The second most ridiculous thing in "Atlas Shrugged" was that Dagny Taggart invented a perpetual motion train "powered by ambient electricity in the air."
Taggart was just a shrewd businesswoman, Jon Galt invented the engine, and he refused to give it to Taggart once she found out about it because he hated the world. Though it's interesting to see someone complain about a book they either haven't read or didn't have the mental aptitude to take in.
Of course the most ridiculous part was the part where CEOs joined together to create a utopia in Colorado with no poor or working people, just their own bootstraps, where they presumably ate nothing, repaired their own lavish houses, and needed no help from tradespeople, doctors or other "takers" who were not rich CEOs and obviously just wanted a handout.
Nope, the most ridiculous part was how they transformed into Seal Team 6 at the end of the book to rescue Galt from the evil socialist mind control camp. While that point is a matter of subjective perspective (arguably,) they had doctors in their utopia (and clearly raw materials were imported as well, given the immense time it would have taken Galt to build his generator on site otherwise. Also, the members of the town were more than CEOs (many weren't even CEOs or businessmen for that matter, but engineers with extreme proficiency in their respective fields,) they also had doctors. The concept was more like that of a bunch of geniuses getting together and forming a town than it was a bunch of businessmen doing so, in fact very few, if any, of today's fortune 500 executives would have made the cut by Galt's standards.
This isn't entirely accurate and is using a claim which is absurd. MRI machines are very short exposure, and they do carry a risk of developing cancer. Similarly, it's mostly the intensity which matters. If you sat on a 4" diameter 2" thick N52 magnet all day every day you would absolutely see changes, interesting those changes differ based on which pole you are facing, but that's another topic entirely. EM on the other hand (the typically used transverse definition you know as RF, light, microwave, THz, etc) can be especially harmful at even moderate power levels (which a device capable of charging a phone from across a room would be.) The less well known longitudinal EM waves (what Tesla worked on) are possibly less or possibly more harmful, there isn't a lot of research on their health effects, but could charge a phone from across a room while technically remaining within FCC guidelines of a 1W limit for the router itself - though you probably wouldn't want to use them because they would place a high voltage charge on anything metallic nearby and you'd be getting shocked every time you touched a doorknob or just about any appliance, they would fry most modern appliances, and your hair would constantly be standing on end.
You can use longitudinal EM at the frequencies specified to get an exponentially more powerful transmission efficiency at the same wattage, however the idea that could be patented is absurd (it's what Tesla devoted a good chunk of his life towards and the patents have long expired.)
Since we are not going to Mars in the forseeable future, ALL spending related to human Mars missions is a waste.
Corporations are taking up the reins, it will happen within the decade. This is exactly the kind of thing NASA should be spending time on - support technologies - because they are too slow to be trusted with the actual colonization effort.
If the computer is going to know everything about the inhabitants anyway just make socialization a priority by finding the people who will make eachother the happiest and arranging serendipitous encounters by doing things like controlling traffic flow, class schedules, "random" malfunctions in cars leaving people stranded on the side of the road together, etc. If society is going to criminalize stalking there's a clear market gap available for computing to step in.
The government exists for defense and the things the private sector can't/won't do. Now that there are multiple private rocket companies NASA should be refocused to things like breakthrough propulsion (EM Drive, Warp Drive, even Orion-style nuclear, etc), life support/reclamation (as opposed to the current wasteful system of "crack water and dump the shit overboard"), and other supporting technologies to colonization of space. The government, including NASA, is always going to be slower than the private sector in production, it only really shines when there is no incentive for private corporations to do a thing.
This is standard practice already everywhere anyone is competent, only they pay actual wages instead of internships. Everyone who has worked in the software development industry for any period of time knows CS majors are the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel worst programmers around, the CEO's 8-year-old kid is almost always better than anyone with a CS degree.
You're right, you said "super capacitor plates" which is not entirely the same thing, but the same principle still applies: For high tech applications, purity is critical, and mineral coal is not pure.
Firstly, I said "between super capacitor plates," massive difference. Secondly, I've built super capacitors out of activated coal and I know you're full of shit.
And mineral coal is not that "close" - it contains a lot of impurities (eg heavy metals, sulfur) which makes it unsuitable for water filtration and battery electrodes in your list of examples.
Do you ever even attempt to take in the opposing side before getting on your soap box? Did I say anything about using activated carbon in battery electrodes? No? Huh, I guess that's because I'm not the fucking retarded one in this conversation.
Coal is already damned close to activated CHARCOAL (it's actually called "activated coal" when made directly from coal, but it's practically the same thing, with "practically" meaning functionally the same in use mentioned above.)
It can be made from just about anything with Carbon. In the case of coal the conversion is much much more energy efficient than that of wood because it's already nearly identical to the desired end product.
Not necessarily. There are applications for coal other than burning it. The biggest one that comes to mind is activated coal - which can be used to clean up toxins, guide chemical reactions and act as the material between super capacitor plates - all of which are good for the environment. It just depends how it is used. With the demand for batteries in the clean energy sector you could quite easily mass produce super capacitors to fill the gap and have a more robust power grid as a result, without the nasty chemicals of LiIon batteries.
This is a travesty*, the shameful, traditional closing ranks of an organization to protect their own.
Nope. In Maine they do the same thing with traffic lights - the rapid (or in our case, random between about 2 and 4 seconds in one town) yellow light causes more accidents and in turn causes more fines. Originally they had the light set in the town mentioned to be 1-6 seconds or yellow lights, but after a few police cruisers rammed into people getting caught by it they must have decided it was a bit too extreme.
humans are incapable of driving cars without getting intoxicated first and even if not, they kill thousands more than robots would.
I get that you're either a marketing shill and/or an idiot, but the issue with self-driving cars isn't that they're worse drivers than some people, it's that if you aren't a terrible driver you are giving up control over your life to a machine which very well may be worse, but at the very least can be hacked, can be confused by novel scenarios, etc. Sure, anyone with a DUI in their track record should be forced to use only self-driving cars, for most people however it's a massive step down AND it puts their lives in the hands of governments, corporations, and a bunch of politically-zealous hipsters living in Silicon Valley.
Hell, let's say a best case scenario we have the ~30,000 auto deaths in the US every year reduced in half. Why only half, since machines are so great, you demand? Well, the same reason we have Moore's law, not because that is a true metric of the development and capability of technological progress, but because it is what the markets will tolerate for maximum gain. If the government, silicon valley execs, liberal extremists in Silicon Valley (all likely "hackers" if they even get caught) can kill off 15,000 of their enemies every year and get away with it while being hailed as heros for pushing a technology that reduced deaths by half, why wouldn't they? So, what's so bad about reducing the death toll by half, even if what I just wrote is true, you demand like a petulant child? Well, 30k/yr random people is nothing compared to the 15k/yr most politically, financially and otherwise active people of specific groups. That changes society as a whole from having just another mindless thing people die by more or less at random (not even a cause in the top 10) to a weapon which, like most other technology these days, will be used to control people, remove liberty, expand the wealth gap, and increase the bar to entry in industry. Oh, and to top it all of they will put the largest single industry employing high-school-educated-males (the group most likely to revolt and start killing everyone if they are horrendously impoverished) out of work while moving all that wealth further up the ladder to the executives of FedEx, UPS, and more industrialized transportation companies you probably haven't even heard of.
TL;DR: Technology is the devil and self-driving cars have the potential to be arch-demons with little hope for tangible benefits capable of outweighing the damages to our society.
Anyone who is all for functional, OO, actor-model, etc programming is incompetent. Different paradigms work in different scenarios and being a good programmer is mostly about knowing what to use when/where.
More importantly, it might act as a convenient surface to catch snowfall and get it thick enough to form a new glacier before the salt water underneath can get to it.
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He wants to cut all sorts of science and research budgets
The EPA isn't science, it's a Liberal and Bureaucratic propaganda and shakedown racket.
This has gotten ridiculous lately. Even science.slashdot.org tends to be 1-2 days behind drudge report.
Spoken like someone truly incompetent.
I still like my Windows Phone, and my next one will be a Windows Phone, as well. The UI is much better than the other two.
Hello, Microsoft PR shill.
Hope you never escape the furthest depths of Hell.
These can be sent to Mars to build an entire village before the colonists arrive.
Because expando-foam is a wonderfully air-tight, radiation-proof, and easy to make material on the surface of Mars.
The second most ridiculous thing in "Atlas Shrugged" was that Dagny Taggart invented a perpetual motion train "powered by ambient electricity in the air."
Taggart was just a shrewd businesswoman, Jon Galt invented the engine, and he refused to give it to Taggart once she found out about it because he hated the world. Though it's interesting to see someone complain about a book they either haven't read or didn't have the mental aptitude to take in.
Of course the most ridiculous part was the part where CEOs joined together to create a utopia in Colorado with no poor or working people, just their own bootstraps, where they presumably ate nothing, repaired their own lavish houses, and needed no help from tradespeople, doctors or other "takers" who were not rich CEOs and obviously just wanted a handout.
Nope, the most ridiculous part was how they transformed into Seal Team 6 at the end of the book to rescue Galt from the evil socialist mind control camp. While that point is a matter of subjective perspective (arguably,) they had doctors in their utopia (and clearly raw materials were imported as well, given the immense time it would have taken Galt to build his generator on site otherwise. Also, the members of the town were more than CEOs (many weren't even CEOs or businessmen for that matter, but engineers with extreme proficiency in their respective fields,) they also had doctors. The concept was more like that of a bunch of geniuses getting together and forming a town than it was a bunch of businessmen doing so, in fact very few, if any, of today's fortune 500 executives would have made the cut by Galt's standards.
This isn't entirely accurate and is using a claim which is absurd. MRI machines are very short exposure, and they do carry a risk of developing cancer. Similarly, it's mostly the intensity which matters. If you sat on a 4" diameter 2" thick N52 magnet all day every day you would absolutely see changes, interesting those changes differ based on which pole you are facing, but that's another topic entirely. EM on the other hand (the typically used transverse definition you know as RF, light, microwave, THz, etc) can be especially harmful at even moderate power levels (which a device capable of charging a phone from across a room would be.) The less well known longitudinal EM waves (what Tesla worked on) are possibly less or possibly more harmful, there isn't a lot of research on their health effects, but could charge a phone from across a room while technically remaining within FCC guidelines of a 1W limit for the router itself - though you probably wouldn't want to use them because they would place a high voltage charge on anything metallic nearby and you'd be getting shocked every time you touched a doorknob or just about any appliance, they would fry most modern appliances, and your hair would constantly be standing on end.
You can use longitudinal EM at the frequencies specified to get an exponentially more powerful transmission efficiency at the same wattage, however the idea that could be patented is absurd (it's what Tesla devoted a good chunk of his life towards and the patents have long expired.)
Since we are not going to Mars in the forseeable future, ALL spending related to human Mars missions is a waste.
Corporations are taking up the reins, it will happen within the decade. This is exactly the kind of thing NASA should be spending time on - support technologies - because they are too slow to be trusted with the actual colonization effort.
If the computer is going to know everything about the inhabitants anyway just make socialization a priority by finding the people who will make eachother the happiest and arranging serendipitous encounters by doing things like controlling traffic flow, class schedules, "random" malfunctions in cars leaving people stranded on the side of the road together, etc. If society is going to criminalize stalking there's a clear market gap available for computing to step in.
The government exists for defense and the things the private sector can't/won't do. Now that there are multiple private rocket companies NASA should be refocused to things like breakthrough propulsion (EM Drive, Warp Drive, even Orion-style nuclear, etc), life support/reclamation (as opposed to the current wasteful system of "crack water and dump the shit overboard"), and other supporting technologies to colonization of space. The government, including NASA, is always going to be slower than the private sector in production, it only really shines when there is no incentive for private corporations to do a thing.
This is standard practice already everywhere anyone is competent, only they pay actual wages instead of internships. Everyone who has worked in the software development industry for any period of time knows CS majors are the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel worst programmers around, the CEO's 8-year-old kid is almost always better than anyone with a CS degree.
You're right, you said "super capacitor plates" which is not entirely the same thing, but the same principle still applies: For high tech applications, purity is critical, and mineral coal is not pure.
Firstly, I said "between super capacitor plates," massive difference. Secondly, I've built super capacitors out of activated coal and I know you're full of shit.
And mineral coal is not that "close" - it contains a lot of impurities (eg heavy metals, sulfur) which makes it unsuitable for water filtration and battery electrodes in your list of examples.
Do you ever even attempt to take in the opposing side before getting on your soap box? Did I say anything about using activated carbon in battery electrodes? No? Huh, I guess that's because I'm not the fucking retarded one in this conversation.
Coal is already damned close to activated CHARCOAL (it's actually called "activated coal" when made directly from coal, but it's practically the same thing, with "practically" meaning functionally the same in use mentioned above.)
It can be made from just about anything with Carbon. In the case of coal the conversion is much much more energy efficient than that of wood because it's already nearly identical to the desired end product.
Coal is dead.
Not necessarily. There are applications for coal other than burning it. The biggest one that comes to mind is activated coal - which can be used to clean up toxins, guide chemical reactions and act as the material between super capacitor plates - all of which are good for the environment. It just depends how it is used. With the demand for batteries in the clean energy sector you could quite easily mass produce super capacitors to fill the gap and have a more robust power grid as a result, without the nasty chemicals of LiIon batteries.
I know this, for I am well travelled.
If you think you know anything you aren't well traveled, you're pretentious and arrogant.
This is a travesty*, the shameful, traditional closing ranks of an organization to protect their own.
Nope. In Maine they do the same thing with traffic lights - the rapid (or in our case, random between about 2 and 4 seconds in one town) yellow light causes more accidents and in turn causes more fines. Originally they had the light set in the town mentioned to be 1-6 seconds or yellow lights, but after a few police cruisers rammed into people getting caught by it they must have decided it was a bit too extreme.
humans are incapable of driving cars without getting intoxicated first and even if not, they kill thousands more than robots would.
I get that you're either a marketing shill and/or an idiot, but the issue with self-driving cars isn't that they're worse drivers than some people, it's that if you aren't a terrible driver you are giving up control over your life to a machine which very well may be worse, but at the very least can be hacked, can be confused by novel scenarios, etc. Sure, anyone with a DUI in their track record should be forced to use only self-driving cars, for most people however it's a massive step down AND it puts their lives in the hands of governments, corporations, and a bunch of politically-zealous hipsters living in Silicon Valley.
Hell, let's say a best case scenario we have the ~30,000 auto deaths in the US every year reduced in half. Why only half, since machines are so great, you demand? Well, the same reason we have Moore's law, not because that is a true metric of the development and capability of technological progress, but because it is what the markets will tolerate for maximum gain. If the government, silicon valley execs, liberal extremists in Silicon Valley (all likely "hackers" if they even get caught) can kill off 15,000 of their enemies every year and get away with it while being hailed as heros for pushing a technology that reduced deaths by half, why wouldn't they? So, what's so bad about reducing the death toll by half, even if what I just wrote is true, you demand like a petulant child? Well, 30k/yr random people is nothing compared to the 15k/yr most politically, financially and otherwise active people of specific groups. That changes society as a whole from having just another mindless thing people die by more or less at random (not even a cause in the top 10) to a weapon which, like most other technology these days, will be used to control people, remove liberty, expand the wealth gap, and increase the bar to entry in industry. Oh, and to top it all of they will put the largest single industry employing high-school-educated-males (the group most likely to revolt and start killing everyone if they are horrendously impoverished) out of work while moving all that wealth further up the ladder to the executives of FedEx, UPS, and more industrialized transportation companies you probably haven't even heard of.
TL;DR: Technology is the devil and self-driving cars have the potential to be arch-demons with little hope for tangible benefits capable of outweighing the damages to our society.
Anyone who is all for functional, OO, actor-model, etc programming is incompetent. Different paradigms work in different scenarios and being a good programmer is mostly about knowing what to use when/where.
By the time Elizabeth Holmes gets out of jail, she'll be so old no one (even Slashdot readers) would want to fuck her.
It's societies fault, really. Nobody should have expected that much from her.
It's not.
More importantly, it might act as a convenient surface to catch snowfall and get it thick enough to form a new glacier before the salt water underneath can get to it.