During the heat of the property bubble, a New York developer set eyes on view of Lake Geneva from the grounds of Yerkes observatory. An $8 million deal would have preserved the 40 inch refractor (The world's largest useful refractor) in exchange for the use of the land for condo development. The deal fell through when local residents objected to the condo development which gave the developer time to notice that the bottom fell out of the real estate market. I'd been wondering whether the deal would go through and then UofC or some other astronomical research organization would buy the land back from bankruptcy recovery firm for $1 million once the developer noticed that even the best real estate in Wisconsin won't support NYC prices.
I disagree; unless you're shooting a cartoon, everything should be as realistic and beleivable as possible. And everything in the movie should strive to be a work of art in itself.
I agree with this filmmaker, "The goal of special effects shouldn't necessarily be to look realistic, they should be works of art themselves and help create a mood or tell a story." Look at Aleksandr Petrov's Old Man and the Sea vs the B&W 1958 photograph version with Spencer Tracey vs some not yet made 3D surround sound version vs Hemingway's book. Which is the most "realistic" version? Which is the most "artistic?" CGI, green screen, 3D, multichannel sound is not the end-all in movie creativity. The art of film is in showing us a particular point of view, compressing time and space, focusing on aspects of visual space which lend themselves to moving the story forward. I'd highly recommend looking at The story of Film:An Odyssey which shows that early attempts at film didn't understand that the art of film is in what it doesn't show. If you don't believe me, set up a 3D HDR camera in an apartment and film daily life 24 x 7 x 365 and see if anyone wants to watch it.
Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin still holds the world's largest refractor in a beautiful 19th century building. The Astronomer royale of Scotland once called it, "The Taj Mahal of astronomy" and perfectly fits the stereotype of what an observatory should look like. Their visiting hours are meager and much of the lovely grounds was turned into a housing development during the property bubble, but it's well worth a visit.
Venture further north to the Wisconsin Dells, a down-to-earth tourist trap where you'll find water parks, Indian trading posts and.... the Mir space station? Yep. One Mir copy fell out of orbit, the other is somewhere in Russia and this one is in Wisconsin.
The university of Chicago's old Stagg Field was demolished (happily, via non-nuclear means) but you can visit a sculpture at the site of the world's first man-made atomic pile.
It's as though a billion potential businesspeople in China collectively cried out, "Horray for 0wn3d U.S. Congressmen enacting a clever tarriff against their own country!"
"Faith" has no place in a field based on empirical evidence and doubt.
This ignores the fact that faith plays an enormous role in the unsteady progression of science. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of the Scientific Revolution provides many examples where faith, politics and other irrational aspects of human nature have always pulled science in directions contrary to what should be a steady progression of knowledge.
Humans decide which areas of science deserve study. Global warming (aka climate change), oil production and weapons development gets more funding than breast cancer and potentially hazardous asteroids. AIDs and obesity gets more funding than diarrheal diseases and malaria-- not for scientific reasons, not because funded studies can improve more lives, but for political and economic reasons. Even once a project is funded, we shouldn't ignore real bias applied by individual scientists and teams based on their expectations. This isn't just falsified data. Some data is overlooked because it doesn't fit expectations-- our paradigm. On the surface this may not appear the same as religious faith-- indeed because it tends to be far more subtle, it is more dangerous.
Do we trust anthropogenic climate change research (in an environment where dissenting research isn't funded and anomalous data and opinions are marginalized)? Most of us trust it enough to want to make our modern world more efficient, some trust it enough to want to switch to potentially hazardous energy alternatives such as solar and nuclear. But should we trust it enough to modify the climate? We don't have a very good track record regarding the use of science to modify ecological systems?
Science has become a profession, usually far removed from the experience of ordinary individuals-- we all rely on faith. So we believed the tobacco industry studies which told us that smoking wasn't hazardous, we don't worry about the curious lack of studies on the long-term effects of GM foods, BPA and artificial fats and sweeteners. We have faith in science.
"New scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -- Max Planck
When they were giving credit cards out like candy, did the price of everything skyrocket?
Yes. From 1900 to 1970 (The year BankAmericard bulk mailed 100 million credit cards-- a move Betty Furness compared "giving candy to diabetics", U.S. inflation averaged 2.5%. From 1970-1979 (when credit cards became our de-facto national ID) U.S. inflation rose above 13%. True some of it had to do with the oil crisis, Brent Woods etc... And yes, credit card debt is a relatively small portion of per-capita debt. But the assumption that printing debt is not at least as inflationary as the printing of physical money shows just how far the likes of Bernanke have strayed from economic reality.
When the government subsidized roads and national parks, did tolls and user fees skyrocket?
When government subsidized roads (our interstate highway system), our cities sprawled out and the price of gasoline skyrocketed. The subsidies of national parks are too small to make a dent in our economy.
Federal housing programs didn't make housing prices jump. The secondary mortgage market did.
Where would the secondary mortgage market be if the government didn't use our tax money to back the original loans?
The government subsidizes things for which there is enormous demand. That's the idea. They do it because of the basic defect in what's known as the "free market".
Suppose you have a lemonade stand. Your lemonade is $10/glass because you only have a 10 gallon supply and it's a hot day so there is an enormous demand. But not everyone can only afford to pay $10 so the government decides to give poor people $5 lemonade coupons which the lemonade stand owner can exchange for $5 cash. Great system, right? Now everyone can afford lemonade. Has demand increased or decreased? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?... Increased, yes demand has increased. And what happens to the price of any commodity when demand rises relative to supply? Anyone? Anyone?
Conservatives believe whatever crap their AM radios tell them to believe, because "somebody's always getting something I'm not", while being the first in line to get their free cheese.
I'm a social liberal but I'll put my conservative hat on to answer this one. One of the problems with the current U.S. university system is that entrenched liberalism has forced out ideas which run contrary to liberal philosophy. Some of these ideas do make it onto AM radio (albeit in an intellectually and audibly distorted form) but many are driven out as effectively as a modern day witch hunt. Witness the smear campaign against Newt Gingrich's decades old plan to save Medicare as well as the smears against anyone who attempts to reign-in the public service union/Democratic party cartel or any scientist who questions any aspect of the eco-meme du-jour (global cooling, acid rain, global warming...) As for the cheese. Again it's typical short-sighted thinking. The beneficiaries of the cheese giveaways aren't those who receive the free cheese (though I've never met a fiscal conservative who has partaken). The beneficiaries of the cheese giveaways are the powerful agribusiness companies who coaxed the government into policies which allowed them to temporarily disobey the laws of supply and demand, and profit from overproduction.
The reason the loan problem is so bad is that higher education in the US is so ridiculously overpriced.
The reason higher education in the US is so ridiculously overpriced is that the loan program is so bad.
--Fixed that for you.
FMAE+FMAC housing afford-ability programs (sic) drove house prices beyond insanity, SMAE did the same for university education. So let's see if we can use the government subsidy bias to prop up the sagging cost of health care!
Liberals have beautiful, compassionate, optimistic ideas which ignore the unintended consequences which take place in any actual universe. But I think they would excel at one dimensional chess.
Congratulations: you just outlawed HID headlamps, HID street lamps, projector HID lamps, fluorescent lighting, and incandescent lighting all in one fell swoop -
No, such lights could also carry an ID pulse, though at a slower data rate.
and you have just broken optical communications technology.
No, the protocol I've suggested specifically allows for optical communication. LEDs and laser diode lights will be increasingly used for communication and area lighting. I'm suggesting that such a protcol should contain a GUID (as WiFi, CDMA already do) and synchronized dark intervals.
You just outlawed laser light shows, and also pointers used by astronomers at meets and classes.
I've never understood why these should be exempt from sensible lighting rules. Does it really matter whether your plane is brought down by a Pink Floyd concert, an 'astronomer' pointing out Alberio or man-child with a laser pointer?
Shortsighted numbskull who if a politician would cause more problems than they solved.
When someone is eventually killed or injured by abuse of these devices, lawmakers will respond with far more draconian rules. To assume otherwise is shortsighted. The U.S. is a knee-jerk "somebody do something" society and much of the world follows the U.S. in these matters. I would also like to keep these devices legal but I think the best way to do this is some sort of science based pre-emptive legislation along with technology which allows us to identify those who use these devices in a manner which may bring harm to others.
Scuba diving, model rocketry, ameteur radio and many other hobbies have managed to avoid excessive regulation by devising their own training and regulations. I suggest that we do something similar for lasers and other potentially dangerous portable light sources. My initial proposal should not be taken as the final but I think it should be a starting point for discussion. (e.g. I'd be willing to use a tactical nuke instead of a Tsar bomb)
Then some turkey mounts one aimed at the sky above your window. In your dystopia, you and yours are now the target of some manner of bomb.
We're talking about a laser guided Tsar bomb here. The correct pronouns are, Ye (medieval plural of you) and yours and his and hers and theirs and its and everbodys. The beauty of a Tsar bomb is your targeting only has to be accurate give or take a subcontinent.
You might even see the beam of a higher powered red laser at night if the air has the typical "city airport" level of pollutants and the beam was directed at you. At 600-800nm wavelengths, there is much more forward scattering than Raleigh scattering.
One of the reasons they're called flashlights in the U.S. (where they were invented) is that when they were invented, portable batteries were so weak and incandescent bulbs so inefficient that they would literally flash on for a few seconds before dimming (presumably from hydrogen build-up on the wet-cells) then they would go out. We have the opposite problem today. Forget lasers, ordinary LED flashlights (aka torches) are now powerful enough to cause eye damage. Until the 1980s, nearly all flashlights were fitted with a button on the switch which could be used to flash the light for signaling. I propose that lasers and high powered portable coherent lights should automatically flash a PCM GUUID code identifying the owner, the seller and (optionally) the GPS coordinates. See my earlier post for details.
The technical/legal solution:This applies to all light (300nm-1090nm) sources capable of emitting more than 10mW radiant power or 0.5mW power/mm with a beam divergence of less than 1 radian/meter.
1) At 10 millisecond intervals, the light must pulse a data frame containing Globally Unique ID pattern, followed by a dark interval of at least 1ms and optional packet data.
{50us GUUID pulse} {1ms dark interval} {5ms optional data packet or CW beam} {optional 0-50ms dark interval}... {50 us GUUID pulse...}
The GUUID pulse shall be modulated to carry:
{16 bit country ID, 64 bit Mfg ID, 128 bit User ID,3D GPS coordinates of device (optional),spectral code(optional) }
The dark intervals will for pulse-width dimming as well as magneto-optical and/or rotating shutter synchronization for mitigation of light pollution at observatories, airports and elsewhere. This light data frame standard is designed for all fast switch (e.g. LED) light sources and can be applied to streetlights, headlights, searchlights, insecurity lights...
2) All unidentified lights shall be considered contraband and will be targeted by laser guided Tsar bombs.
Lasers pointed above the horizon should be considered a special case of light pollution (light tresspass). I suspect more deaths are caused by morons installing 500W+ "insecurity lights" on their home or business and aiming them so that they impair the ability of drivers to see the road, cyclists, pedestrians... There is a tight curve in the road near my house and the business at the end of this road installed three 500W+ halogen security light aimed into the windshields of cars as they approach this curve. The lighthouses and light buoys here and in my hometown are almost invisible until you are almost upon the rocks because there is so much light pollution in the city behind the lighthouse. IMHO we should solve the incoherent morons with incoherent light problem at the same time as we solve the incoherent morons with coherent light problem.
How about this? Seriously, look at the ratio of searches for HTC, Nokia, Samsung, Blackberry to iphone and then append "cracked screen" onto any of these search terms and you'll see that, though iPhone doesn't necessarily lead in market share anymore, it certainly leads in cracked searches. Are iPhone users naturally clumsier or is the iPhone designed to be fragile?
Jobs and Apple are the modern equivalent of Edison and Edison electric, they invent a few things but far more often then steal other people's ideas and perfect them. Nokias had multitasking, youtube videos... in 2006 if not earlier, Velo 1, Palm and similar devices had grid icons, touch screens years earlier. But there is one area where iPhone is far ahead of Android. I hope Apple patented this method of planned obsolescence.
The writing has been on the wall for sometime now but just as with the housing bubble, the U.S.higher education bubble has not yet worked its way onto primetime TV and therefore has not captured the public imagination. Just as with the housing, dot com, tulip and other bubbles, the higher education bubble starts with a plausible story-- that after you invest $XXXXXX and 4 years of your life, you'll come out ahead financially. But like these other bubbles, the story outgrows the basic reality. We have universities forgoing basic R&D, building high-priced gymnasiums, swimming pools, dormitories in order to attract tuition and alumni endowments. We have created courses in subjects which do very little for society or the individual and yet are attractive to students and therefore, keep the tuition flowing.
And we have Sallie Mae, enabling us to pay far more for education than would otherwise be possible, thus performing the same role as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "affordable housing" programs did when they enabled house prices to rise far past anyone's ability to support them.
The University bubble does have some unique characteristics which might turn out to be good news for all of us:
This bubble confined to the U.S. The cost of higher education in much of the free world is only a small fraction of what it costs here. For example, Oxford graduates pay only about 1/2 the tuition of your typical state-supported commuter college.
There are alternatives such as free online courses. Unfortunately those with a vested interest in maintaining this bubble want to keep their oligopoly intact.
These are recourse loans, no matter how hard they try banks can't repossess your education. But banks will try to pursue defaulters to the ends of the earth, bankruptcy will not help you avoid paying off a Sallie Mae loan.
You're also exchanging some pixel depth (color/greyscale levels) and information about the point spread function for spacial resolution. It looks like magic but it's a very old technique. I did similar in the mid 1990s. Capturing camera motion (accelerometer) during the photograph would be useful here since it helps you calculate the point spread function. To poster who worried about the memory this would require, we're talking about three long ints or 6 bytes for the X, Y and Z vectors. Since we're below $1/gigabyte for flash, you're talking about ~0.0000006 cents per photo. So, no I wouldn't worry about it. It would be ideal for iPhones and Androids which already have an accelerometer and the small image sensor means low shutter speeds which means lots of motion blur in dim light.
I wonder why the south pole station doesn't make more use of robotic transport such as the Tubleweed Rover, ballistic transport pods or steerable balloons to transport supplies rather than depending on people. The ISS relies on robotic "progress" supply ships at least as much as it relies on human space flights. If we can do this in space, why not on earth?
We can finally dump the multiple layers of caching, look-ahead and other OS complexity designed to hide several orders of magnitude difference between register/DRAM access and persistent storage (tape/Hard drive/core memory...). Operating systems can return to the level of simplicity they had back when everything was uniformity slow. But now everything will be uniformly fast and we'll can focus complexity on multiprocessing.
It will become practical to implement neural networks in hardware. This will completely change the way we design and program software and databases.
Persistent and portable user sessions will become the norm. (Look at Sun Ray for an idea of how this works. Sun Ray sessions are typically logged in for months at a time. This means software has to be better behaved but it also means we won't have to rely on user memory to restore a desktop and applications to... now where was I?
14) Oh, and be sure to utilize the full power of three letter federal government and defense agencies (FBI/CIA...) in order to support the RIAA and MPAA creative content cartels. Also, suppress or ban all free content creation and distribution technology:
Audio recorders, Betamaxs, analog holes, CDR & DVDR,.mp3,.ogg,.pdf,.txt, two way Internet == bad
Record players, CD, DVD, DRM-shackled.wmv &.aac files and ebooks, Blue-Ray == good!
1) Devise a patent system whose complexity favors large companies who can hire a powerful legal staff and where hoarding defensive and offensive patents is far more profitable than utilizing or selling patent rights.
2) Devise a tax system which favors companies large enough to hire a powerful legal team and a creative accounting team.
3) Devise a legal system which favors companies large enough to buy powerful members of congress who then create "save the baby seal" laws with line-items favoring said companies.
4) Create a complex system of regulations. If someone were to try to invent the iPad in 2011, it should be required to pass draconian FCC, FDA, AMA, DNR, OSHA, KGB, DHS and various other three and four letter bureaucracy reviews at the federal, state and local level and would probably be considered a terrorist weapon.
5) Devise an economic system which forces companies to report profits every 90 days and favors short term hire/fire business plans and nanosecond derivative trading over inventing for the future.
6) Devise a primary school educational system narrowly focused on the least common denominator "intelligence" as measured by a national standardized test (aka NCLB). Make sure it favors schools in high-income districts and punishes schools in poor areas, thus preserving the socioeconomic status-quo.
7) Devise a university educational system equally focused on short-term financial gain rather than long term social gain. Make sure its expensive enough to keep silver spoon fraternities intact and the common riff-raff out.
8) Channel as much private money into the public sector as possible so that it can preserve bureaucracies and be diverted to "too big to fail" multinationals.
9) Create public economic policies which reward failure and punish success.
10) Drop interest rates near zero so that large unnovative companies have "free money" to use to buy up any competition from smaller, less risk-averse companies.
11) When economic meddling no longer sufficiently favors the powerful, insert protectionism into the economy. ( e.g. Taft-Hartley, Bernanke/Obama) Make sure these tarriffs apply to imported commodity technology (chips...) so that an Apple II+ would cost consumers the equivalent of $10,000 and an iPad would cost $50,000.
The wikipedia link you cite is a mess and makes no mention of your 1EJ estimate for (global?) wave wave energy. I think you might be mixing units, EJ->TWh?
In any case, this link and this link provide much clearer estimates of wave and thermal ocean energy potential for Japan as about 30-50 Gigawatts. As far as this being "insignificant", top it up with a few GW of Hokaido wind or conservation (even in ultra-efficient Japan, conservation remains the most cost effective energy "source.") and you could shut down all of the nuclear power plants in Japan. Ocean energy could could certainly produce more than all existing wind (2.1Gw) and solar (3.6GW) facilities in Japan.
We don't exclude drilling in arctic wilderness areas and at the bottom of the ocean as impractical. We don't exclude energy-negative corn ethanol even with the political and economic food supply disturbances U.S. corn-ethanol subsidies have caused. We don't shutdown the hundreds of archaic nuclear power plants of the same design as the Fukushima Daiichi plant which failed in Japan. So we don't have the luxury of excluding viable alternatives such as ocean power.
Wave power can't supply a significant portion of the worldwide energy demand, pursuing it is a waste of resources.
So, nearly 80% of the world's population live near the world's largest solar->wind->wave & tidal energy collecting system and we should ignore it? So, efforts to collect this energy might accidentally protect cities from rising sea levels, hurricanes, typhoons and tsunamis and we should ignore it? If this is a "waste of resources", is drilling for oil miles below the surface of the ocean (endangering a sizable fraction of our food supply), considered a wise use of resources?
Slashdot Mirror
http://failblog.org/2011/08/07/epic-fail-photos-environmental-protection-fail/
During the heat of the property bubble, a New York developer set eyes on view of Lake Geneva from the grounds of Yerkes observatory. An $8 million deal would have preserved the 40 inch refractor (The world's largest useful refractor) in exchange for the use of the land for condo development. The deal fell through when local residents objected to the condo development which gave the developer time to notice that the bottom fell out of the real estate market. I'd been wondering whether the deal would go through and then UofC or some other astronomical research organization would buy the land back from bankruptcy recovery firm for $1 million once the developer noticed that even the best real estate in Wisconsin won't support NYC prices.
I disagree; unless you're shooting a cartoon, everything should be as realistic and beleivable as possible. And everything in the movie should strive to be a work of art in itself.
I agree with this filmmaker, "The goal of special effects shouldn't necessarily be to look realistic, they should be works of art themselves and help create a mood or tell a story." Look at Aleksandr Petrov's Old Man and the Sea vs the B&W 1958 photograph version with Spencer Tracey vs some not yet made 3D surround sound version vs Hemingway's book. Which is the most "realistic" version? Which is the most "artistic?" CGI, green screen, 3D, multichannel sound is not the end-all in movie creativity. The art of film is in showing us a particular point of view, compressing time and space, focusing on aspects of visual space which lend themselves to moving the story forward. I'd highly recommend looking at The story of Film:An Odyssey which shows that early attempts at film didn't understand that the art of film is in what it doesn't show. If you don't believe me, set up a 3D HDR camera in an apartment and film daily life 24 x 7 x 365 and see if anyone wants to watch it.
X64? Weren't the Taliban still using C64s? Can GCHQ crack this Commodore 64 crypto: ; WAIT Command B82D 20 EB B7 JSR $B7EB B830 86 49 STX $49 B832 A2 00 LDX #$00 B834 20 79 00 JSR $0079 B837 F0 03 BEQ $B83C B839 20 F1 B7 JSR $B7F1 B83C 86 4A STX $4A B83E A0 00 LDY #$00 B840 B1 14 LDA ($14),Y B842 45 4A EOR $4A B844 25 49 AND $49 B846 F0 F8 BEQ $B840 B848 60 RTS
Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin still holds the world's largest refractor in a beautiful 19th century building. The Astronomer royale of Scotland once called it, "The Taj Mahal of astronomy" and perfectly fits the stereotype of what an observatory should look like. Their visiting hours are meager and much of the lovely grounds was turned into a housing development during the property bubble, but it's well worth a visit.
Venture further north to the Wisconsin Dells, a down-to-earth tourist trap where you'll find water parks, Indian trading posts and.... the Mir space station? Yep. One Mir copy fell out of orbit, the other is somewhere in Russia and this one is in Wisconsin.
The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry isn't my favorite science museum, but it is big and was recently updated.
The university of Chicago's old Stagg Field was demolished (happily, via non-nuclear means) but you can visit a sculpture at the site of the world's first man-made atomic pile.
It's as though a billion potential businesspeople in China collectively cried out, "Horray for 0wn3d U.S. Congressmen enacting a clever tarriff against their own country!"
"Faith" has no place in a field based on empirical evidence and doubt.
This ignores the fact that faith plays an enormous role in the unsteady progression of science. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of the Scientific Revolution provides many examples where faith, politics and other irrational aspects of human nature have always pulled science in directions contrary to what should be a steady progression of knowledge.
Humans decide which areas of science deserve study. Global warming (aka climate change), oil production and weapons development gets more funding than breast cancer and potentially hazardous asteroids. AIDs and obesity gets more funding than diarrheal diseases and malaria-- not for scientific reasons, not because funded studies can improve more lives, but for political and economic reasons. Even once a project is funded, we shouldn't ignore real bias applied by individual scientists and teams based on their expectations. This isn't just falsified data. Some data is overlooked because it doesn't fit expectations-- our paradigm. On the surface this may not appear the same as religious faith-- indeed because it tends to be far more subtle, it is more dangerous.
Do we trust anthropogenic climate change research (in an environment where dissenting research isn't funded and anomalous data and opinions are marginalized)? Most of us trust it enough to want to make our modern world more efficient, some trust it enough to want to switch to potentially hazardous energy alternatives such as solar and nuclear. But should we trust it enough to modify the climate? We don't have a very good track record regarding the use of science to modify ecological systems?
Science has become a profession, usually far removed from the experience of ordinary individuals-- we all rely on faith. So we believed the tobacco industry studies which told us that smoking wasn't hazardous, we don't worry about the curious lack of studies on the long-term effects of GM foods, BPA and artificial fats and sweeteners. We have faith in science.
"New scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -- Max Planck
When they were giving credit cards out like candy, did the price of everything skyrocket?
Yes. From 1900 to 1970 (The year BankAmericard bulk mailed 100 million credit cards-- a move Betty Furness compared "giving candy to diabetics", U.S. inflation averaged 2.5%. From 1970-1979 (when credit cards became our de-facto national ID) U.S. inflation rose above 13%. True some of it had to do with the oil crisis, Brent Woods etc... And yes, credit card debt is a relatively small portion of per-capita debt. But the assumption that printing debt is not at least as inflationary as the printing of physical money shows just how far the likes of Bernanke have strayed from economic reality.
When the government subsidized roads and national parks, did tolls and user fees skyrocket?
When government subsidized roads (our interstate highway system), our cities sprawled out and the price of gasoline skyrocketed. The subsidies of national parks are too small to make a dent in our economy.
Federal housing programs didn't make housing prices jump. The secondary mortgage market did.
Where would the secondary mortgage market be if the government didn't use our tax money to back the original loans?
The government subsidizes things for which there is enormous demand. That's the idea. They do it because of the basic defect in what's known as the "free market".
Suppose you have a lemonade stand. Your lemonade is $10/glass because you only have a 10 gallon supply and it's a hot day so there is an enormous demand. But not everyone can only afford to pay $10 so the government decides to give poor people $5 lemonade coupons which the lemonade stand owner can exchange for $5 cash. Great system, right? Now everyone can afford lemonade. Has demand increased or decreased? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?... Increased, yes demand has increased. And what happens to the price of any commodity when demand rises relative to supply? Anyone? Anyone?
Conservatives believe whatever crap their AM radios tell them to believe, because "somebody's always getting something I'm not", while being the first in line to get their free cheese.
I'm a social liberal but I'll put my conservative hat on to answer this one. One of the problems with the current U.S. university system is that entrenched liberalism has forced out ideas which run contrary to liberal philosophy. Some of these ideas do make it onto AM radio (albeit in an intellectually and audibly distorted form) but many are driven out as effectively as a modern day witch hunt. Witness the smear campaign against Newt Gingrich's decades old plan to save Medicare as well as the smears against anyone who attempts to reign-in the public service union/Democratic party cartel or any scientist who questions any aspect of the eco-meme du-jour (global cooling, acid rain, global warming...) As for the cheese. Again it's typical short-sighted thinking. The beneficiaries of the cheese giveaways aren't those who receive the free cheese (though I've never met a fiscal conservative who has partaken). The beneficiaries of the cheese giveaways are the powerful agribusiness companies who coaxed the government into policies which allowed them to temporarily disobey the laws of supply and demand, and profit from overproduction.
The reason the loan problem is so bad is that higher education in the US is so ridiculously overpriced.
The reason higher education in the US is so ridiculously overpriced is that the loan program is so bad.
--Fixed that for you.
FMAE+FMAC housing afford-ability programs (sic) drove house prices beyond insanity, SMAE did the same for university education. So let's see if we can use the government subsidy bias to prop up the sagging cost of health care!
Liberals have beautiful, compassionate, optimistic ideas which ignore the unintended consequences which take place in any actual universe. But I think they would excel at one dimensional chess.
Congratulations: you just outlawed HID headlamps, HID street lamps, projector HID lamps, fluorescent lighting, and incandescent lighting all in one fell swoop -
No, such lights could also carry an ID pulse, though at a slower data rate.
and you have just broken optical communications technology.
No, the protocol I've suggested specifically allows for optical communication. LEDs and laser diode lights will be increasingly used for communication and area lighting. I'm suggesting that such a protcol should contain a GUID (as WiFi, CDMA already do) and synchronized dark intervals.
You just outlawed laser light shows, and also pointers used by astronomers at meets and classes.
I've never understood why these should be exempt from sensible lighting rules. Does it really matter whether your plane is brought down by a Pink Floyd concert, an 'astronomer' pointing out Alberio or man-child with a laser pointer?
Shortsighted numbskull who if a politician would cause more problems than they solved.
When someone is eventually killed or injured by abuse of these devices, lawmakers will respond with far more draconian rules. To assume otherwise is shortsighted. The U.S. is a knee-jerk "somebody do something" society and much of the world follows the U.S. in these matters. I would also like to keep these devices legal but I think the best way to do this is some sort of science based pre-emptive legislation along with technology which allows us to identify those who use these devices in a manner which may bring harm to others.
Scuba diving, model rocketry, ameteur radio and many other hobbies have managed to avoid excessive regulation by devising their own training and regulations. I suggest that we do something similar for lasers and other potentially dangerous portable light sources. My initial proposal should not be taken as the final but I think it should be a starting point for discussion. (e.g. I'd be willing to use a tactical nuke instead of a Tsar bomb)
I don't need a ;-) do I?
Then some turkey mounts one aimed at the sky above your window. In your dystopia, you and yours are now the target of some manner of bomb.
We're talking about a laser guided Tsar bomb here. The correct pronouns are, Ye (medieval plural of you) and yours and his and hers and theirs and its and everbodys. The beauty of a Tsar bomb is your targeting only has to be accurate give or take a subcontinent.
You might even see the beam of a higher powered red laser at night if the air has the typical "city airport" level of pollutants and the beam was directed at you. At 600-800nm wavelengths, there is much more forward scattering than Raleigh scattering.
One of the reasons they're called flashlights in the U.S. (where they were invented) is that when they were invented, portable batteries were so weak and incandescent bulbs so inefficient that they would literally flash on for a few seconds before dimming (presumably from hydrogen build-up on the wet-cells) then they would go out. We have the opposite problem today. Forget lasers, ordinary LED flashlights (aka torches) are now powerful enough to cause eye damage. Until the 1980s, nearly all flashlights were fitted with a button on the switch which could be used to flash the light for signaling. I propose that lasers and high powered portable coherent lights should automatically flash a PCM GUUID code identifying the owner, the seller and (optionally) the GPS coordinates. See my earlier post for details.
Ah, what you need is superchromatic peril sensitive sunglasses.
The technical/legal solution:This applies to all light (300nm-1090nm) sources capable of emitting more than 10mW radiant power or 0.5mW power/mm with a beam divergence of less than 1 radian/meter.
... {50 us GUUID pulse...}
1) At 10 millisecond intervals, the light must pulse a data frame containing Globally Unique ID pattern, followed by a dark interval of at least 1ms and optional packet data.
{50us GUUID pulse} {1ms dark interval} {5ms optional data packet or CW beam} {optional 0-50ms dark interval}
The GUUID pulse shall be modulated to carry:
{16 bit country ID, 64 bit Mfg ID, 128 bit User ID,3D GPS coordinates of device (optional),spectral code(optional) }
The dark intervals will for pulse-width dimming as well as magneto-optical and/or rotating shutter synchronization for mitigation of light pollution at observatories, airports and elsewhere. This light data frame standard is designed for all fast switch (e.g. LED) light sources and can be applied to streetlights, headlights, searchlights, insecurity lights...
2) All unidentified lights shall be considered contraband and will be targeted by laser guided Tsar bombs.
Lasers pointed above the horizon should be considered a special case of light pollution (light tresspass). I suspect more deaths are caused by morons installing 500W+ "insecurity lights" on their home or business and aiming them so that they impair the ability of drivers to see the road, cyclists, pedestrians... There is a tight curve in the road near my house and the business at the end of this road installed three 500W+ halogen security light aimed into the windshields of cars as they approach this curve. The lighthouses and light buoys here and in my hometown are almost invisible until you are almost upon the rocks because there is so much light pollution in the city behind the lighthouse. IMHO we should solve the incoherent morons with incoherent light problem at the same time as we solve the incoherent morons with coherent light problem.
How about this? Seriously, look at the ratio of searches for HTC, Nokia, Samsung, Blackberry to iphone and then append "cracked screen" onto any of these search terms and you'll see that, though iPhone doesn't necessarily lead in market share anymore, it certainly leads in cracked searches. Are iPhone users naturally clumsier or is the iPhone designed to be fragile?
Jobs and Apple are the modern equivalent of Edison and Edison electric, they invent a few things but far more often then steal other people's ideas and perfect them. Nokias had multitasking, youtube videos... in 2006 if not earlier, Velo 1, Palm and similar devices had grid icons, touch screens years earlier. But there is one area where iPhone is far ahead of Android. I hope Apple patented this method of planned obsolescence.
The writing has been on the wall for sometime now but just as with the housing bubble, the U.S.higher education bubble has not yet worked its way onto primetime TV and therefore has not captured the public imagination. Just as with the housing, dot com, tulip and other bubbles, the higher education bubble starts with a plausible story-- that after you invest $XXXXXX and 4 years of your life, you'll come out ahead financially. But like these other bubbles, the story outgrows the basic reality. We have universities forgoing basic R&D, building high-priced gymnasiums, swimming pools, dormitories in order to attract tuition and alumni endowments. We have created courses in subjects which do very little for society or the individual and yet are attractive to students and therefore, keep the tuition flowing. And we have Sallie Mae, enabling us to pay far more for education than would otherwise be possible, thus performing the same role as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "affordable housing" programs did when they enabled house prices to rise far past anyone's ability to support them.
The University bubble does have some unique characteristics which might turn out to be good news for all of us:
You're also exchanging some pixel depth (color/greyscale levels) and information about the point spread function for spacial resolution. It looks like magic but it's a very old technique. I did similar in the mid 1990s. Capturing camera motion (accelerometer) during the photograph would be useful here since it helps you calculate the point spread function. To poster who worried about the memory this would require, we're talking about three long ints or 6 bytes for the X, Y and Z vectors. Since we're below $1/gigabyte for flash, you're talking about ~0.0000006 cents per photo. So, no I wouldn't worry about it. It would be ideal for iPhones and Androids which already have an accelerometer and the small image sensor means low shutter speeds which means lots of motion blur in dim light.
I wonder why the south pole station doesn't make more use of robotic transport such as the Tubleweed Rover, ballistic transport pods or steerable balloons to transport supplies rather than depending on people. The ISS relies on robotic "progress" supply ships at least as much as it relies on human space flights. If we can do this in space, why not on earth?
We can finally dump the multiple layers of caching, look-ahead and other OS complexity designed to hide several orders of magnitude difference between register/DRAM access and persistent storage (tape/Hard drive/core memory...). Operating systems can return to the level of simplicity they had back when everything was uniformity slow. But now everything will be uniformly fast and we'll can focus complexity on multiprocessing.
It will become practical to implement neural networks in hardware. This will completely change the way we design and program software and databases.
Persistent and portable user sessions will become the norm. (Look at Sun Ray for an idea of how this works. Sun Ray sessions are typically logged in for months at a time. This means software has to be better behaved but it also means we won't have to rely on user memory to restore a desktop and applications to... now where was I?
The wikipedia link you cite is a mess and makes no mention of your 1EJ estimate for (global?) wave wave energy. I think you might be mixing units, EJ->TWh?
In any case, this link and this link provide much clearer estimates of wave and thermal ocean energy potential for Japan as about 30-50 Gigawatts. As far as this being "insignificant", top it up with a few GW of Hokaido wind or conservation (even in ultra-efficient Japan, conservation remains the most cost effective energy "source.") and you could shut down all of the nuclear power plants in Japan. Ocean energy could could certainly produce more than all existing wind (2.1Gw) and solar (3.6GW) facilities in Japan.
We don't exclude drilling in arctic wilderness areas and at the bottom of the ocean as impractical. We don't exclude energy-negative corn ethanol even with the political and economic food supply disturbances U.S. corn-ethanol subsidies have caused. We don't shutdown the hundreds of archaic nuclear power plants of the same design as the Fukushima Daiichi plant which failed in Japan. So we don't have the luxury of excluding viable alternatives such as ocean power.
Wave power can't supply a significant portion of the worldwide energy demand, pursuing it is a waste of resources.
So, nearly 80% of the world's population live near the world's largest solar->wind->wave & tidal energy collecting system and we should ignore it? So, efforts to collect this energy might accidentally protect cities from rising sea levels, hurricanes, typhoons and tsunamis and we should ignore it? If this is a "waste of resources", is drilling for oil miles below the surface of the ocean (endangering a sizable fraction of our food supply), considered a wise use of resources?