I'm not a big fan of Trump, but if he actually delivers on this campaign promise (even if it's just scrawling his signature on the bill and then taking all the credit in speeches) that will be a good thing for me and most employed people on slashdot.
Is there any way this is a bad thing? H1B was supposed to be for bringing in essential foreign talent. If a company isn't willing to pay $100k per year plus the various expenses, whoever they are bringing it must not have been all that talented.
With thrust vectoring it's in theory possible to do the staging where you shed 1 booster at a time, with fuel crossfeed to the other 2. The Delta IV can be launched like this, with just one SRB on one side. Whether or not this will be possible with the Falcon Heavy depends on how they build it, and realistically which version of the rocket it is. (since SpaceX keeps making changes)
Here's the other thing. So the government is trying to make sure that companies - like, uh, google - it gives Federal money too aren't blatantly discriminatory. Anyways, you were whining that ", why does the government get to have my name, contact info, salary history, and God knows what else?"
Do you pay your taxes or at least file em? Who do you think issued that SSN? At some level, the government already knows everything they are asking for - they are just demanding the records from google because this lets them prove that google knew they were discriminating. If google's own records show that their average employee is 29 and that anyone over that, with a near identical resume, has a 90% lower chance to be hired, well, that's a smoking gun.
That's kind of like saying a "Saturn V is exactly like a bottle rocket". It's still an immense improvement in performance. And by on the fly choosing to sometimes carpool with others, you greatly reduce the amount of automated vehicles you need and the traffic added but with minimal increase in trip times. I don't know what the discount would be for choosing the "may be other passengers" option, but I would guess it might be half cost, because while the car can hold 4 I suspect it would often not find 3 other people who want to go to the same place in the next 3 minutes.
An obvious additional feature would be a way to downvote your fellow passengers after a trip, and/or snobbishly exclude low rated passengers from riding with you.
Do you want to have an in depth discussion about this? The net TLDR is that if your house is heated electrically and you live in a "heating climate", where the majority of the year you need heat, those incandescent bulbs weren't hurting anything. Most people, especially in heating climates, burn fuel for heat or use heat pumps. In that case, while yes, you were getting heat from the bulbs, this was at a rate of 1 joule electrical = 1 joule heat, minus losses in the summer. That sounds good, but burning natural gas is about 3 times better. That is, if you replaced all the incandescent bulbs with LED and worked your natural gas furnace a little harder, you get 3 times as much heat per dollar and this is a significant net improvement.
Another factor is that most of the benefit from going to LED is the diodes produce light very efficiently. 100 lumens/watt on some of readily available bulbs. So a small % loss in the power supply inside the LEDs (which you wouldn't have if the house had a DC power bus) is not a big deal, because it is a small % of an already small number.
If you already have all LEDs, the next bang/buck upgrade for your house is cellulose insulation in your attic. It's very cheap to apply - $200-$400 bucks at Home Depot or Lowes will get you enough to drown your attic with a foot or more of the stuff. (and rent you the machine to blow it in)
The next upgrade after that is a mini-split retrofit. In most homes, the majority of the load is heating and cooling. The most efficient way to do heating and cooling, except in extremely cold climates, is electric mini split AC/heat pumps. Some of the higher end Fujitsu and Mitsubishi models are over 30 SEER and 15 HPSF. More than twice the efficiency of central ACs and heat pumps. If you DIY the installs, you can retrofit in several of them and heat/cool your house at double efficiency for a modest investment. Hell, people with trailer homes and campers have figured this out and also are starting to retrofit them in, because they are vastly more efficient than RV made ACs. They are simple to install if you put them in an outside wall - just run a new electric line in conduit outside or through the attic, drill one hole, install brackets on both sides of the wall, and connect a small number of wires and tighten 4 hoses. Evacuate with a pump borrowed for free from autozone and done.
Why bother? Readily available inverters like SMA TL inverters are 96.5% efficient. So Solar (high voltage DC) -> 120/240 V AC. Computers and LED light bulbs and various other consumer electronics need different DC voltages. So their power supplies work by either using the AC from the wall to run through a transformer, or in some cases, they do AC->DC->high frequency AC->transformer->low voltage high frequency AC->DC. That's how things like laptop power supplies work.
As you can see, you already do a shit-ton of conversions, since the way you voltage convert DC efficiently is to convert it to high frequency AC first. Using 60 Hz AC for the house wiring only reduces the efficiency of the system a few percent. And it's a standard that very large sums of money were already sunk into. Not enough benefit in replacing it to even bother.
Really, the only thing needed to be done is to make some of those power supplies used by consumer electronics more efficient. 96% efficiency is possible, but as you may know, 80% is more typical.
It is nothing like a bus. With a bus, you have to find a bus line that goes somewhere closer to your destination. Then walk to a stop for that bus. (can be several blocks) Then wait for the bus, a bus is not on the way to you, it will get there when it gets there.
If you want to go "diagonal" in NYC, you're gonna usually need to do this twice.
With MIT's solution, you get out your phone before you even get on the elevator and tap the place you want to go. It'll obviously remember your last few destinations. By the time you get to the ground floor and to the curb, the autonomous vehicle will be pulling up (average delay of 3 minutes). Get in. It's a 4 seat sedan and if you didn't choose the "I want a single occupancy vehicle for an extra fee" option on your phone's app, there might be someone else in one of the other seats. The vehicle starts heading to it's destination. Ideally, non automated vehicles on the streets would be banned during heavy traffic periods. (so there would just be these and busses)
If someone else's stop is on the way to your destination with minimal increase in route time, your vehicle might stop to let someone off/pick them up. The vehicle will not wait more than a few seconds to pick someone up, if someone's phone by GPS is nowhere near the curb, it's just going to keep going and let the next auto-carpooling-taxi pick them up.
So that's how it would work. You would expect for the long term costs to be significantly cheaper than owning and operating your own personal vehicle. Wanna cruise in style? Select a single occupancy vehicle then choose a luxury car to pick you up. Or a limo.
One issue that has to be addressed in your scheme is inflation due to artificially restricted housing supply. Right now, as it is, individual state/local governments are easily influenced by the wealthy, who tend to own a lot of real estate. Those people want there to be no more real estate supply, so their existing holdings skyrocket in value. So cities have endless reviews, permitting requirements, height requirements - essentially blocking the construction of new housing (and commercial/industrial space) by obstructing it, making the existing owners wealthier. Obviously this happens in NYC and LA to the greatest degree.
I understand your frustration and fears somewhat, but keep in mind that :
1. Today, the government controls 100% of your income for nearly all workers because they have the power to freeze your accounts and assess whatever taxes they want on your income. We already do live in a complex mess of stealing (they can seize your money even if you are never convicted of a crime), borrowing (look at the Federal debt), modifying (tax credits change every year), and there are many many strings to get some of your money back with tax credits (get married, have a kid, install solar panels - the list goes on for literally thousands of pages)
2. Most workers are at the mercy of a private employer who may fire them at any time for basically any reason. Yeah, there are supposed to be "protected classes" but all that means is the employer has to cover their ass with paper by writing you up for every negligible infraction, while letting the employees that they want to keep get away with those same infractions. Once fired, that is 100% of your income, and you may be able to get another job next week, or it might take 2 years...
3. Right now, if #2 happens, you basically become homeless and basically starve. Most states there is only minimal help in the form of food stamps, food banks, and homeless shelters. Oh, and if you get sick, if the illness is treatable and will kill you in about a day, yeah you can get free medical care at an emergency room. Get treatable cancer, and you can't afford health insurance? Well fuck you, you're gonna die.
So was I. Supposedly drone pilots, who get to work in air conditioned trailers at an airbase in Nevada and go home every day, get PTSD sometimes. I don't know how prevalent it is. And certainly, if they are working in optimal conditions, not chaotic field conditions, you could rotate your combat operators off duty every month or so. Have them spend 2 weeks decompressing and talking about their experiences under the influence of some drugs to help them process what they had to do.
Another thing not fully appreciated is that combat robots - if we ever have something resembling a Terminator that can blow in a door and storm into a building - don't have to be armed with lethal weapons. The reason soldiers don't have rifles that shoot bean bags or taser rounds is because neither less lethal weapon is nearly as effective as making someone become no longer a threat as a volley of bullets. So soldiers are trained to shoot early and often, from long range. (taser/bean bags also have very short range)
Armored walking robots could in principle get far closer to the enemy, being repairable of any battle damage and armored to be resistant to most small arms, shooting down enemy RPGs with automated point defense. They could then capture most enemy combatants alive, able to be interrogated and incentivized to give up their buddies. The remote operators of these robots would not be directly responsible for as many deaths. (realistically, the U.S. might hand the enemy fighters over to be executed by a new puppet government - but that pushes responsibility for the deaths to someone else)
Having to murder a bunch of living people via remote control may still give people PTSD. But yes, I don't think it would be as bad - especially with plenty of sleep, little personal fear, and other stressors being reduced.
I'm sure it gets it wrong lots of times, but so do humans. It's only a problem (with Watson) if humans wrongfully assume it to be infallible or if Watson gets it wrong so often it's useless. This does not seem to be the case.
If the RIAA shrinks down to a minimal number of middlemen from lack of money (I guess those people would go to work in regular finance or something their skills would apply for), is this enough to keep the world's musicians able to make new songs and live in modest comfort?
How many people does it actually take to record a decent sounding album? I had the impression, from my friends with their amateur semi-pro bands, that it just takes a few. You need the musicians, some instruments, and a booth in a place with cheap rent that has good mics and that special stuff in the walls. Then a computer and a few thousand bucks worth of gear (including the mics) to convert the sound to digital, and a (usually pirated) copy of that software that lets you mix the tracks.
1 billion from youtube, plus a few more billion from direct sales and from the movie industry does sound like it ought to keep a few thousand artists in business. Enough to make more new songs than we can ever individually or collectively listen to. Am I right?
Ok, sure, but it's still $1500 for something that I won't be able to use in a few years because of bad color balance.
When LED backlit computer monitors get dimmer, you can just turn up the brightness to compensate (since you run them at about 50% of their maximum potential brightness generally at the beginning). You can't do this forever - but the lifespan is probably 100k total hours which is 20 years if nothing else fails.
Its hours of use. For use as a computer monitor, that's 14 hours a day for 4.9 years. I would rather the equipment either lasted longer than that or were inexpensive enough that I can easily swap it. At $1500-3k for a 4k OLED TV, that's a bit too expensive to throw it away that often.
What things are those? The only ones I know of (that prevented me from buying an OLED black Friday) were:
1. Cost. Thousands of dollars, LCD equivalents are now $600 for 55-65" 4k set 2. Input lag. While the physical panel is near instant, for whatever reason, the chipsets the current OLED manufacturers are using have more input lag than low input lag LCDs. Unacceptable. 3. Longevity. The LCD backlights are down to 80% brightness at 25,000 hours and will probably remain usable displays for perhaps 100k hours, give or take. (most like a capacitor will fail before the backlight does). At 25k hours the oled dyes age at different rates and the blue will be shot at that point. 4. Maximum brightness - harder to make the thin layer glow as hard than it is to throw in bigger backlights behind an LCD.
Summary of the TFA : the actual method of brain signaling is primarily all or nothing electrical impulses. The timing is analog - THEORETICALLY a difference in an electrical impulse arriving down to the planck-second could have an effect.
This research does not change any of this. The brain is still analog at the individual synapse level, it just follows certain patterns that are related to binary math for setting up arrays of neural circuitry.
In practice, like any analog system, true resolution is finite because there is noise. So the system merely needs to be quantized down to the level of resolution of noise and you can replicate it's behavior exactly in a digital equivalent. Remember analog PIDs and other simple analog computers, the ones that used vacuum tubes and were used from ww2 and a few decades after? Those systems also had finite effective resolution even though analog systems theoretically have infinite resolution. That was because of all the various forms of noise in the actual physical equipment. In practice if you replace an analog system with a digital system you can get BETTER resolution because all the intermediate processing steps do not introduce additional noise. (while each vacuum tube op amp you solder in picks up extra noise that is added to the signal)
Yeah I think that is also what it is saying. We should be able to upgrade our neural network models to use this method of organization and get more performance. We should also be able to mimic any single subsystem of the human brain in the relatively near future*. Mimicking a full brain - what we think of as a general purpose artificial intelligence - is still immensely harder because of all the complex relationships between subsystems and the vast amount of memory and hardware we'll need. Even the massive GPU/ASIC clusters Google is using are nowhere close to the scale of a full human brain. It really partially is just a matter of hardware.
* I mean in terms of utility, not in terms of being an exact copy of neural hardware.
Amazon product search is bad? To be fair I sometimes have trouble with it - especially if use the wrong search terms - and the sponsored products can be annoying - but it generally works. It lets you know what most people buy, what most people give good reviews to, and the review system is...better than nothing. When/if they fix the bribed review system it'll be pretty good. Also the "other products people bought" is good, so the "frequently bought together".
All in all it's better than newegg or ebay or going to the store in person. It's not bad.
Yeah that would be easier, wouldn't it. Requiring both high and low current chargers and high and low current cables to populate every conductor means the low current cables would have a long lifespan from having more total conductors than they need. So in your version, you'd make the low current cable have a thinner cable portion while the high current cable would have much thicker copper wires and even tubes for coolant water? (the coolant would be supplied by the charger)
High current cable might also need temperature sensors embedded along the main conductor to detect hot spots.
? I'm talking about the connector. The connector needs to support different charging rates by an array of parallel pins so slower cords can just have an empty connector for all but the minimum set of current carrying pins.
Wouldn't mind, I'm sure they are way more complex. I was just thinking an all in one plug needs to support earlier cars with slower max charging rates and the cord/plug needs to be cheaper, saving you the weight and expense of several extra kilograms of copper that the high amperage cord would need.
Why do tech companies even do this? Why can't everyone just agree on a standard and stick with it from the start instead of having a war that means us consumers who buy gear from the wrong side will suffer. No doubt there will be large dongle adapters between charging standards, but I bet an adapter that can handle 100+ kilowatts is pretty darn expensive.
I mean, the basic requirements for a plug are that it be mechanically sound and inexpensive to manufacture. It ought to have several conductor pins, filled in by order of amperage, so a 2 pin plug is 50 amp and a 4 pin plug is 100 amp and so on. The plugs for lower amperage would be the same size plastic mold, just missing the conductors for higher amperage. Not that hard to get right. It needs a data pin to do handshaking with the destination.
It's not worth fighting a war to get royalties, every electric car manufacturer has an incentive to use the standard used by the majority so everyone's vehicles can charge more places.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a big fan of Trump, but if he actually delivers on this campaign promise (even if it's just scrawling his signature on the bill and then taking all the credit in speeches) that will be a good thing for me and most employed people on slashdot.
Is there any way this is a bad thing? H1B was supposed to be for bringing in essential foreign talent. If a company isn't willing to pay $100k per year plus the various expenses, whoever they are bringing it must not have been all that talented.
With thrust vectoring it's in theory possible to do the staging where you shed 1 booster at a time, with fuel crossfeed to the other 2. The Delta IV can be launched like this, with just one SRB on one side. Whether or not this will be possible with the Falcon Heavy depends on how they build it, and realistically which version of the rocket it is. (since SpaceX keeps making changes)
Here's the other thing. So the government is trying to make sure that companies - like, uh, google - it gives Federal money too aren't blatantly discriminatory. Anyways, you were whining that ", why does the government get to have my name, contact info, salary history, and God knows what else?"
Do you pay your taxes or at least file em? Who do you think issued that SSN? At some level, the government already knows everything they are asking for - they are just demanding the records from google because this lets them prove that google knew they were discriminating. If google's own records show that their average employee is 29 and that anyone over that, with a near identical resume, has a 90% lower chance to be hired, well, that's a smoking gun.
Google is infamous for age discrimination and you're an outlier.
That's kind of like saying a "Saturn V is exactly like a bottle rocket". It's still an immense improvement in performance. And by on the fly choosing to sometimes carpool with others, you greatly reduce the amount of automated vehicles you need and the traffic added but with minimal increase in trip times. I don't know what the discount would be for choosing the "may be other passengers" option, but I would guess it might be half cost, because while the car can hold 4 I suspect it would often not find 3 other people who want to go to the same place in the next 3 minutes.
An obvious additional feature would be a way to downvote your fellow passengers after a trip, and/or snobbishly exclude low rated passengers from riding with you.
Do you want to have an in depth discussion about this? The net TLDR is that if your house is heated electrically and you live in a "heating climate", where the majority of the year you need heat, those incandescent bulbs weren't hurting anything. Most people, especially in heating climates, burn fuel for heat or use heat pumps. In that case, while yes, you were getting heat from the bulbs, this was at a rate of 1 joule electrical = 1 joule heat, minus losses in the summer. That sounds good, but burning natural gas is about 3 times better. That is, if you replaced all the incandescent bulbs with LED and worked your natural gas furnace a little harder, you get 3 times as much heat per dollar and this is a significant net improvement.
Another factor is that most of the benefit from going to LED is the diodes produce light very efficiently. 100 lumens/watt on some of readily available bulbs. So a small % loss in the power supply inside the LEDs (which you wouldn't have if the house had a DC power bus) is not a big deal, because it is a small % of an already small number.
If you already have all LEDs, the next bang/buck upgrade for your house is cellulose insulation in your attic. It's very cheap to apply - $200-$400 bucks at Home Depot or Lowes will get you enough to drown your attic with a foot or more of the stuff. (and rent you the machine to blow it in)
The next upgrade after that is a mini-split retrofit. In most homes, the majority of the load is heating and cooling. The most efficient way to do heating and cooling, except in extremely cold climates, is electric mini split AC/heat pumps. Some of the higher end Fujitsu and Mitsubishi models are over 30 SEER and 15 HPSF. More than twice the efficiency of central ACs and heat pumps. If you DIY the installs, you can retrofit in several of them and heat/cool your house at double efficiency for a modest investment. Hell, people with trailer homes and campers have figured this out and also are starting to retrofit them in, because they are vastly more efficient than RV made ACs. They are simple to install if you put them in an outside wall - just run a new electric line in conduit outside or through the attic, drill one hole, install brackets on both sides of the wall, and connect a small number of wires and tighten 4 hoses. Evacuate with a pump borrowed for free from autozone and done.
Why bother? Readily available inverters like SMA TL inverters are 96.5% efficient. So Solar (high voltage DC) -> 120/240 V AC. Computers and LED light bulbs and various other consumer electronics need different DC voltages. So their power supplies work by either using the AC from the wall to run through a transformer, or in some cases, they do AC->DC->high frequency AC->transformer->low voltage high frequency AC->DC. That's how things like laptop power supplies work.
As you can see, you already do a shit-ton of conversions, since the way you voltage convert DC efficiently is to convert it to high frequency AC first. Using 60 Hz AC for the house wiring only reduces the efficiency of the system a few percent. And it's a standard that very large sums of money were already sunk into. Not enough benefit in replacing it to even bother.
Really, the only thing needed to be done is to make some of those power supplies used by consumer electronics more efficient. 96% efficiency is possible, but as you may know, 80% is more typical.
It is nothing like a bus. With a bus, you have to find a bus line that goes somewhere closer to your destination. Then walk to a stop for that bus. (can be several blocks) Then wait for the bus, a bus is not on the way to you, it will get there when it gets there.
If you want to go "diagonal" in NYC, you're gonna usually need to do this twice.
With MIT's solution, you get out your phone before you even get on the elevator and tap the place you want to go. It'll obviously remember your last few destinations. By the time you get to the ground floor and to the curb, the autonomous vehicle will be pulling up (average delay of 3 minutes). Get in. It's a 4 seat sedan and if you didn't choose the "I want a single occupancy vehicle for an extra fee" option on your phone's app, there might be someone else in one of the other seats. The vehicle starts heading to it's destination. Ideally, non automated vehicles on the streets would be banned during heavy traffic periods. (so there would just be these and busses)
If someone else's stop is on the way to your destination with minimal increase in route time, your vehicle might stop to let someone off/pick them up. The vehicle will not wait more than a few seconds to pick someone up, if someone's phone by GPS is nowhere near the curb, it's just going to keep going and let the next auto-carpooling-taxi pick them up.
So that's how it would work. You would expect for the long term costs to be significantly cheaper than owning and operating your own personal vehicle. Wanna cruise in style? Select a single occupancy vehicle then choose a luxury car to pick you up. Or a limo.
One issue that has to be addressed in your scheme is inflation due to artificially restricted housing supply. Right now, as it is, individual state/local governments are easily influenced by the wealthy, who tend to own a lot of real estate. Those people want there to be no more real estate supply, so their existing holdings skyrocket in value. So cities have endless reviews, permitting requirements, height requirements - essentially blocking the construction of new housing (and commercial/industrial space) by obstructing it, making the existing owners wealthier. Obviously this happens in NYC and LA to the greatest degree.
I understand your frustration and fears somewhat, but keep in mind that :
1. Today, the government controls 100% of your income for nearly all workers because they have the power to freeze your accounts and assess whatever taxes they want on your income. We already do live in a complex mess of stealing (they can seize your money even if you are never convicted of a crime), borrowing (look at the Federal debt), modifying (tax credits change every year), and there are many many strings to get some of your money back with tax credits (get married, have a kid, install solar panels - the list goes on for literally thousands of pages)
2. Most workers are at the mercy of a private employer who may fire them at any time for basically any reason. Yeah, there are supposed to be "protected classes" but all that means is the employer has to cover their ass with paper by writing you up for every negligible infraction, while letting the employees that they want to keep get away with those same infractions. Once fired, that is 100% of your income, and you may be able to get another job next week, or it might take 2 years...
3. Right now, if #2 happens, you basically become homeless and basically starve. Most states there is only minimal help in the form of food stamps, food banks, and homeless shelters. Oh, and if you get sick, if the illness is treatable and will kill you in about a day, yeah you can get free medical care at an emergency room. Get treatable cancer, and you can't afford health insurance? Well fuck you, you're gonna die.
So was I. Supposedly drone pilots, who get to work in air conditioned trailers at an airbase in Nevada and go home every day, get PTSD sometimes. I don't know how prevalent it is. And certainly, if they are working in optimal conditions, not chaotic field conditions, you could rotate your combat operators off duty every month or so. Have them spend 2 weeks decompressing and talking about their experiences under the influence of some drugs to help them process what they had to do.
Another thing not fully appreciated is that combat robots - if we ever have something resembling a Terminator that can blow in a door and storm into a building - don't have to be armed with lethal weapons. The reason soldiers don't have rifles that shoot bean bags or taser rounds is because neither less lethal weapon is nearly as effective as making someone become no longer a threat as a volley of bullets. So soldiers are trained to shoot early and often, from long range. (taser/bean bags also have very short range)
Armored walking robots could in principle get far closer to the enemy, being repairable of any battle damage and armored to be resistant to most small arms, shooting down enemy RPGs with automated point defense. They could then capture most enemy combatants alive, able to be interrogated and incentivized to give up their buddies. The remote operators of these robots would not be directly responsible for as many deaths. (realistically, the U.S. might hand the enemy fighters over to be executed by a new puppet government - but that pushes responsibility for the deaths to someone else)
Having to murder a bunch of living people via remote control may still give people PTSD. But yes, I don't think it would be as bad - especially with plenty of sleep, little personal fear, and other stressors being reduced.
I'm sure it gets it wrong lots of times, but so do humans. It's only a problem (with Watson) if humans wrongfully assume it to be infallible or if Watson gets it wrong so often it's useless. This does not seem to be the case.
If the RIAA shrinks down to a minimal number of middlemen from lack of money (I guess those people would go to work in regular finance or something their skills would apply for), is this enough to keep the world's musicians able to make new songs and live in modest comfort?
How many people does it actually take to record a decent sounding album? I had the impression, from my friends with their amateur semi-pro bands, that it just takes a few. You need the musicians, some instruments, and a booth in a place with cheap rent that has good mics and that special stuff in the walls. Then a computer and a few thousand bucks worth of gear (including the mics) to convert the sound to digital, and a (usually pirated) copy of that software that lets you mix the tracks.
1 billion from youtube, plus a few more billion from direct sales and from the movie industry does sound like it ought to keep a few thousand artists in business. Enough to make more new songs than we can ever individually or collectively listen to. Am I right?
Ok, sure, but it's still $1500 for something that I won't be able to use in a few years because of bad color balance.
When LED backlit computer monitors get dimmer, you can just turn up the brightness to compensate (since you run them at about 50% of their maximum potential brightness generally at the beginning). You can't do this forever - but the lifespan is probably 100k total hours which is 20 years if nothing else fails.
Its hours of use. For use as a computer monitor, that's 14 hours a day for 4.9 years. I would rather the equipment either lasted longer than that or were inexpensive enough that I can easily swap it. At $1500-3k for a 4k OLED TV, that's a bit too expensive to throw it away that often.
LED TVs are LCDs.
What things are those? The only ones I know of (that prevented me from buying an OLED black Friday) were:
1. Cost. Thousands of dollars, LCD equivalents are now $600 for 55-65" 4k set
2. Input lag. While the physical panel is near instant, for whatever reason, the chipsets the current OLED manufacturers are using have more input lag than low input lag LCDs. Unacceptable.
3. Longevity. The LCD backlights are down to 80% brightness at 25,000 hours and will probably remain usable displays for perhaps 100k hours, give or take. (most like a capacitor will fail before the backlight does). At 25k hours the oled dyes age at different rates and the blue will be shot at that point.
4. Maximum brightness - harder to make the thin layer glow as hard than it is to throw in bigger backlights behind an LCD.
Summary of the TFA : the actual method of brain signaling is primarily all or nothing electrical impulses. The timing is analog - THEORETICALLY a difference in an electrical impulse arriving down to the planck-second could have an effect.
This research does not change any of this. The brain is still analog at the individual synapse level, it just follows certain patterns that are related to binary math for setting up arrays of neural circuitry.
In practice, like any analog system, true resolution is finite because there is noise. So the system merely needs to be quantized down to the level of resolution of noise and you can replicate it's behavior exactly in a digital equivalent. Remember analog PIDs and other simple analog computers, the ones that used vacuum tubes and were used from ww2 and a few decades after? Those systems also had finite effective resolution even though analog systems theoretically have infinite resolution. That was because of all the various forms of noise in the actual physical equipment. In practice if you replace an analog system with a digital system you can get BETTER resolution because all the intermediate processing steps do not introduce additional noise. (while each vacuum tube op amp you solder in picks up extra noise that is added to the signal)
Yeah I think that is also what it is saying. We should be able to upgrade our neural network models to use this method of organization and get more performance. We should also be able to mimic any single subsystem of the human brain in the relatively near future*. Mimicking a full brain - what we think of as a general purpose artificial intelligence - is still immensely harder because of all the complex relationships between subsystems and the vast amount of memory and hardware we'll need. Even the massive GPU/ASIC clusters Google is using are nowhere close to the scale of a full human brain. It really partially is just a matter of hardware.
* I mean in terms of utility, not in terms of being an exact copy of neural hardware.
Amazon product search is bad? To be fair I sometimes have trouble with it - especially if use the wrong search terms - and the sponsored products can be annoying - but it generally works. It lets you know what most people buy, what most people give good reviews to, and the review system is...better than nothing. When/if they fix the bribed review system it'll be pretty good. Also the "other products people bought" is good, so the "frequently bought together".
All in all it's better than newegg or ebay or going to the store in person. It's not bad.
Yeah that would be easier, wouldn't it. Requiring both high and low current chargers and high and low current cables to populate every conductor means the low current cables would have a long lifespan from having more total conductors than they need. So in your version, you'd make the low current cable have a thinner cable portion while the high current cable would have much thicker copper wires and even tubes for coolant water? (the coolant would be supplied by the charger)
High current cable might also need temperature sensors embedded along the main conductor to detect hot spots.
? I'm talking about the connector. The connector needs to support different charging rates by an array of parallel pins so slower cords can just have an empty connector for all but the minimum set of current carrying pins.
Wouldn't mind, I'm sure they are way more complex. I was just thinking an all in one plug needs to support earlier cars with slower max charging rates and the cord/plug needs to be cheaper, saving you the weight and expense of several extra kilograms of copper that the high amperage cord would need.
Why do tech companies even do this? Why can't everyone just agree on a standard and stick with it from the start instead of having a war that means us consumers who buy gear from the wrong side will suffer. No doubt there will be large dongle adapters between charging standards, but I bet an adapter that can handle 100+ kilowatts is pretty darn expensive.
I mean, the basic requirements for a plug are that it be mechanically sound and inexpensive to manufacture. It ought to have several conductor pins, filled in by order of amperage, so a 2 pin plug is 50 amp and a 4 pin plug is 100 amp and so on. The plugs for lower amperage would be the same size plastic mold, just missing the conductors for higher amperage. Not that hard to get right. It needs a data pin to do handshaking with the destination.
It's not worth fighting a war to get royalties, every electric car manufacturer has an incentive to use the standard used by the majority so everyone's vehicles can charge more places.