If by 'numerics' you mean 'collision detection and game physics' then please note that there are some convincing implementations of those things on the GPU too. When you are already using 500Gflops for shading - then adding 5 more Gflops makes negligable difference. But offloading 5Gflops from a machine that only needs 0.5 for game logic makes a spectacular difference. So if your figures are correct then logically the GPU should evolve to do physics...which is exactly what is happening. That leaves the CPU with very little left to do - except maybe AI.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something - the Wikipedia page was 'seeded' with this junk information at 21:33 on 14th March - and corrected by 5:33 on the following day. So it was screwed up for exactly 8 hours. Hardly a big deal. Subsequent to that, random vandalisms come and go - but are never there for more than a few minutes before being corrected.
I believe that on most cars, the water pump is driven continuously by the engine - whether it's needed or not. What the mechanical thermostat does is to allow the output of the pump to go through the radiator or simply to circulate around the engine block and directly back to the pump. So when the engine is cold, no water flows through the radiator - but the water pump is still pumping at full speed. As soon as you get up to temperature, the thermostat opens, the water goes through the radiator and (all being well) the engine temperature immediately stabilises at whatever temperature your thermostat was built to set.
The radiator fan is also turned on and off with an electrical thermostat - you don't need the fan on unless the radiator is failing to cool the water sufficiently unaided - but that's not to regulate engine temperature - that's to save energy by not running the fan unnecessarily.
Some people react to a chronically overheating car by completely removing the thermostat which allows the water to flow around the radiator all the time - and removes an obstruction to the water flow. However, this can be dangerous. On an older car that I own (a '63 Mini as it happens), removing the thermostat also removes turbulance from the water stream which causes a 'stagnant' area where water no longer flows - this results in a hot-spot building up on the sides of two of the cylinders which can wreck the engine in pretty short order!
If you did that on one of these trucks - then you might well have problems in cold weather of the engine never reaching it's desired operating temperature. That's bad for gas milage - but shouldn't be all that serious otherwise.
The '07 MINI Cooper'S has a 4 cylinder 1.6 liter direct-injected twin-turbocharged engine - and since most fuel in the US now contains 10% ethanol, I'd say the "experimental" technology these guys are pushing is already out there in at least one production car. The problem with knocking has been nailed a bazillion years ago - just about all modern cars have an anti-knock sensor that can richen the mixture if it detects signs of knocking - but with high octane gasoline - it only very rarely has to actually do that - so the "problem" of knocking isn't really there. The only time the MINI actually does something like that is when the dumb user filled the thing with regular low-octane gas instead of 'the good stuff'.
Add to that that the MINI has goodies like electric oil, power steering and water pumps that can actually be turned off (rather than merely bypassed) when not needed - so the engine reaches it's most efficient temperature faster and you aren't burning fuel circulating fluids that don't need to be circulated yet. It has computer controlled inlet and exhaust valves - so the timing is infinitely variable - and can be varied separately for each cylinder. For short bursts of accelleration, the car has an 'overboost' feature from the turbo - which won't help you much for prolonged hard accelleration - but is great for a rapid burst of speed for overtaking, blasting out of a corner (FUN!) or blowing away those bloody ugly Scion xB's at traffic lights (a personal mission of mine, I might add).
Well, yes - but my PC isn't using 400W all the time either (expecially if I'm web browsing) that's also a peak figure...and for sure my car isn't *ever* using as little as 1hp. But I agree that my numbers are indeed very, very rough - and to do a proper comparison we'd have to look at the relative efficiency of an internal combustion engine versus a power station...the losses in getting the energy to it's destination and the relative amount of CO2 output. But my point remains - a car uses VASTLY more energy than a PC - so if you are looking for a place to save, keeping from pegging your tachometer at every red light, buy a fuel-efficient car, turn off the A/C...any of those things will completely dominate your overall energy consumption - and an extra couple of hours of web surfing is pretty negligable.
This is the entire problem - why won't people think?
My PC has a 400W power supply - that's the most it can draw it probably uses much less than that on the average say 350W - but let's roughly double that just to be on the safe side because we have a monitor to power too. Let's add a bit to allow for my natural love of round numbers and say that my PC consumes 754.7W (!)
Why? Because 745.7W is 1 horsepower.
My car (a particularly small, fuel efficient one) has a 150hp engine.
So on very rough numbers, running my PC for 150 hours is equivelent to driving my car for 1 hour.
It should be abundantly clear that saving energy by surfing less is really pretty pointless. If I drive for one hour and web surf for ten hours then then buying a car with ten less horsepower will completely "pay" for all of the "wasted" surfing I do.
We've done that - we are well beyond the "Is there a problem?" and the "I wonder what the cause is" stages - we have gotten through the "What the heck can we do to fix this" part, are now into the "OK - we understand this very, very well - so now over to the politicians to implement our recommendations" phase...but everything has come to a grinding halt. (Well in some parts of the world at least).
Yes, there are still a few skeptics - but in any human endeavor, there are always skeptics and there comes a point where you have to stop letting a very tiny percentage of experts cripple your decisionmaking and doom you to inaction.
If we have to wait until 100% of scientists and laymen believe in this then the planet is doomed. The number of scientists who are dissenters is down to a very tiny number indeed. The public at large is nowhere near as far along that road - but that's because the press seem to delight in giving equal prominance to the 0.1% of dissenting scientists (I made that number up but it's not so far off) than to the 99.9% who agree that there is a problem.
This is now an urgent matter - we don't have time for yet more studies and yet more dissenters. If we don't act very soon indeed - we won't be able to pull the planet back into some kind of stability until we have 2 billion people with flooded-out homes, 30% less viable farmland and half the species of animals and plants exterminated.
If it should (by some amazing flook) prove that the majority are wrong - then the costs of cleanup won't be wasted. Cutting down pollution from all sources and reducing our dependence on dwindling stocks of fossil fuels is undoubtedly a public good - and would be worthwhile even if global warming were not an issue.
The consequences of inaction when needed are so profound and the consequences of unnecessary action are so minor in comparison that even if it was a 50/50 thing, we should still be doing this.
Aspergers is a spectrum - it's simply not possible to place people accurately on the line - but we all joke that slashdotters are comfortable with computers and can't get chicks - that places you someplace along the line - not at the origin!
For me, a conversation requires me to multitask a gazillion things. I can try to give an idea of what following a conversation is like for an Aspie who is trying to seem normal:
* Am I making the right amount of eye contact? Too much - creepy. Too little - withdrawn. How long has it been since I made eye contact with each of the three people I'm talking to? Am I remembering to switch eye contact when the conversation switches from one person to another. I know that keeping eye contact with the previous speaker indicates that I'm still thinking about what they said - but if I fail to look towards the new speaker, then that person will think I've lost interest.
* Am I talking too much? In too much detail? I'd better not stop talking right in the middle of something I'm saying - but I think I see people losing interest.
* I'm bored out of my skull - I desperately need to switch the subject - I need to start thinking about an appropriate way to do that. What thing that I care about can I talk about without being ridiculously off-topic? I want to say: "Did you know that the Mini Cooper was disqualified from the 1966 Monte Carlo Rally because it didn't meet the homologation rules because of it's headlamp dimmer switch was non-standard?"...but I don't think "Hey, I like your car" is going to get me there. Argh!
* Geez - this guy is taking the long way around to explain a simple point that I saw coming at least a minute ago. Could I somehow step in and cut him off? No - that might be bad.
* Did his voice go up in pitch at the end of that last sentence? I think so - he's paused - OK so that was a question. Was it directed at me? Damn! I didn't notice where his eyes were pointed when he said that. Does it look like anyone else is going to answer?
* Is anyone looking confused? Look carefully at the expressions on their faces - where are eyebrows placed? Maybe I need to go into more detail in the next thing I say...but too much detail and they'll get bored. Does anyone look bored? That's a harder expression to read. Argh.
* What she said was pretty funny - was it supposed to be funny? Who knows? Well - is anyone else smiling at it? They are all looking at her - maybe there is a punchline coming.
* I need to stop talking - but it's my turn. I need to ask a question that will cause the other person to talk about themselves...which is a pain because I really don't care all that much. This is someone I'll probably never meet again - what do I care what they do for a living or what kind of dog they have...well, I need to say something...OK - lets go with stock conversation starter number seventeen: "Do you have any pets?"
* Someone is being slightly racist - I want to jump in an tell them that this is deeply offensive and that they are an idiot - but if I do that the party will be a smoking ruin and my wife will kill me when we get home. OK - can I somehow just say nothing and let it slide? What can I say? I can't agree...but I can't say nothing. Oh-oh...there has been a 'pregnant pause' while I've been thinking about this - maybe that's worse than just agreeing.
This is hard work. It's easier with people you know well - and it helps that they know you're geeky and have appropriate expectations. Then, of course a bunch of other people at work are close to me on the Normal/Aspie/Autistic spectrum - so with them, I can skip all of this crap - just get on with the business of communicating simply and clearly and without hidden stuff.
I *HATE* parties - I avoid them like the plague. My poor wife likes to go to these things - but for me they are utter torture. The kind where I don't know many people are quite unbearable.
I love to explain things to people - especially if I have a white-board. That way, people want me to go into detail - I can look at the white-board - so no messy eye contact crap. They probably won't talk until I make a gap - and when they do, they'll say something relevent and important.
OK - that's scares me a LOT! As a 3D graphics professional, I'm very familiar with the concept of the uncanny valley. The thought that my efforts to come across as more 'human' in conversations might actually be making me creepier is a strong possibility that I hadn't considered.
Fortunately - since this is a learned/forced thing (I can't make small-talk effortlessly - and probably never will), it would be the easiest thing in the world to turn it off and go back to being a mere 'unrealistic' person rather than a "creepily close to being realistic" conversationalist.
That whole walking on tiptoe thing is very weird. I clearly recall parents and other kids remarking on this when I was really young. My mother was always telling me not to walk on tiptoe - and complaining that my shoes wore out around the ball of my foot while the heels were almost pristine.
It's so hard to imagine that some genetic/environmental effect could affect your ability to sit in front of a CRT for 16 hours straight looking for the same damned stupid bug - as well as affect how you walk.
But I've read it in many places and every genuine, diagnosed Aspie I know has the exact same story to tell - it's definitely a real symptom of the syndrome.
The problem with informed consent is that once you get sufficiently far along the spectrum to be clearly in need of treatment, you are likely to be so cut off from other people that it's going to be almost impossible for anyone to regard your consent (or otherwise) as "informed".
Messing with peoples brains (their personalities - their 'souls' to use a quaint term) is dangerous stuff. What happens if you cure them - and only after they are "normal" do they clearly and coherently point out that they were happier beforehand?
Not easy.
I recently started to have hearing problems - and was told by the audiologist that a CAT scan of my head would help him to see what was going on. During the scan, they found a 2cm x 1cm x 1cm tumor on my temporal lobe - totally unrelated to the hearing problem. This (needless to say) put me into a complete state of panic - but they told me that from the way the brain was folded around it, it must have appeared when I was a small child and stopped growing in my early teens - and has not changed since. I remarked that maybe it would be a good idea to get rid of it anyway - but as the doctor pointed out - your temporal lobe is where your 'personality' lives. If we "fix" this problem you may not be "you" afterwards. Which makes me think - if that thing hadn't popped into my head at age 12 or so - I wouldn't be the "me" I am now. If I had had truly "informed consent" back when I was a kid, would I have taken it? Would I take it in hindsight?
The problem is that autism isn't a binary diagnosis. If you have a broken leg - fix it. If you don't have a broken leg then don't cover your leg with plaster and walk around on crutches for a couple of months. Easy choice. But Autism is a spectrum of conditions running from mild geekiness through Asperger's to someone who is completely and devastatingly cut off from the world. There's the problem. It's very clear that at one end of the line a cure is a wonderful thing and we should all be very happy for the people who's lives will be immeasureably improved. But at the other end of the line, there are people who not only are not suffering unduly - they are actually benefitting from the ability to focus, to specialise, to abstract and to think in three dimensions to a greater degree than the general population. Those people must not be 'cured' - at least not at an early age before they have a chance to figure out what they want out of life.
So where between those two extremes do we start intervening?
I have no clue - it's an analog problem with a binary solution - never a good thing.
I found out 5 or 6 years ago at age 48. It could be worse!
But I don't see Aspergers as such a terrible liability. It has enormous benefits as well as the downsides. I maintain that once you know what the problems are, you can compensate for the downsides and still reap the rewards of the good side.
In retrospect, I'd dearly love to have been diagnosed at a young age and properly coached on ways to compensate - but I most certainly wouldn't ever want to be "cured". No way.
I don't know how old you are - I'm just over 50 years old - I only realised I am an Asperger's "victim" less than 5 years ago. When I saw a list of common symptoms (some very odd - such as the tendancy to walk on tip-toe instead of with feet flat on the floor) - it was blindingly obvious that this was me. Looking back on things that happened when I was younger, I cringe at the realisation of all of the terrible things I messed up.
But you CAN learn to fit in - or at least to know where you're likely to have problems and make adjustments accordingly.
You know that you can focus on pretty much any narrow subject and become insanely specialised in it. One day I decided to try to broaden my horizons - so I picked a subject far from work or computers. I decided to get interested in 1960's cars - it was interesting - it came easily - but (predictably) because I have Aspergers, I'm now a leading expert in exactly one make of car and can pretty much name every part - every change for every model year...you get the picture I'm sure. It was no harder than learning a new programming language.
OK - so if you can do that, then you can focus on learning how conversations with other humans 'work'. You can study that with scientific rigor - and whilst it won't ever be a 'natural' thing - you'll be able to fake it pretty well. I don't feel comfortable in idle chit-chat - but I can fake it well enough to get by without coming off as being completely weirdo (or at least I think I can - maybe there are subliminal cues that I'm completely missing that say that I can't!).
You need to do some deliberate 'horizon broadening' so you have at least a handful of interesting things that you know well - but it's not hard to do that. Then you need to sharply rein in that awful tendency we have to tell everyone who will listen the difference between the Mk I 2.5" carberettor fuel feed adjustment and the improved Mk II model. Save that for writing Wikipedia articles. Ration yourself to a few high level sentences on your favorite topics "I restore classic cars"..."I'm working on a '63 Mini Cooper"..."They were successful rally cars" - then that's your lot. You have shut the heck up about that subject and only briefly answer direct questions about '63 Mini Coopers until the next topic of conversation comes around. Learn some vapid questions that cause the other person to feel the need to talk. A 'normal' friend said that "...and how does that make you feel?" works great in response to almost anything a woman says to you. It's hard to believe it - but that seems to work really well. You can actually research that stuff.
Make sure that people who are close to you know that you don't do well at picking up subtle cues from speech. It's no use someone dropping subtle hints that they want you to do something - you'll never notice them. Tell them: "You have to tell me directly - no matter what - you won't ever upset me by doing that". This is why we geeks have trouble with women. They are dropping large hints that they like you and want you to make your move *NOW*...you have no clue that they are saying that because they never seem to come right out and say "OK - tonight you're going to get laid" - or "Don't bother, it's never going to happen"...which is a shame because it would make life a whole lot easier if they did.
Being tall is nothing to do with it. Being tall correlates well with success in most fields.
You CAN learn what you need - you just have to care enough to do it. I just wish someone had told me this thirty years before I found out myself.
Let me say clearly and up-front: Full-blown autism is a terrible thing - and a cure for it is most certainly worth striving for.
The problem is that there is no bright line between "Autism" and "Aspergers" (and no bright line between "Aspergers" and normality at the other end of the scale). We have a range of brain types ranging along a continuum from normal to completely autistic - and we've chosen to confuse matters still further by giving the people in the middle of that range another name for their position along the line.
But this is where the moral dilemma strikes. Those of us (and I'm one of them) with Aspergers frequently benefit from it. Notably, Asperger "victims" who are programmers are able to focus their minds on a tiny problem for insane amounts of time - to be happy to amass vast amounts of ultra-detailed knowledge on ridiculously small topics. This is "A Good Thing" for some of us to be able to do.
I for one would strongly resist being "cured". I like being this way. There are undoubtedly downsides - I'm terrible at reading sarcasm and 'undercurrents' and body language and other societal cues...I know that I suck at this and I try my hardest to make allowances for my possible lack of knowledge. I tell people I work with "don't hint - tell!" - and my wife has come to understand that - yes - I'm even worse than most guys at picking up on subtle hints. I walk on tiptoes too - a classic Asperger symptom which people think is odd. But the benefits (I'm happy and I earn a pile of cash for doing what I do) by far outweigh the downsides. I just wish someone had told me about this when I was 10 years old instead of waiting for me to figure it out in my late forties! Jeez - I have so many memories of teenage problems which just make me cringe when I look back on them and realise how things I did must have looked to other people!
So - at what point in the fuzzy region between 'Severe Aspergers' and 'Mild Autism' do we start the magic treatment?
We could greatly damage society by making the cut too close to the 'normality' side - we gain great benefits from Nerds. Yet we would unnecessarily ruin the lives of too many severe autism sufferers if we went too far the other way and refused to treat people with more severe symptoms.
I'm a big fan of paying for the things I use. If I don't pay for it, yet still insist on using it then it's going to get funded by sponsors or advertisers or governments or....people who I don't want having control over my information.
So a reasonable micropayment for absolutely every web page I visit would be a welcome change for me. However, there had better not be any advertising or other hidden 'control' on the sites I visit if that's the case.
Direct payments is a very efficient way to fund these things. Consider advertising: The information provider (Google for example) charges the advertiser per view or per click-through - that price is the cost of providing the information I wanted PLUS the cost of serving the advert, managing the advertising department, billing the adverts, etc. The advertiser has advert production costs, profit margins, billing costs, etc. They charge that to charge the product manufacturer - and the product manufacturer jacks up the price of the product to cover the difference (plus the cost of their advertising department). That increased price gets further magnified through profit margins of wholesalers and retailers.
So a payment of $0.01 to the information provider is probably increasing the cost of things I buy by $0.10. A direct payment to the website would be vastly cheaper.
I'd extend this to movies (no more product placement please!) to Television (no adverts!), to Magazines and Newspapers (which would be a tenth of the size if you removed the adverts).
So aside from the sheer annoyance factor of adverts - they are an enormous economic drain.
Firstly, Google inserts an advert between you typing the search terms in and getting the link to the Wikipedia article. If they owned Wikipedia then either Wikipedia would have to support advertising (which would be spectacularly unpopular with the community) - or Google would have to forgo advertising revenue for any search that wound up in Wikipedia. Neither of those things is particularly attractive.
Secondly, using a direct Wikipedia search instead of a Google search looses you a couple of things. Firstly, Google's search copes with spelling errors and secondly, the pagerank algorithm is much much better than Wikipedia's internal search mechanism at finding things that aren't article titles.
So the Wiki search box is better if you know what you want and spell it correctly then you might as well use it and avoid the adverts - but if you are unsure of spelling or exact word choice, then Google scores big-time.
You can't sell advertising on Wikipedia - hundreds of thousands of contributors have added information on the premise that it's all free and advert free. The community would never stand for it.
What Wikipedia needs is some rich benefactors. We know from all kinds of press coverage that a bunch of people with a lot of personal wealth use Wikipedia regularly - the sorts of donations that those people would make would put Wikipedia onto a sound financial footing. But it's hard to predict if or when that might happen.
I wonder whether Wikipedia could switch it's physical web presence to something more distributed and let enthusiasts each mirror some portion of the encyclopedia.
After all, 25GBytes isn't that much - I have about 250GB free on my home server - so I could certainly mirror it. The problem is that of bandwidth. But if we had thousands of mirrors and some kind of automated bit-torrent-like mechanism then it might be possible to reduce the costs of maintaining servers and buying bandwidth to almost zero.
Raw information isn't IP protected and therefore will be free - one way or another. Britannica are in trouble if they can't offer their information for free and leverage that good old Internet standby: Advertising. Then it becomes a matter of whether consumers will prefer peer-reviewed articles written by experts WITH adverts versus community-written articles without adverts. If their errors-per-article rate was significantly better than Wikipedia's then that would be a reasonable business model - but frankly, it's not much better and the gap is narrowing fast.
Wikipedia could still screw the pooch though - the long running arguments about 'Fair Use' images could tear the community in two - and as suggested here, funding could still be an issue. The last fundraising drive picked up about a million dollars in about six weeks over Xmas...not too shabby. It seems to me that if public radio can get funding to the degree that they do from public donations in just the USA, Wikipedia (with users all around the world) ought to be able to get enough contributions to stay afloat.
It's all down to the numbers & we don't have t
on
Water From Wind
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· Score: 1
So - we know windmills work - you can buy one...even the 'vertical' kind. We know a windmill can drive a generator and with that you can make electricity. You can buy one of those too. With electricity you can run an air conditioner and/or dehumidifier to cool air and/or extract whatever water there is in the way of humidity. Both of those you can buy.
So nothing that this guy can do is in any way difficult or novel - you can build one with little more than a nice fat chequebook and a suitable mail order catalog.
It's all down to the numbers. How much does it cost to buy? How much does it cost to run? What is it's MTBF and it's MTTR? How much air can it cool? How efficient is it at extracting water? How big is it?
If it's dramatically cheaper/better than present technologies then it's potentially revolutionary - if it's not then this is nothing at all new. Since there are absolutely no numbers quoted, claimed or proven - there is nothing whatever to get excited about.
Slashdot Mirror
If by 'numerics' you mean 'collision detection and game physics' then please note that there are some convincing implementations of those things on the GPU too. When you are already using 500Gflops for shading - then adding 5 more Gflops makes negligable difference. But offloading 5Gflops from a machine that only needs 0.5 for game logic makes a spectacular difference. So if your figures are correct then logically the GPU should evolve to do physics...which is exactly what is happening. That leaves the CPU with very little left to do - except maybe AI.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something - the Wikipedia page was 'seeded' with this junk information at 21:33 on 14th March - and corrected by 5:33 on the following day. So it was screwed up for exactly 8 hours. Hardly a big deal. Subsequent to that, random vandalisms come and go - but are never there for more than a few minutes before being corrected.
Well, if you're not even going to *try* to offer advice - I'll take my business elsewhere. I bet the Wikipedia help desk will be more helpful!
I believe that on most cars, the water pump is driven continuously by the engine - whether it's needed or not. What the mechanical thermostat does is to allow the output of the pump to go through the radiator or simply to circulate around the engine block and directly back to the pump. So when the engine is cold, no water flows through the radiator - but the water pump is still pumping at full speed. As soon as you get up to temperature, the thermostat opens, the water goes through the radiator and (all being well) the engine temperature immediately stabilises at whatever temperature your thermostat was built to set.
The radiator fan is also turned on and off with an electrical thermostat - you don't need the fan on unless the radiator is failing to cool the water sufficiently unaided - but that's not to regulate engine temperature - that's to save energy by not running the fan unnecessarily.
Some people react to a chronically overheating car by completely removing the thermostat which allows the water to flow around the radiator all the time - and removes an obstruction to the water flow. However, this can be dangerous. On an older car that I own (a '63 Mini as it happens), removing the thermostat also removes turbulance from the water stream which causes a 'stagnant' area where water no longer flows - this results in a hot-spot building up on the sides of two of the cylinders which can wreck the engine in pretty short order!
If you did that on one of these trucks - then you might well have problems in cold weather of the engine never reaching it's desired operating temperature. That's bad for gas milage - but shouldn't be all that serious otherwise.
Mmm'k - so it's AskSlashdot next time?
The '07 MINI Cooper'S has a 4 cylinder 1.6 liter direct-injected twin-turbocharged engine - and since most fuel in the US now contains 10% ethanol, I'd say the "experimental" technology these guys are pushing is already out there in at least one production car. The problem with knocking has been nailed a bazillion years ago - just about all modern cars have an anti-knock sensor that can richen the mixture if it detects signs of knocking - but with high octane gasoline - it only very rarely has to actually do that - so the "problem" of knocking isn't really there. The only time the MINI actually does something like that is when the dumb user filled the thing with regular low-octane gas instead of 'the good stuff'.
Add to that that the MINI has goodies like electric oil, power steering and water pumps that can actually be turned off (rather than merely bypassed) when not needed - so the engine reaches it's most efficient temperature faster and you aren't burning fuel circulating fluids that don't need to be circulated yet. It has computer controlled inlet and exhaust valves - so the timing is infinitely variable - and can be varied separately for each cylinder. For short bursts of accelleration, the car has an 'overboost' feature from the turbo - which won't help you much for prolonged hard accelleration - but is great for a rapid burst of speed for overtaking, blasting out of a corner (FUN!) or blowing away those bloody ugly Scion xB's at traffic lights (a personal mission of mine, I might add).
Well, yes - but my PC isn't using 400W all the time either (expecially if I'm web browsing) that's also a peak figure...and for sure my car isn't *ever* using as little as 1hp. But I agree that my numbers are indeed very, very rough - and to do a proper comparison we'd have to look at the relative efficiency of an internal combustion engine versus a power station...the losses in getting the energy to it's destination and the relative amount of CO2 output. But my point remains - a car uses VASTLY more energy than a PC - so if you are looking for a place to save, keeping from pegging your tachometer at every red light, buy a fuel-efficient car, turn off the A/C...any of those things will completely dominate your overall energy consumption - and an extra couple of hours of web surfing is pretty negligable.
This is the entire problem - why won't people think?
My PC has a 400W power supply - that's the most it can draw it probably uses much less than that on the average say 350W - but let's roughly double that just to be on the safe side because we have a monitor to power too. Let's add a bit to allow for my natural love of round numbers and say that my PC consumes 754.7W (!)
Why? Because 745.7W is 1 horsepower.
My car (a particularly small, fuel efficient one) has a 150hp engine.
So on very rough numbers, running my PC for 150 hours is equivelent to driving my car for 1 hour.
It should be abundantly clear that saving energy by surfing less is really pretty pointless. If I drive for one hour and web surf for ten hours then then buying a car with ten less horsepower will completely "pay" for all of the "wasted" surfing I do.
We've done that - we are well beyond the "Is there a problem?" and the "I wonder what the cause is" stages - we have gotten through the "What the heck can we do to fix this" part, are now into the "OK - we understand this very, very well - so now over to the politicians to implement our recommendations" phase...but everything has come to a grinding halt. (Well in some parts of the world at least).
Yes, there are still a few skeptics - but in any human endeavor, there are always skeptics and there comes a point where you have to stop letting a very tiny percentage of experts cripple your decisionmaking and doom you to inaction.
If we have to wait until 100% of scientists and laymen believe in this then the planet is doomed. The number of scientists who are dissenters is down to a very tiny number indeed. The public at large is nowhere near as far along that road - but that's because the press seem to delight in giving equal prominance to the 0.1% of dissenting scientists (I made that number up but it's not so far off) than to the 99.9% who agree that there is a problem.
This is now an urgent matter - we don't have time for yet more studies and yet more dissenters. If we don't act very soon indeed - we won't be able to pull the planet back into some kind of stability until we have 2 billion people with flooded-out homes, 30% less viable farmland and half the species of animals and plants exterminated.
If it should (by some amazing flook) prove that the majority are wrong - then the costs of cleanup won't be wasted. Cutting down pollution from all sources and reducing our dependence on dwindling stocks of fossil fuels is undoubtedly a public good - and would be worthwhile even if global warming were not an issue.
The consequences of inaction when needed are so profound and the consequences of unnecessary action are so minor in comparison that even if it was a 50/50 thing, we should still be doing this.
You'd think they'd have learned from this one:
http://www.f20a.com/f20ins.htm
Aspergers is a spectrum - it's simply not possible to place people accurately on the line - but we all joke that slashdotters are comfortable with computers and can't get chicks - that places you someplace along the line - not at the origin!
For me, a conversation requires me to multitask a gazillion things. I can try to give an idea of what following a conversation is like for an Aspie who is trying to seem normal:
* Am I making the right amount of eye contact? Too much - creepy. Too little - withdrawn. How long has it been since I made eye contact with each of the three people I'm talking to? Am I remembering to switch eye contact when the conversation switches from one person to another. I know that keeping eye contact with the previous speaker indicates that I'm still thinking about what they said - but if I fail to look towards the new speaker, then that person will think I've lost interest.
* Am I talking too much? In too much detail? I'd better not stop talking right in the middle of something I'm saying - but I think I see people losing interest.
* I'm bored out of my skull - I desperately need to switch the subject - I need to start thinking about an appropriate way to do that. What thing that I care about can I talk about without being ridiculously off-topic? I want to say: "Did you know that the Mini Cooper was disqualified from the 1966 Monte Carlo Rally because it didn't meet the homologation rules because of it's headlamp dimmer switch was non-standard?"...but I don't think "Hey, I like your car" is going to get me there. Argh!
* Geez - this guy is taking the long way around to explain a simple point that I saw coming at least a minute ago. Could I somehow step in and cut him off? No - that might be bad.
* Did his voice go up in pitch at the end of that last sentence? I think so - he's paused - OK so that was a question. Was it directed at me? Damn! I didn't notice where his eyes were pointed when he said that. Does it look like anyone else is going to answer?
* Is anyone looking confused? Look carefully at the expressions on their faces - where are eyebrows placed? Maybe I need to go into more detail in the next thing I say...but too much detail and they'll get bored. Does anyone look bored? That's a harder expression to read. Argh.
* What she said was pretty funny - was it supposed to be funny? Who knows? Well - is anyone else smiling at it? They are all looking at her - maybe there is a punchline coming.
* I need to stop talking - but it's my turn. I need to ask a question that will cause the other person to talk about themselves...which is a pain because I really don't care all that much. This is someone I'll probably never meet again - what do I care what they do for a living or what kind of dog they have...well, I need to say something...OK - lets go with stock conversation starter number seventeen: "Do you have any pets?"
* Someone is being slightly racist - I want to jump in an tell them that this is deeply offensive and that they are an idiot - but if I do that the party will be a smoking ruin and my wife will kill me when we get home. OK - can I somehow just say nothing and let it slide? What can I say? I can't agree...but I can't say nothing. Oh-oh...there has been a 'pregnant pause' while I've been thinking about this - maybe that's worse than just agreeing.
This is hard work. It's easier with people you know well - and it helps that they know you're geeky and have appropriate expectations. Then, of course a bunch of other people at work are close to me on the Normal/Aspie/Autistic spectrum - so with them, I can skip all of this crap - just get on with the business of communicating simply and clearly and without hidden stuff.
I *HATE* parties - I avoid them like the plague. My poor wife likes to go to these things - but for me they are utter torture. The kind where I don't know many people are quite unbearable.
I love to explain things to people - especially if I have a white-board. That way, people want me to go into detail - I can look at the white-board - so no messy eye contact crap. They probably won't talk until I make a gap - and when they do, they'll say something relevent and important.
OK - that's scares me a LOT! As a 3D graphics professional, I'm very familiar with the concept of the uncanny valley. The thought that my efforts to come across as more 'human' in conversations might actually be making me creepier is a strong possibility that I hadn't considered.
Fortunately - since this is a learned/forced thing (I can't make small-talk effortlessly - and probably never will), it would be the easiest thing in the world to turn it off and go back to being a mere 'unrealistic' person rather than a "creepily close to being realistic" conversationalist.
Drat!
Right - exactly. Now, if only there was a manual I could pick up somewhere!
That whole walking on tiptoe thing is very weird. I clearly recall parents and other kids remarking on this when I was really young. My mother was always telling me not to walk on tiptoe - and complaining that my shoes wore out around the ball of my foot while the heels were almost pristine.
It's so hard to imagine that some genetic/environmental effect could affect your ability to sit in front of a CRT for 16 hours straight looking for the same damned stupid bug - as well as affect how you walk.
But I've read it in many places and every genuine, diagnosed Aspie I know has the exact same story to tell - it's definitely a real symptom of the syndrome.
He was being rude to me? Damn! I missed that one. :-)
The problem with informed consent is that once you get sufficiently far along the spectrum to be clearly in need of treatment, you are likely to be so cut off from other people that it's going to be almost impossible for anyone to regard your consent (or otherwise) as "informed".
Messing with peoples brains (their personalities - their 'souls' to use a quaint term) is dangerous stuff. What happens if you cure them - and only after they are "normal" do they clearly and coherently point out that they were happier beforehand?
Not easy.
I recently started to have hearing problems - and was told by the audiologist that a CAT scan of my head would help him to see what was going on. During the scan, they found a 2cm x 1cm x 1cm tumor on my temporal lobe - totally unrelated to the hearing problem. This (needless to say) put me into a complete state of panic - but they told me that from the way the brain was folded around it, it must have appeared when I was a small child and stopped growing in my early teens - and has not changed since. I remarked that maybe it would be a good idea to get rid of it anyway - but as the doctor pointed out - your temporal lobe is where your 'personality' lives. If we "fix" this problem you may not be "you" afterwards. Which makes me think - if that thing hadn't popped into my head at age 12 or so - I wouldn't be the "me" I am now. If I had had truly "informed consent" back when I was a kid, would I have taken it? Would I take it in hindsight?
Yes - there will be problems over this.
The problem is that autism isn't a binary diagnosis. If you have a broken leg - fix it. If you don't have a broken leg then don't cover your leg with plaster and walk around on crutches for a couple of months. Easy choice. But Autism is a spectrum of conditions running from mild geekiness through Asperger's to someone who is completely and devastatingly cut off from the world. There's the problem. It's very clear that at one end of the line a cure is a wonderful thing and we should all be very happy for the people who's lives will be immeasureably improved. But at the other end of the line, there are people who not only are not suffering unduly - they are actually benefitting from the ability to focus, to specialise, to abstract and to think in three dimensions to a greater degree than the general population. Those people must not be 'cured' - at least not at an early age before they have a chance to figure out what they want out of life.
So where between those two extremes do we start intervening?
I have no clue - it's an analog problem with a binary solution - never a good thing.
I found out 5 or 6 years ago at age 48. It could be worse!
But I don't see Aspergers as such a terrible liability. It has enormous benefits as well as the downsides. I maintain that once you know what the problems are, you can compensate for the downsides and still reap the rewards of the good side.
In retrospect, I'd dearly love to have been diagnosed at a young age and properly coached on ways to compensate - but I most certainly wouldn't ever want to be "cured". No way.
I don't know how old you are - I'm just over 50 years old - I only realised I am an Asperger's "victim" less than 5 years ago. When I saw a list of common symptoms (some very odd - such as the tendancy to walk on tip-toe instead of with feet flat on the floor) - it was blindingly obvious that this was me. Looking back on things that happened when I was younger, I cringe at the realisation of all of the terrible things I messed up.
But you CAN learn to fit in - or at least to know where you're likely to have problems and make adjustments accordingly.
You know that you can focus on pretty much any narrow subject and become insanely specialised in it. One day I decided to try to broaden my horizons - so I picked a subject far from work or computers. I decided to get interested in 1960's cars - it was interesting - it came easily - but (predictably) because I have Aspergers, I'm now a leading expert in exactly one make of car and can pretty much name every part - every change for every model year...you get the picture I'm sure. It was no harder than learning a new programming language.
OK - so if you can do that, then you can focus on learning how conversations with other humans 'work'. You can study that with scientific rigor - and whilst it won't ever be a 'natural' thing - you'll be able to fake it pretty well. I don't feel comfortable in idle chit-chat - but I can fake it well enough to get by without coming off as being completely weirdo (or at least I think I can - maybe there are subliminal cues that I'm completely missing that say that I can't!).
You need to do some deliberate 'horizon broadening' so you have at least a handful of interesting things that you know well - but it's not hard to do that. Then you need to sharply rein in that awful tendency we have to tell everyone who will listen the difference between the Mk I 2.5" carberettor fuel feed adjustment and the improved Mk II model. Save that for writing Wikipedia articles. Ration yourself to a few high level sentences on your favorite topics "I restore classic cars"..."I'm working on a '63 Mini Cooper"..."They were successful rally cars" - then that's your lot. You have shut the heck up about that subject and only briefly answer direct questions about '63 Mini Coopers until the next topic of conversation comes around. Learn some vapid questions that cause the other person to feel the need to talk. A 'normal' friend said that "...and how does that make you feel?" works great in response to almost anything a woman says to you. It's hard to believe it - but that seems to work really well. You can actually research that stuff.
Make sure that people who are close to you know that you don't do well at picking up subtle cues from speech. It's no use someone dropping subtle hints that they want you to do something - you'll never notice them. Tell them: "You have to tell me directly - no matter what - you won't ever upset me by doing that". This is why we geeks have trouble with women. They are dropping large hints that they like you and want you to make your move *NOW*...you have no clue that they are saying that because they never seem to come right out and say "OK - tonight you're going to get laid" - or "Don't bother, it's never going to happen"...which is a shame because it would make life a whole lot easier if they did.
Being tall is nothing to do with it. Being tall correlates well with success in most fields.
You CAN learn what you need - you just have to care enough to do it. I just wish someone had told me this thirty years before I found out myself.
Let me say clearly and up-front: Full-blown autism is a terrible thing - and a cure for it is most certainly worth striving for.
The problem is that there is no bright line between "Autism" and "Aspergers" (and no bright line between "Aspergers" and normality at the other end of the scale). We have a range of brain types ranging along a continuum from normal to completely autistic - and we've chosen to confuse matters still further by giving the people in the middle of that range another name for their position along the line.
But this is where the moral dilemma strikes. Those of us (and I'm one of them) with Aspergers frequently benefit from it. Notably, Asperger "victims" who are programmers are able to focus their minds on a tiny problem for insane amounts of time - to be happy to amass vast amounts of ultra-detailed knowledge on ridiculously small topics. This is "A Good Thing" for some of us to be able to do.
I for one would strongly resist being "cured". I like being this way. There are undoubtedly downsides - I'm terrible at reading sarcasm and 'undercurrents' and body language and other societal cues...I know that I suck at this and I try my hardest to make allowances for my possible lack of knowledge. I tell people I work with "don't hint - tell!" - and my wife has come to understand that - yes - I'm even worse than most guys at picking up on subtle hints. I walk on tiptoes too - a classic Asperger symptom which people think is odd. But the benefits (I'm happy and I earn a pile of cash for doing what I do) by far outweigh the downsides. I just wish someone had told me about this when I was 10 years old instead of waiting for me to figure it out in my late forties! Jeez - I have so many memories of teenage problems which just make me cringe when I look back on them and realise how things I did must have looked to other people!
So - at what point in the fuzzy region between 'Severe Aspergers' and 'Mild Autism' do we start the magic treatment?
We could greatly damage society by making the cut too close to the 'normality' side - we gain great benefits from Nerds. Yet we would unnecessarily ruin the lives of too many severe autism sufferers if we went too far the other way and refused to treat people with more severe symptoms.
Where do you make the cut? It's a tough call.
I'm a big fan of paying for the things I use. If I don't pay for it, yet still insist on using it then it's going to get funded by sponsors or advertisers or governments or....people who I don't want having control over my information.
So a reasonable micropayment for absolutely every web page I visit would be a welcome change for me. However, there had better not be any advertising or other hidden 'control' on the sites I visit if that's the case.
Direct payments is a very efficient way to fund these things. Consider advertising: The information provider (Google for example) charges the advertiser per view or per click-through - that price is the cost of providing the information I wanted PLUS the cost of serving the advert, managing the advertising department, billing the adverts, etc. The advertiser has advert production costs, profit margins, billing costs, etc. They charge that to charge the product manufacturer - and the product manufacturer jacks up the price of the product to cover the difference (plus the cost of their advertising department). That increased price gets further magnified through profit margins of wholesalers and retailers.
So a payment of $0.01 to the information provider is probably increasing the cost of things I buy by $0.10. A direct payment to the website would be vastly cheaper.
I'd extend this to movies (no more product placement please!) to Television (no adverts!), to Magazines and Newspapers (which would be a tenth of the size if you removed the adverts).
So aside from the sheer annoyance factor of adverts - they are an enormous economic drain.
Two problems with this.
Firstly, Google inserts an advert between you typing the search terms in and getting the link to the Wikipedia article. If they owned Wikipedia then either Wikipedia would have to support advertising (which would be spectacularly unpopular with the community) - or Google would have to forgo advertising revenue for any search that wound up in Wikipedia. Neither of those things is particularly attractive.
Secondly, using a direct Wikipedia search instead of a Google search looses you a couple of things. Firstly, Google's search copes with spelling errors and secondly, the pagerank algorithm is much much better than Wikipedia's internal search mechanism at finding things that aren't article titles.
So the Wiki search box is better if you know what you want and spell it correctly then you might as well use it and avoid the adverts - but if you are unsure of spelling or exact word choice, then Google scores big-time.
You can't sell advertising on Wikipedia - hundreds of thousands of contributors have added information on the premise that it's all free and advert free. The community would never stand for it.
What Wikipedia needs is some rich benefactors. We know from all kinds of press coverage that a bunch of people with a lot of personal wealth use Wikipedia regularly - the sorts of donations that those people would make would put Wikipedia onto a sound financial footing. But it's hard to predict if or when that might happen.
I wonder whether Wikipedia could switch it's physical web presence to something more distributed and let enthusiasts each mirror some portion of the encyclopedia.
After all, 25GBytes isn't that much - I have about 250GB free on my home server - so I could certainly mirror it. The problem is that of bandwidth. But if we had thousands of mirrors and some kind of automated bit-torrent-like mechanism then it might be possible to reduce the costs of maintaining servers and buying bandwidth to almost zero.
Raw information isn't IP protected and therefore will be free - one way or another. Britannica are in trouble if they can't offer their information for free and leverage that good old Internet standby: Advertising. Then it becomes a matter of whether consumers will prefer peer-reviewed articles written by experts WITH adverts versus community-written articles without adverts. If their errors-per-article rate was significantly better than Wikipedia's then that would be a reasonable business model - but frankly, it's not much better and the gap is narrowing fast.
Wikipedia could still screw the pooch though - the long running arguments about 'Fair Use' images could tear the community in two - and as suggested here, funding could still be an issue. The last fundraising drive picked up about a million dollars in about six weeks over Xmas...not too shabby. It seems to me that if public radio can get funding to the degree that they do from public donations in just the USA, Wikipedia (with users all around the world) ought to be able to get enough contributions to stay afloat.
So - we know windmills work - you can buy one...even the 'vertical' kind. We know a windmill can drive a generator and with that you can make electricity. You can buy one of those too. With electricity you can run an air conditioner and/or dehumidifier to cool air and/or extract whatever water there is in the way of humidity. Both of those you can buy.
So nothing that this guy can do is in any way difficult or novel - you can build one with little more than a nice fat chequebook and a suitable mail order catalog.
It's all down to the numbers. How much does it cost to buy? How much does it cost to run? What is it's MTBF and it's MTTR? How much air can it cool? How efficient is it at extracting water? How big is it?
If it's dramatically cheaper/better than present technologies then it's potentially revolutionary - if it's not then this is nothing at all new. Since there are absolutely no numbers quoted, claimed or proven - there is nothing whatever to get excited about.