The Nanny state has run amok. I think even sadder is that the hacker crowd at Slashdot even a decade ago would have reacted with a collective, "Cool, let's give this a try and see how it works and how we can make it better", rather than with a zillion arguments about how an obviously versatile technology must be banned under the force of law.
We sure have a lot of totalitarians of fascist and other stripes here these days.
In almost all cases, technology is morally neutral - nukes, biotech, radio waves, and gunpowder can all be either murderous and evil or protective and supportive - it depends entirely on the *way* they're used. Laws attempting to force a particular outcome are generally doomed to fail, because people are smarter than their lawmakers and will do what makes sense in their particular situation, which they invariably recognize far better than their lawmakers. (Nobel winner Milton Friedman even went so far as to argue (quite persuasively, I might add) against intrusive government programs such as professional licensing, even for doctors. In today's world of frictionless information, there really is much less call for overly controlling laws.)
Wow, Slashdot sure is full of hand-wringing politically correct armchair lawyers these days!
Seriously guys, HUDs are not new and they are quite likely the least intrusive way to present information to driver (or even front seat passengers wanting to avoid motion sickness, for that matter).
Quite a few cars have had a HUD option from the factory - heck, some GM cars (Pontiacs mostly, but not exclusively) had factory HUD options more than 20 years ago.
Nearly 100 years ago, the same kinds of busybodies were trying to outlaw radios in cars, since that was "obviously" a distraction for the driver. News flash - the vast majority of the time, people (yep, even the ones that don't live in your hipster high-rise) are more than capable of enough multitasking to deal with both driving and another task. A good HUD would be far *safer* than today's method of navigating from a phone screen, since everyone has a phone and built-in GPS nav systems suck, add thousands to the cost of a car, and have a technology lifespan even shorter than a lawyer's lease term...
Seconding the Soekris approach. I have a couple of networks that have been running on the old net48xx series boxes for more than a decade. These things are flat bulletproof. Since I'm using them strictly as firewalls, and they still route at speeds much higher than the internet connections that feed them, even these older boxes are fine. (As recommended by others here, wireless is a separate router in bridge mode, since wireless standards change every few years and I don't rely on the wireless router's security other than for WPA2 itself - which is now pretty easy to bypass if you know the right things...)
Kris Sorensen builds some good stuff. Do yourself a favor and at least check out Soekris before you decide to buy anything else...
So, just wondering, does this mean we eliminate just the DEA, or the FDA, too? (The FDA is in actuality far worse in terms of arbitrarily restricting things for any reason or no reason.)
The most interesting questions aren't along the lines of "What happens when heroin, cocaine, etc. are legal?", but more along the lines of these:
What happens if Viagra and Cialis are now freely available? (Why on earth should they still require a Rx if heroin doesn't, for cryin' out loud? Can't the users see four hours on a clock?)
Does this mean that hemp can finally be cultivated in the US as a valuable natural fiber again? (Personally, I couldn't care less if dope is illegal, but making hemp illegal is just stupid - it's a killer natural fiber with amazing properties, grows like mad, and is dirt cheap.)
More importantly, will this finally allow the sale of unadulterated milk (raw milk and cheeses)? While poor sanitation can produce a risk of tuberculosis, any kind of reasonable cleanliness standards reduce that risk FAR below that of smoking marijauna, even assuming no one will ever drive, boat, or operate heavy equipment while stoned...
The world would indeed be upside-down if heroin is legal and raw milk isn't!
Only a fool "trusts the Internet" - especially Wikipedia.
It's funny, the other day, I was hanging out with a group that included several pretty top-level IT and networking folks, including some leading CS academics. Not one of us uses internet banking, or allows access of any kind to any of our financial accounts over the net. On the rare occasions that companies force the use of the Internet, the general response is to enable access only long enough to do the job, then destroy the Inet access account (best), disable net access (2nd best), or set the password to random gibberish that even we don't know or keep a record of. This forces a long, manual process to "reenable" the acccount that cannot as easily be done by an impostor. None of us "trust" the Internet, I guess.
That was a real eye-opener for some of the younger "Internet-savvy" group, who all of a sudden realized that maybe they were opening themselves up far more than they realized, especially in a world where every WiFi network, even with WPA2, is now as open as the one at Starbucks...
Actually, there's probably more money and effort focused on trying to build grid storage than there ought to be, given that there's really no technology known that's capable of doing the job in a generally viable way. There's a name for that: WOMBAT - Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.
(Not saying we shouldn't be looking at all, but realistically, grid-scale storage requires technologies we simply don't have, and largely, can't yet even envision or propose. We're a smart society with a few centuries of intense technology and engineering development under our belts, and there is no known viable solution to this problem. If there was, then billions, or even trillions, of dollars would be flowing into it. This isn't like most hard problems, which can be solved by throwing enough effort and money at them - we really just don't know how to do this!
For all its faults, Hydrogen may be the best of the bad options - but the most (only?) economically viable source of hydrogen at large scales today is natural gas. Both environmentally and from an energy loss point of view, you're better off just burning the natural gas (our cleanest fuel in the first place) than taking the hit converting it to H2. Any effort to split water will result in H2 that is *much* more expensive than making it from natural gas, especially given the benefits of the fracking revolution - water is an *extremely* stable molecule...
Yeah, sounds simple, right? Just store it! First, even the best solar systems today are not economically viable without huge government subsidies unless you live on an island and have to ship your fuel in, so really, you're upside down before you've spent a dime on storage.
Secondly, with any known and viable technology storage is *really*, *REALLY* expensive on a grid scale. For all practical purposes, it's fair to say that there is NO known way to do it in most locations. (The dangers of gas-pressurized reservoirs may well be orders of magnitude higher than fracking at its worst, and very few places have geography that allow pumped hydro to be even marginally cost-effective.) Batteries, supercaps, and the like still need another couple of orders of magnitude price/performance improvement to be viable.
Do the math, and you'll see that storage isn't even an option - the solar plant is barely viable even with subsidies (here in Texas, with cheap and readily available natural gas, solar costs 4-5 times as much per KWH, according to EIA's LCOE figures). Add in any kind of grid-scale storage at all, and the costs soar through the stratosphere, especially since most storage technologies have relatively short economic lives.
So yes, paying someone to take the power is actually the cheapest thing to do - not only in Germany, but many nights here in the US with wind power, too. There's just more capacity than demand, and since it costs the power companies to deal with that, they justifiably want to get paid to offset the costs and inefficiencies of having to shut down and spin up their conventional plants.
I don't have any mod points, and have posted on this thread anyway, but LISTEN TO THIS GUY (brambus).
Unlike most of the armchair experts here, brambus is explaining *exactly* why the German grid is broken and why it will eventually fail - at this point, I think the only questions are "When?", and, "How bad?" The tariffs that led to all this investment in solar et al are completely unsustainable over the long haul, and everyone has known that all along, but like the actual climate record, it didn't fit with the narrative and had to be ignored.
If Germany is really lucky, they'll get by with some scary but not-totally-grid-meltdown failures that might finally kick some sense into the Greens and others who think they can legislate reality based on wishcraft...
It's sad, but they're going to have to learn what I taught my kids: You are free to choose your actions, but you are NOT free to choose the consequences of your actions...
Sunk costs arent free, nor are the panels when you have to replace them in 30 years.
And 30 years is best-case. In the real world, the output of quality solar panels at around 25 years will only be about 20% of their nameplate rating. That last 5 years is really just trying to eke out enough additional energy production to get positive over the entire life of the array.
Although tight, the economics are workable with good quality panels. Unfortunately, the crappy Chinese panels that now dominate the market are starting to show significant failures (backing delamination, which results in water ingress, destruction of the panel, and leaching of heavy metals into the environment) even BEFORE 10 YEARS. If that happens, you will NEVER, EVER break even on your solar plant.
Nobody mandated solar, people just decided it would work and be profitable. Germany got a lot of wind power built as well, but apparently solar also works well enough to be worth the investment.
Germany's problems are entirely of its own making - the government wrote laws that required the power companies to pay solar generators at rates that are often over 3X the going rate for electricity. Not surprisingly, a LOT of people took them up on that deal. This works sort-of-OK until a big squall line blows over and you lose a hundred megawatts in a few minutes (it's worse than that really, since sites that were exporting power to the grid now need to become consumers, so demand increases simultaneously even faster than the loss of supply!)
Germany is now the global poster child for grid instability, and I suspect they'll get bitten hard before too long - you can't keep up that balancing act forever, especially with declining spinning reserves, and no incentives for power companies to keep them at the ready. In the very near future, if Russia pulls the plug on natural gas at the same time as a major storm front, all of Germany will go black...
Depends on location, usage, and interest rates... In many locations (deserts, mostly), consumer rooftop PV solar absolutely is cheaper than buying grid power, after less than 20 years, without even counting the subsidizes.
Not really. I've been working in the solar industry the last five or six years, and the short answer is that solar only makes sense without subsidies in places where you simply can't get energy from other sources - mostly islands or other areas where there are no fossil fuel resources nearby.
But then again, coal, nuclear, and natural gas get many subsidizes of their own, so it's not a fair comparison.
Again, that's not really true - depending on whose numbers you use, solar and other renewables are subsidized at a rate that is at least 25 to 50 TIMES that of any other energy source (including nuclear) on a per unit energy basis (which is really the only sensible way to even attempt a subsidy comparison.)
From a WSJ editorial based on the US govt's EIA figures (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324432404579051123500813210):
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated in 2010 that fossil-fuel subsidies amounted to $4 billion a year.... Renewable sources received more than triple that figure, roughly $14 billion. That doesn’t include $2.5 billion for nuclear energy.
Actual spending skews even more toward green energy than it seems. Since wind turbines and other renewable sources produce much less energy than fossil fuels, the U.S. is paying more for less. Coal-powered electricity is subsidized at about 5% of one cent for every kilowatt-hour produced, while wind power gets about a nickel per kwh. For solar power, it costs the taxpayer 77 cents per kwh. (Emphasis mine)
Don't get me wrong - I'm not opposed to solar, in fact, I favor it - but the fact is that solar and other renewables are not economically viable without subsidies. This is why the Original article is important - Germany has subsidized solar to the point that it's now a sizable portion of the German power grid. Unfortunately, renewables are NOT a replacement for power plants, since they literally only work at the whims of the weather. That means you still have to keep enough power plants in operation to meet peak demand. Therefore, letting the gluts determine prices is folly (this is why West Texas wind energy actually often has a *negative* price - you literally have to pay the grid to take it at night.)
Here in Austin, bicycle travel is subsidized to ridiculous degrees - new bicycle lanes are reducing 4-lane roads to two-lane all over town in a blatant and brazen attempt to botch traffic so badly that voters will finally approve the light rail boondoggle the city council has been drooling over for decades.
The ONLY thing mass transit does well is offer exceptional opportunities for graft, cronyism, and corruption.
Sorry, they are rarely if ever a public good - building roads is almost always far better and more efficient than another multibillion dollar mass transit boondoggle.
The only thing mass transit (especially "urban rail") excels at is creating the perfect environment for increasingly large-scale graft and corruption.
Although there may be one somewhere, I'm not aware of any mass transit system that breaks even on fares, nor am I aware of one whose cost even had the same number of zeroes promised when hoodwinking the voters into paying for it - Cost overruns of 10-100X are *ordinary* for mass transit projects, with powered train cars now costing more than F-16s!
Since mass transit systems never wind up being able to pay for themselves, mass transit is really just a taxpayer-funded subsidy for those who benefit from ridiculously dense, family-hostile, and outrageously expensive real estate and development.
Mass transit is one of the very best reasons to hate what most large cities have become. The cities without much in the way of mass transit are inevitably safer and more livable, and have much more positive and healthier mental attitudes. And yes, this is one of the few things that can destroy the dynamism even of cities like Austin...
Why is is that every successive generation is forced to re-learn the truth about the way people work? Even before I had any gray hair, I always sought to work on teams with widely mixed ages - as a young guy who thought he knew everything, I at least had a *chance* to short cut some painful and expensive lessons because the older, more experienced guys were usually more than happy to share their wisdom.
As was pointed out above, there is truly nothing new under the sun. (Seriously - even if you have zero inclination towards Judaism or Christanity, you really must read the Book of Proverbs sometime, just to be culturally literate and understand where so many of these phrases and sayings actually came from - it's a book of 31 short chapters, so one a day will knock it out in a month. My guess is you'll want to start over then, but YMMV...)
Today I intentionally build teams with a mix of ages, as it's by far the most important kind of diversity. (Yes, I know that's a very non-PC thing to say. Get over it.)
BTW, if you're looking for a more modern writing dealing with the issue, there is no better book than Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, which should be required reading for *anyone* working on, with, or around any software project, anywhere, ever.
Russian stuff varied a lot in practice, but some of it was actually brilliantly simple. Like Rutan's brilliant simplification of landing gear for a flying spaceship, some Russian designs wind up being better sinply becasue they *avoid* the problem rather than trying to solve it head-on.
Two examples I saw when working at NASA JSC in the 90's:
1) The Russians used a simple low pressure cooling system for their space stations and the original design of their ISS modules. This allowed them to easily use freeze-proof, but toxic coolants - since they operated below cabin pressure, if there was a leak, it was air into the coolant, not the other way around. The US approach used pressurized coolant, was insanely complicated by comparison, and *still* had the potential to freeze solid.
2) US spacesuit gloves are ridiculously complicated structures with many layers and exotic materials and parts laboriously assembled to make sure that they won't leak, or if they do, they'll self-seal, etc. so that a glove rip (a likely point of damage) won't lead to loss of suit pressure. Maintaining any dexterity in the glove while doing this is an obvious challenge with the many redundant layers. The Russians, on the other hand, use something more like a thick rubber glove (modified to avoid inflation effects), and a simple inflatable cuff that seals off around the astronaut's wrist in case of a leak - turns out that a full vacuum in the glove will blow a bunch of capillaries in your hand, turning it red for a week, but you'll be fine the week after. This gives a glove with more dexterity, at a cost that's only a tiny fraction of a US spacesuit glove...
I can't think of a single good technology that originated at Sun
ZFS, dtrace ?
Yep, those two, and how about network file sharing in general, including the various versions of the NFS protocol, and the YP/NIS/NIS+ systems that provided (for their day, anyway) secure and scalable directory services and access control?
How about bringing the best of both the Berkeley and AT&T System V Unix worlds together, with the guidance of the author of BSD, one of the most brilliant computer guys ever?
How about the first 64-bit hardware and OS that didn't require you to completely rewrite your apps and libraries to take advantage of that great new hardware? How about compilers from a computer manufacturer that actually didn't completely suck?
How about the open source graphical user environment (OpenWindows) that in the early days of Linux, finally gave it a GUI that didn't suck, and arguably transformed it from a schoolboy's neat hack into an alternative OS that could grow to run a fair fraction of the world's computers?
How about the very concept of corporate-sponsored, open source software in the first place? (Not just trivial fluffy stuff, but the actual guts of the system and services that run the computer and the network, including several mentioned above, eventually extending to things like OpenSolaris, Spring, and OpenStep.)
How about supporting networking and networked apps from the very beginning? - How about realizing that "The network *IS* the computer"? How about being one of the very first to adopt and support new high-performance networks? (3Mbps ->10Mbps Ethernet, FDDI, built-in 100 Mbps Ethernet, ATM, FibreChannel, etc.)
How about the first reasonably priced, small, scalable, lighting-fast storage array, with hot-swappable disks and compatible with the expensive industry-standard volume and disk management software, but also usable with free/inexpensive Sun "Solstice" alternatives?
And then, of course, there's Java itself. I'm not a huge Java fan these days, given the rise of things trying to do its job better, but there's no question Java is solid and runs important chunks of the world, and is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of object-oriented programming, which was previously a niche thing for the Smalltalk and LISP guys.
Oh, I almost forgot...
How about mice that required you to not twist their mirrored mousepads? (yeah, I know, SGI used those, too...) How about the ridiculously goofy and expensive 13W3 video connectors and cables? How about the rackmount Ultra servers that destroyed the CD tray if you ejected a CD with the door closed? How about computers that really *were* the size and shape of a Pizza Box, but were strong enough support an 80-lb 24-in HDTV monitor on top?
Like they say about people telling Woodstock stories, you obviously weren't there...
I was at Sun doing market development in the healthcare and petroleum "verticals" when Java came out. I'm telling you, the interest was staggering. I once spoke on Java at a local JUNIOR college weekend CS/Internet interest forum to nearly a THOUSAND people, including top IT staff from NASA and all the major oil companies. I just broke the awesome oceangoing coffee mug they gave me about a year ago.
I can tell you that although we all realized Java was a good implementation of some great ideas, we were pretty much taken aback with the Java frenzy that ensued, and quickly moved to leverage it for all it was worth. (With a couple of decades in the rearview mirror, it's easy to forget how revolutionary Java really was at the time, and how hungry the world was for what it offered - namely the most open cross-platform platform and programming environment anyone had ever seen. It didn't hurt that the Java wave lined up really nicely with the 64-bit UltraSPARC architecture's amazing price/performance.)
It worked - Java was HUGE for both reestablishing Sun as a power player in technical and scientific computing, but also breaking into other lucrative markets we'd been frozen out of, including finance and healthcare - Before Java, Data General had far better name recognition than Sun - I literally met with a BIG heatlhcare CTO who's first question was, "So you're with Sun OIL?" He didn't even know there was a computer company called Sun. Shortly after, he was leading a transition to Sun hardware and software across his entire company. We got him hooked up with the right talent to integrate several critical Java-based products and he saved millions the first year, even after all the switching costs.
Trust me, we could have sold Java seats, no problem, although being free certainly helped its popularity and stood out from other "enterprise-capable" languages. The big mistake was when the programmers took over and turned a great system focused on cross-platform results and networked computing into something that tried in vain to check every box on the academic CS geeks' wet dream list, and the simple but vital stuff (like say, nailing down a single place where one could expect to FIND a JVM/JRE of a particular version on any given OS platform, to name one example of thousands) fell by the wayside.
Sadly, Java's never really recovered from the bloat it acquired in trying to be everything to everyone, but it did blaze the pathway for others, including what we called "Java with semicolons": the JavaScript that rules the web now and for the foreseeable future...
Sun was an amazing company with amazing people doing amazingly innovative things (NFS, YP/NIS/NIS+, Java, same binary desktop-to-supercomputer with transparent 64-bit support (compare Sun's 64-bit transition to IBM/HP/DEC's 64-bit cluster foxtrots - Sun's thinking here continues to fuel the current ARM revolution). There were some stinkers, but overall , we'd all be better off with Sun's innovation still pushing things forward. In a lot of ways, Sun was a better Apple than Apple when it came to "doing it right", especially back in the Java days, when we passed on actually buying Apple...
This is the really scary aspect of this decision, and it seems to be lost on most of the commenters here -
In order for Google (or any other provider of information services) to even putatively be *able* to delete all information they have regarding you, they first have to have all information about and relating to you tagged with your identity.
This effectively means they must (by law) keep an auditable log of everything you ever do on the net.
What could possibly go wrong with that? I'm telling you, Hitler and Stalin only dreamed of the power that big governments and big corporations will have to monitor, control, and even "disappear" us in the very near future...
BTW, all Amazon would have to do to get me onto their phone platform would be to build a modern WebOS phone (or something that works like it.) We still desperately need a platform that is really web-centric (web apps were first-class under WebOS - all of the "native" apps, including the dialer, were just web apps themselves that happened to be pre-loaded on the phone or tablet.)
That, and it really ticks me off to have brain damage on the iPhone that was elegantly fixed 20 years ago in PalmOS. (Including really easy stuff like week views for calendars and easy datetime stamping of notes entries...)
In several conversations recently among various tech, marketing, and entrepreneurial/business types here in Austin, there has been near universal agreement on the following really interesting points of perception:
1) Google used to be trusted, but definitely is not trusted anymore. They have blown their trust and probably can never earn it back. A surprising number of people who were comfortable "running their company" on Google until recently are now actively looking for other alternatives, as they are too dependent on Google, and now see a need to begin to move away at least partly, if not entirely. Not a single person in these discussions trusted Google to "not be evil" and misuse or sell their information if it's to Google's benefit to do so. Even here in Austin, where many of us would love the speed of Google Fiber, many were hesitant, fearing that this would give Google too much control and access. Android and Chrome are also impacted by their being fully in the Google fold.
2) Although Amazon actually has *more* (and more accurate/valid) data on each of us, they have not (to date, anyway) abused that in any substantial way. Everyone agrees that Amazon "could be really scary", but isn't, since they are only using our personal data on our own behalf, and that data (at least the personal data we care about) stays within Amazon's walls. Amazon has also proven to be a trustworthy partner on the AWS side of the fence, too, which has earned them the trust of the tech guys. The general opinion of Amazon is that "they 'get' making things easy". Amazon's customers are wary, but trusting, so far. The fact that they do trust Amazon made several of them wish for an Amazon alternative to iOS and Android on both phone and tablets. Although they would like to see it, there is little expectation that Amazon will do general-purpose phones or tablets well enough to be viable competition.
3) Microsoft is now more trusted than Google. This is staggering. At the same time, I have only have slight qualms about putting information into OneNote that I absolutely would not want or trust Google to have. The CEOs of two marketing firms that had been on the road to being Chromebook shops are in the now hedging with a transition to Microsoft Surface instead.
4) Apple is not trusted all that much, either, but convenience and superior product design and usability seem to be overriding those concerns. There is a small (but much larger than I expected) portion of iOS device users that do not use iTunes and/or the AppStore except when they have to. iCloud, in particular, seems to be very untrusted, except by Mac users, who again seem to have a arrangement of convenience.
You can argue about whether or not these perceptions are valid or justified, but one thing is clear - this is a seismic shift in the perceived trustability of the largest Internet players.
97% of the world's climate scientists, who are generally not paid very well, agree that global warming is real and a real danger to human existence.
I'm not going to address their pay scale, although all evidence points to them being paid far more than they should be, given the the shoddy quality of the "science" they produce.
And remember that both Wind Turbines and Solar Panels are short-term energy investments, in spite of their already higher cost. A coal or gas-fired plant can easily run for 50-100 years with a little maintenance.
Wind farms need economically infeasible turbine/generator replacements inside a 30-year timeframe.
Solar is even worse: most of the energy production is gone by the time you reach 20 years, and it's literally not economically viable to continue to let the plant operate beyond about 30 years, as the meager operating cost exceed the value of the energy produced. And that economic calculus is based on quality solar panels such as those produced in Germany, which have a life of 25-30 years - many of the current, cheap Chinese panels going in to the field today claim that life but are already beginning to show catastrophic failures of the backing laminates and sealing systems in less than SEVEN years. There is NO WAY you can ever break even on solar in that circumstance, even with the richest subsidies available.
Oh, and once the laminating systems and seals are broached, they leak toxic heavy metals directly into their environment - it's these same materials that make recycling them even more expensive than buying them.
Don't get me wrong - solar has its place, and some real advantages in certain circumstances, but it's certainly no panacea, and in reality, it's a really expensive energy source, both economically and environmentally.
There's no reason to think Solyndra was anything other than an investment that didn't pan out because the market changed. Accusations of cronyism weren't sustained by any evidence, and if there were evidence it would certainly have surfaced given the brightness of the spotlight that was shone on that failure.
Complete and utter bullshit. I was in the solar industry, and even while Solyndra was raising money, we all stood back agape as the scene unfolded becasue it was glaringly obvious to the casual observer that the entire company was a huge scam that could *never* succeed. From a "revolutionary technology" that was grossly inefficient, to a manufacturing process with gold-plated factories and overhead structures that had the company *projecting* a $7/Watt cost at a time when the market was already at $4/W and falling fast, there was NO reason anyone doing actual due diligence would have *ever* invested in this company. The whole deal was as corrupt as they come, and really *far* worse than Enron, since at least Enron didn't (much) coopt and corrupt the government to carry out its scams.
Like I said, I've worked in the solar industry for several years, and although there are bright spots, most of it is a cesspool of corruption, with heavily subsidized companies happily doing the will of blatantly corrupt government officials siphoning off millions to billions of taxpayer dollars to fund their takeover of the government.
Slashdot Mirror
The Nanny state has run amok. I think even sadder is that the hacker crowd at Slashdot even a decade ago would have reacted with a collective, "Cool, let's give this a try and see how it works and how we can make it better", rather than with a zillion arguments about how an obviously versatile technology must be banned under the force of law.
We sure have a lot of totalitarians of fascist and other stripes here these days.
In almost all cases, technology is morally neutral - nukes, biotech, radio waves, and gunpowder can all be either murderous and evil or protective and supportive - it depends entirely on the *way* they're used. Laws attempting to force a particular outcome are generally doomed to fail, because people are smarter than their lawmakers and will do what makes sense in their particular situation, which they invariably recognize far better than their lawmakers. (Nobel winner Milton Friedman even went so far as to argue (quite persuasively, I might add) against intrusive government programs such as professional licensing, even for doctors. In today's world of frictionless information, there really is much less call for overly controlling laws.)
Wow, Slashdot sure is full of hand-wringing politically correct armchair lawyers these days!
Seriously guys, HUDs are not new and they are quite likely the least intrusive way to present information to driver (or even front seat passengers wanting to avoid motion sickness, for that matter).
Quite a few cars have had a HUD option from the factory - heck, some GM cars (Pontiacs mostly, but not exclusively) had factory HUD options more than 20 years ago.
Nearly 100 years ago, the same kinds of busybodies were trying to outlaw radios in cars, since that was "obviously" a distraction for the driver. News flash - the vast majority of the time, people (yep, even the ones that don't live in your hipster high-rise) are more than capable of enough multitasking to deal with both driving and another task. A good HUD would be far *safer* than today's method of navigating from a phone screen, since everyone has a phone and built-in GPS nav systems suck, add thousands to the cost of a car, and have a technology lifespan even shorter than a lawyer's lease term...
Seconding the Soekris approach. I have a couple of networks that have been running on the old net48xx series boxes for more than a decade. These things are flat bulletproof. Since I'm using them strictly as firewalls, and they still route at speeds much higher than the internet connections that feed them, even these older boxes are fine. (As recommended by others here, wireless is a separate router in bridge mode, since wireless standards change every few years and I don't rely on the wireless router's security other than for WPA2 itself - which is now pretty easy to bypass if you know the right things...)
Kris Sorensen builds some good stuff. Do yourself a favor and at least check out Soekris before you decide to buy anything else...
So, just wondering, does this mean we eliminate just the DEA, or the FDA, too? (The FDA is in actuality far worse in terms of arbitrarily restricting things for any reason or no reason.)
The most interesting questions aren't along the lines of "What happens when heroin, cocaine, etc. are legal?", but more along the lines of these:
What happens if Viagra and Cialis are now freely available? (Why on earth should they still require a Rx if heroin doesn't, for cryin' out loud? Can't the users see four hours on a clock?)
Does this mean that hemp can finally be cultivated in the US as a valuable natural fiber again? (Personally, I couldn't care less if dope is illegal, but making hemp illegal is just stupid - it's a killer natural fiber with amazing properties, grows like mad, and is dirt cheap.)
More importantly, will this finally allow the sale of unadulterated milk (raw milk and cheeses)? While poor sanitation can produce a risk of tuberculosis, any kind of reasonable cleanliness standards reduce that risk FAR below that of smoking marijauna, even assuming no one will ever drive, boat, or operate heavy equipment while stoned...
The world would indeed be upside-down if heroin is legal and raw milk isn't!
But these handouts are such a magnificently efficient means for graft through corrupt cronies that support your "environmental" policies!
This certainly appears to be the *only* thing our governments excel at anymore...
Only a fool "trusts the Internet" - especially Wikipedia.
It's funny, the other day, I was hanging out with a group that included several pretty top-level IT and networking folks, including some leading CS academics. Not one of us uses internet banking, or allows access of any kind to any of our financial accounts over the net. On the rare occasions that companies force the use of the Internet, the general response is to enable access only long enough to do the job, then destroy the Inet access account (best), disable net access (2nd best), or set the password to random gibberish that even we don't know or keep a record of. This forces a long, manual process to "reenable" the acccount that cannot as easily be done by an impostor. None of us "trust" the Internet, I guess.
That was a real eye-opener for some of the younger "Internet-savvy" group, who all of a sudden realized that maybe they were opening themselves up far more than they realized, especially in a world where every WiFi network, even with WPA2, is now as open as the one at Starbucks...
Actually, there's probably more money and effort focused on trying to build grid storage than there ought to be, given that there's really no technology known that's capable of doing the job in a generally viable way. There's a name for that: WOMBAT - Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.
(Not saying we shouldn't be looking at all, but realistically, grid-scale storage requires technologies we simply don't have, and largely, can't yet even envision or propose. We're a smart society with a few centuries of intense technology and engineering development under our belts, and there is no known viable solution to this problem. If there was, then billions, or even trillions, of dollars would be flowing into it. This isn't like most hard problems, which can be solved by throwing enough effort and money at them - we really just don't know how to do this!
For all its faults, Hydrogen may be the best of the bad options - but the most (only?) economically viable source of hydrogen at large scales today is natural gas. Both environmentally and from an energy loss point of view, you're better off just burning the natural gas (our cleanest fuel in the first place) than taking the hit converting it to H2. Any effort to split water will result in H2 that is *much* more expensive than making it from natural gas, especially given the benefits of the fracking revolution - water is an *extremely* stable molecule...
Yeah, sounds simple, right? Just store it! First, even the best solar systems today are not economically viable without huge government subsidies unless you live on an island and have to ship your fuel in, so really, you're upside down before you've spent a dime on storage.
Secondly, with any known and viable technology storage is *really*, *REALLY* expensive on a grid scale. For all practical purposes, it's fair to say that there is NO known way to do it in most locations. (The dangers of gas-pressurized reservoirs may well be orders of magnitude higher than fracking at its worst, and very few places have geography that allow pumped hydro to be even marginally cost-effective.) Batteries, supercaps, and the like still need another couple of orders of magnitude price/performance improvement to be viable.
Do the math, and you'll see that storage isn't even an option - the solar plant is barely viable even with subsidies (here in Texas, with cheap and readily available natural gas, solar costs 4-5 times as much per KWH, according to EIA's LCOE figures). Add in any kind of grid-scale storage at all, and the costs soar through the stratosphere, especially since most storage technologies have relatively short economic lives.
So yes, paying someone to take the power is actually the cheapest thing to do - not only in Germany, but many nights here in the US with wind power, too. There's just more capacity than demand, and since it costs the power companies to deal with that, they justifiably want to get paid to offset the costs and inefficiencies of having to shut down and spin up their conventional plants.
I don't have any mod points, and have posted on this thread anyway, but LISTEN TO THIS GUY (brambus).
Unlike most of the armchair experts here, brambus is explaining *exactly* why the German grid is broken and why it will eventually fail - at this point, I think the only questions are "When?", and, "How bad?" The tariffs that led to all this investment in solar et al are completely unsustainable over the long haul, and everyone has known that all along, but like the actual climate record, it didn't fit with the narrative and had to be ignored.
If Germany is really lucky, they'll get by with some scary but not-totally-grid-meltdown failures that might finally kick some sense into the Greens and others who think they can legislate reality based on wishcraft...
It's sad, but they're going to have to learn what I taught my kids: You are free to choose your actions, but you are NOT free to choose the consequences of your actions...
Sunk costs arent free, nor are the panels when you have to replace them in 30 years.
And 30 years is best-case. In the real world, the output of quality solar panels at around 25 years will only be about 20% of their nameplate rating. That last 5 years is really just trying to eke out enough additional energy production to get positive over the entire life of the array.
Although tight, the economics are workable with good quality panels. Unfortunately, the crappy Chinese panels that now dominate the market are starting to show significant failures (backing delamination, which results in water ingress, destruction of the panel, and leaching of heavy metals into the environment) even BEFORE 10 YEARS. If that happens, you will NEVER, EVER break even on your solar plant.
Nobody mandated solar, people just decided it would work and be profitable. Germany got a lot of wind power built as well, but apparently solar also works well enough to be worth the investment.
Germany's problems are entirely of its own making - the government wrote laws that required the power companies to pay solar generators at rates that are often over 3X the going rate for electricity. Not surprisingly, a LOT of people took them up on that deal. This works sort-of-OK until a big squall line blows over and you lose a hundred megawatts in a few minutes (it's worse than that really, since sites that were exporting power to the grid now need to become consumers, so demand increases simultaneously even faster than the loss of supply!)
Germany is now the global poster child for grid instability, and I suspect they'll get bitten hard before too long - you can't keep up that balancing act forever, especially with declining spinning reserves, and no incentives for power companies to keep them at the ready. In the very near future, if Russia pulls the plug on natural gas at the same time as a major storm front, all of Germany will go black...
Depends on location, usage, and interest rates... In many locations (deserts, mostly), consumer rooftop PV solar absolutely is cheaper than buying grid power, after less than 20 years, without even counting the subsidizes.
Not really. I've been working in the solar industry the last five or six years, and the short answer is that solar only makes sense without subsidies in places where you simply can't get energy from other sources - mostly islands or other areas where there are no fossil fuel resources nearby.
But then again, coal, nuclear, and natural gas get many subsidizes of their own, so it's not a fair comparison.
Again, that's not really true - depending on whose numbers you use, solar and other renewables are subsidized at a rate that is at least 25 to 50 TIMES that of any other energy source (including nuclear) on a per unit energy basis (which is really the only sensible way to even attempt a subsidy comparison.)
From a WSJ editorial based on the US govt's EIA figures (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324432404579051123500813210):
Don't get me wrong - I'm not opposed to solar, in fact, I favor it - but the fact is that solar and other renewables are not economically viable without subsidies. This is why the Original article is important - Germany has subsidized solar to the point that it's now a sizable portion of the German power grid. Unfortunately, renewables are NOT a replacement for power plants, since they literally only work at the whims of the weather. That means you still have to keep enough power plants in operation to meet peak demand. Therefore, letting the gluts determine prices is folly (this is why West Texas wind energy actually often has a *negative* price - you literally have to pay the grid to take it at night.)
And this distinguishes it from the US how?
Here in Austin, bicycle travel is subsidized to ridiculous degrees - new bicycle lanes are reducing 4-lane roads to two-lane all over town in a blatant and brazen attempt to botch traffic so badly that voters will finally approve the light rail boondoggle the city council has been drooling over for decades.
The ONLY thing mass transit does well is offer exceptional opportunities for graft, cronyism, and corruption.
Sorry, they are rarely if ever a public good - building roads is almost always far better and more efficient than another multibillion dollar mass transit boondoggle.
The only thing mass transit (especially "urban rail") excels at is creating the perfect environment for increasingly large-scale graft and corruption.
Although there may be one somewhere, I'm not aware of any mass transit system that breaks even on fares, nor am I aware of one whose cost even had the same number of zeroes promised when hoodwinking the voters into paying for it - Cost overruns of 10-100X are *ordinary* for mass transit projects, with powered train cars now costing more than F-16s!
Since mass transit systems never wind up being able to pay for themselves, mass transit is really just a taxpayer-funded subsidy for those who benefit from ridiculously dense, family-hostile, and outrageously expensive real estate and development.
Mass transit is one of the very best reasons to hate what most large cities have become. The cities without much in the way of mass transit are inevitably safer and more livable, and have much more positive and healthier mental attitudes. And yes, this is one of the few things that can destroy the dynamism even of cities like Austin...
Why is is that every successive generation is forced to re-learn the truth about the way people work? Even before I had any gray hair, I always sought to work on teams with widely mixed ages - as a young guy who thought he knew everything, I at least had a *chance* to short cut some painful and expensive lessons because the older, more experienced guys were usually more than happy to share their wisdom.
As was pointed out above, there is truly nothing new under the sun. (Seriously - even if you have zero inclination towards Judaism or Christanity, you really must read the Book of Proverbs sometime, just to be culturally literate and understand where so many of these phrases and sayings actually came from - it's a book of 31 short chapters, so one a day will knock it out in a month. My guess is you'll want to start over then, but YMMV...)
Today I intentionally build teams with a mix of ages, as it's by far the most important kind of diversity. (Yes, I know that's a very non-PC thing to say. Get over it.)
BTW, if you're looking for a more modern writing dealing with the issue, there is no better book than Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, which should be required reading for *anyone* working on, with, or around any software project, anywhere, ever.
Russian stuff varied a lot in practice, but some of it was actually brilliantly simple. Like Rutan's brilliant simplification of landing gear for a flying spaceship, some Russian designs wind up being better sinply becasue they *avoid* the problem rather than trying to solve it head-on.
Two examples I saw when working at NASA JSC in the 90's:
1) The Russians used a simple low pressure cooling system for their space stations and the original design of their ISS modules. This allowed them to easily use freeze-proof, but toxic coolants - since they operated below cabin pressure, if there was a leak, it was air into the coolant, not the other way around. The US approach used pressurized coolant, was insanely complicated by comparison, and *still* had the potential to freeze solid.
2) US spacesuit gloves are ridiculously complicated structures with many layers and exotic materials and parts laboriously assembled to make sure that they won't leak, or if they do, they'll self-seal, etc. so that a glove rip (a likely point of damage) won't lead to loss of suit pressure. Maintaining any dexterity in the glove while doing this is an obvious challenge with the many redundant layers. The Russians, on the other hand, use something more like a thick rubber glove (modified to avoid inflation effects), and a simple inflatable cuff that seals off around the astronaut's wrist in case of a leak - turns out that a full vacuum in the glove will blow a bunch of capillaries in your hand, turning it red for a week, but you'll be fine the week after. This gives a glove with more dexterity, at a cost that's only a tiny fraction of a US spacesuit glove...
I can't think of a single good technology that originated at Sun
ZFS, dtrace ?
Yep, those two, and how about network file sharing in general, including the various versions of the NFS protocol, and the YP/NIS/NIS+ systems that provided (for their day, anyway) secure and scalable directory services and access control?
How about bringing the best of both the Berkeley and AT&T System V Unix worlds together, with the guidance of the author of BSD, one of the most brilliant computer guys ever?
How about the first 64-bit hardware and OS that didn't require you to completely rewrite your apps and libraries to take advantage of that great new hardware? How about compilers from a computer manufacturer that actually didn't completely suck?
How about the open source graphical user environment (OpenWindows) that in the early days of Linux, finally gave it a GUI that didn't suck, and arguably transformed it from a schoolboy's neat hack into an alternative OS that could grow to run a fair fraction of the world's computers?
How about the very concept of corporate-sponsored, open source software in the first place? (Not just trivial fluffy stuff, but the actual guts of the system and services that run the computer and the network, including several mentioned above, eventually extending to things like OpenSolaris, Spring, and OpenStep.)
How about supporting networking and networked apps from the very beginning? - How about realizing that "The network *IS* the computer"? How about being one of the very first to adopt and support new high-performance networks? (3Mbps ->10Mbps Ethernet, FDDI, built-in 100 Mbps Ethernet, ATM, FibreChannel, etc.)
How about the first reasonably priced, small, scalable, lighting-fast storage array, with hot-swappable disks and compatible with the expensive industry-standard volume and disk management software, but also usable with free/inexpensive Sun "Solstice" alternatives?
And then, of course, there's Java itself. I'm not a huge Java fan these days, given the rise of things trying to do its job better, but there's no question Java is solid and runs important chunks of the world, and is largely responsible for the widespread adoption of object-oriented programming, which was previously a niche thing for the Smalltalk and LISP guys.
Oh, I almost forgot...
How about mice that required you to not twist their mirrored mousepads? (yeah, I know, SGI used those, too...)
How about the ridiculously goofy and expensive 13W3 video connectors and cables?
How about the rackmount Ultra servers that destroyed the CD tray if you ejected a CD with the door closed?
How about computers that really *were* the size and shape of a Pizza Box, but were strong enough support an 80-lb 24-in HDTV monitor on top?
Like they say about people telling Woodstock stories, you obviously weren't there...
I was at Sun doing market development in the healthcare and petroleum "verticals" when Java came out. I'm telling you, the interest was staggering. I once spoke on Java at a local JUNIOR college weekend CS/Internet interest forum to nearly a THOUSAND people, including top IT staff from NASA and all the major oil companies. I just broke the awesome oceangoing coffee mug they gave me about a year ago.
I can tell you that although we all realized Java was a good implementation of some great ideas, we were pretty much taken aback with the Java frenzy that ensued, and quickly moved to leverage it for all it was worth. (With a couple of decades in the rearview mirror, it's easy to forget how revolutionary Java really was at the time, and how hungry the world was for what it offered - namely the most open cross-platform platform and programming environment anyone had ever seen. It didn't hurt that the Java wave lined up really nicely with the 64-bit UltraSPARC architecture's amazing price/performance.)
It worked - Java was HUGE for both reestablishing Sun as a power player in technical and scientific computing, but also breaking into other lucrative markets we'd been frozen out of, including finance and healthcare - Before Java, Data General had far better name recognition than Sun - I literally met with a BIG heatlhcare CTO who's first question was, "So you're with Sun OIL?" He didn't even know there was a computer company called Sun. Shortly after, he was leading a transition to Sun hardware and software across his entire company. We got him hooked up with the right talent to integrate several critical Java-based products and he saved millions the first year, even after all the switching costs.
Trust me, we could have sold Java seats, no problem, although being free certainly helped its popularity and stood out from other "enterprise-capable" languages. The big mistake was when the programmers took over and turned a great system focused on cross-platform results and networked computing into something that tried in vain to check every box on the academic CS geeks' wet dream list, and the simple but vital stuff (like say, nailing down a single place where one could expect to FIND a JVM/JRE of a particular version on any given OS platform, to name one example of thousands) fell by the wayside.
Sadly, Java's never really recovered from the bloat it acquired in trying to be everything to everyone, but it did blaze the pathway for others, including what we called "Java with semicolons": the JavaScript that rules the web now and for the foreseeable future...
Sun was an amazing company with amazing people doing amazingly innovative things (NFS, YP/NIS/NIS+, Java, same binary desktop-to-supercomputer with transparent 64-bit support (compare Sun's 64-bit transition to IBM/HP/DEC's 64-bit cluster foxtrots - Sun's thinking here continues to fuel the current ARM revolution). There were some stinkers, but overall , we'd all be better off with Sun's innovation still pushing things forward. In a lot of ways, Sun was a better Apple than Apple when it came to "doing it right", especially back in the Java days, when we passed on actually buying Apple...
This is the really scary aspect of this decision, and it seems to be lost on most of the commenters here -
In order for Google (or any other provider of information services) to even putatively be *able* to delete all information they have regarding you, they first have to have all information about and relating to you tagged with your identity.
This effectively means they must (by law) keep an auditable log of everything you ever do on the net.
What could possibly go wrong with that? I'm telling you, Hitler and Stalin only dreamed of the power that big governments and big corporations will have to monitor, control, and even "disappear" us in the very near future...
BTW, all Amazon would have to do to get me onto their phone platform would be to build a modern WebOS phone (or something that works like it.) We still desperately need a platform that is really web-centric (web apps were first-class under WebOS - all of the "native" apps, including the dialer, were just web apps themselves that happened to be pre-loaded on the phone or tablet.)
That, and it really ticks me off to have brain damage on the iPhone that was elegantly fixed 20 years ago in PalmOS. (Including really easy stuff like week views for calendars and easy datetime stamping of notes entries...)
In several conversations recently among various tech, marketing, and entrepreneurial/business types here in Austin, there has been near universal agreement on the following really interesting points of perception:
1) Google used to be trusted, but definitely is not trusted anymore. They have blown their trust and probably can never earn it back. A surprising number of people who were comfortable "running their company" on Google until recently are now actively looking for other alternatives, as they are too dependent on Google, and now see a need to begin to move away at least partly, if not entirely. Not a single person in these discussions trusted Google to "not be evil" and misuse or sell their information if it's to Google's benefit to do so. Even here in Austin, where many of us would love the speed of Google Fiber, many were hesitant, fearing that this would give Google too much control and access. Android and Chrome are also impacted by their being fully in the Google fold.
2) Although Amazon actually has *more* (and more accurate/valid) data on each of us, they have not (to date, anyway) abused that in any substantial way. Everyone agrees that Amazon "could be really scary", but isn't, since they are only using our personal data on our own behalf, and that data (at least the personal data we care about) stays within Amazon's walls. Amazon has also proven to be a trustworthy partner on the AWS side of the fence, too, which has earned them the trust of the tech guys. The general opinion of Amazon is that "they 'get' making things easy". Amazon's customers are wary, but trusting, so far. The fact that they do trust Amazon made several of them wish for an Amazon alternative to iOS and Android on both phone and tablets. Although they would like to see it, there is little expectation that Amazon will do general-purpose phones or tablets well enough to be viable competition.
3) Microsoft is now more trusted than Google. This is staggering. At the same time, I have only have slight qualms about putting information into OneNote that I absolutely would not want or trust Google to have. The CEOs of two marketing firms that had been on the road to being Chromebook shops are in the now hedging with a transition to Microsoft Surface instead.
4) Apple is not trusted all that much, either, but convenience and superior product design and usability seem to be overriding those concerns. There is a small (but much larger than I expected) portion of iOS device users that do not use iTunes and/or the AppStore except when they have to. iCloud, in particular, seems to be very untrusted, except by Mac users, who again seem to have a arrangement of convenience.
You can argue about whether or not these perceptions are valid or justified, but one thing is clear - this is a seismic shift in the perceived trustability of the largest Internet players.
97% of the world's climate scientists, who are generally not paid very well, agree that global warming is real and a real danger to human existence.
I'm not going to address their pay scale, although all evidence points to them being paid far more than they should be, given the the shoddy quality of the "science" they produce.
One things for sure though: It's DEFINITELY NOT a 97% consensus. According to an actual survey (which was not the source of the bogus 97% claim) conducted by the American Meteorological Society, the real number is no more than 52%.
AGW is BS, and certainly NOT settled science.
And remember that both Wind Turbines and Solar Panels are short-term energy investments, in spite of their already higher cost. A coal or gas-fired plant can easily run for 50-100 years with a little maintenance.
Wind farms need economically infeasible turbine/generator replacements inside a 30-year timeframe.
Solar is even worse: most of the energy production is gone by the time you reach 20 years, and it's literally not economically viable to continue to let the plant operate beyond about 30 years, as the meager operating cost exceed the value of the energy produced. And that economic calculus is based on quality solar panels such as those produced in Germany, which have a life of 25-30 years - many of the current, cheap Chinese panels going in to the field today claim that life but are already beginning to show catastrophic failures of the backing laminates and sealing systems in less than SEVEN years. There is NO WAY you can ever break even on solar in that circumstance, even with the richest subsidies available.
Oh, and once the laminating systems and seals are broached, they leak toxic heavy metals directly into their environment - it's these same materials that make recycling them even more expensive than buying them.
Don't get me wrong - solar has its place, and some real advantages in certain circumstances, but it's certainly no panacea, and in reality, it's a really expensive energy source, both economically and environmentally.
There's no reason to think Solyndra was anything other than an investment that didn't pan out because the market changed. Accusations of cronyism weren't sustained by any evidence, and if there were evidence it would certainly have surfaced given the brightness of the spotlight that was shone on that failure.
Complete and utter bullshit. I was in the solar industry, and even while Solyndra was raising money, we all stood back agape as the scene unfolded becasue it was glaringly obvious to the casual observer that the entire company was a huge scam that could *never* succeed. From a "revolutionary technology" that was grossly inefficient, to a manufacturing process with gold-plated factories and overhead structures that had the company *projecting* a $7/Watt cost at a time when the market was already at $4/W and falling fast, there was NO reason anyone doing actual due diligence would have *ever* invested in this company. The whole deal was as corrupt as they come, and really *far* worse than Enron, since at least Enron didn't (much) coopt and corrupt the government to carry out its scams.
Like I said, I've worked in the solar industry for several years, and although there are bright spots, most of it is a cesspool of corruption, with heavily subsidized companies happily doing the will of blatantly corrupt government officials siphoning off millions to billions of taxpayer dollars to fund their takeover of the government.