5. Solar off-peak is simply not a problem, not for a long time. Peak demand is highly correlated with sunshine in most of the world
Maybe most of the world, but not those parts where peak power usage actually is. Right now is pretty close to peak usage where I live. It's still working hours, but it's dark out and damn cold to boot. It's winter, the days are short and the need for power is great -- double-whammy. Most of the world may be seeing a lot of sunshine now, but the parts of the world that are both highly populated and highly developed (e.g. the northeastern US, western Europe, etc.), i.e. those parts of the world with the highest energy needs, are *not* seeing a lot of sunshine right now, despite what most of the rest of the world might be seeing.
The high-quality FYIQ (Fuck You I Quit) has a long tradition.
Yeah, but ol' Zed here is taking it to previously unseen heights by doing it in such a public way....
Well, when what you're FYIQing is not a company but an open-source community, the FYIQ letter to the boss is not an option. Isn't the great thing about open-source that all this stuff is public?;)
This is one of those cases where a single "false" result precludes a "true" result from the rest of the experiment.
So, unless every simulation is a realistic simulation, that can't be the purpose of it? Your argument boils down to this: because we don't do this perfectly, that can't be the reason why we do it. That's a bit on the absurd side. In fact, we can have many many "falses" here while the premise is still quite true. One need merely assume that although the purpose is as stated, not every single dream succeeds in that purpose.
How can Linden Labs set up a safety net to catch things like this?
The same way all Internet hosting companies set up safety nets to catch things like this. Is it your web service provider's responsibility to set up a safety net for people who get scammed on websites they host? Still not sure why people think if you interact using a 3D browser, it's fundamentally different from doing so on a 2D browser.
Internet service provides should not become a law onto themselves. If things are occurring in cyberspace that we don't like, we already have governments and laws to deal with these things. Let's not create more, nor give hosting companies responsibilities they're ill-suited to deal with.
Sure he might be of the tech industry. That doesn't mean that what he has to say is interesting.
Um, that was the GP's point. If he's part of the tech industry, given what his article has to say about the tech industry, it would be paradoxical for his article to actually be interesting.
It's a common enough misread -- the problem is, a lot of people's first instinct upon reading something they believe is incorrect is to immediately correct it. I've learned over the years that the first thing you should do is reread it more slowly. Then start looking at alternate interpretations. The majority of the time, when I see someone "correct" someone else on the Internet, it's because they didn't understand what the first person was actually saying.
Interestingly enough, most mothers have no problems understanding that the first year of their child's life *ends* on its first birthday, that its one year old during the second year of its life, two years old during the third year of its life, etc. But then, most mothers are smarter than most/.ers...:p
People who can't keep which century it is straight are people who basically just can't count. I don't think anyone should get an "F" in communication for assuming their listener can count.
I do precisely that. Control key sequences, especially the vital Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q, are much easier to type when you put the control key back where God intended it to be.;)
WTF? A 2008 Mustang looks nothing like an 80's Trans Am!
Um, so?
If you want it to be just like the original series, go put the old tapes in the VCR and just watch the original series. There's utterly no point at all whatsoever in that case.
It's a new show, it's got new stuff. Deal with it...
You're probably thinking of silver, not platinum. Silver actually conducts better than copper, but it's both more expensive and it suffers from corrosion. Gold is not a better conductor than either "out of the box", but after a bit of time and oxidation of those silver and copper contacts, it becomes better than both.
Long story short: a scientist will tell you silver is the best conductor, followed by copper, followed by gold. An engineer making something that needs to work more than a few days in the lab will note that gold is actually the best conductor of the three when put into real use, at least for those exposed contacts. Your silver or copper contacts are going to sound crappier than my gold ones all too soon...
Nemertes Research, in its recent report on the subject, concluded that "demand for Internet and IP services is increasing exponentially, while access investment is proceeding linearly. An exponential curve will always intersect a linear one given enough time."
Yes, demand for bytes is increasing exponentially while investment in network infrastructure is increasing linearly. This would be alarming, if one was born yesterday, or if one was a knuckle-dragging moron. Those who aren't either note that the amount you get for each dollar spent on technology increases exponentially over time. Thus, not only is a linear spending "curve" capable of keeping up with an exponential required capabilities curve, often it can be done even if the spending line is going down. My most recent gigabit ethernet switch cost a fraction of what my first 10mbps hub. My conclusion from this simple observation is that there's an exponential curve in the increase of stupidity at Nemertes Research.
That would indirectly suggest that in this galaxy there was no sufficiently advanced life that would detect, and try to protect itself, or stop, said "death ray".
Huh? Why would this suggest that? The fact that the "ray" is there says no one tried to stop it, but I can't see why any sufficiently advanced life would bother trying. There's no evidence here that they didn't try to protect themselves, and indeed I would assume that any sufficiently advanced life would be in no danger from such a beam. They're probably sitting happily on their worlds admiring the pretty light-show as the radiation blasts bounces harmlessly off their shields.
And as to parts availability, did they really build that thing from off the shelf parts?
Does NASA own foundries for making their own nuts & bolts? Do they own their own chip fabs for making processor and RAM? Or the appropriate factories for making the thousands of other pieces in any modern vehicle?
Granted, what they make out of the stuff is unique, but it would surprise me in the extreme if anything less than 95% of the parts in any NASA vehicle aren't made from "off-the-shelf" components. They aren't, of course, the gee-whiz things that get attention from Popular Science or whatnot, but they're still the majority of the individual pieces in the craft.
Actually, you shouldn't have said "numeric definition". What you appear to be trying to say is something along the lines of the "decimal representation" of pi, which is, of course, not a "definition" by any stretch of the word.
However, one thing that continues to surprise me is how willing most people are to having a third party store all of their data.
A lot of people don't backup their data regularly, and know that their data is probably safer on some ASP's servers than on their own hard drive.
Of course, from your comments about Goggle logging conversations being scary (this is one feature I make sure to turn on in every chat app -- it's SO damn useful to be able to bring up the text of old conversations, especially given that my memory is not what it used to be), I'm guessing what surprises you is the privacy concerns.
I suspect most people have come to grips with the fact that they aren't James Bond. I'm well aware that someone at any of the companies storing my data could read it, that the NSA has probably already scanned it, etc. If there's someone at the NSA reading everything I write, my gods, dude, I'm sorry I've got such a boring life. I feel for ya, man...
It's worse than that. It's not merely a matter of "who's going to collect my garbage and make me my cheeseburger?" Having unhealthy people around you is hazardous to your health. Seeing the best doctor every day while many people around you can't afford to see a doctor at all creates a situation like having every expert in fire-safety in the world suggest improvements to your house while you live in a neighborhood of fire-traps. I don't care how well you've taken care of your home, when the fire rages across the city, your house will burn with all the rest. The fact that the fire was less likely to *start* there will be of little consolation.
Individual fire protection isn't better than a public fire department because some things, like fire (or disease) can rapidly get out of control when control isn't comprehensive, and then even those who *did* pay for private fire control end up suffering. There are things in life that can't be effectively gone about piecemeal by individuals -- they require coordinated public solutions, or else they're not effectively dealt with at all.
Sounds like a silly question, I know, but I seem to recall that when talking about the "spin" of fundamental particles, you aren't really talking about the same thing as when you're talking about the spin of a baseball. Can anyone confirm/clarify this?
According to the FTA, the find was originally located in 1999, and partially excavated in 2004 with a full investigation commencing in 2006. Having never studied archeology or paleontology, is it common for sites like this to be passed by even though there is something located there?
I don't think it's a matter of being "passed by" as much as this is how long it takes with all available resources being devoted to it. This is the United States we're talking about -- basic science doesn't get funded unless there's a corporation that sees a potential for profit in it.:p
World of Warcraft (the last game Blizzard released for a while) doesn't even count as a sequel to Warcraft in any way, considering that it isn't an RTS. So yeah, I don't know where you get your ideas, but it isn't reality.
Apparently the people at Blizzard are out of touch with reality by your definitions. For a very long time during its development, Warcraft III wasn't considered an RTS (they eventually morphed it back into one when they decided their ideas weren't working out). By your definition, had they stayed the course on that one and not turned it back into an RTS, Warcraft III would not have been a sequel to Warcraft in any way. One wonders, then, why at Blizzard they were calling it Warcraft III if it wasn't in any way a sequel.
Of course, it was a sequel. It just didn't happen to be an RTS.
The many of the ideas that they tried, then removed from Warcraft III (some of which were originally from a cancelled product called Warcraft Adventures, an RPG sequel to Warcraft II) eventually spawned World of Warcraft.
Saying World of Warcraft isn't a sequel to Warcraft in any way is patently absurd.
Now, I remember something about how Linden EULA was very generous when it comes to ownership (someone please bring more details on this since I'm clueless how far this goes)...
Never quite understood why this is either a surprising or hard to understand issue for anyone, so let me put it into perspective relative to how LL sees SL. LL sees SL as the "3D Web".
Ownership? LL has as much legal claim to ownership for things you upload to their servers as any web hosting provider has to content you upload to their servers, which is to say, none whatsoever. This is not "very generous", this is merely standard operating procedure for an Internet service hosting provider, which is what LL is -- they're also software developers, but they give away the software, they make their money from hosting fees, commonly called "tier".
(Going on a complete tangent...) People are always asking what's the point of SL, which is rather like asking what's the point of WWW. It's a platform, not a monolithic thing you can talk about the point of. You can talk about the purpose or point of a particular website, but it just doesn't make sense to talk about the point of the WWW. People who don't see the point of SL are usually looking for something that doesn't exist, some mythical unifying objective that just isn't there. Like the web, it is what people make of it. Like the web, that means it's mostly pr0n.;) But it's also corporate PR and financial deals and artistic collections and personal expressions and dancing hamsters and a million other things.
What's it for? It's a tool for making what you want. There's nothing in the tool that predestines a particular purpose, just a particular form, just as Apache doesn't limit your purpose, just the medium of its expression.
And for the "But it isn't real!" crowd: is the web real? I mean, a book or printed magazine page is real, but a webpage isn't, right? Therefore, people who spend time browsing the web, interacting on the web, playing games on the web, engaging in financial transactions on the web, it's all just make believe, right? Or wait, could it be that the lack of a physical manifestation of a thing doesn't necessarily invalidate it -- the same information may be equally valid whether printed on dead trees or not?
SL is neither more nor less real than the world wide web. If you're not familiar with SL but want some perspective on questions people ask or statements people make about it, understand that SL is a platform for publishing content, more rich in some ways but still that's what it is at the core. When people make statements about SL, and if you replace "SL" with "WWW" in the statement and find that it is now an utterly absurd statement, rest assured that it was utterly absurd to begin with, since the speaker was attempting to invest in SL some quality or other it doesn't actually posses, or assert it lacks some quality that other platforms, like the web, do possess, other than shear number of users. There are exceptions, but they are few, and someone making such a statement would need to explain what particular quality they're getting at that makes it an exception here, or they'd be making a half-baked argument.
The hack raises tough questions for operators of virtual worlds. Should they be as secure as banks and guarantee the safety of money and property that characters in the world possess?"
Considering that you buy Lindens with real currency, then yes. Yes, they should be just as secure, since it's real money you're dealing with.
The hack raises tough questions for operators of amusement parks. Should the ski ball tent be as secure as banks and guarantee the safety of money and property that kids stuff in their pockets?
Considering that you buy little red tickets with real currency, then yes. Yes, they should be just as secure, since it's real money you're dealing with.
Come on. Get some perspective.
The hack raises tough questions for operators of websites. Should the day-trading site be as secure as banks and guarentee the safety of money and property that investors in the market trade?
Considering you buy stocks with real money, then yes...
Okay, let's get some perspective, as you say. Which analogy presented above is more relevant?
I'll accept yours is if you can answer, why is it that if service is provided through a 2D viewer (e.g. a web browser), entities dealing in financial transactions are expected to be secure, but if service is provided through a 3D viewer (e.g. any VR software like SL), entities dealing with financial transactions should be exempted from such concerns? What is it about the addition of a third dimension to the software interface that should absolve service providers of financial responsibility?
You see, to me, the nature of the action being done is what makes it deserving or not deserving of protection. You, on the other hand, seem to be insisting that it's the interface that determines this. What justifies basing this determination on the nature of the interface rather than the nature of the transaction?
Indeed. I'm reminded of that song, "The Internet is for Porn". One could take a look at the World Wide Web and make the same characterization about it as SL. People who rant about what SL is all about are like people who rant about what the WWW is all about -- they're both mind-bogglingly stupid. Neither platform is "all about" any one or two particular things. Both platforms allow you to deliver a lot of different content for a lot of different purposes. Sure, a lot of people do use it for said purposes, but a lot of people don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe most of the world, but not those parts where peak power usage actually is. Right now is pretty close to peak usage where I live. It's still working hours, but it's dark out and damn cold to boot. It's winter, the days are short and the need for power is great -- double-whammy. Most of the world may be seeing a lot of sunshine now, but the parts of the world that are both highly populated and highly developed (e.g. the northeastern US, western Europe, etc.), i.e. those parts of the world with the highest energy needs, are *not* seeing a lot of sunshine right now, despite what most of the rest of the world might be seeing.
Well, when what you're FYIQing is not a company but an open-source community, the FYIQ letter to the boss is not an option. Isn't the great thing about open-source that all this stuff is public? ;)
So, unless every simulation is a realistic simulation, that can't be the purpose of it? Your argument boils down to this: because we don't do this perfectly, that can't be the reason why we do it. That's a bit on the absurd side. In fact, we can have many many "falses" here while the premise is still quite true. One need merely assume that although the purpose is as stated, not every single dream succeeds in that purpose.
The same way all Internet hosting companies set up safety nets to catch things like this. Is it your web service provider's responsibility to set up a safety net for people who get scammed on websites they host? Still not sure why people think if you interact using a 3D browser, it's fundamentally different from doing so on a 2D browser.
Internet service provides should not become a law onto themselves. If things are occurring in cyberspace that we don't like, we already have governments and laws to deal with these things. Let's not create more, nor give hosting companies responsibilities they're ill-suited to deal with.
Um, that was the GP's point. If he's part of the tech industry, given what his article has to say about the tech industry, it would be paradoxical for his article to actually be interesting.
It's a common enough misread -- the problem is, a lot of people's first instinct upon reading something they believe is incorrect is to immediately correct it. I've learned over the years that the first thing you should do is reread it more slowly. Then start looking at alternate interpretations. The majority of the time, when I see someone "correct" someone else on the Internet, it's because they didn't understand what the first person was actually saying.
Interestingly enough, most mothers have no problems understanding that the first year of their child's life *ends* on its first birthday, that its one year old during the second year of its life, two years old during the third year of its life, etc. But then, most mothers are smarter than most /.ers... :p
People who can't keep which century it is straight are people who basically just can't count. I don't think anyone should get an "F" in communication for assuming their listener can count.
I do precisely that. Control key sequences, especially the vital Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q, are much easier to type when you put the control key back where God intended it to be. ;)
Um, so?
If you want it to be just like the original series, go put the old tapes in the VCR and just watch the original series. There's utterly no point at all whatsoever in that case.
It's a new show, it's got new stuff. Deal with it...
You're probably thinking of silver, not platinum. Silver actually conducts better than copper, but it's both more expensive and it suffers from corrosion. Gold is not a better conductor than either "out of the box", but after a bit of time and oxidation of those silver and copper contacts, it becomes better than both.
Long story short: a scientist will tell you silver is the best conductor, followed by copper, followed by gold. An engineer making something that needs to work more than a few days in the lab will note that gold is actually the best conductor of the three when put into real use, at least for those exposed contacts. Your silver or copper contacts are going to sound crappier than my gold ones all too soon...
It's very useful though when you're shutting down a computer lab for the night. Makes it easy to find which monitors got left on.
Yes, demand for bytes is increasing exponentially while investment in network infrastructure is increasing linearly. This would be alarming, if one was born yesterday, or if one was a knuckle-dragging moron. Those who aren't either note that the amount you get for each dollar spent on technology increases exponentially over time. Thus, not only is a linear spending "curve" capable of keeping up with an exponential required capabilities curve, often it can be done even if the spending line is going down. My most recent gigabit ethernet switch cost a fraction of what my first 10mbps hub. My conclusion from this simple observation is that there's an exponential curve in the increase of stupidity at Nemertes Research.
Um, no. The states do not need more power. No branch of government needs more power.
Huh? Why would this suggest that? The fact that the "ray" is there says no one tried to stop it, but I can't see why any sufficiently advanced life would bother trying. There's no evidence here that they didn't try to protect themselves, and indeed I would assume that any sufficiently advanced life would be in no danger from such a beam. They're probably sitting happily on their worlds admiring the pretty light-show as the radiation blasts bounces harmlessly off their shields.
Does NASA own foundries for making their own nuts & bolts? Do they own their own chip fabs for making processor and RAM? Or the appropriate factories for making the thousands of other pieces in any modern vehicle?
Granted, what they make out of the stuff is unique, but it would surprise me in the extreme if anything less than 95% of the parts in any NASA vehicle aren't made from "off-the-shelf" components. They aren't, of course, the gee-whiz things that get attention from Popular Science or whatnot, but they're still the majority of the individual pieces in the craft.
Actually, you shouldn't have said "numeric definition". What you appear to be trying to say is something along the lines of the "decimal representation" of pi, which is, of course, not a "definition" by any stretch of the word.
A lot of people don't backup their data regularly, and know that their data is probably safer on some ASP's servers than on their own hard drive.
Of course, from your comments about Goggle logging conversations being scary (this is one feature I make sure to turn on in every chat app -- it's SO damn useful to be able to bring up the text of old conversations, especially given that my memory is not what it used to be), I'm guessing what surprises you is the privacy concerns.
I suspect most people have come to grips with the fact that they aren't James Bond. I'm well aware that someone at any of the companies storing my data could read it, that the NSA has probably already scanned it, etc. If there's someone at the NSA reading everything I write, my gods, dude, I'm sorry I've got such a boring life. I feel for ya, man...
But seriously, who really cares? And why?
Bah, by the time the blast wave reaches us, we'll be able to shield all our systems with giant statis fields. :)
It's worse than that. It's not merely a matter of "who's going to collect my garbage and make me my cheeseburger?" Having unhealthy people around you is hazardous to your health. Seeing the best doctor every day while many people around you can't afford to see a doctor at all creates a situation like having every expert in fire-safety in the world suggest improvements to your house while you live in a neighborhood of fire-traps. I don't care how well you've taken care of your home, when the fire rages across the city, your house will burn with all the rest. The fact that the fire was less likely to *start* there will be of little consolation.
Individual fire protection isn't better than a public fire department because some things, like fire (or disease) can rapidly get out of control when control isn't comprehensive, and then even those who *did* pay for private fire control end up suffering. There are things in life that can't be effectively gone about piecemeal by individuals -- they require coordinated public solutions, or else they're not effectively dealt with at all.
Sounds like a silly question, I know, but I seem to recall that when talking about the "spin" of fundamental particles, you aren't really talking about the same thing as when you're talking about the spin of a baseball. Can anyone confirm/clarify this?
I don't think it's a matter of being "passed by" as much as this is how long it takes with all available resources being devoted to it. This is the United States we're talking about -- basic science doesn't get funded unless there's a corporation that sees a potential for profit in it. :p
Apparently the people at Blizzard are out of touch with reality by your definitions. For a very long time during its development, Warcraft III wasn't considered an RTS (they eventually morphed it back into one when they decided their ideas weren't working out). By your definition, had they stayed the course on that one and not turned it back into an RTS, Warcraft III would not have been a sequel to Warcraft in any way. One wonders, then, why at Blizzard they were calling it Warcraft III if it wasn't in any way a sequel.
Of course, it was a sequel. It just didn't happen to be an RTS.
The many of the ideas that they tried, then removed from Warcraft III (some of which were originally from a cancelled product called Warcraft Adventures, an RPG sequel to Warcraft II) eventually spawned World of Warcraft.
Saying World of Warcraft isn't a sequel to Warcraft in any way is patently absurd.
Never quite understood why this is either a surprising or hard to understand issue for anyone, so let me put it into perspective relative to how LL sees SL. LL sees SL as the "3D Web".
Ownership? LL has as much legal claim to ownership for things you upload to their servers as any web hosting provider has to content you upload to their servers, which is to say, none whatsoever. This is not "very generous", this is merely standard operating procedure for an Internet service hosting provider, which is what LL is -- they're also software developers, but they give away the software, they make their money from hosting fees, commonly called "tier".
(Going on a complete tangent...) People are always asking what's the point of SL, which is rather like asking what's the point of WWW. It's a platform, not a monolithic thing you can talk about the point of. You can talk about the purpose or point of a particular website, but it just doesn't make sense to talk about the point of the WWW. People who don't see the point of SL are usually looking for something that doesn't exist, some mythical unifying objective that just isn't there. Like the web, it is what people make of it. Like the web, that means it's mostly pr0n. ;) But it's also corporate PR and financial deals and artistic collections and personal expressions and dancing hamsters and a million other things.
What's it for? It's a tool for making what you want. There's nothing in the tool that predestines a particular purpose, just a particular form, just as Apache doesn't limit your purpose, just the medium of its expression.
And for the "But it isn't real!" crowd: is the web real? I mean, a book or printed magazine page is real, but a webpage isn't, right? Therefore, people who spend time browsing the web, interacting on the web, playing games on the web, engaging in financial transactions on the web, it's all just make believe, right? Or wait, could it be that the lack of a physical manifestation of a thing doesn't necessarily invalidate it -- the same information may be equally valid whether printed on dead trees or not?
SL is neither more nor less real than the world wide web. If you're not familiar with SL but want some perspective on questions people ask or statements people make about it, understand that SL is a platform for publishing content, more rich in some ways but still that's what it is at the core. When people make statements about SL, and if you replace "SL" with "WWW" in the statement and find that it is now an utterly absurd statement, rest assured that it was utterly absurd to begin with, since the speaker was attempting to invest in SL some quality or other it doesn't actually posses, or assert it lacks some quality that other platforms, like the web, do possess, other than shear number of users. There are exceptions, but they are few, and someone making such a statement would need to explain what particular quality they're getting at that makes it an exception here, or they'd be making a half-baked argument.
The hack raises tough questions for operators of websites. Should the day-trading site be as secure as banks and guarentee the safety of money and property that investors in the market trade?
Considering you buy stocks with real money, then yes. ..
Okay, let's get some perspective, as you say. Which analogy presented above is more relevant?
I'll accept yours is if you can answer, why is it that if service is provided through a 2D viewer (e.g. a web browser), entities dealing in financial transactions are expected to be secure, but if service is provided through a 3D viewer (e.g. any VR software like SL), entities dealing with financial transactions should be exempted from such concerns? What is it about the addition of a third dimension to the software interface that should absolve service providers of financial responsibility?
You see, to me, the nature of the action being done is what makes it deserving or not deserving of protection. You, on the other hand, seem to be insisting that it's the interface that determines this. What justifies basing this determination on the nature of the interface rather than the nature of the transaction?
Indeed. I'm reminded of that song, "The Internet is for Porn". One could take a look at the World Wide Web and make the same characterization about it as SL. People who rant about what SL is all about are like people who rant about what the WWW is all about -- they're both mind-bogglingly stupid. Neither platform is "all about" any one or two particular things. Both platforms allow you to deliver a lot of different content for a lot of different purposes. Sure, a lot of people do use it for said purposes, but a lot of people don't.