The numbers work for colonizing HEO, the asteroid belt, or a slow trip to mars and other planets. That is, we could do it with current technology and billions of dollars.
It seems that a good place to try something like this would be the moon...
I go along with the idea of trying to solve an easier problem first, but rather than starting on the moon, how about building a skyhook from geo-stationary orbit to "as far down as we can go". I.e. instead of reaching all the way to the ground, let's try to reach high earth orbit first, then low earth orbit, etc.
Some states do not legally require members of the electoral college to vote for the candidate that won the popular vote in that state, but I'd be curious about when the last time that actually happened was. I don't remember hearing about it any time in recent history.
They're called "Faithless electors"
The last one I know of was in 2000 - Barbara Lett-Simmons who abstained instead of voting.
Here's a snippet from Wikipedia;
A faithless elector is one who casts an electoral vote for someone other than whom they have pledged to elect. On 158 occasions, electors have not cast their votes for president or vice president to whom they were pledged. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was in 1836 when 23 Virginia electors changed their vote together. In that year, Martin Van Buren's Vice Presidential running mate, Richard Johnson, did not receive the minimum votes to become the Vice President but ultimately won the office on the first ballot by the United States Senate in 1837.
LEDs, unfortunately, are way too dim right now for general-purpose lighting. They make great spotlights, but are lousy in terms in Lumens, and not that great in terms of Lumens/watt (before anyone argues with me, PLEASE compare lumens between LEDs and incandescents or CFLs).
There are highly effecient white LEDs available right now at 40-50 Lumens per Watt. A typical CFL is about 40-60 Lumens per Watt - better, but not astoundingly so.
The problem with LED bulbs isn't the brightness (traffic lights are plenty bright for example), it's the cost.
BTW in my house we use NON-compact fluorescents (the 48" tubes), which are even more efficent, cheaper to replace, and are rated at 20,000 hours of life.
Soybeans can give you 50 to 60 gallons of oil an acre compared to 75 to 125 gallons for canola, but algae is almost limitless because it grows so fast, so potentially you could get 10,000 gallons per acre.
Pardon my bluntness, but reasearching higher yields per hectare is stupid. Land suitable for algae production is cheap. What we should be looking into are cheaper ways to harvest, grow, and water it.
Practical algae growth involving cheap materials but lower yields per hectare - think "sea water pumped over plastic tarps".
Algae grown in the outdoors, without CO2 charged water and heating may "only" have 10-20 times higher yields than Canola, instead of 80-130, but so what? Even at approximately 100 barrels (4200 gallons) per hectare per year, the Great Sandy could grow all the worlds current oil needs twice over.
Would you like your email to be read by someone you don't even know? Well that is what could happen if you hire a SysAdmin and do not conduct a background check.
So if I run a background check, my email will be read by someone I do know?
So, how many cases of child porn were there (in Gonzales estimation) that couldn't be prosecuted because it took two years to get a warrent? I mean are we talking tens? hundreds? thousands? more?
Do you know how much 5Mb of bandwidth costs and ISP? It's a lot more than $40. In the market I'm in, we pay THOUSANDS of dollars for that much bandwidth.
I suggest you shop around then, 'cause I can buy 100Mbps of transit for just under $3000 a month.
Look at the complaints here on Slashdot. Most of them are complaining about ISPs lying about the service they sell. If you can't accommodate bit torrent that's OK, just sell an honest service plan that doesn't appeal to people using bit torrent, but does appeal to people who just surf. For example, 5Mbps for 100 hours a month (burst), plus 128Kbps continuous.
WoW is not revolutionary, new, or different. It's little more than Everquest without the bugs. That's actually quiet an accomplishment, but6.5 million players is not even 10% of the market. There are offline games with much stiffer competion and better numbers.
I'll be surprised if we don't see a game with 20-30 million subscribers in the next 5-10 years.
What will that game be like? Here are some of my predicitons;
It will have only slightly better graphics, but there will be a lot more of them.
It will have a clean user interface.
It will be even "easier" than WoW, in the sense that level a character to Max Level will take less than 500 hours, probably less than 80.
It will be more addicitive, but people will spend less time playing it.
Most hard core gamers won't like it.
Quests (or whatever quest like thing it has instead) will be far more numerous, and enough new quests will be added often enough that most people will not be able to do all of them.
There will only be one server of each "type". There won't be any limit to the number of players on a server. The PvE "no profanity" server will be the most popular, but the media will talk about the PvP "adult" server as if it were the only one that existed.
Selling gold will be tolerated. The suspicion will exist that the company running that game is selling the majority of the gold, but actually, they won't be.
It will have a solid support base outside of the game.
Using the TFA's metric, revenue and subscriber numbers, WoW beats UO. After 9 years, UO has about 20 million "subscriber months". WoW does that every 4 months.
There just isn't enough energy hitting the roof of even a moderate office block to power the aircon irrespective of the price of solar cells. Energy from the sun totals about 1kW per sq m. Look at amount of unused space on the roof most office blocks. The amount of power you can generate simply isn't enough to power the aircon even if solar cells were 100% efficient. Even the best solar cell is 20% efficient and that drops with time (not counting the fact that huge amounts of power go into making a solar cell int he first place).
Solar cells have a loooooong way to go before they are worth it. Wind turbines on the other hand are nearly there.
The colo facility my servers are in has about 5,000 square meters of roof space, of which more than 50% is unused. 2,500 square meters = 2.5 megawatts at 100% efficiency, or more than twice the power used.
Data centers aren't typical though, a more typical business uses less than 100 watts per square meter of office space. Without bothering to post the details, the breakdown point is about two stories, buildings taller than that don't get enough sunlight to completely power themselves, though if all you wanted to run was the air conditioning you could probably go taller.
All of which is irrelevant. Solar cells on the roof are worth it when they generate more electricity than it costs to put them there. Whether that's 100%, 50%, or 2% of the total amount of electricity consumed by the building doesn't matter. You don't have to run all the air conditioning off solar, you can have a mix of conventional and nonconventional technology. The "magic" price point is a dollar a watt, which we aren't at yet, but we are close. ($3 a watt is the cheapest I've seen) And more importantly, it's likely that we will have some fundamental improvements in solar cell technology, like cheap Gratzel cells. Wind turbans on the other hand are are very old technology. There have been some improvements, but they nearly as cheap today as they will ever be. The only real "improvement" is that the price of alternatives is going up.
Studies have shown that self-checkout actually takes longer for the average person
Maybe he's above average? I understand about 50% of us are.
When I use the self check, I'm pressing the touch screen before the "OK" button even appears. I've learned that many of the buttons are optional, for example, you don't have to "select a payment type" you can just put your money in the machine at that point, before it even it's done asking. I'm probably not typical, but for me the self check is the quickest way out.
Yup, there oughta be a law. One that says in situations where one side is presenting terms on a take it or leave it basis, that they must have a contract describing all the terms, with a real signature on it.
Let's put an end to these stupid EULAs, and get some new laws.
Do they really need a precise count? The number of things left in the patient should be zero. I'd think a normal metal detector could detect most tools without modification, and it wouldn't be that hard to add a bit of steel to the sponges.
The same technology they should be using at the MRI machine.
'You can't sit a child in front of a computer and expect him to learn things he needs to succeed in society,'
Maybe, but the real question isn't "Does it work?", but rather, "Does it work better?".
There's a straight forward way to test it. Allow some number of children to be educated this way, and compare them with standard school kids. (Of course, there's probably many less destructive ways to test it too.) I'd say it's strange that they haven't proposed this, but then, I don't hear much talk about comparing results for any other schooling method either. The U.S. seems to stress conformity above all else.
Besides, parking in front of the fire hydrant could, in the worst-case scenario, lead to an out-of-control fire that kills hundreds of people, so if we go the cost-to-society rote, it should carry a mandatory death penalty.
In the grand old tradition of eye-for-an-eye, how about giving them a 1:100,000 chance (or whatever the odds of a fire are) of the death penalty?
The should not have given their party a self-defeating name.
The word "piracy" is a terrible one to describe the act of making a copy of something. "Copyright infringement" or simply "infringement" would have been much more accurate.
But then, they aren't the ones who chose that word are they?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the name walkabot was already taken.
It's usually called "space settlement" http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/settle.htm
The numbers work for colonizing HEO, the asteroid belt, or a slow trip to mars and other planets.
That is, we could do it with current technology and billions of dollars.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
When most questions asked are of the "Have you stopped beating your wife?" variety, I don't really blame them for not answering.
We need better answers and better questions.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
640 digits of PI ought to be good enough for anyone.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I go along with the idea of trying to solve an easier problem first, but rather than starting on the moon,
how about building a skyhook from geo-stationary orbit to "as far down as we can go".
I.e. instead of reaching all the way to the ground, let's try to reach high earth orbit first, then low earth orbit, etc.
I think we're a long way off from seeing computer controlled characters that aren't merely following scripts
http://www.amazon.com/Scripts-People-Live-Transac
I wish I didn't believe you.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
They're called "Faithless electors"
The last one I know of was in 2000 - Barbara Lett-Simmons who abstained instead of voting.
Here's a snippet from Wikipedia;
A faithless elector is one who casts an electoral vote for someone other than whom they have pledged to elect. On 158 occasions, electors have not cast their votes for president or vice president to whom they were pledged. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was in 1836 when 23 Virginia electors changed their vote together. In that year, Martin Van Buren's Vice Presidential running mate, Richard Johnson, did not receive the minimum votes to become the Vice President but ultimately won the office on the first ballot by the United States Senate in 1837.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
There are highly effecient white LEDs available right now at 40-50 Lumens per Watt.
A typical CFL is about 40-60 Lumens per Watt - better, but not astoundingly so.
The problem with LED bulbs isn't the brightness (traffic lights are plenty bright for example), it's the cost.
There have been announcements of 100+ Lumens per Watt from an LED, but you can't buy them yet.
http://members.misty.com/don/led.html
BTW in my house we use NON-compact fluorescents (the 48" tubes), which are even more efficent, cheaper to replace, and are rated at 20,000 hours of life.
How much of an emergency can it be? We're talking snail-mail here.
Hold the letter in quarantine until you can talk to a judge and get a warrent.
-- Should you trust authority without question?
Pardon my bluntness, but reasearching higher yields per hectare is stupid.
Land suitable for algae production is cheap.
What we should be looking into are cheaper ways to harvest, grow, and water it.
Practical algae growth involving cheap materials but lower yields per hectare - think "sea water pumped over plastic tarps".
Algae grown in the outdoors, without CO2 charged water and heating may "only" have 10-20 times higher yields than Canola, instead of 80-130, but so what?
Even at approximately 100 barrels (4200 gallons) per hectare per year, the Great Sandy could grow all the worlds current oil needs twice over.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
So if I run a background check, my email will be read by someone I do know?
-- Should you trust authority without question?
Not at all, that's the way it's been for thousands of years.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain
So, how many cases of child porn were there (in Gonzales estimation) that couldn't be prosecuted because it took two years to get a warrent?
I mean are we talking tens? hundreds? thousands? more?
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I suggest you shop around then, 'cause I can buy 100Mbps of transit for just under $3000 a month.
Look at the complaints here on Slashdot.
Most of them are complaining about ISPs lying about the service they sell.
If you can't accommodate bit torrent that's OK, just sell an honest service plan that doesn't appeal to people using bit torrent, but does appeal to people who just surf.
For example, 5Mbps for 100 hours a month (burst), plus 128Kbps continuous.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
It's little more than Everquest without the bugs.
That's actually quiet an accomplishment, but6.5 million players is not even 10% of the market.
There are offline games with much stiffer competion and better numbers.
I'll be surprised if we don't see a game with 20-30 million subscribers in the next 5-10 years.
What will that game be like? Here are some of my predicitons;
There won't be any limit to the number of players on a server.
The PvE "no profanity" server will be the most popular, but the media will talk about the PvP "adult" server as if it were the only one that existed.
The suspicion will exist that the company running that game is selling the majority of the gold, but actually, they won't be.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Using the TFA's metric, revenue and subscriber numbers, WoW beats UO.
After 9 years, UO has about 20 million "subscriber months".
WoW does that every 4 months.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I thought he.net had the first fully automatic BitTorrent server
.
The colo facility my servers are in has about 5,000 square meters of roof space, of which more than 50% is unused.
2,500 square meters = 2.5 megawatts at 100% efficiency, or more than twice the power used.
Data centers aren't typical though, a more typical business uses less than 100 watts per square meter of office space.
Without bothering to post the details, the breakdown point is about two stories, buildings taller than that don't get enough sunlight to completely power themselves, though if all you wanted to run was the air conditioning you could probably go taller.
All of which is irrelevant.
Solar cells on the roof are worth it when they generate more electricity than it costs to put them there.
Whether that's 100%, 50%, or 2% of the total amount of electricity consumed by the building doesn't matter.
You don't have to run all the air conditioning off solar, you can have a mix of conventional and nonconventional technology.
The "magic" price point is a dollar a watt, which we aren't at yet, but we are close. ($3 a watt is the cheapest I've seen)
And more importantly, it's likely that we will have some fundamental improvements in solar cell technology, like cheap Gratzel cells.
Wind turbans on the other hand are are very old technology.
There have been some improvements, but they nearly as cheap today as they will ever be.
The only real "improvement" is that the price of alternatives is going up.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Maybe he's above average? I understand about 50% of us are.
When I use the self check, I'm pressing the touch screen before the "OK" button even appears.
I've learned that many of the buttons are optional, for example, you don't have to "select a payment type" you can just put your money in the machine at that point, before it even it's done asking.
I'm probably not typical, but for me the self check is the quickest way out.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Yup, there oughta be a law.
One that says in situations where one side is presenting terms on a take it or leave it basis,
that they must have a contract describing all the terms, with a real signature on it.
Let's put an end to these stupid EULAs, and get some new laws.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Do they really need a precise count?
The number of things left in the patient should be zero.
I'd think a normal metal detector could detect most tools without modification,
and it wouldn't be that hard to add a bit of steel to the sponges.
The same technology they should be using at the MRI machine.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Maybe, but the real question isn't "Does it work?", but rather, "Does it work better?".
There's a straight forward way to test it.
Allow some number of children to be educated this way, and compare them with standard school kids.
(Of course, there's probably many less destructive ways to test it too.)
I'd say it's strange that they haven't proposed this, but then,
I don't hear much talk about comparing results for any other schooling method either.
The U.S. seems to stress conformity above all else.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
In the grand old tradition of eye-for-an-eye, how about giving them a 1:100,000 chance (or whatever the odds of a fire are) of the death penalty?
-- Should you believe authority without question?
The word "piracy" is a terrible one to describe the act of making a copy of something.
"Copyright infringement" or simply "infringement" would have been much more accurate.
But then, they aren't the ones who chose that word are they?