The "poaching employees, helping competitors and starting legal battles" sounds to me like he came in with promises of being treated as a company founder and was surprised when he was stabbed in the back.
Right. Based on reading the article, the author's definition of a "jerk" is someone who doesn't understand that they were just a resource to be used during the founding of the company and then thrown away. Pretty much the worst thing the author lists as something the "brilliant jerk" does is bothering management by assuming they will deign to talk to him. The author is assuming that we all share his implicit understanding that the people who built the company will stay down at the bottom while the company grows and the managers will grow with the company adding more and more layers between them.
It's the "(of equal or lesser value)" part. For example if you buy one priced at $1.00 and another normally priced at $.60, then you get the second at $.30 on sale for a total of $1.30, which is an 18.75% discount. The crossover point is 2/3 of a dollar. Anything less than that for the second item and the discount is less than 20% on the whole thing. Any more than 2/3 of a dollar and the whole thing is greater than a 20% discount up to a maximum discount of 25%.
Mormons are just as capable of crimes as anyone else. Ted Bundy, for example, was a Mormon. Mark Hoffman, also a Mormon killed two people with bombs and would have continued if a third bomb hadn't gone off prematurely and injured him. Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. hijacked a plane with a hand grenade and a gun. Of course, you could claim that their actions make them not Mormons via the no-true-scotsman argument. This is the same argument that you used when you wrote:
And no, not those fringe cults that bonk 12 year old girls say they're Mormon - because they're not.
They may be splinter groups, but Mormonism is still the root of the religion they practice. Also, their practices seem to be consistent with those of the early founders of the church.
It wasn't Tesla either. Electric light bulbs (mostly arc lamps, but also some filament-based designs) were already in use before Edison's supposed invention. The innovation in the bulb that Edison patented and marketed was simply in the carbonized filament used which gave the bulb an acceptable lifespan. Edison's team weren't even the first to come up with that particular type of filament either. Joseph Swan, among others, invented it previously. Let's also not forget that Edison was an industrialist who paid other people to invent things for him, then put his name on the patent. So, people are crediting Edison with something that had already been done and that he was just rubber stamping his name on anyway.
This is the problem with measuring "efficiency" and assigning it a percentage. "Efficiency" can mean various different things. In this case, you're clearly comparing apples and oranges. Even worse, you're measuring average apple to best-case orange.
Aren't we all supposed to have learned about solid, liquid, gas and plasma back in grade school? I seem to recall having the concept explained over and over again from before high school and right through it. I can see the people who pass through school without learning to read having trouble with it, but it's a depressing thought that the ones who managed to become journalists missed the entire concept.
News channels tend to hold to their news format better, true. On the other hand, the kind of news they report tends to be affected by the same lowest common denominator trend.
Quite aside from how it reflects on his opinions about colonizing space, that quote says some pretty bad things about Romney's management style if he's in earnest. Most of us have seen that sort of autocrat manager that can't even tolerate discussion of anything outside the box. They're pretty much universally idiots.
Although, I am a bit worried about what this will do to gummy worm prices.
Well, since the primary ingredient in gummy worms is gelatin and one of the main sources of that gelatin is cows, there might be an interesting pricing dynamic there. On the one hand, you have increased gummy worm demand which could drive up prices, on the other hand, if you don't feed it to the cows, you have reduced cow supply, which could also drive up gummy worm prices.
Also, I should note that this means we're feeding cows to cows. That's nothing new, of course.
Nice theory. The reality is, unfortunately, that a basic cable channel that tries to specialize will face enormous pressure to generalize. It might be acclaimed and beloved by its (limited) audience for a few years, but would rapidly end up being just another network full of reality shows about child beauty pageants, weddings and cake competitions. Possibly they'll mix it up and make it about wedding cake competitions for the marriages of child beauty queens.
While I agree, the article left out some "techy" points, none of this changes the fact that data centers consume enormous amounts of energy whether you have a good PUE or not and that is the point of the article.
Well, the original article says: "Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times." Since this is for the entire world, then that thirty gigawatts needs to be considered in that context. That context would be the 7+ billion people in the world. It's about 4 watts per person. Can it improve. Certainly it can, and it is. Compared against things like lighting, heating, cooking, refrigeration, it's pretty negligible. An infant probably uses more power just to breathe. It's about 3 kilowatt-hours (one of the stupidest units ever) per month (oh, wait, kilowatt-hours/month, an even more stupid unit). That's just not very much. Even supposedly energy-efficient TVs use more than that when they're "turned off". All the AC/DC converters people use for all their personal electronics probably waste more than that - each! In cold climates, insulating just one drafty door or window will probably save 20X that.
Since these data centers are highly concentrated and tightly managed resources, they are, of course, a logical place for energy-efficiency measures to be employed for the benefit of all. Of course, exactly the same thing can be said for manufacture of TVs, wall-warts, etc. Since the data-centers (being the ones who directly pay for inefficiency, rather than passing it along to the end user) are actually working hard on the problem, the alarmist tone of the original article seems a little strange.
On the other hand, most reporters these days seem to come from the same pool of communications majors that the marketing people come from. The marketing people are the ones behind most of the problems you mentioned.
All of them are in fact obvious. You can argue that the _idea_ of pinch to zoom or spring-back animation or swipe to unlock or stacking pictures in software like you'd stack them on a table is non-obvious. I disagree, but you can certainly argue it for those ideas. Regardless of whether the ideas are obvious or not, the implementations are obvious. You can go to absolutely anyone who fits the definition of "skilled in the art" with one of those ideas and ask them to implement it and they can do so easily using obvious, well known methods. Since patents are supposed to cover actual inventions and not just ideas, none of those things should be patentable.
Really? What is the ground made of? You realize that "soil" is predominantly just ground up and weathered silicate mineral, right?
I agree with you that you can certainly make soil with appropriate fertilizer. I'm pretty sure that the poster you replied to was using a definition of soil that requires it to contain humus material.
But you'd either have to have it really close to cover up the sun, or really, really far away and of monumentally immense size to actually eclipse the sun. You can situate it to block out a tiny part of the sun for an entire country, but the extremely diffuse shadow wouldn't even be noticed by the most sensitive light meters. To actually park it _over_ a particular country, however, would be a pretty impressive display of power, however. Orbits don't work that way, so to accomplish it, you'd have to be doing something pretty impressive technologically.
And I'm saying everything other than "apply oxygen, get heat" is going to require a needlessly large amount of energy, which would make hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria which follow those methods require more food.
Ok. Now you're really confusing me. Are you saying that hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria burn hydrocarbons just for the heat and then run themselves off the heat? Do they have little steam engines in them? Stirling engines? Some sort of thermocouple. Honestly though, if it's true that the hydrocarbon eating bacteria operate by converting chemical energy to heat, then capture the heat and presumably convert it back to chemical energy as you seem to be implying, I'd be truly fascinated by the mechanism. It seems like, for such a thing to be remotely efficient, the bacteria would have to be able to contain temperatures that would normally kill a living thing.
Do you think bacteria would evolve to needlessly consume excess energy?
No (for a non-nihilistic definition of "needless"), of course not. They certainly do evolve to consume whatever energy they can, however, even when it's bound up in complex chemical forms like hydrocarbons. They will also tend to opportunistically consume what they can, which may involve breaking down a large hydrocarbon into smaller, indigestible pieces, for example. If they can consume something they normally wouldn't be able to by consuming a second substance, then they will, even if it produces all kinds of byproducts. Same thing as humans needing biotin to metabolize amino acids.
Your argument is "science is hard and biological science involves a lot of complex stuff, so this must be complex." That's an argument from ignorance: you don't understand it, so it must be complicated. Your argument fails Occam's Razor. There are important reasons why this would end up being simple.
That is not my argument. As for Ockham's Razor, I find that it's a pretty poor tool in general since so many people end up cutting themselves with it. You, for example, don't seem to understand that there's a difference between apparent complexity and inefficiency. There's also a difference between apparent complexity and real complexity. Sometimes (quite often in biology), additional factors actually make certain things simpler rather than more complex
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The "poaching employees, helping competitors and starting legal battles" sounds to me like he came in with promises of being treated as a company founder and was surprised when he was stabbed in the back.
If someone is just killing people or eating them, it doesn't necessarily mean they're a serial killer
Serial just means one after the other. If someone is killing plural "people", then they're a serial killer by definition.
Right. Based on reading the article, the author's definition of a "jerk" is someone who doesn't understand that they were just a resource to be used during the founding of the company and then thrown away. Pretty much the worst thing the author lists as something the "brilliant jerk" does is bothering management by assuming they will deign to talk to him. The author is assuming that we all share his implicit understanding that the people who built the company will stay down at the bottom while the company grows and the managers will grow with the company adding more and more layers between them.
It's the "(of equal or lesser value)" part. For example if you buy one priced at $1.00 and another normally priced at $.60, then you get the second at $.30 on sale for a total of $1.30, which is an 18.75% discount. The crossover point is 2/3 of a dollar. Anything less than that for the second item and the discount is less than 20% on the whole thing. Any more than 2/3 of a dollar and the whole thing is greater than a 20% discount up to a maximum discount of 25%.
You don't see Mormons blowing up buildings.
Mormons are just as capable of crimes as anyone else. Ted Bundy, for example, was a Mormon. Mark Hoffman, also a Mormon killed two people with bombs and would have continued if a third bomb hadn't gone off prematurely and injured him. Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. hijacked a plane with a hand grenade and a gun. Of course, you could claim that their actions make them not Mormons via the no-true-scotsman argument. This is the same argument that you used when you wrote:
And no, not those fringe cults that bonk 12 year old girls say they're Mormon - because they're not.
They may be splinter groups, but Mormonism is still the root of the religion they practice. Also, their practices seem to be consistent with those of the early founders of the church.
It wasn't Tesla either. Electric light bulbs (mostly arc lamps, but also some filament-based designs) were already in use before Edison's supposed invention. The innovation in the bulb that Edison patented and marketed was simply in the carbonized filament used which gave the bulb an acceptable lifespan. Edison's team weren't even the first to come up with that particular type of filament either. Joseph Swan, among others, invented it previously. Let's also not forget that Edison was an industrialist who paid other people to invent things for him, then put his name on the patent. So, people are crediting Edison with something that had already been done and that he was just rubber stamping his name on anyway.
This is the problem with measuring "efficiency" and assigning it a percentage. "Efficiency" can mean various different things. In this case, you're clearly comparing apples and oranges. Even worse, you're measuring average apple to best-case orange.
Ummm... Yeah. I think you might have been a little overexposed to that fairy dust in the walls. ;)
It's hot, but it's also a hard vacuum. For a spacecraft travelling through it, it's probably better to just think of it as radiation.
Aren't we all supposed to have learned about solid, liquid, gas and plasma back in grade school? I seem to recall having the concept explained over and over again from before high school and right through it. I can see the people who pass through school without learning to read having trouble with it, but it's a depressing thought that the ones who managed to become journalists missed the entire concept.
News channels tend to hold to their news format better, true. On the other hand, the kind of news they report tends to be affected by the same lowest common denominator trend.
Quite aside from how it reflects on his opinions about colonizing space, that quote says some pretty bad things about Romney's management style if he's in earnest. Most of us have seen that sort of autocrat manager that can't even tolerate discussion of anything outside the box. They're pretty much universally idiots.
Although, I am a bit worried about what this will do to gummy worm prices.
Well, since the primary ingredient in gummy worms is gelatin and one of the main sources of that gelatin is cows, there might be an interesting pricing dynamic there. On the one hand, you have increased gummy worm demand which could drive up prices, on the other hand, if you don't feed it to the cows, you have reduced cow supply, which could also drive up gummy worm prices.
Also, I should note that this means we're feeding cows to cows. That's nothing new, of course.
Most of the earth's water is salt water, which isn't much good for growing crops
Depends on the crops.
Nice theory. The reality is, unfortunately, that a basic cable channel that tries to specialize will face enormous pressure to generalize. It might be acclaimed and beloved by its (limited) audience for a few years, but would rapidly end up being just another network full of reality shows about child beauty pageants, weddings and cake competitions. Possibly they'll mix it up and make it about wedding cake competitions for the marriages of child beauty queens.
While I agree, the article left out some "techy" points, none of this changes the fact that data centers consume enormous amounts of energy whether you have a good PUE or not and that is the point of the article.
Well, the original article says: "Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times."
Since this is for the entire world, then that thirty gigawatts needs to be considered in that context. That context would be the 7+ billion people in the world. It's about 4 watts per person. Can it improve. Certainly it can, and it is. Compared against things like lighting, heating, cooking, refrigeration, it's pretty negligible. An infant probably uses more power just to breathe. It's about 3 kilowatt-hours (one of the stupidest units ever) per month (oh, wait, kilowatt-hours/month, an even more stupid unit). That's just not very much. Even supposedly energy-efficient TVs use more than that when they're "turned off". All the AC/DC converters people use for all their personal electronics probably waste more than that - each! In cold climates, insulating just one drafty door or window will probably save 20X that.
Since these data centers are highly concentrated and tightly managed resources, they are, of course, a logical place for energy-efficiency measures to be employed for the benefit of all. Of course, exactly the same thing can be said for manufacture of TVs, wall-warts, etc. Since the data-centers (being the ones who directly pay for inefficiency, rather than passing it along to the end user) are actually working hard on the problem, the alarmist tone of the original article seems a little strange.
Don't blame reporters for a societal problem.
On the other hand, most reporters these days seem to come from the same pool of communications majors that the marketing people come from. The marketing people are the ones behind most of the problems you mentioned.
All of them are in fact obvious. You can argue that the _idea_ of pinch to zoom or spring-back animation or swipe to unlock or stacking pictures in software like you'd stack them on a table is non-obvious. I disagree, but you can certainly argue it for those ideas. Regardless of whether the ideas are obvious or not, the implementations are obvious. You can go to absolutely anyone who fits the definition of "skilled in the art" with one of those ideas and ask them to implement it and they can do so easily using obvious, well known methods. Since patents are supposed to cover actual inventions and not just ideas, none of those things should be patentable.
(On Earth, most start from oil, and sometimes coal and natural gas. None of these exist on Mars)
But you can make them. Especially "natural gas", which is pretty much just methane.
Really? What is the ground made of? You realize that "soil" is predominantly just ground up and weathered silicate mineral, right?
I agree with you that you can certainly make soil with appropriate fertilizer. I'm pretty sure that the poster you replied to was using a definition of soil that requires it to contain humus material.
But you'd either have to have it really close to cover up the sun, or really, really far away and of monumentally immense size to actually eclipse the sun. You can situate it to block out a tiny part of the sun for an entire country, but the extremely diffuse shadow wouldn't even be noticed by the most sensitive light meters. To actually park it _over_ a particular country, however, would be a pretty impressive display of power, however. Orbits don't work that way, so to accomplish it, you'd have to be doing something pretty impressive technologically.
And what country wouldn't love the power to park your space carrier between another country's capital city and the Sun?
Why? So that it casts a negligible shadow on the country? Admittedly, the power required to do so would be pretty scary.
Some basic math says 20-50*~6; which makes for 120-300 years away.
It's good to see someone being realistic instead of just pulling numbers out of the air.
No. No. No. Always use double-ROT13! For extra security.
And I'm saying everything other than "apply oxygen, get heat" is going to require a needlessly large amount of energy, which would make hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria which follow those methods require more food.
Ok. Now you're really confusing me. Are you saying that hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria burn hydrocarbons just for the heat and then run themselves off the heat? Do they have little steam engines in them? Stirling engines? Some sort of thermocouple. Honestly though, if it's true that the hydrocarbon eating bacteria operate by converting chemical energy to heat, then capture the heat and presumably convert it back to chemical energy as you seem to be implying, I'd be truly fascinated by the mechanism. It seems like, for such a thing to be remotely efficient, the bacteria would have to be able to contain temperatures that would normally kill a living thing.
Do you think bacteria would evolve to needlessly consume excess energy?
No (for a non-nihilistic definition of "needless"), of course not. They certainly do evolve to consume whatever energy they can, however, even when it's bound up in complex chemical forms like hydrocarbons. They will also tend to opportunistically consume what they can, which may involve breaking down a large hydrocarbon into smaller, indigestible pieces, for example. If they can consume something they normally wouldn't be able to by consuming a second substance, then they will, even if it produces all kinds of byproducts. Same thing as humans needing biotin to metabolize amino acids.
Your argument is "science is hard and biological science involves a lot of complex stuff, so this must be complex." That's an argument from ignorance: you don't understand it, so it must be complicated. Your argument fails Occam's Razor. There are important reasons why this would end up being simple.
That is not my argument. As for Ockham's Razor, I find that it's a pretty poor tool in general since so many people end up cutting themselves with it. You, for example, don't seem to understand that there's a difference between apparent complexity and inefficiency. There's also a difference between apparent complexity and real complexity. Sometimes (quite often in biology), additional factors actually make certain things simpler rather than more complex