Given the numbers above, the average transaction cost is about $22 at $0.10/kWh. And it's only increasing with time. With costs like that, Bitcoin no longer makes sense for normal, everyday purchases. Why does Bitcoin have this amazing staying power? Why can't another cryptocurrency with cheaper transactions supplant it?
Does it make sense to buy the Pixel 1 XL 128GB now that it has come down in price? It still comes with the headphone jack and Google's OS updates. The Pixel 2's lack of headphone jack is a no-go for me. The USB-C headphone adapter is too fragile. Hunting for good sounding Bluetooth earbuds is unappealing to me (plus expensive, plus the battery charging and relatively quick failure..).
What I wonder is, say you have a 5V ADC. Using their technique, could you drive a 15V (max) signal into the ADC and effectively triple your resolution? You're still using all your bits to measure a 5V range... so if that's the case then it truly is quite groundbreaking.
It may be groundbreaking, but not for the reason advertised in the paper/article/summary. From a quick look at this paper, ADC power dissipation is proportional to f * 2^(2*n), where f is the sampling rate and n is the number of bits per sample. High performance ADCs are constrained by power dissipation, which limits either sampling rate or resolution. What these guys are probably trying to do is constrain n. By allowing signals larger than the ADC input range, and then unwrapping them in software, they increase the effective number of bits. Even if they gain only 2 bits by doing this, this is a factor of 16 advantage in power dissipation (but how does the self-resetting ADC compare to normal ADCs in terms of power?). In any case, the article seems to be hyping a non-existent advantage (sampling signals exceeding the nominal ADC range - why not just attenuate the signal and use a higher resolution ADC?), but does not mention the real advantage (power dissipation).
I'm an EE. This concept is interesting to me, but then I'm left wondering how they really tackle the problem of signal limits. It's not just that ADC that limits the signal. The amplifiers in the chain also do it. Maybe I should just read about it. The whole self-resetting ADC concept just strikes me as odd. I have a feeling it was invented to improve the dynamic range or sampling rate or reduce the power usage of ADCs, but not to magically sample arbitrarily large signals.
The congresscritters also heavily criticized the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM):
"This is a misguided mission without a mission, without a launch date, and without ties to exploration goals," concluded Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). "It's just a time-wasting distraction."
From the looks of it, this mission will probably not receive funding. It's a bit of a shame. It would have been a good opportunity to start developing asteroid mining technology. Perhaps no one is ready for that yet.
The +5 cap is good, but the "karma bonus" is not great. It basically makes +1 and +2 the same. I know that I can disable the karma bonus, but then many +5 comments will appear as +4, which is not great either. I'd like the ability to quickly spot the top modded comments and also see all comments with just one positive mod on them.
I'd like to add that if any changes are made to the moderation system at all, the ability to make controversial comments visible should be a priority. Just an observation: controversial comments (even if modded into oblivion) tend to generate a lot of replies that themselves are highly modded. So there are two criteria to detect these: the total number of mods (in either direction) and the number (and score) of the replies. To allow users some control over display of such comments, maybe promote them one level: from not shown to abbreviated, or from abbreviated to full.
This long article is worth a read to the end. The author acknowledges the possibility that his anecdotes are just the results of coincidences or him networking, like you suggested. The article is actually humorous and designed to make people think about the direction our society is heading. His anecdotes about the visit to the NSA data center, the gun show, the tire shop, the hot springs are all well written. This article is by no means a list of complaints, like you suggest. He makes fun of people that are truly paranoid (seemingly to the point of insanity), while raising some unsettling thoughts as a side-effect.
I've also been eyeing this project, but haven't tried it on any of my machines yet. In the reddit/r/sysadmin thread people seem quite critical of this script. There is credible opinion that these updates will be required for windows to continue updating in the future, so it's dangerous to remove them; and that privacy cannot be achieved anymore while running Microsoft operating systems.
I'm looking for a reliable, verified way to remove all this telemetry. Can anyone confirm if this project delivers what it promises? It supposedly works on windows versions 7-10.
Why is this modded +5 Informative? Youtube HTML5 video still autoplays even with this option set to false. Apparently they get around this by loading the video from a script. I basically had to disable HTML5 on Youtube to get it to stop autoplaying. Flash, thankfully, can be blocked until user permission.
Check out "Pathological Science" for some cautionary tales. It's kind of sad how enthusiasm for EM Drive seems to be rising just like for all those past examples, while full scientific rigor has not yet been achieved in the experiments (the experimenters themselves admit this... a sign of progress). I wonder if we will eventually see an experimental satellite propelled by this drive... Part of me thinks that is a waste of money. But another part thinks that all the debate on this topic is an even bigger economic drain through time wasting. So maybe launching an EM drive into space is worth it, just to end this pointless debate.
But this is not just another exoplanet. It's the Kepler spacecraft being back in business. I think that's news-worthy. By looking at many different patches of sky they will detect many more exoplanets. The only downside is that they won't be able to observe each patch very long, so only short period planets would be discovered. That's still lots of valuable scientific data. The way they precision-point this telescope now is also interesting.
I think the cost is in delta-v, not distance. The asteroid survey would probably not make the asteroid redirect mission cheaper, but may identify an asteroid with a more interesting composition.
Why say this? Nature isn't intelligent, so can't define concepts like "right and wrong". However, it's not hard to propose a simple definition that applies to nature: a behavior is "right" if it's beneficial to the species' survival and prosperity, and "wrong" if harmful to the species. This may be somewhat different from some ethical philosophies, but not entirely incompatible. Human population density has increased significantly above that for which we evolved, and we no longer compete for food. This is a case of natural violent tendencies being "wrong", impeding the prosperity of the species. However, violence may be "right" for chimps that still compete for food.
I found myself willingly paying a $6/month subscription to a website (this surprised me quite a bit): nicovideo.jp. Their model is very interesting. You do not pay for content, but with subscription you get more bandwidth and generally smoother access to their content (video), as well as wiki editing ability, unlimited "mylists", time shifted "live broadcasts"... basically just better service and perks, but not more content. They also run the "related products" ads below the main content, but with a twist: all "related product" links are user-submitted. It's actually fun to browse those.
Yes, the paper handles the vacuum issue very badly (Sections II and IV contradict each other, and Figure 22 says "(In 750mm Air)"). However, convective air flow is unlikely to be the cause of the anomalous thrust. I would expect convection to have a slow time constant as objects heat up and cool down, but the thrust turns on and off quickly in the paper.
I would like to see more plausible causes of the anomalous thrust. Any new physics discovery is extremely unlikely here, but so far the proposed explanations have been lacking.
Ionization of air might be one such possibility. The very high-Q cavity with tens of watts of input power may reach electric fields strong enough to ionize the air inside the cavity. The ions/electrons/air would need to escape the cavity somehow to produce thrust.
There is another clue in the paper: In the lower right corner of Figure 22 it says "(In 750mm Air)". So at least the tapered cavity test article was not run in a vacuum. However, it is reasonable to read that that their earlier tests with a pillbox cavity were done in a vacuum. You'd have to agree that they were sloppy in specifying the exact conditions under which each test was performed. I'm looking forward to independent tests of this concept that are undoubtedly coming given the publicity this received.
Someone made this paper available for download. Their writeup makes it seem like they perform the experiment in a vacuum, except for one tidbit in the "Summary and Forward Work" section:
Vacuum compatible RF amplifiers with power ranges of up
to 125 watts will allow testing at vacuum conditions which was not possible using our current RF amplifiers due to
the presence of electrolytic capacitors.
This makes it sound as if these tests were not conducted in vacuum after all...
I haven't seen this vacuum issue addressed by anyone after some searching. To me it seems premature to speculate about quantum vacuum effects when interactions with air seem very likely. Perhaps they planned to perform these experiments in a vacuum, but didn't quite get to that point when the abstract was due? At this point, they may have finished the vacuum version of these experiments, so may have some results to present. If someone does know, please pitch in.
Yeah, that paper should be rejected. The results are totally useless. I wonder how many people went "WTF?" upon reading "...within a stainless steel vacuum chamber with the door closed but at ambient atmospheric pressure."
Can you point to good criticism of the Asteroid Redirect Mission? I can't think of a better way to kick-start in situ space resource utilization, which is what we need for sustained human presence in space. Perhaps you mean the manned portion of this mission? The redirection of an asteroid into a close orbit is a very good idea by itself. Of course, spacecraft sent to study this asteroid and try extracting resources from it should mostly be unmanned (and will be).
Slashdot Mirror
Given the numbers above, the average transaction cost is about $22 at $0.10/kWh. And it's only increasing with time. With costs like that, Bitcoin no longer makes sense for normal, everyday purchases. Why does Bitcoin have this amazing staying power? Why can't another cryptocurrency with cheaper transactions supplant it?
The Pixel XL 128 GB is now listed at $769.00 on the Google store. It was at least $100 more a week ago. I'm not considering third party sellers.
Does it make sense to buy the Pixel 1 XL 128GB now that it has come down in price? It still comes with the headphone jack and Google's OS updates. The Pixel 2's lack of headphone jack is a no-go for me. The USB-C headphone adapter is too fragile. Hunting for good sounding Bluetooth earbuds is unappealing to me (plus expensive, plus the battery charging and relatively quick failure..).
What I wonder is, say you have a 5V ADC. Using their technique, could you drive a 15V (max) signal into the ADC and effectively triple your resolution? You're still using all your bits to measure a 5V range... so if that's the case then it truly is quite groundbreaking.
It may be groundbreaking, but not for the reason advertised in the paper/article/summary. From a quick look at this paper, ADC power dissipation is proportional to f * 2^(2*n), where f is the sampling rate and n is the number of bits per sample. High performance ADCs are constrained by power dissipation, which limits either sampling rate or resolution. What these guys are probably trying to do is constrain n. By allowing signals larger than the ADC input range, and then unwrapping them in software, they increase the effective number of bits. Even if they gain only 2 bits by doing this, this is a factor of 16 advantage in power dissipation (but how does the self-resetting ADC compare to normal ADCs in terms of power?). In any case, the article seems to be hyping a non-existent advantage (sampling signals exceeding the nominal ADC range - why not just attenuate the signal and use a higher resolution ADC?), but does not mention the real advantage (power dissipation).
I'm an EE. This concept is interesting to me, but then I'm left wondering how they really tackle the problem of signal limits. It's not just that ADC that limits the signal. The amplifiers in the chain also do it. Maybe I should just read about it. The whole self-resetting ADC concept just strikes me as odd. I have a feeling it was invented to improve the dynamic range or sampling rate or reduce the power usage of ADCs, but not to magically sample arbitrarily large signals.
"This is a misguided mission without a mission, without a launch date, and without ties to exploration goals," concluded Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). "It's just a time-wasting distraction."
From the looks of it, this mission will probably not receive funding. It's a bit of a shame. It would have been a good opportunity to start developing asteroid mining technology. Perhaps no one is ready for that yet.
The +5 cap is good, but the "karma bonus" is not great. It basically makes +1 and +2 the same. I know that I can disable the karma bonus, but then many +5 comments will appear as +4, which is not great either. I'd like the ability to quickly spot the top modded comments and also see all comments with just one positive mod on them.
I'd like to add that if any changes are made to the moderation system at all, the ability to make controversial comments visible should be a priority. Just an observation: controversial comments (even if modded into oblivion) tend to generate a lot of replies that themselves are highly modded. So there are two criteria to detect these: the total number of mods (in either direction) and the number (and score) of the replies. To allow users some control over display of such comments, maybe promote them one level: from not shown to abbreviated, or from abbreviated to full.
This long article is worth a read to the end. The author acknowledges the possibility that his anecdotes are just the results of coincidences or him networking, like you suggested. The article is actually humorous and designed to make people think about the direction our society is heading. His anecdotes about the visit to the NSA data center, the gun show, the tire shop, the hot springs are all well written. This article is by no means a list of complaints, like you suggest. He makes fun of people that are truly paranoid (seemingly to the point of insanity), while raising some unsettling thoughts as a side-effect.
I've also been eyeing this project, but haven't tried it on any of my machines yet. In the reddit /r/sysadmin thread people seem quite critical of this script. There is credible opinion that these updates will be required for windows to continue updating in the future, so it's dangerous to remove them; and that privacy cannot be achieved anymore while running Microsoft operating systems.
I'm looking for a reliable, verified way to remove all this telemetry. Can anyone confirm if this project delivers what it promises? It supposedly works on windows versions 7-10.
Why is this modded +5 Informative? Youtube HTML5 video still autoplays even with this option set to false. Apparently they get around this by loading the video from a script. I basically had to disable HTML5 on Youtube to get it to stop autoplaying. Flash, thankfully, can be blocked until user permission.
Check out "Pathological Science" for some cautionary tales. It's kind of sad how enthusiasm for EM Drive seems to be rising just like for all those past examples, while full scientific rigor has not yet been achieved in the experiments (the experimenters themselves admit this... a sign of progress). I wonder if we will eventually see an experimental satellite propelled by this drive... Part of me thinks that is a waste of money. But another part thinks that all the debate on this topic is an even bigger economic drain through time wasting. So maybe launching an EM drive into space is worth it, just to end this pointless debate.
But this is not just another exoplanet. It's the Kepler spacecraft being back in business. I think that's news-worthy. By looking at many different patches of sky they will detect many more exoplanets. The only downside is that they won't be able to observe each patch very long, so only short period planets would be discovered. That's still lots of valuable scientific data. The way they precision-point this telescope now is also interesting.
I think the cost is in delta-v, not distance. The asteroid survey would probably not make the asteroid redirect mission cheaper, but may identify an asteroid with a more interesting composition.
Posting to undo accidental mod
Why say this? Nature isn't intelligent, so can't define concepts like "right and wrong". However, it's not hard to propose a simple definition that applies to nature: a behavior is "right" if it's beneficial to the species' survival and prosperity, and "wrong" if harmful to the species. This may be somewhat different from some ethical philosophies, but not entirely incompatible. Human population density has increased significantly above that for which we evolved, and we no longer compete for food. This is a case of natural violent tendencies being "wrong", impeding the prosperity of the species. However, violence may be "right" for chimps that still compete for food.
I found myself willingly paying a $6/month subscription to a website (this surprised me quite a bit): nicovideo.jp. Their model is very interesting. You do not pay for content, but with subscription you get more bandwidth and generally smoother access to their content (video), as well as wiki editing ability, unlimited "mylists", time shifted "live broadcasts"... basically just better service and perks, but not more content. They also run the "related products" ads below the main content, but with a twist: all "related product" links are user-submitted. It's actually fun to browse those.
Yes, the paper handles the vacuum issue very badly (Sections II and IV contradict each other, and Figure 22 says "(In 750mm Air)"). However, convective air flow is unlikely to be the cause of the anomalous thrust. I would expect convection to have a slow time constant as objects heat up and cool down, but the thrust turns on and off quickly in the paper.
I would like to see more plausible causes of the anomalous thrust. Any new physics discovery is extremely unlikely here, but so far the proposed explanations have been lacking.
Ionization of air might be one such possibility. The very high-Q cavity with tens of watts of input power may reach electric fields strong enough to ionize the air inside the cavity. The ions/electrons/air would need to escape the cavity somehow to produce thrust.
There is another clue in the paper: In the lower right corner of Figure 22 it says "(In 750mm Air)". So at least the tapered cavity test article was not run in a vacuum. However, it is reasonable to read that that their earlier tests with a pillbox cavity were done in a vacuum. You'd have to agree that they were sloppy in specifying the exact conditions under which each test was performed. I'm looking forward to independent tests of this concept that are undoubtedly coming given the publicity this received.
Vacuum compatible RF amplifiers with power ranges of up to 125 watts will allow testing at vacuum conditions which was not possible using our current RF amplifiers due to the presence of electrolytic capacitors.
This makes it sound as if these tests were not conducted in vacuum after all...
I haven't seen this vacuum issue addressed by anyone after some searching. To me it seems premature to speculate about quantum vacuum effects when interactions with air seem very likely. Perhaps they planned to perform these experiments in a vacuum, but didn't quite get to that point when the abstract was due? At this point, they may have finished the vacuum version of these experiments, so may have some results to present. If someone does know, please pitch in.
Yeah, that paper should be rejected. The results are totally useless. I wonder how many people went "WTF?" upon reading "...within a stainless steel vacuum chamber with the door closed but at ambient atmospheric pressure."
Double-check your units. 0.4 kg will accelerate at 1e-4 m/s^2 under 40e-6 N of force. That's ~3000 m/s per year (3.15569e7 seconds in a year).
Can you point to good criticism of the Asteroid Redirect Mission? I can't think of a better way to kick-start in situ space resource utilization, which is what we need for sustained human presence in space. Perhaps you mean the manned portion of this mission? The redirection of an asteroid into a close orbit is a very good idea by itself. Of course, spacecraft sent to study this asteroid and try extracting resources from it should mostly be unmanned (and will be).