If you can project in advance exactly how much something will cost to build, that means by definition you're not doing anything novel because if you're doing anything new, you don't know what kinds of problems you'll run into.
Well, the VLHC would be novel, so there's gonna be unexpected costs.
Oh god, why did you have to mention Albert Lea to Rapid City? I was finally putting the neverending ads for Wall Drug out of my mind... Of course, a robot would ignore them and I'd have been reading, so that'd have been a plus...
The funny part is back in the old days of medicine doctors and researchers were interested in finding cures and creating cures. Today it is all about making a profit and continuing to make profits.
Yeah, greed is totally a modern invention brought about by The Evil Corporations. I think my eyes just rolled a full 360*.
All you'll do is generate a huge amount of data that adds nothing of value, because the data you're modelling from comes from the tiny pieces of data you already now, no *new* insight is gained from taking that data and modelling more copies of it.
Much like there's no point building weather prediction computers, since all we do is put data we already have from weather stations into them, and no point building FEM simulators for structural engineering since we already know how a single girder acts under stress.
Or... could it be that multiple simple elements can interact in ways that are not meaningfully predicted by an understanding of individual elements? NAW!
Oh, yes, wanting the kids you raise to be your own offspring can only be the result of a totem pole of arrogance up the ass. There's absolutely no biological or instinctual reason people might feel that way.
Zealots like you are the worst enemy of your cause, whatever unlucky cause you inflict yourselves upon.
Weather is what it is out right now. Feel free to dig through graphs of past temperature records, and you can satisfy yourself that no day of the year will have the same temperature, humidity, rainfall, or anything graph on two successive years. Climate is the time-averaged expectation value and ignores anything on shorter than several year scales at the very least.
It's not even that simple, as there are many characteristic timescales involved in the climate, not just one. For example, the pacific decadal oscillation and atlantic mean oscillation occur over decade timescales and have an enormous impact on rainfall levels throughout north america.
There's two big things that used to come out of fossil fuel smokestacks: CO2 and aerosols. CO2 increases the atmosphere's opacity to mid IR (thereby trapping heat), while aerosols scatter light in the upper atmosphere and generally prevent light/heat from reaching the surface.
Pollution controls have gone a long way towards reducing aerosol emissions, but CO2 continues to be dumped freely. So we see slight warming before the mid 20th century, then a levelling off, now expect faster warming.
Open source is a nice idea, but I'll take thoroughly documented, reliable PIC hardware and IDE over an Arduino any day of the week, but I'm getting off topic...
Just like to say, there's nothing inherently wrong with the Arduino's hardware (the fact that a stm32f4-series device of comparable price is about two orders of magnitude more powerful notwithstanding). But their silly "hide the reality of microcontrollers" IDE and most-C language made me intensely stabby.
I guess what I'm saying is, get an stm32. Or msp430 if you're ok writing in windows only.
In defense of "bury it," the sarcophagus at Chernobyl was built using late-Soviet era materials, under unbelievable constraints of time and construction difficulty. You try "doing it right" when your welders can literally work for about 15 minutes before they have to leave and never return, building structurally sound walls to support your dome is impossible, and all while knowing that every single vehicle and piece of equipment you bring in will have to be abandoned and left to rot because it's now Contaminated.
Any sarcophagus built at Fukushima will be as if construction at Chernobyl were to begin today: "This area is somewhat contaminated. Mind your dosimeter, wear your protective clothes, take a shower after every shift and don't lick your tools and you'll be fine. Oh, and smile for the tourists."
The power system you have now will be approximately the power system running when you die.
I think it's very unlikely that we'll still have gas to burn at the rate we're going by the 2090s. Coal, perhaps, but hopefully we won't be insanely stupid enough to completely and irreversibly rape our environment (dumping that much CO2 into the air would be a catastrophe beyond description due to ocean acidification) and then be left practically in the dark when everything except nuclear, hydro and solar becomes too expensive to fuel.
Fukushima, in short, has cesium contamination like Chernobyl (because cesium is volatile at low temperatures) but basically none of the heavy isotope contamination. So we can fast forward about 20 years on the recovery (virtually the entire open-air dose rate near Chernobyl is now Cesium decay). So while the radiation levels at Chernobyl have decreased from lethal to sorta-dangerous relatively quickly, it will still be another 120 years or so until they go from sorta-dangerous to pretty-much-not-dangerous.
Personally, I'd guess that around 2040 (one more Cs half-life) enough of the radiation from both Chernobyl and Fukushima will be gone, either truly due to decay or apparently by diffusing into the ground away from the surface, that there will be significant human return to much of the exclusion zones, although monitoring will have to be ongoing for a long time.
And yet, all the places in the world one who has the choice would actually want to live have tons of regulations, while the places whose names are synonymous with hell in the public zeitgeist have none or next to none.
It might have to do with how unrestrained human behavior creates problems when there are millions of them living in close quarters, and all those horrible, awful laws and taxes and regulations are our way of kinda making it work anyway.
See, that's what would take care of the gambling problem, couple that with dismantling the FDIC and all of a sudden you have people who actually would be worried about their banks and financial institutions and start evaluating risks and rewards based on real market signals.
1. Yeah, because Joe Average Worker really has time to monitor "real market signals" on the bank into which he deposits his paycheck once a week. We can't all be John Galt like you, so brilliant you can single-handedly be an expert in every kind of transaction you will ever engage in and have no reason to fear ever being defrauded.
2. It's funny because the FDIC was created when the exact opposite of what you appear to think will happen happened.
If you were in a foreign country and your image appeared on tv as the main suspect of an act of terror, would you hand yourself in of hide?
I think the campus security guard, the Mercedes owner who was carjacked and forced to withdraw cash at gunpoint, and the cops who were attacked with automatic weapons and explosives that the "possibly innocent suspect" just happened by pure chance to have on him, might disagree with the characterization of Dzhokhar's actions as a scared boy trying to hide.
Well the security guard won't I suppose, but that's because he's kind of dead. Which doesn't exactly go in the "wrongly accused and just trying to hide" column either.
Option 1: Police/govt over-react, nothing bad happens: Grumbling about over reaction
Option 2: Police/govt over-react, something bad still happens: Grumbling that still not enough was done
Option 3: Police/govt under-react, nothing bad happens: No problem
Option 4: Police/govt under-react, another attack happens: Everyone "responsible" as good as burnt alive at stake
In light of the potential outcome of option 4 (which based on what these psychopaths did before and during capture was altogether probable) risk-averse structures, like governments, will choose to over-react every time.
That's only the best commercially available. Since we're talking about what are currently lab fantasies here, why not consider triple-junction cells which have acheived efficiencies north of 50% (and which will never be commercially viable outside of cost-is-no-object because they're as insanely expensive to make as you might imagine)?
I succeeded in installing Gentoo and XCFE on a now 16 year old SGI Indy (one 150MHz MIPS R5K, 160MB 60ns ram, Fast SCSI HDD, framebuffer-only Linux graphics driver). It's not snappy by any means, and it makes it very obvious which programs "do it right" and which ones rely on hardware to cover up bad algorithms. Yet none the less, it boots right up, I can login and start the GUI no problem, I can play music back and do ssh consoles, IRC (with a gui client no less) and even browse the web with a WebKit browser.
Can't imagine what even kde 3.5 would do to the poor thing, let alone kde 4 or gnome 3. Kde 3 might actually have been borderline usable... When my desktop had 256M ram, kde 3 started grinding the hard drive after about 6-7 tabs and 3-4 konsoles were opened.
You do realize that biological agents do something that chemicals don't, right?
Spill any chemical you want - that's all there is and all I have to do to escape it is not go where it's laying. Weaponized anthrax? Smallpox? Pandemic flu? Yeah, good luck escaping that shit by staying away from the place of the initial outbreak.
Adobe: "Hey, let's write a computer program for editing pictures. It'll be like a darkroom in your computer... let's call it... photo - shop!
Marketers: "I can work with this!"
GNU: "Hey, let's write a computer program for editing pictures. Let's give it a name which means "person who is crippled!"
Marketers: "Please tell me this is a joke."
"His platform of peace and ending wars has turned into more wars."
Oh really? Please, yell me about all these wars that Obama's started based on lies that are now bleeding our treasury dry.
and a "falling" unemployment number caused by 9,400,000 people leaving the work force since he took office and more each month.
1. Ever heard of the baby boomers? They're starting to retire, so of course some people are leaving the labor force.
2. Turns out some people will give up when 30 years of GOP economic policy has left us staring down the abyss of Depression. Yet routinely since spring 2009, monthly job reports have come with a "jobs created but not enough due to people rejoining the labor force" label attached.
Except for the fact that the dark ages were far better than this so-called enlightened era of mass murder, human trafficking, torture-that-is-not-torture, unlimited power for the powerful without responsibility (corporatism)...
Trying to cover just how much wrong you stuffed into that single sentence would be a task akin to cleaning the Agean Stables. That you say such a thing while you sit on your well-fed ass, in your warm home, taking access to all the 100% clean and safe water and food you could ever want for granted, wearing machine-woven cloth, sitting in front of a machine so incredible it would've been literally indistinguishable from magic 100 years ago (let alone 1000), leads to one of two conclusions:
Either you are a spoiled whinging twit posessed of an ignorance of history as stunning as your lack of perspective, or you are so stupid it's amazing that you remember how to breathe.
Slashdot Mirror
BZZZT, WRONG.
This is where you can stop reading, folks.
If you can project in advance exactly how much something will cost to build, that means by definition you're not doing anything novel because if you're doing anything new, you don't know what kinds of problems you'll run into.
Well, the VLHC would be novel, so there's gonna be unexpected costs.
Oh god, why did you have to mention Albert Lea to Rapid City? I was finally putting the neverending ads for Wall Drug out of my mind... Of course, a robot would ignore them and I'd have been reading, so that'd have been a plus...
Yeah, greed is totally a modern invention brought about by The Evil Corporations. I think my eyes just rolled a full 360*.
Much like there's no point building weather prediction computers, since all we do is put data we already have from weather stations into them, and no point building FEM simulators for structural engineering since we already know how a single girder acts under stress.
Or... could it be that multiple simple elements can interact in ways that are not meaningfully predicted by an understanding of individual elements? NAW!
Oh, yes, wanting the kids you raise to be your own offspring can only be the result of a totem pole of arrogance up the ass. There's absolutely no biological or instinctual reason people might feel that way.
Zealots like you are the worst enemy of your cause, whatever unlucky cause you inflict yourselves upon.
Because "weather" is not "climate."
Weather is what it is out right now. Feel free to dig through graphs of past temperature records, and you can satisfy yourself that no day of the year will have the same temperature, humidity, rainfall, or anything graph on two successive years. Climate is the time-averaged expectation value and ignores anything on shorter than several year scales at the very least.
It's not even that simple, as there are many characteristic timescales involved in the climate, not just one. For example, the pacific decadal oscillation and atlantic mean oscillation occur over decade timescales and have an enormous impact on rainfall levels throughout north america.
There's two big things that used to come out of fossil fuel smokestacks: CO2 and aerosols. CO2 increases the atmosphere's opacity to mid IR (thereby trapping heat), while aerosols scatter light in the upper atmosphere and generally prevent light/heat from reaching the surface.
Pollution controls have gone a long way towards reducing aerosol emissions, but CO2 continues to be dumped freely. So we see slight warming before the mid 20th century, then a levelling off, now expect faster warming.
Wall Street has plenty of things they are scared of, and plenty of things they ought to be scared of.
People having the ability to turn astonishingly expensive plastic fiber into pitifully low-quality plastic doodads is not one of them.
Just like to say, there's nothing inherently wrong with the Arduino's hardware (the fact that a stm32f4-series device of comparable price is about two orders of magnitude more powerful notwithstanding). But their silly "hide the reality of microcontrollers" IDE and most-C language made me intensely stabby. I guess what I'm saying is, get an stm32. Or msp430 if you're ok writing in windows only.
In defense of "bury it," the sarcophagus at Chernobyl was built using late-Soviet era materials, under unbelievable constraints of time and construction difficulty. You try "doing it right" when your welders can literally work for about 15 minutes before they have to leave and never return, building structurally sound walls to support your dome is impossible, and all while knowing that every single vehicle and piece of equipment you bring in will have to be abandoned and left to rot because it's now Contaminated.
Any sarcophagus built at Fukushima will be as if construction at Chernobyl were to begin today: "This area is somewhat contaminated. Mind your dosimeter, wear your protective clothes, take a shower after every shift and don't lick your tools and you'll be fine. Oh, and smile for the tourists."
The power system you have now will be approximately the power system running when you die.
I think it's very unlikely that we'll still have gas to burn at the rate we're going by the 2090s. Coal, perhaps, but hopefully we won't be insanely stupid enough to completely and irreversibly rape our environment (dumping that much CO2 into the air would be a catastrophe beyond description due to ocean acidification) and then be left practically in the dark when everything except nuclear, hydro and solar becomes too expensive to fuel.
Fukushima, in short, has cesium contamination like Chernobyl (because cesium is volatile at low temperatures) but basically none of the heavy isotope contamination. So we can fast forward about 20 years on the recovery (virtually the entire open-air dose rate near Chernobyl is now Cesium decay). So while the radiation levels at Chernobyl have decreased from lethal to sorta-dangerous relatively quickly, it will still be another 120 years or so until they go from sorta-dangerous to pretty-much-not-dangerous.
Personally, I'd guess that around 2040 (one more Cs half-life) enough of the radiation from both Chernobyl and Fukushima will be gone, either truly due to decay or apparently by diffusing into the ground away from the surface, that there will be significant human return to much of the exclusion zones, although monitoring will have to be ongoing for a long time.
And yet, all the places in the world one who has the choice would actually want to live have tons of regulations, while the places whose names are synonymous with hell in the public zeitgeist have none or next to none.
It might have to do with how unrestrained human behavior creates problems when there are millions of them living in close quarters, and all those horrible, awful laws and taxes and regulations are our way of kinda making it work anyway.
1. Yeah, because Joe Average Worker really has time to monitor "real market signals" on the bank into which he deposits his paycheck once a week. We can't all be John Galt like you, so brilliant you can single-handedly be an expert in every kind of transaction you will ever engage in and have no reason to fear ever being defrauded.
2. It's funny because the FDIC was created when the exact opposite of what you appear to think will happen happened.
I think the campus security guard, the Mercedes owner who was carjacked and forced to withdraw cash at gunpoint, and the cops who were attacked with automatic weapons and explosives that the "possibly innocent suspect" just happened by pure chance to have on him, might disagree with the characterization of Dzhokhar's actions as a scared boy trying to hide.
Well the security guard won't I suppose, but that's because he's kind of dead. Which doesn't exactly go in the "wrongly accused and just trying to hide" column either.
Option 1: Police/govt over-react, nothing bad happens: Grumbling about over reaction
Option 2: Police/govt over-react, something bad still happens: Grumbling that still not enough was done
Option 3: Police/govt under-react, nothing bad happens: No problem
Option 4: Police/govt under-react, another attack happens: Everyone "responsible" as good as burnt alive at stake
In light of the potential outcome of option 4 (which based on what these psychopaths did before and during capture was altogether probable) risk-averse structures, like governments, will choose to over-react every time.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=astounding+stories+of+super+science
Yep, sometimes oldies are goodies.
That's only the best commercially available. Since we're talking about what are currently lab fantasies here, why not consider triple-junction cells which have acheived efficiencies north of 50% (and which will never be commercially viable outside of cost-is-no-object because they're as insanely expensive to make as you might imagine)?
I succeeded in installing Gentoo and XCFE on a now 16 year old SGI Indy (one 150MHz MIPS R5K, 160MB 60ns ram, Fast SCSI HDD, framebuffer-only Linux graphics driver). It's not snappy by any means, and it makes it very obvious which programs "do it right" and which ones rely on hardware to cover up bad algorithms. Yet none the less, it boots right up, I can login and start the GUI no problem, I can play music back and do ssh consoles, IRC (with a gui client no less) and even browse the web with a WebKit browser.
Can't imagine what even kde 3.5 would do to the poor thing, let alone kde 4 or gnome 3. Kde 3 might actually have been borderline usable... When my desktop had 256M ram, kde 3 started grinding the hard drive after about 6-7 tabs and 3-4 konsoles were opened.
You do realize that biological agents do something that chemicals don't, right?
Spill any chemical you want - that's all there is and all I have to do to escape it is not go where it's laying. Weaponized anthrax? Smallpox? Pandemic flu? Yeah, good luck escaping that shit by staying away from the place of the initial outbreak.
Adobe: "Hey, let's write a computer program for editing pictures. It'll be like a darkroom in your computer... let's call it... photo - shop!
Marketers: "I can work with this!"
GNU: "Hey, let's write a computer program for editing pictures. Let's give it a name which means "person who is crippled!"
Marketers: "Please tell me this is a joke."
This would be a more convincing Both Sides Are Equally Bad if both sides were even remotely equally bad.
Oh really? Please, yell me about all these wars that Obama's started based on lies that are now bleeding our treasury dry.
1. Ever heard of the baby boomers? They're starting to retire, so of course some people are leaving the labor force. 2. Turns out some people will give up when 30 years of GOP economic policy has left us staring down the abyss of Depression. Yet routinely since spring 2009, monthly job reports have come with a "jobs created but not enough due to people rejoining the labor force" label attached.
Trying to cover just how much wrong you stuffed into that single sentence would be a task akin to cleaning the Agean Stables. That you say such a thing while you sit on your well-fed ass, in your warm home, taking access to all the 100% clean and safe water and food you could ever want for granted, wearing machine-woven cloth, sitting in front of a machine so incredible it would've been literally indistinguishable from magic 100 years ago (let alone 1000), leads to one of two conclusions:
Either you are a spoiled whinging twit posessed of an ignorance of history as stunning as your lack of perspective, or you are so stupid it's amazing that you remember how to breathe.