Drop a big concrete tube into the ocean, stick a lid on the top and pump the water out of the bottom using photovoltaic & wind
You, sir, win the Internet. I love the idea.
But why power it with photovoltaics and wind, when you have all that wave power? Imagine closing the bottom end of the pipe with a low drag matrix of one-way valves. As the pipe bobs up and down in the water, gravity and the mass of the water column would force more and more water out due to wave-induced vertical oscillation. Maxwell's Demons principle, in macroscope. When you have a need for the potential energy, pipe water back into the column via turbines.
It's hard to quantify awareness, and until we can do that we have nothing to measure, and therefore no science. Best to stick with applications, at least that way we'll make steady advancement and perhaps approach the goal.
Remember it's mostly a matter of interpretation, of semantics. To ask whether a machine can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim.
Actually I think he's a bit too fast in some ways, too slow in others. He just let a $4.7B tender for fibre to the premises, which is good, but I tend to distrust any agent of change who moves too quickly.
Yes, see, that I get. But bejeezus you're confusing.
I apologise for that, I was aiming for simple obscurity. But you are definitely to be congratulated for not getting the first joke, which requires a peculiarly Economics-focussed mind set. Here's another sample of what I was trying to achieve, but targeted at another occupation:
Two lawyers were walking down the beach past a stunning young lady. The first lawyer says "Geeze I'd sure love to screw her". The second lawyer looks at him quizzically -- "Out of what?"
The joke came originally from one of David Friedman's books on economics. It was there to illustrate the difference between people's stated desires, versus evidence of their desires as described by statistics covering what people actually bought. Economists are notorious for this narrow view. +1 to you for not getting the joke, -1 for me for explaining it.
By "moving to Facebook" I was inferring that economists are better off polishing their social interaction skills by attending to that website rather than Slashdot.
To this end I'm hoping also that you'll support my new group Society for Understanding Commercial Concepts, Economics, and Responsibility. It's dedicated toward replacing all incandescent bright ideas with low-impact flourescents. Free sarcasm filter with every new member.
One of the early Spider Robinson "Callihan" books had a large section devoted to "The Font", a machine designed to go from raw beans through the complete process of delivering Irish Coffee in a heated mug. It was invented by a mythical person named "The Slave of Coffee" whom I believe must really live out there somewhere (there's a back alley coffe supplier in Melbourne who comes close, I think). The machine stayed in the background perking away through most of his later works.
I love coffee, but hate espresso, which is mostly all you can buy nowdays.
Starbucks tries to sell coffee, but their product relates to coffee in the same way that a vacuum cleaner resembles a supercharger.
You're going to see the ads anyway, why not see ads targeted towards products you're interested in?
How do they know? I'm interested in most things, and I don't want to be limited to what I've seen before.
I hate having people put me in a box, demographic or otherwise. It denies me an essential view of things I've not encountered before. I'd rather be reincarnated as a lawyer before I'd ever stoop to behaving like some economist wants me to.
Two economists walk past a Porsche dealer. One says "I'd really like to have one of those new Boxters." The other one looks at him and replies "Obviously not."
If you get that joke, I suggest you move to Facebook.
Well, I know I'm a bit older, and slightly more paranoid about the Facebook/Myspace type social network sites....I basically have seen how things can be used against you later in life, and I wonder as the generation that has embraced these sites
There is a phase in one's life where you need to advertise; birds do it with coloured feathers and elaborate dances, and teenagers looking for a partner do it with coloured feathers and elaborate dances. You have to advertise your availability, until you are no longer available, then it makes sense to hide.
The problem with social networking sites is that the feathers aren't real. And the false image of the feathers stays forever.
I, too, am regretting the purchase of that modem so many long years ago, but so far I've resisted the urge to let everyone know that Nefarious Wheel is actuafasf6789#$%^-=[NO CARRI
In the spirit of "The Unwritten Laws of Business" (W.J.King, Profile Books) you need to choose your boss carefully. If the company you're with is not transparent enough for that, check their culture against the culture you'd like to associate yourself with. To do that, I'd suggest large amounts of common sense or read "Good to Great" (Jim Collins, check Amazon).
Don't be a whistleblower, be an activist for change. See if you have a risk compliance manager and talk to them, ask for their advice. At worst, you'll get your name known in the higher echelons, at best you'll get your own way. Most people will shy away from a confrontation, but love giving advice in a tricky situation.
Your mileage may vary, and I may be full of compost. Think and do.
Sure, it's predictable. You might only be able to get so many KWh out of it at a given water level, but you can turn it up and down almost at will.
Moving hydro is a great energy storage method -- very efficient. But the amount of fresh water available for this energy buffering scheme is likely to diminish over time due to population growth and increasing demands on this resource.
Of course I live in south east Australia, where we're generally more concerned about this issue, but I don't think the concept of bottling that much water to store energy will play well among our population, who tend to be fairly well informed on water issues.
Building rockets etc on earth is horrendously complex and expensive as well.
Meh. It's a couple of ballons in an aluminium tube, parked on top of a gimballed copper funnel fed by pumps and a fuel-based cooling system. Control systems are cheap. Computation is cheap. Comms are cheap. Contractors are cheap and we've done all this stuff before.Not to say it isn't reasonably complex, just not horribly.
And I'm not sure what they can do as far as listening on LCD displays
Not sure how accurate it is, but there's a lovely bit of discussion about hacking a laptop remotely via RF during the jail scene of Cryptonomicon. At least enough for me to wonder if it wouldn't work in the ideal circumstances described there.
I started thinking about that the first time I heard an AM radio tuned to an SDS 930's M register. I figured -- someday some spook would be able to parse that noise.
Mixture of optical and boutique, depending on the local community demographic. Or perhaps "Bran Dex" for a generic hi-fibre network. Or "Wire WeHere" if the value proposition is king. Dunno, I'd be happy with "FRED" (an acronym for "ridiculous electronic device").
It shows up in layers, bottom up - the new folks layer in on top, the older tenured employees at the bottom. It's very difficult to improve your lot if you're seen as an expert; it's not so much that you're seen as less intelligent, just more embedded - nobody wants to disturb a working ecosystem by promoting what are seen as essential roles. The result is that the experts sort of decant, and end up on the top layer somewhere else.
A problem with dealing with acoustic resonance is just how to manufacture the rocket nozzle to avoid the buildup of these dangerous resonances. Modelling them is the first step, but how can you build the nozzle with sufficient strength while building in structure to interrupt the phase of the wave repeats? Experimentation is a lot cheaper when you can simulate the results. I could imagine moving to non-round shapes might solve the problem, or heterogenious structures - possibly by introduction of dissimilar materials in the bell, perhaps a strapped interspersion of titanium and stainless? I wonder how difficult that could be to model.
Or I could be full of crap, which is also a distinct possibility.
If you look over the last twenty years in relation to human history (to say nothing of geological time frames) technology has developed all at once. There's a huge, nay exponential effect on technology of having near universal communications and access to knowledge content. If you scrape off the foam from the top of the Internet, there's an aweful lot of beer there. It's nearly instantaneous from that perspective.
...is 28,000 lines of code. I doubt if it will be terribly useful, although perusal of the document format could assist those who want to engineer a bit of cross-platform compatibility into their products, and need to vet what they've written against the MSFT code. So that could be useful, perhaps. Full-scale porting of any of the code is unlikely to profitable, so MSFT is safe in that respect. The risk to them lies more the potential for an easy path to alternate solutions.
I tend to think more in the enterprise context, because that's kind of where I live. Banks take it to extremes - block replication of everything in the SAN to a dupe across the city. That sort of combines off-site backup with mirroring. Saving the database logs pretty much perpetually in a version control system covers the databases, plus backup of individual file shares by more common methods (although disk is increasingly preferred to tape).
Nowdays you're pretty much encouraged to consider your laptop/desktop storage as nothing more than a working cache, often times by requiring documents to be stored / indexed on some form of doc control system such as Documentum or similar.
A good place to start reading is hit the EMC web site and follow the links and reference terms you read there, either Wiki or JFGI. Interesting subject, storage infrastructure, and a good career path that covers boring to brilliant solutions.
I use a raid 1 mirror.
Have had many HD's fail, don't make backups. Am i of the "those that make backups" type, as the mirror can be seen as a continual backup
There are at least two ways of looking at backups. By using a RAID device you are protecting your system against catastrophic hardware failure, by using remote media (tape or remote VCS) you are protecting your data. Two separate things. For data that's important, you have to guard against young Bobby Tables running a script that renders your database or file unusable, and for that you need the ability to roll back to a previous version. RAID1 doesn't do that by itself unless you use a 3-disk RAID1 set and periodically drop the third mirror (i.e. have it spun down during the work day).
Och aye, and the unexpected effects of a terrible great weapon o' destruction the Large Hadron Collider was, became the death of that planet when the highly effective accelerator was eventually miniaturised and sold on ThinkGeek along with the intelligent Wheatstone Bridge and edible algebraic variables. Truly the destiny of that planet named "Dirt" or "Earth" was settled by the natives who riddled it with billions of nanoscopic black holes as the fools who played with green lasers got tired of crashing jets and turned to this new toy. Most of the damage was done by the ones on keychains delivered with stuck switches. Nobody knew they were on.
("This species has amused itself to death" -- Roger Waters)
I strongly recommend Cryptonimicon as a good start. It's a big novel with two storylines from different historical points converging to a single dramatic and climatic end, with a subtle blend of emotions, tensions and strong, believable obligations. Woven throughout is an intensely technical drama concerning the power of cryptography and the people who had a life and death effect on the world around them because of their knowledge. Possibly the best insight into the ancestors of computing in the WWII era. Hugely scientific, well-drawn characters, mathematical, and a truly gripping read. Dangerously engaging in the way that only a truly great novel can affect your sleep cycles. This book, good sir or madam, is for the geek, and a new novel from him is profoundly Stuff That Matters.
I will be hanging out for the new book, and he's got at least one guaranteed customer.
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, win the Internet. I love the idea.
But why power it with photovoltaics and wind, when you have all that wave power? Imagine closing the bottom end of the pipe with a low drag matrix of one-way valves. As the pipe bobs up and down in the water, gravity and the mass of the water column would force more and more water out due to wave-induced vertical oscillation. Maxwell's Demons principle, in macroscope. When you have a need for the potential energy, pipe water back into the column via turbines.
Remember it's mostly a matter of interpretation, of semantics. To ask whether a machine can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim.
I think that would be infinitely cool. Provided you're a single photon, of course.
Actually I think he's a bit too fast in some ways, too slow in others. He just let a $4.7B tender for fibre to the premises, which is good, but I tend to distrust any agent of change who moves too quickly.
Disagree a little here. I don't believe a computer is necessary for common sense to be ignored, just an endocrine system.
I apologise for that, I was aiming for simple obscurity. But you are definitely to be congratulated for not getting the first joke, which requires a peculiarly Economics-focussed mind set. Here's another sample of what I was trying to achieve, but targeted at another occupation:
Two lawyers were walking down the beach past a stunning young lady. The first lawyer says "Geeze I'd sure love to screw her". The second lawyer looks at him quizzically -- "Out of what?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Known_Space
There are a lot of unanswered questions about this technology, but I'd quote AC Clarke at you if someone says it's impossible.
By "moving to Facebook" I was inferring that economists are better off polishing their social interaction skills by attending to that website rather than Slashdot.
To this end I'm hoping also that you'll support my new group Society for Understanding Commercial Concepts, Economics, and Responsibility. It's dedicated toward replacing all incandescent bright ideas with low-impact flourescents. Free sarcasm filter with every new member.
I love coffee, but hate espresso, which is mostly all you can buy nowdays.
Starbucks tries to sell coffee, but their product relates to coffee in the same way that a vacuum cleaner resembles a supercharger.
How do they know? I'm interested in most things, and I don't want to be limited to what I've seen before.
I hate having people put me in a box, demographic or otherwise. It denies me an essential view of things I've not encountered before. I'd rather be reincarnated as a lawyer before I'd ever stoop to behaving like some economist wants me to.
Two economists walk past a Porsche dealer. One says "I'd really like to have one of those new Boxters." The other one looks at him and replies "Obviously not."
If you get that joke, I suggest you move to Facebook.
There is a phase in one's life where you need to advertise; birds do it with coloured feathers and elaborate dances, and teenagers looking for a partner do it with coloured feathers and elaborate dances. You have to advertise your availability, until you are no longer available, then it makes sense to hide.
The problem with social networking sites is that the feathers aren't real. And the false image of the feathers stays forever.
I, too, am regretting the purchase of that modem so many long years ago, but so far I've resisted the urge to let everyone know that Nefarious Wheel is actuafasf6789#$%^-=[NO CARRI
Don't be a whistleblower, be an activist for change. See if you have a risk compliance manager and talk to them, ask for their advice. At worst, you'll get your name known in the higher echelons, at best you'll get your own way. Most people will shy away from a confrontation, but love giving advice in a tricky situation.
Your mileage may vary, and I may be full of compost. Think and do.
Sure, it's predictable. You might only be able to get so many KWh out of it at a given water level, but you can turn it up and down almost at will.
Moving hydro is a great energy storage method -- very efficient. But the amount of fresh water available for this energy buffering scheme is likely to diminish over time due to population growth and increasing demands on this resource.
Of course I live in south east Australia, where we're generally more concerned about this issue, but I don't think the concept of bottling that much water to store energy will play well among our population, who tend to be fairly well informed on water issues.
Meh. It's a couple of ballons in an aluminium tube, parked on top of a gimballed copper funnel fed by pumps and a fuel-based cooling system. Control systems are cheap. Computation is cheap. Comms are cheap. Contractors are cheap and we've done all this stuff before.Not to say it isn't reasonably complex, just not horribly.
Not sure how accurate it is, but there's a lovely bit of discussion about hacking a laptop remotely via RF during the jail scene of Cryptonomicon. At least enough for me to wonder if it wouldn't work in the ideal circumstances described there.
I started thinking about that the first time I heard an AM radio tuned to an SDS 930's M register. I figured -- someday some spook would be able to parse that noise.
Mixture of optical and boutique, depending on the local community demographic. Or perhaps "Bran Dex" for a generic hi-fibre network. Or "Wire WeHere" if the value proposition is king. Dunno, I'd be happy with "FRED" (an acronym for "ridiculous electronic device").
It shows up in layers, bottom up - the new folks layer in on top, the older tenured employees at the bottom. It's very difficult to improve your lot if you're seen as an expert; it's not so much that you're seen as less intelligent, just more embedded - nobody wants to disturb a working ecosystem by promoting what are seen as essential roles. The result is that the experts sort of decant, and end up on the top layer somewhere else.
Or plated wire memory.
Or I could be full of crap, which is also a distinct possibility.
If you look over the last twenty years in relation to human history (to say nothing of geological time frames) technology has developed all at once. There's a huge, nay exponential effect on technology of having near universal communications and access to knowledge content. If you scrape off the foam from the top of the Internet, there's an aweful lot of beer there. It's nearly instantaneous from that perspective.
...is 28,000 lines of code. I doubt if it will be terribly useful, although perusal of the document format could assist those who want to engineer a bit of cross-platform compatibility into their products, and need to vet what they've written against the MSFT code. So that could be useful, perhaps. Full-scale porting of any of the code is unlikely to profitable, so MSFT is safe in that respect. The risk to them lies more the potential for an easy path to alternate solutions.
Nowdays you're pretty much encouraged to consider your laptop/desktop storage as nothing more than a working cache, often times by requiring documents to be stored / indexed on some form of doc control system such as Documentum or similar.
A good place to start reading is hit the EMC web site and follow the links and reference terms you read there, either Wiki or JFGI. Interesting subject, storage infrastructure, and a good career path that covers boring to brilliant solutions.
There are at least two ways of looking at backups. By using a RAID device you are protecting your system against catastrophic hardware failure, by using remote media (tape or remote VCS) you are protecting your data. Two separate things. For data that's important, you have to guard against young Bobby Tables running a script that renders your database or file unusable, and for that you need the ability to roll back to a previous version. RAID1 doesn't do that by itself unless you use a 3-disk RAID1 set and periodically drop the third mirror (i.e. have it spun down during the work day).
("This species has amused itself to death" -- Roger Waters)
Ok, genuine answer here.
I strongly recommend Cryptonimicon as a good start. It's a big novel with two storylines from different historical points converging to a single dramatic and climatic end, with a subtle blend of emotions, tensions and strong, believable obligations. Woven throughout is an intensely technical drama concerning the power of cryptography and the people who had a life and death effect on the world around them because of their knowledge. Possibly the best insight into the ancestors of computing in the WWII era. Hugely scientific, well-drawn characters, mathematical, and a truly gripping read. Dangerously engaging in the way that only a truly great novel can affect your sleep cycles. This book, good sir or madam, is for the geek, and a new novel from him is profoundly Stuff That Matters.
I will be hanging out for the new book, and he's got at least one guaranteed customer.