Because it turns out you can get more bang for your buck by improving the manufacturing of silicon cells than you can get by launching the alternatives that have been tried so far. Monocrystalline silicone is still king when it comes to conversion efficiency and they're no longer particularly expensive, so way go for second or third best?
Well, I'm not a physicist either and I could be wrong but I think that there are two equivalent views of what a black hole is. The holographic view is pretty strange...
The stuff that supposedly sits at the event horizon in the holographic view is not matter; it is information. My understanding is that the event horizon of a black hole can basically be though of as a data storage device that stores scrambled information about everything that the hole has swallowed, except for the information about the stuff that it has since spit out.
I imagine it works something like this: when the black hole swallows some matter the information content in that matter (that is the entropy) gets stored on the horizon and the horizon expands to make room for it. When the hole spits out a particle the horizon "erases" the information/entropy of that particle and the horizon contracts to make sure there isn't any empty "disk space".
If I understood it correctly they mean that on the other side is a universe with 4 spatial dimensions.
Think of it this way: in a universe with 3 spatial dimensions a black hole has a 2-d surface (shaped roughly like the surface of a sphere) as its event horizon. On the inside of the surface is the black hole. On the outside is the rest of the universe. Generalizing this to a hypothetical universe with 4 spatial dimension, a black hole in such a universe would have a 3-d "surface" surrounding it with the black hole inside of the surface and the rest of the universe outside of it.
By the way, there is already an idea floating around about how the edge of the visible universe seems be a bit like the event horizon of a black hole. Once something has passed the edge of the visible universe it is effectively lost to us, a bit like when something passes the event horizon of a black hole.
Maybe so, but there is no technical reason not to use a long key. The bit rate is more than 100 bits per second IIRC, so a 64-bit key would work without being inconvenient. It would obviously take a long while to brute force that.
By the way for anyone interested in starting out with digital electronics and micro controllers, making a an IR-lock and a key (and then a key sniffer for extra credit) is a good first project in terms of difficulty. You could start with an old remote as the key for the first iteration.
What I mean was that if you listen to a fair bit of music, which most people do, you will eventually get to a point around age 25 (give or take) where almost everything you stumble on or get recommended seems like a rehash of something you've already heard, perhaps while you were doing something for one of the first times in your life that made the music seem more profound and soulful than it really was.
It's a lot more challenging to find music that comes to mean something to you when it is no longer almost automatically being tied to exciting memories.
But yeah, a lot of music these days is literally made to be used as soundtrack for commercials. That's not an artifact of me or anyone else getting older.
I think you're getting a little ahead of time here. Your description is where Apple will be if their only major new platform the next three years is the smart watch.
It's fairly likely, like they speculate in TFV, that Apple has an answer to Google Glass in their R&D pipeline. If that product turns out to be better than Glass then Apple would probably be back in the spotlight again. Wearables look like a market that Apple would find easy to dominate since it's a lot about style and other fussy qualities that Apple have done extremely well on in the past.
Painting roofs and outer walls white would have a negligible effect on the global climate. It's a great idea if you live relatively close to the equator because it'll save you a lot on air conditioning and if everyone in the neighborhood does it your neighborhood will be a bit cooler. This will become more important as heat waves become hotter because of climate change. But again, negligible effect on the global climate.
There are cars that get 40 mpg, but people prefer to take out improvements in efficiency in bigger cars, better acceleration and by driving longer distances. The only way to solve the problem with emissions from cars through technological progress is to come up with an obscenely large SUV with brutal acceleration and top speed that gets 100 mpg. Companies are working on this, but it will take decades to get to where such a car would be cheap to buy.
It's business as usual in AGW-land. Yet another unforseen event? No worries, blame it on CO2 and add another complexity layer on the model. I expect their models to start matching reality at about the same time as global climate control becomes reality.
Hopefully they will stop predicting catastrophes all the time by then.
A temporary bounce back after an extremely rapid decline can hardly be called unexpected. Regression to the mean.
Which climate model predicted catastrophes all the time? None that I've heard of.
Follow the link http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ and scroll down to the chart that shows month of August ice extent 1979 to 2013. That really puts it into perspective. Also notice how they've made things look better than they are (not worse as conspiracy theorists would expect) by fitting a line instead of say a second or third order polynomial.
I'll wait to see what Apple (or anyone else) comes out with but I don't hold out much hope for any of them - seems like a lost cause. The marginal increase in convenience from having it on your wrist compared to taking it out of your pocket just doesn't counter the decrease in display size and functionality compared to a phone. Even if it was extremely low cost, if I have the phone with me anyway, why bother with the watch?
Any increase in convenience,however marginal, has been enough in the past to sell products and services if everything else about the product is up to par.
You still keep your phone just like you did before. The cost is not that you lose your phone, the cost is that you're going to have to wear something around your wrist again like in the olden days. That thing then has to look good enough, has to be reasonably comfortable, can't get too much in the way, etc.
The main problem for Apple and other prospective smartwatch makers is going to be competing with established watchmakers over style and other perceived qualities. Well, that and getting the size of the thing down while simultaneously achieving decent battery life.
Nope, Nokia wasn't defeated from the outside, it committed suicide.
Sadly not far from the truth.
While we're on the topic of tasteless analogies I'd like to compare Elop to the airline captain who entered the cockpit a minute after his copilot has stalled the plane while they were descending through 15,000 feet towards the rapidly approaching ocean surface.
Who knows though, I guess Elop and Microsoft could still have conspired to continue the descent so that MS could get Nokia's top minds and their factories and other assets for cheap.
It would be a very minor improvement, but so is almost everything these days. If the price is low enough and if it looks nice and shiny it will probably sell.
The bar for what counts as technological innovation is not exactly set sky high. I sometimes wonder if there are diminishing returns inherent in innovation, or if innovators have just been doing things wrong the last 30 years or so.
Its quite ugly not to mention far too bulky. I'm not sure what benefit having this could provide anyway. Can anyone provide a credible use-case?
The main user case would be getting brief information of all sorts faster and with less effort. Who sent that message that your phone just announced you got? What's the score in the game your live score app is following? Roughly how many calories have you burned today by moving about? When does your next calendar event start?
It's not going to be worth it if it's ugly and bulky and burns through the battery every day... Watch out (no pun intended) for Apple's smart watch which is likely to be smaller, prettier and have a longer battery life.
I'm not personally guilty since I'm not in the US or a US citizen or involved in the NIF project, but I suspect that mbkennel's answer contains a clue to why there isn't a lot of cooperation on the laser fusion projects. The results will be useful if and when it is time to build new hydrogen bombs. The main reason why the US and China have nukes is so that they can point them at one another and at Russia, which could be an obstacle when it comes to cooperation.
USA, China, EU and Russia are all partners in the ITER project which is the most ambitious mainstream fusion project aimed at a commercially viable reactor design for the grid. The really sad part is that the US and other leading industrial countries have only spent proverbial pennies on fusion research over the years. The US has spent a mere 30 billion in total according to this source http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful. We're probably not going to find out if fusion is viable in our lifetimes.
I'm afraid we're looking at lots and lots of 'clean' coal, a good deal of fracking and other unconventional natural gas, lots of solar panels, some wind turbines and maybe a tiny bit of fission for the next 50 years or so. (Unless someone comes up with a really good fission reactor design. That could change everything.)
China does not really need to invent anything to clean up its air. They need to absorb technology and regulation from the west.
Scrubbing exhaust from all coal fired plants and enforcing that all cars must have functioning catalytic converters would probably solve a lot of the air quality problems that they have.
The article refers to it as Shenguang Laser Project for Inertial Confinement Fusion, which may give a clue about what it's primarily for. It's apparently the Chinese equivalent of USA's National Ignition Facility.
When machines replaced muscle power people were freed up to work with their brains and the labor market was better for it.
Common economic sense therefore says that when machines replace brains the labor market will be better because everyone who is working with their brain will be freed up to work with things that the invisible hand of the market will discover that humans are better than super intelligent machines at doing, such as, um... Something.
Like what?
If I believed the singularity was near I would be working on my abs and whitening my teeth and trying to befriend rich people.
The moon's too lossy, and keeps having its time of the month where it's completely useless. For getting solar power beamed down from space, I'd propose using... the sun!
I'm curious - how much taxpayer funding has this received? Is this just another one of the "ride the replace-fossil-fuel-usage bandwagon" schemes?
I suspect someone thought there might be a chance that this could be used to beam down power to overseas armies in the field at night or during cloudy weather when you don't have solar power.
I also suspect they forgot to take into account that you need to build a large, hard to defend receiver array on the ground in order to harvest the dilute microwave beam.
The obvious response would have been to partner with a hardware manufacturer and make a line of mid- to high-end Windows laptops and desktop computers that look and feel almost exactly like Macbooks and iMacs.
Customers want nice shiny products. If someone else is making a nicer shinier product; copy it. Most customers won't know or care that you stole the idea.
How many children would die if there was no power?
How many children would have died from coal burning related illnesses?
How many children would not have been born because their parents died due to either of the above?
About 10% of all children die before the age of five in societies with little or no power compared to about 0.5% in countries with power, so that's about 2000 additional deaths per year per 100,000 children under five.
No, I'm discussing the options that are discussed. The discussion is usually about governments taking actions to reduce emissions vs. governments doing nothing. Doing nothing seems like an increasingly bad option.
It would be interesting to compare a larger set of options, like blocking sunlight or promoting adaptation, but more research is needed before anyone could say much about that. We can only discuss options that someone has suggested and that have been shown to be not obviously unfeasible.
You could cap and trade. You could ration fossil fuels war-time style. You could plain outlaw them. Finally, you could decide to don't fix the problem and let people, businesses and local governments adapt to the changing climate.
None of these options seem feasible and/or nice if you ask me.
The good news is that governments don't have to do a lot. Increase taxes on fossil fuel, lower taxes on income, fund basic research and other promising but currently unprofitable research into energy saving and energy production and distribution.
The details are going to be a bit tricky, but not prohibitively so if all political parties agree that it needs to be done. That 'if' is admittedly a rather significant one, but it may help to talk more about the carrot part of the deal, i.e. the lower income taxes.
Yes and no. Half the purpose of the commercial districts is to be a place for teenagers and single adults to look for potential partners while sober and without online picture trickery (did you know the camera removes 50 pounds if aimed from above? if you've dated a lot lately you probably did).
Commercial districts downtown and around the downtown will probably be all coffee shops, bars, restaurants, fancy boutiques and one or two shops catering to the 15-25 crowd... Wait, scratch future tense...
Slashdot Mirror
Because it turns out you can get more bang for your buck by improving the manufacturing of silicon cells than you can get by launching the alternatives that have been tried so far. Monocrystalline silicone is still king when it comes to conversion efficiency and they're no longer particularly expensive, so way go for second or third best?
Well, I'm not a physicist either and I could be wrong but I think that there are two equivalent views of what a black hole is. The holographic view is pretty strange...
The stuff that supposedly sits at the event horizon in the holographic view is not matter; it is information. My understanding is that the event horizon of a black hole can basically be though of as a data storage device that stores scrambled information about everything that the hole has swallowed, except for the information about the stuff that it has since spit out.
I imagine it works something like this: when the black hole swallows some matter the information content in that matter (that is the entropy) gets stored on the horizon and the horizon expands to make room for it. When the hole spits out a particle the horizon "erases" the information/entropy of that particle and the horizon contracts to make sure there isn't any empty "disk space".
If I understood it correctly they mean that on the other side is a universe with 4 spatial dimensions.
Think of it this way: in a universe with 3 spatial dimensions a black hole has a 2-d surface (shaped roughly like the surface of a sphere) as its event horizon. On the inside of the surface is the black hole. On the outside is the rest of the universe. Generalizing this to a hypothetical universe with 4 spatial dimension, a black hole in such a universe would have a 3-d "surface" surrounding it with the black hole inside of the surface and the rest of the universe outside of it.
By the way, there is already an idea floating around about how the edge of the visible universe seems be a bit like the event horizon of a black hole. Once something has passed the edge of the visible universe it is effectively lost to us, a bit like when something passes the event horizon of a black hole.
Maybe so, but there is no technical reason not to use a long key. The bit rate is more than 100 bits per second IIRC, so a 64-bit key would work without being inconvenient. It would obviously take a long while to brute force that.
By the way for anyone interested in starting out with digital electronics and micro controllers, making a an IR-lock and a key (and then a key sniffer for extra credit) is a good first project in terms of difficulty. You could start with an old remote as the key for the first iteration.
What I mean was that if you listen to a fair bit of music, which most people do, you will eventually get to a point around age 25 (give or take) where almost everything you stumble on or get recommended seems like a rehash of something you've already heard, perhaps while you were doing something for one of the first times in your life that made the music seem more profound and soulful than it really was.
It's a lot more challenging to find music that comes to mean something to you when it is no longer almost automatically being tied to exciting memories.
But yeah, a lot of music these days is literally made to be used as soundtrack for commercials. That's not an artifact of me or anyone else getting older.
I miss songs that you can 'feel' the soul coming through the speakers.
<=> You are more than 25 years old.
I think you're getting a little ahead of time here. Your description is where Apple will be if their only major new platform the next three years is the smart watch.
It's fairly likely, like they speculate in TFV, that Apple has an answer to Google Glass in their R&D pipeline. If that product turns out to be better than Glass then Apple would probably be back in the spotlight again. Wearables look like a market that Apple would find easy to dominate since it's a lot about style and other fussy qualities that Apple have done extremely well on in the past.
Painting roofs and outer walls white would have a negligible effect on the global climate. It's a great idea if you live relatively close to the equator because it'll save you a lot on air conditioning and if everyone in the neighborhood does it your neighborhood will be a bit cooler. This will become more important as heat waves become hotter because of climate change. But again, negligible effect on the global climate.
There are cars that get 40 mpg, but people prefer to take out improvements in efficiency in bigger cars, better acceleration and by driving longer distances. The only way to solve the problem with emissions from cars through technological progress is to come up with an obscenely large SUV with brutal acceleration and top speed that gets 100 mpg. Companies are working on this, but it will take decades to get to where such a car would be cheap to buy.
Any other ideas?
It's business as usual in AGW-land. Yet another unforseen event? No worries, blame it on CO2 and add another complexity layer on the model.
I expect their models to start matching reality at about the same time as global climate control becomes reality.
Hopefully they will stop predicting catastrophes all the time by then.
A temporary bounce back after an extremely rapid decline can hardly be called unexpected. Regression to the mean.
Which climate model predicted catastrophes all the time? None that I've heard of.
Follow the link http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ and scroll down to the chart that shows month of August ice extent 1979 to 2013. That really puts it into perspective. Also notice how they've made things look better than they are (not worse as conspiracy theorists would expect) by fitting a line instead of say a second or third order polynomial.
I'll wait to see what Apple (or anyone else) comes out with but I don't hold out much hope for any of them - seems like a lost cause. The marginal increase in convenience from having it on your wrist compared to taking it out of your pocket just doesn't counter the decrease in display size and functionality compared to a phone. Even if it was extremely low cost, if I have the phone with me anyway, why bother with the watch?
Any increase in convenience,however marginal, has been enough in the past to sell products and services if everything else about the product is up to par.
You still keep your phone just like you did before. The cost is not that you lose your phone, the cost is that you're going to have to wear something around your wrist again like in the olden days. That thing then has to look good enough, has to be reasonably comfortable, can't get too much in the way, etc.
The main problem for Apple and other prospective smartwatch makers is going to be competing with established watchmakers over style and other perceived qualities. Well, that and getting the size of the thing down while simultaneously achieving decent battery life.
Nope, Nokia wasn't defeated from the outside, it committed suicide.
Sadly not far from the truth.
While we're on the topic of tasteless analogies I'd like to compare Elop to the airline captain who entered the cockpit a minute after his copilot has stalled the plane while they were descending through 15,000 feet towards the rapidly approaching ocean surface.
Who knows though, I guess Elop and Microsoft could still have conspired to continue the descent so that MS could get Nokia's top minds and their factories and other assets for cheap.
It would be a very minor improvement, but so is almost everything these days. If the price is low enough and if it looks nice and shiny it will probably sell.
The bar for what counts as technological innovation is not exactly set sky high. I sometimes wonder if there are diminishing returns inherent in innovation, or if innovators have just been doing things wrong the last 30 years or so.
Its quite ugly not to mention far too bulky.
I'm not sure what benefit having this could provide anyway.
Can anyone provide a credible use-case?
The main user case would be getting brief information of all sorts faster and with less effort. Who sent that message that your phone just announced you got? What's the score in the game your live score app is following? Roughly how many calories have you burned today by moving about? When does your next calendar event start?
It's not going to be worth it if it's ugly and bulky and burns through the battery every day... Watch out (no pun intended) for Apple's smart watch which is likely to be smaller, prettier and have a longer battery life.
I'm not personally guilty since I'm not in the US or a US citizen or involved in the NIF project, but I suspect that mbkennel's answer contains a clue to why there isn't a lot of cooperation on the laser fusion projects. The results will be useful if and when it is time to build new hydrogen bombs. The main reason why the US and China have nukes is so that they can point them at one another and at Russia, which could be an obstacle when it comes to cooperation.
USA, China, EU and Russia are all partners in the ITER project which is the most ambitious mainstream fusion project aimed at a commercially viable reactor design for the grid. The really sad part is that the US and other leading industrial countries have only spent proverbial pennies on fusion research over the years. The US has spent a mere 30 billion in total according to this source http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful. We're probably not going to find out if fusion is viable in our lifetimes.
I'm afraid we're looking at lots and lots of 'clean' coal, a good deal of fracking and other unconventional natural gas, lots of solar panels, some wind turbines and maybe a tiny bit of fission for the next 50 years or so. (Unless someone comes up with a really good fission reactor design. That could change everything.)
China does not really need to invent anything to clean up its air. They need to absorb technology and regulation from the west.
Scrubbing exhaust from all coal fired plants and enforcing that all cars must have functioning catalytic converters would probably solve a lot of the air quality problems that they have.
The article refers to it as Shenguang Laser Project for Inertial Confinement Fusion, which may give a clue about what it's primarily for. It's apparently the Chinese equivalent of USA's National Ignition Facility.
And in some cases their talent is an amazing amount of jealousy which comes out in passive-aggressive comments on Slashdot.
Wait, did you make a fortune posting anonymous annoying comments on Slashdot? Looks like a lot of people here have been missing out!
When machines replaced muscle power people were freed up to work with their brains and the labor market was better for it.
Common economic sense therefore says that when machines replace brains the labor market will be better because everyone who is working with their brain will be freed up to work with things that the invisible hand of the market will discover that humans are better than super intelligent machines at doing, such as, um... Something.
Like what?
If I believed the singularity was near I would be working on my abs and whitening my teeth and trying to befriend rich people.
The moon's too lossy, and keeps having its time of the month where it's completely useless. For getting solar power beamed down from space, I'd propose using ... the sun!
I'm curious - how much taxpayer funding has this received? Is this just another one of the "ride the replace-fossil-fuel-usage bandwagon" schemes?
I suspect someone thought there might be a chance that this could be used to beam down power to overseas armies in the field at night or during cloudy weather when you don't have solar power.
I also suspect they forgot to take into account that you need to build a large, hard to defend receiver array on the ground in order to harvest the dilute microwave beam.
The obvious response would have been to partner with a hardware manufacturer and make a line of mid- to high-end Windows laptops and desktop computers that look and feel almost exactly like Macbooks and iMacs.
Customers want nice shiny products. If someone else is making a nicer shinier product; copy it. Most customers won't know or care that you stole the idea.
How many children would die if there was no power?
How many children would have died from coal burning related illnesses?
How many children would not have been born because their parents died due to either of the above?
About 10% of all children die before the age of five in societies with little or no power compared to about 0.5% in countries with power, so that's about 2000 additional deaths per year per 100,000 children under five.
No, I'm discussing the options that are discussed. The discussion is usually about governments taking actions to reduce emissions vs. governments doing nothing. Doing nothing seems like an increasingly bad option.
It would be interesting to compare a larger set of options, like blocking sunlight or promoting adaptation, but more research is needed before anyone could say much about that. We can only discuss options that someone has suggested and that have been shown to be not obviously unfeasible.
Well, there are other ways.
You could cap and trade. You could ration fossil fuels war-time style. You could plain outlaw them. Finally, you could decide to don't fix the problem and let people, businesses and local governments adapt to the changing climate.
None of these options seem feasible and/or nice if you ask me.
The good news is that governments don't have to do a lot. Increase taxes on fossil fuel, lower taxes on income, fund basic research and other promising but currently unprofitable research into energy saving and energy production and distribution.
The details are going to be a bit tricky, but not prohibitively so if all political parties agree that it needs to be done. That 'if' is admittedly a rather significant one, but it may help to talk more about the carrot part of the deal, i.e. the lower income taxes.
Yes and no. Half the purpose of the commercial districts is to be a place for teenagers and single adults to look for potential partners while sober and without online picture trickery (did you know the camera removes 50 pounds if aimed from above? if you've dated a lot lately you probably did).
Commercial districts downtown and around the downtown will probably be all coffee shops, bars, restaurants, fancy boutiques and one or two shops catering to the 15-25 crowd... Wait, scratch future tense...