Wrong, the problem today is corruption and people accepting corruption as the normal.
Corruption, as in caring only about oneself and fuck everyone else, is a natural instinct. Unethical behavior is fair game if you can get away with it. The animal world works almost exclusively on this principle. Why is it any wonder that people accept corruption as normal?
We should be designing our society not based on the premise of moral players, but immoral ones. This is why Capitalism has been celebrated as such a success: It converts natural purely selfish behavior into benefit for the common good. Even sociopaths can be productive members of society! Hurray!
However, pure Capitalism tends to let a sizable percentage of the population just starve. So we tried to build a public institution that would help all the citizens achieve their full potential: a large, sophisticated government. Unfortunately, government work requires ethical conduct, and temptation to corruption is great. To achieve further progress, we need to place more checks on corruption wherever it can do the most damage. Right now the lack of oversight of the NSA, and their resulting unethical conduct, are generating news. The power of lobbyists is also going unchecked, and we have had some poor legislative outcomes that do not benefit the greater society because of this. Many politicians rely on corporate money to get elected, and so legislate favorably to the corporations, not the general public. These are definitely problems that needs addressing. However, no one is suggesting that what they are doing is unnatural or unexpected. Corruption is very natural.
Could we discuss this issue instead: Is it better to allocate your donations yourself, or to simply give it to the public (government) and let the public decide? What makes one think that they are better qualified to allocate public spending than elected representatives? (Yeah, you can make the argument that it's my money, I decide how to spend it. But, you already decided to donate it to public causes....)
I'm of the opinion that the fall of the USSR has hurt not just its former citizens, but just about everyone in the world. The loss of ideological competition has opened up the flood gates of corruption in western democracies. The loss of military competition has slowed our scientific progress significantly. Economy-wise we seem to be headed towards something resembling feudalism. How exactly we will dig ourselves out of this I don't know.
Here's an interesting visualization of a possible early evolution of the solar system. It's a bit surprising just how sudden the late heavy bombardment event was.
Admittedly, that's an observation of the situation in my own field: electrical engineering. The attitude of most professors is pretty horrible: They will basically laugh at you if you try to publish in a non-reputable journal, be it open access or not. I never said any of this was good or desirable. It's just an obstacle these journals face. It's good to see that in some science fields open access is slowly becoming the norm. These people deserve lots of respect for this achievement. Lets hope this success snowballs. It's just hard for me to imagine the IEEE journals and conference proceedings being replaced... maybe they will open up access.
Open-access journals and scientific wikis are failing because researchers have no strong motivation to publish there. The cost of access is not an issue to the researchers themselves. Prestige is a huge issue.
Batteries are not likely to ever be cost competitive to pumped hydro for grid-scale energy storage. Although the initial capital costs can be similar (if we can get enough lead for multi-GWh battery banks), the overall operating cost over a >60 yeah life span is so much in favor of pumped hydro, it's not even a contest. I think it might be worthwhile to invest more into pumped hydro technology, for example to find economical ways of reducing land use for a given storage capacity. There's a somewhat interesting proposal to build high energy density per area storage shafts on flat terrain. People are also experimenting with compressed air storage, which has similar economics to pumped hydro, but the tech is not quite as simple and mature.
It puzzles me why the Germans would promote household-level battery storage as the solution. Perhaps their terrain is too flat for hydro or compressed air storage? Even if batteries are really the only choice, grid-scale batteries using specialized technology would still be way cheaper.
Posts like this are what makes Slashdot worth reading. I wonder if that kind of stuff goes on in the US. It's all too easy for a secretive intelligence agency to slide down the slope of unchecked corruption into a mafia-like organization.
I would guess every person of Russian origin was a suspected spy. Granted, Isaac Asimov left Russia when he was 3. Even so, it may be possible to coerce someone like this into spying, for example by threatening some of his relatives still in Russia (if he had any). Using his Sci Fi work as some sort of evidence is far fetched, but the suspicions less so. One does not need to sympathize with the communist regime in order to spy.
Don't look at Itanium in a completely bad light. It was a good microprocessor architecture experiment, and had the right motivations (break free of the x86 legacy cruft, design a truly scalable architecture). A lot of useful technology was developed along the way. This technology will be incorporated into future chips. Intel is rare among large technology companies to actually take huge long-term risks, and even survive failure. We need more high-risk projects like this to develop truly breakthrough technology.
I'm also curious what an actual expert thinks. I think both nuclear and renewables need a good energy storage solution to reach their full potential. Currently pumped hydro is looking the most promising. Is it worth investing more into this technology, for example to make it take up less land for reservoirs? Are the people advocating nuclear and renewables also advocating storage technology?
I kind of see the point the article is making. It is not actually impossible to use all renewables for energy, but it is land intensive and more expensive than necessary. We do something else that is land intensive: farming.
Unlike farming, energy generation can be done at a high density using nuclear power. That is really economically advantageous and hard to ignore. I think it makes sense to pursue three broad energy technology categories: (1) nuclear, (2) solar & wind, (3) storage, like pumped hydro. Nuclear would be used for reliable constant energy supply. Solar (mostly residential PV and desert solar farms) & wind would generate cheap extra energy that would mostly be used by customers that can time their energy use to when it is most abundant. Pumped storage would be used to buy energy during low demand and sell it back during high demand in the 24-hour cycle, absorbing some of the energy from renewables and allowing nuclear to operate at full capacity 24/7. To account for seasonal and weather related variation, extra generation capacity will be installed. For the even rarer cases of capacity shortfall, chemical fueled (most likely methane) power stations would come online.
These technologies should allow us to economically stop using fossil fuels for energy. The only missing piece is how to power vehicles: batteries? synthesized fuel (from CO2 and water)?
I'm cautiously optimistic that hypersonic flight will eventually make it to passenger airlines. It would be really nice to travel to Japan or Australia in 3 hours instead of 15. There are enough oceans over which to fly without worrying about the sonic boom. Reaction Engines is working on an interesting hypersonic engine prototype. That one looks even better than this military scramjet: higher thrust-to-weight ratio and ability to function as a rocket engine. This engine would enable travel by ballistic trajectory.. even faster and way cooler. People would pay crazy money just to ride it for the thrill of it. Maybe these are just dreams.
It's not immoral to be against slavery. Freeing the slaves dramatically improves their lives in the long term. Taking the slaves (property) away from the slave owners punishes the morally corrupt (the slave owners would not want to be slaves themselves). Is there really a moral problem here? The only issue is what happens to the freed slaves in the short term. They suffer because they have no possessions or the necessary skills to integrate into the existing society. This short term - long term tradeoff is pretty common in moral decisions.
Snowden's thinking was more complicated than this. He also considered the harm his actions will cause to innocent bystanders and to himself, obviously.
It's kind of similar to the reasoning of revolutionaries: do we break a brutal regime and start a civil war that will result in many innocent casualties, or do we continue to obey the current regime? How do you apply your simple rule here? Most of the more difficult moral decision arise when confronting the morally unjust people that hold a lot of power. These people won't go away just by wishing that everyone obey one simple moral rule.
You might be right. What I was referring to might not be "morality," but more closely related to "ethics." The definitions for these are not strict. Some examples of why treating everyone like you want yourself to be treated is a bit iffy:
Some people like questionable things. It's not a good idea to treat others as if they like the same things.
There are difficult moral choices where harming someone is actually beneficial to society at large. Snowden's leaks are an example, but there are far more extreme examples like wars. Whose shoes do you place yourself in to make this decision? Considering the greater society is inevitable.
It is a feasable theory to say that our planetary system is unusually loose, however, until we have more data on more systems, its impossible to say.
Actually, the Kepler mission has collected quite a bit of data. Even though Kepler is more likely to detect planets closer in to their star and larger in size, the probability of detection can be estimated. We can then divide the observed planet frequency by the probability of detection and estimate the actual statistics of planetary occurrence. I tried to find a good paper or article on this. Here is one from 2012. According to this, the solar system is indeed very loose compared to most.
The main issue may not be private-owned for-profit vs. government-owned non-profit utilities, but the safety vs. cost tradeoff. We are already operating in a tricky middle ground where the cost is already quite high (other energy sources are already cheaper, at least in the short term), but safety is still somewhat lacking (accidents, like Fukushima, still happen). The best way to solve this problem is probably with new nuclear technology development. Safer and cheaper nuclear reactors should be possible.
Has AMD only cut the budget for CPU R&D and not GPUs? That might be a strategic decision, betting that x86 is a dead-end technology and GPUs are the future. It's plausible that more and more computing (not just graphics) will shift to the GPU in the future, and a (standardized?) compute-capable GPU will become a required part of the PC platform.
I think the nature of light has everything to do with our perception of time. According to this story, we perceive time by being entangled with the universe. The main way we interact with the universe is through the electromagnetic force, or basically through photons. We should be approaching your question from the point of view of the light itself and then deriving what it means for a massive object to "move." If time is emergent, then motion is also an emergent concept. The photon's wavefunction might be the fundamental concept here. I'm not a physicist, so can't take this train of thought further..
My experience with the Galaxy S3 has been that the RF transmitter ("cell standby") is what runs down the battery when not using the phone. The cell standby power varies tremendously with the quality of the cell signal. Sometimes it's bad enough that the phone noticeably heats up and the battery empties in 3 hours (this often happens at my house when I forget to plug the phone into the charger). If I place the phone in airplane mode, it the battery lasts seemingly forever. This must be just crappy RF subsystem design.
We're already using your model for the vast majority of research, so it hardly qualifies as a "better model." If that were sufficient, there would be no need for discussion. What I imagine the OP is asking for is a better model to finance research with a very far-away goal and a poorly understood path to it. Should we continue projects like the LHC, ITER, JWST? What is a better way to get funding for things like this? Something like the JWST does not have a clear economic goal. However, it is still heavily optimized to produce the best science possible for the money. A lot of wrangling goes on over it's funding. I'm fairly sure a lot of people consider this project poorly managed, or "unaccountable" in your words. This is a complex topic. Projects like this are becoming less and less likely in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong, the problem today is corruption and people accepting corruption as the normal.
Corruption, as in caring only about oneself and fuck everyone else, is a natural instinct. Unethical behavior is fair game if you can get away with it. The animal world works almost exclusively on this principle. Why is it any wonder that people accept corruption as normal?
We should be designing our society not based on the premise of moral players, but immoral ones. This is why Capitalism has been celebrated as such a success: It converts natural purely selfish behavior into benefit for the common good. Even sociopaths can be productive members of society! Hurray!
However, pure Capitalism tends to let a sizable percentage of the population just starve. So we tried to build a public institution that would help all the citizens achieve their full potential: a large, sophisticated government. Unfortunately, government work requires ethical conduct, and temptation to corruption is great. To achieve further progress, we need to place more checks on corruption wherever it can do the most damage. Right now the lack of oversight of the NSA, and their resulting unethical conduct, are generating news. The power of lobbyists is also going unchecked, and we have had some poor legislative outcomes that do not benefit the greater society because of this. Many politicians rely on corporate money to get elected, and so legislate favorably to the corporations, not the general public. These are definitely problems that needs addressing. However, no one is suggesting that what they are doing is unnatural or unexpected. Corruption is very natural.
Could we discuss this issue instead: Is it better to allocate your donations yourself, or to simply give it to the public (government) and let the public decide? What makes one think that they are better qualified to allocate public spending than elected representatives? (Yeah, you can make the argument that it's my money, I decide how to spend it. But, you already decided to donate it to public causes....)
I'm of the opinion that the fall of the USSR has hurt not just its former citizens, but just about everyone in the world. The loss of ideological competition has opened up the flood gates of corruption in western democracies. The loss of military competition has slowed our scientific progress significantly. Economy-wise we seem to be headed towards something resembling feudalism. How exactly we will dig ourselves out of this I don't know.
Here's an interesting visualization of a possible early evolution of the solar system. It's a bit surprising just how sudden the late heavy bombardment event was.
Admittedly, that's an observation of the situation in my own field: electrical engineering. The attitude of most professors is pretty horrible: They will basically laugh at you if you try to publish in a non-reputable journal, be it open access or not. I never said any of this was good or desirable. It's just an obstacle these journals face. It's good to see that in some science fields open access is slowly becoming the norm. These people deserve lots of respect for this achievement. Lets hope this success snowballs. It's just hard for me to imagine the IEEE journals and conference proceedings being replaced... maybe they will open up access.
Open-access journals and scientific wikis are failing because researchers have no strong motivation to publish there. The cost of access is not an issue to the researchers themselves. Prestige is a huge issue.
Batteries are not likely to ever be cost competitive to pumped hydro for grid-scale energy storage. Although the initial capital costs can be similar (if we can get enough lead for multi-GWh battery banks), the overall operating cost over a >60 yeah life span is so much in favor of pumped hydro, it's not even a contest. I think it might be worthwhile to invest more into pumped hydro technology, for example to find economical ways of reducing land use for a given storage capacity. There's a somewhat interesting proposal to build high energy density per area storage shafts on flat terrain. People are also experimenting with compressed air storage, which has similar economics to pumped hydro, but the tech is not quite as simple and mature.
It puzzles me why the Germans would promote household-level battery storage as the solution. Perhaps their terrain is too flat for hydro or compressed air storage? Even if batteries are really the only choice, grid-scale batteries using specialized technology would still be way cheaper.
Posts like this are what makes Slashdot worth reading. I wonder if that kind of stuff goes on in the US. It's all too easy for a secretive intelligence agency to slide down the slope of unchecked corruption into a mafia-like organization.
I would guess every person of Russian origin was a suspected spy. Granted, Isaac Asimov left Russia when he was 3. Even so, it may be possible to coerce someone like this into spying, for example by threatening some of his relatives still in Russia (if he had any). Using his Sci Fi work as some sort of evidence is far fetched, but the suspicions less so. One does not need to sympathize with the communist regime in order to spy.
Don't look at Itanium in a completely bad light. It was a good microprocessor architecture experiment, and had the right motivations (break free of the x86 legacy cruft, design a truly scalable architecture). A lot of useful technology was developed along the way. This technology will be incorporated into future chips. Intel is rare among large technology companies to actually take huge long-term risks, and even survive failure. We need more high-risk projects like this to develop truly breakthrough technology.
I'm also curious what an actual expert thinks. I think both nuclear and renewables need a good energy storage solution to reach their full potential. Currently pumped hydro is looking the most promising. Is it worth investing more into this technology, for example to make it take up less land for reservoirs? Are the people advocating nuclear and renewables also advocating storage technology?
I kind of see the point the article is making. It is not actually impossible to use all renewables for energy, but it is land intensive and more expensive than necessary. We do something else that is land intensive: farming.
Unlike farming, energy generation can be done at a high density using nuclear power. That is really economically advantageous and hard to ignore. I think it makes sense to pursue three broad energy technology categories: (1) nuclear, (2) solar & wind, (3) storage, like pumped hydro. Nuclear would be used for reliable constant energy supply. Solar (mostly residential PV and desert solar farms) & wind would generate cheap extra energy that would mostly be used by customers that can time their energy use to when it is most abundant. Pumped storage would be used to buy energy during low demand and sell it back during high demand in the 24-hour cycle, absorbing some of the energy from renewables and allowing nuclear to operate at full capacity 24/7. To account for seasonal and weather related variation, extra generation capacity will be installed. For the even rarer cases of capacity shortfall, chemical fueled (most likely methane) power stations would come online.
These technologies should allow us to economically stop using fossil fuels for energy. The only missing piece is how to power vehicles: batteries? synthesized fuel (from CO2 and water)?
I'm cautiously optimistic that hypersonic flight will eventually make it to passenger airlines. It would be really nice to travel to Japan or Australia in 3 hours instead of 15. There are enough oceans over which to fly without worrying about the sonic boom. Reaction Engines is working on an interesting hypersonic engine prototype. That one looks even better than this military scramjet: higher thrust-to-weight ratio and ability to function as a rocket engine. This engine would enable travel by ballistic trajectory .. even faster and way cooler. People would pay crazy money just to ride it for the thrill of it. Maybe these are just dreams.
It's not immoral to be against slavery. Freeing the slaves dramatically improves their lives in the long term. Taking the slaves (property) away from the slave owners punishes the morally corrupt (the slave owners would not want to be slaves themselves). Is there really a moral problem here? The only issue is what happens to the freed slaves in the short term. They suffer because they have no possessions or the necessary skills to integrate into the existing society. This short term - long term tradeoff is pretty common in moral decisions.
Snowden's thinking was more complicated than this. He also considered the harm his actions will cause to innocent bystanders and to himself, obviously.
It's kind of similar to the reasoning of revolutionaries: do we break a brutal regime and start a civil war that will result in many innocent casualties, or do we continue to obey the current regime? How do you apply your simple rule here? Most of the more difficult moral decision arise when confronting the morally unjust people that hold a lot of power. These people won't go away just by wishing that everyone obey one simple moral rule.
You might be right. What I was referring to might not be "morality," but more closely related to "ethics." The definitions for these are not strict. Some examples of why treating everyone like you want yourself to be treated is a bit iffy:
Some people like questionable things. It's not a good idea to treat others as if they like the same things.
There are difficult moral choices where harming someone is actually beneficial to society at large. Snowden's leaks are an example, but there are far more extreme examples like wars. Whose shoes do you place yourself in to make this decision? Considering the greater society is inevitable.
Remember one rule: treat every other person the way you want to be treated.
Slight correction: Act in a way that is not harmful to the rest of society.
This requires a bit more consideration, but summarizes most of morality more accurately in my opinion.
It is a feasable theory to say that our planetary system is unusually loose, however, until we have more data on more systems, its impossible to say.
Actually, the Kepler mission has collected quite a bit of data. Even though Kepler is more likely to detect planets closer in to their star and larger in size, the probability of detection can be estimated. We can then divide the observed planet frequency by the probability of detection and estimate the actual statistics of planetary occurrence. I tried to find a good paper or article on this. Here is one from 2012. According to this, the solar system is indeed very loose compared to most.
The only difference being lack of vendor lock-in.
This is something I'm curious about: Does Chrome send tracking data to Google? Does Firefox? Google is the main sponsor of Firefox after all..
The main issue may not be private-owned for-profit vs. government-owned non-profit utilities, but the safety vs. cost tradeoff. We are already operating in a tricky middle ground where the cost is already quite high (other energy sources are already cheaper, at least in the short term), but safety is still somewhat lacking (accidents, like Fukushima, still happen). The best way to solve this problem is probably with new nuclear technology development. Safer and cheaper nuclear reactors should be possible.
Has AMD only cut the budget for CPU R&D and not GPUs? That might be a strategic decision, betting that x86 is a dead-end technology and GPUs are the future. It's plausible that more and more computing (not just graphics) will shift to the GPU in the future, and a (standardized?) compute-capable GPU will become a required part of the PC platform.
I think the nature of light has everything to do with our perception of time. According to this story, we perceive time by being entangled with the universe. The main way we interact with the universe is through the electromagnetic force, or basically through photons. We should be approaching your question from the point of view of the light itself and then deriving what it means for a massive object to "move." If time is emergent, then motion is also an emergent concept. The photon's wavefunction might be the fundamental concept here. I'm not a physicist, so can't take this train of thought further..
My experience with the Galaxy S3 has been that the RF transmitter ("cell standby") is what runs down the battery when not using the phone. The cell standby power varies tremendously with the quality of the cell signal. Sometimes it's bad enough that the phone noticeably heats up and the battery empties in 3 hours (this often happens at my house when I forget to plug the phone into the charger). If I place the phone in airplane mode, it the battery lasts seemingly forever. This must be just crappy RF subsystem design.
We're already using your model for the vast majority of research, so it hardly qualifies as a "better model." If that were sufficient, there would be no need for discussion. What I imagine the OP is asking for is a better model to finance research with a very far-away goal and a poorly understood path to it. Should we continue projects like the LHC, ITER, JWST? What is a better way to get funding for things like this? Something like the JWST does not have a clear economic goal. However, it is still heavily optimized to produce the best science possible for the money. A lot of wrangling goes on over it's funding. I'm fairly sure a lot of people consider this project poorly managed, or "unaccountable" in your words. This is a complex topic. Projects like this are becoming less and less likely in the future.