But you can't use old apps forever anyway. Apple will push OS updates that will eventually break them and you will have to get new versions. So they are doing you a favor by getting you a head of the curve/s.
Seriously - anything in the cloud is volatile storage and unless you are paying for it you can expect one day the service "provider" will decide to stop providing. Even if you do pay for the service, you are entirely at the mercy of their competence and the durability of their business model.
Pournelle never had any grasp of that very fundamental thing in human endeavor called "economics", which is where all space-mining, colonies-on-the-moon fantasies and such fail if they ever touch it in the slightest degree. Spaceflight hardware of any sort is simply too expensive to move "off Earth" without increasing economic productivity by another couple of orders of magnitude. When it takes the labor of 100,000 to put one man in space (paying the bills, or building and maintaining the systems) space travel can only be very rare.
There is a coterie of militaristic Libertarian hard SF fans (like Pournelle) who are really as much soft-headed wish-filled pipe-dreamers as any New Age holistic crystal-healing fans -- believing that simple economics do not apply to the stuff that catches their fancy. For them there is a magic infinite money fountain for space travel (and weapons) but nothing at all can be spared to help people who are poor.
The bitter nonsense that obsessed Pournelle in his later years was all there at the very beginning.
As the saying goes - speed bumps are no problem if you take them fast. Like "washboard" roads this is really true, a car's dynamic suspension can even out the double bump if you moving fast enough.
But speed dips are another story entirely. Mostly these aren't really put in for speed control, usually it is for surface drainage, but they work really well to make people slow down. A memorable occasion I recall in one such town was a caddy that went into the dip excessively fast, and the front of the car pitched forward and hit the macadam with a shower of sparks, then rocked backed and the rear did the same thing, then the car rocked forward and hit the pavement again, with another spark shower. I doubt the driver did this again.
Ah grasshopper, you know absolutely nothing about handling gases! I expect that you have encountered the idea that gas can be compressed and/or liquified and stored in tanks however.
Sulfur dioxide is very easily liquefied (if has been uses a refrigerant since the 19th century) and a room temperature has a vapor pressure of only 2.5 atmospheres, so a light weight low pressure container easily holds it (you would need a 3.5 atmosphere container of course to hold it as you climb to the stratosphere). If you like you can refrigerate it to lower the vapor pressure even further.
The density of sulfur dioxide is 2.6, which is 2.6 tonnes per cubic meter. So 100 tonnes can be loaded into a pressure tank with a volume of only 40 cubic meters, not 55,600 cubic meters. It would be a little bitty (but heavy) tank. The SO2 would vaporize completely when the pressure was released through a nozzle.
Here is a link to the actual journal article, rather than these popularizations. Are we geeks or not?
The paper does not discuss the process of injecting 5 teragrams (5 million tonnes) of SO2 into the stratosphere each year but since airliners fly in the lower stratosphere, and a 747-400 can carry 100+ tonnes as payload 50,000 flights a year could do this using planes that were flying SO2 tanks. If one plane could do 10 flights a day then a fleet of only 15 planes could handle the mission.
Don't tell the chemtrail people about this.
Although fighting pollution with more pollution is hardly an optimal approach, it is one weapon that is perhaps available. Since periodic injections of SO2 occur naturally (e.g. Pinatubo) we do have data about the lifetime of these aerosols. It appears that scavenging will prevent long-term effects if it is decided that this is not something we want to keep doing.
Basically a really large EF4 tornado, however these speeds are only found in the eyewall so it's not as bad as it sounds.
Plenty bad enough. The eye of Irma is currently 40 km across, which means when the eye sweeps over some place a zone 40+ km is getting hit with the maximum wind speed. I don't want to meet up with any ~50 km wide tornado.
But people get fixated on the wind speeds. Throw in a 3-4 m storm surge and torrential rain, all at the same time...
Reading the TFA (I know, I know, what sort of slashdotter am I?) we find that only people watching multiple episodes at a sitting found the experience "less enjoyable". People who watched one episode each day in a row found it equally enjoyable.
I found waiting for the end of Breaking Bad and watching all 62 episodes over two months (one a day) to be quite enjoyable, and I am certain that I caught certain plot points that spanned seasons (which aired over a five year period) better than I would have with nearly year-long breaks between seasons.
The initial adoption is going to be by commercial operations - specifically trucking and other delivery services. They are only motivated by the bottom line and legal restrictions.
And the adoption by trucking companies has already started. Automated long distance trucking (with remote drone driving to take over on surface streets at the beginning and end) is already hitting the roads.
The cost advantages of automated trucking is staggering. Not only is the cost of the driver eliminated, but the truck can be kept on the road 24/7, and the truck can be operated in the most cost efficient manner. Is fuel the pain point? Drive slowly. Is it the delivery time? Drive faster. Human drivers do not optimize like this.
The cost advantage is something like 3-to-1. This is so large that any company that does not adopt it as soon as competitors do will immediately go out of business. It will not be optional.
A nice historical analogy is the introduction of the spinning mule in cotton spinning in England in 1779. The introduction of the spinning jenny had already enormously increased the productivity of the home spinner several fold and led to a huge cotton spinning industry in the countryside. But the factory-based spinning mule was so much more efficient that the entire spinning jenny industry was put out of business in only 8 years (by 1787).
Once commercial automated vehicles have replaced human drivers, the adoption of automated cars will seem much less revolutionary (and the commercial operators will have killed legions of snakes to perfect the whole technology).
This is going to happen. Look for the collapse of the trucking employment to start within the next decade, and it will probably be as fast in going to completion as the destruction of the spinning jenny.
A sheet of 8.5x11 paper weighs about 6 grams (100 grams per square meter) so 50 trillion pages is 300 million tons of printed paper.
In 2015 world paper production was 400 million tons, so this is 3/4 of the world's paper being used for printing.
Seems high - there is a lot of paper used in packaging and other uses, but possible the printed fraction is this high. But it would include every sort of printing at all: books, newspapers, magazines, advertising circulars, legal documents, etc. Xerox does not have a presence in all of these markets I expect.
Let us look up some actual data about cobalt rather than rely on a random AC's notions.
The bottom line is that world production is 124,000 tons of cobalt, and proven reserves are 7.2 million tons, or a 60 year supply. It is important to understand what "proven reserves" means - it is a very conservative estimate of the known supplies that can be profitably extracted at current prices. These figures are always much lower than what could be called "ultimate reserves". According to the USGS report: "Identified world terrestrial cobalt resources are about 25 million tons", or a 200 year supply based on what is known on land. But: "More than 120 million tons of cobalt resources have been identified in manganese nodules and crusts on the floor of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans." which takes us up to a 1000 year supply.
No, cobalt is quite abundant for the requirements placed upon it.
For comparison the reserves for all platinum group metals combined total just 66,000 tons.
Proving P=NP would mean a P solution to an NP problem was theoretically possible, but it wouldn't necessarily help you find one.
Barring some very strange proof that would be fundamentally different from the way we currently know how to prove things in complexity that is exactly what it would mean. The proof would likely take the form of a reduction of some NP-complete problem to some problem in P, which would then, via a series of transformations, allow for all problems in NP to be solved in P time.
And that would be because what we are trying to prove here is nothing like the things we currently know to prove in complexity theory.
Donald Knuth, the greatest living theoretical computer scientist thinks that P = NP, but that the proof we not help us find an algorithm (it would be non-constructive). He gives as an example of this type of proof the Robertson-Seymour Theorem proof that there exists a polynomial time algorithm to compute fixed-parameter tractability graph invariants of a particular type. But not only does it not indicate how to find such an algorithm, it shows that it will be extremely hard to find.
The P+NP algorithm, if it exists, may be completely intractable in size or complexity, or time complexity, say X^Y for some colossal number Y (Graham's number exponent anyone?).
Surely they meant "billions", right? I can't imagine how it's possible that there's 2000 cameras per each person already, including babies and third-world countries.
The article keeps hammering on the "trillions" all the way through with no explanation at all of how you can possibly have 2000 cameras per human on Earth at this very moment.
In light of the fact that TFA thinks having smart phones with 13 cameras is a major escalation in the world's camera count (there are currently 2.6 billion smart phones), which would add about 30 billion cameras to the planet if every phone had this feature (going from a supposed 14 billion now to 44 billion) I would have to say" "Yah, they have trillions confused with billions".
I find it ironic that nuclear power supporters here get condescending and accuse everyone else of being anti-scientific and of living in a fantasy world, all while pointing at worldwide conspiracies in order to explain why no one invests in nuclear energy anymore, without accepting the more simple and realistic explanation that the energy source they believe to be cheap, safe and clean is neither cheap, nor safe, nor clean. It's always only a couple years away from becoming such, but its's not just there yet. And it has been so since the 80s.
I am a nuclear power supporter - I think it is a viable zero CO2 emitting power producing technology - but I am one that lives in the real world. The world where nuclear power is unable to compete with natural gas on price, and never will - unless taxes (probably carbon taxes) are imposed on natural gas that raise its price considerably. Probably not going to happen - the idea seems to have fallen off the radar entirely. Of course such taxes would immediately kill coal off completely since it releases nearly twice as much carbon as natural gas, and is dying anyway. Some other form of subsidy to make it economically attractive would be needed if carbon taxes aren't on the table.
Since completely paid for nuclear plants are closing due to operating costs, the prospect of any new plants being built in the U.S. are close to zero.
Nuclear power has no special claim to support for power generation, if it is not economical. In a diverse continent-wide power grid with long distance high voltage transmission lines to ship power coast-to-coast to balance supply and demand, building out of surplus renewable capacity, natural gas peaking plants, pumped storage, and some amount of battery capacity, together eliminates most of the need for an always-on base load plant. Nuclear power could still fill this much reduced role, it supplies 19% of all U.S. electricity now, and some will continue to do do for some more decades, but new plants aren't going to be built unless the government funds it some fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
It just means that you can't ever get to your own data again.
Not one of their use cases so you are screwed.
But you can't use old apps forever anyway. Apple will push OS updates that will eventually break them and you will have to get new versions. So they are doing you a favor by getting you a head of the curve /s.
I wish I could mod you up to "6"!
Seriously - anything in the cloud is volatile storage and unless you are paying for it you can expect one day the service "provider" will decide to stop providing. Even if you do pay for the service, you are entirely at the mercy of their competence and the durability of their business model.
Can't someone turn this into a car analogy?
That makes sense. Thanks.
Pournelle never had any grasp of that very fundamental thing in human endeavor called "economics", which is where all space-mining, colonies-on-the-moon fantasies and such fail if they ever touch it in the slightest degree. Spaceflight hardware of any sort is simply too expensive to move "off Earth" without increasing economic productivity by another couple of orders of magnitude. When it takes the labor of 100,000 to put one man in space (paying the bills, or building and maintaining the systems) space travel can only be very rare.
There is a coterie of militaristic Libertarian hard SF fans (like Pournelle) who are really as much soft-headed wish-filled pipe-dreamers as any New Age holistic crystal-healing fans -- believing that simple economics do not apply to the stuff that catches their fancy. For them there is a magic infinite money fountain for space travel (and weapons) but nothing at all can be spared to help people who are poor.
The bitter nonsense that obsessed Pournelle in his later years was all there at the very beginning.
Maybe an asshole who wrote like an angel that couldn't write fiction if its immortal life depended on it.
I've met Pournelle, heard him speak repeatedly, read his blog, tried to read some of his fiction, and agree with all of the above.
Whooosh, I think.
As the saying goes - speed bumps are no problem if you take them fast. Like "washboard" roads this is really true, a car's dynamic suspension can even out the double bump if you moving fast enough.
But speed dips are another story entirely. Mostly these aren't really put in for speed control, usually it is for surface drainage, but they work really well to make people slow down. A memorable occasion I recall in one such town was a caddy that went into the dip excessively fast, and the front of the car pitched forward and hit the macadam with a shower of sparks, then rocked backed and the rear did the same thing, then the car rocked forward and hit the pavement again, with another spark shower. I doubt the driver did this again.
Ah grasshopper, you know absolutely nothing about handling gases! I expect that you have encountered the idea that gas can be compressed and/or liquified and stored in tanks however.
Sulfur dioxide is very easily liquefied (if has been uses a refrigerant since the 19th century) and a room temperature has a vapor pressure of only 2.5 atmospheres, so a light weight low pressure container easily holds it (you would need a 3.5 atmosphere container of course to hold it as you climb to the stratosphere). If you like you can refrigerate it to lower the vapor pressure even further.
The density of sulfur dioxide is 2.6, which is 2.6 tonnes per cubic meter. So 100 tonnes can be loaded into a pressure tank with a volume of only 40 cubic meters, not 55,600 cubic meters. It would be a little bitty (but heavy) tank. The SO2 would vaporize completely when the pressure was released through a nozzle.
Here is a link to the actual journal article, rather than these popularizations. Are we geeks or not?
The paper does not discuss the process of injecting 5 teragrams (5 million tonnes) of SO2 into the stratosphere each year but since airliners fly in the lower stratosphere, and a 747-400 can carry 100+ tonnes as payload 50,000 flights a year could do this using planes that were flying SO2 tanks. If one plane could do 10 flights a day then a fleet of only 15 planes could handle the mission.
Don't tell the chemtrail people about this.
Although fighting pollution with more pollution is hardly an optimal approach, it is one weapon that is perhaps available. Since periodic injections of SO2 occur naturally (e.g. Pinatubo) we do have data about the lifetime of these aerosols. It appears that scavenging will prevent long-term effects if it is decided that this is not something we want to keep doing.
Basically a really large EF4 tornado, however these speeds are only found in the eyewall so it's not as bad as it sounds.
Plenty bad enough. The eye of Irma is currently 40 km across, which means when the eye sweeps over some place a zone 40+ km is getting hit with the maximum wind speed. I don't want to meet up with any ~50 km wide tornado.
But people get fixated on the wind speeds. Throw in a 3-4 m storm surge and torrential rain, all at the same time...
Reading the TFA (I know, I know, what sort of slashdotter am I?) we find that only people watching multiple episodes at a sitting found the experience "less enjoyable". People who watched one episode each day in a row found it equally enjoyable.
I found waiting for the end of Breaking Bad and watching all 62 episodes over two months (one a day) to be quite enjoyable, and I am certain that I caught certain plot points that spanned seasons (which aired over a five year period) better than I would have with nearly year-long breaks between seasons.
The initial adoption is going to be by commercial operations - specifically trucking and other delivery services. They are only motivated by the bottom line and legal restrictions.
And the adoption by trucking companies has already started. Automated long distance trucking (with remote drone driving to take over on surface streets at the beginning and end) is already hitting the roads.
The cost advantages of automated trucking is staggering. Not only is the cost of the driver eliminated, but the truck can be kept on the road 24/7, and the truck can be operated in the most cost efficient manner. Is fuel the pain point? Drive slowly. Is it the delivery time? Drive faster. Human drivers do not optimize like this.
The cost advantage is something like 3-to-1. This is so large that any company that does not adopt it as soon as competitors do will immediately go out of business. It will not be optional.
A nice historical analogy is the introduction of the spinning mule in cotton spinning in England in 1779. The introduction of the spinning jenny had already enormously increased the productivity of the home spinner several fold and led to a huge cotton spinning industry in the countryside. But the factory-based spinning mule was so much more efficient that the entire spinning jenny industry was put out of business in only 8 years (by 1787).
Once commercial automated vehicles have replaced human drivers, the adoption of automated cars will seem much less revolutionary (and the commercial operators will have killed legions of snakes to perfect the whole technology).
This is going to happen. Look for the collapse of the trucking employment to start within the next decade, and it will probably be as fast in going to completion as the destruction of the spinning jenny.
Let do a little Googling and a little arithmetic.
A sheet of 8.5x11 paper weighs about 6 grams (100 grams per square meter) so 50 trillion pages is 300 million tons of printed paper.
In 2015 world paper production was 400 million tons, so this is 3/4 of the world's paper being used for printing.
Seems high - there is a lot of paper used in packaging and other uses, but possible the printed fraction is this high. But it would include every sort of printing at all: books, newspapers, magazines, advertising circulars, legal documents, etc. Xerox does not have a presence in all of these markets I expect.
Let us look up some actual data about cobalt rather than rely on a random AC's notions.
The bottom line is that world production is 124,000 tons of cobalt, and proven reserves are 7.2 million tons, or a 60 year supply. It is important to understand what "proven reserves" means - it is a very conservative estimate of the known supplies that can be profitably extracted at current prices. These figures are always much lower than what could be called "ultimate reserves". According to the USGS report: "Identified world terrestrial cobalt resources are about 25 million tons", or a 200 year supply based on what is known on land. But: "More than 120 million tons of cobalt resources have been identified in manganese nodules and crusts on the floor of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans." which takes us up to a 1000 year supply.
No, cobalt is quite abundant for the requirements placed upon it.
For comparison the reserves for all platinum group metals combined total just 66,000 tons.
And you didn't quit, I FIRED you! God that guy is pathetic.
You need to bone up on your Trumpisms. It would closer to: "Not quit! Not quit! Fired! I FIRED you!"
Proving P=NP would mean a P solution to an NP problem was theoretically possible, but it wouldn't necessarily help you find one.
Barring some very strange proof that would be fundamentally different from the way we currently know how to prove things in complexity that is exactly what it would mean. The proof would likely take the form of a reduction of some NP-complete problem to some problem in P, which would then, via a series of transformations, allow for all problems in NP to be solved in P time.
And that would be because what we are trying to prove here is nothing like the things we currently know to prove in complexity theory.
Donald Knuth, the greatest living theoretical computer scientist thinks that P = NP, but that the proof we not help us find an algorithm (it would be non-constructive). He gives as an example of this type of proof the Robertson-Seymour Theorem proof that there exists a polynomial time algorithm to compute fixed-parameter tractability graph invariants of a particular type. But not only does it not indicate how to find such an algorithm, it shows that it will be extremely hard to find.
The P+NP algorithm, if it exists, may be completely intractable in size or complexity, or time complexity, say X^Y for some colossal number Y (Graham's number exponent anyone?).
This is promising topic of discussion. Which Pokemon are the most "Nazi"?
There are lots of press releases hyping breakthroughs that are anything but. However, this looks like it might very well be the real thing.
Surely they meant "billions", right? I can't imagine how it's possible that there's 2000 cameras per each person already, including babies and third-world countries.
The article keeps hammering on the "trillions" all the way through with no explanation at all of how you can possibly have 2000 cameras per human on Earth at this very moment.
In light of the fact that TFA thinks having smart phones with 13 cameras is a major escalation in the world's camera count (there are currently 2.6 billion smart phones), which would add about 30 billion cameras to the planet if every phone had this feature (going from a supposed 14 billion now to 44 billion) I would have to say" "Yah, they have trillions confused with billions".
I find it ironic that nuclear power supporters here get condescending and accuse everyone else of being anti-scientific and of living in a fantasy world, all while pointing at worldwide conspiracies in order to explain why no one invests in nuclear energy anymore, without accepting the more simple and realistic explanation that the energy source they believe to be cheap, safe and clean is neither cheap, nor safe, nor clean. It's always only a couple years away from becoming such, but its's not just there yet. And it has been so since the 80s.
I am a nuclear power supporter - I think it is a viable zero CO2 emitting power producing technology - but I am one that lives in the real world. The world where nuclear power is unable to compete with natural gas on price, and never will - unless taxes (probably carbon taxes) are imposed on natural gas that raise its price considerably. Probably not going to happen - the idea seems to have fallen off the radar entirely. Of course such taxes would immediately kill coal off completely since it releases nearly twice as much carbon as natural gas, and is dying anyway. Some other form of subsidy to make it economically attractive would be needed if carbon taxes aren't on the table.
Since completely paid for nuclear plants are closing due to operating costs, the prospect of any new plants being built in the U.S. are close to zero.
Nuclear power has no special claim to support for power generation, if it is not economical. In a diverse continent-wide power grid with long distance high voltage transmission lines to ship power coast-to-coast to balance supply and demand, building out of surplus renewable capacity, natural gas peaking plants, pumped storage, and some amount of battery capacity, together eliminates most of the need for an always-on base load plant. Nuclear power could still fill this much reduced role, it supplies 19% of all U.S. electricity now, and some will continue to do do for some more decades, but new plants aren't going to be built unless the government funds it some fashion.
I popped in here is to see how many thorium liquid salt reactor nutters were posting. Only found one. Disappointing.
Nah. He just wants to eliminate 95% of the competition.