For most kids, its going to take a huge investment of time and energy from a parent who is knowledgeable and eager to teach and nurture.
I have first hand experience with something not entirely unlike this. I was very ill and was able to attend school less than half the time. my father was out of the picture due to extreme violence. My mother was out of the picture due to college and working to try to support us on her own. I was not a normal child, I had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, I would watch education TV and read textbooks for fun. When all the other kids were watching cartoons or sleeping, I remember waking up one saturday morning and flipping over to the shuttle launch instead of cartoons and I got to watch Challenger blow up live. My mother once had to make a rule that I had to check out at least one non-fiction book from the library because she was worried I was to analytical. I didn't learn anything at all in any of the time I spent in a classroom until I went to college. I absolutely rejected home schooling because the only home schooling available was more than 50% religious brainwashing material. By my mid to late teens, my health had improved. But I missed so many credits from "truancy" in middle school, despite being officially handicapped, that I could not graduate HS until I was 21, so I had to get a GED and entered college at 17.
Most children faced with that? It would never work. Their desire to socialize with their peers would far outstrip their desire to self educate
"The Cloud" isn't just about hosting data. Its about hosting everything, your data, your applications, your medical records, who you communicate with, what you say, when you say it, where you say it, what you spend money on, what you do with it, what color underwear you are wearing, everything.
Google mail, google docs, myspace, facebook, amazon ec2 (a service that allows you define an OS image that can be dynamically deployed on any number of VMs or even physical systems, its actually quite useful if you need a highly variable number of servers running at any given time) are all examples of cloud computing.
Oh, I tend to agree with that. I have long been a proponent of building new nuclear plants over most of the US (along with a lot of solar thermal in the southwest). With enough surplus power, we could desalinate seawater and pump it inland, use electrolysis to produce hydrogen for vehicles or even use "third rail" like system on major roadways to charge electric vehicles while in motion (requiring no new technology for more advanced batteries or high density hydrogen storage). Hell, even unreliable wind power would be useful for water desalination or hydrogen electrolysis.
Unfortunately, most people are not going to be aware of the problem or even care about it until its likely to be to late to do something about it. Desalination takes a lot of power when we are talking about the hundreds of millions of gallons that would be needed for industrial agriculture, that kind of output will take decades at least to build out. If we don't start right now, it could already be too late.
The massive aquifers beneath the US mid west (Ogallala among others) are being drained at a rate many times faster than they are being refilled by precipitation to irrigate industrialized corporate agriculture. At the current rate of depletion we will be able to sustain this rate for less than another 50 years. At that point the global food supply will collapse, 10s of millions (possibly hundreds of millions) will starve, desertification will rapidly consume vast swaths of territory and the USA will be be lucky to have it as good as Ethiopia does now.
You think peak oil is a crisis? Peak water is just around the corner.
those of you modding me as troll obviously never heard of some of the more esoteric cults found throughout America. Its OK, I don't mind, my karma is good enough to absorb it. A number of cases exist where sick and injured children were allowed to die because their parents were members of a cult that did not believe in medicine. This has resulted in at least a few murder trials and convictions here in the US. Were I not at work, I would google you a few references.
Depends on who you ask... Some of the "most faithful" let their baby die a slow painful death while they pray, dance with a rattlesnake and babble incoherently.
Nuclear power has those problems only because we throw out 99% of nuclear fuel before we use it combined with the fact that all our nuclear facilities are aging (because we stopped building nuclear power plants) and using 30 to 50 year old technology.
A modern feeder/breeder reactor would be much cheaper and is more "green" than this (remember all that rocket fuel you have burn to launch the orbital platform and a feeder/breeder can use up the "nuclear waste" of obsolete reactors as fuel with minimal waste).
There are only two advantages of the orbital solar/microwave plant. 1: The NIMBY sheep won't be upset. 2: You can use it as an orbital death ray.
Uranium is a highly reactive toxic heavy metal, it has higher toxicity than lead and mercury. That will kill you thousands of times faster than the very low amount of radiation will if you have uranium in your body.
It actually won't be hard to build a 1 g environment on mars for a sufficiently small environment. We already have examples of increasing the perception of gravity on the surface of a planet in every theme-park and county fair on earth.
All you have to do is attach a "room pod" to the end of a boom and spin the boom until the room reaches 1g. Probably not practical for an entire colony, but it would be easy enough to do for sleeping quarters and a rec room.
Algae has potential, but its in development. Solar and nuclear power are ready now and proven. Wind power is inadequately reliably to provide base load power to the grid. And with the rise of modern piracy and the trend towards rapid delivery, sailing ships probably won't be making a comeback any time soon.
I agree. We could build solar power in the southwest, and nuclear plants in other areas where land use or weather is an issue and completely replace all our use of fossil fuels. Except that grid power really isn't a replacement for oil used in mobile vehicles.
To power mobile energy use we would need a better way to transfer grid power to vehicles. For ocean going vessels, the nuclear plants used by the military could be adapted for civilian use. Trains could be grid bound relatively easily. Cars can be battery powered for short distances, but would be only be effective with current technology if they could be charged from the grid while moving. We really don't have a way to replace fossil/bio fuel for aircraft.
Mississippi is the number 3 state in the US in computing power. Only California and New Mexico beat Mississippi. I used to live less than a half hour drive from the NAVOCEANO supercomputer complex located at NASA's Stennis facility. guess what? No high speed internet available.
I'll pardon your disbelief, Mississippi can be very surprising even for those familiar with it. I never really considered my experience that unusual. A dozen or so avid gamers among a few thousand? Not unexpected considering that more money is spent on gaming in the US than any other form of entertainment media.
There are about 300 million people in America. 300 million / 5 million = 60. 12 / 60 = 1/5. Its your wildly inaccurate statement that I was referencing, not a fact. Your assertion that 1 in 5 million was in the circumstance that I and the dozen gamers I knew in the same circumstance would indicate that our population of 12 was a 5th of the US population in that circumstance.
Yes, my inclusion in that group is in the past tense, I having moved since then, and some of my friends having finally gotten broadband. It was however the recent past, and a lot of people are still there.
As for your comment about rural mississippi? Get your head out of your ass. There really are a lot of people there that have interests other than nascar, drugs or getting knocked up.
My "unrealistic" circumstance was my reality for a good long time. More than half the people I knew well enough to know they game and what kind of internet access they had were in the same kind of situation. Your "1 in 5 million" concept is flawed. I was one of a dozen connection challenged gamers that I personally knew in my community of a few thousand in rural mississippi. If your 1 / 5,000,000 statistic was realistic, I knew 1/5th of the entire population of the US with the same circumstance.
They are building a series of instruments in Antarctica. Transport costs alone are going to eat up a fairly large chunk of that 2 million, and radar equipment isn't exactly cheap either. Quit frankly I would be surprised if they could even attempt this for only 2 million.
Just because I am no long affected by the lack of internet does not mean these conditions do not persist for hundreds of thousands to millions of americans.
My college friends are still living in the same location, though they did eventually get a not quite broadband connection from comcast. Unfortunately most of us have wives and children now, so all night LAN parties are a rare occurrence. It is still our preferred mode of play. And with battle net as is, we would be unable to play starcraft 2 as a group at a single location.
Middle of Nowhere? And you have broadband? I don't think you know where the middle of nowere is.
At my parents home a few years back: 1: could not get cable. 2: could not get dsl. 3: could not get dialup 4: could not get cell phone service, no towers nearby. 5: could not get a voice land line (oh, the phone company was happy to charge for one, but you could barely hear the dialtone strait from the box outside due to the static).
At my friends house while in college: The cable company promised broadband "real soon" for over 5 years, the phone company did the same. They were IT majors and had a shitload of network gear.
I believe there is a tribe in africa that harvests a strip of fat/meat from a anesthetized cow and stitches it back together. I learned this through non-internet related sources, so I can't be arsed to hunt down a reference.
The average hurricane spawns hundreds of tornadoes, a big one can spawn thousands. After katrina my home was without water and power for a month, cable/internet came back on after about 2-3 months. I lived 60 miles inland. I know people that were without power for 6 months. Katrina took out all power, all cell towers, and all am/fm radio towers in an area hundreds of miles wide and deep. We went a week and a half with absolutely no contact with the outside world. Almost 2 million of people were displaced, 10s to 100s of thousands lost their homes. even now there are areas where rebuilding has not yet begun. Driving down I59 (a 4 lane highway with a broad open median) a week after the storm, for 40 miles it was 5 to 15 feet thick with fallen trees across all four lanes and the median the entire way. With your tornado, did you get to see a 500ft wide swath of pine trees sheared off at 15 feet stretching to the horizon?
Wing Commander was one of my favorite games as a child. Hell, I spent a years worth of chore money to upgrade to 8 megs of ram to get wing commander 3 to play on my parents 486.
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For most kids, its going to take a huge investment of time and energy from a parent who is knowledgeable and eager to teach and nurture.
I have first hand experience with something not entirely unlike this. I was very ill and was able to attend school less than half the time. my father was out of the picture due to extreme violence. My mother was out of the picture due to college and working to try to support us on her own. I was not a normal child, I had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, I would watch education TV and read textbooks for fun. When all the other kids were watching cartoons or sleeping, I remember waking up one saturday morning and flipping over to the shuttle launch instead of cartoons and I got to watch Challenger blow up live. My mother once had to make a rule that I had to check out at least one non-fiction book from the library because she was worried I was to analytical. I didn't learn anything at all in any of the time I spent in a classroom until I went to college. I absolutely rejected home schooling because the only home schooling available was more than 50% religious brainwashing material. By my mid to late teens, my health had improved. But I missed so many credits from "truancy" in middle school, despite being officially handicapped, that I could not graduate HS until I was 21, so I had to get a GED and entered college at 17.
Most children faced with that? It would never work. Their desire to socialize with their peers would far outstrip their desire to self educate
"The Cloud" isn't just about hosting data. Its about hosting everything, your data, your applications, your medical records, who you communicate with, what you say, when you say it, where you say it, what you spend money on, what you do with it, what color underwear you are wearing, everything.
Google mail, google docs, myspace, facebook, amazon ec2 (a service that allows you define an OS image that can be dynamically deployed on any number of VMs or even physical systems, its actually quite useful if you need a highly variable number of servers running at any given time) are all examples of cloud computing.
Monopoles? Dirac Strings? Did I just wake up in Star Trek? If so, where the hell is my Uhura?
Oh, I tend to agree with that. I have long been a proponent of building new nuclear plants over most of the US (along with a lot of solar thermal in the southwest). With enough surplus power, we could desalinate seawater and pump it inland, use electrolysis to produce hydrogen for vehicles or even use "third rail" like system on major roadways to charge electric vehicles while in motion (requiring no new technology for more advanced batteries or high density hydrogen storage). Hell, even unreliable wind power would be useful for water desalination or hydrogen electrolysis.
Unfortunately, most people are not going to be aware of the problem or even care about it until its likely to be to late to do something about it. Desalination takes a lot of power when we are talking about the hundreds of millions of gallons that would be needed for industrial agriculture, that kind of output will take decades at least to build out. If we don't start right now, it could already be too late.
The massive aquifers beneath the US mid west (Ogallala among others) are being drained at a rate many times faster than they are being refilled by precipitation to irrigate industrialized corporate agriculture. At the current rate of depletion we will be able to sustain this rate for less than another 50 years. At that point the global food supply will collapse, 10s of millions (possibly hundreds of millions) will starve, desertification will rapidly consume vast swaths of territory and the USA will be be lucky to have it as good as Ethiopia does now.
You think peak oil is a crisis? Peak water is just around the corner.
those of you modding me as troll obviously never heard of some of the more esoteric cults found throughout America. Its OK, I don't mind, my karma is good enough to absorb it. A number of cases exist where sick and injured children were allowed to die because their parents were members of a cult that did not believe in medicine. This has resulted in at least a few murder trials and convictions here in the US. Were I not at work, I would google you a few references.
Depends on who you ask... Some of the "most faithful" let their baby die a slow painful death while they pray, dance with a rattlesnake and babble incoherently.
Nuclear power has those problems only because we throw out 99% of nuclear fuel before we use it combined with the fact that all our nuclear facilities are aging (because we stopped building nuclear power plants) and using 30 to 50 year old technology.
A modern feeder/breeder reactor would be much cheaper and is more "green" than this (remember all that rocket fuel you have burn to launch the orbital platform and a feeder/breeder can use up the "nuclear waste" of obsolete reactors as fuel with minimal waste).
There are only two advantages of the orbital solar/microwave plant.
1: The NIMBY sheep won't be upset.
2: You can use it as an orbital death ray.
Uranium is a highly reactive toxic heavy metal, it has higher toxicity than lead and mercury. That will kill you thousands of times faster than the very low amount of radiation will if you have uranium in your body.
It actually won't be hard to build a 1 g environment on mars for a sufficiently small environment. We already have examples of increasing the perception of gravity on the surface of a planet in every theme-park and county fair on earth.
All you have to do is attach a "room pod" to the end of a boom and spin the boom until the room reaches 1g. Probably not practical for an entire colony, but it would be easy enough to do for sleeping quarters and a rec room.
Its been my experience that past 1 woman, the communication costs become prohibitive.
It could be worse. He could be named Robert R. Bank, aka "Bank, Rob R." on most forms.
Algae has potential, but its in development. Solar and nuclear power are ready now and proven. Wind power is inadequately reliably to provide base load power to the grid. And with the rise of modern piracy and the trend towards rapid delivery, sailing ships probably won't be making a comeback any time soon.
He said solar, he didn't specify PV vs thermal. I would err on the side of sanity and assume he intended solar thermal for mass energy production.
I agree. We could build solar power in the southwest, and nuclear plants in other areas where land use or weather is an issue and completely replace all our use of fossil fuels. Except that grid power really isn't a replacement for oil used in mobile vehicles.
To power mobile energy use we would need a better way to transfer grid power to vehicles. For ocean going vessels, the nuclear plants used by the military could be adapted for civilian use. Trains could be grid bound relatively easily. Cars can be battery powered for short distances, but would be only be effective with current technology if they could be charged from the grid while moving. We really don't have a way to replace fossil/bio fuel for aircraft.
Mississippi is the number 3 state in the US in computing power. Only California and New Mexico beat Mississippi. I used to live less than a half hour drive from the NAVOCEANO supercomputer complex located at NASA's Stennis facility. guess what? No high speed internet available.
I'll pardon your disbelief, Mississippi can be very surprising even for those familiar with it. I never really considered my experience that unusual. A dozen or so avid gamers among a few thousand? Not unexpected considering that more money is spent on gaming in the US than any other form of entertainment media.
There are about 300 million people in America. 300 million / 5 million = 60. 12 / 60 = 1/5. Its your wildly inaccurate statement that I was referencing, not a fact. Your assertion that 1 in 5 million was in the circumstance that I and the dozen gamers I knew in the same circumstance would indicate that our population of 12 was a 5th of the US population in that circumstance.
Yes, my inclusion in that group is in the past tense, I having moved since then, and some of my friends having finally gotten broadband. It was however the recent past, and a lot of people are still there.
As for your comment about rural mississippi? Get your head out of your ass. There really are a lot of people there that have interests other than nascar, drugs or getting knocked up.
My "unrealistic" circumstance was my reality for a good long time. More than half the people I knew well enough to know they game and what kind of internet access they had were in the same kind of situation. Your "1 in 5 million" concept is flawed. I was one of a dozen connection challenged gamers that I personally knew in my community of a few thousand in rural mississippi. If your 1 / 5,000,000 statistic was realistic, I knew 1/5th of the entire population of the US with the same circumstance.
They are building a series of instruments in Antarctica. Transport costs alone are going to eat up a fairly large chunk of that 2 million, and radar equipment isn't exactly cheap either. Quit frankly I would be surprised if they could even attempt this for only 2 million.
Just because I am no long affected by the lack of internet does not mean these conditions do not persist for hundreds of thousands to millions of americans.
My college friends are still living in the same location, though they did eventually get a not quite broadband connection from comcast. Unfortunately most of us have wives and children now, so all night LAN parties are a rare occurrence. It is still our preferred mode of play. And with battle net as is, we would be unable to play starcraft 2 as a group at a single location.
Middle of Nowhere? And you have broadband? I don't think you know where the middle of nowere is.
At my parents home a few years back:
1: could not get cable.
2: could not get dsl.
3: could not get dialup
4: could not get cell phone service, no towers nearby.
5: could not get a voice land line (oh, the phone company was happy to charge for one, but you could barely hear the dialtone strait from the box outside due to the static).
At my friends house while in college: The cable company promised broadband "real soon" for over 5 years, the phone company did the same. They were IT majors and had a shitload of network gear.
I believe there is a tribe in africa that harvests a strip of fat/meat from a anesthetized cow and stitches it back together. I learned this through non-internet related sources, so I can't be arsed to hunt down a reference.
The average hurricane spawns hundreds of tornadoes, a big one can spawn thousands.
After katrina my home was without water and power for a month, cable/internet came back on after about 2-3 months. I lived 60 miles inland. I know people that were without power for 6 months. Katrina took out all power, all cell towers, and all am/fm radio towers in an area hundreds of miles wide and deep. We went a week and a half with absolutely no contact with the outside world. Almost 2 million of people were displaced, 10s to 100s of thousands lost their homes. even now there are areas where rebuilding has not yet begun. Driving down I59 (a 4 lane highway with a broad open median) a week after the storm, for 40 miles it was 5 to 15 feet thick with fallen trees across all four lanes and the median the entire way. With your tornado, did you get to see a 500ft wide swath of pine trees sheared off at 15 feet stretching to the horizon?
Wing Commander was one of my favorite games as a child. Hell, I spent a years worth of chore money to upgrade to 8 megs of ram to get wing commander 3 to play on my parents 486.
All your base are not belong to 10...
A factor of x3 is exactly one order of magnitude in log3.
It is more than an order of magnitude in log2.