why do they want their customers to use less power? I'd think they would want to increase the amount of energy they harvest and instead encourage the industries to buy as much electricity from them as they want... am I missing something?
The marginal cost of the next kilowatt of electricity can be huge, depending on the amount of spare capacity the generating company has on hand.
Here's why: Most power plant designs have susbtantial economies of scale; the larger the plant (up to a point, of course), the more electricity generated per dollar of capital investment. Therefore it is advantageous to build fairly large plants.
So, if the company is out of generating capacity, and they are facing additional demand, they either need to lay out many billions for a large new plant, money that they won't see back for decades, or they need to build a smaller, less efficient plant that is a poorer investment.
So in many cases, the company is better off with demand staying as is. With some cleverness, they can buy power from other companies and re-sell it, waiting until demand grows to the point that they can justify construction of new capacity. But this depends on the willingness of neighbors to sell them power at a rate that they can afford.
"wheeling" (the practice of CA buying from faraway places like Quebec and Quebec shipping to intermediate places while the intermediate places actually ship their electricity to CA) to cut down on transmission losses
Maybe a dumb question, but why does that cut transmission loss? If the electricity is sent 1500 miles from Montreal to Cheyenne, and then "different" electricity is sent 1500 miles from Cheyenne to Los Angeles, there is still 3000 miles of wire resistance.
Many of these 'places like Africa' you talk about don't even have electricity, and you want to give them PDAs? To turn them into global capitalist countries brought to compete against such noble adversaries as China and the USA? Dude, you got a strange set of priorities. Try living in the real world, sometimes.
In the real world, people in developing countries want to improve their economies so that they can have electricity and all the other things you take for granted. Many technologies, particularly telecommunication, catalyze development in that they have substantial multiplier effects on business growth.
Wire infrastructure is expensive. Wireless provides a way for smaller economies to deploy telecoms without requiring hideously capital-intensive projects like tearing up streets. Why do you think mobile phones have such larger market shares v. landline in developing countries than in developed?
In the Aftrican and Asian countries where I've worked on telecoms projects, the economics of wireless were hugely favorable. Remember that the penetration will be much lower than you're used to in the developed world. For a landline phone switch to be useful, cables have to be run to all the potential neighborhoods that might require service, with low return due to the sparse usage. For wireless, on the other hand, just put up a tower and scale its capacity up as necessary.
The wire stuff only works in an environment where you can be reasonably sure everyone will want - and pay for - the service.
I would consider Japanese easy, English medium, French medium hard, Latin hard, and Russian Chinese German most difficult languages, correct me if I'm wrong.
Among major languages, the hardest for English speakers are those with complex syntax and/or major conceptual differences from what they're used to.
These include ideographic and/or tonal languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese. Among these, Japanese is by far the easiest.
Next hardest are those with grammatical structures entirely unlike European languages. Here you'd include Arabic, Hebrew, Finnish, and the various languages used in India. Arabic, for instance, has a tiny number of words compared to English, but each one can have up to dozens of forms with entirely different meanings. The subtlety of the difference makes it quite confusing. It's sort of like trying to recognize people's faces in China if you're used to Western faces (and vice versa - just as hard for Chinese to recognize Western faces).
After that it's pretty much a toss-up. Russian is on the hard side of the remainders. Most of the romance languages are fairly easy, especially Spanish because of its crystal-clear orthography and very regular structure. Almost all of the European languages have large swathes of vocabulary (or at least word roots) in common with English, which makes feeling your way around relatively easy.
The easiest languages for English-speakers to learn would be Dutch, which is grammatically and lexographically very similar (the closest living language to English) and Bahasa (Indonesia/Malaysia) which is just a remarkably straightforward language.
But in any case, almost any decent-paying IT job worldwide will be in an office full of English-speakers of varying ability.
For example, a phone of 1-630-555-1234 would have been at the IP 4.3.2.1.5.5.5.0.3.6.phone
This has been done for many years at the tpc.int domain, which is used for free internet faxing.
P.S. Points to anyone who knows who TPC rep "Mr. Arlington Hewes" is.
Re:Intelligent computers are inevitable and essent
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 2
Every 18 months our technology doubles (I'm really generalizing... bear with me here). That means, regardless of what point technology must reach before we can make truly intelligent machines, it will eventually happen so long as this trend continues. So, yes, it will happen.
The fact that processor speed and hard drive size are increasing rapidly doesn't mean that those things are on a trajectory heading toward humanlike artificial intelligence. I can go to Circuit City with all my Slashdot Frequent Poster checks and buy 1000 80-gig drives, most likely capable of storing more than the human brain, and I promise you that the ensuing machine will in no way be smarter than me, or even than George W Bush.
Let's put it another way. You can grow twice as tall every 18 months for as long as you want, but that doesn't mean you'll eventually have red hair.
The simple fact is, intelligence is more than, and qualitatively different from, storage capacity or calculation speed. It's a different way of processing information, a way that we don't even remotely understand (we can only attempt to create machines that imitate its symptoms, and not very well at that). Few of the artificial intelligence researchers I know lament the lack of sufficiently fast CPUs anywhere near as much as the lack of conceptual breakthroughs in their field.
Re:Tidal generators are the stuff dreams are made
on
Wave Driven Generators
·
· Score: 1
Homes getting bigger is actually a good thing. Soon, within the next few decades, very efficient, environmentally-friendly cars will be available. So, you don't need to worry so much about people having to travel further due to sprawl. Now, if you lower the population density, you have ultimately less expenditure of energy. What produces more energy? 10sq miles with 10,000 people, or 10sq miles with 10 people?
I'm not usually a flamer, but this is the number one most asinine statement I've read in about a year of Slashdotting. Actually I have to wonder if you're being sarcastic (your giddy enthusiasm for the Miracle Auto suggests you're not).
The only way 10 people per 10 mi2 vs 10000 per mi2 gets us anything is if you execute the other 9990 people. Otherwise they do, um, have to live somewhere. And yes, the closer they live to each other the less energy they'll use, all other things being equal.
For example, we pay a property tax that is related to what our house MAY bring IF we sell it.
That's not similar at all. The Linux kernel will never bring you $100, or $1000, or $10000 if you sell it BECAUSE IT HAS A MARKET VALUE OF ZERO. Only the media and distribution and manuals and bundled non-GPL software have market value, and these are already visible in the price tag. This is entirely unlike a house, which can in the future be sold and therefore is a legitimate target of taxation.
Next thing you know, they'll be hanging around listening to people talk, and if they notice anyone speaking about a new marketable idea, they'll charge everyone within earshot half a million dollars.
Fact: The District of Columbia has the toughest gun laws in the U.S., much stricter than most of the world also.
Those laws were enacted in response to the high rates of violent crime escalated by the prevalence of firearms. It's not as if DC was a happy, peaceful place, and then suddenly someone randomly decided to ban handguns, and then everyone started shooting each other.
Once the gun culture has taken hold (and in the case of DC, continues to be fed by irresponsible western neighbor Virginia), it takes as long time to get worked out so the city can return to peace.
Another excellent place to find information on internet availability in developing countries is www.nsrc.org. From back when I was actually working on this stuff in the mid-90s, this was always a great way to find contacts at the local telcos as well as to get a sense of the situation on the ground. The excitement of posting the first traceroute to a new country has probably passed (there's still an opportunity for someone to spot Iraq!) but the info is still great (and relatively up-to-date, even now).
I have one question, if the company is using tools on itself, who is going to press charges?
"Pressing charges", at least in the US system, doesn't mean very much. Remember that in a criminal case it is the government vs the accused, unlike a civil case where it is one civilian party vs another (as opposed to, say, the Islamic system where a criminal case faces the victim against the accused as the actual parties of the trial). All it means to "press charges" is that you will support the police and the prosecutor's office in their investigation and in court (and it indicates, in cases where the statute requires that something be done against your will in order to be illegal, that in fact it was against your will). You can not "press charges" and the prosecutor might still go ahead with the prosecution - it happens all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
why do they want their customers to use less power? I'd think they would want to increase the amount of energy they harvest and instead encourage the industries to buy as much electricity from them as they want... am I missing something?
The marginal cost of the next kilowatt of electricity can be huge, depending on the amount of spare capacity the generating company has on hand.
Here's why: Most power plant designs have susbtantial economies of scale; the larger the plant (up to a point, of course), the more electricity generated per dollar of capital investment. Therefore it is advantageous to build fairly large plants.
So, if the company is out of generating capacity, and they are facing additional demand, they either need to lay out many billions for a large new plant, money that they won't see back for decades, or they need to build a smaller, less efficient plant that is a poorer investment.
So in many cases, the company is better off with demand staying as is. With some cleverness, they can buy power from other companies and re-sell it, waiting until demand grows to the point that they can justify construction of new capacity. But this depends on the willingness of neighbors to sell them power at a rate that they can afford.
"wheeling" (the practice of CA buying from faraway places like Quebec and Quebec shipping to intermediate places while the intermediate places actually ship their electricity to CA) to cut down on transmission losses
Maybe a dumb question, but why does that cut transmission loss? If the electricity is sent 1500 miles from Montreal to Cheyenne, and then "different" electricity is sent 1500 miles from Cheyenne to Los Angeles, there is still 3000 miles of wire resistance.
Many of these 'places like Africa' you talk about don't even have electricity, and you want to give them PDAs? To turn them into global capitalist countries brought to compete against such noble adversaries as China and the USA? Dude, you got a strange set of priorities. Try living in the real world, sometimes.
In the real world, people in developing countries want to improve their economies so that they can have electricity and all the other things you take for granted. Many technologies, particularly telecommunication, catalyze development in that they have substantial multiplier effects on business growth.
Wire infrastructure is expensive. Wireless provides a way for smaller economies to deploy telecoms without requiring hideously capital-intensive projects like tearing up streets. Why do you think mobile phones have such larger market shares v. landline in developing countries than in developed?
In the Aftrican and Asian countries where I've worked on telecoms projects, the economics of wireless were hugely favorable. Remember that the penetration will be much lower than you're used to in the developed world. For a landline phone switch to be useful, cables have to be run to all the potential neighborhoods that might require service, with low return due to the sparse usage. For wireless, on the other hand, just put up a tower and scale its capacity up as necessary.
The wire stuff only works in an environment where you can be reasonably sure everyone will want - and pay for - the service.
I would consider Japanese easy, English medium, French medium hard, Latin hard, and Russian Chinese German most difficult languages, correct me if I'm wrong.
Among major languages, the hardest for English speakers are those with complex syntax and/or major conceptual differences from what they're used to.
These include ideographic and/or tonal languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese. Among these, Japanese is by far the easiest.
Next hardest are those with grammatical structures entirely unlike European languages. Here you'd include Arabic, Hebrew, Finnish, and the various languages used in India. Arabic, for instance, has a tiny number of words compared to English, but each one can have up to dozens of forms with entirely different meanings. The subtlety of the difference makes it quite confusing. It's sort of like trying to recognize people's faces in China if you're used to Western faces (and vice versa - just as hard for Chinese to recognize Western faces).
After that it's pretty much a toss-up. Russian is on the hard side of the remainders. Most of the romance languages are fairly easy, especially Spanish because of its crystal-clear orthography and very regular structure. Almost all of the European languages have large swathes of vocabulary (or at least word roots) in common with English, which makes feeling your way around relatively easy.
The easiest languages for English-speakers to learn would be Dutch, which is grammatically and lexographically very similar (the closest living language to English) and Bahasa (Indonesia/Malaysia) which is just a remarkably straightforward language.
But in any case, almost any decent-paying IT job worldwide will be in an office full of English-speakers of varying ability.
For example, a phone of 1-630-555-1234 would have been at the IP 4.3.2.1.5.5.5.0.3.6.phone
This has been done for many years at the tpc.int domain, which is used for free internet faxing.
P.S. Points to anyone who knows who TPC rep "Mr. Arlington Hewes" is.
Every 18 months our technology doubles (I'm really generalizing... bear with me here). That means, regardless of what point technology must reach before we can make truly intelligent machines, it will eventually happen so long as this trend continues. So, yes, it will happen.
The fact that processor speed and hard drive size are increasing rapidly doesn't mean that those things are on a trajectory heading toward humanlike artificial intelligence. I can go to Circuit City with all my Slashdot Frequent Poster checks and buy 1000 80-gig drives, most likely capable of storing more than the human brain, and I promise you that the ensuing machine will in no way be smarter than me, or even than George W Bush.
Let's put it another way. You can grow twice as tall every 18 months for as long as you want, but that doesn't mean you'll eventually have red hair.
The simple fact is, intelligence is more than, and qualitatively different from, storage capacity or calculation speed. It's a different way of processing information, a way that we don't even remotely understand (we can only attempt to create machines that imitate its symptoms, and not very well at that). Few of the artificial intelligence researchers I know lament the lack of sufficiently fast CPUs anywhere near as much as the lack of conceptual breakthroughs in their field.
Homes getting bigger is actually a good thing. Soon, within the next few decades, very efficient, environmentally-friendly cars will be available. So, you don't need to worry so much about people having to travel further due to sprawl. Now, if you lower the population density, you have ultimately less expenditure of energy. What produces more energy? 10sq miles with 10,000 people, or 10sq miles with 10 people?
I'm not usually a flamer, but this is the number one most asinine statement I've read in about a year of Slashdotting. Actually I have to wonder if you're being sarcastic (your giddy enthusiasm for the Miracle Auto suggests you're not).
The only way 10 people per 10 mi2 vs 10000 per mi2 gets us anything is if you execute the other 9990 people. Otherwise they do, um, have to live somewhere. And yes, the closer they live to each other the less energy they'll use, all other things being equal.
For example, we pay a property tax that is related to what our house MAY bring IF we sell it.
That's not similar at all. The Linux kernel will never bring you $100, or $1000, or $10000 if you sell it BECAUSE IT HAS A MARKET VALUE OF ZERO. Only the media and distribution and manuals and bundled non-GPL software have market value, and these are already visible in the price tag. This is entirely unlike a house, which can in the future be sold and therefore is a legitimate target of taxation.
Next thing you know, they'll be hanging around listening to people talk, and if they notice anyone speaking about a new marketable idea, they'll charge everyone within earshot half a million dollars.
Fact: The District of Columbia has the toughest gun laws in the U.S., much stricter than most of the world also.
Those laws were enacted in response to the high rates of violent crime escalated by the prevalence of firearms. It's not as if DC was a happy, peaceful place, and then suddenly someone randomly decided to ban handguns, and then everyone started shooting each other.
Once the gun culture has taken hold (and in the case of DC, continues to be fed by irresponsible western neighbor Virginia), it takes as long time to get worked out so the city can return to peace.
Another excellent place to find information on internet availability in developing countries is www.nsrc.org. From back when I was actually working on this stuff in the mid-90s, this was always a great way to find contacts at the local telcos as well as to get a sense of the situation on the ground. The excitement of posting the first traceroute to a new country has probably passed (there's still an opportunity for someone to spot Iraq!) but the info is still great (and relatively up-to-date, even now).
I have one question, if the company is using tools on itself, who is going to press charges?
"Pressing charges", at least in the US system, doesn't mean very much. Remember that in a criminal case it is the government vs the accused, unlike a civil case where it is one civilian party vs another (as opposed to, say, the Islamic system where a criminal case faces the victim against the accused as the actual parties of the trial). All it means to "press charges" is that you will support the police and the prosecutor's office in their investigation and in court (and it indicates, in cases where the statute requires that something be done against your will in order to be illegal, that in fact it was against your will). You can not "press charges" and the prosecutor might still go ahead with the prosecution - it happens all the time.
AOL, I believe, has all of 172.*
Impossible! I personally have 172.16.* through 172.31.*.
And they are well-protected, so you won't be able to traceroute me, and neither can this "secretive startup".