The train comparison is completely fatuous since no train can carry 25,000 and the smaller ones don't run frequently enough to sustain that level of movement. Plus, last time I checked, I can't get a train from right outside my doorstep.
Yup, and the article also ignores the time taken to load and unload 25,000 people on trains. Cars are loaded and unloaded in parallel, trains have to be loaded and unloaded essentially serially. Think of the time for people to get in and out of sports stadiums.
What's fueling renewables are the laws and incentives to install them. But electrical energy demand in the US is almost flat, under 1% growth annually (pg 24 of http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a... ). So even if growth of renewables is "exponential", there's simply not a requirement for a lot of them -- unless laws mandate that they replace existing generating capacity. Still, natural gas is expected to provide the bulk of any new electric power generating capacity.
Someone wants to make an argument that government investment into science and technology doesn't lead to anything useful on the internet?
The internet is often used as one example for government innovation. But in the '80s lots of companies had alternatives for TCP/IP networking such as IBM's token ring and IPX/SPX used by Netware. These were not funded by the government. They didn't support the distances and other features of TCP/IP, but those weren't required commercially at first. But without TCP/IP there's no doubt industry would have come up with something else to take its place.
Instead of getting larger by orders of magnitude to fill out a galaxy, advanced civilizations get smaller by using nanotech.
Biologic cells as we know them are too bulky, slow, and inefficient. As a result, to expand by orders of magnitudes we would have to take over planets, star systems, and eventually galaxies.
But maybe instead we could convert from biology to computers based on nanotech. By shrinking ourselves we could still expand by orders of magnitudes and not take up more than a few star systems.
Police have control over vehicles now primarily to stop the behaviour of drivers who are breaking motor vehicle laws.
I agree, but Google is moving towards self-driving cars that don't have steering wheels. One day they may remove the brake petal. In such a case the car itself will have to be able to respond to requests by the police to stop. Similar issues could arise if one day we get the hyperloop.
If a police officer sees a crime such as murder or rape being committed in a self-driving car, they have every right to stop the car without the occupants permission.
I can't think of a valid reason an individual LEO should be allowed control of an individual self-driving vehicle, ever.
That happens today if the police are in hot pursuit. They take control of the car by doing things such as putting out spikes to blow the tires. There's been talk of EMP-like devices to blow out the electronics that every modern car uses. The legal justifications for this are well-established.
The study referenced in the article starts with the assumption:
If H-1Bs were primarily cheaper substitutes for American labor, the pace of H-1B requestsâ"measured by the length of time before the cap on visas is reachedâ"should rise when unemployment rises, as employers look to cut labor costs by laying off workers.
But that's wrong. Rising unemployment means an economy already in the early stages of recession. Instead of replacing highly skilled workers with cheaper ones, companies shut down entire projects. They want to get rid of employees, not add them.
The study goes on to say:
But since 2003, we see the opposite: H-1B requests rise as unemployment falls.
Falling unemployment means an economy coming out of recession. Companies start hiring again, but because of the recent recession they are always nervous about adding permanent workers, especially more expensive domestic ones. So of course we see more H-1B requests.
Otherwise, there's no point to even having health or safety codes, if corporations can just say "yeah yeah, we're up to code, but no peeking!"
Actually, livestock operations are subject to random inspections by government inspectors at the federal, state, and county levels.
Livestock operations can still legally prevent trespassers from entering their property. Of course employees have access to the property, but their employers can prevent them from carrying any recording devices. In practice if an employee does manage to take pictures and sneak them out, there's nothing the livestock operation can do to stop it. It does appear that some people have become employed at livestock operations with the sole purpose of documenting bad practices, so they don't care if they lose their job.
Or the entire middle east keeps giving Israel the free pass to bomb Iran's missile and nuclear programs back into the stone age,
Israel doesn't have the capability. All it has are fighters, and they can't carry heavy enough bombs. For the buried sites they don't have access to the US "bunker buster" bombs (the only ones capable of doing the job, and even then it will take two precisely landed ones) and nothing large enough to carry them if they did. There are also issues of refueling (limited air tankers), and where to have them waiting for the fighter jets.
Iran is also getting sophisticated ground to air missile systems from the Russians. Even the US stealth planes have never been up against such advanced systems. The Israelis would take a terrible beating and afterwards their air force may not be able to defend Israel.
The Silicon Vally ethos is for entrepreneurs to "fail fast, and fail often". Your number of failures is supposed to be a badge of honor on the way to finally hitting it big.
But the truth is that entrepreneurs have to get personally involved in every startup or they will never succeed. It's no surprise that living on the edge like this takes its toll.
This problem comes about because it is assumed Boeing will deliver the EUS on time so that the ICPS will only be needed once for a manned mission. But seriously, what are the odds of that???
Chances are there will be delays and the ICPS will be needed for manned missions several times, in which case having it human-rated makes sense.
Denver metro has plenty of open land. Denver in particular could easily build to the east. The real problem is that cities here are deliberately not building on open space and forcing close in, packed developments. People may argue quality of life, but sky-high rents really impact your quality of life.
Even in Manhattan, much of the land is restricted to four stories. Most builders would prefer to go to 25 to 50 stories
The problem with Manhattan is that skyscrapers can only be built where there is bedrock close to the surface. That's why existing skyscrapers are at the southern tip and central Manhattan. In between and north of that the bedrock dips further below the surface. There are techniques for stabilizing a building in soft ground, but they are very expensive.
Your comments are full of half-truths. The estate tax is on the value of the estate at death. It's not based on income at all. Otherwise, the federal exemptions on the estate would not make any sense. Trusts aren't established at death; they have to be established before death.
The federal estate tax exemption only exempts a few millions, so for hundred-millionaires and billionaires it's just a blip. The same for the annual $15K gifts. One million over a lifetime is a lot for you and me, but Paris probably blows that on one shopping trip. So while the extremely wealthy still use gifts, it doesn't shelter a lot of their money.
What the extremely wealthy do have are very expensive lawyers and ways of not having their assets in their name when they die. Standard trusts like you're referring to don't do that.
Also, much less than the incentives oil companies get.
According to the EIA's "Direct Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy in Fiscal Year 2013" page XV, in the US in 2013 oil and petroleum got $2.346 billion in subsidies while all renewables got $15.043 billion (mostly wind and solar). Keep in mind that in 2013 (page XVII) oil and petroleum provided 15,342 trillion BTUs (tBTUs), natural gas 28,353 tBTUs, coal 20,209 tBTUs, and nuclear 8,117 tBTUs, while solar only provided 286 tBTUs and wind 1,549 tBTUs. As a result, per energy output wind and solar subsidies are much, much higher.
What I don't get though is what the heck kind of plan he has. Even if he was online 24 hours a day for 30 days, to get to $15,687, that would mean a per-minute rate of $0.363!!!
There are plans that have no minimum long distance service, local service only. If you do dial a long distance number, you get charged a huge per minute fee. Even a dollar a minute isn't out of line for these kinds of plans.
If you have one large lake located up high somewhere and can pump water uphill to it, problem solved.
It's not just the overall system you have to worry about, but all the stages in between as well. You might have a massive dump centrally located somewhere to take up the global excess, but if a particular neighborhood has a lot of solar and blows out local transformers sending power upstream, it's not a solution for that neighborhood.
The problem of solar is going to require changes at all levels of production and consumption. That's going to take a lot of money and planning.
Agriculture is the big culprit, taking 80% of the state's water
Nonsense. In the first place, half the state's ground water flows to the sea and is never tapped for various reasons (e.g., recreational and environmental). Agriculture does take 80% of what's left, which means it only uses 40% of the state's water. You have to treat the recreational and environmental uses of water as part of the overall issue. They reflect choices by the state's population, just as having a green lawn does. The environment won't collapse if the delta smelt gets trapped in irrigation pumps, preserving it instead is a choice made by others.
While this has been the worst drought on record, in the past agriculture and the state's urban areas have always managed to get by during previous droughts. What's seldom mentioned, for example, is that California's population has grown since the last major drought, and there have been more mandated environmental diversions. But of course, nobody ever considers these as part of the problem.
If you want food, it takes plenty of land, plenty of sunshine, and plenty of water. It happens that California has some of the best land and sunshine in the world for growing crops. Water was always an issue. But to say that agriculture "wastes" water is nonsense. Even when it's subsidized, it's still a major cost to any Californian farmer. There have always been incentives to reduce its use. I grew up on a California farm from the '60s to the '80s, and saw the advent of drip irrigation, sophisticated monitoring, and other advances. The state even metered the wells in our area in the '80s and eventually started charging for water.
It's easy for people who have never been on a farm to point fingers. But how many of them run the faucets while they shave or brush their teeth, never turn off the shower while they soap up, and over-water their lawns? This is just the tyranny of the majority over a minority -- one which provides a product essential to life.
If agriculture uses 60% of the water, then how is the greywater produced by the other 40% supposed to supply agriculture's needs? And how would you get it to the agricultural areas from the distant urban areas where it's produced? This also overlooks the fact that many cities in California already recycle their own greywater, and aren't about to give it up.
Agricultural water use wasn't an issue until all the people came to California decades later. So why is agriculture the problem? Why should America and the rest of the world give up all the unique crops produced in California because a lot of people just wanted to spend their days by the beach? While this drought is record breaking, a lot of the issues can be traced to California's population growth since the last major drought.
As SSD cells wear, the problem is that they hold charge for less time. Starting new, the time that the charge will be held would be years, but as the SSD wears, the endurance of the held charge declines.
True, but SSD manufacturers say the drive should hold its data for at least 10 years after the drive has reached its recommended lifetime (these drives were well past that).
This study is interesting in light of the fact that a recent NOAA study found that the current California drought is not caused by climate change. In fact, under climate change California winters are supposed to get wetter, if also hotter. See http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/s... .
This appears to be nonsense, as any other drive vendor already has the debug tools to pull such things from memory, and extracting it from an update isn't that hard.
That's true of course. But the level of expertise at major drive vendors like WD and Seagate is so high that there's no need to steal the code from a competitor. If it comes down to it for a critical piece of technology, you just steal the employee instead. It's cheaper and more legal. On top of that, employees move back and forth on their own so over time knowledge is shared.
Besides, the hardware designs and technology of the manufacturers are different enough that the code can't be shared directly. You'd have to spend lots of money reverse-engineering it and then adapting it to your hardware. For the engineers at these companies -- who are the world-class experts at drive engineering -- it's quicker and cheaper just to design and write your own.
You can't, but you can be quite sure that the manufacturer will take serious measures to make sure this doesn't happen.
You'd think, but it turns out that isn't so. Have a look at https://spritesmods.com/?art=h... where Jeroen Domburg hacked into a WD 2TB Green drive using the JTAG port. He was able to modify the firmware and store it in the external flash chip holding the firmware.
Drive manufacturers still seem to be relying on "security by obscurity"
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The train comparison is completely fatuous since no train can carry 25,000 and the smaller ones don't run frequently enough to sustain that level of movement. Plus, last time I checked, I can't get a train from right outside my doorstep.
Yup, and the article also ignores the time taken to load and unload 25,000 people on trains. Cars are loaded and unloaded in parallel, trains have to be loaded and unloaded essentially serially. Think of the time for people to get in and out of sports stadiums.
What's fueling renewables are the laws and incentives to install them. But electrical energy demand in the US is almost flat, under 1% growth annually (pg 24 of http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a... ). So even if growth of renewables is "exponential", there's simply not a requirement for a lot of them -- unless laws mandate that they replace existing generating capacity. Still, natural gas is expected to provide the bulk of any new electric power generating capacity.
Someone wants to make an argument that government investment into science and technology doesn't lead to anything useful on the internet?
The internet is often used as one example for government innovation. But in the '80s lots of companies had alternatives for TCP/IP networking such as IBM's token ring and IPX/SPX used by Netware. These were not funded by the government. They didn't support the distances and other features of TCP/IP, but those weren't required commercially at first. But without TCP/IP there's no doubt industry would have come up with something else to take its place.
Instead of getting larger by orders of magnitude to fill out a galaxy, advanced civilizations get smaller by using nanotech.
Biologic cells as we know them are too bulky, slow, and inefficient. As a result, to expand by orders of magnitudes we would have to take over planets, star systems, and eventually galaxies.
But maybe instead we could convert from biology to computers based on nanotech. By shrinking ourselves we could still expand by orders of magnitudes and not take up more than a few star systems.
Police have control over vehicles now primarily to stop the behaviour of drivers who are breaking motor vehicle laws.
I agree, but Google is moving towards self-driving cars that don't have steering wheels. One day they may remove the brake petal. In such a case the car itself will have to be able to respond to requests by the police to stop. Similar issues could arise if one day we get the hyperloop.
If a police officer sees a crime such as murder or rape being committed in a self-driving car, they have every right to stop the car without the occupants permission.
I can't think of a valid reason an individual LEO should be allowed control of an individual self-driving vehicle, ever.
That happens today if the police are in hot pursuit. They take control of the car by doing things such as putting out spikes to blow the tires. There's been talk of EMP-like devices to blow out the electronics that every modern car uses. The legal justifications for this are well-established.
The study referenced in the article starts with the assumption:
If H-1Bs were primarily cheaper substitutes for American labor, the pace of H-1B requestsâ"measured by the length of time before the cap on visas is reachedâ"should rise when unemployment rises, as employers look to cut labor costs by laying off workers.
But that's wrong. Rising unemployment means an economy already in the early stages of recession. Instead of replacing highly skilled workers with cheaper ones, companies shut down entire projects. They want to get rid of employees, not add them.
The study goes on to say:
But since 2003, we see the opposite: H-1B requests rise as unemployment falls.
Falling unemployment means an economy coming out of recession. Companies start hiring again, but because of the recent recession they are always nervous about adding permanent workers, especially more expensive domestic ones. So of course we see more H-1B requests.
Otherwise, there's no point to even having health or safety codes, if corporations can just say "yeah yeah, we're up to code, but no peeking!"
Actually, livestock operations are subject to random inspections by government inspectors at the federal, state, and county levels.
Livestock operations can still legally prevent trespassers from entering their property. Of course employees have access to the property, but their employers can prevent them from carrying any recording devices. In practice if an employee does manage to take pictures and sneak them out, there's nothing the livestock operation can do to stop it. It does appear that some people have become employed at livestock operations with the sole purpose of documenting bad practices, so they don't care if they lose their job.
Technically they don't burp the methane. It gets transmitted in their bloodstream from their guts to their lungs where it is simply exhaled like CO2.
Or the entire middle east keeps giving Israel the free pass to bomb Iran's missile and nuclear programs back into the stone age,
Israel doesn't have the capability. All it has are fighters, and they can't carry heavy enough bombs. For the buried sites they don't have access to the US "bunker buster" bombs (the only ones capable of doing the job, and even then it will take two precisely landed ones) and nothing large enough to carry them if they did. There are also issues of refueling (limited air tankers), and where to have them waiting for the fighter jets.
Iran is also getting sophisticated ground to air missile systems from the Russians. Even the US stealth planes have never been up against such advanced systems. The Israelis would take a terrible beating and afterwards their air force may not be able to defend Israel.
The Silicon Vally ethos is for entrepreneurs to "fail fast, and fail often". Your number of failures is supposed to be a badge of honor on the way to finally hitting it big.
But the truth is that entrepreneurs have to get personally involved in every startup or they will never succeed. It's no surprise that living on the edge like this takes its toll.
This problem comes about because it is assumed Boeing will deliver the EUS on time so that the ICPS will only be needed once for a manned mission. But seriously, what are the odds of that???
Chances are there will be delays and the ICPS will be needed for manned missions several times, in which case having it human-rated makes sense.
Denver metro has plenty of open land. Denver in particular could easily build to the east. The real problem is that cities here are deliberately not building on open space and forcing close in, packed developments. People may argue quality of life, but sky-high rents really impact your quality of life.
Even in Manhattan, much of the land is restricted to four stories. Most builders would prefer to go to 25 to 50 stories
The problem with Manhattan is that skyscrapers can only be built where there is bedrock close to the surface. That's why existing skyscrapers are at the southern tip and central Manhattan. In between and north of that the bedrock dips further below the surface. There are techniques for stabilizing a building in soft ground, but they are very expensive.
Your comments are full of half-truths. The estate tax is on the value of the estate at death. It's not based on income at all. Otherwise, the federal exemptions on the estate would not make any sense. Trusts aren't established at death; they have to be established before death. The federal estate tax exemption only exempts a few millions, so for hundred-millionaires and billionaires it's just a blip. The same for the annual $15K gifts. One million over a lifetime is a lot for you and me, but Paris probably blows that on one shopping trip. So while the extremely wealthy still use gifts, it doesn't shelter a lot of their money. What the extremely wealthy do have are very expensive lawyers and ways of not having their assets in their name when they die. Standard trusts like you're referring to don't do that.
All we need to do is end the subsidies, and let the market set the price for water to incentivize conservation.
I'm all for that! Though the delta smelt will have a hard time bidding for their water...
Also, much less than the incentives oil companies get.
According to the EIA's "Direct Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy in Fiscal Year 2013" page XV, in the US in 2013 oil and petroleum got $2.346 billion in subsidies while all renewables got $15.043 billion (mostly wind and solar). Keep in mind that in 2013 (page XVII) oil and petroleum provided 15,342 trillion BTUs (tBTUs), natural gas 28,353 tBTUs, coal 20,209 tBTUs, and nuclear 8,117 tBTUs, while solar only provided 286 tBTUs and wind 1,549 tBTUs. As a result, per energy output wind and solar subsidies are much, much higher.
The Atlantic article this slashdot article is based on is dated Feb 27, 2014. It's old news. Why is this a slashdot story today?
What I don't get though is what the heck kind of plan he has. Even if he was online 24 hours a day for 30 days, to get to $15,687, that would mean a per-minute rate of $0.363!!!
There are plans that have no minimum long distance service, local service only. If you do dial a long distance number, you get charged a huge per minute fee. Even a dollar a minute isn't out of line for these kinds of plans.
If you have one large lake located up high somewhere and can pump water uphill to it, problem solved.
It's not just the overall system you have to worry about, but all the stages in between as well. You might have a massive dump centrally located somewhere to take up the global excess, but if a particular neighborhood has a lot of solar and blows out local transformers sending power upstream, it's not a solution for that neighborhood. The problem of solar is going to require changes at all levels of production and consumption. That's going to take a lot of money and planning.
Agriculture is the big culprit, taking 80% of the state's water
Nonsense. In the first place, half the state's ground water flows to the sea and is never tapped for various reasons (e.g., recreational and environmental). Agriculture does take 80% of what's left, which means it only uses 40% of the state's water. You have to treat the recreational and environmental uses of water as part of the overall issue. They reflect choices by the state's population, just as having a green lawn does. The environment won't collapse if the delta smelt gets trapped in irrigation pumps, preserving it instead is a choice made by others.
While this has been the worst drought on record, in the past agriculture and the state's urban areas have always managed to get by during previous droughts. What's seldom mentioned, for example, is that California's population has grown since the last major drought, and there have been more mandated environmental diversions. But of course, nobody ever considers these as part of the problem.
If you want food, it takes plenty of land, plenty of sunshine, and plenty of water. It happens that California has some of the best land and sunshine in the world for growing crops. Water was always an issue. But to say that agriculture "wastes" water is nonsense. Even when it's subsidized, it's still a major cost to any Californian farmer. There have always been incentives to reduce its use. I grew up on a California farm from the '60s to the '80s, and saw the advent of drip irrigation, sophisticated monitoring, and other advances. The state even metered the wells in our area in the '80s and eventually started charging for water.
It's easy for people who have never been on a farm to point fingers. But how many of them run the faucets while they shave or brush their teeth, never turn off the shower while they soap up, and over-water their lawns? This is just the tyranny of the majority over a minority -- one which provides a product essential to life.
If agriculture uses 60% of the water, then how is the greywater produced by the other 40% supposed to supply agriculture's needs? And how would you get it to the agricultural areas from the distant urban areas where it's produced? This also overlooks the fact that many cities in California already recycle their own greywater, and aren't about to give it up. Agricultural water use wasn't an issue until all the people came to California decades later. So why is agriculture the problem? Why should America and the rest of the world give up all the unique crops produced in California because a lot of people just wanted to spend their days by the beach? While this drought is record breaking, a lot of the issues can be traced to California's population growth since the last major drought.
As SSD cells wear, the problem is that they hold charge for less time. Starting new, the time that the charge will be held would be years, but as the SSD wears, the endurance of the held charge declines.
True, but SSD manufacturers say the drive should hold its data for at least 10 years after the drive has reached its recommended lifetime (these drives were well past that).
This study is interesting in light of the fact that a recent NOAA study found that the current California drought is not caused by climate change. In fact, under climate change California winters are supposed to get wetter, if also hotter. See http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/s... .
This appears to be nonsense, as any other drive vendor already has the debug tools to pull such things from memory, and extracting it from an update isn't that hard.
That's true of course. But the level of expertise at major drive vendors like WD and Seagate is so high that there's no need to steal the code from a competitor. If it comes down to it for a critical piece of technology, you just steal the employee instead. It's cheaper and more legal. On top of that, employees move back and forth on their own so over time knowledge is shared.
Besides, the hardware designs and technology of the manufacturers are different enough that the code can't be shared directly. You'd have to spend lots of money reverse-engineering it and then adapting it to your hardware. For the engineers at these companies -- who are the world-class experts at drive engineering -- it's quicker and cheaper just to design and write your own.
You can't, but you can be quite sure that the manufacturer will take serious measures to make sure this doesn't happen.
You'd think, but it turns out that isn't so. Have a look at https://spritesmods.com/?art=h... where Jeroen Domburg hacked into a WD 2TB Green drive using the JTAG port. He was able to modify the firmware and store it in the external flash chip holding the firmware.
Drive manufacturers still seem to be relying on "security by obscurity"