Solar panels in orbit work great for powering the electronics of the satellite they're attached to. They're not ever going to be efficient for delivering ground-based power because the energy required to lift them to orbit is something like billions x the power they could provide over their lifetime.
A price of $200 per barrel translates to a cost of something like $7 per gallon. Which would put it on par with the price of the bottle of tap water you buy when you fill up. Perspective, it's important.
We're not leaving anything in the ground until it's used up. Increasing scarcity will drive the price up, and when the price goes up to where common folk won't bear it, we'll turn over the governments that won't take it by force. That's the sort of selfish critters we are.
Someday crude oil will be reserved for manufacture of lubricants - but not until we've burned almost all of the extractable sources.
Now that the "Arab Spring" has installed puppet governments in most of the Middle East, America's oil problems should be settled for a good while. We should probably make friends with Brazil though, just to be safe. They've just discovered some offshore deposits that look to be huge, and they've got no use for it because they converted to alcohol years ago.
Well, for some values of "evenutally," maybe. But we still have something like two-thirds of all discovered fossil fuels left to burn, and we've not begun to investigate the arctic circle, the antarctic basin, some deeper reservoirs, methane clathrates on the ocean floors, permafrost hydrocarbons, limestone catalysis, and some other things I forget. The future is quite far, but I'm OK with that. I kind of like our CO2 blanket and the end of the glaciation cycle it means to me.
Unfortunately for Canada in addition to vast reserves of most of these things, they also have a million times more geothermal resources than they need - and a great donut franchise. There's also that hydroponic technology that delivers fantastic tomatoes and marijuana up there where such things should not grow - clearly captured alien technologies that must be distributed to the needy corporations of the lower 48. This clearly means that they're holding out on us and annexation is for the greater good. Canada will like the NFL I think. It's like soccer, with less substance and more strikes - but the same sense of entitlement on the part of franchise owners.
I'm hearing May, which is like 6 months - not "literally a year". The 4s was a stopgap to get the Q4 trade because the fabs weren't ready with the quad-core chips and the hi-rez screens. Tegra 3 and other quad-core Android phones will be out at MWC in February and Apple can hardly wait 6 months after that if they want to stay a premium brand. Innovation in mobile is still accelerating (thank goodness!) Let's be thankful for competition.
But the answers are "quad core, SDHC, HDMI 1080p, porn apps, Flash, keyboard, kickstand, smartbook dock, Tegra 3" and of course the golden "choice of form factors and prices".
There's a certain amount of truth in this. People, and their fingers, come in different sizes, different visual acuities. Some are more graceful than others. Some have purses to carry their phones in, some shirt pockets, some cargo pockets. Some prefer a physical keyboard, others a choice of onscreen keyboards. Some need a cheaper phone to suit their wallet, some more battery life, some more storage, some the slimmest possible device. In Android serving these needs is called "choice." On other platforms it's called "fragmentation" and is held to diminish the main.
The Jobsian vision is to make the one best phone they can, and continue to make several historical revisions. This increases economies of scale and hence margins. It simplifies developer needs and update complexity so that one app works on all phones and updates can be swift and sure. It gives a great experience if it suits your needs, and the design is engineered toward a human curve that should fit most. Because it delivers a premium experience for the people it's engineered for they can charge a premium price for it. But if your needs diverge from this solid design that suits most: too bad.
I wouldn't say Jobs' design philosophies are falling down here. By all reports these devices serve so many people so well that customer satisfaction is as high as any product gets, for all products, for all time. Apparently the engineers are masters of the standard deviation and excel at serving huge numbers of people with what they want, even before the people themselves know what that is. And hence the devices are as profitable as consumer products get and then 6x times that. So much so that they gather an estimated two thirds of the profits in the smartphone trade with something like 20 percent of sales. I would call that a win both for Apple and for their well-served customers.
But if it's not for you, it's not. Apparently there are other companies eager to serve the outliers on the curve like you and me. So many in fact that you can find a phone to suit any conceivable assortment of needs that aren't contradictory. These phones can't run the proprietary iOS, but they do run software deemed by many to be close enough in utility and with a grand assortment of applications. In their eagerness to please these phone vendors get bold and try seriously crazy things: pico projectors, 5" screens, detachable keyboards, gamepads for keyboards, phones that dock to a tablet or smartbook, HDMI 1080p outputs, all kinds of stuff. Some of these extreme solutions become niche markets that don't sell many units - on some of them the manufacturer loses money. In general they're not as profitable as iPhone, but it beats earning $10 on a $200 laptop, or $3 on a BluRay player - and it's honest work.
Like many commodity shortages this one is aggravated by hoarding. The hoarders will likely suffer as they usually do, by overpaying. Some few will make a killing by gouging late hoarders. Eventually things straighten out.
I would encourage the moderators of the parent not to look on it as a comment on the fine article, but as a short story in its own right that hopes to be relevant to the article. It's a stone bitch to get a short story into so few words. And for this commentary, mod it as you will.
Goddamn, but she gave good head. "It's not really you" she said. "It's a recording of you."
Well Fuck You bitch. You're not out here between the stars freezing your virtual ass off. Would have killed mission control to grant my virtual self a virtual beej now and then?
Look, I wasn't shitting. It turns out that even the most efficient human propulsion, the bicycle, cannot compete with the Hummer for efficiency on net inputs. The good thing about the bicycle is that it encourages you to work someplace that's close enough to bike to. You could defeat this efficiency by just living in the attic of your office, and then you wouldn't have to commute at all. You could just slide down the pole in the morning. That's the most efficent way.
That's why the most efficient factories in the world are cities unto themselves where workers sleep as close as possible to their workstations. There are some downsides though, like the anti-suicide nets.
Well, you've invoked Godwin's law, so you lose and the discussion is over. I'm going to respond anyway.
It's reasonable to expect that if modern or post-modern technologies were present in prior ages they would have penetrated to Africa, the Phillipines, China and India where the people went and survived to the present day and there would be some evidence remaining even across 100,000 years of glaciation which didn't reach those climes, so obviously the lost tech theorists are a bit wacky. It's not disputable that miles-high glaciers have scraped away remnants of prior human habitation from Europe, Russia and North America - it's one of the biggest bugbears of anthropology that the best evidence is lost to glaciation. It's indisputable that some value has been lost, but we know not what - no more than future generations 120k years hence will know much about our current culture and science across a glacial age. They'll find iPods but not know what they were for. But if prior generations had iPod equivalents, we would know at least that they did.
That much was lost was indisputable, but ancient tech seems unlikely to meet or exceed current levels or we would remember, as some of us persist. That ancient tech was higher than we ascribe seems likely,
As for your DNA analysis assertion, you're not well read on the current matter. I would recommend looking a bit beyond your current library, which may be a bit focused on a political or social objective. Look wide and judge for yourself, Mom used to say.
You need not ask for citations. Most of this is in the OSM for the study, and the rest is well understood. What sets these sensitivity limits are that the model goes to snowball Earth if either end of the range is exceeded.
At some point the device has to decrypt the stream into "Frame begin. Scanline begin. red pixel, 12.43%. green pixel, 0.004%. blue pixel 48.32%. red pixel,..." And that's the end of that story.
This is actually covered in the online reference material for the study.
You see, we live in an "interglacial" period. These last about 12,000 years on the average, but can be much shorter. We've been in this one about 12,000 years, and it's about 9,700 years from the climate maximum called "Holocene optimum" that is roughly the "10,000 years" you're talking about it took those glaciers to form. Humans were not responsible for the Holocene optimum. Interglacial periods are times when the glaciers melt, and they occur naturally. They are sort of a "warm break" from the normal condition which is icy glaciers covering most of the land masses of the planet that last on average 100,000 years. It was this cooling trend, also not caused by man, that caused the formation of these lovely glaciers. Up until about the year 1750 we were headed back into a glacial period and approaching the global trigger temperature at which the climate abruptly shifts into glacial mode, and land surface temperatures abruptly drop by about 8C. Current theories have these interglacial periods caused by orbital dynamics, shifting of water flows in the oceans, solar variability, or other causes - but not by man since they've been going on for far longer than men were numerous enough to induce this much global change.
Some might argue that those glaciers were a threat to mankind. They reflect solar energy back into space, which contributes to the cooling pattern.
These long periods of glaciation happening while Men have been around contribute to the isolation of large masses of populations in the temperate zones, leading to racial variations. Basically when the ice melts, men leave the climate zones they've been trapped in and wander about, becoming trapped in new equatorial regions as the cold kills off the vast bulk of the population and the isolated populations diverge slightly from each other. When the ice thaws the isolated populations find each other again and either intermingle or kill each other off. Usually both.
You need not mourn your glaciers - they're receding now but sooner or later they'll be back. When they come back they're going to kill almost all of us because you can't grow crops on a glacier. The only way they could be stopped is to increase global concentrations of CO2 by something like 6 x, returning the atmosphere to conditions prevalent a half-million years ago when temperate climes could last for millions of years. Among other things, these glaciers wipe away the history of what has gone before - vertical miles of ice scrape away almost all evidence that we were here, powdering our settlements and depositing the powder into the sea. The sustainable human population of the earth drops down to a few hundred million or less.
I don't think we have enough fossil fuels to prevent a return of glaciation. Even if we did the glaciers eventually win as the biosphere contains an unimaginable mass of photosynthethic plants in the ocean working aggressively to restore the CO2 balance to glacier-inducing levels. To offset that we would have to start burning limestone and marble too - and they're not useful as fuels.
When the shift back to the cold comes it will come suddenly enough that we'll know it's happening but be powerless to stop it. Given our current level of technology that may be the end of us. I don't foresee seven billion humans just agreeing to go quietly into the dark.
Since it was me who wrote that, I suppose I should reply. The existence of the Streisand effect is well-known but should be more publicized. Lawyers are just not good at shutting people up. The blowback from unleashing the lawyers on people can have far more disastrous consequences than making a mistake and fixing it - it can scuttle a whole company that has unquestionably good parts as well as one that's being questioned. I think it's important that responsible people understand that because it saves everybody a lot of trouble and outrage, it saves the jobs and products unrelated to the issue.
I think CarrierIQ press release is brilliantly done. I have no doubt they'll use more care to guard privacy and engage the public openly when there are questions from now on. And I think the world's going to forgive and forget, mostly.
If the nuclear industry were willing to retire more of these T-Rex reactors before they blow up, people might be less resistant to letting them build new ones. But they aren't.
Bikes consume even more fossil fuels than a Hummer. It turns out you're a really inefficient engine for propulsion, and while you don't consume fossil fuels, the things you consume do.
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Solar panels in orbit work great for powering the electronics of the satellite they're attached to. They're not ever going to be efficient for delivering ground-based power because the energy required to lift them to orbit is something like billions x the power they could provide over their lifetime.
A price of $200 per barrel translates to a cost of something like $7 per gallon. Which would put it on par with the price of the bottle of tap water you buy when you fill up. Perspective, it's important.
We're not leaving anything in the ground until it's used up. Increasing scarcity will drive the price up, and when the price goes up to where common folk won't bear it, we'll turn over the governments that won't take it by force. That's the sort of selfish critters we are.
Someday crude oil will be reserved for manufacture of lubricants - but not until we've burned almost all of the extractable sources.
Now that the "Arab Spring" has installed puppet governments in most of the Middle East, America's oil problems should be settled for a good while. We should probably make friends with Brazil though, just to be safe. They've just discovered some offshore deposits that look to be huge, and they've got no use for it because they converted to alcohol years ago.
Well, for some values of "evenutally," maybe. But we still have something like two-thirds of all discovered fossil fuels left to burn, and we've not begun to investigate the arctic circle, the antarctic basin, some deeper reservoirs, methane clathrates on the ocean floors, permafrost hydrocarbons, limestone catalysis, and some other things I forget. The future is quite far, but I'm OK with that. I kind of like our CO2 blanket and the end of the glaciation cycle it means to me.
Unfortunately for Canada in addition to vast reserves of most of these things, they also have a million times more geothermal resources than they need - and a great donut franchise. There's also that hydroponic technology that delivers fantastic tomatoes and marijuana up there where such things should not grow - clearly captured alien technologies that must be distributed to the needy corporations of the lower 48. This clearly means that they're holding out on us and annexation is for the greater good. Canada will like the NFL I think. It's like soccer, with less substance and more strikes - but the same sense of entitlement on the part of franchise owners.
This. Apple will never sell a phone or tablet that uses a stylus.
I'm hearing May, which is like 6 months - not "literally a year". The 4s was a stopgap to get the Q4 trade because the fabs weren't ready with the quad-core chips and the hi-rez screens. Tegra 3 and other quad-core Android phones will be out at MWC in February and Apple can hardly wait 6 months after that if they want to stay a premium brand. Innovation in mobile is still accelerating (thank goodness!) Let's be thankful for competition.
But the answers are "quad core, SDHC, HDMI 1080p, porn apps, Flash, keyboard, kickstand, smartbook dock, Tegra 3" and of course the golden "choice of form factors and prices".
There's a certain amount of truth in this. People, and their fingers, come in different sizes, different visual acuities. Some are more graceful than others. Some have purses to carry their phones in, some shirt pockets, some cargo pockets. Some prefer a physical keyboard, others a choice of onscreen keyboards. Some need a cheaper phone to suit their wallet, some more battery life, some more storage, some the slimmest possible device. In Android serving these needs is called "choice." On other platforms it's called "fragmentation" and is held to diminish the main.
The Jobsian vision is to make the one best phone they can, and continue to make several historical revisions. This increases economies of scale and hence margins. It simplifies developer needs and update complexity so that one app works on all phones and updates can be swift and sure. It gives a great experience if it suits your needs, and the design is engineered toward a human curve that should fit most. Because it delivers a premium experience for the people it's engineered for they can charge a premium price for it. But if your needs diverge from this solid design that suits most: too bad.
I wouldn't say Jobs' design philosophies are falling down here. By all reports these devices serve so many people so well that customer satisfaction is as high as any product gets, for all products, for all time. Apparently the engineers are masters of the standard deviation and excel at serving huge numbers of people with what they want, even before the people themselves know what that is. And hence the devices are as profitable as consumer products get and then 6x times that. So much so that they gather an estimated two thirds of the profits in the smartphone trade with something like 20 percent of sales. I would call that a win both for Apple and for their well-served customers.
But if it's not for you, it's not. Apparently there are other companies eager to serve the outliers on the curve like you and me. So many in fact that you can find a phone to suit any conceivable assortment of needs that aren't contradictory. These phones can't run the proprietary iOS, but they do run software deemed by many to be close enough in utility and with a grand assortment of applications. In their eagerness to please these phone vendors get bold and try seriously crazy things: pico projectors, 5" screens, detachable keyboards, gamepads for keyboards, phones that dock to a tablet or smartbook, HDMI 1080p outputs, all kinds of stuff. Some of these extreme solutions become niche markets that don't sell many units - on some of them the manufacturer loses money. In general they're not as profitable as iPhone, but it beats earning $10 on a $200 laptop, or $3 on a BluRay player - and it's honest work.
There's a submit story link on every page. Want better content? Click it.
Like many commodity shortages this one is aggravated by hoarding. The hoarders will likely suffer as they usually do, by overpaying. Some few will make a killing by gouging late hoarders. Eventually things straighten out.
Wait until W8. Supposedly its requirements are less than XP.
Reality is an illusion. Force is a deception. Power is a fantasy. Porn though, that's real.
I would encourage the moderators of the parent not to look on it as a comment on the fine article, but as a short story in its own right that hopes to be relevant to the article. It's a stone bitch to get a short story into so few words. And for this commentary, mod it as you will.
Goddamn, but she gave good head. "It's not really you" she said. "It's a recording of you."
Well Fuck You bitch. You're not out here between the stars freezing your virtual ass off. Would have killed mission control to grant my virtual self a virtual beej now and then?
Look, I wasn't shitting. It turns out that even the most efficient human propulsion, the bicycle, cannot compete with the Hummer for efficiency on net inputs. The good thing about the bicycle is that it encourages you to work someplace that's close enough to bike to. You could defeat this efficiency by just living in the attic of your office, and then you wouldn't have to commute at all. You could just slide down the pole in the morning. That's the most efficent way.
That's why the most efficient factories in the world are cities unto themselves where workers sleep as close as possible to their workstations. There are some downsides though, like the anti-suicide nets.
Well, you've invoked Godwin's law, so you lose and the discussion is over. I'm going to respond anyway.
It's reasonable to expect that if modern or post-modern technologies were present in prior ages they would have penetrated to Africa, the Phillipines, China and India where the people went and survived to the present day and there would be some evidence remaining even across 100,000 years of glaciation which didn't reach those climes, so obviously the lost tech theorists are a bit wacky. It's not disputable that miles-high glaciers have scraped away remnants of prior human habitation from Europe, Russia and North America - it's one of the biggest bugbears of anthropology that the best evidence is lost to glaciation. It's indisputable that some value has been lost, but we know not what - no more than future generations 120k years hence will know much about our current culture and science across a glacial age. They'll find iPods but not know what they were for. But if prior generations had iPod equivalents, we would know at least that they did.
That much was lost was indisputable, but ancient tech seems unlikely to meet or exceed current levels or we would remember, as some of us persist. That ancient tech was higher than we ascribe seems likely,
As for your DNA analysis assertion, you're not well read on the current matter. I would recommend looking a bit beyond your current library, which may be a bit focused on a political or social objective. Look wide and judge for yourself, Mom used to say.
While I would in general agree, sensor size has a lot to do with it also.
You need not ask for citations. Most of this is in the OSM for the study, and the rest is well understood. What sets these sensitivity limits are that the model goes to snowball Earth if either end of the range is exceeded.
For the win!
At some point the device has to decrypt the stream into "Frame begin. Scanline begin. red pixel, 12.43%. green pixel, 0.004%. blue pixel 48.32%. red pixel, ..." And that's the end of that story.
This is actually covered in the online reference material for the study.
You see, we live in an "interglacial" period. These last about 12,000 years on the average, but can be much shorter. We've been in this one about 12,000 years, and it's about 9,700 years from the climate maximum called "Holocene optimum" that is roughly the "10,000 years" you're talking about it took those glaciers to form. Humans were not responsible for the Holocene optimum. Interglacial periods are times when the glaciers melt, and they occur naturally. They are sort of a "warm break" from the normal condition which is icy glaciers covering most of the land masses of the planet that last on average 100,000 years. It was this cooling trend, also not caused by man, that caused the formation of these lovely glaciers. Up until about the year 1750 we were headed back into a glacial period and approaching the global trigger temperature at which the climate abruptly shifts into glacial mode, and land surface temperatures abruptly drop by about 8C. Current theories have these interglacial periods caused by orbital dynamics, shifting of water flows in the oceans, solar variability, or other causes - but not by man since they've been going on for far longer than men were numerous enough to induce this much global change.
Some might argue that those glaciers were a threat to mankind. They reflect solar energy back into space, which contributes to the cooling pattern.
These long periods of glaciation happening while Men have been around contribute to the isolation of large masses of populations in the temperate zones, leading to racial variations. Basically when the ice melts, men leave the climate zones they've been trapped in and wander about, becoming trapped in new equatorial regions as the cold kills off the vast bulk of the population and the isolated populations diverge slightly from each other. When the ice thaws the isolated populations find each other again and either intermingle or kill each other off. Usually both.
You need not mourn your glaciers - they're receding now but sooner or later they'll be back. When they come back they're going to kill almost all of us because you can't grow crops on a glacier. The only way they could be stopped is to increase global concentrations of CO2 by something like 6 x, returning the atmosphere to conditions prevalent a half-million years ago when temperate climes could last for millions of years. Among other things, these glaciers wipe away the history of what has gone before - vertical miles of ice scrape away almost all evidence that we were here, powdering our settlements and depositing the powder into the sea. The sustainable human population of the earth drops down to a few hundred million or less.
I don't think we have enough fossil fuels to prevent a return of glaciation. Even if we did the glaciers eventually win as the biosphere contains an unimaginable mass of photosynthethic plants in the ocean working aggressively to restore the CO2 balance to glacier-inducing levels. To offset that we would have to start burning limestone and marble too - and they're not useful as fuels.
When the shift back to the cold comes it will come suddenly enough that we'll know it's happening but be powerless to stop it. Given our current level of technology that may be the end of us. I don't foresee seven billion humans just agreeing to go quietly into the dark.
That'll work. Or even just shut down one old creaker and one coal plant for each three new nuclear plants - our energy needs aren't going to go down.
Work that into the plant approvals process and it looks like a winner.
Since it was me who wrote that, I suppose I should reply. The existence of the Streisand effect is well-known but should be more publicized. Lawyers are just not good at shutting people up. The blowback from unleashing the lawyers on people can have far more disastrous consequences than making a mistake and fixing it - it can scuttle a whole company that has unquestionably good parts as well as one that's being questioned. I think it's important that responsible people understand that because it saves everybody a lot of trouble and outrage, it saves the jobs and products unrelated to the issue.
I think CarrierIQ press release is brilliantly done. I have no doubt they'll use more care to guard privacy and engage the public openly when there are questions from now on. And I think the world's going to forgive and forget, mostly.
Lighten up, Francis.
If the nuclear industry were willing to retire more of these T-Rex reactors before they blow up, people might be less resistant to letting them build new ones. But they aren't.
Bikes consume even more fossil fuels than a Hummer. It turns out you're a really inefficient engine for propulsion, and while you don't consume fossil fuels, the things you consume do.