I commend you on providing some reasonable objections to your own argument, but I think you missed out on some big ones, mostly on your assumption that electric cars are "practical" with today's batteries.
First off, this glossed over the energy cost per mile. Electric cars are quite terrible on this note. Sure, grid electricity is produced more efficiently than a car's engine power, but that's not the end of the line. Now that juice has to be pushed across the grid to your house, then pumped in to your battery, then pulled back out. This leaves the final cost per mile outside of the "practical" range, in the sense that it has a rough time competing with that massive storehouse of energy, gasoline. (remember, we tried electric cars in the very first days of automotive design-- we abandoned it because of these energy issues. at the time electricity was more common than gasoline, so there's no conspiracy, either)
Next, the idea that "200 miles is good enough" is a bit narrow. For a lot (most?) of commuters, I will concede the point. However, these commuters would kick any e-car's ass on a Vespa or even gigantic motorcycle. If we're serious about commuting cleanly, public transportation and two-wheelers are the way to go (especially bikes on trains-- one of the best ways to shuffle around many parts of Europe). In particular, I live in Texas, and use my car mostly for highway trips of 100 to 200 miles (I commute by bike). That 200 mile limit makes me a bit skittish, given the geography around these parts. Plus, most people forget that car engines, especially nice big American ones, are great on the highway. The high engine temp keeps pollutants down, and the lack of stopped time really helps overall MPG, irrespective of relative speed efficiencies.
Finally, the entirely restricted size of e-cars doesn't do much for my 6'4" 230 pound physique, let alone the massive moving of junk and people that is so wonderfully convinient with my hatchback. So, again, the e-car falls just a bit short of "practical."
I'm all for transportation efficiency, but the sheer physics and chemistry of it all means that liquid hydrocarbon fuels are essentially unbeatable. Thus, biofuels (from secondary waste, not corn kernels) and better engine designs are almost certainly a better idea than battery-only. There are plenty of wonderful ideas languishing because of the popularity of battery research-- e.g., we could double or triple the fuel efficiency of all cars on the road: http://www.starrotor.com/
And everybody seems to be omitting the other factor in favor of ultracaps-- that you can use their full potential. Hybrid batteries are never thrown to full charge, as it significantly degrades their performance over time. This leads to wasted weight. If ultracaps can provide at least the fraction of power that is actually held by the battery, and last longer to boot, they would have the advantage.
I think someone got the idea right when they classified different levels of programmers. You could pretty much look at it like subsets of skills: "code monkeys" have a subset of the skills required to be a "software engineer" who have a subset of those requird to be a "computer scientist". Sorry to be cliche, but cars are yet again a good comparison. For a complete system, you need auto mechanics, automotive/mechanical engineers, and automotive researchers. The researchers put forth new ideas (not always useful, as previously noted about computer scientists...), the engineers design each specific car, and the mechanics put the cars together from standard parts.
This is exactly what we do in the programming realm. Unfortunately, this does not mean that you can test the computing realm just as easily. The engineers and researchers don't need a specific standardized skill set-- an engineer on a graphics card driver project is going to need very different skills than an engineer working on Google's search technology. I think this is because computer science is too much of a mixed field. You have to mix natural science, engineering, and even art mentalities to grasp the breadth of the subject. Only one of these fields has the ability to rigorously test its practitioners... that's why it's so hard to nail down what you'd test a programmer in.
Does anybody here know the specifics of the reaction? All the article says is that the seawater reacts with "unstable mantle rocks," and that it occurs with much cooler eruptions. Does anybody with some real arcane chemistry knowlege care to enlighten us? I want some serious scientific coolness and basically the info just says 'it happens.'
Scenario:
Guy gets new place, wants to show off to buddies. Sees Manly Sports Program coming up on his new digital cable. Invites all the Other Manly Guys over for a night of beer and male bonding... and sees only tampon and bath bead commercials.
Let's just say that this guy has considerably set back his aspirations for being Alpha Male.
It's almost like the media is doing a reverse-Sesame Street on parents:
Today's broadcast on today's incorrigible youths brought to you by the number 666 and the color "black".
If only adults weren't so susceptible to what they see on TV.
This just doesn't seem to be anything new. I may not be a philosophy major, but anyone who has read the Dune series by Frank Herbert knows this problem has been around longer than this lecture. What if, in fact, there is a problem that the human mind cannot master? What if all logic cannot explain a certain event, or some "fact" of existence? This seems only to be a mathematical proof of such a thing. But wait, if this is fact then maybe it also cannot be explained by logic...:-D That could hurt your nogin.
It is always scary to think there is something you can't explain. How about existence? Some use religion. Some use the anthropic (sp?) principle: if we weren't in some way created, then no one would ponder that question. Maybe it is just something that cannot be explained by logic, and thus why "pure" mathemeticians will just grumble and go on to prove that pi, in fact, are not round but squared.
I hope that no actor's group so much as peeps about this. Excuse me, but how is this different from animated characters? Like cartoons? I don't see how this is any different, except the artists now use a mouse instead of a brush. Have Disney's animated classics driven actors out of business? I think not. They even use established actors for the voices and it gives the movie more viewership.
Anyone who is afraid of the effects of the new digital characters is only afraid of change, and i'll tell you they have another thing coming.
I'm sorry, but it always gets me that governments get so panicky when it comes to their "deepest secrets". Um, why would you have your servers (be they Microsoft OS'ed or not) that contain your most vital information accessible to the public at all? If all the server is connected to is a power socket, there are few ways anybody in America could pull information off of it. I doubt they have their classified documents in the local public library with a sign on it that says 'Do not disturb'. "[The two companies] will be producing a secure, home-grown system that the German military can be confident in". Isn't that called "Linux" in America? Or really, "BSD". Anybody here who wants real security grabs their favorite distro and locks it down tighter than Trinity's leather pants. Wasn't this one of the stupid plot elements in "Antitrust", how the corporation put their secrets unencrypted on an internet server? Give me a break.
Um, i don't think the point was to negate all objections, but rather to keep them on a moderate scale and not go on a rampage. I see this as logical because Google did it in a "good" way; they clearly told the end user exactly what they were doing and why and put a nice, big button to turn it off (according to the accounts posted here). Though there might be some privacy issues with the method of information gathering they are using, there are simply no grounds for objecting to the way in which Google implemented it.
All of the greater Houston area is on 10-digit dialing code... and nobody seems to care much anymore. There are actually 3 different area codes, and nobody forgets to dial it. Most software concers are really unfounded, because anything that's been written well has the extra 3 digits on it (does this remind anyone else of Y2k bugs?). I'm just saying that if they made the move, no houstonian would notice for a while. The only problem, i think, would be when people automatically dial 1 for a long distance call... and end up talking to George in Texas instead of Jeb in Florida because it's actually a new area code now.
Well, looking at the TV guide listing for Dune, i see that they repeat each episode 3 times (8-10, 10-12, 12-2) on each night of airing. I could understand it if they wanted to hit many different audiences by showing it at several different times... but right next to each other? Anybody who can will probably see it live, anybody who can't will tape (or TiVo) it and watch it later. Am i missing something or does the Sci-Fi channel just have the programming time to spare?
~Kooshman
We all have to remember that computers are no replacement for teaching, parenting, and interaction. Make a comparison with any other activity- reading about a chemistry lab and its results aren't going to give you the same learning experience as doing it yourself. If you play games every day, it does not mean you will intrinsically learn about sportsmanship and being a team player. I think exposure to technology is not only a good thing because of the nececcary experience it gives for today's technology (r)evolution, but it can transmit knowledge in fun and efficient ways (hello internet). However, no amount of technology is going to replace teaching your kids about the stuff they are doing.
I think technology is a great tool for introducing these kids to the topics i mentioned- like reading Slashdot news can spark your interest in science, but it's not going to replace years of education.
Sorry, i don't have a physics doctorate, but your conception of "everything moving outward" isn't quite right. Our universe right now has a gradient towards moving outwards, but that doesn't mean everything is moving in a straight line from a single point. Remember, our universe is BIG. Try to imagine the imensity... No, bigger than that. Yet bigger than that. Now take that and raise it to the power of a hundred. Now what you're imagining is just our neighborhood. You see, when you have something that big, stuff gets pulled around and it goes in all directions. Since the biggest bang of them all (affectionately known as "The Big Bang", amazingly enough) was so powerful, everyone is still moving in a net outward direction, but that still leaves a variance. Think of an atomic explosion: everything is moving outwards very rapidly, but eventually it runs into stuff and changes direction. Okay, not the best analogy, but i think you can get the point by now.
Oh, just an amusing story along with it... i saw it in a forbes magazine just laying around the house, thought/.'ers should see it. Went to forbes.com, found the online version, submitted it for posting. Doesn't seem to have made it to the front page, but hey, the link's still useful.
Really, if you look at the question asked the writer specifically mentioned "in games like Quake III." True, it's fun to crank up the framerates, but as some Slashdotters have mentioned, it's useless to go past the refresh rate of your monitor; skip perception, it just isn't coming any faster no matter what the number says. The reason to to it is the physics bugs in Quake III native to super-high frame rates. Otherwise, these crazy rates might have been much more passing in mention.
What we need to start considering is realistic images. When will we have computers that can even render a slide show that looks 100% realistic? One thing that comes to mind is Star Wars E1. Mr. Lucas spent big green on making very realistic stupidity (die JarJar), but it still has that computer-rendered quality. Realism will be the next jump, since that nice man with his essay pointed out that there is a definite fps limitation on human sight, and we have technology that passes it up on these polygon-based worlds.
~the Koosh man
Slashdot Mirror
I commend you on providing some reasonable objections to your own argument, but I think you missed out on some big ones, mostly on your assumption that electric cars are "practical" with today's batteries.
First off, this glossed over the energy cost per mile. Electric cars are quite terrible on this note. Sure, grid electricity is produced more efficiently than a car's engine power, but that's not the end of the line. Now that juice has to be pushed across the grid to your house, then pumped in to your battery, then pulled back out. This leaves the final cost per mile outside of the "practical" range, in the sense that it has a rough time competing with that massive storehouse of energy, gasoline. (remember, we tried electric cars in the very first days of automotive design-- we abandoned it because of these energy issues. at the time electricity was more common than gasoline, so there's no conspiracy, either)
Next, the idea that "200 miles is good enough" is a bit narrow. For a lot (most?) of commuters, I will concede the point. However, these commuters would kick any e-car's ass on a Vespa or even gigantic motorcycle. If we're serious about commuting cleanly, public transportation and two-wheelers are the way to go (especially bikes on trains-- one of the best ways to shuffle around many parts of Europe). In particular, I live in Texas, and use my car mostly for highway trips of 100 to 200 miles (I commute by bike). That 200 mile limit makes me a bit skittish, given the geography around these parts. Plus, most people forget that car engines, especially nice big American ones, are great on the highway. The high engine temp keeps pollutants down, and the lack of stopped time really helps overall MPG, irrespective of relative speed efficiencies.
Finally, the entirely restricted size of e-cars doesn't do much for my 6'4" 230 pound physique, let alone the massive moving of junk and people that is so wonderfully convinient with my hatchback. So, again, the e-car falls just a bit short of "practical."
I'm all for transportation efficiency, but the sheer physics and chemistry of it all means that liquid hydrocarbon fuels are essentially unbeatable. Thus, biofuels (from secondary waste, not corn kernels) and better engine designs are almost certainly a better idea than battery-only. There are plenty of wonderful ideas languishing because of the popularity of battery research-- e.g., we could double or triple the fuel efficiency of all cars on the road: http://www.starrotor.com/
And everybody seems to be omitting the other factor in favor of ultracaps-- that you can use their full potential. Hybrid batteries are never thrown to full charge, as it significantly degrades their performance over time. This leads to wasted weight. If ultracaps can provide at least the fraction of power that is actually held by the battery, and last longer to boot, they would have the advantage.
I think someone got the idea right when they classified different levels of programmers. You could pretty much look at it like subsets of skills: "code monkeys" have a subset of the skills required to be a "software engineer" who have a subset of those requird to be a "computer scientist". Sorry to be cliche, but cars are yet again a good comparison. For a complete system, you need auto mechanics, automotive/mechanical engineers, and automotive researchers. The researchers put forth new ideas (not always useful, as previously noted about computer scientists...), the engineers design each specific car, and the mechanics put the cars together from standard parts.
This is exactly what we do in the programming realm. Unfortunately, this does not mean that you can test the computing realm just as easily. The engineers and researchers don't need a specific standardized skill set-- an engineer on a graphics card driver project is going to need very different skills than an engineer working on Google's search technology. I think this is because computer science is too much of a mixed field. You have to mix natural science, engineering, and even art mentalities to grasp the breadth of the subject. Only one of these fields has the ability to rigorously test its practitioners... that's why it's so hard to nail down what you'd test a programmer in.
Does anybody here know the specifics of the reaction? All the article says is that the seawater reacts with "unstable mantle rocks," and that it occurs with much cooler eruptions. Does anybody with some real arcane chemistry knowlege care to enlighten us? I want some serious scientific coolness and basically the info just says 'it happens.'
Scenario:
Guy gets new place, wants to show off to buddies. Sees Manly Sports Program coming up on his new digital cable. Invites all the Other Manly Guys over for a night of beer and male bonding... and sees only tampon and bath bead commercials.
Let's just say that this guy has considerably set back his aspirations for being Alpha Male.
It's almost like the media is doing a reverse-Sesame Street on parents:
Today's broadcast on today's incorrigible youths brought to you by the number 666 and the color "black".
If only adults weren't so susceptible to what they see on TV.
This just doesn't seem to be anything new. I may not be a philosophy major, but anyone who has read the Dune series by Frank Herbert knows this problem has been around longer than this lecture. What if, in fact, there is a problem that the human mind cannot master? What if all logic cannot explain a certain event, or some "fact" of existence? This seems only to be a mathematical proof of such a thing. But wait, if this is fact then maybe it also cannot be explained by logic... :-D That could hurt your nogin.
It is always scary to think there is something you can't explain. How about existence? Some use religion. Some use the anthropic (sp?) principle: if we weren't in some way created, then no one would ponder that question. Maybe it is just something that cannot be explained by logic, and thus why "pure" mathemeticians will just grumble and go on to prove that pi, in fact, are not round but squared.
I hope that no actor's group so much as peeps about this. Excuse me, but how is this different from animated characters? Like cartoons? I don't see how this is any different, except the artists now use a mouse instead of a brush. Have Disney's animated classics driven actors out of business? I think not. They even use established actors for the voices and it gives the movie more viewership.
Anyone who is afraid of the effects of the new digital characters is only afraid of change, and i'll tell you they have another thing coming.
(Insert 3-d, animated, gigantic tux terrorizing Hollywood. Oh yeah.)
I'm sorry, but it always gets me that governments get so panicky when it comes to their "deepest secrets". Um, why would you have your servers (be they Microsoft OS'ed or not) that contain your most vital information accessible to the public at all? If all the server is connected to is a power socket, there are few ways anybody in America could pull information off of it. I doubt they have their classified documents in the local public library with a sign on it that says 'Do not disturb'.
"[The two companies] will be producing a secure, home-grown system that the German military can be confident in". Isn't that called "Linux" in America? Or really, "BSD". Anybody here who wants real security grabs their favorite distro and locks it down tighter than Trinity's leather pants. Wasn't this one of the stupid plot elements in "Antitrust", how the corporation put their secrets unencrypted on an internet server? Give me a break.
Um, i don't think the point was to negate all objections, but rather to keep them on a moderate scale and not go on a rampage. I see this as logical because Google did it in a "good" way; they clearly told the end user exactly what they were doing and why and put a nice, big button to turn it off (according to the accounts posted here). Though there might be some privacy issues with the method of information gathering they are using, there are simply no grounds for objecting to the way in which Google implemented it.
~Kooshman
All of the greater Houston area is on 10-digit dialing code... and nobody seems to care much anymore. There are actually 3 different area codes, and nobody forgets to dial it. Most software concers are really unfounded, because anything that's been written well has the extra 3 digits on it (does this remind anyone else of Y2k bugs?). I'm just saying that if they made the move, no houstonian would notice for a while.
The only problem, i think, would be when people automatically dial 1 for a long distance call... and end up talking to George in Texas instead of Jeb in Florida because it's actually a new area code now.
~Kooshman
Well, looking at the TV guide listing for Dune, i see that they repeat each episode 3 times (8-10, 10-12, 12-2) on each night of airing. I could understand it if they wanted to hit many different audiences by showing it at several different times... but right next to each other? Anybody who can will probably see it live, anybody who can't will tape (or TiVo) it and watch it later. Am i missing something or does the Sci-Fi channel just have the programming time to spare?
~Kooshman
We all have to remember that computers are no replacement for teaching, parenting, and interaction. Make a comparison with any other activity- reading about a chemistry lab and its results aren't going to give you the same learning experience as doing it yourself. If you play games every day, it does not mean you will intrinsically learn about sportsmanship and being a team player. I think exposure to technology is not only a good thing because of the nececcary experience it gives for today's technology (r)evolution, but it can transmit knowledge in fun and efficient ways (hello internet). However, no amount of technology is going to replace teaching your kids about the stuff they are doing.
I think technology is a great tool for introducing these kids to the topics i mentioned- like reading Slashdot news can spark your interest in science, but it's not going to replace years of education.
Sorry, i don't have a physics doctorate, but your conception of "everything moving outward" isn't quite right. Our universe right now has a gradient towards moving outwards, but that doesn't mean everything is moving in a straight line from a single point. Remember, our universe is BIG. Try to imagine the imensity... No, bigger than that. Yet bigger than that. Now take that and raise it to the power of a hundred. Now what you're imagining is just our neighborhood. You see, when you have something that big, stuff gets pulled around and it goes in all directions. Since the biggest bang of them all (affectionately known as "The Big Bang", amazingly enough) was so powerful, everyone is still moving in a net outward direction, but that still leaves a variance. Think of an atomic explosion: everything is moving outwards very rapidly, but eventually it runs into stuff and changes direction. Okay, not the best analogy, but i think you can get the point by now.
~Chad
Oh, just an amusing story along with it... i saw it in a forbes magazine just laying around the house, thought /.'ers should see it. Went to forbes.com, found the online version, submitted it for posting. Doesn't seem to have made it to the front page, but hey, the link's still useful.
~the Koosh man
Really, if you look at the question asked the writer specifically mentioned "in games like Quake III." True, it's fun to crank up the framerates, but as some Slashdotters have mentioned, it's useless to go past the refresh rate of your monitor; skip perception, it just isn't coming any faster no matter what the number says. The reason to to it is the physics bugs in Quake III native to super-high frame rates. Otherwise, these crazy rates might have been much more passing in mention. What we need to start considering is realistic images. When will we have computers that can even render a slide show that looks 100% realistic? One thing that comes to mind is Star Wars E1. Mr. Lucas spent big green on making very realistic stupidity (die JarJar), but it still has that computer-rendered quality. Realism will be the next jump, since that nice man with his essay pointed out that there is a definite fps limitation on human sight, and we have technology that passes it up on these polygon-based worlds. ~the Koosh man