There are rarely fines for tossing cigarette butts on the ground, so smokers do it. People used to toss all kinds of garbage, but many cities instituted fines, and jacked them up until it stopped.
Some idiot chucking a butt out a car window in an area just devastated by a forest fire recently got a $2500 fine. He complained in national media. He didn't get a lot of sympathy.
Most anthropogenic carbon emissions will naturally come to an end within a few decades as renewables become more efficient. Therfore we don't need to "change our culture"; it is our culture of free enterprise that is bringing about this change.
Yes to the first part. Maybe to the second. Yeah, right, to the third.
Development of renewables has benefitted from a lot of subsidies, publicly funded research, and other government programs. The leaders in renewables have leaned towards more government intervention, from Europe to China. The US, which still has a lot of government involvement, lags behind.
So our average world economic culture of "freeish enterprise harnessed by intelligent public guidance" does seem to be about to save us. We would probably be better off if some parts of the planet adjusted their culture a bit towards the mean though.
Price competition is the big offer of capitalism to the working man. Except it comes with quite a few caveats and assumptions. It turns out it doesn't work so well in many markets, transportation being one of the big ones.
Virtually nobody estimates schedules (or budgets) correctly. Nobody wants to hear the truth, so you underestimate. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
One of my coworkers turned to me after we'd shared an office for four or five years and said "I thought you were a bit of a pessimist, but then everything you said came true."
Musk likes to throw rocks in the pond. But he's also smart (and rich) enough to get a bunch of smart people together to actually make things happen.
If he only delivers half of what he promises, a benchmark he's been exceeding so far, then it's a good thing. Progress in the world has settled into navel gazing app development. Someone needs to come along and start challenging thinking on the big things.
Very few people bought music on tape and kept it forever. They replaced their tapes with CDs, then their CDs with something else. So theoretically a CD would last a long time, but in actual use it doesn't. Also, very few people buy an iPod Touch (or an iPad?!) to listen to streaming music. They listen on some device they already own or are buying for another purpose, like a smartphone.
The impact on the economy is what the average person does, not what some nerd on Slashdot points out is technically possible.
It's increased efficiency, which produces downward pressure on prices that counters the normal upward inflationary pressure. But like all efficiency gains, it's limited.
I assume "amazonification" is just a buzzword. I expect the real improvements are in the logistics algorithms the entire industry uses.
I was thinking more along the lines of the growth of the Chinese solar panel manufacturing industry. Nobody was seriously going to do much about climate change anyway, until a competitive alternative source of industry came along. China looks like they're going to be the primary manufacturer of the main alternative.
That's actually an interesting idea. I wonder if the Chinese encouraged anti-climate change sentiment in the US? It certainly looks like it's going to work out to their advantage.
If you don't put a colour scale on your graph some pedant will point it out. So you put one on even if it should be perfectly obvious.
The answer to your second question is, not pedantic enough. The label should read "less light" not "less lights" or "fewer lights" because the satellite is incapable of counting individual light sources.
In fact, my "probably" was probably too cautious. It seems likely that this problem is in the class of problems that has been proven to be efficiently simulatable on quantum hardware.
I also didn't notice any mention of reality simulations in their paper.
It's been proven that a general purpose quantum computer can simulate any local quantum process (and quite a few non-local ones) efficiently (i.e. they don't suffer the exponential requirements that a classical computer does).
I don't believe that's the case. From the paper abstract:
It is believed that not all quantum systems can be simulated efficiently using classical computational resources. This notion is supported by the fact that it is not known how to express the partition function in a sign-free manner in quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations for a large number of important problems. The answer to the question—whether there is a fundamental obstruction to such a sign-free representation in generic quantum systems—remains unclear. Focusing on systems with bosonic degrees of freedom, we show that quantized gravitational responses appear as obstructions to local sign-free QMC.
Fenynman showed that simulating quantum systems on a classical computer would require exponential resources. Then he proposed a quantum computer as a solution. It was later shown that a quantum computer can simulate any local quantum system efficiently.
Maybe. Or maybe the cloud craze will come to a screeching halt when people realize the ex-CEO of Equifax is correct: "all companies get breached."
There's no reason you can't run an Alexa or Google type assistant on a computer of your own. When Alexa's collection of sex tapes gets released on The Pirate Bay the first one to market with such a thing will make a killing.
Problem is, most of the stuff Amazon sells isn't Alexa stuff. I see the hierarchy this way:
1. Apple: makes physical products, things like Siri are features of those products. Apple could probably make a bit of extra money spying on you, but it could easily hurt their primary business.
2. Amazon: sells physical products, but only a few that they could use to spy on you. Amazon can use your information to sell you lots of other stuff. If you don't buy Alexa devices because you don't want to be spied on, it's not really a bit part of their business.
3. Facebook, Google: revenue is pure advertising. Any information they get from you must be used to support their advertising business.
You don't take this thing for a 1 hour commuter flight. You take it on the 20 hour + runs halfway across the planet. Trust me, sitting in a comfy airport for a couple of hours waiting for your flight is much more pleasant than being shoved into an airline seat for 24 hours.
The kinds of flights you'd use this on are around 20 hours. So the amount of 747 fuel use is similar to what the BFR holds (200 or so tons; the oxygen isn't fuel and the 747 needs to use that much as well, although it will cost something for the BFR to liquify it).
Presumably if the BFR can put itself into orbit with that much fuel, it can use quite a bit less to do a suborbital hop. The log in the rocket equation kicks in here, in favour of the suborbital BFR.
The BFR is supposed to take 100 people, and at least life support supplies on a multi-month trip to Mars. I wouldn't be surprised if you could pack 1000 people in airline seats into that space for an hour flight. Also, fuel is less than 20% of the cost of operating an airline. You realize quite a bit of savings by being able to use your aircraft to do 15+ flights per day instead of one.
The back of the napkin analysis suggests the idea, at least from a fuel point of view, isn't immediately infeasible.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think it's more dignified for the human who currently has the job?
There are rarely fines for tossing cigarette butts on the ground, so smokers do it. People used to toss all kinds of garbage, but many cities instituted fines, and jacked them up until it stopped.
Some idiot chucking a butt out a car window in an area just devastated by a forest fire recently got a $2500 fine. He complained in national media. He didn't get a lot of sympathy.
Yeah, but it's not really Cuba's fault that the USA keeps all their political prisoners there.
Yes to the first part. Maybe to the second. Yeah, right, to the third.
Development of renewables has benefitted from a lot of subsidies, publicly funded research, and other government programs. The leaders in renewables have leaned towards more government intervention, from Europe to China. The US, which still has a lot of government involvement, lags behind.
So our average world economic culture of "freeish enterprise harnessed by intelligent public guidance" does seem to be about to save us. We would probably be better off if some parts of the planet adjusted their culture a bit towards the mean though.
That approach will never work. Even if you could guarantee every computation was correct, you can't guarantee every input is bit correct.
The only way is making the algorithms resistant to noise. Which modern ones are.
Because there isn't now?
Price competition is the big offer of capitalism to the working man. Except it comes with quite a few caveats and assumptions. It turns out it doesn't work so well in many markets, transportation being one of the big ones.
Virtually nobody estimates schedules (or budgets) correctly. Nobody wants to hear the truth, so you underestimate. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
One of my coworkers turned to me after we'd shared an office for four or five years and said "I thought you were a bit of a pessimist, but then everything you said came true."
Musk likes to throw rocks in the pond. But he's also smart (and rich) enough to get a bunch of smart people together to actually make things happen.
If he only delivers half of what he promises, a benchmark he's been exceeding so far, then it's a good thing. Progress in the world has settled into navel gazing app development. Someone needs to come along and start challenging thinking on the big things.
Very few people bought music on tape and kept it forever. They replaced their tapes with CDs, then their CDs with something else. So theoretically a CD would last a long time, but in actual use it doesn't. Also, very few people buy an iPod Touch (or an iPad?!) to listen to streaming music. They listen on some device they already own or are buying for another purpose, like a smartphone.
The impact on the economy is what the average person does, not what some nerd on Slashdot points out is technically possible.
It's increased efficiency, which produces downward pressure on prices that counters the normal upward inflationary pressure. But like all efficiency gains, it's limited.
I assume "amazonification" is just a buzzword. I expect the real improvements are in the logistics algorithms the entire industry uses.
They can. It's really old. It works at radio or microwave frequencies. They call it radar.
I was thinking more along the lines of the growth of the Chinese solar panel manufacturing industry. Nobody was seriously going to do much about climate change anyway, until a competitive alternative source of industry came along. China looks like they're going to be the primary manufacturer of the main alternative.
That's actually an interesting idea. I wonder if the Chinese encouraged anti-climate change sentiment in the US? It certainly looks like it's going to work out to their advantage.
If you don't put a colour scale on your graph some pedant will point it out. So you put one on even if it should be perfectly obvious.
The answer to your second question is, not pedantic enough. The label should read "less light" not "less lights" or "fewer lights" because the satellite is incapable of counting individual light sources.
In fact, my "probably" was probably too cautious. It seems likely that this problem is in the class of problems that has been proven to be efficiently simulatable on quantum hardware.
I also didn't notice any mention of reality simulations in their paper.
Was that a Slashdot lookitme reaction?
It's been proven that a general purpose quantum computer can simulate any local quantum process (and quite a few non-local ones) efficiently (i.e. they don't suffer the exponential requirements that a classical computer does).
Lots of citations for you here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I don't believe that's the case. From the paper abstract:
Fenynman showed that simulating quantum systems on a classical computer would require exponential resources. Then he proposed a quantum computer as a solution. It was later shown that a quantum computer can simulate any local quantum system efficiently.
Also, N = 3.
No, it shows that we are incapable of simulating this phenomenon on a classical computer. It probably works fine on a quantum computer.
Maybe. Or maybe the cloud craze will come to a screeching halt when people realize the ex-CEO of Equifax is correct: "all companies get breached."
There's no reason you can't run an Alexa or Google type assistant on a computer of your own. When Alexa's collection of sex tapes gets released on The Pirate Bay the first one to market with such a thing will make a killing.
Or your pants pocket.
Problem is, most of the stuff Amazon sells isn't Alexa stuff. I see the hierarchy this way:
1. Apple: makes physical products, things like Siri are features of those products. Apple could probably make a bit of extra money spying on you, but it could easily hurt their primary business.
2. Amazon: sells physical products, but only a few that they could use to spy on you. Amazon can use your information to sell you lots of other stuff. If you don't buy Alexa devices because you don't want to be spied on, it's not really a bit part of their business.
3. Facebook, Google: revenue is pure advertising. Any information they get from you must be used to support their advertising business.
You don't take this thing for a 1 hour commuter flight. You take it on the 20 hour + runs halfway across the planet. Trust me, sitting in a comfy airport for a couple of hours waiting for your flight is much more pleasant than being shoved into an airline seat for 24 hours.
The kinds of flights you'd use this on are around 20 hours. So the amount of 747 fuel use is similar to what the BFR holds (200 or so tons; the oxygen isn't fuel and the 747 needs to use that much as well, although it will cost something for the BFR to liquify it).
Presumably if the BFR can put itself into orbit with that much fuel, it can use quite a bit less to do a suborbital hop. The log in the rocket equation kicks in here, in favour of the suborbital BFR.
The BFR is supposed to take 100 people, and at least life support supplies on a multi-month trip to Mars. I wouldn't be surprised if you could pack 1000 people in airline seats into that space for an hour flight. Also, fuel is less than 20% of the cost of operating an airline. You realize quite a bit of savings by being able to use your aircraft to do 15+ flights per day instead of one.
The back of the napkin analysis suggests the idea, at least from a fuel point of view, isn't immediately infeasible.
That's not necessarily true. Aircraft are expensive, so if you can take one and make twenty flights versus one, that's something.
The IATA figures that fuel was about 19% of the global airline industry's operating expenses in 2016.