You should also add in the cost of fuel, because you're of course carrying that weight as well.
But anyway, you just bring it up in pieces and build it in orbit, like the ISS. Because of the exponential growth of fuel costs, I imagine that this would be much cheaper.
The RvB guys do some good work, especially considering the tools at their disposal, and have fairly good writing for many of their episodes.
However, I'd like to plug the guys doing a new machinima: Bloodspell. That group has done a number of machinima shorts and features over the years and has constantly been pushing the envelope with machinima. The quality they get out of engines never designed for this is amazing.
I'm on your side in this one, but honestly, how could you possibly think that "Well, they might decide to fuck us later" is a valid argument?
If it were, you wouldn't be allowed to do anything. Well, if I pay you for my groceries, you might just take the money and run, so I don't have to pay. But officer, if you arrest me, you might beat a confession out of me, so you're not allowed to arrest me.
No, congress isn't supposed to be allowed to fuck me over things I 'might' do, and the inverse applies too.
Now hold on just a moment there. While the likely environmental changes to the environment are terrible, they're not that bad.
Six billion people dead? As another replier commented, that much land simply won't be lost. We won't be stuck in Water World, and while things will change there will still be enormous amounts of land left.
Your statements have no basis in fact. You may be interested to know that one of the big problems global warming will cause is not in fact floods, but droughts as places like China whose rivers are largely glacier fed will dry up as the glaciers vanish, leading to many farming problems due to lack of water.
Now, please tell me, what's wrong with recognizing the effects of global warming, be they positive or negative? You focus on the negative, but that doesn't mean that the positive aren't there. Now, it'll be bad enough that we should try to avoid it, but *if it happened*, why shouldn't we take advantage of anything new in the world?
The crux of the problem is that universities think they're preparing someone for employment in the real world and that's what they market, even though the curriculum hasn't been updated for that at all. That's why my school has silly classes like a management class that covers all the useless stuff like Gantt charts, and has a data structures class that only makes you use the structures, not implement them.
I find this article interesting not because it sucks up to programmer egos - which it does - but because, unlike many other articles, it brings in some relatively hard data to support the up-suckage.
Consider Paul Graham, who could be accused of writing programmer ego-stroking articles. They are both good writers, but I like that Joel (at least here) tries to support the theory. He doesn't say "Some programmers are fundamentally better", which is a fairly wide-spread folk belief, backed only anecdotally usually. Instead, Joel says "Are some programmer's fundamentally better? Here's some data that suggests just that".
On a seperate note, a lot of other posters here are saying "Who's Joel?" and "Why should I listen to some guy I've never heard of?". Well, that's a silly argument against whatever he might be saying in your article of choice. Remember that ESR was a nobody once; he seems to be primarily noted for writing the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Similarly with Joel: he's worked on a few software projects, though you may have never heard his name, and he writes well, and his articles make sense. To me anyway: you may disagree, but at least then you're disagreeing based on content, not based on "I've never heard of him so he must be some jackass upstart know-it-all."
Efficiency, I'd think, as far as a percentage goes, should refer to the amount of energy (heat) moved (cooled) compared to the energy put into the A/C unit. Meaning that 50% efficiency means that I expend 50 watts for every 25 watts of heat I've removed.
Is this understanding flawed?
If it's not, then what is 400% effiency? Cold fusion? It would mean that I pull out of the cooled air more energy than I use to cool it.
Ahh, but they're not lost. You pull the one out of your safe location and go change all your passwords.
Keep in mind where you stand: yes, you can lose your passwords with everything else. But you've lost everything else then too; I'd be more worried about losing my drivers license, credit cards, etc., than I would the couple of passwords. Even if I lost my bank's website's passwords, how is that worse than losing my debit card?
No, seriously. Paper is an incredible solution. At our office we have a locked filing cabinets we store passwords in. Quite handy.
An excellent personal solution is to keep a list in your wallet. Keep another list somewhere safe and stationary, so that if you lose the first one you have a complete list of sites to go down to change all the passwords.
It's pretty much the simplest thing you could possibly have, secure, and responds well to failure.
Now, maybe I'm one of those stolen minds, but I'd appreciate it if you could explain to us why per capita innovation matters more than total innovation.
I see the reverse being important, because most breakthroughs depend on something else. Integrated circuits don't matter until there's readily available electricity, for instance. This suggests to me that the rate of breakthroughs depends on itself more than the number of people researching it.
I agree with you quite strongly, however I still don't think that argument really quite works.
It's one thing entirely to know that something unknown might go wrong and you may die. It's quite another to know that what went wrong last time wasn't fixed.
I count the former to be an acceptable risk, given the care NASA usually takes and their track record. The latter, I really must concede. They should fix the problems better.
Am I okay with countries sending suicide bombers? No. But, I respect the tactic. I think it would be better if we weren't at war and if we weren't a target.
The question of whether war in general is morally right or wrong is one thing (I think it's bad), and it is quite a different question to ask whether or not, given a war being fought already, it is morally right or wrong to fight that war effectively.
So, to answer your question: No, I do not support terrorists attacking us, and yes I think that suicide bombers are a perfectly reasonable tactic. It has, from a military standpoint, proven to be one of the most effective attacks possible, i.e. Pearl Harbor (I'm sure there's other examples fresh in your minds as well).
Hell yeah it sounds like us. America fights to win. Now maybe we fight too often and in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons (I'm not interested in debating the appropriateness of the most recent war, I hate it, but that's not the question at hand), but when we fight, we don't just march out some poor draftees in front of enemy machine guns to be fair to the enemy. We airstrike them and snipe them and smartbomb them, because we're not there to be fair, we're there to win. We're there to liberate or conquer or raze, but we're not there to die.
I hate this war and I hate the reasons for it and I hate those who perpetrated it. But I won't hate the man that saves legions of my fellow Americans by taking out the enemy from safe distance.
It is as great a crime to send our boys in defenseless, ill-equipped, and without backup to die as it is to subjugate and persecute the enemy.
And as for the name 'rod of god', it's a nickname for Pete's sake. It's not official marketingspeak from the government, it's a bloody nickname! And a pretty damned good one, too.
Not because we want humanoid robots as such; there is some use for them, of course, but you're right: they aren't the solution to all problems.
However, many of the problems involved in making a bipedal robots are the same problems you get in other areas. For instance, I suspect that the problems in making a robot walk on two legs are present to some extent in making a 4 or 8 legged robot. That is, while we can make an 8 legged robot now, if we knew how to make a 2 legged one, we could probably make a better 8 legged one.
That's the first example that comes to mind; it's rather silly because you could just start with the 8-legged robot and make it better on its own. But I think it serves to illustrate the idea, at least.
I am not exactly a materials engineer, but I believe that many of the plastic components, PCBs, etc., release extremely toxic fumes when burned. Now, maybe they can be melted safely at below burning temperature, and maybe I'm just totally off-base. But most of my little burning experiments as a misguided youth were geared towards less smelly things than electronics.
What the fuck are you talking about? What perfect insulator? The suits aren't a perfect insulator, and no one has a perfect insulator yet. Put a self warming thing in an imperfect insulator and what happens? You probably get cold.
Your blood won't boil? Bullshit. The temperature things boil at depends quite a bit on pressure. This is one of the reasons that many cake mixes and such have different directions for cooking at high altitude. How the hell do you think that rubber glove works? It works by *maintaining pressure*.
The only thing you got right was the radiation. Honestly, who taught you that?!
How about this, from kernel.org as I type this: Current bandwidth utilization 146.96 Mbit/s
There are tons of legitimate sites with that level of traffic. The ibiblio archives come to mind, along with much stuff from archive.org. Don't pretend that there's not overwhelming legitimate usages for BT. That may be true for Napster, but I think you have a hard case to prove, if you're looking at BT.
That's not really the problem, because we're still consuming it. It may be at a slower rate, but we still are. No oil-burning is a good step to take, but it's not a solution. It's a patch, because we haven't the foggiest idea how to live without oil.
Recycling isn't a solution either, because you don't get 100% back.
We'll still be heavily dependant on materials that we'll run out of and can't synthesize or replace.
Why the concern about "want to believe this, want to believe that"? Why don't you consider the facts that are there. Fact 1: This guy could be lying. Fact 2: regardless of his thoughts, the election results do not make much sense. Take a look at my roomate's page. He's compiled a bit of data, from official sources (linked to from the page), that brings into question the results of the election. Real numbers. Scary, isn't it?
Yeah, I'm of the ignorant new generation, so sue me. But seriously, has anything like this ever happened? A close/disputed election, with the administration massively changed between terms? Is there any precedent for what we're seeing, and what did it mean last time?
Of course they'll have an effect! Cities full of buildings have an effect, don't they? We already know that significantly altering the wind profile of the land changes the climate.
Now, many people say that 'of course they won't have as big an affect as a big city'. Maybe not. But wind power on a scale large enough to power that same big city, it might. It'd be significant, anyway.
I'm glad there's a study saying it now, but dammit people, duh!
Slashdot Mirror
You should also add in the cost of fuel, because you're of course carrying that weight as well.
But anyway, you just bring it up in pieces and build it in orbit, like the ISS. Because of the exponential growth of fuel costs, I imagine that this would be much cheaper.
"This pedantry regarding ending a sentence with a preposition is the sort of business up with which I will not put" -- Winston Churchill
However, I'd like to plug the guys doing a new machinima: Bloodspell. That group has done a number of machinima shorts and features over the years and has constantly been pushing the envelope with machinima. The quality they get out of engines never designed for this is amazing.
I'm on your side in this one, but honestly, how could you possibly think that "Well, they might decide to fuck us later" is a valid argument?
If it were, you wouldn't be allowed to do anything. Well, if I pay you for my groceries, you might just take the money and run, so I don't have to pay. But officer, if you arrest me, you might beat a confession out of me, so you're not allowed to arrest me.
No, congress isn't supposed to be allowed to fuck me over things I 'might' do, and the inverse applies too.
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
Please the boss that can give you the raise and fire you.
Now hold on just a moment there. While the likely environmental changes to the environment are terrible, they're not that bad.
Six billion people dead? As another replier commented, that much land simply won't be lost. We won't be stuck in Water World, and while things will change there will still be enormous amounts of land left.
Your statements have no basis in fact. You may be interested to know that one of the big problems global warming will cause is not in fact floods, but droughts as places like China whose rivers are largely glacier fed will dry up as the glaciers vanish, leading to many farming problems due to lack of water.
Now, please tell me, what's wrong with recognizing the effects of global warming, be they positive or negative? You focus on the negative, but that doesn't mean that the positive aren't there. Now, it'll be bad enough that we should try to avoid it, but *if it happened*, why shouldn't we take advantage of anything new in the world?
The crux of the problem is that universities think they're preparing someone for employment in the real world and that's what they market, even though the curriculum hasn't been updated for that at all. That's why my school has silly classes like a management class that covers all the useless stuff like Gantt charts, and has a data structures class that only makes you use the structures, not implement them.
I find this article interesting not because it sucks up to programmer egos - which it does - but because, unlike many other articles, it brings in some relatively hard data to support the up-suckage.
Consider Paul Graham, who could be accused of writing programmer ego-stroking articles. They are both good writers, but I like that Joel (at least here) tries to support the theory. He doesn't say "Some programmers are fundamentally better", which is a fairly wide-spread folk belief, backed only anecdotally usually. Instead, Joel says "Are some programmer's fundamentally better? Here's some data that suggests just that".
On a seperate note, a lot of other posters here are saying "Who's Joel?" and "Why should I listen to some guy I've never heard of?". Well, that's a silly argument against whatever he might be saying in your article of choice. Remember that ESR was a nobody once; he seems to be primarily noted for writing the Cathedral and the Bazaar. Similarly with Joel: he's worked on a few software projects, though you may have never heard his name, and he writes well, and his articles make sense. To me anyway: you may disagree, but at least then you're disagreeing based on content, not based on "I've never heard of him so he must be some jackass upstart know-it-all."
Efficiency, I'd think, as far as a percentage goes, should refer to the amount of energy (heat) moved (cooled) compared to the energy put into the A/C unit. Meaning that 50% efficiency means that I expend 50 watts for every 25 watts of heat I've removed.
Is this understanding flawed?
If it's not, then what is 400% effiency? Cold fusion? It would mean that I pull out of the cooled air more energy than I use to cool it.
Ahh, but they're not lost. You pull the one out of your safe location and go change all your passwords.
Keep in mind where you stand: yes, you can lose your passwords with everything else. But you've lost everything else then too; I'd be more worried about losing my drivers license, credit cards, etc., than I would the couple of passwords. Even if I lost my bank's website's passwords, how is that worse than losing my debit card?
No, seriously. Paper is an incredible solution. At our office we have a locked filing cabinets we store passwords in. Quite handy.
An excellent personal solution is to keep a list in your wallet. Keep another list somewhere safe and stationary, so that if you lose the first one you have a complete list of sites to go down to change all the passwords.
It's pretty much the simplest thing you could possibly have, secure, and responds well to failure.
Now, maybe I'm one of those stolen minds, but I'd appreciate it if you could explain to us why per capita innovation matters more than total innovation.
I see the reverse being important, because most breakthroughs depend on something else. Integrated circuits don't matter until there's readily available electricity, for instance.
This suggests to me that the rate of breakthroughs depends on itself more than the number of people researching it.
I agree with you quite strongly, however I still don't think that argument really quite works.
It's one thing entirely to know that something unknown might go wrong and you may die. It's quite another to know that what went wrong last time wasn't fixed.
I count the former to be an acceptable risk, given the care NASA usually takes and their track record. The latter, I really must concede. They should fix the problems better.
Am I okay with countries sending suicide bombers? No. But, I respect the tactic. I think it would be better if we weren't at war and if we weren't a target.
The question of whether war in general is morally right or wrong is one thing (I think it's bad), and it is quite a different question to ask whether or not, given a war being fought already, it is morally right or wrong to fight that war effectively.
So, to answer your question: No, I do not support terrorists attacking us, and yes I think that suicide bombers are a perfectly reasonable tactic. It has, from a military standpoint, proven to be one of the most effective attacks possible, i.e. Pearl Harbor (I'm sure there's other examples fresh in your minds as well).
Hell yeah it sounds like us. America fights to win. Now maybe we fight too often and in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons (I'm not interested in debating the appropriateness of the most recent war, I hate it, but that's not the question at hand), but when we fight, we don't just march out some poor draftees in front of enemy machine guns to be fair to the enemy. We airstrike them and snipe them and smartbomb them, because we're not there to be fair, we're there to win. We're there to liberate or conquer or raze, but we're not there to die.
I hate this war and I hate the reasons for it and I hate those who perpetrated it. But I won't hate the man that saves legions of my fellow Americans by taking out the enemy from safe distance.
It is as great a crime to send our boys in defenseless, ill-equipped, and without backup to die as it is to subjugate and persecute the enemy.
And as for the name 'rod of god', it's a nickname for Pete's sake. It's not official marketingspeak from the government, it's a bloody nickname! And a pretty damned good one, too.
Not because we want humanoid robots as such; there is some use for them, of course, but you're right: they aren't the solution to all problems.
However, many of the problems involved in making a bipedal robots are the same problems you get in other areas. For instance, I suspect that the problems in making a robot walk on two legs are present to some extent in making a 4 or 8 legged robot. That is, while we can make an 8 legged robot now, if we knew how to make a 2 legged one, we could probably make a better 8 legged one.
That's the first example that comes to mind; it's rather silly because you could just start with the 8-legged robot and make it better on its own. But I think it serves to illustrate the idea, at least.
At least, this is why I like humanoid robots.
I am not exactly a materials engineer, but I believe that many of the plastic components, PCBs, etc., release extremely toxic fumes when burned. Now, maybe they can be melted safely at below burning temperature, and maybe I'm just totally off-base. But most of my little burning experiments as a misguided youth were geared towards less smelly things than electronics.
What the fuck are you talking about? What perfect insulator? The suits aren't a perfect insulator, and no one has a perfect insulator yet. Put a self warming thing in an imperfect insulator and what happens? You probably get cold.
Your blood won't boil? Bullshit. The temperature things boil at depends quite a bit on pressure. This is one of the reasons that many cake mixes and such have different directions for cooking at high altitude. How the hell do you think that rubber glove works? It works by *maintaining pressure*.
The only thing you got right was the radiation. Honestly, who taught you that?!
How about this, from kernel.org as I type this: Current bandwidth utilization 146.96 Mbit/s
There are tons of legitimate sites with that level of traffic. The ibiblio archives come to mind, along with much stuff from archive.org. Don't pretend that there's not overwhelming legitimate usages for BT. That may be true for Napster, but I think you have a hard case to prove, if you're looking at BT.
That's not really the problem, because we're still consuming it. It may be at a slower rate, but we still are. No oil-burning is a good step to take, but it's not a solution. It's a patch, because we haven't the foggiest idea how to live without oil.
Recycling isn't a solution either, because you don't get 100% back.
We'll still be heavily dependant on materials that we'll run out of and can't synthesize or replace.
To claim 'oil-free' is just fucking stupid.
Yes, if they stopped burning oil they'd have more oil for other uses.
Which makes them oil-free how exactly?
Why the concern about "want to believe this, want to believe that"? Why don't you consider the facts that are there. Fact 1: This guy could be lying. Fact 2: regardless of his thoughts, the election results do not make much sense. Take a look at my roomate's page. He's compiled a bit of data, from official sources (linked to from the page), that brings into question the results of the election. Real numbers. Scary, isn't it?
VC may be a good idea, but it probably isn't. Read these links:
- Joel on Software on VCs
- 10 reasons to shy away from venture capital
I wouldn't bet on it, personally. Consider very very hard what you're in it for, and what risks you're willing to take.Yeah, I'm of the ignorant new generation, so sue me. But seriously, has anything like this ever happened? A close/disputed election, with the administration massively changed between terms? Is there any precedent for what we're seeing, and what did it mean last time?
Of course they'll have an effect! Cities full of buildings have an effect, don't they? We already know that significantly altering the wind profile of the land changes the climate.
Now, many people say that 'of course they won't have as big an affect as a big city'. Maybe not. But wind power on a scale large enough to power that same big city, it might. It'd be significant, anyway.
I'm glad there's a study saying it now, but dammit people, duh!