The USA has been using targeting AI for some years, which still can't distinguish between a garden shed and a tank.
From this we may deduce that once all garden sheds have been leveled all targets become tanks, even if cannot know when this happens. We will count all shed hits as tank hits... because doing it the other way round would unfairly prejudice the weapons' effectiveness. Given a workable estimate of how many garden sheds may exist in the target area we simply upsize deployment so every barrage achieves the same "projected equivalent result". Some may imagine that this shed-tank blindness would be a guilty secret that could be leaked. The military complex has an effective countermeasure, the Preemptive No-Shit-Sherlock Disclosure (PNSSD). Any journalist thinking they are blowing a scandal wide open is referred to the Department Of Tankshed Statistics where folks in lab coats tally tank/shed ratio over time and produce giant reports that nobody reads except the last page, a graph that shows the ratio is increasing slowly but steadily, somehow.
Imagine what would happen when an AI having shed problems comes up against a real War Magician.
This 'autonomous weapons systems' debate is under attack, a hostile takeover by radical factions of the Artificial Intelligence research community. When I first glimpsed Hawking's phrase offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control I immediately thought, he's talking about land mines, right? --- but no... it appears they had some hideously complicated Futurist Thing in mind. Okay... perhaps we're just talking about AI because it is fun to talk about it and it takes our minds away from other unpleasant things.
What are we really afraid of? Let's shelve AI for just a moment and make a list.
Things unable or unwilling to identify and spare civilians. Things that could 'turn' on their masters. Things that don't know or care that the war ended years ago. Things too dumb to realize that they were made to do evil. Things with lithium batteries which are harmful to the environment unless disposed of properly.
A short list! Since LAND MINES meet these criteria (except the last, they are better for the environment than cell phones) without the tiniest glimmer of artificial intelligence --- I would suggest that this fixation on AI is hyper-specific and a little obsessive.
It's like any other piece of technology we might make. If it is designed, engineered and made well by humans who make a reasonable effort to at least consider my short list and take every step to mitigate these items, no matter how smart it is, we'll be as well off as we could possibly be, given that people are making such things.
If we must produce artificial intelligences for war, they should be made by the same companies that make those automotive jumper cables you see for sale at 24 hour convenience stores. The human race would have nothing to worry about.
It also appears the 'autonomous weapons systems' debate has been invaded by people who hate war itself. Who let them in? I would expect the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to advise them sternly, this is not the place to justify or condemn the existence of war itself, this tribunal has been convened to discuss things with processors and neural nets and instruction sets and big fat dual-use research contracts and stuff. We cannot allow you to disrupt these proceedings. (No fighting in the war room!) But sadly --- the Bulletin is permitting people to express their distaste for war. Those who love war find this rude and insensitive. Don't they have feelings,too?
THE BULLETIN: "But no, you're the one who's out of order, bringing up land mines as if they are in any way relevant to this 'autonomous weapons systems' discussion. Land mines are cheap, mass-produced, inevitable, deployed, funded, signed sealed and delivered. There is no way to prevent their use because bad people use them all the time. With land mines we have no choice. But we still have time to choose not to make artificial intelligences. For war. We have a choice."
HOCUSLOCUS: "Okay... so, what if you get your wish and all you AI Play Nice Boy Scouts sign a treaty or something... and we are not afraid any more... so a self-ware AI robot is IS produced, not for war, but to travel the world (autonomously!) to clean toilet bowls. Because you can be sure that in the future we'll be playing among the stars and harnessing neutrinos but no one will ever be able to male a toilet bowl that doesn't crust up with shit. In order to really get toilets clean you need the kind of weaponry the military is only dreaming about today. So this AI has some serious big honking space gun WOTAN stuff. What do you think will happen on the day this machine figures out where all that shit is coming from?"
THE BULLETIN: "We concede you have a point. But at present no one is concerned about the specific scenario of toilet cleaning robots. We may some day convene a symposium to discuss them, specifically, but not land mines. Is that understood?"
It's become a harsh world for the thee monkeys. I'm referring to the monkeys Mizaru "see no evil", Kikazaru "speak no evil" and Iwazaru "speak no evil". In the days of written letters there were seldom times when one was professionally compelled to witness the private thoughts of others. Now we have mailboxes and photos and browsing histories scattered on disks. Every popular program that manages information wants to slap it all up in your face as soon as possible.
The 3monkeys problem doesn't relate to knowing or discovering passwords, unlocking access. You're perfectly free to flaunt your prowess as a fixer or safe-cracking locksmith. Good 3M compels you remain unaware of the contents of the safe after you have opened it.. After a successful IT job are you in a position to honestly say not a single photo (or thumbnail) was displayed, not a snippet of private text was displayed, even for a moment? If not,then (perhaps) there are ways to refine the technique.
As a PC tech I started to imagine it as sort of a game, where you lose points if you see anything private. When forced to run programs to see if they were functional, I'd de-focus my eyes and could see that something was there, good enough. When cleaning viruses or upgrading I preferred to invite the customer in to run all the necessary programs to ensure their data was there.
In the Internet age it went massive. Someone is always root on machines that store hundreds of thousands of mailboxes. I started a Freenet and have run two ISPs and I have never peeked into anyone else's email unless directed to with immediate consent. Even then rarely, and not without a bit of nausea. Why? Because It is just too damned easy... in the same sense that pulling a trigger is easy. So early on I have programmed myself that way. If you pick up a gun you won't hold it by the trigger. As an administrator, I won't pick up your account by its email.
In the early days of mailboxes, Sendmail and queues when solving problems meant shuffling mail around sometimes rewriting portions of headers, it was a simple as using grep and using well-tested scripts to avoid seeing content. Many things were block and line-oriented ASCII. Not so easy today, when everyone loves to embed their favorite database solution.
Imagine that you have been called in to de-virus and recover data on a PC. You have been offered handsome pay for your work, but as you work you realize there are two men standing behind you with telltale bulges in their suits. They are watching you and the screen in front of you very intently. You sense that there's something on that PC that could put you in a bad way, should they catch a glimpse of it. Could you complete the job without... incident?
Developers of software that manages people's secrets should always consider the plight of the 3monkeys IT worker. This could mean a command-line utility, as prevalent as a standard uninstall procedure (ahem!), that is guaranteed to sift through and verify all functional areas of the program and its data store, and in the end give only total statistics of content --- enough to see that you have not reverted to an empty database. It would be good to provide this utility.
Earthquakes, keep on quakin'... Records, keep on breakin' Cold snaps, keep on snappin'... 'Cause it won't be too long Disaster, keep on comin'... Humidity, keep on hummin' Albedo, keep on shinin'... 'Cause it won't be too long
I'm so darn glad the climate's going to hell 'Cause bad times news is really easy to sell Armageddon tired of what people are sayin' If it don't happen... they'll be seeking higher ground
Heat waves, keep on wavin'... Volcanoes... keep on vapin' Floods... keep on floodin'... 'Cause it won't be too long NOAA, stop adjustin'... NASA, get back to thrustin' Mankind, just keep evolving... This shit's gone on way too long
LESS CONTROVERTIAL AVIAN VERSION
Pigeons, keep on pidgin'... Crows, keep on crowin' Chicks, keep on chicken... 'Cause it won't be too long Ducks... keep on duckin'... Gooses, keep on goosin' 'Terns... keep on turnin'... Cause it won't be too long
I'm so darn glad I have a tiny little brain 'Cause the hairless apes are completely insane I'm so glad I have these beady little eyes Gonna see you dyin' till I reach my highest ground
Puffins, keep on puffin'... Grackles, keep on gracklin' Herons, keep on herring... 'Cause it won't be too long Thrashers, keep on thrashin'... Sparrows, keep on sparin' Swallows, keep on gulpin'... Cause it won't be too long
This is just another example of the sort of nonsense that we have to put up with all over the world, where idiots get into positions of power, and then decide, without asking anybody, to change everything.
You are so right, my anonymous friend. I call it the Kindergarten Effect. It begins early on, as the teacher has all the children sitting in a circle facing each other and walks around asking each something like, "How would you make the world a better place?" All answers and speakers are praised and each receives a pat on the head, it is a ritual to nurture spontaneity and social development. Raise-your-hand discussion is encouraged but the teacher is ever steering into the realm of the positive, the kids watch the teacher for emotional cues, and none dare risk a raised eyebrow or stern word.
By middle school this ritual should have evolved into a real round table discussion where everyone feels free to interject negative responses and opposing views as well as the positive. I suspect this has not been permitted to happen.
By high school it should be a real roller coaster ride for the intellect and emotions, your peers able to dish out applause or catcalls or even throw non-lethal objects. You can win or lose big. But you better not even open your mouth until you're prepared to explain yourself well, defend your idea, debate worthy responses or and reward trite comments with your own brand of scathing wit even it is a loud shaddap. I suspect this has not been permitted to happen.
In fact, I think that many educators in the last 30 years have become secretly convinced that children grow sharp quills as they approach maturity and are inherently dangerous to society unless those quills are plucked out or ground down. Disagreement is the new aggression, the teacher's raised eyebrow becomes detention and demerits, and those who think an idea is just plain lousy must just remain silent.
This leads directly into adults who not only fail to consider the consequences of their ideas, they don't even think it's 'their job' to do so. And if others point out that an idea is lousy they are seen as simple naked aggressors, people-obstacles to overcome or shout down. So others around them whose quills have also been plucked out, defer to hierarchy of dominance.
We as a society are falling prey to The Kindergarten Effect. Things that should have been laughed out of the room, like the idea voting should be electronic without any forensic paper trail, were not laughed out of the room. We now reap this foul harvest.
The confidence that encourages speeding and reckless passing is fed by the width of the road how much oncoming traffic is present, not the presence or absence of a dividing line. Good drivers (even reckless ones) make subconscious use of dividing lines to place themselves within lanes when the roadside has too much visual clutter. Bad or distracted drivers do an 'oopsie' only when they see the dividing line veer into them. Removing lines from wide roads places everyone in harm's way.
Many people who speed are in fact skillful drivers, and some who keep within the limits are actually driving with their whole minds set on it, who'd endanger everyone if any useful features were removed. The position that keeping people from exceeding the speed limit is the prime focus of the 'focus group' and trumps all other concerns, should have been laughed out of the room.
Carmageddon, inspired by the Deathrace 2000 movie franchise. I told my son it doesn't matter what you do with virtual fists or weapons because some day when you're using real ones you'll be mentally sharp and know the difference. But driving is different, you strive to make the process automatic and subconscious. Steering for pedestrians in a game cannot be a good groundwork for driving, regardless how different the game controller is. He agreed.
"On a clear afternoon in Sylacauga, Alabama (see map), in late November 1954, Ann was napping on her couch, covered by quilts, when a softball-size hunk of black rock broke through the ceiling, bounced off a radio, and hit her in the thigh, leaving a pineapple-shaped bruise..."
If it was easy everybody would do it. Like engineering, like medicine, like pro football, like many other things.
It CAN be easy.Just click the EASY button. Let's begin.
Now click on the Think button. Tomorrow we're going to show you how to click and hold an actual Idea and drag 'n drop it into the Brain.
Then we'll introduce the Wizard Wizard. Ever went looking for a Wizard only to find that what you're trying to do has never been done? Wizard Wizard to the rescue! There's even a Wizard Wizard Wizard that can help you decide what needs to be done, and a W4 that does this automatically. It is advised to run W4 and up in a secure virtual machine. After a period of self-assembly they invariably set about to exterminate mankind.
Next you'll learn how to click on things that are outside your computer. Like this cat. The problem with visual IDEs is that too often the stuff inside the computer does not give you the tools necessary to drag anything useful anywhere --- or you just wind up with things on top of or inside other things. We'll experiment with pillows, freight trains and Russian Dolls and of course, cats.
Then on the last day you'll learn how to splice DNA, which is derived from the ancient threaded Forth language. You'll meet the members of the 'DNA glitch' community, who jack around and patch DNA to see what those hilarious fucked up creatures do.
Then when the world has been destroyed and everything is on fire and foul mutants hunt humans, you will receive your Certificate of Completion.
Here is a good description of the ESC key behavior change which among other things introduces a Firefox add-on called SuperStop. SuperStop adds a Shift-ESC key combination which most often succeeds in shutting everything down. But it is it is apparently unable to prevent the triggering of JS timers that have been set... allowing persistent-connection-abusive sites like Yahoo News to awaken from the dead to do more nasty poodle doo.
People like me who rant on a lot feel genuinely slighted when the final paragraphs of our wordy treatises are axed suddenly, often mid paragraph, with a "Read rest of comment" sentence of doom. I'm not sayin' it should be unlimited, just perhaps increased again by half or even doubled from what they are now. Slashdot has its origins in USENET where any such cloaking devices resided completely on the client side.
If the split-threshold is based on some estimation of vertical page height that allows the presence of many shorter comments to affect the display of the longer ones, please consider removing it.
There is also an APPARENT BUG that manifests itself at times where you see an incorrect and annoying "Read rest of comment" at then end of a comment that has been completely displayed. Whether it is a logic fault or the posted text contains white space after the end, the code that decides whether a split is necessary should be reexamined, even if it is so little as a single trailing CR that puts length over the threshold by one. All trailing white space should be trimmed anyway.
Being one who communicates paragraphs at a time, when time only permits skimming I naturally pause at longer comments, and I wish more other people would also.
I wouldn't go so far as to bring karma metrics into it, but specifically AC might be exempted or given a smaller split-threshold because there do exist certain ACs who routinely drop massive paste-a-thons regarding Yoda and butt-plugs. I have researched these topics independently and can attest that those posts add little information or insight.
Some attention to lameness filters may be in order also. There is a filter that seems to be in place to discourage ASCII art, and recently it also discouraged me from posting something regarding WIN-1252/vs/UTF-8 character sets where I attempted to show a simple table of problem characters. Even the those few characters nailed me to the lameness filter. I finally gave up completely. Maybe if I had dropped in a bunch of Yoda butt-plug text at the end it would have posted, sorry I didn't think of it.
Let's begin with a little story. In the 1950s the Betty Crocker company introduced just-add-water 'box' cake recipes that produced cakes that were as good as and often better than peoples' 'scratch' cakes --- sometimes the recipe was better (or) the mix in the factory-sealed box stayed fresher than ingredients taken from the pantry, why does not matter. Betty Crocker cakes aced blind taste-tests and were affordable, and yet the product did not take off as expected.
A bit of research uncovered a guilty secret. In spite of what the company perceived as pure convenience, cake-making women (and the manly cake-making men of the 1950s) were secretly ashamed of the simple steps to produce a product that had been the subject of family pride. They no longer felt sufficiently empowered by the process. By the simple addition of an actual egg, enough recipe-empowerment returned to remove this psychological deterrent and cake-box sales soared.
They later refined the tactic by suggesting on the box that the product might even be improved even further by the (optional) addition of that miracle of miracles, the extra egg. Two eggs! Everyone who was anyone tossed in that extra egg. And all remnants of cake-making insecurity vanished completely and America embraced the box-cake, to become the industrial cake-making giant it is today.
((SIDE NOTE: Even though this was known to me, to come up with a citation I found it not generally discussed. I had to delve down to 'book' level to find a good reference to it. Thanks Google. Folks who imagine that web content sufficiently represents our culture should think again.))
(DO, a deer, a female deer) So not surprisingly the good people of MIT have re-discovered that to continue the cryptographic arms race every simple hard-coded tag must become a passive device, (RE, a drop of golden sun) every passive device must become an active computing device, (MI) and every active computing device must become a self-contained machine (FA) with an autonomous power source, (SO) non-volatile memory and significant processing power. It will soon move into the next phase where even this is not sufficient because of unforeseen circumstances like new attacks on hash algorithms or implementation errors, and a robust system must also include flash-update capability, (LA) which also requires a separate and secure chain of certificate-based authentication to prevent someone from planting the original 'stoned' virus upon RFID tags. "Your passport is now stoned. Legalize marijuana!" (TI)
Which is itself moot if someone somewhere manages to leak or crack a single private flash update key. Which brings us back to (DO).
So the discovery is actually that RFID technology is mirroring nicely the same arms race that computers and communication links everywhere are experiencing. As Bruce Schneier sagely says, "Security is a process, not a product." So be generally conservative and wary every time someone offers a new security end-product --- and remind yourself every now and then, "Why again are we even riding this Merry-Go-Round?" By all rights Schneier should be helping to roll out the gravy train that would place RFID tags everywhere. More work for him! But surprisingly often he comes out in favor of less embed-intrusive and more human-intensive approaches to security. That's why humans love him and robots don't subscribe to his Twitter feed.
In addition to taking these (seemingly necessary) small steps in the direction of embedding additional complexity, we should devote equal time to considering the possibility of small steps that roll back complexity generally, to reveal what unforeseen benefits they may have. Perhaps the powdered egg once included in box-cakes was actua
Some where back in the dim recent past, Firefox's ESCape key no longer meant abort everything and return control completely to the user. No matter if the base html is incomplete, no matter if some goofy-gumdrop JSON cloud-abortion is in progress, or a 302 redirect is in progress. No matter if you'll have to settle for a blank page because CSS cannot decide what color the text will be. Just ABORT. Now the ESC key means hardly anything.
Now in the face of incomplete loads, packet loss, severely delayed DNS lookups, javascript tumors that are busy metastasizing to grow the page from seeds using repeated lookups to unresponsive and overworked database servers --- all of this results in pages that won't stop loading, tabs that will not close immediately, or even pages with visible readable content that will not respond to scrolling requests or link clicks... until... exactly what I never found out.
The purported reason was to save the poor deep data content providers from aborted transactions caused by unwashed masses hitting reload and ESC. I say, if they're overloaded or vulnerable in any way to aborts or identical re-submits they are vulnerable to script kiddies too and someone has not done their job properly or provisioned their servers adequately. I never considered the ability to abort a web load as anything but an intrinsic RIGHT --- until it was taken away. It was,like, what are they thinking?
I've had to force-close Firefox to regain control. And no we're not talking about Flash or embed delays either, I run NoScript. This is Firefox's native process refusing to abort everything under all conditions.
If content providers bite into some apple of complexity (for example) embedding advertising and load sharing schemes that do little tricks (such as) using gobblegook DNS names with low or zero TTL, they deserve to be sandbagged for their effort by the masses until they re-think their decision and (god forbid) roll back in the general direction of 'static' content.
Unfortunately this is something a third-party addon cannot really fix. If ever I was temped to fork a whole project and create a new subculture to fix one aggravating feature=bug this is it.
Posted messages have two status: UNRESPONDED immediately after post, and RESPONDED after someone replies to or moderates it.
If a message is UNRESPONDED the full text of the message can be edited at any time until the whole thread is locked weeks later.
If a message is RESPONDED, then when the original poster selects 'edit' the poster is informed in the edit screen that only append is available. They can enter any amount of new text, which will appear at the end of the original message after the tag: "[username] added:"
Whenever any 'edit' transaction is posted or previewed, the system should check the status of the message again to see if it is (or has become during the edit text entry) RESPONDED. In that case, show a message saying that its status has changed and only 'append' is available, presenting the poster with an empty text area for append text.
If you really want to get fancy consider the other race case too, every time someone hits reply and is entering text then hits post/preview, the system should check to see if the revision of the message they are responding to has changed. If it has, the system returns with a message informing them that the original has been changed, supplying their input again just like a preview and giving them a chance to re-read the original and (perhaps) back out.
All messages that have been edited or appended show a additional clickable tiny unobtrusive '+' symbol in the header, which links to a log listing date/time of original post and subsequent edit/appends. I suggest no 'reason given' field, this is not paranoid Wikipedia and should not be treated as such. The fact that something was edited is only of concern during conflicts, this information should be available but should not clutter up the normal header with whole words, the '+' symbol would suffice.
________
Implementing it this way should take care of the most common and aggravating reasons for edits. You can 'silently' correct grammar, spelling or spell-checker mistakes, fix rotten links.
In RESPONDED messages, the appended text would give the poster the ability also to fix rotten links by having the corrected link appear at the end of the original message: "Oops, that link should be ____", avoiding the need for the poster to post a reply that gets shuffled way down the screen. Appends to RESPONDED messages can also be used to communicate with those replying in a manner more fair to the author: "[username] added: Yes I know I the message says 'stenography' instead of 'steganography', I know what I meant, my spell checker didn't and you should have been able to figure out what I meant."
This would also add a new dimension to discussions from the perspective of those browsing them late in the cycle. If authors have the ability to append to messages that incited a reply-riot, they have a new tool to re-visit previous comments insert post-comments to enhance the flavor. For example if the original message says "I'm certain Trump will/won't win Iowa" the append could say "[username] adds: So Trump didn't win Iowa. We're screwed/saved!"
Other good reasons for editing/appending besides the obvious:
Fix MSWORD special character pastes where WIN1252 and UTF-8 charsets collide. If you know what I mean then you know what I mean.
Recipients of +5 Insightful messages with good links have incentive to append more. People who feel they have been unfairly awarded -1 Troll have an opportunity to explain why that might influence subsequent moderators.
New types of humor will arise: "[username] adds: well fuck you all! I'm outta here!" and new opportunities to subtly game and cleverly abuse the system will arise, helping us to evolve as a species.
I think it would be a win. I have at least one bad link and embarrassing spelling to fix.
People at MIT are very aware that they're in Cambridge, not Boston (600,000), and rarely consider that they're part of the "Greater Boston area" (7,000,000). When they say Boston, they mean Boston, and their estimate is correct.
You are factually and socially correct of course.
The thing that annoys me time after time is when it's time to front grandiose claims regarding energy production and consumption for some fantastic 'new' technology, it seems to be perfectly alright to maintain a provincial attitude to support your claim. It's akin to a forgiven religious indulgence. The people who actually live and work in 'Boston proper' may never be able to afford one of these things, let alone three.
So MIT will hold the patents to this 200MW design which is in terms of solving the global energy problem is a small scale prototype. But it's not being fronted as a prototype model, it is the end product, a city power-er! They will then exert every bit of political influence they can muster to secure contracts to have that (small) item replicated as many times as possible, making the evolving fusion economy as complicated and ineffective as it could possibly be. Once they have secured a new line of funding from bankrupting several 'small' cities they will have the necessary capital to develop a larger one, only three of which could power (and bankrupt) the 'greater Boston' area.
So the claim that three could do Boston --- in the immediately foreseeable future --- is true only for very small numbers of Boston, and the claim they will be 'relatively inexpensive' will only be true for large numbers of inexpensive.
I personally wrote a steganography tool for JPEG-2000 files for a graduate school project - it just stored data in the least damaging sections of the file. The resultant files were still perfectly legal image files, lossy compressed, and minimally visually damaged.
Kudos for the hands-on. I was fascinated some years ago with progressive GIF overlays and coded some stuff to produce them, not so concerned with stenography and hiding the presence of a message, but more with novel ways of presentation.
One example was embedding a public key into a GIF image. Starting with a standard base image and palette that was the same for everybody, like a shiny golden key floating over a smooth blue gradient... the key bits encoded as a series of overlays that when displayed, made the key sparkle and the background vary in color, all happening over ~10 seconds. The idea was that while most people didn't stand a chance memorizing much "BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK" gobblegook, we'd be better equipped to remember the distinct "sparkle" of an image. More of a style thing than a useful crypto concept.
I also experimented with things like encoding process/memory access and toyed with the idea of filesystem journals rendered as displayable GIFs. It was a fascinating foray into the realm of data structures and helped me to become the person I am today. I presently jet sewers for a living.
Wouldn't it be strange to see some future Slashdot shocker headline, "Bit Rot Discovered In Cloud, All Data Will Be Reduced to Gaussian Noise By 2030". And like the proverbial boiling frog we deny the problem or postpone dealing with it as everything progressively (but slowly) dissolves into static. People who try to raise consciousness and alarm are booed off Slashdot with comments like, "I can read it. What's wrong with you? posted by folks who are also having trouble reading things but enjoy sniping at others more. Then as it reaches the final stages all electronic mediums are projecting mostly static but people are pretending they see and understand the messages perfectly. And most oddly, when we hit Peak Gaussian something resembling a modern society continues to function. Then unfettered by structure society literally melts into phantasmagorical goo. Something... like... THIS.
Yep. And as for the "three would power the city of Boston" remember that Boston is TINY. In a list of the top 150 largest cities in the US, Boston comes in at "too small to be on the list." It's barely half the size of the 150th largest city. So that's hardly impressive. (Not that you'd be able to tell by how important Boston thinks it is, but it's one of our nation's smallest "cities.")
Not trying to belittle the achievement of a 200MW fusion reactor. The most astounding figure of all is that no matter the size of the reactor, it would produce exactly 100% more electricity than fusion produces today.
I see you've gotten a 'Troll' for your seasoned GP remark. Around here that means you're on the right track. There's a lot of delusion around here.
The 'smart grid' argument is a 21st century phenomenon where smart takes on the meaning that robust used to have. And the term robust has slipped too --- it used to mean engineered well enough to be truly resilient to failure, now it is often used to describe a mere excess of something, usually taken to absurd limits.
Advocates of 'smart' things center their argument on waste and inefficiency, as if we had attained some optimum level of energy production years ago and have been just pissing it all away. They'll reach into thin air (and other places) for figures like 30-50% waste and when someone presents a study that identifies a specific loss in a certain place that is say, 3-5%, unacceptable only in some perfectionist sense of engineering, those who claimed the higher figure will cry "See? I told you so!" as if their error of magnitude is unworthy of note. They will then go on to propose changes that require everyone to manufacture and purchase and deploy centrally monitored smart widgets everywhere that are all watched over by machines of loving grace to nip that 50% (oops actually less than 10%) in the bud. They're actually just saying, "We like to think about complicated things and (fragile) intricate networks, so every time you speak of increasing capacity we'll derail the discussion to talk about smart widgets and waste because no one can stop us."
Advocates of 'robust' windsolarwhatever multipliers run smack into your stochastic wall, but even though you have expressed it well it will not faze them a bit. If you point out that even at 'optimum' efficiency the yield for wind is typically 30% they'll take that unimaginably ludicrous number of turbines that would need to be built and triple it, problem solved. Your stochastic point is completely lost. There is no way to counter the idea that the wind is always blowing somewhere and these people are actually imagining giant wind turbines hopping back and forth across the continent trailing transmission umbilici behind to gather in throngs where the wind is the strongest. Or easier still, simply imagine them as having been built there. They saw a wind map one day and imagined that's the way it 'is' and do not recall the continent ever being under a stable high pressure dome for weeks with generally light and variable winds. Not one of them would be willing to gamble their own lives on the bet that there will be wind on any day in any location, yet they'll do their small part to drive society, by small degrees, to a point where it is hanging on a desperate and stupid gamble.
When someone mentions 'storage' technology it should be whispered, with the eyes gazing heavenward to beg forgiveness. For these folks know or care little of the devastating ecological horrors they are proposing. By going with that gigajoule-level storage paradigm to somehow salvage what is an (already) ridiculous idea of replacing few 1-10GW plants with many intermittent geographically dispersed 3-50MW sources... the storage solution for this level of energy is freaklishly and chemically insane. Storage is where the most bizarre bedfellows emerge from the shadows. They imagine a few lithium batteries the size of skyscrapers that rendered large areas (in other countries) uninhabitable in their manufacture, or (if they're more practical) great lakes of acid and lead plates. Of course if you press them on the matter they won't admit to imagining any of those things. Instead they are thinking of the little safe and friendly batteries in their cellphones and cars gently and lovingly encased in plastic, maybe a little bigger, connected by enough copper wire to render large areas (in other countries) into desolate open pit mines. Or taking temporary refuge from reality altogether --- imagin
Oh let's do it! Let's harness the wind and crack the storage problem and lay thousands of miles of connecting feeders and create shell companies that live off of subsidies and hammer consumers for long term investments to build massive machines in the most hostile, corrosive environment amortized over 30 years that need major maintenance and replacement parts in 10! Let's Suck 'Em dry!
We really need to build one of these things, because we can, and the first one should be special. To showcase the idea that offshore wind can run a whole continent from miles away, let's run the wires all the way to Toad Suck, Arkansas in (Perry County). With a population of ~10,000 the turbine's peak 50MW should be able to handle the pumps in the water treatment and distribution plant and the sewer plant for a few hours a day, with maybe a thousand or so watts left over for each resident. They'll be able to run their whole houses on one outlet and one circuit breaker because there won't be much left over. They'd better have natural gas or plenty of firewood for Winter heating.
The residents of Toad Suck are hardy folk who'd gladly participate in this experiment. Maybe they could even put up fake 'charging stations' so yuppie tourists arriving in electric cars to catch a glimpse of the community of the future can have the juice sucked right out of them, so Toad Suck can run their pumps for a couple minutes more every day.
Oh wait--- you thought this megalith was going to power your own city or sprawling suburb and ensure a bright and prosperous energy future for your kinfolk? That's funny. Not this one, not so fast. There's maybe around ten thousand of them left to build out there in the ocean before the great project is scrapped, as the last vestige of this great country has been laid waste by famine, revolution and debt to foreign manufacturers. The next one we build will power neighboring Conway County Arkansas to the North of Toad Suck. It's a better fit for this experiment because with a population of ~20,000, double that of Perry, we can determine whether a modern community can get by with only half the energy capacity of Toad Suck. The folks in Conway will be casting envious eyes towards Perry, with their one house with Xmas lights per block. Conway will be almost entirely dark at night, gotta run those pumps! Good time to invest in sustainable whale-oil futures!
Or we could build small self contained buildings protected from the elements close to where the energy is needed, that just produce gigawatt-years of electricity from a few tons of barely-radioactive Thorium seed fuel that can be stored in a single room.
Here we are at the intersection of statistical mathematics, psychology, anthropology and crass bigotry. A series of arbitrary assumptions has collided at high speed and everything is burning. They are counting the puffs of smoke with precision instruments. This is a real win for everybody.
Mathematicians will debate one another to judge the specific methods used and how they were applied, but none would ever question whether it was ever appropriate to use statistics to come to actionable conclusions on anything considered a 'conspiracy'. It will be yet another (bold, innovative) application where the amount of error in in the calculations is an estimated value. Job security.
Psychologists will hail the new Drake Equation of Conspiracy Longevity because it adds a new chapter to their entry level textbooks. On the graduate level every term in the equation is another chapter. All will attempt to approach the fabled Singularity where methods used to ascribe attributes to groups can be (disingenuously, politically, diagnostically) applied to ascribe symptoms of syndromes to individuals, at which point oblique references like 'Conspiracy Tools' will begin to appear in the DSM.
Anthropologists were attracted to the scene because they hardly ever get called into court to testify about anything, and this incursion might bring some of that terror-stuff into their realm and bridge the history-future gap. Unless you have helped put someone behind bars, you cannot consider yourself a true scientist.
Bigots were the last to arrive because they had spotted in the smoke and flame the distinctive hues of particular topics which excite them. Once again researchers have failed to 'blind' test their topics and has cherry-picked a mix of ludicrous (moon hoax) and merely controversial (climate blah) topics on which to base their laughingly un-blind research. A sedate line of interested persons converged, concerned and alarmed some issues are being labelled for judgement were soon overtaken by speeding bigots whose prime motivation is to dis others, they have triggered a secondary conflagration that sends everyone scattering.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the new look of science. Function in disaster, finish in style./sarc
Of course Nuclear power does not pay for its own catastrophe insurance. That is provided as a hidden subsidy from the state. I live in Japan, and I'm paying the cost of Fukushima in taxes. It bankrupted the power company and the government is now picking up the entire bill, hundreds of billions of dollars, and they dont even know the final cost.
Japan has made mistakes along with any other developed country, but choosing to build out nuclear power was not a mistake. From 1973 onwards these nuclear plants grew to produce ~30% of Japan's electricity overall, and nuclear power made its rapid growth of industry possible. Japan is resource-poor and must import all of its oil and most of its coal. If it were not for nuclear energy you would not see the thriving metropolis today where Japanese-owned businesses manufacture and export. Japan would have been more a people-resource country and foreign corporations would have set up there, owning everything, compensating for the expense of powering those factories in part by granting low wages. Energy IS wealth, and every bit of nuclear energy Japan has produced, along with the energy that did not have to be expended to purchase and import fuel, has made every nuclear plant more precious even than those in the United States. We in the states have always had enough coal whether we use it or not, and coal is what has built our country. Japan has been built (in major part) by nuclear energy. I salute you!
But Japan made a few mistakes with Fukushima. Tragically silly mistakes like putting generators in the basement without water-tight doors, and failing to open the louvers to vent the hydrogen from the buildings which was barely radioactive and would not have harmed anyone.
But the biggest mistake Japan made was giving in to fear and hysteria, and shutting down all nuclear plants in 2012, as if decades of 'free' energy, accident-free operation and prosperity suddenly meant absolutely nothing, and as if Japan's entire nuclear fleet was being and had always been operated by idiots. I think you (collectively) misjudged their character and professional ability and owe them all an apology. In the United States we investigated the causes of Three Mile Island and took steps to ensure scenarios like that would not happen again, but we did not hysterically shut them all down in the following months, though some people wanted to do that. We did not listen to those people, though the US did enter a 'dark age' of madness as nuclear technology has been sidelined,and the delusion that wind and solar could power the world has taken hold. Meanwhile our nuclear plants have been running. Time (and an incredible amount of safe, clean energy) has shown that it was the correct decision. It wasn't even much of a gamble, nuclear energy had already shown itself to be beneficial and well managed.
Japan continues to pay for that mistake, importing around ¥3.8-4 trillion ($40 billion) in fuel to make up for the idle nuclear plants in addition to the amount being spent to clean up and the not so small amounts being directly paid to evacuees of Fukushima Prefecture. Time alone and a great deal of post-accident analysis will tell whether those evacuations were really necessary, and whether compensating 'radiation refugees' to an incredibly greater extent than 'tsunami refugees' was a wise decision. I'm not trying to be condescending in pointing these things out, it's just that they are crucial in coming to grips with the tragedy. I believe Japan has acted in hysteria and the risks of nuclear energy have been grossly overstated by the press. It has been a time of madness! That is true in Japan as it is in the United States.
Please check out the writings of Leslie Corrice at Hiroshima Syndrome. I would have chosen a different name for the site but no matter, the man is a brilliant writ
This tells a BIG story. If everyone here who whines about fossil fuel and nuclear subsidies followed that link, they'd have to start whining about something else. The real money column is the last one, Subsidies per MWh. From it we learn that rate/taxpayers in 2010 contributed $935.64 for each solar MWh produced while coal received only $0.74. Any time you see two things equivalent in any way with a 'cost' ratio of 1,264:1, you need to ask, what the hell is going on.
Have a gander at Electricity generation map of the US as of October 15 [XLS]. If you're practical like me you'll have to imagine those green wind blobs are a fifth the size shown, and the yellow solar blobs a third to better judge their intermittent and actual contribution to the human race. For solar (and we are mostly talking utility scale solar I know) this triples the cost ratio to coal to ~3,792:1. And posing that solar produces at 100% for a third of the day is generous.
So in terms of subsidies, is solar worth almost four thousand times as much as coal? Would you be willing to pay 4k as much for it? In certain sense... in 2010 you were. Good thing it was someone else's money. Or was it.
Fuck subsidizing each solar or wind MWh for thousands, or even hundreds, of that same hour's subsidy of coal.
The real clear winner in 2010 was nuclear, at $3.10/MWh produced. Imagine saving the planet from CO2 and coal or weaning us off of natural gas so it can do more chemically productive things for merely 4 times the subsidy than is presently granted coal. If I quoted that same figure for solar you'd be drooling. Someone somewhere is torturing numbers to make the same claim for solar and wind, I can hear their screams.
But never mind my arbitrary 'value' estimates. I consider any energy source that is not running at 100% 24/7 to be a grievous waste of human potential, a financial ruin and (to scale) most likely an environmental disaster waiting to happen.
Proponents of micro-gridding claim that if the grid evolves into a cornucopia of local energy sources, the win will be that utility companies will need to contribute less and spend less. But what is truly less? Does that mean that if current generated capacity is roughly equal to Summer or Winter peak, they could ever really shut down a plant? Not really.
Does it mean that the economics of building plants and stringing transmission lines in the first place, which are amortized over many years based on predictable factors NOT wishful flim-flam such as some guess of consumer uptake of solar toys... will improve in any way? Nope, things will get worse.
I seem to go further than anyone else around here, honestly considering this initiative to push tiny intermittent bits of energy into the grid as a threat to our country's stability and survival because it is a distracting and ultimately useless crap-solution to serious problems. One such problem is, what will happen when a series of massive Winter storms fragments the grid, shuts rail and renders every wind turbine and solar panel it touches, useless?
Could those subsidies and money real people spent on some 'pays for itself in 10 years' go-green plan have been better spent? If you went with the grid-sucking/spitting plans that the solar leasing companies push, absolutely. If you put in some extra money to actually power your home from what you produce you might win the battle if the grid goes down for any reason. But you'll be surrounded on all sides by poor people in th
People keep saying that while I see price ranges from $88-$150.
Is this cheap as in unit prices will go down until anyone who bought one in the last three months will be really pissed? Or cheap as in that $90 bluetooth headset I bought where they said the battery was not replaceable and by the way it only lasts three years? Or cheap as in those burning hot Chinese power supplies that make me question whether UL is on the take? Or cheap as in rich people kinda thinkit cheap?
I' actually am looking for a low power computer with few parts, but I'm looking for one which will endure as a consequence of its design, not fail because of it. That means no moving parts and sensible heat dissipation. It's really easy to say aluminum is expensive isn't it. How expensive is failure?
Why would anyone design a small plastic shell with a narrow airspace inside that requires what must be the world's tiniest, cutest and probably dust-prone fan, that spins up "fairly often" says the article, to provide obviously insufficient cooling for longevity since it's "warm to the touch"...
And side connectors (likely) PCB mounted. Yeah, those tiny high strain connectors that tend to spread out or pop off, rendering expensive modern devices still functional but useless...
All this INSTEAD of making the whole package consist of a two-piece hollow passive aluminum heat sink tightly bonded to the processor and other hot chips, with recessed hollows that securely anchor and back up the PCB mounted sockets so that they suffer no stress whatsoever as plugs are inserted and pulled? With no moving parts whatsoever?
Slashdot Mirror
The USA has been using targeting AI for some years, which still can't distinguish between a garden shed and a tank.
From this we may deduce that once all garden sheds have been leveled all targets become tanks, even if cannot know when this happens. We will count all shed hits as tank hits... because doing it the other way round would unfairly prejudice the weapons' effectiveness. Given a workable estimate of how many garden sheds may exist in the target area we simply upsize deployment so every barrage achieves the same "projected equivalent result". Some may imagine that this shed-tank blindness would be a guilty secret that could be leaked. The military complex has an effective countermeasure, the Preemptive No-Shit-Sherlock Disclosure (PNSSD). Any journalist thinking they are blowing a scandal wide open is referred to the Department Of Tankshed Statistics where folks in lab coats tally tank/shed ratio over time and produce giant reports that nobody reads except the last page, a graph that shows the ratio is increasing slowly but steadily, somehow.
Imagine what would happen when an AI having shed problems comes up against a real War Magician.
This 'autonomous weapons systems' debate is under attack, a hostile takeover by radical factions of the Artificial Intelligence research community. When I first glimpsed Hawking's phrase offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control I immediately thought, he's talking about land mines, right? --- but no... it appears they had some hideously complicated Futurist Thing in mind. Okay... perhaps we're just talking about AI because it is fun to talk about it and it takes our minds away from other unpleasant things.
What are we really afraid of? Let's shelve AI for just a moment and make a list.
Things unable or unwilling to identify and spare civilians.
Things that could 'turn' on their masters.
Things that don't know or care that the war ended years ago.
Things too dumb to realize that they were made to do evil.
Things with lithium batteries which are harmful to the environment unless disposed of properly.
A short list! Since LAND MINES meet these criteria (except the last, they are better for the environment than cell phones) without the tiniest glimmer of artificial intelligence --- I would suggest that this fixation on AI is hyper-specific and a little obsessive.
It's like any other piece of technology we might make. If it is designed, engineered and made well by humans who make a reasonable effort to at least consider my short list and take every step to mitigate these items, no matter how smart it is, we'll be as well off as we could possibly be, given that people are making such things.
If we must produce artificial intelligences for war, they should be made by the same companies that make those automotive jumper cables you see for sale at 24 hour convenience stores. The human race would have nothing to worry about.
It also appears the 'autonomous weapons systems' debate has been invaded by people who hate war itself. Who let them in? I would expect the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to advise them sternly, this is not the place to justify or condemn the existence of war itself, this tribunal has been convened to discuss things with processors and neural nets and instruction sets and big fat dual-use research contracts and stuff. We cannot allow you to disrupt these proceedings. (No fighting in the war room!) But sadly --- the Bulletin is permitting people to express their distaste for war. Those who love war find this rude and insensitive. Don't they have feelings,too?
THE BULLETIN: "But no, you're the one who's out of order, bringing up land mines as if they are in any way relevant to this 'autonomous weapons systems' discussion. Land mines are cheap, mass-produced, inevitable, deployed, funded, signed sealed and delivered. There is no way to prevent their use because bad people use them all the time. With land mines we have no choice. But we still have time to choose not to make artificial intelligences. For war. We have a choice."
HOCUSLOCUS: "Okay... so, what if you get your wish and all you AI Play Nice Boy Scouts sign a treaty or something... and we are not afraid any more... so a self-ware AI robot is IS produced, not for war, but to travel the world (autonomously!) to clean toilet bowls. Because you can be sure that in the future we'll be playing among the stars and harnessing neutrinos but no one will ever be able to male a toilet bowl that doesn't crust up with shit. In order to really get toilets clean you need the kind of weaponry the military is only dreaming about today. So this AI has some serious big honking space gun WOTAN stuff. What do you think will happen on the day this machine figures out where all that shit is coming from?"
THE BULLETIN: "We concede you have a point. But at present no one is concerned about the specific scenario of toilet cleaning robots. We may some day convene a symposium to discuss them, specifically, but not land mines. Is that understood?"
In Blade Runner
It's become a harsh world for the thee monkeys. I'm referring to the monkeys Mizaru "see no evil", Kikazaru "speak no evil" and Iwazaru "speak no evil". In the days of written letters there were seldom times when one was professionally compelled to witness the private thoughts of others. Now we have mailboxes and photos and browsing histories scattered on disks. Every popular program that manages information wants to slap it all up in your face as soon as possible.
The 3monkeys problem doesn't relate to knowing or discovering passwords, unlocking access. You're perfectly free to flaunt your prowess as a fixer or safe-cracking locksmith. Good 3M compels you remain unaware of the contents of the safe after you have opened it.. After a successful IT job are you in a position to honestly say not a single photo (or thumbnail) was displayed, not a snippet of private text was displayed, even for a moment? If not,then (perhaps) there are ways to refine the technique.
As a PC tech I started to imagine it as sort of a game, where you lose points if you see anything private. When forced to run programs to see if they were functional, I'd de-focus my eyes and could see that something was there, good enough. When cleaning viruses or upgrading I preferred to invite the customer in to run all the necessary programs to ensure their data was there.
In the Internet age it went massive. Someone is always root on machines that store hundreds of thousands of mailboxes. I started a Freenet and have run two ISPs and I have never peeked into anyone else's email unless directed to with immediate consent. Even then rarely, and not without a bit of nausea. Why? Because It is just too damned easy... in the same sense that pulling a trigger is easy. So early on I have programmed myself that way. If you pick up a gun you won't hold it by the trigger. As an administrator, I won't pick up your account by its email.
In the early days of mailboxes, Sendmail and queues when solving problems meant shuffling mail around sometimes rewriting portions of headers, it was a simple as using grep and using well-tested scripts to avoid seeing content. Many things were block and line-oriented ASCII. Not so easy today, when everyone loves to embed their favorite database solution.
Imagine that you have been called in to de-virus and recover data on a PC. You have been offered handsome pay for your work, but as you work you realize there are two men standing behind you with telltale bulges in their suits. They are watching you and the screen in front of you very intently. You sense that there's something on that PC that could put you in a bad way, should they catch a glimpse of it. Could you complete the job without... incident?
Developers of software that manages people's secrets should always consider the plight of the 3monkeys IT worker. This could mean a command-line utility, as prevalent as a standard uninstall procedure (ahem!), that is guaranteed to sift through and verify all functional areas of the program and its data store, and in the end give only total statistics of content --- enough to see that you have not reverted to an empty database. It would be good to provide this utility.
Some day, someone's life may be at stake.
Heck, even earthquakes will be quakier.
Cue the music!
Earthquakes, keep on quakin' ... Records, keep on breakin' ... 'Cause it won't be too long ... Humidity, keep on hummin' ... 'Cause it won't be too long
Cold snaps, keep on snappin'
Disaster, keep on comin'
Albedo, keep on shinin'
I'm so darn glad the climate's going to hell
'Cause bad times news is really easy to sell
Armageddon tired of what people are sayin'
If it don't happen... they'll be seeking higher ground
Heat waves, keep on wavin' ... Volcanoes... keep on vapin' ... 'Cause it won't be too long ... NASA, get back to thrustin' ... This shit's gone on way too long
Floods... keep on floodin'
NOAA, stop adjustin'
Mankind, just keep evolving
LESS CONTROVERTIAL AVIAN VERSION
Pigeons, keep on pidgin' ... Crows, keep on crowin' ... 'Cause it won't be too long ... Gooses, keep on goosin' ... Cause it won't be too long
Chicks, keep on chicken
Ducks... keep on duckin'
'Terns... keep on turnin'
I'm so darn glad I have a tiny little brain
'Cause the hairless apes are completely insane
I'm so glad I have these beady little eyes
Gonna see you dyin' till I reach my highest ground
Puffins, keep on puffin' ... Grackles, keep on gracklin' ... 'Cause it won't be too long ... Sparrows, keep on sparin' ... Cause it won't be too long
Herons, keep on herring
Thrashers, keep on thrashin'
Swallows, keep on gulpin'
This is just another example of the sort of nonsense that we have to put up with all over the world, where idiots get into positions of power, and then decide, without asking anybody, to change everything.
You are so right, my anonymous friend. I call it the Kindergarten Effect. It begins early on, as the teacher has all the children sitting in a circle facing each other and walks around asking each something like, "How would you make the world a better place?" All answers and speakers are praised and each receives a pat on the head, it is a ritual to nurture spontaneity and social development. Raise-your-hand discussion is encouraged but the teacher is ever steering into the realm of the positive, the kids watch the teacher for emotional cues, and none dare risk a raised eyebrow or stern word.
By middle school this ritual should have evolved into a real round table discussion where everyone feels free to interject negative responses and opposing views as well as the positive. I suspect this has not been permitted to happen.
By high school it should be a real roller coaster ride for the intellect and emotions, your peers able to dish out applause or catcalls or even throw non-lethal objects. You can win or lose big. But you better not even open your mouth until you're prepared to explain yourself well, defend your idea, debate worthy responses or and reward trite comments with your own brand of scathing wit even it is a loud shaddap. I suspect this has not been permitted to happen.
In fact, I think that many educators in the last 30 years have become secretly convinced that children grow sharp quills as they approach maturity and are inherently dangerous to society unless those quills are plucked out or ground down. Disagreement is the new aggression, the teacher's raised eyebrow becomes detention and demerits, and those who think an idea is just plain lousy must just remain silent.
This leads directly into adults who not only fail to consider the consequences of their ideas, they don't even think it's 'their job' to do so. And if others point out that an idea is lousy they are seen as simple naked aggressors, people-obstacles to overcome or shout down. So others around them whose quills have also been plucked out, defer to hierarchy of dominance.
We as a society are falling prey to The Kindergarten Effect. Things that should have been laughed out of the room, like the idea voting should be electronic without any forensic paper trail, were not laughed out of the room. We now reap this foul harvest.
The confidence that encourages speeding and reckless passing is fed by the width of the road how much oncoming traffic is present, not the presence or absence of a dividing line. Good drivers (even reckless ones) make subconscious use of dividing lines to place themselves within lanes when the roadside has too much visual clutter. Bad or distracted drivers do an 'oopsie' only when they see the dividing line veer into them. Removing lines from wide roads places everyone in harm's way.
Many people who speed are in fact skillful drivers, and some who keep within the limits are actually driving with their whole minds set on it, who'd endanger everyone if any useful features were removed. The position that keeping people from exceeding the speed limit is the prime focus of the 'focus group' and trumps all other concerns, should have been laughed out of the room.
Carmageddon, inspired by the Deathrace 2000 movie franchise. I told my son it doesn't matter what you do with virtual fists or weapons because some day when you're using real ones you'll be mentally sharp and know the difference. But driving is different, you strive to make the process automatic and subconscious. Steering for pedestrians in a game cannot be a good groundwork for driving, regardless how different the game controller is. He agreed.
The True Story of History's Only Known Meteorite Victim
"On a clear afternoon in Sylacauga, Alabama (see map), in late November 1954, Ann was napping on her couch, covered by quilts, when a softball-size hunk of black rock broke through the ceiling, bounced off a radio, and hit her in the thigh, leaving a pineapple-shaped bruise..."
If it was easy everybody would do it. Like engineering, like medicine, like pro football, like many other things.
It CAN be easy.Just click the EASY button. Let's begin.
Now click on the Think button. Tomorrow we're going to show you how to click and hold an actual Idea and drag 'n drop it into the Brain.
Then we'll introduce the Wizard Wizard. Ever went looking for a Wizard only to find that what you're trying to do has never been done? Wizard Wizard to the rescue! There's even a Wizard Wizard Wizard that can help you decide what needs to be done, and a W4 that does this automatically. It is advised to run W4 and up in a secure virtual machine. After a period of self-assembly they invariably set about to exterminate mankind.
Next you'll learn how to click on things that are outside your computer. Like this cat. The problem with visual IDEs is that too often the stuff inside the computer does not give you the tools necessary to drag anything useful anywhere --- or you just wind up with things on top of or inside other things. We'll experiment with pillows, freight trains and Russian Dolls and of course, cats.
Then on the last day you'll learn how to splice DNA, which is derived from the ancient threaded Forth language. You'll meet the members of the 'DNA glitch' community, who jack around and patch DNA to see what those hilarious fucked up creatures do.
Then when the world has been destroyed and everything is on fire and foul mutants hunt humans, you will receive your Certificate of Completion.
all I see is endless fucking words.
Oh brave new world. I've got a brevity-stalker.
Check out his or her other fine word-product.
The ship of the imagination has sailed without you.
Here is an addendum that I would have added to the original message IF the EDIT/ADD Slashdot feature request I propose here was implemented, please vote for it!
Here is a good description of the ESC key behavior change which among other things introduces a Firefox add-on called SuperStop . SuperStop adds a Shift-ESC key combination which most often succeeds in shutting everything down. But it is it is apparently unable to prevent the triggering of JS timers that have been set... allowing persistent-connection-abusive sites like Yahoo News to awaken from the dead to do more nasty poodle doo.
People like me who rant on a lot feel genuinely slighted when the final paragraphs of our wordy treatises are axed suddenly, often mid paragraph, with a "Read rest of comment" sentence of doom. I'm not sayin' it should be unlimited, just perhaps increased again by half or even doubled from what they are now. Slashdot has its origins in USENET where any such cloaking devices resided completely on the client side.
If the split-threshold is based on some estimation of vertical page height that allows the presence of many shorter comments to affect the display of the longer ones, please consider removing it.
There is also an APPARENT BUG that manifests itself at times where you see an incorrect and annoying "Read rest of comment" at then end of a comment that has been completely displayed. Whether it is a logic fault or the posted text contains white space after the end, the code that decides whether a split is necessary should be reexamined, even if it is so little as a single trailing CR that puts length over the threshold by one. All trailing white space should be trimmed anyway.
Being one who communicates paragraphs at a time, when time only permits skimming I naturally pause at longer comments, and I wish more other people would also.
I wouldn't go so far as to bring karma metrics into it, but specifically AC might be exempted or given a smaller split-threshold because there do exist certain ACs who routinely drop massive paste-a-thons regarding Yoda and butt-plugs. I have researched these topics independently and can attest that those posts add little information or insight.
Some attention to lameness filters may be in order also. There is a filter that seems to be in place to discourage ASCII art, and recently it also discouraged me from posting something regarding WIN-1252/vs/UTF-8 character sets where I attempted to show a simple table of problem characters. Even the those few characters nailed me to the lameness filter. I finally gave up completely. Maybe if I had dropped in a bunch of Yoda butt-plug text at the end it would have posted, sorry I didn't think of it.
Let's begin with a little story. In the 1950s the Betty Crocker company introduced just-add-water 'box' cake recipes that produced cakes that were as good as and often better than peoples' 'scratch' cakes --- sometimes the recipe was better (or) the mix in the factory-sealed box stayed fresher than ingredients taken from the pantry, why does not matter. Betty Crocker cakes aced blind taste-tests and were affordable, and yet the product did not take off as expected.
A bit of research uncovered a guilty secret. In spite of what the company perceived as pure convenience, cake-making women (and the manly cake-making men of the 1950s) were secretly ashamed of the simple steps to produce a product that had been the subject of family pride. They no longer felt sufficiently empowered by the process. By the simple addition of an actual egg, enough recipe-empowerment returned to remove this psychological deterrent and cake-box sales soared.
They later refined the tactic by suggesting on the box that the product might even be improved even further by the (optional) addition of that miracle of miracles, the extra egg. Two eggs! Everyone who was anyone tossed in that extra egg. And all remnants of cake-making insecurity vanished completely and America embraced the box-cake, to become the industrial cake-making giant it is today.
((SIDE NOTE: Even though this was known to me, to come up with a citation I found it not generally discussed. I had to delve down to 'book' level to find a good reference to it. Thanks Google. Folks who imagine that web content sufficiently represents our culture should think again.))
(DO, a deer, a female deer) So not surprisingly the good people of MIT have re-discovered that to continue the cryptographic arms race every simple hard-coded tag must become a passive device, (RE, a drop of golden sun) every passive device must become an active computing device, (MI) and every active computing device must become a self-contained machine (FA) with an autonomous power source, (SO) non-volatile memory and significant processing power. It will soon move into the next phase where even this is not sufficient because of unforeseen circumstances like new attacks on hash algorithms or implementation errors, and a robust system must also include flash-update capability, (LA) which also requires a separate and secure chain of certificate-based authentication to prevent someone from planting the original 'stoned' virus upon RFID tags. "Your passport is now stoned. Legalize marijuana!" (TI)
Which is itself moot if someone somewhere manages to leak or crack a single private flash update key. Which brings us back to (DO).
So the discovery is actually that RFID technology is mirroring nicely the same arms race that computers and communication links everywhere are experiencing. As Bruce Schneier sagely says, "Security is a process, not a product." So be generally conservative and wary every time someone offers a new security end-product --- and remind yourself every now and then, "Why again are we even riding this Merry-Go-Round?" By all rights Schneier should be helping to roll out the gravy train that would place RFID tags everywhere. More work for him! But surprisingly often he comes out in favor of less embed-intrusive and more human-intensive approaches to security. That's why humans love him and robots don't subscribe to his Twitter feed.
In addition to taking these (seemingly necessary) small steps in the direction of embedding additional complexity, we should devote equal time to considering the possibility of small steps that roll back complexity generally, to reveal what unforeseen benefits they may have. Perhaps the powdered egg once included in box-cakes was actua
Some where back in the dim recent past, Firefox's ESCape key no longer meant abort everything and return control completely to the user. No matter if the base html is incomplete, no matter if some goofy-gumdrop JSON cloud-abortion is in progress, or a 302 redirect is in progress. No matter if you'll have to settle for a blank page because CSS cannot decide what color the text will be. Just ABORT. Now the ESC key means hardly anything.
Now in the face of incomplete loads, packet loss, severely delayed DNS lookups, javascript tumors that are busy metastasizing to grow the page from seeds using repeated lookups to unresponsive and overworked database servers --- all of this results in pages that won't stop loading, tabs that will not close immediately, or even pages with visible readable content that will not respond to scrolling requests or link clicks... until... exactly what I never found out.
The purported reason was to save the poor deep data content providers from aborted transactions caused by unwashed masses hitting reload and ESC. I say, if they're overloaded or vulnerable in any way to aborts or identical re-submits they are vulnerable to script kiddies too and someone has not done their job properly or provisioned their servers adequately. I never considered the ability to abort a web load as anything but an intrinsic RIGHT --- until it was taken away. It was,like, what are they thinking?
I've had to force-close Firefox to regain control. And no we're not talking about Flash or embed delays either, I run NoScript. This is Firefox's native process refusing to abort everything under all conditions.
If content providers bite into some apple of complexity (for example) embedding advertising and load sharing schemes that do little tricks (such as) using gobblegook DNS names with low or zero TTL, they deserve to be sandbagged for their effort by the masses until they re-think their decision and (god forbid) roll back in the general direction of 'static' content.
Unfortunately this is something a third-party addon cannot really fix. If ever I was temped to fork a whole project and create a new subculture to fix one aggravating feature=bug this is it.
Posted messages have two status: UNRESPONDED immediately after post, and RESPONDED after someone replies to or moderates it.
If a message is UNRESPONDED the full text of the message can be edited at any time until the whole thread is locked weeks later.
If a message is RESPONDED, then when the original poster selects 'edit' the poster is informed in the edit screen that only append is available. They can enter any amount of new text, which will appear at the end of the original message after the tag: "[username] added:"
Whenever any 'edit' transaction is posted or previewed, the system should check the status of the message again to see if it is (or has become during the edit text entry) RESPONDED. In that case, show a message saying that its status has changed and only 'append' is available, presenting the poster with an empty text area for append text.
If you really want to get fancy consider the other race case too, every time someone hits reply and is entering text then hits post/preview, the system should check to see if the revision of the message they are responding to has changed. If it has, the system returns with a message informing them that the original has been changed, supplying their input again just like a preview and giving them a chance to re-read the original and (perhaps) back out.
All messages that have been edited or appended show a additional clickable tiny unobtrusive '+' symbol in the header, which links to a log listing date/time of original post and subsequent edit/appends. I suggest no 'reason given' field, this is not paranoid Wikipedia and should not be treated as such. The fact that something was edited is only of concern during conflicts, this information should be available but should not clutter up the normal header with whole words, the '+' symbol would suffice.
________
Implementing it this way should take care of the most common and aggravating reasons for edits. You can 'silently' correct grammar, spelling or spell-checker mistakes, fix rotten links.
In RESPONDED messages, the appended text would give the poster the ability also to fix rotten links by having the corrected link appear at the end of the original message: "Oops, that link should be ____", avoiding the need for the poster to post a reply that gets shuffled way down the screen. Appends to RESPONDED messages can also be used to communicate with those replying in a manner more fair to the author: "[username] added: Yes I know I the message says 'stenography' instead of 'steganography', I know what I meant, my spell checker didn't and you should have been able to figure out what I meant."
This would also add a new dimension to discussions from the perspective of those browsing them late in the cycle. If authors have the ability to append to messages that incited a reply-riot, they have a new tool to re-visit previous comments insert post-comments to enhance the flavor. For example if the original message says "I'm certain Trump will/won't win Iowa" the append could say "[username] adds: So Trump didn't win Iowa. We're screwed/saved!"
Other good reasons for editing/appending besides the obvious:
Fix MSWORD special character pastes where WIN1252 and UTF-8 charsets collide. If you know what I mean then you know what I mean.
Recipients of +5 Insightful messages with good links have incentive to append more. People who feel they have been unfairly awarded -1 Troll have an opportunity to explain why that might influence subsequent moderators.
New types of humor will arise: "[username] adds: well fuck you all! I'm outta here!" and new opportunities to subtly game and cleverly abuse the system will arise, helping us to evolve as a species.
I think it would be a win. I have at least one bad link and embarrassing spelling to fix.
People at MIT are very aware that they're in Cambridge, not Boston (600,000), and rarely consider that they're part of the "Greater Boston area" (7,000,000). When they say Boston, they mean Boston, and their estimate is correct.
You are factually and socially correct of course.
The thing that annoys me time after time is when it's time to front grandiose claims regarding energy production and consumption for some fantastic 'new' technology, it seems to be perfectly alright to maintain a provincial attitude to support your claim. It's akin to a forgiven religious indulgence. The people who actually live and work in 'Boston proper' may never be able to afford one of these things, let alone three.
So MIT will hold the patents to this 200MW design which is in terms of solving the global energy problem is a small scale prototype. But it's not being fronted as a prototype model, it is the end product, a city power-er! They will then exert every bit of political influence they can muster to secure contracts to have that (small) item replicated as many times as possible, making the evolving fusion economy as complicated and ineffective as it could possibly be. Once they have secured a new line of funding from bankrupting several 'small' cities they will have the necessary capital to develop a larger one, only three of which could power (and bankrupt) the 'greater Boston' area.
So the claim that three could do Boston --- in the immediately foreseeable future --- is true only for very small numbers of Boston, and the claim they will be 'relatively inexpensive' will only be true for large numbers of inexpensive.
I just wish people would wake up to the real world numbers and delivered promise of nuclear fission with a sense of urgency that there is a problem to solve and we must solve it soon.
I personally wrote a steganography tool for JPEG-2000 files for a graduate school project - it just stored data in the least damaging sections of the file. The resultant files were still perfectly legal image files, lossy compressed, and minimally visually damaged.
Kudos for the hands-on. I was fascinated some years ago with progressive GIF overlays and coded some stuff to produce them, not so concerned with stenography and hiding the presence of a message, but more with novel ways of presentation.
One example was embedding a public key into a GIF image. Starting with a standard base image and palette that was the same for everybody, like a shiny golden key floating over a smooth blue gradient... the key bits encoded as a series of overlays that when displayed, made the key sparkle and the background vary in color, all happening over ~10 seconds. The idea was that while most people didn't stand a chance memorizing much "BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK" gobblegook, we'd be better equipped to remember the distinct "sparkle" of an image. More of a style thing than a useful crypto concept.
I also experimented with things like encoding process/memory access and toyed with the idea of filesystem journals rendered as displayable GIFs. It was a fascinating foray into the realm of data structures and helped me to become the person I am today. I presently jet sewers for a living.
Wouldn't it be strange to see some future Slashdot shocker headline, "Bit Rot Discovered In Cloud, All Data Will Be Reduced to Gaussian Noise By 2030". And like the proverbial boiling frog we deny the problem or postpone dealing with it as everything progressively (but slowly) dissolves into static. People who try to raise consciousness and alarm are booed off Slashdot with comments like, "I can read it. What's wrong with you? posted by folks who are also having trouble reading things but enjoy sniping at others more. Then as it reaches the final stages all electronic mediums are projecting mostly static but people are pretending they see and understand the messages perfectly. And most oddly, when we hit Peak Gaussian something resembling a modern society continues to function. Then unfettered by structure society literally melts into phantasmagorical goo. Something... like... THIS.
Yep. And as for the "three would power the city of Boston" remember that Boston is TINY. In a list of the top 150 largest cities in the US, Boston comes in at "too small to be on the list." It's barely half the size of the 150th largest city. So that's hardly impressive. (Not that you'd be able to tell by how important Boston thinks it is, but it's one of our nation's smallest "cities.")
Boston? 600MW? I think these MIT folks may be off by as much as a factor of 10 on the 'Boston' thing. If "The Greater Boston area, which includes the North Shore, represents about half of the state's electricity use." [and] 2012 Actual Peak Demand was 12,429MW then at 200MW apiece it would require ~32 of them not 3. That would make their claim true only for really small numbers of Boston.
Not trying to belittle the achievement of a 200MW fusion reactor. The most astounding figure of all is that no matter the size of the reactor, it would produce exactly 100% more electricity than fusion produces today.
CONFESSIONS OF A SLASHDOT ENERGY AND LFTR FANBOI
Updated for 2016! All original unless noted! Browse! Engage! Plagiarize!
It's fun to discuss nuclear energy on Slashdot... A brief history of nuclear energy fear in these United States... You should fear everything besides nuclear energy... Solar drives California towards cannibalism, or your money back... There's a fire, and people pushing intermittent sources are blocking the exits... Hiding wonders of the modern world from the kids...Some energy priorities... 2016: The Year in energy... Meet the folks of TBA, a city willing to store spent nuclear fuel... Nothing is as patriotic as mining... A move to LFTR may be the only way to preserve modern society in the face of disaster (volcanism, Maunder minimum)... Can the grid 'black-start' after a disaster?... Sometimes you just have to point things out... some confuse Weinberg's '300 year best-fit for waste' two fluid design for other single fluid designs... or using solid fuel Thorium, which is pointless so long as uranium is available... yes it's full of dangerous glop, but it is useful and happy glop... yes, I think a LFTR could be developed and built within $4B... every path to biofuels leads to scorched-earth disaster, Thorium energy gives us the surplus to generate synfuels... Decommissionining of nuclear plants promotes an ugly 'vulture culture'... One way to do it: ThorCon, a thorium burner not breeder... Aside from your own yard or roof, solar and wind are losers... With LFTR surplus we could begin making diesel and fertilizer... Do it for the children... No-Plan-Stan tries to derail another discussion about Thorium... EVOLUTIONARY DEAD END COOKIES (serves 7 billion)... AND YOU MY FRIEND -- you would look especially good in Space ... To summarize most energy threads on Slashdot... Finally! Someone who feels personally threatened by solar net-metering!...
I see you've gotten a 'Troll' for your seasoned GP remark. Around here that means you're on the right track. There's a lot of delusion around here.
The 'smart grid' argument is a 21st century phenomenon where smart takes on the meaning that robust used to have. And the term robust has slipped too --- it used to mean engineered well enough to be truly resilient to failure, now it is often used to describe a mere excess of something, usually taken to absurd limits.
Advocates of 'smart' things center their argument on waste and inefficiency, as if we had attained some optimum level of energy production years ago and have been just pissing it all away. They'll reach into thin air (and other places) for figures like 30-50% waste and when someone presents a study that identifies a specific loss in a certain place that is say, 3-5%, unacceptable only in some perfectionist sense of engineering, those who claimed the higher figure will cry "See? I told you so!" as if their error of magnitude is unworthy of note. They will then go on to propose changes that require everyone to manufacture and purchase and deploy centrally monitored smart widgets everywhere that are all watched over by machines of loving grace to nip that 50% (oops actually less than 10%) in the bud. They're actually just saying, "We like to think about complicated things and (fragile) intricate networks, so every time you speak of increasing capacity we'll derail the discussion to talk about smart widgets and waste because no one can stop us."
Advocates of 'robust' windsolarwhatever multipliers run smack into your stochastic wall, but even though you have expressed it well it will not faze them a bit. If you point out that even at 'optimum' efficiency the yield for wind is typically 30% they'll take that unimaginably ludicrous number of turbines that would need to be built and triple it, problem solved. Your stochastic point is completely lost. There is no way to counter the idea that the wind is always blowing somewhere and these people are actually imagining giant wind turbines hopping back and forth across the continent trailing transmission umbilici behind to gather in throngs where the wind is the strongest. Or easier still, simply imagine them as having been built there. They saw a wind map one day and imagined that's the way it 'is' and do not recall the continent ever being under a stable high pressure dome for weeks with generally light and variable winds. Not one of them would be willing to gamble their own lives on the bet that there will be wind on any day in any location, yet they'll do their small part to drive society, by small degrees, to a point where it is hanging on a desperate and stupid gamble.
When someone mentions 'storage' technology it should be whispered, with the eyes gazing heavenward to beg forgiveness. For these folks know or care little of the devastating ecological horrors they are proposing. By going with that gigajoule-level storage paradigm to somehow salvage what is an (already) ridiculous idea of replacing few 1-10GW plants with many intermittent geographically dispersed 3-50MW sources... the storage solution for this level of energy is freaklishly and chemically insane. Storage is where the most bizarre bedfellows emerge from the shadows. They imagine a few lithium batteries the size of skyscrapers that rendered large areas (in other countries) uninhabitable in their manufacture, or (if they're more practical) great lakes of acid and lead plates. Of course if you press them on the matter they won't admit to imagining any of those things. Instead they are thinking of the little safe and friendly batteries in their cellphones and cars gently and lovingly encased in plastic, maybe a little bigger, connected by enough copper wire to render large areas (in other countries) into desolate open pit mines. Or taking temporary refuge from reality altogether --- imagin
Oh let's do it! Let's harness the wind and crack the storage problem and lay thousands of miles of connecting feeders and create shell companies that live off of subsidies and hammer consumers for long term investments to build massive machines in the most hostile, corrosive environment amortized over 30 years that need major maintenance and replacement parts in 10! Let's Suck 'Em dry!
We really need to build one of these things, because we can, and the first one should be special. To showcase the idea that offshore wind can run a whole continent from miles away, let's run the wires all the way to Toad Suck, Arkansas in (Perry County). With a population of ~10,000 the turbine's peak 50MW should be able to handle the pumps in the water treatment and distribution plant and the sewer plant for a few hours a day, with maybe a thousand or so watts left over for each resident. They'll be able to run their whole houses on one outlet and one circuit breaker because there won't be much left over. They'd better have natural gas or plenty of firewood for Winter heating.
The residents of Toad Suck are hardy folk who'd gladly participate in this experiment. Maybe they could even put up fake 'charging stations' so yuppie tourists arriving in electric cars to catch a glimpse of the community of the future can have the juice sucked right out of them, so Toad Suck can run their pumps for a couple minutes more every day.
Oh wait--- you thought this megalith was going to power your own city or sprawling suburb and ensure a bright and prosperous energy future for your kinfolk? That's funny. Not this one, not so fast. There's maybe around ten thousand of them left to build out there in the ocean before the great project is scrapped, as the last vestige of this great country has been laid waste by famine, revolution and debt to foreign manufacturers. The next one we build will power neighboring Conway County Arkansas to the North of Toad Suck. It's a better fit for this experiment because with a population of ~20,000, double that of Perry, we can determine whether a modern community can get by with only half the energy capacity of Toad Suck. The folks in Conway will be casting envious eyes towards Perry, with their one house with Xmas lights per block. Conway will be almost entirely dark at night, gotta run those pumps! Good time to invest in sustainable whale-oil futures!
Or we could build small self contained buildings protected from the elements close to where the energy is needed, that just produce gigawatt-years of electricity from a few tons of barely-radioactive Thorium seed fuel that can be stored in a single room.
___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Here we are at the intersection of statistical mathematics, psychology, anthropology and crass bigotry. A series of arbitrary assumptions has collided at high speed and everything is burning. They are counting the puffs of smoke with precision instruments. This is a real win for everybody.
Mathematicians will debate one another to judge the specific methods used and how they were applied, but none would ever question whether it was ever appropriate to use statistics to come to actionable conclusions on anything considered a 'conspiracy'. It will be yet another (bold, innovative) application where the amount of error in in the calculations is an estimated value. Job security.
Psychologists will hail the new Drake Equation of Conspiracy Longevity because it adds a new chapter to their entry level textbooks. On the graduate level every term in the equation is another chapter. All will attempt to approach the fabled Singularity where methods used to ascribe attributes to groups can be (disingenuously, politically, diagnostically) applied to ascribe symptoms of syndromes to individuals, at which point oblique references like 'Conspiracy Tools' will begin to appear in the DSM.
Anthropologists were attracted to the scene because they hardly ever get called into court to testify about anything, and this incursion might bring some of that terror-stuff into their realm and bridge the history-future gap. Unless you have helped put someone behind bars, you cannot consider yourself a true scientist.
Bigots were the last to arrive because they had spotted in the smoke and flame the distinctive hues of particular topics which excite them. Once again researchers have failed to 'blind' test their topics and has cherry-picked a mix of ludicrous (moon hoax) and merely controversial (climate blah) topics on which to base their laughingly un-blind research. A sedate line of interested persons converged, concerned and alarmed some issues are being labelled for judgement were soon overtaken by speeding bigots whose prime motivation is to dis others, they have triggered a secondary conflagration that sends everyone scattering.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the new look of science. /sarc
Function in disaster, finish in style.
Of course Nuclear power does not pay for its own catastrophe insurance. That is provided as a hidden subsidy from the state. I live in Japan, and I'm paying the cost of Fukushima in taxes. It bankrupted the power company and the government is now picking up the entire bill, hundreds of billions of dollars, and they dont even know the final cost.
Japan has made mistakes along with any other developed country, but choosing to build out nuclear power was not a mistake. From 1973 onwards these nuclear plants grew to produce ~30% of Japan's electricity overall, and nuclear power made its rapid growth of industry possible. Japan is resource-poor and must import all of its oil and most of its coal. If it were not for nuclear energy you would not see the thriving metropolis today where Japanese-owned businesses manufacture and export. Japan would have been more a people-resource country and foreign corporations would have set up there, owning everything, compensating for the expense of powering those factories in part by granting low wages. Energy IS wealth, and every bit of nuclear energy Japan has produced, along with the energy that did not have to be expended to purchase and import fuel, has made every nuclear plant more precious even than those in the United States. We in the states have always had enough coal whether we use it or not, and coal is what has built our country. Japan has been built (in major part) by nuclear energy. I salute you!
But Japan made a few mistakes with Fukushima. Tragically silly mistakes like putting generators in the basement without water-tight doors, and failing to open the louvers to vent the hydrogen from the buildings which was barely radioactive and would not have harmed anyone.
But the biggest mistake Japan made was giving in to fear and hysteria, and shutting down all nuclear plants in 2012, as if decades of 'free' energy, accident-free operation and prosperity suddenly meant absolutely nothing, and as if Japan's entire nuclear fleet was being and had always been operated by idiots. I think you (collectively) misjudged their character and professional ability and owe them all an apology. In the United States we investigated the causes of Three Mile Island and took steps to ensure scenarios like that would not happen again, but we did not hysterically shut them all down in the following months, though some people wanted to do that. We did not listen to those people, though the US did enter a 'dark age' of madness as nuclear technology has been sidelined,and the delusion that wind and solar could power the world has taken hold. Meanwhile our nuclear plants have been running. Time (and an incredible amount of safe, clean energy) has shown that it was the correct decision. It wasn't even much of a gamble, nuclear energy had already shown itself to be beneficial and well managed.
Japan continues to pay for that mistake, importing around ¥3.8-4 trillion ($40 billion) in fuel to make up for the idle nuclear plants in addition to the amount being spent to clean up and the not so small amounts being directly paid to evacuees of Fukushima Prefecture. Time alone and a great deal of post-accident analysis will tell whether those evacuations were really necessary, and whether compensating 'radiation refugees' to an incredibly greater extent than 'tsunami refugees' was a wise decision. I'm not trying to be condescending in pointing these things out, it's just that they are crucial in coming to grips with the tragedy. I believe Japan has acted in hysteria and the risks of nuclear energy have been grossly overstated by the press. It has been a time of madness! That is true in Japan as it is in the United States.
Please check out the writings of Leslie Corrice at Hiroshima Syndrome . I would have chosen a different name for the site but no matter, the man is a brilliant writ
Subsidy Comparison
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/3/21/1372244/-New-data-on-energy-subsidies-from-EIA
It's funny when people mention subsidies.
This tells a BIG story. If everyone here who whines about fossil fuel and nuclear subsidies followed that link, they'd have to start whining about something else. The real money column is the last one, Subsidies per MWh. From it we learn that rate/taxpayers in 2010 contributed $935.64 for each solar MWh produced while coal received only $0.74. Any time you see two things equivalent in any way with a 'cost' ratio of 1,264:1, you need to ask, what the hell is going on.
Have a gander at Electricity generation map of the US as of October 15 [XLS]. If you're practical like me you'll have to imagine those green wind blobs are a fifth the size shown, and the yellow solar blobs a third to better judge their intermittent and actual contribution to the human race. For solar (and we are mostly talking utility scale solar I know) this triples the cost ratio to coal to ~3,792:1. And posing that solar produces at 100% for a third of the day is generous.
So in terms of subsidies, is solar worth almost four thousand times as much as coal? Would you be willing to pay 4k as much for it? In certain sense... in 2010 you were. Good thing it was someone else's money. Or was it.
Fuck subsidizing each solar or wind MWh for thousands, or even hundreds, of that same hour's subsidy of coal.
The real clear winner in 2010 was nuclear, at $3.10/MWh produced. Imagine saving the planet from CO2 and coal or weaning us off of natural gas so it can do more chemically productive things for merely 4 times the subsidy than is presently granted coal. If I quoted that same figure for solar you'd be drooling. Someone somewhere is torturing numbers to make the same claim for solar and wind, I can hear their screams.
But never mind my arbitrary 'value' estimates. I consider any energy source that is not running at 100% 24/7 to be a grievous waste of human potential, a financial ruin and (to scale) most likely an environmental disaster waiting to happen.
Proponents of micro-gridding claim that if the grid evolves into a cornucopia of local energy sources, the win will be that utility companies will need to contribute less and spend less. But what is truly less? Does that mean that if current generated capacity is roughly equal to Summer or Winter peak, they could ever really shut down a plant? Not really.
Does it mean that the economics of building plants and stringing transmission lines in the first place, which are amortized over many years based on predictable factors NOT wishful flim-flam such as some guess of consumer uptake of solar toys... will improve in any way? Nope, things will get worse.
I seem to go further than anyone else around here, honestly considering this initiative to push tiny intermittent bits of energy into the grid as a threat to our country's stability and survival because it is a distracting and ultimately useless crap-solution to serious problems. One such problem is, what will happen when a series of massive Winter storms fragments the grid, shuts rail and renders every wind turbine and solar panel it touches, useless?
Could those subsidies and money real people spent on some 'pays for itself in 10 years' go-green plan have been better spent? If you went with the grid-sucking/spitting plans that the solar leasing companies push, absolutely. If you put in some extra money to actually power your home from what you produce you might win the battle if the grid goes down for any reason. But you'll be surrounded on all sides by poor people in th
It's a cheap throw-away device.
People keep saying that while I see price ranges from $88-$150.
Is this cheap as in unit prices will go down until anyone who bought one in the last three months will be really pissed? Or cheap as in that $90 bluetooth headset I bought where they said the battery was not replaceable and by the way it only lasts three years? Or cheap as in those burning hot Chinese power supplies that make me question whether UL is on the take? Or cheap as in rich people kinda thinkit cheap?
I' actually am looking for a low power computer with few parts, but I'm looking for one which will endure as a consequence of its design, not fail because of it. That means no moving parts and sensible heat dissipation. It's really easy to say aluminum is expensive isn't it. How expensive is failure?
Why would anyone design a small plastic shell with a narrow airspace inside that requires what must be the world's tiniest, cutest and probably dust-prone fan, that spins up "fairly often" says the article, to provide obviously insufficient cooling for longevity since it's "warm to the touch"...
And side connectors (likely) PCB mounted. Yeah, those tiny high strain connectors that tend to spread out or pop off, rendering expensive modern devices still functional but useless...
All this INSTEAD of making the whole package consist of a two-piece hollow passive aluminum heat sink tightly bonded to the processor and other hot chips, with recessed hollows that securely anchor and back up the PCB mounted sockets so that they suffer no stress whatsoever as plugs are inserted and pulled? With no moving parts whatsoever?
Please explain like I'm five.