Did you look at the video before commenting? They showed a 3 million triangle scene done in realtime at 30 fps with shadow rays. The thing ran on a mini-cluster of 3 PS3s connected via the built-in Gigabit Ethernet. One more iteration of Moore's law and I expect this to be possible using a single box. Cell is manufactured at 90nm. At the 45nm design node, in two Moore's law iterations, I expect it to be easy to make a real-time raytraced game.
One thing I realized some time ago is that most people admire rule breakers. But only successful rule breakers which either do not get caught, or take a long time to get caught.
Examples: Kevin Mitnick (cracked computers). Adolf Hitler (turned a democracy into his dictatorship by gaming the system). Ariel Sharon (persistently violated superior military command orders to pursue reckless, yet successful attacks).
Bill got caught. Plus, the woman he picked was not that admired. Compare this with the alleged Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe affair and the reactions that had, and draw your own conclusions.
The Gulag de facto existed from Tzarist times. Try reading Dostoyevsky.
The Soviet regime was brutal by Western standards, but by Russian standards, it was business as usual. Let's not forget Nicolas II's regime gunned down a group of unarmed protestors.
Most of that energy is wasted by the internal combustion engine. Most are between 20 to 30% efficient.
Even more is lost in the transmission. Every time you brake in a conventional vehicle, you are throwing kinetic energy away by converting it to useless heat in the brakes.
So an electric vehicle does not need to go full hog. You probably need something like 10-20% the energy in that gasoline at best.
You forgot to look at MJ/l in your comparison. Ethanol is much less energy dense per volume, than either gasoline or diesel, which means you need a larger fuel tank to store the same amount of energy. The tank itself will count towards vehicle mass and it is mass that never goes away no matter how empty the tank gets. Current ethanol production, even from sugar cane, is much lower efficiency than biodiesel production from palm oil. Ethanol from corn has been a US pipe dream since the 70s. No one else has pursued it because the economics make no sense at all. It is little more than an agribusiness pork barrel. Cellulosic ethanol may turn the economic issue around but there are much better yielding cellulosic crops than corn. I repeat: corn makes no sense as an energy fuel.
Diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines. Diesel is also a higher energy density fuel. The army runs on diesel and aircraft use a sort of kerosene which is quite similar to diesel AFAIK. The army runs on diesel for another reason: diesel does not explode as easily as gasoline (which is good when your fueled up M1A2 gets pierced by a shell).
I suspect a diesel hybrid would not only be vastly cheaper than a fuel cell vehicle, but it would have a longer range as well. AFAIK ethanol cannot be burned in fuel cells either. Not without slow to startup and cumbersome reformers anyway. Carbon is a non-issue if you are using a biofuel. Sure it will emit carbon at the tailpipe, but the carbon was sucked out of the air by a plant to begin with.
There's no "next oldest" to move to.
That we know of. What if someone managed to exploit zero point energy? Or something more exotic we cannot even imagine now? Who would have said a thousand years ago that we would manage to get power from uranium? It was used for little more than colouring glass.
Anyway, this is all besides the point. The Sun has plenty of power for our purposes. Just capturing a fraction of the amount that reaches our planet surface, even after it has been filtrated by the atmosphere, would be enough. If we need more we can capture it in space and beam it towards Earth. AFAIK the Sun will last for some billion years more. That would be a pretty permanent solution IMO.
Uh... no. The most powerful booster rocket engine being manufactured in the ex-USSR right now AFAIK is the RD-170 used in the Zenith and Sea Launch vehicles. Which were designed for Energia, which is more recent than the Shuttle. Those modified N-1 engines you were talking about, the NK-33, are a toy compared to them.
declining fresh water supplies
Water can be desalinated using reverse osmosis or other methods. Nothing that cannot be powered by a nuclear or some other thermal plant (solar, coal, etc).
reliance on artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers (which requires petroleum to synthesize),
Not quite. Nitrogen fertilizers require hydrogen to synthesize via the Haber-Bosch process. Most of this hydrogen is now produced from natural gas for economic reasons, but it can be produced by other means as well.
desertification, etc.
We can grow food with no soil at all if it comes to that.
Trees are big cellulose producers if you select the right tree. The paper industry usually grows eucalyptus for this purpose. Some countries (hello Netherlands!) do grow some minor amounts of hemp in crop rotation, but they are less productive than an eucalyptus monoculture.
I think the idea that women are worse at maths is bunk. I have known a lot of women in maths studies and in fact, the number of women vs men in maths studies seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. There are many more women, in proportion, in maths than in computing.
Just like the article said computer programming is often a sort of lone wolf enterprise. Where you have to be driven to do something by yourself. Managers often expect to do the work with as few people and as little redundancy as possible and try to suck your entire time into whatever is their project for you. Your schedule is determined by the corporation. This leaves next to no chance of socializing. Women do seem to like to interact with people more on a personal level. Most women I know in computing seem to work at their best while inserted in a group. Managers usually hate people who socialize as they believe they are disrupting the other people's work and decreasing productivity. Sometimes I feel that working in computing is like being in elementary grade school. Brooke's law does not help here. Increased communication will often decrease productivity in our line of business.
I have known men which are the opposite type. They like to socialize more than actually do lone wolf programming. This usually results in them being fired for the reasons I mentioned before. Again: You are not expected to be sociable, unless you are near a client. You are expected to be an obedient servant which will please your masters by doing the job they want. I find the most successful people in the business can both work as a lone wolf and socialize when necessary, say at lunch or at a client, which is not an easy thing to do.
This is somewhat unrelated but I notice when we have a casual gathering of computer people the men and women split into separate groups. The men usually talk about politics, sports, economics or computing. The women usually talk about their private lives. I think this is probably cultural. A man is not supposed to show vulnerability and is expected to be a provider or leader or some sort. When I ask another man a personal question in a group setting he usually shirks it off and plays invincible and that is the end of it. Women like to be listened to and feel appreciated and need an escape valve for the stifled environment they are in.
Just one minute. Those pictures look doctored to me.
This picture was shot with the rabbit really up close and personal to the camera lens. So the rabbit will look larger than it is.
Now this looks even more fake. Notice how the hand of the person holding the rabbit is larger than his own head. That was obviously a doctored picture.
I ask you because I did the math once and figured out I would need to save 10 years pay to afford a good house (i.e. on a quiet neighbourhood with plenty of space). I guess this is reasonable considering the time vs number of people required to build a house. I am leaning for a house away from the city rather than an apartment because I think these have a better bang for the buck.
The good neighbourhoods in central places seem to cost 5-6x more. Sure I could save on transport by being there and using public transport or walking. I would also save a couple of hours stuck in transit I could otherwise be working and making money. That is, I could save on transport if I planned to not own a car. Which will limit my choices of where to work more than I want to.
Having to pay a bank loan sucks. Giving all that money to the bank. Renting sucks even more because I would own nothing in the end. If I had no house I get a loan I could afford by myself if I lived like a pauper plus a 6 months money cushion. Then buy a central apartment close to something like a subway station, merge the kitchen with the living room and rent that extra room, plus at least one other room.
Yet I can live with my parents. I did the math and this allows me to save like 30% more of my income than I could otherwise. I plan to sink those earnings into improving my education and bootstrapping my own business. I would rather sink it trying my own failed business than into someone elses by playing in the stock market.
At 23 years of age, how much of your apartment, computer, TV is paid?
Anyone can get a computer easily, a TV is a couple of months salary at worst. A house is something else. How long have you been paying for it and for how much longer will you have to work to finish paying it?
IMO it is wireless. I just do not see what is the point. I could see a point in having a wireless mouse or keyboard which is being continuously powered at a distance for example. Using it for merely recharging does not make much sense to me. I mean, it will waste more energy than using a cable.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you look at the video before commenting? They showed a 3 million triangle scene done in realtime at 30 fps with shadow rays. The thing ran on a mini-cluster of 3 PS3s connected via the built-in Gigabit Ethernet. One more iteration of Moore's law and I expect this to be possible using a single box. Cell is manufactured at 90nm. At the 45nm design node, in two Moore's law iterations, I expect it to be easy to make a real-time raytraced game.
No. Life's fundamental purposes is to spread everywhere and self-perpetuate.
Procreation and evolution are merely tactics to achieve that.
One thing I realized some time ago is that most people admire rule breakers. But only successful rule breakers which either do not get caught, or take a long time to get caught.
Examples: Kevin Mitnick (cracked computers). Adolf Hitler (turned a democracy into his dictatorship by gaming the system). Ariel Sharon (persistently violated superior military command orders to pursue reckless, yet successful attacks).
Bill got caught. Plus, the woman he picked was not that admired. Compare this with the alleged Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe affair and the reactions that had, and draw your own conclusions.
The Gulag de facto existed from Tzarist times. Try reading Dostoyevsky.
The Soviet regime was brutal by Western standards, but by Russian standards, it was business as usual. Let's not forget Nicolas II's regime gunned down a group of unarmed protestors.
1. Telcos also need licences.
2. Lines cross over more land are (hence cost more money) than cell phone towers
When is Captain America getting it?
You can increasingly use LEDs for that instead. Given some more years incandescents will be utterly useless.
I still think a tax on low efficiency lights would have been better though.
Most of that energy is wasted by the internal combustion engine. Most are between 20 to 30% efficient. Even more is lost in the transmission. Every time you brake in a conventional vehicle, you are throwing kinetic energy away by converting it to useless heat in the brakes.
So an electric vehicle does not need to go full hog. You probably need something like 10-20% the energy in that gasoline at best.
You forgot to look at MJ/l in your comparison. Ethanol is much less energy dense per volume, than either gasoline or diesel, which means you need a larger fuel tank to store the same amount of energy. The tank itself will count towards vehicle mass and it is mass that never goes away no matter how empty the tank gets. Current ethanol production, even from sugar cane, is much lower efficiency than biodiesel production from palm oil. Ethanol from corn has been a US pipe dream since the 70s. No one else has pursued it because the economics make no sense at all. It is little more than an agribusiness pork barrel. Cellulosic ethanol may turn the economic issue around but there are much better yielding cellulosic crops than corn. I repeat: corn makes no sense as an energy fuel.
Diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines. Diesel is also a higher energy density fuel. The army runs on diesel and aircraft use a sort of kerosene which is quite similar to diesel AFAIK. The army runs on diesel for another reason: diesel does not explode as easily as gasoline (which is good when your fueled up M1A2 gets pierced by a shell).
I suspect a diesel hybrid would not only be vastly cheaper than a fuel cell vehicle, but it would have a longer range as well. AFAIK ethanol cannot be burned in fuel cells either. Not without slow to startup and cumbersome reformers anyway. Carbon is a non-issue if you are using a biofuel. Sure it will emit carbon at the tailpipe, but the carbon was sucked out of the air by a plant to begin with.
There's no "next oldest" to move to.
That we know of. What if someone managed to exploit zero point energy? Or something more exotic we cannot even imagine now? Who would have said a thousand years ago that we would manage to get power from uranium? It was used for little more than colouring glass.
Anyway, this is all besides the point. The Sun has plenty of power for our purposes. Just capturing a fraction of the amount that reaches our planet surface, even after it has been filtrated by the atmosphere, would be enough. If we need more we can capture it in space and beam it towards Earth. AFAIK the Sun will last for some billion years more. That would be a pretty permanent solution IMO.
Uh... no. The most powerful booster rocket engine being manufactured in the ex-USSR right now AFAIK is the RD-170 used in the Zenith and Sea Launch vehicles. Which were designed for Energia, which is more recent than the Shuttle. Those modified N-1 engines you were talking about, the NK-33, are a toy compared to them.
declining fresh water supplies
Water can be desalinated using reverse osmosis or other methods. Nothing that cannot be powered by a nuclear or some other thermal plant (solar, coal, etc).
reliance on artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers (which requires petroleum to synthesize),
Not quite. Nitrogen fertilizers require hydrogen to synthesize via the Haber-Bosch process. Most of this hydrogen is now produced from natural gas for economic reasons, but it can be produced by other means as well.
desertification, etc.
We can grow food with no soil at all if it comes to that.
Trees are big cellulose producers if you select the right tree. The paper industry usually grows eucalyptus for this purpose. Some countries (hello Netherlands!) do grow some minor amounts of hemp in crop rotation, but they are less productive than an eucalyptus monoculture.
How long has he been working for the company and how many people are above him?
the EU is too weak to achieve the necessary standartization.
The EU was not too weak to impose GSM, DVB, the Euro. If anything, I think our representatives impose too many standards.
You know, there is one way of getting to a management position quickly. Starting your own company. :-)
At my university, the girl-boy ratio in the CS department is more like 1:30. I remember some half a dozen girls in over 200 students.
I think the idea that women are worse at maths is bunk. I have known a lot of women in maths studies and in fact, the number of women vs men in maths studies seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. There are many more women, in proportion, in maths than in computing.
Just like the article said computer programming is often a sort of lone wolf enterprise. Where you have to be driven to do something by yourself. Managers often expect to do the work with as few people and as little redundancy as possible and try to suck your entire time into whatever is their project for you. Your schedule is determined by the corporation. This leaves next to no chance of socializing. Women do seem to like to interact with people more on a personal level. Most women I know in computing seem to work at their best while inserted in a group. Managers usually hate people who socialize as they believe they are disrupting the other people's work and decreasing productivity. Sometimes I feel that working in computing is like being in elementary grade school. Brooke's law does not help here. Increased communication will often decrease productivity in our line of business.
I have known men which are the opposite type. They like to socialize more than actually do lone wolf programming. This usually results in them being fired for the reasons I mentioned before. Again: You are not expected to be sociable, unless you are near a client. You are expected to be an obedient servant which will please your masters by doing the job they want. I find the most successful people in the business can both work as a lone wolf and socialize when necessary, say at lunch or at a client, which is not an easy thing to do.
This is somewhat unrelated but I notice when we have a casual gathering of computer people the men and women split into separate groups. The men usually talk about politics, sports, economics or computing. The women usually talk about their private lives. I think this is probably cultural. A man is not supposed to show vulnerability and is expected to be a provider or leader or some sort. When I ask another man a personal question in a group setting he usually shirks it off and plays invincible and that is the end of it. Women like to be listened to and feel appreciated and need an escape valve for the stifled environment they are in.
Just one minute. Those pictures look doctored to me.
This picture was shot with the rabbit really up close and personal to the camera lens. So the rabbit will look larger than it is.
Now this looks even more fake. Notice how the hand of the person holding the rabbit is larger than his own head. That was obviously a doctored picture.
I guess this is the German version of the Giant Canadian cat.
And another point: If you only carry a card (and no cash) you will never run the risk of losing serious money from theft/mugging.
Many criminals here resort to kidnapping and extortion because of this.
I ask you because I did the math once and figured out I would need to save 10 years pay to afford a good house (i.e. on a quiet neighbourhood with plenty of space). I guess this is reasonable considering the time vs number of people required to build a house. I am leaning for a house away from the city rather than an apartment because I think these have a better bang for the buck.
The good neighbourhoods in central places seem to cost 5-6x more. Sure I could save on transport by being there and using public transport or walking. I would also save a couple of hours stuck in transit I could otherwise be working and making money. That is, I could save on transport if I planned to not own a car. Which will limit my choices of where to work more than I want to.
Having to pay a bank loan sucks. Giving all that money to the bank. Renting sucks even more because I would own nothing in the end. If I had no house I get a loan I could afford by myself if I lived like a pauper plus a 6 months money cushion. Then buy a central apartment close to something like a subway station, merge the kitchen with the living room and rent that extra room, plus at least one other room.
Yet I can live with my parents. I did the math and this allows me to save like 30% more of my income than I could otherwise. I plan to sink those earnings into improving my education and bootstrapping my own business. I would rather sink it trying my own failed business than into someone elses by playing in the stock market.
At 23 years of age, how much of your apartment, computer, TV is paid?
Anyone can get a computer easily, a TV is a couple of months salary at worst. A house is something else. How long have you been paying for it and for how much longer will you have to work to finish paying it?
So does Intel I expect. Yet they manage to open source their drivers just fine...
IMO it is wireless. I just do not see what is the point. I could see a point in having a wireless mouse or keyboard which is being continuously powered at a distance for example. Using it for merely recharging does not make much sense to me. I mean, it will waste more energy than using a cable.