Yes it is shared spectrum with a number of services, but LICENSED services have priority over UNLICENSENED services.
So Part 15 devices MUST accept any interference from Part 95 licensed devices. So, if an amateur radio operators who are licensed for part of the 2.4 GHz band which is shared by most WiFi devices wants to operate at high enough power to obliterate WiFi devices around, the Part 15 device operator can gripe and complain, but the FCC won't lift a finger. Generally though, Hams will be very careful to cause the minimum amount of disruption. I will only run with the minimum power I can, using very directional antennas with horizontal polarization and I won't leave it running when I'm not using it.
So people never report problems to you which are not really problems but they didn't take the time to learn how to use the software so they think it is a problem with the software?
Of course they do. If my coworker is unaware of how the software is supposed to work and shows up with a "problem" for me to solve, my approach is to enlist them to "help" me fix it. What happens though, is they learn how the software is supposed to work because they get some OJT from ME the author. I get a reputation for being helpful and the company is better off because they then know their jobs better. Plus, understanding the perspectives of the users is ALWAYS a good idea. It helps me build the product in ways they want it to work and makes any UI's I produce more intuitive and user friendly.
If I just told them to get lost and go learn their job, I'd get a reputation for being rude and unhelpful and neither of us would learn anything.
Everything wears out. In space, it happens faster than you might imagine. Mir was deorbited for a reason. It was old, obsolete, ailing, expensive and dangerous. The ISS will go down the same path.
Weren't they going to crash the ISS into the atmosphere to dispose of it at one point? That would have been incredibly stupid.
Nope, eventually that will be it's fate.... I believe that the current project only goes out to 2025 which puts the re-entry in 10 years or so unless it's been extended.
Skylab did, Mir did, the ISS will too...
We may be able to deorbit parts of it and revamp the station by replacing modules as they become too old to be supportable, but I'm guessing that eventually it's going to be easier to just start over.. The question really is HOW LONG will it take for the funding to dry up, the station to become unsupportable from age or the international coalition that controls the station dissolves. IMHO - I'm guessing that the collation will break up about the same time as funding goes away and that will happen sometime in the next 10 years, if some technical fault doesn't cause irreparable damage and render the ISS uninhabitable before then.
Because this country largely lacked any real serious economic problems for a couple of generations, children have been raised more and more selfishly. It's more "I'm entitled!" than it used to be. We see this on Facebook, Twitter et all, where folks are posting "Look at Me!" and getting "liked" or "followed" by their friends. We have selfie sticks to take pictures of ourselves with our $800 phones and wine when the credit card gets maxed out and we cannot make the payments on our student loans. So this leads to "I don't care about YOU" and we forget the simple truths that made society safe at home as well as work. It's not being a nerd or geek, it's about not being raised to care about others.
The sad part though is we are loosing the skills that smooth out interpersonal relationships, that make cohesive teams and friendly work environments where people are motivated, fulfilled and efficient. Yea it takes effort, but I can assure you it is worth the price to think of others.
Look, Torvalds does the final code merge and it's up to him to refuse the update if the developer isn't listening to his direction. He has absolute control over the code base and NOTHING gets in that HE doesn't approve and merge it. Torvalds doesn't need to resort to sending profanity laced E-mail to stop this, he can stop it other ways.
Torvalds doesn't need to be nice I suppose, but to me it smacks of lack of professionalism and perhaps a bit of narcissism when people do this kind of thing to others. But let's face it, it's easy to chew out somebody on the web you don't know, won't ever meet, and have no real relationship with. But IMHO it's a really small world and more than once I've seen where what goes around really does come around sometimes so this is one character trait of Torvalds I would strongly recommend nobody emulate.
Oh young one.. There is a basic level of human decency and professionalism which we all do well to maintain. Unfortunately this is a rare quality in many organizations these days.
I suspect that if your boss called your efforts crap in full ear shot of your peers, even if he was correct, you'd be a bit miffed at him/her for embarrassing you in public. It may change your behavior, but it also will change your attitude to them due to being rudely treated. Most folks have issues when they "loose face" in public and a wise professional manager avoids creating issues when possible. It only makes sense to go out of your way to avoid offending others, even in circumstances where you don't think you should have to bother. Wise people bend over backwards to avoid creating problems, trust me.
For instance, as a software developer in a large organization, I ALWAYS assume that any software problem I find, or get's reported to me is MY FAULT, even when it's not. I will either *fix* the problem, or if I cannot do that, I will enlist others to "help me" figure out how to fix it. I never say "See, it's your problem to fix." but keep showing them the evidence and asking them how I can fix it. When it is their problem, they will eventually realize this but because I've not been rubbing their nose in it I don't have to fix the relationship the next time something rolls around. The other option is to just shoot your coworkers full of holes, and the first time you are wrong about who's at fault it was, you are the hard nosed worker looking to get out of responsibly.
Do I have to do this? No, but it establishes you as the guy that knows your stuff, who is willing to work with others on stuff that's not his responsibility and exposes you to details from the larger picture. You are the nice hard worker that everybody trusts.
To each his own, but all in all I'd rather not work for a douchebag. Even if he's a really talented douchebag, he's still a douchebag. Real managers supervise without being an asshole.
I don't mind working for a professional who holds to high standards and doesn't mind telling me when my code is crap, but I'm not going to work for a douchebag that reprimands me in front of everybody.
Professional and effective managers always reprimand in private, and praise in public. DON'T work for someone who doesn't follow that rule, life is too short.
Well feel free to go do stupid stuff if you insist...
BTW - I have two kids, the oldest is in college making nearly straight "A's" in her third year of a STEM degree (enjoying a full scholarship) and my youngest is doing great in high school (better than his sister did actually.) Further, both kids where entirely home schooled except for one year they went to private school, with my wife and I serving as their teachers (I do the STEM subjects in the evening and she does the rest). So, I'm not so sure I consider your critique valid, plus it's a little late to keep my genes out of the pool.
> Fission does work, is safe, and we know how to use it.
Indeed. Except it costs five times as much to build a fission power plant than to build enough wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy.
Well, that may be true, but only as long as the wind is blowing.... Fission works ALL the time (or nearly so), Wind? Not so much.
Plus, I'd contend that the cost of Fission is not that far from Wind, but going by cost says Natural gas is first and in my world I'd build all sorts of generation capacity so we don't have all our eggs in a single basket.
We are going to debate this for weeks? The solution is clear and the question is easy... How close do we need to be to the astronomical time? Once you answer that, we all know what to do.
There is that.... I was appealing to the environmentalists out there and avoiding them going nuclear by making such a provocative (yet true) statement. Fission does work, is safe, and we know how to use it.
Just because something is "technically possible" does not mean it's a good idea. There are things that are *possible* technically, but impossible economically or so impractical due to size, complexity or other possible solutions exist which are not so hard/expensive that it doesn't make sense to do them. This idea of collecting energy in space, transferring it to the surface to be used is one of these ideas.
First, it's technically possible, but to do this on an industrial scale will requires HUGE systems to be build in space and on the surface. If you use microwaves to transfer the energy, the structures required are literally measured in kilometers, both in space and on the ground.
HOWEVER, it's not practical for economic reasons so it won't ever happen.
1. Throwing huge structures into orbit is pretty costly and energy intensive. Just getting the materials into orbit for a structure 1Km by 1Km is a daunting task, but then loading it up with solar panels, maneuvering devices to point both the solar arrays and transmission array is only going to add weight, complexity and expense.
2. Efficiency is going to be crap. Some folks claim 95% transfer using microwaves, but nobody is calculating the systems real losses going from solar panel output, into microwaves, transfer (at 95%), conversion back to something useful. I'd be willing to bet the attainable efficacy of this system would be below 50%, which means you have to fly twice the solar panel capacity than the energy you are going to get.
3. The ground station part is measured in Kilometers too. It's going to suck up a LOT of real estate in really large blocks to beam the energy down.
4. There are easier and cheaper ways to do the SAME thing. Oh yes, here is the BIG rub for these wide eyed nut jobs.... It's going to be more cost effective just to throw up solar panels on the surface and forego all the complexity and expense of collecting in space. Seriously less expensive for the same amount of power. It will be less expensive to initially build, it will be less expensive to maintain and I'll bet it will be more efficient. You can build this solar collector in the same (or smaller) tract of land than the Microwave collector, or spread it out into smaller tracts and avoid the expense of the legal fight necessary to put a 1Km by 1Km parcel of real estate to public use. Solar on the ground is cheaper, more cost effective and a whole lot more efficient.
My conclusion is it won't happen as much as we like the Pie in the Sky idea it is stupid one. The ROI isn't there and other viable options exist which do the same for less cost So while it's an interesting thought experiment, we need to be investing in things which have promise of being more practical if they can be made to work, things like Fusion power.
Ah come on... They have to keep the "pie in the sky" ideas flowing or what's the point?
This whole idea gets even worse when you start to consider the efficiency of everything... Collecting the energy, converting it into a suitable form to transfer down to the surface, transferring it, collecting it AGAIN and converting it into something we can use. The overall losses alone says they are nuts, even before you start flinging huge pieces of heavy hardware into orbit...
No, I'm not surprised. However, opinions differ on this end.
Directly burning wood for heat aside....
Long term you may be correct. As Oil becomes more and more scarce and the "easy" stuff to recover is used up, oil will become more expensive. Eventually, this will make biofuels more attractive, all other things being equal. But there are things that may drive the "long" part of the "long term" out to be much longer than you expect.
First, history shows that as the price of oil increases, the amount of economically recoverable oil grows rather quickly. As oil approached $100/bbl. recently, the amount of proven (economically recoverable) oil grew and literally made the USA one of the largest holders of fossil fuel reserves in the world. At $100/bbl. it made sense to spend the money to frack and use expensive extraction technologies where this wasn't true at $50/bbl. There is a bit of lag in the production rate so we see spikes in oil prices as demand outstrips production, but this is short term. Much of the sharp rise in motor fuel prices we recently saw where driven by supply side limits, and we briefly may have ended up close to parity with Bio-Fuels on cost, but that would have been short term, and turned out to really be an artificial supply problem caused by OPEC.
Second, bio fuel production costs are directly linked to energy prices. They take fuel/energy to produce (fertilizer, cultivation, harvesting, converting into fuel) especially when you have to convert it into motor fuels like diesel or ethanol. So as overall fuel/energy prices rise, bio-fuels also cost more to produce. Yes, I guess there is a point where the two costs end up on par, but I have no doubt that if you took the government incentives out of the bio-fuel markets it would be a lot higher than you imagine and certainly a lot higher than we've actually seen so far.
Third, you do realize that we highly subsidize this industry in a number of ways. Government mandates minimum Ethanol content of gasoline in many areas and requires that it be sold. They provide tax incentives and credits for producers and users of Biofuels. It's really hard to tell how much they cost to produce in the real world because government activity is artificially driving prices. I think this is driving the cost of bio-fuels lower, meaning that the break even point naturally is going to be well beyond $100/Bbl. oil we've already seen if the government took it's hands off like it should.
Fourth, why would we waste food production capacity on this? As the world's population grows at an alarming rate, we are going to struggle more and more to produce food enough for all. The amount of land suitable for this production is limited, as is our ability to obtain the resources (fertilizer, water, sunlight) necessary to make the right kinds of plants grow. We are not running at full capacity in food production, but if we choose to convert more and more of our capacity over to bio-fuel production, we eventually will. Also, because we are now using "food" plants for bio-fuel production, we drive up the price of the food. It may not matter to you, but I can assure you it matters to the poorer folks who depend on these crops we insist on using for bio-fuels. Surely you see how this rush to farm for bio-fuels makes food more expensive, so there are additional indirect costs to consider.
So, I don't think we disagree in principle here, but in the effective time line. "Long" term unsubsidized viability of bio-fuels has got to be well beyond the future point where oil exceeds $150/bbl. (all prices adjusted for inflation in the future) and I think this puts "long" in the realm of a couple of decades sans any big spikes in demand or available supplies. 20 years is a long time for technology to develop....
I'd think there's better, more subtle ways to protect yourself.
You mean like encrypting your hard drive?
Personally, If I figured I had a lot to hide, I'd set up my machine to require manual intervention while booting. Set up a boot loader that silently boots to a decoy, throw away, it returns to it's initial state every time system that you use for things like web browsing and game playing. Encrypt all the rest of the partitions used for the *working* system where you keep the stuff you want/need to keep secure. You boot to the *real* system to work by knowing that the boot loader can be interrupted, directed to the real system and will only then request the decryption key.
In this way, you just power up the system when asked, they "inspect" it and it looks like what they expect to see.
Again, this is a "use case" question and I said at the start that we didn't have enough information.
If you are just cooking up some small script thing on the fly and python is already built and on your system, python wins. But if you are looking to deploy something in an embedded system with limited resources, getting a already compiled Go program onboard might be better. You will need to "cross compile" that Go program to make it run, but once you have that, it will be smaller than the whole python distribution. How many Go programs you have might be a consideration though. Each of those native executables carry a lot of extra stuff, where the python scripts are just small text files.
On the size question... Python is sizeable, but it includes everything to compile and run from source code. The Go executable does not. I'm just guessing here, but I think if you consider the Go build environment to get you from source to a running program, the comparison might not be so uneven.
But all this begs the "how are you using this" question. We don't know and either tool may be the preferred choice depending on the specific application.
Being less verbose isn't necessarily a good thing. All it really does is abstract away behind keywords and syntax the complex things that are really going on. Where it's not a bad thing when done well, it does make the language harder to learn and use well. My favorite example is C++ constructors/destructors and variables going in and out of scope in the middle of a statement sometimes, if you don't understand why all this happens, why the compiler hid this activity, you can get yourself into serious trouble and not know why. So Abstraction isn't always a good thing.
Yea, the source is smaller and it goes directly into native a executable, but it still carries similar overhead of the garbage collection and all the stuff they hide from the programmer by abstraction, just like Java. Did they do a better job? Perhaps...
More sophisticated concurrency model? Perhaps, I'd say it's more abstracted away so you may not have to worry about it, usually, but that must means it's going to be harder if your problem doesn't fit well in their concurrency model. (Need we discuss Open GL?)
But where "go" and "Java" differ, they are extremely similar looking when you compare them to "C". Which is my point. I'm not dissing Go or Java, nor am I saying they are exactly the same, only that they are, from the prospective of "C" programmers, pretty similar.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes it is shared spectrum with a number of services, but LICENSED services have priority over UNLICENSENED services.
So Part 15 devices MUST accept any interference from Part 95 licensed devices. So, if an amateur radio operators who are licensed for part of the 2.4 GHz band which is shared by most WiFi devices wants to operate at high enough power to obliterate WiFi devices around, the Part 15 device operator can gripe and complain, but the FCC won't lift a finger. Generally though, Hams will be very careful to cause the minimum amount of disruption. I will only run with the minimum power I can, using very directional antennas with horizontal polarization and I won't leave it running when I'm not using it.
So people never report problems to you which are not really problems but they didn't take the time to learn how to use the software so they think it is a problem with the software?
Of course they do. If my coworker is unaware of how the software is supposed to work and shows up with a "problem" for me to solve, my approach is to enlist them to "help" me fix it. What happens though, is they learn how the software is supposed to work because they get some OJT from ME the author. I get a reputation for being helpful and the company is better off because they then know their jobs better. Plus, understanding the perspectives of the users is ALWAYS a good idea. It helps me build the product in ways they want it to work and makes any UI's I produce more intuitive and user friendly.
If I just told them to get lost and go learn their job, I'd get a reputation for being rude and unhelpful and neither of us would learn anything.
Everything wears out. In space, it happens faster than you might imagine. Mir was deorbited for a reason. It was old, obsolete, ailing, expensive and dangerous. The ISS will go down the same path.
Mir #2... Yep, I've heard that the Russians have indicated they want to do this and I don't suppose we could stop them.
Weren't they going to crash the ISS into the atmosphere to dispose of it at one point? That would have been incredibly stupid.
Nope, eventually that will be it's fate.... I believe that the current project only goes out to 2025 which puts the re-entry in 10 years or so unless it's been extended.
Skylab did, Mir did, the ISS will too...
We may be able to deorbit parts of it and revamp the station by replacing modules as they become too old to be supportable, but I'm guessing that eventually it's going to be easier to just start over.. The question really is HOW LONG will it take for the funding to dry up, the station to become unsupportable from age or the international coalition that controls the station dissolves. IMHO - I'm guessing that the collation will break up about the same time as funding goes away and that will happen sometime in the next 10 years, if some technical fault doesn't cause irreparable damage and render the ISS uninhabitable before then.
Ho boy... The fight is on.. You are wise to observe this, but I'm not so sure it's wise to bring it up..
No, there is something going on...
Because this country largely lacked any real serious economic problems for a couple of generations, children have been raised more and more selfishly. It's more "I'm entitled!" than it used to be. We see this on Facebook, Twitter et all, where folks are posting "Look at Me!" and getting "liked" or "followed" by their friends. We have selfie sticks to take pictures of ourselves with our $800 phones and wine when the credit card gets maxed out and we cannot make the payments on our student loans. So this leads to "I don't care about YOU" and we forget the simple truths that made society safe at home as well as work. It's not being a nerd or geek, it's about not being raised to care about others.
The sad part though is we are loosing the skills that smooth out interpersonal relationships, that make cohesive teams and friendly work environments where people are motivated, fulfilled and efficient. Yea it takes effort, but I can assure you it is worth the price to think of others.
Look, Torvalds does the final code merge and it's up to him to refuse the update if the developer isn't listening to his direction. He has absolute control over the code base and NOTHING gets in that HE doesn't approve and merge it. Torvalds doesn't need to resort to sending profanity laced E-mail to stop this, he can stop it other ways.
Torvalds doesn't need to be nice I suppose, but to me it smacks of lack of professionalism and perhaps a bit of narcissism when people do this kind of thing to others. But let's face it, it's easy to chew out somebody on the web you don't know, won't ever meet, and have no real relationship with. But IMHO it's a really small world and more than once I've seen where what goes around really does come around sometimes so this is one character trait of Torvalds I would strongly recommend nobody emulate.
I was going to say something about Captain Obvious, but I like what you said too..
Oh young one.. There is a basic level of human decency and professionalism which we all do well to maintain. Unfortunately this is a rare quality in many organizations these days.
I suspect that if your boss called your efforts crap in full ear shot of your peers, even if he was correct, you'd be a bit miffed at him/her for embarrassing you in public. It may change your behavior, but it also will change your attitude to them due to being rudely treated. Most folks have issues when they "loose face" in public and a wise professional manager avoids creating issues when possible. It only makes sense to go out of your way to avoid offending others, even in circumstances where you don't think you should have to bother. Wise people bend over backwards to avoid creating problems, trust me.
For instance, as a software developer in a large organization, I ALWAYS assume that any software problem I find, or get's reported to me is MY FAULT, even when it's not. I will either *fix* the problem, or if I cannot do that, I will enlist others to "help me" figure out how to fix it. I never say "See, it's your problem to fix." but keep showing them the evidence and asking them how I can fix it. When it is their problem, they will eventually realize this but because I've not been rubbing their nose in it I don't have to fix the relationship the next time something rolls around. The other option is to just shoot your coworkers full of holes, and the first time you are wrong about who's at fault it was, you are the hard nosed worker looking to get out of responsibly.
Do I have to do this? No, but it establishes you as the guy that knows your stuff, who is willing to work with others on stuff that's not his responsibility and exposes you to details from the larger picture. You are the nice hard worker that everybody trusts.
But does he have to be such a dick about it?
Apparently he does. I don't know why, but he does this from time to time, launching into some tirade laced with explicatives.
To each his own, but all in all I'd rather not work for a douchebag. Even if he's a really talented douchebag, he's still a douchebag. Real managers supervise without being an asshole.
I don't mind working for a professional who holds to high standards and doesn't mind telling me when my code is crap, but I'm not going to work for a douchebag that reprimands me in front of everybody.
Professional and effective managers always reprimand in private, and praise in public. DON'T work for someone who doesn't follow that rule, life is too short.
Film at eleven
Why? Haven't we seen this before many times?
Well feel free to go do stupid stuff if you insist...
BTW - I have two kids, the oldest is in college making nearly straight "A's" in her third year of a STEM degree (enjoying a full scholarship) and my youngest is doing great in high school (better than his sister did actually.) Further, both kids where entirely home schooled except for one year they went to private school, with my wife and I serving as their teachers (I do the STEM subjects in the evening and she does the rest). So, I'm not so sure I consider your critique valid, plus it's a little late to keep my genes out of the pool.
> Fission does work, is safe, and we know how to use it.
Indeed. Except it costs five times as much to build a fission power plant than to build enough wind turbines to produce the same amount of energy.
Well, that may be true, but only as long as the wind is blowing.... Fission works ALL the time (or nearly so), Wind? Not so much.
Plus, I'd contend that the cost of Fission is not that far from Wind, but going by cost says Natural gas is first and in my world I'd build all sorts of generation capacity so we don't have all our eggs in a single basket.
Hold up, slow down.... Wait just a second...
We are going to debate this for weeks? The solution is clear and the question is easy... How close do we need to be to the astronomical time? Once you answer that, we all know what to do.
There is that.... I was appealing to the environmentalists out there and avoiding them going nuclear by making such a provocative (yet true) statement. Fission does work, is safe, and we know how to use it.
Just because something is "technically possible" does not mean it's a good idea. There are things that are *possible* technically, but impossible economically or so impractical due to size, complexity or other possible solutions exist which are not so hard/expensive that it doesn't make sense to do them. This idea of collecting energy in space, transferring it to the surface to be used is one of these ideas.
First, it's technically possible, but to do this on an industrial scale will requires HUGE systems to be build in space and on the surface. If you use microwaves to transfer the energy, the structures required are literally measured in kilometers, both in space and on the ground.
HOWEVER, it's not practical for economic reasons so it won't ever happen.
1. Throwing huge structures into orbit is pretty costly and energy intensive. Just getting the materials into orbit for a structure 1Km by 1Km is a daunting task, but then loading it up with solar panels, maneuvering devices to point both the solar arrays and transmission array is only going to add weight, complexity and expense.
2. Efficiency is going to be crap. Some folks claim 95% transfer using microwaves, but nobody is calculating the systems real losses going from solar panel output, into microwaves, transfer (at 95%), conversion back to something useful. I'd be willing to bet the attainable efficacy of this system would be below 50%, which means you have to fly twice the solar panel capacity than the energy you are going to get.
3. The ground station part is measured in Kilometers too. It's going to suck up a LOT of real estate in really large blocks to beam the energy down.
4. There are easier and cheaper ways to do the SAME thing. Oh yes, here is the BIG rub for these wide eyed nut jobs.... It's going to be more cost effective just to throw up solar panels on the surface and forego all the complexity and expense of collecting in space. Seriously less expensive for the same amount of power. It will be less expensive to initially build, it will be less expensive to maintain and I'll bet it will be more efficient. You can build this solar collector in the same (or smaller) tract of land than the Microwave collector, or spread it out into smaller tracts and avoid the expense of the legal fight necessary to put a 1Km by 1Km parcel of real estate to public use. Solar on the ground is cheaper, more cost effective and a whole lot more efficient.
My conclusion is it won't happen as much as we like the Pie in the Sky idea it is stupid one. The ROI isn't there and other viable options exist which do the same for less cost So while it's an interesting thought experiment, we need to be investing in things which have promise of being more practical if they can be made to work, things like Fusion power.
Ah come on... They have to keep the "pie in the sky" ideas flowing or what's the point?
This whole idea gets even worse when you start to consider the efficiency of everything... Collecting the energy, converting it into a suitable form to transfer down to the surface, transferring it, collecting it AGAIN and converting it into something we can use. The overall losses alone says they are nuts, even before you start flinging huge pieces of heavy hardware into orbit...
>> coming up with a practical way to collect solar energy beyond our atmosphere...down to the Earth's surface
That's easy! You just run an big orange extension cord down the space elevator.
That's actually a better idea than the "Use Microwaves and BEAM it down" junk I've argued about in the past.
Yea, no problem even then.. Just turn on the AC and run the thermostats down...
No, I'm not surprised. However, opinions differ on this end.
Directly burning wood for heat aside....
Long term you may be correct. As Oil becomes more and more scarce and the "easy" stuff to recover is used up, oil will become more expensive. Eventually, this will make biofuels more attractive, all other things being equal. But there are things that may drive the "long" part of the "long term" out to be much longer than you expect.
First, history shows that as the price of oil increases, the amount of economically recoverable oil grows rather quickly. As oil approached $100/bbl. recently, the amount of proven (economically recoverable) oil grew and literally made the USA one of the largest holders of fossil fuel reserves in the world. At $100/bbl. it made sense to spend the money to frack and use expensive extraction technologies where this wasn't true at $50/bbl. There is a bit of lag in the production rate so we see spikes in oil prices as demand outstrips production, but this is short term. Much of the sharp rise in motor fuel prices we recently saw where driven by supply side limits, and we briefly may have ended up close to parity with Bio-Fuels on cost, but that would have been short term, and turned out to really be an artificial supply problem caused by OPEC.
Second, bio fuel production costs are directly linked to energy prices. They take fuel/energy to produce (fertilizer, cultivation, harvesting, converting into fuel) especially when you have to convert it into motor fuels like diesel or ethanol. So as overall fuel/energy prices rise, bio-fuels also cost more to produce. Yes, I guess there is a point where the two costs end up on par, but I have no doubt that if you took the government incentives out of the bio-fuel markets it would be a lot higher than you imagine and certainly a lot higher than we've actually seen so far.
Third, you do realize that we highly subsidize this industry in a number of ways. Government mandates minimum Ethanol content of gasoline in many areas and requires that it be sold. They provide tax incentives and credits for producers and users of Biofuels. It's really hard to tell how much they cost to produce in the real world because government activity is artificially driving prices. I think this is driving the cost of bio-fuels lower, meaning that the break even point naturally is going to be well beyond $100/Bbl. oil we've already seen if the government took it's hands off like it should.
Fourth, why would we waste food production capacity on this? As the world's population grows at an alarming rate, we are going to struggle more and more to produce food enough for all. The amount of land suitable for this production is limited, as is our ability to obtain the resources (fertilizer, water, sunlight) necessary to make the right kinds of plants grow. We are not running at full capacity in food production, but if we choose to convert more and more of our capacity over to bio-fuel production, we eventually will. Also, because we are now using "food" plants for bio-fuel production, we drive up the price of the food. It may not matter to you, but I can assure you it matters to the poorer folks who depend on these crops we insist on using for bio-fuels. Surely you see how this rush to farm for bio-fuels makes food more expensive, so there are additional indirect costs to consider.
So, I don't think we disagree in principle here, but in the effective time line. "Long" term unsubsidized viability of bio-fuels has got to be well beyond the future point where oil exceeds $150/bbl. (all prices adjusted for inflation in the future) and I think this puts "long" in the realm of a couple of decades sans any big spikes in demand or available supplies. 20 years is a long time for technology to develop....
I'd think there's better, more subtle ways to protect yourself.
You mean like encrypting your hard drive?
Personally, If I figured I had a lot to hide, I'd set up my machine to require manual intervention while booting. Set up a boot loader that silently boots to a decoy, throw away, it returns to it's initial state every time system that you use for things like web browsing and game playing. Encrypt all the rest of the partitions used for the *working* system where you keep the stuff you want/need to keep secure. You boot to the *real* system to work by knowing that the boot loader can be interrupted, directed to the real system and will only then request the decryption key.
In this way, you just power up the system when asked, they "inspect" it and it looks like what they expect to see.
Again, this is a "use case" question and I said at the start that we didn't have enough information.
If you are just cooking up some small script thing on the fly and python is already built and on your system, python wins. But if you are looking to deploy something in an embedded system with limited resources, getting a already compiled Go program onboard might be better. You will need to "cross compile" that Go program to make it run, but once you have that, it will be smaller than the whole python distribution. How many Go programs you have might be a consideration though. Each of those native executables carry a lot of extra stuff, where the python scripts are just small text files.
On the size question... Python is sizeable, but it includes everything to compile and run from source code. The Go executable does not. I'm just guessing here, but I think if you consider the Go build environment to get you from source to a running program, the comparison might not be so uneven.
But all this begs the "how are you using this" question. We don't know and either tool may be the preferred choice depending on the specific application.
Being less verbose isn't necessarily a good thing. All it really does is abstract away behind keywords and syntax the complex things that are really going on. Where it's not a bad thing when done well, it does make the language harder to learn and use well. My favorite example is C++ constructors/destructors and variables going in and out of scope in the middle of a statement sometimes, if you don't understand why all this happens, why the compiler hid this activity, you can get yourself into serious trouble and not know why. So Abstraction isn't always a good thing.
Yea, the source is smaller and it goes directly into native a executable, but it still carries similar overhead of the garbage collection and all the stuff they hide from the programmer by abstraction, just like Java. Did they do a better job? Perhaps...
More sophisticated concurrency model? Perhaps, I'd say it's more abstracted away so you may not have to worry about it, usually, but that must means it's going to be harder if your problem doesn't fit well in their concurrency model. (Need we discuss Open GL?)
But where "go" and "Java" differ, they are extremely similar looking when you compare them to "C". Which is my point. I'm not dissing Go or Java, nor am I saying they are exactly the same, only that they are, from the prospective of "C" programmers, pretty similar.