Even if the homeowner generates exactly as much energy as she uses, she's providing the power company with a huge benefit. Generally speaking, residential power usage is highest in the evenings, whereas solar generates during peak load times, when the grid is maxed out and generating more power is the most expensive. The ability to shift power generation from one time to another is a ginormous benefit.
Also, unless the customer uses exactly as much power as she generates, she's either paying for electricity, or selling the excess to the power company at some standard wholesale rate.
We'll just make sure that the AIs are only smart enough to "understand what we want from it?"
How is that going to help? We're going to want machines to do all sorts of things. AI, collect my tax information and file it with the IRS. AI, watch my front door for visitors. AI, drive me to the restaurant. AI, choose a great restaurant for me. AI, prove this theorem for me. AI, help me uncover the psychological root of my behavioral problems. AI, make this car design cheaper to manufacture. AI, write a bestselling novel.
Not all the things we're going to want can be delivered by an obedient dog, no matter how much the dog wants to please us.
>> You might not like the idea of thinking of "faith" outside of the belief in magic, but the standard recognized English definition is what it is. Arguing about the difference in saying that you don't believe in the existence of God and saying that you believe in the non-existence of God is just sophistry.
No, it's a very important distinction. The former is a much weaker claim than the latter, because the former requires no active belief.
Say I asked you, "Do you believe a woman named Mary Gillespe lives at 524 Circle Creek, New York City?" You would probably say no, because you don't know anything about whether the woman exists or not.
But if I asked you, "Do you believe there is no woman named Mary Gillespe living at 524 Circle Creek, New York City?" you would also have to answer 'no', again because you have no relevant information. In order to answer yes -- even though the questions are superficially opposite, you would have to take some positive action.
Now, I believe there is no such woman living at that address, because the name and the address are entirely made up. But there's a probably 1/5000000 chance that I inadvertently gave a correct name/address combination. So I would be a strong (though not dogmatic) agillespean, whereas you would be an agnostic towards gillespeanism.
>> Face it, faith in many things is an important aspect of everyone's lives every day. Thinking of it in such narrow terms so that you can use it as an attack point just makes you an ass.
You can't even prove "God didn't do X". Even if the X in question is something that conforms perfectly to well-established natural laws, God could still have had a hand in it.
Example: I'm shooting a basketball from three point range. It goes in. The video shows a standard parabolic arc, no surprises. But I'm claiming that an invisible hawk swooped down, grabbed the ball, and put it in the basket. The parabolic arc is just the path the hawk took.
Proof? I suck at basketball, and I would never have made that shot unassisted.
Just goes to show the difficulty of proving a negative.
stinking rotten lousy communist-bastard-leftist constantly assaulting my freedoms, fortune and sanity
As a stinking rotten lousy communist-bastard-leftist, I resent that remark.
I think people are overreacting somewhat. Aside from the enforcement problem, pay-per-mile insurance is a wonderful idea. But you have to have an objective way of determining mileage, and the easiest way to do so is a real privacy-buster: install a GPS that can report your activities second by second.
But in principle, you should be able to create a device that can judge your distance based solely on the input from an accelerometer. It shouldn't need to record anything about where you are, when the acceleration happened, etc.
A complete recording of your daily whereabouts is a huge privacy intrusion. A quarterly report of total miles driven is hardly a concern at all. Such a device could easily be simulated by a GPS with no long-term memory.
Rather than kill a really good idea in the name of privacy, I think we ought to be insisting that the technology be the bare minimum to do the job.
I'm not disagreeing with you. But I do think that the most straightforward approach* to a human-like intelligence is to work from a known good pattern. Reimplementing evolution seems likely to be a long, drawn out process, and one which is unlikely to lead to an intelligence "like us". I think it's important that artificial intelligences be a lot like us.
* Not necessarily the fastest approach, or the most rewarding. Just the most certain to succeed.
No, he made some excellent points, which you decided to ignore.
The article makes for fascinating reading, but it isn't at all clear what you're trying to accomplish by citing it. The brain/computer analogy is a useful one for dealing with certain issues. It has its limits. Ultimately, computers today are based on different principles than the human brains.
The article is just a warning (seemingly directed towards cognitive scientists) to take care in drawing conclusions about how the brain works from their understanding of computers. What are you trying to claim? That artificial intelligence is impossible? That it cannot be simulated on a Von Neumann style machine, no matter how fast a processor or how big a RAM store it has? Or maybe that only brain-style AI is possible? I don't think any of those things are true. They certainly can't be derived from the evidence presented.
Regarding specific points:
1) It is entirely possible to build analogue circuits.
2) A content-addressable system can be built atop a standard memory system. I don't see a theoretical problem there.
3) Any parallel computation can be performed in a serial way.
4) There are processors that have no system clocks. See "asynchronous computing."
5) That's not to say that human-style memory couldn't be simulated within a computer-style system.
6) While the point is good, it's possible to erase that distinction on computer hardware as well. You can take essentially any set of software rules, map the rules to a set of transistors and pathways, and etch those onto a chip. As simple as that, you have a chip that has this very feature: there is no distinction between hardware and software.
7) It's not clear which of the differences are vital and which have minimal effect on the overall process. But all the differences could be embodied in a sufficiently complex neuron simulation.
8) Still, software that behaves that way could be executed inside your average laptop. He's pointing out differences, not fundamental barriers to artificial intelligence.
9) Again, not part of the standard computer architecture. But software living atop it could have such behavior.
10) If anything, this point says that we're dumber than we thought, because we let our environment remember things for us. That would, if anything, make it easier for machines to outperform humans.
Bonus) That state of affairs may not last forever, and it's not clear which items would have to be simulated in order to make a brain work in software. Maybe you have to simulate every glial cell. Maybe an entire class of neurotransmitters could be removed entirely from the simulation, or replaced by a simple adjustment of its propensity to fire.
New Scientist screwed up on this one. As far as I can glean from the article, memristors are magic fairy dust that could make artificial brains work. No real explanation as to why, beyond "We're New Scientist, and we'd sell our own mothers for a few more page clicks."
I'll admit I'm a bit rusty on the subject, but I'm just not seeing how grammars (context free, context sensitive, unrestricted, whatever) have anything to do with intelligence. What's the claim actually being made there?
A quick Wikipeding says that a Turing Machine is equivalent to an unrestricted grammar, the way a finite state automaton is equivalent to a regular expression. We use Turing-equivalent machines on a daily basis (to the limits of your computer's memory), so I'm not sure what it means to say that "we don't have the power." Is there evidence that the calculations that would lead to true intelligence would require unimaginable amounts of RAM? I doubt there is.
Or is he saying that we really haven't mastered the art of creating unrestricted grammars?
It's possible to simulate a mouse's brain today. That's about 1 gram of brain matter. The human brain weighs about 1350g. Eleven more doublings, maybe throw in a couple more (under the assumption that the simulations need to be more thorough), and you're pretty well there. So before 2030 would be a good guess.
I suspect that, rather than deriving Artificial Intelligence from first principles, we'll just start by trying to map and run the human brain. He's right: it's not enough to pour neurons into a simulator. You have to wire them up in very specific configurations, which I don't think we'll discover without guidance from existing examples.
Just as an aside, has anyone ever read a New Scientist story where the subject was anything less than An Astonishing Breakthrough That Will Change Everything Forever? I'm becoming ever more convinced that they suck.
I don't think anybody is asking for the right to show up to a job and idle away the hours on Facebook. The way to get out of a doomed project is to request a reassignment, or to look for another job. Nor did he say that you should explicitly mention your career as the reason for your departure.
It's hard to say what signal you're sending by quitting in the middle of a doomed project. Interviewers hear everything from "this guy takes pride in his work" to "quitter." All you can do is try to spin your way to the former interpretation, and let the chips fall where they may. If you can communicate the sentiment, "I'm generally loyal to my employer, but I do have my threshold for stupidity," and an employer takes that as a red flag, it's probably because they intend to exceed that threshold on a regular basis.
The answer depends a lot on how much adversity you intend to dump on them.
Sitch1: tiny amounts of adversity. Those who can't handle it in small, necessary amounts clearly have problems with their own sense of entitlement, and should be avoided.
Sitch2: moderate amounts of adversity. Different people will have different tolerances. Some will thrive under pressure, others will just muddle through, and some will fall by the wayside.
Sitch3: crank the pain up to 11 and rip off the knob. At this point, all that's left are the kids who haven't yet realized that there are better jobs out there, and the depressed mole people who will cling to the job because they don't think themselves fit to be in the industry at all. But they'll still be resentful, and will plot your demise.
Is this the spiel you give your developers? "We will pile on the stupid and expect you to turn it into gold?"
Your admonitions won't improve anyone's geek-fu. Quite the contrary, it gets them into a mindset where, if it compiles, it's good, and if it runs, it's perfect.
It also teaches them that 90 hour work weeks are not just to be expected, but are in fact a gift from the coding gods, an opportunity to temper your skills on the field of battle. Which may work for a while. Until their marriage fails, or until they realize that they hate working "Jedi hours" for a lousy fifty grand a year. Then, because they've swallowed your Kool-aid, and convinced themselves that "real coders" are supposed to thrive under constant stress and hammer out six impossible algorithms before breakfast, they start looking not for a more laid back coding job, but for a shift at Best Buy.
There is only one use for the crap you're peddling: to get a horde of young coders working long hours at substandard wages. As you mentioned that you're the CEO of your company, this fact doesn't surprise me in the least.
That can be overcome. I looked over Google for any long-term trends in network latency, but all I could find is that the Internet2 network has remarkably low latency. So "fantasyland" may just be "the future", which I find strangely appropriate.
Another thing to think about is that, since it doesn't matter where the computing is going on, there's no reason not to migrate the virtual server to a node that is near your connection.
Lastly, the importance of latency is very application-dependent. I'd guess that, today, it's nearly good enough for everything but gaming.
I imagine that, with improving virtualization technology and ever faster bandwidth, we could reach a point where the guts of many computers could be moved into the cloud. All you'd really need is something with the horsepower needed to receive your inputs and display the resulting images. A device like that could be magnificently tiny.
Cap and trade isn't about getting green energy in place, it's about limiting what the majority of people can do.
It's not about either. Cap and trade is about lowering CO2 emissions, and doing so by letting the market find the cheapest way.
Now, if your optimism is justified, and the price of solar is dropping so fast that it becomes significantly cheaper than coal, then you're right, there's no need for Waxman-Markey. But in that case, the price of permits falls through the floor, the costs to be passed onto consumers is insignificant, and Waxman-Markey does nothing to the economy, because there are more permits out there than there are tons of CO2 being emitted.
But I think your optimism is entirely misguided. The only reason the solar market is booming, the only reason we're seeing all these different breakthroughs, is because governments around the globe were subsidizing solar before it was profitable, and are now sending the signals that the era of cheap carbon is drawing to a close, and that there will be great money in renewables. Had they implied the opposite -- that industry could expect to be burning coal fifty and a hundred years down the road, without cost -- then research into alternatives would have languished, and we'd be facing the current crisis with fewer tools in our toolbox.
The U.S. has been a laggard in this movement. Worse, for the last eight years, we've been China's excuse for inaction. We need to take real action, then implement a border adjustment so that they can't gain a competitive advantage by it.
Anyways, we don't need to expand anything for human civilization, that's nothing but a crock of crap. The planet isn't burning up, and ever the liberal estimates say we have until the middle or end of this century before it's a serious problem. Quit fear mongering and making crap up.
"We have decades" is an acceptable argument against acting on something like, say, Social Security reform. There, the problem was primarily a legislative one: outlays exceeded income, and in forty years, we were going to be forced to raise taxes or reduce benefits. Big whoop. It can be fixed with the stroke of a pen any time in the next forty years.
Climate change is a little different. There, we're dealing with something that is clearly beyond our control. Climate change has vast momentum behind it. If we stopped emitting carbon *right now*, we'd continue warming for decades. The fact that it has thus far been so hard to get even a few countries to shave a sliver of emissions from their annual output shows how hard it is to legislate it away. The climate is not a sports car that we can turn this way or that way, or thread the needle to avoid the various feedback effects. It's more like a landslide.
Say I'm making crap up all you like. But the "we need to act now to avert dire consequences" side simply has more scientific support -- and the support of more scientists -- than does the "wait a few decades and see" crowd. A few decades may be more time than we have.
Now for the free market, who fucking cares. This is about creating unnecessary hardships on the poor and middle class people that are designed to limit their quality of life.
We can argue over whether or not that will occur. I strongly believe that it won't. More important, there are numerous provisions in the bill to ease any difficulties that this will cause for people.
Half of the money collected in the carbon auctions will go straight back into taxpayer's pockets. Another big chunk goes to helping businesses that need lots of energy, and still more goes to unemployment and job training for those whose jobs would be threatened by a scaling back of CO2-intensive energy. Hell, one of the big criticisms of the bill is that it gives away so many of the permits early on, giving existing industries plenty of time to adjust to th
For example, Nano-Solar has, for all intents and purposes, unlimited funding, and has already sold out several years worth of production, even that which is not actually happening yet. They are buying huge rafts of warehouse space in the Bay Area, in what used to be automotive manufacturing areas.
This is probably a dumb question, but why do they need so much warehouse space if their output is going out the door as fast as they can print it?
The point is, the solar industry is doing pretty well right now. The bottom has fallen out of the silicon market, thanks to all the new capacity that has just come on line. Solar panels are getting cheaper to make, and demand for them is increasing faster than supply. The photovoltaics industry could continue to supply the market, and probably even expand slowly, even if government subsidies were ratcheted down.
But we don't need it to expand slowly. We need it to scale up quickly, into the multi-gigawatt-per-year range, and we need it to scale up fast. Human civilization needs this to happen, and that trumps letting the Glorious Free Market do whatever is profitable in the short term while the planet burns up.
I'm not seeing the problem here. If you can buy ten of one thing for the cost of another thing, why can't it be described as ten times less?
"Twice as cold" should also be a valid construction, though given the distance between the temperatures we experience and absolute zero, there's little opportunity to use it.
Some lines are more efficient than others, but the technology is available to take energy all the way across the country, with the losses of maybe fifteen percent. Look up "High Voltage Direct Current."
When you portray yourself as a pesky realist who actually understands how things work, it helps if you actually understand how things work.
A truly distributed cloud is an interesting concept, but difficult in practice. First, in order to keep the data safe, it would have to be encrypted. But that means that it's difficult (probably impossible) for the local computer to actually interact with the data. You might be able to do some sort of web of trust thing that allows semi-trusted clients access to the data they need to do calculations, but it looks really hard to me.
Next, in order to ensure that the data is always available, you need to make sure it's backed up several different places. Which means tracking which versions of which files are on which nodes, and keeping everything in sync, which leads to more traffic and resource usage.
Then there's the problem of fairness. The number of people who want to use the cloud will generally swamp the number of people who want to let the cloud use them. You could try something akin to BitTorrent, where they have a tit-for-tat protocol to ensure nobody hogs. But that's prone to error and abuse.
Distributed storage has been done, but this is way harder.
It seems like a more likely path to Ultimate Victory is to engineer an open source cloud where anybody with $20K worth of hardware can easily set up their own micro-cloud, to provide some niche service to a few dozen or few hundred clients. You might have entire companies using that software to run an offsite backup service, scalable web app hosting, or hosting third-party, niche MMORPGs. If your company is entirely devoted to doing one thing -- like deploying Rails apps a la Heroku, it's hard to imagine Amazon would muscle into your territory any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the homeowner generates exactly as much energy as she uses, she's providing the power company with a huge benefit. Generally speaking, residential power usage is highest in the evenings, whereas solar generates during peak load times, when the grid is maxed out and generating more power is the most expensive. The ability to shift power generation from one time to another is a ginormous benefit.
Also, unless the customer uses exactly as much power as she generates, she's either paying for electricity, or selling the excess to the power company at some standard wholesale rate.
So I don't see where the solar mooching occurs.
::spurts coffee everywhere::
You like what?
Perhaps they're paranoid that the profits of the past will be plundered by pilferous and plagiarizing pirates.
At least with Ruby on Rails, that fifteen minutes is enough time to write a blog engine, a photo sharing site, and a social networking app. I kid!
We'll just make sure that the AIs are only smart enough to "understand what we want from it?"
How is that going to help? We're going to want machines to do all sorts of things. AI, collect my tax information and file it with the IRS. AI, watch my front door for visitors. AI, drive me to the restaurant. AI, choose a great restaurant for me. AI, prove this theorem for me. AI, help me uncover the psychological root of my behavioral problems. AI, make this car design cheaper to manufacture. AI, write a bestselling novel.
Not all the things we're going to want can be delivered by an obedient dog, no matter how much the dog wants to please us.
>> You might not like the idea of thinking of "faith" outside of the belief in magic, but the standard recognized English definition is what it is. Arguing about the difference in saying that you don't believe in the existence of God and saying that you believe in the non-existence of God is just sophistry.
No, it's a very important distinction. The former is a much weaker claim than the latter, because the former requires no active belief.
Say I asked you, "Do you believe a woman named Mary Gillespe lives at 524 Circle Creek, New York City?" You would probably say no, because you don't know anything about whether the woman exists or not.
But if I asked you, "Do you believe there is no woman named Mary Gillespe living at 524 Circle Creek, New York City?" you would also have to answer 'no', again because you have no relevant information. In order to answer yes -- even though the questions are superficially opposite, you would have to take some positive action.
Now, I believe there is no such woman living at that address, because the name and the address are entirely made up. But there's a probably 1/5000000 chance that I inadvertently gave a correct name/address combination. So I would be a strong (though not dogmatic) agillespean, whereas you would be an agnostic towards gillespeanism.
>> Face it, faith in many things is an important aspect of everyone's lives every day. Thinking of it in such narrow terms so that you can use it as an attack point just makes you an ass.
I don't see why that would be the case.
You can't even prove "God didn't do X". Even if the X in question is something that conforms perfectly to well-established natural laws, God could still have had a hand in it.
Example: I'm shooting a basketball from three point range. It goes in. The video shows a standard parabolic arc, no surprises. But I'm claiming that an invisible hawk swooped down, grabbed the ball, and put it in the basket. The parabolic arc is just the path the hawk took.
Proof? I suck at basketball, and I would never have made that shot unassisted.
Just goes to show the difficulty of proving a negative.
As a stinking rotten lousy communist-bastard-leftist, I resent that remark.
I think people are overreacting somewhat. Aside from the enforcement problem, pay-per-mile insurance is a wonderful idea. But you have to have an objective way of determining mileage, and the easiest way to do so is a real privacy-buster: install a GPS that can report your activities second by second.
But in principle, you should be able to create a device that can judge your distance based solely on the input from an accelerometer. It shouldn't need to record anything about where you are, when the acceleration happened, etc.
A complete recording of your daily whereabouts is a huge privacy intrusion. A quarterly report of total miles driven is hardly a concern at all. Such a device could easily be simulated by a GPS with no long-term memory.
Rather than kill a really good idea in the name of privacy, I think we ought to be insisting that the technology be the bare minimum to do the job.
Have you contemplated the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this guy was just cracking wise to the reporter?
"Can I buy Europe on pump 4?" That doesn't really sound like a guy who was taking the bill seriously.
I'm not disagreeing with you. But I do think that the most straightforward approach* to a human-like intelligence is to work from a known good pattern. Reimplementing evolution seems likely to be a long, drawn out process, and one which is unlikely to lead to an intelligence "like us". I think it's important that artificial intelligences be a lot like us.
* Not necessarily the fastest approach, or the most rewarding. Just the most certain to succeed.
No, he made some excellent points, which you decided to ignore.
The article makes for fascinating reading, but it isn't at all clear what you're trying to accomplish by citing it. The brain/computer analogy is a useful one for dealing with certain issues. It has its limits. Ultimately, computers today are based on different principles than the human brains.
The article is just a warning (seemingly directed towards cognitive scientists) to take care in drawing conclusions about how the brain works from their understanding of computers. What are you trying to claim? That artificial intelligence is impossible? That it cannot be simulated on a Von Neumann style machine, no matter how fast a processor or how big a RAM store it has? Or maybe that only brain-style AI is possible? I don't think any of those things are true. They certainly can't be derived from the evidence presented.
Regarding specific points:
1) It is entirely possible to build analogue circuits.
2) A content-addressable system can be built atop a standard memory system. I don't see a theoretical problem there.
3) Any parallel computation can be performed in a serial way.
4) There are processors that have no system clocks. See "asynchronous computing."
5) That's not to say that human-style memory couldn't be simulated within a computer-style system.
6) While the point is good, it's possible to erase that distinction on computer hardware as well. You can take essentially any set of software
rules, map the rules to a set of transistors and pathways, and etch those onto a chip. As simple as that, you have a chip that has this very feature: there is no distinction between hardware and software.
7) It's not clear which of the differences are vital and which have minimal effect on the overall process. But all the differences could be embodied in a sufficiently complex neuron simulation.
8) Still, software that behaves that way could be executed inside your average laptop. He's pointing out differences, not fundamental barriers to artificial intelligence.
9) Again, not part of the standard computer architecture. But software living atop it could have such behavior.
10) If anything, this point says that we're dumber than we thought, because we let our environment remember things for us. That would, if anything, make it easier for machines to outperform humans.
Bonus) That state of affairs may not last forever, and it's not clear which items would have to be simulated in order to make a brain work in software. Maybe you have to simulate every glial cell. Maybe an entire class of neurotransmitters could be removed entirely from the simulation, or replaced by a simple adjustment of its propensity to fire.
New Scientist screwed up on this one. As far as I can glean from the article, memristors are magic fairy dust that could make artificial brains work. No real explanation as to why, beyond "We're New Scientist, and we'd sell our own mothers for a few more page clicks."
I'll admit I'm a bit rusty on the subject, but I'm just not seeing how grammars (context free, context sensitive, unrestricted, whatever) have anything to do with intelligence. What's the claim actually being made there?
A quick Wikipeding says that a Turing Machine is equivalent to an unrestricted grammar, the way a finite state automaton is equivalent to a regular expression. We use Turing-equivalent machines on a daily basis (to the limits of your computer's memory), so I'm not sure what it means to say that "we don't have the power." Is there evidence that the calculations that would lead to true intelligence would require unimaginable amounts of RAM? I doubt there is.
Or is he saying that we really haven't mastered the art of creating unrestricted grammars?
It's possible to simulate a mouse's brain today. That's about 1 gram of brain matter. The human brain weighs about 1350g. Eleven more doublings, maybe throw in a couple more (under the assumption that the simulations need to be more thorough), and you're pretty well there. So before 2030 would be a good guess.
I suspect that, rather than deriving Artificial Intelligence from first principles, we'll just start by trying to map and run the human brain. He's right: it's not enough to pour neurons into a simulator. You have to wire them up in very specific configurations, which I don't think we'll discover without guidance from existing examples.
Just as an aside, has anyone ever read a New Scientist story where the subject was anything less than An Astonishing Breakthrough That Will Change Everything Forever? I'm becoming ever more convinced that they suck.
I don't think anybody is asking for the right to show up to a job and idle away the hours on Facebook. The way to get out of a doomed project is to request a reassignment, or to look for another job. Nor did he say that you should explicitly mention your career as the reason for your departure.
It's hard to say what signal you're sending by quitting in the middle of a doomed project. Interviewers hear everything from "this guy takes pride in his work" to "quitter." All you can do is try to spin your way to the former interpretation, and let the chips fall where they may. If you can communicate the sentiment, "I'm generally loyal to my employer, but I do have my threshold for stupidity," and an employer takes that as a red flag, it's probably because they intend to exceed that threshold on a regular basis.
The answer depends a lot on how much adversity you intend to dump on them.
Sitch1: tiny amounts of adversity. Those who can't handle it in small, necessary amounts clearly have problems with their own sense of entitlement, and should be avoided.
Sitch2: moderate amounts of adversity. Different people will have different tolerances. Some will thrive under pressure, others will just muddle through, and some will fall by the wayside.
Sitch3: crank the pain up to 11 and rip off the knob. At this point, all that's left are the kids who haven't yet realized that there are better jobs out there, and the depressed mole people who will cling to the job because they don't think themselves fit to be in the industry at all. But they'll still be resentful, and will plot your demise.
There must be balance in all things.
Is this the spiel you give your developers? "We will pile on the stupid and expect you to turn it into gold?"
Your admonitions won't improve anyone's geek-fu. Quite the contrary, it gets them into a mindset where, if it compiles, it's good, and if it runs, it's perfect.
It also teaches them that 90 hour work weeks are not just to be expected, but are in fact a gift from the coding gods, an opportunity to temper your skills on the field of battle. Which may work for a while. Until their marriage fails, or until they realize that they hate working "Jedi hours" for a lousy fifty grand a year. Then, because they've swallowed your Kool-aid, and convinced themselves that "real coders" are supposed to thrive under constant stress and hammer out six impossible algorithms before breakfast, they start looking not for a more laid back coding job, but for a shift at Best Buy.
There is only one use for the crap you're peddling: to get a horde of young coders working long hours at substandard wages. As you mentioned that you're the CEO of your company, this fact doesn't surprise me in the least.
That can be overcome. I looked over Google for any long-term trends in network latency, but all I could find is that the Internet2 network has remarkably low latency. So "fantasyland" may just be "the future", which I find strangely appropriate.
Another thing to think about is that, since it doesn't matter where the computing is going on, there's no reason not to migrate the virtual server to a node that is near your connection.
Lastly, the importance of latency is very application-dependent. I'd guess that, today, it's nearly good enough for everything but gaming.
I imagine that, with improving virtualization technology and ever faster bandwidth, we could reach a point where the guts of many computers could be moved into the cloud. All you'd really need is something with the horsepower needed to receive your inputs and display the resulting images. A device like that could be magnificently tiny.
You're right. This will be no different.
It will also be way better than Windows.
It's not about either. Cap and trade is about lowering CO2 emissions, and doing so by letting the market find the cheapest way.
Now, if your optimism is justified, and the price of solar is dropping so fast that it becomes significantly cheaper than coal, then you're right, there's no need for Waxman-Markey. But in that case, the price of permits falls through the floor, the costs to be passed onto consumers is insignificant, and Waxman-Markey does nothing to the economy, because there are more permits out there than there are tons of CO2 being emitted.
But I think your optimism is entirely misguided. The only reason the solar market is booming, the only reason we're seeing all these different breakthroughs, is because governments around the globe were subsidizing solar before it was profitable, and are now sending the signals that the era of cheap carbon is drawing to a close, and that there will be great money in renewables. Had they implied the opposite -- that industry could expect to be burning coal fifty and a hundred years down the road, without cost -- then research into alternatives would have languished, and we'd be facing the current crisis with fewer tools in our toolbox.
The U.S. has been a laggard in this movement. Worse, for the last eight years, we've been China's excuse for inaction. We need to take real action, then implement a border adjustment so that they can't gain a competitive advantage by it.
"We have decades" is an acceptable argument against acting on something like, say, Social Security reform. There, the problem was primarily a legislative one: outlays exceeded income, and in forty years, we were going to be forced to raise taxes or reduce benefits. Big whoop. It can be fixed with the stroke of a pen any time in the next forty years.
Climate change is a little different. There, we're dealing with something that is clearly beyond our control. Climate change has vast momentum behind it. If we stopped emitting carbon *right now*, we'd continue warming for decades. The fact that it has thus far been so hard to get even a few countries to shave a sliver of emissions from their annual output shows how hard it is to legislate it away. The climate is not a sports car that we can turn this way or that way, or thread the needle to avoid the various feedback effects. It's more like a landslide.
Say I'm making crap up all you like. But the "we need to act now to avert dire consequences" side simply has more scientific support -- and the support of more scientists -- than does the "wait a few decades and see" crowd. A few decades may be more time than we have.
We can argue over whether or not that will occur. I strongly believe that it won't. More important, there are numerous provisions in the bill to ease any difficulties that this will cause for people.
Half of the money collected in the carbon auctions will go straight back into taxpayer's pockets. Another big chunk goes to helping businesses that need lots of energy, and still more goes to unemployment and job training for those whose jobs would be threatened by a scaling back of CO2-intensive energy. Hell, one of the big criticisms of the bill is that it gives away so many of the permits early on, giving existing industries plenty of time to adjust to th
This is probably a dumb question, but why do they need so much warehouse space if their output is going out the door as fast as they can print it?
You never lack for something to say, do you?
The point is, the solar industry is doing pretty well right now. The bottom has fallen out of the silicon market, thanks to all the new capacity that has just come on line. Solar panels are getting cheaper to make, and demand for them is increasing faster than supply. The photovoltaics industry could continue to supply the market, and probably even expand slowly, even if government subsidies were ratcheted down.
But we don't need it to expand slowly. We need it to scale up quickly, into the multi-gigawatt-per-year range, and we need it to scale up fast. Human civilization needs this to happen, and that trumps letting the Glorious Free Market do whatever is profitable in the short term while the planet burns up.
I'm not seeing the problem here. If you can buy ten of one thing for the cost of another thing, why can't it be described as ten times less?
"Twice as cold" should also be a valid construction, though given the distance between the temperatures we experience and absolute zero, there's little opportunity to use it.
Some lines are more efficient than others, but the technology is available to take energy all the way across the country, with the losses of maybe fifteen percent. Look up "High Voltage Direct Current."
When you portray yourself as a pesky realist who actually understands how things work, it helps if you actually understand how things work.
A truly distributed cloud is an interesting concept, but difficult in practice. First, in order to keep the data safe, it would have to be encrypted. But that means that it's difficult (probably impossible) for the local computer to actually interact with the data. You might be able to do some sort of web of trust thing that allows semi-trusted clients access to the data they need to do calculations, but it looks really hard to me.
Next, in order to ensure that the data is always available, you need to make sure it's backed up several different places. Which means tracking which versions of which files are on which nodes, and keeping everything in sync, which leads to more traffic and resource usage.
Then there's the problem of fairness. The number of people who want to use the cloud will generally swamp the number of people who want to let the cloud use them. You could try something akin to BitTorrent, where they have a tit-for-tat protocol to ensure nobody hogs. But that's prone to error and abuse.
Distributed storage has been done, but this is way harder.
It seems like a more likely path to Ultimate Victory is to engineer an open source cloud where anybody with $20K worth of hardware can easily set up their own micro-cloud, to provide some niche service to a few dozen or few hundred clients. You might have entire companies using that software to run an offsite backup service, scalable web app hosting, or hosting third-party, niche MMORPGs. If your company is entirely devoted to doing one thing -- like deploying Rails apps a la Heroku, it's hard to imagine Amazon would muscle into your territory any time soon.