, but it has become dramatically better of late. Modern C++ feels almost like a completely new language, one that's simpler to read and write, harder to screw up (much less of a footgun) and yet still provides the same run-time performance.
The biggest problem with C++ now is that the size of it makes it a steep learning curve.
I'm not so sure about that. I think it's becoming possible to write the modern dialect of C++ without ever learning most of the old cruft. You probably do need someone around who knows the dusty corners, but largely you can ignore them.
Then they had access to DemolitionRanch. They should know how much shit a 50 cal will go through.
Also, they had access to a gun. A quick test would have demonstrated the fatal flaw in their plan. Maybe they only had one book.
Obama really did screw up healthcare royally by creating a system where insurance will pay for healthcare no matter the cost. Why don't you actually go out look how much the cost of healthcare has gone up since 2008, instead of living in your bubble.
I'm no fan of Obama or the ACA, but this is factually false. The ACA slowed the rate of increase of heathcare costs. Pre-ACA, the total per-capita spend on healthcare in the US was increasing by about 6% annually. The ACA reduced this to about 4%. Still unsustainable, but lower.
(Note that the lowest increase in recent years was in 2013 when healthcare expenditure increased only 2.9%. That would have been 3.5%, but sequestration arbitrarily lopped 2% off of all Medicare and Medicaid payments.)
While it's true that the ACA fundamentally broke the insurance model by requiring that insurers cover pre-existing conditions, enabling people to simply avoid buying coverage while healthy (no, the token tax penalty didn't help; it would have had to be an order of magnitude larger), that's not what made the free market approach to healthcare impossible. That's been impossible for a long time, without both a fundamental restructuring of our approach to healthcare and a willingness to let people who can't pay.
There are lots of problems, but I think the three most significant reasons for-profiit healthcare is infeasible in the US are:
1. Misaligned provider incentives for healthcare providers. Doctors and hospitals are paid for doing procedures, not maintaining health.
2. Customer disincentive and inability to economize. Patients who have health care coverage have little incentive to shop for the best value for their money, and even when coinsurance payments and deductibles give them some incentive, they have little ability to make good decisions regarding what kind of care they should buy. And people can't really even shop for healthcare plans, since they can generally only pick from the two or three offered by their employer.
3. Societal unwillingness to let people who can't pay, die. This arises in all sorts of ways, but probably the best example is the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires hospitals to provide care to anyone who arrives at the emergency room in need. This means that at the end of the day everyone has guaranteed healthcare, but only if they get treatment at the most expensive possible time and in the most expensive possible place.
We could probably fix #1 and #2. Not with the ACA (though its exchanges are an attempt to partially address #2 by allowing more "shopping" of insurance options), but with a complete restructuring along the lines of the old HMO idea, but without the tie to employment. There would still be a big question around how to handle patients with serious chronic conditions, though. The McCarran–Ferguson Act of 1945 made it illegal for insurers to drop patients who have such conditions, which is how the whole hullabaloo about pre-existing conditions arose.
But it's not worth investing too much time or effort into trying to figure out how to make that work in a free market system, because #3 is deadly to free market healthcare. As long as we have legal requirements that providers must take care of people who can't pay, we cannot have a free market healthcare system. And we as a society are unwilling to let people die of acute medical conditions merely because they can't pay. Note that coverage for chronic conditions is just a special case of this more general problem.
Please read *my* whole post before responding. Whether or not the artist intends to convey something, or successfully conveys it, is not really important to the perception of the work as art by the viewers.
What art does is convey feelings.
No, what art does is generate feelings. An artist may be able to use this mechanism to convey them, but I think in lot of cases -- especially in modern art -- there's very little conveying going on. The artist just creates something that generates reactions in viewers, reactions that may have nothing to do with the artist's intentions, and may vary widely among viewers.
So far, machines have none.
Which doesn't in any way mean they can't generate images which provoke emotional reactions in human viewers, or even that we couldn't apply machine learning algorithms to make them better at doing exactly that... or even generating particular kinds of emotions. It's not necessary to have feelings to create them in others.
You didn't read the post you responded to.
Perhaps you can explain what I'm missing here?
That power = money and unless you have money you have no power.
Nonsense. In democratically-run countries, money is only a second-order power. Money can be used to try to convince voters to vote a particular way, and a skillfully-run, well-funded campaign can often succeed. But the true power still lies with the voters.
In this particular case, most of the voters probably do agree, for exactly the reason that it's a way to avoid wiping out the power grids which most of them rely on.
I don't know how people can sleep 20 hours without getting a headache. I know I'm not the only one.
I don't think I've ever gotten a headache from sleeping too much. I just don't know how you could sleep 20 hours, at all. Not without pharmaceutical assistance, anyway. There comes a point where you're just done sleeping, and awake.
I think it's a reference to this
Ah, thanks. I saw the Minority Report reference in "predictive law enforcement", but I'd forgotten about the three precogs bit. I don't think I ever paid attention to the meaning of the title, somehow.