Let's compare old technology (rubber shock absorbing mounts) with new (active maglev shock suppressors):
Old - cheap, zero power requirement, silent, no additional support/control systems needed, simple maintenance by minimally skilled techs, pretty effective
New - expensive, lots of power required, non-silent, lots of additional support/control systems needed, complex maintenance by highly skilled techs, super-duper-extra effective (as soon as they get it to work, which will be Real Soon Now)
All of this... for a seat cushion? For years, I've been hearing about active controls in shock absorbers using electrorheological or magnetorheological fluids in place of regular fluid or gas filled shock absorbers. These would be a lot more straighforward than maglev shock suppressors, but where are they?
The fact is, the control systems still are too expensive and unresponsive, and don't offer any significant benefit over traditional shock absorbing systems. The power requirements for a full-on maglev systems would be ridiculous.
Disclaimer: I *am* a parent (two boys (7 & 5), two girls (3 and 2).
any computer - is a tool for self-expression. A computer is one of the most important tools of today.
For a 7 year old boy, "self-expression" means jumping up and down on the couch yelling, "I am the Butt-Master! I will fart on you!" at the top of his lungs, and then laughing so hard with his 5 year old brother that he goes short of breath, staggers into the dresser and cracks his head so hard that he not only cuts his forehead, but knocks the lamp over so it smashes on the floor, which makes him sit down in crying, hysterical pain while his little brother is scrambling out of the room on hands and knees, because he can hardly stand himself from the effect of deep belly laughs being suddenly wrenched into the need to get the hell out the vicinity before Dad comes upstairs from his workshop to find out what that crash was before the 2 year old starts to play with the broken glass... and the 3 year old is trying to get Dad's attention so she can tell on her borthers while Dad is cleaning up said broken glass, holding back said 2 year old, bandaging said cut on 7 year old's forehead, and calling for said 5 year old so he find out if he's bleeding, too.
All this with a couch and a $30 lamp. Imagine what they'd be able to do with a $1500 computer.
So, I would say the whole "self-expression" thing is really overrated. These days, I really like the "knock it off and behave yourself" model.
Fact: the US gets transportation primarily from oil, and power primarily from coal. Fact: the oil will run out before the coal does. Fact: nuclear power is more expensive than coal power Fact: hydrogen can be used directly for transportation, but coal can't Fact: shifting the transportation energy requirement onto coal-fired plants (coal -> power -> hydrogen) will mean the consumption of A LOT MORE coal
Conclusion: when oil hits $60/barrel and stays there, people will start wanting to build nuclear plants to allow the shift of some portion of the power and transportation sectors to hydrogen.
Nethack is like the ex-girlfriend from hell. Once upon a time, you had a mad, passionate love affair with her. You spent every spare hour with her, helpless to resist, almost psychotic in your obsession with her, until you realized that she was sucking the life out of you. To save yourself, to keep from flunking every single course and losing all your friends, you forced yourself to give her up. It was a long, long time before you undid the damage.
Needless to say, you haven't seen her or thought about her in years. Then, one day, someone mentions her, and says she's still around, still ready for a good time. Thinking yourself older and wiser, and beliving yourself to have outgrown the kind of all-consuming infatuation that robs you of your time, your precious, irreplaceble time, you go to see her.
She is, indeed, ready to pick up where you left off.
After an hour of fun and good times, you wonder why you ever stopped seeing her.
The degradation rate isn't really germaine to the economic calculation I presented, since it assumes that the performance remains steady, but to address your question:
In decades-long tests the fully-developed technology of single- and poly-crystal modules has shown to degrade at fairly steady rates of 0.5% to 1% per year. First-generation amorphous modules degraded faster, but there are so many new wrinkles and improvements in amorphous production that we can't draw any blanket generalizations for this module type.
The first thin films, made of copper sulfide, suffered from an electrochemical instability that led to degraded performance. Copper sulfide never became a commercially significant thin film. The second commercial thin film, amorphous silicon, suffers from a serious degradation associated with (of all things) exposure to light. Called the Staebler-Wronski Effect, it results in about a 20%-40% degradation unless checked by design modifications such as thinner intrinsic layers and the use of multijunctions.
This NREL article is from Oct 1995, and the 20-40% degradation rates are pretty bad. I got my 10% degradation figure from a paper article I read more recently, which discussed "recent improvements". Since I don't have time to find a citation for it, I'll withdraw the number, and grant a degradation rate of 1% per year to the car roof-top system.
A PV panel that loses 1% efficiency a year will produce 90% of rated power output after 10 years, 82% after 20 years and 74% after 30 years. At 2% degradation, these are outputs of 82%, 67% and 54% of rated, respectively. Your 1970's models look like they are averaging a loss of ~2%/yr.
That assumption of 200,000 miles is over the entire life of the car, right? At 20K/yr, this is roughly ten years. Will the photovoltaic panel continue to provide energy at the same efficiency over 10 years? Doubtful. Solar panels degrade in efficiency over time, maybe by as much as 10% per year.
In the first year, that $2200 kit will save you a whopping $66, assuming that the manufacturer's claims are accurate. You would do better to put that $2200 in a savings account earning 3% and use the interest ($66) to pay for the extra gasoline. Repeat that for 10 years and you'll be no worse off from the amount of money you spent on gas, plus you'll have $2200 in the bank instead of a 10-year old photovoltaic rig.
I don't usually respond to Anonymous Cowards, but, yes, that's exactly what will happen. All of the wild and wooly, profane and free speech that is part of the Internet now will be Premium Services on Googlenet, and will either cost extra, or won't be available. New content will be created on the old Internet, but it will be like Usenet is today... a ragged shadow of its former glory, existing on the fringes of society, only ever visited by those with exotic tastes and preferences, who can't get their fix from the mainstream.
Also, Google needn't worry about losing a supply of fresh porn when the content creators on the old Internet wither away. They can just repackage all the terabytes of porn in the cache, stored up from a decade or two. It's impossible for any one individual to look at each of the bazillion photos in the cache. Google will just keep track of what you've seen and make sure to serve up something fresh each time you ask for porn.
But as the level and size of content increases, it will require more bandwidth to deliver it to the user. Google will still crawl/trawl the internet for content, and cache it.
The customer then has a choice: a) get your content directly from the entity that created it, over the old, slow Internet, or, b) get that same content over the blazing fast, all fibre Googlenet, with a few targetted ads before, during or after, or ad-free for a monthly subscription fee.
Google then becomes a content delivery entity, separate from the content creation entities.
One more thing... with everything cached by Google, you would never get a "Page No Longer Exists" message. You might have to pay a few cents to see pages that exist only in the Google cache, but they would still be available. Google thus also takes on the role of content archival entity.
I didn't mean to imply plagiarism. My subject ("More like 'Stolen From Arthur'") was intended to be a play on words, based on the parent's subject ("Stolen From Author"). Puns (especially mine) don't always come across in writing, unfortunatley.
BTW, I commend you on your choice of phrasing. A more typical Slashdot response would have been, "She didn't steal it from anybody you ASSHAT! Their completly different! RTFA!"
De nada. The Silver Age will never be forgot, at least not as long as I'm around.
FWIW, I read "God's Debris" a few years ago, and thought it was half-assed crap, a collection of the kind of self important sophist nonsense that is so impressive and insightful sounding to people who don't really have much experience at thinking.
"This is a slightly unusual request," said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. "As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an automatic sequence computer. I don't wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly thought that your --ah-- establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?"
"Gladly," replied the lama, readjusting his silk robe and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. "Your Mark V computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures."
"I don't understand . .."
"This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries -- since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it."
"Naturally."
"It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God."
"I beg your pardon?"
"We have reason to believe," continued the lama imperturbably, "that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised."
"And you have been doing this for three centuries?"
"Yes. We expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task."
"Oh." Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. "Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?"
The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.
"Call it ritual, if you like, but it's a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being -- God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on -- they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters, which can occur, are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all."
"I see. You've been starting at AAAAAAAAA . . . and working up to ZZZZZZZZZ . .."
"Exactly -- though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession."
"Three? Surely you mean two."
"Three is correct. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language."
"I'm sure it would," said Wagner hastily. "Go on."
"Luckily it will be a simple matter to adapt your automatic sequence computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a thousand days."
Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right . ..
"There's no doubt," replied the doctor, "that we can modify the Mark V to print lists of this nature. I'm much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is n
The OLED mini-screens seem like a poor choice for this, given the fact that these will presumably be used as easily-changed labels, rather than dynamic minidisplay screens. If you only need to change them once in a while, wouldn't electronic ink displays be better suited to this task? Even LCD would be more appropriate, except that they would be a constant power draw.
No, their problem is that they don't want to be thin, or at least not badly enough to overcome the security blanket of their fat existence. If you want to stop being fat, you have to stop being who you are and become someone new. That's just way, way too scary a prospect for many people. If you're happy and comfortable being fat, then fine, stay that way. If you want to be thin, then you have to want it badly enough to do something about it.
A while ago, I finally decided that I was tired of being obese (230#, 6'0") and started wanting to be thinner. Actually wanting it badly enough to do something about it. After I lost 50#, I went to a family reunion, and listened to an uncle, who is at least 450#, telling me how he could be skinny if he wanted to, but his doctor told him he'd have to give up Pepsi to do it. "No way I'm giving up my Pepsi! I love Pepsi! I go through at least one 2-liter bottle a day!" When I suggested that if he switched to Diet Pepsi (zero calories), he could drink as much of it as he liked and remove 2000+ calories from his daily intake. "Aw, calories are just bullshit - it's my metabolism! I got a bad metabolism!" His is an extreme case, but different from most fat people only in degree.
There is a tiny, tiny fraction of people who actually do have a screwed up metabolism. The vast majority of the overweight, obese and hugely obese pepople out there have a screwed up psychology, or at least a screwed up sense of priorities. They eat too much, and they eat the wrond stuff, and they continue to do it because they don't want to acknowledge or accept the negative impact of their actions. They want a pill or a magic new cooking oil or some other maguffin that will let them eat their cake and lose it too.
When I was fat, I generally felt OK, and when I looked around me, I saw that most people looked like me. After I lost my weight and went from "obese" to "normal", I had an astonishing number of people tell me that they got dealt a bad metabolism, or else they'd be thin, too. I also had a gratifying number of people who, after seeing that a fat slob like me could do it, made a serious commitment to doing it themselves.
Don't worry... this is just a trial balloon before the State of the Union address. He wants to be able to say, "Which do you want? A thousand oil wells in ANWR or a thousand new reactors in the lower 48?"
I feel like I'm psychic... just in case you missed this incredibly prescient rant on reprocessing, I'll repost a summary of it here since it is so germaine. It was in response to the item about Sweden weaning themselves from oil in 20 years, because the oil is running out....everyone else have to get over their reluctance to embrace nuclear power... Sooner or later, somebody is going to wake up to the fact that breeder reactors that use fuel recycing produce less than 3% of that high level waste that would go into Yucca.... encase the waste in 5-ton concrete casks...("physical security")... Call it a "Temporary Cask Transit Facility"... "Renew the lease" on the land every 10 years to give you an opportunity to re-bribe the new set of elected officials in town... cheaper than Yucca Mountain, while offering 1000x the storage capacity.
But look at the citation for the data on that table: Energy and the U.S. Economy: A Biophysical Perspective Cutler J. Cleveland; Robert Costanza; Charles A. S. Hall; Robert Kaufmann Science, New Series, Vol. 225, No. 4665 (Aug. 31, 1984), 890-897.
Technology has advanced a long way since 1984, particularly in the area of enzymology to break down chemically resistant carbon in plant tissues, like cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Brazil's ethanol program relies heavily on conversion of sugar; to make ethanol economically competitive in the US, we would need to rely on conversion of cross-linked starch and long-chain polymers. The phenolics in lignin would be a feedstock for industrial chemistry. Here's some more general info.
Full disclosure: I don't work for these guys, and I have no financial interest in bio-based fuels (other than the usual "No Blood For Oil" thing). I just think that what they're doing is cool.
uranium, too, is a natural resource that will be depleted sooner or later
By "long-term", I don't mean "forever". True enough, there is a finite amount of uranium in the world, but even if you limit yourself to one-pass fission of enriched uranium, with all of the accumulated waste, there's still enough naturally occurring U-235 for hundreds, if not thousands of years of energy production. If you recover the plutonium from the spent fuel and reprocess it for use in a breeder reactor, you can make more plutonium (out of U-238) than you use up in the energy generation process. The supply of U-238 available for conversion to plutonium is enormous, enough for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years of energy production.
50,000 years is not a "forever" energy solution, but it is certainly a "long-term" energy solution.
... which is why the Swedes, the Germans, the Chinese, the Americans and everyone else have to get over their reluctance to embrace nuclear power. As oil gets more scarce, it will get more expensive. After our fourth or fifth hideously expensive war to secure, yet again, access to "our" oil, the politicians will finally run a cost-benefit analysis. The oil will be so expensive that it's just better to let Venezuela, Saudi Arabia or some other OPEC country go to hell and redirect our time and effort into energy independence. Not short-term BS like ANWR or LNG, but the only viable long-term energy option, nuclear fission.
"But what about all the waste?", cry the environmentalists, "don't despoil Yucca Mountain with those mountains of radioactive waste!" Sooner or later, somebody is going to wake up to the fact that breeder reactors that use fuel recycing produce less than 3% of that high level waste that would go into Yucca. When the volumes are that low, you can just glassify it, sink the glass pieces in an ingot of lead and encase the ingots in 5-ton concrete casks and put them in neat rows in a parking lot somewhere. Put up a razor wire fence and that's that. No chance of anyone stealing it for dirty bombs because the casks are so damned heavy ("physical security"), even if the concrete cracks in 30 years the glass won't go anywhere, and the local town will welcome the jobs for Buford and Billy Joe to walk around the fence thirty times a night at $17.50/hr.
Don't want a permanent radioactive waste dump on the outskirts of your town? Call it a "Temporary Cask Transit Facility" and shuffle the casks around every now and again to make it look like they aren't there permanently. "Renew the lease" on the land every 10 years to give you an opportunity to re-bribe the new set of elected officials in town, and make sure you paint the casks every year as part of "safety inspections" to keep them looking neat and safe... that will give jobs to Jim Bob and Cyrus, too.
In the end, you can spend $10,000,000 a year on each of 100 different "Temporary Cask Transit Facilities" for 100 years and still end up cheaper than Yucca Mountain, while offering 1000x the storage capacity.
Beaujolais Nouveau is supposed to be a very bright, aggressive, raw table wine... it's not supposed to be refined and subtle. It wouldn't take much to make it mellower or more complex.
Be that as it may, the size of the machine and the very limited description of how it works suggests they're doing two things.
The pulsed light systems affect only the surface of the product being treated. Photoproducts resulting from this treatment are much fewer than those produced by thermal treatments, thus minimizing product degradation. Pulsed light treatment has been reported to be effective in extending the shelf life of foods such as bread, shrimp and meats (26). Pulsed light is effective in treating water, owing to the transparency of water and the fact that it permits the penetration of light. The reported costs of equipment amortization, lamp replacement, electricity and maintenance indicate expenditures of only a few tenths of a cent (U.S.) per square foot of treated area (24).
This step is most likely to force a photodegradation of the phenolics to reduce the tannin bite and raw tang of a new wine.
Small molecules in wine may pass through an R.O. filter preferentially according to their smallness. Since H2O is the smallest molecule in wine, all of the other constituents are passed into the permeate in lower concentrations than are present in the wine. A typical permeate stream might contain water plus ethanol (75% of retentate concentration), acetic acid (60%), ethyl acetate (40%), and lactic acid (15%), and little else. Since the effective cut-off molecular weight for significant passage is 100 daltons and ions do not pass at all, R.O. permeate contains substantially no tartaric, citric or malic acids, anthocyanins or other phenolics.
Depending on what the winemaker desires to accomplish, this permeate stream may be simply discarded, or may be treated to remove a particular constituent and then recombined with the retentate. The result may be a wine with the same volume and constituents except that a specific element has been reduced, enhancing the perception of desirable flavors. All R.O. applications seek to remove "surgically" a low-molecular-weight constituent of the wine with as little change in the rest of the wine's composition as possible.
This would be to remove the products of the photodegradation and generally clean up the wine to smooth it out. The end result would be a decent, drinkable wine, much like the winemakers sell now in the $5-8/bottle range.
Since wine is a luxury item in the US, a higher price = exclusivity = higher desirability, so this process isn't going to be used in the high end stuff. However, if it can shave a month off the aging process for the low end wines, that means the vineyards can get away with less space for storing inventory as it ages, so they might be interested.
When Roddenberry died, the franchise lost its soul, and became an imitation of itself.
Oh, hell, here I was warming up for a good old fashioned Kirk vs. Picard/ST:TOS vs. ST:TNG flamewar, sharpening the standard set of knives, but my boss just e.mailed me that he needs the project summary reports and '06 projections by 4:00 today, rather than next Thursday, so I just don't have time for it today. Too bad... that argument is always fun.
Slashdot editors, could you please repost this story on Monday, so we can have this argument next week? Thanks.
Neal Stephenson has a hilarious comment on this in "Mother Earth Mother Board", in his description of a big project to lay fiber optic cable in the Pacific Rim.
Q: Why bother running two widely separated routes [for cable from Point A to Point B] over theMalay Peninsula?
A: Because Thailand, like everywhere else in the world, is full of idiots with backhoes.
Imagine that you are a biotech company, and you've successfully created a line of engineered pigs. Maybe they are suitable for organ transplantation into humans, maybe they eat lawyers and sh*t nickles... they're really valuable for whatever reason. How do you keep somebody from just hijacking a shipment of your WonderPigs(tm) and claiming they invented an unrelated line of pigs that do the same thing as yours?
Easy! Create an artificial gene that makes a do-nothing protein with a novel, specific, unique sequence that you select. Insert that gene along with the action gene cluster (EatLawyer + ShtNickles) and the marker gene (Green Fluorescent Protein). Then, everytime the pig's cells express the action genes, they also express the marker (GFP) and your non-obvious marker protein.
When their SuperPigs(tm) hit the marketplace two years after your WonderPigs(tm), you just take a tissue sample and look for the telltale protein. Even if they silcenced the GFP and replaced it with Red, Yellow or Magenta, they wouldn't know to look for your hidden gene. You could even set it up so that it's only expressed under certain conditions, like an Easter Egg. That particular proetin sequence isn't found in nature, so if it's there, this must be a pirated pig.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's compare old technology (rubber shock absorbing mounts) with new (active maglev shock suppressors):
Old - cheap, zero power requirement, silent, no additional support/control systems needed, simple maintenance by minimally skilled techs, pretty effective
New - expensive, lots of power required, non-silent, lots of additional support/control systems needed, complex maintenance by highly skilled techs, super-duper-extra effective (as soon as they get it to work, which will be Real Soon Now)
All of this... for a seat cushion? For years, I've been hearing about active controls in shock absorbers using electrorheological or magnetorheological fluids in place of regular fluid or gas filled shock absorbers. These would be a lot more straighforward than maglev shock suppressors, but where are they?
The fact is, the control systems still are too expensive and unresponsive, and don't offer any significant benefit over traditional shock absorbing systems. The power requirements for a full-on maglev systems would be ridiculous.
For a 7 year old boy, "self-expression" means jumping up and down on the couch yelling, "I am the Butt-Master! I will fart on you!" at the top of his lungs, and then laughing so hard with his 5 year old brother that he goes short of breath, staggers into the dresser and cracks his head so hard that he not only cuts his forehead, but knocks the lamp over so it smashes on the floor, which makes him sit down in crying, hysterical pain while his little brother is scrambling out of the room on hands and knees, because he can hardly stand himself from the effect of deep belly laughs being suddenly wrenched into the need to get the hell out the vicinity before Dad comes upstairs from his workshop to find out what that crash was before the 2 year old starts to play with the broken glass... and the 3 year old is trying to get Dad's attention so she can tell on her borthers while Dad is cleaning up said broken glass, holding back said 2 year old, bandaging said cut on 7 year old's forehead, and calling for said 5 year old so he find out if he's bleeding, too.
All this with a couch and a $30 lamp. Imagine what they'd be able to do with a $1500 computer.
So, I would say the whole "self-expression" thing is really overrated. These days, I really like the "knock it off and behave yourself" model.
... you should think "nuclear".
Fact: the US gets transportation primarily from oil, and power primarily from coal.
Fact: the oil will run out before the coal does.
Fact: nuclear power is more expensive than coal power
Fact: hydrogen can be used directly for transportation, but coal can't
Fact: shifting the transportation energy requirement onto coal-fired plants (coal -> power -> hydrogen) will mean the consumption of A LOT MORE coal
Conclusion: when oil hits $60/barrel and stays there, people will start wanting to build nuclear plants to allow the shift of some portion of the power and transportation sectors to hydrogen.
Oh, wait, that's already happened.
Nethack is like the ex-girlfriend from hell. Once upon a time, you had a mad, passionate love affair with her. You spent every spare hour with her, helpless to resist, almost psychotic in your obsession with her, until you realized that she was sucking the life out of you. To save yourself, to keep from flunking every single course and losing all your friends, you forced yourself to give her up. It was a long, long time before you undid the damage.
Needless to say, you haven't seen her or thought about her in years. Then, one day, someone mentions her, and says she's still around, still ready for a good time. Thinking yourself older and wiser, and beliving yourself to have outgrown the kind of all-consuming infatuation that robs you of your time, your precious, irreplaceble time, you go to see her.
She is, indeed, ready to pick up where you left off.
After an hour of fun and good times, you wonder why you ever stopped seeing her.
After ten hours, you remember.
After a hundred hours, you remember all too well.
Real Goods says:
Presumably, that 0.5-1% degradation is for crystalline silicon PV. NREL says that amorphous thin-film cells:
This NREL article is from Oct 1995, and the 20-40% degradation rates are pretty bad. I got my 10% degradation figure from a paper article I read more recently, which discussed "recent improvements". Since I don't have time to find a citation for it, I'll withdraw the number, and grant a degradation rate of 1% per year to the car roof-top system.
A PV panel that loses 1% efficiency a year will produce 90% of rated power output after 10 years, 82% after 20 years and 74% after 30 years. At 2% degradation, these are outputs of 82%, 67% and 54% of rated, respectively. Your 1970's models look like they are averaging a loss of ~2%/yr.
That assumption of 200,000 miles is over the entire life of the car, right? At 20K/yr, this is roughly ten years. Will the photovoltaic panel continue to provide energy at the same efficiency over 10 years? Doubtful. Solar panels degrade in efficiency over time, maybe by as much as 10% per year.
In the first year, that $2200 kit will save you a whopping $66, assuming that the manufacturer's claims are accurate. You would do better to put that $2200 in a savings account earning 3% and use the interest ($66) to pay for the extra gasoline. Repeat that for 10 years and you'll be no worse off from the amount of money you spent on gas, plus you'll have $2200 in the bank instead of a 10-year old photovoltaic rig.
I don't usually respond to Anonymous Cowards, but, yes, that's exactly what will happen. All of the wild and wooly, profane and free speech that is part of the Internet now will be Premium Services on Googlenet, and will either cost extra, or won't be available. New content will be created on the old Internet, but it will be like Usenet is today... a ragged shadow of its former glory, existing on the fringes of society, only ever visited by those with exotic tastes and preferences, who can't get their fix from the mainstream.
Also, Google needn't worry about losing a supply of fresh porn when the content creators on the old Internet wither away. They can just repackage all the terabytes of porn in the cache, stored up from a decade or two. It's impossible for any one individual to look at each of the bazillion photos in the cache. Google will just keep track of what you've seen and make sure to serve up something fresh each time you ask for porn.
But as the level and size of content increases, it will require more bandwidth to deliver it to the user. Google will still crawl/trawl the internet for content, and cache it.
The customer then has a choice:
a) get your content directly from the entity that created it, over the old, slow Internet, or,
b) get that same content over the blazing fast, all fibre Googlenet, with a few targetted ads before, during or after, or ad-free for a monthly subscription fee.
Google then becomes a content delivery entity, separate from the content creation entities.
One more thing... with everything cached by Google, you would never get a "Page No Longer Exists" message. You might have to pay a few cents to see pages that exist only in the Google cache, but they would still be available. Google thus also takes on the role of content archival entity.
I didn't mean to imply plagiarism. My subject ("More like 'Stolen From Arthur'") was intended to be a play on words, based on the parent's subject ("Stolen From Author"). Puns (especially mine) don't always come across in writing, unfortunatley.
...and it would have been posted anonymously.
BTW, I commend you on your choice of phrasing. A more typical Slashdot response would have been, "She didn't steal it from anybody you ASSHAT! Their completly different! RTFA!"
De nada. The Silver Age will never be forgot, at least not as long as I'm around.
FWIW, I read "God's Debris" a few years ago, and thought it was half-assed crap, a collection of the kind of self important sophist nonsense that is so impressive and insightful sounding to people who don't really have much experience at thinking.
The Nine Billion Names of God
."
."
.
By Arthur Clarke
(originally published 1953)
"This is a slightly unusual request," said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. "As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an automatic sequence computer. I don't wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly thought that your --ah-- establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?"
"Gladly," replied the lama, readjusting his silk robe and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. "Your Mark V computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures."
"I don't understand . .
"This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries -- since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it."
"Naturally."
"It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God."
"I beg your pardon?"
"We have reason to believe," continued the lama imperturbably, "that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised."
"And you have been doing this for three centuries?"
"Yes. We expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task."
"Oh." Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. "Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?"
The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.
"Call it ritual, if you like, but it's a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being -- God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on -- they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters, which can occur, are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all."
"I see. You've been starting at AAAAAAAAA . . . and working up to ZZZZZZZZZ . .
"Exactly -- though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession."
"Three? Surely you mean two."
"Three is correct. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language."
"I'm sure it would," said Wagner hastily. "Go on."
"Luckily it will be a simple matter to adapt your automatic sequence computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a thousand days."
Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right . .
"There's no doubt," replied the doctor, "that we can modify the Mark V to print lists of this nature. I'm much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is n
The OLED mini-screens seem like a poor choice for this, given the fact that these will presumably be used as easily-changed labels, rather than dynamic minidisplay screens. If you only need to change them once in a while, wouldn't electronic ink displays be better suited to this task? Even LCD would be more appropriate, except that they would be a constant power draw.
It's not like fat people want to be fat.
No, their problem is that they don't want to be thin, or at least not badly enough to overcome the security blanket of their fat existence. If you want to stop being fat, you have to stop being who you are and become someone new. That's just way, way too scary a prospect for many people. If you're happy and comfortable being fat, then fine, stay that way. If you want to be thin, then you have to want it badly enough to do something about it.
A while ago, I finally decided that I was tired of being obese (230#, 6'0") and started wanting to be thinner. Actually wanting it badly enough to do something about it. After I lost 50#, I went to a family reunion, and listened to an uncle, who is at least 450#, telling me how he could be skinny if he wanted to, but his doctor told him he'd have to give up Pepsi to do it. "No way I'm giving up my Pepsi! I love Pepsi! I go through at least one 2-liter bottle a day!" When I suggested that if he switched to Diet Pepsi (zero calories), he could drink as much of it as he liked and remove 2000+ calories from his daily intake. "Aw, calories are just bullshit - it's my metabolism! I got a bad metabolism!" His is an extreme case, but different from most fat people only in degree.
There is a tiny, tiny fraction of people who actually do have a screwed up metabolism. The vast majority of the overweight, obese and hugely obese pepople out there have a screwed up psychology, or at least a screwed up sense of priorities. They eat too much, and they eat the wrond stuff, and they continue to do it because they don't want to acknowledge or accept the negative impact of their actions. They want a pill or a magic new cooking oil or some other maguffin that will let them eat their cake and lose it too.
When I was fat, I generally felt OK, and when I looked around me, I saw that most people looked like me. After I lost my weight and went from "obese" to "normal", I had an astonishing number of people tell me that they got dealt a bad metabolism, or else they'd be thin, too. I also had a gratifying number of people who, after seeing that a fat slob like me could do it, made a serious commitment to doing it themselves.
It is a matter of will. Period.
Don't worry... this is just a trial balloon before the State of the Union address. He wants to be able to say, "Which do you want? A thousand oil wells in ANWR or a thousand new reactors in the lower 48?"
Personally, I'd go for the fast-neutron reactors.
I feel like I'm psychic... just in case you missed this incredibly prescient rant on reprocessing, I'll repost a summary of it here since it is so germaine. It was in response to the item about Sweden weaning themselves from oil in 20 years, because the oil is running out. ...everyone else have to get over their reluctance to embrace nuclear power... Sooner or later, somebody is going to wake up to the fact that breeder reactors that use fuel recycing produce less than 3% of that high level waste that would go into Yucca.... encase the waste in 5-ton concrete casks...("physical security")... Call it a "Temporary Cask Transit Facility" ... "Renew the lease" on the land every 10 years to give you an opportunity to re-bribe the new set of elected officials in town... cheaper than Yucca Mountain, while offering 1000x the storage capacity.
Damn, a href=http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 6/01/26/170232>that was fast.
But look at the citation for the data on that table: Energy and the U.S. Economy: A Biophysical Perspective Cutler J. Cleveland; Robert Costanza; Charles A. S. Hall; Robert Kaufmann Science, New Series, Vol. 225, No. 4665 (Aug. 31, 1984), 890-897.
Technology has advanced a long way since 1984, particularly in the area of enzymology to break down chemically resistant carbon in plant tissues, like cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Brazil's ethanol program relies heavily on conversion of sugar; to make ethanol economically competitive in the US, we would need to rely on conversion of cross-linked starch and long-chain polymers. The phenolics in lignin would be a feedstock for industrial chemistry. Here's some more general info.
The USDA's Crop Conversion Science and Engineering Research Unit is all about developing new tools to increase the efficiency of extracting usable energy from plant products. Here are a few examples:
Aqueous Enzymatic Extraction of Corn Oil and Value-Added Products from Corn Germ Produced in New Generation Dry-Grind Ethanol Processes
Economic Competitiveness of Renewable Fuels Derived from Grains and Related Biomass
Enzyme-Based Technologies for Milling Grains and Producing Biobased Products and Fuels
Full disclosure: I don't work for these guys, and I have no financial interest in bio-based fuels (other than the usual "No Blood For Oil" thing). I just think that what they're doing is cool.
uranium, too, is a natural resource that will be depleted sooner or later
By "long-term", I don't mean "forever". True enough, there is a finite amount of uranium in the world, but even if you limit yourself to one-pass fission of enriched uranium, with all of the accumulated waste, there's still enough naturally occurring U-235 for hundreds, if not thousands of years of energy production. If you recover the plutonium from the spent fuel and reprocess it for use in a breeder reactor, you can make more plutonium (out of U-238) than you use up in the energy generation process. The supply of U-238 available for conversion to plutonium is enormous, enough for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years of energy production.
50,000 years is not a "forever" energy solution, but it is certainly a "long-term" energy solution.
... which is why the Swedes, the Germans, the Chinese, the Americans and everyone else have to get over their reluctance to embrace nuclear power. As oil gets more scarce, it will get more expensive. After our fourth or fifth hideously expensive war to secure, yet again, access to "our" oil, the politicians will finally run a cost-benefit analysis. The oil will be so expensive that it's just better to let Venezuela, Saudi Arabia or some other OPEC country go to hell and redirect our time and effort into energy independence. Not short-term BS like ANWR or LNG, but the only viable long-term energy option, nuclear fission.
"But what about all the waste?", cry the environmentalists, "don't despoil Yucca Mountain with those mountains of radioactive waste!" Sooner or later, somebody is going to wake up to the fact that breeder reactors that use fuel recycing produce less than 3% of that high level waste that would go into Yucca. When the volumes are that low, you can just glassify it, sink the glass pieces in an ingot of lead and encase the ingots in 5-ton concrete casks and put them in neat rows in a parking lot somewhere. Put up a razor wire fence and that's that. No chance of anyone stealing it for dirty bombs because the casks are so damned heavy ("physical security"), even if the concrete cracks in 30 years the glass won't go anywhere, and the local town will welcome the jobs for Buford and Billy Joe to walk around the fence thirty times a night at $17.50/hr.
Don't want a permanent radioactive waste dump on the outskirts of your town? Call it a "Temporary Cask Transit Facility" and shuffle the casks around every now and again to make it look like they aren't there permanently. "Renew the lease" on the land every 10 years to give you an opportunity to re-bribe the new set of elected officials in town, and make sure you paint the casks every year as part of "safety inspections" to keep them looking neat and safe... that will give jobs to Jim Bob and Cyrus, too.
In the end, you can spend $10,000,000 a year on each of 100 different "Temporary Cask Transit Facilities" for 100 years and still end up cheaper than Yucca Mountain, while offering 1000x the storage capacity.
Be that as it may, the size of the machine and the very limited description of how it works suggests they're doing two things.
First, it's probably being treated with a pulsed light system:
This step is most likely to force a photodegradation of the phenolics to reduce the tannin bite and raw tang of a new wine.
Then, it's probably going through a reverse osmosis matrix:
This would be to remove the products of the photodegradation and generally clean up the wine to smooth it out. The end result would be a decent, drinkable wine, much like the winemakers sell now in the $5-8/bottle range.
Since wine is a luxury item in the US, a higher price = exclusivity = higher desirability, so this process isn't going to be used in the high end stuff. However, if it can shave a month off the aging process for the low end wines, that means the vineyards can get away with less space for storing inventory as it ages, so they might be interested.
When Roddenberry died, the franchise lost its soul, and became an imitation of itself.
Oh, hell, here I was warming up for a good old fashioned Kirk vs. Picard/ST:TOS vs. ST:TNG flamewar, sharpening the standard set of knives, but my boss just e.mailed me that he needs the project summary reports and '06 projections by 4:00 today, rather than next Thursday, so I just don't have time for it today. Too bad... that argument is always fun.
Slashdot editors, could you please repost this story on Monday, so we can have this argument next week? Thanks.
Neal Stephenson has a hilarious comment on this in "Mother Earth Mother Board", in his description of a big project to lay fiber optic cable in the Pacific Rim.
Q: Why bother running two widely separated routes [for cable from Point A to Point B] over theMalay Peninsula?
A: Because Thailand, like everywhere else in the world, is full of idiots with backhoes.
Q: Isn't that a pain in the ass?
A: You have no idea.
Michigan State University.
Toledo, Ohio.
Karate.
Leslie St.
Just a guess....
Well, if it means anything, I don't think you suck. Keep up the good work.
/. sucks*. Digg is much better.**
Shoot, I was going to post exactly the same thing. Now I'll get modded Redundant. The moderation system on
* = joke
** = another joke
Imagine that you are a biotech company, and you've successfully created a line of engineered pigs. Maybe they are suitable for organ transplantation into humans, maybe they eat lawyers and sh*t nickles... they're really valuable for whatever reason. How do you keep somebody from just hijacking a shipment of your WonderPigs(tm) and claiming they invented an unrelated line of pigs that do the same thing as yours?
Easy! Create an artificial gene that makes a do-nothing protein with a novel, specific, unique sequence that you select. Insert that gene along with the action gene cluster (EatLawyer + ShtNickles) and the marker gene (Green Fluorescent Protein). Then, everytime the pig's cells express the action genes, they also express the marker (GFP) and your non-obvious marker protein.
When their SuperPigs(tm) hit the marketplace two years after your WonderPigs(tm), you just take a tissue sample and look for the telltale protein. Even if they silcenced the GFP and replaced it with Red, Yellow or Magenta, they wouldn't know to look for your hidden gene. You could even set it up so that it's only expressed under certain conditions, like an Easter Egg. That particular proetin sequence isn't found in nature, so if it's there, this must be a pirated pig.
It's like the funny pictures that chip manufacturers hide on processing chips... copy this layout and we'll know where to look for our signature.