It's a friggin' SciFi movie, for gods sake. You don't see this crap about the science in the new Star Wars movie, so why this one?
Oh please. That's because Star Wars is space fantasy ("a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."). No one expects a lot of realism there; a big part of the story is some mystical mumbo-jumbo about "The Force" after all.
This movie is basically this century's version of "2001: A Space Odyssey" (but without that starchild weirdness at the end). It's set in the very near future and as such people expect it to be realistic.
If you saw a drama movie set in the present day yet they had cops with laser guns, what would you think about that? You'd probably walk out because it broke your suspension of disbelief; it's totally unrealistic and fantastical. Laser guns in a story about some guy with a lightsaber flying spaceships and talking to Wookies in another galaxy is one thing, but not in a story set in New York in 2014. It's not much different here. If you want to make a movie that completely ignores science, then you have to go all the way and make the whole thing fantastical.
Yeah, I'm wondering about this too. The characters were definitely questionable: the mapping guy who gets lost, the biologist guy who gets killed by an alien lifeform he tries to pick up, etc. But I didn't see anything wrong with the science really. Just like the other two "Alien" movies, the ships weren't even FTL, the biggest stretch is hyper-sleep but there's every indication that that's technically possible, we just haven't quite figured it out yet.
Not a single manager would need to know this if a small group of engineers (two, maybe three) decided to conspire in order to make their bonus targets.
Bonuses? For engineers?
Must be a German thing; we don't have anything like that in America these days. Those days ended with the dot-com implosion.
Seems like all the programmers on Slashdot have never worked in a company larger than 10 people.
You'd be surprised; a lot of engineers and programmers are just like this, and have only worked in very small companies where there's no documentation of requirements and a completely ad-hoc development model. I've even worked in workgroups in very large companies that were like this; the company might have tens of thousands of employees, but the workgroup might only have 5. There's no formal development going on in a group like that.
Employers here don't care about holding onto skilled programmers or other skilled people, because PHBs think they can just hire replacements on a whim.
Yes, in reality new ones are hard to find and take a while to get up to speed. The PHBs will even acknowledge this when they're trying to hire.
But once they have one employed, they don't care about keeping him happy, because they think they're al interchangeable cogs.
If you're seeing a giant disconnect here, yes, there is. This is how American corporations think; it makes no sense at all. I can't explain it. It's the same phenomenon where corporations will give a big salary offer to a new engineer, but once he's employed there, they'll just freeze his salary or give him paltry CoL raises, while giving new hires even bigger salaries, causing employees to switch jobs every 2-4 years (in Silicon Valley, it's 12-18 months).
Fortunately I've never lived in a state that requires emissions *sniff* tests, but I understand it is a PITA in some states to put on even a simple aftermarket exhaust system for performance.
Citation needed.
Even in California, which is surely the most stringent state for emissions, it's not that hard for a company making aftermarket exhausts to get a CARB exemption. Aftermarket exhausts that are any good always come with a CARB exemption number and certificate. It's fairly easy to get these, because freer-flowing exhaust systems (downstream of the catalytic converter, called "cat back") do not affect emissions significantly on modern cars, so they just have to go through an emissions test to prove this. Aftermarket exhausts just trade off noise for better performance, but OEM exhausts these days are usually very good anyway, so you're not going to get much improvement with an aftermarket one, though you will get a different exhaust note, which is usually what buyers are after.
I'm not saying that we should trust corporations with our wallets. I'm talking about standards - there's a fine line between saying that we expect them to behave this way, and excusing that behavior.
I think we should absolutely expect them to act as awfully as possible, whenever it means more profit. In short, we should expect them to do whatever maximizes profit, without regard to ethics or repercussions.
Accordingly, the only thing we can do as a society is enact regulatory legislation to constrain their behavior, and structure our legal system to further constrain it and provide a disincentive to actions we consider wrong.
So whenever the legal system or regulation fails to have this effect, it's really government's fault, and by extension, the voters' fault.
The idea that a company ought to take a calculated risk and weigh the profitability of unethical behavior against the cost of fines is reprehensible.
Yes, but that's the way we've designed the system. We don't have legal judgments that are punitive enough. When something reprehensible like that is found, the individuals responsible should be rooted out, and punished in a draconian matter, because of the damage they've caused. Since managers and executives are the ones in charge, they're the ones who should be punished harshly, including public executions when their actions result in deaths, as they did with the GM ignition switch fiasco and the Ford Pinto fiasco. If all we're going to do is slap a minimal fine on them for these things, then we shouldn't be surprised when they do weight the cost of settlements and risk of being caught against the cost of properly engineering something or the cost of fixing an issue correctly (recall costs).
Blaming the government for not preventing unethical corporate behavior is like blaming a retail store for shoplifting.
Similar, but not exactly. The retail store is indeed negligent if it does *nothing* to guard against shoplifting, because shoplifting happens a lot, however it's probably impossible to prevent it 100% without resorting to measures that are either illegal or will kill business (like strip-searching all customers). But the retail store does not represent society at large; government does, because it's elected by the people. However, a parallel can be made: just as the retail store can see that it's losing too much to shoplifting, and alter its tactics to reduce that loss (taking into account legality and not pissing off paying customers too much or getting bad press; an example would be keeping small but high-ticket items locked up behind the cash register), government should see that its current methods aren't working at keeping corporations acting right, so it needs to change its methods. But the government doesn't, because it's corrupt. I'm not really sure what the answer to this is, because the people are so dumb they keep electing the worst people possible.
Expecting corporations to act ethically isn't unreasonable
I completely disagree. It IS unreasonable. Corporations are sociopathic by nature, and are run by sociopaths. Expecting them to act ethically is pure lunacy; it's like expecting a hungry predator not to eat its prey. The only thing you can do to counter this is to have a legal system that harshly punishes corporations for actions which society considers "unethical". Expecting them to do it on their own, out of the goodness of their hearts, is ridiculously naïve and downright insane considering corporations have proven over and over that they do act unethically.
No, it's not "purely" for tax reasons. Gas/petrol/diesel cars get a big tax because of their environmental effects, and Teslas don't because they're electic, so the Teslas don't look so expensive. The tax makes sense because it makes the polluters responsible for their mess, instead of socialistically subsidizing their choice and making the rest of society pay for it.
I didn't mean to downplay it, because you're exactly right: tablets did hit on the casual-use market big-time. They're smaller, lighter, and simpler than a regular PC or laptop, so for simple tasks and casual use, they can be a better option. If you just want to watch a movie on an airplane, for instance, a tablet is definitely a better choice than a full-size laptop, because it's so much smaller and lighter.
My whole point was that I was comparing the pre-PC days to the days of PCs and laptops, and then comparing that to tablets. There's nothing you can do on a tablet that you can't do on a laptop PC, though it may require more arm muscles and might be awkward at times (trying to walk around and enter stuff on a form on a laptop would be a PITA, but it's possible, you'd just have to stop and set it on something for instance). However, there's a whole world of things you can do on a laptop which you simply couldn't do before the microcomputer revolution, or would be utterly impractical or would be so expensive that most people had no access to it.
As for instant-on, that's not true; a tablet is simply in a sleep mode, no different from a cellphone which "comes on" instantly when you hit a button, and that's no different from a laptop that's in sleep mode. There's no way a tablet cold-boots to the home screen in less than a second. Cellphones certainly don't; they usually take a minute or so to do a cold boot. People just think it's "instant on" because they keep them in sleep mode all the time and recharge them frequently, and don't restart them very much. I do the exact same with my laptop.
You may find it convenient to get part of your power from solar panels, but it does entail a big capital investment.
Not so much any more. The prices are constantly falling. Just look at how well Germany is doing rolling out solar panel across their nation, and they're not exactly a sunny country unlike the western US.
The batteries or grid-connected power for night time power would be another big capital investment.
No, it'd be free, or pretty close, for the grid connection. You have to convert the DC power to AC to use it in existing buildings anyway; hooking it up to the grid doesn't really cost any more. Batteries are costly, but not grid connections.
Few owners want to let any significant amount of its capacity go unused.
That's why nuclear is used for base load power, not for peak loads. It's always been that way; nuclear plants can't spool up and down quickly to meet load demands, so they supplement it with other things (like gas-fired generators like you mention). Solar and wind can help supplement, as well as other stored-energy methods already in use such as hydroelectric power (you use excess generation capacity to pump water uphill behind a dam, then let it flow back downhill when you need energy--this is used in Arizona to store excess power generated by the Palo Verde nuclear plant).
I think the ideal approach is to (1) invest today in enough research that the next generation of nuclear power (e.g., LFTR) will be much less expensive,
I don't see why this is necessary; why not just hire the French? They're already experts in cutting-edge nuclear plants, and run most of their country with it, and even sell power and nuclear plant services to other EU nations. And they haven't had any Chernobyls, Three Mile Islands, or Fukushimas. Maybe we should cut out our NIH.
The real fantasy is that the 600M people in India without electricity could rely on solar power. They do not have the land or the money to invest that way.
Well, some electricity is better than no electricity, right? If they're getting by with none right now, solar would be a big improvement, even if it's insufficient to meet our Western 24x7 availability expectations. Any they're not far from the equator, so solar should work better for them. Besides, it's not like they have no electricity at all, they have really unreliable electricity with rolling blackouts last I heard. Supplementing that with solar would probably be an improvement because the blackouts probably happen during the daytime, which is when solar generation peaks. And I don't think nuclear is a good option for them; if the Italians don't trust themselves to run nuclear plants safely and vote to buy power from France instead (because of all the corruption problems in Italy), then India would be even worse. Solar is great this way: it's pretty hard to fuck up solar and cause a catastrophe, unlike with nuclear power. It's easily the safest power-generation method in existence currently.
Agreed. I just don't see what the drive is to go to Mars at this point (with humans; with rovers, sure).
Asteroids look like a much better way to collect resources than Mars, because asteroids are literally flying by us all the time. Then we could have a Moon base to do refining and some low-g manufacturing operations. Mars is just too far away for resource extraction to be worthwhile; it'd take so much fuel to get anything back it wouldn't be worth it, but with asteroids or a Moon base, it wouldn't take much energy at all to drop stuff back into Earth's gravity well.
And what about the Moon itself as a mining target? Have we even begun investigating what kind of composition it has and whether it has any valuable ores? We collected a few rocks from the surface, but that's about it I think. And with all the asteroids that have obviously collided with it over the aeons, there should be a lot of mineral resources there. Why go someplace that's 6 months away (and even then, only every 2 years) when you can go someplace that's only 3 days away?
Then it needs to start acting like a developed country. It can start by having some decent telecom regulation so that internet speeds are sufficient and inexpensive (if the US can't beat Romania of all places, then it deserves to be called "third world"), and cellular coverage is as good as northern Finland while as inexpensive.
Another vote for Dell Latitudes here. I run Mint KDE on E6400 and E6410 laptops and it works perfectly. They're a little old now, admittedly, but for most tasks they're perfectly adequate. They also look great (unlike most modern laptops, including newer Latitudes), have excellent keyboards for laptops, and are rugged with magnesium chasses. Just make sure to get the higher-res screens (1440x900) instead of the crappier low-res ones. You can get them on Ebay for a song.
I had initially tried to switch to linux, multiple times, but I couldn't find a single distro that could handle suspending properly,
Works great for me on Linux Mint KDE on a Dell Latitude E6400. A big part of the suspend problem is probably with the hardware. You probably had a crappy laptop. Get a business-class computer with Intel hardware; that's the secret recipe for running Linux reliably and everything working well.
not to mention there was no decent virtualization software to run non-linux applications on
Ok, this is just dumb. VirtualBox and VMWare both run fine on Linux, among many other choices.
Have you never watched Star Trek? Probably the most unrealistic thing in the whole show (even more unrealistic than warp drive and various technobabble) was that nearly everyone was hyper-competent. You never saw any idiots or incompetent people in it, except for some of the red-shirts in TOS of course. All the officers were really smart and really good at everything they did.
In the real world, it's amazing things work as well as they do because most people are pretty much incompetent.
Good, maybe our workforce can be put to use making fucking domestic products instead of making foreign products for foreign companies that violate our laws.
Sounds nice, but Americans suck at designing and manufacturing cars on their own. Proof: decades of garbage from Chrysler, Ford, and GM. Exception: Tesla.
So unless you're proposing that Tesla take over the factory, this is a bad idea.
This doesn't mean that American factory workers suck; to the contrary, they do just fine with the right management. Tesla makes great cars in California, but also other foreign makers like VW, Honda, Toyota, etc. make high-quality cars in American plants too. But the American Big 3's products made in the US all suck.
GM deliberately covered up their ignition-switch defect, and in so doing, deliberately murdered people.
Why cheating on an emissions test warrants a far higher penalty than murder, I for one would like to know. I'm not excusing VW, but killing people is much worse to me than cheating on emissions tests.
It's not "fantasy" to have solar power powering much of our world. There's a huge amount of open space that can be used for solar panels; building rooftops come to mind, as do parking lots. There's quite a few people who power their homes with solar power exclusively, and make so much extra they can sell it back to the utility. Of course, storage (for nighttime or rainy days) is a problem, but if our utilities ran well and compensated solar users properly, this wouldn't be a problem, as the solar users could supplement generation capacity during the daytime when there's a peak load anyway (due to A/C usage and other daytime usage), in exchange for using utility power at night during non-peak times. In my opinion, the ideal combination is solar + nuclear: solar for daytime peak loads, and nuclear for baseline day and night. In some areas, this can be supplemented with wind power, and in other areas, hydro can provide baseline power. Between these four types (plus maybe tidal), it should be entirely possible to eliminate fossil fuel usage for electric power generation.
Now, for powering a colony on Mars, things are rather different, to say the least. It sounds like there's about 1/2 to 1/3 as much power available, which is a big problem combined with the high launch costs (how much it costs to get stuff transported to Mars, which makes it infeasible to simply bring more solar panels to make up for it). And of course the storage problem is a big one; with only 4 hours of usable sunlight (according to posts above), that means you need a lot of storage capacity, and batteries are heavy and costly to transport from Earth.
Finally, I agree with the naysayer in TFA: this whole idea is silly. We should be building a Moon base first. It's much closer, easy to resupply, easy to get people back to Earth from, etc. It's a much more sensible first step if you're going to try to establish a human presence on another celestial body.
Very interesting. I wonder what Kent thinks of Metro. From his own paper, they're already doing things that he specifically determined were bad ideas:
Under "Separate UI for Beginners": If just one function a user needed was not supported in the beginner shell, s/he would have to abandon it (at least temporarily).
I've found this with the control panel in Metro: it doesn't have much stuff in it, so you have to go hunt down the old Windows 7 control panel.
The beginner shell was not at all like the programs users would run (word processors, spreadsheets, etc.). As a result, users had to learn two ways of interacting with the computer, which was confusing.
This describes Metro to a tee; it's an entirely different way of interacting with the computer than the regular desktop.
Another key finding: Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or "context") menus, even after training.
Metro isn't discoverable, at all. In fact all the new UIs these days are like this: there's hidden functions when you move the mouse to a corner of the screen, etc. That's a bit unavoidable on a phone because there's just not much room there, but on a 23" monitor there's no reason for requiring swiping motions and the like.
I don't see how it's a "privacy invasion" for a freely-available public website to have an ad on it; that's plainly ridiculous. That assumes, of course, that we're just talking about an ad and not anything that tracks you, installs cookies on your browser, etc. If you don't want to see the ad, don't go to the website, it's pretty simple. The website is under no obligation to provide you a site to visit or post messages on. However, you're under no obligation to download and look at their ads or put up with their trackers, either. But if everyone blocks ads and the site gets zero revenue, it's probably not going to stick around long (unless it's someone's little hobby site on a $4/month plan). But putting up with the blatantly dishonest and immoral stuff isn't virtuous either. So basically, for now, those of us who use ad-blockers are getting a free ride from the fools who either don't know how to, or strangely refuse to install an ad-blocker (or don't know that it even exists). Eventually, this situation will probably change as people become more and more savvy; there's only so many ignorant fools left out there, and surely they aren't clicking on that many ads to generate that much revenue for all these sites.
I have no problem blocking ads; if webmasters don't like it, they can serve ads directly from their own domains instead of pointing my browser at some ad domain; it's pretty hard to block that kind of ad without resorting to very fine-grained filters. Their complaints fall on deaf ears here; we've seen all kinds of abuses with advertising in the last 15-20 years on the internet, so AFAIC they're made their own bed. If this means a bunch of possibly useful sites go away, so be it. But I'm under no illusion that I'm entitled to browse other peoples' websites for free and without advertising. That's a pretty serious entitlement mentality there. I don't mind getting away with it as long as their sites willingly serve me pages; how I render those pages on my machine is my own business. But I don't feel entitled to that content, nor am I going to complain when they put it behind a paywall; I'll just go somewhere else most likely.
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It's a friggin' SciFi movie, for gods sake. You don't see this crap about the science in the new Star Wars movie, so why this one?
Oh please. That's because Star Wars is space fantasy ("a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."). No one expects a lot of realism there; a big part of the story is some mystical mumbo-jumbo about "The Force" after all.
This movie is basically this century's version of "2001: A Space Odyssey" (but without that starchild weirdness at the end). It's set in the very near future and as such people expect it to be realistic.
If you saw a drama movie set in the present day yet they had cops with laser guns, what would you think about that? You'd probably walk out because it broke your suspension of disbelief; it's totally unrealistic and fantastical. Laser guns in a story about some guy with a lightsaber flying spaceships and talking to Wookies in another galaxy is one thing, but not in a story set in New York in 2014. It's not much different here. If you want to make a movie that completely ignores science, then you have to go all the way and make the whole thing fantastical.
Yeah, I'm wondering about this too. The characters were definitely questionable: the mapping guy who gets lost, the biologist guy who gets killed by an alien lifeform he tries to pick up, etc. But I didn't see anything wrong with the science really. Just like the other two "Alien" movies, the ships weren't even FTL, the biggest stretch is hyper-sleep but there's every indication that that's technically possible, we just haven't quite figured it out yet.
Not a single manager would need to know this if a small group of engineers (two, maybe three) decided to conspire in order to make their bonus targets.
Bonuses? For engineers?
Must be a German thing; we don't have anything like that in America these days. Those days ended with the dot-com implosion.
Seems like all the programmers on Slashdot have never worked in a company larger than 10 people.
You'd be surprised; a lot of engineers and programmers are just like this, and have only worked in very small companies where there's no documentation of requirements and a completely ad-hoc development model. I've even worked in workgroups in very large companies that were like this; the company might have tens of thousands of employees, but the workgroup might only have 5. There's no formal development going on in a group like that.
It's an American thing.
Employers here don't care about holding onto skilled programmers or other skilled people, because PHBs think they can just hire replacements on a whim.
Yes, in reality new ones are hard to find and take a while to get up to speed. The PHBs will even acknowledge this when they're trying to hire.
But once they have one employed, they don't care about keeping him happy, because they think they're al interchangeable cogs.
If you're seeing a giant disconnect here, yes, there is. This is how American corporations think; it makes no sense at all. I can't explain it. It's the same phenomenon where corporations will give a big salary offer to a new engineer, but once he's employed there, they'll just freeze his salary or give him paltry CoL raises, while giving new hires even bigger salaries, causing employees to switch jobs every 2-4 years (in Silicon Valley, it's 12-18 months).
Fortunately I've never lived in a state that requires emissions *sniff* tests, but I understand it is a PITA in some states to put on even a simple aftermarket exhaust system for performance.
Citation needed.
Even in California, which is surely the most stringent state for emissions, it's not that hard for a company making aftermarket exhausts to get a CARB exemption. Aftermarket exhausts that are any good always come with a CARB exemption number and certificate. It's fairly easy to get these, because freer-flowing exhaust systems (downstream of the catalytic converter, called "cat back") do not affect emissions significantly on modern cars, so they just have to go through an emissions test to prove this. Aftermarket exhausts just trade off noise for better performance, but OEM exhausts these days are usually very good anyway, so you're not going to get much improvement with an aftermarket one, though you will get a different exhaust note, which is usually what buyers are after.
I'm not saying that we should trust corporations with our wallets. I'm talking about standards - there's a fine line between saying that we expect them to behave this way, and excusing that behavior.
I think we should absolutely expect them to act as awfully as possible, whenever it means more profit. In short, we should expect them to do whatever maximizes profit, without regard to ethics or repercussions.
Accordingly, the only thing we can do as a society is enact regulatory legislation to constrain their behavior, and structure our legal system to further constrain it and provide a disincentive to actions we consider wrong.
So whenever the legal system or regulation fails to have this effect, it's really government's fault, and by extension, the voters' fault.
The idea that a company ought to take a calculated risk and weigh the profitability of unethical behavior against the cost of fines is reprehensible.
Yes, but that's the way we've designed the system. We don't have legal judgments that are punitive enough. When something reprehensible like that is found, the individuals responsible should be rooted out, and punished in a draconian matter, because of the damage they've caused. Since managers and executives are the ones in charge, they're the ones who should be punished harshly, including public executions when their actions result in deaths, as they did with the GM ignition switch fiasco and the Ford Pinto fiasco. If all we're going to do is slap a minimal fine on them for these things, then we shouldn't be surprised when they do weight the cost of settlements and risk of being caught against the cost of properly engineering something or the cost of fixing an issue correctly (recall costs).
Blaming the government for not preventing unethical corporate behavior is like blaming a retail store for shoplifting.
Similar, but not exactly. The retail store is indeed negligent if it does *nothing* to guard against shoplifting, because shoplifting happens a lot, however it's probably impossible to prevent it 100% without resorting to measures that are either illegal or will kill business (like strip-searching all customers). But the retail store does not represent society at large; government does, because it's elected by the people. However, a parallel can be made: just as the retail store can see that it's losing too much to shoplifting, and alter its tactics to reduce that loss (taking into account legality and not pissing off paying customers too much or getting bad press; an example would be keeping small but high-ticket items locked up behind the cash register), government should see that its current methods aren't working at keeping corporations acting right, so it needs to change its methods. But the government doesn't, because it's corrupt. I'm not really sure what the answer to this is, because the people are so dumb they keep electing the worst people possible.
Expecting corporations to act ethically isn't unreasonable
I completely disagree. It IS unreasonable. Corporations are sociopathic by nature, and are run by sociopaths. Expecting them to act ethically is pure lunacy; it's like expecting a hungry predator not to eat its prey. The only thing you can do to counter this is to have a legal system that harshly punishes corporations for actions which society considers "unethical". Expecting them to do it on their own, out of the goodness of their hearts, is ridiculously naïve and downright insane considering corporations have proven over and over that they do act unethically.
No, it's not "purely" for tax reasons. Gas/petrol/diesel cars get a big tax because of their environmental effects, and Teslas don't because they're electic, so the Teslas don't look so expensive. The tax makes sense because it makes the polluters responsible for their mess, instead of socialistically subsidizing their choice and making the rest of society pay for it.
I didn't mean to downplay it, because you're exactly right: tablets did hit on the casual-use market big-time. They're smaller, lighter, and simpler than a regular PC or laptop, so for simple tasks and casual use, they can be a better option. If you just want to watch a movie on an airplane, for instance, a tablet is definitely a better choice than a full-size laptop, because it's so much smaller and lighter.
My whole point was that I was comparing the pre-PC days to the days of PCs and laptops, and then comparing that to tablets. There's nothing you can do on a tablet that you can't do on a laptop PC, though it may require more arm muscles and might be awkward at times (trying to walk around and enter stuff on a form on a laptop would be a PITA, but it's possible, you'd just have to stop and set it on something for instance). However, there's a whole world of things you can do on a laptop which you simply couldn't do before the microcomputer revolution, or would be utterly impractical or would be so expensive that most people had no access to it.
As for instant-on, that's not true; a tablet is simply in a sleep mode, no different from a cellphone which "comes on" instantly when you hit a button, and that's no different from a laptop that's in sleep mode. There's no way a tablet cold-boots to the home screen in less than a second. Cellphones certainly don't; they usually take a minute or so to do a cold boot. People just think it's "instant on" because they keep them in sleep mode all the time and recharge them frequently, and don't restart them very much. I do the exact same with my laptop.
You may find it convenient to get part of your power from solar panels, but it does entail a big capital investment.
Not so much any more. The prices are constantly falling. Just look at how well Germany is doing rolling out solar panel across their nation, and they're not exactly a sunny country unlike the western US.
The batteries or grid-connected power for night time power would be another big capital investment.
No, it'd be free, or pretty close, for the grid connection. You have to convert the DC power to AC to use it in existing buildings anyway; hooking it up to the grid doesn't really cost any more. Batteries are costly, but not grid connections.
Few owners want to let any significant amount of its capacity go unused.
That's why nuclear is used for base load power, not for peak loads. It's always been that way; nuclear plants can't spool up and down quickly to meet load demands, so they supplement it with other things (like gas-fired generators like you mention). Solar and wind can help supplement, as well as other stored-energy methods already in use such as hydroelectric power (you use excess generation capacity to pump water uphill behind a dam, then let it flow back downhill when you need energy--this is used in Arizona to store excess power generated by the Palo Verde nuclear plant).
I think the ideal approach is to (1) invest today in enough research that the next generation of nuclear power (e.g., LFTR) will be much less expensive,
I don't see why this is necessary; why not just hire the French? They're already experts in cutting-edge nuclear plants, and run most of their country with it, and even sell power and nuclear plant services to other EU nations. And they haven't had any Chernobyls, Three Mile Islands, or Fukushimas. Maybe we should cut out our NIH.
The real fantasy is that the 600M people in India without electricity could rely on solar power. They do not have the land or the money to invest that way.
Well, some electricity is better than no electricity, right? If they're getting by with none right now, solar would be a big improvement, even if it's insufficient to meet our Western 24x7 availability expectations. Any they're not far from the equator, so solar should work better for them. Besides, it's not like they have no electricity at all, they have really unreliable electricity with rolling blackouts last I heard. Supplementing that with solar would probably be an improvement because the blackouts probably happen during the daytime, which is when solar generation peaks. And I don't think nuclear is a good option for them; if the Italians don't trust themselves to run nuclear plants safely and vote to buy power from France instead (because of all the corruption problems in Italy), then India would be even worse. Solar is great this way: it's pretty hard to fuck up solar and cause a catastrophe, unlike with nuclear power. It's easily the safest power-generation method in existence currently.
Agreed. I just don't see what the drive is to go to Mars at this point (with humans; with rovers, sure).
Asteroids look like a much better way to collect resources than Mars, because asteroids are literally flying by us all the time. Then we could have a Moon base to do refining and some low-g manufacturing operations. Mars is just too far away for resource extraction to be worthwhile; it'd take so much fuel to get anything back it wouldn't be worth it, but with asteroids or a Moon base, it wouldn't take much energy at all to drop stuff back into Earth's gravity well.
And what about the Moon itself as a mining target? Have we even begun investigating what kind of composition it has and whether it has any valuable ores? We collected a few rocks from the surface, but that's about it I think. And with all the asteroids that have obviously collided with it over the aeons, there should be a lot of mineral resources there. Why go someplace that's 6 months away (and even then, only every 2 years) when you can go someplace that's only 3 days away?
Then it needs to start acting like a developed country. It can start by having some decent telecom regulation so that internet speeds are sufficient and inexpensive (if the US can't beat Romania of all places, then it deserves to be called "third world"), and cellular coverage is as good as northern Finland while as inexpensive.
Another vote for Dell Latitudes here. I run Mint KDE on E6400 and E6410 laptops and it works perfectly. They're a little old now, admittedly, but for most tasks they're perfectly adequate. They also look great (unlike most modern laptops, including newer Latitudes), have excellent keyboards for laptops, and are rugged with magnesium chasses. Just make sure to get the higher-res screens (1440x900) instead of the crappier low-res ones. You can get them on Ebay for a song.
I had initially tried to switch to linux, multiple times, but I couldn't find a single distro that could handle suspending properly,
Works great for me on Linux Mint KDE on a Dell Latitude E6400. A big part of the suspend problem is probably with the hardware. You probably had a crappy laptop. Get a business-class computer with Intel hardware; that's the secret recipe for running Linux reliably and everything working well.
not to mention there was no decent virtualization software to run non-linux applications on
Ok, this is just dumb. VirtualBox and VMWare both run fine on Linux, among many other choices.
Have you never watched Star Trek? Probably the most unrealistic thing in the whole show (even more unrealistic than warp drive and various technobabble) was that nearly everyone was hyper-competent. You never saw any idiots or incompetent people in it, except for some of the red-shirts in TOS of course. All the officers were really smart and really good at everything they did.
In the real world, it's amazing things work as well as they do because most people are pretty much incompetent.
Actually, Teslas are really popular in Norway. Of course, I don't think that's what you meant by "US cars"....
Good, maybe our workforce can be put to use making fucking domestic products instead of making foreign products for foreign companies that violate our laws.
Sounds nice, but Americans suck at designing and manufacturing cars on their own. Proof: decades of garbage from Chrysler, Ford, and GM. Exception: Tesla.
So unless you're proposing that Tesla take over the factory, this is a bad idea.
This doesn't mean that American factory workers suck; to the contrary, they do just fine with the right management. Tesla makes great cars in California, but also other foreign makers like VW, Honda, Toyota, etc. make high-quality cars in American plants too. But the American Big 3's products made in the US all suck.
GM deliberately covered up their ignition-switch defect, and in so doing, deliberately murdered people.
Why cheating on an emissions test warrants a far higher penalty than murder, I for one would like to know. I'm not excusing VW, but killing people is much worse to me than cheating on emissions tests.
It's not "fantasy" to have solar power powering much of our world. There's a huge amount of open space that can be used for solar panels; building rooftops come to mind, as do parking lots. There's quite a few people who power their homes with solar power exclusively, and make so much extra they can sell it back to the utility. Of course, storage (for nighttime or rainy days) is a problem, but if our utilities ran well and compensated solar users properly, this wouldn't be a problem, as the solar users could supplement generation capacity during the daytime when there's a peak load anyway (due to A/C usage and other daytime usage), in exchange for using utility power at night during non-peak times. In my opinion, the ideal combination is solar + nuclear: solar for daytime peak loads, and nuclear for baseline day and night. In some areas, this can be supplemented with wind power, and in other areas, hydro can provide baseline power. Between these four types (plus maybe tidal), it should be entirely possible to eliminate fossil fuel usage for electric power generation.
Now, for powering a colony on Mars, things are rather different, to say the least. It sounds like there's about 1/2 to 1/3 as much power available, which is a big problem combined with the high launch costs (how much it costs to get stuff transported to Mars, which makes it infeasible to simply bring more solar panels to make up for it). And of course the storage problem is a big one; with only 4 hours of usable sunlight (according to posts above), that means you need a lot of storage capacity, and batteries are heavy and costly to transport from Earth.
Finally, I agree with the naysayer in TFA: this whole idea is silly. We should be building a Moon base first. It's much closer, easy to resupply, easy to get people back to Earth from, etc. It's a much more sensible first step if you're going to try to establish a human presence on another celestial body.
My laptop does instant power-on too (well, it's a couple of seconds out of sleep mode, but that's the same thing a tablet does).
Saving and loading? You have to do that on every computer of any kind. It's not like tablets keep everything in RAM all the time.
Cheap price? You can get laptops for $250 or less these days. Any decent tablet will cost at least that much.
Cheap software? I can get all kinds of free software online; I'm not stuck with purchasing ad-laden "apps" from an "app store" with a laptop.
Very interesting. I wonder what Kent thinks of Metro. From his own paper, they're already doing things that he specifically determined were bad ideas:
Under "Separate UI for Beginners":
If just one function a user needed was not supported in the beginner shell, s/he would have to abandon it (at least temporarily).
I've found this with the control panel in Metro: it doesn't have much stuff in it, so you have to go hunt down the old Windows 7 control panel.
The beginner shell was not at all like the programs users would run (word processors, spreadsheets, etc.). As a result, users had to learn two ways of interacting with the computer, which was confusing.
This describes Metro to a tee; it's an entirely different way of interacting with the computer than the regular desktop.
Another key finding:
Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or "context") menus, even after training.
Metro isn't discoverable, at all. In fact all the new UIs these days are like this: there's hidden functions when you move the mouse to a corner of the screen, etc. That's a bit unavoidable on a phone because there's just not much room there, but on a 23" monitor there's no reason for requiring swiping motions and the like.
I guess so, unless they can get donations to pay for it. Supposedly that's been tried and didn't work, but maybe they need to try again.
I don't see how it's a "privacy invasion" for a freely-available public website to have an ad on it; that's plainly ridiculous. That assumes, of course, that we're just talking about an ad and not anything that tracks you, installs cookies on your browser, etc. If you don't want to see the ad, don't go to the website, it's pretty simple. The website is under no obligation to provide you a site to visit or post messages on. However, you're under no obligation to download and look at their ads or put up with their trackers, either. But if everyone blocks ads and the site gets zero revenue, it's probably not going to stick around long (unless it's someone's little hobby site on a $4/month plan). But putting up with the blatantly dishonest and immoral stuff isn't virtuous either. So basically, for now, those of us who use ad-blockers are getting a free ride from the fools who either don't know how to, or strangely refuse to install an ad-blocker (or don't know that it even exists). Eventually, this situation will probably change as people become more and more savvy; there's only so many ignorant fools left out there, and surely they aren't clicking on that many ads to generate that much revenue for all these sites.
I have no problem blocking ads; if webmasters don't like it, they can serve ads directly from their own domains instead of pointing my browser at some ad domain; it's pretty hard to block that kind of ad without resorting to very fine-grained filters. Their complaints fall on deaf ears here; we've seen all kinds of abuses with advertising in the last 15-20 years on the internet, so AFAIC they're made their own bed. If this means a bunch of possibly useful sites go away, so be it. But I'm under no illusion that I'm entitled to browse other peoples' websites for free and without advertising. That's a pretty serious entitlement mentality there. I don't mind getting away with it as long as their sites willingly serve me pages; how I render those pages on my machine is my own business. But I don't feel entitled to that content, nor am I going to complain when they put it behind a paywall; I'll just go somewhere else most likely.
Millennials are leaving the federal workforce in droves.
Hmm, I wonder if there's a connection....