Time was that a government research project could actually be accomplished within a specified period of time. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo project are two examples. Why should battery improvements be any different than mandating CAFE standards? How does Chu know that a matter of time a few million dollars are all it's going to take? $120 million is chump change by today's standards. This sounds more like a political goal than a practical one. Seems to me that there are too many uninformed people in Washington that think there's always some corporate conspiracy preventing them from reaching their utopian technological goals. This isn't to say that it's not a worthy goal but IMHO, if you really want to make this happen, then you do it Manhattan Project style (walk walk walk walk Manhattan Project style). You hire the top people in the field away from their current jobs, bring them together in one place, isolated with no distractions each competing to solve one problem.
James Burke was talking about this more than 30 years ago in Connections. The final episode is something every modern luddite should watch and learn from.
In the wake of the Italian seismologists who were recently convicted of manslaughter, Mann could easily be accused of scientific misconduct if his predictions turn out to be wrong. Personally, I find people's panic over the hockey stick graph to be akin to people getting excited over Facebook's recent stock jump. http://consumerist.com/2012/10/24/facebook-stock-price-soars-to-about-half-of-what-it-was-worth-at-ipo/ That graph says a lot about having tunnel vision. But let's assume that Mann turns out to be not just a little bit wrong but a whole lot wrong. How many billions of dollars were wasted on schemes like carbon trading? Can the people and businesses who got screwed as a result potentially sue for damages? Who would they sue?
So here's a question: if this sets a legal precedent, will scientists who fail to predict other things get thrown in jail too? What about scientists who predict stuff that never happens? Jail time is rather pointless but what if a bogus prediction leads to people spending a lot of money? Can they sue for damages?
I seem to be hearing the sound of UN flunkies screaming that this wasn't the way it was supposed to work? "AIIIIEEEEE!!! You can't just MANUFACTURE carbon credits!! That defeats the whole purpose of redistributing North American wealth!! Oh, wait, I wasn't supposed to tell anyone that. My bad."
What's interesting is how far off the mark the predictions of electricity-based technology these cards are. Lots of mechanical levers and knobs to control things. Also, miniaturization seems to have been missed.
Full of? Really? And if you understand the characters you'll realize that the heroine desires to give herself over to the power of self-made men. Sadly, too many men these days have been brainwashed into thinking that women want a sensitive, gentle girly man. So not true. Women don't want a wuss. They are drawn to power and control.
I find myself thinking the same thought I have when I flip through Syd Mead's books. Wow, that cityscape is super cool but it will never happen because you never get to start from scratch and without plenty of morons who think their idea is better. But I digress. I have dozens of big plastic containers full of electronic stuff I've accumulated since college. My biggest desire and quandary is how to get all that crap organized. I look at blog pages with photos of well-organized workshops and I think "That's cool but how did you decide on how many storage racks and drawer systems and of what size would you need if you hadn't been anally organizing things from day one?"
As to the one answer, I recent spent a few bucks on a decent work bench. I looked at the high-end offerings from companies like Edsal. They have some nifty stuff but it's all pretty spendy. I eventually bought a bench from Uline. Nice thick maple. I skipped the ESD top because it was more expensive and I already had a mat. Basically, be sure to budget for good furniture because all the expensive test equipment in the world is going to piss you off if your work area is a pain.
First, according to the Reuters report, there is a claim that Monsanto had no rights to the seeds after the initial sale. This is going to dovetail in with the copyright case also before SCOTUS this session where a student bought cheap textbooks overseas and Wiley sued him for copyright infringement.
The other head-scratcher here is that the farmer bought the seed from a supplier that wasn't Monsanto. How he hell could he have known that there was Monsanto seed mixed in? Why isn't it the suppliers fault? But also, Monsanto has tried other tactics like suing farmers that were downwind of a farmer that used Monsanto seed saying they were illegally using their seed. Huh? I guess Monsanto doesn't understand natural processes. It's like the case of the city in Oregon that threw a property owner in jail because he had rainwater catch basins because the city supposedly owns all the water that falls on the land. If that's true and I seed the rain clouds upwind of that town, am I stealing their water?
Now, see, when I started screwing around with embedded Linux-based single-board computers, I had lots of questions and documentation was not aimed at the newbie. So, naturally, I asked a lot of questions. More often than not, my questions were answered by "did you try Google?" or more obnoxiously, "If I told you how to do X, you'd be standing on the shoulders of giants."
Ironically, I find that even in cases where publishing a book for newbies can be justified, once you're past the newbie stage there is rarely a good advanced text available.
Now, if you think undocumented technology is frustrating, try dealing with government bureaucracies and their inscrutable paperwork. I'm convinced that there are too many people on this planet who serve no other purpose than to generate extra crap the rest of us are forced to deal with for no other reason than to justify their own jobs.
Now, see, I would add a 12-inch linear actuator to the neck connection so that I could make my virtual presence taller. Everyone knows that most women want a guy who is between 5'8" and 6'2". So when I meet a cute female virtual presence, I can make my presence the appropriate height. Of course, I've now opened the door to other uses for linear actuators but that's a separate issue.
It's simply a fundamentally impractical vehicle for people to use for 90-95% of their needs. Limited range. Recharge time sucks. Severely limited payload capacity. What people want is something that works as well as their SUV. A really useful all-electric vehicle needs to have a 300+ mile range, 400-500 would be better. It needs to fully recharge in the same amount of time it takes to fill a gas tank. And it needs to be able to hold four adults and all their paraphernalia comfortably. To a lesser degree, the battery pack needs to have at least a 5 year life if not 10 years. So, ultimately, it comes down to energy storage. Fossil fuels are a really efficient energy storage medium.
Beyond the practical issues are aesthetics. Every "green" vehicle with the exception of a Tesla, is a big dork-mobile. Excuse me, tiny dork-mobile.
The other issue that has conspiracy overtones is the fact that you have to have access to a public utility to drive it and in places where rapid charging is available. That means a major city. Want to drive out into the wide open spaces? Nope. You are now restricted to the city limits. There are five boxes to be used in defense of liberty: Moving, soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. By restricting your ability to move freely, the easier it is to control the populace.
This plays right into my two theories on solving the problems in the Middle East. Everyone knows that bacon is awesome and makes you happy when you eat it. So, all we need to do is get the imams to declare that bacon is acceptable to eat. The second part is to get the Palestinians to open casinos. Worked pretty well for quite a few native American tribes.
I found the whole Jurassic Park lunch debate scene interesting when Dr. Ian Malcolm says "This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction". Such a statement suggests that human beings are somehow not part of nature.
"OS X did a much better job of ensuring backward compatibility." Yeah, not so much. Lion and Mountain Lion no longer has Rosetta which killed off all remaining PowerPC-based apps. Not the least of which was Quicken (for a while anyway. And yes, Intuit does suck the big one). IMHO, Apple would have scored a lot of points by making Rosetta open-source. Yeah, yeah, I could run Parallels and install a Snow Leopard virtual machine but I don't need the whole OS.
The sad thing is the fact that legislators and do-gooders fail to understand duality. Everything, and I mean everything, can be used for both good and bad, used and abused. A piece of rope has lots of useful applications. It also can be used to strangle someone or tie someone up against their will. A knife can be used to prepare food...or to slit someone's throat. Do we legislate against the potential misuse of these things i.e. try to prevent someone from buying a piece of rope because they might hang themselves? Or take more nebulous concepts such as legislating against so-called hate speech. Who decides what hate speech is? You? Me? And on what basis? Gut reaction? How it makes you feel? Why is what some talk show hosts or politicians say acceptable to one group yet considered hate speech to another? And why are the same "tests" not applied equally?
The simple fact is that it all boils down to someone's interpretation of a concept as to whether or not it's good or bad. You can legislate all you want and never solve the problems. People will always find a way around it. (And legislators don't really care about the efficacy of their laws because they're only interested in getting reelected saying "Look, I tried to do something, vote for me").
Technology will always be subject to misuse. Trying to prevent it is a waste of time and money. Trying to prevent Darwinism from thinning the herd only weakens the gene pool.
The more star systems will slip through your fingers. Or to put it in more terrestrial terms, no company, when hit with arbitrary regulation, will simply take it up the a$$. The newly regulated company will A) pass the cost on to the customer, B) lay people off, or C) go out of business. This is the same unintended consequence that stalks Net Neutrality. If you think a phone company like AT&T (which btw, has only a 3.67% profit margin) will simply continue to increase available bandwidth and quality of service because some government flunky forced them to handle everyone's pointless video chat traffic, think again. They will delay or stop service improvements or they will raise the rates for everyone. Don't believe me? Ever look at all the little persnickety fees on your bill? All those social-engineering mandates are listed there.
Hey, Jules, dude, lemme esplain...no, there is too much, lemme assum up. You put people's lives at risk. This isn't like leaking photos of the iPhone 5 innards. You may have very well gotten people killed because of your arrogance. You get no sympathy from me. Ever.
Yeah, I do realize this. In fact, I happen to be the developer and manufacturer of a product that uses a Linux-based ARM SBC. It's a Technologic Systems product. They do offer systems that boot to Busybox in less than 2 seconds. But if you add USB to the kernel, that takes a further 4-5 seconds before you can run an app that needs to use USB. And don't even think about running Debian. That takes a lot longer to come up.
For a DVR appliance, you have two things: 1) a deep user interface i.e. the TV, 2) constant power. Devices like a sprinkler system, a fancy fridge, maybe a high-end entertainment center, game consoles, etc. They all have these two things. I'm talking about appliances that run off a battery and may be faceless. If it takes more than a few seconds to boot, the user might think something is wrong. Granted, a car will likely have a user-interface display that can show status but even my SBC project takes about 4 seconds before I can even blink an LED (okay, so I could modify the kernel to do that earlier) but a USB-based display needs almost 7 seconds before you see anything. With regards to the car, you should be able to turn the key and go. Anything else gets a big meh from me. With regards to embedded devices, IMHO, good design would have a real power switch and not need user interaction to start or shutdown.
I can just see the horror film scene where the scantily clad heroine escapes the scary character to a Linux-based car only to find out that it takes 30 seconds to start. IMHO, if the Linux development community really wants it to gain acceptance as an operating system for appliances, they really have to get boot times (especially when USB support is enabled) down to the sub-two-second range. That and file systems that work instantaneously after a sudden power loss. None of this graceful shutdown crap.
Warning: sarcasm ahead. Ahem....that's what you get when you do it on the cheap and use "clean" fuels. (I'll bet if they used dirty fuel, the assplosion would have been better)
Slashdot Mirror
Time was that a government research project could actually be accomplished within a specified period of time. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo project are two examples. Why should battery improvements be any different than mandating CAFE standards? How does Chu know that a matter of time a few million dollars are all it's going to take? $120 million is chump change by today's standards. This sounds more like a political goal than a practical one. Seems to me that there are too many uninformed people in Washington that think there's always some corporate conspiracy preventing them from reaching their utopian technological goals. This isn't to say that it's not a worthy goal but IMHO, if you really want to make this happen, then you do it Manhattan Project style (walk walk walk walk Manhattan Project style). You hire the top people in the field away from their current jobs, bring them together in one place, isolated with no distractions each competing to solve one problem.
James Burke was talking about this more than 30 years ago in Connections. The final episode is something every modern luddite should watch and learn from.
In the wake of the Italian seismologists who were recently convicted of manslaughter, Mann could easily be accused of scientific misconduct if his predictions turn out to be wrong. Personally, I find people's panic over the hockey stick graph to be akin to people getting excited over Facebook's recent stock jump. http://consumerist.com/2012/10/24/facebook-stock-price-soars-to-about-half-of-what-it-was-worth-at-ipo/ That graph says a lot about having tunnel vision. But let's assume that Mann turns out to be not just a little bit wrong but a whole lot wrong. How many billions of dollars were wasted on schemes like carbon trading? Can the people and businesses who got screwed as a result potentially sue for damages? Who would they sue?
So here's a question: if this sets a legal precedent, will scientists who fail to predict other things get thrown in jail too? What about scientists who predict stuff that never happens? Jail time is rather pointless but what if a bogus prediction leads to people spending a lot of money? Can they sue for damages?
I seem to be hearing the sound of UN flunkies screaming that this wasn't the way it was supposed to work? "AIIIIEEEEE!!! You can't just MANUFACTURE carbon credits!! That defeats the whole purpose of redistributing North American wealth!! Oh, wait, I wasn't supposed to tell anyone that. My bad."
What's interesting is how far off the mark the predictions of electricity-based technology these cards are. Lots of mechanical levers and knobs to control things. Also, miniaturization seems to have been missed.
And teenage boys will still have trouble unhooking them.
Full of? Really? And if you understand the characters you'll realize that the heroine desires to give herself over to the power of self-made men. Sadly, too many men these days have been brainwashed into thinking that women want a sensitive, gentle girly man. So not true. Women don't want a wuss. They are drawn to power and control.
http://artofmanliness.com/2008/05/14/100-must-read-books-the-essential-mans-library/#more-183
Add to this Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. And to be non-partisan, you might as well read Rules for Radicals so you understand both sides.
I find myself thinking the same thought I have when I flip through Syd Mead's books. Wow, that cityscape is super cool but it will never happen because you never get to start from scratch and without plenty of morons who think their idea is better. But I digress. I have dozens of big plastic containers full of electronic stuff I've accumulated since college. My biggest desire and quandary is how to get all that crap organized. I look at blog pages with photos of well-organized workshops and I think "That's cool but how did you decide on how many storage racks and drawer systems and of what size would you need if you hadn't been anally organizing things from day one?"
As to the one answer, I recent spent a few bucks on a decent work bench. I looked at the high-end offerings from companies like Edsal. They have some nifty stuff but it's all pretty spendy. I eventually bought a bench from Uline. Nice thick maple. I skipped the ESD top because it was more expensive and I already had a mat. Basically, be sure to budget for good furniture because all the expensive test equipment in the world is going to piss you off if your work area is a pain.
First, according to the Reuters report, there is a claim that Monsanto had no rights to the seeds after the initial sale. This is going to dovetail in with the copyright case also before SCOTUS this session where a student bought cheap textbooks overseas and Wiley sued him for copyright infringement.
The other head-scratcher here is that the farmer bought the seed from a supplier that wasn't Monsanto. How he hell could he have known that there was Monsanto seed mixed in? Why isn't it the suppliers fault? But also, Monsanto has tried other tactics like suing farmers that were downwind of a farmer that used Monsanto seed saying they were illegally using their seed. Huh? I guess Monsanto doesn't understand natural processes. It's like the case of the city in Oregon that threw a property owner in jail because he had rainwater catch basins because the city supposedly owns all the water that falls on the land. If that's true and I seed the rain clouds upwind of that town, am I stealing their water?
There. I fixed it. #sarcasm
Now, see, when I started screwing around with embedded Linux-based single-board computers, I had lots of questions and documentation was not aimed at the newbie. So, naturally, I asked a lot of questions. More often than not, my questions were answered by "did you try Google?" or more obnoxiously, "If I told you how to do X, you'd be standing on the shoulders of giants."
Ironically, I find that even in cases where publishing a book for newbies can be justified, once you're past the newbie stage there is rarely a good advanced text available.
Now, if you think undocumented technology is frustrating, try dealing with government bureaucracies and their inscrutable paperwork. I'm convinced that there are too many people on this planet who serve no other purpose than to generate extra crap the rest of us are forced to deal with for no other reason than to justify their own jobs.
Now, see, I would add a 12-inch linear actuator to the neck connection so that I could make my virtual presence taller. Everyone knows that most women want a guy who is between 5'8" and 6'2". So when I meet a cute female virtual presence, I can make my presence the appropriate height. Of course, I've now opened the door to other uses for linear actuators but that's a separate issue.
It's simply a fundamentally impractical vehicle for people to use for 90-95% of their needs. Limited range. Recharge time sucks. Severely limited payload capacity. What people want is something that works as well as their SUV. A really useful all-electric vehicle needs to have a 300+ mile range, 400-500 would be better. It needs to fully recharge in the same amount of time it takes to fill a gas tank. And it needs to be able to hold four adults and all their paraphernalia comfortably. To a lesser degree, the battery pack needs to have at least a 5 year life if not 10 years. So, ultimately, it comes down to energy storage. Fossil fuels are a really efficient energy storage medium.
Beyond the practical issues are aesthetics. Every "green" vehicle with the exception of a Tesla, is a big dork-mobile. Excuse me, tiny dork-mobile.
The other issue that has conspiracy overtones is the fact that you have to have access to a public utility to drive it and in places where rapid charging is available. That means a major city. Want to drive out into the wide open spaces? Nope. You are now restricted to the city limits. There are five boxes to be used in defense of liberty: Moving, soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. By restricting your ability to move freely, the easier it is to control the populace.
This plays right into my two theories on solving the problems in the Middle East. Everyone knows that bacon is awesome and makes you happy when you eat it. So, all we need to do is get the imams to declare that bacon is acceptable to eat. The second part is to get the Palestinians to open casinos. Worked pretty well for quite a few native American tribes.
I found the whole Jurassic Park lunch debate scene interesting when Dr. Ian Malcolm says "This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Dinosaurs had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction". Such a statement suggests that human beings are somehow not part of nature.
"OS X did a much better job of ensuring backward compatibility." Yeah, not so much. Lion and Mountain Lion no longer has Rosetta which killed off all remaining PowerPC-based apps. Not the least of which was Quicken (for a while anyway. And yes, Intuit does suck the big one). IMHO, Apple would have scored a lot of points by making Rosetta open-source. Yeah, yeah, I could run Parallels and install a Snow Leopard virtual machine but I don't need the whole OS.
The sad thing is the fact that legislators and do-gooders fail to understand duality. Everything, and I mean everything, can be used for both good and bad, used and abused. A piece of rope has lots of useful applications. It also can be used to strangle someone or tie someone up against their will. A knife can be used to prepare food...or to slit someone's throat. Do we legislate against the potential misuse of these things i.e. try to prevent someone from buying a piece of rope because they might hang themselves? Or take more nebulous concepts such as legislating against so-called hate speech. Who decides what hate speech is? You? Me? And on what basis? Gut reaction? How it makes you feel? Why is what some talk show hosts or politicians say acceptable to one group yet considered hate speech to another? And why are the same "tests" not applied equally?
The simple fact is that it all boils down to someone's interpretation of a concept as to whether or not it's good or bad. You can legislate all you want and never solve the problems. People will always find a way around it. (And legislators don't really care about the efficacy of their laws because they're only interested in getting reelected saying "Look, I tried to do something, vote for me").
Technology will always be subject to misuse. Trying to prevent it is a waste of time and money. Trying to prevent Darwinism from thinning the herd only weakens the gene pool.
The more star systems will slip through your fingers. Or to put it in more terrestrial terms, no company, when hit with arbitrary regulation, will simply take it up the a$$. The newly regulated company will A) pass the cost on to the customer, B) lay people off, or C) go out of business. This is the same unintended consequence that stalks Net Neutrality. If you think a phone company like AT&T (which btw, has only a 3.67% profit margin) will simply continue to increase available bandwidth and quality of service because some government flunky forced them to handle everyone's pointless video chat traffic, think again. They will delay or stop service improvements or they will raise the rates for everyone. Don't believe me? Ever look at all the little persnickety fees on your bill? All those social-engineering mandates are listed there.
Hey, Jules, dude, lemme esplain...no, there is too much, lemme assum up. You put people's lives at risk. This isn't like leaking photos of the iPhone 5 innards. You may have very well gotten people killed because of your arrogance. You get no sympathy from me. Ever.
Yeah, I do realize this. In fact, I happen to be the developer and manufacturer of a product that uses a Linux-based ARM SBC. It's a Technologic Systems product. They do offer systems that boot to Busybox in less than 2 seconds. But if you add USB to the kernel, that takes a further 4-5 seconds before you can run an app that needs to use USB. And don't even think about running Debian. That takes a lot longer to come up.
For a DVR appliance, you have two things: 1) a deep user interface i.e. the TV, 2) constant power. Devices like a sprinkler system, a fancy fridge, maybe a high-end entertainment center, game consoles, etc. They all have these two things. I'm talking about appliances that run off a battery and may be faceless. If it takes more than a few seconds to boot, the user might think something is wrong. Granted, a car will likely have a user-interface display that can show status but even my SBC project takes about 4 seconds before I can even blink an LED (okay, so I could modify the kernel to do that earlier) but a USB-based display needs almost 7 seconds before you see anything. With regards to the car, you should be able to turn the key and go. Anything else gets a big meh from me. With regards to embedded devices, IMHO, good design would have a real power switch and not need user interaction to start or shutdown.
I can just see the horror film scene where the scantily clad heroine escapes the scary character to a Linux-based car only to find out that it takes 30 seconds to start.
IMHO, if the Linux development community really wants it to gain acceptance as an operating system for appliances, they really have to get boot times (especially when USB support is enabled) down to the sub-two-second range. That and file systems that work instantaneously after a sudden power loss. None of this graceful shutdown crap.
Sending out Ship B would go a long way to solving the world's problems.
Warning: sarcasm ahead. Ahem....that's what you get when you do it on the cheap and use "clean" fuels. (I'll bet if they used dirty fuel, the assplosion would have been better)