We could send people to Mars today. Granted, their chances of survival would be near zero. It may even be as low as 50/50 to make it to Mars orbit and under 10/90 to manage to walk on the surface before death. But these are much better odds than many past explorers enjoyed.
Those explorers were usually private explorers who sometimes had government backing. After a brief period in which the governments actually took full charge of the missions and has now allowed the efforts to mostly stall for almost half a century, we are thankfully seeing real explorers return to the advanced exploration game.
The new explorers will accomplish with vastly less expenditure what NASA will not or perhaps can not. It is far cheaper to follow an incremental path in which people live a bit longer into each mission until we finally achieve success. The cost of trying to reach NASA quality levels on the first attempt guarantees failure of the mission before it even leaves the ground.
We landed men on Mars. Faced with humiliation after having faked a moon landing themselves and witnessing a superior man launching a mission to Mars purely paid for and even fueled by his will, the embarrassed liberal media has hidden the whole operation. It was sort of like what happens when man sees the face of God, they utterly and completely broke and joined forces with all broadcast and internet providers to erase all evidence in transit. So, it's fake news that he hasn't already achieved this goal.
Well, Kemper is planned to be on the order of 582 MW. I was figuring $25K per home * 300K homes = $7.5B. As a mass purchase, $25K should be enough to install 7KW systems with a Powerwall to allow those homes to be almost entirely off grid in a southern state like Mississippi. Note that I'm only comparing against the construction costs. I've included no operating costs for the plant.
Basically, I think it compares pretty favorably.
I'm not saying we don't need new plants, but the plants we build from now on need to be small and flexible. We need to be able to quickly turn them off when the solar is fully producing so that we don't have the problem of needing to give the solar away because the plant is too hard to shut down that California has already been experiencing. When building plants for the next 30 years, the impact of solar HAS to be considered. This plant doesn't begin to do that.
In real numbers, at 12.4 million we're down more than 7 million factory jobs since the 1979 peak of 19.5 million jobs. Adjusted for population growth, we need 10 million more factory jobs to get back to similar levels. At 1000 jobs a piece, that would require an average of more than 3 announcements per day of a two-term presidency.
The problem is, the world doesn't need that much more goods - especially considering the volume that could be produced by a buildout of that level with the technology the buildout's investment would create. Though it would only be an 80% increase over current factory employment, it would likely produce a tripling or more of output because we're talking all new plants here.
We'd be drowning in even more crap than we already have. It's a stupid vision.
Let's move forward, not backward. We need a new vision. That 19.5 million job peak came during a horrible economic time with 11%+ inflation. As I remember it, it sucked. Do we really want that back?
Here in Florida, many of the patrol cars have the license plate reading cameras and they are active all the time soaking up plates that the car passes and running them. That is a much wider surveillance effort than a few fixed cameras. The reason for the few fixed cameras approach is to get a kickback instead of keeping the funds fully in the state's hands. I'm sure the company's lobbyist approached somebody, not vice versa.
I'm just curious as to whether anyone knows whether 750 miles is low enough to experience enough atmospheric drag to cause the junk from the inevitable collisions to come down in a reasonable time? I personally think it irresponsible to launch satellite swarms of this magnitude at a level above one guaranteed to come down within a couple of years after active station-keeping hardware fails. It seems like I recollect that 750 miles might be above that level.
My first thought was "how far off center can it be without rolling the barge?" followed immediately by questions as to the likelihood of it making it to shore without tipping. Then again, the empty weight might be very minimal and heavily concentrated at the bottom.
I would have never picked San Francisco as one of the starting points for laws specifically discriminating against robots. I'd have expected something like their being the leaders in placing the "R" on LGBTQ.
I've long realized that the critics at RottenTomatoes are radically out of step with the average consumer. Like many, I watch a movie to escape. And, as the difference in the critic's scores and the audience's scores show clearly in the case of Baywatch for example (20% vs 70%), the elitist critics seem to have something different in mind from your average viewer.
I have long found the audience score to be a vastly more reliable guide to whether a movie is entertaining than the critic's score. And before the new systems existed, I found critic's scores to be more reliable as an inverse of entertainment value.
The difference today is that these scores are being used to determine what movies are advertised to you and are being placed everywhere you see the movies presented on line. They are really in-your-face instead of something you go to look for. That does bring them into the realm of possibly causing a self-realizing effect. I totally hate the idea of defending anything Hollywood, but I believe there is at least a smidgin of truth to their complaints here. And it is not unlike another argument we've had concerning the effect of exit polls on elections.
Priorities are indeed cultural. Could it be that this generation is envisioning a different world?
Perhaps they want to lead a lighter life - more virtual and less actual. There is a lot of positive good that can come of that.
I personally believe that our society badly needs to step back and assess what is important and reduce our per capita consumption of resources.
There would be nothing wrong with millennials not tieing themselves to the home ownership boat anchor if it is a movement based on values. We would just have to figure out how to get through the economic impact of millennials not turning over their future to their profiteering elders via stepping into life-changing loans.
That is the real problem here. How are the business interests of the older generations going to remain alive in a world where people feel free to bounce around from place-to-place without the weight of paying for cars and homes?
And there can be good reason for lack of updates. From the ars article on the subject today:
"Researchers with security firm Rapid7, meanwhile, said they detected 110,000 devices exposed on the Internet that appeared to run vulnerable versions of Samba. 92,500 of them appeared to run unsupported versions of Samba for which no patch was available."
That directly mirrors the windows situation in which many of the infected machines were running unsupported OS versions.
You need a writeable share exposed to the intranet for this to work like wannacry. If you're running samba, that is very likely the case. Why else run samba than to allow windows machines on your network to access it? Many corporations use linux machines running samba as web servers for windows machines.
Once a windows or linux user opens any single email with an exploit and writes it to any samba share on your corporate network, the worm could then hit every machine within the intranet that is vulnerable.
What is really bad is that this response of denial is simply repeating history. The following quote is from this ars article).
"When the Windows vulnerability was first disclosed in April, many security experts assumed it would be hard to exploit because few computers would expose file- and print-sharing capabilities on the Internet. The rapid spread of WCry quickly dashed those assumptions. Dan Tentler, founder of security firm Phobos Group, told Ars that more than 477,000 Samba-enabled computers exposed port 445, although it wasn't clear how many of them were running a vulnerable version of the utility. Tentler cited figures returned by the Shodan computer search engine."
With the exception of the car seat stand, my auto is pretty much empty sitting there wasting space in my parking space at the moment.
It stands to reason that these fleets will have car seats built-in to back seats. That's an obvious direction to go as some vehicles already have them and will be SO much more convenient.
I have bad vision, with both near-sightedness and presbyopia, and carry no glasses with me. My daily wear contacts with presbyopia correction are awesome. Though I live in Florida, I've never used sunglasses because the bright light coming into my more dilated pupils from the sides kills my eyes.
Kleenex? Take allergy meds.
Music? You mean it isn't on your phone? What century are you writing from?
And, by the way, they are tracking you right now. Give it up.
I pay $540 per year for my internet connection. That's pure internet cost. I don't have cable or landline. I've not included my mobile though at least some of that is arguably internet too. They are trying to do it with a one time payment of about $1500 per person? That seems like they've low-balled it, especially when you consider that their landmass is almost equal to the contiguous US. So with less than a tenth of the population density, their costs per connection should be higher than ours.
I think it is shortsighted as is much of our case law in similar areas. As someone with a bad memory, my electronic files are part of my cyber enhancement. They are not yet encased within my head, but they are very much part of my definition of self. I am one of those who believes that we need to be working to learn to enhance ourselves as quickly as possible in order to stay relevant. It is vital in order to not stifle this development that contents of the chips we eventually put in our head and use to augment our selves are protected by fifth amendment rights.
3000 humans is not even remote to the ballpark of the required number to monitor FB's videos. It is in the ballpark of what is truly required to accelerate the training of the AI-based filters. This is 100% about doing what is necessary to reduce the problem in the only way it can be. To use humans to filter video, news, or any other media in today's volumes can never meet cost requirements.
I think it could be worse than paying more to keep your Netflix from being throttled. This opens the door to exclusive deals. We could end up with a split internet that requires the purchase of multiple providers to get all services.
The opportunities provided are false because they are wasteful. For example, a market would open up for routers that connect to multiple providers and automatically send traffic to the best one for that traffic type. But that need is not a real one but one that is artificially created by a lack of proper regulation.
The pipes are underwater at the same depth too. Can't remember the principle that causes it, but water can't be "pulled" uphill through a pipe more than 30ish feet. The turbines for this have to be at the bottom with only the electricity running uphill.
I saw that. My initial thoughts were based on pumping the air. It then clicked that they are pumping the water. So, yeh, my bad. Pumping an incompressible liquid is a vastly more favorable problem than the air.
It still falls short of the efficiencies that can be had with mechanical coupling to a modern generator though. And as I've mentioned elsewhere, I think they have more underwater complexity because the pump units / turbines have to be at the same depth as the spheres in their case. I'd envision pulleys at depth and cables mechanically transmitting energy back to motor / generators at the surface.
I was envisioning a system of anchored pulleys with locking brakes below each sphere with cables going all the way back to a floating motor/generation unit on the surface. Nothing would be under water but spheres, pulleys, and cables. The motor generation unit could have many spheres tied to a single shaft with an ability to control whether the shaft is actually engaged with each sphere's cable individually (or the cable is locked at the bottom pulley when the generator is not engaged). A sphere near the bottom with more buoyancy can supply more force. So with all the sphere's on the bottom, only one at a time might actually apply force until it gets to a certain depth. As the depth rises, more spheres at a time would be used to keep the force the same with all spheres applying force as the maximum depth is approached. Gearing is eliminated, the force pulling the floating motor/generator under is always kept to a fraction of the storage farm's capacity thus not forcing some island sized floating unit, and with a little extra thought, you could manage to harness some of the tide's energy as the floating unit goes up and down with the tide.
At 700m where they are experiencing ~70 atmospheres of pressure, the story becomes different. I bet that one of the hardest problems they will have is reliably keeping these things anchored to the bottom when they pump the water out.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps designed to demo how far slashdot has fallen?
We could send people to Mars today. Granted, their chances of survival would be near zero. It may even be as low as 50/50 to make it to Mars orbit and under 10/90 to manage to walk on the surface before death. But these are much better odds than many past explorers enjoyed.
Those explorers were usually private explorers who sometimes had government backing. After a brief period in which the governments actually took full charge of the missions and has now allowed the efforts to mostly stall for almost half a century, we are thankfully seeing real explorers return to the advanced exploration game.
The new explorers will accomplish with vastly less expenditure what NASA will not or perhaps can not. It is far cheaper to follow an incremental path in which people live a bit longer into each mission until we finally achieve success. The cost of trying to reach NASA quality levels on the first attempt guarantees failure of the mission before it even leaves the ground.
RIP NASA.
We landed men on Mars. Faced with humiliation after having faked a moon landing themselves and witnessing a superior man launching a mission to Mars purely paid for and even fueled by his will, the embarrassed liberal media has hidden the whole operation. It was sort of like what happens when man sees the face of God, they utterly and completely broke and joined forces with all broadcast and internet providers to erase all evidence in transit. So, it's fake news that he hasn't already achieved this goal.
Well, Kemper is planned to be on the order of 582 MW. I was figuring $25K per home * 300K homes = $7.5B. As a mass purchase, $25K should be enough to install 7KW systems with a Powerwall to allow those homes to be almost entirely off grid in a southern state like Mississippi. Note that I'm only comparing against the construction costs. I've included no operating costs for the plant.
Basically, I think it compares pretty favorably.
I'm not saying we don't need new plants, but the plants we build from now on need to be small and flexible. We need to be able to quickly turn them off when the solar is fully producing so that we don't have the problem of needing to give the solar away because the plant is too hard to shut down that California has already been experiencing. When building plants for the next 30 years, the impact of solar HAS to be considered. This plant doesn't begin to do that.
There are less that 1.2 million homes in Mississippi. The $7.5B cost of this facility could have put solar power in about 30% of them.
In real numbers, at 12.4 million we're down more than 7 million factory jobs since the 1979 peak of 19.5 million jobs. Adjusted for population growth, we need 10 million more factory jobs to get back to similar levels. At 1000 jobs a piece, that would require an average of more than 3 announcements per day of a two-term presidency.
The problem is, the world doesn't need that much more goods - especially considering the volume that could be produced by a buildout of that level with the technology the buildout's investment would create. Though it would only be an 80% increase over current factory employment, it would likely produce a tripling or more of output because we're talking all new plants here.
We'd be drowning in even more crap than we already have. It's a stupid vision.
Let's move forward, not backward. We need a new vision. That 19.5 million job peak came during a horrible economic time with 11%+ inflation. As I remember it, it sucked. Do we really want that back?
Here in Florida, many of the patrol cars have the license plate reading cameras and they are active all the time soaking up plates that the car passes and running them. That is a much wider surveillance effort than a few fixed cameras. The reason for the few fixed cameras approach is to get a kickback instead of keeping the funds fully in the state's hands. I'm sure the company's lobbyist approached somebody, not vice versa.
I'm just curious as to whether anyone knows whether 750 miles is low enough to experience enough atmospheric drag to cause the junk from the inevitable collisions to come down in a reasonable time? I personally think it irresponsible to launch satellite swarms of this magnitude at a level above one guaranteed to come down within a couple of years after active station-keeping hardware fails. It seems like I recollect that 750 miles might be above that level.
My first thought was "how far off center can it be without rolling the barge?" followed immediately by questions as to the likelihood of it making it to shore without tipping. Then again, the empty weight might be very minimal and heavily concentrated at the bottom.
No worries. The turmoil caused by propagating the changes to stop doing it will make up for years of that loss to the economy.
I would have never picked San Francisco as one of the starting points for laws specifically discriminating against robots. I'd have expected something like their being the leaders in placing the "R" on LGBTQ.
I've long realized that the critics at RottenTomatoes are radically out of step with the average consumer. Like many, I watch a movie to escape. And, as the difference in the critic's scores and the audience's scores show clearly in the case of Baywatch for example (20% vs 70%), the elitist critics seem to have something different in mind from your average viewer.
I have long found the audience score to be a vastly more reliable guide to whether a movie is entertaining than the critic's score. And before the new systems existed, I found critic's scores to be more reliable as an inverse of entertainment value.
The difference today is that these scores are being used to determine what movies are advertised to you and are being placed everywhere you see the movies presented on line. They are really in-your-face instead of something you go to look for. That does bring them into the realm of possibly causing a self-realizing effect. I totally hate the idea of defending anything Hollywood, but I believe there is at least a smidgin of truth to their complaints here. And it is not unlike another argument we've had concerning the effect of exit polls on elections.
Interesting.
Priorities are indeed cultural. Could it be that this generation is envisioning a different world?
Perhaps they want to lead a lighter life - more virtual and less actual. There is a lot of positive good that can come of that.
I personally believe that our society badly needs to step back and assess what is important and reduce our per capita consumption of resources.
There would be nothing wrong with millennials not tieing themselves to the home ownership boat anchor if it is a movement based on values. We would just have to figure out how to get through the economic impact of millennials not turning over their future to their profiteering elders via stepping into life-changing loans.
That is the real problem here. How are the business interests of the older generations going to remain alive in a world where people feel free to bounce around from place-to-place without the weight of paying for cars and homes?
And there can be good reason for lack of updates. From the ars article on the subject today:
"Researchers with security firm Rapid7, meanwhile, said they detected 110,000 devices exposed on the Internet that appeared to run vulnerable versions of Samba. 92,500 of them appeared to run unsupported versions of Samba for which no patch was available."
That directly mirrors the windows situation in which many of the infected machines were running unsupported OS versions.
You need a writeable share exposed to the intranet for this to work like wannacry. If you're running samba, that is very likely the case. Why else run samba than to allow windows machines on your network to access it? Many corporations use linux machines running samba as web servers for windows machines.
Once a windows or linux user opens any single email with an exploit and writes it to any samba share on your corporate network, the worm could then hit every machine within the intranet that is vulnerable.
What is really bad is that this response of denial is simply repeating history. The following quote is from this ars article).
"When the Windows vulnerability was first disclosed in April, many security experts assumed it would be hard to exploit because few computers would expose file- and print-sharing capabilities on the Internet. The rapid spread of WCry quickly dashed those assumptions. Dan Tentler, founder of security firm Phobos Group, told Ars that more than 477,000 Samba-enabled computers exposed port 445, although it wasn't clear how many of them were running a vulnerable version of the utility. Tentler cited figures returned by the Shodan computer search engine."
With the exception of the car seat stand, my auto is pretty much empty sitting there wasting space in my parking space at the moment.
It stands to reason that these fleets will have car seats built-in to back seats. That's an obvious direction to go as some vehicles already have them and will be SO much more convenient.
I have bad vision, with both near-sightedness and presbyopia, and carry no glasses with me. My daily wear contacts with presbyopia correction are awesome. Though I live in Florida, I've never used sunglasses because the bright light coming into my more dilated pupils from the sides kills my eyes.
Kleenex? Take allergy meds.
Music? You mean it isn't on your phone? What century are you writing from?
And, by the way, they are tracking you right now. Give it up.
I pay $540 per year for my internet connection. That's pure internet cost. I don't have cable or landline. I've not included my mobile though at least some of that is arguably internet too. They are trying to do it with a one time payment of about $1500 per person? That seems like they've low-balled it, especially when you consider that their landmass is almost equal to the contiguous US. So with less than a tenth of the population density, their costs per connection should be higher than ours.
I think it is shortsighted as is much of our case law in similar areas. As someone with a bad memory, my electronic files are part of my cyber enhancement. They are not yet encased within my head, but they are very much part of my definition of self. I am one of those who believes that we need to be working to learn to enhance ourselves as quickly as possible in order to stay relevant. It is vital in order to not stifle this development that contents of the chips we eventually put in our head and use to augment our selves are protected by fifth amendment rights.
3000 humans is not even remote to the ballpark of the required number to monitor FB's videos. It is in the ballpark of what is truly required to accelerate the training of the AI-based filters. This is 100% about doing what is necessary to reduce the problem in the only way it can be. To use humans to filter video, news, or any other media in today's volumes can never meet cost requirements.
I walked 5 miles to and from school - uphill in both directions - through snow most of the year and rain the rest.
I think it could be worse than paying more to keep your Netflix from being throttled. This opens the door to exclusive deals. We could end up with a split internet that requires the purchase of multiple providers to get all services.
The opportunities provided are false because they are wasteful. For example, a market would open up for routers that connect to multiple providers and automatically send traffic to the best one for that traffic type. But that need is not a real one but one that is artificially created by a lack of proper regulation.
The pipes are underwater at the same depth too. Can't remember the principle that causes it, but water can't be "pulled" uphill through a pipe more than 30ish feet. The turbines for this have to be at the bottom with only the electricity running uphill.
I saw that. My initial thoughts were based on pumping the air. It then clicked that they are pumping the water. So, yeh, my bad. Pumping an incompressible liquid is a vastly more favorable problem than the air.
It still falls short of the efficiencies that can be had with mechanical coupling to a modern generator though. And as I've mentioned elsewhere, I think they have more underwater complexity because the pump units / turbines have to be at the same depth as the spheres in their case. I'd envision pulleys at depth and cables mechanically transmitting energy back to motor / generators at the surface.
I was envisioning a system of anchored pulleys with locking brakes below each sphere with cables going all the way back to a floating motor/generation unit on the surface. Nothing would be under water but spheres, pulleys, and cables. The motor generation unit could have many spheres tied to a single shaft with an ability to control whether the shaft is actually engaged with each sphere's cable individually (or the cable is locked at the bottom pulley when the generator is not engaged). A sphere near the bottom with more buoyancy can supply more force. So with all the sphere's on the bottom, only one at a time might actually apply force until it gets to a certain depth. As the depth rises, more spheres at a time would be used to keep the force the same with all spheres applying force as the maximum depth is approached. Gearing is eliminated, the force pulling the floating motor/generator under is always kept to a fraction of the storage farm's capacity thus not forcing some island sized floating unit, and with a little extra thought, you could manage to harness some of the tide's energy as the floating unit goes up and down with the tide.
At 700m where they are experiencing ~70 atmospheres of pressure, the story becomes different. I bet that one of the hardest problems they will have is reliably keeping these things anchored to the bottom when they pump the water out.