Installed it, and when I go back to that page, my browser crashes. This honestly makes a lot of sense when I hear that that rushed to get it out. It's to be expected.
The worst mileage cars in our country today (generally) are OLD clunkers which pollute like crazy (manufactured before 1982) and SUVs, which are mostly built on truck frames.
Getting as many of the first off the road is in our general interest. It reduces asthma and generally cleans the air. One of these cars produces as many as (pulling a number from the air) 20 modern cars. It's beneficial to society. Does it benefit $5k worth? I'm not sure. Very possibly, given that there are economy stimulus aspects to this project which somewhat lower that cost.
Getting as many of the truck frame SUVs off the road is another benefit to society. They kill people in numbers much greater than real cars. Both the drivers and the people they hit. We pay for those accidents via higher insurance costs.
If the $5k is for replacing either of these with a modern, non truck frame vehicle, it's probably worth it. If we're replacing a 1992 SUV with a slightly smaller one, it's not benefiting anyone outside of the auto industry very much.
"no longer cost effective to operate and modernize the two 19-year-old VC-25s"? huh?
Newer designs are "newer", meaning they're not as well understood. We're better off with a slightly older plane. Newer planes, like the Dreamliner, are NOT much more efficient. Meanwhile they haven't crashed yet, so we haven't had a chance to see what really goes wrong with them. There are lots of 747s around, so there are lots of spare parts and very skilled people.
The stats on modern aircraft stink when compared with the 747, meaning they're much newer and not substantially better. Not much more efficient, certainly.
Please someone tell me why I'm wrong.
(I realize that they're talking about replacing them in 2017, but that's in 8 years. Why make a choice about this now? Why not wait to see whether the machines which were made last year are performing well in 2015, THEN make a decision?)
Ha! Possible, but I think it's much more likely that the firmware upgrade just restricts the player even more and this is about a contract with a IP vendor, meaning the MPAA or Sony.
Ignoring todays news, what's the state of support for the 4850 right now? Does it work flawlessly? I have some 3 year old ATI hardware and some older stuff. None of it quite works right with X. Running games is really hit or miss. Is the 4850 sort of semi-there on the Linux drivers, or is it working almost perfectly?
The clear big winner, in terms of impact for the world might be EEStore's supercapacitor.
It was developed (it appears) in 2008. It will (if it's real and works) make electric cars actually happen and actually be good, radically change how we think about charging cell phones, IPods, etc.
If they get the kids programming just a little in third grade, the kids will teach themselves from that point on. A set of kids who would grow up to be programmers anyway will grow up faster and be better programmers.
The better part of that will have to do with how facile they are at juggling structures and algorithms in their heads. They might wind up WORSE as team players, code commenters, flexible pattern learners, etc. because they started out early and had poor guidance at that point.
So AP-CS in early high school (or late grade school) will have to include remedies for this, and move into how to do group projects and how to take on new approaches/technologies.
But this leaves us with a huge problem/opportunity. Getting kids (mostly young males) into programming will make it much more possible for them to withdraw from others, get fat, and not mature as social animals. In other words, these kids will be high-risk for social problems, and schools will be able to identify them and target them for specific social skills activities.
I think teaching young kids to program is easy. You hand them a computer and do a crappy job of getting them started, and the ones who would do it even if you didn't try anything will pick it up and run with it. Do this just gets them started earlier.
That'll give them a number of extra years head-start.
But do we have the teaching talent to counteract the damage that computer-based isolation for those extra years will cause?
I wrote a book using OpenOffice, and I don't recommend doing so yourself.
I like OpenOffice a LOT, but it has little annoyances and printing bugs which add up to problems. These can cost you weeks of issues.
And when you have these issues, your publisher is unlikely to be able to support you in it.
That said, it's hard to hate a program which allows you to write perl scripts which unzip a file, make a modification, and re-zip it. This makes some very sophisticated search and replaces or style cloning possible.
Lastly, without having done it myself, I'd agree with people who recommend LaTex. Not because it does a wonderful job, but because you as a writer will be VASTLY more productive. If you have a wisiwyg editor, you'll be forever messing around with how things look. With a LaTeX post-processing system, you can write in a powerful editor and not spend a large percentage of your time poking at styles and pagination, etc.
At the end, you either like what LaTex gives you or you don't. You can edit the formatting styles, and make changes systematically throughout the document without making this page an exception and that page an exception. That really seems IDEAL.
I've already paid the price of doing one book. I have the methods down. So my next book will probably be OpenOffice again. But if you haven't started yet, write it in LaTeX. You can always port it to OpenOffice later, if you want to use that for your ultimate output because you can't get LaTex to look the way you want, but you can't go in the other direction and you'll be MUCH more productive using LaTeX.
I hate speed bumps too, but "bad things happen to stupid people doing stupid things" ignores the corollary that "bad things happen to people who get hit by cars driven by stupid people doing stupid things"
Yes, it's a regressive tax. But the connection between the cost to society and the gallons of fuel consumed is pretty direct, these days.
If it's cheaper to keep your beater which gets bad gas mileage and doesn't burn gas cleanly, a person with little money will do just that.
We could compensate for the cost of taxes by offering low-interest loans for car purchases by poor people trading in a beater, who would need to show receipts for gas consumption.
(We could also send the tax revenues straight into public transportation, earmarking the money for expansion to badly served areas and modernization of gas-burning vehicles -- buses on the road today are general very inefficient, and modernizing those buses would pay back the investment in approximately five years, depending on the size and age of the buses involved.)
We need to get cars off the road which only make sense because gas is cheap. It's in everyone's best interest. A regressive tax is the stick. A carrot needs to be there, too, but you can't just do it with a carrot.
This compressed into blocks and placing at the bottom of the ocean sounds interesting. Do you have any links to share?
How do you compress it into blocks? Are we talking about making dry ice, here?
What keeps it in block form, down there? Is the pressure so great that it stays as dry ice? Or do you really mean increase the ocean's CO2 levels throughout?
And the $16 trillion -- I'm asking, not attacking, I really want to know -- is that a replacement cost, or is that primarily realestate for gas stations which is a sunk cost? Is it the cost of putting in an electric car infrastructure or hydrogen or the cost of our current oil infrastructure? Does it include the cost of the cars?
It's always nice to see sources for the numbers we bandy about.
Let's say it works. (I suspect it would, but I don't know.) Imagine the heat you're creating to accomplish that. How much of that heat would escape? That would be the most obvious measure of the process's inefficiency.
And I think another point here is that a lot of inefficiency comes from pushing the hydrogen, once you've made it, around in tubes which will leak a little. Tiny little molecule, hydrogen. Hard to keep from oozing out of things.
The upshot is that you might have a 10% better solution, there, but I don't think it's going to change the general bigness of the inefficiency number. (But it would be good to look at the inefficiency of other systems before assuming that the inefficiency of hydrogen is so terrible.)
Not necessarily. There has been small, tiny voices peeping for a long time that dinosaurs, or plants, for that matter, might not be the source of oil. Recently some bacteria were discovered which create hydrocarbons.
Conventional wisdom definitely supports you, but you might just turn out to be wrong, and then we'd have wasted money cloning dinosaurs, and time, by waiting millions of years for them to turn into oil.
But what the hell. Let's give it a try. It'll be cheaper than bailing out GM.
Batteries heat up when you charge them. They heat up when you discharge them.
I suspect that there might be other forms of energy loss, too.
So if we took the same energy we were making hydrogen out of, and put it in a battery, then put the battery in a car and got miles out of it, in the same way we would with a fuel cell, how efficient are batteries compared to this?
Anyone know?
What about ultracapacitors? Are they more efficient than batteries?
CNG is worth thinking about. South Korea has been pushing CNG (and natural gas, in general) for vehicles.
The politics implied by his post are worth thinking about. Paying a premium (even a 75% premium) may be better than sending our money out of the country for oil. Compare hydrogen's inefficiency to paying money to other countries, then using energy to transport the oil we buy.
And yes, some of that money we pay definitely does get spent on bullets on our trading partners' side, and causes us to spend even more on bullets on our side.
Don't like these ideas? Think they're not correct? Reply to the parent, rather than stifle with a "Flamebait" tag.
My current gambit is something like 'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is 23 years old. What do you know that he doesn't?'
Any statement you make like this will cause a variety of responses, of which only a few are positive. To find out what these guys have going, you do what you'd do in any intelligent interview. You pose a few problems and see what comes out of them. In particular, you'll want to find out something they cannot do, then make them do it. I know that seems cruel, but you can watch how they think, watch how they learn (when you hint them with parts of the problem) and learn whether they just stop and say "NO. I don't know that. I won't try."
Expect that old timers are sometimes just as much incompetent lying little know-nothings who cannot write a FizzBuzz program as the younger set. Test them. See what they can do. And when you find one who can code and think, hire them!
All we'd have to do to find this out is stop a bunch of randomly chosen passengers. A well-designed control group would tell us how well this thing worked.
That would be a very easy study to do. Why haven't they done it, then?
It's possible that 2% were carrying for all we know. Maybe this thing is an innocence detector.
Real numbers are a risk. Best to stay with the unknown.
I don't think nearly as much of Schneier as many of my peers do, simply because I saw him talk and while he said some very true things, he also said some patently dumb things.
I think he's got the right idea on a lot of what's wrong, right now, but that doesn't make him a panacea.
That said, my respect for him drops more with this statement. Not because he's wrong about the TSA, but because if offered a chance to serve, he'll decline. If the president asked me to head an agency, and I thought I could do it at all, I'd jump at it.
His excuse is that he wouldn't be able to head the agency and downsize it is ludicrous. Many people work as the head of companies and downsize them. He could accomplish the real goal of safe transportation without spending as much.
So his excuse is just that. He's making plenty of money and can't fail where he is. He puts his pocketbook ahead of the liberties and happiness and safety of millions of his fellow citizens.
OK, the male/female ration is interesting, but I find the drop in 1983 much MORE interesting.
We know why people stopped enrolling in 2000. Computer people were getting laid off, and kids stopped seeing CS as a good money option.
What happened 1983? Why did males AND females decide that CS wasn't for them anymore? The Personal computer was becoming very available. The Macintosh was about to be released, and yet, just when people were getting more experience with computers younger, enrollment disappears.
Slashdot Mirror
Installed it, and when I go back to that page, my browser crashes. This honestly makes a lot of sense when I hear that that rushed to get it out. It's to be expected.
Ah well. I'll install it again in four years.
The worst mileage cars in our country today (generally) are OLD clunkers which pollute like crazy (manufactured before 1982) and SUVs, which are mostly built on truck frames.
Getting as many of the first off the road is in our general interest. It reduces asthma and generally cleans the air. One of these cars produces as many as (pulling a number from the air) 20 modern cars. It's beneficial to society. Does it benefit $5k worth? I'm not sure. Very possibly, given that there are economy stimulus aspects to this project which somewhat lower that cost.
Why 1982? Because emissions haven't gone down since then, which is pathetic. http://www.slideshare.net/marcus.bowman.slides/vehicle-technology-improvement-curve-462599
Getting as many of the truck frame SUVs off the road is another benefit to society. They kill people in numbers much greater than real cars. Both the drivers and the people they hit. We pay for those accidents via higher insurance costs.
If the $5k is for replacing either of these with a modern, non truck frame vehicle, it's probably worth it. If we're replacing a 1992 SUV with a slightly smaller one, it's not benefiting anyone outside of the auto industry very much.
Next time: Benedryl. Go ahead, take two.
"no longer cost effective to operate and modernize the two 19-year-old VC-25s"? huh?
Newer designs are "newer", meaning they're not as well understood. We're better off with a slightly older plane. Newer planes, like the Dreamliner, are NOT much more efficient. Meanwhile they haven't crashed yet, so we haven't had a chance to see what really goes wrong with them. There are lots of 747s around, so there are lots of spare parts and very skilled people.
The stats on modern aircraft stink when compared with the 747, meaning they're much newer and not substantially better. Not much more efficient, certainly.
Please someone tell me why I'm wrong.
(I realize that they're talking about replacing them in 2017, but that's in 8 years. Why make a choice about this now? Why not wait to see whether the machines which were made last year are performing well in 2015, THEN make a decision?)
Ha! Possible, but I think it's much more likely that the firmware upgrade just restricts the player even more and this is about a contract with a IP vendor, meaning the MPAA or Sony.
Maybe they're not just smart.
Maybe they're smart and oblivious. Or smart and indoctrinated. Or smart and sociopathic.
Ignoring todays news, what's the state of support for the 4850 right now? Does it work flawlessly? I have some 3 year old ATI hardware and some older stuff. None of it quite works right with X. Running games is really hit or miss. Is the 4850 sort of semi-there on the Linux drivers, or is it working almost perfectly?
Huh? "The entire vaccination program is about intellectual property - countries have to forgo local pharma factories"?
Can you post a link about this?
The clear big winner, in terms of impact for the world might be EEStore's supercapacitor.
It was developed (it appears) in 2008. It will (if it's real and works) make electric cars actually happen and actually be good, radically change how we think about charging cell phones, IPods, etc.
The problem is it might be snake oil.
If they get the kids programming just a little in third grade, the kids will teach themselves from that point on. A set of kids who would grow up to be programmers anyway will grow up faster and be better programmers.
The better part of that will have to do with how facile they are at juggling structures and algorithms in their heads. They might wind up WORSE as team players, code commenters, flexible pattern learners, etc. because they started out early and had poor guidance at that point.
So AP-CS in early high school (or late grade school) will have to include remedies for this, and move into how to do group projects and how to take on new approaches/technologies.
But this leaves us with a huge problem/opportunity. Getting kids (mostly young males) into programming will make it much more possible for them to withdraw from others, get fat, and not mature as social animals. In other words, these kids will be high-risk for social problems, and schools will be able to identify them and target them for specific social skills activities.
I think teaching young kids to program is easy. You hand them a computer and do a crappy job of getting them started, and the ones who would do it even if you didn't try anything will pick it up and run with it. Do this just gets them started earlier.
That'll give them a number of extra years head-start.
But do we have the teaching talent to counteract the damage that computer-based isolation for those extra years will cause?
I wrote a book using OpenOffice, and I don't recommend doing so yourself.
I like OpenOffice a LOT, but it has little annoyances and printing bugs which add up to problems. These can cost you weeks of issues.
And when you have these issues, your publisher is unlikely to be able to support you in it.
That said, it's hard to hate a program which allows you to write perl scripts which unzip a file, make a modification, and re-zip it. This makes some very sophisticated search and replaces or style cloning possible.
Lastly, without having done it myself, I'd agree with people who recommend LaTex. Not because it does a wonderful job, but because you as a writer will be VASTLY more productive. If you have a wisiwyg editor, you'll be forever messing around with how things look. With a LaTeX post-processing system, you can write in a powerful editor and not spend a large percentage of your time poking at styles and pagination, etc.
At the end, you either like what LaTex gives you or you don't. You can edit the formatting styles, and make changes systematically throughout the document without making this page an exception and that page an exception. That really seems IDEAL.
I've already paid the price of doing one book. I have the methods down. So my next book will probably be OpenOffice again. But if you haven't started yet, write it in LaTeX. You can always port it to OpenOffice later, if you want to use that for your ultimate output because you can't get LaTex to look the way you want, but you can't go in the other direction and you'll be MUCH more productive using LaTeX.
Buying newer, faster hardware usually only speeds things up by a factor of two or four.
(There are exceptions to this, mostly occurring when you add more memory to eliminate disk access.)
Conversely, a good programmer MAY (depending on the situation) be able to fix the work of bad programmers to speed the program up by 10x or 100x.
It always depends on what you need and what you're slowdown is.
I hate speed bumps too, but "bad things happen to stupid people doing stupid things" ignores the corollary that "bad things happen to people who get hit by cars driven by stupid people doing stupid things"
That should be "perl harbor".
Excellent point!
You're absolutely right.
Yes, it's a regressive tax. But the connection between the cost to society and the gallons of fuel consumed is pretty direct, these days.
If it's cheaper to keep your beater which gets bad gas mileage and doesn't burn gas cleanly, a person with little money will do just that.
We could compensate for the cost of taxes by offering low-interest loans for car purchases by poor people trading in a beater, who would need to show receipts for gas consumption.
(We could also send the tax revenues straight into public transportation, earmarking the money for expansion to badly served areas and modernization of gas-burning vehicles -- buses on the road today are general very inefficient, and modernizing those buses would pay back the investment in approximately five years, depending on the size and age of the buses involved.)
We need to get cars off the road which only make sense because gas is cheap. It's in everyone's best interest. A regressive tax is the stick. A carrot needs to be there, too, but you can't just do it with a carrot.
This compressed into blocks and placing at the bottom of the ocean sounds interesting. Do you have any links to share?
How do you compress it into blocks? Are we talking about making dry ice, here?
What keeps it in block form, down there? Is the pressure so great that it stays as dry ice? Or do you really mean increase the ocean's CO2 levels throughout?
And the $16 trillion -- I'm asking, not attacking, I really want to know -- is that a replacement cost, or is that primarily realestate for gas stations which is a sunk cost? Is it the cost of putting in an electric car infrastructure or hydrogen or the cost of our current oil infrastructure? Does it include the cost of the cars?
It's always nice to see sources for the numbers we bandy about.
Let's say it works. (I suspect it would, but I don't know.) Imagine the heat you're creating to accomplish that. How much of that heat would escape? That would be the most obvious measure of the process's inefficiency.
And I think another point here is that a lot of inefficiency comes from pushing the hydrogen, once you've made it, around in tubes which will leak a little. Tiny little molecule, hydrogen. Hard to keep from oozing out of things.
The upshot is that you might have a 10% better solution, there, but I don't think it's going to change the general bigness of the inefficiency number. (But it would be good to look at the inefficiency of other systems before assuming that the inefficiency of hydrogen is so terrible.)
Not necessarily. There has been small, tiny voices peeping for a long time that dinosaurs, or plants, for that matter, might not be the source of oil. Recently some bacteria were discovered which create hydrocarbons.
Conventional wisdom definitely supports you, but you might just turn out to be wrong, and then we'd have wasted money cloning dinosaurs, and time, by waiting millions of years for them to turn into oil.
But what the hell. Let's give it a try. It'll be cheaper than bailing out GM.
Batteries heat up when you charge them. They heat up when you discharge them.
I suspect that there might be other forms of energy loss, too.
So if we took the same energy we were making hydrogen out of, and put it in a battery, then put the battery in a car and got miles out of it, in the same way we would with a fuel cell, how efficient are batteries compared to this?
Anyone know?
What about ultracapacitors? Are they more efficient than batteries?
Flamebait? Who moderated this as Flamebait?
CNG is worth thinking about. South Korea has been pushing CNG (and natural gas, in general) for vehicles.
The politics implied by his post are worth thinking about. Paying a premium (even a 75% premium) may be better than sending our money out of the country for oil. Compare hydrogen's inefficiency to paying money to other countries, then using energy to transport the oil we buy.
And yes, some of that money we pay definitely does get spent on bullets on our trading partners' side, and causes us to spend even more on bullets on our side.
Don't like these ideas? Think they're not correct? Reply to the parent, rather than stifle with a "Flamebait" tag.
My current gambit is something like 'IT is seen as a young man's game. My next applicant after you is 23 years old. What do you know that he doesn't?'
Any statement you make like this will cause a variety of responses, of which only a few are positive. To find out what these guys have going, you do what you'd do in any intelligent interview. You pose a few problems and see what comes out of them. In particular, you'll want to find out something they cannot do, then make them do it. I know that seems cruel, but you can watch how they think, watch how they learn (when you hint them with parts of the problem) and learn whether they just stop and say "NO. I don't know that. I won't try."
Expect that old timers are sometimes just as much incompetent lying little know-nothings who cannot write a FizzBuzz program as the younger set. Test them. See what they can do. And when you find one who can code and think, hire them!
All we'd have to do to find this out is stop a bunch of randomly chosen passengers. A well-designed control group would tell us how well this thing worked.
That would be a very easy study to do. Why haven't they done it, then?
It's possible that 2% were carrying for all we know. Maybe this thing is an innocence detector.
Real numbers are a risk. Best to stay with the unknown.
I don't think nearly as much of Schneier as many of my peers do, simply because I saw him talk and while he said some very true things, he also said some patently dumb things.
I think he's got the right idea on a lot of what's wrong, right now, but that doesn't make him a panacea.
That said, my respect for him drops more with this statement. Not because he's wrong about the TSA, but because if offered a chance to serve, he'll decline. If the president asked me to head an agency, and I thought I could do it at all, I'd jump at it.
His excuse is that he wouldn't be able to head the agency and downsize it is ludicrous. Many people work as the head of companies and downsize them. He could accomplish the real goal of safe transportation without spending as much.
So his excuse is just that. He's making plenty of money and can't fail where he is. He puts his pocketbook ahead of the liberties and happiness and safety of millions of his fellow citizens.
Great guy.
OK, the male/female ration is interesting, but I find the drop in 1983 much MORE interesting.
We know why people stopped enrolling in 2000. Computer people were getting laid off, and kids stopped seeing CS as a good money option.
What happened 1983? Why did males AND females decide that CS wasn't for them anymore? The Personal computer was becoming very available. The Macintosh was about to be released, and yet, just when people were getting more experience with computers younger, enrollment disappears.
What happened?