210 Watts peak * 15% efficiency = 31.5 Watts going into decomposing water at peak production.
re-read the article. 210W *is* peak efficiency -- it's 15% of the average daily insolation, as the article plainly states. The article's numbers add up, and yours do not.
Absent this error, your argument for a large centralized processing plant collapses. It's almost as if you deliberately misread the article because you have some vested interest in preserving the current centralized power infrastructure. I have to ask: are you now, or have you ever received funding from any Koch-backed source?
What is the first thing you notice when you walk into a ball park? Ads. Ads everywhere. What dominates a televised game? Ads. Anything that fucks with the revenue stream created by ads probably is not going to be embraced by the league owners. Every gap in play has a queue full of commercials. Reducing those gaps reduces that revenue stream. For broadcast games, automated officiating means the multiple replays of disputed calls will stop, and that means all those revenue producing ads queued up for that particular gap in play will evaporate.
With that said, I will make a prediction. Baseball doesn't really have a time-out system, like American football, but I would predict the "TV time-out" the NFL introduced to enhance their ad revenue stream will be introduced to baseball if automated officiating ever is adopted.
I think a little bit of history is in order. NASA's charter was to "...provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes." These are the first words of the legislation that established NASA in October of 1958. NASA has been delivering what NASA has promised since they opened the doors for business -- data on the problems of flight, and other purposes, like data on climate, crops, and the environment. They've had to deal with wildly divergent funding regimes, fluctuations in public opinion, and most recently, an active, directed effort by Republicans to remove science from the public policy sphere. Without NASA's research mission, there would be a far smaller set of commercial opportunities for American businesses in space. Plenty of military ones, but practically no private, commercial ones.
And Apollo? Apollo was a one-off. It should have been handled 100 percent by the military, and never darkened NASA's door. (The only non-active duty Apollo program astronaut was Armstrong, and he was still military, just not on active duty at the time.)
Ditto the STS -- Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, convinced Nixon that US intelligence agencies would need reliable access to space to combat the growing Soviet presence in orbit, so NASA was given the incompatible tasks of trying to do science and having to keep it secret at the same time. The STS was a failure, not a success, and it should be laid at Nixon/Kissinger's feet, not the US government in general, or NASA in particular.
So, no. Don't piss on NASA, or the government that created NASA. Instead, piss on the military-industrial complex that hijacked NASA for sixty years. Ironically, the same president that proposed NASA to the American people also warned against that military-industrial complex. And doubly ironic, the agency that was created simultaneously with NASA to handle the weaponization of technology, the Advanced Research Project Agency, accidentally created the Internet. Go figure.
The legislation, which just passed the Senate Transportation and Public Safety Committee in a 5-3 vote that was about as party line as it gets (5 republican yes, 3 democrat no) and still needs to be voted on by the legislature, applies only to people licensed to provide direct care to mentally disabled patients in an intermediate care facility, and was initiated because some fuckwad raped and impregnated an incapacitated woman at the Hacienda Healthcare long term care facility.
So we are talking about legislation that affects at most a couple hundred people, in a state with six million citizens. Arizona already requires bio-data (read fingerprints) for tens of thousands of people who have jobs involving direct contact with their fellow AZ citizens -- everybody from cops and firemen, to school bus drivers and pharmacy technicians. This legislation requires a small subset of those people already required to provide biometric data to provide additional bio-metric data that would be *useful* in identifying somebody suspected of a heinous crime and clearing everybody else. And making them pay for it? Hey, it's Fiscally Responsible! (TM). They can write it off on their taxes, the way pharmacy techs write off the costs of their fingerprint cards.
Why is anybody getting their knickers in a twist over this?
sure, I can tweak your model. you keep using "incentive" as if it is neutral in this game. It isn't. The profit motive is the problem with the US health care delivery system; it can't be part of the solution. Any model with profit still in it reduces to "How to profit off sick people." There is no successful model like that. Rework your model to remove profit. (Hint: there already is a successful model used by every developed nation on the planet except the US. It's called "single payer.")
What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise
What do scientists do when the math/physics doesn't work? They adjust the model in the *belief* that the adjustment will correct the error -- until the adjusted model is tested, it is still just a *belief*. You can't know if the adjusted model is going to work until you test it, but you have to convince your peers that the adjusted model is worth testing. That's where opinion enters into your scientific enterprise. You have to get the people that control the funding to *believe* that your new model is worth testing. A really smart guy wrote a book about this process. Please check it out.
*Belief* is an inextricable part of the scientific enterprise. NB: The difference between a scientific enterprise and a non-scientific enterprise lies in what you do after nature says your model is wrong. A scientist shrugs and finds a new model, everybody else cries "heresy!" to defend their continued belief in the old model.
That's because he is more PT Barnum than Werner Von Braun.
The comparison to PT Barnum is apt. Carl Sagan and Steven Hawking could wear that label too. Anybody who has a vision has to be part showman to make it happen. But WVB was a Nazi war criminal who ordered the deaths (by hanging) of a dozen random workers at a forced labor camp named Dora to set an example for the other workers after production schedules for the V2 rocket parts being produced at Dora slipped. EM's labor relations are notoriously bad, but he hasn't resorted to stringing up his employees.
I'll be waiting for the inevitable talking points about how the US will never get off coal and natural gas because _strawman_ won't let it.
Here's the reality, the rest of the world is moving off fossil fuels at a quick clip, the US will be left behind if we still allow industry to drive the ship (e.g. having oil company executives making energy policy that enriches themselves instead of the needs of the nation).
Energy policy in the US is preventing more widespread adoption of alternative energy sources, period.
1. Less than one percent of US energy is produced by oil, so while "oil company executives making energy policy" is an accurate statement, it is somewhat misleading when it comes to how US politics is influenced by the energy sector.
2. Thirty-two percent of energy production in the US is powered by natural gas. Another thirty percent is powered by coal. Yes, US energy policy at the national level is being set by an ex-petroleum industry person, but at the state and city level, energy policy is being influenced primarily by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a conservative political action group that focuses on getting legislation passed at the local level.
3. ALEC was created by Charles and David Koch decades ago, and is steadily funded by them and other conservative business people. The Koch brothers derive most of their wealth from --- you guessed it -- coal and natural gas. ALEC-backed legislation has killed or severely curtailed alternative energy initiatives in dozens of states and municipalities. For what it's worth, right here in sunny Az, a Koch-backed trio of people on the Az corporation commission effectively killed private roof-top solar in Arizona by drastically altering the rates at which Arizona utilities would pay for energy placed back on the grid by private citizens, going from full retail to less than half of wholesale. New roof-top solar installations by private citizens went from over 40 a month to zero that same month, April 2015.
All politics is local, and the Koch brothers know this. That is why they pour millions and millions of their private wealth into ALEC -- to get legislation passed locally that protects their business interests nationally.
...Musk is in trouble with the SEC because he lied, period. Markets have rules, and one of the rules here is "Don't misrepresent your intentions." With that said, your hagiographic defense of Musk is admirable, because we need forward thinkers and doers like him if we are going to think ourselves out of the crapsack world we are heading towards. But we don't want to cure the disease by killing the patient. Musk has some really good ideas, but he also has some really dated (read: flawed) ideas about the role of markets and of labor. fwiw, he seems to be adapting strategies that were successful for a class of entrepreneurs in the late 18th century that created the conditions that produced our current political-economic paradigm. Look up "robber baron" if you want some insight into Musk's style of disruption. We need to recognize and correct the errors in our current economic and political models, and it is going to take disruptors like Musk to keep those errors front and center -- to keep reminding everybody that the current paradigm is seriously flawed and in need of serious re-thinking.
In 2012, 75% of the 2 million farms in the US produced a paltry three percent of total revenue. In fact, their average annual income was less than $40k per farm, and most of that was from "non-farm" income, like subsidies, retirement income, etc.
John Deere couldn't care less about those farmers -- the money obviously lies elsewhere. Their real target for this action was the three percent of farms (classed "large" or "very large" by the US Dept of Agriculture) that accounted for a whopping 52 percent of all production and 66.4% of agricultural revenue in the US.
So -- John Deere isn't going to worry about a bunch of hayseeds hacking their tractors, not even 2.5 million of them -- they are not a significant revenue source now, and based on concentration trends in the US agriculture market, they are going to disappear entirely. With this action John Deere is sending a message to those three percent of farms that account for two-thirds of all farm revenue: John Deere will not tolerate competition from their own customers when it comes to fixing broke tractors.
Marx was right about one thing -- owning the means of production (he called it "tools"; we call it hardware, now) is one of the two keys to capitalist success, and in a largely mechanized and automated industry like agriculture, that means owning the firmware, and through it, the hardware. Ironically, killing competition is the other key, and John Deere has apparently grokked both keys rightly.
Note: this is a slightly updated version of a post I made a year and a half ago on a slashdot story about John Deer cracking down on farmers using Ukrainian firmware on their tractors to dodge John Deere's $240 + $130/hr fee to have a John Deer engineer "authorize" repairs.
Psych 101, man. Fan is short for "fanatic," after all. In cognitive neuroscience, we use scales that assess subjects' attitudes that allow us to rank, rate, and partition their behaviors. You can google Celebrity Attitude Scale for one of the more prevalent scales we use when assessing obsession. People with higher scores on the scale possess a well-defined spectrum of cognitive and social dysfunctions. They will, with a probability approaching unity, have negative body image, poor interpersonal boundaries, epistemic closure and cognitive rigidity. You can google Dunning-Kruger Effect for more about cognitive rigidity and epistemic closure. the Dunning-Kruger effect, for example, explains *a lot* about obsessive Trump fans. Obsessive fans exhibit well defined psycho-pathologies like dissociation, addiction, stalking behavior, and compulsive spending/purchasing. Highly obsessive individuals tend to score low on mental health assessments, be clinically depressed, and exhibit anxiety and broad social dysfunction. There is no correlation (yet) between these documented behaviors and Axis I and II psychiatric disorders in the DSM, but I think it is only a matter of time before they are established and incorporated. The data are out there and we are shoring up our models with them.
The homicide rate (deaths per 100,000) has declined in the US from over 10 in 1980 to less than 5 as of 2017. Don't feel bad, Trump made the same erroneous claim during and after the election. Overall, violent crime is actually down in this country. Your assertion that there is an increased level of threat (you said, "massively more likely to commit homicide") is not supportable.
You assert that proliferation of firearms is not a problem. I respectfully disagree. In case anybody reading this has any doubt, we do have a prolific supply of guns in the US -- nearly 250 million guns. That stat alone is stunning, but if we "dig deeper," as you put it, we find that only seven million US adults account for half of those guns. That stat is just terrifying. That is the real problem -- the 2nd Amendment is protecting access to guns for less than two percent of the nation.
Owning a gun is one thing, and it is not necessarily a bad thing, and for the time being, it is protected by the 2nd Amendment. But there is a very real difference between owning a gun, and having access to one. The real problem in the US is that anybody who wants a gun one can get one, thanks to the 2nd Amendment. Remember, arguments supporting ownership are pointless if the person acquiring a gun wants only to shoot somebody.
Just maybe, the cautious folks who wait and see what mistakes the "firsts" have made . . . will in the end be more successful . . . ?
Indeed. As a certain SF author pithily put it, "You live and you learn, or you don't live long."
More philosophically, progress (in anything) is not about moving towards some goal as much as it is about moving away from error. Our models and theories can't account for everything we observe, but we can (and do) adjust them when nature tells us that we are barking up the wrong tree.
The actual fuel efficiency ratio is on the order 4:1, not 17:1. You have factored in the number of passengers twice, for some reason, creating the erroneous 17:1 ratio. Fuel cost can be off-set by an increase in the number of passengers, which in turn is enabled by the increase in the number of routes that can be flown, which is what this project is all about. The only routes that the Concorde could fly at Mach or above had to be over water, which limited the number of potential routes, which in turn severely constrained the number of potential passengers. The lack of routes killed Concorde and nothing else.
The fifty year old Concorde had a max speed just north of Mach 2. Assuming no increase in performance in the last half century (unreasonable, I know, but I'm deliberately low-balling to make a point) imagine the demand if a route to Moscow from London opened up with a flight time of one hour.
To Dubai in under three hours? or to Beijing in four? Bicoastal elites in the US are a huge potential market. LAX or SFO to JFK in less than two hours instead of nearly six? LAX to JFK is the third busiest air route in the US. London to Dubai is the fourth busiest air route in Europe. Each of these two routes had more passengers in 2015 than the Concorde flew in it's entire 34 year operational history. I hope you are beginning to get the big picture. Even if maintenance costs were as high as you assert (they aren't, but again, I'm being deliberately pessimistic to prove a point) the increased passenger base would still insure a more than healthy profit margin and a quick ROI.
In a bucket, FR algorithms calculate the distance between eyes, chin, nose, mouth and cheeks and then create a digraph hash based on a linear combination of these measurements, in exactly the same manner fingerprint or retinal scanner algorithms create a digraph hash of the loops and swirls of fingerprints or of branching retinal arteries.
Juggalo paint, or cosmetics in general, can create enough uncertainty in some of those measurements to defeat the algorithm, but only if the sensor is using visible light. IR and UV sensors will not be fooled by pigments that do not reflect those wavelengths. What will work, however, is to alter the contours of the face. A wad of cotton tucked into the check pouches and/or between lips and gums works, as does a prosthetic applied to the bridge of the nose or forehead.
The cracks in the SM are getting too large to ignore. The LHC cannot now, nor can it ever, probe at the scales we need to correct the serious gaps in the SM. Throwing a billion dollars at it is not a good use of our wealth. If you want to throw money at something, spend it on upgrading LIGO or getting LISA off the ground sooner, which are two tools that can open new windows on the universe right now. The SM needs to be corrected, and the LHC cannot help with that.
Which is why the recently enacted "Right to Try" legislation is so important. It legalizes patients obtaining experimental drugs and treatments that are in clinical trial but still far from approval. Before that, you couldn't get such a treatment (in the US) for any price, and any medical practitioner who sold or gave it to you would be a criminal (and also almost certain to lose their certs to practice medicine).
Bullshit. Look up snake oil salesman. Right-to-try is a push by pharma to get drugs into the market faster, so they can start recovering costs and making profits. Right-to-try simply opens up a new path to the market that bypasses regulatory control for drugs that haven't been proven to be safe with humans. It was crafted to allow desperately ill people to be exploited, period.
There is already a method in place to allow people to volunteer for unsanctioned therapies, and it protects them against weaponized snake oil. It's called the Expanded Access Program, and it is administered by the FDA.
I fully support their right to strike since it is the only mechanism the 'common worker' has to defend themselves and ensure they get a reasonable slice of the pie. However, this is probably something that cannot be stopped.
Indeed. It cannot be stopped.
Employees are tools that produce profits; they do not get to share in them. Profits are for owners and shareholders, not employees.
Granted, employees, like any other tool, should be maintained in reasonable working order. But when the cost to maintain a tool begins to eat into your profits, you find a better tool.
Remember, a robot will never demand higher wages, safer working conditions, subsidized healthcare, or paid time off, nor will it ever threaten your profits by going on strike to get "a slice of the pie."
So why on earth would a company send that much value into the wild, undefended? Locating them would be trivial. Harvesting them for anything of value would be equally trivial. So again, why? Did the VCs backing this even pause for a moment to consider the possibility they were being farmed?
Okay. I agree with you in spirit, but I think you need to really think about what you mean by "ownership."
How can you define ownership in a network of heterogenous devices that must share abstract protocols in order to function? The phone that you "own" (for whatever definition of "own" you care to invoke) is functionally useless without the underlying network, so "phone ownership" (whatever that is) must also include the concept of the network that the phone is part of, and not just the hardware that represents one node on the network.
The question becomes, Do you also own the network? If not, who does? What does "owning" a network even mean? Where does my ownership of a node in that network stop, and where does ownership of an adjacent node begin? If I can select a subset of nodes to interact with (e.g. a LAN) is my "ownership" with regards to the rest of the unselected nodes affected?
You can see where this is going. Before networks, ownership was a relatively simple thing to define. Networks make a consistent definition of ownership pretty difficult, because networks allow emergent phenomenon that didn't exist prior to the formation of the network, and thus were not captured by any existing legal framework. You can look at law as the evolving attempt to constrain definitions of ownership as new phenomenon emerge from our existing networks. For example, think about the ways the modern media industry created laws to redefine ownership in an era where creating and distributing exact duplicates of a valuable item (a movie, a computer game, a song) is trivial thanks to computers connected to a planet-spanning network.
FWIW, I think you are on the right track when you suggest that liability is what is going to define ownership in the future. Making a node owner liable for damage to the network, and not just to another node owner would be a good step in that direction. It is still going to be arduous and complex, but it becomes tractable at that point, because you are addressing more than just individual nodes and not ignoring the underlying network that connects the nodes.
The Orville is a true to form Star Trek show disguised as generic sci-fi.
Discovery is generic sci-fi disguised as Star Trek.
Uh...no. Well, not yet, anyway.
Right now, Orville is not Trek; it is not even Trek-like. "Orville" has a satirical element that riffs on Trekish memes to score SJW points. And given its overt imitation of characters from Trek, it also could be called a parody of Trek. But neither of these characterizations put it into the Trek universe. Trek was *never* a satire or a parody. Let's get that straight.
Right now, after seven episodes, "Orville" is in the same spectrum of spoofs that has Quark on one end and Red Dwarf at the other. "Quark" was a spoof of 70's era sci-fi created by a guy who was well known for spoofing other genres. "Red Dwarf" was a parody of 80's era British sitcoms (in space!) that lampooned the whole "annoying people having vaguely interesting things to say" schematic that every British sitcom has followed to this day.
If Macfarlane can resist mining cultural memes from his adolescence for quick humor (e.g. see any episode of "Family Guy" when Macfarlane was directly involved with the writing) "Orville" can become something more.
There are hints of a different path Macfarlane could be contemplating for the series. For example, In S1E4, the government sanctioned murder of a dissident by a violent mob of intolerant alt-right standins was a good sign that Macfarlane can read the zeitgeist. Subtlety is not Macfarlane's strong suit, so the fact that he didn't give the despotic leader of the government a bad comb-over to drive the point home is an indication that Macfarlane might be considering a different approach.
There are other hints of it, especially in the evolving arc of Bortus' "son," and the potential arc involving the rescued Krill children darkly hinted at in S1E6.
McFarlane has created a spoof, but to what end? Trek was not about satire. If anything, it was about social commentary. Stephen Colbert's widely successful "The Colbert Report," a textbook perfect example of satire that deconstructed right-wing bloviators like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh is something I hope Macfarlane is shooting for. Satire is one method of social commentary, but it is not the only one. Handled well, the way Colbert handled his conservative alter ego, it can be devastating. But it is too targeted. A culture as sick as ours needs a broad spectrum cure, and social commentary in a popular TV series *can* reach far more people.
Granted, much of the hype surrounding ST:Discovery was about the stated intention of the creative team to use the show as a vehicle for social commentary a la ST:TOS. Macfarlane made no such announcement, but it seems that he is leaving himself some room to go that route.
Linking the bad guys with the alt-right wackos emboldened by the dumpster fire president we elected is probably not going to end well for either series. "Remain Klingon" and "Make America Great Again" are too similar in meaning to be a coincidence, and as soon as the alt right realize that they are ST:Discovery's Klingons, and Macfarlane's Krill in "Orville," it is going to get ugly, fast.
Slashdot Mirror
210 Watts peak * 15% efficiency = 31.5 Watts going into decomposing water at peak production.
re-read the article. 210W *is* peak efficiency -- it's 15% of the average daily insolation, as the article plainly states. The article's numbers add up, and yours do not.
Absent this error, your argument for a large centralized processing plant collapses. It's almost as if you deliberately misread the article because you have some vested interest in preserving the current centralized power infrastructure. I have to ask: are you now, or have you ever received funding from any Koch-backed source?
I'll bet the answer is "yes."
What is the first thing you notice when you walk into a ball park? Ads. Ads everywhere. What dominates a televised game? Ads. Anything that fucks with the revenue stream created by ads probably is not going to be embraced by the league owners. Every gap in play has a queue full of commercials. Reducing those gaps reduces that revenue stream. For broadcast games, automated officiating means the multiple replays of disputed calls will stop, and that means all those revenue producing ads queued up for that particular gap in play will evaporate.
With that said, I will make a prediction. Baseball doesn't really have a time-out system, like American football, but I would predict the "TV time-out" the NFL introduced to enhance their ad revenue stream will be introduced to baseball if automated officiating ever is adopted.
I think a little bit of history is in order. NASA's charter was to "...provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes." These are the first words of the legislation that established NASA in October of 1958. NASA has been delivering what NASA has promised since they opened the doors for business -- data on the problems of flight, and other purposes, like data on climate, crops, and the environment. They've had to deal with wildly divergent funding regimes, fluctuations in public opinion, and most recently, an active, directed effort by Republicans to remove science from the public policy sphere. Without NASA's research mission, there would be a far smaller set of commercial opportunities for American businesses in space. Plenty of military ones, but practically no private, commercial ones.
And Apollo? Apollo was a one-off. It should have been handled 100 percent by the military, and never darkened NASA's door. (The only non-active duty Apollo program astronaut was Armstrong, and he was still military, just not on active duty at the time.)
Ditto the STS -- Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, convinced Nixon that US intelligence agencies would need reliable access to space to combat the growing Soviet presence in orbit, so NASA was given the incompatible tasks of trying to do science and having to keep it secret at the same time. The STS was a failure, not a success, and it should be laid at Nixon/Kissinger's feet, not the US government in general, or NASA in particular.
So, no. Don't piss on NASA, or the government that created NASA. Instead, piss on the military-industrial complex that hijacked NASA for sixty years. Ironically, the same president that proposed NASA to the American people also warned against that military-industrial complex. And doubly ironic, the agency that was created simultaneously with NASA to handle the weaponization of technology, the Advanced Research Project Agency, accidentally created the Internet. Go figure.
The legislation, which just passed the Senate Transportation and Public Safety Committee in a 5-3 vote that was about as party line as it gets (5 republican yes, 3 democrat no) and still needs to be voted on by the legislature, applies only to people licensed to provide direct care to mentally disabled patients in an intermediate care facility, and was initiated because some fuckwad raped and impregnated an incapacitated woman at the Hacienda Healthcare long term care facility.
So we are talking about legislation that affects at most a couple hundred people, in a state with six million citizens. Arizona already requires bio-data (read fingerprints) for tens of thousands of people who have jobs involving direct contact with their fellow AZ citizens -- everybody from cops and firemen, to school bus drivers and pharmacy technicians. This legislation requires a small subset of those people already required to provide biometric data to provide additional bio-metric data that would be *useful* in identifying somebody suspected of a heinous crime and clearing everybody else. And making them pay for it? Hey, it's Fiscally Responsible! (TM). They can write it off on their taxes, the way pharmacy techs write off the costs of their fingerprint cards.
Why is anybody getting their knickers in a twist over this?
sure, I can tweak your model. you keep using "incentive" as if it is neutral in this game. It isn't. The profit motive is the problem with the US health care delivery system; it can't be part of the solution. Any model with profit still in it reduces to "How to profit off sick people." There is no successful model like that. Rework your model to remove profit. (Hint: there already is a successful model used by every developed nation on the planet except the US. It's called "single payer.")
What is believe? Either the math / physics works or it doesn't. Science is not an opinion based enterprise
What do scientists do when the math/physics doesn't work? They adjust the model in the *belief* that the adjustment will correct the error -- until the adjusted model is tested, it is still just a *belief*. You can't know if the adjusted model is going to work until you test it, but you have to convince your peers that the adjusted model is worth testing. That's where opinion enters into your scientific enterprise. You have to get the people that control the funding to *believe* that your new model is worth testing. A really smart guy wrote a book about this process. Please check it out.
*Belief* is an inextricable part of the scientific enterprise. NB: The difference between a scientific enterprise and a non-scientific enterprise lies in what you do after nature says your model is wrong. A scientist shrugs and finds a new model, everybody else cries "heresy!" to defend their continued belief in the old model.
That's because he is more PT Barnum than Werner Von Braun.
The comparison to PT Barnum is apt. Carl Sagan and Steven Hawking could wear that label too. Anybody who has a vision has to be part showman to make it happen. But WVB was a Nazi war criminal who ordered the deaths (by hanging) of a dozen random workers at a forced labor camp named Dora to set an example for the other workers after production schedules for the V2 rocket parts being produced at Dora slipped. EM's labor relations are notoriously bad, but he hasn't resorted to stringing up his employees.
I'll be waiting for the inevitable talking points about how the US will never get off coal and natural gas because _strawman_ won't let it.
Here's the reality, the rest of the world is moving off fossil fuels at a quick clip, the US will be left behind if we still allow industry to drive the ship (e.g. having oil company executives making energy policy that enriches themselves instead of the needs of the nation).
Energy policy in the US is preventing more widespread adoption of alternative energy sources, period.
1. Less than one percent of US energy is produced by oil, so while "oil company executives making energy policy" is an accurate statement, it is somewhat misleading when it comes to how US politics is influenced by the energy sector.
2. Thirty-two percent of energy production in the US is powered by natural gas. Another thirty percent is powered by coal. Yes, US energy policy at the national level is being set by an ex-petroleum industry person, but at the state and city level, energy policy is being influenced primarily by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a conservative political action group that focuses on getting legislation passed at the local level.
3. ALEC was created by Charles and David Koch decades ago, and is steadily funded by them and other conservative business people. The Koch brothers derive most of their wealth from --- you guessed it -- coal and natural gas. ALEC-backed legislation has killed or severely curtailed alternative energy initiatives in dozens of states and municipalities. For what it's worth, right here in sunny Az, a Koch-backed trio of people on the Az corporation commission effectively killed private roof-top solar in Arizona by drastically altering the rates at which Arizona utilities would pay for energy placed back on the grid by private citizens, going from full retail to less than half of wholesale. New roof-top solar installations by private citizens went from over 40 a month to zero that same month, April 2015.
All politics is local, and the Koch brothers know this. That is why they pour millions and millions of their private wealth into ALEC -- to get legislation passed locally that protects their business interests nationally.
...Musk is in trouble with the SEC because he lied, period. Markets have rules, and one of the rules here is "Don't misrepresent your intentions." With that said, your hagiographic defense of Musk is admirable, because we need forward thinkers and doers like him if we are going to think ourselves out of the crapsack world we are heading towards. But we don't want to cure the disease by killing the patient. Musk has some really good ideas, but he also has some really dated (read: flawed) ideas about the role of markets and of labor. fwiw, he seems to be adapting strategies that were successful for a class of entrepreneurs in the late 18th century that created the conditions that produced our current political-economic paradigm. Look up "robber baron" if you want some insight into Musk's style of disruption. We need to recognize and correct the errors in our current economic and political models, and it is going to take disruptors like Musk to keep those errors front and center -- to keep reminding everybody that the current paradigm is seriously flawed and in need of serious re-thinking.
In 2012, 75% of the 2 million farms in the US produced a paltry three percent of total revenue. In fact, their average annual income was less than $40k per farm, and most of that was from "non-farm" income, like subsidies, retirement income, etc.
John Deere couldn't care less about those farmers -- the money obviously lies elsewhere. Their real target for this action was the three percent of farms (classed "large" or "very large" by the US Dept of Agriculture) that accounted for a whopping 52 percent of all production and 66.4% of agricultural revenue in the US.
So -- John Deere isn't going to worry about a bunch of hayseeds hacking their tractors, not even 2.5 million of them -- they are not a significant revenue source now, and based on concentration trends in the US agriculture market, they are going to disappear entirely. With this action John Deere is sending a message to those three percent of farms that account for two-thirds of all farm revenue: John Deere will not tolerate competition from their own customers when it comes to fixing broke tractors.
Marx was right about one thing -- owning the means of production (he called it "tools"; we call it hardware, now) is one of the two keys to capitalist success, and in a largely mechanized and automated industry like agriculture, that means owning the firmware, and through it, the hardware. Ironically, killing competition is the other key, and John Deere has apparently grokked both keys rightly.
Note: this is a slightly updated version of a post I made a year and a half ago on a slashdot story about John Deer cracking down on farmers using Ukrainian firmware on their tractors to dodge John Deere's $240 + $130/hr fee to have a John Deer engineer "authorize" repairs.
Psych 101, man. Fan is short for "fanatic," after all. In cognitive neuroscience, we use scales that assess subjects' attitudes that allow us to rank, rate, and partition their behaviors. You can google Celebrity Attitude Scale for one of the more prevalent scales we use when assessing obsession. People with higher scores on the scale possess a well-defined spectrum of cognitive and social dysfunctions. They will, with a probability approaching unity, have negative body image, poor interpersonal boundaries, epistemic closure and cognitive rigidity. You can google Dunning-Kruger Effect for more about cognitive rigidity and epistemic closure. the Dunning-Kruger effect, for example, explains *a lot* about obsessive Trump fans. Obsessive fans exhibit well defined psycho-pathologies like dissociation, addiction, stalking behavior, and compulsive spending/purchasing. Highly obsessive individuals tend to score low on mental health assessments, be clinically depressed, and exhibit anxiety and broad social dysfunction. There is no correlation (yet) between these documented behaviors and Axis I and II psychiatric disorders in the DSM, but I think it is only a matter of time before they are established and incorporated. The data are out there and we are shoring up our models with them.
Quantum mechanics
The order does not matter
until classical
hmmm. Niels, is that you? Let's call this the Copenhagen Haiku -- clever, but not quite right. :)
How about...
Quantum mechanics
The order does not matter
nor does classical
One universe, one set of rules, eh?
Just...no. Let's do this by the numbers.
The homicide rate (deaths per 100,000) has declined in the US from over 10 in 1980 to less than 5 as of 2017. Don't feel bad, Trump made the same erroneous claim during and after the election. Overall, violent crime is actually down in this country. Your assertion that there is an increased level of threat (you said, "massively more likely to commit homicide") is not supportable.
You assert that proliferation of firearms is not a problem. I respectfully disagree. In case anybody reading this has any doubt, we do have a prolific supply of guns in the US -- nearly 250 million guns. That stat alone is stunning, but if we "dig deeper," as you put it, we find that only seven million US adults account for half of those guns. That stat is just terrifying. That is the real problem -- the 2nd Amendment is protecting access to guns for less than two percent of the nation.
Owning a gun is one thing, and it is not necessarily a bad thing, and for the time being, it is protected by the 2nd Amendment. But there is a very real difference between owning a gun, and having access to one. The real problem in the US is that anybody who wants a gun one can get one, thanks to the 2nd Amendment. Remember, arguments supporting ownership are pointless if the person acquiring a gun wants only to shoot somebody.
Just maybe, the cautious folks who wait and see what mistakes the "firsts" have made . . . will in the end be more successful . . . ?
Indeed. As a certain SF author pithily put it, "You live and you learn, or you don't live long."
More philosophically, progress (in anything) is not about moving towards some goal as much as it is about moving away from error. Our models and theories can't account for everything we observe, but we can (and do) adjust them when nature tells us that we are barking up the wrong tree.
The actual fuel efficiency ratio is on the order 4:1, not 17:1. You have factored in the number of passengers twice, for some reason, creating the erroneous 17:1 ratio. Fuel cost can be off-set by an increase in the number of passengers, which in turn is enabled by the increase in the number of routes that can be flown, which is what this project is all about. The only routes that the Concorde could fly at Mach or above had to be over water, which limited the number of potential routes, which in turn severely constrained the number of potential passengers. The lack of routes killed Concorde and nothing else.
The fifty year old Concorde had a max speed just north of Mach 2. Assuming no increase in performance in the last half century (unreasonable, I know, but I'm deliberately low-balling to make a point) imagine the demand if a route to Moscow from London opened up with a flight time of one hour. To Dubai in under three hours? or to Beijing in four? Bicoastal elites in the US are a huge potential market. LAX or SFO to JFK in less than two hours instead of nearly six? LAX to JFK is the third busiest air route in the US. London to Dubai is the fourth busiest air route in Europe. Each of these two routes had more passengers in 2015 than the Concorde flew in it's entire 34 year operational history. I hope you are beginning to get the big picture. Even if maintenance costs were as high as you assert (they aren't, but again, I'm being deliberately pessimistic to prove a point) the increased passenger base would still insure a more than healthy profit margin and a quick ROI.
...change the detected shape of the face.
In a bucket, FR algorithms calculate the distance between eyes, chin, nose, mouth and cheeks and then create a digraph hash based on a linear combination of these measurements, in exactly the same manner fingerprint or retinal scanner algorithms create a digraph hash of the loops and swirls of fingerprints or of branching retinal arteries.
Juggalo paint, or cosmetics in general, can create enough uncertainty in some of those measurements to defeat the algorithm, but only if the sensor is using visible light. IR and UV sensors will not be fooled by pigments that do not reflect those wavelengths. What will work, however, is to alter the contours of the face. A wad of cotton tucked into the check pouches and/or between lips and gums works, as does a prosthetic applied to the bridge of the nose or forehead.
There is a three-part mantra that project managers learn at the enterprise level:
This project fell to the third part.
The cracks in the SM are getting too large to ignore. The LHC cannot now, nor can it ever, probe at the scales we need to correct the serious gaps in the SM. Throwing a billion dollars at it is not a good use of our wealth. If you want to throw money at something, spend it on upgrading LIGO or getting LISA off the ground sooner, which are two tools that can open new windows on the universe right now. The SM needs to be corrected, and the LHC cannot help with that.
Which is why the recently enacted "Right to Try" legislation is so important. It legalizes patients obtaining experimental drugs and treatments that are in clinical trial but still far from approval. Before that, you couldn't get such a treatment (in the US) for any price, and any medical practitioner who sold or gave it to you would be a criminal (and also almost certain to lose their certs to practice medicine).
Bullshit. Look up snake oil salesman. Right-to-try is a push by pharma to get drugs into the market faster, so they can start recovering costs and making profits. Right-to-try simply opens up a new path to the market that bypasses regulatory control for drugs that haven't been proven to be safe with humans. It was crafted to allow desperately ill people to be exploited, period.
There is already a method in place to allow people to volunteer for unsanctioned therapies, and it protects them against weaponized snake oil. It's called the Expanded Access Program, and it is administered by the FDA.
I fully support their right to strike since it is the only mechanism the 'common worker' has to defend themselves and ensure they get a reasonable slice of the pie. However, this is probably something that cannot be stopped.
Indeed. It cannot be stopped.
Employees are tools that produce profits; they do not get to share in them. Profits are for owners and shareholders, not employees.
Granted, employees, like any other tool, should be maintained in reasonable working order. But when the cost to maintain a tool begins to eat into your profits, you find a better tool.
Remember, a robot will never demand higher wages, safer working conditions, subsidized healthcare, or paid time off, nor will it ever threaten your profits by going on strike to get "a slice of the pie."
So why on earth would a company send that much value into the wild, undefended? Locating them would be trivial. Harvesting them for anything of value would be equally trivial. So again, why? Did the VCs backing this even pause for a moment to consider the possibility they were being farmed?
clean as chernobyl? reliable as three mile island? safe as fukushima?
really?
...got *a lot* of margaritas for me and nothing but laughs from the crew when I showed the perplexed stew delivering all those drinks my SSID. YMMV.
Okay. I agree with you in spirit, but I think you need to really think about what you mean by "ownership."
How can you define ownership in a network of heterogenous devices that must share abstract protocols in order to function? The phone that you "own" (for whatever definition of "own" you care to invoke) is functionally useless without the underlying network, so "phone ownership" (whatever that is) must also include the concept of the network that the phone is part of, and not just the hardware that represents one node on the network.
The question becomes, Do you also own the network? If not, who does? What does "owning" a network even mean? Where does my ownership of a node in that network stop, and where does ownership of an adjacent node begin? If I can select a subset of nodes to interact with (e.g. a LAN) is my "ownership" with regards to the rest of the unselected nodes affected?
You can see where this is going. Before networks, ownership was a relatively simple thing to define. Networks make a consistent definition of ownership pretty difficult, because networks allow emergent phenomenon that didn't exist prior to the formation of the network, and thus were not captured by any existing legal framework. You can look at law as the evolving attempt to constrain definitions of ownership as new phenomenon emerge from our existing networks. For example, think about the ways the modern media industry created laws to redefine ownership in an era where creating and distributing exact duplicates of a valuable item (a movie, a computer game, a song) is trivial thanks to computers connected to a planet-spanning network.
FWIW, I think you are on the right track when you suggest that liability is what is going to define ownership in the future. Making a node owner liable for damage to the network, and not just to another node owner would be a good step in that direction. It is still going to be arduous and complex, but it becomes tractable at that point, because you are addressing more than just individual nodes and not ignoring the underlying network that connects the nodes.
The Orville is a true to form Star Trek show disguised as generic sci-fi.
Discovery is generic sci-fi disguised as Star Trek.
Uh...no. Well, not yet, anyway.
Right now, Orville is not Trek; it is not even Trek-like. "Orville" has a satirical element that riffs on Trekish memes to score SJW points. And given its overt imitation of characters from Trek, it also could be called a parody of Trek. But neither of these characterizations put it into the Trek universe. Trek was *never* a satire or a parody. Let's get that straight.
Right now, after seven episodes, "Orville" is in the same spectrum of spoofs that has Quark on one end and Red Dwarf at the other. "Quark" was a spoof of 70's era sci-fi created by a guy who was well known for spoofing other genres. "Red Dwarf" was a parody of 80's era British sitcoms (in space!) that lampooned the whole "annoying people having vaguely interesting things to say" schematic that every British sitcom has followed to this day.
If Macfarlane can resist mining cultural memes from his adolescence for quick humor (e.g. see any episode of "Family Guy" when Macfarlane was directly involved with the writing) "Orville" can become something more.
There are hints of a different path Macfarlane could be contemplating for the series. For example, In S1E4, the government sanctioned murder of a dissident by a violent mob of intolerant alt-right standins was a good sign that Macfarlane can read the zeitgeist. Subtlety is not Macfarlane's strong suit, so the fact that he didn't give the despotic leader of the government a bad comb-over to drive the point home is an indication that Macfarlane might be considering a different approach.
There are other hints of it, especially in the evolving arc of Bortus' "son," and the potential arc involving the rescued Krill children darkly hinted at in S1E6.
McFarlane has created a spoof, but to what end? Trek was not about satire. If anything, it was about social commentary. Stephen Colbert's widely successful "The Colbert Report," a textbook perfect example of satire that deconstructed right-wing bloviators like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh is something I hope Macfarlane is shooting for. Satire is one method of social commentary, but it is not the only one. Handled well, the way Colbert handled his conservative alter ego, it can be devastating. But it is too targeted. A culture as sick as ours needs a broad spectrum cure, and social commentary in a popular TV series *can* reach far more people.
Granted, much of the hype surrounding ST:Discovery was about the stated intention of the creative team to use the show as a vehicle for social commentary a la ST:TOS. Macfarlane made no such announcement, but it seems that he is leaving himself some room to go that route.
Linking the bad guys with the alt-right wackos emboldened by the dumpster fire president we elected is probably not going to end well for either series. "Remain Klingon" and "Make America Great Again" are too similar in meaning to be a coincidence, and as soon as the alt right realize that they are ST:Discovery's Klingons, and Macfarlane's Krill in "Orville," it is going to get ugly, fast.