The Hindenburg was unfortunate - an example of why you should never let the advice of your accountants override that of your engineers. An airship actually designed to use hydrogen wouldn't have had such a problem, but a helium airship is unsurprisingly cheaper to build. And when you then fill it with much cheaper hydrogen instead of the non-flammable helium it was designed for... well, you're begging for trouble, and the inevitable disaster managed to take the whole airship industry down with it.
For everyone not triggered, hydrogen balloons are actually a lot of fun, and probably safer than most gunpowder-based fireworks.
My reply on the red site, to someone asking how much of the moon could be mined before the tides were effected:
Not even one grain - any change in mass whatsoever will have an effect on the tides. Just a proportionally minuscule one.
How much before the effects become noticeable? That's a kind of arbitrary line, but if we say a 0.1% reduction in the force of lunar gravity would be noticeable, then we could remove 0.1% of the Moon's mass.
How much is that in tonnes? Mass of moon(=7*10^22kg) * 0.1%(=10^-3) = 7*10^19kg = 70 million billion tonnes.
>Where did that line of BS get started? As you say, it was there right from the beginning. Colleges offer a place for scientists and other intelligent experts to do research rather than causing trouble amongst the general population, and for would-be intellectuals to learn from them. If you want a more practical education, go to a different kind of school.
The real problem is that colleges have been marketed as career-training institutions, and used as proof of competency by employers, so that people will pay far more than the education is worth in practical terms. When in fact, the primary practical benefit of college for your career is the networking with those children of rich nobles, who will end up being the ones hiring you. Unfortunately nobody tells you that, and that value falls off rapidly as college becomes more popular, and the noble-to-commoner ratio diminishes.
Bringing back to the Earth? Not so much. Using in space though? Lots. The moon is estimated to be 60% oxygen by mass, with plenty of iron, titanium, carbon and other useful ores* . And gigatons of radiation shielding (aka rock) for the easy taking. Essentially it's a MASSIVE asteroid (20x the combined mass of the entire asteroid belt) already captured in Earth orbit where it's most useful for developing Earth orbit.
Mining rare elements from asteroids will likely be far more profitable for Earth-based entrepreneurs, but the moon is close, has bountiful mundane resources, and offers a wonderful test bed for developing experience in mining and industry in the harsh vacuum and radiation of space, without simultaneously facing the many added complications of microgravity, and in a manner that creates long-term useful orbital industrial potential for Earth. Good experience for practicing colonizing another planet too.
*Sadly from what I can find there's not much hydrogen on the moon, which is a problem for making water and hydrocarbon fuels - mostly what has been captured from the solar wind by surface minerals, and at an impact rate of only about 73g per km^2 per year... well it's a good thing it's been soaking it up for billions of years.
Well, that depends on how fusion technology develops - we seem to finally be approaching the cusp of useful applaications, despite decades of crushing apathy and collapsing budgets from the funding agencies. And He3 is a valuable aneutronic fusion fuel.
> if he wants to create a SpaceX mono culture in the launch industry Do you have any evidence that he does? Seems to me his big motivation is to get into space in a real way, which would be aided by real competition. It's not his fault that all the would-be competition was too busy sucking at the government teat to actually invest in getting to space cost-effectively. And if they manage to turn themselves around now that he's proven it's possible? Well then everybody wins.
And the lesson is - don't try mining using explosives powerful enough to accelerate half the planet to escape velocity. (Yeah, they actually claimed "screwed up the orbit" - which is even worse. For the moon to break up due to orbital issues, you'd need to bring it from 384,399km from the Earth's center, to within the Earth-Moon Roche Limit of 9,492 km. Needless to say the moon would look a LOT bigger, and the average gravitational influence on Earth would be about 1,500x greater. Much more when directly overhead, since the ~13,000km diameter of the Earth would be considerably more than the center-to-center distance.
I find that one of the most implausible scenes in the movie, which is saying a lot. (Not to mention there's no ring around the Earth in the far future, which would be a natural result of the moon breaking up due to tidal effects.)
And the concept of a throwaway employee is a big part of why companies have so much trouble finding talent at their desired price point. You just want to hire me temporarily to use my existing skills to finish your project? You'd better expect to pay contractor rates for that shit - employee rates are based on the assumption of a long-term relationship that increases my value.
College (can) offer a great education - but that's not what companies want. Education offers the foundational theoretical knowledge of a domain - deep understanding of relevant principles that allow for faster and more flexible skill development. But companies want practical skills, not foundational knowledge. And practical skills are the domain of work experience and trade schools, not colleges.
>Turn off Windows data collection which is meant to have been a opt in. I think you meant either "should have been", or "was originally claimed to be" - if it was meant to be, it would have been fixed in one of the last half-dozen major updates.
Also, turning it off only eliminates some of the information it sends back, and updates turn it back on regularly. I would be interested to know if a software firewall would even stop it, or if Windows treats it as privileged communication that can only be stopped by an external firewall.
It is a machine that processes information - a.k.a.... a computer. It operates in a manner very alien to digital computers, with different strengths and weaknesses, but they serve a common purpose. In fact "computer" originally referred to a person whose job was to perform computations - a job rendered obsolete by digital devices that far exceeded human capabilities.
>no computer regardless of how many sensors it has at its disposal, regardless of how accurate mapping is, can cope with the literally infinite scenarios
Obviously that's not true - the computer between our ears does a good enough job, if far from flawless. Our more primitive artificial computers just aren't really up to the task yet. Or perhaps more accurately, they fail in scenarios completely unlike those that we fail in. Which is not surprising considering they operate in a completely alien manner, but does tend to make them look really incompetent. Especially since we don't often look at ourselves from the perspective of the many frequent accidents we cause that could easily be avoided by an AI.
Actually... autonomous scooters and bicycles could be an excellent place to work on developing a safer AI driver - the operating environment is far more chaotic than highway traffic, while the occasional inevitable collisions are unlikely to be more than a nuisance.
Agreed - however, the leaning of the passenger is also a big component of the stability of most two-wheel vehicles. Not having that, most autonomous two-wheel vehicles need to add a gyroscopic balancing system.
Also - when buying a first bike for a toddler, consider a pedal-less balance bike. It lets them lean to balance and steer a bike (the actually difficult part), without the distraction of learning to maintaining a pedal cadence (the mostly labor-intensive part, once you know how to balance and steer).
Fun fact - that was how the first commercially successful adult bicycle worked, patented in 1818 and commonly called a velocipede. Pedals weren't introduced until more than 40 years later.
Agreed on wanting more information. From what I recall, possibly from other sources as well, the Aquion battery is made from relatively common, nontoxic materials, can be made for a similar price to lead-acid, with a similar energy/weight ratio, but lower energy/volume. So not really suitable for mobile applications, but with great potential for grid and home use.
And then there's the unrelated liquid metal batteries - I don't recall hearing of any commercially available models yet, but they seem to hold the promise of simplicity, effectively unlimited lifetime (since the normal mechanical damage associated with charging can't form in liquid) , and extremely high charge and discharge rates. Of course, operating at temperatures that keep the metals liquid makes them unsuitable for many/most applications, but the grid potential is immense.
If they're using electrolysis, I would assume pure hydrogen. Synthesizing methane/ethynol/etc. involves considerably more complicated infrastructure, while hydrogen is quite simple and requires only water as an input material - you can synthesize it with nothing more than a glass of water, a 9V battery and some very corrosion resistant electrodes. Presumably a grid-scale system would be more sophisticated, but a lot simpler than creating a more complicated fuel.
I haven't really dug into it, but it sounds like the technology is at the very least a *lot* cleaner than the existing options, and possibly no more toxic than the ambient environment.
Agreed - hydrogen is a difficult fuel to work with, which sets a lower limit on how far you can scale it down before competing technologies become far more attractive. I'd love to see it take off for grid-scale energy storage though. And islands like these, that don't have a lot of other options, would seem to be a good place to refine the technology.
That would be more plausible if I had ever played the game.
Come on - it's an obvious wordplay when pointing out that the world is already covered in powerful, ubiquitous nano-machines that multiply exponentially and are only kept in check by the many other kinds of powerful, ubiquitous nano-machines that eat them. Start modifying them to build themselves out of something the other nanomachines can't eat, and a "green goo" scenario is the natural outcome.
How about we start by enforcing the law just as ruthlessly on the wealthy white people currently getting a slap on the wrist for the same crime that will put a poor black man behind bars for years?
After all, pretty much everyone is guilty of something (I've heard there used to be a game show where you tried to walk around the block without breaking the law), and if the law is not enforced equally on everyone, then it's little more than a tool for the authorities to exercise their personal prejudices.
Once the law is enforced equally, then we can as a nation decide if we all want to spend the rest of our lives behind bars for speeding, having a beer at the park, etc., or relax a whole lot of overbearing, puritanical laws far too often originally created to make it convenient to harass some group of cultural or political "undesirables".
No, it's just a much more complicated problem than you present it as. The US was explicitly established as a federation of States, rather than a single unified nation - it's properly compared not to any other single democratic nation, but to the EU as a whole. And from what I've heard of European's approval of the much younger EU, we're actually doing really well here in the US.
To put things in proper perspective - The entire E.U. population is only about 56% larger than the U.S. Meanwhile, the US has 4x the population of the largest EU nation, Germany, which in turn has 2x the population of California, the largest US state.
Now, there's certainly an argument to be made that we should update the federal rules to better reflect the realities of a federal government that has grossly outgrown its constitutional foundation, but I think it should be done in context of why things were set up the way they are, rather than in unsupported accusations of interstate gerrymandering.
First off let me clarify some poor phrasing on my part: pretend that read "iTunes on your Mac". Macs are PCs (personal computers) - it is unfortunate that the term has a double meaning of "PCs running Windows", but I meant it in the larger context here. I probably should have just said "computer" (but the phones are also computers so that's even worse - the curse of trying to translate between technical thinking and common language). And I agree - iTunes on Windows is junk. But, at least in my experience, the majority of iPhone owners use Macs.
As an aside - if not iTunes, what do you use to sync your iPhone library with your PC, or do you not use your PC to play music?
>How long something was a standard is not a compelling argument to keep using it once there are more compelling options available. You're absolutely right. However, any new standard needs to be compelling enough to justify removing backwards compatibility, and that includes having a large established ecosystem that's compatible with the new standard. Look at computer monitors: you have HDMI, DVI, and DisplayPort all vying for space, and quite possibly USB-C soon. But virtually every monitor also has a VGA port - even a lot of TVs do. Because if all else fails, that will at least make it work. (And there's no patents throwing up artificial costs and barriers to implementation.)
And in the case of audio, PCs and phones are fringe players. Most audio equipment doesn't really have any compelling reason to connect specifically to a phone or computer - it's all analog-to-analog. That stuff isn't going to switch to USB-C any time soon, and by removing the 3.5mm jack, you remove compatibility with that huge independent ecosystem of dedicated audio hardware.
Now don't get me wrong - I think USB-C has great potential as a docking connector, and absolutely approve of analog-audio-over USB-C for such purposes. Just don't take away the 3.5mm jack and cut me off from easy compatibility with the larger audio ecosystem.
Except, most of the power *wasn't* given to that one individual - it was taken by them (and their predecessors in office), while Congress and the Supreme Court consistently abdicated their responsibility as checks and balances on that power.
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The Hindenburg was unfortunate - an example of why you should never let the advice of your accountants override that of your engineers. An airship actually designed to use hydrogen wouldn't have had such a problem, but a helium airship is unsurprisingly cheaper to build. And when you then fill it with much cheaper hydrogen instead of the non-flammable helium it was designed for... well, you're begging for trouble, and the inevitable disaster managed to take the whole airship industry down with it.
For everyone not triggered, hydrogen balloons are actually a lot of fun, and probably safer than most gunpowder-based fireworks.
My reply on the red site, to someone asking how much of the moon could be mined before the tides were effected:
Not even one grain - any change in mass whatsoever will have an effect on the tides. Just a proportionally minuscule one.
How much before the effects become noticeable? That's a kind of arbitrary line, but if we say a 0.1% reduction in the force of lunar gravity would be noticeable, then we could remove 0.1% of the Moon's mass.
How much is that in tonnes? Mass of moon(=7*10^22kg) * 0.1%(=10^-3) = 7*10^19kg = 70 million billion tonnes.
>Where did that line of BS get started?
As you say, it was there right from the beginning. Colleges offer a place for scientists and other intelligent experts to do research rather than causing trouble amongst the general population, and for would-be intellectuals to learn from them. If you want a more practical education, go to a different kind of school.
The real problem is that colleges have been marketed as career-training institutions, and used as proof of competency by employers, so that people will pay far more than the education is worth in practical terms. When in fact, the primary practical benefit of college for your career is the networking with those children of rich nobles, who will end up being the ones hiring you. Unfortunately nobody tells you that, and that value falls off rapidly as college becomes more popular, and the noble-to-commoner ratio diminishes.
Bringing back to the Earth? Not so much. Using in space though? Lots. The moon is estimated to be 60% oxygen by mass, with plenty of iron, titanium, carbon and other useful ores* . And gigatons of radiation shielding (aka rock) for the easy taking. Essentially it's a MASSIVE asteroid (20x the combined mass of the entire asteroid belt) already captured in Earth orbit where it's most useful for developing Earth orbit.
Mining rare elements from asteroids will likely be far more profitable for Earth-based entrepreneurs, but the moon is close, has bountiful mundane resources, and offers a wonderful test bed for developing experience in mining and industry in the harsh vacuum and radiation of space, without simultaneously facing the many added complications of microgravity, and in a manner that creates long-term useful orbital industrial potential for Earth. Good experience for practicing colonizing another planet too.
*Sadly from what I can find there's not much hydrogen on the moon, which is a problem for making water and hydrocarbon fuels - mostly what has been captured from the solar wind by surface minerals, and at an impact rate of only about 73g per km^2 per year... well it's a good thing it's been soaking it up for billions of years.
Well, that depends on how fusion technology develops - we seem to finally be approaching the cusp of useful applaications, despite decades of crushing apathy and collapsing budgets from the funding agencies. And He3 is a valuable aneutronic fusion fuel.
Bah. Hydrogen balloons are cheaper, 50% lighter, and as an added bonus they explode like nice loud fireworks if exposed to fire.
> if he wants to create a SpaceX mono culture in the launch industry
Do you have any evidence that he does? Seems to me his big motivation is to get into space in a real way, which would be aided by real competition. It's not his fault that all the would-be competition was too busy sucking at the government teat to actually invest in getting to space cost-effectively. And if they manage to turn themselves around now that he's proven it's possible? Well then everybody wins.
And the lesson is - don't try mining using explosives powerful enough to accelerate half the planet to escape velocity. (Yeah, they actually claimed "screwed up the orbit" - which is even worse. For the moon to break up due to orbital issues, you'd need to bring it from 384,399km from the Earth's center, to within the Earth-Moon Roche Limit of 9,492 km. Needless to say the moon would look a LOT bigger, and the average gravitational influence on Earth would be about 1,500x greater. Much more when directly overhead, since the ~13,000km diameter of the Earth would be considerably more than the center-to-center distance.
I find that one of the most implausible scenes in the movie, which is saying a lot. (Not to mention there's no ring around the Earth in the far future, which would be a natural result of the moon breaking up due to tidal effects.)
And the concept of a throwaway employee is a big part of why companies have so much trouble finding talent at their desired price point. You just want to hire me temporarily to use my existing skills to finish your project? You'd better expect to pay contractor rates for that shit - employee rates are based on the assumption of a long-term relationship that increases my value.
College (can) offer a great education - but that's not what companies want. Education offers the foundational theoretical knowledge of a domain - deep understanding of relevant principles that allow for faster and more flexible skill development. But companies want practical skills, not foundational knowledge. And practical skills are the domain of work experience and trade schools, not colleges.
>Turn off Windows data collection which is meant to have been a opt in.
I think you meant either "should have been", or "was originally claimed to be" - if it was meant to be, it would have been fixed in one of the last half-dozen major updates.
Also, turning it off only eliminates some of the information it sends back, and updates turn it back on regularly. I would be interested to know if a software firewall would even stop it, or if Windows treats it as privileged communication that can only be stopped by an external firewall.
It is a machine that processes information - a.k.a.... a computer. It operates in a manner very alien to digital computers, with different strengths and weaknesses, but they serve a common purpose. In fact "computer" originally referred to a person whose job was to perform computations - a job rendered obsolete by digital devices that far exceeded human capabilities.
Intriguing...
>no computer regardless of how many sensors it has at its disposal, regardless of how accurate mapping is, can cope with the literally infinite scenarios
Obviously that's not true - the computer between our ears does a good enough job, if far from flawless. Our more primitive artificial computers just aren't really up to the task yet. Or perhaps more accurately, they fail in scenarios completely unlike those that we fail in. Which is not surprising considering they operate in a completely alien manner, but does tend to make them look really incompetent. Especially since we don't often look at ourselves from the perspective of the many frequent accidents we cause that could easily be avoided by an AI.
Actually... autonomous scooters and bicycles could be an excellent place to work on developing a safer AI driver - the operating environment is far more chaotic than highway traffic, while the occasional inevitable collisions are unlikely to be more than a nuisance.
Agreed - however, the leaning of the passenger is also a big component of the stability of most two-wheel vehicles. Not having that, most autonomous two-wheel vehicles need to add a gyroscopic balancing system.
Also - when buying a first bike for a toddler, consider a pedal-less balance bike. It lets them lean to balance and steer a bike (the actually difficult part), without the distraction of learning to maintaining a pedal cadence (the mostly labor-intensive part, once you know how to balance and steer).
Fun fact - that was how the first commercially successful adult bicycle worked, patented in 1818 and commonly called a velocipede. Pedals weren't introduced until more than 40 years later.
Agreed on wanting more information. From what I recall, possibly from other sources as well, the Aquion battery is made from relatively common, nontoxic materials, can be made for a similar price to lead-acid, with a similar energy/weight ratio, but lower energy/volume. So not really suitable for mobile applications, but with great potential for grid and home use.
And then there's the unrelated liquid metal batteries - I don't recall hearing of any commercially available models yet, but they seem to hold the promise of simplicity, effectively unlimited lifetime (since the normal mechanical damage associated with charging can't form in liquid) , and extremely high charge and discharge rates. Of course, operating at temperatures that keep the metals liquid makes them unsuitable for many/most applications, but the grid potential is immense.
If they're using electrolysis, I would assume pure hydrogen. Synthesizing methane/ethynol/etc. involves considerably more complicated infrastructure, while hydrogen is quite simple and requires only water as an input material - you can synthesize it with nothing more than a glass of water, a 9V battery and some very corrosion resistant electrodes. Presumably a grid-scale system would be more sophisticated, but a lot simpler than creating a more complicated fuel.
Are you familiar with the Aquion Saltwater battery? http://aquionenergy.com/techno...
I haven't really dug into it, but it sounds like the technology is at the very least a *lot* cleaner than the existing options, and possibly no more toxic than the ambient environment.
Agreed - hydrogen is a difficult fuel to work with, which sets a lower limit on how far you can scale it down before competing technologies become far more attractive. I'd love to see it take off for grid-scale energy storage though. And islands like these, that don't have a lot of other options, would seem to be a good place to refine the technology.
That would be more plausible if I had ever played the game.
Come on - it's an obvious wordplay when pointing out that the world is already covered in powerful, ubiquitous nano-machines that multiply exponentially and are only kept in check by the many other kinds of powerful, ubiquitous nano-machines that eat them. Start modifying them to build themselves out of something the other nanomachines can't eat, and a "green goo" scenario is the natural outcome.
And here we've been worrying about a mechanical grey-goo scenario...
How about we start by enforcing the law just as ruthlessly on the wealthy white people currently getting a slap on the wrist for the same crime that will put a poor black man behind bars for years?
After all, pretty much everyone is guilty of something (I've heard there used to be a game show where you tried to walk around the block without breaking the law), and if the law is not enforced equally on everyone, then it's little more than a tool for the authorities to exercise their personal prejudices.
Once the law is enforced equally, then we can as a nation decide if we all want to spend the rest of our lives behind bars for speeding, having a beer at the park, etc., or relax a whole lot of overbearing, puritanical laws far too often originally created to make it convenient to harass some group of cultural or political "undesirables".
No, it's just a much more complicated problem than you present it as. The US was explicitly established as a federation of States, rather than a single unified nation - it's properly compared not to any other single democratic nation, but to the EU as a whole. And from what I've heard of European's approval of the much younger EU, we're actually doing really well here in the US.
To put things in proper perspective - The entire E.U. population is only about 56% larger than the U.S. Meanwhile, the US has 4x the population of the largest EU nation, Germany, which in turn has 2x the population of California, the largest US state.
Now, there's certainly an argument to be made that we should update the federal rules to better reflect the realities of a federal government that has grossly outgrown its constitutional foundation, but I think it should be done in context of why things were set up the way they are, rather than in unsupported accusations of interstate gerrymandering.
First off let me clarify some poor phrasing on my part: pretend that read "iTunes on your Mac". Macs are PCs (personal computers) - it is unfortunate that the term has a double meaning of "PCs running Windows", but I meant it in the larger context here. I probably should have just said "computer" (but the phones are also computers so that's even worse - the curse of trying to translate between technical thinking and common language). And I agree - iTunes on Windows is junk. But, at least in my experience, the majority of iPhone owners use Macs.
As an aside - if not iTunes, what do you use to sync your iPhone library with your PC, or do you not use your PC to play music?
>How long something was a standard is not a compelling argument to keep using it once there are more compelling options available.
You're absolutely right. However, any new standard needs to be compelling enough to justify removing backwards compatibility, and that includes having a large established ecosystem that's compatible with the new standard. Look at computer monitors: you have HDMI, DVI, and DisplayPort all vying for space, and quite possibly USB-C soon. But virtually every monitor also has a VGA port - even a lot of TVs do. Because if all else fails, that will at least make it work. (And there's no patents throwing up artificial costs and barriers to implementation.)
And in the case of audio, PCs and phones are fringe players. Most audio equipment doesn't really have any compelling reason to connect specifically to a phone or computer - it's all analog-to-analog. That stuff isn't going to switch to USB-C any time soon, and by removing the 3.5mm jack, you remove compatibility with that huge independent ecosystem of dedicated audio hardware.
Now don't get me wrong - I think USB-C has great potential as a docking connector, and absolutely approve of analog-audio-over USB-C for such purposes. Just don't take away the 3.5mm jack and cut me off from easy compatibility with the larger audio ecosystem.
Except, most of the power *wasn't* given to that one individual - it was taken by them (and their predecessors in office), while Congress and the Supreme Court consistently abdicated their responsibility as checks and balances on that power.