"...it takes roughly 165 pounds of raw mined materials to make the average cell phone..."
In the meantime, it takes roughly 1996.3 pounds of labor-intensive grown food per year to grow the human brain that thought up this brainless argument.
"When Her Best Friend Died, She Rebuilt Him Using Artificial Intelligence"
We're supposed to not be critical of this ridiculous statement in deference to the feelings of someone who lost a love one? That's a new low in Slashdot publishing
Ranbot: you apparently missed the history that SR has also burned through two $750K Federal grants. That, combined with other government funds, makes the government SR's primary investor. Now, on the basis of proving nothing, SR is on the verge of burning through much more tax money. Government-funded innovation rarely, if ever, works. In the rare cases it does (e.g., ARPAnet) there is plenty of early evidence that the fundamental assumptions are correct. That evidence is missing with SR, with plenty of evidence to the contrary, and we've already started flushing serious public bucks down the toilet.
Who wouldn't like lunch on the moon? Think about the prestige you'll get. My new business Lunar Roadways is paving a path to a moony restaurant that will, ahem, eclipse all earthy establishments. Yes, there are some technical details to work out. But if Marconi and Tesl... er Edison had listened to the Debbie Downers, we'd have no radio and we'd not have it in the dark.
On this here napkin I've sketched out the key astronomical constants, solid fuel prices, launch pad costs per square foot, and my five-year revenue projection. True, the first few lunch dates will be expensive, but this is all proven technology. NASA went to the moon no fewer than several times, and when you factor in economies of scale, my Lunar Lunch Shuttle will be competitive -- on a per-mile basis -- with Uber.
The population of the earth is 7.2 billion people. If only half of these want to dine lunarly, that's 3.6 billion customers, nearly as many as McDonalds. Figure $100 a seat not counting meal service, and we're talking 3.5 TRILLION dollars of income. It's widely known that with trillions of dollars you can do anything. And we haven't even factored in repeat business!
Is it green, you ask? It's green! All those people off the earth will cut CO2 emissions by up to a lot! I have done testing with people in walk-in refrigerators, which proves it.
I've raised a couple million dollars already on my IndieNoNo campaign, from people who like to gamble and don't understand basic mathematics. I'm on the verge of securing government funding, thanks to the Really Great Idea of the Year award from Popular Mechanics.
Get in on this rocket ship (literally) while there's still room!
“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success . . . Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.” – Nikola Tesla
Sometimes love can get in the way of seeing the infeasibility of an idea. It's actually commonly known that inventors falling in love with their inventions is the primary cause of failure to launch. If you add large amounts of money to that scenario, you just get a bigger blast radius when the invention blows up.
It's actually 200x less, not that that doesn't still prove our point:) The widely accepted all-up cost for urban freeway construction is $3 million per mile; that drops in half between cities. So conservatively it's 2.1 orders of magnitude cheaper than solar.
It's a prototype and will likely fail, but there's a slim chance it might work out and at the very least something will be learned that might apply to other technologies.
Great. Then let SR fail with THEIR OWN MONEY! Stop guzzling from the public trough. It's a proven fact that the government cannot successfully fund innovation. Steve Jobs revolutionized seven industries and created the most valuable company in the world with ZERO government investment. J. Craig Venter sequenced the human genome from scratch in three years while a room full of government researchers frittered away thirteen.
The government dole landscape is littered with dozens of government-failed green-energy startups that burned through "billions and billions" of dollars without a single genuine success story. These projects start out promising, but they promise much that they never deliver.
They are windfalls for the startups right up to the implosion. Then everyone loses.
AmiJoJo: Your anecdotal math doesn't mean anything, because you're not comparing apples to apples. Colas cost claims are all meaningless unless they're backed with data: bills of materials, labor costs, maintenance expense, measured power output. Colas hasn't provided any of that, and despite your worrying about the 7000-euro post hole, the fact is that the known cost for a mile of freeway in the US is $3 million per mile, and the known cost for a real-world solar road is $3.7 million per 100 meters. Until Colas presents real numbers showing how that $3.7M/100m can be cut by a factor of 200,to be "competitive", then they can pound glass. They're just generating hot air.
Cite the testing and data that this works. Apart from SR's glorified thought experiment on their web site, I can find zero empirical testing of the ice-melting concept.
I'm all for privately funded research. But SR has turned into a government-funded boondoggle. They've raised more in government funds than they did with IndieGoGo. It's true that invention entails a lot of failure. It's also true that where the government funds invention, everyone fails.
Transami, I recommend you go read the Solar Roadways website. I think you'll find that your "recollection" is incorrect. All SR has done is some mathematical modeling and a static load test. From their site: "The glass has undergone both 3D Finite Element Method analysis and actual physical load testing at civil engineering labs. The results showed that Solar Roadways can handle trucks up to 250,000lbs." That last statement of theirs is unfounded, as SR has done ZERO real world testing, either of durability or reliability.
Then they claim "The final testing results showed the texture was sufficient to stop a vehicle going 80mph (129kph) on a wet surface in the required distance." Really? What weight vehicles were tested? Where are the raw test data? Who conducted the testing, and what were the test conditions? SR provides zero documentation for their claims. Later they say they can "stop a car" going 80mph. So they can't stop a much heavier truck? How does this compare with real roadways? And is texture the only variable to consider? What about wet vs dry, hot vs cold, clean vs dirty? This testing would take a reputable lab tens of millions of dollars to complete, yet SR has only raised a few million, much of that from government grants. So they haven't even had the money necessary to do testing that would support the claims they're already making.
I doubt you can support your statement that the cost is no more than the added infrastructure cost to make solar canopies. If you can, please cite sources or provide data. The same goes for your ice-melting claim: where's the data? How much energy, specifically, goes into heating? What is the cost of that energy at night when it must come from the grid? SR has nothing.
They are building the wright flyer, so they can learn to build the sopwith camel, so they can learn to build the...
But the Wright Brothers paid for their invention themselves. They received no government funding. In fact, they couldn't even sell their airplane to the government until it had proven itself.
I'm glad you brought up the Wrights, though, as their story illustrates perfectly why solar projects (or any green energy initiative) should not be government funded. Dr. Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution used a $70,000 U.S. government grant (equal to $1.5 million in today's dollars) to design and build an airplane. He had prestige. He had presumed expertise. He had popular support. Yet his catapult-launched plane crashed into the Potomac River, "like a handful of mortar," on its maiden flight. The design itself was proven to be unworkable. Yet the government continued to spend money because, well, they had money left in the budget.
The Wright brothers successfully flew their aircraft nine days later, and all of its design was proven to be useful. Langley, meanwhile, laid the blame for his failure on "inadequate" Federal funding. Like today, however, the government lied and tried to bury the Wrights. The Smithsonian put on display not the Wright Flyer, but the Curtis Aerodrome in its museum, as "the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight". The government, including the Smithsonian, then sued to invalidate the Wrights' patent, citing the imprimatur of the venerable Smithsonian.
The government can always be counted on to squander the public's money on untried ideas, and then lie about the outcome. Always.
Jxander: I wouldn't complain if SolarRoads were only spending their own indigogo capital on this idea with little more than wishful thinking rather than actual data. But they are gorging themselves at the public trough, which means citizens are funding the Sandpoint boondoggle.
Capitalism works well at filtering bad ideas, because a company that can't deliver can't persist. Ideas are proven in the marketplace. But once the bottomless well of government funding enters the mix, all parties are motivated to keep pouring money down a rathole, just to save face. Like the gambler thinking the next bet will save his house, the government has proven incapable of recognizing and defunding failures:
Solyndra. First Solar. SunPower. SpectraWatt. Fisker Automotive. Willard and Kelsey. Bright Source. GreenVolts.
Each of these green-eyed startups lost at least a half-billion dollars, totaling more than $7 billion in unrequited taxes. This doesn't include other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies, which more than doubles the amount of taxpayer money these companies have squandered.
So pardon me for demanding that we immediately stop giving public money to the utterly unscientific boondoggle that is Solar Roads.
AmiJoJo, You keep saying solar paving is just a minor cost addition to normal road maintenance costs, but you never provide any actual numbers. The only demonstrated cost of a solar road is $3.7 million per 100 meters (Dutch SolaRoad), while the cost for building a freeway from scratch is only $3 million per mile.
If Colas has "clerkly though about this", where is their cost data? Where are their test results? Where is their durability study? Colas looks to me like a giant tic getting ready to tap into a huge vein of socialist French tax money. To say that a company that builds roads has no conflict of interest in a publicly-funded unproven 1000-KM technology rollout is like saying Bill Clinton has no conflict of interest in Chinese-funded speaking gigs while Senator Clinton was negotiating with Beijing.
Please provide a reference to these "modular road surfaces" in Japan. I can find nothing on the InterWebs about it, and none of my Japanese friends have heard of this. If it exists, it's a well-kept secret (like Godzilla?)
All of which they will recoup with increased tax revenue from tourists visiting to see the installation and spending money in the local shops and restaurants.
Ha ha! Maybe. "Come see the world's largest ball of red tape!" This gives new meaning to the phrase "highway robbery."
I don't know where you're getting your data, but "actual material cost" is hundreds of times more expensive than with conventional roads. The Dutch SolaRoad project reported a $3.7 million cost per 100 meters, without maintenance. The cost to build a highway is $3 million per mile in the urban U.S. (and half that in rural areas). Thus solar roadways are 200 times more costly than conventional roads. And solar roadways require the construction of a conventional road first, so it's pointless to compare these costs as if they were a trade off.
Cola won't reveal its cost details, or their test data. Neither will Idaho's Solar Roadways. Yet both are spending public money to fund their unsupported design premises.
Solar can possibly work in roadway medians, elevated and angled to gain the most efficient light capture. But not as a driving surface. And certainly not as a cheaper surface.
If you have other data (and I mean data, not wishful thinking), present it.
Are you kidding me? The City of Sandpoint donated many hours of maintenance and city planning staff hours for preparation work at the site, not to mention real estate, to give Solar Roadways a prime downtown public demonstration venue. According to the City Council meeting minutes, the project was funded by city-donated employee labor ($10,000), the State of Idaho Department of Commerce ($47,134), and the Sandpoint Urban Renewal Agency ($10,000). The City also provided infrastructure to back feed energy to the power grid, and is staffing the ongoing system programming with its own employees. The city absorbed unexpected contingencies, such as when city workers discovered the sand bed couldn't support level tiles, so they had have to pull them out and start over.
Naysayers were brushed aside in the excitement to be the first demonstration site for this mathematically unsupportable technology. At least one city council member had problems seeing this as a public benefit The project passed a funding vote marginally, 3:2.
This is what's known in municipal circles as "as sweetheart deal."
uPNP is the culprit in most cases. It lets IOT devices unilaterally open holes in firewalls. The thing is, there is no reason to do so, as IoT devices should only need to "phone home", which doesn't require inbound access.
The second vector is viruses that invade a home user's desktop computer, and then scan for, and infect, IoT devices. This is much harder to protect against, as ISPs can't scan through the firewall. What would be helpful is a downloadable tool to let users run their own IoT vulnerability assessment. I notice that commercial tools, such as Nessus, still haven't woken up to this threat.
A model based upon data and able to predict future observations is, well, by definition a demonstration of the validity of a hypothesis
That's a bold assertion. I can find no support for it in the literature. Since you're making the assertion, you have the burden of proof. Prove away, preferably by citing a simulation model that satisfies your assertion.
Here are some requirements you should make sure your candidate model meets:
* How do you know the model makes accurate predictions for all possible valid inputs? Hint: This is a subset of the general problem of proving software correctness, which is currently unsolved.
* How do you know the model includes all required variables? A missed variable can lead to some correct results, but spectacularly incorrect ones, such as every climate model that failed to predict the 15-year “hiatus” in global warming.
* Is the model falsifiable? This is a requirement for any analytical method to be classified as scientific. If your candidate model doesn't explicitly specify what evidence would falsify it, it's not scientific, and hence disqualified.
If your assertion is true, you should be able to find a model and the hypothesis it "confirms" practically at random. So not a tough job for you, if you're right.
Slashdot Mirror
"...it takes roughly 165 pounds of raw mined materials to make the average cell phone..."
In the meantime, it takes roughly 1996.3 pounds of labor-intensive grown food per year to grow the human brain that thought up this brainless argument.
And that, indeed, is a tragedy.
"This is someone dealing with grief..."
Thanks for admitting that it's not artificial intelligence.
"When Her Best Friend Died, She Rebuilt Him Using Artificial Intelligence"
We're supposed to not be critical of this ridiculous statement in deference to the feelings of someone who lost a love one? That's a new low in Slashdot publishing
Ranbot: you apparently missed the history that SR has also burned through two $750K Federal grants. That, combined with other government funds, makes the government SR's primary investor. Now, on the basis of proving nothing, SR is on the verge of burning through much more tax money. Government-funded innovation rarely, if ever, works. In the rare cases it does (e.g., ARPAnet) there is plenty of early evidence that the fundamental assumptions are correct. That evidence is missing with SR, with plenty of evidence to the contrary, and we've already started flushing serious public bucks down the toilet.
Who wouldn't like lunch on the moon? Think about the prestige you'll get. My new business Lunar Roadways is paving a path to a moony restaurant that will, ahem, eclipse all earthy establishments. Yes, there are some technical details to work out. But if Marconi and Tesl... er Edison had listened to the Debbie Downers, we'd have no radio and we'd not have it in the dark.
On this here napkin I've sketched out the key astronomical constants, solid fuel prices, launch pad costs per square foot, and my five-year revenue projection. True, the first few lunch dates will be expensive, but this is all proven technology. NASA went to the moon no fewer than several times, and when you factor in economies of scale, my Lunar Lunch Shuttle will be competitive -- on a per-mile basis -- with Uber.
The population of the earth is 7.2 billion people. If only half of these want to dine lunarly, that's 3.6 billion customers, nearly as many as McDonalds. Figure $100 a seat not counting meal service, and we're talking 3.5 TRILLION dollars of income. It's widely known that with trillions of dollars you can do anything. And we haven't even factored in repeat business!
Is it green, you ask? It's green! All those people off the earth will cut CO2 emissions by up to a lot! I have done testing with people in walk-in refrigerators, which proves it.
I've raised a couple million dollars already on my IndieNoNo campaign, from people who like to gamble and don't understand basic mathematics. I'm on the verge of securing government funding, thanks to the Really Great Idea of the Year award from Popular Mechanics.
Get in on this rocket ship (literally) while there's still room!
“I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success . . . Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.” – Nikola Tesla
Sometimes love can get in the way of seeing the infeasibility of an idea. It's actually commonly known that inventors falling in love with their inventions is the primary cause of failure to launch. If you add large amounts of money to that scenario, you just get a bigger blast radius when the invention blows up.
It's actually 200x less, not that that doesn't still prove our point :) The widely accepted all-up cost for urban freeway construction is $3 million per mile; that drops in half between cities. So conservatively it's 2.1 orders of magnitude cheaper than solar.
The going rate for freeway construction averages $3 million PER MILE. It's way, way cheaper than solar roadways. Way. Cheaper.
It's a prototype and will likely fail, but there's a slim chance it might work out and at the very least something will be learned that might apply to other technologies.
Great. Then let SR fail with THEIR OWN MONEY! Stop guzzling from the public trough. It's a proven fact that the government cannot successfully fund innovation. Steve Jobs revolutionized seven industries and created the most valuable company in the world with ZERO government investment. J. Craig Venter sequenced the human genome from scratch in three years while a room full of government researchers frittered away thirteen.
The government dole landscape is littered with dozens of government-failed green-energy startups that burned through "billions and billions" of dollars without a single genuine success story. These projects start out promising, but they promise much that they never deliver.
They are windfalls for the startups right up to the implosion. Then everyone loses.
AmiJoJo: Your anecdotal math doesn't mean anything, because you're not comparing apples to apples. Colas cost claims are all meaningless unless they're backed with data: bills of materials, labor costs, maintenance expense, measured power output. Colas hasn't provided any of that, and despite your worrying about the 7000-euro post hole, the fact is that the known cost for a mile of freeway in the US is $3 million per mile, and the known cost for a real-world solar road is $3.7 million per 100 meters. Until Colas presents real numbers showing how that $3.7M/100m can be cut by a factor of 200,to be "competitive", then they can pound glass. They're just generating hot air.
Cite the testing and data that this works. Apart from SR's glorified thought experiment on their web site, I can find zero empirical testing of the ice-melting concept.
I'm all for privately funded research. But SR has turned into a government-funded boondoggle. They've raised more in government funds than they did with IndieGoGo. It's true that invention entails a lot of failure. It's also true that where the government funds invention, everyone fails.
Transami, I recommend you go read the Solar Roadways website. I think you'll find that your "recollection" is incorrect. All SR has done is some mathematical modeling and a static load test. From their site: "The glass has undergone both 3D Finite Element Method analysis and actual physical load testing at civil engineering labs. The results showed that Solar Roadways can handle trucks up to 250,000lbs." That last statement of theirs is unfounded, as SR has done ZERO real world testing, either of durability or reliability.
Then they claim "The final testing results showed the texture was sufficient to stop a vehicle going 80mph (129kph) on a wet surface in the required distance." Really? What weight vehicles were tested? Where are the raw test data? Who conducted the testing, and what were the test conditions? SR provides zero documentation for their claims. Later they say they can "stop a car" going 80mph. So they can't stop a much heavier truck? How does this compare with real roadways? And is texture the only variable to consider? What about wet vs dry, hot vs cold, clean vs dirty? This testing would take a reputable lab tens of millions of dollars to complete, yet SR has only raised a few million, much of that from government grants. So they haven't even had the money necessary to do testing that would support the claims they're already making.
I doubt you can support your statement that the cost is no more than the added infrastructure cost to make solar canopies. If you can, please cite sources or provide data. The same goes for your ice-melting claim: where's the data? How much energy, specifically, goes into heating? What is the cost of that energy at night when it must come from the grid? SR has nothing.
They are building the wright flyer, so they can learn to build the sopwith camel, so they can learn to build the...
But the Wright Brothers paid for their invention themselves. They received no government funding. In fact, they couldn't even sell their airplane to the government until it had proven itself.
I'm glad you brought up the Wrights, though, as their story illustrates perfectly why solar projects (or any green energy initiative) should not be government funded. Dr. Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution used a $70,000 U.S. government grant (equal to $1.5 million in today's dollars) to design and build an airplane. He had prestige. He had presumed expertise. He had popular support. Yet his catapult-launched plane crashed into the Potomac River, "like a handful of mortar," on its maiden flight. The design itself was proven to be unworkable. Yet the government continued to spend money because, well, they had money left in the budget.
The Wright brothers successfully flew their aircraft nine days later, and all of its design was proven to be useful. Langley, meanwhile, laid the blame for his failure on "inadequate" Federal funding. Like today, however, the government lied and tried to bury the Wrights. The Smithsonian put on display not the Wright Flyer, but the Curtis Aerodrome in its museum, as "the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight". The government, including the Smithsonian, then sued to invalidate the Wrights' patent, citing the imprimatur of the venerable Smithsonian.
The government can always be counted on to squander the public's money on untried ideas, and then lie about the outcome. Always.
Jxander: I wouldn't complain if SolarRoads were only spending their own indigogo capital on this idea with little more than wishful thinking rather than actual data. But they are gorging themselves at the public trough, which means citizens are funding the Sandpoint boondoggle.
Capitalism works well at filtering bad ideas, because a company that can't deliver can't persist. Ideas are proven in the marketplace. But once the bottomless well of government funding enters the mix, all parties are motivated to keep pouring money down a rathole, just to save face. Like the gambler thinking the next bet will save his house, the government has proven incapable of recognizing and defunding failures:
Solyndra.
First Solar.
SunPower.
SpectraWatt.
Fisker Automotive.
Willard and Kelsey.
Bright Source.
GreenVolts.
Each of these green-eyed startups lost at least a half-billion dollars, totaling more than $7 billion in unrequited taxes. This doesn't include other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies, which more than doubles the amount of taxpayer money these companies have squandered.
So pardon me for demanding that we immediately stop giving public money to the utterly unscientific boondoggle that is Solar Roads.
AmiJoJo, You keep saying solar paving is just a minor cost addition to normal road maintenance costs, but you never provide any actual numbers. The only demonstrated cost of a solar road is $3.7 million per 100 meters (Dutch SolaRoad), while the cost for building a freeway from scratch is only $3 million per mile.
Provide proof for your pudding.
If Colas has "clerkly though about this", where is their cost data? Where are their test results? Where is their durability study? Colas looks to me like a giant tic getting ready to tap into a huge vein of socialist French tax money. To say that a company that builds roads has no conflict of interest in a publicly-funded unproven 1000-KM technology rollout is like saying Bill Clinton has no conflict of interest in Chinese-funded speaking gigs while Senator Clinton was negotiating with Beijing.
Please provide a reference to these "modular road surfaces" in Japan. I can find nothing on the InterWebs about it, and none of my Japanese friends have heard of this. If it exists, it's a well-kept secret (like Godzilla?)
All of which they will recoup with increased tax revenue from tourists visiting to see the installation and spending money in the local shops and restaurants.
Ha ha! Maybe. "Come see the world's largest ball of red tape!" This gives new meaning to the phrase "highway robbery."
I don't know where you're getting your data, but "actual material cost" is hundreds of times more expensive than with conventional roads. The Dutch SolaRoad project reported a $3.7 million cost per 100 meters, without maintenance. The cost to build a highway is $3 million per mile in the urban U.S. (and half that in rural areas). Thus solar roadways are 200 times more costly than conventional roads. And solar roadways require the construction of a conventional road first, so it's pointless to compare these costs as if they were a trade off.
Cola won't reveal its cost details, or their test data. Neither will Idaho's Solar Roadways. Yet both are spending public money to fund their unsupported design premises.
Solar can possibly work in roadway medians, elevated and angled to gain the most efficient light capture. But not as a driving surface. And certainly not as a cheaper surface.
If you have other data (and I mean data, not wishful thinking), present it.
Are you kidding me? The City of Sandpoint donated many hours of maintenance and city planning staff hours for preparation work at the site, not to mention real estate, to give Solar Roadways a prime downtown public demonstration venue. According to the City Council meeting minutes, the project was funded by city-donated employee labor ($10,000), the State of Idaho Department of Commerce ($47,134), and the Sandpoint Urban Renewal Agency ($10,000). The City also provided infrastructure to back feed energy to the power grid, and is staffing the ongoing system programming with its own employees. The city absorbed unexpected contingencies, such as when city workers discovered the sand bed couldn't support level tiles, so they had have to pull them out and start over.
Naysayers were brushed aside in the excitement to be the first demonstration site for this mathematically unsupportable technology. At least one city council member had problems seeing this as a public benefit The project passed a funding vote marginally, 3:2.
This is what's known in municipal circles as "as sweetheart deal."
Fine. In the meantime, don't make the public pay for it.
It doesn't work out: https://youtu.be/6-ZSXB3KDF0 (EEVBlog video debunking the concept7)
uPNP is the culprit in most cases. It lets IOT devices unilaterally open holes in firewalls. The thing is, there is no reason to do so, as IoT devices should only need to "phone home", which doesn't require inbound access. The second vector is viruses that invade a home user's desktop computer, and then scan for, and infect, IoT devices. This is much harder to protect against, as ISPs can't scan through the firewall. What would be helpful is a downloadable tool to let users run their own IoT vulnerability assessment. I notice that commercial tools, such as Nessus, still haven't woken up to this threat.
A model based upon data and able to predict future observations is, well, by definition a demonstration of the validity of a hypothesis
That's a bold assertion. I can find no support for it in the literature. Since you're making the assertion, you have the burden of proof. Prove away, preferably by citing a simulation model that satisfies your assertion.
Here are some requirements you should make sure your candidate model meets:
* How do you know the model makes accurate predictions for all possible valid inputs? Hint: This is a subset of the general problem of proving software correctness, which is currently unsolved.
* How do you know the model includes all required variables? A missed variable can lead to some correct results, but spectacularly incorrect ones, such as every climate model that failed to predict the 15-year “hiatus” in global warming.
* Is the model falsifiable? This is a requirement for any analytical method to be classified as scientific. If your candidate model doesn't explicitly specify what evidence would falsify it, it's not scientific, and hence disqualified.
If your assertion is true, you should be able to find a model and the hypothesis it "confirms" practically at random. So not a tough job for you, if you're right.