I have a family and an internet-connected TV we use for netflix and youtube frequently but haven't even approached the cap. We usually use about 50-60GB/month, I think our max was about 100 GB last December (short winter days = more TV). Netflix is roughly 1 GB per hour, so you could stream for about 8 hours per day and still stay under 250 GB. Youtube is substantially less than that.
Also, my kids definitely watch less TV than we did. I'm afraid they still get just as much or more "screen time," but game consoles, flash games, and web surfing have really cut into TV time, and all use less much bandwidth than streaming video.
It does seem odd that Comcast's super-premium service has the same cap as every other tier, but it's not a very restrictive cap.
they would simply refine their definition of 'evil'.
...as if a concept like "evil" could simply be defined once and for all.
New situations arise all the time. The chances of google and any given individual (such as yourself) agreeing every time are nil, regardless of intentions.
So, is "don't be evil" completely worthless? No, but it is going to be judged by the principals of the company, not Internet-wide consensus.
Yeah, I was raised in a religious tradition in which you were supposed to "let God decide how many children to send you." (Today most members of that church do practice birth control but still have quite a few).
But if our goal is to maximize the number of people who can enjoy the earth over time, how about pacing ourselves? You wouldn't run a marathon by sprinting the first 100 meters, would you? We have millions if not billions of years if we play our cards right. Don't force your descendants to live at carrying capacity; that's how animals live, and how humans lived before technology, and it's horribly brutish.
I disagree. Burning wood is an example of something that was completely renewable and sustainable at the time, given the small number of people 40,000 years ago. The planet has never been this swamped with any single species before, especially one so efficient in consuming natural resources, so this is truly new territory. The fact that it worked OK to use up whatever we could get our hands on up to this point is no guarantee of anything.
The part you are supposed to care about is when you own and use it, not how it was made -- that is a matter that happens before it gets to you, so it doesn't concern you.
If energy costs accurately reflected the long-term harm of energy extraction, consumers wouldn't have to worry about anything but saving money. Cap and trade, anyone? Carbon tax? Personally I would vote for those things in a heartbeat, except there's no way to implement them globally. So we are stuck in a race to the bottom.
I'm finding this topic interesting, but a little surprising that so many people are on such geographically dispersed teams. Is it worth it? What is so special about one guy's coding expertise that it's worth going half way around the world for? I'm not disputing it, I just want to understand.
GE has developed the highest efficiency, full-sized CdTe thin film solar panel ever reported; is building what its say will be the largest solar panel factory in the US; has made two considerable business acquisitions that support its solar endeavors and has taken 100 megawatts worth of orders for its thin-film solar panel products.... When at capacity, the new plant is supposed to produce enough panels per year to power 80,000 homes annually. GE currently estimates the facility will employ about 400 people.
More broadly, the cost of solar has plummeted, and the installed capacity is skyrocketing. Those are actual data, not predictions.
I'm excited about this. I live in New Mexico where sunny skies are the norm. If I got a motorcycle with a swappable battery so I could leave one home charging while I take the other on my 20 mile round-trip commute, I wouldn't need much from the grid or gas station at all.
OK, I agree that's the best analogy for now. But I think it's an interesting possibility that, maybe, because facebook is so universal, it could become more. I know most people gave up on the idea long ago or simply don't want it, but I still think some form of true digital cash, efficient enough to make micropayments feasible, could be revolutionary.
It's possible Flip was profitable for some or all of that 2 years, so not all the $590e6 was a loss.
I like how the Wired article calls its appearance "retro." I blame it on the click-wheel-inspired design. Man I hate the clickwheel, and always did. It's still polluting the design of non-Apple mp3 players to this day. Please, please give us real clickable buttons, far enough apart to operate through a jacket pocket.
I dunno, I saw this recent article that CompSci is still among the best-paying degrees - in fact the same as I remember it 20 years ago, with ChemE on top, then CompSci among the other engineering degrees a little lower. One detail that surprised me is Electrical Engineering being a bit under CompSci... when I was in school electrical engineers were the most haughty of the geek set and, I thought, made a bit more than CS.
That said, that article is all about starting salaries. Business doesn't have a ceiling like engineering does. Then again, potentially high-paying fields like law and business don't have much of a floor either, whereas engineering is a pretty safe bet.
We know what TFA is actually saying. It's desperately trying to whip up a mountain from a molehill, and not too successfully. It's just email addresses and names.
How many of the hundreds of reactors are along known fault lines?
Of those, how many are susceptible to tsunamis?
Those are hindsight questions, not foresight questions. In other words, the question is NOT how many reactors are subject to the previously-understated risks that ended up causing the Fukushima disaster; the question is how many reactors have understated risks, of any kind.
Of course, that's much harder to answer. Which is exactly the problem.
I would think the light source is easy - a fiber optic cable about the diameter of a human hair, connected to an external light source. Disclaimer: I know nothing about endoscopy.
No doubt the parent is using somebody's calculation of total tax burden. Estimates vary. This estimate claims poor people pay about 20%, working its way up to 30% for everybody with average income or above.
I agree that getting the word out quickly is important in certain circumstances - but that happens automatically for all important information (and some not-so important information) these days, does it not? The media (broadly defined to including bloggers, twits, etc) have already done their job for them. If the government said there was a high probability of a terrorist attack with some specificity as to time and place, you can bet word would travel fast.
Maybe not quite fast enough for something like a tsunami warning system, but no single event could threaten the entire US on that timescale anyways.
I would prefer a probability (i.e. a scalar between 0.0 and 1.0). That way after they issue a dozen or so we can go back and determine how accurate they really are, and adjust our fear accordingly.
I think the duration and capacity just depend on the size. This wikipedia page has a picture of a 2 GWh storage unit. Apparently homes average about 50 KW/h per day. If my math is right that's 10,000 homes for 4 days. Granted, that's just home electricity - not cars, not heating, not industry. I'd imagine an electric-powered steel mill would run down one of those very quickly.
I disagree. Convenience dictates the vast majority of people will migrate to one of a few centralized solutions, which can be pressured (or legislated) to honor wiretap orders. And the few who go out of their way for extra privacy are practically volunteering themselves for extra scrutiny by doing so.
Oh, and here I thought your analogy was about to crap on the notion of educators presuming to know how to prepare people for the real-world job responsibilities of engineers.
Many would Woz is the bridge builder, and educators are the movie watchers, not the other way around.
You can cheaply store energy in molten salt for a week. That, combined with an upgraded, national power grid to distribute power beyond regional weather patterns, should allow us to replace most of the base load with variable sources.
Some of the rest could be filled in with hydro... a reservoir is a huge energy store, and more reliance on local solar/wind would let us keep the reservoirs topped up for when we need them.
Then coal would be a last resort. After all, nature can absorb CO2, we don't need to eliminate carbon emissions, just reduce them to a sustainable level.
All that said, I'm not opposed to nuclear either. $12 billion cleanup is an awful lot, yet the US consumes 21e6 barrels per day, which at current pricing is over $2e9 per day or $14e9 per week... that is, a $12e9 cleanup is less than we spend on crude oil alone in a single week - not counting the environmental and geopolitical costs of oil. Expensive solutions are viable for expensive problems.
B) The theory isn't even plausible because nobody can force a particular comic to be popular among millions of people. Not the secret super-corporation that controls all corporations, the CIA, or anybody else.
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You could download that 4.5 GB iso 55 times every month and still be under the cap.
Also, my kids definitely watch less TV than we did. I'm afraid they still get just as much or more "screen time," but game consoles, flash games, and web surfing have really cut into TV time, and all use less much bandwidth than streaming video.
It does seem odd that Comcast's super-premium service has the same cap as every other tier, but it's not a very restrictive cap.
New situations arise all the time. The chances of google and any given individual (such as yourself) agreeing every time are nil, regardless of intentions.
So, is "don't be evil" completely worthless? No, but it is going to be judged by the principals of the company, not Internet-wide consensus.
It is dead. FTP was once the majority of all bandwidth used on the Internet. It was overtaken by http... in 1995!
But if our goal is to maximize the number of people who can enjoy the earth over time, how about pacing ourselves? You wouldn't run a marathon by sprinting the first 100 meters, would you? We have millions if not billions of years if we play our cards right. Don't force your descendants to live at carrying capacity; that's how animals live, and how humans lived before technology, and it's horribly brutish.
I disagree. Burning wood is an example of something that was completely renewable and sustainable at the time, given the small number of people 40,000 years ago. The planet has never been this swamped with any single species before, especially one so efficient in consuming natural resources, so this is truly new territory. The fact that it worked OK to use up whatever we could get our hands on up to this point is no guarantee of anything.
If energy costs accurately reflected the long-term harm of energy extraction, consumers wouldn't have to worry about anything but saving money. Cap and trade, anyone? Carbon tax? Personally I would vote for those things in a heartbeat, except there's no way to implement them globally. So we are stuck in a race to the bottom.
I'm finding this topic interesting, but a little surprising that so many people are on such geographically dispersed teams. Is it worth it? What is so special about one guy's coding expertise that it's worth going half way around the world for? I'm not disputing it, I just want to understand.
More broadly, the cost of solar has plummeted, and the installed capacity is skyrocketing. Those are actual data, not predictions.
I'm excited about this. I live in New Mexico where sunny skies are the norm. If I got a motorcycle with a swappable battery so I could leave one home charging while I take the other on my 20 mile round-trip commute, I wouldn't need much from the grid or gas station at all.
OK, I agree that's the best analogy for now. But I think it's an interesting possibility that, maybe, because facebook is so universal, it could become more. I know most people gave up on the idea long ago or simply don't want it, but I still think some form of true digital cash, efficient enough to make micropayments feasible, could be revolutionary.
That's like saying only gold miners could use gold coins as currency.
I like how the Wired article calls its appearance "retro." I blame it on the click-wheel-inspired design. Man I hate the clickwheel, and always did. It's still polluting the design of non-Apple mp3 players to this day. Please, please give us real clickable buttons, far enough apart to operate through a jacket pocket.
That said, that article is all about starting salaries. Business doesn't have a ceiling like engineering does. Then again, potentially high-paying fields like law and business don't have much of a floor either, whereas engineering is a pretty safe bet.
We know what TFA is actually saying. It's desperately trying to whip up a mountain from a molehill, and not too successfully. It's just email addresses and names.
Those are hindsight questions, not foresight questions. In other words, the question is NOT how many reactors are subject to the previously-understated risks that ended up causing the Fukushima disaster; the question is how many reactors have understated risks, of any kind.
Of course, that's much harder to answer. Which is exactly the problem.
I would think the light source is easy - a fiber optic cable about the diameter of a human hair, connected to an external light source. Disclaimer: I know nothing about endoscopy.
Income tax, yes. The figure I posted was for total tax burden at all levels of government, which is "the bottom line" after all.
No doubt the parent is using somebody's calculation of total tax burden. Estimates vary. This estimate claims poor people pay about 20%, working its way up to 30% for everybody with average income or above.
Maybe not quite fast enough for something like a tsunami warning system, but no single event could threaten the entire US on that timescale anyways.
I would prefer a probability (i.e. a scalar between 0.0 and 1.0). That way after they issue a dozen or so we can go back and determine how accurate they really are, and adjust our fear accordingly.
I think the duration and capacity just depend on the size. This wikipedia page has a picture of a 2 GWh storage unit. Apparently homes average about 50 KW/h per day. If my math is right that's 10,000 homes for 4 days. Granted, that's just home electricity - not cars, not heating, not industry. I'd imagine an electric-powered steel mill would run down one of those very quickly.
I disagree. Convenience dictates the vast majority of people will migrate to one of a few centralized solutions, which can be pressured (or legislated) to honor wiretap orders. And the few who go out of their way for extra privacy are practically volunteering themselves for extra scrutiny by doing so.
Many would Woz is the bridge builder, and educators are the movie watchers, not the other way around.
Some of the rest could be filled in with hydro... a reservoir is a huge energy store, and more reliance on local solar/wind would let us keep the reservoirs topped up for when we need them.
Then coal would be a last resort. After all, nature can absorb CO2, we don't need to eliminate carbon emissions, just reduce them to a sustainable level.
All that said, I'm not opposed to nuclear either. $12 billion cleanup is an awful lot, yet the US consumes 21e6 barrels per day, which at current pricing is over $2e9 per day or $14e9 per week... that is, a $12e9 cleanup is less than we spend on crude oil alone in a single week - not counting the environmental and geopolitical costs of oil. Expensive solutions are viable for expensive problems.
B) The theory isn't even plausible because nobody can force a particular comic to be popular among millions of people. Not the secret super-corporation that controls all corporations, the CIA, or anybody else.