You're right, it's only fair to subsidize energy from fossil fuel sources. You know, real energy.
I never said it was "only fair to subsidize energy from fossil fuel sources".
You're right though, fossil fuels (for example) are an actual energy source when compared to typical current photovoltaic solar panels which use more energy to produce than they'll generate over their lifetime (and that's before the conversion losses). The typical solar panel you see on a rooftop is really more a coal burning panel.
Nothing against research into solar energy, just when you find people deploying with current technology onto their rooftops (or window panes) and announcing their "helping the environment" or that they have a "carbon neutral" energy source or that what they're doing makes economic sense is laughable.
As someone has pointed out with some simple estimated values, you'll generate about a penny worth of electricity every 5 days. Or about $11 worth after 15 years...
Normal solar panel takes 10-15 years to pay for itself
Assuming no subsidies anywhere along the production/sales/installation process making the solar panels feel artificially cheap. And not counting losses converting the electricity into 120v/Hz AC. Nor counting losses converting power to storage and back again to match energy demand that doesn't coincide with peak production. Or feeding it back into the grid where it takes at a minimum DC --> 120v 60Hz AC --> 240v 60Hz AC --> 120v 60Hz AC path with conversion losses at each step. Assuming your output from the panels at year 10 is the same as year 1.
Otherwise yes, a normal solar panel only takes 10-15 years to pay for itself.
If it only produces 20% of a normal panel it won't be worth it unless it costs about 20% of a normal panel
...or just use the usual tactic, ratchet up the subsidies a little more to further hide the underlying inefficiencies.
How DARE he be an anti fanboi!?! He's breaking the rules, isn't he! I'm going to do the right thing and instead be a smart sounding fanboi with you, CrackedButter!
and since practically everyone nowadays carry sophisticated personal radio beacons (aka "cell phones") that periodically transmit uniquely identifiable (on a per device basis) signals, I'm surprised no one has jumped on using this as a way of sensing where the people are.
Total speculation, but during a time multiple rather-similar hominids were walking around I wonder if it would have served an anti-mating purpose for situations where the genetic difference may have been large enough to increase odds of hybrid (i.e. sterile) offspring.
I think realistically, they shouldn't be complaining too much. Outages happen (what, they thought "the cloud" was magical?), and statistically so far Amazon had given decent uptime (especially for the price). If their customers want to be able to micromanage exactly how quickly/in what manner the outage is responded to they probably shouldn't be paying to outsource exactly that.
People who trust science often do so through faith. People who trust (for example) religion also do so through faith (ignoring for example those who probably ate something they shouldn't have and then had a "religious experience").
What separates science is that it doesn't depend on it; if you have the time, the energy, the resources and the mental capacity everything in the realm of science is available for your testing. Most people don't have the time, energy or mental capacity to do this so they get by on faith instead.
That happens to be why I have a great deal of faith in science; I trust that when a scientist publishes a finding that others who do have time/energy/resources/mental capacity will check those results and will happily announce if they could not recreate them.
Most (even though they could) don't look through widely-distributed source code of binaries they run looking for malicious code for that matter either. They don't need to, getting by on faith works well enough.
I often use my blackberry to access open WiFi spots, and I don't have a record of a network that I have connected to called 'Free Public WiFi'.
Err, OS 5 certainly doesn't support ad hoc connections (I doubt OS 6 does either) so possibly your observation is being colored by your blackberry helpfully filtering those SSID's out.
Depending on the configuration of the tool you're using on your laptop, it very likely is doing the same thing to protect a less experienced user from connecting to a useless ad hoc network themselves.
I still see it reasonably often at the airport (OAK or SFO), sometimes in other fairly random locations, though it seems less now.
Holy cow, do they realize how much hot air is generated from within the Whitehouse on an average weekday? I hope those Sterling engines have some sort of governor to protect themselves from shaking apart.
---snip an experienced driver knows that in a battle between engine and brakes, the engine will win, so it's utterly vital to get the engine out of play early on. ---snip
Are you kidding? In almost any case (any production car, there are a few narrow market industrial/non-street legal vehicles this isn't the case) the exact opposite is true, usually by a large (very large) margin. Compare vehicle 60 to 0 distances vs. 0 to 60 distances and compare weight. For example, a 638HP, 3350LB 2010 Corvette takes 3.3 seconds to accelerate 0-60. The brakes on a meek 3400LB 2010 (~150 HP) Toyota Camry are more powerful.
A experienced, safety-conscious driver such as yourself should take your car out on your next local track day, setup your G Meter, and do some runs and you'll see the margin of difference built in (margin will actually be under represented of what you would have in an actual throttle-on condition if your vehicle has a front weight bias; which is usually the case). Then do an open throttle/full brake run, see which side wins very quickly to confirm for yourself in the real world what would happen.
Incidentally: ---snip I suppose if it was one of those "key must be present" cars with the fancy starter button, he could have thrown the keyfob out the window and hoped the engine would shut itself down once the keyfob was out of range, but I expect another safety feature would have prevented that from happening. ---snip
Yes. Think of what a disaster on the highway it would be if the engine ever cut out on a driver because the keyfob was briefly unreadable. I own two of those "fancy starter button" cars, neither will cut the engine when the fob is out of range (in both cases you'll get a warning on the dash, and once the engine is off, you won't be able to restart). Both will allow you to switch off the engine under throttle by pressing the button (and of course, in both cases, simply braking would be the best response). In one car (probably all I'd assume) when you press the stop/start button while in gear instructions flash up prominently to continue to press to cut the engine. Also, many (most?) modern cars with a physical rotating key lock aren't physically tied to anything more than an ignition button on the shifter is; there's no functional advantage or disadvantage (other than perhaps a user interface preference) of many key operated ignition switches over a button press ignition switches.
Incidentally: ---snip If the driver had been able to idle the engine, NEUTRAL would have worked. But he couldn't, and the interlock (a safety feature) worked against him. So on to the next attempt... ---snip
Automatic transmission lock (just like cruise control) is almost always tied to your brake lights. If your brake lights are on, you can move the selector lever to neutral irregardless of inputs from the engine side of the transmission. A manual transmission is very difficult (to impossible) to pull out of gear under acceleration of course.
Both VLC and mplayer are so insanely good, so much better than any alternatives, that it's kind of like arguing about whether you should drink belgian beer or german beer compared to drinking raw sewage.
Clearly hasn't done his research. Beer in the United States is almost always pasteurized.
Used his own personal laser pointer to hand cut every chip. Speaks in code to a special computer that compiles it on the fly. And then hand assembles each and every Apple devise.
I think the GP said "don't see very many". Lichens aren't exactly in a dominant position compared to the other lifeforms around. Where the fierce competition is going on (low cost/high energy sources) this is like a band of Hobbits taking knives to a Species 8472 phaser-fight.
Nanobots which digested rock as an energy source would move so slow that they'd be getting their asses kicked by a world already completely infested with high energy, high performance biological nanobots.
Now, a flesh eating nanobot on the other hand...that would be cool and would have plenty of energy sources available. Unfortunately my experiments in that direction at the home lab keep getting side tracked by my cat knocking over and breaking the isolation aquarium, etc...but one day! And the nice thing, with them set to self-replicate, I only need to make one good one! Yay!
Exactly. Doesn't matter what the source of the belief system is, if it saves you from analysis and makes acting easy, people will put their faith into it.
With us only beginning to understand what's going on the logical thing would be to put that Trillion dollars into research, if anything. Unfortunately that's not what we do. It just _feels_ better to do "something" in reaction to something threatening; in the simplest situations (like a flight/fight situation) where your brain is overwhelmed with information, sure, doing _something_ will be better than sitting there and analyzing. Anything less immediate than 10 seconds and the advantage bends rapidly to analysis before action. Although better adapted to coping with the modern world, it isn't our default behavior and for most of human existence the majority of the problems were very immediate compared to now. It not only feels good to act, it can be work to think. People on a deep level get excited by action rather than analysis.
For example yes, pointers are confusing and you can get in to trouble with them. However, that is actually how a processor handles things. It has registers that are pointers to memory locations of things it needs (like a pointer to the instruction to execute). So while more restrictive, managed references might be nice, they've nothing at all to do with how the processor works. That means you have to implement additional code overhead to deal with that sort of thing, and that you are losing the ability to optimise in certain ways.
You can say all the same for a low-level language like assembly, only more so, which makes it the coal mine canary for a "mid level" language like C. In 10 to 15 years I suspect you may see the same percentage of development done in C as you see in assembler today. Why "hand code" your entire video game in C when you can lazily write in very high level language like Java and still get 30+ frames per second?
Go back 15 years, you would still see relatively plenty of hand coding in assembler. Now, almost never except maybe in very small, tight subroutines.
It does not require each of those drivers to have TomTom devices. It does not require the cell phones to have GPS trackers. It does not require the cell phones to use air time or have unlimited data plans, or even have the ability to connect to the internet.
Which was critical in the beginning when there weren't many Nav systems out there and wireless data service via cell phone wasn't a commodity.
The "chicken and egg" and "critical mass" problems are solved by combining traffic data from several different source, and getting a lot more data points than we would get if we only collected data from drivers who have a TomTom that's always connected to the internet with an unlimited data plan.
Sounds more like "were" solved; like I said before in the post you're responding to, this was probably a killer feature when there weren't many Nav systems out there.
The other question is how to TomTom users receive this real time traffic information. The TomTom devices that support HD traffic have their own cell phones with built-in SIM cards, whose cost is covered by the HD traffic subscription, so it can download traffic reports in real time. It does not require you to drain the batteries and increase the bill of your own cell phone. The TomTom device is usually plugged into the car charger.
That's great, although I think the number of mobile phone users with limited data plans are dwindling fast, besides, if they're paying for the dataplan on the TomTom embedded cell phone, why not just pay for that same data on their main phone instead? You're not streaming video; I doubt anyone would notice the battery loss from getting time between point info on the three most likely routes, nor transmitting the time it took to drive between two points; pretty low-bandwidth stuff.
There's another feature called "IQ Routes" that enables TomTom to plan intelligent routes even when they're not connected to the internet, based on historical time sensitive information. Traffic on different roads has different speeds at different times of day and different weekdays, so IQ Routes measures that, and takes it into account when planning routes. Then HD traffic can add another layer of real time traffic information to make the routes even more accurate.
TomTom devices (even if they're not connected to the internet live) can record the speed you drive along the roads you travel, and if you choose to opt in, they anonymize and upload that data when you hot-sync your device to your PC or Mac (using your computer's internet connection instead of requiring a wireless data plan). Then they download the aggregation of all other TomTom user's traffic speed information. So each time you hot-sync, you get fresh traffic data based on the latest measurements of many other TomTom users.
Definitely another kick-ass, clever method of getting traffic info, which will probably outlive the former.
I think the 1st method (triangulating cell signals to determine traffic speed/embedding a dedicated cell phone in the Nav unit for receiving data/etc.) has a limited future; great technology/strategy in the beginning with a low density of devices deployed (especially when you can take advantage of another device that _is_ widely deployed, even though you are getting less precise data), or when adequate cheap mobile bandwidth wasn't a given, however as time goes on it will just be a more complex and costly than necessary to get the job done. Convergence rather than duplication here is a no-brainer. If TomTom doesn't do it, one of your competitors will and will force the issue for you; they'll get rid of the embedded mobile phone and sell a smaller Nav unit for a higher profit margin.
The 2nd method (currently store and forwarding the data when a user syncs their Nav unit to their PC, and the PC syncing to TomTom/more broadly stated as "let the GPS worry a
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You're right, it's only fair to subsidize energy from fossil fuel sources. You know, real energy.
I never said it was "only fair to subsidize energy from fossil fuel sources".
You're right though, fossil fuels (for example) are an actual energy source when compared to typical current photovoltaic solar panels which use more energy to produce than they'll generate over their lifetime (and that's before the conversion losses). The typical solar panel you see on a rooftop is really more a coal burning panel.
Nothing against research into solar energy, just when you find people deploying with current technology onto their rooftops (or window panes) and announcing their "helping the environment" or that they have a "carbon neutral" energy source or that what they're doing makes economic sense is laughable.
As someone has pointed out with some simple estimated values, you'll generate about a penny worth of electricity every 5 days. Or about $11 worth after 15 years...
Normal solar panel takes 10-15 years to pay for itself
Assuming no subsidies anywhere along the production/sales/installation process making the solar panels feel artificially cheap. And not counting losses converting the electricity into 120v/Hz AC. Nor counting losses converting power to storage and back again to match energy demand that doesn't coincide with peak production. Or feeding it back into the grid where it takes at a minimum DC --> 120v 60Hz AC --> 240v 60Hz AC --> 120v 60Hz AC path with conversion losses at each step. Assuming your output from the panels at year 10 is the same as year 1.
Otherwise yes, a normal solar panel only takes 10-15 years to pay for itself.
If it only produces 20% of a normal panel it won't be worth it unless it costs about 20% of a normal panel
...or just use the usual tactic, ratchet up the subsidies a little more to further hide the underlying inefficiencies.
completely deleted more than 4,800 websites that the company was unable to recover
They host (at least) 4,800 websites yet they don't have a working backup system in place? Amazing.
You sound stupid and an anti-apple fanboi
How DARE he be an anti fanboi!?! He's breaking the rules, isn't he! I'm going to do the right thing and instead be a smart sounding fanboi with you, CrackedButter!
Memory size: 262144 Megabytes ... and yes that is 262 GIGA BYTES of Ram. How much again can an ARM address?
Only roughly 3 processes per core
Just a minor detail, that looks more like 256 "GIGA BYTES".
Yes, only in a form deployable by a first responder.
and since practically everyone nowadays carry sophisticated personal radio beacons (aka "cell phones") that periodically transmit uniquely identifiable (on a per device basis) signals, I'm surprised no one has jumped on using this as a way of sensing where the people are.
What should we call this device?
A brake.
Total speculation, but during a time multiple rather-similar hominids were walking around I wonder if it would have served an anti-mating purpose for situations where the genetic difference may have been large enough to increase odds of hybrid (i.e. sterile) offspring.
farming!
-ducks-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip#Buggy_whip_and_coachwhip
Many clients, not laughing.
I think realistically, they shouldn't be complaining too much. Outages happen (what, they thought "the cloud" was magical?), and statistically so far Amazon had given decent uptime (especially for the price). If their customers want to be able to micromanage exactly how quickly/in what manner the outage is responded to they probably shouldn't be paying to outsource exactly that.
People who trust science often do so through faith. People who trust (for example) religion also do so through faith (ignoring for example those who probably ate something they shouldn't have and then had a "religious experience").
What separates science is that it doesn't depend on it; if you have the time, the energy, the resources and the mental capacity everything in the realm of science is available for your testing. Most people don't have the time, energy or mental capacity to do this so they get by on faith instead.
That happens to be why I have a great deal of faith in science; I trust that when a scientist publishes a finding that others who do have time/energy/resources/mental capacity will check those results and will happily announce if they could not recreate them.
Most (even though they could) don't look through widely-distributed source code of binaries they run looking for malicious code for that matter either. They don't need to, getting by on faith works well enough.
I often use my blackberry to access open WiFi spots, and I don't have a record of a network that I have connected to called 'Free Public WiFi'.
Err, OS 5 certainly doesn't support ad hoc connections (I doubt OS 6 does either) so possibly your observation is being colored by your blackberry helpfully filtering those SSID's out.
Depending on the configuration of the tool you're using on your laptop, it very likely is doing the same thing to protect a less experienced user from connecting to a useless ad hoc network themselves.
I still see it reasonably often at the airport (OAK or SFO), sometimes in other fairly random locations, though it seems less now.
Holy cow, do they realize how much hot air is generated from within the Whitehouse on an average weekday? I hope those Sterling engines have some sort of governor to protect themselves from shaking apart.
---snip
an experienced driver knows that in a battle between engine and brakes, the engine will win, so it's utterly vital to get the engine out of play early on.
---snip
Are you kidding? In almost any case (any production car, there are a few narrow market industrial/non-street legal vehicles this isn't the case) the exact opposite is true, usually by a large (very large) margin. Compare vehicle 60 to 0 distances vs. 0 to 60 distances and compare weight. For example, a 638HP, 3350LB 2010 Corvette takes 3.3 seconds to accelerate 0-60. The brakes on a meek 3400LB 2010 (~150 HP) Toyota Camry are more powerful.
A experienced, safety-conscious driver such as yourself should take your car out on your next local track day, setup your G Meter, and do some runs and you'll see the margin of difference built in (margin will actually be under represented of what you would have in an actual throttle-on condition if your vehicle has a front weight bias; which is usually the case). Then do an open throttle/full brake run, see which side wins very quickly to confirm for yourself in the real world what would happen.
Incidentally:
---snip
I suppose if it was one of those "key must be present" cars with the fancy starter button, he could have thrown the keyfob out the window and hoped the engine would shut itself down once the keyfob was out of range, but I expect another safety feature would have prevented that from happening.
---snip
Yes. Think of what a disaster on the highway it would be if the engine ever cut out on a driver because the keyfob was briefly unreadable. I own two of those "fancy starter button" cars, neither will cut the engine when the fob is out of range (in both cases you'll get a warning on the dash, and once the engine is off, you won't be able to restart). Both will allow you to switch off the engine under throttle by pressing the button (and of course, in both cases, simply braking would be the best response). In one car (probably all I'd assume) when you press the stop/start button while in gear instructions flash up prominently to continue to press to cut the engine. Also, many (most?) modern cars with a physical rotating key lock aren't physically tied to anything more than an ignition button on the shifter is; there's no functional advantage or disadvantage (other than perhaps a user interface preference) of many key operated ignition switches over a button press ignition switches.
Incidentally:
---snip
If the driver had been able to idle the engine, NEUTRAL would have worked. But he couldn't, and the interlock (a safety feature) worked against him. So on to the next attempt...
---snip
Automatic transmission lock (just like cruise control) is almost always tied to your brake lights. If your brake lights are on, you can move the selector lever to neutral irregardless of inputs from the engine side of the transmission. A manual transmission is very difficult (to impossible) to pull out of gear under acceleration of course.
Both VLC and mplayer are so insanely good, so much better than any alternatives, that it's kind of like arguing about whether you should drink belgian beer or german beer compared to drinking raw sewage.
Clearly hasn't done his research. Beer in the United States is almost always pasteurized.
Used his own personal laser pointer to hand cut every chip. Speaks in code to a special computer that compiles it on the fly. And then hand assembles each and every Apple devise.
That would be Wozniak.
Jobs super power is his reality-distortion field.
What that means is that immorality leads to a decreasing population leading to more resources for fewer people.
Shucks, I already miss the good old days, when good old fashioned immorality would lead to population increase.
I think the GP said "don't see very many". Lichens aren't exactly in a dominant position compared to the other lifeforms around. Where the fierce competition is going on (low cost/high energy sources) this is like a band of Hobbits taking knives to a Species 8472 phaser-fight.
Nanobots which digested rock as an energy source would move so slow that they'd be getting their asses kicked by a world already completely infested with high energy, high performance biological nanobots.
Now, a flesh eating nanobot on the other hand...that would be cool and would have plenty of energy sources available. Unfortunately my experiments in that direction at the home lab keep getting side tracked by my cat knocking over and breaking the isolation aquarium, etc...but one day! And the nice thing, with them set to self-replicate, I only need to make one good one! Yay!
Exactly. Doesn't matter what the source of the belief system is, if it saves you from analysis and makes acting easy, people will put their faith into it.
With us only beginning to understand what's going on the logical thing would be to put that Trillion dollars into research, if anything. Unfortunately that's not what we do. It just _feels_ better to do "something" in reaction to something threatening; in the simplest situations (like a flight/fight situation) where your brain is overwhelmed with information, sure, doing _something_ will be better than sitting there and analyzing. Anything less immediate than 10 seconds and the advantage bends rapidly to analysis before action. Although better adapted to coping with the modern world, it isn't our default behavior and for most of human existence the majority of the problems were very immediate compared to now. It not only feels good to act, it can be work to think. People on a deep level get excited by action rather than analysis.
P.S. Loved my Apple IIe, thanks.
How is it lame to ask other people questions when learning how to do something yourself?
For example yes, pointers are confusing and you can get in to trouble with them. However, that is actually how a processor handles things. It has registers that are pointers to memory locations of things it needs (like a pointer to the instruction to execute). So while more restrictive, managed references might be nice, they've nothing at all to do with how the processor works. That means you have to implement additional code overhead to deal with that sort of thing, and that you are losing the ability to optimise in certain ways.
You can say all the same for a low-level language like assembly, only more so, which makes it the coal mine canary for a "mid level" language like C. In 10 to 15 years I suspect you may see the same percentage of development done in C as you see in assembler today. Why "hand code" your entire video game in C when you can lazily write in very high level language like Java and still get 30+ frames per second?
Go back 15 years, you would still see relatively plenty of hand coding in assembler. Now, almost never except maybe in very small, tight subroutines.
It does not require each of those drivers to have TomTom devices. It does not require the cell phones to have GPS trackers. It does not require the cell phones to use air time or have unlimited data plans, or even have the ability to connect to the internet.
Which was critical in the beginning when there weren't many Nav systems out there and wireless data service via cell phone wasn't a commodity.
The "chicken and egg" and "critical mass" problems are solved by combining traffic data from several different source, and getting a lot more data points than we would get if we only collected data from drivers who have a TomTom that's always connected to the internet with an unlimited data plan.
Sounds more like "were" solved; like I said before in the post you're responding to, this was probably a killer feature when there weren't many Nav systems out there.
The other question is how to TomTom users receive this real time traffic information. The TomTom devices that support HD traffic have their own cell phones with built-in SIM cards, whose cost is covered by the HD traffic subscription, so it can download traffic reports in real time. It does not require you to drain the batteries and increase the bill of your own cell phone. The TomTom device is usually plugged into the car charger.
That's great, although I think the number of mobile phone users with limited data plans are dwindling fast, besides, if they're paying for the dataplan on the TomTom embedded cell phone, why not just pay for that same data on their main phone instead? You're not streaming video; I doubt anyone would notice the battery loss from getting time between point info on the three most likely routes, nor transmitting the time it took to drive between two points; pretty low-bandwidth stuff.
There's another feature called "IQ Routes" that enables TomTom to plan intelligent routes even when they're not connected to the internet, based on historical time sensitive information. Traffic on different roads has different speeds at different times of day and different weekdays, so IQ Routes measures that, and takes it into account when planning routes. Then HD traffic can add another layer of real time traffic information to make the routes even more accurate.
TomTom devices (even if they're not connected to the internet live) can record the speed you drive along the roads you travel, and if you choose to opt in, they anonymize and upload that data when you hot-sync your device to your PC or Mac (using your computer's internet connection instead of requiring a wireless data plan). Then they download the aggregation of all other TomTom user's traffic speed information. So each time you hot-sync, you get fresh traffic data based on the latest measurements of many other TomTom users.
Definitely another kick-ass, clever method of getting traffic info, which will probably outlive the former.
I think the 1st method (triangulating cell signals to determine traffic speed/embedding a dedicated cell phone in the Nav unit for receiving data/etc.) has a limited future; great technology/strategy in the beginning with a low density of devices deployed (especially when you can take advantage of another device that _is_ widely deployed, even though you are getting less precise data), or when adequate cheap mobile bandwidth wasn't a given, however as time goes on it will just be a more complex and costly than necessary to get the job done. Convergence rather than duplication here is a no-brainer. If TomTom doesn't do it, one of your competitors will and will force the issue for you; they'll get rid of the embedded mobile phone and sell a smaller Nav unit for a higher profit margin.
The 2nd method (currently store and forwarding the data when a user syncs their Nav unit to their PC, and the PC syncing to TomTom/more broadly stated as "let the GPS worry a