Good stuff. The only place you lost me was "For our needs, hard disk just can't keep up with the data rates we require". Really? Your first-tier storage is hard drive based, right? Tape is only a backup. How can hard disk not be fast enough? If you mean streaming naively to a single spindle, I guess I can dig it, but that's not my idea of hard drive archiving.
Absolutely so. Optical media as it exists now (not the old WORM drives, and not even magneto-optical) is laughably unreliable. I have yet to identify a single rotted bit in my entire history of storage on multiple tens of terabytes of disk drives, but I have many CDs and DVDs, both mass production stamped stamped and custome burned, that are entirely unreadable, anywhere from one minute after burning to years after. Many of them you can clearly see with the naked eye have bit the big one.
Yeah, and in 10 years when the M-Discs fail to read back, I'm sure the company will still be around and you can get a refund of $10.00 on your crappy unreadable M-Discs with the $10,000,000 worth of absolutely irreplaceable data on them.
Oh, you trusting soul.
If we are talking about true archival beyond some 3-to-7-year business records obligation, tape isn't going to cut it. Tape is for backup with a lifetime not greatly exceeding that range. It might take you up to 20 years or so, or it might not. You're only going to know for sure when you test reading it back.
I don't mean to be a sourpuss, I really don't. It's just that I have experience with crap like this over the years and decades. The only reliably stored data is live stored data on live first-tier storage (basically and realistically, that limits you to hard drives) that is replicated on multiple everything. Multiple spindles from multiple manufacturers bought in multiple batches, running multiple types of filesystems on multiple types of operating system in multiple locations, with multiple levels of error detection and correction. That data can be continuously sampled and analyzed and copied to fresh drives and even changing architecture.
Is that ideal actually implemented by anybody I know? No, but you can come close. Multiple ZFS checksummed RAID-Z3 pools with PAR2 file level redundancy added where applicable, on at least one ZFS-on-linux host plus at least one FreeBSD host in separate rooms, with regular scheduled scrubs gets you pretty close. You need multiple physical locations to guard against disaster if you think having your data accessable after civilization breaks down is worth providing for. Or you can drop back to tape for the low-runner hazard which true geographical and jurisdictional multiple locations addresses.
Ordinary XFS or the like on ordinary RAID? Don't make me laugh. That's not what I'm talking about.
What do you think the remains will be? What part of "incinerated into their component chemical elements" do you not understand? Does the phrase "chemical element" frighten you? Are you afraid of oxygen? Carbon? Hydrogen? What do you think your body is composed of?
Because if there's any place in the entire world where you want to put decommissioned WMDs, it's in the middle of a sea too large for effective policing and too shallow to put them out of the reach of wreck divers
The average depth of the Mediterranean Sea is 1500 m, that of the Atlantic Ocean is 3900 meters, and that of the Pacific Ocean is at least 4000 m. Or the deepest piont is 5300 m, 8400 m, and 10,900 m respectively. Are you suggesting that there is any difference in suitability from a depth standpoint? Remember that "divers" in the the form of deep diving vehicles can reach the deepest of those depths. On the other hand, "divers" in the form of assholes with scuba tanks are going to be equally unable to reach even the average depth of any of those places.
The Mediterranean is, in technical language, fucking goddam deep.
Finally, the component chemical elements left after incinerating poison gases are not "WMDs". They are things like garden variety oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc. Or did you suppose they were just going to dump the intact chemical munitions?
I don't waste any energy actively hating them. They are irrelevant to me. They tack on a GUI which many find helpful for certain task scenarios to an absolutely free compiler, which isn't even necessarily up to date, and then charge an absurd premium. It's an option.
If I need to do any work in Windows I just use free Cygwin or MinGW.
I would guess they are having trouble with keeping the car polling their server while shut down.
Jesus. Every cellphone polls the system while it is sleeping, responds to incoming SMS and calls essentially immediately, and this only costs a few milliwatts. Tesla needs to hire some decent engineers.
Perhaps you could find a citation for your power level. It seems pointless to me. The desert already receives solar radiation of close to 1000 W/m^2 absolutely free directly from the sun, and nobody has figured out yet how to make a profit harnessing that at large scale.
Remember, the US has an installed electrical generating capacity in excess of one trillion watts (1 TW).
I think you would need a much much higher energy density in your beam, and I think it could be very dangerous if it got out of control. For example, 1-10 kW/m^2 of microwave energy is not something you want striking any human body.
So what you are saying is that you can solve the obsolete design part (is that even a problem? something newer isn't automatically better)
Absolutely, something newer isn't automatically better, but a newer design that has much better passive/inherent safety really is better. It's not the obsolescence of the GE torus BWR that makes it shitty. It's the inherently unsafe design with terrible containment that makes it shitty. There is a reason that naval vessel reactors are PWR. Three Mile Island was a PWR and suffered a partial core meltdown and did not harm the environment at all. It did not blow up. No dangerous levels of radiation were released into the surrounding neighborhood. And it is was from about the same era as Fukushima.
The operators of TMI were as much "cheap screwups" (as you put it very well) as those of Fukushima, but the outcome was very, very different because of the much safer design and much more intelligent and competent dealing with the accident in the hours and days following.
but the problems of rare unplanned-for events and bad luck are still there.
Bad luck had nothing at all to do with it, unless you spell bad luck i-n-c-o-m-p-e-t-e-n-c-e. Not planning in the design for levels of natural disasters well known to have occurred in the very recent past was criminal. I suppose you could say that criminal acts will always be with us. All the more reason to stay away from designs that require perfectly executed continuing active measures to prevent them from becoming disasters. A pebble bed reactor, for example, is passively safe. It does not require large quantities of water actively circulating to prevent meltdown even after shutdown. It does not rely on control rods to prevent a runaway reaction. The coolant, being an inert gas, physically cannot change phase (like water into steam) and get used up thereby; it cannot become radioactive in the case of helium. The material of the fuel "pebbles" does not melt at any temperature, and does not sublimate (directly gasify) until it reaches 4000 C. That is well over twice the temperature at which steel melts into a puddle.
Is this an elaborate joke, or did you mean to say WW 2?
Hitler wanted Lebensraum via lightning strokes with no or next to no fighting, and it was going pretty damn good for him until Poland. Actually, it went pretty good through the Phoney War of October 1939 to April 1940.
The idea that Hitler wanted general war is ignorant, in the literal, not abusive, sense of the word. He wanted Lebensraum. He wanted to build up enough strength so that no nation could challenge him. He had a plan to build his naval strength up to challenge the British naval supremacy by 1945-1950. No one was more surprised than Hitler at the idiotic declaration of war by Britain and France. They felt they had to reply to the invasion of Poland, yet they did next to nothing to help Poland before it was overrun.
This is an entirely separate matter from issues of who did what evil acts. It is a matter of accepted history.
China is a 3rd world country wholly dependent economically on the US.
Less and less so as the US slides toward irrelevance.
China's military is not a threat.
You do know China has 250 nuclear warheads and credible delivery systems, right? More than any of the UK, India, Pakistan, or Israel individually. About as many as France. The only ones with more are the US and Russia. If you have enough warheads to do Hiroshima at least 250-2500 or more times over, does it really make any difference that somebody else has over 10 times as many as you do? It's a boolean equation. Both have enough
The chances of nukes and bang bangs over this are very, very low.
Yeah, keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel happy. And there was no way WW 1 was going to happen... until it did. And there was no way WW 2 was going to happen... until it did. Nobody wanted those wars, not the Kaiser, not Hitler, not Stalin, not the British and not the French. The Japanese didn't want it in 1941. They thought there was no way out. They were getting pushed hard.
Fact is, nobody remembers all the times sabers have been rattled and nothing much happened, and yes, there have been plenty of those times. But those times the russian roulette trigger was pulled and the gun went off - those will never be forgotten by people who are engaged.
Just how many places do you think people can drive 75 mph for one hour, given traffic? Highway speeds in populated areas average more like 10-40 mph. And since nobody can possibly drive only on the highway, what about city/town traffic? That is more like 5-20 mph. At speeds people actually drive, and counting regenerative braking, most driving consumes more like 2-6 kW than 20 kW. That means that 1 kW for heat, plus the much worse battery performance in the cold, add up to an enormous impact on range.
OK, I'll bite. Which two of those does ANY EV have? I would say EVs have zero to one of those attributes. There are plenty of gas cars that have all three though.
On Mount Everest, time slows by 0.00261261 seconds (2.6ms) compared to sea level.
That statement is void of any sense. The units of time dilation are not units of time. More like unitless (percent). Do you mean that a clock on the top of Everest is slower by 0.00261261 seconds per second, 0.00261261 seconds per year, 0.00261261 seconds since the dawn of time? What exactly do you really mean?
I doubt VERY much that the effect is 0.00261261 seconds per second (0.26%).
Cosmic rays (they are actually particles, not electromagnetic radiation) cover a whole range of stuff, with individual particles varying extremely widely in energy content. Primary cosmic rays originate outside Earth's atmosphere. When they collide with the atmosphere, secondary cosmic rays are generated. Primary cosmic rays are mostly (99%) nuclei of various atoms. The remaining 1% are mostly free electrons (beta particles). In turn, 90% of the nuclei are free protons (hydrogen nuclei), just because most of the matter in space is hydrogen. 9% are alpha particles (helium nuclei), and 1% are the nuclei of other (heavier) elements. There is also a very small fraction of more exotic stuff, like antimatter.
While the mean energy content of a cosmic ray particle is in the range of only about 10^-11 to 10^-10 J, extremely rare single particles with energy content up to 50 J exist. This energy is truly astounding, as it means a single submicroscopic particle has the same kinetic energy as a slowly pitched or fairly briskly thrown baseball!
Cosmicrays are some of the most penetrating radiative phenoma known. Just compare their mean atmospheric penetrative power to that of other radiative phenomena. The following represent rough mean values of what are actually widely distributed ranges; in other words, some fraction of cosmic rays penetrate hugely in excess of the figure quoted below, just as some fraction falls far short.
cosmic "rays" - 10,000 m (about the same for both primary and secondary) gamma rays - 1000 m x-rays - 100 m alpha particles - 0.1 m
It should also be noted that significant sources of radiative phenomena are generally point sources, or at least localized sources. They are attenuated in concentration, not total amount,by distance, even in a perfect vacuum. This arises due to spreading out according to the inverse square law. For example, if you want to escape the radiation from a nuclear explosion, even in outer space, you can just move away from it. Cosmic rays are completely different in that they are diffuse. They are not "radiating" from a single point at all. They are distributed in concentration and direction everywhere. There is no attenuation due purely to distance. The attenuation of cosmic rays by the atmosphere is a result of collisions of cosmic ray particles with the atoms in the atrmosphere.
Cosmic rays, or better stated, cosmic ray products (neutrinos) have been detected in deep mineshafts after penetrating kilometers of rock. Clearly the beta particles are not penetrating very much at all, and even the nuclei have limited penetration, but some of the subnucleic particles ain't stoppin' for nobody.
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Good stuff. The only place you lost me was "For our needs, hard disk just can't keep up with the data rates we require". Really? Your first-tier storage is hard drive based, right? Tape is only a backup. How can hard disk not be fast enough? If you mean streaming naively to a single spindle, I guess I can dig it, but that's not my idea of hard drive archiving.
Absolutely so. Optical media as it exists now (not the old WORM drives, and not even magneto-optical) is laughably unreliable. I have yet to identify a single rotted bit in my entire history of storage on multiple tens of terabytes of disk drives, but I have many CDs and DVDs, both mass production stamped stamped and custome burned, that are entirely unreadable, anywhere from one minute after burning to years after. Many of them you can clearly see with the naked eye have bit the big one.
Yeah, and in 10 years when the M-Discs fail to read back, I'm sure the company will still be around and you can get a refund of $10.00 on your crappy unreadable M-Discs with the $10,000,000 worth of absolutely irreplaceable data on them.
Oh, you trusting soul.
If we are talking about true archival beyond some 3-to-7-year business records obligation, tape isn't going to cut it. Tape is for backup with a lifetime not greatly exceeding that range. It might take you up to 20 years or so, or it might not. You're only going to know for sure when you test reading it back.
I don't mean to be a sourpuss, I really don't. It's just that I have experience with crap like this over the years and decades. The only reliably stored data is live stored data on live first-tier storage (basically and realistically, that limits you to hard drives) that is replicated on multiple everything. Multiple spindles from multiple manufacturers bought in multiple batches, running multiple types of filesystems on multiple types of operating system in multiple locations, with multiple levels of error detection and correction. That data can be continuously sampled and analyzed and copied to fresh drives and even changing architecture.
Is that ideal actually implemented by anybody I know? No, but you can come close. Multiple ZFS checksummed RAID-Z3 pools with PAR2 file level redundancy added where applicable, on at least one ZFS-on-linux host plus at least one FreeBSD host in separate rooms, with regular scheduled scrubs gets you pretty close. You need multiple physical locations to guard against disaster if you think having your data accessable after civilization breaks down is worth providing for. Or you can drop back to tape for the low-runner hazard which true geographical and jurisdictional multiple locations addresses.
Ordinary XFS or the like on ordinary RAID? Don't make me laugh. That's not what I'm talking about.
What do you think the remains will be? What part of "incinerated into their component chemical elements" do you not understand? Does the phrase "chemical element" frighten you? Are you afraid of oxygen? Carbon? Hydrogen? What do you think your body is composed of?
The average depth of the Mediterranean Sea is 1500 m, that of the Atlantic Ocean is 3900 meters, and that of the Pacific Ocean is at least 4000 m. Or the deepest piont is 5300 m, 8400 m, and 10,900 m respectively. Are you suggesting that there is any difference in suitability from a depth standpoint? Remember that "divers" in the the form of deep diving vehicles can reach the deepest of those depths. On the other hand, "divers" in the form of assholes with scuba tanks are going to be equally unable to reach even the average depth of any of those places.
The Mediterranean is, in technical language, fucking goddam deep.
Finally, the component chemical elements left after incinerating poison gases are not "WMDs". They are things like garden variety oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc. Or did you suppose they were just going to dump the intact chemical munitions?
I don't waste any energy actively hating them. They are irrelevant to me. They tack on a GUI which many find helpful for certain task scenarios to an absolutely free compiler, which isn't even necessarily up to date, and then charge an absurd premium. It's an option.
If I need to do any work in Windows I just use free Cygwin or MinGW.
One man's extremism is another man's passion for truth and the rights of the people.
Clang 3.1 is prehistoric. Clang is at 3.3 now and really *is* pretty complete C++11. Screw Embarcadero.
Gcc 4.8, which is current, is also pretty complete C++11.
Jesus. Every cellphone polls the system while it is sleeping, responds to incoming SMS and calls essentially immediately, and this only costs a few milliwatts. Tesla needs to hire some decent engineers.
Neither do 99.9% of the commenters. Ignorant as hell in the literal sense of the word, but can't stop themselves from spouting off complete nonsense.
Oh jesus. Are you superstitious? The power the car wastes has nothing to do with night or day. It wastes power all day and all night.
Informative, my ass. Fail. Power is watts, energy is kWh.
The car is using 180 watts all the time, duh.
Jesus.
Perhaps you could find a citation for your power level. It seems pointless to me. The desert already receives solar radiation of close to 1000 W/m^2 absolutely free directly from the sun, and nobody has figured out yet how to make a profit harnessing that at large scale.
Remember, the US has an installed electrical generating capacity in excess of one trillion watts (1 TW).
I think you would need a much much higher energy density in your beam, and I think it could be very dangerous if it got out of control. For example, 1-10 kW/m^2 of microwave energy is not something you want striking any human body.
Absolutely, something newer isn't automatically better, but a newer design that has much better passive/inherent safety really is better. It's not the obsolescence of the GE torus BWR that makes it shitty. It's the inherently unsafe design with terrible containment that makes it shitty. There is a reason that naval vessel reactors are PWR. Three Mile Island was a PWR and suffered a partial core meltdown and did not harm the environment at all. It did not blow up. No dangerous levels of radiation were released into the surrounding neighborhood. And it is was from about the same era as Fukushima.
The operators of TMI were as much "cheap screwups" (as you put it very well) as those of Fukushima, but the outcome was very, very different because of the much safer design and much more intelligent and competent dealing with the accident in the hours and days following.
Bad luck had nothing at all to do with it, unless you spell bad luck i-n-c-o-m-p-e-t-e-n-c-e. Not planning in the design for levels of natural disasters well known to have occurred in the very recent past was criminal. I suppose you could say that criminal acts will always be with us. All the more reason to stay away from designs that require perfectly executed continuing active measures to prevent them from becoming disasters. A pebble bed reactor, for example, is passively safe. It does not require large quantities of water actively circulating to prevent meltdown even after shutdown. It does not rely on control rods to prevent a runaway reaction. The coolant, being an inert gas, physically cannot change phase (like water into steam) and get used up thereby; it cannot become radioactive in the case of helium. The material of the fuel "pebbles" does not melt at any temperature, and does not sublimate (directly gasify) until it reaches 4000 C. That is well over twice the temperature at which steel melts into a puddle.
A liquid fluoride thorium reactor is another example of inherently safe design with passive cooling.
Is this an elaborate joke, or did you mean to say WW 2?
Hitler wanted Lebensraum via lightning strokes with no or next to no fighting, and it was going pretty damn good for him until Poland. Actually, it went pretty good through the Phoney War of October 1939 to April 1940.
Correct. I guess expecting an historical knowledge of motivations of the time is asking too much of many.
The idea that Hitler wanted general war is ignorant, in the literal, not abusive, sense of the word. He wanted Lebensraum. He wanted to build up enough strength so that no nation could challenge him. He had a plan to build his naval strength up to challenge the British naval supremacy by 1945-1950. No one was more surprised than Hitler at the idiotic declaration of war by Britain and France. They felt they had to reply to the invasion of Poland, yet they did next to nothing to help Poland before it was overrun.
This is an entirely separate matter from issues of who did what evil acts. It is a matter of accepted history.
Ignorant tripe.
Less and less so as the US slides toward irrelevance.
You do know China has 250 nuclear warheads and credible delivery systems, right? More than any of the UK, India, Pakistan, or Israel individually. About as many as France. The only ones with more are the US and Russia. If you have enough warheads to do Hiroshima at least 250-2500 or more times over, does it really make any difference that somebody else has over 10 times as many as you do? It's a boolean equation. Both have enough
Yeah, keep telling yourself that, if it makes you feel happy. And there was no way WW 1 was going to happen ... until it did. And there was no way WW 2 was going to happen ... until it did. Nobody wanted those wars, not the Kaiser, not Hitler, not Stalin, not the British and not the French. The Japanese didn't want it in 1941. They thought there was no way out. They were getting pushed hard.
Fact is, nobody remembers all the times sabers have been rattled and nothing much happened, and yes, there have been plenty of those times. But those times the russian roulette trigger was pulled and the gun went off - those will never be forgotten by people who are engaged.
Just how many places do you think people can drive 75 mph for one hour, given traffic? Highway speeds in populated areas average more like 10-40 mph. And since nobody can possibly drive only on the highway, what about city/town traffic? That is more like 5-20 mph. At speeds people actually drive, and counting regenerative braking, most driving consumes more like 2-6 kW than 20 kW. That means that 1 kW for heat, plus the much worse battery performance in the cold, add up to an enormous impact on range.
OK, I'll bite. Which two of those does ANY EV have? I would say EVs have zero to one of those attributes. There are plenty of gas cars that have all three though.
Where did you pull that number from? I pay $0.22/kWh for my electricity. I expect that's a lot closer to what most people in the US and Europe pay.
That statement is void of any sense. The units of time dilation are not units of time. More like unitless (percent). Do you mean that a clock on the top of Everest is slower by 0.00261261 seconds per second, 0.00261261 seconds per year, 0.00261261 seconds since the dawn of time? What exactly do you really mean?
I doubt VERY much that the effect is 0.00261261 seconds per second (0.26%).
Cosmic rays (they are actually particles, not electromagnetic radiation) cover a whole range of stuff, with individual particles varying extremely widely in energy content. Primary cosmic rays originate outside Earth's atmosphere. When they collide with the atmosphere, secondary cosmic rays are generated. Primary cosmic rays are mostly (99%) nuclei of various atoms. The remaining 1% are mostly free electrons (beta particles). In turn, 90% of the nuclei are free protons (hydrogen nuclei), just because most of the matter in space is hydrogen. 9% are alpha particles (helium nuclei), and 1% are the nuclei of other (heavier) elements. There is also a very small fraction of more exotic stuff, like antimatter.
While the mean energy content of a cosmic ray particle is in the range of only about 10^-11 to 10^-10 J, extremely rare single particles with energy content up to 50 J exist. This energy is truly astounding, as it means a single submicroscopic particle has the same kinetic energy as a slowly pitched or fairly briskly thrown baseball!
Cosmic rays are some of the most penetrating radiative phenoma known. Just compare their mean atmospheric penetrative power to that of other radiative phenomena. The following represent rough mean values of what are actually widely distributed ranges; in other words, some fraction of cosmic rays penetrate hugely in excess of the figure quoted below, just as some fraction falls far short.
cosmic "rays" - 10,000 m (about the same for both primary and secondary)
gamma rays - 1000 m
x-rays - 100 m
alpha particles - 0.1 m
It should also be noted that significant sources of radiative phenomena are generally point sources, or at least localized sources. They are attenuated in concentration, not total amount,by distance, even in a perfect vacuum. This arises due to spreading out according to the inverse square law. For example, if you want to escape the radiation from a nuclear explosion, even in outer space, you can just move away from it. Cosmic rays are completely different in that they are diffuse. They are not "radiating" from a single point at all. They are distributed in concentration and direction everywhere. There is no attenuation due purely to distance. The attenuation of cosmic rays by the atmosphere is a result of collisions of cosmic ray particles with the atoms in the atrmosphere.
Cosmic rays, or better stated, cosmic ray products (neutrinos) have been detected in deep mineshafts after penetrating kilometers of rock. Clearly the beta particles are not penetrating very much at all, and even the nuclei have limited penetration, but some of the subnucleic particles ain't stoppin' for nobody.