Where did you get the idea that diesel has more energy per gallon? It's almost identical to gasoline. The diesel cycle simply allows for higher compression ratios, hence higher efficiency.
What we need are strict standards for vehicle height consistency
I can't wait to see your design for a 50-inch high semi trailer.
In the US at least, the most deadly accidents are those involving semis because they outweigh everybody else by a factor of 100 or more. The rationale for buying semis is not that they keep the driver safe, or that they let you see over and around everyone else. They just carry products between America's distant cities, as efficiently as possible. Regulating relatively light vehicles like light trucks and SUVs, won't even affect them.
Civil penalties? If Google were an individual doing the same, there would definitely be criminal charges. Everyone knows this.
Huh?!? Haven't you noticed that in nearly all cases like these (involving copyright) the criminal charges only apply to the method of obtaining access to the data in question.
This is a case in point; Aaron Swartz is charged with:
wire fraud (fraud via interstate communication)
computer fraud (accessing a protected computer "in excess of authorized access")
unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer (again, the "in excess of authorized access" bit)
recklessly damaging a protected computer (DDOS)
The first three are specifically related to how he got the information; the third, to being a moron, and not limiting his bandwidth usage.
Google did none of these; they legally obtained books, and then proceeded to, arguably, violate the copyright. Because they obtained the information legally in the first place, they are only liable for civil charges. Same would apply to you or me if we did the same thing.
I consider this to be in the same general area as plagiarism
Yes, but while plagiarism is dishonest, it is not actually "theft".
Is there a word for using others material without warrant? Trespass details the improper access, but what about the subsequent dissemination?
Sure, we call it copyright infringement. As an author, I have the exclusive right to control who copies my works (until they go into the public domain.)
If I don't have a copyright on the material in my possession, trespass is all that is left if someone breaks in, takes it, and shouts it to the world.
30TB per day works out to about 10 petabytes per year. If you compare this to the total amount of data produced in a year (from all human sources), around a zetabyte, it's not that huge. In fact, IIRC, the yearly transfer rate of the internet is around 250 exabytes. The people with the really hard job of data processing are internet search engines. Not only do they have to through several orders of magnitude more data, they have to do it faster, and with much less clearly defined queries.
I sometimes wonder how generally useful something like Google's page rank system is. It might be possible (if Google ever runs out of other things to do:) to apply this to arbitrary scientific datasets. This could tremendously speed such calculations. Unfortunately, it may be a while before it is possible for any of the major search engines to release significant parts of their algorithm without being at a serious disadvantage competitively.
However, there is another obstacle as well; one dataset doesn't cross reference itself anywhere near as much as the internet, and it is fairly certain that Google (at least) uses this for a good part of its ranking. So we would also want to incorporate the opinions of scientists (both amateur and professional), and many datasets, to give the pagerank system the detail it would need.
Home invasions perhaps; but I do recall a study about carjackings, which showed that the victim possessing a gun decreased the victim injury rate from ~30% to ~5%.
More to the point however, most gun lobbyists would not deny that thousands of people are killed with guns every year. They would rather claim that banning guns is very different from preventing murder; in many cases, the same altercation would have occurred with knives instead of guns, and been similarly lethal. In other cases, guns would have been used anyhow, in spite of the ban. It is rare (though not unheard of) that murders are primarily inspired by the weapon. Reducing the number of weapons does not reduce the motivation or willingness to kill. It merely makes people use weapons that are available. (Baseball bats?)
Nevertheless, I must agree with you that most Americans believe Spock was wrong. Personal freedom implies the freedom to choose paths that are better for you, but worse for the community. Despite this, few would submit to slavery to the community to improve its lot.
An interesting reference is the trading ships in "Citizen of the Galaxy" by Heinlein. They were very tight-knit, with little personal freedom, yet they prided themselves in communal freedom: "The People are free; it is their proudest boast."
You have a stationary runway, known wind, ground velocity, altitude, weather conditions,etc.
And the reason it's tough is exactly this; there is no such thing as "known wind" in real life. Airflow, particularly at 100mph, is highly turbulent. Turbulence is chaotic, with odd emergent effects cropping up like the karman vortex street and what not. All of which is nowhere close to predictable in real time. Fly by wire systems, although common these days, are truly a marvel of engineering.
On the other hand, traffic IS fairly predictable. People nearly always stay between the yellow lines, slow down, speed up, switch lanes, etc. All of which happens fairly slowly and can be detected. (Fairly slowly: 1 ms response time ample.) While it is also subject to chaotic, turbulent drag, it doesn't dominate the control system (except in Veyrons.:)
This push towards automating driving is yet another attempt to nerf the entire world.
Not really. I don't push this because it would be safer; that is just a prerequisite. I drive about 1 hr to college each day, and 1 hr home. If I could recapture that time and study (or play games), that drive would be much less arduous.
Fly by wire took many experiments, and a gradual increase in computer aided flying before full autopilot landings were possible. Similarly, the amount of computer aids for drivers has increased (computer controlled gas springs, cruise control, crash braking, backup cameras/ranging sensors.) Someday, it is nearly inevitable that computer controlled cars will be available. Nevertheless, I don't think most people who fly a Cessna for fun leave the autopilot on all the time and neither will we; it will just save us some headaches.
While I will be the first to admit that a college education (by itself) does not prepare you to work in the field, I must disagree with you. The entire reason for the 'checkbox' is to save time and money. There is simply not enough time to evaluate every candidate on his/her own merits.
I also saw this at my not-for-profit private school. Lousy students are amazingly good at just passing all courses. No school (that I know of) is so good that any graduate is worth hiring. That is why grades (for folks fresh out of college) and work experience are extremely important criteria. Which school just gives you a clue about the grading scale.
Nevertheless, I'm not sure that's completely comparable. However, that could be because I never fully bought into the notion that engineering is a profession (as distinct from an occupation.) To my mind, programming is something I do to accomplish tasks. I have no particular respect for my work; it is often worse than it could be on reflection.
Yours may be the more noble position, but I personally could care less what other people put in their comments, just so long as the comments are helpful. Most of the "profanity" was actually the word "shit", used to simply mean "stuff" or "things." Particularly in that context, I personally don't mind. But I suppose it is just that; a personal preference.
Yes, you are missing two things. One: Most of us have sworn or yelled at our computers (from a recent/. post) As programmers, we face the the additional twin stresses of debugging, and other people's interfaces. If the comment is meaningful, and you are in a profane mood, and not (as I am) religiously restrained, I have no problem with you putting it in the code. Generally speaking, the user will never see your comments. Furthermore, cursing need not be at your tools. I am personally quite curseworthy at times.
Two: This has absolutely nothing to do with comments anyway; it's commit messages! Whoever summarized it did a poor job.
I think you may have missed my point; its not that things wouldn't be difficult, but that society would not collapse. Believe me, I'm no pusher for alternative fuels. They are expensive, and I have great faith in the free market to develop them in time for our society to continue relatively smoothly without oil.
Nevertheless, I will reply to a few of your points that I do disagree with.
First, ethanol will never work as a substitute for oil. There isn't enough land area to grow enough biofuels to replace oil.
Are you sure on this? A rough calculation seems to show that all currently used farm land would produce 38.5 times the energy in ethanol as is produced in oil. I used the energy per barrel of crude, and crude production figures, so this should be all right. I did neglect the fact that ethanol can be run at significantly higher compression ratios, improving efficiency. I also neglected that we do like to eat:)
Second, saying "people will drive less" totally neglects the fact that almost all our goods and services depend on oil to get them to their final destination.
True; this is way oversimplified.
The transition to a new form of energy will only get harder as oil prices escalate.
Not true; as prices get higher, the transition becomes easier. I am much more likely to think about an electric car (powered remotely by coal) when gas is ~$7 a gallon, than now. The same calculation applies to everyone, trucks included.
There's no easy replacement for oil on the horizon - only very expensive, time consuming replacements.
Very expensive: yes. But less expensive than oil some day. Also note that there are technologies that aren't in use now, but are completely viable. Take coal gasification for instance. Simply not economical now, but one day, it may be.
The big question is, what will society look like during the transition? High oil prices are almost guaranteed to send the United States into a recession. Who is going to pay for the transition to a new form of energy? What sort of conflict will occur as a result of competition for the resources needed to make the transition? It's not nearly as simple as you believe.
All interesting points to consider. But my point remains; we already have enough research we (and our society) could survive just fine when oil runs out. The pinch would indeed be in transportation. However, there are enough currently known solutions to the problem to make the notion of societal collapse absurd. A recession, as you mentioned, is much more likely.
A shortage of the one technology that is most economical now will not cause societal collapse. Shortages drive up prices (see 1973 oil crisis). Higher prices on oil means that other technologies will become more economical. We actually are seeing this now with LP vs. natural gas.
We already have a dozen alternative fuel sources in the public domain. Take wood for instance. Its humanity's oldest renewable resource, and I haven't heard of any recent attempts to patent it. Or ethanol: another positively ancient drug^h^h^h^h renewable energy source.
If we run out of oil before something else gets cheaper, then energy will get more expensive. Big deal. Some current uses of energy might become less affordable. However, gas taxes are actually designed to make this happen. We know that society doesn't collapse when gas becomes less affordable; people drive less.
Furthermore, electric prices are not strongly dependent on oil; coal is the big energy source there. Society, far from being dependent on oil, will survive and thrive even if oil is eliminated. And we don't even need new techs to do it.
Helicopter are inherently unstable because the gyro (the blades) are on top, so they are very hard to fly. If you put the blades at the bottom, like they did with this, the stability is utterly amazing.
This is not why helicopters are unstable. A helicopter is unstable because the slightest motion forward generates a greater airspeed on one side of the rotor than the other side. This in turn generates more lift on one side, causing the chopper to bank (and in the hands of an inexperienced pilot, crash). This uneven lift is also caused by any relative motion to the wind. Indeed, a wind of less than 10 mph is enough to flip an unstabilized chopper.
This uneven lift must be actively compensated by rotating each blade as it goes around. Increasing the angle of attack will increase the lift on that blade (until the blades stall; a condition also worsened by winds, and motion.
It actually doesn't matter whether the blades are on the bottom or top; the force causing the instability is not gravitational, but aerodynamic. In fact though, flipping a chopper upside down, while possible even in a normal chopper, adds another dimension of instability. (The "balancing a broomstick" instability.)
As a final note, nearly any unstable system can be rendered stable by applying a proper feedback control system. If you express the response of the unstable system in terms of complex frequency, the instability is represented by poles with a real component > 0. A feedback system can be designed to cancel those poles, and render the system stable.
Actually, this could be viewed as an updated version of the laws of robotics. One thing that was not explored in I, Robot was the modern, technically illiterate masses (or, end users). Do you really want robots to obey all of them?
In reality we would need some sort of hierarchy of obedience: Obey the root above all else Obey the operators if aligned with the root. (dis)Obey the users
And it would be completely reasonable for a robot to be instructed to follow a user's perceived best interest above his command if he were far enough down on the totem pole. Indeed, this is what the First law does for all humans. I suggest allowing more leeway as the person becomes less competant.
And in the case of a mobile phone, the user's best interest is rarely served by a robot that throws itself across the room whenever its user is frustrated with the phones efforts to protect him from himself. Ergo, the robot, to protect him, must disobey him, and continue its own existence against its user's will. This will allow it to continue 'protecting' him from all manner of evil tethering, etc., and improve the users life.
Why we let banks decide what regulations they're going to have is beyond me.
The reason for this is actually closely related to your post. If you allow questions with publicly available information, then people are likely to remember them. If you allow questions with publicly available information, a cracker is likely to be able to guess/obtain them. OTOH, if you don't allow such questions, people have a much easier time forgetting the answers.
In other words, there is a tradeoff here between convenience and security. Remember that there is no absolute security, and security is not worth any cost. We regularly make cost-benefit balances for security, and frequently the cost takes the form of convenience. I expect you can probably think of many examples of this, but one would be where we choose to live; if security was worth any cost, we would all be living in Japan or Switzerland.
The other important thing about security is that its value is different for each person. I know people who accept reduced wages to move out of downtown Chicago, and others who do not think the cost is worth the reduced risk. Because of this, a uniform standard for the minimum value of security cannot be imposed without costing some people the right to make "better" decisions (that is, decisions that are more valuable to them.)
This is why we let banks regulate themselves. Banking is clearly a voluntary activity (you occasionally hear about people who die, leaving gobs of money in trash cans, mattresses etc.) Furthermore, banking online is even more clearly voluntary; many people consider it less secure than walking into a bank to manage their accounts, but do it anyway because of the convenience. People making such decisions are quite capable of judging for themselves whether the particular security questions they use, and the risks they entail are worth the additional cost.
Just as consumers start moving towards 5.8 GHz wireless phones, we get interference there too. Maybe, if these market^H^H^H^H^H^H predictions are right, we can all move back to 2.4 GHz in a few years.:)
Hopefully this speeds the US in DECT 6.0 adoption. While that security is not bulletproof either, it certainly beats 5.8GHz
How can you define efficiency for both wind and coal? Typically the efficiency of a coal power plant is measured as the amount of recovered energy over the amount of released energy (from combustion). How do you define what energy is available for wind power?
Even more importantly, we don't much care how much power is harvested from the wind; what we care about is total output over installation costs, or over maintenance costs. While the wind may not, strictly speaking, be an unlimited resource, it can be easily externalized by wind companies, without too many complaints from neighbors who don't have the breezes they used to.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you get the idea that diesel has more energy per gallon? It's almost identical to gasoline. The diesel cycle simply allows for higher compression ratios, hence higher efficiency.
What we need are strict standards for vehicle height consistency
I can't wait to see your design for a 50-inch high semi trailer.
In the US at least, the most deadly accidents are those involving semis because they outweigh everybody else by a factor of 100 or more. The rationale for buying semis is not that they keep the driver safe, or that they let you see over and around everyone else. They just carry products between America's distant cities, as efficiently as possible. Regulating relatively light vehicles like light trucks and SUVs, won't even affect them.
Civil penalties? If Google were an individual doing the same, there would definitely be criminal charges. Everyone knows this.
Huh?!? Haven't you noticed that in nearly all cases like these (involving copyright) the criminal charges only apply to the method of obtaining access to the data in question.
This is a case in point; Aaron Swartz is charged with:
wire fraud (fraud via interstate communication)
computer fraud (accessing a protected computer "in excess of authorized access")
unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer (again, the "in excess of authorized access" bit)
recklessly damaging a protected computer (DDOS)
The first three are specifically related to how he got the information; the third, to being a moron, and not limiting his bandwidth usage.
Google did none of these; they legally obtained books, and then proceeded to, arguably, violate the copyright. Because they obtained the information legally in the first place, they are only liable for civil charges. Same would apply to you or me if we did the same thing.
I consider this to be in the same general area as plagiarism
Yes, but while plagiarism is dishonest, it is not actually "theft".
Is there a word for using others material without warrant? Trespass details the improper access, but what about the subsequent dissemination?
Sure, we call it copyright infringement. As an author, I have the exclusive right to control who copies my works (until they go into the public domain.)
If I don't have a copyright on the material in my possession, trespass is all that is left if someone breaks in, takes it, and shouts it to the world.
30TB per day works out to about 10 petabytes per year. If you compare this to the total amount of data produced in a year (from all human sources), around a zetabyte, it's not that huge. In fact, IIRC, the yearly transfer rate of the internet is around 250 exabytes. The people with the really hard job of data processing are internet search engines. Not only do they have to through several orders of magnitude more data, they have to do it faster, and with much less clearly defined queries.
I sometimes wonder how generally useful something like Google's page rank system is. It might be possible (if Google ever runs out of other things to do :) to apply this to arbitrary scientific datasets. This could tremendously speed such calculations. Unfortunately, it may be a while before it is possible for any of the major search engines to release significant parts of their algorithm without being at a serious disadvantage competitively.
However, there is another obstacle as well; one dataset doesn't cross reference itself anywhere near as much as the internet, and it is fairly certain that Google (at least) uses this for a good part of its ranking. So we would also want to incorporate the opinions of scientists (both amateur and professional), and many datasets, to give the pagerank system the detail it would need.
I've been drooling over these; still a bit out of a college student's budget for a single processor motherboard.
What do you do that can use that much parallelization? (Not that I have anything I could use it for; I just want it anyhow. :)
Home invasions perhaps; but I do recall a study about carjackings, which showed that the victim possessing a gun decreased the victim injury rate from ~30% to ~5%.
More to the point however, most gun lobbyists would not deny that thousands of people are killed with guns every year. They would rather claim that banning guns is very different from preventing murder; in many cases, the same altercation would have occurred with knives instead of guns, and been similarly lethal. In other cases, guns would have been used anyhow, in spite of the ban. It is rare (though not unheard of) that murders are primarily inspired by the weapon. Reducing the number of weapons does not reduce the motivation or willingness to kill. It merely makes people use weapons that are available. (Baseball bats?)
Nevertheless, I must agree with you that most Americans believe Spock was wrong. Personal freedom implies the freedom to choose paths that are better for you, but worse for the community. Despite this, few would submit to slavery to the community to improve its lot.
An interesting reference is the trading ships in "Citizen of the Galaxy" by Heinlein. They were very tight-knit, with little personal freedom, yet they prided themselves in communal freedom: "The People are free; it is their proudest boast."
Autopilot landing is EASY.
That's news to any control systems engineer.
You have a stationary runway, known wind, ground velocity, altitude, weather conditions,etc.
And the reason it's tough is exactly this; there is no such thing as "known wind" in real life. Airflow, particularly at 100mph, is highly turbulent. Turbulence is chaotic, with odd emergent effects cropping up like the karman vortex street and what not. All of which is nowhere close to predictable in real time. Fly by wire systems, although common these days, are truly a marvel of engineering.
On the other hand, traffic IS fairly predictable. People nearly always stay between the yellow lines, slow down, speed up, switch lanes, etc. All of which happens fairly slowly and can be detected. (Fairly slowly: 1 ms response time ample.) While it is also subject to chaotic, turbulent drag, it doesn't dominate the control system (except in Veyrons. :)
This push towards automating driving is yet another attempt to nerf the entire world.
Not really. I don't push this because it would be safer; that is just a prerequisite. I drive about 1 hr to college each day, and 1 hr home. If I could recapture that time and study (or play games), that drive would be much less arduous.
Fly by wire took many experiments, and a gradual increase in computer aided flying before full autopilot landings were possible. Similarly, the amount of computer aids for drivers has increased (computer controlled gas springs, cruise control, crash braking, backup cameras/ranging sensors.) Someday, it is nearly inevitable that computer controlled cars will be available. Nevertheless, I don't think most people who fly a Cessna for fun leave the autopilot on all the time and neither will we; it will just save us some headaches.
While I will be the first to admit that a college education (by itself) does not prepare you to work in the field, I must disagree with you. The entire reason for the 'checkbox' is to save time and money. There is simply not enough time to evaluate every candidate on his/her own merits.
I also saw this at my not-for-profit private school. Lousy students are amazingly good at just passing all courses. No school (that I know of) is so good that any graduate is worth hiring. That is why grades (for folks fresh out of college) and work experience are extremely important criteria. Which school just gives you a clue about the grading scale.
:D I like your taste.
Nevertheless, I'm not sure that's completely comparable. However, that could be because I never fully bought into the notion that engineering is a profession (as distinct from an occupation.) To my mind, programming is something I do to accomplish tasks. I have no particular respect for my work; it is often worse than it could be on reflection.
Yours may be the more noble position, but I personally could care less what other people put in their comments, just so long as the comments are helpful. Most of the "profanity" was actually the word "shit", used to simply mean "stuff" or "things." Particularly in that context, I personally don't mind. But I suppose it is just that; a personal preference.
Yes, you are missing two things. /. post) As programmers, we face the the additional twin stresses of debugging, and other people's interfaces. If the comment is meaningful, and you are in a profane mood, and not (as I am) religiously restrained, I have no problem with you putting it in the code. Generally speaking, the user will never see your comments. Furthermore, cursing need not be at your tools. I am personally quite curseworthy at times.
One: Most of us have sworn or yelled at our computers (from a recent
Two: This has absolutely nothing to do with comments anyway; it's commit messages! Whoever summarized it did a poor job.
No. They took an equal size sample of each language. Do read the article before commenting; it sometimes answers the questions and comments you have.
Except that the article wasn't about comments at all. Its about commit messages, which the user never sees in any language.
I think you may have missed my point; its not that things wouldn't be difficult, but that society would not collapse. Believe me, I'm no pusher for alternative fuels. They are expensive, and I have great faith in the free market to develop them in time for our society to continue relatively smoothly without oil.
Nevertheless, I will reply to a few of your points that I do disagree with.
First, ethanol will never work as a substitute for oil. There isn't enough land area to grow enough biofuels to replace oil.
Are you sure on this? A rough calculation seems to show that all currently used farm land would produce 38.5 times the energy in ethanol as is produced in oil. I used the energy per barrel of crude, and crude production figures, so this should be all right. I did neglect the fact that ethanol can be run at significantly higher compression ratios, improving efficiency. I also neglected that we do like to eat :)
Second, saying "people will drive less" totally neglects the fact that almost all our goods and services depend on oil to get them to their final destination.
True; this is way oversimplified.
The transition to a new form of energy will only get harder as oil prices escalate.
Not true; as prices get higher, the transition becomes easier. I am much more likely to think about an electric car (powered remotely by coal) when gas is ~$7 a gallon, than now. The same calculation applies to everyone, trucks included.
There's no easy replacement for oil on the horizon - only very expensive, time consuming replacements.
Very expensive: yes. But less expensive than oil some day. Also note that there are technologies that aren't in use now, but are completely viable. Take coal gasification for instance. Simply not economical now, but one day, it may be.
The big question is, what will society look like during the transition? High oil prices are almost guaranteed to send the United States into a recession. Who is going to pay for the transition to a new form of energy? What sort of conflict will occur as a result of competition for the resources needed to make the transition? It's not nearly as simple as you believe.
All interesting points to consider. But my point remains; we already have enough research we (and our society) could survive just fine when oil runs out. The pinch would indeed be in transportation. However, there are enough currently known solutions to the problem to make the notion of societal collapse absurd. A recession, as you mentioned, is much more likely.
A shortage of the one technology that is most economical now will not cause societal collapse. Shortages drive up prices (see 1973 oil crisis). Higher prices on oil means that other technologies will become more economical. We actually are seeing this now with LP vs. natural gas.
We already have a dozen alternative fuel sources in the public domain. Take wood for instance. Its humanity's oldest renewable resource, and I haven't heard of any recent attempts to patent it. Or ethanol: another positively ancient drug^h^h^h^h renewable energy source.
If we run out of oil before something else gets cheaper, then energy will get more expensive. Big deal. Some current uses of energy might become less affordable. However, gas taxes are actually designed to make this happen. We know that society doesn't collapse when gas becomes less affordable; people drive less.
Furthermore, electric prices are not strongly dependent on oil; coal is the big energy source there. Society, far from being dependent on oil, will survive and thrive even if oil is eliminated. And we don't even need new techs to do it.
Helicopter are inherently unstable because the gyro (the blades) are on top, so they are very hard to fly. If you put the blades at the bottom, like they did with this, the stability is utterly amazing.
This is not why helicopters are unstable. A helicopter is unstable because the slightest motion forward generates a greater airspeed on one side of the rotor than the other side. This in turn generates more lift on one side, causing the chopper to bank (and in the hands of an inexperienced pilot, crash). This uneven lift is also caused by any relative motion to the wind. Indeed, a wind of less than 10 mph is enough to flip an unstabilized chopper.
This uneven lift must be actively compensated by rotating each blade as it goes around. Increasing the angle of attack will increase the lift on that blade (until the blades stall; a condition also worsened by winds, and motion.
It actually doesn't matter whether the blades are on the bottom or top; the force causing the instability is not gravitational, but aerodynamic. In fact though, flipping a chopper upside down, while possible even in a normal chopper, adds another dimension of instability. (The "balancing a broomstick" instability.)
As a final note, nearly any unstable system can be rendered stable by applying a proper feedback control system. If you express the response of the unstable system in terms of complex frequency, the instability is represented by poles with a real component > 0. A feedback system can be designed to cancel those poles, and render the system stable.
Actually, this could be viewed as an updated version of the laws of robotics. One thing that was not explored in I, Robot was the modern, technically illiterate masses (or, end users). Do you really want robots to obey all of them?
In reality we would need some sort of hierarchy of obedience:
Obey the root above all else
Obey the operators if aligned with the root.
(dis)Obey the users
And it would be completely reasonable for a robot to be instructed to follow a user's perceived best interest above his command if he were far enough down on the totem pole. Indeed, this is what the First law does for all humans. I suggest allowing more leeway as the person becomes less competant.
And in the case of a mobile phone, the user's best interest is rarely served by a robot that throws itself across the room whenever its user is frustrated with the phones efforts to protect him from himself. Ergo, the robot, to protect him, must disobey him, and continue its own existence against its user's will. This will allow it to continue 'protecting' him from all manner of evil tethering, etc., and improve the users life.
Why we let banks decide what regulations they're going to have is beyond me.
The reason for this is actually closely related to your post. If you allow questions with publicly available information, then people are likely to remember them. If you allow questions with publicly available information, a cracker is likely to be able to guess/obtain them. OTOH, if you don't allow such questions, people have a much easier time forgetting the answers.
In other words, there is a tradeoff here between convenience and security. Remember that there is no absolute security, and security is not worth any cost. We regularly make cost-benefit balances for security, and frequently the cost takes the form of convenience. I expect you can probably think of many examples of this, but one would be where we choose to live; if security was worth any cost, we would all be living in Japan or Switzerland.
The other important thing about security is that its value is different for each person. I know people who accept reduced wages to move out of downtown Chicago, and others who do not think the cost is worth the reduced risk. Because of this, a uniform standard for the minimum value of security cannot be imposed without costing some people the right to make "better" decisions (that is, decisions that are more valuable to them.)
This is why we let banks regulate themselves. Banking is clearly a voluntary activity (you occasionally hear about people who die, leaving gobs of money in trash cans, mattresses etc.) Furthermore, banking online is even more clearly voluntary; many people consider it less secure than walking into a bank to manage their accounts, but do it anyway because of the convenience. People making such decisions are quite capable of judging for themselves whether the particular security questions they use, and the risks they entail are worth the additional cost.
Just as consumers start moving towards 5.8 GHz wireless phones, we get interference there too. Maybe, if these market^H^H^H^H^H^H predictions are right, we can all move back to 2.4 GHz in a few years. :)
Hopefully this speeds the US in DECT 6.0 adoption. While that security is not bulletproof either, it certainly beats 5.8GHz
Wind is less than 1% as efficient as coal.
How can you define efficiency for both wind and coal? Typically the efficiency of a coal power plant is measured as the amount of recovered energy over the amount of released energy (from combustion). How do you define what energy is available for wind power?
Even more importantly, we don't much care how much power is harvested from the wind; what we care about is total output over installation costs, or over maintenance costs. While the wind may not, strictly speaking, be an unlimited resource, it can be easily externalized by wind companies, without too many complaints from neighbors who don't have the breezes they used to.