Although I agree that for some jobs that is a clever alternative and the almost eventual future, there will always be a lot of jobs that require the warm body around (medical, teaching and the likes).
Surgery has already been done via telepresence. It's also going to play a bigger role in the future in the military and emergency and hazardous situations.
Teaching is especially amenable to distance learning - and that's what's happening all over the place - talk to any university student today and ask them if they can pass w/o an internet connection for assignments, etc - telecommuting to class will be the norm for the next generation.
And of course, there are some situations where telepresence is already the best solution - like bomb squads, nuclear fuel handling, etc.
Your math is off because you forget that when you scale the dome up, individual elements need to be thickend, not just their surface area enlarged. Scale an ant up to elephant size, and the legs need to have a LOT more cross-section to support the elephant. Similarly, the "skin" of the dome has to be much thicker when you scale it up, as do stringers, buy wires, struts, etc.
There not only is no net savings, you LOSE a lot. There are not only no economies of scale when you get bigger - there are losses.
This is why, for example, you can't just scale up every element of a skyscraper and expect it to stand.
Also, your 2000 sf house should, for more efficiency, be at least on 2 floors.
Additionally, the larger the dome, the larger the non-living space you enclose, so more material wasted per person. This is also a problem in skyscraper design. If you look at the history of buildings, masonry buildings quickly reached their limit - you had to quadruple the thickness of the walls just to get twice the height, so it got to the point that increasing height resulted in LESS interior because you passed the point of diminishing returns and entered negative territory.
The system is designed primarily at cutting fuel consumption, travel time, and congestion.
A better application of technology would be to cut the need for travel via telecomumting, telepresence, etc.
the big problem is that management doesn't have that much of a clue as to how to measure job performance and "manage people" w/o the presence of warm bodies, and when we come up with real metrics and methods, most managers would quickly become redundant.
Why is solar in Vermont in the winter a joke? Vermont winters aren't as bad as Quebec winters, and I'm nice and comfy right now solely on sunshine coming through south-facing windows. Even in the dead of winter, those windows add at least 10 degrees to the place, as long as I let the sun in at sun-up and draw the shades around 2pm, when the sun no longer shies in.
Also, why not just enclose individual buildings in domes? No problem with watering lawns, a failure of one dome doesn't mean everyone is screwed, a lot safer in the event of fire, much less materials used (the covering and the structural members can be orders of magnitude less bulky, and you're not covering nearly as much area), they can be easily partially dismantled in the summer, and there's less problem with condensation (just vent the moist air during the peak temperature). You also have less problems with snow and ice accumulation because now you have a sharper curve.
There are cheaper, easier solutions than a whole-city dome. Individual domes, rooftop collectors, underground thermal storage...
snow melts better from the bottom than from the top. when melting from the top the insulating properties keep the heat away altogether, heated from the bottom, the insulating effect can help because the heat under the snow is trapped by the snow so almost all of it is expended on the snow rather than dispersing into the environment, also water from melting snow does not fall away from the heat source, but rather sits on it and gets warmer as it flows down the surface of the dome, melting even more snow.
2. Most of the problem with melting snow is the energy required for phase change, from crystalline to liquid. It's going to stay at the freezing point for a LONG time.
3. What heat? The snow is blocking the sun, so the dome doesn't warm up. Also, sun falling on the snow is mostly reflected back into space. Cities absorb more insolation in the winter because of pavements, buildings, etc. - they're islands of comparative warmth compared to the snow-covered country around them. The dome, by allowing a blanket of snow to cover the city, chills the city.
I was pointing out an example of the types of parasites.
As for most of the fish flesh being contaminated, that's from people who actually work in fish canneries and have to pick the little buggers off the fish (as well as worms, etc) - a much better source than the wiki.
Go and ask anyone who works in one - I *love* salmon, cod, etc., but now... I'm leary.
This was part of the original idea in Ted Nelson's Xanadu design in the 1960s, the original hypertext system. The user interface where you match the comments to what they are about was also in his system - at that point represented in a demo by 3x5" cards and string, as far as I remember.
So he's the inventor of string information theory? KEWL.
Well, prior art dating back to the '60s certainly puts the torpedo into their hull. Thanks for the info.
("McDonalds food tastes like shit" was one of the first comments for mcdonalds.com).
I can see your point. If I wanted to know what shit tastes like, I wouldn't necessarily know to search for McDonalds. But thanks. Now I know that, should I be curious about fecal flavour, I'll be sure to try McDonalds.
Try the McNuggets - they're made from the one part of a chicken that KFC doesn't use (and now you know why there's usually a Mcdonalds next to a KFC - those chicken assholes are the tenderest part of the bird).
If land animals had the same class of parasites, they would definitely be quarantined and killed, not served to humans. Nobody would tolerate wormy meat, especially with parasites that are harmful to humans.
We tolerate it with fish because "it's different", but we're seeing that, more and more, it's not so different - interspecies barriers get breached as we change the environs, and fish farming definitely changes their environment.
1. When you're doing a search, you just want to find the web site that has what you want. Good search engines do their job and then get out of your way. This whole "annotate and comment and rate" is contrary to that.
2. The ratings are easily manipulated by people, as are the comments, etc.
3. If I want to see comments about something, lots of sites allow me to comment directly. WTF would anyone want to use one of hundreds of different "services" to do that rather than at the canonical source?
4. All attempts were based on the premise of "(1) we'll catch eyeballs and users, (2)... (3) PROFIT". Step 2 is still missing.
1. When the CCCP/USSR collapsed, Russia declared it was the successor to the USSR and announced it would honour the foreign debt.
2. Russia took the initiative to form the CIS
3. Russia subsequently defaulted, and needed an IMF bailout.
If you look at page 159, you'll see that Russia believed it could get the debt written off in return for political concessions - so it was a power grab that was supposed to be at zero cost. Nice work if you can get it, but it didn't work out that way.
Thanks for fixing it. I had done the bandwidth calculations manually a few months ago (for other reasons), and the 356 looked familiar.
However, I had to work with h264 codecs years ago (before Apple got into it), and there's a lot of variability in the quality of the image, depending on the h264 implementation, the compression level, etc. We were compressing the crap out of video streams (a terabyte of hd space was more than 20x the cost it is today, and we were doing 25 video and audio streams at a time on one machine... lots of fancy custom chips with 4 compressors per card, each capable of simultaneously compressing two dvd-res feeds) and 98% savings was common - but you could see artifacts in the results.
Obviously, better codecs have come along, and they're certainly "good enough" nowadays, but, as you point ut, 7mbps divx is not going to give satisfactory 1080p or even 1080i.
Poster trying to worm their way out of saying they were wrong:
Thanks for pointing out my ignorance. Since my original post was about how I saw stating that a modern system doesn't actually have a hard time displaying "HD" flash videos. So I went and downloaded my "pixel perfect" video, and it was ~800x~500 with 5600kbit/sec encoding. Yes, this does look very nice even with not really "pixel perfect"
Anyway, you came along and somehow completely missed the context of my post of CPU usage. Your eye sight may be good but your reading comprehension is not something to be impressed with.
And to go along with how a modern system runs just fine on HD, my comp displayed that 2012 1080p video at only 9-10% cpu.
And I never said modern systems can't decode 1080) This is the part of what you wrote that I took exception to, which is just plain wrong:
Talking about full screen video streams that eat up 700KB(bytes)/sec and look pixel perfect on my 1920x1080 screen.
It's not "hi def", it's not "pixel perfect". No video encoder today does lossless compression. Even blu-ray, which is much higher bandwidth, is lossy. Stop the video of your "picture perfect" 800x500 and look at the picture, and you'll see artifacts from the compression, blurriness in details and sections that are in motion, etc.
500 lines of vertical resolution is nowhere near HD - it has fewer than 50% of the pixel count of even the lower, 720 line, wide-screen resolution. Also, since you're looking at it full-screen on an 1920x1080 display, either you have black bands, or you're scaling is not 1:1 in both dimensions. Also, there's no way to get perfect scaling from 800x500 to 1920x1080 - 1920/800 = 2.4, 800/500-2.16. Neither is an even multiple, so you can't just pixel double - you have to interpolate, which introduces artifacts.
What I'm saying is that my point stands - you were not watching a hi-def video, and if you think it looks all that great, you really need to see what a nice big display and sound system with a proper hi-def source can do. Just make sure you're not wearing your shoes, because it's gonna knock your socks off. You'll never want to settle for anything less afterwards:-) Yes, there are upscaling receiver/players, and upscaling tvs - I have both - but it's not as good as a true HD source. It makes everything else seem like you've been looking at the world through smudged glasses.
keep in mind that the heat of the warm air rising in the dome would be sufficient to maintain it well above freezing. therefore, snow would not collect.
Absolutely not true. Here in Quebec, the roof of the Olympic Stadium is a similar deal, and huge hot-air guns are needed to try to melt the snow - and when it's not fast enough, it has to be removed mechanically, or the roof fails (and then they have to get out these huge mechanical "clothespins" to hold the edges together until it can be fixed.
Go by any ice rink in the summer and look at the pile of snow outside from the Zamboni... snow just doesn't melt as fast as you think, even in 80 degree heat. Also, snow's a half-decent insulator (trapped air), so good luck melting a foot of snow.
The money saved on winter heat would more than lost in summer cooling. Why do you think most greenhouses have lots of fans and they cover most of the glass in summer?
Sorry, but your ignorance is showing. Your divx format is NOT anywhere near true HD. It has less than 2% of the bandwidth of a true HD signal (and that true HD signal is also compressed - uncompressed the bandwidth requirement would be MUCH higher).
1080i/p requires 356 Mbps for the compressed data stream, not the measly 7Mbps you're looking at.
If you have a friend who has a proper setup (600hz plasma tv with PC video/audio in and a real HD source to compare with, not an LCD or DLP tv), go and look at the difference. If you can't see the difference, go visit your eye doctor.
They can also go out and spend $50 for a pair of rabbit-ears and look at an OTA (Over-the-Air) 1080 hi-def signal, and compare it to the crappy compressed signal their cable or satellite provider sends them.
They should check, as you said, to make sure the original source was also hi-def and hasn't been up-scaled. As an example, try David Letterman on CBS - it's 1080i in many areas, and it looks SO different from older canned stuff, etc.
Then there are all the people who bought HD TVs that can't do more than 720 lines, but they're "1080p compatible" - because they downsample.
And then you have the problem of LCDs suffering from uneven luminance along the vertical axis because of the way that the crystals block the backlight, with more light leaking around pixels that are below eye level.
Or the suckers who bought 120hz or 240hz LCDs - not realizing that the picture is interpolated between 60hz source frames, and HAS to be distorted. They're convinced by the in-store demo disk. They'd be much better off buying a 600hz plasma TV (it doesn't interpolate between source frames - just refreshes the screen 600x a second. The entire frame is updated in 1/600 of a second, as opposed to 1/60 (or 1/30) of a second for conventional systems).
Neither one of them is original. People have been coming out with "we'll let you annotate/comment on/mark up" web pages since at least 1999 (which is how far back I looked when the place I was working at came up with "this great new idea to comment on and rate web pages". After almost a week of discussions among themselves (owners and marketing) they told us about their "new idea." My response was "did you take even 5 minutes to check if someone has done it before? It's not new, it's stupid as shit because people who are looking for something aren't going to waste their time on rating search results, and it's not going to work because of spammers."
A month after we implemented it, Google came out with the same thing. At first, the boss' reaction was "See how good an idea it was?" Of course, the idea turned out to be a turkey ("McDonalds food tastes like shit" was one of the first comments for mcdonalds.com).
I recall a while back that the Swiss were angry at the Chinese for eating Switzerland's national animal (the St. Bernard); people were joking that the Swiss should start eating Panda.
That being said, the way that the Chinese kill the dogs is barbaric. And it's not an urban legend. I've known Asians who have admitted to eating dog, and I'm not impressed.
Basically, they examined a couple of habitats and found that habitats with predators (wolves and cougars, in the places they did their studies checked) were -dramatically- more healthy than those without.
Obvious? Of course - predators cull the weak and sick, the easy kills, so of course what you have left is healthier.
Reporter to native: What is your favourite food?
Native: Beans.
Reporter: Really. What type of beans? Navy beans, baked beans, kidney beans?
Native: Human Beans.
BTW: It's been proven that even robots think people taste like salt pork.
Slashdot Mirror
Look around the web for pictures of "pressed St. Bernards".
They believe that the dog should be alive as long as possible to "capture the essence" and "the meat tastes better."
I would have no problem with rendering the same treatment to anyone who does that to a dog. Cruelty is cruelty, and dogs can and do suffer.
Surgery has already been done via telepresence. It's also going to play a bigger role in the future in the military and emergency and hazardous situations.
Teaching is especially amenable to distance learning - and that's what's happening all over the place - talk to any university student today and ask them if they can pass w/o an internet connection for assignments, etc - telecommuting to class will be the norm for the next generation.
And of course, there are some situations where telepresence is already the best solution - like bomb squads, nuclear fuel handling, etc.
Your math is off because you forget that when you scale the dome up, individual elements need to be thickend, not just their surface area enlarged. Scale an ant up to elephant size, and the legs need to have a LOT more cross-section to support the elephant. Similarly, the "skin" of the dome has to be much thicker when you scale it up, as do stringers, buy wires, struts, etc.
There not only is no net savings, you LOSE a lot. There are not only no economies of scale when you get bigger - there are losses.
This is why, for example, you can't just scale up every element of a skyscraper and expect it to stand.
Also, your 2000 sf house should, for more efficiency, be at least on 2 floors.
Additionally, the larger the dome, the larger the non-living space you enclose, so more material wasted per person. This is also a problem in skyscraper design. If you look at the history of buildings, masonry buildings quickly reached their limit - you had to quadruple the thickness of the walls just to get twice the height, so it got to the point that increasing height resulted in LESS interior because you passed the point of diminishing returns and entered negative territory.
A better application of technology would be to cut the need for travel via telecomumting, telepresence, etc.
the big problem is that management doesn't have that much of a clue as to how to measure job performance and "manage people" w/o the presence of warm bodies, and when we come up with real metrics and methods, most managers would quickly become redundant.
Why is solar in Vermont in the winter a joke? Vermont winters aren't as bad as Quebec winters, and I'm nice and comfy right now solely on sunshine coming through south-facing windows. Even in the dead of winter, those windows add at least 10 degrees to the place, as long as I let the sun in at sun-up and draw the shades around 2pm, when the sun no longer shies in.
Also, why not just enclose individual buildings in domes? No problem with watering lawns, a failure of one dome doesn't mean everyone is screwed, a lot safer in the event of fire, much less materials used (the covering and the structural members can be orders of magnitude less bulky, and you're not covering nearly as much area), they can be easily partially dismantled in the summer, and there's less problem with condensation (just vent the moist air during the peak temperature). You also have less problems with snow and ice accumulation because now you have a sharper curve.
There are cheaper, easier solutions than a whole-city dome. Individual domes, rooftop collectors, underground thermal storage ...
1. Snow and ice float on top of water. The water will flow partway down the dome, then re-freeze, forming an ice dam. Look at any poorly insulated roof. Yu can even see this effect in miniature on car roofs in the winter.
2. Most of the problem with melting snow is the energy required for phase change, from crystalline to liquid. It's going to stay at the freezing point for a LONG time.
3. What heat? The snow is blocking the sun, so the dome doesn't warm up. Also, sun falling on the snow is mostly reflected back into space. Cities absorb more insolation in the winter because of pavements, buildings, etc. - they're islands of comparative warmth compared to the snow-covered country around them. The dome, by allowing a blanket of snow to cover the city, chills the city.
I was pointing out an example of the types of parasites.
As for most of the fish flesh being contaminated, that's from people who actually work in fish canneries and have to pick the little buggers off the fish (as well as worms, etc) - a much better source than the wiki.
Go and ask anyone who works in one - I *love* salmon, cod, etc., but now ... I'm leary.
So he's the inventor of string information theory? KEWL.
Well, prior art dating back to the '60s certainly puts the torpedo into their hull. Thanks for the info.
Try the McNuggets - they're made from the one part of a chicken that KFC doesn't use (and now you know why there's usually a Mcdonalds next to a KFC - those chicken assholes are the tenderest part of the bird).
If land animals had the same class of parasites, they would definitely be quarantined and killed, not served to humans. Nobody would tolerate wormy meat, especially with parasites that are harmful to humans.
We tolerate it with fish because "it's different", but we're seeing that, more and more, it's not so different - interspecies barriers get breached as we change the environs, and fish farming definitely changes their environment.
The whole concept sucks.
1. When you're doing a search, you just want to find the web site that has what you want. Good search engines do their job and then get out of your way. This whole "annotate and comment and rate" is contrary to that.
2. The ratings are easily manipulated by people, as are the comments, etc.
3. If I want to see comments about something, lots of sites allow me to comment directly. WTF would anyone want to use one of hundreds of different "services" to do that rather than at the canonical source?
4. All attempts were based on the premise of "(1) we'll catch eyeballs and users, (2) ... (3) PROFIT". Step 2 is still missing.
A short history lesson:
http://books.google.com/books?id=WPhhLfp8huIC&pg=PA142&lpg=PA142&dq=balkans+foreign+debt+cis&source=bl&ots=mosuyMBj0-&sig=-lpR5DhEuqMIk67WEuXxqcXjRxQ&hl=en&ei=5ET4SvSJE8mn8AbJ9LTzCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CCIQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=&f=false
1. When the CCCP/USSR collapsed, Russia declared it was the successor to the USSR and announced it would honour the foreign debt.
2. Russia took the initiative to form the CIS
3. Russia subsequently defaulted, and needed an IMF bailout.
If you look at page 159, you'll see that Russia believed it could get the debt written off in return for political concessions - so it was a power grab that was supposed to be at zero cost. Nice work if you can get it, but it didn't work out that way.
Thanks for fixing it. I had done the bandwidth calculations manually a few months ago (for other reasons), and the 356 looked familiar.
However, I had to work with h264 codecs years ago (before Apple got into it), and there's a lot of variability in the quality of the image, depending on the h264 implementation, the compression level, etc. We were compressing the crap out of video streams (a terabyte of hd space was more than 20x the cost it is today, and we were doing 25 video and audio streams at a time on one machine ... lots of fancy custom chips with 4 compressors per card, each capable of simultaneously compressing two dvd-res feeds) and 98% savings was common - but you could see artifacts in the results.
Obviously, better codecs have come along, and they're certainly "good enough" nowadays, but, as you point ut, 7mbps divx is not going to give satisfactory 1080p or even 1080i.
Poster trying to worm their way out of saying they were wrong:
And I never said modern systems can't decode 1080) This is the part of what you wrote that I took exception to, which is just plain wrong:
It's not "hi def", it's not "pixel perfect". No video encoder today does lossless compression. Even blu-ray, which is much higher bandwidth, is lossy. Stop the video of your "picture perfect" 800x500 and look at the picture, and you'll see artifacts from the compression, blurriness in details and sections that are in motion, etc.
500 lines of vertical resolution is nowhere near HD - it has fewer than 50% of the pixel count of even the lower, 720 line, wide-screen resolution. Also, since you're looking at it full-screen on an 1920x1080 display, either you have black bands, or you're scaling is not 1:1 in both dimensions. Also, there's no way to get perfect scaling from 800x500 to 1920x1080 - 1920/800 = 2.4, 800/500-2.16. Neither is an even multiple, so you can't just pixel double - you have to interpolate, which introduces artifacts.
What I'm saying is that my point stands - you were not watching a hi-def video, and if you think it looks all that great, you really need to see what a nice big display and sound system with a proper hi-def source can do. Just make sure you're not wearing your shoes, because it's gonna knock your socks off. You'll never want to settle for anything less afterwards :-) Yes, there are upscaling receiver/players, and upscaling tvs - I have both - but it's not as good as a true HD source. It makes everything else seem like you've been looking at the world through smudged glasses.
Absolutely not true. Here in Quebec, the roof of the Olympic Stadium is a similar deal, and huge hot-air guns are needed to try to melt the snow - and when it's not fast enough, it has to be removed mechanically, or the roof fails (and then they have to get out these huge mechanical "clothespins" to hold the edges together until it can be fixed.
Go by any ice rink in the summer and look at the pile of snow outside from the Zamboni ... snow just doesn't melt as fast as you think, even in 80 degree heat. Also, snow's a half-decent insulator (trapped air), so good luck melting a foot of snow.
You forgot something. Most of that surface area for the buildings is insulated, so the resulting heat loss is lower.
The money saved on winter heat would more than lost in summer cooling. Why do you think most greenhouses have lots of fans and they cover most of the glass in summer?
There's your first mistake. No, providing more insight is not what you're doing. Your job is to:
Everything else about any reports you fill in for them is just incidental.
Go grab a copy of Dilbert and read it in the can (might as well do it on company time). That's the real world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_video
1080i/p requires 356 Mbps for the compressed data stream, not the measly 7Mbps you're looking at.
If you have a friend who has a proper setup (600hz plasma tv with PC video/audio in and a real HD source to compare with, not an LCD or DLP tv), go and look at the difference. If you can't see the difference, go visit your eye doctor.
They can also go out and spend $50 for a pair of rabbit-ears and look at an OTA (Over-the-Air) 1080 hi-def signal, and compare it to the crappy compressed signal their cable or satellite provider sends them.
They should check, as you said, to make sure the original source was also hi-def and hasn't been up-scaled. As an example, try David Letterman on CBS - it's 1080i in many areas, and it looks SO different from older canned stuff, etc.
Then there are all the people who bought HD TVs that can't do more than 720 lines, but they're "1080p compatible" - because they downsample.
And then you have the problem of LCDs suffering from uneven luminance along the vertical axis because of the way that the crystals block the backlight, with more light leaking around pixels that are below eye level.
Or the suckers who bought 120hz or 240hz LCDs - not realizing that the picture is interpolated between 60hz source frames, and HAS to be distorted. They're convinced by the in-store demo disk. They'd be much better off buying a 600hz plasma TV (it doesn't interpolate between source frames - just refreshes the screen 600x a second. The entire frame is updated in 1/600 of a second, as opposed to 1/60 (or 1/30) of a second for conventional systems).
And it's not original. Other people have tired to launch similar products since 1999.
Here's a few of them:
http://www.icomment.com/
http://www.purplebunny.com/bbs/index5.php
joeblowanswers.com
Fishkin is an idiot for taking this approach without doing proper research. There's nothing they can sue google for.
A month after we implemented it, Google came out with the same thing. At first, the boss' reaction was "See how good an idea it was?" Of course, the idea turned out to be a turkey ("McDonalds food tastes like shit" was one of the first comments for mcdonalds.com).
It's still a shitty idea.
No such thing as a national animal for Switzerland. http://www.about.ch/administration/index.html#CH_Admin_Nationals
That being said, the way that the Chinese kill the dogs is barbaric. And it's not an urban legend. I've known Asians who have admitted to eating dog, and I'm not impressed.
Disclaimer: I owned a St. Bernard.
Obvious? Of course - predators cull the weak and sick, the easy kills, so of course what you have left is healthier.
Well, if you insist on eating the intestines ...
Reporter to native: What is your favourite food?
Native: Beans.
Reporter: Really. What type of beans? Navy beans, baked beans, kidney beans?
Native: Human Beans.
BTW: It's been proven that even robots think people taste like salt pork.