Something moody, dark, and raw megatech-feeling like the superb German movie Cargo (I think it was 2009) mixed with Aliens (2 and 4), a dash of Firefly for style, and a splash of original Star Wars for colour (less of the force and more of the wacky non humanoid alien races). I would watch the shit out of that. Revelation Space would probably come closest.
CEOs often get paid largely in stock options rather than cash, and so are incentivised to make sure the company does well in the short term at least. Which leads to its own set of problems, but the headline grabbing corporate salaries are often not what they seem.
HVDC, molten salt tech, pumped stored hydro, supergrids, and grid based storage. Any questions?
However I do agree that space solar will do to current renewables what they're doing to coal and nuclear.
And I for one can't wait to see that happen.
Space solar is mostly a solved problm with the exception of economics, it just costs too much to get them up there. However there are people working on that problems too.
Yes, molten salt technology is one avenue. Then we have pumped storage hydro which is being used throughout the world. And of course there's grid based storage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Really, the frothing nukers on this thread are doing more to turn people off nuclear energy with their lack of knowledge and blind religious zeal than any amount of research.
Nothing theoretical about them. The geopolitics is an issue but it shouldn't be in places like the US. HVDC lines have been built and work great, and are being built in many places around the world.
Bottom line boys and girls, we're drowning in energy whether shining from on high or blown in by the wind.
I've already posted this below but just to repeat it so this 5% nonsense doesn't gain any more traction...
I'm afraid you underestimate the staggering power of the grand daddy of all nuclear power plants, the one that rises and sets each day. Covering some tiny percentage of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara for example, approximately the size of Wales, would supply Europe's baseload, and that's with relatively inefficient PV cells.
I'm afraid you underestimate the staggering power of the grand daddy of all nuclear power plants, the one that rises and sets each day. Covering some tiny percentage of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara for example, approximately the size of Wales, would supply Europe's baseload, and that's with relatively inefficient PV cells. http://www.dailytech.com/EU+Of...
Your link says nothing of wind, and as for solar it says the following:
"Technologies exist to recycle the chemical byproducts of solar-cell production, but some Chinese polysilicon plants, including Luoyang Zhonggui, are cutting costs and corners by avoiding significant extra investment in pollution control."
Meanwhile solar cell manufacturing in Europe and elsewhere does in fact use full environmental controls.
It always puzzles me how people can type rants about toxic materials being used in the manufacture of solar cells on a machine which was manufactured from and using... toxic materials.
Anyway the trick is in laying down HVDC cables all over the place to get the power from where there's sun/wind to where the energy is most needed. Thankfully large scale projects of that nature are under construction as we speak.
You start running into the gold rush problem then. Pay too well for a job and you get people interested only in the pay, not doing the job well. This is especially true in jobs where it's difficult to measure performance.
In any case the best teachers in the world are usually the child's parents. There's a direct correlation between how well kids do at school and how much time and effort their parents put into helping them at home, not to mention the general happiness and security of the home.
If anything funding should go into making parents aware of this and giving them time off work for example to help their children succeed academically.
People get ideas from all sorts of places, good and bad.
They get them from marketing, they get them from institutionalised education, from various propaganda pieces put forth by ideological factions, they get them from legislation, reading the news, and interaction with their peers. Not only do these ideas change over time but the memory of how things used to be is an absolutely vital part of understanding why things are the way they are today. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, remember?
People aren't tainted because they happen to have lived through unpleasant periods of history (and I know I'm going to have to point out to you that the USA isn't the world), they know what to look out for next time, unlike the young who usually take whatever is spoonfed to them. People don't need to die off for society to change and science to advance, that's completely insane.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light" If that really is the case then science as we know it is fundamentally broken and needs a complete overhaul. But of course it's not true, as evidenced by the increasingly breakneck advancements in the sciences.
"Anyone trying to "fix" this is an active threat to humanity." Anyone trying to impede the advancement of science and the betterment of the lives of people because they're unable to take off their grimy and scratched ideological spectacles is a far greater threat. Really, this is just knee jerk reactionism dressed in shabby misanthropic rags.
Lacking a crystal ball, I can't see how many units I need to produce, assuming I'm in a business that produces units in advance, so I make as many as I think will sell. If revenue is down 10% and my profit margins are 10% of revenue, I make nothing at all. I probably make less than nothing because I have to somehow dispose of all those unsold units.
I've certainly heard of Nortel, I used to work there. At their peak they were employing over 120,000 people spread across the majority of countries on earth. Now they've been sawn up for spare parts, not even taken over. And they're far from alone - I mean how many companies are around today, and/or are bigger today that were also around in 1994?
Believe it or not, competence always comes home to roost in the end. Unless you're working for the government of course.
Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities re- reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first and last author positions. Moreover, women are significantly underrepresented as authors of single-authored papers. Academics should be aware of the subtle ways that gender disparities can appear in scholarly authorship.
equals this:
However you often get sexism manifesting as women requireing on average higher qualifications to get the same job as men.
because I'm not seeing a connection. Doesn't "women are significantly underrepresented as authors of single-authored papers" mean that less women are writing single authored papers? Did they also control for experience and qualification, and I guess reputation this being academia, in their analysis of first and alst author names, or did they (as seems highly likely with eight million papers) just run the data through a gender based name analysis? You're not making sense here.
It's really hard to prove that you were discriminated against unless there is a written record of the employer basically saying, "I don't want to hire her because she's a woman."
Not really. Compare her CV to the CV of the candidate that got the job, if she's better qualified and more experienced it's time to start looking at everyone else's CVs. Really, it's not that difficult.
Lets also not pretend that you can only be successful by hiring the absolutely best candidate. If all you want to do is hire white males, and it costs you 10% of your revenue, then maybe that is worth it to you because you are a bigoted asshole.
10% of revenue or less is the profit margin for a great many companies. I don't think you get how capitalism works. Companies don't and shouldn't care about anything other than your ability to do the job. Companies that do start caring get eaten by companies that don't. Greed may be the only completely blind motivation in existence.
Companies that don't hire the best candidates tend to collapse, slowly or quickly, as their more savvy competitors eat them up. And equal opportunities are already enforced by laws, if a woman feels she has been discriminated against she can certainly take people to court.
Equality of outcome is completely insane. Everyone gets the same no matter how hard they work or what they do? The communists tried that and it led to corruption on an unprecedented scale, horrific human rights abuses, ever diminishing standards, and eventually the collapse of the state. But maybe they just weren't doing it right.
I had been hoping there was a definite end that science could not trick.
There isn't. Our bodies are machines, no more no less, and ultimately science will solve every riddle they pose. Soon, fifty or a hundred years from now, the first immortals will be born. Who knows, perhaps they already have been.
Slashdot Mirror
No, dollars are backed by a stable government and the GDP of the USA. Bitcoin is backed by nothing.
Something moody, dark, and raw megatech-feeling like the superb German movie Cargo (I think it was 2009) mixed with Aliens (2 and 4), a dash of Firefly for style, and a splash of original Star Wars for colour (less of the force and more of the wacky non humanoid alien races). I would watch the shit out of that. Revelation Space would probably come closest.
CEOs often get paid largely in stock options rather than cash, and so are incentivised to make sure the company does well in the short term at least. Which leads to its own set of problems, but the headline grabbing corporate salaries are often not what they seem.
religious influence on science will continue to wane
O RLY?
HVDC, molten salt tech, pumped stored hydro, supergrids, and grid based storage. Any questions?
However I do agree that space solar will do to current renewables what they're doing to coal and nuclear.
And I for one can't wait to see that happen.
Space solar is mostly a solved problm with the exception of economics, it just costs too much to get them up there. However there are people working on that problems too.
We certainly can. With enough energy you can do almost anything, and there's no shortage of energy.
Yes, molten salt technology is one avenue. Then we have pumped storage hydro which is being used throughout the world. And of course there's grid based storage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Really, the frothing nukers on this thread are doing more to turn people off nuclear energy with their lack of knowledge and blind religious zeal than any amount of research.
HVDC lines, and done.
Nothing theoretical about them. The geopolitics is an issue but it shouldn't be in places like the US. HVDC lines have been built and work great, and are being built in many places around the world.
Bottom line boys and girls, we're drowning in energy whether shining from on high or blown in by the wind.
I've already posted this below but just to repeat it so this 5% nonsense doesn't gain any more traction...
I'm afraid you underestimate the staggering power of the grand daddy of all nuclear power plants, the one that rises and sets each day. Covering some tiny percentage of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara for example, approximately the size of Wales, would supply Europe's baseload, and that's with relatively inefficient PV cells.
http://www.dailytech.com/EU+Of...
I'm afraid you underestimate the staggering power of the grand daddy of all nuclear power plants, the one that rises and sets each day. Covering some tiny percentage of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara for example, approximately the size of Wales, would supply Europe's baseload, and that's with relatively inefficient PV cells. http://www.dailytech.com/EU+Of...
Your link says nothing of wind, and as for solar it says the following:
"Technologies exist to recycle the chemical byproducts of solar-cell production, but some Chinese polysilicon plants, including Luoyang Zhonggui, are cutting costs and corners by avoiding significant extra investment in pollution control."
Meanwhile solar cell manufacturing in Europe and elsewhere does in fact use full environmental controls.
It always puzzles me how people can type rants about toxic materials being used in the manufacture of solar cells on a machine which was manufactured from and using... toxic materials.
Anyway the trick is in laying down HVDC cables all over the place to get the power from where there's sun/wind to where the energy is most needed. Thankfully large scale projects of that nature are under construction as we speak.
You start running into the gold rush problem then. Pay too well for a job and you get people interested only in the pay, not doing the job well. This is especially true in jobs where it's difficult to measure performance.
In any case the best teachers in the world are usually the child's parents. There's a direct correlation between how well kids do at school and how much time and effort their parents put into helping them at home, not to mention the general happiness and security of the home.
If anything funding should go into making parents aware of this and giving them time off work for example to help their children succeed academically.
Some research has been done on the matter in the UK: http://www.irishtimes.com/news...
People get ideas from all sorts of places, good and bad.
They get them from marketing, they get them from institutionalised education, from various propaganda pieces put forth by ideological factions, they get them from legislation, reading the news, and interaction with their peers. Not only do these ideas change over time but the memory of how things used to be is an absolutely vital part of understanding why things are the way they are today. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, remember?
People aren't tainted because they happen to have lived through unpleasant periods of history (and I know I'm going to have to point out to you that the USA isn't the world), they know what to look out for next time, unlike the young who usually take whatever is spoonfed to them. People don't need to die off for society to change and science to advance, that's completely insane.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light"
If that really is the case then science as we know it is fundamentally broken and needs a complete overhaul. But of course it's not true, as evidenced by the increasingly breakneck advancements in the sciences.
"Anyone trying to "fix" this is an active threat to humanity."
Anyone trying to impede the advancement of science and the betterment of the lives of people because they're unable to take off their grimy and scratched ideological spectacles is a far greater threat. Really, this is just knee jerk reactionism dressed in shabby misanthropic rags.
You will eventually sell them, whether it be at reduced price or just by waiting.
"The market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain sovlent".
Words of wisdom young padawan. Remember them.
Let's try this again.
Lacking a crystal ball, I can't see how many units I need to produce, assuming I'm in a business that produces units in advance, so I make as many as I think will sell. If revenue is down 10% and my profit margins are 10% of revenue, I make nothing at all. I probably make less than nothing because I have to somehow dispose of all those unsold units.
I've certainly heard of Nortel, I used to work there. At their peak they were employing over 120,000 people spread across the majority of countries on earth. Now they've been sawn up for spare parts, not even taken over. And they're far from alone - I mean how many companies are around today, and/or are bigger today that were also around in 1994?
Believe it or not, competence always comes home to roost in the end. Unless you're working for the government of course.
Can you explain to me how this:
Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities re- reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first and last author positions. Moreover, women are significantly underrepresented as authors of single-authored papers. Academics should be aware of the subtle ways that gender disparities can appear in scholarly authorship.
equals this:
However you often get sexism manifesting as women requireing on average higher qualifications to get the same job as men.
because I'm not seeing a connection. Doesn't "women are significantly underrepresented as authors of single-authored papers" mean that less women are writing single authored papers? Did they also control for experience and qualification, and I guess reputation this being academia, in their analysis of first and alst author names, or did they (as seems highly likely with eight million papers) just run the data through a gender based name analysis? You're not making sense here.
However you often get sexism manifesting as women requireing on average higher qualifications to get the same job as men.
Where, exactly?
You mean pswimming.
It's really hard to prove that you were discriminated against unless there is a written record of the employer basically saying, "I don't want to hire her because she's a woman."
Not really. Compare her CV to the CV of the candidate that got the job, if she's better qualified and more experienced it's time to start looking at everyone else's CVs. Really, it's not that difficult.
Lets also not pretend that you can only be successful by hiring the absolutely best candidate. If all you want to do is hire white males, and it costs you 10% of your revenue, then maybe that is worth it to you because you are a bigoted asshole.
10% of revenue or less is the profit margin for a great many companies. I don't think you get how capitalism works. Companies don't and shouldn't care about anything other than your ability to do the job. Companies that do start caring get eaten by companies that don't. Greed may be the only completely blind motivation in existence.
Yeah, just like women needing to be able to do a certain amount of chinups to join the military... oops, nevermind...
Companies that don't hire the best candidates tend to collapse, slowly or quickly, as their more savvy competitors eat them up. And equal opportunities are already enforced by laws, if a woman feels she has been discriminated against she can certainly take people to court.
Equality of outcome is completely insane. Everyone gets the same no matter how hard they work or what they do? The communists tried that and it led to corruption on an unprecedented scale, horrific human rights abuses, ever diminishing standards, and eventually the collapse of the state. But maybe they just weren't doing it right.
I had been hoping there was a definite end that science could not trick.
There isn't. Our bodies are machines, no more no less, and ultimately science will solve every riddle they pose. Soon, fifty or a hundred years from now, the first immortals will be born. Who knows, perhaps they already have been.