Though I applaud all efforts at green energy, I can't help but think that turning highways into solar farms is going about things the wrong way. Their purposes are fundamentally different, and as such their design is (or should be) fundamentally different. Designing a solar panel to support a considerable weight, provide as much traction in its glass surface as asphalt designed for the task, and be reasonably efficient at generating electricity has got to an engineering nightmare! Not to mention the expense of doing so. The only advantage I can see for a design such as this is that the footprint on the land isn't increased by anything more than the roads already use. But aren't there significantly more inexpensive and straightforward alternatives? Even at the very least, constructing a long array of panels along the right of way beside the roads wouldn't require more land area than already allocated to the roadways, plus the engineers would have the much easier task of designing good roads and good solar panels independently without having to work the conflicting requirements into some sort of cobbled together harmony.
The patent system in the US is so horribly broken. The original idea of patenting is to protect ideas that provide a benefit but aren't immediately obvious to people in the industry. Yet somehow, patent trolls are managing to get away with vague patents or ideas that are obvious or even already in common use before the patent is granted. And they don't even have to provide a realization of their idea any more - it's enough now to just patent a vague idea, let someone else figure out how to actually do it, and then sue the pants off them. Patenting is supposed to provide an environment allowing inventors to thrive - instead, it's gone completely the opposite way, stifling original thinkers who actually come up with creative ideas and preventing them to bring those ideas to market in fear of just getting sued by a patent troll.
But what's even more sad is that everyone seems to realize this but nobody's doing anything about it. How can change happen?
To me, this is like trying to legislate that pi equals 3. Like it or not, the Earth's rotation doesn't "behave" to our convenience. Getting rid of leap seconds is a massive step backwards, so after awhile the Earth's day doesn't align with the time we keep. Eventually, a fixed adjustment would need to be made, as has been done in the past when the problem wasn't handled as elegantly as leap seconds now do - and that's even more of a hack. The fact that servers crash just means that their software is poorly written in the first place and should be fixed. Many more servers than those isolated examples of problems, have handled the event just fine in the past, so it's not that hard to do. The simple solution - computer clocks kept synchronized internally to atomic time (TAI) which progresses simply and uniformly without caring about leap seconds and the Earth's rotation. Then, when humans need to view the time in a manner convenient to them, it's converted to local time which does account for leap seconds. No computer crashes, as it's just then a time display issue. Too bad Unix time doesn't already do this.
If legislators wanted to get rid of needless and pointless complication, I'd much rather see them banning Daylight Savings Time... but that's another discussion.
From the looks of the stock price drop, it seems I'm not the only one unimpressed by the lineup. I'm not a fan of "bigger is better". For an iPhone to be practical to me, it has to fit comfortably in my pocket... which rules out the 6 and 6s lineup. I can't be the only one. If they would have released a iPhone 5-sized 6s, I would have snapped it up right away. Same goes for tablets. I have a full sized iPad, and that's as big as I want to go - I can't imagine the inconvenience of lugging around their latest behemoth. I know the iPad mini 4 was just released and was briefly excited about it, until I realized it's capabilities are still behind the year-old iPad Air 2. Bottom line is though I have the money and desire to buy the latest and greatest Apple tech, since size is important to me, their new offerings are less practical than their old, so I won't be getting them.
On the other hand, I'm excited about tvOS. Though I'm not a gamer, bringing the world of third party apps to your TV has potential to be a game changer. If the hardware is reasonably capable, having a platform capable of interactive apps and games (not to mention, of course, TV and movies) in a device costing $150 may change some things. It's just too bad that Apple has gone from a company that really innovated to one that just makes marginal changes (not even necessarily improvements) to its products.
First, a 4 foot diameter pipeline is going to make any kind of significant difference? This wouldn't even have the capacity of a small creek.
Second, he wants to build it aboveground. Maybe in California that's doable, but in piping the water from Seattle, there are some places that do freeze. How would such a pipeline handle that?
As others have posted here, that $50,000,000,000 would be much more effective in working out better (more economical, environmentally friendly, etc.) methods of desalination.
Also, the economics just don't make sense. It takes 5 gallons of water to grow a single walnut. How in the world would it be cost effective to power the pumps needed to transport that much water that far to raise so little? Unless people expect to pay hundreds of dollars per pound of walnuts, I can't fathom how this would work.
I think if California is being hit by drought, it needs to take a hard look at where their water is going. If the crops they love to grow there just aren't sustainable for the water they use, they really have no choice but to transition to agriculture appropriate for their climate. A bandaid solution like this is in no way the right way to go.
This has been commented on relentlessly, but it doesn't hurt to add another. I have to assume that this summary of the research is missing something critical (though if this is true, then the abstract of the original paper suffers from the same problem). There is no end of arbitrary values picked to come up with the solution they wanted. Why 10 cubic kilometre voxels? That's not a "fundamental" measurement to the universe. Where does 10^25 stars come from? Most current estimates put the number of stars from 10^23 to 10^24, though nobody really knows for sure of course - and even then, estimates vary widely depending on what we exactly consider a star. And naturally, why does even defining the number of stars themselves have anything to do with energy density of the universe? Stars are just arbitrary conglomerations of matter that have nothing to do with "information content" of the universe unless the only items in the universe fundamentally worth counting are stars.
I'm stunned a paper like this was published, let alone slashdotted, unless there is much more to the study than immediately meets the eye. Now, if someone did a study on the information density of fundamental positions (i.e.: resolved down to Planck length), with fundamental particles (fermions and bosons), their momentums, and so on, then it would be a study worth doing. Starting with arbitrary human-derived units that have no cosmological significance makes the entire result of the study meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
Though I applaud all efforts at green energy, I can't help but think that turning highways into solar farms is going about things the wrong way. Their purposes are fundamentally different, and as such their design is (or should be) fundamentally different. Designing a solar panel to support a considerable weight, provide as much traction in its glass surface as asphalt designed for the task, and be reasonably efficient at generating electricity has got to an engineering nightmare! Not to mention the expense of doing so. The only advantage I can see for a design such as this is that the footprint on the land isn't increased by anything more than the roads already use. But aren't there significantly more inexpensive and straightforward alternatives? Even at the very least, constructing a long array of panels along the right of way beside the roads wouldn't require more land area than already allocated to the roadways, plus the engineers would have the much easier task of designing good roads and good solar panels independently without having to work the conflicting requirements into some sort of cobbled together harmony.
The patent system in the US is so horribly broken. The original idea of patenting is to protect ideas that provide a benefit but aren't immediately obvious to people in the industry. Yet somehow, patent trolls are managing to get away with vague patents or ideas that are obvious or even already in common use before the patent is granted. And they don't even have to provide a realization of their idea any more - it's enough now to just patent a vague idea, let someone else figure out how to actually do it, and then sue the pants off them. Patenting is supposed to provide an environment allowing inventors to thrive - instead, it's gone completely the opposite way, stifling original thinkers who actually come up with creative ideas and preventing them to bring those ideas to market in fear of just getting sued by a patent troll. But what's even more sad is that everyone seems to realize this but nobody's doing anything about it. How can change happen?
To me, this is like trying to legislate that pi equals 3. Like it or not, the Earth's rotation doesn't "behave" to our convenience. Getting rid of leap seconds is a massive step backwards, so after awhile the Earth's day doesn't align with the time we keep. Eventually, a fixed adjustment would need to be made, as has been done in the past when the problem wasn't handled as elegantly as leap seconds now do - and that's even more of a hack. The fact that servers crash just means that their software is poorly written in the first place and should be fixed. Many more servers than those isolated examples of problems, have handled the event just fine in the past, so it's not that hard to do. The simple solution - computer clocks kept synchronized internally to atomic time (TAI) which progresses simply and uniformly without caring about leap seconds and the Earth's rotation. Then, when humans need to view the time in a manner convenient to them, it's converted to local time which does account for leap seconds. No computer crashes, as it's just then a time display issue. Too bad Unix time doesn't already do this. If legislators wanted to get rid of needless and pointless complication, I'd much rather see them banning Daylight Savings Time... but that's another discussion.
From the looks of the stock price drop, it seems I'm not the only one unimpressed by the lineup. I'm not a fan of "bigger is better". For an iPhone to be practical to me, it has to fit comfortably in my pocket... which rules out the 6 and 6s lineup. I can't be the only one. If they would have released a iPhone 5-sized 6s, I would have snapped it up right away. Same goes for tablets. I have a full sized iPad, and that's as big as I want to go - I can't imagine the inconvenience of lugging around their latest behemoth. I know the iPad mini 4 was just released and was briefly excited about it, until I realized it's capabilities are still behind the year-old iPad Air 2. Bottom line is though I have the money and desire to buy the latest and greatest Apple tech, since size is important to me, their new offerings are less practical than their old, so I won't be getting them. On the other hand, I'm excited about tvOS. Though I'm not a gamer, bringing the world of third party apps to your TV has potential to be a game changer. If the hardware is reasonably capable, having a platform capable of interactive apps and games (not to mention, of course, TV and movies) in a device costing $150 may change some things. It's just too bad that Apple has gone from a company that really innovated to one that just makes marginal changes (not even necessarily improvements) to its products.
First, a 4 foot diameter pipeline is going to make any kind of significant difference? This wouldn't even have the capacity of a small creek. Second, he wants to build it aboveground. Maybe in California that's doable, but in piping the water from Seattle, there are some places that do freeze. How would such a pipeline handle that? As others have posted here, that $50,000,000,000 would be much more effective in working out better (more economical, environmentally friendly, etc.) methods of desalination. Also, the economics just don't make sense. It takes 5 gallons of water to grow a single walnut. How in the world would it be cost effective to power the pumps needed to transport that much water that far to raise so little? Unless people expect to pay hundreds of dollars per pound of walnuts, I can't fathom how this would work. I think if California is being hit by drought, it needs to take a hard look at where their water is going. If the crops they love to grow there just aren't sustainable for the water they use, they really have no choice but to transition to agriculture appropriate for their climate. A bandaid solution like this is in no way the right way to go.
This has been commented on relentlessly, but it doesn't hurt to add another. I have to assume that this summary of the research is missing something critical (though if this is true, then the abstract of the original paper suffers from the same problem). There is no end of arbitrary values picked to come up with the solution they wanted. Why 10 cubic kilometre voxels? That's not a "fundamental" measurement to the universe. Where does 10^25 stars come from? Most current estimates put the number of stars from 10^23 to 10^24, though nobody really knows for sure of course - and even then, estimates vary widely depending on what we exactly consider a star. And naturally, why does even defining the number of stars themselves have anything to do with energy density of the universe? Stars are just arbitrary conglomerations of matter that have nothing to do with "information content" of the universe unless the only items in the universe fundamentally worth counting are stars. I'm stunned a paper like this was published, let alone slashdotted, unless there is much more to the study than immediately meets the eye. Now, if someone did a study on the information density of fundamental positions (i.e.: resolved down to Planck length), with fundamental particles (fermions and bosons), their momentums, and so on, then it would be a study worth doing. Starting with arbitrary human-derived units that have no cosmological significance makes the entire result of the study meaningless.