Why go through all the effort to turn plastic (and other waste) into a fuel, when you can just dump it all in a big waste incinerator and burn it? The heat can be used to produce electricity, which is equally useful.
I'd much rather spend the resources on a mission to collect some martian rocks. Sending humans over to plant a flag is a nice accomplishment, but the science value is limited.
CO2 is such a minor component that it's effect is almost buried in the noise
The key word is almost. In my room it's 298 Kelvin right now, of which 295 are due to the sun. If I turn on a space heater, I can add 10 more Kelvin, but that would make it very uncomfortable. The fact that the space heater's effect "is almost buried in the noise" doesn't help me.
Looks like a cute idea, but a single modern CPU will easily outperform a whole table of these processors, which makes the whole exercise a bit pointless. This is especially true for problems that aren't embarrassingly parallel. A single processor will be much easier to program too. If you want to go faster than a single processor, the most effective way is to combine already fast CPUs, with lots of memory, and a fast interconnect network, preferably using cache coherent NUMA architecture. Those systems already exist too.
You have the law of biogenesis showing that life does not come from non-life
Before that statement makes any sense you have to define exactly what 'life' is, and how it differs from non-life. Given a definition, there must be a point where the difference between life and non-life is just a microscopic change. Microscopic changes can certainly occur randomly, so there's a chance life can arise from non-life.
Besides, getting off this rock is the only thing that will save it. The resources in space are unlimited and as is pretty obvious from looking back at history, almost all wars are fights over limited resources.
The people that stay behind are still going to be fighting over the resources, so what's the point of sending a few people away ?
It's takes longer to reboot the system than it does to re-open firefox.
As you make the kernel smaller, and the user layer bigger, the difference between restarting all user processes or the whole system becomes trivial. If you're lucky you can save some time by only restarting user processes that have crashed, but that won't work for processes that share a lot of state, which is quite common for processes that are part of a traditional kernel. For instance, you can't really restart a file system, a virtual memory manager, or a network stack without restarting a lot of other applications.
The L4 kernel only does the low-level part of memory management, such as managing the page tables. It still relies on a process to do the higher level stuff, such as swapping and (demand) paging.
What's that got to do with higher kernel reliability?
Nothing, of course. The point is that the end user doesn't care about kernel reliability, but about systems reliability. If I only use my computer to run firefox, there is no useful difference between firefox crashing, or the kernel crashing.
Because a microkernel doesn't do much, nearly all functionality has to be implemented by user processes. In a complex system, these processes will depend on each other, so if one has a bug, it has the potential to disrupt another process. If the memory management process dies, the rest of the system won't keep on running.
Instead of sending people to Mars, send an unmanned probe to collect rock samples and fly them back to earth. This is hard enough, but still a lot easier than sending people. Besides, there's nothing for people to do on Mars except walk around for a bit, collect some rocks and come back.
It would be great if those "smaller numbers" could come about through enlightened voluntary birth control. This is - regrettably - highly unlikely, and most people think that the more likely way in which it will happen - Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death - should be generally avoided to minimize human suffering.
Yes, voluntary birth control would be nice, but it's not an evolutionary stable strategy. Any gene that causes people to have more children will automatically spread and multiply. The only thing left is strict enforcement on a global scale, which won't be pretty if you could actually make it work.
Without birth control, exponential growth is only bounded by suffering.
Slashdot Mirror
Why go through all the effort to turn plastic (and other waste) into a fuel, when you can just dump it all in a big waste incinerator and burn it? The heat can be used to produce electricity, which is equally useful.
The math does work out for people who pay more for their electricity. I pay around $0.30 / kWh, so total cost would be $36 per year.
Anyone who can afford it, and think rationally.
For heat generation only, 92% efficiency can be achieved using a secondary heat exchanger which extracts heat from the flue gas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensing_boiler
Do viruses even have oxygen processing enzymes ?
I'd much rather spend the resources on a mission to collect some martian rocks. Sending humans over to plant a flag is a nice accomplishment, but the science value is limited.
1/640th of the budget should be enough for anyone.
I relies on a ground crew to throw some dirt at the target.
Natural absorption is also 20x man's production
The key word is almost. In my room it's 298 Kelvin right now, of which 295 are due to the sun. If I turn on a space heater, I can add 10 more Kelvin, but that would make it very uncomfortable. The fact that the space heater's effect "is almost buried in the noise" doesn't help me.
With the glass on you can test your transmitter on the ground.
Looks like a cute idea, but a single modern CPU will easily outperform a whole table of these processors, which makes the whole exercise a bit pointless. This is especially true for problems that aren't embarrassingly parallel. A single processor will be much easier to program too. If you want to go faster than a single processor, the most effective way is to combine already fast CPUs, with lots of memory, and a fast interconnect network, preferably using cache coherent NUMA architecture. Those systems already exist too.
Well the first two are from Woodstock by Joni Mitchell, but I think you ad libbed the last one.
See the lyrics:
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/joni+mitchell/woodstock_20075381.html
You have the law of biogenesis showing that life does not come from non-life
Before that statement makes any sense you have to define exactly what 'life' is, and how it differs from non-life. Given a definition, there must be a point where the difference between life and non-life is just a microscopic change. Microscopic changes can certainly occur randomly, so there's a chance life can arise from non-life.
But it's much easier to have a rover spend a year on mars than it is to have a geologist spend a week.
The people that stay behind are still going to be fighting over the resources, so what's the point of sending a few people away ?
As you make the kernel smaller, and the user layer bigger, the difference between restarting all user processes or the whole system becomes trivial. If you're lucky you can save some time by only restarting user processes that have crashed, but that won't work for processes that share a lot of state, which is quite common for processes that are part of a traditional kernel. For instance, you can't really restart a file system, a virtual memory manager, or a network stack without restarting a lot of other applications.
The L4 kernel only does the low-level part of memory management, such as managing the page tables. It still relies on a process to do the higher level stuff, such as swapping and (demand) paging.
Nothing, of course. The point is that the end user doesn't care about kernel reliability, but about systems reliability. If I only use my computer to run firefox, there is no useful difference between firefox crashing, or the kernel crashing.
Because a microkernel doesn't do much, nearly all functionality has to be implemented by user processes. In a complex system, these processes will depend on each other, so if one has a bug, it has the potential to disrupt another process. If the memory management process dies, the rest of the system won't keep on running.
If your filesystem task running on top of a proven kernel has a bug, it can still corrupt your disk.
Instead of sending people to Mars, send an unmanned probe to collect rock samples and fly them back to earth. This is hard enough, but still a lot easier than sending people. Besides, there's nothing for people to do on Mars except walk around for a bit, collect some rocks and come back.
and the moon is only 20 times as far as flying to the other side of the earth...
Yes, voluntary birth control would be nice, but it's not an evolutionary stable strategy. Any gene that causes people to have more children will automatically spread and multiply. The only thing left is strict enforcement on a global scale, which won't be pretty if you could actually make it work.
Without birth control, exponential growth is only bounded by suffering.
Earth's survival was never in jeopardy. It's Human survival we worry about.
Humans will survive too. Maybe in smaller numbers, but is that really all that bad ? Exponential growth is not sustainable anyway.