This was my first thought, too -- seems like an expensive way to get bandwidth. You pay for the energy for everyone else's browsing. If you turn it off, you degrade the network performance. So you're relying on everyone else to waste money/energy so you can have lots of bandwidth. Kinda sketchy.
It is not "sensationalist" so say the scientists were surprised.
Neither is it sensationalist to say the machines learned on their own. Perhaps you haven't considered what "learning" means. It's not particularly mystical, and many machines do it.
"Thinking" is less well defined, but no one claimed the machines are "thinking" -- rather, they are "breeding".
Saying it "cheated" is absurd. It flattly makes no sense at all. The algorithm was given a desired result and it achieved that result. It wasn't given an particulars about how to achieve the result -- which was, in fact, largely the point of the experiment. More briefly: there were no rules to break. It could not have cheated even if it had "wanted" to.
And no one said mutation and selection was "the answer", but it is certain AN answer, and one that has proven very powerful.
Heh. Right. Nothing is ever "proven" in the sense that all doubt is removed. If you mean provide compelling evidence, well we have 1) engineers who worked for the big manufacturers say they were never serious about the projects and wanted them to fail, 2) the manufacturers spent more effort trying to kill legislation towards developing this technology than they spent trying to get the technology to market, 3) now that they've killed most of the legislation they're killing development of the technology and blaming it on "lack of government support", 4) American car manufacturers have a very long history of straight-up lying about these issues -- after all, according to "industry scientists" the catalytic converter and the Honda cvcc engine are "impossible". Or so they said when California told them to reduce emissions.
This is wholly false. You don't know if "nobody has died" until you do the double-blind study and compare death rates. Herbal "cures" that have been used for thousands of years *have* been found to kill people. The traditionalists merely "explain" away the deaths with more nonsense.
"Alternative" medicine is "alternative" for one reason: it's a load of shit, without a scrap of evidence to support it.
Sadly, much of Western medicine is also based on tradition, rather than evidence. But the key to improvement is to move medicine towards science, not away from it.
You've left out duration-of-use from all these examples, so you've only shown power, not energy, and your conclusion is dead wrong.
150 watts left on all day is 3.6 khw. Typical US home uses around 40 khw/day. Typical California home uses around 20 khw/day. So one computer left on is 9-18% of typical energy use.
Add printer, scanner, usb hub, dsl modem, etc., and it will go up another 5 or 10 percent.
Lights typically aren't left on all day, and in any case incandescent lights spew power. Saying "it's only as much as a lightbulb" means "it's only a huge energy waste".
During last summer's manufactured energy crisis I got a watt-hour meter and measured everything. The biggest losses were to cooling (attic fans) and computers. Computers pulled more than refridgeration, which is frequently listed as the largest consumer after AC. I fixed the attic cooling by improving the passive venting, and fixed the computers by powering them down when not in use. This required putting a hard switch on them (power strip), because most computer devices continue to bleed power even when they're "off".
If you're using AC it's definately more than computers, but that doesn't mean computers use little energy.
If you're trying to lower your AC use, don't forget the attic. Much heat enters through the attic. Many attics overheat because they have black shingles, and inadequate venting and insulation. No amount of insulation is going to do the job if you have black shingles in a really sunny climate. Reflective mylar thermal barrier can help, though.
Yeah, you would think, wouldn't you? Especially since the half-assed attempts at conservation last summer turned out to be spectacularly successful. Basically if *any* attempt is made *at all* to lower energy use, the results are dramatic -- because normally we heedlessly spew energy like a firehose spews water.
Part of the blame for this indifference goes to leaders like our VP, poo-pooing conservation (and strangely enough people believe him even after California proved him wrong). Part goes to our artificially low energy prices (and boneheaded consumer groups, including the Green Party, that think it's somehow good to have inaccurately priced energy).
Personally, my energy use was already low when the "crisis" began, but I was still able to nearly cut it in half without making any changes in lifestyle or spending any money. I expect to cut it more in the next year or two, by investing in better appliances.
Many, perhaps most of the people who shop at Walmart don't want their media selected by religious extremists. But they are either unaware of the policy, or unable to shop elsewhere since Walmart has put most of their competition out of business.
When they entered my home town, they didn't post signs on the entrance saying "WARNING: After we drive all the other stores out of business, and do the same all across America, we will control the market to such an extent that we can force our political agenda on you". This isn't a case of "loyal customers" getting what they want. With the current situation a minority is able to force changes in the market which the majority don't want. This isn't "choice".
Re:We don't have a supply problem
on
Cradle to Cradle
·
· Score: 1
Dyson sphere? Pffft. Yeah, right.
People are going off-grid with solar today, by eliminating all their waste and buying PV and solar thermal solutions. Industries can and have built buildings than generate more power than they use. That was the point of the article. In a word, you're wrong.
Solar for home use is not economical largely because the market doesn't accurately reflect the cost of oil, and because (like any new technology) it can't benefit from economies of scale, and refinements of mass-production until it sees wider adoption.
Re:Litter is advocated?
on
Cradle to Cradle
·
· Score: 2, Informative
> Name industries where ecological improvements resulted in better revenues, or other tangible benefits.
This has happened in the paper industry. I can't find figures for profit increase at the moment, but here's a link to one of the mills involved:
http://www.ipmaine.com/html/environ_right.html A lot of technologies like this are just sitting on the ground, waiting for industry to use them even though there are strong financial benefits. I believe in the case of paper the methods were known and used outside the US for some time before someone got the bright idea of doing it here.
You might also check the book "Natural Capitalism", which discusses industrial scenarios where moving to environmentally friendly solutions have led to a doubling of output with a halving of energy use.
We have a demand problem. Most of the energy we produce goes to waste. Solar could provide all our energy needs by a very wide margin, if me merely stopped wasting all that we're producing.
Nuclear power is a messy solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Yeah! Just like all the public outcry when text book publishers started censoring their works to conform to the wishes of Christian lobbying groups, because they couldn't afford to lose the Texas (conservative Christian) market. State-wide contracts in this large state can make or break a publisher.
Errr.... except there was no outcry, and the text books are still being censored according to the wishes of Texas conservative Christians. Amusingly this includes eliminating text books that mention that latinos lived in the western states before they "became" part of the US. This is considered "radical liberal propaganda" these days. Instead these populations are called "immigrants" in the text books. Uh. Yeah.
Personally, I hate it. It does pretty much everything wrong, IMHO. It's window cycling behavior is the most unusable thing I've ever seen (fails to update title bar reliably, and I can never predict the sequence it's going to take through the windows). It also makes bizzare decisions about raising and lowering windows while cycling, which invariably obscure things I'm trying to read. It makes similarly bizzare decisions about what window to focus when changing desktops, sometimes not focusing any window.
It frequently forgets configuration, and reverts to horrible defaults, like disallowing moving windows after they've been maximized.
In all, I've never used a worse window manager. I realize I could fix all these little things by spending a month writing scripts. But at that point it makes more sense to use a different window manager.
>The aggregate savings that society relizes can be used to reeducate the workforce that would have been manufacturing the imported good to perform work that requires more education or skills and then the standard of living for ALL Americans can increase.
What country are YOU living in?
I guess the emphasis is on "can". Of course this would never actually occur in the US. Rather, we will just join the race to the bottom, the gap between rich and poor will widen, and we can all listen to William F. Buckley musing "I don't see what the problem is" after he hires you to be his towel boy for a few peanuts a day (or the equivalent cash rate of the cheapest labor available globally).
But, really, the main problem with "globalization" as it's being implemented is it hands the sovereignty of citizens to foreign businessmen. You no longer have democratic control of the laws in your community. A foreign businessman can over-turn them in a foreign court where you have no standing.
> I've never yet heard of some significant biological distinction between a chicken and a fertilized chicken egg which make them different species, so why is a human and a fertilized human egg a different species?
>killing a fetus is killing a person, but noone is going to argue when they're dead so why bother with it?
The issue has little to do with species. A hang-nail is human. A tumor is human. Given the proper environment and technical support, you might grow a person out of them. That doesn't mean they *are* people. We don't hold funerals for hang-nails, or for the billions of early abortions performed by God that go unnoticed by us.
"Using less energy is not a solution because I've been reading bad science fiction novels for the last 24 hours."
The way we use energy right now is we generate lots of it, then we throw most of it away. We're trying to fill a bucket that has the bottom kicked completely out of it, and people are crying "Get a bigger hose!"
Ummm... here's an idea: fix the damn bucket.
Using dramatically less energy is trivial, cheap, and requires no compromises of life style. It's much, much more effective than investing more in generation technology. California made a rather half-assed attempt at conservation last summer, and demand dropped well below all expectations. (Or at least, expectations of people who've never looked at energy use patterns).
New energy technologies are cool, and good long-term investments, but right now they're irrelevant -- like installing a bigger furnace when your house has no insulation and the windows are all broken out.
>I can tell you that Walt Mossberg's reviews are always thorough and fair.
Really? From the guy who thought having a floppy drive grafted onto your camera was a good idea? I know so many people who bought those lemons and are now fantastically irritated that it takes 15 seconds to record a photo, and you can only store about dozen shots before you have to swap floppies. The cameras were unusable, but Mossberg gave them a great review, and they sold like crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
This was my first thought, too -- seems like an expensive way to get bandwidth. You pay for the energy for everyone else's browsing. If you turn it off, you degrade the network performance. So you're relying on everyone else to waste money/energy so you can have lots of bandwidth. Kinda sketchy.
Looks like your numbers are off, though.
Every statement you make is false.
It is not "sensationalist" so say the scientists were surprised.
Neither is it sensationalist to say the machines learned on their own. Perhaps you haven't considered what "learning" means. It's not particularly mystical, and many machines do it.
"Thinking" is less well defined, but no one claimed the machines are "thinking" -- rather, they are "breeding".
Saying it "cheated" is absurd. It flattly makes no sense at all. The algorithm was given a desired result and it achieved that result. It wasn't given an particulars about how to achieve the result -- which was, in fact, largely the point of the experiment. More briefly: there were no rules to break. It could not have cheated even if it had "wanted" to.
And no one said mutation and selection was "the answer", but it is certain AN answer, and one that has proven very powerful.
> Guess what? If technology is good, then it doesn't need to be legislated.
The history of the auto industry demonstrates that you're dead wrong.
> Prove it. JUST PROVE IT.
Heh. Right. Nothing is ever "proven" in the sense that all doubt is removed. If you mean provide compelling evidence, well we have 1) engineers who worked for the big manufacturers say they were never serious about the projects and wanted them to fail, 2) the manufacturers spent more effort trying to kill legislation towards developing this technology than they spent trying to get the technology to market, 3) now that they've killed most of the legislation they're killing development of the technology and blaming it on "lack of government support", 4) American car manufacturers have a very long history of straight-up lying about these issues -- after all, according to "industry scientists" the catalytic converter and the Honda cvcc engine are "impossible". Or so they said when California told them to reduce emissions.
> According to the "Economic Freedom of the World" [cato.org] report from the Cato Institute
Then again, reports from the Cato Institute are about as reliable as reports in The Weekly World News.
My thoughts exactly. Find someone with a brain and a heart. It worked for me.
This is wholly false. You don't know if "nobody has died" until you do the double-blind study and compare death rates. Herbal "cures" that have been used for thousands of years *have* been found to kill people. The traditionalists merely "explain" away the deaths with more nonsense.
"Alternative" medicine is "alternative" for one reason: it's a load of shit, without a scrap of evidence to support it.
Sadly, much of Western medicine is also based on tradition, rather than evidence. But the key to improvement is to move medicine towards science, not away from it.
You've left out duration-of-use from all these examples, so you've only shown power, not energy, and your conclusion is dead wrong.
150 watts left on all day is 3.6 khw. Typical US home uses around 40 khw/day. Typical California home uses around 20 khw/day. So one computer left on is 9-18% of typical energy use.
Add printer, scanner, usb hub, dsl modem, etc., and it will go up another 5 or 10 percent.
Lights typically aren't left on all day, and in any case incandescent lights spew power. Saying "it's only as much as a lightbulb" means "it's only a huge energy waste".
During last summer's manufactured energy crisis I got a watt-hour meter and measured everything. The biggest losses were to cooling (attic fans) and computers. Computers pulled more than refridgeration, which is frequently listed as the largest consumer after AC. I fixed the attic cooling by improving the passive venting, and fixed the computers by powering them down when not in use. This required putting a hard switch on them (power strip), because most computer devices continue to bleed power even when they're "off".
If you're using AC it's definately more than computers, but that doesn't mean computers use little energy.
If you're trying to lower your AC use, don't forget the attic. Much heat enters through the attic. Many attics overheat because they have black shingles, and inadequate venting and insulation. No amount of insulation is going to do the job if you have black shingles in a really sunny climate. Reflective mylar thermal barrier can help, though.
> Of course, you neglect to mention that Indians started the custom of scalping.
Uh, no. Wrong again.
Efficiency is only part of the issue. The other is expense and difficulty of manufacturing. If it's less efficient but cheaper, it's still viable.
Yeah, you would think, wouldn't you? Especially since the half-assed attempts at conservation last summer turned out to be spectacularly successful. Basically if *any* attempt is made *at all* to lower energy use, the results are dramatic -- because normally we heedlessly spew energy like a firehose spews water.
Part of the blame for this indifference goes to leaders like our VP, poo-pooing conservation (and strangely enough people believe him even after California proved him wrong). Part goes to our artificially low energy prices (and boneheaded consumer groups, including the Green Party, that think it's somehow good to have inaccurately priced energy).
Personally, my energy use was already low when the "crisis" began, but I was still able to nearly cut it in half without making any changes in lifestyle or spending any money. I expect to cut it more in the next year or two, by investing in better appliances.
When they entered my home town, they didn't post signs on the entrance saying "WARNING: After we drive all the other stores out of business, and do the same all across America, we will control the market to such an extent that we can force our political agenda on you". This isn't a case of "loyal customers" getting what they want.
With the current situation a minority is able to force changes in the market which the majority don't want. This isn't "choice".
Dyson sphere? Pffft. Yeah, right.
People are going off-grid with solar today, by eliminating all their waste and buying PV and solar thermal solutions. Industries can and have built buildings than generate more power than they use. That was the point of the article. In a word, you're wrong.
Solar for home use is not economical largely because the market doesn't accurately reflect the cost of oil, and because (like any new technology) it can't benefit from economies of scale, and refinements of mass-production until it sees wider adoption.
> Name industries where ecological improvements resulted in better revenues, or other tangible benefits.
This has happened in the paper industry. I can't find figures for profit increase at the moment, but here's a link to one of the mills involved:
http://www.ipmaine.com/html/environ_right.html
A lot of technologies like this are just sitting on the ground, waiting for industry to use them even though there are strong financial benefits. I believe in the case of paper the methods were known and used outside the US for some time before someone got the bright idea of doing it here.
You might also check the book "Natural Capitalism", which discusses industrial scenarios where moving to environmentally friendly solutions have led to a doubling of output with a halving of energy use.
We have a demand problem. Most of the energy we produce goes to waste. Solar could provide all our energy needs by a very wide margin, if me merely stopped wasting all that we're producing.
Nuclear power is a messy solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
You'd be more convincing if you at least knew the names of the economists you're talking about.
It'd also help if you weren't wildly out of step even with conservative economists.
Yeah! Just like all the public outcry when text book publishers started censoring their works to conform to the wishes of Christian lobbying groups, because they couldn't afford to lose the Texas (conservative Christian) market. State-wide contracts in this large state can make or break a publisher.
Errr.... except there was no outcry, and the text books are still being censored according to the wishes of Texas conservative Christians. Amusingly this includes eliminating text books that mention that latinos lived in the western states before they "became" part of the US. This is considered "radical liberal propaganda" these days. Instead these populations are called "immigrants" in the text books. Uh. Yeah.
Personally, I hate it. It does pretty much everything wrong, IMHO. It's window cycling behavior is the most unusable thing I've ever seen (fails to update title bar reliably, and I can never predict the sequence it's going to take through the windows). It also makes bizzare decisions about raising and lowering windows while cycling, which invariably obscure things I'm trying to read. It makes similarly bizzare decisions about what window to focus when changing desktops, sometimes not focusing any window.
It frequently forgets configuration, and reverts to horrible defaults, like disallowing moving windows after they've been maximized.
In all, I've never used a worse window manager. I realize I could fix all these little things by spending a month writing scripts. But at that point it makes more sense to use a different window manager.
I totally don't get all the people saying "wow, the ending was all religious. How weird."
The only message the X-files has ever had was "Science bad. Religion good." The ending couldn't have been more predictable.
>The aggregate savings that society relizes can be used to reeducate the workforce that would have been manufacturing the imported good to perform work that requires more education or skills and then the standard of living for ALL Americans can increase.
What country are YOU living in?
I guess the emphasis is on "can". Of course this would never actually occur in the US. Rather, we will just join the race to the bottom, the gap between rich and poor will widen, and we can all listen to William F. Buckley musing "I don't see what the problem is" after he hires you to be his towel boy for a few peanuts a day (or the equivalent cash rate of the cheapest labor available globally).
But, really, the main problem with "globalization" as it's being implemented is it hands the sovereignty of citizens to foreign businessmen. You no longer have democratic control of the laws in your community. A foreign businessman can over-turn them in a foreign court where you have no standing.
> I've never yet heard of some significant biological distinction between a chicken and a fertilized chicken egg which make them different species, so why is a human and a fertilized human egg a different species?
>killing a fetus is killing a person, but noone is going to argue when they're dead so why bother with it?
The issue has little to do with species. A hang-nail is human. A tumor is human. Given the proper environment and technical support, you might grow a person out of them. That doesn't mean they *are* people. We don't hold funerals for hang-nails, or for the billions of early abortions performed by God that go unnoticed by us.
Corporate lobbyists already use wireless links and laptops to tell congressmen what to say during congressional debates.
Having the congressman rather than corporate representatives sitting in the chamber is only a quaint anachronism.
Pffft. Yeah, right.
"Using less energy is not a solution because I've been reading bad science fiction novels for the last 24 hours."
The way we use energy right now is we generate lots of it, then we throw most of it away. We're trying to fill a bucket that has the bottom kicked completely out of it, and people are crying "Get a bigger hose!"
Ummm... here's an idea: fix the damn bucket.
Using dramatically less energy is trivial, cheap, and requires no compromises of life style. It's much, much more effective than investing more in generation technology. California made a rather half-assed attempt at conservation last summer, and demand dropped well below all expectations. (Or at least, expectations of people who've never looked at energy use patterns).
New energy technologies are cool, and good long-term investments, but right now they're irrelevant -- like installing a bigger furnace when your house has no insulation and the windows are all broken out.
> Yeah, exactly, those prices are *cheaper* than you can get RedHat boxed set or Mandrake or anything else.
Uh.. no. You can install linux on any number of machines. Divide by the number of machines you install on, and the price is basically zero.
>I can tell you that Walt Mossberg's reviews are always thorough and fair.
Really? From the guy who thought having a floppy drive grafted onto your camera was a good idea? I know so many people who bought those lemons and are now fantastically irritated that it takes 15 seconds to record a photo, and you can only store about dozen shots before you have to swap floppies. The cameras were unusable, but Mossberg gave them a great review, and they sold like crazy.
I can't take this guy seriously.